Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The structural deficit of the Olympics and the World Cup: Comparing costs against revenues over time

The Olympic Games and the Football World Cups are among the most expensive projects in the world. While available theoretical explanations suggest that the revenues of mega-events are overestimated and the costs underestimated, there is no comprehensive empirical study on whether costs exceed revenues. Based on a custom-built database from public sources, this article compares the revenues and costs of the Olympic Games and World Cups between 1964 and 2018 (N = 43), together totalling close to USD 70 billion in revenues and more than USD 120 billion in costs. It finds that costs exceeded revenues in most cases: more than four out of five Olympics and World Cups ran a deficit. The average return-on-investment for an event was negative (– 38%), with mean costs of USD 2.8 billion exceeding mean revenues of USD 1.7 billion per event. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2002 World Cup in Japan/South Korea recorded the highest absolute deficits. The Summer Olympics 1984 in Los Angeles, the Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver and the 2018 World Cup in Russia are among the few events that posted a surplus. The article concludes that the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup suffer from a structural deficit and could not exist without external subsidies. This finding urges a re-evaluation of these events as loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability.
Archimede solar energy molten salt parabolic trough demo plant: Improvements and second year of operation

Since July 2013, the first stand-alone Molten Salt Parabolic Trough (MSPT) demo plant, which was built in collaboration with Archimede Solar Energy and Chiyoda Corporation, is in operation, located adjacent to the Archimede Solar Energy (ASE) manufacturing plant in Massa Martana (Italy). During the two year’s operating time frame, the management of the demo plant has shown that MSPT technology is a suitable and reliable option.Several O&M procedures and tests have been performed, as Heat Loss and Minimum Flow Test, with remarkable results confirming that this technology is ready to be extended to standard size CSP plant, if the plant design takes into account molten salt peculiarities.Additionally, the plant has been equipped on fall 2014 with a Steam Generator system by Chiyoda Corporation, in order to test even this important MSPT plant subsystem and to extend the solar field active time, overcoming the previous lack of an adequate thermal load.Here, a description of the plant improvements and the overa.
The regulation of electro-optical properties of the polymer dispersed liquid crystal films doped ZnO whiskers under applied pre-orientation voltage

ABSTRACT This study demonstrates a simple and effective method for the fabrication of PDLC films with low driving voltage by applying a pre-orientation voltage during the photoinitiated polymerisation process. The results indicated that the electro-optical performances of PDLC films have been regulated successfully with the pre-orientation voltage method, in which the voltage could pre-orient the LC molecules and change the interface between the LC molecules and the polymer matrix. By manipulating the proportion of liquid crystal and polymer monomers and introducing ZnO whiskers as the dopant, the driving voltage was dramatically reduced and the sample could be fully driven by an electric field with a voltage of 32 V below the safe voltage. The results indicated that the polymer meshes were broadened by the addition of ZnO whiskers due to their excellent UV-absorbing properties that result in a slower polymerisation rate, while the contrast ratio could maintain a good value of 31. It has been found that both application of pre-orientation voltage and doped ZnO whiskers can optimise the electro-optical performance of the PDLC and reduce the driving voltage. Therefore, this experiment is expected to provide certain research value to fabricate the low-driven PDLC films for practical applications. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Increasing the Carrying Capacity of the Solid-Body Rail Freight Car

In paper has been carried out to develop a load-bearing floor to increase the carrying capacity of the solid-body rail freight car. An analysis of the structures made it possible to formulate the hypothesis that the load-bearing floor of the solid-body rail freight car should have a different cross-sectional shape. As a result, the load-bearing floor of the solid-body rail freight car was proposed, making it possible to reduce the consumption of materials by 1 to 2%. The maximum equivalent stresses (according to Mises) of the proposed load-bearing floor of the solid-body rail freight car in static analysis are 210.7 MPa, which is less than the yield limit of simple carbon steel. The proposed technical solution allows one to increase the carrying capacity of the solid-body rail freight car by 1.4–1.7 tons. The proposed technical solutions for the future operating conditions of rail freight cars make it possible to reduce the number of units in a train by 1–2 units while maintaining the gross weight of the train.
Revisiting Polyglot Persistence: From Principles to Practice

—To cope with the rapid advancements in information technologies, many database systems have been developed in the last decade to satisfy various data storage requirements, such as NoSQL databases. In many cases, using a single database system cannot be an option because of the limitations posed on the functionalities of the software application. Therefore, applications may use multiple distributed storage databases that complement each other to satisfy the conﬂicting requirements. Such applications that are called polyglot persistent applications. However, the practical implementation of polyglot persistence and its complexities have not been studied enough. In this paper, the most recent studies related to polyglot persistence are reviewed. Database systems are classiﬁed based on their data storage model, and their use cases are discussed. The principles of polyglot persistence and its challenges are expounded. The implementation architectures of polyglot persistence applications are categorized into Application-coordinated Polyglot Persistence, Service-oriented Polyglot Persistence, Polyglot- Persistence-as-a-Service, and Multi-models Databases. An analysis of the issues related to each architecture is presented. In light of the study ﬁndings, a practical polyglot persistence implantation strategy is proposed. The outcomes of this work can help design future polyglot persistence applications and inﬂuence future research on how to resolve the complexity involved in polyglot persistence solutions.
SMART REAL TIME EMBEDDED ARDUINO BASED DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM

In this paper, an effort has been made to design and develop a smart real time embedded Arduino based data logger for indoor and outdoor environment. The present work has been concentrated to environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity and solar insolation. The data logger is proposed to be developed with the use of Arduino Uno based on ATmega328. The Arduino Microcontroller board is used which has inbuilt ADC and other peripheral circuitry necessary for operation. The physical parameter is sensed by the sensors and is converted into analog signal. This analog signal is fed to the Arduino board ADC pins which is then converted in to an equivalent digital quantity and is further processed in the microcontroller. The raw digital signal or processed signal out of microcontroller may be displayed on the LCD display or it’s saved in a database or even at the same time this data is sent to computer through the USB serial port. The serial port data is then accessed and is imported in Microsoft excel for computation and graphical representation.
Product Life Cycle, Technology Life Cycle and Market Life Cycle: Similarities, Differences and Applications

The conference paper is a literature review for investigating three concepts: Product Life Cycle, Technology Life Cycle and Market Life Cycle. The aim of the research and comparing the three life cycles is promoting efficiency of strategic decision making in product development area. The concepts are exploring mostly based on the high tech industry specifications. Product Life Cycle illustrate the fluctuations of the product sales revenue over time, from the beginning of its design to the last phase of its ramp down. While, Technology Life Cycle demonstrates the cumulative product development projects of a technology or technology performance over time, which could represent the technology maturity level in various periods of time. Subsequently, Market Life Cycle represents appearance and developments of various market segments to market area of a technology. Apparently, each Technology life Cycle could contain various Product life cycles and each market life cycle could include different technology and product life cycles. Therefore market life cycle has more comprehensive view point and product life cycle is more detailed with specific product centric insight. But outcomes of each life cycle concept are different and making decision based on all of them together can lead to more optimized results.
A Novel Code Completion Strategy

—Programmers rely on a multitude of techniques to speed up the development process. Among these techniques is code completion, a productivity improvement technique widely used by developers to explore APIs and automatically complete a word being typed by providing a progressively reﬁned list of candidate words (or recommendations). Still called auto-completion, it reduces incorrect calls to APIs. Several techniques have been developed to obtain the list of candidates. Some methods use the history of the code, others neural networks or artiﬁcial intelligence; some exploit the program’s structure through AST. Often the recommendation list is long, and ﬁnding suitable candidates comes at a cost. In this work, we propose a strategy that improves the accuracy of recommendation list offered by code completion. We present a sorting approach based on the popularity and importance of the elements (suggestions) of the list by analyzing the usage data of classes, methods, and variables of projects in the same development environment. We implemented our sorting strategy in Pharo (IDE and language), an immersive modern programming environment to show its applicability. The empirical evaluation results of this strategy show that our approach improves the quality of the suggestions.
Velocity Variability and Performance in Backstroke in Elite and Good-Level Swimmers

Backstroke swimming, a cyclic and continuous movement, displays a repeating structure due to the repeated action of the limb, presenting similar (but not identical) cycles. Some variability is generated by instabilities, but this may play a functional role in the human performance, allowing individual adaptations to constraints. The current study examined the role of velocity variability in backstroke performance, hypothesizing that this variable is associated with swimmers’ performance. Sixteen elite and fifteen good-level swimmers were video recorded in the sagittal plane when performing 25 m backstroke at maximal intensity in order to determine hip velocity and mean velocity, stroke rate, stroke length and indexes of coordination/synchronization. Lyapunov maximal exponent and sample entropy were also calculated for successive cycles. The elite swimmers’ performances were more unstable (0.1742 ± 0.1131 versus 0.0831 ± 0.0042, p < 0.001) and complex (0.9222 ± 0.4559 versus 0.3821 ± 0.3096, p < 0.001) than their good-level counterparts, but intracycle velocity variation did not differ (11.98 ± 3.47 versus 12.03 ± 3.16%, p > 0.05). Direct relationships were observed between mean velocity and stability (r = 0.40, p = 0.03), as well as with complexity (r = 0.53, p = 0.002), with intracycle velocity variation and complexity also being related (r = 0.38, p = 0.04). Backstroke performance is associated with velocity variability, with elite swimmers being able to control it through several adaptations, overcoming the high drag and inertia.
Fuzzy model-based reconstruction of paleovegetation in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT We introduce a new method to compute plant distribution in Ethiopia under paleoclimatic conditions using fuzzy logic. Using a published map of the potential vegetation for Ethiopia we decipher the boundary conditions for the main vegetation units shown, reflecting modern climatic conditions for temperature and precipitation in this region. Fuzzy logic using these climatic values on a GIS platform then derived the computational map of the potential vegetation. Comparing it with the original map shows a general correspondence of about 90%. By changing the underlying climate parameters, we then used this model for hypothetical paleoclimatic conditions to simulate the vegetational response on these changed climate settings. Finally, vegetational response maps for Ethiopia are presented for two scenarios: (i) a colder and drier condition (such as the Last Glacial Maximum) and (ii) a warmer and wetter condition (such as the last interglacial) than today.
Deep Multi-Modal Network Based Automated Depression Severity Estimation

Depression is a severe mental illness that impairs a person's capacity to function normally in personal and professional life. The assessment of depression usually requires a comprehensive examination by an expert professional. Recently, machine learning-based automatic depression assessment has received considerable attention for a reliable and efficient depression diagnosis. Various techniques for automated depression detection were developed; however, certain concerns still need to be investigated. In this work, we propose a novel deep multi-modal framework that effectively utilizes facial and verbal cues for an automated depression assessment. Specifically, we first partition the audio and video data into fixed-length segments. Then, these segments are fed into the Spatio-Temporal Networks as input, which captures both spatial and temporal features as well as assigns higher weights to the features that contribute most. In addition, Volume Local Directional Structural Pattern (VLDSP) based dynamic feature descriptor is introduced to extract the facial dynamics by encoding the structural aspects. Afterwards, we employ the Temporal Attentive Pooling (TAP) approach to summarize the segment-level features for audio and video data. Finally, the multi-modal factorized bilinear pooling (MFB) strategy is applied to fuse the multi-modal features effectively. An extensive experimental study reveals that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Use of Mobile Device Wireless Signals to Determine Transit Route-Level Passenger Origin–Destination Flows: Methodology and Empirical Evaluation

Directly observing stop-to-stop origin–destination (O-D) flows for transit passengers by onboard surveys is time-consuming and costly. While the use of automatic passenger count (APC) and automatic fare collection data to infer transit O-D flows has undergone important developments lately, the value of directly observing O-D movements remains of interest in light of inference errors. The increasing use of personal mobile devices and the corresponding reliance on wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) communications in public spaces allow for the prospect of using the detected anonymous Wi-Fi signals of mobile devices carried by transit passengers to extract O-D movements. An empirical study is conducted when O-D movements determined directly from Wi-Fi signal data and from a combination of Wi-Fi and APC data are compared to extensive, directly observed high-fidelity ground truth data obtained from an onboard survey. While O-D flows determined directly from the Wi-Fi data for a specific bus trip do not correspond well to the ground truth flows, the results demonstrate the promise of using Wi-Fi signal data for O-D flow determination when the data are aggregated across multiple bus trips for a time-of-day period, especially when used in conjunction with APC data.
Robust Adaptive Resonant Controller for PMSM Speed Regulation Considering Uncertain Periodic and Aperiodic Disturbances

This article studies a robust adaptive resonant controller (RARC) for the speed loop of permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drives to attenuate periodic speed fluctuation of uncertain frequency. The conventional adaptive resonant controller is susceptible to the aperiodic disturbances (e.g., load torque, parameter variation, and friction torque), so it has poor robustness to the aperiodic disturbance. To solve this problem, a linear extended state observer is applied to estimate the aperiodic disturbances, and then the estimated disturbances are adapted to the adaptive resonant controller to enhance its robustness. Thus, the proposed scheme can suppress the uncertain periodic and aperiodic disturbances simultaneously. Also, the stability of the closed-loop system with the proposed scheme is analyzed by the singular perturbation theory and the averaging theorem, which can guide the tuning of control parameters. Therefore, even if there exist aperiodic disturbances, the studied RARC can also stably operate to suppress the periodic disturbance of uncertain frequency. The effectiveness of the studied RARC is validated on a 2.2-kW PMSM drive platform.
Coherent method for ground-moving target indication and velocity estimation using Hough transform

In this study, a novel algorithm for detecting the ground-moving targets and estimating their motion parameters is proposed. Based on the fact that clutter has a certain phase pattern, clutter cancellation is accomplished using a phase modification and finite impulse response filtering. Then a type of coherent Hough transform is utilised to estimate the moving target velocity. By employing the coherent Hough transform, the proposed algorithm leads to the significant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-clutter ratio improvement in comparison with similar previous Hough- or Radon-based ground-moving target indication and velocity estimation methods. In fact, uncorrelated noise samples have random phases that cancel each other, therefore, a noticeable SNR improvement would be achieved. Moving target detection is done by conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) techniques over different range gates.
Transformer-based Models for Arabic Online Handwriting Recognition

—Transformer neural networks have increasingly be- come the neural network design of choice, having recently been shown to outperform state-of-the-art end-to-end (E2E) recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Transformers utilize a self-attention mechanism to relate input frames and extract more expressive sequence representations. Transformers also provide parallelism computation and the ability to capture long dependencies in contexts over RNNs. This work introduces a transformer-based model for the online handwriting recognition (OnHWR) task. As the transformer follows encoder-decoder architecture, we investigated the self-attention encoder (SAE) with two different decoders: a self-attention decoder (SAD) and a connectionist temporal classiﬁcation (CTC) decoder. The proposed models can recognize complete sentences without the need to integrate with external language modules. We tested our proposed mod- els against two Arabic online handwriting datasets: Online-KHATT and CHAW. On evaluation, SAE-SAD architecture per- formed better than SAE-CTC architecture. The SAE-SAD model achieved a 5% character error rate (CER) and an 18%word error rate (WER) against the CHAW dataset, and a 22% CER and a 56% WER against the Online-KHATT dataset. The SAE-SAD model showed signiﬁcant improvements over existing models of the Arabic OnHWR.
THE EFFECT OF SPIRITUAL EMOTIONAL FREEDOM TECHNIQUE (SEFT) ON ANXIETY DURING THE ACTIVE PHASE I LABOR

Anxiety often occurs in maternity mothers and not being treated will have an impact on the mother's physical and psychological. As many as 9% of mothers who experience anxiety will increase pain and result in a long labor process. Therefore, it is necessary to take action by the midwife to control anxiety so that the delivery process runs smoothly. SEFT is a psycho-religious therapy that can reduce maternal anxiety without causing side effects. To determine the effect of SEFT on anxiety in maternity mothers during the active phase I. This is pre-experimental research with one group pre-post-test design. This study used purposive sampling. The statistical test used the dependent t-test. The average anxiety score before SEFT therapy was 24.44, with a minimum score was 20 and a maximum score was 29. The average anxiety score after SEFT therapy was 19.06, with a minimum score was 14 and a maximum score was 25. The results of the dependent t-test showed a p-value 0.000 (0.05) which means that there is a difference in the average anxiety score before and after the application of SEFT. There is an effect of the Spiritual Emotional Freedom Technique (SEFT) on reducing maternal anxiety scores during the Active Phase I in the Dempet Health Center Work Area. The application of SEFT can increase the relaxation that can be obtained from conditions of solemnity, sincerity, resignation, confidence, and gratitude so that mothers can produce responses that can reduce anxiety during the delivery process.
Mechanical characteristics analysis of the orthotropic steel deck in heavy-haul railway bridges

Abstract This paper aims to assess the mechanical characteristics of the orthotropic steel deck (OSD) in heavy-haul railway bridges. Taking the Dongting Lake Bridge as an example, to simulate the transfer effect of the track structure and get mechanical characteristics of the OSD under the service load, the refined segmental finite element model (FEM) of the OSD in a heavy-haul railway bridge was established. Moreover, the Chinese C80 heavy-haul train (the C80) was selected as the applied load to make the analysis results close to the actual situation. And then, the stress influence lines of critical components in OSD were analyzed. Notches at diaphragms of the OSD are more likely to produce stress concentration. Due to the dense distribution and high stiffness of the longitudinal ribs of OSD, the final load influence range of OSD is limited. Since the T-shaped longitudinal ribs (T-Ribs) are located under the position of each rail, and its stiffness is greater than the adjacent U-shaped longitudinal ribs (U-Ribs), so that the T-Ribs are important load-bearing components of the OSD in heavy-haul railway bridges. Furthermore, the influences of the stiffness ratio of T-Rib to U-Rib on the mechanical characteristics of the OSD were analyzed.