Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Low Profile, Dual-band, Dual Polarized Antenna for Indoor/Outdoor Wearable Application

A planar, low-profile, dual-band and dual-polarized antenna on a semi-flex substrate is proposed in this paper. The antenna is fabricated on Rogers substrate with a thickness of 3.04 mm and sized at $70.4 \times 76.14 \times 3.11$ mm3 ( $0.37\lambda _{0} \times 0.40\lambda _{0}\times 0.016 \lambda _{0}$ ) only. The circular polarization property is enabled in the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) L1/E1 (lower) band by introducing a complementary split ring resonator on the antenna patch. Meanwhile, the antenna operates in the second (upper) 2.45 GHz WLAN band is enabled by etching a U-shaped slot on its ground plane. This simultaneous, dual-band and dual-polarized operation enables the proposed antenna to be applied in the indoor/outdoor wearable application. To isolate the antenna against the influence of the human body, a multiband artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) plane is added on the reverse side of the dual-band radiator. Comparison of the antenna without AMC in free space and when evaluated on the chest of a human body backed by AMC showed improved gain; from 3–5.1 dBi in the lower band, and from 1.53–5.03 dBi in the upper band. Besides that, the front-to-back ratio of the AMC backed monopole antenna also improved from 11–21.88 dB and from 2.5–24.5 dB in the GNSS and WLAN bands, respectively. Next, the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the monopole antenna with and without the AMC plane is assessed. Evaluation results indicate that the maximum SAR value decreased by up to 89.45% in comparison with the antenna without AMC in the lower band. This indicates the effectiveness of the AMC array in increasing gain and FBR, besides reducing EM absorption in the human body.
To study the morphological properties of graphene based polymer nanocomposite for food packaging

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a widely used thermoplastic polymer. The addition of small amounts of nanofillers into a polymer matrix has proven an efficient method of improving the properties of the neat polymer. In the current project PET and PET nanocomposites reinforced with exfoliated graphene layers were prepared by melt compounding. In this project the morphological properties i.e (XRD, SEM, TEM) of PET by adding grapheme were studied. PET/Graphene blend have been prepared by melt blending process using a co-rotating twin-screw micro compounder (X pore 15, Netherlands) attached with a mini injection molder. The processing temperature has been kept as 240, 260 and 270 C for the three successive zones of the extruder with a screw speed of 40 rpm (acceleration rate: 50 rpm). Injection molding parameters were fixed as mold temperature at 120 C, melt temperature at 245 C Injection time as 4 min and injection pressure 10 bar.
Perspectives of Asian/Pacific Islanders on Lung Cancer Screening in Philadelphia: A Qualitative Study

• Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs) tends to be overlooked with an unnecessarily high cancer burden7,8 • Rates of lung cancer deaths are still one of the highest in APIs compared to those of other minority groups in the US9,10 • While a study has shown that Asian Americans were less likely to attribute quitting smoking and not smoking to reduced cancer risk compared to Whites, there’s still a gap in understanding the barriers and persisting stigmas surrounding lung cancer and early screening11
Formulation Screening of Palm-based Nanoemulsion for an Oral Drug Vehicle of Phyllanthin†

Nurin Afiqah Zairul Azman, Ismail Ab. Raman, Ibrahim Jantan and Darfizzi Derawi Laboratory for Biolubricant, Biofuels and Bioenergy Research, Centre for Advanced Materials and Renewable Resources, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia Consumer Product Development Unit, Advanced Oleochemical Technology Division, Malaysian Palm Oil Board, Selangor, Malaysia Faculty of Pharmacy, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Corresponding author (e-mail: darfizzi@ukm.edu.my)
STRESS EFFECTS ON CANOPY GROWTH AND ARCHITECTURE: A CASE STUDY ON SAL MORTALITY

Abstract: Disturbances and fragmentation of the study areaBarkot Range (Moist Deciduous Sal Forest, Dehradun Forest Division) resulted in changes in the physical environment due to microclimatic variations, altered species composition and soil properties and had severe implications on the physiological functioning of the Sal trees. Two Shorea robusta (Sal) stands one containing many Sal trees with canopy dieback, mortality site (MS) and the other with healthy green, full crowns, non-mortality site (NMS) were selected. The paper investigates the soil moisture status of the two sites and evaluates effect of nutrient and water stress on the canopy growth and architecture of the Sal trees. In the present study, the difference in the average soil moisture percentage in the NMS (14.30%) and MS (12.74%) was statistically significant, indicating lower moisture availability in the mortality site in comparison to the non-mortality site. Tree growth increment was affected especially leaf production and lateral branching, which was greatly reduced. Sal stressed trees of the mortality site had highly reduced canopy growth. The crown height increased invariably however the crown width had greatly reduced. In general, canopy height was positively correlated to the bole height of the healthy Sal trees in the nonmortality site. No such relationship was obtained for stressed Sal trees in the mortality site.
Determinants of Bank Failure in Nigeria: An empirical Investigation By Prof

This study investigates the determinants of bank failure in Nigeria from 1970-2013. It uses Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach in the analysis and further examines the extent to which these determinants lead to bank failure in Nigeria. The study found that there is significant long run relationship between bank failure and exchange rate, interest rate, capital adequacy ratio, non-performing loans and liquidity ratio, but an insignificant relationship with inflation in Nigeria. On the direction of causality, the study found a bidirectional causal relationship between bank failure and, capital adequacy ratio and nonperforming loans (NPL), while a unidirectional causal relationship was found between bank failure and exchange rate but shows no causal relationship between bank failure and, inflation and interest rate. The study therefore conclude that bank failure is mainly determined by capital adequacy ratio (CAR), exchange rate, interest rate and liquidity ratio in Nigeria, and that Non-Performing Loans (NPL) undermines financial sector thereby making the financial institutions vulnerable to failure. It is recommended that monetary authorities in Nigeria should ensure that all banks operating in the country comply with the CAR guideline to guard against sudden bank failure, and that financial institutions should make sure that all necessary checks prior to the advancement of credit such as adequate collateral and viable financial projection be dully carried out and satisfied in order to forestall the incidence of bank failure in Nigeria.
Belief Revision for Growing Awareness

The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to new information. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience. ’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting.
Filtering and Model Predictive Control of Networked Nonlinear Systems

Networked control systems (NCSs) present many advantages such as easy installation and maintenance, flexible layouts and structures of components, and efficient allocation and distribution of resources. Consequently, they find potential applications in a variety of emerging industrial systems including multi-agent systems, power grids, tele-operations and cyber-physical systems. The study of NCSs with nonlinear dynamics (i.e., nonlinear NCSs) is a very significant yet challenging topic, and it not only widens application areas of NCSs in practice, but also extends the theoretical framework of NCSs with linear dynamics (i.e., linear NCSs). Numerous issues are required to be resolved towards a fully-fledged theory of industrial nonlinear NCS design. In this dissertation, three important problems of nonlinear NCSs are investigated: The robust filtering problem, the robust model predictive control (MPC) problem and the robust distributed MPC problem of large-scale nonlinear systems. In the robust filtering problem of nonlinear NCSs, the nonlinear system model is subject to uncertainties and external disturbances, and the measurements suffer from time delays governed by a Markov process. Utilizing the Lyapunov theory, the algebraic Hamilton-Jacobi inequality (HJI)-based sufficient conditions are established for designing the H∞ nonlinear filter. Moreover, the developed results are specialized
Parenting Styles, Self- Esteem and Students’ Academic Achievement in Secondary Schools in Sironko District Muzaki Winnie 2014/HD03/2330U Dissertation Submitted to the School of Psychology in Partial Fulfillment of the Award of a Degree of Master of Educational Psychology of Makerere

This study examined the relationship between parenting styles, selfesteem and students’ academic achievement in secondary schools in Sironko District. The objectives were to examine the relationships between: parenting styles and self-esteem; self-esteem and students’ academic achievement; parenting styles and academic achievement.The study was a survey and used a sample of 472 S.4 students of 2016 drawn from four secondary schools, namely, Masaba SS, Bugunzu SS, Buhugu SS and Bumasifwa SS. Demographic data were analyzed using frequencies counts and descriptive statistics. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to test the study variables. The findings revealed an insignificant positive relationship between authoritative parenting style and students’ self-esteem; while authoritarian parenting style and permissive parenting style each had a significant negative relationship on students’ self-esteem. On research objective two, this study found an insignificant negative relationship between selfesteem and academic achievement among secondary school students in Sironko District. For research objective three, authoritative parenting style and permissive parenting styles each had insignificant relationship with student’s academic achievement while authoritarian parenting style had a significant positive relationship with academic achievement. Recommendations were that; parents in Sironko District should consider other strategies to boost self-esteem other than authoritative parenting style; urgent strategies and mitigation measures should be put in place to address the negative effects of authoritarian and permissive parenting styles on self-esteem among secondary school students there; much emphasis should be put on authoritarian parenting style as a strategy to boost academic achievement among secondary school students but not authoritative and permissive parenting styles.
Decomposition, rating and filtering of tonality and other acoustic structures in noise

For the subjective evaluation of noise and sounds often a note scale is used for the characterization of tonal components. Here we present a method for an objective measure of the grade of tonality. For this a tool is developed which decomposes the sound online into tonal components, modulations, pulses and random noise. From the random noise a set of equal loudness curves for the tonal components is derived and used to rate each tonal component according to its masked loudness. The results of this rating are compared with the results of the DIN 45681 rating for tonal components dependent on level and frequency. A similar measure is introduced for the amount of pulses and modulation in the sound. The objective measures can be validated due to the ability to filter the components with independent filter sets for random noise, tonal components and modulations.
Low power SAR analog-to-digital converter for internet-of-things RF receivers

The "Internet of Things" (IoT) has been a topic of intensive research in industry, technological centers and academic community, being data communication one aspect of high relevance in this area. The exponential increase of devices with wireless capabilities as well as the number of users, alongside with the decreasing costs for implementation of broadband communications, created a suitable environment for IoT applications. An IoT device is typically composed by a wireless transceiver, a battery and/or energy harvesting unit, a power management unit, sensors and conditioning unit, a microprocessor and data storage unit. Energy supply is a limiting factor in many applications and the transceiver usually demands a significant amount of power. In this scenario the emerging wireless communication standard IEEE 802.11ah, in which this work focuses, was proposed as an option for low power sub-GHz radio communication. A typical architecture of modern radio receivers contains the analog radio-frequency (RF) front-end, which amplifies, demodulates and filters the input signal, and also analog-to-digital converters (ADC), that translate the analog signals to the digital domain. Additionally, the Successive-Approximation (SAR) ADC architecture has become popular recently due to its power efficiency, simplicity, and compatibility with scaled-down integrated CMOS technology. In this work, the RF receiver architecture and its specifications aiming low power consumption and IEEE 802.11ah standard complying are outlined, being the basis to the proposition of an 8-bit resolution and 10 MHz sampling rate ADC. A power efficient switching scheme for the charge redistribution SAR ADC architecture is explored in detail, along with the circuit-level design of the digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The transistor-level design of the two remaining ADC main blocks, sampling switch and comparator, are also explored. Electrical simulation of the physical layout, including parasitics, at a 130nm CMOS process resulted in a SINAD of 47.3 dB and 45.5 dB and at the receiver IF 3 MHz and at the Nyquist rate, respectively, consuming 21 μW with a power supply of 1 V . The SAR ADC resulting Figure-of-Merit (FoM) corresponded to 11.1 fJ/conv-step at IF, and 13.7 fJ/conv-step at the Nyquist rate.
Compact UWB-MIMO Antenna With High Isolation and Triple Band-Notched Characteristics

A novel and high-performance four-element ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna is proposed in the paper. The proposed antenna is designed by using a novel integration technology of the symmetric layout, orthogonal structure, four-directional staircase-shaped decoupling, and multi-slit and multi-slot techniques. The mutual couplings among the antenna elements are significantly reduced by introducing the symmetric orthogonal and separated four-directional staircase-shaped structure. Furthermore, the antenna size is effectively miniaturized, and its impedance bandwidth is broadened by using a two-sided symmetric layout, partial and defected ground structure, the decoupling structure, and multi-slot and multi-slit techniques. Therefore, the antenna has the low-profile structure and a small dimension of 39mm<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 39$ </tex-math></inline-formula>mm<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 1.6$ </tex-math></inline-formula>mm. Moreover, the proposed antenna achieves triple band-notched characteristics by embedding different type slots and slits on the square radiating elements, default ground structure, and the decoupling structure, respectively. As a result, the antenna obtains the wider bandwidth of 2.30–13.75 GHz with the notched bands of 3.25–3.75 GHz, 5.08–5.90 GHz, and 7.06–7.95 GHz. The three notched bands are good in agreement with the existing interference bands of WiMAX (3.3–3.7 GHz), WLAN (5.15–5.875 GHz), and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${X}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band (7.1–7.9 GHz), respectively. In addition, the proposed antenna also has a lower mutual coupling (<−22dB), lower envelop correlation coefficient (ECC<0.02, except for the three notched bands), high multiplexing efficiency (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\eta _{\mathrm {mux}}> -3.0$ </tex-math></inline-formula>dB), stable gain, and quasi-omnidirectional radiation patterns at the entire impedance bandwidth. Therefore, a good tradeoff of the performance is obtained for the proposed antenna. The proposed antenna can be a good candidate for UWB-MIMO wireless communication applications, and especially for portable UWB-MIMO systems.
The Carnegie RR Lyrae Program: mid-infrared period–luminosity relations of RR Lyrae stars in Reticulum

We analysed 30 RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) globular cluster Reticulum that were observed in the 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m passbands with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on board of the Spitzer Space Telescope. We derived new mid-infrared (MIR) period-luminosity PL relations. The zero points of the PL relations were estimated using the trigonometric parallaxes of five bright Milky Way (MW) RRLs measured with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and, as an alternative, we used the trigonometric parallaxes published in the first Gaia data release (DR1) which were obtained as part of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) and the parallaxes of the same stars released with the second Gaia data release (DR2). We determined the distance to Reticulum using our new MIR PL relations and found that distances calibrated on the TGAS and DR2 parallaxes are in a good agreement and, generally, smaller than distances based on the HST parallaxes, although they are still consistent within the respective errors. We conclude that Reticulum is located ~3 kpc closer to us than the barycentre of the LMC.
A SURVEY ON CHINESE NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION

Internet has become more and more connected with people’s work and life, and the resources of online information has become increasingly diverse. We need to obtain useful information from a huge amount of data, which puts fowward a great challenge to information extraction. Therefore, information extraction have drawnmore attention. As a kind of information extraction technology, there are differences between Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Named Entity Recognition in other languages. This paper discusses the existing Chinese NER methods, features, models and evaluation methods and give aviewofthe future of NER.
Modular, Accessible, Sensorized Objects for Evaluating the Grasping and Manipulation Capabilities of Grippers and Hands

The human hand is Nature's most versatile and dexterous end-effector and it has been a source of inspiration for roboticists for over 50 years. Recently, significant industrial and research effort has been put into the development of dexterous robot hands and grippers. Such end-effectors offer robust grasping and dexterous, in-hand manipulation capabilities that increase the efficiency, precision, and adaptability of the overall robotic platform. This work focuses on the development of modular, sensorized objects that can facilitate benchmarking of the dexterity and performance of hands and grippers. The proposed objects aim to offer; a minimal, sufficiently diverse solution, efficient pose tracking, and accessibility. The object manufacturing instructions, 3D models, and assembly information are made publicly available through the creation of a corresponding repository.
Peak-Power-Aware Energy Management for Periodic Real-Time Applications

Two main objectives in designing real-time embedded systems are high reliability and low power consumption. Hardware replication (e.g., standby-sparing) can provide high reliability while keeping the power consumption under control. In this paper, we consider a standby-sparing system where the main tasks on primary cores are scheduled by our proposed peak-power-aware earliest-deadline-first policy while the backup tasks on spare cores are scheduled by our proposed peak-power-aware earliest-deadline-late policy to meet the chip thermal design power (TDP) constraint. These policies provide the best opportunity to shift the task executions as much as possible to minimize execution overlaps between main and backup tasks that consume high power consumption. Since TDP is the maximum amount of power generated by a chip that the cooling component is designed to dissipate under any workload, the total power consumption should not be higher than the TDP constraint. When a task finishes successfully a larger portion of its corresponding copy task can be canceled, resulting in a significant amount of peak/average power reduction. To achieve further peak/average power reduction, we use dynamic voltage and frequency scaling and dynamic power management (DPM). The main reason of using DPM is that, once the first copy of each task has finished successfully, its corresponding copy task is terminated, and if there is no more task for execution, the core goes to a low-power mode. We evaluated our scheme under various system configurations. Experiments show that our scheme provides up to 47.6% (on average by 28.2%) peak power reduction compared to four state-of-the-art techniques.
Using Social Media Content to Identify Mental Health Problems: The Case of #Depression in

This paper aims to propose a logistic regression model that would predict depression by relying on content-related factors observed through social media. Specifically, we propose that by examining: 1) emotions embedded in Weibo posts, 2) user’s tendency of self-disclosure, and 3) user characteristics, it could be determined whether the person is likely to be suffering from depression or not. Data was gathered from 48 individual users of Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in mainland China, and was then subjected to quantitative analysis based on several factors. The sample consisted of 5,354 Weibo posts from the 48 individuals, 11 of whom were suffering from depression. We found that some, but not all, negative emotions (e.g., sadness, disgust) were positively related to depression. Furthermore, the two indicators of self-disclosure, number of followers and length of self-introduction in user profile, were negatively related to depression. In addition, user characteristics such as gender and location could determine the likelihood of depression. Finally, we addressed some theoretical and practical implications and suggested several directions for future study on related topics.