Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Optimal Air-Conditioner On-Off Control Scheme under Extremely Hot Weather Conditions

Being reliant on Air Conditioning (AC) throughout the majority of the year, desert countries with extremely hot weather conditions such as Qatar are facing challenges in lowering weariness cost due to AC On-Off switching while maintaining an adequate level of comfort under a wide-range of ambient temperature variations. To address these challenges, this paper investigates an optimal On-Off control strategy to improve the AC utilization process. To overcome complexities of online optimization, a Elman Neural Networks (NN)-based estimator is proposed to estimate real values of the outdoor temperature, and make off-line optimization available. By looking up the optimum values solved from an off-line optimization scheme, the proposed control solutions can adaptively regulate the indoor temperature regardless of outdoor temperature variations. In addition, a cost function of multiple objectives, which consider both Coefficient of Performance (COP), and AC compressor weariness due to On-Off switching, is designed for the optimization target of minimum cost. Unlike conventional On-Off control methodologies, the proposed On-Off control technique can respond adaptively to match large-range (up to 20 ∘ C) ambient temperature variations while overcoming the drawbacks of long-time online optimization due to heavy computational load. Finally, the Elman NN based outdoor temperature estimator is validated with an acceptable accuracy and various validations for AC control optimization under Qatar’s real outdoor temperature conditions, which include three hot seasons, are conducted and analyzed. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed optimal On-Off control solution.
TEM observation of nitrogen-tunable bcc–bct–fcc transformation of iron-cobalt with added vanadium

We used transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to observe tunable bcc–bct–fcc transformation of FeCo films caused by the addition of auxiliary elements. The crystal structure of the FeCo with added V was bcc, and the transformation of the bcc structure through the bct to fcc was found to depend on the N content (x). TEM observation revealed that bct structure with c/a = 1.12 was obtained for x = 1.7 atomic%, while fcc structure with c/a = 2 was obtained for x = 9.6 atomic%. The c/a-values depended on x, so the bcc–bct–fcc transformation of the FeCoV was tunable by N content. This research was made possible by special preventative measures taken during preparation to avoid compressive stress, which could otherwise induce the bct FeCo lattice of axial ratio c/a > 1.00 to transform to bcc structure. A FeCo coating of thickness 20 nm was therefore deposited directly on a MgO substrate without any other metallic layers.
Comparative Study of Effect of Silver Nitrate Gel and Differentiated Dermal Precursors (BMSCs) on Third Degree Burn in Wistar Rats

Skin is an ectodermal derivative that maintains internal homeostasis of the body. Any damage to the skin like burn injury internal homeostasis is lost, resulting in delayed healing. The aim is to study the histoarchitecture comparative effect of silver nitrate gel, and BMSCs (DDP) on third-degree burns in Wistar rats. A burn wound of size 2.5 cm (length) x 2.5 cm (breadth) x 6 mm (depth) was created using a preheated metal plate on flanks of Wistar rat. Every burn wound was treated with silver nitrate gel (commercially available as silverex), bone marrow differentiated dermal precursors, and monitored for 1, 7, 14, 21 days until wound healing. Wound surface area was measured and compared among groups with histological and gross observations. The healing time was faster in bone marrow differentiated dermal precursors (DDP) group compared to control. Prolonged silver nitrate gel usage heals burn wound with no infection, but silver toxicity was noted. Wound contraction is slower but steady using bone marrow differentiated dermal precursors (DDP) cell when compared to the group treated with silver nitrate gel. The data from this study help use to use bone marrow differentiated dermal precursors (DDP) cells as an alternate and effective way to treat burn wounds.
Struggles and Strategies of Black Women Business Owners in the U.S.

Black women start businesses at a rate above the national average. Yet, a revenue gap persists when compared to businesses owned by Black men and White men and women. Existing explanations for the differences in revenue highlight the lack of experience and limited access to start-up capital that constrain racial and gender minorities and also the type of industries in which they operate. Research specifically examining Black women business owners is very limited. In this article, we explore if Black women business owners’ gender and racial identities pose challenges to running their businesses. We find that, because of their race and gender, Black women business owners contend with unique challenges that many entrepreneurs do not face. In-depth interviews reveal that they confront negative stereotypes held about them and, surprisingly, experience difficulties interacting with Black clients. These entrepreneurs cite navigation strategies that include monitoring self-presentation, adopting standards of excellence, and creating clear professional boundaries. This study suggests that Black women business owners might be spending more time than other business owners navigating challenges specifically linked to their identity, which seems to impact their business directly.
Under-reporting of Adverse Events in the Biomedical Literature

Abstract Purpose To address the under-reporting of research results, with emphasis on the under-reporting/distorted reporting of adverse events in the biomedical research literature. Design/methodology/approach A four-step approach is used: (1) To identify the characteristics of literature that make it adequate to support policy; (2) to show how each of these characteristics becomes degraded to make inadequate literature; (3) to identify incentives to prevent inadequate literature; and (4) to show policy implications of inadequate literature. Findings This review has provided reasons for, and examples of, adverse health effects of myriad substances (1) being under-reported in the premiere biomedical literature, or (2) entering this literature in distorted form. Since there is no way to gauge the extent of this under/distorted-reporting, the quality and credibility of the ‘premiere’ biomedical literature is unknown. Therefore, any types of meta-analyses or scientometric analyses of this literature will have unknown quality and credibility. The most sophisticated scientometric analysis cannot compensate for a highly flawed database. Research limitations The main limitation is in identifying examples of under-reporting. There are many incentives for under-reporting and few dis-incentives. Practical implications Almost all research publications, addressing causes of disease, treatments for disease, diagnoses for disease, scientometrics of disease and health issues, and other aspects of healthcare, build upon previous healthcare-related research published. Many researchers will not have laboratories or other capabilities to replicate or validate the published research, and depend almost completely on the integrity of this literature. If the literature is distorted, then future research can be misguided, and health policy recommendations can be ineffective or worse. Originality/value This review has examined a much wider range of technical and non-technical causes for under-reporting of adverse events in the biomedical literature than previous studies.
A Novel Cooperative HARQ Protocol for Free-Space Optical Broadcasting Systems

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) transmission protocol for broadcasting systems over free space optical (FSO) channels, which is applicable to both incremental redundancy (IR) and chase combining (CC) schemes. In traditional optical HARQ systems, upon receiving a non-acknowledgment (NACK) signal from a given user, the corresponding data packet is retransmitted from the central node to that user. However, in the proposed transmission protocol, called cooperative interuser retransmission protocol (CIRP), the optical users cooperate in the ARQ process. Specifically, instead of relying on the central node, a user who successfully decoded the original data packet and whose distance from the NACK issuing user is smaller than that of the central node, is invited to retransmit this packet to the latter user. This interuser cooperation, in fact, leverages the distance-dependent scintillation effect and path loss, which critically impact FSO channels and degrade the receiver's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as distance increases. We provide a detailed performance analysis of both the proposed and traditional protocols in terms of the achievable average sum rate and the next round probability of success. Our numerical results demonstrate that the former outperforms the latter for both IR and CC schemes under various turbulence conditions as well as in the presence of pointing errors.
Adaptive trust-region algorithms for unconstrained optimization

In this paper, we propose two trust-region algorithms for unconstrained optimization. The trust-region algorithms minimize a model of the objective function within the trust-region, next update the size of the region and then repeat the procedure to find a first-order stationary point for the objective function. The size of the trust-region at each step is very critical to the effectiveness of the algorithm, particularly for large-scale problems, because minimizing the model at each step needs the gradient and the Hessian information of the objective function. Our modified trust-region algorithms are opportunistic in the sense that they explore beyond the trust-region if the boundary of the region prevents the algorithm from accepting a more beneficial point. It occurs when there is a very good agreement between the model and the objective function on the trust-region boundary, and we can find a step outside the trust-region with smaller value of the model while at which the agreement between the model and the objective function remains good. We show that the algorithms are convergent. Initial numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithms are more efficient than the traditional trust-region algorithm for a large majority of problems in the CUTEst suite.
Some issues of nanometals applications in cancer treatment

Nanotechnology and the use of innovative materials, such as nanoparticles, have created a new and effective approach to fight cancer. Several achievements in cancer therapy using metal nanoparticles and challenges facing them are presented in the current review. Cancer therapy requires teamwork with a multidisciplinary approach. It has different levels according to the type of cancer, including chemotherapy (induction, neoadjuvant, adjuvant, consolidation or maintenance chemotherapy), radiotherapy and surgical resection. Nanometals and nanodrugs may be used on the different levels of cancer therapy, especially in chemotherapy. Platinum (Pt)-based drugs are one group of the most effective drugs used for cancer chemotherapy. Gold nanoparticles are the other group of nanometals commonly used in cancer treatment. Although effectiveness of nanometals including gold-, silver-, and iron-based, has been investigated on different cancer cell lines and animal models both in vitro and in vivo, their effectiveness should also be explored from the viewpoints of evidence-based medicine.
Soil pH and Electrical Conductivity: A County Extension Soil Laboratory Manual

This is a minor revision with new authors. Originally published April 1993 by E.A. Hanlon. This manual has been designed as a reference source for UF/IFAS Extension county offices offering soil pH and/ or electrical conductivity tests to their clients. This manual if followed, will assist county faculty in assuring that these laboratory measurements are done correctly with high quality assurance.https://edis.ifas. ufl.edu/ss118
BAF facilitates interphase nuclear membrane repair through recruitment of nuclear transmembrane proteins

Nuclear membrane rupture during interphase occurs in a variety of cell contexts, both healthy and pathological. Membrane ruptures can be rapidly repaired, but these mechanisms are still unclear. Here we show BAF, a nuclear envelope protein that shapes chromatin and recruits membrane proteins in mitosis, also facilitates nuclear membrane repair in interphase, in part through recruitment of the nuclear membrane proteins emerin and LEMD2 to rupture sites. Characterization of GFP-BAF accumulation at nuclear membrane rupture sites confirmed BAF is a fast, accurate, and persistent mark of nucleus rupture whose kinetics are partially dictated by membrane resealing. BAF depletion significantly delayed nuclear membrane repair, with a larger effect on longer ruptures. This phenotype could be rescued by GFP-BAF, but not by a BAF mutant lacking the LEM-protein binding domain. Depletion of the BAF interactors LEMD2 or emerin, and to a lesser extent lamin A/C, increased the duration of nucleus ruptures, consistent with LEM-protein binding being a key function of BAF during membrane repair. Overall our results suggest a model where BAF is critical for timely repair of large ruptures in the nuclear membrane, potentially by facilitating membrane attachment to the rupture site.
Object-Level Memory Allocation and Migration in Hybrid Memory Systems

Hybrid memory systems composed of emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) and DRAM have drawn increasing attention in recent years. To fully exploit the advantages of both NVM and DRAM, a primary goal is to properly place application data on the hybrid memories. Previous studies have focused on page migration schemes to achieve higher performance and energy efficiency. However, those schemes all rely on online page access monitoring (costly), and data migration at the page granularity may cause additional overhead due to DRAM bandwidth contention and maintenance of cache/TLB consistency. In this article, we present Object-level memory Allocation and Migration (OAM) mechanisms for hybrid memory systems. OAM exploits a profiling tool to characterize objects’ memory access patterns at different execution phases of applications, and applies a performance/energy model to direct the initial static memory allocation and runtime dynamic object migration between NVM and DRAM. Based on our newly-developed programming interfaces for hybrid memory systems, application source codes can be automatically transformed via static code instrumentation. We evaluate OAM on an emulated hybrid memory system, and experimental results show that OAM can significantly reduce system energy-delay-product by 61 percent on average compared to a page-interleaving data placement scheme. It can also significantly reduce data migration overhead by 83 and 69 percent compared to the state-of-the-art page migration scheme CLOCK-DWF and 2PP, respectively, while improving application performance by up to 22 and 10 percent.
Generalized FWER control procedures for testing multiple hypotheses

Abstract Most methods for testing multiple hypotheses assume the monotone likelihood ratio (MLR) condition holds. In fact, in some cases, MLR does not hold, and the widely used Bonferroni procedure may be inefficient. In this paper, we aim to improve the Bonferroni procedure without assuming the MLR condition holds. By combining the advantages of the test method constructed according to the Neyman–Pearson lemma and the Bonferroni procedure, we propose two generalized Bonferroni procedures, denoted as GB1 and GB2. Further, we propose to plug the proportion of true null hypotheses in the GB2 procedure to improve power. We numerically compare the proposed methods with existing methods. Simulation results show that the proposed methods perform very close to or significantly better than existing ones; the proposed plug-in procedure performs best among all in terms of power performance. Two real data sets are analyzed with the proposed procedures.
Removal and predation of aril-covered seeds: the case of Afzelia bipindensis (Fabaceae – Detarioidae)

Background and aims – Most tree species with aril-covered seeds are assumed to be dispersed by frugivores. However, the number of studied African rainforest plant species remains low. This study focused on Afzelia bipindensis, an important timber species, which produces seeds partly covered by an aril. Specifically, this study aimed to: (1) identify the dispersers and the predators of A. bipindensis seeds, (2) characterize the role of those dispersers and predators in the regeneration process, and (3) understand the role of the aril in seed germination in relation to the feeding behaviour of the identified dispersers. Methods – The study took place in a Gabonese evergreen rainforest in 2015 and in a Cameroonian semi-deciduous rainforest in 2016 and 2017. We conducted more than 100 hours of direct observations, and used camera traps to monitor animal activities for 3000 hours within the canopy and 10 000 hours on the ground under fruiting trees. Key results – Three rodent taxa (Cricetomys emini, Funisciurus isabella and an undetermined species of Muridae) were mainly observed interacting with the seeds but neither birds nor monkeys were observed. Rodents removed more than 90% of the seeds, after detaching the aril, to probably cache them in burrows or superficial caches. Seeds from which we manually removed the aril (mimicking rodent behaviour) had a higher germination rate.Conclusions – Rodents may play a more important role than expected in the dynamics of tree species producing aril-covered seeds.
Light electric vehicle powertrain: Modeling, simulation, and experimentation for engineering students using PSIM

Electric transport has been gaining more interest and importance in the last years. Moreover, the variety of transport systems driven by an electric motor has also been increased. Therefore, it is very important to provide engineering students with solid and comprehensible knowledge, as well as handly tools, for modeling an electric traction system. So far, this has been a difficult task for undergraduate students due to a variety of subjects involved, such as electric machines, power converters, control systems, and load estimations. This work is intended to provide a detailed and comprehensible description of the analysis, modeling, and implementation of a powertrain of a light utility vehicle using power electronics simulation (PSIM) commercial software in order that the student acquires the required knowledge for analyzing multiple configurations in the powertrain.
Déterminants et évolution de profils de qualité de vie et d’adhésion aux traitements : analyse dans une cohorte de patients transplantés rénaux

En parallele des facteurs cliniques et biologiques, de nombreux determinants psychologiques, dont l’adhesion et la qualite de vie, peuvent influencer la survie des greffons et des patients transplantes. Dans ce contexte notre objectif etait d’etudier l’heterogeneite des profils d’evolution de la qualite de vie et d’adhesion chez les patients transplantes renaux et d’en identifier les determinants. Dans un premier temps, l’etude de la qualite de vie a permis d’identifie deux sous-populations homogenes de patients: une majorite presentaient une qualite de vie semblable a la population generale alors que 40% des patients montraient une qualite de vie degradee associe a une augmentation d’episodes d’anxiete et de faiblesse musculaire. Nous avons pu montrer, dans un deuxieme temps, qu’il existait deux profils d’evolution de l’adhesion : la majorite des patients etaient adherents alors que 15 % des patients presentaient une non-adhesion en constante augmentation, une qualite de vie mentale degradee et de plus nombreux episodes de depression. Enfin, nous presentons dans ce travail un nouvel outil dedie a l'evaluation de l’adhesion aux immunosuppresseurs des patients transplantes francophones. Cette these fournit de nouveaux outils, facile a utiliser precocement ou a distance de la greffe, permettant de detecter les patients presentant une qualite de vie et/ou une adhesion degradee afin de mettre en place, pour ces patients, une prise en charge personnalisee.
Development of the multifunctional rescue robot FUHGA2 and evaluation at the world robot summit 2018

Abstract Robots are needed in rescue activities and the inspection of infrastructure. We developed the rescue robot FUHGA2 so that it has various functions. FUHGA2 has high mobility, with main crawlers covering the body and four sub-crawlers, high dexterity using a long six-axis arm, and high searching ability using various sensors. Furthermore, a novel parallel gripper unit with wire-jamming mechanism is mounted at the tip of the arm, which can change its hardness and fit its shape to an object. Additionally, high Maneuvering is achieved by displaying sensor information to the operator clearly and intuitive operation command design. FUHGA2 won the World Robot Summit 2018 Standard Disaster Robotics Challenge, which is a competition for rescue robots. We achieved high scores in all categories of tasks. In this paper, we describe the development of FUHGA2 and the performance evaluation results from the World Robot Summit 2018. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Micro-structures for morphology guiding and signal recording of neuronal cells: towards an integrated platform

Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto Departamento de Fı́sica e Astronomia MSc. Engineering Physics Micro-structures for morphology guiding and signal recording of neuronal cells: towards an integrated platform by Henrique TEIXEIRA Bioelectronics uses electrical signals to interact with biological systems. Sensors that allow for electrical read-out of important disease markers, and implants/stimulators used for the detection and treatment of pathological cellular activity are only a few examples of what this technology can offer. One of the major advancements in neuroelectronics was the invention of planar multielectrode arrays (MEA), which conferred the possibility of reading neuronal signals without destroying the cell. However, these MEAs are limited to the recordings of extracellular field potentials (FPs) rather than the entire electrophysiological signalling repertoire of the brain. Nevertheless, the enormous advances made over the last 50 years in materials science, microelectronics, and nanoelectronics, have prompted a number of laboratories to merge the advantages of planar MEA technologies (non-evasive and durable) with those of the classical sharp and patch electrodes for intracellular recordings. Unlike extracellular planar electrode-based MEAs, the new generation of three-dimensional (3D) vertical nanoelectrodes are designed to functionally penetrate the plasma membrane of cultured cells and operate in a similar manner to classical intracellular microelectrodes. In parallel, advancements in organic electronics or π-conjugated materials have been extensively explored regarding their use in bioelectronics applications. These materials are soft and flexible in nature, providing a better match with organic tissues and also have the electrical advantage of lower impedance and higher capacitance in comparison to common metals, such as gold. The prototypical material of organic bioelectronics is the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) doped with polystyrene sulfonate (PSS). This material has proved to greatly enhance the recording quality and the coupling between electrodes and neuron cells, by just applying a coating of it in microelectrodes. In the present work we investigate an approach to tailor the fabrication of mushroom-shaped PEDOT:PSS microelectrodes and study their impact and performance. At the same time, we also explored the possibility of reproducing a common microfluidic design and a novel one in a clean-room environment through the use of a Direct Write System (DWS) for practical and economical reproducibility. UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO