Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integrated in-stand debarking with a harvester in cut-to-length operations – processing and extraction performance assessment

ABSTRACT Climate change fostered one of the most destructive spruce pests, the Eurasian spruce bark beetle. One measure to control bark beetle outbreaks could be debarking by a harvester. To assess the difference in harvesting and forwarding productivity between cut-to-length (CTL) and CTL with integrated debarking, a detailed time and motion study was carried out. The study covered two stands (2.1 ha) divided into sample plots, whereby 19 were treated as CTL and 20 as CTL debarking. The harvesting head H415 attached to a John Deere 1270G was modified with special feed rollers and adjusted hydraulic settings. A John Deere 1210E forwarder extracted the logs. Trees were measured and video recordings of the operation allowed a post hoc time and motion study. Linear and mixed models were applied to develop prediction functions. Altogether 400 spruce trees were harvested whereof 163 trees with an average stem volume of 0.45 m3 were processed CTL and 237 (0.40 m3) were treated with CTL debarking. Harvesting productivity reached 26.4 m3 PSH0 −1 in CTL debarking, which was 25% lower than CTL causing €2.40 m−3 additional costs. Forwarding productivity with 18.8 m3 PSH0 −1 did not differ.
A Comparison Of Meta -modeling Methods Using Practical Industry Requirements

In spite of the exponential growth of computing power, the enormous computational cost of complex and large -scale engineering design problems make it impractical to rely exclusively on original high fidelity simulation codes. Performing probabilistic and robust design on these long running applications is still a formidable task in any industry. The objective of this paper is to investigate the advantages and disad vantages of the several promising meta -modeling techniques under practical industry requirements. The comparisons are based on a set of performance criteria that are known to be important to industry. The meta -models include Multivariate Adaptive Regressio n Splines (MARS), Radial Basis Functions (RBF), Adaptive Weighted Least Squares (AWLS), Gaussian Process (GP), and quadratic response surface regression (RSM). Twenty benchmark problems representing different levels of dimensionality, non -linearity and noi se level are used for the evaluation.
Numerical through-resistor (TR) calibration technique for modeling of microwave integrated circuits

A through-resistor (TR) calibration procedure is proposed for parameter extraction and accurate modeling of planar discontinuities and circuits by using a full-wave technique such as method of moments (MoM). This new scheme allows the effective use of a commercial electromagnetic field simulator in removing inherent numerical noises or errors in simulation, and making the parameter extraction for circuit models. A microstrip open-end and a microstrip gap are studied and effectiveness of this new scheme is verified.
A Point Process Model for Simulating Gang-on-Gang Violence

Gang on gang violence is a prevalent problem in Los Angeles. In this paper a point process method is presented for simulating gang on gang crimes. The Hawkes process, a self exciting point process, is introduced as a temporal model for crimes between pairs of gangs. This model is expanded upon to simulate crimes not only temporally but also spatially. Following this, we introduce a method to assign directionality to these crimes. Finally, we present a model to simulate directed crimes in the 33 gang system of the policing district Hollenbeck, Los Angeles.
3-D shape recovery of planar and curved surfaces from shading cues in underwater images

Automatic construction of high-resolution topographical maps, or determining the shape of man-made objects, targets, and obstacles for localization, identification, and/or recognition, is an important capability in the application of autonomous or intelligent underwater vehicles. In this paper, we investigate the application of underwater image models for the reconstruction of three-dimensional object shapes from the shading cues in two-dimensional optical images. We first present the results of a sensitivity analysis in support of a simplified model for a Lambertian surface illuminated by a point source in an attenuating medium, proposed in earlier work. We then generalize a closed-form solution for planar scenes, previously proposed for negligible source-camera baseline, to the case where the baseline may be increased to minimize backscatter effects. For curved surfaces, we propose two techniques based on different iterative updating strategies to recursively improve the recovered surface shape. We study the performance of various methods using synthetic data and real images acquired under different turbidity conditions.
On the environmental effects of development and non-development expenditure in India: Evidence from an asymmetric ARDL model

The main purpose of this study is to model and measure the impact of development and non-development expenditure on the carbon dioxide emissions (per capita metric tons) in India over 1980–2018. The Asymmetric ARDL approach (NARDL), an advanced econometric technique, was applied to examine the nexus between CO2 emissions, development and non-development expenditure, national income, energy consumption and population. The short-run and long-run results establish a statistically significant relationship between carbon emissions and the explanatory variables. The long-run asymmetrical results indicate that energy consumption and national income growth pollute the environment. However, we did not find any significant long-run impact of population on pollution levels in India. Furthermore, the results reveal that increase in development expenditure leads to environmental degradation and non-development expenditure mitigates pollution. No evidence of the applicability of EKC was found in India. The authors conclude that a reasonable method of tackling the threat of environmental degradation is to remove distortions in public expenditure policy. We recommend the government to phase out fiscal benefits to pollution-prone economic activities and thus spend the money saved on pollution abatement efforts.
Drought Spatiotemporal Characteristics Based on a Vegetation Condition Index in Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq

Drought is a complex phenomenon that has severe impacts on the environment. Vegetation and its conditions are very sensitive to drought effects. This study aimed to monitor and assess the drought severity and its relationships to some ecological variables in ten districts of Erbil Governorate (Kurdistan Region), Iraq, throughout 20 years (1998-2017). The results revealed that droughts frequently hit Erbil throughout the study period. The Landsat time-series- based on Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) significantly correlated with precipitation, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and latitude. Extreme VCI-based drought area percentages were recorded in 1999, 2000, 2008, and 2011 by 43.4%, 67.9%, 43.3%, and 40.0%, respectively. The highest crop yield reduction in the study area occurred mainly in 2000, 2008, and 2012 due to low precipitation rates. These results reveal the capability of the VCI for drought characteristics and highlighting relationships with some ecological variables, which provide vital information to the decision-makers, environmental, and economic sectors.
Enhancing Students’ Attitude towards Biology through the Integration of Traditional Medicine and 5E’s Learning Cycle

The study investigated the effect of integrating traditional medicine (TM) concepts with grade 9th microorganism and disease topics on students’ attitude towards biology. The study used a quasi-experimental pretest, posttest non-equivalent group design. two intact classes were selected in Chiro district of Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia. The first class belonged to the treatment group where TM contents are integrated through 5E’s learning cycle with the topic Microorganism and Disease and the second was assigned as comparison group learning the same biology unit on Microorganisms and Disease using the usual approach. Biological Attitude Questionnaires (BAQ) was administered for both groups as pre- and post-tests. The findings showed that the integration of TM with the school biology enhanced students’ attitude towards biology as compared with teaching the topics without integration.
Penerapan Teori Permainan dalam Strategi Pemasaran Produk Ban Sepeda Motor di Fmipa Usu

Game Theory is a mathematical model that is used in situations of conflict or competition between the various interests face each other as competitors. The goal is to obtain the optimal strategy for each player. In game theory, there are two types of optimal strategies, the pure strategy and mixed strategy. The author use linear programming to obtain the optimal mixed strategy and use QM 2.0 to solve linear programming problems. In this research, the author apply game theory in competition motorcycle tire, the IRC, Federal, and Swallow. The research was conducted at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences and using primary data. In other words, this research produced the preferences and perceptions of consumers for each tires.
Determinants of Fertility Trend at District, Divisional and Regional Levels and Policy Implication for Poverty Alleviation

: Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries of the world (1278 persons per sq. km.) but it represents one of the few countries in developing world where the pace of fertility decline has been unparalleled over the last few decades despite pervasive poverty and under-development. It has been passing through a critical phase of fertility transition. The data was collected for this research from the following five sources: i. Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2012-13 for fertility rate, contraceptive use, proportion of children engaged in work and access to mass media and ICT of women. ii. Statistical Yearbook of Bangladesh for literacy rate, iii. Population Census 2011 for population density characteristics of different districts, iv. Directorate of Agricultural Extension personnel for daily average wage rate of agricultural labor and v. Bangladesh Poverty Map, 2014 for the level of poverty of different districts. This study contributes to basic knowledge of the structural determinants of fertility rate in the Bangladesh by analyzing the expanded set of determinants at district level, namely contraceptive use, literacy rate, daily wage rate of agricultural labor, population density, child labor, access to mass media and ICT of women and poverty level using spatial data analysis techniques. In this study, the binary join matrix/binary contiguity matrix and inverse distance spatial weight matrix techniques are used to capture spatial dependence in the data. This analysis extends the spatial model by allowing spatial dependence to vary across divisions and regions. The results strongly indicate that the fertility associated with contraceptive use, literacy rate, daily wage rate of agricultural labor, child labor, poverty level and their neighbors’ districts. These results suggest that district should pay particular attention to policies in neighboring districts and policy maker should realize that declining the fertility rate in neighboring districts are likely to affect fertility rate in their own district, therefore, a key issue for policy development is how to stimulate the contraceptive use, educational attainment, promote daily wage of agricultural labor and decrease child labor and poverty level could control the fertility and result in sustainable development and poverty alleviation of regions that are both high fertility and economically lagging. This needs to be addressed both in terms of national level policies and more emphatically within regional and sub-regional development strategies than it has been hither.
The effect of visual and tactile information in motor preparation of climbing

ABSTRACT In rock climbing, an appropriate motor preparation to a given climbing hold(s) is crucial for a fluent climbing. We investigated the influence of visual-tactile information in motor preparation of climbing, particularly the effect of the number of the holds and the tactile input of an actual hold was examined. Reaction times (RTs) under the priming paradigm were compared for climbers and non-climbers. Participants were asked to respond to a visual target (left or right arrow) after the presentation of a picture of a single climbing hold (Single-Prime condition: SP) or two holds (Double-Prime condition: DP). Before commencing each trial block, the participants were also asked to touch or watch an actual hold (touch /no-touch condition). The response based on the congruity between the orientation of the hold and that of the arrow was categorised as either congruent or incongruent. An ANOVA performed on the RTs showed the congruency effect, but this was observed only in the non-climbers. An additional analysis revealed a marginally significant climbing experience-related interaction. In the high-experienced climbers, the RTs in the touch condition were slower than those in the no-touch condition but this was only in the SP condition. In the no-touch condition, the RTs of DP were slower than those of SP. These results therefore suggest that the motor preparation is mediated by visual and tactile inputs of a given hold. The time needed for motor preparation, particularly in highly experienced climbers, may be modulated by the representational complexity of climbing movements through tactile information. Highlight The number of the holds visually presented affected the motor preparation. The tactile input of the climbing hold modulated the motor preparation only in the highly experienced climbers. Our findings imply that climbing-specific context (i.e. combination of the given holds) and experience (i.e. action competency) are involved in the motor preparation of climbing.
Secure and Efficient Ey Distribution for Scada

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is a computer based monitoring tool which controls and monitors the process and take supervisory decisions accordingly. These days' modern industrial facilities have command and control systems. So need for SCADA connection to open network increases and thereby increases the issues in security. One critical aspect for SCADA system is that the communication needs to be secured. SCADA consists of three types of communication equipments and data transmitted between these equipments have to be protected by encryption. A secure key management is essential for data encryption. Several key management schemes already exist for static and dynamic groups. Perfect secrecy can only be achieved in multicast groups by ciphering data sent o group with a different key every time a member joins or leaves the group. This paper proposes ternary tree based new technique to establish a contributory secure group key where ternary tree has at most three children per node. This method provides some advantage over the existing binary tree based technique. As a result, the scheme supporting broadcast and multicast efficiently is proposed.
Internet of Medical Things-Based Secure and Energy-Efficient Framework for Health Care

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a collection of medical equipment and software that can help patients get better care. The purpose of this study is to improve the security of data collected through remote health monitoring of patients utilizing Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Asymmetric cryptography techniques may be used to assure the security of such sensor networks. For communication between different IoMT devices and a remote server, the safe CoAP is compatible with the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol for creating a secure session using existing algorithms such as Lightweight Establishment of Secure Session. The DTLS layer of CoAP, in contrast, has shortcomings in key control, session establishment, and multicast message exchange. As a consequence, for IoMT communication, the creation of an efficient protocol for safe CoAP session establishment is needed. Thus, to solve the existing problems related to key management and multicast security in CoAP, we have proposed an efficient and secure communication technique to establish a secure session key between IoMT devices and distant servers using lightweight Energy-Efficient and Secure CoAP Elliptic Curve Cryptography (E2SCEC2). The advantage of using E2SCEC2 over other identification methods such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) is its compact key size, which allows it to use a smaller key size. This article also compares these algorithms on parameters such as time spent generating keys, signature generation, and verification of E2SCEC2 and RSA algorithms, as well as energy consumption and radio duty cycle, to see if they are compatible in constrained environments.
Specifically Adsorbed Ions in the Reverse Cationic Flotation of Iron Ore

ABSTRACT Although extensive research has been conducted on the effect of water chemistry in flotation, no single study exists which describes the effect of calcium and magnesium on the adsorption of starch onto the hematite in iron ore flotation. In this work flotation, entrainment, zeta potential, and settling tests were performed to determine the differing impact of calcium and magnesium in iron ore flotation. Results showed that magnesium is more detrimental to the flotation process at far lower concentrations than calcium. Performing flotation with 45 ppm of calcium resulted in a comparable impact on the process as performing flotation with 7 ppm of magnesium. While calcium promotes the adsorption of starch onto the hematite and reduces entrainment, past an optimal dosage magnesium is promoting the adsorption of starch to everything in solution causing low grades and recoveries. It was found that the starch adsorption onto the hematite is strongly impacted by the presence of magnesium, suggesting that starch is collecting the magnesium and self-flocculating prior to adsorption onto the hematite. Thus, the presence of magnesium can significantly reduce the flotation performance far more than what would be expected from calcium.
Agent-based dynamic integrated process planning and scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems

Process planning and scheduling are important manufacturing planning activities which deal with resource utilisation and time span of manufacturing operations. The process plans and the schedules generated in the planning phase will be modified in the execution phase due to the unforeseen disturbances in the manufacturing systems. This paper deals with a multi-agent architecture of an integrated and dynamic system for process planning and scheduling for multiple jobs. A negotiation protocol is discussed, in this paper, to generate the process plans and the schedules of the manufacturing resources and the individual jobs, dynamically and incrementally, based on the alternative manufacturing processes. The alternative manufacturing processes are presented by the process plan networks discussed in the previous paper [Tehrani et al. 2007. A search algorithm for generating alternative process plans in flexible manufacturing system. Journal of Advanced Mechanical Design, System, and Manufacturing, 1 (5), 706–716], and the suitable process plans and schedules are searched and generated to cope with both the dynamic status and the disturbances of the manufacturing systems. Coordination agents are proposed to generate a suitable assignment of the job agents to the machine tool agents at each step of the negotiation. Simulation software has been developed to carry out case studies, aimed at verifying the performance and it has been integrated with open robot interface network (ORIN) architecture for practical application of the multi-agent system in a real manufacturing system.
High performance W-band InAlAs-InGaAs-InP HEMTs

0.15 mu m T-gate lattice-matched In/sub 0.52/Al/sub 0.48/As-In/sub 0.53/Ga/sub 0.47/As-InP HEMTs with a device minimum noise figure of 1.7 dB with 7.7 dB associated gain at 93 GHz have been fabricated. A single-ended active mixer was fabricated using these devices, and a conversion gain of 2.4 dB was measured with 7.3 dB single-sideband noise figure at 94 GHz. This is the first reported active mixer conversion gain at W-band.
Designing for awareness : an experience-focused HCI perspective

Within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research, the notion of technologically-mediated awareness is often used for allowing relevant people to maintain a mental model of activities, behaviors and status information about each other so that they can organize and coordinate work or other joint activities. The initial conceptions of awareness focused largely on improving productivity and efficiency within work environments. With new social, cultural and commercial needs and the emergence of novel computing technologies, the focus of technologically-mediated awareness has extended from work environments to people’s everyday interactions. Hence, the scope of awareness has extended from conveying work related activities to people’s emotions, love, social status and other broad range of aspects. This trend of conceptualizing HCI design is termed as experience-focused HCI. In my PhD dissertation, designing for awareness, I have reported on how we, as HCI researchers, can design awareness systems from experience-focused HCI perspective that follow the trend of conveying awareness beyond the task-based, instrumental and productive needs. Within the overall aim to design for awareness, my research advocates ethnomethodologically-informed approaches for conceptualizing and designing for awareness. In this sense, awareness is not a predefined phenomenon but something that is situated and particular to a given environment. I have used this approach in two design cases of developing interactive systems that support awareness beyond task-based aspects in work environments. In both the cases, I have followed a complete design cycle: collecting an in-situ understanding of an environment, developing implications for a new technology, implementing a prototype technology to studying the use of the technology in its natural settings.
Construction contracting and civil–military interaction

There is a need for improved insights into the contracting process for construction projects that the military contract out to civil contractors in the specific setting of civil–military interaction (CMI) in regions that are suffering from instability and armed conflict. The core questions are: what are the key criteria for contracting out CMI projects in out‐of‐area operations, and what contracting methods are appropriate? First, we discuss possible methods and key criteria for contracting out CMI projects. Following this, a case study based in the Uruzgan province of Afghanistan explores key criteria for contracting out CMI projects. Based on this case study, the following five CMI‐related criteria have been identified: generating information on the civilian environment; contributing to building local capacity; process transparency; force acceptance and local participation; and contracting as a tool for stability. These criteria dominate more regular criteria such as cost and time. Some methods frequently used in developed economies, for example the open public tender procedure, seem less appropriate when contracting out CMI projects within a military mission. In CMI projects, contracting most closely resembles the multiple negotiated tender procedure. Future projects can use the identified range of methods and key criteria in designing an improved contracting process.