Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalized van der Waals theory. I. Basic formulation and application to uniform fluids

A generalized van der Waals theory is derived on the basis of simple physical and mathematical arguments. The derivation results in a free- energy functional wherein the independent variable is a coarse-grained particle density. It is assumed that a well defined particle density dominates the free energy and this density is to be obtained by minimizing the free energy functional. The variational theory so obtained can be applied to non-uniform fluids. In the present work the possibility of stable non-uniform structure is neglected and the theory is applied to uniform fluids. It then produces an equation of state identical in form to that proposed originally by van der Waals but the excluded volume is only about half as large in the three-dimensional case. Applications to several two- and three-dimensional systems indicate that the new equation of state is a distinct improvement over the traditional van der Waals theory when the full range of fluid densities is considered. The quantitative accuracy in the case of simple uniform fluids is sufficient to warrant further development and exploitation of the theory.
The Influence of Microstructural Texture and Prior Beta Grain Recrystallisation on the Deformation Behaviour of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Produced Ti-6al-4v

The control and predictability of mechanical properties during manufacturing is essential in achieving parts that consistently deliver adequate mechanical properties. In laser powder bed fusion produced Ti-6Al-4V, this control is complex and dependent on the build orientation. While studies have identified the columnar prior-β grain structure as a cause in mechanical anisotropy, differences in underlying micro-structure and its influence on anisotropy are not yet well understood. This study investigates micro-structural texture differences in two build orientations before and after post-process heat treatments and in what way the micro-structural features control deformation-and-failure behavior. The study uses uniaxial tensile tests to determine tensile behavior of samples built “vertically” and “horizontally” with reference to the build plate. Microscopy techniques of scanning electron microscopy imaging and back-scatter diffraction are used for micro-structure characterization and deformation mode identification. Results identify key crystallographic and morphological textural differences in the two build-orientations. Heat treatments above the β-transus successfully globularise prior β grains, thereby improving mechanical anisotropy. The use of electron backscatter diffraction demonstrates key morphological features that control slip, micro-crack initiation and final fracture.
Inhibitive Effect of Chlorophytum borivilianum Root Extract on Mild Steel Corrosion in HCl and H2SO4 Solutions

Inhibition effect of Chlorophytum borivilianum root extract (CBRE) on mild steel corrosion in 1 M HCl and 0.5 M H2SO4 media has been studied using various techniques, viz., weight loss, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, Tafel polarization, and scanning electron microscopy. Results indicate that inhibition efficiency of CBRE increases with an increase in inhibitor concentration in both acid media. Furthermore, the effect of immersion time (120 h), temperature (35–55 °C), and acid concentration on the inhibition potential of CBRE has been investigated by weight loss method. Characterization of CBRE is carried out using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, UV–visible spectroscopy, and preliminary phytochemical screening tests. The Langmuir isotherm model is proposed as the most suitable adsorption isotherm in both acid solutions. UV–visible study and scanning electron microscopy images have confirmed the molecular adsorption of the extract on a mild steel surface. Results of the techniques used are.
Monte Carlo methodologies for neutron streaming in diffusion calculations - Application to directional diffusion coefficients and leakage models in XS generation

complex systems that involve several physical phenomena. The safe and sustainable operation of present-day reactors requires powerful numerical methods. Moreover, innovative reactor concepts pose an additional burden on the computational techniques available nowadays. This thesis explores the performance of preexisting and novel numerical formalisms for the solution of the steady-state neutron transport problem by combined Monte Carlo and diffusion theory methods with a view to improving the accuracy of the solution whilst keeping computational costs at reasonable levels. A new directional diffusion coefficient method exhibited very good performance in a sodium-cooled reactor environment. A novel neutron leakage model at assembly level provided valuable information about the spaceenergy coupling of the scalar neutron flux. A ato-D D 6 0 /2 16
Effects of Different Media and Organic Additives on Seed Germination of Geodorum Densiflorum (Lam) Schltr. – An Endangered Orchid

Interaction of different media and organic additives showed significant effects on seed germination of G. densiflorum. Among the different organic additives tomato extracts significantly enhanced seed germination and was found to be the most suitable one for enhance the seed germination, It was also the best among treatments for production of viable protocorms. Highest seed germination was recorded in 5% tomato extract fortified with 1⁄2 MS medium than compared to mMS, MS, KC medium. In this study, Tomato was selected to be the best organic additive and 1⁄2 MS medium as the suitable medium for seed germination of G.densiflorum when compared to other organic additives like potato and coconut water and different media. Effects of Different Media and Organic Additives on Seed Germination of Geodorum Densiflorum (Lam) Schltr. – An Endangered Orchid
Expecting the Unexpected: A new Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) – concept and first results

The phenomenon of economic uncertainty has attracted considerable attention in recent years. New indicators have been introduced aiming at measuring uncertainty and its potential economic consequences. Still, the Corona pandemic has hit the world economy virtually out of the blue. In this paper, we argue that, while it is clear that true uncertainty, by definition, cannot be forecasted, better early warning systems could be built. To further this goal, we propose a new taxonomy of economic uncertainty and construct a news-based indicator that captures different kinds of uncertainty, some of which may precede others. If we are able to detect the preludes of an uncertainty shock, we may be able to gauge its size and potential economic impact early on. In earlier writings (Muller et al. 2018, Muller 2020a) we demonstrated the feasibility of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for gauging uncertainty. Here, we base our analysis on an enhanced data set, a broader query, and we propose a routine to scan the recent past for new sources of uncertainty. Based on a text corpus of more than 750.000 newspaper articles published since 2008, we run several topic models of the LDA type. As an unsupervised text mining technique LDA has the potential to make economic indicators more sensitive to hitherto unknown – or overlooked – factors of economically relevant uncertainty. Our results are preliminary, yet encouraging. The notion that economic uncertainty comes in three types, two of which, market-based and economic policy uncertainty, may reinforce one another, while the third type is truly exogeneous, is broadly supported by our empirical approach. The Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) is able to shed light on the links between the three categories of uncertainty and is systematically open to new developments; it is designed to detect not merely known unknowns (e.g. fiscal and monetary policy, trade policy, regulation), but also surprising unknowns (e.g. technological, ecological, social changes).
Bio-based epoxy resins with low molecular weight kraft lignin and pyrogallol

Abstract A low-molecular lignin fraction (L) was extracted for the preparation of bio-based epoxy resins. Various compositions with the “green” 1,3-glycerol diglycidyl ether (1) and the co-component pyrogallol (2) were tested. In a first series of experiments, thermosets consisting of 1 and L, were studied with respect to variable lignin contents between 20 and 50%. The best thermoset has a tensile strength of 37 MPa and a Young’s modulus of 2.2 GPa at 40% lignin input. Secondly, lignin-free compositions of 1 and 2 were prepared. For a molar fraction of the functional groups (nOH nEpoxy-1) of 130%, the tensile strength could be enhanced to 93 MPa and the modulus reached 3.7 GPa. Finally, systems with all three components were examined. The best mechanical performance of the corresponding neat thermosets was reached at nOH nEpoxy-1 of 130%. Tensile strength decreases slightly to 86 MPa and Young’s modulus remains nearly unchanged at 3.2 GPa. Two resin compositions, L+1 and L+1+2, were tested for the preparation of unidirectional composites reinforced with man-made cellulosic fibers (50% by vol.). The bending strength was 208 MPa in combination with a bending modulus of 12.5 GPa.
Exchange Rate Dynamics and Trade Balance in Selected African Countries

African countries have over the years experienced persistent current account deficits. The role of asymmetries in explaining the response of trade balance to exchange rate movement has not received adequate attention as linear models dominate extant empirical literature. In this paper, we examined the impact of exchange rate on the trade balance in five African countries using both linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag models to analyze data for the period 1980–2018. The linear model revealed that the J-curve holds in Uganda in the short run, whereas evidence of long-run J-curve effect was found only in Algeria. However, the nonlinear analysis showed that the short-run J-curve holds for South Africa and Uganda whereas a long- run J-curve effect was found in Algeria and Uganda. The results make a case for modeling asymmetries as the nonlinear model performed relatively better. An important policy implication is the need to address structural imbalances in the economy to leverage on the exchange rate and trade policies to improve trade outcomes. under the CC BY-NC of foreign income. α 0 is a constant whereas α 1 – α 3 are parameters of the model, and ε t is the random error term. The J-curve hypothesis posits that an increase in the real effective exchange rate leads to an initial deterioration of the trade balance of a country but thereafter improves it when exports and imports adjust to price changes. An increase in real domestic income is expected to worsen the trade balance because the demand for imports increases, whereas an increase in foreign income improves the trade balance because it stimulates foreign demand for domestic products. The J-curve hypothesis incorporates time effects into the Marshall–Lerner condition, suggesting that the sum of trade elasticities may be below unity in the short run but greater than unity over the long run.
First-Principles Study of Ferromagnetism in Two-Dimensional Silicene with Hydrogenation

We performed first-principles simulation on the electronic structure and magnetic properties of two-dimensional hexagonal silicene, which was recently synthesized. The results show that the weak overlapping between 3pz orbitals of neighbor Si atoms leads to a very reactive surface, resulting in a more energetically stable semiconducting surface upon being fully hydrogenated. Half-hydrogenation breaks the extended π-bonding network of silicene, leaving the electrons in the unsaturated Si atoms localized and unpaired, and thus it exhibits ferromagnetic semiconducting behavior with a band gap of 0.95 eV. The long-range ferromagnetic coupling between Si atoms was also predicted, with a Curie temperature of about 300 K. These results demonstrated that hydrogenation is an efficient route to tune the electronic properties of silicene sheets.
PEDAGOGICAL POSSIBILITIES OF AN INTEGRATIVE-ACTIVITY APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTIFUNCTIONAL CORE OF PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE OF FUTURE NURSING SPECIALISTS

Aim. To give scientific understanding of conditions for the development of multifunctional core of future nurses’ professional competence using an integrative-activity approach. Methodology. Observations and generalizations have been made regarding the realization of the integrative-activity approach in educational organizations of medical profile in the Russian Federation and European countries that train nurses. Results. The analysis showed that the pedagogical possibilities of integrative-active approach in the development of multifunctional core of professional competence of future specialists in nursing have
Hierarchical part-based disentanglement of pose and appearance

Landmarks and keypoints are an important intermediate representation for image understanding and reconstruction. Although many supervised approaches exist, many of them require labels of the target domain, which exist for humans, but only for sparse keypoints and not for the breadth of object and animal classes present in our rich world. We propose a self-supervised approach for discovering landmarks from unstructured image collections by disentangling pose and appearance of object parts. In particular, we propose a hierarchical structure that helps to find more meaningful keypoint locations. We demonstrate that our simplifications and hierarchical extensions of prior work are effective quantitatively and qualitatively in 2D keypoint estimation and image modification operations tasks. Our approach eases the discovery of objects and their parts in domains for which no labeled data exist and thereby eases downstream tasks, such as behaviour classification for neuroscience applications, and intuitive image editing.
Evaluation of a particle trap laser desorption mass spectrometer (PT-LDMS) for the quantification of sulfate aerosols

Abstract A particle trap laser desorption mass spectrometer (PT-LDMS) has been developed for the online measurements of the chemical composition of submicron aerosol particles. The PT-LDMS was evaluated by both laboratory and ambient measurements, with the focus being the quantification of sulfate aerosols. Ammonium sulfate ((NH4)2SO4) is generally the predominant form of sulfate aerosols in urban air; hence, it is used as a material for laboratory experiments and calibration. Major fragments of (NH4)2SO4 were observed at mass-to-charge ratios (m/z) of 48 (SO+) and 64 (SO2+). The dependence of sensitivity (expressed as the ratio of m/z 48 signal to sulfate mass) on laser power and cell temperature was investigated. An intercomparison of PT-LDMS with a commercial sulfate particle analyzer (SPA) and filter sampling was performed in Tokyo. Good agreement was observed between SPA and filter analysis (slope = 0.98, r2 = 0.99). Although the mass concentration of sulfate measured by PT-LDMS exhibited a tight correlation with that measured by SPA, the mass concentration measured by PT-LDMS tended to underestimate that measured by SPA (slope = 0.70, r2 = 0.96). While the discrepancy can be mainly attributed to the difference in size cut between PT-LDMS (approximately PM1) and SPA (PM2.5), differences in vaporization efficiency were also found to be important. Copyright © 2016 American Association for Aerosol Research
Building and Comparing Lemma Embeddings for Latin. Classical Latin versus Thomas Aquinas

This paper presents a new set of lemma embeddings for the Latin language. Embeddings are trained on a manually annotated corpus of texts belonging to the Classical era: different models, architectures and dimensions are tested and evaluated using a novel benchmark for the synonym selection task. In addition, we release vectors pre-trained on the “Opera Maiora” by Thomas Aquinas, thus providing a resource to analyze Latin in a diachronic perspective. The embeddings built upon the two training corpora are compared to each other to support diachronic lexical studies. The words showing the highest usage change between the two corpora are reported and a selection of them is discussed.
Physico-chemical study of the interaction between levofloxacin hemihydrate Drug with Cetylpyridinium chloride in aqueous medium: conductometric and spectrophotometric investigation

Herein, the interaction between levofloxacin hemihydrate (LFH), a fluoroquinolone antibiotic drug, and cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC), a cationic surfactant, has been studied by applying conductometric and spectrophotometric techniques at various temperatures. The binding constant of LFH to various types of micelles has also been calculated by means of the Benesi-Hildebrand Equation. (CPC+LFH) mixed system exhibits lower critical micelle concentration (cmc) values in magnitude compared to the pure CPC in aqueous solution at a particular temperature as confirmed by the conductometric measurements. The profound change in the cmc values of the (CPC+LFH) mixtures by varying the concentration of LFH signify the synergistic (attractive) interaction between CPC and LFH. In addition, The negative values of standard free energy demonstrate the stability of the (CPC+LFH) mixture. Furthermore, the other thermodynamic parameters such as the standard enthalpy and standard entropy data suggest the existence of hydrophobic interaction between LFH and surfactants.
Ca-ALGINAT UNTUK ADSORPSI Fe DAN Mn PADA AIR GAMBUT

Ca-alginate for the adsorption of Fe and Mn in peat water has been carried out using a batch method. Brownish water color, low pH, and high content of Fe and Mn metals are obstacles in direct utilization of peat water. Peat water treatment can be done by the adsorption method. The stages of this study began with the preparation of the adsorbent by dripping Na-alginate solution into a variety of CaCl2 solution concentrations. Furthermore, the adsorption of peat water was carried out by batch method with variations in the contact time and mass of the adsorbent to get the adsorbent with the highest % removal. The optimal contact time for Fe and Mn adsorption on peat water is 6 hours. The optimal % removal value for the influence of Fe adsorption contact time for Ca-alginate variations of 0.1 M and 0.2 M CaCl2 solution were 20.38% and 21.19%, respectively. The optimal % removal value for the influence of Mn adsorption contact time for Ca-alginate variations of 0.1 M and 0.2 M CaCl2 solution were 30.98% and 41.37%, respectively. The optimal mass of adsorbent for Fe and Mn adsorption in peat water is 0.75 g. The optimal % removal value for the influence of Fe adsorption mass adsorption for Ca-alginate variations of 0.1 M and 0.2 M CaCl2 solution were 79.28% and 21.67%, respectively. The optimal % removal value for the mass effect of Mn adsorption adsorption for Ca-alginate variation of 0.1 M and 0.2 M CaCl2 solution respectively at 24.44% and 26.13%.
Home Telemonitoring of Arterial Hypertension With Antihypertensive Treatment Titration: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Prospective Trial (HOROSCOPE Study)

Background Despite the availability of effective treatment, the control of hypertension remains insufficient. Telemonitoring in the management of hypertension would be an effective way to improve blood pressure control. Objective The aim of our study will be to evaluate the effects of telemonitoring with antihypertensive treatment titration on blood pressure control in Tunisian patients with hypertension. Methods Our trial will be a prospective, rater-blinded randomized controlled trial carried out with primary care physicians in the Sahel region of Tunisia. Patients will be eligible for enrollment if they are aged over 35 years, are newly diagnosed with hypertension, or are known to be poorly controlled on antihypertensive therapy. Participants will be randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to the telemonitoring arm or usual care arm. The telemonitoring arm will involve a weekly telephone call for the collection of the home blood pressure measurements, therapeutic education, and treatment compliance assessment as well as a monthly call for treatment titration and a side effect check. Randomization will be done via the use of an interactive web responsive system, and patients will be stratified by investigation center. Neither participants nor investigators will be masked to the group assignments. The primary outcome will be the change in mean 24-hour systolic blood pressure from baseline to the 6-month follow-up in the 2 groups. All randomized patients who attend the follow-up visit at 6 months and have no missing data for the primary outcome will be included in the analysis. Results Recruitment to the trial started in July 2020. The study was initiated with 17 primary care physicians. We expect the inclusion period to last for approximately 6 months. We expect to complete data collection by the end of 2021 and plan to disseminate the results subsequently. Conclusions The HOROSCOPE (Home Telemonitoring of Arterial Hypertension With Antihypertensive Treatment Titration: Randomized Controlled Prospective Trial) study will provide important new evidence that could shed some light on the feasibility and impact of telemonitoring and self-monitoring in a Tunisian population of patients with hypertension who consult primary care physicians. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04607239; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04607239 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/26184
An international initiative of predicting the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic using ensemble data assimilation

This work demonstrates the efficiency of using iterative ensemble smoothers to estimate the parameters of an SEIR model. We have extended a standard SEIR model with age-classes and compartments of sick, hospitalized, and dead. The data conditioned on are the daily numbers of accumulated deaths and the number of hospitalized. Also, it is possible to condition the model on the number of cases obtained from testing. We start from a wide prior distribution for the model parameters; then, the ensemble conditioning leads to a posterior ensemble of estimated parameters yielding model predictions in close agreement with the observations. The updated ensemble of model simulations has predictive capabilities and include uncertainty estimates. In particular, we estimate the effective reproductive number as a function of time, and we can assess the impact of different intervention measures. By starting from the updated set of model parameters, we can make accurate short-term predictions of the epidemic development assuming knowledge of the future effective reproductive number. Also, the model system allows for the computation of long-term scenarios of the epidemic under different assumptions. We have applied the model system on data sets from several countries, i.e., the four European countries Norway, England, The Netherlands, and France; the province of Quebec in Canada; the South American countries Argentina and Brazil; and the four US states Alabama, North Carolina, California, and New York. These countries and states all have vastly different developments of the epidemic, and we could accurately model the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in all of them. We realize that more complex models, e.g., with regional compartments, may be desirable, and we suggest that the approach used here should be applicable also for these models.