Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heat flux as a predictor of moisture content

The energy required to dry wood can be divided into two areas, 1) that actually used to remove water from wood, and 2) that which is lost as a result of venting and transmission losses through the kiln structure. Energy used to remove water from wood can be divided into the heat of vaporization, the heat of sorption, and the sensible heat associated with raising the temperature of the wood. Of these, energy used for evaporation (i.e., the heat of vaporization) is significantly larger than the other two energy requirements. The relationship between the energy used to remove water from wood and evaporation implies that energy flow into a sample can be used to predict moisture loss during drying. Since the sensible heat and the heat of sorption are small relative to the heat of vaporization, these energy requirements have a negligible effect on the relationship between moisture content and heat flow. Measuring heat flow into drying material is potentially a reliable nondestructive method for predicting moisture content and/or drying rate and therefore could provide the basis for a control system for drying wood products. Heat flux sensors have been used by forest products researchers to measure transmission losses through the kiln structure (Arganbright et al. 1979; Laytner and Arganbright 1984). In these applications, the sensor was attached to the outside of a kiln wall while the kiln was operating, and the heat flow was measured for a short period of time. By making readings over a wide variety of locations a measure of within-kiln variability of heat loss was obtained. More recently Vanek (1989, 1990) conducted experiments using both embedded thermocouples and a heat flux sensor to predict or estimate moisture content during drying for the purpose of determining the drying rate and/or end-point. Vanek obtained good results using the heat flux sensor, and reported that the results were more reliable than those obtained using embedded thermocouples. Some researchers have also investigated using internal temperature as an indication of average moisture content. Bai and Garrahan (1984) and Panow and Nester (1985) reported good results using this technique, whereas Holmes and Forrer (1989) reported that their results were not as promising. A fundamental discussion of heat flux sensors, both with regard to application assumptions and design considerations was given by Scott (1976). The advantage of a heat flux sensor to obtain surface heat flux values over methods using a temperature measurement device (i.e., thermocouple, resistance temperature device (RTD), or thermistor) embedded in the wood sample is that assumptions regarding internal and external resistances are not as critical, and it is not necessary to know accurate values of material physical properties such as thermal conductivity, density, heat capacity and thickness.
ACCIDENTS, SPEED DEVIATION AND SPEED LIMITS

THIS RESEARCH SOUGHT TO IDENTIFY CHARACTERISTICS OF ACCIDENT-INVOLVED VEHICLES PRIOR TO THEIR ACCIDENT. SPEED DEVIATION, AS ESTIMATED BY AN ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION TEAM, WAS CORRELATED WITH TRAFFIC SPEED PRIOR TO THE ACCIDENT, AS MEASURED BY A COMPUTER. THE COMPUTER OUTPUT PROVIDED AN OVERVIEW OF THE TRAFFIC FLOW AT EACH OF 16 MAGNETIC LOOP SENSORS AT REGULAR INTERVALS ON INDIANA STATE HIGHWAY 37 NEAR BLOOMINGTON. INVOLVEMENT RATE PER MILLION VEHICLE-MILES WAS FOUND TO BE HIGHER FOR THE SLOW DEVIATION VEHICLES THAN FOR THE FAST DEVIATION VEHICLES. HIGHER ACCIDENT RATES WERE ASSOCIATED WITH INTERSECTIONS. THE INVOLVEMENT RATE WAS FOUND TO BE APPROXIMATELY THE SAME FOR HIGH AND LOW SPEED DEVIATIONS AFTER DELETION OF ACCIDENTS INVOLVING TURNING VEHICLES. SPEED LIMITS SET AT THE 85TH AND 15TH PERCENTILE SPEED, AND ENFORCEMENT AT THE 95TH AND 5TH PERCENTILE WERE RECOMMENDED.
The relationship between environmental quality level and housing sale prices in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area

In this study, the relationship between environmental quality level and housing sale prices is examined in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area (IMA). Examination is carried out in two steps. Firstly, the environmental quality index is developed by utilizing principal component analysis. The geographical scope of the index is 32 districts within boundaries of the IMA. The index is achieved related to subjective and objective indicators. It is seen that natural advantages, dissatisfactions based on high density, and some negative externalities resulted from industrial areas have impacts on the environmental quality index levels. Secondly, the relationship between the index levels and housing sale prices is explored. For this reason, correlation coefficient and chi-square goodness-of-fit tests are utilized. Results provide enough evidence that there is a positive and strong linear relationship between the environmental quality and housing sale prices at the district level in the IMA; the index levels and housing sale prices are dependent ranks.
Inflammatory Endotypes and Tissue Remodeling Features in Antrochoanal Polyps

Purpose The pathogenic mechanisms of antrochoanal polyps (ACPs) remain largely unknown. This study aimed to characterize inflammatory patterns and tissue remodeling features in ACPs. Methods Inflammatory cell infiltration and tissue edema severity as well as fibrin deposition in ACPs and bilateral eosinophilic and noneosinophilic nasal polyps (NPs) were studied with immunohistochemical and immunofluorescence staining. Cytokine levels in sinonasal tissues were detected with the Bio-Plex assay. The expression of coagulation and fibrinolytic markers was measured using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. Results Compared to control tissues and bilateral eosinophilic and noneosinophilic NPs, ACPs had higher levels of neutrophil infiltration and expression of myeloperoxidase (MPO), interleukin (IL)-8 and interferon (IFN)-γ. In total, 94.4% of ACPs demonstrated an eosinophil cationic protein/MPO ratio of < 1, compared to 79.0% of noneosinophilic and 26% of eosinophilic NPs. Principle component and multiple correspondence analyses revealed a neutrophilic and type 1 inflammation pattern in ACPs. Compared to control tissues, edema scores and fibrin deposition were increased, whereas d-dimer and tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) levels were decreased in ACPs and bilateral NPs, with more prominent changes in ACPs even than in eosinophilic NPs. The tPA levels were negatively correlated with IFN-γ, IL-8, and MPO levels in ACPs. Neutrophils were the major cellular source of IFN-γ in ACPs, and the number of IFN-γ+ neutrophils was elevated in ACPs than in control tissues and bilateral eosinophilic and noneosinophilic NPs. Conclusions ACPs are characterized by the neutrophilic and type 1 inflammation endotype. Neutrophil-derived IFN-γ is associated with reduced tPA production in ACPs.
Evaluating factors affecting pellet durability and energy consumption in a pilot feed mill and comparing methods for evaluating pellet durability

A series of experiments was conducted to compare methods used to evaluate the durability of animal feed pellets, as well as to investigate the potential for modeling the effects of formulation and processing factors on both pellet durability index (PDI) and pelleting energy consumption, measured in kilowatt hours per ton (kWh/ton). Seven different factors, including ground corn particle size, added fat level, inclusion of distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), feed rate, steam conditioning temperature, conditioner retention time, and pellet die thickness (L:D ratio) were examined. Each factor was evaluated at two levels, and treatments were developed in order that all factor to factor comparisons could be made. Pellet samples were analyzed according to the standard method as described in ASAE S269.4, a modification of this method, and by using the NHP100 pellet tester set to each of its four testing intervals (30, 60, 90, and 120 seconds). The standard method was found to provide the most consistent and repeatable determinations of pellet durability, and was found to correlate well with the modified method, as well as with the NHP100 results at 30 and 60 seconds. Physical attributes of feed pellets, such as pellet hardness, bulk density, and moisture content were found to have significant, but weak correlations with pellet quality. Pellet quality was found to be significantly influenced by all factors other than ground corn particle size and feed rate. Higher fat level, lower conditioning temperature, and the thinner pellet die most significantly lowered pellet quality, with increasing effect respectively. A regression model was developed that was able to predict pellet durability within an average of 1.1 PDI. Pelleting energy consumption was found to be significantly influenced by all seven factors, with the higher fat level, thinner pellet die, and higher conditioning temperature most improving efficiency, with increasing effect respectively. A regression model was developed that was able to predict energy consumption within an average of 0.3 kWh/ton. The successful creation of regression equations demonstrates that there is potential for modeling and optimizing pellet quality and energy consumption within a pelleting operation. EVALUATING FACTORS AFFECTING PELLET DURABILITY AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION IN A PILOT FEED MILL AND COMPARING METHODS FOR EVALUATING PELLET DURABILITY
A proposed strategy for the validation of ground-water flow and solute transport models

Ground-water flow and transport models can be thought of as a combination of conceptual and mathematical models and the data that characterize a given system. The judgment of the validity or invalidity of a model depends both on the adequacy of the data and the model structure. This report proposes a validation strategy for testing both components independently. The strategy is based on the philosophy that a model cannot be proven valid, only invalid or not invalid. In addition, the authors believe that a model should not be judged in absence of its intended purpose. Hence, a flow and transport model may be invalid for one purpose but not invalid for another. 9 refs.
Melatonin-Mediated Colonic Microbiota Metabolite Butyrate Prevents Acute Sleep Deprivation-Induced Colitis in Mice

Radical cure colitis is a severe public health threat worldwide. Our previous studies have confirmed that melatonin can effectively improve gut microbiota disorder and mucosal injury caused by sleep deprivation (SD). The present study further explored the mechanism whereby exogenous melatonin prevented SD-induced colitis. 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing and metabolomics analysis were used to explore the correlation between SD-induced colitis and intestinal microbiota and metabolite composition in mice. Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) and melatonin or butyrate supplementation tests verified the core role of gut microbiota in melatonin-alleviating SD-induced colitis. Further, in vitro tests studied the modulatory mechanism of metabolite butyrate. The results demonstrated that SD leads to reductions in plasma melatonin levels and colonic Card9 expression and consequent occurrence of colitis and gut microbiota disorder, especially the downregulation of Faecalibacterium and butyrate levels. The FMT from SD-mice to normal mice could restore SD-like colitis, while butyrate supplementation to SD-mice inhibited the occurrence of colitis, but with no change in the plasma melatonin level in both treatments. However, melatonin supplementation reversed all inductions in SD-mice. In intestinal epithelial cells, the inflammatory ameliorative effect of butyrate was blocked with pretreatments of HDAC3 agonist and HIF-1α antagonist but was mimicked by GSK-3β and p-P65 antagonists. Therefore, the administration of MLT may be a better therapy for SD-induced colitis relative to butyrate. A feasible mechanism would involve that melatonin up-regulated the Faecalibacterium population and production of its metabolite butyrate and MCT1 expression and inhibited HDAC3 in the colon, which would allow p-GSK-3β/β-catenin/HIF-1α activation and NF-κB/NLRP3 suppression to up-regulate Card9 expression and suppress inflammation response.
Unified Transformer Multi-task Learning for Intent Classification with Entity Recognition

Intent classification (IC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) are arguably the two main components needed to build a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine, which is a main component of conversational agents. The IC and NER components are closely intertwined and the entities are often connected to the underlying intent. Current research has primarily focused to model IC and NER as two separate units, which results in error propagation, and thus, sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective novel framework for NLU where the parameters of the IC and the NER models are jointly trained in a consolidated parameter space. Text semantic representations are obtained from popular pre-trained contextual language models, which are fine-tuned for our task, and these parameters are propagated to other deep neural layers in our framework leading to a faithful unified modelling of the IC and NER parameters. The overall framework results in a faithful parameter sharing when the training is underway, leading to a more coherent learning. Experiments on two public datasets, ATIS and SNIPS, show that our model outperforms other methods by a noticeable margin. On the SNIPS dataset, we obtain a 1.42% improvement in NER in terms of the F1 score, and 1% improvement in intent accuracy score. On ATIS, we achieve 1.54% improvement in intent accuracy score. We also present qualitative results to showcase the effectiveness of our model.
A Bio-economic Feasibility Model for Remote Setting: Potential for Oyster Aquaculture in Virginia

A bio-economic model in the form of an interactive enterprise budget was constructed and tuned using empirical data to assess, practically, the feasibility of extensive oyster culture in Virginia using remote setting production techniques to produce spat-on-shell. Data was collected from ten sites located in various areas of the Virginia portion of Chesapeake Bay. If data collected during this study are typical, remote setting based oyster culture is biologically and economically feasible. Remote setting success, as measured by the ratio of surviving spat at planting to the quantity of larvae used at setting, was highly variable with a range from 0-24% and a mean of 7%. Setting rate over 5% is sufficient for economically viable spat-on-shell production. Growout duration to harvest size was estimated by fitting the Bosch and Shabman growth function to empirical estimates of growth from planting to approximately 13 months of age. This function predicts that 80% of surviving oysters reach market size (>76mm) in approximately 30 months. Survival to harvest size (30 months) was estimated by fitting the Weibull function to empirical estimates of survival from planting to 13 months of age, and estimated a mean of 21% with a range from 9-33% among growout sites. Wiebull parameter estimates were A,=0.67±0.14 and y=0.44±0.01 (±SE) with R2=0.80. Survival to one year was found to be density dependent with lower survival significantly correlated (a=0.1) with higher spat count per shell (-0.469, p=0.09). Infrastructure costs for a remote setting facility capable of producing approximately 3,000 bushels annually were modest with a mean of $9,750 and a range from $8,300 to $17,750. Labor requirements for producing one bushel of spat-onshell ranged from 0.18 to 1.05 with a mean of 0.45 man hours per bushel. Cost distribution predicted by the bio-economic model was as follows: 1% for facility set-up, 6% for site preparation, 30% for larvae purchase, 12% for setting labor and materials, and 51% for harvest. Given the most probable parameterization of the model, and using empirical estimates derived in this study, the predicted cost of producing, planting, and harvesting one bushel of market size oysters was $21.40. Assuming a market value of $35.00 for a bushel of market size oysters, this is a return of $13.60 per bushel. A Bio-Economic Feasibility Model for Remote Setting: Potential for Oyster Aquaculture in Virginia
Enhancing the e-commerce experience through haptic feedback interaction

The sense of touch is important in our everyday lives and its absence makes it difficult to explore and manipulate everyday objects. Existing online shopping practice lacks the opportunity for physical evaluation, that people often use and value when making product choices. However, with recent advances in haptic research and technology, it is possible to simulate various physical properties such as heaviness, softness, deformation, and temperature. The research described here investigates the use of haptic feedback interaction to enhance e-commerce product evaluation, particularly haptic weight and texture evaluation. While other properties are equally important, besides being fundamental to the shopping experience of many online products, weight and texture can be simulated using cost-effective devices. Two initial psychophysical experiments were conducted using free motion haptic exploration in order to more closely resemble conventional shopping. One experiment was to measure weight force thresholds and another to measure texture force thresholds. The measurements can provide better understanding of haptic device limitation for online shopping in terms of the availability of different stimuli to represent physical products. The outcomes of the initial psychophysical experimental studies were then used to produce various absolute stimuli that were used in a comparative experimental study to evaluate user experience of haptic product evaluation. Although free haptic exploration was exercised on both psychophysical experiments, results were relatively consistent with previous work on haptic discrimination. The threshold for weight force discrimination represented as downward forces was 10 percent. The threshold for texture force discrimination represented as friction forces was 14.1 percent, when using dynamic coefficient of friction at any level of static coefficient of friction. On the other hand, the comparative experimental study to evaluate user experience of haptic product information indicated that haptic product evaluation does not change user performance significantly. However, although there was an increase in the time taken to complete the task, the number of button click actions tended to decrease. The results showed that haptic product evaluation could significantly increase the confidence of shopping decision. Nevertheless, the availability of haptic product evaluation does not necessarily impose different product choices but it complements other selection criteria such as price and appearance. The research findings from this work are a first step towards exploring haptic-based environments in e-commerce environments. The findings not only lay the foundation for designing online haptic shopping but also provide empirical support to research in this direction.
Relative Toxicity of Arsenite and Arsenate on Early Seedling Growth and Photosynthetic Pigments of Rice

Arsenic is a potential contaminant of groundwater as well as soil in many regions of the world. Elevated soil arsenic levels resulting from long-term use of arsenic contaminated ground water for irrigation may inhibit seed germination and seedling establishment of rice, the country’s main food crop. An experiment was conducted to study the effect of different forms of arsenic on growth and photosynthetic pigments of rice plants. For this purpose rice seedlings were grown hydroponically with half strength of modified Hoagland nutrient solution toxified with different doses of arsenate and arsenite namely 0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 ppm. Germination percent of rice seeds and photosynthetic pigment content of rice seedling decreased significantly with increase in concentration of arsenic of both the forms. Growth parameters affected more seriously in arsenite treated plants than arsenate treated plants.
Real-World Frequency of Use of Automotive Lighting Equipment

Abstract This study provides information about average annual use of the following automotive lighting equipment by U.S. drivers: low- and high-beam headlamps, turn signals, and stop, back-up, parking, sidemarker, and tail lamps. The data were collected as part of a naturalistic field study of crash warning systems. Eighty-seven randomly selected drivers from southeastern Michigan were provided with instrumented research vehicles (11 identical 2003 Nissan Altimas) for periods averaging 26 days and instructed to drive the vehicles as their personal vehicles. The results are presented for each lamp type in terms of the average annual hours of use and minutes used per 100 km driven. These findings are discussed in relation to the rated life of various lamps and the average life of vehicles in the U.S. License plate, parking, sidemarker, and tail lamps were the most frequently used automotive lighting equipment, averaging just over 100 hours per year. The least used lamps were back-up lamps, which were used less than five hours per year. Average annual hours of lamp use decreased with increasing driver age. While rates of use for stop, turn signal, and back-up lamps were similar for females and males, male drivers accrued 34 percent more hours of nighttime driving than female drivers, while using their high beams about half as often.
CFD modeling of two-phase boiling flows in the slug flow regime with an interface capturing technique

The objective of this thesis was to improve the commercial CFD software Ansys Fluent to obtain a tool able to perform accurate simulations of flow boiling in the slug flow regime. The achievement of a reliable numerical framework allows a better understanding of the bubble and flow dynamics induced by the evaporation and makes possible the prediction of the wall heat transfer trends. In order to save computational time, the flow is modeled with an axisymmetrical formulation. Vapor and liquid phases are treated as incompressible and in laminar flow. By means of a single fluid approach, the flow equations are written as for a single phase flow, but discontinuities at the interface and interfacial effects need to be accounted for and discretized properly. Ansys Fluent provides a Volume Of Fluid technique to advect the interface and to map the discontinuous fluid properties throughout the flow domain. The interfacial effects are dominant in the boiling slug flow and the accuracy of their estimation is fundamental for the reliability of the solver. Self-implemented functions, developed ad-hoc, are introduced within the numerical code to compute the surface tension force and the rates of mass and energy exchange at the interface related to the evaporation. Several validation benchmarks assess the better performances of the improved software. Various adiabatic configurations are simulated in order to test the capability of the numerical framework in modeling actual flows and the comparison with experimental results is very positive. The simulation of a single evaporating bubble underlines the dominant effect on the global heat transfer rate of the local transient heat convection in the liquid after the bubble transit. The simulation of multiple evaporating bubbles flowing in sequence shows that their mutual influence can strongly enhance the heat transfer coefficient, up to twice the single phase flow value.