Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Frequency and genetic variability of the avirulence gene AvrLm4-7 among Leptosphaeria maculans isolates collected in Oklahoma, USA

Abstract Blackleg, caused by Leptosphaeria maculans, is an important disease of canola, managed primarily through host--plant resistance. Fungal avirulence (AvrLm) genes code for effectors recognized by major host--plant resistance (Rlm) genes. AvrLm4-7 is predominant in the pathogen population in Oklahoma and Kansas, USA, and interacts with the Rlm4 and Rlm7 resistance genes. High-resolution melting analysis and sequencing were used to evaluate the genetic variability of AvrLm4-7 in avirulent (A) and virulent (a) reference isolates, and in isolates (n = 67) collected in Oklahoma from 2014 to 2017. Melting analysis of PCR products from the central primers (493 bp) and from new upstream external primers (105 bp) produced melting profiles that differed among avirulent (AvrLm4-AvrLm7 (A4A7)) and virulent (avrLm4-AvrLm7 (a4A7) and (avrLm4-avrLm7 (a4a7)) pathogen genotypes. Genotypic classification by melting analysis was supported by pathogenicity scores on seedling cotyledons of susceptible, Rlm4, and Rlm7 differentials. All of the local isolates were a4A7 genotypes. In the sequences of a4A7 reference isolates, all showed the expected mutation at bp 358 of C to G resulting in virulence on Rlm4, and silent mutations of either C to T at bp 256 or A to G at bp 134. These two haplotypes displayed unique melting profiles from the central primers in 64% and 36% of local isolates, respectively. Only the central primers produced pathotype-specific melting curves. Sustainable deployment of Rlm7 canola is needed for effective management of blackleg in the region. High-resolution melting will be useful to monitor allelic variability in AvrLm4-7 and for rapid detection of a4a7 strains.
A Methodology for Student Competency Mapping to Boost their Profiles for Better Captivation in Industry

In today's competitive age, placement is the buzz word for academic institutions and students. Opportunities in the job market are increased tremendously in the last decade and job offering organizations are also interested to conduct on-campus, off-campus and job fair with the synchronization of academic institutions. However, there are many students who are not able to get through the recruitment process and jobs. Therefore, it is a demand to develop a methodology that can scrutinize the student's profile, identify the lacking skills for available job positions, and advise them to acquire the necessary skill sets, suggest the appropriate pedagogy and ultimately make them prepared for better captivation in the industry. In this paper, we present a methodology for student competency mapping to boost their profiles for better captivation in industry by integrating knowledge-based expert information system.
Exact calculation of corrosion rates by the weight-loss method

Abstract Corrosion is an important problem that engineers and scientists must overcome to avoid the collapse of structures, chemical processing plants, and metallic objects, which can lead to not only economic loss but also environmental and human losses. One of the simplest and most widely used methods to quantify corrosion rates (CRs) is the immersion test. The usual approach that has been used to date, to quantify the CR by this method, is to assume that the initial surface area of the corroding object remains constant over time. It is shown that such approximations underestimate the true CR and that they may lead to significant errors. A formula to calculate the CR considering changes in the area is presented in this work. The formula herein can be used to accurately quantify the CR by the immersion test and improve the quality of experimental data and the analysis and modeling of corrosion phenomena.
Movement Paradigm for Hazara Torrent Frog Allopaahazarensis and Murree Hills Frog Nanoranavicina (Anura: Dicroglossidae)

Abstract Endemic anurans are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes, and are susceptible to population declines because of their restricted distribution ranges. The Murree Hills Frog Nanoranavicina and Hazara Torrent Frog Allopaahazarensis are associated with the torrential streams and nearby clear water pools in subtropical chir pine forest and other forest types, at elevations higher than 1000 m in Pakistan. In this study, we have provided data on the extent of movement of these frog species for the first time. We installed radio transmitters on a total of 13 Murree Hills Frogs and 13 Hazara Torrent Frogs during eight consecutive days in September 2017 and 2018. Our results showed that these frogs did not move long distances along the stream or away from the stream into the forest. All the radio-tracked frogs showed movement of < 3 m. We found a significant differences only in the distance moved by Murree Hills Frogs between the two years studied. Based on our findings, we propose a movement paradigm that focuses on conservation implications for these endemic frogs.
Gene-set enrichment analysis of selective sweeps reveals phenotypic traits in Nguni cattle

Adaptation of animals to different environments is typically associated with structural and functional genomic variations. High throughput SNP genotyping and next-generation sequencing (NGS) have made it possible to study positive selection footprints and adaptation traits. Nguni is a small frame-size breed, mostly horned, and well known for being adapted to diverse South African environmental conditions. This study used previously identified selective sweeps to perform functional analysis of genes related to phenotypic characteristics in Nguni. Two hundred and sixty-four candidate selective sweeps were used for gene-set enrichment analysis in molecular functional categories (KEGG pathways) using the database for annotation, visualization, and integrated discovery (DAVID). In total, 107 genes were identified across all the chromosomes with 74 genes associated with eight phenotype queries, including fat content, milk production, walking ability, heat tolerance, meat production, reproduction, and bone and muscle development. Gene CRHR2 was associated with meat quality (juiciness and flavour). The IRAK3 gene was associated with decreased body size, feed intake and fatness in cattle, and CARD15 with disease resistance. Gene annotation using phenotype queries identified four genes (SPI, YWHAZ, RGS4, and RGS5) that were associated with myometrial relaxation in cattle. Genes such as NOD2 and IL21R were associated with inflammatory bowel diseases in cattle, whereas CPLS gene was associated with fat content. These genes are important to the phenotypic and adaptive characteristics present in South African Nguni cattle and hold potential for selection for traits of economic importance.
A Novel 3D Wideband Time-Varying Channel Model for Orbital Angular Momentum Communication Systems

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) is regarded as a key technology of the sixth generation (6G) wireless communication systems. The vortex wave is a typical application of OAM. In this paper, a novel time-varying three-dimensional (3D) geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system employing the vortex wave is proposed. This model supports all kinds of OAM antennas that generate the vortex wave and introduces a spiral phase term to represent the helical wavefront of the vortex wave. To better reveal characteristics of the OAM-based MIMO system, some important statistical properties like temporal autocorrelation function (ACF) and spatial cross-correlation function (CCF) are derived and analyzed. Non-negligible impacts on the temporal ACF caused by OAM antennas are revealed. The results illustrate that the OAM-based MIMO system can help decrease spatial CCF, especially in the environment that angular spreads are small. Characteristics analyzed in this paper are important for future OAM communication systems.
On some issues in Kalman filter based trilateration algorithms for indoor localization problem

Accurate determination of moving object’s location in indoor environment is important to facilitate location based services for cellular phone users. Various techniques such as fingerprinting, pedestrian dead reckoning etc. have been studied in many researches and proven to be effective. Installation of costly hardware equipment and use of complex algorithms in these methods make them difficult to implement in real time situation. Received signal strength based geometrical algorithms have been proven to be economical, but suffer due to degraded quality of signals in indoor environment. Kalman filter based approach can solve the problem by filtering out the noisy signal. Presence of obstacles in the forms of walls, furniture etc. in indoor location makes the tracking dynamics nonlinear which requires a nonlinear variant of Kalman filer to be used. In conventional extended Kalman filter based indoor localization technique, filter algorithms are applied with every stationary access point’s measurements, prior to the application of trilateration algorithm. Application of many filters makes the system computationally expensive. Current work investigates an approach where a single extended Kalman filter algorithm is used. The approach first applies trilateration algorithm on collected measurements of distances of all reachable access points from the mobile object. Then it runs an extended Kalman filter algorithm on the measurement of the access point which is found to be the nearest from the target based on the computation of the previous stage. Simulation results show that, the presented approach exhibits similar performance in comparison with only trilateration method and trilateration method aided with more than one extended Kalman filter based technique.
Heritage languages and language as heritage: the language of heritage in Canada and beyond

ABSTRACT This article draws on recent discourses surrounding intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and its relationship to language preservation, practice, and revitalisation to propose that language be considered a form and practice of heritage in and of itself, not merely a vehicle for the conveyance of ICH. As such, language can serve as a bridge between the often-parallel tracks of tangible and intangible heritage, helping arrive at an understanding of heritage that is broader, more nuanced, and more inclusive. Until now, most scholars have resisted fully characterising language as heritage, viewing ‘heritagisation’ as a threat to the vitality of language rather than embracing language as a boon to the aliveness of heritage. In support of our argument, we draw on examples from Latin America, Asia, and in particular Canada to highlight specific historical and political discourses that determine whose language counts as heritage and whose heritage counts more generally. While certain communities may derive some benefit from an acknowledgement of their language as a form of heritage in service of a language reclamation agenda, the field of heritage will benefit greatly from inviting the vitality of language to enrich its many facets – discourse, practice, materiality, and the interplay among these three.
Assessment of the socio-economic performance of vulnerable and depressed territories in Kazakhstan

Relevance. In Kazakhstan, regional disparities present a major challenge to national development. The COVID-19 pandemic and the recent political turmoil exacerbated this situation because smaller towns and settlements in less accessible regions lack the resources to cope with the consequences of the crisis on their own. Research objective. The study aims to propose a methodological approach to assessing the socio-economic performance of vulnerable and depressed territories. Data and methods. The methodological approach is developed taking into account the specifics and peculiarities of territorial development, as well as the availability of statistical information in small towns and settlements. The depressiveness and vulnerability ranking were compiled for monotowns and small towns in Kazakhstan. The study relies on the statistical data provided by the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Results. The proposed methodology was applied to analyze the aggregate indicators characterizing the socio-economic performance of towns and settlements in East Kazakhstan, North Kazakhstan, and Zhambyl regions between 2009 and 2019. The towns of Ridder, Semey, Mamlyutka, Sergeevka, Karatau, and Janatas were classified as severely depressed areas. The same towns and the town of Bulaev demonstrated the highest levels of vulnerability. Conclusions. The research findings may be of interest to government agencies of all levels. The methodology can be used for assessing the socio-economic performance of lagging areas for more informed decision- and policy-making.
TEACHING ESP IN THE DIGITAL ERA: THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN PROJECT-BASED LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT

In today's technological age computers and related electronic resources have come to play a central role in education, in the teaching-learning process. Most students are fully immersed in the "digital revolution" and love web community. The present paper discusses project-based learning (PBL), a dynamic, essentially student-centered approach to teaching which motivates students to explore real-world problems and to learn by discovery (rather than through the textbook-centered learning or through information given directly by the teacher). PBL is a suitable approach for the Generation Y students, offering them the opportunity to work in collaborative teams and to use the digital technology now available. It is also a valuable tool for authentic assessment, reflecting as well the students' passion, creativity, and self-reliance - qualities that cannot be adequately assessed by multiple-choice tests. Conducted at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, my research focuses on the use of project work for the purpose of improving the students' knowledge of English, their written but especially their oral communication skills, through true-to-life activities and tasks (in particular, through performance of job interviews and oral presentations). The outcome of their projects was a role play, or a lively presentation, a poster, a case study, a video clip, a Web site. The study has shown that the incorporation of technology and art into projects and assignments is often the key that inspires and motivates a student to learn. Students respond to images/visuals and find technology engaging and challenging; they love to take the lead in situations (such as technology-supported learning) in which they are actually the experts; they are "born digital"; they use technologies in the most natural way to access information and to create new knowledge and art forms. At the same time in order to ensure a solid foundation, to keep the focus on the subject matter and not on the tools, especially in the case of second-language acquisition, it is recommendable to use a combination of technology-based learning and more traditional teaching styles and types of interaction. Technology properly embedded in a course or relevant to a project or seminar activity along with a well-conceived course material, clear objectives, well explained requirements, relevant tasks, detailed assignments, rigorous project planning - all this represent the key to successful teaching and learning. Students still value 'live' teaching highly; their most important need is actually represented by dedicated, inspiring teachers, by educators, ready to assist and guide them (and learn from them, adopt their digital language) throughout the learning process.
Iterative Receiver for Power-Domain NOMA with Mixed Waveforms

Power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising radio access technique with non-orthogonal resource allocation that provides a greater spectrum efficiency than the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). In this paper, an iterative receiver is derived for NOMA. It is based on soft-information successive interference cancellation (SIC) combined with a minimum mean square error parallel interference cancellation (MMSE-PIC) detector. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is usually the typical waveform employed. However, with the proposed receiver design, any linear modulation can be used. In addition to OFDM, single-carrier (SC) and the recently proposed sparse Walsh-Hadamard (SWH) are investigated. The NOMA scheme is analysed in a multi-path fading channel, where two users have different power ratios and waveforms. Simulation results show that mixing OFDM and SWH for a two-user NOMA gives the best performance with low receiver complexity.
Robust Identification of Figurative Language in Personal Health Mentions on Twitter

People often discuss their health on social media platforms. Discussion of personal experiences with diseases and symptoms can be useful in public health applications like adverse event surveillance. A major challenge comes from the need to distinguish personal health mentions from other uses of those terms, including figurative use, where words are used to mean something different. Public health applications require the separation of personal health mentions from other uses. Prior approaches incorporate some elements of context but could be improved to capture relationships between the linguistic characteristics of figurative expressions and the representations of the context. In this work, we investigate the role of context representation for identifying personal health mentions on social media and measure the impact of different representation choices on detecting figurative use of a range of disease and symptom words. We present an end-to-end approach that selects representations adaptively for different disease or symptom words. We conduct experiments using a publicly available health-mention dataset, annotated with ten disease or symptom labels. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state of the art (SOTA) in the identification of figurative language use across a range of disease or symptom words, with an F1-score of 0.925 (an increase of 10.7% over the SOTA) and the proportion of correctly identified figurative mentions was 0.923 (an increase of 16.7% over the SOTA). An ablation analysis demonstrates that each of the new modules contributes to this increased performance.
Analysis of Fuel Cell Based Time Delayed Load Frequency Control Having Energy Storage Systems

In this paper single area fuel cell based load frequency control (LFC) system is examined. This system has a battery energy storage system (BESS) and flywheel energy storage system (FESS). Due to communication components, communication time delay is often occurred in the LFC system in practice. For this reason, this delay is added to system model. In order to improve the system performances, fractional order proportional-integral-derivative PIλDµ) controller is used and it is tuned via recently developed Equilibrium Optimizer (EO). The present study, three different analyzes are performed. First, effectiveness of proposed controller and method are compared with the literature. Second, impact of variations of communication time delays are analyzed. Finally, the impact of changing of system time constants are examined. Obtained results are shown that system performances have been improved. In addition, the effects of variations in time delay and time constants on the system are shown comparatively.
Disguised as Privacy: Data Poisoning Attacks Against Differentially Private Crowdsensing Systems

Although crowdsensing has emerged as a popular information collection paradigm, its security and privacy vulnerabilities have come to the forefront in recent years. However, one big limitation of previous research is that the security domain and the privacy domain are typically considered separately. Therefore, it is unclear whether the defense methods in the privacy domain will have unexpected impact on the security domain. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel Disguise-based Data Poisoning Attack (DDPA) against the differentially private crowdsensing systems empowered with the truth discovery method. Specifically, we propose a novel stealth strategy, i.e., disguising the malicious behavior as privacy behavior, to avoid being detected by truth discovery methods. With this stealth strategy, the shortcoming of failing to maximize the attack effectiveness is avoided naturally through structuring a bi-level optimization problem, which can be solved with the alternating optimization algorithm. Moreover, we show that the differentially private crowdsensing systems are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, and enhancing the level of privacy will bring more serious security threats. Finally, the evaluation results on the real-world dataset Emotion and the synthetic dataset SynData demonstrate that DDPA can not only achieve maximum utility damage but also remain undetected.
Routing Strategies for Efficient Deployment of Alternative Fuel Vehicles for Freight Delivery

With the increased emphasis on sustainability, several logistics companies have purchased alternative fuel vehicles, like Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) trucks, to support their delivery operations. However, CNG trucks face several challenges on their way to replacing traditional diesel trucks such as limited mile range and small load capacity. Without effective deployment strategies for fueling stations it is not clear that these initiatives will result in net savings in emissions. Many of the local freight delivery operations are performed by independent truckers who are too small to manage their own fueling station, while the public fueling stations are limited. This research develops efficient deployment strategies for these carriers.View the NCST Project Webpage
Multi-Access Coded Caching with Coded Placement

The multi-access variant of the coded caching problem with K users, K caches and N files, where each user has access to L neighbouring caches in a cyclic wrap-around manner, is studied. Coded placement technique is introduced in the multi-access coded caching set-up for the first time. Furthermore, it is shown that the rate of transmission can be significantly lowered using coded placement, especially when the number of files is no more than the number of users. For cache memory $M \leq \frac{{N - (K - L)}}{K}$, a multi-access coded caching scheme with coded placement is introduced. The scheme presented is optimal when N ≤ K. Also, for some specific values of K,L,N and M, achievable schemes and matching converses are presented.
Foot disorders in dairy cattle : a socio-economic approach to improve dairy cow welfare

Klauwaandoeningen en de kreupelheid die daardoor ontstaat zijn een belangrijk probleem in de huidige melkveehouderij. Op basis van de incidentie, duur en ernst van klauwaandoeningen, worden ze aangemerkt als het belangrijkste welzijnsprobleem. Ondanks dat er veel kennis is over de klauwaandoeningen en de risicofactoren, is het probleem nog niet afgenomen. Bovendien onderschatten melkveehouders de grootte van het probleem van klauwaandoeningen, evenals de relatie met kreupelheid.