Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic diversity in two populations of Limicolaria aurora (Jay, 1839) from two ecological zones in Nigeria

Limicolaria aurora belongs to the group of land snails commonly called garden snails. This study seeks to use shell morphology and random amplified polymorphic DNA-polymerase chain reaction (RAPD-PCR) to examine gross morphological differences in populations of L. aurora from New Bussa (guinea savannah) and Benin City (tropical rain forest) in Nigeria and possibly delimit the populations into sub species. A total of one hundred and ten specimens of L. aurora made up of fifty five individuals from each of the two ecological zones were collected randomly for the study. Data on shell parameters including: height of shell (SH), width of shell (SW), aperture height (AH), aperture width (AW), spire length (SL), and first whorl length (1WL) measured on each snail were subjected to one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Principal component analysis (PCA) and canonical variates analysis (CVA) were performed on the data using PAST statistical software. DNA which was extracted from the muscular tissues of the foot of eight individuals from each location using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method was subjected to RAPD-PCR. Amplification of the DNA was done using five primers (OPB-12, OPB-18, OPH-08, OPD-11 and OPS-13). Analyses showed significant differences (P<0.05) in L. aurora populations within and between the vegetation zones revealing great heterogeneity in the populations. Both PCA and CVA clusters did not separate the populations into distinct sub-populations. SH was the most variable morphological characteristic and consequently the most suitable for the separation of L. aurora specimens into distinct populations. All the primers used in the amplification of the DNA produced polymorphic bands. The Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA) cluster diagram revealed two major clades within the snail populations with about 74% similarity. The study showed that RAPD-PCR analysis is more suitable for delimiting populations of L. aurora than morphometrics and that the basis for gross morphological differences in these populations might not only be environmental but also genetic factors. Key words: Achatinidae, biodiversity, environmental factors, morphometrics, phylogenetics, shell, sub-populations, variation.
Methodology for testing a system for remote monitoring and control on auxiliary machines in electric vehicles

A laboratory system for remote monitoring and control of an asynchronous motor controlled by a soft starter and contemporary measuring and control devices has been developed and built. This laboratory system is used for research and in teaching. A study of the principles of operation, setting up and examination of intelligent energy meters, soft starters and PLC has been made as knowledge of the relevant software products is necessary. This is of great importance because systems for remote monitoring and control of energy consumption, efficiency and proper operation of the controlled objects are very often used in different spheres of industry, in building automation, transport, electricity distribution network, etc. Their implementation in electric vehicles for remote monitoring and control on auxiliary machines is also possible and very useful. In this paper, a methodology of tests is developed and some experiments are presented. Thus, an experimental verification of the developed methodology is made.
Performance comparison of in-memory and disk-based databases using transaction processing performance council (TPC) benchmarking

Database performance throughput is one of the main measurements of the application effectiveness or a system, in terms of speed and delivery. Higher application efficiency is always a goal for any organization; therefore, finding the way to improve the database performance has priority. There are two main factors that can contribute to performance gain or slowness. Firstly, how well designed the database structure is in terms of data types, referential integrity, and indexes. Secondly, the underlying hardware infrastructure that consists of a server, storage, and network. During the application design lifecycle, the database schema is one area that continuously evolves. There are numerous configurational parameters that need to be adjusted according to database schema design and underlying infrastructure, in which in-memory is an important feature. In-memory database stores all data in physical memory, because of keeping entire data and changes of data in physical memory, the in-memory database provides very short response time and transactional throughput as compared to the disk-based database. This study provides comparison between in-memory and disk-based performance with impact analysis of concurrent users and parallelism using TPC-C benchmarking. A comprehensive benchmark guideline benefits for specific database environment was provided in order to track performance changes while migrating to in-memory from disk-based database. These benchmarking statistics provided comparative standpoint that can be verified during performance bottleneck. This study shows that transitioning from disk-based database to in-memory database decreased the response time and reduced the lock contention, however, requires detailed review for index design changes. Key words: Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL) Server, in-memory, disk-based, transaction processing performance council (TPC-C), benchmarking, database performance, performance comparison, response time, parallelism, concurrent users.
Determination and evaluation of the parameters influencing the virtual educational costs

Article history: Received July 30, 2011 Received in Revised form September, 15, 2011 Accepted 17 September 2011 Available online 18 September 2011 E-learning has recently attracted many people specially those who cannot attend traditional educational programs for different reasons such as busy schedule, long distance, etc. There is also a growing interest among many public universities to develop such programs in addition to their regular business activities. The primary question is to know how much a program cost and what is the most important factors affecting the cost of e-learning. In this paper, we present an empirical study the measure the effects of different items on the cost of e-learning programs. The proposed study of this paper gathers the necessary cost components of three governmental universities located in city of Tehran/Iran. We choose ten different cost items for our analysis and using some statistical test determine the most important ones. The preliminary study of this paper indicates that seven cost items play essential role on determining the cost of e-learning, which includes utilities, internet connection and network, employee payment, software & licensing, payments of instructors and their assistants, hardware equipments and other overhead expenditures. This could help us determine the precise cost of e-learning using activity cost method. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Measurement of serum lactate values in domestic cats ( Felis catus ) submitted to physical and chemical restraint

The use of serum lactate has become increasingly common in Veterinary Medicine, since it is an excellent marker of tissue oxygenation, elevated in situations of tissue hypoxia, where anaerobic glycolysis is used as an energy source. Studies point out its use in dogs as a prognostic factor in several affections; however it is not commonly used in domestic felines due to the high stress threshold of the species, which may interfere with their values. The aim of the present study was to evaluate serum lactate values in domestic cats during physical restraint and after chemical restraint using the combination of 8mg/kg ketamine-S, 0.4 mg/kg midazolam, and 2 mg/kg Tramadol. To this end, 20 clinically healthy female cats without defined race, from six months to five years of age, were divided into two groups, GPR (n = 10) represented by felines that had only physical restraint and the GCR (n = 10) by felines that underwent physical restraint (TPR) and after 30 hours by chemical restraint (TCR). It was observed that in both groups (GPR and CPR) during physical restraint presented hyperlactatemia (GPR = 6.23 ± 0.9 mmol/L – GCR – Tpr = 6.66 ± 1.59 mmol/L) and mean values of 4.42 ± 1.28 mmol/L during chemical restraint (GCR – Tcr). It was concluded that physical restraint interferes with serum lactate values, with the reduction of such values with the use of chemical restraint in the feline species.
Movements of sperm whales in the tropical Pacific

The movements of female and immature sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus in the tropical Pacific Ocean and adjacent waters are described using photoidentifications over time scales of 3 d to 15 yr and the tracks of followed groups over scales of 1 to 48 h. The female/immature whales frequently made movements of less than 2000 km and occasionally made movements of about 4000 km. There were no recorded movements of greater than 5000 km (for instance, between the eastern and western Pacific). On average, displacements for female/immature whales were about 4 km after 1 h of movement, 50 km after 1 d, 200 km after 3 d, and 1000 km after periods of 1 yr or more. Members of the 2 principal cultural clans of female and immature sperm whales that use waters near the Galapagos had distinctive movement patterns over all time scales greater than 3 h, with 1 clan's displacements about 50% greater than the displacements of the other. Displacements were greater than predicted by the correlated random walk over scales of 12 to 48 h because of auto- correlation in displacement, approximately as predicted by the correlated random walk over periods of days to weeks, but less than predicted by the correlated random walk over scales of years because of boundaries of home ranges. The adaptive movement of sperm whales over large spatial and tem- poral scales likely contributes to their substantial trophic impact, and reduces geographic population structure. These movements, together with cultural heterogeneity, complicate the management of the species, including the designation of management stocks.
Optimization of Extraction of Anthocyanins from Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa var. sabdariffa) in Aqueous Medium

The dried roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa var. sabdariffa) calyces were studied for the extraction of anthocyanin in aqueous solution. The total anthocyanin content in dried roselle powder was found to be 310.48mg/100g of dry matter. The extraction temperature at 70°C gave the highest yield (66.69-70.61%), while at 90°C the degradation of anthocyanins occurred. The solid-liquid ratio revealed no significant effect (p>0.05), whereas the particle size showed a significant effect (p<0.05) on the extraction of anthocyanin. The yields of anthocyanin extraction for 300 and 600 μm particle powders were significantly higher (p<0.5) than that of 1180μm powder. Reduction in the particle size inversely increased the yield of anthocyanins. In conclusion, the extraction of anthocyanin from dried roselle calyces with an average particle size of 600μm using a solid-liquid ratio of 1:50 in aqueous medium with pH 7.0 at 70°C for 20min showed the maximum yield (69.84%). J. Food Sci. Technol. Nepal, Vol. 6 (66-72), 2010 DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3126/jfstn.v6i0. 8263
Crime Mapping from Satellite Imagery via Deep Learning

Ensuring urban safety is an essential part of developing sustainable cities. An urban safety map can assist cities to prevent future crimes. However, mapping is costly in terms of both time and money due to the need for manual data collection. On the other hand, satellite imagery is becoming increasingly abundant and accessible with higher resolution. Given the outstanding success deep learning has achieved in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition over the past 5 years, in this paper we attempt to investigate the use of deep learning to predict crime rate directly from raw satellite imagery. To this end, we have trained a deep Convolutional Neural Network on satellite images obtained from over one million crime-incident reports collected by the Chicago Police Department. The best performing model predicted crime rate from raw satellite imagery with an accuracy of 79%. To test their reusability, we used the learned Chicago models to predict for the cities of Denver and San Francisco city-scale maps indicating crime rate in three different levels. Compared to maps made from years' worth of data collected by the corresponding police departments, our maps have an accuracy of 72% and 70%, respectively.
Contagion and causality: an empirical analysis on sovereign bond spreads

The current decade was marked by the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression, many economies experiencing a severe contraction of output in late 2008 and early 2009. But, was this evolution of the activity only the result of the domestic factors or a certain form of international contagion influenced it, at least partially? The aim of this paper is to empirically explore the contagion phenomenon during the subprime crisis for seven EU and non-EU countries. To test for contagion, we apply a Granger causality/VECM methodology on sovereign bond spreads as a measure of perceived country risk. Following partially the methodology of Kleimeier and Sander (2003), we investigate two sub-periods: a pre-crisis tranquil period (January, 1st 2003-July 29, 2007) and a crisis period (July 2, 2007 -September 1, 2009). Results highlight the fact that the causality patterns have changed during the crisis period compared to the pre-crisis tranquil period.
ANALYSIS OFBISPHENOL A MIGRATION IN REUSABLE POLYCARBONATE CONTAINERS AND CANNED PRODUCTS AVAILABLE IN INDIAN MARKETS.

Amanpreet Kaur. The wide applications of Bisphenol A (BPA) in food and packaging industry have increased the exposure and risk of this chemical towards the human population with its endocrine disrupting effects. BPA is used among the various products with everyday use. The vulnerable population especially infants are at an increased risk of exposure as BPA is widely used in baby feeding bottles. The present study was carried out to determine the amount of BPA migrating in to the water samples from the polycarbonate material of baby feeding bottles, drinking water bottles, microwave safe plastic and canned food products. Different brands of polycarbonate feeding bottles, water bottles and microwave safe plastic were included in the study and BPA was determined in the water samples using HPLC with fluorescence detector. BPA leach out was also determined in the canned products which included canned fruits and canned vegetables.The testrevealed 2.80 mg/L of BPA leaching for the feeding water bottles,0.06 mg/L from the drinking water bottles, 0.008 mg/L from microwave safe plastic bowls and 0.067 mg/L in the canned products.
Adaptive Optics for Radio Interferometers

Radio interferometry has the potential to achieve milliarcsecond resolution of important astrophysical processes, but a significant impediment, particularly at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, is the scintillation due to turbulence in the troposphere. Since this is largely due to water vapor, considerable effort has been put into measuring absolute humidity along the line of sight of observations to derive corrections for the delay fluctuations. Alternatively, measurement of atmospheric delay variations by observing a bright point-like calibrator close to the science target has been investigated as a more direct probe of refractive index changes. While great strides have been made in the instrumentation and application of the results, the goal of a robust, reliable seeing correction remains elusive. Full realization of the potentials of these techniques will require a concerted effort to understand the complex behavior of the atmosphere, including the wet and dry components. Over the next few years we expect close collaboration among the radio astronomy community, as well as the meteorological community, to achieve significant progress towards routine high-resolution interferometry.
Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma in Calabar, southern Nigeria

Background. Several studies have shown that in Africa squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is commoner than other skin malignancies. The risk factors are grouped generally into solar and nonsolar factors and their contributions vary with race, geographical region and site of lesion. This study attempted to identify risk factors and outcome of management of this problem in our region of southern Nigeria.
Indigenous Knowledge, Uses and Conservation of Prunus africana (Hook. F.) Kalkman in Nandi Forests

Prunus africana is a multipurpose medicinal tree of worldwide fame in treatment of benign prostate cancer. However, the wild collection is no-longer sustainable due to overharvesting. In order to conserve the species, there is need to determine the status of the local community knowledge on uses and conservation measures to develop protocols for sustainable utilization and avert extinction of the species. Stratified random sampling was used to interview and administer questionnaires to 188 households and herbalists within a buffer zone of 1 km in South Nandi Forest. The study found that 99% of the locals were aware of the P. africana tree. Majority (82%) agreed that P. africana population was decreasing both in the forests and farmlands. Almost all parts of the P. africana were utilized for different purposes. Majority of the locals (66%) acquire P. africana products from the forest. Closer proximity to the forest and uncontrolled harvesting provides easier accessibility to P. africana for households use. The study concluded that P. africana is an important multipurpose medicinal tree to the local community and recommends enhanced planting and protection within and outside the forests to ensure posterity. Keywords: Multipurpose, medicinal, sustainable, local community, use.
RESPONSE OF POTATO (SOLANUM TUBEROSUM) PRODUCTIVITY TO SOIL AMENDEMENT AND WATER REQUIREMENTS

n experiment was applied in DRC Experimental Station at East Elqantara in North Sinai to test the effect of water application rate of 40, 60, 80, 100 and 120% of ETc and bentonite as soil amendment at rate of 0, 2, 3, and 4 ton/fed on growth, yield, chemical composition, water use efficiency and investment ratio of potato plants. Result revealed that growth, tuber parameters and yield and its components were increased with increasing water and bentonite application. There were no significant differences between irrigation treatments of 100 and 120% of ETc or between 3 and 4 ton/fed bentonite in most studied parameters in both seasons. Also no significant effect was found on chemical components, except P, which was significantly increased with 100% of ETc in the second season. Moreover, the maximum WUE values were contributed to high bentonite treatments i.e., 3 and 4 ton/fed combined with either 80 or 100% of Etc. Significant positive correlations were found between total yield and either average tuber weight or number of tubers/plant. Also, between tuber number/plant and number of aerial stems/plant. Results of investment ratio and multiple regression of total yield on both amount of irrigation water and bentonite rate led to conclude that there were two options to get sufficient investment ratio.
Major features and forcing of high‐latitude northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation using a 110,000‐year‐long glaciochemical series

The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 glaciochemical series (sodium, potassium, ammonium, calcium, magnesium, sulfate, nitrate, and chloride) provides a unique view of the chemistry of the atmosphere and the history of atmospheric circulation over both the high latitudes and mid-low latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Interpretation of this record reveals a diverse array of environmental signatures that include the documentation of anthropogenically derived pollutants, volcanic and biomass burning events, storminess over marine surfaces, continental aridity and biogenic source strength plus information related to the controls on both high- and low-frequency climate events of the last 110,000 years. Climate forcings investigated include changes in insolation of the order of the major orbital cycles that control the long-term behavior of atmospheric circulation patterns through changes in ice volume (sea level), events such as the Heinrich events (massive discharges of icebergs first identified in the marine record) that are found to operate on a 6100-year cycle due largely to the lagged response of ice sheets to changes in insolation and consequent glacier dynamics, and rapid climate change events (massive reorganizations of atmospheric circulation) that are demonstrated to operate on 1450-year cycles. Changes in insolation and associated positive feedbacks related to ice sheets may assist in explaining favorable time periods and controls on the amplitude of massive rapid climate change events. Explanation for the exact timing and global synchroneity of these events is, however, more complicated. Preliminary evidence points to possible solar variability-climate associations for these events and perhaps others that are embedded in our ice-core-derived atmospheric circulation records.
Working Paper Series Corporate Real Estate : Perspectives , Evidence and Issues

A significant proportion of capital is tied up in corporate real estate (CRE) by the US, European and Asian non-real estate firms. As CRE can function as either a production factor or profit centre, providing flexibility not common to other corporate assets, the firm must recognize their strategic importance and manage them efficiently. Alternatively, the firm may consider appropriate exit strategies such as real estate disposals, sales-and-leasebacks or strategic outsourcing to reduce substantially the amount of capital tied up in the CRE. This paper discusses the business, financial and capital market perspectives of CRE and some potential issues, supported by key research studies and evidence drawn from the retail companies in the international environment.
Proof-of-concept Evaluation of the Mobile and Personal Speech Assistant for the Recognition of Disordered Speech

—Recently, Assistive Technologies tend to exploit speech-based interfaces as a means of communication between humans and machines. While they perform very well for normal speech, their efﬁcacy is very limited for people suffering from a variety of speech disorders, especially in the presence of environmental factors related to the disease. To overcome these issues, we have proposed a Mobile and Personal Speech Assistant (mPASS) – a platform providing the users with a set of tools, which enable to intuitively create their own automatic speech recognition system (ASR) corresponding to their needs and capabilities. The system can be designed at users’ home and tailored to the domain, vocabulary, and language they ﬁnd most useful. The personalized speech recognizer can be used with diversiﬁed speech-based applications. The initial results depict the baseline performance of ASR systems created with the mPASS platform and help to identify the most accurate system set-up. Moreover, a proof-of-concept ﬁeld trial shows that the mPASS speech recognition system was successfully used in the voice-controlled application, achieved high recognition accuracy and was identiﬁed by the user as better than the traditional touch input.