Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship of Lane Width to Saturation Flow Rate on Urban and Suburban Signalized Intersection Approaches

An understanding of the relationship between lane width and traffic operations is important in making decisions about urban and suburban arterials. Numerous geometric elements, including lane width, affect the saturation flow rate at an intersection on an urban or suburban arterial. Several studies have been conducted to evaluate the relationship between lane width and saturation flow rate at intersections. This relationship is investigated on urban and suburban signalized intersection approaches by using field-study sites with the most ideal conditions possible. Research results indicate that saturation flow rate varies with lane width. Average saturation flow rate was in the range of 1,736 to 1,752 passenger cars (pc)/h/ln for 2.9-m (9.5-ft) lanes, 1,815 to 1,830 pc/h/ln for 3.3- to 3.6-m (11- to 12-ft) lanes, and 1,898 to 1,913 pc/h/ln for lane widths of 4.0 m (13 ft) or greater. These measured saturation flow rates are generally lower than those currently used in the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM). Furthermore, the percentage difference in saturation flow rate between sites with 2.9- and 3.6-m (9.5- and 12-ft) lanes was about half the value used in the HCM. Because data were limited to queue lengths between 8 and 11 vehicles, the research results do not directly address queue lengths longer than 11 vehicles.
Biogenic Copper Nanoparticles From Medicinal Plants As Novel Antidiabetic Nanomedicine

Department of Microbiology, Modern College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Ganeshkhind, Pune-411016, India. Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune411007, India. Department of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, Bio Medi Tech, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 10, 33720, Tampere, Finland. National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Thiruvananthapuram-695019, India. Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Powai, Mumbai-400076, India. Department of Microbiology, RK University, Rajkot, Gujarat-360020, India.
Antioxidant activity and protective effect of propolis against carbon tetrachloride-induced liver and kidney injury by modulation of oxidative parameters

Abstract Background and Aim: Propolis has a protective effect against cellular damage caused by toxic agents such as drugs, metals, xenobiotics, and chemicals. The aim of this study was to investigate the antioxidant activity and the effect of ethanolic extract of propolis on carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced oxidative stress on kidney and liver injury in rat. Materials and Methods: The study quantified phenol, flavone, and flavonol in propolis and assessed antioxidant activity using 2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl, ferric reducing antioxidant power, and molybdate. The investigators used four groups of rats to study the effect of propolis on CCl4-induced toxicity. Propolis extract was given orally (500 mg/kg) for 12 days, and CCl4 (1 mL/kg) was administered intraperitoneally on day 5 of the experiment. Blood and tissue samples of the liver and kidney were collected on day 13 to measure biochemical and oxidative parameters. The parameters included malondialdehyde (MDA), protein carbonyl formation (PCO), advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP), catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), reduced glutathione (GSH), and ascorbic acid (AA). Biochemical parameters included liver enzymes, blood urea (BU), creatinine, and uric acid (UA). Results: CCl4 decreased antioxidant agents, including CAT, GPx, GSH, and AA in the liver and kidney tissues. The oxidative agents’ levels, including MDA, PCO, and AOPP, increased by CCl4 compared to the control group. CCl4 increased liver enzymes, UA, BU, and creatinine in the blood samples. Propolis significantly alleviated liver and kidney function, improved antioxidant parameters, and decreased levels of oxidative agents. Conclusion: The data showed for the 1st time that Moroccan propolis has a protective effect against CCl4-induced kidney and liver toxicity by maintaining the activity of the antioxidant defense system, which was most likely due to its antioxidant activity.
Awareness of risky behaviour among Chinese drivers

Background In China, as in many developing countries, rapid increases in car ownership and new drivers have been coupled with a large trauma burden. The World Health Organization has identified key risk factors including speeding, drink-driving, helmet and restraint non-use, overloaded vehicles, and fatigued-driving in many rapidly motorising countries, including China. Levels of awareness of these risk factors among road users are not well understood. Although research identifies speeding as the major factor contributing to road crashes in China, there appears to be widespread acceptance of it among the broader community. Purpose To assess self-reported speeding and awareness of crash risk factors among Chinese drivers in Beijing. Methods Car drivers (n=299) were recruited from car washing locations and car parks to complete an anonymous questionnaire. Perceptions of the relative risk of drink-driving, fatigued-driving and speeding, and attitudes towards speeding and self-reported driving speeds were assessed. Results Overall, driving speeds of >10km/hr above posted limits on two road types (60 and 80 km/hour zones) were reported by more than one third of drivers. High-range speeding (i.e., >30 km/hour in a 60 km/hour zone and >40 km/hour in an 80 km/hour zone) was reported by approximately 5% of the sample. Attitudinal measures indicated that approximately three quarters of drivers reported attitudes that were not supportive of speeding. Drink-driving was identified as the most risky behaviour; 18% reported the perception that drink-driving had the same level of danger as speeding and 82% reported it as more dangerous. For fatigued-driving, 1% reported the perception that it was not as dangerous as speeding; 27.4% reported it as the same level and 71.6% perceived it as more dangerous. Conclusion Driving speeds well above posted speed limits were commonly reported by drivers. Speeding was rated as the least dangerous on-road behaviour, compared to drink-driving and fatigued-driving. One third of drivers reported regularly engaging in speeds at least 10km/hr above posted limits, despite speeding being the major reported contributor to crashes. Greater awareness of the risks associated with speeding is needed to help reduce the road trauma burden in China and promote greater speed limit compliance.
Directed Probabilistic Watershed

The Probabilistic Watershed is a semi-supervised learning algorithm applied on undirected graphs. Given a set of labeled nodes (seeds), it deﬁnes a Gibbs probability distribution over all possible spanning forests disconnecting the seeds. It calculates, for every node, the probability of sampling a forest connecting a certain seed with the considered node. We propose the "Directed Probabilistic Watershed", an extension of the Probabilistic Watershed algorithm to directed graphs. Building on the Probabilistic Watershed, we apply the Matrix Tree Theorem for directed graphs and deﬁne a Gibbs probability distribution over all incoming directed forests rooted at the seeds. Similar to the undirected case, this turns out to be equivalent to the Directed Random Walker. Furthermore, we show that in the limit case in which the Gibbs distribution has inﬁnitely low temperature, the labeling of the Directed Probabilistic Watershed is equal to the one induced by the incoming directed forest of minimum cost. Finally, for illustration, we compare the empirical performance of the proposed method with other semi-supervised segmentation methods for directed graphs.
Interaction of Chemical, Physicochemical, and Geotechnical Soil Properties of Anambra State Gully Erosion Sites

Disturbed subgrade soil samples were collected from five (5) different erosion sites in Anambra State, Nigeria. In-situ and laboratory tests were conducted to ascertain the biochemical, physicochemical, and geotechnical properties of these samples. The topsoil characteristics were studied differently from the subsoil characteristics. All the samples considered were non plastic (from Atterberg limit tests). The result of relative size of soil particles in Anambra state reveals a higher mean values of sand when compared to silt and clay. The maximum dry density of the soil averaged (1858.19 ± 52.257) kg/m 3 and (1866.986 ± 50.298) kg/m 3 for the topsoil and subsoil respectively indicating high compaction values. The sodicity (Sodium Absorption Ratio and Exchangeable Sodium Percentage) of the soil was used to measure the dispersiveness of the soil, and the results show that Anambra state soils are highly dispersive, especially the topsoil. Hence, it is highly related to the erodibility of the soils in the zone considered. Furthermore, correlation analysis showed that there is a considerable correlation between geotechnical, physicochemical and biochemical properties of the soils in the state with the presence of sodium playing a major role in determining the influential properties.
Can we overcome the Winners Curse by (behavioral) Auction Design?

The Winners Curse (WC) is a non-equilibrium behavior in common-value auctions involving systematic overbidding leading to signi cant losses. We propose a static auction mechanism with a payment rule that internalizes the adverse selection, resulting in sincere bidding, as no-regret equilibrium. We compare this mechanism with other payment rules resulting in sincere bidding equilibrium but with regret. The other rules use excessive information, and we study whether that helps bidders nd their way to equilibrium bidding. Our no-regret rule generates signi cantly less WC than the static rst-price auction, but more than the dynamic English auction. Yet, our other, more intuitive, sincere bidding rule mitigates overbidding better than the no-regret rule, and remarkably for a sealed-bid design, matches the performance of the dynamic English auction. Keywords: common value auction, direct mechanism, English auction, lab experiment. JEL classi cation: C72, C92, D44 Financial support from Maastricht University through METEOR and the Department of Economics (AE1) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Lawrence Ausubel, B. Douglas Bernheim, Vitali Gretschko, Jacob Goeree, Ron Harstad, Sergiu Hart, Michael Mandler, Marco Pagano, Marco Pagnozzi, Robert Porter, Orly Sade, Jereon Swinkels, Leeat Yariv and audiences in Ankara, Berkeley, Evanston (MEA2012; Kellogg), Exeter, Istanbul (GAMES2012), London (RHUL), Mannheim (2017 ZEW Market Design Workshop), Naples, Salerno, Stanford (seminar and SITE2011), Jerusalem, and Maastricht (MBEES2011) for helpful comments. Special thanks to Yaron Azrieli for many helpful comments and to John Kagel for providing the comparison data on rst-price common value auctions. yDepartment of Economics, The Ohio State University, 1945 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43210, e-mail: levin.32@osu.edu. zKarlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute of Economics (ECON), Bluecherstr. 17, 76185 Karlsruhe, Germany, e-mail: philipp.reiss@kit.edu.
Marketing of Some Selected Cassava Products in Udi Local Government Area, Enugu State Nigeria

The study examined the marketing of some cassava based products in Udi Local Government Area of Enugu State, Nigeria. Forty respondents were sampled using multistage sampling techniques. A well structured questionnaire was used for collection of data. The analytical tools used were descriptive statistics, gross margin analysis, net margin and marketing margin. The socio-economic characteristics showed that female respondents dominated (92.5%), majority of respondents were married (42.5%), the household size was between 6 and 10 persons and the age bracket of the majority of respondents was 40 to 49 years. Gari was ranked as the most important staple cassava based product in the study area. Colour was the common criterion among the selected cassava based products for patronage by customers. Fufu had the highest gross ( 59,788.75) and net margins ( 14,188.75). The major constraints marketers of cassava based products faced were high cost of transportation, inadequate capital, high cost of labour, perishability of the product, inadequate storage facilities and unstandardised and unattractive products for exports. It is recommended that government should provide good road networks especially in the rural areas and the extension agents should assist in organizing the farmers into cooperative groups to facilitate procurement of loan.
Cross-view Geo-localization with Layer-to-Layer Transformer

In this work, we address the problem of cross-view geo-localization, which estimates the geospatial location of a street view image by matching it with a database of geo-tagged aerial images. The cross-view matching task is extremely challenging due to drastic appearance and geometry differences across views. Unlike existing methods that predominantly fall back on CNN, here we devise a novel layer-to-layer Transformer (L2LTR) that utilizes the properties of self-attention in Transformer to model global dependencies, thus signiﬁcantly decreasing visual ambiguities in cross-view geo-localization. We also exploit the positional encoding of the Transformer to help the L2LTR understand and correspond geometric conﬁg-urations between ground and aerial images. Compared to state-of-the-art methods that impose strong assumptions on geometry knowledge, the L2LTR ﬂexibly learns the positional embeddings through the training objective. It hence becomes more practical in many real-world scenarios. Although Transformer is well suited to our task, its vanilla self-attention mechanism independently interacts within image patches in each layer, which overlooks correlations between layers. Instead, this paper proposes a simple yet effective self-cross attention mechanism to improve the quality of learned representations. Self-cross attention models global dependencies between adjacent layers and creates short paths for effective information ﬂow. As a result, the proposed self-cross attention leads to more stable training, improves the generalization ability, and prevents the learned intermediate features from being overly similar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L2LTR performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on standard, ﬁne-grained, and cross-dataset cross-view geo-localization tasks. The code is available online. 3
Structure-Aware Random Fourier Kernel for Graphs

Gaussian Processes (GPs) deﬁne distributions over functions and their generalization capabilities depend heavily on the choice of kernels. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware random Fourier (SRF) kernel for GPs that brings several beneﬁts when modeling graph-structured data. First, SRF kernel is deﬁned with a spectral distribution based on the Fourier duality given by the Bochner’s theorem, transforming the kernel learning problem to a distribution inference problem. Second, SRF kernel admits a random Fourier feature formulation that makes the kernel scalable for optimization. Third, SRF kernel enables to leverage geometric structures by taking subgraphs as inputs. To effectively optimize GPs with SRF kernel, we develop a variational EM algorithm, which alternates between an inference procedure (E-step) and a learning procedure (M-step). Experimental results on ﬁve real-world datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in two typical graph learning tasks, i.e., object classiﬁcation and link prediction.
On the Bandgap Energy and Refractive Index of Cd Zn S Thin Films Deposited By Two Methods

Cadmium Zinc Sulphide thin films were prepared at room temperature using Successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction(SILAR) and chemical bath (CBN) techniques. The solution is made of solution of Cadmium Sulphide (CdS) as a source of Cd 2+ , Zinc Sulphate (Z n So 4 ) as a source of Z n 2+ , thiourea [CS(NH 2 ) 2 as a source of Sulphide ion and ammonia (NH 2 ) as the complexing agent. The grown films were annealed at temperature of 200 K and 300 K in each case in order to investigate the effect of annealing temperature on the deposited thin films. The films grown by both techniques were studied using X-ray Diffractometer (XPERTPEA) and UV-ViS Spectropholometer. Extrapolation of the linear portion of the plots to the energy axis yielded the direct bad gap values of 2.9-3.0 eV for CBD deposited films and 3.49-3.50 eV for SILAR deposited films and the range of band gap obtained from the CDB deposited film were in close agreement with that of other authors. Also, the index of refraction was found to be in the range 1.05-1.15 eV for CBD deposited film and 1.5-2.65 eV for SILAR deposited films.
Measurement analysis of braking forces and braking coefficient at different loads of a passenger vehicle

This paper presented an analysis of the braking force efficiency, i.e. its intensity in the case. It presented an analysis of the efficiency of braking forces, i.e. their intensity in the case when the load of a passenger vehicle was gradually changing. The change in the load of the vehicle was done by varying the number of passengers in it from one to five which is a feature of a higher number of M1 category vehicle. By increasing in the number of passengers the weight of the vehicle varied by approximately 75kg per passenger. The experimental test was performed in the technical inspection station, i.e. on standard rollers for the brake system testing. The test results shown that the relative difference of braking forces occurred on the front axle during intensive braking and that the braking coefficient was the lowest of about 69.94% in the case when only the driver was in the vehicle. It increased with increasing load, i.e. the number of passengers in the vehicle up to 85.91% and then dropped by increasing the rear passenger behind the driver and front passenger to 80.43% which can affect the stability of the vehicle when braking in the event of a dangerous traffic situation.
Simulation of shell and tube heat exchanger using COMSOL software

The aim of this paper is to propose a model to simulate the behaviour of water flows in shell and tube heat exchanger. Particularly, the continuity equation, the general heat transfer equations and the energy equation in COMSOL Multiphysics software were implemented in the numerical modelling. Besides, the experiment was also conducted to validate the proposed COMSOL model. The water temperature at locations close to the inlet and outlet of the shell side was respectively predicted at 31.5°C and 34.6°C in the simulation, and it was respectively measured at 31.5°C and 35°C in the experiment. These findings showed that the simulation results had a good agreement with the experiment. Next, this model was extended to simulate the overall heat coefficient and the pressure drops of the water flows in such heat exchanger. The overall heat coefficient was at 736.62 W/m2K. The pressure drops at the inlet/outlet areas of the shell and tubes were at 849.93 Pa and 6255.50 Pa, respectively. Conclusive evidence showed that the proposed model is a reliable method for studying the heat transfer behaviour of the shell and heat exchanger.
Searching for Diamagnetic Blob Accretion in the 74 day K2 Observation of V2400 Ophiuchi

Since its discovery in 1995, V2400 Ophiuchi (V2400 Oph) has stood apart from most known intermediate polar cataclysmic variables due to its proposed magnetic field strength (9–27 MG) and diskless accretion. To date, the exact accretion mechanism of the system is still unknown, and standard accretion models fail to accurately predict the peculiar behavior of its light curve. We present the K2 Campaign 11 light curve of V2400 Oph recording 74.19 days of photometric data cadenced at 1 minute. The light curve is dominated by aperiodic flickering and quasiperiodic oscillations, which make the beat and spin signals inconspicuous on short timescales. Notably, a log–log full power spectrum shows a break frequency at ∼102 cycles d−1 similar to some disk-fed systems. Through power-spectral analysis, the beat and spin periods are measured as 1003.4 ± 0.2 s and 927.7 ± 0.1 s, respectively. A power spectrum of the entire K2 observation demonstrates beat period dominance. However, time-resolved power spectra reveal a strong dependence between observation length and the dominant frequency of the light curve. For short observations (2–12 hr) the beat, spin, or first beat harmonic can be observed as the dominant periodic signal. Such incoherence and variability indicate a dynamical accretion system more complex than current intermediate polar theories can explain. We propose that a diamagnetic blob accretion model may serve as a plausible explanation for the accretion mechanism.
To Assess and Correlate Cardiorespiratory Adaptations in Endurance-Trained Cyclist and Recreational Cyclist

Background: This cross-sectional study aimed to compare and correlate HRV indices, body composition, and aerobic power (VO2max) in recreational cyclists and trained endurance (road) cyclists. 47 male cyclists participated in the study (age: 20.32 ± 0.365; height: 171.50 ± 1.117; BMI: 23.00 ± 0.47) divided into 3 groups (Group 1: Recreational cyclist; group 2: Delhi Cyclist, playing at State/National level; and group 3: IGI cyclist, playing at National/International level). Methods: The participants underwent body composition analysis (BMI, Subcutaneous whole body, body density, body fat %, lean body mass) and anthropometry profiling. HRV was recorded (RMSSD, pNN50%, SDNN, LH/HF ratio) at resting state (~5 minutes) using the Heartware Shimmer ECG device. Later 3 minutes McArdle step test was done to measure VO2 max. Result: The VO2max (F2, 44=22.821, P<0.001) and Body fat % (7-Fold) (F2, 44=6.772, P=0.003) differed significantly between the 3 groups of cyclists. A highly significant negative correlation was seen between cycling experience in years with Resting HR and LF/HF ratio (p<0.01) with their r- values at -. 382 and -. 448 respectively, and statistically significant negative correlation was indicated with Body fat% (7-fold), r=-. 322 (p<0.05). Conclusion: Significant differences were seen in the aerobic capacity (VO2max) between all the 3 groups of cyclists. Improved VO2max in trained road cyclists can be particularly due to the nature of cycling (endurance) training, overall training volume, and reduction in the body fat % and fat mass, which further enhances the adaptations to autonomic control. KEY WORDS: adaptation, autonomic nervous system, body composition, cardiorespiratory, cyclist, endurance, HRV, recreational, road cycling, VO2max.