Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Allee Effects Determine Pollinator Services at Local and Geographic Scales

Climatic factors have attracted much attention in the study of species’ distributions, while little is known about the role of biotic interactions. Here, we tested for variation in pollinator service across the distribution of a plant species, and evaluated the driving mechanisms. We monitored insect pollinators using time-lapse cameras in populations of North American Arabidopsis lyrata from the southern to the northern range limit. We spotted 67 pollinating insect taxa, indicating that this plant-pollinator network is a generalist system. Pollinator service increased with latitude. Higher pollinator visitation was correlated with the richness of other flowering plants and with plant census size, which was largest in northern populations. Furthermore, pollinator service reached a maximum at intermediate local flower density. Synthesis: This study indicates that pollination service underlies Allee effects on a local and species’ range scale, and that plant populations at range limits receive only marginal pollination service if they are small.
GIS Based Multi-Criteria Land Suitability Assessment for Future Urban Development in The Country Park Peripheries of Hong Kong

In recent years, land supply in Hong Kong has fallen sharply and fails to keep pace with the growth of population and number of households. Land shortage becomes urgent and dire. With the inadequate provision of residential land, housing supply is also adversely affected.Insufficient housing supply leads to surging property and rental price in the private market. According to the Rating and Valuation Department (RVD), the overall private domestic price index peaked in June 2017 at 336.1. Keen housing demand is also observed in the private rental market. RVD statistics showed that the domestic rental index also reached the peak at 183.6 in June 2017 and the vacancy rate of about 3.8% as at the end-2016, which is much lower than the average vacancy rate of 5% from 1996 to 2015 (Development Bureau, 2017). In addition, there is soaring housing demand in public housing. As at the end-December 2021, the average waiting time for general applicants was 5.7 years, which is nearly double of the Housing Authority’s target for providing the first flat offer to general applicants at around three years on average (Housing Authority, 2021). Identifying and securing sufficient land to meet both current and anticipated pressing housing demand becomes a key challenge of the government. In the light of this, the government has established a dedicated task force (Task Force on Land Supply) in September 2017 and appointed 30 professionals from different disciplines, such as planning, engineering, academia and think tank, to take a Marco-review on the land supply sources, look for feasible options as well as consider the pros and cons of various options. 18 land supply options were worked out for the public to make choices in the public engagement exercise. Among the 18 choices, the development area on the Periphery of Country Parks was regarded as one of the land supplies sources. This option does not only include the Hong Kong Housing Society’s studies on developing Two Pilot Areas on the Periphery of Tai Lam and Man On Shan Country Parks, but also include developing more areas on the periphery of Country Parks. The proposed option received overwhelming attention from the public and aroused debates in various perspectives. Its ecological value, recreational value, financial viability and even legitimacy were discussed. However, spatial analysis on the suitability of having residential development in Country Parks has not been conducted. Therefore, in this study, multi criteria GIS analysis is conducted to evaluate the geographic suitability of Hong Kong Country Parks for residential purpose with the consideration of various criteria.
Exploring Two Streptomyces Species to Control Rhizoctonia solani in Tomato

Streptomyces species are effective biocontrol agents toward many plant pathogens. These microorganisms are well known for producing secondary metabolites, promoting plant growth and inducing plant defense mechanisms. In this study, the ability of tomato root-colonizing Streptomyces strains to trigger the resistance against Rhizoctonia solani (J.G. Kühn) AG4 was investigated. For this goal, we evaluated the pattern of LOXB and PAL1 genes expression changes upon pathogen inoculation in primed tomato plants. The results revealed that Streptomyces globisporous (Krasil'nikov) strain F8 and S. praecox (Millard and Burr) strain R7 were able to enhance the expression of lipoxygenase and phenylalanine ammonia lyase in tomato plants. This finding suggests that Streptomyces strains F8 and R7 may trigger jasmonic acid and phenyl propanoid signaling pathways in plants, therefore, resulting an induced defense status in tomatoes against R. solani. Biochemical characterization of these Streptomyces strains showed that they were strong producers of siderophores. S. praecox strain R7 produced siderophores of hyderoxamate and catechol types and S. globisporous strain F8 produced a phenolic siderophore. Moreover, they also produced protease while only the S. praecox strain R7 was able to produce amylase. Taken together, these results indicate that S. globisporous strain F8 and S. praecox strain R7 promote plant growth and reduces disease and hence are suitable for future in depth and field studies with the aim to attain appropriate biocontrol agents to protect tomatoes against R. solani.
Design, Manufacture, and Test of a Rotary Transformer for Contactless Power Transfer System

In traditional applications such as machine field excitation, where power transfer from stationary to rotary side is needed, contact slip rings are often adopted. However, this kind of slip ring is easy to wear and needs frequent maintenance. In a contactless power transfer system, mechanical slip rings can be removed which will largely increase the system reliability. In this article, a contactless power transfer device using wireless power transfer (WPT) is designed. Its performances are simulated by finite-element method. To increase the system power rate and efficiency, the device is operated under high frequency. Thus, high-frequency ferromagnetic materials and Litz wires are used. Moreover, compensation circuits are added to improve the coupling between the primary and secondary sides. At last, a prototype is built and tested. From the experimental results, the functions and performances of the device are well verified.
Evolution of Pre-service Teachers’ Perceptions about Classroom Management and Student Misbehavior in an Inquiry-based Classroom Management Course

ABSTRACT This study investigated how pre-service teachers’ perceptions about classroom management and student misbehavior evolved in an inquiry-based classroom management course. Twenty-four pre-service teachers in Northern Cyprus participated in the study. Data were collected through writing prompts. The results showed that most of the pre-service teachers regarded the major goal of classroom management as establishing discipline in the classroom through deploying reactive disciplinary strategies prior to taking the course. Their conceptualization of classroom management changed, and they mostly started to include proactive strategies to create a learning environment fostering meaningful learning and enhancing students’ social and emotional development. Their approach to student misbehavior became more nuanced and informed with more elaboration in terms of a) the context in which it would appear, (b) its frequency of happening, (c) its severity, and (d) its possible effects on students, wider audience, and teaching-learning processes.
Catchments of German surface water bodies

The European Water Framework Directive demands to assess and report the chemical and ecological status of water bodies (WB). Linking their status to drivers and pressures and deriving suitable mitigation measures require knowledge of the shape and area of WB catchments. We derived a network of 26 570 WB catchments in Germany using the hydrologically‐defined drainage basins of the German federal states. We established a network of 338 149 drainage basins. This network underwent plausibility checks and a validation with the catchment areas of 348 monitoring stations across Germany. To this network, we assigned the longest intersecting or the next downstream WB code. To account for geometric inaccuracies we revised spurious intersections resulting in splittings and cycles in the WB network. As WB may be ecologically but not hydrologically well defined, we split them at confluences and intersections. The network of drainage basins matched the monitoring stations with a Nash‐Sutcliffe efficiency of 1.00. The final WB network contained 11 005 out of the 11 586 original WBs longer than 1 m. The corresponding local catchment areas range from <<0.0001 to 446 km2, with a median of 10 km2. The dataset combines the requirements of hydrological and ecological modelling applications at basin or national scales with the needs of the EU reporting which can foster their acceptance by state authorities and river‐basin management.
Teaching and Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Topic Modeling Study

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused significant disruption to teaching and learning activities at all levels. Faculty, students, institutions, and parents have had to rapidly adapt and adopt measures to make the best use of available resources, tools and teaching strategies. While much of the online teaching pedagogies have been theoretically and practically explored to a limited extent, the scale at which these were deployed was unprecedented. This has led a large number of researchers to share challenges, solutions and knowledge gleaned during this period. The main aim of this work was to thematically model the literature related to teaching and learning during, and about, COVID-19. Abstracts and metadata of literature were extracted from Scopus, and topic modeling was used to identify the key research themes. The research encompassed diverse scientific disciplines, including social sciences, computer science, and life sciences, as well as learnings in support systems, including libraries, information technology, and mental health. The following six key themes were identified: (i) the impact of COVID-19 on higher education institutions, and challenges faced by these institutions; (ii) the use of various tools and teaching strategies employed by these institutions; (iii) the teaching and learning experience of schools and school teachers; (iv) the impact of COVID-19 on the training of healthcare workers; (v) the learnings about COVID-19, and treatment strategies from patients; and (vi) the mental health of students as a result of COVID-19 and e-learning. Regardless of the key themes, what stood out was the inequities in education as a result of the digital divide. This has had a huge impact not only in middle- and low-income nations, but also in several parts of the developed world. Several important lessons have been learned, which, no doubt, will be actively incorporated into teaching and learning practices and teacher training. Nonetheless, the full effect of these unprecedented educational adaptions on basic education, expert training, and mental health of all stakeholders is yet to be fully fathomed.
Schnellfreisetzende,feste darreichungsform zur oralen applikation schwerlöslicher wirkstoffe

Die vorliegende Erfindung befasst sich mit festen, einzeldosierten Darreichungsformen zur beschleunigten Freisetzung von schwerloslichen Wirkstoffen. Die Darreichungsformen basieren auf einer koharenten, in physiologischen Flussigkeiten schnell zerfallenden Matrix. In der Matrix sind ein oder mehrere schwerlosliche Wirkstoffe in Form von schnellfreisetzenden Mikro- oder Nanokapseln enthalten. Die Darreichungsform eignet sich besonders zur Verabreichung von solchen schwerloslichen Wirkstoffen, bei denen ein schneller Wirkungseintritt erwunscht ist.
The assessment of the protein profiles and oxidant/antioxidat status in conjunctival Brucella melitensis Rev1 vaccinated sheep

Brucellosis is a zoonotic and economically significant animal disease worldwide. The most frequently used vaccine to avoid brucellosis in small ruminants is the Rev.1 conjunctival Brucella melitensis vaccine. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of B.melitensis Rev.1 conjunctival vaccine on total protein, albumin, globulin levels, protein profiles and oxidant/antioxidant status in sheep. Ten sheep were used as animal material for this purpose. The bloods taken before vaccination were used as negative control. The sera obtained one month after administration of single dose B.melitensis vaccine were used as experimental materials. The spectrophotometric method estimated total protein, albumin, globulin levels, total antioxidant capacity (TAS), and total oxidant capacity (TOS). Protein profile was determined by sodium-dodecyl-sulphate and native-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis methods. It was determined that total protein and globulin levels increased slightly in sero positive sheep (P>0.05). There was no difference for protein profiles in both electrophoresis methods. The band densities of albumin decreased but gamma globulin increased slightly after vaccination. TAS levels decreased significantly (P<0.05), but TOS levels increased slightly (P>0.05). In conclusion, Rev.1 conjunctival Brucella vaccine was thought to be safe to use to prevent Brucellosis, and the addition of antioxidant after vaccination can reduce oxidative stress.
Kinematics of a planar slider-crank linkage in screw form

This paper investigates the forward and inverse kinematics in screw coordinates for a planar slider-crank linkage. According to the definition of a screw, both the angular velocity of a rigid body and the linear velocity of a point on it are expressed in screw components. Through numerical integration on the velocity solution, we get the displacement. Through numerical differential interpolation of velocity, we gain the acceleration of any joint. Traditionally, position and angular parameters are usually the only variables for establishing the displacement equations of a mechanism. For a series mechanism, the forward kinematics can be expressed explicitly in the variable of position parameters while the inverse kinematics will have to resort to numerical algorithms because of the multiplicity of solution. For a parallel mechanism, the inverse kinematics can be expressed explicitly in the variable of position parameters of the end effector while the forward kinematics will have to resort to numerical algorithms because of the nonlinearity of system. Therefore this will surely lead to second order numerical differential interpolation for the calculation of accelerations. The most prominent merit of this kinematic algorithm is that we only need the first order numerical differential interpolation for computing the acceleration. To calculate the displacement, we also only need the first order numerical integral of the velocity. This benefit stems from the screw the coordinates of which are velocity components. The example of planar four-bar and five-bar slider-crank linkages validate this algorithm. It is especially suited to developing numerical algorithms for forward and inverse velocity, displacement and acceleration of a linkage.
Short-term volatility forecasting with kernel support vector regression and Markov switching multifractal model

In volatility forecasting literature, Markov switching multifractal (MSM) models are well known for capturing many important stylized facts such as long memory and fat tails. MSM delivers stronger performance both in- and out-of-sample than GARCH-type models in long-term forecasts. However, the literature shows that MSM forecasts only slightly improve on GARCH(1,1) at short-term intervals. This indicates that there may exist certain patterns to be discovered in the innovation part . To enhance MSM's prediction accuracy at the short-term level with higher frequency data, a hybrid model of the MSM model and support vector regression (SVR) is proposed, in which a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to optimize hyperparameters of the support vector regression in the scope of constraint permission. The method is referred to as MSM-PSO-SVR. Further, we introduce the Fourier kernel MSM-PSO-SVR and evaluate the performance of various MSM-PSO-SVR models in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and the mean squared error (MSE) with one-minute data of the exchange traded fund (ETF) SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (ticker symbol: SPY). The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other competing peer models and in particular, the selection of SVR kernel might yield significant boosts in forecasting ability. Results of Hansen's Superior Predictive Ability test further validate the conclusion.
Titanium carbide MXene for generating Q‐switched pulses in erbium‐doped fiber laser cavity

In this paper, a new thin‐film saturable absorber (SA) that belongs to the MXene family is used to generate Q‐switched laser pulses. In constructing the SA, titanium carbide (Ti3C2Tx) powder obtained through a selective etching process is dispersed in polyvinyl alcohol solution before the mixture is dried to form a thin film. A small piece of the film is placed between two fiber ferrules to form a SA device and added to a laser cavity of an erbium‐doped fiber laser to produce Q‐switched pulses in the region of 1561 nm. The repetition rate of the pulses can be varied between 45.25 and 65.59 kHz with the corresponding pulse width of 5.04–3.11 μs when the pump power is increased from 29.8 to 66.3 mW. At the maximum output power of 8.17 mW, the highest pulse energy of 125 nJ is obtained.
Biotic Response to Early Eocene Warming Events: Integrated Record From Offshore Zealandia, North Tasman Sea

Environmental and biotic responses to early Eocene hyperthermal events in the southwest Pacific are critical for global paleoclimate reconstructions during Cenozoic greenhouse intervals, but detailed multidisciplinary studies are generally missing from this time and location. Eocene carbonate sediments were recovered during International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 371 at Site U1510 on southern Lord Howe Rise in the Tasman Sea. Part of the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO; 53.26–49.14 Ma) and superimposed hyperthermal events have been identified based on refined calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphic data and carbon stable isotope records on bulk sediment and benthic foraminifera. Four negative carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) associated with negative oxygen isotope excursions are recognized within the EECO. Comparison with a global compilation of sites indicates these CIEs correlate to the K event (Eocene Thermal Maximum 3), and tentatively to the S, T, and U events. Sediments with a high carbonate content throughout the EECO provide an excellent opportunity to examine these CIEs, as carbonate dissolution often impacts correlative records elsewhere. Benthic foraminifera and calcareous nannoplankton taxa indicative of warm waters are most abundant during the K event, the most prominent hyperthermal of the EECO. Eutrophication of surface waters during the K event did not lead to increased trophic conditions at the seafloor, whereas a coupled response is observed during smaller hyperthermals. The biotic turnover sheds new light on the paleoenvironmental consequences of hyperthermal events.
Effect of Textural Properties and Presence of Co-Cation on NH3-SCR Activity of Cu-Exchanged ZSM-5

Comparative studies over micro-/mesoporous Cu-containing zeolites ZSM-5 prepared by top-down treatment involving NaOH, TPAOH or mixture of NaOH/TPAOH (tetrapropylammonium hydroxide) were conducted. The results of the catalytic data revealed the highest activity of the Cu-ZSM-5 catalyst both in the absence and presence of water vapor. The physico-chemical characterization (diffuse reflectance UV-Vis (DR UV-Vis), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, temperature-programmed desorption of NOx (TPD-NOx), and microkinetic modeling) results indicated that the microporous structure of ZSM-5 effectively stabilized isolated Cu ion monomers. Besides the attempts targeted to the modification of the textural properties of the parent ZSM-5, in the next approach, we studied the effect of the co-presence of sodium and copper cations in the microporous H-ZSM-5. The presence of co-cation promoted the evolution of [Cu–O–Cu]2+ dimers that bind NOx strongly with the desorption energy barrier of least 80 kJ mol−1. Water presence in the gas phase significantly decreases the rate of ammonia oxidation, while the reaction rates and activation energies of NH3-SCR remain unaffected.
Systematic reviews and meta‐analyses in engineering education

Olusola O. Adesope, Washington State University (Lead Guest Editor) Maura Borrego, University of Texas at Austin Jeffrey Froyd, The Ohio State University John C. Nesbit, Simon Fraser University, Canada Peng Peng, University of Texas at Austin Emily Fyfe, Indiana University Bloomington Nathaniel Hunsu, University of Georgia, Athens Zhe Wang, East China Normal University Jason Power, University of Limerick, Ireland Lishan Zhang, Central China Normal University Yuqin Yang, Central China Normal University
Hard-of-Hearing (HH) Students’ Perceptions of Multimodal EFL Learning

Learners with hearing loss tend to learn visually. It attracted a teacher of hard-of-hearing (HH) students in a special needs school to implement multimodality that integrated all verbal and visual semiotic modes and used ICT in her English classroom. The study aims to explore the students’ perceptions of multimodal English learning. The interview of the two females and one male participant individually. In addition to the data gained from the interview, students' diaries were also analyzed based on themes that emerged from the codes and categories. The data were triangulated by checking the interviews with the diaries and confirming with the teacher and the students' parents. The findings of the study revealed both positive and negative perceptions emerged. The students perceived ICT-based multimodal learning positively to help them learn new vocabularies and understand a story quickly, increase their motivation to learn, improve their engagement, and make them able to learn autonomously. Meanwhile, they perceived the EFL learning negatively so that it took much time to learn all of the materials. Also, the students felt unconfident in performing activities. Therefore, it is recommended for HH teachers to provide more significant assistance, time, and patience to successfully support students in learning English.