Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preliminary analysis of the structural effects due to dynamic loads of the isolated next generation lead cooled reactor

The main purpose of this preliminary study deals with the evaluation of the structural effects due to the dynamic loads exerted and propagated through the lead coolant during a safety shut down earthquake with reference, as an example, to the isolated ELSY system configuration (CEE-7 Framework Project). Seismic base isolation is increasingly used to protect structures and their contents against dangerous ground motions as well as mitigate the structural effects, on the internals walls and reactor components of the induced dynamic load and of the coupling between coolant and vessel. An adequate predictive numerical modelling, by means a 3-D finite element model, was set up and a non-linear approach was used for the foreseen structural preliminary analyses and simulations of the plant and internals behaviours, in order to describe the interactions among the different subsystems. Moreover the fluid-structure interaction problem, due to the high density of the primary coolant has received a particular attention in relation to the possible hydrodynamic interaction, between lead and the surrounding internals, as well as the sloshing wave motion that may significantly influence the stress level in the reactor pressure vessel. As for the seismic analysis, isolation systems may influence the seismic capacity of as-built structure to reduce the intensity of the propagated seismic loads. Numerical results are presented and discussed highlighting the importance of the fluid-structure interaction effects as well as the isolation technique effectiveness, which is expected to be effective in raising the reliability of internals and vessel structures, during an earthquake event.
BALANCING LINK COUNTS AT NODES USING A VARIETY OF CRITERIA: AN APPLICATION IN LOCAL AREA TRAFFIC ASSIGNMENT

A study of the impact of a major change in a campus street network began with the collection of link flows before the change. Despite the care with which the link counts were made, conservation of flow at each node was not satisfied. Therefore, the flows through the nodes had to be "balanced. " This paper discusses the variety of techniques developed to balance the network. The techniques fell into two categories: algorithms and mathematical programming formulations. A comparison was made between these procedures and the maximum-likelihood method advocated in the literature. It became evident that the node-balancing solution depends on the criteria chosen to evaluate the solution, which in turn can offer guidance as to the specific method to choose or develop.
Courtship and behavioral maturation of male mouflons

This study fails to find qualitative differences in courtship (ie intra- and intersexual interactions), according to male age in mouflon Ouis gmelini musimon (Pallas, 1811). Conversely, clear age differences arose concerning the proportion of time males dedicated to reproductive and non-reproductive activities. During the rut, males spent less time feeding, and more time scanning and in male-male interactions as age increased. Young males ( 7 years old). So male behavioral maturation does not only depend on age but could also be influenced by demographic constraints, ie presence of old dominant males. The male reproductive effort, however, seemed independent of the presence of old dominant males, which could reflect a developmental constraint. Young males would not have enough energy reserves because of growth to dedicate as much time as mature males to reproduction, even in the absence of these latter.
A test bench for gas turbine combustor cooling investigations

Design and installation of a test bench for combustion chamber cooling investigations of gas turbines are carried out. The test bench mainly consists of a radial fan, an electrical heater, an air tunnel, a test section, and cooling air supply system. The combustor liner is presented by a flat test plate which is a scaled-up model of a real combustor geometry. Main flow can be provided at a temperature in the range of 298-573 K, which enables a wide range of density and blowing ratio between the main flow and the coolant. The surface temperature distribution of the test plate is measured by infrared thermography technique to determine the adiabatic cooling effectiveness. The test bench enables to investigate the effects of different geometrical and flow parameters on effusion and film cooling effectiveness.
Cause Marketing Partnerships, Diffusion of Breast Cancer Awareness & the Komen Case

First, this paper examines the growth of cause marketing. Then, an overview is provided of cause marketing partnerships used to increase awareness of the breast cancer cause by nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and in Australia Next, this paper discusses Diffusion of Innovation Theory, and is the first to apply this theory to cause marketing, with an analysis done in the specific context of The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, the largest breast cancer nonprofit organisation in the world. The rationale for selecting this particular organisation had the purpose of determining Komen’s successful usage of partnerships, including cause marketing alliances, which can serve as an example for other nonprofit organisations. This paper provided new insights on the relationship of diffusion characteristics, cause marketing benefits and marketing strategies which can be of valuable assistance to nonprofit organisations to help achieve greater success in the future. In addition, recommendations are made for future research.
Modification of lignin with silane coupling agent to improve the interface of poly(L-lactic) acid/lignin composites

To improve the mechanical properties of lignin-filled poly(L-lactic) composites, three silane coupling agents, 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (KH550), γ-glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane (KH560), and g-methyacryl-oxypropyltrimethoxysilane (KH570), were treated systematically with different solvents to modify the interfacial connections. The treatment of lignin with 2 wt. % aqueous KH550 solution was proved to be the most successful. Chemical bonding between the filler and the matrix was formed, according to the FTIR spectra. Furthermore, scanning electron microscope images showed that such treated lignin particles dispersed well in the composites. The tensile strength and Young’s modulus of the composite improved significantly from 55.1 and 1589 MPa to 67.0 and 1641 MPa, respectively, with 5 wt. % treated lignin addition. Although its elongation at break decreased from 20.3 to 12.4% after 5 wt. % of the treated lignin was added, it was still better than that of poly(L-lactic acid) without any additive (10.3%).
LASSO penalised likelihood in high-dimensional contingency tables

Abstract: We consider several least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) penalized likelihood approaches in high dimensional contingency tables and with hierarchical log-linear models. These include the proposal of a parametric, analytic, convex, approximation to the LASSO. We compare them with “classical” stepwise search algorithms. The results show that both backwards elimination and forward selection algorithms select more parsimonious (i.e. sparser) models which are always hierarchical, unlike the competing LASSO techniques.
Group control and identification of residential appliances using a nonintrusive method

Identifying and controlling (ON/OFF) electrical appliance(s) from a remote location is an essential part of energy management. This motivated us to design a system that can collect the aggregate load signature from a single point, obtain the features, and finally identify the ON state of electrical appliance(s). The proposed disaggregation technique can be divided into two modules: the first part proposes an electrical installation system to disaggregate the appliance at the circuit level, whereas the second part consists of feature selection, dimension reduction, and classification algorithms. Load signatures of electrical appliances were combined with white Gaussian noise to analyze how noise affects the classification results. Amplitudes of the major eight harmonics of load signatures were selected as a feature for the classification. Various classification algorithms were applied to data to check their feasibility. The comparative evaluation showed that among the considered classifiers, the multilayer perceptron-artificial neural network (MLP-ANN) classifier leads in classification accuracy with 99.18{\%}. If the system is combined with noise, the accuracy decreases to 93.10{\%}. This paper also shows that the proposed technique reduces the space complexity and decision time of the smart meter.
De novo characterization of skeletal muscle transcriptome of Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) using Next Generation Sequencing NGS)

Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), one of the most abundant fish species on earth is an economically important marine species that is found in the Baltic Sea and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Although it has been a popular species for marine fish population studies since long, yet the genomic information for Atlantic herring is scarce. Recent developments in ultra high throughput RNA sequencing methods has allowed rapid and cost effective generation of large sequence information, which can be used to characterize the transcriptome in any non-model species even when no reference sequence is available. Transcriptome sequencing from the skeletal muscle of a single specimen of Atlantic herring was performed using Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform that generated approximately 116 million reads (with 101 bp length). These short reads were trimmed for quality and were assembled into 115,046 contigs with an average length of 291 bp and N50 of 375 bp, thereby producing a draft transcriptome assembly with total size of 33.51 Mb. With the e-value threshold set to 10-4, 46,979 contigs (40.84%) were identified to have matches against GenBank non-redundant (NR) proteins and Zebrafish unigenes database. Using the annotated transcriptome resource, 25,431 putative allelic variants (24,351 SNPs and 1080 indels) were identified. The present study provides a comprehensive muscle transcriptome resource which will be particularly useful for the validation of draft genome assembly of Atlantic herring that is currently being established within our group.
Towards Crowd Validation of the UK National Health Service

Online patient opinions are a very important instrument for the eective evaluation of local hospitals, hospices and mental health services but the distillation of knowledge from this unstructured information remains a dicult and complex task. Within this paper we aim to eectively mine and analyze this social information to make a comprehensive and dynamic evaluation of the UK National Health Service. To this end we use Sentic Computing, a new opinion mining and sentiment analysis paradigm which exploits AI and Semantic Web techniques to better recognize, interpret and process opinions and sentiments in natural language text.
Assessing the Europeanisation of Turkey domestic politics: To what extent has candidate status transformed the military control over civilian rule in Turkey?

The relationship between the European Union (EU) and Turkey can go back to 1963, the Ankara Agreement, aiming the accession of Turkey to the European Economic Community. For more than two decades after 1963, Turkish political life has been very unstable and interrupted with military interventions. In 1987, Turkey applied for the full EU membership and a candidacy status was granted to her in 1999, in Helsinki Summit. With candidacy status, Turkey has to improve the functioning of its domestic political and democratic structure to become eligible for full membership. This article seeks to assess the impact of EU on Turkish domestic politics with specific focus on the civil-military relations after Turkey gained candidate status. The theory of top-down Europeanisation is employed to assess EU-level pressure on domestic political and democratic structure of Turkey. Since Turkey is a candidate country, this pressure on Turkey emerges through EU conditionality policy-tool which has become quite important after the Copenhagen process in 1993. Key words: Turkey, European Union, Europeanisation, conditionality, military rule, democratisation.
Exploring Marketing Strategies for Building Trust

The era of Internet and globalization immediately brings to mind the crucial role that trust, defined as perceptual belief that one party respects the intentions, actions, and integrity of another party plays in transactions, and conversely, how its absence can be a slowing factor in the growth of commerce. Trust’s importance as a major facilitator of transactions has led it to be widely analyzed and discussed in economic and business studies. The personality of the trusting party, competence and reputation of the trusted party, and finally the governance of the third parties such as legal, autoregulated or cultural institutions have been mentioned as major sources of trust. While there appears to be widespread agreement about the importance of trust in transactions, much less is theoretically or practically done about the operating mode of building trust. The purpose of the present research is to suggest actionable policies to build trust. By understanding how trust is generally built, marketers and business responsible managers can contribute to build trust in order to facilitate and thus accelerate transactions and exchanges that fall to them to manage. The results of this inquiry can be practically applied to facilitate, accelerate, and simplify transactions between individuals. In other words, the findings should help to build trust in order to develop and do business with others. The ultimate objective is to help a seller actively build his counterparts’ trust and confidence to better conclude transactions and deals.
Symmetry Enforced, a priori RF Shimming in MRI for the Human Head at High Field Strengths

To obtain an a priori RF shim set for in vivo measurements of the human head where derivation and implementation are feasible on standard MRI systems without the need for sophisticated hard- or software. The method is targeted for initial anatomical scout scans and adjustments on high field scanners. Tailoring a rotationally symmetric phantom to be electrically large will produce characteristic interference patterns. This pattern is employed to enforce rotational symmetry in MRI images acquired with a multi-element transmit coil by adjusting transmit phases and/or amplitudes. Using the a priori shim on a human head defocuses the transmit fields, resulting in images with reduced signal dropouts. Three different sized adult heads were scanned with the predetermined shim set and a coil array consisting of eight transceiver elements. The images were found to show better image homogeneity than CP mode excitation and performed only slightly worse compared to a per subject RF shim. Relatively homogeneous excitation can be achieved with a pre-determined RF shim set. The homogeneity is sufficient for static field shimming and scout imaging. Primary application is the development of double resonant head coils with a fixed RF shim set for the proton channel intended for high field imaging in systems that do not poses parallel transmission capabilities.
New approach to remote gas-phase chemical quantification: selected-band algorithm

Abstract. We propose an algorithm for standoff quantification of chemical vapor plumes from hyperspectral imagery. The approach is based on the observation that the quantification problem can be easily solved in each pixel with the use of just a single spectral band if the radiance of the pixel in the absence of the plume is known. This plume-absent radiance may, in turn, be recovered from the radiance of the subset of spectral bands in which the gas species is transparent. This “selected-band” algorithm is most effective when applied to gases with narrow spectral features, and are therefore transparent over many bands. We also demonstrate an iterative version that expands the range of applicability. Simulations show that the new algorithm attains the accuracy of existing nonlinear algorithms, while its computational efficiency is comparable to that of linear algorithms.
Mel-frequencies Stochastics Model for Gender Classification based on Pitch and Formant

—Speech recognition applications are becoming more and more useful nowadays. Before this technology is applied, the first step is test the system to measure the reliability of system. The reliability of system can be measured using accuracy to recognize the speaker such as speaker identity or gender. This paper introduces the stochastic model based on mel-frequencies to identify the gender of speaker in a noisy environment. The Euclidean minimum distance and back propagation neural networks were used to create a model to recognize the gender from his/her speech signal based on formant and pitch of Mel-frequencies. The system uses threshold technique as identification tool. By using this threshold value, the proposed method can identifies the gender of speaker up to 94.11% and the average of processing duration is 15.47 msec. The implementation result shows a good performance of the proposed technique in gender classification based on speech signal in a noisy environment.
Competitive Balance and Assortative Matching in the German Bundesliga

In this paper we consider trends in the distribution of player talent across association football clubs over time. Player talent is the most important prerequisite for team success in professional sports leagues and changes in players' assortativeness in regard to the clubs they play for may arguably be an important factor for changes in competitive balance. We offer a new approach for measuring player talent and its distribution - the partial correlation of each player with the goal margin. We use this measure to analyze the degree of competitive balance over time. This approach enables us to examine how player mobility drives competitive balance over time. Empirical results are based on 19 seasons of the first two divisions of the German Bundesliga as well as domestic cup games. Our results show a decrease in competitive balance over time; better teams tend to attract increasingly better players. We show that this is driven by an increasingly unequal inter-divisional distribution of teams, coaches and players, as well as increasing assortativeness in the 1st Bundesliga. We further demonstrate that player transfers between Bundesliga teams results in assortative matching between players and teams. These domestic transfers do not, however, explain the reduction in competitive balance over time. Furthermore, we show that UEFA Champions League payments may have contributed to the reduction in competitive balance over the last two decades.
Human Capital Specificity: Direct and Indirect Evidence from Canadian and US Panels and Displaced Worker Surveys

Recent papers by Neal (1995) and Parent (2000), using different methods, provided evidence in support of the hypothesis that previously estimated firm tenure effects are, in fact, capturing industry specific human capital investments due to a correlation between firm and industry tenure. This paper uses both methods applied to both US and Canadian data sets to provide evidence in support of an alternative hypothesis that human capital is, for the most part, not narrowly specific to firm or industry. An analysis using either the indirect method of Neal, or the direct approach of Parent, provides evidence against the importance of industry specific capital and in favor of broad skill based specificity.
Measurement of Cosmic-ray Muons and Muon-induced Neutrons in the Aberdeen Tunnel Underground Laboratory

In this study, we have measured the muon flux and production rate of muon-induced neutrons at a depth of 611 m water equivalent. Our apparatus comprises three layers of crossed plastic scintillator hodoscopes for tracking the incident cosmic-ray muons and 760 L of a gadolinium-doped liquid scintillator for producing and detecting neutrons. The vertical muon intensity was measured to be Iμ = (5.7±0.6)×10–6 cm–2 s–1 sr–1. The yield of muon-induced neutrons in the liquid scintillator was determined to be Yn = (1.19 ± 0.08(stat) ± 0.21(syst)) × 10–4 neutrons/(μ•g•cm–2). A fit to the recently measured neutron yields at different depths gave a mean muon energy dependence of 0.76±0.03 for liquid-scintillator targets.
HIGH ACCURACY BACK-RETREAT DIFFUSION-FUZZY CLUSTERING OF BREAST CANCER DATA FOR THE DETECTION OF MALIGNANCY

A novel fuzzy clustering method has been proposed here for separating the breast cancer data, which operates with reasonable accuracy, allows flexibility in dataset and is modestly time consuming. This method can be applied to any type of cancer data set with some initial labels to obtain high accuracy result in the classification of unlabeled samples. Further, the curse of dimensionality is not an issue for the proposed scheme as it can be applied to data having any number of dimensions or attributes. The DifFUZZY unsupervised clustering algorithm is applied at the initial stage, giving an accuracy of 96.28% over Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset (WBCD); the result is further improved to 98.14% by using the proposed Back-Retreat algorithm. The formed clusters are estimated using three internal cluster validation indices and the performance of the method is evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The clustering algorithm is compared with Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm and the results are compared with different classifiers and clustering techniques.
Red Sea Sponges of the Genus Hyrtios as a Source of Symbiotic Fungi with Antimicrobial Activities

The diversity of the symbiotic fungi associated with two Red Sea sponges of the genus Hyrtios (H. erecta and H. erectus) was investigated. A total of 20 isolates were purified from these sponges. Using the morphological properties, 10 fungal strains were identified to the genus level from each sponge. Strains isolated from H. erecta were identified to the species level using the Internal Transcribed Spacer ITS-rDNA sequences. Most of the identified fungal strains belong to the genera Penicillium and Aspergillus. The antibacterial activities of organic extracts of these fungi were investigated against three pathogenic microbes including E. coli, S. aureus and C. albicans. All of the fungal extracts displayed moderate to high levels of antimicrobial activities against the three pathogens. Several fungal strains of the genera Penicillium and Aspergillus displayedstrong antibacterial activities provide potential for future investigation of these strains to identify the bioactive leads in these fungal extracts.