Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SUCCESSFULLY LOWERING THE RISKS AND COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE LEGACY OF THE ABANDONED BRUKUNGA PYRITE MINE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 1 .

Pyrite (FeS 2 ) and pyrrhotite (FeS) were mined by open pit methods at Brukunga, South Australia, between 1955 and 1972. Eight million tonnes of waste rock (2 wt.% S) and 3.5 Mt of tailings (1.7 wt.% S) were produced. Oxidation of this material, and remaining in-situ rock mass, has resulted in acid drainage (pH<3) with elevated sulphate and dissolved metals. Prior to June 2003 this acid drainage entered Dawesley Creek making the water unsuitable for livestock and irrigation use for up to 20 km downstream. The site is now under the care of the State Government. A lime neutralization plant commissioned by the State Government in 1980 and currently operated by Primary Industries and Resources South Australia (PIRSA), a government body, was built to address water quality issues on site and reduce downstream impacts in Dawesley Creek. Construction of a drain in June 2003 diverted flow from Dawesley Creek around the mine enabling all acid drainage to be retained, collected and treated on site. Upgrade of the existing plant to High Density Sludge (HDS) mode resulted in additional improvements in water quality, increased reagent efficiency and reduced overall treatment costs, including a 50% cost savings on sludge handling and disposal. An additional plant has been commissioned to cope with increased treatment volumes brought about by improvements in the containment and collection of acid drainage from the site. Having substantially reduced the water quality risks to downstream users PIRSA's ongoing rehabilitation of the site is aimed at lowering the acid load entering the treatment plants. Future stages in the rehabilitation program include plans to move and cap waste rock piles and to continue to revegetate the site. This will further reduce treatment and sludge handling costs while maintaining water quality for users downstream of the site.
State Space Construction for Cooperative Behavior Acquisition in the Environments Including Multiple Learning Robots

This paper proposes a method that acquires cooperative behaviors based on the estimation of the state vectors . In order to acquire the cooperative behaviors in multi robots environments, each learning robot estimates the local predictive model between the learner and the other objects separately. Based on the local predictive models, robots learn the desired behaviors using reinforcement learning. The proposed method is applied to a soccer playing situation, where a rolling ball and other moving robots are well modeled and the learner's behaviors are successfully acquired by the method. Computer simulations and real experiments are shown and a discussion is given .
Comparative Study of Optimum Medical Diagnosis of Human Heart Disease Using Machine Learning Technique With and Without Sequential Feature Selection

Predicting heart disease is regarded as one of the most difficult challenges in the health-care profession. To predict cardiac disease, researchers employed a variety of algorithms including LDA, RF, GBC, DT, SVM, and KNN, as well as the feature selection algorithm sequential feature selection. For verification, the system employs the K-fold cross-validation approach. These six strategies were used to conduct the comparative study. The Dataset for Cleveland, Hungray, Switzerland, and Long Beach V, as well as the Dataset Heart Statlog Cleveland Hungary, were used to assess the models performance. For both Hungary, Switzerland & Long Beach V and Heart Statlog Cleveland Hungary Dataset, Random Forest Classifier sfs and Decision Tree Classifier sfs produced the highest and almost identical accuracy values (100%, 99.40% and 100%, 99.76% respectively). The findings were compared to previous research that focused on cardiac prediction. In the future, we hope to extend the model even further so that it may be used with various feature selection techniques; another possibility is to use a random forest classifier. The major goal of this study is to improve on previous work by developing a new and unique technique for creating the model, as well as to make the model relevant and easy to use in real-world situations.
Is Being Physically Active Enough or Do People with Parkinson’s Disease Need Structured Supervised Exercise? Lessons Learned from COVID-19

Social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted people’s lifestyles and daily activities. In this work we compared pre- and post-pandemic clinical outcomes in people with Parkinson’s disease, to assess differences according to the type of behaviour and exercise habits adopted by participants. After two months of COVID-19 lockdown, we assessed: changes in exercise behaviour; motor and non-motor aspects of daily life experiences (MDS-UPDRS I & II); activities of daily living (The Schwab & England scale); quality of life (Parkinson Disease Questionnaire); sleep (Parkinson Disease Sleep Scale); falls; and Clinical Global Impression Change. Twenty-seven individuals aged between 57 and 92 years old participated; from these, ten individuals (37%) completely interrupted physical activities, while seventeen (63%) maintained some level of active lifestyle. Regardless of whether they remained active or not, all participants perceived a significant worsening of their clinical condition, reporting an increase in difficulties completing daily activities or chores (37%) and worsening of their health condition (51.8%). The quantifiable influence of exercise habits was borderline for the group who kept active. The active group seem to have a better self-perception of their health condition, although it was not enough to show a clear benefit. People with Parkinson’s disease should be informed that being physically active may not be enough and more structured exercise could be needed.
The Future of Design Studio Education: Student Experience and Perception of Blended Learning and Teaching during the Global Pandemic

Urban design studio education aims to prepare future urban designers to more effectively understand how cities work and critically engage with the role of design intervention in the built environment. A design studio is an appropriate setting where this can take place. This paper details the design and delivery of a postgraduate urban design studio subject in the MA Urban Design programme at Cardiff University during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. We particularly investigate the capacities and challenges of blended learning and teaching, with a primary focus on the experience and perception of students in the context of design studio pedagogy. To this end, we discuss the findings from an online survey of postgraduate urban design students and reflect on their experience and perception of the related learning and teaching activities, assessment, feedback, field study visits, workshops, and digital platforms during the subject delivery period in the 2021–2022 academic year. The outcomes of this paper can inform future practices of blended learning and teaching incorporating a mix of face-to-face and online modes of delivery in relation to design studio education, particularly in the context of unprecedented global health challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
A rounding strategy-based algorithm for the k-clustering minimum biclique completion problem

Abstract In logistics, completion problems can arise in batching a group of distribution warehouses. It is often preferable to group orders from different customers into a pick batch (cluster), where all requested orders must be collected. This problem occurs when combining multiple orders from a single customer into a single pick order. Therefore, this study aims to investigate a variant of this problem: the k-clustering minimum bi-clique completion problem. For this purpose, a hybrid algorithm is designed to solve it, where both rounding strategy and augmented local search cooperate for highlighting the quality of the solutions achieved. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a set of benchmark instances taken from the literature, where its provided results (bounds) are compared to those achieved by the best method available in the literature. New bounds are obtained.
Linear Feedback Shift Register Reseeding for Stochastic Circuit Repairing and Minimization

Stochastic computing (SC) is a re-emerging paradigm to realize complicated computation by simple circuitry. Although SC has strong tolerance to bit flip errors, manufacturing defects may still cause unacceptably large computation errors. SC circuits commonly adopt linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) for stochastic bit stream generation. In this study, we observe that the computation error of a faulty LFSR-based SC circuit can be reduced by LFSR reseeding. We propose novel methods to use LFSR reseeding to 1) repair a faulty SC circuit and 2) minimize an SC circuit by constant replacement. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed methods. Notably, the proposed SC circuit minimization method achieves an average 36% area-delay product reduction over the state-of-the-art fully-shared LFSR design with no reduction of the computation accuracy.
The Current Epidemiology of Rotavirus Infection in Children Less than 5 Years of Age after Introduction of RV Vaccine in India

Rotavirus is a major cause of severe acute gastroenteritis in infants and young children worldwide. It is responsible for 40% of childhood hospitalization. It has been estimated that about 23% of diarrhoeal death occurs due to the rotavirus infection in India. To study the epidemiology of rotavirus infection in children less than 5 years of age at a tertiary care teaching hospital. A total of 240 stool samples were collected from children <5 years of age suffering from acute diarrhea at a tertiary health care referral hospital in Western Uttar Pradesh, India. Rotavirus antigen was detected in stool by Enzyme immunoassay (EIA) which utilizes monoclonal antibodies directed against VP6 antigen. Molecular genotyping was done by nested multiplex PCR. The rotavirus antigen positivity rate was found to be 14.58% in this study. There was male preponderance and the male: female ratio was 1.5:1. Rotavirus diarrhoea was reported predominantly (42.85 %) in the age group of 13 to 24 months. The most common circulating G/P genotype strain was G9P[4] accounting for 36% of cases. Rotavirus remains a major cause of diarrhoea in children <5 years of age in Uttar Pradesh. However, the positivity rate has decreased after introduction of rotavirus vaccine into the Universal immunization program (UIP) in UP.
Interference and inhibition of lift fluctuation on quadrotor aircraft

The lift of a quad-rotor aircraft is composed of series frequencies related to the rotor speeds. As it will interferes the control of the aircraft, this paper analyzes the effect of high-frequency lift component on the aircraft and gives an inhibiting method for the lift fluctuation. Firstly, the dynamic model of quad rotor aircraft was established by Lagrangians method and the relational expression between the high-frequency lift component and the disturbance of aircraft angular velocity was obtained. According to the previous analysis, the angular velocity feedback loop was joined a Kalman filter for colored noise to restrain the disturbance of angular velocity acting on the controller. A prototype was designed. The testing results show when the proposed method is used in hovering control of the quad rotor aircraft, the control variable fluctuations decrease by 50% and the high frequency control volume attenuates to under -17 db as compared with that of traditional PID method, respectively. The method of this paper effectively solves the effect of lift fluctuation on the quad rotor aircraft and improves the efficiency of control.
High-Speed Rail Development and Regional Inequalities: Evidence From Japan

This study investigates the impact of the introduction of high-speed rail (HSR) on regional income and innovation, focusing on peripheral regions in Japan. Average income per capita (IN) and number of patent applications per employee (PA) are assumed to represent regional income and innovation, respectively. “Peripheries” are defined based on each municipality’s employment density and its accessibility, the latter is measured by effective density, an index representing interregional communication opportunities. Municipality-level panel data from Japan for a 40-year period are used. A difference-in-differences analysis of municipalities with variable treatment timings is employed to investigate the impact of HSR on the IN and PA of peripheries. The findings indicate that the introduction of HSR has been able to contribute to the mitigation of regional inequalities by positively affecting the IN and PA of peripheries. Furthermore, the results estimated with the accessibility-based peripheries show that the impacts of HSR on IN are smaller and on PA are larger in these peripheries than in core regions. These suggest the crucial role that accessibility may play in peripheries for catching up with the economic growth of core regions, particularly in a context of geographical concentration of economic activities, as in the case of Japan. It is also argued that the enhanced PA in peripheries with poor accessibility might not have been well exploited for economic gains because of their underdeveloped industrial structures and distance to large hub cities, leading to challenges in catching up.
Unsupervised Spectrum Anomaly Detection Method for Unauthorized Bands

With the rapid development of wireless communication, spectrum plays increasingly important role in both military and civilian fields. Spectrum anomaly detection aims at detecting emerging anomaly signals and spectrum usage behavior in the environment, which is indispensable to secure safety and improve spectrum efficiency. However, spectrum anomaly detection faces many difficulties, especially for unauthorized frequency bands. In unauthorized bands, the composition of spectrum is complex and the anomaly usage patterns are unknown in prior. In this paper, a Variational Autoencoder- (VAE-) based method is proposed for spectrum anomaly detection in unauthorized bands. First of all, we theoretically prove that the anomalies in unauthorized bands will introduce Background Noise Enhancement (BNE) effect and Anomaly Signal Disappearance (ASD) effects after VAE reconstruction. Then, we introduce a novel anomaly metric termed as percentile (PER) score, which focuses on capturing the distribution variation of reconstruction error caused by ASD and BNE. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, we developed an ISM Anomaly Detection (IAD) dataset. The proposed PER score achieves superior performance against different type of anomalies. For QPSK type anomaly, our method increases the recall rate from 80% to 93% while keeping a false alarm rate of 5%. The proposed method is beneficial to broadband spectrum sensing and massive spectrum data processing. The code will be released at :QXSLAB/vae_ism_ano. git.
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches Applied to Study Creative Industries

Purpose – This paper highlights the challenges and key arguments for digital copyright protection legislation for creative industries. Design/methodology/approach – This briefing is prepared by independent academics who place the arguments in context based upon literature and market data. Findings – Many of the arguments used against copyright protection laws draw upon flawed analysis. Artistic creators should be treated fairly and their work should be afforded the same protection as other property. Practical implications – Digital legislation warrants review, but not for the frequently cited reasons of ‘stifling innovation’ or ‘restriction’ of others using the work. Rather, artists need better protection for their work and fairer treatment with regards their property rights. Originality/value – The paper provides context and practical insights into the data used to influence policy decision makers, providing a stronger case for legislative review.
The Influence of Organizational Information Security Culture on Information Security Decision Making

In this study three aspects of information security decision making—namely, knowledge of policies and procedures, attitude towards policies and procedures, and self-reported behavior—were examined in conjunction with the organizational factors that may increase human-based cyber vulnerabilities. The results of a survey of 500 Australian employees revealed a significant, positive relationship between information security decision making and organizational information security culture. This suggests that improving the security culture of an organization will positively influence the behavior of employees, which in turn should also improve compliance with security policies. This means that risk to an organization’s information systems and data will be mitigated. The complexity associated with implementing effective rewards and punishments are discussed, along with suggestions for further research to adequately understand the many factors that influence information security decision making.
Ideology Matters: The Influence of Competing Message Framings on Public Attitudes toward Humanitarian Interventions

This study assessed the effects of different message framing strategies on average Americans’ attitude towards interventions in humanitarian crises abroad. Two survey experiments were conducted via Qualtrics between late 2019 and early 2020, where participants were randomly assigned to read a mock news story about a foreign humanitarian crisis written using one of the three framing techniques. Results of both studies indicated that the framing effect on respondents’ support for intervention interacted with ones’ political ideology and prompted distinctive reactions among different populations. Most intriguingly, the results of Study 2, which employed a non-student sample and a secondary frame, suggested that the specific order of message framings also influences public opinion towards humanitarian intervention. These findings contribute to the growing body of literature on the persuasiveness of message design and framing in the context of military humanitarian interventions (MHI). Accordingly, news organizations and policymakers are encouraged to consider these findings in specific contexts.
Coating of Silicone Monofilaments with Elastic Carbon Black-Silver-Silicone Layers and Their Characterization Especially with Regard to the Change of the Electrical Resistance in Dependence on Strain

Smart textiles have properties that outperform the conventional protective and decorative function of textiles. By integrating special sensors into clothing, body functions and movements can be detected. Piezoresistive sensors measure a change in electrical resistance due to the application of force in the form of stretching, pressure or bending. In order to manufacture such sensors, conventional non-conductive textile materials need to be made conductive by finishing processes. Therefore, a non-conductive silicone monofilament was coated with a conductive carbon silicone and additional silver-containing components and investigated for its suitability as a strain sensor. The changes in electrical resistance and the gauge factor as a measure of the sensitivity of a sensor were measured and calculated. In this publication, the electrical properties of such a filament-based sensor in the context of particle composition and concentration are discussed. The electrical resistance was already significantly reduced in a first step by coating with conductive carbon silicone (145 kΩ). The addition of silver-containing components further reduced the electrical resistance in a second step. Thereby, flat flakes of silver proved to be much more effective than silver-containing particles (5 kΩ at 20% addition). The former was easier to integrate into the coating and formed contact surfaces with each other at higher concentrations. Stretching the samples increased the resistance by enlarging the distance between the conductive components. With 30% silver-coated glass flakes in the coating, the highest gauge factor of 0.33 was achieved. Consequently, the changes in electrical resistance during stretching can be exploited to detect motion and the gauge factor indicates that even small changes in strain can be detected, so the herein developed coated monofilaments are suggested for use as strain sensors. Future work includes matching the particle composition and concentration to the exact application and investigating the sensors in the field.
SnO2 Anchored in S and N Co-Doped Carbon as the Anode for Long-Life Lithium-Ion Batteries

Tin dioxide (SnO2) has been the focus of attention in recent years owing to its high theoretical capacity (1494 mAh g−1). However, the application of SnO2 has been greatly restricted because of the huge volume change during charge/discharge process and poor electrical conductivity. In this paper, a composite material composed of SnO2 and S, N co-doped carbon (SnO2@SNC) was prepared by a simple solid-state reaction. The as-prepared SnO2@SNC composite structures show enhanced lithium storage capacity as compared to pristine SnO2. Even after cycling for 1000 times, the as-synthesized SnO2@SNC can still deliver a discharge capacity of 600 mAh g−1 (current density: 2 A g−1). The improved electrochemical performance could be attributed to the enhanced electric conductivity of the electrode. The introduction of carbon could effectively improve the reversibility of the reaction, which will suppress the capacity fading resulting from the conversion process.
Political Interventions to ‘Ripen’ Peace Initiatives: An Analysis of the Northern Ireland and Israeli/Palestinian Conflicts

ABSTRACT As President of the United States, Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel served to heighten tensions in the Middle East and instantly undermined his stated goal of bringing peace to the troubled region. This paper will argue that there are important lessons to be gained from the political process in Northern Ireland to help bolster a peace process in the Middle East. Through an analysis of Unionist politics pre- and post- the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the paper will argue that there is a need to not only encourage militants to make peace, but also to incentivise regional hegemons into meaningful negotiations. The paper will highlight the important role played by international hegemonic powers as they seek to create a Strategically Benefical Moment for all sides in the conflict as they seek to ‘ripen’ the conditions for peace.
Live Will Never Be the Same! How Broadcasting Might Influence the Acceptance and Widespread Usage of Augmented Reality

While anticipated in Hollywood movies and sci-fi literature, a perfect artifical reality - i.e. the ultimate VR environment - will prob- ably not become real within the next couple of years. However, using Augmented Reality (AR) technologies in order to seamlessly embed arti- ficial content into the real environment, might be a much more feasible way to remove the clear border between reality and virtuality. In this paper we will look into lately developed AR technologies and how they relate to recent trends in movie and TV productions. We will further anticipate what this will mean to live broadcasts and which implications this might have for a widespread individual usage of sophisticated AR technology.