Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficiency of modern large-area photodetectors

The review of computational models and numerical results for end-to-end design of microchannel plate (MCP) amplifiers were presented. We use “microscopic” Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, empirical theories, and close comparison to experiment to obtain the influence of back-scattered electrons and the saturation effect on the emission properties of materials, in order to study the gain and transit times for various MCPs. We have applied this method to Al2O3, MgO emission materials of various thickness and surface quality. The experimental secondary emission yield (SEY) data were obtained at normal electron impacts and were used as the reference data for the adjustment of our MC simulations. The SEY at oblique angles of the primary electrons in the interval of 0 80° were calculated. The energy dependence of backscattered electron coefficients (BSC) for various primary electron incidence angles were calculated by MC for both materials and the results were compared to experimental “average” values obtained in the literature. Both SEY and BSC data were used for our “macroscopic” trajectory simulation that models of MCP amplifiers as whole devices, and is capable of gain and transit time calculations. The deposition and characterization experiments were conducted for the Large Area Picosecond Photodetector (LAPPD) project at Argonne National Laboratory.
Retinoic Acid Promotes Mucosal and Systemic Immune Responses after Mucosal Priming and Systemic Boosting in Mice

Objective: Few mucosal vaccines are available for human use, none of which are recombinant proteins or subunits of pathogens, owing to the lack of potent and safe mucosal adjuvants. Given the crucial role of retinoic acid (RA) in favouring dendritic cell differentiation, imprinting a mucosal homing capacity on T and B cells, as well as its potential to promote the differentiation of IgA-producing plasma cells, we evaluated the capacity of RA to improve mucosal vaccinations. Study design: BALB/c mice were treated for eight days with RA or its vehicle and then intranasally immunized with tetanus toxoid (TT) with or without CT and boosted three times. Alternatively, mice treated with RA or its vehicle, were exposed to intranasal delivery of TT alone and boosted systemically with TT and Alum. Serum and mucosal Ag-specific antibody responses were examined 2 weeks and 8 months after the priming. Results: Treatment with RA synergises with the adjuvant capacity of CT to enhance both systemic and mucosal TT-specific antibody responses. The combination of mucosal priming with Ag alone, followed by a boost with systemic adjuvant was also evaluated. Mice treated with RA showed a higher titer of mucosal IgA compared to untreated mice, after intranasal priming with TT followed by a systemic boost with TT plus Alum. After eight months, higher IgG TT-specific antibodies in the serum and a higher frequency of TT-specific IgG and IgA secreting cells were detected in the bone marrow of mice treated with RA as compared to untreated mice. Higher percentages of proliferating CD4 and CD8 T cells upon TT stimulation were found in the spleens, in the mesenteric lymph nodes and in the colonic lamina propria of mice treated with RA. Conclusion: This approach induces mucosal immunity in the absence of mucosal adjuvants and improves the effectiveness of mucosally-delivered vaccine.
Comparative Analysis of the Performance of Different Photovoltaic (PV) Technologies Based on PVSyst Thermal Model

This paper presents the effect of ambient meteorological parameters on the performance of different photovoltaic (PV) technologies based on PVSyst thermal model. The PV technologies considered are: monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, microcrystalline and cadmium telluride. The study is conducted with hourly meteorological data obtained from PVSyst software meteo-file for Dakar in Senegal, with site coordinate of 14.5° N and 17.0° W. The results show that the different PV technologies have the same cell temperature because PVSyst uses default adsorption coefficient of 0.9 for the different PV technologies. However, the performance of the different PV technologies in response to the cell temperature differs in respect of their thermal coefficient. Among the five PV technologies studied, amorphous silicon has the lowest thermal coefficient and the best thermal response but the worst solar energy conversion efficiency. This means that amorphous silicon would occupy much more space to achieve the same energy output as the other PV technologies studied. Conversely, polycrystalline silicon has the highest thermal coefficient and the worst thermal response but its solar energy conversion efficiency is relatively higher than those of other PV technologies except monocrystalline silicon. The polycrystalline silicon with the same PV module size will yield more energy than its equivalent sized amorphous silicon PV module.
Gene expression signature associated with metastasis of stomach adenocarcinoma

Metastasis is the leading cause of death for stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD). Molecular mechanism underlying its metastasis is still unclear. Identification of gene expression signature involved in metastasis is highly desirable. The cancer genome atlas (TCGA) data was used to obtain the mRNA expression profiles for metastatic and non-metastatic STAD samples, respectively. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified and the DEGs specifically appeared in metastatic STAD were further screened. Functional enrichment and PPI network of the DEGs were performed to determine their significance in STAD metastasis. Totally, 21 metastatic and 11 nonmetastatic STAD samples were obtained, which have tumor and adjacent normal tissue in each sample. Integrated analysis led to 2979 DEGs in metastatic STAD and 491 DEGs in non-metastatic STAD with FDR<0.001. And 2593 DEGs specifically appeared in metastatic STAD. Functional annotation indicated that cell cycle was a significantly enriched GO term and KEGG pathway, which may play the important role in STAD metastasis. In metastatic STAD, HSPD1 and FHOD1 were increased, while RPS6KA6, ESRRG, BMP3 and RGMB were decreased. These DEGs may be involved in STAD metastasis process and serve as the promising metastasis biomarkers for STAD. We found specific gene expression patterns and metastasis-driving genes associated with STAD metastasis process. Our data enhances the understanding on the mechanisms underlying the STAD metastasis.
An automated method for characterization of facial expression

This paper presents a new facial expression technique, locality directional ternary pattern (LDTP), for facial emotion recognition. LDTP efficiently encode various information of expression-related features (i.e., eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and lips) by using the directional information and advanced pattern in order to take advantage of the robust of advanced patterns in the edge region while overcoming the weakness of other methods in smooth regions. Our proposal, unlike existing face description methods that divide the face into multiple regions and sample the codes uniformly, uses a two-level grid to construct the face descriptor while sampling emotion information at different scales. We use a grid for stable codes (highly related to non-expression), and another one for active codes (highly related to expression). This multi-level approach enables us to do a finer description of facial motions while still characterizing the other features of the expression. Moreover, we learn the active pattern codes from the expression-related facial regions. We tested our method by using person-dependent and independent cross-validation schemes to evaluate the performance. We show that our approaches improve the overall accuracy of facial expression recognition on six data sets.
Effect of Different Methods of Tillage and Conservation Farming on Nutrient Uptake, Available Nutrient in Soil and Balance Sheet of Nutrient in Finger Millet [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.] Under Rainfed Conditions

Finger millet [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn. ] is a stable food crop for millions of people in the semi-arid region of the world, particularly in Africa and India, and especially those who live by subsistence farming. This crop is cultivated in a wide geographical zone ranging from Senegal, Nigeria, across eastern and southern Africa, through the Middle East and into tropical Asia. Finger millet [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn. ] is among the most cultivated millets and belongs to the genus Elelusine, in the Chloridoidae subfamily. It is a native African crop which is also extremely important in South Asia (India and Nepal). The crop is adapted to a wide range of environments and can be grown in variety of soils with medium or low water holding capacity, but requires rainfall of at least 800 mm per annum (Thakur et al., 2016). Millets are also unique due to their short growing International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 6 Number 12 (2017) pp. 3670-3683 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Analysis of Capacity Enhancement and Disruption Probability for Freeway Ramp Controls Based on Gap-Acceptance and Queuing Models

Gap-acceptance and queuing theory based models are proposed to model the effect of ramp controls on freeway operations. The models are developed for three types of ramp control and traffic flow patterns, namely the uniform arrival with ramp-metering, the random arrival without ramp-metering, and platoon arrival without ramp-metering but with an upstream signalized intersection. One of the applications of these models is to address, from the theoretical point of view, one of the practical issues regarding freeway ramp-metering thresholds and the corresponding disruption probability. Studies have shown that ramp-metering is effective in reducing vehicle delays only when freeway traffic flow rate reaches a certain flow threshold level. When freeway traffic is low, there will be enough gaps in the freeway flow to accommodate the ramp flow, even when ramp traffic enters the freeway in platoons. The presented models take into account the effect of platoon size resulted from the three ramp controls and arrival flow patterns. The study results clearly indicate that more significant disruption on freeway operations exist due to large platoon arrivals resulting from an upstream traffic signal, compared to when traffic arrives randomly or uniformly. The models are also applied to provide quantitative assessments from the perspectives of freeway capacity, indicating that ramp-metering results in increased freeway capacity and decreased disruption probability.
A Comparison of Three Dry Matter Forage Production Methods Used in South Africa

A common method for determining forage production of rangelands is by clipping and weighing forage from quadrats with predetermined areas. This technique is however time consuming. Other techniques which require less time and labour include amongst others using the disk pasture meter or phytomass derived from the vegetation classification program PHYTOTAB, in conjunction with the Plant Number Scale, which is used to determine vegetation canopy cover. The phytomass determined using PHYTOTAB/Plant Number Scale and the disk pasture meter was compared to the phytomass obtained from the actual clipping and weighing of forage. Tests showed that there were indeed statistically significant differences between the mean phytomass values of the three techniques. Considerable variation was shown in the results of the disk pasture meter readings compared to the other two techniques. The phytomass values obtained using the disk pasture meter were significantly higher than the phytomass determined using both the PHYTOTAB/Plant Number Scale and the clipping and weighing techniques. Results further indicated a significant similarity in the phytomass determined using the PHYTOTAB/Plant Number Scale and the clipping and weighing technique. The results of this pilot study need further investigation.
A Replacement Algorithm of Non-Maximum Suppression Base on Graph Clustering

Non-maximum suppression is an important step in many object detection and object counting algorithms. In contrast with the extensive studies of object detection, NMS method has not caused too much attention. Although traditional NMS method has demonstrated promising performance in detection tasks, we observe that it is a hard decision approach, which only uses the confidential scores and Intersection-over-Unions (IoUs) to discard proposals. By this way, NMS method would keep many false proposals whose IoU with the ground truth proposal is smaller than the threshold, which indicates that NMS may not suitable for counting the object number in images. To eliminate the limitation on object counting task, we propose a novel algorithm base on graph clustering to replace the NMS method in this paper. Experiments on faster-rcnn and SSD show that our algorithm achieves better performance than that of NMS on the object counting task.
A distributed k-mean clustering algorithm for cloud data mining

cloud computing is a new generation computational manner. In this technique the way of computing is transformed into distributed computing, therefore the concept of cloud is used where the efficient computational experience and scalable computing is required. Not only has the cloud provided the scalable computing it also provides the scalable storage units. Therefore a significant amount of data is arrived in these units to handle them, among various kinds of storage the unstructured data storage is also a part of entire cloud data storage i.e. social networking text data, images and other electronic form of documents. Thus in this presented work a survey is introduced for cloud data storage, and their cluster analysis for utilizing the data into various business intelligence applications. in addition of that a new model of cluster analysis of data is proposed which provides the clustering as service. Keywords— cloud computing, cluster analysis, data mining, social networking, text clustering.
Immunization response of rabbits and Guinea pigs to different antigens of Bacillus anthracis vaccine strain

Immunization response of rabbits and Guinea pigs to different antigens of Bacillus anthracis vaccine strain Abbas M. Ahmed, Layla, I. Mohamed, M.M. Omer, M.M. Gumaa, S.A. Mulla and Sarah Abusalab 1 Veterinary Research Institute, Animal Resources Research Corporation, P. O. Box 8067 (Al Amarat), Khartoum, Sudan. Kassala Veterinary Research Laboratory, Kassala, Sudan Corresponding author ma_abas@hotmail.com, Tel: +249 912226347
Generation and Dramatization of Detective Stories

We introduce in the present paper an operationally defined subclass within the genre of detective stories, specified on the basis of the logic programming model adopted in our Logtell project. Special attention is given to the treatment of communicative events. An SWI-Prolog plan-based tool was developed to compose consistent plots, conforming to the conventions of the genre. Seven criminal cases generated by the tool are described as illustration. It is shown, using the PlotBoard interface, how to run plan-based composition in interactive stepwise mode. We have also developed a storytelling system capable of representing the stories in the format of interactive comic books on tablet computers.
Search algorithm to find optimum strategies to shape political action with subjective assessment

This paper introduces a problem related to decision-making and the shaping of political strategies in the course of one term of office, in which the government and the opposition shape their proposals for action on two issues that are relevant for the citizens. A variable component is considered regarding both the relevance of the issues to be dealt with and the strategies that the parties are presumed to adopt. The aim of this study is to find the optimum strategies for the two majority parties of a country, while allowing them to vary their proposals to a certain degree. In addition, the process is dynamic because the proposals are intended to be modified taking into account the other party's foreseen action. The contribution of this article lies in this approach, as well as in its taking into account variable components. The problem is dealt with from a geometric point of view, and a search algorithm to find optimum strategies is developed.
On the Poisson kernel for the Kohn Laplacian

In this note we obtain some estimates of the Green function and the Poisson kernel for the Kohn Laplacian ∆IHn on bounded domains of the Heisenberg group IH. As a consequence we are able to give L estimates for ∆IHn -harmonic functions in terms of the L norms of their boundary values. 1 – Introduction We are concerned with the Kohn Laplacian ∆IHn on the Heisenberg group IH and with the study of ∆IHn-harmonic functions on a bounded domain Ω of IH. The aim of this paper is to establish some estimates of the Green function G and the Poisson kernel P for ∆IHn on Ω, in terms of the natural distance d on IH. Indeed, under suitable boundary regularity assumptions on Ω, we prove the following inequalities: (1.1) G(ξ, η) ≤ cd(η, ∂Ω)d(ξ, η)1−Q, |∇IHnG(ξ, ·)| ≤ cd(ξ, ·)1−Q, (1.2) |P (ξ, η)| ≤ cd(ξ, η)1−Q,
Utilisation of tactile sensors in ergonomic assessment of hand -handle interface: a review

Many ergonomic studies deal with comfort or try to find optimal parameters for tool design. Most of these studies also emphasise the importance of coupling between hand and handle. In order to collect objective data about hand -handle interface pressure, tactile sensors can be used. A trade-off between sensor dimensions, sensel density, robustness, and accuracy must be considered while choosing between commercial tactile sensors for ergonomic investigations. Based on literature from the last two decades, the main aspects of tactile sensors usage are highlighted.
Human IRIS as a Biometric for Identity Verification

The use of human biometrics for automatic identity verification has become widespread. Mostly used human biometrics are face, fingerprint, iris, gait, retina, voice, hand geometry etc. Among them iris is an externally visible, yet protected organ whose unique epigenetic pattern remains stable throughout one’s whole life. These characteristics make it very attractive to use as a biometric for identifying individuals. This paper presents a detailed study of iris recognition technique. It encompasses an analysis of the reliability and the accuracy of iris as a biometric of person identification. The main phases of iris recognition are segmentation, normalization, feature encoding and matching. In this work automatic segmentation is performed using circular Hough transform method. Daugman’s rubber sheet model is used in normalization process. Four level phase quantization based 1D Log-Gabor filters are used to encode the unique features of iris into binary template. And finally the Hamming distance is considered to examine the affinity of two templates in matching stage. We have experimented a better recognition result for CASIA-iris-v4 database. Keywords— Biometric Identification, Iris Recognition, Pattern Recognition, 1D-Log Gabor Filter.
Multilevel B-Spline Repulsive Energy in Nanomodeling of Graphenes

Quantum energies which are used in applications are usually composed of repulsive and attractive terms. The objective of this study is to use an accurate and efficient fitting of the repulsive energy instead of using standard parametrizations. The investigation is based on Density Functional Theory and Tight Binding simulations. Our objective is not only to capture the values of the repulsive terms but also to efficiently reproduce the elastic properties and the forces. The elasticity values determine the rigidity of a material when some traction or load is applied on it. The pairpotential is based on an exponential term corrected by B-spline terms. In order to accelerate the computations, one uses a hierarchical optimization for the B-splines on different levels. Carbon graphenes constitute the configurations used in the simulations. We report on some results to show the efficiency of the B-splines on different levels.
Mercury Reduces Avian Reproductive Success through Direct Embryotoxicity Rather Than Altered Parental Behavior

PAGE Mercury (Hg) is an environmental contaminant that impairs avian reproduction by reducing hatching and fledging success. While direct embryotoxicity is a documented cause of reduced reproductive success, altered parental care behaviors of Hg-exposed parents could also contribute. The objective of this study was to determine how dietary Hg exposure (1.2 pg/g wet weight in food) influenced avian parental care and associated reproductive success, utilizing zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) as a model species. Using a cross-fostering design, we isolated the influence of parental care from direct embryotoxic effects of maternally transferred Hg. Four treatments were used, with control and Hg-exposed adults raising control or Hg-exposed foster eggs. A lower percentage of Hg birds reached each reproductive stage than did control birds. Only 53% of Hg birds successfully fledged nestlings compared to 65% of control birds. Mercury-dosed parents spent less time constructing nests than control birds, and nests were lighter, possibly related to an impaired ability to bring pieces of hay through the nest box opening. However, nest temperature, incubation behavior, and provisioning rate did not differ between parental treatments. Control eggs tended to have shorter incubation periods and were more likely to hatch than Hg-treated eggs, but there was no significant effect of parental treatments on these parameters. These results suggest that embryotoxicity is the likely explanation for reduced reproductive success, rather than altered parental behavior. However, further research is warranted in field settings, where parents are exposed to greater environmental challenges, fluctuating temperatures, and limited resources.
How to Engage Children into the World of Traditional Car Brands? Exploration of Specific Touchpoints between Future Buyers in the Car Industry and Established Brands

This paper aims to define the consumer journey of children through their childhood stages and provide specific touchpoints relevant for a given age, which could be integrated into the marketing communication of car brands to start building this young audience as future buyers. A qualitative study of children in different age brackets was used to identify their current and potential touchpoints with the car industry. The results of the study present specific stands on the prepurchase stage of the children’s consumer journey where the brand might interact with children and build the long-term positive attitudes of this group of potential customers. Specific implications for the industry in terms of understanding the language of the mobile game applications, computer games, YouTubers and integrating those specific activities into the brand’s marketing communication are highlighted for the car industry marketers.