Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weak upstream westerly wind attracts western North Pacific typhoon tracks to west

The steering flow of the large-scale circulation patterns over the western North Pacific and North East Asia, constrains typhoon tracks. Westerly winds impinging on the Tibetan Plateau, and the resulting flow uplift along the slope of the mountain, induce atmospheric vortex flow and generate stationary barotropic Rossby waves downstream. The downstream Rossby wave zonal phase is determined by the upstream zonal wind speed impinging on the Tibetan Plateau. Negative anomaly of westerly wind forcing tends to induce a westward shift of the large-scale Rossby wave circulation pattern, forming an anti-cyclonic circulation anomaly over North East Asia. In this study, we show that the Tibetan Plateau dynamically impacts the tracks of western Pacific typhoons via modulation of downstream Rossby waves. Using the topographically forced stationary Rossby wave theory, the dynamical mechanisms for the formation of the North East Asian anti-cyclonic anomaly and its impact on the typhoon tracks are analyzed. The westward shift of typhoon tracks caused by the southeasterly wind anomaly, or track density increase over the western flank of the North East Asian anti-cyclonic circulation anomaly is robust in June, August and September, but it is not statistically significant in July. The physical understanding of the large-scale circulation pattern affecting typhoon trajectories has large implications not only at the seasonal prediction of the high impact weather phenomena, but also at the right understanding of the long-term climate change.
Antibodies as Biosensors’ Key Components: State-of-the-Art in Russia 2020–2021

The recognition of biomolecules is crucial in key areas such as the timely diagnosis of somatic and infectious diseases, food quality control, and environmental monitoring. This determines the need to develop highly sensitive display devices based on the achievements of modern science and technology, characterized by high selectivity, high speed, low cost, availability, and small size. Such requirements are met by biosensor systems—devices for reagent-free analysis of compounds that consist of a biologically sensitive element (receptor), a transducer, and a working solution. The diversity of biological material and methods for its immobilization on the surface or in the volume of the transducer and the use of nanotechnologies have led to the appearance of an avalanche-like number of different biosensors, which, depending on the type of biologically sensitive element, can be divided into three groups: enzyme, affinity, and cellular/tissue. Affinity biosensors are one of the rapidly developing areas in immunoassay, where the key point is to register the formation of an antigen–antibody complex. This review analyzes the latest work by Russian researchers concerning the production of molecules used in various immunoassay formats as well as new fundamental scientific data obtained as a result of their use.
THE E3i VILLAGE CONCEPT

The E 3i concept stands for empowerment the rural society in getting a better access to renewable energy sources for economic and productive activities in an environmentally sound sustainable development. This concept, proposed by the author, is meant to create the spirit of self help among the rural society who have been living in prolonged poverty and lack of access to basic energy need, especially in recent years when the price of oil becomes uncertain. Indonesia, now, is a net oil import country. Therefore, the need to tap locally available renewable energy sources is becoming an important issue. Initial works to establish the E 3i village was first conducted in 1999 using the grassroots project from Japan in which several small processing units were installed in some villages in Java, Bali and West Nusa Tenggara. SPU as the value-added facilities could provide more jobs as source of income for the villagers. The paper provides more information on continuing activities in an effort to realize the E 3i village concept. The importance of making use locally available renewable energy sources as the main energy input for the SPU has now gradually being appreciated by both the central and local government including the private sector.
Response of foragers of the giant Himalayan honey bee, Apis laboriosa, to microclimates in agro-net and climate control greenhouses

Abstract The giant honey bee Apis laboriosa is endemic in the high-elevation zone of the Himalaya extending from central to eastern belt and its adjacent mountain ranges. Its abundance is however reported to decline in recent decades. The present study aims to find out the favourable microclimate for foraging activity of A. laboriosa. Therefore, to explore the response of foragers to ambient temperature, relative humidity and sunlight intensity, experiments were conducted in captivity using two types of greenhouses: agro-net and climate control greenhouse. One colony of a combless cluster in each greenhouse was monitored for a period of 22 days. Monitoring was done by counting the number of foragers on honey, sugar syrup and forage plants at an interval of 1 hour. The microclimate of the greenhouses differs in sunlight intensity and relative humidity. Principal component analysis showed that the foraging activity is positively associated with sunlight intensity and relative humidity and is negatively associated with ambient temperature. Higher number of active foragers in the climate control greenhouse shows its relative humidity and sunlight intensity as favourable for foraging activity of A. laboriosa compared to the agro-net greenhouse. The result is also indicative of possible impact of change in sunlight intensity and relative humidity on the foraging activity of A. laboriosa that may affect pollination of the native plants and honey production.
Using New Media and Social Media in Disaster Communication

New media and social media have changed the frame of communication that appears quickly, is interactive, and has no geographical boundaries. The media plays an essential role in disseminating accurate and responsible information in a disaster situation. The strategy of using communication media will reduce the impacts arising from disasters in the mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery phases. Through a literature review, the author presents disaster communication, strategies, and using media in disasters. The research use case studies are the natural disaster of Mount Merapi and the Covid-19 pandemic to represent non-natural disasters. The results of the analysis show that sensitivity to the situation is an adequate response in a disaster. Furthermore, new media and social media tend to be sufficient as the primary source of information for the public, coordination, and fundraising. The effectiveness of media use in the Merapi disaster is the beginning of new media and social media in disaster communication in Indonesia. This media is also used in disaster management during the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of media in both case studies is considered adequate to reduce the negative impacts arising from the disaster. It is hoped this idea will contribute to disaster communication studies.
Fiber collimator arrays for optical devices/systems

New single-mode fiber collimator arrays (FCAs) were designed, assembled, and tested at a wavelength of 1550 nm. For FCAs using an 8-channel GRIN planar microlens array with a pitch of 250 μm and a focal length of 0.7 mm, the insertion loss was 0.5 dB with uniformity of 0.12 dB, at a collimator separation of 10 mm. The crosstalk from the other channels was less than -45 dB and the return loss of each channel was > 60 dB. For FCAs using a 6-channel lens array by fixing GRIN rod lenses into a V-groove array, the insertion loss was less than 0.5 dB at a collimator separation of 100 mm. By analyzing formulas for calculating Gaussian beam propagation for the design, some simple and useful formulas were introduced for calculating the size and position of the beam waist from those of its image, and for calculating the maximum collimator separation with efficient coupling.
A Matter of Feelings: Mediators’ Perceptions of Emotion in Hierarchical Workplace Conflicts

Emotions play a central role in the process of conflict and resolution. For a mediator, it is important to recognize emotions correctly and act upon them. Whether interventions are appropriate depends to a large extent on the ability of mediators to accurately perceive the emotions of conflict parties. Particularly in hierarchical labor conflicts, this can be challenging, since subordinates tend to hide emotions while supervisors tend to express them. In this study, we investigated if subordinates and supervisors differ in their emotional experience during mediation and whether mediators perceive these emotions accurately. To this end, we compared the extent to which disputants experienced certain emotions with the extent to which mediators perceived these emotions. Data were collected through surveys of mediation clients and mediators in hierarchical labor conflicts in the Netherlands. As expected, subordinates experienced a higher level of negative emotions during the mediation than supervisors did. Positive emotions, however, were experienced to a similar extent by both supervisors and subordinates in mediation. Mediators perceived supervisors’ emotions more accurately than they did subordinates’ emotions. While supervisors’ emotions were positively related with mediators’ perceptions, this was not the case for subordinates’ emotions. Furthermore, mediators were more accurately perceiving supervisors’ negative emotions than their positive emotions. Implications for mediation theory and practice are discussed.
Engineering Design Education and Practice as Collaborative Knowledge Building

Engineering design is the process of devising a technical system to satisfy a defined need. The design process can be modeled as a transformation of knowledge. Collaborative engineering design can be described as a collaborative knowledge building (CKB) process. CKB is a goal-driven collaborative process of generating and refining ideas and concepts of value to the community. Properly applied and supported, CKB has the potential to improve both learning and design outcomes resulting from collaborative design projects. The paper proposes an integrated model of the CKB process, and discusses requirements for supporting computer tools. Existing computer tools do not provide adequate support for CKB, and better tools are needed based on the specific requirements discussed in this paper.
CLASSIFICATION OF POTENTIAL DEFECTS IN THE AUTOMATIC INSPECTION OF ALUMINIUM CASTINGS USING STATISTICAL PATTERN RECOGNITION

In this paper we report the results obtained recently by classifying potential defects in the automated x-ray inspection of aluminium castings using statistical pattern recognition. In our classification, 71 features (e.g. area, perimeter, roundness, invariant moments, Fourier descriptors, mean grey level, several contrasts, texture features, etc.) were analysed to characterise the potential flaws. The extracted features were measured from more than 10.000 regions segmented in 56 radioscopic images (without frame averaging) of cast aluminium wheels. In addition, five statistical classifiers were tested.
Collinsville solar thermal project: Yield forecasting – Final report

The primary aim of this report is to produce hourly yield projections of electricity power for the proposed LFR plant at Collinsville, Queensland, Australia based on the environmental condition between 2007 and 2013. However, the techniques and methods used to overcome the inadequacies of the environmental, site-specific datasets provide a wider appeal for the report. The dataset inadequacies make accurate projections of future income streams and the subsequent securing of funding difficult (Cebecauer et al. 2011; Lovegrove, Franklin & Elliston 2013; Stoffel et al. 2010). The hourly power yield projections from this report are used in our subsequent report called ‘Energy economics and dispatch forecasting’ (Bell, Wild & Foster 2014a), to calculate the lifetime revenue of the proposed plant and perform sensitivity analysis on gas prices. This report compares the yield from the proposed Collinsville LFR plant using two different calculation methods. One method simply uses complete historical datasets from three nearby sites: MacKay, Rockhampton, and Townsville in Queensland. The other method uses datasets derived from a meteorological model developed from three sources: - BoM’s hourly solar satellite data - BoM’s Collinsville Post Office weather station - Allen’s (2013) datasets The overarching research question for the report is: Can modelling the weather with limited datasets produce greater yield predictive power than using the historically more complete datasets from nearby sites?
The Enigma of Absolute Pitch

Figure 1. The pitch class circle. The notes of the traditional Western musical scale are produced by dividing the octave into 12 semitone steps. A semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a keyboard, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17. Each of the twelve notes within the octave is assigned a name: C, C#, D; D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, and B. The entire scale is generated by repeating this series of note names (or ‘pitch classes’) across octaves. When people with absolute pitch identify notes by name, they are identifying the positions of the tones along the pitch class circle. Introduction In the summer of 1763, the Mozart family embarked on the famous tour of Europe that established the young composer’s reputation as a musical prodigy. Just before they left, an anonymous letter appeared in the Augsburgischer Intelligenz-Zettel describing seven year old Wolfgang’s extraordinary abilities. The letter included the following:
Design and Simulation of an Absorption Diffusion Solar Refrigeration Unit

The purpose of this study was the design and the simulation of an absorption diffusion refrigerator using solar as source of energy, for domestic use. The design holds account about the climatic conditions and the unit cost due to technical constraints imposed by the technology of the various components of the installation such as the solar generator, the condenser, the absorber and the evaporator. Mass and energy conservation equations were developed for each component of the cycle and solved numerically. The obtained results showed, that the new designed mono pressure absorption cycle of ammonia was suitable well for the cold production by means of the solar energy and that with a simple plate collector we can reach a power, of the order of 900 watts sufficient for domestic use.
Combining CNN and Grad-Cam for COVID-19 Disease Prediction and Visual Explanation

With daily increasing of suspected COVID-19 cases, the likelihood of the virus mutation increases also causing the appearance of virulent variants hav-ing a high level of replication. Automatic diagnosis methods of COVID-19 disease are very important in the medical community. An automatic diagnosis could be performed using machine and deep learning techniques to analyze and classify different lung X-ray images. Many research studies proposed automatic methods for detecting and predicting COVID-19 patients based on their clinical data. In the leak of valid X-ray images for patients with COVID-19 datasets, several researchers proposed to use augmentation techniques to bypass this limitation. However, the obtained results by augmentation techniques are not efficient to be projected for the real world. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method to analyze and distinguish COVID-19 cases from other pneumonia and normal cases using the transfer learning technique. To help doctors easily interpret the results, a recent visual explanation method called Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) is applied for each class. This technique is used in order to highlight the regions of interest on the X-ray image, so that, the model prediction result can be easily interpreted by the doctors. This method allows doctors to focus only on the important parts of the image and evaluate the efficiency of the concerned model. Three selected deep learning models namely VGG16, VGG19, and MobileNet, were used in the experiments with transfer learning technique. To bypass the limitation of the leak of lung X-ray images of patients with COVID-19 disease, we propose to combine several different datasets in order to assemble a new dataset with sufficient real data to accomplish accurately the training step. The best results were obtained using the tuned VGG19 model with 96.97% accuracy, 100% precision, 100% F1-score, and 99% recall. © 2022, Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.
Single-mode data buses for local area network applications

An optimized fifteen-terminal tapped-tee data bus and a 9 × 9 star data bus were constructed using low-loss single-mode fiber fused-tapered 2 × 2 and 3 × 3 couplers. High-speed data transmission was demonstrated at 500 Mbit/s with a maximum throughput loss of 33 dB for the tapped tee system and mean throughput loss of 11 dB for the star system. System design parameters and experimental results are given in each case.
An Exploration of the Effectiveness of Product Archeology in an Undergraduate Engineering Curriculum: What Can a Five-Hour Curriculum Do?.

In this paper, we present our efforts in embedding product archeology inspired curricula into two engineering courses along with assessment results. The assessment focuses on the effectiveness of the embedded curricula in enhancing students’ understanding on the global, societal, environmental, and economic (GSEE) implications of engineering design. The results show the significant positive impact of the curricula as perceived by students in comparison to other engineering courses, and thus, is another testament to the fact that carefully crafted curricula can have substantial impact.
Prey preferences of juvenile whelk Neptunea arthritica (Gastropoda: Buccinidae) in Hakodate Bay, Hokkaido, Japan

: Juvenile Japanese Neptune whelk Neptunea arthritica preys on small gastropods in the ﬁeld. Although the most common prey is Homalopoma sangarense , its density is lower than those of other prey species (e.g., Barleeia angustata , Reticunassa fratercula , and Cantharidus japonicus ) in the ﬁeld. To clarify whether N. arthritica juveniles show an “ actual ” or “ apparent ” preference for H. sangarense , we conducted a single-prey feeding experiment. Although N. arthritica attacked H. sangarense earlier and more frequently than B. angustata and C. japonicus , there was no dif-ference in attack frequency and latency between H. sangarense and R. fratercula . Attacks on H. sangarense failed more frequently than on the other species, and the handling time for H. sangarense was signiﬁcantly longer compared to the other three species. The large diﬀerence in handling time (over 10-fold diﬀerence) could be caused by the presence of a thick calcareous operculum on H. sangarense . Eventually, N. arthritica consumed more individuals of R. fratercula than of H. sangarense in the experiment. These results indicate that N. arthritica juveniles exhibit both “ actual ” and “ apparent ” preferences for H. sangarense . The “ actual preference ” of N. arthritica juveniles may reﬂect the past species compositions of small gastropods, because H. sangarense has been previously reported as the dominant species at the study site.
Haul Time Effects on Unmodified, Foamed, and Additive-Modified Binders Used in Hot-Mix Asphalt

In recent years, warm technologies have made enormous changes to the flexible pavement industry in a variety of ways. Warm-mix asphalt is the most recognizable warm technology product, although other advantages are associated with better compaction over a wide range of temperatures and have made long-haul distances appealing for some applications. This paper focuses on using warm-mix technology at traditional hot-mix production temperatures for the purpose of facilitating long haul distances. The primary objective of this study was to investigate how binder-related properties change with haul time when material was mixed at hot-mix temperatures. A secondary objective was to determine if any behavioral differences were present between asphalt binders with no additive, foamed asphalt binders, and asphalt binders with a chemical additive. Plant-mixed asphalt was used for the investigation. The overall conclusion of the research was that haul times of 1 to 8 h produced no major differences in aging for a given binder type or between binder types. Subtle differences were observed between binder types in some instances (e.g., low-temperature properties were slightly better for mixes using warm-mix technologies).
Research on Blended Learning in Physical Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Chinese Students

The coronavirus virus (COVID-19) epidemic has swept the world, with the World Health Organization defining it as a pandemic on March 11. This in turn has affected the approaches and methods used in education throughout the world. According to United Nations report, by the time of mid-April 2020, 94% of learners in more than 200 countries around the world have been affected, and 1.58 billion students from pre-school to higher education are affected. In response to increased learning needs regarding infection prevention, the Ministry of Education has also provided cloud educational resources and private online learning resources, platforms, and tools to schools at all levels to encourage teachers and students to make effective use of digital resources. Although the government provides abundant teaching resources, the implementation of distance teaching in college physical education still faced with many problems, such as the shortage of course resources, the lack of information literacy of teachers, the difficulty in implementing conventional teaching plans online, the limited conditions for students to exercise at home, and the doubts about online physical education. Therefore, this study proposes a new teaching method, and studies, analyzes and discusses this method. The method of experimental design was adopted in this study to divide the students into two groups: blended learning group (synchronous and asynchronous) and single type learning group (synchronous). The results show that blended learning students perform better than single type learning students in all these aspects, which proves the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Adding Flavours: Use of and Attitudes towards Sauces and Seasonings in a Sample of Community-Dwelling UK Older Adults

Adding flavours can encourage food intake in older adults for health benefits. The use and attitudes of 22 community-dwelling UK older adults (15 females, aged 65–83 years) towards foods and products that add flavour, e.g., sauces and seasonings, were investigated. Participants used foods/products to add flavour when cooking and eating from 0 to 17 times/day. Taste and flavour were important, and foods/products could add flavour, make foods more pleasant and did not cause discomfort. There were concerns, however, over the healthiness of some foods/products, while consuming a healthy diet and one’s health were important. Reasons for adding flavours largely centred around ‘meal enhancement’, reasons for not adding flavours focused on ‘the product itself’ and ‘characteristics of the meal’, but there was ‘variation’ and many ‘individual differences’. Our findings highlight the benefits of adding flavours for food intakes, particularly the use of naturally flavoursome foods, such as herbs, spices, onion and garlic.