Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NIR Spectroscopy and NMF Algorithm for Identification of Oil Pollutants in Water

Oil pollutants is one of the major pollution sources in water. Accurate, rapid, and convenient detection method of oil pollutants in water has very important theoretical value and practical significance. The combination of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) and chemometrics is ideal for such a situation. NIR spectroscopy is a powerful and effective technique. traditional NIR methods do not take full account of the absorbance data non-negative characteristics, resulting in the analysis lack of reasonable explanation. In this paper, the qualitative discriminate method of single species oil contaminants based on nonnegative matrix factorization feature extraction combined with support vector machine classification algorithm is studied. Non-negative matrix factorization algorithm and support vector machine classifier parameters on classification accuracy are discussed in depth to optimize NIR qualitative classification model. The present method has a good identification effect and strong generalization ability , and can work as a new method for rapid identification of oil pollutants in water. Keywords-NIR Spectroscopy; Non-negative matrix factorization; oil pollutans;; Support Vector Machine; Genetic
Feeding with chicory roots reduces the amount of odorous compounds in colon and rectal contents of pigs

Sixteen pigs (eight entire males and eight females) were given individually two diets, control and control added 25% chopped chicory roots for 2 months before slaughter. Samples were taken from the contents in colon and rectum and subjected to GC-MS analysis for amount of odour impact compounds. The compounds 2-pentanone, ethylbutyrate, propylpropionate, butyric acid, ethyl-2-methylbutyrate, p-cresol, indole and skatole showed a significant difference between the two treatments. The esters, which have relatively pleasant, often fruity odours, increased in the chicory treatment, whereas the malodorous compounds, p-cresol, indole and skatole decreased in the chicory treatment. The measured amounts of compounds were corrected for their odour thresholds as different compounds can have widely different odour thresholds. Principal components analysis was then used to analyse the raw and corrected data results. p-Cresol was the most malodorous compound and together with skatole and indole count as the most malodorous compounds in the colon and rectum cotents. However, butyric acid also had some minor influence. Feeding chicory roots decreased significantly the concentrations of these malodorous compounds, especially if the lowest odour threshold values are used as correction factors.
Planar Visualisation of Vortical Flows

This paper presents two over-looked post-processing techniques which provide the investigator with additional tools for data analysis and visualisation. Both techniques exploit the trend for planar experimental data collection and are implemented in two-dimensions. Critically, both techniques are suitable for use on computational and experimental datasets, require no a-priori knowledge of the flow-field and minimal user interaction during processing. Firstly, line integral convolution will be introduced as an alternative to streamline or in-plane velocity vector visualisation. Secondly, a feature identification procedure will be outlined that can be used to reduce datasets for clearer visualisation and provide quantitative information about topological flow features.
4-D Retro-Directive Antenna Arrays for Secure Communication Based on Improved Directional Modulation

The 4-D antenna arrays combined with retro-directive technique based on an improved directional modulation technique are proposed for physical layer secure communications. The optimized time sequence is designed, which improves the security performance of 4-D antenna arrays greatly. By introducing the retro-directive technique into 4-D antenna arrays, secure communication can be realized without any prior knowledge of the legitimate receiver’s location. Moreover, the proposed approach avoids both the heavy computational burden and complex hardware implementation, benefiting from the inherent advantages of retro-directive antenna arrays in automatic target tracking. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed transmitter architecture of 4-D retro-directive arrays provides an effective way to achieve wireless secure communication in the scenario with multiple legitimate receivers and under multipath environment.
Body Objectification, MTV, and Psychological Outcomes Among Female Adolescents1

In response to the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, the present study explored the role of sexually objectifying media—in this case, music television—in a host of psychological consequences among a community sample of adolescents girls (M age = 13 years). Objectification theory posits that the consequences of sexual objectification involve the process of self-objectification. As such, we hypothesized that music television consumption would first and foremost be associated with self-objectification, which would, in turn, predict a number of body-related consequences. The findings support a model in which self-objectification mediates a direct relation between music television viewing and body esteem, dieting, depressive symptoms, anxiety, and confidence in math ability.
Application of genetic programming for proton-proton interactions

AbstractThe aim of the present work is to use one of the machine learning techniques named the genetic programming (GP) to model the p-p interactions through discovering functions. In our study, GP is used to simulate and predict the multiplicity distribution of charged pions (P(nch)), the average multiplicity (〈nch〉) and the total cross section (σtot) at different values of high energies. We have obtained the multiplicity distribution as a function of the center of mass energy ($$ \sqrt s $$) and charged particles (nch). Also, both the average multiplicity and the total cross section are obtained as a function of $$ \sqrt s $$. Our discovered functions produced by GP technique show a good match to the experimental data. The performance of the GP models was also tested at non-trained data and was found to be in good agreement with the experimental data.
Rationally Defensible Standards for Research in Developing Countries

D ebates on ethical requirements for conducting international collaborative medical research in developing countries have achieved considerable prominence in recent years. The stark implications of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, major escalation of clinical research in developing countries, and the imbalance of only 10% of world medical research expenditure on diseases causing 90% of the global burden of disease have rekindled concern about relationships between researchers and their subjects. Information gained from clinical trials conducted efficiently and expeditiously in developing countries has the appeal of allowing early registration of drugs, thus considerably enhancing profits. Growing sensitivity to the potential for exploitation has been associated with the expectation that profits should also benefit the citizens of developing
Towards Practical Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Multi-lane Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we propose an approach for making hierarchical reinforcement learn1 ing practical for autonomous driving on multi-lane highway or urban structured 2 roads. While this approach follows the conventional hierarchy of behavior decision, 3 motion planning, and control, it introduces an intermediate layer of abstraction 4 that specifically discretizes the state-action space for motion planning according to 5 a given behavioral decision. This hierarchical design allows principled modular 6 extension of motion planning, in contrast to relying on either monolithic behavior 7 cloning or a large set of hand-written rules. We show that this design enables 8 significantly faster learning than a flat design, when using both value-based and 9 policy optimization methods (DQN and PPO). We also show that this design allows 10 transferring of the trained models, without any retraining, from a simulated environ11 ment with virtually no dynamics to one with significantly more realistic dynamics. 12 Overall, our proposed approach is a promising way to allow reinforcement learning 13 to be applied to complex multi-lane driving in the real world. In addition, we 14 introduce and release an open source simulator for multi-lane driving that follows 15 the OpenAI Gym APIs and is suitable for reinforcement learning research. 16
Do employees really gain from strong employment protection? Workplace stress and labor market institutions.∗

This paper explores the link between the rigidity of employment protection and workrelated stress. Theoretical reasoning suggests a positive correlation: in the same way that a costly divorce exacerbates family tensions, costly separations reinforce the extent to which workers and employers engage in conflict. Separation costs also induce firms to use monitoring in order to increase pressure on workers, as well as reduce the latter’s propensity to quit by reducing labour market turnover, thereby increasing job dissatisfaction. Data from Canada’s National Public Health Survey, which provides details on workrelated stress and the consumption of psychoactive medications such as anti-depressants, support the conjecture. By first exploiting cross-province differences in employment protection legislation (EPL), I find positive links between individual employment protection and some dimensions of stress, and weaker but positive links between employment protection, depression and the consumption of various psychoactive drugs. I then use tenure and firm size information from another dataset to generate further variance in EPL within regions, by imputation. They confirm the previous results. Falsification exercises indicate that family stress, for example, is unrelated to regional EPL, while financial stress is negatively correlated with EPL. ∗This research was financed by a grant from PAFARC (UQAM & Canada Research Chair) and a grant from SSRHC. I would like to thank Mario Bédard, Denis Gonthier and Isabelle Pronovost from CIQSS for their very useful suggestions on geographical codes to match NPHS with Census data, colleagues at UQAM, participants in various seminars and conferences, notably the European Symposium in Labour Economics, the Fed of Cleveland, Les Journées du CIRPÉE, OFCE, MIT’s Macro seminar, the SOEGW conference in Rimini, CIAR’s meeting in Montreal, and Wilfried Laurier University. I would also like to thank Daron Acemoglu, David Altig, Stéphane Auray, Roland Benabou, Giuseppe Bertola, Olivier Blanchard, Matthieu Chemin, Damon Clark, Azim Essaji, Armin Falk, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Xavier Gabaix, Winfried Koninger, John Helliwell, Maia Guell, Pierre Lefebvre, Nicolas Lepage-Saucier, Lars Ljungqvist, Nicolas Marceau, Espen Moen, Jose-Rodriguez Mora, Ed Nosal, Louis Phaneuf, Michael Piore, Chris Pissarides, Gilles Saint-Paul, Peter Rupert and Mark Schweitzer and in particular Alain Guay, Francis Kramarz, Phil Merrigan, Julian Messina and Philippe Weil.
AATF RNome: Cellular Antiviral Armour

A common target of all viruses in general and RNA viruses in particular is nucleolus, a dynamic sub-cellular organelle that employs the apoptosis-antagonizing transcription factor (AATF) as its surveillance sensor. It is in this context the AATF RNome, that holds AATF coding transcript and regulatory non-coding miR-2909 within its fold, assumes importance because of its ability to tailor cellular response against a given sensed viral-dependent host-cell nucleoli subversion. This phenomenon is exemplified by the ability of HIV-1 to conspicuously target AATF RNome that ensures cellular antiviral defense through the initiation of CCL5 and RIG-1 signaling response as well as by regulating chromatin dynamics to restrict HIV-1 latency.
Validación de encuesta para determinar la flexibilidad de cadena de suministro

Hoy en dia la flexibilidad en la cadena de suministro (CS) es una de las caracteristicas mas representativa de la CS, ya que esta se ve reflejada en la capacidad con la que las empresas responden a los cambios y necesidades de los clientes. En este articulo se presenta una validacion estadistica de una encuesta disenada para conocer los 3 diferentes tipos de flexibilidades y los beneficios obtenidos en una CS. Los resultados muestran que la encuesta es valida y fiable para ser utilizada para futuros analisis.
Die Wahrnehmung der Arbeitgebermarke von Familienunternehmen am Beispiel Studierender

Bei der vorliegenden Studie wird der Einfluss der Arbeitgebermarke auf die Bewerbungsabsicht untersucht. Die Arbeitgebermarke wird nach dem Modell von Kabst und Baum (2013) in die Variablen Arbeitsatmosphäre, Aufgabenattraktivität, Karrieremöglichkeiten, Work-Life-Balance und Verdienstmöglichkeiten eingeteilt. Dieses Modell wird in dieser Studie vollumfänglich angewandt, jedoch im Kontext eines singulären Familienunternehmens. Mithilfe einer quantitativen Forschungsmethode wurde 2016 eine Online-Umfrage an einer österreichischen Hochschule mit dem Tool EFS Survey durchgeführt. Die Stichprobe bestand aus Studierenden mit technischer, wirtschaftlicher und touristischer Studienrichtung. Zuerst wurde ein fiktives Familienunternehmen beschrieben. Zudem wurden fünfzehn Fragen zur Bewertung der Arbeitgebermarke dieses fiktiven Familienunternehmens gestellt. Das Ergebnis der Studie zeigt, dass die Variablen Aufgabenattraktivität und Karrieremöglichkeiten den stärksten Einfluss auf eine Bewerbungsabsicht von Studenten haben. Zudem wird nachgewiesen, dass die Variable Verdienstmöglichkeiten kaum einen Einfluss auf die Bewerbungsabsicht hat. Weiters implizieren die Ergebnisse der Studie, dass Familienunternehmen ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit erhöhen können, wenn sie ihre Arbeitsplätze und ihre Besonderheiten effektiv vermitteln. Familienunternehmen, Arbeitgebermarke, Arbeitgeberattraktivität Einleitung Qualifizierte Mitarbeiter sind ein großer Vorteil im Wettbewerb mit Konkurrenten. Verschiedene Studien zeigen, dass Arbeitgeber um fähige Mitarbeiter kämpfen müssen (Lado und Wilson 1994; Pfeffer 1994; Wright et al. 1995), wodurch die Bedeutung der Arbeitgeberattraktivität ständig steigt. Angesichts mangelnder Informationen, die Unternehmen ihren potenziellen Bewerbern zur Verfügung stellen, stehen Bewerber oftmals vor der Situation, Unternehmensaktivitäten entsprechend interpretieren zu müssen (Rynes 1991). So stützen sich die Bewerber häufig eher auf ihre eigene Vorstellung bei der Wahrnehmung eines Unternehmens, als sich auf die tatsächlichen Merkmale des Unternehmens zu beziehen; diese Wahrnehmung bildet die Arbeitgebermarke (Backhaus 2004). 106 – Family Business Management
Clustering Techniques on Web Data

Searching a specified topic on the web and finding it effectively without wasting time on unrelated topics is everybody’s desire. Our concern is how to accomplish this by using web data mining. In this paper, we introduce three ways of clustering techniques on web data and compare them with each other. One of the areas we concentrated on is finding related pages on web by using Companion and Cocitation algorithms. The other one is finding replicated web collections by doing similarity analysis.
A Methodology for Comparative Analysis of Collaborative Robots for Industry 4.0

Collaborative robots are one of the key drivers in Industry 4.0 and they have evolved considerably since the last decades of the 20th century. With respect to the industrial robots, collaborative robots are more productive, flexible, versatile and safer. In the recent years, many industrial robot producers and startups entered the segment of collaborative robots. In this paper, we propose a methodology for developing a comparative analysis of the collaborative robots currently available in the market. The goal of the paper is to provide a framework for allowing the benchmarking, based on common robot parameters and standardized experiments that can be performed with the robot under investigation. An experimental technological review of three different collaborative robots is provided, to show how the methodology can be applied in real cases.
Critical geography of urban agriculture

Urban agriculture is a broad term which describes food cultivation and animal husbandry on urban and peri-urban land. Grassroots as well as institution-led urban agricultural projects are currently mushrooming in the cities of the Global North, reshaping urban landscapes, experimenting with alternatives to the capitalist organization of urban life and sometimes establishing embryonic forms of recreating the Commons. While this renewed interest in land cultivation and food production is attracting increasing interest in a wide range of disciplines – from planning to landscape and cultural studies – it remains a very marginal and almost unexplored field of human geography. Nonetheless, beyond the rhetoric of sustainability and health, urban agriculture raises several relevant questions of interest for a critical geographer. Starting by drawing a map of concepts and theories available in an interdisciplinary literature, and highlighting fields of possible inquiry, this paper aims to define the scope of and an initial agenda for a critical geography of urban agriculture.
ROLE OF CALCIUM IN ENHANCING THE ACTIVITY AND THERMAL STABILITY OF A NEW CATIONIC PEROXIDASE PURIFIED FROM EUPHORBIA TIRUCALLI LATEX

A new cationic peroxidase from Euphorbia tirucalli (pencil cactus) latex was purified to homogeneity using benzene fractionation, gel filtration and cation-exchange chromatography. The purified enzyme was found to be monomeric with a molecular weight of 44 kDa as determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The purified enzyme had a broad specificity towards some phenolic substrates in the order of 2,2’azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonicacid) (ABTS) > guaiacol > o-phenylenediamine > 4-aminoantipyrene, whereas no affinity towards ascorbic acid and o-dianisidine was recorded. The enzyme had pH and temperature optima at 7.0 and 40°C, respectively. Study of kinetic parameters demonstrated that ABTS had the highest affinity towards ELP, where Km, Vmax and Vmax/Km values were 0.503 mM, 500 U/assay and 994.04 U/mM, respectively. ELP was stable from 10°C up to 60°C and lost about 70% of its activity at 70 ̊C. The thermal inactivation profile of ELP in absence of Ca is biphasic and characterized by a rapid decline in activity on exposure to heat, followed by a more gradual decrease in activity on continued exposure. However, the purified enzyme exhibited increased thermal stability in the presence of calcium ions. Furthermore, the activity of purified enzyme was enhanced by ~ 550% in the presence of 15 mM CaCl2, suggesting a pivotal role for Ca 2+ in conferring structural stability to the heme environment and in retaining the active site of Afaf S. Fahmy et all ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 246 ELP. Most of the examined metal ions (except for Ca and Mg) and compounds had differential inhibitory effects on ELP activity. In conclusion, a locally available plant (Euphorbia tirucalli) could be a potential candidate source for peroxidase, the most widely used enzyme in industrial and biomedical applications. In addition, calcium was found to be essential for enhancing enzymatic activity and thermal stability of the purified Euphorbia tirucalli latex peroxidase.
Is Serum Tryptase a Valuable Marker for Obesity-Bronchial Asthma Interrelationship in Children?

Background: Asthma among obese represents a unique phenotype. Mast cells are more abundant in obese. Serum tryptase (ST) is a marker of mast cell numbers or activity. Since obesity and asthma have been linked in epidemiological studies, a possible higher mast cell activity in obesity could be a factor between the two conditions. This study was to investigate ST and its potential association between obesity and childhood asthma.
Cross-sensory correspondences: A Theoretical framework and their relevance to music

Each of our senses is 'blind' to some features of objects and events (e.g., hearing can tell us little or nothing about the shape, colour, and weight of an object, or about how it might taste or smell). When we listen to sounds without support from other sensory modalities, such as when listening to recorded music, how do will fill-in these blind spots? Evidence identifying a core set of cross-sensory correspondences among basic stimulus features is reviewed, and it is proposed that they offer a potential basis for the filling-in of information that is missing when one or more sensory systems is not available. An emerging theoretical framework for understanding correspondences and their impact on behaviour is presented. Evidence pertaining to key features of the framework is reviewed, including that cross-sensory correspondences are based on cross-talk among conceptual representations of aligned feature dimensions, are bi-directional in their effects, obey transitivity in the feature associations they support, involve the relative (context-sensitive) coding of stimulus features, and can be accessed through the verbal specification of feature values. After illustrating how cross-sensory correspondences are able to embrace basic features of bodily actions, gestures, and vocalisations, their potential for exploitation in the communication of ideas is explained. The relevance of cross-sensory correspondences to musical sounds, and their potential to enhance the composition, performance, and appreciation of music, are discussed.
Introduction to the Bayesian Approach Applied to Elastic Constants Identification

The basic formulation of the least-squares method, based on the L2 norm of the residuals, is still widely used today for identifying elastic constants of aerospace materials from experimental data. While this method often works well, methods that can benefit from statistical information, such as the Bayesian method, may sometimes be more accurate. We seek situations with significant difference between the material properties identified by the two methods. For a simple three-bar truss example we illustrate three situations in which the Bayesian approach systematically leads to more accurate results: different sensitivity of the measured response to the parameters to be identified, different uncertainty in the measurements, and correlation among response components. When all three effects add up, the Bayesian approach can be much more accurate. Furthermore, the Bayesian approach has the additional advantage of providing the uncertainty in the identified parameters.We also compare the two methods for a more realistic problem of identification of elastic constants from natural frequencies of a composite plate.