Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Challenges and Possibilities of Overtaking Strategies for Autonomous Vehicles

This paper present three distinct probability-based methods for decision making and trajectory planning layers of overtaking maneuvering functionality for autonomous vehicles. The computation time of the proposed decision-making algorithms may be high, because the number of describing parameters of the traffic situations may vary in a high range. The presented clustering-based, graph-based and dynamic-based methods differ in the complexity of their computation algorithms. Since the decision-making process may require considerable online computation effort, a neural-network-based approach is presented for implementation purposes.
Emergence of Colistin Resistant Gram-Negative Bacteria in a Tertiary Care Rural Hospital in 2019

Introduction Antibiotic resistance, which started in the 1970s among Gramnegative bacteria, is a crucial global problem. The rapid increase in the prevalence of Gram-negative pathogens that are resistant to fluoroquinolones and aminoglycosides as well as all beta lactams, including carbapenems, monobactam, cephalosporins and broad-spectrum penicillin, has prompted to solve this challenge by one of the oldest antibiotics Colistin in the polymyxin groupis using as a last therapeutic optionfor critically ill patients suffering from infections caused by multidrug resistant gram negative bacteria. Colistin (polymyxin E) is a polypeptide bactericidal agent available in two forms for clinical use as (polymyxin B and polymyxin E). Colistin sulfate and colistimethate sodium. Colistimethate sodium is to hydrolyze to colistin sulfate on parenteral administrationand acts like bactericidal drug by disrupting lipopolysaccharide (LPS) molecules of gram negative bacterial outer membrane. It is also established that neither new development of antimicrobials nor an alternative drug working activity against multidrug-resistant (MDR) gram-negative bacteria, all are bound to widespread use of colistin. As a result, there are reports of emergence of older antibiotics like colistin resistance to gram negative bacteria of Enterobacteriaceae.
A degradation-based detection framework against covert cyberattacks on SCADA systems

Abstract Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are commonly used in critical infrastructures. However, these systems are typically vulnerable to cyberattacks. Among the different types of cyberattacks, the covert attack is one of the hardest to detect – it is undetectable when the system is operating under normal conditions. In this article, we develop a data-driven detection framework that utilizes the degradation process of the system to detect covert attacks. We derive mathematical characteristics of the degradation processes under covert attacks that are used for developing a sequential likelihood ratio test method for attack detection. We verify our methodology through an extensive numerical study and a case study on a rotating machinery setup. Our results show that the methodology helps detect covert attacks within reasonable delay time and is applicable under real-world settings.
Loneliness and emotion regulation: implications of having social anxiety disorder

ABSTRACT Objective: Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) are more likely to feel lonely compared with those without the disorder (NOSAD). Loneliness is also associated with increased emotion regulation deficits. In this study, we examined the relationships among different emotion regulation processes and loneliness in individuals with and without a diagnosis of SAD. Method: We recruited demographically matched groups comprising 42 participants with a primary diagnosis of SAD, and 42 participants from the broader community who acted as the NOSAD sample. Results: In line with predictions, loneliness severity and difficulties with regulating emotions differed between a SAD and NOSAD sample. We also found that loneliness in those with SAD was positively associated with the clarity and awareness subscales of the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale. Conclusion: Overall, those with SAD reported more difficulties regulating emotions and higher loneliness compared with the sample with NOSAD. Results are discussed in line with theoretical and clinical implications. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic: (1) Loneliness is associated with poor mental health. (2) Social anxiety symptoms predict higher loneliness over time and vice versa. (3) Emotion regulation capacity is related to both social anxiety and loneliness. What this topic adds: (1) Compares loneliness and emotion regulation across clinical and NOSAD samples. (2) Difficulties in emotion regulation ability are uniquely associated with loneliness in the sample with social anxiety disorder compared to those without social anxiety disorder. (3) Provides a rationale to target emotion regulation deficits.
The improved inventory sample counter INVS Mod-III

The Inventory Sample Coincidence Counter or INVS was developed for the passive assay of small plutonium samples by neutron coincidence counting. The INVS has been modified to enhance its performance. The new design can now be used with a glove box sample-well (in-line application) in addition to the standard at-line mode. The counter has been designed to have more counting efficiency and be less sensitive to variations in sample position. These factors lead to a high degree of precision and accuracy in a given counting period. A calculational study was performed using the Los Alamos transport code MCNP to optimize the design parameters. The counter underwent performance testing and precalibration at Los Alamos and was then shipped to the Plutonium Fuel Production Facility in Japan where final calibration was done using mixed oxide powder and pellets. 9 refs., 8 figs., 7 tabs.
Converting a Water Pressurized Network in a Small Town into a Solar Power Water System

The efficient management of water and energy is one challenge for managers of water pressurized systems. In a scheme with high pressure on the environment, solar power appears as an opportunity for nonrenewable energy expenditure reduction and emissions elimination. In Spain, new legislation that eliminates old taxes associated with solar energy production, a drop in the cost of solar photovoltaic modules, and higher values of irradiance has converted solar powered water systems into one of the trendiest topics in the water industry. One alternative to store energy (compulsory in standalone photovoltaic systems) when managing pressurized urban water networks is the use of head tanks (tanks accumulate water during the day and release it at night). This work intends to compare the pressurized network running as a standalone system and a hybrid solution that incorporates solar energy supply and electricity grids. The indicator used for finding the best choice is the net present value for the solar power water system lifespan. This study analyzed the possibility of transferring the energy surplus obtained at midday to the electricity grid, a circumstance introduced in the Spanish legislation since April 2019. We developed a real case study in a small town in the Alicante Province, whose findings provide planning policymakers with very useful information in this case and similar case studies
Financial and Economic Assessment of Tidal Stream Energy—A Case Study

This case study is based on actual project and consultancy work, balancing real life experience with a review and analysis of empirical and theoretical literature. Tidal stream energy (TSE) is still a nascent technology, but with much better predictability than the classical alternatives of sun and wind. Being still more expensive than other renewable technologies, it is important to find locations in order to initiate a learning process to bring down cost to a competitive level as it was the case for solar and wind technologies. Locations for an initial phase of operation of TSE small islands in the Philippines (and other Asian countries) were found to be most suitable, because expensive and polluting diesel generators can be replaced and a reliable 24 h electricity supply can be established. Different appraisal methods in different scenarios show that under normal circumstances a hybrid combination of TSE, solar energy and battery storage is financially and economically superior to existing fossil energy based power stations as well as to solar energy alone. However, the traditional financial approaches are not always reliable, in spite of superficial mathematical exactness, and the parameters used must be analysed carefully, especially if we deal with innovative technologies with fast changes. In times of global warming we must also include the controversial issue of evaluating damages from greenhouse gases if choosing fossil alternatives. When evaluating and planning renewable technologies, engineering know-how is important, but insufficient. Since financing is a crucial issue for most renewable technologies with high front loaded cost and long amortisation periods, a thorough and trustworthy financial and economic analysis is necessary not only to avoid financial failure later on, but also to attract stakeholders like private investors, banks and government institutions to support a still unknown technology.
Exploring and Sustaining Language Teacher Motivation for Being a Visiting Scholar in Higher Education: An Empirical Study in the Chinese Context

Language teacher motivation has been explored through various contexts in recent decades. However, less attention has been paid to teachers’ motivations for furthering their professional development in multilingual academic environments, such as by becoming visiting scholars at top universities at home or abroad. This study adopts a mixed-method approach to investigate language teachers’ motivations for being visiting scholars. First, a questionnaire was conducted on 169 teachers who spoke both English and languages other than English (LOTEs). Following an exploratory factor analysis, six separate motivational sources were identified: internal needs, stress relief, academic positioning, academic contact, academic symbolism, and policy support. For triangulation purposes, further interviews were conducted with three visiting scholars and one supervisor for in-depth qualitative data analysis. Interview findings reveal an imbalance between high demand for visiting scholarship funding and the financial allowances granted by governments and universities. Visiting scholars also experience inadequate academic guidance from their supervisors and few opportunities to participate in supervisors’ projects. Based on the research findings, this study proposes ways to sustain teacher motivation at the macro (policy) level, the meso (tutor system) level, and the micro (individual supervision) level.
Fuel Consumption and Emissions of Ocean-Going Cargo Ship with Hybrid Propulsion and Different Fuels over Voyage

Hybrid propulsion and using liquefied natural gas (LNG) as the alternative fuel have been applied on automobiles and some small ships, but research investigating the fuel consumption and emissions over the total voyage of ocean-going cargo ships with a hybrid propulsion and different fuels is limited. This paper tries to fill the knowledge gap by investigating the influence of the ship mission profile, propulsion modes and effects of different fuels on the fuel consumption and emissions of the ship over the whole voyage, including transit in open sea and manoeuvring in close-to-port areas. Results show that propulsion control and electric power generation modes have a notable influence on the ship’s fuel consumption and emissions during the voyage. During close-to-port manoeuvres, propelling the ship in power-take-in (PTI) mode and generating the electric power by auxiliary engines rather than the main engine will reduce the local NOx and HC (hydrocarbons) emissions significantly. Sailing the ship on LNG will reduce the fuel consumption, CO2 and NOx emissions notably while producing higher HC emissions than traditional fuels. The hybridisation of the ship propulsion and using LNG together with ship voyage optimisation, considering the ship mission, ship operations and sea conditions, will improve the ship’s fuel consumption and emissions over the whole voyage significantly.
Observation impact statement on satellite sea surface salinity data from two operational global ocean forecasting systems

ABSTRACT Observing system experiments have been carried out with two operational ocean data assimilation systems to assess the impact of assimilating satellite sea surface salinity (SSS) data. The SSS data reduces the errors in tropical Pacific salinity by 4% and 8% in the Met Office and Mercator Ocean systems respectively with an impact down to about 50 m depth on average. Salinity errors were reduced by up to 30% in the tropical Atlantic in both systems. There were significant reductions in near-surface temperature and sea level anomaly errors in both the central tropical Pacific and Amazon outflow regions in the Met Office system. The experiment results and characteristics of the operational ocean forecasting systems lead to a new set of requirements for satellite salinity data. The product accuracy required to significantly improve real-time ocean analysis and forecasts should be less than 0.2 pss at a resolution of at least 50 km for daily products. Improvements to spatial resolution down to the order of 10 km would represent an even more significant breakthrough. To be assimilated in near-real time, products should be available within 24 h and estimates of the systematic and random components of the uncertainty should be provided with each measurement.
Application of a modified IEKF algorithm in mobile robot localization

In order to improve the localization accuracy of mobile robots and solve the problems of SLAM algorithm of EKF in the strongly nonlinear system with increasing error and decreasing localization accuracy, this paper proposes a modified IEKF algorithm based on the combined Newton iteration method from the perspective of Gaussian-Newton iteration. IEKF is optimized and a modified IEKF algorithm based on the combined Newton iteration method is proposed. The algorithm determines the new iteration value by judging the approximation degree of each iteration to the state in real time, using a weighted average method, followed by a quantitative update of the state using the Kalman filter framework. The modified algorithm has the advantages of higher accuracy and insensitivity to initial values compared to the traditional IEKF. The effectiveness of this modified algorithm is verified through experimental simulations.
Sustainable development and the circular economy in Greece: case examples from Costa Navarino and Grecotel

Purpose This paper aims to identify and analyse sustainable development in the Greek hospitality industry. Drawing on an evaluation of two leading hotel groups in Greece, TEMES S.A. and Grecotel Hotels and Resorts and their respective landmark hotels Costa Navarino and Grecotel (Lux Me) Rhodos, the authors focussed on the role that the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have played in the industry and in a country heavily reliant on its tourism industry. Additionally, this paper examines and assesses the concepts of the triple bottom line and the circular economy and suggests practical approaches by which hotels may achieve sustainability. The recommendation relies on the belief that the two concepts are interconnected in tackling and achieving a successful vision of the future of sustainability through until 2030. Design/methodology/approach The case study focus with regard to the two hotel groups relied heavily on their respective 2018 sustainability reports. Additionally, further secondary research was conducted via several journal databases from 2013 to 2020. Third-party sites were also leveraged including the UN and Forbes. Findings It is evident that hotel companies often highlight their sustainability programmes online so that they are accessible to consumers and other stakeholders – including investors. This enables companies to create and close business loops in innovative ways. Their actions on sustainable development help the local economy and in turn help the country. This paper showcases examples of two leading Greek hotel groups, TEMES and Grecotel already working towards a more sustainable operating future. Originality/value In spite of research that was limited to secondary sources, the topic of sustainability in Greece is of great value as it is yet to be fully explored. This paper does yield some practical insights that will be of interest to the industry as to how to use the UN’s SDGs as pathway drivers for a successful circular economy.
Pruning Convolutional Neural Networks with an Attention Mechanism for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Despite the great success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in various visual recognition tasks, the high computational and storage costs of such deep networks impede their deployments in real-time remote sensing tasks. To this end, considerable attention has been given to the filter pruning techniques, which enable slimming deep networks with acceptable performance drops and thus implementing them on the remote sensing devices. In this paper, we propose a new scheme, termed Pruning Filter with Attention Mechanism (PFAM), to compress and accelerate traditional CNNs. In particular, a novel correlation-based filter pruning criterion, which explores the long-range dependencies among filters via an attention module, is employed to select the to-be-pruned filters. Distinct from previous methods, the less correlated filters are first pruned after the pruning stage in the current training epoch, and they are reconstructed and updated during the next training epoch. Doing so allows manipulating input data with the maximum information preserved when executing the original training strategy such that the compressed network model can be obtained without the need for the pretrained model. The proposed method is evaluated on three public remote sensing image datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority, compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, PFAM achieves a 0.67% accuracy improvement with a 40% model-size reduction on the Aerial Image Dataset (AID) dataset, which is impressive.
Constructing Hypothesis Lattices for Virtual Experiments in Data Intensive Research

Data intensive research is increasingly dependent on the explicit use of hypotheses, simulations and computational models. This paper is devoted to the development of infrastructure for explicit management of virtual experiments and research hypotheses. In particular, hypothesis lattices construction issues are considered. Basic concepts for working with research hypotheses such as hypotheses structure, its basic properties, causal correspondence of equations and variables over the defined structures are provided. The notion of hypotheses lattice is presented as a graph whose vertices are hypotheses, edges are the derived by relationship between hypotheses. An algorithm for constructing hypothesis lattices in virtual experiments is presented. A proof of the proposition on the complexity of the algorithm for constructing a lattice of hypotheses is provided. The developed method for constructing hypothesis lattices is implemented as a program component in the Python3 language.
Sensitive and selective methods for the determination of olanzapine in pharmaceuticals using N-bromosuccinimide and 2 dyes.

Three indirect methods for the quality control of olanzapine (OLP) in com. formulations based on titrimetric and spectrophotometric techniques are described using N-bromosuccinimide (NBS) and 2 dyes, namely amaranth and janus green B as reagents. In titrimetry, a measured excess of NBS is added to an acidified soln. of OLP and the unreacted NBS is detd. iodometrically. Spectrophotometry involves the addn. of a known excess of NBS to OLP in acid medium followed by estn. of residual NBS by reacting with a fixed amt. of either amaranth and measuring the absorbance at 520 nm (method A) or janus green B and measuring the absorbance at 620 nm (method B). Titrimetric procedure is applicable over the range 0.5-5.0 mg OLP, and the reaction stoichiometry is found to be 1 : 6 (OLP : NBS). The spectrophotometric methods are applicable over the ranges 0.1-0.9 I¼g/mL (method A) and 0.1-1.2 I¼g/mL (method B). The proposed methods were applied successfully for the detn. of OLP in pure form and in its dosage forms and the results were compared with those of a literature method by applying the Student's t-test and F-test. The validity of the methods was established by recovery studies. [on SciFinder(R)]
Preheating strategy of variable‐frequency pulse for lithium battery in cold weather

Aiming to the issue of charging difficulty and capacity fading for lithium‐ion battery at low temperature, this study proposes a preheating strategy using variable‐frequency pulse. The innovation of this paper is to propose the thermo‐electric coupling model based on the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy of battery at different temperatures, integrated with variable frequency changing for pulse method to develop an effective inner pre‐heating strategy. Meanwhile, the evaluating method of impact of this strategy on capacity fading of battery has also been proposed to examine its effectiveness, to find the optimal strategy. First, temperature rise model and the thermo‐electric coupling model at different temperatures according to the equivalent circuit model of battery are presented. Further, optimal heating frequency of current pulse at different temperatures is calculated according to the changing of internal impedance. The results show that the optimal variable‐frequency pulse pre‐heating strategy can heat the lithium‐ion battery from −20°C to 5°C in 1000 seconds. Meanwhile, it brings less damage to the battery health and improves the performance of battery in cold weather based on the views of power consumption, capacity attenuation, and internal impedance changes.
Effect of water excess on soil carbon dioxide, seepage water chemistry, and calcite speleothem growth: An experimental and modelling approach

The effect of the water excess in soil on soil gaseous carbon dioxide concentrations (cCO2) was studied based on field experiments. The gradual water addition of 15 and 30 L m−2 to leptosols and anthrosols, simulating 15 and 30 mm precipitation, respectively, caused the overall cCO2 increase of 1.53 × 10−1 mol m−3 (increase by 60%) and 1.61 × 10−1 mol m−3 (increase by 112%) in the soil airs. The effect of the cCO2 increment on seepage water, cave dripwater chemistry, and calcite speleothem overgrowths was deduced from geochemical modelling. It showed that the cCO2 increments may lead to the increments in total dissolved carbon, aqueous calcium, and dissolved solids of 1.10 × 10−3 mol L−1 (increase by 35%), 4.45 × 10−4 mol L−1 (increase by 30%), and 1.55 × 10−3 mol L−1 (increase by 34%), respectively. After the total degassing of CO2 in the cave, the increment in the saturation index of dripwater, SI, could reach up to ΔSI = 0.31, which means an increase by hundreds of percent. The water excess of 5 L m−2 following a dry period would cause the increment in saturation index ΔSI = 0.17. The modelling further showed that the cCO2 increase associated with the 30 L m−2 water excess could induce the calcite overgrowth up to 1 μm thick per 1 m2 surface area. The effect of water excess with additional water supplies gradually weakens, probably due to reduced CO2 diffusivity and soil microorganism activity. It can be assumed that the most contrasting peaks in dripwater chemistry are associated with the individual precipitation events after short dry periods. The increased supersaturation of dripwater is expected to lead to faster growth of speleothem and changes in calcite textures.