Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spectroscopic excitation and quenching processes in rare-earth-ion-doped Al2O3 and their impact on amplifier and laser performance

This thesis presents in-depth spectroscopic investigations of the optical properties of Al2O3:Er3+ and Al2O3:Yb3+, materials employed for the realization of integrated optical devices such as waveguide amplifiers and lasers. The aim is to provide important spectroscopic parameters for the design and optimization of such devices. Nevertheless, some of the spectroscopic investigations presented here have a fundamental importance as well. The ion-ion process of energy-transfer upconversion (ETU) is investigated in Al2O3:Er3+. Generally this process, in combination with energy migration, can be detrimental for the amplifier or laser performance of a number of rare-earth-ion-doped compounds by depleting the population of the long-lived upper state of the corresponding luminescence transition, thereby diminishing the available optical gain. The most important energy-transfer models found in the literature from the last sixty years – Burshtein’s and Zubenko’s microscopic treatments of ETU, as well as Grant’s macroscopic rate-equation approach – are put to the test when applied to analyze photoluminescence decay measurements under quasi-CW excitation performed on Al2O3:Er3+. Zubenko’s model provides the best agreement. A fast quenching process induced by, e.g., active ion pairs and clusters, undesired impurities, or host material defects such as voids, that is not revealed by any particular signature in the luminescence decay curves because of negligible emission by the quenched ions under quasi-CW excitation, is verified by pump-absorption experiments. Such fast quenching process is investigated in both Al2O3:Er3+ and Al2O3:Yb3+, and results are compared. A new model that takes the fast quenching into account is presented, which can be helpful in predicting and optimizing the performance of rare-earth-ion-doped devices. Finally, the impact of quenching on Al2O3:Er3+ amplifiers and on Al2O3:Yb3+ distributed-feedback lasers is discussed.
Emotional difficulties in early adolescence following severe early deprivation: Findings from the English and Romanian adoptees study

Abstract The study assessed conduct and emotional difficulties in a group of Romanian adoptees at age 11, and serves as a follow-up to assessments made when the children were 6 years old. It was found that there was a significant increase in emotional difficulties, but not conduct problems, for the Romanian sample since age 6. It was also found that emotional difficulty was significantly more prevalent at age 11 in the Romanian group than in a within-UK adoptee group. Emotional difficulties in the Romanian adoptee group were found to be significantly and strongly related to previous deprivation-specific problems (disinhibited attachment, cognitive impairment, inattention/overactivity and quasi-autism); however, the presence of such early problems did not account fully for the onset of later emotional problems. Five contrasting hypotheses concerning possible mediators for later onset of emotional difficulties for the Romanian group were examined. No links were found to duration of deprivation or other deprivation-related indices, stresses/difficulties in the postadoption family environment, or educational attainment and self-esteem. There was some evidence that emotion recognition might play a role in the emergence of these problems, but other measures of social competence and theory of mind showed no associations with the onset of emotional problems.
An approximate method of obtaining surface-wave band gap from reflection phase plots for mushroom structures

This paper proposes an approximate method of obtaining the surface-wave band gap from reflection phase plots for mushroom structures. The upper bound of the band gap can be found by observing the first in-phase frequency on the reflection phase plot of TE plane waves under grazing incidence, and the lower bound of the band gap can be approximated by the three specific frequencies on reflection phase plots of TM plane waves: the first in-phase frequencies under normal and grazing incidence and the frequency where the first +90° reflection phase occurs. By comparing surface-wave band gaps obtained from dispersion plots and from reflection phase plots through the approximate method in the commercial software CST, results show that the errors of estimated values are less than 10% in different cases of mushroom structures.
Normal forms and uniform approximations for bridge orbit bifurcations

We discuss various bifurcation problems in which two isolated periodic orbits exchange periodic ‘bridge’ orbit(s) between two successive bifurcations. We propose normal forms which locally describe the corresponding fixed point scenarios on the Poincaré surface of section. Uniform approximations for the density of states for an integrable Hamiltonian system with two degrees of freedom are derived and successfully reproduce the numerical quantum-mechanical results.
Parallelism analyzers for parallel discrete event simulation

Discrete event simulation is usually time consuming. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in using parallel computers to speed up the simulation process. Before the parallel simulation approach is applied, it is important to understand the inherent parallelism of simulation applications. A simple technique called critical path analysis was proposed to study paralllelism of simulation applications. This paper describes three critical path analysis algorithms based on different event-scheduling (process scheduling) policies. These algorithms are much simpler than a previous approach, where the events must be recorded in a trace and an extra pass is required to process the event trace. In our approach, the critical path analysis algorithms are integrated with the sequential simulation. At the end of the sequential simulation, the optimal parallel execution time is also computed. Livny proposed an algorithm similar to our approach (His, however, was designed for a specific language). Our algorithms can be integrated with sequential simulation programs written by users or be integrated with simulation languages. Another advantage of our algorithms over previous approaches is that ours can be used to study load balancing under different event-scheduling policies. Since our algorithms can be easily inserted in sequential simulation programs, critical path analysis can be applied to existing sequential programs without difficulty. The results can then be used to predict the performance of parallel simulation on similar applications. An example is given to show how useful information can be obtained from our algorithms.
GLB: lifeline-based global load balancing library in x10

We present GLB, a programming model and an associated implementation that can handle a wide range of irregular parallel programming problems running over large-scale distributed systems. GLB is applicable both to problems that are easily load-balanced via static scheduling and to problems that are hard to statically load balance. GLB hides the intricate synchronizations (e.g., inter-node communication, initialization and startup, load balancing, termination and result collection) from the users. GLB internally uses a version of the lifeline graph based work-stealing algorithm proposed by Saraswat et al [25]. Users of GLB are simply required to write several pieces of sequential code that comply with the GLB interface. GLB then schedules and orchestrates the parallel execution of the code correctly and efficiently at scale. We have applied GLB to two representative benchmarks: Betweenness Centrality (BC) and Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS). Among them, BC can be statically load-balanced whereas UTS cannot. In either case, GLB scales well -- achieving nearly linear speedup on different computer architectures (Power, Blue Gene/Q, and K) -- up to 16K cores.
STAPHYLOCOCCUS ALBUS IN WOUND INFECTION AND IN SEPTICEMIA.

Coagulase-negative Staphylococcus albus was considered to be the causal agent in 53 (4.4%) of 1200 wound infections investigated in a large general hospital over the eight-year period 1957-1964. There was clinical evidence of morbidity in these patients, with fever, but the infection cleared spontaneously, usually in a week or two, and antibiotics were unnecessary.Of much greater importance was the finding of this organism in blood cultures on repeated occasions, with associated clinical septicemia. Twelve patients were so affected, of whom six died, a mortality rate of 50%. Such data emphasize the tragic mistake of dismissing the report of Staph. albus in a blood culture as "only a contaminant", and of failure to recognize that the organism can cause serious disease. This is particularly true in poor-risk patients, and in those who have undergone cardiac surgery.
Finding optimal realignments in sports leagues using a branch-and-cut-and-price approach

The sports team realignment problem can be modelled as k-way equipartition: given a complete graph Kn = (V, E), with edge weight ce on each edge, partition the vertices V into k divisions that have exactly S vertices, so as to minimise the total weight of the edges that have both endpoints in the same division. In this paper, we discuss solving k-way equipartition problem using branch-and-price scheme. We demonstrated the necessity of cutting planes for this problem and suggested an effective way of adding cutting planes in the branch-and-price framework. We solved the pricing subproblem as an integer programming problem. Using this method, we found the optimal realignment solution for three major professional sports leagues in North America (basketball, hockey, football). We also present computational results on some larger randomly generated microaggregation problems.
Using Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Machine Readable Dictionaries for Domain Independent Language Modelling

Machine Readable Dictionaries (MRDs) have been used in a variety of language processing tasks including word sense disambiguation, text segmentation, information retrieval and information extraction. In this paper we describe the utilization of semantic knowledge acquired from an MRD for language modelling tasks in relation to speech recognition applications. A semantic model of language has been derived using the dictionary definitions in order to compute the semantic association between the words. The model is capable of capturing phenomena of latent semantic dependencies between the words in texts and reducing the language ambiguity by a considerable factor. The results of experiments suggest that the semantic model can improve the word recognition rates in “noisy-channel” applications. This research provides evidence that limited or incomplete knowledge from lexical resources such as MRDs can be useful for domain independent language modelling.
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Closed-Loop Behavior of an Autonomous Helicopter Equipped with a Robotic Arm for Aerial Manipulation Tasks Regular Paper

This paper is devoted to the control of aerial robots interacting physically with objects in the environment and with other aerial robots. The paper presents a controller for the particular case of a small‐ scaled autonomous helicopter equipped with a robotic arm for aerial manipulation. Two types of influences are imposed on the helicopter from a manipulator: coherent and non‐coherent influence. In the former case, the forces and torques imposed on the helicopter by the manipulator change with frequencies close to those of the helicopter movement. The paper shows that even small interaction forces imposed on the fuselage periodically in proper phase could yield to low frequency instabilities and oscillations, so‐called phase circles.
Understanding a lack of trust in Global Software Teams: a multiple-case study

Many organizations have turned towards globally distributed software development (GSD) in their quest for cheap, higher-quality software that has a short development cycle. However, this kind of development has often been reported as being problematic and complex to manage. There are indications that trust is a fundamental factor in determining the success or failure of GSD projects. This article studies the key factors that cause a lack of trust and the effect of lacking trust and present data from four projects in which problems with trust were experienced. We found the key factors to be poor socialization and socio-cultural fit, increased monitoring, inconsistency and disparities in work practices, reduction of and unpredictability in communication; and a lack of face-to-face meetings, language skills, conflict handling, and cognitive-based trust. The effect of lacking trust was a decrease in productivity, quality, information exchange and feedback, morale among the employees, and an increase in relationship conflicts. In addition, the employees tended to self-protect, to prioritize individual goals over group goals, and to doubt negative feedback from the manager. Further, the managers increased monitoring, which reduced the level of trust even more. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners involved in GSD. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Daith Piercing in a Case of Chronic Migraine: A Possible Vagal Modulation

Daith piercing is an ear piercing located at the crus of the helix, bilaterally. It is getting great consent on social media as alternative treatment in chronic migraine. No data about its efficacy and action are available in scientific literature so far. We present the case of a 54-year-old male patient suffering from refractory chronic migraine with medication-overuse, who substantially improved after bilateral ear daith piercing. His migraine was refractory to symptomatic as well as prophylactic therapies. He used to treat headaches with up to five symptomatic drugs per attack and had attempted several pharmacological preventive therapies, including Onabotulinumtoxin A. He also underwent detoxification treatments with intravenous steroids and diazepam, without durable benefit. At the time of daith piercing, the headache-related disability measures showed a HIT-6 score of 64, a MIDAS-score of 70, and a 11-point Box scale of 5. On his own free will, he decided to get a “daith piercing. ” After that, he experienced a reduction of migraine attacks, which became very rare, and infrequent, less disabling episodes of tension-type headache (HIT-6 score of 56; MIDAS score of 27, 11-point Box scale of 3). Painkiller assumption has much decreased: he takes only one tablet of indomethacin 50 mg to treat tensive headaches, about four times per month. Beyond a placebo effect, we can speculate a vagal modulation as the action mechanism of daith piercing: a nociceptive sensory stimulus applied to trigeminal and vagal areas of the ear can activate ear vagal afferents, which can modulate pain pathways by means of projections to the caudal trigeminal nucleus, to the locus coeruleus and to the nucleus raphe magnus. Currently, daith piercing cannot be recommended as migraine treatment because of the lack of scientific evidence, the unquantified rate of failure and the associated risks with insertion. However, given the increasing but anecdotal evidence, we think that the mechanism needs testing by means of a controlled clinical trial in a population of chronic migraineurs.
Stress-Strain Behavior and California Bearing Ratio of Artificially Cemented Sand

In this study, effects of cement content and curing time on the compressive stress-strain relationship and California bearing ratio (CBR) value of artificially cemented sand cured up to 7 days was investigated. The CBR study was focused on investigating the sensitivity of this non-destructive test to measure the changes in the compacted cemented sand properties during construction (limited curing time). The cement content in the cemented sand was varied up to 6 % by weight. The strength, modulus, and unit weight of the artificially cemented sand varied from, 60 to 1250 kPa, 14 to 290 MPa, and 15.98 to 18.33 kN/m3, respectively. The CBR values for cemented sand, compacted using the standard proctor method, varied from 8 to 230 %. Compressive stress-strain relationship of cemented sand was represented by a non-linear relationship. Relationship between compressive properties of cemented sand and the CBR was also investigated. The variation of compressive strength, modulus, and CBR values with curing time were represented using hyperbolic relationships. Finite element method (FEM) was used to model the CBR test, based on the data obtained from the unconfined compression tests for 1.5, 3, and 6 % cemented sand. In the FEM analyses the cemented sand was modeled using linear elastic-perfectly plastic constitutive relationship with Mohr-Coulomb failure criteria. The ratio of predicted to measured CBR values varied from 0.67 to 1.31.
Generative software-based memory error detection and correction for operating system data structures

Recent studies indicate that the number of system failures caused by main memory errors is much higher than expected. In contrast to the commonly used hardware-based countermeasures, for example using ECC memory, software-based fault-tolerance measures are much more flexible and can exploit application knowledge, such as the criticality of specific data structures. This paper presents a software-based memory error protection approach, which we used to harden the eCos operating system in a case study. The main benefits of our approach are the flexibility to choose from an extensible toolbox of easily pluggable error detection and correction schemes as well as its very low runtime overhead, which totals in a range of 0.09-1.7 %. The implementation is based on aspect-oriented programming and exploits the object-oriented program structure of eCos to identify well-suited code locations for the insertion of generative fault-tolerance measures.
Transesophageal Echocardiographic Measurement of HVAD Flows.

We recently read the review article by Geisen et al, on echocardiographic-based hemodynamic management in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit. This article did not mention the use of echocardiography to guide LVAD hemodynamic management, which can be challenging. There are more than 5 million patients with heart failure in the United States today, and durable continuous-flow left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) have become increasingly common, with more than 900 LVADs implanted in the United States during 2012 and the first 3 months of 2013. Echocardiography is used in LVAD management for evaluating right ventricular function, determining the presence of intracardiac shunt or clot, assessing aortic valve competence and opening, assessing the amount of tricuspid regurgitation or mitral stenosis, and setting optimal pump speed (revolutions per minute [RPM]). It also has been used to measure blood velocity through the inflow and outflow cannulae, with normal peak flow velocities less than 2 meters/second. Abnormally high velocities can indicate high flow or resistance to flow and abnormally low velocities indicate reduced blood flow. Aside from these general interpretations, transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) can be used to quantify LVAD flow.
GLOBAL STABILITY OF AN EPIDEMIC MODEL IN A PATCHY ENVIRONMENT

We investigate an SIR compartmental epidemic model in a patchy environment where individuals in each compartment can travel among n patches. We derive the basic reproduction number R0 and prove that, if R0 ≤ 1, the disease-free equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable. In the case of R0 > 1, we derive sufficient conditions under which the endemic equilibrium is unique and globally asymptotically stable.
P‐226: New Tris Bipyridyl Derivative as Hole‐Blocking and Electron‐Transporting Materials for Organic Light‐Emitting Devices

We demonstrate that tris bipyridyl benzene (TbpyB) works well as an electron transporting and hole‐blocking material for organic light‐emitting diodes. Using TbpyB for phosphorescent organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs), we can obtain comparable high external quantum efficiency and a lower operation voltage without any additional hole‐blocking layer that must be needed usually. In other words, the TbpyB layer worked as a double functioned (hole‐blocking and electron‐transporting) layer, and TbpyB provides more simple fabrications of phosphorescent OLEDs that work at a lower power consumption.
Feature Selection for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

We explore the problem of feature selection for inverse reinforcement learning in cases where the true reward is sparse in terms of features. We recover such structures by using a sparsity-inducing L1-norm in the problem formulation, and explore different techniques for efficiently solving the resulting non-smooth convex minimization problem. Our results indicate that the sparse problem formulation, and our techniques for solving it, are effective in recovering the true reward function.
Clustering and Mode Classiication of Engineering Time Series Data

The problem of eeciently and accurately locating patterns of interest in massive time series data sets is an important and non-trivial problem in a wide variety of applications, including diagnosis and monitoring of complex systems, biomedical data analysis, and exploratory data analysis in scientiic and business time series. In this paper a proba-bilistic approach is taken to this problem. Using piecewise linear segmentations as the underlying representation, local features (such as peaks, troughs, and plateaus) are de-ned using a prior distribution on expected deformations from a basic template. Global shape information is represented using another prior on the relative locations of the individual features. An appropriately deened probabilistic model integrates the local and global information and directly leads to an overall distance measure between sequence patterns based on prior knowledge. A search algorithm using this distance measure is shown to eeciently and accurately nd matches for a variety of patterns on a number of data sets, including engineering sensor data from space Shuttle mission archives. The proposed approach provides a natural framework to support user-customizable \query by content" on time series data, taking prior domain information into account in a principled manner.
Exploring Trust in E-B2B Relationships

The Internet’s unbounded opportunity for inter-firm exchanges is limited by concerns about trust, however, little is known about the development and formation of trust in the area of electronic business-to-business relationships. Drawing on existing research the aim of paper is to explore differences arising between trust in the traditional and in the electronic business to business relationship. In addition, an overall research framework is developed which links trust formation to three dimensions: the type of interaction, the stage of the relationship lifecycle and the type of transacting organizations. These dimensions are further examined in different relationship scenarios. Finally, implications for the agri-food industry are examined.
Retrieval from facet spaces

The facet-space approach for accessing document records organized by faceted classifications is described. The interface gives users detailed control over the facet display and it makes use of color to reduce the number of windows which need to be presented. The interface supports searching. A cluster analysis is described for organizing search return lists based on facets distances. The implementation is applied to 1381 summaries of computer science dissertations as organized by the ACM Computing Reviews classification system.