Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance traits of pigs fed sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) foliage ad libitum and graded levels of protein

A growth trial was conducted with a total of 40 crossbred castrate males and female pigs (1:1) of 29.3 kg mean initial live weight distributed at random into five treatments to study the effect of feeding ad libitum fresh foliage from sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) and graded levels of protein. From 30 to 60 kg the animals received 1.6 kg/day of a feed mix (20.7 MJ/kg) containing 25.1, 23.7, 17.0 or 13.2% protein. From 60 to 90 kg the pigs were fed with 1.8 kg/day of a feed mix (22.0 MJ/g) containing 23.0, 20.6, 14.5 and 9.9% protein. In both periods the animals were fed fresh sweet potato foliage (SPF) ad libitum. In both periods feed intake decreased (P<0.05) with less protein in the feed. Intake of SPF showed a non linear response (P>0.10) with lower values for intermediate levels of protein in the feed. There was no treatment effect on carcass traits of the animals. For the overall growth and finishing periods, the mean daily gain (721 g) and feed conversion (2.40 kg DM/kg gain) were the best with a combination of 23.7/20.6% protein in the feed supplement (1.6/1.8 kg per day). It is suggested that it is possible to obtain good performance traits in pigs fed fresh sweet potato foliage ad libitum, provided a feed supplement is given which contains either 23.7and 20.6% or 17.0 and 14.5% protein during the growing and finishing periods, respectively.
A Restart Strategy of a Rotating Induction Machine for Inrush Current Elimination

In the application of electric railway traction, induction machines may suffer momentary power interruptions. Restarting control while machine running is a critical part of such applications, but residual flux in the free-running rotor deteriorates conventional controller performances, leading to inrush current and torque impact. Thus, this article proposes an improved feed-forward current controller that compensates voltage variations in the restart process. The residual rotor flux, as well as the induced back electromotive force, is estimated only with the measured speed in the free-running stage. The exact electromotive force is compensated at the restart moment, and the following current re-establishing stage. Based on the feed-forward compensation, the restart impact is eliminated and the restart current is controlled accurately in the predefined trajectories. Verified by experiments, the restart controller provides flexible restart manipulations.
CO-EXTRUSION OF COLLAGEN CASINGS. EFFECTS OF PREPARATION, BRINING, AND HEATING ON STRENGTH, RHEOLOGY AND MICROSTRUCTURE

Properties of five collagen preparations were investigated to enhance understanding of in-line co-extrusion casing formation. The first study revealed that 30% NaCl and 5 min brining provided maximum strength. The second study showed 100% difference in tensile strength between preparations; when adjusted to % protein, the difference was smaller but still existed. Extrusion force and elastic modulus (G’) also varied; appear to be acid dependent. Denaturation temperature of raw dispersions was between 36.7 and 38.9 ? C. Upon salt brining, it substantially increased to 63.3 -65.3 ? C. Polarized light microscopy revealed numerus intact segments of connective tissue fibers and some cellulose fibers.
Design of the Element Interior with Betawi Culture Ornaments Made of Portable Diffusor for Interior Acoustics and Aesthetics

: The results of Betawi culture need to be preserved, developed and interpreted as a legacy of Indonesian cultural wealth that has high aesthetic value. Interior elements are part of building space, also need to be processed aesthetically. The purpose of this study was to develop ornaments of Betawi culture that are applied to interior elements by using portable diffusion as an acoustic function and enhance cultural aesthetics in the interior. Previous research was only about designing portable acoustic diffuses and space decorations. The method used in this study is the method of distributing the functions of quality and a positive design. The positive design process has explored the application of creative concepts, by considering love and charity, for the design process. Benefits in the form of interior design results, for now, long-term and short-term happiness aspirations, and can direct someone to behave well. The design of interior elements with Betawi cultural ornaments made of portable diffuses for acoustic and aesthetic interiors. Interior design needs to consider the function, happiness of the user, and preserve the wealth of cultural results.
Random Forest Ensemble for River Turbidity Measurement From Space Remote Sensing Data

River turbidity, serving as an important evaluation index for monitoring water contamination and guiding pollution control, is mainly measured based on the data gathered from contacting turbidity sensors or contactless space satellites. Nevertheless, the prevalence of those abovementioned two measurements is strongly limited due to the disadvantages of low-density spatial distribution of sensor data and extremely high price of satellite data. To solve such difficulty, depending on the Google earth engine (GEE) that freely supplies hyperspectral remote sensing data, in this article, we propose a novel river turbidity measurement model based on random forest ensemble. First, by fully taking advantage of each spectral information and their tuned spectral information, a newly proposed full combination subspace is deployed to generate all the possible base random forests. Second, we introduce a novel error-minimization-based pruning algorithm to circularly delete poor base random forests in accordance with the dynamic threshold. Finally, a weighted average method solved by regularized linear regression is used to aggregate the entire remainder base random forests that are preserved after pruning, thereby yielding the final measurement result of river turbidity. Experiments corroborate the superiority of our proposed model over state-of-the-art competitors and its simplified counterparts.
Effect of Economic and Monetary Policy Uncertainty on stock markets. Evidence on return, volatility and liquidity

This paper studies the effect of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and Monetary Policy Uncertainty (MPU) on the return, volatility and liquidity of the stock markets. Taking the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 as reference, it is demonstrated how these uncertainties influence the return and volatility and, to a lesser extent, the liquidity of these indexes. It has been found that EPU have a greater effect on return and volatility during periods of recession, having only an effect on liquidity during periods of expansion. In contrast, MPU influences return and volatility more during periods of expansion, and liquidity only during periods of recession. These findings demonstrate the existence of behavioural biases consistent with Behavioural Finance, as well as the importance of controlling uncertainty on the part of economic policy makers to avoid the damages that EPU and MPU can generate in the stock markets.
Notes on Exploitation, Population Status, Distribution, and Natural History of the Sulawesi Forest Turtle (Leucocephalon yuwonoi) in North-Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

ABSTRACT A field survey of the Sulawesi forest turtle (Leucocephalon yuwonoi) in north-central Sulawesi demonstrates that the species is collected by turtle hunters, and population densities are relatively low. Several new localities for the species and data on reproduction, habitat, and parasites are reported in this article.
Short Communication Negative modulation of the chicken infectious anemia virus promoter by COUP-TF1 and an E box-like element at the transcription start site binding dEF1

Expression of enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) under control of the promoterenhancer of chicken infectious anemia virus (CAV) is increased in an oestrogen receptorenhanced cell line when treated with oestrogen and the promoter-enhancer binds unidentified proteins that recognize a consensus oestrogen response element (ERE). Co-transfection assays with the CAV promoter and the nuclear receptor chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter transcription factor 1 (COUP-TF1) showed that expression of EGFP was decreased by 50 to 60% in DF-1 and LMH cells. The CAV promoter that included sequences at and downstream of the transcription start point had less expression than a short promoter construct. Mutation of a putative E box at this site restored expression levels. Electromobility shift assays showed that the transcription regulator delta-EF1 (dEF1) binds to this E box region. These findings indicate that the CAV promoter activity can be affected directly or indirectly by COUP-TF1 and dEF1.
A Stray-Field-Immune Magnetic Displacement Sensor With 1% Accuracy

We present a new Hall sensor design for the accurate and robust measurement of linear displacement. Implemented in CMOS, the sensor is based on a novel gradient measurement concept combining Hall elements with integrated magnetic concentrators. In typical applications with practical Ferrite magnets, the peak output voltage of the Hall transducers is only around 1.7 mV at the maximum operating temperature of 160°C, and thus requires high-performance low-offset readout electronics. Over its 15-mm linear displacement range, the sensor’s total error is 1% including manufacturing tolerances, trimming accuracy, temperature, aging effects, and practical magnet constraints. In addition, the sensor is immune to magnetic stray fields up to 5 mT, complying with the most stringent automotive norm.
Integrating Wearable Haptics and Obstacle Avoidance for the Visually Impaired in Indoor Navigation: A User-Centered Approach

Recently, in the attempt to increase blind people autonomy and improve their quality of life, a lot of effort has been devoted to develop technological travel aids. These systems can surrogate spatial information about the environment and deliver it to end-users through sensory substitution (auditory, haptic). However, despite the promising research outcomes, these solutions have met scarce acceptance in real-world. Often, this is also due to the limited involvement of real end users in the conceptual and design phases. In this article, we propose a novel indoor navigation system based on wearable haptic technologies. All the developmental phases were driven by continuous feedback from visually impaired persons. The proposed travel aid system consists of a RGB-D camera, a processing unit to compute visual information for obstacle avoidance, and a wearable device, which can provide normal and tangential force cues for guidance in an unknown indoor environment. Experiments with blindfolded subjects and visually impaired participants show that our system could be an effective support during indoor navigation, and a viable tool for training blind people to the usage of travel aids.
A New Postfault Control Method for CHB Inverter to Increase Maximum Output Voltage

In this article, a new postfault control algorithm for cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel inverter is proposed to increase the maximum available output voltage under semiconductor fault conditions. Once a semiconductor switch in an H-bridge power cell fails, instead of bypassing the faulty cell, it can be utilized to generate a voltage. However, one of the three levels (positive, negative, or zero) of the faulty cell output voltage is not available, reducing the available output voltage of the cell to half. In the proposed method, the faulty cells being utilized and combined with the neutral shift (NS) method to achieve a higher output voltage of the CHB in faulty conditions. The output voltage obtained by the proposed method is analyzed for different faulty conditions and compared with the conventional NS method. Experimental results are presented confirming the effectiveness of the proposed methods in increasing the maximum output voltage at different faulty conditions.
Future prospects in respiratory syncytial virus genetics

Host genes, together with viral and environmental factors, determine the susceptibility, severity and course of respiratory syncytial virus infections. The course of infection is influenced by several frequently occurring gene variants that especially appear to influence the innate immune system and the regulation of the T helper (Th) type 1/Th2 cytokine pathways. Naturally occurring polymorphisms in certain genes have been associated with a severe course of respiratory syncytial virus infection. Genetic association between interleukin (IL)-4, IL-4Rα and IL-10 polymorphisms and respiratory syncytial virus bronchiolitis differ between children younger and older than 6 months, indicating a different pathogenesis in these subsets of patients. Knowledge of host genetic variants adds to our understanding of pathogenesis, and may identify critical steps to which prevention and therapy may be directed.
Learning Class-Aligned and Generalized Domain-Invariant Representations for Speech Emotion Recognition

Although recent research on speech emotion recognition has demonstrated that learning domain-invariant features provide an elegant solution to domain mismatch, the features learned by the existing methods lack generalization capabilities to capture latent information from datasets. We propose two novel domain adaptation methods, the generalized domain adversarial neural network (GDANN) and the class-aligned GDANN (CGDANN), to learn generalized domain-invariant representations for emotion recognition. GDANN and CGDANN, which are derived from multitask learning (MTL), consist of three tasks. The main task is to recognize the emotional category to which the input belongs. The remaining two tasks are auxiliary tasks. One is to use a variational autoencoder to model the input distribution, which encourages the model to learn the distribution of latent representations. The other is to learn the common representations of different domains, for which distinguishing via the domain classifier is difficult. The gradient of the domain classifier guides the shared representations of the source and target domains to approximate each other using a gradient reversal layer. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we conduct several experiments with the IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV datasets. The results illustrate that good performance is achieved compared with that of state-of-the-art methods. Notably, CGDANN utilizes a small quantity of labeled target domain samples to align the distribution representation and obtains the best performance among the comparison methods. We further visualize the representations learned by the proposed methods and discover that the representations of the source and target domains converge with a low variance.
Molecular genetic analyses of TTG1-dependent cell fate pathways identifies a combinatorial Myb/bHLH transcription factor network in Arabidopsis

Dedication To my family, thank you. IV Acknowledgements Although a cliché, it is certainly true that throughout my graduate career I benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of too many to mention here. I must thank, however, my committee members for the expert and excellent guidance I received in our meetings and discussions. I am also indebted to past and present members of the Lloyd lab for sharing their knowledge, reagents, and beer, particularly during my more hectic moments in research. Most of all I thank Dr. Alan Lloyd for a great many things, not the least of which was encouragement to enroll in graduate school. Under his mentorship it was my privilege to experience the elusive balance of freedom to properly explore but with ample, unobtrusive guidance to learn meaningfully and succeed. Thanks Alan. The discovery of the Arabidopsis ttg1 mutant almost three decades ago provided a unique opportunity for the study of how several cell fates and organ identity pathways are co-regulated. Besides showing a lack of flavonoid based pigments, the pleiotropic ttg1 mutant is also deficient for the development of several epidermal characters including plant hair cells (trichomes), the non-hair cells of the root and the mucilage-secreting cells of the seed coat epidermis. Ectopic expression of the maize R bHLH transcriptional regulator of the flavonoid pigment pathway could completely suppress all the ttg1 mutant phenotypes, providing the first clue to the nature of the control mechanisms governing TTG1-dependent traits. Because it was established that a bHLH and a Myb protein are required for the regulation of anthocyanin pigment production in several plant species and an Arabidopsis Myb gene was necessary for trichome initiation, the existence of bHLH and Myb proteins that would regulate all the TTG1-dependent developmental pathways was hypothesized. This study works towards the elucidation of the transcriptional control mechanisms that regulate the TTG1-dependent developmental pathways. The identification and characterization of a key regulator, EGL3, uncovered the redundant nature of bHLH proteins operating under the TTG1 regulatory umbrella. As a result, bHLH regulators VI were assigned to all TTG1-dependent epidermal cell fate pathways and new roles for previously identified bHLH proteins were revealed. Roles suggested in the literature for Arabidopsis Myb factors suspected of regulating the flavonoid pigment pathway were at odds with findings from other plant models. Analysis of Myb loss-of-function RNAi lines and TTG1:GR and GL3:GR fusion lines presented here provides a clarified …
Applying the Optimal Estimation Method for Retrieving Rayleigh-Scatter Lidar Temperatures in the Mesosphere

The Rayleigh-scatter lidar (RSL) system at the Atmospheric Lidar Observatory at Utah State University (ALO-USU) provided a rich database of absolute temperatures throughout the mesosphere from 45 km to above 90 km between 1993 and 2004. Recently, a new method for retrieving absolute temperatures from RSL observations has been developed by a group at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada. The Optimal Estimation Method (OEM) uses machine learning to minimize a cost function by optimizing the temperature parameter in a forward model, in our case the lidar equation, to RSL data. This optimization provides some benefits over the existing method through a robust uncertainty budget and a quantitative determination of the cut-off altitude, or the topmost altitude in the temperature profile. Using this method also provides a slight increase in the top observable altitude and does not have a large dependence on the initial temperature. The OEM procedure was converted from MATLAB, which is used by the UWO group, into Python, which is used at ALO-USU. The temperatures were then reduced using the OEM from observations made between 1993 and 2004. Initial results obtained using the Python version of OEM were compared with those using MATLAB showing good agreement. More observations from ALO-USU were then reduced using OEM and compared with the original reduction method. The results show good agreement between the two methods until higher altitudes. These differences can be attributed to dependence on initial conditions in the original method or over-constraining from overestimating the altitude range to be used in the OEM retrieval. At higher altitudes, however, the temperatures tend to agree within the given uncertainties. Further work with this method is being done to generate a temperature climatology using ALO-USU observations and developing a method to retrieve absolute neutral densities using a modification of the forward model in the OEM.
Age and growth of forkbeard, Phycis phycis, in Portuguese continental waters

The forkbeard, Phycis phycis, is an important commercial species in Portugal; however, little information is available on its biology. Age and growth of the forkbeard from Portuguese continental waters were studied using 687 otoliths from specimens caught between May 2011 and December 2012. Otoliths were transversally sectioned, and assigned ages were validated by marginal increment analysis and edge analysis, and indices of precision were also calculated to corroborate ageing within and between readers. Validation techniques showed that an annual growth increment is formed every year, corresponding to the succession of an opaque and a translucent growth zone. Specimens ranged from 15.5 to 67.1 cm total length (TL), and their estimated ages ranged between 0 and 18 years. The forkbeard is a relatively slow growing, long lived species, that does not show sexual dimorphism in growth. The von Bertalanffy growth parameters estimated for forkbeard from the Portuguese continental waters were L∞ = 75.14 cm TL, k = 0.10 yr−1 and t0 = −2.09 yr.
Complementing IoT Services Through Software Defined Networking and Edge Computing: A Comprehensive Survey

Millions of sensors continuously produce and transmit data to control real-world infrastructures using complex networks in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT devices are limited in computational power, including storage, processing, and communication resources, to effectively perform compute-intensive tasks locally. Edge computing resolves the resource limitation problems by bringing computation closer to the edge of IoT devices. Providing distributed edge nodes across the network reduces the stress of centralized computation and overcomes latency challenges in the IoT. Therefore, edge computing presents low-cost solutions for compute-intensive tasks. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables effective network management by presenting a global perspective of the network. While SDN was not explicitly developed for IoT challenges, it can, however, provide impetus to solve the complexity issues and help in efficient IoT service orchestration. The current IoT paradigm of massive data generation, complex infrastructures, security vulnerabilities, and requirements from the newly developed technologies make IoT realization a challenging issue. In this research, we provide an extensive survey on SDN and the edge computing ecosystem to solve the challenge of complex IoT management. We present the latest research on Software-Defined Internet of Things orchestration using Edge (SDIoT-Edge) and highlight key requirements and standardization efforts in integrating these diverse architectures. An extensive discussion on different case studies using SDIoT-Edge computing is presented to envision the underlying concept. Furthermore, we classify state-of-the-art research in the SDIoT-Edge ecosystem based on multiple performance parameters. We comprehensively present security and privacy vulnerabilities in the SDIoT-Edge computing and provide detailed taxonomies of multiple attack possibilities in this paradigm. We highlight the lessons learned based on our findings at the end of each section. Finally, we discuss critical insights toward current research issues, challenges, and further research directions to efficiently provide IoT services in the SDIoT-Edge paradigm.
Paraconcinnum leirsi n.sp. (Trematoda: Dicrocoeliidae) from Rodents in Tanzania and its Phylogenetic Position within the Dicrocoeliids

The trematode Paraconcinnum leirsi n.sp. (Dicrocoeliidae) is described from two rodent species, the African gerbil, Gerbilliscus vicinus, and the spiny mouse, Acomys spinosissimus, from Tanzania. It differs from the description of P. hylomisci found in the Stella wood mouse, Hylomyscus Stella, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Molecular studies were performed by sequencing the near complete 18S rDNA gene of the fluke to assess its phylogenetic position within the Dicrocoeliidae. The resulting estimate of evolutionary divergence between the fluke and other dicrocoeliids was 1.60 ± 0.22% base differences per site. The phylogenetic analysis shows that the fluke is a new species within Dicrocoeliidae falling in a cluster with the genera Corrigia, Lyperosomum, Concinnum and Eurytrema although phylogenetic relationships among these genera are not well resolved. This is the first dicrocoeliid reported from rodents in eastern Africa.