Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Twist Bend Nematic phase in Cyanobiphenyl and Difluoroterphenyl based Bimesogens

The paper reviews assignment of the observed low temperature nematic phase in simple bimesogenic or dimeric systems based on cyanobiphenyls and difluoroterfluorophenyls to the twist‐bend nematic phase, NTB, using a range of experimental techniques. These include DSC, X‐rays, Polarising Microscopy, electro‐optics, birefringence and measurements of the electroclinic effect arising from flexoelectricity. An emphasis is laid on the observations of the chiral domains of opposite handedness at zero field in an otherwise achiral liquid crystalline system in this phase. These observations are a direct consequence of the structure of the twist‐ bend phase predicted by Ivan Dozov for achiral bent core molecules. The paper reviews the electro‐optic phenomena and the observed electroclinic effect and how these observations assign it as the NTB phase. Results of the nano‐scale helical pitch measurements using freeze‐ fracture microscopy are reviewed and discussed briefly. Results of the measurements of elastic constants especially close to the N‐NTB transition are also reviewed. *author of correspondence
Dual Illumination Estimation for Robust Exposure Correction

Exposure correction is one of the fundamental tasks in image processing and computational photography. While various methods have been proposed, they either fail to produce visually pleasing results, or only work well for limited types of image (e.g., underexposed images). In this paper, we present a novel automatic exposure correction method, which is able to robustly produce high‐quality results for images of various exposure conditions (e.g., underexposed, overexposed, and partially under‐ and over‐exposed). At the core of our approach is the proposed dual illumination estimation, where we separately cast the under‐and over‐exposure correction as trivial illumination estimation of the input image and the inverted input image. By performing dual illumination estimation, we obtain two intermediate exposure correction results for the input image, with one fixes the underexposed regions and the other one restores the overexposed regions. A multi‐exposure image fusion technique is then employed to adaptively blend the visually best exposed parts in the two intermediate exposure correction images and the input image into a globally well‐exposed image. Experiments on a number of challenging images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its superiority over the state‐of‐the‐art methods and popular automatic exposure correction tools.
Enskog kinetic theory for multicomponent granular suspensions.

The Navier-Stokes transport coefficients of multicomponent granular suspensions at moderate densities are obtained in the context of the (inelastic) Enskog kinetic theory. The suspension is modeled as an ensemble of solid particles where the influence of the interstitial gas on grains is via a viscous drag force plus a stochastic Langevin-like term defined in terms of a background temperature. In the absence of spatial gradients, it is shown first that the system reaches a homogeneous steady state where the energy lost by inelastic collisions and viscous friction is compensated for by the energy injected by the stochastic force. Once the homogeneous steady state is characterized, a normal solution to the set of Enskog equations is obtained by means of the Chapman-Enskog expansion around the local version of the homogeneous state. To first order in spatial gradients, the Chapman-Enskog solution allows us to identify the Navier-Stokes transport coefficients associated with the mass, momentum, and heat fluxes. In addition, the first-order contributions to the partial temperatures and the cooling rate are also calculated. Explicit forms for the diffusion coefficients, the shear and bulk viscosities, and the first-order contributions to the partial temperatures and the cooling rate are obtained in steady-state conditions by retaining the leading terms in a Sonine polynomial expansion. The results show that the dependence of the transport coefficients on inelasticity is clearly different from that found in its granular counterpart (no gas phase). The present work extends previous theoretical results for dilute multicomponent granular suspensions [Khalil and Garzó, Phys. Rev. E 88, 052201 (2013)10.1103/PhysRevE.88. 052201] to higher densities.
Spectral Subsampling MCMC for Stationary Time Series

Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) on large datasets has developed rapidly in recent years. However, the underlying methods are generally limited to relatively simple settings where the data have specific forms of independence. We propose a novel technique for speeding up MCMC for time series data by efficient data subsampling in the frequency domain. For several challenging time series models, we demonstrate a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude while incurring negligible bias compared to MCMC on the full dataset. We also propose alternative control variates for variance reduction based on data grouping and coreset constructions.
DesignCon 2019 Effect of Power Plane Inductance on Power Delivery Networks

Power plane loop inductance is an important metric in Power Delivery Network (PDN) design, but it is not easy to visualize how PCB design changes impact a power plane’s loop inductance. This paper considers the impact on loop inductance of common power plane design changes such as the placement of vias, the anti-pad pitch and periodicity in a pin field array, and the placement of decoupling capacitors. The analysis considers tradeoffs of parametric values and provides guidance to engineers for PDN designs that meet a desired frequency response, minimize ground bounce, and reduce coupling due to power plane loop inductance.
A Heuristically Modified FP-Tree for Ontology Learning with Applications in Education

We propose a heuristically modified FP-Tree for ontology learning from text. Unlike previous research, for concept extraction, we use a regular expression parser approach widely adopted in compiler construction, i.e., deterministic finite automata (DFA). Thus, the concepts are extracted from unstructured documents. For ontology learning, we use a frequent pattern mining approach and employ a rule mining heuristic function to enhance its quality. This process does not rely on predefined lexico-syntactic patterns, thus, it is applicable for different subjects. We employ the ontology in a question-answering system for students' content-related questions. For validation, we used textbook questions/answers and questions from online course forums. Subject experts rated the quality of the system's answers on a subset of questions and their ratings were used to identify the most appropriate automatic semantic text similarity metric to use as a validation metric for all answers. The Latent Semantic Analysis was identified as the closest to the experts' ratings. We compared the use of our ontology with the use of Text2Onto for the question-answering system and found that with our ontology 80% of the questions were answered, while with Text2Onto only 28.4% were answered, thanks to the finer grained hierarchy our approach is able to produce.
Variational mean-fluctuation splitting and drift-fluid models

After summarizing the variational approach to splitting mean flow and fluctuation kinetics in the standard Vlasov theory, the same method is applied to the drift-kinetic equation from Littlejohn’s theory of guiding-center motion. This process sheds a new light on drift-ordered fluid (drift-fluid) models, whose anisotropic pressure tensor is then considered in detail. In addition, current drift-fluid models are completed by the insertion of magnetization terms ensuring momentum conservation. Magnetization currents are also shown to lead to challenging aspects when drift-fluid models are coupled to Maxwell’s equations for the evolution of the electromagnetic field. In order to overcome these difficulties, a simplified guiding-center theory is proposed along with its possible applications to hybrid kinetic-fluid models.
Efficient Probabilistic Inference in Generic Neural Networks Trained with Non-Probabilistic Feedback

Animals perform near-optimal probabilistic inference in a wide range of psychophysical tasks. Probabilistic inference requires trial-to-trial representation of the uncertainties associated with task variables and subsequent use of this representation. Previous work has implemented such computations using neural networks with handcrafted and task-dependent operations. We show that generic neural networks trained with a simple error-based learning rule perform near-optimal probabilistic inference in nine common psychophysical tasks. In a probabilistic categorization task, error-based learning in a generic network simultaneously explains a monkey’s learning curve and the evolution of qualitative aspects of its choice behavior. In all tasks, the number of neurons required for a given level of performance grows sub-linearly with the input population size, a substantial improvement on previous implementations of probabilistic inference. The trained networks develop a novel sparsity-based probabilistic population code. Our results suggest that probabilistic inference emerges naturally in generic neural networks trained with error-based learning rules. 1 ar X iv :1 60 1. 03 06 0v 4 [ qbi o. N C ] 2 1 A pr 2 01 7
Power Estimation Using Transaction Level Modeling

The increasing complexity of current day Systems-on-Chip and the rising market demands for low power devices has necessitated the need to perform power analysis of the complete system-on-chip at system level. This would facilitate selection of optimal system architecture and opportunity to optimize the selected system design for reduced power consumption in the silicon as much more design optimization opportunities are available at system level in contrast to Register Transfer Level (RTL). Transaction level model provides the conceptual implementation of the design at higher abstraction level above RTL and is available much early in the design cycle as against RTL, hence, is being used in industries for early software development and functional verification of the hardware. In this work, we present a methodology to estimate power consumption of an IP at transaction level by capitalizing the existing transaction level model of the corresponding IP. The proposed methodology makes use of SystemC transaction level model not specifically designed with power estimation in mind. We then validate the proposed method against RTL for accuracy and speed. The proposed approach enables estimation of dynamic power consumption and leakage power consumption with an error within 20% of RTL and total power consumption with an error within 12% with respect to RTL. In terms of speed-up, the proposed approach enables 10x faster simulation, hence, faster power estimation compared to estimating power at RTL. The accuracy and speed-up of the proposed approach are illustrated through experimental results. To my Family Mom, Dad, Grandmom and my Sister
acp-2015-920: Simulating secondary organic aerosol from missing diesel-related intermediate-volatility organic compound emissions during the Clean Air for London

In this paper, Ots et al. present an interesting method to account for the emissions of intermediate volatile organic compounds (IVOCs). They suggest that VOC emissions can be added proportionally to VOC emissions as opposed to the POA emissions which is the standard method used by current Volatility Basis Set (VBS) models. This approach can potentially pave the way for an accurate representation of IVOCs in the emission inventories which is proved to be a necessity for SOA models during the last decade. Overall, the manuscript is well written and scientifically sound. I recommend this study for publication after taking the following comments into account. General comment: The authors include additional diesel related IVOC emissions based on the VOC emissions from the transport sector. This resulted in a significant improvement of their model results which brought the predicted SOA close to measurements during winter, spring, and summer while it resulted in an overprediction during autumn (Fig. 17 of the manuscript). However, the transport sector consist only one of the ten sectors that their emission inventory includes. This raise the question of how much their model performance will change (towards overprediction) if they will add the missing IVOC emissions from the rest nine sectors. Do they have indications that the only important source of IVOCs is the transport sector? While I strongly support the suggested approach of deriving the IVOC emissions based on intermediate length alkanes (or naphthalene seen in other studies; Pye and Seinfeld, 2010) I am quite sceptic about the impact shown here by only one sector. I suggest adding a discussion on this matter, probably in section 4.
Emotional intelligence and ADHD: A comparative analysis in students of Lima Metropolitan area Inteligencia emocional y TDAH: Un análisis comparativo en estudiantes de Lima Metropolitana

aBachelor ́s degree in Psychology granted by the Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola. Secondary school Psychologist at Antares school. bBachelor ́s degree in Psychology granted by the Universidad de Lima, Master in Neuroscience and PhD candidate in Psychology at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Director of the Assessment, Integral Formation ad Competences of the Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola. Specialist in statistics and measurement in behavioral sciences.
Use of Dielectrophoresis in a High-Yield Fabrication of a Carbon Nanotube Tip June-Ki Park, Ji-Eun Kim and Chang-Soo Han Fabrication Technique for Carbon Nanotube Single-Electron Transistors Using Focused Ion Beam

This work reports on a sensitive and selective genosensor fabrication method for Escherichia coli (E.coli) detection. The functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) synthesized via chemical vapour deposition have been deposited electrophoretically onto indium tin oxide coated glass surface and have been utilized as matrices for the covalent immobilization of E. coli specific probe oligonucleotide that was identified from the 16s rRNA coding region of the E. coli genome. This fabricated functionalized MWCNT based platform sought to provide improved fundamental characteristics to electrode interface in terms of electro-active surface area and diffusion coefficient. Electrochemical cyclic voltammetry revealed that this genosensor exhibits a linear response to complementary DNA in the concentration range of 10 to 10 M with a detection limit of 1×10 M.
The effect of physiotherapy on interleukin-8 levels in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Introduction: Interleukin-8 (IL-8), a chemokine formed by macrophages and epithelial cells and a potent chemoattractant for neutrophils, plays the principal role in the activation of neutrophils and eosinophils in the airways of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and may be used as a marker of inflammation. The inflammation in the course of COPD may be characterised by an increased neutrophil count in the sputum and elevated IL-8 levels. The aim of the study was to assess the effect of physiotherapy on IL-8 levels in induced sputum in patients with COPD. Material and methods: The study included 44 patients (21 men and 23 women, mean age 56.47 ± 9.52) managed at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration Specialist Hospital in Głuchołazy, Poland, and undergoing rehabilitation at the Therapeutic Rehabilitation Facility, with the diagnosis of COPD (FEV1/VC < 65%), receiving stable drug treatment during physiotherapy. Before physiotherapy all the patients underwent treadmill exercise testing according to the Bruce protocol and had their dyspnoea assessed on the 20-point Borg scale as part of qualification for physiotherapy. All the patients participated a multidirectional three-week respiratory physiotherapy programme based on aerobic training performed on a cycloergometer. The training loads were selected on an individual basis depending on exercise tolerance. The standard physiotherapy programme also included respiratory muscle exercises with a particular emphasis on the abdominal muscles and the diaphragm, saline inhalations, postural drainage and percussion, relaxation and walks. Results: IL-8 levels were significantly lower after completion of the three-week physiotherapy. IL-8 levels in the sputum decreased from 18.91 ± 25.2 to 9.69 ± 14.06 ng/ml (p = 0.0215). The highest reduction of IL-8 levels was observed in patients with the highest baseline values. Conclusions: The decrease of IL-8 levels in induced sputum following comprehensive physiotherapy in patients with COPD suggests suppression of neutrophil activity, which may be one of the reasons for the improved clinical condition of the patients.
Maestŕıa en F́ısica Simultaneous optical and photoacoustic diagnostics of cavitation bubbles produced by laser ablation in liquids

Photoacoustic (PA) technique and laser-beam-transmission-probe (LBTP) were used simultaneously to investigate the temporal behavior of cavitation bubbles produced by laser ablation of different materials (Au, Ag, Al, Cu and Si) in ethanol. The laser ablation was produced by focussing a pulsed Nd:YAG laser with 1064 nm wavelength and pulse duration of 7 ns into a submerged target in a glass cuvette filled with ethanol. The laser pulse energy used during the experiment was of 60 mJ, with a fluence of 2 J/cm. First hundreds of pulses over the same target and liquid were studied in order to accomplish a complete study of the development of the cavitation bubbles during the generation of nanoparticles (NPs) in liquids by laser ablation. The possibility of using both techniques (PA and LBTP) at the same time gave us the chance to study the cavitation phenomena due to the laser ablation process in a wider perspective being able to compare the results obtained from each technique. While PA gave us information about the ablation rate per pulse besides the duration of the cavitation process, the optical signal obtained by the LBTP showed us secondary oscillations of the cavitation bubble. Signals from different targets revealed variations in time and amplitude for both signals (PA and LBTP) being consistent with the nature of each material studied. The LBTP technique also gave us information about the behavior of the cavitation bubbles for different number of pulses hitting the targets.
Observational Completion Limit of Minor Planets from the Asteroid Belt to Jupiter Trojans

With the growing numbers of asteroids being discovered, identifying an observationally complete sample is essential for statistical analyses and for informing theoretical models of the dynamical evolution of the solar system. We present an easily implemented method of estimating the empirical observational completeness in absolute magnitude, , as a function of semimajor axis. Our method requires fewer assumptions and decisions to be made in its application, making results more transportable and reproducible among studies that implement it, as well as scalable to much larger data sets of asteroids expected in the next decade with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Using the values of (a) determined at high resolution in semimajor axis, a, we demonstrate that the observationally complete sample size of the main belt asteroids is larger by more than a factor of 2 compared with using a conservative single value of , an approach often adopted in previous studies. Additionally, by fitting a simple, physically motivated model of (a) to ∼7 × 105 objects in the Minor Planet Database, our model reveals statistically significant deviations between the main belt and the asteroid populations beyond the main belt (Hungarias, Hildas, and Trojans), suggesting potential demographic differences, such as in their size, eccentricity, or inclination distributions.
Marriage variables relation to abnormal cervical Pap smears results in Nineveh governorate patient's women

Background The cervical Pap smear test is a standard screening procedure used for cervical cytology testing for the diagnosis of premalignant and malignant cervical lesions . The risk factors for cervical cancer are early age at first intercourse, multiple sexual partners, nutritional status, hormonal changes, parity, host immune status, smoking, viral oncogenic Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) types and coinfection with other viruses such as human immunedeficiency virus-1 and herpes simplex virus. Aim: is to study the relation of some of the marriage variants as risk factors for cervical cancer with abnormal Pap smears results for women in Nineveh governorate. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out on patients' women attended the Obstetric and Gynecological Mosul Hospitals for the period from June 2013 through June 2014, after the collection of data through direct meeting and a questionnaire comprising patients' characteristics and the results of Pap smear. Five hundred fifty one Pap smears were collected from women between the ages of 11 and 76 years. The personal characteristics of women included the mean age at 1st marriage which was 18.9 years; 18.8 years mean age of duration of marriage, and mean age at 1st delivery as 20.3 years. Other features included the sequences among wives or husbands which were found to be higher in 1st sequence (who had one husband or those who her husbands never had another wife): 464, 84.21% and 508, 92.20% respectively. Results: abnormal Pap smears were 99/551(17.97%). A significant relation were observed between abnormal Pap smear in highest percentage at age (25-45) years 51.52% (P=0.032), and mean age at early forty 41.6± 12.21(P=0.002). The highest rate of women with epithelial abnormal Pap smears results were 1st sequence among wives and husbands (79.80% and 91.92% respectively). The mean ± SD of women with epithelial abnormal Pap smears were 18.3 ± 4.66 years of age at 1st marriage, and 19.7 ± 4.90 years of age at 1st delivery. Non-significant relation was detected between abnormal Pap smears and each of (the sequence among wives or husbands, age at 1st marriage, and at 1st delivery). Mean ± SD of women with epithelial abnormal Pap smears results were 21.1 ± 12.41years of duration of marriage, and there was significant effect for duration of marriage by using the same test between the two mean ages (P=0.028). Conclusion: the age, and duration of marriage were strongly related to abnormal cervical Pap smear results, while age at 1st marriage , 1st delivery , sequence among wives or husbands were not related with epithelial abnormal cervical Pap smear in Nineveh governorate women.
Educating Difficult Adolescents: Effective Education for Children in Public Care or with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties

Educational achievements for children in care are significantly poorer than for the general school population. This book explores why this is and how to enable children in care to succeed in the classroom. It evaluates the educational experience and performance of a sample of `difficult' adolescents living in foster families, residential children's homes and residential special schools for pupils with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD). The book addresses factors such as the failure to prioritise education for children in care, placement instability and disrupted schooling. It investigates care environments, policy changes and young people's background experiences - as well as the costs of services - in order to gauge the effectiveness of targeted initiatives. The authors adopt a multidisciplinary approach to suggest how best to support children in care in educational settings. This book will be essential reading for professionals supporting children in care, including social workers, directors of children's services, policy makers, school leaders, teachers and managers in the public, voluntary and private sectors. It is also highly relevant for social work and education lecturers, researchers and students.