Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RIBOSOMAL DNA-ITS2 GENOTYPES OF THE MALARIA VECTOR ANOPHELES SUPERPICTUS (DIPTERA: CULICIDAE) FROM IRAN

Recent advances in DNA based technology have made available a wide range of molecular characteristics for taxonomic and systematic studies of malaria vectors. One region of the anopheline mosquito genome that has received particular attention is the ribosomal DNA. In this study, mosquitoes of the Anopheles superpictus collected from a wide geographical distribution of Iran were investigated for sequence variation within the ribosomal DNA ITS2. Two morphological forms of this species were identified based on adult female palpi and compared to genotypes identified by the rDNA ITS2 sequences. Sequence analysis of the ITS2 within and between populations identified three genotypes designated as X, Y, and Z. Genotype X occurred in north, west, south, and central regions whereas genotypes Y and Z were found sympatric in Baluchistan in southeast corner of the country. Totally 127 mutations occurred in the 518 bp region sequenced. The rate of genetic variation was 24.52% in which respectively 0.2%, 0.77% and 23.55% corresponded to 28S, 5.8S, and ITS2 regions. The length of ITS2 region was varied between populations; one group had 357 and other one 378 bp. These genotypes appeared to be evolving independently suggesting the possibility of cryptic species within taxon. This study is the first comparative study on morphological and genetic characteristics of An. superpictus and for the first time in the world reporting this taxon as a species complex.
Leveraging the Smart Grid: The Effect of Real-Time Information on Consumer Decisions

This report reviews the literature on the impact of real-time information provision on consumer decision-making. In addition, it describes the results of a study in which about 7000 households in Ontario, Canada were provided with in-home displays linked to smart meters that provided real-time feedback on electricity consumption. The results show that electricity consumption declines by about 3% as a result of information feedback, that the reduction in demand is sustained for at least five months, and that it is highly correlated with outdoor temperature.
Assessment of the role of sports in fighting HIV/AIDS in Bugulumbya sub-county, Kamuli Uganda

Introduction: Although sports has been widely used and believed to help in HIV/AIDS prevention to date its impact in fighting HIV/AIDS has not been thoroughly investigated. Because sports tend to conjoin many people of all walks of life either as participants or as spectators, the use of the power of sports in tackling the HIV/AIDS pandemic may be worthy studying hence this study. The study aimed at assessing the role of sports in fighting HIV/AIDS among the youth of Bugulumbya sub-county in Kamuli District. Methods: The researcher employed a Descriptive cross-sectional study design that used both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. The methods included; questionnaires, interviews, observations as well as documentary analysis. The researcher used a purposive sampling technique to meet part of the population like the head-teachers and teachers whereas stratified random sampling was employed to select the students. Convenience sampling was used to select the parents of the students depending on their accessibility and availability. Part of the data collected was analyzed using content analysis while the quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The analyzed results were presented in form of tables, pie-charts, graphs and narratives. Results: The results of the study indicate that majority of the youth who participated in various sports activities in their various schools had something to learn from the sports events where HIV/AIDS messages are conveyed to masses. This helped them to make informed decisions after participating in the above sports events hence leading to an overall positive behavioral change. They all recommended the strategy of using the power of sport in tackling HIV/AIDS among the youth as being an effective tool in fighting HIV/AIDS and as well as being a learning experience with fun. Most teachers, parents and head-teachers contended the strategy of using the power of sport to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic as being effective in creating awareness among the youth and reinforcing what the youth had already known about the HIV/AIDS scourge.
Impact of the UV Lamp Power on the Formation of Swimming pool Water Treatment By-Products

Abstract The operation of swimming pools requires a constant monitoring of water quality parameters and protection of water against pathogens. This is implemented by various disinfection methods, among which the most commonly used are based on chlorine action supported by ozone or UV irradiation. The paper presents the comparison of the effectives of organic micropollutants decomposition occurring in swimming pool water during UV irradiation emitted by a 15 and 150 W UV lamp. The tests were conducted on real swimming pool water collected from a sport basin. The identification and the determination of micropollutants concentration were performed by the use of gas chromatography GC-MS (EI) preceded by solid-phase extraction SPE. It was shown that the concentration of micropollutants decreases with the increase in the irradiation time of pool water. The 150 W UV lamp allowed for an over 33% removal of micropollutants from the group of pharmaceuticals compounds (except for caffeine) and more than 76% decrease of other compounds, which belong to the group of personal care products additives, food additives and phthalates. In addition, it has been demonstrated that during the irradiation of such complex water matrixes as swimming pool water, a significant number of micropollutants degradation by-products were formed, which are not found in water before UV irradiation.
Quantitative Spectroscopy of Supergiants in the Local Group Dwarf Galaxy IC 1613: Metallicity and Distance

We present a spectral analysis of 21 blue supergiant stars of spectral types late B to early A within the Local Group dwarf galaxy IC 1613, based on VLT Focal Reducer and Low Dispersion Spectrograph 2 low-resolution spectra. Combining our results with studies of early B-type blue supergiants, we report a wide bimodal distribution of metallicities with two peaks around [Z] ∼ −0.50 dex and [Z] ∼ −0.85 dex. The bimodal distribution correlates with spatial location, when compared with column densities of neutral hydrogen in IC 1613. While the low [Z] objects appear in regions of relatively high ISM H i column densities or close to them, the high [Z] supergiants are found in the central H i hole that is almost devoid of hydrogen. This suggests there are varied chemical evolution histories for the young stellar populations in IC 1613. Utilizing the flux-weighted gravity–luminosity relation, we determine IC 1613's distance modulus as m − M = 24.39 ± 0.11 mag. This value is in agreement within previous distance measurements using the near-infrared period–luminosity relationship of Cepheids and the tip of the red giant branch.
A Study on Relation between Corporate Social Responsibility and Profitability-and-Corporate Value

The purpose of this research is to analyze whether there is a systematic relation between CSR performance and corporate profitability-and-corporate value with Korean companies as target. For the purpose, 943 KEJI indexes that have been calculated from 2012 to 2014 were used as surrogate variables of CSR, and ROA and Tobinâ€™s q were used as surrogate variables of corporate profitability-and-corporate value before a correlation analysis and a regression analysis were carried out. As a result of analysis, a significant positive (+) relation appeared between CSR performance measured by KEJI index and corporate profitability (ROA) and corporate value (Tobinâ€™s q). Based on this analysis result, we have examined preceding studies with regard to the relation between CSR and financial performance of companies and presented possibility of CSR as a key management strategy of a company.
Signatures of Dark Matter Halo Expansion in Galaxy Populations

Dark matter cores within galaxy haloes can be formed by energy feedback from star forming regions: an energy balance suggests that the maximum core formation efficiency arises in galaxies with M$_{\star}\sim10^{8.5}$M$_{\odot}$. We show that a model population of galaxies, in which the density profile has been modified by such baryonic feedback, is able to explain the observed galaxy velocity function and Tully-Fisher relations significantly better than a model in which a universal cuspy density profile is assumed. Alternative models, namely warm or self-interacting dark matter, also provide a better match to these observed relations than a universal profile model does, but make different predictions for how halo density profiles vary with mass compared to the baryonic feedback case. We propose that different core formation mechanisms may be distinguished based on the imprint they leave on galaxy populations over a wide range of mass. Within the current observational data we find evidence of the expected signatures of the mass dependence of core formation generated by baryonic feedback.
Sex ratio of Parus major and P. caeruleus broods depends on parental condition and habitat quality

Brood sex ratio was studied in 88 families of Parus caeruleus (blue tit) and 95 families of P. major (great tit) in deciduous and mixed forest habitats differing in food availability. As a food specialist, the blue tit is expected to be more sensitive to the nutritional differences between the habitats than a food generalist such as the great tit. A shift of brood sex ratio towards males was detected for great tits in the high quality habitat, but there was no significant impact of parental condition or the number of nestlings. In contrast, brood sex ratio of blue tits was not affected by habitat quality. In blue tits, male condition correlated positively with a male-biased sex ratio. Habitat quality, however, affected the body mass differences of male and female blue tit siblings, and nestlings developed differently. The low quality habitat had a negative effect on the sexual dimorphism of siblings in male-biased broods, and the condition of offspring was bad. Nevertheless, sexual dimorphism cannot explain the differences between great and blue tits with respect to the correlation of sex ratio and individual condition.
UPGRADE OF THE ISIS MAIN MAGNET POWER SUPPLY

ISIS, situated at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is the world’s most powerful pulsed neutron source. Intense bursts of neutrons are produced every 20ms, when a heavy metal target is bombarded with a beam of high energy, 800 MeV, protons from a synchrotron. On the ISIS synchrotron the dipoles, doublet quadrupoles and singlet quadrupole magnets are connected in series using a configuration known as the “White circuit” [1]. The circuit uses a large, 1MJ, energy storage choke together with capacitor banks operated at the resonant frequency of 50 Hz, to reduce the reactive load on the AC make up supply. The series connection also has the advantage of ensuring that the same current, leakage current excepted, flows in all the magnets. A DC supply is used to bias the sinusoidal magnet waveform. Most of the power supply components were manufactured in the 1960’s and are reaching the end of their design life. This paper discusses the issues involved in upgrading a central part of a facility, which is in continual use, without significantly affecting the users. Consideration is given to reducing the risk of extended down times resulting from the failure of major components. At the same time, ways of improving performance, by reducing losses and modifying the magnet current waveform are being actively sought.
A New Information Diffusion Model in Weibo: UA-SCIR

To illustrate how information spreads in Weibo, this paper proposed a user attributes based diffusion model (UA-SCIR) which defined four node states: susceptible, contacted, infected and refractory. The contacted state was first introduced to describe the nodes who had read the message but had not decided whether reposting or ignoring. Moreover, we recalculated the transfer probability between various states based on user attributes. Experiments on real-world dataset show that our UA-SCIR model can demonstrate the information diffusion progress more accurately than the existing models.
COMPARING RELATIVE SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY OF LA AND RNA-PAGE IN DETECTING BOVINE ROTAVIRUSES

Fifty-three faecal samples from diarrheic calves were collected from November 2008 to March 2009 and screened by LAT, and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) to detect the presence of group A rotavirus antigen. Of the 53 samples screened by LAT, 17 (32.08%) tested positive for rotavirus antigen. When the results from the PAGE were compared to those from LAT, the “gold standard” for detection of bovine rotavirus in fecal samples, the sensitivity and specifi city were found to be 52.94 and 100%, respectively. Latex agglutination is easy to perform in a short time and does not require expensive equipment or skilled personnel, and the reagents have long shelf lives. These factors make the LAT suitable and highly effi cient for use in a clinical laboratory as a rapid screening test for bovine rotavirus.
Looking for cosmic ray data? The ASI Cosmic Ray Database

A new Cosmic Ray DataBase (CRDB) is under development at the Space Science Data Center, a facility of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) that provides support to several space missions and acts as a multi-mission science operation, data processing and data archiving center. To ensure a more extensive utilisation of space data from existing, archived and future missions, on-line access to archival data, analysis software, calibration files and documentation are provided by a MultiMission Interactive Archive (MMIA) of the Space Science Data Center. Space data from different missions and in different research fields (astro-physics, astro-particle, cosmology, planetology) are connected in the MMIA in order to stimulate their cross-analysis and comparison. In this context, the CRDB aims to provide the scientific community with tools for an easy and efficient access to published data from missions dedicated to charged Cosmic Rays measurements. Originally developed to support the retrieval of PAMELA and AMS-02 results, it is now expanding to include more data sets from other experiments and evolving to provide new tools for data retrieval, visualisation and download. As an example, measurements of differential energy fluxes and flux ratios for the different species are available as a function of various parameters (e.g. energy, rigidity, time, magnetic parameters), for particles of galactic and solar origin, as well as particles trapped in the Earth magnetosphere. Data are ready for retrieval, visualisation and download. In this contribution, we will introduce the main features of the CRDB, accessible online at http://tools.asdc. asi.it/CosmicRays/, and the perspectives for its future development.
Impact of cooking and conservation for twelve days on total polyphenols content, antioxidant and anticholinesterase activities of red onion

The objective of this work was to determine the impact of three cooking modes (boiling, steaming and microwaving) and the conservation of onion at 4°C for 12 days on total polyphenol, flavonoid, tannins, phenolic acids contents antioxidant and anticholinesterase activity of red onion: Allium cepa. The results showed that the three cooking modes caused an increase of the levels of total polyphenols, flavonoids and tannins, but decreased the levels of phenolic acids. Storage at 4°C for 12 days caused a decrease in levels of total polyphenols, flavonoids, tannins and phenolic acids. A decrease in antiradical activity during storage was found. Three cooking modes resulted in a decrease in antioxidant activity. However, the use of microwave was more effective as' to higher polyphenol contents. The level of anticholinesterase activity steadily decreased during refrigerated storage and after 12 days it was 1/4 of the value found in the raw material.The raw onion showed a moderate activity which increased after most cooking treatments. The highest level of capacity was observed after microwaving.
Comparative studies on enzyme activities of bacterium (Bacillus subtilis) and Nigerian edible fungi (Termitomyces clypeatus, Termitomyces globulus, Pleurotus tuber-regium, and Agaricus sp)

Enzyme activities of Termitomyces clypeatus, Termitomyces globulus, Pleurotus tuber-regium, andAgaricus sp (edible Nigerian fungi) were compared with that of Bacillus subtilis (a bacterium) which have been known to be a very good amylase producer. In these studies, Pleurotus tuber-regium and Agaricus sp had amylase activities values of 0.45 and 0.39 U/min respectively. Bacillus subtilis had highest amylase value with yeast extract (0.63U/min) and least valuewithNaNO3 (0.35unit/min). For cellulase activity, Bacillus subtilis had value of 0.4unit/minwith yeast extractwhileCoriolus vesicolor, Pleurotus tuber-regium and Termitomyces clypetus had values of 0.67,0.59 and 0.51 U/min respectively. Temperature and pH also had significant effect on the production of these enzymes.
Electromechanical Impedance Analysis on Piezoelectric Smart Beam with a Crack Based on Spectral Element Method

An electromechanical impedance (EMI) analysis of a piezoelectric smart beam with a crack is implemented in this paper. Spectral element method (SEM) is used to analyze the EMI response of the piezoelectric smart beam. In this analysis, the spectral element stiffness matrices of different beam segments are derived in this paper. The crack is simulated using spring models, and the EMI signatures of piezoelectric smart beam with and without crack are calculated using SEM, respectively. From the analysis results, it is found that the peak position and amplitude of the EMI signatures have significant changes with the change in crack depth, especially in higher frequency ranges. Different vibration modes of the piezoelectric smart beam are analyzed, and the effect of thickness of the adhesive layer on the admittance is also researched. An experimental study is also implemented to verify the validity of the analysis results using SEM.
Analysis of the effect of InfoRanking on content pollution in P 2 P systems

Content pollution is one of the most common attacks against P2P file sharing systems. As such systems are usually open to users and the deployed security mechanisms merely examine the sanity of the downloaded files, content pollution attacks can be easily launched. InfoRanking is a mechanism that tries to mitigate this security risk by ranking content items. In this paper we show through analysis, fluid modeling and simulation that when InfoRanking is used, attackers can deceive users only when they share corrupted copies of legitimate file versions. Nevertheless as corrupted files can be immediately detected after being downloaded this attack is only effective when users enter the system at very low rate and leave relatively fast. InfoRanking; content pollution; P2P; fluid model; game theory
Approach towards the Professional Development of Academics as Espoused in Institutional Policy Documents at a South African University

Abstract How do institutional policy documents espouse the approach towards the professional development of academics in their role as teachers at one South African University? In order to answer the above question, the researcher conducted a document analysis of the case study institution’s documents relating to the teaching and learning agenda focusing specifically on the development of academics as teachers. Using the Archerian social realist theoretical framework, the paper analyses the cultural, structural and agential mechanisms in relation to the professional development of academics as espoused in institutional policy documents at a University. The findings from the document analysis suggest that while an espoused culture exists, structure and agency do exert an influence on the extent to which this espoused culture is translated into reality. The documents show the need to strengthen agency that will work in the domain of culture to effect a paradigm shift in terms of seeing the development of academics as teachers as an integral aspect of an academic’s career. In addition the documents suggest a strengthening of the structures responsible for supporting the professional development of academics. The study recommends strengthening of synergy among the various structures and agents that deal with staff development to avoid duplication and the re-inventing of the wheel.
Comparing Imperialist Competitive Algorithm with Backpropagation Algorithms for Training Feedforward Neural Network

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and evolutionary algorithms are two relatively young research areas that were subject to a steadily growing interest during the past years. The use of ANN has been proved to be a cost-effective technique. It is very important to choose a suitable algorithm for training a neural network. Mostly Back Propagation (BP) algorithm is a gradient descent algorithm (a first-order optimization algorithm) on the error space, which most likely gets trapped into a local minimum and has very slow convergence. This shortcoming can be removed by global searching ability of the evolutionary algorithms such as Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) which is a new evolutionary algorithm based on the human's socio-political evolution. This investigation provides a comparison between training a neural network with BP algorithms used for training Feed-forward Neural Networks (FNN) and ICA. Among the BP algorithms, Gradient descent, Levenberg–Marquardt, Conjugate gradient descent, Resilient, BFGS Quasi-newton, and One-step secant algorithm are tested then the obtained results will be compared with the results of training the neural network with ICA. Also, Accuracy and Mean Squared Error (MSE) are the main measures selected to assess both models. Also the MSE was used as a criterion to specify optimum number of neurons in the hidden layer. The results showed that ICA approach outperforms the BP for training neural network models.
Analysis of The Factors That Affect The Repayment Rates KUR Micro (Case Study: PT. BRI Unit Ciampea, Bogor)

Small and medium micro businesses generally have limited capital, to overcome the problems the government makes a financing program known as KUR. The KUR program is that micro business doers of micro and can obtain loans . This study done in BRI Unit Ciampea , the election of research is done deliberately with the consideration that BRI Unit Ciampea is one of the largest Bank in distributing KUR micro agribusiness in Bogor. In addition to show a decrease in non-performing loans in December 2013 until March 2014 at 0.72 %, but in April 2014 until August 2014 increasing non-performing loans amounting to 2.84 %, then decline again until now reaching 1.15 %, the level of non-performing loans are also show the performance of the distribution of KUR in BRI Unit Ciampea already be above the level of non-performing loans at the BRI micro overall. This study aims to to analyze the factors that affect the rate of return in BRI Unit Ciampea KUR Micro. The analysis shows that a variable double linear regression that exert influence on the rate of return real micro KUR is the variable business experience, business turnover, received credit and experience the use of credit to venture . Where the four it has negative variable influence on the rate of return micro KUR. While variables such that the level of education, the distance a borrower 's house , the number of families to support, business assets and the tenor the repayment of credits not influence significantly to micro KUR the rate of return.