Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Political orientation and support for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from Brazil

Abstract Social distancing practices have been widely recommended to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite the medical consensus, many citizens have resisted adhering to and/or supporting its implementation. While this resistance may stem from the non-negligible personal economic costs of implementing social distancing, we argue that it may also reside in more fundamental differences in normative principles and belief systems, as reflected by political orientation. In a study conducted in Brazil, we test the relative importance of these explanations by examining whether and how support for social distancing varies according to self-identified political orientation and personal economic vulnerability. Results show that while economic vulnerability does not influence support for social distancing, conservatives are systematically less supportive of these practices than liberals. Discrepancies in sensitivity to threats to the economic system help explain the phenomenon.
Effect of packed structure on flow behaviour in a trickle bed biofilter

The effects of operation conditions on the flow behaviour in gas–liquid countercurrent trickle bed biofilter were experimentally examined. In order to prevent gas channelling in the biofilter, packings with a relatively large void fraction, which have a role to maintain a high void fraction in the bed, were added. The gas and liquid velocities of the packed structure and the packings were changed, and the residence time distributions (RTDs) of the gas and liquid were measured. It was found that the addition of void supporters was very effective in the suppression of gas channelling. On a examine de maniere experimental les effets des conditions operatoires sur les comportements d'ecoulement dans un biofiltre a lit ruisselant a contre-courant gaz-liquide. Afin d'empěcher le renardage dans le biofiltre, des garnissages ayant une fraction de vide relativement grande, qui joue un rǒle pour maintenir un haut degre de vide, ont ete ajoutes. Les vitesses de gaz et de liquide, la structure garnie et les garnissages ont ete modifies, et les distributions de temps de sejour (RTD) du gaz et du liquide ont ete mesurees. On a trouve que l'ajout de supports de vide etait tres efficace pour la suppression du renardage.
Molecular dynamics simulations of side chain pendants of perfluorosulfonic acid polymer electrolyte membranes

Perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) polymer electrolyte membranes like Dow, Aciplex and Nafion have similar backbones but different side chain pendants. The effect of hydration and temperature on the side chain pendant nanostructure, and water and hydronium ion dynamics, are investigated by employing classical molecular dynamics simulations at 300 K and 350 K. The 60% longer side chain pendant length in Aciplex compared to Dow results in phase segregation. The presence of an extra ether oxygen atom in the Nafion side chain pendant provides more flexibility (∼20% chain length contraction caused by flexibility and the hydrophobic force of the pendant CF3 group) where the sulfonate group tends to drift from the hydrophilic–hydrophobic domain, which gives rise to a hydrosphere region at higher hydration. The calculated structure factors and scattering intensities reproduce features of SANS and SAXS profiles for Dow and Nafion, and confirm the existence of spherical water aggregates in the rod shaped pendant nanostructure of Nafion. The effect of hydration on the mobility of hydronium ions at 300 K in Nafion is insignificant at higher hydration (λ ≥ 9), and trends are in agreement with experimental data. The activation energy of the diffusion of hydronium ions and water molecules in Nafion side chain pendant–water mixtures (14–25 kJ mol−1) validate experimental observations (16–22 kJ mol−1).
Db2 event store

The requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) workloads are unique in the database space. While significant effort has been spent over the last decade rearchitecting OLTP and Analytics workloads for the public cloud, little has been done to rearchitect IoT workloads for the cloud. In this paper we present IBM Db2 Event Store™, a cloud-native database system designed specifically for IoT workloads, which require extremely high-speed ingest, efficient and open data storage, and near real-time analytics. Additionally, by leveraging the Db2 SQL compiler, optimizer and runtime, developed and refined over the last 30 years, we demonstrate that rearchitecting for the public cloud doesn't require rewriting all components. Reusing components that have been built out and optimized for decades dramatically reduced the development effort and immediately provided rich SQL support and excellent run-time query performance.
Effect of Melilotus Officinalis Oil on Knee Joint Pain and Stiffness in the Elderly With Primary Knee Osteoarthritis

Objectives: Osteoarthritis is one of the most common diseases among older people which is one the most important causes of disability and heavy socio-economic burden on the elderly and society. This study aimed to investigate the effect of melilotus officinalis oil on knee joint pain and stiffness among older adults with mild to moderate primary knee osteoarthritis. Methods & Materials: This is a double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial (registration code: IRCT2016082129461N1). Participants were 61 eligible older adults (35 females and 26 males with a mean age of 78±7.79 years) residing in one of the nursing homes in Tehran, Iran who had mild to moderate knee osteoarthritis clinically diagnosed by an orthopedic physician. Then they were assigned randomly into two groups of intervention and control received melilotus officinalis oil and diclofenac gel, respectively, using a randomization table based on balance block randomization. The data were collected using a demographic form and the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) for evaluating knee joint pain and stiffness at baseline, 2 weeks and 4 weeks after the intervention. Collected data were analyzed in SPSS V. 23 software. Results: There was no statistically significant different between the intervention and control groups in terms of sociodemographic variables (age, education, marital status, occupation, smoking, physical activity, chronic illness, and medication) at baseline. Knee pain (F1,58=119.07, P<0.001) and joint stiffness (F 1,58=19.9, P<0.001) reduced significantly in both groups, where the effect size was higher in the intervention group. No considerable side effect reported during the study. Conclusion: Compared to diclofenac gel, melilotus officinalis oil can reduce knee joint pain and stiffness in older people with mild to moderate knee osteoarthritis. Therefore, it is suggested for treatment of people with knee osteoarthritis. Further studies are recommended to investigate the mechanism of melilotus oficinalis oil in reducing knee pain and stiffness and determine its effective dosage.
Measurement of large infinite dilution activity coefficients of nonelectrolytes in water by inert gas stripping and gas chromatography

An inert gas stripping gas chromatography method was described for the determination of infinite dilution activity coefficients (γ 2 ∞) of organic compounds in water. The infinite dilution activity coefficients for 31 compounds including many halogenated and aromatic compounds were measured. In general, the γ 2 ∞ values measured by gas stripping are in very good agreement with γ 2 ∞ values estimated from the inverse solubilities and other experimental measurements
Characteristics of Phosphate Ion Adsorption-Desorption onto Aluminum Oxide Hydroxide for Preventing Eutrophication

Human and industrial activities have recently lead to problems in regard to the eutrofication of isolated bodies of water due to influx of phosphate ions from industrial and domestic wastewater. Various methods have been developed for the removal of phosphate ions. And in particular, adsorption allows efficient and inexpensive recovery of phosphate ions in which the adsorbant and adsorbate are regenerable. In this study, investigations were carried out regarding the production of aluminum oxide hydroxide and granular aluminum oxide hydroxide, the adsorption and desorption capacities of these substances with respect to phosphate ion, and desorption efficiency and phosphate ion recovery levels obtained using sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate. Adsorption and desorption were repeated 50 times in order to evaluate the effectiveness of aluminum oxide hydroxide, and it was determined that the adsorption performance of aluminum oxide hydroxide and granular aluminum oxide hydroxide with respect to phosphate ions is highly relative to aluminum oxide. The quantity of phosphate ions adsorbed was seen to decrease with repeated use of aluminum oxide hydroxide. The adsorption mechanism for phosphate ions onto aluminum oxide is conjectured as involving the presence of active hydroxyl groups contributing to ion exchange at the surface of the aluminum oxide hydroxide, ion exchange with phosphate ions, and the chemical bonding of hydroxyl groups with phosphate ions. It was thus clarified that aluminum oxide hydroxide is suitable for use as an adsorbant for the recovery of phosphate ions. Moreover, the investigations suggested that this material would be useful for preserving phosphate ion resources by recovering phosphate, a cause of eutrophication, as a value-added sodium phosphate product.
Soil Nutrient and Fescue (Festuca spp.) Responses To Compost and Hydroseed on a Disturbed Roadside

Inadequate nutrients and poor soil quality pose challenges for turfgrass establishment on disturbed soils. Compost amendment has been shown to mitigate poor soil quality. This research was conducted to compare surface applications of compost to standard hydroseeding for improving soil chemical properties and turfgrass establishment. Plots established with either hydroseed or compost in spring 2007 were evaluated for soil pH, Mehlich-I extractable K, Mg, Zn, P, total N, organic C, and percent ground cover, fescue coverage and biomass production of tall (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) and chewing's fescue [Festuca rubra L. ssp. fallax (Thuill.) Nyman]. Two years after plot establishment, the compost treatment had significantly increased Mehlich-I extractable soil P, K and Zn. Phosphorus increased 566% in the compost soil but only 17% in the hydroseeded soil. Higher percentages of ground coverage were reported in the compost than the hydroseed treatments with coverage in treatments declining from 2008 to 2009. Although the surface additions of compost initially enhanced the establishment and growth of fescue, vegetation may be limited in the long run by soil conditions in the root zone and competing broadleaf weeds.
Effects of seismogenic width and low-velocity zones on estimating slip-weakening distance from near-fault ground deformation

Fault weakening process controls earthquake rupture propagation and is of great significance to impact the final earthquake size and seismic hazard. Critical slip-weakening distance (${D_c}$) is one of the key parameters, which however is of difficult endeavours to be determined on natural faults, mainly due to its strong trade-off with the fault strength drop. An estimation method of ${D_c}$ proposed by Fukuyama et al. provides a simple and direct reference of ${D_c}$ on real faults from the near-fault ground displacement at the peak of ground velocity (${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$). However, multiple factors may affect the observed near-fault ground velocity and thus need to be considered when estimating ${D_c}. $ In this work we conduct 3-D finite element numerical simulations to examine the effects of finite seismogenic width and near-fault low velocity zones (LVZs) on the results of ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$. In uniform models with constant prescribed ${D_c}$, the derived ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$ values increase with seismogenic width. Furthermore, the scaling between ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$ and final slip in models with a constant ${D_c}$ indicates that the scale-dependent feature of ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$ might not be related to variation in friction properties. With a near-fault LVZ, ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$ values show significant magnification. The width of the LVZ plays a more important role in enlarging ${D_c}$ estimation compared to the depth of the LVZ. Complex wavefields and multiple wiggles introduced by the LVZ could lead to delay pick and then cause large deviation. The value of ${D_c}$ on the fault may be overestimated through ${D_c}^{\prime\prime}$ from limited stations only.
The state of residual stress in TiN films made by physical vapor deposition methods; the state of the art

Existing transmission electron microscope studies indicate that a variety of lattice defects such as dislocation loops, ultramicrocracking, and trapped argon and its precipitation can be present in thin TiN films, where the precise defects observed in a given sample depend on the deposition conditions of the film. There are also changes in texture and grain size as the film thickness increases. A considerable amount of data has also been reported on the lattice parameters, diffraction peak widths (which indicate the strain distribution), and x‐ray diffraction (XRD) residual stress, which are all found to depend strongly on the deposition conditions of TiN films. These properties also change through the thickness of the film. In the present work, existing XRD data and their trends are reviewed. While it is clear that correlations exist between the XRD data and microscopic and microstructural changes, it is not yet possible to relate them to specific microstructural features or lattice defects. The state of.
Genetic Types of the Alkane Gases in Giant Gas Fields with Proven Reserves over 1000×108m3 in China

By the end of 2011, 20 giant gas fields with proven reserves over 1000×108m3 had been discovered in 7 sedimentary basins in China. Based on the molecular and the carbon isotopic compositions of the alkane gases in these gas fields, in combination with the δ13C1-δ13C2-δ13C3 and δ13C1-C1/C2+3 identification diagrams, the origin of the alkane gases in these 20 giant gas fields are discussed: the alkane gases in Sulige, Daniudi, Yulin, Zizhou, Wushenqi, Hechuan, Guang'an, Anyue, Yuanba, Xinchang, Kela2, Dina2, Dongfang1–1and Kelameili giant gas fields are mainly coal-derived; the alkane gases in Tazhong1 and Datianchi giant gas fields are oil-derived; the alkane gases in Tainan giant gas field are bacterial gases; the alkane gases in Jingbian giant gas field are mixed gases mainly composed of coal-derived gases supplemented with a small quantity of oil-derived gases; the alkane gases in Puguang giant gas field are mixed gases mainly composed of oil-derived gases supplemented with a small quantity of coal-derived gases; the alkane gases in Xushen giant gas field are mixed gases mainly composed of abiogenic gases supplemented with a small quantity of coal-derived gases. The study on the genetic types of the alkane gases in these fields is not only of great scientific importance to the gas correlation, gas accumulation research and the optimization of the exploration targets, but also to the acceleration of the Chinese natural gas industry.
Composition of the Essential Oil of Nepeta fissa C.A.Meyer

Abstract Water distilled oil of the herbal parts of Nepeta fissa (Labiatae) was analyzed by GC/MS. Thirty seven compounds representing 95.1% of the oil were identified with caryophyllene oxide (24%) and β-caryophyllene (8.3%) as main constituents.
Retrieval of daytime mesospheric ozone using OSIRIS observations of O2 (a1Δg) emission

Abstract. Improving knowledge of the ozone global distributions in the mesosphere–lower thermosphere (MLT) is a crucial step in understanding the behaviour of the middle atmosphere. However, the concentration of ozone under sunlit conditions in the MLT is often so low that its measurement requires instruments with very high sensitivity. Fortunately, the bright oxygen airglow can serve as a proxy to retrieve the daytime ozone density indirectly, due to the strong connection to ozone photolysis in the Hartley band. The OSIRIS IR imager (hereafter, IRI), one of the instruments on the Odin satellite, routinely measures the oxygen infrared atmospheric band (IRA band) at 1.27 µm. In this paper, we will primarily focus on the detailed description of the steps done for retrieving the calibrated IRA band limb radiance (with <10 % random error), the volume emission rate of O2 (a1Δg) (with <25 % random error) and finally the ozone number density (with <20 % random error). This retrieval technique is applied to a 1-year sample from the IRI dataset. The resulting product is a new ozone dataset with very tight along-track sampling distance (<20 km). The feasibility of the retrieval technique is demonstrated by a comparison of coincident ozone measurements from other instruments aboard the same spacecraft, as well as zonal mean and monthly average comparisons between Odin-OSIRIS (both spectrograph and IRI), Odin-SMR and Envisat-MIPAS. We find that IRI appears to have a positive bias of up to 25 % below 75 km, and up to 50 % in some regions above. We attribute these differences to uncertainty in the IRI calibration as well as uncertainties in the photochemical constants. However, the IRI ozone dataset is consistent with the compared dataset in terms of the overall atmospheric distribution of ozone between 50 and 100 km. If the origin of the bias can be identified before processing the entire dataset, this will be corrected and noted in the dataset description. The retrieval technique described in this paper can be further applied to all the measurements made throughout the 19 year mission, leading to a new, long-term high-resolution ozone dataset in the middle atmosphere.
Rancang Bangun Sistem Informasi Document Managemen System pada LKP ITC-PCB Berbasis WEB Menggunakan UML dan PHP

Dalam suatu lembaga baik swasta maupun pemerintah dalam melakukan kegiatannya tidak terlepas dari kegiatan surat-menyurat, karena surat mempunyai fungsi dan peranan penting dalam saranan pencapaian tujuan dari perusahaan/ instansi yang bersangkutan tidak hanya sebagai alat komunikasi, melainkan sebagai bukti otentik atas kegiatan yang telah dilakukan. Pada LKP ITC-PCB pengelolaan surat masih mengalami beberapa kendala, yaitu tidak adanya database surat, jadi susah dalam hal pencarian surat tersebut jika sewaktu-waktu dibutuhkan Adapun metode penelitian yang saya gunakan menggunakan metode waterfall. Permasalahan yang dikaji dalam penelitian ini adalah tentang membangun Sistem Manajemen Dokumen. Dari hasil penelitian yang saya jalani, banyak manfaat yang saya peroleh diantaranya bertambah wawasan saya tentang membangun sistem manajemen dokumen secara struktur dan terkomputerisasi, serta menambah ilmu untuk dunia kerja kelak yang akan saya jalani nantinya.
Shareholder Litigation and Conservative Accounting: Evidence from Universal Demand Laws

We use the staggered adoption of the Universal Demand Laws (UD Laws) to examine the effect of an exogenous reduction in shareholders' ability to litigate on the extent of accounting conservatism. On average, we find an increase in reporting conservatism post-UD. The increased conservatism is concentrated in firms that contemplate equity issuance, with a high proportion of monitoring investors, and high corporate governance quality. In contrast, firms with specific short-term incentives for aggressive accounting—such as those narrowly beating benchmarks, those with abnormal insider trading, and those likely to violate debt covenants—weakly governed firms, and firms with high ex ante litigation risk decrease reporting conservatism after UD. Our results suggest that the relation between the litigation environment and reporting conservatism is complex and dependent on specific characteristics and unique circumstances of the firms.
Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine fault tolerance

A longstanding vision in distributed systems is to build reliable systems from unreliable components. An enticing formulation of this vision is Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) state machine replication, in which a group of servers collectively act as a correct server even if some of the servers misbehave or malfunction in arbitrary (“Byzantine”) ways. Despite this promise, practitioners hesitate to deploy BFT systems, at least partly because of the perception that BFT must impose high overheads. In this article, we present Zyzzyva, a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost of BFT replication. In Zyzzyva, replicas reply to a client's request without first running an expensive three-phase commit protocol to agree on the order to process requests. Instead, they optimistically adopt the order proposed by a primary server, process the request, and reply immediately to the client. If the primary is faulty, replicas can become temporarily inconsistent with one another, but clients detect inconsistencies, help correct replicas converge on a single total ordering of requests, and only rely on responses that are consistent with this total order. This approach allows Zyzzyva to reduce replication overheads to near their theoretical minima and to achieve throughputs of tens of thousands of requests per second, making BFT replication practical for a broad range of demanding services.
√3-subdivision

A new stationary subdivision scheme is presented which performs slower topological refinement than the usual dyadic split operation. The number of triangles increases in every step by a factor of 3 instead of 4. Applying the subdivision operator twice causes a uniform refinement with tri-section of every original edge (hence the name √3-subdivision) while two dyadic splits would quad-sect every original edge. Besides the finer gradation of the hierarchy levels, the new scheme has several important properties: The stencils for the subdivision rules have minimum size and maximum symmetry. The smoothness of the limit surface is C2 everywhere except for the extraordinary points where it is C1. The convergence analysis of the scheme is presented based on a new general technique which also applies to the analysis of other subdivision schemes. The new splitting operation enables locally adaptive refinement under built-in preservation of the mesh consistency without temporary crack-fixing between neighboring faces from different refinement levels. The size of the surrounding mesh area which is affected by selective refinement is smaller than for the dyadic split operation. We further present a simple extension of the new subdivision scheme which makes it applicable to meshes with boundary and allows us to generate sharp feature lines.
Node2Seq: Towards Trainable Convolutions in Graph Neural Networks

Investigating graph feature learning becomes essentially important with the emergence of graph data in many real-world applications. Several graph neural network approaches are proposed for node feature learning and they generally follow a neighboring information aggregation scheme to learn node features. While great performance has been achieved, the weights learning for different neighboring nodes is still less explored. In this work, we propose a novel graph network layer, known as Node2Seq, to learn node embeddings with explicitly trainable weights for different neighboring nodes. For a target node, our method sorts its neighboring nodes via attention mechanism and then employs 1D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enable explicit weights for information aggregation. In addition, we propose to incorporate non-local information for feature learning in an adaptive manner based on the attention scores. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Node2Seq layer and show that the proposed adaptively non-local information learning can improve the performance of feature learning.