Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimation for the generalized inverted exponential distribution under adaptive progressive type II hybrid censoring scheme

Abstract This paper discusses the point and interval estimation of two parameters of generalized inverted exponential distribution under the adaptive progressive type II hybrid censoring scheme. The maximum likelihood estimators of two parameters have been derived by using Newton-Raphson method and the existence and uniqueness of them have been proved. Furthermore, the asymptotic and transformed confidence intervals of the parameters have been constructed. On the other hand, the Bayesian estimation has been approximated with Lindley and Importance Sampling methods, since there is no explicit solution. Moreover, the highest posterior density credible intervals of two parameters have been established. Then, the proposed approaches have been compared and illustrated through the simulation and actual data of breakdown time of an electrically insulating fluid. Finally, the optimal censoring scheme is suggested via three optimization rules.
Biomass and vegetation index by remote sensing in different caatinga forest areas

ABSTRACT: Continued unsustainable exploitation of natural resources promotes environmental degradation and threatens the preservation of dry forests around the world. This situation exposes the fragility and the necessity to study landscape transformations. In addition, it is necessary to consider the biomass quantity and to establish strategies to monitor natural and anthropic disturbances. Thus, this research analyzed the relationship between vegetation index and the estimated biomass using allometric equations in different Brazilian caatinga forest areas from satellite images. This procedure is performed by estimating the biomass from 9 dry tropical forest fragments using allometric equations. Area delimitations were obtained from the Embrapa collection of dendrometric data collected in the period between 2011 and 2012. Spectral variables were obtained from the orthorectified images of the RapidEye satellite. The aboveground biomass ranged from 6.88 to 123.82 Mg.ha-1. SAVI values were L = 1 and L = 0.5, while NDVI and EVI ranged from 0.1835 to 0.4294, 0.2197 to 0.5019, 0.3622 to 0.7584, and 0.0987 to 0.3169, respectively. Relationships among the estimated biomass and the vegetation indexes were moderate, with correlation coefficients (Rs) varying between 0.64 and 0.58. The best adjusted equation was the SAVI equation, for which the coefficient of determination was R² = 0.50, R2aj = 0.49, RMSE = 17.18 Mg.ha-1 and mean absolute error of prediction (MAE) = 14.07 Mg.ha-1, confirming the importance of the Savi index in estimating the caatinga aboveground biomass.
Removal of ions from produced water using Powder River Basin coal

In addition to being used as an energy source, coal also has significant potential for other, more sustainable uses including water treatment. In this study, we present a simple approach to treat water that was produced during oil production and contained a total dissolved solids (TDS) content of over 150 g/L using Powder River Basin (PRB) coal. PRB coal used as packing material in a flow-through column effectively removed 60%–80% of the cations and anions simultaneously. Additionally, 71%–92% of the total organic carbon in the produced water was removed as was all of the total suspended solids. The removal mechanisms of both cations and anions were investigated. Cations were removed by ion exchange with protons from oxygen-containing functional groups such as carboxylic and phenolic hydroxyl groups. Anions, mainly Cl −1 , appeared to be removed through either the formation of resonance structures as a result of delocalization of electrons within coal molecules or through ion–π interactions. We propose that coal is a “pseudo-amphoteric” exchange material that can remove cations and anions simultaneously by exchanging ions with both ionized and non-ionized acids that are ubiquitous in coal structure or resonance effect. Graphical abstract
A Miniature Permanent Magnet Assembly with Localized and Uniform Field with an Application to Optical Pumping of Helium

Atomic state preparation can benefit from a compact and uniform magnetic field source. Simulations and experimental measurements have been used to design, build, and test such a source as shown by optical pumping of atomic Helium. This source is a 9.5 mm (3/8") OD x 6.7 mm (1/4") ID x 9.5 mm (3/8") long, NdFeB-N42 assembly of 1.6 mm (1/16") thick customized annular magnets. It has octopole decay with a residual dipole far field from imperfect dipole cancelations. It has greater than 50% clear aperture with uniform and collimated magnetic field consistent with the prediction of several models. Octopole roll-off localizes the field minimizing the need for shielding in applications. The device is applied to a high precision 3,4He laser spectroscopy experiment using σ+ or σ- optical pumping currently resulting in a measured 99.3% preparation efficiency and in accordance with a rate-equation model.
Pareto Effect of LMI for Ship Propulsion

The aim of this study was to analyze the dynamics of a multidimensional object based on the Pareto curve for the Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) controller. The study was carried out based on an available “Blue Lady” training vessel model controller with the use of a MATLAB and Simulink simulation package. Research was focused on optimising both the energy to be used when manoeuvring and the ship’s dynamics. Analysis was combined with the application of H2/H∞ norms finding the Pareto optimal solution for mixed norms used at the γ∞ parameter. Observations for a multidimensional ship model proved that it is possible to optimize the system, using principles of the Pareto curve, to reduce energy consumption in steering-propulsion systems while performing precise manoeuvres in ports correctly. Parameter values, received from observations of operation of individual steering-propulsion systems, proved to be reasonable.
Characterization of the histone chaperones: somatic Nuclear Autoantigenic Sperm Protein (sNASP) and Nucleoplasmin 2 (NPM2)

Recent studies have focused their attention on the structure and function of histone chaperones involved in different aspects of somatic chromatin assembly and disassembly. However, one of the most dramatic chromatin remodeling processes takes place immediately after fertilization and is mediated by proteins in metazoan eggs that function as histone chaperones and histone storage proteins. These include members of the nucleoplasmin (NPM) family and the nuclear autoantigenic sperm protein (NASP) families. While it had been know for some time that these proteins function as “histone sinks”, new studies are shedding light on their role as histone chaperones. NASP was first identified in Xenopus laevis eggs where it accumulated in the nucleoplasm and was found to bind histones H3 and H4 at which time it believed to act simply as a histone storage protein. Interestingly, in addition to binding and providing storage to H3-H4 in the egg and in somatic cells, our studies have shown NASP to be the first characterized chaperone for histone H1. The members of the histone H1 family (linker histones) are essential to maintaining the structure of chromatin with respect to the folding of the chromatin fiber, nucleosome spacing, chromatin remodeling, gene transcription and progression through the cell cycle. Until recently there has been no histone H1 chaperone characterized and no evidence of a storage protein to which linker iv histones are bound, when not associated with DNA of NCPs. By using recombinant NASP, to incorporate linker histones onto the nucleosome arrays in a chromatin fiber, we studied the dynamics and conformation of chromatin in a more biologically relevant and precise method than presented in any previous chromatin research. Like NASP, nucleoplasmin was identified as a factor in X. laevis eggs that binds histones and loads them onto DNA. Subsequently, the nucleoplasmin protein family has been to be universally represented throughout metazoans where it plays a similar role in chromatin metabolism. Members of this family include nucleophosmin (NPM1), nucleoplasmin (NPM2, NPM or Np), the newly characterized NPM3 and nucleoplasminlike proteins (NPM-like or NLP). We have been able to demonstrate that NPM2 that is highly phosphorylated in X. laevis eggs can unfold sperm and somatic chromatin by facilitating the removal of linker histones and other chromosomal proteins from linker DNA regions between nucleosomes in the absence of any stable interaction with the nucleosome core particle (NCP) itself. In addition, our studies reveal that NPM2 is a pentameric chaperone, as opposed to a decameric chaperone, that regulates the condensation state of sperm and somatic chromatin by removing linker histones and specific nuclear basic proteins and depositing histone H2A-H2B dimers on the distal face of the NPM2.
Investigation of pancreatic tumor cell intrinsic differences in capacity to activate tumor-specific T cells

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), is the most common form of pancreatic cancer which can be modeled in mice. There are two district morphological types of PDA cells: cuboidal and mesenchymal. In this line of experimentation, it has been found that both cell types do not activate T cells from endogenous antigen sources, however, when a peptide is presented to these cells they can activate T cells. Based on this information future experiments need to be conducted, including determining if peptide processing machinery is present in PDA cells. With this information novel immunotherapy techniques can be developed to destroy PDA cells and eliminate the cancer.
Predicting secondary school students’ academic achievement from their elementary school performance and learning behaviours: A longitudinal study based on South Korea’s national assessment of educational achievement

ABSTRACT Academic achievement is an important factor strongly related to positive educational experiences that facilitate subsequent learning. Therefore, identifying students who need support at an early stage and promptly providing appropriate intervention play a crucial role in preventing learning deficits. This study examined the longitudinal change in elementary school students’ proficiency status to understand the nature of longitudinal transitions. It explored the feasibility of developing early predictive models for identifying students potentially facing academic difficulties based on information obtained from elementary school. Deep neural network and hierarchical generalized linear models were applied to large-scale national assessment panel data collected within the framework of an accountability system in South Korea. The results showed that although most students maintained their initial proficiency status, a substantial number of students made longitudinal transitions from non-proficiency to proficiency or vice-versa as they progressed from elementary to high school. The predictive models had an acceptable level of accuracy in predicting future academic performance, considering the degree of student mobility across proficiency levels over grades. The study concluded that the predictive models can serve as a starting point to identify students who need assistance and provide educators with a means to intervene promptly.
Transforming Worker–Client Identities: From Shelters to Housing First

The Housing First (HF) approach to counteracting homelessness, stemming from the USA, is advocated as a blueprint for homelessness policy change in Europe, including the Nordic countries. In contrast to traditional homelessness policies based on shelters as the first step towards ending homelessness, the HF policy discourse regards access to one’s own housing as a basic human right that should not be conditional upon good or acceptable behaviour. Building on ethnographic research in a Swedish HF unit striving to implement the HF approach ‘by the book,’ which includes both focus group interviews with workers and observations of worker–client interactions during home visits, we show how the new HF policy challenges both workers and clients, who used to encounter each other in shelters but now meet in clients’ own homes, transforming their identities. We demonstrate how workers account for transformations in worker–client identities by referring to how they and their clients used to think, talk and act, thus contrasting their new identities with their former selves. Moreover, in their efforts to accomplish their actual work tasks within the framework of the new HF policy discourse in the homes of formerly homeless clients, we show how workers struggle with their identities when they encounter clients in practice. In their accounts of policy change, the workers embraced their new identities with pleasure, but in practice, they were hesitant when dealing with issues of concern, such as their clients’ use of tobacco, alcohol and drugs. In sum, it becomes complicated in practice.
Shear‐Wave Velocity Structure of Sediments on Cascadia's Continental Margin From Probabilistic Inversion of Seafloor Compliance Data

Several seismic techniques, both passive and active, exist for estimating the shear‐wave velocity VS structure of shallow sedimentary structures. In particular, passive compliance signals recorded by broadband ocean‐bottom seismometers (OBSs) can be used to invert for VS structure. While compliance‐based imaging studies have been carried out at several locations across the Cascadia Subduction Zone, such an approach has not been extensively applied to OBSs deployed on the continental shelf and slope. In this study, we measure compliance and coherence signals at 13 broadband OBSs deployed along Cascadia's continental shelf and upper slope. We then use a recently developed technique to probabilistically invert compliance signals for shallow VS structure that makes use of mixture density neural networks. Finally, we compare and contrast our inverted VS profiles and derived properties obtained using this method with previous studies focused on the properties of basin sediments.
Community Detection for Air Traffic Networks and Its Application in Strategic Flight Planning

An environmentally and economically sustainable air traffic management system must rely on fast models to assess and compare various alternatives and decisions at the different flight planning levels. Due to the numerous interactions between flights, mathematical models to manage the traffic can be computationally time-consuming when considering a large number of flights to be optimised at the same time. Focusing on demand–capacity imbalances, this paper proposes an approach that permits to quickly obtain an approximate but acceptable solution of this problem. The approach consists in partitioning flights into subgroups that influence each other only weakly, solving the problem independently in each subgroup, and then aggregating the solutions. The core of the approach is a method to build a network representing the interactions among flights, and several options for the definition of an interaction are tested. The network is then partitioned with existing community detection algorithms. The results show that applying a strategic flight planning optimisation algorithm on each subgroup independently reduces significantly the computational time with respect to its application on the entire European air traffic network, at the cost of few and small violations of sector capacity constraints, much smaller than those actually observed on the day of operations.
Short-term effects in canopy gap area on the recovery of compacted soil caused by forest harvesting in old-growth Oriental beech (Fagus orientalis Lipsky) stands

Abstract: Natural treefall gaps have a substantial role in maintaining soil and plant diversity in old-growth forests. However, the amount of information on the effects of gaps on the recovery of physical and chemical properties of compacted soils is scarce. We tested the hypothesis that natural treefall gaps accelerate the restoration of compacted soil by enhancing biological and microbial activity in the topsoil after a period of five years. Five years after a ground-based skidding operation in the Hyrcanian forest, the recovery levels of soil properties were compared among different treatments including natural canopy gaps with an area of 200 m2 (NCG), clear-cuts with an area of 1600 m2 (CC), disturbed trails under a dense canopy (DDC), and an undisturbed area (UND) as control. The lowest soil bulk density (1.07 g cm-3), penetration resistance (1.11 MPa), and the highest macroporosity (36.3%), and sand content (14.4%) among treatments were recorded for the NCG followed by DDC and CC treatments. Significantly lower values of soil pH, and electric conductivity and the highest values of soil organic C, total N, available P, K, Ca, and Mg were detected under the NCG followed by the DDC and CC treatments, as compared to the UND area. The highest values of earthworm density and dry mass, and soil microbial respiration were found in the NCG followed by the DDC and CC treatments. Fine root biomass was significantly higher in the UND area (92.27 g m-2) followed by the DDC, NCG and CC treatments. We can conclude that the effects of gap size on the recovery values of compacted soil were significant in terms of greater nutrient availability and higher earthworm density and dry mass, suggesting that mimicking natural canopy gap was more effective than the clear-cut gap (CC) for the resilience of the forest stand in the restoration of soil quality.
Trade-off study of a high-resolution spectrograph on a CubeSat to study exoplanets

The majority of the 4,000 known exoplanets have been detected via transit photometry. Unambiguous characterization of their atmospheres for biosignatures such as H2O, CH4, O3 and O2 can be unlocked with high-resolution spectroscopy from space. To this end, we investigate the feasibility of a high-resolution (R=50,000) spectrograph on a CubeSat. This work compares optical design elements of traditional Echelle grating and a virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) using exposure time calculations. The limited magnitude when varying the spectral resolution and instrument size is reported. VIPAs on a 6U CubeSat is a cost-effective solution for high-resolution spectroscopy from space.
Spiritual care needs and their associated influencing factors among elderly patients with moderate-to-severe chronic heart failure in China: A cross-sectional study

Abstract Background The significance of spiritual care needs among chronic diseases patients has been emphasized across countries and cultures in many studies. However, there were few studies on spiritual care needs among elderly patients with moderate-to-severe chronic heart failure (CHF) in China. Objective To investigate spiritual care needs and associated influencing factors among elderly patients with moderate-to-severe CHF, and to examine the relationships among spiritual care needs, self-perceived burden, symptom management self-efficacy, and perceived social support. Methods A cross-sectional design was implemented, and the STROBE Checklist was used to report the study. A convenience sample of 474 elderly patients with moderate-to-severe CHF were selected from seven hospitals in Tianjin, China. The sociodemographic characteristics questionnaire, the Spiritual Needs Questionnaire Scale, the Self-Perceived Burden Scale, the Self-efficacy for Symptom Management Scale, and the Perceived Social Support Scale were used. Descriptive statistics, univariate, multiple linear regression, and Pearson's correlation analysis were used to analyze data. Results The total score of spiritual care needs among 474 elderly patients with moderate-to-severe CHF was 37.95 ± 14.71, which was moderate. Religious belief, educational background, self-perceived burden, symptom management self-efficacy, and perceived social support were the main factors affecting spiritual care needs, and spiritual care needs were negatively correlated with self-perceived burden (r = −0.637, p < 0.01) and positively correlated with symptom management self-efficacy (r = 0.802, p < 0.01) and social support (r = 0.717, p < 0.01). Significance of results The spiritual care needs of elderly patients with moderate-to-severe CHF were moderate, which were influenced by five factors. It is suggested that clinical nurses, families, and society should take targeted spiritual care measures to improve patients’ symptom management self-efficacy and perceived social support from many aspects, and reduce self-perceived burden to meet their spiritual care needs and improve the quality and satisfaction of spiritual care in nursing practice.
The Role of Acidity in the Synthesis of Novel Uranyl Selenate and Selenite Compounds and Their Structures

Herein, the novel uranyl selenate and selenite compounds Rb2[(UO2)2(SeO4)3], Rb2[(UO2)3(SeO3)2O2], Rb2[UO2(SeO4)2(H2O)]·2H2O, and (UO2)2(HSeO3)2(H2SeO3)2Se2O5 have been synthesized using either slow evaporation or hydrothermal methods under acidic conditions and their structures were refined using single crystal X-ray diffraction. Rb2[(UO2)2(SeO4)3] synthesized hydrothermally adopts a layered 2D tetragonal structure in space group P42/ncm with a = 9.8312(4) Å, c = 15.4924(9) Å, and V = 1497.38(15) Å, where it consists of UO7 polyhedra coordinated via SeO4 units to create units UO2(SeO4)58− moieties which interlink to create layers in which Rb+ cations reside in the interspace. Rb2[(UO2)3(SeO3)2O2] synthesized hydrothermally adopts a layered 2D triclinic structure in space group P1¯ with a = 7.0116(6) Å, b = 7.0646(6) Å, c = 8.1793(7) Å, α = 103.318(7)°, β = 105.968(7)°, γ = 100.642(7)° and V = 365.48(6) Å3, where it consists of edge sharing UO7, UO8 and SeO3 polyhedra that form [(UO2)3(SeO3)2O2] layers in which Rb+ cations are found in the interlayer space. Rb2[UO2(SeO4)2(H2O)]·2H2O synthesized hydrothermally adopts a chain 1D orthorhombic structure in space group Pmn21 with a = 13.041(3) Å, b = 8.579(2) Å, c = 11.583(2) Å, and V = 1295.9(5) Å3, consisting of UO7 polyhedra that corner share with one H2O and four SeO42− ligands, creating infinite chains. (UO2)2(HSeO3)2(H2SeO3)2Se2O5 synthesized under slow evaporation conditions adopts a 0D orthorhombic structure in space group Cmc21 with a = 28.4752(12) Å, b = 6.3410(3) Å, c = 10.8575(6) Å, and V = 1960.45(16) Å3, consisting of discrete rings of [(UO2)2(HSeO3)2(H2SeO3)2Se2O5]2. (UO2)2(HSeO3)2(H2SeO3)2Se2O5 is apparently only the second example of a uranyl diselenite compound to be reported. A combination of single crystal X-ray diffraction and bond valance sums calculations are used to characterise all samples obtained in this investigation. The structures uncovered in this investigation are discussed together with the broader family of uranyl selenates and selenites, particularly in the context of the role acidity plays during synthesis in coercing specific structure, functional group, and topology formations.