Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Boosting Erasure-Coded Multi-Stripe Repair in Rack Architecture and Heterogeneous Clusters: Design and Analysis

Large-scale storage systems have introduced erasure codes to guarantee high data reliability, yet inevitably at the expense of high repair costs. In practice, storage nodes are usually divided into different racks, and data blocks in nodes are organized into multiple stripes independently manipulated by erasure code. Due to the scarcity and heterogeneity of the cross-rack bandwidth, the cross-rack transmission dominates the entire repair costs. When erasure code is deployed in rack architectures, existing repair techniques are limited in different aspects: neglecting the heterogeneous cross-rack bandwidth, less consideration for multi-stripe failure, and no special treatment on repair-link scheduling. In this paper, we present CMRepair, a Cross-rack Multi-stripe Repair technique that aims to reduce the repair time for multi-stripes failure repair in heterogeneous erasure-coded clusters. CMRepair first carefully chooses the nodes for reading/repairing blocks and searches for the multi-stripe repair solution. It adopts different algorithms to adjust the solution, including the Computation Time Priority (CTP) algorithm based on the greedy idea and the Repair Time Priority (RTP) algorithm based on the meta-heuristics idea. Furthermore, CMRepair selectively schedules the execution orders of cross-rack links, with the primary objective of saturating the unused upload/download bandwidth resources and avoiding network congestion. The experiments show that CMRepair with the CTP algorithm can reduce 27.59%-58.12% of the repair time while only introducing negligible computation overhead, and CMRepair with the RTP algorithm can reduce 33.52%-97.75% of the repair time in an acceptable computation time, over existing repair techniques.
Damage Detection in Free–Free Glass Fiber Fabric Composite Beams by measuring Flexural and Longitudinal Vibrations

This paper presents the experimental investigation results of the use of the vibration method by impulse excitation of free flexural and longitudinal vibrations of composite materials. The purpose of the study is to establish the sensitivity of the method used for defect detection and localization. To realize the objective, rectangular notch-type defects were simulated at different distances and depths. The influence of the location and depth of the artificial cracks on the dynamic properties of the beams was investigated by measuring the natural frequencies of flexural and longitudinal vibrations. The conducted experiments show a change in the dynamic characteristics of the beam depending on the dimensions and location of the defects.
Stress control as a method to reduce perceived pain in oral lichen planus

Introduction Oral lichen planus (OLP) is a common chronic, T-cell-mediated, inflammatory and non-infectious mucodermatosis. Patients diagnosed with oral lichen planus are more prone to depression, anxiety and higher perceived mental stress than the rest of the population. Aim This study investigated stress control methods as a means of reducing pain levels in patients with oral lichen planus. Material and methods The study involved 62 adult oral lichen planus patients who have never received any OLP treatment before. Patients with a high level of perceived mental stress received, in addition to standard pharmacological treatment, herbal sedative medication or Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation guidance (JPMR), and the patients without a high level of perceived mental stress level did not receive any additional stress control methods. The research tool was the PSS questionnaire and NRS pain level scale. Results Before the treatment, the level of perceived pain did not differ in any of analysed groups. After the treatment, in the group not using any stress control methods, the mean NRS level was significantly higher than in the group performing Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation (2.79 ±1.76 vs. 1.08 ±1.29), and also significantly higher than in the group receiving the herbal sedative (2.79 ±1.76 vs. 1.41 ±2.06). Conclusions The use of mental stress control methods as an additional element of therapy has a positive effect on the success of oral lichen planus treatment since it helps to reduce the perceived pain level in the oral mucosa better than a standard pharmacological therapy alone.
Explosive reconnection of the double tearing mode in relativistic plasmas with application to the Crab nebula

The Crab pulsar and its surrounding nebula is a well-known relic of a massive star that exploded in 1054 AD. The Crab nebula was generally believed to be a good standard candle in gamma rays. Recently, this view has been challenged by sudden increases in the gamma-ray flux in a narrow spectral band within a few hundred MeV. These flares are short but powerful; their duration is between a few hours and up to several days with a rising/falling time of a few hours/days. To date it is neither clear what mechanism powers these flares nor where exactly in the nebula they should be located. However, recent models seem to favor emission sites inside the nebula. In the present work, we study the magneto-hydrodynamic tearing instability occurring in a double current sheet configuration with application to the Crab flares. This is investigated by means of resistive relativistic magneto-hydrodynamic simulations. These put some constraints on the maximum Lorentz factor of the striped wind, Γ≲150 and on the localization of the emission region, r ≈ 50 rL where rL = c/Ω is the light-cylinder radius, c is the speed of light and Ω is the rotation speed of the pulsar. Sites close to but outside the light-cylinder are favored in our model.
An Application of Analytic Network Process (ANP) to Assess Critical Risks of Bridge Projects in the Mekong Delta Region

Risk management is one of the critical factors contributing to infrastructure project success. Risk assessment enables both practitioners and decision-makers to identify and analyze potential risks and quantify risk impacts on project performance in terms of time, cost, and quality. Even though many studies attempt to investigate the risk of construction projects with the consideration of technical, organizational, and legal aspects, only a few studies deeply focus on identifying the critical risks of bridge projects with the examination of climate change impact. The current study concentrates on analyzing risks in bridge construction projects in the Mekong Delta region which has been significantly affected by climate change. An intensive review of previous publications and technical project reports from 2010 to 2021 was conducted to identify the list of potential risks and interviews and discussions with engineers and managers involved in bridge projects were carried out to identify critical risks of bridge projects. Analytic Network Process (ANP) method was introduced to evaluate the impact of such risks on the performance of bridge project implementation. The initial results of this study provide a holistic picture of risk management for bridge projects with the consideration of climate change impact. The findings can help the involved parties including owners, contractors, and project managers to assess particular risks and scheme backup plans to mitigate project delays and cost overruns.
Intrinsic Immunogenic Tumor Cell Death Subtypes Delineate Prognosis and Responsiveness to Immunotherapy in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Simple Summary Intrinsic immunogenic cell death (ICD) property plays an important role in the prognosis and immune microenvironment of patients with lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). In this study, we performed an overall multi-omics analysis of the intrinsic ICD property and developed a risk scoring system. We found two distinct ICD-associated transcriptomic molecular patterns (termed ICD-high and ICD-low). We identified and validated ICDrisk subtypes (ICDrisk) which can effectively predict overall survival (OS) in LUAD patients and immunotherapeutic response across Pan-cancer. Our results may help to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms of intrinsic immunogenicity and heterogeneous responses to immunotherapy in LUAD patients. Abstract Recent studies have highlighted the combination of activation of host immunogenic cell death (ICD) and tumor-directed cytotoxic strategies. However, overall multiomic analysis of the intrinsic ICD property in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) has not been performed. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop an ICD-based risk scoring system to predict overall survival (OS) and immunotherapeutic efficacy in patients. In our study, both weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) and LASSO-Cox analysis were utilized to identify ICDrisk subtypes (ICDrisk). Moreover, we identify genomic alterations and differences in biological processes, analyze the immune microenvironment, and predict the response to immunotherapy in patients with pan-cancer. Importantly, immunogenicity subgroup typing was performed based on the immune score (IS) and microenvironmental tumor neoantigens (meTNAs). Our results demonstrate that ICDrisk subtypes were identified based on 16 genes. Furthermore, high ICDrisk was proved to be a poor prognostic factor in LUAD patients and indicated poor efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment in patients with pan-cancer. The two ICDrisk subtypes displayed distinct clinicopathologic features, tumor-infiltrating immune cell patterns, and biological processes. The ISlowmeTNAhigh subtype showed low intratumoral heterogeneity (ITH) and immune-activated phenotypes and correlated with better survival than the other subtypes within the high ICDrisk group. This study suggests effective biomarkers for the prediction of OS in LUAD patients and immunotherapeutic response across Pan-cancer and contributes to enhancing our understanding of intrinsic immunogenic tumor cell death.
Next-Generation Sequencing Data-Based Association Testing of a Group of Genetic Markers for Complex Responses Using a Generalized Linear Model Framework

To study the relationship between genetic variants and phenotypes, association testing is adopted; however, most association studies are conducted by genotype-based testing. Testing methods based on next-generation sequencing (NGS) data without genotype calling demonstrate an advantage over testing methods based on genotypes in the scenarios when genotype estimation is not accurate. Our objective was to develop NGS data-based methods for association studies to fill the gap in the literature. Single-variant testing methods based on NGS data have been proposed, including our previously proposed single-variant NGS data-based testing method, i.e., UNC combo method. The NGS data-based group testing method has been proposed by us using a linear model framework which can handle continuous responses. In this paper, we extend our linear model-based framework to a generalized linear model-based framework so that the methods can handle other types of responses especially binary responses which is a common problem in association studies. To evaluate the performance of various estimators and compare them we performed simulation studies. We found that all methods have Type I errors controlled, and our NGS data-based methods have better performance than genotype-based methods for other types of responses, including binary responses (logistics regression) and count responses (Poisson regression), especially when sequencing depth is low. We have extended our previous linear model (LM) framework to a generalized linear model (GLM) framework and derived NGS data-based methods for a group of genetic variables. Compared with our previously proposed LM-based methods, the new GLM-based methods can handle more complex responses (for example, binary responses and count responses) in addition to continuous responses. Our methods have filled the literature gap and shown advantage over their corresponding genotype-based methods in the literature.
Parking Prediction in Smart Cities: A Survey

With the growing number of cars in cities, smart parking is gradually becoming a strategic issue in building a smart city. As the precondition in smart parking, accurate parking prediction can reduce the time drivers spend searching for parking spaces and relieve traffic congestion. Meanwhile, VANET and the Internet-of-things (IoT) are the key elements of the current intelligent transportation system. With the IoT devices based on VANET becoming more extensively employed, a large amount of parking data is generated every day, and various methods are proposed for parking prediction, therefore, it is time to systematically summarize the parking prediction issues and the state-of-the-art prediction methods. In this survey, we first provide a comprehensive review of the existing methods used for parking prediction ranging from conventional statistical methods to the latest graph neural network methods. Then, we classify a variety of parking problems such as parking availability prediction, parking behavior prediction, and parking demand prediction. We also compile all the evaluation metrics, open data, and open-source code of the surveyed literature. Finally, we present the challenges and future directions of the parking prediction technique. As far as we know, this is the first survey exploring parking prediction methods, which will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners engaging in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and smart cities.
Development of a General-Purpose Compressible Flow AnuPravaha Based Solver

With India focussing even more on Aerospace applications , research and development in compressible ow has received a boost in the country. We aim to develop a general-purpose and robust compressible ow solver to help in research in Aerospace problems. The present work aims to make the Euler Solver developed by previous post-graduate students as part of the general purpose AnuPravaha Solver more robust and accurate, and develop it as a stand-alone compressible ow solver. In this work, the solver has been made more general and now incorporates non-re ecting, symmetric and other boundary conditions, taking into the account curvature at the boundary. As a step to move to higher accuracy, the TVD scheme and the upwind-based scheme AUSM+
A Topological Characterization of a Class of Integral Operators

x = x(t) (2) y = y(t) may be interpreted as the parametric representation of a closed oriented curve in the x-y-plane. Any curve obtained in this way will be said to be 'generated by the kernel function k(t). ' Various problems in analysis and geometry (study of smoothing operators, of the behavior of analytic functions on the boundary and finally of umbilical points) led the author to the following question: Which kernel functions k(t) generate only curves of non-negative circulation? A complete answer is given in this paper. It states: THE PRINCIPAL THEOREM: An Li-integrable function k(t) generates only curves of non-negative circulation if and only if, after a possible change of its values in a set of measure zero which has no influence on the operator (1), it is analytic in the open interval 0 < t < 2ir and its derivative can there be represented by a LaplaceStieltjes integral
Employing Indirect Adenosine 2A Receptors (A2AR) to Enhance Osseointegration of Titanium Devices: A Pre-Clinical Study

The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of dipyridamole, an indirect adenosine 2A receptors (A2AR), on the osseointegration of titanium implants in a large, translational pre-clinical model. Sixty tapered, acid-etched titanium implants, treated with four different coatings ((i) Type I Bovine Collagen (control), (ii) 10 μM dipyridamole (DIPY), (iii) 100 μM DIPY, and (iv) 1000 μM DIPY), were inserted in the vertebral bodies of 15 female sheep (weight ~65 kg). Qualitative and quantitative analysis were performed after 3, 6, and 12 weeks in vivo to assess histological features, and percentages of bone-to-implant contact (%BIC) and bone area fraction occupancy (%BAFO). Data was analyzed using a general linear mixed model analysis with time in vivo and coating as fixed factors. Histomorphometric analysis after 3 weeks in vivo revealed higher BIC for DIPY coated implant groups (10 μM (30.42% ± 10.62), 100 μM (36.41% ± 10.62), and 1000 μM (32.46% ± 10.62)) in comparison to the control group (17.99% ± 5.82). Further, significantly higher BAFO was observed for implants augmented with 1000 μM of DIPY (43.84% ± 9.97) compared to the control group (31.89% ± 5.46). At 6 and 12 weeks, no significant differences were observed among groups. Histological analysis evidenced similar osseointegration features and an intramembranous-type healing pattern for all groups. Qualitative observation corroborated the increased presence of woven bone formation in intimate contact with the surface of the implant and within the threads at 3 weeks with increased concentrations of DIPY. Coating the implant surface with dipyridamole yielded a favorable effect with regard to BIC and BAFO at 3 weeks in vivo. These findings suggest a positive effect of DIPY on the early stages of osseointegration.
Numerical Study on Breaking Wave Interaction with Vertical Wall Attached with Recurved Parapet

This paper numerically investigates breaking wave interaction with a vertical wall attached with a recurved parapet in 1:8 model scale, as part of the ISOPE-2022 comparative study. The in-house CFD solver naoe-FOAM-SJTU based on the open source platform OpenFOAM is used to perform all simulations. For wave generation, a novel generating-absorbing boundary condition (GABC) is adopted to replace the time-consuming moving boundary wavemaker. A geometric volume-of-ﬂuid (VOF) method based on piecewise-linear interface calculation (PLIC) is incorporated in the present numerical model to capture the sharp interface and improve the accuracy of the predicted impact pressure. The time history and frequency analysis of the wave elevation and pressure at each probe are compared with the experimental data. The comparison demonstrates that the present numerical model is able to predict the impact pressure with sufﬁcient accuracy but gives less accurate results of wave elevation. Moreover, the evolutions of free surface, pressure, and vorticity distribution are further provided to achieve a better understanding of this complex wave-structure interaction issue as a good complement to the experiments.
Maximization of a survival probability and its application

When a mission is assigned, it often is the case that the component used to perform the task is required to work properly during the period of the mission time. In other words, the probability of the event that this component does not fail within the allowable mission time should be as large as possible. This problem is considered for the case when the lifetime of a component has a bathtub-shaped failure rate function, and it is found that burn-in procedure is beneficial. An application of this result to the problem of minimizing the mean number of failures in a given period of mission time is also considered.
The effect of planktivorous fish on the vertical flux of polystyrene microplastics

Abstract Numerous studies have analyzed the distribution and concentration of microplastic particles (MPs) in various aquatic habitats, and estimated how they affect residual biota. Decidedly less research concerns how organisms (e.g. ichthyofauna) affect the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of MPs in the water. Therefore, the aim of our study was to test, if fish can increase the vertical flux of MPs to sediments. This would be the result of the combined effect of increased sedimentation rate and the active transport resulting from vertical migration of the fish in the simultaneous presence of a thermal gradient (and in turn water density gradient). We conducted eight 5-day-long experiments in thermally stratified twin vertical columns filled with a suspension of polystyrene beads of 25 and 250 µm in size, with initial density of 1000 and 200 × L−1, respectively. In each of the experiments, we placed sediment traps at three different depths in each of the columns, and four planktivorous fish in one of them. During the experiments, we monitored the distribution of fish. At the end of the experiment, we determined the number of MPs and the amount of detritus in both sediment traps and water. We found that the presence of planktivorous fish significantly increased the vertical flux of MPs to sediments and decreased the density of MPs in the water column. These effects seem to be more likely due to the increased sedimentation rate of MPs due to the fish activity, rather than to their active transport, as MPs in the experimental variant were covered with detritus to a greater extent, than in the control, and the fish remained in the subsurface layer in the water column. Our study seems to be the first one showcasing the effect of fish on the concentration and distribution of MPs in aquatic ecosystems. Highlights Fish foraging activity increased the sedimentation of PS MPs. Fish foraging activity decreased the PS MP concentration in the water column. The study seems to provide the first experimental evidence on the effect of fish on the distribution of MPs in aquatic environments.
Recent Demographic Survey of the Radiated Tortoise ( Astrochelys radiata ) in Southwestern Madagascar

— Effective management strategies for at-risk chelonian populations require sound knowledge of population demographics. Previous research on the Critically Endangered Radiated Tortoise, Astrochelys radiata (Shaw 1802), revealed a trend of increasing male bias in the sex ratio and a concomitant decrease in the proportion of juveniles in Lavavolo, southern Madagascar. This location is one of the few remaining sites with a high concentration of this species and was last studied ten years ago. The aim of our study was to provide an updated snapshot of Radiated Tortoise demographics at Lavavolo, which, when combined with previous studies, will provide insight into changes over 20 years (1999–2019). Additionally, we provide the first assessment on the impact of soil types (calcareous, ferruginous, and sandy) on the distribution of individuals across the site. We used mark-recapture data to determine the sex ratio, age structure, and distribution of size classes. Overall, the study site contained mostly adults (76.87%) with only a few juveniles (23.13%). Though the proportion of juveniles is low, it has increased over the last ten years. However