Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of water stress on seed germination for select landscape plants

In this study, the effect of water stress on the germination rate of the seeds of nine pieces of species used for landscaping works in Kastamonu is investigated. The seeds of these species have been subject to germination trials with water stress level between 0 and -8 bar and the germination percentages of the seeds have been identified. The water stress was constituted with the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG-6000) solution and germinations were carried out at 25oC in a period of 35 days. Depending on the water stress as a result of these studies, it has been stated that the percentages of all species have decreased as from -2 bar water stress; there are no germinations in -6 bar water stress for the tree of heaven, and in -8 bar water stress for Cupressus arizonica and Sophora japonica. We found that the species most resistant to water stress are Pinus nigra, Cupressus sempervirens, and Pinus brutia.
A mediated model of mindful awareness, emotion regulation, and maternal mental health during pregnancy and postpartum

ABSTRACT Objective Growing evidence links mindful awareness to the regulation of emotion, yet little is known about the temporal features of this association. This preliminary prospective study aimed to test the bidirectional relationship between mindful awareness, emotion regulation, anxiety, and depressive symptoms during pregnancy and postpartum. Method One-hundred forty-nine women completed an online survey at any stage during pregnancy and at 3-6 months postpartum. Psychosocial variables were assessed using validated, self-report measures. Results Bootstrapped mediation analysis demonstrated a bidirectional association between mindful awareness and emotion regulation for anxiety, but not depressive symptoms. Conclusions Results provide partial support for the hypothesized bidirectional relationship, whereby mindful awareness facilitates adaptive regulation of anxiety, but not depressive symptoms, and in turn, emotion regulation enhances the ability for present moment awareness. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic: (1) Mindfulness and emotion regulation are conceptually and empirically related. (2) Emotion regulation has been proposed as a pathway through which mindfulness exerts influence on mental health. (3) Mindfulness has also been linked with emotion regulation. What this topic adds: (1) Preliminary support for a temporal bidirectional relationship. (2) Preliminary support for a reciprocal relationship in a perinatal context. (3) Reciprocal relationship may not be evidenced in relation to depression.
A Technique for Securing Multiple Digital Images Based on 2D Linear Congruential Generator, Silver Ratio, and Galois Field

Security of multiple digital images over an unsecured channel is a current area of research in the field of image cryptography. Several techniques have been proposed for this purpose. However, the main drawbacks of the existing techniques are as follows: the existing techniques can be applied merely to the grayscale or the truecolor images; the size of the cipher (output) image is bigger than that of the plain (input) images; the authors have used a large number of parameters in the encryption/decryption process, besides the secret key; and the cipher/decipher rounds use the same key for encryption/decryption process. The proposed technique, which is based on a two-dimensional (2D) Linear Congruential Generator (LCG), silver ratio, and Galois field, is designed not merely to secure multiple digital images, namely, three truecolor, nine grayscale, and seventy-two binary images of different sizes, simultaneously, but also to address the above drawbacks. The designed technique achieves both confusion and diffusion properties essential for a secure cryptosystem. Also, the technique is empirically assessed via several statistical and security evaluation metrics, such as key sensitivity, histogram, chi-square, entropy, number of pixel change rate, structural similarity index measure, processing time, etc. The results of these evaluation metrics prove the efficiency and robustness of the designed technique.
WHOT, a Novel Tool to Assist Women Victims of Violence: A Case Study in the Brazilian Amazon

Violence against women is a problem faced in several ways, in various societies; however, the introduction of computational tools is something still little explored in this confrontation. Thus, it is necessary to invest in researches that bring technological development closer to the prevention, discovery, and combat of this form of violence. This paper presents the Women’s Health Observer Tool (WHOT) that helps to build psychobehavioral profiles of women victims of violence, based on three features: i) recognition of facial expressions to infer emotions; ii) provision of digital questionnaires on intimate partner violence (IPV), adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and iii) generation of individual reports with cross-references of statistical analysis between the data obtained in each interview. To validate the tool, a case study was conducted with 50 women assisted in basic health units in a city of the Brazilian Amazon for prenatal care. The results are satisfactory for the use of the tool, which was able to infer emotions (joy, surprise, sadness, and anger), and the prevalence of sadness (25.24%) was verified among the interviewees. For ACE, the majority (21) of the women reported having suffered only physical abuse; as for IPV, the majority of the interviewees (27) reported no abuse; and 78% of the women (39) had no indicative signs of PTSD. The results further point out that there is 3.94 more chance that the group of women who reported any abuse, either in childhood or adulthood, compared to the reference group, would develop PTSD.
The Rise of Emergent Corporate Sustainability: A Self-Organised View

Escalating climate crisis activism highlights the potential of self-organised approaches in sustainability to address the disconnect between corporate sustainability activities and globally declining ecological systems. This paper argues that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence which may enable organisations to address this disconnect by creating a context supportive of emergence within the organisation rather than reacting to pressures from outside. An exploratory mixed-methods case study was used to explore how corporate sustainability emerged in two financial services institutions. This article develops the idea of corporate sustainability as a co-evolutionary process of emergence and presents a framework to assist organisations to cultivate sustainability. It adopts a complexity view and posits that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has contributed to the sustainability issues faced by humanity. This study suggests that the paradigmatic assumptions that have contributed to the sustainability crisis must be interrogated to create an environment which is conducive to the emergence of corporate sustainability. Through examining corporate sustainability as an emergent process, this paper sheds light on how businesses can foster conditions in which a self-organised response to sustainability challenges is distributed across the organisation whilst being embedded in the containing system.
A New Strategy-Based PID Controller Optimized by Genetic Algorithm for DTC of the Doubly Fed Induction Motor

Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) is the most popular controller used in automatic systems, because of its robustness, ability to adapt the behaviors of the system, making them converge toward its optimum. These advantages are valid only in the case of the linear systems, as they present poor robustness in nonlinear systems. For that reason, many solutions are adopted to improve the PID robustness of the nonlinear systems. The optimization algorithm presents an efficient solution to generate the optimums PID gains adapting to the system’s nonlinearity. The regulation speed in the Direct Torque Control (DTC) is carried out by the PID controller, which caused many inconveniences in terms of speed (overshoot and rejection time), fluxes, and torque ripples. For that, this work describes a new approach for DTC of the Doubly Fed Induction Motor (DFIM) powered by two voltage inverters, using a PID controller for the regulation speed, based on a Genetic Algorithm (GA), which has been proposed for adjustment and optimizing the parameters of the PID controller, using a weighted combination of objective functions. To overcome the disadvantages cited at the beginning, the new hybrid approach GA-DTC has the efficiency to adapt to the system’s nonlinearity. This proposed strategy has been validated and implemented on Matlab/Simulink, which is attributed to many improvements in DFIM performances, such as limiting speed overshoot, reducing response time and the rate of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the stator and rotor currents, and minimizing the rejection time of speed and amplitude of the torque and flux ripples.
Spatiotemporal Patterns of Land Surface Temperature Change in the Tibetan Plateau Based on MODIS/Terra Daily Product From 2000 to 2018

Under the background of climate change, the Tibetan Plateau presents high spatial and temporal variability in land surface temperature (LST). To understand the spatiotemporal patterns of LST change, this article conducted a spatiotemporal analysis using the Mann–Kendall trend analysis method with time series of mean annual surface temperature extracted from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer/Terra daily LST product from 2000 to 2018. The analysis indicated that both daytime and nighttime MASTs show an obvious warming trend with the average rates of 0.028 K/year and 0.069 K/year, and the nighttime variation has larger spatial coverage. Areas ranging from 4500 to 5000 m exhibited the strongest warming effect. The geodetector method was applied to detect the impacts from seven factors, including elevation, land cover type, latitude, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), precipitation, air temperature, and solar radiation on the spatial distribution of LST. The controlling effects of these factors were generally stronger in the nighttime than those in the daytime, and elevation was the most important factor with the contribution scores of 27.12% and 62.98% in the daytime and nighttime, respectively. In addition, the analysis revealed that the temporal changes of LST were mainly caused by surface properties (vegetation, snow cover, and water surface area) changes, radiant flux changes induced by cloud amount changes, and climate warming. In general, this article provides important insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of LST in the TP since 2000 and helps to reveal the impact of climate change on ecoenvironmental conservation.
Spatially Smoothed TF-Root-MUSIC for DOA Estimation of Coherent and Non-Stationary Sources Under Noisy Conditions

This paper proposes a method for efficient Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent and non-stationary sources under adverse noise conditions. The method consists of three main parts: 1) derivation of Spatial Time-Frequency Distribution (STFD) matrix; 2) application of the forward-backward spatial smoothing technique; 3) estimating the angles of arrival by solving for the roots of the polynomial. The key significance of the proposed method is that the combination of existing methods and techniques allows an estimation of DOA angles for both coherent and non-stationary source signals under noise. Whereas the individual use of the existing methods does not show adequate performance under these conditions. The experiments allow studying the performance of the proposed method for 1) both coherent and non-coherent clean sinusoidal signals; 2) noisy non-stationary chirp signals; 3) coherent and non-stationary signals under noise. Furthermore, extensive simulations have been carried out to compute the root mean square error (RMSE) performance of the proposed method in comparison with the existing ones. The experiments have been designed for varying number of microphones, level of noise, and value of the time-frequency threshold. As a result of the experiments, we observe the efficacy of the proposed method in comparison with the conventional Root-MUSIC and Time-Frequency MUSIC (TF-MUSIC) methods.
An Image Encryption Scheme Based on IAVL Permutation Scheme and DNA Operations

In this paper, a novel image encryption algorithm based on a new permutation scheme and DNA operations are introduced. In our algorithm, SHA 256 and DNA hamming distance participate in the generation of the initial conditions of the 4D chaotic system, which can associate the encryption system with the original image. In the permutation process, based on the adjustment process of the IAVL (improved balanced binary tree), a new scrambling algorithm is constructed. Then the dynamic block coding rules are designed, in which different image blocks have different coding rules. In the diffusion process, a new diffusion algorithm with intra-block and inter-block is proposed to perform DNA operations on the intermediate encryption result and the key matrix. In the security analysis, the key space of the encryption system is 2933 and the information entropy is about 7.9973. In addition, the NPCR and UACI in the differential attack test are close to the ideal values of 99.6094% and 33.4653%. To further prove the security of the encryption algorithm, the Irregular deviation, Maximum deviation, Energy, Contrast, and Homogeneity tests are introduced into the analysis. Experimental results illustrate that the encryption scheme can against multiple illegal attacks like statistical, brute-force and differential attacks.
Retorting Oil Shale by a Self-Heating Route

Retorting is a frequently used method for producing shale oil from oil shale. During retorting, heat is usually supplied to the retort by heat-carrier gas of high temperature, such as 700 °C, until retorting ends. In this work, a low-energy-input retorting process using low-temperature carrier gas but without marked loss in oil yield was achieved by a self-heating effect, that is, spontaneously increasing retorting temperature in the absence of external heat provision. The self-heating retorting process starts by preheating oil shale from room temperature to 300 °C by external heating under N2 and then switching N2 to air of 150 °C. When N2 is replaced by air, the self-heating effect starts. Subsequently, the temperature of raw oil shale can increase spontaneously to complete the retorting, so that an external heat supply is no longer required. While using only N2 or only air as the carrier gas throughout the whole retorting process cannot produce such a good effect. In this N2-air sequence retorting proc.
Physical Aging in Ultrathin Polystyrene Films: Evidence of a Gradient in Dynamics at the Free Surface and Its Connection to the Glass Transition Temperature Reductions

We have measured the temperature dependence of the physical aging rate β of thick (2430 nm) and thin (29 nm) polystyrene (PS) films supported on silicon using a new streamlined ellipsometry procedure that we have recently developed. The physical aging rates β(T) for the ∼30 nm thick films are found to be reduced at all temperatures, which is not consistent with a simple shift in β corresponding to the average reduced glass transition temperature (Tg) of these films. Instead, the β(T) results correspond well with there being a gradient in dynamics near the free surface. Our β(T) results can be well fit by both a two-layer model and a gradient model. The temperature-dependent length scale (of order 10 nm) that characterizes the depth to which the enhanced dynamics near the free surface propagate into the film is similar to that found previously by Forrest and Mattsson [Phys. Rev. E 2000, 61, R53−R56] for the molecular weight (MW)-independent Tg reductions of low-MW free-standing PS films, strongly suggestin.
Policy-led Virtue Cultivation: Can we nudge citizens towards developing virtues? Forthcoming in: The Theory and Practice of Virtue Education (eds. Harrison and Walker)

This chapter examines what role, if any, new governmental behaviour-modification policies, commonly known as nudges, might play in cultivating virtues. It distinguishes between two types of nudge – automaticbehavioural and discernment-developing – and shows that what divides them is the ability of the latter, which the former lacks, to play an educative role in developing practical reason. In so doing, it outlines and defends what it calls the socio-ecological account of critical habituation. It thus provides an answer to the question of whether virtue-cultivating nudges are possible, while remaining neutral on whether virtue cultivation is, or under what conditions it may be, a permissible aim of liberal-democratic states.
Distinct neurocomputational mechanisms support informational and normative conformity

A change of mind in response to social influence could be driven by informational conformity to increase accuracy, or by normative conformity to comply with social norms such as reciprocity. Disentangling the behavioural, cognitive and neurobiological underpinnings of informational and normative conformity have proven elusive. Here, participants underwent fMRI while performing a perceptual task that involved both advice-taking and advice-giving to human and computer partners. The concurrent inclusion of two different social roles and two different social partners revealed distinct behavioural and neural markers for informational and normative conformity. dACC BOLD response tracked informational conformity towards both human and computer but tracked normative conformity only when interacting with human. A network of brain areas (dmPFC and TPJ) that tracked normative conformity increased their functional coupling with the dACC when interacting with humans. These findings enable differentiating the neural mechanisms by which different types of conformity shape social changes of mind.
Photocatalytic Degradation of Deoxynivalenol Using Cerium Doped Titanium Dioxide under Ultraviolet Light Irradiation

Deoxynivalenol (DON) is a major mycotoxin with high toxicity that often contaminates grains, foods and feeds. The traditional approaches for DON removal are difficult to meet industry and agriculture demands due to the high stability of the DON molecule. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop green and effective strategies for DON degradation. In this study, a batch of photocatalytic nanomaterials of cerium (Ce) doped titanium dioxide (TiO2) were successfully prepared by sol-gel method. The catalysts were systematically characterized by XRD, HRTEM, FT-IR, UV-Vis and XPS. The catalyst 0.5Ce-TiO2 showed superior photocatalytic activity for DON degradation in aqueous solution under ultraviolet light irradiation, better than that of traditional photocatalyst pure TiO2, and 96% DON with initial concentration of 5.0 mg/L could be degraded in 4 h. In addition, the two possible degradation intermediate products C5H8O3 and C17H18O6 were identified, the photocatalytic degradation mechanism and degradation pathway were studied. The results indicate that Ce doped TiO2 photocatalyst can be used to reduce DON effectively.
Probiotic lactobacilli in faeces of breastfed babies

The intestinal microbiota is an active ecosystem with high complexity, which is composed of more than 400 bacterial species and an average of 1014 microorganisms (Pinto et al., 2006). This microbiota plays crucial roles in preventing colonization from potential pathogenic microorganisms and developing the immune system. The microbiota is associated with allergy and infection risks in early life stages and even with later risks of obesity. The FAO of the UN and the WHO (WHO/FAO) describe ‘probiotics’ as living microorganisms that provide a health benefit to the host when administered in adequate amounts (Munoz-Quezada et al., 2013). Dairy products, cereal products, juices, processed meat, and vegetable products, nutritional supplements, and drugs have been considered as a source of probiotic (Zendeboodi et al., 2020). Different terms about probiotics have also been proposed in recent years. postbiotics (healthful metabolites of probiotics), probioactives (probitic bacterial lysates that eliciting immune response), paraprobiotics (inactivated/dead cells of probiotics) psycobiotic (mental healthful probiotics) (Champagne et al., 2018; Zendeboodi et al., 2020).
A P ] 8 A pr 2 00 8 Divergence form operators in Reifenberg flat domains .

We study the boundary regularity of solutions of elliptic operators in divergence form with C coefficients or operators which are small perturbations of the Laplacian in non-smooth domains. We show that, as in the case of the Laplacian, there exists a close relationship between the regularity of the corresponding elliptic measure and the geometry of the domain. AMS Subject Classifications: 35J25, (31B05)
S PATIAL AND TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF P UUMALA HANTAVIRUS INFECTION IN RED BANK VOLE ( C LETHRIONOMYS GLAREOLUS ) POPULATIONS IN B ELGIUM

Dynamics of hantavirus infection and population densities in rodents were investigated from 1996 to 1999 in southern Belgium. Evidence of Puumala infection was restricted to Clethrionomys glareolus. Although the serotype was not determined, antibodies against hantavirus were also found in eight Apodemus sylvaticus. In fall 1996, the seroprevalence in C. glareolus was high (20.1%, 37 of 184) and the infection was widely distributed in the area studied whereas a focal occurrence of positive rodents and lower seroprevalence rates were recorded in spring 1997 (14.3%, six of 42), fall 1997 (6.6%, 11 of 166), spring 1998 (6.4%, three of 47) and fall 1998 (6.7%, 11 of 165). A pullulation of rodents was observed in spring 1999 and was associated with a markedly higher seroprevalence in C. glareolus (47.7%, 189 of 396). In all seasons, infection rates in adults were higher than in juveniles and subadults. No significant difference of prevalence was recorded between males and females. In two trapping sites, the temporary disappearance of positive animals after a crash in rodent populations suggests that a threshold in density is necessary for the maintenance of the enzootic cycle. Published in : Virus Research (2000), vol. 67, n°1, pp. 91 – 107 DOI: 10.1016/S0168-1702(00)00136-2 Status : Postprint (Author’s version)