Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of a silicon nanowire-based cantilever air-flow sensor

Silicon nanowire (SiNW)-based cantilever flow sensors with three different cantilever sizes (10 × 50, 20 × 90 and 40 × 100 µm2) and various SiNW lengths (2, 5 and 10 µm) have been designed for air velocity sensing. The total device thickness is around 3 µm, which consists of the bottom SiO2 layer (0.5 µm) and the top SiNx layer (2.5 µm). In addition, the SiNx layer is used to compensate the initial stress and also enhance the device immunity to air-flow-induced vibrations significantly. To experience the maximum strain induced by the air flow, SiNWs are embedded at the clamp point where the cantilever is anchored to the substrate. Taking advantage of the superior properties of SiNWs, the reported flow sensor shows outstanding air-flow-sensing capability in terms of sensitivity, linearity and hysteresis. With only a supply voltage of 0.1 V and the high initial resistance of the piezoresistive SiNWs, significant energy saving is reached in contrast to the thermal-based flow sensors as well as other recently reported piezoresistive designs. Last but not least, the significant size reduction of our device demonstrates the great scalability of SiNW-based flow sensors.
The Moderating Effects of Positive and Negative Automatic Thoughts on the Relationship Between Positive Emotions and Resilience

Resilience is generally characterized as the ability to recover and grow following adversity (Connor & Davidson, 2003) and is considered an integral factor in the promotion of overall physical and psychological health (Masten & Reed, 2002). One factor thought to be associated with resilience is more frequent positive emotions, but the relationship between positive emotions and resilience varies (Tugade, Fredrickson, & Feldman-Barrett, 2004), suggesting moderating factors may be involved. Cognitive factors may be involved in determining the parameters that define when and to what degree this relationship occurs (Troy & Mauss, 2011). The current study was designed to further elucidate the relationship between positive emotions and resilience by examining the moderating effects of cognition, specifically positive and negative thinking styles. A sample 87 college men and 184 college women participated in this cross-sectional, correlational study by completing a series of online measures. Results indicated that positive affect was directly associated with resilience. In addition, different cognitive styles were associated with resilience in the expected directions. Finally, only negative thinking styles moderated the positive affect/resilience relationship. Implications for theory development and clinical interventions are discussed.
Self-Similarity of Images and Non-local Image Processing

This thesis has two related goals: the first involves the concept of self-similarity of images. Image self-similarity is important because it forms the basis for many imaging techniques such as non-local means denoising and fractal image coding. Research so far has been focused largely on self-similarity in the pixel domain. That is, examining how well different regions in an image mimic each other. Also, most works so far concerning self-similarity have utilized only the mean squared error (MSE). In this thesis, self-similarity is examined in terms of the pixel and wavelet representations of images. In each of these domains, two ways of measuring similarity are considered: the MSE and a relatively new measurement of image fidelity called the Structural Similarity (SSIM) Index. We show that the MSE and SSIM Index give very different answers to the question of how self-similar images really are. The second goal of this thesis involves non-local image processing. First, a generalization of the well known non-local means denoising algorithm is proposed and examined. The groundwork for this generalization is set by the aforementioned results on image self-similarity with respect to the MSE. This new method is then extended to the wavelet representation of images. Experimental results are given to illustrate the applications of these new ideas.
Pooled whole‐genome sequencing of interspecific chestnut (Castanea) hybrids reveals loci associated with differences in caching behavior of fox squirrels (Sciurus niger L.)

Abstract Dispersal of seeds by scatter‐hoarding rodents is common among tropical and temperate tree species, including chestnuts in the genus Castanea. Backcrossed (BC) interspecific hybrid chestnuts exhibit wide variation in seed traits: as the parent species (Castanea dentata and C. mollissima) have distinct seed phenotypes and tend to be handled differently by seed dispersers, phenotypic variation in BC trees is likely due to inheritance of genes that have undergone divergent evolution in the parent species. To identify candidate genomic regions for interspecific differences in seed dispersal, we used tagged seeds to measure average dispersal distance for seeds of third‐generation BC chestnuts and sequenced pooled whole genomes of mother trees with contrasting seed dispersal: high caching rate/long distance; low caching rate/short distance; no caching. Candidate regions affecting seed dispersal were identified as loci with more C. mollissima alleles in the high caching rate/ long‐distance pool than expected by chance and observed in the other two pools. Functional annotations of candidate regions included predicted lipid metabolism, dormancy regulation, seed development, and carbohydrate metabolism genes. The results support the hypothesis that perception of seed dormancy is a predominant factor in squirrel caching decisions, and also indicate profitable directions for future work on the evolutionary genomics of trees and coevolved seed dispersers.
SUPPLEMENTATION EFFECTS OF TANNIN AND SAPONIN EXTRACTS TO DIETS WITH DIFFERENT FORAGE TO CONCENTRATE RATIO ON In vitro RUMEN FERMENTATION AND METHANOGENESIS

This experiment was aimed to investigate the effect of combining tannin and saponin extracts onruminal methane emission of diets with different proportion of forage to concentrate in the in vitrofermentation. The experiment was conducted in a factorial block design. The first factor was theproportion of forage:concentate in diets (70:30 and 30:70) and the second was addition of tannin andsaponin extracts (control, tannins, saponins, tannins + saponins) in the dose of 2 mg/ml. Variablesobserved were gas production kinetics, methane production, dry matter digestibility (DMD), organicmatter digestibility (OMD) and ammonia concentration. Results revealed that addition of tannins,saponins and their combination generally lowered total gas and methane production during 24 and 48 hof incubation period in both types of diets (P<0.05), but combination of tannins and saponins comparedwith their separated forms did not show any significant differences. The addition of tannins, saponinsand their combination reduced DMD, OMD and ammonia significantly (P<0.05). It can be concludedthat the addition of tannin, saponin and their combination at a dose of 2 mg/ml could reduce methaneemission but followed by a decline in the DMD, OMD and ammonia.
Video Sprite Replacement

Animation has gained much attention overtime since the creation of animated films during early 20 century. Up to present day, a popular thing to do, through various media, is to combine live-action and animation together in videos. This practice has been done by professionals and amateurs alike from film industries for movies to public internet videos. However, the process can be time consuming and costly to draw or model out the animation separately and then put it into video. This paper explores methods to simplify the process by using pose recognition between two different sets of sprite images--a set of key sprites of a live-action person from a video with a set of key sprites of a cartoon character.
Dynamical, dielectric, and elastic properties of GeTe investigated with first-principles density fun

The dynamical, dielectric, and elastic properties of GeTe, a ferroelectric material in its low-temperature rhombohedral phase, have been investigated using first-principles density functional theory. We report the electronic energy bands, phonon-dispersion curves, electronic and low-frequency dielectric tensors, infrared reflectivity, Born effective charges, and elastic and piezoelectric tensors and compare them with the existing theoretical and experimental results, as well as with similar quantities available for other ferroelectric materials, when appropriate.
Compressed Sensing Based Distributed Sampling Method for Vibration Signal from Train Rotating Parts

Sensor network based on-line fault diagnosis for rotating parts of the train bogies is a significant technology that is making a great impact on rail transit operation. But the signal sampling method conforming to Nyquist theorem can cause great trouble because it will produce too large amount of data to be transmitted and stored via the poor bandwidth sensor network. Aiming to this, this paper proposes a novel distributed sampling method of vibration signal from train rotating parts based on compressed sensing theory. The system consists of two parts: analog-to-information converter based signals sample and orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm based signals reconstruction. The experiment results show that the proposed method can recover signal over 0.9 correlation degree while the compression ratio is over 5. This mean that the method proposed in this paper will great reduce the transmission bandwidth and storage. At the same time, the compressive signal also contains all the failure feature information as the original signal. The experiments also show that the proposed method is better than traditional method in the robustness to noise and packet loss.
A High Gain and High Harmonic Rejection LNA Using High Q Series Resonance Technique for SDR Receiver

This paper presents a high gain and high harmonic rejection low-noise amplifier (LNA) for software-defined radio receiver. This LNA exploits the high quality factor (Q) series resonance technique. High Q series resonance can amplify the in-band signal voltage and attenuate the out-band signals. This is achieved by a source impedance transformation. This technique does not consume power and can easily support multiband operation. The chip is fabricated in a 0.13-μm CMOS. It supports four bands (640, 710, 830, and 1,070 MHz). The measured forward gain (S21) is between 12.1 and 17.4 dB and the noise figure is between 2.7 and 3.3 dB. The IIP3 measures between 5.7 and 10.8 dBm, and the third harmonic rejection ratios are more than 30 dB. The LNA consumes 9.6 mW from a 1.2-V supply.
Improved Community Detection using Deep Embeddings from Multilayer Graphs

Community detection is a challenging, yet crucial, problem while mining large-scale graph structured data. Most existing approaches solve this problem by mapping nodes into a vector space and performing unsupervised learning with the resulting embeddings. In cases where multiple types of connectivity patterns exist for the set of nodes, commonly modeled as multilayer graphs, new strategies are required to model the inter-layer dependencies in order to perform effective inferencing. In this paper, we focus on learning embeddings for each node of a multilayer graph through neural modeling techniques, such that the complex dependencies can be concisely encoded into low-dimensional representations. Referred to as multilayer graph embeddings, these representations can be utilized for discovering community structure in a scalable fashion, even with a large number of layers. Furthermore, in order to ensure that the semantics that persist over a longer range in the network are well modeled, we propose to refine the multilayer embeddings via a proxy clustering loss and a graph modularity measure. Using real-world datasets, we demonstrate that this algorithm generates scalable and robust representations, and outperforms existing multilayer community detection approaches.
Cbprs: A City Based Parking and Routing System

Navigational systems assist drivers in finding a route between two locations that is time optimal in theory but seldom in practice due to delaying circumstances the system is unaware of, such as traffic jams. Upon arrival at the destination the service of the system ends and the driver is forced to locate a parking place without further assistance. We propose a City Based Parking Routing System (CBPRS) that monitors and reserves parking places for CBPRS participants within a city. The CBPRS guides vehicles using an ant based distributed hierarchical routing algorithm to their reserved parking place. Through means of experiments in a simulation environment we found that reductions of travel times for participants were significant in comparison to a situation where vehicles relied on static routing information generated by the well known Dijkstra’s algorithm. Furthermore, we found that the CBPRS was able to increase city wide traffic flows and decrease the number and duration of traffic jams throughout the city once the number of participants increased.
Changes in Shear Moduli of Liquefied and Nonliquefied Soils during the 1995 Kobe Earthquake and Its Aftershocks at Three Vertical-Array Sites

Acceleration records of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and its first after- shocks, provided by vertical arrays at Port Island (PI), SGK, and TKS sites, were used to estimate changes in the shear moduli of subsurface soils caused by strong ground motion. Shear-moduli estimates are based on stress-strain relations deter- mined for consecutive time intervals during the mainshock and aftershocks. We found that in the upper 0-13 m at PI (reclaimed fill above the groundwater level), the shear modulus decreased by 80%-90% of its initial value owing to liquefaction. Signs of its recovery appeared 3-5 min after the decrease in the intensity of strong motion. At depths of 13-18 m (reclaimed fill below the water level) and 27-32.5 m (water-saturated sand) at PI, 0-11 m at SGK, and 0-14 m at TKS (water-saturated alluvium), the shear modulus decrease was estimated at about 80%, 50%-60%, 60%-70%, and 50%, respectively. Recovery began immediately after the decrease in the intensity of strong motion and was completed within a few minutes. The results show that the behavior of the upper layers at sites PI and SGK, where the highest accelerations were recorded, was dynamically unstable. So far as the method can be applied to any site where vertical-array records and profiling data are available, ac- cumulation of representative data on nonlinear soil behavior during strong motion for various soil conditions is desirable. Summarizing and generalizing these data, we may be able to predict soil behavior in future earthquakes.
H 2 sensor based on Au/TiO 2 nanoparticles synthesized by flame spray pyrolysis

TiO2 is used extensively as a gas sensing material due to its change in electrical conductivity under analyst gas exposure. Gold (Au) is a good catalyst that promotes chemical reactions by reducing the activation energy between sensing film and particular gas. Unloaded TiO2 and TiO2 nanoparticles loaded with 0.25–0.75 at% Au were successfully produced in a single step by Flame spray pyrolysis (FSP) technique. The structure and morphology of as-prepared products have been characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM). TiO2 and Au-loaded TiO2 nanoparticle films were prepared by spincoating technique. The gas sensing of H2 was studied at the operating temperatures ranging from 300-350°C in dry air. It was found that the TiO2 loaded with Au sensing film showed higher response of H2, with faster response time (within second) than pure TiO2 sensing film. The response increased and the response time decreased with increasing of H2 concentration.
A New Vaccine Strategy of Dendritic Cell Presented Kinetoplastid Membrane (KMP-11) as Immunogen for Control against Experimental Visceral Leishmaniasis

Available reports suggest that, Leishmania donovani antigen KMP-11 may be significant in the modulation of immune responses in visceral leishmaniasis (VL). This study evaluated vaccine prospect of presentation of KMP-11 antigen through murine dendritic cells against VL in infected BALB/c mice. We report here that immunization with KMP-11 delivered through bone marrow derived dendritic cells can lead to killing of L. donovani in infected BALB/c mice. Furthermore, the strategy to use KMP-11 as vaccine delivered through DCs can stimulate the production of IFN-g, IL-12, IL-2R and TNF-α with concomitant down-regulation of IL-10 and IL-4. Furthermore, anti-leishmanial defence function (ROS) of splenocytes was observed increased in the presence of DC-delivered KMP-11 vaccination accompanied with an increased p38-MAPK signalling in vaccinated splenocytes. We summarized from our data that KMP-11 delivered through DCs has potential for eliciting protective immunity through pro-inflammatory cytokines (IFN-γ, IL-12, IL-2, TNF-α) following an up-regulation in signalling event of p38-MAPK. Therefore the study suggests a new control strategy against VL in future.
NuSTAR Detection of a Hard X-Ray Source in the Supernova Remnant-molecular Cloud Interaction Site of IC 443

We report on a broadband study of a complex X-ray source (1SAX J0618.0+2227) associated with the interaction site of the supernova remnant (SNR) IC 443 and ambient molecular cloud (MC) using NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Chandra observations. Its X-ray spectrum is composed of both thermal and nonthermal components. The thermal component can be equally well represented by either a thin plasma model with kT = 0.19 keV or a blackbody model with kT = 0.11 keV. The nonthermal component can be fit with either a power law with Γ ∼ 1.7 or a cutoff power law with Γ ∼ 1.5 and a cutoff energy at Ecut ∼ 18 keV. Using the newly obtained NuSTAR data set, we test three possible scenarios for isolated X-ray sources in the SNR–MC interaction site: (1) a pulsar wind nebula (PWN); (2) an SNR ejecta fragment; and (3) a shocked molecular clump. We conclude that this source is most likely composed of an SNR ejecta (or a PWN) and surrounding shocked molecular clumps. The nature of this hard X-ray source in the SNR–MC interaction site of IC 443 may shed light on unidentified X-ray sources with hard X-ray spectra in rich environments for star-forming regions, such as the Galactic center.
The influence of unstable housing on children's wellbeing and development

This research project was funded by the Australian Government under the 2009-13 National Homelessness Research Agenda. Little evidence has been produced on the influence of housing on children’s development in Australia. This study, relying on LSAC 2004 and 2008 data, begins to fill this gap by examining the association between residential mobility, unstable housing tenure and housing stress on children’s cognitive development and social-emotional functioning. Previous research indicates that parental relationship breakdown often leads to unstable housing; therefore, this study has a separate focus on the experiences of children living in separated or coupled families. Section 2 of the report presents a review of the Australian and international literature on the association between residential mobility, housing stress and housing tenure on child outcomes. Section 3 provides an overview of some definitions relevant to housing and homelessness in Australia and the data used in this report. Section 4 provides a description of these aspects of the housing circumstances of Australian children. Section 5 focuses on the housing circumstances of children living in families where their parents have separated and where their parents are still coupled. Section 6 examines the relationships between child outcomes and housing characteristics for 4–5 and 8–9 year old children in separated and couple families, while controlling for other socio-economic characteristics of children’s families. The final section discusses these findings and their implications. Final Report [PDF - 1050 KB] [DOCX – 1052 KB] Evidence Note [PDF - 54 KB] [DOCX - 141 KB] Image: D Sharon Pruitt, Pink Sherbet Photography / flickr
Radiocarbon ages of sorted circles on King George Island, South Shetland Islands, West Antarctica

Lichen and moss colonize the surface of glacial debris left after deglaciation. Transformation of unsorted debris into a sorted circle causes early plant remains to be preserved in the fine-grained centre encircled by a coarse, clastic border. Systematic radiocarbon dating of plant remains from the sorted stone circles on King George Island, South Shetland Islands, West Antarctica, yielded ages between 290–4710 14C yrs BP. The oldest age obtained from a large stone circle approximated the regional deglaciation age recorded in marine and lacustrine sediment cores. Most of the ages, however, underestimate the time of deglaciation due to the continual addition of younger plant remains, changes in soil motion, and the diverse vegetation history. Despite its current limitations as a terrestrial proxy for regional deglaciation, further systematic dating and careful interpretation based on surface processes may improve the usefulness of sorted circles in reconstructing the glacial and periglacial history of polar terrestrial environments.
Channel Contract Behavior: the Role of Risk Attitudes, Risk Perceptions, and Channel Member Market Structures

By integrating elements of both marketing and finance, we show how risk influences channel contract behavior. We model risk behavior as the interaction between risk attitude and risk perception (IRAP). An analysis of the joint channel decisions of 208 producers, wholesalers, and processors provides three results. First, risk attitudes significantly vary across different levels of channel members. Second, IRAP in combination with the channel member's market structure on the buying and selling side is a strong predictor of contract behavior. Third, increases in channel power strengthen the impact of IRAP on channel contract behavior.
Does Information Disclosure Matter?—Evidence from China's Multi-Tiered Capital Market System

This paper contributes to the literature on whether the information disclosure system decreases earnings management. Using China's Multi-Tiered Capital Market including the Main Board, SME Board, and the ChiNext market, we find that earnings management can be effectively reduced by the disclosure system, and that the level of information disclosure is negatively related to earnings management. Comparing firms with a transparency ranking downgrade, we show that firms with a ranking upgrade tend to exhibit a significant decrease in their earnings management activities.