Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of variations in solar activity on hydrological decadal patterns in northern Italy

[1] Using spectral and statistical analyses of discharges and basin average precipitation rates acquired over the Po River since the early 1800s, we investigate the impact of variations in solar activity on hydrological decadal patterns over northern Italy. Wet and dry periods appear to alternate in accordance with polarized sunspot cycles. Intriguingly, a solar signature on Po River discharges is detected to be highly significant since the late 1800s, before the onset of sunspots hyperactivity established by the middle 1900s. In particular, observed hydrological patterns over northern Italy are significantly correlated, under periods of quiet sunspot activity, with parameters characterizing the Sun's orbital motion, specifically with the time derivative of the solar angular momentum (τ) which is thought to modulate the strength of the solar wind and sunspot dynamics under weak sunspot activity. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is detected as potential link between the Sun and Po River discharges, since it is significantly correlated with both solar activity and the decadal variability in the north Italian climate. In particular, positive (negative) NAO anomalies, which are associated with comparatively lower (higher) Po River discharges, are assessed to alternatively correlate at decadal timescales either with τ or with the Earth's geomagnetic activity (GA), which closely follows sunspot activity. This changing correlation seems to be regulated by the strength of sunspot activity: under periods of quiet sunspot activity, a weakening of the GA-NAO connection and a reinforcement of the τ-NAO connection is observed. In this sense, the strength of solar activity apparently modulates the connection between the NAO and Po River discharges.
Innovative Elevated Walkway for a Liveable Kuala Lumpur City

Malaysia is employing a wide variety of redevelopment strategies in efforts to control the issues associated with car traffic congestion and pedestrian activities in Kuala Lumpur city centre. The current leading strategy is the physical separation of pedestrians from vehicular traffic with the elevated walkway system. Though designed primarily for effective movement via walking, protection of pedestrians from fatal car accidents, snatch thefts and exposure to worsening climate conditions; the design of the elevated walkway system is becoming increasingly controversial. Local authorities have recently adopted new elevated walkway designs which include a climate regulated walkway using mechanical cooling systems that would contribute to heat gain in the urban area. The purpose of this study is to recommend the development of a Code of Urban Design Practice for Elevated Walkway Design using innovative strategies and devices with renewable energy. The study is comparison of 2 case study elevated walkways of different characteristics in Kuala Lumpur. The recommendation is based on performance evaluation via direct observation of typology and post occupancy evaluation (POE) using questionnaires to understand the user’s evaluation of safety, and comfort in the occupancy stage of the systems lifecycle. 643 respondents were involved, representing the users during peak hours on weekdays and weekends. The emerging results identified the various typologies of elevated walkway design in Kuala Lumpur. It further reveals patterns in user’s evaluation of the elevated walkway as safe but to some degree comfortable and finally significantly unenjoyable. The paper concludes with suggestions of innovative, passive and low energy designs of elevated walkways as a recommendation for a Code of Urban Design Practice for Elevated Walkway Design based on the performance evaluation conducted in all two (2) case study areas.
Confronting Death: Co-infection with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C

This paper discusses a qualitative study completed by the researcher revealing the need for assistance for people living with a co-infection of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. It is the role of a social worker to assist this at-risk population. Services must be made available to those co-infected, including courses on end of life coping skills, substance abuse, stigma, and depression and anxiety. Included in this article is a study that documents qualitative data from clients at a Drop-in Center in Providence, Rhode Island for people living with HIV/AIDS. The data proved inconclusive with regards to co-infection and death and dying, but demonstrates that death and dying still play a large role in persons diagnosed with HIV. Within the excerpts, the following 5 themes were identified: initial shock and references to dying, drug use as a method for coping with death, perseverance after initial diagnosis, hepatitis C adding additional worry and stress to HIV diagnosis, and the inability to cope with death and dying. Implications suggest that further data be collected on this topic and that death and dying needs to be addressed by social workers in a therapeutic setting when working with this population.
Development and use of microsatellites markers for genetic variation analysis, in the Namibian germplasm, both within and between populations of marama bean (Tylosema esculentum)

Tylosema esculentum (marama) has long been identified as a candidate crop for arid and semi-arid environments due to its success in these environments and the high nutritional value of the seed. Molecular markers are essential for the assessment of the levels of genetic variation present within and between populations of marama as well for future marker-assisted breeding efforts. Microsatellites were isolated using a modified FIASCO enrichment technique. Eighty pairs of primers were designed to amplify across a selected set of perfect microsatellite repeats with greater than 5 repeat units. Of the 80 primer pairs screened, 76% were able to detect polymorphism and 21% gave monomorphic bands while the other 3% gave inconsistent results. Four of the polymorphic SSR’s were used for genetic variation analysis and have proved to be useful and informative markers for assessing intra-specific and inter-specific variability of marama bean. Heterozygosity (H) within and between populations of marama bean in the Namibian germplasm ranged from 0.30 to 0.74. Some of the populations had low genetic variation while others had high genetic variation. Key words: Tylosema esculentum, microsatellites, FIASCO, polymorphism, genetic variation, heterozygosity.
Effects of Substituting Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) Meal with Soya Bean Meal on the Performance of SASSO X RIR Crossbred Chicken

This experiment was carried out to evaluate the nutritive value of safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) meal with the substituting of soybean grain on the performance of SASSO x RIR crossbred chicks. A total of one hundred fifty six 21 day-old male SASSO x RIR crossbred chicks were grouped into 12 pens of 13 chicks each, and randomly assigned to four dietary treatments with the first treatment T1 comprised a ration with no safflower meal (100% SBM), while T2, T3, and T4 were made to contain 20%, 40% and 60% safflower meal with substituting for soybean meal out of 36.35% of total mixed ration (TMR), respectively. All diets were isocaloric (3695.74 kcalME/kg DM) and isonitrogenous (21.42% CP). Feed intake, feed utilization efficiency and growth performance were determined from 2 to 12 weeks. The results showed that the mean dry matter intake and feed conversion efficiency were varying significantly (P<0.05) among the dietary treatments. Moreover, significantly (P<0.01) inferior final body weight gain was obtained in chicks fed 100% safflower meal than the rest of dietary treatments. Weight gain was highest (18.17 g/day) for the ration containing 21.8% safflower meal (60% substitute T4) and lowest (13.9 g/day) for the diet containing 36.35% soybean meal (control T1). The higher net return was detected in T4 (81.87 ETB) as compared to other treatments and the least return T1 (64.08 ETB). Based on this, it could be concluded that soybean grain could be substituted by safflower meal in chick’s rations at the level of 60% without any adverse effect on the performance of chicks so as to increase the economic efficiency.
DESIGNING WITH STAKEHOLDERS DURING SOCIAL INNOVATION PROJECTS: A MAPPING AND ANALYSIS TOOL

During co-innovation projects multiple agencies, organizations, internal and external groups, and communities collaborate in a complex situation to develop mutual value and social improvement. During these projects it is important that the project community is able to conceptualise the network that they rely upon and impact. Established network mapping and analysis practices and tools are objective and evaluative in nature and do not support mapping that is generative, undertaken as a community and explorative. This research sought to address that challenge and answer the question: what re-usable technique, with scripted procedures, supports generative stakeholder analysis and supports the principle of an empathic project community? Students and academics, during a series of social improvement projects, following a design-led multidisciplinary innovation process within which a dynamic stakeholder mapping tool has been developed. This research reports on the tool’s iterative development and evaluation. The research established a successful procedure for stakeholder mapping which demonstrated that involving stakeholders in the identification and analysis process allows for a deep and rich stakeholder map to emerge that is focused upon individuals and reciprocal perspectives.
Transmission Properties of Metallic Grating with Subwavelength Slits in THz Frequency Region

This paper presents a fully experimental and theoretical study on transmission properties of a deep metallic grating with subwavelength slits in THz frequency region by using THz time domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS). The grating exposed to p-polarized incident wave exhibits enhanced nonresonant transmission in the long-wavelength region where the incident wavelength is larger than the grating period. Wood anomalies are observed when the wavelength is comparable to the grating period. Strict theory is given to explain the experimental results and the two are in good agreement. It is proposed that the Wood dips may be considered a criterion and a tool to judge and control the uniformity or fabricating accuracy of the grating period.
Vocal separation using nearest neighbours and median filtering

Recently, single channel vocal separation algorithms have been proposed which exploit the fact that most popular music can be regarded as a repeating musical background over which a locally non-repeating vocal signal is superimposed. In this paper we describe a novel vocal separator inspired by these approaches which finds the k nearest neighbours to each frame of a spectrogram of the mixture signal. The median value of these frames is then used as the estimate of the background music at the current frame. This is then used to generate a mask on the original complex-valued spectrogram before inversion to the time domain. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on a number of real-world signals. (5 pages)
I . RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION OPTIMAL INTEGRATION OF DISTRIBUTED ENERGY STORAGE AND SMALL GENERATORS INTO AN ISLANDED MICROGRID WITH RENEWABLE SOURCE

The purpose is to study how best to integrate distributed energy storage and small thermal generators in a Microgrid mainly powered by renewable sources. Optimal placing and capacity sharing of distributed energy storage helps to reduce Joule losses and voltage drops. Small generators give same advantages at optimal location. Optimal capacity sharing of Distributed energy storage is based on Droop mode control of specific inverter. Storage units are guided to behave homogenously to have the same evolution of State of Charge, so the same life cycle. By minimizing the Joule losses, the decentralization of storage allows to reduce the conductor section or the size of renewable power sources at design phase. For existed grid, it could delay distribution grid’s upgrade investment. It should be therefore financially interesting.
Direction Finding System Using Planar Luneburg Lens

─ In this paper, a novel two-dimensional Luneburg lens, composed of artificial impendence surfaces (AIS), is proposed for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Several detectors are mounted around the Luneburg lens to estimate the DOA of a microwave signal, owing to the surface wave can be focused perfectly on the diametrically opposite side of the lens. The desired refractive index profile of the Luneburg lens is controlled by the variable surface impendence of the unit cells, which is obtained by using an array of complementary unipolar compact photonic band gap (UC-PBG) structure inside a parallel plate waveguide. The proposed Luneburg lens with several probes, which operate in X-band region, are fabricated and measured to demonstrate the direction finding system. Both simulation and measured results show that the system has an excellent focusing ability, and the measured resolution of the system agrees very well with the theoretical value. Index Terms ─ Artificial impendence surfaces, direction of arrival estimation, Luneburg lens, surface wave.
Internal and External Influences on the Firm Objective

Firms are increasingly responding to social and environmental claims from society. Practices oriented to attend issues such as poverty, work equality, or renewable energy, are being implemented more frequently by firms to address impacts on sustainability. However, questions remain on how the responses of firms vary across industries and regions between the social and the economic objectives. Using concepts from organizational theory and social network theory, this paper aims to create a theoretical framework that explains the internal and external influences that make a firm establish its objective. The framework explains why firms might have a different objective orientation in terms of its economic and social prioritization. Keywords—Organizational identity, social network analysis, firm objective, value maximization, social responsibility.
Light-Induced Molecular Potentials

We investigate the dissociation dynamics of molecules exposed to intense laser fields that induce electronic Rabi frequencies comparable to the frequency of nuclear vibration. A fast, mass selected beam of the simply structured model molecule Ar{sub 2}{sup +} was prepared in low vibrational levels and crossed with a dye laser beam (532nm, {le}5{times}10{sup 12}W/cm{sup 2}). The absolute number of photofragments has been measured as a function of intensity. A clear experimental signature of light-induced potential curves is observed: enhanced dissociation by tunneling through a light-induced potential barrier. This is deduced from a quantitative comparison with theoretical predictions. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}
Virucidal Activity of Newly Synthesized Chalcone Derivatives againstH1N1 Virus Supported by Molecular Docking and Membrane InteractionStudies

Oseltamivir and zanamivir are the commercially successful neuraminidase (NA) inhibitors approved for treatment of influenza, caused by highly pathogenic H1N1 influenza virus. Being transition state analogs of sialic acid, an endogenous ligand of NA, many scaffolds were developed based on similar structural features. But high rate of mutation in H1N1 necessitates extra search of a novel drug which can withstand drug resistance. Considering this we have developed a known naturally occurring scaffold chalcone, which is not a transition state analog, by incorporating various substituents based on their electronic and steric properties. With the help of computational drug design few promising molecules are screened and synthesized further. All the compounds under study showed different mode of binding in the active cavity. The inhibition of cytopathic effect of H1N1 by synthesized derivatives has been evaluated by in vitro cell based technique using oseltamivir as a standard. To gain insight into molecular mechanism of interaction of the derivatives with H1N1-NA, we have investigated the effect of these molecules on thermotropic properties and organization of membrane bilayer prepared from lipids using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and differential scanning calorimetric (DSC) techniques. The compounds under study point towards stabilization of the membrane bilayer as expected for antiviral activity. Almost all derivatives showed activity parallel to the standard. Among all derivative ChmN showed highest activity at 0.67 nM whereas lowest activity was displayed by derivative ChmM at 10.35 nM. Derivative ChpH showed activity almost equivalent to oseltamivir.
The Impact of Unprofitable Customer Abandonment on Current Customers’ Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Intentions: An Empirical Analysis

To manage relationships of unprofitable customer and mainly divesting is the area has receiving growing attention between researchers and practitioners over the past few years. The aim of paper is to explore the influence of abandonment of unprofitable customer on existing customers of abandoning firm, specially their exit voice and loyalty intentions. For the first time this study examines that how current customer that a company want to keep along reacts towards termination of unprofitable customer’s relationship. As a result, insights have been provided with regard to cost associated with the abandonment of unprofitable customer relationship a problem that has not been the focus of any empirical study nowadays. This is mainly an empirical study and a scale was settled to know the influence of constructs comprising; relational and structural constraints on exit, voice and loyalty intentions. The survey was circulated among the participants based on convenience sampling. Data were analyzed using correlation and regression analysis to assess the impact of abandonment of unprofitable customer on existing ones of abandoning firm. Study show that existing customers are more inclined and actively respond to abandonment of unprofitable customer in terms of exit/voice than passively through loyalty silence. Moreover, this indicates that current customers are less likely to limit the potential negative consequences, abandon unprofitable customer switching costs increase or satisfied.
Regional Integration and Technology Diffusion: The Case of the North America Free Trade Agreement

The literature on regional integration agreements (RIAs) is vast and deals with political, economic, and political economy issues. The literature on the economics of RIAs deals mostly with static effects, and concludes that these effects are, in general, ambiguous. So far there has been no empirical analysis of the dynamic effects of RIAs based on their impact on technology diffusion from partner and nonpartner countries. Schiff and Wang's paper is a first attempt in this direction. The authors examine the impact of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on total factor productivity in Mexico through its impact on trade-related technology transfers from OECD countries. They estimate trade-related technology diffusion by using a measure of trade-related foreign research and development (R&D). Foreign R&D is constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the OECD, OECD-Mexico trade patterns, and input-output relations in Mexico. The authors find that: Mexico's trade with its NAFTA partners had a large and significant impact on Mexico's total factor productivity, while trade with the rest of the OECD did not. Simulating the impact of NAFTA has led to a permanent increase in total factor productivity in Mexico's manufacturing sector of between 5.5 percent and 7.5 percent and to some convergence with the economies of Canada and the United States.
Assessment of population genetic diversity accounting for genomic relationships of founders that have unknown pedigree relationships

Genetic relatedness is a fundamental concept in animal breeding and conservation genetics. Typically, pedigree information is available for calculating an additive relationship () matrix, while ancestors of founder individuals are assumed unrelated. Recently, genome-wide dense SNP markers have been available for measuring genetic similarity between all pairs of individuals, to construct a so-called matrix, and moreover, a hybrid () matrix of the and matrices as proposed for single-step GBLUP. A concept of metafounders has been advocated for constructing founder genetic relationships. Our objective was to investigate relationships between a matrix using all individuals in pedigree with , matrices and an matrix with metafounder (). We generated data having different two scenarios regarding relatedness among founders; linkage equilibrium (LE) and linkage disequilibrium (LD). Correlations of the matrix of whole individuals with the or matrices were better in the LE scenario than those in the LD scenario. On the other hand, in the LD scenario, regression coefficients of elements of on elements in or were less than the desired value of 1, and intercepts were higher than 0. In both scenarios, constructed using a small number of genotyped individuals departed from the matrix, whereas, that using a moderate number of individuals with the genotypes resulted in better adjusted matrices relative to .
Intercalibration of Broadband Geostationary Imagers Using AIRS

Abstract Geostationary simultaneous nadir observations (GSNOs) are collected for Earth Observing System (EOS) Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on board Aqua and a global array of geostationary imagers. The imagers compared in this study are on (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) GOES-10, GOES-11, GOES-12, (Meteorological Satellites) Meteosat-8, Meteosat-9, Multifunctional Transport Satellite-IR (MTSAT-IR), and Fenguyun-2C (FY-2C). It has been shown that a single polar-orbiting satellite can be used to intercalibrate any number of geostationary imagers. Using a high-spectral-resolution infrared sensor, in this case AIRS, brings this method closer to an absolute reckoning of imager calibration accuracy based on laboratory measurements of the instrument’s spectral response. An intercalibration method is presented here, including a method of compensating for AIRS’ spectral gaps, along with results for approximately 22 months of comparisons. The method appears to work very well for most ban.
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON ADIABATIC TWO-PHASE EXPANSION IN A CYLINDER FOR TRILATERAL CYCLE

In the present study, temperature and pressure measurements and visualization of two-phase adiabatic expansion for trilateral cycle are carried out. Experimental setup with piston and cylinder which mimics the reciprocating expander is constructed and boiling phenomenon is visualized. Working fluids are water and ethanol, and initial temperatures are 100 and 80 ℃ in this study. Output work is calculated from the P – V diagram. In addition, filter-type sintered metal is fixed on the bottom of the cylinder to enhance boiling. The difference between measured and quasi-static pressures becomes larger and the adiabatic efficiency decreases as piston velocity is increased. With sintered metal filter on the bottom of the cylinder, the deterioration of adiabatic efficiency becomes moderate for both working fluids because of the initial captured bubbles in the sintered metal. The adiabatic efficiency for pore diameter of dpore = 20 m and piston velocity 300 mm/s case is about 87 % for water, which is 1.05 times larger than that of the smooth surface condition. For ethanol, the adiabatic efficiency was about 92 % which is 1.18 times larger than that of the smooth surface condition. To investigate the feasibility of the two-phase expander, an experiment reproducing the intake and exhaust processes is conducted. The adiabatic efficiency increases with the increase of maximum piston velocity because of the reduction of heat loss. The sintered metal filter for boiling enhancement is also effective in an expander with intake and exhaust processes.