Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecotourism production process : best practices for developing ecotourism in the Pacific Northwest

Ecotourism Production Process: Best Practices for Developing Ecotourism in the Pacific Northwest Michael Anthony Montanari Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Marc L. Miller School of Marine and Environmental Affairs The field of marine and environmental affairs is multi-disciplinary connecting the complexities of science, law, and policy and incorporating the framework of Human Dimensions of Global Change in the Marine (and Terrestrial) Environment. Ecotourism focuses on sustainability and is causally affected by the driving forces in global change. The tourism industry is increasingly recognized as an enormously potent force for sustainable development and positive change in the environment. Today, people travel more than ever. In recent years, elements of the travel market have begun to insist that their travel not jeopardize the quality of the natural environment and their travel not jeopardize the quality of life for the visited communities. Ecotourism is examined in connection with the sociological model of tourism that includes brokers, locals, and tourists and this model is expanded to include nature and technologies. Ecotourism definitions incorporate principles of sustainable tourism and the triple bottom line is the metric for measuring ecotourism success. Ecotourism is an experience and an industry jointly produced by Broker-Local-Tourist dynamics. Ecotourism entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest have an opportunity to develop environmentally sound, socially aware, and economically profitable businesses. Additionally, the concept of the tourist spectrum is presented. The development of an ecotourism business can be visualized as a three-step process: vision of the ecotourism entrepreneur, identification of the ecotourism vision, and analysis of the Ecotourism Production Process. The innovative six-phase Ecotourism Production Process is a framework to develop best practices and will lead the ecotourism entrepreneur to a sequence of logical business decisions. This model was validated with elite interviews with private sector ecotourism brokers.
Semantic-aware Cartoon Style Transfer

In the community of computer vision, style transfer usually refers to the extraction of texture information from the source image and then transfer and synthesis into the target image. However, the existing style transfer methods ignore information such as the hierarchical structure of the input image, and consider the entire parts of input image belong to the same distribution. The results show that a trained generative adversarial network can only convert the entire image from one distribution to another specific distribution, which cannot produce satisfactory results for images with complex hierarchies and structures. In this paper, we propose a new method for specific style transfer by combining different semantic parts, such as foreground characters and background content, with different representation weights, which is of great significance in the fields of painting and cartoon generation. We assist in training adversarial networks by adding a pre-trained semantic segmentation network, and control and adjust our framework by observing different semantic parts of the generated image and comparing their distribution with the various distributions we hope to obtain. Qualitative comparison and quantitative analysis show that our method significantly improves the sense of hierarchy of the generated image, and different parts of the image have different textures, structures and color distributions. For example, our method makes the texture of the generated foreground characters more dense, while the texture of the background content becomes sparse, which makes the generated image look better than the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, the ablation study proved the impact of each component in our framework. The code will be made publicly available at
A controllable gelatin-based microcarriers fabrication system for the whole procedures of MSCs amplification and tissue engineering

Abstract Biopolymer microbeads present substantial benefits for cell expansion, tissue engineering, and drug release applications. However, a fabrication system capable of producing homogeneous microspheres with high precision and controllability for cell proliferation, passaging, harvesting and downstream application is limited. Therefore, we developed a co-flow microfluidics-based system for the generation of uniform and size-controllable gelatin-based microcarriers (GMs) for mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) expansion and tissue engineering. Our evaluation of GMs revealed superior homogeneity and efficiency of cellular attachment, expansion and harvest, and MSCs expanded on GMs exhibited high viability while retaining differentiation multipotency. Optimization of passaging and harvesting protocols was achieved through the addition of blank GMs and treatment with collagenase, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrated that MSC-loaded GMs were printable and could serve as building blocks for tissue regeneration scaffolds. These results suggested that our platform held promise for the fabrication of uniform GMs with downstream application of MSC culture, expansion and tissue engineering.
Relationship between market orientation and organizational performance in public hospitals in China

There are abundant research arguments on market orientation, including measurement scales and the relationship between market orientation and business performance. However, most of these researches focus mainly on business organizations, while study in public hospitals is extremely limited. Basing on existing literatures about market orientation and business performance, the authors develop a framework to describe the relationship between market orientation and organizational performance in public hospitals in China. The findings suggest that market orientation has significant positive effects on both organizational performance and organizational learning in public hospitals. The results of this research also show that organizational learning has a significant positive effect on organizational performance and it mediates the impact of market orientation on organizational performance in public hospitals. These findings are significant to both the market orientation theory and management implication of the theory in public hospitals.
AN ENHANCED FORWARD-LOOKING SAR IMAGING ALGORITHM BASED ON COMPRESSIVE SENSING

Having the imaging ability of the area in front of flight direction, forward-looking synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has become a hot topic in areas of SAR research. Nevertheless, constrained by limited azimuth aperture length, the imaging of forward-looking SAR suffers from poor azimuth resolution. Aiming at this problem, an enhanced forward-looking SAR imaging algorithm is proposed in this paper. This algorithm takes both super-resolving ability and computational burden into account. Firstly, an imaging framework is proposed to decrease the computational burden. Secondly, an iterative regularization implementation of compressive sensing (CS) is proposed to improve azimuth resolution. Finally, imaging experiments based on simulated data and Ku-band complex valued image data from the MiniSAR system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
A Decade of Maqasid Shariah Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

This study analysed the frontier of Maqasid Shariah (MS) research repertoire by identifying essential features to direct future research in the sector. This research used bibliometric and citation analysis. Scopus is used as a bibliometric data source for many research reviews, scientific policy evaluations, research landscape studies, and university rankings because of its reliability. Scopus yielded 126 data points linked to the article title Maqasid Shariah . Numerous programmes were used, including Microsoft Excel to perform the frequency study, VOS viewer to visualise the data, and Harzing’s Publish or Perish to calculate and analyse citation metrics. The results suggest that Maqasid Shariah is a cross-disciplinary research area where past literature concentrated mainly on business-related and environmental science domains. The growing number of publications on Maqasid Shariah demonstrates that the critical nature of technology has affected the financial services sector, and there are undoubtedly some ramifications for the economy. Performance and products of Islamic finance are the most areas of concern regarding Maqasid Shariah . The data sources selected were from the Scopus database only. This study is the first bibliometric examination of Maqasid Shariah utilising a 16-year-old publication database with a review paper.
Politeness Strategies in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC): An Issue of University Professors and Students.

This paper examines the politeness theory in the light of Austin & Searle’s speech act theory as reflected in CMC between students and their lecturers or supervisors. Thus politeness aspects were analyzed as enacted in the five categories such as: Assertives, commisives, directives, expressives, and declaratives. The paper also examined politeness in other language aspects that are usually present in any form of communication, such as: Address phrases, meeting requests, request for reply, and adjunct phrases. The objective of this article was to shed light on the politeness strategies employed by the lecturers and students in their e-communication through Whatsapp and SMS (short messages or text messages) platforms. Fifty communications were downloaded from the lecturers’ phones through their permission and the students’, which were used as data for this study. Five lecturers and seven postgraduate students made the population of this study. The findings indicated that students seem to be comfortable using this mode of communication, and it is important to understand how students and lecturers make choices and how these choices affect the perception of the cultural appropriateness of CMCs. The results also revealed that elements of politeness greatly decrease in the follow-up messages, that is, messages that require some kind of response. From the study, lecturers adhered to formal language use as compared to the students in their communication.
Benefiting From a Pest- Paraupsylla tuberculate Infested Alstonia scholaris Latex Cross-Reactivity To HCV, Plasmodium

Astonia scholaris is well known for its medicinal properties. Its bark is used for anti-malarial compounds and its leaf is used for treatment of dysentery. It is infested by the insect pathogen causing leaf gall namely Paraupsylla tuberculate. In this article we show for the first time that the latex of Alstonia scholaris has cross-reacting proteins with human pathogens namely HCV, Malaria and these cross-reacting proteins react differentially when infested by the insect pest Paraupsylla tuberculate causing leaf gall. Taking into consideration that plant galls are consumed by certain population, this finding could be important for underlying factor for resistance to certain diseases in certain group of people.
An explicit characterization of spherical curves according to bishop frame and an approximately solution

In this paper, spherical curves are studied by using Bishop frame. First, the differential equation characterizing the spherical curves is given. Then, we exhibit that the position vector of a curve which is lying on a sphere satisfies a third-order linear differential equation. Then we solve this linear differential equation by using Bernstein series solution method.
Trapped mountain waves with a critical level just below the surface

The trapped mountain waves produced when the incident wind near the surface is small compared with its value aloft are analyzed with a theory adapted from Long (1953) and compared with fully nonlinear simulations performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). Although small near‐surface incident winds occur naturally in fronts via a combination of the thermal wind balance and the boundary layer, they pose at least two problems in mountain meteorology: zero surface incident winds produce no wave in the fully linear case; they also correspond to places where mountain waves have a critical level.
Food security and nutrition governance post-Covid-19 in Africa

The article examines the food security and nutrition governance of South Africa, Nigeria and Zimbabwe post-COVID-19 in Africa. Drawn from a qualitative approach that utilises a case study design of multiple cases, this study compared the food security and nutrition governance interventions adopted by the three countries post-COVID-19. Using the Post Development Theory of Food Security, the key findings from the study indicate that, among the three countries, food security was threatened by COVID-19 as the supply chain of all the countries was abruptly disrupted owing to partial and total lockdowns. Reconfiguring the food security landscape to achieve nutrition governance requires the three countries to revisit their agricultural policies in the case of Zimbabwe, where farmers need extensive state support to revitalise grain produce. South Africa also recommends supporting agriculture and subsidies to smallholder farmers, which is fundamental for promoting food security and nutrition governance in many poor rural provinces. Nigeria also needs to improve regarding stakeholder support as agriculture was affected by the lockdown, and farmers' productivity declined. Therefore, the assessment of all three cases led researchers to conclude that state and stakeholder investment is fundamental in agriculture mainly, which is the backbone for promoting food security and food nutrition and safety policies are fundamental for ensuring nutrition governance among citizens. The creation of employment and provision of machinery to smallholder farming can mitigate food insecurity at the household level.
When and How Can the Stratosphere Modify the Midlatitude Cold Air Outbreaks in Northern Winter: An Isentropic Meridional Mass Circulation View

Cold air outbreaks (CAOs) in northern winter can be attributed to the variations in the lower‐tropospheric equatorward cold branch (CB) of the isentropic meridional mass circulation (IMMC) across the subpolar latitudes. Understanding when and how the variations of CB are related to the stratosphere is crucial for improving the extended‐range forecast skills of CAOs in winter. Investigation on the vertical coupling of the stratospheric and tropospheric branches of IMMC suggests that the CB (or CAOs) exhibits two major timescales: sub‐monthly (10–30 days) and monthly‐to‐seasonal (>30 days). The CB can be modified by the stratospheric variability that is represented by the stratospheric poleward warm branch (WB‐ST) of the IMMC at monthly‐to‐seasonal timescales via the two‐way stratosphere‐troposphere coupling. At sub‐monthly timescales, however, the upward one‐way coupling from the troposphere to the stratosphere dominates. While changes of the CB always precede those of the WB‐ST at both timescales, indicating the upward tropospheric wave forcing into the stratosphere, the downward impacts of the WB‐ST on the CB (particularly CAOs in North America) are observed only at monthly‐to‐seasonal timescales. Specifically, the accumulated effect of the monthly‐to‐seasonal mass transport by the poleward WB‐ST can be strong enough to dominate the Arctic total column airmass changes, producing not only a barotropic structure of the Northern Annular Mode but also direct changes to the low‐level ageostrophic zonal‐mean meridional flow. The anomalous low‐level ageostrophic flow, in turn, plays a greater role in intensifying (weakening) the equatorward CB following a stronger (weaker) WB‐ST than tropospheric wave activities.
Optimizing Digital Tools for the Field of Substance Use and Substance Use Disorders: Backcasting Exercise

Background Substance use trends are complex; they often rapidly evolve and necessitate an intersectional approach in research, service, and policy making. Current and emerging digital tools related to substance use are promising but also create a range of challenges and opportunities. Objective This paper reports on a backcasting exercise aimed at the development of a roadmap that identifies values, challenges, facilitators, and milestones to achieve optimal use of digital tools in the substance use field by 2030. Methods A backcasting exercise method was adopted, wherein the core elements are identifying key values, challenges, facilitators, milestones, cornerstones and a current, desired, and future scenario. A structured approach was used by means of (1) an Open Science Framework page as a web-based collaborative working space and (2) key stakeholders’ collaborative engagement during the 2022 Lisbon Addiction Conference. Results The identified key values were digital rights, evidence-based tools, user-friendliness, accessibility and availability, and person-centeredness. The key challenges identified were ethical funding, regulations, commercialization, best practice models, digital literacy, and access or reach. The key facilitators identified were scientific research, interoperable infrastructure and a culture of innovation, expertise, ethical funding, user-friendly designs, and digital rights and regulations. A range of milestones were identified. The overarching identified cornerstones consisted of creating ethical frameworks, increasing access to digital tools, and continuous trend analysis. Conclusions The use of digital tools in the field of substance use is linked to a range of risks and opportunities that need to be managed. The current trajectories of the use of such tools are heavily influenced by large multinational for-profit companies with relatively little involvement of key stakeholders such as people who use drugs, service providers, and researchers. The current funding models are problematic and lack the necessary flexibility associated with best practice business approaches such as lean and agile principles to design and execute customer discovery methods. Accessibility and availability, digital rights, user-friendly design, and person-focused approaches should be at the forefront in the further development of digital tools. Global legislative and technical infrastructures by means of a global action plan and strategy are necessary and should include ethical frameworks, accessibility of digital tools for substance use, and continuous trend analysis as cornerstones.
Flexible circle antenna for 5G system operating in 3.6 GHz band

Radiocommunication systems have been directed towards the fifth generation (5G) technology due to the requirements of compact, fast and broadband systems. These types of radio communication systems require new and more efficient antenna designs. The paper presents the process of designing a wearable flexible antenna working in the 5G system. The proposed antenna has a center operating frequency of 4.085 GHz and two resonates frequency 3.6 GHz and 4.6 GHz. The dimensions of the antenna and its parameters were calculated, simulated and optimized using the FEKO software. The proposed antenna has a compact structure with dimensions (50 mm x 56 mm x 1 mm). A jeans fabric with a dielectric index of 1.76 and a thickness of h = 1.0 mm was used as a substrate for the antenna construction. The paper presents an analysis of the results of simulation and measurement of electrical parameters and radiation patterns of the proposed planar antenna for the case of an antenna placed in a free space. The planar antenna on jeans substrate described in the article, working in 5G systems with a center frequency of 4.085 GHz, a low reflectance of -29.31 dB, an energy gain of 1.68 dBi and a wide operating band of 2.23 GHz (54.58 %).
Detection the genetic relation between several fungal isolates by using a universal ITS primers

The goal of this study is to evaluate the internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS) of the rDNA to detect a phylogenetic relationshep based on PCR technique between four isolates of Trichoderma viride, Chaetumium elatum and tow isolates (pathogen and non-pathogen strains) of Rhizoctonia solani obtained from tomato plant rhizosphere, rice plant rhizosphere and root rotted tomato plants fields of Al-Najaf province, Iraq.Internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS) of the ribosomal DNA was amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique using a set of common universal primers for ITS1, ITS3 and ITS4 regions. Two of three different random primers examined (primers 3 and 4) reflected a specific amplicons within Rhizoctonia solani(1), Chaetumium elatum , and Trichoderma viride, while the primer 1 did not give any PCR end product with all of tested isolates, while Rhizoctonia solani(2) isolates did not revealed any band detected in PCR technique with all primers, also data showing a diferent degree of genetic similarity depanding on PCR data analysis using UVIBand softwear.Results of this study indicate that ITS set of primers can used to find a genetic relation between fungi.
Climate Change Scenarios and Challenges for the Water Environment

The provision of downscaled global circulation output is the first stage in assessing the implications of climate change for the water environment. Using only one global climate model Sweeney and Fealy, 2003 concluded that projected changes in climate will have potentially large effects on the water environment in Ireland, particularly on flood and drought frequencies. Increased winter runoff in western parts as a result of wetter winters and decreased summer runoff, especially in eastern Ireland as a result of substantial reductions in summer rainfall are projected. Considerable uncertainties however exist from such projections since they are based on only one GCM. These uncertainties limit the reliability of such climate scenarios for future water resource management since different GCMs tend to show different results for areas such as Ireland. This arises from inherent weaknesses they possess due to problems of scale and feedback. One way of addressing these uncertainties and providing more reliable inputs to hydrological models is to use multi- model downscaling, and this approach is presented here.
Examining the Influence of Innovation, Market Orientation, and Entrepreneurial Orientation on Marketing Performance in the Batik Industry

Pilang Village in Sragen Regency is renowned for its unique batik centers, known for their distinctive flora and fauna ornaments. The local government actively supports artisans by promoting innovation and providing assistance in design, production, and marketing. However, entrepreneurs in the creative industry face challenges related to fostering innovation, strategic planning, and embracing risk-taking to enhance marketing performance. This study investigates the influence of innovation, market orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation on marketing performance in the batik industry, focusing on batik craftsmen from Pilang Village. A sample of 53 respondents is selected using saturated or census sampling techniques, and data analysis is conducted through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the SmartPLS 3.0 application. The findings demonstrate that innovation, market orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation significantly impact marketing performance. Consistent product innovation, addressing customer needs, and following trends are crucial. Furthermore, emphasizing product marketing variations and modernizing production processes play a vital role. An entrepreneurial mindset that embraces risk-taking and proactiveness effectively boosts sales and marketing success. This study offers valuable insights into the batik industry's marketing dynamics, emphasizing the importance of customer-centricity, innovation, and entrepreneurial mindset to thrive in a competitive market.