Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Review of River Herring Science in Support of Species Conservation and Ecosystem Restoration

River herring — a collective name for the Alewife Alosa pseudoharengus and Blueback Herring A. aestivalis — play a crucial role in freshwater and marine ecosystems along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. River herring are anadromous and return to freshwater habitats in the tens to hundreds of millions to spawn, supplying food to many species and providing nutrients to freshwater ecosystems. After two and a half centuries of habitat loss, habitat degra- dation, and over ﬁ shing, river herring are at historic lows. In 2013, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries established the Technical Expert Working Group (TEWG) to synthesize information about river herring and to provide recommendations to advance the science related to their restoration. This paper was composed largely by the chairs of the TEWG subgroups and represents a review of the current state of knowledge of river herring, with an emphasis on identi ﬁ cation of threats and discussion of recent research and management actions related to understanding and reducing these threats. Important research needs are then identi ﬁ ed and discussed. Finally, current knowledge is synthesized, considering the relative importance of different threats. This synthesis identi ﬁ es dam removal and increased stream connectivity as critical to river herring restoration. Better understanding and accounting for preda- tion, climate change, and ﬁ sheries are also important for restoration. Finally, there is recent evidence that the effects of human development and contamination on habitat quality may be more important threats than previously recog- nized. Given the range of threats, an ecosystem approach is needed to be successful with river herring restoration. To facilitate this ecosystem approach, collaborative forums such as the TEWG (renamed
Color Index of Transformer Oil: A Low-Cost Measurement Approach Using Ultraviolet-Blue Laser

The color of transformer oil can be one of the first indicators determining the quality of the transformer oil and the condition of the power transformer. The current method of determining the color index (CI) of transformer oil utilizes a color comparator based on the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) D1500 standard, which requires a human observer, leading to human error and a limited number of samples tested per day. This paper reports on the utilization of ultra violet-blue laser at 405- and 450-nm wavelengths to measure the CI of transformer oil. In total, 20 transformer oil samples with CI ranging from 0.5 to 7.5 were measured at optical pathlengths of 10 and 1 mm. A linear regression model was developed to determine the color index of the transformer oil. The equation was validated and verified by measuring the output power of a new batch of transformer oil samples. Data obtained from the measurements were able to quantify the CI accurately with root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of 0.2229 for 405 nm and 0.4129 for 450 nm. This approach shows the commercialization potential of a low-cost portable device that can be used on-site for the monitoring of power transformers.
A Dual Band Patch Antenna with a Pinwheel-Shaped Slots EBG Substrate

A dual band microstrip patch antenna integrated with pinwheel-shaped electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures is proposed. The patch antenna consists of a pair of spiral slots on the patch and is fed by using coaxial line. Its full-wave simulation predicts dual bands from 4.43 GHz to 4.56 GHz and from 4.96 GHz to 5.1 GHz in the C-band. The designed EBG with eight pinwheel-shaped slots addresses smaller frequency drift compared with the traditional square mushroom-like EBG when applied to the patch antenna. With the help of designed EBG structure, the impedance bandwidth, radiation efficiency, and gain of the patch antenna are improved significantly. The 10 dB impedance bandwidth is extended by 3.4% and 6.5% at the low- and high-frequency bands, respectively. The radiation efficiency is increased by 5% and 17.8%, and the realized gain is enhanced by 1.87 dB and 1.56 dB at 4.57 GHz and 5.06 GHz, respectively. The designed EBG structure may have many applications in other types of planar antennas.
Post-Construction Evaluation of Lime-Treated Soils

Lime is used to treat weak subgrade soils during construction of highways. A small amount of lime (4 to 7%) is used to rapidly dehydrate and modify fine grained soils. The modification process improves workability and compactability of the soils. Although the lime modification process is primarily aimed at construction expediency, additional effects such as long-term improvement of stiffness and/or strength by pozzolanic and carbonation cementation reactions are expected. Lime treatment has been employed in Indiana over several decades, but the long-term performance of lime-treated soils has not been well quantified and no field tests have been done on roads in service. A comprehensive field investigation was carried out to determine the properties of subgrade soils treated with lime in pavements that had been in service for at least five years. Six sites were selected for the field tests. At each site, SPT, DCPT, and FWD tests were performed to evaluate the in-situ stiffness and/or strength properties of the lime-treated subgrade. Laboratory tests from soil samples taken from the SPT spoon were done to obtain index properties of the lime-treated subgrade and the lime content that remains in the soil. The long-term performance of the lime-treated subgrade at each site has been evaluated by comparing the soil indices and stiffness and/or strength properties of the lime-treated subgrade soil with those of the natural soil. In addition, the lime content of the subgrade and the natural soil were measured to establish the remaining lime in the treated subgrade and detect any leaching in the underlying soil. The research has shown the following: (1) the lime remains in the soil even after 11 years of service of the road after construction; (2) the addition of lime decreases the plasticity of the soil and increases its CBR; and (3) the construction quality observed from the field tests is highly variable.
Dietary protein supplementation results in molecular and cellular changes related to T helper type 2 immunity in the lung and small intestine in lactating rats re-infected with Nippostrongylus brasiliensis

Abstract Abstract Acquired immunity to gastrointestinal nematodes reduces during late pregnancy and lactation which is known as periparturient relaxation of immunity (PPRI). Protein supplementation reduces the degree of PPRI in a rat model re-infected with Nippostrongylus brasiliensis, but the underlying molecular mechanisms have yet to be elucidated. Here, we hypothesized that protein supplementation will enhance T helper type 2 immunity (Th2) in the lung and small intestine. Nulliparous Sprague-Dawley rats were given a primary infection of N. brasiliensis prior to mating and restrictedly fed diets with either low protein (LP) or high protein (HP) during pregnancy and lactation. Dams were secondary infected with N. brasiliensis on day 2 post-parturition, and histology and gene expression were analysed for tissue samples collected at days 5, 8 and 11. Genes related to Th2 immunity in the lung, Retnla, Il13 and Mmp12, and in the intestine, Retnlb, were upregulated in HP dams compared to LP dams, which indicates the effect of dietary protein on Th2 immunity. HP dams also had increased splenic CD68+ macrophage populations compared to LP dams following secondary infection, suggesting enhanced immunity at a cellular level. Our data assist to define strategic utilization of nutrient supply in mammals undergoing reproductive and lactational efforts.
All-Back-Schottky-Contact Thin-Film Photovoltaics

The concept of All-Back-Schottky-Contact (ABSC) thin-film photovoltaic (TFPV) devices is introduced and evaluated using 2D numerical simulation. Reach-through Schottky junctions due to two metals of different work functions in an alternating, side-by-side pattern along the non-illuminated side generate the requisite built-in field. It is shown that our simulation method quantitatively describes existing data for a recently demonstrated heterojunction thin-film cell with interdigitated back contacts (IBCs) of one metal type. That model is extended to investigate the performance of ABSC devices with bimetallic IBCs within a pertinent parameter space. Our calculations indicate that 20% efficiency is achievable with micron-scale features and sufficient surface passivation. Bimetallic, micron-scale IBCs are readily fabricated using photo-lithographic techniques and the ABSC design allows for optically transparent surface passivation layers that need not be electrically conductive. The key advantages of the ABS.
Improving Multipath TCP

The Internet is ever increasing since its creation in the early 70s. Nowadays, it is interconnection billions of digital devices, from smartphones to huge servers. In order to cope with the ever increasing demand of traffic, multiple paths are available between the end-hosts. An attempt to use these multiple paths is done by Multipath TCP, a major extension to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It allows to transmit a single byte stream across different paths, enabling an efficient pooling of the Internet's resources and a better resilience against failures of one of the paths. This thesis is a contribution to make multipath communication not an exception, but the rule by improving Multipath TCP and its Linux Kernel implementation. These improvements enable Multipath TCP to achieve good performance in a very wide range of environments, as well as be scalable in an operating system implementation.
Transforming the Pension Industry Based on Aged Care Quality Reports

With the intensification of population aging, the importance of the pension industry has gradually been reflected. The purpose of this study is to find mainly challenges in the pension industry by analyzing the Australian Aged Care Quality Reports. In recent years, Aged Care Quality reports have played a positive role in improving the service quality of aged care institutions and strengthening risk management. This study found that the risk factors in the aged care quality report are the key factors for the upgrading of the pension industry. With the help of traditional text data analysis and mining methods, we can effectively provide new growth points and breakthrough links for the upgrading of the pension industry. This research found the upgrading of the pension industry in the construction of basic hardware and software facilities, the level of informatization and intelligence, the improvement of the quality of aged care services, the improvement of medical problems, and the training of professionals. The research methods proposed in this study are significant to the upgrading of the current pension industry.
Weather Forecasting Using ANFIS and ARIMA MODELS

Abstract This paper presents a comparative study of statistical and neuro-fuzzy network models for forecasting the weather of Goztepe, Istanbul, Turkey. For developing the models, we used nine year’s data (2000-2008) comprising of daily average temperature (dry-wet), air pressure, and wind-speed. We used Adaptive Network Based Fuzzy Inference System ( ANFIS ) and ARIMA models. To ensure the effectiveness of ARIMA and ANFIS techniques, we also tested the different models using a different training and test data set. The criteria of performance evaluation are calculated in order to evaluate and compare the performances of ARIMA and ANFIS models. Hence, paper briefly explains how neuro-fuzzy models could be formulated using different learning methods and then investigates whether they can provide the required level of performance, which are sufficiently good and robust to provide a reliable model for practical weather forecasting. From the results, the best fit model and network structure are determined according to prediction performance and the approach is effective and reliable. The performance comparisons of ANFIS and ARIMA models due to MAE,RMSE,R 2 criteria, the ANFIS gives better results have been observed.
Are ex-military executives trustworthy? Evidence from audit fees

ABSTRACT This study examines the association between firm executives’ ex-military backgrounds and audit fees. We find that auditors tend to charge lower fees from clients with ex-military executives than clients without ex-military executives. This finding holds for various robustness tests, including a change model using executive turnovers, instrumental variable estimation and a propensity score matching method. Further analyses indicate that the negative association between audit fees and military experience is more pronounced in non-state-owned entities, in more complex firms and firms with CEO/chairman duality. Finally, we show that firms with ex-military executives are more likely to have better information transparency and more minor internal control weakness, issue fewer financial restatements and are less likely to be involved in litigation. This suggests that the lower audit pricing can be partially attributed to reduced inherent and control risks. This paper demonstrates that executives’ life experiences can affect auditors’ risk perceptions and audit pricing.
A novel act‐and‐wait control scheme for fixed‐time stabilization of input‐delay systems and assignment of the monodromy matrix

An act‐and‐wait (AAW) fashioned control scheme is proposed for input delay systems, which is characterized by switches between different gains during the acting phases. Under very mild conditions, the novel control scheme allows to freely assign the monodromy matrix and to solve the fixed‐time stabilization problem. In additionally, a variant is proposed where the control law is simplified by keeping the control signal constant after every switch, amendable for a sampled‐data implementation. For multi‐input systems it is also demonstrated how the number of switches per acting period in the basis scheme can be reduced to the dimension of the system, starting from the controllability indices set. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified on two simulation case‐studies.
Informal Sperm Donation in Russia

Rising infertility across the globe has created a growing demand for assisted reproductive technologies (ART). In recent years, apart from sperm donation in formal settings such as fertility clinics, informal donation practices have emerged and spread across Russia. These reproductive donation practices have become possible due to the development of social networks and private online platforms. We conducted a pilot study (eleven semi-structured interviews) of the informal sperm donation in Russia and analyzed donor-recipient interactions, donors’ expectations and experiences of finding recipients online. We focus on donors' motivations and on the meanings, which donors invest in this practice that consumes significant resources on their part (medical tests and artificial insemination costs, travel and accommodation expenses, sometimes mutually agreed financial support of future offspring). We interpreted the practices that coalesced around informal donation from the perspective of symbolic interactionism, because it allowed us to showcase how actors reflected on and formulated the meanings of their actions in the absence of externally imposed rules (legal regulations, established moral conventions). Since informal donation practices do not fit into the traditional schemes of interpretation, such research requires the actors involved in informal donation either to create their own schemes or to modify the existing conceptual frames in creative ways. The study shows that informal donors do not only provide their genetic material but also spend time and invested considerable resources to ensure their procreation, including eventual financial support of the child. At the same time, these men are not interested in marital relations or paternal relations with their offspring. Thus, the informal sperm donors do not associate the parental project with traditional family and its values. We conclude that ART engendered a new phenomenon, which might be described as extramarital reproduction. Assisted reproduction outside marriage ­gains footing in Russia and requires more detailed further study.
Study, Modeling and Design of Semiconductor Photonic Crystal Based Devices

This thesis is focused on the study of nonlinear effects in semiconductor materials. The aim is the design of effcient optical devices able to supply ultra-fast high-performances all-optical signal processing. The goal is pur- sued by implementing different tools, either theoretical models as well as numerical methods. The main achievement is the design of new topologies for photonic crystal based devices that implement various optical functional- ities such as optical conversion and switching. This work has provided some confgurations for the manufacturing of a new generation of optical devices.
An Established Th2-Oriented Response to an Alum-Adjuvanted SARS-CoV-2 Subunit Vaccine Is Not Reversible by Sequential Immunization with Nucleic Acid-Adjuvanted Th1-Oriented Subunit Vaccines

A recently reported parallel preclinical study between a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mRNA vaccine and an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine adjuvanted with alum showed pulmonary immunopathology typical of eosinophil accumulation in a mouse pneumonia model for the latter, which implied a potential role of cellular immunity in the difference in the protection rate between these two forms of vaccines. For those who have been vaccinated with alum-adjuvanted subunit or inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, whether the Th2 responses that have been established and the absence of induced cellular immunity could be changed is an open question. Using two heterologous boosts with Th1-oriented CpG ODN-adjuvanted S1-based SARS-CoV-2 subunit vaccines for mice that were primed with two doses of Th2-oriented alum-adjuvanted S1-based SARS-CoV-2 subunit vaccines, we demonstrated that established Th2 orientation could not be reversed to Th1 orientation and that no cellular immunity was induced, which should have been induced if the boosting vaccines were used as the prime vaccines. These results remind us that if widely administered alum-adjuvanted SARS-CoV-2 vaccines cannot overcome the challenge of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and that if cellular immunity is important for the efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in the future, the choice of more powerful heterologous boosting vaccine forms that can induce cellular immunity should be considered very carefully before application.
The impact of a TQM intervention on work attitudes : a longitudinal case study

Total Quality Management (TQM) has been heralded as a new way of managing organizations. While there are widespread endeavours by organizations to implement TQM, a visible lag exists between the adoption of TQM and a systematic evaluation of this phenomenon. The thesis, therefore, addresses a fundamental question in TQM; what is the impact, if any, of a TQM intervention on employee work attitudes? This 'before and after study' examines the impact of a 'soft' TQM intervention on two key elements of TQM: teamwork and continuous improvement. A questionnaire was completed by respondents six months prior to and nine months after the launch of the intervention. The starting point in the evaluation is the development of theoretical models containing hypothesized antecedents of teamwork and continuous improvement which are empirically tested on the data. The intervention is then evaluated on the basis of its direct and indirect effects on the two key elements of TQM. In addition, the impact of the intervention is assessed both at the individual and the organizational level. At the individual level, the intervention was found to have a significant effect on team orientation as well as on a number of dimensions of continuous improvement, including general orientation to quality, improvement as part of the job and intrinsic motivation. However, a significant overall improvement at the organizational level was not evidenced in any of these variables. This raises the possibility that a longer time lag may be required for the individual level effects to develop into an overall organizational improvement. Additional important findings emerged from this evaluation. First, a consistent finding throughout is the importance of supervisory behaviour in affecting employee attitudes. Second, employee assessment of the intervention is a more significant predictor of subsequent changes than employee participation in the intervention per se. Finally, the prior experience and attitudes of individuals have a significant effect on how the intervention is assessed, which subsequently affects changes in attitudes, highlighting the fact that organizational change interventions do not occur in a vacuum.
Categorizing Diseases from Leaf Images Using a Hybrid Learning Model

Plant diseases pose a severe threat to crop yield. This necessitates the rapid identification of diseases affecting various crops using modern technologies. Many researchers have developed solutions to the problem of identifying plant diseases, but it is still considered a critical issue due to the lack of infrastructure in many parts of the world. This paper focuses on detecting and classifying diseases present in the leaf images by adopting a hybrid learning model. The proposed hybrid model uses k-means clustering for detecting the disease area from the leaf and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classifying the type of disease based on comparison between sampled and testing images. The images of leaves under consideration may be symmetrical or asymmetrical in shape. In the proposed methodology, the images of various leaves from diseased plants were first pre-processed to filter out the noise present to get an enhanced image. This improved image enabled detection of minute disease-affected regions. The infected areas were then segmented using k-means clustering algorithm that locates only the infected (diseased) areas by masking the leaves’ green (healthy) regions. The grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) methodology was used to fetch the necessary features from the affected portions. Since the number of fetched features was insufficient, more synthesized features were included, which were then given as input to CNN for training. Finally, the proposed hybrid model was trained and tested using the leaf disease dataset available in the UCI machine learning repository to examine the characteristics between trained and tested images. The hybrid model proposed in this paper can detect and classify different types of diseases affecting different plants with a mean classification accuracy of 92.6%. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid model, a comparison was made against the following classification approaches viz., support vector machine, extreme learning machine-based classification, and CNN. The proposed hybrid model was found to be more effective than the other three.
Drain voltage scaling in carbon nanotube transistors

Decreasing the oxide thickness in carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) improves the turn-on behavior. However, we demonstrate that this also requires scaling the range of the drain voltage. This scaling is needed to avoid an exponential increase in off-current with drain voltage, due to modulation of the Schottky barriers at both the source and drain contact. We illustrate this with results for bottom-gated ambipolar CNFETs with oxides of 2 and 5 nm, and give an explicit scaling rule for the drain voltage. Above the drain voltage limit, the off-current becomes large and has equal electron and hole contributions. This allows the recently reported light emission from appropriately biased CNFETs.