nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Enhance learning on software project management through a role play game in a virtual world+
Venue: Interact. Learn. Environ.

This article presents a role play game for software project management (SPM) in a three dimensional online multiuser virtual world. The Opensimulator platform is used for the creation of an immersive virtual environment that facilitates students' collaboration and realistic interaction, in order to manage unexpected events occurring during the development of a software project. Through the simulation of a real life company, the game aims to enhance experiential learning of human related issues, such as project team members' communication and collaboration, which are not easy to be taught through ordinary teaching methods. Roles are assigned to the participating students, who have to overcome problems initiated by non player units (software controlled units) while collaborating with other students and the instructor. The instructor, holding a key role in the game, is able to observe the players, intervene and dynamically alter specific game scenario parameters adapting to player encounter difficulties. The environment is combining the experience of a typical game (based on an event driven SPM scenario and interaction with non player units) with the experience of a virtual world (interacting with other players) and has been positively evaluated by the participants regarding the overall game experience and the learning effect.
Distributed leadership through the lens of Activity Theory

Using Activity Theory as an interpretive lens to examine the distribution of leadership, this paper shares a case study on how leadership for an ICT project was distributed in a Singapore school.  The case study involved observations of 49 meetings and 34 interviews of leaders and the teachers who were involved in the ICT project.  Applying the lens of third generation Activity Theory helped to reveal two main interrelated activity systems, and the leadership actions performed by senior and middle management. The two activity systems comprised the school and the ICT project. The focus in Activity Theory on the social cultural perspective highlighted the role played by social norms in mediating the leadership activity. Implications for future research: The conclusion focuses on the understanding of distributed leadership as analysed through the lens of Activity Theory and suggests future research directions. Activity Theory enables research on distributed leadership to identify and examine interrelated activity systems that various leaders are involved in, and how these impact the leadership provided.
Therapeutic Potential of Pterocarpus santalinus L. An Update
Venue: Pharmacognosy reviews

Recently there has been increasing interest in plants and plant derived compounds as raw food and medicinal agents. In Ayurveda, an Indian system of traditional medicine, a wide spectrum of medicinal properties of Pterocarpus santalinus is described. Many important bioactive phytocompounds have been extracted and identified from the heartwood of P. santalinus. Bioactive compounds typically occur in small amounts and have more subtle effects than nutrients. These bioactive compounds influence cellular activities that modify the risk of disease rather than prevent deficiency diseases. A wide array of biological activities and potential health benefits of P. santalinus have been reported, including antioxidative, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, anticancer, and anti inflammatory properties, and protective effects on the liver, gastric mucosa, and nervous system. All these protective effects were attributed to bioactive compounds present in P. santalinus. The major bioactive compounds present in the heartwood of P. santalinus are santalin A and B, savinin, calocedrin, pterolinus K and L, and pterostilbenes. The bioactive compounds have potentially important health benefits: These compounds can act as antioxidants, enzyme inhibitors and inducers, inhibitors of receptor activities, and inducers and inhibitors of gene expression, among other actions. The present review aims to understand the pharmacological effects of P. santalinus on health and disease with "up to date" discussion.
Isolation and characterisation of Pterocarpus santalinus heartwood extract

Recently there has been increasing interest in plants and plant derived compounds as medicinal agents. Bioactive compounds typically occur in small amounts and have more subtle effects. These bioactive compounds influence cellular activities that modify the risk of disease rather than prevent deficiency diseases. Many important bioactive phytocompounds have been extracted and identified from the heartwood of Pterocarpus santalinus. A wide array of biological activities and potential health benefits of Pterocarpus santalinus have been reported, including antioxidative, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, anticancer, antiinflammatory and protective effects on the liver, gastric mucosa, and nervous system. All these protective effects were attributed to bioactive compounds present in Pterocarpus santalinus. Pterocarpus santalinus Linn. heartwood was extracted with ethanol and blackish brown residue was obtained and percentage yield of was found to be 15% w/w. Pterocarpus santalinus Linn. heartwood extract was subjected to qualitative analysis for various phytochemical constituents and revealed the presence of glycosides, flavonoids, alkaloids, tannins, phenols, saponins and sterols. The extract was subjected to column chromatography for isolation of compounds and characterized by 1H NMR, 13C NMR and LC MS Spectral analysis. Based on the spectral data's, the proposed structure of the compound was characterized as 6 Hydroxy 7 methoxycoumarin with C10H8O4 and the melting point 204oC was confirmed by comparison of its spectral data with reported values.
Contracts and coordination: Supply chains with uncertain demand and supply

Considering a supply chain with a supplier subject to yield uncertainty selling to a retailer facing stochastic demand, we find that commonly studied classical coordination contracts fail to coordinate both the supplier's production and the retailer's procurement decisions and achieve efficient performance. First, we study the vendor managed inventory (VMI) partnership. We find that a consignment VMI partnership coupled with a production cost subsidy achieves perfect coordination and a win win outcome; it is simple to implement and arbitrarily allocates total channel profit. The production cost subsidy optimally chosen through Nash bargaining analysis depends on the bargaining power of the supplier and the retailer. Further, motivated by the practice that sometimes the retailer and the supplier can arrange a "late order," we also analyze the behavior of an advance purchase discount (APD) contract. We find that an APD with a revenue sharing contract can efficiently coordinate the supply chain as well as achieve flexible profit allocation. Finally, we explore which coordination contract works better for the supplier vs. the retailer. It is interesting to observe that Nash bargaining solutions for the two coordination contracts are equivalent. We further provide recommendations on the applications of these contracts.
SD Anti DDoS: Fast and efficient DDoS defense in software defined networks
Venue: J. Netw. Comput. Appl.

In order to overcome Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) in Software Defined Networking (SDN) this paper proposes a mechanism consisting of four modules, namely attack detection trigger, attack detection, attack traceback and attack mitigation. The trigger of attack detection mechanism is introduced for the first time to respond more quickly against DDoS attack and reduce the workload of controllers and switches. In the meantime, the DDoS attack detection method based on neural network is implemented to detect attack. Furthermore, an attack traceback method taking advantages of the characteristics of SDN is also proposed. Meanwhile, a DDoS mitigation mechanism including attack blocking and flow table cleaning is presented. The proposed mechanism is evaluated on SDN testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can quickly initiate the attack detection with less than one second and accurately trace the attack source. More importantly, it can block the attack in source and release the occupied resources of switches.
Cost Efficient Multi Cloud Storage and Data Hosting with Cloud Computing Security Using AES Algorithm

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development in online data hosting service. Facing the numerous cloud vendors as well as their heterogeneous pricing policies, customers may well be perplexed with which cloud(s) are suitable for storing their data. Also, cloud security is a major concern for customers storing data in cloud. This paper proposes and implements a cost effective data hosting scheme while providing an appropriate redundancy strategy in multi cloud. Also, we enhance the cloud computing security using AES algorithm.
Enhancement of Cloud Computing Security with Secure Data Storage using AES

The evolution of Cloud computing makes the major changes in computing world as with the assistance of basic cloud computing service models like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS an organization achieves their business goal with minimum effort as compared to traditional computing environment. On the other hand security of the data in the cloud database server is the key area of concern in the acceptance of cloud. It requires a very high degree of privacy and authentication. To protect the data in cloud database server cryptography is one of the important methods. Cryptography provides various symmetric and asymmetric algorithms to secure the data. This paper presents the symmetric cryptographic algorithm named as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) It is based on several substitutions, permutation and transformation.
Enhancing Data Security Using AES Encryption Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing offers computation as per utility of the customer and hence it is known as utility computing. This model is attractive mainly for business oriented people because it reduces total cost of operation, maintainance cost, increases return of investment. But the only thing that is impeding popularity of cloud computing is security issues. This paper discuss about AES encryption algorithm (RIJNDAEL) that secure data stored on cloud. This method is more efficient than DES which is symmetry based algorithm and offers 56 bits key size whereas RIJNDAEL algorithm is asymmetry and offers 128 bits key and 128 bits blocks. RIJNDAEL is block cipher algorithm and is secure against cryptanalytic attacks. It is versatile, which means it can be implemented on different working environment efficiently, its key agility is good which means setup time of key is less and this algorithm is easy to be understood and using it. Rijndael requires less memory and hence make it is well suited for environments which have less space such as 8 bit micro processor, also it shows marvellous performance in terms of software and hardware implementation.
Akkermansia glycaniphila sp. nov. an anaerobic mucin degrading bacterium isolated from reticulated python faeces.
Venue: International journal of systematic and evolutionary microbiology

A Gram stain negative, non motile, strictly anaerobic, oval shaped, non spore forming bacterium (strain PytT) was isolated from reticulated python faeces. Strain PytT was capable of using mucin as sole carbon, energy and nitrogen source. Cells could grow singly, in pairs, and were also found to aggregate. Scanning electron microscopy revealed the presence of filamentous structures connecting individual bacterial cells. Strain PytT could grow on a limited number of single sugars, including N acetylglucosamine, N acetylgalactosamine, glucose, lactose and galactose, but only when a plentiful protein source was provided. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing showed strain PytT to belong to the Verrucomicrobiae class I, family Akkermansiaceae, genus Akkermansia, with Akkermansia muciniphila MucT as the closest relative (94.4 sequence similarity) DNA DNA hybridization revealed low relatedness of 28.3 with A. muciniphila MucT. The G+C content of DNA from strain PytT was 58.2 mol% The average nucleotide identity (ANI) of the genome of strain PytT compared to the genome of strain MucT was 79.7 Chemotaxonomic data supported the affiliation of strain PytT to the genus Akkermansia. Based on phenotypic, phylogenetic and genetic characteristics, strain PytT represents a novel species of the genus Akkermansia, for which the name Akkermansia glycaniphila sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is PytT =DSM 100705T=CIP 110913T)
Lean and Green Supply Chain for the Product Services System (PSS) The Literature Review and A Conceptual Framework

In recent years, the distinction between manufacturing and services has been blurring. They are often combined together to provide customers a total offering for better economic performance. At same time, manufacturers are facing rising pressures from government, society and end users to reduce the impacts of their products and services on environmental sustainability throughout the supply chain. As a result, Product Services System (PSS) was developed to drive for both business excellence and environmental sustainability. The application of Lean and Green thinking in supply chain management has also shown the advantage of addressing the two issues. However, there is a lack of systematic research on how Lean and Green thinking could support the development of PSS supply chain, esp. in the fields of supplier collaboration and relationship development across the product life cycle. For instance, how can Lean and Green help reshaping the supplier structure and network? Which Lean and Green tools can promote the supplier relationship? From literature review, this paper summarizes the state of art researches on PSS, Lean/Green supply chain management and the connections between them. Then a conceptual framework of Lean and Green supply chain for PSS is constructed to guide the case studies in next steps.
The Impact of Capital Structure Choice on Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from Diversified Companies in Sri Lanka

The Capital structure decision is fundamental for any business organization, because of the need to maximize return to the various stakeholders and such decision has great impact on the firms' ability to deal with competitive environment (Awunyo Vitor, 2012) Therefore managers need to take decision very carefully regarding to the capital structure of company. Hence the researcher investigated the impact of capital structure choice on firm performance. The objective of this research is to evaluate the impact of capital structure choice on performance of diversified companies in Sri Lanka. The study used secondary data for a sample of 14 listed diversified companies in Colombo stock exchange during 2008 2016.Short Term Debt to Asset Ratio and Long Term Debt to Assets Ratio used as measurements of capital structure. Further firm size used as control variable and also Net Profit Margin, Return on Equity and Return on Assets used as measurements of performance of the diversified companies. The results indicated that firm performance, which is measured by Return on Asset, Return on Equity and have negative relationship with Short Term Debt to Asset Ratio and there is no significant relation with Short Term Debt to Asset Ratio. Further Short Term Debt to Asset Ratio has a negative significant impact on Net Profit Margin. Moreover, Long Term Debt to Asset Ratio has a negative significant impact on Return on Asset and Return on Equity. Therefore, there is negative relationship between capital structure choice and performance of diversified companies in Sri Lanka.
Some novel hybrid forecast methods based on picture fuzzy clustering for weather nowcasting from satellite image sequences
Venue: Applied Intelligence

Weather nowcasting comprises the detailed description of the current weather along with forecasts obtained by extrapolation for very short range period of zero to six hours ahead. It is particularly useful when forecasting complicated processes such as rainfall, clouds, and rapidly developing or changing storms. This plays an important role for daily activities like working, traveling, daily planning, flying, etc. Weather forecast can be solved by latest radar, satellite or observational data. However, the main challenges associated with nowcasting are the flawed characterization of transitions between different meteorological structures. In this paper, we propose two novel hybrid forecast methods based on picture fuzzy clustering for weather nowcasting. The first method named as PFC STAR uses a combination of picture fuzzy clustering and spatiotemporal regression. The second one named as PFC PFR integrates picture fuzzy clustering with picture fuzzy rule. Those methods are equipped with advanced training processes which enhance the accuracy of predicted outputs. The experiments indicate that the proposed methods are better than the relevant ones for weather nowcasting.
Combining solar irradiance measurements, satellite derived data and a numerical weather prediction model to improve intra day solar forecasting

Isolated power systems need to generate all the electricity demand with their own renewable resources. Among the latter, solar energy may account for a large share. However, solar energy is a fluctuating source and the island power grid could present an unstable behavior with a high solar penetration. Global Horizontal Solar Irradiance (GHI) forecasting is an important issue to increase solar energy production into electric power system. This study is focused in hourly GHI forecasting from 1 to 6 h ahead. Several statistical models have been successfully tested in GHI forecasting, such us autoregressive (AR) autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) In this paper, ANN models are designed to produce intra day solar forecasts using ground and exogenous data. Ground data were obtained from two measurement stations in Gran Canaria Island. In order to improve the results obtained with ground data, satellite GHI data (from Helioclim 3) as well as solar radiation and Total Cloud Cover forecasts provided by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) are used as additional inputs of the ANN model. It is shown that combining exogenous data (satellite and ECMWF forecasts) with ground data further improves the accuracy of the intra day forecasts.
On the assimilation of satellite sounder data in cloudy skies in numerical weather prediction models
Venue: Journal of Meteorological Research

Satellite measurements are an important source of global observations in support of numerical weather prediction (NWP) The assimilation of satellite radiances under clear skies has greatly improved NWP forecast scores. However, the application of radiances in cloudy skies remains a significant challenge. In order to better assimilate radiances in cloudy skies, it is very important to detect any clear field of view (FOV) accurately and assimilate cloudy radiances appropriately. Research progress on both clear FOV detection methodologies and cloudy radiance assimilation techniques are reviewed in this paper. Overview on approaches being implemented in the operational centers and studied by the satellite data assimilation research community is presented. Challenges and future directions for satellite sounder radiance assimilation in cloudy skies in NWP models are also discussed.
Floods, Fortresses, and Cabin Fever: Worlding "Domeland" Security in Dave Eggers's Zeitoun and The Circle

This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Dave Eggers's journalistic account Zeitoun and his novel The Circle. It considers how and why both are preoccupied with the kinds of (in)security discourses, stretching from Hurricane Katrina through the implosion of Syria and into imagined futures, that have shaped and continue to shape our cultural and geopolitical imaginaries. The article argues that Zeitoun and The Circle develop the transnational commitments of Eggers's earlier work in particular ways. In so doing, both call upon their readers to challenge the reductive, invariably taxonomical rhetoric associated with the kinds of security questions that proliferate in the aftermath of events such as 9/11 and Katrina. By exploring what Rob Nixon calls a "transnational ethics of place" in these two texts, Eggers interrogates paradigms such as "development," as well as affiliated ideas of US exceptionalism. In their formally and conceptually distinctive ways, I argue that both Zeitoun and The Circle ask readers to imagine the possibilities of "worlding" these discourses in more generative terms. By recalibrating some of the defining security questions of our time, Eggers invites us to conceptualize and engage with them more fully.
Influence of in port ships emissions to gaseous atmospheric pollutants and to particulate matter of different sizes in a Mediterranean harbour in Italy

Ship emissions are a growing concern, especially in coastal areas, for potential impacts on human health and climate. International mitigation strategies to curb these emission, based on low sulphur content fuels, have proven useful to improve local air quality. However, the effect on climate forcing is less obvious. Detailed information on the influence of shipping to particles of different sizes is needed to investigate air quality and climate interaction. In this work, the contributions of maritime emissions to atmospheric concentrations of gaseous pollutants (NO, NO 2 SO 2 and O 3 and of particles (sizes from 0.009 mm to 30 mm) were investigated considering manoeuvring (arrival and departure of ships) and hotelling phases (including loading/unloading activities) Results showed that the size distributions of shipping contributions were different for the two phases and could be efficiently described, using measured data, considering four size ranges. The largest contribution to particles concentration was observed for D p p 0.35 mm. The minimum contribution was observed at D p around 0.8 0.9 mm with a negligible contribution from hotelling for size range 0.4 1 mm. The comparison of 2012 and 2014 datasets showed no significant changes of gaseous and particulate pollutant emissions and of the contribution to particle mass concentration. However, an increase of the contribution to particle number concentration (PNC) was observed. Results suggested that harbour logistic has a relevant role in determining the total impact of shipping on air quality of the nearby coastal areas. Additionally, future policies should focus on PNC that represents an important fraction of emissions also for low sulphur fuels. DOAS remote sensing proved a useful tool to directly measure NO 2 and SO 2 ship emissions giving estimates comparable with those of emission inventory approach.