Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flow generated by a disc turbine. I: Experimental

An attempt has been made to develop a detailed understanding of the flow generated by a disc turbine in a fully baffled cylindrical vessel. Mean flow and turbulence intensities have been measured for the bulk region using a laser Doppler anemometer. An energy balance around the impeller has been performed and the hydraulic efficiency of the disc turbine was found to be about 65%. The effect of vessel diameter on flow characteristics has also been studied. Part I provides a set of boundary conditions to the model as well as the necessary and sufficient set of data to evaluate the model performance.
Adsorptive Behavior of Zeolite-Amended Backfills for Enhanced Metals Containment

AbstractThe containment function of soil-bentonite (SB) cutoff walls can be enhanced when the adsorption capacity of the SB backfill for targeted contaminants is increased. In this regard, the potential use of three commercially available zeolites, i.e., two chabazites and a clinoptilolite, as SB backfill amendments to enhance the adsorption capacity for two metal sorbates, potassium (K) and zinc (Zn), was evaluated via batch equilibrium adsorption testing. The adsorptive behaviors of K and Zn to both the unamended and zeolite-amended backfill sorbents were nonlinear over the concentration ranges of interest. Depending on the specific zeolite, the addition of only 5% zeolite increased the adsorption capacity relative to that for the unamended backfill sorbent by a factor ranging from 6.2 to 7.3 for K and from 2.8 to 3.4 for Zn, whereas 10% zeolite amendment increased the adsorption capacity by a factor ranging from 7.5 to 13.5 for K and 3.1 to 3.7 for Zn. The lower increase in adsorption capacity for Zn r.
Stability study of an aqueous formulation of the Annatto dye.

Annatto is a natural dye extracted from the pericarp of Bixa Orellana L. seeds. The main coloring agents of this dye are bixin and norbixin. In this study, it was evaluated the effect of light and temperature on the stability of an aqueous formulation of norbixin. Both studies were carried out in controlled conditions. Photostability studies were conducted exposing samples in different concentrations under irradiated for 6 hours using a xenon lamp at 1000 W/m2. The effect of temperature was assessed by analyzing the samples exposed at 30±2oC during 12 months, in order to simulate the natural storage condition. Norbixin concentration during storage after exposure to various conditions was measured by spectrophotometry at 455 nm. This was correlated with color, which was measured by sensorial analysis, where perceptible changes in color were identified. Results from forced photostability studies showed that samples at high norbixin concentration (5.58%) did not suffer decomposition. The decay of norbixin promoted by temperature was fitted a linear model, and a significant change of color was observed at 12 months when the remaining norbixin concentration was 4.42%. The findings showed that high concentrations are a protective factor against photo-degradation, and the shelf life of norbixin in aqueous formulation was 12 months at 30oC.
Estimating the contribution of HIV-infected adults to household pneumococcal transmission in South Africa, 2016–2018: A hidden Markov modelling study

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected adults are at a higher risk of pneumococcal colonisation and disease, even while receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART). To help evaluate potential indirect effects of vaccination of HIV-infected adults, we assessed whether HIV-infected adults disproportionately contribute to household transmission of pneumococci. We constructed a hidden Markov model to capture the dynamics of pneumococcal carriage acquisition and clearance observed during a longitudinal household-based nasopharyngeal swabbing study, while accounting for sample misclassifications. Households were followed-up twice weekly for 10 months for nasopharyngeal carriage detection via real-time PCR. We estimated the effect of participant age, HIV status, presence of a HIV-infected adult within the household and other covariates on pneumococcal acquisition and clearance probabilities. Of 1,684 individuals enrolled, 279 (16.6%) were younger children (<5 years-old) of whom 4 (1.5%) were HIV-infected and 726 (43.1%) were adults (>=18 years-old) of whom 214 (30.4%) were HIV-infected, most (173, 81.2%) with high CD4+ count. The observed range of pneumococcal carriage prevalence across visits was substantially higher in younger children (56.9-80.5%) than older children (5-17 years-old) (31.7-50.0%) or adults (11.5-23.5%). We estimate that 14.4% (95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 13.7-15.0) of pneumococcal-negative swabs were false negatives. Daily carriage acquisition probabilities among HIV-uninfected younger children were similar in households with and without HIV-infected adults (hazard ratio: 0.95, 95%CI: 0.91-1.01). Longer average carriage duration (11.4 days, 95%CI: 10.2-12.8 vs 6.0 days, 95%CI: 5.6 - 6.3) and higher median carriage density (622 genome equivalents per millilitre, 95%CI: 507-714 vs 389, 95%CI: 311.1-435.5) were estimated in HIV-infected vs HIV-uninfected adults. The use of ART and antibiotics substantially reduced carriage duration in all age groups, and acquisition rates increased with household size. Although South African HIV-infected adults on ART have longer carriage duration and density than their HIV-uninfected counterparts, they show similar patterns of pneumococcal acquisition and onward transmission.
Study on Phase Transition and Coercivity of C-doped Co Sintered by High Temperature High Pressure

The C-doped Cobalt (Co) sintered body was prepared, using cobalt and graphite powders as starting materials, under high temperature and high pressure (HPHT, 4-5 GPa, 600-900 °C) conditions. The effects of the experimental parameters (temperature, pressure and C-doped content) on the phase transition and coercivity of Co were investigated by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Vibrating Sample Magnetometer (VSM). XRD results show that the transformation temperature of Co from the structure of hexagonal close-packed (α-Co) to face-centered cubic (β-Co) decreases with the increase of C-doped content in 1-5 wt. %. The increase of temperature is in favor of doping C into Co as result of the increasing of β-Co phase, however, the increasing of pressure is not conducive to the phase formation of β-Co. VSM results show that the coercivity of the C-doped Co decreases with the increase of C-doped content and temperature, and the changes are not obvious with the increasing of pressure.
Accuracy of the Memory of a Child as an Eyewitness

Trials are heavily influenced by eyewitness testimony, but just how accurate is the memory of the person who saw the crime? Research suggests that eyewitness testimonies are often not accurate, but still have a significant impact on the outcome of the trial. Increasingly, children are testifying in court. Little research looks at the credibility of a child’s testimony, instead focuses on the impact the testimony had on the jurors, or the outcome of the trial. I propose an experimental study to examine the effect that age has on memory. Pages: 45-50
Response of coriander (Coriandrum sativum L.) cultivars to graded levels of vermicompost

A field study was undertaken at Sakaleshpur (Karnataka, India) to study the response of three cultivars of corriander (Coriandrum sativum) to graded levels ofvermicompost in comparison with chemical fertilization (NPK). The study indicated that application of vermicompost significantly increased herbage and seed yield and was comparable to chemical fertilization. The herbage yield was maximum in Rcr-41 (6067.5 kg/ha) at 60th day after sowing when 15 t/ha of vermicompost was applied. Seed yield was maximum in Rcr-41 (1314 kg/ha) in plants treated with 20tlha vermicompost. The study also showed that vermicompost can be used as an alternative nutrient source for coriander cultivation.
Development of new photocatalysts for the enhanced removal of chlorophenol from water

Photocatalysis is a useful method for the removal of organic contaminants from water, in which the contaminants are in general mineralised, i.e. converted to inorganic materials. The efficiency of the catalyst is most important, and the improvement of activity of conventional catalysts for photocatalytic degradation of organic contaminants remains a significant challenge. Modification of titanium dioxide, the most commonly used photocatalyst, with metal nanoparticles offers a very effective way of enhancing its activity. This paper presents the results of modification of titanium dioxide with gold nanoparticles. A range of catalysts with different amount of gold loading was prepared. It was found that the photocatalytic activity towards decomposition of chlorophenol increased substantially in comparison with unmodified catalyst. Even at very low loadings of gold, which only fractionally increases the cost of the catalyst, the improvement of the photocatalytic performance for degradation of organic contaminants was significant. The paper also presents the results of catalyst characterization by surface area measurements, transmission electron microscopy, and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy.
Novel Spectral Decay Dynamics of Hot Excitons in PbSe Nanocrystals: A Tunable Femtosecond Pump–Hyperspectral Probe Study

Ultrafast exciton cooling in highly monodisperse PbSe nanocrystals is followed with tunable pump–hyperspectral near-IR probe spectroscopy. Unexpected kinetic and spectral correlations between induced bleach and absorption features are revealed, which are incompatible with standard models for excited nanocrystal absorption. Interband optical excitation immediately generates a sharp bleach feature near the 1Sh1Se transition which is unchanged during exciton thermalization, while pumping well above the band edge induces an intense absorption at frequencies just below the band edge which decays concurrently with a buildup of renewed absorbance at the 1Ph1Pe peak during exciton cooling. Transient spectra of hot single and double excitons are nearly indistinguishable, arguing against the controversial involvement of Auger cooling in the rapid dissipation of excess energy in excited PbSe QDs. Finally, quantitative signal analysis shows no signs of multiexciton generation up to photon energies four times the samp.
Insecticidal Activities Against Odontotermes formosanus and Plutella xylostella and Corresponding Constituents of Tung Meal from Vernicia fordii

Simple Summary Odontotermes formosanus (Shiraki) (O. formosanus) and Plutella xylostella (Linnaeus) (P. xylostella) are common industrial and agricultural pests with a wide distribution range, multiple host species, few natural predators, and rapid reproduction. The control of these pests relies heavily on synthetic chemical pesticides; however, environmental pollution and the rise of insect resistance induced by the excessive use of synthetic chemical pesticides pose serious challenges. The present study was designed to systematically evaluate the insecticidal activities of different extracts of tung meal against the above two pests and to reveal the chemical constituents of the main active parts. The result confirmed the remarkable insecticidal activity of tung meal and provided a theoretical basis for its development as a potential plant insecticide. Abstract The environmental pollution, pesticide resistance, and other associated problems caused by traditional chemical pesticides with limited modes of action make it urgent to seek alternative environmentally-friendly pesticides from natural products. Tung meal, the byproduct of the detoxified Vernicia fordii (Hemsl.) seed, has been commonly used as an agricultural fertilizer and as a pesticide. However, its active insecticidal extracts and ingredients remain elusive. In the present study, the contact toxicities of tung meal extracts against the agricultural and forest pests like O. formosanus and P. xylostella were examined. Our results showed that ethyl acetate and petroleum ether extracts showed the strongest toxicity against O. formosanus and P. xylostella, respectively. In order to further explore the chemical profiles of the ethyl acetate and petroleum ether extracts, UPLC-Q/TOF-MS and GC-MS analyses have been performed, and 20 and 29 compounds were identified from EA and PE extracts, respectively. The present study, for the first time, verified the noteworthy insecticidal activities on the aforementioned agricultural and forest pesticides and revealed the potential active parts and chemical composition, which are conducive to further exploiting the potential of tung meal as a natural plant-derived insecticide for biological control of agricultural and forest pests.
Surface Wettability of Basal Surfaces of Clay Minerals: Insights from Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Understanding the wettability of clay mineral surfaces is crucial for enhancing oil recovery, investigating primary migration of hydrocarbon, and evaluating the performance of sealing rocks in a petroleum system. On the basis of molecular dynamics simulations, we investigated the interactions between four typical clay minerals (i.e., pyrophyllite, montmorillonite, illite, and kaolinite) and confined pore fluids (i.e., water/alkane/salts). The influences of surface group, layer charge, and salts on the wettability of clay surfaces were revealed. As the layer charge increases, the hydrophilicity of the montmorillonite basal surface gradually increases. The basal surface of 2:1-type pyrophyllite is completely alkane-wet independent of salts. However, for 1:1-type kaolinite, the presence of salts makes the siloxane surface completely water-wet, whereas it is partially alkane-wet at the absence of salts. In general, the salt ions adsorbed onto clay surfaces promote the surface hydrophilicity. By using nonequil.
Microscale radiometer based on the Knudsen thermal force

Strongrich, Andrew D. MS, Purdue University, December 2015. Microscale Radiometer Based on the Knudsen Thermal Force. Major Professor: Alina A. Alexeenko. Radiometric phenomena arise in non-isothermal rarefied gas flows for which the molecular mean-free path is approximately equal to the characteristic scale of the temperature gradient. The non-equilibrium nature of these flows results in thermal stresses which are capable of exerting forces and moments on immersed structures. When the stresses are established between unequally heated bodies the forces are referred to as Knudsen thermal forces. This work presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel in-plane microscale radiometer capable of both producing and resolving Knudsen forces in low pressures. The current work differs from previous implementations in that both capacitance and temperature measurements are acquired simultaneously, extending permissible measurement range by up to 3 pressure decades. Sensitivity to ambient pressure, temperature gradient, as well as gas composition is demonstrated, illustrating the mechanism’s versatility in measuring various macroscopic fluid properties. For constant input power force output is shown to vary non-monotonically with ambient pressure, having peak magnitude at a Knudsen number of approximately unity. Using thermal microscopy, results are presented in terms of a non-dimensional force coefficient, showing output enhancement of over 7 times at peak magnitude compared to existing out-of-plane cantilevered configurations.
Growing up at the nanoscale: studies of ferroelectric domain wall functionalities, roughening, and dynamic properties by atomic force microscopy

Les materiaux ferroelectriques sont caracterises par une polarisation electrique reversible. Les interfaces separant deux domaines ferroelectriques, appelees parois de domaines, possedent des proprietes specifiques en raison de la brisure locale de symetrie et de l'accumulation de defauts, et ce a l'echelle nanometrique. Cette these presente plusieurs de ces proprietes, mesurees par microscopie a force atomique sur des ferroelectriques en couches minces. En premier lieu, il est demontre que la brisure de symetrie modifie les proprietes piezoelectriques aux parois. Puis il est demontre que, bien que le ferroelectrique soit isolant, les parois autorisent le transport de courant electrique via l'accumulation de lacunes d'oxygene. La seconde partie de cette these porte sur les proprietes statiques et dynamiques des parois dans le cadre theorique d'interfaces elastiques desordonnees. Il est observe que leur rugosite ainsi que leur reponse dynamique suivent des lois d'echelles doublement influencees par la nature du desordre et les conditions environnementales.
Acid-base properties and catalytic activity of metal-organic frameworks: A view from spectroscopic and semiempirical methods

ABSTRACT This article summarizes several approaches for understanding the catalytic chemistry and “structure-surface acidity-reactivity” relationships in a multiplicity of catalytic applications of a continually increasing assemblage of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) structures. The various spectroscopic techniques for acid-base characterization of MOFs are reviewed. The experimental requirements and the type and nature of probe molecules available are also discussed. Special emphasis is given to the revealing of the surface acid-base effect on the catalytic performance of MOFs.
Quantile Multi-Armed Bandits: Optimal Best-Arm Identification and a Differentially Private Scheme

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic rewards when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a successive elimination algorithm for strictly optimal best-arm identification, show that it is $\delta $ -PAC and characterize its sample complexity. Further, we provide a lower bound on the expected number of pulls, showing that the proposed algorithm is essentially optimal up to logarithmic factors. Both upper and lower complexity bounds depend on a special definition of the associated suboptimality gap, designed in particular for the quantile bandit problem — as we show, when the gap approaches zero, best-arm identification is impossible. Second, motivated by applications where the rewards are private information, we provide a differentially private successive elimination algorithm whose sample complexity is finite even for distributions with infinite support and characterize its sample complexity. Our algorithms do not require prior knowledge of either the suboptimality gap or other statistical information related to the bandit problem at hand.
The Heterogeneity Hypothesis: Finding Layer-Wise Differentiated Network Architectures

In this paper, we tackle the problem of convolutional neural network design. Instead of focusing on the design of the overall architecture, we investigate a design space that is usually overlooked, i.e. adjusting the channel configurations of predefined networks. We find that this adjustment can be achieved by shrinking widened baseline networks and leads to superior performance. Based on that, we articulate the "heterogeneity hypothesis": with the same training protocol, there exists a layer-wise differentiated net-work architecture (LW-DNA) that can outperform the original network with regular channel configurations but with a lower level of model complexity.The LW-DNA models are identified without extra computational cost or training time compared with the original network. This constraint leads to controlled experiments which direct the focus to the importance of layer-wise specific channel configurations. LW-DNA models come with advantages related to overfitting, i.e. the relative relationship between model complexity and dataset size. Experiments are conducted on various networks and datasets for image classification, visual tracking and image restoration. The resultant LW-DNA models consistently outperform the baseline models. Code is available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/Heterogeneity_Hypothesis. git.
Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog

Most language understanding models in task-oriented dialog systems are trained on a small amount of annotated training data, and evaluated in a small set from the same distribution. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable output when being exposed to natural language perturbation or variation in practice. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis with respect to the robustness of natural language understanding models, and introduce three important aspects related to language understanding in real-world dialog systems, namely, language variety, speech characteristics, and noise perturbation. We propose a model-agnostic toolkit LAUG to approximate natural language perturbations for testing the robustness issues in task-oriented dialog. Four data augmentation approaches covering the three aspects are assembled in LAUG, which reveals critical robustness issues in state-of-the-art models. The augmented dataset through LAUG can be used to facilitate future research on the robustness testing of language understanding in task-oriented dialog.
Spectral sets and tiles in $\mathbb{Z}_p^2 \times \mathbb{Z}_q^2$

In this paper we study Fuglede's conjecture on the direct product of two cyclic groups. After collecting the known results we prove that Fuglede's conjecture holds on $\mathbb{Z}_{pq} \times \mathbb{Z}_{pq} \cong \mathbb{Z}_p^2 \times \mathbb{Z}_q^2$.
T H ] 1 8 M ay 2 02 2 A Random Attention and Utility Model ∗ Nail

We generalize the stochastic revealed preference methodology of McFadden and Richter (1990) for finite choice sets to settings with limited consideration. Our approach is nonparametric and requires partial choice set variation. We impose a monotonicity condition on attention first proposed by Cattaneo et al. (2020) and a stability condition on the marginal distribution of preferences. Our framework is amenable to statistical testing. These new restrictions extend widely known parametric models of consideration with heterogeneous preferences. JEL classification numbers: C50, C51, C52, C91.
Adversarially Trained Models with Test-Time Covariate Shift Adaptation

We empirically demonstrate that test-time adaptive batch normalization, which re-estimates the batch-normalization statistics during inference, can provide (cid:96) 2 -certiﬁcation as well as improve the commonly occurring corruption robustness of adversarially trained models while maintaining their state-of-the-art empirical robustness against adversarial attacks. Furthermore, we obtain similar (cid:96) 2 -certiﬁcation as the current state-of-the-art certiﬁcation models for CIFAR-10 by learning our adversarially trained model using larger (cid:96) 2 -bounded adversaries. Therefore our work is a step towards bridging the gap between the state-of-the-art certiﬁcation and empirical robustness. Our results also indicate that improving the empirical adversarial robustness may be suﬃcient as we achieve certiﬁcation and corruption robustness as a by-product using test-time adaptive batch normalization.