Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Logistics management of the rail connections using graph theory: the case of a public transportation company on the example of Koleje Dolnośląskie S.A.

Abstract The main purpose of the paper was the structural analysis of the connections network used by a railway carrier Koleje Dolnośląskie S.A. operating in southern Poland. The analysis used simulation methods. The analysis and simulation were based on graph theory, which is successfully used in analysing a wide variety of networks (social, biological, computer, virtual and transportation networks). The paper presents indicators which allow judging the analysed connections network according to an appropriate level of transport services. Simulation results allowed proposing some modifications for the improvement of the analysed connections network. The paper also demonstrates that graph theory and network simulations should be used as tools by transportation companies during the stage of planning a connections network.
Bridging the Gap Between Antiretroviral Access and Adherence in Mexico

The goal in this article is to examine social problems associated with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) adherence in Mexico and the related challenges for Mexican persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs). The study was conducted from the perspective of infected and affected individuals. The authors completed 64 in-depth interviews with heterosexual male and female PLWHAs, as well as with some key individuals from their social network. Following the principles of grounded theory, they carried out inductive analysis to create codes and organize central themes. The authors identified problems related to accessing HAART and found that conditions for implementing recommendations made in the international literature to improve adherence are poor. The findings highlight the importance of social factors, such as health care system irregularities, ineffective physician—patient communication, and availability of family and other sources of social support such as self-help groups for PLWHAs' access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy in Mexico.
Value Evaluation of Inclusive Innovation System Empirical Study on Rural E-commerce in China

By constructing the hierarchical regression model, it is verified that the inclusive innovation system has a positive effect on solving the problems of rural poverty, peasants employment, gender inequality and changing people's ideas, to further validate China inclusive innovation form of rural e-commerce to promote inclusive development of China's economy and society. Through the evaluation of the value of the inclusive innovation system, it is found that the emergence of rural e-commerce in China has solved the problem of poverty in rural areas, promoted the employment of the labor force, improved the gender inequality and changed the peasants' thinking concept, and provided a new way to evaluate the social value of inclusive innovation system.
A comparison of state-owned enterprises and private companies

Worldwide we see trends of privatization and nationalization. It is questionable which type of ownership results in better financial performance of a firm. In this study, I examine the differences in performance between state-owned enterprises and private companies in the Netherlands. Financial performance is measured using profits and volatility of profits. I use a propensity score method to match public firms with private firms, using multiple matching algorithms, and to measure the average treatment effect on the treated. The results suggest that state-owned companies do not perform worse than private companies in terms of profitability, however, state-owned companies do perform worse in terms of the volatility of profits.
Dissociation of β‐amyloid from lipoprotein in cerebrospinal fluid from Alzheimer's disease accelerates β‐amyloid‐42 assembly

Monoclonal 2C3 specific to β‐amyloid (Aβ) oligomers (AβOs) enabled us to test our hypothesis that the alteration of lipoprotein–Aβ interaction in the central nervous system (CNS) initiates and/or accelerates the cascade favoring Aβ assembly. Immunoprecipitation of frontal cortex employing 2C3 unequivocally detected soluble 4‐, 8‐, and 12‐mers in Alzheimer's disease (AD) brains. Immunoblot analysis of the entorhinal cortex employing 2C3 revealed that the accumulation of soluble 12‐mers precedes the appearance of neuronal loss or cognitive impairment and is enhanced as the Braak neurofibrially tangle (NFT) stages progress. The dissociation of soluble Aβ from lipoprotein particles occurs in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and the presence of lipoprotein‐free oligomeric 2C3 conformers (4‐ to 35‐mers) was evident, which mimic CNS environments. Such CNS environments may strongly affect conformation of soluble Aβ peptides, resulting in the conversion of soluble Aβ42 monomers into soluble Aβ42 assembly. The findings suggest that functionally declined lipoproteins may accelerate the generation of metabolic conditions leading to higher levels of soluble Aβ42 assembly in the CNS. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Receiver channel with resonance-based timing detection for a laser range finder

An integrated receiver channel for a pulsed time-of-flight laser range finder is presented. The receiver operates in a wide dynamic range without gain control. This is achieved by converting the received unipolar pulse to a bipolar waveform already after the optical detector before the signal is fed to amplifier blocks. Thus the nonlinearities of the amplifiers have the minimum effect on the timing point, which is located in the zero crossing of the bipolar pulse. A parallel resonant circuit is used to shape the pulse in the input of the channel, which consists of a cascade of limiting voltage amplifiers followed by a comparator. The measurements show that the receiver has a walk error of 74 ps in the dynamic range of 1:1280. This corresponds to 11 mm in distance. The minimum usable input signal is limited by the noise of the receiver and equals 1.9 muA
AI Planning: Systems and Techniques

This article reviews research in the development of plan generation systems. Our goal is to familiarize the reader with some of the important problems that have arisen in the design of planning systems and to discuss some of the many solutions that have been developed in the over 30 years of research in this area. In this article, we broadly cover the major ideas in the field of AI planning and show the direction in which some current research is going. We define some of the terms commonly used in the planning literature, describe some of the basic issues coming from the design of planning systems, and survey results in the area. Because such tasks are virtually never ending, and thus, any finite document must be incomplete, we provide references to connect each idea to the appropriate literature and allow readers access to the work most relevant to their own research or applications.
Optimal self‐healing strategy for microgrid islanding

Renewable resource based microgrids provide reliable and cost-effective electricity with low carbon emissions. The flexibility of operating in grid-connected or islanded modes enables a microgrid to serve loads reliably. In the case of unexpected events happening to the main grid, the microgrid will isolate itself and operate in islanded mode to prevent any adversary impacts. The availability of renewable generation in the microgrid has significant impacts on the islanding strategy and different scenarios need to be considered. This study proposes a comprehensive microgrid self-healing strategy under different circumstances. The proposed strategy encompasses generation re-dispatch, network reconfiguration, and load shedding. The microgrid self-healing problem is formulated as a mixed-integer quadratic programming problem, which provides a globally optimal solution to facilitate smooth islanding of the microgrid. A modified Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions microgrid is used to conduct simulation under various scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed self-healing strategy in minimising costs of load shedding and generation with optimal switching actions.
Transductive attributes for ship category recognition

Ship category recognition is one of the remote sensing applications that requires designing accurate image representation and classification models. Training these models is usually a data hungry process, that requires a lot of labeled data which are usually scarce and expensive. As unlabeled data are more abundant and relatively cheaper, transductive methods exploiting these data are highly preferred. We introduce in this paper a novel representation learning approach based on transductive attributes. The strength of our method resides in its ability to upgrade labeled training sets using attributes shared across categories, and also its ability to further push the benefit of attributes by taking into account not only the labeled data but also the abundant unlabeled ones. When plugging these learned attribute representations into transductive classifiers, we obtain a substantial gain of accuracy compared to several baselines as well as the related work, on the challenging task of ship category recognition, especially when labeled training data are very scarce.
Understanding Booking Intention of Consumers in Online Short Rental Platforms: Social Presence, Perceived Social Benefits, and Trust

For studying the whole process of online short rental platform consumers, which start from the attention to the booking intention, this paper based on the social presence theory, analyzed the consumers' online short rental booking intention from the social perspective. Taking the consumers' perceived social benefits and trust as mediators, we explored the process and mechanism of consumers' booking intention on the short rental platform and constructs a research model of consumer online short rental booking intention. Then, the empirical studies have shown that social presence can influence consumers' booking intention by increasing their perceived social benefits and trust. Finally, based on the results, the recommendations of online short rental platform and the host were put forward.
Investigation of Emerging Technology Usage Characteristics as Predictors of Innovativeness

For today’s societies trying to cope with the current globally increased competition, existence of individuals who can take risks, solve problems and adopt changes an innovation has gained more importance when compared to the past. This situation brings responsibility to educational institutions for increasing the number of innovative individuals and the qualifications of these individuals. Therefore, in the process of designing and developing any kind of in-class activities which will contribute to innovativeness, it is important to determine the technology usage characteristics that can be used to define individuals who have high levels of innovativeness. The purpose of the present study was to determine the variables related to technology which will be used to discriminate between individuals who have high and low levels of innovativeness. In the study, which was carried out using the causal-comparative design, a logistic regression model was formed by using technology-related variables, and which technology-related variables managed to predict high level of innovativeness was tested. In the logistic model, the technology budget (purchases, internet, and phone bills), technology ownership (smart phones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, internet, websites, blogs), technology renewal/update time (smart phones, computers), the number of utilized internet applications and internet usage habits were analyzed as predictors. The study was conducted with 244 university students from different class grades at a state university in Turkey. The results revealed that among the variables examined, only the variables of Internet usage habit, the number of Internet applications used, blog ownership and the money spent on technology use were significant predictors. In addition, the model in which these variables were used was found to classify high and low levels of innovativeness with accuracy of 71%. Implications are discussed.
A new approach to increase the integration of RES in a mediterranean island by using HTLS conductors

Today, in many countries, it is very difficult to build new power lines, especially because of right of way authorization problems. Furthermore, the production of electricity from renewable sources is growing more and more. For these reasons Terna S.p.A. (Italian TSO) has to take advantage of existing overhead transmission lines. In order to increase the transmission capacity and the exportation of RES (Renewable Energy Sources) from Sicily to the mainland, the existing high-voltage power grid in Sicily has been studied and analysed by Neplan®, which is a powerful software tool able to analyze, plan, optimize and simulate electrical power grids. This paper, after a description of existing power grid in Sicily and HTLS (High Temperature Low Sag) Conductors, shows how it is possible to increase the active power exportation from RES to the mainland, under certain load conditions during the summer and winter.
AltiVec/sup TM/: bringing vector technology to the PowerPC/sup TM/ processor family

Motorola's AltiVec/sup TM/ Technology provides a new, SIMD vector extension to the PowerPC/sup TM/ architecture. AltiVec adds 162 new instructions and a powerful new 128-bit datapath, capable of simultaneously executing up to 16 operations per clock. AltiVec instructions allow parallel operation on either 8, 16 or 32-bit integers, as well as 4 IEEE single-precision floating-point numbers. AltiVec technology includes highly flexible "Permute" instructions, which give the data re-organization power needed to maintain a high level of data parallelism. Fine grained data prefetch instructions are also included, which help hide the memory latency of data hungry multimedia applications. All of these features add up to a dramatic performance improvement with the first implementation of AltiVec technology: routines written with AltiVec instructions can execute significantly faster sometimes by a factor of 10 or more, than traditional scalar PowerPC code. Yet AltiVec technology is flexible enough to be useful in a wide variety of applications.
Measurement of nanosecond time‐resolved fluorescence with a directly gated interline CCD camera

CCD cameras coupled optically to gated image intensifiers have been used for fast time‐resolved measurements for some years. Image intensifiers have disadvantages, however, and for some applications it would be better if the image sensor could be gated directly at high speed. Control of the ‘charge drain’ function on an interline‐transfer CCD allows the sensor to be switched rapidly from an insensitive state. The temporal and spatial properties of the charge drain are explored in the present paper and it is shown that nanosecond time resolution with acceptable spatial uniformity can be achieved for a small commercial sensor. A fluorescence lifetime imaging system is demonstrated, based on a repetitively pulsed laser excitation source synchronized to the CCD control circuitry via a programmable delay unit.
Simplifying massive planar subdivisions

We present the first I/O- and practically-efficient algorithm for simplifying a planar subdivision, such that no point is moved more than a given distance exy and such that neighbor relations between faces (homotopy) are preserved. Under some practically realistic assumptions, our algorithm uses O(SORT(N)) I/Os, where N is the size of the decomposition and SORT(N) is the number of I/Os need to sort in the standard external-memory model of computation. Previously, such an algorithm was only known for the special case of contour map simplification. Our algorithm is simple enough to be of practical interest. In fact, although more general, it is significantly simpler than the previous contour map simplification algorithm. We have implemented our algorithm and present results of experimenting with it on massive real-life data. The experiments confirm that the algorithm is efficient in practice. For example, for the contour map simplification problem it is significantly faster than the previous algorithm, while obtaining approximately the same simplification factor.
Horizontal cells in the retina of the rabbit

The light responses, morphology, and connections of horizontal cells (HCs) were studied in the retina of the rabbit using intracellular recordings and the injection of visible markers. Two types of HCs were identified, axonless and axon-bearing HCs. Axonless HCs and the somatic end of axon-bearing HCs respond to white light of varying intensity with graded hyperpolarizations; both display a transient superimposed on the sustained hyperpolarization at stimulus initiation and a small rod aftereffect at the cessation of high intensity stimuli. Anatomically, both are connected to cones, but their responses also suggest rod influence. Both summate stimuli from a retinal area which is much larger than their respective fields. However, only axonless HCs transfer a fluorescent, low molecular weight dye to adjoining, homologous cells. The axon terminal of axon-bearing HCs has response properties different from those of the cell body: the transient at stimulus initiation is absent; furthermore, at high levels of illumination, the rod aftereffect becomes equal in amplitude to the primary hyperpolarization. Anatomically, it is connected to rods, but its responses also suggest cone influence. Its receptive field approximates in diameter its anatomical spread and it does not transfer fluorescent dye to its neighbors.
Astaxanthin Prevented Oxidative Stress in Heart and Kidneys of Isoproterenol-Administered Aged Rats

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of astaxanthin on isoproterenol (ISO)-induced myocardial infarction and cardiac hypertrophy in rats. To evaluate the effect of astaxanthin on ISO-induced cardiac dysfunction, 18 aged Long Evans male rats were evenly divided into three groups. Group I (Control group) was given only the laboratory-ground food and normal water. Group II (ISO group) was administered ISO at a dose of 50 mg/kg subcutaneously (SC) twice a week for two weeks. Group III (Astaxanthin + ISO group) was treated with astaxanthin (25 mg/kg) orally every day and ISO 50 mg/kg SC twice a week for two weeks. ISO administration in rats increased the heart and left ventricular wet weights and increased inflammatory cell infiltration and fibrosis. Moreover, ISO administration increased the lipid peroxidation and decreased antioxidant enzyme activities in heart tissues. Astaxanthin treatment prevented the increased wet weight of heart and decreased inflammatory cell infiltration and fibrosis. The protective effect of astaxanthin was associated with reduction of free radicals by improving antioxidant enzyme function, as well as normalization and/or suppression of elevated oxidative stress markers, such as malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO), and advanced protein oxidation product (APOP) in ISO-administered rats. Furthermore, astaxanthin decreased the elevated activities of aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine transaminase (ALT), and creatinin kinase muscle/brain (CK-MB) in ISO-administered rats. In conclusion, astaxanthin may protect cardiac tissues in ISO-administered rats through suppression of oxidative stress and enhancement of antioxidant enzyme functions.
Esophageal Impedance and Esophagitis in Children: Any Correlation?

Aim: The aim of this study was to correlate the data obtained with multiple intraluminal esophageal impedance and pH (MII-pH) recordings in infants and children referred for suspected gastroesophageal reflux disease with esophageal histology. Materials and Methods: In a prospective study, results of esophageal biopsies and MII-pH recording obtained in 45 children (mean age ± SD: 69 ± 55 months) were analyzed. Regarding the MII-pH data, an automatic (Autoscan Bioview Analysis Software, version 5.3.4, Sandhill Scientific Inc, Highlands Ranch, CO) and a manual reading were performed; an automatic pH analysis (meal included) was also performed. Results: Acidic, weakly acidic, and alkaline reflux episodes accounted, respectively, for 48.7%, 49.5%, and 1.8% of the total number of reflux episodes detected by MII-pH. Esophagitis was present in 25 (56%) children. Concordance between classic pH-study analysis (alone) and esophageal histology was found in 19 of 45 (42%) children. According to the MII-pH analysis, the mean and median value of the pH were significantly higher in the group with esophagitis than in the group with normal esophageal histology. A longer clearance time was found in the group with esophagitis than in subjects with normal histology. Gas reflux episodes represented 21% of the total reflux episodes and were comparable in both groups. Conclusions: Multiple intraluminal esophageal impedance and pH analysis does not provide a distinct parameter to predict esophageal mucosal injury in children. In our population, MII-pH shows comparable acidic, weakly acidic, alkaline, and gas reflux in children with and without esophagitis. Further research is needed to analyze clearance parameters.
COHERENT THz MEASUREMENTS AT THE METROLOGY LIGHT SOURCE

The Metrology Light Source (MLS) [1] is the first storage ring optimized for THz generation [2]. It applies a bunch shortening mode, based on a flexible momentum compaction factor ’α’ optics. The short bunches emit coherent THz radiation. We report on measured THz signals as a function of different machine parameters. Two type of measurements are presented in this paper. The first part presents THz bursting thresholds for a variety of ring parameters compared with theoretical predictions and similar results achieved at BESSY II. The second part discusses an example of a special machine tuning, where the coherent THz signal suddenly and unexpectedly vanishes. Some measurements are shown to demonstrate this effect, a physical explanation is missing.
Multi-objective optimization of wideband spiral arrays

A challenging task in array design is to synthesize an array working at multiple frequencies within a large frequency band, with constraints imposed to the radiation pattern in terms of side lobe level (SLL). This kind of array synthesis requires a multi-objective approach since there is no single solution which can be considered the best at the multiple investigated frequencies for all the compulsory requirements. Therefore this class of problems, instead of a single one, is characterized by an ideal set of solutions, the Pareto front (PF), which comprises solutions over which no other solution of the population dominates [1]. This set provides a range of solutions for which no one can simultaneously satisfy the required performance but represents a tradeoff of the design requirements. Multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOAs) can be a useful tool for determining the Pareto front. They perform similarly to conventional genetic algorithms but they search for the set of solution which belongs to the PF, rather than providing only a single optimal solution. In particular, we have adopted a multi-objective genetic algorithm, called Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) [2] to optimize the array factor of a Spiral Array.