Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular Analysis of Bacterial Communities in Biofilms of a Drinking Water Clearwell

Microbial community structures in biofilms of a clearwell in a drinking water supply system in Beijing, China were examined by clone library, terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and 454 pyrosequencing of the amplified 16S rRNA gene. Six biofilm samples (designated R1–R6) collected from six locations (upper and lower sites of the inlet, middle and outlet) of the clearwell revealed similar bacterial patterns by T-RFLP analysis. With respect to the dominant groups, the phylotypes detected by clone library and T-RFLP generally matched each other. A total of 9,543 reads were obtained from samples located at the lower inlet and the lower outlet sites by pyrosequencing. The bacterial diversity of the two samples was compared at phylum and genus levels. Alphaproteobacteria dominated the communities in both samples and the genus of Sphingomonas constituted 75.1%–99.6% of this phylum. A high level of Sphingomonas sp. was first observed in the drinking water biofilms with 0.6–1.0 mg L−1 of chlorine residual. Disinfectant-resistant microorganisms deserve special attention in drinking water management. This study provides novel insights into the microbial populations in drinking water systems and highlights the important role of Sphingomonas species in biofilm formation.
Periarticular Injection with Bupivacaine for Postoperative Pain Control in Total Knee Replacement: A Prospective Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Trial

Background. Local periarticular injection with bupivacaine alone in TKA has not been studied. Thus, we aimed to examine the effectiveness of local periarticular injection with bupivacaine for post-operative pain control in TKA. Method. Sixty patients undergoing TKA by a single surgeon were randomly assigned into two groups in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. In the injection group, patients received periarticular injections with 0.25% bupivacaine before wound closure; in the control group, patients received a 0.9% normal saline injection. Both groups received the same anesthetic procedure, post-operative pain control, and rehabilitation protocol. Results. There was a significant reduction in post-operative morphine consumption in the first six hours after the operation (mean 0.9 mg and 2.43 mg, P = 0.01), but there was no significant difference in post-operative morphine consumption between six hours and ninety-six hours after the operation, visual analogue scale (VAS) score, morphine side effects during the first 96 hours, length of hospital stay, or complications from morphine consumption. Conclusion. Local periarticular injection with bupivacaine alone before wound closer was shown to be an effective method to improve pain control after TKA with a few complications and ease of use.
Dealing with Heterogeneity in Load Balancing Algorithms

Cluster heterogeneity increases the difficulty of balancing the load across the system nodes. Although the relationship between heterogeneity and load balancing is difficult to describe analytically, in this paper an exhaustive analysis of the effects of this system feature on load balancing algorithms performance is presented. Considering the performed analysis, there are two main challenges that need to be faced when dealing with cluster heterogeneity in load balancing algorithms: one related to the state measurement stage and another to the initiation rule. In this paper techniques to deal with heterogeneity in these two algorithm stages are proposed. Furthermore, suggestions to improve the performance of the rest of algorithm stages in heterogeneous environments are made too
Searching for Nodes in Random Graphs

We consider the problem of searching for a node on a labeled random graph according to a greedy algorithm that selects a route to the desired node using metric information on the graph. Motivated by peer-to-peer networks two types of random graph are proposed with properties particularly amenable to this kind of algorithm. We derive equations for the probability that the search is successful and also study the number of hops required, finding both numerical and analytic evidence of a transition as the number of links is varied.
Seaside — a Multiple Control Flow Web Application Framework

Developing web applications is difficult since (1) the client-server relationship is asymmetric: the server cannot update clients but only responds to client requests and (2) the navigation facilities of web browsers lead to a situation where servers cannot control the state of the clients. Page-centric web application frameworks fail to offer adequate solutions to model control flow at a high-level of abstraction. Developers have to work manually around the shortcomings of the HTTP protocol. Some approaches offer better abstractions by composing an application out of components, however they still fail to offer modeling control flow at a high level. Continuation-based approaches solve this problem by providing the facilities to model a control flow over several pages with one piece of code. However combining multiple flows inside the same page is difficult. This article presents Seaside. Seaside is a framework which combines an object-oriented approach with a continuation-based one. A Seaside application is built out of components (i.e., objects) and the logic of the application benefits from the continuation-based program flow infrastructure. Seaside offers a unique way to have multiple control flows on a page, one for each component. This enables the developer to write components that are highly reusable and that can be used to compose complex web applications with higher quality in less time.
Aged boreal biomass-burning aerosol size distributions from BORTAS 2011

Abstract. Biomass-burning aerosols contribute to aerosol radiative forcing on the climate system. The magnitude of this effect is partially determined by aerosol size distributions, which are functions of source fire characteristics (e.g. fuel type, MCE) and in-plume microphysical processing. The uncertainties in biomass-burning emission number–size distributions in climate model inventories lead to uncertainties in the CCN (cloud condensation nuclei) concentrations and forcing estimates derived from these models. The BORTAS-B (Quantifying the impact of BOReal forest fires on Tropospheric oxidants over the Atlantic using Aircraft and Satellite) measurement campaign was designed to sample boreal biomass-burning outflow over eastern Canada in the summer of 2011. Using these BORTAS-B data, we implement plume criteria to isolate the characteristic size distribution of aged biomass-burning emissions (aged ~ 1–2 days) from boreal wildfires in northwestern Ontario. The composite median size distribution yields a single dominant accumulation mode with Dpm = 230 nm (number-median diameter) and σ = 1.5, which are comparable to literature values of other aged plumes of a similar type. The organic aerosol enhancement ratios (ΔOA / ΔCO) along the path of Flight b622 show values of 0.09–0.17 μg m−3 ppbv−1 (parts per billion by volume) with no significant trend with distance from the source. This lack of enhancement ratio increase/decrease with distance suggests no detectable net OA (organic aerosol) production/evaporation within the aged plume over the sampling period (plume age: 1–2 days), though it does not preclude OA production/loss at earlier stages. A Lagrangian microphysical model was used to determine an estimate of the freshly emitted size distribution corresponding to the BORTAS-B aged size distributions. The model was restricted to coagulation and dilution processes based on the insignificant net OA production/evaporation derived from the ΔOA / ΔCO enhancement ratios. We estimate that the young-plume median diameter was in the range of 59–94 nm with modal widths in the range of 1.7–2.8 (the ranges are due to uncertainty in the entrainment rate). Thus, the size of the freshly emitted particles is relatively unconstrained due to the uncertainties in the plume dilution rates.
Comparison of LPCC and MFCC features and GMM and GMM-UBM modeling for limited data speaker verification

This work address text-independent speaker verification with the constraint of limited data (<;15 seconds). The existing techniques for speaker verification work well for sufficient data (>1 minute). Developing techniques for verifying the speakers for limited data condition is a challenging issue since data available of speakers is very small nowadays. This is because people reluctant to give more data. In this work to extract features of speech signal Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC) are used. The extracted features are modeled using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and GMM-Universal Background Model (UBM) modeling techniques. The NIST-2003 database is used to carry-out the experiments. The experiments are evaluated for limited amount of training and testing speech data. The experimental observation indicates that the Equal Error Rate of LPCC features is less as compared to MFCC for limited data.
The StickyBallot Voting Scheme

Recently, the ThreeBallot voting scheme has been proposed as a means of providing a voter with a non-transferable receipt for their vote without resorting to more traditional means of cryptography. The ThreeBallot scheme is attractive because voters are not required to either understand complex cryptography present in other voting schemes, or more usually, trust a software or hardware artifact to perform the cryptography on their behalf. This paper describes an alternative scheme that provides similar properties without use of cryptography.
DESEMPENHO PERCEBIDO: UMA AN¡LISE DA SATISFA«√O DE OUVINTES DE UMA EMISSORA DE R¡DIO DE DIFUS√O COMUNIT¡RIA PERCEIVED PERFORMANCE: A LISTENERSSATISFACTION ANALYSIS OF A COMMUNITY RADIO BROADCASTING STATION

Perceived performance is an important analysis of listener’s level of satisfaction of a radio station. Based on this assumption, the purpose of this article is to examine the satisfaction of Thermal FM Radio listeners, located in Santo Amaro da Imperatriz Santa Catarina. Methodologically, this research is characterized by a quantitative approach. Structured interviews were used as technique for data collection. Study subjects were selected through non-probability sampling for traffic, totaling 400 interviews with 95 % reliability and maximum error margin of 5 %. The findings present 49.5 % of respondents listen to the radio between 01 and 06 years, featuring a "faithful” listener. Of these 400 respondents, 26% listen to the radio from two to three times a week. Most listeners are satisfied with the radio tuning, and 78.50 % are very satisfied or satisfied with the signal. The most preferred program by the listeners is called Show da Manha in which is broadcasting the higher number of information and news from the city. The number of respondents who prefer country music is expressive, 38.29 % of the total, among several options of music style. Respondents were satisfied with the musical diversification, featuring a score of 64.75%. Therefore, the indicators obtained by this research highlights that the searched station provides a service that meets the public expectations.
Discovering Semantic Frames for a Contrastive Study of Verbs in Medical Corpora

The field of medicine gathers actors with different levels of expertise. These actors must interact, although their mutual understanding is not always completely successful. We propose to study corpora (with high and low levels of expertise) in order to observe their specificities. More specifically, we perform a contrastive analysis of verbs, and of the syntactic and semantic features of their participants, based on the Frame Semantics framework and the methodology implemented in FrameNet. In order to acheive this, we use an existing medical terminology to automatically annotate the semantics classes of participants of verbs, which we assume are indicative of semantics roles. Our results indicate that verbs show similar or very close semantics in some contexts, while in other contexts they behave differently.
Flow separation control over a pitching airfoil using an oscillatory jet By

With the recent success in controlling various separating flows using a temporally oscillatory zero-net-mass-flux jet (synthetic jet), our objective is to devise efficient and universal control algorithms using synthetic jets for a full suppression of dynamic stall, which would substantially improve the performance of various rotorcraft. For this long-term goal, suitability of Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Simulations (URANS) as a computational tool for synthetic-jet design is first examined in the present study, and flow over a NACA0015 airfoil pitching about the quarter chord with α(t) = 13◦ + 5◦ sin(ωpt) and k = ωpc/2U = 0.1 at the chord Reynolds number of Re = 300, 000 is computed using the v–f turbulence model. Several cases controlled by a synthetic jet are also computed. A large deviation from the experiment is observed for both uncontrolled and controlled cases, which suggests that currently available turbulence models should be significantly improved to account for the correct dynamics of a separated shear layer and unsteady separation/reattachment. The URANS results also demonstrate challenging aspects of dynamic-stall control, indicating the necessity of introducing more sophisticated control strategies, such as intermittent control, feedback loop, or combination with large-scale spatial modulations.
Optimal Risk / Dividend Distribution Control Models

The current paper presents a short survey of stochastic models of risk control and dividend optimization techniques for a nancial corporation. While being close to consump-tion/investment models of Mathematical Finance, dividend optimization models possess special features which do not allow them to be treated as a particular case of consumption/investment models. In a typical model of this sort, in the absence of control, the reserve (surplus) process, which represents the liquid assets of the company, is governed by a Brownian motion with constant drift and diiusion coeecient. This is a limiting case of the classical Cramer-Lundberg model in which the reserve is a compound Poisson process, amended by a linear term, representing a constant innux of the insurance premiums. Risk control action corresponds to reinsuring part of the claims the cedent is required to pay simultaneously diverting part of the premiums to a reinsurance company. This translates into controlling the drift and the diiusion coeecient of the approximating process. The dividend distribution policy consists of choosing the times and the amounts of dividends to be paid put to shareholders. Mathematically, the cumulative dividend process is described by an increasing functional which may or may not be continuous with respect to time. The objective in the models presented here is maximization of the dividend pay-outs. We will discuss models with diierent types of conditions imposed upon a company and diierent types of reinsurances available, such as proportional, noncheap, proportional in a presence of a constant debt liability, excess-of-loss. We will show that in most cases the optimal dividend distribution scheme is of a barrier type, while the risk control policy depends substantially on the nature of reinsurance available.
Web servicing the biological office

UNLABELLED Biologists routinely use Microsoft Office applications for standard analysis tasks. Despite ubiquitous internet resources, information needed for everyday work is often not directly and seamlessly available. Here we describe a very simple and easily extendable mechanism using Web Services to enrich standard MS Office applications with internet resources. We demonstrate its capabilities by providing a Web-based thesaurus for biological objects, which maps names to database identifiers and vice versa via an appropriate synonym list. The client application ProTag makes these features available in MS Office applications using Smart Tags and Add-Ins. AVAILABILITY http://services.bio. ifi.lmu. de/prothesaurus/
A semi-autonomous security robot employing telepresence

There has been a great deal of work recently in the fields of teleoperation and telerobotics [5]. In these man-machine systems, a robot arm or a land vehicle are commanded to move in real-time by a human operator who is viewing the progress of the operation. The decisions on the task of moving the arm or vehicle to the desired position are made by the operator. A branch of research in this field has moved toward telepresence [2] or tele-existence [9], where the human operator is made to feel that he or she is located at the task site by providing her with as much input information about the task site as possible using stereo vision or contact force feedback. Telepresence allows the removal of the operator from the vehicle to a remote location, and can greatly increase operator safety and comfort in applications such as surveillance and fire-detection. Current integrated building systems use closed-circuit TV (CCTV) for surveillance and fixed floor-or ceiling-mounted sensors for fire and intrusion detection. However, these systems are less than ideal since the user is limited to the fixed viewpoint of these cameras. Likewise, the sensors can only detect problems over a vague and general area. Further investigation of an alarm may endanger humans who must enter the hazardous area. Thus, we are developing a
On source decoding based on finite-bandwidth soft information

Designing a communication system using joint source-channel coding in general makes it possible to achieve a better performance than when the source and channel codes are designed separately, especially under strict delay-constraints. The majority of work done in joint source-channel coding uses a discrete channel model, corresponding to an analog channel in conjunction with a hard decision modulation scheme. The performance of such a system can however be improved by using soft decision modulation. The main cost is a higher decoding complexity. An alternative is to quantize the soft information and store the pre-calculated soft decision values in a lookup table. In this paper we propose new methods for quantizing soft channel information, to be used in conjunction with soft-decision source decoding. We achieve a performance close to that of a system using unquantized soft information
Instructional Level Parallelism

This paper is a review of the developments in Instruction level parallelism. It takes into account all the changes made in speeding up the execution. The various drawbacks and dependencies due to pipelining are discussed and various solutions to overcome them are also incorporated. It goes ahead in the last section to explain where is the new research leading us.
Landscape-level interactions of prefire vegetation, burn severity, and postfire vegetation over a 16-year period in interior Alaska

Landsat imagery was used to study the relationship between a remotely sensed burn severity index and prefire vegetation and the postfire vegetation response related to burn severity within a 1986 burn in interior Alaska. Vegetation was classified prior to the fire and 16 years after the fire, and a chronosequence of remotely sensed vegetation index values was analyzed as a surrogate of vegetation recovery. Remotely sensed burn severity varied by vegetation class, with needle-leaf forest classes experiencing higher burn severity than broadleaf forest or broadleaf shrubland classes. Burn severity varied by cover within needle-leaf classes. Elevation also had an influence on burn severity, presumably as a result of there being less fuel above the treeline. Several large broadleaf areas at the fire perimeter appeared to act as fire breaks. A remotely sensed vegetation index peaked 814 years after the fire, and increase in the vegetation index was highest within the highest burn severity class. Self-replaceme.
EXP3 with drift detection for the switching bandit problem

The multi-armed bandit is a model of exploration and exploitation, where one must select, within a finite set of arms, the one which maximizes the cumulative reward up to the time horizon T. For the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem, where the sequence of rewards is chosen by an oblivious adversary, the notion of best arm during the time horizon is too restrictive for applications such as ad-serving, where the best ad could change during time range. In this paper, we consider a variant of the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem, where the time horizon is divided into unknown time periods within which rewards are drawn from stochastic distributions. During each time period, there is an optimal arm which may be different from the optimal arm at the previous time period. We present an algorithm taking advantage of the constant exploration of EXP3 to detect when the best arm changes. Its analysis shows that on a run divided into N periods where the best arm changes, the proposed algorithms achieves a regret in O(N √T log T).
The reading desk: applying physical interactions to digital documents

Reading is increasingly being performed interactively on-screen; for instance, new novels are now routinely released in electronic format for viewing on PCs and mobile devices. Unfortunately, on-screen reading loses many of the natural features of conventional physical media, such as the ability to annotate, slip in bookmarks, turn page corners, and so on. How best should these features be represented electronically? Can computerized representations give benefits that excel the conventional benefits of paper? We describe the design and implementation of a novel reading system that mimics key properties of paper and surpasses them by incorporating digital techniques. A comparative user study evaluating the system confirmed the effectiveness of the features and the value of the system as a whole.
Workflow Engine Model on Multi-Agent Technology Research

Researching how to combine workflow with Agent in order to improve flexibility and self learning ability is a hotspot of researches because of the needs of the workflow technology and the characteristics of the agent technology with self-learningability. This paper introduces agent technology in workflow engine, designs a Workflow Engine Model on Multi-agent and analyzes the functions of each agent in the model. Finally, this paper analyzes briefly the communication method between the multiple agents.
Union membership and density: Some (not so) stylized facts and challenges

This article surveys recent data and empirical literature on (trends in) unionization and its determinants in advanced countries. There are some robust stylized facts, for instance that unionization is positively related to public sector employment, establishment size, and the business cycle. Union-administered unemployment insurance and union presence at the workplace also play a positive role. However, some seemingly obvious explanations for union decline – such as economic globalization and changes in economic structure and workforce composition – do not seem to have impeded union membership everywhere; nor has the decentralization of collective bargaining. It also remains an open question whether changes in social values and employee attitudes towards unions have affected unionization negatively.