Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GRB 080517: a local, low-luminosity gamma-ray burst in a dusty galaxy at z = 0.09

We present an analysis of the photometry and spectroscopy of the host galaxy of Swift-detected GRB 080517. From our optical spectroscopy, we identify a redshift of z = 0.089 ± 0.003, based on strong emission lines, making this a rare example of a very local, low-luminosity, long gamma-ray burst. The galaxy is detected in the radio with a flux density of S4.5 GHz = 0.22 ± 0.04 mJy - one of relatively few known gamma-ray bursts hosts with a securely measured radio flux. Both optical emission lines and a strong detection at 22 μm suggest that the host galaxy is forming stars rapidly, with an inferred star formation rate ∼16 M⊙ yr−1 and a high dust obscuration (E(B − V) > 1, based on sightlines to the nebular emission regions). The presence of a companion galaxy within a projected distance of 25 kpc, and almost identical in redshift, suggests that star formation may have been triggered by galaxy-galaxy interaction. However, fitting of the remarkably flat spectral energy distribution from the ultraviolet through to the infrared suggests that an older, 500 Myr post-starburst stellar population is present along with the ongoing star formation. We conclude that the host galaxy of GRB 080517 is a valuable addition to the still very small sample of well-studied local gamma-ray burst hosts.
Comparative study on the biosorption of Pb(II), Cd(II) and Zn(II) using Lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus): Kinetics, isotherms and thermodynamics

A comparative study on the biosorption of Pb(II), Cd(II) and Zn(II) using Lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) was investigated under various physicochemical parameters. Optimisation studies were carried out using batch biosorption studies. The biosorption of each of the metal ions was found to be pH-dependent. Kinetic study showed that each biosorption process followed the pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The sorption of each metal ion was analysed with Freundlich, Langmuir, Temkin and Dubinin-Radushkevich (D-R) isotherm models, in each case, the equilibrium data were best represented by Freundlich isotherm model. Thermodynamic parameters such as standard Gibbs free energy (∆G˚), standard enthalpy (∆H˚), standard entropy (∆S˚) and the activation energy (A) were calculated. The biosorption of each metal ion was spontaneous and the order of spontaneity of the biosorption process being Zn(II) > Cd(II) > Pb(II). Similarly, the change in entropy shows that the order of disorder is Cd(II) > Zn(II) > Pb(II). In each case, the value of activation energy obtained shows that each process is a diffusion-controlled adsorption process.
Policy learning in Europe: the open method of co-ordination and laboratory federalism

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the potential of the open method of co-ordination (OMC) and of laboratory federalism for policy innovation and learning in a multi-level system of jurisdictions. Our analysis shows that both can be seen as institutions that establish processes of generating and spreading new knowledge about appropriate public policies. However, the respective learning mechanisms are very different: in laboratory federalism learning takes place through a purely non-centralized process of experimentation with different new policies. In comparison, the OMC relies on a benchmarking process carried out on a higher-level jurisdiction from which, in a rather centralized way, policy recommendations are derived. In both cases, serious learning problems resulting from limited transferability of experiences gained with policies and from lacking or distorting incentives arise. We find that to fully use their potential the OMC should become an integral part of laboratory federalism, thus supporting the smooth working of yardstick, interjurisdictional and regulatory competition.
1 The influence of knowledge and persuasion on the 2 decision to adopt or reject alternative fuel vehicles 3

Alternative fuel vehicles, such as battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, 14 support the imperative to decarbonise the transport sector, but are not yet at a stage in their 15 development where they can successfully compete with conventional fuel vehicles. This paper 16 examines the influence of knowledge and persuasion on the decision to adopt or reject alternative 17 fuel vehicles, underpinned by Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory. A household questionnaire 18 survey was undertaken with respondents in the Sutton Coldfield suburb of the United Kingdom 19 city of Birmingham. This suburb was previously identified as having a strong spatial cluster of 20 potential early adopters of alternative fuel vehicles. The results confirm that among respondents 21 the knowledge of alternative fuel vehicles was limited and perceptions have led to the 22 development of negative attitudes towards them. The reasons largely relate to three problems: 23 purchase price, limited range, and poor infrastructure availability. The majority of respondents 24 have passively rejected alternative fuel vehicles, such that they have never given consideration to 25 adoption. This confirms that a concerted effort is required to inform the general public about 26 alternative fuel vehicles. 27
Vesicular cells of the lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium americanum) fruit: development, cytochemistry, and lipid analysis

The lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe, Arceuthobium americanum Nutt. ex Engelm. , is a parasitic angiosperm that infects conifers in western Canadian forests. A striking feature of the Arceuthobium life cycle is explosive seed dispersal, triggered by hydrostatic build-up within the fruit, localized in a tissue called “viscin. ” Viscin is composed of two cell types: “viscin cells” that accrue pressure in their hydrated mucilage, and “vesicular cells” with a previously undetermined function. The objective of this work was to investigate the development and composition of vesicular cells using microscopy, cytochemistry, and gas chromatography – mass spectroscopy. We found that vesicular cells are initiated from mesocarp cells lining the viscin cells. As development of the seed progresses, vesicular cells form a single layer, enlarge, and become isodiametric. Later, the cells make up all of the remaining 3–4 outer mesocarp layers. Concomitant with enlargement, intracellular triacylglycerides (TAGs) largely compose.
An overview of production systems

Abstract : Since production systems were first proposed in 1943 as a general computational mechanism, the methodology has seen a great deal of development and has been applied to a diverse collection of problems. Despite the wide scope of goals and perspectives demonstrated by the various systems, there appear to be many recurrent themes. This paper is an attempt to provide an analysis and overview of those themes, as well as a conceptual framework by which many of the seemingly disparate efforts can be viewed, both in relation to each other, and to other methodologies. Accordingly, the authors use the term 'production system' in a broad sense, and attempt to show how most systems which have used the term can be fit into the framework. The comparison to other methodologies is intended to provide a view of PS characteristics in a broader context, with primary reference to procedurally-based techniques, but with reference also to some of the current developments in programming and the organization of data and knowledge bases.
HYPOMETHYLATION IS RESTRICTED TO THE D 4 Z 4 REPEAT ARRAY IN PHENOTYPIC

Background: Patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) show a contraction of the D4Z4 repeat array in the subtelomere of chromosome 4q. This D4Z4 contraction is associated with significant allele-specific hypomethylation of the repeat. Hypomethylation of D4Z4 is also observed in patients with phenotypic FSHD without contraction of D4Z4 and in patients with the immunodeficiency, centromeric instability, and facial anomalies (ICF) syndrome, an unrelated disease that does not present with muscular dystrophy and is in part caused by DNMT3B mutations. Methods: In order to identify the gene defect and to find the pathogenetic epigenetic pathway in phenotypic FSHD, we have aimed to identify the differences and commonalities in phenotypic FSHD and ICF by 1) investigation of DNA methylation of non-D4Z4 repeat arrays, 2) analysis of mitogen-stimulated lymphocytes to detect pericentromeric abnormalities involving chromosomes 1, 9, and 16, 3) determination of IgA, IgG, and IgM levels, and 4) mutational analysis of candidate genes to identify a second disease locus involved in the pathogenesis of phenotypic FSHD. Results: Our results do not show epigenetic or phenotypic commonalities between phenotypic FSHD and ICF other than the earlier observed D4Z4 hypomethylation. We could not identify any mutations in the candidate genes tested for. Conclusion: Our data suggest that in phenotypic FSHD hypomethylation is restricted to D4Z4 and that phenotypic FSHD and ICF do not share a defect in the same molecular pathway.
Light Microscopic Determination of Particle Size Distribution in an Aqueous Gel By :

The need for particle size control in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals is becoming increasingly apparent as the pharmaceutical industry attempts to capitalize on some APIs with less-than-ideal solubility profiles. Also, significant advances in drug delivery have been made in which a finely divided API, with the concomitant increase in specific surface area, has resulted in increased bioavailability. Precise particle size control technologies have also assisted in the development of drug delivery platforms for the delivery of a medicament to the lung. As these trends have occurred, the need for highly reproducible particle size assessment techniques has grown significantly in the past decade. The interest in particle size measurements will remain high, particularly in view of FDA trends toward recommending more thorough descriptions of particle size distributions in submissions in which the emphasis of a drug product claim is based in a tightly controlled particle size.
Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics

A multiple center milestone study of clinical vertebra segmentation is presented in this paper. Vertebra segmentation is a fundamental step for spinal image analysis and intervention. The ﬁrst half of the study was conducted in the spine segmentation challenge in 2014 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Workshop on Computational Spine Imaging (CSI 2014). The objective was to evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art vertebra segmentation algorithms on computed tomography (CT) scans using ten training and ﬁve testing dataset, all healthy cases; the second half of the study was conducted after the challenge, where additional 5 abnormal cases are used for testing to evaluate the performance under abnormal cases. Dice coefﬁcients and absolute surface distances were used as evaluation metrics. Segmentation of each vertebra as a single geometric unit, as well as separate segmentation of vertebra substructures, was evaluated. Five teams participated in the comparative study. The top performers in the study achieved Dice coefﬁcient of 0.93 in the upper thoracic, 0.95 in the lower thoracic and 0.96 in the lumbar spine for healthy cases, and 0.88 in the upper thoracic, 0.89 in the lower thoracic and 0.92 in the lumbar spine for osteoporotic and fractured cases. The strengths and weaknesses of each method as well as future suggestion for improvement are discussed. This is the ﬁrst multi-center comparative study for vertebra segmentation methods, which will provide an up-to-date performance milestone for the fast growing spinal image analysis and intervention.
Sense-Aware Word Embeddings Using Stream Clustering By Willie Boag Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Commonwealth

When a computer displays the word "football" on a page, it does not understand it to be a popular sport, but instead it simply sees a sequence of letters: f, o, o, t, b, a, l, l. The computer has no notion of what those letters mean. In Natural Language Processing, the modern approach for word representation is to build a special vector space, called an embedding space, where every word is represented by its own 200-dimensional vector. In this proposed vector space, words with similar meanings would have close vectors, which would enable the computer to easily determine how similar two words are. In 2013, Google released a tool called word2vec which could be trained on data to learn an embedding space that was able to go one step further for the structure of its word embeddings. They found that vector operations were able to capture semantic transformations, most famously, analogies could be performed with simple vector addition : vecKing − vecMan + vecWoman ≈ vecQueen where vecw is the embedding for a given word w. One issue with word2vec’s learning algorithm is that it learns exactly one embedding per word. Although this may sound desirable at first, consider the word "bank", which has multiple, entirely unrelated senses, including: 1. financial institution 2. river bank. Rather than having a jack-of-all-trades vector for "bank" that tries to satisfy both concepts at once, it would be better to give each concept its own dedicated embedding. In this thesis, I propose an extension of the word2vec algorithm to automatically detect various word senses and learn an embedding for each one. This approach uses a sequential clustering algorithm which I engineered to learn how many senses each word should have. The result is a senseaware representation for words which can improve performance on tasks that require word sense disambiguation.
Testing for a monotone trend in a modulated renewal process

Abstract : In examining point processes which are overdispersed with respect to a Poisson process, there is a problem of discriminating between trends and the appearance in data of sequences of very long intervals. In this case the standard robust methods for trend analysis based on log transforms and regression techniques perform very poorly, and the standard exact test for a monotone trend derived for modulated Poisson processes is not robust with respect to its distribution theory when the underlying process is non-Poisson. However, experience with data and an examination of the departures from the Poisson distribution theory suggest a modification to the standard test for trend, both for modulated renewal and general point processes.
Morphing Generic Organs To Speaker-Specific Anatomies

We present here a framework for developing a generic talking head capable of reproducing the anatomy and the facial deformations induced by speech movements with only a few parameters. Speech-related facial movements are controlled by six parameters. We characterize the skull and mandible variability by six and seven free parameters respectively. Speaker-specific skull, jaw and face data are normalized using generic meshes of these organs and a robust 3D-to-3D matching procedure. Further analysis of these normalized data is performed using a decomposition of the 3D variance based on iterative principal component analysis aimed at identifying and predicting kinematic consequences of anatomical settings.
J Neutrino signals from dark matter decay

We investigate different neutrino signals from the decay of dark matter particles to determine the prospects for their detection, and more specifically if any spectral signature can be disentangled from the background in present and future neutrino observatories. If detected, such a signal could bring an independent confirmation of the dark matter interpretation of the dramatic rise in the positron fraction above 10GeV recently observed by the PAMELA satellite experiment and offer the possibility of distinguishing between astrophysical sources and dark matter decay or annihilation. In combination with other signals, it may also be possible to distinguish among different dark matter decay channels.
- 1-A non-linear model of information sharing practices in academic communitiesi

A new model of information sharing practices in academic communities is based on Latour's circulatory system of scientific facts and some elements of Foster's non-linear model of information-seeking behavior. The main proposition of this model is that information sharing practices and context simultaneously shape each other. The proposed model supports Foster's conceptualization of information practices as non-linear processes, but its emphasis on the interdependence between context and information practices provides a more effective means to capture complex negotiations involved in information sharing practices. The proposition is that the major reason for non-linearity in information practices is a continuous shifting of actors' interests, pressures, and concerns. Capturing these dynamic relations becomes possible through this model. The model also offers a way to generate a number of research questions and hypotheses, and as such it could be a useful tool for empirical studies on information sharing in academic communities.
Blind chip-rate multiuser equalisation

This paper addresses blind multiuser detection in a DS-CDMA downlink channel. The synchronous users are separated by re-establishing orthogonality of their spreading sequences in a common chip-rate equaliser. The adaptation algorithm can be based either on a constant modulus (CMA) criterion of the various users, or on a decision directed (DD) scheme. In either case, a stochastic gradient descent algorithm will result, as derived, in a multiple error filtered-X LMS type approach, whereby the equaliser input to both the multichannel CMA or DD algorithm are replaced by spreading code filtered versions. Adaptation examples are given underlining some of the characteristics of the proposed algorithms.
Taxonomy and identification of chiffchaffs in the Western Palearctic

The 'chiffchaff complex' within the genus Phylbscopus covers a wide area of Europe and northern Asia, and has often been considered to include a number of good species based on physical and vocal differences. The affinities of certain populations, however, were unclear and gave rise to a number of taxonomic treatments. The application of DNAsequence analysis has now added further insights by revealing the genetic differentiation and the relationships of various taxa and populations. Based on these analyses and a review of vocal and plumage differences, the speciation within the complex is discussed. The results show various levels of divergence and support the recognition of at least four (possibly five) species of chiffchaff: Common Chiffchaff P. collybita (with five subspecies), Iberian Chiffchaff P. brehmii, Canary Islands Chiffchaff P. canariensis, and Mountain Chiffchaff P. sindianus (with two subspecies); the taxonomic status of the form tristis remains unclear. [Brit. Birds 91: 361-376, September 1998] © British Birds Ltd 1998 361 362 Clement, Helbig & Small: Taxonomy and identification of chiffchaffs Table 1. Breeding distribution of chiffchaffs Phylloscopus. See also fig. 1.
CNNSAT: FAST, ACCURATE BOOLEAN SATISFIA-

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) is one of the most well-known NP-complete problems and has been extensively studied. State-of-the-art solvers exist and have found a wide range of applications. However, they still do not scale well to formulas with hundreds of variables for uniform 3-SAT problems. To tackle this fundamental scalability challenge, we introduce CNNSAT, a fast and accurate statistical decision procedure for SAT based on convolutional neural networks. CNNSAT’s effectiveness is due to a precise and compact representation of Boolean formulas. On both real and synthetic formulas, CNNSAT is highly accurate and orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art solver Z3. We also describe how to extend CNNSAT to predict satisfying assignments when it predicts a formula to be satisfiable.
Research and Development of an Algorithm for Solving the Problem of Control over the Input – Output Material Flows of an Industrial Company

A discussion is given of a universal mathematical economic model designed to find optimal strategies for controlling the production and logistics subsystems (subsystem components) of a company. The declared universal character of the model allows a systematic consideration of both production components, including constraints associated with how raw materials and components are converted into goods for sale, and resource-based and logical constraints on input–output material flows. The model and the generated control problems are developed within a single approach allowing the implementation of logical conditions of any complexity and the formulation of the corresponding formal optimization problems. An explanation is provided for the meaning behind the criteria and constraints. An approximate polynomial algorithm is proposed for solving the formulated mixed programming optimization problems of actual dimension. The results are presented of testing the algorithm for problem instances over a wide range of dimensions.
The Time Series Consumption Function Revisited

THE RELATIONSHIP between consumer spending and income is one of the oldest statistical regularities of macroeconomics-and one of the sturdiest. Like the aging movie star, it needs a little touching up now and again, but always seems to come bouncing back. A dozen years ago, both the theoretical derivation and the econometric form of the aggregate consumption function were considered settled. Most economists adhered to one of two ways of putting Fisher's theory of intertemporal optimization into operation: Milton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis (henceforth, PIH) or Franco Modigliani's life-cycle hypothesis (henceforth, LCH). ' Since each variant seemed to have sound theoretical underpinnings, and since the two had similar econometric forms that explained the data well and had similar implications for policy, there was not a great deal to quarrel about. Perhaps the most contentious empirical issue was the apparently large marginal
Investigation on the Fretting Wear of a Coated Substrate: Interlayer Stress Behaviour

The effect of surface modification due to fretting wear behaviour of coated SCMV (High Strength Alloy Steel) with interlayer is investigated by simulation using ABAQUS Software on a cylinder on flat contact configuration under gross sliding conditions. The effect of interlayer stiffness and the surface modification are analysed with the focus on the interlayer stress failures and its associated stresses behaviour. Tangential stress and shear stress are predicted to reduce with the increase of numbers of wear cycles due to the effect of contact conforming. Stresses in the interlayer are predicted to increase with the interlayer stiffness due to the function of the interlayer as the load bearer.