Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling the United States crack spread: Market efficiency, persistence and the Verleger hypothesis

ABSTRACT The price formation of crude oil and its refined products plays an essential role in the global economic system and mainly in the United States, where any shock on this market has implications for the different concerned parties. In this sense, we employ the fractionally cointegrated vector autoregressive model to analyze the long-run relationship between crude oil and each refined product and the persistence of the error term resulting, i.e., the crack spread, simultaneously. Once the cointegrating relationships between crude oil price and each refined product price are tested, we also evidence that the order of integration of the crack spread displays a long memory process. Finally, by attending to the coefficient adjustments, supply-driven market integration is given. Additionally, the Verleger hypothesis is rejected for all refined products, corroborated by the component share. This paper has important policy implications for investors, energy policymakers and refiners.
A Study on the Application of a Exhaust Engine in Basement Karaoke Fires

Abstract In this study, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a exhaust engine in a basement karaoke fire. Exhaust engine was used as ventilation equipment in the experiment. Experiment was carried out in a basement karaoke for redevelopment. Temperature distribution and smoke concentration were evaluated according to the operation of an exhaust engine. Temperatures were decreased below 50℃ at the corridor due to the operation of the exhaust engine. Visibility was also improved. Key words Underground fire, Exhaust engine, Smoke movement, Visibility초 록 본 연구에서는 지하공간에서 화재 발생 시 배연장비의 연기배출 성능을 평가하기 위하여 실험을 실시하였다. 배연장비로는 일선 관서에서 사용 중인 배연차를 사용하였다 . 실험은 재개발 예정 지하 노래방에서 수행되었다. 배연차의 가동에 따라 실내 온도분포 및 연기농도를 측정하였다 . 배연차를 가동함으로 인하여 복도에서 온도가 50℃ 이하로 감소하였으며 가시도 또한 향상되었다 . 핵심어 지하화재, 배연차, 연기거동, 가시도 1. 서 론 자동 반주기계 같은 것을 갖추어 노래를 부를 수 있게 한 영업소를 노래방이라 한다 . 주로 동남아시아, 동북아시아에 많으며 나라마다 다른 이름으로 불리고 있다. 중국과 대만에서는 KTV, 일본에서는 가라오케, 필리핀에서는 비디오케로 불리고 있다 . 그림 1에 2009년도 다중이용업소에서 발생한 화재통계를 나타내었다.
Effective parameters for unsaturated flow in heterogeneous soil

Estimates of field-scale hydraulic conductivities of heterogeneous unsaturated soils are very difficult to obtain. The representativeness of effective parameters for unsaturated flow in heterogeneous soils is tested by comparing laboratory measurements of the effective ^(^-relationship to expressions derived from the local hydraulic parameters based on either simple averaging procedures or a stochastic theory. Field experiments are difficult to carry out, but a step towards validation of the theoretical concept of effective parameters is to test against controlled laboratory experiments. Thus, a flow experiment was carried out in a laboratory tank with a random distribution of soils of given hydraulic properties. As opposed to most previous laboratory investigations our system allows for two- dimensional flow. The water flux is controlled at the upper boundary while suction is adjusted at the lower boundary in order to establish a uniform pressure profile in the tank. During the experiment water content and suction are measured automatically at different locations in the tank using TDR probes and tensiometers. The hydraulic properties of the different heterogeneities comprising the soil system are measured using a flow pump technique.
A Brief Climatology of Dunkelflaute Events over and Surrounding the North and Baltic Sea Areas

In the coming decades, the European energy system is expected to become increasingly reliant on non-dispatchable generation such as wind and solar power. Under such a renewable energy scenario, a better characterization of the extreme weather condition ‘Dunkelflaute’, which can lead to a sustained reduction of wind and solar power, is important. In this paper, we report findings from the very first climatological study of Dunkelflaute events occurring in eleven countries surrounding the North and Baltic Sea areas. By utilizing multi-year meteorological and power production datasets, we have quantified various statistics pertaining to these events and also identified their underlying meteorological drivers. It was found that almost all periods tagged as Dunkelflaute events (with a length of more than 24 h) are in November, December, and January for these countries. On average, there are 50–100 h of such events happening in each of these three months per year. The limited wind and solar power production during Dunkelflaute events is shown to be mainly driven by large-scale high-pressure systems and extensive low-cloud coverage. Even though the possibility of simultaneous Dunkelflaute events in neighboring countries can be as high as 30–40%, such events hardly occur simultaneously in all the eleven countries. Through an interconnected EU-11 power system, the mean frequency of Dunkelflaute drops from 3–9% for the individual countries to approximately 3.5% for the combined region, highlighting the importance of aggregating production over a wide area to better manage the integration of renewable energy generation.
Cooperative in-vehicle advice: a study into drivers' ability and willingness to follow tactical driver advice

Motorway traffic congestion is a problem in today’s society. Driver behaviour is a factor that ca deteriorate traffic flow in nearly congested traffic. Traffic flow efficiency may be improved by an in-vehicle system that advises drivrs on their speed, gap, and lane choice. The system’s effect depends on its penetration rate and drivers’ compliance with the advice. This thesis describes a user-survey, driving simulator experiments and a real road study to assess drivers’ ability and willingness to use the systm and follow advice messages. Results show a general ability to follow given advice messages. Factors are identified that may reduce drivers’ willingness to follow the advice and adopt the system.
Compressed sensing for electron microscope data

Recent work in the field of Compressed Sensing [1, 2, 3] has suggested a great variety of new possibilities in the world of image reconstruction. We have been focused on a novel approach using this kind of algorithms based on CS to solve problems related to limited-angle data (e.g, computed tomography or electron microscope) or when we only dispose from few radon projections, low frequencies of an image, model or figure. This approach has been based on a variation of the Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation procedure [4] with regularization enabled by a spatially adaptive filter. The idea consists in exciting an algorithm by injection of random noise in the unobserved portion of the image spectrum and a spatially adaptive image denoising filter, working in the image domain, is exploited to attenuate the noise and reveal new features and details out of the incomplete and degraded observations of the model. We developed the algorithm and we tested with some variations of the Shepp-Logan phantom and Hansandrey crystallography, to prove its viability in an empirical way before applying it to real cases. Our idea after the tests was to apply this procedure in a reconstruction of a 3D-protein crystallography taken in a TEM (Transmission Electronic Microscopy) with limited-angle views that can lead to have missing wedges or cones in the final results. 12-dimensional case 2artificially created 3-dimensional model 3A crystallography with limited-angle views and a viral structure where we have forced the missing cone
Materials for high-power laser optics: the thermal lensing issue

High-power/high-energy laser (HEL) systems include an optical train consisting of mirrors and windows, which must be capable of transporting and directing the beam without seriously degrading the nominal performance. Since catastrophic failure modes are not a major threat at beam-power levels of current interest, the system's performance as measured in terms of achievable target irradiances may degrade as a result of thermal lensing, that is, the wavefront distortion caused by thermally induced phase aberrations. The purpose of this paper is to review and update analytical investigations that address the problem of evaluating die nature of laser-driven mirror/window distortions; in this context, it is shown how to obtain simple figures of merit (FoM) for rating the thermal lensing performance of mirror-substrate materials as well as window-material candidates. The performance of cooled HEL mirrors reflects their ability to minimize irradiance-mapping wavefront distortions, which leads to defining a thermal distortion coefficient % that controls the out-of-plane growth of the faceplate. It is then straightforward to derive equations for characterizing the RMSsed surface deformation and to assess the merit of mirror-faceplate materials in a pulsed or a CW environment. Since state-of-the-art heat exchangers exhibit relatively modest Biot numbers, the thermal conduction is not a critical parameter but the modulus of elasticity must be properly factored into the FoM for CW operation. Window-induced wavefront deformations require special attention because they involve not only position-dependent variations of the window thickness but also position- and polarization-dependent variations of the refractive index. This situation leads to introducing a symmetric and an anti-symmetric distortion coefficient, which can be combined into an effective optical distortion coefficient x that specifies the relative weight of birefringence compared to all other sources of distortion and shows that zero distortion can only be achieved with stress-birefringence free material having a negative dn/dl'. As in the case of mirror-faceplate materials, FoM’s for the pre-diffusion and the steady-state regimes emerge in a direct manner and demonstrate that fluoro-zirco-aluminate glass by far outperforms other window-material candidates in implementing the zero-distortion goal.
Shocks, Information, and Structural VARs

Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) have become one of the most popular tools to measure the effects of structural economic shocks. Several new techniques to “identify” economic shocks have been proposed in the literature in the last decades. Identification hinges on the implicit assumption that economic shocks are retrievable from the data. In other words, the data contain enough information to correctly estimate the shocks. SVAR models, however, are small-scale models, only a small number of variables can be handled, and this feature can forcefully limit the amount of information that variables can convey. Narrow information sets present problems for identification, but some theoretical results and empirical procedures can test whether such information is sufficient to estimate economic shocks. Additionally, there are possible solutions to the problem of limited information, such as Factor Augmented VAR or dynamic rotations.
Department of Defense Net-Centric Data Strategy

Abstract : In the December 2001 memorandum Interoperability and Data Management, the DoD CIO requested development of an enterprise level data strategy to advance the Department toward the goal of network centric operations. A Core Data Management Working Group, with representatives from across the Department, was established to develop this strategy consistent with other net-centric initiatives, such as the Global Information Grid (GIG) Enterprise Services. The attached DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy provides a key enabler of the Department's Transformation by establishing the foundation for managing the Department's data in a net-centric environment.
A simulation study of turbofan engine deterioration estimation using Kalman filtering techniques

Deterioration of engine components may cause off-normal engine operation. The result is an unecessary loss of performance, because the fixed schedules are designed to accommodate a wide range of engine health. These fixed control schedules may not be optimal for a deteriorated engine. This problem may be solved by including a measure of deterioration in determining the control variables. These engine deterioration parameters usually cannot be measured directly but can be estimated. A Kalman filter design is presented for estimating two performance parameters that account for engine deterioration: high and low pressure turbine delta efficiencies. The delta efficiency parameters model variations of the high and low pressure turbine efficiencies from nominal values. The filter has a design condition of Mach 0.90, 30,000 ft altitude, and 47 deg power level angle (PLA). It was evaluated using a nonlinear simulation of the F100 engine model derivative (EMD) engine, at the design Mach number and altitude over a PLA range of 43 to 55 deg. It was found that known high pressure turbine delta efficiencies of -2.5 percent and low pressure turbine delta efficiencies of -1.0 percent can be estimated with an accuracy of + or - 0.25 percent efficiency with a Kalman filter. If both the high and low pressure turbine are deteriorated, the delta efficiencies of -2.5 percent to both turbines can be estimated with the same accuracy.
DYADIC GREEN'S FUNCTIONS FOR LAYERED GENERAL ANISOTROPIC MEDIA AND THEIR APPLICATION TO RADIATION OF DIPOLE ANTENNAS

In this dissertation, the dyadic Green‟s functions (DGFs) for unbounded and layered anisotropic media, with no restriction imposed on the medium property, are derived. Utilizing the obtained DGFs, the radiation problems of a Hertzian dipole and a microstrip antenna in the presence of an anisotropic substrate are solved. After a brief introduction, the eigenvector dyadic Green‟s functions (E-DGFs) for an unbounded general anisotropic medium through the eigen-decomposition method are derived. The E-DGFs of a layered anisotropic geometry are then constructed based on the derivation of the unbounded E-DGFs using two different approaches. One is through the symmetrical property of the DGFs and the other is through the direct construction method. Rigorous proof and detailed derivation of the formulation for the E-DGFs are presented. The usage and limitation of each approach as well as the relationships between the corresponding E-DGFs are discussed. Applying the method of stationary phase to the associated E-DGFs, we formulate the radiation fields of an arbitrarily oriented Hertzian dipole located either above or inside the layered anisotropic medium. The important new findings include the analysis of the radiation field in terms of the reflection coefficients as a function of incidence angle, and the use of the biasing magnetic field to improve the broadside directivity for a z-directed source when a gyroelectric medium is involved. In addition to solving the radiation of a Hertzian dipole in the presence of a layered anisotropic medium, the layered E-DGFs derived here are also utilized to solve the more practical problem of a microstrip dipole printed on an anisotropic substrate. A method of moment solution is formulated with the E-DGF in the spectral domain. To demonstrate the feasibility of this method applicable to a general anisotropic medium, the current distribution, input impedances, and radiation patterns are numerically calculated for a microstrip dipole printed on various anisotropic substrates. Furthermore, a detailed parametric study of the effect of frequency, and direction and magnitude of the biasing magnetic field is provided for a dipole printed on a gyroelectric substrate. The parametric analysis in this dissertation may lead to a method whereby the additional freedom introduced by the gyroelectric medium can be utilized effectively to adjust the resonant length and radiation pattern of a printed dipole antenna. DYADIC GREEN’S FUNCTIONS FOR LAYERED GENERAL ANISOTROPIC MEDIA AND THEIR APPLICATION TO RADIATION OF DIPOLE ANTENNAS
Review of Modern Techniques for the Assessment of Skin Hydration

Skin hydration is a complex process that influences the physical and mechanical properties of skin. Various technologies have emerged over the years to assess this parameter, with the current standard being electrical probe-based instruments. Nevertheless, their inability to provide detailed information has prompted the use of sophisticated spectroscopic and imaging methodologies, which are capable of in-depth skin analysis that includes structural and composition details. Modern imaging and spectroscopic techniques have transformed skin research in the dermatological and cosmetics disciplines, and are now commonly employed in conjunction with traditional methods for comprehensive assessment of both healthy and pathological skin. This article reviews current techniques employed in measuring skin hydration, and gives an account on their principle of operation and applications in skin-related research.
Team Software Process (TSP) Body of Knowledge (BOK)

Abstract : The Team Software Process Body of Knowledge (TSP BOK) was drafted to define the fundamental knowledge and skills that set TSP-trained individuals apart from other software professionals. It helps individual practitioners to assess and improve their own skills, provides employers with an objective baseline for assessing the process improvement skills and capabilities of their development team members, and guides academic institutions that want to incorporate TSP into their software and other engineering courses or curricula. The TSP BOK also facilitates the development of TSP certification programs that are based on a well-established standard set of knowledge and skills.
Essential Features of Methodologically Inclusive Research Syntheses.

Contemporary educational research is marked by diversity, complexity, and richness of purposes, methods, and perspectives. A framework, the Methodologically Inclusive Research Synthesis (MIRS), has been developed to offer a set of guidelines to facilitate informed choices at the critical decision points of any research synthesis process. The MIRS perspective has been developed on the premise/observation that methods of primary research and research synthesis hold a reflexive relationship. A dialectic tension exists between the methods of primary research,and research synthesis where methodological developments at either level influence methodological developments at the other level. This tension is illustrated in the award-winning article "A Critical Analysis of the Research on Learning To Teach: Making the Case for an Ecological Perspective on Inquiry" (M. Wideen, J. Mayer-Smith, and B. Moon) which appeared in "Review of Educational Research" volume 68, number 2. This paper describes the essence of the MIRS framework by drawing illustrations from this article. (Contains 14 references.) (SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Essential Features of Methodologically Inclusive Research Syntheses PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
Study of the design and tuning methods of PIDcontroller based on fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm

This project tries to explore the potential of using soft computing methodologies in controllers and their advantages over conventional methods. PID controller, being the most widely used controller in industrial applications, needs efficient methods to control the different parameters of the plant. This thesis asserts that the conventional approach of PID tuning is not very efficient due to the presence of non-linearity in the system of the plant. The output of the conventional PID system has a quite high overshoot and settling time. The main focus of this project is to apply two specific soft-computing techniques viz. fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm to design and tuning of PID controller to get an output with better dynamic and static performance. The application of fuzzy logic to the PID controller imparts it the ability of tuning itself automatically in an on-line process while the application of genetic algorithm to the PID controller makes it give an optimum output by searching for the best set of solutions for the PID parameters. The project also discusses the benefits and the short-comings of both the methods. The simulation outputs are the MATLAB results obtained for a step input to a third-order plant.
The LEGO System as a tool for thinking, creativity, and changing the world

This chapter looks at LEGO as a tool for supporting creative thinking, developing creative cultures, and contributing to processes which might make a difference in how the world works. My thoughts about these ambitious themes are not plucked from nowhere, and nor are they those of a passive observer, but they might be treated cautiously for a different reason, because they draw upon my experience of several years of close collaboration with the LEGO Group in Billund, Denmark. I am an academic, a Professor in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster in London, UK, but this means I have also – very happily, for me – been able to work with LEGO on a number of projects, as part of their ongoing collaboration with selected academic researchers. From 2005, I worked with the LEGO Group on the development of the consultancy process, LEGO Serious Play, and since 2008, I have worked with the LEGO Learning Institute and the LEGO Foundation exploring play, creativity and learning.
Comparability of estimated and determined LDL cholesterol
in hospitalized children

Introduction: The concentration of LDL cholesterol (LDLC) is the main parameter used in the stratification of risk and the management of atherosclerosis. Aim of study: The aim of this study was to compare the LDLC concentration calculated by the Friedewald (LDLCF ), the Cordova (LDLCC) and the Planelli (LDLCP ) formulas with the LDLC concentration measured by direct metod (LDLCD) with regard to age and sample matrix. Material and Methods: 594 serum samples were collected from children (1 day to 18 years) hospitalized in University Children’s Hospital in Krakow. Concentrations of hemoglobin A1c and/or creatinine were determined. In all serum samples total cholesterol, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, apolipoprotein B and LDLCD were measured. In addition, the LDLC concentration was estimated. Results: The means of the LDLCF and LDLCC concentrations were significantly lower compared to the mean of the LDLCD in all samples and in samples from children ≥1 years of age (in all cases p<0,0001). Bland-Altman analys is showed, that the values LDLCC were not comparable to the values of LDLCD in samples from all children and regardless of the LDLCD concentration. In samples with HbA1c≥6,0% mean values of differences between estimated LDLC and LDLCD were higher than in samples with HbA1c<6,0%, regardless of the used formula. The mean values of differences between estimated LDLC and LDLCD in samples with creatinine concentrations <74,0 µmol/l and ≥74,0 µmol/l differed significantly regardless of the used formula (in all cases p<0,001). Conclusion: The differences between concentration of determined and estimated LDLC depend on composition of sample matrix and formula which is used in calculations.