Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbon storage in low‐alpine grassland soils: effects of different grazing intensities of sheep

Grazing in outlying fields has a long history and is important in local communities worldwide. During the last few decades, grazing pressure has both decreased and increased in alpine ecosystems, but little is known about the effects on soil carbon storage. As part of a sheep grazing experiment with three sheep stocking rates of no sheep (control), 25 and 80 sheep km−2, we tested effects of grazing on soil organic carbon storage, the form of soil organic matter (SOM) and its lability (potential carbon mineralization) in organic horizons of low‐alpine grasslands in southern Norway. After 7 years of grazing, the greatest sheep density reduced soil organic carbon concentration (% SOC) and carbon stocks at equivalent soil mass as compared with the control. In contrast, the low stocking rate caused no change or a slight increase. The form of SOM, expressed as ratios of particulate organic carbon to soil organic carbon, was only slightly affected by grazing, with a small decrease and moderate increase at the greater and smaller stocking rate, respectively. The lability of SOM was not affected by grazing directly, but was significantly related to the mineral content of the O‐horizons. In general, there were large differences between the plant communities of snowbed and willow‐shrub for several soil attributes. We concluded that 7 years of grazing had limited impacts on stocks, form and lability of SOM.
Comparing the Calcium Requirements of Wheat and Canola

ABSTRACT Spring wheat (Triticum aestivumL.) is the major crop species grown in south-western Australia and no responses of wheat to applied calcium (Ca) have been obtained in field experiments though responses have been obtained in glasshouse pot studies for wheat grown on the predominantly sandy acidic soils of the region. Since the mid 1990s canola (oilseed rape, Brassica napus L.) has been grown in rotation with wheat and has often developed symptoms of Ca deficiency when grown on sandy acidic soils in the field. The Ca requirement of canola in these soils is not known and was measured and compared with Ca requirements of wheat in the glasshouse study reported here when 5 amounts of Ca (0–630 mg Ca/pot), as calcium sulfate, were applied. Application of Ca did not affect shoot production of wheat but increased grain yields by about 25% and 50 mg Ca/pot was required to produce 90% of the maximum grain yield. Two canola cultivars were grown, and both showed no shoot yield responses to applied Ca at early growth (GS1.5). However, at flower bud visible (GS3.5) shoots of triazine tolerant canola cv. ‘Karoo’ showed about 17% increase to applied Ca and required ∼47 mg Ca/pot to produce 90% of the maximum yield, while corresponding values for cv. ‘Outback’ were 42% and 185 mg Ca/pot. Both canola cultivars showed large seed (grain) yield responses to applied Ca. Canola cv. ‘Outback’ produced no grain when no Ca was applied and showed ∼ 97% increase to applied Ca and required about 462 mg Ca/pot to produce 90% of the maximum grain yield. The triazine tolerant cv. ‘Karoo’ produced about 22% of the maximum grain yield when no Ca was applied, showed approximately 78% grain yield response to applied Ca and required about 475 mg Ca/pot to produce 90% of the maximum grain yield. However, to produce 50% of the maximum grain yield, cv. ‘Outback’ required 250 mg Ca/pot while cv. ‘Karoo’ required about 100 mg Ca/pot. The grain yield response curve for cv. ‘Karoo’ was exponential and that for cv. ‘Outback’ was sigmoid so differences in the response curves were largest when small amounts of Ca were applied and decreased as more Ca was applied. Evidently canola cultivars differ in their ability to access soil and applied Ca providing opportunity to breed and select cultivars efficient at accessing soil and applied Ca. For both wheat and canola the concentration of Ca in dried shoots increased as more Ca was applied and, for each amount of Ca applied, the concentration of Ca in shoots decreased as plants matured. Both canola cultivars consistently had larger concentrations of Ca in shoots than wheat, either when no Ca was applied and for each amount of Ca applied, suggesting canola roots were better able to access soil and applied Ca than wheat roots. The Ca concentration in young wheat (GS15) and canola (GS1.5) shoots that was related to 90% of the maximum grain yield (critical Ca concentration) was 0.33% for wheat and 2.5% for both canola cultivars.
Differential Testing of Certificate Validation in SSL/TLS Implementations

Certificate validation in Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security protocol (SSL/TLS) is critical to Internet security. Thus, it is significant to check whether certificate validation in SSL/TLS implementations is correctly implemented. With this motivation, we propose a novel differential testing approach that is based on the standard Request for Comments (RFC). First, rules of certificates are extracted automatically from RFCs. Second, low-level test cases are generated through dynamic symbolic execution. Third, high-level test cases, i.e., certificates, are assembled automatically. Finally, with the assembled certificates being test cases, certificate validations in SSL/TLS implementations are tested to reveal latent vulnerabilities or bugs. Our approach named RFCcert has the following advantages: (1) certificates of RFCcert are discrepancy-targeted, since they are assembled according to standards instead of genetics; (2) with the obtained certificates, RFCcert not only reveals the invalidity of traditional differential testing but also is able to conduct testing that traditional differential testing cannot do; and (3) the supporting tool of RFCcert has been implemented and extensive experiments show that the approach is effective in finding bugs of SSL/TLS implementations. In addition, by providing seed certificates for mutation approaches with RFCcert, the ability of mutation approaches in finding distinct discrepancies is significantly enhanced.
Cyclization and Self-Organization in Polymerization of Trialkoxysilanes

Sol−gel polymerization of organotrialkoxysilanes RSi(OR‘)3 and formation of silsesquioxane (SSQO) structures was followed using SEC, 29Si NMR, and both small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering. Evolution of the SSQO structure is controlled by the competition between intermolecular polycondensation and cyclization. A strong tendency to buildup of polyhedral cyclic oligomersmainly octamer “cages” and larger cagelike structureswas found to grow with increasing size of substituent R. As a result, long substituents prevent gelation of the trifunctional system and increase stability of the SSQO. Because of incompatibility of the polyhedral SSQO framework and pendant organic chains, microphase separation takes place and spontaneous self-organization occurs. A micellar arrangement of compact SSQO domains with a correlation distance corresponding to the size of the substituent is formed, and the ordering is promoted by increasing length of the organic chain. The most organized arrangement was observed with the trial.
GEST: a program for structure determination from powder diffraction data using a genetic algorithm

The GEST software has been developed for the solution of molecular crystal structures from powder diffraction data. In this package, a genetic algorithm is used for global optimization to search for the structural model. For more efficient calculation time, a modified Bragg R factor is used as the evaluation function for the genetic algorithm. Applications of this program for structure determination of molecular crystals from powder diffraction data are demonstrated with known and previously unknown structures. A friendly graphical user interface (GUI) is used to generate the control file and run the program. The GEST program with GUI, for Linux and Windows platforms, is freely available from the authors upon request.
A Modified Bouc-Wen Model of Pneumatic Artificial Muscles in Antagonistic Configuration

Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs) exhibit hysteresis, nonlinear, and uncertain characteristics. This makes it difficult to build a highly precise model of PAM. In this study, a modified Bouc-Wen model is used to describe the hysteresis in the relationship between internal pressure and joint angle of PAMs in the antagonistic configuration. Through an identification method using particle swarm optimization, it is verified that the proposed model can approximate the behavior of PAM based antagonistic actuator with high accuracy. This could lead to enhancing the tracking performance of PAMs.
Growth of Oriented Zinc Oxide Nanowire Array into Novel Hierarchical Structures in Aqueous Solutions

The strategy to manipulate nanoscale building blocks into well-regulated hierarchical architectures is of great interest and valuable to both material synthesis and advanced nanodevices. Novel ZnO hierarchical structures with nanowire arrays connected on both faces of parallel ZnO hexagonal disks were produced in a facile temperature-dependent multi-step hydrothermal route within an open vessel, in which lamellar zinc hydroxide (LHS-Zn) disks were firstly formed as intermediate basic floor, whose surface may be roughened at elevated temperature; the resultant ZnO nanowires were then assembled into a highly ordered array on the top/bottom surfaces of disks in the presence of dense ammonia. Higher [Zn2+] at the beginning lead to multicell sandwiches or nanowire−disk−nanowire−disk−nanowire-like superlattice. Ammonia molecules in the vessel play a key role in controlling architecture evolution. Room-temperature Raman-scattering and photoluminescence measurements indicated the optical properties of single as-p.
A Novel and Reliable Framework of Patient Deterioration Prediction in Intensive Care Unit Based on Long Short-Term Memory-Recurrent Neural Network

The clinical investigation explored that early recognition and intervention are crucial for preventing clinical deterioration in patients in Intensive Care units (ICUs). Deterioration of patients is predictable and can be preventable if early risk factors are recognized and developed in the clinical setting. Timely detection of deterioration in ICU patients may also lead to better health management. In this paper, a new model was proposed based on Long Short-Term Memory-Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) to predict deterioration of ICU patients. An optimisation model based on a modified genetic algorithm (GA) has also been proposed in this study to optimize the observation window, prediction window, and the number of neurons in hidden layers to increase accuracy, AUROC, and minimize test loss. The experimental results demonstrate that the prediction model proposed in this study acquired a significantly better classification performance compared with many other studies that used deep learning models in their works. Our proposed model was evaluated for two tasks: mortality and sudden transfer of patients to ICU. Our results show that the proposed model could predict deterioration before one hour of onset and outperforms other models. In this study, the proposed predictive model is implemented using the state-of-the-art graphical processing unit (GPU) virtual machine provided by Google Colaboratory. Moreover, the study uses a novel time-series approach, which is minute-by-minute. This novel approach enables the proposed model to obtain highly accurate results (i.e., an AUROC of 0.933 and an accuracy of 0.921). This study utilizes the individual and combined effectiveness of different types of variables (i.e., vital signs, laboratory measurements, GCS, and demographic data). In this study, data was extracted from MIMIC-III database. The ad-hoc frameworks proposed by previous studies can be improved by the novel and reliable prediction framework proposed in this research, which will result in predictions of more accurate performance. The proposed predictive model could reduce the required observation window (i.e., a reduction of 83%) for the prediction task while improving the performance. In fact, the proposed significant small size of observation window could obtain higher results which outperformed all previous works that utilize different sizes of observation window (i.e., 48 hours and 24 hours). Moreover, this research demonstrates the ability of the proposed predictive model to achieve accurate results (>80%) on ‘raw’ data in an experimental work. This shows that the rule-based pre-processing of clinical features is unnecessary for deep learning predictive models.
2-D Self-Injection-Locked Doppler Radar for Locating Multiple People and Monitoring Their Vital Signs

This article presents the combination of a self-injection-locked (SIL) radar with frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) and switched phased-array (SPA) techniques to locate multiple people and detect their vital signs with high resolution and high sensitivity. The proposed system utilizes a subharmonic upconverter/downconverter with a 1.675–2.175-GHz chirp local oscillator (LO) signal to convert between a 2.45-GHz SIL IF signal and a 5.8–6.8-GHz FMCW RF signal. It transmits the FMCW RF signal and receives the echo signal using a transmit (Tx) antenna and a switched receive (Rx) antenna array, respectively, and processes the SIL IF signal to produce a range–azimuth map (RAM) that displays the positions of all people, their respiration rates (RRs), and their heart rates (HRs) in the monitoring region. The key advantage of combining the FMCW and SPA techniques is the provision of higher spatial resolution than obtained using each technique alone. This article also proposes a Doppler-weighted RAM to improve the identifiability of the images that are generated by two persons close to each other. Finally, the presented system was experimentally validated by measuring the locations and vital signs of up to five seated persons at a range of more than 1.5 m, of which two persons were seated almost shoulder by shoulder.
Noise Reduction Method based on Autocorrelation for Threshold-Based Heartbeat Detection

Detecting heartbeats is more challenging in an ambulatory condition due to a higher level of noise and artefacts compared to heartbeats recorded in a hospital setting. To reduce false detection and improve the performance of threshold-based beat detection algorithm, an autocorrelation method for noise reduction within noisy electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is presented in this paper. The proposed method contained two components: autocorrelation and refining process. The proposed work used the autocorrelation method to generate periods of heartbeats to refine and identify the correct QRS complex and remove the noise in the candidate QRS complex, thus reducing incorrect detections. Results from the experiment showed that the proposed method was capable of reducing the noise and improving the beat detection performance in noisy signals.
Exploring the Use of Early Inter-view Offset Estimation for Low Complexity MV-HEVC

The latest multi-view video coding generation MV-HEVC exploited effectively the interview redundant information in multi-view videos and provided high compression efficiency. However, increasing the distance between cameras during multi-view videos acquisition creates an inter-view disparity. This latter, influences the inter-view similarities and affects the disparity estimation which is requiring an individual estimation for each coding unit. This process increases the computational complexity of the MV-HEVC encoder. In this paper, we propose an improved disparity estimation by eliminating the offset between views during inter-view encoding. This elimination of the offset leads to the decrease of the search window in disparity estimation process according to the coding units size. For reliable motion estimation, an earlier decision of coding units splitting (EDCS) is also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach roughly reduces the encoding time from 23.31 % to 44.35 % on average with negligible performance degradation.
A Fast and Accurate Method of Synthesizing X-Wave Launchers by Metallic Horns

This paper presents a method for synthesizing metallic horns capable of radiating highly localized electromagnetic pulses, known as X-waves. The proposed method is based on a mode-matching framework for shaped horns. The aperture field distribution required to generate X-waves is synthesized by mode conversion. The near-field horns generated by this method are full-metal structures radiating X-waves in a wide range of frequencies with low dispersion. The obtained structures may be scaled to any frequency range, and they are particularly suited to millimeter and sub-millimeter wave applications. We validate the concept by presenting a horn capable of radiating X-waves over a 44% fractional bandwidth (FBW) with a 5° dispersion of the axicon angle. Capabilities and limitations of this design procedure and the synthesized launchers are demonstrated, discussed, and compared with other state-of-the-art solutions.
Total Deposition of Ultrafine Hydrophobic and Hygroscopic Aerosols in the Human Respiratory System

The deposition of ultrafine particles in the human respiratory system was studied under a variety of steady breathing conditions. The monodisperse aerosols tested were hydrophobic kerosene heater, aluminosilicate, and hygroscopic NaCl in the size range of 0.03 to 0.4 μm in diameter. The results for all aerosols show that particle deposition increases with an increase in tidal volume, but with a decrease in breathing frequency. Also, deposition during breath holding increases nearly exponentially with an increase in time. However, particle deposition as a function of particle size is different between hydrophobic and hygroscopic aerosols in the size range tested. The hydrophobic aerosols increase with a decrease in particle size, while hygroscopic aerosols show minimum value in the size range of 0.06 to 0.09 μm. The hydrophobic kerosene heater and aluminosilicate particle deposition confirms the recent theoretical calculations of Yeh and Schum (1980), Yu and Diu (1982), and Yu and Hu (1983). The NaCl parti.
Implementation and analysis of dynamic stability for bipedal robotic motion

This work presents the design and simulation of a stable balance and locomotion approach for a bipedal robot. The torque response of a falling body is modelled and a low-pass filter was designed and implemented for the angular position of actuators within the robot’s legs. A torque control method is also described, akin to using proportional and derivative control of the angular position of the actuators. Finally, a Zero Moment Point based capture step is described and implemented within simulation. With torque control alone, the result is a stable bipedal recovery from disturbances along the saggital plane of up to 11.25N of force, from a standing pose. In comparison, the previous implementation without dynamic stability leads to the robot falling after a minor disturbance of 2N. When capture step is included in the approach, the robot can recover from disturbances of up to 45N. The codebase is open-source and provides a humanoid robot simulation platform for research teams working in this area.
Triple Rectangular Notch UWB Antenna Using EBG and SRR

This paper investigates an ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna with a triple-rectangular notch band at 5G, WLAN, and Satellite downlink bands. The 5G and WLAN bands are notched by using a pair of electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures while the satellite downlink band is notched by using two split-ring resonators (SRRs). The EBG structure is a metallic conductor loaded on the backside of the radiator which is connected to the patch via a shorting pin. The SRRs consist of a pair of metallic rings etched on the backside of the feedline. The simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna has an operational bandwidth from 3.1 – 11.8 GHz for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\vert \text{S}11\vert < -10$ </tex-math></inline-formula> rejecting 5G sub-6 GHz (3.4 – 3.9 GHz), WLAN (5.15 – 5.825 GHz), and satellite downlink band (7.25 – 7.75 GHz) signals with high selectivity. The peak gain of the UWB antenna is 3.86 dBi but it sharply decreases up to -13 dBi at stop-bands. The antenna also has additional advantages of the overall compact size (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20\times 26\times1.52$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm3) with stable gain and radiation patterns at the pass-bands.
SSBC 2020: Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition in the Mobile Environment

The paper presents a summary of the 2020 Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition (SSBC), the 7th in the series of group benchmarking efforts centred around the problem of sclera segmentation. Different from previous editions, the goal of SSBC 2020 was to evaluate the performance of sclera-segmentation models on images captured with mobile devices. The competition was used as a platform to assess the sensitivity of existing models to i) differences in mobile devices used for image capture and ii) changes in the ambient acquisition conditions. 26 research groups registered for SSBC 2020, out of which 13 took part in the final round and submitted a total of 16 segmentation models for scoring. These included a wide variety of deep-learning solutions as well as one approach based on standard image processing techniques. Experiments were conducted with three recent datasets. Most of the segmentation models achieved relatively consistent performance across images captured with different mobile devices (with slight differences across devices), but struggled most with low-quality images captured in challenging ambient conditions, i.e., in an indoor environment and with poor lighting.
Chemical synthesis of PEDOT/Ag nanocomposites via emulsion technique in silver colloid

An efficient route is used to prepare poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)/silver nanocomposite by chemical oxidative polymerization of 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene monomer in Ag colloidal medium through emulsion technique using iron (III) p-toluenesulfonate hexahydrate (Fe(OTs)3.6H2O) oxidant. Sodium dodecyl sulfate plays a dual role involving both as emulsifier of the polymerization medium and stabilizer of the simultaneously reduced Ag nanoparticles. To compare the results obtained, an Ag-unloaded PEDOT is also prepared analogously. The resulted samples are fully characterized by fourier transform infrared, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, UV/vis, and thermogravimetric analyses. No remarkable aggregation of Ag nanoparticles occurs during the polymerization reaction. Moreover, average particle size of the incorporated Ag is found to be <10 nm.