Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detritus dynamics in the seagrass Posidonia oceanica: elements for an ecosystem carbon and nutrient budget

Leaf decay, leaf l~ t ter export, burial in belowground sinks, and resp~ratory consumption of detritus were exam~ned at 2 different depths in a Posidonia oceanica (L ) Delile meadow off the Medes Islands, NW Mediterranean. At 5 m , the amount of exported leaf litter represented carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus losses of 7 . 9 and 6%) of the plant primary productlon, respectively. About 26% of the carbon produced by the plant in 1 yr was immobilized by burial in the belowground compartment, i.e. as roots and rhizomes. Annual nitrogen and phosphorus burial in the sediment was 8 and 5",, of total N and P needs, respectively. Respiratory consumption (aerobic) of carbon leaf detritus represented 17"" of the annual production. An additional, but very substantial, loss of carbon as very fine particulate organic matter has been estimated at ca 48%. At 13 m the pattern of carbon losses was similar, but the lesser effect of wave action (reldtive to that a t 5 m) reduced exportation, hence increasing the role of respiratory consumption. Data on carbon losses indicated that only a small part of the plant productlon was actually available to fuel the food web of this ecosystem. Total nutrient losses were in the range of 21 to 47 " , I of annual needs. From differences found in N and P concentrations between l iv~ng and dead tissues, it is suggested that important nutrient recycling (50 to 70%)) may be due either to reclamation or to leaching immediately after plant death.
Population assessment of Acropora palmata (Scleractinia: Acroporidae): relationship between habitat and reef associated species

Three decades ago, Acropora palmata was one of the main reef-building coral species throughout the Caribbean, forming an essential component of the structural complexity of shallow coral reef habitats. These colonies still provide microhabitats for settlement, food and shelter to many vertebrates and invertebrates. The recent decline of A. palmata has been followed by a significant loss in spatial heterogeneity and possibly in species diversity. Studies addressing whether dead and living stands of Acropora hold different fish and benthic assemblages are scarce. The status of Acropora colonies and their associated species were assessed in October 2012, at two reef zones of Cayo Sombrero, Venezuela. Visual censuses of fish abundance and the number of macrofaunal individuals were recorded for both live and dead zones. Living Acropora colonies had the lowest abundance (˂31%). In both zoned the fish community was dominated by damselfishes (˂53%) and wrasses (˂36%), the benthic macrofauna by peracarid crustaceans (˂40%) and polychaetes (˂38%). Fish and benthic communities were not correlated with the condition (live or dead) of the Acropora habitats; possibly branching structures provide the necessary shelter and protection no matter if they are dead or alive. More replication is necessary to test this unexpected result. Rev. Biol. Trop. 62 (Suppl. 3): 85-93. Epub 2014 September 01.
Human Tracking Methods Comparison for Smart House Method Comparison in Human Tracking for Smart House Purpose

Smarthouse systems require some information of human locations in the system environment, different smart house system offers different human tracking method. The idea of this paper is to determine which method is better in which condition. This paper discusses amongst RFID, voice recognizer and temperaturesensor. As a result, each method have its own advantages and disadvantages.
Market competition and innovation in Luxembourg

This paper studies the empirical relation between market competition and innovation using Luxembourg's Structural Business Statistics. The competitive pressure in Luxembourg's markets is assessed by computing a prot elasticity measure, based on the idea of cost-efficiency. From this, the paper analyses the relation between competition and innovation performance by estimating an equation for the determinants of R&D expenditure. The results show that Luxembourg's industries are characterised by low levels of competition intensity, especially in markets relevant to competition policy and regulation. The relation between competition and innovation is non-linear and depends crucially on the efficient use of inputs to production. The impact of the distribution of technological efficiency on innovation is assessed by measuring both average technology gap and technology spread. The innovation effort is increasing as industries are closer to the frontier, and decreasing in the technology spread.
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE BEHAVIOR INTENTION OF E-BANKING TRANSACTIONS THROUGH MOBILE PHONES IN CHINA

With the growth of using e-banking transactions through mobile phones in China, it brings along with convenience of people’s life as it enables people to have access to JIBC April 2018, Vol. 23, No.1 2 banking services anywhere and at any time as well as it conducts business more effectively. Technology acceptance model (TAM) has been applied in different contexts to examine a wide range of information technology. With mobile transactions popularity, online payments grew 33.8 percent year over year since 2014 (Marketing China, 2015). It is necessary to investigate the factors influence on customers’ behavior intention towards the e-banking transactions through mobile phones. The study employed convenience sampling technique to collect data from 500 respondents of e-banking of mobile users. The results revealed that perceived compatibility and mobility significantly affects to perceived usefulness, and further perceived usefulness significantly affect behavior intention of using e-banking through mobiles. It also examined that perceived usefulness as a mediator between the relationship of perceived compatibility and behavior intention as well as the relationship between mobility and behavior intention.
Mechanical properties of fly ash geopolymer mortar reinforced with carbon fibers

Portland cement industry releases high amounts of CO2, so efforts have been made for alternative binders. Geopolymers are one of the highlighted elective binders. The aims of this study are to produce fly ash Geopolymer boards reinforced with carbon fibers and investigate the mechanical properties of several blends of fly ash Geopolymer mortar reinforced with carbon fibers (FGC). Carbon fibers (CF) were added at different percentages (WF) of 0.2%, 0.5%, 1%, and 1.5% by weight. The sodium hydroxide condensation of 8 molars, sodium silicate to sodium hydroxide weight ratio of 2.0, the alkaline liquid/binder proportion of 0.47 and the dry heat curing of 70°C for 24 hours were utilized as a piece of blends. Fresh and hardening state properties such as Flow capacity, flexural strength and compressive strength, and physical properties such as bulk density were determined from the 3-day FGC samples after the curing process. The results obtained from this study, show that the uses of CF were significant in improving the compressive and flexural strength due to the bonding characteristics of fibers with Geopolymer pastes. Then again, the used of CF results in slightly decrease of the bulk density. The optimal compressive and flexural strength outcomes were at weight percentage 1% of CF.
Segmentation of Portuguese customers’ expectations from fitness programs

Expectations towards fitness exercises are the major factor in customer satisfaction in the service sector in question. The purpose of this study is to present a segmentation framework for fitness customers, based on their individual expectations. The survey was designed and validated to evaluate individual expectations towards exercises. The study included a randomly recruited sample of 723 subjects (53% males; 47% females; 42.1±19.7 years). Factor analysis and cluster analysis with Ward’s cluster method with squared Euclidean distance were used to analyse the data obtained. Four components were extracted (performance, enjoyment, beauty and health) explaining 68.7% of the total variance and three distinct segments were found: Exercise Lovers (n=312), Disinterested (n=161) and Beauty Seekers (n=250). All the factors identified have a significant contribution to differentiate the clusters, the first and third clusters being most similar. The segmentation framework obtained based on customer expectations allows better understanding of customers’ profiles, thus helping the fitness industry develop services more suitable for each type of customers. A follow-up study was conducted 5 years later and the results concur with the initial study.
Development of a New Pipeline for Identification and Characterization of Micro RNAs from Plants

Open source microRNA analysis pipelines for next generation sequencing data (NGS) often make necessary use and working knowledge of command line interface, massive data processing resources and expertise which is a daunting task for biologists. Further, the microRNA data generated from NGS platforms will not be in a form from which one could understand or make use of it. Hence a comprehensive pipeline has been developed by integrating several open source NGS tools along with a graphical user interface called sRNAbench. It is used for expression profiling of small RNAs and prediction of microRNAs from NGS data. The pipeline features functionalities such as read processing, sequence identification, target prediction and enrichment analysis. It provides even prediction of novel microRNAs and its sequences. The pipeline will be very useful for plant genomics community and it does not require knowledge in computational biology in order to discover miRNAs and utilize the same in genomics studies.
Structural Characterisation of Asphaltenes during Residue Hydrotreatment with Light Cycle Oil as an Additive

Several atmospheric residues (AR) of Kuwaiti crude, in the absence, or in the presence, of light cycle oil (LCO) as an aromatic additive, were hydrotreated in an experimental plant. Asphaltenes (precipitated from Kuwaiti AR, a hydrotreated AR, and a hydrotreated blend of AR and LCO) were characterised by chemical structure and changes during residue hydrotreatment. The average structural parameters of these asphaltenes, obtained from a combined method of element analysis, average molecular weight, X-ray diffraction, and NMR, demonstrate that, after hydrotreatment, the aromatic cores of the asphaltenes become more compact and smaller whereas the peripheral alkyl branches are decreased in number and shortened. The influence of LCO on residue hydrotreating is also studied in terms of structural changes in the asphaltenes. The findings imply that LCO added to AR during hydrotreating improves the degree of aromatic substitution, the total hydrogen/carbon atomic ratio per average molecule, the distance between aromatic sheets and aliphatic chains, and so forth, by modifying the colloidal nature and microstructure of asphaltene: this is beneficial for the further hydroprocessing of AR. Three hypothetical average molecules are proposed to represent the changes undergone by such asphaltenes during hydrotreatment as well as the effects of additive LCO.
Scalable sentiment analytics

Spark has become a widely popular analytics framework that provides an implementation of the equally popular MapReduce programming model. Hadoop is an Apache foundation framework that can be used for processing large datasets on a cluster of computers using the MapReduce programming model. Mahout is an Apache foundation project developed for building scalable machine learning libraries, which includes built-in machine learning classiers. In this paper, we show how to build a simple text classier on Spark, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Mahout for extracting out sentiments from a text collection containing millions of text documents. Using a collection of 7 million movie reviews taken from IMDB, a Bayesian classier was learned to predict sentiments for test reviews. Separate classiers were learned on both Spark and Hadoop, i.e. our contenders for scalable sentiment analytics. Our empirical results showed that the sentiment learning task on Spark ran almost 10 times faster than the learning task on Hadoop.
Effect of Genetic Polymorphisms in CD14 and TLR4 on Cardiomyopathy

Background: We investigated polymorphisms of immune related genes (CD14 and TLR4) and explore the associations of these variants and risk of CM. Method: We detected SNPs of CD14 (-159C>T) and TLR4 (299 A>G) using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with peripheral blood samples from 141 patients with CM and 198 healthy people, further analyzing their relations with the risk of CM. Result: The CT genotype of CD14 gene was found to be associated with CM and 1.84 folds increased risk to CM when compared to CC genotype (OR 1.84, 95% CI 1.18–2.88, P=0.0051). Heterozygotes (AG) of TLR4 gene were found to be predominant in the CM group when compared to controls (50.4%, 38.4% respectively, P=0.0081) with 1.79 folds increased risk for CM, which was statistically significant (OR 3.79, 95% CI 1.15–2.80, P=0.0081). Conclusion: Polymorphism in CD14 and TLR4 gene is associated with an increased risk of CM. The combined effects of polymorphisms within innate immune genes of CD14 and TLR14 may contribute to a high risk of CM.
Obstacle Avoidance with Safety Guarantees Feasibility of MPC-based Steering Algorithms Master’s thesis in Signals and Systems

Enabled by the increasing computational power available in embedded microcontrollers, model predictive control (MPC) for automotive applications has been extensively studied in the past ten years and has attracted industry, among others, for autonomous driving applications. Implementing an MPC control algorithm to determine an optimal steering action in a lane change maneuver involves iteratively solving a Finite Time Constrained Optimal Control Problem (FTCOCP). Hence, in a situation where the environment is restricted by lane boundaries and obstacles, the FTCOCP might be unfeasible because collision avoidance constraints represent strict boundaries that cannot be violated if passenger safety shall be guaranteed. Intuitively, in such problems infeasibility is more likely to occur as the vehicle velocity increases. Furthermore, because of the problem structure, classical results from MPC theory for guaranteeing feasibility cannot be efficiently applied. This thesis investigates methods to predict an upper bound on the vehicle’s velocity leading to feasibility guarantees for an MPC-based lane change algorithm. By exploiting invariant set theory and reachability analysis tools, we focus on the problem of (offline) characterizing the set of states for which a solution to the lane change MPC problem exists for a given speed. An MPC controller is implemented in a vehicle and test data from lane change maneuvers ranging from 50-100 km/h is collected at the AstaZero proving grounds. The applicability of the proposed method is evaluated by comparison with experimental data.
Empirical‐statistical downscaling and error correction of daily precipitation from regional climate models

Although regional climate models (RCMs) are powerful tools for describing regional and even smaller scale climate conditions, they still feature severe systematic errors. In order to provide optimized climate scenarios for climate change impact research, this study merges linear and nonlinear empirical‐statistical downscaling techniques with bias correction methods and investigates their ability for reducing RCM error characteristics. An ensemble of seven empirical‐statistical downscaling and error correction methods (DECMs) is applied to post‐process daily precipitation sums of a high‐resolution regional climate hindcast simulation over the Alpine region, their error characteristics are analysed and compared to the raw RCM results.
Validated UV spectrophotometric method for estimation of domperidone for dissolution study

The aim of this research paper was to develop a simple, sensitive, rapid, accurate and economical Ultra Violet spectrophotometric method for the estimation of Domperidone.The study was performed in pH 6.8 phosphate buffer with 0.5 % Sodium Lauryl Sulphate (SLS) and presence of the drug was analysed using UV spectrophotometer. Various analytical parameters such as linearity, range, precision, accuracy, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were determined according International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines. Absorbance maximum (λmax) of drug in pH 6.8 phosphate buffer was found to be 284 nm. Beer’s law was obeyed over the concentration range of 2 - 10 μg/ml with a correlation coefficient (R2) value of 0.999. % RSD values below 2 at different concentration levels for Intra and inter-day precision indicated that the proposed spectrophotometric method is highly reproducible. LOD and LOQ were 0.84 and 2. 54μg/ml respectively signifying that it can be adopted for routine quality testing. The results of the study demonstrated that the developed method is accurate, precise and reproducible while being simple, cheap and less time consuming and hence can be suitably applied for the analysis of Domperidone in pharmaceutical preparations for dissolution studies.
Design of Tabletop Interface for Adding Tags to Non-Annotated Image Collections through Natural Discussion

Many media forms can be stored easily at present. Photographs, for example, can be easily stored even though most of them have not been edited. Th is means they will gradually lose their value and become essentially unusable. To make better use of photographs, we tried to make use of informat ion provided by viewers who had seen and commented on them. We felt that analyzing this information would enable us to make maximum use of photographic data. To do this, we defined a ''tag propagation'' model and relationships between photos. We also proposed a system that uses image processing to analyze viewers' handling of photos and how the photos are relevant to each other. We then validated our model by using it.
SDR Based Energy Detection Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio for Real Time Video Transmission

Cognitive radio is a budding approach which helps to address the imminent spectrum crisis by dynamic spectrum allocation and support the increased data traffic with an intelligent mechanism of Software Defined Radio (SDR). SDR avoid the frequent modifications in the hardware structure with the use of software defined protocols. The main novelty of the paper is an effective implementation of CR using energy based spectrum sensing method which is done on GNU radio for real time transmission of video as a primary user. From evaluation results, one can see that the proposed system can indicate the frequency band occupancy by setting the detection output. Detection output changes to one with start of video transmission. Motivation behind this work is design of a spectrum sensing method which is best suited for detection of white spaces during the transmission of video as a primary user on SDR platform.
The dependency of AGN infrared colour-selection on source luminosity and obscuration - An observational perspective in CDFS and COSMOS

Aims. This work addresses the AGN IR-selection dependency on intrinsic source luminosity and obscuration, in order to identify and characterise biases that could affect conclusions in studies. Methods. We study IR-selected AGN in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) survey and in the Cosmological Survey (COSMOS). The AGN sample is divided into low and high X-ray luminosity classes and into unobscured (type-1) and obscured (type-2) classes by means of X-ray and optical spectroscopy data. Specifically in the X-ray regime, we adopt the intrinsic luminosity taking the estimated column density (NH) into account. We also take the opportunity to highlight important differences resulting from adopting different methods of assessing AGN obscuration. Results. In agreement with previous studies, we also find that AGN IR-selection efficiency shows a decrease with decreasing source AGN X-ray luminosity. For the intermediate-luminosity AGN population (43.3 < log(LX [erg s −1 ]) < 44), the efficiency also worsens with increasing obscuration (NH). The same sample also shows an evolution with cosmic time of the obscured fraction at the highest X-ray luminosities, independently of the adopted type-1/type-2 classification method. Conclusions. We confirm that AGN IR-selection is genuinely biased towards unobscured AGNe, but only at intermediate luminosities. At the highest luminosities, where AGN IR-selection is more efficient, there is no obscuration bias. We show that type-1 AGNe are intrinsically more luminous than type-2 AGNe only at z < 1.6, thus resulting in more type-1 AGN being selected when the IR survey is shallower. Based on this and other studies, we conclude that deep hard-X-ray coverages, high-resolution IR imaging, or a combination of IR and radio data are required to recover the lower luminosity obscured AGN population. In addition, wide IR surveys are needed to recover the rare powerful, obscured AGN population. Finally, when the James Webb Space Telescope comes online, the broad-band filters 2. 0µm, 4. 4µm, 7. 7µm, and 18µm will be essential for disentangling AGN from non-AGN dominated SEDs at depths where spectroscopy becomes impractical.
Radar backscattering model of oil spill and its applications

In this paper, an Oil Spill Viscous Dissipation Transfer Function Dm, which can be used to quantify the damping effect of oil spill on the wind-induce gravity-capillary, was introduced. And then an extended spectrum of gravity-capillary waves Wm, based on the spectrum of gravity-capillary waves proposed by Liu in 1995, was proposed. The NRCS of the stochastic rough sea surface covered by different kind of oil spills as a function of wavelength and angle of incidence with wind direction and wind speed at 10m above the sea surface as parameters was simulated according to composite surface EM waves scattering model and Wm. As a result, the positive correlation between the damping effect and the kinematic molecular viscosity was revealed. By comparing the NRCS of oil spills simulated by the proposed model and that evaluated from the relevant SAR image, it was summarized that the proposed NRCS evaluation model can be used to derive the difference of NRCS of the stochastic rough sea surface covered by oil slicks with different ages.
Molecular Diversity Assessment of Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria Using Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) of 16s rRNA Gene

The rhizobacteria were isolated from rhizosphere of rice plant of different fields of 4 districts of Nepal and 5 districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, adjoining states of India with Nepal. The DGGE analysis was performed for diversity analysis. For the construction of dendrogram, 16S rRNA gene was amplified by two different sets of primers. The DGGE ladder consisting of PCR amplified products of nine pure bacterial cultures were obtained. The first DGGE ladder was prepared by 400 bp fragment of 16S rDNA with GC clamp and the second DGGE ladder was prepared with 200 bp fragment of 16S rDNA with GC clamp. The perpendicular DGGE of these amplicons based on their melting behavior clearly demonstrated separation of different isolates. The 16S rDNA fragment amplified with primer set of V2-V3 regions with GC clamp showed separation between 40-60% of denaturant. The DGGE profile based on primer set F352T and 519r for various bacteria present in soil samples of 5 districts of India and 4 districts of Nepal revealed that the number of bands which might be specific for diazotrophic isolates varied from 2 to 11. The dendrogram constructed based on DGGE profile of various samples of 5 districts of India and 4 districts of Nepal showed that all the samples could be clustered in nine groups with 58-96% similarity to each other. Among all these 37 samples, only Var-4 and Var-5 showed 100% similarity, no other samples from any site showed 100% similarity. Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 5(1): 72-80