Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Context dependence in the symbiosis between Dictyostelium discoideum and Paraburkholderia

Symbiotic interactions change with environmental context. Measuring these context-dependent effects in hosts and symbionts is critical to determining the nature of symbiotic interactions. We investigated context-dependence in the symbiosis between social amoeba hosts and their inedible Paraburkholderia bacterial symbionts, where the context is the abundance of host food bacteria. Paraburkholderia have been shown to harm hosts dispersed to food-rich environments, but aid hosts dispersed to food-poor environments by allowing hosts to carry food bacteria. Through measuring symbiont density and host spore production, we show that this food context matters in three other ways. First, it matters for symbionts, who suffer a greater cost from competition with food bacteria in the food-rich context. Second, it matters for host-symbiont conflict, changing how symbiont density negatively impacts host spore production. Third, data-based simulations show that symbiosis often provides a long-term fitness advantage for hosts after rounds of growth and dispersal in variable food-contexts, especially when conditions are harsh with little food. These results show how food context can have many consequences for the Dictyostelium-Paraburkholderia symbiosis and that both sides can frequently benefit. Impact Statement Many organisms form symbiotic relationships with other species. These symbioses often exhibit context-dependence, where the sign or magnitude of one partner’s effect on the other will change in different environments. Context-dependent effects make it difficult to assign interactions to categories like mutualisms or antagonisms because they involve both benefits and costs depending on the environment. However, in some cases, accounting for context-dependence can clarify an interaction so that it more easily fits a mutualism or antagonism. We investigated context-dependence using the symbiosis between Dictyostelium discoideum and two symbiotic Paraburkholderia species. In this symbiosis, Paraburkholderia bacteria allow hosts to carry food bacteria to food-poor contexts, where hosts rarely survive without food, but reduce host fitness in the more hospitable food-rich contexts. The effect of food context on Paraburkholderia symbionts is unknown. We show that Paraburkholderia symbionts are also affected by this context, through facing reduced competition after being dispersed by hosts to food-poor contexts. We also identify a new way that symbionts affect hosts, where symbiont density reduces host fitness, but less so in food-poor contexts. Finally, we use simulations to show that infected hosts benefit in the long-term across variable food contexts, especially in the harshest environments with little food. These results show that context-dependence in symbiosis can have many consequences for hosts and symbionts, though in general for D. discoideum and Paraburkholderia, both are likely to benefit.
Report on Lightweight Cryptography

NIST-approved cryptographic standards were designed to perform well on general-purpose computers. In recent years, there has been increased deployment of small computing devices that have limited resources with which to implement cryptography. When current NIST-approved algorithms can be engineered to fit into the limited resources of constrained environments, their performance may not be acceptable. For these reasons, NIST started a lightweight cryptography project that was tasked with learning more about the issues and developing a strategy for the standardization of lightweight cryptographic algorithms. This report provides an overview of the lightweight cryptography project at NIST, and describes plans for the standardization of lightweight cryptographic algorithms.
The Role of Work-Life Balance and Job Satisfaction as Predictors of Organizational Commitment

AbstractMuch of the research on organizational commitment has generated findings that organizational commitment considers to predict individual performance. The purpose of the study is to examine the factors that affect organizational commitment, namely work-life balance and job satisfaction. The study was conducted at PT. PLN Indonesia, and mainly utilized quantitative data (from questionnaires). The sample for the study consisted of 210 permanent employees of PT. PLN. Path analysis was used to find out the relationship among variables. The results showed, there was a positive effect of job satisfaction on organizational commitment; a negative effect work-life balance on organizational commitment; a positive effect of work-life balance on job satisfaction; a positive effect of work-life balance on organizational commitment through job satisfaction. This study proposed some recommendations tostrong indicators that have a high contribution to the organizational commitment in order to improve employees' organizational commitment. Keywords: organizational commitment, job satisfaction, work-life balance, individual performancePeran Kesimbangan Pekerjaan – Kehidupan Pribadi dan Kepuasan Kerja sebagai Prediktor Komitmen terhadap Organisasi pada Perusahaan Publik AbstrakBanyak penelitian berkaitan dengan komitmen organisasi menunjukkan bahwa komitmen organisasi diyakini memprediksi kinerja individu. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengkaji faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi komitmen organisasi yaitu work-life balance dan kepuasan kerja. Penelitian dilakukan di PT. PLN Indonesia, dan menggunakan data kuantitatif (dari kuesioner). Sampel penelitian terdiri dari 210 karyawan tetap PT. PLN. Analisis jalur digunakan untuk mengetahui hubungan antar variabel. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan, terdapat pengaruh positif kepuasan kerja terhadap komitmen organisasi; pengaruh negatif work-life balance terhadap komitmen organisasi; pengaruh positif work-life balance terhadap kepuasan kerja; pengaruh positif work-life balance terhadap komitmen organisasi melalui kepuasan kerja. Penelitian ini mengusulkan beberapa rekomendasi indikator kuat yang memiliki kontribusi tinggi terhadap komitmen organisasi dalam rangka meningkatkan komitmen organisasi karyawan. Kata kunci: komitmen terhadap organisasi, kepuasan kerja, keseimbangan Pekerjaan-Kehidupan Pribadi, kinerja individu
Effect of Intermediate Elastic Support on Vibration of Functionally Graded Euler-Bernoulli Beams Excited by a Moving Point Load

The effect of intermediate elastic support on the vibration of functionally graded Euler-Bernoulli beams excited by a moving point load is studied. The material properties of the beams are assumed to vary in the thickness direction of the beams by a power function. Governing equations of motion that take into account the shift in the physically neutral surface position, are constructed using Hamilton′s principle. A finite element model is developed and employed in computing the dynamic response of the beams. The influence of the stiffness and position of the elastic support on the dynamic characteristics of the FGM beams is examined and highlighted.
Traffic-GGNN: Predicting Traffic Flow via Attentional Spatial-Temporal Gated Graph Neural Networks

Recent spatial-temporal graph-based deep learning methods for Traffic Flow Prediction (TFP) problems have shown superior performance in modeling higher-level spatial interactions and temporal correlations. However, most of these methods suffer from post-fusion efficiency difficulty caused by separate explorations of the spatial communications and the temporal dependencies, which could result in delayed and biased predictions. To address that, we propose a Traffic Gated Graph Neural Networks (Traffic-GGNN) for real-time-fused spatial-temporal representation modeling. Firstly, we adopt bidirectional message passing to capture the location-wise spatial interactions. Secondly, we apply a GRU-based module to explore and aggregate the spatial interactions with the temporal correlations in a real-time fusion way. Lastly, we introduce a self-attention mechanism to reweight the location-based importance and produce the final prediction. Moreover, our proposed model allows end-to-end training thus it is easy to scale to diverse types of traffic datasets and yield better efficiency and effectiveness on three real-world datasets (SZ-taxi, Los-loop, and PEMS-BAY).
Upper Cretaceous-Paleocene Unconventional Oil Shales in Egypt and Jordan: Insights into Organic Geochemistry

Abstract The present paper investigates the unconventional hydrocarbon potential and characteristics of Campanian–Paleocene oil shales at five outcrop sections in central Egypt and Jordan. One-hundred and seven outcrop samples were analyzed for their content of total organic carbon and total sulfur. Twenty-four samples were selected for further geochemical treatment, including Rock-Eval pyrolysis, and six samples were subjected to molecular analyses using gas Chromatography (GC) and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). The distribution of aliphatic hydrocarbon biomarkers indicated that most of the organic matter in the studied samples had a marine origin under anoxic to suboxic conditions. The results indicated that the upper Campanian Duwi Formation in the Quseir area of central Egypt and the Maastrichtian-Paleocene Muwaqqar Chalk Marl (MCM) Formation in the Lajjun area of central Jordan had a relatively high hydrocarbon generating potential with a TOC content of up to 20%wt of immature Type I/II kerogen. Biomarker studies of the investigated formations revealed that the origin of the organic matter is marine algae with a minor contribution of bacterial biomass. The terrigenous/aquatic ratio (TAR) indicated the marine origin of the Jordanian organic matter (MCM and Al-Hisa Phosphorite Formation formations). By contrast, the Duwi Formation in Egypt and the Amman silicified limestone Formation in the Umm Qais section of Jordan showed that these localities were affected by a more terrigenous influx to the principal marine organic matter compared with other rock units. In addition, in the Abu Tartur section the Duwi Formation showed a significant microbial reworking of organic matter reducing the actual amount of organic matter and its hydrocarbon generating potentiality. Clear correlations between nature and the preservation of organic matter is noticed, where the high organic matter mainly occurs in regional paleo-upwelling areas, strongly related to an increase in marine phytoplanktonic/algal and bacterial productivity.
LCCCRN: robust deep learning-based speech enhancement

Deep learning-based speech enhancement methods make use of their nonlinearity properties to estimate the speech and noise signals, especially the nonstationary noise. DCCRN, in particular, achieves state-of-the-art performance on speech intelligibility. However, the nonlinear property also causes concern about the robustness of the method. Novel and unexpected noises can be generated if the noisy input speech is beyond the operation condition of the method. In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework called LDCCRN, which integrates a traditional speech enhancement method LogMMSE-EM and DCCRN. The proposed framework leverages the strength of both approaches to improve the robustness in speech enhancement. While the DCCRN continues to remove the nonstationary noise in the speech, the novel noises generated by DCCRN, if any, are effectively suppressed by LogMMSE-EM. As shown in our experimental results, the proposed method achieves better performance over the traditional approaches measured with standard evaluation methods.
A night pavement crack detection method based on image‐to‐image translation

Deep learning provides an efficient automated method for pavement condition surveys, but the datasets used for this model are usually images taken in good lighting conditions. If images are taken at night, this model cannot work effectively. This paper proposes a method for normalizing pavement images at night, which includes three main steps. First, the image feature point detection and matching method is used to process images taken during the day and night. Then, paired images of pavement during the day and night are obtained. Second, with the help of the image‐to‐image translation model, those paired images are used for training, and the best model for converting night images into day images is selected. Third, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on VGGNet is constructed, and pavement images taken during the day are used for training. After that, six types of images are used and tested separately, namely, those taken during the day and the night, converted by the proposed method and converted by traditional methods. As evaluated by various evaluation indices and visualization methods, the detection performance of the CNN model can be significantly improved by using the proposed method of converted night‐to‐day images.
Research on Low-Frequency Noise Control of Automobiles Based on Acoustic Metamaterial

With the transformation of the trend of vehicle electrification, the overall noise level in the vehicle is gradually reduced. The problem of low-frequency noise in the vehicle, which was previously ignored, is becoming more and more prominent. To solve the vehicle low-frequency noise problem, a combination of real-vehicle tests and simulation analysis is carried out. During the test, the driver and passengers feel that there is a relatively obvious low-frequency roar noise in the car, which results from the structural radiation noise of the trunk door vibration. Therefore, to solve this problem, we design an acoustic metamaterial with lightweight and miniaturized features based on the local resonance principle of phononic crystals. Firstly, the selection of the resonant unit configuration and the design of the band gap are implemented. Then, the layout planning of the whole vehicle, the layout of the resonance unit and the design of the base frame are implemented. The actual vehicle test results show that: after attaching the designed acoustic metamaterial, the low-frequency noise sound pressure levels in the front and rear of the vehicle were reduced by 2.0 dB (A) and 2.3 dB (A), respectively, meanwhile, the interior noise sound quality was improved. The sound pressure level at the driver’s right ear in the car has an abnormal peak of around 35Hz. In addition, the driver and passengers feel that there is a relatively obvious low-frequency roar noise in the car, and through low-pass filtering of the collected signals, it is confirmed that the peak frequency is the main cause of the low-frequency roar in the car. The low-frequency steady-state noise of the car is generally considered to be the low-frequency vibration of the body panel and the radiation occurs. Through the finite element simulation analysis (Grid Participation Analysis) of the abnormal peak frequency, the results show that the low-frequency roar is caused by the low-frequency vibration of the tailgate sheet metal, and the problem peak frequency is not coupled with the acoustic cavity mode. Facing the problem of the low-frequency roar radiated into the car by the vibration of the tailgate sheet metal parts, based on the local resonance band gap theory, we developed a design to suppress the 35 Hz vibration of the tailgate sheet metal parts and meet the characteristics of lightweight and miniaturization. By attaching the acoustic metamaterial to the tailgate and performing CAE simulation of the whole vehicle, it is determined that the structure can indeed reduce the 35 Hz noise in the car and the peak value of the tailgate sheet metal vibration.
Module intervention to improve involvement and practices of fathers towards infant and young child feeding (IYCF) in Coastal South India - a randomized controlled trial

Background: Overall child health depends on nutrition and its related practices. At the family level, responsibility of child feeding lies with both parents. There is no uniform and systematic way to determine and assess the practices of fathers in infant and young child feeding (IYCF). Also, there is a paucity of evidence related to interventions for fathers in improving their practices and involvement in the feeding of their infant or young child (aged less than two years). Methods: This was a community-based randomized control trial, conducted among 120 fathers with infants and/or young children in Dakshina Kannada District of Karnataka. Fathers with poor level of involvement and practices towards IYCF, during the initial assessment, were included as the study participants. For the intervention, a module in the flipchart format was developed. Simple randomization technique was used to allot the participants into two groups - intervention and control. Participants in the intervention group received module intervention, in addition to the care which they received routinely, and the control group received only routine care. The participants in the intervention group were paid a monthly visit to implement the module, for six months. The post-intervention assessment was done at the end of 6 months. Results: A total of 117 participants provided post-intervention data. The mean age was 34.7 (+/- 5.48) years in the intervention group and 34.36 years (+/- 5.26) in the control group. The intervention group showed significantly higher improvement in knowledge, attitude, and practice components at 6 months (p<0.05), in both unadjusted and adjusted models. Conclusions: The extent of increase in practice and involvement in child feeding was clearly higher among the intervention group. The module developed was successful in improving the practices of fathers in feeding their infants and young children. Clinical Trials Registry India: CTRI/2017/06/008936 (29/06/2017)
Self-Consistent Parameterization of DNA Residues for the Non-Polarizable AMBER Force Fields

Fixed-charge (non-polarizable) forcefields are accurate and computationally efficient tools for modeling the molecular dynamics of nucleic acid polymers, particularly DNA, well into the µs timescale. The continued utility of these forcefields depends in part on expanding the residue set in step with advancing nucleic acid chemistry and biology. A key step in parameterizing new residues is charge derivation which is self-consistent with the existing residues. As atomic charges are derived by fitting against molecular electrostatic potentials, appropriate structural models are critical. Benchmarking against the existing charge set used in current AMBER nucleic acid forcefields, we report that quantum mechanical models of deoxynucleosides, even at a high level of theory, are not optimal structures for charge derivation. Instead, structures from molecular mechanics minimization yield charges with up to 6-fold lower RMS deviation from the published values, due to the choice of such an approach in the derivation of the original charge set. We present a contemporary protocol for rendering self-consistent charges as well as optimized charges for a panel of nine non-canonical residues that will permit comparison with literature as well as studying the dynamics of novel DNA polymers.
Fault Current Management in Power Systems using Inverter Based Distributed Generators

Distributed generator (DG) connection to power systems has attained special attention in recent years because it provides a number of operational and economic benefits for both utilities and customers. On the downside, the connection of many deregulated power generation units introduces new challenges to utility sectors. One of the most critical drawbacks of DG installations in power systems can be observed during a fault, when the additional DG fault current violates the original settings of protection systems. Protective devices installed in the system are designed based on the fault current analysis performed for the original system without DGs. When DGs are added, the current seen by protective devices will be different from the values originally specified. The change in the level of fault currents may alter the operation time of protective devices and disturb the coordination between primary and secondary protective devices. Consequently, serious protection problems may occur in the presence of DGs. On the other hand, many types of DGs that produce a dc voltage or a variable ac voltage require power electronic (PE) interfaces in order to connect to the power system. While these PE interfaces are used to control the active and reactive power injected to the system during normal operation, they are usually left idle during fault condition. The novel idea of this work is to employ the idle PE interface of inverter based distributed generators (IBDG) to manage the fault current flows through the power system. The scheme is based on utilizing the available current and voltage phasor information from smart meters and applying the necessary control actions to operate the IBDGs as fault current management (FCM) units. This FCM operation eases the distribution and protection system constraints on new DGs connections. From short circuit point of view, DGs with larger capacity can be connected to any location in the system without affecting the fault current magnitude. This operation also eliminates the need to disconnect DGs during each temporary fault. Moreover, the need to upgrade protective devices is reduced. From the two controllable parameters of IBDGs current, the current magnitude and current phase angle, the current phase angle is employed to manage the contribution of DGs to the total fault current without deactivating them. Three zones of FCM operation are defined for IBDGs by changing their current phase angle: zones A, B, and C. The reference current phase angle that enables the FCM operation is calculated for zone B operation when only IBDGs exist in the system. The FCM operation and the reference current phase angle are then extended for zone C operation in order to manage the contribution of other types of DGs, such as synchronous DGs, to the fault current. In another part of this work, two power flow based fault analysis techniques are developed to explore the behavior of IBDGs during fault conditions. In both, the buses
Relationality and Ojibwemowin† in Forest Walks: Learning from Multimodal Interaction about Land and Language

Abstract Indigenous language reclamation efforts are pushing academic ideas of what language is, in order to be accountable to Indigenous epistemologies. Simultaneously, as our Indigenous languages grow, we (academics) are pushed to grow beyond the boundaries of disciplines. Categories of “language” and “land” have been segregated by this colonial structure. In this study, as we bring them together, we seek to describe what the ontology in play looks like. We argue that as reclamation efforts successfully grow more young speakers, we are able to push against colonial constructs of learning when we witness learning in the context of movement, land, and intergenerational interactions. In this article, we closely examine episodes from three walks taken from a broader corpus of walks (14), to describe how one Elder walking with groups of two children constructed knowledge and joint meaning-making in the Ojibwe language while walking on Ojibwe lands. We take seriously the idea that there is an Indigenous epistemology at work in these cultural ecologies, one that sees humans as a part of the natural world, at play on the walks. Here we describe specifically what this looks like in the moment-to-moment interactions, and how we read these constellations of cultural practices as an apprenticeship into sustaining relationships with land.