Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patch Similarity Graph Matrix-Based Unsupervised Remote Sensing Change Detection With Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Sensors

Change detection (CD) of remote sensing images is an important and challenging topic, which has found a wide range of applications in many fields. In particular, one of the main challenges is to detect changes between heterogeneous images, where the difference in imaging mechanism makes it difficult to carry out a direct comparison. In this article, we propose an unsupervised CD framework based on the patch similarity graph matrix (PSGM), which assumes that the patch similarity graph structure of each homogeneous or heterogeneous image is consistent if no change occurs. First, it learns the PSGM of one image based on the self-expressive property, which can be interpreted as containing the edges of the fully connected graphs with each image patch as a vertex. Then, the change level depends on how much one image still conforms to the similarity graph structure learned from the other image. Meanwhile, the change map can be further optimized by using the prior sparse knowledge that only a small part of the image changed and most areas remain unchanged. Experiments with both homogeneous and heterogeneous data sets demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed PSGM-based CD method.
Indirect consequences of COVID-19 on people’s lives. Findings from an on-line survey in France, Italy and Spain

The COVID-19 pandemic has limited individuals’ possibility to meet and socialize with others due to the state of emergency restrictions to movements, events and relations imposed in different countries. Most shops and restaurants have been closed and some economic activities have been seriously damaged. This significant disruption may have contributed to a deterioration of people’s mental health on top of other negative consequences of the pandemic. To better understand the indirect consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak on people’s lives we have designed the intergen-COVID online survey (https://sites.google.com/unifi.it/intergen-covid), carried out in France, Italy and Spain between the 14th to the 24th of April 2020. Quota sampling on the population 18-plus and post-stratification weights were used to achieve the alignment between the sample (N = 9,056) and the total population on important socio-demographic characteristics. We collected information on four key domains of individuals’ lives: intergenerational (and other type of) relationships (physical and non-physical; means of communication; frequency, etc.); living arrangements; mental health; events experienced during the lockdown (e.g., income loss, death of relative/friend due to COVID-19, worsened partner relationships, time spent with family); intentions for the future 3 years (e.g., fertility, living parental home, marriage, cohabitation, divorce/separation, retirement). In this paper we provide the main results from this survey, focusing on the first three domains abovementioned. The fourth domain consists of questions applicable to different sub-groups of the population and will be analyzed in separate papers. We show that, despite the general reduction of physical contacts, with low educated people reporting a lower reduction in all kinds of physical contacts, non-physical contacts have significantly increased, especially among women. About 50% of respondents felt sad or depressed more often than usual during the lockdown, but mental health deterioration was found to be heterogeneous and vary with respondents’ age, gender and country. Job and income loss, and worsening of relationships quality were other negative consequences often experienced during the lockdown, especially by younger individuals. Finally, although maintaining physical distance, during the lockdown people have experienced a high level of social connection, emotional support and practical help.
A Deep Learning Algorithms to Generate Activity Sequences Using Historical As-built Schedule Data

Project schedule development requires having knowledge about the project’s activities and the proper sequence of them. In traditional practice, arranging project activities in a feasible sequential order heavily relies on the project scheduler’s practical experience. However, personal experience is limited and prone to include human errors. In this paper, a Deep Learning model is employed to be trained on historical project schedules to predict sequential activities. The proposed model uses a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks that learns the activity predecessors in the forward direction and the activity successors in the backward direction. The model receives one or more activities and predicts subsequent and precedent activities in a sequential order that have the highest likelihood of occurrence in the historical data. The model is compared with a Sequential Pattern Mining technique that identifies the most probable sequential patterns of activities. The two methods are applied to as-built highway project schedules obtained from a highway agency in the U.S to compare the performance of the two methods. While the Sequential Pattern Mining model provides sequential patterns for certain activities, the Deep Learning model generates a back-tail and a front-tail of activities with any arbitrary length for to provide a more flexible support tool for project schedulers.
Distance to Internal Instability of Linear Time-Invariant Systems Under Structured Perturbations

In this article, uncertain continuous-time and discrete-time linear time-invariant systems are considered. The uncertainties are assumed to affect polynomially the dynamics of the system and they can be structured. The problem of computing the distance to internal instability of an internally exponentially stable nominal system is solved by using tools from algebraic geometry, thus extending previous results valid in case of unstructured uncertainties. The choice of the nominal system is formulated and solved as the choice of a point in the parameter space that is sufficiently far from the boundary of the domain of stability. A simple example of application to robust control is outlined.
The complete chloroplast genome of a wild onion species Allium monanthum (Alliaceae)

Abstract Allium monanthum is a typical spring ephemeral, appearing above ground for only 2–3 weeks in late March to early or late April. Here, Illumina pair-end reads of this species was used to record the complete chloroplast (cp) genome. The circular genome with 154,804 bp in length contains a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 24,551 bp, separated by a large single-copy region (LSC) of 83,701 bp and a small single-copy region (SSC) of 21,867 bp. It harbors 132 genes, including 86 protein-coding genes, 38 transfer RNA genes, and 8 ribosomal RNA genes. Phylogenetic analysis supported that the A. monanthum was located in the crown of the Alliaceae, and was closely clustered with other Allium species.
Cyclic peptide scaffold with ability to stabilize and deliver a helical cell-impermeable cargo across membranes of cultured cancer cells

Cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) are valuable tools for developing anticancer therapies due to their ability to access intracellular targets, including protein–protein interactions. cPF4PD is a newly described CPP designed from a transduction domain of the human defense protein platelet factor 4 (PF4), that also has antimalarial activity. The cPF4PD peptide recapitulates the helical structure of the PF4 domain and maintains activity against intracellular malaria parasites via a selective membrane-active mechanism. We hypothesized that cPF4PD and PF4-derived peptide analogues would enter cancer cells and have utility as scaffolds for delivering a peptide dual inhibitor (pDI) sequence with ability to inhibit p53:MDM2/X interactions and reactivate the p53 pathway. Here we designed and produced PF4 peptide and PF4 peptide-pDI grafted analogues with low micromolar activity toward melanoma and leukemia. Two grafted analogues achieved a stable helical structure and inhibited interaction with MDM2 and MDMX. These peptides reached the cytoplasm of cells but were unable to reactivate the p53 pathway. Instead, the cytotoxic mechanism was attributed to peptide binding to mitochondrial membranes that perturbed function within two hours of treatment. These studies of PF4-derived CPPs suggest their potential as scaffolds for delivering cell-impermeable cargoes into the cytoplasm of cells and highlight the importance of characterizing the internalization and cell death mechanism of designer peptide-based drugs.
An Efficient Design Solution for a Low-Cost High-G Centrifuge System

The development of high-gravity centrifuge systems (HCSs) for G tolerance training has been justified from both safety and economic perspective. A low-cost HCS can provide a crucial standpoint toward an accessible simulator saving aircrews’ lives and air assets during flight operations; however, there are several challenges associated with the design and development of a low-cost HCS. These challenges are a result of the strength and stability of the structure, capability of the main actuator, durability of the subfloor footing system, and cost of preventive maintenance. This article discusses design and development of an efficient and low-cost HCS, named Cyclone. The system has the capability of generating a maximum sustained acceleration of 9G with an onset rate of 5 G/s. Cyclone has a modular design, a capable rotary main drive, and a self-balanced structure with an effective centrifuge radius of 5 m. The design and development steps of the system, including the mechanical design, motion analysis, and structural analysis, are described. These steps have been implemented to meet the highest level of safety for a human-capable system providing an isolated and repeatable motion and force fields for air force aircrews and aviation medicine specialists to take greater advantage of the system for the purpose of effective centrifuge training and aerospace medicine research. The experimental results of test scenarios are shown. The system has not been human-rated, and this step is currently under investigation.
Niche maintenance of germline stem cells in C. elegans males

Stem cell maintenance by niche signaling is a common theme across phylogeny. In the Caenorhabditis elegans gonad, the broad outlines of germline stem cell (GSC) regulation are the same for both sexes: GLP-1/Notch signaling from the mesenchymal Distal Tip Cell (DTC) niche maintains GSCs in the distal gonad of both sexes (Austin and Kimble 1987), and does so via two key stem cell regulators, SYGL-1 and LST-1 (Kershner et al. 2014). Most analyses of niche signaling and GSC regulation have focused on XX hermaphrodites, an essentially female sex making sperm in larvae and oocytes in adults. Here we focus on XO males, which are sexually dimorphic in all tissues, including the distal gonad. The architecture of the male niche and the cellular behavior of GSCs are sex-specific. Despite these differences, males maintain a GSC pool similar to the hermaphrodite with respect to size and cell number and the male GSC response to niche signaling is also remarkably similar.
International Journal of Science and Business

Many are the presumptions of the effect of Foreign aid on growth on one side and the effect of Foreign Direct investment (FDI) on the other side. Our research empirically examines the impact of FDI and Foreign Aid on economic growth of Sub-Saharan African countries. To do so, we answer three questions: What drives the economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa? What are the impacts of FDI and Foreign Aid on economic growth? and which relationship does exist in one part between FDI and economic growth and the other part between Foreign Aid and economic growth? To tackle our objectives we formulated four hypotheses with Gravity model and Two Stages Generalized Method of Moment analysis. Our findings lead us to conclude: Firstly, three fundamental factors responsible for the economic growth: the country fundamentals (the population, the capital formation), the governance implication (governance effectiveness, Regulatory Quality), and the macro stabilities (Foreign Direct Investment, Foreign Aid, Trade) are responsible and the key factors for the growth in SSA. Secondly, FDI and Aid have a positive and highly significant effect on the GDP. Thirdly, FDI and Aid have short run relationship with the economic growth. And fourthly, our result fall in line with others which have found that domestic factors are vital in promoting the growth effects of FDI. Nevertheless, the findings of this study diverge from others in the literature studies. Even though other researches in the literature works hypothesize that FDI has no absolute positive effect on growth, this study finds that FDI plays a direct role in promoting growth. IJSB Accepted 17 May 2020 Published 31 May 2020 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3870562
Knowledge Translation Approaches in Occupational Therapy: A Scoping Review

A gap exists between what is known in occupational therapy and how occupational therapists practice. Knowledge translation approaches have been designed to bridge the gap between research and practice. Currently there is limited literature exploring the knowledge translation approaches being implemented specifically within occupational therapy. Therefore, a scoping review was completed to provide an overview of the existing literature on knowledge translation approaches in occupational therapy. Three electronic databases were searched. All peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative articles which met the inclusion criteria were reviewed. A data extraction table aided the analysis and synthesis of the literature. The initial search returned 565 articles, of which 59 were selected based on the inclusion criteria. Comprehensive screening of the 59 articles resulted in 16 peer-reviewed articles being included in the review. A range of knowledge translation methods have been used in occupational therapy including faceto-face education sessions, online resources, and clinical audits of documentation with feedback to the therapists. A small number of studies used a knowledge translation framework to guide the knowledge translation approach. Findings from this study highlighted that knowledge translation approaches are useful for overcoming challenges and changing practice. In particular, a knowledge translation framework may be useful to guide the design and implementation of a knowledge translation initiative. Although there were a number of knowledge transfer strategies used in the studies, face to face education was used most often. However, a combination of transfer strategies had the most lasting impact on practice change. Including participants’ perspectives in the planning, delivery, and evaluation was beneficial. More research is needed to identify how the use of a theoretical framework might support positive outcomes for knowledge translation.
Extraction of crude Mannan oligosaccharides from yeast and their uses

This review aims to emphasize the importance of mannan oligosaccharides, obtained from various resources especially from yeasts. Attractive features of mannan polysaccharides have had influenced the decisions of food scientists to pursue research on this element, and that may expand their uses and applications in medicine, food industry and animals feed. Food researchers are increasingly focusing on yeast cell wall (YCW) as a promising source of mannan extraction, as the yeast extracts sector generates a huge amount of YCW as a by-product. Extraction is an important method used to obtain the water-soluble mannan oligosaccharides from the wall cells of yeast and in this review was showed the optimal conditions for the extraction of mannan from cell yeast according to results some of the scientific studies along with the deproteinization methods. In the fооd industry, mаnnаn has various аррliсаtiоns such as viscosity modifiers, stabilizers, and increasing the thermo-stability of anthocyanins. Mannan has many health benefits, which have expanded its uses in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. In the animal feed sector, several studies of farm animals have shown significant positive effects of weight gain, reduced bird mortality, and improved fish growth. In pigs, the addition of mannan to pig diets led to obvious economic benefits.
Multilevel Switching-Mode Operation of Finite-Set Model Predictive Control for Grid-Connected Packed E-Cell Inverter

In this article, we propose a modified finite-set model predictive control (M-FS-MPC) for multilevel switching-mode operation of grid-connected nine-level packed E-cell (PEC9) inverter. With a single-dc source, six power switches, back-to-back-connected switches as bidirectional and two capacitors horizontally extended, PEC9 inverter topology has remarkably reduced the components count. Packed E-cell (PEC) prominent feature has the capability of switching among different multilevel voltages: nine-, seven-, or five-level under faulty switch cases without any structural modification and only if the controller is appropriately designed. M-FS-MPC is proposed to operate the grid-connected PEC with the multilevel switching mode under bidirectional switch fault operation. Switching among five-, seven-, or nine-level voltages is attained by proper dc capacitors’ voltages regulation, whereas the desired current injection with low total harmonic distortion (THD) and requested power factor for addressing grid connectivity applications is guaranteed. The system discrete model is developed and the experimental results verify the performance and robustness of M-FS-MPC in targeting the capability of PEC multilevel switching-mode operation and grid connectivity requirements in both steady and transient states.
Real-Time Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a Virtual Motorcycle

Virtual prototyping tools are widely used in the development of new motorcycles, but the instability of two-wheel vehicles leads to the necessity of implementing a vehicle driver. In this brief, the development of an effective virtual rider (VR) is described that is capable of controlling the motorcycle during complex, high performance maneuvers. The control inputs are the steering angle, the lateral rider movement, and the throttle/braking effort. The proposed motorcycle model consists of a plane that can roll and slide (both in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula>- and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$y$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-directions), on which a moving point mass with lateral degree of freedom (DoF) is attached, representing the rider. The controller is designed within the nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) framework. The implementation is developed in MATMPC, an open-source toolbox, and tested in co-simulation with the commercial software <bold>VI-BikeRealTime</bold>, specifically designed to reproduce vehicles behavior with high fidelity. A chicane and a lap on a challenging track have been used to both show flexibility and evaluate performance, demonstrating the capability of the proposed VR of handling complex maneuvers.
TRACE METAL RETENTION IN LBOS-AMENDED, VERTICAL-FLOW CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS TREATING LOW PH, FERRIC IRON-DOMINATED ACID ROCK DRAINAGE

Remediation strategies employed for mitigation of low-pH, metal-sulfate drainage (i.e., acid rock drainage, ARD) may include passive treatment systems. While shown effective for neutralization of acid and removal of major ions (e.g., iron, aluminum, and manganese), trace element removal during acid neutralization in passive systems is rarely investigated. Therefore, in this presentation, we will focus on the fate of trace metals in one common type of passive treatment system, the vertical flow wetland (VFW). Our experimental VFW contained a limestone buffered organic substrate (LBOS) and received low pH (<3), ferric iron-dominated ARD for two years. During this time, trace elements (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, U, Co, Ni, and Zn) were removed along a pH gradient controlled by a series of reaction zones that developed above a dynamic limestone dissolution front. Therefore, for the practical purpose of implementing LBOS to treat low pH, ferric iron-dominated ARD, high trace element removal efficiency can be expected as long as the limestone dissolution front does not pass completely through the substrate. With the exception of uranium, trace metal attenuation largely occurred above the limestone dissolution front in the transitional and oxide reaction zones. Moreover, trace metal removal exhibited a strong dependence on pH. Based largely on increasing pH with depth, trace metal removal within the LBOS follows the sequence:
Wearable Belt Antenna for Body Communication Networks

This letter presents a dual-band wearable belt antenna design offering stable performance for both on and off body scenarios. The proposed antenna is composed of a metal buckle and a lossy leather substrate. A layer of conductive fiber is attached to the leather to provide isolation between the human body and the radiating element. A novel snap-on button structure is used as the antenna feed. The antenna can achieve an on body realized gain of 5.10 dBi at 2.45 GHz, 4.05 dBi at 5.2 GHz, and 3.31 dBi at 5.8 GHz. A specific absorption rate of 0.87 W/kg is achieved. The on/off body radiation efficiency of the antenna is measured in a reverberation chamber. The antenna can operate in both on- and off-body communication. The proposed belt antenna is a low-cost and reliable solution for smart on-body applications.
National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) - capabilities and recent measurements

The National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) located at the Device Assembly Facility (DAF) at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) and operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is home to four critical assemblies which are used to support of range of missions, including nuclear criticality safety and nuclear nonproliferation. Additionally, subcritical systems can also be assembled at NCERC. NCERC is providing critical and subcritical experiments valuable to the nuclear data community and experiments performed at NCERC are often published as benchmarks in the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) Handbook. This manuscript will give a broad overview of recent experiments performed at NCERC, upcoming experiments, and why integral measurements are important and useful to the nuclear data community. The four critical assemblies are GODIVA IV, FLATTOP, COMET, and PLANET. GODIVA IV is a cylindrical metal fast burst reactor, the fourth in the GODIVA series that dates back to the 1950’s. FLATTOP is an highly enriched uranium (HEU) or Pu core reflected by natural uranium. COMET and PLANET are vertical lift assemblies, where one half of the reactor can be lifted to the upper half of the reactor to create a critical system. Some recent experiments include various critical intermediate energy assemblies with lead, and subcritical measurements of plutonium reflected by copper, tungsten, and nickel. Work is also underway to make a better measurement of the critical mass of neptunium, using a neptunium sphere surrounded by nickel shells. Additionally, measurements will be performed next year with HEU shells from Rocky Flats. These HEU shells will be stacked together to make larger systems, allowing for a large range of criticality (from subcritical to delayed critical). Other upcoming measurements include an HEU critical assembly sensitive to intermediate energy neutrons.
Sharp coefficients bounds for class of almost starlike mappings of order α in ℂ^n

Let Ω be the bounded starlike circular domain. In this paper, we obtain the sharp bounds for the Fekete-Szeg¨o functional | A 3 − μ A 22 | of the class A S ∗ α ( Ω ) of almost starlike mappings of order α in C n ( n (cid:2) 2 ) , where μ ∈ R , and A 2 , A 3 are the ﬁ rst two coef ﬁ cients of the homogeneous expansion of mappings f ∈ A S ∗ α ( Ω ) . Our results can be regarded as the extensions of corresponding works from the case in one dimension to the case in higher dimensions.