Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Methods for biogeochemical studies of Sea Ice: The State of the art, caveats and recommendations

Over the past two decades, with recognition that the ocean’s sea-ice cover is neither insensitive to climate change nor a barrier to light and matter, research in sea-ice biogeochemistry has accelerated significantly, bringing together a multi-disciplinary community from a variety of fields. This disciplinary diversity has contributed a wide range of methodological techniques and approaches to sea-ice studies, complicating comparisons of the results and the development of conceptual and numerical models to describe the important biogeochemical processes occurring in sea ice. Almost all chemical elements, compounds, and biogeochemical processes relevant to Earth system science are measured in sea ice, with published methods available for determining biomass, pigments, net community production, primary production, bacterial activity, macronutrients, numerous natural and anthropogenic organic compounds, trace elements, reactive and inert gases, sulfur species, the carbon dioxide system parameters, stable isotopes, and water-ice-atmosphere fluxes of gases, liquids, and solids. For most of these measurements, multiple sampling and processing techniques are available, but to date there has been little intercomparison or intercalibration between methods. In addition, researchers collect different types of ancillary data and document their samples differently, further confounding comparisons between studies. These problems are compounded by the heterogeneity of sea ice, in which even adjacent cores can have dramatically different biogeochemical compositions. We recommend that, in future investigations, researchers design their programs based on nested sampling patterns, collect a core suite of ancillary measurements, and employ a standard approach for sample identification and documentation. In addition, intercalibration exercises are most critically needed for measurements of biomass, primary production, nutrients, dissolved and particulate organic matter (including exopolymers), the CO2 system, air-ice gas fluxes, and aerosol production. We also encourage the development of in situ probes robust enough for long-term deployment in sea ice, particularly for biological parameters, the CO2 system, and other gases.
A Simple Method to Create Superhydrophobic Aluminium Surfaces

Superhydrophobic surfaces were prepared using a very simple and low-cost method by spray coating. A high static water contact angle of about 154° was obtained by deposition of stearic acid on an aluminium alloy. However, this coating demonstrated a high contact angle hysteresis (~ 30º). On the other hand, superhydrophobic surfaces with a static contact angle of about 162º and 158º, and a low contact angle hysteresis of about 3º and 5º were respectively obtained by incorporating nanoparticles of SiO2 and CaCO3 in stearic acid. The excellent resulting hydrophobicity is attributed to the synergistic effects of micro/nanoroughness and low surface energy. A study of the wettability of these surfaces at temperatures ranging from 20 to-10 °C showed that the superhydrophobic surface becomes rather hydrophobic at supercooled temperatures.
Stress hormones and selection: Assessing the physiological underpinnings of a sexually selected melanin-based trait and the roles of genes and environment in shaping corticosterone profiles

In natural populations, reproductive success and survival largely depend on phenotypic traits that are functionally relevant in a given context. It is also important for individuals to be able to respond adaptively to a fluctuating environment and to provide reliable information about this ability to conspecifics. There is remarkable variation in phenotypic traits such as sexual signals and behavior that stems from variation in the physiological mechanisms mediating trait expression, and in turn, physiological systems are shown to greatly influence fitness outcomes. In order for evolutionary processes to shape sexual signals and behavior to be both informative and adaptive, variation in the underlying physiology that regulates phenotypic trait expression should be explained by the variation in the expressed trait and genetic variation that selection can act upon. The avian glucocorticoid hormone corticosterone (CORT) is a steroid hormone involved in many important physiological and behavioral processes at baseline levels and also at heighted concentrations in response to stressors. Within populations, inter-individual variability in both baseline and stress-induced CORT concentrations is often substantial, and can predict reproductive success and survival in free-living populations. Sexual signal traits have been proposed to convey information about individual variation in the response to stressors, but these
Safe Human-Robot Physical Interaction To Assist Balance

Our goal is to learn from current clinical practice how assistive robots (physical co-robots) should physically interact with patients with balance disorders, and develop robots with human level competence in assisting and providing therapy to patients. Caregivers provide physical support using large forces, provide guidance using light touch, and provide additional sensory feedback and references (Figure 1). These aids are sometimes provided intermittently on a schedule or based on patient progress to optimize patient recovery and learning (assist as needed (AAN) control). Patients may be standing, standing up from a chair, sitting down, walking without aids, or using crutches, a cane, a walker, an IV stand, or grasping hand rails or grab bars. Contact strategies include holding hands, hand to arm or body, full arm contact, and no contact. Grasping (push and pull) or unilateral contacts (pushing only) can be used. Current robot assistance is typically provided by the robot doing all the work, and providing a rigid physical support for patients. This is quite different from what human caregivers provide. We will explore using safe soft robots to provide compliant guidance using light touch, and sensory feedback and references. Figure 2 shows some possible applications of our work. Figure 3 shows some of our work on safe soft robot arms. Both to instrument patient-caregiver interations and to provide sensors for our safe soft robots, we will utilize soft sensors we have developed (Figure 4). We will model caregivers as providing multiple contact points, each providing a variable three dimensional force. The forces will be generated using time varying desired position, stiffness, and damping. We will learn appropriate parameters for these variables by instrumenting patient-caregiver interactions, learning appropriate strategies for support, guidance, and and other situations. We will implement, optimize, and evaluate these strategies using both external robot and wearable device experimental testbeds. These testbeds will be based both on our existing work on soft safe robots and wearable devices, as well as new versions of these devices customized for individual patients. Our basic research will lay the foundation for several demonstration systems built on open platforms for transfer to industry and for use in clinical studies. PITT: Paragraph on why focus on balance disorders needed here. Intellectual Merit: 1) We will collect data in order to characterize how human caregivers interact with patients. We will organize, analyze, and publish this data. 2) We expect modeling active humans will be a major challenge in this work. We will develop new modeling techniques to quickly tailor kinematic and dynamic models to individuals and their capabilities. We will also model tasks, including how patients and caregivers might react to or actively participate in a particular joint behavior, to choose effective individual behaviors and to plan for errors and possible failure. 3) We will improve our inherently safe robot designs using soft (non-rigid) struc-
“I think relax, relax and it flows a lot easier”: Exploring client-generated relax strategies

Background. Some adult stroke survivors participating in Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) treatment programs self-generated relax strategies that have not been explored in previous CO-OP publications. The objective of this study was to describe the process by which adults with stroke used relax strategies and to explore the outcomes associated with their use. Methods. Secondary analysis of transcripts of intervention sessions from five participants was conducted. Results. All five participants applied relax strategies after initially observing a breakdown in performance that was attributed to increased fatigue or tension. The relax strategies used by the participants during their occupations included general relaxation, physical modifications to reduce tension, mental preparation, and pacing. The application of these strategies seemed to result in improved skill performance, reduced fatigue, and transfer to other activities. Conclusion. The relax strategy warrants further investigation as a potentially important therapeutic tool to improve occupational performance in individuals who have had a stroke.
Applications of Niosome and Targeting Strategies in the Field of Phyto-Pharmaceuticals : A Review

DOI: 10.21276/sjmps.2018. 4.4. 12 Abstract: Medication carrier systems are delineated as definitions intended to exchange a medication to the desirable territory of activity inside the body. Principle part of medication carrier is a proper bearer which shields the medication from fast degradation or clearance and along these lines improves concentration of drugs in the targeted tissues. In light of their biodegradable, biocompatible, and non-immunogenic properties, niosomes are promising nanoscale carriers that are formed by selfaggregation of non-ionic surfactants and cholesterol in a watery stage. As of late, various researches have been accounted for the capability of niosomes to fill in as a bearer for the conveyance of various kinds of medications. Niosomes make better substance and strength conditions other than lipid vesicles. Niosomes have been generally assessed for controlled discharge and focused on conveyance for the treatment of malignancy, viral contaminations and other microbial sicknesses. In this sense, the present work means to audit the principle niosomal approaches utilized for relationship of various medications and the fundamental accomplishments from utilizing this innovation.
Automatic Processing Method for Deformation Monitoring of Circle Tunnels Based on 3D LiDAR Data

The application of 3D LiDAR technology has become increasingly extensive in tunnel monitoring due to the large density and high accuracy of the acquired spatial data. The proposed processing method aims at circle tunnels and provides a clear workflow to automatically process raw point data and easily interpretable results to analyze tunnel health state. The proposed automatic processing method employs a series of algorithms to extract point cloud of a single tunnel segment without obvious noise from entire raw tunnel point cloud mainly by three steps: axis acquisition, segments extraction and denoising. Tunnel axis is extracted by fitting boundaries of the tunnel point cloud rejection in plane with RANSAC algorithm. With guidance of axis, the entire preprocessed tunnel point cloud is segmented by equal division to get a section of tunnel point cloud which corresponds to a single tunnel segment. Then the noise in every single point cloud segment is removed by clustering algorithm twice, based on distance and intensity. Finally, clean point clouds of tunnel segments are processed by effective deformation extraction processor to get ovality and three-dimensional deformation nephogram.
Exploring Forms of Triangulation to Facilitate Collaborative Research Practice: Reflections From a Multidisciplinary Research Group

This article contains critical reflections of a multidisciplinary research group studying the human and technological dynamics around some newly offered electronic services in a specific rural area of Finland. For their research, the group adopted ethnography. On facing the challenges of doing ethnographic research in a multidisciplinary setting, the group evolved its own breed of research practice based on multiple forms of triangulation. This implied the use of multiple data sources, methods, theories, and researchers, in different combinations. One of the outcomes of the work is a model for collaborative research. It highlights, among others, the importance of creating a climate for collaboration within the research group and following a process of individual and collaborative writing to achieve the potential benefits of such research. The article also identifies a set of remaining challenges relevant to collaborative research.
Child reactivity moderates the over-time association between mother–child conflict quality and externalizing problems

Constructive parent–child conflict interactions that teach children to problem-solve and negotiate can enhance children’s social adjustment. This paper identifies constructive and destructive qualities of mother–child conflict and explores whether child temperament moderated associations with changes in externalizing problems over time. One hundred and ninety mothers and their 5- to 7-year-old children participated in a laboratory conflict discussion rated on aspects of maternal sensitivity, child mood, and mothers’ and children’s contemptuous and planning comments. Mothers also reported on children’s negative reactivity and their externalizing behavior problems concurrently and one year later. Structural equation modeling revealed that constructive conflict quality was related to decreases in children’s externalizing problems, but only among children low in negative reactivity.
Influence of Gelling Agents in Micropropagation of Banana var. Grand Naine

A b s t r a c t K e y w o r d s This study was aimed to examine the effects of different kinds of gelling agents in micropropagation of banana, Musa paradisiaca var. Grand Naine. Four types of gelling agents namely Agar agar (Himedia), Crude agar (NR Chem), CleriGel (Himedia) and Gelwell (Microxpress) were used as supporting matrices and the performance of the banana cultures was assessed. There were significant differences in terms of shoot length, number of leaves and number of shoots produced per culture among the supporting media used. Best results were obtained with Gelwell with 5.75 shoots per culture, while media containing Agar agar, Crude agar and CleriGel resulted in 5.12, 4.58 and 4.37 shoots per culture respectively. The plantlet length (9.7 cm) was the highest in Gelwell followed by Crude agar (7.9 cm), Agar agar (6.8 cm) and CleriGel (5.8 cm).
Numerical and Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Elias’s and Peres’s Extractors with Finite Input Sequences †

Many cryptographic systems require random numbers, and the use of weak random numbers leads to insecure systems. In the modern world, there are several techniques for generating random numbers, of which the most fundamental and important methods are deterministic extractors proposed by von Neumann, Elias, and Peres. Elias’s extractor achieves the optimal rate (i.e., information-theoretic upper bound) h(p) if the block size tends to infinity, where h(·) is the binary entropy function and p is the probability that each bit of input sequences occurs. Peres’s extractor achieves the optimal rate h(p) if the length of the input and the number of iterations tend to infinity. Previous research related to both extractors has made no reference to practical aspects including running time and memory size with finite input sequences. In this paper, based on some heuristics, we derive a lower bound on the maximum redundancy of Peres’s extractor, and we show that Elias’s extractor is better than Peres’s extractor in terms of the maximum redundancy (or the rates) if we do not pay attention to the time complexity or space complexity. In addition, we perform numerical and non-asymptotic analysis of both extractors with a finite input sequence with any biased probability under the same environments. To do so, we implemented both extractors on a general PC and simple environments. Our empirical results show that Peres’s extractor is much better than Elias’s extractor for given finite input sequences under a very similar running time. As a consequence, Peres’s extractor would be more suitable to generate uniformly random sequences in practice in applications such as cryptographic systems.
Classification of Cardiac Arrhythmia using Hybrid Technology of Fast Discrete Stockwell-Transform (FDST) and Self Organising Map

The diagnosis of Cardio-Vascular diseases (CVD) is highly dependent on analysis of ECG signals. ECG analysis can be helpful in estimating the underlying cause and condition of heart in cardiac abnormality. The effectiveness of ECG signal analysis in detection of CVDs is widely accepted by professional healthcare service provider. Many algorithms have been proposed but almost all of them have some kind of limitations, and these limitations largely influence the effectiveness of ECG analysis. The performed research work is dedicated for design of unique self-organizing maps (SOMs) based neural network for classification of arrhythmia according to a particular ECG signal, the generation of SOMs is based on the certain unique signatures of ECG signals and have potential to classify different cardiac conditions. For extraction of unique features from ECG signals, we have proposed to use Fast Discrete Stockwell Transform (FDST). Since the proposed technique is a result of combining two different techniques hence called as hybrid technology. The purpose of using FDST is to identify unique signatures of ECG signals in a more improved manner than existing one, the term improved is used because it has several advantages over existing techniques such as wavelet and Fourier Transform based methods. Results obtained from the implementation of the technique are capable in visualizing the ECG sinus rhythm and arrhythmia conditions in form of unique SOM for each associated arrhythmia condition. This unique SOM based classification makes them ideal for being used as a diagnostic tool. This ability of arrhythmia classification using FDST and SOMs makes the technique unique and useful providing valuable information about patient condition. Using proposed technology a portable diagnosis tool for monitoring of patient at their site may be facilitated later, that will improve the quality of life of the patient by diagnosing cardiac condition.
Recommended Items Rating Prediction based on RBF Neural Network Optimized by PSO Algorithm

In order to mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start problems of recommendation item ratings and more accurately predict the ratings of recommended items, according to the characteristics of the non-linearity and randomness in recommendation content changes, recommended items ratings prediction model based on RBF neural network optimized by PSO algorithm is proposed and the parameters of RBF neural network are globally optimized by using the proposed PSO algorithm. Experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art models including the traditional user-based collaborating filtering method, the traditional item-based collaborating filtering method and RBF neural network model, the proposed RBF neural network optimized by PSO algorithm can more accurately predict the recommendation item ratings, which has higher prediction accuracy and much lower prediction error measured by Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Precision@N and Recall@N. Keywords—PSO algorithm, RBF neural network, recommended item rating prediction, data sparsity.
The Effect of Current and Nickel Nitrate Concentration on the Deposition of Nickel Hydroxide Films

Nickel hydroxide is one of the most commonly used active materials for the positive electrode in rechargeable batteries. An electrochemical quartz crystal nanobalance (EQCN) has been utilized to measure the mass of Ni(OH){sub 2} films electrochemically deposited from Ni(NO{sub 3}){sub 2} solutions. The objective of this work was to quantify electrochemical deposition as a function of deposition conditions. The changing mass recorded on the EQCN was demonstrated to be the result of Ni(OH){sub 2} deposition. Deposited mass was observed to increase proportionally with applied charge as suggested by previous investigators. Most significantly, the rate of deposition was found to decrease more than an order of magnitude as the Ni(NO{sub 3}){sub 2} concentration increased from 0.2 to 2.0M. The effect of concentration is shown to be related to NI(2) concentration as opposed to solution pH or NO{sub 3}{sup {minus}} concentration. An empirical correlation is given to predict deposition rates in solutions ranging from 0.1 to 3.0M Ni(NO{sub 3}){sub 2} and at current densities ranging from 0.5 to 5.0 mA/cm{sup 2}. The decreased deposition rates in concentrated Ni(NO{sub 3}){sub 2} are attributed to the formation of intermediate species [e.g., NiOH{sup +} or Ni{sub 4}(OH){sub 4}{sup 4+}] which diffuse away from the reactionmore » interface before deposition can occur. « less
Synesthesia: Detecting Screen Content via Remote Acoustic Side Channels

We show that subtle acoustic noises emanating from within computer screens can be used to detect the content displayed on the screens. This sound can be picked up by ordinary microphones built into webcams or screens, and is inadvertently transmitted to other parties, e.g., during a videoconference call or archived recordings. It can also be recorded by a smartphone or ``smart speaker'' placed on a desk next to the screen, or from as far as 10 meters away using a parabolic microphone. Empirically demonstrating various attack scenarios, we show how this channel can be used for real-time detection of on-screen text, or users' input into on-screen virtual keyboards. We also demonstrate how an attacker can analyze the audio received during video call (e.g., on Google Hangout) to infer whether the other side is browsing the web in lieu of watching the video call, and which web site is displayed on their screen.