Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Air Foil Bearings With External Pressurization

Foil bearings are widely used for oil-free microturbomachinery. One of the critical technical issues related to reliability of the foil bearings is a coating wear on the top foil and rotor during start/stops. Especially for heavily loaded foil bearings, large start torque requires a large drive motor. Bearing cooling is also mandatory for certain applications because the foil bearings can generate significant amount of heat depending on operating conditions. Usually axial flow is used through the space between the top foil and bearing sleeve. In this paper, a hybrid air foil bearing with external pressurization is introduced. A flexible steel tube is attached to the backside of the top foil with orifice holes, and externally pressurized air is directly supplied to the bearing clearance to lift off the rotor before rotor spins. The hybrid operation eliminates the coating wear during start/stop cycles, reduces drag torque during starts, and eliminates axial flow cooling. The hybrid foil gas bearing was constructed using a multiple compression springs to demonstrate a feasibility of the concept. A simple analytical model to calculate top foil deflection under hydrostatic pressurization has been developed. Predictions via orbit simulations indicate the hybrid air foil bearings can have much higher critical speed and onset speed of instability than hydrodynamic counter part. Measured load capacity was slightly higher than hydrodynamic bearing even under smaller amount of air flow. In addition, the hybrid operation was very effective for bearing cooling even if the cooling flow rate was lower than hydrodynamic counterpart. The measured very small drag torque during the start/stop demonstrates the hybrid foil bearing can have near-infinite life time without wear of the bearing and rotor surface. The experimental studies show high potential of the hybrid air foil bearings for various oil-free turbomachinery, especially for heavily loaded high temperature applications. © 2006 ASME
Comparison of Waist Circumference, Body Mass Index, Percent Body Fat and Other Measure of Adiposity in Identifying Cardiovascular Disease Risks among Thai Adults.

OBJECTIVE To compare the abilities of body mass index (BMI), percent body fat (%BF), waist circumference (WC), waist-hip ratio (WHR) and waist-height ratio (WHtR) to identify cardiovascular disease risk factors. METHODS This cross-sectional study is comprised of 1,391 Thai participants (451 men and 940 women) receiving annual health check-ups. Spearman's rank correlation was used to determine the association of the five anthropometric indices with metabolic parameters including fasting plasma glucose, triglyceride, high density lipoprotein and blood pressure. The prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors was determined according to tertile of each anthropometric measure. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were plotted to compare anthropometric measure as predictors of the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors. RESULTS Metabolic parameters were more strongly associated with %BF and WHR and least correlated with BMI in men. Among women, BMI was most strongly correlated with metabolic parameters. In both genders, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors increased across successive tertiles for each anthropometric measure. Review of ROC curves indicated that %BF and WHR performed slightly better than other measures in identifying differences in CVD risk factors among men. BMI performed at least as well or better than other measures of adiposity among women. CONCLUSIONS These findings confirm high correlations between anthropometric measures and metabolic parameters. BMI, WC and other measures were not materially different in identifying cardiovascular disease risk factors. Although small differences were observed, the magnitudes of those differences are not likely to be of public health or clinical significance.
Status report on the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents living in urban slums in Kenya

This report is based on secondary analysis of data from the Transition to Adulthood (TTA) project among 12-22 years olds living in two informal settlements Korogocho and Viwandani in Nairobi Kenya. The report highlights the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) challenges faced by adolescents living in these slums as well as the perceptions and strategies that adolescents adopt to deal with each of these challenges. The findings are expected to contribute guidance to the design and implementation of appropriate SRH intervention programs that respond to the unique needs of adolescent boys and girls living in poor urban settings.
A new simple RC modeling for on-chip interconnects with its applications to buffer insertion

A new improved RC modeling for on-chip interconnects derived from pi-configuration of AWE-Based RLC model is presented. A platform utilized to generate all-possible T- and pi configurations of RC, RLC and RLCG models using GAM, TPN, and AWE methods is proposed. 18 different RC, RLC, and RLCG models are generated based on this platform. The pi-configuration of AWE-RLC model provides the best performance. This model is mapped into an improved RC model to preserve the accuracy of the RLC model while keeping the simplicity of the RC model. As compared with conventional RC model, the simulation results of interconnect's delay with buffer insertion show that the proposed RC model improves the delay by 20.5%, reduces the number of required buffers by 24%, and the buffer sizes by 32%.
Structural behaviour of reinforced concrete beams strengthened by epoxy bonded steel plates.

The development of synthetic adhesives based on epoxy resins has opened new possibilities for bonding structural materials together. The present work was concerned with the use of epoxy resins to strengthen reinforced concrete beams by externally bonded steel plates. It was found in the first part that the assessment of the properties of the epoxy adhesive is of paramount importance as they varied considerably with the thickness of the test specimen and the rate of loading. The adhesive proved to offer a bond stronger than concrete in shear and resulted in a composite action between the beams and steel plates. Preloading the beams prior to strengthening them did not have any adverse effect on their behaviour. The added strength from the plates was fully exploited even in beams which were held under a preload of 70% of their ultimate strength while being strengthened. Stopping the plate in the shear span, short of the support, created a critical section where premature bond failure occurred beyond a certain plate thickness. Failure was caused by the combination of high peeling and bond stresses present in the region where the plate was stopped. These stresses were due to the transfer of tensile forces from the plate to the bars in that region and were higher with thicker plates. Bonding steel plates on the tension face of the beams increased their shear capacity by 9 to 15%. This may have been due to dowelling action from the plates which had a greater contact area with concrete than an equivalent amount of internal steel bars. The use of externally bonded steel as shear reinforcement was effective but requires further investigation. The external web strips failed prematurely as compared to equivalent stirrups. The long term deformations in plated beams were highly affected by the conditions of their environment but despite 47 month exposure no visual deterioration of the concrete-epoxy-steel joint was observed.
The INTERSPEECH 2011 Speaker State Challenge

While the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more ‘conventional’ phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. The INTERSPEECH 2011 Speaker State Challenge thus addresses two new sub-challenges to overcome the usually low compatibility of results: In the Intoxication Sub-Challenge, alcoholisation of speakers has to be determined in two classes; in the Sleepiness Sub-Challenge, another two-class classification task has to be solved. This paper introduces the conditions, the Challenge corpora “Alcohol Language Corpus” and “Sleepy Language Corpus”, and a standard feature set that may be used. Further, baseline results are given. Index Terms: Speaker State Challenge, Intoxication, Sleepiness
Obstetric epidural anaesthesia in patients with Harrington instrumentation

This fiveyear retrospective study reviews our experience with epidural obstetric analgesia in patients with previous Harrington rod instrumentation (HRI) for correction of idiopathic scoliosis. Patients were identified by the presence of an antepartum anaesthetic consultation for HRI. The anaesthetic record was examined to determine the frequency of epidural catheter insertion and any problems related to this procedure. Nine epidural insertions were attempted in the 16 patients identified. Five were uncomplicated but four were complicated by one or more of: failure to identify the epidural space, blood vessel trauma, dural puncture, failure to obtain analgesia or the need for multiple attempts before successful insertion. There were no sequelae related to epidural insertion. There were no sequelae related to epidural insertion. We conclude that patients with HRI may be offered epidural anaesthesia for labour and delivery provided that they are informed of the increased risk of complications. RésuméCette étude rétrospective revolt notre experience d’une anal gésie épidurale en obstétrique chez des patientes ayant précédemment subi une opération de Harrington. Neuf insertions de cathéter épiduralfurent tentées chez 16 patientes. Cinq furent sans complication et quatre furent compliquees par une ou plusieurs des complications suivantes: impossibilité d’identifier l’espace épidural, trauma des vaisseaux sanguins, ponction de la dure-mère, impossibilité d’obtenir de l’analgesie ou plusieurs tentatives afin d’insérer le cathéter. On conclut que les patientes ayant HRI peuvent subir une anesthésie épidurale lors du travail et de l’accouchement en autant qu’elles soient informées du risque croissant de complications.
Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection Using Character n-gram Profiles

The task of intrinsic plagiarism detection deals with cases where no reference corpus is available and it is exclusively based on stylistic changes or inconsistencies within a given document. In this paper a new method is presented that attempts to quantify the style variation within a document using character n-gram profiles and a style change function based on an appropriate dissimilarity measure originally proposed for author identification. In addition, we propose a set of heuristic rules that attempt to detect plagiarism-free documents and plagiarized passages, as well as to reduce the effect of irrelevant style changes within a document. The proposed approach is evaluated on the recently-available corpus of the 1 st Int.
Optimization algorithm for rectangle packing problem based on varied-factor genetic algorithm and lowest front-line strategy

Rectangle packing problem exists widely in manufacturing processes of modern industry, such as cutting of wood, leather, metal and paper, etc. It is also known as a typical NP-Complete combinatorial optimization problem with geometric nature, which contains two sub-problems, parking problem and sequencing problem of rectangles. Considering the features of the problem, this paper proposes an optimization algorithm based on an improved genetic algorithm (GA), combined with a lowest front-line strategy for parking rectangles on the sheet. The genetic algorithm is introduced to determine packing sequence of rectangles. To avoid premature convergence or falling into local optima, the traditional GA is improved by changing genetic factors according to quality of solutions obtained during evolution. Numerical experiments were conducted to take an evaluation for the proposed algorithm, along with a comparison with another algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance in optimization results and can improve utilization rate of material effectively.
Identification of a TPX2-Like Microtubule-Associated Protein in Drosophila

Chromosome segregation during mitosis and meiosis relies on the spindle and the functions of numerous microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). One of the best-studied spindle MAPs is the highly conserved TPX2, which has been reported to have characteristic intracellular dynamics and molecular activities, such as nuclear localisation in interphase, poleward movement in the metaphase spindle, microtubule nucleation, microtubule stabilisation, microtubule bundling, Aurora A kinase activation, kinesin-5 binding, and kinesin-12 recruitment. This protein has been shown to be essential for spindle formation in every cell type analysed so far. However, as yet, TPX2 homologues have not been found in the Drosophila genome. In this study, I found that the Drosophila protein Ssp1/Mei-38 has significant homology to TPX2. Sequence conservation was limited to the putative spindle microtubule-associated region of TPX2, and intriguingly, D-TPX2 (Ssp1/Mei-38) lacks Aurora A- and kinesin-5-binding domains, which are highly conserved in other animal and plant species, including many insects such as ants and bees. D-TPX2 uniformly localised to kinetochore microtubule-enriched regions of the metaphase spindle in the S2 cell line, and it had microtubule binding and bundling activities in vitro. In comparison with other systems, the contribution of D-TPX2 to cell division seems to be minor; live cell imaging of microtubules and chromosomes after RNAi knockdown identified significant delay in chromosome congression in only 18% of the cells. Thus, while this conserved spindle protein is present in Drosophila, other mechanisms may largely compensate for its spindle assembly and chromosome segregation functions.
The Spalt transcription factors regulate cell proliferation, survival and epithelial integrity downstream of the Decapentaplegic signalling pathway

Summary The expression of the spalt genes is regulated by the Decapentaplegic signalling pathway in the Drosophila wing. These genes participate in the patterning of the longitudinal wing veins by regulating the expression of vein-specific genes, and in the establishment of cellular affinities in the central region of the wing blade epithelium. The Spalt proteins act as transcription factors, most likely regulating gene expression by repression, but the identity of their target genes in the wing is still unknown. As a preliminary step to unravel the genetic hierarchy controlled by the Spalt proteins, we have analysed their requirements during wing development, and addressed to what extent they mediate all the functions of the Decapentaplegic pathway in this developmental system. We identify additional functions for Spalt in cell division, survival, and maintenance of epithelial integrity. Thus, Spalt activity is required to promote cell proliferation, acting in the G2/M transition of the cell cycle. The contribution of Spalt to cell division is limited to the central region of the wing blade, as they do not mediate the extra growth triggered by Decapentaplegic signalling in the peripheral regions of the wing disc. In addition, Spalt function is required to maintain cell viability in cells exposed to high levels of Decapentaplegic signalling. This aspect of Spalt function is related to the repression of JNK signalling in the spalt domain of expression. Finally, we further characterise the requirements of Spalt to maintain epithelial integrity by regulating cellular affinities between cells located in the central wing region. Our results indicate that Spalt function mediates most of the requirements identified for Decapentaplegic signalling, contributing to establish the cellular qualities that differentiate central versus peripheral territories in the wing blade.
Osculating Thevenin model for predicting delay and slew of capacitively characterized cells

To extrapolate from one point to another using a line, one had better get the slope right. In this paper we apply a similar concept to the important problem in Static Timing Analysis (STA) of predicting cell timing for RC loads using capacitive characterization data. Instead of a line we have a Thevenin circuit, and instead of matching slopes we match load sensitivities. We present a table driven, highly accurate cell delay and slew prediction procedure that can improve STA when interconnect effects dominate. It is significantly more accurate (especially slew) than previously published C/sub eff/ methods.
Total productive maintenance: literature review and directions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and to present an overview of TPM implementation practices adopted by the manufacturing organizations. It also seeks to highlight appropriate enablers and success factors for eliminating barriers in successful TPM implementation.Design/methodology/approach – The paper systematically categorizes the published literature and then analyzes and reviews it methodically.Findings – The paper reveals the important issues in Total Productive Maintenance ranging from maintenance techniques, framework of TPM, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), TPM implementation practices, barriers and success factors in TPM implementation, etc. The contributions of strategic TPM programmes towards improving manufacturing competencies of the organizations have also been highlighted here.Practical implications – The literature on classification of Total Productive Maintenance has so far been very limited. The paper reviews a larg.
Serum bicarbonate concentration correlates with arterial base deficit in critically ill patients.

BACKGROUND Base deficit (BD) and lactate concentration have been established as endpoints of resuscitation (EOR) in critically ill patients. However, obtaining these data has traditionally required an arterial blood gas (ABG) sample. We hypothesized that the more easily available serum bicarbonate (SB) concentration could approximate BD and potentially serve as a useful EOR of critically ill or septic patients. We evaluated retrospectively the correlation of SB with BD in a cohort of surgical intensive care unit patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS Clinical data from April 1996 through April 1998 were recorded in a computerized application from 1,712 critically ill adult patients. The data were downloaded daily and imported into a relational database for storage and analysis. A subset of paired SB and ABG samples obtained simultaneously was analyzed by linear regression to determine the correlation coefficients (r) and coefficient of determinations (r(2)) for the respective analyses. RESULTS A total of 26,690 BD and 16,737 SB determinations were available in the database. Of these, 5,301 BD and SB samples were drawn simultaneously on the same patient. The correlation coefficient for these data pairs was 0.91, and the coefficient of determination was 0.83. The base deficit was predicted by the equation: BD = 22.43 - (0.9522 x SB) (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSION In this large data set, there was a close inverse correlation between SB and BD in critically ill or septic patients. The predictive equation explains 83% of the variability for BD values. A prospective study comparing SB to BD and lactate could confirm SB as a useful marker of resuscitation.
Acoustic differentiation of ip and IP boundary levels: comparison of l- and l-l% in the switchboard corpus

Prosodic phrase boundaries, regardless of level of disjuncture, can be signaled by variation in pitch, loudness, and finalsyllable length. In an attempt to find acoustically distinctive characteristics correlated with ip (intermediate phrase) versus IP (intonation phrase) labels in a ToBI-labeled subset of the Switchboard corpus, we compared F0 drop, intensity drop, and nucleus duration in the phrase-final rime for L- and L-L% boundary labels. The results indicate no significant difference in F0 or intensity drop, but final-syllable lengthening as measured by nucleus duration differed significantly between the two boundary levels. Additionally, F0 aperiodicity associated with creaky voice was found to occur more frequently at L-L% than at L- boundaries. These results provide empirical corroboration of the statement that F0 does not reliably differentiate L- from L-L% [1], and support previous findings that degree of finalsyllable lengthening [3] and presence of creaky phonation [10] are correlated with differences in perceived level of phrasal disjuncture.
Two Modes of Cell Death Caused by Exposure to Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Field

High-amplitude electric pulses of nanosecond duration, also known as nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF), are a novel modality with promising applications for cell stimulation and tissue ablation. However, key mechanisms responsible for the cytotoxicity of nsPEF have not been established. We show that the principal cause of cell death induced by 60- or 300-ns pulses in U937 cells is the loss of the plasma membrane integrity (“nanoelectroporation”), leading to water uptake, cell swelling, and eventual membrane rupture. Most of this early necrotic death occurs within 1–2 hr after nsPEF exposure. The uptake of water is driven by the presence of pore-impermeable solutes inside the cell, and can be counterbalanced by the presence of a pore-impermeable solute such as sucrose in the medium. Sucrose blocks swelling and prevents the early necrotic death; however the long-term cell survival (24 and 48 hr) does not significantly change. Cells protected with sucrose demonstrate higher incidence of the delayed death (6–24 hr post nsPEF). These cells are more often positive for the uptake of an early apoptotic marker dye YO-PRO-1 while remaining impermeable to propidium iodide. Instead of swelling, these cells often develop apoptotic fragmentation of the cytoplasm. Caspase 3/7 activity increases already in 1 hr after nsPEF and poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) cleavage is detected in 2 hr. Staurosporin-treated positive control cells develop these apoptotic signs only in 3 and 4 hr, respectively. We conclude that nsPEF exposure triggers both necrotic and apoptotic pathways. The early necrotic death prevails under standard cell culture conditions, but cells rescued from the necrosis nonetheless die later on by apoptosis. The balance between the two modes of cell death can be controlled by enabling or blocking cell swelling.
Abstractness in speech-metronome synchronisation: P-centres as cyclic attractors

ness in Speech-Metronome Synchronisation: P-Centres as Cyclic Attractors Plinio A. Barbosa, Pablo Arantes, Alexsandro R. Meireles, and Jussara M. Vieira Speech Prosody Studies Group, Department of Linguistics State University of Campinas, Brazil plinio@iel.unicamp. br
A Robust Aggregation Method for Quasi-blind Robots in an Active Environment

The aggregation of a swarm of autonomous agents into com- pact clusters is often a required behavior of multi-agent systems. In the case where no central control or coordination exists, this problem is known as the Decentralized Gathering. This presents a first step in the application of a bio-inspired aggregation scheme to aggregate robots whose abilities are very restricted: the only way they can communicate is through an active environment (stigmergy) and the only information they can receive is the local detection of the waves produced by other robots. The active environment obeys a cellular automaton rule and is simulated with a projection of light on the robots.