Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of the statistics of second-order polarization-mode dispersion on system performance

Summary form only given. Increasing the bit rate to 10 Gbit/s and beyond in a single channel for the terrestrial optical links is one of today's major challenges. At 10 Gbit/s, both first- and second-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) are important impairments, which have been already studied theoretically and experimentally. It has already been shown that the impact of second-order PMD is magnified by chromatic dispersion. However, the statistical point of view was not analyzed. In this paper, we will first show the statistics of second-order PMD, and we will explain why second-order PMD may not significantly reduce the maximum tolerable PMD if only first-order was considered.
The history of ventilation and temperature control

About the Author John E. Janssen chaired Standards Project Committee (SPC) 62, which developed ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 621989, Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Qualtiy and also served on the SPC that wrote Standard 621981. Until his retirement, he was a principal research fellow at Honeywell. Janssen has authored several Journal articles, including The V in ASHRAE, An Historical Perspective as part of ASHRAEs Centennial series. W
Non-genetic effects on milk yield and composition in altamurana sheep

The effect of year of production, parity and lambing type on milking yield and milk composition (fat, protein, lactose and solids-not-fat percentages) were examined on 391 milk records of 179 Altamurana ewes, collected from 1993 to 1999. The quantitative traits analyzed were suckled milk (SM), milk yield (MY), total milk yield (TMY) and lactation length (LL). Data were analysed with a mixed linear model assuming animal models that included the fixed effect of year, parity and lambing type and the random effect of ewe. Results showed that year of production affected quantitative and qualitative traits; parity too affected all investigated traits, except for MY and LL; lambing type influenced all milk traits (P < 0.0001) except for LL.
Effect of hygienic behavior on resistance to chalkbrood disease ( Ascosphaera apis ) in Africanized bee colonies ( Apis mellifera )

: The objective was to evaluate the hygienic behavior (HB) of Africanized honeybees ( Apis mellifera ) and its impact on resistance to ascospherosis caused by Ascosphaera apis . The HB and the population of adult bees and brood of 50 colonies were evaluated. In addition, colonies with high (>95 %) and low (<50 %) HB were inoculated with A. apis and in them, the number of broods with signs of ascospherosis (mummies) was determined for 17 days, data that correlated with their degree of HB. The susceptibility to A. apis of larvae from colonies with high and low HB in a common environment was also evaluated to separate environmental from genotypic effects. The degree of HB between colonies varied significantly (CV>36 %), with 20 % of the colonies showing high HB (≥95 %) and this did not correlate with the population of adult bees and brood. Colonies with high HB had significantly fewer mummies than colonies with low HB and there was a negative correlation between HB and number of mummies (r= -0.63, P = 0.02). In addition, larvae from colonies with high or low HB were equally susceptible to the fungus. These results suggest that HB and larval susceptibility are not associated and that the main protection mechanism against A. apis in Africanized bee populations is HB. Therefore, the selection of colonies with high hygienic behavior could contribute to improving the health and productivity of honeybees.
The experience of using ACE inhibitors and Ca channel blockers in the treatment of hypertension in patients with renal cell carcinoma

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is one of widely spread urological cancers. It is known that approximately 26% of patients with a history of kidney cancer (KC) may have concomitant coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and some other systemic diseases, which may lead to nephrosclerotic changes and the development or progression of the existing CRF. The aim of the study. To study the renal function effects of ACE inhibitors (perindopril arginine) in patients with RCC, both as monotherapy and in combination with Ca channel blockers when conducting treatment of concomitant hypertension (HT). Materials and methods. The study enrolled 38 patients with RCC. All patients were diagnosed with RCC for the first time, with their cancer staged according to the TNM International Classification (Т 1 N 0 M 0 ). during the same period, glomerular filtration rate reduced by 5 ml/min/1.73 m 2 in patients of the first group and by 15 ml/min/1.73 m 2 in patients of the second group.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF DC +/- 500KV EXTRUDED CABLES

(Japan) Summary In this report development of DC +/-500 kV extruded cables and factory joints is described. During the development process, insulating materials with low space charge accumulation and high resistivity under DC voltage were selected. The DC +/-500 kV extruded cables with 23mm insulation thickness were designed and extruded with such insulation materials. Factory joints (FJ) were also developed and fabricated using extrusion moulded joint (EMJ) technology. Both DC +/-500 kV extruded cables and FJs were subjected to initial and long-term tests. The results confirmed that the DC +/-500 kV extruded cables and FJs satisfied the required properties for DC +/-500 kV submarine transmission lines.
Effects of Surfactants on Zein Cast Films for Simultaneous Delivery of Two Hydrophilic Active Components

In order to prepare edible films with outstanding antimicrobials and antioxidants utilized in applications of food and pharmaceutics, in this study, effects of surfactants on zein cast films for simultaneous delivery of lysozyme (LY) and ascorbic acid (AA) were investigated, where sodium alginate (SA), soy lecithin (SL), and Pluronic f-68 (PF-68) were selected as surfactants. FT-IR tests indicated that SL or PF-68 dramatically changed secondary structure of zein composite films, which heightened the irregularity of the composite film and inhibited LY crystallization. Mechanical tests showed that highly flexible films exhibiting elongations between 129% and 157% were obtained when adding PF-68. Compared with the film without emulsifier, zein film containing SL and PF-68 showed approximately 7.51 and 0.55 times lower initial release rates for LY and AA respectively, which significantly improved the controlled release and heightened the anti-microbial and anti-oxidant activities of the film. Finally, emulsified mechanisms of the surfactants in zein films were proposed.
Management of nondysplastic Barrett’s esophagus: When to survey? When to ablate?

Barrett’s esophagus (BE), a precursor for esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), is defined as salmon-colored mucosa extending more than 1 cm proximal to the gastroesophageal junction with histological evidence of intestinal metaplasia. The actual risk of EAC in nondysplastic Barrett’s esophagus (NDBE) is low with an annual incidence of 0.3%. The mainstay in the management of NDBE is control of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) along with enrollment in surveillance programs. The current recommendation for surveillance is four-quadrant biopsies every 2 cm (or 1 cm in known or suspected dysplasia) followed by biopsy of mucosal irregularity (nodules, ulcers, or other visible lesions) performed at 3- to 5-year intervals. Challenges to surveillance include missed cancers, suboptimal adherence to surveillance guidelines, and lack of strong evidence for efficacy. There is minimal role for endoscopic eradication therapy in NDBE. The role for enhanced imaging techniques, artificial intelligence, and risk prediction models using clinical data and molecular markers is evolving.
The Gender Recontest Gap in Elections

IZA DP No. 14981 DECEMBER 2021 The Gender Recontest Gap in Elections* This paper documents an important but mostly overlooked reason for female underrepresentation in politics: gender gaps in the recontest likelihood of candidates. Using hand-collected data on 116,185 candidates in four consecutive local council elections (2001-2016) in a German state, we provide evidence for a gender recontest gap among both incumbent and non-incumbent candidates. Female candidates are 4 to 5 percentage points less likely than male candidates to run again conditional on previous candidacy. Studying mechanisms, we find that women are likely held back by incompatibilities between family obligations and political duties as well as a culture of male dominance in local politics. JEL Classification: D72, D78, J16
The Effects of Total Health Expenditure on Economic Growth in Southern and Western sub-Saharan Africa

: The purpose of this work was to investigate the effects of total health spending on the growth of the economy in Southern and Western Sub-Saharan Africa. The mean group, dynamic fixed effect, and pooled mean group/ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lags) panel data analyses were used to scrutinize the short and long-term effects of total per capita health spending on the growth of the economy. The short-run finding reveals that total health per capital expenditure and life expectancy at birth (LEB) has an upbeat effect on the growth of the economy (LGDP PC) in Southern Africa at all relevant levels. At all significant levels, total health per capital expenditure and life expectancy at birth (LEB) both have an upbeat outcome on the growth of the economy (LGDP PC). The short-run analysis shows that current health per capital spending and government spending has a positive effect on the growth of the economy (LGDP PC) at a 5% significant level in West Africa, while total and current health per capital expenditure has an upbeat effect on economic growth (LGDP PC) at 5% significant level in the long run. Because per-capita health spending has a beneficial impact on the growing economy, more monies should be dedicated to the health sector to increase the quality of healthcare operations.
Robust Optimization and Its Application to Power System Operation

SUMMARY Robust optimization, as one of the risk management techniques, could be applied to the power system operation. This paper introduces the robust optimization concept and two potential applications to power system operation, which include robust unit commitment and robust economic dispatch. Power system operation in the ISO environment typically involves day-ahead planning and real-time operation. In the day-ahead planning period, the system operator normally makes commitment decisions for slow-start units based on the forecasted real-time system condition. However, the increased variability caused by the high penetration of variable resources could result in the actual real-time system condition considerably different from its forecast. Since uncommitted slow-start units are in general unavailable to relieve the imbalance caused by the large forecast error during the real-time operation, a robust commitment decision that can provide the system operator with a wider operating range is desirable. Applying the robust optimization concept, a two-stage robust unit commitment problem is presented in this paper. The first-stage decision is the commitment decision and the second-stage decision is the dispatch decision against different uncertainty realizations. The objective of the robust unit commitment problem is to minimize the total commitment cost and the worst-case dispatch cost. The uncertain parameter considered in the model is the nodal demand, which can be used to represent wind power, demand and interchange uncertainty, etc. The solution methodology and conceptual examples are also discussed. During the real-time operation, system operators maintain system balance and security by dispatching generators, pump-storage units and DR resources. However, the performance of the price sensitive DR and wind power resources may not be completely incorporated in the load forecast, and in turn affects the real-time balance. All imbalance caused by these factors will have to be compensated by the regulation service. Applying robust optimization concept, a robust economic dispatch problem is proposed to ensure the reachability of the secure system condition. The objective of the robust dispatch problem is to minimize the sum of the dispatch cost, the regulation capacity cost and the worst-case regulation performance cost. The resulting economic dispatch solution is feasible under different system loading levels while maintaining the system frequency. The solution algorithm and numerical examples are presented.
Comprehensive RTP modeling and simulation including thermal stress analysis and feature size optical effects

A comprehensive simulation capability to describe RTP related issues has been developed. The simulator describes: 1) The radiative heat transfer in 3D with cylindric symmetry by combined zonal-Monte-Carlo method for arbitrary geometry and for various boundary conditions. The spectrum of tungsten-halogen lamp is modeled realistically and the software allows for analysis of multivariable independent lamp control; 2) Conductive heat transfer in the patterned wafer as a function of patterns (3D representation-crucial for stress analysis) and in the chamber walls (important for temperature uniformity from run to run); 3) 3D wafer warpage and thermal stress analysis of the wafer treated as a laminated plate; 4) Electromagnetic wave interaction with the object of a size comparable to the wave length of radiation for multi-layered nonplanar structures including steps and trenches; 5) Evaluation of emissivity of the wafer with deposited films for optical pyrometry. The software has been applied to various situations of which selected subsequent examples demonstrate its capability. <<ETX>>
The Effect of Strobilanthes crispus on Blood Glucose Levels and Lipid Profile of Streptozotocin-induced Diabetic Rats

BACKGROUND: Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease associated with unhealthy eating patterns, a lack of physical activity, obesity, smoking habits, and family history. Strobilanthes crispus (SC) contains antioxidant compounds known to exert a hypoglycemic effect during long-term interventions in non-diabetic samples. AIM: This study sought to determine the effect of administering the extract of SC leaves on the blood glucose levels and blood serum lipid profiles of streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. METHODS: A total of 30 male Rattus norvegicus rats were divided into control and treatment groups. The control groups consisted of negative (normal rats) and positive controls (diabetic rats), whereas the treatment groups consisted of diabetic rats administered with 3.2% and 16.8% SC leaf extract, and glibenclamide as the drug comparison groups. Blood samples were collected from the rats’ retro-orbital vein for the purposes of glucose level and lipid profile measurement before and after the induction of diabetes with STZ as well as 14 days after the intervention. The collected data were analyzed statistically by means of a one-way analysis of variance continued with Duncan’s multiple range test. RESULTS: The results showed the rats to be hyperglycemic experienced changes in their lipid profiles following the induction of diabetes. The administration of 3.2% SC leaf extract for 14 days reduced the rats’ blood glucose levels, while the effect of the 16.8% SC leaf extract was more pronounced in terms of reducing the rats’ blood glucose levels and improving their lipid profiles (reducing the triglyceride, total cholesterol, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, while increasing the high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels). CONCLUSIONS: This study found 16.8% SC leaf extract to exert a good hypoglycemic effect and leads to an improvement in the lipid profiles in diabetic rats.
Production of Meat and Milk from Grass in the United Kingdom

Grassland accounts for a high proportion of the agricultural area of the United Kingdom, but the significance of its contribution to the nation’s food supply has been questioned. Using representative figures for the composition of UK ruminant livestock diets, we estimated the total production of human-edible protein from grass and forage crops consumed by cattle and sheep. We found that this equates to 21.5 g of protein per person per day, of which 15.2 g comes from milk, 4.71 g from beef and 1.60 g from sheep meat. This represents 45% of the total amount of human-edible animal protein produced in the UK (46.6 g/head) and is equivalent to one-third of the recommended adult human daily protein intake of 64 g/head. Given the growing pressure to produce food in a more resource-efficient manner, grasslands have a valuable role to play in providing food alongside multiple public goods.
Iris Recognition Using Low-Level CNN Layers Without Training and Single Matching

Iris is one of the most accurate biometrics. This has led to the successful development of large-scale applications. However, with population growth, and new international applications, datasets are constantly increasing in size, requiring more robust and faster methods. Many descriptors and feature extractors have been developed to extract features that represent the iris biometric pattern. Most of them have been designed by human experts and require a bit-shifting process to increase their robustness to eye rotations, at the expense of increased matching time. We propose a fast iris recognition method that requires a single matching operation and is based on pre-trained image classification models as feature extractors. Our approach uses the filters of the first layers from Convolutional Neural Networks as feature extractors and does not require fine-tuning for new datasets. Since our selected features extracted from convolutional layers encode the iris surface, they have the advantage of not being restricted to specific spatial positions. Thus, it is not necessary to perform a bit-shifting process in the matching stage, eliminating a significant number of computations. Additionally, to mitigate the effect produced by the mask border in rubber-sheet images, we propose filtering the feature map tensors by masking their channels and selecting the most relevant features. Our method was assessed on the publicly available datasets CASIA Iris Lamp and CASIA Iris Thousand, and showed significant improvement both in accuracy and in matching time.
Evaluation of Stone Matrix Asphalt (SMA) For Airfield Pavements

Stone Matrix Asphalt (SMA) was developed in Germany over 30 years ago. Its success has led to its usage throughout Europe on both highway and airfield pavements. In 1990, an American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) led European Asphalt Study Tour introduced SMA to the United States (U.S.) SMA has demonstrated good performance on highway pavements in the U.S., but has seen little use on airfields. Recently, there has been resurgence in interest in SMA in the U.S. as a more durable paving option than Superpave or other dense-graded mixes. SMA is a gap-graded asphalt mixture with a high percentage (> 70 percent) of coarse aggregate. Gap-graded refers to the fact that SMA mixtures typically have very little material retained on the sand size sieves (e.g. between 2.36 mm and 0.075 mm). SMA is differentiated from dense-graded mixes by its coarse aggregate skeleton, consisting of a limited number of particle sizes, which carries the load. Mastic, consisting of mineral filler, fibers, and asphalt binder, fills the voids between the coarse aggregate skeleton. The percentage by weight passing the 0.075 mm sieve is typically greater than 8 percent. Asphalt contents range from 6 to 7.5 percent by weight of total mix. Fiber, either cellulose or mineral, is generally added to prevent draindown of the binder during construction. SMA has been used extensively on airfields in both China and Norway. Additionally, airfields have been constructed using SMA in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the United States (U.S.). Additional details on specifications and individual projects are provided in reference. The U.S. Air Force constructed SMA runways in Germany and Italy.
Synopsis of Orchidaceae from Fazenda Sete Irmãos: a fragment of Amazon Forest in northwestern Maranhão, Brazil

Abstract This study provides an inventory of the Orchidaceae in one of the most threatened areas of the Brazilian Amazon, situated in the eastern portion of the Belém Endemism Center. A total of 51 species, distributed in 24 genera, are recorded. Epiphytes represent 86% of the species, the remaining are terricolous (6%), hemiepiphytic (6%) or myco-heterotrophic (2%). The most representative genera were Epidendrum (6 spp.) and Maxillaria (5 spp.). This study cites for the first time five genera (Coryanthes, Sarcoglottis, Stelis, Trichosalpinx and Wullschlaegelia) and ten species for the flora of Maranhão, of which four are new records to the Brazilian Northeast. An identification key, photographs of the new records, taxonomic and ecological comments, as well as geographic distribution are provided. The data reinforce the importance of the forest fragments of the Amazon Forest in Maranhão for the conservation of Orchidaceae which is constantly threatened by deforestation in the Belém Endemism Center.
Suicide in cancer patients undergoing palliative care: A report of two cases

Introduction. Suicide represents a major public health problem worldwide, and cancer patients might have vulnerability factors which increase suicide risk. There are multiple factors associated with this tragic outcome, including those stemming from the disease itself, mental illness and social, personal and spiritual factors. Although previous reports have identified a suicide rate which ranges from . 03-7% among cancer patients undergoing palliative care, this has not been studied in Mexico. Objective. This study sought to report the cases of suicide in patients with cancer undergoing palliative care at a large cancer reference center. Method. A retrospective review of records was performed between 2018-2019 for patients treated at the Palliative Care Service of the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología in Mexico City. Records for patients who committed suicide were reviewed to describe factors associated with this outcome. Results. Among all deaths identified during the record review, two were due to suicide (.09%). The patients were one female and one male, 60 and 42 years of age, diagnosed with breast cancer and gastroesophageal junction cancer, respectively, associated with tobacco and alcohol consumption, as well as several economic, social, and familial stress factors. One of the patients was identified as likely having major depressive disorder. Discussion and conclusion. Deaths might be underreported in our population. A systematic evaluation is required in order to establish and detect suicidal behavior risk factors, and a follow-up plan for all these patients.