Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In vitro Evaluation of the Cytotoxicity of Starch from Curcuma comosa Rhizomes

Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the cytotoxicity of the starch from Curcuma comosa rhizomes in HepG2 and Jurkat T cells. Materials and Methods : The starch powder of C. comosa rhizomes was provided from a previous research project on the isolation and characterization of starch from the rhizomes of plants in the Ginger family (Zingiberaceae). Various concentrations of C. comosa starch solution were prepared and investigated for cytotoxicity effects in both HepG2 and Jurkat T cell lines after 24, 48 and 72 h incubation by using an 3-(4,5-dimethyl thiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay and the trypan blue exclusion test method. Results: The results demonstrated that the starch solutions at low concentrations (0.001, 0.01, 0.1 and 5 µg/ml) were not toxic to either type of cells, while at high concentrations (10, 50 and 100 µg/ml) they might be toxic. Conclusions: The starch from C. comosa rhizomes at lower concentration is safe to HepG2 and Jurkat T cells, and should be further investigated for biocompatibility by using appropriate cell models and methods before developing it for use in pharmaceutical applications. doi: 10.14456/WJST.2014. 66
Impact of Service Marketing Mixes on Customer Perception: A Study on Eastern Bank Limited, Bangladesh

Modern banks are blending all the 7Ps of services marketing in their marketing activities to retain existing customers as well as to attract potential ones. This study has put efforts to investigate the impact of service marketing mixes on customer perception towards modern banking in Bangladesh. Target population of the study was the customers of Eastern Bank Limited, Khulna branch. Sample size was 315 and convenience sampling method was applied to collect data from the respondents with a structured questionnaire. 5 point Liket scale was used to develop the survey questionnaire. Multiple regression statistics was used to identify the relationship between the elements of services marketing mixes and customer perception. The result shows that price, promotion, people and physical evidence were found to be statistically significant with customer perception. Therefore, price, promotion, people and physical evidence have positive impact on perception of the customers of Eastern Bank Limited, Khulna. Whereas, product, place and process were found having no significant impact on customer perception. Keywords: Services marketing mix, customer perception, modern banking.
Biodegradation of Crude Oil in Contaminated Water by Local Isolates of Enterobacter cloacae

This paper study the ability of Enterobacter cloacae for degrading crude oil in contaminated water. Six isolates of E. cloacae were isolated from hydrocarbon contaminated soil and water of different sites. The isolate E. cloacae E1 showed the highest emulsification index (E24%) reached 62% thus it was chosen for further study. Biosurfactant produced by E. cloacae E1 reduced the surface tension of the medium from 64 to 36 mN/m. pH range 6.5 – 7 and temperature range 30˚C - 35˚C were the optimal conditions for maximum degradation. After 30 days of incubation, E. cloacae E1 degraded 70.00 ± 0.40% of the crude oil. GC-MS analysis revealed that E. cloacae E1 was able to degrade aromatic compounds. This study proved that E. cloacae E1 consider being an efficient in crude oil degradation.
Ethnography of Scenes. Towards a Sociological Life-world Analysis of (Post-traditional) Community-building

Die Art von Ethnographie, die in diesem Beitrag vorgestellt wird, stellt eine Weiterentwicklung der lebensweltlichen Ethnographie dar. Sie wird als "Szenen-Ethnographie" bezeichnet, weil sie (a) vorzugsweise posttraditionale Gemeinschaften wie z.B. Jugend-(Club)Kulturen zum Gegenstand hat, und weil sie (b) einen sozusagen "szenischen" Blick auf das menschliche Miteinander verfolgt. Allgemein geht es (auch) bei diesem Forschungskonzept – wie in der Ethnographie uberhaupt – darum, wegzukommen vom pseudo-objektivistischen "Uber-Blick" uber die Kopfe der Akteure hinweg und hinzukommen zum muhevollen "Durch-Blick" sozusagen durch die "Augen" der Akteure hindurch. Dieses explorative Programm wird bislang am konsequentesten mit der Lebensweltanalyse in der Tradition von Alfred SCHUTZ verfolgt. Die soziologische Lebensweltanalyse ist gegenuber einer rein phanomenologischen nun dahingehend erweitert, dass es um die Rekonstruktion der subjektiven Perspektive, d.h. der Lebenswelten anderer Akteure geht. Folglich ist hier die phanomenologische Deskription eingebettet in ein methodenplurales, triangulatives ethnographisches Forschungskonzept, das feldrelevante Daten aller Art mit praktischen Teilnehmerdaten verknupft. Wenngleich Teilnahme zum Zwecke der Perspektivenubernahme das Basisverfahren dieses Forschungsansatzes darstellt, integriert er diese in weitere Verfahren der Datenerhebung wie Beobachtung und Interviews. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0503430
InPCM: a network caching technique for improving the performance of TCP in wireless ad-hoc networks

We propose a novel mechanism called In-Network Packet Caching Mechanism (inPCM) to address TCP's poor performance in IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop wireless networks. In particular, we address TCP's inappropriate response to bursty and location dependent errors. The key concept is the use of intermediate nodes to perform packet recovery on behalf of TCP senders, similar to the well-known Snoop TCP but adapted to work over multi-hop wireless networks. We have conducted ns-2 simulation studies over a variety of network conditions and topologies. Our results confirm InPCM's benefits to TCP in terms of delay and throughput. Moreover, it is immediately deployable without modifications to current protocols. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication Details Adinegara, A. , Lau, W. & Chin, K. (2006). InPCM: a network caching technique for improving the performance of TCP in wireless ad-hoc networks. IEEE Wireless Telecommunications Symposium 2006 USA: IEEE. This conference paper is available at Research Online: https://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/2956 InPCM: A Network Cache Technique for Improving the Performance of TCP in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks Andrew Adinegara and W.H. O Lau Curtin University of Technology GPO Box U 1987 Perth, Western Australia {12380189, lauhow}@cs.curtin. edu.au Kwan-Wu Chin University of Wollongong Northfields Ave Wollongong, NSW, Australia 2522 kwanwu@uow.edu.au
First results of the SONS survey: submillimetre detections of debris discs

New detections of debris discs at submillimetre wavelengths present highly valuable complementary information to prior observations of these sources at shorter wavelengths. Characterization of discs through spectral energy distribution modelling including the submillimetre fluxes is essential for our basic understanding of disc mass and temperature, and presents a starting point for further studies using millimetre interferometric observations. In the framework of the ongoing SCUBA-2 Observations of Nearby Stars, the instrument SCUBA-2 on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope was used to provide measurements of 450 and 850µm fluxes towards a large sample of nearby main-sequence stars with debris discs detected previously at shorter wavelengths. We present the first results from the ongoing survey, concerning 850µm detections and 450µm upper limits towards 10 stars, the majority of which are detected at submillimetre wavelengths for the first time. One, or possibly two, of these new detections is likely a background source. We fit the spectral energy distributions of the star+disc systems with a blackbody emission approach and derive characteristic disc temperatures. We use these temperatures to convert the observed fluxes to disc masses. We obtain a range of disc masses from 0.001 to 0.1 M⊕, values similar to the prior dust mass measurements towards debris discs. There is no evidence for evolution in dust mass with age on the main sequence, and indeed the upper envelope remains relatively flat at ≈0.5 M⊕ at all ages. The inferred disc masses are lower than those from disc detections around pre-main-sequence stars, which may indicate a depletion of solid mass. This may also be due to a change in disc opacity, though limited sensitivity means that it is not yet known what fraction of pre-main-sequence stars have discs with dust masses similar to debris disc levels. New, high-sensitivity detections are a path towards investigating the trends in dust mass evolution.
Measuring spatially varying, multispectral, ultraviolet bidirectional reflectance distribution function with an imaging spectrometer

Abstract. The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) data in the ultraviolet (UV) band are valuable for many applications including cultural heritage, material analysis, surface characterization, and trace detection. We present a BRDF measurement instrument working in the near- and middle-UV spectral range. The instrument includes a collimated UV light source, a rotation stage, a UV imaging spectrometer, and a control computer. The data captured by the proposed instrument describe spatial, spectral, and angular variations of the light scattering from a sample surface. Such a multidimensional dataset of an example sample is captured by the proposed instrument and analyzed by a k-mean clustering algorithm to separate surface regions with same material but different surface roughnesses. The clustering results show that the angular dimension of the dataset can be exploited for surface roughness characterization. The two clustered BRDFs are fitted to a theoretical BRDF model. The fitting results show good agreement between the measurement data and the theoretical model.
Vision-Assisted Remote Robotic Assembly Guided by Sensor-driven 3D Models

This paper proposes an approach to developing a cyber-physical model-driven system that performs robotic distant assembly operations in decentralised manufacturing environment. The system uses an industrial robot to assemble components unknown in advance. The system captures and analyses the components’ silhouettes, and constructs the corresponding 3D models. By the help of the models, the system is able to guide a distant human operator to assemble the real components in the actual robot cell. The results show that the developed system can construct the 3D models and assemble them within a suitable total time, imitating the human behaviour in a similar situation.
Privacy Preserving Sensitive Data Coverage: Design and Analysis

: Privacy and security has become major issues in today’s communication. In respect to the last ten years the nature and utilization of the communication technology is changed much frequently. Due to this a significant amount of data is communicated in a fraction of seconds. Therefore the traditional computational techniques have moved towards the big data processing and analytics. In this environment the entire client module and administration is directly connected with the same data sources. Due to this the communication becomes easy but security and privacy concern in communicated data has appeared. Sometimes these issues are arising due to data leakage. In this presented work the main aim is to investigate the privacy and security concerns due to data leakage in big data environment. The main reason to utilize the big data is to demonstrate the real time system using twitter accounts to fetch and improve the sensitivity of data. During the investigation the promising approach is appeared where the sliding window and fuzzy logic based system is provided to analyze and reform the data. But this approach is found slow processing capability by which the system performance is affected. Due to this a new approach using the random walk technique is prepared by modification of existing system to enhance the resource consumption of the system.
Pilot Investigation of Coal Chemical Wastewater Containing Phenol by Pervaporation Process

Coal chemical wastewater contains a large number of industrial raw materials, such as phenol, resulting in difficulty as target to be treated and the resource waste as industrial raw materials. A pilot pervaporation process is investigated to separate and recycle phenols from coal chemical wastewater to reduce the follow-up biochemical processing load. Operation parameters which affect removing and recovering efficiency are studied, such as temperature, flow rate and downstream pressure. Phenol removal efficiency could reach 50% under the conditions of 70 o C, 210 L/h and 3000 Pa. The system could continuously run for 20 cycles. Furthermore, the pervaporation procedure could be enhanced when pumped with gas which made the removal efficiency up to 66%.
Hierarchical Multinomial Modeling of Individual Differences in Memory

Multinomial processing tree (MPT) models are a class of statistical models that can be applied to categorical data to separate underlying cognitive processes. Traditionally, MPT models use data that are aggregated over participants and items – thereby ignoring heterogeneity. This thesis presents three studies that applied two hierarchical extensions of MPT models that incorporate heterogeneity: The beta-MPT approach (J. B. Smith & Batchelder, 2010) and the latent-trait approach (Klauer, 2010, Matzke, Dolan, Batchelder, & Wagenmakers, 2013). In the first study, the beta-MPT version of the two-high-threshold model of source-monitoring (Bayen, Murnane, & Erdfelder, 1996) was applied to find significant correlations between the perceived source-item contingency and source guessing. When the source schema was not activated until retrieval, the correlation between the deviation of the guessing bias from the true contingency and the accuracy of source memory was also significant. This supports the probability-matching account (Spaniol & Bayen, 2002) which states that people adjust their source-guessing to the perceived source-item contingency. In the second study, the beta-MPT was applied to the multinomial model of event-based prospective memory (PM; R. E. Smith & Bayen, 2004). PM requires remembering to perform a task in the future. The prospective component – remembering that you have to do something – and the retrospective component – remembering when to do something – were correlated with questionnaire estimates for depression and anxiety. Only state anxiety was negatively correlated with the prospective component. The third study was a comparison of the beta-MPT and the latent-trait approach by a reanalysis of three experiments (R. E. Smith & Bayen, 2005, Experiments 1 and 2; R. E. Smith, Persyn, & Butler, 2011) that investigated the relationship between PM and working memory. The prospective component of PM was positively correlated with working-memory span for both hierarchical approaches. Parameter estimates of both approaches were highly correlated.
Temperature-averaged and total free-free Gaunt factors for $\kappa$ and Maxwellian distributions of electrons

Aims. Optically thin plasmas may deviate from thermal equilibrium and thus, electrons (and ions) are no longer described by the Maxwellian distribution. Instead they can be described by $\kappa$-distributions. The free-free spectrum and radiative losses depend on the temperature-averaged (over the electrons distribution) and total Gaunt factors, respectively. Thus, there is a need to calculate and make available these factors to be used by any software that deals with plasma emission. Methods. We recalculated the free-free Gaunt factor for a wide range of energies and frequencies using hypergeometric functions of complex arguments and the Clenshaw recurrence formula technique combined with approximations whenever the difference between the initial and final electron energies is smaller than $10^{-10}$ in units of $z^2Ry$. We used double and quadruple precisions. The temperature- averaged and total Gaunt factors calculations make use of the Gauss-Laguerre integration with 128 nodes. Results. The temperature-averaged and total Gaunt factors depend on the $\kappa$ parameter, which shows increasing deviations (with respect to the results obtained with the use of the Maxwellian distribution) with decreasing $\kappa$. Tables of these Gaunt factors are provided.
GPS-Derived Strain Rates on an Active Ice Shelf Rift

Abstract Ice shelves are important components of the Antarctic ice sheet due to their ice-ocean-atmosphere interface and vulnerability to global increases (or decreases) in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures. The development of rifts, which are fractures that penetrate through the entire ice shelf thickness, precede large tabular iceberg detachment and can lead to ice shelf break-up. Changes in strain rates on an active propagating rift system on the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica are determined using in-situ Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements. Results for the 2002/03 Antarctic summer period (Dec-Feb) confirm previous observations by [2] that rift propagation occurs in episodic bursts separated by several days. Transverse-to-flow (i.e. parallel-to-rift) strain rates exceed longitudinal-to-flow (i.e. normal-to-rift) rates by up to a factor of 5 and maximum principal strain rates around the rift tip vary from 12 to 21 [x 10-3/yr]. A rotation in the direction of the principal strain is evident around the rift tip, indicating a change in the mechanics of rift fracture. It is demonstrated that cumulative sum analysis [12], obtained by differencing a pair of residual baseline time series situated approximately normal and parallel to the rift, is an effective method to detect small baseline length changes.
Potential Genitourinary Toxicity and Lithogenic Effect of Ractopamine

Ractopamine is a β-adrenoreceptor agonist that excites sympathetic nerves. It has been used to increase cattle weight, for breeding, and to enhance muscle content in some countries. The concentration allowed in the environment is below 10 parts per billion (ppb). However, there are increasing concerns about the effect of long-term ractopamine on health. Our study aimed to investigate the potential effects of a “safe” dosage of ractopamine on urinary tract by using genitourinary cell cultures and our well-established translational model, Drosophila melanogaster. The results showed that ractopamine dose-dependently induces cytotoxicity in SV40 MES 13 and SV-HUC-1 cells. After 21 days of 10 ppb ractopamine administration, the rate of crystal formation in the ractopamine group significantly increased. We also found that long-term administration of ractopamine to flies decreases their climbing ability and shortens their lifespan. Overall, the long-term effects of ractopamine on the urinary tract system were evident in our cell and animal studies. In particular, renal mesangial and urothelial cells are more susceptible to damage; urolithiasis and neurological damage are other possible side effects of ractopamine. These effects on the human urinary tract should be further investigated.
Diffuse optical tomography based on time-resolved compressive sensing

Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) can be described as a highly multidimensional problem generating a huge data set with long acquisition/computational times. Biological tissue behaves as a low pass filter in the spatial frequency domain, hence compressive sensing approaches, based on both patterned illumination and detection, are useful to reduce the data set while preserving the information content. In this work, a multiple-view time-domain compressed sensing DOT system is presented and experimentally validated on non-planar tissue-mimicking phantoms containing absorbing inclusions.
A Versatile Universal Capacitor‐Grounded Voltage‐Mode Filter Using DVCCs

In this paper, a versatile three‐input five‐output universal capacitor‐grounded voltage‐mode filter is proposed. The circuit employs two differential voltage current conveyors as active elements together with two grounded capacitors and four resistors as passive elements. The proposed configuration can be used as either a single‐input five‐output or three‐input two‐output. Unlike the previously reported works, it can simultaneously realize five different generic filtering signals: lowpass, bandpass, highpass, bandreject, and allpass. It still maintains the following advantages: (i) the employment of all grounded capacitors, (ii) no need to employ inverting‐type input signals, (iii) no need to impose component choice, (iv) orthogonal control of the resonance angular frequency ωo and the quality factor Q, and (v) low active and passive sensitivity performances.
The Manchester Polish STRUT

This study investigates the acquisition of a local variant of the STRUT vowel in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, United Kingdom. While the local accent has no distinction between STRUT and FOOT, the incoming Polish speakers arrive using something close to the standard pedagogical model of British English pronunciation, which clearly separates the two. Measuring the change in production toward the local variant along with corresponding social factors suggests that, in addition to the experiential factors of length of residence and having a native-speaker partner, attitude toward Manchester also affects the degree of vowel change, with a more positive attitude encouraging a greater degree of acquisition. The results are discussed in the context of individuals’ attitudes and use of the STRUT vowel as part of the process by which they position themselves in relation to the target community.
Computer Simulation of Transition Regimes of Solitons in Stimulated Raman Scattering with Excitation of Polar Optical Phonons

The system of nonlinear equations modeling the process of nonstationary stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) in noncentrosymmetric crystals for the waves on laser, Stokes, polariton, and phonon frequencies is investigated by using the numerical methods. The general case for amplitudes of waves that resulted in doubling of the number of equations is considered. It is shown that the application of the methods of finite differences to the computer simulation of transition regimes is completely consistent with the analytical results found for the asymptotical solutions in form of solitons. The obtained results also indicate that the laser pulses of Gaussian shape appearing at the boundary of nonlinear medium tend to become solitons of Lorentzian shape. It was also found that the formation of solitons occurs when the vibrations of optical phonons and that of electromagnetic wave were either in or out of phase. It is shown that all electromagnetic waves entering the medium with different speeds become solitons having the same speed. In the second part of the paper we considered the computer simulation of soliton stability with respect to small (weak) perturbations of all interacting waves. In the present paper we considered the case of evolution of those disturbances in the vicinity of peaks of solitons. The numerical analysis showed that in wide range of parameters the solitons were stable.