Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of binary interaction on the evolution of blue supergiants

A large fraction of massive stars evolve in interacting binary systems, which dramatically modifies the outcome of stellar evolution. We investigated the properties of blue supergiants in binary systems and whether they are suitable for extragalactic distance determinations using the flux-weighted gravity luminosity relationship (FGLR). This is a relationship between the absolute bolometric magnitude Mbol and the spectroscopically determined flux-weighted gravity gF = g/T4eff, where g is the surface gravity and Teff is the effective temperature. We computed a grid of binary stellar evolution models with MESA and use the v2.1 BPASS models to examine whether they are compatible with the relatively small scatter shown by the observed relationship. Our models have initial primary masses of 9–30 M⊙, initial orbital periods of 10–2511 days, mass ratio q = 0.9, and metallicity Z = 0.02. We find that the majority of primary stars that produce blue supergiant stages are consistent with the observed FGLR, with a small offset towards brighter bolometric magnitudes. In between 1%–24% of cases, binary evolution may produce blue supergiants after a mass transfer episode, that lie below the observed FGLR. A very small number of such stars have been found in extragalactic FGLR studies, suggesting that they may have evolved through binary interaction. Some models with shorter periods could resemble blue hypergiants and luminous blue variables. We used CMFGEN radiative transfer models to investigate the effects of unresolved secondaries on diagnostics for Teff and g, and the biases on the determination of interstellar reddening and Mbol. We find that the effects are small and within the observed scatter, but could lead to a small overestimate of the luminosity, of Teff and of g for extreme cases. We conclude that the observed FGLR can, in principle, be well reproduced by close binary evolution models. We outline directions for future work, including rotation and binary population synthesis techniques.
Efficient Memristor-Based Architecture for Intrusion Detection and High-Speed Packet Classification

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a critical component to prevent intrusion detection. This requires a detailed analysis of each network packet header and body. Although this is often done on dedicated high-power servers in most networked systems, mobile systems could potentially be vulnerable to attack if utilized on an unprotected network. In this case, having DPI hardware on the mobile system would be highly beneficial. Unfortunately, DPI hardware is generally area and power consuming, making its implementation difficult in mobile systems. We developed a memristor crossbar-based approach, inspired by memristor crossbar neuromorphic circuits, for a low-power, low-area, and high-throughput DPI system that examines both the header and body of a packet. Two key types of circuits are presented: static pattern matching and regular expression circuits. This system is able to reduce execution time and power consumption due to its high-density grid and massive parallelism. Independent searches are performed using low-power memristor crossbar arrays giving rise to a throughput of 160Gbps with no loss in the classification accuracy.
The invasion ecology of mammals: a global perspective

Of the extant species of land mammals, 124 (2.6%) can be classed as 'successful invaders', whereas 1038 (21.6%) are classed as threatened, according to the 2006 IUCN Red List. Relatively high proportions of successful invaders are found among Artiodactyla, Carnivora, Lagomorpha and Perissodactyla. Compared with other organisms, mammals seem relatively likely to become established when introduced outside their natural range. Studies of determinants of invasion success indicate that the number of individuals released, the size of the natural range of the introduced species, and the temperateness of climate in the new range can all increase the probability of establishment of introduced mammals. Negative impacts of invasive mammals on native biodiversity include direct effects such as predation, browsing and competition, but can extend to disruption of patterns of nutrient flow, and trophic cascades. Eradication of several species of invasive mammals from increasingly large areas is now possible. In this context, it is important to better understand ecological interactions between such mammals (and between them and other species) to avoid unwanted consequences such as mesopredator or competitor release, after the removal of particular species. Finally, it is increasingly apparent that research is needed on the behaviour of dispersing and invading individuals, to improve the early detection of new mammal invasions or reinvasions.
Implementation of a multinomial logit model with fixed effects

Fixed-effect models have become increasingly popular in the field of sociology. The possibility of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity makes these models a prime tool for causal analysis. As of today, fixed-effects models have been derived and implemented for many statistical software packages for continuous, dichotomous, and count-data dependent variables, but there are still many important and popular statistical models, for which only population-average estimators are available, such as models for multinomial categorical dependent variables. In a seminal paper by Chamberlain (1980) such a model was derived. Possible applications would be analyses of effects on employment status with special consideration of part-time or irregular employment and analyses of the effects on voting behavior that impicitly control for longtime party identification rather than having to measure it directly. This model has not yet been implemented in any statistical software package. In this presentation, I show a first version of an ado-file, that closes this gap. The implementation draws on the native Stata multinomial logit and conditional logit model implementations. The actual ml evaluator utilizes Mata functions to implement the conditional likelihood function. To show the numerical stability and computational speed of the implementation, comparison results with the built-in clogit are shown, as well as some basic results with simulated data.
A Total Turbulent Energy Closure Model for Neutrally and Stably Stratified Atmospheric Boundary Layers

This paper presents a turbulence closure for neutral and stratified atmospheric conditions. The closure is based on the concept of the total turbulent energy. The total turbulent energy is the sum of the turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent potential energy, which is proportional to the potential temperature variance. The closure uses recent observational findings to take into account the mean flow stability. These observations indicate that turbulent transfer of heat and momentum behaves differently under very stable stratification. Whereas the turbulent heat flux tends toward zero beyond a certain stability limit, the turbulent stress stays finite. The suggested scheme avoids the problem of self-correlation. The latter is an improvement over the widely used Monin–Obukhov-based closures. Numerous large-eddy simulations, including a wide range of neutral and stably stratified cases, are used to estimate likely values of two free constants. In a benchmark case the new turbulence closure performs indistinguishably from independent large-eddy simulations.
Particle and Particle-Surfactant Mixtures at Fluid Interfaces: Assembly, Morphology, and Rheological Description

We report here a review of particle-laden interfaces. We discuss the importance of the particle’s wettability, accounted for by the definition of a contact angle, on the attachment of particles to the fluid interface and how the contact angle is strongly affected by several physicochemical parameters. The different mechanisms of interfacial assembly are also addressed, being the adsorption and spreading the most widely used processes leading to the well-known adsorbed and spread layers, respectively. The different steps involved in the adsorption of the particles and the particle-surfactant mixtures from bulk to the interface are also discussed. We also include here the different equations of state provided so far to explain the interfacial behavior of the nanoparticles. Finally, we discuss the mechanical properties of the interfacial particle layers via dilatational and shear rheology. We emphasize along that section the importance of the shear rheology to know the intrinsic morphology of such particulate system and to understand how the flow-field-dependent evolution of the interfacial morphology might eventually affect some properties of materials such as foams and emulsions. We dedicated the last section to explaining the importance of the particulate interfacial systems in the stabilization of foams and emulsions.
Behavioural responses in pigs administered with ascorbic acid and transported by road for eight hours during the harmattan season.

Experiments were carried out with the aim of investigating the modulatory role of ascorbic acid (AA) on responses to 8h road transportation, covering a distance of 260 km at a speed of 40 - 50 km/h, during the harmattan season. Twentynine adult local pigs aged 9 - 12 months served as subjects. Seventeen pigs administered with AA, prior to the transportation, at the dose of 250 mg/kg orally and individually served as experimental animals, and 12 others administered orally with sterile water were used as control animals. The behavioural activities of pigs which included resting (that is, either lying down or standing idle), defaecating, urinating, sniffing, threats of attack (fight), attempts to escape, mounting on one another, hurdling together and routing the floor were monitored with the aid of a video camera without the pigs knowing that they were being observed. Recordings were done based on the number of pigs found performing each activity within 30 min of direct observation, alternated by 30 min of rest and this continued for a period of 4 h. The tape was later watched, analysed and the number of pigs exhibiting each behavioural activity was recorded. Post-transportation, the behavioural activities of standing (94.1 ± 5.8 %), aggressiveness indicated by the percentage of pigs involved in fighting (23.5 ± 6.00 %) and attempts to escape (66.67 ± 14.21 %) were higher in experimental pigs (P < 0.05) post-transportation than control pigs with the corresponding values of 25.00 ± 3.00 %; 0.00 % and 35.29 ± 11.95 %, respectively. The results showed that road transportation induced considerable behavioural stress resulting in depression of the central nervous system. AA administration pre-transportation reduced the manifestation of stressful behavioural activities in experimental pigs following road transportation. In conclusion, long-term road transportation of pigs during the harmattan season induces behavioural stress, alleviated by AA administration.
Wave‐particle interactions in the equatorial source region of whistler‐mode emissions

Wave-particle interactions can play a key role in the process of transfer of energy between different electron populations in the outer Van Allen radiation belt. We present a case study of wave-particle interactions in the equatorial source region of whistler-mode emissions. We select measurements of the Cluster spacecraft when these emissions are observed in the form of random hiss with only occasional discrete chorus wave packets, and where the wave propagation properties are very similar to previously analyzed cases of whistler-mode chorus. We observe a positive divergence of the Poynting flux at minima of the magnetic field modulus along the magnetic field lines, indicating the central position of the source. In this region we perform a linear stability analysis based on the locally measured electron phase space densities. We find two unstable electron populations. The first of them consists of energy-dispersed and highly anisotropic injected electrons at energies of a few hundreds eV to a few keV, with the perpendicular temperature more than 10 times higher than the parallel temperature with respect to the magnetic field line. Another unstable population is formed by trapped electrons at energies above 10 keV. We show that the injected electrons at lower energies can be responsible for a part of the waves that propagate obliquely at frequencies above one half of the electron cyclotron frequency. Our model of the trapped electrons at higher energies gives insufficient growth of the waves below one half of the electron cyclotron frequency and a nonlinear generation mechanism might be necessary to explain their presence even in this simple case.
Point process latent variable models of larval zebrafish behavior

A fundamental goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how neural activity gives rise to natural behavior. In order to achieve this goal, we must first build comprehensive models that offer quantitative descriptions of behavior. We develop a new class of probabilistic models to tackle this challenge in the study of larval zebrafish, an important model organism for neuroscience. Larval zebrafish locomote via sequences of punctate swim bouts--brief flicks of the tail--which are naturally modeled as a marked point process. However, these sequences of swim bouts belie a set of discrete and continuous internal states, latent variables that are not captured by standard point process models. We incorporate these variables as latent marks of a point process and explore various models for their dynamics. To infer the latent variables and fit the parameters of this model, we develop an amortized variational inference algorithm that targets the collapsed posterior distribution, analytically marginalizing out the discrete latent variables. With a dataset of over 120,000 swim bouts, we show that our models reveal interpretable discrete classes of swim bouts and continuous internal states like hunger that modulate their dynamics. These models are a major step toward understanding the natural behavioral program of the larval zebrafish and, ultimately, its neural underpinnings.
Does Cultural Background Affect Volunteering Behavior?

The purpose of this qualitative investigation is to help nonprofit organizations which rely heavily on the support of volunteers increase the effectiveness of their marketing by accounting for differences in cultural background among community members. It was conducted in the multi‐cultural Australian context and included 79 participants from different cultural backgrounds. Findings indicate that as a whole, cultural groups differ significantly with respect to their attitudes, social norm and perceived behavioral control over volunteering. Nonprofit organizations are unlikely to be successful in attracting volunteers from a range of different cultural backgrounds unless they account for heterogeneity among volunteers and customize marketing messages. To the authors' knowledge this is the first study that investigates differences in attitude, social norm and perceived behavioral control regarding an important social marketing issue: changing the volunteering behavior of individuals in a multi‐cultural society.
Small into-isomorphisms between spaces of continuous functions

Introduction. In [1], [3] D. Amir and M. Cambern proved, independently, that if C(K) and C(S) are isomorphic with an isomorphism T satisfying 11 TI 11 T-'II 0, with limEg(e) = 0, such that if T: C(K) -* C(S) is an into-isomorphism satisfying IITI T'1 < I + e, then there is an isometry W of C(K) into C(S) satisfying T WI < g(c). It turns out that the answer is positive when K is metrizable. This is Theorem 2 in ? 2. When K is nonmetrizable this is no longer true. A counterexample is given in ? 3. The proof of Theorem 2 depends on the construction of a special w*-continuous retract on the unit ball of C(K)*. This subject is treated in ? 1. The last section contains some remarks and open problems. We shall use standard notation, see e.g. [6]. The reader is also referred to [6] and its references for results quoted without a specific reference. We shall treat the real case only. Some modifications are needed in the complex case, and the estimates obtained are somewhat worse than in the real case. I wish to thank D. Amir and Y. Sternfeld for many discussions during the preparation of this article.
Impact of land-use change on the hydrology of North Lao PDR watersheds

We investigated the impact of land-use change on the hydrology of different major Lao tributary watersheds of Mekong River. The region is the North of Laos centred on Luang Prabang and the watersheds are the Nam Khan, Nam Ou, Nam Suong, Nam Lik and Nam Ngum. An additional small agricultural catchment called Houay Pano close to the Nam Khan, is also considered. We used the lumped rainfall–- runoff conceptual models GR4J and GR2M, developed by Irstea in France, the Mekong River Commission hydro-meteorological database and the Japanese Aphrodite meteorological database. The objective was to detect in the hydrological regime of the watersheds an impact of de(re)forestation, processes known to have occurred since the 1980s, but at a degree which has not been quantified. For this purpose we adopted the cross simulation methodology developed by Irstea which has proved to be efficient to detect trends in long term watershed hydrology. The results did not show any significant hydrological change since 1960. On the other hand the application of the same methodology to the small catchment Houay Pano surveyed since 2001 proved to be convincing. We saw evidence of the impact of slash and burn practice, followed by a long fallow period, on a catchment’s hydrology over a seven year period.
One-step real-time loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP): evaluation and its application for the detection of foot-and-mouth-disease virus and its serotypes

Sidra MARYAM, Tahir RASHEED, Asma LATIF, Rabaab ZAHRA, Aamer Bin ZAHUR, Aitezaz AHSAN, Muhammad AFZAL, Umer FAROOQ* Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Biological Sciences Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan Animal Health Laboratories, Animal Sciences Institute, National Agricultural Research Centre, Islamabad, Pakistan Progressive Control of Foot-and-mouth Disease in Pakistan, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Islamabad, Pakistan
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONFLIT DE LANGAGE OVER LAND AND FORESTS IN SOUTHERN CAMEROON

When Germans colonized Cameroon in the nineteenth century, most of the ethnic groups living in the forest zone had already established territories. However, Germany then became the legal owner of land and forests. This brutal cohabitation of the new version of the state and customary systems of territorial management generated serious problems and has continued to this day in post-independence Cameroon. Among these problems, I focus on the confl it de langage (confl ict of language or of discourse) between the state and local com- munities on land and forests ownership and on the regulation of access to natural resources. This article reconstructs the foundations of this conflit de langage, by revealing elements such as the exclusion of indigenous systems and the requirements of capitalist accumulation. The author explores various property rights formation processes and forestry legislations (German, British, French and post-independence). The article points out how the situation has worsened through the creation of forest concessions on customary lands, the creation of protected areas, the sharing of revenues from commercial logging, the establishment of agro- industries, and oil compensation.
Optimization foam filled thin-walled structures for the crashworthiness capability: Review

In automotive industry, foam-filled structures have aroused increasing interest because of lightweight and capacity of energy absorption. Two types of foam filled thin walled structures such as the uniform foam filled (UF) and the functionally graded foam (FGF). To improve crashworthiness performance, FGF are used to fill structures, unlike existing uniform foam materials. In addition, by seeking for an optimal design systematically, some computational optimization signifies a more effective tool to find the best crashworthiness design of structures,. This paper will an exhaustive review of the previous studies of simulation-based optimization such as metamodels, objective functions, design variables, design of experiments, optimization techniques of crashworthiness of tubes.
Hybrid Timeslot Design for IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH to Support Heterogeneous WSNs

The IEEE 802.15. 4 Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol defines two types of timeslots for communications, namely dedicated and shared timeslots. An upper layer in the protocol stack uses these timeslots to design a communication schedule for the network links, based on the required bandwidth for each link. Considering a network with time-varying data traffic generation by each node, the bandwidth requirements are changing over time for each link. This leads to poor efficiency of a predefined schedule when there is no data traffic for the dedicated timeslots, or there is too much data traffic injected to the shared timeslots. In this paper, we propose a new type of timeslot, called hybrid timeslot. A hybrid timeslot acts as a dedicated timeslot for a specific link, when there are packets available to be transmitted on that link. Otherwise, it acts as a shared timeslot that can be accessed by other links, using a contention-based mechanism. The hybrid timeslot has backward compatibility with the TSCH protocol and is functional with a few adaptations in the parameter setup of the TSCH protocol. Experimental and simulation results show that for heterogeneous networks using hybrid timeslots improves communication latency without reliability penalty.
Recurrent Deep Divergence-based Clustering for Simultaneous Feature Learning and Clustering of Variable Length Time Series

The task of clustering unlabeled time series and sequences entails a particular set of challenges, namely to adequately model temporal relations and variable sequence lengths. If these challenges are not properly handled, the resulting clusters might be of suboptimal quality. As a key solution, we present a joint clustering and feature learning framework for time series based on deep learning. For a given set of time series, we train a recurrent network to represent, or embed, each time series in a vector space such that a divergence-based clustering loss function can discover the underlying cluster structure in an end-to-end manner. Unlike previous approaches, our model inherently handles multivariate time series of variable lengths and does not require specification of a distance-measure in the input space. On a diverse set of benchmark datasets we illustrate that our proposed Recurrent Deep Divergence-based Clustering approach outperforms, or performs comparable to, previous approaches.