Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shake Table Test of Confined Brick Masonry Building

This paper presents the shake table test of a one-forth scaled model, representing a typical Pakistani three stories confined brick masonry building. The model was constructed following complete model similitude and subjected to a series of sinusoidal base motions of increasing amplitude at a constant frequency equivalent to the predominant frequency of JMA Kobe-1995 earthquake record. The dynamic test data was processed and analyzed to generate the force-deformation curve, ductility ratio and response modification factor of the system. A shear-dominated failure mode was observed. As expected, the ground storey was found to suffer more damage than the other two stories. Out-of-plane failure of walls and crushing of concrete in confining elements were also noted in the final test runs. Based on the damage mechanism and force-deformation characteristics, various performance levels are suggested.
IMPLEMENTATION & SIMULATION OF FUZZY LOGIC CONTROLLERS FOR THE SPEED CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CERTAIN MEMBERSHIP FUNCTIONS

The development in Power Electronic devices, converters, advancements in IC Technologies, advanced control methodologies, modeling and simulation tools made a dynamic evolution in the design and control of electric drive systems. The basic requirements of IM drives include fast response of the system. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of certain membership functions in the developed Simulink model of both Mamdani & Sugeno model based fuzzy control for an Induction motor drive. The built in membership functions of Matlab were selected for evaluation. The evaluation is done using the developed 49 fuzzy rules through the implementation in Matlab/Simulink model. The results of voltage, current, rotor speed and torque of the Induction motor are compared. The performances of triangular and trapezoidal membership functions on Sugeno model based fuzzy control are very close and better compared to other membership functions as far as the fast response and starting currents are concerned for the developed model.
Muscle Strength and Body Cell Mass in Postmenopausal Women

these investigators reported that a 24-week periodized ST regimen using free weights and an intensity level of 70-90% of 1 RM resulted in greater strength gains than a traditional ST regimen in a group of older men and women (mean age: 54 years). Body composition changes were not evaluated in this study. Furthermore, the exact characteristics of the ST protocol were not discussed in their report; however, their results provide support for the safety and potential benefits of this alternative approach to ST in an older population. Additional research investigating muscle strength and body composition changes in older adults involved in periodized ST is warranted.
Molecular Mechanism of Astragaloside IV in Improving Endothelial Dysfunction of Cardiovascular Diseases Mediated by Oxidative Stress

Endothelial dysfunction, induced by oxidative stress, is an essential factor affecting cardiovascular disease. Uncoupling of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) leads to a decrease in nitric oxide (NO) production, an increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, NO consumption, and NO synthesis. As a main active ingredient of astragalus, astragaloside IV can reduce the apoptosis of endothelial cells during oxidative stress. This review is aimed at exploring the mechanism of astragaloside IV in improving oxidative stress-mediated endothelial dysfunction relevant to cardiovascular diseases. The findings showed that the astragaloside IV can prevent or reverse the uncoupling of eNOS, increase eNOS and NO, and enhance several activating enzymes to activate the antioxidant system. In-depth validation and quantitative experiments still need to be implemented.
Distribution and Dynamics of Dissolved Organic Matter in the Changjiang Estuary and Adjacent Sea

Large, river‐dominated estuaries provide important land‐ocean interfaces for biogenic element fluxes that impact global marine biogeochemistry. However, the reactivity and fate of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in this dynamic region remain not well understood. In this study, three cruises were conducted in February, May, and July 2017 in the Changjiang Estuary and adjacent sea (CEAS). Incubation experiments to determine photochemically and/or biologically mediated degradation of terrigenous and marine DOM were performed. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC), chromophoric DOM (CDOM) absorption, and total dissolved amino acids (TDAAs) were measured. DOM photodegradation and transformation were indicated by the CDOM spectral slope (S275−295) and diagenetic state by DOC‐normalized yields of TDAA [TDAA (%DOC)]. From the river to the open sea, DOC showed non‐conservative mixing and was rapidly removed in low salinity areas. Photodegradation, biodegradation, and photoenhanced biodegradation are important DOC removal mechanisms and exhibit specific responses depending on DOC source and composition. Terrigenous DOM is vulnerable to photodegradation, while marine DOM experiences rapid biodegradation. Contrary to DOC, TDAA (%DOC) increased from the river to the nearshore and then decreased toward the open sea, indicating the contribution of fresh marine plankton production. A box model showed that the annual DOC removal of CEAS was 2.6 ± 1.9 × 106 tons. Seaward increase of ammonium (NH4‐N) was observed in the CEAS; photoammonification, biomineralization of autochthonous and allochthonous DOM are potential NH4‐N regeneration mechanisms. A model was developed to calculate surface DOC concentrations based on CDOM absorption coefficients allowing high‐resolution monitoring of DOC in the CEAS.
Automobile Engine Waste Heat Recovery and Possible Utilization- 1. Water Distillation & 2. Water Heating

This is a proposal of a system to recover and use some of the automobile engine waste heat. Two-thirds of the fuel energy used in automobile engines is lost as heat to the atmosphere. Appreciable percentage of up to 80% of this heat can be recovered. This waste heat can be used to produce fresh water scarce in many regions of the world by a desalination process or to support everyday requirements of the domestic hot water. Finding other uses such as space heating in cold regions can minimize the mismatch between the domestic needs and the availability of the recovered heat. A lab test on a small petrol engine produced about 0.7L/h distilled water per kW engine power output and heated 10 L of water to boiling in less than one hour at 2.0 kW output.
Accessibility to Industrial Factors and Business Performance: A Case Study of Female Entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka

This study aims to examine the impact of accessing industrial factors in enhancing business performance with special reference to Muslim women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. Industrial factors are industrial resources available to Muslim women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka and it was measured using the dimensions of resource accessibility and government and non-governmental support. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 260 women entrepreneurs from the Muslim community who are registered with the chamber of commerce in the three districts of the Eastern province of Sri Lanka, using a simple random sampling technique. Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS was used as the data analysis technique. The structural model showed that resource accessibility had a significant and positive relationship with business performance, whereas government and non-governmental support did not significantly influence business performance. Especially, Muslim women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka do not show interest in getting support such as finance, training, and other necessities from government and non-government organizations as well as business development support agencies. Trade chambers and decision-making authorities may use this finding to gain insights and develop strategies to enhance the business performance of women entrepreneurs.
Synthesis, Characterization, and Antifungal Activity of Silver Nanoparticles Embedded in Pullulan Matrices

Steady developments made in nanotechnology-based products have facilitated new perspectives for combating drug-resistant fungi. Silver nanoparticles represent one of the most attractive nanomaterials in biomedicine due to their exclusive optical, electromagnetic, and catalytic properties and antifungal potency compared with other metal nanoparticles. Most studies show that the physicochemical parameters affecting the antifungal potential of AgNPs include the shape, size, surface charge, and concentration and colloidal state. For the present study, pullulan (P) and its oxidized counterpart (PO) have been selected as matrices for the silver nanoparticles’ generation and stabilization (AgNPs). The TEMPO (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-yl radical)–sodium hypochlorite–sodium bromide system was used for the C6 selective oxidation of pullulan in order to introduce negatively charged carboxylic groups in its structure. The structure and morphology of the synthesized AgNPs were analyzed using FTIR and EDX. The main objective of this study was to elucidate the antifungal activity of AgNPs on the clinical yeasts isolates and compare the performance of AgNPs with the conventional antifungals. In this study, different concentrations of AgNPs were tested to examine antifungal activity on various clinical isolates.
Identity Privacy in Mobile: Issues, Challenges and Solutions

The gap between mobile phones and portable computers is shrinking, and almost everyone’s daily activities are highly dependent upon a device, known as mobile phone/Smart phone (SP). So mobile device security is becoming increasingly important, as business information and personal information move from the PC onto handheld storage. It is very important to do our daily activities without any problems. But what if our mobile gets stolen? The paper describes issues and challenges in security and privacy of mobile devices. The paper also proposes privacy solutions. Fingerprint sensors and face recognition are also highlighted as a growing feature in security and navigation for handsets. In this paper, we have used security password, face recognition and finger print recognition to avoid unnecessary messaging. It operates silently in the background and it should be very hard to spot.
Implicit and Explicit Feature Opinion mining using Explicit Semantic Analysis method

: A huge amount of people’s crowd has attracted by explosive development of e-commerce for online shopping, blogging etc. Most of the peoples give reviews about the product, blogs, tweet etc and these reviews are important for potential customers and companies for evolution. From these reviews opinion mining and feature extraction is becoming popular field of research. In this research, we implement corpus statistics association measure to compute the semantic dependency between each pair of words and present an association-based unified system to recognize features such as explicit feature and implicit feature. For explicit feature identification and its opinion words we have propose association-based bootstrapping method (ABOOT), which has lead into two types as, LRTBOOT and LSABOOT. We first group the extracted synonymous explicit features into clusters and build a robust semantic correlation set between feature clusters and opinion words. For each new recognized opinion word devoid of an explicit feature, we then find its best matching cluster from the correlation set and assign the representative word of the cluster as the implicit feature, then used ESA i.e. Explicit Semantic Analysis based on corpus dataset of reviews. This method is to applied on set of context and non-context to identify implicit feature.
Efficient Revocable Data Access Control with Multiple Trusted Authorities and CSP’s in Cloud

Security and access control issues are main obstacles for wide application of cloud computing. To ensure security for data we construct an efficient user revocation CP-ABE scheme through improving the scheme and prove our scheme is secure from chosen plain text attack CPA secure under the selective mod-el. To solve security issue, we embed a certificate into each user’s private key. In this way, each user’s group secret key is different from others and bound to-gether with his private key associated with attributes. To reduce users’ computation burdens, we introduce two cloud service providers named encryption -cloud service provider (E-CSP) and decryption-cloud service provider (D-CSP). The duty of E-CSP is to perform outsourced encryption operation and D-CSP is to perform outsourced decryption operation. We extended the System security by adding One Time Password to the System while downloading the file and to overcome burden of Trusted Authority we Created Multiple Trusted Authorities to handle the requests.
Investigation of conducted disturbance from driving system in fuel cell bus

Full-scale evaluating and improving the EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) of vehicle is the necessary insurance for the safety of the vehicle. This paper presents some of the research results on the conducted disturbance from the driving system in a fuel cell city bus. First, the distribution of the disturbance source in the driving system surveyed by measurement is introduced. Then, its generating mechanics are discussed. The high-frequency circuit models of the fuel cell, the inverter, and the AC motor are set up. The conductive disturbance propagation along cable is analyzed by numerical simulation. Finally, measures to restrain the disturbance propagation are also discussed.
Analysis of a low-finesse extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric optical fiber sensor

Theoretical and experimental aspects of the extrinsic Fabry-Perot(FP) interferometric(EFPI) optical fiber sensor are studied. For a low-finesse EFPI sensor, the change of cavity length will influence the visibility of the interference fringes reflected back into the fiber. In this paper, an analysis on the fringe visibility of EFPI sensors based on the power distribution is presented. The effect that the cavity length and the source bandwidth play in the fringe visibility of EFPI sensors interrogated with a broadband light source which makes the sensor immune to source fluctuations is explored. The analysis may provide useful guidance for sensor design.
Effects of cultivating different crops on soil erosion of slope farmland

The soil nutrient content, particle size composition, crop yield and erosion resistance were studied considering the slope farmland with different slope sizes and different crops as the research object. The results showed that the available phosphorus content was higher under the wheat planting mode. Rape planting was conducive to the accumulation of organic matter, total nitrogen and available potassium, and nutrient accumulation was more obvious when treated at 5° slope. The soil texture was sandy loam under the wheat planting mode. After rapeseed planting, the soil texture began to change to silt loam. The crop yield was the highest under different planting modes at 5°. Rapeseed was found to increase the soil erosion resistance of sloping farmland compared with wheat, and the greater was the slope, the stronger the erosion resistance. Bangladesh J. Bot. 50(3): 925-932, 2021 (September) Special
A Time-calibrated Firefly (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) Phylogeny: Using Genomic Data for Divergence Time Estimation

Fireflies (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) consist of over 2,000 described extant species. A well-resolved phylogeny of fireflies is important for the study of their population genetics, bioluminescence, evolution, and conservation. We used a recently published anchored hybrid enrichment dataset (AHE; 436 loci for 88 Lampyridae species and 10 outgroup species) and state-of-the-art statistical methods (the fossilized birth-death-range process implemented in a Bayesian framework) to estimate a time-calibrated phylogeny of Lampyridae. Unfortunately, estimating calibrated phylogenies using AHE and the latest and most robust time-calibration strategies is not possible because of computational constraints. As a solution, we subset the full dataset by applying three different strategies: (i) using the most complete loci, (ii) using the most homogeneous loci, and (iii) using the loci with the highest accuracy to infer the well established Photinus clade. The estimated topology using the three data subsets agreed on almost all major clades and only showed minor discordance within less supported nodes. The estimated divergence times overlapped for all nodes that are shared between the topologies. Thus, divergence time estimation is robust as long as the topology inference is robust and any well selected data subset suffices. Additionally, we observed an un-expected amount of gene tree discordance between the 436 AHE loci. Our assessment of model adequacy showed that standard phylogenetic substitution models are not adequate for any of the 436 AHE loci which is likely to bias phylogenetic inferences. We performed a simulation study to explore the impact of (a) incomplete lineage sorting, (b) uniformly distributed and systematic missing data, and (c) systematic bias in the position of highly variable and conserved sites. For our simulated data, we observed less gene tree variation which shows that the empirically observed amount of gene tree discordance for the AHE dataset is unexpected and needs further investigation.
Insecticide resistance in field populations of the pear psyllids Cacopsylla permixta and Cacopsylla bidens in Iran

Cacopsylla permixta and Cacopsylla bidens are major pests of pears in Iran. They are commonly sprayed with various insecticides up to 12 times a year but control by these means is no longer reliable, suggesting the evolution of resistance. Here, we report about 60‐fold variation in diazinon susceptibility both among five geographic populations of C. bidens and among three geographic populations of C. permixta, as well as 12‐ to 14‐fold variations in imidacloprid susceptibility in these populations. The levels of resistance to the two compounds were highly correlated in the different populations. Esterase, cytochrome P450, and glutathione S‐transferase activities all varied by about two‐fold among the different populations and were also highly correlated with population resistance to the two insecticides, implying differences in metabolism contribute to the differences in resistance. Bioassays with inhibitors of each class of enzyme indicated all three, but particularly the esterases, contributed to the variation in diazinon resistance, while esterase and, in particular, cytochrome P450 activities contributed to the variation in imidacloprid resistance. The most resistant populations of each species also showed some resistance to chlorpyrifos and acetamiprid, suggesting there may be wide cross resistance to organophosphates and neonicotinoids in these populations. The sampled psyllid populations showed lower levels of resistance to representatives of two other classes of insecticides currently used in Iran, spirotetramat and abamectin, though resistance to spirotetramat was detectable and was correlated with diazinon and imidacloprid resistance across populations. We conclude that metabolic resistance to a range of insecticides is now evolving in field populations of both species in Iran, warranting timely development of resistance management plans.
Micro-grid for on-site wind-and-hydrogen powered generation

Abstract The authors propose a micro-grid for autonomous wind-and-hydrogen power generation thus replacing such traditional fossil-fuelled equipment as domestic diesel generators, gas micro-turbines, etc. In the proposed microgrid the excess of electrical energy from a wind turbine is spent on electrolytic production of hydrogen which is then stored under low-pressure in absorbing composite material. The electrolyser has a non-traditional feeding unit and electrode coatings. The proposed DC/DC conversion topologies for different micro-grid nodes are shown to be well-designed. The prototypes elaborated for the converters and hydrogen storage media were tested and have demonstrated a good performance. Kopsavilkums Rakstā piedāvātā mikrotīkla izpēte ir veikta ar mērķi izstrādāt autonomu, uz vēja un ūdeņraža enerģiju balstītu elektroapgādes sistēmu, kas varētu aizvietot tradicionālās fosilā kurināmā sistēmas, piemēram, mājsaimniecību dīzeļa ģeneratorus, gāzes mikroturbīnas u.c. Mikrotīkla elektroapgādes sistēmā vēja agregāta saražotā elektroenerģija tiek pārveidota atbilstoši standarta maiņsprieguma elektroapgādes parametriem un piegādāta slodzei. Pārpalikusī enerģija tiek pārveidota un uzkrāta ūdeņraža formā, izmantojot elektrolīzes iekārtu un kompozītmateriālu uzkrājēju. Ja pieejamā vēja enerģija nenosedz slodzes enerģijas patēriņu, elektroenerģijas padeves funkciju ar atbilstoša energoelektronikas pārveidotāja palīdzību pārņem ūdeņraža degvielas elements. Ja, savukārt, slodzei nav nepieciešama enerģija, no vēja saražoto enerģiju izmanto elektrolīzes iekārta un tā tiek uzkrāta ūdeņraža formā, atbilstoši uzkrājēja ietilpībai. Piedāvātajā mikrotīklā ir izmantota elektrolīzes iekārta ar netradicionāliem elektrodu pārklājumiem un barošanas bloku, kā arī zemspiediena kompozītmateriālu ūdeņraža uzkrājējs. Galvenie mikrotīkla elektriskās enerģijas pārveidošanas mezgli ir realizēti uz energoefektīvu energoelektronikas pārveidotāju bāzes. Ir izveidoti atsevišķo piedāvātās elektroapgādes sistēmas iekārtu prototipi un veiktas to eksperimantālās pārbaudes, gan atsevišķi, gan darbam kopējā sistēmā.
THE MULTIVARIATE MODE INDICATOR FUNCTION IN MODAL ANALYSIS

In the sine dwell school of modal testing, a frequency domain function, most often called the Mode Indicator Function (MIF), has been employed for several years to detect the presence of real normal modes. This function is calculated from Frequency Response Functions from a single exciter location to highlight those frequencies where the global response phase lags the sinusoidal excitation by 90 degrees. Recently, a multivariate mode indicator procedure was presented, that, using FRF's from several exciter locations, can detect repeated roots, as well as providing initial force patterns for the sine dwell tuning of the associated modes. This paper presents a brief outline of the theory of this multivariate mode indicator and then shows how the information generated by this procedure may be used for the extraction of selected modal parameters through function enhancement and frequency domain SDOF techniques. The use of the multivariate mode indicator in the traditional MDOF procedures will also be discussed. Examples will be presented from several tests.
Application of Neural Networks for Proportioning of Concrete Mixes

In determining proportioning of concrete mixes, code information, specifications, and the experience of experts are needed. However, all factors regarding mix proportioning cannot be considered. Therefore, the final acceptance depends on concrete quality control test results. In this process, the uncertainties of materials, temperature, site environmental situations, personal skillfulness, and errors in calculations and testing process come into view. Then the adjustments must be made for proper proportioning. This kind of concrete mix proportioning and adjustments are somewhat complicated and time-consuming, and are uncertain tasks. In this paper, as a tool to minimize the uncertainties and errors of the proportioning of concrete mixes, an artificial neural network is used. Not only are the required compressive strengths used to train and test the network, but so are the actual compressive strengths with variations obtainable from the final compressive strength test. The results show that neural networks have strong potential as a tool for concrete mix proportioning.