Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Close to open—Factors that hinder and promote open science in ecology research and education

The Open Science (OS) movement is rapidly gaining traction among policy-makers, research funders, scientific journals and individual scientists. Despite these tendencies, the pace of implementing OS throughout the scientific process and across the scientific community remains slow. Thus, a better understanding of the conditions that affect OS engagement, and in particular, of how practitioners learn, use, conduct and share research openly can guide those seeking to implement OS more broadly. We surveyed participants at an OS workshop hosted by the Living Norway Ecological Data Network in 2020 to learn how they perceived OS and its importance in their research, supervision and teaching. Further, we wanted to know what OS practices they had encountered in their education and what they saw as hindering or helping their engagement with OS. The survey contained scaled-response and open-ended questions, allowing for a mixed-methods approach. We obtained survey responses from 60 out of 128 workshop participants (47%). Responses indicated that usage and sharing of open data and code, as well as open access publication, were the most frequent OS practices. Only a minority of respondents reported having encountered OS in their formal education. A majority also viewed OS as less important in their teaching than in their research and supervisory roles. The respondents’ suggestions for what would facilitate greater OS engagement in the future included knowledge, guidelines, and resources, but also social and structural support. These are aspects that could be strengthened by promoting explicit implementation of OS practices in higher education and by nurturing a more inclusive and equitable OS culture. We argue that incorporating OS in teaching and learning of science can yield substantial benefits to the research community, student learning, and ultimately, to the wider societal objectives of science and higher education.
Two-dimensional solitons and clusters in dissipative lattices

We study the dynamics of two-dimensional spatial solitons in the structured optical medium modeled by the complex Ginzburg–Landau equation with cubic–quintic nonlinearity and a spatially periodic modulation of the local gain–loss coefficient [a dissipative lattice (DL)]. The analysis, following the variation of the DL’s amplitude and period, reveals several dynamical scenarios: stable or unstable propagation of a single dissipative soliton (the unstable propagation entails generation of an irregular multisoliton cluster), transformation of the input soliton into stable or unstable regular clusters patterned as the underlying DL, and decay of the input. Most results are obtained by means of systematic simulations, but the boundary of the single-soliton stability domain is explained analytically.
The oscillating blue stragglers in the open cluster M67

Results from high-precision, time-resolved CCD photometry of two oscillating blue stragglers in M67 are presented. By comparing similar observations obtained two years apart, we have detected ten independent modes in one of these δ Scuti stars, and five modes in the other. We discuss results from stellar evolution computations and theoretical eigenfrequency analyses in attempts to make definitive mode identifications. For both oscillating blue stragglers, nonradial p modes are present that carry information on internal structure, rotation, and inclination of the stars. We discuss the implications of oscillation frequency analyses for theories of the origin of blue stragglers
Optimizing time delay feedback for active vibration control of a cantilever beam using a genetic algorithm

Active vibration control using time delay for a cantilever beam is developed in this paper. The equation of motion of the system is developed using the discrete standard formulation, and the discrete quadratic function is used to design the controller. The original contribution in this paper is using a genetic algorithm to determine the optimal time delay feedback for active vibration control of a cantilever beam. Simulations of the beam demonstrated that the genetic algorithm correctly identified the time delay which produced the quickest attenuation of unwanted vibrations for both mode one and mode two. In terms of frequency response, the optimal time delay for both modes reduced the resonant amplitude. In a mixed mode situation, the simulation demonstrated that an optimal time delay could be identified.
Development of Tilted Toroidal Beam Wideband Transducer Using Quadrature Phase Shift Keying for Underwater Acoustic Communication

To achieve high-speed underwater acoustic communication, a wideband transducer suitable for use in the vicinity of the sea bottom was developed. With the wideband characteristic maintained, the beam can be formed by combining two free-flooded rings. The characteristic of the developed transducer was measured. An excellent characteristic was obtained within an angular range from the horizontal to 30° elevation. Also, an excellent characteristic was obtained within the frequency range from 60 to 100 kHz. Moreover, a communication experiment was carried out using this transducer and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation, and data were obtained near the sea bottom of 1,000 m depth. Transmitted data were demodulated by postprocessing, and it was able to be communicated at the transmission rate of 80 kbps over a transmission distance of 350 m.
Analysis of low Za impurity pellet ablation for fusion diagnostic studies

The possibility of using low atomic number (Za) impurity pellets such as carbon, lithium and beryllium as diagnostic probes for fusion grade plasmas is investigated using an ablation model based on the vapour shielding phenomenon. It is shown that pellet injection velocities of approximately six kilometres per second would be required for penetration of a 1 mm sized carbon (diamond) pellet half-way into a CIT-like plasma. Properties of the high density ablation cloud surrounding a low Za pellet are discussed in relation to a diagnostic scheme that uses double charge-exchange interactions of fusion-born alpha particles with the ablation cloud to determine the local alpha energy distribution function. Pellet lifetime results are given and compared with experimental ones.
A Monte Carlo investigation of E×B discharges in molecular nitrogen

A Monte Carlo simulation method has been developed and tested using the ramp model gas proposed by Reid (1979). This method is particularly useful for investigations in gases which must be modelled using many cross sections. This paper reports various phenomena associated with Townsend discharges in ExB fields in nitrogen. Of particular interest is the relative importance of terms in the density gradient expansion of the electron energy distribution function. Simulations are conducted to assist in the interpretation of data from experimental techniques, particularly the 'photon flux' method.
GraphTango: A Hybrid Representation Format for Efficient Streaming Graph Updates and Analysis

Streaming graph processing involves performing updates and analytics on a time-evolving graph. The underlying representation format largely determines the throughputs of these updates and analytics phases. Existing formats usually employ variations of hash tables or adjacency lists. However, adjacency-list-based approaches perform poorly on heavy-tailed graphs, and the hash-based approaches suffer on short-tailed graphs. We propose GraphTango, a hybrid format that provides excellent update and analytics throughput regardless of the graph's degree distribution. GraphTango switches among three different formats based on a vertex's degree: i) Low-degree vertices store the edges directly with the neighborhood metadata, confining accesses to a single cache line, ii) Medium-degree vertices use adjacency lists, and iii) High-degree vertices use hash tables as well as adjacency lists. In this case, adjacency list provides fast traversal during the analytics phase, while the hash table provides constant-time lookups during the update phase. We further optimized the performance by designing an open-addressing-based hash table that fully utilizes every fetched cache line. In addition, we developed a thread-local lock-free memory pool that allows fast growing/shrinking of the adjacency lists and hash tables in a multi-threaded environment. We evaluated GraphTango with the help of the SAGA-Bench framework and compared it with four other representation formats. On average, GraphTango provides 4.5x higher insertion throughput, 3.2x higher deletion throughput, and 1.1x higher analytics throughput over the next best format. Furthermore, we integrated GraphTango with the state-of-the-art graph processing frameworks DZiG and RisGraph. Compared to the vanilla DZiG and vanilla RisGraph, [GraphTango + DZiG] and [GraphTango + RisGraph] reduces the average batch processing time by 2.3x and 1.5x, respectively.
Monolith Development History for Microservices Identification: a Comparative Analysis

Recent research has proposed different approaches on the automated identification of candidate microservices on monolith systems, which vary on the monolith representation, similarity criteria, and quality metrics used. On the other hand, they are generally limited in the number of codebases and decompositions evaluated, and few comparisons between approaches exist. Considering the emerging trend in software engineering in techniques based on the analysis of codebases’ evolution, we compare a representation based on the monolith code structure, in particular the sequences of accesses to domain entities, with representations based on the monolith development history (file changes and changes authorship). From the analysis on a total of 468k decompositions of 28 codebases, using five quality metrics that evaluate modularity, minimization of the number of transactions per functionality, and reduction of teams and communication, we conclude that the changes authorship representation of codebases with many authors achieves comparable or better results than the sequences of accesses representation of codebases with few authors with respect to minimization of the number of transactions per functionality and the reduction of teams.
Group Sparse Coding for Image Denoising

Group sparse representation has shown promising results in image debulrring and image inpainting in GSR [3] , the main reason that lead to the success is by ex-ploiting Sparsity and Nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) between patches on natural images, and solve a regularized optimization problem. However, directly adapting GSR[3] in image denoising yield very unstable and non-satisfactory results, to overcome these issues, this paper proposes a progressive image denoising algorithm that successfully adapt GSR [3] model and experiments shows the superior performance than some of the state-of-the-art methods
Near-infrared characterization of ultra-diffuse galaxies in Abell 2744 by JWST/NIRISS imaging

We present a search and characterization of ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) in the Frontier Fields cluster Abell 2744 at $z$ = 0.308. We use JWST/NIRISS F200W observations, acquired as part of the GLASS-JWST Early Release Science programme, aiming to characterize morphologies of cluster UDGs and their diffuse stellar components. A total number of 22 UDGs are identified by our selection criteria using morphological parameters, down to stellar mass of ∼107 M⊙. The selected UDGs are systematically larger in effective radius in F200W than in Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/ACS F814W images, which implies that some of them would not have been identified as UDGs when selected at rest-frame optical wavelengths. In fact, we find that about one-third of the UDGs were not previously identified based on the F814W data. We observe a flat distribution of the UDGs in the stellar mass–size plane, similar to what is found for cluster quiescent galaxies at comparable mass. Our pilot study using the new JWST F200W filter showcases the efficiency of searching UDGs at cosmological distances, with 1/30 of the exposure time of the previous deep observing campaign with HST. Further studies with JWST focusing on spatially resolved properties of individual sources will provide insight into their origin.
Online Statistical Inference for Matrix Contextual Bandit

Contextual bandit has been widely used for sequential decision-making based on the current contextual information and historical feedback data. In modern applications, such context format can be rich and can often be formulated as a matrix. Moreover, while existing bandit algorithms mainly focused on reward-maximization, less attention has been paid to the statistical inference. To fill in these gaps, in this work we consider a matrix contextual bandit framework where the true model parameter is a low-rank matrix, and propose a fully online procedure to simultaneously make sequential decision-making and conduct statistical inference. The low-rank structure of the model parameter and the adaptivity nature of the data collection process makes this difficult: standard low-rank estimators are not fully online and are biased, while existing inference approaches in bandit algorithms fail to account for the low-rankness and are also biased. To address these, we introduce a new online doubly-debiasing inference procedure to simultaneously handle both sources of bias. In theory, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed online doubly-debiased estimator and prove the validity of the constructed confidence interval. Our inference results are built upon a newly developed low-rank stochastic gradient descent estimator and its non-asymptotic convergence result, which is also of independent interest.
Subarcminute Localization of 13 Repeating Fast Radio Bursts Detected by CHIME/FRB

We report on improved sky localizations of 13 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) discovered by CHIME/FRB via the use of interferometric techniques on channelized voltages from the telescope. These so-called “baseband localizations” improve the localization uncertainty area presented in past studies by more than three orders of magnitude. The improved localization regions are provided for the full sample of FRBs to enable follow-up studies. The localization uncertainties, together with the limits on the source distances from their dispersion measures, allow us to identify likely host galaxies for two of the FRB sources. FRB 20180814A lives in a massive passive red spiral at z ∼ 0.068 with very little indication of star formation, while FRB 20190303A resides in a merging pair of spiral galaxies at z ∼ 0.064 undergoing significant star formation. These galaxies show very different characteristics, further confirming the presence of FRB progenitors in a variety of environments even among the repeating subclass.
Subwavelength hybrid plasmonic nanodisk with high Q factor and Purcell factor

Optical nanodisk resonators based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguiding geometry are investigated theoretically in the wavelength range of 1200–2000 nm with their radii varying from 320 to 1000 nm. Due to the fact that a hybrid plasmonic structure can efficiently confine light in a deep-subwavelength mode volume with a relatively low propagation loss, the nanodisks designed exhibit simultaneously a high Q factor and a high Purcell factor. For a hybrid plasmonic nanodisk with the radius of 1000 nm, a Q factor of 819 and a Purcell factor of 1827 are achieved at the telecommunication wavelength of 1558 nm.
The X-Ray Spectral Variability of the BL Lacertae Type Object PKS 2155-304

We present a detailed study of the hard X-ray properties of the BL Lacertae object PKS 2155-304 based on measurements made in 1988 and 1989 with the Large Area Counter (LAC) on board the Ginga satellite. The source exhibited a high degree of variability with a dynamic range of a factor 7 in the 2-6 keV band. The fastest amplitude variation was a factor 2 decline in the intensity in this band within 4 hours. The spectrum is characterized by a break which occurs at about 4 keV. Spectral fits to the data integrated in 6400 s time bins reveal that, in common with previous observations of BL Lacertae objects, the spectral slope is generally anticorrelated with intensity in the sense that the spectrum hardens as the intensity increases. However, the tracks of sequential points in the index-intensity plane are occasionally seen to differ during the rise and decay stages of individual flares. Furthermore, during one, or possibly two, flaring episodes the spectral index is observed to correlate with intensity variations.
The Kotake-Narasimhan Theorem in general ultradifferentiable classes

We prove a Kotake-Narasimhan type theorem in general ultradifferentiable classes given by weight matrices. In doing so we simultaneously recover and partially generalize the known results for classes given by weight sequences and weight functions. In particular, we obtain a sharp Kotake-Narasimhan theorem for Beurling classes.
GlobULeS. IV. UVIT/AstroSat Detection of Extremely Low Mass White Dwarf Companions to Blue Straggler Stars in NGC 362

We report the discovery of extremely low mass white dwarfs (ELM WDs) as a companion of blue straggler stars (BSSs) in the Galactic globular cluster NGC 362 using images from AstroSat's Ultra Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT). Spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for 26 far-UV (FUV) bright member BSSs are created using data from the UVIT, the UltraViolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT), Gaia EDR3, and the 2.2 m ESO/MPI telescope. A single SED is fitted to 14 BSSs, whereas double-SED fits revealed ELM WDs as binary companions in 12 of the 26 BSSs studied. The effective temperature, radius, luminosity, and mass of the 12 ELM WDs are found to have a range of T eff = 9750−18,000 K, R = 0.1−0.4 R ⊙, L = 0.4−3.3 L ⊙, and M = 0.16−0.20 M ⊙. These suggest that 12 BSSs are post-mass-transfer systems formed through the case A/B mass transfer pathway. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first finding of ELM WDs as companions to BSSs in globular clusters. This cluster is known to have a binary BSS sequence, and the 12 binary and 14 single BSSs (as classified by the SEDs) follow the mass transfer and collisional sequence of BSSs in the color–magnitude diagram. The cooling ages of nine of the ELM WDs are found to be younger than 500 Myr. Though the binary BSSs may have formed during the core collapse (∼200 Myr) or as part of the dynamical evolution of the cluster, they provide new insights on the dynamics of this cluster.
Unlocking the Potential of Two-Point Cells for Energy-Efficient and Resilient Training of Deep Nets

Context-sensitive two-point layer 5 pyramidal cells (L5PCs) were discovered as long ago as 1999. However, the potential of this discovery to provide useful neural computation has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show for the first time how a transformative L5PCs-driven deep neural network (DNN), termed the multisensory cooperative computing (MCC) architecture, can effectively process large amounts of heterogeneous real-world audio-visual (AV) data, using far less energy compared to best available ‘point’ neuron-driven DNNs. A novel highly-distributed parallel implementation on a Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC device estimates energy savings up to 245759 × 50000 $\mu$J (i.e., 62% less than the baseline model in a semi-supervised learning setup) where a single synapse consumes $8e^{-5}\mu$J. In a supervised learning setup, the energy-saving can potentially reach up to 1250x less (per feedforward transmission) than the baseline model. The significantly reduced neural activity in MCC leads to inherently fast learning and resilience against sudden neural damage. This remarkable performance in pilot experiments demonstrates the embodied neuromorphic intelligence of our proposed cooperative L5PC that receives input from diverse neighbouring neurons as context to amplify the transmission of most salient and relevant information for onward transmission, from overwhelmingly large multimodal information utilised at the early stages of on-chip training. Our proposed approach opens new cross-disciplinary avenues for future on-chip DNN training implementations and posits a radical shift in current neuromorphic computing paradigms.
Knowledge-driven Scene Priors for Semantic Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation

Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about object and region semantics. These weaknesses limit the development and assessment of models' abilities to generalise their learned experience. In this work, we introduce the use of knowledge-driven scene priors in the semantic audio-visual embodied navigation task: we combine semantic information from our novel knowledge graph that encodes object-region relations, spatial knowledge from dual Graph Encoder Networks, and background knowledge from a series of pre-training tasks -- all within a reinforcement learning framework for audio-visual navigation. We also define a new audio-visual navigation sub-task, where agents are evaluated on novel sounding objects, as opposed to unheard clips of known objects. We show improvements over strong baselines in generalisation to unseen regions and novel sounding objects, within the Habitat-Matterport3D simulation environment, under the SoundSpaces task.
Physical Properties of the Nucleus of Comet 2P/Encke

Abstract We report a new study of the nucleus of Comet 2P/Encke, which the CONTOUR spacecraft is scheduled to encounter in November 2003. During the comet's close approach to Earth in July 1997, we measured the mid-infrared thermal and optical scattered continua with data from the TIMMI instrument (imaging) at the ESO 3.6-m telescope (wavelength λ from 8 to 12 μm), the ISOPHOT instrument (photometry) aboard ISO (3.6 μm ≤λ≤100 μm), and the STIS instrument (imaging) aboard HST (5500 A≤λ≤11000 A). The optical images show the nucleus with very little coma contamination, and the ISO photometry allowed us to separate the comatic and nuclear contributions to the ESO images. We used the Standard Thermal Model for slow rotators to calculate an effective nuclear radius of 2.4 km±0.3 km. The comet's mid-IR light curve implies a nuclear rotation period of 15.2 h±0.3 h, although some subharmonics of this also satisfy the data. If we assume that the nucleus is a triaxial ellipsoid in principal short axis rotation with the axis direction in 1985 as derived by Sekanina (1988, Astron. J.95, 911), then by combining our data with light curves from the 1980s we find that the nucleus' angular momentum vector migrates, making a would-be circle in less than 81 years, and that one axial ratio is at least 2.6. The nucleus' optical linear phase coefficient is 0.06 mag/degree, making it one of the most phase-darkened objects known. The surface is also rougher than that of most asteroids. The visual geometric albedo is 0.05±0.02, within the range found for other cometary nuclei.