Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contact resistance study of noble metals and alloy films using a scanning probe microscope test station

The proper selection of electrical contact materials is one of the critical steps in designing a metal contact microelectromechanical system (MEMS) switch. Ideally, the contact should have both very low contact resistance and high wear resistance. Unfortunately this combination cannot be easily achieved with the contact materials currently used in macroswitches because the available contact force in microswitches is generally insufficient (less than 1mN) to break through nonconductive surface layers. As a step in the materials selection process, three noble metals, platinum (Pt), rhodium (Rh), ruthenium (Ru), and their alloys with gold (Au) were deposited as thin films on silicon (Si) substrates. The contact resistances of these materials and their evolution with cycling were measured using a specially developed scanning probe microscope test station. These results were then compared to measurements of material hardness and resistivity. The initial contact resistances of the noble metals alloyed with Au a.
Acceptance limits for the duration of pre-Helmholtz transients in bowed string attacks

The attack of most bowed notes shows an initial part before Helmholtz triggering occurs (the pre-Helmholtz transient), during which the stick-slip interaction promotes frequencies other than that of the string’s fundamental. Depending on the particular combination of bowing parameters, this state is characterized either by periods that are prolonged, or by a division of the period into two or more parts, multiple flyback. An onset with perfectly periodic motion (Helmholtz triggering) directly from the very start is also possible. A sample of violin tones representing these three classes of attacks, and with different duration of the pre-Helmholtz transient, has been collected by the use of a computer-controlled bowing machine. The tones were evaluated by 20 advanced string students and professionals in a listening test, judging the acceptance and quality of the attacks. The maximum acceptable duration of the pre-Helmholtz transient was estimated to 50 ms (⩽10 nominal periods, open G string, violin) for attacks with prolonged periods, and 90 ms (⩽18 periods) for multiple-flyback attacks. These values refer to a neutral start in a neutral context, such as when practicing a scale. A playing test, in which the performances of two professional violinists were analyzed, confirmed these results, and showed that the same limits apply to a larger group of bowing styles as well.
Demographics and the global office market-consequences for property portfolios.

Executive Summary, This study examines the effects of demographic changes on the global office markets. Growth in the labor force, the ultimate driver of office demand, is slowing down in some countries and is contracting in others. Eased on demographic forecasts, expectations are formulated about the future shape of the office markets. The results suggest that office supply generally reacts accurately to changes in demand, but that this will be much harder if demand contracts harder than the write-off rate for offices. If office developers fail to incorporate these ongoing demographic shifts adequately, office portfolios might soon be confronted with structurally high vacancies, decreasing rents and falling values.
The Effect of Foreign Equity Ownership on Corporate Social Responsibility: Empirical Evidence from Poland

Abstract In the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) the origin of the equity is seen as one the drivers of CSR. There is evidence of multinational corporations stimulating diffusion of CSR practices in a few emerging economies. There are no similar studies focusing on the Polish economy. Since CSR practices are country-specific it is important to investigate if and how capital flows foster corporate social responsibility among firms established and operating in Poland. The method applied in the study is a statistical analysis of the ownership structure of firm whose socially responsible practices are highly ranked by the independent think-tanks compared to the ownership structure of their most relevant competitors. The results allow for a more comprehensive understanding of CSR drivers in Poland as well as the role of foreign capital in reshaping economic structures in Poland.
The role of usability in the Web development process – an analysis of SMEs providing MIS applications for the web

The number, variety and complexity of Web applications is growing steadily and a large number of these applications are developed by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This growth creates a need for supporting development processes and usability standards that meet the unique needs of web application development. This study analyses the practices of several SMEs who develop web applications through a series of case studies. With the focus on SMEs who develop web applications as Management Information Systems and not ECommerce sites, informational sites, online communities or web portals. This study gathered data about the usability techniques practiced by these companies and their awareness of usability in the context of the software process in those SMEs. The contribution of this study is to further the understanding of the current role of usability within the software development processes of SMEs who develop web applications.
EXPLOITATION OF DIGITAL SURFACE MODELS GENERATED FROM WORLDVIEW-2 DATA FOR SAR SIMULATION TECHNIQUES

Abstract. GeoRaySAR, an automated SAR simulator developed at DLR, identifies buildings in high resolution SAR data by utilizing geometric knowledge extracted from digital surface models (DSMs). Hitherto, the simulator has utilized DSMs generated from LiDAR data from airborne sensors with pre-filtered vegetation. Discarding the need for pre-optimized model input, DSMs generated from high resolution optical data (acquired with WorldView-2) are used for the extraction of building-related SAR image parts in this work. An automatic preprocessing of the DSMs has been developed for separating buildings from elevated vegetation (trees, bushes) and reducing the noise level. Based on that, automated simulations are triggered considering the properties of real SAR images. Locations in three cities, Munich, London and Istanbul, were chosen as study areas to determine advantages and limitations related to WorldView-2 DSMs as input for GeoRaySAR. Beyond, the impact of the quality of the DSM in terms of building extraction is evaluated as well as evaluation of building DSM, a DSM only containing buildings. The results indicate that building extents can be detected with DSMs from optical satellite data with various success, dependent on the quality of the DSM as well as on the SAR imaging perspective.
Finite element analysis of individual wood-pulp fibers subjected to transverse compression

The nonlinear and large displacement finite element method has been used to perform computer simulations of the transverse collapse of single wood-pulp fibers. Initial uncollapsed cross-sectional geometries are defined based on the collapsed geometry of single fibers subjected to experimental transverse compression. These initial uncollapsed geometries are assumed to be either square-formed or circle-formed. The fiber material is assumed to be isotropic and elastic. The elastic modulus is taken as the equivalent transverse elastic modulus for the fiber wall, determined from the slope of the cell-wall compression part of the experimental collapse curve. Simulations of the deformation of fibers under transverse compression yield upper and lower bounds on experimental data. Parametric studies of the effects of fiber wall thickness, uncollapsed thickness, and elastic modulus on collapse behavior are also presented.
A Unified Approach to Structural Change Tests Based on ML Scores, F Statistics, and OLS Residuals

ABSTRACT Three classes of structural change tests (or tests for parameter instability) that have been receiving much attention in both the statistics and the econometrics communities but have been developed in rather loosely connected lines of research are unified by embedding them into the framework of generalized M-fluctuation tests (Zeileis and Hornik, 2003). These classes are tests based on maximum likelihood scores (including the Nyblom–Hansen test), on F statistics (sup F, ave F, exp F tests), and on OLS residuals (OLS-based CUSUM and MOSUM tests). We show that (representatives from) these classes are special cases of the generalized M-fluctuation tests, based on the same functional central limit theorem but employing different functionals for capturing excessive fluctuations. After embedding these tests into the same framework and thus understanding the relationship between these procedures for testing in historical samples, it is shown how the tests can also be extended to a monitoring situation. This is achieved by establishing a general M-fluctuation monitoring procedure and then applying the different functionals corresponding to monitoring with ML scores, F statistics, and OLS residuals. In particular, an extension of the sup F test to a monitoring scenario is suggested and illustrated on a real-world data set.
Web Data Extraction from Scientific Publishers’ Website Using Heuristic Algorithm

WWW is a huge repository of information and the amount of information available on the web is growing day by day in an exponential manner. End users make use of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bingo etc. for retrieving information. Search engines use web crawlers or spiders which crawl through a sequence of web pages in order to locate the relevant pages and provide a set of links ordered by relevancy. Those indexed web pages are part of surface web. Getting data from deep web requires form submission and is not performed by search engines. Data analytics and data mining applications depend on data from deep web pages and automatic extraction of data from deep web is cumbersome due to diverse structure of web pages. In the proposed work, a heuristic algorithm for automatic navigation and information extraction from journal’s home page has been devised. The algorithm is applied to many publishers website such as Nature, Elsevier, BMJ, Wiley etc. and the experimental results show that the heuristic technique provides promising results with respect to precision and recall values.
On the hounding rules for logarithmic and exponential operations

This work is a detailed investigation of the rounding rules for logarithmic and exponential operations, including mathematical derivations and statistical analyses via Monte-Carlo simulations. H. Lawrence Clever suggested rounding rules for logarithmic and exponential operations in 1979. We have found Clever’s rules for logarithmic operations to be quite good, especially for natural logarithms, and found that they never lead to a loss of information. We propose a refinement to Clever’s rounding rule for common (i.e. base 10) logarithmic operations that significantly increases its accuracy. Clever’s rules for exponential operations were found to be extremely poor, almost never predicting the correct number of significant figures in the result. We suggest two alternate rules for exponential operations, both of which are demonstrated to be far more accurate and completely safe for data (i.e. never leading to a loss of information).
Social Projectionism: A Vision For New Ethics In Social Welfare

This article approaches social projectionism as an orientation within the new post-modern epistemologies, starting from its principles. At the same time, the author presents some phenomena generated by the post-modern perspectives opened by the new ideologies that produce new ethical orientations in social practice. These visions have made profound changes in the way the social services user is seen, the contextualisation of social practice, the volatility of social programmes and the development of the public-private partnership from the point of view of social constructionism. The marketisation of social services has conditioned the development of equality relations between the public service providers and the private providers, the adaptation of programmes to the local needs and resources and a permanent change, giving up the illusion of progress, recognising and using to their full potential the multilinear evolutions of the existing situations.
Using contact imprinting for adhesive wafer-to-wafer bonding

Fabrication of microfluidic devices often requires assembly of two patterned wafers with microchannels, inlet and outlet holes, and even electrodes defined on their surfaces. Because applications often call for optical detection, one of the wafers is usually made of glass. Wafer-to-wafer bonding in such cases is possible, but it must be performed at temperatures below 500◦C, the annealing temperature of the glass. There are few established processes for low-temperature wafer-to-wafer bonding. Anodic bonding1 is a well-known process in the MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) industry. The bonding temperature is in the range 300–450◦C, but the process requires a good-quality surface. Eutectic bonding,2 another low-temperature process, has the disadvantage of reduced yield and high sensitivity to contamination. Glass frit bonding,3 which is gaining popularity in industry due to its low cost, is an alternative to anodic bonding. However, it is considered to be a ‘dirty’ process and is used more for inactive surfaces. Adhesive bonding enables joining of silicon or glass wafers at even lower temperatures (usually below 200C). The technique is also less dependent on substrate material, particles, surface roughness, and planarity of the bonding surfaces.4 The opportunity to combine standard microfabrication deposition and patterning approaches with low demands on the wafer surface make this a very attractive and cost-effective solution. Several lithographically patternable materials, such as benzocyclobutene (BCB) and positive and negative photoresists, have already been studied as intermediate layers for adhesive wafer bonding. Besides BCB, the epoxy-based negative photoresist SU8 shows the best results in bonding experiments.5, 6 The advanFigure 1. (a) Spinning of SU8-5 photoresist onto a dummy wafer. (b) Contact-imprinting SU8-5 photoresist on a Teflon cylinder. (c) Contact-imprinting SU8-5 from the Teflon cylinder onto the desired wafer surface. (d) Alignment and contact with the second desired wafer. (e) Wafer-to-wafer bonding.
PREPARATION OF NANO-OXIDE DISPERSED STEEL POWDERS BY POWDER METALLURGY

Nanostructured steels may be realized by two different methods. There is well-known the „top-down” method where taking account the grain size the technological step, like Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD) are developing from top to down. The other „bottom-up” method is starting from individual grains and is developing the product starting from bottom and ending at the top. The last method is considered the main approach of nanotechnology. In this work a summary of „bottom-up” methodology of preparation and
A stable laser-basedmillimeter wavelength source

A radio-interferometric array usually consists of several spatially separated antennas observing the same celestial source and equipped with identical receivers. A high-resolution source image is produced by combining the receiver outputs, simulating a single larger antenna with an effective diameter set by the largest array element separation. Each element uses a heterodyne radio receiver, which produces a low-frequency replica of a radio signal by differencing it with a reference signal from a local oscillator (LO). The replica is easier to work with and carries all of the information of the original signal: frequency, phase, and amplitude. To effectively combine outputs from the array receivers and faithfully preserve signal information, each local oscillator must produce the required frequency with known phase. For use at the submillimeter wavelengths observed with, for example, Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array (SMA),1 there are two main approaches for generating LO power sufficient to operate heterodyne receivers. One approach employs an InP Gunn oscillator operating at about 100GHz, followed by varactor diode frequency multiplier. The other approach uses a YIG (yttrium iron garnet) oscillator operating at about 20GHz, followed by a cascade of varactor multiplier and amplifier pairs. However, both approaches have shortcomings. The availability of suitable InP devices is limited, and amplifier diode frequency multiplier pairs suffer from high cost and large, broadband output power variations. We describe here an approach based on beating two IR lasers in a photonic mixer. Previous attempts using this method have lacked the spectral purity and phase stability required to operate an interferometric array. At the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, we have developed a 200–230GHz local oscillator, mostly using commercially available 1550nm laser communication components (see Figure 1). Figure 2 shows the basic configuration of our photonic LO. The optical path consists of a single 1550nm diode laser, a Figure 1. Shown is a side view of the laser-based millimeter-wave local oscillator.
Fuel optimal initialization of a spacecraft formation

In this paper, we treat a formation initialization problem for a multiple spacecraft formation wherein a collective of spacecraft, initially located on a pay load delivery vehicle, are required to maneuver and acquire a specified formation pattern. We focus on the modeling and analysis of fuel optimal formation initialization by exploiting a multi-agent, fuel optimal, spacecraft formation reconfiguration methodology. Specifically, we address the formation initialization problem using a hybrid multi-agent optimization architecture, which decomposes the multi-agent optimal control problem as maneuver optimization, task assignment, and parameter optimization problems. In this paper, maneuver optimization, task assignment, and parameter optimization are performed using calculus of variation, dynamic-programming, and genetic algorithm, respectively. Finally, we provide illustrative simulations to show the efficacy of our proposed fuel-optimal formation initialization control architecture.
MOBILE COMPUTATION OF QUERIES IN AN UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENT

The World Wide Web (WWW) is exploited by the average user for communication, data access, business transactions, and entertainment. In a competitive environment, it is essential for (possibly mobile) users to be able to retrieve relevant information from databases geographically distributed over the Internet, regardless of their own location. Such information retrieval entails computation of queries in an uncertain environment. We examine some of the issues involved like the uncertainty in data, and in criteria like complexity or computation size of the query, current network traffic, etc. which are evaluated by the system while deciding when and where a mobile computation should move. This paper proposes a framework for a system that incorporates concepts from fuzzy logic into a plan language to formulate and execute a plan for a mobile query computation that will process a large query efficiently in an uncertain environment like the Internet.
Offshore Outsourcing to Russian IT Providers - Opportunities, Risks and Best Practice Procedures

Outsourcing IT to specialized providers 'off-shore' has become an important option for many western companies for maintaining or improving their competitiveness. The vast majority of those specialized IT providers are located in Asia, especially in India. Relatively little is known though about the Russian IT provider market. To provide IT decision makers with deeper insights, this article provides the necessary theoretical foundations as well as practical information about the Russian IT provider market based on extensive market research and project experiences.
Joyce and China: A Mode of Intertextuality - The Legitimacy of Reading and Translating Joyce

Drawing upon the history of the reception of James Joyce in China, this essay addresses a number of critical issues with which Joyce’s readers – Chinese or international – are confronted. These issues include, most notably, the problems of the liberal humanist approach to reading Joyce – and to studying literature as a whole, the varied conceptions of translation in relation to the Chinese translations of Joyce’s Ulysses, and the meaning of a literary text characterised by the notion of intertextuality – and hence the particular modes of intertextuality that Joyce’s work presents. While acknowledging the importance of translating Joyce, this essay undertakes a task to question the presupposed legitimacy which endorses the ‘accurate’ reading and/or translation of Joyce. Save China’s millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. (U.5.326-27) This is one of the typical Bloomian reveries – or what critics would normally call ‘stream of consciousness’ – that flow endlessly throughout the whole day of June 16, 1904, in the conscious or unconscious of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is also one of the comparatively few places in Joyce’s oeuvre in which he draws upon China. It is not evident that Joyce had ever been inclined to show much interest in the socalled ‘Celestials’, nor does Bloom demonstrate a culturally or historically accurate knowledge of China at the time. Jin Di (金堤), a distinguished Chinese Joycean who first translated Ulysses into Chinese, comments, ‘Gone forever is the China that Bloom vaguely visualized as a land of opium-smoking Celestials’ (Jin, 14). Having pointed out Bloom’s ‘insufficient’ knowledge of China, I do not intend to embark on a study of an orientalism in Joyce by following a certain postcolonial theory, such as that proposed by Edward Said, who may perhaps argue that the accounts of China in Ulysses – just like the depictions of Africa in
Comparision of Splitting Properties of Various 1x16 Splitters

Optical Access Networks (OAN) mostly use optical splitters to distribute the services from Optical Line Terminal (OLT) on the provider's side to the subscribers in Optical Network Unit (ONU). Optical splitters are the key components in such access networks as for example GPON and XG-PON by ITU-T. In this paper we investigate the optical properties of 1x16 Y-branch splitter and 1x16 MMI splitters based on different widths of multimode interference section and different lengths of the output ports. These two splitters were designed, simulated and the obtained results of both were studied and compared with each other. Additionally, we show that the used standard waveguide core size (usually 6x6 µm2 to match the diameter of the single mode input/output fibers, i.e. to keep the coupling loses as low as possible) supports not only propagation of the single mode but of the first mode too, leading to an asymmetric splitting ratio (increasing non-uniformity of split power over all the output waveguides). Decreasing waveguide core size, it is possible to suppress presence of the first mode and this way to reduce non-uniformity.