Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling tourism demand: a comparative study between artificial neural networks and the Box-Jenkins methodology

This study seeks to investigate and highlight the usefulness of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) methodology as an alternative to the Box-Jenkins methodology in analysing tourism demand. To this end, each of the above-mentioned methodologies is centred on the treatment, analysis and modelling of the tourism time series: “Nights Spent in Hotel Accommodation per Month”, recorded in the period from January 1987 to December 2006, since this is one of the variables that best expresses effective demand. The study was undertaken for the North and Centre regions of Portugal. The results showed that the model produced by using the ANN methodology presented satisfactory statistical and adjustment qualities, suggesting that it is suitable for modelling and forecasting the reference series, when compared with the model produced by using the Box? Jenkins methodology.
Chlorophyllin in the intrauterine development of mice exposed or not to cyclophosphamide

Chlorophyllin, a sodium-copper salt synthesized from chlorophyll, has already proved to have anticlastogenic, antimutagenic and anticarcinogenic activity, however few are the studies in the teratogenicity area. The present study evaluated the effects of chlorophyllin in intra-uterine development of mice exposed or not to cyclophosphamide. Pregnant females were divided into 8 groups of 15 animals each, G01 PBS (0.1 mL 10.0 g) orally; G02 – cyclophosphamide (20.0 mg kg) i.p.; G03, G04 and G05 chlorophyllin at concentrations of (5.0, 10.0 and 15.0 mg kg) orally; G06, G07 and G08 (5.0, 10.0 and 15.0 mg kg) orally, of chlorophyllin, respectively, and (20.0 mg kg) i.p. of cyclophosphamide. In the 18 day the females were submitted to laparotomy and females and fetuses analyzed. The results showed that the chlorophyllin was not effective in protecting the reproductive parameters as well as teratogenicity. Finally, it was observed that the presence of chlorophyllin increased the frequency of some malformations when combined with cyclophosphamide. However, it was not teratogenic and not embryo lethal in this experimental design.
Multi-PBil: an estimation distribution algorithm applied to multimodal optimization problems

The Estimation Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) compose an evolutionary metaheuristic whose main characteristic is the construction of solutions in randomly form, using a distribution of probabilities that evolves during the execution. The Population-Based Incremental Learning Algorithm (PBIL) is a type of EDA where the variables are independent, that is, they do not have significant interactions between themselves. The PBIL considers that the solutions can be represented as vectors of discrete variables, what makes it more adequate for combinatorial optimization problems. This paper presents a method called Multi-PBil that is an extension of PBIL with applications in multimodal problems. The Multi-PBil was developed with the goal to have an efficient and non expensive algorithm of search in multimodal spaces. From PBIL, it was implemented a routine that allows the Multi-PBil to create a probability model to act in the search space. A formula that allows initiating the probability models in regions of the search space next to the searched global points was applied in the process of the probability model initialization rule. The Multi-PBil method was tested and analyzed, presenting some experimental results that highlight its viability and characteristics. It is also shown a comparison of the performance between the Multi-PBil and a traditional Genetic Algorithm using the sharing method.
Achieving Sustainable Business for Industrial Software Systems

Sustainable development of industrial software systems with controllable outcome in terms of cost, schedule and quality despite changes originating from new technology, stakeholders’ concerns, organization, and business goals during long life-times is a challenge. Unruh [17] has argued that numerous barriers to sustainability arise because today's technological systems were designed and built for permanence and reliability, not change.
Isolation and partial characterization of a novel lectin from Aegle marmelos fruit and its effect on adherence and invasion of Shigella to HT 29 cells

Lectins are a class of ubiquitous proteins/glycoproteins that are abundantly found in nature. Lectins have unique carbohydrate binding property and hence have been exploited as drugs against various infectious diseases. We have isolated one such novel lectin from the fruit pulp of Aegle marmelos. The isolated lectin was partially characterised and its effect against Shigella dysenteriae infection was evaluated. The isolated lectin was found to be a dimeric protein with Nacetylgalactosamine, mannose and sialic acid binding specificity. The effect of Aegle marmelos fruit lectin on the adherence of Shigella dysenteriae to human colonic epithelial cells (HT29 cells) was evaluated by Enzyme Linked Immune Sorbent Assay and invasion was analysed. The protective nature of the Aegle marmelos fruit lectin was assessed by analyzing apoptosis through dual staining method. Aegle marmelos fruit lectin significantly inhibited hemagglutination activity of Shigella and its minimum inhibitory concentration is 0.625 mg/well. Further, at this concentration lectin inhibited Shigella dysenteriae adherence and invasion of HT29 cells and protects the HT29 cells from Shigella dysenteriae induced apoptosis. To conclude, isolated lectin dimeric protein with N-acetylgalactosamine, Mannose and sialic acid binding specificity and inhibits adherence and invasion of Shigellae to HT29 cells thus, protects the host. Citation: Raja SB, Murali MR, Kumar NK, Devaraj SN (2011) Isolation and Partial Characterisation of a Novel Lectin from Aegle marmelos Fruit and Its Effect on Adherence and Invasion of Shigellae to HT29 Cells. PLoS ONE 6(1): e16231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0016231 Editor: Vladimir N. Uversky, University of South Florida College of Medicine, United States of America Received October 21, 2010; Accepted December 9, 2010; Published January 21, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Raja et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study was supported by Junior Research Fellowship from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Government of India to S. Bharathi Raja. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: niranjali@yahoo.com
New Methods for Spacecraft Formation Design

This paper applies previous research on the solution of two-point boundary value problems to spacecraft formation dynamics and design. The underlying idea is to model the motion of a spacecraft formation as a Hamiltonian dynamical system in the vicinity of a reference solution. Then we can analytically describe the nonlinear phase flow using generating functions found by solving the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Such an approach is very powerful and allows one to study any Hamiltonian dynamical system independent of the complexity of its vector field, and to solve any two-point boundary value problem using only simple function evaluations. We present the details of our approach through the study of a non-trivial example, the reconfiguration of a formation in Earth orbit and in the Hill three-body problem. Both continuous and impulsive thrusts are considered.
High‐precision baseband timing of 15 millisecond pulsars

We describe extremely precise timing experiments performed on five solitary and 10 binary millisecond pulsars during the past 3 yr, with the Caltech Parkes Swinburne Recorder (CPSR2) coherent dedispersion system at the Parkes 64-m radio telescope. 12 of our sources have rms timing residuals below 1.5 μs and four are below 200 ns. The quality of our data allows us to measure eight parallaxes and nine proper motions, from which we conclude that models of galactic electron density still have limited predictive power for individual objects. We derive a mean transverse velocity of 87+31/−14 km s −1 for these pulsars, in good agreement with previous authors. We demonstrate that unless multifrequency observations are made, typical variations in dispersion measure (DM) could introduce an additional drift in arrival times of ∼1 μs per year at 20-cm wavelengths. Our high timing precision means that Shapiro delay can be used to constrain the inclination angles and component masses of all but two of the selected binary systems. The signature of annual orbital parallax is detected in the timing of PSR J0437−4715 and PSR J1713+0747, providing additional geometric constraints. The timing of PSR J1909−3744 is used to demonstrate that the DE405 ephemeris is a better model of the Solar system than the earlier DE200. In addition, we show that pulsar astrometric parameters measured using DE200 and DE405 often differ significantly. In order to use pulsars to search for a cosmological gravitational wave background, it is desirable to time them against each other to eliminate Earth-based time standards. We demonstrate that PSR J1909−3744 can be used as a reference against which we obtain a very small rms residual of 133 ns for PSR J1713+0747. Although the gain of the Parkes antenna is small compared to other telescopes involved in precision timing, we obtain some of the lowest rms residuals ever measured, highlighting the importance of good instrumentation such as CPSR2 and good analysis software.
Archaeological Obsidian Studies in Hokkaido, Japan: Retrospect and Prospects PIXE Provenancing of Obsidian Artefacts from Paleolithic sites in Korea

Obsidian sourcing has been used in Philippine archaeology for the first time. This paper discusses the potential of this new approach for studying mobility patterns and exchange networks of early Filipinos. Currently, two obsidian sources have been identified in the Philippines. The Nagcarlan and Pagudpod sources are both located on the spectroscopy (XRF) was used to obtain a chemical signature of these sources and to link obsidian artefacts recovered at three archaeological sites to their geological source. The results provide evidence for long distance movement of obsidian in the past. A review of all known obsidian artefacts recovered from archaeological sites in the different islands and provinces of the Philippines provides essential background for further studies of obsidian movement and exchange. Abstract Theory and data are difficult to reconcile on the question of whether relative humidity affects the results of obsidian hydration dating when the rim thickness is measured by optical microscopy. This paper briefly reviews the experimental data and the relevant theory of hydration, based on the diffusion-reaction model of Doremus. It concludes that the apparent divergence may be due to an unexamined assumption in the hydration model, as regards the mathematical definition of the “hydration front”. A protocol for resolving the question is suggested.
Model-based predictive control using Modelica and open source components

This thesis is about Model Predictive Control (MPC) method for process control. It describes how this method could be implemented using some different open source software components, describing functionalities of each one and showing how the implementation has been done. Finally the code is tested to demonstrate effectiveness of this software in front of this kind of problems and to demonstrate MPC main characteristics. The main goals of this thesis are these last ones, code development and tests, so all mathematical and theoretical background are described but not as in detail as development and tests. Globally describing, MPC is a process control method where a previous knowledge of the plant is needed, so the controller have a model to simulate and predict the behavior of the system to calculate the best command signal. It has an optimization algorithm determining the optimal trajectory to bring system from initial state to desired state. Optimization is done by iterative simulation and solved online periodically at each sample time, initializing values at each time with measured feedback.
Labor Market Frictions into Staggered Wage Contracts

This paper proposes a generalization of the Calvo wage-setting equation, which embeds labor market frictions in the form of a Nash wage bargain. Adding labor market frictions changes significantly the dynamics of the standard wage-setting equation, such that it may have non-trivial implications for the design of optimal monetary policy, and could improve the ability of a general equilibrium model to replicate important labor market stylized facts.
Isolation and Characterization of Linuron Degrading Bacteria from Soils under Horticultural Production in Kenya

Pesticides use has been one of the major factors in improving productivity in agricultural enterprises in Kenya. Phenylurea herbicides are one of the main categories of crop protection products that kill weeds and other plants that grow where they are unwanted. In recent years researchers have been paying greater attention to this family of herbicides because of their high biotoxicity and possible carcinogenic properties and lengthy periods of time for their removal from the environment. However, systematic studies on microbial removal of these pesticide residues are scarce in developing countries including Kenya. A survey in four horticultural regions of central and rift-valley Kenya showed that out of the twenty two (22) formulations of pesticides used linuron had the highest frequency of application at 45.9%. Through enrichment and isolation a total of six isolates were obtained from linuron contaminated soils. Degradation kinetics of the pesticides residues was monitored by High pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). Level of degradation was scored by the data fit with a linear regression by the line y =49508x with an R2 value of 0.9831. The corroboration of various degradation intermediate metabolites was aided by GC-MS machine. The identified metabolites from linuron were 3, 4 dichloroanilline, 3,-chloroanalline, 4-chloroanalline N, O dimethylhydroxylamine, and N-methyl-N-methoxy carbamic acid methyl ester. Isolates designated LoG-8A, Lwa-2A, Lsh-6B, LJk-5C, Lla-1A and Lwa-2C showed the ability to degrade 70.7- 98.9% of 50mgl-1 of linuron within 84 days. Morphological, biochemical and 16S rRNA sequence analysis of these isolates indentified them with the genus Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomanas, Burkholderia, Lysinibacillus, Arthrobacter and Flavobacteria. The study demonstrated that soils from horticultural farms in Kenya harbor biodegrades for linuron. Further work can show whether these microbes can be used for the development of bioremediation strategy.
Expression of human granulocyte-colony stimulating factor ( hG-CSF ) gene in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum )

Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) is a member of the CSF family that regulates hematopoietic cell proliferation and differentiation. In this research, Tobacco (Nicotianatabacum L., var. NC-2512) leaf disc explants were transformed with Agrobacterium tumefaciens (LBA4404 strain), harboring the recombinant binary vector pBI121 containing hG-CSF gene and neomycin phosphotransferase (nptII) antibiotic resistant gene. Inoculated tissues (leaf discs) were placed on tobacco co-cultivation medium and then transformed explants were selected on MS medium containing 50 mgl-1 kanamycin and 300 mgl-1 cefotaxime antibiotic combinations. Finally, shoots were transferred to hormone free medium containing 50 mgl-1 kanamycin and 200 mgl-1 cefotaxime antibiotics to induce roots. Polymerase chain reaction using specific primers was employed to confirm the integration of hG-CSF and nptII transgenes in the T0 and T1 plants genome. However, merging of hG-CSF gene into the genome of putative transgenic plants was further verified by Southern blot analysis. In addition, molecular analysis was performed at the mRNA and protein levels. In the first transgenic tobaccos (T1), the mRNA transcripts were analyzed by RT-PCR method which strongly showed presence of hG-GCF transcript. Ultimately western blot analysis of T2 plants approved stable transformation and expression of hG-CSF gene in transgenic plants. The _2test of T1 plants in greenhouse condition indicated that the inheritance of hG-CSF gene followed Mandelian ratio for single gene segregation (3:1).
Length-weight relationship and condition factor of white leg shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei (Boone, 1931) in culture systems of Choebdeh, West-South of Iran

In present study, 634 individual was investigated. The samples were selected from a cultural farm in Choebdeh fisheries site, close to Abadan city in the west-south of Iran. Weight and length of each sample were measured. The average weight and length of Litopenaeus vannamei were 8.96± 0.15(gr) and 11.82±0.07 (cm), respectively. The specific growth rate per days and condition factor (K) average were measured as 4.90% and 0.56. Length–weight equation was Y = 0.0108 X2.6935 with b parameter value of 2.6935 and R2 = 0.8895. Therefore, a negative allometry was observed. It seems that, the ecological indices in cultured shrimps provide useful information from cultural condition to the farmers and aquaculture experts. In such a way, even minor fluctuation in feeding amounts, quality or quantity of inflow water and other parameters appear in these indices. The managers could use these indices to assess individual health and habitat conditions and decrease handling.
Self-Perceived Job Insecurity and Social Context

Job insecurity causes far reaching negative outcomes. The fear of job loss damages the health of employees and reduces the productivity of firms. Thus, job insecurity should result in increasing social costs. Analyzing representative data from 17 European countries, this paper investigates self perceived job insecurity. Our multi level analysis reveals significant crosscountry differences in individuals’ perception of job insecurity. This finding is not only driven by social-structural or institutional differences, but job insecurity is also shown to be affected by cultural characteristics. Discussion Papers 688
Compaction process in concrete during missile impact: a DEM analysis

A local behavior law, which includes elasticity, plasticity and damage, is developed in a three dimensional numerical model for concrete. The model is based on the Discrete Element Method (DEM)and the computational implementation has been carried out in the numerical Code YADE. This model was used to study the response of a concrete slab impacted by a rigid missile, and focuses on the extension of the compacted zone. To do so, the model was first used to simulate compression and hydrostatic tests. Once the local constitutive law parameters of the discrete element model were calibrated, the numerical model simulated the impact of a rigid missile used as a reference case to be compared to an experimental data set. From this reference case, simulations were carried out to show the importance of compaction during an impact and how it expands depending on the different impact conditions. Moreover, the numerical results were compared to empirical predictive formulae for penetration and perforation cases, demonstrating the importance of taking into account the local compaction process in the local interaction law between discrete elements.
Control of soft X-ray high harmonic spectrum by using two-color laser pulses

We demonstrate the suppression of soft X-ray high harmonics generated by two-color laser pulses interacting with Ne gas in a gas cell. We show that harmonic suppression can occur at the proper combination of the propagation distance and gas pressure. The physical mechanism behind is the phase mismatch between “short”-trajectory harmonics generated at the early and later times through the interplay of geometric phase, dispersion, and plasma effects. In addition, we demonstrate that the position and depth of harmonic suppression can be tuned by increasing the gas pressure. Furthermore, the suppression can be extended to other laser focusing configurations by properly scaling macroscopic parameters. Our investigation reveals a simple and novel experimental scheme purely relying on the phase mismatch for selectively controlling soft X-ray tabletop light sources without adopting the filters for applications.
An eclipse plug-in to model system requirements and adaptation capabilities

Requirements elicitation is an important phase of the software life-cycle, since it helps to reduce the software development time and costs. Unfortunately, existing tools for software design are mainly focused on building a “solution” (i.e., the software system), and neglect the elicitation and analysis of the stakeholders’ requirements. Besides, systems are constantly required to adapt to cope with the variability of the environment in which they operate. For this reason, self-adaptation must be also taken into account during requirements elicitation.This paper proposes a graphical designer to express the conventional (functional and non functional) requirements together with the adaptation capabilities of the system. It has been developed as an Eclipse plug-in and leverages other Eclipse projects, such as EMF [1], GMP [2] and Xtext [3], which helped us to make the designer usable and extensible.
Molecular Characterization Of Autochtonus Slavonian Syrmian Podolian Cattle

Abstract The aim of the study is to increase the knowledge on the genetic structure status of the autochthonous Slavonian Syrmian Podolian cattle breed currently listed by the FAO as “critically endangered”. Blood samples obtained from a total of 20 randomly selected individua were included in genotyping upon microsatellite panel recommended by ISAG and FAO. The procedure enabled the identification of as many as 214 (96.34%) genotypes and, at the same time, 129 allelic variations were found with = 11.73 alleles per locus. The genotypes showed differences between the microsatellite loci and also significant differences (p<0.05) in the frequency of both homozygosity and heterozygosity. The analyses of the allelic distribution within microsatellite loci showed marked variability. The distribution of genetic relationship was expressed by Wright's F coefficients. A moderate level of genetic diversity was observed at the tested loci. The findings demonstrate the degree of breed relationship and breed purity but also indicate that gene pool of the tested population has been threatened. Therefore, urgent measures must be taken to support both the genetic consolidation and preservation of the remaining population of Slavonian Syrmian Podolian cattle in Croatia.
Precise modeling of a four wheeled omni-directional robot

Recent applications in Autonomous Robotics are becoming more demanding every day. Modern Mobile Robots use Omni-Directional locomotion in order to achieve additional maneuverability and efficiency. These features are gained at the expense of increased mechanical complexity and increased complexity in control. Demanding applications require precise dynamical model in order to allow for precise locomotion. Dynamical Models are also essential to study limitations of current mechanical configurations and to allow for future enhancements both at controllers level and at mechanical configuration level. The presented work finds a precise dynamical model for a 4 wheeled omni-directional robot and a prototype is used for validation. Simulations and real experimental runs are shown and the adequacy of the model is discussed.