Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Kinetics of Evaporation of Alloying Elements under Vacuum: Application to Ti alloys in Electron Beam Melting

Abstract Vacuum metallurgical processes such as the electron beam melting are highly conducive to volatilization. In titanium processing, it concerns the alloying elements which show a high vapor pressure with respect to titanium matrix, such as Al. Two different experimental approaches using a laboratory electron beam furnace have been developed for the estimation of volatilization rate and activity coefficient of Al in Ti64. The first innovative method is based on the deposition rate of Al on Si wafers located at different angles θ above the liquid bath. We found that a deposition according to a cos2(π/2−θ) law describes well the experimental distribution of the weight of the deposition layer. The second approach relies on the depletion of aluminum in the liquid pool at two separate times of the volatilization process. Both approaches provide values of the Al activity coefficient at T=1, 860 °C in a fairly narrow range [0.044–0.0495], in good agreement with the range reported in the literature. Furthermore numerical simulation of the Al behavior in the liquid pool reveals (in the specific case of electron beam button melting) a weak transport resistance in the surface boundary layer.
Measles and Rubella Seroprevalence Among HIV–infected and Uninfected Zambian Youth

Background: Measles and congenital rubella syndrome remain significant causes of morbidity and mortality despite available vaccines. HIV-infected youth may be at increased risk of measles because of greater waning immunity after vaccination. At a population level, they constitute a potentially large pool of susceptibles to measles and rubella. More data among HIV-infected youth in sub-Saharan Africa are needed to guide vaccination policy and control strategies. Methods: This cross-sectional study was nested within 2 ongoing studies of malaria and HIV in Zambia. Dried blood spot cards from youth (5–15 years) in these studies from 2009 to 2013 were tested for IgG antibodies to measles and rubella viruses. HIV-uninfected youth, HIV-infected treatment-naive youth and HIV-infected youth receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) were compared. Results: A total of 617 HIV-uninfected, 144 HIV-infected treatment-naive and 128 HIV-infected youth receiving ART were included in this study. The proportion seropositive for measles virus was significantly higher among HIV-uninfected youth (92.5%) compared with HIV-infected treatment-naive youth (74.1%) and HIV-infected youth receiving ART (71.9%). No differences by age were observed. The proportion seropositive for rubella virus was significantly higher among HIV-uninfected youth (54.7%) compared with HIV-infected treatment-naive youth (41.7%) and HIV-infected youth receiving ART (49.6%), with increases observed by age for all groups. Conclusions: Measles seroprevalence was lower among HIV-infected than uninfected youth, consistent with waning immunity after measles vaccination. HIV-infected youth would benefit from revaccination. Half of all youth in rural Zambia were susceptible to rubella and may need targeting for catch-up rubella campaigns when measles–rubella vaccine is introduced.
Effect of fluoride ions modifier and ceramic Al2O3 particles additives on plasma electrolytic oxidation of AZ31

Plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) process is proved to be an effective technique for forming highly protective oxide film on Mg alloy AZ31. A comparative study has been done to investigate the PEO films deposited from silicate solution with NaF, Al2O3 nano-additives. The surface morphology feature, phase composition and elemental composition were examined by field scanning electron microscope, energy dispersive X-ray, X-ray diffraction. Doping of additives showed an obvious effect mainly on the peak of MgO and the thickness of the PEO films. Fluoride has a promising role and its presence considerably resulted in thicker and compacter films with improved corrosion resistance. Vice versa unexpected negative results had been obtained in the presence of alumina additives. It is assumed that fluoride ions enhanced ions conductivity during PEO process therefore promoted the film growth rate. On the other hand, the bulk Al2O3 particles hindered the ions movement through the coating deposition leading to thinner less compact films formation.
The Accuracy of Ultrasonography in Detection of Ulnar Collateral Ligament of Thumb Injuries; a Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Timely diagnosis and treatment of traumatic injury to ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) of thumb is of special importance for preserving the full function of the hand. Therefore, the present study has been designed with the aim of evaluating the accuracy of ultrasonography in detection of these injuries. Methods: The present diagnostic accuracy study was performed on trauma patients over 15 years old who had clinical evidence of injury to UCL of thumb and were admitted to the emergency department. All patients were evaluated regarding injury to the mentioned ligament via ultrasonography and MRI and finally, the accuracy of ultrasonography in this regard was measured considering MRI as the reference test. Results: 20 individuals with the mean age of 38.60 ± 13.45 (16 – 64) years were evaluated (60% male). Based on ultrasonography and MRI findings 7 (35%) individuals and 7 (35%), respectively had complete ligament rupture (kappa: 0.560 (95% CI: 0.179 – 0.942)). Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value, and positive and negative likelihood ratio of ultrasonography in detecting injuries of the mentioned ligament were 71.42 (30.25 – 94.88), 84.61 (53.66 – 97.28), 71.42 (30.25 – 94.88), 84.61 (53.66 – 97.28), 2.5 (0.71 – 8.82), and 0.18 (0.04 – 0.67), respectively. Conclusion: Based on the findings of the present study, performance of ultrasonography by a radiologist in the emergency department has 80% accuracy in detecting traumatic injuries of UCL of the thumb.
Learning Robust and Adaptive Real-World Continuous Control Using Simulation and Transfer Learning

We use model-free reinforcement learning, extensive simulation, and transfer learning to develop a continuous control algorithm that has good zero-shot performance in a real physical environment. We train a simulated agent to act optimally across a set of similar environments, each with dynamics drawn from a prior distribution. We propose that the agent is able to adjust its actions almost immediately, based on small set of observations. This robust and adaptive behavior is enabled by using a policy gradient algorithm with an Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) function approximation. Finally, we train an agent to navigate a two-dimensional environment with uncertain dynamics and noisy observations. We demonstrate that this agent has good zero-shot performance in a real physical environment. Our preliminary results indicate that the agent is able to infer the environmental dynamics after only a few timesteps, and adjust its actions accordingly.
SYNERGISTIC REINFORCEMENT OF ORGANOCLAY AND DOUBLE NETWORKING IN NATURAL RUBBER

ABSTRACT Research was undertaken on natural rubber (NR) nanocomposites with organoclays. A double-network (DN) structure is formed when a partially cross-linked elastomer is further cross-linked during a state of strain. Two methods were used in the preparation of NR/organoclay nanocomposites: the ordinary method (single-network NR nanocomposite) and double-networked NR (DN-NR) nanocomposites. The single-networked NR nanocomposites were used for comparison. The effects of organoclay (5 phr) with a different extension ratio on curing characteristics, mechanical properties, hardness, swelling behavior, and morphology of single- and double-networked NR nanocomposites were studied. The results showed that double-networked NR nanocomposites exhibited higher physical and mechanical properties. The tensile strength of DN-NR nanocomposites increased up to 33 MPa (more than four times greater than that of pure NR) and then decreased with an increasing extension ratio. Modulus and hardness continuously increased wi.
Compensatory axon sprouting for very slow axonal die‐back in a transgenic model of spinal muscular atrophy type III

Smn+/− transgenic mouse is a model of the mildest form of spinal muscular atrophy. Although there is a loss of spinal motoneurons in 11‐month‐old animals, muscular force is maintained. This maintained muscular force is mediated by reinnervation of the denervated fibres by surviving motoneurons. The spinal motoneurons in these animals do not show an increased susceptibility to death after nerve injury and they retain their regenerative capacity. We conclude that the hypothesized immaturity of the neuromuscular system in this model cannot explain the loss of motoneurons by systematic die‐back.
Evaluation of the efficacy of a probiotic containing Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Enterococcus, and Pediococcus strains in promoting broiler performance and modulating cecal microflora composition and metabolic activities.

The aim of this work was to investigate the efficacy of a new multibacterial species probiotic in broiler nutrition. The probiotic contained 2 Lactobacillus strains, 1 Bifidobacterium strain, 1 Enterococcus strain, and 1 Pediococcus strain. Four hundred 1-d-old male Cobb broilers were allocated in 4 experimental treatments for 6 wk. The experimental treatments received a corn-soybean basal diet and were as follows: "control," with no other additions; "probiotic in feed and water," (PFW) with probiotic administered at 1 g/kg of feed for the whole period and in water on scheduled intervals during the first 4 wk; "probiotic in feed," (PF) with probiotic in feed as in PFW; and "antibiotic," (AB) with addition of avilamycin at 2.5 mg/kg of feed. Salinomycin Na was used as a coccidiostat. Each treatment had 5 replicates of 20 broilers. Treatment effects on parameters of broiler performance and cecal microbial ecology were determined. Broiler BW, feed intake, and feed conversion ratio were determined on a weekly and overall basis. Cecal microflora composition, concentration of volatile fatty acids, and activities of 5 bacterial glycolytic enzymes (alpha-galactosidase, beta-galactosidase, alpha-glucosidase, beta-glucosidase, and beta-glucuronidase) were determined at the end of the experiment. Overall, treatment PFW displayed a growth-promoting effect that did not differ from AB. Overall, feed conversion ratio in treatment AB was significantly better (P < or = 0.01) than the control treatment, whereas treatments PFW and PF were intermediate and not different from AB. Concentrations of bacteria belonging to Bifidobacterium spp. , Lactobacillus spp. , and gram-positive cocci were significantly (P < or = 0.05) higher in treatments PFW and PF compared with the control and AB treatments. Treatments PFW and PF had significantly higher specific activities of alpha-galactosidase and beta-galactosidase compared with the control and AB treatments. In conclusion, probiotic treatment PFW displayed a growth-promoting effect that was comparable to avilamycin treatment. In addition, treatments PFW and PF modulated the composition and, to an extent, the activities of the cecal microflora, resulting in a significant probiotic effect.
Adaptive random testing through test profiles

Random testing (RT), which simply selects test cases at random from the whole input domain, has been widely applied to test software and assess the software reliability. However, it is controversial whether RT is an effective method to detect software failures. Adaptive random testing (ART) is an enhancement of RT in terms of failure‐detection effectiveness. Its basic intuition is to evenly spread random test cases all over the input domain. There are various notions to achieve the goal of even spread, and each notion can be implemented by different algorithms. For example, ‘by exclusion’ and ‘by partitioning’ are two different notions to evenly spread test cases. Restricted random testing (RRT) is a typical algorithm for the notion of ‘by exclusion’, whereas the notion of ‘by partitioning’ can be implemented by either the technique of bisection (ART‐B) or the technique of random partitioning (ART‐RP). In this paper, we propose a generic approach that can be used to implement different notions. In the new approach, test cases are simply selected based on test profiles that are in turn designed according to certain notions. In this study, we design several test profiles for the notions of ‘by exclusion’ and ‘by partitioning’, and then use these profiles to illustrate our new approach. Our experimental results show that compared with the original RRT, ART‐B, and ART‐RP algorithms, our new approach normally brings at least a higher failure‐detection capability or a lower computational overhead. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Adversarial Risk and the Dangers of Evaluating Against Weak Attacks

This paper investigates recently proposed approaches for defending against adversarial examples and evaluating adversarial robustness. The existence of adversarial examples in trained neural networks reflects the fact that expected risk alone does not capture the model's performance against worst-case inputs. We motivate the use of adversarial risk as an objective, although it cannot easily be computed exactly. We then frame commonly used attacks and evaluation metrics as defining a tractable surrogate objective to the true adversarial risk. This suggests that models may be obscured to adversaries, by optimizing this surrogate rather than the true adversarial risk. We demonstrate that this is a significant problem in practice by repurposing gradient-free optimization techniques into adversarial attacks, which we use to decrease the accuracy of several recently proposed defenses to near zero. Our hope is that our formulations and results will help researchers to develop more powerful defenses.
The influence of free fatty acid content and degree of saturation on the apparent metabolizable energy value of fats fed to broilers.

To determine the influence of free fatty acid (FFA) content on the subsequent nutritive value of fats, the following were studied: tallow (FFA content of 138.4 g/kg) and tallow acid oil (FFA = 952.1 g/kg) in Experiment 1; palm oil (FFA = 57.5 g/kg) and palm acid oil (FFA = 917.5 g/kg) in Experiment 2; and soybean oil (FFA = 14.4 g/kg) and soybean acid oil (FFA = 683.4 g/kg) in Experiment 3. The two fats within each experiment were blended in proportions to give three mixtures of intermediary FFA content. Thus, each experiment investigated five fats by substituting them into a basal diet at the expense of the energy-yielding ingredients at rates of 40, 80, and 120 g/kg. Experimental diets were evaluated for apparent fat availability (AFA) of broiler chicks 1.5 and 7.5 wk of age. Corresponding values for fats were obtained through extrapolation of the linear response, or interpolation of the quadratic response, of AFA of diets. The AME was calculated as the product of fat AFA and gross energy. The degree of saturation had a pronounced effect upon the AME of fats; values decreased in the following order: soybean oil, tallow, and palm oil. Overall AME of fats linearly decreased with increasing FFA content, and the decrease was more pronounced with the younger birds. This rate of reduction appeared to be influenced by degree of saturation of the fat, but only with younger birds. Thus, AME of fats declined from 30.9 to 20.4, 27.7 to 14.8, and 38.5 to 33.1 MJ/kg (1 MJ = .239 Mcal) for young birds in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Corresponding data for older birds were from 32.9 to 28.3, 32.3 to 27.5, and 38.5 to 35.1 MJ/kg. Effects of rate of inclusion of fats were minor and, generally, were confined to fats of a higher degree of saturation with greater contents of FFA evaluated with younger birds.
Influence of dietary supplementation with Streptococcus faecium M-74 on broiler body weight, feed conversion, carcass characteristics, and intestinal microbial colonization.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the influence of Streptococcus faecium M-74 supplementation of broiler diets. Mixed-sex or male only chicks were used in the experiments. Both experiments consisted of six dietary treatments and four replicates per treatment in a randomized block design. The S. faecium was fed alone for 21, 36, or 44 days or for 44 days with S. faecium supplemented in the water for the first 14 days. In another treatment, S. faecium was fed for 44 days, but the feed was restricted for Days 8 through 13. The S. faecium was also fed in combination with antibacterial products (AP) for 44 days. An additional diet was an unsupplemented basal, and another was supplemented only with AP. In Experiment 1, feed efficiency was significantly better with the basal and diets supplemented with S. faecium than with those diets supplemented with AP or AP and S. faecium. In Experiment 2, BW of broilers at 44 days of age were significantly heavier for broilers receiving S. faecium in the feed and also S. faecium in the water for the first 14 days as compared with broilers receiving AP or AP and S. faecium supplementation. There were no significant differences in carcass yield or composition characteristics. In Experiment 1, the scores representing S. faecium colonies found in the intestinal tract were not influenced by dietary treatment. The ceca had the highest S. faecium score of any of the intestinal tract locations. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
HAL—The Missing Piece of the Puzzle for Hardware Reverse Engineering, Trojan Detection and Insertion

Hardware manipulations pose a serious threat to numerous systems, ranging from a myriad of smart-X devices to military systems. In many attack scenarios an adversary merely has access to the low-level, potentially obfuscated gate-level netlist. In general, the attacker possesses minimal information and faces the costly and time-consuming task of reverse engineering the design to identify security-critical circuitry, followed by the insertion of a meaningful hardware Trojan. These challenges have been considered only in passing by the research community. The contribution of this work is threefold: First, we present $\sf {HAL}$HAL, a comprehensive reverse engineering and manipulation framework for gate-level netlists. $\sf {HAL}$HAL allows automating defensive design analysis (e.g., including arbitrary Trojan detection algorithms with minimal effort) as well as offensive reverse engineering and targeted logic insertion. Second, we present a novel static analysis Trojan detection technique $\sf {ANGEL}$ANGEL which considerably reduces the false-positive detection rate of the detection technique $\sf {FANCI}$FANCI. Furthermore, we demonstrate that $\sf {ANGEL}$ANGEL is capable of automatically detecting Trojans obfuscated with $\sf {DeTrust}$DeTrust. Third, we demonstrate how a malicious party can semi-automatically inject hardware Trojans into third-party designs. We present reverse engineering algorithms to disarm and trick cryptographic self-tests, and subtly leak cryptographic keys without any a priori knowledge of the design's internal workings.
Chloride Ion Penetration in Stressed Concrete

Steel corrosion owing to chloride ion penetration is one of the most common problems related to the durability of concrete structures. Although previous studies of this phenomenon have produced useful results, they primarily focused on unstressed concrete. To study the effect of stress on the resistance of concrete to chloride ion penetration, tests of stressed specimens exposed to salt solution immersion and salt spray were performed. The chloride contents in uncracked concrete specimens with different water-cement ratios, states and levels of stress, and environmental conditions are analyzed in this article. The results show that the resistance of concrete to chloride ion penetration can be improved by reducing the water-cement ratio. The content of chloride ions is higher in concrete stressed in tension than in unstressed concrete. For concrete stressed in compression, chloride content depends on stress level. Salt solution immersion is more severe than salt spray.
An Afforestation System for Restoring Bottomland Hardwood Forests: Biomass Accumulation of Nuttall Oak Seedlings Interplanted Beneath Eastern Cottonwood

Bottomland hardwood forests of the southeastern United States have declined in extent since European settlement. Forest restoration activities over the past decade, however, have driven recent changes in land use through an intensified afforestation effort on former agricultural land. This intense afforestation effort, particularly in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, has generated a demand for alternative afforestation systems that accommodate various landowner objectives through restoration of sustainable forests. We are currently studying an afforestation system that involves initial establishment of the rapidly growing native species eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides Bartr. ex Marsh.), followed by enrichment of the plantation understory with Nuttall oak (Quercus nuttallii Palm.). In this article, we examine the growth and biomass accumulation by Nuttall oak seedlings to determine whether this species can be established and whether it will develop beneath the cottonwood overstory. After 3 years of growth beneath cottonwood canopies, Nuttall oak seedlings were similar in height (126 cm), but were 20% smaller in root‐collar diameter than seedlings established in open fields. Seedlings established in the open accumulated more than twice the biomass of seedlings growing beneath a cottonwood canopy. However, the relative distribution of accumulated biomass in seedlings did not differ in the two environments. Ten percent of total seedling biomass was maintained in leaf tissue, 42% was maintained in stem tissue, and 48% was maintained in root tissue on open‐grown seedlings and seedlings established in the understory of cottonwood plantations. Though establishment in the more shaded understory environment reduced Nuttall oak growth, seedling function was not limited enough to induce changes in plant morphology. Our results suggest that an afforestation system involving rapid establishment of forest cover with a quick‐growing plantation species, followed by understory enrichment with species of later succession, may provide an alternative method of forest restoration on bottomland hardwood sites and perhaps other sites degraded by agriculture throughout temperate regions.