Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Finite Element Approximation of the Acoustic Impedance in Transducer Layers Comprising Silver Coated Monodisperse Polymer Spheres in a Polymer Adhesive

In this work, we study the acoustic impedance of Isotropic Conductive Adhesives (ICAs) consisting of silver coated monodisperse polymer spheres. These ICAs are intended to be used as thermal conductive isolation and matching layers in dual frequency ultrasound transducers because of their low acoustic impedance. In order to design the transducer layers, it is necessary to understand how the geometric parameters (such as particle size, coating thickness and particle density) alter the acoustic impedance. As far as the author know, there are no studies of the acoustic impedance of these ICAs. We use the Finite Element Method (FEM) and the Three Phase Model (TPM) (also known as the Generalized Self-Consistent Method) to approximate the effective acoustic impedance of composites and compare our results to experimentally measured acoustic impedances. Finally, we use the models to do numerical experiments in design. In conclusion, the TPM is just as good as the Finite Element (FE) model at approximating the homogeneous properties. However, we show that the composite used as a transducer layer may be too thin to be assumed homogeneous at a macroscopic level. Large particles seem favourable to use in thermal conductive transducer layers, and polystyrene is more favourable than PMMA as the core material.
Nonlinear Mapping by Constrained Co-clustering

The latent block model is an efficient alternative to the mixture model for modelling a dataset when the number of rows or columns of the data matrix studied is large. For analyzing and reducing the spaces of a matrix, the methods proposed in the litterature are most of the time with their foundation in a non-parametric or a mixture model approach. We present an embedding of the projection of co-occurrence tables in the Poisson latent block mixture model. Our approach leads to an efficient way to cluster and reduce this kind of data matrices.
Email-based File System for Personal Data

Email services have been offering growing email storage capacity, reliable service, and powerful search capabilit y, making them appealing as storage resources. In this paper, we present EMFS, which aggregates back-end storage by establishing a RAID-like system on top of virtual email disks formed by email accounts. By replicating data across accounts from different service providers, highly available storage services can be constructed based on already reliable, cloud-based email storage. EMFS provides a POSIX-like file system interface that allows ubiquitous data access. We have implemented a prototype of EMFS and conducted experiments in a campus network. Our results indicate that while EMFS cannot match the performance of highly optimized distributed file systems such as NFS and AFS, it performs quite closely to JungleDisk, a commercial cloud storage solution. 1
Micro‐aggregates do not influence bone marrow stromal cell chondrogenesis

Although bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) appear promising for cartilage repair, current clinical results are suboptimal and the success of BMSC‐based therapies relies on a number of methodological improvements, among which is better understanding and control of their differentiation pathways. We investigated here the role of the cellular environment (paracrine vs juxtacrine signalling) in the chondrogenic differentiation of BMSCs. Bovine BMSCs were encapsulated in alginate beads, as dispersed cells or as small micro‐aggregates, to create different paracrine and juxtacrine signalling conditions. BMSCs were then cultured for 21 days with TGFβ3 added for 0, 7 or 21 days. Chondrogenic differentiation was assessed at the gene (type II and X collagens, aggrecan, TGFβ, sp7) and matrix (biochemical assays and histology) levels. The results showed that micro‐aggregates had no beneficial effects over dispersed cells: matrix production was similar, whereas chondrogenic marker gene expression was lower for the micro‐aggregates, under all TGFβ conditions tested. This weakened chondrogenic differentiation might be explained by a different cytoskeleton organization at day 0 in the micro‐aggregates. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Detection, Representation, and Exploitation of Events in the Semantic Web Why the Topic Is of Particular Interest Now Questions Addressed

Current museum metadata tends to be focused around the properties of the heritage object such as the artist, style and date of creation. This form of metadata can index a museum’s collection but cannot express the relations between heritage objects and related concepts found in contemporary museum exhibitions. A modern museum exhibition, rather than providing a taxonomic classification of heritage objects, uses them in the construction of curatorial narratives to be interpreted by an audience. In this paper we outline how curatorial narratives can be represented semantically using our Curate Ontology. The Curate Ontology, informed by a detailed analysis of two museum exhibitions, draws on structuralist theories that distinguish between story (i.e. what can be told), plot (i.e. an interpretation of the story) and narrative (i.e. its presentational form). This work has implications for how events can be used in the description of museum narratives and their associated heritage objects.
Fat and Organogel Structure Within Pâté and Their Influence on Texture and Sensory Attributes

Fat and Organogel Structure Within Pâté and Their Influence on Texture and Sensory Attributes Brian Eckyman Tiensa Advisors: University of Guelph, 2017 Dr. Shai Barbut Dr. Alejandro G. Marangoni Five commercial brand pâtés were characterized by examining their texture, microstructure, fatty acid composition, melting profile, and polymorphism. Powder x-ray diffraction studies demonstrated that while the fat extracted from one of the pâtés crystallized in a β polymorphic form; while embedded in a pâté protein matrix, it was crystallized in a β’ polymorphic form. This implies an effect of the food matrix on fat crystallization and structure and an interaction between fat and other components present in the food matrix. Five different canola oil organogel formulations were used to replace pork fat in liver pâté to improve its polyunsaturated fat content and evaluate their effects on texture and sensory properties. Pâtés made using organogels showed comparable textural, physical, and sensory properties as the traditional pâté made with pork fat while reducing the saturated fat content by 62%. Organogel replaced pâtés were perceived to have similar hardness, oiliness, and juiciness in the sensory test compared to control pâté made with pork fat. Partial replacement of pork fats with canola oil organogels was done to improve oil retention, sensory and textural properties of liver pâté. Oil retention performance could be retained at 60% pork fat replacement while maintaining the textural properties and having minimal effect on the sensory properties and colour of the products.
Enhanced Electrochemical Kinetics on Conductive Polar Mediators for Lithium-Sulfur Batteries.

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have been recognized as promising substitutes for current energy-storage technologies owing to their exceptional advantage in energy density. The main challenge in developing highly efficient and long-life Li-S batteries is simultaneously suppressing the shuttle effect and improving the redox kinetics. Polar host materials have desirable chemisorptive properties to localize the mobile polysulfide intermediates; however, the role of their electrical conductivity in the redox kinetics of subsequent electrochemical reactions is not fully understood. Conductive polar titanium carbides (TiC) are shown to increase the intrinsic activity towards liquid-liquid polysulfide interconversion and liquid-solid precipitation of lithium sulfides more than non-polar carbon and semiconducting titanium dioxides. The enhanced electrochemical kinetics on a polar conductor guided the design of novel hybrid host materials of TiC nanoparticles grown within a porous graphene framework (TiC@G). With a high sulfur loading of 3.5 mg cm-2 , the TiC@G/sulfur composite cathode exhibited a substantially enhanced electrochemical performance.
Heat-insulating Finishing Composition of the Optimal Structure with Microspheres

As fillers in most heat-insulating finishing compounds, various highly porous materials with high open microporosity and moisture capacity are used - expanded vermiculite sand and expanded perlite sand. In composites based on such compositions in the pore structure, open pores predominate, which is why the performance properties deteriorate, the strength and water resistance of the resulting coatings decrease. Of great interest is the use as fillers of materials with closed microporosity - glass hollow microspheres and ash microspheres of aluminosilicate. The aim of the work is the development of a model for the heat-insulating composite of the optimal structure, which allows to minimize the consumption of the binding agent by achieving the maximally dense packing of the microspheres. On the basis of the developed model, the optimal content of hollow glass microspheres and ash microspheres of aluminosilicate, in the case of cement and lime as binding agent, was calculated in heat-insulating composites. The average density of composites of the optimal structure for each pair of “binder-filler” is predicted. It has been established that the composites of the optimal structure obtained with the use as binder of lime will have a lower density in comparison with composites obtained using binder cement. As a result of the conducted studies, the possibility of effective use of lime as a binder in heat-insulating composites obtained with the use of microspheres was identified. When it is used, it is possible to significantly reduce the density of the resulting thermal insulation coatings, thereby increasing their thermal insulation properties and vapour permeability.
The formation of helium lines in the spectrum of COM J1740-5340

The He  λ5876 A absorption line recently discovered in the spectrum of the companion to the millisecond pulsar PSR J1740-5340 is tentatively attributed to electron impact excitations due to the irradiation of its atmosphere by γ-rays emitted by the pulsar's magnetosphere. Numerical calculations, similar to those carried out previously for type Ib SNe, indicate that a pulsar beam with photon energies ∼1 MeV gives rise to a λ5876 A line of the observed strength if the beam's spin-down conversion efficiency approaches 1%. However, a significant difficulty for the proposed mechanism is the strength of the singlet line at λ6678 A. Compared to the corresponding triplets, singlet lines are weak because of the loss of excitation when photons emitted in the series n 1 P 0 → 1 1 S ionize hydrogen atoms, an effect absent in the hydrogen-free atmospheres of type Ib SNe.
New Techniques for Accelerating Small Delay ATPG and Generating Compact Test Sets

The small delay defects testing has two challenges. One is that the longest testable path selection for every target fault in ATPG consumes much CPU time. The other is the test data volume are very large. In this paper, we propose two strategies to resolve these two problems. A new path selection in advance scheme is proposed to accelerate ATPG. It aims to find fewer paths and cover more faults in advance, which is different from the previous works. To reduce the test data volume, we propose a novel scan-based test scheme. We partition the scan flip-flops into some scan chains. The first scan flip-flop of every scan chain works in enhanced scan mode. And other scan flip-flops work in broad-side mode. This can significantly increase the don't care bits of every test pattern and provide more room for test compaction. Then the test pattern count can be reduced significantly. Experimental results show the efficiency of these techniques.
Applying Personal and Group-based Trust Models in Document Recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have been used in various application domains to solve the information-overload problem. Recently, trust-based recommender systems have incorporated the trustworthiness of users into CF techniques to improve the quality of recommendation. Some researchers have proposed rating-based trust models to derive the trust values based on users’ past ratings of items, or based on explicitly specified relations (e.g. friends) or trust relationships. The rating-based trust model may not be effective in CF recommendations, due to unreliable trust values derived from very few past rating records. In this work, we propose a hybrid personal trust model which adaptively combines the rating-based trust model and explicit trust metric to resolve the drawback caused by insufficient past rating records. Moreover, users with similar preferences usually form a group to share items (knowledge) with each other, and thus users’ preferences may be affected by group members. Accordingly, group trust can enhance personal trust to support recommendation from the group perspective. Eventually, we propose a recommendation method based on a hybrid model of personal and group trust to improve recommendation performance. The experiment result shows that the proposed models can improve the prediction accuracy of other trust-based recommender systems.
OEA_SAT: An Organizational Evolutionary Algorithm for solving SATisfiability problems

A novel evolutionary algorithm, Organizational Evolutionary Algorithm for SATisfiability problems (OEA_SAT), is proposed in this paper. OEA_SAT first divides a SAT problem into several sub-problems, and each organization is composed of a sub-problem. Thus, three new evolutionary operators, namely the self-learning operator, the annexing operator and the splitting operator are designed with the intrinsic properties of SAT problems in mind. Furthermore, all organizations are divided into two populations according to their fitness. One is called best-population, and the other is called non-best-population. The idea behind OEA_SAT is to solve the sub-problem first, and then synthesize the solution for the original problem by adjusting the variables which have conflicts. Since the dimensions of sub-problems are smaller and the sub-ones are easy to be solved compared with the original one, the computational cost is reduced in this way. In the experiments, 3700 benchmark SAT problems in SATLIB are used to test the performance of OEA_SAT. The number of variables of these problems is ranged from 20 to 250. Moreover, the performance of OEA_SAT is compared with those of two well-known algorithms, namely WalkSAT and RFEA2. All experimental results show that OEA_SAT has a higher success ratio and a lower computational cost. OEA_SAT can solve the problems with 250 variables and 1065 clauses by only 1.524 seconds and outperforms all the other algorithms.
A class of QC-LDPC codes with low encoding complexity and good error performance

We propose a novel approximate lower triangular structure for the parity part of the parity-check matrix of QC-LDPC codes. About half of the non-zero elements in the parity part are set to locate on the upper diagonal while the remaining non-zero elements can be located almost anywhere within the lower triangular area, provided certain rules are observed. Compared with the typical dual-diagonal structure, the proposed structure requires very similar encoding complexity and produces lower error rates over an AWGN channel.
Overexpression of AmRosea1 Gene Confers Drought and Salt Tolerance in Rice

Ectopic expression of the MYB transcription factor of AmROSEA1 from Antirrhinum majus has been reported to change anthocyanin and other metabolites in several species. In this study, we found that overexpression of AmRosea1 significantly improved the tolerance of transgenic rice to drought and salinity stresses. Transcriptome analysis revealed that a considerable number of stress-related genes were affected by exogenous AmRosea1 during both drought and salinity stress treatments. These affected genes are involved in stress signal transduction, the hormone signal pathway, ion homeostasis and the enzymes that remove peroxides. This work suggests that the AmRosea1 gene is a potential candidate for genetic engineering of crops.
Maize Domestication and Anti-Herbivore Defences: Leaf-Specific Dynamics during Early Ontogeny of Maize and Its Wild Ancestors

As a consequence of artificial selection for specific traits, crop plants underwent considerable genotypic and phenotypic changes during the process of domestication. These changes may have led to reduced resistance in the cultivated plant due to shifts in resource allocation from defensive traits to increased growth rates and yield. Modern maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) was domesticated from its ancestor Balsas teosinte (Z. mays ssp. parviglumis) approximately 9000 years ago. Although maize displays a high genetic overlap with its direct ancestor and other annual teosintes, several studies show that maize and its ancestors differ in their resistance phenotypes with teosintes being less susceptible to herbivore damage. However, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here we addressed the question to what extent maize domestication has affected two crucial chemical and one physical defence traits and whether differences in their expression may explain the differences in herbivore resistance levels. The ontogenetic trajectories of 1,4-benzoxazin-3-ones, maysin and leaf toughness were monitored for different leaf types across several maize cultivars and teosinte accessions during early vegetative growth stages. We found significant quantitative and qualitative differences in 1,4-benzoxazin-3-one accumulation in an initial pairwise comparison, but we did not find consistent differences between wild and cultivated genotypes during a more thorough examination employing several cultivars/accessions. Yet, 1,4-benzoxazin-3-one levels tended to decline more rapidly with plant age in the modern maize cultivars. Foliar maysin levels and leaf toughness increased with plant age in a leaf-specific manner, but were also unaffected by domestication. Based on our findings we suggest that defence traits other than the ones that were investigated are responsible for the observed differences in herbivore resistance between teosinte and maize. Furthermore, our results indicate that single pairwise comparisons may lead to false conclusions regarding the effects of domestication on defensive and possibly other traits.
Laser cladding NiCrBSi/TiN/h-BN self-lubricating wear resistant coating on Ti–6Al–4V surface

Self-lubricating wear resistant composite coating with TiN0.3, TiN and TiB as reinforcement phases, BN as lubricating phase were fabricated on the surface of Ti–6Al–4V alloy substrate by laser cladding with NiCrBSi, TiN and BN composite powders. The phase compositions, microstructure, interface metallurgical bonding and interdiffusion behavior between coating and substrate, microhardness, wear profile and tribological properties are investigated by x-ray diffractometer (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), electron backscatter diffraction technique(EBSD), microhardness tester and multi-purpose friction and wear testing machine, respectively. And the corresponding friction and wear mechanism is analyzed. Results show that the nickel-based composite powder containing TiN reinforcing phase and BN lubricating phase reacts to a composite coating which is densely bonded with the matrix and has no obvious defects such as pores and cracks. The section of the coating is smooth and the microstructure is fine, and the reinforcement phase is uniformly distributed in the coating with distributing the reinforcement phase uniformly in the coating. TiNX and BN in the coating are mainly in the form of black particles gathered into dendritic form. When the h-BN mass fraction is 5%, the average microhardness of the coating is about 967.1 HV, which is about 2.6 times higher than that of the substrate (370 HV). The friction coefficient and wear rate of the coating are obviously lower than that of the substrate, and the wear surface of the cladding layer is relatively smooth, and the wear resistance is remarkably improved.
Correction: An intrinsically stretchable humidity sensor based on anti-drying, self-healing and transparent organohydrogels

Correction for ‘An intrinsically stretchable humidity sensor based on anti-drying, self-healing and transparent organohydrogels’ by Jin Wu et al., Mater. Horiz. , 2019, 6, 595–603, DOI: 10.1039/C8MH01160E.
VISTA-user interface, task level, and tool integration

Succeeding an earlier paper on the data level, the Viennese Integrated System for Technology CAD Applications (VISTA), an integration and development system for Technology CAD, is presented. Starting with a short overview of TCAD methodology and existing integrated systems, portability and comprehensibility are postulated as key considerations and an application-framework architecture is proposed. The design of VISTA's user interface and task level, presented next, adheres strictly to these guidelines. To enable the cooperation of independent simulation tools, an automatic triangulation-based service is provided by VISTA to resolve inconsistencies in wafer representations. A final example shows how three different simulators, integrated by the framework are used to simulate a planarized, trench-isolated 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS process. >
Smoking worsens the prognosis of mild abnormalities in cervical cytology

Objective. To examine the effect of smoking on the incidence of low‐ and high‐grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) in women with a baseline Pap smear of atypical squamous cells (ASC) or a low‐grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL). Design. Prospective study in which a cohort of women with normal colposcopy and ASC/LSIL at baseline were followed at 6‐month intervals of up to 36 months. Women were grouped in post‐hoc analysis according to their smoking behavior: never (or past) smokers and current smokers. Setting. This report was based on data from the Latin American Screening Study, conducted in São Paulo, Campinas, Porto Alegre (Brazil) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). Population. A subset of 150 women derived from a cohort of 1,011 women. Methods. Multivariate Cox analysis and Kaplan–Meier curves were used. Main outcome measures. Low‐ and high‐grade CIN during follow‐up. Results. The only factor related to an increased risk of developing CIN was the positive high‐risk (hr) HPV status (hazard ratio (HR) = 3.42; 95% CI: 1.11–9.43). A total of 21 cases of incident CIN were detected during follow‐up. Of these, 11 appeared in the group of 67 smokers and 10 among the 83 non‐smoker women (log‐rank, p = 0.33). Smoking status was not associated with the risk of developing CIN (HR = 0.73; 95% CI: 0.40–1.33). However, when restricting the analysis to high‐grade CIN only (11 cases), the probability of developing the disease was significantly higher among smokers (p = 0.04). Conclusions. Smoking contributes additional risk for developing high‐grade CIN in women with ASC or LSIL cytology but normal colposcopy.