Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrochemical Process Engineering in Biohydrometallurgical Metal Recovery from Mineral Sulfides

Primary copper sulfides are recalcitrant to bioleaching, probably due to semi-conductivity or passivation effects which result in slow dissolution kinetics. The mineral dissolution strongly depends on redox reactions and, consequently, electrochemical techniques are recommendable for analyzing and processing of redox-active minerals. For this reason we installed a three electrode system into a conventional bioreactor. Electrolytic bioleaching was applied to a copper concentrate from black shale ore. First results verified the operational capability of ferric iron reduction during electrochemical leaching and that bioleaching is not hindered by the physical presence of the electrochemical setup. Although the working electrode was able to reduce ferric iron and to regenerate it as electron supply for ferrous iron oxidizing microorganisms, the electron input into the bioleaching process has to be further increased to keep up with fast biocatalytical iron oxidation.
Correlation between physicochemical properties of natural building materials and adsorption behaviour of volatile organic compounds

The present study correlates the physicochemical properties of commercially available natural building materials, such as lime mortar, wood-based panels and natural fibres, with their adsorption of VOCs. Experiments to determine the adsorption characteristics of toluene, limonene, dodecane and formaldehyde were carried out over a 48 hour period using environmental chambers with controlled temperature and relative humidity. The adsorption behaviour was then related to the chemical nature of the materials and also to their physical properties, such as microstructure and porosity. The outcomes of this study will be useful when developing new building materials and will serve to broaden the current understanding of interactions between various solids and airborne VOCs.
Reservoir Scheduling Using a Multi-Objective Cuckoo Search Algorithm under Climate Change in Jinsha River, China

Changes in rainfall and streamflow due to climate change have an adverse impact on hydropower generation reliability and scheduling of cascade hydropower stations. To estimate the impact of climate change on hydropower, a combination of climate, hydrological, and hydropower scheduling models is needed. Here, we take the Jinsha River as an example to estimate the impact of climate change on total power generation of the cascade hydropower stations and residual load variance of the power grid. These two goals are solved by applying an improved multi-objective cuckoo search algorithm, and a variety of strategies for the optimal dispatch of hydropower stations are adopted to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Using streamflow prediction results of CMIP5 climate data, in conjunction with the Xinanjiang model, the estimated results for the next 30 years were obtained. The results indicated that the negative correlation between total power generation and residual load variance under the RCP 2.6 scenario was weaker than that under the RCP 8.5. Moreover, the average power generation and the average residual load variance in RCP 2.6 was significantly larger than that in RCP 8.5. Thus, reducing carbon emissions is not only beneficial to ecological sustainability, but also has a positive impact on hydropower generation. Our approaches are also applicable for cascade reservoirs in other river catchments worldwide to estimate impact of climate change on hydropower development.
How have after-school clubs adapted in the United Kingdom post-March lockdown?

After-school clubs have provided an important childcare service for parents and carers where children are provided with an environment to play once the school day has finished. When the United Kingdom went into lockdown in March 2020, all children’s services closed that included the childcare provision of after-school clubs. When they re-opened in between July and September 2020, changes had to be implemented to meet Government restrictions. This study from 54 respondents working in the childcare sector identified changes within four themes: maintain service; bubbles; play space and play behaviour. This has resulted in an increase hygiene measures, staffing and amount of space for individual children, however, there is a decreased in the number of children attending, the resources and activities on offer and movement within the place space. Although after-school childcare is still being offered, there is financial concern on their viability and sustainability as parental demand may drop which has implications in providing a unique environment where children of different ages and abilities mix.
Laboratory studies on optical properties of secondary organic aerosols generated during the photooxidation of toluene and the ozonolysis of α -pinene: OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF SOAS

[1] It has recently been suggested that some organic aerosols can absorb solar radiation, especially at the shorter visible and UV wavelengths. Although quantitative characterization of the optical properties of secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) is required in order to confirm the effect of SOAs on the atmospheric radiation balance, the light absorption of SOAs has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we conducted laboratory experiments to measure the optical properties of SOAs generated during the photooxidation of toluene in the presence of NOx and the ozonolysis of α-pinene. Extinction and scattering coefficients of the SOAs were measured by a cavity ring-down aerosol extinction spectrometer and an integrating nephelometer, respectively. Refractive indices of the SOAs were determined so that the measured particle size dependence of the extinction and scattering efficiencies could be reproduced by calculations using Mie scattering theory. As a result, significant light absorption was found at 355 nm for the toluene SOAs. In contrast, no significant absorption was found either at 355 or 532 nm for the α-pinene SOAs. Using the obtained refractive index, mass absorption cross-section values of the toluene SOAs were calculated to be 0.3–3 m2 g−1 at 355 nm. The results indicate that light absorption by the SOAs formed from the photooxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons have a potential to influence the total aerosol light absorption, especially at UV wavelengths.
AliExpress Learning-to-Rank: Maximizing Online Model Performance Without Going Online

Learning-to-rank (LTR) has become a key technology in E-commerce applications. Most existing LTR approaches follow a supervised learning paradigm with data collected from an online system. Yet, LTR models sometimes have good performance on the offline validation set but poor performance with online metrics, suggesting an inconsistency exists between offline and online evaluation measurements. We confirm that this inconsistency exists in AliExpress Search, the search engine for an international E-commerce business. One major reason for the inconsistency is the ignorance of the item context, as the item order of the newly served model is always different from that in the offline dataset. This paper proposes an evaluator-generator framework for E-commerce LTR with the item context. The framework consists of an evaluator that generalizes to evaluate recommendations involving the context, a generator that maximizes the score of the evaluator with reinforcement learning, and an adversarially-trained discriminator that ensures the reliable explorations of the generator. Extensive experiments in the simulation environment and AliExpress Search show that, first, the classic data-based metrics on the offline dataset has an obvious inconsistency with online performance, and can even be misleading. Second, the proposed evaluator score is significantly more consistent with the online performance than common ranking metrics. As a result, our method achieves a significant improvement (><inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\%$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mo>%</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhou-ieq1-3098898.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>) in terms of Conversion Rate (CR) over the industrial-level fine-tuned model in online A/B tests.
Effect of Capacitor Voltage Ripples on Submodule Active Power Control Limits of Cascaded Multilevel Converters

In the operation of cascaded H-bridge converters and modular multilevel converters with energy storage or renewable power resources, unbalanced active power distribution among the submodules (SMs) is unavoidable. Depending on the operating conditions, there are certain upper and lower limits on the active power that can be processed by a single SM or a subset of SMs. The control system needs to restrict the SM power references to these limits, hence, accurate knowledge of the power limits is important. In existing methods to derive the power limits, the SM capacitor voltages are assumed to have negligible ripples, whereas in practice the ripples can be considerable. This article analyzes the effect of capacitor voltage ripples on the SM active power control limits and highlights the importance of considering the ripple effect. A methodology is proposed to accurately incorporate capacitor voltage ripples in the derivation of SM active power control limits. Simulation and experimental results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
Validated TLC-Densitometry Method for Simultanouse Determination of Brinzolamide and Timolol in Their Ophthalmic Preparation

Abstract Sensitive, simple and accurate thin-layer chromatography (TLC) - densitometry method for simultaneous determination of brinzolamide (BRZ) and timolol maleate (TML) in their pharmaceutical formulations was developed and validated, where separation was occurred using a mobile phase composed of chloroform: methanol: ammonia (9:0.5:0.1 by volume) on silica gel 60 F254 plates, densitometric detection was done at 254 nm for brinzolamide and 298 nm for timolol. The calibration curves are linear over the concentration range of 3-16 μg/spot for BRZ and 4-14 μg/spot for TML. The obtained results were statistically compared with those obtained by the reported methods, showing no significant difference. The developed method was validated according to the ICH guidelines and was successfully applied for simultaneous determination of brinzolamide and timolol maleate in bulk drug and in their ophthalmic preparation.
OPDB: A Scalable and Modular Design Benchmark

Progress in electronic design automation (EDA) has enabled us to manage the exponential growth of complexity in integrated circuits (ICs) allowed by Moore’s Law, and translate it into performance improvements. Furthermore, as Moore’s law slows down and with the collapse of Dennard scaling over the past decade, EDA tools become increasingly important in addressing inefficiencies in ICs. As new proposals and techniques are put forward to address the current and future issues of IC design, a concrete set of contemporary benchmarks needs to be used for their evaluation. Traditionally, EDA researchers have mainly relied on industry provided design benchmarks in evaluating the performance of their tools. However, due to their effort to maintain their competitive advantage, industry releases include older designs with limited information about the details of each design. This means that in multiple cases, new proposals are evaluated with significantly dated designs, often more than a decade old, especially in terms of scale. In this work, we describe OPDB: a scalable, modular, heterogeneous, and extensible design benchmark for the EDA community. OPDB leverages and extends the OpenPiton open-source, tile-based research infrastructure to create a surplus of design benchmarks that target different components. Due to the tiled nature of this architecture, OPDB benchmarks can be made arbitrarily large in order to evaluate the efficiency of EDA tools across different design scales and configurations. OPDB contains several accelerators enabling full SoC designs to be used as benchmarks for EDA tools.
RAT: Reinforcement-Learning-Driven and Adaptive Testing for Vulnerability Discovery in Web Application Firewalls

Due to the increasing sophistication of web attacks, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have to be tested and updated regularly to resist the relentless flow of web attacks. In practice, using a brute-force attack to discover vulnerabilities is infeasible due to the wide variety of attack patterns. Thus, various black-box testing techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, these techniques suffer from low efficiency. This article presents Reinforcement-Learning-Driven and Adaptive Testing (RAT), an automated black-box testing strategy to discover injection vulnerabilities in WAFs. In particular, we focus on SQL injection and Cross-site Scripting, which have been among the top ten vulnerabilities over the past decade. More specifically, RAT clusters similar attack samples together. It then utilizes a reinforcement learning technique combined with a novel adaptive search algorithm to discover almost all bypassing attack patterns efficiently. We compare RAT with three state-of-the-art me&thods considering their objectives. The experiments show that RAT performs 33.53 and 63.16 percent on average better than its counterparts in discovering the most possible bypassing payloads and reducing the number of attempts before finding the first bypassing payload when testing well-configured WAFs, respectively.
A Phase-Shift-Modulated Resonant Two-Switch Boosting Switched-Capacitor Converter and Its Modulation Map

In this article, a phase-shift-modulated resonant two-switch boosting switched-capacitor converter (RTBSC) and its modulation map are proposed. Compared with the traditional RTBSC, all diodes are replaced by active switches and then phase-shift modulation is applied. The advantages of the modified topology are obtained as follows. First, the voltage gain can be regulated efficiently either below or above the nominal value within wide range (about ±20%) even at light-load condition, making it suitable for applications with voltage fluctuations, such as the battery charging/discharging system, photovoltaic system and battery/PV voltage equalizer. Second, the conduction loss is reduced by replacing all diodes in RTBSC with low turn-on resistance transistors and adopting phase-shift modulation, especially for high-order and high-gain configuration. Third, all switches achieve the zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) turn-on, reducing the switching loss significantly. Fourth, the soft-charging property smooths the current profile. Aside from the topology modification, a comprehensive analysis of operation principle, voltage gain, component stress and ZVS region is given. On the basis, a modulation map with the optimal operation region is proposed. It provides a guideline to operate and design such converters in the target gain range, low component stress and ZVS region, making up for the lack of modulation map and design guideline. A 120W prototype with low-voltage side 43–60 V and high-voltage side 150 V was designed in the optimal operation region to verify the above analyses.
Structural Equation Modeling for Quantifying Riding Performance of Motorcycle Rider using Real-time Measurable Indexes

: Motorcycle riders’ fatality is four times that of four-wheeled vehicle drivers. Previous studies have shown the effect of the Advanced Rider Assistance System (ARAS) is different depending on the user’s driving style. To realize personally optimized ARAS, it needs to keep track of riding performance and emotional state. Most studies define one index as driving performance to control the onset timing of ARAS. In this study, we designed a structural equation model to identify the driving behavior indexes that are directly related to the risk of traffic accidents from the emotional state and driving behavior. We investigated the driving behaviors of 23 test subjects using a riding simulator by inducing various emotional states in different conditions of driving scenery, traffic volume, and music. As a result, this model suggests that arousal level, valence level, carelessness, lateral instability, steering instability, and driving style are related to riding performance.
GOKHRU (TRIBULUS TERRESTRIS AND PEDALIUM MUREX): MEDICINAL IMPORTANCE OF CHOTA GOKHRU AND BADA GOKHRU IN AYURVEDA AND MODERN SCIENCE

Tribulus terrestris and Pedalium murex are the two popular herbal plants originated from a very famous Ayurvedic plant named Gokshuru. These plants are well known for their medicinal importance. In Ayurveda, T. terrestris is known as laghu gokhshuru and P. murex is known as brihat gokshuru. The fruits of T. terrestris plant are slightly astringent in taste while the fruits of P. murex are somewhat sweeter in taste. The fruits are used to treat various diseases such as urinary disorder adrenal stone. In this current paper, we have discussed the pharmacological, Ayurvedic and folk uses of these plants in every region of the world. From various reported studies, it was found that the T. terrestris plant carries much medicinal importance while the P. murex fruits is only used as a substitute or as an adulterant of the T. terrestris plant. It was found that the T. terrestris plant is mainly used to cure urinogenital disorders and kidney disorders such as renal and gall bladder stone. On the other hand, the P. murex plant carries aphrodisiac property and mainly used to cure sexual disorders like infertility, erectile dysfunctioning in both male and females. It was also found that these plants have some similar phytochemical constituents which possess aphrodisiac, anti-inflammatory, demulcent, diuretic properties, and also used to cure other diseases such as cough, asthma, cardiac disease, vesical calculi, and gall bladder stone. These plants are known for major therapeutic properties such as anti-ulcerative, antiurolithic, anticancer, aphrodisiac, analgesic, stomachic, anti-hypertensive, diuretic, urinary anti-infective, cardio tonic, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, nephroprotective, antispasmodic, anthelmintic, and anti-carcinogenic.
Stability of Hydrated Clay Layers from Molecular Simulations

Clays adsorb water following discrete steps in which water is roughly structured in layers. The resulting discrete hydration states can be viewed as phases separated by unstable domains and the change of hydration state can be viewed as a phase transformation. Here, we identify stable basal spacings and the domains of (meta-) stability through the analysis of confining pressure isotherms obtained from molecular simulations performed in grand canonical ensemble. This ensemble mimics drained conditions. Through thermodynamic analysis, we can explain the coexistence of different hydration states at clay particle scale and provide kinetics arguments to the hysteresis observed with respect to traction and compression. The gained insights into the mechanical behavior of the elementary constituents of clays may lead to a better understanding of the behavior of clay-rich rocks and soils.
El fenómeno fan de las microcelebridades: el caso de AuronPlay

Aunque existen abundantes trabajos sobre las comunidades de fans y, en menor medida, sobre las microcelebridades, la relación entre ambos ha sido solo superficialmente abordada. Este trabajo persigue, pues, estudiar la adaptación del fenómeno fan al entorno online y las microcelebridades. AuronPlay es uno de los youtubers más relevantes del panorama nacional e internacional, con 24,5 millones de suscriptores. Este trabajo parte de un diseño de investigación exploratorio-descriptivo de carácter cualitativo. Se emplean la entrevista estructurada en línea —con 44 entrevistas a fans españoles de AuronPlay— y el análisis del discurso. Se pretende así abordar la relevancia del youtuber en un determinado contexto social/comunicacional y las percepciones y el comportamiento de sus fans como comunidad de seguidores de una microcelebridad. El éxito de AuronPlay parece relacionarse con una comunicación cercana y constante con la comunidad mediante plataformas digitales. Coexisten procesos de identificación y proyección. Los propios fans son conscientes de la influencia del youtuber sobre ellos en la manera de hablar, el consumo de contenidos o la percepción de la realidad. La comunidad se constituye como un apoyo a la microcelebridad y una expansión de su imaginario. Pese a todo, la relación entre microcelebridad y comunidad tiene un carácter parasocial.
LC-MS/MS simultaneous determination of 37 bioactive compounds in Bunium crassifolium Batt. and its biological activities

: Bunium crassifolium Batt. is an extremely rare species growing in Algeria. Its leaf or aerial part is used for flavoring and garnishing food. The aim of the current study was to determine 37 bioactive phytochemicals and biological evaluation of the methanol and methanol:water (70:30) extracts of B. crassifolium for the first time. A total of 10 phenolic acids and 8 flavonoids have been identified in the extracts of the aerial parts by LC–MS/MS. Chlorogenic, gallic and ferulic acids were the most abundant phenolic acids detected, while rhoifolin, quercitrin and rutin were the most abundant flavonoids. In addition, 3 non-phenolic organic acids (fumaric acids, quinic and malic) were detected and among them quinic and malic acids were the most abundant. Antioxidant activity was evaluted by six methods and the extracts showed significant activity. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents were determined and methanol:water (70:30) extract showed higher values which entails its greater antioxidant capacity. In addition, anticholinesterase (AChE and BChE) activity was evaluated for both extracts using Ellman method. Methanol extract showed a better anti-acetylcholinesterase activity than methanol:water (70:30) one. While, both extracts showed a weak anti-butyrylcholinesterase activity. Furthermore, the anti-tyrosinase activity was tested and the methanol:water (70:30) extract was promising and more potent. In conclusion, B. crassifolium could be used in food industries and pharmaceutical as a potential functional food ingredient.