Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MESOSCALE MODELLING OF SHOCK INITIATION IN HMX-BASED EXPLOSIVES

Hydrocode calculations we used to simulate initiation in single- and double-shock experiments on several HMX-based explosives. Variations in the reactive behavior of theee materials reflects the differences between binders in the material, providing information regarding the sensitivity of the explosive to the mechanical properties of the constituents. Materials considered are EDC-37, with a soft binder, PBX-9601, with a relatively malleable binder, and PIBX-9404, with a stiff binder. Bulk reactive behavior of these materials is dominated by the HMX component and should be comparable, while the mechanical response varies. The reactive flow model is temperature-dependent, based on a modified Arrhenius rate. Some unreacted material is allowed to react at a rate given by the state of the hotspot rather than the bulk state of the unreacted explosive, according to a length scale reflecting the hotspot size, and a time scale for thermal equilibration. The Arrhenius rate for HMX is wsumed to be the same for all compositions. The initiation data for different HMX-bwd explosives axe modelled by choosing plausible parameters to describe the reactive and dissipative properties of the binder, and hence the behavior of the hotspots in each formulation.
Synthesis and characterization of fluorinated carbon nanotubes for lithium primary batteries with high power density

The synthesis and characterization of fluorinated carbon nanotubes have been carried out under an inert gas containing fluorine. All of the samples have been characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (13C and 19F ss-NMR) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. The comparison of the effects of various experimental parameters on the structure of fluorinated materials allows the disclosure of the fluorination mechanism. It is shown that fluorine was intercalated into the outer part of the carbon nanotubes initially where graphene layers were coaxial within a distance of 0.60 nm. In contrast, the inner part of the carbon nanotubes was not intercalated. The electrochemical performance such as discharge capacity as a cathode for a primary lithium battery has also been investigated. The samples with a F/C ratio of 0.75 exhibited the best performance, namely high energy and power densities. The highest specific energy density and specific power density were 1147 Wh kg−1 and 8998 W kg−1, respectively, at a current density of 4 A g−1.
Numerical simulation of phase separation in Fe-Cr binary and Fe-Cr-Mo ternary alloys with use of the Cahn-Hilliard equation

The Cahn-Hilliard nonlinear diffusion equation for a binary alloy system was extended to a ternary system. Numerical model based on the Cahn-Hilliard equation for multicomponent system was applied to the prediction of microstructural evolutions in Fe-Cr binary and Fe-Cr-Mo ternary alloys. The free energy of the system was approximated by the regular solution model. In an Fe-40at%Cr binary alloy, the Cr composition profile at 800 K shows a modulated structure with the wave length of about 4 nm. This result is consistent with those of reported Atom-probe FIM analyses. In an Fe-40at%Cr-3at%Mo ternary alloys, the wave lengths of Cr and Mo composition profiles were similar to that for the binary alloy. However, the decrease in the Mo composition was observed at the peak position of Cr composition because of the repulsive interaction of Cr and Mo atoms.
Plasticizer compatibility testing: Dynamic mechanical analysis and glass transition temperatures

Plasticizer compatibility with the polymer, which implies that plasticizer and polymer will remain closely associated as the finished polymer product is used, is critically important in determining whether a flexible poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) product will have an acceptably long service life. However, with traditional test methods, it is often difficult to distinguish degrees of compatibility among relatively compatible ingredients (ingredients that do not dissociate themselves from the polymer in a very short time or under very mild storage conditions). Dynamic mechanical analysis is a commonly used technique for measuring glass transition temperatures, which can be a useful property in comparing additives' compatibilities. Unlike many polymers, flexible PVC shows two glass transition temperatures, one for the polymer segments that show syndiotactic (but noncrystalline) stereochemistry, and one for the polymer segments that show atactic stereochemistry. The glass transition temperature for the atactic segments of flexible PVC provides some information about the plasticizer's compatibility. When the dynamic mechanical analysis temperature sweep for a plasticized PVC compound detects a particularly low glass transition for the atactic polymer segments, this can be an indication that the plasticizer is relatively incompatible with the PVC. J. VINYL ADDIT. TECHNOL. , 21:7–11, 2015. © 2014 Society of Plastics Engineers
Selective Hippocampal Lesions Do Not Increase Adrenocortical Activity

It has been proposed that the hippocampus exerts a tonic inhibitory influence on the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) stress axis. This claim rests, in particular, on the upregulation of corticosterone secretion and other measures of HPA activity after nonselective lesions of the hippocampal formation. We measured plasma corticosterone concentrations after selective neurotoxic damage to the hippocampus and the subiculum in rats. Concentrations were estimated during rest in the rat's home cage and at several time points after varying degrees of stress. Lesions of the hippocampus did not increase the concentration of corticosterone relative to control rats in any condition. Temporary inactivation of the hippocampus or the ventral subiculum by infusion of the GABAA receptor agonist muscimol also failed to induce hypersecretion, although hippocampal infusions did impair spatial memory. These results suggest that the hippocampus is not necessary for tonic inhibition of adrenocortical activity and imply that the HPA axis receives efficient negative feedback inhibition from other brain systems too.
Computing Nash Equilibria of Action-Graph Games

This talk will survey two graphical models which the authors have proposed for compactly representing single-shot, finite-action games in which a large number of agents contend for scarce resources. The first model considered is Local-Effect Games (LEGs). These games often (but not always) have pure-strategy Nash equilibria. Finding a potential function is a good technique for finding such equilibria. We give a complete characterization of which LEGs have potential functions and provide the functions in each case; we also show a general case where pure-strategy equilibria exist in the absence of potential functions. Action-graph games (AGGs) are a fully expressive game representation which can compactly express both strict and context-specific independence between players' utility functions, and which generalize LEGs. We present algorithms for computing both symmetric and arbitrary equilibria of AGGs, based on a continuation method proposed by Govindan and Wilson. We analyze the worst- case cost of computing the Jacobian of the payoff function, the exponential- time bottleneck step of this algorithm, and in all cases achieve exponential speedup. When the indegree of G is bounded by a constant and the game is symmetric, the Jacobian can be computed in polynomial time.
Meander line technique for size reduction of quadrifilar helix antenna

A method to reduce the axial length of a conventional printed quadrifilar helix antenna (PQHA) using a meander line technique is described. The design approach and the measurement results for the meander printed quadrifilar helix antenna (MPQHA) are presented. A 53% size reduction and considerable bandwidth increase of a conventional PQHA is achieved by using this technique.
Continuous Ice Core Melter System with Discrete Sampling for Major Ion, Trace Element, and Stable Isotope Analyses

We present a novel ice/firn core melter system that uses fraction collectors to collect discrete, high-resolution ( 32 trace elements by inductively coupled plasma sector field mass spectrometry (ICP-SMS), and stable oxygen and hydrogen isotopes by isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). The new continuous melting with discrete sampling (CMDS) system preserves an archive of each sample, reduces the problem of incomplete particle dissolution in ICP-SMS samples, and provides more precise trace element data than previous ice melter models by using longer ICP-SMS scan times and washing the instrument between samples. CMDS detection limits are similar to or lower than those published for ice melter systems coupled directly to analytical instruments and are suitable for analyses of polar and mid-low-latitude ice cores. Analysis of total calcium and sulfur by ICP-SMS and calcium ion, sulfate, and methanesulfonate by IC from the Mt. Logan Prospector-Russell Col ice core confirms data accuracy and coregistration of the split fractions from each sample. The reproducibility of all data acquired by the CMDS system is confirmed by replicate analyses of parallel sections of the GISP2 D ice core. (A)
Iron Requirement for Mn(II) Oxidation by Leptothrix discophora SS-1

ABSTRACT A common form of biocatalysis of Mn(II) oxidation results in the formation of biogenic Mn(III, IV) oxides and is a key reaction in the geochemical cycling of Mn. In this study, we grew the model Mn(II)-oxidizing bacterium Leptothrix discophora SS-1 in media with limited iron (0.1 μM iron/5.8 mM pyruvate) and sufficient iron (0.2 μM iron/5.8 mM pyruvate). The influence of iron on the rate of extracellular Mn(II) oxidation was evaluated. Cultures in which cell growth was limited by iron exhibited reduced abilities to oxidize Mn(II) compared to cultures in medium with sufficient iron. While the extracellular Mn(II)-oxidizing factor (MOF) is thought to be a putative multicopper oxidase, Mn(II) oxidation in the presence of zero added Cu(II) was detected and the decrease in the observed Mn(II) oxidation rate in iron-limited cultures was not relieved when the medium was supplemented with Cu(II). The decline of Mn(II) oxidation under iron-limited conditions was not accompanied by siderophore production and is unlikely to be an artifact of siderophore complex formation with Mn(III). The temporal variations in mofA gene transcript levels under conditions of limited and abundant iron were similar, indicating that iron limitation did not interfere with the transcription of the mofA gene. Our quantitative PCR results provide a step forward in understanding the regulation of Mn(II) oxidation. The mechanistic role of iron in Mn(II) oxidation is uncertain; the data are consistent with a direct requirement for iron as a component of the MOF or an indirect effect of iron resulting from the limitation of one of many cellular functions requiring iron.
Does Personalization Benefit Everyone in the Same Way ? Multilingual Search Personalization for English vs

Mobile recommender systems have been proven as a promising approach in mobile scenarios to support the decision making process of users by suggesting beneficial items in a certain mobile context. The main goal of this paper is to examine whether a stereotype user model leads to better recommendations as part of such a system. For this purpose, we developed and tested a prototype for a shopping scenario. Research on fashion stereotypes led to a user model containing ten different stereotypes. The stereotype classification is performed by computing the proximity of each stereotype to the user’s properties. Results of a user study show that a user model based on stereotypes generates better results than a recommender system without a stereotype-based user model. Moreover, stereotype-based user models allow personalized recommendations right away thus contributing to alleviating the cold start problem.
Anti-angiogenesis target therapy for advanced osteosarcoma

Osteosarcomas (OS), especially those with metastatic or unresectable disease, have limited treatment options. The greatest advancement in treatments occurred in the 1980s when multi-agent chemotherapy, including doxorubicin, cisplatin, high-dose methotrexate, and, in some regimens, ifosfamide, was demonstrated to improve overall survival compared with surgery alone. However, standard chemotherapeutic options have been limited by poor response rates in patients with relapsed or advanced cases. It has been reported that VEGFR expression correlates with the outcome of patients with osteosarcoma and circulating VEGF level has been associated with the development of lung metastasis. At present, it seems to us that progress has not been made since Grignani reported a phase II cohort trial of sorafenib and sorafenib combined with everolimus for advanced osteosarcoma, which, in a sense, have become a milestone as a second-line therapy for osteosarcoma. Although the recognization of muramyltripepetide phosphatidyl-ethanolamine has made some progress based on its combination with standard chemotherapy, its effect on refractory cases is controversial. Personalized comprehensive molecular profiling of high-risk osteosarcoma up to now has not changed the therapeutic prospect of advanced osteosarcoma significantly. Thus, how far have we moved forward and what therapeutic strategy should we prefer for anti-angiogenesis therapy? This review provides an overview of the most updated anti-angiogenesis therapy in OS and discusses some clinical options in order to maintain or even improve progression-free survival.
A study of advances in characterization of interfaces and fiber surfaces in lignocellulosic fiber-reinforced composites

This article deals with the aspects of interfacial and surface characterization of natural fibers and their composites. Vegetable fibers and their composites have attracted the attention of scientists worldwide because of their favorable properties. The different chemical modifications of natural fibers and characterization aspects have been discussed. The adhesion between fiber and matrix is a major factor in determining the response of the interface and its integrity under stress. Therefore characterization of the interface is of utmost importance. Both fiber surface and polymer matrix surface can be modified to obtain a strong interface. Various treatments being used for the lignocellulosic surfaces and the characterization techniques have been illustrated. The four main techniques of interfacial characterization that are enumerated in this article are the micromechanical techniques, spectroscopic, microscopic and swelling techniques. The micromechanical techniques like fiber pull-out and fragmentation have been dealt with giving emphasis to experimental aspects. Recent studies dealing with interfacial study of different lignocellulosic fiber reinforced composites have also been cited.
When is Bad News Really Bad News?

We examine whether the price response to bad and good earnings shocks changes as the relative level of the market changes. The study is based on a complete sample of annual earnings announcements during the period 1988 to 1998. The relative level of the market is based on the difference between the current market P/E and the average market P/E over the prior 12 months. We find that the stock price response to negative earnings surprises increases as the relative level of the market rises. Furthermore, the difference between bad news and good news earnings response coefficients rises with the market. Copyright The American Finance Association 2002.
Correlation of Continuous Electroencephalograms With Cerebral Blood Flow Measurements During Carotid Endarterectomy

During an 11-month period, 81 endarterectomies under a carefully controlled level of general anesthesia were monitored with continuous electroencephalograms (EEG) and intermittent regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) measurements. There was a high correlation between the CBF (milliliter per 100 gm per minute) during carotid occlusion and alterations in the EEG: no EEG change was seen with the flow above 30 ml/100 gm brain per minute, major changes were not seen with a flow between 18 and 30 ml, and changes invariably occurred with a flow below 17 ml. The degree of EEG change reflected the severity of flow reduction but was always reversible with the placement of a shunt. The EEG at the termination of the surgery corresponded with the patient's neurological state in that all EEG tracings were normal or unchanged as compared to the preoperative tracing and no neurological worsening occurred in any patients studied. The EEG is a valuable monitoring technique that indicates when a shunt is required and informs the surgeon of the state of cerebral function not only during occlusion but also throughout the entire operative procedure.
An approach to extract RBAC models from BPEL4WS processes

The Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL) has become the defacto standard for Web service composition. Yet, it does not address security aspects. This paper is concerned with access control for BPEL based processes. We present an approach to integrate role-based access control (RBAC) and BPEL on the meta-model level. Moreover, we show that such integration can be used to automate steps of the role engineering process. In particular, we extract RBAC models from BPEL processes and present an XSLT converter that transforms BPEL code to the XML import format of the xoRBAC software component.
A New Approach for Attribute Importance Measure Based on TCA-SSVM

The lack of heuristic information is the fundamental reason that affects the attribute selection in data mining. Spatial hypersurface plays a very important role in the classification problem which reflects the characteristic of class attribute and condition attributes. In this paper, a new measure for determining the importance level of the attributes based on partial derivative distribution of the output corresponding to the inputs is presented. For more convenience, we present a new SVM model called TCA-SSVM which could use simple algorithm to solve the optimization problem to acquire the classification hypersurface. The proposed approach is experimentally evaluated in two datasets and the results prove that it can improve the validity of the problem and lead to interesting results.
Chaos: scale-out graph processing from secondary storage

Chaos scales graph processing from secondary storage to multiple machines in a cluster. Earlier systems that process graphs from secondary storage are restricted to a single machine, and therefore limited by the bandwidth and capacity of the storage system on a single machine. Chaos is limited only by the aggregate bandwidth and capacity of all storage devices in the entire cluster. Chaos builds on the streaming partitions introduced by X-Stream in order to achieve sequential access to storage, but parallelizes the execution of streaming partitions. Chaos is novel in three ways. First, Chaos partitions for sequential storage access, rather than for locality and load balance, resulting in much lower pre-processing times. Second, Chaos distributes graph data uniformly randomly across the cluster and does not attempt to achieve locality, based on the observation that in a small cluster network bandwidth far outstrips storage bandwidth. Third, Chaos uses work stealing to allow multiple machines to work on a single partition, thereby achieving load balance at runtime. In terms of performance scaling, on 32 machines Chaos takes on average only 1.61 times longer to process a graph 32 times larger than on a single machine. In terms of capacity scaling, Chaos is capable of handling a graph with 1 trillion edges representing 16 TB of input data, a new milestone for graph processing capacity on a small commodity cluster.
Benefits of Physical Exercise on the Aging Brain: The Role of the Prefrontal Cortex

Motor planning in older adults likely relies on the overengagement of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and is associated with slowness of movement and responses. Does a physically active lifestyle counteract the overrecruitment of the PFC during action preparation? This study used high-resolution electroencephalography to measure the effect of physical exercise on the executive functions of the PFC preceding a visuomotor discriminative task. A total of 130 participants aged 15–86 were divided into two groups based on physical exercise participation. The response times and accuracy and the premotor activity of the PFC were separately correlated with age for the two groups. The data were first fit with a linear function and then a higher order polynomial function. We observed that after 35–40 years of age, physically active individuals have faster response times than their less active peers and showed no signs of PFC hyperactivity during motor planning. The present findings show that physical exercise could speed up the response of older people and reveal that also in middle-aged people, moderate-to-high levels of physical exercise benefits the planning/execution of a response and the executive functions mediated by the PFC, counteracting the neural overactivity often observed in the elderly adults.
Suppressing model overfitting in mining concept-drifting data streams

Mining data streams of changing class distributions is important for real-time business decision support. The stream classifier must evolve to reflect the current class distribution. This poses a serious challenge. On the one hand, relying on historical data may increase the chances of learning obsolete models. On the other hand, learning only from the latest data may lead to biased classifiers, as the latest data is often an unrepresentative sample of the current class distribution. The problem is particularly acute in classifying rare events, when, for example, instances of the rare class do not even show up in the most recent training data. In this paper, we use a stochastic model to describe the concept shifting patterns and formulate this problem as an optimization one: from the historical and the current training data that we have observed, find the most-likely current distribution, and learn a classifier based on the most-likely distribution. We derive an analytic solution and approximate this solution with an efficient algorithm, which calibrates the influence of historical data carefully to create an accurate classifier. We evaluate our algorithm with both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that our algorithm produces accurate and efficient classification.
Silhouette‐Aware Warping for Image‐Based Rendering

Image‐based rendering (IBR) techniques allow capture and display of 3D environments using photographs. Modern IBR pipelines reconstruct proxy geometry using multi‐view stereo, reproject the photographs onto the proxy and blend them to create novel views. The success of these methods depends on accurate 3D proxies, which are difficult to obtain for complex objects such as trees and cars. Large number of input images do not improve reconstruction proportionally; surface extraction is challenging even from dense range scans for scenes containing such objects. Our approach does not depend on dense accurate geometric reconstruction; instead we compensate for sparse 3D information by variational image warping. In particular, we formulate silhouette‐aware warps that preserve salient depth discontinuities. This improves the rendering of difficult foreground objects, even when deviating from view interpolation. We use a semi‐automatic step to identify depth discontinuities and extract a sparse set of depth constraints used to guide the warp. Our framework is lightweight and results in good quality IBR for previously challenging environments.