Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental and numerical study on the scale effect of stern flap on ship resistance and flow field

ABSTRACT The hydrodynamic performance of a ship with and without a stern flap was comprehensively investigated based on model tests and model- and full-scale simulations. The stern flap led to an increase in the stern pressure and improved the transom stern flow field, which resulted in a change in the ship attitude and decrease in resistance. The stern flap performance obtained using the full-scale ship simulation was associated with a larger drag reduction range and drag reduction effect than the extrapolated value. The scale effect of the stern flap was notable owing to the different effects exerted by the stern flaps with different scales on the hull hollow and rooster tail. In addition, the stern flap was observed to increase boundary-layer thickness near its installation location whilst lowering velocity across the propeller disk. However, this velocity reduction effect was over-predicted at the model scale compared to that at the full scale.
Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy and Branch Retinal Artery Occlusion after Transcatheter Closure of Foramen Ovale – a Case Report

This case report il lustrates delayed ophthalmologic complications after transcatheter closure of patent foramen ovale in a young patient. A 39-year-old woman underwent transcatheter closure of patent foramen ovale with subsequent delayed (after four years) development of the anterior ischemic optic neuropathy in the left eye, pos sibly due to paradoxical embolization. The patient’s condition was further complicated by branch retinal artery occlusion in the same eye. The objective fi nd ing and subjective problems improved fol low ing optic nerve sheath decompression and a series of vasodilator infusions. Physicians should be aware of pos sible simultaneous occur rence of anterior ischemic optic neuropathy and retinal artery occlusion in young patients, even several years after patent foramen ovale closure, and of pos sible eff ectiveness of intensive vasodilation therapy and early decompres sion of the optic nerve sheaths.
Recognition System of Herbal Medicine on Mobile Terminal Based on Android Platform

In order to recognize the Chinese herbal medicine our side and to provide the help for the Chinese herbal medicine lovers, we design a kind of recognition system of herbal medicine by our mobile terminal based on the Android platform. By the application software in our mobile terminal we achieve the Chinese herbal medicine recognition application to meet the requirements of Chinese herbal medicine. The application is focus the functions on storing the information of Chinese herbal medicine by database and querying the information from the database so as to recognize the Chinese herbal medicine by comparison. The system is accomplished with Android platform and Java programming. By the application, we can recognize the Chinese herbal medicine our side by our mobile terminals conveniently.
Insect herbivory and herbivores of Ficus species along a rain forest elevational gradient in Papua New Guinea

Classic research on elevational gradients in plant–herbivore interactions holds that insect herbivore pressure is stronger under warmer climates of low elevations. However, recent work has questioned this paradigm, arguing that it oversimplifies the ecological complexity in which plant–insect herbivore interactions are embedded. Knowledge of antagonistic networks of plants and herbivores is however crucial for understanding the mechanisms that govern ecosystem functioning. We examined herbivore damage and insect herbivores of eight species of genus Ficus (105 saplings) and plant constitutive defensive traits of two of these species, along a rain forest elevational gradient of Mt. Wilhelm (200–2,700 m a.s.l.), in tropical Papua New Guinea. We report overall herbivore damage 2.4% of leaf area, ranging from 0.03% in Ficus endochaete at 1,700 m a.s. l. to 6.1% in F. hombroniana at 700 m a.s. l. Herbivore damage and herbivore abundances varied significantly with elevation, as well as among the tree species, and between the wet and dry season. Community‐wide herbivore damage followed a hump‐shaped pattern with the peak between 700 and 1,200 m a.s. l. and this pattern corresponded with abundance of herbivores. For two tree species surveyed in detail, we observed decreasing and hump‐shaped patterns in herbivory, in general matching the trends found in the set of plant defenses measured here. Our results imply that vegetation growing at mid‐elevations of the elevational gradient, that is at the climatically most favorable elevations where water is abundant, and temperatures still relatively warm, suffers the maximum amount of herbivorous damage which changes seasonally, reflecting the water availability.
New records of Seira dowlingi (Wray, 1953) (Collembola, Entomobryidae, Seirinae) for New World

Seira dowlingi (Wray, 1953) is recorded for the first time in Peru and Brazil from five states, including Fernando de Noronha archipelago plus a new record from United States. These new records support that S. dowlingi has a wide distribution in Neotropical Region, and expanded to 34 the number of species of Seira Lubbock, 1870 found in Brazil. In addition, our revision excluded the record of Seira domestica (Nicolet, 1842) for Brazil.
Knowledge gained and preventive practices planned by mothers of children with dengue admitted to a ward at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Background and objective Targeting parents of children affected by dengue fever offers a window of opportunity for education. The present study aimed to assess the knowledge on dengue fever and preventive measures planned among mothers of children with dengue fever admitted to the University Paediatric Unit at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital. Methods This cross-sectional study included a consecutive sample of 300 mothers of children admitted to the University Paediatric Unit at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital with a clinical suspicion of dengue/confirmed dengue infection. An interviewer administered questionnaire was used to collect data. Results Of the 300 mothers, 122(40.6%) were between 26 to 30 years of age. Approximately half 140 (46.7%) were educated up to G.C. E Ordinary Level and a great majority 266 (88.7%) were housewives. Approximately half of the mothers had ‘good’ knowledge on symptoms, warning signs and complications of dengue fever [139 (46.3%)] and on initial home management of a child with suspected dengue fever [135 (45.3%)] while a great majority had ‘good’ knowledge on transmission and prevention of dengue fever [268 (89.3%)]. A majority agreed that their knowledge on dengue [192 (64%)] and level of competence [190 (63.3%)] has improved following hospital admission. All participants reported looking for potential breeding places even prior to the admission and would continue to do so after discharge. Only 64 (21.3%) cleaned small water collections prior to the admission and those who would continue/take up this new practice was shown to increase to 174 (58%). The practice of day time application of repellent oils/ointments or sprays was seen to be the least practiced preventive measures 48(16%) but was the practice that the highest number indicated that they would adhere to after discharge from the hospital 258(86%). Conclusions The study showed evidence of success of the health education services of the University Paediatric Unit at Lady Ridgeway hospital and also revealed some important gaps to be addressed to improve the services.
“As long as you need me I’m yours.” Caregiving for a pediatric cancer survivor

A pediatric cancer diagnosis is devastating – to children, as well as their families. Children experience a variety of negative effects, whether physical, cognitive, and/or emotional, and often face continued or newly developed effects l past remission termed late effects. However, it is imperative to note that support persons, or caregivers of survivors of pediatric cancer, are also affected by their caregiver roles as they help their survivors cope with their late effects. This study aimed to understand how caring for pediatric cancer survivors influences facets of caregivers lives. Nine primary support persons of pediatric cancer survivors (as chosen by the survivors they care for) participated in one-on-one, semi-structured interviews, in which they discussed their roles in caring for a pediatric cancer survivor, and how being a support person has affected their lives. A total of four themes emerged from the research, but for the purposes of this paper only the theme “As long as you need me I’m yours” will be discussed. From this theme, two subthemes emerged: (1) “Do their effects affect me? ” and (2) “You realize what’s important and it sticks with you. ” Support persons experienced negative emotional and cognitive effects, such as worrying or feelings of anxiety for their survivors, but also admitted to finding silver linings in their experiences. As well, caregivers expressed that they have developed stronger relationships with their survivors and family, in addition to developing newly optimistic outlooks on life. This work provides valuable information for policy makers and health care professionals to ensure that adequate supports and resources are available to caregivers for the multifaceted needs they may have in supporting pediatric cancer survivors.
Maternal Socioeconomic Status and Fertility Behaviour in Nigeria: Evidence from a Cross Sectional Nationally Representative Survey

Aims: Studies have linked individual factors such as education and household variables including wealth index as predictors of fertility behaviour. This study aims to examine the effect of socioeconomic characteristics on fertility behaviour when combined as a single proxy among women of reproductive ages in Nigeria. Methods: Data for this study was extracted from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys (NDHS) of 2003, 2008, and 2013. The explanatory variable, “socioeconomic status”, was derived as a composite index from the combination of individual and household variables. The outcome variable “fertility behaviour” is measured by total children ever born (CEB). Pearson chi-square test was used to determine the association among variables. Ordinal logistic regression was used to assess the effect of the explanatory variable on the outcome variable. Level of significance was determined at 5% and 95% confidence interval. The analysis was carried out using Stata 14.0. Results: There is a statistically significant but inverse association between socioeconomic status and reported CEB. If women were to change their socioeconomic status from low to high, the CEB would reduce by -0.502 (p<.001) and by -1.038 (p<.000). This pattern remained consistent in the adjusted model and across all surveys. Conclusion: The study concludes that women’s socioeconomic status significantly predicts fertility behaviour. An improved socioeconomic status would reduce reported CEB. Efforts to reduce fertility in Nigeria must embrace a multi-dimensional approach that creates opportunities aimed at promoting women’s economic status.
Theoretical and experimental study of an electromagnetic vibration energy harvester

Abstract In this paper, we propose a vibration energy harvester which can convert mechanical vibration energy into electrical energy using diamagnetic levitation technology and electromagnetic induction. The energy harvester is mainly composed of permanent magnets, pyrolytic graphite sheets and copper coils that are electroplated on the pyrolytic graphite sheets. Finite element analysis is adopted to study the levitation space and output voltage of the energy harvester in COMSOL Multiphyscis™ 5.3. The key factors of the maximum stable levitation space of the floating magnet are determined, and parameters which determine the output voltage of the harvester are investigated in detail. Under an external excitation with 5 Hz frequency and 0.8mm amplitude, the maximum output voltage and the maximum power of a single 80-turn coil are 1.64 mV and 0.0755 μW, respectively. In addition, the optimization method for the output voltage of the energy harvester is also discussed. Frictionless movement of the floating magnet is beneficial to improve the energy harvesting efficiency. The energy harvesting setup is potential in the power supply of wireless sensors network and autonomous micro devices.
GACNN SleepTuneNet: a genetic algorithm designing the convolutional neuralnetwork architecture for optimal classification ofsleep stages from a single EEG channel

This study presents a method for designing--by a genetic algorithm, without manual intervention--the feature learning architecture for classification of sleep stages from a single EEG channel, when using a convolutional neural network called GACNN SleepTuneNet. Two EEG electrode positions were selected, namely FP2-F4 and FPz-Cz, from two available datasets. Twenty-five generations were involved in diagnosis without hand-crafted features, to learn the architecture for classification of sleep stages based on AASM standard. Based on the results, our model not only achieved the highest classification accuracy, but it also distinguished the sleep stages based on either of the two EEG electrode signals, in both datasets. The results show that our model performed the best with highest overall accuracy rates and kappa statistic (CAP sleep: 95.61 % and 0.94; Sleep EDF: 92.51 % and 0.90) among other state-of-the-art methods that require no manual intervention. Our model could automatically learn the features for classification of sleep stages, for different raw EEG electrode positions in different datasets, without user-assisted feature extraction.
A silver lining for disadvantaged youth on the apprenticeship market: an experimental study of employers’ hiring preferences

ABSTRACT In dual vocational education and training (VET) systems, school-leavers in their mid-teens who wish to pursue vocational certificates through in-firm apprenticeships are subjected to the training providers’ quite selective hiring-processes. Previous research shows that youth with weak school performances are one of the groups that have the largest difficulties being hired as apprentices. Less investigated in the literature is what employer characteristics that are conducive for their willingness to hire a disadvantaged apprentice: both on the level of the organisation and of the recruiter. I draw on organisational and institutional literature and on person-organisation fit and ethical decision-making theory to formulate expectations regarding the preferences of the organisations and recruiters. The applied method is a factorial survey experiment administered to in-firm vocational trainers with recruitment authority in the commercial occupation in Switzerland. The findings show that public sector employers are more lenient towards candidates with weaker academic achievements than employers in the private sector. Moreover, respondents with a more egalitarian outlook on the access to vocational training for disadvantaged youths tend to lower their thresholds for the candidates’ academic achievements.
The research and development of the hybrid algorithm based on the collective behavior of Fish schools and the classical optimization methods

In this paper, we consider the hybridization problem of the evolutionary-inspired Fish School Search algorithm. The algorithm shows accurate results on solving multi-extremal optimization problems, outperforms most other swarm intelligence algorithms and is computationally inexpensive. But, the accuracy of the algorithm highly depends on the defined iteration count to compute. The accuracy increases with the increase of iteration count, but this also affects computation time required to find the suboptimal solution. In this paper, we propose two hybrid approaches which intend to accelerate the Fish School Search algorithm using either gradient descent or Newton’s algorithm. We provide the comparative analysis of the original algorithm and the two hybrid algorithms applied to the Styblinsky-Tang, Eggholder and other test functions for optimization, including multi-extremal and multi-dimensional ones. The obtained results confirm that the proposed hybrid algorithms are more effective, compared to the original population-based algorithm. The results demonstrate the strong advantage of the hybrid algorithm, where the gradient descent is used as its part. Additionally, we provide the solution of the XOR problem using a perceptron with one hidden layer, where the most effective hybrid approach is used to train the network. We visualize the loss function surface near the global extreme point to show the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid algorithm.
Seismic impedance inversion using second-order overlapping group sparsity with A-ADMM

The anisotropic total variation with overlapping group sparsity (ATV_OGS) regularisation term is an improvement on the anisotropic total variation (ATV) regularisation term. It has been employed successfully in seismic impedance inversion as it can enhance the boundary information and relieve the staircase effect by exploring the structured sparsity of seismic impedance. However, because ATV_OGS constrains only the structured sparsity of the impedance's first-order difference and ignores the structured sparsity of the second-order difference, the staircase effect still occurs in an inversion result based on ATV_OGS. To further fit the structured sparsity of the impedance's second-order gradients, we introduce the overlapping group sparsity into the second-order difference of the impedance and propose a novel second-order ATV with overlapping group sparsity (SATV_OGS) seismic impedance inversion method. The proposed method reduces the interference of the large amplitude noise and further mitigates the staircase effect of the ATV_OGS. Furthermore, the accelerated alternating direction method of multipliers (A-ADMM) framework applied to this novel method. It can increase the efficiency of inversion. The experiments are carried out on a general model data and field data. Based on the experimental results, the proposed method can obtain higher resolution impedance than some impedance inversion methods based on total variation.
How “Real Boys” Construct Heterosexuality on the Primary School Playground

ABSTRACT This study draws on focus group discussions to explore how 12- to 14-year-old boys in a low economic township primary school in South Africa construct their hegemonic identity as “real boys” in the school playground during break. Addressing masculinity and boys’ investment in power is now a major research development in the country, especially in light of boys’ and men’s culpability in sexual and gender violence. What is often missing, however, is attention to younger boys and the construction of gender and sexuality in the primary school. Analysis of the data reveals that heterosexual masculine power is a major element in the construction of being a “real boy. ” “Real boys” express their power-based heterosexual identity in ways that objectify girls, while, at the same time, promoting a culture of gender violence through heterosexual competition and the policing of girls’ sexual agency. The major finding in our article is that the school playground is an important site for hegemonic and heterosexual identities, where a “real boy” is displayed and given dominance during break time. Implications for addressing heterosexual masculinity among younger boys is vital.
Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Multi-scale Drought in North China

The North China is located in the East Asian monsoon region. The uneven spatial and temporal distribution of water resources leads to frequent drought disasters, and drought has increasingly become a limiting factor for regional development. In this paper, the intrinsic evolution characteristics of multi-scale spatial and temporal distribution of meteorological drought in the past 57 years in North China are analyzed by using standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index and ensemble empirical mode decomposition with multi-time scale features. The results show that the North China region was generally humid in the 1960s and 1970s. Drought in the 1980s and 1990s increased relatively. The interannual SPEI of North China changed in 1991, and entered a relatively dry period in the late 1990s and 2000s. From the SPEI index sequence, the scale characteristics of each scale were extracted. It was found that the SPEI sequence of the three-month time scale in North China mainly existed in the three scale ranges of monthly, interannual and intergenerational, At the same time, through the comparison of the temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of the summer drought in june and august 2002 in North China, it was found that the severe drought in august 2002 was caused by the temporal and spatial overlap of short-term scale and long-term drought events.
Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging technology to support resource-intensive yet delay-sensitive applications using small cloud-computing platforms deployed at the mobile network edges. However, the existing MEC techniques are not applicable to the situation where the number of mobile users increases explosively or the network facilities are sparely distributed. In view of this insufficiency, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been employed to improve the connectivity of ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices due to their high altitude. This article proposes an innovative UAV-enabled MEC system involving the interactions among IoT devices, UAV, and edge clouds (ECs). The system deploys and operates a UAV properly to facilitate the MEC service provisioning to a set of IoT devices in regions where the existing ECs cannot be accessible to IoT devices due to terrestrial signal blockage or shadowing. The UAV and ECs in the system collaboratively provide MEC services to the IoT devices. For optimal service provisioning in this system, we formulate an optimization problem aiming at minimizing the weighted sum of the service delay of all IoT devices and UAV energy consumption by jointly optimizing UAV position, communication and computing resource allocation, and task splitting decisions. However, the resulting optimization problem is highly nonconvex and thus, difficult to solve optimally. To tackle this problem, we develop an efficient algorithm based on the successive convex approximation to obtain suboptimal solutions. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed collaborative UAV-EC offloading scheme largely outperforms baseline schemes that solely rely on UAV or ECs for MEC in IoT.
AutoSight: Distributed Edge Caching in Short Video Network

In recent years there has been a rapid increase of short video traffic in CDN. While the video contributors change from large video studios to distributed ordinary end users, edge computing naturally matches the cache requirements from short video network. But distributed edge caching exposes some unique characteristics: non-stationary user access pattern and temporal and spatial video popularity pattern, which severely challenge the edge caching performance. While the QoE in traditional CDN has been much improved, prior solutions become invalid in solving the above challenges. In this article, we present AutoSight, a distributed edge caching system for short video network, which significantly boosts cache performance. AutoSight consists of two main components, solving the above two challenges respectively: the CoStore predictor, which solves the non-stationary and unpredictability of local access pattern, by analyzing the complex video correlations; and a caching engine Viewfinder, which solves the temporal and spatial video popularity problem by automatically adjusting future horizon according to video life span. All these inspirations and experiments are based on the real traces of more than 28 million videos with 100 million accesses from 488 servers located in 33 cities. Experiment results show that AutoSight brings significant boosts on distributed edge caching in short video network.