Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DSL and Engine for Pervasive Treasure Hunt Games

The purpose of this master thesis was to eliminate the technical barrier for creating pervasive games. In order to achieve this a domain-specific language (DSL) was made along with an engine to interpret the DSL scripts. This was done by using a customized development method, combining the DSL lifecycle and an iterative game development method. The goal was to make pervasive games more established in society and to make them more popular. Initial stage was to analyze pervasive games and making a game specification. This resulted into the four pervasive dimensions, goal, mobility, social, and temporal, with their three levels, low, medium, and high. These dimensions and levels, along with certain game elements, made it possible to create a DSL expressive enough to make pervasive treasure hunt games. The conclusion was that a DSL can be used to create pervasive games, thus making them more available for the audiences. This could eventually make pervasive games more popular.
BiRASP - The Bistatic Range-Dependent Active System Performance Prediction Model.

Abstract : In 1992, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) published a report describing the Range-dependent Active System Performance (RASP) prediction model; a sequence of computer programs using multipath propagation and scattering processes to predict the long-range, low-frequency boundary reverberation, and target returns that would be received in real ocean environments. That computer model has been extended to admit arbitrary source/receiver configurations within a three-dimensional, range-dependent environment. The enhancements include: (1) range and azimuthal dependence in all environmental parameters, (2) volume scattering and bistatic scattering strength functions, (3) realistic source and receiver characteristics (e.g., three-dimensional beam patterns for linear arrays and array tilt), and (4) calculation of target returns with time/angle spreading. In addition to addressing the prediction and evaluation of active sonar systems in real ocean environments, the set of programs that comprise the Bistatic Range-dependent Active System Performance (BiRASP) prediction model also produce the detailed, high-resolution results required for basic theoretic and experimental acoustic research. This report presents the theoretical foundations of the BiRASP model and the corresponding numerical implementation of this theory. Further, a detailed description of the model software, instructions for execution, and sample results are provided.
Modelling Wetland Eco-hydrological state in Pressure-State-Response framework validating it using Ecosystem service potentiality approach

The present study has tried to model the Eco-hydrological state of wetlands for both pre dam and post dam periods of the Lower Tangon river basin using Pressure-State-Response (PSR) framework with advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms and validated it with Ecosystem service potentiality (ESP) approach along with conventional approaches of validation. All the applied models have explored that 22.48–39.52% wetland under very good EHS zone has converted into 15.52–16.57% relatively lower category of EHS zones indicating the gradual degradation of EHS quality over wider parts of the wetland. The result of model validation has noted the acceptability of all the applied models but performance is found high in the case of REPtree and Bagging models. Expert-based ESP behaves accordingly with the EHS models. Based on the results, the study suggests using ML models for such modelling and used field-based validation approach like ESP.
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ROTARY KILN EXPANDED SLATE LIGHTWEIGHT AGGREGATE

This paper discusses the unique physical characteristics of rotary kiln expanded slate lightweight aggregate for producing high performance and high strength lightweight concrete. The compressive strength, elastic modulus, splitting tensile strength, specific creep, and other properties of lightweight concrete are significantly affected by the structural properties of the lightweight aggregate used. Concrete production, transportation, pumping and placing are also affected. Raw materials and rotary kiln processing is discussed. Data from academic and laboratory studies is presented as well as data from actual projects such as the Raftsundet Bridge in Norway and the Hibernia Offshore Oil Platform Gravity Base Structure. (A) For the covering abstract see ITRD E123363.
COMPARISON BETWEEN CONTINUOUS-FLOW AND INCREASED-DISCHARGE IRRIGATIONS IN BLOCKEDEND FURROWS USING A MATHEMATICAL MODEL

The comparison between the efficiencies of continuous-flow irrigation (CFI) and increased-discharge irrigation (IDI) in blocked-end furrows using a mathematical model, as well as the measured distribution uniformities in field is presented in this article. The aim of this study is to determine if the IDI is an alternative method to the CFI in order to use water more efficiently. Infiltration and roughness parameters were calibrated with the water-advance curve of the CFI applied in furrows on different fields. These parameters satisfy the equation of continuity between the soil-applied and infiltrated volume with the best approximation. The parameters obtained through the CFI are maintained when the IDI is simulated. The efficiencies in theoretical results and the distribution uniformities (DU) from the field of the IDI, using equal or approximated discharges to the CFI, are higher than in the CFI. In agreement with the results of field in an only furrow, IDI increases DU 14.5% compared with CFI and, according to the theoretical results in three furrows, IDI can potentially save 18.2% of water compared with CFI. It is concluded that the IDI is an alternative method to the CFI when one uses length, slope, soil type, and roughness with similar characteristics to those used in this article.
Inlet Distortion Characterization of the Boundary Layer Ingesting D8 Aircraft

This thesis experimentally assesses the inflow towards the propulsors and the pressure distribution at the propulsor fan-face for the boundary layer ingesting D8 aircraft, and examines the dependence of the model, the propulsor and the flight condition on the inlet distortion. Use is made of mini-tuft flow visualization and five hole probe pressure surveys. The results are compared with CFD simulations. The experiments were performed at the most important mission points of the D8: cruise, descent, start of climb, and top of climb. CFD was only performed for cruise and top of climb. From the pressure distributions the distortion coefficient, DC(60), was calculated, the maximum variation in pressure over a specified circumferential segment (60°). At cruise the DC(60) equaled ~0.3, compared to DC(60)~0.1-0.2 for conventional aircraft. The D8 model caused cross-flow to the propulsors, the flow is directed towards the sides of the model. Both fans rotate in the same direction, such that one propulsor has the flow in the direction of rotation, and the other has the flow opposite to the direction of rotation, causing an asymmetry between the left and right propulsor. The flight phase is characterized by ? , the angle of attack, ? , the ratio of tip velocity over tunnel speed, and ? , the yaw angle. It is found that at a high value of ? the pressure differences at the fan-face are reduced by engine suction, lowering the distortion and counter-acting the cross-flow. A low value of ? means a relative lower influence of the propulsor on the flow, such that the propulsor is not able to (fully) counter-act the cross-flow, resulting in a higher difference in DC(60) and power required between the left and right propulsor. Changing ? mainly changes the location of the pressure distributions. The results from experiments agree well with CFD, there is a 1% deviation in DC(60) at top of climb condition, and 6% at cruise. The pressure distributions look similar and the pressure coefficient values scale equally, from -0.8 to 0. Further research should focus on the exact fan response on the distortion. The D8 used conventional engines, optimized for uniform inflow. Developing a BLI optimized engine could further increase the BLI benefit. The D8 model induced cross-flow, resulting in an asymmetry between the left and right engine. Eliminating this cross-flow by a change in model design could also decrease the distortion.
Developing life cycle inventory for life cycle assessment of Australian cotton

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally recognised approach for evaluating the environmental impacts of products and services. In this paper, the potential issues in the development of a consistent and comprehensive life cycle inventory (LCI) data are illustrated in the context of Australian cotton industry. These include diversity and variable nature of farming practices, and the inherent complexities such as the inter-linkages between co-products. For the implementation of LCI, the choices of functional unit and system boundary, definition of regional sub-sectors, methods of energy assessments, and rules of allocations of inputs and emissions are discussed. It is shown that for cotton production, the contribution of on-farm indirect 'chemical' inputs is particularly important, accounting for up to 50–80% of the total energy input in the life cycle. The need for quantified trade off analysis between alternative systems in the LCA context is also emphasized.
Development of Software to Digitize Historic Hardcopy Seismograms from Nuclear Explosions

Abstract : One main issue associated with nuclear explosion monitoring research is the paucity of seismic recordings to be used for calibration purposes. The problem is particularly acute for nuclear explosions that occurred in the predigital seismic era. Many of these historic explosions have been detonated under a wide variety of geologic and emplacement conditions and it is important to revisit them in the context of broad area monitoring. Our Phase I work has demonstrated the feasibility of developing software for the digitization of historic hardcopy seismograms from nuclear explosions. We have already begun development of a prototype MATLAB(registered trademark) based Graphical User Interface (GUI) computer code called DigiSeis that is specifically designed to meet this goal. Importantly, our project is conducted by seismologists who have a long history of nuclear explosion monitoring with intimate understanding of the nuances of the signal aspects that are important to this field. The key element of our approach is to use mathematical statistics to automatically determine specified tuning parameters in order to develop spatially adaptive thresholding parameters, accurate timing and calibration information, and signal reconstruction schemes that maintain waveform fidelity. We have implemented some of the statistics algorithms in the current version of DigiSeis and have successfully applied DigiSeis to digitize some WWSSN LP recordings of NTS explosions. Human interaction with the program is facilitated via a graphical user interface. Scanned photographic images can be read in, cropped and rotated. Image processing techniques are used for adaptive contrast enhancement and horizontal noise trace removal prior to digitization. The core methodology used in DigiSeis is global and local histogram enhancement techniques combined with median-value processing.
Applying Text Mining, Clustering Analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation Techniques for Topic Classification of Environmental Education Journals

Facing the big data wave, this study applied artificial intelligence to cite knowledge and find a feasible process to play a crucial role in supplying innovative value in environmental education. Intelligence agents of artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) are two key areas leading the trend in artificial intelligence; this research adopted NLP to analyze the research topics of environmental education research journals in the Web of Science (WoS) database during 2011–2020 and interpret the categories and characteristics of abstracts for environmental education papers. The corpus data were selected from abstracts and keywords of research journal papers, which were analyzed with text mining, cluster analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and co-word analysis methods. The decisions regarding the classification of feature words were determined and reviewed by domain experts, and the associated TF-IDF weights were calculated for the following cluster analysis, which involved a combination of hierarchical clustering and K-means analysis. The hierarchical clustering and LDA decided the number of required categories as seven, and the K-means cluster analysis classified the overall documents into seven categories. This study utilized co-word analysis to check the suitability of the K-means classification, analyzed the terms with high TF-IDF wights for distinct K-means groups, and examined the terms for different topics with the LDA technique. A comparison of the results demonstrated that most categories that were recognized with K-means and LDA methods were the same and shared similar words; however, two categories had slight differences. The involvement of field experts assisted with the consistency and correctness of the classified topics and documents.
Designing Secure Web-Based Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 with CDROM

From the Publisher: Today, businesses use networks consisting of intranets, Internet sites, and extranets, all of which extend the network, requiring increased system security. In addition, confidential information may be stored on mobile computing devices, which are subject to theft and loss. Windows 2000 provides end-to-end security that lets organizations integrate systems both inside and outside the corporate network boundaries, while providing complete access control and data protection. Security features include advanced techniques for identifying who is accessing the system, including the use of digital "keys" to access selected data, and a single ID that permits users to access not only their own computer, but also other shared resources (such as printers or files) on the corporate network, the Internet, or even a business partner's network
Development of VBI Models with Vehicle Acceleration for Bridge-Vehicle Dynamic Response

There has been a growing interest to model and analyze the Vehicle-Bridge Interaction (VBI) of intricate vehicles on bridges. VBI analysis is used if the dynamic response of the vehicle in addition to that of the bridge is required. This is particularly sound in case of high-speed trains where the vehicle acceleration is a design criterion for passenger comfort and needs to be well predicted. The main objective of this research is to establish efficient numerical procedures within the framework of finite element methods to solve the dynamic response of the VBI systems for vehicles moving with constant velocity or with acceleration. For vehicles with constant velocity, the dynamic condensation method is applied to reduce the vehicle DOFs to the VBI element. A new formulation is proposed for the mass, damping, and stiffness of the VBI element considering new formulation for the contact points. For vehicles experiencing acceleration or deceleration, external forces resulting from vehicle horizontal acceleration are numerically formulated in a matrix form as the function of vertical contact forces. By defining a new variable called acceleration parameter, the contact force formula is reformulated. Consequently, a new formulation for the VBI element containing the effect of vehicle acceleration is developed. The effect of shear deformation and consistent mass on the vehicle and bridge responses is investigated. The Timoshenko beam element is used to simulate the effect of shear deformation with consistent mass including the effect of rotary mass. Results generally imply that all bridge responses are affected, particularly mid-span acceleration. A comprehensive parametric study is conducted on the model variables and their effects on the dynamic response of the bridge and the vehicle. The studied parameters include vehicle and bridge damping, frequency parameter, system mass parameter, and a new parameter called vehicle mass parameter. The new VBI element for vehicles experiencing acceleration is studied for three types of vehicle models. Results demonstrate the capability of the developed VBI elements in capturing several dynamic effects when compared to the available models, particularly for high speed vehicles. The new VBI models showed better predictions for the vertical contact forces, vehicle vertical acceleration, and the bridge mid-span deflection.
A Vehicle Dynamics Model for Driving Simulators

Driving simulators play an important role in research concerning mainly human factors and the development of new advanced driver assistance systems. Since the human body is a very sensitive “machine”, driving simulator experiences must be as close as possible to reality, in order to conduct simulator experiments that generate accurate results, so they can be extrapolated to real driving situations. One part of the driving simulator that influences the driver perception is the vehicle dynamics model. This is the part of the simulator software that calculates the physics and motion of a real vehicle according to the driver inputs and environmental conditions. In this Master’s thesis, a new vehicle dynamics model with ten degrees of freedom has been developed, using Modelica® as a programming language. The model is specially designed for Real-time applications, mainly driving simulators. The model is intended to calculate the motion of a passenger vehicle when driving in normal conditions, representing real vehicle behaviour in public roads, since this is a common characteristic in many simulator experiments. In addition, the model must also present a realistic and predictable behaviour in some severe driving conditions such as collision avoidance manoeuvres, which can also be of interest when performing simulator experiments. A very important part of this thesis concerns the model validation. In order to ensure that the vehicle dynamics model behaves like a real car would do in the conditions mentioned above; predefined manoeuvres representing these driving conditions have been performed in a test track with a car equipped with data acquisition systems. Moreover, the model has been tuned in an attempt to match the test data when performing the same predefined manoeuvres. The last part of the model validation consisted in a simulator experiment where different skilled drivers compared the new model against an old version, in order to evaluate the behaviour of the new model.
Building a 'community co-operative' at Hill Holt Wood

This article documents the business history of Hill Holt Wood (HHW), a community-run social enterprise based in rural Lincolnshire. It argues that HHW is an example of a particular kind of co-operative, namely a 'community co-operative' (Somerville, 2007), and it aims to shed light on the issues and obstacles associated with developing a co-operative of this kind. To this end, face-to-face interviews were conducted with the venture's founder over a period of approximately five years. It was found that the motivation and persistence of the founder, in addition to key support networks that can be drawn upon when required, were critical to the success of this particular enterprise. The article concludes with a discussion of the future prospects for HHW and similar 'community co-operatives'.
Fiscal Expenditure, Pricing-to-Market and Exchange Rate Behavior

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal expenditure shock on exchange rate behavior and the role of asymmetric pricing-to-market in the New Open Economy Macroeconomics. The findings of this paper indicated that if discriminatory pricing behavior is considered, and when a country faced with a fiscal expenditure shock, exchange rate fluctuation in the short run would be wider than in the long run with overshooting of exchange rate. Further, the increase of government expenditure will push up exchange rates. If the firms in both countries take pricing based on home (foreign) currency, an enlargement of the size of the home country will cause lesser (wider) range of exchange rate fluctuation with the change in government expenditure. In addition, the greater the effect of the elasticity of substitution among the products and marginal utility of the real money demand will trigger lesser range of exchange rate fluctuation with the change in government expenditure.
Effectiveness and Potential of a Web-based Sensor Network System for Agricultural Applications Using Image Data

Image data provide useful and helpful information for agricultural use, but it is difficult to collect image data stably at field sites and to perform image analyses with the collected image data. To address these difficulties, we propose a practical image monitoring system for agricultural use with a Web-based sensor network system. The monitoring system with Internet cameras can be easily constructed by using Field Servers. For the image monitoring, we also devised a simple image analysis method that uses a combination of cropping, subtracting, and binarizing functions on the proposed system. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the monitoring system and the image analysis method in agricultural applications. The results demonstrated that practical and effective image monitoring can be realized with the proposed system.
Partition noise extraction using TCAD simulations

PARTITION NOISE EXTRACTION USING TCAD SIMULATIONS by Carol Cui Lan Lin As Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology scales down, partition noise may start to play a bigger role in reducing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in sample-and-hold circuits and other capacitive sensing circuits that reset the voltage across a capacitor. Previous studies on partition noise lack a reliable and accurate measurement method to quantify partition noise. In our study, we have developed a method using Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations to estimate partition noise. Through simulation, we determined the transistor dimensions and sense capacitance required to measure partition noise. Furthermore, we designed a test circuit based on our simulation results with the flexibility to study partition noise. The test circuit has a buffer that allows us to measure partition noise without interference from test measurement equipments. Finally, we presented a method to measure and extract partition noise using our test circuit.
Implementing a 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation for Teachers' Continuing Professional Development

D Virtual Worlds (VWs) are becoming important for education as they provide realistic three-dimensional environments, offer engaging, interactive and immersive experiences, and create new opportunities related to learning and teaching. To this end, it is useful for school teachers to understand these environments and explore their possibilities in enhancing their educational practices. However, in order to achieve this using 3D VWs, teachers should acquire competences that would enable them design and deliver educational activities in the context of 3D VWs, as part of their Continuing Professional Development. To this end, in this paper we present the design and the implementation of a 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation that takes into consideration the instructional strategy of Synectics.