Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Current Insights into Nonuniform Flow across Scales, Processes, and Applications

Core Ideas Nonuniform flow has proven to be the rule rather than the exception in nearly all soils. Computational and technological advancements are promising for nonuniform flow. They allow improved visualization and characterization of structures across scales. We need to translate apparent complexity of geosystems into reproducible outcomes. Those outcomes must be of generalizable applicability in flow and transport research.
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Background: Treatment of Class III pulmonary hypertension that can affect the oxygenation and quality of life may be worthwhile. Objective: To identify class III pulmonary hypertension in a tertiary pulmonary OPD practice and observe the effect of treating them with sildenafil on defined indications. Methods: The presence of pulmonary hypertension was diagnosed on a composite clinico-radio-echocardiographic criteria and the etiological factors were identified using an evaluation algorithm in a referral OPD services. Concomitant to the optimum treatment of their underlying etiological conditions, the WHO functional class III and IV patients from varied etiologies were treated with sildenafil on a real world protocol. The quality of life measured with CAT (COPD assessment test) score, and the resting arterial oxygen saturation were noted at the beginning and after 3 months of sildenafil therapy with documentation of the adverse and serious adverse events. Results: 81 patients (mean age 62.43±10.17 years) from different etiologies have been recorded to have documented follow up on sildenafil. COPD (35.7%), past history of tuberculosis (21%), indeterminate etiology (13.5%), DPLD (13.5%), and asthma (11%) remain the major causes of pulmonary hypertension. There has been universal improvement across the different causes with the mean CAT score reducing from 15.33±5.52 to 13.01±5.79 (p=0.004) and the mean arterial oxygen saturation improving from 94.6±2.90 to 95.05±3.15 percent. The improvement in CAT was significant for COPD (p=0.03, n=29) Conclusion: the causes of Class III PH looks different than known and the patients show improvement in quality of life following sildenafil therapy.
Spatial-Temporal Dynamic Analysis of Land Use and Landscape Pattern in Guangzhou, China: Exploring the Driving Forces from an Urban Sustainability Perspective

Rapid urbanization is one of the most important factors causing land-use change, which mainly results from the orientation of government policies, adjustment of industrial structure, and migration of the rural population. Land use and land cover change (LUCC) is the natural foundation of urban development that is significantly influenced by human activities. By analyzing the LUCC and its inner driving force, as well as landscape pattern change, human activity and urban sustainable development can be better understood. This research adopted a geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) technology to comprehensively analyze land use of Guangzhou, respectively, in 1995, 2005, and 2015. Fragmentation Statistics (FRAGSTATS) is the most authoritative software to calculate landscape metrics. Landscape pattern change was analyzed by FRAGSTATS. The results showed that urban land significantly increased from 16.33% in 1995 to 36.05% in 2015. Farmland greatly decreased from 45.16% in 1995 to 27.82% in 2005 and then slightly decreased to 25.10% in 2015. In the first decade, the non-agricultural conversion of rural land and the expansion of urban land was the dominant factor that led to the change. In the second decade, urban land had been supplemented through the redevelopment of low-efficiency land. The fragmentation of landscape patterns significantly increased from 1995 to 2005 and slightly decreased from 2005 to 2015. It indicated that the change in land use in the second decade was different from that in the first. This difference mainly resulted from three aspects: (1) urban development area and ecological conservation area were clearly defined in Guangzhou; (2) many small towns had developed into urban centers, and the scattered urban land gathered into these centers; (3) the establishment of greenway improved the connection of fragmented patches. After that, this study discussed land-use change and its causes and proposed the trend of urban development from the perspective of sustainability.
EXPLORING METHOD EFFECTS IN THE SIX-FACTOR STRUCTURE OF THE SURVEY OF ATTITUDES TOWARD STATISTICS (SATS-36)

We use ordinal confirmatory factor analysis techniques to investigate the six-factor structure of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36) and to estimate method effects associated with its items and factors. We extend previous confirmatory research to include posttest, as well as pretest, item-level data. We also investigate method effects by adding a common method factor to the original six-factor model. Interestingly, results reveal noticeable proportions of common variance associated with the Difficulty construct only at pretest and with the Value and Interest constructs only at posttest. We examine the characteristics of the SATS items as a possible source for these method effects.
United States Patent ( 19 ) Kowalczykowski et al . 54 SPECTROSCOPIC HELICASE ASSAY 75 ) Inventors :

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Time Scale Analysis and Synthesis of Wind Energy Conversion Systems

In the last decade, the need to exploit renewable energy resources have been provided an impetus, by many governing bodies through favorable policy making and investment. This paper presents design of an optimal control scheme for Wind Energy Conversion Systems based on time scale analysis. The slow and fast dynamics governing the mechanical components of a variable speed wind turbine are modeled. The decoupled dynamics facilitate model order reduction, thereby making the control scheme computationally more efficient. Linear Quadratic Regulators are designed for the reduced order slow and fast subsystems. The simulations compare the proposed method to a full order system. The results manifest the effectiveness of the proposed method, which provides comparable control while reducing model order and computational efficiency. Key-Words: Time Scales, Wind Energy Conversion Systems, Linear Quadratic Regulator.
Recent Advances in MFDn

The Many-body Fermion Dynamics for nuclear physics (MFDn) code was originally developed by James Vary and his colleagues for performing nuclear configuration interaction (CI) calculations. We describe a number of recent algorithmic and implementation advances in MFDn that enabled it to achieve high performance, and allowed scientists to study properties of light nuclei with high accuracy on modern high performance computers.
On Understanding Visual Relationships of Concepts by Visualizing Bag-of-Visual-Words Models

Recent applications in image processing often use a multimodal approach using both text and imagery. This is prone to semantic gap issues when converting between image and language. There has been few research quan-tiﬁying visual diﬀerences when assessing semantic relationships. In this research, we analyze datasets composed of logically related concepts. By visualizing a Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model spatially, visual semantics of logically related sub-concepts are shown. To ﬁnd hidden semantics of related concepts, the most common visual words of an image in relation to its neighbors are highlighted. This provides additional semantic knowledge on how sub-ordinate concepts visually relate to another. It is thought to give an insight on the human perception of these concepts, and can be used in future research to estimate psycholinguistic ratings.
Wireless Monitoring of People in a Home Environment

The consistent increase in the world’s elder population has been putting a lot of challenges regarding national development, sustainability of families and the ability of health care systems to provide for ageing populations. As wireless sensing technology continues to evolve, devices integrating lowpower, low-bandwidth radios and a modest amount of storage, emerge due to considerable reduced costs. Wireless sensors based home monitoring systems provide a safe, sound and secure environment for elder people, enabling them to live in their own home as long as possible. This work introduces the Elder Monitoring System (EMoS), a MiXiM based framework, in which an Ad hoc On-demand Vector Routing (AODV) protocol has been implemented together with a modified HORUS system, for tracking and monitoring, in a home environment, elder people or people with special needs. The results obtained from this research demonstrate the feasibility to build a monitoring system for elder care using a simulated environment in which several aspects of the hardware commercially available have been also discussed.
Genetic Variants Associated with the Risk of Diabetic Nephropathy

Background: One of the most common complications of diabetes mellitus is diabetic nephropathy (DN). The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between variants of transcription factor 7–like 2 (TCF7L2) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator-1 alpha (PPARGC1A) gene polymorphisms individually or in combination with the progression of nephropathy in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients.
Mathematical Model of Electrically-Aided Sintering

Sintering is a process where powder is heated and compacted to form a solid with desired mechanical properties. Traditional sintering requires high oven temperatures for long periods of time resulting in high energy consumption and high costs. Due to these drawbacks, field-assisted sintering technology has attracted great interest. The goal of this research is to mathematically model electrically-aided sintering. Electrically-aided sintering uses a combination of a furnace and direct current to heat up the specimen. In addition to being heated by conduction, the material is being heated due to Joule heating. An experiment done by the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California, San Diego was used to predict thermal runaway conditions during “flash” sintering. Sintering occurs due to the thermal runaway conditions. An Arrhenius relation was used to describe the conductivity of the specimens in the experiment and positive feedback lead to the thermal runaway condition. Results from the experiment showed that powder substances appeared to sinter at lower temperatures compared to single crystals and that sintering starts as a thermal runaway for the specimen. In order to mathematically model electrically-aided sintering we considered a one-dimensional rod. The governing equations for this model are conservation of energy, conservation of charge density, and isotropic shrinkage that relates density and temperature. This coupled system of nonlinear, partial differential equations was numerically approximated by using Crank-Nicolson Adams-Bashforth method. The resulting temperature profiles show that as the electrical power increases, the temperature of the specimen reaches oven temperature quicker. The results for density show that as the
JIG: an Approach to Computational Jazz Improvisation

This thesis describes JIG (Jazz Improvisation Generator), an algorithm for jazz improvisation. The kind of improvisation that is attempted, is 'formulaic' improvisation, which involves the use of pre-existing motifs within the improvisation. The design of JIG was based on a cognitive model for jazz improvisation by Pressing. This model can be classified as a temporal approach to improvisation. The model was adjusted (simplified in some respects and elaborated in others) to make it feasible for implementation. JIG was implemented in NOOS, an object-centered language for knowledge representation and problem solving. The improvisation capabilities of JIG have been incorporated in SaxEx, a case based reasoning system for generating expressive performances of jazz-ballads. Both NOOS and SaxEx were developed at the Artificial Intelligence Institute lilA, in Barcelona.
Financial Early Warning Model of Listed Companies: An Empirical Study of Y-Score Model

This paper is based on the experience of financial crisis of Listed Companies in China. By studying the principal component analysis method of operational research, the y-score model of early warning mode of financial recruitment of listed companies, and through the sample indicators selected in this study, it preliminarily determines the evaluation area of financial situation of enterprises and predicts financial crisis for enterprises. A scientific and feasible prediction method is provided.
Combining Spectrum-Based Fault Localization and Statistical Debugging: An Empirical Study

Program debugging is a time-consuming task, and researchers have proposed different kinds of automatic fault localization techniques to mitigate the burden of manual debugging. Among these techniques, two popular families are spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) and statistical debugging (SD), both localizing faults by collecting statistical information at runtime. Though the ideas are similar, the two families have been developed independently and their combinations have not been systematically explored. In this paper we perform a systematical empirical study on the combination of SBFL and SD. We first build a unified model of the two techniques, and systematically explore four types of variations, different predicates, different risk evaluation formulas, different granularities of data collection, and different methods of combining suspicious scores. Our study leads to several findings. First, most of the effectiveness of the combined approach contributed by a simple type of predicates: branch conditions. Second, the risk evaluation formulas of SBFL significantly outperform that of SD. Third, fine-grained data collection significantly outperforms coarse-grained data collection with a little extra execution overhead. Fourth, a linear combination of SBFL and SD predicates outperforms both individual approaches. According to our empirical study, we propose a new fault localization approach, PREDFL (Predicate-based Fault Localization), with the best configuration for each dimension under the unified model. Then, we explore its complementarity to existing techniques by integrating PREDFL with a state-of-the-art fault localization framework. The experimental results show that PREDFL can further improve the effectiveness of state-of-the-art fault localization techniques. More concretely, integrating PREDFL results in an up to 20.8% improvement w.r. t the faults successfully located at Top-1, which reveals that PREDFL complements existing techniques.
EFFECTS OF HYDROALCOHOLIC EXTRACT OF PROPOLIS ON OXIDATIVE STRESS INDICES OF RAT FETAL BRAIN INDUCED BY CHRONIC PRENATAL STRESS

Introduction: Prenatal stresses have different effects on structural features and antioxidant system in the fetus and build up disturbances in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenalaxis. Propolis is known as one of the strongest natural antioxidants. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of hydroalcoholic extract of Propolis on indices of oxidative stress induced by prenatal stress in the rat fetal brain. Materials and Methods: Pregnant female Wistar rats were divided into 6 groups: Control, stress+Propolis solvent, non-stress +Propolis solvent, stress +Propolis 50 mg/kg, stress + Propolis 100 mg/kg and stress + Propolis 200 mg/kg. In the third to sixth groups, stress was created by restrainer for 6 hours per day from day 12 to day 20 of gestation in the rats. Then, the blood corticosterone and malondialdehyde (MDA), ferric ion reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) levels in brain were measured on day 21 of pregnancy. Results: Chronic prenatal stress significantly increased blood corticosterone levels and MDA, whileas, reduced the levels of FRAP, SOD and GPx in the brain tissue of 21 days old embryos. Treatment of pregnant rats under chronic stress with extract of Iranian Propolis significantly reduced corticosterone levels in blood and brain's MDA and also increased FRAP, SOD and GPx in the brain tissue from fetuses. Conclusion: Our findings showed that Iranian Propolis prevents from increasing serum corticostrone and brain MDA levels and from decreasing FRAP, SOD and GPx levels in brain under prenatal stress. Keywords: propolis, Prenatal stress, Oxidative stress, Fetal brain, Rats
Books

Most clinical biochemists probably have a partial understanding of the biochemistry and function of the vitamins, perhaps last updated when studying for professional examinations. This is compounded by the fact that only a small number of specialist clinical biochemistry laboratories run vitamin assays, and the most commonly measured vitamins, B12 and folate, are often measured by haematologists. On the other hand, the clinical biochemist (or the dietician) is usually the ¢rst port of call when clinical or research questions about vitamins arise, and there is everincreasing involvement of clinical biochemists in clinical nutrition teams. This book is written by an academic biochemist who is one of the foremost UKexperts in the biochemistry of the vitamins. It is not, and does not pretend to be, a textbook of clinical nutrition. Rather, it sets out in a comprehensive manner the biochemistry of each vitamin, ranging from chemistry through metabolism and function to metabolic consequences of de¢ciency, methods of assessment and reference intakes. There is only a cursory discussion of clinical de¢ciency states; but this is not the main remit of the bookor expertise of its author, and little data on dietary sources; but this is not a textbook of dietetics. A major strength is that it is a very readable book ^ which is no mean feat. Clarity is helped further by a large number of clear chemical structures and pathways. Chapters on individual vitamins (the book also extends to marginal compounds and phytonutrients) are short enough to be read as a whole if the reader wishes to revise his or her knowledge, and there is a detailed index for use when the book is subsequently in use in reference mode. In addition there is an up-to-date bibliography that extends to some 51 pages. For the na|« ve reader, chapter one is essential and interesting reading as it de¢nes vitamins within a historical context (it appears that only letters O and Z have not been assigned to putative vitamins at one time or another). This chapter also gives a useful summary of methods of assessment of vitamin status and the di⁄culties in establishing safe levels of intake. Whilst this is probably not a book that should be purchased by every clinical biochemist, it would certainly be a complementary companion to a textbook of clinical nutrition in the laboratory library, or perhaps a recommended purchase for the local medical library.
Selection of parents for the Scots pine breeding population in Britain

Summary Breeding values of Corsican pine (Pinus nigra subsp. laricio (Poir.) Maire) plus-trees were estimated according to Best Linear Unbiased Predictor techniques, as well as the same simple techniques used in estimating Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis (Bong) Carr. ) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) breeding values. Progeny tests had been established over a 20-year period during which time test-design and assessment procedures varied considerably. Although over 1000 Corsican pine plus-trees were originally selected, the complete suite of breeding values for early height, stem straightness and branching quality could only be estimated for 367 plus-trees. Estimates of heritabilities for growth rate and stem straightness were found to be lower than other species for which there are breeding programmes in Britain. These low heritablities coupled with relatively low selection intensities result in modest estimates of genetic gains from production populations. The two methods of estimating breeding values and variance components compared favourably, giving further confidence in breeding value estimates presented in earlier studies for Sitka spruce and Scots pine.
A multidisciplinary approach to identify pelagic shark fins by molecular, morphometric and digital correlation data

Accurate species identification is one of the most important issues to conserve and manage shark fisheries. A multidisciplinary approach involving molecular (using variation at ITS2 sequences), morphometrical and image processing species identification was performed to evaluate their discriminating power with three pelagic shark species common to the coasts of Chile (Prionace glauca Linnaeus 1785, Isurus oxyrinchus Rafinesque 1810, and Lamna nasus (Bonnaterre, 1788). Species-specific DNA markers and multivariate analyses based on twenty morphometrical measurements were used to identify fresh and dry fin sets for each shark species. Additionally, coloring patterns and fin shape were jointly used to distinguish dry fin sets of shark species by using digital invariant correlation (relation target and problem image independent of their changes in position, scale and rotation). Our results showed that morphometrical analysis was the least accurate approach, whereas DNA-based identification and image processing approaches were 100% successful on the identification of shark species. Thus ITS2 sequences and morphological diagnostic characteristics such as the ones related to color patterns, allow the correct identification of shark species. Therefore, the implementation of molecular and/or image tools can be applied to confidently identify the main pelagic shark species involved in Chilean landing and fin trade.