Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Optimal Solver for a KKT-System arising from an Interior-Point Formulation of a Topology Optimization Problem

There are basically two approaches to solve optimal design problems with a partial differential equation, usually called the state equation, as a constraint. The usual procedure is to eliminate the state variables and the state equation and only optimize in the design space. Another possibility is to keep the state equation and to treat it as a constraint throughout the optimization progress. This formulation is called simultaneous or one-shot optimization. Then, in order to satisfy the optimality conditions, large scale indefinite linear systems (KKT-systems) have to be solved. This is the drawback, or better the challenge, of this alternative approach. If it is possible to construct an optimal solver to this KKT-systems, we can benefit from the expected speed-up of the one-shot formulation. In this work we consider a multigrid based solver to such a KKT-system, resulting from stress constrained topology optimization. As a proper smoothing procedure we use a multiplicative Schwarz-type smoother. Here, in each iteration step of the smoother, several small local saddle-point problems are solved. The numerical test examples show the typical multigrid convergence behaviour, i.e. asymptotic constant number of iterations and convergence rates.
Perceptual grouping leads to objecthood effects in the Ebbinghaus illusion

The Ebbinghaus illusion is argued to be a product of low-level contour interactions or a higher cognitive comparison process. We examined the effect of grouping on the illusion by manipulating objecthood, i.e., the degree to which an object is a cohesive perceptual entity. We hypothesized that reduced objecthood would decrease the illusion magnitude, because the objects become less efficient in the comparison process. To test this hypothesis, we used a version of the illusion where the target and flanking objects were squares that were composed from their corners or sides. Degree of objecthood was manipulated by changing the gap size or rotation angle of the elements constructing the objects, so that larger gaps and angles produced less cohesive objects than smaller. Participants performed an adjustment procedure on the test target to match a control target in size. In addition, subjective reports of the objects’ shape were collected as a measure of perceived shape. Our results show decreased illusion magnitude with increasing gap size and rotation angle. Surprisingly, the perceived shape of the objects did not correlate with illusion magnitude. These results provide novel evidence of the role of mid-level processes in the Ebbinghaus illusion and point to a dissociation between subjective and objective measures of objecthood.
An Inducible Diabetes Mellitus Murine Model Based on MafB Conditional Knockout under MafA-Deficient Condition

Diabetes mellitus is an increasingly severe chronic metabolic disease that is occurring at an alarming rate worldwide. Various diabetic models, including non-obese diabetic mice and chemically induced diabetic models, are used to characterize and explore the mechanism of the disease’s pathophysiology, in hopes of detecting and identifying novel potential therapeutic targets. However, this is accompanied by disadvantages, such as specific conditions for maintaining the incidence, nonstable hyperglycemia induction, and potential toxicity to other organs. Murine MAFA and MAFB, two closely-linked islet-enriched transcription factors, play fundamental roles in glucose sensing and insulin secretion, and maintenance of pancreatic β-cell, respectively, which are highly homologous to human protein orthologs. Herein, to induce the diabetes mellitus model at a specific time point, we generated Pdx1-dependent Mafb-deletion mice under Mafa knockout condition (A0BΔpanc), via tamoxifen-inducible Cre-loxP system. After 16 weeks, metabolic phenotypes were characterized by intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test (IPGTT), urine glucose test, and metabolic parameters analysis. The results indicated that male A0BΔpanc mice had obvious impaired glucose tolerance, and high urine glucose level. Furthermore, obvious renal lesions, impaired islet structure and decreased proportion of insulin positive cells were observed. Collectively, our results indicate that A0BΔpanc mice can be an efficient inducible model for diabetes research.
Design and cfd modelling of a low pressure turbine for aeroengines

During the last decades, the reduction of aeroengines fuel consumption is becoming an issue of high importance, due to economic and environmental reasons. One of the main parameters that can severely affect the fuel consumption and the whole performance of the engine is the efficiency of its turbomachinery components. In this work, a detail design study of a low-pressure turbine (LPT), which is integrated in a turbofan engine, is presented. The LPT is designed based on a thermodynamic cycle analysis of the turbofan engine, based on specific requirements such as: mass flow rate, inlet pressure, temperature, power etc, targeting always to an aerodynamic design of increased efficiency. In the first part, the development of a computational tool (0D analysis) based on the book of Saravanamuttoo et al. (2001) on gas turbine theory and the work by Kacker and Okapuu (1982) on axial-flow turbines, capable to calculate the main geometrical and thermodynamic characteristics of the turbine (e.g. inlet and outlet flow and blade angles, aspect ratio, pitch to chord ratio, root and tip radius, pressures, temperatures and densities at each stage) is presented. In order to have a proper evaluation of the design methodology, a 3D CAD of all the turbine stages is created and detailed 3D CFD computations are performed. The CFD analysis and the results are presented in the second part of this work. The ANSYS commercial software is used for the design, meshing and prediction of the flow field through the turbine. Additionally, grid independency study is conducted also, in order to determine and conclude to the size of grid that will provide grid-independent results. Finally, the results of the 0D analysis are compared with those of the 3D CFD computations. A very close agreement is achieved, with a deviation in efficiency values less than 1 %. Thus, it can be concluded that the 0D computer tool can be used as a first low-computational-cost and accurate presizing tool for the calculation of the engine turbine performance.
BPMN Serialization - Step Toward Busssiness & IT alignment

This paper points out the importance of using standardized tools for notation and exchange or execution of business processes. Presented service oriented platform enables business IT alignment and make companies open for collaboration in global business environment. Special attention is given to methods for serialization or converting notation of business processes to forms suitable for computer processing. This business-IT alignment enables the efficient use of all resources in order to achieve business
Contact Pressure Distribution as an Evaluation Metric for Human-Robot Hand Interactions

Soft robotic technologies are paving way for physical human-robot hand interactions, creating a need for structured evaluation metrics for robot hands. We propose that the contact pressure distribution of the grasp should be used as a hand benchmark both for naturalness and comfort, and present our initial work in this direction. We describe an experimental setup for measuring the contact pressure distribution, and present a case study comparing the pressure distributions from a robotic hand and a human hand. The grasping force of the human hand is ten times greater than the robot, but the robot hand produces higher peak contact pressures and smaller contact areas.
Relationship Between Oxygen Uptake Kinetics and the Running Strategy on a 10 Km Race

Mailing address: Faculdade de Nutrição – Universidade Federal de Alagoas (UFAL) Avenida Lorival Melo Mota, S/N – Campus A.C. Simões, Tabuleiro do Martins – 57072-970 – Maceió, AL, Brazil. E-mail: may_hand@hotmail.com ABSTRACT This study examined the influence of the O2 kinetics on the running strategy adopted during a 10km running race in runners with different performance levels. Twenty-one runners (28.5 ± 5.3 years; 17.6 ± 7.3 cm; 66.3 ± 9.3 kg) performed 1) a test with increments of 1.2 km.h-1 every 3 min until exhaustion; 2) one 6-min test of constant velocity at 9 km.h-1 for determination of O2 kinetics and; 3) a 10 km time trial simulation. The subjects were divided into two groups, Moderated Performance (MP) and Low Perfomance (LP), based on the 10-km running performance. Mean velocity (MP= 16.9 ± 0.8 vs BP= 14.9 ± 1 km.h-1) on the 10km race was significantly different (p<0.05) between groups. There were no differences (p>0.05) between groups in any kinetics parameters analyzed. However, the O2 increase amplitude (A1 parameter) was inversely correlated with mean velocity (r= -0.48, p < 0.05) and with the partial velocities on time trial (r between -0.44 and -0.48, p < 0.05), except for the last session (r=-0.19, p > 0.05). In conclusion, the correlation of A1 parameter with the partial velocities suggests an influence of running economy on the strategy adopted during the 10 km time trial.
Assessment of Land Cover Change in Peri-Urban High Andean Environments South of Bogotá, Colombia

Bogota, the rapidly growing center of an emerging economy in the northern part of South America, is located within a biodiversity hotspot in the tropical Andes. The surrounding mountains harbor the ecosystems Paramo and Bosque Altoandino whose high water retention capacity serves as a “natural water tower” for the city’s freshwater supply. Since Bogota is steadily growing, the city spreads into its peri-urban area, thus threatening its proximal ecosystems. In this study, the land use and land cover change (LULCC) of Bogota’s surrounding area is analyzed with random forest algorithms for the period 1989 to 2016. The basin of the Rio Tunjuelo, a subbasin of the Rio Bogota, was selected for analysis, as it is typical for the entire area in terms of relief, land use and land cover. A multiple logistic regression analysis is applied to identify different determining factors of the changes. LULCC analysis of the Rio Tunjuelo basin shows an ongoing but abating southward spread of Bogota’s outer rim, an increase of agricultural land, and decrease of natural vegetation. After an initial heavily spatial spread of urbanization in the early 1990s, the speed of urban spread declined in the past years. Statistical analysis implies that the defined natural vegetation classes must be considered as one spatial entity. The probability for their change increases with decreasing distance to established agricultural areas, which indicates human impact as a relevant factor for LULCC. Generally, the explained deviance (D2) is low and hence it is presumed that the LULCC determining factors are not predominantly found among environmental parameters.
Assessing Short‐Term Impacts of Management Practices on N2O Emissions From Diverse Mediterranean Agricultural Ecosystems Using a Biogeochemical Model

Croplands are important sources of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. The lack of both long‐term field measurements and reliable methods for extrapolating these measurements has resulted in a large uncertainty in quantifying and mitigating N2O emissions from croplands. This is especially relevant in regions where cropping systems and farming management practices (FMPs) are diverse. In this study, a process‐based biogeochemical model, DeNitrification‐DeComposition (DNDC), was tested against N2O measurements from five cropping systems (alfalfa, wheat, lettuce, vineyards, and almond orchards) representing diverse environmental conditions and FMPs. The model tests indicated that DNDC was capable of predicting seasonal and annual total N2O emissions from these cropping systems, and the model's performance was better than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission factor approach. DNDC also captured the impacts on N2O emissions of nitrogen fertilization for wheat and lettuce, of stand age for alfalfa, as well as the spatial variability of N2O fluxes in vineyards and orchards. DNDC overestimated N2O fluxes following some heavy rainfall events. To reduce the biases of simulating N2O fluxes following heavy rainfall, studies should focus on clarifying mechanisms controlling impacts of environmental factors on denitrification. DNDC was then applied to assess the impacts on N2O emissions of FMPs, including tillage, fertilization, irrigation, and management of cover crops. The practices that can mitigate N2O emissions include reduced or no tillage, reduced N application rates, low‐volume irrigation, and cultivation of nonleguminous cover crops. This study demonstrates the necessity and potential of utilizing process‐based models to quantify N2O emissions from regions with highly diverse cropping systems.
Concentration of Measure in Matrix-Valued Dependent Settings

An important generalization of this bound was achieved by Gilman (Gillman, 1998), who significantly relaxed the independence assumption to Markov dependence. Specifically, suppose that v1, . , vk is a k-length stationary random walk of a regular graph G = (V,E). Additionally, assume a scalar valued function F ∶ [V]↦ C. Then, even though the random variables vi are not independent, one has P [∣ 1 k k ∑ i=1 F (vi) −E[F ]∣ > ] ≤ 2 ⋅ exp(−Ω((1 − λ)k )), (2)
Phase Modulation Schemes in Food Free Space Optical Coherent System

In this study, it is the most appropriate modulation format for food free space optical (FFSO) system compared with other modulation schemes. Performance of BER for BPSK, DPSK and QPSK has been detail discussed under Gamma-Gamma turbulent channel with intensity scintillation and phase fluctuations. The closed average BER expression and channel capacity expression have been derived by adopting the method of generalized hypergeometric. From experiments show that BER and transmission power degraded seriously for the three kinds of modulation format owing to intensity scintillation and phase fluctuations. Comparing performance of the three modulation methods under the atmospheric turbulence, the results for the performance of BPSK and QPSK almost unanimously, in the case of an given SNR it is obvious that BPSK with lower BER. Therefore, BPSK modulation has a good BER and effective resist turbulent but the transmission power will not be increased.
1 Efficient Conversion of Glucose into 2 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural via a simple catalyst 3 γ-AlOOH at a Mild Reaction Condition 4

A simple solid acid catalyst γ-AlOOH was employed to synthesize 9 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) from glucose in the dimethyl sulfoxide. Various reaction 10 parameters, such as catalyst loading, temperature, reaction duration and solvent, were 11 investigated. A high HMF yield of 61.24 % was obtained at the mild reaction condition of 130 °C for 12 3 h. More importantly, the catalyst γ-AlOOH could be reused for several times without the loss of 13 its significant catalytic activities. After five reaction runs, a HMF yield about 57.23 % was obtained. 14 In addition, the results demonstrated that the γ-AlOOH also had high catalytic activities on the 15 degradation of other polysaccharides, like Maltose, Sucrose and Cellulose, into HMF using ionic 16 liquid 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, DMSO and a small amount of water as the reaction 17 solvents. For instance, a high HMF yield of 50.26 % was obtained at 170 °C for 2.5 h on the 18 decomposition of Cellulose. 19
Time‐lapse imaging of saline‐tracer transport in fractured rock using difference‐attenuation radar tomography

Accurate characterization of fractured‐rock aquifer heterogeneity remains one of the most challenging and important problems in groundwater hydrology. We demonstrate a promising strategy to identify preferential flow paths in fractured rock using a combination of geophysical monitoring and conventional hydrogeologic tests. Cross‐well difference‐attenuation ground‐penetrating radar was used to monitor saline‐tracer migration in an experiment at the U.S. Geological Survey Fractured Rock Hydrology Research Site in Grafton County, New Hampshire. Radar data sets were collected every 10 min in three adjoining planes for 5 hours during each of 12 tracer tests. An innovative inversion method accounts for data acquisition times and temporal changes in attenuation during data collection. The inverse algorithm minimizes a combination of two functions. The first is the sum of weighted squared data residuals. Second is a measure of solution complexity based on an a priori space‐time covariance function, subject to constraints that limit radar‐attenuation changes to regions of the tomograms traversed by high difference‐attenuation ray paths. The time series of tomograms indicate relative tracer concentrations and tracer arrival times in the image planes; from these we infer the presence and location of a preferential flow path within a previously identified zone of transmissive fractures. These results provide new insights into solute channeling and the nature of aquifer heterogeneity at the site.
Optimization of Passenger Transportation Corridor Mode Supply Structure in Regional Comprehensive Transport Considering Economic Equilibrium

Reasonable transportation network layoutsarecritical for optimizing a comprehensive transport system. With the gradual development of a transportation industry from quantitative expansion to structural optimization, and transformation of various transportation modes from independent operation to integrated development, traditional comprehensive transport planning theories and methods have not adapted. In thispaper, a new planning concept is proposed from the perspective of economic equilibrium with theaim ofoptimizing a supply structure for a comprehensive transport passenger transportation corridor. An in-depth analysis was conducted of the internal mechanism of the dynamic equilibrium between supply and demand of this corridor,wherein the maximum of the globaltransportation demand subjectcustomer surplus wastaken as a target function, respective interest functions of a demand subject and a supply subject served as constraints to quantitatively optimize the supply structure of the passenger transportation corridor in comprehensive transport, and a Gradient Descent algorithmwasdesigned. The results show that the proposed model better reflectstheeconomic operation mechanism of a passenger transportation market in a comprehensive transport corridor (CTC), and prove that the supply structure of CTC is closely related to passenger flow, travel value distribution, a supply subject's scale rate of return,and travel time. These research results have important academic values in terms of improving passenger transportation corridor structure optimization in region-specific comprehensive transport that conforms to a market economy mechanism. This concept can be extended from single corridor planning to point-to-point and door-to-door transportation supply structure planning, andto comprehensive transport network planning and urban transportation planning without loss of generality.
1 Test-equivalence Analysis for Automatic Patch Generation

Automated program repair is a problem of finding a transformation (called a patch) of a given incorrect program that eliminates the observable failures. It has important applications such as providing debugging aids, automatically grading student assignments and patching security vulnerabilities. A common challenge faced by existing repair techniques is scalability to large patch spaces, since there are many candidate patches that these techniques explicitly or implicitly consider. The correctness criteria for program repair is often given as a suite of tests. Current repair techniques do not scale due to the large number of test executions performed by the underlying search algorithms. In this work, we address this problem by introducing a methodology of patch generation based on a test-equivalence relation (if two programs are "test-equivalent" for a given test, they produce indistinguishable results on this test). We propose two test-equivalence relations based on runtime values and dependencies respectively and present an algorithm that performs on-the-fly partitioning of patches into test-equivalence classes. Our experiments on real-world programs reveal that the proposed methodology drastically reduces the number of test executions and therefore provides an order of magnitude efficiency improvement over existing repair techniques, without sacrificing patch quality.
Modelling the distribution of Mustela nivalis and M. putorius in the Azores archipelago based on native and introduced ranges

The aims of this study were to predict the potential distribution of two introduced Mustelidae, Mustela nivalis and M. putorius in the Azores archipelago (Portugal), and evaluate the relative contribution of environmental factors from native and introduced ranges to predict species distribution ranges in oceanic islands. We developed two sets of Species Distribution Models using MaxEnt and distribution data from the native and introduced ranges of the species to project their potential distribution in the archipelago. We found differences in the predicted distributions for the models based on introduced and on native occurrences for both species, with different most important variables being selected. Climatic variables were most important for the introduced range models, while other groups of variables (i.e., human-disturbance) were included in the native-based models. Most of the islands of the Azorean archipelago were predicted to have suitable habitat for both species, even when not yet occupied. Our results showed that predicting the invaded range based on introduced range environmental conditions predicted a narrower range. These results highlight the difficulty to transfer models from native to introduced ranges across taxonomically related species, making it difficult to predict future invasions and range expansion.
GC-MS and HPLC Methods for Determination of Estriol Hormone in Pharmaceutical Preparations

This paper describes two rapid, sensitive and specific methods for determination of estriol hormone in pharmaceutical preparations by gas chromatography (GC) with mass spectrometry (MS) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection. The calibration curves were linear for estriol ( r > 0.99 ) at the concentration range of 12.5-500 ng/ml and 10-400 ng/ml for GC-MS and HPLC, respectively. The relative standard deviation (RSD) for intra- and inter-day precision was less than or equal to 4.72 and 6.25%, respectively. The developed methods were applied to a pharmaceutical preparation (Gynoflor) as tablet form which does not require any preliminary separation or treatment of the samples. No interference was found from tablet excipients at the selected assay conditions. Also, the results obtained from the methods were statistically compared and no significant difference was found.