Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of pre and post-harvest management practices on coffee (Coffea arabica L.) quality determining factors in Gedeo zone, Southern Ethiopia

In Gedeo zone, coffee quality is declining from time to time due to several improper pre and post-harvest management practices. Therefore, this study was designed with the objective of assessing impact of pre and post-harvest management practices on Coffea arabica L. quality determining factors in Gedeo zone, Southern Ethiopia. Totally, 90 household respondents were used from three Woredas and selected purposively. Finally, quantitative data was analyzed by employing SPSS (version 20). In pre harvesting practices, the result indicated that most of the respondents owned old coffee trees (>20 years), prune their tree frequently within one year interval and observed various diseases on their coffee tree. According to the survey result, majority of farmers use shade trees, which is the most common cropping practiced by coffee producing farmers in the study area, and majority of the farmers use dry method of coffee processing. Descriptive statistics of the field survey revealed that majority responded the provision of support and training from the respective Agricultural research and Development offices. On the contrary, the coffee farming family suffered from shortage of money as well as time at harvesting stage of coffee. On the side of traders, they received extension services in maintaining coffee quality in particular. Most of the traders in the study area in order to buy and sell coffee, did not get advises from market advisers. In general, most management practices in addition to trading methods in the study area have problems in maintaining coffee quality in the zone. Key words: Coffea arabica L, coffee quality, pre-harvest, post-harvest, Gedeo zone.
Evaluation of Genotypic Diversity of some Varieties of Egyptian Clover under Salinity Levels of Sea Water

This investigation was conducted at the laboratory of Seed Technology Research Department at Sakha Agric. Res. Station ARC, Egypt, during the year of 2016-2017, to study the effect of salinity of four sea water levels i.e. 0, 4, 6 and 8ML mixed with distillated water which was used as the evaluation included a control seed germination, shoot length, root length, seedling fresh and dry weight of all 16 genotype varieties. The experimental design was factorial completely randomize arrangement Excluded in a design with three replicates. Seeds were sowed in patri-dishes. The effect of seawater concentrations varied significantly where the germination percentage, shoot length, root length, fresh weight and dry weight decreased with the increasing of the seawater concentrations from 0 to 8ML. The maximum germination percentage was found with fahl genotype (mono cut type) and for Sakha 4 (multcut type). Among the 64 treatments combinations the lowest germination percentage was found in population 46 and differed, in fresh weight for the seedling which ranged between 185.83 and 50.83 (mg) for Fahl and Sakha4, respectively while genotype Helaly gave 237.50(mg). The highest germination percentage was obtained for Serw 1, Fahl, Sakha4 and Sakha 96 genotypes, respectively. On the other hand, the lowest germination percentage under the highest level was Sakha comp 2000. ISSR (Inter Simple Sequence Repeat) and Sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) analysis were utilized in this study to evaluate at molecular level the differences between levels of water salinity stress of Egyptian clover. Five primers of ISSR generate highly genetic variation for resistance, moderate and sensitive. Clover genotypes resulting in salinity stress. 72, 68, 62, 31, and 25% of genetic similarity were reflected for third, fifth, fourth, second and first ISSR primers. Common important protein fraction with 54 KDa was expressed in all resistance, moderate and sensitive as well Egyptian clover which refers to its importance role in salinity metabolism cycle. Varied protein interactions were distinguished clearly and showed different responses or reaction for salinity level.
Period Selection for Wireless Control Systems

Recent advancements in Industrial Internet-ofThings and cyber-physical systems through the development of wireless standards like WirelessHART and ISA100 for real-time and reliable communication paved the way for a new industrial trend called Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 proposes to improve production efficiency by employing smart factories. One approach to improve the production efficiency is to predict the external disturbances and adjust the sampling periods accordingly. In a wireless control system, an online adjustment of the sampling periods can decrease the energy consumption of nodes, especially when the system is within a stable state. Although adjusting the sampling period is beneficial, the stability of the system may be compromised due to external disturbances through an increase in sampling period while decreasing the sampling period can impact the real-time performance and energy of the wireless network. Existing work on online sampling period selection assumes that the controller computes the periods and schedules, and repeatedly broadcasts the new sampling periods and schedules to all the nodes. Such an approach is highly energy consuming and can impact control performance. In contrast, to handle online period selection, we propose an autonomous scheduler based on game theory, where each node in the network generates the schedules locally and without any communication with the others. Our approach can handle any changes in the period and link qualities locally and on the fly. We also propose a heuristic for online sampling period assignment, where each node predicts the state and adjust the period locally. Our evaluation on a case study shows that the proposed approach consumes at least 59% less energy when compared to the state-of-the-art approach.
High-Performance Composable Transactional Data Structures

Exploiting the parallelism in multiprocessor systems is a major challenge in the post “power wall” era. Programming for multicore demands a change in the way we design and use fundamental data structures. Concurrent data structures allow scalable and thread-safe accesses to shared data. They provide operations that appear to take effect atomically when invoked individually. A main obstacle to the practical use of concurrent data structures is their inability to support composable operations, i.e., to execute multiple operations atomically in a transactional manner. The problem stems from the inability of concurrent data structure to ensure atomicity of transactions composed from operations on a single or multiple data structures instances. This greatly hinders software reuse because users can only invoke data structure operations in a limited number of ways. Existing solutions, such as software transactional memory (STM) and transactional boosting, manage transaction synchronization in an external layer separated from the data structure’s own threadlevel concurrency control. Although this reduces programming effort, it leads to significant overhead associated with additional synchronization and the need to rollback aborted transactions. In this dissertation, I address the practicality and efficiency concerns by designing, implementing, and evaluating high-performance transactional data structures that facilitate the development of future highly concurrent software systems. Firstly, I present two methodologies for implementing high-performance transactional data structures based on existing concurrent data structures using either lock-based or lock-free synchronizations. For lock-based data structures, the idea is to treat data accessed by multiple operations as resources. The challenge is for each thread to acquire exclusive access to desired resources while preventing deadlock or starvation. Existing locking strategies, like two-phase locking and resource hierarchy, suffer from performance degradation under heavy contention, while lacking a desirable
Multi-employer bargaining under pressure : decentralisation trends in five European countries

Multi-employer bargaining has been under pressure in recent years from the dual impact of the economic crisis and government interventions in areas traditionally within the remit of social partner autonomy. Such pressure has impacted on both the structure of collective bargaining – notably the degree of coordination between different bargaining levels and across bargaining units – and its outcomes. This has resulted, among other things, in wage restraint and internal devaluation, as well as more concession bargaining at company level. The space for decentralised bargaining has increased even where bargaining systems remain strongly organised. The reforms introduced during the crisis have increased the number of options available to employers, thereby reinforcing their bargaining position vis-à-vis the unions, and have sometimes directly strengthened employers’ prerogatives to modify employment terms and conditions.
Does god play dice ? ? Randomness vs . deterministic explanations of idea originality in crowdsourcing

Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Extant research appears to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organization of the tournament, characteristics of the participants attracted, and specific situational factors on the one hand and the quality of their contributions gained on the other. We introduce the alternative idea that in fact the originality of any participants? idea is largely random and thus the success of the tournament rests on the number of participants attracted. In order to compare the explanatory power of randomness and 22 deterministic factors derived from literature we conducted a huge experiment in which 1,089 participants developed ideas for apps. Our finding is crystal clear: randomness outperforms deterministic explanations by over 500%. It appears that at least in crowdsourcing, God indeed plays dice. Jelcodes:O32,O3 1 “Does god play dice? ” Randomness vs. deterministic explanations of idea originality in crowdsourcing Abstract: Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Extant research app rs to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organi zation of the Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Extant research app rs to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organi zation of the tournament, characteristics of the participants attracted, and specific si tuational factors on the one hand and the quality of their contributions gained on the other. We introduce the alternative idea that i n fact the originality of any participant s’ idea is largely random and thus the success of the tournament rests on the number of participants attracted. In order to compare the explanatory power of randomness and 22 deterministic factors derived from literature we conducted a huge experiment in which 1,089 participants developed ideas for apps. Our finding is crystal clear: randomness outperforms deterministic e xplanations by over 500%. It appears that at least in crowdsourcing, God indeed plays dice.
Predicting the Shear Strength of Fiber Reinforced Concrete Corbels Via Support Vector Machines

Prefabrik kisa konsollar, ozellikle sanayi yapilarinda sikca tercih edilen yapi elemanlaridir. Bu calismada, lifli betonarme kisa konsollarin kesme dayanimi, literaturde ilk defa, destek vektor makineleri (DVM) ile tahmin edilmistir. Mevcut deneysel veriler kullanilarak DVM modelleri olusturulmus ve tahmin performanslari analiz edilmistir. Secilen modelin tahminleri, deney sonuclari ve literaturde mevcut olan modelin (Fattuhi, 1994) tahminleri ile karsilastirilmistir. Model, celik lifli kisa konsollarin yani sira cam lifli konsollarin tasima kapasitelerini de tahmin edebilmektedir. Ayrica model, her bir girdi parametresinin etkisini incelemek amaciyla, parametrik analize tabi tutulmustur. Sonuclar , onerilen modelin yuksek tahmin kapasitesine sahip oldugunu gostermektedir.
EasyChair Preprint No 1046 Image Caption Generation With Adaptive Transformer

Encoder-decoder framework based image caption has made promising progress. The application of various attention mechanisms has also greatly improved the performance of the caption model. Improving the performance of every part of the framework or employ more effective attention mechanism will benefit the eventual performance. Based on this idea we make improvements in two aspects. Firstly we use more powerful decoder. Recent work shows that Transformer is superior in efficiency and performance to LSTM in some NLP tasks, so we use Transformer to substitute the traditional decoder LSTM to accelerate the training process. Secondly we combine the spatial attention and adaptive attention into Transformer, which makes decoder to determine where and when to use image region information. We use this method to experiment on the Flickr30k dataset and achieve better results.
On the Ranking of Hospitals with regard to Quality in Health Care

Background: With the development of the society, assessment of the quality in health care becomes important. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions make a series of yearly reports, Regional comparisons. The league plot and traffic light approach have been used to present a number of indicators for assessing the quality in health care of the hospitals. Results: For discussing the statistical uncertainty of the rankings and the weakness of the traffic light methods, we use the Monte Carlo procedure to simulate the possible results and describe them. We also get the expected change in the ranking in order to demonstrate the meaningless of the ranking procedure. Moreover, we suggest to use the chi-square test as a new criterion instead of the ’one third’ criterion in the traffic light approach used in the reports. Additionally, we modify the chi-square statistics to handle the over-dispersion phenomenon. Conclusions: The new criterion can be a choice to detect the less well functioning hospital we are interested in when the public want to compare the quality in health care of hospitals in terms of indicators. ∗Statistics department, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Invariant‐Feature Based Object Tracking Using Discrete Dynamic Swarm Optimization

With the remarkable growth in rich media in recent years, people are increasingly exposed to visual information from the environment. Visual information continues to play a vital role in rich media because people's real interests lie in dynamic information. This paper proposes a novel discrete dynamic swarm optimization (DDSO) algorithm for video object tracking using invariant features. The proposed approach is designed to track objects more robustly than other traditional algorithms in terms of illumination changes, background noise, and occlusions. DDSO is integrated with a matching procedure to eliminate inappropriate feature points geographically. The proposed novel fitness function can aid in excluding the influence of some noisy mismatched feature points. The test results showed that our approach can overcome changes in illumination, background noise, and occlusions more effectively than other traditional methods, including color‐tracking and invariant feature‐tracking methods.
Effect of Propagation Model Calibration on DCM Positioning Accuracy in a Dense Urban Area

In this paper the authors evaluate the effect of propagation model calibration on the positioning accuracyobtained by a database correlation method (DCM). The calibration procedure defines a single calibration factor. This factor i s added to the predicted path loss to minimize the sum of the squared differences between predicted and measured received signa l strength values. The selected DCM algorithm (RF-FING+RTDPRED) employs a correlation database built using the Okumur aHata empirical propagation model. Additional diffraction losses are calculated using Epstein-Peterson’s method applied up on digital elevation models with building heights with a planar resolution of 10 meters. The experimental evaluation was ca rried out in a GSM radio access network in a dense urban area. Keywords— Okumura-Hata, Calibration, Database Correlation Method, Mobile Station, Positioning Accuracy.
Antimicrobial Effects of Calcium Oxide Nanoparticles and Some Spices in Minced Meat Doaa

Spices have more than one function in food; it can be used as flavoring agent and as biopreservatives due to its antimicrobial effect. So, it can be used to prevent both food spoilage and growth of pathogenic microorganisms. Additionally, spices have nutraceutical benefits, used as immunomodulators (garlic), lowering blood cholesterol (garlic, onion and turmeric), antimutaginic (garlic, ginger and turmeric), digestive stimulant (turmeric, cumin, ginger, onion, sage and mint) natural antimicrobials (garlic, sage and turmeric) and can be safely used especially against antibiotic resistant microorganisms [2]. Garlic and onion are widely used for flavoring of foods. Moreover, these spices contain antimicrobial compounds. There are higher quantities of sulphur compounds (allicin) in garlic than onion, whereas, onion contains higher amount of flavonol compounds. Moreover, ginger includes gingerol and shagelol[3].
A Systematic Review of Yoga Interventions in the Incarcerated Setting

While yoga interventions in the incarcerated setting are on the rise, little is known regarding their efficacy. The objective of this article is to assess the effects of yoga on the well-being of incarcerated populations. Two reviewers systematically searched PubMed, Psycinfo, EBSCO MegaFILE, Web of Science, Science Direct, AMED, and Google Scholar for yoga intervention studies in jails and prisons. The search yielded 54 results; ten papers met inclusion criteria. Evaluated outcomes included stress, cognitive performance, mental and physical well-being and re-incarceration rates. While the majority of yoga practiced was hatha, yoga interventions also included a focus on yogic philosophy and spirituality. The reviewed studies found statistically significant outcomes pointing to the benefits of yoga. Many of the studies were limited by study design challenges (such as lack of control groups) and minimal discussion regarding the intervention's purported mechanism. Yoga interventions in the incarcerated setting are associated with positive well-being outcomes. Future interventions can choose outcomes based both on the type of yoga practiced and on the needs of the criminal justice population.
Sex-Dependent Modulation of Acute Stress Reactivity After Early Life Stress in Mice: Relevance of Mineralocorticoid Receptor Expression

Early life stress (ELS) is considered a major risk factor for developing psychopathology. Increasing evidence points towards sex-dependent dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis as a contributing mechanism. Additionally, clinical studies suggest that the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) may further confer genetic vulnerability/resilience on a background of ELS. The link between ELS, sex and the HPA axis and how this interacts with MR genotype is understudied, yet important to understand vulnerability/resilience to stress. We used the early life-limited nesting and bedding model to test the effect of ELS on HPA properties in adult female and male mice carrying a forebrain-specific heterozygous knockout for MR. Basal HPA axis activity was measured by circadian peak and nadir corticosterone levels, in addition to body weight and weight of stress-sensitive tissues. HPA axis reactivity was assessed by mapping corticosterone levels after 10 min immobilization. Additionally, we measured the effects of ELS on steroid receptor [MR and glucocorticoid receptor (GR)] levels in the dorsal hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with western blot. Finally, behavioral reactivity towards a novel environment was measured as a proxy for anxiety-like behavior. Results show that HPA axis activity under rest conditions was not affected by ELS. HPA axis reactivity after immobilization was decreased by ELS in females and increased, at trend-level in males. This effect in females was further exacerbated by low expression of the MR. We also observed a sex*ELS interaction regarding MR and GR expression in the dorsal hippocampus, with a significant upregulation of MR in males only. The sex-dependent interaction with ELS was not reflected in the behavioral response to novel environment and time spent in a sheltered compartment. We did find increased locomotor activity in all groups after a history of ELS, which attenuated after 4 h in males but not females regardless of condition. Our findings support that ELS alters HPA axis functioning sex-dependently. Genetic predisposition to low MR function may render females more susceptible to the harmful effect of ELS whereas in males low MR function promotes resilience. We propose that this model may be a useful tool to investigate the underlying mechanisms of sex-dependent and genetic vulnerability/resilience to stress-related psychopathology.
Discovery of Genomic Characteristics and Selection Signatures in Korean Indigenous Goats Through Comparison of 10 Goat Breeds

Indigenous breeds develop their own genomic characteristics by adapting to local environments or cultures over long periods of time. Most of them are not particularly productive in commercial terms, but they have abilities to survive in harsh environments or tolerate to specific diseases. Their adaptive characteristics play an important role as genetic materials for improving commercial breeds. As a step toward this goal, we analyzed the genome of Korean indigenous goats within 10 goat breeds. We collected 136 goat individuals by sequencing 46 new goats and employing 90 publicly available goats. Our whole-genome data was comprised of three indigenous breeds (Korean indigenous goat, Iranian indigenous goat, and Moroccan indigenous goat; n = 29, 18, 20), six commercial breeds (Saanen, Boer, Anglo-Nubian, British Alpine, Alpine, and Korean crossbred; n = 16, 11, 5, 5, 2, 13), and their ancestral species (Capra aegagrus; n = 17). We identified that the Iranian indigenous goat and the Moroccan indigenous goat have relatively similar genomic characteristics within a large category of genomic diversity but found that the Korean indigenous goat has unique genomic characteristics distinguished from the other nine breeds. Through population analysis, we confirmed that these characteristics have resulted from a near-isolated environment with strong genetic drift. The Korean indigenous goat experienced a severe genetic bottleneck upon entering the Korean Peninsula about 2,000 years ago, and has subsequently rarely experienced genetic interactions with other goat breeds. From selection analysis and gene-set enrichment analysis, we revealed selection signals for Salmonella infection and cardiomyopathy in the genome of the Korean indigenous goat. These adaptive characteristics were further identified with genomic-based evidence. We uncovered genomic regions of selective sweeps in the LBP and BPI genes (Salmonella infection) and the TTN and ITGB6 genes (cardiomyopathy), among several candidate genes. Our research presents unique genomic characteristics and distinctive selection signals of the Korean indigenous goat based on the extensive comparison. Although the adaptive traits require further validation through biological experiments, our findings are expected to provide a direction for future biodiversity conservation strategies and to contribute another option to genomic-based breeding programmes for improving the viability of Capra hircus.