Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AFRICAN UNION: MBEKI’S SOUTH AFRICA POLICY FOR AFRICA1

Marked by tragedies that reinforce stereotypes about itself, especially those that portray it as dependent on developed countries and unable to solve its own dilemmas, the African continent still presents itself in the 21st century with challenges related to hunger and humanitarian calamities, more recurrent in some regions than others. The initiatives to deal with theses issues arise right at the beginning of the second millennium primarily from South Africa. In this sense, it is possible to ask the following question: what political and economic measures were adopted by the African continent in order to combat these problems? Based on the bibliographic review of qualitative secondary sources relevant to the theme and on the analysis of primary sources, such as speeches and official documents of the Organization of African Unity, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate changes in the political and economic dynamics. Those changes were materialized in the different principles incorporated by the Organization of African Unity (1963) and the African Union (2001), the two main organizations for political, economic and social cooperation at the continental level, which took place in Africa at the beginning of the 21st century. The specific objective of this article is to present the change of
Intraoral Scan Based versus Cast Scan Based Surgical Guides

Intraoral Scan Based versus Cast Scan Based Surgical Guides Randa Hussein Ezzat Dabbous1 , Marwa Ezzat Sabet 2, Hebatallah Tarek Mohammed 3 Abstract Aim: The aim of this study was to compare the accuracy of implant placement using both intraoral scan based and cast scan based completely limiting surgical guide. Materials and Methods: 20 implants divided equally into two groups, group A implants inserted using intraoral scan based surgical guides while group B implants inserted using cast scan based surgical guides. A pre-operative CBCT was taken to determine the virtual implant location regarding coronal and apical and angular positions, after implant placement, a postoperative CBCT was taken and the DDS-Pro computer software was used to match the pre and postoperative CBCT images, to compare angular, coronal, and apical deviations of the virtual and the actual implants positions by superimposition with the post-operative CBCT. Results: Cast scan based surgical guide gave better results over intraoral scan based; however the difference in accuracy was statistically insignificant between group A and group B. Conclusion: Both methods can be used in manufacturing surgical guides, as difference in accuracy is statistically insignificant.
Tricks and tips for faster small-scale swimming : complex fluids and elasticity

Many cells exploit the bending or rotation of flagellar filaments in order to self-propel in viscous fluids. Often swimming occurs in complex, nonlinear fluids, e.g. mucus. Furthermore even in simple Newtonian fluids, if swimming appendages are deformable then locomotion is subject to fluid-structure interactions. The fundamental question addressed in this thesis is how exactly locomotion is impacted, in particular if it is faster or slower, with or without these effects. First we study locomotion in shear-thinning and viscoelastic fluids with rigid swimming appendages. Following the introductory Chapter, in Chapter 2 we propose empirical extensions of the classical Newtonian resistive-force theory to model the waving of slender filaments in non-Newtonian fluids, based on experimental measurements for the motion of rigid rods in non-Newtonian fluids and on the Carreau fluid model. We then use our models to address waving locomotion in shear-thinning fluids, and show that the resulting swimming speeds are systematically lowered – a result which we are able to capture asymptotically and to interpret physically. In Chapter 3 we consider swimming using small-amplitude periodic waves in a viscoelastic fluid described by the Oldroyd-B constitutive relationship. Using Taylor’s swimming sheet model, we show that if all travelling waves move in the same direction, the locomotion speed of the organism is systematically decreased. However, if we allow waves to travel in two opposite directions, we show that this can lead to enhancement of the swimming speed, which is physically interpreted as due to asymmetric viscoelastic damping of waves with different frequencies. A change of the swimming direction is also possible. Secondly we consider the affect of fluid-structure interactions. In Chapter 4, we use Taylor’s swimming sheet model to describe an active swimmer immersed in an Oldroyd-B fluid. We solve for the shape of an active swimmer as a balance between the external fluid stresses, the internal driving moments, and the passive elastic resistance. We show that this dynamic balance leads to a generic transition from hindered rigid swimming to enhanced flexible locomotion. The results are physically interpreted as due to a viscoelastic suction increasing the swimming amplitude in a non-Newtonian fluid and overcoming viscoelastic damping. In Chapter 5 we consider peritrichously flagellated bacteria, such as Escherichia coli. The rotation of each motor is transmitted to a flexible rod called the hook which in turns transmits it to a helical filament, leading to swimming. The motors are randomly distributed over the body of the organism, and thus one expects the propulsive forces from the filament to almost cancel out leading to negligible swimming. We show that the transition to swimming is an elasto-hydrodynamic instability arising when the flexibility of the hook is below a critical threshold.
Multilingual Chart-based Constituency Parse Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models

As it has been unveiled that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are to some extent capable of recognizing syntactic concepts in natural language, much effort has been made to develop a method for extracting complete (binary) parses from PLMs without training separate parsers. We improve upon this paradigm by proposing a novel chart-based method and an effective top-K ensemble technique. Moreover, we demonstrate that we can broaden the scope of application of the approach into multilingual settings. Specifically, we show that by applying our method on multilingual PLMs, it becomes possible to induce non-trivial parses for sentences from nine languages in an integrated and language-agnostic manner, attaining performance superior or comparable to that of unsupervised PCFGs. We also verify that our approach is robust to cross-lingual transfer. Finally, we provide analyses on the inner workings of our method. For instance, we discover universal attention heads which are consistently sensitive to syntactic information irrespective of the input language.
Mechanical energy harvester based on cashmere fibers

Fabrication of a flexible, lightweight and cost-effective mechanical energy harvester is a promising approach for next-generation wearable electronics. Herein, a triboelectric mechanical energy harvester based on cashmere fibers is developed for the first time using a facile fabrication process with polytetrafluoroethylene as the triboelectric counterpart. The surface properties of cashmere play a significant role in output performance. Remarkable power output can be achieved when subjected to Tween 20 treatment with an open-circuit voltage of 19.5 V, which is 4.5-fold higher than that of a pristine fiber based harvester. As a H-bond donor, the lowered ionization potential of cashmere significantly increases its tendency to lose electrons during contact electrification. The treated cashmere based harvester can achieve an output power density of 41.7 mW m−2 at a load resistance of 14.1 MΩ. Additionally, the device displays good stability over a wide range of relative humidity. This study demonstrates a new approach for surface modification via mild solvent treatment. Successful demonstration of a cashmere based harvester as a power source for light-emitting diodes shows potential application in self-powered wearable electronics.
Active Carbon from Date Stones for Phenol Oxidation in Trickle Bed Reactor, Experimental and Kinetic Study

The catalytic wet air oxidation (CWAO) of phenol has been studied in a trickle bed reactor using active carbon prepared from date stones as catalyst by ferric and zinc chloride activation (FAC and ZAC). The activated carbons were characterized by measuring their surface area and adsorption capacity besides conventional properties, and then checked for CWAO using a trickle bed reactor operating at different conditions (i.e. pH, gas flow rate, LHSV, temperature and oxygen partial pressure). The results showed that the active carbon (FAC and ZAC), without any active metal supported, gives the highest phenol conversion. The reaction network proposed accounts for all detected intermediate products of phenol oxidation that composed by several consecutive and parallel reactions. The parameters of the model estimated using experimental data obtained from a continuous trickle bed reactor at different temperatures (120-160  C) and oxygen partial pressures (8-12 bar). Simple power law as well as Langmuir-Hinshelwood (L-H) expressions accounting for the adsorption effects were checked in the modeling of the reaction network. A non-linear multi-parameter estimation approach was used to simultaneously evaluate the high number of model parameters. Approach by simple power law only succeeds in fitting phenol disappearance. Instead, when L-H expressions are incorporated for the intermediate reaction steps, the model accurately describes all the experimental concentration profiles, giving mean deviations below 10%.
Photo-fenton and UV photo degradation of naphthalene with zero- and two-valent iron in the presence of persulfate

Abstract An initial set of 12 kinetic experiments was carried out to remove naphthalene from an aqueous effluent by photo-Fenton involving Fe0 and Fe2+ at two different concentrations of H2O2 (150 and 300 mg L−1) and three different pHs (3, 5, and 7) (22×31 experiments). The rate constants (k) for the reaction of naphthalene degradation by involving Fe2+ as reactant were in general higher than those with Fe0, but the use of Fe2+ increased the concentration of naphthalene at equilibrium (Ce) when compared with the same response obtained with Fe0 at analogous conditions. A second set of twelve kinetic experiments of photo-Fenton degradation was also performed with persulfate as additive at the conditions already reported, but at a constant concentration of H2O2 of 150 mg L−1 (21×31 experiments with NaCl +21×31 experiments without NaCl). In almost all the runs in which only the source of iron was varied, k from the kinetic data involving Fe2+ was higher than that involving Fe0, but no difference was observed in terms of Ce that was always zero. The addition of persulfate to treat the effluent either containing or not containing salt enhanced the chemical kinetics, and shifted the equilibrium toward the full removal of naphthalene. A final set of nine experiments of UV photo degradation of naphthalene by involving persulfate without iron, with Fe0 and Fe2+ in the pH range from 3 to 7 (32 experiments) mainly showed that the use of H2O2 may be avoided to remove rapidly and completely naphthalene from wastewater.
Adaptability analysis of Leucaena collinsii in the microbasin Tula, Mexico

In recent decades, the deterioration of natural resources in Mexico has increased due to changes in land use and increasing urbanization in areas of high ecological vulnerability and low levels of productivity. The Tula micro-basin, Mexico is located in a semi-dry climate zone where soil degradation and population increase are having a strong impact on soil conservation. The objective of this study was to determine the areas suitable for the optimal development of the Leucaena collinsii Britton & Rose species in the Tula microbasin, through the maximum entropy ecological niche model, MaxEnt, for soil rehabilitation purposes. For the modeling, 19 environmental variables and 8 presence records were used, obtained from the GBIF and MEXU databases. The modeling results indicated that the variables with the greatest contribution were temperature and evapotranspiration, and that the model has a good predictive capacity (p-value= 0.013), according to the significance test with a level α= 0.05, based on the Jackniffie technique. In the model, the potential distribution of the species was low, with just 8% of the surface of the micro-basin, but a high survival (100%) was recorded, in the experimental validation. It was concluded that there are few adaptability zones for the species, in the Tula microbasin; however, its high survival in the experimental plot, determined that its introduction is an option for soil rehabilitation.
EXTERNAL LOAD IN BASKETBALL ACCORDING TO GAME SITUATION AND METHODOLOGY CARGA EXTERNA EN BALONCESTO SEGÚN LA SITUACIÓN DE JUEGO

1 Doctorate from the University of Extremadura. Lecturer in the Santa Ana University Center, Spain (Spain) sgones@unex.es 2 Doctorate from the University of Extremadura. Lecturer in the Faculty of Sport Sciences, University of Extremadura (Spain) jagaru@unex.es, sfeu@unex.es 3 Professor at the University of Extremadura. Lecturer in the Faculty of Sport Sciences, University of Extremadura (Spain) sibanez@unex.es
CNN Hyperparameter Optimization for Pulmonary Nodule Classification

Redes Neurais Convolucionais (RNCs) são uma técnica poderosa para sistemas de diagnóstico auxiliado por computador, mas a configuração manual de redes complexas é inviável. A otimização automática de hiper-parâmetros é uma abordagem promissora, mas não há consenso sobre a técnica mais adequada. Neste trabalho, comparamos busca direta, probabilística e otimização bayesiana na otimização de RNCs 2D e 3D para classificação de nódulos pulmonares. Foram obtidas AUC de 0,88, sensibilidade de 87,03% e especificidade de 78,66%. Nossos experimentos demonstram o fraco desempenho da busca em grade, enquanto mostram que técnicas simples, como a busca aleatória, pode ter desempenho comparável a abordagens probabilísticas
Deploying PolKA Source Routing in P4 Switches : (Invited Paper)

One great challenge of modern networks is how to select paths and react to highly variable and demanding traffic patterns. In recent years, emerging networking languages and architectures, such as P4/PISA, have created unprecedented opportunities for rapidly prototyping disruptive solutions in programmable data planes. In this direction, source routing (SR) is a prominent alternative to conventional table-based routing, since it reduces the convergence time of building distributed routing tables. In particular, PolKA explores the polynomial residue number system (RNS) for a fully stateless SR, i.e., no state update on packet headers needs to be conveyed along the route. This paper reports the deployment of PolKA in a continental testbed composed of P4 programmable switches. Results for end-to-end throughput and forwarding latency show that PolKA matches the data plane performance of traditional approaches, while paving the way for further innovative applications by exploring RNS properties in dynamic scenarios.
Lift: An Educational Interactive Stochastic Ray Tracing Framework with AI-Accelerated Denoiser

Real-time physically based rendering has long been looked at as the holy grail in Computer Graphics. With theintroduction of Nvidia RTX-enabled GPUs family, light transport simulations under real-time constraint startedto look like a reality. This paper presents Lift, an educational framework written in C++ that explores the RTXhardware pipeline by using the low-level Vulkan API and its Ray Tracing extension, recently made available byKhronos Group. Furthermore, to accomplish low variance rendered images, we integrated the AI-based denoiseravailable from the Nvidia ́s OptiX framework. Lift’s development arose primarily in the context of the graduate3D Programming course taught at Instituto Superior Técnico and Master Theses focused on Real-Time Ray Trac-ing and provides the foundations for laboratory assignments and projects development. The platform aims to makeeasier students to learn and to develop, by programming the shaders of the RT pipeline, their physically-based ren-dering approaches and to compare them with the built-in progressive unidirectional and bidirectional path tracers.The GUI allows a user to specify camera settings and navigation speed, to select the input scene as well as therendering method, to define the number of samples per pixel and the path length as well as to denoise the generatedimage either every frame or just the final frame. Statistics related with the timings, image resolution and totalnumber of accumulated samples are provided too. Such platform will teach that nowadays physically-accurateimages can be rendered in real-time under different lighting conditions and how well a denoiser can reconstructimages rendered with just one sample per pixel
A Question Answering System over Chronic Diseases and Epigenetics Knowledge

Medical records describe patients’ health conditions and help experts to decide on treatments. The scientific biomedical knowledge can improve the prevention and treatment of diseases and promote innovation and discovery in health. However, healthcare professionals may have difficulty in searching for relevant scientific information due to lack time and constant literature update. The present work proposes a Question Answering (Q&A) architecture to support a more focused search for information about chronic diseases. A user question in natural language initiates the search for answering and promoting knowledge such as a learning healthcare system. To evaluate the system, we employ a reference collection on epigenetics and chronic disease and calculate performance measures like precision, recall and F-measure.
Secret Reserve Prices by Uninformed Sellers

If bidders are better informed than the seller about a common component of auction heterogeneity, the seller can allocate more efficiently by keeping her reserve price secret and revising it using submitted bids. We build a model of a first‐price auction under unobserved auction heterogeneity—imperfectly observed by the seller—that captures this rationale and derive conditions for identification. An application to French timber auctions, where such revisions are widely used, shows that having perfect information about unobserved auction heterogeneity would increase surplus by 5.22%. Combining a secret reserve price with learning from submitted bids reduces this surplus gap by up to 84%.
Regional Interdependence of the Japan REIT Market: A Heteroscedasticity-Robust Time Series Approach

This paper investigates the dynamic interdependence between the stock returns of regionally disjoint Japanese real estate investment trusts (REITs), where the property type and a market return are controlled. We take a multivariate time series approach with the error term being allowed to have conditional heteroscedasticity of unknown form. We find significant spillover effects from central to local areas in conditional mean, a potential signal of arbitrage opportunities. The spillover effects have become stronger after the COVID-19 crisis for the office and hotel sectors, but not for the residential sector. This contrast suggests that a geographic diversification strategy within residential REIT securities should be more effective than that within office or hotel, especially during a period of turmoil.
Network Games, Peer Effect and Neutral Transfers

We study properties of collective action problems bounded by minimal contributions as well as endowment and variable contributions are neighbourhood dependent. We relate nearness to non-interior agents and its implication for interior contribution. Here, we see the aspects of node distance to non-interior agents which have implications for interior agents. Endowments may be redistributed among agents. We highlight strict conditions for budget balanced transfers for which neighbourhood contributions and individual residual consumption's are invariant. Agents may or may not be concerned about neighbourhood outcomes. We find that welfare is self correcting and neither cases are relevant to the overall welfare impact of neutral transfers.
On-Demand Source of Dual-Rail Photon Pairs Based on Chiral Interaction in a Nanophotonic Waveguide

Entanglement is the fuel of advanced quantum technology. It is for instance consumed in measurement-based quantum computing and allows loss-tolerant encoding of quantum information. In photonics, entanglement has traditionally been generated probabilistically, requiring massive multiplexing for scaling up to many photons. An alternative approach utilizes quantum emitters in nanophotonic devices for deterministic generation of single photons, which an be extended to two- and multi-photon generation on demand. The proposed polarization-entanglement sources are, however, incompatible with spatial dual-rail qubit encoding, which is preferred in photonic quantum computing realized in scalable integrated photonic circuits. Here we propose and experimentally realize an on-demand source of dual-rail photon pairs using a quantum dot in a planar nanophotonic waveguide. The source exploits the cascaded decay of a biexciton state and chiral light-matter coupling to achieve deterministic generation of spatial dual-rail Bell pairs with the amount of entanglement determined by the chirality. The operational principle can readily be extended to multi-photon entanglement generation, and such sources may be interfaced with advanced photonic-integrated circuits, e.g., for efficient preparation of entanglement resource states for photonic quantum computing.
Mixup Decoding for Diverse Machine Translation

Diverse machine translation aims at generating various target language translations for a given source language sentence. Leveraging the linear relationship in the sentence latent space introduced by the mixup training, we propose a novel method, MixDiversity, to generate different translations for the input sentence by linearly interpolating it with different sentence pairs sampled from the training corpus when decoding. To further improve the faithfulness and diversity of the translations, we propose two simple but effective approaches to select diverse sentence pairs in the training corpus and adjust the interpolation weight for each pair correspondingly. Moreover, by controlling the interpolation weight, our method can achieve the trade-off between faithfulness and diversity without any additional training, which is required in most of the previous methods. Experiments on WMT'16 en-ro, WMT'14 en-de, and WMT'17 zh-en are conducted to show that our method substantially outperforms all previous diverse machine translation methods.
A note on the permutation distribution of generalized correlation coefficients

aijbij is common under a variety of settings. For example, given a sample (xi, yi), i = 1, · · · , N , the popular Pearson and Spearman measures, ignoring standardization, can be obtained with aij = xi − xj , bij = yi − yj , and aij = rank(xi) − rank(xj), bij = rank(yi) − rank(yj), respectively. It is also a unified form for non-parametric two-sample test when the permutation null distribution is of interest. Explicitly, let xi’s be the observations, yi’s be 0’s and 1’s indicating the group ID, m be the number of 0’s in yi’s, and n be the number of 1’s in yi’s. We give a few examples of non-parametric test statistics below.