Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling Kinetics of Extruded Fish Feeds in a Continuous Belt Dryer

Feed is the major inputs in aquaculture production which affects the development growth of aquaculture in the African continent. Extruded fish feeds are dried to desire moisture content to increase the shelf life. Conventional method of drying fish feeds had gained attention recently in Nigeria in order to reduce high cost of producing fish feeds. However, this method is still grossly underutilized. Extrude floating fish feed was dried using continuous belt dryer at drying air temperature from 60°C to 100°C at an interval of 10°C, velocity of air using for drying from 0.8 m s-1 to 1.0 m s-1 at an interval of 0.1 m s-1 using a constant linear belt speed of 50 m s-1. Various moisture contents gotten at different conditions were changed to ratio of the dried extrudates moisture so as to obtain curves of drying by plotting the ratio of moisture against time. The dried extrudates behaviour was determined by fixing the drying curves with five well known models. Model with high determination coefficient and low reduced chi-square, low standard error, low value of least square and low standard deviation error (SEE) was used as best model. Midilli et al model was found suitable in describing the behaviour of extruded fish feed during drying. The temperature of air used for drying was discovered to have a major influence on the drying kinetics of the extruded fish feeds based on the conditions of this experiment.
Effects of Positioning Errors Onto the Ratio and Angle Measurements in Photographs of Patients With Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate

Background: Nasolabial esthetics is 1 of the most important issues in the evaluation of treatment outcomes in patients with unilateral cleft lip and palate (CLP). Frontal and basal view photographs are commonly used to evaluate nasolabial esthetics in patients with unilateral CLP. High-quality photography plays an important role in evaluating the treatment outcomes and poor quality photographs can result in errors, whereas evaluating the treatment results. Facial proportions and angles are important in the esthetic perception of the face. Hence, this study aimed to determine the effects of positioning errors on the ratio and angle measurements in photographs of patients with unilateral CLP. Methods: In the clinical and computer environment, a mechanism was set up to take photos at standard and at different angles. A real-size unilateral CLP silicone doll was constructed for the photographs to be taken in the clinical setting. A test-retest was performed to determine the reliability of the measured values. Results: The correlation coefficients for the first measurement and remeasurement values were statistically significant; positive and strong correlations were obtained. Conclusions: Based on the data obtained from our study, the angle and ratio measurements obtained from the two-dimensional photographs provided reliable results.
A study of internal wave influence on OTEC systems

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) systems utilize the temperature difference between the surface water and deep ocean water to generate electrical energy. In addition to ocean surface waves, wind and current, in certain locations like the Andaman Sea, Sulu Sea and the South China Sea the presence of strong internal waves may become a concern in floating OTEC system design. The current paper focuses on studying the dependence of the CWP hydrodynamic drag on relative velocity of the flow around the pipe, the effect of drag amplification due to vortex induced vibrations and the influence of internal waves on the floating semi and the cold water pipe integrated OTEC system. Two CWP sizes are modeled; the 4m diameter pipe represents a small scale prototype and the 10m diameter pipe represents a full commercial size CWP. are considered in the study.
A compliant soft-actuator laterotactile display

Humans are extremely adept at eliciting useful information through touch, and the tactile domain has huge potential for handheld and wearable electronic devices. Smart materials may be central to exploiting this potential. The skin is highly sensitive to laterotactile stimulation, where tactile elements move laterally against the skin, and this modality is well suited for wearable devices. Wearable devices should be soft and compliant, in order to move with the user and be comfortable. We present and characterize a laterotactile display using soft and compliant dielectric elastomer actuators. We carry out an initial psychophysical study to determine the absolute sensitivity threshold of laterotactile stimulation, and find that at low frequencies sensitivity is higher than for normal tactile stimulation. Our results suggest that the mechanoreceptors close to the skin surface (SA1, FA1) have improved sensitivity to laterotactile stimulation. We believe our results lay the foundation for a range of new soft robotic human interface devices using smart materials.
Cascade Connection of the Ladder Switched Capacitor Cell

This work presents an alternative for the connection of switched capacitor ladder cells in order to obtain a high cc-cc conversion rate. The proposed modification consists in split the output capacitor of the first cell, being they the input capacitors of a second ladder cell, that is, a series connection with integration of elements is performed. The modification in the output capacitor allows the connection with a reduced number of components. These advantages make the structure suitable for converters with a high conversion rate, step-up or step-down. The topology, the ladder cell and connection analysis, the equivalent circuit and cascade connection loss analysis are studied. The theoretical analysis is validated through experimental results in a prototype of 200 V for 50 V and 200 W of power. Additionally, a comparison with the classic ladder connection and other high-gain converters is presented to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed structure.
Fatigue, Physical Disability and Self-Efficacy as Predictors of the Acceptance of Illness and Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic progressive demyelinating disease of the central nervous system that leads to permanent disability and many neurological symptoms, making everyday functioning difficult. The predictors of the acceptance of illness and the health-related quality of life in people with MS include the degree of disability, neurological symptoms and psychosocial factors, such as personal resources. The aim of our study is to determine the relationships among disability, fatigue, self-efficacy, acceptance of illness and quality of life. The study group consisted of 137 people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—73 women and 64 men. EDSS, GNDS, LSES, AIS and MSIS-29 were used in the present study. The results show that all tested variables were significantly correlated with each other. Disability and fatigue were significant predictors of both the physical and psychological aspects of patients’ quality of life. Self-efficacy was a significant predictor of both the acceptance of illness and the psychological aspect of patients’ quality of life. Based on the current research study, it can be concluded that factors of a biomedical nature explain other aspects of struggling with the disease, rather than psychological resources.
A dynamic-threshold SOI device with a J-FET embedded source structure and a merged body-bias-control transistor. I. A J-FET embedded source structure properties

The floating-body effects in SOI CMOSFETs are fully suppressed by embedding a J-FET source structure immediately beneath the source/drain junction. The drain of the J-FET consists of a Schottky barrier diode; the holes generated in the body can easily be ejected into the source through the forward-biasing of this diode. The source-drain breakdown voltage and drain-induced barrier-lowering characteristics of this device are the same as those of a bulk device. With this structure, the body potential syncrhronously couples to the gate bias in the dynamic mode without potential hysteresis when the body-to-source resistance is properly designed. The inverter-chain delay time should be 45% of that of a bulk device operating at 1 V without an excess load.
Using Teaching Resources to Help Students Develop Team and Project Skills Pays Off, Both in Terms of Employability and Shorter Study Time

Since Aalborg University in Denmark was started in 1974 it has been using a special educational model, where Problem Based Learning is the turning point. Each semester the students on the Engineering Educations form groups of approximately 6 persons, which uses half of the study time within the semester to solve and document a real-world engineering problem. Working with problems gives the students a very deep learning of the subjects they study, but also very good problem solving skills and team work competencies that are highly recommended by the Danish companies. In the first years of the university many students had difficulties with practical issues such as collaboration, communication, and project management. An important aspect of the basic part of the education (first year), has therefore been the development of a course where the students gets tools and tricks for good communication, collaboration, learning and project management (CLP). Although the course was a good help to a lot of students it was not everyone that was using the tools in their project work, and since it is only possible to learn about these issues by actually doing them the students had to deliver not only a written report documenting the results of their project, but also an analysis of the working process getting there. Since year 1998 the teachers giving the CLP course have focused very much on these process analyses and as they are a part of the examination the students also have focused more on how they work together and plan and do the project. This has clearly improved the students team and project work skills, which the CLP-teachers can see and document because they have read all of the process analyses every year since year 1998. This paper will explain the content and the form of the CLP-course and give some examples of the student’s exercises and outcome of the course in terms of the process analyses. Results from a new Danish survey will document that not only are the engineering students from Aalborg University highly requested by companies, but there is also a much lower drop out rate among the students and a dramatically higher rate of students finishes their study within the prescribed time, compared to other Danish universities and engineering schools.
Power management for sub-mW energy harvester with adaptive hybrid energy storage

Energy harvesting with its ubiquitous availability is intensively investigated to extend the wireless sensor nodes lifetime. While the harvested power is often less than 1 mW, the commercial-off-the-shelf power management circuits designed for conventional battery applications operate in much higher power. A designated power management module for sub-mW energy harvester is proposed in this article to increase the energy conversion efficiency and extend the energy storage lifetime for small input power. The proposed module consists of discrete component–based pulse-width modulation (PWM) controlled synchronous boost converter structured impedance matching circuit and supercapacitor/micro-battery hybrid energy storage. The synchronous boost converter-based power management circuit achieves 79% conversion efficiency at the input power of 0.5 mW. The power loss during the energy conversion is significantly reduced and thus allows wireless sensor nodes to be powered from a minimum of 120 Lux fluorescent light with a photovoltaic cell smaller than a credit card. The supercapacitor/micro-battery energy storage provides lifetime of more than 73 h when no external energy is available. The experimental results with 25 energy harvester–powered wireless sensor nodes demonstrate that the practical ultra-low–power design makes sub-1-mW energy harvester power management applicable.
Formulation of the field-to-transmission line coupling equations in terms of magnetic excitation field

Different formulations of the field-to-transmission-line coupling equations are reviewed and discussed. An equivalent formulation is derived in which the source terms (or forcing functions) are expressed in terms of the magnetic excitation field. This formulation is particularly useful for evaluating field-to-transmission-line coupling when the exciting field is determined experimentally, since only the measurement of the electric field-generally easier to measure than the electric field-is necessary. >
Measurements on a charge-coupled area image sensor with blooming suppression

Blooming, the lateral spreading of charge from an intensely illuminated area of an image sensor, can be present in an especially objectionable form in charge-coupled devices. Bright lines are formed in the display, owing to a charge propagation along the transfer channels. The introduction of overflow drains, i.e., stripes of a reverse-biased p-n junction placed between the transfer channels, provides a well-defined leakage path for excess carriers from saturated potential wells. An implanted threshold barrier between these drains and the integrating potential wells determines the saturation potential of the integration sites and prevents the total collapse of the associated depletion region. Therefore, the lateral diffusion of minority carriers is also greatly reduced. An existing design of a charge-coupled area image sensor with 64 × 106 resolution elements and frame transfer organization has been modified to study these methods of blooming suppression. The lateral distance of charge spreading has been reduced by a factor of seven at overload conditions of 20 dB. For stronger overloads the booming suppression becomes even more striking, but the performance of the device iS limited by frame transfer smearing. Furthermore, lens flare limits most optical systems at overloads above 30 dB. However, by using an optical fiber, well-localized overloads of 50 dB could be generated. Although, in our particular test device, the addition of blooming suppression reduced the light sensitivity by a factor of four, other geometries for overflow drain structures that should result in only a negligible loss in sensitivity are discussed.
Wielding the power of interactive molecular simulations

Since the dawn of the computer age, scientists have designed devices to represent molecular structures and developed tools to simulate their dynamic behavior in silico. To this day, these tools remain central to our understanding of biomolecular phenomena. In contrast to other fields such as fluid mechanics or meteorology, the observation of molecular motions at the atomic level remains a major experimental challenge. Continuous advances in computer graphics and numerical computation, combined with the emergence of human–computer interaction approaches, led to the methodology of so‐called “interactive molecular simulations”, characterized by two main features. First, the possibility to visualize a running simulation in interactive time, that is, compatible with human perception. Second, the possibility to manipulate the simulation interactively by imposing a force, changing a biophysical property, or editing runtime parameters on the fly. Such simulations are still little used in computational biology, where it is more common to run a series of offline simulations and then visualize and analyze the results. However, interactive molecular simulation tools promise to handle time‐consuming tasks such as the modeling of particularly complex biomolecular structures more efficiently or to support approaches such as Rational Drug Design with regard to pharmaceutical applications.
Intermodal Transportation Network Custom Evaluators for Environmental Policy Analysis

We are leveraging the power of GIS-based transportation network analysis to provide tools for public policy analysts to understand the environmental impact trade-offs of intermodal transportation networks that integrate truck, rail, and inter-coastal waterway modes of transportation. We will describe the environmental policy analysis problem, the intermodal network model, and the creation of environmental network attributes and custom attribute evaluators. We will describe what drove our choice to use C# and the Microsoft . NET framework to design and develop evaluators that access external data from relational databases and that have their own evaluator configuration user interfaces. We will conclude with a description of possible next steps, including evaluator access of environmental data from external web services, a way for policy analysts to create new attributes and custom evaluators without any programming skills, and porting the desktop-based system to a web and server-based system for broad deployment.
Effects of control techniques and damper constraint on the performance of a semi-active magnetorheological damper

Semi-active dampers change their damping force in real time by simply changing the damping coefficient according to a control policy. In this study, a number of semi-active control algorithms namely modified skyhook, modified groundhook and modified hybrid skyhook-groundhook controllers are evaluated to be used with a magnetorheological damper. The effectiveness of these control algorithms in disturbance rejection are investigated along with their ability to consistently provide the target force in the same direction with the damper velocity to overcome the damper constraint. From the simulation and experimental results, the modified hybrid skyhook-groundhook controller shows significant improvement in body acceleration, body displacement, suspension displacement without allowing excessive wheel acceleration magnitude. The modified hybrid skyhook-groundhook controller is also superior to the counterparts in overcoming the damper constraint by producing the target forces consistently in the same sign with the damper velocity.
The roles of long non-coding RNAs in lung cancer

Lung cancer is the most common malignancy, being a serious threat of human lives. The incidence and mortality of lung cancer has been increasing rapidly in the past decades. Although the development of new therapeutic modes, such as target therapy, the overall survival rate of lung cancer remains low. It is urgent to advance the understanding of molecular oncology and find novel biomarkers and targets for the early diagnosis, treatment, and prognostic prediction of lung cancer. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-protein coding RNA transcripts that are more than 200 nucleotides in length. LncRNAs exert diverse biological functions by regulating gene expressions at transcriptional, translational, and post-translational levels. In the past decade, it has been shown that lncRNAs are extensively involved in the pathogenesis of various diseases, including lung cancer. In this review, we highlighted the lncRNAs characterized in lung cancer and discussed their translational potential in lung cancer clinics.
MANAGEMENT - IS IT A DYING ART?

Management, over the years, is widely debated as being Art as well as Science. Art implies application of knowledge and skills whereas Science is concerned with developing and applying models and concepts that help to illuminate management issues and solve managerial problems This paper is of the view that Management, as a function, is getting influenced by more sophisticated techniques nowadays in order to arrive at a decision. These management techniques apply in the domain of marketing, finance, production, human resources etc. Consequently, Management is now to be considered more as a Science than Art. Art form of Management is getting diminished gradually with more and more techniques developing. The paper also tries to elaborate the implications of Management as a Science.
Improving pedestrian detection using MPEG-7 descriptors

Abstract. During the last decade, modern Pedestrian Detection Systems made massive use of the steadily growing numbers of high-performance image acquisition sensors. Within our naturalistic driving environment, a lot of different and heterogeneous scenes occur that are caused by varying illumination and weather conditions. Unfortunately, current systems do not work properly under these hardened conditions. The aim of this article is to investigate and evaluate observed video scenes from an open source dataset by using various image features in order to create a basis for robust and more accurate object detection.
Cervical Cancer Knowledge and Screening among Young Female Adults in the Kintampo Municipal Hospital, Bono East Ghana.

Purpose: This study sought to determine the cervical cancer knowledge and screening among young female adults in Kintampo North Municipality. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was employed using a quantitative approach. Data was collected from 341 participants using a consecutive sampling with structured questionnaire and analysed using SPSS version 23. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse continuous variables like age and expressed as means and standard deviations, whilst categorical variables were summarized into frequencies and percentages. Pearson’s Chi-square test was used to determine the associations between the independent and dependent variables. Findings: More than half (58%) of the respondents had knowledge of cervical cancer. The two major sources of cervical cancer knowledge to respondents were the health workers (45.6%) and radio/television/internet (45.1%). Most (70.5%) had no idea about the causes of cervical cancer. Again, more than half (55.5%) of the respondents had no idea on the signs and symptoms of cervical cancer while less than half (48.4%) also had no idea about prevention of cervical cancer. Almost all (94.6%) the respondents had never been screened. Recommendations: Cervical cancer knowledge and screening is low among young female adults attending the Kintampo North Municipal Hospital. As such, there is the need to put strategies in place to increase cervical cancer knowledge and screening in the Kintampo North and its environs.
An exhaust gas recirculation control strategy for passenger car diesel engines using an inverse valve model

In diesel engines, accurate control of the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is important because of its effects on the nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions. The conventional EGR control system adopts a simple proportional–integral (PI) control algorithm with a lookup-table-based feedforward control and gain scheduling. However, this lookup-table-based control system has limited control performance in transient operations because the lookup tables are obtained from static engine data. The objective of this paper is to improve the control performance of the diesel engine EGR system by using a mathematical model of the EGR path. The proposed EGR control system is composed of PI controller gain scheduling and a feedforward control algorithm based on the mathematical model. The gain-scheduling algorithm provides a PI controller gain based on a sensitivity function that elucidates the relationship between the effective flow area of the EGR valve and the EGR mass flowrate. The feedforward algorithm calculates the EGR valve position based on the inverse model of the EGR valve. The driving cycle test result showed that, compared with the conventional EGR control system, the r.m.s. and maximum values of the target tracking error were reduced by 2.5 per cent and 8.0 per cent respectively.