Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
OPTIMIZATION OF CONTRACTOR' S S-CURVE

While striving to satisfy owners’ needs, to minimize construction cost and pursue the maximum profits under a fixed contract amount and duration is always one of the most important objectives of contractors. Only a sound work plan, which includes optimal working sequences and perfect timing for executing each individual activity, can enhance the work efficiency and enable contractors to fulfill the contract at the lowest cost. This research develops a contractors’ optimal S-curve model, which can optimize the allocation of resources along the project schedule, under major assumptions that for a specific task, there is a trade-off relationship in terms of work productivity between two different types of resources and there are costs for resource mobilization and demobilization. The S-curve established can be used as a baseline to measure the extra cost caused by changes and disruptions in the course of construction and the overall project performance at the completion of the project.
Application of 2D URANS in fluid structure interaction problems of rectangular cylinders

In this work the authors have studied the applicability of the 2D URANS approach adopting a block structured mesh and Menter’s SST k-omega turbulence model for the aspect ratio 4 rectangular cylinder. As a first step, a verification study is carried out for the mesh refinement level and the time step size. Then, the static response for a 0o angle of attack is considered for validation purposes. The vortex induced vibration response is computed based on the outof-phase component and phase angle of a one degree of freedom heave forced oscillation simulation at different reduced velocities. Finally, the flutter derivatives are evaluated based on the results of forced induced oscillations in both heave and pitch degrees of freedom. The computational results obtained herein have been in agreement with both experimental and numerical data available in the literature. The proposed methodology based on 2D URANS is less computer power demanding than a 3D LES approach, while it keeps a good accuracy level, which is of particular interest in the frame of industrial applications.
Hypertension and exposure to noise near airports - results of the HYENA study

Hypertension is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Even a small contribution in risk from environmental factors may have a major impact on public health. The HYENA study aimed to assess the relations between noise from aircraft or road traffic near airports and the risk of hypertension. Blood pressure was measured, and data on health (history of hypertension, medication), socio-economic, life-style factors and potential effect and exposure modifiers (personality factors, remedies to reduce the noise) were collected via questionnaire at home visits for 4,861 persons aged 45 to 70, who had lived at least five years near any of six major European airports. Aircraft noise contours and road traffic noise levels were modeled using the Integrated Noise Model (INM) and national calculation methods. The noise levels were linked to each participant's home address using graphical information systems. Significant exposure-response relationships between night-time aircraft as well as average daily road traffic noise and risk of hypertension were found after adjustment for major confounders. For night-time aircraft noise (Lnight), a 10 dB(A) increase in exposure was associated with an odds ratio of 1.14 (95 % confidence interval: 1.01-1.29). For 24h road traffic noise (Leq,24h), a 10 dB(A) increase in exposure was associated with an odds ratio of 1.10 (95% confidence interval: 1.001.20). The exposure-response relationships for road traffic noise was stronger for men with an odds ratio of 1.54 (95% CI: 0.99-2.40) in the highest exposure category (>65dB); (ptrend = 0.008). The results indicate excess risks of hypertension related to long term noise exposure, primarily for night-time aircraft noise and daily average road traffic noise.
THE SPEED LIMITS DEBATE: IS EFFECTIVE A TEMPORARY CHANGE? THE CASE OF SPAIN

Nowadays, speeding is one of the most relevant problems for traffic safety and most resistant to change in motorized countries. The key instruments in Speed Management Policy are speed limits. This road safety strategy is often established or changed, in order to save fuel during periods of rising prices. However, the relationship between speed limits and traffic accidents, is a topic widely discussed by researchers, and there seems to be some consensus about 'speed kills. ' By applying advanced time series models of unobserved components, our study investigates the impact of a temporary reduction of maximum speed limits, implemented in Spain in 2011, in terms of fuel consumption and fatalities. Our analysis shows that this measure caused a positive effect, although with a limited statistical significance, on fuel consumption and a discrete reduction in road mortality. The costs associated with this temporary change seem to explain the discrepancies between these estimates and the forecasts that initially held the Spanish government.
Emerging microfluidics-enabled platforms for osteoarthritis management: from benchtop to bedside

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a prevalent debilitating age-related joint degenerative disease. It is a leading cause of pain and functional disability in older adults. Unfortunately, there is no cure for OA once the damage is established. Therefore, it promotes an urgent need for early detection and intervention of OA. Theranostics, combining therapy and diagnosis, emerges as a promising approach for OA management. However, OA theranostics is still in its infancy. Three fundamental needs have to be firstly fulfilled: i) a reliable OA model for disease pathogenesis investigation and drug screening, ii) an effective and precise diagnostic platform, and iii) an advanced fabrication approach for drug delivery and therapy. Meanwhile, microfluidics emerges as a versatile technology to address each of the needs and eventually boost the development of OA theranostics. Therefore, this review focuses on the applications of microfluidics, from benchtop to bedside, for OA modelling and drug screening, early diagnosis, and clinical therapy. We first introduce the basic pathophysiology of OA and point out the major unfilled research gaps in current OA management including lack of disease modelling and drug screening platforms, early diagnostic modalities and disease-modifying drugs and delivery approaches. Accordingly, we then summarize the state-of-the-art microfluidics technology for OA management from in vitro modelling and diagnosis to therapy. Given the existing promising results, we further discuss the future development of microfluidic platforms towards clinical translation at the crossroad of engineering and biomedicine.
Silicon-Based Integration of Groups III, IV, V Chemical Vapor Depositions in High-Quality Photodiodes

Heterogeneous integration of III-V semiconductors with silicon (Si) technology is an interesting approach to utilize the advantages of both high-speed photonic and electronic properties. The work presented in this thesis is initiated by this major goal of merging III-V semiconductor technology with Si technology. The focus was primitively placed on development of a Si-compatible tool for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of gallium arsenide (GaAs). For this purpose, a Si/SiGe CVD reactor, ASMI Epsilon 2000, was extended with a TriMethylGallium (TMGa) bubbler system and extra tubing to allow the deposition of GaAs as well as the standard Si and SiGe depositions. Of key importance was to apply a very low arsine (AsH3) concentration: 0.7% as compared to the at least ten times higher values normally used in MOCVDs. The correspondingly low concentration of TMGa means that the contamination of the reactor chamber with gallium or arsenic is so low that standard high-quality low-doped Si and SiGe depositions can still be performed in the same CVD reactor chamber. In view of this, the research took a unique direction of creating devices where the merging of depositions of gallium (Ga), arsenic (As) and boron (B), together with Si and Ge, all in one reactor, proved indispensable. For the first time, deposition cycles containing layers of different combinations of these III, IV, V elements could then be performed without vacuum break. This was important not only for the growth of good quality GaAs epitaxy and crystalline Ge-on-Si, but also for the formation of junction diodes in these materials. In particular, the formation of p+n Si diodes of exceptional quality was facilitated by deposition of pure gallium (PureGa) or pure boron (PureB) to create the p+-region. The combination of both PureGa and PureB techniques have been implemented on crystalline Ge-on-Si to form ideal Ge-on-Si p+n junctions with world record low saturation currents. The term PureGaB is introduced for this technology. On the application side, this thesis work has been directed towards the very challenging feat of fabricating Ge avalanche photodiodes (Ge APDs)on Si substrates. The low dark current and clear breakdown curve of these diodes were proven to be suitable for infrared detection in linear and photon counting (Geiger) mode.
Robust optical transmission systems : modulation and equalization

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Tuning parameter calibration for personalized prediction in medicine

: Personalized prediction is of high interest in medicine; poten- tial applications include the prediction of individual drug responses or risks of complications. But typical statistical pipelines such as ridge estimation combined with cross-validation ignore the heterogeneity among the patients and, therefore, are not suited for personalized prediction. We, therefore, in- troduce an alternative ridge-type pipeline that can minimize the prediction error of each patient individually. We show that our pipeline is optimal in terms of oracle inequalities, fast, and highly eﬀective both in simulations and on real data.
Fertility in Cystinosis

Cystinosis is a rare inheritable lysosomal storage disorder characterized by cystine accumulation throughout the body, chronic kidney disease necessitating renal replacement therapy mostly during adolescence, and multiple extra-renal complications. The majority of male cystinosis patients are infertile due to azoospermia, in contrast to female patients who are fertile. Over recent decades, the fertility status of male patients has evolved from a primary hypogonadism in the era before the systematic treatment with cysteamine to azoospermia in the majority of cysteamine-treated infantile cystinosis patients. In this review, we provide a state-of-the-art overview on the available clinical, histopathological, animal, and in vitro data. We summarize current insights on both cystinosis males and females, and their clinical implications including the potential effect of cysteamine on fertility. In addition, we identify the remaining challenges and areas for future research.
CRCLoc: A Crowdsourcing-Based Radio Map Construction Method for WiFi Fingerprinting Localization

The WiFi-based fingerprint indoor-positioning system has attracted increasing interest from industry and academia, benefiting from the widespread deployment of the wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure. However, with the expansion of application scenarios, this system suffers from labor-intensive work for received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint construction. In this article, we propose a crowdsourcing-based radio map construction method and trajectory matching algorithm to solve the time-consuming preliminary fingerprint data collection in the offline phase, where the tedious collection work is replaced by the massive crowdsourcing sensor data. First, the latent information of the map is extracted by using some image processing methods, and all possible routes are obtained simultaneously with the depth-first traversal method. Then, considering the strict restrictions on walking in indoor environments, the crowdsourcing trajectories are produced by matching the result of pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) with the candidate routes based on the Shape Context algorithm. Further, a crowdsourcing trajectory can be represented by uniformly distributed reference points based on step detection, and each point corresponds to a unique RSS of access points (APs). Since such a fingerprint construction method can be performed while smartphone holders are moving and not aware of their actual positions, it can be referred to the dynamic construction method of the radio map. The real scenario experiments reveal that the proposed solution can significantly reduce the time and manpower consumption to build the radio map. Moreover, compared with traditional schemes, our crowdsourcing-based radio map construction method for the WiFi fingerprinting localization (CRCLoc) system can improve the accuracy and robustness of the indoor-positioning results.
Tapered bent folded monopole for dual-band wireless local area network (WLAN) systems

An antenna structure based on the geometry of the bent folded monopole is described in this letter. This novel tapered bent folded monopole is designed to cover popular frequency spectrum of the 2.4 and the 5 GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) bands. The proposed antenna capable of dual-frequency operation is fed by the coplanar waveguide (CPW) and fabricated on the RO4003 substrate. Obtained numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental data. It has been validated that the configuration can meet the demands for the WLAN systems and effectively enhance the impedance bandwidth to 12.5% for the lower band and 32.4% for the upper band for VSWR<2:1.
Field Behavior of Driven Prestressed High-Strength Concrete Piles in Sandy Soils

AbstractDriven piles are used widely both offshore and onshore. However, accurate axial capacity and load-displacement prediction is difficult at sand-dominated sites, and offshore practice is moving towards cone penetration test (CPT) based design methods developed from instrumented pile research and database studies. However, onshore use of these methods remains limited; there is a paucity of high quality case histories to assess their potential benefits clearly, and application in layered profiles may be uncertain. This paper presents new tests on prestressed concrete (PHC) pipe piles driven in sands for a major new Yangtze River bridge project in China, assessing the performance of the ‘new CPT’ and conventional capacity approaches, considering the influence of weak sublayers on base resistance and noting the marked changes in shaft capacity that apply over time.
The Effect of Blade Tip Geometry on the Tip Leakage Flow in Axial Turbine Cascades

The phenomenon of tip leakage has been studied in two linear cascades of turbine blades.The investigation includes an examination of the performance of the cascades with a variety of tip geometries. The effects of using plain tips, suction side squealers and pressure side squealers are reported. Traverses of the exit flow field were made in order to determine the overall performance.A method of calculating the tip discharge coefficients for squealer geometries is put forward. In linking the tip discharge coefficient and cascade losses a procedure for predicting the relative performance of tip geometries is developed. The model is used to examine the results obtained using the different tip treatments and to highlight the important aspects of the loss generation process.Copyright © 1991 by ASME
Assessment of Clinical Scales for Detection of Large Vessel Occlusion in Ischemic Stroke Patients from the Dijon Stroke Registry

(1) Background: The limited availability of thrombectomy-capable stroke centres raises questions about pre-hospital triage of patients with suspected stroke (IS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO). Aims: This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of clinical stroke severity scales available for LVO detection. (2) Methods: Patients with IS were prospectively identified among residents of Dijon, France, using a population-based registry (2013–2017). Clinical signs and arterial imaging data were collected. LVO was defined as an occlusion site affecting the terminal intracranial internal carotid artery, the M1 segment of the middle cerebral artery (MCA), or the basilar artery (restricted definition). A wide definition of LVO also included the M2 segment of the MCA. For each of the 16 evaluated scales, a receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed, and the c-statistic representing the area under the ROC curve was evaluated to assess discrimination for predicting LVO. (3) Results: 971 patients were registered, including 123 patients (12.7%) with an LVO according to the restricted definition. The c-statistic for LVO detection ranged between 0.66 and 0.80 according to the different scales, with a sensibility varying from 70% to 98% and a specificity from 33% to 86%. According to the wide definition of LVO (174 patients, 17.9%), the c-statistic was slightly lower, ranging between 0.64 and 0.79. The sensitivity was 59% to 93%, and the specificity was 34% to 89%. (4) Conclusion: The clinical scales failed to combine a high sensitivity and a high specificity to detect LVO. Further studies are needed to determine the best strategy for pre-hospital triage of IS patients.
Interbacterial Transfer of Carbapenem Resistance and Large Antibiotic Resistance Islands by Natural Transformation in Pathogenic Acinetobacter

Acinetobacter baumannii is a multidrug-resistant pathogen responsible for difficult-to-treat hospital-acquired infections. Understanding the mechanisms leading to the emergence of the multidrug resistance in this pathogen today is crucial. ABSTRACT Acinetobacter baumannii infection poses a major health threat, with recurrent treatment failure due to antibiotic resistance, notably to carbapenems. While genomic analyses of clinical strains indicate that homologous recombination plays a major role in the acquisition of antibiotic resistance genes, the underlying mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer often remain speculative. Our understanding of the acquisition of antibiotic resistance is hampered by the lack of experimental systems able to reproduce genomic observations. We here report the detection of recombination events occurring spontaneously in mixed bacterial populations and which can result in the acquisition of resistance to carbapenems. We show that natural transformation is the main driver of intrastrain but also interstrain recombination events between A. baumannii clinical isolates and pathogenic species of Acinetobacter. We observed that interbacterial natural transformation in mixed populations is more efficient at promoting the acquisition of large resistance islands (AbaR4 and AbaR1) than when the same bacteria are supplied with large amounts of purified genomic DNA. Importantly, analysis of the genomes of the recombinant progeny revealed large recombination tracts (from 13 to 123 kb) similar to those observed in the genomes of clinical isolates. Moreover, we highlight that transforming DNA availability is a key determinant of the rate of recombinants and results from both spontaneous release and interbacterial predatory behavior. In the light of our results, natural transformation should be considered a leading mechanism of genome recombination and horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance genes in Acinetobacter baumannii. IMPORTANCE Acinetobacter baumannii is a multidrug-resistant pathogen responsible for difficult-to-treat hospital-acquired infections. Understanding the mechanisms leading to the emergence of the multidrug resistance in this pathogen today is crucial. Horizontal gene transfer is assumed to largely contribute to this multidrug resistance. However, in A. baumannii, the mechanisms leading to genome recombination and the horizontal transfer of resistance genes are poorly understood. We describe experimental evidence that natural transformation, a horizontal gene transfer mechanism recently highlighted in A. baumannii, allows the highly efficient interbacterial transfer of genetic elements carrying resistance to last-line antibiotic carbapenems. Importantly, we demonstrated that natural transformation, occurring in mixed populations of Acinetobacter, enables the transfer of large resistance island-mobilizing multiple-resistance genes.
Reliable hypotheses testing in animal social network analyses: global index, index of interactions and residual regression

Animal social network analyses (ASNA) have led to a foundational shift in our understanding of animal sociality that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of genetics, spatial movements, epidemiology, information transmission, evolution, species assemblages and conservation. However, some analytical protocols (i.e., permutation tests) used in ASNA have recently been called into question due to the unacceptable rates of false negatives (type I error) and false positives (type II error) they generate in statistical hypothesis testing. Here, we show that these rates are related to the way in which observation heterogeneity is accounted for in association indices. To solve this issue, we propose a method termed the “global index” (GI) that consists of computing the average of individual associations indices per unit of time. In addition, we developed an “index of interactions” (II) that allows the use of the GI approach for directed behaviours. Our simulations show that GI: 1) returns more reasonable rates of false negatives and positives, with or without observational biases in the collected data, 2) can be applied to both directed and undirected behaviours, 3) can be applied to focal sampling, scan sampling or “gambit of the group” data collection protocols, and 4) can be applied to first- and second-order social network measures. Finally, we provide a method to control for non-social biological confounding factors using linear regression residuals. By providing a reliable approach for a wide range of scenarios, we propose a novel methodology in ASNA with the aim of better understanding social interactions from a mechanistic, ecological and evolutionary perspective.