Ethnobotanical Documentation of Medicinal Plants Used by the Indigenous Panay Bukidnon in Lambunao, Iloilo, Philippines

The Panay Bukidnon is a group of indigenous peoples living in the interior highlands of Panay Island in Western Visayas, Philippines. Little is known about their ethnobotanical knowledge due to limited written records, and no recent research has been conducted on the medicinal plants they used in ethnomedicine. This study aims to document the medicinal plants used by the indigenous Panay Bukidnon in Lambunao, Iloilo, Panay Island. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 75 key informants from June 2020 to September 2021 to determine the therapeutic use of medicinal plants in traditional medicine. A total of 131 medicinal plant species distributed in 121 genera and 57 families were used to address 91 diseases in 16 different uses or disease categories. The family Fabaceae was best represented with 13 species, followed by Lamiaceae with nine species and Poaceae with eight species. The leaf was the most frequently used plant part and decoction was the most preferred form of preparation. To evaluate the plant importance, use value (UV), relative frequency citation (RFC), relative important index (RI), informant consensus factor (ICF), and fidelity level (FL) were used. Curcuma longa L. had the highest UV (0.79), Artemisia vulgaris L. had the highest RFC value (0.57), and Annona muricata L. had the highest RI value (0.88). Diseases and symptoms or signs involving the respiratory system and injury, poisoning, and certain other consequences of external causes recorded the highest ICF value (0.80). Blumea balsamifera (L.) DC. and Chromolaena odorata (L.) R.M. King & H. Rob were the most relevant and agreed species for the former and latter disease categories, respectively. C. odorata had the highest FL value (100%) and was the most preferred medicinal plant used for cuts and wounds. The results of this study serve as a medium for preserving cultural heritage, ethnopharmacological bases for further drug research and discovery, and preserving biological diversity.

Investigating the Village-based Tourism Economic Impact

Many studies have been documented that tourism economic impact is a determinant of community support toward tourism development. However, there is a lack of study investigating tourism economic impact on village-based tourism. This study investigates the relative important index of the item offered by previous literature. Besides, this study also examines different means from different respondents: gender, education, and age. Forty-seven respondents have participated in this study. The validity and reliability test is run before the items are ranked using the relative important index (RII). Mann-Whitney U test has applied any difference of means value between woman and man. Moreover, the Kruskal-Wallis test is employed to determine any difference of means value among different levels of respondent education. The result shows that all items are valid and reliable. This study concludes that the first rank is variable 1 (village-based tourism increased job opportunities for village communities) with a relative important index of 0.898. Besides, six items have no mean value difference between man and woman, except for variable 5 (village-based tourism given economic benefit to village people). Its asym significance of Mann-Whitney U asym significance is lesser than 0.05. Further, respondent education and age category also have no difference in mean value using the Kruskal Wallis test. This study implies that the tourism economics impact for village-based tourism can be used for further studies.

A CNN-Based Method for Counting Grains within a Panicle

The number of grains within a panicle is an important index for rice breeding. Counting manually is laborious and time-consuming and hardly meets the requirement of rapid breeding. It is necessary to develop an image-based method for automatic counting. However, general image processing methods cannot effectively extract the features of grains within a panicle, resulting in a large deviation. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is a powerful tool to analyze complex images and has been applied to many image-related problems in recent years. In order to count the number of grains in images both efficiently and accurately, this paper applied a CNN-based method to detecting grains. Then, the grains can be easily counted by locating the connected domains. The final error is within 5%, which confirms the feasibility of CNN-based method for counting grains within a panicle.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESS IMPLEMENTATION IN PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVE PROJECT IN MALAYSIA

PFI involved a project with long-term relationships at various stages from pre-contract stage to contractual stage and in use stage which also include maintenance stage. KM process is one of the elements to ensure the success of the KM system. In the PFI project, the KM process also needs to be checked whether it is applied in the various stage of the pre-contract stages. Questionnaires had been distributed to the parties involved at the pre-contract stage. The results are then analyse using the Relative Important Index (RII) to identify the ranking of KM usage in various stages of the pre-contract stage. According to the analysis, some of the stages in the pre-contract process of the PFI are not fully implemented in the KM process. For knowledge acquisition and storage practise, the high usage of the process is at the conduct of value management, submission to cabinet and access, evaluation, and approval. The next KM process which is capturing and storing, the process evaluation, negotiation and recommend are the activities at the higher level practising these KM processes. At next KM process which is re-using and sharing are Access and approval by the ministry, evaluation, negotiate and recommend practise more on this KM process.

STI direct test method based on wavelet transform to extract envelope

Speech transmission index (STI for short) is an important index to evaluate the quality of speech transmission of the room, it can better reflect the degree of voice signal affected by room reverberation and noise in the transmission process.This paper presents an algorithm for directly measuring STI index, white noise is filtered by Paul Kellet filter to generate pink noise, the signal envelope is extracted by wavelet transform, which improves the extraction accuracy of signal envelope and makes the measurement of STI index more accurate.

Research on Improving the Affinity of Ideological and Political Education in Colleges and Universities in the New Era

The affinity of ideological and political education in colleges and universities is an important index to measure the effect of ideological and political education. The improvement of affinity is the internal requirement of ideological and political education in colleges and universities. In the current ideological and political education activities, facing multiple challenges such as insufficient attraction and weak effectiveness, the improvement of affinity is particularly necessary. To enhance the affinity of ideological and political education in colleges and universities, we should realize the organic unity of the affinity of ideological and political education content, the affinity of ideological and political teachers’ personality and the affinity of ideological and political education form based on adhering to the principles of people-oriented, keeping pace with the times and interest.

Modeling and Analysis of Different Architecture for Civil Aircraft Hydraulic System

For the evaluation of civil aircraft hydraulic system, Fuel Consumption is a very important index. However, there is no effective method to perform analysis for different architecture. This paper proposes that taking fuel weight penalty as a major mathmatical modeling method to analysis traditional architecture and more electric architecture. The result shows that the fuel consumption of more electric architecture is less than traditional architecture.

Living standard of people with disabilities in the Republic of Moldova

An important index that reflects the efficiency of the state socio-economic policy is the population standard of living. This index represents the result of the country’s socio-economic development. No result of the development of individual sectors of the economy, regardless of how large and positive it is, have sufficient value without appropriate changes in the standard of living of the population. Increasing the living standards of the population, including people with disabilities, is a strategic priority in the state policy of the Republic of Moldova. One way to achieve this is to improve micro and microeconomic mechanisms for GDP growth. It is also important to ensure economic inclusion through the equitable distribution of income and the reduction of economic inequalities for the harmonious development of society as a whole. The purpose of the research is to highlight the essential aspects of the standard of living of people with disabilities in the Republic of Moldova in order to create adequate measures for their social protection.

Development of Estimating Methodology for Transit Accessibility Using Smart Card Data

Transit accessibility is an explanatory variable evaluating the mobility of a region in consideration of the connectivity and demand among the regions, which has been used for an important index to determine transport policy on the transit network. This study aims to develop an accessibility index considering the two factors with a demand-weighted approach, that is, impedance and attraction level. Two variables, travel time and the ratio of trips, are employed to calculate the accessibility index, and comparative assessments between zones are conducted. The application of smart card data makes it possible to analyze travel information and reflect them empirically in the model. This study identifies zones with vulnerable accessibility and suggests criteria for transit investment plans with two aspects, that is, intensive transit area and spatial distribution of the accessibility index. These aspects contribute to transit planners by suggesting transit investment criteria and comprehensible statistics to evaluate accessibility. Since zones with low accessibility indexes are identified as being vulnerable to access from other zones, policymakers should focus on those zones to improve the overall transit network.