Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extended blockage detection in pipelines by using the system frequency response analysis

This paper proposes a technique for the detection of extended blockages in pressurized water pipelines by using the system frequency responses under transient conditions. The impact of extended blockages on the system frequency responses is illustrated by using the analytical transfer matrix method, and the results indicate that extended blockages cause the resonant frequencies of the system to shift, and the blockage locations and sizes can be determined by analyzing the occurrences of the resonant peaks in the frequency axis. The analytical derivations of the blockage effect on the resonant frequencies are validated through different numerical experiments, and the applied results demonstrate that the extended blockages in pipeline can be detected by the proposed method as long as the system resonant frequencies are accurately determined. Practical implementations of the findings are discussed at the end of this paper.
Influence of Design on the Service Life of Pitched Roofs’ Cladding

AbstractThis paper follows the development of an inspection and diagnosis system for the external cladding of pitched roofs (ECPR) and shows the results of that study with respect to the design stage. It mainly focuses on how errors associated with the design stage influence the durability of ECPR and, consequently, the service life of buildings. Design errors are a constant feature in ECPRs and a statistical-based approach founded in a significant sample was felt to be the best way to fill the remaining gaps in the knowledge of this specific area, because there are no similar studies on pitched roofs in the literature. Therefore, the pathological situation, the diagnosis methods and the repair options of pitched roofs are characterized for the first time in terms of the influence of the design of pitched roofs through quantitative indicators and for eight different types of claddings. Only an improvement of the quality of design plans of ECPRs can lead to a significant decrease of their anomalies and to .
Dual-channel supply chain pricing decisions with a risk-averse retailer

This paper investigates a dual-channel supply chain with one risk-neutral manufacturer and one risk-averse retailer where there is only one perishable product with price-dependent stochastic demand. We choose Conditional Value-at-Risk criterion to measure the retailer’s risk-averse level, and assume that the manufacturer’s direct sales channel and the retailer’s traditional channel adopt a consistent pricing strategy. The model explores a Nash bargaining problem where the manufacturer and the retailer negotiate with each other on the wholesale price, the retail price and the order quantity when they have equal bargaining power. It is found that when demand uncertainty follows a uniform distribution, a Nash bargaining equilibrium exists and the retail price will decrease as the retailer becomes more risk averse. However, when the risk-averse indicator increases, the manufacturer’s profit on his direct channel will decrease, increase or first increase and then decrease, depending on the values of the related parameters. The profit shares of the manufacturer and the retailer under the Nash equilibrium model are related to the risk-averse indicator of the retailer. Furthermore, we perform three sets of numerical experiments to verify the effects of the retailer’s risk-averse indicator on decision-making and profit allocations under the different environmental parameters and gain several meaningful managerial insights.
A design procedure for optimal energy compaction IIR filters

In this brief we consider the energy compaction problem for filters belonging to a restricted class of infinite-impulse response (IIR) filters, having the transfer function h(z)=(H/sub 0/(z/sup 2/)+z/sup -1/ H/sub 1/(z/sup 2/))//spl radic/2, where both polyphase components H/sub 0/(z) and H/sub 1/(z) are stable all pass filters. Assuming rational input spectra, we reduce the infinite series expansion of the compaction gain criterion to a finite sum with terms depending on the parameters of the filter H(z). Simple expressions for computing the gradient of the criterion are derived, and finally a gradient ascent maximization routine is proposed, which provides the IIR filter with optimum parameters. Simulation results illustrate the good compaction gain of the optimal IIR filters, which despite their constrained nature (allpass polyphase components), may well outperform finite-impulse response (FIR) filters with much more parameters. The main envisaged application of our work is building QMF perfect reconstruction filterbanks with maximum coding gain, but the above optimization problem and simple extensions of it can be solved in the same manner and also be used in other filter design applications.
EFFECTS OF INTER-ROW SPACING AND PLANT DENSITY ON PERFORMANCE OF SESAME (SESAMUM INDICUM L.) IN A NIGERIAN SUDAN SAVANNA

Field trials were conducted during 2006 and 2007 rainy seasons at the University of Maiduguri Teaching and Research Farm, Maiduguri, Nigeria, to determine the influence of inter-row spacing and plant density on growth, development and yield of sesame. The treatments comprised three inter-row spacing (25, 50 and 75 cm) and four plant densities (2, 4, 6 and 8 plants/stand). A split plot design was used where inter-row spacing was assigned to the main plot and plant density was assigned to the sub plot and replicated three times. Results showed that plant height significantly decreased with increase in inter-row spacing. The tallest plants were recorded for 25 cm at 3 and 6 WAS, but values declined significantly at closer inter rows as the growth period progressed. Dry stalk weight increased significantly with increase in spacing and plant density. Seed yield was significantly higher at 50 cm than 25 cm or 75 cm spacing in 2006 and slightly higher in 2007. The 75 cm spacing recorded significantly higher seed yield than 25 cm or 50 cm spacing for the combined mean. Seed yield was also significantly higher for 6 plants / stand than the other plant densities in 2006. In 2007, 4 plants / stand significantly realized higher seed yield than the other treatments. There were significant interactions on plant height, number of days to 50% flowering, seed yield and seed weight. The interactions showed that seed yield was significantly higher at 25 cm with 6 plants per stand in 2006 and at 25 cm with 4 plants per stand in 2007. The linear relationships showed that seed yield was negatively correlated with plant height at 3 WAS (r = - 0.87***), days to 50% flowering (r = - 0.67***), dry stalk weight (r = - 0.40***) and seed weight (r = - 0.71***). Seed weight was positively correlated with days to 50% flowering and dry stalk weight (r = 0.40*** to 0.68***). Grain yield of sesame could therefore be enhanced by sowing at 50 cm x 25 cm spacing with 4-6 plants per stand (320,000 - 480,000 plants/ha) to reduce plant competition in Nigeria's Sudan savanna.
Harmonic compensation using advanced electric machines

In this paper, a new electromechanical active harmonic filter is proposed. The proposed electromechanical harmonic filter is essentially a rotating asymmetric air gap concentrated winding synchronous machine (AACWSM) with AC and DC excitation field. It is shown that the AACWSM with its unique design can be used to cancel the most dominant current harmonics of the adjacent nonlinear load. The filter is connected in a shunt manner between a nonlinear load and utility. This new AACWSM with its nonlinear current waveform can generate the nonlinear load required harmonics current. By proper control of the field excitation, the proposed electromechanical harmonic filter can compensate for the 5/sup th/ and 7/sup th/ harmonic currents in the electric power distribution system. In addition, 11/sup th/ and 13/sup th/ harmonics magnitudes are also significantly reduced. Analysis and simulation are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed harmonic compensation method.
Automated unit dose dispensing systems producing individually packaged and labelled drugs for inpatients: a systematic review

Objectives Pharmacy automation is increasing in hospitals. The aim of this systematic review was to identify and evaluate the literature on automated unit dose dispensing systems (UDDS) producing individually packaged and labelled drugs for inpatients. Methods The search was conducted on eight electronic databases, including Scopus, Medline Ovid, and Cinahl, and limited to peer reviewed articles with English abstracts published 2000–2020. Studies were included in the review if drug dispensing was performed by an automated UDDS where individually packaged and labelled unit doses were subsequently assembled patient specifically for inpatients. All outcomes related to UDDS functionality were included with specific interest in medication safety, cost-efficiency and stock management. Outcomes were categorised and results synthesised qualitatively. Results 664 publications were screened, one article identified manually, resulting in eight included articles. Outcomes of the studies were categorised as medication administration errors (MAEs), dispensing errors, costs and cost-effectiveness. Studies showed that automated UDDS reduced significantly MAEs of inpatients compared with traditional ward stock system (WSS), especially when UDs were dispensed patient specifically by unit dose dispensing robot. Patient specific drug dispensing with automated UDDS was very accurate. Of three different automated medication systems (AMSs), patient specific AMS (psAMS) was the most cost-effective and complex AMS (cAMS) the most expensive system across all error types due to the higher additional investments and operation costs of automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs). None of the studies investigated the impact on the medication management process such as efficiency, costs and stock management as primary outcome. Conclusions UDDS improved patient safety. However, automation is a costly investment and the implementation process is complex and time consuming. Further controlled studies are needed on the clinical and economical outcomes of automated UDDS to produce reliable knowledge for hospital decision makers on the cost-benefit of the investment and to support decision making.
Network Polarization, Network Interdependence, and International Conflict, 1816–2002

This study examines the effect of polarization and interdependence on systemic conflict. It argues that both polarization and interdependence must be conceptualized in terms of different types of relations among states and that different relationships would reflect varied levels of polarization and inter-dependence. Accordingly, this study develops general measures of network polarization and interdependence that allow measurement of these concepts over a wide array of international relations. Hypotheses are deduced from the realist and liberal paradigms about how alliance polarization, trade polarization, and cultural polarization affect systemic conflict. Likewise, hypotheses are deduced regarding the expected effects of strategic and economic interdependence on conflict. These hypotheses are tested using data on alliance, trade, linguistic, and religious networks over the period 1816–2002. The findings suggest that alliance polarization and strategic interdependence increase the amount of systemic conflict, while trade polarization and economic interdependence have a dampening effect on the amount of conflict in the international system. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.
Evaluating the Transition for Self-Managed Teams through Analysis of Roles in Agile Product Development Process in a Technology-Based Startup

Self-managed teams are key elements to deliver value to the customer in the development of agile projects in the software industry though not so often described in manufacturing literature. Here one collected a background theory on self-managed teams developed on the basis of software projects and sought to apply the frameworks and roles encountered to a manufactured product development using the concepts of agile product development. Complex Adaptive Space (CAS) and Agile management were the lenses in which the subject was studied and the fundamental role of the coach was discussed as a provider for evolving team maturity. A semi-structured questionnaire was applied to a technological base startup located in Sao Paulo-Brazil in the mid of 2018 in an attempt to evaluate how product development projects and specifically how self -managing teams was approached by the company. Through the analysis of the answers it was evidenced that the company work in its projects following a traditional model, i.e. a centered leader and team members as task executors. Therefore, under the view of the self-managed team theory the main team roles were adapted to the business scenario in a tentative to optimize the way projects are guided. This study elucidates the absence of depth discussion on the topic of self-managed teams in manufacturing projects and the discussion shows that is possible to adapt the concepts developed for the software industry to product development context in order to lead to excellent and more innovative projects.
E quilibrium E ffects of H ousing S ubsidies : E vidence from a P olicy N otch in C olombia

This paper studies how the housing market in Colombia responds to policies that aim to increase homeownership among low-income households. Private sector developers received tax incentives to build houses priced below a cutoff, and households received subsidies to buy houses below the same cutoff. To benefit from the policy, households change their housing consumption and spend less on housing, bunching at the cutoff. To rationalize this response, the paper models an equilibrium between heterogeneous developers building differentiated housing and heterogeneous households buying them. The model is estimated with the moments recovered by comparing the distribution with bunching to a counterfactual distribution estimated using the techniques from the bunching literature. I use the model and estimated parameters to evaluate the policy. I calculate the efficiency cost induced by the notched subsidy scheme and I show that without supply-side incentives, developers may exit the market; their profits would be up to 14 percent lower. However, the existence of these tax incentives artificially increases the profits of developers who would build low-cost housing even in their absence. marginal (MWTP) for different (Greenstone, 2017). Although MWTP estimates can be informative, they do not allow for non-marginal policy evaluations or counterfactual policy analysis. This paper studies the social housing policy in Colombia, which combines subsidies and tax incentives for developers and households buying and building low-cost housing. The policy design allows me to overcome the empirical challenges associated with the evaluation of housing subsidies. Low-cost housing is defined using a market price cut-off of 135 times the monthly minimum wages (roughly USD 40, 000). This cutoff introduces notches, or discontinuous incentives, on both the supply and demand sides. This triggers bunching at the cutoff. I use this notch and the variation of the notch size overtime to provide evidence of the market response to these subsidies. I propose a model that rationalizes the observed equilibrium, and I integrate the bunching and hedonic equilibrium literature to propose a method to identify and estimate the structural parameters of the model. 3 The model and estimated parameters are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Colombian policy design and to evaluate counterfactual policies.
Reliability analysis and spares provisioning for repairable systems with dependent failure processes and a time-varying installed base

ABSTRACT Line Replaceable Units (LRUs), which can be quickly replaced at a first-level maintenance facility, are widely deployed on capital-intensive systems in order to maintain high system availability. Failed LRU are repaired after replacement and reused as fully serviceable spare units. Demand for spare LRUs depends on factors such as the time-varying installed base, reliability deterioration or growth over maintenance cycles, procurement leadtime of new LRUs, turn-around leadtime of repaired LRUs, etc. In this article, we propose an integrated framework for both reliability analysis and spares provisioning for LRUs with a time-varying installed base. We assume that each system consists of multiple types of LRUs and associated with each type of LRU is a non-stationary sub-failure process. The failure of a system is triggered by sub-failure processes that are statistically dependent. A hierarchical probability model is developed for the demand forecasting of LRUs. Based on the forecasted demand, the optimum inventory level is found through dynamic programming. An application example is presented. A computer program, called the Integrated Platform for Reliability Analysis and Spare Provision, is available that makes the proposed methods readily applicable.
Sketch Your Own GAN Supplemental Material

Training details We use the same training hyperparameters as [5]. In particular, we are using softplus for GAN loss, and R1 regularization [7] on both the sketch and image discriminator, DY and DX . We do not use path length regularization, as it has no effect on the latent mapping network. Also, we set the batch size to 4 for all of our experiments, except when the sketch inputs are less than four, where we set the batch size to 1. Hyperparameters. We use the same hyperparameters for our full method in all of our experiments. In particular, we use λimage = 0.7 In the main text (Sec 4.1), we compared several variants of our method in our ablation studies. To make the comparison fair, for each variant, we tuned the loss weights for optimal performance. In Table 2, we list the hyperparameters used for each variant. The only exception is that we use λweight = 50 for the Lsketch + Lweight and Lsketch + Lweight + aug. variant model trained on the standing cat task. Also, if the variants are not listed in the table, the same loss weights as the full method are used. The search space of the λimage is [0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0], and the search space of λweight is [0.1, 1, 10, 50, 100, 1000]. Data collection. In the main text (Sec. 4.1), we selected sets of 30 sketches with similar shapes and poses to designate as the user input: examples of sketches from these sets are shown in Figure 1. To evaluate generation quality, we collected images that match the input sketches from LSUN [10]. To retrieve matching images, we experimented with two sketch-image cross-domain matching methods. We applied both the SBIR method of Bui et al. [2] and chamfer distance [1]. Both of these retrieval results are shown in Figure 2. We observe that with chamfer distance, the retrieved images match poses of the sketches more faithfully. As a result, we adopt this method to generate our evaluation sets. However, we notice that there still exists outliers after the retrieval; hence, we hand-selected 2,500 images out of top 10,000 matches to curate the evaluation sets. A comparison between curated dataset and top chamfer matches are shown in Figure 3. Evaluation procedure. To evaluate each model, we sample 2,500 images without truncation and save them into png files. Likewise, the evaluation set described in the main text (Sec. 4.1) consists of 2,500 256×256 images stored in png. We evaluate the Fréchet Inception Distance values using the CleanFID code [8].
A Blueprint for Cancer-Related Inflammation and Host Innate Immunity

Both in situ and allograft models of cancer in juvenile and adult Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies offer a powerful means for unravelling cancer gene networks and cancer–host interactions. They can also be used as tools for cost-effective drug discovery and repurposing. Moreover, in situ modeling of emerging tumors makes it possible to address cancer initiating events—a black box in cancer research, tackle the innate antitumor immune responses to incipient preneoplastic cells and recurrent growing tumors, and decipher the initiation and evolution of inflammation. These studies in Drosophila melanogaster can serve as a blueprint for studies in more complex organisms and help in the design of mechanism-based therapies for the individualized treatment of cancer diseases in humans. This review focuses on new discoveries in Drosophila related to the diverse innate immune responses to cancer-related inflammation and the systemic effects that are so detrimental to the host.
Offset masks for lift‐off photoprocessing

We describe a technique using photolithography to produce submicron‐scale thin‐film structures and simple multilevel structures by single‐mask lift‐off processing. The technique employs masks offset from the substrate and oblique angle thin‐film deposition. It provides a simple means of making small‐area Josephson junctions and varying‐thickness superconducting bridges and is suitable for the inclusion of these devices in circuits. The examples we show emphasize such applications in superconductivity; however, the technique may find uses in other fields as well.
The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Does It Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?

Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progressed to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member states are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joining the UN. Of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and in the region of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Macedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a party to this international treaty (and its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state party's actual behavior. The hypothesis is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) and across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bivariate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences between the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-party states. However, this difference does not appear in the bivariate analysis that compares the states parties' behavior before becoming a party to the treaty with their behavior after becoming a party state. When the analysis progresses to more sophisticated multivariate analysis, in which factors known to affect human rights are controlled, the impact of the covenant and its optional protocol disappears altogether. Overall, this study suggests that it may be overly optimistic to expect that being a party to this international covenant will produce an observable direct impact.
Snapchat, eavesdropping, and the surgical practices of Dr. Miami: a resurrection of the anatomical theatre

This article draws on John Locke’s theoretical conceptualisation of eavesdropping in examining the surgical, representational, and communicative practices of plastic surgeon and celebrity, Dr. Michael Salzhauer (aka Dr. Miami). I draw in part on literature in surveillance and visual studies to critically examine the visual and auditory features of Dr. Miami’s Snapchat stories, which, like reality television, are disseminated to audiences for their consumption. Through a critical visual analysis, I examine how the combination of social media (i.e., Snapchat) and visually documenting surgical practices has helped resurrect the Anatomical Theatres of the 13th to 18th centuries in digital forms through eavesdropping. Five themes emerged from the analysis: Resurrecting the Anatomical Theatre, Cosmetic Theatres, Technologically Mediated Gazes, Clinical Anatomical Objectification (CAO) and Anaesthetic Coma: Digitally Eavesdropping.