Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Surface Water Availability for Irrigation Development in Mbarali River Sub-Catchment Mbeya, Tanzania

Although Tanzania has a large land suitable for irrigation development, only 4.2% of the arable land which is potential for irrigation has been developed. Mbarali District is characterized by commercial and small-scale irrigation ac-tivities for paddy production. Currently, surface water availability for irrigation in Mbarali District is dwindling due to high water demands. Inadequate studies that estimate water availability for irrigation is one of the underlying factors to the lack of irrigation development in many parts of Tanzania including in Mbarali District. This study, therefore, aimed to model surface water availability for irrigation development in Mbarali River sub-catchment Mbeya, Tanzania. The Soil and Water Analysis Tool (SWAT) model and field observations were used to accomplish the study. The model estimates that Mbarali River sub-catchment receives about 631 mm of total mean precipitation an-nually. About 53% of received precipitation is lost through evapotranspiration, 12% recharged to deep aquifer and the remaining 35% discharged to the stream flow through surface runoff, lateral flow and return flow from unconfined aquifer. Discharge to the steam flow contributes to the total annual means of river discharge ranging from 0 - 10 cubic meters per second at upper catchment to 120 - 140 cubic meters per second at lower catchment. The study recommends that the lower reach tices including excavation of small ponds to capture and store surface runoff for dry season use or to supplement irrigation as the rainfall declines.
Measurement of laser powder bed fusion surfaces with light scattering and unsupervised machine learning

Quality monitoring for laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF), particularly in-process and real-time monitoring, is of importance for part quality assurance and manufacturing cost reduction. Measurement of layer surface topography is critical for quality monitoring, as any anomaly on layer surfaces can result in defects in the final part. In this paper, we propose a surface measurement method, based on the use of scattered light patterns and a convolutional autoencoder-based unsupervised machine learning method, designed and trained using a large set of scattering patterns simulated from reference surfaces using a scattering model. The advantage of using an autoencoder is that the monitoring model can be trained using solely data from acceptable surfaces, without the need to ensure the presence of representative observations for all the types of possible surface defects. The advantage of using simulated data for training is that we can obtain an effective monitoring solution without the need for a large collection of experimental observations. Here we report the results of a preliminary investigation on the performance of the proposed solution, where the trained autoencoder is tested on experimental data obtained off-process, using a dedicated experimental apparatus for generating and collecting light scattering patterns from manufactured L-PBF surfaces. Our results indicate that the proposed monitoring solution is capable of detecting both acceptable and anomalous surfaces. Although further validation is required to fully assess performance within an on-machine and in-process setup, our preliminary results are encouraging and provide a glimpse of the potential benefits of using our surface measurement solution for L-PBF in-process monitoring.
Assessing the Reliability of Merging Chickering & Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice with Merrill’s Different Levels of Instructional Strategy (DLISt7)

Based on Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) Seven Principles for Good Practice, this research project attempted to revitalize the principles by merging them with Merrill’s (2006) Different Levels of Instructional Strategy. The aim was to develop, validate, and standardize a measurement instrument (DLISt7) using a pretest-posttest Internet quasi-experiment. It was proposed that the instrument could then be used as a rubric either for facilitating the implementation of DLISt7, or as a set of unobtrusive diagnostic indicators for assessing the quality of learning experienced by students in blended and online courses. The study was conducted across five faculties at a regional Australian multi-campus university. The intent was to contribute to knowledge building by leveraging the data that had been collected, analyzed, and reported to generate awareness about the likelihood of scaffolding and scaling, varying levels of instructional strategies for communicating expectations, and relaying information. The idea was to produce a tool that would create more opportunities for more of the principles to be put to good use as an effectiveness multiplier. The findings from the analysis conducted using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis verified the validity of DLISt7 and demonstrated excellent internal reliability values.
Approximate Solution of the “Inverse Problem” of Boundary Layer Theory

Existing approximate formulae for the thickness of laminar and turbulent boundary layers are used to derive a method of calculating the free-stream velocity distribution corresponding to a given variation of shape parameter. Thwaites has given the formula for the momentum thickness of a laminar boundary layer with free-stream velocity u (x). This is the integral form of the empirical equation
Removal of Cresol Red by Adsorption Using Wastepaper

The utilization of less expensive and more effective adsorbents derived from a variety of basic materials has been investigated. The research aimed to investigate the feasibility of employing waste paper as the adsorbent to remove the cresol red (CR) dye from wastewater through adsorption mechanism. Langmuir, Jovanovic, and Freundlich model were observed for isotherms models, while pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order were examined for kinetic models. The results indicated that increasing the adsorbent dose and contact time gave no significant effect to adsorption capacity while adsorption capacity increased with the increasing of pH until it reached a maximum at pH 8, and raising the starting dye concentration leads in a significant increase in adsorption capacity (16.7 mg/g). When the experimental adsorption isotherms and kinetic were fitted using the Freundlich models and pseudo-second-order model, it was discovered that those models were more accurately represented by the data, as indicated by a high correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.974 and 0.963.
Endoscopic retrograde appendicitis therapy for acute appendicitis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and study aims Endoscopic retrograde appendicitis therapy (ERAT) is an endoscopic procedure for management of patients with acute appendicitis (AA). In addition to being minimally invasive, it has the added advantages of preservation of appendix and simultaneous inspection of colon. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis on ERAT in patients with AA. Methods We conducted a comprehensive search of multiple electronic databases (from inception through January 2022) to identify studies reporting ERAT in AA. The primary outcome was to evaluate the overall clinical and technical success of ERAT. The secondary outcome was to study the total and individual adverse events (AEs). The meta-analysis was performed using Der Simonian and Laird random effect model. Results Seven studies reporting on 298 patients were included. The majority of the patient population was male (55.3 %), with mean age of 31 ± 12.39 years. The pooled technical success rate was 99.36 % (95 % CI 97.61–100, I 2 = 0) and the pooled clinical success rate was 99.29 % (95 % CI 97.48–100, I 2 = 0). The pooled AE rate was 0.19 % (95 % CI 0–1.55, I 2 = 0). The most common AE was perforation with 0.19 % (95 % CI 0–1.55, I 2 = 0). The recurrence rate was 6.01 % (95 % CI 2.9–9.93, I 2 = 20.10). Average length of procedure was 41.1 ± 7.16 min. Low heterogeneity was noted in in our meta-analysis. Conclusions ERAT is a safe procedure with high rates of clinical and technical success in patients with AA. Further randomized controlled trials should be performed to assess the utility of ERAT in AA as compared to laparoscopic appendectomy.
Extreme fire spread events and area burned under recent and future climate in the western USA

Aim: Wildfire activity in recent years is notable not only for an expansion of total area burned but also for large, single- day fire spread events that pose challenges to ecological systems and human communities. Our objectives were to gain new insight into the relationships between extreme single- day fire spread events, annual area burned, and fire season climate and to predict changes under future warming. Location: Fire- prone regions of the western USA. Time period: 2002– 2020; a future + 2°C scenario. Methods: We used a satellite- derived dataset of daily fire spread events and gridded climate data to assess relationships
A lithium ion battery model considering state-of-charge and battery current

Abstract In this paper, an electric circuit model for lithium-ion batteries is proposed for predicting the over-voltage transients after discharging or charging. Primary factors, such as state-of-charge (SOC), and battery current are separately experimented to examine their impacts. Kalman filter algorithm is applied to analyze the long-time recorded data, so as to identify the over-potential features during each different SOC stage. On monitoring battery current and voltage, the model is capable of predicting the over-voltage dynamics. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the model to test the feasibility of the battery model.
Putting small and big pieces together: a genome assembly approach reveals the largest Lamiid plastome in a woody vine

The plastid genome of flowering plants generally shows conserved structural organization, gene arrangement, and gene content. While structural reorganizations are uncommon, examples have been documented in the literature during the past years. Here we assembled the entire plastome of Bignonia magnifica and compared its structure and gene content with nine other Lamiid plastomes. The plastome of B. magnifica is composed of 183,052 bp and follows the canonical quadripartite structure, synteny, and gene composition of other angiosperms. Exceptionally large inverted repeat (IR) regions are responsible for the uncommon length of the genome. At least four events of IR expansion were observed among the seven Bignoniaceae species compared, suggesting multiple expansions of the IRs over the SC regions in the family. A comparison with 6,231 other complete plastomes of flowering plants available on GenBank revealed that the plastome of B. magnifica is the longest Lamiid plastome described to date. The newly generated plastid genome was used as a source of selected genes. These genes were combined with orthologous regions sampled from other species of Bignoniaceae and all gene alignments concatenated to infer a phylogeny of the family. The tree recovered is consistent with known relationships within the Bignoniaceae.
Combined Application of Organic and Inorganic Amendments Improved the Yield and Nutritional Quality of Forage Sorghum

The use of organic amendments is seen to be a promising method for enhancing crop productivity and soil health. Therefore, this study was performed for two consecutive years (2019 and 2020) to determine the effects of organic biochar (BC), sugar industry press mud (MUD), and poultry manure (PM) combined with inorganic amendments on the yield and nutritional quality of forage sorghum at the College of Agriculture, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Bahadur sub-campus, Layyah, Pakistan. The treatments were comprised of the following: control (no inorganic or organic amendments added); recommended dose of NPK (59:72:30 kg ha−1); half dose of NPK (29.5:36:15 kg ha−1); recommended dose of poultry manure (PM) at 5 t ha−1; recommended dose of press mud (MUD) at 40 t ha−1; recommended dose of biochar (BC) at 11 t ha−1; BC + half NPK; MUD + half NPK; PM + half NPK; PM + BC + half NPK; PM + MUD + half NPK; BC + MUD + half NPK; PM + BC + MUD + half NPK. The treatments were carried out in a triplicate randomized complete block design. Results revealed that combined application of PM + BC + MUD + 1/2 NPK significantly enhanced the plant height (201 cm), number of leaves (17), stem diameter (18 mm), stem dry weight (201.7 g), leaf dry weight (30.4 g), leaf area (184.3 cm2), green forage yield (31.8 Mg ha−1), and dry biomass yield (12.7 Mg ha−1) compared with the control treatment. Forage quality traits, including crude protein (CP), brix percentage, acid detergent fiber (ADF), and acid detergent lignin (ADL), showed maximum value with the combined application of PM + BC + MUD + 1/2 NPK. ADF and ADL are linked with lower digestibility; therefore, it was concluded that the combined application of PM + BC + MUD + 1/2 NPK can improve the productivity, dry biomass yield, and CP of sorghum, but reduces the digestibility under semi-arid conditions, such as those in Central Pakistan.
A Case Study for Using a Cognitive Model of Learned Carelessness in Cognitive Engineering

The goal of our work is to develop a methodology for automatically predicting potential pilot errors during the design of mode-based systems for modern cockpits. The main ingredient of this methodology is a cognitive model of pilot behaviour allowing to predict misconceptions in the pilot's mental procedure model based on a cognitive process called "learned carelessness". In a first stage we use this model inside a simulation platform to automatically degrade a normative procedure model in a psychological plausible way. In a second stage we apply formal verification techniques to exhaustively analyze what human errors can be caused by the degraded procedure. In this text we describe a case study conducted at the Lufthansa Flight Training Centre where we analysed a Piper Cheyenne autopilot.
The Response Mechanism and Threshold of Spring Wheat to Rapid Drought

In order to deeply understand the effect mechanism of rapid drought stress on the physiological and biochemical properties of crop leaves and determine drought thresholds, the potted spring wheat under two water treatments, adequate water supply and continuous drought stress, was researched. In the early stage of drought, the parameters of leaves decreased in the order of stomatal conductance (gs), intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci), maximum electron transfer rate (Jmax), mesophyll conductance (gm), photosynthetic rate (Pn,) leaf water content (LWC), triose phosphate utilization rate (TPU), transpiration rate (Tr), and maximum carboxylation rate (Vcmax). Photosynthesis was dominated by stomatal limitation and also limited by carboxylation and mesophyll limitation. The carboxylation limitation was mainly caused by the reduction of electron transport capacity. In the late stage of drought, stomatal limitation first decreased, and then mesophyll limitation decreased. During extreme drought, carboxylation limitation also decreased. With the decrease of relative soil moisture (RSM), except for Ci, which first decreased and then increased, other physicochemical parameters of leaves all showed an S-shaped, decreasing trend. Mild and severe drought thresholds were determined to be 56.6% and 43.6% of the RSM, respectively, according to the curve’s inflection point, corresponding to 16.6% and about 52.2% of the average initial decrease amplitude among all parameters. This will provide a reference for monitoring as well as an early warning of rapid drought in spring wheat.
Wake effects between two neighbouring wind farms

We address the issue of wake effects between two neighbouring offshore wind farms by analysing simultaneous production data from Rodsand II and Nysted. The upstream wind farm is found to not just perturb the flow in its wake, but also to cause speed-ups at the positions of some downstream turbines. We use the data to perform a validation of a simple wake model for flow cases corresponding to wind directions of maximum internal and external wake effects.
Wideband Low-Profile Connected Rectangular Ring Dielectric Resonator Antenna Array for Millimeter-Wave Applications

A wideband low-profile connected rectangular ring dielectric resonator (DR) antenna (DRA) array is presented for millimeter-wave (mmWave) applications. It consists of four rectangular ring DRA elements. The DRA elements are excited by microstrip feedlines through four slots on the ground plane. A slot mode, the DRA TEy 1δ1 and perturbed TEy 3δ1 modes are simultaneously excited, giving a wideband design. To avoid the alignment problem, the DRAs are connected to their adjacent elements through dielectric arms. It is found that the position of the dielectric arms has significant effects on the antenna performance. To demonstrate the idea, a prototype with a dielectric constant of 20.8 was designed, fabricated, and tested for licensed mmWave bands (24.25-29.5 GHz). Reasonable agreement between the measured and simulated results is observed. The measured 10-dB impedance bandwidth (|S11| ≤ -10 dB) is 31.6% (22.52-30.97 GHz), with the measured boresight realized gain being higher than 8 dBi from 22.5 to 30 GHz. The measured mutual couplings between the DRA elements of the array are lower than -20 dB in the operating frequency range. Furthermore, our prototype has a low profile of 0.074 λ0, where λ0 is the wavelength in air at the center frequency.
Polarization-Independent Broadband Angular Selectivity Based on Anisotropic Diamagnetic Metamaterial

Achieving broadband angular selectivity has been attracting much interest from both scientists and engineers in recent years. Previous experimental demonstrations have been limited to the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-polarized incidence. Here, we propose a universal approach to achieve polarization-independent broadband angular selectivity by introducing electrically and magnetically anisotropic diamagnetic medium into multiple 1-D photonic crystal stacks. Such stacks have a broadband angular photonic bandgap for both <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$s$ </tex-math></inline-formula>- and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-polarized waves. The anisotropic diamagnetic medium is artificially constructed with periodically arranged close metallic ring arrays, which exhibits a negligible frequency dispersion in an ultrawide band. As a proof of principle, one stack of photonic structures for the normal-incidence-selective case is fabricated and measured in the microwave region. The proposed approach is simple, robust, and scalable from near-zero frequencies to terahertz frequencies, showing promising practical applications such as spatial filters and anti-jamming communications.
Dual-Layer Inductor Active Equalization Control for Series-Connected Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on SOC Estimation

In order to reduce the time and improve the balancing speed of traditional single-layer inductive equalization circuits, this paper proposes an active equalization control strategy with double-layer inductors for series-connected battery packs, based on an accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation. By selecting the inductor as the intermediate energy storage element, the SOC of the single lithium-ion battery (LIB) cell is calculated by using a particle filter (PF) algorithm. Meanwhile, according to the deviation in SOC among the batteries, stop parameters are introduced to achieve the design and optimization of the equalization strategy. Finally, the relationship between the equalization current and the control signal period is derived to fulfill the equalization. The experimental results show that, compared with the traditional single-layer inductive equalization topology, the proposed equalization control topology can shorten the equalization time by at least 15.6%. More importantly, this equalization scheme overcomes the disadvantage of the long energy transfer path of traditional inductive equalization, which helps to improve the equalization speed and the inconsistency of the battery pack.
Traffic Flow Prediction Using Machine Learning

Abstract –The main objective of this research was to define and verify the methodology of predicting the volume and structure of traffic flows, based on the building and application of a supervised machine learning models. The proposed methodology was applied in the case study of the prediction of traffic flows on selected routes in the Republic of Serbia. Keywords – Machine learning, Big data analytics, Traffic flow
Method for characterization and simulation of non-axisymmetric aspheric rough surface

This paper presents a method for characterization and simulation of the non-axisymmetric aspheric rough surface. With this characterization procedure, simulation of the rough surface is simplified by decomposing the rough surface into two parts, which are the non-axisymmetric aspheric surface and the only rough component without the ideal surface. Then each component of the divided surface is simulated individually. The rough surface exhibits self-affinity and the fractal number D can be associated with any profile and is scale-invariant, and then the rough surface component is simulated with the Weierstrass-Mandelbrot fractal function. An example for simulating a non-axisymmetric and aspheric rough surface is performed and the flexibility of this characterization method is also discussed.
Understanding function and function-to-form evolution

This is a report on a workshop held at Cambridge University Engineering Design Centre, 17-10 June 1992. This workshop was held to discuss the issue of 'function' and 'function-to-form' evolution in mechanical design. The authors organised this workshop as they felt that their understanding of these topics was incomplete and that discussions between researchers might help to clarify some key issues. The topic chosen for the workshop proved to be a stimulating one. The term 'function' is part of a designer's daily vocabulary, however there is poor agreement about its definition. In order to develop computer systems to support product evolution, a precise definition is required. Further the value of 'function' and 'function-to-form' evolution as a good choice of workshop topic is evident from the lack of firm conclusions that resulted from the sessions. This lack of consensus made for lively discussion and left participants questioning many of their preconceived ideas. Attendance at the workshop was by invitation only. A list of the participants (not all those invited could attend due to time and financial constraints) is given in Appendix 1.