Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Digital Material Representation Model of Porous Microstructure Based on 3D Reconstruction Algorithm

Development of the Digital Material Representation (DMR) model, based on 3D reconstruction algorithm and serial sectioning, is the main goal of the present paper. Details on the serial sectioning and image processing algorithms are presented first. Serial sectioning is realized on the basis of light microscopy (LM). Then concept of 3D reconstruction and developed algorithms are presented. Two approaches, based on shape coefficients and the flood fill algorithms, are developed to identify corresponding features on subsequent 2D images. Then, the interpolation algorithm to reconstruct 3D volume between 2D images is presented. Finally, obtained 3D model is an input for finite element mesh generation software for subsequent finite element calculations.
Electrical resistivitiy of hcp-Fe under Earth's core conditions

Iron is the primary component of the Earth’s core. Convection of the conductive liquid outer core generates the geomagnetic field, and secular cooling of the core induces growth of the solid inner core and dynamics in the Earth’s inside. Synchrotron x-ray diffraction study suggests that iron crystallizes in the hexagonal close-packed structure at the inner core conditions (Tateno et al., 2010). Thus, the electrical resistivity of hexagonal close-packed iron (hcp-Fe) is a key piece of information for estimating the transport properties of the core. We report high temperature electrical resistivity for hcp-Fe to 185 GPa measured in a laserheated diamond anvil cell. We observed resistivity saturation in hcp-Fe under high pressure and high temperature conditions as predicted in a recent laboratory-based model for the conductivity of the Earth’s core (Gomi et al., 2013). The saturation effect is significant in estimating electrical and thermal conductivity of the core, which strongly affect the dynamics and thermal evolution of the Earth.
Software Diversity: Practical Statistics for Its Measurement and Exploitation | Draft Currently under Revision

The topic of this paper is the exploitation of diversity to enhance computer system reliability. It is well-established that a diverse system composed of multiple alternative versions is more reliable than any single version alone, and this knowledge has occasionally been exploited in safety-critical applications. However, it is not clear what this property is, nor how the available diversity in a collection of versions is best exploited. We develop, deene, illustrate and assess diversity measures, voting strategies for diversity exploitation, and interactions between the two. We take the view that a proper understanding of such issues is required if multiversion software engineering is to be elevated from the current`try it and see' procedure to a systematic technology. In addition, we introduce inductive programming techniques, particularly neural computing, as a cost-eeective route to the practical use of multiversion systems outside the demanding requirements of safety-critical systems | i.e. in general software engineering. It is widely accepted that complex software will not be error-free, or if by chance it is error-free, we can never know that this is the case. This unsatisfactory situation is further aggravated by the ever-increasing demand for more reliability in computer-based systems. This demand has led to the emergence of extreme reliability requirements in some systems to whom all correspondence should be addressed
Immunophenotype of Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumors as Detected in Cases with EWS-WT1 Gene Fusion Product

Desmoplastic small round cell tumor is a rare tumor typically involving peritoneum. Although the histogenesis of desmoplastic small round cell tumor has yet to be elucidated, immunophenotypical and morphological analysis shows a characteristic divergent phenotype overlapping with other round cell tumors such as Ewing’s sarcoma/primitive neuroectodermal tumor, rhabdomyosarcoma, small cell mesothelioma, and carcinoma. Detection of the EWS-WT1 gene fusion is characteristic of desmoplastic small round cell tumor and has been used reliably in tumor diagnosis. In this study, we evaluated the immunophenotype of 23 desmoplastic small round cell tumor cases with the EWS-WT1 gene fusion product identified by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. Paraffin sections were stained with antibodies against calretinin, WT1 (C19), desmin, myoglobin, MyoD, Myf5, myogenin, placental alkaline phosphatase, cytokeratins, MIC2, HER2/neu and c-kit using standard immunohistochemical methods. Immunoreactivity was evaluated semiquantitively by light microscopy. Desmoplastic small round cell tumors showed reactivity with calretinin in 4/21, desmin in 21/23, myoglobin in 5/17, placental alkaline phosphatase in 17/21, HER2/neu in 7/18 (3+ in 1 and 1+ in 6), c-kit in 2/14, MIC2 in 13/23, WT1 in 16/23, CAM5.2 in 21/23, and AE1/3 in 16/23 cases. The most sensitive myogenic and epithelial markers are desmin and CAM 5.2. Although nuclear reactivity of the early myogenic regulatory factors (MyoD, myogenin, Myf5) was not detected, myoglobin immunoreactivity was present in 29% of desmoplastic small round cell tumors. HER2/neu overexpression (3+) and c-kit expression are uncommon in desmoplastic small round cell tumors. A panel of myogenic and epithelial markers should be used to detect the divergent phenotype in desmoplastic small round cell tumors, a key feature in the differential diagnosis. Detection of EWS-WT1 fusion becomes critical for the diagnosis when the characteristic divergent phenotype cannot be detected immunohistochemically.
04 Fitzmaurice lo

55 M any efforts in computer graphics focus on mimicking reality to generate images and 3D models that capture the same visual fidelity and realistic properties as the physical world. Traditionally, these efforts start with an empty canvas. A combination of algorithmic techniques and user input is then applied to synthesize each element and layer visual effects until the desired fidelity and expression are achieved. Recent inno-now input technology allows high-fidelity sampling of the physical world, dramatically changing the method and user interface for creating computer graphic imagery. vations with input devices promise to significantly alter this process from a start-from-scratch synthesis procedure to a sampling procedure. Elements from our physical environment are scanned to capture relevant 2D images or 3D content and then imported, manipulated, and merged with other imported artifacts or computer-generated elements. These " spatial sampling " approaches will drive some significant future trends in computer graphics. Spatial sampling promises to save enormous amounts of time by allowing the import of preexisting spatial data. Moreover, sampling gives the user a large library of things to choose from—covering the entire physical world—including rich textures and sophisticated shapes, as well as the ability to
Morphological and chemical structure of silver-doped barium strontium titanate thin films fabricated via pulsed laser deposition

Ag-doped barium strontium titanate (Ag/BST) thin films deposited on Si (1 0 0) substrates at various substrate temperatures and oxygen partial pressures via pulsed laser deposition were investigated. The effects of the substrate temperature and oxygen partial pressure on the crystalline structure, chemical state, and morphology were investigated via x-ray diffraction analysis, field-emission scanning electron microscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and atomic force microscopy. The as-deposited thin films were found to be amorphous in nature. However, as the substrate temperature increased, the crystallinity of the films increased. The crystallite size varied from approximately 13 to 33 nm with respect to the substrate temperature. A uniform film with low roughness was obtained at high substrate temperatures with lattice parameters of a = 3.8272 Å and c = 4.4545 Å. A film prepared at 600 °C exhibited a better crystalline structure and a low surface roughness of approximately 70 nm. XPS revealed the core-level spectra of Ba3d, Sr3d, Ti2p, O1s, and Ag3d. An orange emission band at 571 nm was observed in photoluminescence studies of the Ag/BST thin films.
The Nature of the Nuisance—Damage or Threat—Determines How Perceived Monetary Costs and Cultural Benefits Influence Farmer Tolerance of Wildlife

Biodiversity-friendly farming is a growing area of discussion among farmers, as well as in government departments and non-government organizations interested in conservation on private land. Those seeking to encourage biodiversity on farms must understand the production challenges presented by wildlife. Such species destroy agricultural commodities or present threats to family, pets, or infrastructure. A survey of farmers in the Canadian Maritime provinces sought to understand the drivers of tolerance. Our results demonstrated that estimated monetary losses from a species were largely unrelated to the perceived acceptability of those losses. Rather, the type of nuisance—damage to crops/property or threat to the safety of people, pets, or livestock—determined whether a loss would be perceived as acceptable and if that acceptability would influence tolerance. For damaging species, the perception of cultural benefits seemed able to convert high estimated economic losses to acceptable ones, for overall tolerance. For threatening species, however, minor perceived financial losses seemed augmented by low perceived benefits and made unacceptable, leading to intolerance. Female, older, and part-time farmers were most likely to identify threatening species as a nuisance. The use of an elicitation-based survey design provided novel insight as a result of the lack of prompts, but also presented analytical challenges that weakened predictive power. Recommendations are given for further research and management.
Financial Factors and Labor Market Fluctuations (Preliminary)

What are the effects of financial market imperfections on lab or market activities such as the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies? Standard DSGE models are silent about this since they have not modeled unemployment directly. In this paper I augment a standard monetary DSGE model with explicit financial and labor market frictions. Th e financial frictions are modeled as Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The labor market frictions are modeled as match-search frictions with staggered contracting in nominal wages (following Gertler and Trigari (2006)). Assuming the economy is subject to various shocks, including a shock that originates in the financial sector, I calibrate the model on the U.S. data. The preliminary results show that the model accounts well for the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies observed in the U.S. data. The simulation results suggest that financial accelerator p lay an important role in propagating the financial shock. With the financial accelerator mechanism, t he financial shock contributes a significant portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vaca ncies. I also find that the financial accelerator dampens the effects of supply shock on unemployment and vacancies and amplifies the effects of demand shocks. JEL: classification: E31;E32; E52
Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 and Diabetes 2012

The present special issue was aimed at elucidating the role and the effects of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) in type 2 diabetes. GLP-1 is a gastrointestinal hormone, mainly secreted after meals, capable of increasing glucose-stimulated insulin release and inhibits food intake. The physiological activity of this hormone has been demonstrated to be impaired in obese subjects and in patients with type 2 diabetes in comparison with healthy subjects. Available data suggest that GLP-1 plays a relevant role in the regulation of postprandial glucose metabolism in physiologic conditions. Several new drugs act through the GLP-1 signaling system to stimulate insulin release and regulate blood glucose levels in patients with diabetes. Therefore, a special issue exploring the physiological properties of GLP-1 and the possible applications in several clinical settings is particularly warranted. This special issue is composed of 5 articles: two mechanistic studies and three systematic reviews and meta-analyses, exploring GLP-1-induced signaling mechanisms and molecular identification and cloning of the GLP-1 receptor. The reviews and meta-analyses are focused on the promising beneficial extraglycaemic effects of the incretin-based therapy, including those on lipid profile and cardiovascular risk. Matteo Monami Giovanni Di Pasquale Anna Rowzee Carlo Maria Rotella Edoardo Mannucci
Vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) genotoxicity profile: Relevance for carcinogenicity

Abstract Vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) is a site-of-contact carcinogen in rodents. It is also DNA reactive and mutagenic, but only after its carboxylesterase mediated conversion to acetaldehyde (AA), a metabolic reaction that also produces acetic acid and protons. As VAM’s mutagenic metabolite, AA is normally produced endogenously; detoxification by aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) is required to maintain intra-cellular AA homeostasis. This review examines VAM’s overall genotoxicity, which is due to and limited by AA, and the processes leading to mutation induction. VAM and AA have both been universally negative in mutation studies in bacteria but both have tested positive in several in vitro studies in higher organisms that usually employed high concentrations of test agents. Recently however, in vitro studies evaluating submillimolar concentrations of VAM or AA have shown threshold dose-responses for mutagenicity in human cultured cells. Neither VAM nor AA induced systemic mutagenicity in in vivo studies in metabolically competent mice when tested at non-lethal doses while treatments of animals deficient in aldehyde dehydrogenase (Aldh in animals) did induce both gene and chromosome level mutations. The results of several studies have reinforced the critical role for aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2 in humans) in limiting AA’s (and therefore VAM’s) mutagenicity. The overall aim of this review of VAM’s mutagenic potential through its AA metabolite is to propose a mode of action (MOA) for VAM’s site-of-contact carcinogenesis that incorporates the overall process of mutation induction that includes both background mutations due to endogenous AA and those resulting from exogenous exposures.
Autonomic management of elastic services in the cloud

Cloud computing, with its support for elastic resources that are available on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go basis, is an attractive platform for hosting Web-based services that have variable demand, yet consistent performance requirements. Effective service management is mandatory in order for services running in the cloud, which we call elastic services, to be cost-effective. In this paper we describe a management framework to facilitate elasticity of resource consumption by services in the cloud. We extend our framework for services management with the necessary concepts and properties to support elastic services. A prototype implementation is described.
Fast Detection of Curved Edges at Low SNR

Detecting edges is a fundamental problem in computer vision with many applications, some involving very noisy images. While most edge detection methods are fast, they perform well only on relatively clean images. Unfortunately, sophisticated methods that are robust to high levels of noise are quite slow. In this paper we develop a novel multiscale method to detect curved edges in noisy images. Even though our algorithm searches for edges over an exponentially large set of candidate curves, its runtime is nearly linear in the total number of image pixels. As we demonstrate experimentally, our algorithm is orders of magnitude faster than previous methods designed to deal with high noise levels. At the same time it obtains comparable and often superior results to existing methods on a variety of challenging noisy images.
Scalable Web server clustering technologies

The exponential growth of the Internet, coupled with the increasing popularity of dynamically generated content on the World Wide Web, has created the need for more and faster Web servers capable of serving the over 100 million Internet users. Server clustering has emerged as a promising technique to build scalable Web servers. We examine the seminal work, early products, and a sample of contemporary commercial offerings in the field of transparent Web server clustering. We broadly classify transparent server clustering into three categories.
REDOX POTENTIAL (ORP) REGULATION OF NUTRIENT REMOVAL IN WASTEWATER TREATMENT PROCESSES AND THE STRUCTURE - FUNCTION ANALYSIS OF ACTIVATED SLUDGE FLOC

Dr. Baikun Li is the Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut (UConn). She received her Ph.D. from University of Cincinnati in 2002, and completed the post-doctorate training at the Pennsylvania State University in 2003. Dr. Li was the Assistant Professor at Penn State Harrisburg for three years before moving to UConn in 2006. Dr. Li’s research is in the multidisciplinary areas of bioenergy production from wastes, bioelectricity harvest from ocean sediment, and biosensors and bioelectronics. Current research focuses on the development of self-sustained wastewater treatment processes; optimization of biomass energy production from waste treatment; scale-up underwater electricity harvest systems; real time in situ environmental shock sensing; and long-term on-line wastewater quality monitoring. She has advised 10 Ph.D and 15 Master students, and has supervised over 30 undergraduate research thesis and design projects. Dr. Li’s research has been funded by NSF, EPA, ONR, USGS, and industry, with the total research funding of ~$4.0 Million. She is the Al Geib Professorship recipient, and was named the Outstanding Graduate Adviser in 2012 by the UConn School of Engineering. She was awarded the Woman of Innovation (Research Innovation and Leadership) in 2010 by the Connecticut Technology Council (CTC). Dr. Li has served as the Associate Editor for Journal of Environmental Engineering (ASCE) and CLEAN-Soil, Air, Water. She has published ~110 journal papers and over 140 conference papers. Her paper won the Top Citation Award in 2014 by Biochemical Engineering Journal, and featured on the cover of Bioresource Technology in 2015. Dr. Li teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in water quality engineering, biochemical processes, environmental biotechnology, and biodegradation.
A quantized-data based resilient consensus algorithm

Distributed consensus is an important class of distributed algorithms and has attracted great interests in recent years in multi-agent systems, but it introduces a new security issue that adversarial agents may manipulate false information to disrupt the correct operation of consensus process of the whole network. This paper institutes the resilient consensus problem of multi-agent networks under limited communication. The communication channels among the nodes are constrained in which the exchanged information is quantized. The objective is to design a quantized-data based control protocol so that the safe agents can withstand the attackers and acquire an agreement as time goes to infinity. Finally, an example and simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Promoting Access to White Rose Research Papers Generalised Cellular Neural Networks (gcnns) Constructed Using Particle Swarm Optimisation for Spatio-temporal Evolutionary Pattern Identification

(2008) Generalised cellular neural networks (GCNNs) constructed using particle swarm optimisation for spatio-temporal evolutionary pattern identification. Abstract: Particle swarm optimisation (PSO) is introduced to implement a new constructive learning algorithm for training generalised cellular neural networks (GCNNs) for the identification of spatio-temporal evolutionary (STE) systems. The basic idea of the new PSO-based learning algorithm is to successively approximate the desired signal by progressively pursuing relevant orthogonal projections. This new algorithm will thus be referred to as the orthogonal projection pursuit (OPP) algorithm, which is in mechanism similar to the conventional projection pursuit approach. A novel two-stage hybrid training scheme is proposed for constructing a parsimonious GCNN model. In the first stage, the orthogonal projection pursuit algorithm is applied to adaptively and successively augment the network, where adjustable parameters of the associated units are optimised using a particle swarm optimiser. The resultant network model produced at the first stage may be redundant. In the second stage, a forward orthogonal regression (FOR) algorithm, aided by mutual information estimation, is applied to refine and improve the initially trained network. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed method is validated by applying the new modelling framework to a spatio-temporal evolutionary system identification problem.
Parasitic worms and allergies in childhood: Insights from population studies 2008–2013

The last few decades have seen a marked increase in the global prevalence of allergic diseases particularly among children. Among the factors attributed to this rise has been reduced exposure to pathogens during childhood leading to insufficient maturation of the regulatory arm of developing immune systems. Over the years, a number of epidemiological studies have observed an inverse relationship between parasitic worm (helminth) infections and allergies. The purpose of this review is to highlight insights from population studies conducted among children published between 2008 and 2013 that explore the complex dynamics between helminth infections and allergies. These insights include the effect of anthelmintic treatment on allergic responses, an elucidation of immune mechanisms and an examination of helminth‐induced immunoglobulin E cross‐reactivity. A better understanding of the relationship between helminths and allergies is imperative as research directions move toward harnessing the therapeutic potential of helminths and their products in the treatment of allergic disorders.
Coloring Locally Bipartite Graphs on Surfaces

It is proved that there is a function f:N? N such that the following holds. Let G be a graph embedded in a surface of Euler genus g with all faces of even size and with edge-width ? f(g). Then (i)If every contractible 4-cycle of G is facial and there is a face of size >4, then G is 3-colorable. (ii)If G is a quadrangulation, then G is not 3-colorable if and only if there exist disjoint surface separating cycles C1, ? , Cg such that, after cutting along C1, ? , Cg, we obtain a sphere with g holes and g Mobius strips, an odd number of which is nonbipartite. If embeddings of graphs are represented combinatorially by rotation systems and signatures 5], then the condition in (ii) is satisfied if and only if the geometric dual of G has an odd number of edges with negative signature.