Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduced Timing Jitter in a Hybridly Mode-Locked Semiconductor Laser due to an Increased Modulation Curvature ( Student Paper )

Low-noise microwave oscillators are essential to several applications, and mode-locked lasers are good candidates for the realization of these. The total timing jitter of an actively mode-locked laser has previously been shown to be inversely proportional to the modulation curvature of the driving signal. This paper presents the first numerical study on the timing jitter in a semiconductor hybridly mode-locked laser, when the reverse bias voltage of the saturable absorber is driven with different modulation curvatures. It is confirmed that also for these lasers, the total timing jitter scales reciprocally with the modulation curvature. Thus, according to the numerical model, the performance of a mode-locked laser based oscillator will improve by increasing the bandwidth of the signal driving the saturable absorber. Coupled opto-electronic oscillators, as well as clock extraction from pulse trains in optical time division multiplexing systems, can improve from this.
International Journal of Agriculture Ph ton Impact of Planting Space , Irrigation Pattern and Different Concentration of Fertilizers on the Yield and Yield Related Parameters of Sweet Flag ( Acorus calamus Linn ) in South Gujarat Region of India

Acorus calamus L. (Sweet flag) is a perennial herb indigenous to the Himalayan region of central Asia and India. It is one of the endangered medicinal plants , mostly found grown in wild form in forest without m uch consideration for domestication. A study was undert aken in a year under the kharif season of 2013 to assess th prospect of optimizing the rhizome yield of sweet f lag (A. calamus L.) in South Gujarat region of India by maintaining different spacing, concentration of fer tilizers and irrigation pattern under field conditions. The results of the investigations showed a significant increase in the yield of Acorus calamus rhizomes with treatment S1I1F1 planted with spacing of 30 cm × 30 cm, irrigation a t three day intervals and fertilizer concentration of 100:4 0:40 kg NPK/ ha. Both fresh and dry weights of rhizomes in treatment S1I1F1 were 187.73 gm −1 (27310.84 kg ha ) and 96.86 gm (14093.3 kg ha ) followed by treatment combination S1I1F2 with 178.66gm −1 (25986.77 kg ha ) and 93.73gm (13637.96 kg ha ) respectively. Treatment combination S1I1F1 showed performance tha t was twice that recorded for S2I2F2, which is a clea r indication that Irrigation pattern and spacing sign if cantly influence yield and yield parameters of Acorus calamus under different concentration regime of fertilizers . These findings suggest the possibility of optimizing the rhizome yield of A. calamus , by maintaining proper plant spacing, irrigation pattern and different concentra tion of fertilizers under field. Citation: Krishnamurthy R. , Kasture A. , 2015. Impact of Plant ing Space, Irrigation Pattern and Different Concentration of F ertilizers on the Yield and Yield Related Parameters of Sweet Fla g (Acorus calamus Linn) in South Gujarat Region of India. Internatio nal Journal of Agriculture. Photon 126, 405-411. All Rights Reserved with Photon. Photon Ignitor: ISJN77582463D749206042015
ESL : a Data Stream Query Language and System Designed for Power and Extensibility

Applications that span both data streams and databases provide a sound reason for using SQL for continuous queries on data streams as well as for ad-hoc queries on database tables. However, SQL was designed for persistent data on secondary store, and not for transient data on the wire; therefore, SQL is facing major problems in this new role—particularly in the domains of expressive power and extensibility that constitute notorious weakness areas for relational languages. For instance, SQL cannot support sequence queries, approximate queries, and mining queries that represent important applications for data stream management systems (DSMS). The fact that blocking operators cannot be used on continuous queries further impairs the effectiveness of SQL on data streams applications. Our Stream Mill solves these problems with the Expressive Query Language (ESL) designed to maximize the power and flexibility of DSMS through minimal extensions of, and maximal compatibility with, SQL:2003. ESL supports (i) continuous user-defined aggregates (UDAs) that are nonblocking and very effective on data streams, (ii) efficient delta-based maintenance for UDAs on windows, (iii) table expressions to create table snapshots from data streams. With these constructs, we achieve full integration of database and stream queries while retaining a simple semantics which makes it crystal clear which queries run as snapshot queries and which run as continuous queries, and which constructs are allowed for each kind. The paper discusses the benefits of the power of ESL (which is Turing-complete) in advanced applications and its ability to support efficient memory-saving computations.
The Short-Term Relationships Among the U.S., German and Greek Bond Markets in Times of Financial Crises : a Bayesian Analysis of Exogeneity in the VAR-SV Model

This paper examines short-run relationships among the U.S., German and Greek bond markets in times of financial crises. Specifically, the connections among daily and weekly growth rates of the 10-year government bond yields of the U.S., Germany and Greece from July 13, 2006 to January 29, 2016 are considered and an empirical illustration of those, based on the vector autoregressive (VAR) model with stochastic volatility (SV) disturbances, is provided. Finally, sufficient weak and strong exogeneity conditions in the VAR-SV models are tested. Our results indicate that during the time period covered by the analysis, the weekly growth rates of the 10-year U.S. bond yields were not affected by the past growth rates of the 10-year German and Greek bond yields. Contagion effects were absent among all the 10-year bond markets considered. From October 2008 to April 2015 a ‘flight to quality’ effect between Germany and Greece, as well as between the U.S. and Greece seems to have occurred. Since the strong exogeneity hypothesis of the 10-year US bond yields’ weekly growth rates has not been rejected by the data, they can be predicted from the marginal model only, i.e. without taking the German and Greek bond yields into consideration.
Forecasting : A Review and Its Application to Handwritten Signatures

Forecasting helps us to predict the pattern of future data on the basis of present and past or historical data. There are three terms, or periods, of forecasting viz. short-term, medium-term and long-term forecasting. Generally, forecast for short period is more accurate than that of the long period since, as we move further ahead, the probability of uncertainty increases. The concept of forecasting is widely applicable in different areas like business related predictions, governmental budgets, policies and planning, other areas like weather as well as temperature forecasting etc [1]. The concept of forecasting can also be applied in offline handwritten signatures since there is presence of intrapersonal variations among signatures of same person. In the present study, we have put forward an overview about forecasting techniques and subsequently the application of its concept on offline handwritten signatures.
Building hierarchical structures for 3D scenes based on normalized cut

The growing number of 3D scene data available online brings in new challenges for scene retrieval, understanding, and synthesis. Traditional shape processing methods have difficulty to manage 3D scenes because such methods ignore the contextual information, that is, the spatial relationship between the objects or groups of objects, which plays a significant role in describing scenes. Therefore, a context‐aware representation is needed to deal with such a problem. In this paper, we propose a method to build scene hierarchies based on contextual information. Given a 3D scene, we first use the interaction bisector surface to measure the affinity between different objects/elements of the scene and then apply the normalized cut method to build a hierarchical structure for the whole scene. The resulting hierarchical structure contains not only the relationship between the individual objects but also the relationship between object groups, which provides much richer information of the scene compared with a flat structure that only describes the contacts or affinity between the individual objects. We test our method using several public databases and show that the resulting structure is more consistent with the ground truth. We also show that our method can be used for point cloud segmentation and outperforms previous methods.
Community Composition of Parasitic Nematodes of Cyprinion Macrostomum from North and Mid West Regions In Iraq

| The present study was undertaken to investigate the community composition and the infection patterns of parasitic nematodes among preserved Cyprinion macrostomum specimens (n=50) which were collected previously from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at two different regions in Iraq (North region and Midwest region). Ninety-four nematodes (adults and late stage larvae) were counted from fish specimens. The overall prevalence of Rhabdochona spp. nematodes found highest among examined fishes (n=19, 38%). Prevalence of Rhabdochona spp. (adults and larval stages) differed significantly between fishes from North region and fishes from Midwest region. Only two Rhabdochona species nematodes were found prevalent among examined fish included Rhabdochona denudata and Rhabdochona tigridis. Both adult stages of Rhabdochona denudata and Rhabdochona tigridis showed significant differences in their prevalence between Midwest region and North region. Fish from Midwest region showed higher prevalence (42.9%) for each Rhabdochona denudata and Rhabdochona tigridis compared with to north region. Mean intensity did not differ significantly between fishes from North and Midwest regions for Rhabdochona denudate and Rhabdochona tigridis.
2FA Might Be Secure, But It’s Not Usable: A Summative Usability Assessment of Google’s Two-factor Authentication (2FA) Methods

Computer security experts recommend that people use two-factor authentication (2FA) on password protected systems to help keep hackers out. Providing two pieces of information to verify a person’s identity adds extra security to an account. However, it is not clear if the added security and procedures impact system usability. This paper aims to answer this question by assessing per ISO 9241-11’s suggested measurements the usability of Google’s optional 2FA methods. We found few differences across four different 2FA methods when comparing efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction measures—illustrating that one method is not necessarily more or less usable then another. Overall, the measures indicated that the systems’ usability needed to be improved, especially with regard to the initial setup of 2FA. In conclusion, developers need to focus more attention on making 2FA easier and faster to use, especially since it is often optional for password users, yet makes accounts significantly more secure.
An Overlooked Group in the Psychosocial Care in Breast Cancer : Spouses Meme

Breast cancer directly affects women physically, psychologically and socially in the process of diagnosis, treatment and post-treatment, leads to the deterioration of psychosocial adaptation, and affects the family and social relations negatively. The family, which is an important source of support in the breast cancer process, can face the same psychosocial troubles with women. The results of the research show that the most preferred source of support in families is spouses and their quality of life is lower than the other family members. Psychosocial care which is biasedly solely canalized to women by the healthcare professionals often overlooked their spouses, and leads to be received inadequate support by them. In this context with the awaring of the psychosocial problems spouses facing, it is important to include spouses to psychosocial care which healthcare professionals provide to women with breast cancer. In this article, it is aimed to raise awareness about psychosocial problems experienced by the spouses of breast cancer patients as a mostly neglected group and possible interventions.
A GAMS/MPSGE implementation of the PET model

This paper describes a version of the Population-Economy-Technology (PET) model implemented in the GAMS/MPSGE programming language. The implementation of the model is comparable with the original fortran version of iPETS over a number of test cases. While a number of possible configurations exist for both model types, we demonstrate that there is a configuration that makes both implementations behave very similarly and the remaining difference can be traced to different implementations of dynamic agent behavior. This paper also serves as a methodological blueprint for model translation across different programming languages. Disciplines Agricultural and Resource Economics This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/card_workingpapers/601 A GAMS/MPSGE implementation of the PET model Matthias Weitzel, Edward J. Balistreri, Brian C. O’Neill, Xiaolin Ren Working Paper 19-WP 593 September 2019 Center for Agricultural and Rural Development Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 50011-1070 www.card. iastate.edu Matthias Weitzel is Project Officer, European Commision, Joint Research Centre, Seville, Spain 41092. E-mail: Matthias.weitzel@ec.europa. eu. Edward J. Balistreri is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011. E-mail: ebalistr@iastate.edu. Brian C. O’Neill is Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208. E-mail: Brian.ONeill@du.edu. This publication is available on online on the CARD website: www.card. iastate.edu. Permission is granted to reproduce this information with appropriate attribution to the author and the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011-1070. For questions or comments about the contents of this paper, please contact Edward J. Balistreri, ebalistr@iastate.edu Iowa State University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, age, ethnicity, religion, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, sex, marital status, disability, or status as a U.S. veteran. Inquiries can be directed to the Interim Assistant Director of Equal Opportunity and Compliance, 3280 Beardshear Hall, (515) 294-7612. 1 A GAMS/MPSGE implementation of the PET model Matthias Weitzel, Edward J. Balistreri, Brian C. O'Neill, Xiaolin Ren
Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts for Industrial Services

In this work, we propose a system for writing publicly verifiable privacy-preserving smart contracts in distributed ledger technologies (DLT)s. Our approach combines partially homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs in order to support a wide range of privacy-preserving operations. We showcase the effectiveness and the performance of our system by integrating it in Corda, a mainstream permissioned DLT.
Lactic Acid Fermentation Reduces Acrylamide Formation and Other Maillard Reactions in French Fries

Blanched and nonblanched potato rods (var. Beate) were fermented with Lactobacillus plantarum strain NC8 (109 colony-forming units [CFU]/mL) at 37 °C for 45 and 120 min. Potato rods were pre-fried at 170 °C for 3 min, cooled, and subsequently deep-fried for 2 min 15 s. Potato juice (var. Beate) was fermented with the same strain (108 CFU/mL) at 30 °C for 1 to 5 h. Lactic acid fermentation of nonblanched potato rods for 45 min reduced acrylamide level in French fries with 48%, and with 71% after 120 min. By blanching potato rods before fermentation, reductions in acrylamide after 45 min and 120 min were 79% and 94%, respectively. Blanching, and especially fermentation, reduced visually judged browning of the French fries. Fermentation of potato juice reduced pH from 5.70 to 4.05 after 3 h. Simultaneously, glucose declined from 610.8 mg/100 mL to 7.9 mg/100 mL, fructose from 457.8 mg/100 mL to 0.0 mg/100 mL, and sucrose from 132.0 mg/100 mL to 29.2 mg/100 mL. Asparagine content remained largely unaffected between 0 h (1217.5 mmol/100 mL) and 4 h (1175.6 mmol/100 mL) and increased slightly (1470.3 mmol/100 mL) after 5 h fermentation. Levels of several other amino acids involved in Maillard reactions, that is, alanine, arginine, phenylalanine, and serine, decreased during fermentation. It is concluded that acrylamide formation during production of French fries can be effectively lowered by lactic acid fermentation of potato rods before deep-frying. The reduction is due to reduced levels of reducing sugars rather than reduction of available asparagine.
Distributed Approach for Aerodynamic Model Identification of the ICE Aircraft

High performance control allocation methods for the Innovative Control Effectors (ICE) aircraft require accurate onboard aerodynamic models, with preferably first order continuity. Simplotope B-Splines, an extension on Simplex B-Splines, have a high approximation power by using local basis functions. However, enforcing global continuity produces computationally expensive optimization problems. This thesis presents a distributed approach, using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), to reduce the complexity of the B-Coefficients’ estimation. ADMM decouples the simplotopes, and introduces coupling coefficients to enforce global continuity, resulting in a parallel estimation algorithm whose complexity is depending solely on the partition size, being independent of refinement of the model tessellation. Results show that for a 3D model, the distributed algorithm converges steadily to the global solution with a good approximation accuracy after a few hundred iterations. Validation results of the distributed approach were similar to those of the global optimal solution for various noise intensities, and the continuity constraints were satisfied with maximum mismatches below 10-4. The distributed approach has been used to construct a first order continuous aerodynamic model for the ICE aircraft, which has been implemented in Simulink, and proven to perform well compared to the original model.
Low Power Error Control Coding Implementation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer an increasingly attractive mode of data gathering in distributed system architectures and dynamic access via wireless connectivity. ECC provides coding gain, resulting in transmitter energy savings, at the cost of added decoder power consumption. The main challenge in deploying WSN is to improve energy-efficiency and lifetime of the nodes while keeping communication reliability. The energy efficiency of error control schemes should be considered because of the strict energy constraints of wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks require simple and facile error control schemes because of the low complexity request of sensor nodes. With the ever increasing data throughputs required by communication application, there is an actual need for new effective architectures (small area and high speed) for circuit parts dedicated to error detecting/correcting coding (EDC/ECC). The Convolutional Encoder and Decoder for Wireless Sensor Networks are studied and the right configurations for the encoder will be selected and a Parallel/Pipelined Architecture for the Convolutional Encoder will be explored and implemented in an FPGA platform in order to provide a low power and fast encoding scheme and the best architecture will presented.
METABOLIC NETWORK INFERENCE WITH THE GRAPHICAL LASSO by JOSEPH KRITTAMETH AICHER

Metabolic networks describe the interactions and reactions between different metabolites (e.g. sugars, fatty acids, amino acids) in a biological system, which together give rise to the chemical processes which make life possible. Efforts to further knowledge of the structure of metabolic networks have taken place for well over a century through the efforts of numerous biochemists and have revolutionized our understanding of biology and the capabilities of modern medicine. The introduction in the recent past of metabolomics technologies, which allow for the simultaneous measurement of the concentrations of a significant number of metabolites, has led to the development of mathematical and statistical algorithms that aim to use the information and data that these technologies have made available to make inferences about the structure of metabolic networks. In this thesis, I investigate the application of the graphical lasso algorithm to metabolomics data for the purposes of metabolic network inference. I use the graphical lasso on a metabolomics dataset collected by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry from Drosophila melanogaster to estimate graphical models of varying levels of sparsity that describe the conditional dependence structure of the observed metabolite concentrations. With these estimated models, I describe how they can be chosen from and interpreted in the context of both the data and the underlying biology to inform our knowledge of metabolic network structure.
Comparing Arithmetic Logic Unit Performance , Design , and Capabilities of technologies from the recent decade

This paper does an investigatory look at the area, energy consumption, speed of operation, and datapath width over the last decade of various Adder Technologies. The goal of this paper is to do a numerical comparison of the ITRS Technology Area, Energy Consumption, Speed of Operation, and the datapath width of the technologies over the last decade. The largest comparison in the paper will be drawn between different technologies that accomplish the same purpose as to give a time and space complexity comparison between two different technologies meant to provide the same service. Additionally, some parallels will be made between similar device technologies for the purpose of showing a cost benefits analysis of different implementations of a specific technology. Keywords—Clock rate, Datapath Bandwidth, Technology Area, Energy Consumption, Adder, N-Bit, Space complexity, Time Complexity, Operational Efficiency
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN SELECTED PRIVATE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN REGION IVA , PHILIPPINES

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become one of the important yardsticks of business success. Thus, organizations continuously strive for the effective and creative implementation of their CSR activities. In the academic context, CSR takes the form of community service or community extension. This study examined the state of CSR in private higher education institutions (HEI) in Region IVA (Calabarzon), Philippines. Specifically, it sought to: 1) describe the profile of HEI constituents involved in CSR, including students, alumni, faculty members, administrative personnel, and administrators in Region IVA HEIs, with respect to their gender and school of origin; 2) determine their understanding of CSR; 3) ascertain their perception of and attitudes toward CSR; and 4) find out the difference in their attitudes towards CSR based on profile variables. The researchers used one-shot survey among 1,991 respondents from four private universities, namely, Lyceum of the Philippines University (LPU) Laguna, LPUCavite, LPU-Batangas and Manuel S. Enverga University Foundation (MSEUF). Results revealed that majority of the respondents lacked awareness and knowledge on CSR. The administrators, on the other hand, had no knowledge of CSR 1.0 but were knowledgeable of CSR 2.0. Results further showed that respondents were willing to be involved in CSR activities, as evidenced by their favorable attitudes toward CSR. The study concludes that there was significant difference in the attitudes towards CSR among respondents of different provinces. The respondents of Cavite and Laguna had more favorable attitudes towards CSR compared to those from Quezon and Batangas.