Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diffusion as an Oil Recovery Mechanism During CO2 Injection in Fractured Reservoirs

This thesis is part of an ongoing study of enhanced oil recovery by CO2 injection in the Reservoir Physics research group at the Department of Physics and Technology (IFT) at the University of Bergen. This work investigates the feasibility of oil recovery from diffusion during miscible CO2 injection in fractured core plugs by conducting appropriate laboratory tests and numerical simulations. A total of 10 miscible CO2 injection tests were conducted in the laboratory using artificially fractured core plugs and were performed in four laboratories: ConocoPhillips Research center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Texas A&M in College Station, Texas; Haukeland University Hospital and at IFT. A feasibility study for oil recovery by CO2 injection in unconventional oil shale reservoir was performed. The results show that recovery of oil took place by molecular diffusion from tight shale cores with permeability on the order of nanodarcies. More experiments are needed to draw definite conclusions on this matter. A novel approach was tested using explicit imaging of CO2 with C as nuclear tracer in the CO2 phase. Dynamic displacement was visualized using a PET/CT scanner. Early breakthrough of CO2 was caused by a high injection rate and fingers developed through the high conductive fracture; preventing CO2 from saturating the whole fracture whereas only a small area was saturated with CO2. Still, diffusion of CO2 into the matrix from this area of the fracture was successfully visualized during a small time period limited by the short lifespan of the tracer. As a part of this thesis, a high pressure CO2 experimental setup was designed and built at IFT. To achieve a diffusion dominated recovery the cores were cut along the cylinder axis and equipped with a high conductive spacer to maintain an open fracture to limit viscous forces in the displacement of oil and thereby isolating the recovery mechanism to molecular diffusion alone. Oil recovery during injection of supercritical CO2 injection (P = 107 bar, T = 42 °C) in a fractured, 100% oil saturated core plug was visualized in a CT-scanner. CO2 concentration profiles were calculated from the development in spatial distributed CO2 saturation during the experiment. The CT images confirmed that molecular diffusion from the fracture to the oil saturated matrix was the dominating recovery mechanism. This was also confirmed by the absence of a differential pressure across the core during CO2 injection. Total recovery reached 96% OOIP after approximately 7 pore volumes of CO2 injected. An effective diffusion coefficient was calculated to be De = 1.66*10 ± 7.2*10 m/s from concentration profiles based on a graphical method of solving Fick’s second law of diffusion. Results from several mass balance injection tests confirmed the large potential with the use of miscible CO2 injection for EOR, with recoveries ranging from 95-98% OOIP, if large enough quantities of CO2 were injected. The final recovery
Antecedents of organizational knowledge sharing: a meta-analysis and critique

Purpose – Knowledge is the most important component of sustainable organizational growth and economic performance. This meta‐analysis aims to summarize the determinants of individuals' knowledge sharing (KS) intentions and behaviors in organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The authors organize the knowledge sharing antecedents investigated in 46 studies (n≈10,487, median n=172) into three categories, i.e. knowledge sharer intention and attitude (four variables); rewards for KS (three variables); and organizational culture (nine variables). Findings – Variables in all three antecedent categories positively contribute to KS intentions and behaviors; high between‐study variability exists, and the fail‐safe n statistic suggests the observed effects are robust against a “file drawer” (missing study) bias. Moderator results suggest that motivating KS is easier in collectivist, as opposed to individualist, cultures.Research limitations/implications – In most of the studies included in this meta‐analysis, pa.
Magnetic Nanoparticles: Inner Ear Targeted Molecule Delivery and Middle Ear Implant

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SNP) composed of magnetite (Fe3O4) were studied preliminarily as vehicles for therapeutic molecule delivery to the inner ear and as a middle ear implant capable of producing biomechanically relevant forces for auditory function. Magnetite SNP were synthesized, then encapsulated in either silica or poly (D,L,-Lactide-co-glycolide) or obtained commercially with coatings of oleic acid or dextran. Permanent magnetic fields generated forces sufficient to pull them across tissue in several round window membrane models (in vitrocell culture, in vivo rat and guinea pig, and human temporal bone) or to embed them in middle ear epithelia. Biocompatibility was investigated by light and electron microscopy, cell culture kinetics, and hair cell survival in organotypic cell culture and no measurable toxicity was found. A sinusoidal magnetic field applied to guinea pigs with SNP implanted in the middle ear resulted in displacements of the middle ear comparable to 90 dB SPL.
The Association Between Visual, Nonverbal Cognitive Abilities and Speech, Phonological Processing, Vocabulary and Reading Outcomes in Children With Cochlear Implants

Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the possibility that specific nonverbal, visual cognitive abilities may be associated with outcomes after pediatric cochlear implantation. The study therefore examined the relationship between visual sequential memory span and visual sequential reasoning ability, and a range of speech, phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, and reading outcomes in children with cochlear implants. Design: A cross-sectional, correlational design was used. Sixty-six children aged 5 to 12 years completed tests of visual memory span and visual sequential reasoning, along with tests of speech intelligibility, phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, and word reading ability (the outcome variables). Auditory memory span was also assessed, and its relationship with the other variables examined. Results: Significant, positive correlations were found between the visual memory and reasoning tests, and each of the outcome variables. A series of regression analyses then revealed that for all the outcome variables, after variance attributable to the age at implantation was accounted for, visual memory span and visual sequential reasoning ability together accounted for significantly more variance (up to 25%) in each outcome measure. Conclusions: These findings have both clinical and theoretical implications. Clinically, the findings may help improve the identification of children at risk of poor progress after implantation earlier than has been possible to date as the nonverbal tests can be administered to children as young as 2 years of age. The results may also contribute to the identification of children with specific learning or language difficulties as well as improve our ability to develop intervention strategies for individual children based on their specific cognitive processing strengths or difficulties. Theoretically, these results contribute to the growing body of knowledge about learning and development in deaf children with cochlear implants.
A Review of Approaches for Measuring Soil Hydraulic Properties and Assessing the Impacts of Spatial Dependence on the Results

The movement of water in the soil and associated solute transport perform a role of primary importance in many applications in the field of hydrology and agriculture. In the sound management of irrigation water, in relation to specific environmental conditions and cropping systems, knowledge of local water flow conditions in zones affected by the root systems is indispensable. Once the irrigation method has been established, only knowledge of the laws governing water flow allows the necessary irrigation frequencies and rates to be established to optimise the distribution of soil moisture, reducing within established limits the effects of water stress and containing water wastage.
State Capacity, Conflict and Development

The absence of state capacities to raise revenue and to support markets is a key factor in explaining the persistence of weak states. This paper reports on an ongoing project to investigate the incentive to invest in such capacities. The paper sets out a simple analytical structure in which state capacities are modeled as forward looking investments by government. The approach highlights some determinants of state building including the risk of external or internal conflict, the degree of political instability, and dependence on natural resources. Throughout, we link these state capacity investments to patterns of development and growth.
Helios: heterogeneous multiprocessing with satellite kernels

Helios is an operating system designed to simplify the task of writing, deploying, and tuning applications for heterogeneous platforms. Helios introduces satellite kernels, which export a single, uniform set of OS abstractions across CPUs of disparate architectures and performance characteristics. Access to I/O services such as file systems are made transparent via remote message passing, which extends a standard microkernel message-passing abstraction to a satellite kernel infrastructure. Helios retargets applications to available ISAs by compiling from an intermediate language. To simplify deploying and tuning application performance, Helios exposes an affinity metric to developers. Affinity provides a hint to the operating system about whether a process would benefit from executing on the same platform as a service it depends upon. We developed satellite kernels for an XScale programmable I/O card and for cache-coherent NUMA architectures. We offloaded several applications and operating system components, often by changing only a single line of metadata. We show up to a 28% performance improvement by offloading tasks to the XScale I/O card. On a mail-server benchmark, we show a 39% improvement in performance by automatically splitting the application among multiple NUMA domains.
CFO: Conditional Focused Neural Question Answering with Large-scale Knowledge Bases

How can we enable computers to automatically answer questions like "Who created the character Harry Potter"? Carefully built knowledge bases provide rich sources of facts. However, it remains a challenge to answer factoid questions raised in natural language due to numerous expressions of one question. In particular, we focus on the most common questions --- ones that can be answered with a single fact in the knowledge base. We propose CFO, a Conditional Focused neural-network-based approach to answering factoid questions with knowledge bases. Our approach first zooms in a question to find more probable candidate subject mentions, and infers the final answers with a unified conditional probabilistic framework. Powered by deep recurrent neural networks and neural embeddings, our proposed CFO achieves an accuracy of 75.7% on a dataset of 108k questions - the largest public one to date. It outperforms the current state of the art by an absolute margin of 11.8%.
A Classification of Internet Retail Stores

This article describes an empirical method for classifying Internet retail sites for electronic commerce. The technique used 35 observable Internet retail site attributes and features of online stores as the raw data to classify the online stores into meaningful groups. This paper presents a classification of online retail stores based upon an August 1996 convenience sample of 137 Internet retail stores. Descriptive statistics for 44 variables provide a snapshot of key attributes and features of online stores. Subsequent cluster and factor analysis identified five distinct Web catalog interface categories: superstores, promotional stores, plain sales stores, one-page stores, and product listings. Online stores differ primarily on the three dimensions: size, service offerings, and interface quality. A preponderance of the stores in the study had limited product selection, few service features, and poor interfaces. This categorization provides a better understanding of the strategies pursued in Internet-based marketing and will be helpful for Internet retail store designers as well as for researchers to structure and target further analyses in this domain.
Antimicrobial properties of tea (Camellia sinensis L.)

The beverage known as tea is an infusion of variously processed leaves of one of the varieties of an evergreen shrub, Camellia sinensis L. Tea is the most widely drunk beverage in the world (39). Green tea, popular in the Far East, differs from the black tea familiar in the West in that an oxidation step (called ‘‘fermentation’’) occurs in the processing of the latter compound but not the former compound. Although it has little nutritional value per se, tea is refreshing, mildly stimulating, and produces a feeling of well-being. The latter two properties have been assumed to be due to caffeine, about 50 mg of which is present in a cup of tea; caffeine is known to have ‘‘stimulant and anti-soporific actions, that elevate mood, decrease fatigue and increase capacity for work’’ (32). However, other components of a cup of tea, notably, the polyphenols, may also contribute to the effects of tea, in view of their known pharmacological properties (40) (see below). The complex of oxidized polyphenols in tea is often called ‘‘tannin’’ (20). It should be stressed, however, that unlike some compounds from other plants also given this generic name, tea tannins are not harmful. Contrary to widespread belief, tea does not contain tannic acid (39, 47).
MicroRNA-503 acts as a tumor suppressor in glioblastoma for multiple antitumor effects by targeting IGF-1R

microRNA (miRNA) dysregulation is associated with various types of human cancer by regulating cancer cell survival, proliferation and invasion. Aberrant expression of microRNA-503 (miR-503) has been reported in several cancer profiles. However, potential linkage of miR-503 levels and the underlying regulatory mechanisms in human glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) remain unclear. In the present study, we showed for the first time that the expression of miR-503 was significantly reduced in GBM tissues and cell lines (U251 and U87MG) relative to normal brain tissues. Furthermore, our results demonstrated that overexpression of miR-503 in GBM cell lines not only suppressed cell proliferation through inducing G0/G1 cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, but also inhibited cancer cell migration and tumor invasion. In addition, we identified insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1R) receptor mRNA is a bona fide target of miR-503 by computational analysis followed by luciferase reporter assays. Of note, upregulation of miR-503 in GBM cells suppressed endogenous IGF-1R protein expression. Further mechanistic analysis revealed that forced expression of miR-503 inhibited AKT activation, suggesting the tumor suppressive effect of miR-503 in GBM cells is partially mediated by phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/AKT signaling. Taken together, the results of the present study demonstrated that miR-503 is a tumor suppressor for GBM and a favorable factor against glioma progression through targeting IGF-1R, thus providing a new evidence-supported prognostic marker for GBM diagnosis.
Infective endocarditis due to Abiotrophia defectiva and Granulicatella spp. complicated by infectious intracranial cerebral aneurysms: a report of three cases and review of the literature.

Nutritionally variant streptococci, now classified as Abiotrophia defectivaor Granulicatella spp. , are thought to account for 2 % of all infective endocarditis cases but estimates of their frequency are complicated by changes in nomenclature and difficulties in obtaining positive microbiology cultures. Their growth characteristics and difficulty undertaking antibiotic susceptibility testing may impede optimal antibiotic treatment decisions. We describe three patients with definite infective endocarditis due to these organisms seen at our hospital between 2005 and 2010, all of whom presented with neurological symptoms due to infectious intracranial cerebral aneurysms. We recommend that, for patients with left-sided infective endocarditis due to A. defictiva and Granulicatella spp. , clinicians should consider imaging the central nervous system.
A bio-chemo-mechanical model for cell contractility

A general model for the contractility of cells is presented that accounts for the dynamic reorganization of the cytoskeleton. The model is motivated by three key biochemical processes: (i) an activation signal that triggers actin polymerization and myosin phosphorylation, (ii) the tension-dependent assembly of the actin and myosin into stress fibers, and (iii) the cross-bridge cycling between the actin and myosin filaments that generates the tension. Simple relations are proposed to model these coupled phenomena and a continuum model developed for simulating cell contractility. The model is capable of predicting key experimentally established characteristics including: (i) the decrease in the forces generated by the cell with increasing substrate compliance, (ii) the influence of cell shape and boundary conditions on the development of structural anisotropy, and (iii) the high concentration of the stress fibers at the focal adhesions. We present numerical examples of a square cell on four supports to demonstrate these capabilities.
Pregnancy outcome of uterine arterial embolization followed by selective hysteroscopic removal of a placental polyp

Objective. To evaluate the pregnancy outcome of uterine arterial embolization followed by selective hysteroscopic removal of a placental polyp. Methods. Thirteen patients of placental polyp with abundant blood flow, which was diagnosed by ultrasound with color Doppler imaging, were studied. They underwent uterine arterial embolization followed by selective hysteroscopic removal of the polyp. Uterine arterial embolization was carried out using an absorbable gelatin sponge. Selective removal via hysteroscopy was performed on the following day, using the cutting loop with or without electrical stimulation. The polyp was gradually resected to the level of the surrounding endometrium. Results. Complete removal of the placental polyp was achieved in all patients. The presence of placental polyp was confirmed by pathologic examination. The operative time ranged from 20 to 53 min. In all cases, no complications were noted and the bleeding was minimal during and immediately after the procedure. Postoperative ultrasound demonstrated a uterine cavity free of residual mass in each case. The seven patients with complete gestation gave birth to health babies. No recurrence of placental polyp was observed. Conclusions. Selective removal directed via hysteroscopy after reduction of blood supply by uterine arterial embolization provides a safe and effective method to minimize bleeding, and can preserve future fertility and successful uneventful pregnancies in the treatment of placental polyp with abundant blood flow.
Synergetic measurements of aerosols over São Paulo, Brazil using LIDAR, sunphotometer and satellite data during the dry season

A backscattering LIDAR system, the first of this kind in Brazil, has been set-up in a suburban area in the city of Sao Paulo (23o33' S, 46o44' W) to provide the vertical profile of the aerosol backscatter coefficient at 532 nm up to an altitude of 4-6 km above sea level (asl). The measurements have been carried out during the second half of the so-called Brazilian dry season, September and October 2001 and during the first half of the dry season in August and September 2002. The LIDAR data are presented and analysed in synergy with aerosol optical thickness (AOT) measurements obtained by a CIMEL sun-tracking photometer in the visible spectral region and with satellite measurements obtained by the MODIS sensor. This synergetic approach has been used, not only to validate the LIDAR data, but also to derive a typical value (45 sr) of the so-called extinction-to-backscatter ratio (LIDAR ratio) during the dry season. The satellite data analysis offers additional information on the spatial distribution of aerosols over Brazil including the determination of aerosol source regions over the country. The LIDAR data were also used to retrieve the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) height, aerosol layering and the structure of the lower troposphere over the city of Sao Paulo. These first LIDAR measurements over the city of Sao Paulo during the dry season showed a significant variability of the AOT in the lower troposphere (0.5-5 km) at 532 nm. It was also found that the aerosol load is maximized in the 1-3 km height region, although up to 3 km thick aerosol layers were also detected in the 2.5-5.5 km region in certain cases. Three-dimensional 96-hours air mass back-trajectory analysis was also performed in selected cases to determine the source regions of aerosols around Sao Paulo during the dry season.
Solving the Splitting Resilient Modulus of the Asphalt Mixture

The finite element software was applied to simulate the splitting test of asphalt mixture, and the computational formula of resilient modulus was fitted out. On the basis of the measured resilient deformation from the splitting test, the computation process of splitting resilient modulus of the asphalt mixture was illustrated in detail. The splitting resilient moduli of the asphalt mixtures at three temperatures were analyzed. Finally the resilient moduli of the asphalt mixture measured through three kinds of tests were compared with each other. The results are of significance in the determination of resilient modulus of the asphalt mixture and parameter selection in specifications for asphalt pavement design.
Measuring Global Poverty: Why PPP Methods Matter

Abstract We present theory and evidence to suggest that, in the context of analyzing global poverty, the EKS approach to estimating purchasing power parities yields more appropriate international comparison of real incomes than the Geary-Khamis approach. Our analysis of the 1996 and 2005 International Comparison Project data confirms that the Geary-Khamis approach substantially overstates the relative incomes of the world's poorest nations, and this leads to misleading comparisons of poverty across regions and over time. The EKS index of real income is much closer to being a true index of economic welfare and is therefore preferred for assessment of global poverty.
Knowledge is (Less) Power: Experimental Evidence from Residential Energy Use

This paper presents experimental evidence that information feedback dramatically increases the price elasticity of demand in a setting where signals about quantity consumed are traditionally coarse and infrequent. In a randomized controlled trial, residential electricity customers are exposed to price increases, with some households also receiving displays that transmit high-frequency information about usage and prices. This substantially lowers information acquisition costs and allows us to identify the marginal information effect. Households only experiencing price increases reduce demand by 0 to 7 percent whereas those also exposed to information feedback exhibit a usage reduction of 8 to 22 percent, depending on the amount of advance notice. The differential response across treatments is significant and robust to the awareness of price changes. Conservation extends beyond the treatment window, providing evidence of habit formation, spillovers, and greenhouse gas abatement. Results suggest that information about the quantity consumed facilitates learning, which likely drives the treatment differential.