Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electron flow in an iron‐rich acidic sediment—evidence for an acidity‐driven iron cycle

The anoxic sediment of an acidic (pH ∼3) iron‐ and sulfate‐rich lake and its pore water was studied with respect to the turnover rates of solid and dissolved iron and sulfur species. High sedimentation rates of iron (570 g m−2 a−1) lead to an enrichment of the upper (0–5 cm) acidic sediment zone (pH < 4) with schwertmannite (Fe8O8(OH)x(SO4)y (∼ 350 g kg−1). Microbial iron‐reduction rates measured by closed vessel incubation technique were highest close to the sediment‐water interface (250 nmol cm−3 d−1), sulfate reduction measured by the 35S‐tracer technique was not detectable in this zone. The absence of sulfide allowed complete reoxidation of dissolved Fe(II) diffusing into oxic parts of the lake water. Thus, an iron cycle is established where acidity generation through this process (1.0–4.7 mol m−2 a−1) balanced the alkalinity gain through microbial iron reduction in this zone (0.65–4.0 mol m−2 a−1). Predominance of iron over sulfate reduction under acidic conditions is further stabilized by the transformation of schwertmannite to goethite at a depth of 3–5 cm, which releases acidity at a rate of 3.5 mol m−2 a−1. Below, pore‐water pH increased to values between 5 and 6, sulfate reduction occurred with a maximum rate of 14 nmol cm−3 d−1), sulfate reduction measured by the 35S‐tracer technique was at 9 cm depth. Release of Fe(II) and a short turnover time of reduced sulfur relative to the sediment age implies that most of the sulfide formed seemed to be recycled to sulfate at this depth, presumably coupled to the reduction of iron. Consequently, net alkalinity is generated at low rates only (0.12 mol m−2 a−1).
Small-airway dysfunction in paediatric asthma

Purpose of review Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disorder that can involve the entire bronchial tree. Increasing evidence shows that ventilation heterogeneity and small airway dysfunction are relevant factors in the pathogenesis of asthma and represent a hallmark in adults with persistent asthma. Little is known about the contribution of peripheral airway impairment in paediatric asthma, mainly due to the inaccessibility to evaluation by noninvasive techniques, which have only been widely available in recent years. Recent findings Emerging evidence suggests that small airways are affected from the early stages of the disease in childhood-onset asthma. Conventional lung function measurement, using spirometry, is unable to sensitively evaluate small airway function and may become abnormal only once there is a significant burden of disease. Recent studies suggest that chronic inflammation and dysfunction in the small airways, as detected with new advanced techniques, are risk factors for asthma persistence, asthma severity, worse asthma control and loss of pulmonary function with age, both in adults and children. Knowing the extent of central and peripheral airway involvement is clinically relevant to achieve asthma control, reduce bronchial hyper-responsiveness and monitor response to asthma treatment. Summary This review outlines the recent evidence on the role of small airway dysfunction in paediatric asthma development and control, and addresses how the use of new diagnostic techniques available in outpatient clinical settings, namely impulse oscillometry and multiple breath washout, could help in the early detection of small airway impairment in children with preschool wheezing and school-age asthma and potentially guide asthma treatment.
Inclusion complexes of amlodipine besylate and cyclodextrins

AbstractIn this paper the procedure for the preparation of inclusion complexes of amlodipine besylate with β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) and 2-hydrohypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HPβ-CD) and their structural characterization was described. Molecular inclusion complexes of amlodipine besylate are prepared by the coprecipitation method and characterised by the application of spectroscopic methods FTIR, 1H-NMR and XRD. The photosensitivity of amlodipine besylate in the inclusion complexes was also determined with respect to uncomplexed agent. DSC curves indicate the loss of the clear peak due to melting of amlodipine besylate at about 200°C, while on XR diffractograms certain reflections are lost belonging to amlodipine besylate in complexes. This indicates its inclusion in the vacancies of the host. The inclusion of amlodipine besylate with cyclodextrins increases the stability, i.e. decreases the photosensitivity of amlodipine besylate.
The Essential Oil Analysis of Pseudohandelia umbellifera (Boiss.) Tzvel. Growing in Iran

Abstract The volatile constituents of the oil of Pseudohandelia umbellifera (Bois.) Tzvel. flowering herb obtained by hydrodistillation, which growing in Iran were investigated by means of GC and GC-MS. Forty-eight compounds were characterized, comprising about 95.6 % of the total oil. Oxygenated sesquiterpenes (38.7 %) and sesquiterpene hydrocarbons (13.9 %)were found to be the maj or fraction of the oil, with small amount of monoterpene hydrocarbons (0.7 %). The most abundant compounds were 7-hydroxy coumarin (15.7 %), (E,E)-farnesol (9.5 %), (Z)-nuciferol acetate (7.7 %), cis-lanceol acetate (5.9 %), phytol (5.1 %) and γ-terpinene-7-al (4.3 %).
Preparation and Properties of Nanocomposites from Pristine and Modified SWCNTs of Comparable Average Aspect Ratios

Low color, flexible, space-durable polyimide films with inherent and robust electrical conductivity to dissipate electrostatic charge (ESC) have been under investigation as part of a materials development activity for future NASA space missions. The use of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is one means of achieving this goal. Even though the concentration of SWCNTs needed to achieve ESC dissipation is typically low, it is dependent upon purity, size, dispersion and functionalization. In this study, SWCNTs prepared by the electric arc discharge method were used to synthesize nanocomposites using the LaRCTM CP2 backbone as the matrix. Pristine and functionalized SWCNTs were mixed with an alkoxysilane terminated amide acid of LaRC TM CP2 and the soluble imide form of the polymer and the resultant nanocomposites evaluated for mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. Due to the preparative conditions for the pristine and functionalized SWCNTs, the average aspect ratio for both was comparable. This permitted the assessment of SWCNT functionalization with respect to various interactions (e.g. van der Waals, hydrogen bonding, covalent bond formation, etc.) with the matrix and the macroscopic effects upon nanocomposite properties. The results of the study are described.
Measurement and Interpretation of Salinity Tolerance in Four Perennial Grasses

ABSTRACT Whilst the topic of soil salinity has received a substantive research effort over the years, the accurate measurement and interpretation of salinity tolerance data remain problematic. The tolerance of four perennial grass species (non-halophytes) to sodium chloride (NaCl) dominated salinity was determined in a free-flowing sand culture system. Although the salinity tolerance of non-halophytes is often represented by the threshold salinity model (bent-stick model), none of the species in the current study displayed any observable salinity threshold. Further, the observed yield decrease was not linear as suggested by the model. On re-examination of earlier datasets, we conclude that the threshold salinity model does not adequately describe the physiological processes limiting growth of non-halophytes in saline soils. Therefore, the use of the threshold salinity model is not recommended for non-halophytes, but rather, a model which more accurately reflects the physiological response observed in these saline soils, such as an exponential regression curve.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition

One of the major tasks of intelligent human-machine interaction is to empower computers with the ability of “affective computing" [4] such that it can recognize a user’s emotional status and respond to the user in an affective way. This project develops a complete multimodal emotion recognition system that predicts the speaker’s emotion state based on speech, text, and video input. The system consists of two branches. A time synchronous branch where audio, word embeddings, and video embeddings are coupled at frame level. And a time asynchronous branch where sentence embeddings are combined with their context. These two branches are then fused to make prediction. The system generates state-of-the-art multimodal emotion classification accuracy on IEMOCAP database. In-depth investigation of properties of different modalities and their combination is provided. The emotion recognition problem is then re-examined. IEMOCAP database contains a large proportion of utterances that human annotators don’t completely agree on their emotion labels. These utterances are more common in reality but are usually ignored by traditional emotion classification problems. In that case, it is more reasonable to match the label distribution of the sentence rather than doing classification. “Soft" labels are then introduced, which improves label distribution matching by a significantly better KL divergence. Different ways of modelling the label distribution are discussed which includes the proposal of Dirichlet prior network.
USING TIME-DRIVEN ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING AND CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC PLANNINGIN HOTEL MANAGEMENT

Business organizations are under constant pressure to optimize their resource utilization and find ways to maximize their profitability with minimum cost and effort. As a result, managerial accounting practices such as time-driven activity-based costing are being deployed to conduct customer profitability analysis to determine accurately how much profit is generated from each customer. Such accurate cost and profit information enables managers to pinpoint their strategies towards those customer segments that create maximum impact in terms of economic returns to the organization. This study uses a case study approach to understand how a luxury hotel uses customer profitability information derived from cost of serving customers using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to finetune their marketing strategies in order to enhance their profitability.
Characteristics of bioactive compounds of Holothuria atra (Jaeger, 1833) associated bacteria

Sea cucumbers have bioactive compounds with health benefits. These active compounds can be used as raw materials for marine aquaculture. This study aims to determine the potential of sea cucumber intestine-associated bacteria as a raw material for aquaculture through the investigation of its characteristics using the GC-MS method. Holothuria atra samples were collected from December 2018 to April 2019, from Bandengan, Jepara waters, Central Java, Indonesia. The solid-liquid method is used in the extraction process. Open Column Chromatography (OCC) is used in the fractionation process. Antibacterial sensitivity test was carried out using the Kirby-Bauer agar diffusion method. This study found 26 bacterial isolates resulting from the isolation of black sea cucumber (H. atra) symbionts. Of the 26 bacterial isolates, 9 bacterial isolates were found to have antibacterial activity against multi-drug resistant bacteria. 2 isolates were selected from the 9 test results, namely: T.1. 2, which formed a 7.3 mm zone of inhibition against Escherichia coli and 7.8 mm against Staphylococcus aureus; and T.1. 13, which was only active against S. aureus with an inhibition zone of 8.2 mm. Identification of selected isolates showed that isolate T.1. 2 matched with Bacillus manliponensis species with 97% homology and that isolate T.4. 1.25 matched with Bacillus oceanisediminis, with 95% homology. GC-MS analysis found methyl hexadecanoate/methyl palmitate, bis (2-ethylhexyl) -1,2-benzene dicarboxylate, 9-octadecenal, glycerol-1,3-dihexadecanoate and diisooctyl-1,2-benzene dicarboxylate in sea cucumber intestineassociated bacteria.
The Coordicide

4 Autopeering 17 4.1 Peer discovery . 17 4.2 Neighbor selection . 18 4.3 Network reorganization and eclipse protection . 19 4.4 Choosing salts . 20 4.5 Sybil protection . 21
Sorption studies of ionic pesticides and hydrophobic organic compounds on polymerin for potential water remediation

This study investigated the sorption of paraquat and 2,4-D on polymerin, the humic acid-like fraction of olive mill wastewater. Effects of pH, contact time, initial concentration and sorbent dosage on the sorption of both herbicides were studied. Sorption mechanism of paraquat on polymerin was consistent with the ion exchange of this herbicide with Ca, Mg and K natively occurring in the sorbent; in contrast, 2,4-D was bound to polymerin by hydrogen bonding. Simulated wastewaters contaminated with paraquat were purified after three sorption cycles on polymerin renewed at each cycle, at a solid/liquid ratio of 0.5, whereas those containing 2,4-D showed a maximal residue removal of 44% after two sorption cycles at the same ratio. The possible application of this model to other water soluble herbicides, as well as the possible exploitation of polymerin as a bio-filter for the decontamination of pollution point sources is briefly discussed. * A version of this chapter has been published. Sannino, F. , Iorio, M. , De Martino, A. , Pucci, M. , Brown, C.D. , Capasso, R. (2007) Remediation of waters contaminated with ionic herbicides by sorption on polymerin. Water Research, doi:10.1016/j.watres. 2007.08. 015.
Biomechanical Evaluation of Short Implants for Prostheses: Review Article

The goal of advanced dentistry is restoring normal contour, function, comfort, aesthetics, speech and health of the patients. The dental implant is accepted as a promising method to replace a single tooth or multiple adjacent missing teeth, or to support a removable prosthesis for a completely edentulous patient [1]. Implant placement is important for the success of osseointegration and function. The height and width of the residual alveolus and surrounding anatomical structures can determine the proper position and path of insertion of dental implants [2]. Events leading to integration of an implant into bone, and hence determining the performance of the device, take place largely at the tissue implant interface. Development of this interface is complex and involves numerous factors. These include not only implant-related factors, such as material, shape, topography, and surface chemistry, but mechanical loading, surgical technique, and patient variables, such as bone quantity and quality, as well [3]. At the same time, factors belonging to the patient such as smoking, alcohol, drug use, resistance of the immune system, blood values, systemic diseases should be taken into consideration [4]. Therefore, patient related factors and the use of the appropriate implant affect the success rate [5]. In many studies, researchers [6,7] have tried to reduce the stress on the cortical alveolar crest and minimize bone loss by increasing the contact area of the bone-implant interface. Therefore, they have focused on making changes in the diameter and / or length of the implant or changing the attachment design and shape [6-9].
Integrated Strategies for Preserving and Enhancing the Historical Heritage of the University of Pavia

The University of Pavia owns an extensive real estate portfolio, largely consisting of historic buildings still hosting teaching and research activities. This implies a continuous challenge in keeping them efficient, sustainable and completely usable. Indeed, these heritage buildings, alongside an undeniable charm, bring with them deficiencies regarding safety, accessibility, energy efficiency, etc. This work presents an interdisciplinary strategy addressing the issues involved in the management of the multiple needs of conservation and use, complying with modern standards. The legal requirement of a seismic safety assessment was the occasion to launch a comprehensive review of the state of the University building heritage, considering together the different aspects involved, in a perspective of economic sustainability, combining preservation needs and valorisation. The steps of this strategy included a preliminary screening of all the buildings, by simple methods and tools. The aim was to gather homogeneous and comparable information, useful to identify critical structures and/or repeated issues, to allocate resources for deeper analyses and implementation. The case study of San Felice Palace, which presents emblematic features and deficiencies, is illustrated in more detail, with complete seismic safety and accessibility analyses leading to proposals of enhancement interventions.
Practice-Based Teacher Questioning Strategy Training with ELK

Practice is essential for learning. However, for many interpersonal skills, there often are not enough opportunities and venues for novices to repeatedly practice. Role-playing simulations offer a promising framework to advance practice-based professional training for complex communication skills, in fields such as teaching. In this work, we introduce ELK (Eliciting Learner Knowledge), a role-playing simulation system that helps K-12 teachers develop effective questioning strategies to elicit learners' prior knowledge. We evaluate ELK with 75 pre-service teachers through a mixed-method study. We find that teachers demonstrate a modest increase in effective questioning strategies and develop sympathy towards students after using ELK for 3 rounds. We implement a supplementary activity in ELK in which users evaluate transcripts generated from past role-play sessions. We have tentative evidence that a combination of role-play and evaluating conversation moves may be more effective for learning. We contribute design implications of using role-play systems for communication strategy training.
Automatic Segmentation of Liver Tumor Focus Region Based on CT Image

In view of the small proportion of liver tumor in abdominal CT images, an automatic segmentation algorithm of liver tumor CT image based on U-net is proposed in this paper. In order to enlarge the size of the target area, image processing was carried out before image input into the segmentation network. And a hybrid loss function combining Dice Loss and Cross Entropy Loss is used to improve the accuracy and stability of the training network. Finally, three evaluation criteria, Dice similarity coefficient, Recall and Precision, are adopted to evaluate the performance of tumor segmentation. The results of experiments show that this method can use less data to complete the end-to-end training and obtain good training effect.
Think-Aloud Computing: Supporting Rich and Low-Effort Knowledge Capture

When users complete tasks on the computer, the knowledge they leverage and their intent is often lost because it is tedious or challenging to capture. This makes it harder to understand why a colleague designed a component a certain way or to remember requirements for software you wrote a year ago. We introduce think-aloud computing, a novel application of the think-aloud protocol where computer users are encouraged to speak while working to capture rich knowledge with relatively low effort. Through a formative study we find people shared information about design intent, work processes, problems encountered, to-do items, and other useful information. We developed a prototype that supports think-aloud computing by prompting users to speak and contextualizing speech with labels and application context. Our evaluation shows more subtle design decisions and process explanations were captured in think-aloud than via traditional documentation. Participants reported that think-aloud required similar effort as traditional documentation.
Co-activation detection in ten-finger typing on a virtual keyboard

Developing an effective text input method for virtual and augmented reality is an ongoing research area. Virtual keyboards are one potential solution that leverage users existing typing skill. However, they pose their own set of challenges that must be overcome. One of these challenges is the detection and removal of coactivation typing errors. This error is produced by the unintentional selection of a second character as a result of selecting the desired one. This thesis investigates the identifying characteristics of coactivations and uses them to train a model capable of removing coactivations from a text input stream. Four identifying characteristics were found, these were: inter-key interval, key depth, key velocity, and inter-key correlation. Three different models were trained using features derived from these characteristics. These were a neural network, a support vector machine and a naive Bayes model and they achieved a mean accuracy and standard deviation across 4-fold cross validation of 98±1%, 97±1% and 98±1% respectively. The neural network was chosen as the best performing model as it achieved the highest average accuracy and F1 score. This model was successfully integrated into an existing statistical decoder and passed initial tests. Future work includes a full evaluation of the modified decoder. The neural network can successfully identify 97± 1% of coactivations while only incorrectly labelling 2±1% of intended touch events as coactivations. As 4% of characters typed were coactivations, this equates to a 2±1% reduction in errors.
An Analysis of the Auxetic Cranioplasty Implant

The following paper is a reflection on the advisability of using auxetic structures in medical devices. For this purpose, a model of a skull implant was designed. This implant could be used for cranioplasty of bone defects after neurosurgical procedures. The implant is made of a titanium alloy and has an auxetic "double arrow" structure. The behavior of the implant was investigated in two cases, under the influence of increased intracranial pressure and impact of an external force. The calculations were made with the finite element method implemented in the SolidWorks 2020 program. Moreover, the natural frequency of the structure was examined in the Comsol Multiphysics program.
Staying connected during stay‐at‐home: Communication with family and friends and its association with well‐being

COVID-19 and the resulting stay-at-home orders issued to reduce the spread of the virus created a novel social situation in which people could not spend in-person time with their family and friends Thus, emerging technologies like video calling and other forms of mediated communication like voice calling and text messaging became important resources for people to stay in touch The purpose of this study was threefold First, we wanted to test whether people would use more mediated communication (video calls, voice calls, text messaging) to stay in touch during the stay-at-home order Second, we wanted to see if increased mediated communication would be positively associated with well-being Finally, we explored whether mediated communication was related to age To answer these questions, we surveyed 2090 participants who answered questions online about how their use of video calls, voice calls, and text messaging and their well-being had changed since the stay-at-home order Our results show that people increased their use of mediated communication, particularly video calling;and increases in mediated communication with close others, particularly friends, was related to higher levels of well-being Finally, we found that age was related only to the use of video calling;younger people tended to use more video calling These findings support the compensatory theory of technology use, that people use technologically mediated communication to maintain contact with their close friends and family when in-person contact is not possible, and that this form of contact, when in-person interaction is unavailable, is associated with positive outcomes (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)