Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Research Progress in Acoustical Application to Petroleum Logging and Seismic Exploration

This paper is concerned with an improved network model in acoustical application to petroleum logging and seismic exploration. Utilizing acoustic-electric analogue, we report in this paper a newly developed acoustic-logging network model. Important relationships amongst various physical factors are established, i.e. driving-voltage signal, electric-acoustic conversion of source-transducer, acoustic-electric conversion of receiver-transducer, the physical and geometrical properties of propagation media, as well as the measured logging signal. Technically, a driving-voltage convolution with electric-acoustic impulse response is used to substitute for some traditionally assumed acoustic-source functions on acoustic logging, e.g. Tsang wavelet, Ricker wavelet, Gaussian impulse wavelet, etc. With an improved understanding of the anisotropic effects on reflection/refraction between two different anisotropic rock slabs, the new network model can be used to determine the various properties of signal propagation in acoustic-logging, including propagation speed, phase factor, signal amplitude, and frequency information. In turn, it provides input for analysis of amplitude variations with offset (AVO). Corresponding to the improved network model, with available logging and seismic exploration data, a new algorithm for analysis of amplitude variation has been developed to explore new oil reservoirs or gas fields.
Gold nanorod array structured silicon nitride films for reliable RF MEMS capacitive switches

The electrical properties of gold rods nanostructured silicon nitride are investigated. The paper aims to determine the advantages of the nanostructured material over conventional dielectrics that will mitigate the dielectric charging and provide a potential candidate for insulating films in MEMS capacitive switches. Different nanorod diameters and densities were grown. A model was implemented to describe both the DC and low frequency electrical properties. Finally, the device performance up to 40GHz was assessed.
Low rank and sparse matrix reconstruction with partial support knowledge for surveillance video processing

It has been shown recently that incorporating priori knowledge into the basic compressive sensing results in significant improvement of its performance. This has motivated us to extend the incorporation of partial known support into the problem of Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) from compressive measurements. Our proposed algorithm utilizes the known part of the support to recover a matrix as the sum of a low-rank matrix and a sparse component and is tested on the problem of surveillance video reconstruction from compressive measurements. Our experimental results show that the incorporation of partial known support, can significantly improve the reconstruction performance of video sequences.
Korean and English, Language Development Within the Context of a Korean Community and International Schools in Bangkok, Thailand

The main purpose of this study was to identify the functional use of Korean and English, and language development within the context of a Korean Community and international schools in Bangkok from the perspective of six Korean International students in Thailand. Through the analysis of the qualitative data from the six Korean students, such as observation, measuring the number of clauses, the complexity of nominal groups in English writing and the complexity of modifiers in Korean, the findings revealed that the six students learned their L1 (Korean) and L2 (English) through cooperation, mediation, and scaffolding in their interaction as described by Vygotsky in his ―Sociocultural Theory‖. The contexts of the Korean Community and international schools seem to have had a positive effect on development of L1 and L2 based on Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Grammar. Moreover, the practice of translanguaging among participants helped them to understand and mediate with others more effectively. Finally, through comparing the thematic discourse analysis of the participants‘ English writiNgs, the development of the L1 also seemed to have influenced the development of L2.
Chebyshev-filtered subspace iteration method free of sparse diagonalization for DFT calculations

The Kohn-Sham equation in first-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations is a nonlinear eigenvalue problem. Solving the nonlinear eigenproblem is usually the most expensive part in DFT calculations. Sparse iterative diagonalization methods that compute explicit eigenvectors can quickly become prohibitive for large scale problems. The Chebyshevfiltered subspace iteration (CheFSI) method avoids most of the explicit computation of eigenvectors, which results in significant speedup over iterative diagonalization methods for the DFT self-consistent field (SCF) calculations. However, the original CheFSI method utilized a sparse iterative diagonalization at the first SCF iteration to provide initial vectors for latter subspace filtering, and this diagonalization is expensive for large scale problems. We develop a new initial filtering step to fully avoid this first step diagonalization, thus making the CheFSI method free of sparse iterative diagonalizations. The new approach saves memory usage and can be two to three times faster than the original CheFSI method.
Anglican Cathedrals in Modern Life: The Science of Cathedral Studies

it is cracked up to be. But Berglund also has expertise in cross-cultural Islamic education and in that case, there are issues latent which go beyond cultural inheritance to include scientific fact, fundamental human values, and the presumed status of sacred texts. Those issues relate to internal rather than external borders, but they might have been worth exploring on a European comparative basis.
Speech Timing Deficit of Stuttering: Evidence from Contingent Negative Variations

The aim of the present study was to investigate the speech preparation processes of adults who stutter (AWS). Fifteen AWS and fifteen adults with fluent speech (AFS) participated in the experiment. The event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in a foreperiod paradigm. The warning signal (S1) was a color square, and the following imperative stimulus (S2) was either a white square (the Go signal that required participants to name the color of S1) or a white dot (the NoGo signal that prevents participants from speaking). Three differences were found between AWS and AFS. First, the mean amplitude of the ERP component parietal positivity elicited by S1 (S1-P3) was smaller in AWS than in AFS, which implies that AWS may have deficits in investing working memory on phonological programming. Second, the topographic shift from the early phase to the late phase of contingent negative variation occurred earlier for AWS than for AFS, thus suggesting that the motor preparation process is promoted in AWS. Third, the NoGo effect in the ERP component parietal positivity elicited by S2 (S2-P3) was larger for AFS than for AWS, indicating that AWS have difficulties in inhibiting a planned speech response. These results provide a full picture of the speech preparation and response inhibition processes of AWS. The relationship among these three findings is discussed. However, as stuttering was not manipulated in this study, it is still unclear whether the effects are the causes or the results of stuttering. Further studies are suggested to explore the relationship between stuttering and the effects found in the present study.
Adding one edge to planar graphs makes crossing number hard

A graph is near-planar if it can be obtained from a planar graph by adding an edge. We show that it is NP-hard to compute the crossing number of near-planar graphs. The main idea in the reduction is to consider the problem of simultaneously drawing two planar graphs inside a disk, with some of its vertices fixed at the boundary of the disk. This approach can be used to prove hardness of some other geometric problems. As an interesting consequence we obtain a new, geometric proof of NP-completeness of the crossing number problem, even when restricted to cubic graphs. This resolves a question of Hlinený.
Unsupervised learning in islanding studies: Applicability study for predictive detection in high solar PV penetration distribution feeders

Unintentional islanding is a pressing issue associated with integration of distributed solar photovoltaic generation with a distribution network. The probability of its occurrence is usually dominated by the photovoltaic penetration however, as a direct consequence of this, load-inverter dynamic interactions alongside grid-side disturbances can also lead to anomalous instances that can become responsible for accidental island creation and one such anomaly has been described in this work. Given such dynamic behaviours occurring on photovoltaic inverter-integrated distribution feeders, threshold based classical islanding detection can not suffice and hence machine learning based techniques have began to be researched and adopted. However the orientation can be directed towards predictive approaches leveraging knowledge extraction from huge event data available in smart grids. Furthermore, unsupervised learning can be explored for real-time applications to enable self-learning and acting systems. This paper presents preliminary results of application of a self-organizing map neural network for preemptive detection of unintentional islanding by classifying the discovered islanding precursor from other power system events. Classification of a three phase short-circuit fault at the point of common coupling was found to be invariant to input feature reduction however the same gives contrasting results for the other two test cases investigated.
DualFS: a new journaling file system without meta-data duplication

In this paper we introduce DualFS, a new high performance journaling file system that puts data and meta-data on different devices (usually, two partitions on the same disk or on different disks), and manages them in very different ways. Unlike other journaling file systems, DualFS has only one copy of every meta-data block. This copy is in the meta-data device, a log which is used by DualFS both to read and to write meta-data blocks. By avoiding a time-expensive extra copy of meta-data blocks, DualFS can achieve a good performance as compared to other journaling file systems. Indeed, we have implemented a DualFS prototype, which has been evaluated with microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks, and we have found that DualFS greatly reduces the total I/O time taken by the file system in most cases (up to 97%), whereas it slightly increases the total I/O time only in a few and limited cases.
Dynamic Risk Sharing in the United States and Europe

This paper uses a panel VAR model to improve upon the existing literature on interregional risk sharing channels (e.g. Asdrubali, Sorensen and Yosha, 1996) in several respects. First, it endogenizes the output process within a multi-equation framework, capturing the dynamic feedback between output and various risk sharing channels. Second, in contrast to previous research's analysis of static risk sharing in the presence of exogenous output shocks, it uses impulse response functions to trace the role of each risk sharing channel over time, in the presence of different structural shocks (temporary vs. persistent and output vs. risk sharing channels). Third, the paper extends the risk sharing channels typically analyzed, by considering the consumption smoothing role of changes in the nominal exchange rate and relative commodity prices across regions. The empirical method is applied to the U.S. states, 23 OECD countries, and 15 countries in the European Union from 1960 to 1990. Regarding the dynamic responses of each risk sharing channel to exogenous output shocks, the results suggest that the dynamics are substantially different among different channels. First, most capital market smoothing is achieved on impact while fiscal smoothing is achieved over time. Second, credit market plays a positive role on impact, but a negative role later. Regarding the substitutability of channels, first, fiscal smoothing is fully substituted by credit market channel in the U.S. while only half of capital market smoothing is substituted in OECD and EU countries. Second, fiscal smoothing is not substituted by any other channels in the U.S. while half of fiscal smoothing is substituted by credit market smoothing in the OECD and EU countries. The results also suggest that nominal and real exchange rate movements are very important in analyzing international risk sharing in OECD and EU countries.
Using Wikis in a Corporate Context

This paper investigates the technology of Wikis and their current and possible future role within a corporate context. It argues that the phenomenon of Wikis should be understood as not one, but two concepts: A simple and intuitive technology which allows its users to generate documentation and support knowledge-based processes easily and deeply; and a management philosophy that manages knowledge creation through evolution of norms and values rather than directives and incentives. Managers seeking to make effective use of collaborative tools can benefit as much from adopting the Wikis` management philosophy as by adopting the technology – but need to make sure that Wikis are used for what they are best for.
Comix: Joint estimation and lightspeed comparison of mixture models

The Kullback-Leibler divergence is a widespread dissimilarity measure between probability density functions, based on the Shannon entropy. Unfortunately, there is no analytic formula available to compute this divergence between mixture models, imposing the use of costly approximation algorithms. In order to reduce the computational burden when a lot of divergence evaluations are needed, we introduce a sub-class of the mixture models where the component parameters are shared between a set of mixtures and the only degree-of-freedom is the vector of weights of each mixture. This sharing allows to design extremely fast versions of existing dissimilarity measures between mixtures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating the quality of the ordering produced by our method on a real dataset.
Towards real-time ray-tracing of combinatorial solid geometric models

Ray-tracing is essential when it is necessary to accurately compute reflection and refraction effects, shadows with penumbrae, and energy transport through participating media. In this new effort, a combination of hardware and softw are techniques is employed to produce ray-traced renderings of models of enormous comple xity (>500,000,000 polygon equi valents) in near eal-time, with the goal being to achie ve performance of five television-resolution frames per second. For this class of problem, the ray-tracing technique stands to produce images at a substantially faster rate than an y known scanline-rendering system, while simultaneously bestowing all the advantages of ray-traced rendering. This effort uses a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parallel processor array , highspeed HIPPI and ATM networks, and real-time image display hardw are. Theinitial system is being implemented using an 8-node, 96-processor Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) Power Challenge Array . By adding existing BRL-CAD network-distributed raytracing software, the result is a system capable of producing real-time ray-traced optical image generation of low-complexity geometry. The primary goal is to produce real-time imagery for the de velopment and testing of missile automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. This work also addresses one of the pressing needs of the Defense Interacti ve Smulation (DIS) community by pro viding the ability to add a physically accurate high-resolution multispectral signature generation node to a distributed simulation when ne w sensor technology needs to be explored.
A framework for testing distributed systems

Thorough testing of distributed systems, particularly peer-to-peer systems can prove difficult due to the problems inherent in deploying, controlling and monitoring many nodes simultaneously. This problem will only increase as the scale of distributed systems continues to grow. This framework implements a test bed environment using a semi-centralized peer-to-peer network as a substrate for sharing resources made available from standard PCs. This framework automates the process of test-case deployment using a combination of reflection and aspect oriented programming. This allows 'point-and-click' publishing of software onto the test-bed. Our framework also provides a common monitoring, control and logging interface for all nodes running on the network. Together, these features greatly reduce deployment-time for real-world test scenarios. Automated insertion and removal of test code also ensures that the testing process does not compromise the correctness of the final system.
Characteristics and outcome of pediatric patients enrolled in phase I oncology trials.

PURPOSE To describe the characteristics of pediatric subjects who enroll in phase I trials, to determine the associations between pre-enrollment characteristics and the risk for toxicity, and to analyze response and survival outcomes. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Pre-enrollment characteristics and study outcomes were retrospectively analyzed for children with refractory solid tumors treated in one of 16 phase I trials with similar eligibility criteria at the National Cancer Institute between 1992 and 2005. RESULTS The 262 subjects analyzed had received a median of two (range, 0-9) prior chemotherapy regimens, and were on one (range, 0-12) concomitant medication. The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status scores for subjects were 0 (29%), 1 (48%), and 2 (19%); 19% had received a prior stem cell transplantation and 73% had received prior radiation. Approximately 90% of subjects were evaluable for the primary trial endpoints (toxicity and pharmacokinetics). Seventeen percent of subjects experienced a dose-limiting toxicity (DLT), 5% discontinued the study drug because of toxicity, and a drug-related death occurred in one subject (0.4%). Variables associated with a higher risk for developing a DLT, by multiple logistic regression analysis, were drug dose and prior radiation, for myelosuppressive agents, and drug dose and performance status, for nonmyelosuppressive agents. The complete and partial response rate was 4%; however, 17% of subjects had stable disease (received three or more cycles). The median overall survival time from the time of enrollment was five months. CONCLUSIONS Primary trial objectives are achieved in approximately 90% of subjects with the standard phase I trial design and eligibility criteria despite the intensification of frontline and salvage therapies in pediatric subjects with cancer.
A Classification of Schema-Based Matching Approaches

Schema/ontology matching is a critical problem in many application domains, such as, Semantic Web, schema/ontology integration, data warehouses, e-commerce, catalog matching, etc. Many diverse solutions to the matching problem have been proposed so far. In this paper we present a taxonomy of schema-based matching techniques that builds on the previous work on classifying schema matching approaches. Some innovations are in introducing new criteria which distinguish between matching techniques relying on diverse semantic clues. In particular, we distinguish between heuristic and formal techniques at schema-level; and implicit and explicit techniques at element- and structure-level. Based on the classification proposed we overview some of the recent schema/ontology matching systems pointing which part of the solution space they cover.
A semantic web-based integration framework

Data integration of heterogeneous sources is still an active research problem. This topic is especially crucial on enterprises that deal with new and different kinds of data as new services are provided. However, even though research efforts have been applied to the information integration, there is a lack of practical approaches ready to be implemented for real use cases. In this paper, we present a web-based framework and system built upon ontologies and other semantic techniques for the integration of heterogeneous data sources. The example scenario used to demonstrate the utility of the framework consists of a use case with the actual data of a telecom company.
ECAL 97 , Hemelrijk , 1 Cooperation Without Genes , Games Or Cognition

In this paper I describe how the spatial dynamics of autocatalytic interactions among entities in a virtual world led to a type of co-operation that typically would be studied from a game theoretical perspective. The entities were very simple and completely identical at the start of the simulation. They just aggregated and performed aggressive interactions in which winning was self-reinforcing. Patterns of reciprocation emerged at the level of the group, particularly in loose assemblages. These patterns appeared not to be due to global spatial structures as I have suggested before (Hemelrijk, 1996ab), but arose from local series of Titfor-Tat like interactions. These involved pairs of individuals that ‚collaborated‘ by taking turns in chasing away a third entity. Runs with varying parameter values showed that particularly those entities that were designed to be more aggressive, were more prone to co-operate. The processes responsible for the Tit-for-Tat like patterns are outlined. It is suggested that similar epiphenomena may contribute to cooperation found in real animals (such as reciprocation of support in primates, communal predator inspection by fish and co-operative hunting by lions). The explanatory value of game theoretical approaches to cooperation in real animals, such as the Prisoner‘s Di lemma is questioned. Firstly, because in that paradigm the ability to co-operate is attributed to a quality of the individual (be it in terms of genes or cognition) and arises from pay-off rationalisation, secondly because co-operation (or its absence) is studied in isolation, separate from other behavioural acts.
Sustainability and Textual Extensions of Institutional Discourse: Testing the Great Lakes Compact

This article examines the interplay of discourse, texts, and sustainability in the public hearing process for a Wisconsin city’s application to divert water from the Great Lakes of North America. The application is controversial and has been labeled as a ‘precedent’ setting action with respect to the Great Lakes Compact and water management. This article examines how texts are used to support positions on the diversion application and on sustainability. This analysis takes a discourse analytic approach to analyze local public hearings. The central question that is addressed is how do texts matter in sustainability efforts? The analysis indicates that texts are significant in supporting positions, but are associated with stances in different ways such that the same text may be used to support divergent positions. Meeting participants converged in agreeing on the importance of specific texts and of sustainability, but differed in how they related actions to texts.