Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Pulmonary Function in Goats Affected with Bacterial Pneumonia

In India, goat rearing is one of socio economic status to low and moderate farmers. The goats are low cost with highly profitable, adoptable, small in size and easy to handle so in traditional goats are referred as “poor man‟s cow”. In the present situation intensive goat farming system affect the health of goats due to overcrowding, transport stress, immunity and sudden change in the environmental condition that precipitates respiratory problems in goats causing severe economic loss to the farmer. Among this pneumonia is a major problem and pose threat in goat farming. So the current study was envisaged to know the incidence of bacterial pneumonia and any changes in pulmonary function by different diagnostic methods such as hematology, blood gas analysis and radiographic study and also aids in assessing the severity and prognosis of bacterial pneumonia in goats. International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 9 Number 1 (2020) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Adaptive backstepping control for autonomous shipboard landing of a quadrotor with input saturation

This paper presents a novel autonomous shipboard landing control algorithm of a quadrotor subject to external disturbances and input saturation. A coupled six‐degrees‐of‐freedom (6‐DOF) nonlinear relative motion model is derived to facilitate the controller design. To overcome the under‐actuated property of the quadrotor and avoid collision, the shipboard landing process is cooperatively completed by a relative position controller (RPC) and a relative attitude‐altitude controller (RAC). The RPC is proposed for use when the quadrotor is far away from the ship, aiming to drive the quadrotor to the vicinity of the ship. The RAC is used for the situation when the quadrotor is close enough to the ship to land the quadrotor on the ship steadily. An adaptive backstepping technique is proposed for both RPC and RAC, where unknown bounds of the lump disturbances are estimated online by the adaptive laws. To satisfy the input constraint requirement, a smooth model is employed to describe the control input saturation. Stability analysis proves that all states of the closed‐loop systems are uniformly ultimately bounded. A numerical example verifies the performance of the control approach.
Trapdoor Digital Shredder: A New Technique for Improved Data Security without Cryptographic Encryption

Along with the increase of the importance of information used in practice, adversaries tried to take valuable information in diverse ways. The simple and fundamental solution is to encrypt the whole data. Since the cost of encryption is increasing along with the size of data, the cost for securing the data is a burden to a system where the size of the data is not small. For the reason, in some applications where huge data are used for service, service providers do not use any encryption scheme for higher security, which could be a source of trouble. In this work, we introduce a new type of data securing technique named Trapdoor Digital Shredder (TDS) which disintegrates a data to multiple pieces to make it hard to re-construct the original data except the owner of the file who holds some secret keys. The main contribution of the technique is to increase the difficulty in obtaining private information even if an adversary obtains some shredded pieces. To prove the security of our scheme, we first introduce a new security model so called IND-CDA to examine the indistinguishability of shredded pieces. Then, we show that our scheme is secure under IND-CDA model, which implies that an adversary cannot distinguish a subset of shreds of a file from a set of random shreds.
Exact closed form solution for whirling analysis of Timoshenko rotors with multiple concentrated masses

Abstract In this paper, an exact solution is presented for whirling analysis of rotors carrying concentrated masses. Effect of various parameters on the forward and backward frequencies are investigated including velocity of spin and quantity, translational inertia and position of the concentrated masses. It is shown that vibration characteristics of rotors can be affected by concentrated elements depended on the position of point masses and value of their translational inertia. The most advantage of the presented solution is that for rotors with any number of concentrated masses, all natural frequencies can be obtained through solution of a determinant of order 2.
Has the fiscal decentralization of social welfare programs helped effectively reduce poverty across U.S. states?

ABSTRACT This paper looks at whether fiscal decentralization of welfare programs made state governments effective at alleviating poverty. We make use of the National Association of State Budget Officers’ (NASBO) State Expenditure Report which publishes expenditure data in different areas by state and federal government. Using this data, we constructed expenditure ratios to demonstrate the moment when state governments took on more responsibility in funding compared to the federal government. Although we hypothesized fiscal decentralization to worsen poverty growth, we found the fiscal decentralization of Medicaid to reduce poverty rate growth. We believe this negative finding to be the result of the types of additional goods that are being offered to Medicaid beneficiaries beyond what is federally required.
Using Machine Learning to Measure Changes in Cable News Coverage of Immigration (2014-2019)

Did media coverage of immigration change after Donald Trump entered the Republican race, and again after he was inaugurated as President? We apply automated text analysis to every cable news segment since 2014 for Fox News and CNN (and since 2015 for MSNBC) and identify over 60,000 cable news segments about immigration. We examine both the selection into coverage of immigration and determine whether news frames about immigration shifted during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. We find that the volume of immigration coverage on Fox News nearly doubled after the 2016 election, as compared to more modest rises on MSNBC and CNN. We also find striking growth in the use of the crime frame in immigration coverage, with one out of every eight immigration news segments mentioning crime. Finally, we find that media discussions of immigration policy shifted to the right, eschewing traditional debates over comprehensive immigration reform in favor of more punitive measures. These findings have important implications for public attitudes towards immigrants in the era of Trump.
Micronutrient Delivery System for Induction of Organogenesis in Banana in vitro Cultures

Micropropagation techniques represent one of the technologies, which allows the large-scale production of banana and the culture medium composition is one of the major factors affecting in vitro propagation of plants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of a new micronutrient delivery system based on ionic Cu and Zn for inducing in vitro organogenesis in two banana cultivars in vitro cultures, Grand Naine and Pysang Ceylon. The first experiment evaluated different concentrations of BAM-FX ® (0.16, 0.32, 0.64, 1.28, and 2.56 μl ml -1 ) added to the MS culture medium. The concentration of 0.16 μl ml BAM-FX provided the best results for in vitro shoot and root growth and development. Therefore, a second experiment was performed to Original Research Article Londe et al.; JEAI, 42(2): 116-124, 2020; Article no.JEAI. 55483 117 evaluate the potential of combining BAM-FX with a reduced concentration of MS medium (1⁄4, 1⁄2, and 3⁄4 strength), or the use of BAM-FX ® alone without MS medium. Results indicate that MS at 3⁄4 strength combined with 0.16 μl ml -1 BAM-FX ® provided proper in vitro shoot and root growth and development. The use of BAM-FX in vitro requires additional studies to verify the feasibility of this product for efficient micropropagation of banana, as well as for other species.
Effect of Auditor Proficiency and Audit Quality on Internal Audit Effectiveness in Nigeria’s Federal Public Service

The internal audit function, with clearly defined competence and process requirements, has despite its presence within the operations of federal public sector organizations in Nigeria being unable to check the rising cases of frauds and financial improprieties which have continuously been highlighted against them. Furthermore, sufficient attention has not been given to related control issues regardless of the increasing use of information technology (ICT) in public sector operations. The study investigates the effects of competence; the role of ICT; and the quality of internal audit on internal audit effectiveness in Nigeria’s federal public service which is charged with the responsibility of the management of over half of the public revenues accruing to the Nigerian federation but with particular reference to 28 self-accounting federal public organizations operating in the North East Geo-Political Zone. Primary data was obtained from 139 valid responses out of 148 questionnaires administered on the internal auditors of such organizations. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed as the technique of data analysis to test the relationships. The finding of this study revealed that competence and the quality of internal audit showed positive and significant influence on internal audit effectiveness. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) however showed positive but insignificant contribution. The study recommends an effective compliance with minimum entry requirements in the employment and deployment of Internal Auditors; a review and continuous improvement of operating regulations and standards; as well as the deployment of appropriate ICT audit tools and continuous training of internal audit staff by the relevant government offices (Offices of the Accountant General and that of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation – OAGF & OHCSF; and the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency - NITDA). Keywords : Internal Audit Effectiveness, Competence, ICT, Quality of Internal Work, Public Sector DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/11-6-01 Publication date: March 31 st 2020
Efficient Image Super Resolution Via Channel Discriminative Deep Neural Network Pruning

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated superior performance in image super-resolution (SR) problem. However, CNNs are known to be heavily over-parameterized, and suffer from abundant redundancy. The growing size of CNNs may be incompatible with their deployment on mobile or embedded devices. Network pruning has benefited classification tasks by removing redundant parameters and associated computation. However, it has rarely been studied for SR, because existing methods assume the channel-wise features are of equal importance to the final reconstruction. On the contrary, we show the existence of uninformative feature-maps with no contribution to the task. In order to identify and remove such uninformative channels, we propose a new pruning criterion, Discriminant Information, by characterizing the dependency of the output w.r. t to the hidden-layer feature-maps. Empirically, our DI-based channel pruning algorithm is able to trim the state-of-the-art SR networks significantly (e.g. 8.7x model size compression and 3.6x CPU acceleration on SRResNet), with no quantitative or visual performance loss.
The Role of Core Skills Development Through English Language Teaching (ELT) in Increasing Employability of Students in the Saudi Labor Market

The National Commission for Academic Accreditation & Assessment (NCAAA), Saudi Arabia, aims to determine ‘standards and criteria for academic accreditation and assessment and for accrediting post-secondary institutions and the programs they offer’ (2012). Along this line of teaching, learning standards, each department is required to submit the Course Report (CR) and the Course Specifications (CS) reflecting the quality of learning and the management of courses aiming to achieve the highest international standards. As mandatory procedure, English Language Centers (ELC) in the Saudi universities also prepare quality assessment reports. The reports include data about the assessment of English language skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills. In addition, the CR and CS both seek to establish whether students at the Preparatory Year have mastered core skills such as communication skills, problem solving skills, thinking skills, language skills, attention, executive skills, memorizing and other cognitive and interpersonal skills. This qualitative study highlights the major findings the teachers’ perceptions about integrating core skills into English language teaching that would potentially increase employability of students in the labor market in Saudi Arabia and as well as contribute to the national vision 2030 that includes ‘learning for working’. Our study focuses on the relationships between teachers’ perceptions about core skills development during English language teaching and teachers’ decisions about using teaching activities to enhance those skills. Data were collected through questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and class observations and coded into different categories and labelled and then the results were drawn analyzing the connection between those categories.
Auditory Model Based Subsetting of Head-Related Transfer Function Datasets

The rising availability of public head-related transfer function (HRTF) data, measured on hundreds of different individuals, offers a user the possibility to select the best matching non-individual HRTF from a wide catalogue. To this end, reducing the number of alternatives to a small subset of candidate HRTFs is the first step towards an efficient selection process. In this article a novel HRTF subset selection algorithm based on auditory-model vertical localization predictions and a greedy heuristic is outlined, designed to identify a representative HRTF subset from a catalogue including the three biggest public datasets currently available (373 HRTFs overall). The so-resulting subset (6 HRTFs) is then evaluated on a fourth independent dataset. Auditory model predictions show that for over 95% of the subjects of this dataset there exists at least one HRTF out of the representative subset scoring minimal vertical localization error deviations compared to the best available non-individual HRTF out of the catalogue.
Constrained Truth Discovery

To aggregate useful information among diversified sources, a hotspot research topic called truth discovery has emerged in recent years. Existing truth discovery methods attempt to infer the true attribute values for the entities by identifying and trusting reliable data sources. That is, the values provided by reliable sources are more likely to be the true values. However, all these methods neglect the relations among different entities, which play important roles in truth discovery task. When reliable data sources cannot provide sufficient information of entities, the true attribute values of these entities can still be inferred by propagating trustworthy information from related entities. Motivated by this, in this paper, we introduce the constrained truth discovery problem. We incorporate denial constraints, a universally quantified first-order logic formalism which can express a large number of effective and widely existing relations among entities, into the process of truth discovery. We formulate it as a constrained optimization problem and analyze its hardness. To address the problem, we propose algorithms to partition the entities into disjoint groups, and generate arithmetic constraints for each disjoint group separately. Then, the true attribute values of the entities in each disjoint group are derived by minimizing the objective function under the corresponding arithmetic constraints. Experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves good performance even with very few constraints and reliable sources.
Phytosanitary risks of wood chips

This report describes the potential risks of spreading harmful pests and diseases by wood chips. Wood chipping is used as a measure against spread of certain harmful insects in wood, but is not effective to prevent spread of bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens. Here additional measures like composting and heating are necessary. Also in the biofuel chain infestations and spread of diseases are possible. For both the biofuel and phytosanitary wood chains the potential risks are described.
Crafting Jobs for Sustaining Careers during China’s Manufacturing Digitalization

Accelerated digitalization coupled with ever-growing new job demands in China’s manufacturing industry has led to serious concerns about rising work stress and the loss of the sustainability of careers among production workers. They are trapped within an organization due to the lack of career alternatives in the labor market; under such occupational stress, some proactive workers may engage in expansive job crafting (JC) behaviors to get more resources to meet their career goals and make better career plans. As a result, this paper aims to investigate how Chinese manufacturing workers perform JC behaviors to translate perceived work stress into more control over their careers in today’s shrinking job market. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, this study thus investigates how employee continuance commitment (CC), as a manifestation of work stress, influences career control that can reflect the sustainability of careers in such a turbulent time and how the three dimensions of employees’ JC (i.e., increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources, and increasing challenging job demands) mediate the CC‒career control relationship, respectively. A time-lagged survey was carried out with a sample of 476 Chinese production workers. The results show that crafting jobs is instrumental in translating the degree of CC that embodies the level of work stress to the degree of career sustainability during the digital transformation of Chinese manufacturing. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications. Limitations and their implications for future studies are also reviewed.
ENHANCING THE METABOLIC CAPACITY OF CYANOBACTERIA FOR BIOLOGICAL HYDROGEN PRODUCTION: BIOFUEL APPLICATIONS OF CYANOTHECE AND ARTHROSPIRA SPP.

The dissertation presented herein focuses on understanding the biological pathways leading to hydrogen production in cyanobacteria and optimizing their capacity to funnel intracellular reductant to hydrogen. With increasing global population and the continued development of previously unindustrialized nations, it is now more important than ever to meet the worldwide demand for energy to allow economies to continue to develop and grow. Coupling this demand to the decreasing availability of our finite reserves of fossil fuels and the increasing global climate, the development of clean and renewable energy sources is clearly a critical societal need. The biological production of hydrogen from cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria which solely require minimal nutrients and sunlight to grow, is one promising approach to meeting this need. The energy-dense fuel hydrogen is completely carbon-free and can be used in combustion engines or for electricity generation through fuel cells. The production of hydrogen from nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria (e.g. Cyanothece spp.) and non-nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria (e.g. Arthrospira spp.) is explored within this dissertation.
Évolution, génétique et structure coloniale du termite souterrain Reticulitermes grassei (Clément)

Subterranean termites have been known to occur in France since the 17th century. Aquitaine, one of the most infested French regions, is inhabited by the Reticulitermes grassei species, which is particularly tricky to eradicate. The company Dow Agrosciences initiated a project together with the CNRS that aimed to clarify the patterns of this species biology in order to optimise the use of the baiting system technology. In order to elucidate the historical origins of the infestation by termites in France, we first inferred the evolutionary history of R. Grassei. We demonstrated that ancestral populations survived in the south of the Iberian Peninsula during the Quaternary glaciations, before expanding towards northern areas, successively colonising central and northern Spain, and finally France. A phylogeographical study of R. Grassei populations combining ecological, behavioural, chemical and genetic approaches enabled us to identify the migration routes followed by the pioneer populations and their consequences on the present genetic structure of populations established in geographically distinct areas. We also demonstrated the phylogenetic proximity that exists between R. Grassei and R. Banyulensi, another Iberian species. The study of subterranean termite's social and colonial organisation provided new insights on their ability to adapt to urban constraints. The identification of the genetic structure of R. Grassei colonies collected across France and Spain helped to understand their spatial distribution under natural conditions and on their ability to extend through the production of secondary reproductives. R. Grassei colonies can be divided in simple and complex families, based on the number and on the genetic relatedness of the reproductives. By investigating the survival and the development of laboratory colonies, we demonstrated this species' ability to restart an new colony in few months from a few dozens of isolated workers which can differentiate into secondary neotenic reproductives. The originality of termite's life cycle, their good lifespan and their ontogenetic potentialities, unique among social insects, are all factors that serve their settlement and their persistence in human inhabited areas, even the ones that are protected with chemical treatments.
‘Bolder’ together — response to human social cues in groups of free-ranging dogs

In urban environments, humans are a part of an interaction network of several species, impacting them directly or indirectly. The positive, negative and neutral components of such impact can be assessed by studying human-animal interactions in various habitats. While studies have shown animals’ reactions to specific human social cues, information is lacking on how animals respond to such cues in the presence and absence of conspecifics. We investigated the behavioural responses of free-ranging dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) towards various human social cues (neutral, friendly, low- and high-impact threatening) when presented to groups. We used previously published data on dogs’ reactions to identical cues when presented solitarily, and compared them with the group-level responses. Our results strengthen the idea of situation-relevant responsiveness in free-ranging dogs. Dogs in groups exhibited higher approach and less avoidance towards the unfamiliar human experimenter, especially towards the threatening cues, compared to dogs tested alone.
Soft actuators using liquid crystal elastomers with encapsulated liquid metal joule heaters

We present a soft actuator composed of fluidic channels of liquid metal alloy embedded in a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE). The LM channels function as stretchable Joule heating elements that deliver heat to the LCE to induce a shape memory phase transition. Because the heater is fluidic, it can deform with the surrounding LCE as the actuator extends and contracts during actuation. In addition to contractile actuation, the LCE can be programmed to perform in-plane or out-of-plane flexural actuation, which exhibit deformations predictable using a simple finite element analysis model. By combining a liquid metal heater with a shape memory polymer, we achieve a soft actuator that does not require an external heat source and can instead be directly activated with electrical current. Finally, we show that the liquid metal channels can also function as a sensor during the actuation cycle, allowing for closed-loop control of the soft actuator.