Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AFRL-AFOSR-VA-TR-2016-0046 CHARACTERIZATION AND BIOMIMCRY OF AVIAN NANOSTRUCTURED TISSUES

3 Vertebrate animal disclaimer.3 Progress on Objective One 1) Manakins produce bright iridescent feather colors without melanosomes.4 2) A nanostructural basis for glossy red plumage colors . 22 Progress on Objective Two 1) Bio-Inspired fast humidity-responsive dynamic structural colors in films of synthetic melanin nanoparticles . 37 Publications (23). 47 Interactions.50 Evolutionary and transformational aspects of this work.51
Estimation of Oxidative Stress and Serum Mineral ( Ca , Mg , P ) Status in Hashimoto ' s Thyroiditis Patients

Background: Thyroid hormones have a crucial physiological role in maintaining the balance of the body’s metabolism. These hormones also play an important role in the metabolism of the bone system. On the other hand, oxidative stress has been implicated in the pathogenesis of several inflammatory and immune-mediated disorders including Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Therefore, the present study has aimed to find the changes in the serum calcium, phosphorous, and magnesium levels, and to evaluate the effect of HT on the body’s antioxidant status. Methods: The studied people consisted of 86 subjects, who were divided into two groups: 43 individuals with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT) and 43 age-matched healthy individuals. This research checked the amounts of total triiodothyronine (T3), total thyroxine (T4), thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), and also the mineral status and some other antioxidant status parameters. Results: It was observed that the mean TSH and SOD levels were increased significantly in HT patients (1.56  0.73), compared to the control group (1.09  0.62). On the other hand, the levels of T4, Ca, and Mg were meaningfully lower in HT patients, compared to the control group (P < 0.05). However, there was no significant difference in the mean of T3, P, and PON-1, between the hypothyroidism and control groups (P < 0.05). Conclusion: The obtained outcomes established this hypothesis that people with HT have an elevated oxidative stress and a decreased mineral level. Therefore, the importance of monitoring the levels of those antioxidant capabilities and the mineral status in HT patients before treatment became more evident.
Comparison of X-Ray Micro-Tomography Measurements of Densities and Porosity to Traditional Techniques for Carbon-Carbon Composites

Abstract : The porosity in carbonaceous materials affects many of their properties. For this reason, the characterization of this porosity is very important. Many diverse techniques have been utilized to characterize the pores in carbon materials. Some of these technique along with the use of X-ray micro-computed tomography (muCT) have been utilized in this study to provide significant insight into the pore structure of carbon-carbon composites. muCT is not only capable of providing information on the size, shape, and distribution of both open and closed pores in 3-dimensions but in conjunction with mercury porosimetry, it is also able to explain artifacts in the samples.
Choosing Brands: Fresh Produce Versus Other Products

Assuming that brands contribute to quality risk reduction, prestige, and design, we derive and test hypothesis on the willingness to pay (WTP) for brands across different product categories (electronics, clothing, packaged food, and fresh produce). Using the random effect tobit model on the stated point value of WTP and the ordered probit model on the stated range of WTP, we find that WTP for brands of fresh produce is least among the four product categories controlling for relevant demographic variations. Simulations show that fresh produce has a higher optimal price premium for brands but with a much smaller market share. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.
Overexpression in Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer: Molecular Pathways Involved as Targets for Prevention and Treatment

Non melanoma skin cancers (NMSCs) are the most frequent malignancies in humans (Geller & Annas, 2003). It comprises many different types of tumors, such as Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) and Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), which are the main ones among the NMSCs. There are 100.000 new cases of these neoplasms per year in the UK (Aitken et al., 2007) and about a millon in the US (Kuchide, 2003). NMSC incidence is estimated to increase in a 10% by 2060 -taking into account the Copenhagen Amendments scenario for protection of ozone layer(Slaper et al., 1996). The development of both SCC and BCC implies a malignant transformation of keratinocytes, the most abundant cells in the epidermis. In addition to genetic factors, there are a variety of stimulus that can induce this transformation, like viral or bacterial infections and chemical agents (such as 7,12-dimethyl benzanthracene -DMBAor Benzo[a]pyrene-7,8diol-9,10-epoxide -B[a]PDE-), (Aubin et al., 2003; Bouwes Bavinck et al., 2001; Madan et al., 2006). However, the most important carcinogen of the skin is the solar ultraviolet radiation (UVr), mainly the UVB component (280-310 nm), which is able to reach the earth surface (Armstrong & Kricker, 2001). All of those carcinogens promote molecular and cellular changes, modifying different functions like cell cycle control or apoptotic cell death. In this way, the affected cells lose their capacity to regulate their proliferation properly and have the potential to generate an uncontrolled linage of cells, which may ultimately lead to tumor formation and growth. There are many gene products that have been found to be involved in skin cancer development. Some of them are related to cell cycle -like cyclin D1(Liang et al., 2000), apoptosis -like Bax, Bcl-2, and othersor in both processes -like p53 and p21(Coultas & Strasser, 2003; Murphy et al., 2002). Additionally, skin UVB irradiation has been proven to induce an increment in the levels of a significant number of immune system mediators, such as tumor necrosis factor-┙ (TNF-┙), interleukins 6 (IL-6), 10 (IL-10), 8 (IL-8), 4 (IL-4), prostaglandins (PGs), nitric oxide (NO) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF),
Study on isolates of acute meningitis in a tertiary care centre in Assam.

Background: Meningitis is an inflammatory affection of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, which occurs as either a primary disease or secondarily to disease in some other part of the body. The epidemiological trend of acute meningitis varies with time and geography. Objective: To isolate the various agents of acute meningitis in all age group patients and to know the antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of bacterial isolates. Materials and Mathods: In this prospective study, a total of 316 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) specimens were collected from patients showing signs and symptoms of acute meningitis and processed by standard microbiological methods in a tertiary care hospital in Guwahati, Assam over a period of one year, from August 2009 to July 2010. Results: Out of 316 CSF samples, bacterial and fungal culture positivity rate was found to be 16.13%. The most common bacterial isolate was Staphylococcus aureus , 29.41%. Isolation rate of Cryptococcus neoformans was 8%. All the Gram positive isolates were 100% sensitive to linezolid and vancomycin, whereas Gram negative isolates were 92% sensitive to polymyxin B. Conclusion: This study gives an idea about the changing trend of acute meningitis along with the changing in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of the bacterial isolates, which can help the clinicians to formulate the initial empiric therapy for patients of acute meningitis.
Towards a global geomorphometric atlas using Google Earth Engine

Attempts towards a global geomorphometric atlas have been done in the past when computational power was less evolved than nowadays. In this study, we present a possible way to create a global geomorphometric atlas by taking advantage of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) computational capabilities. To exemplify how accessible, efficient and fast GEE works in geomorphometric analysis we globally derive popular land-surface variables (e.g. slope, aspect, multiple curvatures, and surface roughness) and perform a hierarchical pixel-based classification of topography on three levels of details. The scale of analysis can easily be adjusted to meet the user needs. Performing large-scale morphometric analysis with GEE has the potential to become an important milestone in Geomorphometry and can lead towards generating a global geomorphometric atlas.
Review of deep learning approaches for image caption generation

Generation of description of images using natural language sentences is gaining much popularity these days. It is a challenging task, as it requires not only understanding an image, but to translate that visual knowledge into sentence description. To capture the correlation between two modalities i.e. visual and natural language we need to map both these to some same space so at learn the relation between them or say we need to learn the multimodal joint model. The traditional way to do this was to use sentence template or do a retrieval task based on ranking. These methods doesn’t work or generalize well to new images. We somehow need to map both of them to a common semantic space. Again deep neural networks come to the rescue here due to there power to form new grammatically correct sentences as opposed to the template based models and their generalization capability to a novel image.
Predicting critical power in elite cyclists : Questioning validity of the 3min All-out test Original Investigation

word count: 249 Text only word count: 2713 Number of figures and tables: 5 D ow nl oa de d by U ni v SA L ib ra ry T oo w on g on 0 1/ 10 /1 7, V ol um e 0, A rt ic le N um be r 0 “Predicting Critical Power in Elite Cyclists: Questioning Validity of the 3-min All-out Test” by Bartram JC, Thewlis D, Martin DT, Norton KI International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance © 2016 Human Kinetics, Inc.
Explain by Goal Augmentation : Explanation Generation as Inverse Planning

There is a growing interest in achieving explainable robotics during human-robot interaction. However, existing work either focuses on modulating robot plans to make them more explicable, or uses explanations at the cost of increased human cognitive load. Prior work on generating explanations often requires updates to human domain knowledge. However, such work idealized both human memory capacity for updating knowledge and cognitive capacity for reasoning with the new knowledge. Inspired by psychological studies of human cognitive load, we aim at not changing human domain knowledge, which represents long-term memory that is difficult to update, and instead consider explanation generation as an inverse planning problem to search for a new goal that covers the original goal while resulting in an explicable plan. The new goal is then used as an explanation to the human observer. While our method for explanation generation is motivated by minimizing human cognitive load, it may also be used to hide private information from other agents, which can be useful in non-collaborative or adversarial settings. We introduce the problem formulation and illustrate the idea with a few examples.
Reply: (Evaluation of Land-Surface Parameterization Schemes Using Observations)

Robock et al. (1995a) tested a 15-cm bucket model (Manabe 1969) and the Simplified Simple Biosphere (SSiB) model (Xue et al. 1991) by forcing them with observed meteorological and actinometric data and comparing the results with observed soil moisture, albedo, snow depth, and net radiation. Xue et al. (1997) show that it is possible to improve SSiB in response to errors in the simulations by fixing the snowmelt partitioning and adjusting the soil properties to produce a higher effective field capacity. We agree with their conclusion that using real data to test models is a good idea, and this was one of the major conclusions of Robock et al. (1995a). Xue et al. (1997) claim that they demonstrate that the fundamental structure of their model is sound and that it just needs tuning by adjusting parameter values. However, while the bucket model did not have any problem with snowmelt partitioning in the Robock et al. (1995a) experiments, which involved six stations for 6 yr in the former Soviet Union, for some stations the 15-cm field capacity was clearly too low. Schlosser (1995) demonstrated that major improvements are also possible in bucket model simulations for particular stations by taking into account actual conditions at the station. Figure 1, for example, shows a dramatic improvement in the Kostroma simulations by using the actual field capacity of 28 cm of plant-available water in the top 1 m of soil rather than the standard 15 cm used in the GCM version of the bucket model. Not only are the winter soil moisture values accurately simulated, but the summer drying is accurately modeled in wet and dry summers. In fact, this improved simulation of soil moisture for Kostroma, produced by changing only one parameter in the bucket model, the field capacity, appears to be superior to the
Cognitively constrained parsing in ACT-RThe effects of function tags and lexical information on eye movement models

This thesis addresses the implementation of a syntactic parser in the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational cognitive architecture, as opposed to similar research, which use independent parsers alongside a cognitive architecture. This paper specifically explores the effects of functional tags and lexical information on parser results. Implementing a parser directly into a cognitive architecture allows for reading results directly off the parser and this novel approach might provide new insights. An experiment comparing a default parser containing function tags, a simple parser containing no function tags or lexical information, and a lexicalized parser containing lexical information and no function tags has been conducted. Parser recall and precision measures were 36.68% and 39.48% for the default parser, 29.08% and 35.17% for the simple parser, and 34.76% and 38.78% for the lexical parser. Correlation was not found between any of the parser generated models and the self-paced reading data of Frank et al.(2013). Correlation measures consistently doubled after the addition of lexical information to the parser. The removal of function tags had no clear effect on correlation measures. In conclusion, lexical information has a positive effect on the eye movement model accuracy. Although the model generated by the parser as discussed in this paper is less accurate than rival models, the used approach provides a generous amount of freedom for improvements which can be explored in further research.
Stability of anchored sheet wall in cohesive‐frictional soils by FE limit analysis

This study extends the limit analysis techniques used for the computation of strict bounds of the load factors in solids to stability problems with interfaces, anchors and joints. The cases considered include the pull‐out capacity of multi‐belled anchors and the stability of retaining walls for multiple conditions at the anchor/soil and wall/soil interfaces. Three types of wall supports are examined: free standing wall, simply supported wall and anchored wall. The results obtained are compared against available experimental and numerical data. The conclusion drawn confirms the validity of numerical limit analysis for the computation of accurate bounds on limit loads and capturing failure modes of structures with multiple inclusions of complex interfaces and support conditions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Wisconsin Hα Mapper Northern Sky Survey

The Wisconsin Hα Mapper (WHAM) has surveyed the distribution and kinematics of ionized gas in the Galaxy above declination -30°. The WHAM Northern Sky Survey (WHAM-NSS) has an angular resolution of 1° and provides the first absolutely calibrated, kinematically resolved map of the Hα emission from the warm ionized medium (WIM) within ∼±100 km s-1 of the local standard of rest. Leveraging WHAM's 12 km s-1 spectral resolution, we have modeled and removed atmospheric emission and zodiacal absorption features from each of the 37,565 spectra. The resulting Hα profiles reveal ionized gas detected in nearly every direction on the sky with a sensitivity of 0.15 R (3 σ). Complex distributions of ionized gas are revealed in the nearby spiral arms up to 1-2 kpc away from the Galactic plane. Toward the inner Galaxy, the WHAM-NSS provides information about the WIM out to the tangent point down to a few degrees from the plane. Ionized gas is also detected toward many intermediate velocity clouds at high latitudes. Several new H II regions are revealed around early B stars and evolved stellar cores (sdB/O). This work presents the details of the instrument, the survey, and the data reduction techniques. The WHAM-NSS is also presented and analyzed for its gross properties. Finally, some general conclusions are presented about the nature of the WIM as revealed by the WHAM-NSS.
The NU Non-Parallel Voice Conversion System for the Voice Conversion Challenge 2018

This paper presents the non-parallel voice conversion (VC) system developed at Nagoya University (NU) for the SPOKE task of the Voice Conversion Challenge 2018 (VCC2018). The goal of this task is to develop VC systems without the requirement of parallel training data. The key idea of our system is to use a text-to-speech (TTS) voice as a reference voice, making it possible to create two parallel training datasets between the source and TTS voices and between the TTS and target voices. Using these datasets, a cascade VC system is developed to convert the source voice into the target voice via the TTS voice as a reference. Furthermore, we also propose a system selection framework to avoid generating collapsed speech waveforms, which are often observed when using less accurately converted speech features in the WaveNet vocoder. In VCC2018, our system achieved the second best score for similarity (around 70%) and an above-average score for naturalness (a mean opinion score around 3.0) among the submitted systems.
A study on factor that influence online shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping is a process in which buy goods or services through the Internet. With large of consumer using Internet for online shopping, it is not clear what drives them to shop online (Monsure et al., 2006) and studies regarding consumer behavior towards online shopping in the Malaysian environment is still limited number (Haque and Khatibi, 2006). Thus, this study objective is to identify dominant factor that influences consumers to buy online. Purposive sampling method was performed in the selection of sample. These items were empirically tested by data collected from consumer using internet for online shopping. Findings showed that usefulness factor is the most dominant followed by ease of use and enjoyment. In conclusion, consumers in Malaysia believe, with online shopping, shopping time may reduce and online shopping would make their life easier. They are also concerned about privacy, trust and disclosing personal information when dealing with online shopping.
Educational development for online teaching

This thesis discusses a case study that explores the impact on educators’ teaching practices, particularly their assumptions and beliefs about teaching and self-efficacy, as a result of their participation in an educational development programme designed to prepare college educators to develop and teach online and hybrid courses. The philosophical worldview adopted in this study is closely aligned to the constructivist perspective. It draws upon the conceptions of teaching literature, Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy (1977; 1986; 1997) and Mezirow’s (1978) theory of transformational learning as a conceptual framework. The data were collected through an online survey of 34 participants, face-to-face interviews with 18 participants and documentary evidence review of 6 participants, and was analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis approach. The findings suggest that the knowledge and experience that college educators acquire when participating in educational development for online teaching produce a positive increase in technological and pedagogical knowledge and understanding of accessibility for some educators. This new understanding, in turn, results in changes to both online and face-to-face teaching practices of educators. The results also indicate that for some educators, participation in an educational development programme for online teaching encouraged more student-centred teaching approaches and helped to dispel misconceptions about the lower quality and value of online learning. Participation in educational development for online teaching was also found to increase some educators’ technical and pedagogical confidence, although a few participants experienced an initial decline in self-efficacy. Finally, the results reveal that educators perceived their participation in the educational development programme for online teaching to have a positive impact on the learning experience of their students.
Effects of domestic processing on trypsin inhibitor, phytic, acid, tannins and in-vitro Protein Digestibility of three sorghum varieties

Effects of soaking, germination and fermentation on trypsin inhibitors, phytic acid, tannins content and in-vitro protein digestibility of three local sorghum varieties Hamra, Shahla and Baidha were investigated. Soaking process significantly decreased trypsin inhibitory activities (TIA), phytic acid and tannins contents, whereas in vitro protein digestibility was not significantly improved. Germination for 3 days of Hamra, Shahla and Baidha sorghum varieties significantly decreased TIA and phytic acid levels, but it significantly increased tannins content that coincided with decrease in protein digestibility. During 24 hrs fermentation TIA, phytic acid and tannins contents of the three varieties were significantly reduced. Fermentation also significantly improved the in-vitro digestibility of sorghum proteins. Among the three domestic processes, fermentation was the most effective in reducing antinutritional factors and improving protein digestibility.
Genome-wide association for mapping QTLs linked to protein and oil contents in soybean

The objective of this work was to identify single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers linked with quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with increased contents of protein and oil in soybean. A total of 169 Brazilian soybean varieties, genotyped with 6,000 SNP markers, were evaluated. Protein and oil contents were obtained with the near-infrared reflectance method. Correlation and multiple linear regression analyses were used to identify linkage disequilibrium between SNP markers and the QTLs associated with the two characteristics. Seven QTLs were found to be associated with protein content, on six chromosomes (2, 6, 11, 12, 13, and 16), explaining 60.9% of the variation in this trait. For oil content, eight QTLs were identified on six chromosomes (1, 4, 5, 6, 17, and 19), explaining 78.3% of the variation in the trait. The correlation between the number of loci containing favorable alleles and the evaluated characteristics was 0.49 for protein content and 0.60 for oil content. The molecular markers identified are mapped in genomic regions containing QTLs previously mapped for both characteristics, which reinforces the association between these regions and the genetic control of oil and protein contents in soybean.