Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aerosol radiative impact during the summer 2019 heatwave produced partly by an inter-continental Saharan dust outbreak – Part 1: Short-wave dust direct radiative effect

Abstract. The short-wave (SW) direct radiative effect (DRE) during the summer 2019 heatwave produced partly by a moderate, long-lasting Saharan dust outbreak over Europe is analysed in this study. Two European sites (periods) are considered: Barcelona, Spain (23–30 June), and Leipzig, Germany (29 and 30 June), 1350 km apart from each other. Major data are obtained from AERONET and polarised Micro-Pulse Lidar (P-MPL) observations. Modelling is used to describe the different dust pathways, as observed at both sites. The coarse dust (Dc) and fine dust (Df) components (with total dust, DD = Dc + Df) are identified in the profiles of the total particle backscatter coefficient using the POLIPHON (POlarisation LIdar PHOtometer Networking) method in synergy with P-MPL measurements. This information is used to calculate the relative mass loading and the centre-of-mass height, as well as the contribution of each dust mode to the total dust DRE. Several aspects of the ageing of dust are put forward. The mean dust optical depth and its Df / DD ratios are, respectively, 0.153 and 24 % in Barcelona and 0.039 and 38 % in Leipzig; this Df increase in Leipzig is attributed to a longer dust transport path in comparison to Barcelona. The dust produced a cooling effect on the surface with a mean daily DRE of − 9.1 and − 2.5 W m−2 , respectively, in Barcelona and Leipzig, but the Df / DD DRE ratio is larger for Leipzig (52 %) than for Barcelona (37 %). Cooling is also observed at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), although less intense than on the surface. However, the Df / DD DRE ratio at the TOA is even higher (45 % and 60 %, respectively, in Barcelona and Leipzig) than on the surface. Despite the predominance of Dc particles under dusty conditions, the SW radiative impact of Df particles can be comparable to, even higher than, that induced by the Dc ones. In particular, the Df / DD DRE ratio in Barcelona increases by + 2.4 % d−1 (surface) and + 2.9 % d−1 (TOA) during the dusty period. This study is completed by a second paper about the long-wave and net radiative effects. These results are especially relevant for the next ESA EarthCARE mission (planned in 2022) as it is devoted to aerosol–cloud–radiation interaction research.
The Role of Competing Endogenous RNA (ceRNA) Network in Ischemic Cardiomyopathy by Bioinformatic Analysis

Background: Ischemic cardiomyopathy (ISCM) following myocardial infarction is closely related with a poor prognosis in patients with coronary heart disease. Several researches have showed that noncoding RNAs, including long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in the progression of ISCM. The aim of the present study was to explore the potential biomarkers and competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) machenism in ISCM. Methods: Based on the open-source database, we identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and differentially expressed lncRNAs (DELs) between samples from ISCM patients and controls using affy and limma package in R (absolute log2 fold change ≥1 and p
Ion exchange treatment for electroless copper-EDTA rinse water

Utilisation de resines echangeuses d'ions pour traiter l'eau de rincage des systemes de depots chimiques Cu-EDTA. Le procede IX est considere comme le plus economique, il permet de recuperer le complexe Cu-EDTA et l'EDTA libre
A SPATIALLY QUANTIZED POWER AND RESOURCE ASSIGNMENTS FOR CELLULAR & D2D COMMUNICATIONS

This work presents a tractable approach to enabling D2D uplink underlay in cellular networks in order to improve the spatial frequency reuse and to enhance the performance of cellular networks. In general, the cellular-to-D2D interference needs to be restricted to maintain a target performance level of the networks. In this respect, we propose an optimally quantized transmission power control and interpolation schemes for cellular users to limit the interference from them on D2D users. On the other hand, for the interference induced from D2D transmissions on the base station's receiver a concentric cell structure in conjunction with an orthogonal resource assignment scheme is developed. The proposed schemes exploit the assistance of a localization system developed to estimate the D2D and cellular user's spatial separations. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can bring less interference and, at the same time, can easily be implemented in real cellular networks without the need of further standardization work.
Does Anyone Care About Support Inside the University? The Mediating Role of Perceived Organisational Support

Social exchange theory evokes the maximization of one’s personal interests or benefits when one is engaging in a relationship. The central tenant of social exchange theory focuses on the notion of reciprocity. Perceived organizational support (POS) should elicit the norm of reciprocity and employees would feel they are obligated to help organizations to achieve goals. The main objective of this study is to examine the mediating effect of POS between organizational justice and supervisory support with affective commitment. More precisely, five hypotheses were tested using a sample of 207 academics of Malaysian private universities. Partial least squares path modeling was utilised to assess the measurement and structural model. In this study, organizational justice is envisaged as a multi-dimensional construct which comprises distinct variables namely procedural justice, distributive justice and interactional justice. Supervisory support and affective commitment are unidimensional constructs. POS was found to be a mediator for the relationship between organizational justice and supervisory support with affective commitment. The findings of this study were expected to shed light on the scant literature of POS especially its mediating role for the relationship between organizational justice, supervisory support, and affective commitment.
Impact of Green Supply Chain Management Practices on Organizational Performance of the Manufacturing Sector In Sri Lanka

The present study explores the impact of implementing Green Supply Chain Management Practices on Organizational performance, in terms of environmental, operational and financial performance among manufacturing firms in Sri Lanka. 150 no of firms (n = 150) which have already implemented GSCM practices in the Sri Lankan manufacturing industry were selected covering a variety of sectors including automobile (29), garments (36) , food and beverage (13), electronics (20), chemicals (20) and other (32) as the sample size of this study. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the relationship between variables. The empirical evidence verifies that, a significant positive relationship between GSCM practices and organizational performance exists. It can be concluded that higher the adaptation of GSCM practices, higher will be the organizational performance in Sri Lankan Context. Further, it is also concluded that higher the adaptation of GSCM practices, higher will be the environmental, operational and financial performance. This suggests, that the impact of GSCM practices lead to reduce air emission, wastage of water and solid wastages and decrease the consumption of hazardous materials, frequency of environmental accidents under the environmental performance. When considering operational performance, the impact of GSCM practices lead to increase amount of goods delivered on time, decrease inventory levels and scrap rate, promote products quality, reducing and eliminating waste, increased product line and finally improved capacity utilization. Decrease of cost for energy consumption, cost for environmental accidents, and decrease in level of production costs, decrease in packing costs can be considered under the financial performance. This study will play an important role for managers and firms, also this study is contributing in increasing the sales through understanding the benefits of practices of the green supply chain management and got the highest benefits from it. Keywords: Green Supply Chain Management, Green Supply Chain Management Practices, Organizational Performance, Structural Equation Modeling (SME) Cite this paper: N. Priyashani, G.C. I. Gunarathne (2021), Impact of Green Supply Chain Management Practices on Organizational Performance of the Manufacturing Sector in Sri Lanka, Vidyodaya Journal of Management, 7(1), 1-25.
A Collaborative Requirements Elicitation Model For Crowdsourcing Platforms

Crowdsourcing is growing its interests in designing where various designers work independently to a given design task. Recent researchers discovered that collaboration by sharing designs among designers helps to produce high-quality designs. However, design task may still be hard even with that collaboration in case the requirements are not well-defined. Most customers sometimes do not know what they really want and do not know how to clearly define the requirements. Consequently, the lack of requirements creates issues on designers, such as spending much time and effort on collecting requirements alone or from the customers. The designers even end up missing important necessities to complete their tasks. To address this issue, we proposed a collaborative requirements elicitation method that supports designers who are working on the same task. We developed CREFD (Collaborative Requirements Elicitation For Designers and Developers) tool to enable designers collaboratively provide requirements, identify dependencies, add annotations and votes to the provided requirements. We performed the hypothetical and empirical evaluations to test and compare the proposed method with one of the existing elicitation methods, the results show that the proposed method helps in collecting accepted and well-organized requirements better than individual requirements elicitation.
Public Procurement and Environmental Sustainability in Developing Countries: A South African Perspective

The concept of Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) has attracted the interests of academics, practitioners, policy makers and the media recently. The interest can be attributed to the strategic role of purchasing and supply chain as a lever for sustainable development. Despite the enormous amount of funds spent on public procurements in South Africa annually, tender irregularities, corrupt practices, non-compliance and lack of knowledge, casts doubts on its role in fostering sustainable development. An in-depth literature review on SPP implementation was adopted to analyse the manner in which sustainability could be realised through regulation, implementation and monitoring compliance of relevant environmental policy instruments. This approach is used to determine how due consideration of sustainable procurement has been used as a tool to enhance social, economic and environmental sustainability. This article notes that in many developed and developing countries, the dare need of technical and management competence, cultural assimilation, high costs of funding sustainable procurement projects and transparency on the part of managers among others are sighted as factors plaguing the growth of sustainable procurement practices in most institutions. Further, this paper puts forth the argument that implementation of sustainable procurement policies alone, will not necessarily help in the achievement of the developmental objectives, but due consideration should be given to capacity building and collaboration with relevant units of government, whilst also integrating social and economic policies, into the formulation of tender documents and selection of suppliers. This paper posit that, to overcome these challenges faced by South Africa, it is important that all stakeholders including the government, researchers and other agencies should construct a synergy capable of addressing salient issues for progressive sustainable procurement policies and actions, through the incorporation of sustainable procurement practices into the mainstream of both the public and private organisations through relevant legislations, policies and regulatory frameworks.
Mode-Selective Imaging Procedures of Acoustic Ultrasonic Data on Hollow Cylinder Geometries for Structural-Health-Monitoring

Nowadays most common ultrasonic transducers measure only one scalar quantity instead of an elastic displacement field. In the case of Lamb wave propagation, this lack of information is critical under conventional imaging conditions. For baseline based and baseline free crack detection will lead to incorrect localization and classification due to different dispersive phase velocities for each propagating mode. The presented approach provides an heuristic operator to identify and select certain Lamb modes in single component datasets measured by piezoelectric transducers. This allows for the suppression of undesired side–modes. A specific pre–processing step gives us the possibility to use single component imaging procedures like conventional Kirchhoff–, Fresnel– and Reverse– Time–Migration in the terms of physics in a more precise manner.
Investigation of Rosemary Active Ingredients as COVID-19 Inhibitors: Molecular Docking and DFT

Rosemary is an important type of the natural Lamiaceae plant family with several medicinal properties, rendering it as a prospective inhibitor for the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Its SARS-CoV-2 inhibition properties has not yet been reported. In this study the inhibition efficacy of rosemary against SARS-CoV-2 has been demonstrated using molecular docking along with systematic density-functional-theory (DFT) calculations. The estimated DFT data have shown that the dipole moment of rosemary active ingredient was in the range of 4.29-1.68 with the highest value attained by the carnosic acid. The high dipole moment for the carnosic acid may indicate its appropriate binding affinity pose within a specific virus target receptor. Moreover, the structural complexity for the carnosic acid gave rise to its highest calculated polarizability of 225.5 Bohr compared to the rest of the rosemary ingredients. Remarkably, the carnosic acid active ingredient has the least energy gap between the frontier orbitals (highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO)) of ~ 5.43 eV, with several hydrophilic sites for interactions, further enabling its binding with the virus receptors. Interestingly, and as anticipated from DFT results, molecular docking calculations showed that carnosic acid had the least binding energy (−6.9 kcal/mol) and, hence, can be regarded as a prospective inhibitor to SARS-CoV-2 main protease (M). It binds to both M catalytic dyads (Cys-145 and His-41) with hydrogen bond and π-interaction. This carnosic acid ligand binding quality was comparable to renowned SARS-CoV-2 drugs, hydroxychloroquine and favipiravir, having binding affinities of −6.1 and −5.1 kcal/mol, respectively. Keywords— COVID-19, rosemary, molecular docking, DFT calculations _________________________________________________________________________________
Assessment of Motor Compensation Patterns in Stroke Rehabilitation Exercises

The increasing demand concerning stroke rehabilitation and in-home exercise promotion requires objective methods to assess patients’ quality of movement, allowing progress tracking and promoting consensus among treatment regimens. In this work, we propose a method to detect diverse compensation patterns during exercise performance with 2D pose data to automate rehabilitation programs monitorization in any device with a 2D camera, such as tablets, smartphones, or robotic assistants.
Developing EFL Learners’ Creativity in Writing Skill Through Dynamic Assessment-based Teaching

The development of students’ creative potential is one of the objectives of educational programs in TEFL. The ability of TEFL teachers to achieve this objective to shape creative learning environments for their own students’ creative potential depends on their training in such a learning environment. This study attempted to investigate the effect of dynamic assessment-inspired teaching on the creativity of the EFL students, going through creative writing. This study tried to notice which model of dynamic assessment best affects creativity. The creative thinking scale in writing (Torrance, 1990) was used by the researchers to score the descriptors of creative thinking subscales. One-hundred EFL adult learners of both gender who aged between 20 to 22 were recruited to take part in the present study at Soure art and Architecture University, and a sequential explanatory mixed-method design was utilized. The control group received no mediation, and the other two classes received sandwich and cake models of dynamic assessment-related mediations, respectively. A semi-structured interview was conducted with 12 students and three main questions were asked. A thematic analysis was done using qualitative MAXQDA Software which showed a positive attitude of the learners toward this. The results have shown that both the sandwich and cake model of dynamic assessment influenced the creativity of the learners in their writing. Besides, the sandwich model was more beneficial than the cake model.
Portfolio optimization using second order conic programming approach

In this paper, we examine the framework to estimate financial risk called conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR) and examine models to optimize portfolios by minimizing CVaR. We note that total risk can be a function of multiple risk factors combined in a linear or nonlinear forms. We demonstrate that, when using CVaR, several common nonlinear models can be expressed as second order cone programming problems and therefore efficiently solved using modern algorithms. This property is not shared with the more classical estimation of financial risk based on value-at-risk.
Comparative Performance Analysis of Scalar and Vector GNSS Receiver Architectures

This work addresses the performance comparison between scalar and vector architectures for GNSS receivers, regarding mainly code tracking. First, a review on the important literature is undertaken, alongside a mathematical description of the code tracking process and multipath eﬀect. The main diﬀer-ences between scalar and vector receiver architectures are also highlighted. Two navigation estimation algorithms are described: the least-squares algorithm and the extended Kalman ﬁlter (EKF), as well as their integration in scalar and vector receivers. All the receiver architectures, and algorithms are implemented in MATLAB and simulated in a variety of signal reception scenarios and dynamics: pedestrian, car and aircraft. Diﬀerent signal modulations are utilized: BPSK, BOCs(1,1) and CBOC(6,1,1/11), these last two being used by the Galileo system. Additionally, a new code discriminator based on a bank of correlators was devised for processing of the CBOC(6,1,1/11), which was not possible with the traditional one. Simulation results demonstrate that vector architectures outperform scalar ones in almost all cases, especially in scenarios of severe attenuation, regardless of the estimation algorithm used. Additionally, a vector algorithm, with simultaneous code tracking and frequency tracking, was implemented with some performance results displayed.
Combined B-type Natriuretic Peptide as strong predictor of short-term mortality in patients after Liver Transplantation

Background: B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) is a well-known predictor for prognosis in patients with cardiac and renal diseases. However, there is a lack of studies in patients with advanced hepatic disease, especially patients who underwent liver transplantation (LT). We evaluated whether BNP could predict the prognosis of patients who underwent LT. Material and Methods: The data from a total of 187 patients who underwent LT were collected retrospectively. The serum levels of BNP were acquired at four time points, the pre-anhepatic (T1), anhepatic (T2), and neohepatic phases (T3), and on postoperative day 1 (T4). The patients were dichotomized into survival and non-survival groups for 1-month mortality after LT. Combined BNP (cBNP) was calculated based on conditional logistic regression analysis of pairwise serum BNP measurements at two time points, T2 and T4. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was analyzed to determine the diagnostic accuracy and cut-off value of the predictive models, including cBNP. Results: Fourteen patients (7.5 %) expired within one month after LT. The leading cause of death was sepsis (N = 9, 64.3 %). The MELD and MELD-Na scores had an acceptable predictive ability for 1-month mortality (AUROC = 0.714, and 0.690, respectively). The BNPs at each time point (T1 - T4) showed excellent predictive ability (AUROC = 0.864, 0.962, 0.913, and 0.963, respectively). The cBNP value had an outstanding predictive ability for 1-month mortality after LT (AUROC = 0.976). The optimal cutoff values for cBNP at T2 and T4 were 137 and 187, respectively. Conclusions: The cBNP model showed the improved predictive ability for mortality within 1-month of LT. It could help clinicians stratify mortality risk and be a useful biomarker in patients undergoing LT.
Occurrence and description of Clinostomum complanatum (Rudolphi, 1819) metacercariae in freshwater fishes from Gheshlagh basin, West of Iran

Clinostomum spp. have a long uncertain taxonomic history which also have attracted great attentions. This could be due to their zoonotic potential and the presence of yellow grubs in the fish as a second intermediate host. In the current study, a total of 3oo freshwater fish belonging to the nine species were collected from two stations in the Gheshlagh basin, Kurdistan Province. Four species including Alburnus mossulensis, Capoeta damascina, Garra rufa and Squalius cephalus were found to be infected with the metacercariae. The highest prevalence (4.1%) and mean abundance (0.31±0.37) were observed in C. damascina. The metacercariae were identified using molecular (Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS)), SEM and morphological analysis as Clinostomum complanatum. The phylogenetic analysis of four sequences of ITS gene were conducted. The specimens were placed within a lineage of C. complanatum and formed a clade with other Clinostomum species in the Palearctic region. The current study revealed the C. damascina, G. rufa and A. mossulensis as new hosts for C. complanatum and first report of this metacercariae in the region. Furthermore, the present study demonstrate the first molecular and morphological data on C. complanatum of the Iranian freshwater fish.