Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Experience Make Hucul Horses More Resistant to Stress? A Pilot Study

Simple Summary Breeding programs dedicated to some horse breeds require the application of performance tests, which can be a source of stress exerting a negative impact on the welfare of these animals. By monitoring the level of stress with non-invasive methods, factors that reduce welfare and are not indispensable in horse breeding and use can be eliminated. An attempt was made to investigate whether the age and the number of starts in championships contribute to horses’ experience and therefore increase their resistance to stress. The results of the tests conducted on Hucul mares who participated in the Polish Championships for Hucul Horse showed an increase in cortisol levels in all mares after each element of the championship. Age and a higher number of horse starts did not result in increased resistance to stress accompanying the competition. Abstract The aim of the study was to determine whether experience related to horse age and number of starts in championships influences stress level, measured by salivary cortisol concentration. The study involved 18 clinically healthy Hucul mares who participated in the Polish Championships for Hucul Horses. Evaluation of performance value was carried out in accordance with the guidelines specified in the breeding and genetic resources conservation program for this breed. The championship lasted two days, consisting of conformation evaluation, endurance, and Hucul path. Saliva was collected at baseline (T1), after arena assessment (T2), after endurance (T3), and on the second day after the Hucul path (T4). Cortisol levels increased from an average of 2.73 ± 1.18 ng/mL (T1) to 10.46 ± 8.03 ng/mL after T3. Significantly lower levels of free cortisol were detected in the saliva of the younger mares, up to 9 years old, and mares who participated in only one qualifying path after each element of the championship. The highest levels of cortisol (T3) were found in mares competing repeatedly on the qualifying path. No correlation was found between cortisol levels and the championship results. Participation of mares in the championship was associated with stress, which was reflected in the increase in cortisol levels in saliva.
Springback Simulation of the Process Chain Press Line Forming and Roller Hemming Processes

In recent years the process simulation of entire manufacturing chains in sheet metal forming has gained more ground on its way to be established in the validation of feasibility and the meeting of quality targets. Nowadays, especially the simulation of manufacturing automotive sheet metal components such as doors, hoods roofs etc., using the finite element analysis, belongs to state of the art in the development process of sheet metal components. The different joining technologies in the bodyshell work, such as riveting, welding etc., can be simulated by numerical methods. Rarely are any of these methods linked to the forming simulations of the previous process step. Further developments in this field should deal with new strategies, linking both the forming simulation and the joining simulation. Regarding the process chain press line forming and bodyshell work, the prediction of springback of closure assemblies is of special interest, and thereby new strategies for springback compensation have to be developed in an early stage of product development. Until now, only few experiences have been gained concerning application of method to calculate springback of an assembly, so far a reliable comparison between simulation and reality is required. For this reason in this paper a closer examination of an automotive hood assembly was carried out to develop and to validate a corresponding simulation model. Based on close-to-production experiments and optical surface measurements of outer skin components (doors, bonnets, trunk lids etc.) and their assembly prior start of series production, a new simulation strategy was developed for a consistent process chain for the press plant and bodyshell work. The assembly in this example was comprised of an inner and outer panel. For forming objectives of both parts, finite element simulations were conducted, including secondary forming operations, as for instance trimming and flanging including individual unloading sequences. In a following simulation step both parts were joined together by roller hemming. Finally, a springback analysis of the assembly was also conducted. The simulation method illustrates the possibility of predicting springback of assemblies. Furthermore, the experiments and simulations show, that the springback of the assembly leads to different final shapes than those obtained from individual components. With this method it is possible to predict the final shape and the influence of the individual components on shape and dimensional accuracy, aiding the optimization of the assembly process.
Single-cell RNA sequencing of the Strongylocentrotus purpuratus larva reveals the blueprint of major cell types and nervous system of a non-chordate deuterostome

Identifying the molecular fingerprint of organismal cell types is key for understanding their function and evolution. Here, we use single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to survey the cell types of the sea urchin early pluteus larva, representing an important developmental transition from non-feeding to feeding larva. We identify 21 distinct cell clusters, representing cells of the digestive, skeletal, immune, and nervous systems. Further subclustering of these reveal a highly detailed portrait of cell diversity across the larva, including the identification of neuronal cell types. We then validate important gene regulatory networks driving sea urchin development and reveal new domains of activity within the larval body. Focusing on neurons that co-express Pdx-1 and Brn1/2/4, we identify an unprecedented number of genes shared by this population of neurons in sea urchin and vertebrate endocrine pancreatic cells. Using differential expression results from Pdx-1 knockdown experiments, we show that Pdx1 is necessary for the acquisition of the neuronal identity of these cells. We hypothesize that a network similar to the one orchestrated by Pdx1 in the sea urchin neurons was active in an ancestral cell type and then inherited by neuronal and pancreatic developmental lineages in sea urchins and vertebrates.
Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach Mini-workshop: Shearlets

Over the last 20 years, multiscale methods and wavelets have revolutionized the field of applied mathematics by providing an efficient means for encoding isotropic phenomena. Directional multiscale systems, particularly shearlets, are now having the same dramatic impact on the encoding of multivariate signals. Since its introduction about five years ago, the theory of shearlets has rapidly developed and gained wide recognition as the superior way of achieving a truly unified treatment in both the continuum and digital setting. By now, shearlet analysis has reached maturity as a research field, with deep mathematical results, efficient numerical methods, and a variety of high-impact applications. The main goal of the Mini-Workshop Shearlets was to gather the world's experts in this field in order to foster closer interaction, attack challenging open problems, and identify future research directions.
Data Fusion Methods for Human Health Risk Assessment: Review and Application

ABSTRACT The improved accessibility to data that can be used in human health risk assessment (HHRA) necessitates advanced methods to optimally incorporate them in HHRA analyses. This article investigates the application of data fusion methods to handling multiple sources of data in HHRA and its components. This application can be performed at two levels, first, as an integrative framework that incorporates various pieces of information with knowledge bases to build an improved knowledge about an entity and its behavior, and second, in a more specific manner, to combine multiple values for a state of a certain feature or variable (e.g., toxicity) into a single estimation. This work first reviews data fusion formalisms in terms of architectures and techniques that correspond to each of the two mentioned levels. Then, by handling several data fusion problems related to HHRA components, it illustrates the benefits and challenges in their application.
Analysis on the Relationship between the Effect of Diversity and Innovation of Technology in Chinese Cities

Improving the capacity of urban technological innovation is the only way to develop urban economy and improve national innovation capacity. From the perspective of the technology spillover effect of the different industrial agglomeration mode, we select the prefecture-level cities of 23 provinces in China from 2008 to 2010 and use empirical analysis.The results suggest that: The research on the innovation of civil technology in China imply that the relatively diverse industrial cluster, that is to say the Jacobs' externality, could accelerate this process. Both of educational expense and GDP affect the innovation of urban technology positively and significantly. FDI doesnt make a significantly effect on the innovation of urban technology.
Software product line reuse in practice

The study of software product line addresses the issues of engineering software systems families, or collections of similar software systems. The objective of a software product line is to reduce the overall engineering effort required to produce a collection of similar systems by capitalizing on the commonality among the systems and by formally managing the variation among the systems. This is a classic software reuse problem (C. Krueger, 1992). The primary focus of software product line research has been on domain analysis and modeling, architecture modeling, software reuse repositories, generators, and process definition. In contrast, for engineering single systems, these technologies and techniques provide significant value, while for engineering software product lines the conventional wisdom suggests they are essential. We hypothesize, however, that domain analysis, architecture modeling, software reuse repositories, generators, and process definition are simply compensating for a void in the existing software engineering technology space and that this void can be filled by a more simple, powerful, and concise technology for engineering software product lines. This new technology then redefines the status of domain analysis and the other existing technologies so that they have the same status in software product line development that they do in single system development: valuable engineering technologies but not necessarily requisite.
A study on the terahertz nondestructive testing of foam sandwich structure composites based on morphological filtering

A new method for defect recognition of foam sandwich structure composites based on morphological filtering is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the terahertz frequency modulated radar imaging system is used to detect the foam sandwich structure composites to obtain the original detection signal, and the original detection image is obtained by using amplitude imaging method. Secondly, the original detection images are transformed to binary images by setting threshold values. Thirdly, based on the morphological filtering theory we carry out closing operation to fill the inner tiny holes in the binary images, and connect the discontinuous adjacent targets. Finally, the opening operation is used to remove the redundant small objects in the image, and obtain the final detection result image. In this paper, the imaging detection of polymethacrylimide foam sandwich structure composites is carried out, and the original detection signal is processed by using the above method, the resulting images with the prefabricated defect effectively recognized is obtained.The accuracy of the proposed method for defect recognition is evaluated by calculating and comparing the error ratio of the defect area in the processed image and the original detection image relative to the actual defect area.The results show that the proposed method can effectively recognized the prefabricated defects in foam sandwich structure composites and optimize the size of the defects to be close to the actual defects, which is conducive to the further application of terahertz nondestructive testing technology in foam sandwich structure composites.
Ingwer in der Phytotherapie: Fokus Onkologie

Zusammenfassung Ingwer ist eine tropische Pflanze, welche im Wurzelstock 1,5–3% ätherisches Öl enthält. Ingwer fördert die Magenentleerung und den Magen-Darm-Transit und kann einen kurzfristigen Effekt bei der Behandlung und Prävention von Übelkeit und Erbrechen hervorrufen. Als in Pulverform anerkannte Arznei findet sie auch in der Onkologie Verwendung. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass Ingwer bei Chemotherapie-induzierter Übelkeit/Erbrechen (CINV) behilflich sein könnte. Es gibt Hinweise, dass höhere Ingwerdosen weniger wirksam sind oder vorhandene Symptome verstärken können. Es liegen erste Ergebnisse vor, dass die Tagesdosis von 1 g nicht überschritten werden sollte. Weiterhin zeigte sich in einer Studie mit fraglicher Qualität, dass mit Ingwer behandelte Ovarialkarzinompatientinnen weniger Metastasen im Vergleich zur Kontrollgruppe aufwiesen. Studien, welche den Einfluss von Ingwer auf die Lebensqualität untersuchten, zeigen keine einheitlichen Ergebnisse. Weitere qualitative hochwertige Studien sind nötig, um die medizinische Wirksamkeit des Ingwers im onkologischen Kontext bestätigen und in der Praxis etablieren zu können.
Deep Learning-based PDR Scheme that Fuses Smartphone Sensors and GPS Location Changes

Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR), a sensor-based localization method using a smartphone, combines multi-sensor data from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) generated by the movement of pedestrians and calculates the amount of movement change from a previous location using fusion of sensor data. In this study, we propose a method to improve the efficiency of a deep learning (DL)-based PDR scheme to solve problems associated with the existing PDR method. The proposed DL-PDR scheme solves the movement change of smartphone users as a regression problem by combining IMU and global positioning system (GPS) data. In this paper, we (1) describe the existing PDR methods and problems, describe the proposed DL-PDR scheme and the data collection process of the input sensor data and output GPS used for deep learning, (2) correlate the collected I/O data and conduct preprocessing to make the data suitable for learning, (3) apply data refining and data augmentation methods to provide efficient learning and prevent overfitting, and (4) Verify the performance of the proposed scheme. The localization performance between the proposed scheme and existing methods is compared in various buildings where continuous localization is possible owing to connected indoor/outdoor spaces.
Developing credit based micro-credentials for the teaching profession: An Australian descriptive case study

ABSTRACT The impact of the pandemic has revealed just how important teachers are to a nation’s economic productivity and to the very social fabric and well-being of any society. It has also revealed more starkly the socio-economic and digital divides that teachers continue to address daily to support student learning. How then, to best support teachers own professional learning in complex times? This is a question that has long been asked—but now requires a new framing against the backdrop of constant technological change and disruption. This paper reports on a descriptive case study exploring and critiquing the approach to building a set of credit-bearing micro-credentials for teachers continuing professional development in the Australian context. The set of micro credentials were designed to both support teacher’s professional learning in a set of key learning fields and to enable them to build pathways to further Graduate and Master of Education Studies. The study documents the various stages of design and development drawing from the literature and provides some early findings of the affordances and challenges of establishing further micro credentials for the teaching profession.
A novel channel estimation method for OFDM in high-speed mobile system

In order to meet the requirements which are considered in an OFDM system under a high-speed mobile environment, lots of techniques have been studied. In mobile communication systems, fading distortion affects the overall performance. Furthermore, the higher the velocity of any mobile system, the more severe the effect of fading is. To solve this problem, in an OFDM system, exact channel estimation can be an important method. We propose a channel estimation method which outperforms conventional methods. The analytical results demonstrate that the proposed system has better performance than the conventional methods such as PSAM and ESAE.
Estimating signal-dependent noise (SDN)-based motion variations to enhance gesture recognition

Gesture recognition is an important manoeuvre that uses known data patterns for comparison and/or training the recognition algorithm. Previously learned gestures can be recognized irrespective of the environment and position. However, even if the same gesture is repeated, variations are inevitably generated because of unconscious muscle movements. Such variations in motion can adversely affect the accuracy of gesture recognition algorithms. Extensive training data is conventionally used to reduce this effect. In this paper, we propose predicting such variations in gesture motions from a single training data-set. We first generate muscle activation data from the measured gesture trajectory using musculoskeletal simulation. Signal-dependent noise is then superimposed on the muscle activation data to generate 100 predictions containing noise variations. Back-calculation is performed on the predicted muscle activation. The final output is acceleration data in the X and Y axes, which are segmented to calculate the segment-wise variation. The inverse of variation is named as reliability unique to each segment. A 26% increase in the F-measure was observed when we compared the best-case scenarios of the proposed algorithm with conventional dynamic time warping gesture recognition without segmentation and consideration of motion variation. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Contesting Agricultural Markets in South Asia: Farmer Movements, Co-operatives and Alternative Visions

Recent laws for privatizing agricultural produce markets in India are just one prominent example of long-running efforts to liberalize agriculture across South Asia. These legacies of state withdrawal from agriculture and the growing role of private intermediaries in both input and output markets have precipitated simultaneous crises of reproduction and accumulation in the countryside. However, such trajectories of liberalization are both context-specific and politically contested. Drawing from two cases—the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad’s efforts to build a broad political coalition among differentiated agrarian producers to contest the place of farmers in agricultural markets and the Northern Sri Lanka co-operative movement’s autonomous initiatives for post-war rural reconstruction—this article argues that rural movements are providing new and alternative visions for how farmers can engage with liberalizing agricultural markets on more equitable terms.
AI Empowered RIS-Assisted NOMA Networks: Deep Learning or Reinforcement Learning?

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multi-user downlink communication system over fading channels is investigated, where both non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes are employed. In particular, the time overhead for configuring the RIS reflective elements at the beginning of each fading channel is considered. The optimization goal is maximizing the effective throughput of the entire transmission period by jointly optimizing the phase shift of the RIS and the power allocation of the AP for each channel block. In an effort to solve the formulated problem and fill the research vacancy of the performance comparison between different machine learning tools in wireless networks, a deep learning (DL) approach and a reinforcement learning (RL) approach are proposed and their representative superiority and inferiority are investigated. The DL approach can locate the optimal phase shifts with the deep neural network fitting as well as the corresponding power allocation for each user. From the perspective of long-term reward, the phase shift control with configuration overhead can be regarded as a Markov decision process and the RL algorithm is proficient in solving such problems with the assistance of the Bellman equation. The numerical results indicate that: 1) From the perspective of the wireless network, NOMA can achieve a throughput gain of about 42% compared with OMA; 2) The well-trained RL and DL agents are able to achieve the same performance in Rician channel, while RL is superior in the Rayleigh channel; 3) The DL approach has lower complexity and faster convergence, while the RL approach has preferable strategy flexibility.
An approach to design for reliability

Abstract A method is presented by which design problems may be formulated, evaluated and developed in order to achieve maximum reliability. The method integrates component failure and functional performance considerations so that a maximum safety margin is achieved with respect to all failure criteria. The method proposed does not rely on failure rate data. Additionally, provided that all parameters are able to be calculated, it is possible to undertake a multi-objective optimization to determine an optimal solution.
Stepped impedance resonator bandpass filters using tapped‐line for controlling spurious response

A stepped impedance resonator bandpass filter was designed and implemented, combining with the tapped‐line structure. The measured bandpass filters at the center frequency of 2.0 GHz has the characteristics: the insertion loss S21 = −2.98 dB, BWR is 15.1%, and the transmission zeros occurred at 2.62 GHz with −48.5 dB. Especially, the wider rejection of −20 dB can be obtained form 2.4 to 8.2 GHz from the proper position of tapped‐line I/O. The designed filter shows the excellent abilities to shift and suppress the spurious response by properly designing the structure of the resonator. The proposed filter was designed and fabricated, and the performances closely matched the simulation results. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 40: 481–484, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.20010