Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
XAFS Spectroscopy Analysis of Selected Elements in Fine Particulate Matter Derived from Coal Combustion

X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectroscopy has been used to investigate the valence states and molecular structures of sulfur (S), chromium (Cr), arsenic (As), and zinc (Zn) in fine particulate matter (PM) separated from coal fly ash produced in a laboratory combustion system. A cyclone separator was used to separate the PM into fractions 2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5+). Sulfate was the dominant form of S present. However, thiophene was present in many samples, and sulfite was significant in two of the PM2.5+ samples. For Cr and As, the valence states were of primary concern. Analysis of the X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) regions of the spectra revealed that the toxic Cr6+ valence state accounted for approximately 10 to 30% of the Cr in PM derived from the fly ash of several coals from the western United States. However, only Cr3+ was observed in a number of PM samples from eastern U.S. bituminous coal fly ash. For As, only As5+ as arsenate was dete.
Repartição da lâmina de irrigação, aplicada via pivô central, na cultura do milho

This study was conducted in the experimental area of ESALQ/USP, Piracicaba, SP, to investigate and to quantify in terms of percentage of total irrigation water applied by center pivot, corresponding to flow through corn stem (Ec), interception by crop canopy (INT) and internal precipitation (PI). For the analysis, plastic recipients were fixed to the corn stem and pools (gutters on two sides of the plant row) were installed at three different heights (inferior, medium and superior part of the plant) in relation to the soil. The mean values of PI, INT and Ec for the heights of 0 and 0.25 m were 85.57 and 88.31%, 6.56 and 5.57%, and 7.87 and 6.12%, respectively, for leaf area index (LAI) equivalent to 3. For the LAI = 4.35 the largest observed values of PI, INT and Ec were 83.93, 6.89 and 13.44%, respectively, for the heights studied. The increase in height for water collection in relation to the soil level caused an increment in values of internal precipitation and stem flow, and a reduction in the values of leaf interception.
Tracer Testing: Recommended Best Practice for Design and Optimization of In Situ Remediation Systems

also implies that the initial benefits of remedial actions may be observed down-gradient faster than expected and injected remediation reagents will be distributed greater distances than expected. • Much of the aquifer pore space acts as a storage zone (the immobile porosity, q im ) and local-scale diffusion causes solutes to move into and out of these zones at rates that have an impact on remediation timescales. In source zones, this may result in significant contaminant storage and long-lasting backdiffusion that yields results in very low concentration levels even after long periods of remedy operation. This also implies that injected remediation reagents may not directly access much of the stored contaminants within the immobile space. • The role of mechanical dispersion
The linear relationship between Koopmans' and hydrogen bond energies for some simple carbonyl molecules

Recently Galabov and Bobadova-Parvanova have shown that the energy of hydrogen bond formation calculated at the HF/6-31G(d,p) level is highly correlated with the molecular electrostatic potential at the acceptor site for a number of simple carbonyl compounds. Here it is shown that the electrostatic potential can be replaced by Koopmans' energy. The correlation between this energy and the hydrogen bond formation energy is just as high as the one observed by Galabov and Bobadova-Parvanova. The Siegbahn simple potential relating Koopmans' energies and GAPT charges shows that the hydrogen bond energy is not simply correlated with the charge of the acceptor site because the charges on the neighboring atoms are also important in the hydrogen bonding process.
Synthesis of polystyrene nanoparticles “armoured” with nanodimensional graphene oxide sheets by miniemulsion polymerization

Polystyrene particles “armoured” with nanosized graphene oxide (GO) sheets have been prepared by aqueous miniemulsion polymerization of styrene, exploiting the amphiphilic properties of GO in the absence of conventional surfactants. The nanoscale GO sheets were prepared from graphite nanofibers of diameter approximately 100 nm based on a novel procedure, thus effectively ensuring the absence of larger sheets. Polymerization proceeded to high conversion with minor coagulation, with final number-average particle diameters of approximately 500 nm, but relatively broad particle size distributions. Scanning electron microscopy analysis revealed particles with a textured surface, consistent with the expected morphology. Interestingly, analysis of GO sheets recovered from the polymerization revealed that the GO sheets are partially reduced during the polymerization—approximately 50% of the initial carboxyl groups of the GO were lost, consistent with some loss in colloidal stability at high conversion. The overall approach offers a convenient and attractive synthetic route to novel graphene-based polymeric nanostructures. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem, 2013
NbN-Based Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector with a Rewound Spiral Resonator for Broadband Terahertz Detection

We propose a microwave kinetic inductance detector consisting of an NbN rewound spiral resonator (spiral-MKID) as a possible broadband terahertz detector operating with a conventional cryogen-free 4He refrigerator. The spiral-MKIDs fabricated with NbN films reveal high-Q microwave resonation with loaded Q factors on the order of 104 at 3 K, and the temperature dependence of the microwave resonance frequency is well fitted by the Mattis–Bardeen theory. The optical response was confirmed in the terahertz range below 2.4 THz. We also discuss the expected noise equivalent power of the NbN-based MKIDs.
Monte Carlo simulations of CO2-expanded acetonitrile

The structure and phase-equilibrium properties of CO2-expanded acetonitrile (MeCN) were examined using Gibbs Ensemble Monte Carlo simulations. The results showed that the mole fraction of the CO2 in the binary system increased linearly with pressure and the predicted volume expansion of the liquid phase with pressure is nonlinear and in agreement with experiment. The site–site radial distribution functions (RDFs) were determined for this binary mixture, which show that the homomolecular CO2–CO2 and heteromolecular CO2–MeCN do not exhibit a significant dependence on CO2 mole fraction. The only major structural change that is seen to occur as the CO2 mole fraction is increased in the mixture is a decrease in the fraction of nearest neighbour MeCN molecules with parallel dipole orientations.
Composition and detection of alignment marks for electron‐beam lithography

High energy backscattered electron signals have been measured from 1‐, 3‐, and 10‐μm‐wide gold alignment marks on silicon and gallium arsenide substrates as a function of electron‐beam energy (5–30 keV) and gold film thicknesses (650–10 000 A) using an annular silicon‐diode detector. Thin films of both silicon dioxide (3500 A) and polymethyl methacrylate (5200 A) on gold alignment marks (2600 A) on silicon reduced the original signal contrast at 30‐keV incident‐beam energy by only 16% (10% and 6%, respectively) and degraded the original edge acuity by only about a factor of two. Signal contrast maxima for gold on silicon and gold on gallium arsenide were found to be 1.64 and 0.86, respectively, while silicon and silicon dioxide steps (∠4000 A) produced no more than 0.08 and 0.04 contrast, respectively. The gold on silicon results are presented with the full realization of the general processing incompatibility of gold on silicon devices and circuits at high temperatures. These results are applicable to ot.
Chemical and electrical dopants profile evolution during solid phase epitaxial regrowth

Solid phase epitaxial regrowth (SPER) is a promising method for junction formation of sub-65 nm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology nodes. This is mainly due to a high dopant activation level, easy control over electrical junction depth, excellent abruptness, and limited boron diffusion. In the present research we investigate in detail the activation process and the chemical profile change after SPER junction activation with respect to the regrowth temperature. We also obtain the electrically active profiles. We find that the process window for SPER between T=620 °C and T=740 °C offers the best activation level and has a dopant profile similar to the as-implanted. While increasing the regrowth temperature, we observe the gradual increase of the transient enhanced diffusion effect and formation of B trapping centers in the end-of-range (EOR) region. At temperatures as high as T=800 °C and T=850 °C the dopant activation beyond the original a-Si layer is observed and the high metastable B acti.
Effect of Hybrid and Physical Properties of Individual Popcorn Kernels on Expansion Volume

ABSTRACT The relationships between expansion volume and physical properties of three varieties of popcorn kernels were investigated on a single kernel basis. Physical properties studied were kernel size, kernel sphericity, and kernel density. Methods of measuring densities and popped volumes of individual popcorn kernels were developed. Popcorn kernels were separated into seven kernel sizes by screening with round-hole sieves. Thirty kernels from each of three kernel sizes (4.76 < D < 5.16, 5.56 < D < 5.95, 6.35 < D < 6.75 mm) of three popcorn varieties were individually measured for sphericity, density, and popped volume. Density and sphericity measures of popcorn kernels showed little variability. Variety, kernel sphericity, and kernel density had minor effects on expansion volume. Kernel size had no effect. There were no strong linear relationships (R2 = 0.28) among expansion volume and physical properties of the three varieties of popcorn kernels. The variety with the highest mean density and the high.
Reaction of a New Thiol Cationic Surfactant with Bunte Salt in Wool Fibers

A new, effective, specific quaternary ammonium compound, N-dodecyl-amino-betaine-2-mercaptoethylamine hydrochloride (dabm), is synthesized to confer permanent characteristics (antimicrobial properties, improved dyeing and softening) on keratin material (wool, human hair). We have studied the reaction between bisulphite-treated wool and dabm as a function of time in a buffered medium, and monitor it with ftir/atr spectroscopy, which allows us to follow the changes in cysteine-S-sulphonate groups (at 1023 cm–1) located in the cuticula of keratin fibers. We believe dabm links permanently to keratin fibers, given the disappearance of the cysteine-S-sulphonate band during treatment. Trend approximation and corresponding functions are obtained for experimental data.
Enhanced user flash estimates of quarter - on-quarter changes in gross domestic product of the Czech Republic at constant prices

The authors present an algorithm for making flash estimate of quarterly change in gross domestic product at constant prices in the conditions of the Czech Republic. This algorithm is based on monthly/quarterly statistics on the output of individual branches, i.e. on data measuring trends in structured domestic supply. Estimates produced by the Czech Statistical Office and covering six preceding quarters make up the part of history, which the flash estimate is built on. It depends therefore on both the stability of methodology used for compiling quarterly national accounts and the perfection of its application. The authors assume that the innovated algorithm should be accessible to experts as well as the general public, and that it can serve them to arrive at well-founded rough information on total quarter-on-quarter change in GDP at constant prices a month or so before Czech Statistical Office official estimate is released.
High pressure raman study of Bi-2212

The hydrostatic pressure dependence of the Raman spectra of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 single crystals has been investigated. The energy of the A g and B 1g modes was found to increase with pressure in agreement with previously reported measurements, except the strong mode at ∼465 cm−1, which softens with pressure, while another peak at ∼458 cm−1 appears more pronounced at low temperatures and high pressures. The energy of both modes does not seem to change with increasing pressure, up to ∼5 GPa, although the average energy of the wide band has been found to soften, which is in disagreement with previously published results. Based on the modifications observed in some phonons at ∼1.8 GPa, which correlate with the reduction of T c and the deformations of the CuO5 pyramids, we attribute the mode at ∼465 cm−1 to the vibrations of the apex oxygen atoms. All modes due to the oxygen atoms were found to be strongly anharmonic.
Electrophoretic deposition of apatite type lanthanum silicates for SOFC half cell production

Apatite type lanthanum silicates (ATLS) are a new class of electrolyte materials exhibiting good oxygen ion conductivity in the intermediate temperature range. Electrophoretic deposition of aluminium doped ATLS powders from a non-aqueous solvent on a conductive polymer substrate was assessed by carefully adjusting the charging agent and polyelectrolyte addition. A modified electrode was built to be able to deposit on the non-conductive substrate. The optimised suspension was used to assess the feasibility of depositing a thin ATLS electrode powder layer directly on a precompacted non-conductive porous mixed ATLS-NiO anode. The combined use of optimised suspension along with the modified electrode configuration enabled successful production of green half cells.
Chemistry and Temperature Perturbations Due to Pinatubo Aerosols Calculated by a Chemical-radiative Coupled 1-D Model.

The increase of stratospheric aerosol caused by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and its effects on atmospheric temperature and chemical constituents, are studied by using a chemical-radiative coupled 1-D model. The optical parameters of the aerosols and the surface area are calculated, assuming the size distribution of the aerosols and the composition. Two kinds of numerical experiments were made in this study. In the first experiment, a simple form of vertical distribution and the time variation of the aerosols are assumed based on lidar measurement data, and satellite data analyses. The simplification is necessary for an easy and clear understanding of chemistry-radiation coupled variations in temperature and ozone. In the second experiment, lidar data are used for calculation and input into the model as a function of altitude and time. These experiments show that the temperature increased in the range of 4.7-5.8 K and the ozone concentration decreased by 13-14% at the maximum perturbation phase in the center of the aerosol layer at 20 km. The maximum total ozone decrease was 18-20 DU (5.0-5.5%). The total ozone decrease, however, was 13-15 DU (3.5-4.0%) when the effect of the temperature variation on chemistry was ignored. Sedimentation of the aerosols within the first 1-2 years after the Pinatubo eruption explains the small difference in the results of these two experiments. The experiments also show that the ground surface temperature rapidly dropped by 0.1 K-0.35 K in the first 6 months, depending on the solar radiation absorption efficiency of the aerosols, followed by a recovery of more than a half in magnitude in the next 6 months. A cooling of less than 0.1 K then continued for the next 3-4 years, until the stratospheric ozone loss disappeared. The mechanisms of this surface temperature variation in the 1-D model are studied examining the results of the first experiment. The effects of a hydrolysis reaction of BrONO2 on ozone loss are also examined. The results suggest that the hydrolysis reaction more than doubled the ozone loss. All these results from the 1-D model show substantially larger positive temperature perturbations, and a somewhat longer duration of chemical perturbations than observed.
Universal information of critical quantum spin chains from wavefunction overlap

Given a critical quantum spin chain, we show how universal information about its quantum critical point can be extracted from wavefunction overlaps. More specifically, we consider overlap between low-energy eigenstates of the spin chain Hamiltonian with different boundary conditions, namely periodic boundary conditions and open boundary conditions. We show that such overlaps decay polynomially with the system size, where the exponent only depends on the central charge. Furthermore, the bulk-to-boundary operator product expansion (OPE) coefficients can be extracted from the overlaps involving excited states. We illustrate the proposal with the Ising model and the three-state Potts model.
Real-time Data Infrastructure at Uber

Uber's business is highly real-time in nature. PBs of data is continuously being collected from the end users such as Uber drivers, riders, restaurants, eaters and so on everyday. There is a lot of valuable information to be processed and many decisions must be made in seconds for a variety of use cases such as customer incentives, fraud detection, machine learning model prediction. In addition, there is an increasing need to expose this ability to different user categories, including engineers, data scientists, executives and operations personnel which adds to the complexity. In this paper, we present the overall architecture of the real-time data infrastructure and identify three scaling challenges that we need to continuously address for each component in the architecture. At Uber, we heavily rely on open source technologies for the key areas of the infrastructure. On top of those open-source software, we add significant improvements and customizations to make the open-source solutions fit in Uber's environment and bridge the gaps to meet Uber's unique scale and requirements. We then highlight several important use cases and show their real-time solutions and tradeoffs. Finally, we reflect on the lessons we learned as we built, operated and scaled these systems.
Integrated Optimization of Heterogeneous-Network Management and the Elusive Role of Macrocells

We consider heterogeneous wireless networks in the physical interference model and introduce a new formulation of the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem that addresses base-station activation and many-to-many associations while minimizing power consumption. This formulation is complete, in the sense not only of tackling activations and associations in an integrated manner, but also in that the decoding possibilities allowed in the physical interference model are fully taken into account. The formulation’s integralities and resulting non-differentiabilities are all left in place as well, so solving the MINLP problem calls for somewhat unorthodox methods. Thus, we also introduce HetNetGA, a genetic algorithm that can tackle the problem as it comes, without any approximations. Though unsuitable for practical deployment, HetNetGA enables the investigation of such networks’ true possibilities, allowing for insights that more practical approaches cannot offer. In fact, the results we give, for scenarios involving both macrocells and picocells, though often aligned with what is expected, are sometimes unexpected and essentially point to the need to better understand the role of macrocells in helping provide capacity while remaining energetically advantageous. This contrasts sharply with previous approaches, which typically always spot situations in which macrocells can be accommodated. We expect HetNetGA, with its inherent ability to lead to results such as these, to be useful in helping identify and mitigate similar issues.
Many-to-English Machine Translation Tools, Data, and Pretrained Models

While there are more than 7000 languages in the world, most translation research efforts have targeted a few high resource languages. Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer, and do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages. In this work, we present useful tools for machine translation research: MTData, NLCodec and RTG. We demonstrate their usefulness by creating a multilingual neural machine translation model capable of translating from 500 source languages to English. We make this multilingual model readily downloadable and usable as a service, or as a parent model for transfer-learning to even lower-resource languages.
Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Languages

This work supports further development of language technology for the languages of Africa by providing a Wikidata-derived resource of name lists corresponding to common entity types (person, location, and organization). While we are not the first to mine Wikidata for name lists, our approach emphasizes scalability and replicability and addresses data quality issues for languages that do not use Latin scripts. We produce lists containing approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African languages. We describe the data, the process used to produce it, and its limitations, and provide the software and data for public use. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations of producing this resource and others of its kind.
Domain Invariant Adversarial Learning

The phenomenon of adversarial examples illustrates one of the most basic vulnerabilities of deep neural networks. Among the variety of techniques introduced to surmount this inherent weakness, adversarial training has emerged as the most effective strategy for learning robust models. Typically, this is achieved by balancing robust and natural objectives. In this work, we aim to further optimize the trade-off between robust and standard accuracy by enforcing a domain-invariant feature representation. We present a new adversarial training method, Domain Invariant Adversarial Learning (DIAL), which learns a feature representation that is both robust and domain invariant. DIAL uses a variant of Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) on the natural domain and its corresponding adversarial domain. In the case where the source domain consists of natural examples and the target domain is the adversarially perturbed examples, our method learns a feature representation constrained not to discriminate between the natural and adversarial examples, and can therefore achieve a more robust representation. DIAL is a generic and modular technique that can be easily incorporated into any adversarial training method. Our experiments indicate that incorporating DIAL in the adversarial training process improves both robustness and standard accuracy.
Qualitative Planning in Imperfect Information Games with Active Sensing and Reactive Sensor Attacks: Cost of Unawareness

We consider the probabilistic planning problem where a robot (called Player 1, or P1) can jointly plan the control actions and sensor queries in a sensor network and an attacker (called player 2, or P2) can carry out attacks on the sensors. We model such an adversarial interaction using a formal model-a reachability game with partially controllable observation functions. The main contribution of this paper is to assess the cost of P1’s unawareness: Suppose P1 misinterprets the sensor failures as probabilistic node failures due to unreliable network communication, and P2 is aware of P1’s misinterpretation and P1’s partial observability. Then, from which states can P2 carry out sensor attacks to ensure, with probability one, that P1 will not be able to complete her reachability task even though, due to misinterpretation, P1 believes that she can almost-surely achieve her task. We develop an algorithm to solve the almost-sure winning sensor-attack strategy given P1’s observation-based strategy. Our attack analysis could be used for attack detection in wireless communication networks and the design of provably secured attack-aware sensor allocation in decision-theoretic models for cyber-physical systems.