Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design, analysis and experimental characterization of a propeller in decelerating duct

Despite having been applied since a long time, ducted propellers design still represents a challenge for the designer, especially when dealing with the less widespread decelerating duct, due to the complex evaluation of the duct effects and to the limited amount of available experimental information. In the paper an hybrid design approach is described. Moreover, a series of experimental results at towing tank and, especially, at cavitation tunnel are presented, in order to provide an insight into the particular functioning of this propulsor including cavitation behavior and a validation of the proposed design procedure. Particular attention is given to the development of the cavitating tip leakage vortex, which characterizes this propulsor functioning. To this aim, experimental observations are compared with numerical results obtained by means of a commercial RANS solver, in order to check its applicability for the prediction of cavitation inception and extent.
The Impact of Major Events on the Lives of Family Caregivers of Children with Disabilities

The authors examine the family caregiving experience among families with children with severe emotional disabilities from a perspective that recognizes the importance of the family's views and feelings. This viewpoint anticipates the occurrence of both positive and negative experiences and seeks to illuminate the caregiving process from the perspective of outcomes achieved. Family caregivers of 164 children with serious emotional disorders were asked to identify major pleasant and stressful events that had occurred in the past 12 months. The most frequently described pleasant events related to children's behavior, school activities, and interactions with professionals and friends. Frequently described problem areas included children's behavior, professionals/services, and difficulty with school. The impact of these pleasant and stressful events was examined with respect to caregivers' perceived well-being: (1) overall stress, (2) the ability to fulfill responsibilities, and (3) pleasure experienced in various life domains. Implications of the study findings for supporting family caregivers in their roles are discussed.
Silicon alleviates salt stress, decreases malondialdehyde content and affects petal color of salt-stressed cut rose (Rosa xhybrida L.) Hot Lady

A greenhouse experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of different levels of silicon (Si) application on cut rose (Rosa xhybrida L.) ‘Hot Lady’ under two levels of salt stress. Four Si concentrations (0, 50, 100 and 150 ppm) as Si were combined with a 25 mM NaCl (EC � 3.8) level in the nutrient solution supplied to the plants. Addition of Si partially maintained membrane permeability but only fully restored it to control levels in the Si50 and Si100 treatments. 150 ppm Si with or without NaCl could not alleviate or decrease cell wall damages. Inclusion of Si significantly reduced malondialdehyde content and chlorophyll content of salt-stressed plants in all treatments except that of 150 ppm. Maximum chlorophyll content was noticed when 50 ppm Si was supplied. Addition of 50 ppm Si increased the flower number in both plants grown under salinity and unstressed conditions. However, no significant difference was observed between 100 and 50 ppm Si accompanying with NaCl. Plants treated with NaCl alone showed a reduction in plant leaf area, while the reduction in plants treated with NaCl plus 50 and 100 ppm Si were like control and other unstressed plants.
Molecular Identification and Characterization of Bacillus Antagonist to Inhibit aflatoxigenic Aspergillus flavus

The rhizosphere is a complex system in which beneficial plant microbe interactions play vital role in agriculture to sustain the plant growth and productivity. Plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) exert the positive effect on plant growth through various mechanisms either directly or indirectly (Joseph et al., 2007). The bacillus bacteria play vital role in plant health by direct and indirect activities. The direct activity attributed by increased uptake of nitrogen (Kennedy et al., 2004) phytohormones synthesis (Hayat et al. 2008 a, b) solubilization of phosphorus and siderophore production (Pidello, 2003) while indirect activity include realise of phytoharmones like secondary metabolites viz. HCN, ammonia, antibiotics, and volatile metabolites (Owen International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 3 (2017) pp. 2466-2484 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Assessing Human Cortical Activation and Network During Pitch Discrimination Task in Quiet and in Noisy Background

In spite of extensive research conducted in studying pitch memory processing, knowledge about the functional anatomy of the brain while performing pitch discrimination task is still lacking. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of background noise and tonal frequencies on brain activation during a pitch discrimination task. Thirteen participants were presented with categories of low- and high-frequency tones during an fMRI scan. They listen, recognize and discriminate the target tone with the last tone in a series of four distracting tones. Cortical responses during which the participants engaged with the pitch discrimination task were explored globally and differentially with tonal frequency and background condition as factors. Similar integrative network consisting of bilateral superior temporal gyrus, pre-central gyrus, cerebellum, insula, putamen, inferior parietal lobe and supplementary motor area is established during the four pitch discrimination task conditions. The bilateral A1 and right M1 are effectively activated by noise and action respectively. Background noise increases the participants’ performance hence equalizing that in quiet, while participants performed significantly better in discriminating low-frequency tones as compared to high-frequency tones. This study revealed an integrative network that consists of areas responsible for pitch discrimination strategy. The bilateral primary auditory cortex played important roles in increasing participants’ pitch discrimination performance in noisy surrounding and in discriminating low frequency category of tones.
Transcriptional Analysis of Pha Genes in Pseudomonas Mediterranea Cfbp 5447 Grown on Glycerol

Grazia Licciardelloa, Giulia Devescovib, Patrizia Bellac, Corinne De Gregorioa, Antonino F. Cataraa, Salvatore P.P. Guglieminod, Vittorio Venturib, Vittoria Catarac. aParco Scientifico e Tecnologico della Sicilia s.c. p.a. , z.i. Blocco Palma I, Str.le Lancia 57, 95121 Catania, Italy bBacteriology Group, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Area Science Park, Padriciano, Trieste, Italy cDipartimento di Scienze delle Produzioni Agrarie e Alimentari, Università degli Studi di Catania, Via Santa Sofia 100, 95131 Catania, Italy dDipartimento Scienze Biologiche ed Ambientali, Università di Messina glicciardello@pstsicilia.it
Dependent and Functional Relationship of Finance and Economics on Sustainable Development specially in Indian Economy

The main objective of this paper is to understand the concept of Sustainable Development and study the relationship between Finance, Economics and Sustainable Development. This paper attempts to create a functional and mathematical structure to show sustainable development and its relationship with Finance and Economics, and show how these three of them are strongly related to each along with the method of error calculation between these variable.
Why Dutch media start-ups in the screen-based industry locate in Amsterdam

Currently, there is a movement of media companies that are shifting from Hilversum to Amsterdam. Therefore, this research examines why young media companies(founded in 2010 or later), operating in the screen-based industry, want to be located in Amsterdam. Based on previous theory and research, there already exist some factors that could be of possible influence on why young media companies want to locate in Amsterdam, such as soft location factors and residential quality. However, this research is an addition to literature by diving into these concepts and trying to understand why they are possibly important and how they work. Ten in-depth interviews among a variety of young media companies operating in the screen-based industry in Amsterdam were conducted. Results indicate that young media companies want to be located in Amsterdam because they can be close to each other, experience the competition around them as beneficial, gain knowledge out of the city, have easy access to a social network, are surrounded by a specialized pool of labour, the image of the city reflects on the image of their company in a positive way, the diversity that the city offers, the dynamics of the city, the ‘real life’ face to face interaction that the city offers and finally because Amsterdam is the place to be for (partially) digital media companies. Moreover, the results provide insights on why Amsterdam is chosen over Hilversum and possible explanations for the current movement that is going on.
Are introduced birds unimportant mutualists? A case study of frugivory in European blackbirds (Turdus merula).

Many types of birds regularly consume fleshy fruits and, as seed dispersers, perform important mutualistic services for plants. Some frugivorous birds have recently been introduced to geographic locales beyond their native range. Are non-native birds important frugivores in their introduced range? To answer this question, I observed native and introduced birds foraging for fruits in a New Zealand forest at approximately 5-day intervals for 5 years. I then compared fruit consumption patterns of European blackbirds (Turdus merula) to native New Zealand birds to determine whether blackbirds are important frugivores in New Zealand. I also compared the fruit diets of blackbirds to previously published dietary records from similar latitude forests in the United Kingdom. Results showed that blackbirds were among the most common frugivores at both New Zealand sites. They exhibited similar levels of dietary diversity to native bird species and consumed an unusually broad composition of fruit species. Introduced blackbird populations also exhibited remarkably similar patterns in dietary diversity and composition to populations in their native range. Results suggest that introduced birds can form important mutualistic partnerships with native plants, as seed dispersers, in the absence of contemporary coevolution.
Semantic classification of urban buildings combining VHR images and GIS data

While most existing studies have focused on extracting geometric information on buildings, only a few have concentrated on semantic information. The lack of semantic information cannot satisfy many demands on resolving environmental and social issues. This study presents an approach to semantically classify buildings into much finer categories than those of existing studies by learning random forest (RF) classifier from a large number of imbalanced samples with high-dimensional features. First, a two-level segmentation mechanism combining GIS and VHR image produces single image objects at a large scale and intra-object components at a small scale. Second, a semi-supervised method chooses a large number of unbiased samples by considering the spatial proximity and intra-cluster similarity of buildings. Third, two important improvements in RF classifier are made: a voting-distribution ranked rule for reducing the influences of imbalanced samples on classification accuracy and a feature importance measurement for evaluating each feature’s contribution to the recognition of each category. Fourth, the semantic classification of urban buildings is practically conducted on two different kinds of cities, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and accurate. The seven categories used in the study are finer than those in existing work and more helpful to studying many environmental and social problems.
Combustion of Methane and Biogas Fuels in Gas Turbine Can-type Combustor Model

The paper presents the numerical simulation on combustion of methane and biogas mixtures in the swirl burner can-Type of gas turbine combustion chamber. The study deals with the impact of mass fraction of carbon dioxide for biogas on emissions of noxious compounds during combustion. The investigations were done for four different fuels: pure methane (100% CH 4 ), three biogases (90%CH 4 +10%CO 2 , 75%CH 4 +25%CO 2 and 70%CH 4 +30%CO 2 ), with the constant value of equivalence ratio (  = 0.95). The numerical results show that a low content of carbon dioxide in methane-air mixture leads to a better flame stability through an increase of the volume of the recirculation zone. The numerical analysis has shown that the biogas fuel allows a reduction of about 33% on the NO emissions and about 10% on the CO emissions and carbon dioxide contained in the fuel leads to the lowering of the flame temperature, whose effect reduces NO emissions. The results of the investigation clearly demonstrate that it is possible to use such fuels in combustion systems with swirl burners.
Comparative study of sports motivation among contact and non-contact sports persons

The purpose of the study was “Comparison of sports motivation among contact and non-contact sports persons”. The subjects for this study were district, state, national and international level sports persons. Total 500, including 250 from contact and 250 from non-contact sports persons between 18-40 years of age were selected. The sports motivation scale (sms28) developed by Luc G. Pelletier, Michelle Fortier was applied for this study. The selected variables of sports motivation were intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation. The obtained data were analyzed by applying independent ‘t’ test in order to compare the sports motivation (Intrinsic motivation, Extrinsic motivation and Amotivation) among contact and non-contact sports persons. Further, the level of significance was set at 0.05 level of confidence. The finding of the study reveals that there was no significant difference found in case of sports motivation among contact and non-contact sports persons, may be due to the reason that both type of sports persons undergone with the high training schedule, very high fitness level, more highly motivated to win the medals in competitions. They might have equal level of experience in terms of playing their respective sports, which must have been probable cause for the insignificant difference.
Adaptive software fault prediction approach using object-oriented metrics

OF DISSERTATION ADAPTIVE SOFTWARE FAULT PREDICTION APPROACH USING OBJECT-ORIENTED METRICS by Djuradj Babic Florida International University, 2012 Miami, Florida Professor Naphtali Rishe, Major Professor As users continually request additional functionality, software systems will continue to grow in their complexity, as well as in their susceptibility to failures. Particularly for sensitive systems requiring higher levels of reliability, faulty system modules may increase development and maintenance cost. Hence, identifying them early would support the development of reliable systems through improved scheduling and quality control. Research effort to predict software modules likely to contain faults, as a consequence, has been substantial. Although a wide range of fault prediction models have been proposed, we remain far from having reliable tools that can be widely applied to real industrial systems. For projects with known fault histories, numerous research studies show that statistical models can provide reasonable estimates at predicting faulty modules using software metrics. However, as context-specific metrics differ from project to project, the task of predicting across projects is difficult to achieve. Prediction models obtained from one project experience are ineffective in their ability to predict fault-prone modules when applied to other projects. Hence, taking full benefit of the existing work in software development community has been substantially limited. As a step towards solving this problem, in this dissertation we propose a fault prediction approach that exploits existing prediction models, adapting them to improve their ability to predict faulty system modules across different software projects.
Using personal characteristics and usage patterns for the prediction of adherence and effectiveness in a web-based intervention for the treatment of depression.

Background: Web-based interventions have been shown to be effective and efficient means of providing eHealth. It has been established, however, that high rates of non-adherence (ie. users not following the intervention protocol) have a detrimental effect on their success. At this point there are numerous theories surrounding the various factors that determine effectiveness and adherence in web-based interventions, but none that have been able to do so satisfactorily. Personal factors as well as use of the intervention seem to play an important role. Objective: The aims of this study were to (1) find out to what degree a combination of adherence, personal factors and usage patterns of the intervention could determine its effectiveness, (2) examine to what degree personal factors and usage patterns can predict adherence, (3) determine if there is any added value in using data from the first two weeks as opposed to the first week alone and (4) evaluate, whether there is any advantage to using usage patterns instead of separate intervention features for predicting effectiveness and adherence. Methods: Data were used from 195 participants that used the Web-based intervention Living to the full, a Web-based intervention for the prevention of depression, that had previously been shown to be effective. Log data of the original study were analyzed in quantitative analyses. Outcome measures were mean improvement scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS-A), as well as the lesson a participant reached. Results: There were two variables that proved significant for predicting improvement scores for depression: adherence and being divorced. Use of certain intervention features was also significant. Regarding anxiety, no consistent significant predictors could be found. The most predictive power was found in determining adherence with R2 –values of up to . 30. The only personal factor of significance was the average time spent online per day, but a number of intervention features were also indicated as predictors for adherence when used together. Conclusions: Valuable lessons for future research were learned by including usage patterns as well as personal characteristics in the research model for predicting effectiveness and adherence. Although the predictive value for effectiveness was small, results regarding adherence are more promising. In future, this may help in taking preventative action to keep users engaged with web-based interventions so they can derive as much effect from them as possible.
Transport effects in remote-doped InSb / Al x In 1x Sb heterostructures

Lowand high-field magnetotransport measurements on two 30 nm δ-doped InSb/AlInSb quantum wells (QWs) with different doping densities are reported. The QW two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) carrier densities and mobilities were extracted by analysis of the Hall and quantum Hall data, mobility spectra and Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations. 2DEG channel mobilities of up to 324 000 cm2 V−1 s−1 (T = 2 K) and 44 000 cm2 V−1 s−1 (T = 300 K) are extracted. Carrier densities and mobilities for transport parallel to the 2DEG layer are also deduced where observable. The importance of thermally generated carriers in the lower AlInSb barrier material and the role of transport within the δ-doping plane is considered and the total carrier population as a function of temperature of the two samples is deduced, which is in excellent agreement with experimental observation. 4 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. New Journal of Physics 12 (2010) 053022 1367-2630/10/053022+09$30.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
Weed Classification Analysis Using Localized Multiple Kernel Learning (LMKL)

Weed classification is a need in the agricultural research to improve the weed control system. There are many kernel-based learning algorithms to identify weed images proposed in the literature; however, most of the weed classification technique proposed a single kernel-based algorithm. Recently, the Localized Multiple Kernel Learning (LMKL) instead of using a single kernel has been proposed for the classification technique that can enhance the interpretability of the decision function and improve performances. LMKL is composed of a kernel-based learning algorithm and a parametric gating model to assign local weights to kernel functions. These two components are trained in a coupled manner using a two-step alternating optimization algorithm. The learning algorithm is derived from three different gating models (softmax, sigmoid, and Gaussian), which applies the LMKL framework on the machine learning problems of binary classification. Therefore, in this work, feature vectors of weed images extracted using the Gabor Wavelet and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) were employed to analyze weed pattern images using LMKL algorithms. The result with the aid of gating model are visualized and discussed to prove the performance of LMKL classifier. The results showed the visualization using six types of combinations kernels for all set feature vectors are different for each weed dataset.
Meridional Considerations of the Centrifugal Compressor Development

Centrifugal compressor developments are interested in using optimization procedures that enable compressor high efficiency and wide operating ranges. Recently, high pressure ratio and efficiency of the centrifugal compressors require impeller design to pay attention to both the blade angle distribution and the meridional profile. The geometry of the blades and the meridional profile are very important contributions of compressor performance and structure reliability. This paper presents some recent studies of meridional impacts of the compressor. Studies indicated that the meridional profiles of the impeller impact the overall compressor efficiency and pressure ratio at the same rotational speed. Proper meridional profiles can improve the compressor efficiency and increase the overall pressure ratio at the same blade back curvature.
Exploring a Methodology for Tracing Spatial, Social and Textual Networks Through Neighbourhoods

This study, currently in progress, is concerned with the circulation of knowledge, practice and objects related to parenting through three contrasting neighbourhoods. This project is motivated by a desire to better understand how parents in different circumstances access, share and produce knowledge about children's learning and development. We are considering the impact of affordances provided by the spatial and social environment including information points (on- and off-line), displays and meeting places as well as patterns of usage. Here we describe our methodology which incorporates travelling in and through neighbourhoods, visual documentation, mapping, artefact collection, observation, excursions into cyberspace, interviews, collaborative analysis and various methods of representing networks. We discuss the influence of ecological approaches, network theory and geosemiotics on our approach and offer emerging insights from the first year of the project.