Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VOProof: Efficient zkSNARKs from Vector Oracle Compilers

The design of zkSNARKs is increasingly complicated and requires familiarity with a broad class of cryptographic and algebraic tools. This complexity in zkSNARK design also increases the difficulty in zkSNARK implementation, analysis, and optimization. To address this complexity, we develop a new workflow for designing and implementing zkSNARKs, called VOProof. In VOProof, the designer only needs to construct a Vector Oracle (VO) protocol that is intuitive and straightforward to design, and then feeds this protocol to our VO compiler to transform it into a fully functional zkSNARK. This new workflow conceals most algebraic and cryptographic operations inside the compiler, so that the designer is no longer required to understand these cumbersome and error prone procedures. Moreover, our compiler can be fine-tuned to compile one VO protocol into multiple zkSNARKs with different tradeoffs. We apply VOProof to construct three general-purpose zkSNARKs targeting three popular representations of arithmetic circuits: the Rank-1 Constraint System (R1CS), the Hadamard Product Relation (HPR), and the PLONK circuit. These zkSNARKs have shorter and more intuitive descriptions, thus are easier to implement and optimize compared to prior works. To evaluate their performance, we implement a Python framework for describing VO protocols and compiling them into working Rust code of zkSNARKs. Our evaluation shows that the VOProof-based zkSNARKs have competitive performance, especially in proof size and verification time, e.g., both reduced by roughly 50% compared to Marlin (Chiesa et al., EUROCRYPT 2020). These improvements make the VOProof-based zkSNARKs more preferable in blockchain scenarios where the proof size and verification time are critical.
Developmental instability as an indicator of environmental stress in the Pacific hake (Merluccius

bility mIl has been proposed as an inexpensive, quickly applied, and sensitive indicator of stress that can be utilized in early warning and in monitoring anthropogenic impacts on fish and other animals and plants. A problem arises, however, to the extent that natural stressors confound the effects of human-in duced disturbances. Our objective in this work was to investigate whether a natural stressor, in the form of EI Nino conditions, contributed to DI in the Pacific hake. Right-left (fluctuating> asymmetry of otolith length, width, growth rate, and weight, as well as right-left otolith shape differences, were used as mea sures of DI. Results show that in deed EI Nino disrupts development, indicating stress. This outcome sug gests that DI, as an early warning and monitoring tool for stress, must be used with caution.
Digital Commons@Georgia Southern Reclamation of Fused Silica From Investment Shells Used for Casting Steel

Fused silica is widely used for investment casting shell molds. Fused silica shells are discarded after being used for casting one time. This is due to the transformation of fused silica to beta cristobalite above 1652℉ (900℃). To reduce cost and waste of investment casting foundries, this study is exploring a method to inhibit transformation of fused silica and reclaim it from high temperature investment casting shells. This research has employed firing to minimalize fused silica transformation to cristobalite. The phase transformation is minimalized due to sintering and coarsening of the particles during firing. Coarsening reduces surface area to volume ratio of the particles. This reduces the available energy to activate phase transformation. In this study, the strength of shells after various firing conditions was measured to understand how strength is affected when particles are coarsened to prevent phase transformation. It was concluded that densification, over sintering, phase transformation, and particle growth have competing effects on shell strength. Particularly, it was found that over sintering can compromise shell strength in as few as 3 hours at higher temperatures. Consequently, more layers may need to be added to increase strength of shells that will be fired for long periods of time. This will increase processing time. Coarsening of particles did not inhibit phase transformation. This is thought to be due to the amount of sodium in the shell building material, which encourages phase transformation. The author suggests future researchers to utilize a colloidal binder system that has lower sodium content (<0.22wt%).
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Work accidents, injuries, and illnesses are serious problems in organizations. Rates show that, despite efforts to contain these events, accidents still happen in industries, with all the implied costs for companies. ISO 45001:2018 appears on the international scene with the main goal of preventing occupational risks and those related to health within organiza tions, betting on continuous improvement through the standardization of an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OSHMS). These systems are linked to results that generate positive effects when introduced in an organization, impacting both safety and productivity. This systematic review aimed to define the indicators and results related to the implementation of OSHMS through OHSAS 18001 and ISO 45001, seeking to point out the indicators related to OSHMS, categorize such indicators, and compare which OSHMS operates better. This is a systematic literature review that uses the PRISMA protocol (Gul, M., 2018), thus defining a flow with four phases for the search of the selected studies from their identification, selection, and eligibility to inclusion. In this search, inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to 344 articles, leaving 28 studies that made up the pre sent review. Because it is a relatively new standard, there were few articles reviewed that evaluated the indicators from ISO 45001. From the review, it was possible to see that the indicators to monitor the performance of the OSHMS must be aligned with the company’s practices, and it was also seen that the results from the implementation of an OSHMS will be linked to how much the company is involved with the system. This work is essential to understand how management systems in health and safety at work should be monitored through metrics that are often already established by corporations.
Using splines in the application of the instantaneous profile method for the hydrodynamic characterization of a tropical agricultural Vertisol

: An important aspect in the study and understanding of the physical phenomena involved in 0.02262 cm 3 cm -3 at 0.9 m depth for h(θ) relations, and in all cases, the SRMSE k values are less than 0.0018 m day -1 for K(θ) relationships. The results reveal the utility of splines in the IPM for characterizing the soil profile K(θ) relationships in field studies, as well as the need for more research to the generation of pedotransfer functions in tropical Vertisols.
ImageNet suffers from dichotomous data difﬁculty

“The power of a generalization system follows directly from its biases” (Mitchell 1980). Today, CNNs are incredibly powerful generalisation systems—but to what degree have we understood how their inductive bias inﬂuences model decisions? We here attempt to disentangle the various aspects that determine how a model decides. In particular, we ask: what makes one model decide differently from another? In a meticulously controlled setting, we ﬁnd that (1.) irrespective of the network architecture or objective (e.g. self-supervised, semi-supervised, vision transformers, recurrent models) all models end up with a similar decision boundary. (2.) To understand these ﬁndings, we analysed model decisions on the ImageNet validation set from epoch to epoch and image by image. We ﬁnd that the ImageNet validation set suffers from dichotomous data difﬁculty (DDD): For the range of investigated models and their accuracies, it is dominated by 46.0% “trivial” and 11.5% “impossible” images. Only 42.5% of the images are responsible for the differences between two models’ decision boundaries. The impossible images are not driven by label errors. (3.) Finally, humans are highly accurate at predicting which images are “trivial” and “impossible” for CNNs (81.4%). Taken together, it appears that ImageNet suffers from dichotomous data difﬁculty. This implies that in future comparisons of brains, machines and behaviour, much may be gained from investigating the decisive role of images and the distribution of their difﬁculties.
Droplet Image Reconstruction Based on Generative Adversarial Network

In the digital microfluidic experiments, the improper adjustments of the camera focus and background illumination lead to the phenomena of low illumination and blurred edges in the droplet image, which seriously interferes with information acquisition. Removing these blurred factors is an essential pretreatment step before information extraction. In this paper, a generative adversarial network model combining multi-scale convolution and attention mechanism is proposed to reconstruct the droplet image. The feature reconstruction module in generator can reconstruct the image feature maps from multiple scales. The fusion module is used to fuse the multi-scale feature maps into a reconstructed sharp image. The new model was trained on the data set which was made by the Style Transfer. Experimental results show that the proposed model can significantly improve the visual quality of images, effectively reduce the blur and improve the background illumination.
Central Black Hole Mass in the Distant Tidal Disruption Event Candidate of Swift J2058.4+0516

In this article, the central black hole (BH) mass in the distant tidal disruption event (TDE) of Swift J2058.4+0516, the second candidate of relativistic jet birth related to a TDE, is estimated. Swift J2058.4+0516 has quite different BH masses estimated through different indirect methods in the literature. Therefore, it is necessary and interesting to determine the central BH mass in Swift J2058.4+0516 by another independent method. Here, based on the theoretical TDE model applied to describe the long-term time-dependent X-ray variabilities of Swift J2058.4+0516, the central BH mass can be well determined to be around 1.05−0.29+0.39×105M⊙ , after considering the suggested intrinsic beaming effects from such relativistic jets tightly related to TDEs. Moreover, Swift J2058.4+0516 is a unique object in the space of BH masses versus energy transfer efficiencies of the reported TDE candidates, providing interesting clues to detect and/or anticipate candidates of relativistic TDEs that cause the birth of relativistic jets.
Kinematic Decomposition of the H i Gaseous Component in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We perform a profile analysis of the combined H i data cube of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) from observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Parkes radio telescope. For the profile analysis, we use a newly developed algorithm that decomposes individual line profiles into an optimal number of Gaussian components based on a Bayesian nested sampling. The decomposed Gaussian components are then classified into kinematically cold, warm, and hot gas components based on their velocity dispersion. The estimated masses of the kinematically cold, warm, and hot gas components are ∼12.2%, ∼58.3%, and ∼29.5% of the total H i mass of the LMC, respectively. Our analysis reveals the highly complex H i structure and kinematics of the LMC that are seen in previous studies but in a more quantitative manner. We also extract the undisturbed H i gas bulk motions and derive new H i gas bulk rotation curves of the LMC by applying a 2D tilted-ring analysis. In contrast to previously derived H i rotation curves, the newly derived bulk rotation curves are much more consistent with the carbon star kinematics, with rotation velocity linearly increasing in the inner part and reaching a maximum of ∼60 km s−1 at the outermost measured radius. By comparing the lower bulk rotation curves with previous studies, we conclude that there is a lower dynamical contribution of dark matter in the central part of the LMC.
The impact of seasonal changes on tidal water quality in acid sulfate soils for rice cultivation and water management strategies in South Kalimantan, Indonesia

Water management is the leading key to success in tidal swamp rice farming of acid sulfate soils toward seasonal and climate changes to increase rice productivity for overcoming the threat of food crisis. This study aimed to assess and know the dynamics of tidal water quality from the dry peak season to the rainy season’s peak and the best practices on tidal water management strategies for rice cultivation in acid sulfate soils. Measurement started from the peak of the dry season to that of the rainy season, carried out every month at the spring and neap tides. The first measurement was conducted in the Ray 5 Channel located 3 km from the Barito River, hourly for 24 hours. The second one was performed every kilometer from the Barito’s Riverbanks up to 8 km during high and low tides. The main parameters measured were pH and electrical conductivity (EC). The results explained that water quality in tidal lands dynamically fluctuated, spatially, and temporally, hourly, daily, and monthly. Spatially, good water quality is only found at locations 0-4km on the water channel from the Barito River. The water quality decreases farther from the estuary channel and towards the rain peak. The best water quality in the channel occurs at the in-situ tide peak, usually for 2-3hours closest to or from the highest tide. However, the water quality is very acidic, with the pH∼3 value often overflowing the land at the height of the rainy season. This research can be used as a guide in water management in acid sulfate soils and other similar locations. Proper management and location-specific and compatible water systems are proposed to ensure good quality water can optimally improve agricultural success in tidal swamps of acid sulfate soils, namely by holding backwater during the dry season, water drain from the swampland in the rainy season, with leaching and flushing at the beginning rain, and closing the floodgates from the poor water quality.
Bidirectional Attention Flow Using Answer Pointer and QANet

Machine comprehension and question answering have been very popular over the past few years in the natural language processing community. In this work, we choose the SQUAD default project and we improve the baseline BiDAF model with character level embedding. We also implement and improve the QANet [1] model, and explore both a lightweight model and a larger model with more parameters. In addition, we also implement the Answer Pointer model proposed by the work [2] and replace the regular output layers in both BiDAF and QANet with our specially designed Answer Pointer output layer, and perform experiments on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset. We observe that the large QANet with character embedding and Answer Pointer achieve the best results with 68.29 F1 score and 64.98 EM score on the development dataset, and 64.87 F1 score and 61.32 EM score on the test dataset.
The Effectiveness of Advanced Practice Nurses with Respect to Complex Chronic Wounds in the Management of Venous Ulcers

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of advanced practice nurses with respect to complex chronic wounds (APN-CCWs) in the care of patients with venous ulcers. A multicentric, quasi-experimental pre-post study was conducted without a control group in the sanitary management areas where the APN-CCW program is being piloted. The intervention consisted of a mass training of clinical nurses from the participating districts on the proper management of injuries and the use of compression therapy. The data were collected through a specifically constructed questionnaire with questions regarding descriptive variables of injuries and their treatment. A total of 643 professionals responded (response rate of 89.1%), attending to a total population of 707,814 inhabitants. An increase in multilayer bandage use by 15.67%, an increase in elastic bandage use by 13.24%, and a significant decrease in the referral of patients to consultation with hospital specialists was achieved, from 21.08% to 12.34%. The number of patients referred to the APNs was 13.25%, which implied a resolution rate of 94.08% of their injuries. In conclusion, the coordination by the APN-CCWs in patients with venous ulcers was effective in improving the continuity of care, in the optimization of resources, and in their care role.
QANet for Reading Comprehension

In this project, we built a non-pre-trained model for Question Answering task for SQuAD 2.0 dataset. Our primary contribution is a re-implementation of the original QANet architecture which outperforms BiDAF model. In particular, we showed that enriching input features by adding charcter-level embedding and other token features such as Part-of-Speech, Named Entity Recognition and Term Frequency can lead to significant improvements over the baseline architecture. We apply these enhancements to both BiDAF and QANet to study the generalizability of this approach. Additionally, we also study further extensions, such as modifying the output layer and data augmentation. Finally, we take an ensemble of our best performing models, which achieves a score of 72.5/69.9/77 F1/EM/AvNA score on the dev set and 69.73/67.22 F1/EM on the test set.
ESTIMATION OF NATURAL MORTALIlY IN FISH STOCKS: A REVIEW

The instantaneous rate ofnatural mortality 1M I is an important but poorly quantified parameter in most mathematical models of fish stock dynamics. This report reviews methods used commonly to estimate M for fish stocks. sensitivity of some common fishery models to values chosen for M. and evidence refuting the common assumption that a constant value can be an adequate approximation of M within single stocks.
INFORMATION CONSISTENCY OF STOCHASTIC KRIGING AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

In this paper, we introduce the concept of information consistency for Bayesian Gaussian process models and further provide the information consistency results for stochastic kriging (SK). It is found that, to ensure information consistency of SK, the budget allocated should grow in a fashion that is commensurate with the smoothness level of the mean response function to estimate, as the number of design points approaches inﬁnity. Moreover, it is recommended that an experiment design consist of a relatively large number of design points with a few replications at each when given a ﬁxed budget to expend.
Implemention and Analysis of Character-level Embeddings, Self-attention, and R-NET on BiDAF for QA on SQuAD 2.0

Question Answering (QA) is an important task in the field of NLP. From chat bots to social media to medical text analysis, there are countless crucial applications of QA in the real world. In this paper, we aim to improve upon a given Bi-Directional Attention Flow (BiDAF) model for the task of QA on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset, by implementing various features such as character embeddings, self-attention, and another model’s embeddings/encoding layers. We saw general improvement in our model’s performance as we implemented features, with the exception of the other model’s embeddings/encoding layers by themselves, which saw slightly worse performance. We analyzed our results and submitted our best model, which had tweaked hyperparameters, to the Gradescope Default Final Project - SQuAD track test leaderboard, where we got an EM score of 62.06 and an FM score of 65.14, an improvement on the provided baseline model’s performance on the dev leaderboard. Finally, we qualitatively analyzed how our best model performed on different question types.
QAN-et al.: Exploring Extensions on QANet

In this project, we implement a question answering model for the SQuAD 2.0 dataset that improves upon the performance of Seo et al.’s BiDAF baseline. We implement from scratch an improved BiDAF baseline using character-level embed-dings, a high performing QANet-based architecture, and the following variations on that model: an additional module that predicts answerability, conditioned end predictions, learnable positional encodings, and relative positional encodings. With a weighted BiDAF and QANet ensemble (using learnable position encodings, conditioned end prediction variatons, and more) we achieve a significant performance increase over the baseline, reaching 3rd place on both the development set leaderboard and the test set leaderboard.
PROCESS OF CHANGE IN DBT ADAPTED FOR PFID 1 Title: Adapting dialectical behaviour therapy in forensic learning disability services: A grounded theory informed study of "what works". Authors:

BACKGROUND: Emerging evidence indicates effectiveness of dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) for people with intellectual disabilities (PWID) in forensic settings; however, little is known about “what works” facilitating engagement and change. METHODS: Eleven interviews were conducted with nine service-users across two secure inpatient services. Grounded theory was used to develop a model of perceived engagement and change. RESULTS: The model provides insights into how change occurs during DBT delivered in forensic settings. DBT constitutes a challenging journey, yet provides the motivation and means to address individual’s intra/interpersonal aggression and progress towards release. Participants experienced engaging with DBT as difficult and coercive, moving from compliance and avoidance to acceptance and change. Key factors included participants’ motivation, beliefs about safety and ability to change, and interactions with staff. CONCLUSION: Recommendations for increasing intrinsic motivation, reducing perceived coercion and distress, and for future research to address potential aversive elements and enhance effectiveness.
A retrospective analysis of honey bee (Apis mellifera) pesticide toxicity data

Current USEPA ecological risk assessments for pesticide registration include a determination of potential risks to bees. Toxicity data are submitted to support these assessments and the USEPA maintains a large database containing acute and chronic toxicity data on adult and larval honey bees (Apis mellifera), which USEPA considers a surrogate for Apis and non-Apis bees. We compared these toxicity data to explore possible trends. This analysis indicated a significant correlation between acute contact and oral median lethal dose (LD50) values for adult honey bees (ρ = 0.74, p <0.0001). Using default EPA modeling assumptions, where exposure for an individual bee is roughly 12x lower through contact than through ingestion, the analysis indicates that the oral LD50 is similarly if not more protective of the contact LD50 for the majority of pesticides and modes of action evaluated. The analysis also provided evidence that compounds with a lower acute toxicity for adults through contact and oral exposure pathways may still be acutely toxic for larvae. The acute toxicity of herbicides and fungicides was higher for larvae relative to oral and contact toxicity for adult honey bees for the same compounds and the no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) from chronic toxicity studies were lower for larvae relative to adults, indicating increased sensitivity of larvae. When comparing 8-day LD50 values between single dose larval acute studies to those derived from repeat dose 22-day larval chronic toxicity studies, the LD50 values derived from chronic studies were significantly lower than those from acute toxicity tests (Z = -37, p = 0.03).