Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing 21st Century Skills through a Constructivist-Constructionist Learning Environment

Science and technology innovation and 21 st century skills are increasingly important in the 21 st century workplace. The purpose of this study is to propose an instructional strategy that develop constructivist-constructionist learning environment that simultaneously develop chemistry knowledge and 21 st century skills. Based on constructivist and constructionist learning theories, we identified three central guiding principles for this study: (1) engage students in discovery and problem solving task through teamwork, (2) provide opportunities for communicating ideas, and (3) involve students in the process of design. An intervention module, Malaysian Kimia (chemistry) Digital Game known as MyKimDG, was developed as a mechanism for creating the learning environment. In this study, students were required to work collaboratively to design educational media that help their peers who face difficulty in learning particular concept. They were guided to go through the IDPCR (Inquiry, Discover, Produce, Communicate and Review) phases. It is hypothesized that MyKimDG can create learning environment that allows students to deepen subject content knowledge and practice various 21 st century skills in real situation. This study employed quasi-experimental study with non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest control group design. Results suggest that this approach is able to improve the acquisition of chemistry knowledge and high productivity skill.
Resistant strain of staphylococcus among health care providers: A looming threat

Introduction: Healthcare workers and medical students who are at the interface between the hospital and the community may serve as a carrier of cross transmission for resistant bacterial strains like Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA infection is a potentially severe event hence early diagnosis is essential. This study was aimed to identify Health care workers (HCWs) and medical students who harboring resistant strain MRSA. Methods: This study was conducted at College Of Medicine and JNM hospital kalyani, West Bengal during August 2013 to October 2013 at Microbiology Department. HCWs and Medical students were voluntarily participated in this study. Nasal swabs were collected from all the participants and culture was done on Mannitol Salt Agar (MSA). Staphylocooccus aureus (S.aureus) were identified accordingly and antibiotic susceptibility testing was done. MRSA was detected using 30 microgram of Cefoxitin disc. Observations and results: Nasal swabs from 350 health personnel’s were checked for the presence of MRSA. Resistant strain was detected among 2.92% of HCWs. Special attendant came out to be a major group to harbor MRSA in the nostrils. Conclusion: Screening of resistant strains among healthcare workers and medical students should be adopted as a mandatory protocol in medical colleges so as to identify such carriers to curb the spread of circulating drug resistant bacteria from hospital personnel to patient and community.
Galaxy clusters as probes for cosmology and dark matter

In recent years, significant progress has been made in building new galaxy clusters samples, at low and high redshifts, from wide-area surveys, particularly exploiting the Sunyaev--Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. A large effort is underway to identify and characterize these new systems with optical/NIR and X-ray facilities, thus opening new avenues to constraint cosmological models using structure growth and geometrical tests. A census of galaxy clusters sets constraints on reionization mechanisms and epochs, which need to be reconciled with recent limits on the reionization optical depth from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Future advances in SZ effect measurements will include the possibility to (unambiguously) measure directly the kinematic SZ effect, to build an even larger catalogue of galaxy clusters able to study the high redshift universe, and to make (spatially-)resolved galaxy cluster maps with even spectral capability to (spectrally-)resolve the relativistic corrections of the SZ effect.
WP-EC 2012-01 Trade credit policy and firm value * 1

This paper studies the shape of the relation between firm value and trade credit for a sample of Spanish listed firms in the period 2001 to 2007. Considering the tradeoff between benefits and costs of investing in trade credit we estimate a non-linear relationship between accounts receivable and firm value. As expected, the results obtained show a positive relation between firm value and trade credit at low levels of receivables and a negative one at high levels. To give robustness to the results, we analyze whether deviation from target accounts receivable level reduces firm value. Consistent with the previous analysis, we find that deviations from this level of receivables decrease firm value.
Asphalt Pavement Pothole Detection and Segmentation Based on Wavelet Energy Field

Potholes are one type of pavement surface distresses whose assessment is essential for developing road network maintenance strategies. Existing methods for automatic pothole detection either rely on expensive and high-maintenance equipment or could not segment the pothole accurately. In this paper, an asphalt pavement pothole detection and segmentation method based on energy field is put forward. The proposed method mainly includes two processes. Firstly, the wavelet energy field of the pavement image is constructed to detect the pothole by morphological processing and geometric criterions. Secondly, the detected pothole is segmented by Markov random field model and the pothole edge is extracted accurately. This methodology has been implemented in a MATLAB prototype, trained, and tested on 120 pavement images. The results show that it can effectively distinguish potholes from cracks, patches, greasy dirt, shadows, and manhole covers and accurately segment the pothole. For pothole detection, the method reaches an overall accuracy of 86.7%, with 83.3% precision and 87.5% recall. For pothole segmentation, the overlap degree between the extracted pothole region and the original pothole region is mostly more than 85%, which accounts for 88.6% of the total detected pavement pothole images.
Dynamics Analyses of Swing Structure Subject to Rotational Forces

Abstract—Large-scale swing has been used in entertainment and performance, especially in circus, for a very long time. To increase the safety of this type of structure, a thorough analysis for displacement and bearing stress was performed for an extreme condition where a full cycle swing occurs. Different masses, ranging from 40 kg to 220 kg, and velocities were applied on the swing. Then, based on the solution of differential dynamics equation, swing velocity response to harmonic force was obtained. Moreover, the resistance capacity was estimated based on ACI steel structure design guide. Subsequently, numerical analysis was performed in ABAQUS to obtain the stress on each frame of the swing. Finally, the analysis shows that the expansion of swing structure frame section was required for mass bigger than 150kg.
The evaluation of the association between patella types and chondromalacia patella by magnetic resonance imaging

302 non-traumatic patients, who had an MRI scan of the knee with the suspicion of any diagnosis were evaluated in terms of patella types and their relationship to chondromalacia patella. Outerbridge MRI grading system was used in the evaluation of patellar chondromalacia. Type II patella is the most common type. The distribution of patella type was not statistically significantly different between the two genders ( p > 0.05). Patella types have no specific distribution. Chondromalacia in varying degrees was seen in 14 patients among 41 with Type I patella (34%), while this rate was 81 out of 207 (39%) in patients with Type II patella, and 34 out of 53 (64%) in patients with Type III patella. One patient with Type IV patella did not have chondromalacia patella. When all patellar types were included, the rate of chondromalacia in females and males was 50% and 34%, respectively. Chondromalacia was 42.7% in our study. Grade I chondromalacia was observed in 22 knees (12%), Grade II chondromalacia was seen in 32 knees (23%), Grade III chondromalacia was seen in 28 knees (21%), and Grade IV chondromalacia was seen in 49 knees (37%). The frequency of high grade (Grade III and Grade IV) chondromalacia was seen in 59% of cases, while this rate was reported up to 41% in other studies. In our study, the association between Type III patella and chondromalacia was found to be statistically significant.
Effects of Cadmium and Dimethoate on Some Biological and Biochemical Indices in Freshwater Green Algae, Spirogyra sp.

The present study investigates the influence of an organophosphorus pesticide, namely Dimethoate, and cadmium on biomarkers of the green alga, Spirogyra sp. , in a 14-day experiment. For so doing, it has exposed Spirogyra sp. to 0.0, 100, 200, and 400 mg L-1 of Dimethoate and/or 1 mg L-1 of cadmium chloride (CdCl2) to observe a reduction in chlorophyll a and b level in Spirogyra sp. , exposed to 200 and 400 mg L-1 of Dimethoate as well as algae treated with cadmium alone or in combination with Dimethoate. Levels of malondialdehyde (MDA) and total antioxidant in cells, as well as the activity of ascorbate peroxidase (APX) soar in Spirogyra sp. , exposed to Dimethoate and/or cadmium (alone or simultaneously). Also Spirogyra’sexposure to cadmium and/or Dimethoate significantly increases catalase (CAT) activity. However, levels of carotenoids in Spirogyra sp. , treated with both cadmium and Dimethoate, decline significantly, with no significant change found in catalase activity of Spirogyra sp. , exposed to 100 and 200 mg L-1 of Dimethoate, in comparison to the control group. However, CAT activity rises significantly in Spirogyra sp. , treated with 400 mg L-1 of Dimethoate. Cadmium can cause cytotoxicity in 1 mg L-1 concentration of the green algae(Spirogyra sp.). On the whole, investigating the biological and biochemical markers in Spirogyra sp. , exposed to different concentrations of Dimethoate, has revealed some concentration-dependent toxicity. Furthermore, Dimethoate can synergistically increase toxicity and bioavailability of cadmium in Spirogyra sp.
Near-infrared Spectroscopy based Non-invasive Blood Glucose Level Prediction

This paper describes review on Non-invasive method of blood glucose level predictions using Near-Infrared sensor. This research work provides major contribution to the society. First, it provides unique solution for diabetic patient to monitor blood glucose level without pricking the blood. Second, it describes NIR spectroscopy technique to reduce healthcare cost and accurate results. Third, it gives different research approach towards non-invasive blood glucose measurement and monitoring.
Power Efficient High Temperature Asynchronous Microcontroller Design

There is an increasing demand for dependable and efficient digital circuitry capable of operating in high temperature environments. Extreme temperatures have adverse effects on traditional silicon synchronous systems because of the changes in delay and setup and hold times caused by the variances in each device’s threshold voltage. This dissertation focuses on the design of the major functionality of an asynchronous 8051 microcontroller in Raytheon’s high temperature Silicon Carbide process, rated for operation over 300oC. The microcontroller is designed in NULL Convention Logic, for which the traditional bus architecture used for data transfer would consume a large amount of power. To make the design more power efficient, the bus architecture has been replaced with a more complex yet efficient MUXbased data transfer scheme. This change in the design architecture also allows for improved internal data transfer rates leading to an increase in overall circuit performance. Simulation results show that the designed Silicon Carbide microcontroller framework successful executes 8051 ISA instructions. Results from the MUX-based architecture show an overall decrease in power consumption of over two orders of magnitude when compared with its bus architecture counterpart. Also, the increased internal data transfer rates resulted in an overall performance improvement of 22.8%. Acknowledgements To Dr. Jia Di, thank you for your guidance, patience, and wisdom during the years I have spent under your leadership. Thanks to you, I have had many opportunities to learn and grow as a professional in our field. To my fellow colleagues at the University of Arkansas, thank you for your comradery in our studies and research. To my family and friends, your unwavering support has helped me overcome many challenges along the way.
A Novel Prostate Segmentation Algorithm in TRUS Images

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease accurate detection of prostate boundaries in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images is required. This is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a novel method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images is presented. This method involves preprocessing (edge preserving noise reduction and smoothing) and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing. A feed forward neural network and local binary pattern together have been use to find a point inside prostate object. Finally the boundary of prostate is extracted by the inside point and an active contour algorithm. A numbers of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with MSE less than 4.6% relative to boundary provided manually by physicians. Keywords—Prostate segmentation, stick filter, neural network, active contour.
KoralQuery - a General Corpus Query Protocol

The task-oriented and format-driven development of corpus query systems has led to the creation of numerous corpus query languages (QLs) that vary strongly in expressiveness and syntax. This is a severe impediment for the interoperability of corpus analysis systems, which lack a common protocol. In this paper, we present KoralQuery, a JSON-LD based general corpus query protocol, aiming to be independent of particular QLs, tasks and corpus formats. In addition to describing the system of types and operations that KoralQuery is built on, we exemplify the representation of corpus queries in the serialized format and illustrate use cases in the KorAP project.
Quantitative fidelity of recent freshwater mollusk assemblages from the Touro Passo River, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

This study represents one of the first contributions to the knowledge on the quantitative fidelity of the recent freshwater molluscan assemblages in subtropical rivers. Thanatocoenoses and biocoenoses were studied in straight and meandering to braided sectors, in the middle course of the Touro Passo River, a fourth-order tributary of the Uruguay River, located in the westernmost part of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Samplings were carried out through quadrats of 5 m2, five in each sector. A total area of 50 m2 was sampled. Samplings were also made in a lentic environment (abandoned meander), with intermittent communication with the Touro Passo River, aiming to record out-of-habitat shell transportation from the lentic communities to the main river channel. The results show that, despite the frequent oscillation of the water level, the biocoenosis of the Touro Passo River shows high ecological fidelity and undergoes little influence from the lentic vicinal environments. The taxonomic composition and some features of the structure of communities, especially the dominant species, also reflect some ecological differences between the two main sectors sampled, such as the complexity of habitats in the meandering-sector. Regarding the quantitative fidelity, 60% of the species found alive were also found dead and 47.3% of the species found dead were also found alive, at river-scale. However, 72% of the dead individuals belong to species also found alive. This value might be related with the good rank order correlation obtained for live/dead assemblages. Consequently, the dominant species of the thanatocoenoses could be used to infer the ecological attributes of the biocoenoses. The values of all the indexes analyzed were very variable in small-scale samplings (quadrat), but were more similar to others registered in previous studies, when they were analyzed in a station and river scale.
Algorithm quasi‐optimal (AQ) learning

The algorithm quasi‐optimal (AQ) is a powerful machine learning methodology aimed at learning symbolic decision rules from a set of examples and counterexamples. It was first proposed in the late 1960s to solve the Boolean function satisfiability problem and further refined over the following decade to solve the general covering problem. In its newest implementations, it is a powerful but yet little explored methodology for symbolic machine learning classification. It has been applied to solve several problems from different domains, including the generation of individuals within an evolutionary computation framework. The current article introduces the main concepts of the AQ methodology and describes AQ for source detection(AQ4SD), a tailored implementation of the AQ methodology to solve the problem of finding the sources of atmospheric releases using distributed sensor measurements. The AQ4SD program is tested to find the sources of all the releases of the prairie grass field experiment. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Sex ratio and genetic diversity in the dioecious Pistacia atlantica (Anacardiaceae)

Abstract The levels of genetic variation in dioecious plant species have been reported to differ between male and female populations. This has been attributed to different factors including distribution patterns of individuals, sex ratio and also stochastic events. We measured the levels of genetic diversity in male and female populations of dioecious Pistacia atlantica (pistachio, Anacardiaceae) separately for each region and genders in two eco-geographically different regions over 350 km apart and of different population sizes in East Azerbaijan, Iran by randomly sampling 15 individuals of male and female from each of the regions using randomly amplified polymorphic DNAs. The percentage of polymorphic RAPD bands in the male populations of dioecious Pistacia atlantica was significantly higher (88.9%) than that of female populations (80.8%), and similarly, male populations had greater genetic diversity (0.387, Shannon; 0.252, Nei’s) compared to female populations (0.381, Shannon; 0.249, Nei’s). Genetic variation in larger population (Arasbaran) of P. atlantica (0.387, Nei’s) was greater than that of the smaller (Jazire) population (0.312), indicating the impact of population size on genetic variation. Partitioning the total genetic variation using an analysis of molecular variance indicated that 77% of total genetic diversity was allocated within populations while 23% of this variation was dedicated among populations.
Fabrication, Modification, and Emerging Applications of TiO2 Nanotube Arrays by Electrochemical Synthesis: A Review

Titania nanotube arrays (TNAs) as a hot nanomaterial have a unique highly ordered array structure and good mechanical and chemical stability, as well as excellent anticorrosion, biocompatible, and photocatalytic performance. It has been fabricated by a facile electrochemical anodization in electrolytes containing small amounts of fluoric ions. In combination with our research work, we review the recent progress of the new research achievements of TNAs on the preparation processes, forming mechanism, and modification. In addition, we will review the potential and significant applications in the photocatalytic degradation of pollutants, solar cells, water splitting, and other aspects. Finally, the existing problems and further prospects of this renascent and rapidly developing field are also briefly addressed and discussed.
Convective linear stability analysis of two-layer coextrusion flow for molten polymers

The interface instability of the coextrusion flow of a polyethylene and a polystyrene is studied both experimentally and theoretically in a slit geometry. For prototype industrial conditions, we have found a stable/unstable transition which bounds the occurrence of stable/unstable sheets at die exit. By investigating a large range of processing conditions, we have shown that this transition is controlled by both temperature and flow rate ratios. Close to the transition, we used a transparent die to measure spatial amplification of different controlled perturbations at die inlet and pointed out the convective nature of the instability which exhibits a dominant mode (for which the instability is the most severe). We have then found that a convective stability analysis, using the White–Metzner constitutive equation, is able to account for the spatial amplification rate experimentally measured on controlled perturbation experiments. By considering that the instability is controlled by its dominant mode, we performed a convective stability analysis for all studied prototype industrial conditions and showed that such an analysis is able to forecast the occurrence of defects at die exit. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Northward bursts of the West African monsoon leading to rainfall over the Hoggar Massif, Algeria

The Hoggar Massif is a comparatively populated region in the Sahara, where water supply is a critical problem due to the lack of nearby sources and unaffordable water pumping. In the present paper, we analyse the influence of the West African monsoon (WAM) on precipitation over the Hoggar during summer. We investigate (1) two rainfall events during 23–27 July 2006, accounting for almost half of the precipitation of this year, and (2) the representativity of this period with regard to ERA‐40 ECMWF re‐analyses (1979 to 2001).
Splitting of the direct image of sheaves under the Frobenius

A generalisation and a new proof are given of a recent result of J. F. Thomsen (1996), which says that for L a line bundle on a smooth toric variety X over a field of positive characteristic, the direct image F*L under the Frobenius morphism splits into a direct sum of line bundles. (The special case of projective space is due to Hartshorne.) Our method is to interpret the result in terms of Grothendieck differential operators Diff(1) (L, L) Homo (1) (F.L, F.L), and T-linearized sheaves.
Symmetry of reentrant tetragonal phase in Ba 1 -x Na x Fe 2 As 2 : Magnetic versus orbital ordering mechanism

Magnetostructural phase transitions in Ba1−xAxFe2As2 (A = K, Na) materials are discussed for both magnetically and orbitally driven mechanisms, using a symmetry analysis formulated within the Landau theory of phase transitions. Both mechanisms predict identical orthorhombic space-group symmetries for the nematic and magnetic phases observed over much of the phase diagram, but they predict different tetragonal space-group symmetries for the newly discovered reentrant tetragonal phase in Ba1−xNaxFe2As2 (x∼0.24–0.28). In a magnetic scenario, magnetic order with moments along the c axis, as found experimentally, does not allow any type of orbital order, but in an orbital scenario, we have determined two possible orbital patterns, specified by P4/mnc1′ and I4221′ space groups, which do not require atomic displacements relative to the parent I4/mmm1′ symmetry and, in consequence, are indistinguishable in conventional diffraction experiments. We demonstrate that the three possible space groups are, however, distinct in resonant x-ray Bragg diffraction patterns created by Templeton & Templeton scattering. This provides an experimental method of distinguishing between magnetic and orbital models.