Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Sponge‐Submerged Membrane Bioreactor (SSMBR) for Wastewater Treatment and Reuse

Abstract Membrane fouling has been regarded as one of the biggest challenges to widespread application of membrane bioreactor (MBR). This study focuses on minimizing the membrane fouling and improving the performance of submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) by porous sponge addition. The effects of sponge addition on sustainable flux and membrane fouling were investigated. Acclimatized sponge could significantly increase the suspended growth in SMBR with biomass of 16.7 g/L(sponge). With the sponge volume fraction of 10%, SSMBR could enhance sustainable flux up to 50 L/m2 · h compared with sustainable flux of SMBR (only 25 L/m2 · h). SSMBR also exhibited excellent results in terms of DOC removal (over 95%), COD removal (over 97%), lower transmembrane pressure development, and oxygen uptake rate. Over 89% of NH4‐N and 98% of PO4‐P were removed when SSMBR was operated with a MLSS concentration of 15 g/L.
Feature-Level Fusion of Finger Veins and Finger Dorsal Texture for Personal Authentication Based on Orientation Selection

SUMMARY This study proposes a feature-level fusion method that uses ﬁnger veins (FVs) and ﬁnger dorsal texture (FDT) for personal authentication based on orientation selection (OS). The orientation codes obtained by the ﬁlters correspond to di ﬀ erent parts of an image (foreground or background) and thus di ﬀ erent orientations o ﬀ er di ﬀ erent levels of discrimination performance. We have conducted an orientation component analysis on both FVs and FDT. Based on the analysis, an OS scheme is devised which combines the discriminative orientation features of both modalities. Our experiments demonstrate the e ﬀ ectiveness of the proposed method.
Multilevel Motivation and Engagement: Assessing Construct Validity Across Students and Schools

Statistical biases associated with single-level analyses underscore the importance of partitioning variance/covariance matrices into individual and group levels. From a multilevel perspective based on data from 21,579 students in 58 high schools, the present study assesses the multilevel factor structure of motivation and engagement with a particular focus on a recently developed instrument (the Motivation and Engagement Scale—High School; MES-HS) shown in a wide variety of contexts to reflect sound student-level psychometric properties. Multilevel (or hierarchical linear) confirmatory factor analysis using Mplus demonstrated that at student and school levels, the hypothesized framework comprised sound factor structure. Multilevel invariance tests further demonstrated that key parameters were invariant across student and school levels. Results also showed that first and higher order factor correlations were in hypothesized directions and broadly parallel at student and school levels. Taken together, the MES-HS target factors and the framework from which they emanate demonstrate sound multilevel psychometric properties.
TRADITION AND MODERNITY IN THE CULTURE OF AGING IN KOREA

With rapid societal changes and demographic aging in recent Korea, cultural value system related with aging has been changing dramatically. Korea has become youthcentered society and cultural context of family life has been altered. In this paper, the nature of the changes in some of the major themes of the Korean culture is discussed. The various impacts of these changes on the status, role, and life styles of the elderly people in contemporary Korea are also examined. The need to create a positive social attitude toward aging and cultural context friendly to the aged is discussed.
A PC-based multi purpose test bed environment for structural testing and control

The aim of the following paper is to give an overview of a test bed set up for a rail car body to compare different concepts to suppress structural vibrations. It is demonstrated, that such a complex measurement and actuation task can be easily implemented on a single laboratory PC using standard software like Matlab/SIMULINK®. With the help of this PC standard engineering tasks like measuring, identification of transfer functions, as well as controller design and their implementation in real time can be carried out easily. Additionally, the utilization of Matlab/SIMULINK® enables the realisation of a sophisticated virtual instrumentation system. A growing number of measurement as well as actuation devices used in technical applications increases the complexity of the measurement system. Therefore, simple, standardised, and low-cost components and standard software programs are desired for the implementation of the measurement system. In the paper at hand the application is a test bed for a 1:10 scaled railway vehicle car body, which has been built to investigate different concepts to suppress structural vibrations by active damping. In contrast to pure measurement applications the implementation of closed loop control schemes requires both actuators with suitable amplifiers and a fast and versatile realisation of the control unit. A software solution for a short development cycle from design to simulation and finally implementation of a control scheme is therefore necessary. In the remainder of the paper the test bed, the measurement and actuation devices, as well as the implementation in Matlab/SIMULINK® are described.
Physical Environmental Correlates of Domain-Specific Sedentary Behaviours across Five European Regions (the SPOTLIGHT Project)

Background The relation between neighbourhood environmental factors and domain-specific sedentary behaviours among adults remains unclear. This study firstly aims to examine the association of perceived and objectively measured neighbourhood safety, aesthetics, destinations and functionality with transport-related, work-related and leisure-time sedentary behaviour. Secondly, the study aims to assess whether these associations are moderated by age, gender or educational level. Methods In 60 randomly sampled neighbourhoods from 5 urban regions in Europe (Ghent and suburbs, Paris and inner suburbs, Budapest and suburbs, the Randstad, and Greater London), a virtual audit with Google Street View was performed to assess environmental characteristics. A total of 5,205 adult inhabitants of these neighbourhoods reported socio-demographic characteristics, sedentary behaviours, and neighbourhood perceptions in an online survey. Generalized linear mixed models were conducted to examine associations between physical environmental neighbourhood factors and sedentary behaviours. Interaction terms were added to test the moderating role of individual-level socio-demographic variables. Results Lower levels of leisure-time sedentary behaviour (i.e. all leisure activities except television viewing and computer use) were observed among adults who perceived greater numbers of destinations such as supermarkets, recreational facilities, or restaurants in their neighbourhood, and among adults who lived in a neighbourhood with more objectively measured aesthetic features, such as trees, water areas or public parks. Lower levels of work-related sedentary behaviour were observed among adults who perceived less aesthetic features in their neighbourhood, and among adults who lived in a neighbourhood with less objectively measured destinations. Both age, gender and educational level moderated the associations between neighbourhood environmental factors and sedentary behaviours. Conclusion Preliminary evidence was found for associations between neighbourhood environmental factors and domain-specific sedentary behaviours among adults. However, these associations varied according to objective or subjective environmental measures. More research is needed to confirm and clarify the associations.
The involvement of migrant mothers in their children’s education: cultural capital and transnational class processes

This paper analyses the kinds of capital, practices and investments that are implicated in the participation of migrant mothers in the educational careers of their children, drawing on a Bourdieusian framework. We present findings of a study of Muslim Iraqi mothers with school-aged children in Australia, based on 47 interviews with 25 participants. The study identifies different modes of involvement in children’s education and connects these to mothers’ cultural and social capital. Involvement, and its effectiveness, is analysed through the analytical categories of (i) high capital-high involvement; (ii) low capital-high involvement; and (iii) low capital-minimal direct involvement. The paper contributes to the theorisation of family–school relations in the context of migration, and develops a more nuanced perspective for studying social class positioning and repositioning.
A Weakly Supervised Bayesian Model for Violence Detection in Social Media

Social streams have proven to be the mostup-to-date and inclusive information on cur-rent events. In this paper we propose a novelprobabilistic modelling framework, called violence detection model (VDM), which enables the identiﬁcation of text containing violent content and extraction of violence-related topics over social media data. The proposed VDM model does not require any labeled corpora for training, instead, it only needs the in-corporation of word prior knowledge which captures whether a word indicates violence or not. We propose a novel approach of deriving word prior knowledge using the relative entropy measurement of words based on the in-tuition that low entropy words are indicative of semantically coherent topics and therefore more informative, while high entropy words indicates words whose usage is more topical diverse and therefore less informative. Our proposed VDM model has been evaluated on the TREC Microblog 2011 dataset to identify topics related to violence. Experimental results show that deriving word priors using our proposed relative entropy method is more effective than the widely-used information gain method. Moreover, VDM gives higher violence classiﬁcation results and produces more coherent violence-related topics compared toa few competitive baselines.
Predicting the performance of photonic luminescent solar concentrators

Conventional luminescent solar concentrators (LSC) suffer from losses due to the escape cone of total internal reflection and reabsorption. Embedding the luminescent dye in a photonic crystal influences the emission process and improves the light guiding efficiency, thus increasing the overall light collection efficiency. Additionally, the absorption of incident light can be enhanced inside such structures. By combining all these different effects in an analytical model, the overall performance of such a photonic luminescent solar concentrator is calculated. We show for a multilayer photonic crystal and a typical LSC dye that our concept reduces light guiding losses by 60%. For application-relevant concentrator dimensions, the overall efficiency can be improved by a factor of 2.4 compared to conventional LSCs.
Letting loose a SPIDER on a network of POMDPs: generating quality guaranteed policies

Distributed Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems (Distributed POMDPs) are a popular approach for modeling multi-agent systems acting in uncertain domains. Given the significant complexity of solving distributed POMDPs, particularly as we scale up the numbers of agents, one popular approach has focused on approximate solutions. Though this approach is efficient, the algorithms within this approach do not provide any guarantees on solution quality. A second less popular approach focuses on global optimality, but typical results are available only for two agents, and also at considerable computational cost. This paper overcomes the limitations of both these approaches by providing SPIDER, a novel combination of three key features for policy generation in distributed POMDPs: (i) it exploits agent interaction structure given a network of agents (i.e. allowing easier scale-up to larger number of agents); (ii) it uses a combination of heuristics to speedup policy search; and (iii) it allows quality guaranteed approximations, allowing a systematic tradeoff of solution quality for time. Experimental results show orders of magnitude improvement in performance when compared with previous global optimal algorithms.
Influence of a stochastic moist convective parameterization on tropical climate variability

Convective parameterizations used in general circulation models (GCMs) generally only simulate the mean or first‐order moment of convective ensembles and do not explicitly include higher‐order moments. The influence of including unresolved higher‐order moments is investigated using a simple stochastic convective parameterization that includes a random contribution to the convective available potential energy (CAPE) in the deep convective scheme. Impacts are tested in an tropical atmospheric model of intermediate complexity. Adding convective noise noticeably affects tropical intraseasonal variability, suggesting inclusion of such noise in GCMs might be beneficial. Model response to the noise is sensitive not only to the noise amplitude, but also to such particulars of the stochastic parameterization as autocorrelation time.
The effect of emergency department crowding on patient satisfaction for admitted patients.

OBJECTIVES The objective was to study the association between factors related to emergency department (ED) crowding and patient satisfaction. METHODS The authors performed a retrospective cohort study of all patients admitted through the ED who completed Press-Ganey patient satisfaction surveys over a 2-year period at a single academic center. Ordinal and binary logistic regression was used to study the association between validated ED crowding factors (such as hallway placement, waiting times, and boarding times) and patient satisfaction with both ED care and assessment of satisfaction with the overall hospitalization. RESULTS A total of 1,501 hospitalizations for 1,469 patients were studied. ED hallway use was broadly predictive of a lower likelihood of recommending the ED to others, lower overall ED satisfaction, and lower overall satisfaction with the hospitalization (p < 0.05). Prolonged ED boarding times and prolonged treatment times were also predictive of lower ED satisfaction and lower satisfaction with the overall hospitalization (p < 0.05). Measures of ED crowding and ED waiting times predicted ED satisfaction (p < 0.05), but were not predictive of satisfaction with the overall hospitalization. CONCLUSIONS A poor ED service experience as measured by ED hallway use and prolonged boarding time after admission are adversely associated with ED satisfaction and predict lower satisfaction with the entire hospitalization. Efforts to decrease ED boarding and crowding might improve patient satisfaction.
Distribution of glomerular IgG subclass deposits in malignancy-associated membranous nephropathy.

BACKGROUND Several studies have shown a predominant glomerular deposition of IgG4 in patients with idiopathic membranous nephropathy (MN), whereas significant depositions of other IgG subclasses have been shown in patients with lupus-associated MN and bucillamine-induced MN. METHODS We examined the distribution patterns of glomerular IgG subclass deposits in 10 patients with malignancy-associated MN (M-MN) and in 15 patients with idiopathic MN by immunofluorescence (IF) microscopy. RESULTS The glomerular IF intensities of IgG1 and IgG2 were significantly stronger in the malignancy group than in the idiopathic group (P<0.05). In contrast, there were no differences in glomerular IF intensities of IgG3 and IgG4 between the two groups. CONCLUSION Our findings suggest that the distribution patterns of glomerular IgG subclass deposits are different in idiopathic MN and M-MN. The strong IF intensity of glomerular IgG1 and IgG2 in M-MN may provide a possible predictor for this condition.
Probabilistic ParaMor

The ParaMor algorithm for unsupervised morphology induction, which competed in the 2007 and 2008 Morpho Challenge competitions, does not assign a numeric score to its segmentation decisions. Scoring each character boundary in each word with the likelihood that it falls at a true morpheme boundary would allow ParaMor to adjust the confidence level at which the algorithm proposes segmentations. A sliding threshold on segmentation confidence would, in turn, permit a trade off between precision and recall that could optimize F1 or other metrics of interest. Our submission to Morpho Challenge 2009 enriches ParaMor with segmentation confidences by training an off-the-shelf statistical natural language tagger to mimic ParaMor’s morphological segmentations. For a given word, the tagger’s probabilistic confidence that ParaMor would propose the character, c, as the first character of a new morpheme serves as the numeric score of the candidate morpheme boundary that immediately precedes c. We have trained a ParaMor tagger mimic over a development data set of 500,000 unique Hungarian word types. By adjusting the threshold above which the ParaMor mimic proposes morpheme boundaries, we improve ParaMor’s F1 score for Hungarian by 5.9% absolute, from 41.4% to 47.3%. Moreover, by training a probabilistic tagger to emulate the segmentations of a second unsupervised morphology induction system, Morfessor, we are able to combine ParaMor’s segmentation decisions with Morfessor’s to form a single joint segmentation of each word. Our joint ParaMor-Morfessor tagger mimic enhances F1 performance on our Hungarian development set by a further 3.4% absolute, ultimately achieving an F1 score of 50.7%.
Enabling write-reduction strategy for journaling file systems over byte-addressable NVRAM

Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) becomes a mainstream storage device in embedded systems due to its favorable features, such as small size, low power consumption, and short read/write latency. On NVRAM, a write operation consumes more energy and time than a read operation. However, current mobile/embedded file systems (e.g., EXT2/3 and EXT4) are very unfriendly for NVRAM devices. The reason is that a journaling mechanism writes the same data twice during data commitment and checkpoint. Such observations motivate this paper to design a two-phase write reduction journaling file system called wrJFS. In the first phase, wrJFS classified data into two categories: Metadata and user data. Metadata will be handled by partial byte-enabled journaling strategy, and user data will be processed in the second phase. In the second phase, user data will be compressed by hardware encoder so as to reduce the write size, and managed compressed-enabled journaling strategy to avoid the write amplification. The experimental results show that the proposed wrJFS can reduce the size of the write request by 89.7% on average, compared with the original EXT3.
Shared Decision Making in Patients with Stable Coronary Artery Disease: PCI Choice

Background Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and optimal medical therapy (OMT) are comparable, alternative therapies for many patients with stable angina; however, patients may have misconceptions regarding the impact of PCI on risk of death and myocardial infarction (MI) in stable coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods and Results We designed and developed a patient-centered decision aid (PCI Choice) to promote shared decision making for patients with stable CAD. The estimated benefits and risks of PCI+OMT as compared to OMT were displayed in a decision aid using pictographs with natural frequencies and text. We engaged patients, clinicians, health service researchers, and designers with over 20 successive iterations of the decision aid, which were field tested during real-world clinical encounters involving clinicians and patients. The decision aid is intended to facilitate knowledge transfer, deliberation based on patient values and preferences, and shared decision making. Conclusions We describe the methods and outcomes of the design and development of a decision aid (PCI Choice) to promote shared decision making between clinicians and patients regarding the choice of PCI+OMT vs. OMT for treatment of stable CAD. We will evaluate the impact of PCI Choice on patient knowledge, decisional conflict, participation in decision-making, and treatment choice in an upcoming randomized trial.
Analyses of circular dichroism spectra of membrane proteins

Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a valuable technique for the determination of protein secondary structures. Many linear and nonlinear algorithms have been developed for the empirical analysis of CD data, using reference databases derived from proteins of known structures. To date, the reference databases used by the various algorithms have all been derived from the spectra of soluble proteins. When applied to the analysis of soluble protein spectra, these methods generally produce calculated secondary structures that correspond well with crystallographic structures. In this study, however, it was shown that when applied to membrane protein spectra, the resulting calculations produce considerably poorer results. One source of this discrepancy may be the altered spectral peak positions (wavelength shifts) of membrane proteins due to the different dielectric of the membrane environment relative to that of water. These results have important consequences for studies that seek to use the existing soluble protein reference databases for the analyses of membrane proteins.
Decentralized Network-Level Synchronization in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Energy is the scarcest resource in ad hoc wireless networks, particularly in wireless sensor networks requiring a long lifetime. Intermittently switching the radio on and off is widely adopted as the most effective way to keep energy consumption low. This, however, prevents the very goal of communication, unless nodes switch their radios on at synchronized intervals—a rather nontrivial coordination task. In this article, we address the problem of synchronizing node radios to a single universal schedule in wireless mobile ad hoc networks that can potentially consist of thousands of nodes. More specifically, we are interested in operating the network with duty cycles that can be less than 1% of the total cycle time. We identify the fundamental issues that govern cluster merging and provide a detailed comparison of various policies using extensive simulations based on a variety of mobility patterns. We propose a specific scheme that allows a 4,000-node network to stay synchronized with a duty cycle of approximately 0.7%. Our work is based on an existing, experimental MAC protocol that we use for real-world applications and is validated in a real network of around 120 mobile nodes.
Dificultades en el aprendizaje y recuperación de nombres propios en el envejecimiento

Una queja habitual de las personas mayores es que tienen dificultades a la hora de recordar nombres de personas en distintas situaciones y les ocurre incluso con personas que conocen bien. En este trabajo se trata de analizar las causas de esta dificultad revisando las caracteristicas y particularidades de los nombres propios, los modelos teoricos de produccion y los efectos encontrados en el envejecimiento para finalmente hacer una propuesta de intervencion sobre las dificultades en el aprendizaje y recuperacion de los nombres de persona. Esta propuesta esta basada en los resultados experimentales de los trabajos revisados y en ella se destaca la importancia de las claves fonologicas y semanticas, la necesidad de entrenar otras habilidades cognitivas (tambien altamente demandantes y frecuentemente afectadas por la edad) que estan relacionadas con la capacidad de nombrar personas y se incluye la posibilidad de introducir estrategias metamnemicas que faciliten esta dificil tarea. Por ultimo se incide en la necesidad de seguir investigando en este campo para comprobar la eficacia de algunas intervenciones que han sido planteadas y todavia no estan contrastadas.