Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geometry Control System for Exploratory Shape Optimization Applied to High-Fidelity Aerodynamic Design of Unconventional Aircraft

Geometry Control System for Exploratory Shape Optimization Applied to High-Fidelity Aerodynamic Design of Unconventional Aircraft Hugo Gagnon hugo.gagnon@fastmail.fm Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Aerospace Science and Engineering University of Toronto 2015 This thesis represents a step forward to bring geometry parameterization and control on par with the disciplinary analyses involved in shape optimization, particularly high-fidelity aerodynamic shape optimization. Central to the proposed methodology is the non-uniform rational B-spline, used here to develop a new geometry generator and geometry control system applicable to the aerodynamic design of both conventional and unconventional aircraft. The geometry generator adopts a component-based approach, where any number of predefined but modifiable (parametric) wing, fuselage, junction, etc., components can be arbitrarily assembled to generate the outer mold line of aircraft geometry. A unique Python-based user interface incorporating an interactive OpenGL windowing system is proposed. Together, these tools allow for the generation of high-quality, C continuous (or higher), and customized aircraft geometry with fast turnaround. The geometry control system tightly integrates shape parameterization with volume mesh movement using a two-level free-form deformation approach. The framework is augmented with axial curves, which are shown to be flexible and efficient at parameterizing wing systems of arbitrary topology. A key aspect of this methodol-
CFD Simulations as Efficient Tool for the Development and Optimisation of Small-Scale Biomass Furnaces and Stoves

CFD SIMULATIONS AS EFFICIENT TOOL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND OPTIMISATION OF SMALL-SCALE BIOMASS FURNACES AND STOVES Robert Scharler , Claudia Benesch , Kai Schulze, Ingwald Obernberger 1,2,3 1) BIOS BIOENERGIESYSTEME GmbH, Inffeldgasse 21b, A-8010 Graz, Austria Tel: +43 316 48130033, Fax: +43 316 4813004, e-mail: scharler@bios-bioenergy.at 2) BIOENERGY 2020+ GmbH, Inffeldgasse 21b, A-8010 Graz, Austria 3) Institute for Process and Particle Engineering, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 21a, A-8010 Graz, Austria
An Extreme Gradient Boosting Aided Fault Diagnosis Approach: A Case Study of Fuse Test Bench

The health status of a fuse test bench is essential to monitor to ensure quality control of the fuse. A system failure during operation will lead to significant impacts on the final quality of fuses. Thus, it is important to have a fault diagnosis system to detect, classify, and identify the root causes of faults to prevent operation failure. An effective fault diagnosis system should have high accuracy, fast diagnosis time, and interpretable root cause analysis. This article proposes an integrated fault diagnosis system based on extreme gradient boosting for an automated fuse test bench to solve those challenges. The proposed diagnosis system is then validated using the dataset from PHM 2021 Data Challenge. Performance comparison of the fault diagnosis system with other standard approaches in practice is also carried out. Experimental results show that the diagnostic accuracy of the proposed system outperforms several standard fault diagnostic approaches.
Head Pose Estimation in Complex Environment Based on Four-Branch Feature Selective Extraction and Regional Information Exchange Fusion Network

Under the severe situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, masks cover most of the effective facial features of users, and their head pose changes significantly in a complex environment, which makes the accuracy of head pose estimation in some systems such as safe driving systems and attention detection systems impossible to guarantee. To this end, we propose a powerful four-branch feature selective extraction network (FSEN) structure, in which three branches are used to extract three independent discriminative features of pose angles, and one branch is used to extract composite features corresponding to multiple pose angles. By reducing the dimension of high-dimensional features, our method significantly reduces the amount of computation while improving the estimation accuracy. Our convolution method is an improved spatial channel dynamic convolution (SCDC) that initially enhances the extracted features. Additionally, we embed a regional information exchange network (RIEN) after each convolutional layer in each branch to fully mine the potential semantic correlation between regions from multiple perspectives and learn and fuse this correlation to further enhance feature expression. Finally, we fuse the independent discriminative features of each pose angle and composite features from the three directions of channel, space, and pixel to obtain perfect feature expression for each pose angle, and then obtain the head pose angle. We conducted extensive experiments on the controlled environment datasets and a self-built real complex environment dataset (RCE) and the results showed that our method outperforms state-of-the-art single-modality methods and performs on par with multimodality-based methods. This shows that our network meets the requirements of accurate head-pose estimation in real complex environments such as complex illumination and partial occlusion.
Factors affecting the professional skepticism of independent auditors in Viet Nam

Abstract The study investigates the key factors affecting the professional skepticism of independent auditors in Vietnam. The factors that are studied in this research include knowledge and experience, workload, time pressure, and incentives that affect professional skepticism of independent auditors. The authors have utilized quantitative and qualitative analyses in combination with a logistic regression model and other available analytical tools for conducting the research in SPSS software. All the statistics processed in the paper were based on 90 independent Vietnamese auditors in 2021. The results reveal that factors including knowledge, experience, and incentives positively affect professional skepticism, while workload and time pressure negatively impact professional skepticism. The findings suggest Vietnamese lawmakers and auditing firms should regulate annual training courses for auditors to enhance their professional ability and reasonably encourage the auditor’s motivation, while it is necessary to minimize workload and time pressure for auditors in order to maintain and improve the audit quality. This implication could be applied for Vietnamese auditing firms and international auditing firms.
Formicidae fauna in pig carcasses contaminated by insecticide: implications for forensic entomology

T R A C T Corpses in Brazil are commonly hidden in sugarcane plantations in the attempt to delay their finding and hinder the solution of the crime. On the other hand, these plantations are regularly sprayed with insecticides for pest control. Until now no study has reported the effects of insecticides on ant fauna. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that if a body hidden in a monoculture is accidentally contaminated by an insecticide, both the carcass decomposition pattern and the Formicidae fauna will be affected. To accomplish this, pig carcasses contaminated and non-contaminated were placed in a sugarcane monoculture environment and subsequently examined for data collection every 24 hours. The concentration used to contaminate the carcasses was 20 grams per liter of thiamethoxam. The decomposition patterns of contaminated carcasses were changed, in turn affecting the behavior of Formicidae fauna. A total of 5318 ants were collected, 3397 in contaminated carcasses and 1919 in non-contaminated carcasses, and 30 species of 11 genera were identified. According to the analysis, there are no differences between the composition of species between contaminated and non-contaminated carcasses, however, a significant difference was observed in the composition of species along the stages of decomposition between the two types of carcasses. Therefore, our hypothesis has been confirmed, contaminated carcasses undergo changes in their normal pattern of decomposition and the fauna of ants that act on them. As this group of insects has great importance for forensic sciences, the analysis of the experts should
shRNAs Targeting a Common KCNQ1 Variant Could Alleviate Long-QT1 Disease Severity by Inhibiting a Mutant Allele

Long-QT syndrome type 1 (LQT1) is caused by mutations in KCNQ1. Patients heterozygous for such a mutation co-assemble both mutant and wild-type KCNQ1-encoded subunits into tetrameric Kv7.1 potassium channels. Here, we investigated whether allele-specific inhibition of mutant KCNQ1 by targeting a common variant can shift the balance towards increased incorporation of the wild-type allele to alleviate the disease in human-induced pluripotent stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). We identified the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) rs1057128 (G/A) in KCNQ1, with a heterozygosity of 27% in the European population. Next, we determined allele-specificity of short-hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) targeting either allele of this SNP in hiPSC-CMs that carry an LQT1 mutation. Our shRNAs downregulated 60% of the A allele and 40% of the G allele without affecting the non-targeted allele. Suppression of the mutant KCNQ1 allele by 60% decreased the occurrence of arrhythmic events in hiPSC-CMs measured by a voltage-sensitive reporter, while suppression of the wild-type allele increased the occurrence of arrhythmic events. Furthermore, computer simulations based on another LQT1 mutation revealed that 60% suppression of the mutant KCNQ1 allele shortens the prolonged action potential in an adult cardiomyocyte model. We conclude that allele-specific inhibition of a mutant KCNQ1 allele by targeting a common variant may alleviate the disease. This novel approach avoids the need to design shRNAs to target every single mutation and opens up the exciting possibility of treating multiple LQT1-causing mutations with only two shRNAs.
An update to the 2014 nomenclator of Valvatidae

﻿Abstract This contribution is an update to the 2014 compilation of all supra- and (infra-) specific taxa of extant and fossil Valvatidae, a group of freshwater operculate snails near the base of Heterobranchia with a nearly worldwide distribution. This update includes corrections and many additions (two replacement taxon names, 21 mainly fossil taxa previously overlooked, and 37 invalid names) to the 2014 contribution and adds all newly described species (11) during the past eight years. The extensive reference list is directly linked, where possible, to the available electronic source of the cited papers.
Behavior of stainless steel–reinforced concrete piers under lateral impact loading

In this study, stainless steel bars with the same diameter were used to replace ordinary stressed steel bars in reinforced concrete bridge piers. An ultra-high drop hammer impact test system was adopted for multiple horizontal impact tests on two groups of reinforced concrete bridge pier specimens. Based on the study results, it was determined that the maximum impact force of the stainless steel–reinforced concrete specimen, strain occurred in the steel bar and concrete, and the maximum displacement at the specimen’s top was found to be smaller than that before the same diameter replacement under the same impact energy. These results indicate that the stainless steel–reinforced concrete bridge pier specimen may have strong ductility, energy absorption abilities, and impact resistance under the impact load.
An Unsupervised Spectrogram Cross-Correlation Method to Assess ELM Triggering Efficiency by Pellets

The high confinement mode (H-mode) is considered the optimal regime for the production of energy through nuclear fusion for industrial purposes since it allows to increase the energy confinement time of the plasma roughly by a factor of two. Consequently, it has been selected at the moment as the standard scenario for the next generation of devices, such as ITER. However, pressure-driven edge instabilities, known as edge localized modes (ELMs), are a distinct feature of this plasma regime. Their extrapolated thermal and particle peak loads on the plasma-facing components (PFC) of the next generation of devices are expected to be so high as to damage such structures, compromising the normal operations of the reactors themselves. Consequently, the induced loads have to be controlled; this can be achieved by mitigating ELMs. A possibility then lays in increasing the ELMs frequency to lower the loads on the PFCs. As already demonstrated at JET, the pellet pacing of ELMs is considered one of the most promising techniques for such scope, and its optimization is therefore of great interest for present and future operations of nuclear fusion facilities. In this work, we suggest a method to access primary pieces of information to perform statistics, assess and characterize the pacing efficiency. The method, tested on JET data, is based on the clustering (k-means) of convoluted signals, using so-called spectrogram cross-correlation, between the measured pellets and ELMs time traces. Results have also been obtained by taking advantage of a new type of diagnostic for measuring the ELMs dynamic, based on synthetic diamond sensors, faster than the standard spectroscopic cameras used at JET.
Corporate volunteering, positive relationships at work, affective commitment, and work engagement: A mediated moderator model

Purpose: The aim of this study is to test for moderating role of corporate volunteering in relationships between perceived supervisor support, positive relationships at work, work meaningfulness, and work engagement.Methodology/approach: The study is based on a survey conducted on a sample of 724 Polish employees, both involved and non-involved in corporate volunteering.Findings: Results of the study suggest that employee participation in corporate volunteering moderates the link between positive relationships at work and work engagement, and the link between perceived supervisor support and work engagement mediated by positive relationships at work.Implications: Results of the study are consistent with previous studies, which have been proved theoretically by the conservation of resources theory (COR) and self determination theory (SDT). Besides, the findings deliver practical implications. Companies are recommended to design employee-friendly volunteering activities to meet employee needs, and attract those employees who have never participated in volunteering.Originality/value: The study explains the effects of corporate volunteering. It also contributes to the field of organizational behaviors by arguing for the direct and indirect positive relationships between perceived supervisor support and work engagement.Keywords: corporate volunteering, affective commitment, work engagement, positive relationships at workPaper type: Research paper
Effects of Social Media Usage: The Well-Being and Flourishing of Housewives

Motives of social media usage vary and mostly depend on users’ background, interests, profession, and lifestyle. While the usage of social media has grown rapidly, it has caused numerous concerns. The literature on the motivations for women to use social media is edifying, but the results may not reveal the holistic continuum of social media usage motives among Malaysian housewives due to several distinctive and dynamic circumstances of this marginalised group. This study delves into housewives’ motives for social media usage and its effects on their well-being and flourishing based on the uses and gratification theory. Five motives have been proposed, namely escapism, information seeking, friendship maintenance, relationship initiation, and nostalgia, which were then tested for well-being and flourishing. In Study 1, a total of 268 housewives in Malaysia, who are active users of social media in their daily lives were involved in the survey. Data were analysed using SPSS v.23 and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 3.1 applications. Meanwhile Study 2 was conducted by using focus group discussions with ten housewives. The findings of Study 1 revealed that motives of social media usage among housewives have a significant and positive impact on both well-being and flourishing. In contrast, Study 2 found five themes that emerged from the thematic analysis, strengthening relationships, emotional support, encouraging thoughts and characters, side income and support system, and acknowledgement of enrichment. This study provides insight into social media usage motives on women’s well-being and flourishing. Keywords: Motives, social media, well-being, flourishing, housewives.
Investigating Substructure Flexibility in Column-Top Isolation Systems with Elastomeric Bearings

Seismic isolation is a method of earthquake resistant design which has been proven to effectively reduce the damaging effects of earthquakes on buildings as well as the contents within them. However, traditional implementation of an isolation system tends to be expensive. For new construction, rigid diaphragms above and below the isolation layer and construction of a seismic gap contribute to expenses, while retrofit applications also require excavation beneath the building and may need extensive foundation work. To mitigate these major costs bearings may be placed on the tops of columns, forgoing the construction of a seismic gap, additional rigid diaphragm, and foundation work. However, columns under the isolation layer may be flexible, changing the bearing end conditions traditionally assumed. To investigate the effects of flexible end conditions on elastomeric bearings, an analytical model that accounts for translation and rotation of both endplates was developed based on Haringx’s theory. The derivation accounts for compressibility of the rubber and results in a simple stiffness matrix. To evaluate the model, an experimental program testing column-bearing subassemblies under quasi-static cyclic conditions was conducted. Experimental findings show that flexible end conditions can significantly reduce the lateral stiffness of elastomeric bearings. Simulations with the theoretical model compare well under small deformations, but elastic softening of the moment-rotation relationship causes theoretical results to diverge from experimental with larger endplate rotations. The effectiveness of column-top isolation as a retrofit strategy was investigated through nonlinear time history analyses of a moment resisting frame designed to the 1965 National Building Code of Canada and retrofitted with column-top isolation. The frame was simulated under ground motions representative of current hazards and showed that the retrofit resulted in significant reductions in interstory drifts and floor accelerations. Yielding was observed throughout the original frame under maximum considered earthquakes, while the retrofit frame remained elastic.
An investigational Study on Strength Characteristics of Concrete in Rigid Pavements by Partial Replacement of Cement with GGBS

Roads transportation is definitely the life saver of the field and its improvement is a key test. The bituminous asphalts and their needs for long life upkeep and recovery operations are extremely impartment toward the degree for bond solid asphalts. There are many preferences of bond solid asphalts inspect to bituminous asphalts. This wander accentuates on somewhat supplanting bond by method for floor granulated blast furnace slag (ggbs) in rigid (concrete) pavements, because of the reality GGBS supplanted in concrete has a decent risen as a fundamental option texture to traditional cement and has rapidly drawn the solid business. It is keep's the bond, vitality and cost, natural and socio-monetary favorable circumstances. Thus, in this venture is in a matter of seconds energized by utilization of waste material of GGBS having establishing properties, when which can be presented in bond concrete as fractional option of concrete, and without trading off on its quality and toughness. As an approach to be impact in cut of bond substance material and mechanically decrease in discharging the green house gasses to natural as an aftereffect of compound responses in cement. In the meantime completely utilized waste substances. The GGBS is a waste item from the iron assembling undertaking, which could likewise be utilized as fractional substitute of bond in cement and GGBS has solidifying properties. This venture assesses the quality of solidified cement, by method for incompletely changing bond through GGBS at a considerable amount of rates for M20 review of cement at unique quite a while. For this endeavor get ready solid blocks, barrels and shafts are created of five fractional GGBS substitution proportions (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%). The blocks, chambers and bars have been tried on the age of 7, 14 and 28 days with unfaltering water curing circumstance.
CmAim24 Is Essential for Mitochondrial Morphology, Conidiogenesis, and Mycoparasitism in Coniothyrium minitans

Aim24 proteins are involved in mitochondrial biogenesis and accumulate between the two membranes of a mitochondrion. Their function in prokaryotes and filamentous fungi is as yet unknown. In the present study, we characterized an Aim24 protein, CmAim24, in the mycoparasite Coniothyrium minitans and proved its critical role in mitochondrial morphology and function, conidiogenesis, conidial germination, and mycoparasitism to S. sclerotiorum. ABSTRACT Coniothyrium minitans is an important mycoparasite of the notorious phytopathogenic fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. The mycoparasitism system of C. minitans-S. sclerotiorum is unique and important in probing fungi and fungal interactions. Here, we report a conidiation-deficient mutant, ZS-1TN1961, which was screened from a transfer DNA (T-DNA) insertional library of C. minitans. A single-copy gene, encoding a protein with high sequence similarity to Aim24 (altered inheritance of mitochondria protein 24) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was disrupted by T-DNA insertion in this mutant. Gene replacement and complementation experiments confirmed that mutants lacking CmAim24 exhibited significantly reduced conidial production and germination as well as reduced sclerotial mycoparasitic ability. Furthermore, cellular localization assays showed that CmAim24 localized to mitochondria, and abnormal mitochondria were observed in the ΔCmAim24 mutant. The ΔCmAim24 mutant exhibited significant accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and a reduced ATP content in mycelia. In summary, our results suggest that CmAim24 plays a key role in mitochondrial architecture and function, conidiogenesis, and mycoparasitism in C. minitans. IMPORTANCE Aim24 proteins are involved in mitochondrial biogenesis and accumulate between the two membranes of a mitochondrion. Their function in prokaryotes and filamentous fungi is as yet unknown. In the present study, we characterized an Aim24 protein, CmAim24, in the mycoparasite Coniothyrium minitans and proved its critical role in mitochondrial morphology and function, conidiogenesis, conidial germination, and mycoparasitism to S. sclerotiorum.