Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Board Gender and Performance of Sugar Companies in Western Kenya

measures. A single performance metric can fully define all aspects of the word because of organizational priorities and contextual factors, not (Snow &Hambrick, The Kenyan sugar industry has suffered from myriad problems over time. In Western Kenya, in particular, as witnessed by the Mumias Sugar, Sony Sugar, Chemilil Sugar and Miwani Sugar Companies, most of the Kenyan companies have had significant performance challenges. Many businesses either run below capacity or have factories completely Abstract: The study sought to find out the influence of board gender ratio on performance of sugar companies in Western Kenya. Board gender areas that were analyzed included the number of males in the various board committees and also the number of females in the various board committees. Descriptive research design was followed in this report. The research was limited to only Western Kenya's sugar firms, whose number stood at 11 as of 31 December 2019. A census was carried out, given that the number of sugar companies in Western Kenya was only 11. Five respondents were chosen by purposeful sampling to represent each of the 11 sugar factories. These were the Chairman of the Board, the Secretary of the Board (Chief Executive Officer), the two members of the Board (male and female) and the Manager of Finance. The five members are deemed to be in the best position to provide the necessary information for the purposes of this study. Thus, for the analysis, a sample size of 55 respondents was considered. Using semi-structured questionnaires that were self-administered, primary data was obtained. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used and data interpretation showed board gender ratio had a positive statistical and significant effect on performance of sugar companies in Western Kenya. The study recommended that in order to achieve gender-equality on boards of directors, there is need to focus on the educational levels, skills and experiences of the nominees whether male or female. When including women to boards, unique traits such as time consciousness, keenness to details, teamwork, leadership and patience should be considered. Other recommendation is that that research of a similar nature be carried out in other locations
Preparation of TiO2 Nanotube Using Anodization Method: Charactherization and Its Application for CO Sensor

Preparation of highly ordered TiO2 nanotube arrays (HOTNAs) by anodization of Ti foil industrial grade in ethylene glycol electrolyte containing 0.3% of ammonium fluoride and 2% of water at 30 V for 90 minutes was conducted. The morphology structure, chemical composition, functional group, crystal phase, and optical properties of HOTNAs were characterized by field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), Energy Dispersive X-Ray (EDX),Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and ultraviolet visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV/Vis-DRS). The well-ordered nanotube with vertically oriented structure was formed in the HOTNAs having size in diameter, length, and wall thickness of 48,0 nm, 1,8 μm, and 26,7 nm, respectively. The fabricated HOTNAs were evaluated for their sensing properties for CO detection. The results show that the fabricated HOTNAs were able to detect 2500 ppm of CO gas with response about 93,429 at operation temperature 150 °C. This preliminary study of sensing performance demonstrates that the prepared HOTNAs under this study is potential and promising as a material sensor for CO detection.
A Maximum Caliber analysis of the Foldon Hypothesis

Different models of protein folding favor different mechanisms. Some models rely on a defined pathway, while other models rely on a more heterogeneous set of pathways. The Foldon Hypothesis is based on the concept of a defined pathway. According to the Foldon Hypothesis, protein folding is characterized by the stepwise assembly of small, cooperative units called foldons. The Maximum Caliber (Max Cal) method provides an opportunity to test this model. The Max Cal method gives the probabilities for dynamical trajectories, in much the same way that the maximum entropy principle gives the probabilities for equilibrium states. In this study, the Max Cal method was applied to folding data for the protein cytochrome c (cyt c; Hu W, Kan ZY, Mayne L, Englander SW. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016;113:3809–3814). The overall picture to emerge from this analysis is that the data do not require a dominant, defined pathway. The folding of cytochrome c is likely a heterogeneous process that includes multiple pathways.
The Utilization of Information Systems Development Methodologies in Practice

Abstract The objective of our research is to study people and their actions within an organizational context, namely whether and how system developers use Information Systems Development methodologies in practice. This article adds to the ongoing discussion about the practical use of ISD methodologies. Many prescriptive and normative textbooks as well as anecdotes exist, but there is little empirical documentation about the actual use of development methods. To contribute to the scientific documentation of methodology utilization, we provide here an empirically based study of the practical use of development methods in three projects within a large Danish software development company. Founded on a Grounded Theory analysis we identified five main categories of themes, which are related and have an effect on the use of ISD methodologies. These include 1) the extent to which a specific methodology is universally applicable, 2) the need for confidence of and between the parties involved, 3) the degree of the developer’s experience, 4) the developer’s wish for co-determination in the development process, and 5) the nature of the introduction process for a method. Our results confirm existing research in the field and offer new insights, especially with regard to the interplay and relationship of the different, identified themes.
Identification and Reconsidering Phylogeny of Some Aphid Species, (Hemiptera: Aphididae), Based on Molecular DNA Markers Using ISSRs-PCR Technique

: Aphids are considered as most economically importance and worldwide insect pests. Successful pest management systems are based on accurate and rapid pests' species identification. Traditional morphological identification of closed aphid species may be considered as inaccurate taxonomic process. For overcoming disadvantages of traditional morphological identification, molecular techniques, related to DNA markers and based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), were approached by using nine ISSRs primers to identify and diagnose fifteen common aphid species that disperse in Egyptian agro-ecosystem. The examined ISSRs primers could successfully discriminate the tested aphid species that reflected 61.39% polymorphism among them. Moreover, four banding patterns were considered as unique bands which could characterize three aphid species ( Aphis gossypii , Aphis nerii and Myzus persicae ). Highest genetic homology (84.9%) was observed between species Rhopalosipum padi and Schizaphis graminum . In additions, each of A. gossypii and Aphis citricola were also genetically homologous species. In contrast, species Aphis craccivora and M. persicae were analogous genetically with low similarity percentile (59.8%).
Estimation of Agile Functionality in Software Development

An introduction to agile principals through agile manifesto has been shown. To prove the functionality of agile methods, qualitative (or quantitative) comparisons have been carried out with the other regular methods. It's always a complicated task for a project analyst to analyze the development of a software project; especially when it comes to evaluation of the development methodology and estimation of the project's success considering every related aspect. The goal of this paper is to simplify this task for the analyst and clarify the important aspects of a project which develop with agile methodologies.
Optimal lane change times and accelerations of autonomous and connected vehicles

This contribution puts forward a flexible approach to model the decision-making or design controller for automated driving systems, where tactical-level lane change decisions and control-level accelerations are jointly evaluated based on iteratively solving an online optimization problem. The key idea is that automated vehicles determine lane change times and accelerations in the predicted future to minimize an objective function representing multiple criteria of driving safety, efficiency and comfort. The interactions between controlled vehicles and surrounding vehicles are captured in the objective function. The approach can be applied to model non-cooperative decision-making of autonomous vehicles with optimization of own cost and cooperative behavior of connected vehicles with joint optimization of the collective cost. The problem is formulated as a differential game where automated vehicles make decisions based on the expected behavior of surrounding vehicles. An efficient numerical solution algorithm is used to solve problem. The proposed model performance is demonstrated via numerical examples. The results show that the proposed approach can produce efficient lane-changing maneuvers while obeying safety and comfort requirements. Particularly, the approach generates optimal lane change times and accelerations in the predicted future, including strategic overtaking and cooperative merging scenarios.
A Triage for Disposition of Poisoned Patients with Cardiovascular Therapeutic Agents Presented to Poison Control Center of Ain Shams University Hospitals

Background: According to the 2016 annual report of the Poison Control Center of Ain Shams University Hospitals (PCC-ASUH), toxicity of cardiovascular drugs represented 7.8% of all intoxicated cases. There is a great variability in the disposition of the poisoned patients with cardiovascular therapeutic agents between poison control centers depending on triage guidelines, compliance to these guidelines and the current practice. Objective: To compare the triage for disposition of intoxicated patients with cardiovascular therapeutic agents in PCC-ASUH with the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC). Methods: This study was a comparative cross-sectional study. Patients were divided into; retrospective group in which disposition was based on PSS and local PCC protocols, and a prospective observational group using the AAPCC guidelines. Results: Eight hundreds and six patients were included. Retrospectively, (37.2%) of the studied patients were observed in ER then discharged, (36.7%) were admitted to ICU, (8.37%) were admitted to inpatient unit, and (17.73%) were referred to another toxicology center. Prospectively, most of poisoned cases (57.39%) observed in ER then discharged, (11.78%) of patients were admitted to ICU, (27.82%) were admitted to inpatient unit, and (3.01%) were referred to another toxicology center, with no apparent adverse effects during follow up. Conclusion: Application of the AAPCC triage method can reduce the unnecessary admissions of poisoned patients with cardiovascular therapeutic agents through increasing the percent of observed patients in ER and reducing ICU admissions and the need for referral to other health care facility.
DCT-SNN: Using DCT to Distribute Spatial Information over Time for Low-Latency Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to traditional deep learning, since they provide higher computational efficiency due to event-driven information processing. SNNs distribute the analog values of pixel intensities into binary spikes over time. However, the most widely used input coding schemes, such as Poisson based rate-coding, do not leverage the additional temporal learning capability of SNNs effectively. Moreover, these SNNs suffer from high inference latency which is a major bottleneck to their deployment. To overcome this, we propose a time-based encoding scheme that utilizes Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to reduce the number of timesteps required for inference (DCT-SNN). DCT decomposes an image into a weighted sum of sinusoidal basis images. At each time step, a single frequency base, taken in order and modulated by its corresponding DCT coefficient, is input to an accumulator that generates spikes upon crossing a threshold. We use the proposed scheme to train DCT-SNN, a low-latency deep SNN with leaky-integrate-and-fire neurons using surrogate gradient descent based backpropagation. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 89.94%, 68.30% and 52.43% on CIFAR10, CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet, respectively using VGG architectures. Notably, DCT-SNN performs inference with 2-14X reduced latency compared to other state-of-the-art SNNs, while achieving comparable accuracy to their standard deep learning counterparts. The dimension of the transform allows us to control the number of timesteps required for inference. Additionally, we can trade-off accuracy with latency in a principled manner by dropping the highest frequency components during inference. The code is publicly available.1
Modeling microdrop motion between covered and open regions of EWOD microsystems

EWOD Microsystems are now widely used in digital microfluidics. Two different types of EWOD Microsystems are developped: open systems - in which a sessile drop is sitting freely on a horizontal substrate - and covered systems - where the droplet is confined between two horizontal plates. In order to combine the advantages of the two systems, a dual open/covered system has been developed. The concept relies on the fact that motion between a covered and open region – and back - is possible under electrowetting actuation. In this work, the mechanism of such a motion is analyzed by using a numerical model based on energy minimization, and a domain of possible droplet motion is defined by an analytical model based on a simplification of the numerical model. The validity of the models is checked against experimental results.
High speed particle image velocimetry measurements during water entry of rigid bodies

This paper presents the experimental description of the water entry problem of a symmetrical wedge with constant drop velocity. High speed Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is used to determine features of the flow including the velocity field characterization and free surface elevation. The free surface elevation profiles are compared with analytical results, which are found to be in good agreement. Further, results of experimentally and numerically determined velocity fields are presented and discussed.
AC 2012-3655: PROPOSED KEEN INITIATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR EN- TREPRENEURIAL MINDEDNESS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

The development of a comprehensive logistic structure is essential to ensure the success of implementing the vision of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN) initiative to forcefully push engineering education to further the characteristic of entrepreneurial mindedness in engineering graduates. The logistic structure must begin with the KEEN Educational Objectives (KEOs) since they define the direction and end results desired. The KEOs in turn are furthered by assuring students at the time of graduation have achieved the KEEN Student Outcomes (KSOs). The curriculum and extracurricular activities have the function of developing the professional and technical traits defined by the outcomes, which in turn allow the objectives to be pursued and achieved. Alignment of these items is critical to ensure not just the objectives are met but also to ensure the curriculum and outcomes actually influence and affect each other in the intended manner. It is highly advantageous that the proposed structure aligns and is compatible with the ABET Engineering Criteria, which is well-established and well-understood by engineering programs. This would simplify interpretation of language and could serve to minimize any additional assessment work.
Serum Homocysteine as an Early Diagnostic Marker of Spontaneous Bacterial Peritonitis in Patients with Hepatic Cirrhosis

Background: Spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP) is a term used to describe acute infection of ascites, an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the abdomen, without a distinct or identifiable source of infection. Objective: This study aimed to assess serum homocysteine as a novel reliable early diagnostic marker for spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in patients with hepatic cirrhosis. As the diagnosis of SBP depends primarily on a polymorphonuclear leukocyte cell (PMN) count ≥ 250 mm, however this method is invasive and sometimes not diagnostic. Patients and methods: This study was conducted on 50 cirrhotic patients with ascites. Patients were divided into 2 groups: Group (A) included 30 cirrhotic patients with SBP on the basis of PMN count in the ascitic fluid ≥ 250 cells/μL with or without positive ascitic fluid culture. Group (B) included 20 cirrhotic patients with ascites but without SBP (control group). Results: There was a significant difference between the two studied groups regarding C-reactive protein (CRP) (P=0.001) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) (P=0.008). There was also significant difference between the two studied groups regarding ascitic fluid analysis parameters; as ascitic glucose and albumin were significantly lower in SBP group (P=0.002 & P=0.027, respectively) while ascitic lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and PMN count were significantly higher in SBP group (P < 0.001, for both). Serum homocysteine was significantly higher in SBP group compared to non-SBP group (18.43 ± 6.95 vs. 12.13 ± 5.54 μmol/l; P=0.001). Serum homocysteine was significant at a cutoff level of 17.65 μmol/l with a sensitivity of 88.6% and 95.2% specificity for diagnosing SBP with an area under the curve (AUC) = 0.928. Conclusion: Serum homocysteine could serve as a convenient novel and reliable noninvasive early diagnostic marker for SBP in cirrhotic patients with ascites.
Single-contact transmission for the quasi-wireless delivery of power over large surfaces

Single-contact transmission for the quasi-wireless delivery of power overlarge surfacesC.W. Van Neste, J.E. Hawk, Arindam Phani, J.A. J. Backs, Richard Hull, Tinu Abraham, S.J. Glassford, A.K. Pickering andThomas ThundatWireless Power Transfer / Volume 1 / Issue 02 / September 2014, pp 75 - 82 DOI: 10.1017/wpt.2014. 9, Published online: 08 October 2014Link to this article:
Decentralizing trust: new security paradigms for cloud computing

Data and computation integrity and security are major concerns for users of cloud computing facilities. Today's clouds typically place centralized, universal trust in all the cloud's nodes. This simplistic, full-trust model has the negative consequence of amplifying potential damage from node compromises, leaving such clouds vulnerable to myriad attacks. To address this weakness, this dissertation proposes and evaluates new paradigms for decentralizing cloud trust relationships for stronger cloud security. Five new paradigms are examined: (1) Hatman decentralizes trust through computation replication in clouds to ensure computation integrity. Its prototype implementation embodies the first full-scale, data-centric, reputation-based trust management system for Hadoop clouds. (2) AnonymousCloud decentralizes trust by decoupling private billing information from a cloud job's code and data. The resulting cloud conceals computation and data ownership information from nodes that compute using the data, thereby impeding malicious nodes from learning who owns these resources without disrupting the cloud's power to process and bill jobs. (3) Penny is a fully decentralized peer-to-peer structure that shifts trust away from traditional, centralized, cloud master nodes to an equal distribution of trust over all nodes. It supports integrity and confidentiality labeling of data, and enforces a notion of ownership privacy that permits peers to publish data without revealing their ownership of the data. (4) CloudCover decentralizes trust on the user side. It proposes a new form of Security as a Service (SECaaS) that allows untrusted, mostly serial computations in untrusted computing environments to be independently and efficiently validated by trusted, commodity clouds. Finally, (5) SilverLine automatically in-lines secure information flow tracking code into untrusted job binaries, facilitating enforcement of custom security policies without any change to the underlying cloud kernel, operating system, hypervisor, or file system implementations. This makes SilverLine exceptionally easy to deploy and maintain on rapidly evolving cloud frameworks, since the cloud and security enforcement implementations are completely separate and orthogonal. Experiments demonstrate that each paradigm is an effective strategy for realizing stronger security in cloud computing frameworks at modest overheads through reducing or shifting the trusted computing base.
Early Outcomes of Transection of Secondary Chordae with Downsized Ring Annuloplasty in Low Recurrence Risk Severe Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation

Background: Relying solely on restrictive annuloplasty for the repair of ischemic mitral regurgitation is associated with an unacceptable rate of recurrence. Transection of secondary chordae as an adjunctive procedure has been proposed to improve results. Patient and methods: This is a prospective observational study including 20 patients who underwent mitral repair using downsized annuloplasty ring and transection of the secondary chordae, at the time of CABG at the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department of Cairo University Hospitals through the period between March 2016 and October 2018. The primary outcome being examined was the recurrence of significant mitral regurgitation at 6 months postoperatively. Secondary outcomes included coaptation length and ejection fraction. Results: The mean age was 57.5 ± 6.9 years. The mean ejection fraction was 45.1 ± 11%. There was one early mortality (5%). At 6 months postoperatively, there was no incidence of recurrence of significant mitral regurgitation. Coaptation length was quite satisfactory (7.2 ± 0.67 mm). Conclusion: Transection of secondary chordae is a safe and simple option. It may be beneficial when performed in combination with downsized ring annuloplasty in patients with low-risk ischemic mitral regurgitation.
The effectiveness of acupoint herbal patching for non-specific low back pain: A Protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

Non-specific low back pain (NS-LBP) is related to disability and work absence and accounts for high economical costs of global.It is a problem that has a negative impact on physical, mental health of patients and quality of life. At present, acupoint herbal patching(AHP) as an adjuvant therapy is currently undergoing clinical trials in different medical centers. This study aimed to design a systematic review and meta-analysis to explore the effects of AHP on non-specific low back pain (NS-LBP).