Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An insight on survey questionnaire design for Green SCM: Using cognitive interviewing method

This paper features cognitive interviewing method adopted in the pre-test study along with operational definition of the research variables adapted in the study. The findings from cognitive interviews contributed as part of the psychometric testing in improving the survey questionnaire design and content. The cognitive interviews were conducted with five managers from ISO 14001 manufacturing firms in Malaysia. These firms are selected based on purposive sampling method since the ISO 14001 certified firms are in the best position to provide the required information since the adoption and implementation of green practices in their operations are expected. The evidences showed that some participants face difficulty the grasping certain terminology and phase, therefore the interpretation of the questions may vary. Whilst, others face difficulty to comprehend, retrieve and response to the items since the coverage of the content are broad in nature as it focuses on supply chains, information technologies and systems as well as performance. In addition, the participants provide value feedback on the content, format of questionnaire, language, instructions, length as well as response options and scale. The identified issues were clarified and revised in producing the enhanced survey questionnaire for actual data gathering among ISO14001 Manufacturing firms in Malaysia.
Public-private innovation: Mediating roles and ICT niches of industrial research institutes

Abstract Innovation processes involve diverse sets of organizations including universities, private firms, corporate research labs and public research institutes. Collaborative forms of knowledge production and innovative activity enable actors to reduce risk, specialize, and take advantage of knowledge internal and external to the own organization. This paper discusses interactions and collaborations between public and private sector innovation. This is done through an analysis of semi-public research institutes in Sweden and their roles as arenas for R&D processes involving industry, university and government in terms of funding, research and public—private innovation. Particular attention is paid to technological niches of research institutes and utilization of research findings from collaborative R&D. The results show that institutes occupy specific niches which influence their ways of transferring knowledge. It is argued that diversity among R&D performers as well as funding opportunities is paramount for innovation systems to thrive.
Modelling the Control of Cell Proliferation by An Anti-cancer Agent

A mathematical model has been developed which describes human cell growth in the presence of topotecan (TPT), an anti-cancer agent. Previously, a model was developed for the pharmacokinetics (PK) of TPT; this provided a description of the activity of TPT and the subsequent delivery of the active form to the nuclear DNA target. This model is described briefly in this paper. The development of a new pharmacodynamic (PD) model for cell growth, based on a well-known cell cycle model is then discussed. The linking of the PK model to the PD model is considered with respect to the modulation of cell growth. Our PK — PD model has good agreement with in vitro experimental data. In a clinical context, it is intended that the model will be used for discovering routes for drug resistance and eventually as a tool for improving drug treatments for patients.
Author ' s personal copy Molecular diversity and genomic organisation of the α , β and γ eye lens crystallins from the Antarctic toothfish Dissostichus mawsoni

The eye lens of the Antarctic toothfish living in the −2 °C Southern Ocean is cold-stable. To investigate the molecular basis of this cold stability, we isolated, cloned and sequenced 22 full length crystallin cDNAs. We found two α crystallins (αA, αB), six β crystallins (βA1, βA2, βA4, βB1, βB2, βB3) and 14 γ crystallins (γN, γS1, γS2, γM1, γM3, γM4, γM5, γM7, γM8a, γM8b, γM8c, γM8d, γM8e, and γM9). Alignments of α, β and γ with other known crystallin sequences indicate that toothfish α and β crystallins are relatively conserved orthologues of their vertebrate counterparts, but the toothfish and other fish γM crystallins form a distinct group that are not orthologous to mammalian γ crystallins. A preliminary Fingerprinted Contig analysis of clones containing crystallin genes screened from a toothfish BAC library indicated α crystallin genes occurred in a single genomic region of ~266 kbp, β crystallin genes in ~273 kbp, while the γ crystallin gene family occurred in two separate regions of ~180 and ~296 kbp. In phylogenetic analysis, the γM isoforms of the ectothermic toothfish displayed a diversity not seen with endothermic mammalian γ crystallins. Similar to other fishes, several toothfish γ crystallins are methionine-rich (γM isoforms) whichmay have predisposed the toothfish lens to biochemically attenuate γ crystallin hydrophobicity allowing for cold adaptation. In addition to high methionine content, conservation of αβ crystallins both in sequence and abundance suggests greater functional constraints relative to γ crystallins. Conversely, reduced constraints upon γ crystallins could have allowed for greater evolutionary plasticity resulting in increased polydispersity of γ crystallins contributing to the cold-stability of the Antarctic toothfish lens. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) 1-1-2008 Social Dynamics in Online Cultural Fields

In spite of a long literature on online communities and electronic networks, little theoretical work has been done on understanding a recent online phenomenon: "user-generated content" (UGC) platforms. This paper proposes an analytical lens for the study of social dynamics on UGC platforms. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital, we introduce the notion of online cultural field and investigate which characteristics of agents and their contribution behavior produce status distinctions in these fields. These characteristics are then placed in a framework which attempts to address how capital is produced, reproduced and transformed in online cultural fields and how these processes help us understand the evolution of these fields. We briefly review how we will follow this theoretical model with an empirical investigation.
Free advanced modeling and remote-sensing techniques for wetland watershed delineation and monitoring

Watershed scale studies focusing on hydrological pressures influencing freshwater ecosystem dynamics are necessary for the establishment of suitable wetland ecological indicators. Enhanced and reproducible methods for watershed modeling and land-cover assessment are thus essential tools for wetland monitoring and management. However, few integrated studies propose advanced open source methodologies for watershed modeling and assessment. In this study, a set of GIS methodological tools was applied and further developed in order to delineate wetland watersheds and map their land-cover changes over time. Watersheds draining to 11 semiarid Mediterranean saline wetlands were delimited and map algebra operations were applied on the digital elevation model in the Campo de Cartagena coastal plain to enhance watershed delimitation. land-use/land-cover maps of wetland watersheds were obtained for years 1987 and 2008 by means of supervised classification of Landsat images. A set of four spectral indices was included in the classification analysis using a combination of bands in order to improve the discrimination of vegetation, water bodies, infrastructure, and bare soil. An iterative classification procedure based on maximum likelihood and random selection of training areas was applied. Contextual information based on automatic image segmentation of Landsat scenes was also included as ancillary layers. Watershed areas obtained ranged from 70 to 17,000 ha and delineation was improved in the Campo de Cartagena coastal plain. The proposed image classification methodology showed high accuracies and improved standard classification techniques. The proposed methodology is based on free and open source tools, which makes it broadly applicable.
Visual attention while driving: sequences of eye fixations made by experienced and novice drivers

Eye fixations were recorded while novice and experienced drivers drove along three types of roads (rural, suburban and dual-carriageway). An analysis of the content of those fixations was performed in order to identify differences in the scanpaths that can be associated with skill acquisition and that can indicate a sensitivity to road type. This analysis itemized the part of the visual scene that was inspected with each fixation, and identified what the driver looked at as a function of what they had looked at previously. Single-fixation, two-fixation, and three-fixation patterns of eye-movements were identified. Differences in sequences of fixations were found between novice and experienced drivers on the three types of roads, with experienced drivers showing greater sensitivity overall, and with some stereotypical transitions in the visual attention of the novices. A number of individual sequences were identified, including a roadway preview pattern (alternating fixations between near and far views of the road ahead), and patterns involving mirror inspections that varied according to the road type.
Local Prediction in River Discharge Time Series

In this paper, chaotic behavior of the daily river discharge time series from the Karoon River, during January 1999-December 2004 is investigated. The phase space, which describes the evolution of the behavior of a nonlinear system, is reconstructed using the delay embedding theorem suggested by TAKENS. The delay time used for the reconstruction is chosen after examining the first minimum of the average mutual information (AMI) of the data. It is found that a delay time of 40 days and the sufficient embedding dimension is estimated using the false nearest neighbor algorithm which has a value of 8 for the river flow time series. Based on these embedding parameters we calculate the average divergence rate of nearby orbits given by the largest Lyapunov exponent. The largest Lyapunov exponent 0.0255 for is estimated. In this study the local prediction model has been applied to predict daily discharge time series. In this prediction model, the dynamics of the system are described step by step locally in the phase space, the results are quite satisfactory.
Frontiers in Invertebrate Physiology – Grand Challenge

Another issue, which has been increasing enormously during the last years, is the inves-tigation of plasticity in the nervous control of physiological functions (Yamada et al., 2010). Adaptations to external and internal modifications in sensory and motor systems controlling different physiological functions become more and more evident. Detection of intra- and inter-specific stimuli is modi-fied by, e.g., experience and reproductive state (Iyengar et al., 2010). However, we are far from understanding the cellular mecha-nisms and signaling pathways involved in these forms of physiological plasticity. It will be important in the future to investigate the role of hormones, neuromodulators and their mechanisms of action ideally in parallel in different invertebrate species both during development and in adult organisms. New biochemical techniques allow us to detect and measure minute traces of neuropeptides in single cells, whose roles are still largely unknown ( Yew et al., 2009 ). Another impor -tant point is the rapidly developing field of research on post-transcriptional regulation mechanisms involving non-coding RNAs like microRNA (Vo et al., 2010). In addi-tion to plasticity of the individual, different levels of control of physiological plasticity should be taken into consideration at the populational level. Here genetic variation, epigenetic phenomena, and phenotypic plasticity might play together (Espinosa-Soto et al., 2011). Politically important issues such as envi-ronmental and climatic changes (global warming) have a severe impact on the physi-ology of invertebrate organisms. Classically insects, but also aquatic invertebrates have been, and are still, important indicators of pollution. The typically used models, such as the honeybee, allow to study the effects of, e.g., pesticides at multiple levels, from gene expression, over ion channel function to the physiology of the nervous system, behavior, and cognition. Thus ecophysiol-ogy is a growing field within invertebrate physiology and environmental effects on,
Quality of service support in IEEE 802.16 networks

During the last few years, users ail over the world have become more and more accustomed to the availability of broadband access. This has boosted the use of a wide variety both of established and recent multimedia applications. However, there are cases where it is too expensive for network providers to serve a community of users. This is typically the case in rural and suburban areas, where there is slow deployment (or no deployment at all) of traditional wired technologies for broadband access (e.g., cable modems, xDSL). In those cases, the most promising opportunity rests with broadband wireless access technologies, such as the IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX. One of the features of the MAC layer of 802.16 is that it is designed to differentiate service among traffic categories with different multimedia requirements. This article focuses on mechanisms that are available in an 802.16 system to support quality of service (QoS) and whose effectiveness is evaluated through simulation
Color and Texture Features for Image Indexing and Retrieval

The novel approach combines color and texture features for content based image retrieval (CBIR). The color and texture features are obtained by computing the mean and standard deviation on each color band of image and sub-band of different wavelets. The standard Wavelet and Gabor wavelet transforms are used for decomposing the image into sub-bands. The retrieval results obtained by applying color histogram (CH) + Gabor wavelet transform(GWT) to a 1000 image database demonstrated significant improvement in precision and recall, compared to the color histogram (CH), wavelet transform (WT), wavelet transform + color histogram (WT + CH) and Gabor wavelet transform (GWT).
Diagnostic Accuracy of Ultrasonography and Radiography in Initial Evaluation of Chest Trauma Patients

Introduction: Application of chest radiography for all multiple trauma patients is associated with a significant increase in total costs, exposure to radiation, and overcrowding of the emergency department. Ultrasound has been introduced as an alternative diagnostic tool in this regard. The aim of the present study is to compare the diagnostic accuracy of chest ultrasonography and radiography in detection of traumatic intrathoracic injuries. Methods: In the present prospective cross-sectional study, patients with traumatic intrathoracic injuries, who were referred to the emergency department from December 2013 to December 2014, were assessed. The patients underwent bedside ultrasound, radiographic and computed tomography (CT) scan examinations based on ATLS recommendations. Screening performance characteristics of ultrasonography and radiography were compared using SPSS 21.0. Chest CT scan was considered as gold standard. Results: 152 chest trauma patients with a mean age of 31.4 ± 13.8 years (range: 4 ‒ 67), were enrolled (77.6% male). Chest CT scan showed pulmonary contusion in 48 (31.6%) patients, hemothorax in 29 (19.1%), and pneumothorax in 55 (36.2%) cases. Area under the ROC curve of ultrasonography in detection of pneumothorax, hemothorax, and pulmonary contusion were 0.91 (95% CI: 0.86‒0.96), 0.86 (95% CI: 0.78‒0.94), and 0.80 (95% CI: 0.736‒0.88), respectively. Area under the ROC curve of radiography was 0.80 (95% CI: 0.736‒0.87) for detection of pneumothorax, 0.77 (95% CI: 0.68‒0.86) for hemothorax, and 0.58 (95% CI: 0.5‒0.67) for pulmonary contusion. Comparison of areas under the ROC curve declared the significant superiority of ultrasonography in detection of pneumothorax (p = 0.02) and pulmonary contusion (p < 0.001). However, the diagnostic value of the two tests was equal in detection of hemothorax (p = 0.08). Conclusion: The results of the present study showed that ultrasonography is preferable to radiography in the initial evaluation of patients with traumatic injuries to the thoracic cavity
Search engine user behaviour: How can users be guided to quality content?

The typical behaviour of the Web search engine user is widely known: a user only types in one or a few keywords and expects the search engine to produce relevant results in an instant. Search engines not only adapt to this behaviour. On the contrary, they are often faced with criticism that they themselves created this kind of behaviour. As search engines are trendsetters for the whole information world, it is important to know how they cope with their users' behaviour. Recent developments show that search engines try to integrate results from different collections into their results lists and to guide their users to the right results. These results should not only be relevant in general, but also be pertinent in the sense of being relevant to the user in his current situation and in accordance to his background. The article focuses on the problems of guiding the user from his initial query to these results. It shows how the general users are searching and how the intents behind their queries can be used to deliver the right results. It will be shown that search engines try to give some good results for everyone instead of focusing on complete result sets for a specific user type. If the user wishes, he can follow the paths laid out by the engines to narrow the results to a result set suitable to him.
Hybrid mapping for autonomous mobile robot exploration

Hybrid maps combining several approaches to store robot's interpretation about its working environments are getting popular nowadays. The paper deals with a novel approach to hybrid maps that is based on fixed-size interconnected occupancy grids organized in a topological graph. The presented mapping approach is employed in the exploration scenario, where the map is built from scratch and used for both local and global path-planning, and goal selection. Feasibility of the approach has been validated by a set of experiments in the Player/Stage system [1].
Heating up Galilean holography

We embed a holographic description of a quantum field theory with Galilean conformal invariance in string theory. The key observation is that such field theories may be realized as conventional superconformal field theories with a known string theory embedding, twisted by the R-symmetry in a light-like direction. Using the Null Melvin Twist, we construct the appropriate dual geometry and its non-extremal generalization. From the nonzero temperature solution we determine the equation of state. We also discuss the hydrodynamic regime of these non-relativistic plasmas and show that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio takes the universal value η/s = 1/4π typical of strongly interacting field theories with gravity duals.
Experimental study on efficient use of singular configuration in pulling heavy objects with two-link robot arm

This paper demonstrates that singular configuration of a two-link robot arm is advantageous in doing the task of pulling or lifting up a heavy object with small joint torques. As a result of numerical optimization, the initial configuration that minimizes the joint torques necessary for the task is close to the singular configuration where the arm is stretched out. The singular configuration has the dynamic feature that the joint angle vector can be accelerated in a certain direction almost independently of the mass of the object. Then, the joint torques can generate large kinetic energy efficiently at the singular configuration, and the energy can be utilized to pull or lift up the object. The experimental results show that the dynamic feature is practically useful, even when a feedback control is applied in order to make the object follow a planned trajectory.
Artemisinin and a Series of Novel Endoperoxide Antimalarials Exert Early Effects on Digestive Vacuole Morphology

ABSTRACT Artermisinin and its derivatives are now the mainstays of antimalarial treatment; however, their mechanism of action is only poorly understood. We report on the synthesis of a novel series of epoxy-endoperoxides that can be prepared in high yields from simple starting materials. Endoperoxides that are disubstituted with alkyl or benzyl side chains show efficient inhibition of the growth of both chloroquine-sensitive and -resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum. A trans-epoxide with respect to the peroxide linkage increases the activity compared to that of its cis-epoxy counterpart or the parent endoperoxide. The novel endoperoxides do not show a strong interaction with artemisinin. We have compared the mechanism of action of the novel endoperoxides with that of artemisinin. Electron microscopy reveals that the novel endoperoxides cause the early accumulation of endocytic vesicles, while artemisinin causes the disruption of the digestive vacuole membrane. At longer incubation times artemisinin causes extensive loss of organellar structures, while the novel endoperoxides cause myelin body formation as well as the accumulation of endocytic vesicles. An early event following endoperoxide treatment is the redistribution of the pH-sensitive probe LysoSensor Blue from the digestive vacuole to punctate structures. By contrast, neither artemisinin nor the novel endoperoxides caused alterations in the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum nor showed antagonistic antimalarial activity when they were used with thapsigargin. Analysis of rhodamine 123 uptake by P. falciparum suggests that disruption of the mitochondrial membrane potential occurs as a downstream effect rather than as an initiator of parasite killing. The data suggest that the digestive vacuole is an important initial site of endoperoxide antimalarial activity.
Hari Raya Food and its Significance with Malays

It is becoming a long tradition regardless generations for the Malay community to prepare and served traditional foods for Hari Raya celebration. Through observation and interview procedures, this paper describes the significance of traditional Hari Raya food from three Malay generation women’s understanding of the process of Malay traditional Hari Raya food knowledge transfer. Charitable deeds, Social Bonding, and Memories are significant elements in the knowledge transfer processes. Majorities of informers noted that Hari Raya without the traditional food is nothing or did not bring any significant for the celebration. In other words, Hari Raya foods play important roles in cheering or complete the atmosphere of the festive celebration. Keywords: Malay ethnic, Malay generation, Malay traditional food, Women. eISSN 2514-7528 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/jabs.v3i10. 308
Qualitative Temporal Behavior Description and TemporalDiagnosis Using Interval

As noticed in some recent work, describing and diagnosing temporal behavior and faults is an important, but complex task. In this paper we discuss a new approach based on a subset of Allen's interval algebra, which extends previous work by allowing both the representation of qualitative temporal behavior (including symptoms over time) and the diagnosis of these systems.