Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spectroscopic and Quantum Chemical Studies on Some β-Lactam Inhibitors

Amoxicillin (Amox) and ampicillin (Amp) are investigated by using quantum mechanical methods. This compounds was confirmed by XRD analysis and optimized bond parameters were calculated by density functional (DFT) at B3LYP/6-31G(d) level. The optimized geometrical parameters are in good agreement with crystal data. The experimentally observed FT-IR and NMR picks were assigned to calculated modes for the molecules. Some molecular descriptors are calculated with density functional theory (DFT/B3LYP) 6-31G(d) level in the gas phase. The highest occupied molecular orbital energy (E HOMO ), the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy (E LUMO ), the energy difference (ΔE), hardness (η), softness (σ), electronegativity (χ), chemical potential (µ), electrophilicty index (ω) and nucleophilicty index (e) are calculated in the this level and associated with inhibition efficiencies of the mentioned β-lactam inhibitors. Molecular Electrostatic Potantial (MEP) maps was investigated and predicted the reactive sites. Some quantum chemical descriptors which are total static dipole moment (µ), the average linear polarizability (α), the anisotropy of the polarizability (Δα) and first hyperpolarizability (β) were evaluated for explaining the NLO properties in studies molecules. The inhibition activities were studied using molecular docking studies. T he antibiotics were docked into the cocrystallized structure of PXR with SR12813 (PDB ID: 1NRL). Docking results and order of inhibition activity associated with quantum chemical parameters was the same as that of experimental inhibition activity.
Agile Software Development: Evaluating the Methods for Your Organization

Agile methods have taken software development by storm - but a growing controversy over their true effectiveness now pits proponents against detractors in a heated battle of claims. Here at last is a completely impartial guide that gives project managers both expert objective analysis of Agile software development methods and much-needed tools for evaluating the suitability of Agile methods for their organization. The book reviews the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles, and discusses in detail each practice of the six most widely recognized Agile methods. Software developers get clear and unbiased insight into adoption implications, the benefits that may accrue, and the potential pitfalls they face. At its core, this unique assessment resource helps developers systematically address key Agile adoption issues involving organizational culture, customers, staff, tools and processes, and project considerations. A comprehensive start-to-finish worksheet makes it easy for professionals to document observations, draw justifiable conclusions, and market their recommendations to the company. The guide also features expert guidelines for customizing an Agile method, training staff, testing the new method, and evaluating its performance - should readers go the Agile route. Practical ready-to-use tools, including equations and templates in Excel format, are provided in a handy workbook which can be accessed through the author's website.
Laparoscopic distal pancreatectomy for benign and malignant disease: a review of techniques and results

Diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is challenging in the initial phases because its progression is rapid. The pancreatic tail and body roughly accounts for 20–30% of all cancerous cases. The standard treatment for symptomatic benign, malignant, and premalignant diseases of the pancreatic tail and body is distal pancreatectomy. This technique has been modified over the years to fit certain indications, with the goal of enhancing post-operative results as well as reducing patient trauma. In cases of a premalignant and symptomatic benign condition, the spleen must be preserved either using Kimura’s splenic vessel preservation technique or Warshaw’s splenic vessel resection technique. A better long-term prognosis is ensured by regional lymph node dissection and radical R0 resection. Radical antegrade modular pancreatosplenectomy was proposed to tackle the shortcomings of traditional surgery for pancreatic tail and body cancer. In this review, study techniques and results of laparoscopic distal pancreatectomy for malignant and benign pancreatic ailments were described with the intention of providing knowledge on various suitable techniques reported for pancreatic cancer treatment. Furthermore, this study will serve as a ready reckoner for surgeons and could serve to boost their confidence levels during surgery by avoiding confusion on the selection of suitable for the pancreatic diseases diagnosed.
Developing network pictures as a research tool : capturing the output of individuals' sense-making in organisational networks

For the past twenty years, drawing on the Industrial Network Approach, Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group researchers have been trying to get a better understanding of organisational networks related issues. Researchers frequently highlight that whatever the researched phenomena, it is important to consider actors’ subjective views of the world. The concept of Network Pictures as introduced in the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) body of literature by Ford et al. (2002b), refers to those subjective views and despite its recognised importance no in-depth research had been conducted so far on the concept which has thus remained blurred. Ford et al. (2002b) brought in this concept to emphasise that the network is in fact a varying thing depending on what people see. The question is whether this can be translated into a research device, so that researchers may see in a structured and analytical way what an actor’s picture is. This is what this research project is about. The concept’s theoretical foundations are uncovered by reviewing some principles from Sense-Making Theory. This review results most importantly in the identification of a close association between actors’ views of the world and the outcome of those actors’ sense making processes or frameworks. The relevance of actors’ views to obtain a clearer understanding of organisational networks is highlighted when the relation that is believed to exist between those views and action in organisational networks is addressed. With the aim of developing Network Pictures as research tool a two-stage method is put forward and carried out. The method consisted of operationalising the construct of Network Pictures and then testing it in two different network contexts to see if it was usable and useful for carrying out research in organisational networks. The results point to the usability and usefulness of the developed device: not only does it allow for capturing what is believed to be individuals’ views of the world in a rich and comprehensive way, as it also shows diversity between individuals in different contexts. Also and interestingly, some of the identified ‘practitioner theories’ were found to be not coherent with some IMP theoretical cornerstones.
Development and validation of the isothermal recombinase polymerase amplification assays for rapid detection of Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae

Background: Mycoplasmal pneumonia is an important infectious disease that threatens sheep and goat production worldwide, and Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae is one of major etiological agent causing mycoplasmal pneumonia. Recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) is an isothermal nucleic acid amplification technique, and RPA-based diagnostic assays have been described for the detection of different types of pathogens. Results: The RPA assays using real-time fluorescence detection (real-time RPA) and lateral flow strip detection (LFS RPA) were developed to detect M. ovipneumoniae targeting a conserved region of the 16S rRNA gene. Real-time RPA was performed in a portable florescence scanner at 39 °C for 20 min. LFS RPA was performed in a portable metal bath incubator at 39 °C for 15 min, and the amplicons were visualized with the naked eyes within 5 min on the lateral flow strip. Both assays were highly specific for M. ovipneumoniae , as there were no cross-reactions with other microorganisms tested, especially the pathogens involved in respiratory complex and other mycoplasmas frequently identified in ruminant s . The limit of detection of LFS RPA assay was 1.0×10 1 copies per reaction using a recombinant plasmid containing target gene as template, which is 10 times lower than the limit of detection of the real-time RPA and real-time PCR assays. The RPA assays were further validated on 111 clinical sheep nasal swab and fresh lung samples, and M. ovipneumoniae DNA was detected in 29 samples in the real-time RPA, 31 samples in the LFS RPA and 32 samples in the real-time PCR assay. Compared to real-time PCR, the real-time RPA and LFS RPA showed diagnostic specificity of 100% and 98.73%, diagnostic sensitivity of 90.63% and 93.75%, and a kappa coefficient of 0.932 and 0.934, respectively. Conclusions: The developed real-time RPA and LFS RPA assays provide the attractive and promising tools for rapid, convenient and reliable detection of M. ovipneumoniae , especially in resource-limited settings.
Provisioning internet backbone networks to support latency sensitive applications

Interactive applications such as voice, audio, and video, as well as business applications such as Virtual Private Networks are becoming an increasingly important component of Internet traffic. Such applications have strict requirements on the total end-to-end delay which may be incurred in the network. One approach to meeting these delay requirements, known as service differentiation, is to give preferential treatment to latency sensitive traffic. Doing so may lead to an efficient network design with the minimum amount of resources (e.g., bandwidth) required to support the needs of each traffic type. An alternative approach is to provide sufficient resources so that all traffic meets the most stringent delay requirements. This latter approach is known as overprovisioning. In the context of wide-area Internet backbone networks, two factors make overprovisioning an attractive approach. First, the high link speeds and large volumes of traffic make service differentiation complex and potentially costly to deploy. Second, given the degree of aggregation and resulting traffic characteristics, the amount of overprovisioning required may not be very large. We establish that this is indeed the case by collecting and analyzing traffic measurements from the Sprint IP network, a commercial Tier-1 Internet backbone. We begin by performing network simulations using a set of 331 one-hour traffic measurements from the Sprint network. These simulations demonstrate that link utilization can reach 80%–90% before queuing delays begin to exceed several milliseconds. While the simulations can be used to evaluate the level of overprovisioning required in the network, many network design problems are greatly aided by an analytic traffic model. We therefore develop a traffic model which captures the observed characteristics of backbone traffic and derive expressions for the delay through a single queue in the network, as well as the end-to-end queuing delay. Using this model we solve several network design problems including capacity planning and optimal route selection.
Design and Analysis of Exaggerated Rectilinear Gait-Based Snake-Inspired Robots

Title of Document: DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXAGGERATED RECTILINEAR GAIT-BASED SNAKE-INSPIRED ROBOTS James Kendrick Hopkins Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor S. K. Gupta Department of Mechanical Engineering Snake-inspired locomotion is much more maneuverable compared to conventional locomotion concepts and it enables a robot to navigate through rough terrain. A rectilinear gait is quite flexible and has the following benefits: functionality on a wide variety of terrains, enables a highly stable robot platform, and provides pure undulatory motion without passive wheels. These benefits make rectilinear gaits especially suitable for search and rescue applications. However, previous robot designs utilizing rectilinear gaits were slow in speed and required considerable vertical motion. This dissertation will explore the development and implementation of a new exaggerated rectilinear gait that which will enable high speed locomotion and more efficient operation in a snake-inspired robot platform. The exaggerated rectilinear gait will emulate the natural snake’s rectilinear gait to gain the benefit a snake’s terrain adaptability, but the sequence and range of joint motion will be greatly exaggerated to achieve higher velocities to support robot speeds within the range of human walking speed. The following issues will be investigated in this dissertation. First, this dissertation will address the challenge of developing a snake-inspired robot capable of executing exaggerated rectilinear gaits. To successfully execute the exaggerated rectilinear gait, a snake-inspired robot platform must be able to perform high speed linear expansion/contraction and pivoting motions between segments. In addition to high speed joint motion, the new mechanical architecture much also incorporate a method for providing positive traction during gait execution. Second, a new exaggerated gait dynamics model will be developed using well established kinematics and dynamics analysis techniques. In addition to the exaggerated rectilinear gaits which emphasize high speed, a set of exaggerated rectilinear gaits which emphasize high traction will also be developed for application on difficult terrain types. Finally, an exaggerated rectilinear that emphasizes energy efficiency is defined and analyzed. This dissertation provides the foundations for realizing a high speed limbless locomotion capable of meeting the needs of the search, rescue, and recovery applications. Design and Analysis of Exaggerated Rectilinear Gait-Based Snake-Inspired Robots
Performance Analysis of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in Taxi Systems

The rapid development of wireless communication and information technologies has increased the research interests in VANET. But there is little research on application of VANET in public transportation systems, such as taxi systems. In this paper, the authors use the packet delivery fraction and average end-to-end delay as the criteria to evaluate the VANET performance in taxi systems. After briefly introducing the vehicles mobility model and the simulation platform based on network simulator 2, the authors emphasize the combination of vehicle mobility generation and vehicular networks simulation. The authors implement some scenarios on partial Manhattan map with discussing the influence of different packet sending rate, max connectivity number and the number of vehicles. Through the performance analysis, the authors discuss the feasibility of VANET in taxi systems and give some suggestions for implementing it.
POSSIBLE APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS TO VEHICLE DYNAMICS AND CONTROL : A LITERATURE REVIEW

It is a well-known fact that difficulties are generally encountered when mathematical modelling is performed on vehicle systems and sub-systems that are inherently non-linear. Conventional modelling techniques - simulation, where non-linearities are approximated by simple mathematical formulas or look-up tables; finite element approximation, where the system is replaced by a linear model if the range of variables is small; and numerical techniques - have been very successful in modelling complex, non-linear systems. Under certain conditions, however, the approximations and hypotheses developed for each of these models fail to reflect the true behaviour of the system. The non-linearity of vehicle systems and sub-systems is particularly severe when the vehicle is pushed toward its performance limits. The result is that conventional modelling techniques become progressively more inaccurate. Recent developments in the area of artificial neural networks (ANNs) may provide an alternative approach to the modelling of vehicular dynamics, particularly for highly non-linear systems that near their performance limits. The objective of this paper is to direct attention to the possible applications of ANNs to vehicle system dynamics and control. A literature search of work related to the application of ANNs to vehicle systems is presented and an attempt made to propose possible applications of ANNs to vehicle dynamics and control. Language: en
Nuclear, Renewables and Low Carbon Growth:
A Comparative Study on China, U.S.,
France and Japan

Using the ARDL test and Granger approaches, this paper investigates long-term co-integration and causal relationships among nuclear, renewables, GDP and CO2 emissions in China, US, France and Japan. The findings reveal that the long-term coefficient of nuclear energy is smaller than renewable energy, indicating a relative advantage of nuclear power. However, the emission reduction effect of nuclear and renewables in China was not as much as compared to other nations. Moreover, causality from economic growth to nuclear or renewable energy existed in all countries, whereas no causality from nuclear energy to economic growth existed except in Japan. Therefore, giving priority to energy conservation and energy mix optimization is not likely to hurdle economic growth in China. However, greenness of the overall energy production process, augmentation of energy efficiency, technological progress in energy storage and internet, sustainable development of resource-society, and nuclear safety issues should be given priority in order to contribute to low-carbon
A Hybrid Device for Anchoring FRP Sheets Aimed to Enhance the Flexural Capacity of RC Elements

Abstract: The potential of externally applied FRP (fiber-reinforced plastic) sheets, being employed in retrofitting schemes aimed to repair and strengthen RC (reinforced concrete) structural elements damaged by prototype strong earthquakes, is presented and discussed in this study. The limitation of the debonding mode of failure of these FRP sheets is highlighted and the necessity to develop efficient anchoring devices for these FRP sheets is underlined. The behavior of such a novel HAD (hybrid anchoring device), capable of anchoring CFRP (carbon fiber reinforcing plastic) sheets to RC structural elements, is presented and discussed. The behavior of the device itself was studied through a 3D non-linear numerical simulation at the preliminary design stage in order to establish certain desired features such as the ductile behavior of the device itself as well as the satisfactory performance of the FRP sheets wrapped around this device. This HAD was next applied as part of a strengthening scheme aimed to upgrade the flexural capacity of an RC bridge-type pier specimen subjected to a cyclic seismic-type loading sequence. The obtained results demonstrated an increase in the specimen’s flexural capacity by 100% as well as a similar increase in its capability of dissipating energy in a ductile manner during the cyclic load sequence. Moreover, the employed 3D non-linear numerical simulation yielded reasonably good agreement between the measured and the predicted cyclic response of this specimen strengthened by CFRP layers, which were anchored by the novel HAD. The successful behavior of this novel HAD, which has been patented with No. WO2011073696, is currently being tried with a number of other retrofitting schemes employing FRP sheets externally attached on RC structural elements.
T-government for benefit realisation

This paper proposes a model for t-Government and highlights the research agenda needed to increase understanding of transformational government and the processes involved in furthering the agenda of the t-Government. In particular, both an operational and a conceptual model for the effective involvement of citizens and businesses in government functioning have been proposed. This will help to define an agenda for t-Government research that emerges from national UK strategy and policy for e-Government. The main threads of tGovernment encompass: (1) A citizen-centric delivery of public services or e-inclusion, (2) A shared services culture to maximize value added to clients, (3) The effective delivery and management of resources and skills within government or professionalism. All three threads should be addressed principally from the perspectives of delivery, evaluation and participation in view of benefit realisation as envisioned by Government strategic planning and policy directives (CabinetOffice, 2005). The management of change dimension of these phenomena have been included in the research agenda. In particular, research is needed to reshape the discourse towards emphasising a citizen centric approach that defines, develops, and benefits from public service. Decision makers in Government will need models of Governance that fulfil transformational objectives. They will also need models of benefits realisation within a strategic Governance framework. It has been argued that t-Government research should be addressing these relative voids.
The programmable spring : towards physical emulators of mechanical systems

The way motion is generated and controlled in robotics has traditionally been based on a philosophy of rigidity, where movements are tightly controlled and external influences are ironed out. More recent research into autonomous robots, biological actuation and human machine interaction has uncovered the value of compliant mechanisms in both aiding the production of effective, adaptive and efficient behaviour, and increasing the margins for safety in machines that operate alongside people. Various actuation methods have previously been proposed that allow robotic systems to exploit rather than avoid the influences of external perturbations, but many of these devices can be complex and costly to engineer, and are often task specific. This thesis documents the development of a general purpose modular actuator that can emulate the behaviour of various spring damping systems. It builds on some of the work done to produce reliable force controlled electronic actuators by developing a low cost implementation of an existing force actuator, and combining it with a novel high level control structure running in software on an embedded microcontroller. The actuator hardware with its embedded software results in a compact modular device capable of approximating the behaviour of various mechanical systems and actuation devices. Specifying these behaviours is achieved with an intuitive user interface and a control system based on a concept called profile groups. Profile group configurations that specify complex mechanical behaviours can be rapidly designed and the resulting configurations downloaded for a device to emulate. The novel control system and intuitive user interface developed to facilitate the rapid prototyping of mechanical behaviours are explained in detail. Two prototype devices are demonstrated emulating a number of mechanical systems and the results are compared to mechanical counterparts. Performance issues are discussed and some solutions proposed alongside general improvements to the control system. The applications beyond robotics are also explored.