Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Charge Distribution and the Interactive Effect of pH and Ionic Strength on Phosphate Adsorption Properties of Two Benchmark Soils from Botswana

The constraint imposed by phosphate (PO4) deficiency on soil fertility in Botswana necessitated the study of ionic strength (μ) and pH effects on electric charge distribution and PO4 adsorption of two representative soils: Typic Pellustert and Typic Haplustalf. Electric charge increased with increasing soil pH, but the effect of µ on electric charge distribution was indistinct. The point-of-zero-salt-effect (PZSE) occurred at pH 4.8 in the Pellustert and at almost 6.0 in the Haplustalf. Ionic strength decreased PO4 adsorption in the Pellustert, but increased it in the Haplustalf. The Scatchard and reciprocal linearization of the Langmuir model adequately described PO4 adsorption of the soils under varying µ and pH × µ conditions. The PO4 adsorption maxima (M) and affinity index (b) decreased with increasing µ in the Pellustert, but not in the Haplustalf. The decreasing M and b with increasing µ in the Pellustert was explained by electrostatic repulsion from the highly negative charge surface, whereas the increasing M and b with increasing µ in the Haplustalf was attributed to enhanced access to the surface sorption sites due to compression of diffuse double layer. Under varying pH × µ conditions, PO4 sorption sites were resolved into low- and high-energy sites, depending on the concentration of added PO4. Because b is related to the ease of PO4 detachment from soil surfaces into solution for plant uptake or leaching, PO4 added to this Pellustert at µ > 0.01 would likely leach freely, and hence µ monitoring is imperative for PO4 fertilization strategy of this Pellustert.
Geometry Calibration for Acoustic Transceiver Networks Based on Network Newton Distributed Optimization

Geometry calibration for distributed acoustic sensor networks is becoming increasing popular in the signal processing community. In this paper, a distributed geometry calibration method based on network Newton distributed optimization is proposed for the acoustic transceiver networks where each node consists of a microphone array and a loudspeaker. After collecting the direction-of-arrival and time-difference-of-arrival measurements, a two-stage centralized cost function is formulated to estimate the geometrical configuration of networks, and the corresponding identifiability conditions are discussed. Next, to achieve the distributed calibration, a distributed cost function is established by splitting the centralized cost function into multiple local cost functions. Finally, the distributed geometry calibration is carried out by using network Newton distributed optimization. The proposed method can effectively estimate the geometry structure of acoustic transceiver networks in noisy and reverberant environments. Compared with the existing approaches, it implements the calibration process in a distributed manner, which requires only the local communication among nodes and does not need an external central processor. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed method.
Quranic Optical Text Recognition Using Deep Learning Models

A Quranic optical character recognition (OCR) system based on convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by recurrent neural network (RNN) is introduced in this work. Six deep learning models are built to study the effect of different representations of the input and output, and the accuracy and performance of the models, and compare long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). A new Quranic OCR dataset is developed based on the most famous printed version of the Holy Quran (Mushaf Al-Madinah), and a page and line-text image with the corresponding labels is prepared. This work’s contribution is a Quranic OCR model capable of recognizing the Quranic image’s diacritic text. A better performance in word recognition rate (WRR) and character recognition rate (CRR) is achieved in the experiments. The LSTM and GRU are compared in the Arabic text recognition domain. In addition, a public database is built for research purposes in Arabic text recognition that contains the diacritics and the Uthmanic script, and is large enough to be used with the deep learning models. The outcome of this work shows that the proposed system obtains an accuracy of 98% on the validation data, and a WRR of 95% and a CRR of 99% in the test dataset.
Efficient Routing Using Flexible Ethernet in Multi-Layer Multi-Domain Networks

Routing in multi-layer multi-domain (MLMD) networks is challenging due to different technologies and cooperation between different layers and domains. The MLMD routing problem has been considered in prior work, however most of them paid no attention to the inter-layer (or boundary) links, and the inter-domain routing is not yet optimized due to the lack of visibility over the intra-domain network topology. In this article, we investigate the problem of orchestrating MLMD networks by a hierarchical path computation engine (PCE) to leverage the performance of FlexE—the new Flexible Ethernet technology used to link IP and optical domains. We model the routing and FlexE assignment problem for FlexE-Aware and FlexE-Unaware modes and derive an efficient algorithm that optimizes the network utilization by a hierarchical allocation of bandwidth. Facing the issue of missing network information in an MLMD network due to privacy and security reasons, our orchestrator uses a new implicit routing strategy for gathering intra-domain information where the boundary link metrics are considered. Experimental results show that the proposed solution achieves 87% of the optimal throughput, a performance significantly higher than the current practices.
Hybrid NOMA/OMA Broadcasting-and-Buffer-State-Based Relay Selection

In this paper, we propose a novel buffer-aided relay selection scheme that is capable of amalgamating the concepts of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) in the context of two-hop cooperative networks supporting multiple relays. This is enabled by allowing relay nodes to share a common information packet in their buffers with the aid of a source-to-relay broadcasting mode. Hence, the proposed relay selection scheme switches between diverse modes of uplink NOMA, downlink NOMA, unicast, source broadcasting, and cooperative beamforming. The theoretical bounds of the outage probability, throughput, average delay, and diversity order are derived for the proposed scheme, based on a Markov chain model. Through our analytical and numerical results, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is capable of switching to one of the best modes in an adaptive manner while outperforming the conventional buffer-aided cooperative schemes.
Seasonal Variation and Source Apportionment of Atmospheric Carbonyl Compounds in Urban Kaohsiung, Taiwan

ABSTRACTThe concentrations of 18 atmospheric carbonyls species were measured at Nan-Chie and Hsiung-Kong sites in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, during the summer and winter of 2006. Formaldehyde and acetaldehyde were the most abundant carbonyls with respective annual mean concentrations of 17.99 μg/m3 and 13.69 μg/m3 at Nan-Chie, and 21.47 μg/m3 and 16.68 μg/m3 at Hsiung-Kong; altogether the two species accounted for approximately 56–57% of total carbonyls. In summer, the total concentrations of carbonyls were 74.06 μg/m3 and 89.99 μg/m3 at Nan-Chie and Hsiung-Kong, respectively. In winter, the concentrations were 37.14 μg/m3 and 46.50 μg/m3 at Nan-Chie and Hsiung-Kong, respectively. Measured results indicated the predominance of photolysis and photooxidation reactions of aldehydes in summer. In this study, receptor models using principal component analysis (PCA) and absolute principal component scores (APCS) suggest that the primary pollution sources at Nan-Chie in the summer were secondary emissions/vehicle exhausts (gasoline engines)/stationary emissions (food industry), stationary emissions (petrochemical)/waste treatment and restaurant emissions; the primary pollution sources at Nan-Chie in winter were vehicle exhausts (gasoline engines)/stationary emissions (petrochemical) and restaurant emissions. At Hsiung-Kong, the primary pollution sources in summer were secondary emissions/vehicle exhausts (gasoline engines and diesel engines)/stationary emissions (metal assembly), restaurant emissions and others; the primary pollution sources in winter were vehicle exhausts (gasoline engines)/restaurant emissions and vehicle exhausts (diesel engines)/stationary emissions (metal assembly).
COMPOSITION DEPENDENCE OF THE VISCOELASTICITY OF END-LINKED POLY(DIMETHYLSILOXANE) AT THE GEL POINT

Precursor composition is shown to have a considerable impact on the viscoelastic properties of a polymer at the gel point. End-linked poly(dimethylsi1oxane) polymers were prepared with various stoi- chiometry, chain length, and concentration. The power law relaxation modulus, G(t) = St-", identifies the gel point, and a small frequency window (2 decades) is sufficient to determine the relaxation exponent, n, and gel strength, S. Both are shown to be strongly composition dependent. The relaxation exponent ranges between 0.19 and 0.92 in this study, which is almost the entire possible range (0 < n < 1). The gel strength ranges over 5 decades. A prepolymer below the entanglement molecular weight produces critical gels with relaxation exponents in the range 0.4-0.7, depending on stoichiometry. A high molecular weight prepoly- mer, above the entanglement molecular weight, produces critical gels with lower n values, in the range of 0.2-0.4, depending on stoichiometry. Addition of a diluent also affects the relaxation exponent, and near the overlap concentration n approaches the limit of 1. In a series of experiments with different stoichiom- etry and concentration, S and n appear to be related by a material characteristic function S = GOA$, where Go and XO are characteristic constants of the precursor material and n depends on composition.
Estimation of the Fermi contact contribution to the xenon-hydrogen and xenon-xenon spin-spin coupling constants

The Fermi contact interaction contribution to the spin–spin coupling constant is calculated for Xe–H and 129Xe–131Xe. The method used is a simple density functional theory of responses. In the regions of interest, J(Xe–H) is microHz, and J(129Xe–131Xe) is milliHz.
Comparison of tissue segmentation performance between 2D U-Net and 3D U-Net on brain MR Images

In this paper, we compare the tissue segmentation performance of the 2D U-Net and 3D U-Net in brain MR images including Alzheimer's disease. The Open Access Series of Imaging Studies dataset used in this experiment consists of a cross-sectional collection of 416 subjects aged 18 to 96. The final segmentations were classified into 4 classes: background, cerebrospinal fluid, gray matter, and white matter. In the experiment, 3D U-Net showed highly stable segmentation results. Particularly, the evaluation of the 2D/3D U-Net segmentation has shown that the 3D U-Net provided higher dice similarity coefficients $(94.4\pm 4.5\%\sim 95.6\pm 3.0\%)$ and lower Hausdorff distances ($7.5\pm 3.2\text{mm}\sim 12.3\pm 3.9\text{mm}$) than the 2D U-Net ($89.6\pm 4.9\%\sim 96.22\pm 3.1\%$ and $9.1\pm 5.5\text{mm}\sim 14.4\pm 7.4\text{mm}$). And the 3D U-Net provided a better performance despite having less training examples to learn from. The simple image processing pipeline was an added advantage. However, the number of parameters and the amount of memory required was a major limitation of using 3D U-Net.
Joint Optimization of BS Clustering and Power Control for NOMA-Enabled CoMP Transmission in Dense Cellular Networks

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission has great potential in balancing spectrum utilization and interference mitigation in dense cellular networks. However, NOMA reforms the spectrum sharing policy of CoMP transmission due to introducing additional interference among coordinated base stations (BSs), which deteriorates the CoMP transmission rate. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of BS clustering and power control for NOMA-enabled CoMP transmission in dense cellular networks to maximize system sum-rate. We first characterize the impact of interference among coordinated BSs on CoMP transmission rate and find that the BS clustering is dependent on NOMA user grouping and restricted by the NOMA decoding condition. We then derive a tight lower bound on the system sum-rate and exploit it to design a joint BS clustering and power control scheme. Specifically, a power control algorithm is designed by a penalty convex-concave procedure to satisfy the NOMA decoding condition and users’ rate requirements. A BS clustering algorithm based on successive convex approximation is designed to iteratively update the BS clustering and NOMA user grouping to increase system sum-rate. Finally, two algorithms are alternately performed until all users successfully access and the system sum-rate converges. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently alleviate interference among coordinated BSs to improve system sum-rate and spectrum efficiency of NOMA-enabled CoMP transmission even under high user density.
Effect of total solids concentration of municipal solid waste in anaerobic batch digestion on the biogas produced

Municipal solid waste (MSW) contains a relatively high proportion of organic matter, which, when allowed to decompose under the actions of microorganisms, yields biogas. The amount of water available, dictating the level of pH, temperature, etc. of the system, largely influences the conditions for the effective performance of the microorganisms in the decomposition process. Total solids concentration expresses the relative proportion of the amounts of solids and liquid in the system. This work investigated various proportions of solids and liquid in MSW in an anaerobic batch digester and the corresponding amounts of biogas produced with a view to optimizing gas production from the system. Five laboratory-scale anaerobic batch digesters of 5 litres volume each were set up for the anaerobic batch digestion of 2 kg of shredded MSW diluted to a percentage total solids concentration of 26.7%. From the results of the investigation, mathematical relationships were developed to evaluate the operation of the digester and solved using the Microsoft Visual Basic version 6.0 Programme. The digester’s operation was then simulated over a range of percentage total solids concentration of 4-30, at a maximum fractional conversion of 0.8 to cater for system inefficiencies. The amount of biogas produced in the digester was a power function of the percentage total solids concentration, indicating that at some point in time any marginal increase in the percentage total solids concentration was not relevant to the increasing volume of biogas produced. The results showed that optimum biogas production occurred at 20% total solids concentration.
An Extensible Parsing Pipeline for Unstructured Data Processing

Network monitoring and diagnostics systems depict the running system’s state and generate enormous amounts of unstructured data through log files, print statements, and other reports. It is not feasible to manually analyze all these files due to limited resources and the need to develop custom parsers to convert unstructured data into desirable file formats. Prior research focuses on rule-based and relationship-based parsing methods to parse unstructured data into structured file formats; these methods are labor-intensive and need large annotated datasets. This paper presents an unsupervised text processing pipeline that analyses such text files, removes extraneous information, identifies tabular components, and parses them into a structured file format. The proposed approach is resilient to changes in the data structure, does not require training data, and is domain-independent. We experiment and compare topic modeling and clustering approaches to verify the accuracy of the proposed technique. Our findings indicate that combining similarity and clustering algorithms to identify data components had better accuracy than topic modeling.
Single-Phase Voltage Source Inverter with Active Power Decoupling Based on Buck-Boost Converter

This paper presents a single-phase bridge inverter with the capability of solving the second-order ripple power issue. In this topology, the inherent ripple power in the single-phase inverter is eliminated by directly controlling the ripple current with an additional power decoupling circuit based on a bidirectional buck-boost converter. Therefore, the required dc-link capacitance can be significantly reduced. The operation principle and control strategy of the proposed topology is analyzed and its power decoupling capability is compared with two related topologies in literature. Also, the broken down problem of one of the capacitors in the proposed topology is also analyzed. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed topology and control algorithm with the expected power decoupling function.
Detecting Anomalies at a TLD Name Server Based on DNS Traffic Predictions

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical component of Internet infrastructure, as almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query. Given its importance, there is increasing concern over its vulnerability to attacks and failures, as they can negatively affect all Internet-based resources. Thus, detecting these events is crucial to preserve the correct functioning of all DNS components, such as high-volume name servers for top-level domains (TLD). This article presents a near real-time Anomaly Detection Based on Prediction (AD-BoP) method, providing a useful and easily explainable methodology to effectively detect DNS anomalies. AD-BoP is based on the prediction of expected DNS traffic statistics, and could be especially helpful for TLD registry operators to preserve their services’ reliability. After an exhaustive analysis, AD-BoP is shown to improve the current state-of-the-art for anomaly detection in authoritative TLD name servers.
Increasing the Production Yield of White Oyster Mushrooms With Pulsed Electric Fields

Pulsed electric field (PEF) technology can be utilized to increase the growth rate and total yield and alter the nutritional composition of agricultural crops. We investigated the efficacy of PEF treatment on the Pleurotus Ostreatus white oyster mushroom species. Mushroom sawdust substrates in buckets were stimulated with a combination of two rod-to-plate electrode geometries with peak electric field strengths of 1.46 and 6.67 kV/cm through unipolar pulses with approximately 20 kV amplitude. Total electrical energy of 62.3 kJ (0.017 kWh) over 30 days of excitation was delivered to each mushroom bucket. The total yield of the stimulated group showed a 34% increase compared with the control group. The experiment was repeated, and the stimulated buckets showed a 45.5% increase in yield relative to the control. A proximate analysis of the fruiting bodies was examined postexcitation for the moisture, fat, protein, and ash content. The stimulated group shows a slight increase in mean crude fat and protein content compared with the control group. Furthermore, the grounding mesh electrode interface with the fruiting substrate was found to contribute to about 10% higher ash content compared with the control group.
Inactivation of Fungal Spores Collected on Fibrous Filters by Melaleuca alternifolia (Tea Tree Oil)

Microbial aerosols could cause various human and animal health problems and their control is becoming a significant scientific and technological topic for consideration. Filtration is considered to be one of the main processes of the removal of biological aerosols from the air carrier minimizing bioaerosol concentration in industrial and domestic dwellings. However, with regards to biologically active particles, their removal from the air carrier does not solely solve the problem of microbial contamination of the ambient air. Considering that in some situations bioaerosol particles collected on the filter could re-enter the air carrier, some disinfection is required to ensure that no biologically active particles could possibly be removed from the filter surface and reach human occupied areas. This article describes the results of laboratory investigations involving Melaleuca alternifolia (tea tree oil) as disinfecting media for inactivation of common environmental fungal spores on the filter surface. It was found that 50% and 40% of Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus stolonifer spores, respectively, were inactivated over a period of 60 minutes. A single factor ANOVA test confirmed that the reported rates of inactivation were statistically significant (> 95%). For Rhizopus statistically significant inactivation by 31% was also observed after 30 minutes with no inactivation occurring over shorter time periods. No statistically significant inactivation occurred for Aspergillus niger for any time shorter than 60 min.
Methodology for bioassay-directed fractionation studies of air particulate material and other complex environmental matrices

A normal phase HPLC methodology using a semi-preparative polyaminocyano column in conjunction with a selection of short-term genotoxicity assays has been developed for bioassay-directed fractionation studies of complex environmental mixtures. To illustrate the effectiveness of this methodology, an organic extract prepared from respirable air particulate samples collected in Hamilton, Canada was separated into a non-polar aromatic fraction and a polar aromatic fraction using a combination of alumina and Sephadex LH20 chromatography. These fractions were evaluated for their genotoxic potential using the Salmonella/microsome (Ames) assay with six different strains of Salmonella. The non-polar aromatic fraction was analyzed by normal phase HPLC and the eluent was collected in one-minute subfractions ; these subfractions were bioassayed in three different Salmonella strains (YG1021 -S9. YG1024 -S9 and YG1029 +S9) to afford three different mutation profiles of this sample. Some subfractions which exhibited high mutagenic responses were subjected to further chemical analyses using GC/MS in order to identify those compounds responsible for the genotoxic responses. The nitroarene compounds 2-nitrofluoranthene, 1-nitropyrene and 2-nitropyrene and higher molecular weight polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzo[a]pyrene and indeno[1,2,3-cd]pyrene were identified and quantified in some of the biologically active subfractions. The normal phase gradient conditions afforded very reproducible retention times for a series of polycyclic aromatic standards with a broad range of compound polarities. In addition, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) were observed to elute from the normal phase HPLC column in a series of peaks ; successive peaks contained PAH of increasing molecular weight while any individual peak was shown to contain PAH of the same molecular weight.