Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Influence of Intercropping Sorghum with Legumes for Managementand Control of Striga in Sorghum at Assosa Zone, Benshangul GumuzRegion, Western Ethiopia, East Africa

Sorghum is an important cereal crop and occupies third place in production after Maize and Tef in Ethiopia. Striga hermonthica reduces sorghum yields by competing for water, nutrients, space, light and photosynthates with the host plants. Information on the influence of intercropping sorghum with legumes for management and control of striga in sorghum in the Assosa Zone is scanty. On farm experiments were they are conducted at three locations, for three years, to investigate the effect of eleven treatments (Intercrop ground nut with Sorghum 1:1 and Simultaneous planting, Intercrop ground nut with sorghum 1:1 and Relay planting, Intercrop ground nut with Sorghum 2:1 and Simultaneous planting, Intercrop ground nut with Sorghum 2:1 and Relay planting, Intercrop soybean with sorghum 1:1 and Simultaneous planting, Intercrop soybean with sorghum 1:1 and Relay planting, Intercrop soybean with sorghum 2:1 and Simultaneous planting, Intercrop soybean with sorghum 2:1 and Relay planting, Sole soybean, Sole Sorghum and Sole Ground nut.) and was laid out in a randomised complete block design (RCBD) with three replication. Significant influence on the grain yield of sorghum due to treatment application was recorded. During the all season, the sorghum/legume intercrop had the highest sorghum yield. The sorghum/Ground nut intercrop out yielded than the sorghum/soybean intercrop at all growing season. The gross income and Land equivalent ratio indicates greater economic benefit with this intercropping groundnut in 1:1 proportion and simultaneous planting than sole planting. As a result, intercropping groundnut in 1:1 proportion and simultaneous planting for the control striga is essential, ideal and useful to small-scale farmers, in order to achieve sustainable crop production.
MODELLING THE EMOTIONAL QUALITY OF SPEECH IN A TELECOMMUNICATION CONTEXT

This paper presents a study of the perception, the analysis, and the modelling of the emotional quality of speech. Speech emotional quality is defined as the qualities of speech samples in terms of the emotional content that describe the listeners’ global impressions as elicited by their audition. For this study, twenty professional female speakers recorded a welcome prompt of a vocal server in five elocution styles. The sound corpus was submitted to psychoacoustic tests and to signal analysis. From the psychoacoustic tests, twenty subjective criteria could be extracted that characterize the perceived emotional quality. These criteria can be used to draw perceptive portraits of the speech samples. Linear models connecting the perceptive portraits to physical data derived from signal analysis were developed.
Brain Tumor Diagnosis Based on Orthogonal Local Storage Mapping Based on Gabor

– The present work introduces a new method for classifying brain tumor features using the extracted features from filtered brain images. Global feature extraction techniques such as Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA), characteristics of the overall structure of MRI images and local information preserving techniques such as Locality Preserving Projection (OLPP) Local features would maintain the manifold local features of the same images, to exploit the information that can retain the geometry of images to avoid confusion when changes occur. The proposed method is based on the conventional features of the images with some added features for the detection of tumors. To enhance the diagnosis capacity and the hidden features of brain tumor images, firstly Gabor features were determined through the Gabor filter bank of MRI images. These features proved more effective and improved than the original brain images. Then, OLPP was used to extract the conventional features. This included some new features which were different separating information of Gabor features. New images could be classified in terms of the extracted features using a classifier based on the nearest neighbor. The proposed algorithm was used based on a database with 6 other methods. The results showed that the proposed method would show higher detection rates than other detection methods based on the features.
Impact of Corporate Disclosure on Cost of Equity Capital in Vietnam

The objective of the paper is to test the impact of corporate disclosure on the cost of equity capital for firms listed on Vietnam’s stock market. We use the Botosan (1997) scoring methodology and the residual income valuation model to measure disclosure level and the implied cost of equity capital. Our findings suggest that, taking into account other determinants, disclosure has a significant reducing impact on the cost of equity capital.
Flavobacterium columnare / Myxobolus tilapiae Concurrent Infection in the Earthen Pond Reared Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) during the Early Summer

Flavobacterium columnare (F. columnare), the dermotropic Gram negative yellow pigmented bacteria was isolated from different sites of skin ulcerations in the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) and Nile catfish (Clarias gariepinus) collected from an earthen pond located at an aquaculture station in Sharkiya Province, Lower Egypt during an acute episode of mass kills during the early summer of 2009. An acute infection with F. columnare was behind the emergent event of mass mortalities among both populations. Many of the Nile tilapias exhibited typical signs of hole - in- the head like lesions from which F. columnare together with the myxosporean spore, Myxobolus tilapiae (M. tilapiae) were retrieved. Most of the cohabitating infected Nile catfishes exhibited severe form of saddle back like ulcer. The identities of the retrieved isolates were confirmed using morphological, biochemical and molecular tools. The research lead us to conclude that the two diverse etiological agents (F. columnare and M. tilapiae) under the triggering effect of the abrupt change in the water quality measures (abrupt rise in the water temperature, ammonia, pH, sharp decrease in dissolved oxygen) have synergized together to induce the above mentioned pathology with the consequent reemergence of fish mass mortalities.
Atomic structure and structural stability of Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses

Nanoglasses are non-crystalline solids whose internal structure is characterized by fluctuations of the free volume. Due to the typical dimensions of the structural features in the nanometer-range and the disordered atomic structure of the interfacial regions, the atomic structure and the structural stability of nanoglasses is not yet completely understood. Nanoglasses are typically produced by consolidation of glassy nanoparticles. Consequently, the basis for the understanding of the atomic structure of nanoglasses lies in the atomic structure of the primary glassy nanoparticles. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy, the elemental distribution in the Fe90Sc10 primary glassy nanoparticles and in the corresponding nanoglasses produced by consolidation of these glassy nanoparticles have been studied. Due to surface segregation, Fe has been found to be enriched at the surface of the primary Fe90Sc10 glassy nanoparticles. This behavior was found to be consistent with theoretical results based on a monolayer model for surface segregation behavior of the binary liquid alloys. In addition, the heterogeneous structure of Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses with Fe enriched interfaces was also directly observed, and may be attributed to the segregation of the primary glassy nanoparticles on the surface. Furthermore, the electron density of the isolated and loosely compacted primary glassy nanoparticles was investigated using small- and wide- angle X-ray scattering. The results indicate that the surface shells of glassy nanoparticles have an electron density that is lower than the electron density in the cores of the glassy nanoparticles. The lower electron density seems to result mainly from a lower atomic packing density of the surface shells rather than from compositional variations due to the surface segregation. During the consolidation of the glassy nanoparticles, the inhomogeneous elemental distribution and the short-range order in the shells of Fe90Sc10 glassy nanoparticles can be transferred into the interfaces of the resulting bulk Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses. The free volume within the shells of the Fe90Sc10 glassy nanoparticles may delocalize into the interfaces between the Fe90Sc10 glassy nanoparticles resulting in interfacial regions of lower atomic packing density in the Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses. The structural stability of Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses has been studied by means of low temperature annealing in situ in a transmission electron microscope, and ex situ in an ultra-high-vacuum tube-furnace. The analysis of both experiments showed similar results. The structure of the Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses was stable for up to 2 hours when annealed at 150 °C. Annealing of nanoglasses at higher temperatures resulted in the formation of a metastable nanocrystalline bcc-Fe(Sc) with Sc-enriched interfaces. The crystallization process of Fe90Sc10 nanoglasses was clarified and a plausible mechanism for the structural stability was proposed.
How fine is fine-scale? Questioning the use of fine-scale bioclimatic data in species distribution models used for forecasting abundance patterns in butterflies

The use of species distribution models (SDMs) to predict the spatial occurrence and abundance of species in relation to environmental predictors has been debated in terms of species' ecology and biogeography. The predictive power of these models is well recognized for vertebrates, but has not yet been tested for invertebrates. In this study, we aim to assess the use of SDMs for predicting local abundances of invertebrates at a macroscale level. A maximum entropy algorithm was used to build SDMs based on occurrence records of 61 species of butterflies and bioclimatic information with a 30 arc second resolution. Predictions of habitat suitability were correlated with butterfly abundance data derived from independently conducted field surveys in order to check for a relationship between the predictions of the model and local abundances. Even though the model accurately described the current distributions of the species in the study area at a macroscale, the observed occurrences of the species (i.e. presence/absence) recorded by the field surveys differed significantly from the model's predictions for the corresponding grid cells. Moreover, there was no correlation between observed abundance and the model's predictions for most species of butterflies. We conclude that the spatial abundance of butterflies cannot be predicted from environmental suitability modelled at a resolution as large as in this study. Using the finest scale bioclimatic information currently available (i.e. 30 arc seconds) it is not adequate to predict species abundances as structural and ecological factors as well as climatic patterns acting at a smaller scale are key determinants of the occurrence and abundance of invertebrates. Therefore, future studies have to account for the role of the resolution in environmental predictors when assessments of spatial abundances via SDMs will be conducted.
Application of QFD for enabling environmentally conscious design in an Indian rotary switch manufacturing organisation

Many businesses are recognising that environmental consciousness is an important concept for survival in today's highly competitive market. This paper presents a project in which quality function deployment (QFD) for environment (QFDE) has been applied to an Indian rotary switch manufacturing organisation to enable environmentally conscious design at the early stage of product development. QFDE consists of four phases. QFDE phases I and II are concerned with the identification of the rotary switch parts that are important in enhancing environmental consciousness. QFDE phases III and IV are concerned with the evaluation of the effect of design improvement on environmental quality requirements. The results obtained from the case study revealed that QFDE could be applied in the early stage of rotary switch product development as it identified the vital components from an environmental perspective and enabled the options for design improvement to be effectively evaluated. The managerial implications of the case study have also been presented.
Online Learning in Neural Machine Translation

High quality translations are in high demand these days. Although machine translation offers acceptable performance, it is not sufficient in some cases and human supervision is required. In order to ease the translation task of the human, machine translation systems take part in this process. When a sentence in the source language needs to be translated, it is fed to the system which outputs a hypothesis translation. The human then, corrects this hypothesis (also known as post-editing) in order to obtain a high quality translation. Being able to transfer the knowledge that a human translator exhibit when post-editing a translation to the machine translation system is a desirable feature, as it has been proven that a more accurate machine translation system helps to increase the efficiency of the post-editing process. Because the post-editing scenario requires an already trained system, online learning techniques are suited for this task. In this work, three online learning algorithms have been proposed and applied to a neural machine translation system in a post-editing scenario. They rely on the Passive-Aggressive online learning approach in which the model is updated after every sample in order to fulfil a correctness criterion while remembering previously learned information. The goal is to adapt and refine an already trained system with new samples on-thefly as the post-editing process takes place (hence, the update time must be kept under control). Moreover, these new algorithms are compared with well-stablished online learning variants of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Results show improvements on the translation quality of the system after applying these algorithms, reducing human effort in the post-editing process.
Regional scale investigation of net primary productivity associated to dominant land cover classes of Indian Himalayan region

This study is an attempt to understand regional variability of net primary productivity (NPP) of four major land cover classes (LCC), namely evergreen broadleaf forest (EBL), mixed forest (MF), grassland (GL) and crop land (CL), over the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) including Nepal and Bhutan. The study period is chosen to be the 11 years of 2001-2011. Therefore, the spatial distribution along with inter-annual and total NPP is analysed using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LCC and NPP products having a spatial resolution of 0.1 degree. MODIS NPP is based on algorithm developed by applying the radiation conversion efficiency logic to the prediction of daily Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), fractional absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, photosynthetically active radiation and other surface meteorological fields. Irrespective of the spatial distribution, the monthly maximum NPP for EBL, MF, GL and CL were found to be 6.4, 6.3, 4.5 and 4.6 gC.m. day, respectively. The annual total NPP for EBL, GL and CL over the entire IHR were found to be decreasing with the rate of 370.3, 185.1 and 822.5 gC.m. day whereas, the annual total NPP value for the MF category was found to have a small rate of annual enhancement of 16.0 gC.m. day. Overall for the period of 2001–2011, the annual reduction in the NPP values of all the four major LCC was found to be 1.3 KgC.m. day indicating a significant carbon loss in terms of biomass of IHR.
Strategies for spectroscopy on Extremely Large Telescopes – II. Diverse-field spectroscopy

The fields of view of Extremely Large Telescopes will contain vast numbers of spatial sampling elements (spaxels) as their adaptive optics systems approach the diffraction limit over wide fields. Since this will exceed the detection capabilities of any realistic instrument, the field must be dilutely sampled to extract spectroscopic data from selected regions of interest. The scientific return will be maximized if the sampling pattern provides an adaptable combination of separated independent spaxels and larger contiguous subfields, seamlessly combining integral-field and multiple-object spectroscopy. We illustrate the utility of this diverse-field spectroscopy (DFS) to cosmological studies of galaxy assembly. We show how to implement DFS with an instrument concept: the Celestial Selector. This integrates highly multiplexed monolithic fibre systems and switching networks of the type currently available in the telecommunications industry. It avoids bulky moving parts, whose limitations were noted in Paper I. In Paper III, we will investigate the optimization of such systems by varying the input–output mapping.
Filling Simple Holes of Triangular Mesh by using Enhanced Advancing Front Mesh (EAFM) method

Triangular meshes are extensively used to represent 3D models. Some surfaces cannot be digitised due to various reasons such as inadequacy of the scanner, and this generally occurs for glossy, hollow surfaces and dark-coloured surfaces. This cause triangular meshes to contain holes and it becomes difficult for numerous successive operations such as model prototyping, model rebuilding, and finite element analysis. Hence, it is necessary to fill these holes in a practical manner. In this paper, the Enhanced Advancing Front Mesh (EAFM) method was introduced for recovering missing simple holes in an object. The first step in this research was to extract the feature vertices around a hole on a 3D test data function. Then the Advancing Front Mesh (AFM) method was used to fill the holes. When conflicts occurred during construction of the triangle, the EAFM method was introduced to enhance the method. The results of the study show that the enhanced method is simple, efficient and suitable for dealing with simple hole problems.
Creating Animated Diagrams with Flash

Photographs, illustrations and diagrams have long been used as a way to support and enhance textual material. The emergence of the Web as a teaching platform has focused the attention of educators on the use of multimedia as an instructional medium. Sound, video and animation are the primary components of multimedia. Animation can be a powerful tool for introducing concepts and processes. An animated diagram can support the text or go beyond the written explanation. Adding motion to a process diagram or an illustration, which shows how something works, can help to explain difficult concepts. Although most educators avoid multimedia packages due to their expense and complexity, Flash is a great tool for the beginner. Flash offers a quick way to create simple animations to be used on the Web.
Assessment of Population Structure of Coyotes in East-Central Alabama using Microsatellite DNA

Abstract Canis latrans (Coyotes) are a management concern in the southeastern US because of their potential impacts on agriculture, other wildlife species, and human health and safety. This region is part of a recent range expansion by Coyotes, and information about their population structure in the southeastern US is lacking. In this study, we used microsatellite DNA to assess genetic diversity and population structure among Coyotes in east-central Alabama. We detected high genetic diversity (HE = 0.78) and no population structure across the total sampling area. Additionally, we investigated population structure between urban and rural groups. We detected low but significant population structure between these groups, which may be biologically meaningful. We discuss the implications of this result in the context of potential management strategies. Overall, our study sought to provide information about the molecular ecology of Coyotes within a region of recent range expansion.
Removal of Fluoride from Aqueous Solutions Using Chitosan Cryogels

In this study, crosslinked chitosan cryogels (QE) and chitosan’s cryogels modified with iron (QEFe) were synthesized. They were characterized by BET, PZC, FTIR, and XPS spectroscopies. Results show a specific surface area of 36.67 and 29.17 m2g−1 and 7.0 and 6.1 of PZC for the cryogels QE and QEFe, respectively. FTIR results show the characteristic bands of amino and hydroxyl groups, while in the XPS analysis, interactions between iron and oxygen with fluorine were observed. The removal of fluoride at temperatures of 303, 313, and 323 K in cryogels was tested. The Ho model is the best fit for the experimental data, suggesting that there is a chemisorption process involved in the removal of fluoride. The Langmuir-Freundlich model is the best to represent the behavior of the cryogels, and it is used to sorbents with heterogeneous surfaces. A maximum fluoride adsorption capacity of 280 and 295 mg F−/g for QE and QEFe, respectively, at 303 K was obtained, showing that the removal of fluoride is favored by the iron incorporated in the polymer matrix of the cryogels. The thermodynamic parameters were obtained for both cryogels, where the values of and indicate that both systems are endothermic and nonspontaneous.
PHYTOTOXIC EFFECTS OF SAFFLOWER YELLOW EXPOSURE ON SEED GERMINATION AND EARLY SEEDLING GROWTH OF CANOLA (BRASSICA NAPUS L.)

The aim of current investigation was to determine phytotoxic effects of safflower dye (safflower yellow) on seed germination and early seedling growth of canola (Brassica napus L.) cv. Rainbow. Safflower yellow was extracted in autoclaved distilled water and was applied at various concentrations (0.312%, 0.625%, 1.25%, 2.5% and 5%) to canola seeds in petri dishes under axenic conditions. Phenolics content was detected in dye solutions and was maximum (53 mg gallic acid/g extract) in 5% dye solution. The growth rate of canola was decreased with the increase of safflower dye concentration (p<0.05). Maximum inhibition in the activity of enzyme lipase in germinating seeds, germination (%), root and shoot length, root and shoot weight was exhibited by 5% dye solution. In response to the application of safflower dye, canola seedlings accumulated endogenous phenolics. Relative water content and photosynthetic pigments of seedling were reduced to a maximum level by 5% and 2.5% dye solutions. It was inferred that safflower dye exhibited phytotoxic effects at higher concentration on canola. The findings of the current investigation will help in safe disposal of safflower dye found in industrial effluents.
Fibre Laser Cutting and Chemical Etching of AZ31 for Manufacturing Biodegradable Stents

The use of magnesium-alloy stents shows promise as a less intrusive solution for the treatment of cardiovascular pathologies as a result of the high biocompatibility of the material and its intrinsic dissolution in body fluids. However, in addition to requiring innovative solutions in material choice and design, these stents also require a greater understanding of the manufacturing process to achieve the desired quality with improved productivity. The present study demonstrates the manufacturing steps for the realisation of biodegradable stents in AZ31 magnesium alloy. These steps include laser microcutting with a Q-switched fibre laser for the generation of the stent mesh and subsequent chemical etching for the cleaning of kerf and surface finish. Specifically, for the laser microcutting step, inert and reactive gas cutting conditions were compared. The effect of chemical etching on the reduction in material thickness, as well as on spatter removal, was also evaluated. Prototype stents were produced, and the material composition and surface quality were characterised. The potentialities of combining nanosecond laser microcutting and chemical etching are shown and discussed.