Uniqueness Features Research Articles

Unknown localities and new species of flora Chechen Republic (North-Eastern Caucasus)

The paper presents data on unknown localities and new species of flora of the Chechen Republic, which we discovered during expeditionary research in 2022-2023 on the territory of the Makazhoi semiarid basin. The study area belongs to arid ecosystems with unique species and coenotic diversity. Nearby there is a unique natural monument and tourist attraction - the alpine lake Kezenoy-Am. In recent years, the tourism industry has been actively developing here, which inevitably leads to anthropogenic transformation of the flora and increases the risk of losing the uniqueness, originality, and characteristic features of the flora and vegetation of mountain landscapes. For the first time, we provide information about the discovery of 11 new species, previously unknown for the republic, belonging to 9 genera and 8 families. In our research, we strive to emphasize the need for in-depth study and conservation of the biodiversity of these ecosystems for future generations.

CULINARY ETHNOLOGY OF PODILLIA: FEATURES AND RECIPE INGREDIENTS

The article considers the actual and unique issue of studying the traditional recipes of Podillia to identify their uniqueness and regional features. We determined that this issue’s regional and local lore aspect opens vast opportunities for its use as a historical source. Patterns of the presence or absence of particular themes and motives often find their reasons in historical factors. To some extent, this also applies to such an area as the country’s cuisine and culinary traditions. The study revealed that the functioning of folk customs is subordinated to more practical than aesthetic requests. Where the question of folk traditions, beliefs, customs and rites, life and lifestyle of the population arises, only there is a prerequisite for the appearance of authentic cuisine and original recipes. Thus, the etiology of such folk recipes lags far behind the customs etiology in time. The previous research has proven that the identified features of the development of Ukrainian cuisine relate specifically to the national culinary traditions and customs of the population of Podillia. This layer of folk culture needs urgent exploration. A detailed study of the peculiarities of cuisine and culinary traditions can give ethnographers and culturologists valuable information about our people’s history, ancient traditions, beliefs, and culture. The specificity of the researched object and the degree of study of the chosen topic determined the purpose of the article, which is studying and organising the characteristic features of the culinary heritage of Podillia, as well as collecting and registering authentic recipes and methods of cooking dishes that reflect the cultural heritage of this region of Ukraine. The practical significance of the obtained results is that its main provisions can be used by specialists in various fields: ethnographers, folklorists, culturologists, historians, geographers, and tourism specialists. The personal contribution of the authors consists of the systematisation of folk culinary traditions and folk recipes of Podillia and a comprehensive study of the genealogy of ethnic cuisine. Keywords: Podillia, Ukrainian cuisine, culinary ethnology, culinary heritage, folk recipes, cooking technology.

Development and characterization of a sorghum multi-parent advanced generation intercross (MAGIC) population for capturing diversity among seed parent gene pool.

Multiparent advanced eneration inter-cross (MAGIC) populations improve the precision of quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping over biparental populations by incorporating increased diversity and opportunities to reduce linkage disequilibrium among variants. Here, we describe the development of a MAGIC B-Line (MBL) population from an inter-cross among 4 diverse founders of grain sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] across different races (kafir, guinea, durra, and caudatum). These founders were selected based on genetic uniqueness and several distinct qualitative features including panicle architecture, plant color, seed color, endosperm texture, and awns. A whole set of MBL (708 F6) recombinant inbred lines along with their founders were genotyped using Diversity Arrays Technology (DArTseq) and 5,683 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were generated. A genetic linkage map was constructed using a set of polymorphic, quality-filtered markers (2,728 SNPs) for QTL interval-mapping. For population validation, 3 traits (seed color, plant color, and awns) were used for QTL mapping and genome-wide association study (GWAS). QTL mapping and GWAS identified 4 major genomic regions located across 3 chromosomes (Chr1, Chr3, and Chr6) that correspond to known genetic loci for the targeted traits. Founders of this population consist of the fertility maintainer (A/B line) gene pool and derived MBL lines could serve as female/seed parents in the cytoplasmic male sterility breeding system. The MBL population will serve as a unique genetic and genomic resource to better characterize the genetics of complex traits and potentially identify superior alleles for crop improvement efforts to enrich the seed parent gene pool.

CurIAs: Current-Based IC Authentication by Exploiting Supply Current Variations

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have emerged as one of the most notable hardware primitives to mitigate the ever-growing global issue of counterfeiting and cloning of integrated circuits (ICs) in recent times. PUFs exploit the intrinsic manufacturing process-induced parametric variations for generating unique chip identifiers. However, most of the existing PUF implementations require complex structures or the inclusion of additional components, which incur performance and area overheads. In this work, we introduce <i>CurIAs</i> , a supply current-based novel PUF implementation to authenticate ICs and to protect them from counterfeiting attacks. It exploits the dynamic current stemming from temporal switching activities in existing on-chip structures as an entropy source to generate high-quality IC-specific digital signatures. First, we investigate the source of the entropy of this PUF, <i>i.e.</i> , the dynamic current variations in different circuit structures, with transistor-level Monte-Carlo simulations in HSPICE. Next, to evaluate its effectiveness in Silicon, we apply this approach to map LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) designs into 20 FPGA chips (fabricated in TSMC 55nm process node), perform practical measurements, and generate digital signatures. These signatures show high uniqueness, robustness, uniformity, and randomness features, and the overall implementation requires modest hardware overhead ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&lt;$</tex-math></inline-formula> 1%). We assess and substantiate the robustness of this approach at eight different operating points by varying supply voltage and temperature. Furthermore, we upscale the design to more extended LFSR sizes, and it exhibits a constant trend of performance improvement over the operating points. Through a judicious selection of challenge vectors, <i>CurIAs</i> demonstrates a high resilience against model learning attacks, with an average prediction accuracy of 50%. These intrinsic variations in supply current across ICs for varying workloads entail unique chip-specific signatures, which are extremely difficult to clone, and can be deployed effectively against IC counterfeiting issues.

Regulation of immune cell metabolism in health and disease: Special focus on T and B cell subsets.

Metabolism is a dynamic process and keeps changing from time to time according to the demand of a particular cell to meet its bio-energetic requirement. Different immune cells rely on distinct metabolic programs which allow the cell to balance its requirements for energy, molecular biosynthesis, and effector activity. In the aspect of infection and cancer immunology, effector T and B cells get exhausted and help tumor cells to evade immunosurveillance. On the other hand, T cells become hyperresponsive in the scenario of autoimmune diseases. In this article, we have explored the uniqueness and distinct metabolic features of key CD4+ T and B helper cell subsets, CD4+ T, B regulatory cell subsets and CD8+ T cells regarding health and disease. Th1 cells rely on glycolysis and glutaminolysis; inhibition of these metabolic pathways promotes Th1 cells in Treg population. However, Th2 cells are also dependent on glycolysis but an abundance of lactate within TME shifts their metabolic dependency to fatty acid metabolism. Th17 cells depend on HIF-1α mediated glycolysis, ablation of HIF-1α reduces Th17 cells but enhance Treg population. In contrast to effector T cells which are largely dependent on glycolysis for their differentiation and function, Treg cells mainly rely on FAO for their function. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand the metabolic fates of immune cells and how it facilitates their differentiation and function for different disease models. Targeting metabolic pathways to restore the functionality of immune cells in diseased conditions can lead to potent therapeutic measures.

SILVerIn: Systematic Integrity Verification of Printed Circuit Board Using JTAG Infrastructure

A printed circuit board (PCB) provides necessary mechanical support to an electronic system and acts as a platform for connecting electronic components. Counterfeiting and in-field tampering of PCBs have become significant security concerns in the semiconductor industry as a result of increasing untrusted entities in the supply chain. These counterfeit components may result in performance degradation, profit reduction, and reputation risk for the manufacturers. While Integrated Circuit (IC) level authentication using physical unclonable functions (PUFs) has been widely investigated, countermeasures at the PCB level are scarce. These approaches either suffer from significant overhead issues, or opportunistic counterfeiters can breach them like clockwork. Besides, they cannot be extended to system-level (both chip and PCB together), and their applications are also limited to a specific purpose (i.e., either counterfeiting or tampering). In this article, we introduce SILVerIn , a novel systematic approach to verify the authenticity of all chips used in a PCB as well as the board for combating attacks such as counterfeiting, cloning, and in-field malicious modifications. We develop this approach by utilizing the existing boundary scan architecture (BSA) of modern ICs and PCBs. As a result, its implementation comes at a negligible (∼0.5%) hardware overhead. SILVerIn is integrated into a PCB design during the manufacturing phase. We implement our technique on a custom hardware platform consisting of an FPGA and a microcontroller. We incorporate the industry-standard JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) interface to transmit test data into the BSA and perform hands-on measurement of supply current at both chip and PCB levels on 20 boards. We reconstruct these current values to digital signatures that exhibit high uniqueness, robustness, and randomness features. Our approach manifests strong reproducibility of signatures at different supply voltage levels, even with a low-resolution measurement setup. SILVerIn also demonstrates a high resilience against machine learning-based modeling attacks, with an average prediction accuracy of ∼51%. Finally, we conduct intentional alteration experiments by replacing the on-board FPGA to replicate the scenario of PCB tampering, and the results indicate successful detection of in-field modifications in a PCB.

Evolution of Methodological Approaches to Evaluating the Efficiency of the Activities of Research Organizations in Ukraine

The evolution of methodological approaches for evaluation of efficiency of different scientific institutions used in Ukraine is considered. The analysis of current regulatory acts and the methodological approach to state certification and evaluation of the activities of scientific institutions, which has been used after gaining the independence, indicates their orientation on a system of quantitative parameters. Evaluation of the effectiveness of a scientific institution’s activities by a single indicator based on complex and ambiguously defined calculations does not meet international standards, which are implemented in the EU countries.&#x0D; In order to implement measures, mentioned in the Concept of Development of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for 2014-2023, different approach to evaluation of activities of scientific institutions, was applied in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASAU).&#x0D; The introduced Methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of scientific institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is based on the methods, principles and approaches to assessment, defined in the Leiden manifesto of the leading specialists on scientometrics. According to this methodology, procedure of assessment could not be reduced to the utilization of selected quantitative indicators only, despite their importance. In the NASAU, the adoption of evaluation results is carried out on the basis of a qualitative analysis, which covers various aspects of the activities of the institution and its divisions. It is executed by the independent experts, who are specialists in scientific areas of the institution’s activities and who have high reputation among their colleagues.&#x0D; The main differences between two approaches to the evaluation methods, which are used today in Ukraine to assess the activities of scientific institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, are considered. The results obtained are analyzed and compared. The positive aspects of evaluating scientific institutions of NASU through expert judgment are identified, and the problems that arise during the assessment procedure are assessed.&#x0D; As a conclusion, shift from determining the results of the activities of scientific institutions by calculating a single indicator provides an opportunity for experts to evaluate institutions as a whole and their divisions, taking into account the uniqueness and specific features, which depend on the scientific disciplines and research areas. This also opens the way to determine the development prospects and place of the research institutions in the national and international ‘scientific map’.

Consumers’ evaluation and intention to buy traditional seafood: The role of vintage, uniqueness, nostalgia and involvement in luxury

This study extends the understanding of the relationship between consumer motivation, involvement and evaluation of traditional food products (TFP). One important research issue was to explore whether consumers' perceived uniqueness could be one important quality or value that theoretically and empirically could differentiate TFP from ordinary, usual and “everyday” traditional food. A central location test of two different vintages (maturation times) of salt-cured clipfish in combination with a survey to assess individual motivational constructs was used to test the conceptual model. Our expectations were confirmed. Perceived uniqueness influences future intention to consume and is motivated by involvement in TFP. The theoretical arguments of the relevance of the perceived uniqueness of traditional food was also supported by the positive relationship between general involvement in luxury (prestige) and involvement in TFP. In addition, this study found a significant positive relationship between product-specific nostalgia and involvement in TFP. To our knowledge, no previous study we are aware has discussed, designed or tested these theoretical relationships. Our findings have promising implications for the seafood industry in order to achieve unique product value and increase consumers’ willingness to pay, by promoting uniqueness, prestige and nostalgic product features of vintage salt-cured clipfish.

Person identification using EEG channel selection with hybrid flower pollination algorithm

Recently, electroencephalogram (EEG) signal presents a great potential for a new biometric system to deal with a cognitive task. Several studies defined the EEG with uniqueness features, universality, and natural robustness that can be used as a new track to prevent spoofing attacks. The EEG signals are the graphical recording of the brain electrical activities which can be measured by placing electrodes (channels) in various positions of the scalp. With a large number of channels, some channels have very important information for biometric system while others not. The channel selection problem has been recently formulated as an optimisation problem and solved by optimisation techniques. This paper proposes hybrid optimisation techniques based on binary flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and β-hill climbing (called FPAβ-hc) for selecting the most relative EEG channels (i.e., features) that come up with efficient accuracy rate of personal identification. Each EEG signals with three different groups of EEG channels have been utilized (i.e., time domain, frequency domain, and time-frequency domain). The FPAβ-hc is measured using a standard EEG signal dataset, namely, EEG motor movement/imagery dataset with a real world data taken from 109 persons each with 14 different cognitive tasks using 64 channels. To evaluate the performance of the FPAβ-hc, five measurement criteria are considered:accuracy (Acc), (ii) sensitivity (Sen), (iii) F-score (F_s), (v) specificity (Spe), and (iv) number of channels selected (No. Ch). The proposed method is able to identify the personals with high Acc, Sen., F_s, Spe, and less number of channels selected. Interestingly, the experimental results suggest that FPAβ-hc is able to reduce the number of channels with accuracy rate up to 96% using time-frequency domain features. For comparative evaluation, the proposed method is able to achieve results better than those produced by binary-FPA-OPF method using the same EEG motor movement/imagery datasets. In a nutshell, the proposed method can be very beneficial for effective use of EEG signals in biometric applications.

Image fusion with structural saliency measure and content adaptive consistency verification

Image fusion obtains a desired image by integrating the useful information of multiple input images. Most traditional fusion strategy is usually guided by image local contrast or variance, which cannot well represent visual discernable features of source images. And the undesirable seam effects or artifacts produced due to the inconsistency between fusion weight map and image content may severely degrade the visual quality of the fused images. An efficient image fusion method with structural saliency measure and content adaptive consistency verification was proposed. The fusion is implemented under the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT)-based image fusion framework. The low-frequency NSCT decomposition coefficients are fused with the weight map constructed by considering both structural saliency and visual uniqueness features and refined by spatial consistency with guide filter. The high-frequency NSCT decomposition coefficients are fused with structural saliency. The performances of the proposed method have been verified on several pairs of multifocus images, infrared-visible images, and multimodal medical images. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with several existing state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both visual and quantitative comparison.

Explore the Major Characteristics of Learning Management Systems and their Impact on e-Learning Success

Today, there are many educational institutions and organizations around the world, especially the universities have adopted the e-learning and learning management system concepts because they want to enhance and support their educational process since the number of students who would like to attend universities and educational institutions is increasing. This paper has many objectives, the first one is comparing between different types of most popular learning management system (LMS) software such as Moodle and Blackboard based on their uniqueness features. The second objective is presenting the learning management systems and their benefits in e-learning. Finally, this research paper presents a proposed model, which consists of six independent variables (application and integration, communication, assessment, content, cost, and security), and one dependent variable which is e-learning success. A questionnaire has been developed and distributed to 450 respondents, and then data was collected from 418 valid questionnaires. The result showed that there is a statistically significant impact of learning management system major characteristics on e-learning success.

Ulul Albab Generation: Roles of Ulul Albab Teachers in Malaysian Selected School

Since Ulul Albab program has been introduced in several government schools few years ago, it has become a craze among the society and the demand is increasing because of its uniqueness features and the goals it promotes. After analysing the concept of Ulul Albab and its characteristics, however, a huge task on the shoulders of the teachers is needed to carry out the programme. Ulul Albab as defined by many scholars is a term given to gifted individuals who possess wisdom, intelligence and knowledge based on belief and devotion to Allah (SWT) and this is not an ordinary term. The Ulul Albab program is established by taking Ulul Albab in the Al-Quran as the basis for the curriculum, therefore, it requires factors that may contribute to the achievement of an Ulul Albab generation to be analysed and examined continuously. Teachers as the key implementer of the program are seen to have a big role and responsibility towards achieving the goals and objectives. Various studies have shown that there exists a significant relationship between teachers’ effectiveness and students’ achievement. Specifically, this special program requires special trained teachers to run the program effectively. It is not too much to say then that teachers act as the mediators of the Ulul Albab generation. By saying this, teachers’ professional development programme for Ulul Albab pre-service and in-service teachers have become vital in order to enhance the quality of the Ulul Albab teachers in order to effectively run the programme. These quality teachers will then become an effective role-model for the Ulul Albab students.

Power Sector and Hydropower Development in Nepal

This paper is prepared on the answer to the valuable comments made by late Jeewan P. Thanju on my article ‘Water Resources of Nepal: Misconception and Reality’ published in The Rising Nepal on January 23 &amp; 24, 2014.The rivers of Nepal possess sufficient hydropower potentiality to enhance the country’s socio-economic development. However, some spurious expert and vested interest group exaggerated the hydro potentiality and distorted the fact of water resources development prospective in Nepal. This has created confusion among the policymakers, politician and multilateral agencies. As a result, hydropower development in Nepal has headed for wrong course, and now the power sector, the vital impetus for socio-economic development is in dire strait. This paper highlights the uniqueness and distinct technical features of Nepalese Power Sector. In this paper important component like Integrated National Power System/Grid (INPS), Power Generation Modality (Hydropower, Thermal/Nuclear Plants and Diesel Plants) are well described and Master Plan, Project Selection, Construction Schedules and Hydropower potentiality of Nepal are discussed in detail. In a severe power and energy crisis situation in the country, power export is not recommended. Nepal needs 3000 MW to reach the level of other south Asian nations. INPS is owned and operated by NEA; therefore NEA also has the responsibility to prepare master plan for power generation, transmission and distribution. But, the Department Electricity Development a regulatory body of Ministry of Energy of is undertaking / carrying out feasibility study without taking care of INPS/country’s power requirement. This has created duplication of work and confusion; as such the Ministry of Energy deviated from its responsibility of preparing sound policy, regulation and monitoring them strictly. The Ministry shouldn’t indulge in feasibility study, construction and operational activities, which come under the responsibility of concerned technical department /authority. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hn.v16i0.12214 HYDRO Nepal Journal of Water Energy and EnvironmentIssue. 16, 2015, January Page: 18-22 Upload date: March 1, 2015

Periodic solutions with nonconstant sign in Abel equations of the second kind

The study of periodic solutions with constant sign in the Abel equation of the second kind can be made through the equation of the first kind. This is because the situation is equivalent under the transformation x ↦ x − 1 , and there are many results available in the literature for the first kind equation. However, the equivalence breaks down when one seeks for solutions with nonconstant sign. This note is devoted to periodic solutions with nonconstant sign in Abel equations of the second kind. Specifically, we obtain sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of a periodic solution that shares the zeros of the leading coefficient of the Abel equation. Uniqueness and stability features of such solutions are also studied.

Atrichia with Papular Lesions: A Report of Three Novel Human Hairless Gene Mutations and a Revision of Diagnostic Criteria

Atrichia with papular lesions is a rare autosomal recessive condition characterized by complete irreversible hair loss during the first months of life and papules that appear during early childhood. Atrichia with papular lesions is frequently misdiagnosed as alopecia universalis, despite increasing reports of its prevalence and the presence of well-defined diagnostic criteria. Most cases of atrichia with papular lesions have been reported in consanguineous families residing in small geographical regions, but the increasing number of sporadic cases of unrelated individuals suggests that atrichia with papular lesions is more common than previously thought. Mutations in the human hairless gene on chromosome 8p12 have been implicated in this disease. Here, we report two novel heterozygous mutations in an Australian family and a novel homozygous mutation in 2 Arab siblings. We also revise the diagnostic criteria for atrichia with papular lesions in order to clarify its uniqueness and distinguishing features from alopecia universalis.

Some Remarks on Special Conformal and Special Projective Symmetries in General Relativity

Those space-times admitting special conformal vector fields and those admitting special projective vector fields have recently been studied. In this paper these two classes of space times are shown to be very closely related to each other. Certain uniqueness features of (and necessary extra symmetries contained in) the associated Lie algebras are discussed and the dimensionality of each of the algebras is computed.

Identification of the Thermal Conductivity and Heat Capacity in Unsteady Nonlinear Heat Conduction Problems Using the Boundary Element Method

In this study the inverse problem of the identification of temperature dependent thermal properties of a heat conducting body is investigated. The solution of the corresponding direct problem is obtained using a time marching boundary element method (BEM), which allows, without any need of interpolation and solution domain discretisation, efficient and accurate evaluation of the temperature everywhere inside the space–time dependent domain. Since the inverse problem, which requires the determination of the thermal conductivity and heat capacity from a finite set of temperature measurements taken inside the body, possesses poor uniqueness features, additional information is achieved by assuming that the thermal properties belong to a set of polynomials. Thus the inverse problem reduces to a parameter system estimation problem which is solved using the nonlinear least-squares method. Convergent and stable numerical results are obtained for the finite set of parameters which characterise the thermal properties for various test examples. Once the thermal properties are accurately obtained then the BEM determines automatically the temperature inside the solution domain and the remaining unspecified boundary values and the numerically obtained results show good agreement with the corresponding analytical solutions.

Identifiability and Distinguishability of General Reaction Systems

Identifiability and distinguishability are essential uniqueness features of reaction schemes. Identifiability deals with the problem of determining whether an experiment is able to supply the desired information on the parameters of a model, whereas distinguishability examines the uniqueness of a kinetic model itself within a given class of competing models. Deterministic analysis, assuming error-free and continuous knowledge of measurable quantities, is a useful first step toward establishing uniqueness properties, because deterministic identifiability (distinguishability) is a necessary condition for their existence in any realistic experiment. Deterministic uniqueness conditions have been described in the literature only for first-order reaction systems. This paper extends the method to isothermal systems that include reactions of arbitrary order with mass-action-type rate equations. In contrast to the first-order case with relatively simple examples of unidentifiable and/or undistinguishable systems, all higher order schemes we have studied turned out to be both identifiable and distinguishable from other schemes in a deterministic sense when consideration is restricted to reasonable kinetic experiments. 17 refs., 1 fig., 2 tabs.

Uniqueness Features In Sampled Complex-Valued Object Reconstruction From Discrete Intensity Data

A procedure to reconstruct sampled complex-valued objects from intensity data at the output of a general optical system is given. It is shown that both the choice of the sampling points at the output plane (uniform or nonuniform sampling) and the specific values of the intensity at these points determine the uniqueness features of the reconstruction problem.