Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbon-Based Coatings in Medical Textiles Surface Functionalisation: An Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need for antimicrobial surfaces, especially those used in a healthcare environment. Textiles are the most difficult surfaces to modify since their typical use is in direct human body contact and, consequently, some aspects need to be improved, such as wear time and filtration efficiency, antibacterial and anti-viral capacity, or hydrophobicity. To this end, several techniques can be used for the surface modification of tissues, being magnetron sputtering (MS) one of [hose that have been growing in the last years to meet the antimicrobial objective. The current state of the art available on textile functionalisation techniques, the improvements obtained by using MS, and the potential of diamond-like-carbon (DLC) coatings on fabrics for medical applications will be discussed in this review in order to contribute to a higher knowledge of functionalized textiles themes.
Modal analysis from ambient vibration survey of bridges : LNEC experience

In order to study the behavior of bridge structures in relation to traffic, wind and seismic loads, it is extremely important to know their actual dynamic properties (natural frequencies, vibration mode shapes and damping). The experimentally identified dynamic properties of bridge structures are also an effective way to characterize their actual global structural behavior. Whether included in the reception load tests of recently built bridges, before they are opened to the traffic, or as part of the inspection works of bridges already in service, LNEC has performed modal analysis studies based on the results of ambient vibration tests. Some of the studies carried out recently in important bridges are reported in this paper.
Polypharmacy in Clinical Practice

Pharmacotherapy is undoubtedly the most common clinical intervention for many disease conditions. While it can be highly effective in treating diseases or slowing disease progression, there are often concerns raised regarding the inappropriate use of drugs. This can lead to adverse drug reactions (ADR) and drug-drug interactions (DDI). The term polypharmacy means “multiple medications” and is considered to be present when a patient takes five or more medications. It may be “appropriate polypharmacy” when all drugs are prescribed for specific therapeutic objectives and the drug therapy has been optimised to minimise the risk of ADR. However, on occasions “inappropriate polypharmacy” might be present, when one or more drugs are prescribed that are no longer needed, and the combination of several drugs puts the patient at an unacceptably high risk of ADR.
Handbook of Industrial Organization

This is Volume 3 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization series (HIO). Volumes 1 & 2 published simultaneously in 1989 and many of the chapters were widely cited and appeared on graduate reading lists. Since the first volumes published, the field of industrial organization has continued to evolve and this volume fills the gaps. While the first two volumes of HIO contain much more discussion of the theoretical literature than of the empirical literature, it was representative of the field at that time. Since then, the empirical literature has flourished, while the theoretical literature has continued to grow, and this new volume reflects that change of emphasis. Thie volume is an excellent reference and teaching supplement for industrial organization or industrial economics, the microeconomics field that focuses on business behavior and its implications for both market structures and processes, and for related public policies. *Part of the renowned Handbooks in Economics series *Chapters are contributed by some of the leading experts in their fields *A source, reference and teaching supplement for industrial organizations or industrial economists
A manual for wildlife radio tagging

Preface. First Questions: Biological questions. Planning. Training. Basic Equipment: Frequency. Receivers. Receiving antennas. Transmitters. Tag Designs. Tags as Capture Aids. Automated Systems: Satellite Tracking. GPS Tags. Location by Ground-Based Stations. Choosing Location Systems. Data Logging. Making Preparations: Buying Equipment. Software Preparations. Maps and GIS. Making Tags: Tag Components. Tag Construction. Tag Designs. Tag Attachment: Effects on Animals. Minimal Tagging, Soft Tagging. Attachment Techniques. Tag Adjustment and Detachment. Radio Tracking: First Principles. Making a Start. Practice Tracking. Signals from Tagged Animals. Motorised Tracking. Collecting Data: Radio Surveillance. Recording Locations. Accuracy. Survival Data. Continuous Refinement. Behaviour and Home Ranges: Activity and Event Records. Movement Records. Home-Range Analysis. Demography and Interactions: Density Estimations. Survival Analyses. Interaction with Resources. Social Interactions. References. Glossary. Appendix I: Sources of Equipment. Appendix II: Sources of Software. Index.
Towards outcomes-based assessment:an unfinished story of triangulation and transformation

Over the past ten years Higher Education in the United Kingdom (UK) has changed in many ways, mainly influenced by the recommendations of the Dearing Report (published in 1997). One paragraph in the report instigated a fundamental reorientation in the articulation within higher education of teaching, learning and assessment in terms of learning outcomes. Subsequent quality assurance initiatives have reinforced this approach. For the last ten years, the Centre for Outcomes-Based Education (COBE) in the UK Open University (UK OU) has been leading the transformation of the OU curriculum into an outcomes-based approach. The key to this process has been the 'triangulation' between curriculum, staff and student development. Throughout the process, our main concern has been to describe, develop and implement an appropriate way to assess learning outcomes both at course and award level. This paper re-views the process and poses some fundamental questions about an outcomes-based approach to the design and delivery of the curriculum and to the development of staff and students.
Development of Requirement Specifications for Transit Frontal Collision Warning System

CALIFORNIA PATH PROGRAM INSTITUTE OF TRANSPORTATION STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Development of Requirement Specifications for Transit Frontal Collision Warning System Xiqin Wang, Joanne Lins, Ching-Yao Chan, Scott Johnston, Kun Zhou, Aaron Steinfeld, Matt Hanson, Wei-Bin Zhang California PATH Research Report UCB-ITS-PRR-2003-29 This work was performed as part of the California PATH Program of the University of California, in cooperation with the State of California Business, Transportation, and Housing Agency, Department of Transportation; and the United States Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration. The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the State of California. This report does not constitute a standard, specification, or regulation. Final Report for MOU 3018 November 2003 ISSN 1055-1425 CALIFORNIA PARTNERS FOR ADVANCED TRANSIT AND HIGHWAYS
Robustness study of ECG biometric identification in heart rate variability conditions

Electrocardiogram (ECG) has been actively proposed as an aliveness biometric for years. In realistic application, this type of biometrics still needs to be verified in some conditions related to the practical use. Therefore, we propose in this paper the study of two themes that concern its realistic application. First, the single beat of an electrocardiogram (SB‐ECG) is used as the ECG feature, which aims to decrease the time to acquire the ECG from the individual. Second, for the robustness study of ECG features to heart rate variability (HRV), we investigate the relation between the correct identification and the HRV conditions. The HRV‐ECG data is set up and collected by using the Bio‐Pac system. The overall processes of the proposed method are the following: Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is used to analyze each SB‐ECG. Then the root‐mean square (RMS) value of total energy of the wavelet coefficients of each P, QRS, and T segment is calculated. Next, the Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) is applied to all sets of the RMS value for dimension reduction. Lastly, the normalized Euclidean distance is implemented as the classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that, with the proposed method, the classification achieves 97% accuracy and the robustness study achieves over 80% accuracy with HRV‐ECG change up to 20%. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Design of a Charge Domain CMOS Time-of-Flight Range Image Sensor

In this paper we present a new type of CMOS Time-of-Flight (TOF) range image sensor based on CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) techniques. The TOF sensor features high-speed and efficient photocharge transfer that is essential in range imaging. The rapid and efficient charge transfer is made possible by the use of a high-gain inverting amplifier and capacitors connected alternatively to the feedback path. This leads to the cost-effective implementation of the system. The analysis of simulation results suggests that the proposed technique can achieve a sufficient range resolution of millimeters to centimeters depending on the maximum measured range, if the noise is dominated by photon shot noise.
Experimental data and analysis to support the design of an ion-exchange process for the treatment of Hanford tank waste supernatant liquids

Hanford`s 177 underground storage tanks contain a mixture of sludge, salt cake, and alkaline supernatant liquids. Disposal options for these wastes are high-level waste (HLW) glass for disposal in a repository or low-level waste (LLW) glass for onsite disposal. Systems-engineering studies show that economic and environmental considerations preclude disposal of these wastes without further treatment. Difficulties inherent in transportation and disposal of relatively large volumes of HLW make it impossible to vitrify all of the tank waste as HLW. Potential environmental impacts make direct disposal of all of the tank waste as LLW glass unacceptable. Although the pretreatment and disposal requirements are still being defined, most pretreatment scenarios include retrieval of the aqueous liquids, dissolution of the salt cakes, and washing of the sludges to remove soluble components. Most of the cesium is expected to be in the aqueous liquids, which are the focus of this report on cesium removal by ion exchange. The main objectives of the ion-exchange process are removing cesium from the bulk of the tank waste (i.e., decontamination) and concentrating the separated cesium for vitrification. Because exact requirements for removal of {sup 137}Cs have not yet been defined, a range of removal requirements will be considered. more » This study addresses requirements to achieve {sup 137}Cs levels in LLW glass between (1) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Class C (10 CFR 61) limit of 4600 Ci/m{sup 3} and (2) 1/10th of the NRC Class A limit of 1 Ci/m{sup 3} i.e., 0.1/m{sup 3}. The required degrees of separation of cesium from other waste components is a complex function involving interactions between the design of the vitrification process, waste form considerations, and other HLW stream components that are to be vitrified. « less
Determination of Respondents in the Method of Hadith Collection Based on Selected Practice of Imam Bukhari

This article examines the method of hadith collection based on the technical aspects of data collection, especially sahih hadith. The method of collecting hadith that is thorough and has its own collecting method is suitable to be utilized in situations where the conditions of the authenticity of hadith are very strict according to the scholars of hadith. This method has been recognized by Islamic scholars for determining the quality of a hadith to be accepted in argumentative exchange. One of the outstanding technical aspects of this method is the determination of the respondent or informant. Determination of respondents or informants here means the method of selecting a section of the population for the purpose of making inferences or conclusions about the entire population. This prompted this article to be written primarily to look at the technical aspects of determining respondents based on hadith collection methods to be absorbed into the discipline of Islamic-based research methods. The question is how to determine the respondents according to the collection of hadith? Is the method of determining respondents from this method of collecting hadith suitable to be applied in current research? This article first examines the technical aspects of determining respondents in hadith collection methods. Second, to analyze the application of respondent determination of hadith collection method in current research methods. The writing of this article only involved document review and qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyze the data obtained. The results of the analysis found that the five conditions of authentic hadith are very relevant and suitable to be used as a method of determining respondents or informants in conducting research.
Assessing the smartness of buildings

Purpose – This study aims at capturing the perspectives of construction professionals into a classified taxonomy of the various characteristics of smart buildings and at developing an index able to define their level of smartness. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire survey has been administrated to construction professionals in the service of designers, constructors and owners. Results have been analyzed with the Kruskal–Wallis test and they have been used to develop a smartness index. Findings – Designers and owners are more focused on the energy issue than constructors. The energy captures the attention of practitioners with less years of experience, confirming that the awareness of the energy topic is rather recent. Originality/value – The main characteristics of smart buildings have been structured in domains and subdomains. Their importance has been rated by construction professional and a smartness index for smart building has been developed to provide with a convenient tool for evaluation.
Automatic Frontal Face Pose Tracking for Face Recognition System

Face recognition systems have been widely used in various security applications, for example in attendance system. The success of face recognition system relies on the trained face images as well as the face image captured that being recognized. Among the variables that determine the success of face recognition is face pose. Previous works showed that frontal face pose produced the best face recognition success rate. This paper proposes a face pose tracking subsystem that can be used as a filter so that only the frontal face pose that will be processed in the face recognition subsystem. The criteria for various face poses, i.e. frontal, tilted and turned, either left or right, have been formulated. Experimental results showed that the success rate of face recognition by implementing frontal face pose tracking can improve by 70.5%. However, it has trade off in reduced face image capture speed from 61 images per minute to 10 images per minute.
Robotic system for wheel changing

Formula One racing is one of the most fascinating sports ever, it is a perfect combination of high speed, technology, pressure and danger. One problem associated with car racing is the time differential between teams during pit stops, which substantially affects the final results. In addition a high percentage of the accidents in Formula One is due to pit stop problems. Changing the tires of a car while almost in motion after reaching dangerous pressure and temperature values, is a very risky challenge, no matter how well a team is trained. Approximately 15-25 people are constantly exposed to serious dangers. The risks taken are extreme and any idea of reducing it without affecting the quality of the race should be considered Our idea is to build a fully robotized system that takes over the tire changing and refueling process. There will practically be no need for human intervention. The system demonstrates remarkable time accuracy, precision and low risk implications.
Photonic crystal cavity based architecture for optical interconnects

Today’s information and communication industry is confronted with a serious bottleneck due to the prohibitive energy consumption and limited transmission bandwidth of electrical interconnects. Silicon photonics offers an alternative by transferring data optically and thereby eliminating the restriction of electrical interconnects over distance and bandwidth. Due to the inherent advantage of using the same material as that used for the electronic circuitry, silicon photonics also promises high volume and low cost production plus the possibility of integration with electronics. In this thesis, I introduce an all-silicon optical interconnect architecture that promises very high integration density along with very low energy consumption. The basic building block of this architecture is a vertically coupled photonic crystal cavity-waveguide system. This vertically coupled system acts as a highly wavelength selective filter. By suitably designing the waveguide and the cavity, at resonance wavelength of the cavity, large drop in transmission can be achieved. By locally modulating the material index of the cavity electrically, the resonance wavelength of the cavity can be tuned to achieve modulation in the transmission of the waveguide. The detection scheme also utilizes the same vertically coupled system. By creating crystal defects in silicon in the cavity region, wavelength selective photodetection can be achieved. This unique vertical coupling scheme also allows us to cascade multiple modulators and detectors coupled to a single waveguide, thus offering huge channel scalability and design and fabrication simplicity. During this project, I have implemented this vertical coupling scheme to demonstrate modulation with extremely low operating energy (0.6 fJ/bit). Furthermore, I have demonstrated cascadeability and multichannel operation by using a comb laser as the source that simultaneously drives five channels. For photodetection, I have realized one of the smallest wavelength selective detector with responsivity of 0.108A/W at 10V reverse bias with a dark current of 9.4 nA. By cascading such detectors I have also demonstrated a two-channel demultiplexer.
Introduction to Feedback Control

From the Publisher: "Feedback control is present in every aspect of modern life, from simple house thermostats that maintain comfortable indoor temperatures to complex devices that maintain the position of communications satellites in space. Feedback control is also a crucial part of almost all engineering systems. " "Designing feedback systems requires a rigorous understanding of linear systems as well as a number of input/output controller design methods. The purpose of this book is to provide just such a rigorous introduction to input/output controller design for linear systems. For greater clarity, explanations and most examples are confined to single-input-single-output, although generalizations are also made from these examples to more complex multi-input-multi-output systems. "--BOOK JACKET.
3D printing of dual cross-linked hydrogel for fingerprint-like iontronic pressure sensor

Hydrogels with intrinsic high stretchability and flexibility are extremely attractive for soft electronics. However, the existing complicated and laborious methods (such as mold curing) to fabricate microstructured hydrogel (MH) still limit the development of hydrogel-based sensors for flexible devices. Herein, we use digital light processing 3D printing technology to rapidly construct double-network (DN) ionic conductive hydrogel, and then design and print fingerprint-like MH film to manufacture an iontronic pressure sensor. In particular, the DN hydrogel consists of acrylamide/acrylic acid to form a covalently cross-linked network, and magnesium chloride is introduced to form an ionic cross-linked physical network in the hydrogel. The printability (with resolution 150 μm) and mechanical property tunability of DN hydrogel enable the convenient fabrication of sensors. With the biomimetic fingerprint MH film, the iontronic pressure sensor not only has a high sensitivity (0.06 kPa−1), but also has a large detection range (26 Pa–70 kPa) and good stability (200 cycles of pressure loading). We demonstrated that our sensor can be applied to realize tactile sensing in a prosthetic application and detect human motion. With the easy strategy of constructing DN hydrogel with microstructures by 3D printing technology, hydrogel-based sensors are anticipated to be employed in more smart electronics.
Micro-textured surfaces for omniphobicity and drag-reduction

When a liquid droplet contacts a surface possessing the appropriate combination of surface texture and solid surface energy, the liquid may not penetrate into the surface texture. Instead, the droplet sits partially on air, forming a solid-liquid-air composite interface. Entrapped air pockets of the composite interface are known to cause various interesting phenomena such as superrepellency, low hysteresis, and liquid slip. The current thesis research aims to extend the understandings about the role of surface texture on the static and dynamic behavior of the liquids forming composite interfaces on these textured surfaces. The first part of this thesis investigates the ability of surfaces with re-entrant texture, i.e., topography which bends back on itself, to promote the formation of composite interfaces against low surface tension liquids and display omniphobicity, i.e., repellency against a wide range of liquids regardless of their surface tension values. Surfaces that display contact angles of 0* > 1500 with liquids having appreciably lower surface tensions are attained by the incorporation of reentrant surface curvature. The second part is an expansion of the classic Cassie-Baxter model that is widely used to predict the apparent contact angles on composite interfaces. A liquid droplet sitting on composite interfaces shows a range of apparent contact angles and corresponding contact angle hysteresis when the drop advances or recedes. The Cassie-Baxter model only predicts a single value of the apparent contact angle, and consequently, the model is inherently unable to provide an explanation for the hysteretic behavior of the liquid droplet. In this thesis, the classic CassieBaxter relation is extended to predict the contact angle hysteresis observed on textured surfaces as well. In the final part of this thesis, the drag-reducing ability of composite interfaces will be investigated. It will be shown that the robustness, i.e., the resistance against a pressure perturbation, of composite interfaces and the amount of drag-reduction on these interfaces are negatively coupled. An approach to decouple these two important characteristics will be proposed based on the concept of dual-scale textures. Thesis Supervisor: Gareth H. McKinley Title: Professor of Mechanical Engineering