Primitive Methods Research Articles

Quasi‐phase resolved partial discharge pattern analysis of surface discharges arising on the tar polluted porcelain bushing of an electrostatic precipitator unit under high voltage DC

AbstractThis paper investigates on understanding the DC electrical discharges arising on the surface of feed‐through type indoor bushing with tar depositions. Such information not only provides diagnostic status but also characterizes the multitude of species forming tar depositions which is currently unavailable in literatures. The current practice on analyzing surface discharges initiated under DC voltage employs primitive methods that accounts for the individual discharge events over a larger span rendering it less sensitive and time consuming. The usual practice is to count the discharge events initiated under DC voltage as PD pulses and count the events, repetition rates, time of occurrence, and so forth, to estimate the severity of the fault condition. On contrary, synchronizing these discharge pulses to the phase of the AC voltage, input to the rectifier unit, manifests a pattern, which is time independent and is sensitive in revealing diagnostic status of the bushing. These objectives are initially verified on a sample extracted from a tar polluted bushing. A half‐wave bridge rectifier that produces an uncontrolled positive and negative DC voltage is selected to initiate surface discharges. Pertinent pulses are then correlated to the phase of the AC voltage input to the rectifier and a quasi‐phase resolved partial discharge pattern (QPRPD) is developed. Using this QPRPD pattern, the significance of positive and negative DC voltages applied on the surface of the polluted sample is studied and the inception of discharges events and their correlation to the defect conditions are evaluated. Following this, the pertinent findings are validated on an actual bushing installed in an electrostatic precipitator unit applied for cleaning producer gas generated in a biomass gasification plant.

Study on wintry comfort temperature and thermal improvement of houses in cold, temperate, and subtropical regions of Nepal

Nepalese households have been using electricity from hydropower plants at almost the lowest rate among other countries. Residents adjust their indoor environments by relying on very primitive methods. This study focuses on the thermal comfort of residents in Nepalese households and how it can be improved by enhancing the thermal insulation of the houses investigated. A field survey was conducted in winter in cold, temperate, and subtropical regions, and 839 thermal sensation votes were collected from all regions together with the measured indoor and outdoor temperatures. The mean comfort temperatures estimated using Griffiths’ method were 17.2 °C, 20.9 °C, and 21.7 °C in the cold, temperate, and subtropical regions, respectively. The comfort temperature exhibited a large regional difference. The average measured indoor air temperatures in the cold, temperate, and subtropical regions were 10.9 °C, 18 °C, and 20 °C, respectively, and they were 6.3 °C, 2.9 °C, and 2 °C lower than the average estimated comfort temperature. The indoor globe temperature of the cold region was significantly lower than the comfort temperature. In the cold region during winter, the indoor climate can be improved because the indoor temperature is rated as slightly uncomfortable. By enhancing the thermal insulation and reducing the infiltration, the indoor air temperature was found to increase by 1.1–1.8 °C. The findings of this study should be useful in providing a good indoor thermal environment for houses and energy-saving building design in Nepalese society.

Cultivation Practices of Mango (<i>Mangifera indica</i>) Varieties Kent and Keitt Planters and the Origins of Orchard Vulnerability to Rainfall Variability in the Koulikoro District

Malian economy is largely based on agriculture, with mango being one of the country's main agricultural exports. The Koulikoro District is one of the main mango production areas in Mali. The sector is subject to numerous challenges, including vulnerability to rainfall variability. The objective of this study was to document the vulnerability of orchards, particularly those based on the Kent and Keitt varieties, in relation to cultivation practices. The approach used to document this issue was based on surveys and interviews with mango farmers of the Kent and Keitt varieties, to identify cultivation practices and the origins of the vulnerability of orchards to rainfall variability in the district. The results show that mango plantations are mainly managed by young, illiterate people, whose age range is 41-46 years. The orchards are small, with areas ranging from 0.25 ha to 3.00 ha, half of which are located on gravelly soils. Women are very poorly represented (6.52% of the sample) in this production activity. Mango seedlings are generally planted during the rainy season, with a high vegetative recovery rate at the start, but a very low survival rate in the months and years following the vegetative recovery. Water sources are traditional wells and streams (temporary and permanent). Manual watering is practiced by more than 80% of farmers. To conserve soil moisture, farmers mulch with or without basins under the mango trees. The lack of technical assistance and rainfall are the major constraints identified. Traditional water sources, primitive watering methods and poor moisture conservation techniques are factors that increase the vulnerability of orchards to rainfall variability.

The Raw Skin Processing and Physical Propertıes of Leather in the Context of Cultural Heritage

Deri kullanımı tarihsel süreçte köklü bir geçmişe sahiptir. Tarih boyunca farklı insan kültürleri tarafından bir tür deri işleme teknolojisi kullanılarak ham deriler kullanılabilir hale getirilmiştir. Deri üretimi ilk zamanlar ilkel yöntemlerle yapılmıştır, kazanılan tecrübe ve deneyimler sayesinde zamanla deriler bilinçli olarak işlenmiştir. Dericiliğin gelişmesinde Türklerin özel bir yeri bulunmaktadır. Gerek göçebe yaşam tarzı ve gerekse hayvancılığın yaygın olması bu mesleğin Türkler arasında gelişmesinde önemli etkenlerdir. Türklerin tabakladığı deriler renk ve kalitesiyle tüm dünyada tanınır olmuştur. Özellikle Osmanlı Dönemi’nde bitkisel tabaklamada geliştirilen yöntemle tabaklanan keçi derisi sahtiyan adıyla, tüm dünyada Türk derisi olarak tanınmıştır. Bu derilerle yapılmış, her biri zengin geçmişin birer temsilcisi olan çok sayıda deri eser bulunmaktadır. Giyimden barınmaya, savaş teknolojisinden ulaşıma, çantadan mobilyaya kadar birçok alanda deri kullanılmıştır. Post ve derilerden yapılan eserler tarihi, kültürel veya sanatsal değere sahiptir. Kültürel miras niteliğinde olan deri eserlerin bakımı ve korunması belirli ilkeler çerçevesinde yapılmaktadır. Esere herhangi bir koruma müdahalesinden önce, eserin yapıldığı malzemenin özelliklerinin ve hangi yöntemle üretildiğinin anlaşılması önemlidir. Bu gerekçeyle belirlenen konu içeriğinde derinin tanımlanarak, özelliklerinin belirlenmesi bu çalışmanın amacını oluşturmaktadır. Literatür araştırmasıyla derlenen veriler ile derinin özellikleri ve hayvandan yüzülen ham derinin mamul hale gelene kadar olan üretim süreci incelenmiştir. Yapımında kısmen veya tamamen derinin kullanıldığı eserlerde, derinin özgün yapısında çeşitli faktörlerden meydana gelen bozulmalara değinilmiştir. Nitelik ve nicelik düzeyinde önemli bir yere sahip olan deri eserin korunması ve sürdürülebilirliğin sağlanması açısından derilerin tanınmasına yönelik yapılan bu çalışmanın kültürel mirasın korunmasına katkı sağlayacağı düşünülmektedir.

دور تطبيق الاستراتيجية في معالجة مخاطر التعدين الأهلي للذهب – دراسة حالة منطقة أبو حمد ولاية نهر النيل- السودان-

تهدف الورقة إلى توضيح دور تطبيق الاستراتيجيات في تطوير التعدين الأهلي بالسودان وطرق معالجة الأضرار الناجمة عن استخراج معدن الذهب بالطرق البدائية. تناولت الدراسة العوامل والنظريات المفسرة التي ساعدت على التغيير حيث استخدم الباحثون المنهج التاريخي والوصفي والتحليلي لدراسة دور تطبيق الاستراتيجية والمعوقات والمخاطر التي تواجه التعدين بمنطقة الدراسة. بدأت الدراسة بتتبع الخلفية التاريخية لظاهرة التعدين والتغير الاجتماعي ثم انتقلت لوصف الظاهرة محل الدراسة من جميع أبعادها الاجتماعية والاقتصادية والثقافية والصحية البيئية والأمنية العسكرية. كما استخدم أيضا الدراسة الميدانية والمنهج التحليلي حيث أتضح أن هنالك نقصا كبيرا في الدراسات العربية التي تناولت العلاقة بين استراتيجية التعدين والاستغلال الأمثل للموارد التعدينية. وكمجمل خلصت الدراسة إلى إن طرق استخلاص الذهب البدائي تؤدي إلى هدر كميات كبيرة من الذهب كما أن عمليات التهريب وعدم تحصيل العوائد والتهرب الضريبي يفقد الحكومة موارد مالية كبيرة. على ذلك فإن على الجهات المختصة ترتيب الاستغلال الأمثل للموارد المعدنية وفق منظومة استراتيجية لتوسيع دوائر الدخل القومي مع العمل على رفع الوعي إجمالاً. وقدمت الورقة عدة توصيات أهمها أنه يجب نقل الأسواق ومنطقة التعدين بعيداً عن المناطق السكنية ومصادر المياه، أيضاً يجب توفير الأمن والسلامة والخدمات الصحية حفاظاً على المعدنين وأهالي منطقة التعدين.

Soil microplastic pollution in an e-waste dismantling zone of China

Microplastic pollution is ubiquitous and has emerged as a severe global environmental issue. Recent research on microplastic pollution has mainly focused on aquatic ecosystems, while knowledge gaps still exist regarding microplastic in terrestrial environments. In this study, we established a new method for characterizing microplastic in complex soil substrate using FTIR spectroscopy. Microplastic was separated by density without removing soil organic matter to protect microplastic from damage. The Wizards feature was adopted to automatic, direct and continuous characterize micron-size plastic. Furthermore, 33 soil samples were taken from Guiyu, a notorious e-waste dismantling area in Guangdong Province, China, under different land-use. The results showed that microplastic was involved in 30 samples, and the abundance of microplastic varied considerably among different soils, ranged from 0 to 34,100n kg−1, implying that the e-waste dismantling sites have become the microplastic hotspots. There were 60 kinds of microplastic detected with 6 different shapes and 10 colors, most of which were secondary microplastic. They mainly consisted of engineering-plastic and modified plastic, 88.61% had a size range <1 mm, indicating that the majority of microplastics at Guiyu were derived from e-wastes. The surface morphology of microplastic showed signs of aging and degradation, possibly due to primitive dismantling methods and long-term exposure to the soil. The mean Pb, Cd, Cr, Ba, Cu, Co, As concentrations of microplastic were 20.94, 0.67, 11.82, 308.78, 4.11, 1.26, 3.06 μg·g−1, respectively. Our findings providescientific basis for monitoring and controlling microplastic pollution in terrestrial environments.

A Subspace Based Transfer Joint Matching with Laplacian Regularization for Visual Domain Adaptation.

In a real-world application, the images taken by different cameras with different conditions often incur illumination variation, low-resolution, different poses, blur, etc., which leads to a large distribution difference or gap between training (source) and test (target) images. This distribution gap is challenging for many primitive machine learning classification and clustering algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and k-means. In order to minimize this distribution gap, we propose a novel Subspace based Transfer Joint Matching with Laplacian Regularization (STJML) method for visual domain adaptation by jointly matching the features and re-weighting the instances across different domains. Specifically, the proposed STJML-based method includes four key components: (1) considering subspaces of both domains; (2) instance re-weighting; (3) it simultaneously reduces the domain shift in both marginal distribution and conditional distribution between the source domain and the target domain; (4) preserving the original similarity of data points by using Laplacian regularization. Experiments on three popular real-world domain adaptation problem datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement of our proposed method over published state-of-the-art primitive and domain adaptation methods.

Age Prediction using Image Dataset using Machine Learning

Gender is a central feature of our personality still. In our social life it is also an significant element. Artificial intelligence age predictions can be used in many fields, such as smart human-machine interface growth , health, cosmetics, electronic commerce etc. The prediction of people's sex and age from their facial images is an ongoing and active problem of research. The researchers suggested a number of methods to resolve this problem, but the criteria and actual performance are still inadequate. A statistical pattern recognition approach for solving this problem is proposed in this project.Convolutionary Neural Network (ConvNet / CNN), a Deep Learning algorithm, is used as an extractor of features in the proposed solution. CNN takes input images and assigns value to different aspects / objects (learnable weights and biases) of the image and can differentiate between them. ConvNet requires much less preprocessing than other classification algorithms. While the filters are hand-made in primitive methods, ConvNets can learn these filters / features with adequate training.In this research, face images of individuals have been trained with convolutionary neural networks, and age and sex with a high rate of success have been predicted. More than 20,000 images are containing age, gender and ethnicity annotations. The images cover a wide range of poses, facial expression, lighting, occlusion, and resolution.

Safranbolu da Dericiliğin Günümüzde Kalıntısı: Tabakhane Müzesi

People have benefited from the opportunities offered by nature since the early ages to meet their vital needs such as shelter, food and beverage, veiling and security. In this regard, people used primitive methods to skin animal hides in order to satisfy their basic needs such as cover and cold protection, and this has played an important role in the development of leatherworking over time. Safranbolu is one of the last settlements in the last period of the Ottoman Empire and in the first years of the republic, where leatherwork and tanneries were at the forefront. Although there is no active tannery in Safranbolu today, the presence of a “Tabakhane” in Eski Carsi Mevkii reveals how important leather farming and tannery is in Safranbolu history. Accordingly, the subject of the research is to explain the place and importance of leatherworking and tanneries in Safranbolu in socio-economic life. In today's world, where traditional handicrafts begin to disappear rapidly, it is of utmost importance in terms of identifying the masters who try to keep these crafts and meeting them, recording the information they convey in written and sound, not forgetting our cultural heritage elements, transferring them to new generations and thus making them sustainable.

Image Processing to Quantitate Hemoglobin Level for Diagnostic Support

Digital Image processing techniques can be used to explore primitive diagnostics methods fordisease detection at early stages with limited resources and skilled labor. These techniques canalso assist doctors during clinical examination without any need for invasive pathological test andthis facilitates patient comfort and avoids infection during blood test. Various blood componentssuch as hemoglobin and billirubin whose approximate measure can directly be identified by justviewing the color of patient skin, nails, eye or any other target area can be measured and classifiedin terms of the color content of the image of the targeted area. Analysis of image processingtechniques in conjunction with specialized supervision can provide significant exploration in thefield of biomedicine and clinical applications. This research work proposes an image processingbased non-invasive method of measuring hemoglobin (Hb) concentration present in patient’sblood by analyzing the color and texture of digital photographs of patient’s palpebral conjunctiva.The images of patient’s palpebral conjunctiva were processed and eight relevant features wereextracted .Artificial neural network classifier was used to correlate the output quantity to bemeasured with the values of the quantity measured by the standard method as per the guidelinesgiven by WHO. Further, based on the testing results obtained by the classifier the patients whoseHb concentration was less than 11g/dL were screened as anaemic patients. A confusion matrixwas then plotted to evaluate and compare the predicted classification results with the actual valueof Hb obtained from invasive test. It was found that the proposed algorithm was able to diagnoseanemia with 71.42% sensitivity and 89.47% specificity. The proposed method is helpful fordetection of not only severe anemia but works well in detection of moderate anemia too thuspredicting the hemoglobin value to an accuracy of 81.81%.The proposed work is useful for givingassistance to medical practitioners for reliable diagnosis of anaemia in the clinic itself and in lowresource settings.

Geometric Primitives in LiDAR Point Clouds: A Review

To the best of our knowledge, the most recent light detection and ranging (lidar)-based surveys have been focused only on specific applications such as reconstruction and segmentation, as well as data processing techniques based on a specific platform, e.g., mobile laser. However, in this article, lidar point clouds are understood from a new and universal perspective, i.e., geometric primitives embedded in versatile objects in the physical world. In lidar point clouds, the basic unit is the point coordinate. Geometric primitives that consist of a group of discrete points may be viewed as one kind of abstraction and representation of lidar data at the entity level. We categorize geometric primitives into two classes: shape primitives, e.g., lines, surfaces, and volumetric shapes, and structure primitives, represented by skeletons and edges. In recent years, many efforts from different communities, such as photogrammetry, computer vision, and computer graphics, have been made to finalize geometric primitive detection, regularization, and in-depth applications. Interpretations of geometric primitives from multiple disciplines try to convey the significance of geometric primitives, the latest processing techniques regarding geometric primitives, and their potential possibilities in the context of lidar point clouds. To this end, primitive-based applications are reviewed with an emphasis on object extraction and reconstruction to clearly show the significances of this article. Next, we survey and compare methods for geometric primitive extraction and then review primitive regularization methods that add real-world constrains to initial primitives. Finally, we summarize the challenges, expected applications, and describe possible future for primitive extraction methods that can achieve globally optimal results efficiently, even with disorganized, uneven, noisy, incomplete, and large-scale lidar point clouds.

Linear Discriminant Analysis via Pseudo Labels: A Unified Framework for Visual Domain Adaptation

This paper deals with the problem of visual domain adaptation in which source domain labeled data is available for training, but the target domain unlabeled data is available for testing. Many recent domain adaptation methods merely concentrate on extracting domain-invariant features via minimizing the distributional and geometrical divergence between domains simultaneously while ignoring within-class and between-class structure properties, especially for the target domain due to the unavailability of labeled data. We propose Linear Discriminant Analysis via Pseudo Labels (LDAPL), a unified framework for visual domain adaptation that can tackle these two issues together. LDAPL is to learn a domain-invariant features across both domains with preserving important properties such as minimizing the shift between domains both statistically and geometrically, retaining the original similarity of data samples, maximizing the target domain variance, and minimizing the within-class and maximizing the between-class properties of both domains. Specifically, LDAPL preserves the target domain discriminative information (or within-class and between-class properties) using pseudo labels, and these pseudo labels are refined until convergence. Extensive experiment on several visual cross-domain benchmarks, including Office+Caltech10 with all three types of features (such as Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), Deep Convolutional Activation Feature (DeCAF <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</sub> ), and Visual Geometry Group-Fully Connected layer ( VGG-FC <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</sub> ) features), COIL20 (Columbia Object Image Library), digit, and PIE (Pose, Illumination, and Expression), LDAPL achieved average accuracies of 79.11%, 99.72%, 79.0%, and 84.50%, respectively. Comparative results on several visual cross-domain classification tasks verify that LDAPL can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art primitive and domain adaptation methods. Specifically, LDAPL gains over baseline Joint Geometrical and Statistical Alignment (JGSA) method with 6.6%, 5.3%, 6.3%, and 44.93% average accuracies on Office+Caltech10 (SURF, DeCAF <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</sub> , and VGG-FC6 ), COIL20, digit, and PIE, respectively.

Semantic Primitives Extraction for XBRL Domain Ontology

At present, XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) has been used in more and more countries and organizations. Although XBRL has achieved a series of remarkable achievements, the current development of XBRL has also encountered bottlenecks. On the one hand, the XBRL field has not been unified. On the other hand, the semantics of concepts in the domain ontology of XBRL is weak, resulting in the slow application and promotion of XBRL. This paper regulates the extraction of semantic primitives in the ontology of XBRL domain from the perspective of semantics and solves the problem of “how to extract semantic primitives”. The solution to this problem can promote computers to better understand XBRL financial reports and reduce the technical difficulty of XBRL. This paper comprehensively uses the theories of semantic primitives, graph theory, and domain ontology. First, it analyzes the research status and shortcomings of semantic primitive extraction methods. Second, it constructs a graph of accounting term relationship network from the perspective of graph theory. The extraction of semantic primitives. Finally, the validity of semantic primitive extraction is analyzed and verified.

Effects of User Intent Changes on Onboard Sensor Measurements During Exoskeleton-Assisted Walking

Adoption of exoskeletons for rehabilitation and locomotion outside the physical therapy clinic has been limited by relatively primitive methods for identifying and incorporating user intentions. Gait intention resolution varies from high-level goals (increase speed) to mid-level actions (increase stride length) to low-level joint behaviors (increase hip flexion). Onboard sensors only indirectly sense the human via the exoskeleton interface, but offer measurement consistency advantages over more direct methods. In this study, exoskeleton users, both able-bodied and having spinal cord injury, performed goal-level changes in gait speed to characterize joint- and action-level responses. Trials were completed in both trajectory-free and trajectory-based control modes, with both crutches and a walker. Results confirm statistically significant differences between the pre- and post-speed change joint-level measures of position and motor current. Coordination of joint-level changes resulted in significant differences in action-level measures (stride length and stride time). Users realized goal-level speed changes of as much as 0.30 and 0.19m/s in the trajectory-free and trajectory-based modes, respectively. Findings suggest that intent detection is possible for able-bodied and non-able-bodied users with onboard sensors alone. The intent signals depend on exoskeleton control settings, user ability, and gait phase, but do not differ with use of crutches or a walker. The characterization of these intent-related signals via onboard sensors enables more detailed intent recognition without the need for external sensors, which could benefit any control strategy that explicitly incorporates user intent.

Environmental SWOT Analysis for Agricultural Extension in North Sinai Governorate, Egypt

North Sinai governorate is one of the largest desert areas in terms of intensity of agricultural extension work, In spite of efforts by state agencies to bring about agricultural development in the governorate, agriculture is still somewhat characterized by primitive traditional methods, making agricultural development rates almost indistinguishable, And with the scarcity of extension research carried out in North Sinai in the field of environmental SWOT analysis, It was necessary to conduct the study that is trying to analyze the current situation of agricultural extension in North Sinai governorate through identifying the strengths; weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). A participatory SWOT analysis study using open-ended qualitative-type instrument was conducted; Research data were collected through personal interviewing questionnaire with 90 respondents representing 75% of the total extension workers in North Sinai Governorate, during the period from May till October 2018. The results showed that the most important strengths of these were that a large proportion of the extension workers are specialized in agricultural extension, more than half of the guides were from rural areas and the high job satisfaction degree among of the majority of the extension workers while the most important weaknesses were Weak budget and inadequate funding for extension work, Absence of job description for the extension workers, and Lack of financial and material resources. On the other hand the most important opportunities were Availability of research institutes in the governorate, NGO-Public Sector Collaboration. While the most important threats were Decreased investments targeting the agricultural sector in general and the extension system in particular, Poor Farmer Organization, Security instability in the governorate. Depending upon SWOT outputs, some relevant strategies were discussed to develop agricultural extension system in the governorate through some dimensions that uses strengths and opportunities to overcome weaknesses and to avoid threats or minimize their effects.

Contradictory Results of the GULAG Activities in the European North-East of the USSR

The author outlines the conflicts in the actions of the GULAG in the Soviet European north-east. Mobilization facilities of the GULAG allowed creating fuel and energy sources in the North-East of the country in short terms. Due to the GULAG, industries were being developed in the district without any prerequisites. Activities of the victimized population produced fulfillment of important innovative projects at the world level for that time. Primitive methods were often used for the creation of ambitious and high-tech projects with a great portion of manual labor. Forced migration brought about growth in population in the district, forced growth in the urban population, and rapid development of the area. Meanwhile, urbanization process proceeded spontaneously, without taking into consideration some of the possible negative effects of towns’ development having appeared at the camp centers. The need to relocate population from the North is a serious modern problem dating back to the GULAG. Industrial development of the area was followed by the attempt at making life of the locals a little bit more civilized: the victimized population created a health-care system in the Northern districts of the Komi Republic, as well as a personnel-training system, cultural institutions (theaters, social clubs, libraries, publishing houses) and education. Besides, a drastic change in the way of life of the locals under the impact of the GULAG economic activities brought about the destruction of the traditional way of life, loss of self-identity, and transformation of traditional morality. The industrial processes fulfilled by the GULAG were accompanied by the formation and development of the system of training skilled personnel for industries and transportation. At the same time, the wasteful squandering of the skilled prisoners’ abilities and talents occurred in the GULAG camps. The concentration of the labor force in the GULAG camps in the region encouraged the exploration of natural resources in the area in the short term and resulted in a developed economy. At the same time, the development by the camp method caused irreparable injury to the nature of the region. The camps’ economic activities led to the formation of new advanced industrial branches, transportation system, and social infrastructure as modernization phenomena. However, the totalitarian regime did not allow the introduction of the elements of the classical liberalism in the modernization processes. Industrial modernization was carried out by means of coercive labor, deprived of their civil rights, alongside with the lack of democratic values. Modernization was halved and pared-down.

Cell Motility and Cytokinesis: From Mysteries to Molecular Mechanisms in Five Decades.

This is the story of someone who has been fortunate to work in a field of research where essentially nothing was known at the outset but that blossomed with the discovery of profound insights about two basic biological processes: cell motility and cytokinesis. The field started with no molecules, just a few people, and primitive methods. Over time, technological advances in biophysics, biochemistry, and microscopy allowed the combined efforts of scientists in hundreds of laboratories to explain mysterious processes with molecular mechanisms that can be embodied in mathematical equations and simulated by computers. The success of this field is a tribute to the power of the reductionist strategy for understanding biology.

КІНЕМАТИЧНІ ВЛАСТИВОСТІ ТРАЄКТОРІЙ, ОПИСАНИХ NURBS СПЛАЙНАМИ

The purpose of the article is to solve a number of problems of using NURBS curves in the implementation of high-speed processing of complex products on machining equipment. NURBS-splines are becoming increasingly popular among CNC specialists, which is motivated by their wide application in the modeling of the production facility in CAD/CAM systems. Advanced manufacturers of CNC devices in the number of shaping algorithms necessarily include NURBS - interpolation. But despite the extensive capabilities of CAD/CAM systems for describing the shape of products and toolpaths of processing equipment using spline curves, many manufacturers of CNC systems use more primitive methods for describing the trajectory of the tool - piecewise linear and linear-circular. This negates the benefits of using spline curves, including smooth curvature change, which is very important when moving the tool at high speed processing. Such simplification of trajectories is associated with a number of difficulties in the implementation of spline curves in modern CNC systems. In addition, the requirements for industrial cleanliness of the surfaces of the parts is information about the processing parameters, the directions of relative movements of the tool and the workpiece on the finishing operations in order to provide technological conditions to the size of the burrs formed. It is possible that the choice of strategy of processing for obtaining the minimum size of a Burr or reduction of their number. The sizes of the turned-out agnails define methods of their elimination in technological process of production of a detail. Therefore, the provision of technological information using the analytical standard of the part is a necessary condition for ensuring the quality of products and their high reliability. NURBS - interpolation allows to obtain a compact description of the tool movement in the process of forming, which allows to correctly formulate the problem of working of complex-shaped parts.

New technologies for low-grade glioma surgery

Brain surgery has come far from the primitive methods used thousands of years ago. In the last hundred years alone, we have come across countless breakthroughs like the invention of bipolar coagulation, the surgical microscope, microsurgical techniques and a large variety of surgical instruments. The latest years have brought us neuro-navigation, intra-operative imaging techniques and brain activity monitoring. Low-grade glioma surgery, in particular, has taken advantage a lot from all these new methods, bringing great benefits for the patients: the safe extent of resection has grown progressively and tumours located in eloquent areas that were thought until recently to be inoperable, have started to be removed in safe conditions. The purpose of this paper is to present these new technologies as a recap for neurosurgical professionals.

Market Access and Extent of Commercialisation Among the Smallholder Dairy Farmers in Zimbabwe

This study assesses the extent to which market access determine commercialisation among the smallholder dairy farmers in Zimbabwe. A total of 225 smallholder dairy farming households, randomly selected from 11 milk-producing cooperatives in Zimbabwe were analysed using descriptive statistics and the Tobit, regression model. The empirical results indicated that the proportion of farmers’ milk delivered to the market was significantly affected by the mode of transport used to carry the milk from the farmer’s homes to the market. The results show that farmers using more efficient though costly transport mechanisms such as a car, tractor, or motorcycle were more likely to get their milk to the market not only on time but also in good condition. Farmers using primitive methods of carrying the milk to the market such as walking on foot, wheelbarrow or bicycle were often only able to deliver once per day though commercial dairy cows are regularly milked more than once per day. The study stresses the need to find locally relevant milk transport mechanisms such as the corporate hiring of vehicles motorcycles or tractors by farmers residing close to each other to promote efficiency and profitability among the smallholder dairy farmers. Keywords: market access, commercialisation, Tobit regression model, smallholder dairy farming, Zimbabwe, market information DOI : 10.7176/JESD/10-8-14 Publication date : April 30 th 2019