Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comprehensive Evaluation of Raw Eating Quality in 81 Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam) Varieties

The raw eating quality of sweet potato is complex. As consumers start paying more attention to the raw eating quality of tuberous roots in sweet potato, the evaluation of the raw eating quality of sweet potato is becoming an important issue. Therefore, we measured 16 quality indicators in 81 varieties of sweet potato. It was found that these 16 quality traits had different coefficients of variation (C.V.). Among them, the C.V. of fructose, glucose, and adhesiveness were the largest: 87.95%, 87.43% and 55.09%, respectively. The cluster analysis method was used to define six categories of the different tuberous roots of sweet potato. Group I, III, and IV had a stronger hardness and higher starch and cellulose content. Groups II, V, and VI were softer, with a high moisture and soluble sugar content. The principal component analysis method was used to comprehensively evaluate 16 quality indicators of 81 sweet potato varieties. It was found that Futian1, Taishu14, and Nanshu022 are good varieties in terms of raw eating quality. These varieties have low hardness, high adhesiveness in texture, high soluble sugar content, and low starch and cellulose. Future research should focus on improving the raw eating quality of sweet potato by reducing hardness, starch, and cellulose, while increasing adhesiveness, soluble sugar, and moisture content.
NATURAL ORBITALS IN THE QUANTUM THEORY OF TWO-ELECTRON SYSTEMS

The wave functions for the singlet and triplet states of a two-electron system in a given nuclear framework are investigated as superpositions of configurations and are shown to be transformationally equivalent to quadratic forms having certain ranks and signatures. By introducing the "natural orbitals" diagonalizing the generalized first-order density matrix, the total wave functions may also be brought to principal form. If the basis contains $M$ one-electron functions, the singlet and triplet wave functions contain respectively $\frac{M(M+1)}{2}$ and $\frac{M(M\ensuremath{-}1)}{2}$ configurations, but the transformation to natural orbitals reduces the number of terms to $M$ and [$\frac{M}{2}$], respectively. The natural expansion having the best convergence is also characterized by another important extremum property. The approximate wave function of rank $r$ having the smallest quadratic deviation from the exact eigenfunction is obtained by interrupting the natural expansion of the eigenfunction after $r$ terms and renormalizing the result. For the singlet state, the wave function of rank two and signature zero has a special importance as giving a simple extension of the visual one-electron picture to include a large part of the correlation effects. The theory is illustrated by some results on helium obtained by using radial configuration interaction.
Alternative Splicing of TaHsfA2-7 Is Involved in the Improvement of Thermotolerance in Wheat

High temperature has severely affected plant growth and development, resulting in reduced production of crops worldwide, especially wheat. Alternative splicing (AS), a crucial post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism, is involved in the growth and development of eukaryotes and the adaptation to environmental changes. Previous transcriptome data suggested that heat shock transcription factor (Hsf) TaHsfA2-7 may form different transcripts by AS. However, it remains unclear whether this post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism of TaHsfA2-7 is related to thermotolerance in wheat (Triticum aestivum). Here, we identified a novel splice variant, TaHsfA2-7-AS, which was induced by high temperature and played a positive role in thermotolerance regulation in wheat. Moreover, TaHsfA2-7-AS is predicted to encode a small truncated TaHsfA2-7 isoform, retaining only part of the DNA-binding domain (DBD). TaHsfA2-7-AS is constitutively expressed in various tissues of wheat. Notably, the expression level of TaHsfA2-7-AS is significantly up-regulated by heat shock (HS) during flowering and grain-filling stages in wheat. Further studies showed that TaHsfA2-7-AS was localized in the nucleus but lacked transcriptional activation activity. Ectopic expression of TaHsfA2-7-AS in yeast exhibited improved thermotolerance. Compared to non-transgenic plants, overexpression of TaHsfA2-7-AS in Arabidopsis results in enhanced tolerance to heat stress. Simultaneously, we also found that TaHsfA1 is directly involved in the transcriptional regulation of TaHsfA2-7 and TaHsfA2-7-AS. In summary, our findings demonstrate the function of TaHsfA2-7-AS splicing variant in response to heat stress and establish a link between regulatory mechanisms of AS and the improvement of thermotolerance in wheat.
System modeling and control design of a horizontal-shaft magnetic-bearing system

A method for setting up system equations and the control design problem for a horizontal-shaft-type magnetic-bearing system are discussed. We obtain the fundamental equations of the motion of the rotor by adapting the dynamic theory of flight problems to this system and then obtain the system equations with gap-length displacements and controlled currents taken as the state variables. By constructing an integral-type control system, we are able to maintain the rotor in the center position in the final steady state.
A parallel‐APF system with current sharing controller and load‐path control center to improve dynamic response and achieve weighting current distribution

Abstract This paper presents design and implementation of a paralleled active power filter (APF) system with current sharing controller (CSC) and load‐path control center (LPCC). This system can filter harmonic currents, compensate reactive power and improve power factor. In the system, each APF module is directly tied to the load, source and buses, and there is no communication between modules. Through CSC and LPCC, the modules can share the total reactive and harmonic currents of the load according to their power ratings. With the proposed control scheme, power capacity of the system can be readily and flexibly expanded. Since there is no communication between modules, system expandability and flexibility will increase, and a hot‐swap feature can be readily achieved. Simulation and experimental results have verified the feasibility and performance of the proposed parallel‐APF system.
Developing a Low-Cost IoT-Based Remote Cardiovascular Patient Monitoring System in Cameroon

(1) Background: Cameroonians are exposed to poor health services, more so citizens with cardiovascular-related diseases. The global high cost of acquiring healthcare-related technologies has prompted the government and individuals to promote the need for local research and the development of the health system. (2) Objectives: The main goal of this study is to design and develop a low-cost cardiovascular patient monitoring system (RPM) with wireless capabilities that could be used in any region of Cameroon, accessible, and very inexpensive, that are able to capture important factors, well reflecting the patient’s condition and provide alerting mechanisms. (3) Method: Using the lean UX process from the Gothelf and Seiden framework, the implemented IoT-based application measures the patients’ systolic, diastolic, and heart rates using various sensors, that are automated to record directly to the application database for analysis. The validity of the heuristic evaluation was examined in an ethnographic study of paramedics using a prototype of the system in their work environment. (4) Results: We obtained a system that was pre-tested on demo patients and later deployed and tested on seven real human test subjects. The users’ task performances partially verified the heuristic evaluation results. (5) Conclusions: The data acquired by the sensors have a high level of accuracy and effectively help specialists to properly monitor their patients at a low cost. The proposed system maintains a user-friendliness as no expertise is required for its effective utilization.
Multi-View Feature Transformation Based SVM+ for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Liver Cancers With Ultrasound Images

It is feasible to improve the performance of B-mode ultrasound (BUS) based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for liver cancers by transferring knowledge from contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) images. In this work, we propose a novel feature transformation based support vector machine plus (SVM+) algorithm for this transfer learning task by introducing feature transformation into the SVM+ framework (named FSVM+). Specifically, the transformation matrix in FSVM+ is learned to minimize the radius of the enclosing ball of all samples, while the SVM+ is used to maximize the margin between two classes. Moreover, to capture more transferable information from multiple CEUS phase images, a multi-view FSVM+ (MFSVM+) is further developed, which transfers knowledge from three CEUS images from three phases, i.e., arterial phase, portal venous phase, and delayed phase, to the BUS-based CAD model. MFSVM+ innovatively assigns appropriate weights for each CEUS image by calculating the maximum mean discrepancy between a pair of BUS and CEUS images, which can capture the relationship between source and target domains. The experimental results on a bi-modal ultrasound liver cancer dataset demonstrate that MFSVM+ achieves the best classification accuracy of 88.24±1.28%, sensitivity of 88.32±2.88%, specificity of 88.17±2.91%, suggesting its effectiveness in promoting the diagnostic accuracy of BUS-based CAD.
Origami with Rotational Symmetry: A Review on Their Mechanics and Design

Origami has emerged as a powerful mechanism for designing functional foldable and deployable structures. Among various origami patterns, a large class of origami exhibits rotational symmetry, which possesses the advantages of elegant geometric shapes, axisymmetric contraction/expansion, and omnidirectional deployability, etc. Due to these merits, origami with rotational symmetry has found widespread applications in various engineering fields such as foldable emergency shelters, deformable wheels, deployable medical stents, and deployable solar panels. To guide the rational design of origami-based deployable structures and functional devices, numerous works in recent years have been devoted to understanding the geometric designs and mechanical behaviors of rotationally symmetric origami. In this review, we classify origami structures with rotational symmetry into three categories according to the dimensional transitions between their deployed and folded states as three-dimensional to three-dimensional, three-dimensional to two-dimensional, and two-dimensional to two-dimensional. Based on these three categories, we systematically review the geometric designs of their origami patterns and the mechanical behaviors during their folding motions. We summarize the existing theories and numerical methods for analyzing and designing these origami structures. Also, potential directions and future challenges of rotationally symmetric origami mechanics and applications are discussed. This review can provide guidelines for origami with rotational symmetry to achieve more functional applications across a wide range of length scales.
Dispersion analysis and engineering in TiN 2D plasmonic waveguides

An investigation has been performed of the low order guided modes in TiN 2D hollow metallic waveguide. The dispersion characteristics of the TiN 2D hollow metallic waveguides key guided modes are identified and analyzed. Dispersion manipulating is proposed by changing the material of the cladding region. The dispersion analysis of 2D plasmonic waveguide using TiN has been investigated for the first time and compared to that of silver. A study has been conducted on the effect of varying the material on the cutoff in the modes dispersion. The effect of changing the plasmonic material on the dispersion curve key characteristics is also identified. Finally the effect of shifting the cutoff on the enhanced transmission phenomena is investigated.
CBCL: Brain-Inspired Model for RGB-D Indoor Scene Classification

This paper contributes a novel method for RGB-D indoor scene classification. Recent approaches to this problem focus on developing increasingly complex pipelines that learn correlated features across the RGB and depth modalities. In contrast, this paper presents a simple method that first extracts features for the RGB and depth modalities using Places365-CNN and fine-tuned Places365-CNN on depth data, respectively and then clusters these features to generate a set of centroids representing each scene category from the training data. For classification a scene image is converted to CNN features and the distance of these features to the n closest learned centroids is used to predict the image's category. We evaluate our method on two standard RGB-D indoor scene classification benchmarks: SUNRGB-D and NYU Depth V2 and demonstrate that our proposed classification approach achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.
Enterococcus faecium Bacteriophage vB_EfaH_163, a New Member of the Herelleviridae Family, Reduces the Mortality Associated with an E. faecium vanR Clinical Isolate in a Galleria mellonella Animal Model

The rise of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria is a major health concern, especially with regard to members of the ESKAPE group, to which vancomycin-resistant (VRE) Enterococcus faecium belongs. Phage therapy has emerged as a novel alternative for the treatment of AMR infections. This, however, relies on the isolation and characterisation of a large collection of phages. This work describes the exploration of human faeces as a source of new E. faecium-infecting phages. Phage vB_EfaH_163 was isolated and characterised at the microbiological, genomic, and functional levels. vB_EfaH_163 phage, a new member of Herelleviridae, subfamily Brockvirinae, has a dsDNA genome of 150,836 bp that does not harbour any virulence factors or antibiotic resistance genes. It infects a wide range of E. faecium strains of different origins, including VRE strains. Interestingly, it can also infect Enterococcus faecalis strains, even some that are linezolid-resistant. Its capacity to control the growth of a clinical VRE isolate was shown in broth culture and in a Galleria mellonella animal model. The discovery and characterisation of vB_EfaH_163 increases the number of phages that might be used therapeutically against AMR bacteria.
The Impact of Different Kinds of Collaborative Prewriting on EFL Learners’ Degree of Engagement in Writing and Writing Self-Efficacy

Abstract Despite claims concerning the positive impact of prewriting planning, particularly of a collaborative type, research has not produced consistent results. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of different types of prewriting planning on students’ writing self-efficacy and their cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement. The participants were three groups of advanced Iranian EFL students at the Iran Language Institute exposed to one of the following conditions: peer-led collaborative prewriting (PLCP), teacher-led collaborative prewriting (TLCP), and individual prewriting (IP) groups. A number of one-way ANOVAs conducted on the data drawn from the learners’ written performance and questionnaires revealed that the PLCP group outperformed the other two groups on behavioral engagement and the fluency measures of cognitive engagement. However, the TLCP group had a better performance in terms of emotional engagement. As for accuracy and complexity, the other two aspects of cognitive engagement, the three groups showed no significant difference. In addition, PLCP and TLCP groups were similar concerning their self-efficacy and outperformed the IP group in this regard. On the whole, the results showed that each of the prewriting activities employed in this study could have its own distinct role in learners’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement as well as their self-efficacy.
Microfabrication of nanoscale cluster chains on a patterned Si surface

We have studied the formation of Cu clusters from Cu atoms deposited onto a Si (111) surface patterned with (2–5 μm width) lines of photoresist. In addition to a thin Cu layer on the exposed Si surface, large (∼150 nm) clusters nucleate at the boundary between the Si and the resist strips, which remain after removal of the resist by dissolution. The results show how it is possible, using the resist to collect deposited atoms, to assemble nanoscale cluster structures with a precision (∼150 nm feature size) which is much better than the resolution of conventional optical lithography (∼μm linewidth).
Design and Optimization of a High-Gain Filtering Antenna Based on Parasitic Pixel Layer

A novel high-gain filtering antenna based on the parasitic pixel layer is designed and optimized in this letter. Initially, a circular patch surrounded by a shorted concentric annular ring one is proposed as the radiation source, such a design is able to realize an upper radiation null. Afterward, a parasitic pixel layer is placed upon the radiation source with an air gap. Another radiation null at the lower band is then obtained by optimizing the connection status between adjacent pixel elements based on the internal multiport method. Besides that, the parasitic pixel layer can enhance the realized broadside gain. Finally, a high-gain filtering antenna with a bandpass response is obtained. The antenna is validated by a full-wave simulation study followed by the experimental verification. Measured results indicate that the antenna can operate from 4.7 to 5.4 GHz with an average gain of 9.6 dBi and two radiation nulls at the lower and upper band edges of the reflection coefficient curve.
Contacts on LinkedIn: equity crowdfunding platforms' networks and creators' innovation performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how the innovation performance of start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that collect funds using equity crowdfunding (EC), i.e. creators (or proponents), and the EC performance are influenced by the social media networks (SMNs) in which EC platforms' managers and firms exchange their ideas with investors and customers.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis is conducted on a sample composed by all the creators that collected funds in EC platforms over the three-year period 2018–2020. For each creator, the innovation performance is computed as the percentage of sales from new or significantly improved product and services compared to total sales of firm. For each campaign, the EC performance is considered as the ratio between the total amount of funding raised at the end of the campaign and the target capital for the campaign. To investigate EC platform social media activity, LinkedIn profiles of EC platforms managers are analyzed using the social network analysis (SNA) methodology, which permits to observe the quantity and the quality of managers' interactions with other users. A regression analysis is thus performed to observe the relationship between managers' LinkedIn activities, EC performance and creators' innovation performance.FindingsData reveal that EC platforms managers display different activities in networking, with some individuals more active than others and more oriented to interact with business profiles rather than personal ones. The variables related to managers' LinkedIn activities are shown to impact both on the EC performance and on the ability of creators to innovate, suggesting the existence of a link between creators, EC platforms and the activity of the subject who manages it.Originality/valueThe present study is the first to examine the link between the ability of creators to innovate and SMNs, focusing on the social links of platforms managers and considering the LinkedIn social media; moreover, the analysis is conducted analyzing the quality of the interactions in addition to their number. The study is original also in that rather than focusing on specific EC platforms it considers all those purposefully authorized by the Italian financial market supervisory authority over a three-year time span. From a managerial point of view, the observation of the relevance of social networks by personnel with specific professional skills reveals it can be a successful driver for operators in the sector, not only to safeguard their reputation, but to stimulate the processes of co-creation of value that is essential in the crowdfunding market.
Lipidized PrRP Analog Exhibits Strong Anti-Obesity and Antidiabetic Properties in Old WKY Rats with Obesity and Glucose Intolerance

Prolactin-releasing peptide (PrRP) is an anorexigenic neuropeptide that has potential for the treatment of obesity and its complications. Recently, we designed a palmitoylated PrRP31 analog (palm11-PrRP31) that is more stable than the natural peptide and able to act centrally after peripheral administration. This analog acted as an anti-obesity and glucose-lowering agent, attenuating lipogenesis in rats and mice with high-fat (HF) diet-induced obesity. In Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rats fed a HF diet for 52 weeks, we explored glucose intolerance, but also prediabetes, liver steatosis and insulin resistance-related changes, as well as neuroinflammation in the brain. A potential beneficial effect of 6 weeks of treatment with palm11-PrRP31 and liraglutide as comparator was investigated. Liver lipid profiles, as well as urinary and plasma metabolomic profiles, were measured by lipidomics and metabolomics, respectively. Old obese WKY rats showed robust glucose intolerance that was attenuated by palm11-PrRP31, but not by liraglutide treatment. On the contrary, liraglutide had a beneficial effect on insulin resistance parameters. Despite obesity and prediabetes, WKY rats did not develop steatosis owing to HF diet feeding, even though liver lipogenesis was enhanced. Plasma triglycerides and cholesterol were not increased by HFD feeding, which points to unincreased lipid transport from the liver. The liver lipid profile was significantly altered by a HF diet that remained unaffected by palm11-PrRP31 or liraglutide treatment. The HF-diet-fed WKY rats revealed astrogliosis in the brain cortex and hippocampus, which was attenuated by treatment. In conclusion, this study suggested multiple beneficial anti-obesity-related effects of palm11-PrRP31 and liraglutide in both the periphery and brain.