Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integration of Design of Experiments within a Strong Lean Manufacturing Environment

It has been well argued in quality management research that combining and integrating overlapping management practices lead to superior performance. Taguchi methods and lean manufacturing are waste/loss elimination approaches. It is argued that there is a high degree of integration of the Taguchi method within lean manufacturing environment. Surprisingly, there are very few studies that look at how the Taguchi method could be integrated within a lean manufacturing environment. Therefore the key objective of this paper is to address this dearth. The paper is an outline of the PhD research of the first author, shows how the theoretical model explaining how Taguchi philosophy is integrated with lean manufacturing was developed. The paper also shows how the model will be empirically tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) through data collected from world-class lean manufacturing plants. Authors’ Biographies Pramila Gamage is a PhD candidate in her first year at the Massey University, New Zealand. She is undertaking her doctoral research in the field of technology. In her research, she deals with Lean manufacturing and Taguchi philosophy in the scope of quality of product and process. Nihal P. Jayamaha is a lecturer in quality assurance attached to Massey University, New Zealand. Nihal’s research interests include quality/business excellence models, statistical applications in quality and operations management, and healthcare quality. Nigel Grigg is Associate professor (Quality Systems) at Massey University in New Zealand. His teaching and research area focuses on quality and performance improvement, including statistical thinking, knowledge management, organisational culture and change management. Presentation Experience Pramila has some experience in presenting ideas (mostly in the form of lectures) in audiences in her home country (Sri Lanka), in English. Integration of Design of Experiments within a Strong Lean Manufacturing Environment
The recent state and variability of the carbonate system of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and adjacent basins in the context of ocean acidification

Abstract. Ocean acidification driven by the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the surface oceans constitutes a potential threat to the health of marine ecosystems around the globe. The Arctic Ocean is particularly vulnerable to acidification and thus is an ideal region to study the progression and effects of acidification before they become globally widespread. The appearance of undersaturated surface waters with respect to the carbonate mineral aragonite ( ΩA ), an important threshold beyond which the calcification and growth of some marine organisms might be hindered, has recently been documented in the Canada Basin and adjacent Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA), a dynamic region with an inherently strong variability in biogeochemical processes. Nonetheless, few of these observations were made in the last 5 years and the spatial coverage in the latter region is poor. We use a dataset of carbonate system parameters measured in the CAA and its adjacent basins (Canada Basin and Baffin Bay) from 2003 to 2016 to describe the recent state of these parameters across the Canadian Arctic and investigate the amplitude and sources of the system's variability over more than a decade. Our findings reveal that, in the summers of 2014 to 2016, the ocean surface across our study area served as a net CO2 sink and was partly undersaturated with respect to aragonite in the Canada Basin and the Queen Maud Gulf, the latter region exhibiting undersaturation over its entire water column at some locations. We estimate, using measurements made across several years, that approximately a third of the interannual variability in surface dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentrations in the CAA results from fluctuations in biological activity. In consideration of the system's variability resulting from these fluctuations, we derive times of emergence of the anthropogenic ocean acidification signal for carbonate system parameters in the study area.
Auditors’ Selection of Tolerable Error and Risk Levels in the Context of Sample Size Decisions: A Cross-cultural Experiment

As cross-border mergers and acquisitions become more frequent, cross-cultural research into the practices and attitudes of auditors becomes more warranted. Since many large, national auditing firms in northern Europe nowadays are associated with one of the American Big 5 firms, harmonisation of practices and adoption of the same sophisticated methods can be expected. The present study focuses on monetary unit sampling (MUS) or dollar-unit sampling (DUS), a method that has been recommended by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The study tests the effects of population size, internal control, analytical review, audit object and culture on auditors’ selection of acceptable upper-precision (materiality) and risk levels, judgements required when MUS is used to determine the sample size. The results indicate that internal control and analytical review have statistically significant effects on the acceptable upper-precision limits and also the acceptable risk level, suggesting that if internal control is known to be strong, or if an analytical review gives no warning of possible errors, auditors across the two cultures tend to accept lower precision and risk limits, the result of which is smaller sample sizes as determined by MUS. In addition, culture had an almost significant effect on the acceptable risk levels, with Swedish auditors more riskaverse than their Finnish colleagues, resulting in the choice of smaller sample sizes by the latter group.
COVID-19: Justifying therapeutic suggestions

Since March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the world has not been the same again. Economies of nations were shut down following a forced lockdown imposed by the rampaging disease. As of June 4, 2020, number of global deaths caused by the disease is put at 388 thousand, 658 people, with more than 2 million people threatened with job loss globally. Social research linked most patients to the Wuhan whole food market where sea food and live animals are sold. Given the high infectivity of the virus in question, SARS-CoV-19, the rate of transmission of the disease has been on the rise globally. A cure is yet to be found and the battle with the pandemic is still on. From a multi-disciplinary perspective, the paper presents pertinent facts about the novel coronavirus of 2019, and justifies some therapeutic suggestions the health world is currently tinkering with (Remdesivir, Azithromycin, Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine, Chlorpromazine, Immunostimulants, Ascorbic acid) for managing the disease it causes. Key Word: COVID-19, drug repurposing, virus, pandemic, Remdesivir, Azithromycin, Chloroquine/Hydroxychloroquine, Chlorpromazine, Immunostimulants, Ascorbic acid -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Date of Submission: 13-07-2020 Date of Acceptance: 28-07-2020 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Overview of Major Genes Affecting

Prolificacy is defined as the number of progenies born per parturition. Fertility is often used as synonym of prolificacy; however, prolificacy is slightly different from fertility, nevertheless to be prolific, an animal must be highly fertile. High fecundity should reflect the high prolificacy as well due to the linear relationship (i.e., fecundity=fertility×prolificacy). Generally, prolificacy is assessed as ovulation rate (number of mature oocytes released during one reproductive cycle). Whereas, ovulation rate is the primary source of variation in prolificacy, both within and between breeds (Webb et al. 2007) but unfortunately, it is poorly understood in female mammals (Shimasaki et al. 2004; Fabre et al. 2006; Vireque et al. 2008). It is a complex trait influenced by genetic and multiple transection of endocrine signals between ovary and the pituitary gland (McNatty et al. 2001). The complex signals do involve The objective of this review is to explore the current developments on major genes working on prolific sheep breeds and the mechanism behind it, while identifying the future working points. Productivity is the ultimate goal of farm animal production and prolificacy is a key feature in determining productivity in farm animals. Ovulation rate in mammals is an intricate process involving genetics and endocrine pathways. Exceptional reproductive capabilities along with higher ovulation rates were observed in many breeds of sheep from different parts of the world since the discovery of Booroola Merino sheep. These naturally occurring mutations acting on prolificacy are found in chromosomes 5, 6, 11 and X but speculations are around about the presence of more mutations on these genes or different genes on multi ovulating sheep breeds. The exact control mechanism of multiple ovulations and multiple births in prolific sheep breeds is poorly understood. Over the years it has been repeatedly shown that gonadotropins and intra ovarian factors play vital and variety of roles. More specifically, follicular stimulating hormone regulation during folliculogenesis could be a promise for the future studies. Among those intra ovarian factors, bone morphogenic protein system is one of the indispensable components, which exerts enormous enthusiasm among the scientific community towards manipulating ovarian folliculogenesis. Rather surprisingly, biological and physiological roles of bone morphogenic protein subfamily are not thoroughly elucidated and contradictory findings among the mammals make further twists, which will be the gaps to be filled in the near future. Presence of a regulatory control loop between oocyte, granulosa and theca cells through transforming growth factor B (TGFB) superfamily is proposed here.
Hysteroscopy in the management of endometrial hyperplasia and cancer in reproductive aged women: new developments and current perspectives

Over the last twenty years, the incidence of early endometrial cancer (EC) and atypical endometrial hyperplasia (AEH) among women of reproductive age is increasing rapidly, likely due to a combination of factors including increased prevalence of obesity and delayed of childbirths. Regarding preoperative diagnosis of endometrial neoplasia, it is still debated which is the most accurate and reliable method to obtain endometrial histopathological samples with fractional dilatation and curettage (D&C) having been considered, for a long time, as the method of choice. Nowadays, the advent of in-office endometrial biopsy with or without hysteroscopy has radically changed the approach, giving the opportunity to perform the endometrial biopsy under direct visualization. However, the lack of agreement about its diagnostic accuracy is still relevant. Since a significant number of women with AEH and/or EC are of childbearing age, a fertility-sparing diagnostic and therapeutic approach should be considered in all cases. The feasibility, safety and efficacy of fertility-sparing strategies involving hysteroscopic focal resections in conjunction with hormonal therapies have been evaluated and beneficial effects have been confirmed in several studies and one meta-analysis. Both local and systemic administration of hormonal therapies are currently used. Oral progestin, including medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) and megestrol acetate, are the most commonly used therapies. Nowadays, new therapeutic approaches, such as levonorgestrel intrauterine systems (LNG-IUS), gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, combined megestrol acetate and metformin, and other combinations of therapies are also used as first line therapies or after the hysteroscopic resection of the lesion. However, it is still unclear which approach provides higher clinical response with lower relapse rate, in addition to preserving fertility in women desiring to conceive. The aim of this narrative review is to summarize the available evidence regarding the evaluation and management with fertility-sparing treatments options of women with AEC and EC.
Comparative Study of Customer Ratings Analysis Algorithms

: Reviewing online applications and services is now becoming a trend and is highly important as the world is progressing towards digital platform of everything it has become easier to use the services and also to decide which app is to be used and which not. Customer reviews for any online platform business is must and is very essential for its growth. Analyzing ratings and reviews allows a strategist to act according to the market needs and to overcome the shortcomings in the services and in the products. There can be n ways of analyzing the ratings and reviews, the process of data analysis comes under the data mining techniques. Data mining is the process of analyzing hidden patterns of data according to different perspectives for categorization into useful information, which is collected and assembled in common areas, such as data warehouses, for efficient analysis, data mining algorithms, facilitating business decision making and other information requirements to ultimately cut costs and increase revenue.
Exploring by Believing

Sometimes, we face choices between actions most likely to lead to valuable outcomes, and actions which put us in a better position to learn. These choices exemplify what is called the exploration/exploitation trade-off. In computer science and psychology, this trade-off has fruitfully been applied to modulating the way agents or systems make choices over time. This article extends the trade-off to belief. We can be torn between two ways of believing, one of which is expected to be more accurate in light of current evidence, whereas the other is expected to lead to more learning opportunity and accuracy in the long run. Further, it is sometimes rationally permissible to choose the latter. The article breaks down the features of action which give rise to the trade-off, and then argues that each feature applies equally well to belief. This conclusion is an instance of a systematic, foreseeable way in which what is rational to believe now depends on what one expects to be doing in the future. That is, epistemic rationality fundamentally concerns time.
Underwater sound: Its relevance to behavioral functions among fishes and marine mammals

A brief history of the development of underwater bioacoustics (from the early 1960s on) is provided, particularly as it relates to the theoretical problems confronting directional hearing in fishes and its experimental resolution as well as the resulting change that occurred in the interests of many workers, i.e., from understanding the acoustical and associated functional problems confronting the whole animal to understanding the neural and sensory mechanisms of hearing. Several topics are then discussed: (1) functional aspects of acoustical communication (interplay among sensory modalities and sound structure), (2) functional aspects of interception (some insights into old problems), and (3) orientation in space (independent of animal interactions) by fishes and marine mammals. The author concludes that although studies are demonstrating an expanding functional role of sound in the lives of fishes and marine mammals, speculation continues to play a large role. Such speculation has strong heuristic value.
Assessment and Separation of Angiotensin I-Converting Enzyme Inhibitory Peptides in Chinese Soypaste

Abstract A Chinese soypaste-derived fraction with potent angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitory activity (IC50 = 25.9 μg/mL) was obtained by treating soypaste extract with 80% ethanol. The result of gradient reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) suggested that bioactive peptides bearing some polarity groups made a substantial contribution to the ACE inhibitory activity. By mass spectrometric analysis, a component was separated as Glu-Ser-Gly-Asp which was then found to act in a dose-dependent manner against ACE activity as a non-competitive inhibitor, with an IC50 value of 2.297 mM.
DALE : Dark Region-Aware Low-light Image Enhancement

In this paper, we present a novel low-light image enhancement method called dark region-aware low-light image enhancement (DALE), where dark regions are accurately recognized by the proposed visual attention module and their brightness are intensively enhanced. Our method can estimate the visual attention in an efficient manner using super-pixels without any complicated process. Thus, the method can preserve the color, tone, and brightness of original images and prevents normally illuminated areas of the images from being saturated and distorted. Experimental results show that our method accurately identifies dark regions via the proposed visual attention, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
All About Knowledge Graphs for Actions

Current action recognition systems require large amounts of training data for recognizing an action. Recent works have explored the paradigm of zero-shot and few-shot learning to learn classifiers for unseen categories or categories with few labels. Following similar paradigms in object recognition, these approaches utilize external sources of knowledge (eg. knowledge graphs from language domains). However, unlike objects, it is unclear what is the best knowledge representation for actions. In this paper, we intend to gain a better understanding of knowledge graphs (KGs) that can be utilized for zero-shot and few-shot action recognition. In particular, we study three different construction mechanisms for KGs: action embeddings, action-object embeddings, visual embeddings. We present extensive analysis of the impact of different KGs in different experimental setups. Finally, to enable a systematic study of zero-shot and few-shot approaches, we propose an improved evaluation paradigm based on UCF101, HMDB51, and Charades datasets for knowledge transfer from models trained on Kinetics.
Theoretical analysis for dynamic contact angle hysteresis on chemically patterned surfaces

A dynamic wetting problem is studied for a moving thin fiber inserted in fluid and with a chemically inhomogeneous surface. A reduced model is derived for contact angle hysteresis by using the Onsager principle as an approximation tool. The model is simple and captures the essential dynamics of the contact angle. From this model we derive an upper bound of the advancing contact angle and a lower bound of the receding angle, which are verified by numerical simulations. The results are consistent with the quasi-static results. The model can also be used to understand the asymmetric dependence of the advancing and receding contact angles on the fiber velocity, which is observed recently in physical experiments reported in Guan et al Phys. Rev. Lett. 2016.
Temporal Random Indexing of Context Vectors Applied to Event Detection

In this paper we explore new representations for encoding language data. The general method of one-hot encoding grows linearly with the size of the word corpus in space-complexity. We address this by using Random Indexing(RI) of context vectors with non-zero entries. We propose a novel RI representation where we exploit the effect imposing a probability distribution on the number of randomized entries which leads to a class of RI representations. We also propose an algorithm that is log linear in the size of word corpus to track the semantic relationship of the query word to other words for suggesting the events that are relevant to the word in question. Finally we run simulations on the novel RI representations using the proposed algorithms for tweets relevant to the word "iPhone" and present results. The RI representation is shown to be faster and space efficient as compared to BoW embeddings.
The onset time of Fermi’s golden rule

Fermi’s golden rule describes the decay dynamics of unstable quantum systems coupled to a reservoir, and predicts a linear decay in time. Although it arises at relatively short times, the Fermi regime does not take hold in the earliest stages of the quantum dynamics. The standard criterion in the literature for the onset time of the Fermi regime is tF ∼ 1/Δω, with Δω the frequency interval around the resonant transition frequency ω0 of the system, over which the coupling to the reservoir does not vary appreciably. In this work, this criterion is shown to be inappropriate in general for broadband reservoirs, where the reservoir coupling spectrum takes the form R (ω) ∝ ωη, and for which it is found that for η > 1, the onset time of the Fermi regime is given by tF ∝ (ωX/ω0)η−1 × 1/ω0 where ωX is the high-frequency cutoff of the reservoir. Therefore, the onset of the Fermi regime can take place at times orders of magnitude larger than those predicted by the standard criterion. This phenomenon is shown to be related to the excitation of the off-resonant frequencies of the reservoir at short times. For broadband reservoirs with η ≤ 1, and for narrowband reservoirs, it is shown that the standard criterion is correct.
Finding Small and Large $k$-Clique Instances on a Quantum Computer

Algorithms for triangle finding, the smallest nontrivial instance of the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula>-clique problem, have been proposed for quantum computers. Still, those algorithms assume the use of fixed access time quantum RAM. In this article, we present a practical gate-based approach to both the triangle-finding problem and its NP-hard <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula>-clique generalization. We examine both constant factors for near-term implementation on a noisy intermediate scale quantum computing (NISQ) device and the scaling of the problem to evaluate long-term use of quantum computers. We compare the time complexity and circuit practicality of the theoretical approach and actual implementation. We propose and apply two different strategies to the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula>-clique problem, examining the circuit size of Qiskit implementations. We analyze our implementations by simulating triangle finding with various error models, observing the effect on damping the amplitude of the correct answer, and compare to execution on six real IBM quantum machines. Finally, we estimate the approximate quantum volume needed so that the smallest instance of our approach can be executable with minimal error on a real NISQ device.
THERMAL ECOLOGY OF ANOLINE LIZARDS: TEMPERATE VERSUS TROPICAL STRATEGIES

Based on field studies of a Texas population, the thermal ecology of the northernmost anole (Anolis carolinensis) is described in terms of mean and preferred body temperatures. Multiple linear regression analyses of mean body temperatures from 37 anole populations show significant positive regressions with ambient light level and latitude, and a significant negative relationship with eleva- tion. We contrast the roles of mean body temperature in adaptive strategies of dis- persal from lowland tropical sites (1) into low temperate latitudes and (2) up tropical mountains. It appears that with dispersal, the behavior patterns which con- trol mean body temperature (i.e., habitat selection and basking) have been readily modified evolutionarily with the result that changes in a whole suite of other life- history characteristics have been minimized.