Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-agent systems in construction : a ten-year review

This study critically reviews multi-agent systems (MAS) in construction. Given their autonomous, cooperative, and learning attributes, MAS are a promising approach to address the essential problems of “collaboration and consensus” among stakeholders in construction projects. Despite the development of many agent-based technologies and applications in recent years, relatively few reviews have been reported on this area. Based on selected papers, this study proposes a novel framework of MAS in construction. It focuses on collaboration and consensus in construction projects, and comprehensively organizes three dimensions of MAS, namely “application–issue–attribute”. Based on this framework, the applications and issues in construction domain can be facilitated with appropriate attributes of MAS, and it can also help find the potential applications of MAS in construction. Furthermore, this study clarifies the advantages of MAS and support collaboration and consensus in construction domain. Finally, the development of MAS in construction is presented, and future research directions are recommended.
Hydraulic jump in a sloped triangular channel

The hydraulic jump in a sloped triangular channel of 908 central angle is theoretically and experimentally exam- ined. The study aims to determine the effect of the channel's slope on the sequent depth ratio of the jump. A theoretical relation is proposed for the inflow Froude number as function of the sequent depth ratio and the channel slope. An experi- mental analysis is also proposed to find a better formulation of the obtained relation. For this motive, six positive slopes are tested. The relations obtained are recommended for designing irrigation ditches.
A Hybrid Model for Damage Localization and Prognosis Including Temperature Compensation

The development of a reliable structural damage prognostics framework, which can accurately predict the fatigue life of critical metallic components subjected to a variety of in-service loading conditions, is important for many engineering applications. In this paper a hybrid damage localization method is developed for prediction of cracks in aluminum components. The proposed fully probabilistic methodology combines a physics based prognosis model with a data driven localization approach to estimate the crack growth. Particle filtering is used to iteratively combine the predicted crack location from prognostic model with the estimated crack location from localization algorithm to probabilistically estimate the crack location at each time instant, while accounting for the uncertainties. At each time step, the crack location predicted by the prognosis model is used as a priori knowledge (dynamic prior) and combined with the likelihood function of the localization algorithm for accurate crack location estimation. For improving the robustness of the localization framework, temperature compensation is carried out. The model is validated using experimental data obtained from fatigue tests preformed on an Al2024-T351 lug joint at different temperatures. The results indicate that the proposed method is capable of estimating the crack length with an error of less than 1mm for the majority of the presented cases.
effect of introducing a winter forage rotation on CO 2 fluxes at a temperate rassland

Temperate grasslands have the potential to sequester carbon, helping to mitigate rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The ability of grasslands to absorb CO2 is influenced by site elevation, soil type, management practices, climate and climatic variability. There is a need for long-term observations and field experiments to quantify the effects of the key drivers of management and climate variability. This paper presents over 4 years of eddy covariance measurements of CO2 flux over a managed temperate grassland site in south-east Ireland. For the first 2 years the entire study area was under grass. During the second 2 years a winter forage crop was grown over part of the site. The site was found to have a net uptake of CO2 during all years. However, the magnitude of the CO2 uptake varied considerably from year to year, with a maximum net uptake of 1.32 kg CO2 m−2 in 2004, a year with no winter forage crop. reland Net uptakes were much lower in the 2 years of mixed grass and kale cultivation, but detailed analysis of the measurement footprint and statistical comparisons showed that this was not due to the introduction of the forage rotation. For a short period following sowing of the forage crop, daytime CO2 uptake was less than that of the area under grass, but over subsequent months daytime CO2 uptake of the kale areas recovered strongly and exceeded that of the grass areas. The net effect over the year following kale planting is close to CO2-neutral.
An exploratory study to identify critical factors of innovation culture in organizations

Article history: Received February 12, 2013 Received in revised format 10 May 2013 Accepted 12 May 2013 Available online May 28 2013 During the past two decades, there has been a growing trend on knowledge-based organizations. Innovation, on the other hand, plays essential role on building competitive business units. In this paper, we present an exploratory study to identify critical factors of innovation culture in organizations. We detect important factors influencing innovation culture in construction industry based on the implementation of factor analysis. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 400 experts who are involved in construction industry. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.779, which validates the overall questionnaire. The results of factor analysis have indicated that six factors of building cultural infrastructures, education, organizational vision, established culture, strategic culture and flexible culture are the most important items influencing innovation culture. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ergonomic evaluation of effects of handle shape and task orientationon human performance in screw driving task.

This study was designed to ergonomically evaluate the effects of Handle shape and Task Orientation on human performance in screw driving task under applications of different combinations of Handle Shapes and Orientation of Work Surface. To begin with pilot study was performed prior to main study to find out the most affected muscle in screw driving, to find the correct posture and also to decide the type of screw driver. The results of pilot study suggested that PT is the most affected muscle in screw driving and productivity was maximum in standing posture with Philip headed screw. The main study “Ergonomic Evaluation of the effects of Handle Shape and Task Orientation on Human Performance in Torquing Tasks” was investigated. Eight (male and female) participants volunteered in the study. Nine different handles of Triangular, Hexagonal & Circular Shapes were used on three Orientation of the work surface were tested (Horizontal, Vertical and Inclined at 45 Degrees). To enhance the grip one handle from each shape was provided with rubber grip while the surface of one handle of each shape was textured. The result of the study showed that Orientation of the work surface was having the significant effect on all the dependent variables. On analysis of the results, it can be concluded that Vertical Orientation of the work surface was best suited for screw driving task as discomfort was minimum and productivity was maximum and also muscle was least fatigued on this orientation. However, Handle shape’s effect was only significant on discomfort Score and best results were obtained for Rubber Gripped Circular Handle.
Interactions between Biological Control Efforts and Insecticide Applications in Tropical Rice Agroecosystems: The Potential Role of Intraguild Predation

Integrated pest management attempts to combine cultural, chemical, and biological approaches to bring about pest reductions and improve crop yields. In Asian wet rice agriculture, as in many crop systems, there is a real question as to how compatible chemical control methods are with other pest control approaches. Working in an irrigated rice paddy on Java, Indonesia, we crossed a natural enemy treatment (addition of wolf spiders, Lycosa pseudoannulata Boesenberg et Strand) with an insecticide treatment (monocrotophos) in a balanced, replicated, two-way factorial design to explicitly examine the potential interactions between chemical and biological control methods. Although adding either wolf spiders or insecticide to field plots significantly reduced abundance of pests (sucking homopterans), combining the two treatments together generated a significant, season-long interaction effect such that pest densities did not decrease. In other words, pest densities in plots receiving both spiders and insecticide were statistically comparable to those in plots receiving neither pest control method. Furthermore, we found additive effects of wolf spiders and insecticide on other generalist predators, and from those data we hypothesize that intraguild predation and ensuing indirect effects may be responsible for the interaction effect on pest density. Our results indicate that, far from being complementary and compatible approaches to pest reduction, combining treatments of natural enemy addition and insecticide application may be quite counterproductive. r 1998 Academic
Priority Assignment and Application Mapping for Many-Cores Using a Limited Migrative Model

Most of present many-core scheduling and application mapping approaches rely on strict assumptions, e.g. uninterruptible availability of all cores, which significantly limits their scope of application. In this paper we consider a Limited Migrative Model (LMM). LMM is the novel approach in the real-time embedded domain, which gives the possibility to efficiently analyse scenarios that involve occasional core shutdowns for various reasons (e.g. energy and thermal management, load balancing, fault tolerance), thus allowing to embrace the full potential and flexibility of many-core platforms. The contributions of this work are as follows. First, we propose the classification of schedulability guarantees for LMM. Then, we introduce various priority assignment and application mapping techniques and subsequently study their impacts on (i) derived schedulability guarantees for critical and time-constrained applications, and (ii) the performance of best-effort workload. The experiments show that LMM is a valuable approach, even when assuming an uninterruptible availability of all cores, while it exhibits clear benefits in cases where, due to necessity to perform occasional core shutdowns, a higher amount of flexibility is desired. Priority Assignment and Application Mapping for Many-Cores Using a Limited Migrative Model Borislav Nikolic, Konstantinos Bletsas and Stefan M. Petters CISTER/INESC-TEC, ISEP Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal Email: {borni, ksbs, smp}@isep.ipp. pt Abstract—Most of present many-core scheduling and application mapping approaches rely on strict assumptions, e.g. uninterruptible availability of all cores, which significantly limits their scope of application. In this paper we consider a Limited Migrative Model (LMM ). LMM is the novel approach in the real-time embedded domain, which gives the possibility to efficiently analyse scenarios that involve occasional core shutdowns for various reasons (e.g. energy and thermal management, load balancing, fault tolerance), thus allowing to embrace the full potential and flexibility of many-core platforms. The contributions of this work are as follows. First, we propose the classification of schedulability guarantees for LMM . Then, we introduce various priority assignment and application mapping techniques and subsequently study their impacts on (i) derived schedulability guarantees for critical and time-constrained applications, and (ii) the performance of best-effort workload. The experiments show that LMM is a valuable approach, even when assuming an uninterruptible availability of all cores, while it exhibits clear benefits in cases where, due to necessity to perform occasional core shutdowns, a higher amount of flexibility is desired.
A Random Parameter Logit Model for Modeling Health Care Provider Choice in Bolivia

In this paper we model health care provider choice in Bolivia with a Random Parameter Logit (RPL) using MECOVI data during the period 1999 and 2000. To our knowledge this is the first time that a RPL is used for modeling health care provider choice in Bolivia. We found that price and income are determinants of the decision choice of health care provider. Increasing government prices or fees shift the demand from government to private health facilities for children and women. In addition, women are more sensitive than children and adults to changes in price and income. The perception of Quality is significant just for private health facilities except for children. Finally, people would rather private instead of government facilities and self care treatment when they are ill.
Cytokinin priming as a tool to induce in vitro growth and biomass production of some soil fungi.

Effect of different concentrations of cytokinin on growth of 4 species of soil fungi viz., Aspergillus oryzae, A. terreus, A. niger and Alternaria alternata was studied. The hormone was applied singly in various concentrations. Increased growth rate and biomass production revealed significant values when treated with dilute solutions of cytokinin at 15, 30 and 45 mgL. For all test fungi fresh weights and dry weight values dropped significantly when treated with 60 mgL concentration of the hormone solution. The data on fresh and dry biomass revealed that the highest biomass increase was obtained for Alternaria alternata. Fresh biomass of Alternaria alternata showed 39.9% increase when treated with 45 mgL concentration of hormone solution in comparison to control, whereas an increase of 43.75% was obtained in the case of dry weight. At 60 mgL, a significant fresh biomass suppression of 17.9% and 17.64% was observed for Aspergillus niger and A. oryzae, respectively. The highest loss for dry biomass was noticed in Alternaria alternata (18.75%).
Improved BN Model for Regular and Interactive Image Segmentation

We propose a new enhanced Bayesian network (BN) model for both automatic and interactive image segmentation. A multilayer BN is constructed from an over segmentation to model the statistical dependencies among superpixel regions, edge segments, vertices, and their measurements. The BN also incorporates various local constraints to further restrain the relationships among these image entities. The proposed system construct structures for the background and foreground images, i.e. two phase image constructor, and clusters the structured grouped pixels by performing the BN model for easy image segmentation. Given the BN model and various image measurements, belief propagation is performed to update the probability of each node. Image segmentation is generated by the most probable explanation inference of the true states of both region and edge nodes from the updated BN. Besides the automatic image segmentation, the proposed model can also be used for interactive image segmentation. While existing interactive segmentation (IS) approaches often passively depend on the user to provide exact intervention, we propose a new active input selection approach to provide suggestions for the user’s intervention. Such intervention can be conveniently incorporated into the BN model to perform actively IS. We evaluate the proposed model on both the Weizmann dataset and VOC2006 cow images. The results demonstrate that the BN model can be used for automatic segmentation, and more importantly, for actively IS. The experiments also show that the IS with active input selection can improve both the overall segmentation accuracy and efficiency over the IS with passive intervention
Cloning and expression of recombinant polypeptide from the erns coding region of the bovine viral diarrhoea virus in Escherichia coli.

Bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) is an economically important cattle disease with a worldwide distribution. Detection and elimination of animals persistently infected (PI) with bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) is essential for the control of BVD and eradication of BVDV. Usually, there are no pathognomonic clinical signs of BVDV infection. Diagnostic investigations therefore rely on laboratory-based detection of the virus, or virus-induced antigens or antibodies. Erns as an immunogenic protein of BVDV is genetically and antigenically conserved among different isolates and therefore, a candidate antigen for developing ELISA for serological studies or identification of PI animals. In this study, a segment of BVDV genome corresponding to the sequence coding for Erns was amplified using RT-PCR and cloned into expression vector pMalc2x, under the control of the lac promoter. After sequencing of the gene, the recombinant protein was expressed in Escherichia coli BL-21 and analysed by SDS-PAGE and western blotting. The strong promoter of vector pMalc2x allowed a high level of Erns expression. Based on our results it appears that this plasmid construct may be suitable for the production of Erns recombinant antigen and Erns specific antibodies to develop BVDV laboratory diagnostic assays.
Simulation Optimization Approach for Facility Layout Problem-A Queuing Theory Based Approach

One of the most important issues in facility layout problem is to find the location of the Input/ Output points. We consider single loop path as material flow path for a given layout and find locations of Input/Out points on perimeter of the loop in the uncertain environment. The uncertainty is derived from production time of each department. Our objective is to minimize total time of AGV system after conveying all departmental material flows, we solve an uncertain queuing problem and due to difficulty of the queuing problem, an efficient simulation optimization approach is proposed using simulated annealing algorithm. (Seyyed Mohammad Taghi Fatemi Ghomi, Amir Ardestani Jaafari. Simulation Optimization Approach for Facility Layout Problem Using Queuing Theory. Journal of American Science 2011;7(1):937-941). (ISSN: 1545-1003). http://www.americanscience. org.
The Effect of Post-Teaching Activity Type on Vocabulary Learning of Elementary EFL Learners

Considering the significant role of vocabulary in learning a language, and teachers' great responsibility in providing opportunities to facilitate this learning, many studies have focused on the best means of achieving a good knowledge of vocabulary. This study set out to investigate the effect of four post-teaching activities, namely game, narrative writing, role-play, and speaking tasks on vocabulary gain of elementary Iranian EFL learners across gender. The sample in the study was composed of 111 elementary adult EFL learners assigned into four experimental groups for females and four experimental groups for males as well as two control groups one for each gender, at AVA Talk Institute, Urmia, Iran. Successive to the pre-test, which was meant to measure the learners' prior knowledge of the target words, learners were asked to carry out the required tasks using the words they were provided with. The results of two-way ANOVA analysis indicate statistically significant main effects for vocabulary learning across different activity types with role-play leading to the highest vocabulary gain (M=19.27, SD=3.70). Moreover, the gender of participants has a significant [F (1, 168) =28.40, p=. 000] impact upon the vocabulary learning of the participants, with female learners outperforming their male peers. The results of the study have implications for EFL teachers and provide them with new insights into implementing task-oriented activities for better retention of vocabulary.
Garlic nutrient management in Ethiopia - a review

The main aim of this review is to provide an overview of the garlic crop productivity and its production management requirements like soil, climate and fertilization in general and specifically in Ethiopia, comparing them with current research trends and to indicate future benefits of soil nutrient management investigations. The application of balanced nutrients under optimum moisture availability in different soil types is an important crop management strategy, which may help maximizing crop yield and quality. Also, lack of optimum nutrients and moisture in the soil has been the major bottlenecks of garlic production and productivity; since the crop has a very shallow root system that requires frequent irrigation and fertilization with different types of fertilizers under various soil types. Low soil fertility is one of the principal and pervasive constraints to garlic production in Ethiopia; thus, there are differences among soil types in yielding ability under different nutrients and soil characteristics. Most smallholder farmers in Ethiopia appreciate the value of fertilizers, but they seldom apply them at the recommended rates and at the appropriate time according to the soil characteristics. These are because of high cost, lack of credit, delivery delays, and low and variable returns. In addition, the traditional organic inputs, like crop residues and animal manures, it cannot meet crop nutrient demand over large areas because of the limited quantities available, the low nutrient content of the materials, and the high labor demands for processing and application. However, it is possible to increase garlic crop yields through identification/selection of soil type and balanced nutrients application or searching for other nutrients sources beyond Urea and Diammonium phosphate especially in Ethiopian condition. Therefore, the integrated use of both the organic and inorganic fertilizers was felt as the best option to increase both yield potential and quality of garlic crop.
Yield stress for particle suspensions within a clay dispersion

This article focuses on suspensions of coarse particles within a clay dispersion. The behavior of such suspensions is generally dictated by the colloidal fine fraction, notably its yield stress. The dependence of this yield stress on the solid concentration ~in coarse particles ! is examined. It has been experimentally shown that adding coarse particles usually induced an increasingly marked enhancement of yield stress. However, in some cases, adding a small amount of coarse particles led to a decrease in bulk yield stress. We propose two mechanisms responsible for variations in bulk yield stress. First, at low concentrations, depletion of clay particles may be sufficient to induce an increase in the bulk yield stress. Two values for the depletion layer thickness have been found depending on the coarse particle type. At large concentrations, the substantial increase in bulk yield stress has been ascribed to the development of a coarse particle network within the dispersion. In this case, yielding results from the breakdown of indirect ~lubricated! contacts between particles. © 2001 The Society of Rheology. @DOI: 10.1122/1.1343879 #