Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Introductory Chapter: Introduction to “Polyester – Production, Characterization and Innovative Applications”

Recent researches have indicated that using of polyester polymer processed into various forms, e.g., fibers, filament, fabric, composites, resins, dendrimers, films, sheets, and membranes in different fields, such as textile, automotive, medical, electronic, and construction applications, attracts worldwide interest. Polyester is also extensively used as packaging materials, such as bottle/containers. The polymerization of polyester could be carried out as polycondensation, ring-opening polymerization, and polyaddition processes. Furthermore, polyester could be recycled by physical (mechanical) or chemical (hydrolysis, methanolysis, and glycolysis reactions) methods [1, 2].
Cyanobacteria-derived nitrogen uptake by benthic invertebrates in Lake Taihu: a mesocosm study using 15N labeling

Eutrophication of lakes can lead to dominance by cyanobacteria, which are hardly used by zooplankton due to their low nutrition value. However, sedimented cyanobacterial detritus may be a useful source for benthic invertebrates. We studied the Microcystis -derived nitrogen incorporation in benthic invertebrates in Lake Taihu using stable isotopic nitrogen (15 N) as a tracer. The δ 15 N of all organisms increased significantly with time after addition of the labeled Microcystis detritus. δ 15 N values of POM and periphyton peaked earlier than for benthic invertebrates, and the maximum levels were also higher than bivalves, snails and worms (Limnodrilus spp.). Among benthic invertebrates, Radix swinhoei peaked later than other invertebrates, but the maximum level and the excess 15 N of the last sampling day were higher. At the end of the experiment, approximately 70% of the added 15 N was retained in the benthic food web, while only a small fraction (less than 1%) of the added detritus 15 N occurred in the pelagic food web. Our results suggest that nitrogen from cyanobacteria can be incorporated more in benthic than pelagic food webs and cyanobacterial blooms may contribute to the development of benthic animals.
Human Impacts on Lacustrine Ecosystems

Lacustrine ecosystems vary across the world in their form, origin, age and biodiversity ranging from ancient natural lakes of Tertiary age, such as Lake Baikal and Tanganyika, to newly created artificial lakes and impoundments constructed for human use. Most lakes throughout the world have been modified, intentionally or unintentionally, by human activity. Many are used as a source of water for irrigation, drinking water supply and hydro power. Large lakes especially have been hydrologically controlled to prevent flooding and modified to create reservoirs for potable water supply causing habitat instability, particularly in the littoral zones, and water abstraction in dry and subhumid regions of the world have caused severe problems for flow and water-level causing, in some cases, salinisation or complete desiccation. In addition to such hydromorphological modifications lake ecosystems have been significantly changed over time by accelerated infilling rates caused by soil erosion, by excessive nutrient and organic matter loading, by acid deposition from fossil fuel combustion and by the release of toxic substances directly and indirectly, through air pollution, to rivers and lakes. Many have been altered by the impact of invasive species and there are concerns over the impact of climate change and long-distance atmospherically transported pollutants, especially nitrogen. In developed countries in particular, programmes of pollution control and habitat restoration are in place aiming to improve the health of freshwater ecosystems (e.g., US Clean Water Act, EU Water Framework Directive, Australian National Water Initiative), but their success is as yet limited and their future is uncertain. Lake ecosystems typically are affected by many stresses acting together, ecological resilience has been reduced or lost and new threats, especially from climate change, may impair restoration strategies. Identifying and disentangling the relative roles of different kinds of human activity on lake ecosystems is challenging. It requires an understanding of processes that operate on interannual and decadal time scales from the examination and analysis of historical records. These include both long-term data sets from monitoring programmes and palaeo data sets from sediment records. Long-term
Comparison of Electric Vehicle’s Energy Consumption Factors for Different Road Types

Energy-optimal route planning for electric vehicle (EV) is highly required for the wide-spread use of EV, which is hindered by limited battery capacity and relative short cruising range. Obtaining the cost for each link (i.e., link energy consumption) in road networks plays a key role in energy-optimal route planning process. The link energy consumption depends mainly on energy consumption factor, which is related to not only vehicle speed but also road type. This study aims to analyze the difference of EV’s energy consumption factors for different road types. According to the floating car data (FCD) collected from the road network in Beijing, the vehicle specific power (VSP) distributions under different average travel speeds for different road types are analyzed firstly, and then the EV’s energy consumption rates under different VSP-Bins are calculated. By using VSP as an intermediate variable, EV’s energy consumption factor models for different road types are established and the difference of EV’s energy consumption factors is analyzed. The results show that road type-based energy consumption factor should be used in EV’s energy-optimal route planning process.
Linkage analyses in candidate regions for bipolar affective disorder in a large and complex pedigree from the Holguin region in Eastern Cuba

A large Cuban family with 326 family members over seven generations was ascertained. 21 family members were diagnosed as having affective disorder according to ICD-10 and DSM-IV criteria. As part of a genome wide scan 41 microsatellite markers in 14 chromosome regions of a priori interest (on chromosomes 1, 4, 5 , 6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 21 and 22), were genotyped in 24 family members and 58 controls. Two-point parametric linkage analyses were performed on the complete pedigree and nonparametric multipoint analyses were performed on two nonoverlapping subdivisions of the pedigree. The highest LOD score found was 1.09 in chromosome region 12q24.3. The highest single non-parametric score was 1.24, p-value 0.15 in chromosome region 1q41.
Drinking functional coherent mineral water accompanies a strengthening of the very low frequency impact on heart rate variability, and mono and multifractal heart rhythm dynamics in healthy humans

Background: Research on functional water has revealed its physiological functions and health-beneficial effects. Accordingly, this study explored the effects of drinking an average dietary volume of functional coherent mineral water (FCMW) on blood pressure, short-term cardiovascular variables, fractal heart rhythm dynamics, and salivary immunoglobulin A. Methods: Fifteen healthy subjects were randomized in a pre-post crossover design, selected the morning after an overnight fast. Short-term electrocardiography (ECG) was measured before and after drinking either control mineral water (CMW) or FCMW on two separate occasions. Saliva was collected for four minutes before the start of each ECG measurement. Blood pressure was monitored in five-minute intervals for one hour. Results: Drinking 100 ml of FCMW temporarily increased arterial blood pressure at 20 to 25 minutes in the 60 minutes post-drinking. Drinking CMW led to a significant reduction in the heart rate, while all-time domain and Power Spectral Density parameters (PSD) were unaffected. Consumption of FCMW resulted in a highly significant difference and decrease in heart rate, and an increase in NN interbeat intervals, and in two of the PSD parameters. A large increase in total power had a significant increasing effect on 2 – 3-minute oscillations of the very low frequency (VLF) power, indicating a specific change in the heartʼ s intrinsic cardiac rhythm that is fundamental to health and well-being. An extension in mono and multifractal scaling of heart rate dynamics defines a healthy function and non-local adaptability, indicating a higher capacity to respond to unpredictable stimuli and stresses, a function which improves autonomic stability. The effect on the heart rate and VLF power suggest an efficient cellular metabolism and a stabilizing effect on mucosal immunoglobulin A. Conclusions: Functional coherent mineral water with an apparent non-local electromagnetic identity triggered in healthy subjects a sustainable sympathetic response in cardiac VLF power, which is considered an intrinsic health-promoting rhythm produced by the heart itself that accompanies adaptive mono and multifractal heart rhythm dynamics. Keywords: functional water, VLF-power, heart rate variability, fractal scaling, health improvement
First Cenozoic glaciers in West Antarctica

One of the most significant global climatic events in the Cenozoic was the transi− tion from greenhouse to icehouse conditions in Antarctica. Tectonic evolution of the region and gradual cooling at the end of Eocene led to the first appearance of ice sheets at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary (ca. 34 Ma). Here we report geological record of mountain gla− ciers that preceded major ice sheet formation in Antarctica. A terrestrial, valley−type tillite up to 65 metres thick was revealed between two basaltic lava sequences in the Eocene- Oligocene Point Thomas Formation at Herve Cove - Breccia Crag in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, South Shetland Islands. K−Ar dating of the lavas suggests the age of the gla− ciation at 45-41 Ma (Middle Eocene). It is the oldest Cenozoic record of alpine glaciers in West Antarctica, providing insight into the onset of glaciation of the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands. Key wor ds: Antarctica, King George Island, Eocene, mountain glaciers.
Construction of an energy efficiency measuring test bench for belt drives

A test bench for the evaluation of the energy efficiency of belt drives is presented. The construction and measurement procedure is discussed with respect to measurement accuracy and reproducibility. Also the impact of additional parameters such as belt tension and misalignment can be analyzed. First measurement results comparing a V-belt drive and a synchronous belt drive are discussed. The efficiency of the drives is measured in the entire operation range and represented by means of iso efficiency maps.
RESIDUAL VOLUMES AND FINAL WEIGHTS IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF PLASTIC INFUSION CONTAINERS Original Article

Objective: To compare the residual volumes, the drained volumes, and the final weights of different infusion containers with different volumes and degrees of flexibility. The risk of drug error can be aggravated by a high residual volume remaining in a drained intravenous container. A high residual volume can also increase the final weight of the container after drainage. Methods: A total of 80 infusion containers containing normal saline of four different brands (Viaflo® and Freeflex® flexible bags and KabiPac® and Ecoflac® Results: The residual volume that remained in the intravenous containers tested was lower than 2% of the declared volume, with only one exception (KabiPac Plus semi-rigid containers) in two different volumes (250 and 500 ml) were tested. Every container type was tested ten times under close- vent conditions. Residual and total drained volumes and weights of drained containers before and after drying were assessed. ® 250 ml), in which the residual volume was higher than 10% of the declared volume. Using gravity drainage, among the 250 ml containers, only one (Viaflo®) reached the full declared total drained volume of 250 ml. By contrast, among the 500 ml containers, only one failed to reach the declared drained volume. There were significant differences in favor of flexible bags in the final weights of containers after drainage, and in one case (250 ml KabiPac® Conclusion: All four types of containers can be used with the same resulting quality of parenteral treatment. Selection of a specific type of container will be affected primarily by the price (both acquisition and waste disposal costs) and requirements of personnel for handling the container. semi-rigid container) the residual volume accounted for more than a half of the final container weight.
Rapid Detection of Subclinical Mastitis in Dairy Cow

Mastitis is an important disease of dairy cattle. There are two forms of mastitis. One is clinical and another is sub clinical. Clinical Mastitis is easily detected by its clinical signs and milk quality but sub clinical mastitis shows no lesions. Other hand subclinical mastitis cause most economic losses compared to clinical form. Thus rapid field detection technique is a strong tool to reduce this form. California Mastitis Test (CMT) is the most quick and reliable field test to detect this form of mastitis.
Analysis of stability for iron and zinc concentration and molecular diversity in elite lines of lentil (Lens culinaris subsp. culinaris)

Forty-one lentil genotypes along with four check varieties were grown at three diverse locations New Delhi, Ludhiana and Pantnagar in NWPZ (North West Plain Zone) during Rabi season 2010-11 to analyze genotype x environment interaction using Ebarharts and Russel’s stability model and AMMI biplot. The analysis of variance for seed Fe and Zn content at individual locations showed highly significant differences between genotypes. Pooled analysis of variance over locations displayed highly significant differences between genotypes, locations and genotype x location interaction. Among 41 genotypes, the maximum mean for seed Fe content over the locations was obtained in LH84-8 (127.02 mg Kg -1 ) while for seed Zn content it was L 4704 (74.16 mg Kg -1 ). The highest mean seed Fe and Zn producing location was IARI, New Delhi (Fe90.07 mg Kg 1 Zn-66.17 mg Kg 1). In this study, although both micronutrients are influenced by environment, seed Fe is more sensitive to environmental fluctuations in comparison to seed Zn concentration. The analysis of stability based on mean Fe and Zn content, regression coefficient and deviation from regression revealed that the genotypes IPL320 and L4704 were most stable and adapted to the diverse environmental conditions of NWPZ for Zn content; LH 07-26 and LH84-8 had high mean value for Fe content with little deviation from regression. The critical perusal of AMMI biplot revealed that all the three locations have equal discriminating power for Zn content but for Fe content location S1 was found to be most discriminative. Based on the angles of the environment vectors the three locations have poor correlation between them for both seed iron and zinc content. Among all genotypes IPL320 is most stable alongwith relatively better Zn content although L4704 had highest mean value with some G X E interaction. These genotypes are recommended for commercial cultivation and can also be effectively utilized in the recombination breeding programs to enhance genetic variability in lentil. Further being the first report of the iron and zinc study in lentil from India, the present study revealed no correlation between seed Fe and Zn concentrations at all the three locations in the analyzed genotypes, hence indicated the possibility of genetically improving the two target traits independent of each other.
Genotype x Environment interaction for antioxidants and phytic acid contents in bread and durum wheat as influenced by climate

Antioxidants prevent oxidative stress and exert positive health effects. However, phytic acid among them decreases micronutrients absorption, representing also antinutrient to human and non-ruminant animals. Fifteen bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and 15 durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) genotypes were evaluated across six environments to determine contents of phytic acid (PA), inorganic P (Pi), total yellow pigment, total soluble phenolic compounds, free protein sulfhydryl groups (PSH), and also phytic acid P/Pi (Pp/Pi). The objective of this study was to quantify, for each trait the effects of environment, genotype, and their interaction; and the influence of climatic factors on the Genotype x Environment interaction (GEI) by the use of the factorial regression. GEI (P < 0.001) prevailed as source of variation over genotype (P < 0.001) in determining PA content in bread and durum wheat (44.3% and 34.7% of sum of squares-SS, respectively), PSH content in bread and durum wheat (27% and 28.4% of SS, respectively) and total soluble phenolic compounds content in durum wheat (35.5% of SS). The major contribution to the GEI represented climatic variables during stages of stem elongation for PA and phenolic compounds, and also flowering, fertilization, grain formation and grain filling for PSH. Total yellow pigment and Pi contents in bread and durum wheat were predominantly determined by genotype (P < 0.001). Models of climatic variables proved to be efficient in the explanation of more than 92% of the SS of GEI for PA and antioxidants contents.
Thickness-Independent Automated Constitutive Parameters Extraction of Thin Solid and Liquid Materials from Waveguide Measurements

The constitutive parameters measurement of thin solid and liquid materials by transmission-reflection methods generally suffers from a) the requirement of the transformation of measured scattering parameters from the reference plane to the end surfaces of the material (measurement plane) and b) inaccurate knowledge on the length of the material, if the material does not fill the entire measurement cell (a waveguide or coaxial-line section). In this research paper, a microwave waveguide method for constitutive parameters determination of these materials is proposed to simultaneously eliminate these problems. There are three main advantages of the proposed method as: a) it explicitly determines the constitutive parameters from measured S-parameters; b) it does not require the knowledge about sample length since it directly measures it as a byproduct of the method; and c) it offers a self-checking feature to trace the performance and accurateness of measurements. This feature does not depend on the constitutive parameters of the sample. We measured the complex permittivity of some thin solid and liquid test samples for validation of the method.
CLASSIFICATION OF WINE DATASET USING EFFICIENT MODIFIED RANDOM FOREST ALGORITHM

Data mining is used in many applications to provide best solutions. The researchers on data mining invented various solutions to predict data. Random forest algorithm is a one of the ensemble learning method for classification and regression of dataset. It is not accurate and facing classification problem. In this paper, we propose modified random forest algorithm to merge random forest algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm. To analyze the performance of proposed method, wine data with 13 attributes is taken as an input from UCI repository, confusion matrix is used to measure accuracy, recall, F1, and precision. Compare with random forest algorithm proposed method exhibit better results. Keywords: Data Mining, Classification, Random Forest Algorithm, Wine Dataset, Prediction
Testing the weak form of efficient market hypothesis in carbon efficient stock indices along with their benchmark indices in select countries

This paper presents the results of tests on the weak form of Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to carbon efficient stock market indices of India, the United States of America (USA), Japan, and Brazil and their corresponding market indices which are used as their benchmark indices. In this study, Kolmogrov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests are used to test the normality of data. Run test and auto-correlation test are used to check the randomness of the data. The tests are performed using daily closing prices for the whole sample period. It is found from the statistical tests that the daily closing prices do not follow random walks in all the four countries. However, monthly returns are following random walk in case of India, USA, and Brazil, but not in case of Japan.
Arbitrage-Free Prediction of the Implied Volatility Smile

This paper gives an arbitrage-free prediction for future prices of an arbitrary co-terminal set of options with a given maturity, based on the observed time series of these option prices. The statistical analysis of such a multi-dimensional time series of option prices corresponding to $n$ strikes (with $n$ large, e.g. $n\geq 40$) and the same maturity, is a difficult task due to the fact that option prices at any moment in time satisfy non-linear and non-explicit no-arbitrage restrictions. Hence any $n$-dimensional time series model also has to satisfy these implicit restrictions at each time step, a condition that is impossible to meet since the model innovations can take arbitrary values. We solve this problem for any $n\in\NN$ in the context of Foreign Exchange (FX) by first encoding the option prices at each time step in terms of the parameters of the corresponding risk-neutral measure and then performing the time series analysis in the parameter space. The option price predictions are obtained from the predicted risk-neutral measure by effectively integrating it against the corresponding option payoffs. The non-linear transformation between option prices and the risk-neutral parameters applied here is \textit{not} arbitrary: it is the standard mapping used by market makers in the FX option markets (the SABR parameterisation) and is given explicitly in closed form. Our method is not restricted to the FX asset class nor does it depend on the type of parameterisation used. Statistical analysis of FX market data illustrates that our arbitrage-free predictions outperform the naive random walk forecasts, suggesting a potential for building management strategies for portfolios of derivative products, akin to the ones widely used in the underlying equity and futures markets.
Abdelsalam, Ibrahim and Elgenedy, Mohamed A. and Ahmed, Shehab and Williams, Barry W. (2017) Full-bridge modular multilevel sub-module based high-voltage bipolar pulse generator with low voltage DC input for pulsed electric field

High voltage (HV) pulse generators (PGs) are the core of pulsed electric field applications. Applying HV pulses produces electrical pores in a biological cell membrane, in which if the size of the pores increases beyond a critical size, the cell will not survive. This paper proposes a new HV-PG, based on the modular multilevel converter with full-bridge sub-modules (FBSMs). In order to alleviate the need of complicated sensorless or sensor based voltage balancing techniques for the FB-SM capacitors, a dedicated self-regulating charging circuit is connected across each FB-SM capacitor. The individual capacitor charging voltage-level is obtained from three successive stages namely: convert the low-voltage DC input voltage to a highfrequency square AC voltage; increase the AC voltage-level via a nano-crystalline step-up transformer; and rectify the secondary transformer AC voltage via a diode full-bridge rectifier. The HV bipolar pulses are formed across the load in a fourth stage through series connected FB-SMs. The flexibility of inserting and bypassing the FB-SM capacitors, allows the proposed topology to generate different pulse-waveform shapes, including rectangular waveforms with specifically reduced 纂士【纂嗣 and ramp pulses. The practical results, from a scaled down experimental rig with five FB-SMs and a 1kV peak to peak pulse output, validate the proposed topology.