Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computer Investigation of Three phase Clarke-Maximum (maximum p,q) Trigonometrical PLL for Grid Connected Power Converters

This paper focuses on three-phase Clarke-maximum (Maximum p, q) trigonometrical PLL. An advantage of the proposed implementation is the improved performance at an initial difference in phase angles greater than 90o, and the presence of one equilibrium point – coincidence of the input and output signals phases. A block diagram for the implementation of the PLL and a PSIM computer simulation model are presented as well as computer simulation results of the research.
PREDICTING URBAN TRIP GENERATION USING A FUZZY EXPERT SYSTEM

One of the most important stages in the urban transportation planning procedure is predicting the rate of trips generated by each trac zone. Currently, multiple linear regression models are frequently used as a prediction tool. This method predicts the number of trips produced from, or attracted to each trac zone according to the values of independent variables for that zone. One of the main limitations of this method is its huge dependency on the exact prediction of independent variables in future (horizon of the plan). The other limitation is its many assumptions, which raise challenging questions of its application. The current paper attempts to use fuzzy logic and its capabilities to estimate the trip generation of urban zones. A fuzzy expert system is introduced, which is able to make suitable predictions using uncertain and inexact data. Results of the study on the data for Mashhad (Lon: 59.37 E, Lat: 36.19 N) show that this method can be a good competitor for multiple linear regression method, specially, when there is no exact data for independent variables.
Surveying students' conceptions of learning science by augmented reality and their scientific epistemic beliefs

Previous studies have addressed the positive influences of augmented reality (AR) on science learning. However, few studies have explored how learners consider learning science by such an emerging technology, particularly from the perspectives of conceptions of learning. This study therefore aimed to develop a survey to understand students’ conceptions of learning science by AR (CLSAR) considering their demographic characteristics and scientific epistemic beliefs. The CLSAR survey was validated by the responses of 267 junior high school students. The results indicate that the students generally exhibited positive conceptions, with stronger perceptions of learning science by AR as increasing motivation and interaction. Although they expressed less negative conceptions, their considerations of learning science by AR as diminishing learners’ imagination about the scientific information were stronger than those as interrupting learning. The students’ grade level played a role in their conceptions, but their gender did not. However, when considering the relationships between the students’ scientific epistemic beliefs and their conceptions, the gender factor may interfere with the relations. Based on the findings, some suggestions for the development of AR-related science learning systems are discussed.
Do Fungal Naphthalenones Have a Role in the Development of Esca Symptoms

As part of a study on fungal toxins, we isolated and identified a series of naphthalenone-related compounds derived from five species of pathogenic fungi. We report here the investigation of the liquid culture medium of Phaeoacremonium aleophilum, one of the most important pathogens in the first stage of esca. Various biological assays on grapevine callus and on Arabidopsis thaliana were performed to ascertain the toxic effect of the seven naphthatlenones isolated from this pathogen.
Preparative separation of 3O-methylkaempferol from Caragana leucophloea by high-speed counter-current chromatography and its antimicrobial activity

3-O-methylkaempferol was successfully separated from the ethyl acetate fraction of the crude ethanol extract from Caragana leucophloea by high-speed counter-current chromatography (HSCCC) with nhexane-chloroform-methanol-water-acetic acid (0.5:3.5:3.0:2.0:0.05, v/v) as the two-phase solvent system. 3-O-Methylkaempferol was examined to have strong antibacterial activity with the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values ranging from 12.5 to 50 μg/ml, and the median inhibitory concentration (IC50) values from 7.42 to 25.83 μg/ml. The IC50 value of 3-O-methylkaempferol on the spore germination of Magnaporthe oryzae was 56.56 μg/ml. This is the first time to isolate 3-Omethylkaempferol from C. leucophloea. Preparative separation of 3-O-methylkaempferol from C. leucophloea by HSCCC should be an effective and rapid method.
Relationship between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty in the Retail Banking Sector of Ghana

As competition intensifies in the Ghanaian retail banking sector, understanding the antecedents of customer loyalty is critical for effective design and implementation of loyalty programs to ensure customer loyalty and retention. The objective of this study is to examine relationship between the dimensions of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, as well as the effects of socio-economic variables on customer loyalty in the retail banking sector of Ghana. Data were collected using questionnaire administered through personal interviews to 160 customers of retail banks in Ghana. Multiple regression, analysis of variance and one-sample t-test statistical methods were employed to examine the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The study found assurance (knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence) to be a significant driver of customer loyalty. The study also found a significant difference between age groups and customer loyalty. The study recommends that relationship managers give special consideration to such variables as Assurance and ‘Age groups’ when formulating strategies for developing customer loyalty in the retail banking sector of Ghana.
Eigenvalues of Bethe vectors in the Gaudin model

According to the Feigin–Frenkel–Reshetikhin theorem, the eigenvalues of higher Gaudin Hamiltonians on Bethe vectors can be found using the center of an affine vertex algebra at the critical level. We recently calculated explicit Harish-Chandra images of the generators of the center in all classical types. Combining these results leads to explicit formulas for the eigenvalues of higher Gaudin Hamiltonians on Bethe vectors. The Harish-Chandra images can be interpreted as elements of classical W-algebras. By calculating classical limits of the corresponding screening operators, we elucidate a direct connection between the rings of q-characters and classical W-algebras.
Peat decomposition records in three pristine ombrotrophic bogs in southern Patagonia

Abstract. Ombrotrophic bogs in southern Patagonia have been examined with regard to paleoclimatic and geochemical research questions but knowledge about organic matter decomposition in these bogs is limited. Therefore, we examined peat humification with depth by Fourier Transformed Infrared (FTIR) measurements of solid peat, C/N ratio, and δ13C and δ15N isotope measurements in three bog sites. Peat decomposition generally increased with depth but distinct small scale variation occurred, reflecting fluctuations in factors controlling decomposition. C/N ratios varied mostly between 40 and 120 and were significantly correlated (R2 > 0.55, p
Management and Motivation in Ugandan Primary Schools: An impact evaluation report

Among the various challenges that the Ugandan government is facing to improve educational outcomes and achieve Universal Primary Education (UPE) in the country, is the necessity to improve the “quality of education”. Service delivery in education in Uganda has been proven to suffer, in great part, from the “weakness of accountability mechanisms between school administrators, teachers and the communities”. In order to assist national decision-makers in solving these issues, a team of local researchers set out to test and assess the effectiveness of two types of community-based monitoring interventions in improving general educational outcomes, using methods of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on a sample of 100 rural public primary schools in the country. This paper presents the main findings from this experimental impact evaluation project.
Modifications to risk-targeted seismic design maps for subduction and near-fault hazards

ASCE 7-10 introduced new seismic design maps that define risk-targeted ground motions such that buildings designed according to these maps will have 1% chance of collapse in 50 years. These maps were developed by iterative risk calculation, wherein a generic building collapse fragility curve is convolved with the U.S. Geological Survey hazard curve until target risk criteria are met. Recent research shows that this current approach may be unconservative at locations where the tectonic environment is much different than that used to develop the generic fragility curve. This study illustrates how risk-targeted ground motions at selected sites would change if generic building fragility curve and hazard assessment were modified to account for seismic risk from subduction earthquakes and near-fault pulses. The paper also explores the difficulties in implementing these changes.
Using dietary analysis and habitat selection to inform conservation management of reintroduced Great Bustards Otis tarda in an agricultural landscape

Capsule Reintroduced Great Bustards achieve dietary and habitat diversity despite living in an intensive agricultural setting. Aims To investigate dietary composition and habitat use of reintroduced Great Bustards Otis tarda released in southwest England and the impact of supplemental feed on autumn dietary selection. Methods Faecal samples were collected from a mixed group of free-ranging bustards without (July 2012, May, September, and November 2013) and with (October and December 2012) access to supplemental feeds. Concurrently, diurnal land use observations were recorded for all months but September and December. Composite monthly faecal samples were micro-histologically analysed to assess dietary composition. Year-round landscape-level habitat use was determined using re-sightings and satellite telemetry data for birds surviving more than 182 days post-release. Generalized linear models were used to test for differences in habitat selection across the year, by sex and within and outside release areas for each habitat type, and habitat diversity was quantified using the Shannon–Weaver Index. Results Dietary composition varied depending on plant availability and phenological stage, and invertebrates were rarely selected. Agricultural crops – primarily oil-seed rape, mustard, barley grass, lucerne, and barley seed – comprised the bulk of the diet, but grassland and weedy forbs were always important secondary foods (>25%), except when provided extruded pellets. Monthly changes in habitat use suggest sex-based habitat segregation, with females living in higher habitat diversity settings. Grasslands were used across the year. When supplemental food was provided, it came to dominate dietary intake. Conclusion Great Bustards can adapt to an intensive agricultural setting, but require unrestricted access to adjacent grasslands. They would be best served with small-scale habitat mosaics. If supplemental foods are to be provided to juvenile birds, quantities must be limited and the birds weaned off before dispersal to maximize reintroduction success.
Measuring the benefits to advertising under monopolistic competition

This paper determines the benefits and costs of firm-level advertising in a monopolistically competitive industry. The model is useful in an environment in which firm-level costs may be absent or imprecise. The empirical example uses data on the advertising for a new line of prune snacks by Sunsweet Growers between 2008 and 2010, revealing average benefit-cost estimates from $1.26 to $4.35 for every dollar allocated to the new product line.
FORECASTING VOLATILITY USING HIGH-FREQUENCY DATA

This paper deals with the analysis and the forecast of volatility using data characterized by a frequency higher than daily. The aim is to check the adequacy of the traditional ARCH modelling for high frequency returns as well as the use of them for better forecasts of the daily volatility. Finally, tick-by-tick data whose main feature is the irregular spacing in time are investigated.
Capital structure and value firm: an empirical analysis of abnormal returns

This study investigates whether capital structure is value relevant for the equity investor. In this sense, the paper links empirical corporate finance issues with investment analysis. This study also integrates the Miller-Modigliani (MM) framework (1958) into an investment approach by estimating abnormal returns on leverage portfolios in the time-series for different risk classes. For most risk classes, abnormal returns decline in firm leverage. Descriptive statistics, simple and multiple regressions are used to test the hold indicator significance. The results reflect that the designed measures are the negative relationship between returns and leverage could also be due to the market’s pricing of the firm’s ability to raise funds if need be. Further avenues for research in this area include examining the stock return performance of companies based on the changes in leverage of the firms relative to their risk classes. It would be particularly noteworthy to examine the rate at which the information content of said changes is incorporated in the share prices of companies as well as in their long run returns This study encompasses all non-financial firms across the five sectors that cover all the various classes of risk. This study investigates neither the determinants of multiple capital structure choices nor changes in capital structures over time. Our main goal is to explore the effect of capital structure on cumulative abnormal returns. This study also examine a firm’s cumulative average abnormal returns by measuring leverage at the firm level and at the average level for the firm’s industry. And also examine other factors, such as size, price earnings, market-to-book and betas.
Emerging patterns of simulated regional climatic changes for the 21st century due to anthropogenic forcings

We analyse temperature and precipitation changes for the late decades of the 21st century (with respect to present day conditions) over 23 land regions of the world from 18 recent transient climate change experiments with coupled atmosphere‐ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs). The analysis involves two different forcing scenarios and nine models, and it focuses on model agreement in the simulated regional changes for the summer and winter seasons. While to date very few conclusions have been presented on regional climatic changes, mostly limited to some broad latitudinal bands, our analysis shows that a number of consistent patterns of regional change across models and scenarios are now emerging. For temperature, in addition to maximum winter warming in northern high latitudes, warming much greater than the global average is found over Central Asia, Tibet and the Mediterranean region in summer. Consistent warming lower than the global average is found in some seasons over Southern South America, Southeast Asia and South Asia, while cases of inconsistent warming amplification compared to the global average occur mostly in some tropical and southern sub‐tropical regions. Consistent increase in winter precipitation is found in northern high latitude regions, as well as Central Asia, Tibet, Western and Eastern North America, and Western and Eastern Africa regions. The experiments also indicate an increase in South Asia and East Asia summer monsoon precipitation. A number of regions show a consistent decrease in precipitation, such as Southern Africa and Australia in winter, the Mediterranean region in summer and Central America in both seasons. Possible physical mechanisms that lead to the simulated changes are discussed.
Cell Disruption of Chaetoceros calcitrans by Microwave and Ultrasound in Lipid Extraction

Downstream processing, such as cell disruption and extraction, constitutes a key step in microalgal-based industrial bioprocesses, mainly due to high costs and environmental impact. In this context, extraction technologies need to be improved, including the use of nonconventional cell disruption techniques suitable for scale-up, such as microwave and ultrasound. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effects of different methods of cell disruption (microwave and ultrasound) on lipid extraction from biomass of the diatom Chaetoceros calcitrans cultured in mixotrophic conditions in a medium with natural sea water and residual glycerol, with different treatment times. Both techniques applied to the biomass were efficient; that is, the results were 24.6 ± 1.3% lipids (ultrasound for 5 min) and 24.2 ± 0.9% lipids (microwave for 40 s), with no significant differences between them (p≥0.05). Likewise, there was no significant difference regarding the chemical disruption with hydrochloric acid 2 M as control (24.2 ± 1.0%). The ultrasound method consumed less energy than the microwave method. Both cell disruption methods applied to the biomass resulted in changes in the fatty acid profiles, that is, percentages of saturated fatty acids increased from 7.7% (control) to 16.6% (microwave) and 15.5% (ultrasound), whereas polyunsaturated ones increased from 12.8% (control) to 22.8% (microwave) and 21.8% (ultrasound). Concerning monounsaturated fatty acids, percentages decreased from 79.5% (control) to 60.6% (microwave) and 62.7% (ultrasound).
Applications of Gene Targeting in the Investigations of Human Airway

Gene targeting is a powerful tool to dissect gene’s functions. Recent developments of recombineering and sitespecific recombination have dramatically increased the efficacy of gene targeting. In last decade there has been a huge influx of data from gene targeting approaches to airway diseases. The approaches greatly help us to understand the mechanisms from signal transductions to immune response in airway diseases. Recent human association studies revealed many novel genes underlying complicated airway diseases. The next challenge will be the systematic analysis of the precise functions of these genes in the pathogenesis of the diseases. This review looks into the current development of gene targeting in mice in the investigations of airway diseases. It also provides a brief protocol for how to rapidly construct the targeting vectors with recombineering and site-specific recombination systems.
A Novel Cell Based Assay for MMP Inhibitor Screening

Up to date, a plethora of protein based materials are used as implants to stimulate tissue regeneration or fillers to alleviate tissue or organ impairment. This includes glottal insufficiency, urinary bladder incontinence and especially in cosmetic industrial to improve facial contour. Once in vivo, protein-based materials are decomposed by cell secreted matrix metalloproteinases (MMP) and lose their volume within months [1, 2, 3, 4]. By introducing MMP inhibitor (MMPI), the extent of material degradation over time may be reduced. In this dissertation, the development of cell-based assay capable of identifying MMPI candidates for protein-based implant lifetime prolongation is described. To visualize the degradation, DQ-gelatin, (heavily fluorescence labeled gelatin that emits fluorescence signal proportional to its degradation) was used to represent the implant material. This gelatin was co-cultured with NIH-3T3 in a 96-well plate supplemented with growth media under standard tissue culture condition (5% CO2, 95% humidity at 37°C). Number of seeded cells, DQ-gelatin concentration and experiment run time were varied to optimize signal-to-noise ratio whilst taking into account more than 80% of seeded cells must remain viable. With optimized parameters, 0.8 million cells cultured on cell adhesion support scaffold in presence of 50 μg/mL DQ-gelatin for 5 days, the efficacy of BB-94 and TIMP-1 as synthetic and natural MMPI candidate were investigated. Both BB-94 and TIMP-1 were tested at different concentrations according to their IC50 and the approximated amount of MMPs in tissue fluid, 20-1000 nM and 0.1-2 μg/mL respectively, to determine their most efficient dosage. BB-94 and TIMP-1 demonstrated maximum potential at 72.59±4.75 % and 60.00±27.41 % at the concentration of 1000 nM and 2 μg/mL respectively. Statistical Analysis could not detect the significant difference from varying MMP inhibitor concentration, therefore, their concluded most efficient dosage in our experiment is the lowest concentration used for testing. Because our assay generated reliable statistically distinct signals and are capable of detecting quantitative inhibitory efficacy of MMP inhibitors, we believe our novel cell-based assay is a feasible method for MMP inhibitor screening that could better represent the complex degradation process of protein-based implants in biological systems than the current conventional enzyme-based methods.
μ FLU 08-111 HEAT TRANSFER BETWEENWALLS AND FLUIDS : MD SIMULATIONS WITH VIBRATINGWALLS

In Molecular Dynamics simulations of micro channels, a lot of computation time is used to simulate the channel walls when the wall molecules are explicitly simulated. To save computation time, implicit boundary conditions such as the Maxwell conditions can be used. With these boundary conditions, heat transfer is still a problem. In this work, we derive a new boundary condition, based on a vibrating potential wall. The heat transfer properties of the new boundary condition are shown to be comparable to the explicit wall. The computation time needed for the implicit boundary condition is very small compared to the explicit simulation.
NEW FORMS OF STRONG COMPACTNESS IN TERMS OF IDEALS

The aim of this paper is to introduce and study new types of strong compactness, modulo an ideal, calledI-compactness andI-compactness. Several of their properties are presented and some effects of various kinds of functions on them are studied. We compare this new spaces with other known types of strong compactness modulo an ideal.
Depth Camera-Based Screen Control System Employing Fingertip

This paper proposes a system that controls an image shown on a screen through hand information extracted from a depth camera. The proposed method extracts the hand region from the distance information obtained from the depth camera, and employs outline extraction and convex hull to locate the fingertips. An image output on a screen was controlled by the velocity of the fingertip information using current and previous frames, and an application program was written to verify the level of control
Are our memory predictions absolute or relative? : The effect of comparison on memory judgments

iii ÖZET . iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. v TABLE OF CONTENTS. vii LIST OF TABLES . ix LIST OF FIGURES . x CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Description Of Divided Attention . 1 1.2 The Effect of Divided Attention on Memory Processes . 2 1.3 The Effect of Divided Attention on Metamemory Processes. 6 1.4 Shortcomings of The Previous Studies . 10 1.5 Overview Of The Present Study . 17 1.6 Variables . 19 1.6. 1 Independent variables . 19 1.6. 1.1 Attention Type . 19 1.6. 1.2 List composition . 20 1.6. 2 Dependent variables . 20 1.6. 2.1 Free-Recall Performance . 21