Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling Of Protective PotentialDistribution In A Cathodic ProtectionSystem Using A Coupled BEM/FEM Method

Design of any cathodic protection (CP) system requires one to determine current density which meets predefined criteria, and to ensure as uniform a current density distribution as possible over the structure surface. Nowadays the only reliable way to determine current and potential distribution is employment of numerical techniques. In this paper, the optimisation of a passive cathodic protection system by using coupled BEM/FEM is presented. FEM is appropriate for solving completely bounded domains, and it is used for discretization of anodes and cathodes. BEM is applied for discretization of electrolyte, i.e. infinite domain. In the coupled BEM/FEM the soil domain is linked to the steel domain through the current density (boundary condition) generated by the kinetics of the corrosion reactions at the steel surface. Verification of the obtained numerical result is made by comparing it with measured results. Good agreement between simulation and measurements has been found.
Tolerance induced rotor protrusion and resulting torque fluctuation of a synchronous machine

Tolerances in electrical machines can influence their characteristics. These influences can lead to torque fluctuation and are therefore unwanted. Neglecting tolerance effects can lead to the loss of the certification of conformity of industrial systems. Tolerance induced rotor protrusion occurs usually through uneven tolerance ranges for stator and rotor core. This paper studies the probable appearance of rotor protrusion by measuring a significant number of mass produced rotors. Based on these measurements rotor protrusion is likely to happen. To assess the influence of this tolerance on torque output a three dimensional electromagnetic finite element model is built. The model represents an internal permanent magnet machine in the 100 kW range used for hybrid drive applications. The machine is studied in an unskewed and a skewed variant. The results show up to 3 % reduction of maximum torque output. The unskewed machine additionally exhibits a nonlinear influence. This nonlinearity results from flux concentration effects on the protruding end which are further discussed. Protrusion also intensifies axial forces by almost 50 %. In conclusion two measures to reduce the impact or size of this tolerance range are discussed.
MSER and Connected Domain Analysis Based Algorithm for Container Code Locating Process

Effective and efficient automatic container code recognition is an essential component of intelligent port management. Higher sensitivity and intelligence are required in container code locating process. Based on the edge of container code area and the color of the container surface, a container code locating algorithm based on Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) and connected domain analysis is proposed in this paper. This algorithm is an efficient algorithm of container code characters location in complex scenes. Then, this paper further proposed a strategy to combine multiple algorithms. The correct rate under the algorithm combination strategy reached 97.19%, and the time is within 0.6s, effectively adapt to the diversity and code permutation of container code permutation, significantly improve the positioning ability of the container, which can meet the requirement of real time in practical application.
The Efficacy of Minodronate in the Treatment of Glucocorticoid-induced Osteoporosis

Objective To investigate the efficacy of minodronate in the treatment of glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis (GIO). Methods The study population included patients in whom the administration of minodronate (50 mg, once every 4 weeks) had been newly started for the treatment of GIO in Niigata Rheumatic Center from 2012 to 2015. Patients who were bisphosphonate-naïve and those who switched from other bisphosphonates were classified into the naïve and switch groups, respectively. The changes in the bone mineral density (BMD) and bone metabolic markers after one year of minodronate treatment were retrospectively evaluated. We also compared the BMD and bone turnover marker changes of minodronate-naïve patients with those in whom alendronate or risedronate had been prescribed as a first bisphosphonate (control group). Results Minodronate was prescribed to 142 patients, and data were successfully obtained from 120 patients. New vertebral fractures were observed in 5 of the 142 patients; 1 fracture occurred during the cessation of minodronate for dental treatment, and 3 patients already had multiple vertebral fractures before the initiation of minodronate. The patients' tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b (TRACP-5b) (-27.0%, p<0.001) and bone alkaline phosphatase (BAP) (-15.7%, p<0.01) levels were decreased, but no patients showed a decrease to below the normal range. One year of treatment with minodronate significantly increased the lumbar BMD in the naïve (+3.9%, p<0.001) and switch (+2.3%, p<0.001) groups. Although the femoral BMD did not change to a significant extent overall, the patients with a low young adult mean (YAM) (<80%) at baseline showed a significant increase in their femoral BMD (+2.1%, p=0.034) values. Compared with the control group, the minodronate-naïve group showed a significant decrease in the TRACP-5b levels and a significant increase in the lumbar BMD. Conclusion The administration of minodronate appears to be an effective treatment for GIO.
Predicting gully initiation: comparing data mining techniques, analytical hierarchy processes and the topographic threshold

Predicting gully initiation at catchment scale was done previously by integrating a geographical information system (GIS) with physically based models, statistical procedures or with knowledge‐based expert systems. However, the reliability and validity of applying these procedures are still questionable. In this work, a data mining (DM) procedure based on decision trees was applied to identify areas of gully initiation risk. Performance was compared with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) expert system and with the commonly used topographic threshold (TT) technique. A spatial database was used to test the models, composed of a target variable (presence or absence of initial points) and ten independent environmental, climatic and human‐induced variables. The following findings emerged: using the same input layers, DM provided better predictive ability of gully initiation points than the application of both AHP and TT. The main difference between DM and TT was the very high overestimation inherent in TT. In addition, the minimum slope observed for soil detachment was 2°, whereas in other studies it is 3°. This could be explained by soil resistance, which is substantially lower in agricultural fields, while most studies test unploughed soil. Finally, rainfall intensity events >62.2 mm h‐1 (for a period of 30 min) were found to have a significant effect on gully initiation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Elastic Scheduling for Scaling Virtual Clusters in Cloud Data Center Networks

Data center networks (DCNs) have become more extensively applied in cloud computing in recent years. One important mission for DCNs is satisfying the fluctuation of on-demand resources for tenants. During the scaling of virtual clusters (VCs), existing works fail to fully consider placement techniques and the elasticity of the physical resource in the DCN at the same time. To address this, we use elasticity to measure the scaling potential of VCs in terms of both computation and communication resources. In this paper, we consider elastic scaling for existing VCs to maximize elasticity with the constraint of communication cost in the DCN. We achieve this through a resource allocation scheme, VCS, which comes with provable optimality guarantees for single VC scaling. After that, we extend our scheme for the scaling of multiple VCs, and we prove that scaling multiple VCs for the over-time elasticity maximization problem is NP-hard. Based on that, we present the multiple virtual cluster scaling (MVCS) algorithm for offline multiple VC scaling, which can maximize over-time elasticity during a stable time period. Furthermore, we propose two heuristic algorithms, synchronous online MVCS and asynchronous online MVCS, using Bayesian parameter estimation to solve an online scaling with both synchronous and asynchronous incoming rates. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our elastic VC scaling placement schemes outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of flexibility in the DCN.
FullStop: Tracking unsafe stopping behaviour of buses

Road safety is a critical issue the world-over, and the problem is particularly acute in developing countries, where the combination of crowding, inadequate roads, and driver indiscipline serves up a deadly cocktail. We believe that mobile devices can play a positive role in this context by detecting dangerous conditions and providing feedback to enable timely redressal of potential dangers. This paper focuses on a specific problem that is responsible for many accidents in developing countries: the stopping behaviour of buses especially in the vicinity of bus stops. For instance, buses could arrive at a bus stop but continue rolling forward instead of coming to a complete halt, or could stop some distance away from the bus stop, possibly even in the middle of a busy road. Each of these behaviours can result in injury or worse to people waiting at a bus stop as well as to passengers boarding or alighting from buses. We present FullStop, a smartphone-based system to detect safety risks arising from bus stopping behaviour, as described above. We show that the GPS and inertial sensors are unable to perform the fine-grained detection needed, by themselves. Therefore, FullStop is based on the view obtained from looking out to the front of the vehicle using the camera of a smartphone that is mounted on the front windshield. Using optical flow vectors, with several refinements, FullStop running on a smartphone is able to effectively detect safety-related situations such as a rolling stop or stopping at a location that is displaced laterally relative to the designated bus stop.
Validity of Substances of Abuse Detection in Hair by Biochips Array Technology

Using hair as a biological specimen to analyze drug abuse has been receiving elevated attention during last years because of flexibility of collection procedure and because hair does not autolysis like other body fluids or tissues. Hair testing provides a broad-spectrum detection window after drug exposure than urine testing. Hair analysis has specific criteria that it provides a way of obtaining information that cannot be acquired by other commonly used forensic toxicology analytical procedures, such as blood or urine analysis. In the hair matrix, many xenobiotics are trapped permanently, in disparity to the situation with blood or urine where they are only identifiable for a few hours or days. Subsequently substance of abuse detection by hair analysis should be the target procedure in the clinical and forensic toxicology aspect when the evaluation of repeated or chronic exposure to a drug is indicated, e.g. in the case of pre-employment/workplace testing, criminal affairs or a driving license restoration. In the current study, seventy cases of the application of hair analyses using this technique for the determination of substances of abuse (opiates, cannabis, amphetamine, barbiturate, benzodiazepines, and cocaine) are investigated. Analytical toxicology procedure for detection of substance of abuse is critical important: Biochips array technology that confirmed with GC/MS has proved to be a highly sensitive and specific technique for the detection of substances of abuse at very low concentrations in hair except for cannabis.
The Impact of the Antimicrobial Compounds Produced by Lactic Acid Bacteria on the Growth Performance of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis

Cell-free supernatants (CFSs) extracted from various lactic acid bacteria (LAB) cultures were applied to Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) cells to determine their effect on MAP viability. In addition, 5% lactic acid (LA; pH 3) and commercially synthetized nisin bacteriocin were also tested. This procedure was chosen in order to mimic the influence of LAB compounds during the production and storage of fermented milk products, which can be contaminated by MAP. Its presence in milk and milk products is of public concern due to the possible ingestion of MAP by consumers and the discussed role of MAP in Crohn’s disease. Propidium monoazide real-time PCR (PMA qPCR) was used for viability determination. Although all CFS showed significant effects on MAP viability, two distinct groups of CFS – effective and less effective – could be distinguished. The effective CFSs were extracted from various lactobacilli cultures, their pH values were mostly lower than 4.5, and their application resulted in >2 log10 reductions in MAP viability. The group of less effective CFS were filtered from Lactococcus and enterococci cultures, their pH values were higher than 4.5, and their effect on MAP viability was <2 log10. LA elicited a reduction in MAP viability that was similar to that of the group of less effective CFS. Almost no effect was found when using commercially synthetized nisin at concentrations of 0.1–1000 μg/ml. A combination of the influence of the type of bacteriocin, the length of its action, bacteriocin production strain, and pH are all probably required for a successful reduction in MAP viability. However, certain bacteriocins and their respective LAB strains (Lactobacillus sp.) appear to play a greater role in reducing the viability of MAP than pH.
Re(de)fining Innate Lymphocyte Lineages in the Face of Cancer

Innate lymphocytes play critical roles in maintaining tissue homeostasis and integrity of the host at steady state and during pathogenic insults. The successive identification of new innate lymphocyte subsets has revealed an incredible diversity within the family. While this heterogeneous population can be grouped based on their cytotoxic potential into exclusively cytokine-producing helpers and cytolytic killers, the exact developmental relationships between the subsets are not fully understood. The former group is enriched at mucosal surfaces, whereas innate lymphocytes with cytotoxic potential can be identified in a wider array of tissues, including tumors. Although their cytotoxicity suggests an antitumor role, the nature of tumor-elicited innate lymphocyte responses has only begun to be investigated, and the identities of participating subsets still remain contentious. In this review, we provide a brief overview of innate lymphocyte biology, review the current knowledge on their ontogeny, and discuss their roles in tumor immunosurveillance. Cancer Immunol Res; 6(4); 372–7. ©2018 AACR.
Improving Memory Access Efficiency for Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems

Recent trends show that using mobile GPUs to support 3D graphics and H.264 decoding based on OpenGL ES on smart phones are prevalent. To enhance the performance of both CPU and GPU, Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is suggested which is one of methods accessing different kinds of memory using virtual memory structures. In this study, we suggest a method called Fusion Processor Architecture for accessing memory from CPU and GPU without copying contexts between them. We introduce control mechanisms including Job Manager, Re-mapper, and Pre-fetcher to control and distribute data between the two processors. Using these methods help reducing message exchanges and page-table requests between CPU and GPU, which in turn increasing efficiency of the two devices. Evaluations compared to Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), OpenMP, and OpenCL prove the suggested mechanism works 198% faster on a QEMU emulation environment.
Spectroscopic Characterization of Biofield Treated Metronidazole and Tinidazole

Metronidazole and tinidazole are widely used antimicrobial drugs against Gram-negative and Gram-positive anaerobic bacteria. The present study was aimed to evaluate the impact of biofield treatment on metronidazole and tinidazole using FT-IR and UV spectroscopy. The study was carried out in two groups i.e. control and treatment. Treatment groups were subjected to Mr. Trivedi’s biofield treatment while no treatment was given to control group. FT-IR spectrum of treated metronidazole showed the impact of biofield treatment on frequency of characteristic functional groups such as C=C (imidazole ring) stretching was appeared at lower frequency i.e. from 1600 cm-1 to 1553 cm-1. Likewise, NO2 asymmetric stretching and C-N symmetric stretching were appeared at higher wave number i.e. 1479 cm-1 to 1501 cm-1 and 1070 cm-1 to 1077 cm-1, respectively. FT-IR spectrum of tinidazole showed shifting in absorption peak of C-N stretching to higher wavenumber from 1002 cm-1 (control) to 1022 cm-1. The wavenumber of aromatic C=C bond (in imidazole) was shifted to lower frequency, which could be due to increases in conjugationeffect. Further, increases in wavenumber of NO2 and C-N in treated sample suggested the increased force constant and bond strength as compared to control. Because of higher conjugation effect and increased bond strength, the molecule supposed to be more stable. The UV spectra of both metronidazole and tinidazole showed the similar patterns of lambda max (λmax) with respect to their control. The FT-IR results of both drugs suggest that there was an impact of biofield treatment on atomic level of metronidazole and tinidazole, as compared to control.
Performance of TCP Vegas According to Alfa and Beta Parameters in Hybrid Scenarios with Bursts Errors

This paper develops an analysis of the behavior of the variant TCP Vegas for different values of the alpha and beta parameters. When performing the study of the performance of the protocol, a series of tests were performed using the ns-2 simulator, on a hybrid topology (wired and wireless), also incorporating burst errors of different lengths, typical of wireless links. End-to-end delay and throughput metrics were used as a performance benchmark.
Evaluation of patient setup uncertainty of optical guided frameless system for intracranial stereotactic radiosurgery

The optically‐guided frameless system (OFLS) has been used in our clinic for intracranial stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) since 2006, as it is especially effective in IMRT‐based radiosurgery (IMRS), which allows treating multiple brain lesions simultaneously using single isocenter approach. This study reports our retrospective analysis of patient setup accuracy using this system. The OFLS consists of a bite block with fiducial markers and an infra‐red camera system. To test reproducibility, patients are taken for reseat verification after bite block construction. Upon the completion of radiosurgery planning, the isocenter position(s) and images are sent to the optical guidance computer where fiducials are manually registered from the CT scan. During treatment, patient setup is monitored and guided by the camera readings on the fiducials. In addition, two orthogonal kV images are acquired and used as an isocenter verification tool. In addition, we have analyzed the reseat and fiducial digitization data of 56 patients. Retrospective comparison of kV images with reference images has been carried out for all the patients to evaluate actual patient setup accuracy at the time of treatment. The histogram of the findings shows that 82.2% of patients had 3D isodisplacement (E≤1mm; 5.2% had 1<E≤2mm). Hence, for 87.5 % of the patients in the study, treatments were finished under the optical guidance with a maximum setup error of 2 mm and the median setup error of 0 mm. For the remaining 12.5% of patients in the study, the isodisplacements were greater than 2 mm and the treatment records showed that those patients were repositioned, guided by the orthogonal kV‐images. It is found that the OFLS in the SRS treatment has acceptable accuracy when used in conjunction with orthogonal kV images, and the use of orthogonal kV images as a verification tool ensures the efficacy of frameless localization in the radiosurgery treatment. PACS numbers: 87.53. Ly, 87.61. Tg, 87.55. Qr, 87.56. ‐v, 29.20. Ej
DISCRETE TIME PROPAGATION GRAPHS FOR OPTICAL SCATTERING

In this paper, we examine discrete time propagation graphs as a potential framework for thin scattering layer models. The particular class of interest are propagation graphs formed from Cayley graphs of Zd, as their underlying geometry and shift-invariance make them appealing as potential models of the desired physical process. We show that their shift-invariant nature makes it possible to use Fourier analysis and residue calculus to recover exact expressions for transfer functions on the graph when d = 1. Moreover, we reduce the propagation of Fourier modes on the graph in the general case to the d = 1 case, and provide exact solutions for propagation in a layer of the graph with a finite depth. We also consider direction-dependent propagation (e.g. Mie scattering) and extend both the models and methods developed to this new regime. The mathematical tools developed in this paper may provide a framework for the future development of a model of thin scattering layers using graph theory.
On Multi-Phase and Multi-Stage Game-Theoretic Modeling of Advanced Persistent Threats

Advanced persistent threats (APT) are considered as a significant security threat today. Despite their diversity in nature and details, a common skeleton and sequence of phases can be identified that these attacks follow (in similar ways), which admits a game-theoretic description and analysis. This paper describes a general framework that divides a general APT into three major temporal phases, and fits an individual game model to each phase, connecting the games at the transition points between the phases (similarly to “milestones” accomplished during the launch of an APT). The theoretical description is derived from a running example. The benefit of this game-theoretic perspective is at least threefold, as it 1) helps to systematize the threat and respective mitigation actions (by turning them into pure strategies for the gameplay); 2) provides optimized actions for defense and attack, where the latter can be taken as a (non-unique) indication of neuralgic points; and 3) provides quantitative measures of resilience against an APT, in terms that can be defined freely by a security officer. We illustrate this approach with a numerical example.