Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Kernel Methods for Density Estimation in Random Differential Equations Problems

Kernel density estimation is a non-parametric method to estimate the probability density function of a random quantity from a finite data sample. The estimator consists of a kernel function and a smoothing parameter called the bandwidth. Despite its undeniable usefulness, the convergence rate may be slow with the number of realizations and the discontinuity and peaked points of the target density may not be correctly captured. In this work, we analyze the applicability of a parametric method based on Monte Carlo simulation for the density estimation of certain random variable transformations. This approach has important applications in the setting of differential equations with input random parameters.
Comparative Phytochemical and Anti-microbial Studies of Leaf, Stem, Root of Spathodea companulata

Aim: To compare the phytochemicals and anti bacterial activities of leaf, stem and root extracts of Spathodea companulata. Methodology: The leaf, stem and root of Spathodea companulata were collected, washed, airdried, ground and each extracted with water, methanol, ethyl acetate and n-hexane. The extracts were analysed for the presence of phytochemicals. Antimicrobial analysis was also carried out on the extracts. Results: Glycosides were present in all the extracts except stem aqueous extract. Steroids were found absent in most of the extracts except methanol stem and n-hexane root extracts. Saponins were found in methanol, aqueous and ethyl acetate extracts of the root and stem, and in methanol and aqueous leaf extracts. Alkaloids were present in methanol and aqueous extracts of the leaf and root, and in ethyl acetate and nhexane extracts of the stem. Quantity of Alkaloids and tannins were higher in leaf, while flavonoids and glycosides were higher in the stem and the roots Original Research Article Anarado et al.; AJACR, 6(1): 10-20, 2020; Article no.AJACR. 57530 11 contained higher amount of saponins. The extraction solvent polarities played important role in the type of metabolites extracted. The stem extracts were found to be most active against the seven test organisms used. Conclusion: More work should be done on the isolation and identification of compounds responsible for some of the pharmacological effects of the plant parts and the subsequent development of the compounds in formulation of drugs.
Covid 19 Salgını Döneminde Egzersizin Yaşam Kalitesine Etkisi

Arastirmanin amaci, pandemi doneminde egzersiz yapmanin yasam kalitesine etkisini incelemektir. Arastirmaya egzersiz yapan ve yapmayan 18 yas ustu 272 kadin, 295 erkek olmak uzere toplam 567 kisi katilmistir. Arastirma tarama modelindedir. Verilerin toplanmasinda kisisel bilgi formu ve Dunya Saglik Orgutu Yasam Kalitesi Olcegi Kisa Formu (WHOQOL-BREF) kullanilmistir. Verilerin analizi, SPSS 21 paket program ile Pearson-korelasyon testi ve bagimsiz orneklem T testi kullanilmistir. Olcegin carpiklik ve basiklik degerlerinin normal dagilim gosterdigi tespit edilmistir. Olcegin ic tutarlilik katsayisi 0.84 tur. Yapilan tum degerlendirmelerin anlamlilik duzeyi p<0.05 olarak dikkate alinmistir. Arastirmadan elde edilen bulgular, Covid 19 salgini surecinde egzersiz yapan ve yapmayanlarin cinsiyet degiskenine gore, erkek katilimcilarin kadinlardan ortalama puanlari daha yuksek bulunmustur (p<0,05). Yas degiskenine gore; duzenli egzersiz yapanlarda yasam kalitesi acisindan anlamli bir sonuc yok iken, egzersiz yapmayanlarda genel saglik, sosyal iliskiler ve cevre alt boyutunda anlamli farklilik tespit edilmistir (p<0,05). Yas arttikca genel saglik ve cevre boyutunda dusme, sosyal iliskiler boyutunda ise artis gorulmustur. Sonuc olarak; Covid 19 salgini surecinde egzersiz yapan bireylerin yapmayanlara gore yasam kalitesinin daha yuksek oldugu belirlenmistir.
Impact of SLR on Beach-Tourism Resort Revenue at Sahl Hasheesh and Makadi Bay, Red Sea, Egypt; A Hedonic Pricing Approach

Coastal erosion and inundation represent the main impacts of climate change and the consequential sea level rise (SLR) on beaches. The resultant deterioration of coastal habitats and decline in beach tourism revenue has been a primary concern for coastal managers and researchers. Nevertheless, the extent of SLR on beach tourism in Egypt remains relatively unknown. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between beach width shrinkage due to SLR and the loss in tourist resort revenue. We use the hedonic pricing approach, which combines economic and environmental variables, to determine the environmental impact on beach tourism along 14 km of the coast of Sahl Hasheesh and Makadi Bay, Hurghada, Egypt. The resort revenue depends on the cumulative benefits from the market price of the resort rooms, which is a function of morphological variables and tourism variables. Three regression models (semi-log, double-log, and custom-log) were used to select the most appropriate functional hedonic model. Three coastal slopes were considered (0.03, 0.06, and 0.12) to address the uncertainty in beach width. When 0.06 coastal slope is used, the expected losses in revenue are 84,000, 220,000, and 546,000 USD/day period (representing 3%, 7%, and 18%) for 2030, 2050, and 2100, respectively, considering the lowest scenario representative concentration pathway (RCP2.6); for the worst case (RCP8.5 SLR), the expected losses are 142,000, 369,000, and 897,000 USD/day period (representing 5%, 12%, and 30%) for 2030, 2050, and 2100, respectively.
After illness, under diagnosis

A vast portion of the world’s population live with ill health following acute infection or disease and its emergency management. This reflects the increased capacity of technological innovations and pharmaceuticals to interrupt decline or complications, even when cure is unlikely. The authors in this Special Section illustrate how, in different localities, people live with risk for themselves or their offspring; with non-communicable, degenerative, autoimmune, and congenital conditions; with the after-effects of diagnostic procedures and surgical interventions; and with continued treatment and surveillance. We attend to the value of conceptualising this as ‘living under’ diagnosis or description. We illustrate how diagnostic labels overdetermine subsequent embodied states of being, structuring interactions and social relations with family, friends, and health professionals. Living under diagnosis, we argue, impacts on self-care, care for and by others, everyday lives, and anticipations of the future.
Effectiveness assessment of protein drugs and vaccines through in Silico analysis

Informatics studies represent the useful tool for development of the biologic-based therapeutics including proteins, antibodies, and vaccines. In this context, the bioinformatics studies are able to give more insights into the assessment of the effectiveness of the protein constructs, which have been developed as biologic-based therapeutics. Such investigations need a variety of data processing and analysis based on existing knowledge of gene functions and molecular interactions. Here, it is attempted to review some in silico approaches to assess physicochemical properties, posttranslational modification, hydrophobic behavior, solvent accessibility, allergenicity, and other properties of protein drugs and vaccines. Besides, in a part of this review, in silico strategies that are applicable during codon optimization of a recombinant protein are discussed.
Revisiting Supervised and Unsupervised Methods for Effort-Aware Cross-Project Defect Prediction

Cross-project defect prediction (CPDP), aiming to apply defect prediction models built on source projects to a target project, has been an active research topic. A variety of supervised CPDP methods and some simple unsupervised CPDP methods have been proposed. In a recent study, Zhou et al. found that simple unsupervised CPDP methods (i.e., ManualDown and ManualUp) have a prediction performance comparable or even superior to complex supervised CPDP methods. Therefore, they suggested that the ManualDown should be treated as the baseline when considering non-effort-aware performance measures (NPMs) and the ManualUp should be treated as the baseline when considering effort-aware performance measures (EPMs) in future CPDP studies. However, in that work, these unsupervised methods are only compared with existing supervised CPDP methods using a small subset of NPMs, and the prediction results of baselines are directly collected from the primary literatures. Besides, the comparison has not considered other recently proposed EPMs, which consider context switches and developer fatigue due to initial false alarms. These limitations may not give a holistic comparison between the supervised methods and unsupervised methods. In this paper, we aim to revisit Zhou et al.’s study. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make a comparison between the existing supervised CPDP methods and the unsupervised methods proposed by Zhou et al. in the same experimental setting when considering both NPMs and EPMs. We also propose an improved supervised CPDP method EASC and make a further comparison with the unsupervised methods. According to the results on 82 projects in terms of 11 performance measures, we find that when considering NPMs, EASC can achieve prediction performance comparable or even superior to unsupervised method ManualDown in most cases. Besides, when considering EPMs, EASC can statistically significantly outperform the unsupervised method ManualUp with a large improvement in terms of Cliff’s delta in most cases. Therefore, the supervised CPDP methods are more promising than the unsupervised method in practical application scenarios, since the limitation of testing resource and the impact on developers cannot be ignored in these scenarios.
The association between residential housing prices, bicycle infrastructure and ridership volumes

City officials and planners have shown increased interest in pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly designs aimed at addressing urban problems such as traffic congestion, pollution, sprawl and housing availability. An important planning consideration is the economic impact associated with existing or planned infrastructure, especially in relation to home property values. In this study, we use measures of infrastructure and ridership to evaluate the relationship between bicycling infrastructure and activity and single-family home values in Tempe, Arizona. We apply a hedonic modelling approach and find that bicycle infrastructure density is positively associated with home sale price, while ridership density around home locations has no significant relationship with sale price. Our results inform discourse related to the potential economic values of residential bicycle infrastructure, especially in areas where property tax is a source of local public finance revenue. We show that the characteristics of bicycle-friendly design may be the same characteristics valued by homebuyers and the resulting increased home sale values may lead to increased property tax revenue in Tempe, Arizona.
Processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension: ERP evidence

ABSTRACT Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated whether processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension. Five-sentence discourses were used as the materials. The fifth sentence of each discourse contained a critical word that was highly semantically associated with the local sentence context. Three conditions were constructed: congruent, incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions. For the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions, the critical words were semantically incongruent with the contextual information in the third and first sentence of the discourse, respectively. The results showed that the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions failed to elicit the N400 effect compared to the congruent condition. Moreover, a post-N400 positivity effect was found in the incongruent/short-distance condition, and this effect was strongly reduced in the incongruent/long-distance condition, indicating that the good-fit anomalies were ultimately detected and that lower contextual accessibility could lead to more difficulty in detecting semantic incongruence.
Synthesizing the Roughness of Textured Surfaces for an Encountered-Type Haptic Display Using Spatiotemporal Encoding

Encountered-type haptic rendering provides realistic, free-to-touch, and move-and-collide haptic sensation to a user. However, inducing haptic-texture sensation without complicated tactile actuators is challenging for encountered-type haptic rendering. In this article, we propose a novel texture synthesizing method for an encountered-type haptic display using spatial and temporal encoding of roughness, which provides both active and passive touch sensation requiring no complicated tactile actuation. Focused on macro-scale roughness perception, we geometrically model the textured surface with a grid of hemiellipsoidal bumps, which can provide a variety of perceived roughness as the user explores the surface with one’s bare hand. Our texture synthesis method is based on two important hypotheses. First, we assume that perceptual roughness can be spatially encoded along the radial direction of a textured surface with hemiellipsoidal bumps. Second, perceptual roughness temporally varies with the relative velocity of a scanning human hand with respect to the surface. To validate these hypotheses on our spatiotemporal encoding method, we implemented an encountered-type haptic texture rendering system using an off-the-shelf collaborative robot that can also track the user’s hand using IR sensors. We performed psychophysical user tests with 25 participants and verified the main effects of spatiotemporal encoding of a textured model on the user’s roughness perception. Our empirical experiments imply that the users perceive a more rough texture as the surface orientation or the relative hand motion increases. Based on these findings, we show that our visuo-haptic system can synthesize an appropriate level of roughness corresponding to diverse visual textures by suitably choosing encoding values.
ENSO and Southeast Asian biomass burning modulate subtropical trans-Pacific ozone transport

Abstract Trans-Pacific transport of enhanced ozone plumes has been mainly attributed to fossil fuel combustion in Asia in spring, but less attention has been paid to vegetation fires in Asia. Here we show that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-modulated fires in Southeast Asia, rather than Asian fossil fuel plumes, dominate the interannual variability of springtime trans-Pacific transport of ozone across the entire North Pacific Ocean. During El Niño springs, the intensified fires from both the Indochinese Peninsula and Indonesia, together with large-scale circulation anomalies, result in enhanced ozone plumes that stretch over 15 000 km in both the lower-middle and upper troposphere. This enhancement is also observed in the in situ measurements of ozone concentration, with an almost 10% increase at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, a unique site to monitor the long-distance transport over the North Pacific. This study reports an unexpectedly strong influence of vegetation fires, linked with climate variability, on global tropospheric chemistry and proves once more how complex the interactions in the climate system are.
Molecular Structure Properties of Heme Group in the Oxymyoglobin Protein (1mbo.pdb) Using PyMOL & UCSF Chimera

PyMOL and UCSF Chimera are open source multifunctional molecular visualization system developed for the use in structural biology. Both of these tools are well designed with various visualization options available for the user; with the help of such options, we have observed that the iron core binds oxygen in the heme group of oxymyoglobin. Also, various molecular surfaces, internal structures as well as bond lengths between the iron core & molecular oxygen in the heme group and that to the histidine-93 of the oxymyoglobin protein have been calculated. Implementing structural analysis feature of UCSF Chimera, the distance between iron core of heme group and molecular oxygen and that between iron core and histidine 93(H93) have been estimated and found to be 1.827 Å and 2.065 Å respectively which are in good agreement (within 0.5% error) with the bond lengths calculated by x-ray diffraction method.The small value of bond length between Fe and O2 suggests the higher stability of oxygen which is important for transportation, activation and storage of enzymes to support life of living organisms on the Earth. So, it provides an insight in enzymology like oxygenase. Interestingly, oxymyoglobin protein or its constituent amino acid chain may have important role in the origin of early life on the Earth.
Insecticidal Property of Black Seed (Nigella sativa) Powder as an Eco-friendly Management of Skin Beetle Dermestes maculatus (Coleoptera: Dermestidae) in Atlantic Codfish Gadus morhua (Gadiformes: Gadidae)

The bio-pesticidal potential of Nigella sativa seed powder in the management of Dermestes maculatus in codfish (Gadus morhua) was evaluated in the laboratory. D. maculatus beetles were obtained from naturally infested smoked fish, cultured at ambient temperature for the establishment of new stock and same age adults. Purchased N. sativa seeds were ground into fine powder, weighed at 0.4 g, 0.8 g, 1.2 g, 1.6 g and 2.0 g for use in the bioassay. The treatments were separately added into 40 g codfish kept in Kilner jar into which two sexed pairs of D. maculatus were introduced and observed. From the results, the number of the developmental stages (larvae, pupae and adults) of D. maculatus in codfish treated with N. sativa seed powder Original Research Article Bob-manuel and Ukoroije; AJAAR, 13(3): 47-56, 2020; Article no.AJAAR. 56841 48 was inversely proportional to the concentration of the seed powder. Thus, an increase in the concentration of N. sativa powder generated reduction in the mean number of D. maculatus progeny found in the codfish after 35 days as follows: at 0.4 g, progeny development was (103.50, 7.75, 2.50) and 77.00, 8.25 and 1.00 at 2.0 g respectively for larva, pupa and adult stages. Percentage protection conferred by the botanical on D. maculatus showed that all the doses applied were effective. Corrected mortality of D. maculatus adults after 45 days of exposure to the different doses of N. sativa treatments also increased with an increase in concentration of N. sativa from 0.4 g to 2.0 g. Frass weight generated by D. maculatus activity in codfish treated with N. sativa powder was high in codfish treated at 1.6 g. Finally, N. sativa characterized both qualitatively and quantitatively for phytochemicals, proved the secondary metabolites with bio-pesticide potentials against D. maculatus such as phenols, Alkaloid, flavonoid, terpenoid, saponin, tannin, Cardiac glycoside, anthraquinone, steroid and oxalate in different proportion, therefore, should be utilized in Integrated Pest Management program of stored codfish.
FOREST COVERAGE AND STREAMFLOW OF WATERSHEDS IN THE TROPICAL ATLANTIC RAINFOREST

ABSTRACT The present study analyzed the average and minimum streamflow behavior of 11 watersheds located in the Atlantic Forest Biome, relating them to the changes in forest cover. The average minimum flow with seven days of duration (Q7), the average annual flow (Qave), the total annual precipitation (Pa) and the percentage of forest cover (FC) for each watershed were determined. The joint correlation between the FC and the Pa with the flow for each watershed were analyzed by adjusting multiple linear regression equations. The partial correlation coefficient was also used to analyze whether the variation in the FC influenced the water flow when the effects of Pa are fixed. This study allowed us to identify significant associations between FC and Pa with Q7 or Qave in only two of the watersheds. Disregarding the effects of Pa, the increase in the FC tended to result in a reduction in the Qave, and in turn increased the Q7 in these two watersheds.
Effect of Ethnicity on the Speaking Fundamental Frequency Values of Indians vis-a-vis Caucasians, Afro-Americans and Mongoloids: A Forensic Phonetic Perspective

It is established in the forensic literature that the ethnic background of an individual has a robust bearing on one’s speaking fundamental frequency (SFF). The aim of this study is to record the SFF values of Indian adult speakers and compare the SFF of Indian speakers with those of existing data on other ethnic groups like Caucasians, Afro-Americans and Mongoloids in order to examine the effect of ethnicity on SFF. In addition, it is also to observe if language and mode of speech has any bearing on the SFF values. The study included 20 Indian speakers whose ages ranged from 21 to 40 years. A read passage and spontaneous speech in two languages (Telugu and English) constituted the text. PRAAT software was used to extract SFF values and a comparison was made between the obtained SFF values of Indian speakers and those drawn from other studies on three ethnic groups: Caucasians, Afro-Americans and Mongoloids. Results indicate that the Indian speakers (both male and female) exhibited a marginally higher pitch (on an average) compared to those of the other three ethnicities. Keywords— Afro-Americans, Mongoloids, SFF, PRAAT.
Sensor Fusion for Identification of Freezing of Gait Episodes Using Wi-Fi and Radar Imaging

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive and neurodegenerative condition causing motor impairments. One of the major motor related impairments that present biggest challenge is freezing of gait (FOG) in Parkinson’s patients. In FOG episode, the patient is unable to initiate, control or sustain a gait that consequently affects the Activities of Daily Livings (ADLs) and increases the occurrence of critical events such as falls. This paper presents continuous monitoring ADLs and classification freezing of gait episodes using Wi-Fi and radar imaging. The idea is to exploit the multi-resolution scalograms generated by channel state information (CSI) imprint and micro-Doppler signatures produced by reflected radar signal. A total of 120 volunteers took part in experimental campaign and were asked to perform different activities including walking fast, walking slow, voluntary stop, sitting down & stand up and freezing of gait. Two neural networks namely Autoencoder and a proposed enhanced Autoencoder were used classify ADLs and FOG episodes using data fusion process by combining the images acquired from both sensing techniques. The Autoencoder provided overall classification accuracy of ~87% for combined datasets. The proposed algorithm provided significantly better results by presenting an overall accuracy of ~98% using data fusion.