Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Orange Mesocarp Extract as a Natural Surfactant: Impact on Fluid–Fluid and Fluid–Rock Interactions during Chemical Flooding

Surfactant flooding has suffered a huge setback owing to its cost and the ecotoxic nature of synthetic surfactants. The potential of natural surfactants for enhanced oil recovery has attracted a great deal of research interest in recent times. In this research, orange mesocarp extract (OME) was studied as a potential green surface-active agent in recovering heavy oil. The extract obtained from the orange (Citrus sinensis) mesocarp using alkaline water as solvent was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometry . Phase behavior was studied to ascertain its stability at 100 °C and compatibility with divalent ions. Microemulsion system, interfacial tension, optimal salinity, and critical micelle concentration were analyzed to evaluate the surfactant. Oil displacement analysis using an oil–wet sandstone medium under reservoir conditions was performed. Surfactant adsorption mechanism on the core was investigated at atmospheric conditions (28 °C) using the Langmuir, Freundlich, Temkin, and linear isotherm models, while the kinetics pattern was modeled with the pseudo-first-order, pseudo-second-order, intraparticle diffusion, and Elovich models. Results showed fluid compatibility and bicontinuous microemulsion at varied temperatures. Surfactant flooding produced an additional oil recovery of 44 and 29.1%, which confirms the capability of this natural surfactant in recovering heavy oil. Langmuir isotherm gave the highest correlation coefficient (R2) value of 0.982, indicating that the adsorption of the surfactant (OME) on the core occurred at specific homogeneous sites, which when occupied by a higher surfactant concentration will disallow further adsorption on these sites. From the R2 values, almost all of the kinetic models corroborated good adsorption capacity of the core and an affinity for the surfactant at low concentration. This indicates that low concentration of the surfactant may not favor the enhanced oil recovery operation due to adsorption in the reservoirs, hence the need to flood at a higher surfactant concentration.
Magnetic Properties of Carbonate Rocks as a Tool for Estimating Strain near the Dead Sea Transform, Northern Israel

To improve the knowledge of the strain field along the Dead-Sea Transform (DST) system in northern Israel, I measured and analyzed the magnetic properties of ~400 samples of Eocene rocks from the Rosh-Pinna, Mt. Gilboa and the HaOnn-Cliffs areas. Analyses of XRD diffraction, thin-sections and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images indicate that the Eocene Bar-Kokhba Formation consists of crystalline calcite and the amounts of Fe, Mn, Mg, Al and Si are very low. The Bar-Kokhba rocks are diamagnetic with low-field average bulksusceptibility of , indicating that the magnetic susceptibility is exclusively controlled by calcite crystals. The orientations of the anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) k3 axes are co-axial with preferred crystal orientation of the calcite caxes and suggesting the maximum shortening axes. I show that the anisotropy parameters (P` and Δk) are associated with the relative magnitudes of the finite strains accumulated in the rocks. The AMS of ~300 samples from the Eocene Bar-Kokhba Formation in the RoshPinna region reveals ~N-S maximum horizontal shortening that is most likely associated with the DST activity. The strain magnitudes next to the DST are generally heterogeneous and in most cases not associated with distinct structures. An isolation method of magnetic phases, developed in this study, reveals that the paramagnetic phase of Fe-bearing minerals above 500 ppm content mask the diamagnetic phase of calcite-bearing rocks, and dominate the AMS. The diamagnetic phase was successfully isolated from the AMS of multi-phases rock, in one study case, and reveals P’ values in the range between 1.01 to 1.04 . The Eocene chalks of the Adulam, Timrat and Maresha Formations have weak diamagnetic to weak paramagnetic low-field susceptibility. The AMS of the Timrat Formation consists of three magnetic phases: diamagnetic of calcite, paramagnetic of clay-rich minerals and ferrimagnetic of magnetite grains. Using integrative techniques in the isolation method the contribution of the sub-phases to the total AMS was evaluated. I infer that the principal axes of the total AMS in Timrat Formation are indicative of preferred crystal orientation of the calcite diamagnetic phase.
RECYCLING OF Eucalipto cloeziana UNDER BIOCHAR DIFFERENT PYROLISIS TEMPERATURES

In the thermal decomposition of the biomass, products which include carbon compounds are generated. Biochar, a by-product of decomposition, has been efficient in retaining carbon, as well for agricultural and environmental management. Thus, the objective of this research is to evaluate the thermal stability and the recalcitrance of eucalyptus-derived bioburden due to different heating rates and pyrolysis temperatures. To do so, biochar were produced from Eucalyptus cloeziana at nine pyrolysis temperatures and three heating rates, and thermogravimetric analysis, determination of C and functional groups by FTIR were performed. Increasing the aromaticity of the biochromes produced, at higher temperatures, results in an increase in their recalcitrance, as demonstrated by the increase in thermal resistance and the oxidation by acid dichromate.
Thoracotomy Patients Under General Anesthesia: A Comparison on Intra-Operative Anesthetic and Analgesic Requirements, When Combined with Either Epidural Analgesia or Continuous Unilateral Paravertebral Analgesia

ABSTRACT Background and Objective: Regional analgesia is effective for post-thoracotomy pain. The primary objective of the study is to compare the intraoperative requirement of isoflurane and fentanyl between general anaesthesia (GA) with epidural analgesia and GA with paravertebral analgesia. Methods and Material: A prospective observational comparative study was conducted on 56 patients undergoing open thoracotomy procedures. The patients were divided into two groups of 28 by assigning the study participants alternatively to each group: Group GAE - received thoracic epidural catheterization with GA, and Group GAP - received ultrasound guided thoracic paravertebral catheterization on the operative side with GA. Intraoperative requirement of isoflurane, fentanyl, postoperative analgesia, stress response, need of rescue analgesics and adverse effects were observed and analysed. Results: 25 patients in each group were included in the data analysis. The intraoperative requirement of isoflurane (32.28 ± 1.88 vs 48.31 ± 4.34 ml; p < 0.0001) and fentanyl (128.87 ± 25.12 vs 157 ± 30.92 μg; p = 0.0009) were significantly less in the GAE group than in the GAP group. VAS scores and need of rescue analgesics and blood glucose levels were not statistically significant during the postoperative period (p > 0.05). The incidence of adverse effects was comparable except for hypotension and urinary retention which were significantly higher in the GAE group. Conclusion: GA with epidural analgesia resulted in significant reduction in the intraoperative consumption of isoflurane and fentanyl in comparison to GA with paravertebral analgesia. However, both the techniques were equally effective in the postoperative period.
The Analogues Method: Reproducing the Seasonality of Drinking Water Distribution in Mountain Tourist Resorts

I would like to thank Emmanuel Reynard for his comments and recommendations. Also, my regards go to Megève’s water services team (Emmanuel Gannaz, Sylvie De- biève, Carole Talotti, Julien Branchereau and Julien Beline) for their invaluable collaboration and enthusiasm during the field visits. Finally, I thank Marianne Milano, Georges-Marie Saulnier, André Musy and Aude Soureillat for their input on this research.
When petro-capitalism comes knocking: community interpretations and responses to the Gros Morne fracking controversy

With the depletion of conventional oil and gas sources, the world is turning to what Urry terms “tough oil,” such as oil from the Alberta oil sands and Arctic. Fracking is a prominent example of this. Situated within an environmental justice framework, I analyze community interpretations and responses to proposed fracking development near Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada. Based on data generated from interviews, field observations and content analysis of texts, my findings suggest that how residents view rural place is highly significant in influencing supportive or oppositional positions on fracking. Proponents picture place as a resource extraction landscape, whereas opponents understand place as a restorative landscape for leisure/tourism activities. Through debates about fracking, place is contested and re-imagined. In many ways, fracking is a struggle over who has the power to define the meanings and characteristics of rural community in an era of tough oil and significant rural change.
Acoustic Scene Classification Across Cities and Devices via Feature Disentanglement

Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) is a task that classifies a scene according to environmental acoustic signals. Audios collected from different cities and devices often exhibit biases in feature distributions, which may negatively impact ASC performance. Taking the city and device of the audio collection as two types of data domain, this paper attempts to disentangle the audio features of each domain to remove the related feature biases. A dual-alignment framework is proposed to generalize the ASC system on new devices or cities, by aligning boundaries across domains and decision boundaries within each domain. During the alignment, the maximum classifier discrepancy and gradient reversed layer are used for the feature disentanglement of scene, city and device, while four candidate domain classifiers are proposed to explore the optimal solution of feature disentanglement. To evaluate the dual-alignment framework, three experiments of biased ASC tasks are designed: 1) cross-city ASC in new cities; 2) cross-device ASC in new devices; 3) cross-city-device ASC in new cities and new devices. Results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework, showcasing performance improvements of 0.9%, 19.8%, and 10.7% on classification accuracy, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed feature disentanglement approach is further evaluated in both biased and unbiased ASC problems, and the results demonstrate that better-disentangled audio features can lead to a more robust ASC system across different devices and cities. This paper advocates for the integration of feature disentanglement in ASC systems to achieve more reliable performance.
Integrating Non-Fourier and AST-Structural Relative Position Representations Into Transformer-Based Model for Source Code Summarization

Source code summaries play a crucial role in helping programmers comprehend the behavior of source code functions. In recent deep-learning based approaches for Source Code Summarization, there has been a growing focus on Transformer-based models. These models use self-attention mechanisms to overcome the long-range dependency issue that previous models often encounter, making them a promising solution for the Source Code Summarization task. However, these models suffer from two shortcomings: 1) they are weak in handling the semantics of keywords, and 2) they are weak to learn the source code with complex structure. To resolve these shortcomings, our study proposes integrating Non-Fourier and ASTStructural relative position representations into Transformer-based model for Source Code Summarization, which we have named NFASRPR-TRANS. NFASRPR-TRANS employs two types of positional encoding schemes in two different Transformer encoders. The first encoder handles the semantics of the keywords of the input source code sequence by using the Gaussian Embedder to encode the non-Fourier relative position representation of the sequence. The second encoder uses Tree Positional Encoding to learn the structural information of the Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), which provides relative position information in the ASTs for generating the source code summaries. Finally,we compared NFASRPR-TRANS with previous models and evaluated its performance on the Java and Python datasets using five metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE-L, CIDEr, METEOR, and SPICE. NFASRPR-TRANS achieves 2%-10% improvements across all five metrics on both datasets.
Oligocene through Quaternary Planktonic Foraminiferal Biostratigraphy of the North Atlantic: DSDP Leg 49

Nine holes were drilled at eight sites in three areas of the North Atlantic during DSDP Leg 49. Sites 407 through 409 constitute a west-east transect on the west flank of the Reykjanes Ridge. Unconformities are present between the lower and middle Miocene, middle and upper Miocene, and Pliocene and Quaternary in the Oligocene through Quaternary section of Hole 407. A Pliocene/Quaternary unconformity and a probable middle/ upper Miocene unconformity occur in the lower Miocene through Quaternary section of Hole 408. Although data from the questionable upper Pliocene through Quaternary section of Hole 409 are too sparse to allow recognition of an unconformity, the presence of a Pliocene/Quaternary unconformity at Sites 407 and 408 indicates that the unconformity is a regional feature related to increased bottom current or to turbidity current activity associated with one or more major late Cenozoic climatic events. Miocene unconformities were caused by changes in bottom current activity probably related to the subsidence history of the Iceland-Faeroe Ridge. Upper Miocene to Quaternary sediments were recovered from Hole 410, which is situated at lat 45° N on the west side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The occurrence of ice-rafted mineral grains in the Pliocene of Hole 410, at a level estimated to be about 3 m.y. old, confirms and extends the coverage of the mid-Pliocene North Atlantic glacial event detected during DSDP Leg 12. The remaining holes drilled during Leg 49 recovered Quaternary sediments in the FAMOUS area. Four lower Miocene, three middle Miocene, one upper Miocene, two Pliocene, and one Quaternary biostratigraphic divisions are proposed for high-latitude Neogene sediments of the North Atlantic. These informal zones are correlated with formal zonation schemes developed in tropical and extra-tropical areas.
Measurement Invariance of the WISC-V across a Clinical Sample of Children and Adolescents with ADHD and a Matched Control Group

Measurement invariance of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V) 10-primary subtest battery was analyzed across a group of children and adolescents with ADHD (n = 91) and a control group (n = 91) matched by sex, age, migration background, and parental education or type of school. First, confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were performed to establish the model fit for the WISC-V second-order five-factor model in each group. A sufficiently good fit of the model was found for the data in both groups. Subsequently, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFAs) were conducted to test for measurement invariance across the ADHD and control group. Results of these analyses indicated configural and metric invariance but did not support full scalar invariance. However, after relaxing equality constraints on the Vocabulary (VC), Digit Span (DS), Coding (CD), Symbol Search (SS), and Picture Span (PS) subtest intercepts as well as on the intercepts of the first-order factors Working Memory (WM) and Processing Speed (PS), partial scalar invariance could be obtained. Furthermore, model-based reliability coefficients indicated that the WISC-V provides a more precise measurement of general intelligence (e.g., represented by the Full-Scale IQ, FSIQ) than it does for cognitive subdomains (e.g., represented by the WISC-V indexes). Group comparisons revealed that the ADHD group scored significantly lower than the control group on four primary subtests, thus achieving significantly lower scores on the corresponding primary indexes and the FSIQ. Given that measurement invariance across the ADHD and the control group could not be fully confirmed for the German WISC-V, clinical interpretations based on the WISC-V primary indexes are limited and should only be made with great caution regarding the cognitive profiles of children and adolescents with ADHD.
Imaging and measurement of red-infrared stimulated luminescence (R-IRSL) from feldspar samples

When the infrared light was illuminated on granites and feldspar slices irradiated with X-rays, luminescence color images (abbreviated to IRSLCI) showed three color patterns, separable into intense yellow, red and faint violet portions. The yellow and faint violet parts were assignable to plagioclase and potassium feldspars and quartz constituent, respectively. The red color parts appeared on both potassium and albite feldspars. From spectrometry of the IRSL, two main emission peaks in the middle wavelength region, consisting of 550 nm (yellow) and 580 nm (orange), were revealed besides intense emission both in wavelengths shorter than 450 nm (violet region) and in wavelengths longer than 600 nm (red region) on every feldspar sample. The red IRSL (R-IRSL) of as-received feldspars was significantly enhanced after annealing treatment in oxidative conditions, rather than in reductive annealing conditions for 3hrs at 900 o C. The dose response of R-IRSL offered slower saturation of microcline in comparison with rapid saturation tendency of albite. The results are suggestive of a preferable application of R-IRSL to dating of burnt archaeological materials.
Quantification of Chemotherapy Drug Wastage and Incurred Financial Loss in Paediatric Cancer Care: A Cross-Sectional Study at a Tertiary Care Public Hospital in India

Aim: The evolving chemotherapy landscape continually introduces effective agents, but escalating costs call for an evaluation of drug wastage and financial consequences to enhance resource utilization. This study seeks to estimate chemotherapy drug wastage and its economic loss in paediatric cancer care. Methods: In this cross-sectional study of paediatric cancer patients receiving parenteral chemotherapy, we evaluated both the drug used and wasted during each administration. The monetary value of drug loss was calculated using the formula: Cost = Proportion of drug wasted X Cost of drug vial. Result: A total of 100 paediatric cancer patients who received 140 parenteral drug administrations of 22 chemotherapy drugs were studied. The total amount of drug procured was 25,515 mg, out of which 5,004.9 mg were wasted. Wastage amounted to 19.61% of the procured drugs in varying proportions. The total estimated cost of chemotherapy stood at 110,143.1 INR (1,328.7 USD), with cost wastage accounting for 31,929.95 INR (385.19 USD), equivalent to 28.98% of the total expenditure. Notably, doxorubicin 112.2 mg (37.4%) exhibited the highest drug wastage, followed by cytarabine 280 mg (35%) and l-asparaginase 83,400 IU (26.9%), primarily prescribed for acute lymphocytic leukaemia. Cytarabine resulted in the highest financial loss. Dose rounding occurred in 22 cases (15.71%), while vial sharing was observed in only five cases (3.57%) during drug administrations. Methotrexate, doxorubicin, and cytarabine doses never matched the available vial sizes. Conclusions: In resource-limited healthcare settings, implementing centre-specific measures, such as vial sharing and drug categorization, can reduce drug wastage and financial losses. Evaluating the viability of optimizing vial sizes and producing multidose vials is essential.
Assessing Change and Vulnerability of the Guyana Coastline with Multi-Temporal Landsat Imagery and Survey Data

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . v LIST OF TABLES . xi LIST OF FIGURES . xii LIST OF APPENDICES . xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . xv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. 1 1.
Mechanical Tensions Regulate Gene Expression in the Xenopus laevis Axial Tissues

During gastrulation and neurulation, the chordamesoderm and overlying neuroectoderm of vertebrate embryos converge under the control of a specific genetic programme to the dorsal midline, simultaneously extending along it. However, whether mechanical tensions resulting from these morphogenetic movements play a role in long-range feedback signaling that in turn regulates gene expression in the chordamesoderm and neuroectoderm is unclear. In the present work, by using a model of artificially stretched explants of Xenopus midgastrula embryos and full-transcriptome sequencing, we identified genes with altered expression in response to external mechanical stretching. Importantly, mechanically activated genes appeared to be expressed during normal development in the trunk, i.e., in the stretched region only. By contrast, genes inhibited by mechanical stretching were normally expressed in the anterior neuroectoderm, where mechanical stress is low. These results indicate that mechanical tensions may play the role of a long-range signaling factor that regulates patterning of the embryo, serving as a link coupling morphogenesis and cell differentiation.
The Effect of Restoration Thickness on the Fracture Resistance of 5 mol% Yttria-Containing Zirconia Crowns

Background: To determine what thickness of 5 mol% yttria zirconia (5Y-Z) translucent crowns cemented with different cements and surface treatments would have equivalent fracture resistance as 3 mol% yttria (3Y-Z) crowns. Methods: The study included 0.8 mm, 1.0 mm, and 1.2 mm thickness 5Y-Z (Katana UTML) crowns and 0.5 and 1.0 mm thickness 3Y-Z (Katana HT) crowns as controls. The 5Y-Z crowns were divided among three treatment subgroups (n = 10/subgroup): (1) cemented using RMGIC (Rely X Luting Cement), (2) alumina particle-abraded then luted with the same cement, (3) alumina particle-abraded and cemented using a resin cement (Panavia SA Cement Universal). The 3Y-Z controls were alumina particle-abraded then cemented with RMGIC. The specimens were then loaded in compression at 30° until failure. Results: All 5Y-Z crowns (regardless of thickness or surface treatment) had a similar to or higher fracture force than the 0.5 mm 3Y-Z crowns. Only the 1.2 mm 5Y-Z crowns with resin cement showed significantly similar fracture force to the 1 mm 3Y-Z crowns. Conclusion: In order to achieve a similar fracture resistance to 0.5 mm 3Y-Z crowns cemented with RMGIC, 5Y-Z crowns may be as thin as 0.8 mm. To achieve a similar fracture resistance to 1.0 mm 3Y-Z crowns cemented with RMGIC, 5Y-Z crowns must be 1.2 mm and bonded with resin cement.