Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Root growth and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on woody plants for vegetative stabilization of tropical slopes

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi improve plant growth but have not been studied for slope stabilization. Inoculation of these fungi and bamboo intervention can enhance root growth toward the slip plane. The study tests tree roots’ responses to seeding in bamboo tubes and the fungi consortium. METHODS: The growth of three fast-growing native Indonesian woody plants: Paraserianthes falcataria , Acacia mangium , and Gmelina arborea , was monitored in a screen house. These plants were seeded in bamboo tubes containing soil from Jati Radio and Citatah. The tubes were placed on an inclined plane resembling a 20o slope. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi were added in three doses and controlled by the plots without mycorrhiza and bamboo. FINDINGS: The results showed that bamboo could direct root growth toward the slip plane. The best arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculation results were obtained in Gmelina arborea with a treatment dose of M3 or 30 grams on Jati Radio and Citatah soils. Both treatments did not show significant differences in both locations. CONCLUSION: Gmelina arborea has the highest phosphorus absorption at 80 percent and the highest biomass weight at 660 grams with M3 dose in Citatah, and 71 percent with 330 g at the same dose in Jati Radio, which is related to the optimal level of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi inoculation. Therefore, this species provides the best option for implementing biotechnological strategies to stabilize slopes in areas prone to landslides. Combining bamboo with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can direct and accelerate root growth, with the goal of crossing landslide slip planes
Spatial nonuniformity in heat transport across hybrid material interfaces

Successful thermal management in nanostructured devices relies on control of interfacial thermal transport. Recent measurements have revealed poor thermal transport across interfaces between two dissimilar materials, e.g. organic semiconductors and metals. In such systems, the interfacial thermal conductance, Gb , is dominated by the strength of interfacial bonding, but existing analytical models still fail to accurately predict Gb , especially for organic-metal interfaces. Growing interest in this research area calls for comprehensive understandings of interfacial thermal transport across hybrid material interfaces. Here we demonstrate that spatial nonuniformity has to be assessed in the calculation of Gb for interfaces with partial coverage or incommensurate growth that is characteristic of these interfaces. The interface between copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) and F.C. C metals (Ag, Al, Au) exhibits a six-fold difference between the metal’s (~ 4 Å) and organic molecule’s (~ 25 Å) lattice constant. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal the spatial variation of Gb, and a model is developed that considers the spatial variations in phonon transmission, successfully predicting Gb for many organic-metal interfaces.
Abstractions for Concurrent Consensus - Go Implementation

Consensus is a problem in any system using concurrency, such as systems distributed over a network, multi-core machines, or single-core machines with multi threading. This dissertation utilizes the theoretical foundations provided for abstractions of Concurrent Communicating processes and proposes a library designed to support consensus among communicating processes. The library is implemented in Go programming language, which supports communication over channels and shared memory between threads. The library is designed to provide an abstraction where a user can easily design the processes while the library handles communication needed for the transactional nature of these processes. The challenges and design approach of the library is discussed. Further, the analysis of implementation is performed in terms of its correctness, performance and usability.
Zed: Leveraging Data Types to Process Eclectic Data

Data-processing systems increasingly face data that is eclectic—it spans many heterogeneous schemas and its schemas evolve over time. Unfortunately, existing approaches for processing and querying data are not ideal for eclectic data since they impose a tradeoff between efficient querying and simplicity. We argue that this limitation stems from the very foundations of data processing: data models and their corresponding query languages. No existing approach—whether relational, document, or hybrid—is designed to enable ingesting, querying, and reasoning about heterogeneous types of data. In this paper we propose Zed, a new approach to data processing that centers around data types. Zed elevates data types to be first-class members of both the data model and query language, and by doing so offers a promising path towards easing the processing of eclectic data.
Combinatorial materials synthesis: a foundation for AI-driven scientific discovery

Combinatorial synthesis of solid state materials comprises the use of automation or parallelization to systematically vary synthesis parameters. This approach to materials synthesis is a natural fit for accelerated mapping of composition-structure-property relationships, a central tenet of materials research. By viewing combinatorial synthesis not as a panacea but rather as a launching point for holistic design of experimental workflows, we envision a future for accelerated materials science promoted by the co-development of combinatorial synthesis and artificial intelligence techniques. To evaluate the suitability of a synthesis technique in a given experimental workflow, we establish a collection of 10 complementary metrics spanning the speed, scalability, scope, and quality of synthesis. We summarize the state of the field of combinatorial synthesis via a critical review of established techniques in the context of these metrics, which also elucidates opportunities for further development. These opportunities are shaped by the evolution of combinatorial synthesis in research workflows, spanning initial deployments for high throughput experimentation to seminal demonstrations of automated decision making using artificial intelligence. Historical analysis of combinatorial synthesis in the context of the Gartner hype cycle establishes a recent rise in productivity, placing the field on a trajectory for realizing new paradigms in accelerated materials science workflows, built on the foundation of combinatorial synthesis.
Is Garbage Collection Overhead Gone? Case study of F2FS on ZNS SSDs

The sequential write nature of ZNS SSDs makes them very well-suited for log-structured file systems. The Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS), is one such log-structured file system and has recently gained support for use with ZNS SSDs. The large F2FS over-provisioning space for ZNS SSDs greatly reduces the garbage collection (GC) overhead in the log-structured file systems. Motivated by this observation, we explore the trade-off between disk utilization and over-provisioning space, which affects the garbage collection process, as well as the user application performance. To address the performance degradation in write-intensive workloads caused by GC overhead, we propose a modified free segment-finding policy and a Parallel Garbage Collection (P-GC) scheme for F2FS that efficiently reduces GC overhead. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our P-GC scheme can achieve up to 42% performance enhancement with various workloads.
Software-Controlled Polarization for Longer-Range RFID Reading and Localization

The majority of existing RFID readers rely on circu-larly polarized or switched polarization antennas for powering and communicating with tags. In this paper, we argue that a new form of software-controlled polarization brings important benefits to the tasks of powering, communicating with, and localizing RFID tags. Using only two linearly polarized antennas, we demonstrate how one could generate an arbitrarily linear po-larization in the same plane relying entirely on software control. We incorporate this approach into a protocol that automatically discovers RFID orientations in the environment and show how this approach increases the range (or alternatively reduces the transmit power) of RFID readers. We also demonstrate this approach in an end-to-end RFID localization application.
Centralised Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning By Leveraging Tractable Inference

Most previous works on multi-agent reinforcement learning deal with the case of centralised learning for decentralised execution of policies. One of the reasons why learning centralised policies is not preferred is because the joint action space grows exponentially with the number of agents (if each agent can take k actions, the joint action space with n agents is k n ). In this work, we aim to learn the joint policy for multi-agent systems with mild assumptions on the joint action-value function which shall allow us tractability. The joint policy is taken to be a sum-product network which allows for efficient inference.
Minimum-Mapping based Connected Components Algorithm

Finding connected components is a fundamental problem in graph analysis. We develop a novel minimum-mapping based Contour algorithm to solve the connectivity problem. The Contour algorithm can identify all connected components of an undirected graph within O( log 𝑑 𝑚𝑎𝑥 ) iterations on 𝑚 parallel processors, where 𝑑 𝑚𝑎𝑥 is the largest diameter of all components in a given graph and 𝑚 is the total number of edges of the given graph. Furthermore, each iteration can easily be parallelized by employing the highly efficient minimum-mapping operator on all edges. To improve performance, the Contour algorithm is further optimized through asynchronous updates and simplified atomic operations. Our algorithm has been integrated into an open-source framework, Arachne, that extends Arkouda for large-scale interactive graph analytics with a Python API powered by the high-productivity parallel language Chapel. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic graphs show that the proposed Contour algorithm needs less number of iterations and can achieve 5.26 folds of speedup on average compared with the state-of-the-art connected component method FastSV implemented in Chapel. All code is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/Bears-R-Us/arkouda-njit).
Online Appendix Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?

In this Online Appendix we report additional results relating to the Empirical Results and Interpretation and Additional Evidence sections of our paper. We also summarize in more detail the experimental laboratory evidence on the effect of movie violence on aggression. Alternative Instruments, Specifications, and Samples (Online Appendix Table 1). In Online Appendix Table 1, we first document the robustness of our findings to the use of a different instrument. The benchmark instruments form a predictor of the audience in week w (t) using the information on the audience in week w (t) + 1 and allowing for different weekly decay rates for different types of movies (see Appendix B). A coarser, but simpler approach is to use as instruments the audience in week w (t)+1 of all movies in a category (strongly, mildly, and non-violent). The results (column 2) are very similar to the results with the benchmark instrument (reproduced in column 1), though the standard errors are 10 to 20 percent higher, reflecting some loss in precision due to the neglect of movie-type specific decay rates. To clarify the identifying variation behind the benchmark results, we use the standard instrument, but include the audience only for movies in their first week of release (column 3). We get similar point estimates (somewhat lower in the night hours) and comparable standard errors, indicating that new releases contribute substantially to identification. We next explore the role of the controls. One may worry the model is over-specified by the inclusion of 365 indicators for each day-of-year. In column 4, we replace these controls with indicators for the 52 weeks of the year, leaving all other controls in place. The results are similar, indicating that the benchmark model does not appear to be over-specified. Next, we consider alternative dependent variables and present the results separately for the three components of the violent crime definition: aggravated assaults (column 5), simple assaults (column 6), and intimidation (column 7). The results are less precisely estimated
FACTORS IMPACTING MORTALITY IN TURKISH OCTOGENARIAN AND NONAGENARIAN PATIENTS WHO UNDERWENT COLORECTAL SURGERY

Background & objective: Due to their physiological conditions, the postoperative mortality rates of elderly patients are higher compared to other age groups, albeit the postoperative care and intensive care conditions are better than in the past. In this retrospective study, it was aimed to present a model to predict mortality and factors affecting mortality in this patient group who underwent colorectal surgery. Material & Methods: The population of octogenarian and nonagenarian patients who were operated for colorectal surgery in our clinic between 2020 and 2021 were included in the study. Patients' age, gender, albumin, lymphocyte, monocytes, lymphocytemonocyte ratio (LMR), prognostic nutritional index (PNI), delta neutrophil index (DNI), Charlson comorbidity index (CCI), length of hospital stay, modified systemic inflammatory score (mSIS)) values, operation type (emergency/ elective), operation classification (minor/ moderate/ major/ complex major), anesthesia type (general/ epidural), and contamination status (clean/ clean-contaminated/ contaminated/ dirty or infected) were obtained from the hospital system. Results: Case status, operation type, contamination status, DNI, duration of hospitalization, mSIS variables were statistically significant in univariate regression analyses. However, in multivariate regression analyses, DNI of ≥ 0.05 (p< 0.015; OR 3.984, 95%CI 1.30212.195) and contamination status (p< 0.038; OR 13,047, 95%Cl 1,150148,087) were found to be independent risk factors affecting postoperative mortality. Conclusion: In the geriatric patient population undergoing colorectal surgery, DNI and contamination of the surgical field are two important factors affecting mortality. We think that the mortality estimation model created for this patient population will also help physicians for the postoperative period of the patients.
Research on the impact of corporate governance on enterprise bankruptcy risk

This article research on how corporate governance affects enterprise bankruptcy risk from the perspective of decision-making, audit management and risk prevention. This article analyses the results in multiple cases to analyse the bankruptcy of a company due to corporate governance issues. This research discusses the following three points. First, directors’ decisions play a crucial role in the company’s operations. Second, managers must conduct audit management of the company because staff members may ignore accounting standards and implement accounting fraud, making false descriptions of income and expense omissions. Third, risk prevention requires directors to accurately assess conflicts of interest, long-term contracts and participation risks, and future cash flow shortfalls when the company faces legal risks.
Ectopic over-expression of HaFT-1, a 14-3-3 Protein from Haloxylon ammodendron, leads to enhanced acquired thermotolerance of transgenic Arabidopsis

Rong Pan College of Life Science, Xinjiang Agricultural University Wenjing Ren College of Life Science, Xinjiang Agricultural University Hua Zhang College of Life Science, Xinjiang Agricultural University Xin Deng Key Laboratory of Plant Resources and Beijing Botanical Garden, Institute of Botany, the Chinanese Academy of Sciences Bo Wang (  wangbo@xjau.edu.cn ) College of Life Science, Xinjiang Agricultural University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3735-7460
Dynamic Finger Gaits via Pivoting and Adapting Contact Forces

For over three decades, finger gaiting has remained largely a subject for theoretical inquiries. Successful execution of a sequence of finger gaits does not simply reduce to planning collision-free paths for the involved fingers. A major issue is how to move the gaiting finger without losing the finger contacts with the object, which will most likely undergo a motion as the contact forces need to be adapted during the gait. This paper focuses on a single finger gait executed on a tool by an anthropomorphic hand driven by an arm. To improve stability, the tool's tip is leveraged as a pivot on the supporting plane. The gait consists of three stages: removal, during which the contact force on the gaiting finger gradually decreases to zero; relocation, during which the finger follows a pre-planned path (relative to the moving object) to establish a new contact; and addition, during which the contact force on the relocated finger increases to some desired level. Hybrid position/impedance control employs reference finger forces that satisfy the friction cone constraints and are dynamically consistent with the object's motion, which in turn provides reference poses for the fingertips to maintain their contacts during the gait. Finger gaits have been demonstrated on a kitchen knife and a screwdriver with an Adept SCARA robot and a Shadow Dexterous Hand.
Research on Pricing and Coordination of Fresh Supply Chain with Altruistic Fairness Concern

Considering a fresh supply chain consisting of one supplier and one retailer, this paper studies the pricing and coordination of fresh supply chain under altruistic fairness concern of the supplier. Based on the centralized decision and Stackelberg game theory, the decentralized decision model of supplier’s altruistic fairness concern is constructed, the pricing decision is analyzed, and the cost-sharing contract based on altruistic fairness concern is designed for coordination. The results show that the altruistic fairness concern of supplier can inspire retailer to improve the freshness-keeping effort level, which can help to the operation of retailer and supply chain, but damage the profit of himself. Freshness-keeping efficiency has an important impact on the marketing strategy of retailer: the retailer will implement the “high-quality with high price” if the freshness-keeping efficiency is low, otherwise implement the “highquality with low price”. Cost-sharing contract based on the altruistic fairness concern can realize the perfect coordination of supply chain within a certain range.
AoI-aware Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing using Stackelberg Game

Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) is a mobile computing paradigm, through which a platform can coordinate a crowd of workers to accomplish large-scale data collection tasks using their mobile devices. Information freshness has attracted much focus on MCS research worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the incentive mechanism design in MCS systems that take the freshness of collected data and social benefits into concerns. First, we introduce the Age of Information (AoI) metric to measure the freshness of data. Then, we model the incentive mechanism design with AoI guarantees as a novel incomplete information two-stage Stackelberg game with multiple constraints. Next, we derive the optimal strategies of this game so as to determine the optimal reward paid by the platform and the optimal data update frequency for each worker. Moreover, we prove that these optimal strategies form a unique Stackelberg equilibrium. Based on the optimal strategies, we propose an AoI-Aware Incentive (AIAI) mechanism for the MCS system, whereby the platform and all workers can maximize their utilities simultaneously. Meanwhile, the system can ensure that the AoI values of all data uploaded to the platform are not larger than a given threshold to achieve high data freshness. Extensive simulations on real-world traces are conducted to demonstrate the significant performance of AIAI.
Non-constancy of Speed of Light in Vacuum for Difierent Galilean Reference Systems in Case of an Impulsive Plane Wave

Previous work which negates Special Relativity Theory and which was carried out only for a monochromatic plane wave is extended to an impulsive plane wave. The media considered consist in a linear dispersive medium with absorption (the Lorentz medium) that fllls the space x > i1 (medium (I)) and a simple but lossy medium (II) initially fllling the half space x > 0. Medium (I) has frequency dependent conductance and dielectric permittivity in distinction from the original work for the monochromatic wave. Inertial frames K and K 0 are attached to medium (I) and (II), and the above description of these two media are true when they are observed from K and K 0 respectively. K and K 0 have coincident origins in space and time initially, and at t = t 0 = 0, K 0 starts a uniform rectilinear motion with respect to K. An impulsive in time plane wave is assumed to impinge on the plane x = ix0, at the time t0, when ix0 and t0 are both measured from K. Complex phase invariance principle is applied to the resulting elementary plane waves whose superposition yields the impulse response of the system. Transformation relations for the wave numbers and frequencies for incident and re∞ected waves for the interface of medium (I) and (II), are obtained using a 'modifled Lorentz transformation' which incorporates difierent speeds of light in vacuum c and c 0 for K and K 0 , as was done for the monochromatic plane wave case. Next using the dispersion relations for the incident and re∞ected waves an algebraic relation is derived between constitutive parameters of the Lorentz medium, the frequency, c and the relative speed of K 0 with respect to K. This result implies that the speed of light in vacuum c is dependent on the reference frame, a violation of the basic assumption of Special Relativity Theory.
Observer-rated outcomes of Communication-Centered Treatment (CCT) for adults who stutter: A preliminary study

Previous studies have reported that adults who stutter demonstrate significant gains in communication competence, per self-ratings and clinician-ratings, upon completion of a communication-centered treatment, or CCT. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether gains in communication competence would also be reported by untrained observers. Eighty-one untrained observers completed an online survey that required each to view one of two videos depicting an adult who stutters during a mock interview recorded prior to CCT or after CCT. Participants were then asked to rate the communication competence of the interviewee on a 100-point visual analog scale and provide additional demographic information. Communication competence of the adult who stutters was rated significantly higher in their post-treatment video. Two observer-based factors were significantly associated with ratings of communication competence: years of education and years the respondent had known an adult who stutters. Upon controlling for these demographic factors, significantly higher ratings of communication competence for the post-treatment video were maintained. Although preliminary, findings suggest gains in communication competence demonstrated in previous studies through clinician and client observations are not limited to the sterile clinical environment, and further emphasizes the ecological validity of CCT. [ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05908123; https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT05908123]
Input impedance change of a half-wave vertical antenna over a dissipative earth

The problem investigated here is that of calculating the input impedance of a thin vertical center-fed half-wave dipole over a dissipative ground. A variational expression for the input impedance is found which is valid for heights above the ground as small as d\lambda = 0.3 (in many cases the limit is smaller than this) and for refractive indices such that |n|^{2} \geq 10 . Using a zeroth-order trial function, a closed-form expression which represents the change in the input impedance of the antenna between the case of a perfectly conducting ground and the case of a dissipative ground is found.