Sound Absorption Of Micro-Perforated Panel Made By Oil Palm Fibre

This study presents the sound absorption performance of micro-perforated panel (MPP) made by oil palm fibre. Firstly, samples are fabricated from oil palm fibre and perforated by using Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine with a hole diameter of 1 mm. After that, an impedance tube experiment is carried out and the measured results show that the sound-absorbing panel with MPP structure generates a better acoustic performance, comparing to the sound-absorbing panel without MPP structure. MPP with a perforation ratio of 0.8 % shows the greatest peak sound absorption coefficient (SAC) of 0.77 at the frequency of 600 Hz, comparing to the panel without MPP structure, which produces a peak SAC of 0.20 at the same frequency range. The predicted and measured results obtained from the modelling equation of MPP and impedance tube experiment respectively are then compared. Some deviations occur between the results due to the trapped air bubbles inside the samples during fabrication process. Moreover, it is observed that the panel vibration effect significantly modifies the sound absorption performance of thin MPP, which has a panel thickness of 1 mm. Meanwhile, it does not alter the SAC of rigid MPP, which has a panel thickness of 3 mm. Apart from that, it is observed that as the air cavity depth increases, the maximum SAC of the MPP shifts to a lower frequency range. Besides, it is noticed that the peak SAC is decreased and shifted towards a higher frequency range when the perforation ratio of MPP increases. The results of the study proved that the MPP structure can help to enhance the sound absorption performance of oil palm fibre at a selected frequency range by choosing the right parameters like air cavity depth and perforation ratio

Combined CNN Transformer Encoder for Enhanced Fine-grained Human Action Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition is a challenging task in computer vision. As fine-grained datasets have small inter-class variations in spatial and temporal space, fine-grained action recognition model requires good temporal reasoning and discrimination of attribute action semantics. Leveraging on CNN's ability in capturing high level spatial-temporal feature representations and Transformer's modeling efficiency in capturing latent semantics and global dependencies, we investigate two frameworks that combine CNN vision backbone and Transformer Encoder to enhance fine-grained action recognition: 1) a vision-based encoder to learn latent temporal semantics, and 2) a multi-modal video-text cross encoder to exploit additional text input and learn cross association between visual and text semantics. Our experimental results show that both our Transformer encoder frameworks effectively learn latent temporal semantics and cross-modality association, with improved recognition performance over CNN vision model. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the FineGym benchmark dataset for both proposed architectures.Comment: The Ninth Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC9) @ CVPR202

Assessment of post-operative pain in cats: a case study on veterinary students of Universiti Putra Malaysia

The ability to assess and control pain is listed as one of the desired Day One competencies among veterinary graduates. As such, a study was conducted to examine the current status and effectiveness of a video-based training module on the attitude toward and knowledge of pain assessment in cats among fourth- and final-year veterinary students of Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) in January of 2013. A total of 92 students participated in this study, resulting in a response rate of 60.1%. Upon completion of a pre-training survey, the respondents undertook an interactive video-based presentation, followed by a post-training survey. The majority of the students (96.7%) agreed on the importance of pain management. Before the training, many (76.1%) disagreed that they had received adequate training, while 53.3% were not confident in their pain-recognition skills. After training, their knowledge and confidence in pain assessment increased. Responses to the survey were not associated with differences in gender, level of study, or field of interest. Students were found to have mistaken some physiologic parameters as good pain indicators after ovariohysterectomy. Their assessment of three standardized video cases revealed that they could recognize prominent signs of pain but failed to identify changes in behavior that were more subtle. Refinement to the training module is required to address the above deficiencies

Parkin Mediates Apparent E2-Independent Monoubiquitination In Vitro and Contains an Intrinsic Activity That Catalyzes Polyubiquitination

10.1371/journal.pone.0019720PLoS ONE65

The first transcriptome sequencing and data analysis of the Javan mahseer (Tor tambra)

The Javan mahseer ( Tor tambra ) is one of the most valu- able freshwater fish found in Tor species. To date, other than mitogenomic data (BioProject: PRJNA422829), genomic and transcriptomic resources for this species are still lack- ing which is crucial to understand the molecular mechanisms associated with important traits such as growth, immune response, reproduction and sex determination. For the first time, we sequenced the transcriptome from a whole juve- nile fish using Illumina NovaSEQ60 0 0 generating raw paired- end reads. De novo transcriptome assembly generated a draft transcriptome (BUSCO5 completeness of 91.2% [Actinoptery- gii_odb10 database]) consisting of 259,403 putative tran- scripts with a total and N50 length of 333,881,215 bp and 2283 bp, respectively. A total count of 77,503 non-redundant protein coding sequences were predicted from the transcripts and used for functional annotation. We mapped the pre- dicted proteins to 304 known KEGG pathways with signal transduction cluster having the highest representation fol- lowed by immune system and endocrine system. In addi- tion, transcripts exhibiting significant similarity to previously published growth-and immune-related genes were identified which will facilitate future molecular breeding of Tor tambra

The impact of caregiver stigma on real-life social experience of Taiwanese adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

Caregivers of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder commonly experience stigma. However, how stigma influences social interactions of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder is unclear. We aimed to explore the impact of caregiver stigma on real-life social experiences of Taiwanese adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. In the context of everyday activities, 76 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who were not intellectually disabled (69 males, aged 10–16 years) carried a mobile device that prompted them 7 times, randomly, each day for 7 days to record with whom they were interacting, what they perceived, and how they felt about the interactions. Caregivers completed the Affiliate Stigma Scale to measure caregiver stigma. Multilevel analyses revealed that participants whose caregivers perceived high levels of stigma were more likely than those whose caregivers experienced less stigma to interact with family members and less likely to be interested in interacting with people at school. However, those participants also experienced more anxiety while interacting with family members. The findings shed light on ways that caregiver stigma impacted the social experiences of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and suggest that, in promoting social participation for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder, researchers and service providers must support caregivers to manage stigma

First high-quality genome assembly data of sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottboll)

The sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottboll) is a tropical halophytic starch-producing, economically important crop palm mainly located in Southeast Asian countries. Recently, a genome survey was conducted on this palm using the Illumina sequencing platform, with a very low (21.5%) BUSCO genome completeness score, and most of them (∼78%) are either fragmented or missing. Thus, in this study, the sago palm genome completeness was further improved with the utilization of the Nanopore sequencing platform that produced longer reads. A hybrid genome assembly was conducted, and the outcome was a much complete sago palm genome with BUSCO completeness achieved at as high as 97.9%, with only ∼2% of them either fragmented or missing. The estimated genome size of the sago palm is 509,812,790 bp in this study. A sum of 33,242 protein-coding genes was revealed from the sago palm genome and around 96.39% of them had been functionally annotated. An investigation on the carbohydrate metabolism KEGG pathways also unearthed that starch synthesis was one of the major sago palm activities. The genome data obtained from this work is indispensable for future molecular evolutionary and genome-wide association studies on the economically important sago palm

A Review on the Emerging Asian Aquaculture Fish, the MalaysianMahseer (Tor tambroides): Current Status and the Way Forward

The Malaysian mahseer (Tor tambroides)is a sport, ornamental and food all-in-one treasured aquaculture fish member of the Cyprinidae family. However, this freshwater riverine species is currently under the threats of habitat degradation and overfishing, apart from its poorly documented taxonomy. Despite its socio-economic significance, taxonomy confusion and conservation inadequacy, the knowledge gaps in some fields like the genomic landscape and biology are yet to be filled. In this comprehensive review, we presented an overview of all the past and current T. tambroides related research fields, namely morphology, population genetics, growth environment, reproduction, diet and nutrition, metagenome, mitogenome as well as conservation. Furthermore, we have included some future perspectives and recommendations for the advancement of the respective fields. It is anticipated that this review would be of great benefit to those planning to consolidate resources and work in tandem to pace the conservation and fish farming industry improvement endeavours