Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CaCO mineralization in polymer composites with cellulose nanocrystals providing a chiral nematic mesomorphic structure

: CaCO 3 mineralization was carried out using cellulose nanocrystal (CNC)/polymer composites wherein a chiral nematic structure of CNC assembly was immobilized in advance via a polymerization process of the precursory aqueous CNC/vinyl monomer lyotropics (7–11 wt% CNC in feed). Two series of polymer composites were prepared: CNC/poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA) and CNC/poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate-co -acrylic acid) (P(HEMA-co -AA), HEMA:AA = 95:5–70:30 in mol). The mineralization was allowed to proceed solely by soaking the composite films in a salt solution containing Ca 2+ and HCO 3− under a low-basic condition (pH ≤ 9). Polymorphism of CaCO 3 deposited inside the films was examined by X-ray diffractometry as a function of the soaking time (1–5 day) and also of the matrix composition. In the CNC/PHEMA series, the polymorphic form changed from amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) (1-day soaking) to metastable crystalline vaterite (3-day soaking) and then to a mixture of vaterite and aragonite (5-day soaking). In the mineralization of the CNC/P(HEMA-co -AA) series, the formation of stable calcite was prominent besides minor appearance of vaterite. It was deduced that the mesofiller
Irish farmers’ afforestation intentions

Factors influencing Irish farmers’ afforestation intentions Authors(s) Duesberg, Stefanie, Upton, Vincent, Ní Dhubháin, Áine Publication date 2014-02 Publication information Duesberg, Stefanie, Vincent Upton, and Áine Ní Dhubháin. “Factors Influencing Irish Farmers’ Afforestation Intentions” 39 (February, 2014). Publisher Elsevier Item record/more information http://hdl.handle. net/10197/9402 Publisher's statement This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Forest Policy and Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Forest Policy and Economics (39 (February 2014)) DOI:10.1016/j.forpol. 2013.11. 004 Publisher's version (DOI) 10.1016/j.forpol. 2013.11. 004
2. Exploring TV Seriality and Television Studies through Data-Driven Approaches

The article discusses the use of data-driven approaches in television studies, which has become possible due to the increasing availability of digital data. Computational techniques can be used to analyze cultural artifacts, gain insights into audience reactions to specific shows or episodes, and investigate patterns and trends in television programming over time. The article also highlights the challenges of analyzing television series, which are complex open systems that interact with external factors such as the production process, audience feedback, and cultural and social context. Content analysis, which involves qualitative and quantitative methods based on the coding process and data collection, can be used to analyze various elements of a TV series. Generative AI is also discussed, which refers to the use of deep multimodal algorithms to generate new content such as images, speech, and text. Generative methods like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Stable Diffusion can create new content that is almost indistinguishable from real data. While generating videos is more challenging, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) like LSTMs can capture the temporal dynamics of the scenes to create interesting and promising applications for complex, but short duration videos.
Vertebroplasty or kyphoplasty as palliative treatment for cancer-related vertebral compression fractures a systematic review

Background Context: Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) and kyphoplasty (KP) are minimally invasive treatment options for VCFs due to malignancy. Purpose: To perform a systematic review evaluating the effectiveness and safety of vertebral augmentation for malignant vertebral compression fractures (VCFs). Study
GENERATION OF HIGH-CHARGE MAGNETIZED ELECTRON BEAMS CONSISTENT WITH JLEIC ELECTRON COOLING REQUIREMENTS ∗

The proposed Jeﬀerson Lab Electron-Ion Collider (JLEIC), currently under design, relies on electron cooling in order to achieve the desired luminosity. This includes an electron beam with >55 Mev, 3.2 nC bunches that cools hadron beams with energies up to 100 GeV. To enhance cooling, the electron beam must be magnetized with a speciﬁc eigen-emittance partition. This paper explores the use of the Fermilab Accelerator Science and Technology (FAST) facility to demonstrate the generation of an electron beam with parameters consistent with those required in the JLEIC high-energy cooler. We demonstrate via simulations the generation of the required electron-beam parameters and perform a preliminary experiment to validate FAST capabilities to produce such beams.
Symbols, Group Identity and the Hold-Up Problem

Groups, companies, and organizations identify themselves via symbols. Symbols have the potential to create group identity and at the same time create group boundaries, thus allowing for achieving the benefits of cooperation by ingroup members. We use a laboratory experiment to study the role of group identity, created by the use of symbols, in mitigating the hold-up problem. As a team symbol we employ color t-shirts. We find that the usage of t-shirts itself does not create a strong enough group identity to mitigate the hold-up problem. However, in our previous research, we found that group identity created by t-shirts and a group chat aimed to help team members to solve a task is capable of resolving the hold-up problem. These findings are consistent with the everyday practice where organizations often make significant investments in team-building and socialization activities, suggesting that an important objective of such activities might be to strengthen group identity so that it is effective even in highly strategic environments.
Reconﬁgurable Hardware for Microarchitectural Timing Attacks Detection

—Software-based microarchitectural timing attacks evolve quickly, exploiting hardware design properties that widely affect both general-purpose processors and embedded processors. Among the means of attack detection, hardware monitoring ben-eﬁts from less overhead and less power consumption compared to software monitoring. Nevertheless, as usual hardware cannot be upgraded, the efﬁciency of a hardware monitor device component cannot be guaranteed against future attacks. In this paper, we study the feasibility of using reconﬁgurable hardware alongside software attacks detection to cope with microarchitectural timing attacks. We propose to use the hardware’s capability of parallel execution, to deal with the problem that reconﬁgurable technologies suffer from a lower frequency than hardwired technologies. This architecture is designed to adapt to new attacks, because the processor can decide to reconﬁgure the detection logic to take them into consideration. We brieﬂy present an implementation of a proof of concept on FPGA to validate our design.
University of Birmingham The effect of wetting and drying on the performance of stabilized subgrade soils

Stabilization methods are often utilized to improve the performance of road pavement subgrades which are weak or susceptible to small changes in moisture content. However, although a variety of performance models for natural materials have been developed and incorporated within road pavement design methodologies little research attention has been given to the characterization of similar performance models for stabilized subgrade soils. To address this, the research reported herein describes and discusses the results of a laboratory testing programme, incorporating cycles of wetting and drying, for a number of stabilized subgrade soils to determine the resilient behaviour and permanent deformation characteristics of the soils. The results from the experiments were used to characterize six models of subgrade soil permanent deformation performance identified from the literature and from these to develop a new improved model of performance which incorporates resilient behaviour. A comparison of the existing models of permanent deformation showed that those which consider stress state in addition to the number of load repetitions are better able to predict permanent deformation than those which consider the number of load cycles only. Samples subject to wetting and drying exhibited significantly greater permanent deformation and had lower values of resilient modulus than those which were not subject to wetting and drying. The usefulness of the results for analytical road pavement design are demonstrated by using a back-analysis procedure to determine appropriate resilient modulus values to characterise an analytical model of a road pavement together with the performance models to predict road pavement subgrade performance under cumulative applications of traffic load. Accordingly, the results show the importance of adequately replicating material behaviour
Distribution of Diffusion Measures from a Local Mean-Square Displacement Analysis

In cell biology, time-resolved ﬂuctuation analysis of tracer particles has recently gained great importance. One such method is the local mean-square displacement (MSD) analysis, which provides an estimate of two parameters as functions of time: the exponent of growth of the MSD and the diffusion coefﬁcient. Here, we study the joint and marginal distributions of these parameters for Brownian motion with Gaussian velocity ﬂuctuations, including the cases of vanishing correlations (overdamped Brownian motion) and of a ﬁnite negative velocity correlation (as observed in intracellular motion). Numerically, we demonstrate that a small number of MSD points is optimal for the estimation of the diffusion measures. Motivated by this observation, we derive an analytic approximation for the joint and marginal probability densities of the exponent and diffusion coefﬁcient for the special case of two MSD points. These analytical results show good agreement with numerical simulations for sufﬁciently large window sizes. Our results might promote better statistical analysis of intracellular motility.
Title : Regenerating tropical forests are consistently affected by biological invasions across spatial scales

Biological invasions are complex scale-dependent processes. Metacommunity ecology provides the means to understand the effects of invasive non-native species (INNS) because it explicitly considers how local and regional processes interact to drive the three main components of biodiversity: alpha, beta, and gamma. White-popinac (Leucaena leucocephala (Lam.) de Wit) is a widely distributed INNS in regenerating forests in the Atlantic Forest (Brazil). White-popinac invasions results in a particular spatial structure as the species forms dense and homogeneous patches, instead of spreading individuals throughout invaded areas. Here we took advantage of this unique spatial configuration formed by patches of native forest, regenerating areas, and patches of white-popinac to investigate how local and regional dynamics of plant (meta-)communities under natural regeneration are affected by whitepopinac. We conducted replicated multi-strata surveys in 131 communities distributed among 29 metacommunities of regenerating forests that had different ages of white-popinac invasion. We found (i) mirrored responses among local and regional scales: at both scales, native species richness decreased with the increase of invasion age, whereas INNS richness increased; and (ii) β-diversity of native species
A Mixed Regularization Method for Ill-Posed Problems

In this paper we propose a mixed regularization method for ill-posed problems. This method combines iterative regularization methods and continuous regularization methods effectively. First it applies iterative regularization methods in which there is no continuous regularization parameter to solve the normal equation of the illposed problem. Then continuous regularization methods are applied to solve its residual problem. The presented mixed regularization algorithm is a general framework. Any iterative regularization method and continuous regularization method can be combined together to construct a mixed regularization method. Our theoretical analysis shows that the new mixed regularization method is with optimal order of error estimation and can reach the optimal order under a much wider range of the regularization parameter than the continuous regularization method such as Tikhobov regularization. Moreover, the new mixed regularization method can reduce the sensitivity of the regularization parameter and improve the solution of continuous regularization methods or iterative regularization methods. This advantage is helpful when the optimal regularization parameter is hard to choose. The numerical computations illustrate the effectiveness of our new mixed regularization method. AMS subject classifications: 65F22, 35R25, 35R30, 65N20, 65N21
Conceptual design of a large pixelated CZT detector with four-hole collimator matched pixel detector for SPECT imaging: a Monte Carlo simulation study

Significant progress has been achieved in the design of pixelated CZT detectors dedicated to cardiac and breast SPECT imaging. However, their detector geometry and associated collimators' design have limited their clinical use. The aim of this work is to determine the best combination between a large pixelated CZT detector and parallel-hole collimator that can provide high spatial resolution at low injected activity with low-energy radiotracers. Our proposed combination resulted in the design of a novel four-hole matched pixel detector (4-HMPD) configuration. Our novel 4-HMPD design based on large pixelated CZT detector was firstly compared to the standard one-hole matched pixel detector (1-HMPD) configuration using Monte Carlo simulation. We have also predicted the influence of pixel size, interpixel gap and source-to-collimator distance on the basis of resulting spatial resolution, sensitivity and crosstalk events fraction for three collimator hole lengths for Tc-99m (140 keV) . Thereafter, we used the same detector and collimator settings of the 1-HMPD configuration as constructed with the D-SPECT camera module (Redlen Technologies, BC, Canada) for our 4-HMPD design to compare the performance of the two configurations. Our preliminary results showed that a large pixel size, a small interpixel gap and a small collimator hole length increased significantly the sensitivity at the detriment of spatial resolution. The performance comparison between the 4-HMPD and the 1-HMPD configurations demonstrated an improved reconstructed spatial resolution (by a factor two), higher contrast with the large sphere of the modified Jaszczak phantom (from 63.1% to 39.1%), clear appearance of cold spheres (>14 mm diameter) and the cold cylinders (> 11.1 mm diameter). The crosstalk events fraction varied from 8.5% to 12.8%. Our novel detector/collimator combination allows less electronic readout complexity, less crosstalk events between pixels and twofold increase in septal thickness resulting in low septal penetration compared to the classical 1-HMPD configuration. It also showed the highest enhancement in terms of spatial resolution even in cases of low sensitivity with less injected activity, and outperformed the performance of existing conventional NaI (TI) crystal-based systems.
The Microeconomics of Cocaine Production and Trafficking in Colombia (La Microeconomía De La Producción Y Tráfico De Cocaína En Colombia)

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the microeconomics of cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia. The chapter first presents a brief description of the evolution over time of the aggregate figures on the production of cocaine, then focusing on describing in detail each link in the production chain. In particular, based on the information available, this chapter describes the major costs and revenues in each step of the process and provides an estimate of the flow of these illegal resources into the Colombian economy. The stages of production of cocaine chydrochloride starts with activities characterized by rural economies, including low value-added processing, production at low and medium scales, the participation of illegal armed groups in those stages concerning large generation of aggregate value, and complex networks for the distribution cocaine and the chemical precursors necessary to produce it. According to our estimates, the total size of this illegal business in Colombia in 2008 amounted to $13.6 billion pesos (about 2.3% of GDP), distributed as follows. $1.2 billion correspond to the value of coca leaf production; $0.8 billion to the value added in the transformation of coca leaf into coca base, and $2 billion to the transformation of coca base into cocaine; finally, despite no change in the final product (only in its location), we estimate that most of the value added, $9.6 billion, is generated at the trafficking stage. (Este capitulo presenta una radiografia detallada de la microeconomia de la produccion y trafico de cocaina en Colombia. El capitulo presenta una breve descripcion de la evolucion en el tiempo de las cifras agregadas sobre produccion de cocaina y luego se concentra en describir en detalle cada eslabon de la cadena de produccion. En particular, se describen los principales costos e ingresos en cada eslabon y, con base en la informacion disponible, se presenta una estimacion de los flujos de recursos que se mueven en la economia colombiana producto de estas actividades ilegales. Las fases de produccion del clorhidrato de cocaina comprenden desde procesos de economia campesina, que incluye transformaciones de bajo valor agregado, produccion a baja y mediana escala de base de coca, participacion de actores armados ilegales en los eslabones de mayor generacion de valor agregado, y complejas redes de distribucion de precursores y control sobre las rutas del narcotrafico. Nuestros estimativos indican que, con datos a 2008, el tamano del negocio de produccion y trafico de cocaina en Colombia es de aproximadamente $13.6 billones de pesos (2.3% del PIB), valor agregado que se distribuye asi: $1.2 billones corresponden al valor de la hoja de coca producida; $0.8 billones al valor agregado de la base de coca; $2 billones al valor agregado de la transformacion de base en clorhidrato de cocaina; y $9.6 billones al valor generado en el eslabon del trafico. )
Antecedents for Enhanced Level of Cyber-Security in Organizations

Purpose: This study aims to identify and investigate the antecedents fo r an enhanced level of cyber-security at the organisational level, from both the technical and the human resource perspective, using Human–Organization–Technology (HOT) theory. Design/methodology/approach: The study has been conducted on 151 professionals who have expertise in cyber-security in Indian organisations in sectors such as retail, education, healthcare, etc. The analysis of the data is carried out using Partial Least Squares based Structural Equation Modelling technique. Findings: The results suggest that ‘legal consequences’ and ‘technical measures’ are the most important antecedents for an enhanced cyber-security level in the organisations. The other significant antecedents include ‘role of senior management’ and ‘proactive information security’. Implications : This empirical study has significant implications for organisations as they can take pre-emptive measures by focusing on the important antecedents and work towards enhancing the level of cyber-security. Originality/value: The originality of this study is combination of technical and human resource perspectives in identifying the determinants fo r an enhanced level of cyber-security in the organizations.
Do Sunk Costs of Exporting Matter for Net Export Dynamics?

Not all firms export every period. Firms enter and exit foreign markets. Previous research has suggested that these export participation decisions have significant aggregate implications. In particular, it has been argued that these export decisions are important for the comovements of net exports and the real exchange rate. In this paper, the authors evaluate these predictions in a general equilibrium environment. Specifically, assuming that firms face an up-front, sunk cost of entering foreign markets and a smaller period-by-period continuation cost, they derive the discrete entry and exit decisions yielding exporter dynamics in an otherwise standard equilibrium open economy business cycle model. The authors show that the export decisions of firms in the model are infuenced by the business cycle in a manner consistent with evidence presented for U.S. exporters. However, in contrast to previous partial equilibrium analyses, model results reveal that the aggregate effects of these export decisions are negligible.
A Serious Leisure Perspective of Culinary Tourism Co-Creation: The Influence of 1 Prior Knowledge, Physical Environment, and Service Quality 2

3 Purpose: Recognising tourists’ increasing desire for authentic destination-specific 4 experiences, the hospitality industry has responded by increasing provision of innovative 5 culinary activities. This study uses the concepts of serious leisure and terroir to examine how 6 knowledge, physical environment, and service quality influence co-creation within the 7 culinary tourism context. 8 Design/methodology/approach: Following cooking class participation, 575 domestic Iranian 9 tourists were surveyed. These educational classes provide opportunities to learn about local 10 foods alongside peers in an interactive setting. Consistent with the benefits of serious leisure, 11 this consumption context could prove conducive to stimulating co-creation. 12 Findings: Prior knowledge strongly influences tourists’ reflective and recreational motives 13 for participation (i.e., the benefits of serious leisure). This shapes how tourists evaluate 14 physical environments and service quality therein; influencing value co-creation and 15 supporting serious leisure as the conceptual lens through which to understand experiential 16 culinary consumption.
Carbon Dioxide, Hydrographic, and Chemical Data Obtained During the R/V Meteor Cruise 28/1 in the South Atlantic Ocean (WOCE Section A8, March 29 - May 12, 1994)

This data documentation discusses the procedures and methods used to measure total carbon dioxide (TCO{sub 2}) and the fugacity of CO{sub 2} (fCO{sub 2}) at hydrographic stations during the R/V Meteor oceanographic cruise 28/1 in the South Atlantic Ocean (Section A8). Conducted as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), the cruise began in Recife, Brazil, on March 29, 1994, and ended after 35 days at sea in Walvis Bay, Namibia, on May 12, 1994. Instructions for accessing the data are provided. TCO{sub 2} was measured using two single-operator multiparameter metabolic analyzers (SOMMA) coupled to a coulometer for extracting and detecting CO{sub 2} from seawater samples. The overall precision and accuracy of the analyses was {+-}1.17 {micro}mol/kg. For the second carbonate system parameter, the fCO{sub 2} was measured in discrete samples by equilibrating a known volume of liquid phase (seawater) with a known volume of a gas phase containing a known mixture of CO{sub 2} in gaseous nitrogen (N{sub 2}). After equilibration, the gas phase CO{sub 2} concentration was determined by flame ionization detection following the catalytic conversion of CO{sub 2} to methane (CH{sub 4}). The precision of these measurements was less than or equal to 1.0%. The R/V Meteor Cruise 28/1 data set is available free of charge as a numeric data package (NDP) from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. The NDP consists of two oceanographic data files, two FORTRAN 90 data retrieval routine files, a readme file, and this printed documentation that describes the contents and format of all files as well as the procedures and methods used to obtain the data.