Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF MOISTURE INGRESS ON THE PERFORMANCE AND SERVICE LIFE OF MASS TIMBER PANELS IN AUSTRALIAN CLIMATES- CHARACTERIZATION OUTCOMES

: Composite timber systems made of timber and massive wood products used in construction are susceptible to moisture fluctuations during transport, construction, and post-construction. The wetting dynamics, both ingress and egress, of Australian timber species and mass panels exposed to Australian climate conditions have not been extensively explored. Understanding moisture movement in timber is crucial for predicting the design life of timber products and developing decay modelling protocols. An experimental testing has been conducted in detail to comprehend water movement and moisture gradients in massive wood-based composites. The testing results presented in this paper include the density, porosity, gas, and liquid permeability of three Australian timber species (radiata pine, southern pine and shining gum). The experiments have been designed to explore the hygroscopic properties of timber species in different directions, including face, edge and end and of CLT (2P and 3P) and LVL sections. The porosity values for the three tested species were 56% ± 5, 57% ± 3 and 42% ± 8 for radiata pine, southern pine and shining gum respectively. The experimental results presented in this paper showed that CLT samples made from radiata pine with edge gap (3P) had higher porosity and permeability values than solid radiata sample sections. The CLT 2P sections had lower porosity values than the solid radiata pine samples. The porosity values determined for LVL (made from pine) samples (51% ± 3) were slightly lower than southern pine samples tested. The outcomes of this project will facilitate the prediction of product response to moisture and enable the development of maintenance protocols and remedial solutions for the industry to minimize the potential impacts of moisture penetration in mass timber products in the future.
System identification method inheriting steady-state characteristics of existing model

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose an identification method to construct a state-space model that inherits steady-state characteristics from an existing model. It is assumed that in prior to an identification experiment, a designer has a model which accurately expresses steady-state characteristics of an actual system responding to certain inputs. The characteristics are extracted and inherited to a reconstructed state-space model via the combination with a subspace identification method. By applying a change-of-variable technique, the combined identification problem, which is formulated as nonlinear optimisation, is reduced to a least squares problem. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method in three different numerical simulations.
Gas‐kinetic unified algorithm for two‐dimensional planar and axisymmetric nozzle flows

For high‐altitude nozzle or micronozzle flows and other gas flows in the slip or transition flow regime, how to solve it reliably has always been a difficult problem. In this paper, a unified gas kinetic expression is presented to describe the two‐dimensional planar and the axisymmetric nozzle flows, and the computable modeling of the Boltzmann equation is developed at the first time for the nozzle flows by introducing the gas molecular collision relaxing parameter and the local equilibrium distribution function integrated in the unified expression with the flow state controlling parameter, including the macroscopic flow variables, the gas viscosity transport coefficient, the thermodynamic effect, the molecular power law, and molecular models, covering a full spectrum of flow regimes. The boundary conditions involved in the nozzle flow have been mathematically expressed at the level of the gas molecular velocity distribution function, and the model equations have been solved uniformly by the gas‐kinetic unified algorithm (GKUA) for rarefied transition to continuum flows. The presented simulated results from the test cases show promising of simulating gas flow from transitional flow to continuum flow in the same flow domain, especially for those flow involving low‐speed gas flow in rarefied regime, which is otherwise practically difficult using direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC).
Controlled growth and spray deposition of silver nanowires for ITO‐free, flexible, and high brightness OLEDs

The next generation of electronic devices will require low cost materials and processing techniques that are fully compatible with flexible substrates and large area applications. Silver nanowires are promising candidates for many applications and can be processed by various solution‐based large area deposition techniques. In this work, high aspect ratio silver nanowires were synthesized via a polyol reduction of silver nitrate in the presence of a metal‐salt and a capping agent. The grown nanowires were spray coated and simply planarized with inkjet printed PEDOT:PSS to produce smooth and high performance nanocomposite electrodes suitable for industrial applications. The nanocomposite electrodes exhibit figure of merit values (σDC/σOP) of about 60, higher than the values required for industrial use (>35). High conductivity with high optical transparency was achieved by controlling the aspect ratio of the nanowires and their concentration in the films. The highly conductive and transparent electrodes were utilized to fabricate organic light emitting diodes, which exhibited high luminance (∼ 7 × 103 cd m−2) and performance comparable to a “benchmark” ITO electrode. The results show that the combination of the nanocomposite materials, together with the solution based techniques could pave the way towards flexible, solution processable, low cost, and large area device applications.
Diamond plasmonic terahertz detectors

This paper reports on the characteristics of the plasmonic phenomena in diamond FET devices at THz frequencies. We present a detailed numerical study of the terahertz resonant response of n-diamond TeraFETs as a function of temperature and channel length, demonstrate their potential for emerging terahertz applications, and compare their performance with that for p-diamond devices. The results show that short channel n-diamond TeraFETs exhibit a resonant response at room and cryogenic temperatures. We also report on the impact of the amplitude of the impinged THz signal and gate-to-channel separation on the induced voltage response. In our analysis, we have accounted for the effect of the viscosity of the electron fluid in the channel which is one of the major contributors to the damping of the plasma waves.
An Alpine Bouquet of Algebraic Topology

From a bimodule $M$ over an exact category $C$, we define an exact category $C\ltimes M$ with a projection down to $C$. This construction classifies certain split square zero extensions of exact categories. We show that the trace map induces an equivalence between the relative $K$-theory of $C\ltimes M$ and its relative topological cyclic homology. When applied to the bimodule $\hom(-,-\otimes_AM)$ on the category of finitely generated projective modules over a ring $A$ one recovers the classical Dundas-McCarthy theorem for split square zero extensions of rings.
Incorporating Biomarkers to Improve Statistical Power of Immunotherapeutic Neoadjuvant Clinical Trials in Patients with Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Abstract Neoadjuvant (preoperative) approach to breast cancer treatment has become widely accepted. Traditionally, the primary objective of neoadjuvant treatment is to improve subsequent surgical intervention and the effectiveness is often evaluated by its ability to achieve complete pathological response (pCR) and the eradication of the malignant disease in the breast and axillary lymph nodes. More recently, neoadjuvant treatment has also become recognized as an in vivo, preoperative” window of opportunity” to explore the efficacy of novel agents such as immunotherapies where several tumor biomarkers are also routinely collected to quantify antitumor immunity. However, one challenge to combine the traditional pCR and efficacy biomarkers is that these tumor biomarkers are only partially available and cannot be measured in patients who have achieved pCR. In this article, a stepwise hypothesis testing procedure is proposed to combine a continuous tumor biomarker with the conventional binary endpoint in a two-arm randomized phase II superiority trial to improve statistical power. The operating characteristics of the proposed procedure are illustrated with a real-world example and the performance is also evaluated numerically.
Innovating Professional Development Program for Teachers: From theory-based to a more collaborative, practical, and reflective perspective

Education and curriculum require a constant revision to attend the needs and assets of an everchanging society. In this sense, efforts to become more competent within the society have historically guided educators to engage in professional development programs that allow them to update and adjust their instructional practices for effective learning. However little improvement has been documented from using traditional theories and uncontextualized programs of professional development, mainly affecting learners’ academic success. The purpose of this study is (1) to explore how novel and experienced faculty members described their experience using Peer-Observation of Teaching as a novel structure to support their professional development; and (2) to discover whether a semester long intervention had an impact in the perception of teacher sense of efficacy of other faculty members and themselves. The study was applied for a semester long in three different higher education institutions across Ecuador. Data was gathered using a mixed method approach. For the qualitative part, a questionnaire with open-ended questions was given, followed by two rounds of focus groups; for the quantitative part, a peer-observation tool adapted from the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale was applied to measure teachers’ abilities and self-efficacy perspective. The quantitative data was analyzed based on the three variables (student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management) through a two-tails paired sample t-test using SPSS software considering an alpha score of . 05. The qualitative data was analyzed utilizing a constant comparative coding method. The results revealed differing degrees of experience based primarily on years of experience. While some experienced faculty members did not see much benefit in being observed from a less experienced peer, others expressed it was an opportunity to receive a fresh look at their performance. Novice faculty mostly saw benefits in being observed and provided feedback. Novice teachers did better on student engagement and instructional strategies while experienced faculty got higher scores in classroom management. It was concluded that using POT gave faculty members a valuable opportunity for a fresh and wise look at current teaching practices, as well as a space for improvement from two generations that complement each other.
Measurement Error in LASSO - Analytical Results and a Simulation Study

The LASSO (Tibshirani, 1996) is a powerful method which due to the fact that is uses a l 1-penalty allows for the estimation of regression coefficients and variable selection at the same time. An important property of the LASSO is that it can be applied even when the number of covariates p is larger than the number of observations n. This differs the LASSO from the popular OLS method which requires p < n. An assumption that is common to the vast majority of studies on the LASSO is that the design matrix X passed to the LASSO for performing linear regression contains perfect covariate measurements that do not suffer from additive measurement error. However, in practice where data corrupted by measurement errors or errors-invariable data are rather the norm than the exception, this assumption does not meet the truth. In this work, we studied the LASSO in the presence of additive measurement error in the design matrix. In doing so, we allowed for analytical results on the estimation and variable selection consistency of both the LASSO with perfect design and the naive LASSO with additive covariate measurement error. We performed a Monte Carlo simulation study to assess the finite sample performance of the OLS and the LASSO under matrix uncertainty. Thereby, we also computed the corresponding corrected estimates. In particular, we used the well-known reliability ratio (Fuller, 1987) for the OLS estimates and a reliability ratio-like factor according to Sørensen et al. (2014) for the naive LASSO estimates in the presence of measurement error. In summary, we found that the MSE values of both the naive LASSO and the naive OLS increase with growing measurement error variance and covariate correlation. With respect to the corrected LASSO and OLS estimates, our results suggest that there does not exist any overall evidence of the efficacy of the applied measurement error correction factors. Especially, the MSE values of the corrected estimates tend to be larger than the ones for the naive estimators. However, we found that the empirical averages of the MSE values were inflated by a few outliers and that the occurrence of outliers was due to the bad conditioning of a matrix which contributes to the correction factor. Moreover, our simulation results suggest that the coincidence of high covariate correlation and large measurement error variance leads the LASSO to be more or less unable to differ between important and unimportant …
The aid of colour on visuospatial navigation of elderly people in a virtual polyclinic environment

Correspondence Ozge Kumoglu Suzer, Ph.D. Candidate, Bilkent University, Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 06800, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey. Email: ozge.kumoglu@bilkent.edu. tr Abstract It is well documented that elderly people often have difficulties in finding their way in unfamiliar environments. In this study, we aimed to explore the usage of colour as visuospatial navigation tool for elderly people by testing in a virtually simulated polyclinic environment. We compared neutral, warm and cool coloured experiment settings to find out the effect of different colours on elderly people's visuospatial navigation performances. We conducted our experiment with 90 participants in two phases, each with a specific task (Route Replication and Picture Classification). The findings showed that neutral coloured setting affected participants' visuospatial navigation performances negatively compared to warm and cool coloured settings. However, there was no significant performance difference between warm and cool coloured environments. In addition to that, when they were asked to reach to the destination point, male participants spent shorter time, did fewer wrong turns, experienced fewer hesitations and traveled shorter distances compared to female participants. Currently, due to the increase in the elderly population, designing well-functioning interior spaces for the elderly has become a more pressing matter. We believe that the findings of this study will provide important clues for both interior designers and environmental psychologists.
Discrimination and quantification of autofluorescence spectra of human lung cells

To study laser-induced autofluorescence spectroscopy of the human lung cell line, we evaluated the native fluorescence properties of cancer QU-DB and normal MRC-5 human lung cells during continuous exposure to 405 nm laser light. Two emission bands centered at ~470 nm and ~560 nm were observed. These peaks are most likely attributable to mitochondrial fluorescent reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and riboflavin fluorophores, respectively. This article highlights lung cell autofluorescence characterization and signal discrimination by collective investigation of different spectral features. The absolute intensity, the spectral shape factor or redox ratio, the full width of half-maximum and the full width of quarter maximum was evaluated. Moreover, the intensity ratio, the area under the peak and the area ratio as a contrast factor for normal and cancerous cells were also calculated. Among all these features it seems that the contrast factor precisely and significantly discriminates the spectral differences of normal and cancerous lung cells. On the other hand, the relative quantum yield for both cell types were found by comparing the quantum yield of an unknown compound with known fluorescein sodium as a reference solution.
Internet Traffic Forecasting Model using Self Organizing Map and Support Vector Regression Method

Internet traffic forecasting is one of important aspect in order to fulfill the customer demand. So, the service quality of internet service provider (ISP) can be maintained at the good level. In this study self organizing map (SOM) and support vector regression (SVR) algorithm are used as forecasting method. SOM is first used to decompose the whole historical data of traffic internet into clusters, while SVR is used to build a forecasting model in each cluster. This method is used to forecast ISPs traffic internet in Jakarta and surrounding areas. The result of this study shows that SOM-SVR method gives more accurate result with smaller error value compared to that of the SVR method.
Tiling Dense Hypergraphs

There are three essentially necessary conditions for perfect tilings in hypergraphs, which correspond to barriers in space, divisibility and covering. It is natural to ask when these conditions are asymptotically sufficient. Our main result confirms this for hypergraph families that are approximately closed under taking a typical induced subgraph of constant order. As an application, we recover and extend a series of well-known results for perfect tilings in hypergraphs and related settings involving vertex orderings and rainbow structures.
Performance of the Restarted Homotopy Perturbation Method and Split Bregman Method for Multiplicative Noise Removal

In this paper, we first propose restarted homotopy perturbation methods (RHPM) for multiplicative noise removal of the RLO and AA2 models. The main difficulty in applying the RHPM to the nonlinear denoising problem is settled by using binomial series techniques. We next propose the split Bregman methods for multiplicative noise removal of the RLO and AA2 models. The difficulty in applying the split Bregman method to the nonlinear denoising problem can be handled by transforming ill-conditioned linear systems into well-conditioned linear systems using splitting techniques of singular matrices. Lastly, numerical experiments for several test problems are provided to demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of the RHPM and split Bregman methods.
Enhancing of nominal characteristic trajectory following control for motion systems

The goal of this paper is to enhance a practical nominal characteristic trajectory following (NCTF) controller that is specifically designed for two-mass point-to-point positioning systems. A nominal characteristics trajectory contained in the NCTF controller acts as movement/motion reference and a compensator is utilized to force the object to detect and follow the reference/desired trajectory. The object must follow and track closely and should be as fast as possible. The NCTF controller is designed with two different intelligent based compensator approaches which are fuzzy logic and extended minimal resource allocation network. The proposed controller which is NCTF are compared with the conventional proportional integral compensator. Then the results of simulation are discussed for the positioning performances. The inertia variations due to the effect of the design parameters are also assessed to see the robustness of controllers. The results show that the NCTF control method designed from an intelligent based compensator has a better positioning performance in terms of percentage of overshoot, settling time, and steady state error than the classical based compensator.
A Digital Camera-Based Eye Movement Assessment Method for NeuroEye Examination

The ability to perform quantitative and automated neurological assessment could enhance diagnosis and treatment in the pre-hospital setting, such as during telemedicine or emergency medical services (EMS) encounters. Such a tool could be developed by adapting clinically significant information such as symmetry of eye movement or conjugate eye movement. Here we describe a digital camera-based eye tracking method “NeuroGaze” to capture the symmetry of eye movement while performing neurological eye examination. The proposed method was developed based on detecting the center of the pupil for both eyes from a given video and measuring eye conjugacy by transforming the pupil center coordinates to relative gaze. The method was tested on healthy volunteers while performing three neurological eye examinations1. We also compared our proposed approach to state-of-the-art digital camera-based eye-tracking methods and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) eye trackers. NeuroGaze outperformed digital camera-based eye tracking methods by reporting a mean Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient of 0.86 for the H-test, 0.87 for the Dot-test, and 0.56 for the OKN-Test, and shows similarity in trends for the relative gaze trajectories with a noticeable offset in the scale of the relative gaze angle compared to COTS eye tracker (see Fig. 1). The study demonstrates that by using a pupil-center-based eye-tracking method, a digital camera can measure clinically relevant information regarding eye movement.
Lie group analysis of second-order non-linear neutral delay differential equations

Lie group analysis is applied to second order neutral delay differential equations (NDDEs) to study the properties of the solution by the classification scheme. NDDE is a delay differential equation which contains the derivatives of the unknown function both with and without delays. It turns out that in many cases where retarded delay differential equation (RDDE) fail to model a problem, NDDE provides a solution. This paper extends the classification of second order non-linear RDDE to solvable Lie algebra to that for second order non-linear NDDE. In this classification the second order extension of the general infinitesimal generator acting on second order neutral delay is used to determine the determining equations. Then the resulting equations are solved, and the solvable Lie algebra is obtained, satisfying the inclusion property. Finally, one-parameter Lie groups which are corresponding to NDDEs are determined. This approach provides a theoretical background for constructing invariant solutions.
Drought Impact on the Morpho-Physiological Parameters of Perennial Rhizomatous Grasses in the Mediterranean Environment

The selection of non-food crops for bioenergy production in limiting environments is a priority for energy security and climate change mitigation. Therefore, more studies are needed on the interactions between species and environmental factors in specific sites which allows their selection for biomass production. The objective of this work is to study the impact of drought on the morpho-physiological parameters of perennial rhizomatous grasses Panicum virgatum L. , Miscanthus × giganteus, and Arundo donax L. in the Mediterranean environment. Plants were grown on field and trials were carried out under support-irrigation and rainfed conditions during two consecutive years. Morpho-physiological parameters were measured in May, June and August, and dry biomass at the end of the experiment. Under rainfed conditions, A. donax presented the highest photosynthesis rate (25, 15 and 10 CO2 m−2 s−1), relative water content (85–90%), and dry biomass (~4500 g plant−1) compared with P. virgatum (20, 5 and 5 CO2 m−2 s−1, 65–85% RWC and ~1400 g plant−1) and Miscanthus (18, 4 and 0 CO2 m−2 s−1, 80–10% RWC and ~260 g plant−1). It is concluded that A. donax would be the best perennial rhizomatous grass to be used as bioenergy crop under Mediterranean conditions.