Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electronic correlations and crystal structure distortions in BaBiO3

BaBiO3 is a material where Bi4+ ions with half-filled 6s-states form an alternating set of Bi3+ and Bi5+ ions resulting in a charge ordered insulator. The charge ordering is accompanied by breathing distortion of the BiO6 octahedra (extension and contraction of the Bi–O bond lengths). Standard density functional theory (DFT) calculations fail to obtain the crystal structure instability caused by the pure breathing distortions. Combining effects of the breathing distortions and tilting of the BiO6 octahedra allows DFT to reproduce qualitatively an experimentally observed insulator with monoclinic crystal structure but strongly underestimates the breathing distortion parameter and energy gap values. In the present work we reexamine the BaBiO3 problem within the GGA + U method using a Wannier function basis set for the Bi 6s-band. Due to the high oxidation state of bismuth in this material, the Bi 6s-symmetry Wannier function is predominantly extended spatially on surrounding oxygen ions and hence differs strongly from a pure atomic 6s-orbital. That is in sharp contrast to transition metal oxides (with exclusion of high oxidation state compounds) where the major part of the d-band Wannier function is concentrated on the metal ion and a pure atomic d-orbital can serve as a good approximation. The GGA + U calculation results agree well with experimental data, in particular with experimental crystal structure parameters and energy gap values. Moreover, the GGA + U method allows one to reproduce the crystal structure instability due to the pure breathing distortions without octahedra tilting.
Negative effects of smoking, workers’ compensation, and litigation on pain/disability scores for spine patients

Background: When initiating treatment for patients with spinal disorders, we examined the impact of smoking, workers compensation, and litigation on disability and pain scores. Methods: With Institutional Review Board approval, the medical records of 13,704 consecutive patients with spinal disorders treated at two university spine centers were reviewed. Particular attention was focused on the pretreatment impact of three variables: smoking, workers compensation, and litigation. All patients completed a questionnaire that included a modified Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), a visual analog pain scale (VAS) and a history of smoking, workers compensation, and/or litigation issues. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with Bonferroni (when appropriate) was used to analyze the data. Results: ODI scores significantly correlated with a smoking history: Current Smoker > Previous Smoker > Never Smoked (44.22 > 38.11 > 36.02, respectively). Pain scores and ODI scores had a direct correlation to workers compensation and litigation status. Workers compensation, litigation and smoking combined created even higher scores. There was no significant difference between previous smokers and nonsmokers. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that a history of smoking, workers compensation, and/or litigation, considered alone or worse, combined, negatively impacted outcomes for patients seeking treatment at our spine centers. For optimal outcomes in spine patients, cessation of smoking and treatment of attendant psychological and social factors prove critical.
On the Interpretation of the ENSO Signal Embedded in the Stable Isotopic Composition of Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru

The δ18O signal in ice cores from the Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC), Peru, corresponds with and has been used to reconstruct Niño region sea surface temperatures (SSTs), but the physical mechanisms that tie El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)‐related equatorial Pacific SSTs to snow δ18O at 5,680 m in the Andes have not been fully established. We use a proxy system model to simulate how QIC snow δ18O varies by ENSO phase. The model accurately simulates higher and lower δ18O values during El Niño and La Niña, respectively. We then explore the relative roles of ENSO forcing on different components of the forward model: (i) the seasonality and amount of snow gain and loss at the QIC, (ii) the initial water vapor δ18O values, and (iii) regional temperature. Most (more than two thirds) of the ENSO‐related variability in the QIC δ18O can be accounted for by ENSO's influence on South American summer monsoon (SASM) activity and the resulting change in the initial water vapor isotopic composition. The initial water vapor δ18O values are affected by the strength of upstream convection associated with the SASM. Since convection over the Amazon is enhanced during La Niña, the water vapor over the western Amazon Basin—which serves as moisture source for snowfall on QIC—is characterized by more negative δ18O values. In the forward model, higher initial water vapor δ‐values during El Niño yield higher snow δ18O at the QIC. Our results clarify that the ENSO‐related isotope signal on Quelccaya should not be interpreted as a simple temperature response.
Solid Electrolyte Interphase in Li-Ion Batteries: Evolving Structures Measured In situ by Neutron Reflectometry

Li-ion batteries are made possible by the solid electrolyte interphase, SEI, a self-forming passivation layer, generated because of electrolyte instability with respect to the anode chemical potential. Ideally it offers sufficient electronic resistance to limit electrolyte decomposition to the amount needed for its formation. However, slow continued SEI growth leads to capacity fade and increased cell resistance. Despite the SEI’s critical significance, currently structural characterization is incomplete because of the reactive and delicate nature of the SEI and the electrolyte system in which it is formed. Here we present, for the first time, in situ neutron reflectometry measurements of the SEI layer as function of potential in a working lithium half-cell. The SEI layer after 10 and 20 CV cycles is 4.0 and 4.5 nm, respectively, growing to 8.9 nm after a series of potentiostatic holds that approximates a charge/discharge cycle. Specified data sets show uniform mixing of SEI components.
Outcome of 622 Adults With Asymptomatic, Hemodynamically Significant Aortic Stenosis During Prolonged Follow-Up

Background—This study assessed the long-term outcome of a large, asymptomatic population with hemodynamically significant aortic stenosis (AS). Methods and Results—We identified 622 patients with isolated, asymptomatic AS and peak systolic velocity ≥4 m/s by Doppler echocardiography who did not undergo surgery at the initial evaluation and obtained follow-up (5.4±4.0 years) in all. Mean age (±SD) was 72±11 years; there were 384 (62%) men. The probability of remaining free of cardiac symptoms while unoperated was 82%, 67%, and 33% at 1, 2, and 5 years, respectively. Aortic valve area and left ventricular hypertrophy predicted symptom development. During follow-up, 352 (57%) patients were referred for aortic valve surgery and 265 (43%) patients died, including cardiac death in 117 (19%). The 1-, 2-, and 5-year probabilities of remaining free of surgery or cardiac death were 80%, 63%, and 25%, respectively. Multivariate predictors of all-cause mortality were age (hazard ratio [HR], 1.05; P<0.0001), chronic renal failure (HR, 2.41; P=0.004), inactivity (HR, 2.00; P=0.001), and aortic valve velocity (HR, 1.46; P=0.03). Sudden death without preceding symptoms occurred in 11 (4.1%) of 270 unoperated patients. Patients with peak velocity ≥4.5 m/s had a higher likelihood of developing symptoms (relative risk, 1.34) or having surgery or cardiac death (relative risk, 1.48). Conclusions—Most patients with asymptomatic, hemodynamically significant AS will develop symptoms within 5 years. Sudden death occurs in ≈1%/y. Age, chronic renal failure, inactivity, and aortic valve velocity are independently predictive of all-cause mortality.
Accumulated-Downtime-Oriented Restoration Strategy With Service Differentiation in Survivable WDM Mesh Networks

Telecommunications service providers (SP) should place survivability expectations by guaranteeing maximal allowed system downtime for service-level agreement (SLA)-differentiated services. Furthermore, SPs should continuously focus on utilizing network resources effectively, by considering the bounded network capacity and the growth of future data traffic. In order to improve different service availabilities and achieve high resource efficiency, we present a novel restoration scheme by jointly considering accumulated downtime and SLA requirements of faulty connections. While most past related works have focused on providing statistical guarantees on availability when a connection is provisioned, our current approach recognizes that, after a connection has been in existence, it could be ldquoaheadrdquo (or ldquobehindrdquo) its performance guarantee based on what network outages it might have experienced, so the resources allocated to it may be revised judiciously. When a link failure occurs, two sets of faulty connections are examined: (a) connections whose primary or restoration path is disrupted by the failure and (b) connections that are in the ldquodownrdquo state due to some previous failures (which have not been repaired yet). An affected connection is switched to its pre-computed or an alternate restoration path if necessary, when its accumulated downtime plus the link repair time will exceed its SLA requirement. The scheme provides differentiated restoration to existing connections upon a link failure in order to satisfy the connectionspsila availability requirements. We also propose an upgraded version of the scheme that incorporates both excess capacity and resource preemption into the scheme. Given the network capacities and the current network state including routing information for all existing connections, a faulty connection is restored to its restoration path as long as there is enough excess capacity along the path. Otherwise, when protection switching of a high-SLA connection fails due to limited bandwidth on some link(s), it preempts restoration capacity on each link from a low-SLA connection if both disrupted connections share the same restoration capacity and the availability requirement of the low-SLA connection is not violated. Finally, we report simulation results for a large carrier-scale network to show computational performance of our proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves a high availability satisfaction rate and good resource utilization, as well as greatly reduces protection-switching overhead.
Causally Ordered Message Delivery in Mobile Systems

There is a growing trend in using mobile computing environment for several applications, and It is important that the mobile systems are provided adequate support both at the systems level and at the communication level. Causal ordering is a useful property, particularly in applications that involve human intcractions. In this paper, we present three algorithms for causal ordering in mobile systems. The first algorithm handles the resource constraints of the mobile hosts. But the system is not easily scalable and is not graceful to host disconnections and connections. The second algorithm eliminates the above disadvantages at the Cost of inhibiting some messages. The third algorithm is a trade-off between thc first two algorithms.
A global-state-triggered fault injector for distributed system evaluation

Validation of the dependability of distributed systems via fault injection is gaining importance because distributed systems are being increasingly used in environments with high dependability requirements. The fact that distributed systems can fail in subtle ways that depend on the state of multiple parts of the system suggests that a global-state-based fault injection mechanism should be used to validate them. However, global-state-based fault injection is challenging since it is very difficult in practice to maintain the global state of a distributed system at runtime with minimal intrusion into the system execution. We present Loki, a global-state-based fault injector, which has been designed with the goals of low intrusion, high precision, and high flexibility. Loki achieves these goals by utilizing the ideas of partial view of global state, optimistic synchronization, and offline analysis. In Loki, faults are injected based on a partial, view of the global state of the system, and a post-runtime analysis is performed to place events and injections into a single global timeline and to discard experiments with incorrect fault injections. Finally, the experiments with correct fault injections are used to estimate user-specified performance and dependability measures. A flexible measure language has been designed that facilitates the specification of a wide range of measures.
Quantifying the value of knowledge exports from librarianship and information science research

Import–export studies use citation data to describe the exchange of knowledge and ideas between different disciplines. This paper reports the use of journal impact factors (IF) to quantify the extent to which an individual discipline, specifically librarianship and information science (LIS), is able to export knowledge to other disciplines. Web of Science searches were used to identify citations to 232 high quality LIS publications extracted from submissions to the UK’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. These publications resulted in 1061 knowledge exports to 444 unique, non-LIS citing journals, for which IFs were taken from the Journal Citation Reports database and normalised in order to minimise inter-disciplinary differences in citation behaviour. Non-LIS citing journals are shown to have IFs that are above the average for their subject categories, with this pattern of behaviour being considerably more pronounced for citations to LIS research published in non-LIS, rather than LIS, journals.
Variations in Hd1 proteins, Hd3a promoters, and Ehd1 expression levels contribute to diversity of flowering time in cultivated rice

Rice is a facultative short-day plant, and molecular genetic studies have identified the major genes involved in short-day flowering. However, the molecular mechanisms promoting the diversity of flowering time in cultivated rice are not known. We used a core collection of 64 rice cultivars that represent the genetic diversity of 332 accessions from around the world and studied the expression levels and polymorphisms of 6 genes in the short-day flowering pathway. The RNA levels of Heading date 3a (Hd3a), encoding a floral activator, are highly correlated with flowering time, and there is a high degree of polymorphism in the Heading date 1 (Hd1) protein, which is a major regulator of Hd3a expression. Functional and nonfunctional alleles of Hd1 are associated with early and late flowering, respectively, suggesting that Hd1 is a major determinant of variation in flowering time of cultivated rice. We also found that the type of Hd3a promoter and the level of Ehd1 expression contribute to the diversity in flowering time and Hd3a expression level. We evaluated the contributions of these 3 factors by a statistical analysis using a simple linear model, and the results supported our experimental observations.
Heat Transport in Giant (Exo)planets: A New Perspective

We explore the possibility that large-scale convection is inhibited over some regions of giant planet interiors, as a consequence of a gradient of composition inherited from either their formation history or particular events like giant impacts or core erosion during their evolution. Under appropriate circumstances, the redistribution of the gradient of molecular weight can lead to double diffusive layered or overstable convection. This leads to much less efficient heat transport and compositional mixing than large-scale adiabatic convection. We show that this process can explain the abnormally large radius of the transit planet HD 209458b and similar objects and may be at play in some giant planets, with short-period planets offering the most favorable conditions. Observational signatures of this transport mechanism are a large radius and a reduced heat flux output compared with uniformly mixed objects. If our suggestion is correct, it bears major consequences on our understanding of giant planet formation, structure and evolution, including possibly our own Jovian planets.
Model-Driven Design Pattern Detection Using Difference Calculation

This paper addresses the question of how to detect instances of patterns in software systems regarding model-driven development. The knowledge about patterns used in a software assists developers understanding large and complex software systems. Since model-driven engineering is the main philosophy of today’s software engineering and UML is used as a standard language for modeling, developers should be made familiar with pattern instances although they work with models only. While current approaches to pattern detection require developers to translate a pattern into Prolog clauses or other non-familiar formalisms, we propose an approach that allows developers to use ordinary UML diagram editors to specify patterns. The basic idea is to consider a pattern definition and an instance of the pattern as two similar document fragments and to solve the problem of finding pattern instances using a difference algorithm known as SiDiff. The SiDiff algorithm is a highly configurable generic algorithm which computes differences between graph-structured UML diagrams. This algorithm compares diagram elements and computes the similarity of pairs of diagram elements. First experiences indicate that minor modifications of the SiDiff algorithm are sufficient to make it a useful tool for finding instances of a pattern defined by a UML model in a software which is also given as a UML model.
Ecosystem Model of the Entire Beaufort Sea Marine Ecosystem: A Temporal Tool for Assessing Food-Web Structure and Marine Animal Populations from 1970 to 2014

The Beaufort Sea coastal-marine ecosystem is a 476,000 km area in the Arctic Ocean, which extends from -112.5 to -158.0° longitude to 67.5 to 75.0° latitude. Within this polar area the United States indigenous communities of Barrow, Kaktovik, and Nuiqsut, and the Canadian indigenous communities of Aklavik, Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk, Paulatuk, Ulukhaktok, and Sachs Harbour, subsist by harvesting marine mammals, fish, and invertebrates to provide the majority of their community foods. The Beaufort Sea coastal-marine ecosystem includes many specialized marine animals whose life history is tied to the sea ice, such as polar bears that rely on sea-ice for foraging activities and denning, or ice algae that attach to the seasonal cryosphere. Changes in sea-ice extent and sea surface temperature affect the ecosystem through losses of animal habitat, alterations to trophodynamics, and/or impacts to indigenous community harvesting. The present study focuses on developing a dynamic wholeecosystem model that can be used for natural resource management. The resulting Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) temporal model (1970 to 2014) utilizes forcing and mediation functions that describe food
A proximal gradient algorithm for decentralized nondifferentiable optimization

In this paper, we focus on solving the decentralized consensus optimization problem defined over a networked multi-agent system. All the agents shall cooperatively find a common minimizer of the overall objective while each agent holds its own local objective and can only communicate with its neighbors. Motivated by many applications in which the local objective is the sum of a differentiable part and a nondifferentiable part, this paper proposes a proximal gradient exact first-order algorithm (PG-EXTRA) that utilizes the separable problem structure. Here, “exact” means this decentralized algorithm yields an exact consensus minimizer using a fixed step size. When the nondifferentiable part vanishes, PG-EXTRA reduces to EXTRA, an existing decentralized optimization algorithm. When the differentiable part vanishes, PG-EXTRA finds its special case P-EXTRA, a proximal algorithm. We prove convergence and rate of convergence for PG-EXTRA. Numerical experiments on a decentralized compressive sensing problem validates the theoretical results.
Urban soundscape preferences in relation to the function of a place: Case studies in Warsaw

Abstract The survey interviewed three hundred and nine people in five public places within Warsaw. The aim of the survey was to examine if people’s sound preferences are related to a place’s function and how these preferences differentiate. A further aim of this research was to gather users’ ideas for making city soundscapes more pleasant. The results showed that people generally prefer natural and human sounds, but do not like mechanical sounds; the importance of specific sounds are differentiated in relation to the function and history of a place. The main way to make urban places sound better and more appropriate to their function is to eliminate or reduce mechanical sounds (especially traffic), but individual methods depend on local conditions. The second way to make places sound better is to increase natural sounds and to make soundscapes more appropriate to their function – an increase in human sounds (mainly music).
Behavioral programming, decentralized control, and multiple time scales

Behavioral programming is a recently proposed approach for non-intrusive incremental software development. We propose that behavioral programming concepts, such as behavioral decomposition, synchronized execution of independent behaviors, and event blocking, can help in the incremental and natural coding of complex decentralized systems, complementing actor-oriented and agent-oriented approaches. We also contribute to the existing research on behavioral programming a method for coordinating behaviorally-programmed components which, due to different time scales or interaction with the external environment, cannot synchronize and thus cannot employ event blocking. We show that the resulting decentralized system retains many of the advantages present in a purely behavioral, fully synchronized system.
Neuroactive Multifunctional Tacrine Congeners with Cholinesterase, Anti-Amyloid Aggregation and Neuroprotective Properties

The review summarizes research into the highly relevant topics of cholinesterase and amyloid aggregation inhibitors connected to tacrine congeners, both of which are associated with neurogenerative diseases. Various opinions will be discussed regarding the dual binding site inhibitors which are characterized by increased inhibitor potency against acetylcholin/butyrylcholine esterase and amyloid formation. It is suggested that these compounds can both raise levels of acetylcholine by binding to the active site, and also prevent amyloid aggregation. In connection with this problem, the mono/dual binding of the multifunctional derivatives of tacrine, their mode of action and their neuroprotective activities are reported. The influence of low molecular compounds on protein amyloid aggregation, which might be considered as a potential therapeutic strategy in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease is also reported. Finally, attention is paid to some physico-chemical factors, such as desolvation energies describing the transfer of the substrate solvated by water, the metal-chelating properties of biometals reacting with amyloid precursor protein, amyloid beta peptide and tau protein.