Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Temperature Effects on the Activity of Denitrifying Phosphate Accumulating Microorganisms and Sulphate Reducing Bacteria in Anaerobic SideStream Reactor

Temperature changes could strongly affect microbial activity. This dependence is linked to the kind of bacteria used. Any species’ response to temperature is characterized by upper and lower limits of temperature for growth [1]. When the temperature increases the rate of denaturation of particular cell components increases as well, with the consequent disruption of cellular function. On the contrary, when the temperature is too low a loss of efficiency of transport proteins embedded in the membrane, and thus a loss of affinity for substrates, occurs [2]. Temperatures below the optimum typically have a more significant effect on growth rate than temperatures above the optimum [3].
Control of unsteadiness of a shock wave/turbulent boundary layer interaction by using a pulsed-plasma-jet actuator

A pulsed-plasma jet actuator is used to control the unsteady motion of the separation shock of a shock wave/boundary layer interaction formed by a compression ramp in a Mach 3 flow. The actuator is based on a plasma-generated synthetic jet and is configured as an array of three jets that can be injected normal to the cross-flow, pitched, or pitched and skewed. The typical peak jet exit velocity of the actuators is about 300 m/s and the pulsing frequencies are a few kilohertz. A study of the interaction between the pulsed-plasma jets and the shock/boundary layer interaction was performed in a time-resolved manner using 10 kHz schlieren imaging. When the actuator, pulsed at StL ≈ 0.04 (f = 2 kHz), was injected into the upstream boundary layer, the separation shock responded to the plasma jet by executing a rapid upstream motion followed by a gradual downstream recovery motion. Schlieren movies of the interaction showed that the separation shock unsteadiness was locked to the pulsing frequency of the actuator, with amplitude of about one boundary layer thickness. Wall-pressure measurements made under the intermittent region showed about a 30% decrease in the overall magnitude of the pressure fluctuations in the low-frequency band associated with unsteady large-scale motion of the separated flow. Furthermore, by increasing the pulsing frequency to 3.3 kHz, the amplitude of the separation shock oscillation was reduced to less than half the boundary layer thickness. Investigation into the effect of the actuator location on the shock wave/boundary layer interaction (SWBLI) showed qualitatively and quantitatively that the actuator placed upstream of the separation shock caused significant modification to the SWBLI unsteadiness, whereas injection from inside the separation bubble did not cause a noticeable effect.
Quality Assessment of Sharpened Images

This master’s thesis investigates the possibilities of quality assessment of sharpened images. Reliable assessment of these images is crucial for comparing the performance of particular sharpening techniques and also for finding the optimal amount of sharpening. In the thesis, fundamentals of edge detection, sharpness perception, and sharpening algorithms are given. Four of the algorithms are described in more detailed view and subsequently employed in creation of testing images. Furthermore, the pair comparison method for subjective quality tests and procedures for increasing its applicability are discussed. An overview of existing objective quality criteria, focusing at the metrics suitable for sharpened images, and several augmentations of one of the metrics are also presented. Eventually, a new way of incorporating full-reference metrics into assessment of sharpened images, using intentional over-sharpening, is considered. In the experimental part of the thesis, two pre-tests and an extensive subjective quality test are described. Adaptive pair comparison method was used for this test. The results of the test are then the ground-truth of two Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Analyses. 19 state-of-the-art metrics and 7 proposed augmentations are analyzed. From the outcome of the analyses, it can be concluded that the proposed enhancements lead to an improvement of metric’s performance which thereafter outperforms the rest of the state-of-the-art metrics.
PAL, a tool for Pre-annotation and Active Learning

Many natural language processing systems rely on machine learning models that are trained on large amounts of manually annotated text data. The lack of sufficient amounts of annotated data is, however, a common obstacle for such systems, since manual annotation of text is often expensive and time-consuming. The aim of “PAL", a tool for Pre-annotation and Active Learning” is to provide a ready-made package that can be used to simplify annotation and to reduce the amount of annotated data required to train a machine learning classifier. The package provides support for two techniques that have been shown to be successful in previous studies, namely active learning and pre-annotation. The output of the pre-annotation is provided in the annotation format of the annotation tool BRAT, but PAL is a stand-alone package that can be adapted to other formats. (Less)
Emotional Accounting: How Feelings about Money Influence Consumer Choice

Mental accounting posits that people track their expenditures using cognitive categories or “mental accounts. ” The authors propose that this cognitive process can be complemented by an approach that examines how feelings about a sum of money, or the money's “affective tag,” influence its consumption. When people receive money under negative circumstances, this tag can include a negative affect component, which people aim to reduce by engaging in strategic consumption. The authors investigate two such strategies, laundering and hedonic avoidance, and demonstrate their effect on consumption of windfalls. The authors find that people avoid spending their negatively tagged money on hedonic expenditures and prefer to make utilitarian or virtuous expenditures to reduce, or “launder,” their negative feelings about the windfall. The authors call this tagging process and strategic consumption “emotional accounting. ”
Structure and perpendicular magnetization of Fe/Ni(111) bilayers on W(110)

Scanning tunneling microscopy and low energy electron diffraction show that high quality fcc Ni(111) films can be prepared on W(110). The subsequent coverage of this Ni template by monolayers of Fe leads to a Fe/Ni bilayer with striking magnetic properties. The Fe cap layer induces a spin reorientation of the easy axis of magnetization from in-plane to perpendicular to the film, as checked with the magneto-optic Kerr effect. At higher Fe coverages, an in-plane magnetization of the bilayer is found, which is proposed to be caused by the fcc to bcc transition in the Fe layer.
Injuries related to kitesurfing

Participation in sporting activities can lead to injury. Sport injuries have been widely studied in many sports including the more extreme categories of aquatic board sports. Kitesurfing is a relatively new water surface action sport, and has not yet been widely studied in terms of injuries and stress on the body. The aim of this study was to get information about which injuries that are most common among kitesurfing participants, where they occur, and their causes. Injuries were studied using an international open web questionnaire (n=206). The results showed that many respondents reported injuries, in total 251 injuries to knee (24%), ankle (17%), trunk (16%) and shoulders (10%), often sustained while doing jumps and tricks (40%). Among the reported injuries were joint injuries (n=101), muscle/tendon damages (n=47), wounds and cuts (n=36) and bone fractures (n=28). Also environmental factors and equipment can influence the risk of injury, or the extent of injury in a hazardous situation. Conclusively, the information from this retrospective study supports earlier studies in terms of prevalence and site of injuries. Suggestively, this information should be used for to build a foundation of knowledge about the sport for development of applications for physical training and product development.
Prediction of the Aero-Acoustic Performance of Open Rotors

ABSTRACT The rising cost of jet fuel has renewed interest in contra-rotating open rotor propulsion systems. Contemporary design methods offer the potential to maintain the inherently high aerodynamic efficiency of open rotors while greatly reducing their noise output, something that was not feasible in the 1980’s designs. The primary source mechanisms of open rotor noise generation are thought to be the front rotor wake and tip vortex interacting with the aft rotor. In this paper, advanced measurement techniques and high-fidelity prediction tools are used to gain insight into the relative importance of the contributions to the open rotor noise signature of the front rotor wake and rotor tip vortex. The measurements include three-dimensional particle image velocimetry of the intra-rotor flowfield and the acoustic field of a model-scale open rotor. The predictions provide the unsteady flowfield and the associated acoustic field. The results suggest that while the front rotor tip vortex can have a significant influence on the blade passing tone noise produced by the aft rotor, the front rotor wake plays the decisive role in the generation of the interaction noise produced as a result of the unsteady aerodynamic interaction of the two rotors. At operating conditions typical of takeoff and landing operations, the interaction noise level is easily on par with that generated by the individual rotors, and in some cases is even higher. This suggests that a comprehensive approach to reducing open rotor noise should include techniques for mitigating the wake of the front rotor as well as eliminating the interaction of the front rotor tip vortex with the aft rotor blade tip.
ALTERNATIVE METHODS TO MULTIPLE CORRESPONDENCE ANALYSIS IN RECONSTRUCTING THE RELEVANT INFORMATION IN A BURT'S TABLE

In this work, the reconstruction of the Burt's table, Greenacre (1988)'s Joint Correspondence Analysis (JCA), and Gower & Hand (1996)'s Extended Matching Coefficient (EMC) are compared to Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to check the quality of the methods. In particular, for the whole table, the ability is considered separately the diagonal, and the off-diagonal tables, that is the ability to describe either each character's distribution or the interaction between pairs of characters, or both. The theoretical aspects are discussed first, and finally the results obtained in an application are shown and discussed.
Dinoflagellate grazing on the raphidophyte Fibrocapsa japonica

AbstractLaboratory experiments were performed to determine the growth and grazing capabilities of two heterotrophic dinoflagellates with different feeding modes (pallium feeder: Oblea rotunda, engulfment feeder: Oxyrrhis marina) when fed with the raphidophyte Fibrocapsa japonica. Both dinoflagellates readily ingest prey and exhibit positive growth when feeding on monocultures of Fibrocapsa japonica. Maximum growth rates at food saturation were 0.54 d-1 and 0.72 d-1 for O. rotunda and O. marina, respectively. Both dinoflagellates are thus able to grow faster than their prey, for which a maximum growth rate of 0.45 d-1 has been reported. In the case of Oblea marina, it was found that a rather high food concentration of 300 Fibrocapsa cells ml-1 (corresponding to 142 µg C l-1) is needed to sustain half-saturated growth. This is consistent with the quantification of behavioural aspects of the feeding process. In about 55 % of cases, a failure to attach the tow filament after prey encounter was recorded and in about 83 % of cases, F. japonica was able to escape from the attached tow filament, indicating that motility of F. japonica represent a quite effective defence mechanism against pallium feeding dinoflagellates. In addition, qualitative observations suggest that trichocysts of Fibrocapsa may act mechanically as a grazer deterrent.
ASSESSING THE ORGANIZATIONAL READINESS FOR IMPLEMENTING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS

The growing importance of business analytics and its increasing influence on the competitive advantage of organizations leads to the necessity of knowledge management systems, which complex and needs organizational readiness that has been the subject of earlier research. This study aims to examine whether the affective factors on the assessment of the readiness for implementation of the knowledge management system in all organizations are identical. Hence, first by a comprehensive study of literature, readiness factors of the knowledge management system implementation including six factors of organizational culture, individuals, information technology infrastructure, knowledge process, senior management commitment, and strategy were extracted and have been tested in three different organizations of IT services, educational and commerce. Based on the founding, different factors affect various organizations and using a general model should not be advised.
Differentiable Memory Allocation Mechanism For Neural Computing

Memory neural networks were recently introduced in several variants. DNC by [1] which is one extensive implementation of this kind of models make use of several mechanisms designed to allow the iterative modiﬁcation of external memory. Three types of attention forms were presented. The attention mechanism which is in-charge of the memory allocation, involves applying a sort operation on the memory blocks usage vector. Since the sort operation is not differentiable, a workaround was introduced to enable the back-propagation step. In our work we propose an alternative differentiable allocation mechanism in the form of a weighted soft-max on the usage vector of the memory blocks. We show that our method achieves 1.75x in training time on bAbI task, moreover we show that our proposed method positively impacts the convergence, stability and accuracy of the neural computer in a copy and repeat task.
Schemes for and Mechanisms of Reduction in Thermal Conductivity in Nanostructured Thermoelectrics

Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations were performed to investigate schemes for enhancing the energy conversion efficiency of thermoelectric nanowires (NWs), including (1) roughening of the nanowire surface, (2) creating nanoparticle inclusions in the nanowires, and (3) coating the nanowire surface with other materials. The enhancement in energy conversion efficiency was inferred from the reduction in thermal conductivity of the nanowire, which was calculated by imposing a temperature gradient in the longitudinal direction. Compared to pristine nanowires, our simulation results show that the schemes proposed above lead to nanocomposite structures with considerably lower thermal conductivity (up to 82% reduction), implying ~5X enhancement in the ZT coefficient. This significant effect appears to have two origins: (1) increase in phonon-boundary scattering and (2) onset of interfacial interference. The results suggest new fundamental–yet realizable ways to improve markedly the energy conversion efficiency of nanostructured thermoelectrics.
The conductivity of the photoconductive material changes periodically in time accordingly to the laser operating mode and to the recombination time of the carriers in the photoconductor. Consequently a time varying current is induced by the bias

The generation of THz signals resorting to photosensitive semiconductors has been the object of various analysis in the recent years. Typically, such sources consist in a optically pumped semiconductor which is coupled to an antenna to generate THz power. In this paper a theoretical model, based on a spectral Green’s function formulation, for infinite slot fed by a THz photoconductor generator is shown. An equivalent circuit model is then derived, which gives a description of the involved THz power generation and radiation mechanisms. Such model is a useful engineering tool for the analysis and the design of photoconductive slot antennas.
Use of Cryopreserved Osteogenic Matrix Cell Sheets for Bone Reconstruction

Skeletal diseases, such as nonunion and osteonecrosis, are now treatable with tissue engineering techniques. Single cell sheets called osteogenic matrix cell sheets (OMCSs) grown from cultured bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells show high osteogenic potential; however, long preparation times currently limit their clinical application. Here, we report a cryopreservation OMCS transplantation method that shortens OMCS preparation time. Cryopreserved rat OMCSs were prepared using slow- and rapid-freezing methods, thawed, and subsequently injected scaffold-free into subcutaneous sites. Rapid- and slow-frozen OMCSs were also transplanted directly to the femur bone at sites of injury. Slow-freezing resulted in higher cell viability than rapid freezing, yet all two cryopreservation methods yielded OMCSs that survived and formed bone tissue. In the rapid- and slow-freezing groups, cortical gaps were repaired and bone continuity was observed within 6 weeks of OMCS transplantation. Moreover, while no significant difference was found in osteocalcin expression between the three experimental groups, the biomechanical strength of femurs treated with slow-frozen OMCSs was significantly greater than those of non-transplant at 6 weeks post-injury. Collectively, these data suggest that slow-frozen OMCSs have superior osteogenic potential and are better suited to produce a mineralized matrix and repair sites of bone injury.
Genetic Polymorphisms of ABCB1 Gene in Patients Having Resistance to Clopidogrel

Objectives: We sought to study the genetic polymorphisms of ABCB1 gene in post percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) patients with clopidogrel resistance. Background: Dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) is a guideline mandated therapy for patients who undergo PCI. However there exists interindividual variability in drug response to the antiplatelet agents leading to recurrent thrombotic events. Genetic polymorphisms of ABCB1 gene are one among the causes of this interindividual variability. Methods: It is a single center prospective trial and includes221 patients who underwent PCI and were given clopidogrel as a part of DAPT. Platelet reactivity was assessed by grading of platelet activity index (PAI) and considered as high on treatment platelet reactivity (HTPR), i.e., clopidogrel resistance if PAI > 5. Genetic analysis for ABCB1 C-T polymorphism was done by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and single strand confirmation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis. Results: Amongst 221 patients, 37 (16.7%) patients had ABCB1 C-T polymorphisms. The mean PAI value in these patients was 5.1 ± 3.0, while it was 3.5 ± 2.5 in those patients without ABCB1 C-T polymorphisms (p = 0.004). Compared to patients without HTPR, the occurrence of primary endpoints was not significantly increased in patients with HTPR except for stent thrombosis which was significantly high in patients with HTPR. HTPR was also associated with ABCB1 C-T polymorphisms (p = 0.04), but these polymorphisms did not predict the clinical outcome. Conclusions: There was significant prevalence of ABCB1 C-T polymorphisms in patients with HTPR. However it was not an independent risk factor for clopidogrel resistance and also it did not influence adverse cardiovascular outcomes.
Mühendislik Tasarım Temelli Fen Eğitimi ile İlgili Öğretmen Görüşleri

Nitel-durum calismasi olarak yurutulen bu calismanin amaci arastirmacilar tarafindan yurutulen "Muhendislik Tasarim Temelli Fen Egitimi (MTTFE) icin uygulamali ornek etkinlikler atolyesi”ne gonullu olarak katilan ogretmenlerin MTTFE hakkindaki goruslerini ortaya cikarmaktir. Katilimci gorus formu ile toplanan nitel veriler icerik analizi ile analiz edilmistir. Ayrica bulgulari desteklemek amaciyla arastirmaci deneyimlerine de yer verilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda ogretmenler MTTFE’ye yonelik olumsuz dusunceler belirmis olsalar da genellikle olumlu gorus sunmuslardir. Ogretmenler belirttikleri olumsuzluklardan dolayi tereddut yasasalar da, siniflarinda fen ogretirken MTTFE etkinliklerini uygulamak istediklerini belirtmislerdir. Ayrica ogremenlerin cogu onerileri gerceklestirildigi taktirde ulkemizde MTTFE gerceklesebilecegine yonelik dusuncelerini sunmuslardir.
SHORT COMMUNICATION EXTRACELLULAR ATP SELECTIVELY MODULATES A HIGH-VOLTAGE-ACTIVATED CALCIUM CONDUCTANCE IN SALIVARY GLAND CELLS OF THE LEECH

Extracellular ATP appears to have a widespread role as a neurotransmitter or neuromodulator in mammals (Gordon, 1986; Burnstock, 1990), but little is known about any similar functions in invertebrates. During studies of the effects of cyclic nucleotides on electrically excitable salivary cells of the leech, we found that cyclic GMP produced a rapid (less than 1min) reduction of spike duration, suggesting an extracellular effect (Wuttke and Berry, 1991). We now show that micromolar concentrations of ATP (and higher doses of other nucleotides) also reduce spike duration, and that this is caused by depression of a specific voltage-dependent Ca2+ conductance. Selective modulation of Ca2+ current by external ATP has rarely been found, and the effect is also unusual because it changes the kinetics of inactivation rather than those of activation. Experiments were performed on isolated anterior salivary glands of the Amazon leech Haementeria ghilianii (de Filippi). The glands were pinned to Sylgard in a Perspex experimental bath (volume 0.25ml) and immersed in a continuous flow of physiological saline containing (in mmoll21): NaCl, 115; KCl, 4; CaCl2, 2; MgCl2, 1; glucose, 11; Tris maleate, 10 (pH7.4) at room temperature (18–22 ̊C). The following substances (Sigma) were applied by perfusion at known concentration: ATP (adenosine 59-triphosphate), AMP (adenosine 59-monophosphate), cyclic AMP (cyclic 39,59-adenosine monophosphate), adenosine, GMP (guanosine 59-monophosphate), cyclic GMP (cyclic 39,59-guanosine monophosphate) and guanosine. Ba2+ (substituting for Ca2+) or tetraethylammonium and 4-aminopyridine (replacing equimolar Na+) were used to block K+ channels, and Co2+ was used to block Ca2+ channels (Hille, 1984; see Marshall and Lent, 1984, and Wuttke and Berry, 1991, for effects on the salivary cells of Haementeria). Solutions flowed through the bath at a rate of about 10bathvolumesmin21 and could be changed rapidly without altering recording conditions. Individual gland cells were impaled with two bevelled KCl-filled microelectrodes (resistance 10–20 MV) mounted on high-speed steppers (Digitimer SCAT-02).