Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Location sensing of wheel based movable object with low cost sensors in GPS denied environment

In recent years, the location tracking becomes an important issue for locating accurate position of an object. A number of techniques have been proposed and demonstrated successfully. Out of these, the Global Positioning System (GPS) technique has gained popularity among researchers. However, it has been experienced that the GPS has failed miserably in some cases. This problem has been addressed in this paper. A technique of location tracking is hereby proposed to locate a wheel based ground movable object in absence of GPS. To achieve this target, a magnetometer along with a Hall sensor has been employed. A gyroscope sensor and an accelerometer have utilized to achieve more accurate position of the object under consideration. Finally, a prototype has created by housing these sensors on a bicycle in order to locate the cycle. Here, the magnetometer is used to obtain the direction of movement, and the hall sensor is used to calculate the distance covered. Based on the given information, the updated location of that moving object is estimated and plotted to show the trace of its movement.
Distribution, abundance, and roles of freshwater clams (Bivalvia, Unionidae) in the freshwater tidal Hudson River

SUMMARY 1. An extensive series of PONAR grabs was used to determine the distribution and abundance of unionid clams in the freshwater tidal Hudson River. 2. The five species of unionids collected were distributed very unevenly within the river. Mean river-wide density and biomass of unionids were 8.0m−2 and 6.2 g DM m−2 (shell-free). , respectively. 3. The environmental variables that we measured (water depth, distance from shore, sediment granulometry and organic content, presence or absence of macrophytes, and the chlorophyll a and particulate organic matter content of the water) explained little of the variation in abundance of unionids. 4. The distributions of the various species of clams did not differ significantly with respect to the environmental variables measured. 5. We estimate that unionids filter a significant amount of water (0.14m3 m−2 day−1, on average) in the Hudson River estuary, roughly equivalent in magnitude to downstream flushing. 6. We project that unionids will serve as a major substratum for the settlement of the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), which is now invading the estuary. We emphasize that unionids may play important non-trophic roles in large river ecosystems.
Heterogeneity in Formation of Lignin. XIV. Formation and Structure of Lignin in Differentiating Xylem of Ginkgo biloba

Selective labelling of p-hydroxyphenyl-, guaiacyl- and syringyl-propane moieties in protolignin was achieved by administration of corresponding 3 H-labeled monolignol glucosides to differentiating xylem of ginkgo. The growing process of the protolignin macromolecule in the specific morphological region was visualized by application of high resolution microautoradiography to the selectively labeled wood tissue. (.)
Community organization: effects of landscape fragmentation

All over the world, natural terrestrial ecosystems have been subjected to a wide variety of human impacts. Most noticeable are activities and processes associated with agriculture, forestry, mining, and urban development. Results range from virtual obliterations of natural communities through varying degrees of fragmentation to a series of preserves and natural areas. Studies of many taxa, both plant and animal, indicate numerous effects associated with the loss of contiguity, reduction in total area, relationship to physical factors, and increasing separation of remaining fragments. The theory of island biogeography has been tested in many kinds of landscapes and for many groups of organisms. The great differences between true islands and terrestrial "habitat islands" lead to inconclusive results in many investigations and to major questions concerning the applicability of the equilibrium model to fragmented terrestrial landscapes. This paper attempts to summarize indicative examples that have a bearing .
A Theory of the Origin and Evolution of the Australian Marsupialia

ALTHOUGH considerable attention has been given to the discussion of the family and generic affinities of the Australian marsupials from a systematic standpoint, until very recently the phylogenetic aspects of the question have been generally neglected. On this account, and also from the fact that little information has been forthcoming either from paleontology or geographical distribution, it has not been possible, up to the present time, to form an adequate conception of the origin of the fauna and its phylogenetic relationships. The present paper is the result of an attempt to outline a plan of evolution for the group by comparing the adaptive modifications of the teeth and feet with those of placental mammals, in which the course of evolution is fairly well known. On account of the difficulties with which the writer has had to contend in having only a small number of marsupial types at his disposal, the present plan is advanced simply as a working
A MATLAB-based Power System Analysis Software for Engineering Undergraduate Education

This paper presents an open source, freely downloadable, user friendly, MATLAB-based Power System Analysis Software (PSAS) for educational and research purposes of engineering undergraduate students. Using this software, users can familiar with four main analyses in power systems; (i) load flow analysis including Flexible Alternating Current Transmission System (FACTS) devices, (ii) transient stability analysis including stability margin calculation, (iii) small signal stability analysis, and (iv) Prony analysis. The above features have been implemented using standard bus systems; Single Machine Infinite Bus (SMIB) system, three generator nine bus system and two area four generator test system, where the user can select a test system at the beginning. The results of the developed software are validated using commercially available PSSE software.
Optimized Signature Selection for Efficient String Similarity Search

In this paper, we study the problem of string similarity search to retrieve in a database all strings similar to a query string within a given threshold. To measure the similarity between strings, we use edit distance. Many algorithms have been proposed under a filtering-and-verification framework to solve the problem. To reduce the overhead of edit distance verification, it is crucial to efficiently generate a small number of candidates in the filtering phase. Recently, an index structure named HSTree has been proposed for efficiently generating candidate strings. To generate candidates, they select and utilize HSTree nodes at a specific level calculated from a given threshold. In this paper, we observe that there are many alternative ways to select HSTree nodes, and propose a novel technique that selects HSTree nodes in an optimized way based on the observation. We also propose a modified HSTree, named a threaded HSTree, which connects inverted lists of an HSTree node to inverted lists of its child nodes. With a threaded HSTree, we can reduce the overhead of index lookups in HSTree nodes while selecting optimal tree nodes. Experimental results show that the proposed technique significantly outperforms the existing technique using the HSTree.
COUPLING AGENT EFFECT ON THE PROPERTIES OF THERMOPLASTIC COMPOSITES FILLED SAND-DUST FROM MEDIUM DENSITY FIBERBOARD

The study investigates coupling agent effect on some properties of thermoplastic composites filled with sand dust from medium density fiberboard (MDF). The physical, mechanical and morphological properties of the composites produced with the extrusion method were accomplished by using sand dusts of medium density fiberboard (SD_MDF) as lignocellulosic material, high density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) as thermoplastic polymer and maleic anhydride grafted HDPE and maleic anhydride grafted PP as coupling agents. Coupling agents at different ratios were used to improve the adhesion between fiber and polymers in production, and their effects on the properties were evaluated. Thickness swelling and water absorption of the samples decreased when used coupling agent. Except for impact strength, flexural and tensile properties of the composites which increased with presence of a coupling agent. In the light of obtained results, it was specified that use of coupling agent improved physical, mechanical and morphological properties of SD_MDF filled thermoplastic composites. In addition, optimum coupling agent usage rate were determined as 3%.
The Invasion of Native Forest by Phytophthora cinnamomi. II. Post-Infection Vegetation Patterns, Regeneration, Decline in Inoculum and Attempted Control

Further investigations of die-back in sclerophyll forest have shown that the disease continued to spread, averaging 171 m per year over periods of 3 years. Soil disturbance and gravel removal did not result in disease when no P. cinnamomi was present. P. cinnamomi was isolated from areas showing disease symptoms, but not from unaffected areas. The pathogen was confined to the A horizon of the soil and did not penetrate the clay or B horizon. Susceptibility of eucalypts was experi- mentally demonstrated at germination, at the seedling stage, and at maturity. More than 40% of mature stringybarks (of three species) were killed on some severely diseased sites. The eucalypts of the area were rated in order of susceptibility or tolerance to the pathogen. A decline in the disease potential of infected soil with time was demonstrated, and was associated with decreased population density of the pathogen. Changes in both type and composition of the plant community were noted. The sclerophyll forest with its woody understorey became a grassy woodland. A number of woody shrubs disappeared and a variety of herbs, such as grasses, bulbs, and composites, colonized the space made available by the death of woody shrubs and die-back of the eucalypt canopy. The most successful control of the disease was achieved by injecting infected areas with Vapam. This killed everything, and a barrier zone 4 m wide injected with Vapam prevented the spread of infection over a period of 18 months.
EQueue: Elastic Lock-Free FIFO Queue for Core-to-Core Communication on Multi-Core Processors

In recent years, the number of CPU cores in a multi-core processor keeps increasing. To leverage the increasing hardware resource, programmers need to develop parallelized software programs. One promising approach to parallelizing high-performance applications is pipeline parallelism, which divides a task into a serial of subtasks and then maps these subtasks to a group of CPU cores, making the communication scheme between the subtasks running on different cores a critical component for the parallelized programs. One widely-used implementation of the communication scheme is software-based, lock-free first-in-first-out queues that move data between different subtasks. The primary design goal of the prior lock-free queues was higher throughput, such that the technique of batching data was heavily used in their enqueue and dequeue operations. Unfortunately, a lock-free queue with batching heavily depends on the assumption that data arrive at a constant rate, and the queue is in an equilibrium state. Experimentally we found that the equilibrium state of a queue rarely happens in real, high-performance use cases (e.g., 10Gbps+ network applications) because data arriving rate fluctuates sharply. As a result, existing queues suffer from performance degradation when used in real applications on multi-core processors. In this paper, we present EQueue, a lock-free queue to handle this robustness issue in existing queues. EQueue is lock-free, efficient, and robust. EQueue can adaptively (1) shrink its queue size when data arriving rate is low to keep its memory footprint small to utilize CPU cache better, and (2) enlarge its queue size to avoid overflow when data arriving rate is in burstiness. Experimental results show that when used in high-performance applications, EQueue can always perform an enqueue/dequeue operation in less than 50 CPU cycles, which outperforms FastForward and MCRingBuffer, two state-of-the-art queues, by factors 3 and 2, respectively.
Design of a Privacy Risk Model for IoT applications in smart homes

Abstract— Domestic IoT devices have been registering extremely high adoption rates as new generations increase their purchasing power and the promises of value expressed by the manufacturers of these devices are becoming increasingly attractive and necessary for users. Related to this, the user’s privacy surface attack is expanding directly, and its protection is limited by diverse factors, for instance design, device utility or even manufacturers profitability. Therefore, in this paper we propose to develop a risk management model for privacy in IoT domestic devices. However, as the protection of privacy is an individual perception, generalization is not practical given the difference in perception of privacy from individual to individual, our proposal is a framework that guides the elaboration of a specific individual model. In this paper we present the steps to develop the model and establish the action plan to manage privacy risks.
Regulation of tocopherol biosynthesis through transcriptional control of tocopherol cyclase during cold hardening in Eucalyptus gunnii

A clone very similar to the maize sucrose export defective (SXD1) gene encoding a tocopherol cyclase (TC) was isolated from a Eucalyptus cold-acclimation downregulated cDNA library and was designated EgSXD1 (Eucalyptus gunnii sucrose export defective 1). As expected, the synthesis of tocopherols (vitamin E) from 2,3-dimethyl-5-phytyl-1,4-benzoquinol by the recombinant protein demonstrated that the EgSXD1 gene product is a TC. Northern hybridizations with RNA isolated from cell suspension cultures clearly showed a fast EgSXD1 downregulation by cold. This strong repression also evidenced by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction analysis on plantlets was associated with both an increased cold tolerance and a slight but significant decrease in leaf tocopherol content. These results, contrary to the commonly reported tocopherol accumulation after drought or salt stress, raise the question of the role of this gene regulation in cold hardening, which is clearly different from a direct antioxidant protection.
Nursing and Health Policy Perspectives Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): strengthening our resolve to achieve universal palliative care

In this paper, we strongly advocate for universal palliative care access during the COVID-19 pandemic. The delivery of universal palliative care services has been called for by leading global health organizations and experts. Nurses are critical to realizing this goal. COVID-19 diagnoses and fatalities continue to rise, underscoring the importance of palliative care, particularly in the context of scant resources. To inform the writing of this paper, we undertook a review of the COVID-19 and palliative care literature and drew on our experiences. It is very clear that investment in nurses is needed to ensure appropriate palliative care services now and into the future. Avoiding futile interventions and alleviating suffering is an ethical imperative for nurses regardless of the setting. Multi-level practices and policies to foster the delivery of safe, high-quality palliative care for all are urgently needed.
Clustering Residential Customers with Smart Meter data using a Data Analytic Approach – External Validation and Robustness Analysis

Demand Response (DR) is a promising solution to deal with supply and demand imbalances in power systems. Customer classification using unsupervised clustering algorithms based on load measurements from smart meters can provide added knowledge about electricity customers and their potential to provide DR. In this paper, an approach for clustering residential end-users based on their load characteristics is presented. The methodology is reducing hourly load data with a stratification approach, together with K-means which clusters the customers based on their relative load levels. Hourly smart meter load data is collected from 5000 customers, along with complementary energy-use survey data from 95 of these. The survey data is used to validate the clustering results. The validation shows that the approach can distinguish electric and non-electric heating systems, along with behavioral aspects with respect to household compositions. Extensive sensitivity analysis on model parameters are also presented. The analysis shows that the clustering results are sensitive to changes in stratification parameters, and, thus, needs to be addressed carefully before it is used for DR applications.
An Enterprise Rights Management System for On-the-Field Maintenance Facilities

On-the-field maintenance of complex equipments, that may involve multiple subjects and stakeholders, is one of most challenging scenarios for Enterprise Rights Management (ERM). In this paper, we present an ERM system that guarantees the “on-site” protection of information confidentiality. In particular, our system features local data encryption and minimal data transfers. A secure key management protocol is executed by the devices operating on-site and the remote manufacturer’s support center and guarantees an efficient and dynamic enforcement of arbitrary data-provider-defined access policies. Operator identities are verified by means of strong multi-biometric verification schemes whilst protecting their biometries by means of cancelable biometries. To this end, we provide the first experimental evaluation of cancelable biometrics based on the fusion of face and voice biometries, that may be of independent interest.
Aedes albopictus oviposits with other Aedes species in artificial oviposition cups: a case study in Knox County, Tennessee, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: Interspecific associations between two mosquito species can lead to effects such as competition, species displacement, and species stability. To better understand Aedes albopictus (Skuse) and other Aedes species, we monitored eggs in artificial oviposition cups (ovitraps) within Knox County, TN, U.S.A. , during the 2016 and 2017 mosquito seasons. In 2016, one black and one white ovitrap were placed at 18 sites for 21 weeks, while in 2017 black and white ovitraps baited with grass-infused or deionized water were placed at 11 sites for nine weeks. Eggs were identified to species and resulting counts were used to determine the degree of interspecific association using Cole's coefficients (C7) and the degree of heterogeneity across space and time using generalized linear mixed models (GLMM). Here, Aedes mosquitoes are generally ovipositing in black cups with grass-infused water, and Ae. albopictus eggs co-occurred with other Aedes species more often than would be expected. Finding a positive significant interspecific association between Ae. albopictus and other Aedes eggs suggests that methods used to control Ae. albopictus may also control other Aedes mosquitoes. Finding that Ae. albopictus co-occurs with other Aedes mosquitoes warrants additional research to evaluate outcomes associated with co-occurrence within the study area.
Complexity Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Matrix Product on Multicore Architectures

The multicore revolution is underway. Classical algorithms must be revisited in order to take the hierarchical memory layout into account. In this paper, we aim at minimizing the number of cache misses paid during the execution of the matrix product kernel on a multicore processor, and we show how to achieve the best possible tradeoff between shared and distributed caches. Comprehensive simulation results confirm the analytical performance predictions and fully establish the practical significance of our new algorithms.
Behavioural flexibility during year-round foraging in macaroni penguins

Penguins are major consumers in the marine environment. However, like many top predators, very little information exists on their foraging behaviour outside the breeding season. We investigated the foraging behaviour of the macaroni penguin Eudyptes chrysolophus continuously for 2 consecutive years, from the end of December 2001. This allowed us to investigate whether foraging behaviour varied between sexes, years or phases of the annual cycle. Male penguins tended to dive deeper and longer than female penguins, but at a lower frequency, probably as a result of their larger body size. There was little variation in foraging behaviour between the 2 years studied, although neither year included a notable period of low Antarctic krill abundance. Diving behaviour varied substantially within years and general linear models were used to investigate this variability. In summary, all penguins tended to dive deeper, longer and more efficiently during their winter migration than during the summer breeding season. The penguins dived predominantly during daylight hours at all times of the year, but appeared to be more constrained by daylight during the short winter days. Several diving variables including dive duration, dive rate and amount of time spent diving were significantly related to day length and these associations were stronger during winter than summer. The macaroni penguin shows flexibility in its foraging behaviour as it adapts to differing constraints and challenges during its annual cycle.
Corn yield response to nitrogen fertilizer timing and deficiency level

Nitrogen fertilizer is typically applied to corn (Zea mays L.) shortly before planting, but there are several reasons why later N applications may be of interest: to spread work away from the busy planting season, to avoid the frequent wet field conditions in spring, to reduce or remedy in-season N loss in wet years, or to allow use of in-season diagnostic tools. One of the obstacles to the use of later N applications is the fear that irreversible yield loss will occur due to N stress. Our objective was to evaluate the yield impact of delaying N applications until the late vegetative growth stages and as far as silking. We conducted a total of 28 experiments with timing of a single N application as the experimental treatment. We found little or no evidence of irreversible yield loss when N applications were delayed as late as stage V11, even when N stress was highly visible. There was weak evidence of minor yield loss (about 3%) when N applications were delayed until stage V12 to V16. Only 3 of the 28 experiments had N applications later than V16-all were at silking and relative yields were 0.71, 0.89, and 0.95. Though full yield was not achieved when N applications were delayed until silking, yield was still highly responsive to N application at this stage-yield response exceeded 2.2 Mg ha -1 in all three experiments.
Exploring PMU Measurement Representation for ML-based Fault Diagnosis Models

Synchrophasors are becoming more available to distribution systems through the use of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU). This enables the performance of Machine Learning (ML) based fault diagnostic models to improve due to utilization of underlying information from the angle measurement instead of only using the magnitude measurements. However, most ML models do not support complex numbers, such as phasors, as input. One strategy is to decompose each phasor measurement into two features which can be represented in either rectangular or polar form. This research provides a basis on determining which representation yields better patterns in the feature space in terms of building better performing fault diagnosis models. The patterns in the feature space due to different representations were observed through visual and empirical evidences. Results show that decomposing the phasor into its rectangular representation yields better patterns in the feature space which could result in more accurate and robust fault diagnosis models.