Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring digital transformation and technological innovation in emerging markets

PurposeThis research aims to fill the research gaps regarding customer preferences for digitalisation to create value for retailers and customers, as well as focus on retail change and shopping behaviour in grocery retail stores in the emerging market.Design/methodology/approachThis paper contributes to the research in this area by evaluating customers' and retailers' attitudes towards digital transformation in retailing through interviews. Methodologically, 200 questionnaires were gathered, and data were analysed with the partial least squared structural equation modelling method.FindingsThe findings of this study reveal that the effect of digital transformation in the retail industry will be more apparent in an emerging market.Originality/valueThe paper's originality consists in understanding the future retail structure in an emerging market. Notably, focussing on business-to-consumer businesses appears helpful in distinguishing between behavioural (buying) intention and online buying behaviour (actual usage) in an emerging market.
Countervailing Claims: Pro-Diversity Responses to Stigma by Association Following the Unite the Right Rally

Why do firms take positions on divisive social issues? In this article, I draw on theories of stigma by association to explain why firms’ mere proximity to controversial political actors may lead stakeholders to presume that firms silent on social issues are misaligned with the stakeholders’ sociopolitical preferences. Firms, in turn, countervail these presumptions of misalignment by eschewing silence and claiming sociopolitical positions. Substantiating this theory in the context of employee recruitment following the 2017 Unite the Right White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, I show that Charlottesville’s employers combated presumptions that they shared demonstrators’ anti-diversity positions by making countervailing pro-diversity claims in their online job postings. In supplementary analysis, I show that the rally was associated with a newfound wage premium in job postings by Charlottesville’s employers but that this premium was lower when employers made pro-diversity claims. This study advances understanding of strategic sociopolitical positioning whereby firms make calculated appeals to stakeholders. It contrasts with related research showing that firms use social claims to combat negative evaluations resulting from their own actions or to differentiate from competitors. In doing so, it suggests opportunities for further research investigating, for example, additional motivations for firms’ sociopolitical positioning, how positioning might evolve in the context of growing political polarization, and how positioning might relate to workplace inequality and diversity.
Breakfast Consumption and Quality of Macro- and Micronutrient Intake in Indonesia: A Study from the Indonesian Food Barometer

Breakfast is an important meal that has been shown to have a positive effect on health. The current study aimed to assess the patterns of breakfast consumption among adult Indonesians and to estimate the contribution of breakfast to their nutrient intake and dietary quality. The study used 24-h recall data from the 2018 Indonesian Food Barometer study to assess breakfast intake among 1333 adults aged 18 and above from six provinces in Indonesia. Diet quality was measured using the Nutrient Rich Food index (NRF) 9.3, and the nutritional profile of breakfast was compared across tertiles of NRF 9.3. In total, 5.2% of adults in Indonesia skipped breakfast. Breakfast contributed 26% to daily energy intakes and 22–28% to intakes of all reported nutrients, except for total sugar (12%), vitamin C (8%) and vitamin D (7%). With respect to daily requirements, breakfast contributed approximately 20% to energy, protein, fat and sodium requirements, 26% to saturated fat but <15% to the requirements for most micronutrients and only 5% for fiber. Among breakfast consumers, a higher NRF score was associated with higher daily intakes of protein, dietary fiber and micronutrients and lower intakes of sodium from breakfast. This study suggests that a balanced breakfast in Indonesia should aim to lower fat and saturated fat intake while increasing fiber, potassium, calcium and vitamin C and D intake. These findings could inform the development of nutrient-based guidelines for breakfast consumption in Indonesia.
The Scattering and Absorption Coefficients of Atmospheric Soot in the Hygroscopicity of Urban Aerosols

Aerosols are microscopic solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere that have an impact on the Earth's radiative balance. This paper modeled and investigates the effect of scattering and absorption coefficients along with their respective hygroscopicity of atmospheric soot using extracted data from Optical Properties of Aerosols and Clouds (OPAC) incorporated with Fortran at spectral range of 0.25 to 1.00 m for eight different relative humidities (RHs) (0, 50, 70, 80, 90, 95, 98 and 99%). The fine – mode and coarse – mode aerosol size distribution were also investigated. The particle number densities of soot were varied as 110,000 120,000 and 130,000 cm-3 while the water soluble and insoluble components were kept constant. The scattering coefficient decreases with RHs and also with wavelength in the form of power law at all RHs. The absorption coefficient increases with addition of soot, reflecting warming effect. In this study, it was observed that there is a pronounced hygroscopicity growth as from 95-99% RHs. The Ångström exponent decreases with increase in RHs for the case of scattering coefficient but varies for absorption coefficient; the curvature reveals the presence of both fine and coarse mode particles. The results of the turbidity coefficient (? ) based on the scattering coefficient indicated that the atmosphere is relatively clear and hazy while the absorption coefficient indicated that the atmosphere is relatively clear at 0 – 99% relative humidity. The results in this study revealed that the coefficient of determination, ? 2 > 96% for all the models (1 – 3).
Towards a holistic Islamic urbanism : planning for Tripoli in the New Libya

This thesis argues for the development of a Holistic Islamic Urbanism (HIU) as key to the future of a rapidly urbanising Middle East. Because Libya is currently undergoing a post-war reconstruction phase, the adoption of Holistic Islamic Urbanism (HIU) would be a remedy to the current imbalances and a strategy of sustainability, for globalisation, like urbanisation, has brought numerous challenges that have eroded Libya’s ability to contribute innovations that spring from their unique geographic setting, cultural identity and history. HIU is a concept that is deeply rooted in the principles of Islamic urbanism, where full social justice, economic freedom and human rights can be realised. During the last few decades, most countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), including Libya, have experienced rapid economic and population growth. This growth has led to a substantial increase in urbanisation in the form of new districts, towns and housing – but mainly influenced by Western planning principles. Libya’s rapid urbanisation, as in many places, has culminated in many economic, social and demographic problems, which were exacerbated by the Ghaddafi regime. The unsustainable nature of rapid urbanisation and its governance structure under the 40 year dictatorship of Ghaddafi affected various sections of society, which created the social tensions that ultimately led to the 2011 Libyan Revolution. The study adopts a mixed method approach to understanding such processes. The research emphasises the importance of housing, policy, socio-cultural and gender factors, and environmental and sustainability climate conditions, as they are all important in planning and play vital roles in reflecting religion and customs, and the people’s desire for complete privacy within the home and serenity in their public life. The research has also shown the increasing prominence of Libyan women in the urban space of Tripoli, in the context of the revolution, and the role of women in Libyan/Islamic society during a time of rapid social change.
Alpha lipoic acid improved blood glucose level and lipid profile in type-2 diabetic Wistar rats

Diabetes mellitus is one of the most common metabolic disorders that is associated with many complications such as dyslipidemia and cardiovascular disease. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of alpha lipoic acid (ALA) on blood glucose levels and lipid profile in type-2 diabetic male Wistar rats. Thirty (30) Wistar rats weighing between 200 – 250 grams were distributed into six groups of five each (n=5). Diabetes was induced using a high-fat diet for eight weeks with a single low dose of streptozotocin (40 mg/kg) intraperitoneally at the end of the sixth week. Group I served as normoglycemic control and received 1 ml/kg normal saline; groups II, III, IV, V, and VI were diabetic and received 1 ml/kg normal saline; glibenclamide 1 mg/kg; ALA 100 mg/kg, ALA 200 mg/kg and ALA 400 mg/kg; respectively. All administrations were done orally for a duration of 21 days. Blood glucose level was determined using the glucose oxidase method. Serum was collected for lipid profile determination. The results obtained from this study showed that ALA across all doses (100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg, and 400 mg/kg) decreased significantly (p < 0.05) the fasting blood glucose level (10.02 ± 0.71 mmol/L, 8.78 ± 0.94 mmol/L and 8.6 ± 0.68 mmol/L, respectively) when compared to the diabetic control group (20.06 ± 0.70 mmol/L). Lipid profiles were improved with HDL- and LDL- cholesterols increasing and decreasing significantly (42.60 ± 1.66 mg/dL and 1.12 ± 3.68 mg/dL) in the 400 mg/kg ALA group compared to the diabetic untreated group (37.00 ± 2.55 mg/dL and 26.31 ± 2.95 mg/dL, respectively). Therefore, the study demonstrated that ALA has both antihyperglycemic and antilipidemic in type-2 diabetic Wistar rats.
Rate of perceived exertion and cardiovascular response of community dwelling older adults to six-minute walk test

Objectives: This study was designed to determine the rate of perceived exertion, cardiovascular responses of community dwelling older adults to six minutes' walk (6MWT) and possible gender difference. Methods: One hundred and three apparently healthy community dwelling older adults, aged 60 years and above participated in the study. Rate of perceived exertion (RPE) and cardiovascular responses (blood pressure, peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SPO2 ) and pulse rate) were measured pre and post 6MWT. Results: There was a significant increase (p = 0.01) in RPE among all participants after the 6MWT. There was no significant difference (p>0.05) in all the cardiovascular parameters pre and post 6MWT but with a significant difference in SPO2 between male and female participants. Conclusion: Among older adults, rate of perceived exertion after a 6MWT was sort of hard with possible influence on the Systolic Blood Pressure following 6MWT. Female participants showed higher oxygen saturation than males.
Amplified Interannual Variation of the Summer Sea Ice in the Weddell Sea, Antarctic After the Late 1990s

The sea‐ice extent (SIE) in the Weddell Sea plays a crucial role in the Antarctic climate system. Many studies have examined its long‐term trend, however whether its year‐to‐year variation has changed remains unclear. We found an amplified year‐to‐year variance of the Weddell Sea SIE in austral summer since 1998/1999 in observational datasets. Analyses of sea‐ice concentration budget and surface fluxes indicate that it is the thermodynamic process that drives the amplification of SIE variations, rather than the sea‐ice‐drift‐related dynamic process. Compared to 1979–1998, the Southern Annular Mode in the preceding spring shows a closer linkage with the Weddell Sea SIE in 1999–2021 through a stronger and more prolonged impact on sea surface temperature, which thermodynamically modulates local sea ice via changing surface heat and radiation fluxes. Our study helps advance the understanding of extreme low Antarctic‐SIE records occurring in recent decades and improve future projections of the Antarctic sea‐ice variability.
Characterization of the Mycoremediation of n-Alkanes and Branched-Chain Alkanes by Filamentous Fungi from Oil-Polluted Soil Samples in Kazakhstan

For decades, researchers have focused on containing terrestrial oil pollution. The heterogeneity of soils, with immense microbial diversity, inspires them to transform pollutants and find cost-effective bioremediation methods. In this study, the mycoremediation potentials of five filamentous fungi isolated from polluted soils in Kazakhstan were investigated for their degradability of n-alkanes and branched-chain alkanes as sole carbon and energy sources. Dry weight estimation and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) monitored the growth and the changes in the metabolic profile during degradation, respectively. Penicillium javanicum SBUG-M1741 and SBUG-M1742 oxidized medium-chain alkanes almost completely through mono- and di-terminal degradation. Pristane degradation by P. javanicum SBUG-M1741 was >95%, while its degradation with Purpureocillium lilacinum SBUG-M1751 was >90%. P. lilacinum SBUG-M1751 also exhibited the visible degradation potential of tetradecane and phytane, whereby in the transformation of phytane, both the mono- and di-terminal degradation pathways as well as α- and ß-oxidation steps could be described. Scedosporium boydii SBUG-M1749 used both mono- and di-terminal degradation pathways for n-alkanes, but with poor growth. Degradation of pristane by Fusarium oxysporum SBUG-M1747 followed the di-terminal oxidation mechanism, resulting in one dicarboxylic acid. These findings highlight the role of filamentous fungi in containing oil pollution and suggest possible degradation pathways.
Cosine Mixup: A Mixup Strategy for Point Cloud Contrastive Representation Learning

Contrastive representation learning purposes to learn rich point cloud representations from unlabeled data. However, it currently lacks well-designed data augmentation, which can lead to poor regularization and generalization in the point cloud domain. Mixup has been shown to be a simple and effective data augmentation in the image domain. Yet, it was found ineffective to directly applying it to point cloud domain. In this brief, we propose a novel mixup strategy based on the cosine similarity algorithm in point cloud contrastive representation learning. First, we adaptively select pairs of samples with high dissimilarity in the mini-batch for mixing. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) dimensionality reduction algorithm is used to reduce the cost when calculating the similarity. Then we introduce N-pair contrastive loss that fits to the virtual labels assigned for mixing. Our method outperforms other methods in a diverse range of downstream tasks including 3D object classification and few-shot object classification. Our method can be extended to manifold mixup for better regularization. Meanwhile, the ablation experiments demonstrate that our method is an effective data augmentation strategy.
Karaya/Gellan-Gum-Based Bilayer Films Containing 3,3′-Diindolylmethane-Loaded Nanocapsules: A Promising Alternative to Melanoma Topical Treatment

This study aimed to incorporate nanocapsules containing 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM) with antitumor activity into a bilayer film of karaya and gellan gums for use in topical melanoma therapy. Nanocarriers and films were prepared by interfacial deposition of the preformed polymer and solvent casting methods, respectively. Incorporating DIM into nanocapsules increased its antitumor potential against human melanoma cells (A-375) (IC50 > 24.00 µg/mL free DIM × 2.89 µg/mL nanocapsules). The films were transparent, hydrophilic (θ < 90°), had homogeneous thickness and weight, and had a DIM content of 106 µg/cm2. Radical ABTS+ scavenger assay showed that the DIM films presented promising antioxidant action. Remarkably, the films showed selective bioadhesive potential on the karaya gum side. Considering the mechanical analyses, the nanotechnology-based films presented appropriate behavior for cutaneous application and controlled DIM release profile, which could increase the residence time on the application site. Furthermore, the nanofilms were found to increase the permeation of DIM into the epidermis, where melanoma develops. Lastly, the films were non-hemolytic (hemolysis test) and non-irritant (HET-CAM assay). In summary, the combination of karaya and gellan gum in bilayer films that contain nanoencapsulated DIM has demonstrated potential in the topical treatment of melanoma and could serve as a viable option for administering DIM for cutaneous melanoma therapy.
Review of Smishing Detection Via Machine Learning

Smishing is a cybercriminal attack targeting mobile Short Message Service (SMS) devices that contains a malicious link, phone number, or email. The attacker intends to use this message to steal the victim's sensitive information, such as passwords, bank account details, and credit cards. One method of combating smishing is to raise awareness and educate users about the various tactics used by SMS phishers. But even so, this method has been criticized for becoming inefficient because smishing tactics are continually evolving. A more promising anti-smishing method is to use machine learning. This paper introduces a number of machine learning algorithms that can be used for detecting smishing. Furthermore, the differences and similarities among them as well as the pros and cons of each are presented to support future research into more effective anti-smishing solutions for securing mobile devices from cyber criminals.
Manipulator Control System Based on Flexible Sensor Technology

The research on the remote control of manipulators based on flexible sensor technology is gradually extensive. In order to achieve stable, accurate, and efficient control of the manipulator, it is necessary to reasonably design the structure of the sensor with excellent tensile strength and flexibility. The acquisition of manual information by high-performance sensors is the basis of manipulator control. This paper starts with the manufacturing of materials of the flexible sensor for the manipulator, introduces the substrate, sensor, and flexible electrode materials, respectively, and summarizes the performance of different flexible sensors. From the perspective of manufacturing, it introduces their basic principles and compares their advantages and disadvantages. Then, according to the different ways of wearing, the two control methods of data glove control and surface EMG control are respectively introduced, the principle, control process, and detection accuracy are summarized, and the problems of material microstructure, reducing the cost, optimizing the circuit design and so on are emphasized in this field. Finally, the commercial application in this field is explained and the future research direction is proposed from two aspects: how to ensure real-time control and better receive the feedback signal from the manipulator.
Embedded Random Fiber Laser Sensor for In Situ AE Monitoring Inside Buoyancy Material

The embedded high-resolution random fiber laser acoustic emission (RFL-AE) sensor for in situ monitoring of buoyancy material is demonstrated. Our proposed embedded RFL-AE sensor can directly couple inside the solid buoyant materials (SBMs) and be expected to detect different AE signals mechanism of SBM without any medium. The randomly chirped grating array (RCGA) provides effective random distributed feedback (DFB) and is embedded inside the SBM to act as an AE sensing element. Many steep peaks can be provided by the multiple-interfering reflection spectrum of RCGA over a broad spectral range, which significantly suppresses chirping phenomenon caused by the thermal stress of SBM and realizes in situ performance monitoring of buoyant materials under high pressure. The test results show that our proposed RFL-AE sensor is highly responsive to continuous and burst AE signals of SBM. The measured resolution of AE signal is 215 $\text{f}\varepsilon /\surd $ Hz, which provides a potential embedded laser AE monitoring scheme for damage detection of SBM-associated composite material.
Semisupervised Building Instance Extraction From High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Automatic building instance extraction from high-resolution (HR) remote sensing imagery (RSI) is crucial for urban planning and mapping. The dominant approaches are based on the full-supervised learning paradigm that requires a large number of labeled samples to train their models, which is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. To alleviate this problem, this study proposes a semisupervised building instance extraction method that integrates teacher–student learning and pseudo-labeling to improve the building instance extraction from HR RSI. Specifically, the proposed method consists of three modules, the hybrid data augmentation (HDA) module, the pseudo-label generation (PLG) module, and the contour refinement (CR) module. The HDA module is designed to enrich the diversity of labeled samples to optimize the teacher model. The PLG module generates pseudo-labels from unlabeled data to train a student model with pseudo-labels. Finally, the CR module is designed to refine the contours of buildings. Experimental results on three challenging public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance and exhibits great robustness at different proportions of labeled data and different building scenarios. This study provides a new approach for extracting building instances from HR RSI in scenarios with insufficient labeled samples and a methodological reference for various applications of semisupervised on RSIs.
Science opportunities using the NASA scatterometer on N-ROSS

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration scatterometer (NSCAT) is to be flown as part of the Navy Remote Ocean Sensing System (N-ROSS) scheduled for launch in 1989. The NSCAT will provide frequent accurate and high-resolution measurements of vector winds over the global oceans. NSCAT data will be applicable to a wide range of studies in oceanography, meteorology, and instrument science. The N-ROSS mission, is outlined, are described. The capabilities of the NSCAT flight instrument and an associated NASA research ground data-processing and distribution system, and representative oceanographic meteorological, and instrument science studies that may benefit from NSCAT data are surveyed.
PixTextGAN: structure aware text image synthesis for license plate recognition

Rapid progress on text image recognition has been achieved with the development of deep-learning techniques. However, it is still a great challenge to achieve a comprehensive license plate recognition in the real scenes, since there are no publicly available large diverse datasets for the training of deep learning models. This paper aims at synthesising of license plate images with generative adversarial networks (GAN), refraining from collecting a vast amount of labelled data. The authors thus propose a novel PixTextGAN that leverages a controllable architecture that generates specific character structures for different text regions to generate synthetic license plate images with reasonable text details. Specifically, a comprehensive structure-aware loss function is presented to preserve the key characteristic of each character region and thus to achieve appearance adaption for better recognition. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of authors’ proposed method in text image synthetisation over state-of-the-art GANs. Further experimental results of license plate recognition on ReId and CCPD dataset demonstrate that using the synthesised images by PixTextGAN can greatly improve the recognition accuracy.