Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optical emission spectroscopy as a process-monitoring tool in plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition of amorphous carbon coatings multivariate statistical modelling copie

Production of Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) nanocoatings using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition is studied by Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) as a plasma diagnostic technique. The objective of the current research is to establish a predictive model of DLC properties using a multivariate analysis method. This model is based on OES data instead of process parameters, which are reactor dependent and accordingly, their effect on the plasma deposition process may vary from one reactor to another. The predictive potential of OES is evaluated using partial least square regression (PLSR) analysis. The results show that OES derived data are capable of replacing some process parameters to predict the DLC properties. The perspective of PLSR modelling and OES application for the development and monitoring of a structurally graded DLC coating is also discussed.
Creating a Market Oriented Organizational Structure as a Key to Overcoming the Financial Crisis – A Comparative Study

The interconnectedness and the ever-growing interdependency of the European countries had set in motion a vast number of processes that ultimately led to the infamous financial crisis. Now, as we are taking the first steps out of this tight spot, it is of significant importance to look back and examine some of the factors that have aided certain companies to prevail during the crisis. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically based review and analysis of the organizational effectiveness of a selected number of medium sized banks in South East Europe (SEE), with particular emphasis on the role of organizational structure during and after the financial crisis period. The main result of this comparative study is to substantiate the underlying hypothesis of the research, which is to examine the positive link between the market driven organizational structure and organizational effectiveness.
A Simple Model of Relaxed Memory

Relaxed memory models must simultaneously achieve efficient implementability and thread-compositional reasoning. Is that why they have become so complicated? We argue that the answer is no: It is possible to achieve these goals by combining an idea from the 60s (preconditions) with an idea from the 80s (pomsets), at least for x64 and arm8. We show that the resulting model (1) supports compositional reasoning for temporal safety properties, (2) supports all expected sequential compiler optimizations, (3) satisfies the sc-drf criterion, and (4) compiles to x64 and arm8 microprocessors without requiring extra fences on relaxed accesses.
Socio-Economic Development in Ghana: A case

study of the informal sector. 4 5 ABSTRACT 6 7 Revenues generated from taxes constitute a major source of income for governments. However, the epic display of tax evasion by individuals and firms in most countries has induced researches on the factors accounting for tax evasion in developing countries. Therefore, this study is conducted to investigate the effect of personal income tax evasion on economic growth in Ghana. Questionnaires were submitted to 153 respondents to investigate personal income tax evasion and socio-economic development with 109 respondents and 44 tax authority respondents from the informal sector in the Tema Metropolitan Assembly of Ghana. Regression analysis employed in our study depicted the results of the impact of personal income tax evasion on socio-economic development. The results of the study revealed that tax evasion in Ghana has an adverse influence on SocioEconomic Development. Furthermore, a liaison between tax rate and tax evasion was established. In other words, high tax rates amounts to high tax evasion tendency. The study further revealed that tax payers’ relationship with tax authorities has no linkage to the evasion of taxes. Moreover, the existence of weak penalties towards tax evasion also do not contribute to the evasion of taxes. The study conclude with recommendations to policy makers to aide in curbing the high incidence of tax evasion in Ghana. 8
A prospective study of hidden cases of beta thalassemia trait in voluntary blood donors at tertiary care hospital of south Gujarat

Background: Hemoglobinopathies represent a significant national health burden in India. The two most common causes of microcytic (MCV less than 80 fl) anemia are iron deficiency anemia and beta-thalassemia trait. In most of these cases a trial of iron treatment done but in populations where Thalassemia is common, like in India, this approach leads to unnecessary iron therapy / iron overload. Therefore the study has been done to detect hidden cases of beta thalassemia in voluntary blood donors with microcytosis. Materials and Methods: Total 393 donor samples were analyzed for complete blood count, ESR and serum ferritin levels. Mentzer index was calculated by MCV/RBC count formula. HPLC test was done on 12samples with Mentzer index <13 for quantification of HbA2. Results: Out of 393 blood donors, 384 were males and 9 were females. Low MCV detected in 58 samples [14.75%]. Out of 12 samples tested by HPLC, 6 cases were Beta thalassemia trait [1.53%], 5 were normal and one was? sickle cell trait/ ? Hb D trait. Out of 6 BTT cases, 3 cases show normal ferritin value, 2 with low ferritin level and one with high ferritin level. Conclusions: The study revealed a high prevalence of IDA and BTT in blood donors and a higher probability of finding these in the microcytic samples. Screening for thalassemia trait by routine blood counts in all the blood donor samples and if required by HPLC, should be included in the standard blood testing policy after blood donation.
Database-Backed Program Analysis for Finding Cascading Outage Bugs in Distributed Systems

Modern distributed systems (“cloud systems”) have emerged as a dominant backbone for many of today’s applications. As these systems collectively become the “cloud operating system”, users expect high dependability including performance stability and availability. Small jitters in system performance or minutes of service downtimes can have a huge impact on company and user satisfaction. We try to improve cloud system availability by detecting and eliminating cascading outage bugs (CO bugs) . CO bug is a bug that can cause simultaneous or cascades of failures to each of the individual nodes in the system, which eventually leads to a major outage. While hardware arguably is no longer a single point of failure, our large-scale studies of cloud bugs and outages reveal that CO bugs have emerged as a new class of outage-causing bugs and single point of failure in the software. We address the CO bug problem with the Cascading Outage Bugs Elimination (COBE) project. In this project, we: (1) study the anatomy of CO bugs, (2) develop CO-bug detection tools to unearth CO bugs.
A comparison of aerosol chemical and optical properties from the 1st and 2nd Aerosol Characterization Experiments

Shipboard measurements of aerosol chemical composition and optical properties were made during both ACE-1 and ACE-2. ACE-1 focused on remote marine aerosol minimally perturbed by continental sources. ACE-2 studied the outflow of European aerosol into the NE Atlantic atmosphere. A variety of air masses were sampled during ACE-2 including Atlantic, polar, Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean, and Western European. Reported here are mass size distributions of non-sea salt (nss) sulfate, sea salt, and methanesulfonate and submicron and supermicron concentrations of black and organic carbon. Optical parameters include submicron and supermicron aerosol scattering and backscattering coefficients at 550 nm, the absorption coefficient at 550±20 nm, the Ångström exponent for the 550 and 700 nm wavelength pair, and single scattering albedo at 550 nm. All data are reported at the measurement relative humidity of 55%. Measured concentrations of nss sulfate aerosol indicate that, relative to ACE-1, ACE-2 aerosol during both marine and continental flow was impacted by continental sources. Thus, while sea salt controlled the aerosol chemical composition and optical properties of both the submicron and supermicron aerosol during ACE-1, it played a relatively smaller role in ACE-2. This is confirmed by the larger average Ångström exponent for ACE-2 continental aerosol of 1.2±0.26 compared to the ACE-1 average of -0.03±0.38. The depletion of chloride from sea salt aerosol in ACE-2 continental air masses averaged 55±25% over all particle sizes. This compares to the ACE-2 marine average of 4.8±18% and indicates the enhanced interaction of anthropogenic acids with sea salt as continental air masses are transported into the marine atmosphere. Single scattering albedos averaged 0.95±0.03 for ACE-2 continental air masses. Averages for ACE-2 and ACE-1 marine air masses were 0.98±0.01 and 0.99±0.01, respectively.
Predictive assessment of the aquatic toxicity of multiple chemical mixtures

Current approaches to the assessment of chemical hazards focus on toxicity studies with single, pure chemicals. In the environment, however, organisms are exposed to numerous pollutants simultaneously. We studied the toxicities of multiple mixtures of pesticides and antibiotics in algal and bacterial bioassays. The test mixtures were composed of 14 to 18 components with either identical or completely different specific mechanisms of action. The results reveal that reliable predictions of mixture toxicities can be derived from concentration response data of single toxicants by applying two different concepts: concentration addition in cases of similarly acting mixture components and independent action for substances with dissimilar mechanisms of action.
ConFuzzius: A Data Dependency-Aware Hybrid Fuzzer for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that are executed across a blockchain. Unlike traditional programs, once deployed, they cannot be modified. As smart contracts carry more value, they become more of an exciting target for attackers. Over the last years, they suffered from exploits costing millions of dollars due to simple programming mistakes. As a result, a variety of tools for detecting bugs have been proposed. Most of these tools rely on symbolic execution, which may yield false positives due to over-approximation. Recently, many fuzzers have been proposed to detect bugs in smart contracts. However, these tend to be more effective in finding shallow bugs and less effective in finding bugs that lie deep in the execution, therefore achieving low code coverage and many false negatives. An alternative that has proven to achieve good results in traditional programs is hybrid fuzzing, a combination of symbolic execution and fuzzing. In this work, we study hybrid fuzzing on smart contracts and present ConFuzzius, the first hybrid fuzzer for smart contracts. ConFuzzius uses evolutionary fuzzing to exercise shallow parts of a smart contract and constraint solving to generate inputs that satisfy complex conditions that prevent evolutionary fuzzing from exploring deeper parts. Moreover, ConFuzzius leverages dynamic data dependency analysis to efficiently generate sequences of transactions that are more likely to result in contract states in which bugs may be hidden. We evaluate the effectiveness of ConFuzzius by comparing it with state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and fuzzers for smart contracts. Our evaluation on a curated dataset of 128 contracts and a dataset of 21K real-world contracts shows that our hybrid approach detects more bugs than state-of-the-art tools (up to 23%) and that it outperforms existing tools in terms of code coverage (up to 69%). We also demonstrate that data dependency analysis can boost bug detection up to 18%.
Self-organized flocking with an heterogeneous mobile robot swarm

In this paper, we study self-organized flocking in a swarm of behaviorally heterogeneous mobile robots: aligning and nonaligning robots. Aligning robots are capable of agreeing on a common heading direction with other neighboring aligning robots. Conversely, non-aligning robots lack this capability. Studying this type of heterogeneity in self-organized flocking is important as it can support the design of a swarm with minimal hardware requirements. Through systematic simulations, we show that a heterogeneous group of aligning and non-aligning robots can achieve good performance in flocking behavior. We further show that the performance is affected not only by the proportion of aligning robots, but also by the way they integrate information about their neighbors as well as the motion control employed by the robots.
Trajectory Ambiguities in Phase Doppler Systems: Study of a near forward and a near‐backward geometry

Generalized Lorenz-Mie theory for the scattering of arbitrarily shaped beams by spherical particles has been applied to two standard phase Doppler layouts, employing receiving units at 30° and 150° off-axis locations. It is shown that the particle trajectory effects may lead to inaccurate size measurements for the near-forward receiver and may make the near-backward measurements totally misleading when a large particle size range (1:40) needs to be covered. Only limited improvements can be achieved by using two phase-shift signals from a single receiving unit for discrimination. The errors associated with the trajectories are also detrimental to the concentration measurements based on the existing criteria. However, an extended optical system employing two identical receiving units, located symmetrically about the plane of the laser beams, provides a robust solution to the trajectory ambiguity. It can be used to measure correctly the particle size and the particle location in the measuring volume. The difficulties associated with estimating the effective size of the measuring volume as a function of the particle diameter (in order to determine the true size distribution and the particle number density) may also be resolved by employing an extended system. Hence, despite a higher cost, this arrangement is attractive, at least for obtaining some benchmark simultaneous measurements of sizes and velocities in two-phase particulate flows.
Discrete Willmore flow

The Willmore energy of a surface, ∫(H2 - K) dA, as a function of mean and Gaussian curvature, captures the deviation of a surface from (local) sphericity. As such this energy and its associated gradient flow play an important role in digital geometry processing, geometric modeling, and physical simulation. In this paper we consider a discrete Willmore energy and its flow. In contrast to traditional approaches it is not based on a finite element discretization, but rather on an ab initio discrete formulation which preserves the Möbius symmetries of the underlying continuous theory in the discrete setting. We derive the relevant gradient expressions including a linearization (approximation of the Hessian), which are required for non-linear numerical solvers. As examples we demonstrate the utility of our approach for surface restoration, n-sided hole filling, and non-shrinking surface smoothing.
Advanced Tomographic Techniques for Flow Imaging in Columns with Flow Distribution Packings

Design and optimization of separation units, e.g., distillation and absorption columns with flow distribution packings, require detailed knowledge about the internal flow conditions and their impact on the process behavior. This in turn calls for suitable measuring techniques, which can give a detailed insight into such devices, especially for studies on a laboratory and pilot scale. Traditional instrumentation, such as compartment-type liquid collectors installed below packings, or distributed temperature, pressure and conductivity probes, often falls too short if detailed knowledge on flow conditions is required. This concerns especially local liquid holdup, liquid maldistribution, liquid films thickness, wetting of the packing surface, or bubble size and droplet distribution at trays. Advanced imaging techniques, such as tomography, have found only marginal attention in investigations of separation columns with structured and modern dumped flow distribution packings, mostly due to limited spatial and temporal resolution but also due to prevailing technological problems encountered in such applications. In this study, the potentials and limits of some of the most recently emerged tomographic imaging modalities for multiphase flows have been investigated and reviewed, i.e., ultra-fast X-ray tomography, high-resolution gamma-ray tomography, wire-mesh sensor techniques, and X-ray microtomography with respect to a possible application in separation columns with flow distribution packings.
TLC Detection of Chemical Interactions of Vitamins A and D with Drugs

Thin-layer chromatography has been used to investigate possible chemical interactions of vitamins A and D with frequently used therapeutics (estrogens and progestins, corticosteroids, HMG CoA reductase inhibitors, vitamins, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). We also compared our results with biochemical interactions found in the literature. Concentrations of vitamins and drugs applied to the plate were adjusted to mimic the doses usually prescribed in therapy. TLC was performed on 10 cm × 20 cm TLC plates precoated with silica gel 60 F254. The first step was to determine RF values for each vitamin and drug using three different mobile phases - cyclohexane-ether, 50 + 50 (v/v), cyclohexane—ether, 85 + 15 (v/v), and ethyl acetate. Solutions of vitamins A and D were applied to the plates as 8 mm bands and the investigated drugs were applied as spots. Chromatography was performed in ascending mode. After calculation of RF values we used a combination of stationary and mobile phase for which overlapping of the vitamin band and drug spot occurred during chromatogram development. The strength of interaction was measured as a surface below or above the distorted part of the sample band, visible under short wavelength UV light (λ = 254 nm) or after exposing the plates to iodine vapor. The chromatograms were documented by use of a Camag Reprostar 3 System. We established the occurrence of chemical interactions between vitamin A and estradiol propionate, tocopherol acetate, ibuprofen, and ketoprofen, and between vitamin D and hydrocortisone, medrox-yprogesterone acetate, norethisterone acetate, aspirin, ketoprofen, and acetaminophen. A clear relationship between chemical and biochemical interactions could not be established.
Spectroscopic and Geometric Variations in Perturbed Blue Copper Centers: Electronic Structures of Stellacyanin and Cucumber Basic Protein

The electronic structures of the perturbed blue copper proteins stellacyanin (STC) and cucumber basic protein (CBP, also called plantacyanin, PNC) are defined relative to that of the well-understood “classic” site found in plastocyanin (PLC) by combining the results of low-temperature optical absorption, circular dichroism, and magnetic circular dichroism spectra with density functional calculations. Additionally, absorption and magnetic circular dichroism spectra of Alcaligenes denitrificans wild-type and M121Q azurin are presented and compared to PLC and STC, respectively. These studies show that the principal electronic structure changes in CBP/PNC, with respect to PLC, are a small shift of the ligand field transitions to higher energy and a rotation of the Cu dx2-y2 half-filled HOMO which increases the pseudo-σ and decreases the π interactions of the cysteine (Cys) sulfur with Cu dx2-y2 and, in addition, mixes some methionine (Met) sulfur character into the HOMO. The geometrical distortion responsible.
Effect of cadmium on growth and the uptake of cadmium and other elements by durum wheat

Abstract A solution culture study was conducted to determine the effects of cadmium (Cd) application on the uptake of Cd, potassium (K), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), copper (Cu), iron (Fe) and on the growth of seedlings of three wheat (Triticum turgidum L. var Durum) cultivars, Kyle, Nile, and SC84–994. Cadmium application decreased shoot and root biomass, root length, and leaf area. Cadmium application did not produce any differences among cultivars in these growth parameters. There were differential cultivar responses in the uptake of Cd and K but not for Zn, Mn, Cu, and Fe uptake. A solution Cd concentration of 0.1 μM did not affect the concentration of Cd and K compared to zero Cd but at and above 0.5 μM Cd, Nile had a higher concentration and contents of Cd and K in root and shoot than SC84–994 and Kyle. Kyle and SC84–994 were not different in any of the elements tested except K concentration in shoot where the order was SC84–994
Antibacterial surfaces based on functionally graded photocatalytic Fe3O4@TiO2 core–shell nanoparticle/epoxy composites

Functionally graded epoxy composites with various concentration profiles of Fe3O4@TiO2 core–shell nanoparticles (NPs) were synthetized and characterized, with focus on their antibacterial properties. The NPs consisted of rutile, anatase, magnetite and hematite. Graded composites were produced starting with homogeneous 2 vol% to 12 vol% NPs suspensions using a magnetophorese process, leading to an enrichment of TiO2 at the surface of the composite up to 16 vol% from an initial 4 vol%. Homogeneous composites were also produced as references. Graded composites with an initial 4 vol% of NPs inactivated E. coli bacteria in less than 2 hours under simulated solar light (50 mW cm−2), significantly faster than their homogeneous analogues. During bacterial inactivation the pH decreased from 6.8 to 5.0. Repetitive E. coli inactivation tests on these 4 vol% graded composites were stable up to 8 cycles and 5 min contact between the bacteria and the sample surface was enough to guarantee an adequate bacterial adhesion.
Composite magnetopolymers for special applications

The organic magnetics offer a new opportunity for tailoring the devices with required magnetic, electrical, mechanical and chemical properties for special applications. In this paper are presented two-component composite polymers prepared from soft magnetic filler (Fe, MnZn ferrite) in the polymer matrix. The emphasis in study was given to the influence of the particle size distribution of the filler, on the magnetic properties and the estimation of this properties of the composite using the model and the measurement verification.
Multifractal Processes and Self-Organized Criticality of PM2.5 during a Typical Haze Period in Chengdu, China

Scaling and multifractal properties of the hourly PM2.5 average concentration series at the four air monitoring stations of Chengdu (southwestern China) were explored by using a multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis method, during a typical haze episode (from 1 March to 17 March, 2013). Using shuffling procedure and phase randomization procedure, the major sources of multifractality in these PM2.5 series are studied. The results show that the multifractality nature of PM2.5 series is mainly due to long-range correlation. At the same time, the non-Gaussian probability distributions also partly contribute to the multifractal behaviour. The scale-free power laws behaviours are found to govern the cumulative distributions statistics for PM2.5 concentration fluctuations. The temporal evolutions of the multifractality were investigated by the approach of a sliding window. Further, we attempt to find the answers to the following questions: how does longrange correlation and power-law distribution in PM2.5 evolution emerge? It is inviting to do it in a self-organized criticality (SOC) framework, which was specially designed to model the dynamics of complex systems. A novel PM2.5 evolution model is developed on the bases of SOC theory. The model displays robust power law behaviour in certain dynamical region. The self-organized criticality properties of PM2.5 evolution are discussed. This SOC behaviour is related to a statistically steady state that implies the presence of long-range correlation and power-law distribution in PM2.5 evolution during the haze period. It is the stability of SOC that causes the haze period to be sustained for a long time in Chengdu.