Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development and Commissioning of a Chemiluminescence Imaging System for an Optically-Accessible High-Pressure Generic Swirl Burner

A chemiluminescence imaging system has been commissioned at Cardiff University’s Gas Turbine Research Centre. OH* and CH* chemiluminescence measurements were initially made on swirl-stabilised methane flames to find the optimal settings of intensifier gate timing, gain, and UV lens f-stop. Measurements with gate widths down to 100 μs have been achieved on methane flames with thermal powers up to 100 kW, pressures up to 3 bara, and global equivalence ratios of 0.6 to 1.2. OH* and CH* chemiluminescence intensities are found to vary with each parameter and yield sufficient spatial information to confirm visual evidence of stable flame operation as well as both lean and rich stability limits. Additionally, the OH*/CH* chemiluminescence intensity ratio is used for evaluation of the local equivalence ratio within the flame. Further OH* and CH* chemiluminescence measurements were made on BOS gas (65% CO, 34% N2, 1% H2) flames at comparable conditions to the CH4 flames to investigate the change in intensities, with marked variation identified between the two fuel blends. In addition to developing measurement capability, image processing and deconvolution techniques have also been integrated into the chemiluminescence system, extending the fundamental combustion research capabilities of the Gas Turbine Research Centre.
Biological carbon pump revisited: Feedback mechanisms between climate and the Redfield ratio

Biological activity gives rise to a difference in carbon concentration between the ocean surface and the deep waters. This difference is determined by the carbon:nutrient ratio of the sinking organic material and it is crucial in determining the distribution of CO2 between the atmosphere and the ocean. For this reason, it is interesting to determine whether the physical environment affects the carbon:nitrogen ratio of phytoplankton. Using a model with a novel representation of the effect of temperature on phytoplankton stoichiometry, we have investigated the influence of mixed‐layer depth and water temperature on the elemental composition of an algal community. In the light‐limited regime, the carbon:nutrient ratio turns out to decrease with increasing mixed‐layer depth and temperature. Hence our model suggests the existence of a positive feedback between temperature and atmospheric CO2 content through the stoichiometry of phytoplankton. This feedback may have contributed to the glacial/interglacial cycles in the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
School of Chemical Engineering Department of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering Tero Tapani Mikonpoika Junnila BATCH LEACHING OF GOLD IN CUPRIC CHLORIDE MEDIA Master’s thesis for the degree of Master of Science in Technology

Gold is a noble metal, which has been traditionally leached with cyanidation. Nowadays this process is started objected for reconsideration due to toxicity, while alternative methods are pursued. Gold can be leached in acidic environment in the presence of oxidant and halides as complexing agent. Cupric chloride media is a suitable option for gold leaching as it offers rapid dissolution rate and less environmental risks related to leaching chemicals. Additionally, several of current gold reserves are challenging to leach with cyanide, whereas chloride leaching can offer a possible alternative method e.g. for high copper or refractory gold ore leaching. The major deficiency for chloride leaching is the instability of gold chloride complexes. In this thesis, the parameters affecting gold dissolution in cupric chloride media are investigated with batch leaching experiments to determine optimal conditions, and to pursue an alternative for cyanidation. These parameters include leaching duration, circumferential speed, particle size, cupric concentration, chloride concentration and temperature, with two different low-grade raw materials, which are labeled raw material 1 and raw material 2. Additionally, silver extraction was investigated in the leaching process. The laboratory results indicate that chloride concentration is the most consequential parameter and increasing it, increases gold extraction near linearly. Fine particle size and circumferential speed were both noted to have strictly positive effect on gold dissolution rates. The effect of cupric concentration depended on the raw material, as too high concentration reduced gold extraction rate. Therefore, the optimal concentration for raw material 1 is near 1 M and for raw material 2 between 0.5 M and 0.75 M. On contrary to literature, change in temperature from 65 to 95 °C was noted to have an unclear effect. Silver dissolution was more rapid than gold dissolution, yet there was little consistency.
Elaborated Modeling of Synchrotron Motion in Vlasov-Fokker-Planck Solvers

Solving the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation is a well-tested approach to simulate dynamics of electron bunches self-interacting with their own wake-field. Typical implementations model the dynamics of a charge density in a damped harmonic oscillator, with a small perturbation due to collective effects. This description imposes some limits to the applicability: Because after a certain simulation time coherent synchrotron motion will be damped down, effectively only the incoherent motion is described. Furthermore – even though computed – the tune spread is typically masked by the use of a charge density instead of individual particles. As a consequence, some effects are not reproduced. In this contribution, we present methods that allow to consider single-particle motion, coherent synchrotron oscillations, non-linearities of the accelerating voltage, higher orders of the momentum compaction factor, as well as modulations of the accelerating voltage. We also provide exemplary studies - based on the KIT storage ring KARA (KArlsruhe Research Accelerator) - to show the potentiality of the methods.
KINEMATIC ANALYSES OF A NEW MEDICAL ROBOT FOR 3D VASCULAR ULTRASOUND EXAMINATION

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a common vascular disease which can have serious consequences for older people. Owing to the complexity of the vessels in the lower limbs, current PAD medical robots are not desirable to diagnose PAD in this area. The kinematic model of a novel six-axis serial-parallel robot for 3D vascular ultrasound examination of the lower limbs is presented in this paper. The prototype of the robot is described, and then the direct and inverse kinematic problems are solved in closed form.
Chemosensitization FOXO 3 a-Dependent Mechanism of E 1 A-Induced Updated

Gene therapy trials in human breast, ovarian, and head and neck tumors indicate that adenovirus E1A can sensitize cancer cells to the cytotoxic effects of paclitaxel in vitro and in vivo. Resistance to paclitaxel has been reported tooccur in cells expressing low levels of the Forkhead transcription factorFOXO3a. In this article, we report that FOXO3a is critical for E1A-mediated chemosensitization to paclitaxel. RNA interference–mediated knockdown of FOXO3a abolished E1A-induced sensitivity to paclitaxel. Mechanistic investigations indicated that E1A indirectly stabilized FOXO3a by acting at an intermediate step to inhibit a ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis pathway involving theE3 ligasebTrCPand theFOXO3a inhibitory kinase IKKb. E1Aderepressed this inhibitorypathway by stimulating expressionof the protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A)/Cprotein phosphatases,which by binding to theTGF-b–activated kinase TAK1, inhibited its ability to activate IKKb and, thereby, to suppress bTrCP-mediated degradation of FOXO3a. Thus, by stimulating PP2A/C expression, E1A triggers a signaling cascade that stabilizes FOXO3a and mediates chemosensitization. Our findings provide a leap forward in understanding paclitaxel chemosensitization by E1A, and offer a mechanistic rational to apply E1A gene therapy as an adjuvant for improving therapeutic outcomes in patients receiving paclitaxel treatment. Cancer Res; 71(21); 6878–87. 2011 AACR.
Financialisation and Physical Investment: A global race to the bottom in accumulation?

We estimate the effects of financialisation on physical investment in the developed and developing countries using panel data based on balance-sheets of publicly listed non-financial companies (NFCs) for the period 1995-2015. Among the developed economies, we focus on the cases of the USA, Japan, and a group of Western European countries. In the developing world, we present estimations based on the group of the NFCs in all developing countries as well as BRICS as a group- and country specific estimations for South Africa, South Korea, India, and China. We find robust evidence of an adverse effect of both financial payments (interests and dividends) and financial incomes on investment in fixed assets. The negative impacts of financial incomes are non-linear with respect to the companies' size; financial income crowds out investment in large companies, and have a positive effect on the investment of only smaller, relatively more credit-constrained companies. Our findings support the ‘financialisation thesis’ that the increasing orientation of the non-financial sector towards financial activities is ultimately leading to lower physical investment, hence to stagnant or fragile growth, as well as long term concerns for productivity in both developed and developing countries.
Design and Simulation of Electrocardiogram Circuit with Automatic Analysis of ECG Signal

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is the graphical record of bioelectric signal generated by the human body during cardiac cycle, it tells a lot about the medical status of an individual. A typical ECG waveform consist of the P, Q, R, S and T wave. The automatic ECG signal analysis comprises of using computational method/approach in extracting important features and classification of ECG waveform. This paper presents a concise ECG circuit design using an instrumentation amplifier and a band-pass passive filter. It also present the process involved in analysis of ECG signal. The first stage is the pre-filtering stage, followed by feature extraction of the signal. QRS complex is first extracted followed by P and T wave detection, also the FFT of the signal is also extracted. These features are fed into the classifier for proper classification. A pattern recognition neural network is used for classification, prior to the full deployment of the neural network, it is trained by pre-recorded ECG signal downloaded from the MIT/BIH Arrhythmias database. The neural network gave a satisfactory result with accuracy of around 87%. The whole ECG signal analysis is packaged into a MATLAB GUI for ease of use.
Pre-and post-tsunami coastal planning and land-use policies and issues in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s coastal zone contributes 40 percent to the national GDP and is pivotal for economic development. Coastal resources such as coral reefs, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, salt marshes, sand dunes and coastal wetlands have been exploited by development activities; consequently, coastal erosion, degradation and transformation of coastal habitats, as well as water quality deterioration, are major threats. Damage generated by the tsunami in December 2004 has exacerbated socio-economic, cultural and environmental issues. The Sri Lankan Government has had to provide immediate relief, restore livelihoods and rebuild housing facilities and other infrastructure, including hard and soft defense mechanisms.
The intensity of the background visual effect of crispening depending on background lightness

The paper presents the results of a research of the background visual effect of crispening depending on background lightness. An research on graphic reproductions with specifically designed solutions that involve the mentioned effect was conducted. Reproductions were designed through the variations of four different types of background lightness of 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% RTV (secondary stimuli), on which there are internal rectangles of lightness of 45%, 50% and 55% RTV (primary stimuli). The visual experiment was carried out through the use of the technique of simultaneous binocular harmonization with a 10 respondents. The ANOVA with repeated measures revealed statistically differences between the arithmetic means of variations in lightness for four variations of the background in all three primary stimuli. Further post-hoc analysis by Fisher identified the groups that mutually differ. The results indicate the regularities to which the effect of crispening is subjected in the selected graphic medium.
The Price of Pay to Play in Securities Class Actions

This paper studies the effect of campaign contributions to lead plaintiffs — “pay to play’’— on the level of attorneys’ fees in securities class actions. We find that state pension funds generally pay lower attorneys’ fees when they serve as lead plaintiffs in securities class actions than do individual investors serving in that capacity, and larger funds negotiate for lower fees. This differential disappears, however, when we control for campaign contributions made to officials with influence over state pension funds. This effect is most pronounced when we focus on state pension funds that receive the largest campaign contributions and that associate repeatedly as lead plaintiff with a single plaintiffs’ attorney firm. Thus, pay to play appears to increase agency costs borne by shareholders in securities class actions, undermining one of Congress’s principal goals in adopting the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.
Statistics of fermions in a d-dimensional box near a hard wall

We study N noninteracting fermions in a domain bounded by a hard-wall potential in dimensions. We show that for large N, the correlations at the edge of the Fermi gas (near the wall) at zero temperature are described by a universal kernel, different from the universal edge kernel valid for smooth confining potentials. We compute this d-dimensional hard edge kernel exactly for a spherical domain and argue, using a generalized method of images, that it holds close to any sufficiently smooth boundary. As an application we compute the quantum statistics of the position of the fermion closest to the hard wall. Our results are then extended in several directions, including non-smooth boundaries such as a wedge, and also to finite temperature.
Effects of Eddy Vorticity Forcing on the Mean State of the Kuroshio Extension

AbstractEddy–mean flow interactions along the Kuroshio Extension (KE) jet are investigated using a vorticity budget of a high-resolution ocean model simulation, averaged over a 13-yr period. The simulation explicitly resolves mesoscale eddies in the KE and is forced with air–sea fluxes representing the years 1995–2007. A mean-eddy decomposition in a jet-following coordinate system removes the variability of the jet path from the eddy components of velocity; thus, eddy kinetic energy in the jet reference frame is substantially lower than in geographic coordinates and exhibits a cross-jet asymmetry that is consistent with the baroclinic instability criterion of the long-term mean field. The vorticity budget is computed in both geographic (i.e., Eulerian) and jet reference frames; the jet frame budget reveals several patterns of eddy forcing that are largely attributed to varicose modes of variability. Eddies tend to diffuse the relative vorticity minima/maxima that flank the jet, removing momentum from the .
Evidence for Hyporheic Transfer and Removal of Marine-Derived Nutrients in a Sockeye Stream in Southwest Alaska

Evidence for the importance of marine-derived nutrient (MDN) inputs from spawning salmon to terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems is rapidly accumulating, but the mechanisms by which MDN inputs are transferred and stored within spawning streams and their catchments are poorly understood. Presumed marine isotope signals have been found in riparian vegetation, suggesting that marine nutrients may impact terrestrial plant communities. Studies have suggested that MDN increases stream productivity both im- mediately after spawning and during the following spring. The peak of many spawning runs occurs at the end of the summer growing season, suggesting that overwinter storage of MDN must be occurring. A potential location for lateral nutrient transfers and overwin- ter MDN storage is the hyporheic zone within stream channels or in adjacent riparian flood- plains. Within Lynx Creek, a sockeye-spawning stream in the Wood River Lake drainage in southwestern Alaska, extensive floodplain hyporheic zones occur along spawning reaches. Surface water moves into the floodplain hyporheic zone and flows downstream 70-80 m before returning to the stream. Ambient nutrient concentrations within the surface and hyporheic zone indicate that marine-derived nitrogen and phosphorus entered hyporheic flow paths, where they were rapidly removed from the water during the spawning run. Some marine-derived ammonium was remobilized as nitrate and continued to move, but ma- rine-derived phosphorus was stored for at least the duration of the spawning run. Hyporheic sediments are not scoured by winter floods and contain active heterotrophic biological communities that are capable of storing and transforming various forms of MDN. Thus, it seems likely that hyporheic storage and re-release of marine-derived nutrients is an im- portant mechanism by which salmon-derived nutrients are retained over winter within stream ecosystems and subsequently made available to primary producers the following growing season.
An Atmospheric Hydraulic Jump in the Santa Barbara Channel

AbstractAs part of the Precision Atmospheric Marine Boundary Layer Experiment, the University of Wyoming King Air sampled an atmospheric environment conducive to the formation of a hydraulic jump on 24 May 2012 off the coast of California. Strong, northwesterly flow rounded the Point Arguello–Point Conception complex and encountered the remnants of an eddy circulation in the Santa Barbara Channel. The aircraft flew an east–west vertical sawtooth pattern that captured a sharp thinning of the marine boundary layer and the downstream development of a hydraulic jump. In situ observations show a dramatic rise in isentropes and a coincident sudden decrease in wind speeds. Imagery from the Wyoming Cloud Lidar clearly depicts the jump feature via copolarization and depolarization returns. Estimations of MBL depth are used to calculate the upstream Froude number from hydraulic theory. Simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model produced results in agreement with the observations. The innermost dom.
Do Innovative Firms Offshore Less ?

This paper provides the first causal evidence of a link between innovation and offshoring in the U.S. Employment in U.S. manufacturing has shrunk by nearly 30 percent since the year 2000, with the decline concentrated among U.S. multinationals. Policymakers have often invoked a need to promote innovation in the manufacturing industry to secure a next generation of high-tech manufacturing jobs in America. Until now, there has been no empirical evidence that “high-tech” firms are less prone to offshore domestic production employment. Linking confidential U.S. Census micro data on foreign trade transactions, production, and R&D expenditures, and using R&D state tax credits to instrument for firm R&D investment, I find that over the past 20 years more R&D-intensive firms engage in less offshoring. I explore several potential mechanisms for this finding, showing that the dominant force seems to be that high-tech firms use higher quality inputs which are complementary to domestic production.
Developing 3D Freehand Gesture-Based Interaction Methods for Virtual Walkthroughs: Using an Iterative Approach

Gesture-based 3D interaction has been considered a relevant research topic as it has a natural application in several scenarios. Yet, it presents several challenges due to its novelty and consequential lack of systematic development methodologies, as well as to inherent usability related problems. Moreover, it is not always obvious which are the most adequate and intuitive gestures, and users may use a variety of different gestures to perform similar actions. This chapter describes how spatial freehand gesture based navigation methods were developed to be used in virtual walkthroughs meant to be experienced in large displays using a depth sensor for gesture tracking. Several iterations of design, implementation, user tests, and controlled experiments performed as formative and summative evaluation to improve, validate, and compare the methods are presented and discussed
Links between Tropical Cyclone Activity and Madden-Julian Oscillation Phase in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific Basins

Abstract The leading intraseasonal mode of atmospheric and oceanic variability, the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO), influences tropical and extratropical sea level pressure, temperature, divergent and rotational wind components, moisture, and deep convection. As a 40- to 50-day oscillation, the MJO is also known to influence tropical phenomena, including tropical cyclone (TC) activity in various TC basins. The links between the MJO and multiple measures of TC activity, including genesis, landfall, and an integrative accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) index, were quantified for multiple TC-formation basins across the Western Hemisphere, including the North Atlantic and northeast Pacific Ocean and subbasins, for the period 1978–2006. Using this relatively long (29 yr) TC dataset and employing an upper-tropospheric MJO diagnostic that is physically meaningful over the entire Western Hemisphere, this study extends existing research on the relationships between the MJO and TCs. The NOAA Climate Prediction Cente.
Automatic Diagnosis of Short-Duration 12-Lead ECG using a Deep Convolutional Network

We present a model for predicting electrocardiogram (ECG) abnormalities in short-duration 12-lead ECG signals which outperformed medical doctors on the 4th year of their cardiology residency. Such exams can provide a full evaluation of heart activity and have not been studied in previous end-to-end machine learning papers. Using the database of a large telehealth network, we built a novel dataset with more than 2 million ECG tracings, orders of magnitude larger than those used in previous studies. Moreover, our dataset is more realistic, as it consist of 12-lead ECGs recorded during standard in-clinics exams. Using this data, we trained a residual neural network with 9 convolutional layers to map 7 to 10 second ECG signals to 6 classes of ECG abnormalities. Future work should extend these results to cover a large range of ECG abnormalities, which could improve the accessibility of this diagnostic tool and avoid wrong diagnosis from medical doctors.
Blackbox And Non-blackbox Optimization : A Common Perspective

The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation & Class Hierarchizing) framework developed elsewhere (Kargupta, 1995; Kargupta & Goldberg, 1995) offered an alternate perspective toward blackbox optimization (BB0)-optimization in absense of domain knowledge. This paper argues that the fundamental concepts are also applicable to non-blackbox optimization (NBB0)optimization in presence of information about the search domain and objective function. The SEARCH framework investigates the conditions essential for transcending the limits of random enumerative search using a framework developed in terms of relations, classes and partial ordering. This paper reviews some of the main results of that work and describes its generality by considering different popular BBO and NBBO algorithms.