Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Boundary control of non-homogeneous systems of two conservation laws

We investigate the problem of the stability of a system of two conservation laws perturbed by non-homogeneous terms. We assume that these non-homogeneous terms have a small C1-norm. By a Riemann coordinates approach we state a sufficient criterion for the stability in terms of the boundary conditions. This stability result is then applied to the problem of the regulation of the water level and the flow rate in an open channel. The flow in the channel is represented by the SaintVenant equations perturbed by small non-homogeneous terms that account for the friction effects as well as external water supplies or withdrawals.
Robust pedestrian attribute recognition for an unbalanced dataset using mini-batch training with rarity rate

Pedestrian attributes are significant information for Advanced Driver Assistance System(ADAS). Pedestrian attributes such as body poses, face orientations and open umbrella are meant action or state of pedestrian. In general, this information is recognized using independent classifiers for each task. Performing all of these separate tasks is too time-consuming at the testing stage. In addition, the processing time increases with the number of tasks. To address this problem, multi-task learning or heterogeneous learning is able to train a single classifier to perform multiple tasks. In particular, heterogeneous learning is able to simultaneously train regression and recognition tasks, because reducing both training and testing time. However, heterogeneous learning tends to result in a lower accuracy rate for classes with a few training samples. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the performance of heterogeneous learning for such classes. We introduce a rarity rate based on the importance and class probability of each task. The appropriate rarity rate is assigned to each training sample. Thus, the samples in a mini-batch for training a deep convolutional neural network are augmented by this rarity rate to focus on the class with a few samples. Our heterogeneous learning approach with the rarity rate attains better performance on pedestrian attribute recognition, especially for classes representing open umbrellas.
Eddy covariance flux measurements of pollutant gases in urban Mexico City

Abstract. Eddy covariance (EC) flux measurements of the atmosphere/surface exchange of gases over an urban area are a direct way to improve and evaluate emissions inventories, and, in turn, to better understand urban atmospheric chemistry and the role that cities play in regional and global chemical cycles. As part of the MCMA-2003 study, we demonstrated the feasibility of using eddy covariance techniques to measure fluxes of selected volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and CO2 from a residential district of Mexico City (Velasco et al., 2005a, b). During the MILAGRO/MCMA-2006 field campaign, a second flux measurement study was conducted in a different district of Mexico City to corroborate the 2003 flux measurements, to expand the number of species measured, and to obtain additional data for evaluation of the local emissions inventory. Fluxes of CO2 and olefins were measured by the conventional EC technique using an open path CO2 sensor and a Fast Isoprene Sensor calibrated with a propylene standard. In addition, fluxes of toluene, benzene, methanol and C2-benzenes were measured using a virtual disjunct EC method with a Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer. The flux measurements were analyzed in terms of diurnal patterns and vehicular activity and were compared with the most recent gridded local emissions inventory. In both studies, the results showed that the urban surface of Mexico City is a net source of CO2 and VOCs with significant contributions from vehicular traffic. Evaporative emissions from commercial and other anthropogenic activities were significant sources of toluene and methanol. The results show that the emissions inventory is in reasonable agreement with measured olefin and CO2 fluxes, while C2-benzenes and toluene emissions from evaporative sources are overestimated in the inventory. It appears that methanol emissions from mobile sources occur, but are not reported in the mobile emissions inventory.
Scheduling in a Queueing System with Asynchronously Varying Service Rates

We consider the following queueing system which arises as a model of a wireless link shared by multiple users. There is a (cid:12)nite number N of input (cid:13)ows served by a server. The system operates in discrete time t = 0;1;2;::: . Each input (cid:13)ow can be described as an irreducible countable Markov chain; waiting customers of each (cid:13)ow are placed in a queue. The sequence of server states m(t);t = 0;1;2;::: , is a Markov chain with (cid:12)nite number of states M. When server is in state m it can serve (cid:22) m i customers of (cid:13)ow i (in one time slot). The scheduling discipline is a rule that in each time slot chooses the (cid:13)ow to serve based on the server state and the state of the queues. Our main result is that a simple online scheduling discipline, Modi(cid:12)ed Largest Weighted Delay First, along with its generalizations, is throughput optimal, namely it ensures that the queues are stable as long as the vector of average arrival rates is within the system maximum stability region.
Double-side visible projection optical film and manufacturing method thereof

The invention relates to a double-side visible projection optical film. The double-side visible projection optical film is made of titanium-silicon crystalline derivative of which the nano structure is smaller than 10 nm. The derivative has the advantage of small particle size, increased specific area and increased atomicity on the surface of each crystal grain, so that the absorbance on the surface of the optical film is very strong. Photosensitive nano agent, nano reflecting agent and other ingredients are added, and the optical film substrate is used. The experiment is carried out on the visual effects, such as reflecting brightness after projection, black-white contrast, color fidelity, color reduction degree, resolution, color phase and the like; and after small-scale trial production, a standard production operation mode is made. The optical film has the characteristics of high gain, antistatic property, aging resistance, long service life, UV radiation resistance, self-cleaning, large three-dimensional visual sensation (360 degrees), low requirements on ambient light, vivid color and the like. The double-side visible projection optical film series products provide optical projection screens which have the advantages of high definition, energy saving and environmental protection, is not dazzling, subverts the traditional projection mode and enhances the visual sensation.
The ATLAS3D project IX: the merger origin of a fast- and a slow-rotating early-type galaxy revealed with deep optical imaging: first results

The mass assembly of galaxies leaves imprints in their outskirts, such as shells and tidal tails. The frequency and properties of such fine structures depend on the main acting mechanisms - secular evolution, minor or major mergers - and on the age of the last substantial accretion event. We use this to constrain the mass assembly history of two apparently relaxed nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs) selected from the ATLAS3D sample, NGC 680 and 5557. Our ultra-deep optical images obtained with MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope reach 29 mag arcsec-2 in the g band. They reveal very low surface brightness (LSB) filamentary structures around these ellipticals. Among them, a gigantic 160 kpc long, narrow, tail east of NGC 5557 hosts three gas-rich star-forming objects, previously detected in H I with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope and in UV with GALEX. NGC 680 exhibits two major diffuse plumes apparently connected to extended H I tails, as well as a series of arcs and shells. Comparing the outer stellar and gaseous morphology of the two ellipticals with that predicted from models of colliding galaxies, we argue that the LSB features are tidal debris and that each of these two ETGs was assembled during a relatively recent, major wet merger, which most likely occurred after the redshift z ≃ 0.5 epoch. Had these mergers been older, the tidal features should have already fallen back or be destroyed by more recent accretion events. However, the absence of molecular gas and of a prominent young stellar population in the core region of the galaxies indicates that the merger is at least 1-2 Gyr old: the memory of any merger-triggered nuclear starburst has indeed been lost. The star-forming objects found towards the collisional debris of NGC 5557 are then likely tidal dwarf galaxies. Such recycled galaxies here appear to be long-lived and continue to form stars while any star formation activity has stopped in their parent galaxy. The inner kinematics of NGC 680 is typical for fast rotators which make the bulk of nearby ETGs in the ATLAS3D sample. On the other hand, NGC 5557 belongs to the poorly populated class of massive, round, slow rotators that are predicted by semi-analytic models and cosmological simulations to be the end-product of a complex mass accretion history, involving ancient major mergers and more recent minor mergers. Our observations suggest that under specific circumstances a single binary merger may dominate the formation history of such objects and thus that at least some massive ETGs may form at relatively low redshift. Whether the two galaxies studied here are representative of their own sub-class of ETGs is still an open question that will be addressed by an on-going deep optical survey of ATLAS3D galaxies.
Modeling the Experience of Emotion

Affective computing has proven to be a viable field of research comprised of a large number of multidisciplinary researchers, resulting in work that is widely published. The majority of this work consists of emotion recognition technology, computational modeling of causal factors of emotion and emotion expression in virtual characters and robots. A smaller part is concerned with modeling the effects of emotion on cognition and behavior, formal modeling of cognitive appraisal theory and models of emergent emotions. Part of the motivation for affective computing as a field is to better understand emotion through computational modeling. In psychology, a critical and neglected aspect of having emotions is the experience of emotion: what does the content of an emotional episode look like, how does this content change over time, and when do we call the episode emotional. Few modeling efforts in affective computing have these topics as a primary focus. The launch of a journal on synthetic emotions should motivate research initiatives in this direction, and this research should have a measurable impact on emotion research in psychology. In this article, I show that a good way to do so is to investigate the psychological core of what an emotion is: an experience. I present ideas on how computational modeling of emotion can help to better understand the experience of motion, and provide evidence that several computational models of emotion already address the issue.
Packaging Health Services When Resources Are Limited: The Example of a Cervical Cancer Screening Visit

Background Increasing evidence supporting the value of screening women for cervical cancer once in their lifetime, coupled with mounting interest in scaling up successful screening demonstration projects, present challenges to public health decision makers seeking to take full advantage of the single-visit opportunity to provide additional services. We present an analytic framework for packaging multiple interventions during a single point of contact, explicitly taking into account a budget and scarce human resources, constraints acknowledged as significant obstacles for provision of health services in poor countries. Methods and Findings We developed a binary integer programming (IP) model capable of identifying an optimal package of health services to be provided during a single visit for a particular target population. Inputs to the IP model are derived using state-transition models, which compute lifetime costs and health benefits associated with each intervention. In a simplified example of a single lifetime cervical cancer screening visit, we identified packages of interventions among six diseases that maximized disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) averted subject to budget and human resource constraints in four resource-poor regions. Data were obtained from regional reports and surveys from the World Health Organization, international databases, the published literature, and expert opinion. With only a budget constraint, interventions for depression and iron deficiency anemia were packaged with cervical cancer screening, while the more costly breast cancer and cardiovascular disease interventions were not. Including personnel constraints resulted in shifting of interventions included in the package, not only across diseases but also between low- and high-intensity intervention options within diseases. Conclusions The results of our example suggest several key themes: Packaging other interventions during a one-time visit has the potential to increase health gains; the shortage of personnel represents a real-world constraint that can impact the optimal package of services; and the shortage of different types of personnel may influence the contents of the package of services. Our methods provide a general framework to enhance a decision maker's ability to simultaneously consider costs, benefits, and important nonmonetary constraints. We encourage analysts working on real-world problems to shift from considering costs and benefits of interventions for a single disease to exploring what synergies might be achievable by thinking across disease burdens.
Teacher identity, pedagogy and disciplinarity: Exploring the three strands of practice

The relationships between discipline specialisation, teacher identity and pedagogy can be seen as the crux of practice in the music classroom - impacting on all the actions of the teacher, both within and outside the classroom. Crucially, the impact of music teacher identity on the nature of music teaching and learning, is one that has the potential to illuminate influences underlying the professional practices of teachers. This project explores how experienced, well regarded, teachers define their own identities, and implications of such identities to their practice. The primary mode of data collection was through extended semi-structured interviews, although observations of the classroom were also undertaken. Grounded theory analysis techniques were utilised, involving inductive and deductive coding to develop themes and sub-themes. The structured data set was then used to theorise the central topics of the study, while always returning to the empirical data for verification and exemplification. Findings suggest that music teachers identify firstly as performing musicians, and this impacts greatly on the way they perceive themselves in their teaching practice. The analysis raises questions about useful ways for music educators to conceive of their professional identities. Findings have the potential to provide insights into improving classroom practice.
Low‐factor consumption for major surgery in haemophilia B with long‐acting recombinant glycoPEGylated factor IX

Surgery in patients with haemophilia B carries a high risk of excessive bleeding and requires adequate haemostatic control until wound healing. Nonacog beta pegol, a long‐acting recombinant glycoPEGylated factor IX (FIX), was used in the perioperative management of patients undergoing major surgery.
Securely Computing a Ground Speed Model

Consider a server offering risk assessment services and potential clients of these services. The risk assessment model that is run by the server is based on current and historical data of the clients. However, the clients might prefer not sharing such sensitive data with external parties such as the server, and the server might consider the possession of this data as a liability rather than an asset. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables one, in principle, to compute any function while hiding the inputs to the function, and would thus enable the computation of the risk assessment model while hiding the client’s data from the server. However, a direct application of a generic MPC solution to this problem is rather inefficient due to the large scale of the data and the complexity of the function. We examine a specific case of risk assessment—the ground speed model. In this model, the geographical locations of successive user-authentication attempts are compared, and a warning flag is raised if the physical speed required to move between these locations is greater than some threshold, and some other conditions, such as authentication from two related networks, do not hold. We describe a very efficient secure computation solution that is tailored for this problem. This solution demonstrates that a risk model can be applied over encrypted data with sufficient efficiency to fit the requirements of commercial systems.
Correlates of concurrency among young people in Carletonville, South Africa

Abstract There is still a considerable debate about whether socioeconomic or cultural factors underpin the high prevalence of sexual partner concurrency in parts of Southern and Eastern Africa. We analyzed the patterning and correlates of concurrency in a population-based sample of 1182 sexually active 14–24 year olds in Carletonville, South Africa. Potential demographic, socioeconomic and attitudinal risk factors were assessed via a questionnaire. The association between risk factors and respondent reported concurrency were assessed using multivariate logistic regression. Separate models were run for men and women. Point-concurrency rates at the time of the survey and 6 months prior to the survey were similarly high – 19.3 (95% confidence interval, CI 14.2–18.5%) and 16.2% (CI 14.1–18.4%), respectively. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that for men and women, concurrency was not associated with socioeconomic deprivation but was associated with a number of sexual partners, being married and having a partner who was thought to have an additional partner. Female concurrents were more likely to use alcohol, have an older partner and have difficulties negotiating condom usage and refusing sex with their partners. Male concurrents were less likely to use a condom regularly and less likely to wear a condom when their partner asked them to. The strong relationship between respondent and partner concurrency appears to depend on contemporary concurrency, as opposed to the behavior of previous partners. If high concurrency rates are in part driven by positive feedback loops of partner and respondent concurrency, then norm change involving the rejection of concurrents could be self-amplifying leading to a rapid decline of concurrency.
Molecular Quantification of Symbiotic Dinoflagellate Algae of the Genus Symbiodinium

The dinoflagellate microalga Symbiodinium is the dominant algal symbiont in corals and related marine animals. To explore the incidence of mixed infections, methods employing real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (QPCR) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) were developed. In experiments focusing on Symbiodinium clades A and B, QPCR and FISH results were well correlated and generally more precise and sensitive than those from the endpoint PCR–restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis (PCR-RFLP) traditionally used for this application, thus increasing the detected incidence of mixed infections. For example, the prevalence of mixed infections in the sea anemone Condylactis gigantea was 40% by PCR-RFLP and 80%–90% by QPCR and FISH. However, the use of QPCR and FISH was limited by inter-host variation in the rRNA gene copy number per Symbiodinium cell, precluding any single conversion factor between QPCR signal and Symbiodinium cell number; and one FISH probe that gave excellent hybridization efficiency with cultured Symbiodinium yielded variable results with Symbiodinium from symbioses. After controlling for these caveats, QPCR studies revealed that field-collected hosts previously described as universally unialgal bore up to 1.6% of the alternative clade. Further research is required to establish the contribution that algal cells at low density in symbiosis and external to the symbiosis make to the minor clade.
Schematic-Driven Substrate Noise Coupling Analysis in Mixed-Signal IC Designs

This paper presents an approach to reduce substrate cross-talk noise between noisy and sensitive circuitry in mixed-signal integrated circuits at different stages of design and layout development. Silencer! a new, fully automated, schematic-driven substrate noise coupling analysis tool is introduced to accomplish this task. The tool seamlessly enables substrate noise coupling analysis in a standard mixed-signal design flow. Two different methods, fast scalable macro-models and a boundary element solver are integrated into Silencer! These methods allow extractions of a substrate network from geometric layout information. Simulation results obtained with Silencer! are accurate to within 10% of measured integrated circuits
Impact of Preanalytical Handling and Timing for Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells Isolation and RNA Studies: The Experience of the Interinstitutional Multidisciplinary BioBank (BioBIM)

Multicenter studies and biobanking projects require blood transportation from the participating center to a central collection or diagnostic laboratory. The impact of time delays between venous blood collection and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) isolation prior to RNA extraction may affect the quality and quantity of isolated nucleic acids for genomic applications. Thus, standard operating procedure (SOP) optimization for the treatment of biological samples before RNA extraction is crucial in a biological repository. In order to define SOPs for whole blood preservation prior to RNA extraction, we sought to determine whether different blood storage times (0, 3, 6, 10, 24, and 30 hours) prior to PBMCs isolation and storage at –80°C, could affect the quality and quantity of extracted RNA. After spectrophotometric quantification, the quality and integrity of RNA were assessed by agarose gel electrophoresis, RNA integrity number and real time-PCR (RT-PCR). Across the different time points we did not observe significant differences within the first 24 hours of blood storage at room temperature, while a significant loss in RNA yield and integrity was detected between 24 and 30 hours. We conclude that time delays before PBMCs isolation prior to RNA extraction may have a significant impact on downstream molecular biological applications.