Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A binary ACO for controlling all-electric power take off system in wave energy converters

This paper describes a metaheuristic algorithm for controlling all-electric power take off (PTO) system of wave energy converters. It provides optimal parameter values to the controller following the instantaneously changing sea state. The output of the algorithm is used to tune the electrical control systems in the PTO system in order to provide sufficient time for the point absorber to achieve desired heaving resonance compare with the ocean wave. This maximises the power extraction capability of WECs. The method consists of a binary ant colony optimisation algorithm capable of performing optimisation in continuous space. A binary encoding method is introduced to enhance its search exploration feature, hence allowing it to find optimal solution in short time.
Factors Associated with Attitudes towards Seasonal Influenza Vaccination in Poland: A Nationwide Cross-Sectional Survey in 2020

We aimed to assess attitudes towards the influenza vaccine and factors associated with a willingness to vaccinate against seasonal influenza in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic (flu season 2020/2021). This cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was carried out between 5 and 15 November 2020 on a representative nationwide sample of 1052 individuals aged 18+ in Poland. Of the respondents, 5.5% (95% CI: 4.3–7.0%) declared that they had already got vaccinated against influenza and 13.4% (95% CI: 11.4–15.6%) declared a willingness to vaccinate against influenza during the 2020/2021 season. Out of nine different factors analyzed in this study, only three were significantly associated with attitudes towards influenza vaccination. Participants aged 75 years and over (OR = 5.82; 95% CI: 2.63–12.85), as well as participants aged 60–74 years (OR = 2.43; 95% CI: 1.30–4.54), compared to those aged 19–29, had significantly higher odds of having a positive attitude towards seasonal influenza vaccination. Respondents who define themselves as completely religious unbelievers (OR = 4.34; 95% CI: 1.79–10.55), as well as Internet users (OR = 2.12; 95% CI: 1.30–3.47), had higher odds of having a positive attitude towards influenza vaccination. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of adults in Poland who already got vaccinated or declared a willingness to vaccinate against influenza remains low. This also applies to high-risk groups.
Perinatal Mental Health; The Role and the Effect of the Partner: A Systematic Review

Pregnancy is a transitional period involving the most complex experiences in a woman’s life, during which the woman’s psychological status can be affected by a wide range of psychosocial variables. However, positive interpersonal relationships appear to constitute a supportive network that significantly influences perinatal mental health. Therefore, the presence of a supportive partner works psycho-protectively against the difficulties and pressures created by the transition to maternity. The aim of this study was to review systematically the influence of the partner on the woman’s psychology during the perinatal period. Fourteen research articles from PubMed/Medline, Google Scholar and PsycINFO were included in the review from a total of 1846 articles. Most studies have shown a correlation between the support from the partner and prenatal depression and anxiety. Support from the spouse during childbirth is related to the extent to which women feel safe during labor as well as the stress during childbirth. The role of the partner is very important in the occurrence of perinatal mental disorders in women. Of course, more research needs to be done in the field of perinatal mental health. The risk factors that lead to mental disorders need to be clarified and the role of the partner in the perinatal period requires reinforcement and needs to be given the necessary importance.
A three-phase switched reluctance motor with two-phase excitation

A new excitation strategy for a switched reluctance motor (SRM) is described and tested. This scheme excites two phases of an SRM simultaneously, which is similar to the two-phase excitation method of a step motor. In this scheme, the torque is produced by mutual-inductance as well as by self-inductance. The abrupt change of a phase excitation produces mechanical stresses, resulting in torque ripple and noise. The acoustic noise is reduced through a sequential two-phase excitation. Noise reduction occurs because the scheme reduces abrupt changes in excitation levels by distributed, balanced excitation and freewheeling during commutation. The operational principle and a characteristic comparison to that of the conventional SRM show that this novel excitation scheme has some advantages, including torque ripple and noise reduction, as well as simple inverter topology.
Broadband gap‐coupled assembly of patches forming elliptical patch antenna

The radiation performance of a compact gap‐coupled assembly of patches forming the geometry of elliptical patch antenna is simulated and tested using glass epoxy FR4 substrate material. This assembly is achieved by cutting a conventional elliptical patch antenna geometry into three independent patches through two narrow slits parallel to minor axis of elliptical patch. The two outer patches are identical in shape and size, and the central patch is excited through inset probe feed. Two outer patches are gap coupled to the center patch. This arrangement of antenna elements resonate at three frequencies 3.41, 3.62, and 5.54 GHz, respectively. The first two frequencies are closely spaced and gives an improved bandwidth (>10%). The radiation patterns of antenna at all three frequencies are almost identical in shape and nature. Details of the antenna design approach and experimental results are presented and discussed systematically. Measurements are in excellent agreement with simulation results which make the proposed structure promising for Wi‐Max applications. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 53:340–344, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.25693
Selection by TOPSIS for surveyor of candidates in organisations

The process of selecting the most suitable new surveyor among many candidates involves requirements in a number of key areas. Various quantitative methods have been proposed as an aid to make decision on the selection of a surveyor within candidates. The selection criteria also involve the required remuneration by candidates. Decision makers need to consider criteria-based specification, comparison and selection of applicants. This paper demonstrates that applying the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method of simple weighted addition approach for processing the decision making is one of the best methods for selecting a suitable candidate from Khouja and Deng et al. The approach is based on a two-step procedure. Firstly, a fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique is applied to rank the applicants according to the criteria of requirements. In particular, the TOPSIS is used to rank the applicants according to five different criteria. Secondly, the TOPSIS ranking analysis is applied with reference to a compliant evaluation indicator proposed in the literature. The integration of the criteria indicator with the TOPSIS ranking makes it possible to obtain a graphical output that shows the comparison of each applicant's compliance with the different applicants analysed in an easy and intuitive manner. The TOPSIS is a technique developed by Hwang and Yoon, one of the best-known and most widely used method of decision making. It compares some of the current multicriteria with particular emphasis on compliance measurement for helping to recognise and identify the compliance of applicant selection. Finally, this study is conducted using an illustrative example, which is provided by the ABC Register of Shipping and applies the proposed method to select the most suitable surveyor among five candidates in February 2005. The empirical result shows that compliance evaluation for selecting surveyor within candidates can be more comprehensive and useful for consideration by decision makers.
What is an artificial muscle? A comparison of soft actuators to biological muscles

Interest in emulating the properties of biological muscles that allow for fast adaptability and control in unstructured environments has motivated researchers to develop new soft actuators, often referred to as ‘artificial muscles’. The field of soft robotics is evolving rapidly as new soft actuator designs are published every year. In parallel, recent studies have also provided new insights for understanding biological muscles as ‘active’ materials whose tunable properties allow them to adapt rapidly to external perturbations. This work presents a comparative study of biological muscles and soft actuators, focusing on those properties that make biological muscles highly adaptable systems. In doing so, we briefly review the latest soft actuation technologies, their actuation mechanisms, and advantages and disadvantages from an operational perspective. Next, we review the latest advances in understanding biological muscles. This presents insight into muscle architecture, the actuation mechanism, and modeling, but more importantly, it provides an understanding of the properties that contribute to adaptability and control. Finally, we conduct a comparative study of biological muscles and soft actuators. Here, we present the accomplishments of each soft actuation technology, the remaining challenges, and future directions. Additionally, this comparative study contributes to providing further insight on soft robotic terms, such as biomimetic actuators, artificial muscles, and conceptualizing a higher level of performance actuator named artificial supermuscle. In conclusion, while soft actuators often have performance metrics such as specific power, efficiency, response time, and others similar to those in muscles, significant challenges remain when finding suitable substitutes for biological muscles, in terms of other factors such as control strategies, onboard energy integration, and thermoregulation.
Qualitative and quantitative assessment of aerospace structures by pulsed thermography

Pulsed thermography (PT) is an NDT&E technique allowing the remote examination of materials and systems. PT is particularly interesting for the inspection of aerospace structures since it can be used to perform safe inspection of large structures in a fast manner and without having to remove the components from the aircraft. Pulsed thermographic data however, is contaminated by noise of many forms. Fortunately, numerous signal processing techniques are available to perform qualitative and quantitative data analysis of data. In this paper, we present three processing techniques that have shown very promising results. We provide the theoretical background and experimental details as well as some representative results that highlight the pros and cons of each technique. As it will be pointed out, an interesting approach is the combination of existing processing techniques in order to use the most attractive features from each technique while reducing the non-desirable characteristics.
Circuit Configurable Bidirectional DC-DC Converter for Retired Batteries

Due to the rapid development and widespread usage of Electric Vehicles (EVs), there will be more and more retired batteries in the future. These retired batteries can be used in energy storage systems to stabilize smart grid operation with high penetration of renewable energy. The battery modules used in EVs are equipped with dedicated bidirectional converters. However, if a dedicated bidirectional converter is required for a retired battery, it will cause resource waste and increase the difficulty of reuse. Therefore, it is vital to design and develop a bidirectional DC-DC converter with a wide-range voltage conversion ratio due to the various voltage levels of retired batteries. Especially, the designed converter should have the bidirectional voltage boost and buck abilities to change the different voltage levels of retired batteries for different application scenarios. A circuit configurable bidirectional DC-DC converter for retired batteries is proposed in this paper. The proposed converter is constituted by cascading a two-phase interleaved half-bridge circuit and a voltage-doubler circuit and can be operated in the interleaved boost/buck mode, single boost/buck mode, cascaded-buck-boost mode, or single buck/boost mode concerning the voltage levels at the terminals of the proposed converter. Due to the circuit configurable design of the proposed converter, a wide-range voltage conversion ratio and bidirectional buck and boost abilities can be achieved. A prototype circuit for the proposed bidirectional DC-DC converter with a rated voltage of 150V at the terminal of two-phase interleaved half-bridge circuit, a rated voltage between 25V and 1050V at the terminal of voltage-doubler circuit, and a rated power of 1100W is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that the proposed converter can be configured into the diverse operating modes for different voltage levels and above 98% of the maximum conversion efficiency can be realized.
Clinical and Humanistic Outcomes of Community Pharmacy-Based Healthcare Interventions Regarding Medication Use in Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This review and meta-analysis aimed to determine the clinical and humanistic outcomes of community pharmacy-based interventions on medication-related problems of older adults at the primary care level. We identified randomized controlled trials (RCTs) examining the impact of various community pharmacy-based interventions from five electronic databases (namely, MEDLINE (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), CINAHL, APA PSYInfo, and Scopus) from January 2010 to December 2020. Consequently, we assessed these interventions’ clinical and humanistic outcomes on older adults and compared them with non-intervention. We included 13 RCTs in the current review and completed a meta-analysis with six of them. The included studies had a total of 6173 older adults. Quantitative analysis showed that patient education was significantly associated with an increase in the discontinuation of sedative–hypnotics use (risk ratio 1.28; 95% CI (1.20, 1.36) I2 = 0%, p < 0.00001). Moreover, the qualitative analysis showed that medication reviews and education with follow-ups could improve various clinical outcomes, including reducing adverse drug events, reducing uncontrolled health outcomes, and improving appropriate medication use among the elderly population. However, medication review could not significantly reduce the number of older adults who fall (risk ratio 1.25; 95% CI (0.78, 1.99) I2 = 0%, p = 0.36) and require hospitalization (risk ratio 0.72; 95% CI (0.47, 1.12) I2 = 45%, p = 0.15). This study showed that community pharmacy-based interventions could help discontinue inappropriate prescription medications among older adults and could improve several clinical and humanistic outcomes. However, more effective community pharmacy-based interventions should be implemented, and more research is needed to provide further evidence for clinical and humanistic outcomes of such interventions on older adults.
Assessment method of the urban development level in the context of knowledge and innovation economy

The assessment method of the level of industrial city (Zaporozhіzhia) development influence affected by knowledge and innovation economy has been proposed in the article. Assessment of the sustainable development level is represented by three components: economic, social and environmental, each of which is characterized by certain indicators. The algorithm has been worked out to determine knowledge and innovation impact for urban sustainable development. It is comprised of three successive stages: indicators characterizing a certain sub-vector are determined in the first stage; sub-vector indexes are calculated in the second stage: the knowledge and innovation index; the knowledge and innovation index is calculated based on the additive and multiplicative model in the third stage. The knowledge and innovation index is defined as “stimulus” (booster) and “restriction” (depreciation) of urban sustainable development, that is, defined as specific ratios. To substantiate the importance of knowledge and innovation impact, not only quantitative approach to evaluation, but also qualitative analysis based on matrix methods have been applied. Changing specific ratios and the degree of specific ratios impact on urban sustainable development allows to analyze changes (increase or decrease) of sustainability level amid weights alterations. Changing specific ratios forms the priorities of economic policy and strategic landmarks.
Adaptive backstepping control for linear induction motor drive to track periodic references

An adaptive backstepping controller is proposed to control the mover position of a linear induction motor (LIM) drive to track periodic reference inputs in this study. First, the feedback linearisation theory is used to decouple the thrust force and the flux amplitude of the LIM. Then, an integral-proportional (IP) position controller is designed according to the estimated plant model to match the prescribed periodic step-command tracking specifications for the LIM drive. Moreover, a feedforward control is added to the IP control system for the tracking of periodic sinusoidal and triangular reference inputs. Although theoretically the feedforward control can track any time-varying reference, the robust control performance is degenerate when the uncertainties occur in the controlled plant. Therefore, an adaptive backstepping approach is proposed to obtain the robustness for uncertainties. With the proposed adaptive backstepping controller, the mover position of the LIM drive possesses the advantages of good transient control performance and robustness to uncertainties for the tracking of periodic reference inputs. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified by both the simulated and experimental results.
Obstacle avoidance of autonomous underwater vehicle by using streamline function

Abstract Development of efficient and practical path-planning methods is a key issue for modern autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). This paper describes a streamline function based obstacle avoidance path planning method for autonomous underwater vehicle. The specific requirement of the underwater world, AUV manoeuvrability, and constrained view of sonar were considered by the modification of streamline function and numerical techniques. This method is less affected by local minima than classical methods using the potential velocity. The streamline function methods for single and multiple obstacles in two dimensions were discussed with constrained searching space and the detailed parameters conditions. The simulation results confirm that this method is feasible and suitable for autonomous underwater vehicles.
Finite Sample Analysis of Average-Reward TD Learning and $Q$-Learning

The focus of this paper is on sample complexity guarantees of average-reward reinforcement learning algorithms, which are known to be more challenging to study than their discounted-reward counterparts. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the ﬁrst known ﬁnite sample guarantees using both constant and diminishing step sizes of (i) average-reward TD( λ ) with linear function approximation for policy evaluation and (ii) average-reward Q -learning in the tabular setting to ﬁnd an optimal policy. A major challenge is that since the value functions are agnostic to an additive constant, the corresponding Bellman operators are no longer contraction mappings under any norm. We obtain the results for TD( λ ) by working in an appropriately deﬁned subspace that ensures uniqueness of the solution. For Q -learning, we exploit the span seminorm contractive property of the Bellman operator and construct a novel Lyapunov function obtained by inﬁmal convolution of the generalized Moreau envelope and the indicator function of a set.
Internal Supply Chain Integration and Cost Operational Performance in Sudanese, Service Institutions (Medical Field)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of Supply Chain integration (SCI) on services institutions (medical field) Operational Performance (OP). The current study is considered as a causality study, it investigates the effect of SCI elements on services Organizations’ (medical field) OP. The study surveyed the managers working at the services Organizations. Practical data collected from 307 managers out of 330 managers, by means of a questionnaire, which developed and refined through experts’ interviews and the panel of judges committee. Statistical techniques such as descriptive statistics, correlation, and multiple regressions employed. The results of the study indicated a positive significant relationship between SCI and services institutions OP. The results also indicated that the managers in services organizations (medical field) were almost similar in their internal integration indicators. However, internal integration indicated that there are strong inter-relationships and interactions among the one component of SCI between them and OP. Finally, the results showed that the respondents believed that there is a strong relationship between SCI and OP. Results indicated that the internal integration was having the highest effect on OP(cost performance),. Finally, the current study recommend considering improving the one component of SCI because they are strongly interrelated.
Evidence of connectivity of bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) throughout the Indian Ocean inferred from genome-wide genetic markers

In order to resolve the population connectivity of bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) within the Indian Ocean, we analyzed thousands of genome-wide markers of individuals from a broad geographic area of the Indian Ocean as well as from locations in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Our results support a single panmictic population of bigeye tuna within the Indian Ocean isolated from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Introduction Previous studies on the population structure of bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) support inter-oceanic genetic separation (Alvarado Bremer et al. 1998; Chow et al. 2000; Durand et al. 2005; Martínez et al. 2006). However, the few studies that applied genetic methods to understanding population structure of this species within the Indian Ocean did not observe signs of heterogeneity, supporting the existence of a single panmictic IOTC-2020-WPTT22(AS)-16
Transforms based Tensor Robust PCA: Corrupted Low-Rank Tensors Recovery via Convex Optimization

This work studies the Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis (TRPCA) problem, which aims to exactly recover the low-rank and sparse components from their sum. Our model is motivated by the recently proposed linear transforms based tensor-tensor product and tensor SVD. We define a new transforms depended tensor rank and the corresponding tensor nuclear norm. Then we solve the TR-PCA problem by convex optimization whose objective is a weighted combination of the new tensor nuclear norm and ℓ1-norm. In theory, we prove that under some incoherence conditions, the convex program exactly recovers the underlying low-rank and sparse components with high probability. Our new TRPCA is much more general since it allows to use any invertible linear transforms. Thus, we have more choices in practice for different tasks and different type of data. Numerical experiments verify our results and the application on image recovery demonstrates the superiority of our method.