Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATIONS OF DYNAMICS OF ACCRETION FLOWS IRRADIATED BY A QUASAR

We study the axisymmetric and nonaxisymmetric, time-dependent hydrodynamics of gas that is under the influence of the gravity of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and the radiation force produced by a radiatively efficient flow accreting onto the SMBH. We have considered two cases: (1) the formation of an outflow from the accretion of the ambient gas without rotation and (2) that with weak rotation. The main goals of this study are (1) to examine if there is a significant difference between the models with identical initial and boundary conditions but in different dimensionality (two and three dimensions) and (2) to understand the gas dynamics in active galactic nuclei. Our three-dimensional simulations of a nonrotating gas show small yet noticeable nonaxisymmetric small-scale features inside the outflow. The outflow as a whole and the inflow do not seem to suffer from any large-scale instability. In the rotating case, the nonaxisymmetric features are very prominent, especially in the outflow which consists of many cold dense clouds entrained in a smoother hot flow. The three-dimensional outflow is nonaxisymmetric due to the shear and thermal instabilities. In both two- and three-dimensional simulations, gas rotation increases the outflow thermal energy flux, but reduces the outflow mass and kinetic energy fluxes. Rotation also leads to time variability and fragmentation of the outflow in the radial and latitudinal directions. The collimation of the outflow is reduced in the models with gas rotation. The time variability in the mass and energy fluxes is reduced in the three-dimensional case because of the outflow fragmentation in the azimuthal direction. The virial mass estimated from the kinematics of the dense cold clouds found in our three-dimensional simulations of rotating gas underestimates the actual mass used in the simulations by about 40%. The opening angles (∼30°) of the bi-conic outflows found in the models with rotating gas are very similar to that of the nearby Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151 (∼33°). The radial velocities of the dense cold clouds from the simulations are compared with the observed gas kinematics of the narrow-line region of NGC 4151.
Requirement Engineering Practices - An Empirical Study

Requirement Engineering (RE) phase has been regarded as one of the important phases in the development process. Inadequate engineering of requirements can lead to more expensive errors in the later software development phases. Even though there are many methods and techniques which have been proposed in the literatures, many of these methods and techniques have not been widely practiced in the industry. To be able to rectify the situation, the assessment of the current practice is crucial. The main goal of this work is to investigate the software engineering practices especially the requirements engineering practices in the Malaysian software industry. Many of the practicing software developers are the product of the local educational institutions. The findings may help the industries to plan for enhancements in the requirement engineering practices. This research uses a survey instrument to gather data from 27 Malaysian based software firms. The main contribution of this research is the identification of the most practiced requirements engineering activities and the least practiced requirements engineering activities in the software firms.
Natural Language Processing Methods for Automatic Illustration of Text

The thesis describes methods for automatic creation of illustrations of natural-language text. The main focus of the work is to convert texts that describe sequences of events in a physical world into animated images. This is what we call text-to-scene conversion. The first part of the thesis describes Carsim, a system that automatically illustrates traffic accident newspaper reports written in Swedish. This system is the first text-to-scene conversion system for non-invented texts. The second part of the thesis focuses on methods to generalize the NLP components of Carsim to make the system more easily portable to new domains of application. Specifically, we develop methods to sidestep the scarcity of annotated data, needed for training and testing of NLP methods. We present a method to annotate the Swedish side of a parallel corpus with shallow semantic information in the FrameNet standard. This corpus is then used to train a semantic role labeler for Swedish text. (Less)
Distributed Predictive Connectivity Control for Double Integrator Agents based on a Receding Horizon Scheme

In this paper, we propose a distributed constrained connectivity control algorithm for a network of dynamically decoupled agents with constrained discrete-time linear dynamics. This control algorithm works based on a receding horizon control (RHC) scheme and acts as a middleware that modifies the set-points defined by the user or by high-level control units whenever their direct application would violate system constraints. To guarantee the connectivity of the communication graph, the algorithm enforces that a specific spanning tree exists at each time. The algorithm is allowed, under certain conditions, to switch between interaction graphs in order to enhance system performance. Among all possible spanning trees, we propose to use the Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST), and we study its advantages. The overall algorithm is described, and some of its properties are pointed out. Some simulations conclude the paper and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Managing mutual awareness in collaborative virtual environments

This paper introduces a spatial model of interaction which aims to support groups of people in using their natural communication skills in distributed virtual environments. First, we outline our motivation for undertaking this work in terms of the social significance of space in supporting co-operative work. Next, we summarise the model's main concepts, namely aura, awareness, focus, nimbus, adapters and boundaries. Following this, we describe routes to implementing the model. The first is an approach suited to realising the model as an application of existing VR platforms. The second is a general implementation of the model, based on its own specially tailored distributed architecture. Finally, we present our initial observations from use in the laboratory setting and outline issues for future work. 2
Quality of Life and Socioeconomic Status: A Comparative Study among Mothers of Children with and without Disabilities in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT A child's disability affects not only that child but also their caregivers. This study compares the quality of life (QoL) of Saudi mothers (primary caregivers) of children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) and Down Syndrome (DS) and mothers whose children do not have a disability, and explores its relationship with socioeconomic status. Two hundred mothers of children with disabilities and 99 mothers of children without disabilities were recruited from rehabilitation centers and regular schools, respectively. Information on their sociodemographic, social support, and QoL information was collected using the Quality of Life Index (QLI) – Generic Version III. The independent-samples t-test and Welch's test for QoL indicate that the mothers of children with disabilities have less satisfaction (QLI Part 1) in the social and economic subscale compared to the mothers of children without disabilities (p = 0.0068) but no differences were found in the other domains. For QLI Part 2 (Importance), the mothers of children with disabilities were found to attribute more importance to health and functioning than mothers of children without disabilities (p = 0.003). The former were also found to attribute less importance to their psychological/spiritual status than the latter (p < 0.01). There was no significant difference in total score or in the family or socioeconomic domains. It is concluded that Saudi mothers of children with disabilities need more social support and professional help to improve their quality of life.
Long-Term Consequences of Fetal and Neonatal Nicotine Exposure: A Critical Review

Cigarette smoking during pregnancy is associated with numerous obstetrical, fetal, and developmental complications, as well as an increased risk of adverse health consequences in the adult offspring. Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has been developed as a pharmacotherapy for smoking cessation and is considered to be a safer alternative for women to smoking during pregnancy. The safety of NRT use during pregnancy has been evaluated in a limited number of short-term human trials, but there is currently no information on the long-term effects of developmental nicotine exposure in humans. However, animal studies suggest that nicotine alone may be a key chemical responsible for many of the long-term effects associated with maternal cigarette smoking on the offspring, such as impaired fertility, type 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension, neurobehavioral defects, and respiratory dysfunction. This review will examine the long-term effects of fetal and neonatal nicotine exposure on postnatal health.
Reducing under-reporting of stigmatized health events using the List Experiment: results from a randomized, population-based study of abortion in Liberia.

BACKGROUND Direct measurement of sensitive health events is often limited by high levels of under-reporting due to stigma and concerns about privacy. Abortion in particular is notoriously difficult to measure. This study implements a novel method to estimate the cumulative lifetime incidence of induced abortion in Liberia. METHODS In a randomly selected sample of 3219 women ages 15–49 years in June 2013 in Liberia, we implemented the ‘Double List Experiment’. To measure abortion incidence, each woman was read two lists: (A) a list of non-sensitive items and (B) a list of correlated non-sensitive items with abortion added. The sensitive item, abortion, was randomly added to either List A or List B for each respondent. The respondent reported a simple count of the options on each list that she had experienced, without indicating which options. Difference in means calculations between the average counts for each list were then averaged to provide an estimate of the population proportion that has had an abortion. RESULTS The list experiment estimates that 32% [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.29-0.34) of respondents surveyed had ever had an abortion (26% of women in urban areas, and 36% of women in rural areas, P-value for difference < 0.001), with a 95% response rate. CONCLUSIONS The list experiment generated an estimate five times greater than the only previous representative estimate of abortion in Liberia, indicating the potential utility of this method to reduce under-reporting in the measurement of abortion. The method could be widely applied to measure other stigmatized health topics, including sexual behaviours, sexual assault or domestic violence.
Gender, and Satisfaction of Body Image in High School Students of Yucatan, Mexico

Adolescence constitutes a stage of changes and strong social pressures among peers, to adjust to a standard of beauty in which the perception of body image is of great relevance in comprehensive health behaviors as well as a risk factor for eating disorders. Regarding problem that is our interest to know (Body Image), we use a gender focuses, as the transversal analytical axis of the study, as well as the study of a region with a strong presence of Maya-speakers. Methodology: This is a quantitative, cross-sectional study conducted on 1432 high school students in the eastern part of the state of Yucatan, using a self-administered questionnaire (BSQ and SFS scales), with the prior informed consent of parents and participants. Results: It was obtained that 66.5% of the students are satisfied with their body image, and 32.7% are dissatisfied. It was obtained by means of the Kappa index that the perceptions of the body image of the studied students vs the desired body image have a moderate concordance. Significant differences on mean on dissatisfaction with their image were found between men and women p ≤ 0.001. Conclusions: In the area studied it is shown that gender constitutes a risk factor in which the condition of being the social pressure to adjust to beauty models, impacts regardless of the rural, urban or local culture, in this case of the Mayan zone.
Performance Comparison and Overview of Different Approaches for VLSI Optoelectronic Interconnects

Although a great deal of research has been carried out over the last decade in which many different approaches for devising optoelectronic interconnects have been proposed, more detailed analysis of the performance parameters such as power, latency, and area of different optical technologies is yet to be done. Optoelectronics offer potential for new approaches to the production of VLSI interconnects, but previous works have made overly simplified assumptions for optoelectronic interconnections. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of the system parameters of different optoelectronic interconnect technologies. Based on our analysis, we conclude that the three-dimensional free-space optoelectronic interconnect network has the best speed area product performance compared with fiber-optical interconnects and optical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) interconnects. Second, although the optoelectronic interconnect offers higher data rates and less power per bit compared with electronic interconnects, the bipolar encoding scheme on the source plane and the detector plane means that a larger area and volume will be needed.
Causal Joint Multiuser Detection and Multichannel Tracking in Flat-Fading CDMA Channels

The problem of causal joint multiuser detection and multichannel tracking (CJDT) in time-varying flat Rayleigh fading code-division multiple-access (CDMA) channels is considered. Starting upon the consideration that fading correlation prevents, in this scenario, the symbols to be decoded independently, the causal (i.e., corresponding to zero decoding delay) maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver is first derived: as expected, the resulting structure has a complexity which grows exponentially in the number of users, preventing any practical implementation. Sub-optimum detection strategies are thus investigated, basically through the expectation-maximization algorithm: the resulting receiver can be thought of as a combination of an interference suppressor and a Kalman filter, both operating iteratively. The results show that the newly proposed receiver achieves near-optimum performance and outperforms its direct competitors based on decorrelating detection
On the topology and area of higher-dimensional black holes

Over the past decade there has been an increasing interest in the study of black holes, and related objects, in higher (and lower) dimensions, motivated to a large extent by developments in string theory. The aim of the present paper is to obtain higher-dimensional analogues of some well known results for black holes in 3 + 1 dimensions. More precisely, we obtain extensions to higher dimensions of Hawking’s black hole topology theorem for asymptotically flat (� = 0) black hole spacetimes, and Gibbons’ and Woolgar’s genus-dependent, lower entropy bound for topological black holes in asymptotically locally antide Sitter ( �< 0) spacetimes. In higher dimensions the genus is replaced by the so-called σ -constant, or Yamabe invariant, which is a fundamental topological invariant of smooth compact manifolds.
A NOVEL PROTOCOL TO IMPROVE TCP PERFORMANCE - PROPOSAL

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) plays a crucial role in adjusting data rate to avoid congestion from happening. TCP performance degrades significantly in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) due to the packet losses. In this work, a survey is carried out to identify the research issues related to all layers which will help in developing a routing protocol to improve the TCP performance.
Climatic origin is unrelated to national Olympic success and specialization: an analysis of six successive games (1996–2016) using 12 dissimilar sports categories

Abstract Disparities among nations in the summer Olympics are often ascribed to long-lasting climatic influences. In this study, we examined six Summer Games (1996–2016) to investigate the potential correlation between climatic origin and national Olympic success in 12 dissimilar sports categories. We measured total success by medal tallies (MT) and the revealed symmetric comparative advantage (CA). Using Tobit regression, we tested the effect of four generic climates (Dry–Arid, Tropical–Equatorial, Warm–Humid, Cool–Humid) against the covariation of population, gross domestic product and the socialist system. The Tobit models were significant both for MT (ρ2 = 0.20–0.73) and CA (ρ2 = 0.08–0.54). With a few minor exceptions (Weights, Aquatics/Water, Combat) much of the variation in MT and CA was explained by the three covariates. Inter-nation disparities in Olympic performance are unrelated to climatic origin. The previously observed ‘advantage’ of the Temperate climate is discussed considering the strong ‘socialist’ covariate.
Slightly improved sum-product estimates in fields of prime order

Let $\mathbb{F}_p$ be the field of residue classes modulo a prime number $p$ and let $A$ be a nonempty subset of $\mathbb{F}_p$. In this paper we show that if $|A|\preceq p^{0.5}$, then \[ \max\{|A\pm A|,|AA|\}\succeq|A|^{13/12};\] if $|A|\succeq p^{0.5}$, then \[ \max\{|A\pm A|,|AA|\}\succapprox \min\{|A|^{13/12}(\frac{|A|}{p^{0.5}})^{1/12},|A|(\frac{p}{|A|})^{1/11}\}. \] These results slightly improve the estimates of Bourgain-Garaev and Shen. Sum-product estimates on different sets are also considered.
An intelligent and autonomous endoscopic guidance system for minimally invasive surgery

The endoscopic guidance system for minimally invasive surgery presented here autonomously aligns the laparoscopic camera with the end-effectors of the surgeon's instruments. It collects information on the movements of the instruments from former interventions and can therefore predict them for autonomous guidance of the endoscopic camera. Knowledge is extracted by trajectory clustering, maximum likelihood classification and a Markov model to predict states. Alternative movements in an ongoing intervention are modeled. A first prototype of a robotic platform for minimally invasive surgery is described, which has two instrument arms, an autonomous robotic camera assistant and two haptic devices to control the instrument arms. The approach of long-term prediction and optimal camera positioning was tested in a phantom experiment with a hit rate of over 89% for predicting the movement of the end-effectors. Including this prediction for computing the camera position, leads to 29.2% less movements and to an improved visibility of the instruments.
Performance analysis for power-splitting energy harvesting based two-way full-duplex relaying network over nakagami-m fading channel

Energy harvesting relay network is considered as the promising solution for a wireless communication network in our time. In this research, we present and demonstrate the system performance of the energy harvesting based two-way full-duplex relaying network over Nakagami-m fading environment. Firstly, we propose the analytical expressions of the achievable throughput and outage probability of the proposed system. In the second step, the effect of various system parameters on the system performance is presented and investigated. In the final step, the analytical results are also demonstrated by Monte-Carlo simulation. The numerical results demonstrated and convinced the analytical and the simulation results are agreed with each other.
Semiring Pruning for Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Link state routing mechanisms have shown good convergence behaviour with mobile hosts. Pruning methods such as those used in Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) have showed good throughput behaviour when compared to traditional link-state approaches which suffered from broadcast storm problems. In this paper, we show that the pruning function is a fundamental component of link-state routing protocols for mobile networks. We also show that this component architecture aids in interpreting both distance vector and link-state approaches under a common framework. We develop a class of pruning methods for many of the most commonly used routing objectives and show that these pruning methods are a special case of the semiring distribution property.
Protective effect of Cassia fistula Linn. on diethylnitrosamine induced hepatocellular damage and oxidative stress in ethanol pretreated rats.

Diethylnitrosamine (DEN), found in many commonly consumed foods, is widely reported to induce cancer in animals and humans. The aim of the present study was to investigate the hepatoprotective and antioxidant activities of the leaf extract of the medicinal plant Cassia fistula Linn. against diethylnitrosamine induced liver injury in ethanol pretreated rats. Albino Wistar rats, pretreated with ethanol for 15 days, were administered a single dose of DEN. Thirty days after DEN administration, hepatotocellular damage was observed histologically, along with elevated levels of serum AST, ALT, ALP, LDH, γ-GT and bilirubin and a simultaneous fall in the levels of the marker enzymes in the liver tissue. Liver oxidative stress was confirmed by elevated levels of lipid peroxidation (LPO) and a decrease in enzymic and non-enzymic antioxidants activities. Oral administration of the ethanolic leaf extract (ELE) of Cassia fistula for 30 days to ethanol + DEN treated rats significantly improved the above alterations in the markers of hepatotoxicity and oxidative stress, resulting in the reversal of most of the parameters studied and were comparable to the standard hepatoprotective drug silymarin.
An Accuracy Assessment of Forensic Computerized Facial Reconstruction Employing Cone‐Beam Computed Tomography from Live Subjects

Abstract: The utilization of 3D computerized systems has allowed more effective procedures for forensic facial reconstruction. Three 3D computerized facial reconstructions were produced using skull models from live adult Korean subjects to assess facial morphology prediction accuracy. The 3D skeletal and facial data were recorded from the subjects in an upright position using a cone‐beam CT scanner. Shell‐to‐shell deviation maps were created using 3D surface comparison software, and the deviation errors between the reconstructed and target faces were measured. Results showed that 54%, 65%, and 77% of the three facial reconstruction surfaces had <2.5 mm of error when compared to the relevant target face. The average error for each reconstruction was −0.46 mm (SD = 2.81) for A, −0.31 mm (SD = 2.40) for B, and −0.49 mm (SD = 2.16) for C. The facial features of the reconstructions demonstrated good levels of accuracy compared to the target faces.