Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Flavorings, Storage Conditions, and Storage Time on Survival of <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> in SÃ1⁄4rk Cheese

The objectives of this study were to determine the cumulative effects of flavorings (chili pepper, thyme, mint, cumin, nutmeg, allspice, clove, cinnamon, black pepper, salt, and hot red pepper paste), storage conditions, and storage time on the survival of Staphylococcus aureus in Sürk cheese and to monitor the associated chemical changes. Sürk cheese, a traditional Turkish cheese, was produced by heating diluted nonfat yogurt and adding flavorings to the resultant acid-heat curd. The cheese was later inoculated with S. aureus, shaped conically, and stored aerobically for mold growth and anaerobically in olive oil for 30 days at room temperature. The moisture content of aerobically stored cheese decreased over time and led to increases in total solids, salt, salt-in-moisture, and ash content during ripening (P , 0.05). The presence or absence of the flavorings had no significant effect, whereas storage conditions and storage duration decreased the survival of S. aureus (P , 0.05).
ENERGY STORAGE APPLICATIONS

The impressive mechanical and electronic properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) make them ideally suited for use in a variety of nanostructured devices, especially in the realm of energy production and storage. In particular, vertically-aligned CNT “forests” have been the focus of increasing investigation for use in supercapacitor electrodes and as hydrogen adsorption substrates. Vertically-aligned CNT growth was attempted on metal substrates by waterassisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD). CNT growth was catalyzed by iron-molybdenum (FeMo) nanoparticle catalysts synthesized by a colloidal method, which were then spin-coated onto Inconel® foils. The substrates were loaded into a custom-built CVD apparatus, where CNT growth was initiated by heating the substrates to 750 °C under the fl ow of He, H2, C2H4 and a controlled amount of water vapor. The resultant CNTs were characterized by a variety of methods including Raman spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and the growth parameters were varied in an attempt to optimize the purity and growth yield of the CNTs. The surface area and hydrogen adsorption characteristics of the CNTs were quantifi ed by the BrunauerEmmett-Teller (BET) and Sieverts methods, and their capacitance was measured via cyclic voltammetry. While vertically-aligned CNT growth could not be verifi ed, TEM and SEM analysis indicated that CNT growth was still obtained, resulting in multiwalled CNTs of a wide range in diameter along with some amorphous carbon impurities. These microscopy fi ndings were reinforced by Raman spectroscopy, which resulted in a G/D ratio ranging from 1.5 to 3 across different samples, suggestive of multiwalled CNTs. Changes in gas fl ow rates and water concentration during CNT growth were not found to have a discernable effect on the purity of the CNTs. The specifi c capacitance of a CNT/FeMo/Inconel® electrode was found to be 3.2 F/g, and the BET surface area of a characteristic CNT sample was measured to be 232 m2/g with a cryogenic (77K) hydrogen storage of 0.85 wt%. This level of hydrogen adsorption is slightly higher than that predicted by the Chahine rule, indicating that these CNTs may bind hydrogen more strongly than other carbonaceous materials. More work is needed to confi rm and determine the reason for increased hydrogen adsorption in these CNTs, and to test them for use as catalyst support networks. This study demonstrates the feasibility of producing CNTs for energy storage applications using water-assisted CVD.
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES A PROXY INTEGRATED KINETIC ENERGY FOR TROPICAL CYCLONES IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC By SEAN BUCHANAN

The Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE) of a Tropical Cyclone (TC), a volume integration of the surface winds around the center of the TC is computed from a comprehensive sea surface wind (NASA’s CrossCalibrated Multi-platform [CCMP]) analysis available over the global oceans to verify the fidelity of IKE from wind radii estimates of extended best track (EBT) data maintained by NOAA for the North Atlantic TCs. The years 2004-2011 were examined in this study. It is shown that CCMP surface wind analysis severely underestimates IKE for TCs that are characterized as short in lifespan and small in size. Similarly, large and long lived TCs although reasonably well captured in NASA’s CCMP sea surface wind analysis continue to exhibit erroneous areal coverage of the TCs’ wind fields that are stronger than gale-force (34-kt; 17 m s). The phase of the seasonal cycle of North Atlantic TC IKE also verifies in the CCMP analysis. A proxy IKE (PIKE) based on winds at radius of outermost closed isobar (ROCI) shows greater promise in replicating TC-IKE within the CCMP dataset than the traditional IKE. In other words, PIKE is capable of providing representation of the unresolved traditional TC-IKE values within CCMP that are dependent on wind fields at gale-force and stronger. The diagnosis of PIKE of TCs from CCMP was found to have a linear correlation of 0.8 with corresponding IKE from EBT. This relatively strong correlation raises the possibility of extending past IKE application studies over the northern Atlantic basin to other TC basins using CCMP wind analysis.
Growth, Evapotranspiration, and Ion Uptake Characteristics of Alfalfa and Triticale Irrigated with Brackish Groundwater and Desalination Concentrate

Persistent drought, low snowfall, and low rainfall have reduced availability of fresh water for irrigating agricultural crops in many arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Brackish groundwater (electrical conductivity; EC > 3 dSm−1) is increasingly used for irrigation in New Mexico. This study investigates the effect of ion uptake from brackish groundwater and concentrate irrigation on the performance of two forage species, alfalfa (Medicago sativa) and triticale (×Triticosecale), in sand soils in greenhouse conditions. Two simultaneous experiments were run for 90 days using tap water (control; 0.7 dSm−1), brackish groundwater (BGW; 4 dSm−1), reverse osmosis concentrate (RO; 8 dSm−1, Ca2+ dominant), and BGW plus sodium chloride (BGW + NaCl; 8 dSm−1, Na+ dominant). BGW + NaCl irrigation significantly reduced the evapotranspiration (ET) of both the species. Deep percolation (DP) increased significantly with RO and BGW + NaCl irrigation in alfalfa but only with BGW + NaCl irrigation in triticale. Alfalfa plant growth decreased with increasing salinity, while triticale plants followed an opposite trend. ET continued to decrease with increasing salinity for both species. Na+ dominant (BGW + NaCl) irrigation produced robust growth and early flowering and ear head formation in triticale. Na+ ion concentration in shoots was above 0.66%, which led to reduced alfalfa growth, while more than 1.22% did not decrease triticale growth or biomass. Increased Ca2+ sequestration in alfalfa played a crucial role in reducing Na+ ion toxicity. Species performance primarily confirmed that alfalfa is moderately salt-tolerant while triticale is confirmed to be a halophyte producing abundant growth and biomass with higher Na+ uptake. Triticale proved to be a promising species for reuse of RO concentrate for agriculture in marginal lands.
THE STUDY OF VISCOSITY-TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE AND ACTIVATION ENERGY FOR PALM OIL AND SOYBEAN OIL

In fluid transport, precise knowledge or estimation of fluids behaviour is very necessary, for mass flow and heat transfer computations. In this study, physicochemical analysis of palm oil and soybean oil were conducted, in addition to an equation modeling the relationship between the energy (Ea) and the pre-exponential factor (A). Later, two other parameters; the Arrhenius temperature (T) and Arrhenius activation temperature (T*) were introduced to buttress the veracity of the model used. The model is very useful in engineering since it would make for the estimation of the missing parameter value and its derivatives. The goodness of the result is strongly reinforced by the regression coefficient. The results indicate that the model which best fits the major defining parameters are logarithmic in nature. All the parameters studied showed that the two oil samples are good feed stock for biodiesel production and confirms their relevance in electric voltage transformers.
A FORWARD GUIDANCE INDICATOR FOR THE SOUTH AFRICAN RESERVE BANK: IMPLEMENTING A TEXT ANALYSIS ALGORITHM

Abstract The expansion of central bank communications and the increased use thereof as a policy tool to manage expectations have led to an area of research, semantic modelling, that analyses the words and phrases used by central banks. We use text-mining and text-analysis techniques on South African Reserve Bank monetary policy committee statements to construct an index measuring the stance of monetary policy: a forward guidance indicator (FGI). We show that, after controlling for market expectations, FGIs provide significant explanatory power for future changes in the repurchase interest rate (the primary monetary policy instrument). Their out-of-sample predictive power is, however, weak. Furthermore, we show that FGIs are primarily driven by inflation expectations, which highlights the strong link between the SARB’s communication strategy and its inflation targeting mandate. In fact, we observe a systematic anti-inflation bias in the communicated stance of monetary policy—both absolutely and asymmetrically. Overall, Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) statements reflect relevant information on the inflationary stance and policy decisions of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), but, since forecasts are conditional on current information, they provide unreliable forward guidance. Given this finding, MPC statements should emphasize the conditional nature of the SARB’s stance, and what that implies for the future path of the policy rate.
Erosion and its Implication on Hydrocarbon Generation in ‘ARD’ Block, Akimeugah Basin,West Papua

Akimeugah Basin in the western part of Aru Trough is included as a Paleozoic Basin which is one of the potential hydrocarbon-producing basins in Eastern Indonesia. Tectonic evolution in Akimeugah Basin during Cambrian to present has produced a very significant erosion that affected the hydrocarbon generation process. ‘ARD’ Block study uses three exploratory well data including well report and 26 lines of 2D seismic data with a total length of 5,812.55 kilometers and the distance between seismic lines ranging from 10 to 15 kilometers. Seismic data is processed with IHS Kingdom software for tectonostratigraphy analysis, while calculation and erosion analysis are performed by combining well data consisting of sonic, vitrinite reflectance and seismic. To get a burial history model and generation & expulsion period, this study utilizes Petromod software. Five phases of the tectonic evolution led to four times of erosional period with a sediment thickness of 290 – 3,370 feet were loss. The erosion of the sedimentary rocks causes the maturation process delayed more than 200 million years. Burial history in the study area with the erosion absence assumption results a hydrocarbon generation starting from around 210 million years ago. Meanwhile, by considering the loss of eroded sedimentary rocks during four tectonic phases, hydrocarbon generation time just occurred 3.1 million years ago.
Study of the vibration behaviour of rotatory blades using the finite element method

The physics lying behind rotordynamics is complex to model, so that in many cases numerical processing is the only feasible approach. Being rotordynamics a field of great interest in the aerospace industry, the efforts devoted to its understanding are increasing day by day. Following this tendency, the aim of the present study is to develop a simplified elastodynamic model for the case of rotating structures such that can be addressed through numerical tools, built using the finite element method. For the purpose of analysing the vibration phenomena, modal decomposition and numerical integration have been taken advantage from. In this context, it has been found that the singular value decomposition could be applied in structural analysis to extract dominant displacement fluctuations, allowing the unfolding of global properties of the dynamic response. In the present report, the singular value decomposition has been applied to cantilever beams undergoing a single rotation, giving rise to reasonably satisfactory results.
Exploring the relationship between self-managed work teams and work engagement in a gold processing plant

Title Exploring the nature of the relationship between self-managed work teams and work engagement in a gold processing plant. Key terms Engagement, Work Engagement, Self-managed Teams, Psychological Meaningfulness, Psychological Safety, Psychological Availability, Empowerment, Team Work. The general aim of this study was to determine the nature of the relationship between self-managed work teams and work engagement in a gold processing plant as compared to that of employees within the same company with less freedom to manage themselves and their levels of engagement. The value of this investigation lies in determining if there is a favourable difference in the levels of work engagement of members of self-managed work teams as compared to their counterparts and if so, how these findings could be used in mining organisations to effect higher levels of employee performance through increased work engagement, empowerment and teamwork. The study was conducted on two groups of individuals within the same mining organisation. One group consisted of individuals who worked within self-managed work teams and the other group consisted of individuals who functioned in their traditional hierarchical structures. Three previously validated questionnaires were used to administer and obtain data from employees. Firstly, The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003) was used to measure work engagement. Secondly, The Psychological Meaningfulness, Safety and Availability questionnaire designed by May (May et al., 2004) was used to measure the participants’ perceptions about themselves, their jobs and co-workers. Thirdly, The Empowered Teamwork questionnaire was used to measure the participants’ perceptions regarding Empowerment and Teamwork (Slocum & Hellriegel, 2011:352). Using the data from the above questionnaires, a statistical analysis was done to determine relationships. The study concluded that there is a positive relationship between self-managed work teams and work engagement as well as other constructs measured, like empowerment and teamwork. Recommendations were made to organisational managers and future researchers.
Angelina Ivanova Creating a Bilingual Dictionary using Wikipedia

Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to my supervisor dr. Daniel Zeman for providing me a wise supervision, helpful advices, instant replies and encouragement. I am happy to have a chance to acknowledge the work of my coordinators from Charles University in Prague, for being in touch with me since the first year of Masters program, for being patient, kind, very attentive and helpful with all sorts of questions. I send my special thanks for help with paperwork and other questions to Ms. Libuše Brdičková and Ms. Marie Křížková. I am very grateful to my first-year coordinator from Free University of Bolzano prof. Raffaella Bernardi and the secretary of the Computer Science faculty Ms. Federica Cumer for the readiness to answer all sort of questions and for making the adaptation to the European educational system quick and smooth. I would like to thank all the coordinators and organizers of the LCT-Master for doing a great job and running this educational program. I would like to acknowledge the professionalism of prof. Valia Cordoni and Ms. Barbara Pernice and to thank them very much for all the help and support during these two years. It was also great to keep in touch with the computational linguists from Russia prof. Valery Rubashkin and Lidia Pivovarova, I am very grateful to them for all the help and care. I would also like to thank a lot dr. Gosse Bouma for the help in my Master Thesis topic definition and for being open for advice. I also feel very lucky to meet the LCT colleagues with whom we share the deep interest in the field of natural language processing and many special memories from the time spent together. It is very exciting to live and study in the multicultural international environment. I cannot express how important for me is the encouragement and care of my family, relatives and friends. There are many other people to thank who influenced me very much in a very positive way such as prof. I declare that I carried out this master thesis independently, and only with the cited sources, literature and other professional sources. Abstract: Machine-readable dictionaries play important role in the research area of computational linguistics. They gained popularity in such fields as machine translation and cross-language information extraction. In this thesis we investigate the quality and content of bilingual English-Russian dictionaries generated from Wikipedia link structure. Wiki-dictionaries differ …
Visualizing Deep Network Training Trajectories with PCA

Neural network training is a form of numerical optimization in a high-dimensional parameter space. Such optimization processes are rarely visualized because of the difﬁculty of representing high-dimensional dynamics in a visually in-telligible way. We present a simple method for rendering the optimization trajectories of deep networks with low-dimensional plots, using linear projections obtained by principal component analysis. We show that such plots reveal visually distinctive properties of the training processes, and outline opportunities for future investigation.
15-hydroxy-6α,12-epoxy-7β,10αH,11βH-spiroax-4-ene-12-one exerts anti-tumor effects against osteosarcoma through apoptosis induction

Osteosarcoma is the most common type of malignant bone tumor, which has an overall survival rate of only 15-30%. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of 15-hydroxy-6α,12-epoxy-7β,10αH,11βH-spiroax-4-ene-12-one (HESEO), a compound extracted from the endophytic fungus Penicillium sp. FJ-1 isolated from Avicennia marina, on the proliferation of osteosarcoma cells and to explore its underlying mechanisms of action. Cell number was counted to measure the cell proliferation. JC-1 reagent was used to measure mitochondrial membrane potential. ELISA was used to measure the cytochrome c level and caspase activities. Apoptosis was detected by Annexin V-Propidium Iodide staining. Gene and protein expression were measured by reverse-transcription-PCR and western blot analysis, respectively. Additionally, the anti-tumor effects of HESEO were explored within a syngeneic osteosarcoma tumor model. The results suggested that HESEO significantly inhibited the proliferation of osteosarcoma cells and induced apoptosis of MG-63 cells, evidenced by their decreased mitochondrial membrane potential, and increased cytochrome c release, caspase activities and percentage of apoptotic cells. In addition, HESEO increased the expression of pro-apoptotic genes and proteins compared with control cells. The results indicated that HESEO may act through increasing p53 upregulated modulator of apoptosis expression. Furthermore, HESEO treatment significantly increased the survival time and decreased the tumor burden of osteosarcoma tumor-bearing mice compared with vehicle treatment. Furthermore, combined treatment with HESEO enhanced the effects of the chemotherapeutic agent methotrexate on a lung metastasis osteosarcoma model. These data suggested that HESEO could be developed as a potential anti-tumor agent against osteosarcoma.
The Relationship of OrganizationalCultureand Return on Assets of large Manufacturing Firms in Kenya

The general objective of this study was to determine the effect of organization culture on return on assets of large manufacturing firms in Kenya. The specific objective of this study was to determine the influence of organizational culture on return on assets of large manufacturing firms in Kenya. The study was a cross sectional survey targeting 102 large manufacturing firms and the response rate was from 94 firms. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Null hypothesis was tested and results indicated that organizational culture had influence on return on assets. The study was limited in that change of variables of study was not monitored or observed over time as would be the case with longitudinal studies.
Generation of a transgenic mouse model to study biological role of KLK5 in epidermis

A number of studies provide strong evidence that KLK5 is one of the most important serine proteases in the epidermis and is involved in processes such as desquamation, processing of antimicrobial peptides or induction of inflammatory reaction. The role of KLK5 has been deduced from in vitro experiments and thus its functions should be verified in vivo. This work aimed to develop a specific tissue targeting strategy to study the role of murine kallikreins in the epidermal compartment in vivo and to generate a transgenic model overexpressing mKlk5 in the mouse epidermis. Using the modified promoter of human involucrin, transgenic mice expressing the fluorescent marker, tdTomato, were generated in the first step. This transgenic reporter mouse showed specific targeting pattern of the reporter in the upper epidermal layers and, thus, the modified involucrin promoter could be employed for targeting further gene of interest in the differentiated epidermal compartment. In the second step transgenic mouse lines expressing murine kallikrein 5 were successfully generated. Among them two lines exhibited approximately 6-9 fold overexpression at the mRNA and protein levels, however it appeared that the immature protease was not activated under normal healthy conditions. Therefore two models of epidermal diseases were performed to disbalance the epidermal barrier, activate the protease and reveal its impact on the targeted compartment. Nevertheless, the transgenic mice did not show any differences in comparison to the wild-type mice in the model of irritant dermatitis and wound healing. Altogether, we have successfully generated two transgenic mice and developed a targeting strategy for upper layers of epidermis although to target an active protease into these layers will necessitate additional technical modifications.
Screening for waterlogging tolerance of wheat in the field in Western Australia

During 2001 to 2004, replicated field trials were conducted throughout the Southwest of Western Australia (WA) using natural waterlogging gradients in order to rank wheat varieties for waterlogging tolerance. Such gradients enable measurement of waterlogging tolerance as the grain yields under waterlogged relative to drained (or less waterlogged) treatments. Prior to this, the waterlogging tolerance of almost all wheat varieties in the field was unknown in WA conditions.
Toward Visual Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Graphs

An interesting class of heterogeneous datasets, encountered for instance in data journalism applications, results from the inter-connection of data sources of different data models, ranging from very structured (e.g., relational or graphs) to semistructured (e.g., JSON, HTML, XML) to completely unstructured (text). Such heterogeneous graphs can be exploited e.g., by keyword search, to uncover connection between search keywords [1]. In this paper, we present a vision toward making such graphs easily comprehensible by human users, such as journalists seeking to understand and explore them. Our proposal is twofold: (i) abstracting the graph by recognizing structured entities; this simplifies the graph without information loss; (ii) relying on data visualization techniques to help users grasp the graph contents. Our work in this area continues; we present preliminary encouraging results.