Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Urban Traffic Noise Maps under 3D Complex Building Environments on a Supercomputer

The complexity of the 3D buildings and road networks gives the simulation of urban noise difficulty and significance. To solve the problem of computing complexity, a systematic methodology for computing urban traffic noise maps under 3D complex building environments is presented on a supercomputer. A parallel algorithm focused on controlling the compute nodes of the supercomputer is designed. Moreover, a rendering method is provided to visualize the noise map. In addition, a strategy for obtaining a real-time dynamic noise map is elaborated. Two efficiency experiments are implemented. One experiment involves comparing the expansibility of the parallel algorithm with various numbers of compute nodes and various computing scales to determine the expansibility. With an increase in the number of compute nodes, the computing time increases linearly, and an increased computing scale leads to computing efficiency increases. The other experiment is a comparison of the computing speed between a supercomputer and a normal computer; the computing node of Tianhe-2 is found to be six times faster than that of a normal computer. Finally, the traffic noise suppression effect of buildings is analyzed. It is found that the building groups have obvious shielding effect on traffic noise.
Accumulation capacity of cadmium and copper and their effects on photosynthetic performance in Azolla filiculoides Lam. under induced rhizofiltration.

This study evaluated the capacity of Azolla filiculoides to enhance heavy metal accumulation through the addition of different concentrations of cadmium (Cd) and copper (Cu), as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) complexes, under hydroponic conditions. The physiological effect was determined by Photosynthetic efficiency (Fv/Fm) as an indicator of plant stress, and heavy metal content was measured with flame atomic absorption spectroscopy in the whole plants. The results obtained in rhizofiltration systems did not show an increase in accumulation when Cd-EDTA was added, but the Cu-EDTA increased the accumulation of Cu by plants. Although the Fv/Fm was decreased in all treatments, only the Cd-EDTA complex caused damage to photosystem II (PSII) activity, and that damage was critical. These results coincide with the higher toxicity of cadmium to plants; the quantity of cadmium in the plants, although small, was indeed harmful to them. The correlation analysis for both heavy metals coincides with the assumption that the heavy metals on leaf tissue affected the photosynthetic metabolism. This research makes a new contribution to the field by evaluating EDTA-induced Azolla rhizofiltration in aquatic systems, a departure from the majority of the literature on the topic, which examines EDTA in soil remediation. In future, further study is needed on the interactions of EDTA with other ions and the physiological consequences for different plant species.
Influence of nano particles reinforcement on the thermal and electrical properties of aluminium alloy matrix composites

An attempt is being made to develop nano particles reinforced metal matrix composites using powder metallurgy process. Uniform distribution of particles was achieved by sonication of reinforcement for distribution of Carbon nano tube (CNT). FESEM has shown the distribution with particle size conforming nano size and uniformity of distribution. Mechanical properties like radial compressive strength, microhardness, thermal and electrical conductivity were evaluated. Radial compression testing was carried out to see the influence of CNT on aluminium alloy and also evaluate the bonding phenomena. Electrical conductivity of these composites were also evaluated and presented. The findings results in guiding to select the reinforcement to achieve the desired properties.
Scalar perturbations in scalar field quantum cosmology

In this paper it is shown how to obtain the simplest equations for the Mukhanov-Sasaki variables describing quantum linear scalar perturbations in the case of scalar fields without potential term. This was done through the implementation of canonical transformations at the classical level, and unitary transformations at the quantum level, without ever using any classical background equation, and it completes the simplification initiated in investigations by Langlois [D. Langlois, Classical Quantum Gravity 11, 389 (1994). ], and Pinho and Pinto-Neto [E. J. C. Pinho and N. Pinto-Neto, Phys. Rev. D 76, 023506 (2007). ] for this case. These equations were then used to calculate the spectrum index n{sub s} of quantum scalar perturbations of a nonsingular inflationary quantum background model, which starts at infinity past from flat space-time with Planckian size spacelike hypersurfaces, and inflates due to a quantum cosmological effect, until it makes an analytical graceful exit from this inflationary epoch to a decelerated classical stiff matter expansion phase. The result is n{sub s}=3, incompatible with observations.
Mathematical modelling of gas turbine diagnosis

Intelligent diagnostic systems for gas turbines help avoid excessive outages and costly component replacement by calling for corrective action before problems have time to become failures. Various prognostics and health monitoring technologies have been developed that aid in the detection and classification of developing system faults. This paper presents a mathematical approach, which could be useful to the machine operator, to evaluate the performance of the gas turbine when the necessary diagnostic or simulation software is not available. The mathematical model was validated on a turbine, SK30 GT. Results show that the model can be used for performance evaluation of gas turbines, to reduce unplanned down time.
Characterization of Ralstonia solanacearum causing bacterial wilt in ginger

Bacterial wilt pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum isolated from ginger, tomato, Chromolaena, chilli and potato, characterized for biovar, pathogenicity, infectivity titer, and intrinsic antibiotic resistance. The isolates were also characterized on the basis of their membrane protein pattern and amenability of the isolates for serological detection (NCM-ELISA) using R. solanacearum specific antibodies. All the ginger isolates were highly fluidal with characteristic spiral pink center on 2,3,5-triphenyl tetrazolium chlorideamended medium. Among the isolates characterized nine belongs to biovar 3 while one from potato to biovar 2. Among the various isolates tested, only ginger ones except one from Assam induced cent percent wilting in ginger cv. Himachal within a week. Plants were wilted even at a concentration of 3.2 X 102 cfu ml- 1 in stem inoculation while in soil inoculation it was 105 cfu ml- 1 . All the isolates were resistant to antibiotics tetracycline, polymyxin B sulphate and chloramphenicol and isolates GRS Tms and its spontaneous mutant were resistant to Rifamycin. Isolates were detected with NCM-ELISA and biovars on the basis of membrane protein pattern on SDS-PAGE and biovar specific protein from R. solanacearum could be isolated.
Non-nodular Endophytic Bacterial Symbiosis and the Nitrogen Fixation of Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus

There is a need to reduce the negative polluting influence of mineral nitrogen fertiliz - ers and to develop a more sustainable climate smart agriculture capable of meeting our future food security needs. Biological nitrogen fixation can have a role in this if it can be applied to the major food crop plants. Certain strains of the obligate nitrogen-fixing bacterial endophyte Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus have the necessary attributes for this role. An ‘extra-ordinary endophyte’ this bacterium is one of relatively few that has mechanisms to cope with high levels of sucrose, an acidic pH, a wide range of oxygen environments, nitrogen fixation, as well as having respiratory chain attributes that make it a possible candidate eukaryote proto-mitochondria. Having a small genome relative to other endophytes, it is typical of facultative intracellular colonizers, with a life cycle that involves horizontal transfer to other high sucrose species via insects and potential vertical transfer through seeds. Every method used for demonstrating nitrogen fixation in rhizobia have been used to demonstrate nitrogen fixation in G. diazotrophicus both in vitro and in planta , and field trials demonstrate yield increases and the potential to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use, meeting both food security and climate smart agriculture needs. symbiosis, facultative colonization, intracellular colonization, endophyte, yield impact, food security, climate smart agriculture genes are required for the formation the
Deodorizing Effects of Phlorotannins from Edible Brown Alga Eisenia bicyclis on Methyl Mercaptan

In search for new deodorizing compounds, we were identified three phlorotannins; eckol ( 1 ), dioxinodehydroeckol ( 2 ) and dieckol ( 3 ) from edible brown seaweed Eisenia bicyclis and characterized by Fast-atom bombardment mass spectrometry (FAB-MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The deodorizing activity of those compounds was evaluated against methyl mercaptan, which is well known as a major causative material of halitosis and off-flavor. Among them, compound 3 exhibited the highest deodorizing activity against methyl mercaptan at the IC 50 values of 26.71 ± 4.16 µg mL -1 , followed by compound 2 (40.57 ± 0.63 µg mL -1 ) and compound 1 (43.62 ± 1.52 µg mL -1 ). Thus, these results suggest that the phlorotannins derived from E. bicyclis can be an effective deodorizing constituent in the food industry and pharmaceutical industries.
Interaction between gas and electricity market-based trading in the short run

Gas-fired power plants are increasingly used in the production of electricity, which in turn makes them a relevant part of the gas demand. In this paper, we investigate whether the current designs of gas and power markets are robust to the relatively new link between industries. Specifically, we study the cross-industry efficiency losses associated with designs aimed at increasing liquidity by limiting the amount of network services allocated through markets. In the short run, reducing the set of transmission services priced in one market (say gas) affects the use of transmission in the other market (say power). This may result in inefficiencies that should be accounted for when deciding on the network services to be allocated through market arrangements in each industry. We also identify long-term effects of such design strategies: the allocation of gas pipeline storage and transmission services without preference representation may weaken localization signals for power plants investment. In addition, lack of harmonization of market designs may raise barriers to network investment.
EFFECTS OF PHOTOSELECTIVE SHADE NETS ON THE METEOROLOGICAL ELEMENTS, GROWTH AND RADIATION USE EFFICIENCY OF CUCUMBER

CSBE101226 – Presented at Section II: Farm Buildings, Equipment, Structures and Livestock Environment ConferenceABSTRACT Crop growth is influenced by meteorological conditions. Thus, crops growing inside protected environments versus field conditions, are submitted to different meteorological conditions. This research was conducted under photoselective shade nets and field conditions in order to quantify the influence of radiation net (Rn) on growth rate, productivity, global radiation (SR), photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and PAR use efficiency of local variety cucumber crop. The experiment was carried out in the spring of 2009 in a experimental area (Lat. 16°40’S, Long. 49°15’W and alt. 730 m) that consisted of three treatments, named: T1field conditions; T2 30% red filter net in the visible and 30% transmission in the far red spectrum; T3 30% red filter net in the visible and 40% transmission in the far red spectrum. The best results in terms of growth rate, productivity, energy efficiency were obtained under T3 condition. Under these conditions, the reduction of global solar radiation was not limited for the cucumber growth below the nets, being that a crop growth rate of 0.431 g daywas observed with an average global solar radiation incident of 4.4 MJ m day and PAR use efficiency of 0.079 kg MJ dia. Both red filter nets increased dry matter and chlorophyll content.
The Narrative as a Way to Construct Transdisciplinary Knowledge: Building Upon Experience in a Polyphonic Way 1

W hen trying to glimpse at the possible realization of transdisciplinary, Basarab Nicolescu points throughout his work at the powerful potentials of the narrative, particularly in its literary manifestation. In response to that and with the intention to contribute to the further development of transdisciplinary theory and methodology, we aim to explore the potentials of the narrative as a form of transdisciplinary knowing that is rigorous yet escapes from the strict methodology imposed by positive science. Our contribution will explore the narrative in its aesthetic form (literature), in its form of vivid culture as well as in its form of cosmological fundamentals (stories and legends). It will analyze if and how the narrative offers a platform to entangle the abundant heritage of human experiences, both in a historic as well as in an individual way. It will finally asks if this lively, discontinuous and complex way of knowing may be a base for the construction of a more open, accessible and democratic house of knowledge.
A Crow's Beak is not Yellow: Investigations on Cognitively Salient Concept Properties

Subject-generated concept descriptions in terms of properties of different kinds (category: rabbits are mammals, parts: they have long ears, behaviour: they jump, .) are widely used in cognitive science as proxies to feature-based representations of concepts in the mind. These feature norms (as collections of subject-elicited properties are called in the relevant literature) are used in simulations of cognitive tasks and experimental design. Moreover, vector spaces that have subject-generated properties as dimensions have been shown to be a good complement or alternative to traditional semantic models based on corpus collocates. Since the concept–property pairs in feature norms resemble the tuples that semantic relation extraction algorithms extract from corpora, recent research has attempted to extract feature-norm-like concept descriptions from corpora. From a practical point of view, the success of this enterprise would mean being able to produce much larger norms without the need to resort to expensive and time-consuming elicitation experiments, leading to wider cognitive simulations and possibly better vector space models of semantics. Lexical resources incorporating semantic relations between lexical entries would profit likewise from such automatic extraction methods that would facilitate extending the lexical resource with relation instances that are prominent to speakers from a cognitive perspective. From a theoretical point of view, a corpus-based system that produces human-like concept descriptions might provide cues of how humans themselves come up with such descriptions. The general goals of this dissertation are (i) to report empirical investigations of the cognitive salience of semantic relation types and (ii) to present a case study about extracting cognitively salient concept properties from text corpora, namely composite expressions for constitutive parts of concepts (e. g., crow: has a black beak).
Developing countries versus multinationals in a globalising world: the dangers of falling behind

• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.
The Major Challenges Facing Scholarly Journals

I sometimes assign weak manuscripts with promising ideas to a review team of doctoral students. The authors get some constructive feedback, and the doctoral students get practice reviewing. If the doctoral students find potential, we might reassess. Excessive length in a manuscript on its first submission causes a desk rejection because it unacceptably burdens the review team. However, tables, figures, references, and purely supplemental appendices are less onerous. Hence, length restrictions should focus on whether the length of the body of the manuscript is commensurate with the claimed contribution. For invited revisions, additional length is required to accommodate requests by the review team. The authors must still ensure that the contribution justifies the length and the burden on the review team. After committing to the manuscript, the EIC must decide on how many journal pages to allocate to the article based on its relative contribution compared to other accepted articles. At that point, the EIC might require removal of nonessential material and movement of less important material to an online appendix. Again, the EIC must retain flexibility and allocate journal pages based on the marginal contribution of additional pages for specific articles. Step 3—Requesting and Waiting for Reviewer Reports As noted, the EIC appoints the AE and potential reviewers. Many authors assume reviewers are on the editorial board. Some are, but most are not. With three reviewer reports per manuscript and 540 annual submissions, we require 1,620 reviewer reports and 540 AE reports. A 60-person review board produces fewer than 200 reports per year. Consequently, we usually require over 700 different reviewers and over 70 different AEs per year. To ensure fast and efficient reviews, those figures require the constant recruiting of new reviewers (many who decline), meticulous attention to workloads, and careful matching of
Effects of combined application of chemical fertilizer and vermicompost on soil fertility, leaf yield and stevioside content of stevia

Sustainable nutrient management with the combination of organic and chemical fertilizer amendment expects a key part in upgrading stevia yield without harming the environment and to build up the nutrient balance with increasing soil fertility. A pot experiment was conducted in the net house of the Department of Agricultural Chemistry, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh to study the combined effect of vermicompost (VC) and chemical fertilizer (CF) on the growth, leaf biomass yield and stevioside content of stevia in acid soil. Six combinations of VC and CF were applied following completely randomized design (CRD) with three replications. Results showed that VC along with different rates of CF exerted significant influence on the growth, leaf biomass yield and stevioside content of stevia and postharvest soil fertility. The highest values for most of the parameters were found from the plant receiving VC @ 7.5 t ha ­−1 along with 50% CF. About 578% higher leaf biomass yield was obtained from the treatment VC 7.5 +CF 50 over control. Stevioside content was increased with the increasing levels of VC up to 7.5 t ha −1 along with 75% of CF and also with the advancement of growth period from 30 to 60 days after planting. The highest amount of stevioside (11.05%) was detected in the leaves of plant of the same treatment at harvest. Soil acidity was significantly decreased with the increased levels of VC and CF where as soil fertility in terms of organic matter and nutrient content was increased. Considering the overall performance, farmers may be advised to cultivate stevia in acid soil applying VC @ 7.5 t ha −1 along with 50% chemical fertilizer to boost up stevia production under the agroclimatic condition of the study area in the context of Bangladesh J. Bangladesh Agril. Univ. 16(1): 73-81, April 2018
Implementing the Observer Design Pattern as an Expressive Language Construct

Observer is a commonly used design pattern as it carries a lot of reusability and modularity concerns in objectoriented programming and represents a good example of design reuse. Implementing the observer design pattern (and several other design patterns) is known to typically cause several problems such as implementation overhead and traceability. In the literature, several approaches have been proposed to alleviate such problems. However, these approaches only considered the implementation of a specific scenario of the observer pattern, which is concerned with having a single subject with multiple observers. In addition, the code used to implement this pattern was scattered throughout the program, which complicated implementing, tracing and reusing them. In this paper, we: A) provide a systematic classification of all possible scenarios of the observer design pattern and B) introduce a novel approach to implement them using an expressive and easy-to-use construct in Java. The proposed observer construct is built as a language extension using the abc extensible compiler. We illustrate through several observer scenarios how the construct significantly simplifies the implementation and improves reusability. Keywords–Design Patterns; Aspect-Oriented Programming; Extensible Compiler; Language Extension; Observer Pattern.
Optimal harvest timing of Prangos ferulacea (L.) Lindl: effects of phenology stages, elevation and type of plant factors on forage quality

Prangos ferulacea ;(L.) Lindl (Umbelliferae) is a forage and medicinal plant that grows in central Asia. This study was carried out to determine the nutritive value of P. ferulacea, which is often used as animal fodder. Plant samples collected from two elevation levels (2200- 2900 m) of western Iran were evaluated at two stages of maturity, flowering and seeding stage for fertile plants and at 42 and 62 days after leaf emergence for infertile individuals. The nutrient composition, including metabolizable energy (ME) and digestible dry matter (DMD), crude protein (CP), water-soluble carbohydrate (WSC), acid detergent fibre (ADF), natural detergent fibre (NDF) and crude fibre (CF) contents were measured by near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) technology. The stage of maturity and type of plant (fertile and infertile) were significantly related to the CP, ME, NDF and ADF contents. Based on multivariate analysis (two-way ANOVA), the phenology, individual and phenology × individual interaction factors had the highest effect on nutrient composition parameters. Based on our findings, we proposed that infertile plants at 42 days after leaf emergence stage represent the best quality fodder. Elevation level did not significantly affect forage quality.
OPTIMIZATION OF THE CAVITATION ACTIVITY IN PULSED ULTRASOUND FIELDS

In the given work an attempt was made to develop an approach for optimization the conditions of insonation in pulsed ultrasound fields. Cavitation activity was estimated by the sonoluminescence (SL) intensity. The hydrodphone output placed behind the focal spot of a radiator was registered simultaneously with the photomultiplier output. It has been shown that with increase in intensity of ultrasound the maximum of SL intensity is shifted aside longer pulse periods and shorter pulse durations . From the results received it is possible to allocate two thresholds of multibubble cavitation while increasing pulse duration or decreasing pulse period: the first corresponds to the occurrence of light pulses, and the second - to the step-like increase of the SL intensity. The second threshold of cavitation is characterized by the sharp increase of the absorption of ultrasound in cavitation zone. The reason of this increase is evidently connected with the increase in volumetric bubbles in cavitation zone.