Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stability of an anaerobic single reactor filled with dolomitic limestone with increased organic load of sugarcane

The anaerobic single-stage reactor was evaluated to treat vinasse and to evaluate its stability. This bench reactor was filled with dolomitic limestone with a horizontal plug flow to simulate a drainage channel. The experiment lasted 129 days while the reactor was submitted to different applied organic concentrations (chronologically applied: 3.0; 5.0; 12.0; 9.0 and 7.5 g L -1 as COD, chemical oxygen demand). COD removals were 50% and 9% with 3.0 and 7.5 g L -1 , respectively. With 12.0 g L -1 , reactor efficiency increased to 33%, with an abrupt drop to 3% on the 84 th day. Therefore, in order to avoid reactor collapse, a remedial measure was necessary. The system remained in batch without feeding for 19 days (from the 85 th to the 104 th day) with 9.0 g L -1 . Afterwards, it was observed that the performance of the system tended to stabilize, reaching 47% with 7.5 g L -1 in the 118 th day. At the end of the experiment, the potassium content of the wastewater decreased from 800 mg L -1 to 594 mg L -1 (on an average 25%) and calcium and magnesium increased within the reactor liquor. The dissolution of the limestone inside the liquor reactor probably caused this result. After the treatment with limestone, the average pH value of the effluent increased from 4.9 to over 6.0 in all organic concentrations. It could be concluded that the reactor filled with dolomitic limestone in these operational conditions assured a low efficiency in COD removal, potassium reduction, increasing values of pH, alkalinity, calcium and magnesium. The instability was observed when there was increase in organic load to 12 g L -1 with subsequent recovery.
Extraction of p-n junction properties and series resistance in GaAs nanowire-based solar cells using light concentration

Series resistance in solar cells limit their maximum conversion efficiency and thus should be minimized. Generally, such losses originate from deficiencies at the contact or absorber level. Quantifying them is the first step for tackling its reduction. In this work, we provide a new way to assess the series resistance in nanowire-based solar cells, which significantly underperforms predicted theoretical efficiency. We illuminate the devices at different levels of light intensity (from 1 to 1000 suns), which gives us insight in the carrier transport and series losses mechanism. We demonstrate the method on a device obtained by self-assembled GaAs nanowire p-n junction arrays on silicon. This analysis method provides a platform to distinguish the intrinsic response of the nanowire p-n junction from the series resistance effects. More generally, we provide a means of optimizing the efficiency in next generation solar cells, where contacts still have to be developed.
Sieve-based coreference resolution enhances semi-supervised learning model for chemical-induced disease relation extraction

The BioCreative V chemical-disease relation (CDR) track was proposed to accelerate the progress of text mining in facilitating integrative understanding of chemicals, diseases and their relations. In this article, we describe an extension of our system (namely UET-CAM) that participated in the BioCreative V CDR. The original UET-CAM system’s performance was ranked fourth among 18 participating systems by the BioCreative CDR track committee. In the Disease Named Entity Recognition and Normalization (DNER) phase, our system employed joint inference (decoding) with a perceptron-based named entity recognizer (NER) and a back-off model with Semantic Supervised Indexing and Skip-gram for named entity normalization. In the chemical-induced disease (CID) relation extraction phase, we proposed a pipeline that includes a coreference resolution module and a Support Vector Machine relation extraction model. The former module utilized a multi-pass sieve to extend entity recall. In this article, the UET-CAM system was improved by adding a ‘silver’ CID corpus to train the prediction model. This silver standard corpus of more than 50 thousand sentences was automatically built based on the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) database. We evaluated our method on the CDR test set. Results showed that our system could reach the state of the art performance with F1 of 82.44 for the DNER task and 58.90 for the CID task. Analysis demonstrated substantial benefits of both the multi-pass sieve coreference resolution method (F1 + 4.13%) and the silver CID corpus (F1 +7.3%). Database URL: SilverCID–The silver-standard corpus for CID relation extraction is freely online available at: https://zenodo.org/record/34530 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.34530).
Too much R&D? - Vertical differentiation in a model of monopolistic competition

This paper discusses a model of vertical an horizontal product differentiation within the Dixit-Stiglitz framework of monopolistic competition. Firns coompete not only in prices and horizontal attributes of their products, but also in the quality that can be controlled by R&D activities. Based upon te results of a general equilibrium model, intra-sectoral trade and the welfare implications of public intervention in terms of research promotion are considered. The analysis involves a numerical application to ten basic European industries.
A semi-automated framework for homography estimation

Reliable estimation of the geometric transformation (homography)between different planes is a key step in a number of robotics applications. A common requirement is the homography estimation between a ground plane and a camera. For this task, the most usual approach is to define the correspondence between the coordinates of realworld points and their pixel coordinates in the image. Often, however, real-world coordinates are not available or ground measurements are not practical. Targeting these scenarios, a homography estimation framework is proposed using (semi-)rigid objects that can be placed in different positions in the field of view, with its top and bottom pixels approximately identified in the image. The derived method shows that it can work with or without the knowledge of the camera intrinsics, even in presence of non-Gaussian measurement noise. A thorough analysis of the method is presented by observing the effect of noise, distance from the camera and number of measurements on the quality of the final results. The experiments illustrate the applicability of the method.
The Positive Effect of Labor Mobility Restrictions on Human Capital Accumulation in China

The Hukou system restricted most rural-urban migration in China for over 50 years. Under this system, rural residents could permanently migrate to urban areas by acquiring higher education. In this paper, I test the hypothesis that mobility restrictions, combined with selective migration policies, encouraged education. The test is based on an extension of the Regression Discontinuity design that allows it to work when individual treatment status is missing but the aggregate proportion treated is available. Findings suggest that human capital accumulation for rural residents decreased sharply when mobility restrictions were removed in 1998. This effect is bigger for males and for those getting urban identity from relatively rich areas. JEL Classification: J24, J61, O15.
Meta-analysis showing that ERCC1 polymorphism is predictive of osteosarcoma prognosis

To investigate correlations between excision repair cross-complementation group 1 (ERCC1) and 2 (ERCC2) polymorphisms and osteosarcoma prognosis, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies published through October 2016. Studies were identified in the PubMed, ScienceDirect, Springer, and Web of Science databases using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA). Odds ratios (ORs) or hazard ratios (HRs) and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for overall survival (OS), tumor response (TR), and event-free survival (EFS) were estimated. Our meta-analysis included eleven studies in which four SNPs (ERCC1 rs11615 and rs3212986, ERCC2 rs13181 and rs1799793) reportedly associated with osteosarcoma prognosis were investigated. Each of these studies scored > 6 on the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). We found that only one SNP, ERCC1 rs11615, correlated with improved OS and TR. The HR of T vs. C for OS was 1.455 (T/C, 95% CI = 1.151–1.839, P = 0.002, I2 = 37.80%). The OR of T vs. C for good TR was 0.554 (T/C, 95% CI = 0.437–0.702, P < 0.001, I2 = 0%). Few significant outcome was observed in subgroup analyses stratified based on study characteristics with adjustments for potential confounders. Our results suggest that ERCC1 rs11615 CC is associated with a better clinical outcome. This suggests rs11615 may be a useful genetic marker for predicting osteosarcoma prognosis.
Expert perspectives on the role of the bus in school travel

Millions of children travel to and from school each day as part of their daily routine, contributing to increased congestion and traffic on the roads. This paper examines the role of the bus within school travel and reports the views of current professionals in the school travel industry gained from interviews with school travel experts in the UK. The findings suggest that parents, schools, local authorities and bus operators are the key stakeholders, while the children are relatively minor players despite being the main users of the system. The key issues facing the sector concern costs to government and users, institutional and political factors, and social issues around the behaviour of children on buses. The interviewees all see a prominent place for buses in school travel, both now and in the future.
A single serine to alanine substitution decreases bicarbonate affinity of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase in C4Flaveria trinervia

Flaveria trinervia C4 phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPc) has higher affinity for HCO3− than its closely related Flaveria pringlei C3 PEPc, which drives higher modeled rates of C4 photosynthesis under low CO2 partial pressures.
Object of the activity systems as a major barrier to the creative use of ICT in schools

Despite the research and investment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools, many teachers still use it as a neutral tool; that is, a tool that can be used to carry out the same teaching and learning activities as have been undertaken previously with non-ICT tools. This paper adopts activity theory as a conceptual framework to describe and analyse how the objectives of two economics courses are shaped by their participants and learning environments, and in turn, how these shared objectives affect the way ICT is used in these courses. The paper goes on to suggest that the object of the activity systems poses a major barrier to the creative use of ICT in schools.
The antibiotic action of methylarsenite is an emergent property of microbial communities

Arsenic is the most ubiquitous environmental toxin. Here, we demonstrate that bacteria have evolved the ability to use arsenic to gain a competitive advantage over other bacteria at least twice. Microbes generate toxic methylarsenite (MAs(III)) by methylation of arsenite (As(III)) or reduction of methylarsenate (MAs(V)). MAs(III) is oxidized aerobically to MAs(V), making methylation a detoxification process. MAs(V) is continually re‐reduced to MAs(III) by other community members, giving them a competitive advantage over sensitive bacteria. Because generation of a sustained pool of MAs(III) requires microbial communities, these complex interactions are an emergent property. We show that reduction of MAs(V) by Burkholderia sp. MR1 produces toxic MAs(III) that inhibits growth of Escherichia coli in mixed culture. There are three microbial mechanisms for resistance to MAs(III). ArsH oxidizes MAs(III) to MAs(V). ArsI degrades MAs(III) to As(III). ArsP confers resistance by efflux. Cells of E. coli expressing arsI, arsH or arsP grow in mixed culture with Burkholderia sp. MR1 in the presence of MAs(V). Thus MAs(III) has antibiotic properties: a toxic organic compound produced by one microbe to kill off competitors. Our results demonstrate that life has adapted to use environmental arsenic as a weapon in the continuing battle for dominance.
Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumours An Institutional Experience

Objectives: 1)Tostudy thehistomorphological spectrum of gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours(GEP NETs) and to analyze it`sclinicopathological features. 2) To classify the GEP-NETs as per WHO 2010 classification system.3) To analyze the expression of the NET marker Neuron specific enolase (NSE) in the above histomorphological spectrum.Methods: A retrospective study was done with collected cases of GEP-NET (over 7 year period) . Clinical data was collected from medical records.The histopathology slides were retrievedfrom archives and reviewed.Immunohistochemical (IHC) studieswere done with marker NSE.Results: The study included 11 cases of GEP-NETs. The age of the patients ranged from 13 to 65 years. The most common anatomic location was the appendix and colon with 3 cases each (27.27%). Most of the tumours were gradeI (6 cases). None of the tumours were associated with carcinoid syndrome. Six out of eleven cases had metastasis at time of diagnosis (54.54%). IHC studies done with NSEresulted in positivity seen in all 10 casesin which it was done.Conclusions: Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours are rare and occur over a wide age range. Most of these tumours present late with metastasis at time of diagnosis. The most common location of these tumours were in the appendix and proximal colon. NSE is a good marker for these tumours and is beneficial in confirming the diagnosis.
Ethnic Identity among Guatemalan Youth.

AUTHOR de Baessa, Yetilu; Falbo, Toni; Fernandez, Francisco Javier TITLE Ethnic Identity among Guatemalan Youth. PUB DATE 2001-08-00 NOTE 16p. ; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (109th, San Francisco, CA, August 24-28, 2001). PUB TYPE Reports Research (143) Speeches/Meeting Papers (150) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Comparative Analysis; Cross Cultural Studies; *Emotional Adjustment; *Ethnicity; Foreign Countries; *Identification (Psychology); Psychological Patterns; Secondary Education; *Secondary School Students; Secondary Schools; Self Esteem; Social Cognition; Student Surveys IDENTIFIERS Guatemala
Incidence and outcomes of acute lung injury in the surgical intensive care unit of a tertiary care hospital in Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract Background Although the pathophysiology and treatment of acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) are well established, the incidence and outcomes of ALI have not been extensively reported. Variations in healthcare systems, demographics, socioeconomics, and levels of intensive care units (ICU) may explain remarkable differences in outcomes reported. Objectives To evaluate the incidence and outcomes of ALI/ARDS at the surgical ICU (SICU) at Siriraj Hospital of Mahidol University, Bangkok. Methods We included patients aged ≥18 years admitted to the general SICU between June 1, 2010 and May 31, 2013 in this prospective, cohort observational study. All patients required ≥24 h of ventilatory support. The study outcomes were the incidence of ALI/ARDS, SICU length of stay, and mortality rate. Results Of 2523 patients admitted to the SICU, 495 (20%) required ≥24 h ventilatory support, and 15 (3%) developed ALI/ARDS. ALI/ARDS occurred on day 2 of ventilatory support. ARDS was caused by sepsis and pneumonia. The patients who developed ALI/ARDS had a higher APACHE II score (P = 0.001) and end-stage renal disease (P = 0.01). Pneumonia and acute kidney injury were more severe in patients with ALI and ARDS (40% vs 9%, P = 0.002; 33% vs 10%, P = 0.02, respectively). Ventilatory support duration, SICU lengths of stay and hospital mortality were higher in the ALI/ARDS group. Conclusions The incidence of ALI/ARDS in the SICU was low, but the mortality rate was high. A larger sample size is necessary to identify independent risk factors for ALI/ARDS.
Control of rigid formations for agents with passive nonlinear dynamics

This thesis concerns the decentralized formation shape control of a set of homogeneous agents in the plane whose actuation dynamics are nonlinear and passive. The formation shape is specified by a subset of interagent distances. The formation is modeled as an undirected graph, with vertices representing the agents. An edge exists between two vertices if the specification provides the distance between them. Enough distances are assumed to have been specified to make the underlying graph rigid. Each agent executes its control law by measuring its relative positions from its neighbor and by knowing its absolute velocity. The control law is the same as previously proposed for a network where the agents have linear time invariant (LTI) passive dynamics. Despite the nonlinearity we show local convergence of this same law. The stability proof is in fact simpler than given in the LTI case through a redefinition of the state space. The results are verified by simulations, which show that the control law can indeed stabilize under wider ranges of dynamics than previously perceived.
Auditing Deep Neural Networks and Other Black-box Models

In this era of self-driving cars, smart watches, and voice-commanded speakers, machine learning is ubiquitous. Recently, deep learning has shown impressive success in solving many machine learning problems related to image data and sequential data – with the result that people are frequently impacted by deep learning models on a daily basis. However, how do we judge if these models are fair, and how do we discover what information is important when making a decision? And as APIs become ever-more common, how do we determine this information if we do not have access to the model itself? We developed a novel technique called Gradient Feature Auditing which gradually obscures information from a data-set and evaluates how a model’s predictions change as yet more of that information is obscured. This allows a deeper investigation of what information and features are actually used by machine learning models when making predictions. Throughout our experiments, we apply Gradient Feature Auditing on multiple data-sets using several popular modeling techniques (linear ∗Parts of this thesis also appear in “Auditing Black-box Models by Obscuring Features”. Adler, Falk, Friedler, Rybeck, Scheidegger, Smith, and Venkatasubramanian. arXiv:1602.07043 . †This research was funded in part by the NSF under grant DMR-1307801.
Role of tetrahedrally coordinated dopants in palladium hydrides on their superconductivity and inverse isotope effect

Absorption of hydrogen by palladium causes PdH to become superconducting below . Due to the presence of one octapore and two tetrapores per each Pd atom, it is believed that of PdH should increase further. Here, using ab initio calculation we show that (i) H placed in tetrapores of PdH induces a wide optical gap in the phonon density of states, which significantly reduces the electron–phonon coupling, and that (ii) the energetically preferable octapores filled by H enable the 9 K superconductivity only. This scenario may close a long-standing problem of the high- palladium hydrides. Moreover, simulating the pore population by H and D, within ab initio molecular dynamics, we are able to explain the inverse isotope effect in the framework of the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory.
Investigation of out-of-plane motion artifacts in 2D noninvasive vascular ultrasound elastography

Ultrasound noninvasive vascular elastography (NIVE) has shown its potential to measure strains of carotid arteries to predict plaque instability. When two-dimensional (2D) strain estimation is performed, either in longitudinal or cross-sectional view, only in-plane motions are considered. The motions in elevation direction (i.e. perpendicular to the imaging plane), can induce estimation artifacts affecting the accuracy of 2D NIVE. The influence of such out-of-plane motions on the performance of axial strain and axial shear strain estimations has been evaluated in this study. For this purpose, we designed a diseased carotid bifurcation phantom with a 70% stenosis and an in vitro experimental setup to simulate orthogonal out-of-plane motions of 1 mm, 2 mm and 3 mm. The Lagrangian speckle model estimator (LSME) was used to estimate axial strains and shears under pulsatile conditions. As anticipated, in vitro results showed more strain estimation artifacts with increasing magnitudes of motions in elevation. However, even with an out-of-plane motion of 2.0 mm, strain and shear estimations having inter-frame correlation coefficients higher than 0.85 were obtained. To verify findings of in vitro experiments, a clinical LSME dataset obtained from 18 participants with carotid artery stenosis was used. Deduced out-of-plane motions (ranging from 0.25 mm to 1.04 mm) of the clinical dataset were classified into three groups: small, moderate and large elevational motions. Clinical results showed that pulsatile time-varying strains and shears remained reproducible for all motion categories since inter-frame correlation coefficients were higher than 0.70, and normalized cross-correlations (NCC) between radiofrequency (RF) images were above 0.93. In summary, the performance of LSME axial strain and shear estimations appeared robust in the presence of out-of-plane motions (<2 mm) as encountered during clinical ultrasound imaging.
Bottle Label Segmentation Based on Multiple Gradient Information

In this paper, we propose a method to segment the bottle label in images taken by mobile phones using multi-gradient approaches. In order to segment the label region of interest-object, the saliency map method and Hough Transformation method are first applied to the original images to obtain the candidate region. The saliency map is used to detect the most salient area based on three kinds of features (color, orientation and illumination features). The Hough Transformation is a technique to isolated features of a particular shape within an image. Therefore, we utilize it to find the left and right border of the bottle. Next, we segment the label based on the gradient information obtained from the structure tensor method and edge method. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method is able to accurately segment the labels as the first step of product label recognition system.
Merge Double Thompson Sampling for Large Scale Online Ranker Evaluation

Online ranker evaluation is one of the key challenges in information retrieval. While the preferences of rankers can be inferred by interleaved comparison methods, how to effectively choose the pair of rankers to generate the result list without degrading the user experience too much can be formalized as a K-armed dueling bandit problem, which is an online partial-information learning framework, where feedback comes in the form of pair-wise preferences. A commercial search system may evaluate a large number of rankers concurrently, and scaling effectively in the presence of numerous rankers has not been fully studied. In this paper, we focus on solving the large-scale online ranker evaluation problem under the so-called Condorcet assumption, where there exists an optimal ranker that is preferred to all other rankers. We propose Merge Double Thompson Sampling (MergeDTS), which first utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy that localizes the comparisons carried out by the algorithm to small batches of rankers, and then employs the Thompson Sampling (TS) to reduce the comparisons between suboptimal rankers inside these small batches. The effectiveness (regret) and efficiency (time complexity) of MergeDTS are extensively evaluated using examples from the domain of online evaluation for web search. Our main finding is that for large-scale Condorcet ranker evaluation problems MergeDTS outperforms the state-of-the-art dueling bandit algorithms.