Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multishorting Pins PIFA Design for Multiband Communications

A novel PIFA model with multiple shorting pins is proposed for multiband, low profile wireless applications, which has the ability to work in adverse conditions. The proposed model has a planar radiating sheet, a ground plane, and sides covered with PEC boundaries. The substrate inside the antenna box is tempered in order to improve the bandwidth and gain. The enhancements applied to the proposed PIFA model show improved characteristics for this PIFA model and make it a versatile candidate for handheld, low profile, and multiband resonant communication devices. Pertinent communication devices are those that work with GSM 850/900, UMTS 850/900/1700/1900/2100, LTE 2300/2500, and ISM 2400 bands used for Bluetooth and WLAN.
How rural is the EU RDP? An analysis through spatial fund allocation

Although representing less than 20% of total CAP expenditure, the Rural Development Policy (RDP) 2007-2013 is supposed to support rural areas which are facing new challenges. Currently, many EU rural areas are experiencing major trans- formations and the traditional urban-rural divide seems outdated (OECD, 2006). Going beyond dichotomous definitions and approaches, the paper applies at EU NUTS 3 level a new composite and comprehensive measure of rurality and periph- erality (the PeripheRurality Indicator, PRI): the higher this index, the more rural and peripheral a given region is. Within a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach, this indicator takes into account both conventional socio-economic indicators and the relevant geographical characteristics of the region. On the basis of this analysis, the paper also puts forward a clusterisation of NUTS 3 regions across Europe and assesses the correlation between the RDP expenditure intensity, the PRI and the different regional clusters. This analysis is aimed at assessing the coherence of RDP fund allocation with the real characteristics of EU rural space.
Estimating Parameters in Production Function based on Quadratic Synchronous Artificial Fish- Particle Swarm Optimization

Investment analysis is an important element of the process of economic activities, and the rational analysis and selection of production function as well as the parameter estimation, are important part of the investment analysis. Common production functions are characterized by too strong non-linearity for the use of traditional method to estimate parameters; therefore a fast, simple and robust algorithm becomes a hot research interest to optimize the production function. To this end this paper presents QSAFPSO for solving this problem. The algorithm enhances the gene- level exchange of information between individuals, creates a genetic template, employs genetic template evolution, mutation and other operations to improve the convergence speed, solution accuracy, and better helps algorithm out of local optimum. The typical function tests show that QSAFPSO, compared with like algorithms, features fast convergence and higher solution precision. A simulation based on the annual output value from 1820 to 1926, capital investment and labor input in Massachusetts shows that the algorithm is characterized by fast optimization of production function parameter estimation and by small residual sum of squares. Streszczenie. W artykule opisano opracowany algorytm decyzyjny QSA-FPSO sluzący do analizy inwestycji. Jego dzialanie opiera sie na budowie szablonu genetycznego i miedzy genowej wymianie informacji. Wykonane testy funkcjonalności algorytmu pokazują jego wiekszą, w porownaniu z innymi algorytmami, precyzje i szybkośc osiągniecia rozwiązania. Przedstawiono takze wyniki badan symulacyjnych, dokonanych na rzeczywistych danych, potwierdzające wysoką skutecznośc dzialania. (Estymacja parametrow funkcji produkcji algorytmem optymalizacji rojem cząstek QSA-FPSO).
Structural characteristics of elephant grass fertilized with organic composted waste from production and slaughter of small ruminants

This study aimed to evaluate the morphophysiological characteristics of irrigated Pennisetum purpureum cv. Cameroon subjected to doses of an organic compost from waste generated by production and slaughter of small ruminants. The experiment was carried out in a grassland, during four growth cycles of 60 days. The area is located in the Embrapa Caprinos e Ovinos unit, in Sobral - CE, Brazil. Treatments consisted of organic compost doses (0, 13.3, 26.6, 39.9, 53.2 and 79.8 Mg ha-1) plus a mineral fertilization (nitrogen and potassium) at doses equivalent to 720 and 900 kg ha-1 year-1, respectively. The experimental design was arranged in completely randomized blocks, totaling four blocks with seven treatments each, in a split plot scheme with repeated readings over time. The plots corresponded to seven doses of an organic compost and an additional treatment (mineral fertilizer), and subplots to four growth cycles. The variables analyzed were total herbage biomass (THB), canopy height (CH), tiller population density (TPD) and water use efficiency for green leaf biomass production (WUEGLB) and green stem biomass (WUEGSB). In the first cycle, TPD decreased linearly with increasing doses of the compost, with 47 tillers m2 at the dose of 79.8 Mg ha-1, while THB and WUEGLB variables behaved quadratically, with a maximum point of 23.53 Mg DM ha-1 cycle-1, and 16.33 kg DM mm-1 for the doses of 66.52 and 62.94 Mg ha-1 of the organic compost. We concluded plant structural characteristics and water use efficiency were responsive to applications of the organic compost, and we recommend the dose of 67.7 Mg ha-1.
Assessment of rainfall simulations from global climate models and implications for climate change impact on runoff studies

Global warming can potentially lead to significant changes in future water resources availability. Rainfall is the key driver of water resources, where a change in mean annual rainfall in Australia is generally amplified as a two to three times bigger percentage change in mean annual runoff. The future catchment-scale climate series required to drive hydrological models in climate change impact studies is generally informed by the relative global climate model (GCM) simulations for the future and current climates. This paper (i) presents the range of future rainfall projections from the 23 GCMs used in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report for three large regions of Australia (south-east Australia, south-west Western Australia and northern Australia), (ii) assesses whether the GCMs can reproduce the observed characteristics of historical annual rainfall, and (iii) explores the implications of GCM selection, assessed against different criteria, on water resources impact studies. The results indicate that most GCMs can reproduce the observed spatial mean annual rainfall pattern across Australia. However, the difference between the GCMs and observed mean annual rainfalls can be significant, with RMSEs of about one third of the mean annual rainfalls averaged over the regions. The future mean annual rainfall projections from the 23 GCMs per degree global warming range from -9 to +4 percent averaged across south-east Australia, -16 to 0 percent averaged across south-west Western Australia and -7 to +6 percent averaged across northern Australia. The future runoff impact assessment will be more reliable if it is based on future climate projections from the better GCMs. However, it is difficult to objectively determine which GCMs are more likely to give reliable future climate projections. The results indicate that there is no clear difference in the future rainfall projections between the better and poorer GCMs, assessed based on their abilities to simulate the historical climate characteristics, across the three regions studied here. Therefore, using weights to favour the better GCMs give similar rainfall and runoff impact assessment results as the use of all the 23 GCMs. With the rapid progress in climate change science, global climate models will become more accurate and give more consistent projections and there will be better consensus in the research community on appropriate criteria to select GCMs for different applications. For now, the uncertainty and the range of future runoff in impact studies are probably best determined using future climate projections from a large range of archived GCM simulations.
Rating Scale Measures in Multiple-Choice Exams: Pilot Studies in Pharmacology

Multiple-choice questions are widely used in clinical education. Usually, the students have to mark the one and only correct answer from a set of five alternatives. Here, in a voluntary exam, at the end of an obligatory pharmacology exam, we tested a format where more than one alternative could be correct (N=544 students from three year groups). Moreover, the students were asked to rate each item. The students were unaware how many correct answers were contained in the questions. Finally, a questionnaire had to be filled out about the difficulty of the new tests compared to the one out of five tests. In the obligatory final exam, all groups performed similarly. From the results, we conclude that the new rating scales were a better challenge and could be adapted to assess student knowledge and confidence in more depth than previous multiple-choice questions.
Behavior of excited argon atoms in inductively driven plasmas

Laser induced fluorescence has been used to measure the spatial distribution of the two lowest energy argon excited states, 1s5 and 1s4, in inductively driven plasmas containing argon, chlorine and boron trichloride. The behavior of the two energy levels with plasma conditions was significantly different, probably because the 1s5 level is metastable and the 1s4 level is radiatively coupled to the ground state but is radiation trapped. The argon data are compared with a global model to identify the relative importance of processes such as electron collisional mixing and radiation trapping. The trends in the data suggest that both processes play a major role in determining the excited state density. At lower rf power and pressure, excited state spatial distributions in pure argon were peaked in the center of the discharge, with an approximately Gaussian profile. However, for the highest rf powers and pressures investigated, the spatial distributions tended to flatten in the center of the discharge while the.
Scrutinizing Systematic Literature Review Process in Software Engineering

Performing the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in the turbulent field of Software Engineering (SE) brings different obstacles and uncertainties. The commonly used guidelines for performing the SLR in this field are adapted from health sciences and presented by Kitchenham and Charters in 2007. This paper follows the Kitchenham’s three-phases-review-process and fulfils it with the findings, observations and recommendations from other influential authors in the field. The process of SLR is observed from the perspective of appliance in the field of SE and supplemented by the important precautious measures that should be undertaken by the authors performing it. Thus, this paper aims to present the state-of-the-art in performing the SLR in SE.
Developing an in vitro optimized protocol to sweet potato landraces conservation

This study aimed to develop a protocol for the in vitro conservation of 30 accessions of sweet potato collected in the northern region of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil, aiming to extend the period between subcultures for this species. An in vitro minimal growth experiment was established with accession UENF 1931 in a factorial arrangement consisting of four concentrations of mineral salts in MS medium and four concentrations of sucrose, at two temperatures. The others accessions were grown in medium containing 100% MS salts and 2% sucrose, which was the medium that allowed the in vitro conservation of accession UENF 1931 for a longer time period. For this second experiment, 30 accessions of sweet potato and two temperatures were used. Plant height, number of leaves, and survival rate were measured every 30 days for 12 months, in both experiments. In the last stage, the sweet potato plantlets originating from in vitro minimal growth were acclimatized and exhibited 100% survival. The recommended in vitro minimal growth conditions for the studied accessions are MS medium with 100% concentration of mineral salts and 2% sucrose, at a temperature of 27±2°C, with subculture performed every 180 days.
A Spectral Clustering Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Nyström Approximation

In the image segmentation, the spectral clustering algorithm are facing the problems, that the similarity matrix and Laplace matrix requires a lot of computing and storage, which limits its expansion in the large-scale image. Aiming at these problems, a semi-supervised spectrum clustering algorithm based on the Nystrom approximation was proposed. In the algorithm, adopting the Nystrom approximation method to estimate the similarity matrix, which effectively reduces the amount of computation and storage of the spectral clustering algorithm. Finally, on the Brodatz texture library, the image segmentation experiments showed the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithm.
Robust decentralized control of consensus-based formations of leader-follower networks with uncertain directed topologies on bounded velocity trajectories undened for followers via backstepping method

In this paper, decentralized control of formation of a special category of leaderfollower networks on bounded velocity trajectories is addressed. The network of the agents in this study is supposed to have a directed graph with a spanning tree rooted at the leader agent. Moreover, follower agents do not receive online or have oine velocity of the desired trajectory, such as in tracking problem of trajectories which are not prede ned or when the total bandwidth is narrow. Furthermore, the leader does not receive any information from any agent and its control is fully centralized. In the present study, formation problem is considered a consensus problem. The controller is designed for integrator and doubleintegrator agents via backstepping. Furthermore, suitable condition of the robustness of the controller against the changes of the communication topology of the network is derived. Simulations verify the capability and robustness of the designed control law. In a simulation, formation keeping error reduction by tuning a gain of the controller, as claimed in the design procedure, is demonstrated.
Modification of Cell Wall Degrading Enzymes from Soursop (Annonamuricata) Fruit Deterioration for Improved Commercial Development ofClarified Soursop Juice (A Review)

The soursop fruit and the entire soursop plant is associated with a lot of health benefits which includes the killing of cancer cells in cancer patients. The treatment of cancer with soursop has been reported to be accompanied with the risk of Parkinson’s disease while soursop juice is considered safe for consumption. The fruit had been associated with preharvest and postharvest deterioration caused by microorganisms and this reduces the total production of soursop fruit. The deterioration process is being accompanied with the production of cell wall degrading enzymes which has the advantage of being used for industrial purposes. One of the important uses of these enzymes is in the clarification of fruit juices. This review proposes the genetic modification of the genes coding for important microbial enzymes for the clarification of soursop juice for improved yield, taste, and colour.
Sorption of Moisture by Wood Within A Limited Range of Relative Humidities

Information on wood sorption behavior provides desorption and adsorption curves from the green and fully dry initial conditions, respectively. Wood in service, however, is exposed to only a narrow range of relative humidities (RH) and, therefore, should exhibit intermediate isotherms that are different from those of the full isotherms. This paper presents the results of a study performed to establish the intermediate desorption curves at 30 C for yellow poplar wood samples subjected to RH ranges of 92% to 0%, 75% to 0%, 53% to 0%, and 32% to 0%. The desiccator method was used to establish the full desorption curve, while a high-vacuum system was employed to obtain the full adsorption and the four intermediate desorption curves. The desired relative humidities were maintained by saturated salt solutions. The generated intermediate desorption curves all fall within the full adsorption and desorption isotherms, with the isotherms originating from 92%, 75%, 53%, and 32% RH tracing progressively lower curves. These isotherms exhibit relatively short crossovers; a 40% RH change being needed for an intermediate desorption curve to cross over from the full adsorption isotherm to the full desorption isotherm. The intermediate curve from 92% RH has the characteristic sigmoidal shape, but those from 75%, 53%, and 32% RH are concave towards the X-axis. All the intermediate curves exhibit hysteresis, even at low RH levels and narrow RH ranges.
Image Fusion Scheme based on Wavelet Transformation

The paper focuses on image fusion between multi-spectral images and panchromatic images using a gradient based wavelet analysis method with image processing traits. For highlighting the core features of source images, pre-processing is accomplished. A new gradient technique is developed based on wavelet transformation. As of gradient process, for a multi-spectral image, every pixel having 4 neighbors of each of them. The summation that we do matches those of the multi-spectral images that we have selected. Two major considerations for gradient are considered. One is for the pixel values in the multi-spectral images region and other is the gradient pixel values that are at the boundary. Once we have calculated these values, we transfer these values from the multi-spectral images onto the panchromatic image and then rest of the values outside the mask are kept as same. Since we are working on the RGB images, we copied the RGB channels directly. By calculating bigger gradient of the two images either in multi-spectral images or panchromatic images and then construct the final image using inverse wavelet transformation. The proposed method is experimented on satellite, medical and natural images. In all the cases, this method shown superiority with existing methods.
Genetic characterization of Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae strains from stone fruits based on RAPD analysis in Iran.

Bacterial canker is caused by the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae which is present in Iran. Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) was used to assess the genetic structure of P. syringae pv. syringae populations. In this research, genetic diversity of 50 P. syringae pv. syringae isolates from stone fruit trees, olive and hazelnut were analyzed. Out of 100 bands, generated with 8 RAPD primers, 72% were polymorphic and scored as molecular markers. Nei-Li similarity coefficients were computed for every pair of strains from data on fragment presence or absence. Relatedness between strains was evaluated by UPGMA clustering. The results of genetic analysis showed that hazelnut isolates, are completely separated from stone fruit isolates. In addition, all of stone fruit isolate were divided in 3 clusters by RAPD primers. This study shows that strains of P. syringae pv. syringae exhibit genetic diversity detectable by RAPD analysis, and that molecular and statistical analysis of RAPD fragments can be used both to distinguish between strains and to determine relatedness between them.
Main-Branch Structure Iterative Detection Using Approximate Message Passing for Uplink Large-Scale Multiuser MIMO Systems

The emerging large-scale/massive multi-input multioutput (MIMO) system combined with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered a key technology for its advantage of improving the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we introduce an iterative detection algorithm for uplink large-scale multiuser MIMO-OFDM communication systems. We design a Main-Branch structure iterative turbo detector using the Approximate Message Passing algorithm simplified by linear approximation (AMP-LA) and using the Mean Square Error (MSE) criterion to calculate the correlation coefficients between main detector and branch detector for the given iteration. The complexity of our method is compared with other detection algorithms. The simulation results show that our scheme can achieve better performance than the conventional detection methods and have the acceptable complexity.
Mapping Employment Dismissal Law: A Leximetric Investigation of EPL Stringency and Regulatory Style

This paper exploits a newly available dataset from the ILO—the EPLex—that includes unusually rich data about laws regulating individual dismissal in a broad cross-section of nations. These data differ from commonly used leximetric datasets by including comparatively more countries, especially including a considerable sample of developing nations. Although the EPLex dataset has been developed to measure EPL stringency over five years (2009 – 2013), it provides principally a single, cross-sectional observation for 95 countries in the year 2010, along with 13 instances of legal change within the 5-year panel and 11 countries with distinct legal rules for different classes of workers. As additional data for other aspects of EPL and for additional years are released, we plan to update our analyses accordingly.
Grain sorting in the morphological active layer of a braided river physical model

Abstract. A physical scale model of a gravel-bed braided river was used to measure vertical grain size sorting in the morphological active layer aggregated over the width of the river. This vertical sorting is important for analyzing braided river sedimentology, for numerical modeling of braided river morphodynamics, and for measuring and predicting bedload transport rate. We define the morphological active layer as the bed material between the maximum and minimum bed elevations at a point over extended time periods sufficient for braiding processes to rework the river bed. The vertical extent of the active layer was measured using 40 hourly high-resolution DEMs (digital elevation models) of the model river bed. An image texture algorithm was used to map bed material grain size of each DEM. Analysis of the 40 DEMs and texture maps provides data on the geometry of the morphological active layer and variation in grain size in three dimensions. By normalizing active layer thickness and dividing into 10 sublayers, we show that all grain sizes occur with almost equal frequency in all sublayers. Occurrence of patches and strings of coarser (or finer) material relates to preservation of particular morpho-textural features within the active layer. For numerical modeling and bedload prediction, a morphological active layer that is fully mixed with respect to grain size is a reliable approximation.