Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rehabilitation of the Laboratoire De Carbone 14-Dakar (Senegal) with a Super Low-Level Liquid Scintillation Counting System

Following the passing of Prof Cheikh Anta Diop in 1986, the radiocarbon laboratory (LC14) he created 20 yr earlier at the Institut Francophone d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), Dakar, Senegal, fell into a long hibernation. It took nearly 3 yr to renovate the laboratory and reinstall new equipment in order to return LC14 to full functionality and resume its activity. A new dating system has been implemented around a super low-level liquid scintillation spectrometer from Packard, the Tri-Carb 3170TR/LS, located in an underground room. In this paper, we assess the performance of the dating setup (background level and figure of merit) using known samples from Paris 6 and international standards from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). After the calibration, the setup was used to study bolé seashells from the Khant area in the northern part of Senegal (West Africa). The aim is to present evidence of the correlation between the transgression of the Nouakchottan (5500 BP) and a few industries in the Khant area. The corresponding ages are difficult to assess and the dates available for this cultural site are randomly distributed, ranging from 4500 to 1500 BP, i.e., a chronological period spanning from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.
Average Wage, Reputation and Reciprocity

Four experiments with different treatments were conducted to investigate reciprocal behaviour and the role of average wage information in a gift exchange game. No significant differences were found between the stranger and partner treatments but when workers have information on the average wage in the partner treatments, significant differences between stranger and partner treatments emerge. This suggests that average wage information reinforces positive reciprocity as intentions of the employer becomes clearer and easier to interpret. Furthermore, the information on average wage gives workers who are concerned with wage-effort equality the incentive to reciprocate effort relative to average wage.
Machine Translation Quality and Post-Editor Productivity

We assessed how different machine translation (MT) systems affect the post-editing (PE) process and product of professional English–Spanish translators. Our model found that for each 1-point increase in BLEU, there is a PE time decrease of 0.16 seconds per word, about 3-4%. The MT system with the lowest BLEU score produced the output that was post-edited to the lowest quality and with the highest PE effort, measured both in HTER and actual PE operations.
Study of the hydric behaviour of double-layered columns of unsaturated soils - Analysis of water and suction profiles during infiltration tests

Systems of sealing of containers or retention pounds are often associated to drainage layers for leachate recovery. The drainage layer can be installed either above the sealing layer or below it. In this paper, double layered columns of alluvia and clayey sand or of alluvia and clay are made up to run infiltration tests. A follow-up of the water content is implemented during the infiltration in multi-layer columns by using TDR probes. The values and changes in infiltration rate are different if the drainage layer is above or below the sealing layer. It is found that the drainage layer saturation is delayed when the sealing layer is above but the equilibrium water content remains the same for the both configuration. The electrical measurements in the drainage layers prove that the increase rate of the solute accumulation is the same for the both configuration and the same equilibrium solute concentration is reached. The measured coefficient of permeability of the double-layered becomes five times higher when the drainage layer is below the sealing layer. The position of the drainage layer influences the infiltration rate, the water and solute migration. The change in coefficient of permeability must be taken into account for the assessment of the flux of pollutant across a barrier system.
Balancing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Fuzzy Artificial Bee Colony Routing Protocol

Energy is an extremely critical resource for battery-powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), thus making energy-efficient protocol design a key challenging problem. Most of the existing routing protocols always forward packets along the minimum energy paths to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an Uneven Energy Consumption (UEC) problem and eventually results in a network partition. Due to the limited energy resources of sensor nodes, selecting an appropriate routing protocol can be significantly improve overall performance especially energy awareness in WSNs. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy-efficient routing protocol called Fuzzy Artificial Bee Colony Routing Protocol (FABCRP) which is capable of finding the optimal routing path form the source to the destination by favoring some of routing criteria and balancing among them to prolong the network lifetime. To demonstrate the effectiveness of FABCRP in terms of balancing energy consumption and maximization of network lifetime, we compare it with Fuzzy approach, ABC algorithm and Fuzzy_A-star approach using the same criteria in two different topographical areas. Simulation results show that the network lifetime achieved by FABCRP could be increased by nearly 35%, 30%, and 15% more than that obtained by Fuzzy, ABC and Fuzzy_A-star respectively.
Repression of Ppargcla Gene in Liver of Hyperglycemic Rats Induced with High Fat Diet Combined with Streptozotocin

La diabetes mellitus tipo 2 implica desregulacion de varios procesos metabolicos, siendo la mantencion de la glicemia uno de los mas importantes. Varios genes estan involucrados en este proceso. Asi, el objetivo del presente estudio fue evaluar la expresion genica de genes relacionados a diabetes mellitus tipo 2 en higado y pancreas de ratas con hiperglicemia inducida con una dieta alta en grasas junto con una baja dosis de estreptozotocina. Ratas hembra de 210 - 240 g fueron alimentadas con una dieta alta en grasas o con una dieta control por tres semanas. Al dia 14, los animales alimentados con dieta alta en grasas fueron inyectados con una dosis baja de estreptozotocina (35 mg/kg), mientras las del grupo control fueron inyectadas con el vehiculo. El peso corporal y las concentraciones plasmaticas de glucosa, trigliceridos y colesterol total, fueron medidos al inicio, al dia 14 y al final del tratamiento. Al finalizar el tratamiento, los animales fueron sacrificados, el higado y pancreas fueron quirurgicamente removidos e inmediatamente congelados en nitrogeno liquido. El RNA fue extraido usando el reactivo TRIzol, tratado con DNasa I y posteriormente convertido a cDNA. Los analisis de expresion genica fueron realizados usando SYBR Green - real time PCR y el metodo del Cq comparativo. En higado se estudiaron los genes Ahsg y Ppargc1a, mientras que en pancreas se analizaron los genes Slc2a2 y Kcnj11. Las ratas alimentadas con dieta alta en grasas y tratadas con streptozotocina mostraron niveles mayores de glucosa plasmatica (17,09 ± 0,43 vs. 5,91 ± 0,29 mmol/L, p < 0,01) y una menor expresion hepatica de Ppargc1a versus el grupo control (2 veces menor expresion, p < 0,05). En conclusion, la represion del gen Ppargc1a puede ser un importante proceso en el establecimiento de la hiperglicemia cronica, probablemente debido a una desregulacion de la gluconeogenesis hepatica. Sin embargo, estudios adicionales son necesarios para esclarecer el rol de esta desregulacion en la homeostasis hepatica de glucosa.
The application of relationship marketing in the construction industry: Work in progress report

Relationship Marketing (RM) embodies international, industrial and services marketing and in a business context is superseding traditional marketing theory. It is apparent from initial research into product and process industries that RM has the potential to provide construction organizations with significant benefits. These benefits include; enhanced ability to overcome problems, close coordination, process improvements; reduced risk associated with complex decision making and significant long-term value to prospective and existing clients. To determine a suitable research strategy for a PhD topic, a focus group was set up with construction industry stakeholders to discuss issues associated with RM. A brief description of the process and outcome leads to the conclusion of the merit in the research topic. A subsequent literature review formed the basis of quantitative questionnaires that were sent to a broad cross section of the Perth construction community. Interim results of the field study are presented and aligned with concurrent empirical studies of literature pertaining to RM. The final outcome provides a robust benchmark for construction organizations to consider that draws together contemporary best practice contract strategies and industrial and services marketing RM theory/ research. In conclusion an insight into how RM thinking in business services marketing may guide strategic direction for construction organizations is provided.
Development of an Assimilation Scheme for the Estimation of Drought-Induced Yield Losses Based on Multi-Source Remote Sensing and the AcquaCrop Model

In the context of the Dragon-3 Farmland Drought project, our research deals with the development of methods for the assimilation of biophysical variabl es, estimated from multi-source remote sensing, into th e AquaCrop model, in order to estimate the yield loss es due to drought both at the farm and at the regional sc le. The first part of this project was employed to refi n a methodology to obtain maps of leaf area index (LAI) , canopy cover (CC), fraction of adsorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) and chlorophyll (Cab) from satellite optical data, usin g algorithms based on the training of artificial neur al networks (ANN) on PROSAIL model simulations. In the second part, retrieved values of CC were assimilated into the AquaCrop model using the assimilation method of the Ensemble Kalman Filter t o estimate grain wheat yield at the field scale.
Pigmentation Restored in Mutant Laboratory Strain of the Lady Beetle Coleomegilla maculata through Dietary Supplementation

A laboratory colony of Coleomegilla maculata (DeGeer), ye, selected for a pigmentation deficiency, was restored to near wild type cuticle coloration by adding crushed heads and wings of the red colored parental strain to the diet. While the wings and other colored portions of the cuticle re-gained the red color, the eyes of the pigmentation deficient insects were not changed from the pale mutant form. Plant derived carotenes lycopene and beta-carotene did not restore the mutant beetles to a visibly distinguishable red color. An additional pigmentation deficient mutant strain, gold, partially recovered red cuticle color when provided with diet containing pigmented insect particles. This work represents the first rescue of a color phenotype in a lady beetle.
An advance in geolocation by light

A new analysis of twilight predicts that for observations made in narrow-band blue light, the shape of the light curve (irradiance vs. sun elevation angle) between +3 and -5° (87 to 95° zenith angle) has a particular rigid shape not significantly affected by cloudi- ness, horizon details, atmospheric refraction or atmospheric dust loading. This shape is dis- tinctive, can be located reliably in measured data, and provides a firm theoretical basis for animal geolocation by template-fitting to irradiance data. The resulting approach matches a theoretical model of the irradiance vs. time-of-day to the relevant portion of a given day's data, adjusting parameters for latitude, longitude, and cloudiness. In favorable cases, there is only one parameter choice that will fit well, and that choice becomes the position estimate. The entire process can proceed automatically in a tag. Theoretical estimates predict good accuracy over most of the year and most of the earth, with difficulties just on the winter side of equinox and near the equator. Polar regions are favorable whenever the sun crosses -5° to +3° elevation, and the method can yield useful results whenever the sun makes a significant excursion into that elevation range. Early results based on data taken on land at 48°N latitude confirm the predictions vs. season, and show promising performance when compared with earlier threshold-based methods.
Distributed-force recovery for a planar photoelastic tactile sensor

In this paper, an efficient force-recovery algorithm is presented for a novel planar photoelastic tactile transducer. A distributed-force profile input to the tactile sensor developed in our laboratory generates stress in the photoelastic layer of the transducer, making it birefringent. Circularly polarized light input to the transducer is elliptically polarized at the output due to phase-lead created in the stressed photoelastic layer. The algorithm presented recovers the phase-lead distribution and correlates it to the input force profile. Since this distribution is a linear function of the force profile, the solution of the inverse-tactile problem is significantly simplified. The paper presents the analytical basis of the algorithm as well as the numerical technique used in its solution.
Electroosmotic Flow Through a Circular Tube With Slip-Stick Striped Wall

This is an analytical study on electrohydrodynamic flows through a circular tube, of which the wall is micropatterned with a periodic array of longitudinal or transverse slipstick stripes. One unit of the wall pattern comprises two stripes, one slipping and the other nonslipping, and each with a distinct f potential. Using the methods of eigenfunction expansion and point collocation, the electric potential and velocity fields are determined by solving the linearized Poisson‐Boltzmann equation and the Stokes equation subject to the mixed electrohydrodynamic boundary conditions. The effective equations for the fluid and current fluxes are deduced as functions of the slipping area fraction of the wall, the intrinsic hydrodynamic slip length, the Debye parameter, and the f potentials. The theoretical limits for some particular wall patterns, which are available in the literature only for plane channels, are extended in this paper to the case of a circular channel. We confirm that some remarks made earlier for electroosmotic flow over a plane surface are also applicable to the present problem involving patterns on a circular surface. We pay particular attention to the effects of the pattern pitch on the flow in both the longitudinal and transverse configurations. When the wall is uniformly charged, the adverse effect on the electroosmotic flow enhancement due to a small fraction of area being covered by no-slip slots can be amplified if the pitch decreases. Reducing the pitch will also lead to a greater deviation from the Helmholtz‐Smoluchowski limit when the slipping regions are uncharged. With oppositely charged slipping regions, local recirculation or a net reversed flow is possible, even when the wall is on the average electropositive or neutral. The flow morphology is found to be subject to the combined influence of the geometry of the tube and the electrohydrodynamic properties of the wall. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4007690]
Homogenization method for topology optimization of structures built with lattice materials

Thanks to the recent developments of the additive manufacturing processes, structures built with modulated microstructures and featuring a complex topology are now manufacturable. This leads to a resurrection of the homogenization method for shape optimization, an approach developed in the 80’s but which progressively faded away because yielding too complex structures for manufacturing processes at this time. The goal of this thesis is to develop shape optimization methods for structures built with modulated locally periodic lattice microstructures. Three steps have been defined. The first consists in computing the homogenized, or effective, elastic properties of microstructures according to few parameters characterizing their geometry. In the second step, the geometric properties of the microstructure and its orientation are optimized in the working domain, yielding a homogenized optimized structure. Such a structure is nevertheless not straightforwardly manufacturable. Indeed, the homogenization is equivalent to have a structure featuring cells whose size is converging to zero. Hence, in the third and last step, a deshomogenization process is proposed. It consists in building a sequence of genuine structures converging to the homogenized optimal structures. The key point is to respect locally the orientation of the cells, which is performed thanks to a grid diffeomorphism. In this thesis, we present the details of the whole method, for isotropic and orthotropic microstructures, in 2D and in 3D. A coupling of this method with the level-set shape optimization method is also presented, thanks which the set of geometric constraints on the final structures may be enlarged.
Long-term changes of physicochemical parameters and benthos in Lake Qarun (Egypt): Can we make a correct forecast of ecosystem future?

Biotic changes and a salinity increase (from 13 to 40 g.L-1 ) occurred in Lake Qarun (Egypt) since 1901. Was salinity increasing a cause of observed biotic changes? To answer this question we used benthos as a model group. Benthos and water sampling was conducted in different seasons (2008–2013). Comparing our and literature data, we discuss the long-term trends and possible causes of benthos changes. Salinity reached 3 g.L-1 in middle of 19th century; and biotic changes caused by this were started. From middle 19th century to 1928 a biotic transformation was driven by the salinity increase; after 1928 a regular alien species introduction caused that a marine community formed. In 1970–2000 eutrophication played a main role in species composition changes. In 2014 ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi introduced in the lake; eutrophication, chemical pollution, and a population dynamics of this ctenophore may be main drivers of the ecosystem change now. Benthos biomass gradually decreased during interval 1975–2013 without any correlation with salinity change. A variety of other factors than salinity may be significant in determining the structure and dynamics of communities, and we conclude that we have a small chance to make a correct forecast of possible future ecosystem changes in Lake Qarun.
Environmental status of water and sediment around submarine outfalls - west coast of Portugal * Qualidade da água e dos sedimentos na zona circundante de oito emissários submarinos - costa oeste de Portugal

The sea along the western coast of Portugal presents hydrodynamic conditions that place it among the most favourable of European coastal waters for dilution and dispersion of waste water. Thus it is an appropriate zone for the location of submarine outfalls. According to the European Union Directives and Portuguese Regulations the waste waters produced by this densely populated coast should be treated, therefore 18 wastewater treatment plants with submarine outfalls were built along the coast. Between 2002 and 2004, five sampling campaigns were performed in seven outfalls that were selected to participate in water and sediment quality surveys supported by INAG (Portuguese Water Institute), and performed by the Hydrographic Institute of the Portuguese Navy. The water quality assessment was based on 10 chemical and physical parameters, including heavy metals. The results were compared with reference values and data from the largest flow outfall located at Guia , which has an autonomous monitoring program. In order to evaluate significant differences in water quality between years and sampling sites, statistical analyses were performed. Sediments were evaluated for grain size, heavy metals, PAH, hydrocarbons, chlorinated pesticides and PCB. In order to evaluate the level of pollution of the different areas where the outfalls are located, the concentration factor (CF) (sediment/water elemental concentration ratio) was calculated and compared with the recommended values for the CF of each element. The water sampling program did not allow identifying a clear seasonal evolutionary pattern. The environmental status of the waters surrounding the outfalls discharges comply, to a great extent, with the reference values proposed by INAG and did not revel high levels of contaminants. Due to the low sorptive capacity of the sediment for contaminants, trace metals, hydrocarbons and PAHs have a low environmental impact. The values of the concentration factors for metals are below the recommended values.
Frugality: rebalancing material and spiritual values in economic life

This book examines frugality as an ideal and an 'art de vivre' which implies a low level of material consumption and a simple lifestyle, to open the mind for spiritual goods as inner freedom, social peace and justice or the quest for God or 'ultimate reality'. By rational choice we can develop a more frugal and sufficient way of life, but material temptations can always overwrite our ecological, social and ethical considerations. But the spiritual case for frugality is strong enough. Spiritually based frugal practices may lead to rational outcomes such as reducing ecological destruction, social disintegration and the exploitation of future generations.
Genetic diversity and allelic richness in Spanish wild and domestic pig population estimated from microsatellite markers

Genetic diversity measures support the conservation decisions aiming to maintain the genetic flexibility of animal populations and breeds. Many of these measures utilize neutral genetic markers and are based on classical concepts as coancestry and expected heterozygosity. As a component of genetic diversity, allelic richness is also important in conservation genetics. Its measurement requires that variations of sample size be taken into account using either the rarefaction and extrapolation techniques. Methods to estimate genetic diversity and allelic richness were compared in this study. DNA samples from 68 wild boars and 234 domestic pigs of the Duroc and Iberian breeds, including 63 animals of the Torbiscal and Guadyerbas Iberian lines, were genotyped for 18 microsatellites (one per autosome). As the results outline, the rank of these pig populations according to their contributions to the diversity will be different depending on the criteria utilized, because genetic diversity and private allelic richness do not exactly address the same type of diversity. Rarefaction and extrapolation-based techniques also produce partially discrepant results. The desirable integration of allelic richness into the diversity theory poses at the moment some unsolved difficulties.
Improving Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Detection using Entropy Method in Software Defined Network (SDN)

This research proposed a new method to enhance Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) detection attack on Software Defined Network (SDN) environment. This research utilized the OpenFlow controller of SDN for DDoS attack detection using modified method and regarding entropy value. The new method would check whether the traffic was a normal traffic or DDoS attack by measuring the randomness of the packets. This method consisted of two steps, detecting attack and checking the entropy. The result shows that the new method can reduce false positive when there is a temporary and sudden increase in normal traffic. The new method succeeds in not detecting this as a DDoS attack. Compared to previous methods, this proposed method can enhance DDoS attack detection on SDN environment.