Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Triterpenoid saponins from Anemone tetrasepala

From methanol extracts of the whole plants of Anemone tetrasepala Royle, a new triterpenoid saponin, named tetrasepaloside (1), along with oleanolic acid 3-O-alpha -gluccopyranosyl (1 -->2)-alpha -arabinoside (2), HN-saponin F (3), pulsatiloside C (4), akebia saponin D (5), cauloside D (6), ciwujianoside A(1)(7) and cauloside F (8), was isolated. By means of chemical degradation and spectral analysis, including 2D-NMR spectroscopic methods (H-1-(HCOSY)-H-1, HMBC and HMQC), the structure of 1 was elucidated as 23-O-(2 ' ,3 ' -monoacetonide)-alpha -ribofuranosyl-hederagenin-28-O-alpha -rhamnopyranosyl( 1 -->4)-beta -glucopyranosyl( 1 -->6)-beta -gulcopyranoside. All these compounds were reported for the first time from this plant.
Adversarial Attacks on CFO-Based Continuous Physical Layer Authentication: A Game Theoretic Study

5G and beyond 5G low power wireless networks make Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) applications capable of serving massive amounts of devices and machines. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless networks, it is crucial to secure the communication between these devices and machines from spoofing and interception attacks. This paper is concerned with the security of carrier frequency offset (CFO) based continuous physical layer authentication. The interaction between an attacker and a defender is modeled as a dynamic discrete leader-follower game with imperfect information. In the considered model, a legitimate user (Alice) communicates with the defender/operator (Bob) and is authorized by her CFO continuously. The attacker (Eve), by listening/eavesdropping the communication between Alice and Bob, tries to learn the CFO characteristics of Alice and aims to inject malicious packets to Bob by impersonating Alice. First, by showing that the optimal attacker strategy is a threshold policy, an optimization problem of the attacker with exponentially growing action space is reduced to a tractable integer optimization problem with a single parameter, then the corresponding defender cost is derived. Extensive simulations illustrate the characteristics of optimal strategies/utilities of the players depending on the actions, and show that the defender’s optimal false positive rate causes attack success probabilities to be in the order of 0.99. The results show the importance of the parameters while finding the balance between system security and efficiency.
Towards Speech Technologies for Romani Language in Slovakia

This work summarizes activities at the Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (IISAS) in the research and development of speech technologies in the language of the Roma minority in Slovakia. Basic facts on orthography, phonetics, and prosody of the Romani language are given. The design of the text corpus, the speech database and speech synthesizers is described. The challenges that still have to be tackled in speech recognition are briefly mentioned. The current research in human-machine communication using robotic head is presented and its possible use in the education of Romani children is discussed.
N ov 2 00 8 GLOBAL SLIM ACCRETION DISK SOLUTIONS REVISITED

We show that there exists a maximal possible accretion rate, beyond which global slim disk solutions cannot be constructed because in the vertical direction the gravitational force would be unable to balance the pressure force to gather the accreted matter. The principle for this restriction is the same as that for the Eddington luminosity and the corresponding critical accretion rate, which were derived for spherical accretion by considering the same force balance in the radial direction. If the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium is waived and vertical motion is included, this restriction may become even more serious as the value of the maximal possible accretion rate becomes smaller. Previous understanding in the literature that global slim disk solutions could stand for any large accretion rates is due to the overestimation of the vertical gravitational force by using an approximate potential. For accretion flows with large accretion rates at large radii, outflows seem unavoidable in order for the accretion flow to reduce the accretion rate and follow a global solution till the central black hole. Subject headings: accretion, accretion disks black hole physics hydrodynamics
A Reinforcement Learning Hyper-heuristic for Water Distribution Network Optimisation

The Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) optimisation problem focuses on finding the combination of pipes from a collection of discrete sizes available to construct a network of pipes with minimum monetary cost. It is one of the most significant problems faced by WDN engineers. This problem belongs to the class of difficult combinatorial optimisation problems, whose optimal solution is hard to find, due to its large search space. Hyper-heuristics are high-level search algorithms that explore the space of heuristics rather than the space of solutions in a given optimisation problem. In this work, different selection hyper-heuristics were proposed and empirically analysed in the WDN optimisation problem, with the goal of minimising the network’s cost. New York Tunnels network benchmark was used to test the performance of these hyper-heuristics including the Reinforcement Learning (RL) hyper-heuristic method, that succeeded in achieving improved results.
Effects of Culture Medium and Mother Plant Condition on Almond (Prunus dulcis Mill.) Shoot Proliferation from Nodal Segments

In this research, the effects of season (spring and winter), culture medium and 6-benzyladenine (BA) on almond shoot proliferation were evaluated. Nodal segments with a single bud from 4 year-old grafts of two late-flowering almond cultivars, ‘Shahrood 8’ and ‘Shahrood 10’ were used as explants. Fungal and bacterial infections were completely eliminated using an oven infusion solution of fresh olive leaves. In both cultivars, BA at 1.5 and 2 mg/l resulted in the highest proliferation rate and Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium was superior to Woody Plant Medium (WPM) and modified Quoirin and Lepoivre (MQL) medium. In ‘Shahrood 8’, the highest shoot proliferation rate (5.83 shoots/explant) occurred in winter, using 2 mg/l BA, while in spring and with the same hormonal regulation, only 4.00 shoots/explant were produced. Conversely, in ‘Shahrood 10’, an average of 5.5 shoots/explant was produced at 1.5 mg/l BA, which was significantly higher than with 2 mg/l BA, and no significant differences were found when comparing winter with spring. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Synthesis and biological evaluation of new natural phenolic 2E, 4E, 6E octatrienoic esters

In the present study the esterification of the hydroxyl groups of resveratrol, caffeic acid, ferulic acid and ß-sitosterol with an antioxidant polyconjugated fatty acid, 2E,4E,6E-octatrienoic acid, was achieved. As the selective esterification of hydroxyl groups of natural compounds can affect their biological activity, a selective esterification of resveratrol and caffeic acid was performed by an enzymatic approach. The new resulting compounds were characterized spectroscopically (FT-IR, NMR mono and bidimensional techniques); when necessary the experimental data were integrated by quantum chemical calculations. The antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and proliferative activity was evaluated. The good results encourage the use of these molecules as antioxidant and/or anti-inflammatory agents. in dermocosmetic application.
The Marginal Propensity to Consume for Different Socio-economic Groups

This paper investigates the marginal propensity to consume for the UK households across different socio-economic groups. It uses the Family Expenditure Survey, a repeated cross section of British Households, which reports expenditure, income, and household characteristics from quarter 1 of 1986 to quarter 1 of 2016. Since each household is interviewed only once we construct pseudopanels based on the socio-economic status of the household head. We find that households with higher socio-economic status have lower marginal propensity to consume. We also find that the marginal propensity to consume increased after the 2007-2009 financial crisis. This study supports the hypothesis that credit constraints are more serious for lower income groups.
U NCONDITIONAL S YNTHESIS OF C OMPLEX S CENES U SING A SEMANTIC BOTTLENECK

Coupling the high-ﬁdelity generation capabilities of label-conditional image synthesis methods with the ﬂexibility of unconditional generative models, we propose a semantic bottleneck GAN model for unconditional synthesis of complex scenes especially when the number of training examples is small. We assume pixel-wise segmentation labels are available during training and use them to learn the scene structure. During inference, our model ﬁrst synthesizes a realistic segmentation layout from scratch, then synthesizes a realistic scene conditioned on that layout. For the former, we use an unconditional progressive segmentation generation network that captures the distribution of realistic semantic scene layouts. For the latter, we use a conditional segmentation-to-image synthesis network that captures the distribution of photo-realistic images conditioned on the semantic layout. When trained end-to-end, the resulting model outperforms state-of-the-art generative models in unsupervised image synthesis on two challenging domains in terms of the Fr ´ echet Inception Distance and perceptual evaluations. Moreover, we demonstrate that the end-to-end training signiﬁcantly improves the segmentation-to-image synthesis sub-network, which results in superior performance over the state-of-the-art when conditioning on real segmentation layouts.
Drawing on two methodological approaches: A collaborative approach to interview interpretation

Explicating interview approaches is significant for education research in understanding how the nuances of meaning from personal narratives uncover challenges and opportunities for investigating the lived experience across contexts. This paper considers interview approaches that focus on the reflexivity and meaning-making possible over a longitudinal timeframe for researcher and interviewee. Two methodological frameworks enabled a narrative oral history interview and a phenomenological lifeworld interview to establish variation in individual meaning-making, whilst eliciting understandings of shared social phenomena. We elucidate examples shared from the experience of teachers deemed as expert and interrogate the deliberations taken throughout a three-interview process. Reflexivity and the researcher’s attendance to language, timing and open-ended prompting are some techniques considered for clarifying meaning in a small-scale Australian study. We argue that interrogating interview approaches for accessing deeper meaning-making of teacher professional learning further develops our understanding of interviewer-interviewee dynamics and the application of analytical frames.
Modeling the relationship between microbial biomass and total viable count for a new bacterial isolate used in biodesulfurization of petroleum and its fractions

ABSTRACT Microbial parameters in a biodesulfurization batch process are often needed to be defined as mass (mg/mL) rather than total viable count (cells/mL) or optical density. This study illustrates mathematical correlations between different techniques used for following up the growth of a new biodesulfurizing bacterial isolate.
Generalized enamel hypoplasia in a dog: a case report

A one-year-old, spayed female Welsh Corgi dog referred to the dental and oral clinic with chief complaint of apparent pitted, rough teeth surfaces, stained a tan to dark brown color. The dog was diagnosed with diffused enamel hypoplasia with no evidence of endodontic disease or malformation of tooth root. A restorative procedure with nanohybrid composite resin was performed. After treatment, the dog showed a good outcome with a smooth tooth surface, restorative material replaced to cover the previous defect and no evidence of pain or discomfort. Even though enamel hypoplasia is a rare, this condition remains an important problem that can lead to severe problems of dental status in the future. This is the first report of generalized enamel hypoplasia in a canine clinical case at Prasu-Arthorn Animal Hospital, the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the Mahidol University with treatment and a 20 months follow up.
Considering business perception in assessing e-service quality in the Jordanian government

Article history: Received: September 18, 2020 Received in revised format: November 18 2020 Accepted: December 12, 2020 Available online: December 15, 2020 Considering the speedy developments of e-services usages, countries are thriving to present better egovernment services; particularly, regarding the business sector. Therefore, the matter of evaluating egovernment service quality from the business perspective has become an important issue to study. This paper discussed how the business sector perceive the e-services provided by Jordanian government, which is basically derived based on the lack of literature and models addressing such issue. In this regard, this study aims to fill this existed gap. To tackle this problem, a conceptual framework of SERVQUAL questionnaire was developed and proposed. Then, the proposed model was verified and validated. The results of this paper concluded that business perceives different gaps between the actual and anticipated e-services in which the actual recorded less than the anticipated. Additionally, the gaps revealed in the developed SERVQUAL model, which included five dimensions showed, that only one element was found to be statistically insignificant and that is the Security and Privacy. Finally, the proposed model was revised and modified. © 2021 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada
Relation between sludge properties and filterability in MBR: Under infinite SRT

A laboratory-scale submerged membrane bioreactor (MBR) was continuously operated for 100 d at an infinite sludge retention time (SRT) with the aim of identifying possible relation between the filterability of mixed liquor and sludge properties, such as extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), soluble microbial products (SMP), viscosity of mixed liquor, zeta potential of flocs and particle size distributions (PSD). Research results confirmed that MBR can operate with a complete sludge retention ensuring good treatment performances for COD and NH 3 -N. However, the long term operation (about 40 d) of MBR with no sludge discharge had a negative influence on sludge filterability, and an increase in membrane fouling rates with the time was observed. There as a strong correlation between the sludge filterability and the fouling rate. Among the different sludge properties parameters, the concentration SMP and EPS had a more closely correlation with the sludge filterability. The concentrations of SMP, especially SMP with MW above 10 kDa, had a strong direct correlation to the filterability of mixed sludge. The protein fractions in EPS were biodegradable and available for microorganism metabolism after about 60 days, and the carbohydrates in EPS had a significantly negative effect on sludge filterability in MBR at an infinite SRT.
Chaos and bifurcation in time delayed third order phase-locked loop

In this paper, the modern nonlinear theory is applied to a third order phase locked loop (PLL) with a feedback time delay. Due to this delay, different behaviors that are not accounted for in a conventional PLL model are identified, namely, oscillatory instability, periodic doubling and chaos. Firstly, a Pade approximation is used to model the time delay where it is utilized in deriving the state space representation of the PLL under investigation. The PLL under consideration is simulated with and without time delay. It is shown that for certain loop gain (control parameter) and time delay values, the system changes its stability and becomes chaotic. Simulations show that the PLL with time delay becomes chaotic for control parameter value less than the one without time delay, i.e, the stable region becomes narrower. Moreover, the chaotic region becomes wider as time delay increases.
Enhancing Retailers’ Operations Performance with Lean Six Sigma Approach

Retailers face many challenges due to uncertain business environment negatively influencing their performance. In this context, Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployment in the retail industry provides various benefits in terms of higher efficiency and effectiveness. LSS is robust and flexible in nature and hence fits well into the fast-paced and competitive retail environment. LSS transforms the various retail operations and creates competitive advantages by building new operational capabilities for the retailers. To highlight this transformation, the research provides a clear roadmap for LSS deployment in the retail industry. Research develops retail LSS synergy framework as well as financial evaluation metric and underscores that LSS deployment positively affect retailers’ business performance. By using these frameworks, research also discusses various illustrations to highlight successful deployment of LSS by retailers.
Application of AHP algorithm on power distribution of load shedding in island microgrid

This paper proposes a method of load shedding in a microgrid system operated in an Island Mode, which is disconnected with the main power grid and balanced loss of the electrical power. This proposed method calculates the minimum value of the shed power with reference to renewable energy sources such as wind power generator, solar energy and the ability to control the frequency of the generator to restore the frequency to the allowable range and reduce the amount of load that needs to be shed. Computing the load importance factor (LIF) using AHP algorithm supports to determine the order of which load to be shed. The damaged outcome of load shedding, thus, will be noticeably reduced. The experimental results of this proposed method is demonstrated by simulating on IEEE 16-Bus microgrid system with six power sources.
WEBLOGS IN THE TRAINING OF GERMAN-SPEAKING TEACHERS IN ROMANIA – PLANNING, DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, EVALUATION AND DISCUSSION USING THE EXAMPLE OF PROF-ES.COM

The present study deals with the use of a weblog in the further training of teachers at Romanian public schools with German teaching. The question whether an educational blog meets the needs, wishes and expectations of the target group was investigated using the IMMS questionnaire based on the ARCS model by Keller (1983, 1987). The evaluation results show a positive impact of the blog on the study participants and point out the importance of motivational factors in designing online learning content. This referred to the multimedia narrative presentation and the clear structuring of current psycho-educational topics with practical relevance for the target group.
Pain track analysis during gestation using machine learning techniques

During the gestation period women experience Braxton Hicks which is called the false labor, contractions during the second trimester. These contractions are not in regular intervals and also they are often unnoticed. The real labour or the true labour contractions develop late in the third trimester of the gestation usually beyond 36th week (excluding pre-term birth). Some women often fail to identify these pains in the third trimester of the gestation where an efficient facial recognition algorithm along with the support vector machine (SVM) helps them to identify these pains and take optimum care of themselves. The authors in this paper convey a mechanism to identify the pains effectively by creating a database of images pertaining to the pregnant women, her emotional states through out the pregnancy. Using MATLAB the algorithm of decision tree is implemented and the values obtained from them help us analyze the pain type efficiently.
Feature engineering and long short-term memory for energy use of appliances prediction

Electric energy consumption in a residential household is one of the key factors that affect the overall national electricity demand. Household appliances are one of the most electricity consumers in a residential household. Therefore, it is crucial to make a proper prediction for the electricity consumption of these appliances. This research implemented feature engineering technique and long short-term memory (LSTM) as a model predictor. Principal component analysis (PCA) was implemented as a feature extractor by reducing the final 62 features to 25 principal components for the LSTM inputs. Based on the experiments, the two-layered LSTM model (composed by 25 and 20 neurons for the first and second later respectively) with lookback number of 3 found to give the best performance with the error rates of 62.013 and 26.982 for root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean average error (MAE), respectively.
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store

FoundationDB is an open source transactional key value store created more than ten years ago. It is one of the first systems to combine the flexibility and scalability of NoSQL architectures with the power of ACID transactions (a.k.a. NewSQL). FoundationDB adopts an unbundled architecture that decouples an in-memory transaction management system, a distributed storage system, and a built-in distributed configuration system. Each sub-system can be independently provisioned and configured to achieve the desired scalability, high-availability and fault tolerance properties. FoundationDB uniquely integrates a deterministic simulation framework, used to test every new feature of the system under a myriad of possible faults. This rigorous testing makes FoundationDB extremely stable and allows developers to introduce and release new features in a rapid cadence. FoundationDB offers a minimal and carefully chosen feature set, which has enabled a range of disparate systems (from semi-relational databases, document and object stores, to graph databases and more) to be built as layers on top. FoundationDB is the underpinning of cloud infrastructure at Apple, Snowflake and other companies, due to its consistency, robustness and availability for storing user data, system metadata and configuration, and other critical information.
Predictive model of water stress in tenera oil palm by means of spectral signature methods

Agriculture as a competitive business, seeks to improve productivity within crops with a more sustainable environmental management. It is important that agriculture includes new technologies that allow it to generate differential, precise and real-time information. In Colombia, the current lack of knowledge about techniques that allow early identification of water stress in African palm could generate a loss in the investment made in the fertilization of the crop, cause an increase in diseases, pests, and susceptibility to compaction or abortions in female flowers that would lead to decreases in production. In this work, a predictive model is established to quantify water stress based on spectral, physiological and soil information in African palm plants. To this end, a study was carried out in an oil palm plantation where treatments were established with 3 ranges of humidity. It was found that the indices with the highest correlation with the biophysical variable soil moisture were: NDVI_1 and NDVI_16 for treatment 1, SR_4 for treatment 2 and NDVI_16 and NDVI_20 for treatment 3. Finally, the third order polynomial regression model that obtained higher correlation coefficients of Pearson R^2=0.73 was selected as the most suitable model to estimate soil moisture content for treatments 2 and 3.