Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Progress in Oceanography Subtle variation in abyssal terrain induces signi ﬁ cant change in benthic megafaunal abundance, diversity, and community structure

Bathymetric gradients in the deep sea are known to a ﬀ ect key benthic community characteristics such as di- versity. However, most studies investigate large-scale bathymetric variation, while habitat heterogeneity related to modest bathymetric variation has generally been overlooked because of limitations to sampling technology. We investigate the role of modest bathymetric variation (~10 m water depth intervals) on an abyssal hill, and horizontal variation at the 0.1 – 10 km scale, in the structuring of abyssal megafaunal assemblages. We assess numerical density, biomass density, diversity, and assemblage composition using seabed photographs captured with an autonomous underwater vehicle and sediment characteristics determined from cores. We detect sig- ni ﬁ cant di ﬀ erences in sediment particle size and organic carbon content, in relation to modest topographic elevation, with a greater fraction of ﬁ ne particles and organic carbon on the abyssal plain than the hill. Total megafaunal numerical and biomass density, diversity, and the numerical densities of feeding groups were signi ﬁ cantly di ﬀ erent with modest topographic elevation; similarly, megafaunal composition varied signi ﬁ cantly between ~10 m depth intervals. In relation to mesoscale horizontal variation, we also record signi ﬁ cant dif-ferences between megabenthic communities in two abyssal plain areas with no signi ﬁ cant di ﬀ erences in mea- sured sedimentary characteristics and only a 2 m di ﬀ erence in water depth. Di ﬀ erences in these communities were detected in terms of dominance, assemblage composition by density and biomass, and numerical densities of feeding groups. These observations strongly indicate that previous general concepts of the abyssal environment greatly underestimate this mesoscale heterogeneity, such that beta- and gamma-diversity in the abyss may be higher than estimated. Importantly, these results also have clear implications for the design and interpretation of environmental survey and monitoring programmes in the abyss.
A new look at the theory uncertainty of (cid:15) K

The observable (cid:15) K is sensitive to ﬂavor violation at some of the highest scales. While its experimental uncertainty is at the half percent level, the theoretical one is in the ballpark of 15%. We explore the nontrivial dependence of the theory prediction and uncertainty on various conventions, like the phase of the kaon ﬁelds. In particular, we show how such a rephasing allows to make the short-distance contribution of the box diagram with two charm quarks, η cc , purely real. Our results allow to slightly reduce the total theoretical uncertainty of (cid:15) K , while increasing the relative impact of the imaginary part of the long distance contribution, underlining the need to compute it reliably. We also give updated bounds on the new physics operators that contribute to (cid:15) K
Variability studies of Ustilaginoidea virens isolates causing false smut and its severity in different rice growing ecosystems of Karnataka

A study was undertaken to know the severity of false smut in rice growing ecosystems of Karnataka and it was ranged from 1.19 to 4.38 per cent with the mean per cent infected tillers of 2.93 on the varieties like Narmage, MO-21, BPT-5204 and Irga with maximum severity in Udupi and Karkala taluk. During survey, samples were collected and isolations were made to study the variability of false smut pathogen. Among the collected isolates, five isolates representing different rice growing ecosystems were studied for their growth on five different media and found that potato sucrose agar media was best for culturing of fungus. The primer pair ITS-1 and ITS-4 amplified the DNA of U. virens at 600-700 bp and sequencing of PCR amplified product showed 91 to 99 per cent similarity with NCBI-BLAST analysis and confirms the isolates as U. virens. Further, the RAPD analysis indicated the diversity among the U. virens isolates collected from different rice growing ecosystem of Karnataka.
4.0. Interests and attitudes of G.C.E. (A/L) physical science stream students on university education in STEM: A case study in Sri

https://doi.org/10.30574/gjeta.2022. 10.1. 0179 Abstract Sri Lanka has a free education system that gives access to higher education opportunities through the G.C. E. (Advanced Level) examination to a limited number of students. Students can choose their preferred university course if they have fulfilled the required minimum results for university admission. This paper discusses the general interests and attitudes of a sample of physical science stream students towards university education in STEM as a case study in Sri Lanka. The study has investigated several perspectives of the selected sample of G. C. E. (A/L) students through an online survey that includes questions regarding students' attitudes and perceptions on university education and different STEM-related undergraduate courses. The study has covered several schools of three provinces in Sri Lanka, and some of the investigated results are discussed with respect to the provinces. The results revealed career prospects, the academic quality of the undergraduate courses and the reputation of the university as the most influencing factors for undergraduate course selection in STEM disciplines, while engineering-related undergraduate courses were the most preferred ones among the students. The study results can be an asset to further studies since this topic has been rarely explored in the Sri Lankan higher education
CIA_A_293665 525..536

12nd Department of Nephrology and Hypertension with Dialysis Centre, Medical University, Bialystok, Poland; 2Department of Internal Medicine and Hypertension, Medical University, Bialystok, Poland Background: Sirtuin 1 is involved in the pathogenesis of age-related diseases. Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the clinical and diagnostic value of serum sirtuin 1 concentration in patients with CKD. Patients and Methods: The serum sirtuin 1 level was evaluated using ELISA kit in 100 CKD patients stratified for five stages and in a control group of 24 healthy volunteers. Results: Serum sirtuin 1 concentration was higher in the CKD group compared with the control group (p<0.05). Sirtuin 1 correlated with conventional CKD biomarkers and eGFR equations, intact parathyroid hormone (iPTH) and age (all p<0.05). Statins, AT1 receptor antagonists and β-blockers use were associated with decreased sirtuin concentration (p<0.05). Sirtuin 1 was able to distinguish CKD from control group with high sensitivity and specificity (93% and 87%, respectively; AUC=0.954). Surprisingly, after adjustment only iPTH concentration was an independent predictor of sirtuin 1 level. Conclusion: The association between sirtuin 1, eGFR equations and iPTH indicates its possible usefulness as a kidney function marker. In terms of iPTH being the only independent predictor of circulating sirtuin 1 it can be considered as an indirect cardiovascular risk biomarker regardless of renal function and provide additional information for patient management. Alternatively, sirtuin 1 is recognized as protective against vascular disease, and we demonstrated a positive correlation with iPTH, which may be related to accumulation of (7-84)-PTH having opposite biological effects to full-length PTH. Further studies are needed to explore the interplay between sirtuin 1, PTH and CKD-related vascular calcification as well as to assess its prognostic value in observational studies.
Decadal-scale modulation of the NAO/AO by external forcing: Current state of understanding

— Analyses of observations show correlations between the mean state of indices representing either the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) or the Arctic Oscillation (AO, also called Northern Annular Mode) with various external forcings. These include volcanic eruptions, solar variability, greenhouse gas levels and stratospheric ozone depletion. Climate model simulations have been able to reproduce many aspects of these correlations over a variety of time scales ranging from interannual to century scale. This has allowed some insight to be gained into how external forcings modulate these intrinsic variability patterns. I review current understanding derived from comparisons of a range of models with observations to highlight areas of commonality as well as remaining uncertainties. Contrasts between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres suggest that much of the response to external forcing occurs via wave-driven processes. Comparison of the response to forcings at different levels in the atmosphere indicate a sizeable role for both stratospheric and surface-level perturbations. Implications for forcing of changes in Mediterranean climate are presented for pre-industrial times during the last millennium, for the twentieth century, and for the potential future.
IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

In the Emlichheim heavy oil reservoir steam injection is implemented to decrease the oil viscosity and to enhance production. Since 1950 the average production has been 1 million bbls/a. Steam-assisted operations require monitoring techniques to observe the temperature of the liquid rate. Based on these measurements the movement of steam in the reservoir can be understood and the distribution of steam patterns in the reservoir can be modeled. The production management uses these temperature measurements to decide whether the liquid rate in a well should be decreased or increased. The challenge and the aim is to avoid steam breakthrough at producers, to maintain the maximum amount of heat in the reservoir, to distribute it homogeneously throughout the reservoir and finally to increase recovery. Today, the temperature measurements in Emlichheim are performed in production wells at the wellhead but the actual temperature along the reservoir formation is unknown. This means that reservoir management is strongly based on wellhead temperature (WHT) measurements, which represent only an average temperature of the liquid rate. With the installation of distributed temperature sensing (DTS) a measurement each meter from the top to the bottom of the reservoir is possible. A decision whether to decrease or increase the production in a well can therefore be based on the temperature at the formation. This study is a detailed and quantitative analysis of the Emlichheim reservoir to establish whether a decision based on DTS measurement would add value to the operations in terms of additional recovery, compared with the system of temperature measurement at the wellhead. Two liquid rate control strategies are compared. The first strategy represents the current strategy in Emlichheim, where temperature is measured at the wellhead and the liquid rate is decreased when a limit temperature at the wellhead is reached. The second strategy is temperature measurement at the sandface using DTS where the liquid rate is decreased when a limit temperature at the formation is reached. The study shows that with DTS installation a higher recovery can be achieved, but this additional recovery is marginal. A simple cost benefit analysis reveals that the additional gain in production is not sufficient to cover the costs for DTS equipment, installation, operation, interpretation and replacement. 4 [Feasibility study for the application of DTS as an advanced monitoring and control system for steam-assisted EOR]
SiamMask: A Framework for Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation

In this article, we introduce SiamMask, a framework to perform both visual object tracking and video object segmentation, in real-time, with the same simple method. We improve the offline training procedure of popular fully-convolutional Siamese approaches by augmenting their losses with a binary segmentation task. Once the offline training is completed, SiamMask only requires a single bounding box for initialization and can simultaneously carry out visual object tracking and segmentation at high frame-rates. Moreover, we show that it is possible to extend the framework to handle multiple object tracking and segmentation by simply re-using the multi-task model in a cascaded fashion. Experimental results show that our approach has high processing efficiency, at around 55 frames per second. It yields real-time state-of-the art results on visual-object tracking benchmarks, while at the same time demonstrating competitive performance at a high speed for video object segmentation benchmarks.
Giving Hamiltonian Truncation a Boost

We study Hamiltonian truncation in boosted frames. We consider the thermal and magnetic ﬁeld deformations of the 2d Ising model using TCSA at ﬁnite momentum. We ﬁnd that even with moderate momenta, the spectrum and time-dependent correlation functions become signiﬁcantly less dependent on the volume of the system. This allows for a more reliable determination of inﬁnite volume observables.
Efficient Representation Learning via Adaptive Context Pooling

Self-attention mechanisms model long-range context by using pairwise attention between all input tokens. In doing so, they assume a fixed attention granularity defined by the individual tokens (e.g., text characters or image pixels), which may not be optimal for modeling complex dependencies at higher levels. In this paper, we propose ContextPool to address this problem by adapting the attention granularity for each token. Inspired by the success of ConvNets that are combined with pooling to capture long-range dependencies, we learn to pool neighboring features for each token before computing attention in a given attention layer. The pooling weights and support size are adaptively determined, allowing the pooled features to encode meaningful context with varying scale. We show that ContextPool makes attention models more expressive, achieving strong performance often with fewer layers and thus significantly reduced cost. Experiments validate that our ContextPool module, when plugged into transformer models, matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance using less compute on several language and image benchmarks, outperforms recent works with learned context sizes or sparse attention patterns, and is also applicable to ConvNets for efficient feature learning.
Experimental study on seismic performance of L‐shaped partly precast reinforced concrete shear wall with cast‐in‐situ boundary elements

In order to promote industrial production of reinforced concrete shear wall, a typical partly precast reinforced concrete shear wall with both end boundary elements cast‐in‐situ and the other part precast is experimentally studied. In this paper, three L‐shaped specimens of this kind and one completely cast‐in‐situ specimen as a control group are tested under low‐frequency cyclic loading to investigate their safety, applicability, and different characteristics. For the partly precast specimen, the vertical distributed reinforcements of precast part are equivalently spliced by grouting sleeves arranged along the center line of the wall whereas the horizontal reinforcements are directly anchored into the cast‐in‐situ boundary elements. During the test, the axial compression ratio of these specimens is fixed at 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5, respectively. Such test phenomena and test data including failure modes, yielding load and displacement, the skeleton curve, energy dissipation, stiffness degradation, ductility, and so on are observed, analyzed, and compared. Chinese code and American Concrete Institute code are adopted to estimate the bearing capacity. Results show that the partly precast specimens have good integrity. With the increase of axial compression ratio, the bearing capacity of these partly precast specimens increases whereas the ductility decreases. It is also found that the partly precast specimens have slightly lower bearing capacity compared with the cast‐in‐situ specimen as well as excellent deformation capacity and ductility, which indicates the tested partly precast shear wall has good and reliable seismic performance and can be used as a structural element in building construction.
Direct imaging of shock wave splitting in diamond at Mbar pressures

The propagation of a shock wave in solids can stress them to ultra-high pressures of millions of atmospheres. Understanding the behavior of matter at these extreme pressures is essential to describe a wide range of physical phenomena, including the formation of planets, young stars and cores of super-Earths, as well as the behavior of advanced ceramic materials subjected to such stresses. Under megabar (Mbar) pressure, even a solid with high strength exhibits plastic properties, causing the shock wave to split in two. This phenomenon is described by theoretical models, but without direct experimental measurements to conﬁrm them, their validity is still in doubt. Here, we present the results of an experiment in which the evolution of the coupled elastic-plastic wave structure in diamond was directly observed and studied with submicron spatial resolution, using the unique capabilities of the X-ray free-electron laser. The direct measurements allowed, for the ﬁrst time, the ﬁtting and validation of a strength model for diamond in the range of several Mbar by performing continuum mechanics simulations in 2D geometry. The presented experimental approach to the study of shock waves in solids opens up new possibilities for the direct veriﬁcation and construction of the equations of state of matter in the ultra-high pressure range, which are relevant for the solution of a variety of problems in high energy density physics.
An Empirical Study of Implicit Regularization in Deep Offline RL

Deep neural networks are the most commonly used function approximators in offline reinforcement learning. Prior works have shown that neural nets trained with TD-learning and gradient descent can exhibit implicit regularization that can be characterized by under-parameterization of these networks. Specifically, the rank of the penultimate feature layer, also called \textit{effective rank}, has been observed to drastically collapse during the training. In turn, this collapse has been argued to reduce the model's ability to further adapt in later stages of learning, leading to the diminished final performance. Such an association between the effective rank and performance makes effective rank compelling for offline RL, primarily for offline policy evaluation. In this work, we conduct a careful empirical study on the relation between effective rank and performance on three offline RL datasets : bsuite, Atari, and DeepMind lab. We observe that a direct association exists only in restricted settings and disappears in the more extensive hyperparameter sweeps. Also, we empirically identify three phases of learning that explain the impact of implicit regularization on the learning dynamics and found that bootstrapping alone is insufficient to explain the collapse of the effective rank. Further, we show that several other factors could confound the relationship between effective rank and performance and conclude that studying this association under simplistic assumptions could be highly misleading.
Custom Nonlinearity Profile for Integrated Quantum Light Sources

Heralded single-photon sources are a fundamental building block for optical quantum technologies. These sources need to be unfiltered and integrated to have good scalability and avoid unnecessary losses. To attain this goal, it is necessary to control the effective nonlinearity seen by the fields as they mix and propagate in a waveguide source. In this paper, we introduce a method to design nonlinear waveguides with arbitrarily shaped effective nonlinearity profiles. The method takes advantage of the fact that the second order nonlinear response is a tensor quantity and thus the local effective nonlinearity of a material depends on the propagation direction of the fields participating in the interaction. Thus, by locally changing the propagation direction of the fields we can modulate the wave-mixing process. Our methods allows for the waveguide fabrication process to be significantly simplified: The material structure of the waveguide is made by a single crystal, no longer needing oriented patterning (OP) or periodic poling (PP). We use our method to design waveguides with a nonlinearity profile that is Gaussian in the propagation length, allowing to generate perfectly pure heralded single photons.
Quantum annealing: an overview

In this review, after providing the basic physical concept behind quantum annealing (or adiabatic quantum computation), we present an overview of some recent theoretical as well as experimental developments pointing to the issues which are still debated. With a brief discussion on the fundamental ideas of continuous and discontinuous quantum phase transitions, we discuss the Kibble–Zurek scaling of defect generation following a ramping of a quantum many body system across a quantum critical point. In the process, we discuss associated models, both pure and disordered, and shed light on implementations and some recent applications of the quantum annealing protocols. Furthermore, we discuss the effect of environmental coupling on quantum annealing. Some possible ways to speed up the annealing protocol in closed systems are elaborated upon: we especially focus on the recipes to avoid discontinuous quantum phase transitions occurring in some models where energy gaps vanish exponentially with the system size. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Quantum annealing and computation: challenges and perspectives’.
UniCR: Universally Approximated Certified Robustness via Randomized Smoothing

We study certified robustness of machine learning classifiers against adversarial perturbations. In particular, we propose the first universally approximated certified robustness (UniCR) framework, which can approximate the robustness certification of any input on any classifier against any $\ell_p$ perturbations with noise generated by any continuous probability distribution. Compared with the state-of-the-art certified defenses, UniCR provides many significant benefits: (1) the first universal robustness certification framework for the above 4 'any's; (2) automatic robustness certification that avoids case-by-case analysis, (3) tightness validation of certified robustness, and (4) optimality validation of noise distributions used by randomized smoothing. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the above benefits of UniCR and the advantages of UniCR over state-of-the-art certified defenses against $\ell_p$ perturbations.
Design of the Pacific DC Intertie Wide Area Damping Controller

This paper describes the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept Pacific dc Intertie (PDCI) wide area damping controller and includes system test results on the North American Western Interconnection (WI). To damp inter-area oscillations, the controller modulates the power transfer of the PDCI, a ±500 kV dc transmission line in the WI. The control system utilizes real-time phasor measurement unit (PMU) feedback to construct a commanded power signal which is added to the scheduled power flow for the PDCI. After years of design, simulations, and development, this controller has been implemented in hardware and successfully tested in both open and closed-loop operation. The most important design specifications were safe, reliable performance, no degradation of any system modes in any circumstances, and improve damping to the controllable modes in the WI. The main finding is that the controller adds significant damping to the modes of the WI and does not adversely affect the system response in any of the test cases. The primary contribution of this paper, to the state of the art research, is the design methods and test results of the first North American real-time control system that uses wide area PMU feedback.