Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of cookies quality enriched with resistant starch type 2 ( RS 2 ) and resistant starch type 3 ( RS 3 ) from banana ( Musa paradisiaca formatypica )

This research was aimed to evaluate cookies quality with the enrichment of resistant starch type 2 (RS2) and resistant starch type 3 (RS3) from unripe banana. Cookies were formulated with the addition of RS2 and RS3 with three levels of substitution: 10%, 20%, and 30% of the wheat flour basis. RS2 was obtained through water-alkaline extraction, while RS3 was obtained through starch modification by using autoclaving-cooling cycle method. Quality of cookies was evaluated on in vitro digestibility, hardness, color, and sensory acceptance. Both RS2 and RS3 was found to decrease the digestibility of cookies. However, effect of RS3 was more obvious compared to RS2 even at 10% of substitution level. In both type of RS, the higher substitution level resulted in the lower digestibility. Hardness of RS2 and RS3enriched cookies at all substitution levels did not show any significant difference compared to control. Color measurement showed that both type of RS resulted in the significantly darker color of cookies, though the effect was more intense in RS3 substitution. The darker color of cookies was observed along with the increasing substitution level. Sensory acceptance test conducted for aroma, taste, hardness, and overall acceptance attributes showed that panelists rated all the RS2 and RS3-enriched cookies at all substitution levels equally with the control but lower for color attribute. The addition of RS3 at 20% level of substitution was suggested as it was found to be the most acceptable in all attributes tested, while having the significantly lower digestibility compared to control cookies. IPSFAB-2017 International Postgraduate Symposium on Food, Agriculture and Biotechnology 22
Some Experiences with VoIP Over Converging Networks ∗

Over last few years an increasing number of multiaccess devices have emerged, which enable users to stay connected almost everywhere, and in many cases very cheaply. It is likely just a matter of time until VoIP capabilities become ubiquitous in these devices (be it in the form of applications, or in a transparent mode such as the one used in UMA phones), and since they run on heterogeneous networks, with different performance issues, the quality experienced by the users will likely be very variable. In this paper we present some measurements performed with Skype in converging network environments.
In vivo imaging techniques for bone tissue engineering

Bone is a dynamic tissue that constantly undergoes modeling and remodeling. Bone tissue engineering relying on the development of novel implant scaffolds for the treatment of pre-clinical bone defects has been extensively evaluated by histological techniques. The study of bone remodeling, that takes place over several weeks, is limited by the requirement of a large number of animals and time-consuming and labor-intensive procedures. X-ray-based imaging methods that can non-invasively detect the newly formed bone tissue have therefore been extensively applied in pre-clinical research and in clinical practice. The use of other imaging techniques at a pre-clinical level that act as supportive tools is convenient. This review mainly focuses on nuclear imaging methods (single photon emission computed tomography and positron emission tomography), either alone or used in combination with computed tomography. It addresses their application to small animal models with bone defects, both untreated and filled with substitute materials, to boost the knowledge on bone regenerative processes.
Guest Editorial The Convergence of Blockchain and IoT: Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions

Internet of Things (IoT), coming with billions of connected devices, could potentially transform our daily life but could also create a serious security headache. It brings greater complications in securely accessing these devices with privacy protection guaranteed, and several research issues need to be investigated in detail, e.g., access control, traceability, anonymity, authentication, security bootstrap, etc. Most of the traditional security protection mechanisms are centralized, which make them difficult to scale up to meet the security demands of the IoT.
Signal Processing in Acoustics Session 4 aSP : Sensor Array Beamforming and Its Applications

The spherical harmonic decomposition can be applied to present realistically localized sound sources over headphones. The acoustic field, measured by a spherical microphone array, is first decomposed into a weighted sum of spherical harmonics evaluated at the microphone positions. The resulting decomposition is used to generate a set of virtual sources at various angles. The virtual sources are thus binaurally presented by applying the corresponding head-related transfer functions (HRTF). Reproduction accuracy is heavily dependent on the spatial distribution of microphones and virtual sources. Nearly-uniform sphere samplings are used in positioning the microphones so as to improve spatial accuracy. However, no previous studies have looked into the optimal arrangement for the virtual sources. We evaluate the effects of the virtual source distribution on the accuracy of the synthesized HRTF. Furthermore, our study considers the impact of spatial aliasing for a 252channel spherical microphone array. The microphone's body is modeled as a human-head-sized rigid sphere. We evaluate the synthesis error by comparison with the target HRTF using the logarithmic spectral distance. Our study finds that 362 virtual sources, distributed on an icosahedral grid, can synthesize the HRTF in the horizontal plane up to 9 kHz with a log-spectral distance below 5 dB.
The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Firms ’ Profitability in Nigeria

This study examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and firms’ profitability in Nigeria with the use of secondary data, sourced from ten (10) randomly selected firms’ annual report and financial summary between “1999-2008”. The study makes use of ordinary least square for the analysis of collected data. Findings from the analysis show that the sample firms invested less than ten percent of their annual profit to social responsibility. The co-efficient of determination of the result obtained shows the depicts that the explanatory variable account for changes or variations in selected firms performance (PAT) are caused by changes in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Nigeria while recommends that laws and regulations to obligate firms to be recognized, adequate attention should be given to social accounting in terms of social costs and to comply with social responsibility should be enacted.
1 The colors of paintings and viewers ’ preferences

One hypothesis to explain the aesthetics of paintings is that it depends on the extent to which they mimic natural image statistics. In fact, paintings and natural scenes share several statistical image regularities but the colors of paintings seem generally more biased towards red than natural scenes. Is the particular option for colors in each painting, even if less naturalistic, critical for perceived beauty? Here we show that it is. In the experiments, 50 naïve observers, unfamiliar with the 10 paintings tested, could rotate the color gamut of the paintings and select the one producing the best subjective impression. The distributions of angles obtained are described by normal distributions with maxima deviating, on average, only 7 degrees from the original gamut orientation and full width at half maximum just above the threshold to perceive a chromatic change in the paintings. Crucially, for data pooled across observers and abstract paintings the maximum of the distribution was at zero degrees, i.e., the same as the original. This demonstrates that artists know what chromatic compositions match viewers’ preferences and that the option for less naturalistic colors does not constraint the aesthetic value of paintings.
A Case of a Child With Several Anaphylactic Reactions to Drugs

Adverse drug reaction is defined as any harmful, unintended, and undesired effect of a drug that occurs at doses used for treatment, prevention, or diagnoses. Most of these reactions are classified as type A reactions, which by definition are predictable, common, dose-dependent, and caused by known pharmacological actions of the drug, drug toxicity, and side effects. Allergic reactions are qualified as type B reactions independent of dose, affecting a small population, suggesting that individual patient host factors are important. In pediatric population, β-lactam antibiotics are the most common reason for adverse drug reactions, followed by nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. In this article, we report the case of a child with several anaphylactic reactions to several drugs, including cefuroxime, amoxicillin/clavulanate, clarithromycin, ibuprofen, and budesonide, in a context of suspected Helicobacter pylori infection.
hytochemistry and antimicrobial activity of Campomanesia damantium tone

Campomanesia adamantium (Cambess.) O. Berg. , Myrtaceae, is a plant popularly used for its antiinflammatory, anti-diarrhoeal and urinary antiseptic activities. The aims of this study were to obtain the crude ethanolic extract and the hexane, dichloromethane, ethyl acetate, aqueous and concentrated aqueous tannin fractions from C. adamantium leaves, perform biomonitored fractionation to isolate and identify chemical compounds, study the chemical composition of the volatile oils of the leaves and flowers and test the antimicrobial activity of the ethanolic extract, fractions, isolated substances and volatile oils. Phytochemical screening and chromatographic and spectrometric techniques were used. Volatile oils were isolated by hydrodistillation in a Clevenger apparatus and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. The antimicrobial activity was tested by a broth microdilution test. The component stictane-3,22-diol was isolated and identified from the hexane fraction, while valoneic and gallic acid were isolated and identified from the concentrated aqueous tannin fraction. The major constituents of the volatile oils of the leaves were verbenene (13.91%), -funebrene (12.05%) and limonene (10.32%), while those of the volatile oils of the flowers were sabinene (20.45%), limonene (19.33%), thujene (8.86%) and methyl salicylate (8.66%). Antibacterial activity was verified for the hexane fraction, while antifungal activity was observed for the aqueous fraction and concentrated aqueous tannin fraction and for vanoleic acid. These results may justify the popular use of C. adamantium. © 2018 Sociedade Brasileira de Farmacognosia. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda. This is an open he CC access article under t
Comparison of the information content in optical and high resolution SAR images of the Amazon rain forest

A new algorithm for jointly exploiting mean and texture in the segmentation of high resolution SAR images is proposed. The coincidence with the classification of the rain forest from Thematic Mapper (TM) images is demonstrated, for three classes: forest, clearings and regrowth areas. Also the ability to extract information not available in TM data is shown.
Combining metadata, inferred similarity of content, and human interpretation for managing and listening to music collections

Combining Metadata, Inferred Similarity of Content, and Human Interpretation for Managing and Listening to Music Collections. (August 2010) Konstantinos A. Meintanis, B.S., Athens University of Economics and Business Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Frank M. Shipman Music services, media players and managers provide support for content classification and access based on filtering metadata values, statistics of access and user ratings. This approach fails to capture characteristics of mood and personal history that are often the deciding factors when creating personal playlists and collections in music. This dissertation work presents MusicWiz, a music management environment that combines traditional metadata with spatial hypertext-based expression and automatically extracted characteristics of music to generate personalized associations among songs. MusicWiz’s similarity inference engine combines the personal expression in the workspace with assessments of similarity based on the artists, other metadata, lyrics and the audio signal to make suggestions and to generate playlists. An evaluation of MusicWiz with and without the workspace and suggestion capabilities showed significant differences for organizing and playlist creation tasks. The workspace features were more valuable for organizing tasks, while the suggestion features had more value for playlist creation activities.
Smartfloat: A Multimodal Underwater Vehicle Combining Float and Glider Capabilities

This paper proposes a novel hybrid underwater vehicle, the Smartfloat, which integrates the concept of buoyancy-driven underwater gliders and conventional profiling floats. The vehicle is presented to address the challenges in ocean monitoring, such as the multidisciplinary observations of long-range transport of the mesoscale features with high spatial-temporal resolution. The vehicle combines the mechanisms of Argo profiling float and the underwater glider, with the application of a special designed attitude control system and the ingenious general arrangement. The vehicle can switch the operating mode between drifting mode and gliding mode. Such a multimodal vehicle would merge the benefits of making measurements in a very energy-efficient way when drifting with the currents in Argo mode, and operating as an underwater glider in glider mode when it is needed to cross the ocean eddies, ocean fronts, filaments, or some stirring regions. In this paper, a proof-of-concept platform including its concept of operations, the main components and subsystems design, and the correlative mathematical analysis is introduced in detail. Experiments in field trials are presented to characterize and illustrate each mode of operation and repeated mode transitions. The results demonstrate the feasibility and the good performance of the proposed vehicle.
Mutual-Information-Based Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

We present a novel successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding method for the polar codes based on the mutualinformation values of the bit-channels. At short-to-medium blocklengths, only a certain fraction of the bit-channels get polarized. Usually the mutual-information values for the bit- channels are computed for the construction of the code. Using these available mutual-information values, we identify the information bits exhibiting full polarization and having high channel reliability. In the proposed mutual- information-based SCL (MI-SCL) decoder, only one emanating path is considered for such bits. This results in the reduction of the width of the decoding tree. Simulation results confirm the impressive performance of the MI-SCL decoder specially with concatenated cyclic redundancy check codes.
Mode and Wavelength-Switchable Pulsed Fiber Laser With Few-Mode Fiber Grating

We propose and demonstrate a mode and wavelength-switchable pulsed fiber laser using two-mode fiber Bragg grating (TM-FBG) as both transverse mode converter and wavelength selector. The mode-locking mechanism is based on saturable absorption of semiconductor saturable absorption mirror (SESAM). Due to the use of low polarization-dependent mode-locking method, polarization disturbation between mode-locking and transverse-mode selection has been effectively eliminated, thus enabling flexible transverse-mode selection with simultaneous mode-locking operation. Moreover, through the optimized offset launching technique, this laser can operate at the wavelengths of the fundamental mode (LP01) and second-order mode (LP11), and thus export cylindrical vector beams (CVBs) and fundamental mode beams at the TM-FBG output port, respectively. This all-fiber laser is a simple, low-cost, and flexible source for mode-division multiplexing system and other applications.
Session-Enabled Joint Radio Resource Selection for Co-Operative Automated Driving

Co-operative automated driving (CAD) is a key 5th generation mobile networks (5G) use case with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. The current autonomous resource selection mode of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is susceptible to the hidden node problem and half- duplex limitations and has fixed-size transmission sub-channels which limit its ability to meet QoS requirements. Therefore, in order to increase the reliability, this paper proposes a communication session establishment for CAD operation where the session members jointly select and reserve a pool of favorable radio resources for intra-session communications. Furthermore, an inter-session coordination by means of cluster formation is proposed which enables resource pool sharing among sessions to allow for QoS aware resource allocation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms LTE-V Mode-4 in terms of sidelink quality and packet delivery ratio (PDR).
Performance Comparison of Channel Sensing and Geolocation Database-Based Resource Allocation Techniques for Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) technology allows efficient management of the limited usable radio spectrum for communications. Traditionally, channel sensing has been used by the CR devices to acquire information about the primary users (PU) and to borrow channels for secondary users (SU). However, inherent limitations could make channel sensing often unreliable and energy inefficient when deployed in large numbers. Geolocation database (GDB) has been proposed as an alternative to the channel sensing technique for cognitive radio networks (CRN). A GDB can act as a repository of channel information in a CRN. Such an approach could improve the utilization of primary and secondary channels, and QoS of the networks. This paper compares the performance of channel sensing-based and GDB-based secondary channel allocation techniques in a CRN. This work has developed mathematical models for the GDB-based CRN to estimate SU and PU throughputs, and energy efficiency, which are used as the performance metrices. Numerical calculations show that the GDB-based resource allocation technique can deliver higher SU and PU throughput levels while offering improved energy efficiency compared to channel sensing-based techniques in a CRN.
Robust Low Density Parity Check Decoding over Markov Gaussian Channels

Communications systems suffer from impulsive in- terference, generally modeled as a memory channel to account for the inherent bursts of impulse even though conventional receivers take into account the additive white Gaussian noise only. In this paper, finite- field based constructions of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) coding over the Markov Gaussian channel are investigated. In contrast with existing approaches assuming the impulse noise statistics, this paper proposes a modified maximum- a-priori method, which forfeits using the statistical knowledge of impulse, to estimate whether or not each transmitted symbol is corrupted by impulse noise. Subsequently, the sum-product algorithm LDPC decoder invokes a clipper to diminish impulsive interference when the channel state is identified to be impulse- corrupted. The bit error rate (BER) performance versus the signal-to-noise ratio for the proposed decoder is conducted using computer simulation. The experimental results in terms of the BER performance justified the robustness of our proposed receiver and also revealed its competitiveness with the optimal benchmark decoder in the hostile environment. Moreover, using the proposed receiver, our calibrated quasi-cyclic LDPC code is shown to slightly outperform its 5G New Radio counterpart under certain circumstances.
Electromagnetic Performances Analysis of a Microwave Imaging System(MIS) for Breast Tumor Detection

Breast cancer is the second most common disease throughout the world, more than 1.8 million new breast cancer cases diagnosed every year worldwide. Early detection and treatment of breast cancer can be survived up to 97%. X-ray mammography, Ultra-sound system, and MRI techniques are widely used detection system. But X-ray mammography and Ultra-sound system have high false diagnose rate. MRI is the most effective one to detect the tumor but very expensive, sometimes unreachable to the low-income people. On the other hand, Microwave imaging technique is non-invasive and harmless alternative of mammography. It includes transmission of low levels of microwave vitality through the tissues. In this research, an MIS system is developed for breast cancer detection using six highly directive Vivaldi antennas that are uniformly placed over the whole breast phantom. The designed antenna obtained operating band at 3.04 GHz to 3.30 GHz with peak gain of 4.1 dB. The antennas are used as transponder to transmit signal and received backscattered signals. Antenna one transmits signal and other antennas receive the signal. The received backscattered signals are converted to digital data and processed using MATLAB software to visualize the image to detect the tumor.
Power Loss Minimization and Voltage Profile Assessment of Distribution System using WT-DG

Due to adverse environmental change the integration of Distributed Generations (DGs) is gradually increasing in commercial and domestic power system. Hence, it is indispensable to investigate pros and cons of DGs before incorporating in existing network. Non-optimal size and placement of DGs will cause high active power losses in distribution systems and poor voltage profile. This paper presents a probabilistic approach to design of Wind Turbine (WT) distributed generation and its impact on distribution system. Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) has been used to incorporate the stochastic nature of wind variations. Matpower has been used in Matlab environment to design the radial network. All parameter of WT is carefully considered into the equivalent network. For any random wind velocity the WT power is represented as negative load. Current summation method has been used for power flow solution from Matpower. The proposed method has been tested on a 33-bus radial test system.
Wear Analysis of Tube-Baffle Vibration Interaction in a Tube Bundle

Wear analysis has been carried out on aluminum tube in parallel triangular tube bundle with P/D ratio of 1.45 and the baffle plate placed at the mid-span of the bundle. The cross-flow velocity of water ranges from 0.18 m/s to 0.55 m/s. For each flow velocity, tests were performed on five different flow velocities and three-time spans (tube-baffle interaction) i.e., 30, 60, and 90 min. The experiments were designed in a unique way to study the relationship between cross flow velocity and tube baffle interaction time with wear produced on the tube surface. This is the first study of its kind in which wear analysis of a flexible tube has been done in the water tunnel to simulate the real environment of the heat exchanger tubes. The vibration response of the monitored tube was acquired using a tri-axial wireless accelerometer. A Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was used for the measurement of wear sizes. It was observed that the transverse amplitude rises significantly at higher velocities as compared to streamwise amplitude results in significant wear in the transverse direction. The wear sizes also tend to increase with the cross-flow velocity and become prominent at higher velocities. A similar trend has been observed for the wear area and wears volume. Also with the increase in the tube-baffle interaction span, the wear scar tends to be deeper and wider significantly at higher velocities.