Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pressurized artificial muscles

Pressurized artificial muscles are reviewed. These actuators consist of stiff reinforcing fibers surrounding an elastomeric bladder and operate using a pressurized internal fluid. The pressurized artificial muscles, known as McKibben actuators or flexible matrix composite actuators, can be applied to a wide array of applications, including prosthetics/orthotics, robots, morphing wing technologies, and variable stiffness structures. Analytical models for predicting the response behavior have used both virtual work methods and continuum mechanics. Various nonlinear control algorithms have been developed, including sliding mode control (SMC), adaptive control, neural networks, etc. In addition to traditional fluid-driving methods, innovative techniques such as chemical and electrical driving techniques are reviewed. With improved manufacturing techniques, the operational life of pressurized artificial muscles has been significantly extended, thus making them suitable for a vast range of potential applications.
A analytics study Mapping Study of Collaborative business intelligence and self-service

Abstract: Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) is an emerging topic for many companies. Casual users should be enabled to independently build their own analyses and reports. This accelerates and simplifies the decision-making processes. Although recent studies began to discuss parts of a self-service environment, none of these present a comprehensive architecture. Following a design science research approach, this study proposes a new self-service oriented BI architecture in order to address this gap. Starting from an in-depth literature review, an initial model was developed and improved by qualitative data analysis from interviews with 18 BI and IT specialists form companies across different industries. The proposed architecture model demonstrates the interaction between introduced self-service elements with each other and with traditional BI components. For example, we look at the integration of collaboration rooms and a self-learning knowledge database that aims to be a source for a report recommender. Keywords: Business Intelligence, Big Data, Architecture, Self-Service, Analytics
Membrane capacitance and characteristic frequency are associated with contractile properties of skeletal muscle.

The cell membrane capacitance (Cm) and characteristic frequencies (fc) of tissues can be obtained using segmental bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy (S-BIS). Higher Cm and lower fc are associated with a larger surface area of skeletal muscle fibers with T-tubules in the tissues. Muscle fiber membrane is one of the major physiological factors that influence surface electromyograms (EMGs) as well as the number of recruited motor units so that the amplitude of surface EMG may be correlated with Cm and fc. The aim of the current study was to examine the association of fc or Cm in the lower leg with contractile and neuromuscular properties in the plantar flexors. We analyzed data from 59 participants (29 women) aged 21-83 years. The Cm, fc, and intracellular water (ICW) in the lower leg were obtained using S-BIS. We measured electrical-evoked torque, maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) torque, and amplitude of EMG normalized by the M wave during MVC contraction. The high Cm group had a significantly lower fc and significantly higher MVC torque, estimated maximum torque, twitch torque, and root mean square (RMS) of EMG normalized by the M wave (EMG:M) in the musculus triceps surae compared to the low Cm group (P < 0.05). Cm was positively and fc was negatively correlated with the nRMS of EMG:M in the triceps surae (P < 0.05). S-BIS recordings can be used to detect changes in skeletal muscle membrane capacitance, which may provide insights into the number of T-tubules. The muscle capacitance measured with S-BIS can be predictive of muscle force generation.
FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING AMONG YOUNG ADULTS: AN AHP APPROACH

In an uncertain economic environment, the decision-making process regarding personal finances relies heavily on personal experience and behavior, and is largely influenced by a variety of psychological and socio-demographic factors. The aim of this paper is to analyze the key factors of the decision-making process regarding financial choices of the population of young adults in the Republic of North Macedonia, and to further explain young people’s motives for the proposed decision and the conditions under which the decision was made. The research was conducted through an AHP-based questionnaire that was distributed to respondents ranging in age from 18 to 35 years. According to the obtained results, the respondents value financial security the most, hence their primary choice is investment in real estate and commodities. Young adults are less inclined to invest, especially in the more complex financial instruments. The developed AHP model will help young people make better, fact-based financial choices.
Helheim Glacier's Terminus Position Controls Its Seasonal and Inter‐Annual Ice Flow Variability

Over the past decade, one of the largest contributors to total ice discharge across the Greenland ice sheet, Helheim Glacier, has experienced large fluctuations in ice velocity. In this study, we simulate the dynamics of Helheim, from 2007 to 2020, using the Ice‐sheet and Sea‐level System Model to identify the drivers of these large changes in ice discharge. By quantifying the impact of individual external forcing and model parameters on Helheim's modeled velocity, we find that the position of the calving front alone explains the dynamic variability of the glacier, as it has a direct and large impact on Helheim's ice velocity. The seasonal to inter‐annual variability of Helheim Glacier is, however, relatively insensitive to the choice of friction law or ice rheology factor. This study shows that more research on calving dynamics and ice–ocean interactions is required to project the future of this sector of Greenland.
Engineering Online: Assessing Innovative Education

This paper presents research on student performance outcomes, satisfaction, and retention rates in a fiber optics course at Arizona State University. Although the course typically has been taught by conventional methods for over 20 years, the instructor offered alternative delivery methods, such as the Web, during the Fall 2000 semester. This course was also unique in that it was comprised of diverse groups such as undergraduates and graduates and on‐ and off‐campus students. Although online students were significantly more satisfied with the course, performance outcomes and retention rates were favorable overall. It is likely that course options and convenience aided in student outcomes and course retention.
Comparing a Basic Set of Drilling Fluid Pressure-Loss Relationships to Flow-Loop and Field Data

This paper is an extension of a recent AADE publication that introduced the Unified model as a practical rheological characterization of Herschel-Bulkley fluids. Equations have been added to handle other important hydraulics issues, including pressure losses in transitional and turbulent flow. By intent, most of the relationships are already in use by at least part of the drilling industry, and are all direct and simple enough to use in a spreadsheet without complicated macros. A primary purpose of this paper is to compare results from this basic set of equations to laboratory and field measurements. Pressure-loss data presented in this paper have been taken from various scale-up pipe and annular flow loops, full-scale yard tests, and an instrumented offshore well. The data encompass laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow regimes in pipe and annular flow (some with eccentricity). Fluid types include synthetic-based fluids and different compositions of water-based fluids. For the most part, the data fit is good enough to suggest that the basic set of relationships is suitable for use in most industry hydraulics programs. Understandably, some fits are better than others, and some issues related to this critical topic still have not been resolved. Comments on these technology gaps and recommendations for further development also are included in this paper.
Salivary Cortisol as a Stress Biomarker and Total Viable Count of Salivary Bacterial Microbiome among COVID-19 Patients

Background: The COVID-19 virus outbreak had a massive effect on many parts of people's lives, as they were advised to quarantine and lockdown to prevent the virus from spreading, which had a big impact on people's mental health, anxiety, and stress. Many internal and external factors lead to stress. This negatively influences the body's homeostasis. As a result, stress may affect the body's capacity to use energy to defend against pathogens. Many recent investigations have found substantial links between human mental stress and the production of hormones, prohormones, and/or immunological chemicals. some of these researches have verified the link between stress and salivary cortisol levels. The aim of this study is to measure salivary cortisol as a stress biomarker as well as a total viable count of salivary bacterial microbiome among COVID-19 patients. Materials and methods: a sample of 84 adults patients was collected who were divided into two groups: the COVID-19 group consists of 42 patients and the COVID-19 free group which consists of 42 subjects. All subjects undergo a PCR test to confirm their health status. The collection of Un-stimulated saliva was done. Laboratory investigations were carried out to measure the total viable count of the salivary bacterial microbiome by culturing on Brain Heart Infusion Agar and to evaluate the salivary cortisol level using cortisol kit (Elecsys Cortisol II). Results: SPSS version 21 was used for statistical analysis. According to the statistical analysis, the salivary cortisol and total viable count of salivary bacterial microbiome values were substantially greater in the COVID-19 group than in the COVID-19 free group. Conclusion: A positive association was found between salivary cortisol and the total viable count of the salivary bacterial microbiome. So, when the concentration of salivary cortisol is elevated in the COVID-19 group, the level of the total viable count of the salivary bacterial microbiome is also elevated.
Effect of Blade Angle on the Performance of a Cross-Flow Hydro Turbine

In order to improve the performance of cross-flow hydro turbine, detailed examination of the effect of the turbine configuration on the performance is needed necessarily. Therefore, this study is aimed to investigate the effect of blade angle on the performance of the cross-flow hydro turbine. Analysis of the turbine performance with the variation of the blade angle has been made by using a commercial CFD code. The results show that inlet and outlet angles of runner blade give considerable effect on the performance of the turbine. Pressure on the surface of the runner blade changes remarkably by the blade angle both at the Stages 1 and 2. Moreover, relatively small blade inlet angle is effective to produce higher value of output power. Recirculating flow in the runner passage causes remarkable hydraulic loss.
Performance of cultivars on different row configurations.

CONTROLLED TRAFFIC has been promoted in order to reduce compaction. Controlled traffic can be achieved by widening row spacings from the conventional 1.5 m single row system to row spacing of 1.8–1.9 m. This is the width of current harvesting and haul-out machinery. Many growers are now producing cane on these wider row spacings. However, the crop improvement program uses 1.5 m singles rows when selecting clones. Are cultivars that are suitable for wider row spacings making it through the breeding program? This question was addressed by looking at whether a cultivar × row spacing interaction occurs when cultivars are grown on different row configurations. Three trials were planted in Queensland in 2006 (Mackay, Ingham and Meringa). Each trial contained four cultivars on three row configurations. Dualrow configurations tended to produce more early shoots but often this difference was lost later in the season when stalk development occurred. Cultivars used different growth pathways to reach final yield. In many cases these different pathways did not result in significantly different yields at final harvest. However, understanding these pathways may allow for better cultivar recommendations for particular environments. A significant cultivar-by-rowconfiguration interaction was found for total fresh biomass at Ingham, one of the three sites. This interaction was mainly due to the good performance of Q135 on dual rows and the poor performance of Q174 A on dual rows. The lack of an interaction at the other sites suggests that it is still unclear whether selection on wide rows would actually produce cultivars even better suited to wide rows compared to selection on narrow rows.
A comparison of partially adaptive STAP techniques for airborne element digitised phased array radar

In future there will be a growing requirement to use high levels of spatial and temporal sampling to enable the use of space time adaptive processing (STAP) to improve target detection in complex interference environments. However, in practice, the processing power and training data requirements will restrict the degrees of freedom (DOF) that can be used. A number of algorithms have been developed to take advantage of phased array architectures employing many DOF without suffering from slow processing, poor beam pattern control or inadequate training data. This can be achieved using either adaptive or non-adaptive DOF reduction techniques. We evaluate a number of partially adaptive techniques via simulations with airborne element digitised array radar (EDAR).
Joint cooperative MAC and routing in IR-UWB networks

The cooperation issue in the UWB medium access control (MAC) and routing layers is less investigated in the current literature. This is despite the large potential of cooperation for performance improvement in these layers. Moreover, UWB radio provides useful properties to the higher layers, such as immunity to multi path fading, less power consumption, and precise ranging and localization ability. Based on these properties, we propose a joint MAC and routing mechanism for UWB networks to minimize the number of transmissions required for a successful packet delivery from a source node to its intended destination. Specifically, based on the optimal cooperative MAC strategy, the route from the source to its destination is selected in such a way that the probability of receiving a packet is maximized in each hop and also in the entire route. The proposed route selection mechanism is distributed, where each node utilizes its local information for finding the next hop. The simulation results show that the proposed joint cooperative MAC and routing (JCMR) algorithm outperforms the existing cooperative routing mechanisms and provides significant cooperation gain despite its distributed nature and low complexity.
Full-Scale Experimental Investigation of Repair of Reinforced Concrete Interstate Bridge Using CFRP Materials

An experimental study is presented of the behavior of eight reinforced concrete bridge girders taken from a decommissioned Interstate bridge and retrofitted with three different carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) systems. Specimens were subjected to monotonic loading to failure with and without significant fatigue conditioning. Experimental observations indicated that intermediate crack-induced debonding was the dominant failure mode for monotonically loaded beams and that degradation of the CFRP-to-concrete interface was caused by fatigue conditioning. Conventional adhesive applied and near-surface mounted (NSM) CFRP systems behaved well under monotonic loads, with the NSM system exhibiting significantly greater ductility. Powder actuated fastener applied retrofit was observed to be less efficient, requiring a relative slip of the CFRP in order to engage the shear transfer mechanism of the fasteners. The application of current accepted design guidelines for FRP retrofit indicated that guidelines aimed at mitigating debonding failure appear to be appropriately conservative under monotonic loading conditions; however, a significant additional reduction in CFRP strain limits is required to account for even small levels of fatigue loading.
Are they different? A comparative study of European populist party members

Party membership is in decline across the established democracies, but populist parties appear to be reversing this trend. The expansion of populist parties’ membership base raises the question whether these parties are fulfilling their role as actors who serve as a “corrective to democracy” by mobilizing the socially and politically marginalized to become politically active. Using large comparative datasets from the European Social Survey and the World Values Survey, we examine the characteristics of populist party members in terms of their socio-demographic background and their political attitudes. We show that, with the exceptions of income levels and church attendance, the members of populist and non-populist parties look very much alike and hold similar political attitudes. These findings imply that mobilizing the politically disaffected remains a challenge, even for populist actors.
Passivity Analysis of Markovian Jumping Neural Networks with Leakage Time-Varying Delays

This paper is concerned with the passivity analysis of Markovian jumping neural networks with leakage time-varying delays. Based on a Lyapunov functional that accounts for the mixed time delays, a leakage delay-dependent passivity conditions are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The mixed delays includes leakage time-varying delays, discrete time-varying delays, and distributed time-varying delays. By employing a novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional having triple-integral terms, new passivity leakage delay-dependent criteria are established to guarantee the passivity performance. This performance not only depends on the upper bound of the time-varying leakage delay but also depends on the upper bound of the derivative of the time-varying leakage delay . While estimating the upper bound of derivative of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, the discrete and distributed delays should be treated so as to appropriately develop less conservative results. Two numerical examples are given to show the validity and potential of the developed criteria.
Dynamics and control of DC-to-DC converters driving other converters downstream

This paper reveals that the dynamics of a converter loaded with other converters downstream are markedly different from those of a standalone converter and conventional design techniques developed for converters with a resistive load could destabilize the control loop of converters combined with other converters. Based on comprehensive small-signal analyses, this paper presents the proper way of designing the control loop of converters driving other converters downstream. The analysis and design results are verified by both time- and frequency-domain simulations.
Fear or Competition? Antecedents to U.S. Business Student Immigration Attitudes

Immigration is an important and contemporary topic in management education given its impact on labor, wages, innovation, and diversity. However, extant research offers few insights into the antecedents to student immigration attitudes. Survey data from undergraduate students taking business courses at two large public universities in the southeast U.S. reveal that while student attitudes toward immigration are more moderate than the general U.S. population, these attitudes differ by gender, political affiliation, and immigration background. Following realistic conflict theory and social identity theory, these student immigration attitudes are a function of both fear and competition. First, their attitudes are confounded by conflicting antecedents in perceived personal competition for resources with immigrants (e.g., jobs, wages) versus immigration benefits (e.g., costs, labor base, innovation). Second, xenophobia (fear of immigrants) is a remarkably powerful influencer of one’s immigration attitude and its antecedents. With these points, management educators must engage students in critical thinking about immigration to prepare them to effectively work with diverse colleagues and business partners while leading global organizations. We, therefore, present four cross-disciplinary areas of intersection between immigration and management education, including diversity and cultural intelligence, human resource management and ethics, entrepreneurship and innovation, and finally, economic and socioeconomic impacts.
Evaluation of anti-islanding schemes based on nondetection zone concept

This paper present a nondetection zone (NDZ) as a performance index to evaluate different anti-islanding schemes. The NDZ for three basic passive anti-islanding schemes: under/over voltage, under/over frequency, and phase jump are derived analytically and validated by simulation. Based on the NDZ, not only can the dominant factors that influence anti-islanding protection be identified, it may also help find out optimal combined schemes that lead to a reduced NDZ. The methodology presented in the paper can be extended to evaluation of other anti-islanding schemes.
Accurate electrical characterization of forward AC behavior of real semiconductor diode: giant negative capacitance and nonlinear interfacial layer

We have developed a new method to analyze the forward ac behavior of a semiconductor diode that uses a series mode. This method can accurately measure the dependence of series resistance, junction capacitance, junction voltage, ideality factor, and interfacial layer on forward bias voltages. Giant negative capacitance (NC) of the junction and the interfacial layer with nonlinear resistance and capacitance are confirmed in GaN Schottky diodes.
Project management for academic research projects: balancing structure and flexibility

Academic research faces new methods of knowledge production that trigger a need for managing research by projects. However, the literature reports friction between management and research. In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent academic research projects can be managed using classical project management (PM) principles. An analysis of managerial facts from interviews with ten university researchers indicates that research projects are PM-compatible considering certain structural similarities and a cultural acceptance of PM value. However, the human factors and uncertainties inherent in research are not addressed by classical PM. A grounded analysis allows for modelling a PM perspective that integrates soft and hard contingent aspects equally by combining structured and flexible approaches adapted to managing projects of an exploratory, uncertain and complex nature. We thus developed a prescriptive framework for facilitating PM implementation in academic research at the institutional, organisational and operational levels.