Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biomechanics of aging and osteoarthritic human knee ligaments

Background Ligaments work to stabilize the human knee joint and prevent excessive movement. Whilst ligaments are known to decline in structure and function with aging, there has been no systematic effort to study changes in gross mechanical properties in the four major human knee ligaments due to osteoarthritis (OA). This study aims to collate material properties for the anterior (ACL) and posterior (PCL) cruciate ligaments, medial (MCL) and lateral (LCL) collateral ligaments. Our cadaveric samples come from a diverse demographic from which the effects of aging and OA on bone and cartilage material properties have already been quantified. Therefore, by combining our previous bone and cartilage data with the new ligament data from this study we are facilitating subject-specific whole-joint modelling studies. Methods The demographics of the collected cadaveric knee joints were diverse with age range between 31 to 88 years old, and OA International Cartilage Repair Society grade 0 to 4. Twelve cadaveric human knee joints were dissected, and bone-ligament-bone specimens were extracted for mechanical loading to failure. Ligament material properties were determined from the load-extension curves, namely: linear and ultimate (failure) stress and strain, secant modulus, tangent modulus, and stiffness. Results There were significant negative correlations between age and ACL linear force (p=0.01), stress (p=0.03) and extension (p=0.05), ACL failure force (p=0.02), stress (p=0.02) and extension (p=0.02), PCL secant (p=0.02) and tangent (p=0.02) modulus, and LCL stiffness (p=0.05). Significant negative correlations were also found between OA grades and ACL linear force (p=0.05), stress (p=0.02), extension (p=0.01) and strain (p=0.03), and LCL failure stress (p=0.05). However, changes in age or OA grade did not show a statistically significant correlation with the MCL tensile parameters. Trends showed that almost all the tensile parameters of the ACL and PCLs decreased with increasing age and progression of OA. Due to small sample size, the combined effect of age and presence of OA could not be statistically derived. Conclusions This research is the first to correlate changes in tensile properties of the four major human knee ligaments to aging and OA. The current ligament study when combined with our previous findings on bone and cartilage for the same twelve knee cadavers, supports conceptualization of OA as a whole-joint disease that impairs the integrity of many peri-articular tissues within the knee. The subject-specific data pool consisting of the material properties of the four major knee ligaments, subchondral and trabecular bones and articular cartilage will aid reconstruction and graft replacements and advance knee joint finite element models, whilst knowledge of aged or diseased mechanics may direct future therapeutic interventions.
Is cyber-security the new lifeboat? An exploration of the employee's perspective of cyber-security within the cruise ship industry

After the International Maritime Organisation introduced the Maritime Cyber Risk Management in Safety Management Systems Resolution in 2017, with the compliance date set for January 2021, the Maritime industry has displayed an increased focus on its cyber-security. This quantitative research, supported by the socio-technical perspective, explores the employee perceptions of cyber-security onboard cruise ships. The results show that the cruise industry has made an attempt to increase its cyber-security by introducing a formal policy and training their employees. Employees, as a consequence, perceive cyber-security to be important. However, employee perceptions are not reflective of their behaviours onboard. This is because there are various technical and organizational obstacles to their cyber-security practices which have been overlooked. As a result, the cruise industry could do more to prioritise cyber-security on a day-to-day level in order to make sure that the employee experience is in alignment with cyber-security policies.
Efficient Hydrophilic Small Molecule Delivery To Retinal Cell

In this study, we developed a novel solid lipid nanoparticle (SLN) formulation for drug 15 delivery of small hydrophilic cargo to the retina. The new formulation, based on a gel core and 16 composite shell, allowed up to two times increase in the encapsulation efficiency. The type of hy17 drophobic polyester used in the composite shell mixture affects the particle surface charge, colloidal 18 stability, and cell internalization profile. We validated the SLN capability as a drug delivery system 19 by performing encapsulation of a hydrophilic neuroprotective cyclic guanosine monophosphate an20 alogue, previously demonstrated to hold retinoprotective properties, and the best formulation re21 sulted in particles with size of ± 250nm, anionic charge > -20 mV, and an encapsulation efficiency 22 value of ±60%, criteria that are suitable for retinal delivery. In vitro studies using ARPE-19 and 661W 23 retinal cell lines revealed a relatively low SLN toxicity, even when high particle concentration was 24 used. More importantly, SLN could be uptaken by the cells and the release of the hydrophilic cargo 25 in the cytoplasm was visually demonstrated. These findings suggest that the newly developed SLN 26 with a gel core and composite polymer/lipid shell holds all characteristics suitable for drug delivery 27 of small hydrophilic active molecules into retinal cell. 28
Crowd dynamics in internal crowdsourcing: insights from higher education

This article aims to study crowd dynamics in small teams. In particular, we are interested in internal crowdsourcing as a venue for new idea production, highlighting the difference with regard to other cooperative models based, e.g., on communities. Another goal of the study is to identify the setting for further experiments in business domains to investigate how crowd characteristics may lower or increase “crowd capital,” here defined as the total number of crowd units having a demonstrated effectiveness in idea generation or task achievement. Thus, the article aims to contribute to the research on coordination in temporary and flash teams. To this end, the article discusses the main results of six studies carried out with management students in higher education from 2014 to 2018.
Bearing cage temperature measurement using radio telemetry

Abstract Two different versions of a temperature telemeter were designed and developed for use in tribological environments and their usefulness as a condition-monitoring instrument for bearings is demonstrated. The first version is a battery-powered telemeter and it is designed to have extremely small size and mass, which are essential for application in rolling element bearings. The second version is a remotely powered design, which has similar features to that of the battery-powered telemeter but provides the advantage of an almost infinite life and even smaller size. The telemeters were installed on the cage of a tapered rolling element bearing and tests were conducted under normal and severe conditions to determine the feasibility of the cage temperature as a condition-monitoring parameter on a bearing. A finite element model of the cage was developed to study and compare with experimental results. The tests conducted indicate that the cage temperature demonstrates a very fast response to tribological changes such as interruption in lubrication supply, speed or torque variation and it is thus a good parameter for determining the temperature condition of a rolling element bearing.
Ethnographic Theory-Building Research in Construction

Traditional construction research methods have enabled focused but narrow advances in our understanding of industry phenomena. While contributing new insight, these methods are often not adequate to enable understanding of the complex interactions that lead to many of the industry's pervasive social and technical problems. One means of addressing these limitations is for the construction research community to complement prevalent quantitative and case study methodologies with qualitative theory-building methodologies, specifically ethnographic studies or those based on detailed and long-term observation of project environments. This paper identifies the critical need for theory-building methods and their methodological conventions, challenges, and opportunities. Specifically, the paper focuses on data collection in ethnographic studies and analysis of that data through the use of grounded theory. Through better under- standing and more widespread use of theory-building methods, the construction research community can provide a needed complement to the current prevailing methods and greatly aid the maturation of our important field.
Consumer demographics and expected service quality

A sound banking system is a vital pre requisite for financial system stability and economic growth of the country. The competition between banks has also increased tremendously. Sri Lankan financial system of the country mainly depends on banking system because it represents a share of 70.8% of the total financial system of the economy (Central Bank Report, 2010). The rapidly changing and highly competitive environment which banks are forced to operate within are pushing them to rethink about their attitude towards customer satisfaction and optimisation of service quality.
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON EMISSION ANALYSIS OF OXYGENATED FUELS DIMETHYL CARBONATE (DMC) AND DIBUTYL MALEATE (DBM) IN A CI ENGINE

The biggest challenge in front of energy scientists is to find the alternative to diesel engine fuel due to depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental pollution, which is increasing alarmi ngly. Oxygenated fuel is one of the viable solution s to the global environmental changes. Dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and Dibutyl Malea te (DBM) are two hopeful fuel additives to reduce e mission in diesel engine, due to their high oxygen content, 53.3 and 28 % res pectively. This paper presents an experimental stud y of their effects on the emission characteristics of a diesel engine. DMC an d DBM was used with diesel in different blends for all load ranges of the engine viz. at no load, 25%, 50% and 75% of full load and at full load. All tests were conducted at steady st ate and were set at constant engine speed 1500 RPM. The smoke content reduces by 35% at full load conditions using DMC20 blend, the oxygen content in the emission increases by 39% with DBM15, the decrease in the % of unburnt hydrocarbons and carbon monoxid e is respectively 19 and 21. The blends of diesel with 15% DMC and DBM by vo lume is the best fraction for reduction of smoke an d CO emissions without much affecting the performance of the engine. On th e basis of the results obtained, these additives are effective method for reducing the emission of diesel engine.
Design of a new phased‐array driver using a six‐port phase discriminator

A new phased‐array driver module for a two‐antenna array is proposed in this paper. This driver, designed using a six‐port phase discriminator, automatically controls the phase of one antenna‐array element in order to maximize the received power. The results for a phased two‐antenna array operating at 2.45 GHz are presented and discussed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 46: 346–349, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.20983
The art of software testing

Attention is given to methods discovered by the author that allow a person with extensive knowledge of the software and systems development process to apply his/her experience effectively to the task of final systems testing. The paradigms of the paranoid auditor, suicidal test pilot, new operator and designated fool are described. It is concluded that, with the appropriate mental image, final system testing is much more effective. <<ETX>>
Three-Phase 4-Wire Isolated Wind Energy Conversion System Employing VSC with a T-Connected Transformer for Neutral Current Compensation

This paper presents a voltage and frequency controller (VFC) for a 4-wire stand-alone wind energy conversion system (WECS) employing an asynchronous generator. The proposed VF con- troller consists of a three leg IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Junction Transistor) based voltage source converter and a battery at its DC bus. The neutral terminal for the consumer loads is created using a T- connected transformer, which consists of only two single phase transformers. The control algorithm of the VF controller is developed for the bidirectional flow capability of the active power and reactive power control by which it controls the WECS voltage and frequency under different dynamic condi- tions, such as varying consumer loads and varying wind speeds. The WECS is modeled and simulated in MATLAB using Simulink and PSB toolboxes. Extensive results are presented to demonstrate the capability of the VF controller as a harmonic eliminator, a load balancer, a neutral current compensator as well as a voltage and frequency controller.
An Interval-Fuzzy Emissions Reduction Optimization Model for Regional Water Pollutant Total Amount Control

Combining environment policies of structure emissions reduction, engineering emissions reduction and management emissions reduction, this paper uses an interval-fuzzy linear programming and builds an optimization model for total amount control of regional water pollution, on account of severe water pollution condition. The developed model is applied to a case of Hunan Province to validate its validity and reliability. The optimal result demonstrated that the emission reduction of COD and NH3-N are [43.39, 47.57] and [7.05, 7.64] (104 tons), and the optimal total costs of reduction is [35.11, 37.35] (billion yuan), which decreases 6.32~11.20% than the existed recommended scheme (39.87 billion yuan). This method can be used for providing technical support and thus achieves the 12th Five-year goals of the environment protection plan more effectively.
Cahier de recherche

This paper attempts to explore the empirical relationship between credit as proxy to financial development and economic growth in Morocco, and transmission channel between these two variables. We used annually data from 1975 to 2010 and VAR model to examine the impact of financial development on economic growth. We found that financial development induce economic growth via remittance and trade.
Modeling and Simulation of VCSEL’s Turn-on Delay Based on Rate-Equations

Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) are a new generation of semiconductor lasers that have many advantages. In this paper, we present a comprehensive circuit-level VCSEL model that addresses the spatial and thermal behavior of VCSELs including turn on delay based on the rate equations without sacrificing the numerical efficiency demanded by the circuit-level simulation of optoelectronic systems. It is implemented into SPICE-like simulators to simulate the dc, ac and transient features (including turn-on delay and turn-off effect) of VCSELs. The simulated results exhibit good agreements with references.
Least-Cost Design of Urban-Drainage Networks

Network layouts were assumed to be known from previous planning activies; inlet hydrographs were arbitrarily chosen. The optimization problem was posed as an N-stage sequential process; network nodes or junctions were treated as the stage variable, conduit invert elevations at the junctions as the state variable, and maximum flow rates and conduit sizes (restricted to commercial sizes) as decision variables. Unsteady flow routing between stages is incorporated into the optimization model. Compared with conventional design methods, use of the approach could achieve overall drainage network cost reductions amounting to 30%. Of this saving, 40% is attributed to use of storage elements as a flow control option, and the remaining 60% achieved by optimal combinations of conduit sizes and use of advanced hydraulic modeling.
Evaluation of Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Xiangqi

In this thesis we evaluate training deep neural networks on human data in chinese chess and combining them with Monte-Carlo Tree Search. No later than after DeepMinds’ publication of the AlphaGo algorithm, this cooperation of neural networks and Monte-Carlo Tree Search has proven very successful. Choosing the networks’ architecture represents a key aspect for the achievable performance. We inspect two architectures, namely RISEv2 mobile and RISEv3 mobile, both part of the open source chess variant engine CrazyAra. For each of the two we train a small and a large version. Additionally, we inspect the influence of the average playing strength covered in the data set used to train a network. In this regard, we use two different data sets of professional and amateur games. With around 70000 games each, both data sets are comparatively small to train a neural network in a supervised learning setup. As we compare the performance of successive approaches we show that the amount and diversity of samples covered in a data set are essential for reaching high playing strength. Our network architectures output the value of a given state and a probability distribution over all available moves. As a consequence, we need an appropriate representation for the ground truth of the move predictions. We show that using a plane representation enables us to increase the generalization ability of a model by encoding additional information about the spatial correlation of moves into our targets. The symmetric starting position in chinese chess further allows us to augment a data set by horizontally mirroring our representation of the board. Doing so we can artificially increase the diversity of samples we feed to the network. However, against our expectation empirical evaluations show a slight decrease in performance if we perform this form of data augmentation. Finally, we evaluate our strongest model against Fairy-Stockfish. Even though Fairy-Stockfish reaches an Elo difference of 322.7 +/- 77.0 relative to our approach, our model is in the range of other public chess variant engines that were evaluated against Fairy-Stockfish.
Bandwidth‐enhancement approach for a small‐sized harmonic‐suppressed antenna

In this paper, an approach for bandwidth enhancement of a small‐sized harmonic‐suppressed antenna is presented. For bandwidth enhancement and miniaturization of the harmonically suppressed slot antenna, a bowtie‐shaped meander slot antenna is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. From the measured results, the proposed antenna has a wideband characteristic with a harmonic‐suppression characteristic at the 2nd and 3rd frequencies. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 44: 585–587, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.20703
Automated Trace and Copper Plane Extraction of X-ray Tomography Imaged PCBs

Reverse engineering (RE) of Printed circuit boards (PCBs) can be achieved through X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) in a non-destructive manner. For practical applications such as obsolescence replacement and hardware assurance, it is important to perform RE as automated and fast as possible. While our past work has focused on automated via detection, this paper introduces a framework for automated and unsupervised extraction of traces and copper conducting planes in an X-ray CT imaged PCB. We employ a series of algorithms from image processing, computer vision, and graph theory for a robust solution that produces a high fidelity result. We compare our results against off-the-shelf methodologies utilizing ridge detection and Canny edge detection in combination with connected components and show the necessity of utilizing a graph-theoretic approach. Our results are demonstrated on an in-house designed PCB for qualitative and quantitative analysis. On average across all layers, our proposed framework outperforms the relevant methods with IoU, SSIM, Correlation, and Dice image quality scores of 0.9166, 0.9954, 0.8952, and 0.9453, respectively.
Learning Pitch-Class Representations from Score-Audio Pairs of Classical Music

Chroma or pitch-class representations of audio recordings are an essential tool in music information retrieval. Traditional chroma features relying on signal processing are often influenced by timbral properties such as overtones or vibrato and, thus, only roughly correspond to the pitch classes indicated by a score. Deep learning provides a promising possibility to overcome such problems but requires large annotated datasets. Previous approaches therefore use either synthetic audio, MIDI-piano recordings, or chord annotations for training. Since these strategies have different limitations, we propose to learn transcription-like pitch-class representations using pre-synchronized score– audio pairs of classical music. We train several CNNs with musically inspired architectures and evaluate their pitch-class estimates for various instrumentations including or-chestra, piano, chamber music, and singing. Moreover, we illustrate the learned features’ behavior when used as input to a chord recognition system. In all our experiments, we compare cross-validation with cross-dataset evaluation. Obtaining promising results, our strategy shows how to leverage the power of deep learning for constructing robust but interpretable tonal representations.
Utilizing Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument in Agile Software Development Context

Organization culture has a key role in agile software development (Misra et al., 2009). Being agile is not merely a set of tools and practices, first and foremost it is a mind-set. Shared mind-sets create a culture, a meaning inside a system of meaning (Deal and Kennedy, 1983; Sackmann, 1991). The importance of culture is emphasized by Version One’s annual surveys, which have for 3 consecutive years marked culture as one of the top 3 reasons of failing in adopting agile methods (VersionOne, 2010, 2009, 2008). In addition, according to their 2010 survey, ability to change cultural environment is the number one barrier to further adoption of agile methods (VersionOne, 2010). Despite the very apparent importance of culture in agile software development, culture is mainly an empty word in that context. There is very little literature examining agility from cultural perspective. In order to avoid challenges created by an incompatible organization culture, we need both methods to examine the current cultural environment and methods to change that environment. Describing agility from a cultural perspective and diagnosing organization culture in agile software development form the focus of this research. This study adopts an instrumental approach to organization culture in agile software development and pilots a research setting based on the Organization Culture Assessment Instrument (Cameron and Quinn, 2005). Currently the most popular agile software development method (VersionOne, 2010, 2009, 2008) Scrum is examined in this research, which pilots a modified version of Organization Culture Assessment Instrument in Scrum context. During this study a scrumteam was observed during several events and team members were interviewed in order to depict how they perceive freedoms and views to change promoted by agile software development. These observation are used to examine the Organization Culture Assessment Instrument, to which the team members also replied. In Chapter 2 agile software development is depicted through the analytic lens of organization culture. Also, tools for using the lens are provided. The research context