Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Turbulent fluxes during blowing snow: field tests of model sublimation predictions

Sublimation fluxes during blowing snow have been estimated to return 10-50% of seasonal snowfall to the atmosphere in North American prairie and arctic environments. These fluxes are calculated as part of blowing snow two-phase particle transport models with provision for phase change based upon a particle-scale energy balance. Blowing snow models have normally been evaluated based upon their ability to reproduce diagnostic mass flux gradient measurements and regional-scale snow redistribution patterns and snow mass. Direct evidence is presented here that large latent heat fluxes (40-60 W m -2 ) that result in sublimation rates of 0.05-0.075 mm snow water equivalent hour -1 , are associated with mid-winter, high-latitude blowing snow events. For events with wind speeds above the threshold level for snow transport, these fluxes are in the range of those predicted by the Prairie Blowing Snow Model. The fluxes are well in excess of those found during spring snowmelt and which can be predicted by standard bulk aerodynamic transfer equations, suggesting that blowing snow physics will have to be incorporated in land surface schemes and hydrological models in order to properly represent snow surface mass and energy exchange during blowing snow events.
Network Slicing for Critical Communications in Shared 5G Infrastructures - An Empirical Evaluation

Increasing automation in systems such as Smart Grids (SGs), Intelligent Transportation, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, involves the need for robust, highly capable Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Traditionally, to meet diverging use case requirements regarding network data rate, delay, security, reliability and flexibility, dedicated communication infrastructures are employed. Yet, this is associated with high costs and lengthy roll-out times. Therefore it is desirable for multiple tenants to share one Physical Network (PN). However, this may compromise service guarantees, potentially violating Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Network slicing aims to address this challenge by transparently dividing one common infrastructure into multiple, logically independent networks. Thereby tenants are isolated from one another, ensuring the fulfillment of hard performance guarantees. As slicing is central to realizing the potential of 5G networks, this work presents a novel approach based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) driven queueing strategies. The developed solution is comprehensively evaluated with realistic traffic in a physical testing environment. Highly demanding critical infrastructure use cases, with multiple service levels per slice, are used to validate performance and demonstrate functionalities such as dynamic data rate allocation.
IMPROVING DATA-SHUFFLE PERFORMANCE IN DATA-PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS BY SHWEELAN SAMSON

Scaling up to thousands of nodes in data-parallel systems like MapReduce is prevailing. Many logical network topologies like Torus, Binomial Graph, and Hypercubes have been proposed to solve network connections concurrency problem that comes along with this scale. These topologies enforce a limit on the number of the allowed concurrent network connections per node and structure an overlayed network topologies around it. Many implementations of these topologies set the connections’ limit value depending on folklore guesses. One contribution of this work is to experimentally understand the effect of concurrency degree on the machine’s resources and the whole network resources. We implemented a benchmark tool which was used to test different combinations of concurrency and buffer size parameters. We evaluated the results and showed how does the number of concurrent connections affects latencies, throughput, throughput stability, and compute resources consumption. Furthermore, we showed that buffering and messages chunk size are critical for performance and resources utilization. However, The scalability of these topologies comes at the cost of having potentially longer communication paths. With longer paths, more network bandwidth will be utilized in forwarding the messages through intermediate hops. We proposed a hybrid approach that enables data-parallel systems to deploy direct connections to the most congested paths selectively. We implemented a simulation for Binomial graph topology and deployed this hybrid approach. Experiments showed that with skewed datasets, the hybrid approach yielded a decent performance boost, and a good saving in the forwarded messages count, hence increasing bandwidth efficiency, and improving resources utilization.
Distribution of radionuclides and heavy metals in the bituminous sand deposit in Ogun State, Nigeria – A multi-dimensional pollution, health and radiological risk assessment

Pollutants in soils and other environmental matrices can directly pose significant human health risks through various exposure pathways, especially for local population. The concentration and distribution of heavy metals (Pb, Ni, Cd, Cr, Fe and Zn) and the gamma ray emitting (U, Th, and K) radionuclides in bituminous soils were analyzed using well calibrated atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) and γ-ray spectrometry using NaI(TI) detector. The average concentration of Pb, Ni, Cd, Cr, Fe and Zn were 28.2, 24.1, 5.16, 42.5, 170 and 226mg kg respectively. The average activity concentration of U, Th, and K were 42.6 ± 6.50, 113 ± 10.5 and 461 ± 24.3 Bq kg respectively. These values were above the world average value, although only six samples were higher than the world average value. The average activity concentrations, radium equivalent and dose rate of measured radionuclides were compared with other literature values and country's maximum allowable limit for heavy metals. The geo-accumulation index (Igeo), contamination factor, pollution loading index (PI), enrichment factor, and potential ecological risk index (PERI) were calculated to assess the heavy metals pollution level in soils. The total hazard index (THI) and carcinogenic risk (CR) were used to assess human health risk of heavy metals. The pollution level using the four pollution assessment model were in the order Pb > Cd > Ni > Cr > Fe > Zn. The estimated carcinogenic risk (CR) for children and adults obtained were all higher than the safe limit (1× 10) while the non-carcinogenic risk (THI) was below the safe limit (THI ˂ 1). Pollution sources were identified using multivariate statistical analysis. It was found that Cr contributed>97% to the overall cancer risk (CR) for children and adults. The pollution sources were identified using multivariate statistical analysis. Therefore, the federal and state ministry of environment, health and solid minerals must rise to the urgent need of remediating the bituminous soil which may pose great health risk to human population in the study area.
Age-associated arterial remodeling

Arterial remodelling is a major risk factor for a variety of age-related diseases and represents a potential target for therapeutic development. Blood vessel wall is continually remodelled at the tissue level as reflected by the changes in structure and functions. During ageing, the structural, mechanical and functional changes of arteries predispose individuals to the development of diseases related to vascular abnormalities in vital organs such as the brain, heart, eye and kidney. For example, aortic stiffness increases nonlinearly with advancing age a few percent prior to 50 years of age but over 70% after 70 years of age. The elevated stiffness in large elastic arteries affects the blood pressure control and leads to increased transmission of high pressure to downstream smaller blood vessels, in turn affecting the microcirculation and end-organ functions. Meanwhile, the augmented remodelling of small arteries accelerates central arterial stiffening. This chapter is to provide an overview of age-associated changes in the arterial wall and their contributions to both central and peripheral vascular abnormalities associated with ageing. Therapeutics that specially target the different aspects of arterial remodelling are expected to be more effective than the traditional medications, particularly for the treatment and management of vascular ageing-related diseases.
Cohesion and community: the effects of space, place and time on foursquare check-ins in New York City

In previous work, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a technique commonly applied to document collections to discover latent themes, to cluster foursquare users in New York City. We found that although the feature set used was agnostic of geo-spatial location, time, users’ friends on social networking sites and venue function, qualitative evidence existed that groups of people of different types (e.g. tourists), communities (e.g. users tightly clustered in space) and interests (e.g. people who enjoy athletics) could be uncovered. In the present work, we use the same feature set and a similar methodology, but we extend these efforts in seeking a more quantitative understanding of why groups of users frequent certain venues. Specifically, we develop metrics to test the cohesiveness in time, space and function of sets of venues uncovered by LDA that are checked in to by similar users. We find that nearly all venue sets the model uncovers are more cohesive than we would expect by chance along one or more of these metrics, supporting previous work in a variety of domains. In addition, we discover a significant negative correlation between the spread of venue sets in space and function, thus suggesting a “neighborhood” effect observed in other recent work. Finally, we show that the model captures distinct “micro-cultures” within the city and discuss how we can understand these based on the notion of self-representation and by leveraging latent connections between users. These findings are intended to both support and inform social science in the way that location-based services can help to understand community and human behavior in the urban environment.
AGOMELATINE and DULOXETINE – A Combination for the Treatment of Depression

Madam, when a person is suffering from major depressive disorder, they experience a severely depressed mood, along with low activity levels, that may persist for weeks at end. Depression approximately affects about 350 million people. According to The World Mental Health Survey, which was conducted in 17 countries around the world, it was found that on average about 1 in 20 people reported having an episode of depression in the previous year.
The Households Health Spending and Impoverishment: A Study After Iran's Health Transformation Plan

Background: Iran’s Health Transformation Plan (HTP) was implemented to decrease households’ out of pocket and protect them from facing catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment from 2014. It is needed to assess the effect of HTP; therefore, the study aimed to examine the households’ impoverishment due to health expenditure after HTP. Methods: A household survey was carried out in 2017 in Sistan and Baluchestan province in southeast Iran. About 2400 households were selected as the study sample using a multi-stage sampling technique. The household section of the World Health Survey questionnaire was used to collect data. Independent variables contained households’ characteristics, household income, chronic illness status, the use of health services, and health spending. The dependent variable was whether the household was faced with health spending impoverishment. Mixed effects logistic regression was used to assess the effect of the independent variables on the impoverishment using SPSS software 21. Results: About 7.5% of the households had no basic insurance and 757 (31.6) heads’ of the households were unemployment. The results showed that about 5.4% of the households impoverished due to health expenditure. The households in the furthest region were forced with impoverishment more than other regions (23.0%). Living in a rural area, unemployment, economic status, and inpatients and outpatient costs were the main determinates on impoverishment (P < 0.05). In addition, having supplementary insurance was a protective factor in facing impoverishment (P = 0.05). Conclusions: In general, despite the implementation of HTP, healthcare expenditures leading to impoverishment of high percent of the households and Iranian development goals have not been fulfilled in this region. Economic poverty of the people may also be an important factor in this regard. It is recommended that outpatient services are covered by health insurances.
Which fuzzy logic operations are most appropriate for ontological semantics: Theoretical explanation of empirical observations

In several of their papers, Victor Raskin and coauthors proposed to use fuzzy techniques to make ontological semantics techniques more adequate in dealing with natural language. Specifically, they showed that the most adequate results appear when we use min as an “and”-operation and max as an “or”-operation. It is interesting that in other applications of fuzzy techniques, such as intelligent control, other versions of fuzzy techniques are the most adequate. In this chapter, we explain why the above techniques are empirically the best in the semantics case. 1 Formulation of the Problem Use of fuzzy degrees in ontological semantics: a brief (and simplified) reminder. In several of his papers, V. Raskin at al. proposed to use fuzzy techniques to make ontological semantics a more adequate description of natural language; see, e.g., [14, 15, 16]. For example, according to Raskin et al., from the purely logical viewpoint, there are many correct answers to a query “Who can drive a car? ”. For example, “a man”, “a woman”, “an engineer” are all logically correct answers. However, from the natural language viewpoint, the above answers sound weird. From the natural language viewpoint, the most natural answer is “an adult. ” This answer is the most natural because it is the most general. It is desirable to utilize this idea in computer-based natural language processing algorithms. One of the main difficulties in such use of computers is that computers have been originally designed to process numbers, not words, and computers are still much better in processing numbers than in processing textual information. Thus, to
Working Paper WP / 18 / 031 Doing Business and Inclusive Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

PurposeThis study examines how doing business affects inclusive human development in 48 sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2000-2012. Design/methodology/approachThe measurement of inclusive human development encompasses both absolute pro-poor and relative pro-poor concepts of inclusive development. Three doing business variables are used, namely: the number of start-up procedures required to register a business; time required to start a business; and time to prepare and pay taxes. The empirical evidence is based on Fixed Effects and Generalised Method of Moments regressions. FindingsThe findings show that increasing constraints to the doing of business have a negative effect on inclusive human development. Originality/valueThe study is timely and very relevant to the post-2015 Sustainable Development agenda for two fundamental reasons: (i) Exclusive development is a critical policy syndrome in Africa because about 50% of countries in the continent did not attain the MDG extreme poverty target despite enjoying more than two decades of growth resurgence. (ii) Growth in Africa is primarily driven by large extractive industries and with the population of the continent expected to double in about 30 years, scholarship on entrepreneurship for inclusive development is very welcome. This is essentially because studies have shown that the increase in unemployment (resulting from the underlying demographic change) would be accommodated by the private sector, not the public sector. JEL Classification: M20; I30; O10; O30; O55
Energy variational approach to study charge inversion (layering) near charged walls

We introduce a mathematical model, which describes the charge inversion phenomena in systems with a charged wall or boundary. This model may prove helpful in understanding semiconductor devices, ion channels, and electrochemical systems like batteries that depend on complex distributions of charge for their function. The mathematical model is derived using the energy variational approach that takes into account ion diffusion, electrostatics, finite size effects, and specific boundary behavior. In ion dynamic theory, a well-known system of equations is the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equation that includes entropic and electrostatic energy. The PNP type of equation can also be derived by the energy variational approach. However, the PNP equations have not produced the charge inversion/layering in charged wall situations presumably because the conventional PNP does not include the finite size of ions and other physical features needed to create the charge inversion. In this paper, we investigate the key features needed to produce the charge inversion phenomena using a mathematical model, the energy variational approach. One of the key features is a finite size (finite volume) effect, which is an unavoidable property of ions important for their dynamics on small scales. The other is an interfacial constraint to capture the spatial variation of electroneutrality in systems with charged walls. The interfacial constraint is established by the diffusive interface approach that approximately describes the boundary effect produced by the charged wall. The energy variational approach gives us a mathematically self-consistent way to introduce the interfacial constraint. We mainly discuss those two key features in this paper. Employing the energy variational approach, we derive a non-local partial differential equation with a total energy consisting of the entropic energy, electrostatic energy, repulsion energy representing the excluded volume effect, and the contribution of an interfacial constraint related to overall electroneutrality between bulk/bath and wall. The resulting mathematical model produces the charge inversion phenomena near charged walls. We compare the computational results of the mathematical model to those of Monte-Carlo computations.
Teacher Education Partnerships: An Australian Research-Based Perspective

This article reviews literature about partnerships between teacher education faculties and schools that indicates not just heightened interest in recent years, but also significant progress. Despite interest and progress, conceptual and practical difficulties remain in establishing, developing, nurturing and implementing successful partnerships so that core interests of partners are satisfied. Against this background, the article examines the experiences of an Australian teacher education faculty that sought to enhance its arrangements with local schools by reorganizing and staging a teacher education program through a community of practice. Data drawn from a study of the emergent partnership confirm the trends in the literature and provide additional information about what appear to be essential partnership elements. The article concludes with speculative remarks about the trends in the literature and the study findings that may frame future research
Visanko FUNCTIONALIZED NANOCELLULOSES AND THEIR USE IN BARRIER AND MEMBRANE THIN FILMS

Nanocellulose is envisioned as one of the key product innovations of future biorefineries, since it can potentially function in numerous high-end applications and replace many current petroleumbased products due to its superior properties, abundance and renewable nature. The main difficulty hindering the industrial upscaling of nanocellulose is the lack of feasible techniques for processing cellulose fibres on a nanoscale. At the same time, ongoing research efforts have concentrated on charting the suitability of nanocellulose for various novel applications. The chemical functionalization of cellulose is currently regarded as a significant step for both enhancing nanocellulose fabrication and increasing its value as a product by virtue of its adjustable surface properties. This thesis reports on the surface functionalization of cellulosic fibres by means of two new chemical pre-treatments based on periodate oxidation and sequential chlorite oxidation or reductive amination for use in the fabrication of nanocelluloses. The properties of the resulting nanocelluloses were characterized and their applicability to novel film structures was investigated. Both nanoporous thin films for composite membranes and self-standing barrier films were manufactured and studied for their suitability in water purification and packaging applications, respectively. The oxidation of cellulose to 2,3-dicarboxylic acid cellulose (DCC) significantly enhanced the nanofibril production as only 1-4 passes through the homogenizer were required for disintegration of the fibres down to nano-scale. The fabricated DCC-nanofibrils had both high optical transmittance and viscosity comparable to that of TEMPO-oxidized cellulose nanofibrils. DCCnanofibrils with a carboxyl content of 1.75 mmol/g showed a potential for functioning as a nanoporous thin-film membrane layer in ultrafiltration tests. The second pre-treatment introduced an acid-free fabrication of amphiphilic cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) with uniform width and length into nanocellulose production for the first time. Reaction conditions of periodate oxidation were presumed to be one of the key factors to impact the formation of either CNCs or cellulose nanofibrils. The butylamino-functionalized CNCs were used to fabricate barrier films that showed good mechanical strength and high resistance to permeation by oxygen even at elevated relative humidity.
Band structure of ABC-stacked graphene trilayers

The ABC-stacked N-layer-graphene family of two-dimensional electron systems is described at low energies by two remarkably flat bands with Bloch states that have strongly momentum-dependent phase differences between carbon pi-orbital amplitudes on different layers, and large associated momentum space Berry phases. These properties are most easily understood using a simplified model with only nearest-neighbor inter-layer hopping which leads to gapless semiconductor electronic structure, with p^N dispersion in both conduction and valence bands. We report on a study of the electronic band structures of trilayers which uses ab initio density functional theory and k*p theory to fit the parameters of a pi-band tight-binding model. We find that when remote interlayer hopping is retained, the triple Dirac point of the simplified model is split into three single Dirac points located along the three KM directions. External potential differences between top and bottom layers are strongly screened by charge transfer within the trilayer, but still open an energy gap at overall neutrality.