Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disruption of circumstellar discs by large-scale stellar magnetic fields

Spectropolarimetric surveys reveal that 8-10\% of OBA stars harbor large-scale magnetic fields, but thus far no such fields have been detected in any classical Be stars. Motivated by this, we present here MHD simulations for how a pre-existing Keplerian disc -- like that inferred to form from decretion of material from rapidly rotating Be stars -- can be disrupted by a rotation-aligned stellar dipole field. For characteristic stellar and disc parameters of a near-critically rotating B2e star, we find that a polar surface field strength of just 10 G can significantly disrupt the disc, while a field of 100 G, near the observational upper limit inferred for most Be stars, completely destroys the disc over just a few days. Our parameter study shows that the efficacy of this magnetic disruption of a disc scales with the characteristic plasma beta {(defined as the ratio between thermal and magnetic pressure)} in the disc, but is surprisingly insensitive to other variations, e.g. in stellar rotation speed, or the mass loss rate of the star's radiatively driven wind. The disc disruption seen here for even a modest field strength suggests that the presumed formation of such Be discs by decretion of material from the star would likely be strongly inhibited by such fields; this provides an attractive explanation for why no large-scale fields are detected from such Be stars.
Dynamic Operation of High Power Synchronous Generator in Asynchronous Regime or encountering Three-Phase Shortcircuit

This paper presents a method of modeling the synchronous machine subjected to transient regimes. Then, the obtained model is utilized to simulate the dynamic behavior of the high power synchronous generator in conditions of asynchronous operation and for sudden three-phase short circuit occurred at the stator winding terminals. The model is based on Park-Blondel equations expressed in canonical form. The equations are built considering the influence of the induced current into the massive rotor of the generator and the nonlinearity of the magnetization characteristic. For the fulfillment of the simulated cases, an implicit Gear algorithm of third order is applied for the integration of the equations. The results obtained through simulations performed using the proposed model, are compared to those obtained running the predefined model offered for the synchronous machine by Simulink package from MATLAB. In both cases identical simulation scenarios are considered.
A Case Study of 1000 Polish Novels from Ignacy Krasicki to

The success rate of authorship attribution by multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies is studied in a 1000-novel corpus of Polish literary works from the late 18th to the early 21st century. The results are examined for possible influences of the number of authors and/or the number of texts to be attributed. Also, the success rates achieved in this study are compared to those obtained in earlier studies for smaller corpora, too small perhaps to produce regular patterns. This study shows that text sets of this size confirm the intuitive predictions as to those influences: 1) the more authors, the less successful attribution; 2) for the same number of authors, the number of texts to be attributed does not influence success rate.
Cross-Cultural Constructions of Self-Schemas

A “spontaneous approach” was used to define self-schemas within and across cultures. Specifically, self-schemas were extracted from open-ended personality descriptions from Americans (n = 560) and Mexicans (n = 496) using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM). The MEM relies on text analytic tools and factor analyses to learn about the most salient and chronically activated dimensions of personality that influence individuals’ self-defining process. The results showed that there were seven relevant self-schemas for Americans and six dimensions for Mexicans. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, it was possible to observe which self-schemas were cross-cultural and which were culture-specific: Self-schemas common across cultures were Sociability, Values, Hobbies/Daily Activities, and Emotionality. Self-schemas unique to Americans were Fun, Existentialism, and College Experience. Self-schemas unique to Mexicans were Relationships and Simpatía. We discuss cross-cultural differences in self-schemas, along with the advantages and limitations of using the MEM in cross-cultural research.
Investigation of antimonide-based semiconductors for high-efficiency multi-junction solar cells

This paper reports on the investigation of Al<inf>x</inf>Ga<inf>1-x</inf>As<inf>y</inf>Sb<inf>1-y</inf> alloys lattice-matched to GaSb for multi-junction solar cell applications. Optical and electrical characterizations of Al<inf>x</inf>Ga<inf>1-x</inf>As<inf>y</inf>Sb<inf>1-y</inf> alloys are carried out to provide accurate material parameters for simulations. Simulations are then performed with these experimental data to propose an optimized and promising structure for Al<inf>x</inf>Ga<inf>1-x</inf>As<inf>y</inf>Sb<inf>1-y</inf> subcells.
Evo-Devo — Of Course, But Which One? Some Comments on Chomsky’s Analogies between the Biolinguistic Approach and Evo-Devo

In some recent papers, Chomsky has suggested some non-trivial analogies between the biolinguistic approach and evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo). In this paper, the point is made that those analogies should be handled with caution. The reason is that the Evo-Devo version chosen by Chomsky in order to build the analogies fully assumes a gene-centric perspective. Although providing genes with a special power fits in well with the Principles-and-Parameters model, it does not agree at all with the reduction of the power attributed to genes that the Minimalist Program has placed on the agenda. Nevertheless, other Evo-Devo approaches exist that seem more accurate than the particular version adopted by Chomsky — approaches therefore which are more promising for fulfilling the minimalist biolinguistic approach.
SYNTHESIS, CHARACTERIZATION AND BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF A GLYCINE-RICH PEPTIDE − CHERIMOLACYCLOPEPTIDE E

The synthesis of a natural cyclic peptide cherimolacyclopeptide E (12) by coupling of tripeptide units Boc-gly-leu-gly-OCH3 (9) and Boc-phe-tyr-pro-OCH3 (10) after proper deprotection at carboxyl and amino terminals followed by cyclization of linear hexapeptide segment, is described. Structure elucidation of the cyclopeptide 12 is based on detailed spectral analysis such as FTIR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, FAB MS and elemental analysis. After biological screening, the newly synthesized peptide exhibited high cytotoxicity against Dalton’s lymphoma ascites (DLA) and Ehrlich’s ascites carcinoma (EAC) cell lines with CTC50 values of 2.76 and 4.96 μM, and potent antimicrobial activity against pathogenic microbes P. aeruginosa, E.coli and C. albicans with MICs between 12.5-6 μg/mL. Furthermore, compound 12 possessed moderate anthelmintic activity against earthworms M. konkanensis, P. corethruses and Eudrilus sp. at 2 mg/mL dose level.
Development of Selective Sterilization System of Bacteria in Aqueous Solution by High Electric Field Pulse Application

Our paper reported a selective sterilization system of bacteria in an aqueous solution using high electric field pulses. We applied high voltage pulses to Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in 1×10−3mol/L NaCl aqueous solutions. We estimated the survival ratio in a model of high electric field pulse sterilization. As results, the survival ratios of E. coli or S. cerevisiae decreased with an increasing number of pulses. The survival ratio of E. coli was higher than that of S. cerevisiae because E. coli was smaller than S. cerevisiae. Our study shows that it is attainable to kill bacteria selectivity using high electric field pulses in liquid food based on the bacteria type (i.e., size). However, the survival ratio of the experimental results disagreed with that of the calculated values from the model of the sterilization mechanism.
Effect of Pasteurella multocida Soluble Antigen Stimulation on the In Vitro Response of Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells of Holstein Calves

Abstract The expressions of cytokines mRNA, including interleukin-4 (IL-4), interleukin- 17A (IL-17A) and interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), their master regulatory transcription factors, and signal transducers and activator of transcription (STAT) stimulated in vitro with Pasteurella (P.) multocida soluble antigen were examined in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from Holstein calves. The healthy Holstein calves were divided into three groups; 2 weeks old (2W Group, N=8), 6 weeks old (6W Group, N=8), and 10 weeks old (10W Group, N=8). PBMC were stimulated in vitro by soluble antigen of P. multocida. There were significantly lower expressions of IFN-γ, IL-4, and STAT-6 mRNA of PBMC stimulated with P. multocida soluble antigen in the 2W Group compared to that in the 10W Group. Expression of IL-17A and IFN-γ in PBMC stimulated with P. multocida soluble antigen were significantly higher compared with the PBMC without stimulation in the 6W groups. The results of the present study demonstrated that 2W old calves had decreased cytokine expression of PBMC when in vitro stimulated with P. multocida soluble antigen in vitro.
Balancing Video Analytics Processing and Bandwidth for Edge-Cloud Networks

For IoT networks, signals are captured by edge sensors, system-wide decisions are made at a central host, and processing may be performed at either or both sides of the network. Decision on edge or cloud placement of methods depends in part on processing and bandwidth efficiencies. Video analytics offers a good application to investigate this because signals from edge cameras are large both spatially and temporally, and processing usually involves a sequence of methods. For public camera analytics where processing and bandwidth need only be expended for active periods, we find by experiment a data range for crowd, traffic, and building scenes. For a typical sequence of video analytics methods applied to surveillance, we find upper bounds for processing and bandwidth, and experimental measurements for real – much sparser – video. Explicit description of algorithmic requirements and knowledge of experimentally determined loads gives information to balance methods between edge and cloud.
Cobalt, chromium and nickel contents in soils and plants from a serpentinite quarry

Abstract. The former serpentinite quarry of Penas Albas (Moeche, Galicia, NW Spain) left behind a large amount of waste material scattered over the surrounding area, as well as tailing areas. In this area several soils were studied together with the vegetation growing spontaneously over them with the aim of identifying the bioavailability of heavy metals. The potential of spontaneous vegetation for phytoremediation and/or phytostabilization was evaluated. The pH of the soils ranges from neutral to basic, with very low organic matter and nitrogen contents. There are imbalances between exchangeable cations like potassium (K) and calcium (Ca), mainly due to high magnesium (Mg) content that can strongly limit plant production. Moreover, in all of the studied soils there are high levels of cobalt (Co), chromium (Cr) and nickel (Ni) (>70, >1300 and >1300 mg kg−1, respectively). They exceed the intervention limits indicated by soil guideline values. Different soil extractions were performed in order to evaluate bioavailability. CaCl2 0.01 M is the most effective extraction reagent, although the reagent that best predicts plant availability is a mixture of low molecular weight organic acids. Festuca rubra, L. is the spontaneous plant growing in the soils that accumulates the highest amount of the metals, both in shoot and roots. Festuca also has the highest translocation factor values, although they are only >1 for Cr. The bioconcentration factor is >1 in all of the cases, except in the shoot of Juncus sp. for Co and Ni. The results indicate that Festuca is a phytostabilizer of Co and Ni and an accumulator of Cr, while Juncus sp. is suitable for phytostabilization.
Parallelized Convolutions for Embedded Ultra Low Power Deep Learning SoC

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) achieve state of the art results compared to classic machine learning in many applications that need recognition, identification and classification. An ever-increasing embedded deployment of DCNNs inference engines thus supporting the intelligence close to the sensor paradigm has been observed, overcoming limitations of cloud-based computing as bandwidth requirements, security, privacy, scalability, and responsiveness. However, increasing the robustness and accuracy of DCNNs comes at the price of increased computational cost. As result, implementing CNNs on embedded devices with real-time constraints is a challenge if the lowest power consumption shall be achieved. A solution to the challenge is to take advantage of the intra-device massive fine grain parallelism offered by these systems and benefit from the extensive concurrency exhibited by DCNN processing pipelines. The trick is to divide intensive tasks into smaller, weakly interacting batches subject to parallel processing. Referred to that, this paper has mainly two goals: 1) describe the implementation of a state-of-art technique to map DCNN most intensive tasks (dominated by multiply-and-accumulate ops) onto Orlando SoC, an ultra-low power heterogeneous multi cores developed by STMicroelectronics; 2) integrate the proposed implementation on a toolchain that allows deep learning developers to deploy DCNNs on low-power applications.
Effect of temporal variation in precipitation on the demography of four herbaceous populations in a tropical dry forest area in Northeastern Brazil

In tropical dry forests, the dynamics of herbaceous populations is strongly influenced by seasonal and annual variation in total rainfall. Moreover, the present and past events of climatic anomalies (e.g. severe drought years and erratic rain before the growth season) may cause drastic reductions in population size, leading to the temporal disappearance of some species. Therefore, this three-year study aimed to assess the dynamics of Delilia biflora (Asteraceae), Commelina obliqua (Commelinaceae), Phaseolus peduncularis (Fabaceae) and Euphorbia heterophylla (Euphorbiaceae). The study was conducted in an area of tropical dry forest known as Caatinga, situated in the experimental station of the Pernambuco Agronomic Institute (IPA), in Caruaru, Pernambuco, Brazil. The Caatinga has a semiarid climate with strong seasonal and annual variation in total precipitation. During this study, there was a climatic anomaly event called the 2006 drought, and also erratic rains in the dry season. The birth, death and survival of plants were evaluated monthly using 105 plots (1 × 1 m). Differences in density between years and seasons were evaluated using the Kruskal-Wallis test. The explanatory power of present and past precipitation on density was evaluated using the General Linear Model. In this study, we pres- ent the first record of Euphorbia heterophylla in the studied area. The studied populations were larger during the rainy seasons and in wet years, and were drastically reduced in the driest year and dry seasons. Commelina obliqua was the least sensitive to variation in total rainfall. Regarding the variation in density, all four species were present during all three years. Birth rates were higher during the rainy season, and death rates were higher in the dry season. Sporadic rain in the dry season caused pronounced seedling recruitment followed by death, and had a strong impact on the dynamics of D. biflora, E. heterophylla and P. peduncularis. The precipitation of the current year explained between 3 % - 18 % of the inter-annual density variation, and the explanatory power of the previous year precipitation on the density of populations ranged from 32 % to 67 %. Therefore, climatic events of the past also have a significant consequence over the four populations. In conclusion, drastic reduction in total precipitation between years may be considered as a predictive parameter for herbaceous plants popula- tion size (in the present and future time) in a Northeastern Brazilian tropical dry forest area. Rev. Biol. Trop. 63 (4): 903-914. Epub 2015 December 01.
Matric Poten al Measurements by Polymer Tensiometers in Cropped Lysimeters under Water-Stressed Condi ons

1048 W limit plant growth and productivity in many regions of the world. As droughts have become more frequent and intense, the area of land characterized as very dry has more than doubled since the 1970s (Dai et al., 2004; Huntington, 2006). Although 70 to 85% of the world’s consumable water is currently allotted to agriculture, increasing urban demands for potable water due to population growth will continue to compete with agricultural water use from now on (Somerville and Briscoe, 2001; Foley et al., 2005). Th e need to understand plant responses to water defi cits has never been more acute. Th e driving force for root water uptake is the water potential gradient between root and soil. Unsaturated water fl ow in the root zone often occurs at soil water matric potentials that are below the range of water-fi lled tensiometers (to approximately −0.09 MPa; Young and Sisson, 2002). As a consequence, little is known about the distribution of root water uptake throughout the root zone under dry conditions. Hopmans and Bristow (2002) and Feddes and Raats (2004) noted that the lack of knowledge about root water uptake under stressed conditions has unavoidably led to the rather schematic representation of the root zone in unsaturated models. Long-term water stress alters the physiological functioning of the entire plant (Kramer, 1983; Smith and Griffi ths, 1993), but little is known about the short-term dynamics of root water uptake under water-stressed conditions. New techniques such as x-ray tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and two-dimensional light transmission imaging have improved our understanding of plant responses to dry conditions (Tollner et al., 1994; Van der Weerd et al., 2001; Garrigues et al., 2006), but these techniques are complicated and not suitable for fi eld use. Fortunately, the recent development of a POT (Bakker et al., 2007) that measures soil water matric potentials to −1.6 MPa creates new possibilities for studying the dynamics of soil water matric potentials in the vicinity of roots, in the laboratory as well as the fi eld. The total soil water potential, consisting of the matric, osmotic, gravitational, and other potentials, is a direct indication of the amount of energy required by plants to take up water. A plausible hypothesis is that a plant distributes the water uptake throughout its root network in a way that minimizes the expenditure of energy at any given moment (Dirksen et al., 1994; Adiku et al., 2000). Th is would be consistent with the observations of Bohm et al. (1977) that root water uptake and root density correlate poorly. Direct observation of low soil water matric potentials within a plant’s root zone, however, may provide knowledge of Matric Poten al Measurements by Polymer Tensiometers in Cropped Lysimeters under Water-Stressed Condi ons
Temporal Inception Architecture for Action Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

Modeling appearance and short-term dynamic information is the mainstream strategy for action recognition based on deep learning. We consider it important to model the multi-scale temporal information, including both short-term information and long-term information, for action representation. In this paper, a novel temporal inception architecture (TIA) is proposed to solve this problem, which is a general structure that can be combined with multi-segment-based frameworks for action recognition. The TIA is composed of multiple spatial-temporal convolutional branches, in which the temporal information of different scales is extracted. Then feature maps of all branches are concatenated as the output of TIA. In our experiments, the TIA is embedded into temporal segment networks (TSN) to construct our temporal segment inception networks (TSIN) for action recognition tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSIN outperforms TSN and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on HMDB51 and UCF101.
Effect of annealing atmosphere on structural and optical properties of CZTS thin films prepared by spin-coating

Copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS) thin films were deposited by spin coating procedure of a sol-gel prepared from the solution of copper (II)chloride, zinc acetate, tin (II) chloride and thiourea in 2-methoxyehtanol followed by annealing under two different atmospheres viz. N2 gas and Sulphur (S) powder at 530 °C for 5 minutes. The effect of different annealing atmosphere on the structural and optical properties of the CZTS thin films were investigated. The X-ray diffraction study showed higher intensity peaks for films annealed under N2 gas ambient. SEM study revealed that the surfaces of the films in both cases are non-uniform. Films annealed in N2 gas atmosphere showed better absorption coefficient (exceeding 104 cm-1 in the visible region) than the sulphurized ones. The optical band gap (Eg) of the films were found to be in the range of 1.46 - 1.53 eV.Bangladesh J. Sci. Ind. Res.53(1), 13-20, 2018
A model for training undergraduate students in collaborative science

Engagement of undergraduate students in research has been demonstrated to correlate with improved academic performance and retention. Research experience confers many benefits on participants, particularly foundational skills necessary for graduate school and careers in scientific disciplines. Undergraduate curricula often do not adequately develop collaborative skills that are becoming increasingly useful in many workplaces and research settings. Here, we describe a pilot program that engages undergraduates in research and incorporates learning objectives designed to develop and enhance collaborative techniques and skills in team science that are not typical outcomes of the undergraduate research experience. We conducted a collaborative science project that engaged faculty advisors and upper year undergraduates at four institutions and conducted a review to assess the program’s efficacy. Students developed a broad suite of competencies related to collaborative science, above and beyond the experience of completing individual projects. This model also affords distinct advantages to faculty advisors, including the capacity of the network to collect and synthesize data from different regions. The model for training students to conduct collaborative science at an early stage of their career is scalable and adaptable to a wide range of fields. We provide recommendations for refining and implementing this model in other contexts.
Improved Quantum Genetic Algorithm in Application of Scheduling Engineering Personnel

To verify the availability of the improved quantum genetic algorithm in solving the scheduling engineering personnel problem, the following work has been carried out: the characteristics of the scheduling engineering personnel problem are analyzed, the quantum encoding method is proposed, and an improved quantum genetic algorithm is applied to address the issue. Taking the low efficiency and the bad performance of the conventional quantum genetic algorithm into account, a universal improved quantum genetic algorithm is introduced to solve the scheduling engineering personnel problem. Finally, the examples are applied to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the improved quantum genetic algorithm and the rationality of the encoding method.