Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An imbalancing act: the delayed dynamic response of the Kaskawulsh Glacier to sustained mass loss

Abstract The Kaskawulsh Glacier is an iconic outlet draining the icefields of the St. Elias Mountains in Yukon, Canada. We determine and attempt to interpret its catchment-wide mass budget since 2007. Using SPOT5/6/7 data we estimate a 2007–18 geodetic balance of −0.46 ± 0.17 m w.e. a−1. We then compute balance fluxes and observed ice fluxes at nine flux gates to examine the discrepancy between the climatic mass balance and internal mass redistribution by glacier flow. Balance fluxes are computed using a fully distributed mass-balance model driven by downscaled and bias-corrected climate-reanalysis data. Observed fluxes are calculated using NASA ITS_LIVE surface velocities and glacier cross-sectional areas derived from ice-penetrating radar data. We find the glacier is still in the early stages of dynamic adjustment to its mass imbalance. We estimate a committed terminus retreat of ~23 km under the 2007–18 climate and a lower bound of 46 km3 of committed ice loss, equivalent to ~15% of the total glacier volume.
ANALYSIS OF POLYELECTROLYTE CHAIN CONFORMATION BY POLARIZED RAMAN-SPECTROSCOPY

Conformational changes of the weak polyelectrolyte, poly(acrylic acid), are monitored by polarized Raman spectroscopy as the polymer undergoes ionization in salt-free, semidilute solution. Persistence lengths are obtained by interpreting the depolarization ratio for CH stretching in terms of the relative number of gauche and trans conformers and by then inserting these conformer statistics into a simplified rotational isomeric state model. The results show that the polymer stiffens only slightly as it is ionized. The data agree best with wormlike chain models that incorporate the full Poisson-Boltzmann equation.
OPTIMIZING INVERSE DISTANCE WEIGHTED INTERPOLATION WITH CROSS-VALIDATION

Inverse distance weighted interpolation can be easily optimized with commercially available software by selecting distance exponent values that minimize cross-validation (VCROSS) errors of prediction. The effectiveness of this approach has not been critically evaluated but is of concern because of known limitations of the VCROSS procedure. To evaluate this optimization procedure, it should be validated with an independent data set (VIDS). The objectives of this study were (1) to develop and test an optimization procedure based on VCROSS and VIDS analyses, (2) to test the accuracy of optimization of the VCROSS procedure, and (3) to evaluate the quality of maps created with VCROSS. Soil fertility and bulk soil electrical conductivity data from two previously published studies were used for the analyses. These included prediction and validation data sets for multiple locations. Our optimization procedure compared well with those obtained with a commercially available software program. The use of VCROSS resulted in overprediction of optimal distance exponent values and a substantial reduction in map quality. In many cases, the maps produced with VCROSS optimization were blocky and unrealistic. The VCROSS procedure should not be used to optimize distance exponent values for data collected on regular grids or along transects. Instead, distance exponent values between 1.5 and 2.0 should be used. Software developers should consider creating a VIDS optimizing procedure.
Sublimation Thermodynamic Parameters for Cholesterol, Ergosterol, β-Sitosterol, and Stigmasterol

Vapor pressure and enthalpies of sublimation data for sterols are desirable engineering parameters in the separation of sterols from plant materials by vacuum pyrolysis or supercritical fluid extraction. In this study, vapor pressures of cholesterol, ergosterol, β-sitosterol, and stigmasterol were measured by an isothermal Knudsen effusion method. The vapor pressure correlations were fitted to the following equations: cholesterol ln(p/Pa)= −17136/(T/K) + 39.88 (from (386 to 414) K); ergosterol ln(p/Pa)= −17686/(T/K) + 40.61 (from (381 to 412) K); β-sitosterol ln(p/Pa) = −17295/(T/K) + 39.7 (from (389 to 410) K); and stigmasterol ln(p/Pa) = −20254/(T/K) + 46.31 (from (390 to 417) K).
Protein Removal from Whey Waste by Foam Fractionation in a Batch Process

The work investigates the separation of proteins from whey waste collected from a local confectionery by the foam fractionation technique in batch mode. The purpose of this work was to evaluate performance criteria of protein separation. The effects of pH, the concentration of initial feed solution, the nitrogen flow rate, the % gas hold up, the bubble diameter, the breaking time of foam, and the optimization of the protein–surfactant ratio (1.5:1) were investigated in detail. Maximum enrichment ratio (48.189), %Rp (96.378) were observed at a gas flow rate of 330 ml/min and pH 5 that is closest to isoelectric point of observed proteins (Bovine serum albumin, β-Lactoglobulin, α-lactalbumin).
Contribution of photoacid generator to material roughness

The authors have developed an atomic-force-microscopy-based technique to measure intrinsic material roughness after base development. This method involves performing an interrupted development of the resist film and measuring the resulting film roughness after a certain fixed film loss. Employing this technique, the authors previously established that the photoacid generator (PAG) is a major material contributor of film roughness and that PAG segregation in the resist is likely responsible for nanoscale dissolution inhomogeneities. The additional roughness imparted on a test polymer by incorporation of a series of iodonium, sulfonium, diazo, and imido PAGs was measured. The roughness was then correlated to the inhibition properties of the various PAGs. This was accomplished both through a NMR technique that measures interaction of the PAG with the polymer and by evaluating the dissolution inhibition properties of the PAG through a percolation model. Several PAGs that result in significantly lower material.
Flow-Injection Spectrophotometric Determination of Captopril Exploiting Silver Chloranilate Solid-Phase Reactor

Abstract A novel, simple, and rapid flow-injection method for the spectrophotometric determination of captopril in pharmaceutical products, using a solid-phase reactor with silver chloranilate (Ag2C6Cl2O4) immobilized in a polyester resin, is presented. This method explored the formation of an insoluble salt between Ag(I) and captopril in the solid-phase reactor, releasing chloranilate anion ( ). Then, this anion reacted with ferric ions to produce a complex, , which was monitored spectrophotometrically at 528 nm. The analytical curve was linear in the captopril concentration range from 1.0 × 10−5 to 5.0 × 10−4 mol l−1 with a detection limit of 8.0 × 10−6 mol l−1. The relative standard deviation (RSD) was 0.35% (n = 10) for a solution of 3.0 × 10−4 mol l−1 captopril solution, and an analytical frequency of 70 h−1 was obtained. The effects of excipients frequently found with captopril in pharmaceutical formulations, such as lactose, microcrystalline cellulose, starch, and magnesium stearate, were evaluated using the proposed flow-injection method. None of these substances caused significative interference in the proposed method. The method was successfully applied to the determination of captopril in pharmaceutical products, and the results were compared with results obtained using a potentiometric method.
Characterization of spoilage bacteria in pork sausage by PCR-DGGE analysis

To investigate microbial diversity and identify spoilage bacteria in fresh pork sausages during storage, twelve industrial pork sausages of different trademarks were stored at 4 °C for 0, 14, 28 and 42 days, 80% relative humidity and packaged in sterile plastic bags. Microbiological analysis was performed. The pH and water activity (a w ) were measured. The culture-independent method performed was the Polymerase Chain Reaction - Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE). The culturedependent method showed that the populations of mesophilic bacteria and Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) increased linearly over storage time. At the end of the storage time, the average population of microorganisms was detected, in general, at the level of 5 log cfu g –1 . A significant ( P < 0.005) increase was observed in pH and a w values at the end of the storage time. The PCR-DGGE allowed a rapid identification of dominant communities present in sausages. PCR-DGGE discriminated 15 species and seven genera of bacteria that frequently constitute the microbiota in sausage products. The most frequent spoilage bacteria identified in the sausages were Lactobacillus sakei and Brochothrix thermosphacta. The identification of dominant communities present in fresh pork sausages can help in the choice of the most effective preservation method for extending the product shelf-life.
Genetic Feature Fusion for Object Skeleton Detection

Object skeleton detection requires the convolutional neural networks to recognize objects and their parts in the cluttered background, overcome the image definition degradation brought by the pooling layers, and predict the location of skeleton pixels in different scale granularity. Most existing object skeleton detection methods take great efforts into the designing of side-output networks for multiscale feature fusion. Despite the great progress achieved by them, there are still many problems that hinder the development of object skeleton detection, such as the manually designed network is labor-intensive and the network initialization depends on models pretrained on large-scale datasets. To alleviate these issues, we propose a genetic NASmethod to automatically search on a newly designed architecture search space for adaptive multiscale feature fusion. Furthermore, we introduce a symmetric encoder-decoder search space based on reversing the VGG network, in which the decoder can reuse the ImageNet pretrained model of VGG. +e searched networks improve the performance of the state-of-the-art methods on commonly used skeleton detection benchmarks, which proves the efficacy of our method.
Aggregates Selection in Replicated Document-Oriented Databases

Document-stores leverage the ﬂexibility of structured documents to pack closely related data within a single autonomous aggregate ( i . e . document). Selecting an appropriate set of aggregates for a document database is a non-trivial task since: ( i ) there are no clear-cut transformation rules from a conceptual design to a document design; ( ii ) a large space of design options must often be considered; and ( iii ) most importantly, it is difﬁcult, if not impossible, to ﬁnd out a single set of aggregates suitable for all data access patterns. In a previous work, we proposed distorted replicas : a replication scheme that leverages ubiquitous replication in document-stores and restructures replicated data in different ways to better cope with the heterogeneity of data access patterns. In this paper, we tackle the problem of aggregates selection and replication in an integrated manner. In particular, given a database with a replication factor of C and a workload W , we propose novel cost-driven techniques allowing to: ( i ) determine the most interesting aggregates; and ( ii ) pack the most interesting aggregates into C disjoint and complete subsets in such a way that the execution time of W is minimized. The experimental results obtained over two real-world workloads showed that distorted replicas allow to run queries up to tens of times faster than state-of-the-art approaches.
Hybrid Chemical Vapor Deposition/Sol−Gel Route in the Preparation of Nanophasic LaCoO3 Films

Lanthanum cobaltite (LaCoO3) thin films were synthesized by an innovative route based on the combination of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and sol−gel (SG) methods. In particular, the approach is based on the sequential deposition of binary oxide systems (Co−O on La−O) and on the ex situ thermal treatment of the final product (T = 400−900 °C, t = 1−8 h), aimed at favoring solid-state reactions for the formation of a ternary La−Co−O nanosystem. To highlight the peculiar effects of these procedures on the characteristics of the final product, both SG and CVD routes were used for the preparation of single-phase La−O and Co−O species. The process resulted in the formation of LaCoO3 nanostructured films with an average crystallite size lower than 20 nm. The required processing conditions were strongly dependent on the specific synthetic pathway: (i) SG of Co−O on CVD La−O; (ii) CVD of Co−O on SG La−O. In this framework, particular attention was focused on the analogies and differences between the two sequenc.
Square-wave adsorptive stripping voltammetric determination of an antihistamine drug astemizole

The square-wave voltammetric technique was used to explore the adsorption properties of the astemizole drug. The analytical methodology used was based on the adsorptive preconcentration of the drug on a hanging mercury drop electrode (HMDE), followed by the electrochemical reduction process which yielded a well-defined cathodic peak at −1.184 V (vs. the Ag/AgCl electrode). To achieve high sensitivity, various experimental and instrumental variables were investigated such as the supporting electrolyte, pH, accumulation time and potential, drug concentration, scan rate, SW frequency, pulse amplitude, convection rate, and the working electrode area. Under the optimized conditions, the AdSV peak current was proportional over the analyte concentration range of 5 × 10−7 to 2.5 × 10−6 mol L−1 (r = 0.998) with the detection limit of 1.4 × 10−8 mol L−1 (6.4 ng mL−1). The precision of the proposed method in terms of RSD was 2.4 %, whereas the method accuracy was indicated by the mean recovery of 100.1 %. Possible interferences of several substances usually present in the pharmaceutical tablets and formulations were also evaluated. The applicability of this electroanalytic approach was illustrated by the determination of astemizole in tablets and biological fluids.
Fast Stereo Matching with Recursive Refinement and Depth Upsizing for Estimation of High Resolution Depth

In this paper, a fast and precise stereo matching system, which is mainly composed of adaptive stereo matching, recursive refinement and depth upsizing subsystems, is proposed to estimate high resolution depth maps. The adaptive stereo matching subsystem, which adaptively uses color gradient, color intensity and texture census costs, can reduce the most of computation and achieve good primary depth maps. The recursive refinement subsystem consists of median filtering, left-right check, hole filling, and bilateral filtering functions. The refinement subsystem is performed recursively to reduce the most errors occurred in occlusion regions such that we can obtain high-precision depth maps. Finally, the depth upsizing subsystem by referring original high-resolution images performs depth value upscaling, texture-selected interpolation, and weighted depth voting processes to finally obtain the high-precision and high-resolution depth maps. To evaluate the proposed algorithms in three subsystems, the performances of the proposed stereo matching system are exhibited in step-by-step approaches. In comparison of the existing methods, the accuracy performance and computation time of the proposed stereo matching system are finally demonstrated. For future 3D ultra-high resolution videos, the proposed stereo matching system with low computation will be a good solution to extract high-precision and high-resolution depth information.
Laser correlation spectroscopy for determining biochemical parameters of whole blood

Correlation spectroscopy methods are widely used to study dynamical, morphological and optical parameters of biological objects. This work makes an attempt to explore these methods (in particular, due to their expressively) for diagnosing whole blood under normal and pathological states (cardiovascular diseases). Not only morphological characteristics of blood elements are known to change under diseases, but also its biochemical composition does. However, the biochemical analysis of blood is rather time and labor consuming. The paper is directed to investigate the correlation between optical characteristics of light scattering by blood and its biochemical parameters. Samples of whole blood were in vitro investigated for ills with different diagnoses and extend of cardio-vascular diseases as well as for essentially healthy donors. Simultaneous with the above characteristics we have monitored volumetric concentration of lipoproteides, erythrocytes and hemoglobin. The analysis of obtained results has show that the width of spectrum is greater for samples from healthy persons then from ills. Comparison of measured data on frequency spectrum, diffuse reflectivity's, biochemical and morphological blood parameters of the studied samples has shown the high correlation between the spectrum halfwidth and concentration of lipoproteides, erythrocyte setting rate. Some poorer correlation with spectrum occurs for concentration of hemoglobin and cholesterol. Thus, these are revealed an opportunity to design on express non-invasive method for determining the possibility of atherosclerotic disease.
Benzenethiol: Thermodynamic Properties in the Solid, Liquid and Vapor States; Internal Rotation of the Thiol Group1

Studies of benzenethiol by low temperature calorimetry, comparative ebulliometry, flow calorimetry and combustion calorimetry led to values of the standard entropy, heat capacity and heat of formation of the vapor. The calorimetric results were used with molecular structure information to evaluate the contributions of internal rotation and anharmonicity to the thermodynamic functions. Internal rotation of the thiol group is essentially free, and the contributions of anharmonicity are significant even at ordinary temperatures. Thermodynamic functions were computed by the methods of statistical mechanics for selected temperatures between 0 and 1000/sup 0/K. Values of the heat, free energy and logarithm of the equilibrium constant of formation were computed for the same temperatures. The experimental studies provided the following information: Values of the heat capacity for the solid (12 to 258/sup 0/K), the liquid (C/sub satd/ = 34.985 + 2.175 x 10/sup -3/ T + 6.500 x 10/sup -5/ T/sup 2/ cal deg./sup -1/ mole/sup -1/ (258 to 375/sup 0/K)) and the vapor (C/sup 0//sub p/ = -5.541 + 0.12212 T - 6.577 x 10/sup -5/ T/sup 2/ cal. deg./sup -1/ mole/sup -1/ (427 to 500/sup 0/K)); the heat of fusion (2736 cal. mole/sup -1/) at the triple point (258.27 +- 0.05/sup 0/K);more » the entropy of the liquid at 298.16/sup 0/K (S/sub satd/ = 53.25 cal. deg./sup -1/ mole/sup -1/); the heat of vaporization (.delta.Hv = 15808.5 - 13.620 T - 1.586 x 10/sup -3/T/sup 2/ cal. mole/sup -1/ (375 to 417/sup 0/K)); the second virial coefficient in the equation of state, PV = RT(1 + B/V), (B = -588 - 28.50 exp(1500/T) cc. mole/sup -1/ (375 to 500/sup 0/K)); the vapor pressure (log/sub 10/ p(mm) = 6.99019 - 1529.454/(t + 203.048) (114 to 212/sup 0/)); and the standard heat of formation (6C(graphite) + 3H/sub 2/(g) + S(rhombic) = C/sub 6/H/sub 5/SH (liq), . delta.Hf/sup 0//sub 298.16/ = +15.02 +- 0.27 kcal. mole/sup -1/). The heat capacity of solid benzenethiol has a lambda-like anomaly near 128/sup 0/K. « less
The hydrolysis mechanism of polyglycolic acid under tensile mechanical loading: a density functional theory study

The hydrolysis mechanisms of polyglycolic acid (PGA) under tensile mechanical loading were studied by the density functional theory (DFT) calculations for illustrating the enhancement of PGA hydrolysis by external mechanical loading found in previous experimental studies (Iran. Polym. J., 2008, 17(9), 691–701). Before the hydrolysis degradation begins, PGA firstly forms the PGA hydrolysis intermediate by combining one water molecule at the carbonyl carbon and then the C–O alkyl bond is ruptured after the hydrogen atom transfers from the carbonyl oxygen to the alkyl oxygen. Consequently, the effects of tensile forces imposed on the PGA and PGA intermediate were both studied. The variations of bending angle, torsion angle, and bond length as well as the electronic properties of PGA and its intermediate at different strains were presented. From the force–strain profiles of PGA and the PGA intermediate, the tensile force on the PGA can be relaxed once the PGA forms the PGA intermediate, leading to the stabilization of the PGA material under external mechanical loading. After the calculation using the nudged-elastic band (NEB) method, the results reveal that the energy barrier for the dissociation of the PGA intermediate into two PGA molecules significantly decreases under increasing force, which induces PGA hydrolysis. Our DFT calculation results have provided a clear explanation for the experimental observation, where the mechanical loading enhances the PGA degradation rate.
Dirty Pool

International relations scholars make frequent use of pooled cross-sectional regression in which N dyads over T time points are combined to create NT observations. Unless special conditions are met, these regressions produce biased estimates of regression coefficients and their standard errors. A survey of recent publications in international relations shows little attention to this issue. Using data from the period 1951–92, we examine the consequences of pooling for models of militarized disputes and bilateral trade. When pooled models are reestimated to allow for stable but unobserved differences among dyads, the results are altered in fundamental ways.
Collapse of Thermoresponsive Brushes and the Tuning of Protein Adsorption

Protein adsorption onto brush displaying surfaces is strongly affected by collapse, an effect utilized in protein chromatography and in harvesting cell sheets for tissue engineering applications. For relatively small particles, the free energy penalty incurred upon insertion into the brush Fins is related to the work expended against the osmotic pressure of the unperturbed brush. Within the self-consistent field (SCF) theory of brushes, the scale of Fins decreases with the brush thickness ⟨z⟩ because the value of the osmotic pressure at the grafting surface Π(0) ∼ ⟨z⟩ irrespective of the interaction free energy. Brush collapse thus favors adsorption because it reduces Fins via two effects: (i) lowering of the osmotic pressure and (ii) a possible decrease of the inserted volume of the particle. These general results are supplemented by numerical solutions of SCF equations for the collapse of thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) brushes as described by the empirical free energy of Afroze et.