Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A numerical method for measuring capacitive soft sensors through one channel

Soft capacitive stretch sensors are well suited for unobtrusive wearable body motion capture. Conventional sensing methods measure sensor capacitances through separate channels. In sensing garments with many sensors, this results in high wiring complexity, and a large footprint of rigid sensing circuit boards. We have developed a more efficient sensing method that detects multiple sensors through only one channel, and one set of wires. It is based on a R-C transmission line assembled from capacitive conductive fabric stretch sensors, and external resistors. The unknown capacitances are identified by solving a system of nonlinear equations. These equations are established by modelling and continuously measuring transmission line reactances at different frequencies. Solving these equations numerically with a Newton–Raphson solver for the unknown capacitances enables real time reading of all sensors. The method was verified with a prototype comprising three sensors that is capable of detecting both individually and simultaneously stretched sensors. Instead of using three channels and six wires to detect the sensors, the task was achieved with only one channel and two wires.
Developing rules of thumb for the financial conditions of city livability: a study of municipal governments in Indonesia

Abstract This study aims to develop rules of thumb for the financial conditions of city livability. These rules will provide a practical guide for local government leaders managing local government finances on how to realize a livable city. This study identifies three indicators for the financial conditions that characterize a city’s livability, namely its operating capacity, financial flexibility, and commitment to maintain services. The standards for each of these three indicators is 1.20 times for the operating capacity ratio, 0.18 times for the financial flexibility ratio, and 0.25 times for the commitment to maintain services ratio.
Modeling Surface Temperatures for Snow-Covered Roads: A Case Study for a Heated Pavement in Bærum, Norway

Heated pavements are used as an alternative to removing snow and ice mechanically and chemically. Usually a heated pavement system is automatically switched on when snowfall starts or when there is a risk of ice formation. Ideally, these systems run based on accurate predictions of surface conditions a couple of hours ahead of time, for which both weather forecasts and reliable surface temperature predictions are needed. The effective thermal conductivity of the snow layer is often described as a function of its density. However the thermal conductivity of a snow layer can vary considerably, not only for snow samples with a different density, but also for snow samples with the same density, but with a variation in the liquid water content. In this paper a physical temperature and surface condition model is described for snow-covered roads. The model is validated for an entire winter season on a heated pavement in Norway. Two different models to describe the thermal conductivity through the snow layer were compared. Results show that the thermal conductivity of the snow layer can be best described as a function of the density for snow with a low liquid water content. For snow with a high water content, the thermal conductivity can be best described as a function of the volume fractions and thermal conductivity of ice, water, and air, in which air and ice are modeled as a series system and water and air/ice in parallel.
Improving performance of an analog electronic device using quantum error correction

The use of analog classical systems for computation is generally thought to be a difficult proposition due to the susceptibility of these devices to noise and the lack of a clear framework for achieving fault-tolerance. We present experimental results for the application of quantum error correction (QEC) techniques to a prototype analog computational device called a quantum emulation device. It is shown that for the gates tested (transversal Z, X and SH) there is a marked improvement in the performance characteristics of the gate operations following error correction using the 5-Qubit Perfect code. In the case of the Z gate, the median fidelity improved from 0.995 to 0.999 98, a reduction in the gate error by over two orders of magnitude. Other transverse gates similarly show strong improvements.
Construction of circRNA-Mediated Immune-Related ceRNA Network and Identification of Circulating circRNAs as Diagnostic Biomarkers in Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose Accumulating evidence suggests that circular RNAs (circRNAs) are involved in immune and inflammatory processes after acute ischemic stroke (AIS). However, the roles of circRNA-mediated competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) in modulating immune inflammation of AIS have not yet been determined. This study aimed to construct a circRNA-mediated immune-related ceRNA network and identify novel circRNAs in AIS. Methods Microarray data were downloaded from the GEO database and further analysed by R software. Then, we constructed a circRNA-mediated ceRNA network based on interaction information from the bioinformatics database. A topological property analysis of the ceRNA network was conducted to screen novel circRNAs. Finally, we further applied quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) to two independent sets. Results We constructed an AIS immune-related ceRNA (AISIRC) network containing immune-related genes (IRGs), miRNAs, and circRNAs. Additionally, we extracted the subnetwork from the AISIRC network and screened six immune-related circRNAs. After identification and validation, we finally confirmed that plasma levels of circPTP4A2 and circTLK2 were significantly increased in AIS patients compared with both healthy control subjects (HCs) and transient ischemic attack (TIA) patients. Logistic regression and receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses demonstrated that these two circRNAs may function as predictive and discriminative biomarkers for AIS. We also confirmed that plasma levels of circPTP4A2 were elevated in TIA patients compared with HCs and might be an independent risk factor for predicting TIA. Longitudinal analysis of circRNA expression up to 90 days after AIS indicated that the ability of circPTP4A2 and circTLK2 to monitor AIS dynamics was highly desirable. Conclusion In summary, the circRNA-mediated immune-related ceRNA network was successfully constructed, and two circulating circRNAs (circPTP4A2 and circTLK2) improved sensitivity for the diagnosis of AIS and could be considered diagnostic biomarkers.
Effectiveness of Evidence Based Nursing Guidelines on Thyroidectomy Patients Health Outcomes at General Surgery Departments

Background : Implementation of evidence-based nursing guidelines for thyroidectomy patients can enhance their health outcomes by improving compliance and promoting healthy lifestyles. Aim of study: This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an evidence based nursing guidelines on thyroidectomy patients’ health outcomes at General Surgery departments. Research design: A Quasi –experimental research design was conducted to achieve the aim of this study. Subjects: A purposive subject of 80 adult patients who were admitted within 9 months in the General Surgical departments at Benha University Hospital, scheduled for thyroidectomy surgeries and accepted to participate in this study. Setting : This study conducted in General Surgical departments and outpatient surgical clinic at Benha University Hospital. Tools of data collection: three tools were used in this study: I: Structured questionnaire assessment. II: Patients Practical observational checklist and III: Patients’ health outcomes assessment. Results: There was statistically significance improvement in patient’s knowledge, practice and health outcomes immediately, on 7 th days and one-month post implementing of evidence based nursing guidelines compared to pre implementing evidence based guidelines (p =<0.001) and a positive significant correlation between patients’ knowledge and practice was found immediately, on 7 th days and one-month post implementing of an evidence based nursing guidelines. Conclusion: Implementing of an evidence based nursing guidelines for thyroidectomy patients had improved of patients' health outcomes through high significantly increased level of their knowledge, practice and compliance to discharge instructions scores, and decreased overall postoperative complications rate. Recommendations: Developing and designing an in-service training program for nurses’ staff members on applying the evidence-based nursing practice in the field of surgical nursing care including pre and postoperative management, especially for thyroidectomy patients.
Almgren's big regularity paper : Q-valued functions minimizing Dirichlet's integral and the regularity of area-minimizing rectifiable currents up to codimension 2

Fred Almgren exploited the excess method for proving regularity theorems in the calculus of variations. His techniques yielded Holder continuous differentiability except for a small closed singular set. In the sixties and seventies Almgren refined and generalized his methods. Between 1974 and 1984 he wrote a 1,700-page proof that was his most ambitious development of his ground-breaking ideas. Originally, this monograph was available only as a three-volume work of limited circulation. The entire text is faithfully reproduced here.This book gives a complete proof of the interior regularity of an area-minimizing rectifiable current up to Hausdorff codimension 2. The argument uses the theory of Q-valued functions, which is developed in detail. For example, this work shows how first variation estimates from squash and squeeze deformations yield a monotonicity theorem for the normalized frequency of oscillation of a Q-valued function that minimizes a generalized Dirichlet integral. The principal features of the book include an extension theorem analogous to Kirszbraun's theorem and theorems on the approximation in mass of nearly flat mass-minimizing rectifiable currents by graphs and images of Lipschitz Q-valued functions.
Black-box Audit of YouTube's Video Recommendation: Investigation of Misinformation Filter Bubble Dynamics (Extended Abstract)

In this paper, we describe a black-box sockpuppeting audit which we carried out to investigate the creation and bursting dynamics of misinformation filter bubbles on YouTube. Pre-programmed agents acting as YouTube users stimulated YouTube's recommender systems: they first watched a series of misinformation promoting videos (bubble creation) and then a series of misinformation debunking videos (bubble bursting). Meanwhile, agents logged videos recommended to them by YouTube. After manually annotating these recommendations, we were able to quantify the portion of misinformative videos among them. The results confirm the creation of filter bubbles (albeit not in all situations) and show that these bubbles can be bursted by watching credible content. Drawing a direct comparison with a previous study, we do not see improvements in overall quantities of misinformation recommended.
MA-ViT: Modality-Agnostic Vision Transformers for Face Anti-Spoofing

The existing multi-modal face anti-spoofing (FAS) frameworks are designed based on two strategies: halfway and late fusion. However, the former requires test modalities consistent with the training input, which seriously limits its deployment scenarios. And the latter is built on multiple branches to process different modalities independently, which limits their use in applications with low memory or fast execution requirements. In this work, we present a single branch based Transformer framework, namely Modality-Agnostic Vision Transformer (MA-ViT), which aims to improve the performance of arbitrary modal attacks with the help of multi-modal data. Specifically, MA-ViT adopts the early fusion to aggregate all the available training modalities’ data and enables flexible testing of any given modal samples. Further, we develop the Modality-Agnostic Transformer Block (MATB) in MA-ViT, which consists of two stacked attentions named Modal-Disentangle Attention (MDA) and Cross-Modal Attention (CMA), to eliminate modality-related information for each modal sequences and supplement modality-agnostic liveness features from another modal sequences, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that the single model trained based on MA-ViT can not only flexibly evaluate different modal samples, but also outperforms existing single-modal frameworks by a large margin, and approaches the multi-modal frameworks introduced with smaller FLOPs and model parameters.
Construction of amicable orthogonal design

This paper introduces some construction methods for amicable orthogonal designs over the real and quaternion domains which have been explored for code design before. The proposed construction methods generate a large number of amicable orthogonal designs of quaternions can be used to construct restricted quaternion orthogonal designs which can be applied to orthogonal space-time polarization block codes for wireless communications. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication Details Zhao, Y. , Seberry, J. R. , Xia, T. , Wysocki, B. J. & Wysocki, T. A. (2009). Construction of amicable orthogonal designs of quaternions. Australasian Journal of Combinatorics, 44 ( June), 19-35. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow. edu.au/infopapers/3218
Effect of Educational Guidelines Prior Nephrolithotripsy on Patients' Performance and Satisfaction

Background: Nephrolithotripsy is a non-invasive kidney stone treatment procedure which breaks the stones into small fragments. Education about nephrolithotripsy helps patients gain best performance (knowledge, practice and behavior) to meet ongoing health care needs. Aim of study: Was to evaluate the effect of educational guidelines prior nephrolithotripsy on patients' performance and satisfaction. Research design: A quasi-experimental, pre-test and post-test intervention research design was implemented to conduct the current study. Setting: The study was conducted at the Urology department at Benha University Hospital, Qalyubia Governorate, Egypt. Sample: A purposive sample consisting of 80 urinary stone patients included case study 40 patients and control study 40 patients. Tools of data collection: Four tools were used to collect data: (I) A structured interview questionnaire for patients included four parts: Patients' personal data, patients' medical history, patients' health habits and patients' diagnostic studies. (II) Patients’ knowledge about nephrolithotripsy assessment sheet. (III) Patients’ practice and behavior checklist; included three parts: Diet ,fluids, sports activities and behavior. (IV) Patients’ satisfaction assessment scale. Results: There was statistical significant improvement in patients' total knowledge level about nephrolithotripsy to 87.5%, increased mean score of patients' practice of kfluids, foods and sports activities and increase total patients' follow up behavior to82.5% in study group than control groups after implementing educational guidelines. Conclusion: Application of the educational guidelines has a positive effect on patient’s knowledge, practice and behavior regarding nephrolithotripsy of the performance mean scores of study group post guidelines were statistically significantly higher than pre guidelines implementation. Recommendations: Continuous evaluation of patient’s knowledge about nephrolithotripsy, identify their needs, and barriers that hinder healthy habits to prevent urinary stones recurrences.
A bibliometric-qualitative literature review of green finance gap and future research directions

ABSTRACT Green finance (GF) supports the global fight against climate change and its impacts. It is critical to attaining the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Since GF is regarded as the future of finance and investment, it needs to be fully understood. This paper presents the first mixed-methods systematic review with both bibliometric and qualitative analysis of the state-of-the-art and trends in GF research. A bibliometric review was performed to quantitatively examine 995 related publications retrieved from Scopus and validated with the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect. Results showed that GF is still relatively an immature but interdisciplinary research area. A further qualitative-systematic analysis of 60 selected publications was conducted to identify the key findings, challenges, and recommendations for future research. Findings revealed six major research hotspots in GF: (i) green bond market and greenium, (ii) green credit (loan), (iii) carbon investment and market, (iv) green banking, (v) market stress (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic) and GF, and (vi) domestic and international climate finance policies. This study provides insights into key applications of GF as it applies to specific research fields, a and as the pathways to realize the accruable benefits of GF to enhance research and development.
The role of internal control in fraud prevention and detection

An effective internal control system should be able to provide managers with increased accountability for their plans and reasonably ensure that the plans they guide reach the set goals. However, effective systems are not limited to digital systems but also systems that can prevent and detect fraudulent activities. The overall goal of this research is to analyze the impact of internal control systems on fraud detection and prevention. It is necessary to set an appropriate tone at the top, and top management should encourage ethical behaviour in a transparent manner. A risk assessment process needs to be set up, and the risk of fraud can be assessed by brainstorming to deceive the organization. It is necessary to create report and the investigation process. Thus, this work attempted to review and analyze 20 articles among different countries to reveal the importance of internal control system in preventing and detecting fraud in commercial companies. It is discovered that it has a significant role in fraud prevention.
Explicit Alignment Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Even though neural machine translation (NMT) has become the state-of-the-art solution for end-to-end translation, it still suffers from a lack of translation interpretability, which may be conveniently enhanced by explicit alignment learning (EAL), as performed in traditional statistical machine translation (SMT). To provide the benefits of both NMT and SMT, this paper presents a novel model design that enhances NMT with an additional training process for EAL, in addition to the end-to-end translation training. Thus, we propose two approaches an explicit alignment learning approach, in which we further remove the need for the additional alignment model, and perform embedding mixup with the alignment based on encoder--decoder attention weights in the NMT model. We conducted experiments on both small-scale (IWSLT14 De->En and IWSLT13 Fr->En) and large-scale (WMT14 En->De, En->Fr, WMT17 Zh->En) benchmarks. Evaluation results show that our EAL methods significantly outperformed strong baseline methods, which shows the effectiveness of EAL. Further explorations show that the translation improvements are due to a better spatial alignment of the source and target language embeddings. Our method improves translation performance without the need to increase model parameters and training data, which verifies that the idea of incorporating techniques of SMT into NMT is worthwhile.
The Influence of Company Size, Profitability, Auditor’s Opinion, and Reputation of Public Accounting Firm on Audit Delay

Companies and other business entities must disclose or report the company's operational activities contained in the financial statements. However, the level of time span generated from audit reports with financial statements is still quite long. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of company size, profitability, audit opinion, and reputation of the Public Accounting Firm on audit delay. This research was conducted on agricultural sector companies on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the period 2014-2019. The analytical technique used in this study was multiple linear regression analysis. Based on the results, it was found that company size had a negative and significant effect on audit delay disclosure; Profitability has a negative and significant effect on audit delay disclosure; Audit opinion does not affect the disclosure of audit delay; and Reputation of the Public Accounting Firm has no effect on the disclosure of audit delay.
A Cost-Effective Methodology for Sizing Solar PV Systems for Existing Irrigation Facilities in Chile

In the last five years, the Chilean Ministries of Agriculture and Energy developed a national strategy to incorporate renewable energies into various economic sectors. Since 2013, more than 1500 off-grid solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, with power ranging from 1 kW to 3 kW, were installed to drive existing irrigation systems in small and medium-sized farms for the exportation of fresh fruit. A net billing regulation was also implemented in 2014. This study shows a cost-effective methodology for the sizing of solar PV systems for existing irrigation facilities in Chile, in an effort to improve the competitiveness of the fresh-fruit industry. The same methodology may also be implemented in other Latin American countries. The article presents the analysis of four projects (two in the Atacama Region, and two in the Maule Region). The baseline situation of the four units was studied, as well as the energy-efficient actions that may be applied, in addition to the recommended characteristics of the selected PV system to drive the irrigation systems of small fresh-fruit farms. Off-grid and on-grid solar PV systems were analyzed, including some particularities of the Chilean regulations. The required water demand of the irrigation systems and their corresponding pressure heads were also determined. The electricity demand of the system was calculated, and the PV system was designed for an optimal irrigation system. Additionally, an economical assessment was made for two years. In the first year, the cost effectiveness of energy-efficient actions was evaluated for the irrigation system, and it was found that they had paybacks of approximately two years. In the second year, the implementation of a PV system in each demonstrative unit was evaluated. The on-grid solar PV system performed better than the off-grid system, with evaluated paybacks of approximately 12 years. Finally, some recommendations for a well-designed on-grid solar PV system were made on the basis of it lasting over 25 years, with an adequate operation and maintenance plan.