Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synoptic responses to mountain gravity waves encountering directional critical levels

Abstract A heuristic model is used to study the synoptic response to mountain gravity waves (GWs) absorbed at directional critical levels. The model is a semigeostrophic version of the Eady model for baroclinic instability adapted by Smith to study lee cyclogenesis. The GWs exert a force on the large-scale flow where they encounter directional critical levels. This force is taken into account in the model herein and produces potential vorticity (PV) anomalies in the midtroposphere. First, the authors consider the case of an idealized mountain range such that the orographic variance is well separated between small- and large-scale contributions. In the absence of tropopause, the PV produced by the GW force has a surface impact that is significant compared to the surface response due to the large scales. For a cold front, the GW force produces a trough over the mountain and a larger-amplitude ridge immediately downstream. It opposes somehow to the response due to the large scales of the mountain range, whic.
Built infrastructure point cloud data cleaning: an overview of gap filling algorithms

Video captured from infrastructure scenes can be used to generate point cloud data (PCD) as a potential solution for acquiring spatial information of built infrastructure - however, video based PCD is incomplete and includes gaps, outliers and poor/non-reconstructed areas. This phenomenon has a negative impact on both visualization and measurement practices and is mainly caused by a number of reasons including insufficient coverage of all views while videotaping the scene, lack of sufficient features on uniform surfaces and possible errors in calibration, matching and optimization algorithms. To tackle this issue, researchers suggested various post processing algorithms for reconstructing missing surfaces and filling gaps/holes. This paper provides an overview on these algorithms summarize their properties in terms of efficiency, ability to work in complex geometry settings and running time. As the comparison study, three most common hole filling algorithms: MSL, GG and RFR were implemented and tested on a number of real built infrastructure scenes as the case studies. Number of generated 3D points for filling the gaps, proper distribution of points on covered surfaces and running time are three major comparison metrics has been taken into account. Results indicate that in general PML outperforms other algorithms on both flat and curved surfaces.
THE PLAYER – WIND INSTRUMENT INTERACTION

Players control a range of parameters in the playerinstrument system. First we show how loudness and pitch vary over the plane of mouth pressure and force on the reed of a clarinet, and thus how these parameters can be used in compensation to produce trajectories in this plane that have varying loudness and timbre but constant pitch. Next we present impedance spectra for several different types of musical instruments and for the vocal tract, to allow general observations. We report different ways in which the acoustic properties of the player's tract interact with those of the instrument bore to control the frequency of reed vibration in some wind instruments. We also show how vocal tract resonances can influence timbre.
EVALUATION OF ANTICLASTOGENIC POTENTIAL OF CINNAMOMUM CASSIA BARK EXTRACT AGAINST ARSENIC GENOTOXICITY BY USING MICRONUCLEUS ASSAY IN MUS MUSCULUS CAUDAL ERYTHROCYTES

Objective: The study was aimed to evaluate the anticlastogenic potential of ethanolic extract of Cinnamomum cassia against arsenic-induced genotoxicity. Methods: In the experiment, 30 animals were taken and divided into five groups and each group contains six animals. Group 1 was control and fed on tap water of Patna city while rest four (2, 3, 4, 5) groups were treated with 4 mg/kg body weight, per orally sodium arsenite for 8 weeks. Sodium arsenite pre-treated Groups 4 and 5 were followed by dose of 100 mg/kg body weight of 5% ethanolic solution of test plant bark extract for next 8 weeks (total duration of dosing 16 weeks). Caudal blood collected from each mouse by minor nick without their sacrifice and smeared blood was stained by double staining. Approximately, 2000 cells were scored by light microscopy to determine micronucleus (MN) frequency. The percentage of MN frequency was expressed in the terms of mean and standard deviation. Results: High index of MN frequency was observed in the Groups 2 and 3 while its frequency drastically reduced in Groups 4 and 5. The mean number of MN scored per 2000 cell were found to be 4.5, 23.5, 18.8, 10.5, and 9.66 in animal Groups 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,respectively. Conclusion: C. cassia may be effective drug in the area of preventive cancer or other kinds of diseases which lead to damage of genetic materials.
How Much Does Memory Layout Impact Performance ? A Wide Study

Memory layout variations are often cited as a threat to the reproducibility of computer performance experiments. Previous research has shown worst-case effects as large as 300% of execution time, among other surprising cases. While these are worrying results, how frequent and widespread are these large effects? To answer this question, this paper presents a widescale evaluation of memory layout effects on the performance of a large subset of the SPECCPU2006 benchmark suite on a wide array of diverse machines. We find that on average, these benchmarks are not as susceptible to memory layout effects as the worst-case analysis found in the literature suggests. Finally, we re-execute our own experiment and demonstrate why the reproducibility of an experiment’s result should not depend on its data being perfectly reproducible.
Comparative Study of Plating versus Nailing in Distal Tibia Metaphyseal Fractures

Introduction: Distal tibial metaphyseal fracture is unique. The best option for surgical treatment of distal metaphyseal fractures of tibia is still unclear. Objectives: This study was conducted to set the indications for both modalities of fixation in various fracture subtypes; and also to compare the functional outcomes of distal metaphyseal fractures of tibia managed by both methods at 2 years interval. Complication rates with different modalities of fixation were also studied. Method: We have studied 40 pt in Sir JJ hospital group of hospitals from periods May 2009 to April 2011. The study was prospective and comparative for the methods used for management of the fracture. Results: Age range of the patients was 18-65 yr. Most common mode of trauma in both the groups is road traffic accident. Associated fibula fracture was present in 18 (90%) participants in group 1 and 17 (85%) patients in group 2. Difference between 2 groups regarding duration of surgery is not significant. No significant intraoperative complications were noted in both groups. Time after which partial weight bearing and full weight bearing was started were significantly shorter in group1 (p=0.005). The average time before union was 23.45 weeks (range, 16-36 weeks) in group 1 and 26 weeks (range,19-41 weeks), (p=0.09). Malalignment was found in 25% of patients in group 1 and 10% of patients in group2. Angulation in group 1 was 3.4 degree (range, 0-12) and 1.0 degree (range,0-9) in group2 (p=0.04). Conclusion: The overall results were comparable and most patients were satisfied with the results. These results indicate that both modalities of treatment deserve a place in treating distal metaphyseal fractures of tibia.
An objective, sensitive and ecologically valid neural measure of rapid human individual face recognition

Humans may be the only species able to rapidly and automatically recognize a familiar face identity in a crowd of unfamiliar faces, an important social skill. Here, by combining electroencephalography (EEG) and fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS), we introduce an ecologically valid, objective and sensitive neural measure of this human individual face recognition function. Natural images of various unfamiliar faces are presented at a fast rate of 6 Hz, allowing one fixation per face, with variable natural images of a highly familiar face identity, a celebrity, appearing every seven images (0.86 Hz). Following a few minutes of stimulation, a high signal-to-noise ratio neural response reflecting the generalized discrimination of the familiar face identity from unfamiliar faces is observed over the occipito-temporal cortex at 0.86 Hz and harmonics. When face images are presented upside-down, the individual familiar face recognition response is negligible, being reduced by a factor of 5 over occipito-temporal regions. Differences in the magnitude of the individual face recognition response across different familiar face identities suggest that factors such as exposure, within-person variability and distinctiveness mediate this response. Our findings of a biological marker for fast and automatic recognition of individual familiar faces with ecological stimuli open an avenue for understanding this function, its development and neural basis in neurotypical individual brains along with its pathology. This should also have implications for the use of facial recognition measures in forensic science.
Stylized Image Triangulation

The art of representing images with triangles is known as image triangulation, which purposefully uses abstraction and simplification to guide the viewer's attention. The manual creation of image triangulations is tedious and thus several tools have been developed in the past that assist in the placement of vertices by means of image feature detection and subsequent Delaunay triangulation. In this paper, we formulate the image triangulation process as an optimization problem. We provide an interactive system that optimizes the vertex locations of an image triangulation to reduce the root mean squared approximation error. Along the way, the triangulation is incrementally refined by splitting triangles until certain refinement criteria are met. Thereby, the calculation of the energy gradients is expensive and thus we propose an efficient rasterization‐based GPU implementation. To ensure that artists have control over details, the system offers a number of direct and indirect editing tools that split, collapse and re‐triangulate selected parts of the image. For final display, we provide a set of rendering styles, including constant colours, linear gradients, tonal art maps and textures. Finally, we demonstrate temporal coherence for animations and compare our method with existing image triangulation tools.
Moving Hadoop into the Cloud with Flexible Slots

Load imbalance is considered a major source of overhead in parallel programs. Hadoop workloads are in particular susceptible to such imbalance (a.k.a, skew) due to the uneven distribution of input data among tasks. As a result, tasks with more data run significantly slower (known as stragglers) than others, delaying the overall job completion. Although data skew can be mitigated by using customized, job-specific data partitioners, this increases the burden on users. Running Hadoop in a virtual private cloud opens up opportunities for elastic resource allocations, where stragglers are expedited with more resources. However, virtualized environments introduce problems that often cancel out the performance gain: (1) besides data skew, performance interference from corunning jobs may create new stragglers; (2) there exist a semantic gap between Hadoop task management and resource pool-based virtual cluster management preventing tasks from using resources efficiently. In this work, we strive to make Hadoop more resilient to data skew and more efficient in cloud environments. We present FlexSlot, a user-transparent task slot management scheme that automatically identifies map stragglers and resizes their slots accordingly to accelerate task execution. FlexSlot also adaptively changes the number of slots on each virtual node to balance the resource usage so that the pool of resources can be efficiently used by the virtual cluster. Experimental results with representative benchmarks show that FlexSlot effectively reduces job completion time by as much as 46% compared with stock Hadoop and outperforms a recent proposed skew mitigation approach.
BTrim - Hybrid In-Memory Database Architecture for Extreme Transaction Processing in VLDBs

To address the need for extreme OLTP performance on commodity multi-core hardware supporting large amounts of memory, SAP ASE is re-architected to tightly integrate an In-Memory Row Store (IMRS) within the existing database engine. The IMRS is both a store and a caching layer to host "hot" rows in-memory, in a row-oriented format. The IMRS is an extension to the traditional buffer-cache which deals with data in a page-oriented storage format (referred to as the page-store). Data in individual tables marked as IMRS-enabled can be fully memory-resident or can straddle the page store and the IMRS. Cold data in the IMRS is organically identified, harvested, and "packed" back to the page store. SQL statements and transactions can access data transparently from both stores for the same table. All Transact-SQL capabilities and language constructs are supported with no application or stored procedure code changes required. Full durability for in-memory data is provided, including support for backup and restore of database archives and periodic transaction dumps. The high-level system design supporting this architecture, along with experimental results and performance benefits is presented.
Kinesiological Factors in Vertical Jump Performance : Differences Among Individuals

The purpo,e of this ,ludy wa, to invcs1iga1e 1he kinesiological factor, that distinguish good jumperi. from pour ones. in an attcmpl 10 undersiand Lhe critical facton. in vertical jump performance (VJPJ. Fifly-1wo normal, physically ac1ive male college studem, each performed five maximul venical jumps with arms akimbo. Ground reaction forces and video data were collected during the jumps. Subject, ' ~! reng1h wa. , tested isometrically. Thirty-five po1en1ial predictor variables were calculated for statistical modeling by multiple-regre~,ion analy,b . At 1he whole-body level or anaJysb. the best model, (which included peuk and average mechanical power) accounted ror 88<;. of \I JP variation (p < .0005). At the segmental level. the best model, ttccounted for 60% or variation in VJP (p < .0005). Uncxpcc1edly. coordination variables were 1101 related to VJP. The,e data suggeMed that VJP wa. mo,t strongly associated with 1hc mechanical pm\er developed duringjump execution.
CEO Transformational Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility

The overall purpose of this study is to apply transformational leadership theory to improve our understanding of the potential role of CEOs in determining the extent to which their firms engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). We generate a theoretical argument for the existence of relationships between aspects of transformational leadership and CSR, which we test using data from 56 U.S. and Canadian firms. CEO intellectual stimulation (but not CEO charismatic leadership) is found to be positively associated with the propensity of the firm to engage in "strategic" CSR, or those CSR activities that are most likely to be related to the firm's corporate and business-level strategies. Thus, studies that ignore the role of leadership in CSR may generate imprecise conclusions regarding the antecedents and consequences of these activities. We conclude that there is a need for additional multidisciplinary research bridging micro- and macro-level conceptualizations of the role of leadership in CSR.
Jihadists on Social Media : A Critique of Data Collection Methodologies

In this article, we propose a general model of data collection from social media, in the context of terrorism research, focusing on recent studies of jihadists. By analyzing Twitter data collection methods in the existing research, we show that the methods used are prone to sampling biases, and that the sampled datasets are not sufficiently filtered or validated to ensure reliability of conclusions derived from them. Alternatively, we propose some best practices for the collection of data in future research on jihadist using social media (as well as other kinds of terrorist groups). Given the similarity of the methodological challenges posed by research on almost all social media platforms, in the context of terrorism studies, the critique and recommendations offered remain relevant despite the recent shift of most jihadists from Twitter to Telegram and other forms of social media.
Micro-computed tomography evaluation of microleakage of Class II composite restorations: An in vitro study

ABSTRACT Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the microleakage attained with three resin-based material used to restore deep Class II cavities. A null hypothesis was chosen: there is no difference in microleakage among the tested materials. Materials and Methods: A total of 30 Class II cavities were prepared in freshly extracted molars with the proximal mesial and distal margins located, respectively, 1.5 mm apically and 1.5 mm coronally to the cementum-enamel junction. Restorations were completed using a three-step enamel-dentin adhesive system “Etch and Rinse,” margins were relocated using a micro-hybrid, preheated, or flowable composite and restorations were then completed using a conventional composite. All samples were coated with nail varnish with the exception of an area along the margins and apex was sealed using epoxide cement and then thermocycled (30-s dwell time, 5°C/55°C, 1000 cycles). A 50% ammoniac AgNO3 solution was used as tracer according to Tay's protocol. The microleakage analysis was performed using a microtomography system Sky-scan 1072 (SKYSCAN, Kartuizersweg 3B 2550, Konitch, Belgium). Results: The mean microleakage of all the tested materials showed greater leakage in the cementum margins; flowable composite exhibit greater leakage among the groups. Significant differences (P < 5%) within groups in both enamel and dentin margins were present. None of the tested materials eliminated marginal microleakage. Preheated composite showed significantly lesser microleakage. Conclusion: Tested materials showed statistical differences in microleakage; thus, the null hypothesis has been rejected. Within the limitations of the present experimental procedure, it can be concluded that flowable resin composite should be avoided at the dentin/cementum margin.
Reconfigurable THz Plasmonic Antenna Concept Using a Graphene Stack

The concept and analysis of a Terahertz (THz) frequency-reconfigurable antenna using graphene are presented. The antenna exploits dipole-like plasmonic resonances that can be frequency-tuned on large range via the electric field effect in a graphene stack. In addition to efficient dynamic control, the proposed approach allows high miniaturization and good direct matching with continuous wave THz sources. A qualitative model is used to explain the excellent impedance stability under reconfiguration. These initial results are very promising for future all-graphene THz transceivers and sensors. Keywords: Reconfigurable antenna, Graphene, Plasmons, Terahertz, frequency-tuning.
An abstract of a letter from Mr. Anthony Leewenhoeck of Delft to Mr. R. H. concerning the appearances of several woods, and their vessels.

I am not ignorant that the present subject has been learnedly treated of, by the judicious <italic>Malpighius</italic> and Dr. <italic>N. Grew</italic>; I have ventured notwithstanding to represent the Vessels in Wood after such manner as they offer'd themselves to me.
A Noise Adaptive Approach to Impulse Noise Detection and Reduction

A noise adaptive filter has been proposed in this study aiming to estimate the original image pixel values in the presence of impulse noise in monochromatic images. The proposed filter approach is noise adaptive that as the percentage of noise density increases in the image, the size of neighborhood in filtering window is also increased. Proposed approach comprises of two stages, one is impulse noise detection and the other is impulse noise reduction or cancellation. First stage is based on median and mean distance and thresholding whereas the second stage is based on reconstruction of the image using the values of neighboring pixels of the pixel under consideration detected as contaminated pixel by first stage. Reconstruction is done by estimating reference values using uncorrupted pixels in the neighborhood of pixel under consideration. The proposed method has been compared to various existing methods by using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) for measuring the objective quality strength. To measure the impulse noise detection the method has also been compared with other existing methods using the ratio of mis etection (MD) and false detection (FD). DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3126/njst.v15i1. 12016 Nepal Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 15, No.1 (2014) 67-76
Effect of head group size on the photoswitching applications of azobenzene Disperse Red 1 analogues

We investigate the effect of the increased molecular bulk in the ‘head’ group for a class of newly synthesized azobenzene chromophores with a clickable ethynyl group para and a nitro group ortho to the azo bond on the distal benzene ring. This ‘variable-head’ functionalization provides a family of dyes with photophysical characteristics very similar to those of Disperse Red 1, one of the most commonly used azo dyes in materials science. Phenyl, naphthyl, and anthracyl derivatives were synthesized as small molecules, monomers, homopolymers, and copolymers in a rapid and facile manner using click chemistry, confirming the versatility of this parent chromophore. Photochemical and spectral studies indicate that this strategy is suitable to build a ‘bulkiness series’ of stimuli-responsive materials, as the various material derivatives retain the absorption and kinetic characteristics of the parent chromophore necessary for all optical patterning applications that DR1 dyes have been optimized for. In thin films, larger head group size was found to increase the stability of light-induced birefringence in copolymers. The homopolymers formed stable surface-relief gratings upon interference irradiation, whose grating depths correlate with head group size, demonstrating that this new class of polymers can also undergo tailored macroscopic photoinduced motions, which could have applications in all optical nano-patterning.
Guidelines for Optimizing Outcomes with Immediate Molar Implant Placement

This paper is a follow-up to our recent literature review of outcomes with immediate molar implants and summarizes considerations used by various highly experienced clinical investigators to achieve acceptable survival rates. The surgeon’s skills and experience, proper case selection and specific modifications in osteotomy preparation all are crucial in avoiding intra- and extra-operative complications and implant failure.
Model-evaluation tools for three-dimensional cloud verification via spaceborne active sensors

AbstractClouds pose many operational hazards to the aviation community in terms of ceilings and visibility, turbulence, and aircraft icing. Realistic descriptions of the three-dimensional (3D) distribution and temporal evolution of clouds in numerical weather prediction models used for flight planning and routing are therefore of central importance. The introduction of satellite-based cloud radar (CloudSat) and Cloud–Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) sensors to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration A-Train is timely in light of these needs but requires a new paradigm of model-evaluation tools that are capable of exploiting the vertical-profile information. Early results from the National Center for Atmospheric Research Model Evaluation Toolkit (MET), augmented to work with the emergent satellite-based active sensor observations, are presented here. Existing horizontal-plane statistical evaluation techniques have been adapted to operate on observations in th.