Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Meso-structural evaluation of asphalt mixture based on pore cellular structure model

ABSTRACT To provide a reference for the gradation-refined design of asphalt mixtures, pore cellular structure model was developed to evaluate the meso-structure of asphalt mixture, and corresponding meso-structural evaluation indices of the coarse aggregate main skeleton and asphalt mortar interference were obtained. Then three different asphalt mixtures were selected to study the influence of gradation and asphalt mortar performance on the meso-structure of pore cellular structures. The gradual behaviour characteristics of the meso-evaluation indices subjected to load, as well as the correlation between the main skeleton meso-evaluation indices and macro deformation were studied. The results indicated that gradation is a key determinant of the contact point, number of pore cells, and area of pore cell distribution. Under the action of loads, the number of contact points and pore cells within the asphalt mixture increase, interference coefficient decreases, and skeleton rate increases gradually; coarse aggregates with contact that are not involved in the pore cellular structure are the main factor affecting skeleton rate. Meso-structural evaluation indices including interference coefficient and skeleton rate can effectively evaluate the meso-structure of the asphalt mixture, ensure that the coarse aggregates are interlocked with each other to form a stable main skeleton.
Illumination-Adapted Long-Term Tracking Based on Multiple Correlation Framework

Object tracking is a hot field in image processing, among which the kernel correlation filtering algorithm is widely applied based on the advantages of precision and speed. However, due to information decay, it has poor performance in the long-term tracking. In this paper, we develop an illumination-adapted long-term tracking method based on correlation filtering tracker. Firstly, we introduce illumination adaptive normalization and information entropy weighted feature fusion to improve the prediction accuracy. Secondly, we estimate the object scale quickly based on the binary strategy to improve the speed of the algorithm. Then, we design re-detection based on online SVM detection for target loss. Finally, we design an appropriate updating mechanism to combine the whole tracking framework with various judgment thresholds. The experiment on the data set shows that all of our modules are effective and have great improvement as compared with other correlation filter type trackers.
Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weapon-ization of breaking news

In this essay, we conduct a descriptive content analysis from a sample of a dataset made up of 534 thousand scraped tweets, supplemented with access to 1.36 million tweets from the Twitter firehose, from accounts that used the #ADOS hashtag between November 2019 and September 2020. ADOS is an acronym for American Descendants of Slavery, a largely online group that operates within Black online communities. We find that the ADOS network strategically uses breaking news events to discourage Black voters from voting for the Democratic party, a phenomenon we call disinformation creep. Conversely, the ADOS network has remained largely silent about the impact of the novel coronavirus on Black communities, undermining its claims that it works in the interests of Black Americans.
Numerical Modelling of Vibration Responses of Helical Gears under Progressive Tooth Wear for Condition Monitoring

Gear wear is a common fault that occurs in a gear transmission system that degrades the operating efficiency and may cause other catastrophic failures such as tooth breakage and fatigue. The progressive wear of a helical gear and its influences on vibration responses are rarely investigated due to the combined effects of the complicated lubrication state and the time-varying characteristic. To fill this gap, a numerical study was put forward to investigate the interactions between gear wear and dynamic response. In this study, an Archard’s wear model with elastohydradynamic lubrication (EHL) effect is adopted to simulate the helical gear wear, which is incorporated with an eight-degree of freedom dynamic model for understanding the gear dynamic at different wear degrees. The wear model shows that the gear wear mainly happens at the gear root due to the relative high slide-to-roll ratio. The dynamic modelling results demonstrate that the wear causes a reduction in time-varying gear mesh stiffness further leads to more vibration. Besides, the simulated vibration responses and experimental validation show that the wear cause increases in the amplitudes of the gear mesh frequency and its harmonics, which can reflect the evolution of progressive gear wear and can be used as monitoring features of gear wear.
Raman spectroscopy of lignin

Although in the past visible-laser-excited Raman spectroscopy has been used to study lignin and lignocellulosics, only limited information could be obtained due to poor signal-to-background ratios in the spectra. Laser-induced fluorescence of lignin caused the background which frequently overwhelmed Raman spectral features. However, with the development of FT Raman spectroscopy wherein 1064 nm laser light is used for sample excitation, the fluorescence problem has been eliminated (for most samples) and the time required to obtain a spectrum has been significantly reduced. Lignin related Raman information has been generated through studies that focused on identifying lignin`s Raman contributions, comparing Raman features of native, milled-wood, and enzyme lignins, and studies of lignin-models. In addition to this foundation work, Raman spectroscopy is being used to obtain new information in a number of research programs, e.g. quantification of lignin in wood and pulps, photoyellowing in mechanical pulps, ultrastructure of woody tissues, characterization of chemically modified lignins and lignocellulosics, and studies of mechanical pulp containing papers.
A stop-timing microchannel plate detector for multi-reflection time-of-flight mass analyzer

A stop-timing microchannel detector with an integrated fast amplifier has been developed and its mechanical and electronic structure described in detail. A typical output amplitude of 1.1 V, rise time of 10 ns, noise amplitude of 2.5 mVrms and timing jitter of 23 ps of the detector have been obtained. The detector has tested with 133Cs1+ ions in the multi-reflection time-of-flight mass analyzer at the Spectrometer for Heavy Atom and Nuclear Structure (SHANS) and a mass resolving power of 19500 has been achieved for a total time-of-flight of 5.85 ms.
Full Digital Control of an All-Si On-Board Charger Operating in Discontinuous Conduction Mode

This paper deals with the design, tuning and implementation of a digital controller for an all-Si electric vehicle (EV) on-board battery charger operated in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). This charger consists of two cascaded conversion stages: a front-end power factor corrector (PFC) with two interleaved legs and an isolated phase-shifted full bridge DC/DC converter. Both stages operate in DCM over the complete battery charging power range, allowing lower inductance values for both the PFC and the DC/DC filtering elements. Moreover, DCM operation ensures a large reduction of the reverse-recovery losses in the power diodes, enabling the adoption of relatively cheap Si devices. The main goal of the work is to address the well-known DCM control challenges, leveraging a novel control strategy for both converter stages. This control scheme counteracts the DCM system non-linearities with a proper feed-forward contribution and an open-loop gain adjustment, ensuring consistent dynamical performance over the complete operating range. The designed controllers are tuned analytically, taking into account the delay components related to the digital implementation. Finally, the proposed control strategy is implemented on a single general purpose microcontroller unit (MCU) and its performance is experimentally validated on a 3.3 kW battery charger prototype.
Ambidexterity and agility in achieving dry port effectiveness in the greater Jakarta

Article history: Received November 8, 2020 Received in revised format January, 28, 2021 Accepted March 24 2021 Available online March 25 2021 Dry Port, a supply chain company, strives to bring its workers up to speed in the current VUCA world. The study explores the degree to which ambidexterity affects agility, which can impact organizational effectiveness. The structural equation model with multilevel simulation used to test the research hypothesis. The study indicates that ambidexterity is an influential factor to agility, and that ambidexterity is also an impactful factor to agility and organizational effectiveness. Furthermore, there is also evidence that the power of agility contributes to greater organizational effectiveness, and also that ambidexterity has an impact on organizational effectiveness through workforce agility. To achieve organizational effectiveness in dry port business, mobile devices and social network technology are functional enablers of ambidextrous activities that can allow staff to be agile in handling dry port business tasks. by the authors; license Growing Science, Canada 1 202 ©
Analysis of the Aerodynamics in the Heating Section of an Anode Baking Furnace Using Non-Linear Finite Element Simulations

The emissions from the industrial furnaces impact the environment. Among the various factories, those having anode baking furnaces are working on reducing the pollutant emissions. The aerodynamics in the furnace influences the emissions due to the high dependence of combustion and radiation phenomena on the mixing characteristics. Therefore, this paper aims to establish the numerical simulation results for the three-dimensional turbulent flow in a single section of an anode baking furnace with a high rate of fuel injection. The stabilized non-linear finite element approach on the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equation is used with COMSOLMultiphysics. The turbulent viscosity ratio is highly sensitive to the mesh for the standard k-ϵ model. The requirements of the Cartesian and refined mesh near the jet development region is explained. The comparison of meshes generated by two meshing tools namely cfMesh and COMSOL Multiphysics default Mesher is carried out. The high numerical diffusion in the flow models due to the coarser mesh leads to convergence but deficit the precision in the results. This paper shows that the mesh generated by cfMesh with flow aligned refinement combined with the non-linear finite element solver in COMSOL Multiphysics proves to provide accurate results of turbulent quantities.
Identifying Service Opportunities Based on Outcome-Driven Innovation Framework and Deep Learning: A Case Study of Hotel Service

This research proposes a data-driven systematic method to discover service opportunities in a specific service sector. Specifically, the method quantitatively identifies the important but unsatisfied customer needs by analyzing online review data. To represent customer needs in a structured form, the job-to-be-done-based customer outcomes are adopted from the outcome-driven innovation (ODI) framework. Therefore, job-to-be-done information is extracted from the review data and is transformed into customer outcomes. The outcomes having high service opportunities are selected by metrics for quantifying the importance and satisfaction score of the outcomes. This paper conducted an empirical study for hotel service using relevant review data. The results show that the method can identify customer needs in hotel service—e.g., maximizing safety to pay price/deposit, and maximizing possibility to avoid waiting at lobby—and objectively prioritize strategic directions for service innovation. Therefore, the proposed method can be used as an intelligent tool for the effective development of a business strategy.
Research on Recognition Method of Car Fuel Tank Cap Based on Residual Network

Aiming at the problem that traditional algorithms have low recognition accuracy for different car fuel tank caps, a car fuel tank cap recognition algorithm based on improved Faster-RCNN is proposed. Firstly, the VGG16 network in the feature extraction network link is improved to the ResNet-101 residual network to improve the recognition accuracy and system speed. Secondly, the ROI pooling of the original pooling layer is changed to ROI align regional feature aggregation method makes the target rectangular frame more accurate. Finally, the fully connected network is used to perform the classification of the car fuel tank cap and the accurate regression of the frame. Through the detection of 200 actual images of car fuel tank caps, the experimental results show that the algorithm can achieve 98.0% accuracy and a detection speed of 0.139 seconds per image. Compared with traditional image algorithms, it can obtain faster speed and higher accuracy, and can provide technical support for unmanned gas stations, which has certain engineering application value.
A Fully Integrated 47.6% Fractional Bandwidth GaN MMIC Distributed Efficient Power Amplifier With Modified Input Matching and Power Splitting Network

This article presents a fully integrated distributed efficient power amplifier (DEPA) for fifth-generation (5G) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) applications. In conventional DEPA, an individual input matching network (IMN), power splitter, and phase compensation line are used for each auxiliary power amplifier (PA) unit, resulting in a large overall size. To facilitate integration, an energy-efficient and compact DEPA with modified input matching and power splitting network is proposed, where a distributed input matching network (DIMN) is used for the auxiliary PA. A broadband input matching, reasonable power splitting, and phase alignment can be achieved simultaneously by adjusting the dimensions of gate transmission lines (TLs) between different auxiliary PA units. An integrated DEPA is implemented in a commercial 0.25- $\mu \text{m}$ GaN-HEMT process to validate the proposed architecture. The fabricated DEPA shows a saturated output power of 40.4–41.7 dBm, an 8-dB back-off drain efficiency (DE) of 35%–50%, and a saturated DE of 46%–56% from 3.2 to 5.2 GHz, with a compact size of $3.4\times3.0$ mm2. Applying a 100-MHz orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal with a 7.8-dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), an average efficiency of 35.7%–47% is measured over the entire bandwidth, and the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) is better than −46 dBc after digital predistortion (DPD). To the best of our knowledge, the proposed DEPA demonstrates the widest bandwidth among all reported fully integrated back-off efficient PAs without using digital techniques or reconfiguration.
Research on Multi-Agent Task Optimization and Scheduling Based on Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

As a key problem of cloud computing, the performance of task scheduling strategy may seriously affect the efficiency and service quality of the system. With the purpose of achieving balanced task scheduling with optimal completion time, ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is adopted as task scheduling strategy in this paper. Considering the problem of premature convergence to local optimal solution of ACO, an improved Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) is introduced to find the global optimal solution. Based on the study of pheromone’s updating mechanism of MMAS, MMAS is applied as task scheduling strategy with reasonable mapping from the objective of shortest path to shortest completion time. The task scheduling strategy based on MMAS has been simulated from views of tasks’ number, size and load balance, and the results shows that MMAS task scheduling strategy is with a better performance on completion time and load balance than ACO based strategy.
Dropping in electrospinning process: A general strategy for fabrication of microspheres

The dropping mechanism in the electrospinning process is elucidated. A moving jet becomes thinner at the initial stage due to the acceleration caused by the electrostatic force. When the jet diameter reaches a threshold, beyond which the jet breaks into drops and daughter jets, dropping occurs. The drops will finally form microspheres. Effects of applied voltage, flow rate, polymer? s concentration, and receptor? s distance on the dropping process are theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. This paper gives a general strategy for fabrication of smooth fiber, microspheres, and their mixture.
COMPARATIVE STUDIES ON ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTION

1&2 School of Business Management, College of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia 3 Department of Economics and Management Science, Nigerian Police Academy, Wudil Kano State. 4 Institute of Computer Science and Digital Innovation, UCSI University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 5 Posim Petroleum Marketing Sdn. Bhd. Abstract Entrepreneurship is a process of creating realizing values for entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial activities play quite important roles in promoting economic and social development. While the development of entrepreneurship in Malaysia and Nigeria is growing very fast, there have been few studies on entrepreneurship and the factors that influence intentions to become entrepreneurs. In the field of entrepreneurial research, the motivation factors which lead people to leave their comfort zone, take financial risks, abandon their high-income jobs to pursue their own business is always an interesting topic. For these reasons, in recent decades, the problems of entrepreneurship have become a focus for many scholars and policy makers. This paper examines the attributes that influences entrepreneurship intention in Malaysia and Nigeria. Data were collected from universities of the two countries. This study applies a quantitative approach with statistical techniques using descriptive statistics. The output of this study is expected to significantly contribute to business owners as well as decision makers.
Design of an Ultra-Low Voltage Bias Current Generator Highly Immune to Electromagnetic Interference

The paper deals with the immunity to Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) of the current source for Ultra-Low-Voltage Integrated Circuits (ICs). Based on the properties of IC building blocks, such as the current-splitter and current correlator, a novel current generator is conceived. The proposed solution is suitable to provide currents to ICs operating in the sub-threshold region even in the presence of an electromagnetic polluted environment. The immunity to EMI of the proposed solution is compared with that of a conventional current mirror and evaluated by analytic means and with reference to the 180 nm CMOS technology process. The analysis highlights how the proposed solution generates currents down to nano-ampere intrinsically robust to the Radio Frequency (RF) interference affecting the input of the current generator, differently to what happens to the output current of a conventional mirror under the same conditions.
BELIEF-LIKE IMAGINING AND CORRECTNESS

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, vis-à-vis the imaginary world, the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content.
Assessment of Climate Change in Central Asia from 1980 to 2100 Using the Köppen-Geiger Climate Classification

The accelerated global warming and heterogeneous change in precipitation have been resulting in climate system shifts, which plays a key role in the stability of ecosystem and social economic development. Central Asia is account 80% of the temperate desert, characterized by fragile ecosystem; however, it has experienced the fastest warming in recent decades and projected warming in future. The Koppen-Geiger climate classification is a useful tool to assess the potential impacts of climate change on regional ecosystem. The spatial shift and temporal evolution of each climatic zone based on Koppen-Geiger climate classification are analyzed in historical and future period under different scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), high risk regions that might experience more frequent climatic zone shifts are delimited in this study, which could provide the useful information for developing mitigate strategies in coping with the warming threat. The hotter and dryer subtypes of arid climatic zone and warmer subtypes of temperate climatic zone expanded their coverage in Central Asia, corresponding to the tundra climatic, cooler subtype of arid and temperate climatic zone contracted. Based on a method defining the climate-sensitivity, high risk regions are mainly distributed in northern Kazakhstan and Tianshan Mountains region.
DC-Link High-Frequency Current Ripple Elimination Strategy for MMCs Using Phase-Shifted Double-Group Multicarrier-Based Phase-Disposition PWM

The active circulating current suppression may cause high-frequency current ripple in the dc link of modular multilevel converters (MMCs). In this article, a phase-shifted double-group multicarrier-based phase-disposition pulsewidth modulation strategy is proposed to eliminate the dc-link high-frequency current ripple of MMCs, where the fundamental frequency component and the second-order component of the arm reference are modulated, respectively, by two groups of carriers. By shifting the phase angles of double-group multicarrier in each carrier period, the high-frequency current ripple injected into the dc link of MMCs can be eliminated. The proposed strategy not only eliminates the dc-link current ripple, but also extends the active and reactive power region of MMCs in comparison with the existing method. Simulation and experimental studies are conducted, and their results verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Assessing the Current Situation of the World Wheat Market Leadership: Using the Semi-Parametric Approach

This paper examines the world wheat market leadership using price discovery occurring in wheat futures markets of the United States (U.S.) and Europe. An error correction model (ECM) generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH), and semi-parametric dynamic copula methods are used for this purpose. The results indicate a positive link between U.S. and Europe price discovery which is stronger, fluctuating less after August 2010 because of a drought occurring in the Black Sea region, and then lessens, fluctuating more after 2015 with the changing wheat trade map. Furthermore, after 2015, wheat market leadership moved from the U.S. to the European market, meaning price discovery is primarily located by the Marché à Terme International de France (MATIF) futures market.
Commissioning and prospects of the first GEM station at the CMS experiment

The CMS Collaboration has been developing a Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector in the endcap regions of the CMS muon system to maintain the high level of performance achieved during Run 2 in the challenging environment of the high-luminosity phase of the LHC (HL-LHC). The GEM detectors at endcap station 1 (GE1/1) were installed during the second long shutdown. The technical and operational challenges of large-area GEM detectors have been identified during the commissioning of five GEM super chambers (“slice test”) in Run 2. This led to a modification in its system design. A test with cosmic-ray muons is the final stage of quality control before the full-scale installation into the CMS detector. We review the performance of muon detection in the slice test, an improvement of the readout system, commissioning status, and prospects for the muon trigger for Run 3.