Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Switching of Bistable Injection-Locked Fabry–Pérot Laser by Frequency Detuning Variation

Theoretical study of switching of a bistable injection-locked Fabry-Pérot laser by frequency detuning variation is performed and presented. It has been found that the shortest switching time of the master laser, which allows for the slave laser to be successfully switched by frequency detuning variation, reaches the values of several picoseconds, and up to 200 ps. The disproportion of the slave laser switching times with respect to the switching direction is found (3 versus 0.3 ns), and techniques for its equalization, as well as for minimization of the slave laser total switching time, are presented and discussed. We found that the modest increase of the master laser switching time establishes the balance between the two directions of the slave laser switching, providing almost one order of magnitude improvement in comparison to the results achieved for the shortest possible master laser switching times.
Simulation of Quenching Process Using Finite Element Method

This contribution is concerned with modeling and simulation of quenching employing the finite element method. An anisothermal constitutive model formulated within the framework of continuum mechanics and the thermodynamics of irreversible processes is considered adopting two phases: austenite and martensite. A numerical procedure is developed based on operator split technique associated with an iterative numerical scheme in order to deal with nonlinearities in the formulation. With this assumption, coupled governing equations are solved involving four uncoupled problems: thermal, phase transformation, thermoelastic and elastoplastic behaviors. Classical finite element method is employed for spatial discretization of thermal and thermoelastic uncoupled problems. Progressive induction hardening of steel cylinders is concerned as an application of the general procedure. A comparison between numerical and experimental measures is performed showing good agreements between them.
Wildfire Patterns in Western Boreal Canada Healthy Landscapes Research Series Report No. 8

The idea of using natural patterns as guides for policy and practices continues to gain favour in forestland management. Towards this, research activities in the boreal have been focusing on the patterns and processes of wildfires over the last 15-20 years. This project is the fourth phase of a long-term research study looking at natural wildfire patterns across the forested areas of Alberta and central Saskatchewan. This phase involved creating mortality maps from an additional 76 fires across Alberta, generating fire events from wildfires, and completing meta-analyses for all 129 fires. The event-defining algorithm defined an outer boundary for each event representing the general area of influence of each fire. This generated two types of remnants: island remnants as mapped by the original mortality maps, and 2) matrix remnants created by the algorithm, largely representing corridors between disturbed patches. The algorithm captured the entire area of each wildfire into a single event for all but five wildfires. Fires shared many key pattern characteristics across the entire data range, although some of the specifics varied. The average proportional area in remnants within each event averaged 41%, and was unrelated to event size. This finding challenges the notion of the boreal as having a so-called standreplacing fire regime. Less than 10% of the samples in this study technically qualify as stand-replacing, and at least as many would be considered standmaintaining based on mortality figures. One of the previously undocumented patterns noted in this study was the presence of multiple disturbed patches within individual wildfires. About half of all events had multiple disturbed patches, the number of which increased significantly with the log of event size. Furthermore, there tended to be one very large disturbed patch, the size of which was unrelated to event size. The shapes of both events and disturbed patches increased significantly as the log of event area increased, although disturbed patch shapes were more convoluted. Most of the island remnant area was partially disturbed, and small (<1 ha) islands account for 81% of the island numbers, but only 5% of island area. Probability of burning differentials were greater between major land types (such as nonforested versus forested), and less so for differences in forest ages, species, or
Technical note: Estimating unbiased transfer-function performances in spatially structured environments

Abstract. Conventional cross validation schemes for assessing transfer-function performance assume that observations are independent. In spatially structured environments this assumption is violated, resulting in over-optimistic estimates of transfer-function performance. H-block cross validation, where all samples within h kilometres of the test samples are omitted, is a method for obtaining unbiased transfer-function performance estimates. In this study, we assess three methods for determining the optimal h. Using simulated data, we find that all three methods result in comparable values of h. Applying the three methods to published transfer functions, we find they yield similar values for h. Some transfer functions perform notably worse when h-block cross validation is used.
The Nature and Role of Monetary Policy When Money is Endogenous

This paper considers the nature and role of monetary policy when money is modelled as credit money endogenously created within the private sector. There are currently two schools of thought that view money as endogenous: one has been labelled the 'new consensus' in macroeconomics, and the other is the Keynesian endogenous (bank) money approach. The paper first explores the analysis of monetary policy in the 'new consensus' macroeconomic model, followed by an examination of the effectiveness of monetary policy in that analysis. The Keynesian view of endogenous money is discussed, and the role for monetary policy in a Keynesian endogenous monetary policy analysis is considered, including discussion of the objectives and instruments of monetary policy. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
PHYLOGENY OF THE SIEVE ELEMENT / COMPANION CELL COMPLEX

This review deals with aspects of the cellular and molecular biology of the sieve element/companion cell complex, the functional unit of sieve tubes in angiosperms. It includes the following issues: (a) evolution of the sieve elements; (b) the specific structural outfit of sieve elements and its functional significance; (c) modes of cellular and molecular interaction between sieve element and companion cell; (d) plasmodesmal trafficking between sieve element and companion cell as the basis for macromolecular long-distance signalling in the phloem; (e) diversity of sieve element/ companion cell complexes in the respective phloem zones (collection phloem, transport phloem, release phloem); (f) deployment of carriers, pumps and channels on the plasma membrane of sieve element/companion cell complexes in various phloem zones; and (g) implications of the molecular-cellular equipment of sieve element/companion cells complexes for mass flow of water and solutes in a wholeplant frame. Key-words : companion cell; macromolecular signalling; mass flow; phloem evolution; phloem loading; phloemspecific proteins; phloem transport; phloem unloading; plasma-membrane-associated proteins; plasmodesmata; sieve-element plastids.
Immigration and Sleep Problems in a Southern European Country: Do Immigrants Get the Best Sleep?

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the differences in the prevalence of insomnia symptoms and nonrestorative sleep (NRS) between people born in Spain and immigrants from 7 countries with most immigrants in Spain. Data come from the 2006 Spanish National Health Survey. The sample was composed of all individuals aged 16 to 64 years from Spain and the 7 countries with most immigrants in Spain (N = 22,224). In both sexes, people from Bolivia had a higher prevalence of insomnia symptoms and NRS. Conversely, people from Ecuador, Morocco, and Romania had less insomnia symptoms and NRS than Spanish-born participants. No differences were found between Spanish-born participants and Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentinian women. Poor living conditions in the country of origin and in the host country, discrimination, and culturally related lifestyles could be related to poorer sleep health among Bolivian men. Acculturation may explain the similar sleep health patterns noted between Spanish-born participants and long-term immigrants.
Towards Phrase-based Unsupervised Machine Translation: Phrase Representations

: Current unsupervised machine translation models despite achieving promising results work quite modestly comparing to the supervised counterparts. This work aims to make a step towards a new research direction of Phrase-based Unsupervised Machine Translation. Since current word-based models rely on representation of words, phrase-based models require appropriate phrase representations. These representations should be learned without supervision, address phrase speciﬁc multiword expressions issues, and their embedding space has to follow certain regulations for unsupervised translation to perform reasonable. We specify what makes phrase representations effective in terms of Unsupervised Machine Translation, deﬁne and evaluate Unsupervised Compositional Modeling Framework for Phrases, and show how to use this framework to satisfy to the proposed requirements thus obtaining effective representations for phrases. We make the code and trained models publicly available as an open source project.
The Epidemiology of Schistosomiasis Reinfection and Reemergence in Sichuan, China: Implications for Surveillance and Intervention

Treatment can yield rapid reductions in schistosomiasis infections and morbidity, but sustained control of this water-borne parasitic infection has proven challenging. A better understanding of the epidemiology of schistosomiasis following chemotherapy-based control is urgently needed to inform the design of surveillance systems and interventions in post-control regions. The research presented here documents the reemergence of schistosomiasis in Sichuan Province, China, evaluates surveillance methods for monitoring schistosomiasis-induced morbidity, using ultrasound, and schistosomiasis reemergence, and examines village-level characteristics that may promote schistosomiasis transmission. Research was conducted in a region where praziquantel-based control was ongoing, using a five-year longitudinal study, and in regions where schistosomiasis reemerged five to fifteen years after human infections were controlled, using a cross-sectional survey of 53 villages. Reinfection following treatment was common in endemic regions, and widespread human and bovine infections were documented in the reemerging areas. Two commonly used surveillance methods, surveys for Schistosoma japonicum -infected snails and acute schistosomiasis case reporting greatly underestimated the extent of reemergence. Methods that targeted high-risk human populations had high sensitivity. Village-level characteristics that promoted the distribution of S. japonicum eggs, including the use of human waste as an agricultural fertilizer (night soil) and the density of bovines, predicted human infection status. Infection intensities were low in the reemerging region. Areas where night soil use or bovine ownership are common may be primed for reemergence, providing crucial links in the schistosome life cycle that can promote S. japonicum infections. Interventions and surveillance methods that target populations in high-risk environments may aid in interrupting schistosomiasis transmission and permanently reducing morbidity.
The Effect of Lexical Coverage and Dictionary Use on L2 Reading Comprehension

This study aims to further understand the role of lexical coverage on L2 reading comprehension. It examines test scores of learners at or near the 90-95% coverage level to determine if this coverage range allows for comprehension of authentic texts. The findings suggest that 92-93% may be a threshold mark at which understanding of a text significantly increases. However, the data confirms results from previous studies: that many participants in the 90-95% coverage range have difficulty comprehending texts. The second part of the study examines the influence of dictionary use on lexical coverage and comprehension. The data indicates that, for learners at this proficiency level, dictionary use increases comprehension at a similar rate as increased coverage. However, most participants using dictionaries still did not achieve comprehension, though learners who utilized the dictionary links to increase their coverage to over 96% showed some significant gains in comprehension.
Evolving Governance and Contested Water Reforms in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin

This paper explores the ways water governance adapts to changing social values and political imperatives by examining the case of water policy reforms in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Over more than two decades, Australia’s water reforms have explicitly aimed to promote ecological sustainability and economic efficiency, attempting to balance pro-market, micro-economic reforms with broader social and sustainability goals. Despite the formality of Australia’s intergovernmental agreements, water reforms have been expensive and heavily contested, experiencing many implementation challenges. However, water market reforms have generally been regarded as successful, enabling the reallocation of water for environmental and extractive uses, contributing to flexibility and adaptive capacity. Recognising that discursive contestation is central to policy development, the paper documents the way the reform processes have attempted to broker compromises between three competing policy paradigms—national development, economic rationalism and environmentalism. These inherent tensions resulted in prolonged contests for influence over policy directions long after formal statements of policy intent by Governments. Given that climate change is driving the need for water governance reforms, the paper looks to what lessons can be learnt about the redesigns of meta-governance arrangements, including through structured commitments to independent audits and evaluations that can provide the feedback needed for adaptive governance and policy learning.
Comparison Between Standard and Gender-Specific Knee Designs in Total Knee Arthroplasty in Female Patients

Objectives: Current study is a comparative, prospective, randomized, short-term outcome study to compare the early results of Total Knee Arthroplasty in female patients using either standard or gender-specific knee prosthesis for treatment of advanced osteoarthritis of the knee joint. Background: Gender-specific knee athroplasty prosthesis is designed to better accommodate the differences noted in distal femoral anatomy in female patients compared to males. Several studies have reported differences in knee morphometry between genders such as the height/width ratio of the distal femoral condyle, the quadriceps angle and the shape of the distal femur. The need for Gender-specific (GS) femoral prostheses is still debated and has led us to compare short-term outcomes of TKA using standard (STD) or GS femoral components. Methods: In the period between February 2012 and February 2013, a comparative prospective randomized study was conducted involving 34 female patients with 40 knees who underwent primary total knee arthroplasty for knee joint advanced osteoarthritis and divided into two groups , The first group included 20 knees underwent total knee arthroplasty using Gender-Specific Knee Design with Gender-Specific femoral component (Zimmer Gender Solutions NexGen High-Flex ( NexGen LPS-Flex ) Implant , The second group included 20 knees underwent total knee arthroplasty using standard Knee Design with Standard femoral component (Zimmer NexGen LPS Implant). Results: No statistically significant differences were observed between the two groups regarding pain improvement, range of motion improvement, pre and post operative OXFORD scores, Knee Society Scores, WOMAC scores, satisfaction, preference, complications, and radiographic results. Conclusion: Early clinical outcomes for the knees with a gender-specific NexGen LPS-Flex prosthesis were similar to those for the knees with a standard NexGen LPS prosthesis in female patients. gender-specific knee prosthesis showed no advantages over standard unisex knee prosthesis in terms of early clinical outcomes.
Enhanced time synchronization in IEEE 802.11a system using SIGNAL field and MAP channel estimation

This paper addresses the problem of time synchronization in the IEEE 802.11a OFDM wireless communication system.In addition to the reference sequence usually used in conventional algorithms, recently the SIGNAL field of the physical packet has been exploited to improve the coarse time synchronization. To increase the performance of the fine time synchronization, we propose to use joint time synchronization and channel estimation based on the Maximum A Posteriori Probability criterion. Simulation results show that the probability of synchronization failure of the proposed synchronization algorithm is reduced as compared to existing methods.
Effect of Vitamin D on the Treatment and Prevention of Essential Hypertension

The vast majority of epidemiological studies have consistently shown that vitamin D levels are inversely related to blood pressure (BP) and the incidence of hypertension (HTN). Animal studies from diet-induced or genetic models of vitamin D deficiency suggest that vitamin D deficiency directly causes HTN. Based on basic and clinical studies, modestly increased renin expression in genetic mouse models of vitamin D deficiency is associated with, but not causally linked to vitamin D deficiency-induced HTN. Our mechanistic studies indicate that overexpression of a novel target gene seems to play a critical role in vitamin D-deficient HTN, and that vitamin D signaling defect in vascular smooth muscle cells and CD4+ T lymphocytes seems predominantly be responsible for vitamin D deficiencymediated HTN. The data from many clinical trials have consistently demonstrated a minimal or no effect of shortterm vitamin D supplementation on BP in normotensive healthy individuals, but long-term vitamin D supplementation should prevent the development of essential HTN (EH) at high-risk susceptible people. More than 13 randomized controlled trials have shown that vitamin D repletion significantly reduces BP in vitamin D-deficient EH patients, which appears to be more effective in those with type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. Short-term administration of active vitamin D or its analogue has a better antihypertensive role than natural vitamin D in the treatment of vitamin D-deficient EH. While these promising data from relatively small trials have displayed potential beneficial vitamin D effect on EH, it is urgently needed to comprehensively elucidate molecular mechanisms of vitamin D deficiency-induced HTN, which will provide a solid theoretical basis to well design large randomized controlled trials to further address the antihypertensive role of vitamin D in vitamin D-deficient EH patients. Currently, EH is lacking an etiology-specific therapy. Identification of vitamin D deficiency as an environmental stressor that triggers the development of EH at vulnerable individuals will make a great advance in the field of EH research.
Soil attributes and efficiency of sulfentrazone on control of purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L.)

In the soil, herbicides are submitted to absorption, leaching and degradation by physical, chemical and biological processes or absorbed by plants. All these processes are dependent on soil class and weather conditions and affect the product efficiency on weed control. The objective of this work was to investigate the influence of soil attributes on sulfentrazone efficiency for controlling purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L. ). Soil samples from LVAd (Typic Haplustox), LVd, LVdf and LVef (Typic Haplustox and Typic Eutrustox), NVe (Rhodic Kandiustalf), and LVd (Typic Haplustox) were collected under two crop conditions aiming to have different clay, Fe oxides, and organic matter contents. The soil samples were submitted to granulometric, chemical and mineralogical characterization. A bioassay was used to evaluate the efficacy of sulfentrazone (1.6 L c.p. ha-1) to control purple nutsedge on pre-emergence. The sulfentrazone behaved differently among the studied soil classes. The product efficiency decreased when the soil Fe oxide content increased, following the order: LVAd, LVd, NVe, LVef and LVdf. Clay content, ranging from 240 to 640 g kg-1, and organic matter content, ranging from 12 to 78 g kg-1, did not influence sulfentrazone efficiency.
Analyzing the Impact of Fault-Tolerance Methods in ARM Processors Under Soft Errors Running Linux and Parallelization APIs

This paper presents an analysis of the efficiency of traditional fault-tolerance methods on parallel systems running on top of Linux OS. It starts by studying the occurrence of software errors at systems presenting different levels of complexity, from sequential bare metal to parallel Linux applications. Then two traditional fault-tolerance mechanisms (triple modular redundancy and duplication with comparison variant) are applied to the applications and their efficiency analyzed. All cases were tested at the single and dual-core versions of an ARM Cortex-A9 processor that is embedded in many commercial system-on-a-chip. The OVP simulator platform is used to instantiate the processor model and to inject faults into the system. Faults are modeled as bit flips in the processor registers. Results show that traditional fault-tolerance algorithms are not efficient enough to protect a whole parallel system running on top of an operating system, given that the operating system itself is a major source of errors.
FEM study of the bar number impact on the stator core losses of the cage induction motor

The improvement of the cage induction motor's efficiency is a significant scientific subject, since it affects the motor's life-cycle and reliability. Particularly, the rotor slot number strongly affects the induction motor behavior because it is related to the magnetic field's higher harmonic index. In this work, three induction motors with the same stator and different cage bars' numbers, properly selected, are simulated with FEM. The aim is to study and compare the impact of their specific rotor slot number on the stator core losses.
AN IMPROVED APPROACH TO MINIMIZE CONTEXT SWITCHING IN ROUND ROBIN SCHEDULING ALGORITHM USING OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Scheduling is a fundamental operating system function. Almost all computer resources are scheduled before use. All major CPU scheduling algorithms concentrates more on to maximize CPU utilization, throughput, waiting time and turnaround time. In particularly, the performance of round robin algorithm depends heavily on the size of the time quantum. To improve the performance of CPU and to minimize the overhead on the CPU, time quantum should be large with respect to the context switch time. Otherwise, context switching will be more. In this research paper, we propose a method to minimize the context switching and to break the fixed time quantum size in round robin scheduling algorithm using optimization techniques. Both results and calculations show that, our proposed method is more efficient than the existing round robin scheduling algorithm.