Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Allometric relationships of canopy organ development in rice and maize

Functional-structural plant modelling requires the linkage of plant physiological function and its structure at organ level for improved ability in agronomic application. Allometric relationships among organ development represent endogenous coordination that can be used to bridge plant morphology and function. However, there are insufficient allometric relationships available. This study aimed to investigate allometric relationships between organ morphology and biomass (physiological phenotypes) using data from a glasshouse experiment of rice (Nippon Bare and a mutant with low tillering) and a field experiment of maize (Pioneer 34N43 and 31 H50). Allometric relationships were determined with the highest coefficients of determination (R 2 ). Leaf area and fresh biomass relationship was fitted by a linear function for rice, and linear function for phytomers at the ear and below, but replaced by a curvilinear function for phytomers above the ear, in maize. Leaf lamina length and biomass was fitted by exponential functions for both rice and maize. Sheath length and biomass relationship was fitted by a logarithmic function for rice (maximum 9 sheaths) and for phytomers below 9 in maize and an exponential function for phytomers above 8 in maize. Intemode length and biomass was fitted by two exponential functions separated at ear position in maize only, since no data exists on internodes in rice. This study indicated that organ morphology can be predicted from crop physiological process, which facilitates the establishment of feedback of structure and functions of plant modeling.
DIRECTIONAL ADAPTIVE MUSIC-LIKE ALGORITHM UNDER SYMMETRIC α-STABLE DISTRIBUTED NOISE

An algorithm named MUSIC-like algorithm was previously proposed as an alternative method to the MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Without requiring explicit model order estimation, it was shown to have robust performance particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. In this letter, the working principle of a relaxation parameter β, a parameter which was introduced into the formulation of the MUSIC-like algorithm, is provided based on geometrical interpretation. To illustrate its robustness, the algorithm will be examined under symmetric α-stable distributed noise environment. An adaptive framework is then developed and proposed in this letter to further optimize the algorithm. The proposed adaptive framework is compared with the original MUSIC-like, MUSIC, FLOM-MUSIC, and SSCM-MUSIC algorithms. A notable improvement in terms of targets resolvability of the proposed method is observed under different impulse noise scenarios as well as different SNR levels.
Corporate Reporting Quality, Audit Committee and Quality Of Audit1

The study investigates the effectiveness of audit committee in terms of the quality of reporting. Specifically, the study examines the relationship between quality of reporting of companies listed on the Bursa Malaysia and some elements of corporate governance namely the external audit and the audit committee. Characteristics of audit committee being examined include financial literacy, multiple directorships, independence of audit committee, and activeness of the committee. Good quality corporate reporting provides credible information of company performance to users for economic decisions. The quality of corporate reporting is determined based on the selection criteria for the National Annual Corporate Report Award 2002. The sample consists of fifty-four companies with good annual reports and fifty-four companies with poor annual reports. Using logistic regression, results show that only multiple directorships of audit committee members is significantly related to quality of reporting Keywords: audit committee, corporate reporting, independence, financial literacy and multiple directorships.
Health Effects of Occupational Lead Exposures among Informal Automobile Repair Artisans: A Case Study of Nakuru Town, Kenya

Chronic, high-level lead exposure is known to be a risk factor for kidney and liver diseases. The health effect of low-level occupational exposure to lead is less well known, particularly among informal automobile repair artisans, a population that is at risk of occupational lead exposures due to their predisposing occupational tasks. The study assessed blood lead levels and associated health risks on estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and serum Alanine Aminotransferase (ALT) activity among the study participants. A descriptive comparative study was conducted and the participants included ( n = 3 0 ) occupationally exposed artisans and ( n = 3 0 ) non-exposed college students. Blood lead levels were analyzed using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry according to the NIOSH 8003 method. Serum ALT activity and eGFR measurements were conducted using Reflotron automated biochemical analyzer. The eGFR was determined based on Modification of Diet in Renal Disease study (MDRD) equation. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, regression analysis, ANOVA, and ttest. The mean blood lead (BPb) level of the artisans (25.36μg/dl±2.62SE) was significantly higher than that of the control participants (14.17μg/dl±1.74SE), (t (29) =3.65, p=0.001) and exceeded the 20μg/dl WHO biological exposure index (BEI) of concern for adults, (p=0.049). The artisans had a significantly decreased eGFR (128.37 mL/min/1.73m ± 4.37SE) compared to the control participants (152.93 mL/min/1.73m ± 3.91SE), (t (29) = -4.49, p =0.000). Moreover, the artisans had a lower mean serum ALT activity of (18.50 IU/L±1.63SE) compared to the control participants (21.34 IU/L± 2.85SE). However, the difference was insignificant, (t (29) = 0.86, p = 0.40). The study concluded that the artisans were occupationally exposed to lead and risked chronic pathological effects on the kidney and liver functions. The key recommendation therefore is to institute public health intervention measures to curb such occupational health risk among the artisans.
Monte Carlo simulations of relativistic radiation-mediated shocks: II. photon-starved regime

Radiation-mediated shocks (RMS) play a key role in shaping the early emission observed in many transients. In most cases, e.g. shock breakout in supernovae, llGRBs, and neutron star mergers, the upstream plasma is devoid of radiation, and the photons that ultimately reach the observer are generated predominantly inside and downstream of the shock. Predicting the observed spectrum requires detailed calculations of the shock structure and thermodynamic state that account properly for the shock microphysics. We present results of self-consistent Monte Carlo simulations of photon-starved RMS, which yield the shock structure and emission for a broad range of shock velocities, from subrelativistic (βsh = 0.1) to highly relativistic (Γsh = 20). Our simulations confirm that in relativistic RMS the immediate downstream temperature is regulated by exponential pair creation, ranging from 50 keV at βsh = 0.5–200 keV at Γsh = 20. At lower velocities, the temperature becomes sensitive to the shock velocity, with kT ∼ 0.5 keV at βsh = 0.1. We also confirm that in relativistic shocks the opacity is completely dominated by newly created pairs, which has important implications for the breakout physics. We find the transition to pair dominance to occur at βsh = 0.5 roughly. In all cases examined, the spectrum below the νFν peak has been found to be substantially softer than the Planck distribution. This has important implications for the optical emission in fast and relativistic breakouts, and their detection. The applications to GRB 060218 and GRB 170817A are discussed.
Sequence Modeling and Alignment for LVCSR-Systems

Today, modeling automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to considerable improvements in performance, with word error rates being approximately halved compared to the status we had 10 to 15 years ago. Current state-of-the-art systems, at least if they are trained on moderate to medium amounts of training data, still follow the classical separation into language models and generative acoustic models. Acoustic modeling in these systems follows the socalled hybrid HMM approach. However, in the last years, many efforts were started to derive end-to-end models for ASR, which naturally follow the discriminative structure of neural networks. These include alternative solutions for the alignment problem underlying ASR, which in classical systems has been solved using hidden Markov models (HMMs). In this work we discuss and analyze two novel approaches to DNN-based ASR, the attention-based encoder–decoder approach, and the (segmental) inverted HMM approach. Experimental results are presented on the well-known Switchboard corpus and are compared against the standard hybrid approach, with specific focus on the sequence alignment behavior of the different approaches.
Interaction Between Ator and Fennel Remedies in the Treatment of Obesity in Rats

Obesity can be defined as a condition of abnormal or excess fat accumulation in adipose tissue, to the extent that health may be impaired. Fennel is one of the oldest spice plants which widely grows in arid and semi -arid and due to its economic importance and pharmaceutical industry usage. This plant has anti-inflammatory and analgesic effect and is effective in gastrointestinal disorder treatment. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the phytochemical characteristics and therapeutic properties of this medicinal plant. The current study demonstrates that the alteration induced by high fat diet causing changes in blood parameters. These changes are exhibited through a decrease in RBCs, Ht, Hb and platelet and these changes could be due to oxidative stress, which lead to lipid peroxidation in RBCs membranes, auto oxidation of hemoglobin. As regards the total WBCs, lymphocytes and monocytes showed marked decrease. While a distinct increase in the percentage of neutrophils and eosinophil. The present, demonstrates that rats treated with (fennel), (ator) and (fennel with ator) exposure provided significant protection to the altered hematological variables. The effect of the treatment with fennel and ator more effect than fennel only and ator only. The finding of this study indicates that the concentration of Malondialdehyde (MDA) and Myeloperoxidase (MPO) in liver homogenates of the fennel and ator group significant decrease than group (3) and group (4) and the obese group. There is a growing awareness that obesity is a prime risk factor for the development of dyslipidemia profile and that oxidative stress may play a role in various adverse effects of obesity. DOI: 10.14302/issn.2574-450X.jom-19-2852 Corresponding author: EH Radwan, Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Damanhour University, Egypt, Phone: 00201001089259, Email: dr_eman_hashem@yahoo.com, eman.radwan@sci.dmn. edu.eg.
Filamentous Fungal Quality of a Bovine Abattoir and Associated Water Sources in Akure, Southwestern, Nigeria

Aims: This study examined the prevalence of filamentous fungi in Onyearugbulem abattoir wastewater samples in Akure, Nigeria. Methodology: The abattoir’s water source, 5 m away from animal washings, the incinerator, 10 m upstream, 10 m downstream and 100 m downstream were sampled between November 2014 and October 2015 for aerobic and anaerobic fungal counts using standard recommended procedures. Fungal isolates were identified macroscopically and microscopically. Results: The results showed that the water source had the lowest fungal count (1.4x10 3 sfu/ml in November and 2.0x10 2 sfu/ml in February for aerobic and anaerobic counts respectively) throughout the sampling period unlike the incinerator which had the highest fungal count (5.2x10 3 sfu/ml in August and 5.5x10 3 sfu/ml in July for aerobic and anaerobic counts respectively). The aerobic fungal count was lower than the anaerobic fungal count in all the six (6) sampling points except the abattoir water source. The trendline of the data collected also showed a significant increase (p≤0.05) of the fungal counts in the wet season as compared to the dry season. The fungi isolated are Rhizopus spp. , Aspergillus fumigatus, Penicillium chrysogenum, Fusarium oxysporium and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Original Research Article Olusola-Makinde et al.; SAJRM, 1(1): 1-8, 2018; Article no.SAJRM. 40921 2 Conclusion: This work indicated a high dominance of fungi in water bodies associated with the slaughterhouse and therefore warns against environmental and health hazards associated with these microorganisms.
Optimising convolutional neural networks for super fast inference on focal-plane sensor-processor arrays

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionised the Computer Vision discipline in the last few years. CNNs now are state of the art methods to solve almost all classification, segmentation, or detection tasks. In parallel, domain specific architectures have been developed for Computer Vision applications, and amongst others, a new form of hardware has emerged: Focal Plane Sensor Processors (FPSPs). FPSPs consist in merging the light sensor and the the processing unit of a traditional vision system, by enabling each photo-diode with rudimentary analog computation capabilities. In this work, we implement CNNs on an FPSP, a goal previously pursued only twice to the best of our knowledge [49] [5]. To benefit from the low latency and energy efficiency of existing FPSPs, the main challenge is the limited register availability and the inaccurate nature of their computations. An in-depth FPSP-specific optimisation of all components constituting a CNN allows us to beat the previous baseline by a margin of more than 4%. Our AnalogNet2 architecture reaches a testing accuracy of 96.9% on the MNIST dataset, at a speed of 2260 FPS, all for a cost of 0.7 mJ per frame. We also experiment two techniques to implement multi-layer CNNs on an FPSP quantisation and pooling. The resulting accuracy is however gravely hindered by noise, for which we provide a quantitative study. Finally, we prove the impact of this work on a real application, with a proof-of-concept that extracts steering directions from a scene, for a wheeled robot platform.
在 JPEG XR 影像上做資訊隱藏之新研究 A New Study on Information Hiding via JPEG XR Images 研 究 生:姚志憲 Student :

With the convenience of the Internet, information exchanges through the Internet become very frequent nowadays. The JPEG XR image is a new image file format which supports high compression ratios and becomes more and more popular in information communication. In this study, three methods for data hiding applications via JPEG XR images are proposed, including covert communication, image authentication, and copyright protection. For covert communication, a data hiding method via JPEG XR images for use in covert communication is proposed, which encodes selected quantization parameters of highpass frequency bands to embed secret messages. In addition, a technique to generate a stego-image with the original cover image file size being kept for reducing the possibility of arousing notice from attackers is also proposed. For image authentication, a block-based authentication method based on embedding DC_LP coefficients as authentication signals into the highpass coefficients of the image blocks is proposed, which can be employed to verify the integrity and fidelity of JPEG XR images by comparing the extracted authentication signals with
The Role of a Variety of Research Studies on Problem Management

In the process of finding the truth, factual information is needed, starting from simple methods such as good time management in reading, listening and asking questions, until complex ways of research. So, researchers must understand what types of research can be used as references, to facilitate researchers in doing problem management properly, the results of which are able to solve problems and obtain factual information. This paper describes 7 (seven) different types of research, there are research based on approaches, functions, purpose, characteristics, problem characteristics, research process, and measurement techniques and data analysis. The explanation’s purpose of the variety of research is to provide insight into the management of the problems that occur with the planning carried out by the researcher, especially in terms of literature, so that before considering various stages of planning and doing research, researchers can also consider the main features of certain forms of research that are well compiled and reported. So, problem management can be done as well as possible to produce valid steps in solving problems. Keywords​: Variety of Research, Literature, Factual Information, Problem Management.
Nb–Ta fractionation induced by fluid‐rock interaction in subduction‐zones: constraints from UHP eclogite‐ and vein‐hosted rutile from the Dabie orogen, Central‐Eastern China

Niobium and Ta concentrations in ultrahigh‐pressure (UHP) eclogites and rutile from these eclogites and associated high pressure (HP) veins were used to study the behaviour of Nb–Ta during dehydration and fluid‐rock interaction. Samples were collected through a ∼2 km profile at the Bixiling complex in the Dabie orogenic belt, Central‐Eastern China. All but one eclogite away from veins (EAVs) display nearly constant Nb/Ta ratios ranging from 16.1 to 19.2, with an average of 16.9 ± 0.8 (2 SE), similar to that of their gabbroic protolith from the Yangtze Block. Nb/Ta ratios of rutile from the EAVs range from 12.7 to 25.3 among different individual grains, with the average values close to those of the corresponding bulk rocks. These observations show that Nb and Ta were not significantly fractionated by prograde metamorphism up to eclogite facies when no significant fluid‐rock interaction occurs. In contrast, Nb/Ta ratios of rutile from eclogites close to veins (ECVs) are highly variable from 17.8 to 49.8, which are systematically higher (by up to 17) than those of rutile from the veins. These observations demonstrate that Nb and Ta were mobilized and fractionated during localized fluid flow and intensive fluid‐rock interaction. This is strongly supported by Nb/Ta zoning patterns in single rutile grains revealed by in situ LA‐ICP‐MS analysis. Ratios of Nb/Ta in the ECV‐hosted rutile decrease gradually from cores towards rims, whereas those in the EAV‐hosted rutile are nearly invariable. Furthermore, the vein rutile shows Nb/Ta zoning patterns that are complementary to those in rutile from their immediate hosts (ECVs), suggesting an internal origin for the vein‐forming fluids. The Nb/Ta ratios of such fluids evolved from low values at the early stage of subduction to higher values at later supercritical conditions with increased temperature and pressure. Quantitative modelling was conducted to constrain the compositional evolution of metamorphic fluids during dehydration and fluid‐rock interaction focusing on Nb–Ta distribution. The modelling results based on our proposed multistage fluid phase evolution path can essentially reproduce the natural observations reported in the present study.
Review of Push-Out and Shear Response of Hybrid Steel-Trussed Concrete Beams

The hybrid steel trussed concrete beams examined in the present study are comprised of two principal components, i.e., a steel joist with inclined rebars, realized in industry, which is welded to a smooth steel plate and then embedded within the concrete cast in situ. The paper presents first the state of the art on laboratory tests and analytical modeling of the steel-to-concrete stress transfer mechanism investigated by push-out tests. Next, the most relevant scientific contributions currently available in the technical literature regarding experimental investigation on actual shear behavior are summarized and discussed. Lastly codes and analytical models are reviewed.
University of Southern Denmark Measuring a speaker's acoustic correlates of pitch-but which? A contrastive analysis for perceived speaker charisma Niebuhr, Oliver; Skarnitzl, Radek

Intonation is a multitasker. It conveys a plethora of non-lexical meanings and functions, and mirrors a speaker’s personality traits, one of them being charisma. In the age in which leaders communicate globally through digital mass media, speaker charisma has become an important field of research. The number of different f0 level and range measures that are used, not only in phonetics, to determine speaker charisma call for standardization. Which f0 measures correlate most strongly with perceived speaker charisma and should thus be used in future analyses? Our study addresses this question based on 51 speakers whose charisma was rated by 42 listeners. Results show that the f0 mean is the best parameter to measure perceived charisma in terms of pitch level, while the best pitch distribution measures are kurtosis and the 80-percentile f0 range. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences and issues of cross-linguistic generalization.
Novel High Capacity Swelling Superabsorbent Composite and Its Potential for Controlled Release of Fertilizers

A hydrophilic macromolecular network is prepared by performing graft copolymerization of poly (sodium acrylate) chains onto salep and silica gel. The reaction parameters affecting the water absorbency of the superabsorbent composite were optimized using Taguchi method. FT-IR spectroscopy and Thermo Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) were used for confirming the structure of the final product and morphology of the synthesized superabsorbent composite was examined by SEM. The swelling behavior of optimum superabsorbent composite was measured in various swelling media. In addition, swelling kinetics and on-off switching behavior were investigated. In order to evaluate the controlled release potential of the matrix, it was loaded with KNO3 and NH4NO3 as a model agrochemical and the release kinetics was studied.
An analysis of rhythm in japanese and english popular music

Recently, there has been evidence that the rhythm in English and French non-vocal musical themes are significantly different in their contrastiveness of successive durations in the same manner as those of spoken language, suggesting that acomposer's native language exerts an influence on the music composed (Patel & Daniele, 2003). This has been shown using normalized Pairwise Variability Index(nPVI; Grabe & Low, 2002). Would such an effect of a composer's native language also exist for music written with lyrics? Or would the language of the lyrics exert astronger rhythmic influence on the music? In the present study, we compare rhythm in popular music with Japanese and English lyrics. The preliminary result, for musicwritten by Japanese composers, showed a small but significant difference between them, suggesting successive durations in Japanese popular music are less contrastivethan in English. The effect is in accordance with the differences between spoken Japanese and English, and suggests that the language of the lyrics with which themusic is composed exerts an influence on the rhythmic structure of the music, despite the composer's native language.
Corruption on Two Levels: National Comparisons Using Hierarchical Models

For at least twenty years, much of the focus of empirical research on corruption has been on its prevalence. Why do some countries experience more corruption than others? While a host of countries have been profiled in articles and monographs, most of the hypothesis testing has been done using national comparisons (Triesman, 2000). Corruption levels are estimated by elite analysts, often those with business experience, and models are developed to capture the structure of the data.