Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF MARKETING MIX ON BRAND EQUITY DIMENSIONS

Since the elevated position brand equity has an outstanding importance, this paper studies the effect of mixed marketing on brand equity. Given the increased number of competitive goods provided from all product classes in the market, and the opportunities presenting themselves alongside, the dimensions of the brand equity have found increasing importance for the corporations in providing the customers with unlimited choices across brand industries. The brand equity is considered a key indicator of brand health; and its continuous revision is very important in effective brand management. The brands of large corporations survive the attacks from their competition due to the relations they have established with their customers. Thus, the aim of this investigation is to introduce some models illustrating the effect of marketing mix on brand equity. This paper builds on the literature, specifically the works of Buil et al (2013) and Huang and Sarigöllü (2012), in order to allow the researchers to use them in further studies. KeywordsBrand Equity, Brand Loyalty, Perceived Quality, Brand Awareness.
A PHANTOM STUDY OF FACTORS AFFECTING STANDARDIZED UPTAKE VALUE (SUV) MEASUREMENT OF QUANTITATIVE TC-99M MDP BONE SPECT/CT

The objective was to study factors that affect standardized uptake value (SUV) measurement of quantitative Tc-MDP bone SPECT/CT using phantom. A cylindrical phantom was used to determine a calibration factor and a NEMA body phantom was used to measure SUV. Tc solution with activity of 16.38 kBq/ml was filled in the cylindrical phantom and background activity of Tc in the NEMA phantom with TBR of 7:1 was 18 kBq/ml. SPECT/CT data were acquired based on clinical protocol and 3D images were reconstructed using OS-EM algorithm with compensation for degrading factors. Both SUVs including SUVmean and SUVmax were measured using Q.Metrix software and the effect of iterative update and sphere size on SUVs were investigated. The study showed that increasing iterative updates resulted in increasing both SUVs for all spheres and %differences of measured SUVs comparing with true SUV for all spheres tended to increase when sphere size decreased due to PVE.
Antifungal activity of medicinal plants from Northeastern Brazil

The aim of this work was to find how medicinal plants play an important role as source of new bioactive molecules. To evaluate the antifungal activity of 10 medicinal plants from northeastern Brazil, traditionally used as anti-infective agents. The activity of 30 crude extracts (water; ethanol:water, 1:1; acetone:water, 1:1) against four standard species of Candida yeasts (Candida albicans ATCC 90028, Candida dubliniensis ATCC 7289, Candida glabrata ATCC 2001 and Candida krusei ATCC 6258) was investigated by the Minimal Inhibitory Concentration (MIC), using the microdilution method and the working range used was from 1.95 to 1000 μg/mL. Extracts from leaves of Eugenia uniflora (Myrtaceae), stem bark of Caesalpinia ferrea (Caesalpinaceae) and leaves of Psidium guajava (Myrtaceae) showed significant activity against all yeasts evaluated. The best antifungal activities were achieved against C. glabrata and C. krusei by E. uniflora extract (MIC = 15.62) and followed by extracts from C. ferrea and P. guajava (MIC ranged from 15.62 to 250 µg/mL). E. uniflora also showed fungicidal properties against all yeasts, especially against Candida dubliniensis. This study identified plant species that may be candidates for the development of alternative treatments for candidiasis. Key words: Antifungal activity, candidiasis, medicinal plants, crude extracts, fungicide, northeastern Brazil.
CROP CULTIVATION INTELLIGENT SYSTEM

Agriculture has a significant role to play in the economic development of India and the farmer community is the back bone of the agriculture sector. Intelligence refers to the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. The researcher has developed an intelligent environment in the form of ‘Crop Cultivation Intelligence System’. This intelligent system Pre-process data, available from heterogeneous data sources, utilises Mathematical Model’s expertise and presents output in the form of knowledge in knowledge presentation. Agriculture Stake holders in the form of knowledge consumer, apply Crop Cultivation related query and gain generated knowledge in this segment of knowledge presentation. This ‘Agriculture Intelligence’ helps the farmer community in their decision making of farm management and agribusiness activities such as i) Predicting agriculture commodity market price before cultivation, ii) Determining best choice of cultivars to plant in their farm iii) Determine optimum cultivation date v) Evaluate demand and supply risk and vi) Investment Prioritising.
on the In uence of the Approximated Principal Distance on the Accuracy of Orthophotoplans Out of Historic Polychrome ( on Flat and Quasi-Flat Surface ) * * 1

Photographs used in photogrammetry must be taken with cameras with xed and stable interior orientation elements (IO elements). To reconstruct a bundle of rays the exact principal distance the moment of taking the picture needs to be known. This requirement is ful lled by every close-range and aerial photogrammetric camera. However nowadays in close-range photogrammetry professional photogrammetric cameras are used quite rarely. Far more popular are digital SLR cameras. The stability of the IO elements is ensured by turning o the autofocus mode and the mechanical blocking of the lens. It sets limitations for users because after releasing the blocking and changing focus the same IO elements cannot be retrieved, and thus the calibration made for this position of lens loses its value entirely. In this paper the issue of making orthophotoplans of heritage objects is discussed. Materials made for conservators and public display require the highest possible visual quality and thus geometrical accuracy is not a priority. For a survey the professional photographic equipment is being used, mostly full-frame cameras with prime lenses. The character of objects requires a high resolution of resultant materials with object pixels size 1–0.3 mm. While working on a site one can come across numerous problems, such as: instability of ground, a very short time one can spend working, impossibility to assure an equal distance from objects while taking the pictures. This may lead to focus (sharpness) loss on some frames. There is a possibility of taking pictures separately focused in the technology of on-the-job calibration [6, 11]. However this technology needs a number of points stabilized on the object and signi cant depth of eld of view, both of which are impossible to achieve on a at, valuable surface of an historic object. Due to the fact that the highest possible sharpness, provided by the
A Global Weighting Scheme Based on Intra-Class and Inter-Class Term Distributions in Bag-of-Visual Words Image Classification

Bag-of-visual words (BoVW) is one of the most popular image representations in the image classification. Many features (also called visual words or codebooks) are generated to create the vector of images. However, similar to term in the text classification, these features may be relevant or irrelevant which affect the accuracy of classification. Many global weighting schemes (e.g. inverse document frequency) have been proposed to detect the relevant features. These global weighting schemes are based on document frequency (DF) in which the features will have the same weight when they have the same DF. This condition leads to reduce the discriminative power of features. Therefore, this study proposes a global weighting scheme based on intra-class and inter-class term distributions. The experiment was conducted by comparing the proposed method with the state-of-the-art global weighting schemes called inverse gravity moment (IGM) and modified inverse document frequency (mIDF). The evaluation of these weighting schemes is performed on the BoVW based image classification. Support vector machine (SVM) is used as a classifier to evaluate the methods on several benchmark datasets. By using the statistical analysis, such as Friedman nonparametric test, the proposed global weighting scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art global weighting schemes.
Article 7.indd

Phytochemicals are highly concentrated in berries, especially polyphenols as anthocyanins and ellagitannins. These compounds have been associated with antioxidant capacity, lipid peroxidation protection, anti-inflammatory activity, anticarcinogenic activity, obesity prevention and others. Blackberries are commonly grown and consumed as juice in Latin-American countries. However, blackberry juice is easily fermented and different industrial techniques are being applied to enable the juice to be stored for longer periods. One important issue required for these techniques is to preserve the health-promoting capacities of blackberries. This study compared the antioxidant activity and the lipid peroxidation protector effect between a fresh blackberry juice (FJ) and a microfiltrated blackberry juice (MJ). Chemical analysis of both juices show less polyphenols concentration in the MJ. Despite this difference, values for biological activities, such as protection of lipid peroxidation, was not significantly different between FJ and MJ. These results suggest that the compounds responsible for the antioxidant activity are maintained even after microfiltration and the free radical scavenging capacity of these compounds could protect the initiation of lipid peroxidation. Microfiltration could be used as an industrial technique to produce blackberry juice that maintains biological activities of polyphenols.
TriDepth: Triangular Patch-Based Deep Depth Prediction

We propose a novel and efficient representation for single-view depth estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Point-cloud is generally used for CNN-based 3D scene reconstruction; however it has some drawbacks: (1) it is redundant as a representation for planar surfaces, and (2) no spatial relationships between points are available (e.g, texture and surface). As a more efficient representation, we introduce a triangular-patch-cloud, which represents the surface of the 3D structure using a set of triangular patches, and propose a CNN framework for its 3D structure estimation. In our framework, we create it by separating all the faces in a 2D mesh, which are determined adaptively from the input image, and estimate depths and normals of all the faces. Using a common RGBD-dataset, we show that our representation has a better or comparable performance than the existing point-cloud-based methods, although it has much less parameters.
Variations in the Three-Dimensional Structure of the Atmospheric Circulation with Different Flavors of El Niño

Abstract Two rather different flavors of El Nino are revealed when the full three-dimensional spatial structure of the temperature field and atmospheric circulation monthly mean anomalies is analyzed using the Japanese Reanalysis (JRA-25) temperatures from 1979 through 2004 for a core region of the tropics from 30°N to 30°S, with results projected globally onto various other fields. The first two empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) both have primary relationships to El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) but feature rather different vertical and spatial structures. By construction the two patterns are orthogonal, but their signatures in sea level pressure, precipitation, outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and tropospheric diabatic heating are quite similar. Moreover, they are significantly related, with EOF-2 leading EOF-1 by about 4–6 months, indicating that they play complementary roles in the evolution of ENSO events, and with each mode playing greater or lesser roles in different events and seasons. Th.
WST 49.10-T05 CORR

Disposal of sewage sludge is forbidden and agricultural use of stabilized sludge will be banned in 2005 in Switzerland. The sludge has to be dewatered, dried, incinerated and the ashes disposed in landfills. These processes are cost intensive and lead also to the loss of valuable phosphate resources incorporated in the sludge ash. The implementation of processes that could reduce excess sludge production and recycle phosphate is therefore recommended. Partial ozonation of the return sludge of an activated sludge system reduces significantly excess sludge production, improves settling properties of the sludge and reduces bulking and scumming. The solubilized COD will also improve denitrification if the treated sludge is recycled to the anoxic zone. But ozonation will partly inhibit and kill nitrifiers and might therefore lead to a decrease of the effective solid retention time of the nitrifier, which reduces the safety of the nitrification. This paper discusses the effect of ozonation on sludge reduction, the operation stability of nitrification, improvement of denitrification and gives also an energy and cost evaluation.
Evaluation of Phytochemicals in polar and non polar solvent extracts of leaves of Aegle marmelos (L.)

Aegle marmelos (L.) Correa, commonly known as Bael, is a sacred tree for Hindu Religion and is native to northern India. The various phytochemicals from different parts of Aegle marmelos tree have already been investigated and isolated. Different phytochemicals have been isolated from the stem bark of Aegle marmelos such as marmesin–1”α -L rhamnopyranoside and 1, 5 -dihydroxy 6 methoxy -2 methyl anthraquinone along with lupeol and β-sitosterol. The leaves of Aegle marmelos also yielded other chemical compounds such as Aegeline, Lupeol, Cineol, Citral and Eugenol. Moreover, Marmelosin, Luvangetin and Marmelide have been reported and isolated from fruits of Aegle marmelos. In the present investigation the dried leaves of Aegle marmelos were powdered using a mixture grinder and extracted using six different solvents (five non polar viz. Acetone, Petroleum ether, Ethanol, Benzene and Methanol and one polar solvent, the Distilled water). All the six solvent extracts were assayed for qualitative and quantitative screening of their phytochemicals. All the six solvent extracts revealed the presence of various phytochemicals such as tannins, phlobatannins saponins, , terpinoids, diterpinoids, emodins, flavonoids, cardiac glycosides, anthraquinones, carotenoids, reducing sugars, alkaloids, anthocyanin, coumarins, steroids, phytosterols, phenol, fatty acids, proteins and amino acids. Of these 20 phytochemicals tannin, saponin, terpenoid, diterpinoid, emodin, flavonoid, cardiac glycoside, anthraquinone, carotenoid, reducing sugar, alkaloids, anthocyanin, coumarin, phenol, fatty acid, protein and amino acids were detected in all the six solvent extracts. The leaves of Aegle marmelos contained a significant amount of alkaloid, flavonoids, phenolic, saponins and tannin content. The amount of flavonoids was maximum (42.75mg/gm) followed by phenols (23.85mg/gm), alkaloids (15.75mg/gm), saponins (14.65mg/gm) and tannins (12.35mg/gm). The leaf extracts of Aegle marmelos (L.) Correa. and showed the presence of terpenoids, steroids and phytosterols, tannins, alkaloids, glycosides, saponins, reducing sugars, phenols and flavonoids. The extraction of various phytochemicals was seen to be more effectively done in polar solvents (ethanol, methanol and distilled water) than the non polar (Acetone, petroleum ether, benzene) solvents. Especially, ethanolic, methanolic and distilled water leaf extracts showed presence of most of the tested phytochemicals. Hence, it can be reported that alcoholic and aqueous extracts were the best for extracting the active principle than others.
Mapping Dynamics of Bacterial Communities in a Full-Scale Drinking Water Distribution System Using Flow Cytometry

Microbial monitoring of drinking water is required to guarantee high quality water and to mitigate health hazards. Flow cytometry (FCM) is a fast and robust method that determines bacterial concentrations in liquids. In this study, FCM was applied to monitor the dynamics of the bacterial communities over one year in a full-scale drinking water distribution system (DWDS), following implementation of ultrafiltration (UF) combined with coagulation at the drinking water treatment plant (DWTP). Correlations between the environmental conditions in the DWDS and microbial regrowth were observed, including increases in total cell counts with increasing retention time (correlation coefficient R = 0.89) and increasing water temperature (up to 5.24-fold increase in cell counts during summer). Temporal and spatial biofilm dynamics affecting the water within the DWDS were also observed, such as changes in the percentage of high nucleic acid bacteria with increasing retention time (correlation coefficient R = −0.79). FCM baselines were defined for specific areas in the DWDS to support future management strategies in this DWDS, including a gradual reduction of chloramine.
Constant Time Sliding Window Filter SLAM as a Basis for Metric Visual Perception

—This paper describes a Sliding Window Filter (SWF) that is an on-line constant-time approximation to the feature-based 6-degree-of-freedom full Batch Least Squares Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem. The ultimate goal is to develop a ﬁlter that can quickly and optimally fuse all data from a sequence of (stereo) images into a single underlying statistically accurate and precise spatial representation. Such a capability is highly desirable for mobile robots, though it is a computationally intense dense data-fusion problem. The SWF is useful in this context because it can scale from exhaustive batch solutions to fast incremental solutions. For instance if the window encompasses all time, the solution is algebraically equivalent to full SLAM; if only one time step is maintained, the solution is algebraically equivalent to the Extended Kalman Filter SLAM solution; if robot poses and environment landmarks are slowly marginalized out over time such that the state vector ceases to grow, then the ﬁlter becomes constant time, like Visual Odometry. Interestingly, the SWF enables other properties, such as continuous sub-mapping, lazy data association, undelayed or delayed landmark initialization, and incremental robust estimation. We test the algorithm in simulations using stereo vision exterioceptive sensors and inertial measurement proprioceptive sensors. Initial experiments show qualitatively that the SWF approaches the performance of the optimal batch estimator, even for small windows on the order of 5-10 frames.
AN APPLICATION OF ARCH AND ARCH-M MODELS TO STUDY INFLATION IN Abstract MEXICO FROM 1978 TO 1999

MEXICO FROM 1978 TO 1999 Norma A. Hernández Perales* Tecnológico de ·Monterrey, Campus Monterrey Russell Robins A. B. Freeman Sc110ol of Business, Tulane University (Received 31 august 2001, accepted 18 march 2002) This paper analyzes the inflation process in Mexico, recognizing that the variance of inflation in Mexico changes over time (specifically in 1982, 1988, and 1994) and can be modeled following an ARCH (Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic) model. We find that the inflation in Mexico follows an ARCH process from 1978 to 1999, and an ARCH-M process from 1989 to 1999. We also find that the process that better fits the conditional variance from 1978 to 1988 is an ARCH (2) , and from 1989 to 1999 an ARCH (1). In both periods, the exchange rate is significant in the conditional variance, and in the mean of the inflation. The significant variables to explain the inflation from 1978 to 1988 are two inflation lags, the exchange rate, and the money supply (Ml). These same variables, along with wages, are significant in explaining the inflation during 1989 to 1999.
Social bees and food plant associations in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, India

The diversity of social bees was assessed at 15 sites across five locations of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, Western Ghats, India, from January to December 2007. We also conducted floristic analyses of local vegetation in each site using one-hectare sample plots. All woody species with a dbh (diameter at breast height) : 30 cm were recorded within the plots. A total area of 9.72 ha was assessed for floristic composition. Similarity of floristic composition between sites was determined using the Jaccard's distance measure and a dendrogram constructed based on the hierarchical clustering of floristic dissimilarities between sites. A Bee Importance Index (BII) was developed to give a measure of the bee diversity at each site. This index was a sum of the species richness of bee species in a site and their visitation frequencies to flowers, calculated as mean flower visits hour 1 within 2 focal patches within one hectare plots. The visits of bee species to flowers were also recorded. The Jaccard distance measure indicated that the montane sites were quite dissimilar to the low elevation sites in floristic diversity. The BII was 7-9 for the wet forest sites and ranged from 4-6 for drier forest sites. Seventy three plant species were identified as social bee plants and of them 45% were visited by one species of bee, 37% by two bee species and 18% by more than two bee species, indicating a certain degree of floral specialization among bees.
Ab Initio Calculation of Surface Atom Evaporation in Electron Field Emission

Surface atom evaporation under electron field emission was investigated by scattering-state calculations based on the density-functional theory. We found that surface atom evaporation assisted by electron field emission occurs for a certain electric-field strength that is lower than that of usual field evaporation without electron field emission. The present ab-initio study elucidates the surface atom process under field emission, which has been frequently observed in experiments, for the first time. [DOI: 10.1380/ejssnt.2007. 106]
Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Using Clustering for Many Agents

Recently, multi-agent research systems have been used in the field of reinforcement learning to manage with cooperative agents. Simultaneously managing a large number of agents is challenging, so various approaches are being considered. Specifically, the application of high-dimension data methodologies is a significant challenge in the research of manyagent problems, as complexity increases exponentially with the number of agents. Furthermore, policy convergence can be difficult as the contribution of each agent is unclear. In this work, we flexibly decomposed a multi-agent problem into sub-multi-agent tasks using a clustering method, and applied this technique to a hierarchical structure. After abstracting the movements of units through hierarchical approach, a group’s action space and micro-control tasks were mapped onto highand low-level actions, respectively. We demonstrated our method through combat scenarios in the StarCraft video game. Our method successfully decomposed a complex multi-agent problem into homogeneous sub-tasks, and showed the advantage of making the training process efficient and inexpensive.
Genetic Algorithm Optimization of a Traveling Wave Array of Longitudinal Slots in a Rectangular Waveguide ( Invited Paper )

Genetic Algorithm is used to optimize the performance characteristics of a traveling wave array consisting of longitudinal slots cut in the broad wall of a rectangular waveguide. An analysis method employing a loaded transmission line to model the slot arrays is employed. External mutual coupling is considered. The self admittance of the radiating slots is computed using the method-of-moments technique applied to the pertinent integral equations. Numerical results indicate typical performance improvements possible using the genetic algorithm optimization.