Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photonic RF spectral filters based on transversal filters with Kerr microcombs of varying free spectral ranges

Integrated Kerr microcombs are emerging as a powerful tool as sources of multiple wavelength channels for photonic RF and microwave signal processing mainly in the context of transversal filters. They offer a compact device footprint, very high versatility, large numbers of wavelengths, and wide Nyquist bands. Here, we review recent progress on Kerr microcomb-based photonic RF and microwave reconfigurable filters, based both on transversal filter methods and on RF to optical bandwidth scaling. We compare and contrast results achieved with wide comb spacing combs (200GHz) with more finely spaced (49GHz) microcombs. The strong potential of optical micro-combs for RF photonics applications in terms of functions and integrability is also discussed. Index Terms—Microwave photonics, micro-ring resonators.
Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Better Align With Their Politics

Political science generally treats demographic identities as “unmoved movers” in the chain of causality because these identities are conceptualized as being rooted in either ascriptive individual characteristics or hard-to-change aspects of individual experience. Here I hypothesize that the increasingly salient nature of partisanship and ideology as social identities leads liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans to shift their demographic identities to better align with the prototypes of their political groups, and thus the identity groups that make up the left and right coalitions in U.S. politics. I explore the hypothesis with a panel dataset that tracks Americans’ identities and political affiliations over four years. The data show that substantial numbers of Americans change how they identify over this span along the lines of national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and class. Furthermore, identity switching with regard to Latino origin, religion, class, and sexual orientation is significantly predicted by Americans’ partisanship and ideology in their pasts. All of these shifts are in directions that bring Americans’ identities into better alignment with their politics. Politics plays a particularly important role in identification with two identity groups—lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and those identifying as having no religious affiliation—in that the impact of politics on identity is large for these groups relative to their prevalence in the population. In showing how the process of identification can be imbued with politics, these findings both enrich and complicate our efforts to understand the relationship between identity and political behavior and indicate that caution must be taken in treating identities as firm, immovable political phenomena.
A Peer-to-Peer Reputation Evaluation System

Lack of incentives makes most P2P users unwilling to cooperate and lead to free-riding behavior. One way to encourage cooperation is through service differentiation based on each peer’s contributions. This paper presents FuzRep, a reputation system for P2P networks. FuzRep uses fuzzy logic method which uses requester’s reputation and provider’s inbound bandwidth as input information to create incentives for sharing and to avoid overloading problems for primary file providers. Reputation sharing in FuzRep is implemented by interest-based selective polling, which can significantly decrease overheads for reputation communication
Toxoplasma Gondii Seroprevalence at a Tertiary Care Hospital in Makkah, Saudi Arabia

Human toxoplasmosis is a cosmopolitan infection with a wide-ranging prevalence. The prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii infection is variable and depends on different eco-epidemiological factors. Both, active serological screenings and retrospective analytical methods are usually used for the investigation of toxoplasmosis seroprevalence in different populations. We conducted a two-year retrospective database search at a major tertiary care hospital to determine the prevalence of toxoplasmosis and its distribution in relation to gender and age among Makkah's population. In total, 806 females and 118 males with 33.1±9.1 years, mean age (±SD) were tested for anti-T. gondii antibodies in the last two years. Laboratory results revealed 229 seropositive subjects indicating 24.8% overall toxoplasmosis seroprevalence. Infection rate was significantly higher among male subjects (33.9%) than female subjects (23.4%). Seroprevalence increased considerably with age; from 9.7% in children less than 10 years old to 37.4% and 40.5% among adults between 40 and 49 and over 50 years, respectively. Only two anti-T. gondii IgM seropositive cases were recorded along this period, indicating possible active infection. In conclusion, overall T. gondii seropositivity rate is relatively low among Makkah's population, but moderate in adult males. Further investigations are required to determine the risk factors associated with toxoplasmosis transmission in the area. Also, adequate screening for anti-T. gondii specific antibodies are recommended, especially for immunocompromised patients and during pregnancy, in order to minimize prospective complications.
POLARDB Meets Computational Storage: Efficiently Support Analytical Workloads in Cloud-Native Relational Database

This paper reports the deployment of computational storage drives in Alibaba Cloud to enable cloud-native relational database cost-effectively support analytical workloads. With its compute-storage decoupled architecture, cloud-native relational database should pushdown data-intensive tasks (e.g., table scan) from front-end database nodes to back-end storage nodes in order to adequately support analytical workloads. This however makes it a challenge to maintain the cost effectiveness of storage nodes. The emerging computational storage opens a new opportunity to address this challenge: By replacing commodity SSDs with computational storage drives, storage nodes can leverage the in-storage computing power to much more efficiently perform table scans. Practical implementation of this simple idea is non-trivial and demands cohesive innovations across the software (i.e., database, filesystem and I/O) and hardware (i.e., computational storage drive) layers. This paper presents such a holistic implementation for Alibaba cloud-native relational database POLARDB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world deployment of cloud-native databases with computational storage drives ever reported in the open literature.
magnesium(II) 3-chloropyridine disolvate

The structure of the title compound, [Mg(C32H16N8)(H2O)] 2C5H4ClN, comprises MgPcH2O [Pc is phthalocyaninate(2ÿ)] and 3-chloropyridine solvent molecules interacting via OÐ H N hydrogen bonds and ± interactions. The central Mg atom is (4+1)-coordinated by four equatorial isoindole N atoms of the macrocycle and by the O atom of an axial water molecule. The MgPcH2O molecule is not planar, the Mg atom being displaced by 0.496 (2) AÊ from the isoindole N4 plane towards the water O atom. MgPcH2O molecules related by a twofold screw axis interact via OÐH Nazamethine hydrogen bonds, forming a polymeric chain along the b axis, while those related by inversion centres form ± interacting dimers.
Birinci trimester gebelik sonlandirmalarinda farkli iki misoprostol protokolünün karşilaştirilmasi Comparison of two misoprostol regimens for surgical termination of first- trimester pregnancy

Ozet Amac. Bu calismanin amaci ilk trimesterde gebelik sonlandirmasi oncesi servikal olgunlasma icin kullanilan iki farkli misoprostol uygulamasinin etkinligini karsilastirmaktir. Yontem. Gebelik sonlandirilmasi karari verilen 18-42 yas grubunda 167 kadin degerlendirmeye alinmistir. Grup 1 icerisinde yer alan 102 hastaya 4 saat ara ile 100 µg oral ve 100 µg vajinal misoprostol, grup 2 icerisinde yer alan 65 kadin hastaya 6 saat ara ile 200 µg oral ve 200 µg vaginal misoprostol uygulanmistir. Sistemik hastaligi olanlar, servikal operasyon gecirenler, gebeliginde kanamasi olanlar ve bazal servikal acikligi 4 mm'den fazla olanlar calisma disinda birakilmistir. Ulasilan servikal aciklik, dusuk suresi, yan etkiler ve diger baslangic klinik verileri toplandi. Bulgular. Calisma gruplari yas, gravida, parite ve gebelik yasi acisindan benzerdi. Multipar kadinlarda grup 1'de bazal dilatasyon grup 2'ye gore anlamli olarak daha yuksekti (p 0.05). For women with multiparity, the basal dilatation of group 1 was significantly higher than that of the group 2 (p<0.05). For women with nulliparity, the achieved dilatation of group 2 was significantly higher than that of the group 1 (p<0.05). For women with nulliparity, the abortion time of group 2 was significantly higher than that of the group 1 (p<0.05). Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea were present only in six patients. Conclusion: Misoprostol administered as 100 µg of misoprostol oral and 100 vaginal, doses repeated 4 hours later provides adequate cervical dilation after an acceptable period in nullipar women undergoing first-trimester pregnancy termination without significant side effect.
DC-Store: Eliminating Noisy Neighbor Containers using Deterministic I/O Performance and Resource Isolation

We propose DC-store, a storage framework that offers deterministic I/O performance for a multi-container execution environment. DC-store’s hardware-level design implements multiple NVM sets on a shared storage pool, each providing a deterministic SSD access time by removing internal resource conﬂicts. In parallel, software support of DC-Store is aware of the NVM sets and enlightens Linux kernel to isolate noisy neighbor containers, performing page frame reclaiming, from peers. We prototype both hardware and software counterparts of DC-Store and evaluate them in a real system. The evaluation results demonstrate that containerized data-intensive applications on DC-Store exhibit 31% shorter average execution time, on average, compared to those on a baseline system.
Fiscal Federalism and Tax Competition: a Double-Edged Sword?

Over the past decades there has been in many countries a progressive movement towards the devolution of fiscal powers to sub-central governments, a process which is commonly known as fiscal devolution or fiscal decentralization. This has generally been advised on grounds of improving government efficiency and accountability. In particular, advocates of fiscal decentralization point tax competition as the main mechanism that promotes economic development. The European Union (EU) provides, in this context, an ideal ground for looking at the effects of tax competition. We show that tax competition brings growth-maximizing policies. Yet, this translates into a ’race to bottom’ on the taxation of mobile factors, together with a ’race to the top’ on the taxation of immobile factors. Hence, fiscal devolution limits the scope for redistribution and brings potentially large regional asymmetric effects. Against this background, we examine several possible tax harmonization scenarios that may be considered in the EU context. In a nutshell, capital tax harmonization is able to avoid a race to bottom in capital taxation but implies a race to the top in labour taxation. Only labour income tax harmonization is able to avoid the latter, while leaving room for a positive capital tax.
Building An Elastic Query Engine on Disaggregated Storage

We present operational experience running Snowflake, a cloudbased data warehousing system with SQL support similar to state-of-the-art databases. Snowflake design is motivated by three goals: (1) compute and storage elasticity; (2) support for multi-tenancy; and, (3) high performance. Over the last few years, Snowflake has grown to serve thousands of customers executing millions of queries on petabytes of data every day. We discuss Snowflake design with a particular focus on ephemeral storage system design, query scheduling, elasticity and efficiently supporting multi-tenancy. Using statistics collected during execution of 70 million queries over a 14 day period, our study highlights how recent changes in cloud infrastructure have altered the many assumptions that guided the design and optimization of Snowflake, and outlines several interesting avenues of future research.
Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth: a case of Middle East

The current research is aimed at investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth, more specifically, in the context of Middle East countries. Entrepreneurial activities are professed to improve the economic development of the country through employment generation, increase in the rate of gross domestic product (GDP), increased productivity levels, poverty alleviation, and so on. Based on the possibility of these positive aspects, economic growth is considered to be driven through increased entrepreneurial activities, in the context of developing countries. To investigate this relationship between research variables, quantitative data was collected using the World Bank database of 8 Middle Eastern countries for the period 2009-2016. Based on the correlation and regression results, the study finds a significant positive impact of entrepreneurial activity (measured as new businesses registered) on economic growth (GDP growth) in the Middle East. Therefore, it is important for states in the Middle East to focus on promoting entrepreneurial activity, which influences economic growth.
DEVELOPMENT OF CREATIVE CLUSTERS OF A POLICULTURAL REGION: CHALLENGES FOR GOVERNANCE

In the current conditions of global competition, various regions are struggling to attract investment and human resources. The most successful are creative clusters in which a new product with increased consumer value is created. However, for the formation of creative clusters it is necessary to provide a number of conditions: tolerance, talents, technology. Tolerance implies the presence of specialists with different competencies and behaviors. A decrease in the tolerance coefficient leads not only to a risk of low susceptibility of cultural indigents from other countries, but also to a decrease in the variety of forms and ways of thinking, creative realization, selfexpression, which directly affects the country’s innovative and economic development.By the example of assessing the potential of creative clusters in Kazakhstan, it is shown that the loss of tolerance leads to a risk of a decrease in creative potential. The calculation of mathematical clustering was carried out in the STATISTICA program. The state should ensure multicultural diversity for the conditions of innovative development. By an example of assessing the potential of creative clusters in Kazakhstan, it is shown that the loss of tolerance leads to a risk of a decrease in creative potential. The state should ensure multicultural diversity for the conditions of innovative development. a decrease in tolerance directly reduces the potential for the formation of creative spaces, and is also an indicator of the risk of monocultural development, the lag of Kazakhstan in the educational, scientific and innovative spheres of the international country community.
Association between Sociodemographic Factors and Sleeping Patterns from Infancy to Four Years of Life in Saudi Community

Objective: Sleep is a prime factor of healthy development and has been associated with emotional, behavioural, and cognitive development. This study investigates sleep parameters and associated sociodemographic characteristics in a population-based online method in Saudi children from infancy to four years of life. Methods: A Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire (BISQ) for sleep assessment was made available to participants through the web link in Arabic language and were filled by the mothers. The target population were divided into three age groups: 0-11 months, 1-2 years, and 2-4 years. Questions related to demographic factors and sleep problems like bedtime resistance, sleep anxiety, nocturnal awakenings and daytime sleepiness were included. Data were evaluated by logistic regression analysis (p ≤ 0.05) using software R. Results: 1264 individuals participated in the study, which included 51.3% and 48.7% of male and female children respectively. Sleep disorders were significantly associated with age of child, mode of birth, mother’s occupation, family type, parent’s sleep time, sleep onset and sleep duration (P < 0.05). Inadequate bedtime habits and sleep duration below the recommended levels were observed in all age groups. Conclusions: The present study showed the prevalence and association between sleeping patterns and different sleep parameters and could be used to inform future research on how to increase parental knowledge of healthy sleep practices and adequate sleep among young children.
GoSeed: Generating an Optimal Seeding Plan for Deduplicated Storage

Deduplication decreases the physical occupancy of files in a storage volume by removing duplicate copies of data chunks, but creates data-sharing dependencies that complicate standard storage management tasks. Specifically, data migration plans must consider the dependencies between files that are remapped to new volumes and files that are not. Thus far, only greedy approaches have been suggested for constructing such plans, and it is unclear how they compare to one another and how much they can be improved. We set to bridge this gap for seeding—migration in which the target volume is initially empty. We present GoSeed, a formulation of seeding as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem, and three acceleration methods for applying it to realsized storage volumes. Our experimental evaluation shows that, while the greedy approaches perform well on “easy” problem instances, the cost of their solution can be significantly higher than that of GoSeed’s solution on “hard” instances, for which they are sometimes unable to find a solution at all.
Electrical conductivity of the thin films grown by random shaped clusters

In present work, using Monte Carlo technique, a rough and porous thin film recently simulated by deposition of randomly shaped clusters with different sizes on an initially flat substrate. The scaling exponents are calculated and found to agree with the ballistic deposition model. Then, effect of cluster size on the scaling exponents is studied. Moreover, the bulk porosity and its dependence on time and cluster size are also surveyed. As the behavior of film’s conductivity affects by its morphology, in continue, the electrical conductivity of these porous solid films which grown by random shapes and sizes clusters is investigated. The conductivity is computed as a function of several relevant parameters. Based on our results, the frequency-dependent effective conductivity is a decreasing function of the cluster’s sizes, such as porosity. The effective conductivity and dc conductivity depends on the frequency and the clusters sizes through a power law, respectively. Keywords— Electrical conductivity, Porosity, Random shaped clusters, Rough solids
UK agriculture policy and intensification since the 1970’s: Assessing environmental consequences due to fertilizers, pesticides, and hedgerow management

Tel. :+447522111516 Henry Williamson’s documentary ‘The Vanishing Hedgerows’ illustrates increasing environmental problems from agricultural intensification in the UK. Almost half a century later, these concerns continue despite transitions toward sustainable intensification and political conservation agendas. Domestic application rates for artificial pesticides continue to increase, causing additional stress for non-target species. While nitrate fertilizer applications have declined, eutrophication, deposition and acidification remain which suggests possible environmental accumulation. Mechanized management of hedgerows is common practice, affecting local habitat structures and environmental services. In response to these multi-variant problems, the UK government has implemented stringent environmental regulations. This includes promotion of traditional management, investments in agricultural technologies, and payments for ecosystem services. This paper reviews the extent to which these policies have been successful in addressing environmental concerns from agricultural intensification. Analysis takes on a geographic perspective, trying to make sense of the diverse spatial spread of policy uptake. It is concluded that the net results of policy interventions are ambiguous, since environmental problems are still prevalent across different spatial contexts. It is further concluded that examples of localized success may be more closely related to general trends of land abandonment in lowland areas, and not policy effectiveness.
Understanding the awareness of Pneumococcal adult vaccines in India and the factors affecting its compliance in the adult population

Streptococcus pneumoniae is one of the most common causes of community-acquired pneumonia in adults. These infections are widely spreading and are getting more common in the adults. The present study is based on the factors influencing the patient decision to undergo the vaccination program, the doctor’s perception on the recommendation of the pneumococcal vaccine and the brand they choose. The factors differentiating one brand from another were determined using perceptual mapping. Discriminant analysis, frequency testing and hypothesis testing techniques were used to analyze the data.
Appendix 1 – Methods and Statistics in GenAlEx 6 . 5 By Rod Peakall

Overview This appendix summarizes the methods and statistics available in GenAlEx 6.5 (Peakall and Smouse [1, 2]), along with supporting references. With regard to the references, we point (where possible) to one or more texts in population genetics, although some procedures provided in GenAlEx are not yet covered in such texts. The texts we have found particularly useful for teaching include: Principles of Population Genetics (3 Ed) by Hartl and Clark [3], Genetics of Populations by Hedrick [4, 5], Introduction to Conservation Genetics by Frankham et al. [6], and Conservation and the Genetics of Populations by Allendorf and Gordon [7]. A series of very useful primers include: A Primer of Population Genetics (3 Ed) by Hartl [8], A Primer of Ecological Genetics by Conner and Hartl [9], and A Primer of Conservation Genetics by Frankham et al. [10]. Invaluable statistical population genetic resources for advanced users include Genetic Data Analysis by Weir [11, 12] Handbook of Statistical Genetics [13], The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence by the National Research Council [14], and Forensic DNA Evidence Interpretation [15].
Does a High School Diploma Matter? Evidence Using Regression Discontinuity Design

We study whether education raises productivity (human capital theory) or just reflects it (sorting theory) by estimating returns to a high school diploma. For this purpose, we exploit standardized exit exams students must take in the final year of secondary education to obtain a diploma in the Netherlands. Using a regression discontinuity design on administrative population data, we compare earnings of students who barely passed and barely failed standardized exit exams. The results indicate a positive effect of a high school diploma on earnings of about 0.34 EUR per hour. We interpret this finding as evidence of diploma sorting effects. (JEL I26, J24, J31).