Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Salts and Ionic Surfactants on the Micellar Structure of Tri‐Block Copolymer PEO‐PPO‐PEO in Aqueous Solution

The micelles of two poly(ethylene oxide)‐poly(propylene oxide)‐poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO‐PPO‐PEO) block copolymers, P123 and F127 (same mol wt of PPO but different % PEO) in aqueous solution in the absence and presence of salts as well as ionic surfactants were mainly examined by dynamic light scattering (DLS). The study is further supported by cloud point and viscosity measurements. The change in cloud point (CP), as well as the size of micelles in aqueous solution in presence of salts obeys the Hofmeister lyotropic series. Addition of both cationic cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) and anionic sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS) surfactants in the aqueous solution of P123 show initial decrease of micellar size from 20 nm to nearly 7 nm and then increasing with a double relaxation mode, further in the presence of NaCl this double relaxation mode vanishes. The effect of surfactant on F127, which has much bigger hydrophilic part is different than P123 and have no double relaxation. The relaxation time distributions is obtained using the Laplace inversion routine REPES. Two relaxation modes for P123 are explained on the bases of Pluronic rich mixed micelles containing ionic surfactants and the other smaller, predominantly surfactant rich micelles domains.
Selective electrochemical recognition of sulfate over phosphate and phosphate over sulfate using polyaza ferrocene macrocyclic receptors in aqueous solution

Potentiometric and electrochemical studies have been carried out with a family of ferrocene redox-functionalised polyamines (L1–L5) and have been directed towards the discrimination, using electrochemical techniques, between the two oxoanions phosphate and sulfate and the electrochemical sensing of ATP. Potentiometric titrations were carried out in THF–water (70∶30 v/v, 0.1 mol dm–3 tetrabutylammonium perchlorate, 25 °C) for L1, L2, L3, L5 and in water (0.1 mol dm–3 potassium nitrate, 25 °C) for L4. Potentiometric data indicate that all receptors studied form stable complexes with sulfate, phosphate and ATP. Distribution for the ternary diagram system sulfate–phosphate–L2 shows pH dependent selectivity patterns; [L2HjSO4]j – 2 species exist at greater than 90% in the pH range 3–4, whereas the corresponding phosphate complexes are the main species in the neutral and basic pH range. The electrochemical studies are in agreement with the speciation results. Sulfate produces in all cyclic receptors maximum cathodic shifts of the redox potential of the ferrocenyl groups around pH 3–4, whereas maximum cathodic shifts for phosphate were found between pH 7 and 8. This behaviour is not observed for the open-chain tetraamine L5. Selective quantitative electrochemical recognition of sulfate and phosphate in the presence of competing anions in aqueous solution has been achieved using the redox-active polyaza ferrocene macrocyclic L2, L3 and L4 receptors. Additionally ATP is able to cathodically shift the oxidation potential of the ferrocenyl groups of L2 and L3 receptors by up to 100 mV. The electrochemical response of L3 against ADP and AMP is also reported.
Phenotypic Identification and Antifungal Susceptibility of Two Rhodotorula Species Isolated from Dandruff Samples

Rhodotorula are environmental yeasts originally considered non-pathogenic in nature. However, over the last three decades, different species of this yeast have established themselves as pathogens in humans, causing systemic infections among the immunocompromised population. In this study, Rhodotorula species were isolated from dandruff samples using selective media by observing colony morphology and color. The isolates were later identified via biochemical tests and microscopic examinations. In addition, the sensitivity of the isolates to the three antifungal agents, namely ketoconazole, nystatin and fluconazole were tested by using the disk diffusion technique. On completion of the tests, only two species of Rhodotorula were identified from 35 dandruff samples and designated as R1 and R3. Both isolates displayed sensitivity towards ketoconazole and nystatin. No antifungal sensitivity was documented against fluconazole. This study gave preliminary indication of the presence of Rhodotorula species in dandruff samples, and its sensitivity towards antifungal agents.
Towards automatic semantic role labeling of hand drawn sketches

In this paper we propose the use of Computational Linguistics techniques such as the Semantic Role Labeling of natural languages (SRL) to the case of semantic sketch understanding. SRL has many interesting applications in the field of information extraction, question-answering, natural language database querying, spoken dialogue system, machine translation, text summarization, story merging, etc. We propose a way of manually labeling hand drawn sketch constituents with semantic roles based on the natural language sentence to be depicted. Once this is done, applications of SRL can be extended to the case of hand drawn sketches.
2D Lidar and Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Object Distance Measurement of ADAS Using Robotic Operating System (ROS)

— The advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are one of the issues protecting people from a vehicle collision. A collision warning system is an essential part of ADAS to protect people from the dangers of accidents caused by fatigue, drowsiness, and other human errors. Multi-sensors have been widely used in ADAS for environment perception such as cameras, radar, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR). This work proposes that the relative orientation and translation between the two sensors must be considered in performing fusion. The researchers discuss the real-time collision warning system using 2D LiDAR and Camera sensors for environment perception and measure the distance (range) and angle of obstacles. In this paper, the researchers propose a fusion of two sensors consisting of a camera and 2D LiDAR to get the distance and angle of an obstacle in front of the vehicle implemented on Nvidia Jetson Nano using Robot Operating System (ROS). Hence, a calibration process between the camera and 2D LiDAR is required. After that, the integration and testing were carried out using static and dynamic scenarios in the relevant environment. The fusion process's experimental results between the camera and 2D LiDAR obtained an error rate of 0.197 meters. For better accuracy results on object detection and object distance measurement in the upcoming research, it is recommended to use the computational geometric transformation and projection approach.
Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth: Evidence from Bangladesh

The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth in Bangladesh using annual data from 1986 until 2013. Cointegration technique is applied to examine the long run relationship between foreign direct investment and real gross domestic product in Bangladesh. Granger causality is also employed to see the causal effect of foreign direct investment and real gross domestic product. Our main findings reveal that there is no significant long run relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth. However, two-way granger causality is evident between foreign direct investment and gross domestic product. Foreign direct investment granger cause to gross domestic product and gross domestic product also granger cause to foreign direct investment.
Iranian Banks Mergers and Structure of Loans

Iranian banking network policymakers are focused on bank consolidation as one of the reform policies in recent years. But before merging banks, it is necessary to examine their effects. Loans are one crucial item in the banks' balance sheets that are affected by bank consolidation. In the Iranian banking network, loans are offered to various economic sectors. What is important for banking policymakers is how the structure of loans will change as banks merge. Also, the effect of bank consolidation on loan structure is affected by the bank's ownership and its performance. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the impact of bank mergers on loan structure of banks, using panel data model and financial statements of Iranian banks in 2006-2018. For this purpose, 28 models have been designed. Results indicate the merger of banks and the creation of private banks have a positive effect on the loan supply to services and the business sector. The merging of banks and the creation of state-owned banks will also have a positive impact on the loan supply to the industry and mining, construction, and housing sectors. Also, banks merger has a positive effect on the loan supply to services and the business sector.
CAMBRIDGE WORKING PAPERS IN ECONOMICS A deep-narrative analysis of energy cultures in slum rehabilitation housing of Abuja, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro for just policy design

Slum rehabilitation housing (SRH) are critical transitional spaces in urban informality that has deep-rooted implications on poverty alleviation efforts. However, current literature reports systemic injustices in SRH on access to essential services, including energy injustices. This study investigated distributive injustices in the SRH across three cities, Abuja, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, developing ‘energy cultures’ narratives. It employed a computational social science methodology that used textual analysis, followed by a constructivist grounded theoretic approach to inform just policy design. The analysis was performed at two scales to identify and contrast injustices in the study areas. The result at an aggregated scale showed commonalities were around the poor design of the built environment, administrative lags of the utilities and high electricity bills. Case studyspecific results showed that poverty penalties were linked with the energy cultures of each SRHs. In the Mumbai case, poverty penalties were associated with the aspirational purchase of household appliances due to move from slums to SRH. The Abuja case showed low power quality and load shedding frequently damaged appliances that increase the maintenance costs for the occupants. The Rio de Janeiro SRH case had injustices embedded through the adoption of inefficient appliances received as charity from higher-income households. Fuel stacking was also observed in the SRH that illustrated cultural identities associated with cooking energy. The conclusion was drawn to support just policy design by considering the socio-cultural context of the built environment, improving utility governance and promoting cleaner fuel mix at the household level. Reference Details CWPE 20101 Published 11 November 2020
Author or Argumentation: Exploring the Effect of Prior Beliefs and Personality Traits on Persuasiveness

This work aims to explore the in uence of the mutual interests, prior-beliefs and personality traits of discussion participants on their persuasiveness, i.e. the success in changing the opponent's opinion in online discussion forums. To answer the question of whether mutual author beliefs and personality traits between two debaters are as important for persuasiveness as argumentation quality, we introduce several author based features and compare them to textbased features such as grammatical, stylistic and lexical features on two persuasiveness tasks. We use the corpus of the Reddit website as the most popular and vast online forum resource. Particularly, we explore the "Change My View" subreddit, a community on Reddit speci cally devoted to detailed online discussions of various topics, with strict moderation rules and an extensive number of discussions. It implements a special set of "Delta"-rules that help explicitly label persuasive arguments. We use the data from "Change My View" to prepare an input dataset for the main task of predicting the winner of a discussion from a pair of selected participants. As an additional task, we explore the in uence of personality traits on the malleability of the original poster's point of view. Our model of authors relies on two bases: (1) author interests and beliefs inferred from the history of their previous activity in di erent Reddit communities and (2) author psychological traits theory models such as the Big Five personality traits model. We experiment with various author features representing user interests and prior beliefs and observe a noticeable improvement over a baseline of argumentation-level features on persuasiveness detection, that is, author-level features achieve signi cant improvement of accuracy in the two studied tasks.
Dynamics and control analysis of a single flexible link robot with translational joints

Use your smartphone to scan this QR code and download this article ABSTRACT Modern design always aims at reducing mass, simplifying the structure, and reducing the energy consumption of the system especially in robotics. These targets could lead to lowing cost of the material and increasing the operating capacity. The priority direction in robot design is optimal structures with longer lengths of the links, smaller and thinner links, more economical still warranting ability to work. However, all of these structures such as flexible robots are reducing rigidity and motion accuracy because of the effect of elastic deformations. Therefore, taking the effects of elastic factor into consideration is absolutely necessary for kinematic, dynamic modeling, analyzing, and controlling flexible robots. Because of the complexity of modeling and controlling flexible robots, the single-link and two-link flexible robots with only rotational joints are mainly mentioned and studied by most researchers. It is easy to realize that combining the different types of joints of flexible robots can extend their applications, flexibility, and types of structure. However, the models consisting of rotational and translational joints will make the kinematic, dynamic modeling, and control becomes more complex than models that have only rotational joints. This study focuses on the dynamics model and optimal controller based on genetic algorithms (GA) for a single flexible link robot (FLR) with a rigid translational joint. The motion equations of the FLR are built based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) and Lagrange Equations (LE). The difference between flexible manipulators that have only rotational joints and others with the translational joint is presented through boundary conditions. A PID controller is designed with parameters that are optimized by the GA algorithm. The cost function is established based on errors signal of translational joint, elastic displacements of the End-Point (EP) of the FLR. Simulation results show that the errors of the joint variable, the elastic displacements (ED) are destructed in a short time when the system is controlled following the reference point. The results of this study can be basic to research other flexible robots with more joint or combine joint styles.
Molecular and Phylogenetic study of Klebsiella aerogenes isolated from infected burned skin

This study was intended to explore if infected burns of patients of Al-Diwaniyah City, Iraq, haveKlebsiellaaerogenes as one of the pathogenic bacteria that infect burns or wounds. For such case, traditional, Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and DNA gyrase subunit B gene (gyrB)-partial sequencing tooling to confirm diagnosis. Primary testing of the sample using blood and MacConkey agars and certain biochemical tests alarmed that the bacterium was present in this specimen. The PCR results confirmed the occurrence of the infection by this bacterial agent. The gyrBgene-partial sequencing followed by drawing a phylogenic tree placed the bacterium in a separate cluster from other Enterobacteriaceae family members. The current study indicates that this bacterium is present in the infected burns or injuries in Al-Diwaniyahcity.Our results have been reviewed the current trends in molecular phylogenetic analysis, A computational phylogenetic study and data was approach and registered Klebsiellaaerogenes with accession number (MG560868.1).
Consistency Regularization for Variational Auto-Encoders

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They enable scalable approximate posterior inference in latent-variable models using variational inference (VI). A VAE posits a variational family parameterized by a deep neural network called an encoder that takes data as input. This encoder is shared across all the observations, which amortizes the cost of inference. However the encoder of a VAE has the undesirable property that it maps a given observation and a semantics-preserving transformation of it to different latent representations. This"inconsistency"of the encoder lowers the quality of the learned representations, especially for downstream tasks, and also negatively affects generalization. In this paper, we propose a regularization method to enforce consistency in VAEs. The idea is to minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the variational distribution when conditioning on the observation and the variational distribution when conditioning on a random semantic-preserving transformation of this observation. This regularization is applicable to any VAE. In our experiments we apply it to four different VAE variants on several benchmark datasets and found it always improves the quality of the learned representations but also leads to better generalization. In particular, when applied to the Nouveau Variational Auto-Encoder (NVAE), our regularization method yields state-of-the-art performance on MNIST and CIFAR-10. We also applied our method to 3D data and found it learns representations of superior quality as measured by accuracy on a downstream classification task.
An extended Maxwell–Wagner theory for the electric birefringence of charged colloids

Recent frequency resolved electric birefringence experiments on dilute suspensions of charged, ellipsoidal particles reveal new relaxation features in the MHz frequency range. Such behavior can be explained in terms of surface transport processes. Here we develop a model for the electric polarizability of spheroidal particles by combining features of electrokinetic and Maxwell–Wagner theories. The model accurately depicts the high frequency features and relates them to the colloidal properties of the polyelectrolyte. Using the model, particle charge can be extracted from electric birefringence measurements.
Nonideality sources and implementation considerations in polar transmitters

In this paper, the main nonidealities appearing in polar transmitters will be addressed, together with several implementation considerations. Special attention will be paid to the role of AM modulation nonlinearity and parasitic AM-to-PM conversion, once architecture mechanisms such as time-delay mismatch between branches or limited bandwidth in the amplitude path are controlled. The device limiting factors for a highly efficient switched mode operation and a linear amplitude modulation will be identified. Some circuit design and implementation guidelines for the RF modulating stage and the envelope amplifier will be discussed, to finish with system-level analysis considerations under two-tone and real communication signal excitations.
A Two-Fingered Robot Gripper with Variable Stiffness Flexure Hinges Based on Shape Morphing

This paper presents a novel approach for developing robotic grippers with variable stiffness hinges for dexterous grasps. This approach for the first time uses pneumatically actuated pouch actuators to fold and unfold morphable flaps of flexure hinges thus change stiffness of the hinge. By varying the air pressure in pouch actuators, the flexure hinge morphs into a beam with various open sections while the flaps bend, enabling stiffness variation of the flexure hinge. This design allows 3D printing of the flexure hinge using printable soft filaments. Utilizing the variable stiffness flexure hinges as the joints of robotic fingers, a light-weight and low-cost two-fingered tendon driven robotic gripper is developed. The stiffness variation caused due to the shape morphing of flexure hinges is studied by conducting static tests on fabricated hinges with different flap angles and on a flexure hinge with flaps that are bent by pouch actuators subjected to various pressures. Multiple grasp modes of the two-fingered gripper are demonstrated by grasping objects with various geometric shapes. The gripper is then integrated with a robot manipulator in a teleoperation setup for conducting a pick-and-place operation in a confined environment.
The dynamics of annual and seasonal precipitation totals in the Czech Republic during 1961–2019

The long-term change in precipitation has been estimated for 300 stations in the Czech Republic using values of monthly precipitation totals. Annual totals for the whole country show a very slight decrease, in units of mm, there can be significant fluctuation on a year-to-year basis. Long-term changes of annual totals vary at different stations and in different regions. In southern and western Bohemia, precipitation totals increased more, in Elbe lowlands and in large parts of Moravia, a rather small decrease in rainfall has been observed. Long-term changes depend only slightly on the absolute value of annual rainfall at the respective station or region. Summer precipitation totals increased more than annual averages, while spring precipitation totals decreased. During the remaining seasons, the change is negligible. In the meantime, the annual variation in precipitation has changed slightly: maximum values have shifted from June to July.
Short-term Changes in Activities of Daily Living and Physical Activity Level of Inpatients Undergoing Rehabilitation Treatment

—Though increasing physical activity level is essential for health promotion, inpatients are known to experience a drop in physical activity. However, even short-term rehabilitation treatment is expected to improve Activities of Daily Living (ADL), but accompanying changes in physical activity levels are unknown. This study evaluated change over one week in the Barthel Index (BI) and physical activity level in inpatients undergoing rehabilitation treatment and investigated the correlations between variability in these factors. The BI and physical activity levels were measured twice with a one-week interval between measurements for eight inpatients undergoing rehabilitation treatment at Iwate Medical University Hospital, Japan. The number of steps and time spent walking increased significantly from the first measurement to the second. On the other hand, there was no significant difference in BI score between initial measurement and after one week. However, 4 out of 8 inpatients showed the BI improved, and there was no inpatient showed worsened BI. Also, there were no significant correlations between the BI score variability and variability in the number of steps or time spent walking. The results suggested that rehabilitation treatment improved ADL ability and increased physical activity level among inpatients, but that variability in these factors is not correlated. A future study with an increased sample size divided by medical conditions is necessary.