Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Device-oriented telecommunications customer call center demand forecasting

Verizon Wireless maintains a call center infrastructure employing more than 15,000 customer care representatives across the United States. The current resource management process requires a lead time of several months to hire and train new staff for the customer rep position. To ensure that call center resources are balanced with customer demand, an accurate forecast of incoming call volume is required months in advance. The standard forecasting method used at Verizon relies on an analysis of aggregate call volume. By analyzing the growth trend of the customer base and the month-upon-month seasonal fluctuations within each year, the total incoming call volume is predicted several months in advance. While this method can yield solid results, it essentially groups all customers into a single category and assumes uniform customer behavior. Given the size of the Verizon customer base, forecast inaccuracy in the current process can lead to resource allocation errors on the order of tens of thousands of labor hours per month. This thesis proposes a call forecasting model which segments customers according to wireless device type. By taking into consideration customer behavior on a per device basis and accounting for the continuous churn in mobile devices, there is the potential to create a forecasting tool with better accuracy. For each device model, future call volumes are estimated based upon projected device sales and observed customer behavior. Aggregate call volume is determined as the sum across all device models. Linear regression methods are employed to construct forecast models for each of the top 20 mobile devices (those which generate the most customer service calls) using historical device data. The aggregate call volume forecast for these top 20 devices is benchmarked against the standard forecast currently in use at Verizon to validate the reliability of the new approach. Furthermore, device-oriented analytics processes developed for this project will enable Verizon to build a rich library of device data without additional staff or resource investments. By incorporating device-oriented data analysis into the call volume forecasting process, Verizon Wireless hopes to improve forecast accuracy and staff planning, effectively maintaining service levels while reducing overall staffing costs at call centers.
Improved reliability of AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors with a strain-relaxed base

The authors reveal a key to improving the life of MOCVD-grown AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors with carbon-doped base. In addition to presenting new findings on current gain degradation properties, it is shown that the importance of lattice strain relaxation in a carbon-doped base layer. Indium was incorporated into C-doped GaAs to relax strain by controlling the lattice constant in the base layer, which was slightly shrunk by carbon doping. Although lifetime testing is still underway, the median life is estimated to be longer than 2.8 /spl times/ 10/sup 6/ hours and 1.1 /spl times/ 10/sup 5/ hours where the collector current density is 10 kA/cm/sup 2/and 50 kA/cm/ /sup 2/, respectively. <<ETX>>
Essential Oils from Annonaceae Species from Brazil: A Systematic Review of Their Phytochemistry, and Biological Activities

The present work involves a systematic review of the chemical composition and biological effects of essential oils from the Annonaceae species collected in Brazil from 2011 to 2021. Annonaceae is one of the most important botanical families in Brazil, as some species have economic value in the market as local and international fruit. In addition, the species have useful applications in several areas—for instance, as raw materials for use in cosmetics and perfumery and as medicinal plants. In folk medicine, species such as Annona glabra L. and Xylopia sericea A. St.-Hil. are used to treat diseases such as rheumatism and malaria. The species of Annonaceae are an important source of essential oils and are rich in compounds belonging to the classes of mono and sesquiterpenes; of these compounds, α-pinene, β-pinene, limonene, (E)-caryophyllene, bicyclogermacrene, caryophyllene oxide, germacrene D, spathulenol, and β-elemene are the most abundant. The antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antileishmania, antioxidant, antiproliferative, cytotoxic, larvicidal, trypanocidal, and antimalarial activities of essential oils from the Annonaceae species in Brazil have been described in previous research, with the most studies on this topic being related to their antiproliferative or cytotoxic activities. In some studies, it was observed that the biological activity reported for these essential oils was superior to that of drugs available on the market, as is the case of the essential oil of the species Guatteria punctata (Aubl.) R. A. Howard. , which showed a trypanocidal effect that was 34 times stronger than that of the reference drug benznidazol.
High efficiency solar air heaters with novel built-in heat storage for use in a humidification-dehumidification desalination cycle

Compared to solar water heaters, solar air heaters have received relatively little investigation and have resulted in few commercial products. However, in the context of a Humidication-Dehumidication (HD) Desalination cycle air heating offers signicant performance gains for the cycle. Solar collectors can be over 40% of an air-heated HDH system's cost, thus design optimization is crucial. Best design practices and sensitivity to material properties for solar air heaters are investigated, and absorber solar absorptivity and glazing transmissivity are found to have the strongest effect on performance. Wind speed is also found to have a significant impact on performance. Additionally a well designed collector includes a double glazing, roughened absorber plates for superior heat transfer to the airstream. A collector in this configuration performs better than current collectors with an efficiency of 58% at a normalized gain of 0.06 K m/W. Additionally, maintaining a constant air outlet temperature is also important for HD cycle performance. The use of built in phase change material storage (PCM) is found to produce consistent air outlet temperatures throughout the day or night. Using PCM directly below the absorber plate avoids heat transfer inefficiencies by using the working fluid to transfer energy to another storage system. Using a two dimensional finite element model it is found that a PCM layer of 8 cm below the absorber plate is sufficient to produce a consistent output temperature close to the PCM melting temperature with a time-averaged collector efficiency of 35%. However, this efficiency is significantly lower than a collector without storage, indicating a trade-off between efficiency and constant temperature heating, and suggesting alternative forms of energy storage might be more viable. Collectors that can deliver consistent outlet temperatures with good efficiency increase the performance of the HDH cycle. A prototype collector with storage is also built. Thesis Supervisor: John H. Lienhard V Title: Collins Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Assessing the performance of multi-sources gridded data to estimate long-term rainfall change over north-central region of India

As station data quality and availability is not adequate to reliably estimate observed climate change over many parts of the country, multi sources observational gridded datasets have been employed in the present study. The performances of multi-observational gridded datasets, e.g., IMD gridded data, CRU, APHRODITE, GPCC, NCAR/NCEP reanalysis have been compared with the reference rainfall data from IITM over North central India (NCI), a region of subtropical monsoon climate, during four main seasons (MAM,JJAS,ON and DJF) as well as in annual scale for the period 1951-2003. All the gridded data except CRU and NCEP have secured good skill scores in all seasons as well as at annual scale. APHRODITE and NCEP reanalysis have shown large wet bias in all seasons. The reference rainfall data over NCI has shown 6.3 mm, 4.2 mm, 1.9 mm and 11.2 mm increase per decade for MAM, JJAS, DJF seasons and annual rainfall respectively whereas 2.2 mm decrease per decade has been found for ON season. Only GPCC dataset have been able to capture similar trend for all seasons. Performance of NCEP reanalysis has been worse in compared to others. GPCC and IMD high resolution data has shown smallest bias among all the datasets and also obtain superior skill scores than others. Therefore based on visual inspection and the results from different conventional measures, GPCC high resolution gridded data and high resolution IMD gridded data may be reliably used for climatic analysis of this region.
‘Technology and the Academics’: A commentary on Sir Eric Ashby's recent book

Mr Thomas, who is a member of the FBI Education Committee, chairman of the FBI Technical Colleges Committee, member of the BISF Training Committee, and of the West Riding and North Derbyshire Area Training Committee, BISF, discusses two important topics arising in Sir Eric's book: the government of colleges of technology, and the nature of liberal studies.
Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions

From the Publisher: Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button. " Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system developmentunderstanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.
A fuzzy logic based photovoltaic peak power tracking control

This paper describes the analysis, modeling and implementation of a fuzzy based photovoltaic peak power tracking system. The maximum power of a photovoltaic system changes with temperature, solar intensity and load. An analytical model is built for the solar cell on the basis of the manufacturer characteristics. The solar panel is integrated with the converter model and a fuzzy algorithm is developed so as to perform an on-line search procedure to track the maximum power continuously. The system is implemented by an inexpensive RISC microcontroller. Experimental results have shown excellent performance, robustness with parameter variation, modularity for parallel operation at higher power, and ready to retrofit existing installations.
DISEÑO DE PROCEDIMIENTOS PARA LA CALIBRACIÓN DE INCUBADORAS

In the content of this one article reference to the procedure is made of calibration of incubators; procedure for which a technical norm doesn't exist specifies and that the electrophysiology group designed in the frame of a project approved by COLCIENCIAS that has as principal aim credit a laboratory of calibration / test of medical equipment.
Hardware and software platform for Internet of Things

Internet of Things is a relatively new and undiscovered field under constant change. Today several similar technologies exist, all competing to be accepted as the new standard. As the concept of Internet of Things spans from hardware, to operating system, all the way up to application level communication protocol, this project investigated the most promising technologies in each of these areas. The findings of this investigation were used to build a prototype; this prototype was then used to assess the range, response time, connection speed, and power consumption, of the selected communication protocol. The assessment chapter compares the results to the theoretical values and highlights the differences, while the discussion chapter explores why these differences occur. The obtained results give insight in what kind of applications Internet of Things might bring, and also what issues that currently exist. Amongst the discoveries is the poor response time of an Internet of Things system while using power saving measures. These measures are needed to achieve a battery life of 1 year, resulting in the inability for real-time applications to utilize the power of Internet of Things.
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer

From the Publisher: First released in 1984, Fire in the Valley remains one of the most sought-after and widely revered testaments to the dynamic visionaries of the PC era. Now updated and expanded, the second edition contains more photos and new chapters, revealing how the PC came to transform the world today and will shape the century ahead. The authors look at recent developments at Apple, Microsoft, and IBM and convey the exciting development of other companies such as Sun, Netscape, Lotus, and Oracle in the Internet age. Itself a milestone in the fascinating history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley is the definitive account of how it all happened and why.
A novel load sharing control technique for paralleled inverters

A new control technique have been developed, which allows paralleled inverters to share linear or nonlinear load in a distributed AC power supply system. All paralleled inverters have the same power reference, and are forced the output power to follow the same reference by using a PI controller in each inverter unit, so that all paralleled inverters can share the same output power. The approach has significant advantages over existing methods, including the ability to improve reliability and reduce interconnection bus. Principle and scheme of the load-sharing technique is analyzed. The experimental results of a three-unit prototype system show that the proposed scheme is correct.
Diversity and Genetic Structuration of Populations of Plutella xylostella (Lepidoptera, Plutellidae), Cabbage Farming Destroyer in Senegal

Plutella xylostella, pointed out as the most dangerous destroyer of cabbage (Brassica olerarea), is a cosmopolitan species. In fact, owing to its large capacity of adaptation, P. xylestella colonizes any kind of area. This insect can bring about up to 90% of losses on cabbage farming. To control the insect, Senegalese farmers, very often, resort to high dose of chemical pesticides which are repetitively sprayed. The use of these chemical products gives rise to different varieties of resistant insects, which results in the emergence of different haplotypes between populations. It is in such a context that this study has been undertaken. Our objective is then to contribute to the knowledge of the genetic diversity of P. xylostella populations in Senegal. To hit the target, PCR-Sequencing method has been applied on samples from the five following localities: Diofior, Malika, Mboro, Santh Ndong, and Sebikotane. P. xylostella from Mboro is genetically different from the other populations. This fact could be due to a different way of using pesticides in this area vis-à-vis of the other localities. On the other hand, between populations of P. xylostella from Diofior, Malika, Santh
Environmental and socioeconomic correlates of extinction risk in endemic species

Our current understanding of the causes of global extinction risk is mostly informed by the expert knowledge‐based “threats classification scheme” of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Studies based on this dataset came to different conclusions about the relative importance of threats to species, depending on which taxonomic groups and levels of extinction risk were considered, and which version of the database was used. A key reason may lie in data limitations as causes of threat are well known for charismatic and well‐studied species, but not for the majority of species assessed. Here, we aim to fill current knowledge gaps about the importance of drivers of global extinction risks by focusing on endemic species.
Basic concepts of biological microparticles isolation by inertia spiral microchannels in simple terms: a review

The microfluidics separation has absorbed wide-ranging attention in recent years due to its outstanding advantages in biological, medical, clinical, and diagnostical cell studies. While conventional separation methods failed to render the acceptable performance, microfluidics sorting methods offer many privileges such as high throughput, user-friendliness, minimizing sample volumes, cost-efficiency, non-invasive procedures, high precision, improved portability, quick processing, etc. Among the inertial microfluidics approaches such as the straight and curved microchannels, although the spiral microchannels, which are the sorts of passive separations, are complicated in concepts and geometries, they have demonstrated auspicious benefits for this purpose. Thus, numerous studies have strived to explain the principle of particle migrating and forces in these complex microchannels. However, a comprehensive understanding is still necessary. On the other side, it is manifest that the diagnosis and separation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood are significant for targeted treatments of this detrimental disease. Therefore, this study aims to review the previous investigations and developments for understanding the CTC separation using the spiral microchannels straightforwardly and profoundly. After elucidating the inertial microfluidics and their governing physics in simple terms, we provide insights about spiral microchannels’ mechanism and concepts, the secondary flow, the cross-section effects on the separation processes, the investigation about CTCs in the spiral microchannels specifically, and finally, the future applications and challenges of this kind of inertial microfluidics. The analyses reveal that new approaches should be conducted to use spiral microchannels with combined cross-sections. These kinds of microchannels with optimum size and shape of cross-sections can improve performance efficiently.
Interaction between Pre-School Children’s Physical Activity and Physical Fitness and Their Parents’ Physical Activity

Background. Pre-school age is the period of especially fast growth and physical development, characterized by an intensive growth and development of a child’s organism, great changes in the activity of the functional systems, which is affected by increasing physical activeness and fitness (Grinienė & Vaitkevičius, 2009; Howells & Sääkslahti, 2019). Previous studies have identified parental influence as a factor that can shape a child’s physical self–perception and act as a stimulus for physical activity and fitness (Eddolls, McNarry, Stratton, & Mackintosh, 2016). The aim of this study was to indicate physical activity of 5–6-year-old children and to determine the interaction between parents’ physical activity and physical fitness data. Methods. The study involved pre-school age children (n = 59) from 5 to 6 years old: 31 girls and 21 boys; also, their parents (n = 101) were involved: 57 mothers and 44 fathers. Physical activity was measured objectively using the ActiGraph GT3X model. The children performed five physical fitness tests (PFT) according to the Eurofit methodology. Also, parents were asked to fill in questionnaires about their own and their children’s physical activity, and also subjective physical fitness. Results. It turned out that there was a significant difference in the time spent in moderate and moderate to vigorous (MVPA) physical activity between 5 to 6-year-old children (p < .05). Comparing pre-school children’s physical fitness by gender we found that boys were more physically fit than girls when performing long jumps, but girls were more physically fit than boys when performing a sit and reach test (p < .05). Subjectively measured PA identified that 72.6% of parents (of both genders) were sufficiently physically active and 27.4% were inadequate physically active. Conclusion. The results revealed that 6-year-old children spent more time in sedentary time than 5-year-olds, who accumulated more time in moderate and total MVPA physical activity per day. No significant relation was found between parents’ and children’s physical activity and fitness. Keywords: physical activity, physical fitness, pre-school child, health, parents.
The Carbon Footprint Calculation Model of the Integrated ERP Framework – Green Production

The Carbon footprint (CF) or Carbon footprint labels (CFL) of a product reveals the CO 2 released during its all product lifecycle. And, the CF of products informs customers about the amount of CO 2 released during this product lifecycle and may favor products with lower emissions and release the ecological impact in the future. This study concerns about the topics of CF in the manufacturing stage of a product lifecycle, because the CO 2 released in the manufacturing stage has a majority of CF. Basically, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system which has been a common management system in a company provides plentiful data to evaluate the CF in manufacturing stage of a product; hence, an integration model of CF and ERP is developed in this study. Furthermore, a video capture card produced by a plant in Taiwan is utilized to illustrate the application of the proposed model.
Prediction of Covid-19 Based on Chest X-Ray Images Using Deep Learning with CNN

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused trouble in people's daily lives and ruined several economies around the world, killing millions of people thus far. It is essential to screen the affected patients in a timely and cost-effective manner in order to fight this disease. This paper presents the prediction of COVID-19 with Chest X-Ray images, and the implementation of an image processing system operated using deep learning and neural networks. In this paper, a Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Convolutional Neural Network-based approach for predicting Covid-19 positive and normal patients using Chest X-Ray pictures is proposed. In this study, machine learning tools such as TensorFlow were used for building and training neural nets. Scikit-learn was used for machine learning from end to end. Various deep learning features are used, such as Conv2D, Dense Net, Dropout, Maxpooling2D for creating the model. The proposed approach had a classification accuracy of 96.43 percent and a validation accuracy of 98.33 percent after training and testing the X-Ray pictures. Finally, a web application has been developed for general users, which will detect chest x-ray images either as covid or normal. A GUI application for the Covid prediction framework was run. A chest X-ray image can be browsed and fed into the program by medical personnel or the general public.