Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Water conflicts among different water users and uses in the Hakwatuna Oya watershed in the Deduru Oya basin, Sri Lanka

Scarcity of water is the main problem of agriculture and other livelihoods of Hakwatuna Oya watershed in Deduru Oya basin which leads to conflicts among different water users and uses. With this background, a study was conducted to find water conflicts and factors leading to such conflicts among different water users and uses in Hakwatuna Oya watershed. Various field research methodologies including field surveys, focus group discussions, and interviews with farmers, officials and community leaders were used to gather information. In addition, documentary evidence, such as minutes of the monthly Project Management Committee meetings during 2012 Maha to 2014 Yala seasons were perused to study the conflicts within the irrigation command. Conflicts between head-end and tail-end farmers, farmers and officers, farmers of irrigation command area and in the catchment, farmers of irrigation command area and fisherman and farmers of irrigation command and outside of the command area were found during the study. Conflicts arise mainly due to water scarcity, and number of conflicts is comparatively higher during Yala (dry) season. Illegal water tapping is the most common reason for conflicts among farmers. Poor attitudes of farmers, weakness of existing land and water rights, non-implementation of existing law primarily due to political interference, encroachments and inadequate institutional arrangement for water resource management are found to be contributing factors to water conflicts. The socio-economic and cultural factors, such as gender and religion also play roles in existing water conflicts.
A Study on the Intention of Public Institution Managers and Procurement Business Bidding Managers to Use the e-Procurement System

This study analyzes the difference in the intention to use an e-Procurement system by examining public institution procurement managers and the bidding managers of procurement businesses who participate in government bids. A comparison of intention of use between procurement institutions and procurement businesses showed that the influence on the intention to use among public institution procurement managers was stronger than was that on procurement business bidding managers. The results also showed that public institution procurement managers had a stronger influencing relationship with social influence, task–technology fit, partnership, and security variables; the factors and functions related to these must be strengthened in order to revitalize the e-Procurement system. Meanwhile, procurement business bidding managers had a strong relationship with the facilitating condition and technological characteristic variables. This study is significant in showing the importance of strengthening the functions related to security.
Hit-and-Run or Hit-and-Stay: Do Stricter BAC Limits Encourage Drivers to Flee the Crash Scene?

We use state-specific annual data from the 1990-2010 US Fatality Analysis Reporting System to examine the effects of traffic policies on hit-and-run fatalities. Results show that lower blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits may have an unintended consequence of increasing hit-and-run fatality rates, while a similar effect is not present for non-hit-and-run fatalities. Specifically, we find that the 0.08 BAC limit increased hit-and-run traffic fatalities over this period by 13-16 percent. As a potential mechanism, we suspect that intoxicated drivers might flee a crash scene due to severe driving-under-the-influence (DUI) sanctions, which are often more stringent than non-DUI hit-andrun penalties.
A Comprehensive Review of Glucose Biosensors Based on Nanostructured Metal-Oxides

Nanotechnology has opened new and exhilarating opportunities for exploring glucose biosensing applications of the newly prepared nanostructured materials. Nanostructured metal-oxides have been extensively explored to develop biosensors with high sensitivity, fast response times, and stability for the determination of glucose by electrochemical oxidation. This article concentrates mainly on the development of different nanostructured metal-oxide [such as ZnO, Cu(I)/(II) oxides, MnO2, TiO2, CeO2, SiO2, ZrO2, and other metal-oxides] based glucose biosensors. Additionally, we devote our attention to the operating principles (i.e., potentiometric, amperometric, impedimetric and conductometric) of these nanostructured metal-oxide based glucose sensors. Finally, this review concludes with a personal prospective and some challenges of these nanoscaled sensors.
Marketing practices of hotels and resorts in ChiangMai: a study of products, pricing, and promotional practices

The objective of this research is to explore marketing practices in the hospitality industry in terms of product offering, pricing, and promotion along with the relationship of customers’ satisfaction with such practices. The study was limited to the hotels and resorts that provide sleeping accommodations and meal options in ChiangMai. The respondents are 189 clients who checked-in during the research time period and 19 owners/managers of these businesses. The findings show that the hotels and resorts are mostly sole proprietorship, and most managers are college graduates and female. They offer discounts, assist and greet customers, work in a friendly manner, and provide clean rooms. Also, no significant relationship was found between the level of marketing practices and the business-related factors. Likewise, there was no significant relationship between the level of customer’s satisfaction and the marketing practices. Implications and recommendations are provided for managers.
A Method for Identification of the Equivalent Inductance and Resistance in the Plant Model of Current-Controlled Grid-Tied Converters

Precise knowledge of the plant time constant L/R is essential to perform a thorough analysis and design of the current control loop in voltage source converters (VSCs). From the perspective of the current controller dynamics in the low-frequency range, such plant time constant is also suitable for most cases in which an LCL filter is used. As the loop behavior can be significantly influenced by the VSC working conditions, the effects associated to converter losses should be included in the model, through an equivalent series resistance. In addition, the plant inductance may also present important uncertainties with respect to the value of the VSC L/LCL interface filter measured at rated conditions. Thus, in this paper, a method is presented to estimate both parameters of the plant time constant, i.e., the equivalent inductance and resistance in the plant model of current-controlled VSCs. The proposed technique is based on the evaluation of the closed-loop transient responses of both axes of the synchronous reference frame when a proportional-integral current controller is implemented. The method gives a set of resistance and inductance values that should be employed for a rigorous design of the current controllers. Experimental results validate the approach.
Hydrogen Peroxide and Beyond-the Potential of High-voltage Plasma-activated Liquids Against Cancerous Cells.

BACKGROUND The use of plasma-activated liquids such as PBS, medium or simply plasma-activated water (PAW) has been receiving increasing attention for applications in cancer treatments. Amongst the reactive species contained in these solutions, hydrogen peroxide appears to play a pivotal role in causing cytotoxic effects. H2O2 concentrations can be correlated with reduced cell viability and growth and used as an indicator of the potential efficacy of a plasma-activated liquid. OBJECTIVE To investigate the cytotoxic mediators generated in water specific to high-voltage DBD-ACP. METHOD Using a high-voltage dielectric barrier atmospheric cold plasma (DBD-ACP) system, we examined PAW-mediated cytotoxic effects on different mammalian cell lines employing a set-up where short-lived reactive species can be discounted and activated liquids with long-term stability are generated. RESULTS The PAW potency could be modulated using voltage level, treatment time and post-treatment storage time and target-related characteristics such as surface to volume ratio. All of these parameters effected cell viability in a hydrogen peroxide concentration correlated manner. The susceptibility of two cancer cell lines to PAW was similar to that observed for two non-cancer cell lines and the toxicity of plasma-activated water exceeded that of the corresponding hydrogen peroxide concentrations. CONCLUSION In cytotoxic plasma activated water an essential role for H2O2 has been demonstrated multi-fold, yet further contributing factors are apparent and remain to be identified.
Uveal Melanoma Gene Expression Status Post Radiotherapy

Purpose Gene expression profiling has been shown to yield two distinct molecular genetic signatures for uveal melanoma. These class designations tend to predict tumor aggressiveness and the likelihood of metastasis. Tumors with a class 1 genetic signature are generally much less aggressive than tumors with a class 2 genetic signature. Gene expression analysis for previously treated uveal melanoma has not yet been reported. The authors report three cases where genetic analysis was successfully obtained from uveal melanoma that was previously treated years earlier with radiotherapy. Case Report The patients in all three cases received globe-conserving radiotherapy for treatment of choroidal melanoma before gene expression profiling was readily available. The patients in cases 1 and 2 received 125I plaque brachytherapy while the patient in case 3 received proton irradiation therapy. When secondary surgery was necessary to stabilize these eyes from the effects of radiation retinopathy, fine-needle aspiration biopsy was also performed for gene expression profiling. Genomic analysis revealed a class 1 molecular signature for the patient in case 1 and a class 2 molecular signature for the patients in cases 2 and 3. Conclusions Gene expression profiling for uveal melanoma may be obtained from patients who were previously treated with radiotherapy; however, the implication of these results will benefit from ongoing clinical evaluation.
Health-Related Quality of Life Following Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant During Childhood

The purpose of this study is to examine the self-reported and parent-reported health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of children (age < 19 years) who received a hematopoietic (bone marrow, cord blood, or peripheral blood) stem cell transplant (SCT) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). A total of 35 families participated: 31 SCT recipients, 35 mothers, and 28 fathers. Mean scores were 73.6 child, 71.2 mothers, and 76.2 fathers (range of 0-100, with high scores indicating better HRQoL). No significant overall HRQoL difference between parent and child were reported. Mothers reported significantly lower physical functioning (F 2,23 = 3.509, P = .041) compared to child (P = .041) and fathers (P = .025). Older age at time of transplant was associated with higher procedural anxiety according to child (r = .498, P = .005) and mothers (r = .466, P = .008). Older age at time of transplant was associated with less worry according to fathers (r = -.589, P = .002). Overall, SCT recipients and their parents report moderately high HRQoL.
Hierarchical Strategy Synthesis for Pursuit-Evasion Problems

We present a novel approach for solving pursuit-evasion problems where multiple pursuers with limited sensing capabilities are used to detect all possible mobile evaders in a given environment. We make no assumptions about the number, the speed, or the maneuverability of evaders. Our algorithm takes as input a map of the environment and sensor models for the pursuers. We then obtain a graph representation of an environment using a Čech Complex. Even with such a representation, the configuration space grows exponentially with the number of pursuers. In order to address this challenge, we propose an abstraction framework to partition the configuration space into sets of topologically similar configurations that preserve the space of possible evader locations. We validate our approach on several simulated environments with varying topologies and numbers of pursuers.
IOMMU Para-Virtualization for Efficient and Secure DMA in Virtual Machines

IOMMU is a hardware unit that is indispensable for DMA. Besides address translation and remapping, it also provides I/O virtual address space isolation among devices and memory access control on DMA transactions. However, currently commodity virtualization platforms lack of IOMMU virtualization, so that the virtual machines are vulnerable to DMA security threats. Previous works focus only on DMA security problem of directly assigned devices. Moreover, these solutions either introduce significant overhead or require modifications on the guest OS to optimize performance, and none can achieve high I/O efficiency and good compatibility with the guest OS simultaneously, which are both necessary for production environments. However, for simulated virtual devices the DMA security problem also exists, and previous works cannot solve this problem. The reason behind that is IOMMU circuits on the host do not work for this kind of devices as DMA operations of which are simulated by memory copy of CPU. Motivated by the above observations, we propose an IOMMU para-virtualization solution called PVIOMMU, which provides general functionalities especially DMA security guarantees for both directly assigned devices and simulated devices. The prototype of PVIOMMU is implemented in Qemu/KVM based on the virtio framework and can be dynamically loaded into guest kernel as a module, As a result, modifying and rebuilding guest kernel are not required. In addition, the device model of Qemu is revised to implement DMA access control by separating the device simulator from the address space of the guest virtual machine. Experimental evaluations on three kinds of network devices including Intel I210 (1Gbps), simulated E1000 (1Gbps) and IB ConnectX-3 (40Gbps) show that, PVIOMMU introduces little overhead on DMA transactions, and in general the network I/O performance is close to that in the native KVM implementation without IOMMU virtualization.
A locus for ophthalmo‐acromelic syndrome mapped to 10p11.23

Ophthalmo‐acromelic syndrome (OAS, OMIM %206920) is a rare autosomal recessive disease, presenting with clinical anophthalmia and limb anomalies. We recruited three OAS families including a Japanese family with two affected patients and two consanguineous Lebanese families each having an affected. Homozygosity mapping was performed using the 50K SNP chip and additional informative markers. A locus for OAS was mapped to the 422‐kb region at 10q11.23, based on the results from the two consanguineous families as well as the consistent data from the Japanese non‐consanguineous family. The 422‐kb region only contained one gene, MPP7. Although we could not detect any pathological mutations in OAS families analyzed, MPP7 could remain a candidate as aberrant changes might exist beyond our mutation detection methods. Further families are needed to confirm this candidate locus. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
One-cycle Control of induction machine traction drive for high speed railway part II: Square wave modulation region

The configuration of a single-phase AC-DC converter plus a three-phase DC-AC inverter traction system has been widely applied in high speed railway electrical drive systems. If the LC filter is not adopted in the DC-link, the DC-link voltage fluctuation may beat with the motor electric frequency, which could cause an increase in power loss, torque pulsation and audible noise. This paper aims to reduce the beat effect of DC-link voltage fluctuation in the traction drive system, Firstly, the harmonic spectra and beat phenomena are analyzed when square wave modulation is adopted in the high speed region. Secondly, a new extension of One-cycle Control (OCC) is proposed for the inverter-motor drive system in high speed region, which is used for square wave modulation, and the adopted OCC method is designed and analyzed in detail in the paper. Finally, the comparison between the performance of the adopted OCC scheme and the traditional square wave modulation is made, and the effectiveness and advantages of the OCC scheme are confirmed by simulation test.
Why internal and external validity of experimental studies are relevant for clinical practice?

In randomised controlled trials (RCTs) there are two types of validity: internal validity and external validity. Internal validity refers to the extent to which the observed difference between groups can be correctly attributed to the intervention under investigation. In other words, it is the extent to which the design and conduct of the trial eliminate error. Internal validity might be threatened by two types of errors: systematic error (also called bias) and chance error (also called random error or statistical error) (Keirse & Hanssens, 2000. Systematic error, or bias, may be the consequence of erroneous ways of collecting, analysing and interpreting data. This may produce differences between treatments that are not real, with an overestimation or an underestimation of the true beneficial or harmful effect of an intervention (Juni et al., 2001). In RCTs there are four types of bias: selection bias (when the groups differ in baseline characteristics because of the way participants are selected), performance bias (when the care provided to the trial participants differs systematically between the experimental and control group), detection bias (when there are systematic differences in outcome assessment), and attrition bias (when the loss of participants from the study systematically differs between the experimental and control group). By contrast, chance error, or statistical error, is due to outcome variability that may arise by chance alone. Studies with small sample sizes are more likely to incur in this type of error than studies with large sample sizes. Thus, the risk of random error may be minimised by recruiting sufficiently large samples of patients.
Using Low Level Gradient Channels for Computationally Efficient Object Detection and Its Application in Logo Detection

We propose a logo detection approach which utilizes the Haar (Haar-like) features computed directly from the gradient orientation, gradient magnitude channels and the gray intensity channel to effectively and efficiently extract discriminating features for a variety of logo images. The major contributions of this work are two-fold: 1) we explicitly demonstrate that, with an optimized design and implementation, the considerable discrimination can be obtained from the simple features like the Haar features which are extracted directly from the low level gradient orientation and magnitude channels, 2) we proposed an effective and efficient logo detection approach by using the Haar features obtained directly from gradient orientation, magnitude, and gray image channels. The experimental results on the collected merchandise images of Louis Vuitton (LV) and Polo Ralph Lauren (PRL) products show promising applicabilities of our approach.
A new and efficient algorithm for short-circuit calculation in distribution networks with distributed generation

This paper presents a new algorithm for short-circuit currents calculation in distribution networks in which distributed generators are connected. The specifications of the IEC 60909 Standard are applied, in which the fault is replaced by an equivalent voltage source. The algorithm consists in two steps: a forward sweep, in which the aggregated impedances between each bus and the neutral point are calculated, and the backward sweep, in which the short-circuit currents flowing in the network branches are determined. The IEEE 33 bus test network is used for numerical calculations, considering 5 distributed generators.
Arithmetic Circuit Optimization in Finite Word Length Approximation of Arbitrary Functions

In digital circuit design using a hardware description language, some elementary functions and user defined functions can not be expressed directly. In such cases, the target function is approximated as a polynomial to be implemented by additions and multiplications. If an approximation error exceeds the permissible one, it can be corrected with a look-up table (LUT). However, considering discrete and nonlinear relation between the approximation error and the circuit area, optimization of reducing the total hardware cost would be more complex. In this research, for an arbitrary function, we propose the optimization technique of minimizing the hardware cost. The proposed method starts with multiple initial solutions based on two hardware models. Furthermore, for optimization algorithm, tabu search (TS) is used, and it is parallelized to make a global search.
Subunit Interactions and Glutamine Utilization byEscherichia coli Imidazole Glycerol Phosphate Synthase

ABSTRACT A selection strategy has been developed to identify amino acid residues involved in subunit interactions that coordinate the two half-reactions catalyzed by glutamine amidotransferases. The protein structures known for this class of enzymes have revealed that ammonia is shuttled over long distances and that each amidotransferase evolved different molecular tunnels for this purpose. The heterodimericEscherichia coli imidazole glycerol phosphate (IGP) synthase was probed to assess if residues in the substrate amination subunit (HisF) are critical for the glutaminase activity in the HisH subunit. The activity of the HisH subunit is dependent upon binding of the nucleotide substrate at the HisF active site. This regulatory function has been exploited as a biochemical selection of mutant HisF subunits that retain full activity with ammonia as a substrate but, when constituted as a holoenzyme with wild-type HisH, impair the glutamine-dependent activity of IGP synthase. The steady-state kinetic constants for these IGP synthases with HisF alleles showed three distinct effects depending upon the site of mutation. For example, mutation of the R5 residue has similar effects on the glutamine-dependent amidotransfer reaction; however,kcat/Km for the glutaminase half-reaction was increased 10-fold over that for the wild-type enzyme with nucleotide substrate. This site appears essential for coupling of the glutamine hydrolysis and ammonia transfer steps and is the first example of a site remote to the catalytic triad that modulates the process. The results are discussed in the context of recent X-ray crystal structures of glutamine amidotransferases that relate the glutamine binding and acceptor binding sites.