ALBERT

Description: In the present study, we employ fluorescence spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering, and molecular docking methods. Binding of anticancer drug anastrozole with human lysozyme (HL) is studied. Binding of anastrozole to HL is moderate but spontaneous. There is anastrozole persuaded hydrodynamic change in HL, leading to molecular compaction. Binding of anastrozole to HL also decreased in vitro lytic activity of HL. Molecular docking results suggest the electrostatic interactions and van der Waals forces played key role in binding interaction of anastrozole near the catalytic site. Binding interaction of anastrozole to proteins other than major transport proteins in blood can significantly affect pharmacokinetics of this molecule. Hence, rationalizing drug dosage is important. This study also points to unrelated effects that small molecules bring in the body that are considerable and need thorough investigation.

Description: Electroencephalography-(EEG-) based control is a noninvasive technique which employs brain signals to control electrical devices/circuits. Currently, the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems provide two types of signals, raw signals and logic state signals. The latter signals are used to turn on/off the devices. In this paper, the capabilities of BCI systems are explored, and a survey is conducted how to extend and enhance the reliability and accuracy of the BCI systems. A structured overview was provided which consists of the data acquisition, feature extraction, and classification algorithm methods used by different researchers in the past few years. Some classification algorithms for EEG-based BCI systems are adaptive classifiers, tensor classifiers, transfer learning approach, and deep learning, as well as some miscellaneous techniques. Based on our assessment, we generally concluded that, through adaptive classifiers, accurate results are acquired as compared to the static classification techniques. Deep learning techniques were developed to achieve the desired objectives and their real-time implementation as compared to other algorithms.

Description: Background. Young people are challenged with sexual and reproductive health (SRH) problems due to limited access to services and information. It contributes a high burden of sexually transmitted disease, unsafe abortion, and premature mortality, especially in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Hence, this study aimed at assessing the SRH service utilization and associated factors among college students at West Arsi Zone in Oromia region, Ethiopia. Methods. Institutional-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 519 randomly selected college students from January 01, 2019, up to April 30, 2019. Data were collected through self-administered pretested questionnaires. Data entry and analysis for descriptive and logistic regression models were performed by using SPSS (version 23). The result was declared as statistically significant at p 

Description: To solve the problems of current short-term forecasting methods for metro passenger flow, such as unclear influencing factors, low accuracy, and high time-space complexity, a method for metro passenger flow based on ST-LightGBM after considering transfer passenger flow is proposed. Firstly, using historical data as the training set to transform the problem into a data-driven multi-input single-output regression prediction problem, the problem of the short-term prediction of metro passenger flow is formalized and the difficulties of the problem are identified. Secondly, we extract the candidate temporal and spatial features that may affect passenger flow at a metro station from passenger travel data based on the spatial transfer and spatial similarity of passenger flow. Thirdly, we use a maximal information coefficient (MIC) feature selection algorithm to select the significant impact features as the input. Finally, a short-term forecasting model for metro passenger flow based on the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) model is established. Taking transfer passenger flow into account, this method has a low space-time cost and high accuracy. The experimental results on the dataset of Lianban metro station in Xiamen city show that the proposed method obtains higher prediction accuracy than SARIMA, SVR, and BP network.

Description: Most of the existing knowledge graph embedding models are supervised methods and largely relying on the quality and quantity of obtainable labelled training data. The cost of obtaining high quality triples is high and the data sources are facing a serious problem of data sparsity, which may result in insufficient training of long-tail entities. However, unstructured text encoding entities and relational knowledge can be obtained anywhere in large quantities. Word vectors of entity names estimated from the unlabelled raw text using natural language model encode syntax and semantic properties of entities. Yet since these feature vectors are estimated through minimizing prediction error on unsupervised entity names, they may not be the best for knowledge graphs. We propose a two-phase approach to adapt unsupervised entity name embeddings to a knowledge graph subspace and jointly learn the adaptive matrix and knowledge representation. Experiments on Freebase show that our method can rely less on the labelled data and outperforms the baselines when the labelled data is relatively less. Especially, it is applicable to zero-shot scenario.

Description: Portfolio investment is adopted by the venture capital to diversify those risks involved in project selection, investing or operating so that the venture capitalist can expect a relatively stable income and lower financing risks. Based on the design of portfolio investment contract with unlimited funds developed by Kanniainen and Keuschnigg, and Inderst et al., this article makes a modification and presents a model given the limitation of funds available for the venture capitalist. It is demonstrated that the marginal benefit of efforts paid by the entrepreneurs exceeds the marginal cost, given the limitation of funds available, which will conduce to a high-level engagement of the entrepreneurs. Thus, by adopting the design of renegotiation contract, the venture capitalist can manage to stimulate the entrepreneurs to make efforts, which is to result in moral hazard reduction.

Description: Recently, knowledge graph embedding methods have attracted numerous researchers’ interest due to their outstanding effectiveness and robustness in knowledge representation. However, there are still some limitations in the existing methods. On the one hand, translation-based representation models focus on conceiving translation principles to represent knowledge from a global perspective, while they fail to learn various types of relational facts discriminatively. It is prone to make the entity congestion of complex relational facts in the embedding space reducing the precision of representation vectors associating with entities. On the other hand, parallel subgraphs extracted from the original graph are used to learn local relational facts discriminatively. However, it probably causes the relational fact damage of the original knowledge graph to some degree during the subgraph extraction. Thus, previous methods are unable to learn local and global knowledge representation uniformly. To that end, we propose a multiview translation learning model, named MvTransE, which learns relational facts from global-view and local-view perspectives, respectively. Specifically, we first construct multiple parallel subgraphs from an original knowledge graph by considering entity semantic and structural features simultaneously. Then, we embed the original graph and construct subgraphs into the corresponding global and local feature spaces. Finally, we propose a multiview fusion strategy to integrate multiview representations of relational facts. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in knowledge graph representation tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Description: A multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) may have multifeasible solutions, due to its nature of targeting multiobjectives. Given the NP-hard MRCPSP and intricate multiobjective algorithms, finding the optimized result among those solutions seems impossible. This paper adopts data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate a series of solutions of an MRCPSP and to find an appropriate choice in an objective way. Our approach is applied to a typical MRCPSP in practice, and the results validate that DEA is an effective and objective method for MRCPSP solution selection.

Description: Implementing artificial neural networks is commonly achieved via high-level programming languages such as Python and easy-to-use deep learning libraries such as Keras. These software libraries come preloaded with a variety of network architectures, provide autodifferentiation, and support GPUs for fast and efficient computation. As a result, a deep learning practitioner will favor training a neural network model in Python, where these tools are readily available. However, many large-scale scientific computation projects are written in Fortran, making it difficult to integrate with modern deep learning methods. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a software library, the Fortran-Keras Bridge (FKB). This two-way bridge connects environments where deep learning resources are plentiful with those where they are scarce. The paper describes several unique features offered by FKB, such as customizable layers, loss functions, and network ensembles. The paper concludes with a case study that applies FKB to address open questions about the robustness of an experimental approach to global climate simulation, in which subgrid physics are outsourced to deep neural network emulators. In this context, FKB enables a hyperparameter search of one hundred plus candidate models of subgrid cloud and radiation physics, initially implemented in Keras, to be transferred and used in Fortran. Such a process allows the model’s emergent behavior to be assessed, i.e., when fit imperfections are coupled to explicit planetary-scale fluid dynamics. The results reveal a previously unrecognized strong relationship between offline validation error and online performance, in which the choice of the optimizer proves unexpectedly critical. This in turn reveals many new neural network architectures that produce considerable improvements in climate model stability including some with reduced error, for an especially challenging training dataset.

Description: The flavonoids are compounds synthesized by plants, and they have properties such as antioxidant, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and antibacterial, among others. One of the most important bioactive properties of flavonoids is their antioxidant effect. Synthetic antioxidants have side toxic effects whilst natural antioxidants, such as flavonoids from natural sources, have relatively low toxicity. Therefore, it is important to incorporate flavonoids derived from natural sources in several products such as foods, cosmetics, and drugs. For this reason, there is currently a need to extract flavonoids from plant resources. In this review are described the most important parameters involved in the extraction of flavonoids by unconventional methods such as ultrasound, pressurized liquid extraction, mechanochemical, high hydrostatic pressure, supercritical fluid, negative pressure cavitation, intensification of vaporization by decompression to the vacuum, microwave, infrared, pulsed electric field, high-voltage electrical discharges, and enzyme-assisted extraction. There are no unified operation conditions to achieve high yields and purity. Notwithstanding, progress has been achieved in the development of more advanced and environmentally friendly methods of extraction. Although in literature are found important advances, a complete understanding of the extraction process in each of the unconventional techniques is needed to determine the thermodynamic and kinetic mechanisms that govern each of the techniques.

Description: This study investigates a multidepot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem for a variety of hazardous materials with risk analysis, which is a practical problem in the actual industrial field. The objective of the problem is to design a series of routes that minimize the total cost composed of transportation cost, risk cost, and overtime work cost. Comprehensive consideration of factors such as transportation costs, multiple depots, heterogeneous vehicles, risks, and multiple accident scenarios is involved in our study. The problem is defined as a mixed integer programming model. A bidirectional tuning heuristic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm are developed to solve the problem of different scales of instances. Computational results are competitive such that our algorithm can obtain effective results in small-scale instances and show great efficiency in large-scale instances with 70 customers, 30 vehicles, and 3 types of hazardous materials.

Description: Single image super-resolution (SISR) is a traditional image restoration problem. Given an image with low resolution (LR), the task of SISR is to find the homologous high-resolution (HR) image. As an ill-posed problem, there are works for SISR problem from different points of view. Recently, deep learning has shown its amazing performance in different image processing tasks. There are works for image super-resolution based on convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, we propose an adaptive residual channel attention network for image super-resolution. We first analyze the limitation of residual connection structure and propose an adaptive design for suitable feature fusion. Besides the adaptive connection, channel attention is proposed to adjust the importance distribution among different channels. A novel adaptive residual channel attention block (ARCB) is proposed in this paper with channel attention and adaptive connection. Then, a simple but effective upscale block design is proposed for different scales. We build our adaptive residual channel attention network (ARCN) with proposed ARCBs and upscale block. Experimental results show that our network could not only achieve better PSNR/SSIM performances on several testing benchmarks but also recover structural textures more effectively.

Description: Evapotranspiration (ET) is an essential component of watershed hydrological cycle. Spatial-temporal variations analyses of evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration (PET) have remarkable theoretical and practical significances for understanding the interaction between climate changes and hydrological cycle and optimal allocation of water resources under global warming background. The MODIS-estimated ET agreed well with basin evapotranspiration from water balance principle methods in the study. The spatiotemporal variations results based on MOD16 ET data showed the following: (1) multiyear mean ET and PET were 464.2 mm and 1192.2 mm, and annual ET showed an upward trend at a rate of 3.48 mm/a, while PET decreased significantly at a rate of −8.18 mm/a. The annual ET trend showed a complemental relationship with PET; (2) at the seasonal scale, ET was highest in summer and least in winter, while PET was higher in spring and summer. The change of ET and PET in spring and summer had a great contribution to the annual variations; (3) ET and PET in the northern part were significantly stronger than those in the western and southern parts; (4) ET in cropland increased significantly, while PET decreased obviously in grass and forest; (5) changes of ET and PET were closely related to climatic factors. The rise in temperature caused the increase in ET and the decrease of wind speed contributed more to the decrease in PET. The results can provide a scientific basis for water resources planning and management.

Description: Background. The rational use of drugs requires that patients receive medications appropriate to their clinical needs, in doses that meet their own individual requirements, for an adequate period of time, and at the lowest cost to them and their community with full information and with the lowest possible cost. If one of these is not met, it is referred to as irrational drug use. Many drugs have been sold or prescribed inappropriately in the world, and a significant part of the world population lacks access to essential medicine. The aim of this study was to assess practice towards rational drug use at Finoteselam and Asirade Zewudie hospitals. Methods. A cross-sectional study design was used for this study, and the study was conducted from October 11 to November 30, 2019. A total of 770 prescriptions were selected as per WHO criteria by using systematic random sampling and reviewed with the help of an observational checklist. The data were entered and processed with SPSS version 25 and evaluated using the WHO criteria. Result. The average number of drugs per prescription was 1.8 and 2.05, antibiotics encountered were 77.7% and 72.5%, injections encountered were 5.97% and 7.01%, percentage of drugs prescribed by generic names was 97% and 93.4%, counseling time was 1.6 minutes and 2.25 minutes, and dispensing time was 51.3 seconds and 62.72 seconds at Finoteselam and Asirade Zewudie hospitals, respectively. Conclusion. The majority of WHO core drug use indicators were not met in the two hospitals. The average number of drugs encountered in Asirade Zewudie hospital was slightly higher than the WHO recommended range, whereas the average number of drugs encountered in Finoteselam hospital was exactly equal. The percentage of antibiotics encountered was very high compared with WHO recommendation, but the percentage of injections encountered was below the WHO recommended range and time spent on counseling and dispensing was too short when compared with WHO recommendation. In addition to this, both hospitals had no essential drug list or formulary as well as a key drug list.

Description: We investigate numerically fR gravity effects on certain AdS/CFT tools including holographic entanglement entropy and two-point correlation functions for a charged single accelerated Anti-de Sitter black hole in four dimensions. We find that both holographic entanglement entropy and two-point correlation functions decrease by increasing the acceleration parameter A, matching perfectly with literature. Taking into account the fR gravity parameter η, the decreasing scheme of the holographic quantities persist. However, we observe a transition-like point where the behavior of the holographic tools changes. Two regions meeting at such a transit-like point are shown up. In such a nomination, the first one is associated with slow accelerating black holes while the second one corresponds to a fast accelerating solution. In the first region, the holographic entanglement entropy and two-point correlation functions decrease by increasing the η parameter. However, the behavioral situation is reversed in the second one. Moreover, a cross-comparison between the entropy and the holographic entanglement entropy is presented, providing another counterexample showing that such two quantities do not exhibit similar behaviors.

Description: The Cloud Computing paradigm is focused on the provisioning of reliable and scalable virtual infrastructures that deliver execution and storage services. This paradigm is particularly suitable to solve resource-greedy scientific computing applications such as parameter sweep experiments (PSEs). Through the implementation of autoscalers, the virtual infrastructure can be scaled up and down by acquiring or terminating instances of virtual machines (VMs) at the time that application tasks are being scheduled. In this paper, we extend an existing study centered in a state-of-the-art autoscaler called multiobjective evolutionary autoscaler (MOEA). MOEA uses a multiobjective optimization algorithm to determine the set of possible virtual infrastructure settings. In this context, the performance of MOEA is greatly influenced by the underlying optimization algorithm used and its tuning. Therefore, we analyze two well-known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (NSGA-II and NSGA-III) and how they impact on the performance of the MOEA autoscaler. Simulated experiments with three real-world PSEs show that MOEA gets significantly improved when using NSGA-III instead of NSGA-II due to the former provides a better exploitation versus exploration trade-off.

Description: Rice husk biochars were prepared by carbonization at 400–600°C. The products were analyzed by FTIR, SEM-EDS, BET, and approximate analysis in order to find final products with the best properties and the lowest carbonization temperature. It has been found that the biochar prepared at 500°C, which has 37.86 ± 0.11% yield, 341.0776 m2/g of BET surface area, and 0.136639 cm3/g of micropore volume, is suitable for use as a root supplement in the aquaponic system. The aquaponic systems consist of aquaculture and a hydroponic system with and without biochar supplement. The control experiment consists of an aquaculture and planting panel with biochar supplement disconnected from each other. Tilapia and Chinese morning glory were used for growth studies. The water quality from all aquaculture ponds has also been analyzed at an interval of 10 days for 47 days. The results showed that the growth rates of Tilapia and Chinese morning glory in the aquaponic system with biochar were clearly higher than in the control experiment, which is in accordance with the water quality in each aquaculture pond. However, the growth rates of Tilapia (23.5 g/body vs. 22.7 g/body) and morning glory (3.907 g/stem vs. 2.609 g/stem) in supplemented biochar system tend to be higher than the nonsupplemented biochar system. It has been shown that rice husk biochar can help in treating water in the aquaponic system by increasing the amount of dissolved oxygen in the aquaculture water and conversion of toxic compounds to those beneficial for plant growth.

Description: There is a large amount of information and maintenance data in the aviation industry that could be used to obtain meaningful results in forecasting future actions. This study aims to introduce machine learning models based on feature selection and data elimination to predict failures of aircraft systems. Maintenance and failure data for aircraft equipment across a period of two years were collected, and nine input and one output variables were meticulously identified. A hybrid data preparation model is proposed to improve the success of failure count prediction in two stages. In the first stage, ReliefF, a feature selection method for attribute evaluation, is used to find the most effective and ineffective parameters. In the second stage, a K-means algorithm is modified to eliminate noisy or inconsistent data. Performance of the hybrid data preparation model on the maintenance dataset of the equipment is evaluated by Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) as Artificial Neural network (ANN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Linear Regression (LR) as machine learning algorithms. Moreover, performance criteria such as the Correlation Coefficient (CC), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) are used to evaluate the models. The results indicate that the hybrid data preparation model is successful in predicting the failure count of the equipment.

Description: The optical images collected by remotely operated vehicles (ROV) contain a lot of information about underwater (such as distributions of underwater creatures and minerals), which plays an important role in ocean exploration. However, due to the absorption and scattering characteristics of the water medium, some of the images suffer from serious color distortion. These distorted color images usually need to be enhanced so that we can analyze them further. However, at present, no image enhancement algorithm performs well in any scene. Therefore, in order to monitor image quality in the display module of ROV, a no-reference image quality predictor (NIPQ) is proposed in this paper. A unique property that differentiates the proposed NIPQ metric from existing works is the consideration of the viewing behavior of the human visual system and imaging characteristics of the underwater image in different water types. The experimental results based on the underwater optical image quality database (UOQ) show that the proposed metric can provide an accurate prediction for the quality of the enhanced image.

Description: Despite the achievements reported from using rainwater harvesting systems, the contribution and drawbacks that affect their usage in mountainous landscapes have received little attention. The uptake and usage of domestic rooftop rainwater harvesting systems (RRWHS) in developing countries is on the increase due to increasing water scarcities. We explored the effect of rainfall variability on water supply and the downsides of using the systems by rural households in Uganda. The objectives were to assess the variability of rainfall (1985–2018), categorise RRWHS used, and examine the influence of slope ranges on the placement of systems and also to quantify the harvested and saved rainwater and establish the factors that affected system usage. Rainfall variability was assessed using a Mann–Kendall test, while system contributions and drawbacks were examined using socioeconomic data. A representative of 444 households were selected using a multicluster sampling procedure and interviewed using semistructured questionnaires. Findings revealed that the months of March, April, September, August, and October experienced an upward trend of rainfall with a monthly coefficient of variation between 41 and 126%. With this, households responded by employing fixed (reinforced concrete tanks, corrugated iron tanks, and plastic tanks) and mobile RRWHS (saucepans, metallic drums/plastic drums, jerrycans, and clay pots). At the high altitude, households deployed mostly plastic jerrycans and industrial plastic/metallic drums to harvest and save water. Overall, the mean annual volume of rainwater harvested on the slopes of Mt. Elgon was 163,063 m3/yr, while the potential to save water ranged from 4% to 7% of the annual household water demand. The factors that hindered the deployment of RRWHS to harvest and save water were high operational costs, price fluctuations, unreliable rainfall pattern, inadequate funds, and limited accessibility. The rainfall received if well-harvested and saved can redeem households of water insecurity, though there is an urgent need of subsidies from the government to increase accessibility of the systems.

Description: Odor-baited devices are increasingly needed to compliment long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and indoor residual spraying (IRS) for control of residual malaria transmission. However, the odor-baited devices developed so far are bulky, dependent on the source of electricity and carbon dioxide (CO2), and they are logistically unsuitable for scaling up in surveillance and control of malaria vectors. We designed a passive and portable outdoor host seeking device (POHD) and preliminarily evaluated suitable components against Anopheles arabiensis that maintains residual malaria transmission. Experiments were conducted using semifield reared An. arabiensis within the semifield system at Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) in southeastern Tanzania. These mosquitoes were exposed to Suna traps® baited with BG lures or source of light and augmented with carbon dioxide (CO2) in view of identifying best attractants necessary to improve attractiveness of designed POHD. Two Suna traps® were hanged at the corner but outside the experimental hut in a diagonal line and rotated between four corners to control for the effect of position and wind direction on mosquito catches. Furthermore, mosquitoes were also exposed to either a bendiocarb-treated or bendiocarb-untreated POHD baited with Mbita blend, Ifakara blend, and worn socks and augmented with warmth (i.e., 1.5 liter bottle of warm water) inside an experimental hut or a screened rectangular box. This study demonstrated that mosquitoes were more strongly attracted to Suna trap® baited with BG lures and CO2 relative to those traps baited with a source of light and CO2. The POHD baited with synthetic blends attracted and killed greater proportion of An. arabiensis compared with POHD baited with worn socks. Efficacy of the POHD was unaffected by source of warmth, and it was reduced by about 50% when the device was tested inside a screened rectangular box relative to closed experimental hut. Overall, this study demonstrates that the POHD baited with synthetic blends (Mbita and Ifakara blends) and bendiocarb can effectively attract and kill outdoor biting malaria vector species. Such POHD baited with synthetic blends may require the source of CO2 to enhance attractiveness to mosquitoes. Further trials are, therefore, ongoing to evaluate attractiveness of improved design of POHD baited with slow-release formulation of synthetic blends and sustainable source of CO2 to malaria vectors under semifield and natural environments.

Description: In this paper, we study the following nonlinear Choquard equation −ϵ2Δu+Kxu=1/8πϵ2∫ℝ3u2y/x−ydyu,x∈ℝ3, where ϵ〉0 and Kx is a positive bounded continuous potential on ℝ3. By applying the reduction method, we proved that for any positive integer k, the above equation has a positive solution with k spikes near the local maximum point of Kx if ϵ〉0 is sufficiently small under some suitable conditions on Kx.

Description: Gastric diseases are increasing with the infection of Campylobacter jejuni. Late stages of infection lead to peptic ulcer and gastric carcinoma. C. jejuni infects people within different stages of their life, especially childhood, causing severe diarrhea; it infects around two-thirds of the world population. Due to bacterial resistance against standard antibiotic, a new strategy is needed to impede Campylobacter infections. Plants provide highly varied structures with antimicrobial use which are unlikely to be synthesized in laboratories. A special feature of higher plants is their ability to produce a great number of organic chemicals of high structural diversity, the so-called secondary metabolites. Twenty plants were screened to detect their antibacterial activities. Screening results showed that Rheum officinalis was the most efficient against C. jejuni. Fractionation pattern was obtained by column chromatography, while the purity test was done by thin-layer chromatography (TLC). The chemical composition of bioactive compound was characterized using GC-MS, nuclear magnetic resonance, and infrared analysis. Minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the purified compound was 31.25 µg/ml. Cytotoxicity assay on Vero cells was evaluated to be 497 µg/ml. Furthermore, the purified bioactive compound activated human lymphocytes in vitro. The data presented here show that Rheum officinalis could potentially be used in modern applications aimed at the treatment or prevention of foodborne diseases.

Description: Recently, the use of NoSQL databases has grown to manage unstructured data for applications to ensure performance and scalability. However, many organizations prefer to transfer data from an operational NoSQL database to a SQL-based relational database for using existing tools for business intelligence, analytics, decision making, and reporting. The existing methods of NoSQL to relational database transformation require manual schema mapping, which requires domain expertise and consumes noticeable time. Therefore, an efficient and automatic method is needed to transform an unstructured NoSQL database into a structured database. In this paper, we proposed and evaluated an efficient method to transform a NoSQL database into a relational database automatically. In our experimental evaluation, we used MongoDB as a NoSQL database, and MySQL and PostgreSQL as relational databases to perform transformation tasks for different dataset sizes. We observed excellent performance, compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods, in transforming data from a NoSQL database into a relational database.

Description: Knowledge graph is a kind of semantic network for information retrieval. How to construct a knowledge graph that can serve the power system based on the behavior data of dispatchers is a hot research topic in the area of electric power artificial intelligence. In this paper, we propose a method to construct the dispatch knowledge graph for the power grid. By leveraging on dispatch data from the power domain, this method first extracts entities and then identifies dispatching behavior relationship patterns. More specifically, the method includes three steps. First, we construct a corpus of power dispatching behaviors by semi-automated labeling. And then, we propose a model, called the BiLSTM-CRF model, to extract entities and identify the dispatching behavior relationship patterns. Finally, we construct a knowledge graph of power dispatching data. The knowledge graph provides an underlying knowledge model for automated power dispatching and related services and helps dispatchers perform better power dispatch knowledge retrieval and other operations during the dispatch process.

Description: With the advancement in ICT, web search engines have become a preferred source to find health-related information published over the Internet. Google alone receives more than one billion health-related queries on a daily basis. However, in order to provide the results most relevant to the user, WSEs maintain the users’ profiles. These profiles may contain private and sensitive information such as the user’s health condition, disease status, and others. Health-related queries contain privacy-sensitive information that may infringe user’s privacy, as the identity of a user is exposed and may be misused by the WSE and third parties. This raises serious concerns since the identity of a user is exposed and may be misused by third parties. One well-known solution to preserve privacy involves issuing the queries via peer-to-peer private information retrieval protocol, such as useless user profile (UUP), thereby hiding the user’s identity from the WSE. This paper investigates the level of protection offered by UUP. For this purpose, we present QuPiD (query profile distance) attack: a machine learning-based attack that evaluates the effectiveness of UUP in privacy protection. QuPiD attack determines the distance between the user’s profile (web search history) and upcoming query using our proposed novel feature vector. The experiments were conducted using ten classification algorithms belonging to the tree-based, rule-based, lazy learner, metaheuristic, and Bayesian families for the sake of comparison. Furthermore, two subsets of an America Online dataset (noisy and clean datasets) were used for experimentation. The results show that the proposed QuPiD attack associates more than 70% queries to the correct user with a precision of over 72% for the clean dataset, while for the noisy dataset, the proposed QuPiD attack associates more than 40% queries to the correct user with 70% precision.

Description: In this paper, we mainly study the solution and properties of the multiterm time-fractional diffusion equation. First, we obtained the stochastic representation for this equation, which turns to be a subordinated process. Based on the stochastic representation, we calculated the mean square displacement (MSD) and time average mean square displacement, then proved some properties of this model, including subdiffusion, generalized Einstein relationship, and nonergodicity. Finally, a stochastic simulation algorithm was developed for the visualization of sample path of the abnormal diffusion process. The Monte Carlo method was also employed to show the behavior of the solution of this fractional equation.

Description: Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the most common cause of gastric ulcer; however, its association with gastric cancer has been proved through a variety of studies. Importantly, H. pylori infection affects around half of the world’s population leading to a variety of gastric problems and is mostly present in asymptomatic form. Although about 20% of people infected with H. pylori develop preneoplastic gastric lesions in later stages of their life, around 2% of infected individuals develop gastric cancer. Nevertheless, the outcome of H. pylori infection is determined by complex interaction between the host genetics, its environment, and virulence factors of infecting strain. There are several biomarkers/traits of H. pylori that have been linked with the onset of cancer. Among these, presence of certain major virulence factors including cytotoxin-associated gene A (CagA), vacuolating cytotoxin (VacA), and outer inflammatory protein A (OipA) plays a significant role in triggering gastric cancer. These factors of H. pylori make it a potent carcinogen. Therefore, eradication of H. pylori infection has shown positive effects on decreasing the risk of gastric cancer, but this has become a challenge due to the development of antibiotic resistance in H. pylori against the antibiotics of choice. Thus, the unmet need is to develop new and effective treatments for H. pylori infection, considering the antimicrobial resistance in different regions of the world. This review discusses the properties of H. pylori associated with increased risk of gastric cancer, antibiotic resistance pattern, and the possible role of eradication of H. pylori in preventing gastric cancer.

Description: Natural products are used as alternative drugs in traditional medicine to treat infection and inflammation and relieve pain. Heartwood of Cassia garettiana Craib has been investigated as an ingredient in Thai traditional medicine for anti-HIV protease, but there is no report on its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activities. The objectives of this study were to investigate the anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activities, time-kill profile, and main active constituents of an ethanolic extract of C. garettiana heartwood. The study followed the generally accepted experimental design. All tests were investigated in triplicate. The heartwood of C. garettiana was extracted by maceration with 95% EtOH. The antibacterial activity of the extract and its chemical constituents were determined by their MIC values using resazurin as an indicator. Time-kill profile was determined at 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 24 hrs and expressed as log CFU/mL. The anti-inflammatory activity of the extract and its chemical components was investigated by their inhibiting effect on IL-6 and TNF-α production by ELISA. The ethanolic extract was analyzed for its chemical constituents by HPLC technique. The ethanolic extract showed both dose- and time-dependent bactericidal effects against Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistance Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella Typhi, Salmonella Typhimurium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Shigella dysenteriae with MIC values of 312.5, 312.5, 312.5, 1,250, 2,500, 625, 625, 2,500, and 625 μg/mL, respectively. It showed an inhibiting effect on IL-6 production at concentrations of 12.5 to 100 μg/mL. The main active chemical constituent of C. garettiana was piceatannol that showed antibacterial activity against all test bacteria except P. aeruginosa. C. garettiana showed a broad spectrum of antibacterial activity against both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. Piceatannol and resveratrol from the plant strongly inhibited IL-6 production. Based on these results, we concluded that the ethanolic extract of C. garettiana showed both an antibacterial activity and inhibition of IL-6. Piceatannol is the active constituent of the extract and showed anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activities against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria.

Description: Deep borehole heat exchanger (DBHE) technology does not depend on the existence of hot water reservoir and can be used in various regions. However, the heat extraction from DBHE can hardly be improved due to poor thermal conductivity of rocks. Here, a single-well enhanced geothermal system (SWEGS) is proposed, which has a larger heat-exchange area of artificial reservoir created by fracturing hydrothermal technology. We find that, due to heat convection between rocks and fluid, the extracted thermal output for SWEGS is 4772.73 kW, which is 10.64 times of that of DBHE. By changing the injection water temperature, volume flow rate, and artificial reservoir volume, it is easy to adjust the extracted thermal output to meet the requirement of building thermal loads varying with outdoor air temperature. Understanding these will enable us to better apply SWEGS technology and solve the fog and haze problem easily and efficiently.

Description: In this paper, we study the synchronization problem for nonlinearly coupled complex dynamical networks on time scales. To achieve synchronization for nonlinearly coupled complex dynamical networks on time scales, a pinning control strategy is designed. Some pinning synchronization criteria are established for nonlinearly coupled complex dynamical networks on time scales, which guarantee the whole network can be pinned to some desired state. The model investigated in this paper generalizes the continuous-time and discrete-time nonlinearly coupled complex dynamical networks to a unique and general framework. Moreover, two numerical examples are given for illustration and verification of the obtained results.

Description: Extreme rainfall accompanied by strong winds hit the province of Bengkulu in the western coastal area of Sumatera Island during September 19-20, 2017, causing floods and landslides in Seluma and Central Bengkulu district. This extreme rainfall was recorded by Bengkulu Meteorological Station about 257.0 mm day−1 using rain-gauge observation. The spatial distribution of extreme rainfall cannot be seen if only using a rain-gauge observation in this location. The spatial distribution of extreme rainfall is needed to identify the impact of rainfall on landslides in large areas. The study aims to (1) develop the reconstruction of the spatial distribution of extreme rainfall using weather radar and (2) investigate the trigger that caused extreme rainfall by analyzing the synoptic-scale tropical waves. Each weather radar datum is saved in a Constant Altitude Plan Position Indicator (CAPPI). To get rainfall information, the CAPPI must be derived from Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (QPE) values. In this paper, we derived CAPPI using a Marshall-Palmer reflectivity-rain rate relationship. The result shows that rainfall formed on September 20, 2017, 21.00 UTC with total daily rainfall ranged between 176 and 247 mm in both districts and the mean of total daily rainfall has exceeded the average of monthly rainfall. The analysis of tropical waves suggests that only Kelvin waves were active and served as a possible trigger factor while the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and Equatorial Rossby (ER) waves were inactive during this extreme rainfall.

Description: Water hyacinths pose serious challenges to humanity and the environment. Considering the enormity of the menace associated with the growth and spread of the plant and the difficulty in achieving a single, generally acceptable control method, it is becoming increasingly imperative to explore the potentials of the plant. New water hyacinth-related articles are regularly being published. Recently published articles about the plant were accessed, and the information in these articles is presented in the context of the pros and cons of the plant. Some of the benefits that can be derived from the plant include biogas and biofuel production, medicinal functions, vermicomposting, compost production, and bioremediation. However, clogging of waterways, obstruction of water transportation, and fishing activities; breeding grounds for pests and diseases; and reduction of water quality, loss of biodiversity, and economic downturn in areas invaded by the plant are problems associated with it. The peculiarity in the invasiveness of each situation should determine whether or not the growth of the plant is a problem, especially if the opportunity to harness the potentials of the plant exists. There are three major methods for controlling the plants when control becomes inevitable: mechanical, chemical, and biological. To achieve the best control, integrating two or more control methods is advised.

Description: Wind farm siting relies on in situ measurements and statistical analysis of the wind distribution. The current statistical methods include distribution functions. The one that is known to provide the best fit to the nature of the wind is the Weibull distribution function. It is relatively straightforward to parameterize wind resources with the Weibull function if the distribution fits what the function represents but the estimation process gets complicated if the distribution of the wind is diverse in terms of speed and direction. In this study, data from a 101 m meteorological mast were used to test several estimation methods. The available data display seasonal variations, with low wind speeds in different seasons and effects of a moderately complex surrounding. The results show that the maximum likelihood method is much more successful than industry standard WAsP method when the diverse winds with high percentile of low wind speed occur.

Description: In this paper, we solve a generalized Klein-Gordon oscillator in the cosmic string space-time with a scalar potential of Cornell-type within the Kaluza-Klein theory and obtain the relativistic energy eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. We extend this analysis by replacing the Cornell-type with Coulomb-type potential in the magnetic cosmic string space-time and analyze a relativistic analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm effect for bound states.

Description: In this paper, we introduce the Hom-algebra setting of the notions of matching Rota-Baxter algebras, matching (tri)dendriform algebras, and matching pre-Lie algebras. Moreover, we study the properties and relationships between categories of these matching Hom-algebraic structures.

Description: In this paper, we study the SIR epidemic model with vital dynamics Ṡ=−βSI+μN−S,İ=βSI−γ+μI,Ṙ=γI−μR, from the point of view of integrability. In the case of the death/birth rate μ=0, the SIR model is integrable, and we provide its general solutions by implicit functions, two Lax formulations and infinitely many Hamilton-Poisson realizations. In the case of μ≠0, we prove that the SIR model has no polynomial or proper rational first integrals by studying the invariant algebraic surfaces. Moreover, although the SIR model with μ≠0 is not integrable and we cannot get its exact solution, based on the existence of an invariant algebraic surface, we give the global dynamics of the SIR model with μ≠0.

Description: As a sportification form of human-computer interaction, eSports is facing great gender stereotype threat and causing female players’ withdraw. This study aims to investigate the relationship between gender-swapping and females’ continuous participation intention in eSports, the mediating effect of self-efficacy, and the moderating effect of discrimination. The results demonstrate (1) that the effect of gender-swapping on continuous participation intention in eSports was not significant, while gender-swapping had a significant association with self-efficacy, and self-efficacy had a significant association with continuous participation intention in eSports; (2) that gender-swapping had an indirect effect (via self-efficacy) on continuous participation intention in eSports; and (3) that discrimination moderated the effect of self-efficacy on continuous participation intention. Female players who had experienced discrimination displayed higher continuous participation intention in the context of self-efficacy enhanced by gender-swapping.

Description: In order to study the detailed dynamics and associated nonperturbative features of QCD, a dual version of the color gauge theory based on a topologically viable homogeneous fibre bundle approach has been analysed taking into account its magnetic symmetry structure. In the dynamically broken phase of magnetic symmetry, the associated flux tube structure on a S2 sphere in the magnetically condensed state of the dual QCD vacuum has been analyzed for the profiles of the color electric field using flux quantization and stability conditions. The color electric field has its intimate association with the vector mode of the magnetically condensed QCD vacuum, and such field configurations have been analyzed to show that the color electric flux gets localized towards the poles for a large sphere case while it gets uniformly distributed for the small sphere case in the infrared sector of QCD. The critical flux tube densities have been computed for various couplings and are shown to be in agreement with that for lead-ion central collisions in the near infrared sector of QCD. The possible annihilation/unification of flux tubes under some typical flux tube density and temperature conditions in the magnetic symmetry broken phase of QCD has also been analyzed and shown to play an important role in the process of QGP formation. The thermal variation of the profiles of the color electic field is further investigated which indicates the survival of flux tubes even in the thermal domain that leads the possibility of the formation of some exotic states like QGP in the intermediate regime during the quark-hadron phase transition.

Description: Source code similarity detection has extensive applications in computer programming teaching and software intellectual property protection. In the teaching of computer programming courses, students may utilize some complex source code obfuscation techniques, e.g., opaque predicates, loop unrolling, and function inlining and outlining, to reduce the similarity between code fragments and avoid the plagiarism detection. Existing source code similarity detection approaches only consider static features of source code, making it difficult to cope with more complex code obfuscation techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel source code similarity detection approach by considering the dynamic features at runtime of source code using process mining. More specifically, given two pieces of source code, their running logs are obtained by source code instrumentation and execution. Next, process mining is used to obtain the flow charts of the two pieces of source code by analyzing their collected running logs. Finally, similarity of the two pieces of source code is measured by computing the similarity of these two flow charts. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can deal with more complex obfuscation techniques including opaque predicates and loop unrolling as well as function inlining and outlining, which cannot be handled by existing work properly. Therefore, we argue that our approach can defeat commonly used code obfuscation techniques more effectively for source code similarity detection than the existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Description: With the rapid development of Internet and big data, place retrieval has become an indispensable part of daily life. However, traditional retrieval technology cannot meet the semantic needs of users. Knowledge graph has been introduced into the new-generation retrieval systems to improve retrieval performance. Knowledge graph abstracts things into entities and establishes relationships among entities, which are expressed in the form of triples. However, with the expansion of knowledge graph and the rapid increase of data volume, traditional place retrieval methods on knowledge graph have low performance. This paper designs a place retrieval method in order to improve the efficiency of place retrieval. Firstly, perform data preprocessing and problem model building in the offline stage. Meanwhile, build semantic distance index, spatial quadtree index, and spatial semantic hybrid index according to semantic and spatial information. At the same time, in the online retrieval stage, this paper designs an efficient query algorithm and ranking model based on the index information constructed in the offline stage, aiming at improving the overall performance of the retrieval system. Finally, we use experiment to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the place retrieval method based on knowledge graph in terms of retrieval accuracy and retrieval efficiency under the real data.

Description: I investigate a class of models with scalar and pseudoscalar solutions to the g−2 anomaly for both the muon and the electron over the mass range of perturbativity (mϕ≲50 GeV), with Yukawa couplings proportional to the lepton’s mass. In particular, I investigate the constraints from BaBar, beam dump experiments, Z decay measured quantities, LEP mono-γ searches, ee⟶ττγ searches, and solar and horizontal branch (HB) star bounds. For a pseudoscalar, I find that no region in the parameter space can simultaneously provide a solution for both the electron and the muon anomalies while maintaining the required form of the couplings, and therefore, the pseudoscalar solution is disfavored. On the other hand, I find for the scalar case that there is an open window above ~30 MeV in the allowed region, but with significant tension with experiment for the region mϕ≳10 GeV. In addition, there is a smaller window between ~350 KeV and 1 MeV that is not ruled out by cosmological observations. Part of the first open window is expected to be covered by the proposed NA64 experiment. Similar analysis can be readily applied to other proposed solutions to the anomaly, such as solutions with Z′ or with the dark photon.

Description: The motivation for the research is the need to develop an integrated and holistic approach to fostering students’ scientific inquiry based on scientific programming education by conducting computational experiments and simulations. At the same time, the implementation of the learner-centred approaches to scientific programming education and the related development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learner-centred educational environment are of primary importance for K-16 education. The key interest is how to design and integrate learning resources which include software learning objects for making simulations. The research investigates educational aspects of the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework applied to scientific computing and scientific programming educational domain and provides methodological guidelines and design principles of practical implementation of educational resources. These include design principles for the development of the model-based scientific inquiry-centred learning resources, generic design templates for designing educational aspects of scientific programming education, generic use case models for learning resources for scientific programming education, and supportive methodological considerations.

Description: Boron nitride (BN) nanomaterials such as boron nitride graphenes, boron nitride nanotubes, and boron nitride nanocones are attracting attention among the most promising nanomaterials due to their physical, chemical, and electronic properties when compared to other nanomaterials. BN nanomaterials suggest many exciting potential applications in various fields. Joining between BN nanostructures gives new enhanced structures with outstanding properties and potential applications for design of probes for scanning tunnelling microscopy and other nanoscale devices. This paper uses calculus of variations to model the joining between BN graphene with other BN nanostructures: BNNTs and BNNCs. Furthermore, during the joining between these BN nanostructures, this research examines two models which are depending on the curvature of the join profile. For the first case, Model I refers to when the join profile only includes positive curvature where for the second case, Model II is considered for both positive and negative curvatures. Thus, the purpose of this research is to formulate the basic underlying structure to present simple models based on joining BN graphene to other BN nanostructures.

Description: The object of the paper is to study some properties of the generalized Einstein tensor GX,Y which is recurrent and birecurrent on pseudo-Ricci symmetric manifolds PRSn. Considering the generalized Einstein tensor GX,Y as birecurrent but not recurrent, we state some theorems on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the birecurrency tensor of GX,Y to be symmetric.

Description: Bacterial infections are responsible for a large number of deaths every year worldwide. On average, 80% of the African population cannot afford conventional drugs. Moreover, many synthetic antibiotics are associated with side effects and progressive increase in antimicrobial resistance. Currently, there is growing interest in discovering new antibacterial agents from ethnomedicinal plants. About 60% of the population living in developing countries depends on herbal drugs for healthcare needs. This study involved the screening of Centella asiatica commonly used by herbal medicine practitioners in Kisii County to treat symptoms related to bacterial infections. Standard bioassay methods were applied throughout the study. They included preliminary screening of dichloromethane: methanolic extract of Centella asiatica against human pathogenic bacteria including Salmonella typhi ATCC 19430, Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, Shigella sonnei ATCC 25931, Bacillus subtilis ATCC 21332, and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923 using agar disc diffusion, broth microdilution method, and time-kill kinetics with tetracycline as a positive control. Phytochemical screening was carried out to determine the different classes of compounds in the crude extracts. Data were analyzed using one way ANOVA and means separated by Tukey’s test. Dichloromethane: methanolic extract of Centella asiatica was screened against the selected bacterial strains. Time-kill kinetic studies of the extracts showed dose- and time-dependent kinetics of antibacterial properties. Phytochemical screening of the DCM-MeOH extract revealed the presence of alkaloids, flavonoids, phenolics, terpenoids, cardiac glycosides, saponins, steroids, and tannins. The present study indicates that the tested plant can be an important source of antibacterial agents and recommends that the active phytoconstituents be isolated, identified, and screened individually for activities and also subjected further for in vivo and toxicological studies.

Description: Cognitive radar is an intelligent radar system, and adaptive waveform design is one of the core problems in cognitive radar research. In the previous studies, it is assumed that the prior information of the target is known, and the definition of target spectrum variance has not changed. In this paper, we study on robust waveform design problem in multiple targets scene. We hope that the upper and lower bounds of the uncertainty range of robustness are more close to the actual situation, and establish a finite time random target signal model based on mutual information (MI). On the basis of the optimal transmitted waveform and robust waveform based on MI, we redefine the target spectrum variance as harmonic variance, and propose a novel robust waveform design method based on harmonic variance and MI. We compare its performance with robust waveform based on original variance. Simulation results show that, in the situation of multiple targets, compared to the original variance, the MI lifting rate of robust waveform based on harmonic variance relative to the optimal transmitted waveform in the uncertainty range has great improvement. In certain circumstances, robust waveform based on harmonic variance and MI is more suitable for more targets.

Description: The receiver is a signal receiving device in a radio telescope system. As an important parameter to characterize the receiver performance, noise temperature is very practical to calibrate accurately. The traditional receiver noise temperature calibration method is the cold and ambient load method. Through the establishment of K-band ambient receiver, and its amplitude calibration test platform of the cold and ambient load method, chopper wheel method, and ambient and hot load method, comparison and analysis of the above three methods were carried out. The test and calculation results show that the test accuracy of the cold and ambient load method is about 1.3%, that of the chopper wheel method (nonlow elevation) is about 3%, and that of the ambient and hot load method is about 9%. The test accuracy of the ambient and hot load method is slightly lower than that of the above two methods. The analysis is mainly due to the uncertainty of the hot load temperature and the small temperature difference between the two loads, which leads to the deterioration of the overall accuracy. But the advantage is that the method can perform real-time calibration in the process of observation, and it is easier to implement than the traditional cold and ambient load method. The results of noise temperature measurement are compared with those of theoretical calculation, the error is basically within 10%, and it can satisfy the demand of the noise temperature test. In the future, we expect that on the basis of increasing the hot load temperature, further experiments were carried out on the thermostatic treatment of hot load and the accuracy of temperature acquisition, and finally we hope that this method can better meet the testing requirements of receiver noise temperature and radio source amplitude calibration.

Description: Lysine malonylation is a novel-type protein post-translational modification and plays essential roles in many biological activities. Having a good knowledge of malonylation sites can provide guidance in many issues, including disease prevention and drug discovery and other related fields. There are several experimental approaches to identify modification sites in the field of biology. However, these methods seem to be expensive. In this study, we proposed malNet, which employed neural network and utilized several novel and effective feature description methods. It was pointed that ANN’s performance is better than other models. Furthermore, we trained the classifiers according to an original crossvalidation method named Split to Equal validation (SEV). The results achieved AUC value of 0.6684, accuracy of 54.93%, and MCC of 0.1045, which showed great improvement than before.

Description: In this article, the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and multiconfiguration gas-turbines are used to predict the optimal gas-turbine operating parameters. The principle formulations of gas-turbine configurations with various operating conditions are introduced in detail. The effects of different parameters have been analyzed to select the optimum gas-turbine configuration. The adopted ANFIS model has five inputs, namely, isentropic turbine efficiency (Teff), isentropic compressor efficiency (Ceff), ambient temperature (T1), pressure ratio (rp), and turbine inlet temperature (TIT), as well as three outputs, fuel consumption, power output, and thermal efficiency. Both actual reported information, from Baiji Gas-Turbines of Iraq, and simulated data were utilized with the ANFIS model. The results show that, at an isentropic compressor efficiency of 100% and turbine inlet temperature of 1900 K, the peak thermal efficiency amounts to 63% and 375 MW of power resulted, which was the peak value of the power output. Furthermore, at an isentropic compressor efficiency of 100% and a pressure ratio of 30, a peak specific fuel consumption amount of 0.033 kg/kWh was obtained. The predicted results reveal that the proposed model determines the operating conditions that strongly influence the performance of the gas-turbine. In addition, the predicted results of the simulated regenerative gas-turbine (RGT) and ANFIS model were satisfactory compared to that of the foregoing Baiji Gas-Turbines.

Description: With the advancement in modern computational technologies like cloud computing, there has been tremendous growth in the field of data processing and encryption technologies. In this contest there is an increasing demand for successful storage of the data in the encrypted domain to avoid the possibility of data breach in shared networks. In this paper, a novel approach for speech encryption algorithm based on quantum chaotic system is designed. In the proposed method, classical bits of the speech samples are initially encoded in nonorthogonal quantum state by the secret polarizing angle. In the quantum domain, encoded speech samples are subjected to bit-flip operation according to the Controlled–NOT gate followed by Hadamard transform. Complete superposition of the quantum state in both Hadamard and standard basis is achieved through Hadamard transform. Control bits for C-NOT gate as well as Hadamard gate are generated with a modified -hyperchaotic system. Secret nonorthogonal rotation angles and initial conditions of the hyperchaotic system are the keys used to ensure the security of the proposed algorithm. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm has been analysed both in quantum domain and classical domain. Numerical simulation carried out based on the above principle showed that the proposed speech encryption algorithm has wider keyspace, higher key sensitivity and robust against various differential and statistical cryptographic attacks.

Description: In this paper, a complete Lie symmetry analysis is performed for a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation for growing cell populations. Moreover, an optimal system of one-dimensional subalgebras is constructed and used to find similarity reductions and invariant solutions. A new power series solution is constructed via the reduced equation, and its convergence is proved.

Description: Based on the weighted complex network model, this paper establishes a multiweight complex network model, which possesses several different weights on the one edge. According to the method of network split, the complex network with multiweights is split into several different complex networks with single weight. Some new static characteristics, such as node weight, node degree, node weight strength, node weight distribution, edge weight distribution, and diversity of weight distribution are defined. Then, by using Lyapunov stability theory, the adaptive feedback synchronization controller is designed, and the complete synchronization of the new complex network model is investigated. Two numerical examples of a triweight network model with the same and diverse structure are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the control strategies. The synchronization design can achieve good results in the same and diverse structure network models with multiweights, which enrich complex network and control theory, so has certain theoretical and practical significance.

Description: We consider wave propagation problems in which there is a preferred direction of propagation. To account for propagation in preferred directions, the wave equation is decomposed into a set of coupled equations for waves that propagate in opposite directions along the preferred axis. This decomposition is not unique. We discuss flux-normalised and field-normalised decomposition in a systematic way, analyse the symmetry properties of the decomposition operators, and use these symmetry properties to derive reciprocity theorems for the decomposed wave fields, for both types of normalisation. Based on the field-normalised reciprocity theorems, we derive representation theorems for decomposed wave fields. In particular, we derive double- and single-sided Kirchhoff-Helmholtz integrals for forward and backward propagation of decomposed wave fields. The single-sided Kirchhoff-Helmholtz integrals for backward propagation of field-normalised decomposed wave fields find applications in reflection imaging, accounting for multiple scattering.

Description: The investigation of labor is a key aspect of population research, and labor accounting, as its foundation, is an important means to judge the degree of economic development and monitor the changes of the labor market, having always been a focus of scholarly research. At present, the sharing economy is on the rise worldwide and influences labor accounting. In this paper, starting from the context of the sharing economy and the current situation of labor accounting, several important aspects of labor accounting will be discussed. In the context of the sharing economy, household subsistence service production is to be included in the production accounting boundary, which is the root of the changes in labor accounting. On this basis, the following findings are drawn. (1) The scope of accounting for employment should be expanded, which puts higher demands on the labor accounting method. (2) Working time should be remeasured, especially indicators based on pay time. (3) Finally, the design of indicators in labor underutilization also requires the formation of new ideas, especially unemployment should be redefined. Finally, in view of the current status of labor accounting in China, policy suggestions for future improvement under the sharing economy are put forward.

Description: In the past, Kundu et al. and Chakraborty et al. used extra scalar fields to cancel the quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass squared and they determined the mass of the required scalar field. In this work, a spin-3/2 particle has been used in the same manner to nullify the power-law divergences, and it is determined that the mass of the spin-3/2 particle resides in the ball park of the GUT scale.

Description: We investigate the vacuum instability in the presence of dilaton field in a holographic setup. Although the dilaton is a bulk field, it leads to the vacuum instability on the boundary. We show that the whole process crucially depends on the probe brane position and as well on the radial coordinate so that the effects of dilaton scale parameter in different regions of the bulk or for different probe brane positions are different. We also observe that in our study, the temperature can strengthen the effect of scale parameter in reducing the potential barrier. Finally, we show that this Schwinger-like effect, although is interesting by itself, does not produce a considerable pair production rate.

Description: The yield ratios of negatively to positively charged pions (), negatively to positively charged kaons (), and anti-protons to protons () produced in mid-rapidity interval in central gold-gold (Au-Au) collisions, central lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions, and inelastic (INEL) or non-single-diffractive (NSD) proton-proton () collisions, as well as in forward rapidity region in INEL collisions are analyzed in the present work. Over an energy range from a few GeV to above 10 TeV, the chemical potentials of light flavor particles (pion, kaon, and proton) and quarks (up, down, and strange quarks) are extracted from the mentioned yield ratios in which the contributions of strong decay from high-mass resonance and weak decay from heavy flavor hadrons are removed. Most energy dependent chemical potentials show the maximum at about 4 GeV, while the energy dependent yield ratios do not show such an extremum.

Description: Representation of approximation for manifolds of the stochastic Swift-Hohenberg equation with multiplicative noise has been investigated via non-Markovian reduced system. The approximate parameterizations of the small scales for the large scales are given in the process of seeking for stochastic parameterizing manifolds, which are obtained as pullback limits of some backward-forward systems depending on the time-history of the dynamics of the low modes in a mean square sense through the nonlinear terms. When the corresponding pullback limits of some backward-forward systems are efficiently determined, the corresponding non-Markovian reduced systems can be obtained for researching good modeling performances in practice.

Description: Soliton molecules of the (2 + 1)-dimensional variable-coefficient Caudrey-Dodd-Gibbon-Kotera-Sawada equation are derived by -soliton solutions and a new velocity resonance condition. Moreover, soliton molecules can become asymmetric solitons when the distance between two solitons of the molecule is small enough. Finally, we obtained some novel types of hybrid solutions which are components of soliton molecules, lump waves, and breather waves by applying velocity resonance, module resonance of wave number, and long wave limit method. Some figures are presented to demonstrate clearly dynamics features of these solutions.

Description: In this paper, we discussed the quantum plasma system. A nonlinear dynamic disturbed model is studied. We used the undetermined coefficients method, dimensionless transformation and traveling wave transformation for the hyperbolic functions, and perturbation theory and method; then, the solitary wave solution for the quantum plasma nonlinear dynamic model is solved. Finally, the characteristics of the corresponding physical quantity are described.

Description: In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear wave solutions for a ()-dimensional equation which can be reduced to the potential KdV equation. We present generalized -soliton solutions in which some arbitrarily differentiable functions are involved by using a simplified Hirota’s method. Our work extends some previous results.

Description: Periodic solutions of the Coulomb equation motion for three equal negative point charges in the field of six equal positive point charges fixed in vertices of a convex octagon are found. The system possesses an equilibrium configuration. The Lyapunov center theorem is applied.

Description: Among agricultural soil amendment that can enhance crop productivity and soil sustainability is biochar. Hence, two-year field experiments were conducted on a sandy loam Alfisol at Owo, southwest Nigeria, to evaluate the effects of biochar produced from hardwood on soil physical and chemical characteristics, erosion potential, and cocoyam (Xanthosoma sagittifolium (L.) Schott) yield. The study was a 2 × 4 factorial experiment with two years (2017 and 2018) and four biochar levels (0 (control), 10, 20, and 30 t ha−1). The treatments were laid out in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Results indicated that biochar application significantly in both years improved yield of cocoyam and soil physical (bulk density, porosity, moisture content, mean weight diameter (MWD) of soil aggregates, dispersion ratio, and infiltration rate) and chemical (soil organic matter, pH, N, P, K, Ca, Mg, and CEC) properties and erosion resistance. Soil characteristics and cocoyam yield improved with level of biochar from 0–30 t ha−1. When 2018 is compared with 2017 in term of soil loss, in the amended plots, 2018 reduced soil loss by 7.4, 20, and 73.5%, respectively, for 10, 20, and 30 t ha−1biochar, whereas there was an increase of 2.7% soil loss in the control plot in 2018 compared with 2017. Therefore, application rate of 30 t ha−1 biochar is considered as suitable for severely degraded soil because this application rate efficiently improves cocoyam yield and soil properties and reduces soil loss.

Description: To investigate the periodic behaviour and relationship of sunspot numbers with cosmic ray intensity and solar wind speed, we present analysis from daily data generated from 1995 January to 2018 December. Cross-correlation and wavelet transform tools were employed to carry out the investigation. The analyses confirmed that the cosmic ray intensity correlates negatively with the sunspot numbers, exhibiting an asynchronous phase relationship with a strong negative correlation. The trend in cosmic ray intensity indicates that it undergoes the 11-year modulation that mainly depends on the solar activity in the heliosphere. On the other hand, the solar wind speed neither shows a clear phase relationship nor correlates with the sunspot numbers but shows a wide range of periodicities that could possibly be connected to the pattern of coronal hole configuration. A number of short and midterm variations were also observed from the wavelet analysis, i.e., 64–128 and 128–256 days for the cosmic ray intensity, 4–8, 32–64, 128–256, and 256–512 days for the solar wind speed, and 16–32, 32–64, 128–256, and 256–512 days for the sunspot numbers.

Description: Two new orthogonal functions named the left- and the right-shifted fractional-order Legendre polynomials (SFLPs) are proposed. Several useful formulas for the SFLPs are directly generalized from the classic Legendre polynomials. The left and right fractional differential expressions in Caputo sense of the SFLPs are derived. As an application, it is effective for solving the fractional-order differential equations with the initial value problem by using the SFLP tau method.

Description: In the present paper, we study the blowup of the solutions to the full compressible Euler system and pressureless Euler-Poisson system with time-dependent damping. By some delicate analysis, some Riccati-type equations are achieved, and then, the finite time blowup results can be derived.

Description: As one of the possible signals for the whereabouts of the critical point on the QCD phase diagram, recently, the multiplicity fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions have aroused much attention. It is a crucial observation of the Beam Energy Scan program of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In this work, we investigate the centrality dependence of the multiplicity fluctuations regarding the recent measurements from STAR Collaboration. By employing a hydrodynamical approach, the present study is dedicated to the noncritical aspects of the phenomenon. To be specific, in addition to the thermal fluctuations, finite volume corrections, and resonance decay at the freeze-out surface, the model is focused on the properties of the hydrodynamic expansion of the system and the event-by-event initial fluctuations. It is understood that the real signal of the critical point can only be obtained after appropriately subtracting the background; the latter is investigated in the present work. Besides the experimental data, our results are also compared to those of the hadronic resonance gas, as well as the transport models.

Description: It was first observed at the end of the last century that the universe is presently accelerating. Ever since, there have been several attempts to explain this observation theoretically. There are two possible approaches. The more conventional one is to modify the matter part of the Einstein field equations, and the second one is to modify the geometry part. We shall consider two phenomenological models based on the former, more conventional approach within the context of general relativity. The phenomenological models in this paper consider a term firstly a function of and secondly a function of , where and are the scale factor and matter energy density, respectively. Constraining the free parameters of the models with the latest observational data gives satisfactory values of parameters as considered by us initially. Without any field theoretic interpretation, we explain the recent observations with a dynamical cosmological constant.

Description: Bowel preparation traditionally refers to the removal of bowel contents via mechanical cleansing measures. Although it has been a common practice for more than 70 years, its use is based mostly on expert opinion rather than solid evidence. Mechanical bowel preparation in minimally invasive and vaginal gynecologic surgery is strongly debated, since many studies have not confirmed its effectiveness, neither in reducing postoperative infectious morbidity nor in improving surgeons’ performance. A comprehensive search of Medline/PubMed and the Cochrane Library Database was conducted, for related articles up to June 2019, including terms such as “mechanical bowel preparation,” “vaginal surgery,” “minimally invasive,” and “gynecology.” We aimed to determine the best practice regarding bowel preparation before these surgical approaches. In previous studies, bowel preparation was evaluated only via mechanical measures. The identified randomized trials in laparoscopic approach and in vaginal surgery were 8 and 4, respectively. Most of them compare different types of preparation, with patients being separated into groups of oral laxatives, rectal measures (enema), low residue diet, and fasting. The outcomes of interest are the quality of the surgical field, postoperative infectious complications, length of hospital stay, and patients’ comfort during the whole procedure. The results are almost identical regardless of the procedure’s type. Routine administration of bowel preparation seems to offer no advantage to any of the objectives mentioned above. Taking into consideration the fact that in most gynecologic cases there is minimal probability of bowel intraluminal entry and, thus, low surgical site infection rates, most scientific societies have issued guidelines against the use of any bowel preparation regimen before laparoscopic or vaginal surgery. Nonetheless, surgeons still do not use a specific pattern and continue ordering them. However, according to recent evidence, preoperative bowel preparation of any type should be omitted prior to minimally invasive and vaginal gynecologic surgeries.

Description: The stochastic strongly dissipative Zakharov equations with white noise are studied. On the basis of the time uniform a priori estimates, we prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions in energy spaces and , by using the standard Galerkin approximation method of stochastic partial differential equations.

Description: In this paper, a super Wadati-Konno-Ichikawa (WKI) hierarchy associated with a matrix spectral problem is derived with the help of the zero-curvature equation. We obtain the super bi-Hamiltonian structures by using of the super trace identity. Infinitely, many conserved laws of the super WKI equation are constructed by using spectral parameter expansions.

Description: Through the collision-system configuration, the Tsallis statistics is combined with a multisource thermal model. The improved model is used to investigate the transverse momentum and pseudorapidity of particles produced in Xe–Xe collisions at  TeV. We discuss detailedly the thermodynamic properties, which are taken from the transverse momentum distributions of ,, and for different centralities. The pseudorapidity spectra of charged particles for different centralities are described consistently in the model. And, the model result can estimate intuitively the longitudinal configuration of the collision system.

Description: The deformed Dirac equation invariant under the -Poincaré-Hopf quantum algebra in the context of minimal and scalar couplings under spin and pseudospin symmetry limits is considered. The -deformed Pauli-Dirac Hamiltonian allows us to study effects of quantum deformation in a class of physical systems, such as a Zeeman-like effect, Aharonov-Bohm effect, and an anomalous-like contribution to the electron magnetic moment, between others. In our analysis, we consider the motion of an electron in a uniform magnetic field and interacting with (i) a planar harmonic oscillator and (ii) a linear potential. We verify that the particular choice of a linear potential induces a Coulomb-type term in the equation of motion. Expressions for the energy eigenvalues and wave functions are determined taking into account both symmetry limits. We verify that the energies and wave functions of the particle are modified by the deformation parameter as well as by the element of spin.

Description: This paper proposes the pressureless magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) system by neglecting the effect of pressure difference in the MHD system. Firstly, the Riemann problem for the pressureless MHD system is solved with five kinds of structures of solutions consisting of combinations of shock, rarefaction wave, contact discontinuity, and vacuum state. Secondly, the limit behavior of the obtained Riemann solutions as the magnetic field drops to zero is studied. It is shown that, as the magnetic field vanishes, the Riemann solutions of the pressureless MHD system just tend to the corresponding Riemann solutions of the Euler equations for pressureless fluids. The formation processes of delta shocks and vacuum states are clarified. For the delta shock, both the intermediate density and internal energy simultaneously develop delta measures.

Description: We present errors of quadrature rules for the nearly singular integrals in the momentum-space bound-state equations and give the critical value of the nearly singular parameter. We give error estimates for the expansion method, the Nyström method, and the spectral method which arise from the near singularities in the momentum-space bound-state equations. We show the relations amongst the near singularities, the odd phenomena in the eigenfunctions, and the unreliability of the numerical solutions.

Description: The phase field crystal (PFC) method is a density-functional-type model with atomistic resolution and operating on diffusive time scales which has been proven to be an efficient tool for predicting numerous material phenomena. In this work, we first propose a method to predict viscoelastic-creep and mechanical-hysteresis behaviors in a body-centered-cubic (BCC) solid using a PFC method that is incorporated with a pressure-controlled dynamic equation which enables convenient control of deformation by specifying external pressure. To achieve our objective, we use constant pressure for the viscoelastic-creep study and sinusoidal pressure oscillation for the mechanical-hysteresis study. The parametric studies show that the relaxation time in the viscoelastic-creep phenomena is proportional to temperature. Also, mechanical-hysteresis behavior and the complex moduli predicted by the model are consistent with those of the standard linear solid model in a low-frequency pressure oscillation. Moreover, the impact of temperature on complex moduli is also investigated within the solid-stabilizing range. These results qualitatively agree with experimental and theoretical observations reported in the previous literature. We believe that our work should contribute to extending the capability of the PFC method to investigate the deformation problem when the externally applied pressure is required.

Description: A nonlinear PDE combining with a new fourth-order term is studied. Adding three new fourth-order derivative terms and some second-order derivative terms, we formulate a combined fourth-order nonlinear partial differential equation, which possesses a Hirota’s bilinear form. The class of lump solutions is constructed explicitly through Hirota’s bilinear method. Their dynamical behaviors are analyzed through plots.

Description: The present work investigates the problem of a cylindrical crack in a functionally graded cylinder under thermal impact by using the non-Fourier heat conduction model. The theoretical derivation is performed by methods of Fourier integral transform, Laplace transform, and Cauchy singular integral equation. The concept of heat flux intensity factor is introduced to investigate the heat concentration degree around the crack tip quantitatively. The temperature field and the heat flux intensity factor in the time domain are obtained by transforming the corresponding quantities from the Laplace domain numerically. The effects of heat conduction model, functionally graded parameter, and thermal resistance of crack on the temperature distribution and heat flux intensity factor are studied. This work is beneficial for the thermal design of functionally graded cylinder containing a cylindrical crack.

Description: We investigate an electromagnetic Dirichlet type problem for the 2D quaternionic time-harmonic Maxwell system over a great generality of fractal closed type curves, which bound Jordan domains in . The study deals with a novel approach of -summability condition for the curves, which would be extremely irregular and deserve to be considered fractals. Our technique of proofs is based on the intimate relations between solutions of time-harmonic Maxwell system and those of the Dirac equation through some nonlinear equations, when both cases are reformulated in quaternionic forms.

Description: The combination of traditional retail channel with direct channel adds a new dimension of competition to manufacturers’ distribution system. In this paper, we consider a make-to-order manufacturer with two channels of sale, sale through retailers and online direct sale. The customers are classified into different classes, based on their sensitivity to price and due date. The orders of traditional retail channel customers are fulfilled in the same period of ordering. However, price and due date are quoted to the online customers based on the available capacity as well as the other orders in the pipeline. We develop two different structures of the supply chain: centralized and decentralized dual-channel supply chain which are formulated as bilevel binary nonlinear models. The Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is also developed to obtain a satisfactory near-optimal solution and compared to a genetic algorithm. Through various numerical analyses, we investigate the effects of the customers’ preference of a direct channel on the model’s variables.

Description: By using the method of data-driven reanalysis, the midrapidity transverse momentum spectra of charged hadrons (,, and ) produced in central and peripheral gold-gold (Au-Au) collisions from the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are fitted by using the blast-wave model with the Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics. The model results are in agreement with the experimental data measured by the STAR Collaboration at the RHIC-BES energies. We observe that the kinetic freeze-out temperature , transverse flow velocity , mean transverse momentum , and initial temperature increase with collision energy as well as with event centrality.

Description: Ensete ventricosum is a traditional multipurpose crop mainly used as a staple/co-staple food for over 20 million people in Ethiopia. Despite this, scientific information about the crop is scarce. Three types of food, viz., Kocho (fermented product from scraped pseudostem and grated corm), Bulla (dehydrated juice), and Amicho (boiled corm) can be prepared from enset. These products are particularly rich in carbohydrates, minerals, fibres, and phenolics, but poor in proteins. Such meals are usually served with meat and cheese to supplement proteins. As a food crop, it has useful attributes such as foods can be stored for long time, grows in wide range of environments, produces high yield per unit area, and tolerates drought. It has an irreplaceable role as a feed for animals. Enset starch is found to have higher or comparable quality to potato and maize starch and widely used as a tablet binder and disintegrant and also in pharmaceutical gelling, drug loading, and release processes. Moreover, enset shows high genetic diversity within a population which in turn renders resilience and food security against the ever-changing environmental factors and land use dynamics. Therefore, more research attention and funding should be given to magnify and make wider use of the crop.

Description: In this study, using new approach (laser diffraction + biological dyes), we have demonstrated the decrease of cells viability in vitro in the deuterated growth medium, whereas in the deuterium-depleted medium, there was an increase of cell viability. We have also found that not all dyes are equally sensitive to the D/H ratios in the culture medium (system) as well as to the different cell types (cancer vs normal cells).

Description: In different approaches, the temperature-baryon density plane of QCD matter is studied for deconfinement and chemical freezeout boundaries. Results from various heavy-ion experiments are compared with the recent lattice simulations, the effective QCD-like Polyakov linear-sigma model, and the equilibrium thermal models. Along the entire freezeout boundary, there is an excellent agreement between the thermal model calculations and the experiments. Also, the thermal model calculations agree well with the estimations deduced from the Polyakov linear-sigma model (PLSM). At low baryonic density or high energies, both deconfinement and chemical freezeout boundaries are likely coincident, and therefore, the agreement with the lattice simulations becomes excellent as well, while at large baryonic density, the two boundaries become distinguishable forming a phase where hadrons and quark-gluon plasma likely coexist.

Description: A survey of wild edible plants of Gaddi tribes of Himachal Pradesh was carried out in Chamba and Kangra districts of Himachal Pradesh located in Western Himalayas. The inhabitants subsisted primarily on pastoralism and agriculture and have traditional knowledge on wild edible plants. A total of 49 edible plants belonging to 24 families were recorded in the study area. These were commonly used as vegetables, fruits, spices, and chutney. Nearly half of the species belong to Polygonaceae and Rosaceae families. Herbs, shrubs, climbers, and trees form the habit of these plants. The highest proportion of edible species were herbs (29) followed by trees (10), shrubs (8), climber (1), and Morchella esculenta (fungi) (1).

Description: Study of charged particle multiplicity distribution in high-energy interactions of particles helps in revealing the dynamics of particle production and the underlying statistical patterns, by which these distributions follow. Several distributions derived from statistics have been employed to understand its behaviour. In one of our earlier papers, we introduced the shifted Gompertz distribution to investigate this variable and showed that the multiplicity distributions in a variety of processes at different energies can be very well described by this distribution. The fact that the shifted Gompertz distribution, which has been extensively used in diffusion theory, social networking and forecasting, has been used for the first time in high-energy physics collisions remains interesting. In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of oscillatory behaviour of the counting statistics observed in the high-energy experimental data, resulting from different types of recurrence relations defining the probability distributions. We search for such oscillations in the multiplicity distributions well described by the shifted Gompertz distribution and look for retrieval of additional valuable information from these distributions.

Description: In this paper, tracking controller and synchronization controller of the Arneodo chaotic system with uncertain parameters and input saturation are considered. An adaptive tracking control law and an adaptive synchronization control law are proposed based on backstepping and Lyapunov stability theory. The adaptive laws of the unknown parameters are derived by using the Lyapunov stability theory. To handle the effect caused by the input saturation, an auxiliary system is used to compensate the tracking error and synchronization error. The proposed adaptive tracking control and synchronization schemes ensure the effects of tracking and synchronization. Several examples have been detailed to illuminate the design procedure.

Description: Lepton mixing patterns from the modular group PSL2(7) with generalized CP symmetries are studied. The residual symmetries in both charged lepton and neutrino sectors are . Seven types of mixing patterns at the 3σ level of the new global fit data are obtained. Among these patterns, three types of patterns can give the Dirac CP phase which is in the 1σ range of the global fit data. The effective mass of neutrinoless double-beta decay for these patterns is also examined.

Description: This paper analyzes a case with the patient having focal structural epilepsy by processing electroencephalogram (EEG) fragments containing the “sharp wave” pattern of brain activity. EEG signals were recorded using 21 channels. Based on the fact that EEG signals are time series, an approach has been developed for their analysis using nonlinear dynamics tools: calculating the Lyapunov exponent’s spectrum, multiscale entropy, and Lempel–Ziv complexity. The calculation of the first Lyapunov exponent is carried out by three methods: Wolf, Rosenstein, and Sano–Sawada, to obtain reliable results. The seven Lyapunov exponent spectra are calculated by the Sano–Sawada method. For the observed patient, studies showed that with medical treatment, his condition did not improve, and as a result, it was recommended to switch from conservative treatment to surgical. The obtained results of the patient’s EEG study using the indicated nonlinear dynamics methods are in good agreement with the medical report and MRI data. The approach developed for the analysis of EEG signals by nonlinear dynamics methods can be applied for early detection of structural changes.

Description: In this note, we consider particle falling in the black hole with an additional potential. Following the proposal by Susskind (2018), we study the growth rate of the particle’s Rindler momentum, which corresponds to the growth rate of the operator size in the dual chaotic system. A general analysis near the horizon shows that the growth rate of the particle’s Rindler momentum of the particle falling with a regular potential is the same as that of the particle free falling, which saturates the chaos bound. However, when the potential is singular, the growth rate is suppressed such that it is below the Lyapunov exponent. It implies that the chaos suppression may be captured by an additional singular potential in the gravity side. We further explicitly study a particle falling in hyperscaling violating spacetime to confirm the general analysis results. Finally, we study the particle falling in AdS soliton geometry. It also exhibits a suppression of the growth of the Rindler momentum. It is attributed to that when the repulsive potential is introduced or the black hole horizon is absent, the particle is slowed down, and its trajectory seen by a comoving observer is timelike, which corresponds to a weak chaos system.

Description: This paper focuses on efficiently numerical investigation of two-dimensional heat conduction problems of material subjected to multiple moving Gaussian point heat sources. All heat sources are imposed on the inside of material and assumed to move along some specified straight lines or curves with time-dependent velocities. A simple but efficient moving mesh method, which continuously adjusts the two-dimensional mesh dimension by dimension upon the one-dimensional moving mesh partial differential equation with an appropriate monitor function of the temperature field, has been developed. The physical model problem is then solved on this adaptive moving mesh. Numerical experiments are presented to exhibit the capability of the proposed moving mesh algorithm to efficiently and accurately simulate the moving heat source problems. The transient heat conduction phenomena due to various parameters of the moving heat sources, including the number of heat sources and the types of motion, are well simulated and investigated.

Description: Background. Preconception care (PCC) aims to improve pregnancy and health outcomes of mothers and their offspring. However, there is no adequate evidence of awareness on preconception care in Ethiopia. Therefore, the present study was performed to assess the level of awareness and associated factors of preconception care among currently delivered mothers. Method. A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 561 mothers in Northern Ethiopia. Data were collected using a pretested, structured questionnaire. Odds ratio presented with 95% confidence interval, and a value

Description: Inspired by the extension of the Standard Model, we analyzed the effects of the spacetime anisotropies on a massive Dirac field through a nonminimal CPT-odd coupling in the Dirac equation, where we proposed a possible scenario that characterizes the breaking of the Lorentz symmetry which is governed by a background vector field and induces a Landau-type quantization. Then, in order to generalize our system, we introduce a hard-wall potential and, for a particular case, we determine the energy levels in this background. In addition, at the nonrelativistic limit of the system, we investigate the effects of the Lorentz symmetry violation on thermodynamic aspects of the system.

Description: By using the method of data-driven reanalysis, the midrapidity transverse momentum spectra of charged hadrons (,, and ) produced in central and peripheral gold-gold (Au-Au) collisions from the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are fitted by using the blast-wave model with the Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics. The model results are in agreement with the experimental data measured by the STAR Collaboration at the RHIC-BES energies. We observe that the kinetic freeze-out temperature , transverse flow velocity , mean transverse momentum , and initial temperature increase with collision energy as well as with event centrality.

Description: In the past, Kundu et al. and Chakraborty et al. used extra scalar fields to cancel the quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass squared and they determined the mass of the required scalar field. In this work, a spin-3/2 particle has been used in the same manner to nullify the power-law divergences, and it is determined that the mass of the spin-3/2 particle resides in the ball park of the GUT scale.

Description: We propose a new L-R symmetry model where the L-R symmetry transformation reverses both the L-R chirality and the local quantum number. We add to the model a global quantum number whose value is one for fermions (minus one for antifermion) and vanishes for bosons. For each standard model (SM) particle, we have the corresponding L-R dual particle whose mass is very large and which should have decayed at the current low energy level. Due to the global quantum number , there is no Majorana neutrino in the model but a Dirac seesaw mechanism can still occur and the usual three active neutrino oscillation can still be realized. We add two leptoquarks and their L-R duals, for generating the baryon number asymmetry and for facilitating the decay of the L-R dual particles. The decay of the L-R dual particles will produce a large entropy to the SM sector and give a mechanism for avoiding the big bang nucleosynthesis constraint.