Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application of HPLC to Study the Reaction of Free Radicals with Antioxidants and/or Toxins

The application of HPLC in the antioxidative (antiradical) properties studies of various samples is discussed in this paper. The assay is based on the reaction of, characterized by strong oxidizing properties, hydroxyl radicals (generated in the Fenton-like reaction) with the sample and with the, so-called, sensor. The product of the sensor reaction with the radicals is analyzed using RP-HPLC with fluorescence detection. It is well known that antioxidants, which are healthy for living organisms, have a negative environmental effect. Therefore, the goal of the paper is to discuss if the same setup can be used to get rid of unwanted compounds (toxins) from the environment. It was found that the phenols and PAHs are degraded by hydroxyl radicals. The optimal (maximum degree of the degradation) conditions were obtained for and 0.1 mM Fe2
Perceptual Exploration of Factors and Issues Affecting Adoption of E-Insurance

In this ever evolving competitive environment, technology is making its foray into lives of individuals by helping them get the work done at the click of a mouse only. And the financial services industry is no exception. E-banking has already been accepted and adopted by the younger generation and those having access to internet. Another application of E-Commerce in Insurance sector i.e., E-insurance involves keeping all or any of the insurance policies in electronic mode by the policy holders, where in everything including the request, proposal, contract and negotiation is performed on-line. Despite its proclaimed benefits, there are very few users availing this service. The present study is an attempt to explore the usersi¯ perception towards E-insurance and their awareness of the concept. Using a sample size of 189 respondents based on convenience sampling, it further tries to investigate the factors affecting the adoption of E-insurance in India. Also, the study aims at finding out the potential issues and challenges associated with the usage of e-insurance.
IMPROVING CORE BOND STRENGTH OF PARTICLEBOARD THROUGH PARTICLE SIZE REDISTRIBUTION

Novel particleboard furnish mixtures were formulated to improve the core-bonding and screw-holding of industrial particleboard without increasing resin content or board density. Single-layer (uniform vertical density with core furnish only) and conventional 3-layer particleboards were manufactured at two density levels from four novel mixes plus control (unscreened industrial core furnish). Board mean and core density, internal bond strength, edge screw withdrawal resistance, and moduli of rupture and elasticity were measured. The core of commercial furniture-grade particleboard appears to contain too many fine particulates and insufficient coarser particles. Uniform density profile single-layer boards containing novel mixes with higher-coarse (>2 mm) and lower-fines (
NON-DESTRUCTIVE MEASUREMENT OF PERENNIAL CROP N STATUS

Little research has been conducted to evaluate the use on hand-held leaf meters as tools to assess plant N status in perennial crops. In this study, using replicated N rate plots in place for up to four years, we used two hand-held leaf meters (the Minolta SPAD meter and the Field Spec CM1000) to monitor tissue N status in apple and one meter (CM1000 only) in wine grape. In both crops, relationships were found between leaf meter readings and both fertilizer N rate as well as tissue N concentration. For both crops, differentiation between 0 N rate and high N rates were apparent, but low and medium N rates were often not statistically different from the zero and high rates. In apple, the data suggest that a minimum sample size of 24 leaves is required to assess plant N status, suggesting that a larger sample size is needed before guidelines for these meters can be developed.
Wikipedia-Based Relatedness Measurements for Multilingual Short Text Clustering

Throughout the world, people can post information about their local area in their own languages using social networking services. Multilingual short text clustering is an important task to organize such information, and it can be applied to various applications, such as event detection and summarization. However, measuring the relatedness between short texts written in various languages is a challenging problem. In addition to handling multiple languages, the semantic gaps among all languages must be considered. In this article, we propose two Wikipedia-based semantic relatedness measurement methods for multilingual short text clustering. The proposed methods solve the semantic gap problem by incorporating the inter-language links of Wikipedia into Extended Naive Bayes (ENB), a probabilistic method that can be applied to measure semantic relatedness among monolingual short texts. The proposed methods represent a multilingual short text as a vector of the English version of Wikipedia articles (entities). By transferring texts to a unified vector space, the relatedness between texts in different languages with similar meanings can be increased. We also propose an approach that can improve clustering performance and reduce the processing time by eliminating language-specific entities in the unified vector space. Experimental results on multilingual Twitter message clustering revealed that the proposed methods outperformed cross-lingual explicit semantic analysis, a previously proposed method to measure relatedness between texts in different languages. Moreover, the proposed methods were comparable to ENB applied to texts translated into English using a proprietary translation service. The proposed methods enabled relatedness measurements for multilingual short text clustering without requiring machine translation processes.
Utility Maximisation: Non-Concave Utility and Non-Linear Expectation

Since the birth of mathematical nance, portfolio selection has been one of the topics which have attracted a lot of interest, with models formulated in discrete and continuous time and developed in complete and incomplete markets. In conventional or neoclassical finance, many models are based off the assumption that agents make decisions by maximising their expected utility. Deviations between models and market observations have generated a recent field of study, behavioural finance, which incorporates psychology, sociology and finance together to resolve observed phenomenon like bubbles which conventional finance cannot explain. In this thesis, we will be restricting ourselves to the complete continuous market and look at a new formulation of expected utility maximisation with behavioural finance elements incorporated into it, namely S-shaped utilities and probability distortions. We consider the three general cases of expected utility maximisation: utility from terminal wealth, utility from consumption and utility from terminal wealth and consumption. We shall review the neoclassical problems and then explore the cases with behavioural elements installed. Key Words: Portfolio Selection, continuous time, martingale approach, Sshaped function, probability distortion, cumulative prospect theory
Screening tests for Disease Risk Haplotype Segments in Genome by Use of Permutation

The haplotype association analysis has been proposed to capture the collective behavior of sets of variants by testing the association of each set instead of individual variants with the disease. Such an analysis typically involves a list of unphased multiple-locus genotypes with potentially sparse frequencies in cases and controls. It starts with inferring haplotypes from genotypes followed by a haplotype co-classification and marginal screening for disease-associated haplotypes. Unfortunately, phasing uncertainty may have a strong effects on the haplotype co-classification and therefore on the accuracy of predicting risk haplotypes. Here, to address the issue, we propose an alternative approach: In Stage 1, we select potential risk genotypes instead of co-classification of the inferred haplotypes. In Stage 2, we infer risk haplotypes from the genotypes inferred from the previous stage. The performance of the proposed procedure is assessed by simulation studies and a real data analysis. Compared to the existing multiple Z-test procedure, we find that the power of genome-wide association studies can be increased by using the proposed procedure.
The Market Sensitivity of Australian Superannuation Socially Responsible Investment Funds. Evidence from a Markov Regime Switching Approach

An increasing proportion of Australian superannuation funds are being placed in socially responsible investments (SRI). However, there is no clarity yet in the literature as regards the risk and return characteristics of these investments. In this paper, we examine the sensitivity of Australian SRI funds to movements in the Australian and US equity markets and SRI sectors under different states of the markets through the application of Markov regime switching analysis. We find that, just like their nonSRI counterparts, Australian superannuation SRI funds are mostly driven by the US equity market and to a lesser extent by the Australian equity market and are also not successful in timing the market. Further, we find that the US, but not the Australian, SRI sector is a source of systematic risk for Australian superannuation SRI funds.
The relative importance of food and temperature to copepod egg production and somatic growth in the southern Benguela upwelling system

The fecundity and somatic growth rates of Calanus agulhensis and Calanoides carinatus, the dominant large calanoid copepods in the southern Benguela upwelling system, as well as the fecundity of several other common copepods, were measured between September and March of 1993/94 and 1994/95. Mean egg production of most copepods was low at 10 mu m) and temperature to the growth of copepods. ' Multiple regression results suggested that fecundity and somatic growth rates were positively related to both Chi a concentration and phytoplankton cell size, but not to temperature. Although it was not possible to separate the effects of Chi a concentration and phytoplankton cell size, data from previous laboratory experiments suggest that copepod growth is not limited by small cells per se, but by the low Chi a concentrations that are associated with these particles in the field. Despite growth not being directly related to temperature, a dome-shaped relationship was evident in some species, with slower growth rates at cool ( 18 degrees C) temperatures. The shape of this relationship mirrors that of Chi a versus temperature, where poor Chi a concentrations are associated with cool and warm temperatures. It is concluded that the effect of food limitation on growth of copepods outweighs that of temperature in the southern Benguela region. Sources of variability in relationships between growth and Chi a concentration are discussed.
Fire at high latitudes: Data‐model comparisons and their consequences

Fire is an endemic process at high latitudes, connected to a range of other land surface properties, such as land cover, biomass, and permafrost, and intimately linked to the carbon balance of the high‐latitude land surface. Much of our current understanding of these links and their climate consequences is through land surface models, so it is important to ensure that for their credibility, these models should be consistent with available data. Over the vast panboreal region, a key source of information on fire is satellite data. Comparisons between satellite‐based burned area data from the Global Fire Emissions Database and three dynamic vegetation models (LPJ‐WM, CLM4CN, and SDGVM) indicate that all models fail to represent the observed spatial and temporal properties of the fire regime. Although the three dynamic vegetation models give comparable values of the boreal net biome production (NBP), fire emissions are found to differ by a factor 4 between the models, because of widely different estimates of burned area and because of different parameterizations of the fuel load and combustion process. Including a more realistic representation of the fire regime in the models shows that for northern high latitudes, (i) severe fire years do not coincide with source years or vice versa, (ii) the interannual variability of fire emissions does not significantly affect the interannual variability of NBP, and (iii) overall biomass values alter only slightly, but the spatial distribution of biomass exhibits changes. We also demonstrate that it is crucial to alter the current representations of fire occurrence and severity in land surface models if the links between permafrost and fire are to be captured, in particular, the dynamics of permafrost properties, such as active layer depth. This is especially important if models are to be used to predict the effects of a changing climate, because of the consequences of permafrost changes for greenhouse gas emissions, hydrology, and land cover.
Application of Vector Sensors to Acoustic Surveillance of a Public Interior Space

A method for precise sound sources detection and localization in interiors is presented. Acoustic vector sensors, which provide multichannel output signals of acoustic pressure and particle velocity were employed. Methods for detecting acous- tic events are introduced. The algorithm for localizing sound events in the audience is presented. The system set up in a lecture hall, which serves as a demonstrator of the proposed technology, is described. The accurracy of the proposed method is evaluated by the described measurement results. The analysis of the results is fol- lowed by conclusions pertaining the usability of the proposed system. The concept of the multimodal audio-visual detection of events in the audience is also introduced.
Application Extreme Learning Machine To Predict Location And Magnitude Of Pipe Leak On Water Distribution Network

Water is an essential requirement in human life than it is required good management and distribution of this resource. However, in the distribution process sometimes there are problems of water loss due to leakage of pipes. Pipeline leak causes pressure changes at each junction / node in the network of water pipes. The pattern of change in pressure can be analyzed in computationally to know the magnitude and location of leakage. One way to analyze the pattern of the pressure change is the use of artificial intelligence methods to identify patterns based on the data of the water pressure measurement. Pressure data obtained from EPANET. It is a modeling hidrolik system. In this study is used methods Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), i.e the machine learning method that new lately developed. The accuracy of prediction of the magnitude and location of leakage is based on the value RSME. In this case the prediction results from the method of ELM is obtained average RMSE values 0.148 for magnitude of leakage and 0.0518 for the location of leakage.
Enterprise E-Marketplace Adoption: From the Perspectives of Technology Acceptance Model, Network Externalities, and Transition Costs

By empirically surveying over 200 responding firms, the study found that network externalities greatly affected adopting firms' willingness to stay in existing or current e-marketplaces and/or to switch to another one, but both network externalities and transition costs are not antecedents of firm-level technology adoption. Also, transition costs did not play an influential role on enterprise e-marketplace adoption at the post-decision stage. The empirical evidence also verified that TAM effectively forecasts enterprise e-marketplace adoption, and selling technology-based new products to firm-level customers with a higher push from the external environment is more effective than that with a higher push from the internal environment of the firm. Findings derived from this empirical survey may pave the theoretical ground for a better understanding of how a general technology is adopted by business firms.
Assessing the Local Credibility of a Medical Image Segmentation

When a clinician uses an automatic method to segment a medical image, either she must accept the computer's segmentation or she must manually evaluate the quality of the segmentation and correct it as needed. This paper introduces another option: a methodology for identifying regions where the segmentation is not credible. Our method- ology identifies regions where a local geometry to image match function returns a value that is improbably poor when compared to the distribu- tion of values returned in that region for a set of training images with ac- ceptable segmentations. We validate our methodology with experiments performed on CT images of the kidney.
Evaluation of process-driven spray retention model on ear- ly growth stage barley

The efficiency of spray application of foliar plant protection products with hydraulic nozzles on vertically oriented and hydrophobic plants at early growth stages can be very low. The spray retention by crop leaves is affected by application parameters resulting from nozzle kind, size and operating pressure as well as spray mixture physicochemical properties. When optimizing the spray application, such targets are often used to perform retention trials for comparative purpose, i.e. indoor grown monocotyledonous at two leaves stage. A typical arrangement consists in spraying few plants sufficiently spaced underneath the nozzle to avoid interference due to secondary droplets from impacts on other plants. However, retention trials turn out to ineffective for significantly discriminating between application methods and mixtures due to the high variability between trials resulting from the different droplets retained by each plant. An alternative to retention trials is to tackle spray retention with a physical approach at the droplet scale. Such tests are often performed using high speed imaging with high magnification optics to characterize droplet impacts; adhesion, rebound or shatter on small excised leaf areas and neglect, however, the overall plant architecture. The aim of this paper is to evaluate a droplet interception model connecting actual spray retention with process-driven retention models. In this study, barley plants (BBCH11) were sprayed with 2 formulations using the same nozzle. The actual spray retention was assessed by dosing a fluorescent tracer added to the sprayed mixture. The plants were placed linearly below the center of a single moving nozzle during sprayings. Each plant was reconstructed in 3D afterwards using a structured light 3D scanner and used as input for the model. A virtual nozzle was built on the base of droplet size distributions measured with high speed shadow imaging by performing an adjustment of the distribution by the method of moments. A random droplet distribution was allocated for each spraying of a barley plant. Droplet velocities were given to droplets on the basis of the droplet velocity ‐ diameter correlation by resolving the droplet transport equations for different droplet sizes. Initial droplet positions were randomly given. The interception model is based on a mathematical formalism for the interception between triangles of the 3D plant and droplet directions. If the droplet impacts a leaf, the amount actually retained by the leaf was computed on the basis of the droplet impact energy and impact behavior from experiments with high speed shadow imaging. In conclusion, the interception model allowed determining the spray retention by plants and discriminating application parameters by explaining the variability resulting from various droplet size distributions intercepted by single plant.
McCarron, John G. and Chalmers, Susan and Wilson, Calum and Sandison, Mairi E. (2016) Calcium mobilization via intracellular ion channels, store organization and mitochondria in smooth muscle. In: Vascular Ion Channels

In smooth muscle, Ca release from the internal store into the cytoplasm occurs via inositol trisphosphate (IP3R) and ryanodine receptors (RyR). The internal Ca stores containing IP3R and RyR may be arranged as multiple separate compartments with various IP3R and RyR arrangements, or there may be a single structure containing both receptors. The existence of multiple stores is proposed to explain several physiological responses which include the progression of Ca waves, graded Ca release from the store and various local responses and sensitivities. We suggest that, rather than multiple stores, a single luminally-continuous store exists in which Ca is in free diffusional equilibrium throughout. Regulation of Ca release via IP3R and RyR by the local Ca 2+ concentration within the stores explains the apparent existence of multiple stores and physiological processes such as graded Ca release and Ca waves. Close positioning of IP3R on the store with mitochondria or with receptors on the plasma membrane creates ‘IP3 junctions’ to generate local responses on the luminally-continuous store.
UPPER AND LOWER BOUNDS ON THE BINARY INPUT AWGN CHANNEL CAPACITY

ABSTRACT: A series expression for evaluating the channel capacity of the binary input AWGN channel is developed which precludes the necessity of numerical integration. This series expression is compact and easy to evaluate. In addition, tight upper and lower bounds are developed for the binary input AWGN channel capacity. These bounds also provide good approximations for the capacity and are within 0.1% relative error (within 0.01% for upper bound) for C ≥ 0.457 and a corresponding Eb/N0 ≥ 0 dB.
Choosing a baseline configuration for the ILC damping rings

The damping rings for the International Linear Collider must be capable of accepting large beams from the electron and positron sources, and producing highly damped beams meeting demanding stability specifications, at the machine repetition rate of 5 Hz. Between March and November 2005, a program of studies was undertaken by an international collaboration of 50 researchers, to compare a number of configuration options, including ring circumferences between 3 and 17 km. Here, we outline the studies and discuss the principle considerations in the choices of the baseline and alternative damping ring configurations.
QTL mapping for the color, carotenoids and polyphenol oxidase activity of flour in recombinant inbred lines of wheat.

Wheat flour color, which is highly related to carotenoids and polyphenol oxidase activity, is important in the assessment of flour quality, particularly the quality of whole wheat flour. In the present study, quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping for the lutein content (LUC), beta-carotene content (BCC), L* value (Fl*), a* value (Fa*), b* value (Fb*) and polyphenol oxidase activity (PPOA) of the whole wheat flour was conducted using a set of recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from the cross ‘Chuan 35050 × Shannong 483’ in three different environments and their mean values (MV). A total of 77 QTLs were located on 20 chromosomes for all of the investigated traits. A single QTL in an environment explained 3.9 (QFb*-7B) to 48.7% (QBcc-4D) of the phenotypic variation. The positive alleles for 36 of the QTLs were obtained from Chuan 35050, whereas the positive alleles of 41 QTLs came from Shannong 483. There were 9, 17, 13, 12, 13 and 13 QTLs found for LUC, BCC, Fl*, Fa*, Fb* and PPOA, respectively. Fifteen QTLs were detected in at least two environments or in at least one environment and the MV. Seventeen QTL clusters were mapped on 12 chromosomes. Of the QTL clusters, three clusters (C4, C8, C13), formed by the relatively stable QTLs, were more important, and the markers (wPt-5587 on 2B for Fl* and Fa*, wPt-6498 on 5B for LUC and Fb*, wPt-671568 on 6A for Fl* and Fb*) near these loci should be useful in marker-assisted selection (MAS).