Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integrated energy planning and modeling (IEPM) for sustainable electricity generation in Pakistan: Challenges and limitations

Recent technological advancements demand IEPM for sustainable energy development through the induction of advanced computational techniques. However, the applicability and outcomes of such modeling tools vary due to underlying limitations in addition to gaps within the energy sector. This study uses a three-pronged approach to determine the potential of IEPM in shaping sustainable energy systems, particularly for Pakistan. Findings suggest that the main hindrances in sustainable electricity generation in Pakistan are over dependence upon thermal fuel mix and partial achievement of national energy policy targets. A review of the public sector plans, researches, and historical energy mix of Pakistan affirms that all efforts are targeted towards least cost electricity production without considering social and environmental impacts. All past studies projected energy supply and demand to ascertain future implications, but no one suggested sustainable alternatives for meeting national energy targets. Findings of this study necessitate upon development of a fair, consistent, long-term and sustainable IEP with clear policies to overcome sectoral bottlenecks and attain a high growth trajectory. A review of modeling tools, their applications and limitations, carried out in this study, suggests the adoption of the LEAP model for realistic IEP for Pakistan. This considered LEAP’s strengths in terms of energy-environment nexus, strong-accounting and scenario-building, bottom-up/top-down approach, user-friendliness, and spatial-temporal flexibility.
Irreversible Thermodynamics

We present a maximum-entropy theory of mesoscopic kinetics. The theory gives fully nonlinear nonequilibrium thermodynamic relationships and has no explicit requirement for either microscopic bath variables, an equilibrium energy, or an equilibrium partition function. The entropy maximization process is instead carried out over transition probability distributions with constraints on particle position and velocity updates. The Lagrange multipliers for these constraints express the instantaneous temperature and pressure of external (or microscopic) thermostatic driving systems, with which the distinguished system may or may not eventually reach equilibrium. We show that the analogues of the Gibbs-Maxwell relations and free energy perturbation techniques carry over to fluctuation-dissipation theorems and nonequilibrium ensemble reweighting techniques as should be expected. The result is a fully time-dependent, non-local description of a nonequilibrium ensemble coupled to reservoirs at possibly time-varying thermostatic or mechanical states. We also show that the thermodynamic entropy production extends the generalized fluctuation theorem through the addition of an instantaneous information entropy term for the end-points, leading to a concise statement of the second law of thermodynamics.
Affective Networked Space: Polymedia Affordances and Transnational Digital Communication Among the Rohingya Diaspora

This study explores the intersection of affect, affordance, and agency of the Rohingya diaspora in maintaining the everyday transnational digital communication in a context of prolonged displacement and genocide. Drawing on a qualitative multi-sited research approach, I interviewed 25 Rohingya diaspora living in the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh and in Brisbane, Australia. The findings show how affordances of technologies have facilitated affective practice that underpins the digital spaces to negotiate protracted experiences of sufferings. I develop the idea of “affective networked space” to unpack how the participatory digital connections have created a new avenue that acts as an alternative space to compensate the absence of Rohingya script and physical presence and play affective roles from disseminating (re)sources of information to everyday transnational communication. I argue that although transnational connectivity is formed with affordance of digital (poly)media, “affective networked space” is not only infused with pain, love, and intimacy, but also imbued with the affective politics of collective sufferings, solidarity, and identity negotiation.
Differential Inhibitory Responses to Temporal Features Enhance Cortical Coding of Dynamic Stimuli: A Network Model

Cortical circuits feature both excitatory and inhibitory cells that underlie the encoding of dynamic sensory stimuli, e.g., speech, music, odors, and natural scenes. While previous studies have shown that inhibition plays an important role in shaping the neural code, little is known about how excitatory and inhibitory cells coordinate to enhance encoding of temporally dynamic stimuli. Recent experimental recordings in mouse auditory cortex (ACx) have shown that optogenetic suppression of parvalbumin (PV) neurons results in a decrease of neural discriminability between dynamic stimuli with speech envelope modulations. Here, we present a multilayer model of a cortical circuit that mechanistically explains these results. The model incorporates characteristic short-term synaptic plasticity (STP) profiles of excitatory and PV cells. Crucially, the model performance is based on populations of PV cells that separately respond to stimulus onsets and offsets. We reveal that by tuning the relative strengths of inhibition from onset- and offset-responding PV cells, the cortical network model captures the broad range of neural discriminability profiles in cortical single-unit data, with varying contributions from rapid firing rate modulations and spike timing. The model also replicates and explains the experimentally observed reduction in neural discrimination performance during optogenetic suppression of PV neurons. These results suggest that distinct populations of PV neurons enhance cortical discriminability of dynamic stimuli by encoding distinct temporal features, enhancing temporal coding, and reducing cortical noise.
Influence of wettability in immiscible displacements with lattice Boltzmann method

The role of wettability, often characterized by contact angle (θ), in two-phase immiscible phases displacement is not well understood. In this study, the color gradient lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), capable of maintaining the prescribed θ (from 0° to 180° at intervals of 10°) throughout the numerical simulations, was used to investigate the displacement patterns and displacement efficiency in a 2D porous medium. The capillary numbers (Ca) used were 0.01, 1, and 100, and the viscosity ratios (M) used were 0.1, 1, and 10. At M=10, the saturation (S) had a bilinear relationship with θ, while for M=0.1 and 1, the S-θ relationships were complicated by Ca. A saturation contour in the M-Ca-θ space was proposed to demonstrate the movement of a traditional 2D M-Ca phase diagram with θ increments. The value of S continued to increase after the breakthrough, and the final saturation (0.997) for the hydrophilic condition (θ=10°) was higher than that (0.673) for the hydrophobic condition (θ=170°).
Lectures on curves on an algebraic surface

These lectures, delivered by Professor Mumford at Harvard in 1963-1964, are devoted to a study of properties of families of algebraic curves, on a non-singular projective algebraic curve defined over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. The methods and techniques of Grothendieck, which have so changed the character of algebraic geometry in recent years, are used systematically throughout. Thus the classical material is presented from a new viewpoint.
Aspects of hydrodynamics in AdS/CMT

Condensed matter theory is the study of systems at finite density. In this thesis we will attempt to argue that gauge-gravity dualities can give deep and meaningful insights into the behaviour of strongly coupled condensed matter systems. The first three chapters will be a review of material already available in literature. Chapter 1 will introduce holography and the AdS-CFT correspondence. Particularly, in this chapter, the technique for the extraction of diffusion constants for charge and shear stress-energy-momentum fluctuations in a field theory with a holographic dual will be demonstrated. Chapter 2 will summarise relevant literature on the relativistic fluid-gravity correspondence. In the first half of the chapter it will be shown how to calculate the transport coefficients and Navier-Stokes equations for a suitable thermal field theory. The second half of chapter 2 will then be dedicated to extracting the transport coefficients for a strongly coupled field theory dual to a Reissner-Nordstrom AdS spacetime. In chapter 3 a scaling of the metric and gauge field found in chapter 2 will be taken such that the boundary field theory admits Galilean, as opposed to relativistic, symmetry. Consequently, the governing hydrodynamic equations will be the non-relativistic, incompressible Navier-Stokes. Chapters 4 and 5 represent novel work. In chapter 4 the transport coefficients for a particular strongly coupled thermal field theory with underlying Schrodinger symmetry will be extracted from a charged, asymptotically Schrodinger spacetime. The governing hydrodynamic equations will be compressible with non-relativistic symmetry as opposed to those found via the scaling limit of chapter 3. In chapter 5 we show how knowledge of the transport coefficients of a thermal field theory can be used as a test-bed for numerical methods to explore beyond the hydrodynamic (long wavelength and low frequency) regime. With this in mind we consider Reissner-Nordstrom AdS4 and determine the two point correlators at arbitrary frequency and momentum. Finally in chapter 6 we summarise the work discussed in this thesis and speculate about further applications of hydrodynamic techniques to strongly coupled condensed matter theories.
Averaging methods for the phase shift of arbitrarily perturbed strongly nonlinear oscillators with an application to capture

Strongly nonlinear oscillators under slowly varying perturbations (not necessarily Hamiltonian) are analyzed by putting the equations into the standard form for the method of averaging. By using the usual near-identity transformations, energy-angle (and equivalent action-angle) equations are derived using the properties of strongly nonlinear oscillators. By introducing a perturbation expansion, a differential equation for the phase shift is derived and shown to agree with earlier results obtained by Bourland and Haberman using the multiple scale perturbation method. The slowly varying phase shift is used (by necessity) to determine the boundary of the basin of attraction for competing stable equilibria, even though these averaged equations are known not to be valid near a separatrix (unperturbed homoclinic orbit).
Free structures in division rings

Makar-Limanov's conjecture states that if a division ring D is finitely generated and infinite dimensional over its center k then D contains a free k-subalgebra of rank 2. In this work, we will investigate the existence of such structures in D, the division ring of fractions of the skew polynomial ring L[t;\sigma], where t is a variable and $\sigma$ is a k-automorphism of L. For instance, we prove Makar-Limanov's conjecture when either L is the function field of an abelian variety or the function field of the n-dimensional projective space.
Luminosity Functions of Lyman Break Galaxies at z ~ 4 and z ~ 5 in the Subaru Deep Field

We investigate the luminosity functions of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at z ~ 4 and z ~ 5 based on optical imaging data obtained in the Subaru Deep Field project. Three samples of LBGs in a contiguous area of 875 arcmin2 are constructed. One consists of 3808 LBGs at z ~ 4 down to i' = 26.85 selected with the B-R versus R-i' diagram. The other two consist of 539 and 240 LBGs at z ~ 5 down to z' = 26.05 selected with two kinds of two-color diagram: V-i' versus i'-z' and R-i' versus i'-z'. The adopted selection criteria are proved to be fairly reliable by spectroscopic observations. We derive the luminosity functions of the LBGs at rest-frame ultraviolet wavelengths down to MUV = -19.2 at z ~ 4 and MUV = -20.3 at z ~ 5. We find clear evolution of the luminosity function over the redshift range 0 ≤ z ≤ 6, which is accounted for solely by a change in the characteristic magnitude M*. We examine the evolution of the cosmic star formation rate (SFR) density and its luminosity dependence over 0 ≤ z ≲ 6. The SFR density contributed from brighter galaxies is found to change more drastically with cosmic time. The contribution from brighter galaxies has a sharp peak around z = 3-4, while that from fainter galaxies evolves relatively mildly with a broad peak at earlier epochs. Combining the observed SFR density with the standard cold dark matter model, we compute the cosmic SFR per unit baryon mass in dark halos, that is, the specific SFR. The specific SFR is found to scale with redshift as (1 + z)3 up to z ~ 4, implying that the efficiency of star formation is on average higher at higher redshift in proportion to the cooling rate within dark halos, while this is not simply the case at z ≳ 4.
Lipophilic Compounds and Antibacterial Activity of Opuntia ficus-indica Root Extracts from Algeria

The chemical composition, investigated by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and antibacterial activity of lipophilic extractives of three varieties of Opuntia ficus-indica roots from Algeria are reported in this paper for the first time. The results obtained revealed a total of 55 compounds, including fatty acids, sterols, monoglycerides and long chain aliphatic alcohols that were identified and quantified. β-Sitosterol was found as the major compound of the roots of the three varieties. Furthermore, considerable amounts of essential fatty acids (ω3, ω6, and ω9) such as oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acids were also identified. The green variety was the richest among the three studied varieties. The antibacterial activity, evaluated with disc diffusion method, revealed that lipophilic extracts were effective mainly against Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (19~23 mm). Gram-negative strains mainly Pseudomonas aeruginosa gave an inhibition zone of 18 mm, which is considered high antibacterial activity. The minimal inhibitory concentrations of the tested bacteria revealed interesting values against the majority of bacteria tested: 75–100 µg mL−1 for Bacillus sp. , 250–350 µg/mL for the two Staphylococcus strains, 550–600 µg mL−1 for E. coli, and 750–950 µg mL−1 obtained with Pseudomonas sp. This study allows us to conclude that the lipophilic fractions of cactus roots possess interesting phytochemicals such as steroids, some fatty acids and long chain alcohols that acted as antibiotic-like compounds countering pathogenic strains.
BERT-based Transfer Learning Model for COVID-19 Sentiment Analysis on Turkish Instagram Comments

First seen in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) became a worldwide epidemic. Turkey’s first reported case was announced on March 11, 2020—the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 is a pandemic. Due to the intense and widespread use of social media during the pandemic, determining the role and effect (i.e., positive, negative, neutral) of social media gives us important information about society's perspective on events. In our study, two datasets (i.e. Dataset1, Dataset2) consisting of Instagram comments on COVID-19 were composed between different dates of the pandemic, and the change between users' feelings and thoughts about the epidemic was analyzed. The datasets are the first publicly available Turkish datasets on the sentiment analysis of COVID-19, as far as we know. The sentiment analysis of Turkish Instagram comments was performed using Machine Learning models (i.e., Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and BERT-based Transfer Learning). In the experiments, the balanced versions of these datasets (i.e. resDataset1, resDataset2) were taken into account as well as the original ones. The BERT-based Transfer Learning model achieved the highest classification success with 0.7864 macro-averaged F1 score values in resDataset1 and 0.7120 in resDataset2. It has been proven that the use of a pre-trained language model in Turkish datasets is more successful than other models in terms of classification performance.
CONTEXTUAL DETERMINANTS OF MARITAL DISSOLUTION AMONG BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

Marital dissolution and their contextual determinants are concerns to the government and other stakeholders in South Africa. These are so, especially among the Black South African women of childbearing age. The South African Demographic Health Survey (SADHS) 2016 data was used to examine the role of three hierarchical layers of variables (individual, household and community level characteristics) in determining marital dissolution among Black South African women of childbearing age in South Africa. Based on the Social-ecological (SEM) and the Easterlin’s micro-economic models, the chi-squared test and multilevel logistic regression were performed at the bivariate and multivariate levels respectively. The multilevel logistic regressions were performed using the generalised linear and latent mixed model (GLLAMM) to obtain fixed and random effects. Findings suggest that an insignificant proportion of the study sample were ever married. The level of those ever married increased with mother’s age, while the highest proportion of those never married reside in KwaZulu-Natal (88,3%) province. With the exception of language, type of place of residence and place of delivery, all tested factors were found to be significant and/or associated with marital dissolution at different hierarchical model levels (p<0.05). Results of random effect revealed a very small, i.e. insignificant (0.01) variations in their log odds of predicting marital dissolution. The study recommends that these findings be considered in all programme and policy developments around the issue in South Africa.
Exploring the Mutual Nexus of Social Capital, Social Innovations and Organizational Performance

The ability of self-reconstruction is essential to the survival of social organizations. To meet the social challenges, these organizations must enhance their creative and innovative processes. Although an extensive literature describes the impact of social capital on innovations, research on how social and organizational innovations affect organizational performance and social capital is very slim. This paper makes an addition to the literature by investigating the impact of organizational and social innovations in explaining the relationship of social capital and organizational performance. Confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and structural equation modelling are used on the data gained from social organizations in China. It is found that social and organizational innovations affect the organizational performance in positive way while social capital has a vital role in this relationship by improving mutual cooperation, interaction and trust. The mediating role of social and organizational innovations in the relationship of social capital and organizational performance is formalized through structural equation modeling. The empirical findings reveal that organizational and social innovations have mediating role in relationship of organizational performance and social capital. The empirical results do not support the direct relationship between organizational performance and social capital or between innovations and organizational performance. It is also found that social and organizational innovations are necessary to improve the relationship of organizational performance and social capital.
Measurement Error in Nonparametric Item Response Curve Estimation. Research Report. ETS RR-11-28.

Nonparametric, or kernel, estimation of item response curve (IRC) is a concern theoretically and operationally. Accuracy of this estimation, often used in item analysis in testing programs, is biased when the observed scores are used as the regressor because the observed scores are contaminated by measurement error. In this study, we investigate the deconvolution kernel estimation of IRC, correcting for the measurement error in the regressor variable. Using item response theory (IRT) simulated data and some real data, we compared the traditional kernel estimation and the deconvolution estimation of IRC. Results show that in capturing important features of the IRC, the traditional kernel estimation is comparable to the deconvolution kernel estimation in item analysis.
Comparing principal autonomy in time and space: modelling school leaders’ decision making and control

ABSTRACT This article presents the development and application of a model that can be utilized to compare the autonomy of principals in various historical and national contexts. Drawing on former conceptual work on autonomy in education, the model conceptualizes principal autonomy as two-dimensional. The first dimension is the decision making expected from principals, manifested on a continuum of being restricted or extended. The second dimension is the control imposed on principals, also varying between a restricted or an extended nature. In relation to each other, restricted/extended decision making and control can result in four different governance configurations that impact principals’ work complexities. We apply the model for the description of the development of Swedish principals’ work conditions over time and for a comparison of the autonomy of Nordic principals. With this endeavour, we demonstrate how historical and nation-specific particularities in educational governance interact with limitations and opportunities of educational leadership. Moreover, we argue that a focus on the autonomy of various stakeholders in schools might be a fertile strategy for further understanding the confusing concept of school autonomy.
Relation between Physical Fitness Components and the Occurrence and Subjective Intensity of Back Pain in Secondary School Adolescents

Despite the well documented benefits of physical fitness (PF) on general health, its role in back pain (BP) is still unclear. The objective of this study was to assess the association between different PF profiles and BP in a sample of adolescents. The study assessed PF and BP in a sample of 919 youth (age = 15.5 ± 1.3 years) from North and South Tyrol. A total of 531 participants (57.8%) reported no BP, whereas 4.7% (n = 43) reported severe BP. A two-step cluster analysis detected three main groups: the “less fit”, with significantly lower scores in all PF tests (p < 0.001); the “strong sprinters”, with higher speed and muscular strength than the others (p < 0.001); and the “flexible marathoners”, with higher flexibility and cardiorespiratory fitness (p < 0.001). The “flexible marathoners” showed significantly better BP scores than the “less fit” (p = 0.029). Cardiorespiratory fitness and trunk flexibility are potential preventive components of BP in adolescents. Since the decline in flexibility starts very early in life, it is recommended to put a particular emphasis on this component of PF. The role of other components of PF should be further investigated in the future.