Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fundamental Optical Phenomena in Infrared Window Materials

A wide variety of high-energy lasers and associated applications (1) and optical systems with very long path lengths [e.g. fiber optics (2)J have emerged in recent years. These developments have led to corresponding requirements for highly transparent window materials (3). Ideally, a window material would transmit light without any effect on either the light beam or the window. Obviously, no such ideal material exists or is really required; moreover, specific types of beam modi­ fications are often not only tolerable but desirable. Thus, for example, we may require a material which refracts light, modulates light intensity, modifies polariza­ tion, or the like, yet acts as a window in all other respects. Our principal emphasis here is on properties of materials for totally passive windows, although those appropriate for active components are considered briefly. We are concerned with the fundamental optical phenomena of absorption, refraction, and photo­ elasticity in window materials. The latter phenomena underly or contribute to more complex optical effects such as thermally induced lensing (4), laser-induced interference (5), laser-induced breakdown (6), ilnd self-focusing (7), for example. Typical observations of laser-induced lensing and interference in infrared materials are indicated in Figure 1. The primary emphasis here is on bulk infrared materials, especially those for 10 11m (C02) and 3-5 11m (chemical) laser applications. For this case, one is then concerned with the highly transparent frequency regime in insulating or semiconducting solids, which lies well above the principal lattice absorption bands, but well below the onset of the electronic absorption edge. Clearly, in order to achieve high transparency over an extended frequency region, materials with low lattice resonances Wo and high-energy gap frequencies Wg are desirable. It is useful to correlate the latter properties with molecular weight and with families of compounds of the same structure, as pointed out by Hilton (8). The graphs in Figure 2 vividly indicate the decrease in wyand increase in Wo as
Risk-Prediction Model for Transfusion of Erythrocyte Concentrate During Extracorporeal Circulation in Coronary Surgery

Introduction: Our objective was to identify preoperative risk factors and to develop and validate a risk-prediction model for the need for blood (erythrocyte concentrate [EC]) transfusion during extracorporeal circulation (ECC) in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Methods: This is a retrospective observational study including 530 consecutive patients who underwent isolated on-pump CABG at our Centre over a full two-year period. The risk model was developed and validated by logistic regression and bootstrap analysis. Discrimination and calibration were assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the Hosmer-Lemeshow (H-L) test, respectively. Results: EC transfusion during ECC was required in 91 patients (17.2%). Of these, the majority were transfused with one (54.9%) or two (41.8%) EC units. The final model covariates (reported as odds ratios; 95% confidence interval) were age (1.07; 1.02-1.13), glomerular filtration rate (0.98; 0.96-1.00), body surface area (0.95; 0.92-0.98), peripheral vascular disease (3.03; 1.01-9.05), cerebrovascular disease (4.58; 1.29-16.18), and hematocrit (0.55; 0.48-0.63). The risk model developed has an excellent discriminatory power (AUC: 0,963). The results of the H-L test showed that the model predicts accurately both on average and across the ranges of deciles of risk. Conclusions: A risk-prediction model for EC transfusion during ECC was developed, which performed adequately in terms of discrimination, calibration, and stability over a wide spectrum of risk. It can be used as an instrument to provide accurate information about the need for EC transfusion during ECC, and as a valuable adjunct for local improvement of clinical practice.
Hold-up in regulated contracts: The Argentinean natural gas transmission system case

This article aims to understand the role of policy stability perception in the dynamic of network infrastructures regulation. We contribute to the literature by developing an abstract description in which the regulatory institutions in some countries have virtuous relation with network industries, while other countries enter in a vicious cycle. This abstract description allows us to consider general models that can explain different contexts. We test our description in a real case study. The asset specificities inherent to network industries mean high transaction costs, which in turn raises the hold-up risk. We depart from the idea that regulation (as rate structures) is a kind of contract between government and private companies. As explained by Williamson (1976) and Goldberg (1976), it is a special kind of arrangements in the presence of incomplete contract that is able to adapt and protect players from holding up themselves. However, regulation can actual play a positive or a negative role in the network infrastructure development. WORKING PAPER: Hold-up in regulated contracts: The Argentinean natural gas transmission system case 2 This article combines two theoretical streams to build a theoretical model. We depart from the conclusions of the contract theory proposed by Salant and Woroch (1992), who model the governments’ incentives to behave opportunistically according to investors’ investment profiles. We show that their analysis, which is based on the incentive compatibility principles, explains behaviour differences if the investment profile of the industry is heterogeneous. However, it is no able to explain why industries with similar investment profile in diverse countries have completely different dynamics. This model cannot help to explain, for instance, why regulatory tools applied in Europe for network industries (as natural gas) turn out to generate completely different incentives if compared to Latin America. Stein et al. (2008) underlined the importance of policy stability to understanding the Latin America success (or failure) in implementing policies. Regulation is a key element to implement policy, as explained by the authors. We include the variable policy stability perception as a significant element in the understanding of the government’s incentives to behave opportunistically. We check our model with the case study of natural gas network in Argentina. This analysis contributes to understand the role network industries regulation to deal with hold-up problem and how the institutional environment in which regulatory agencies are embedded matters. WORKING PAPER: Hold-up in regulated contracts: The Argentinean natural gas transmission system case
Growth of GaN quasi‐substrates by hydride vapor phase epitaxy

To grow high quality GaN heteroepitaxially is a difficult task due to the lattice mismatch and differences in thermal expansion coefficients between the films and the foreign substrates. A large number of structural defects form in the films, which lateron may limit the performance in the devices. Hydride vapor phase epitaxy is a high-growth-rate technique which has the potential to faciliate large area, low defect density “GaN quasi-substrates” for subsequent growth by MOCVD or MBE. We report on a flow modulated growth process which includes a nitridation of the sapphire substrate and the growth of high temperature buffer layers. The strucutral and optical properties of the films are presented and compared at different stages of the growth process.
1 FORMAL VERSUS INFORMAL CHANNELS : HOW FIRM SIZE AFFECTS CORPORATE POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

Using a novel and global database, this paper undertakes a systematic analysis of the approaches and determinants of firms’ corporate political activities. The empirical results suggest that large firms are more likely to utilize formal channels (i.e., lobbying), whereas small firms are more likely to utilize informal channels (i.e., bribes) for seeking policymaking influence. These nonmarket approaches are conditioned, however, by the extent of competition in the market environment and the consistency and predictability of procedures in the regulatory environment in which firms operate in. Nonmarket strategy implications that follow from this refined understanding are developed and discussed.
Biscoitos tipo "cookie" e "snack" enriquecidos, respectivamente com caseína obtida por coagulação enzimática e caseinato de sódio

The objective of the present work was the formulation and characterization, chemical, nutritional and sensorial, of two types of biscuits, cookie and snack, using rennet casein and sodium caseinate for cookies and snacks enrichment, respectively. The cookie type biscuit presented higher contents of moisture, protein, and total fiber than the snack type which was richer in fat and salt. As to essential minerals the cookies were richer than the snacks, except for sodium and phosphorous which were higher in the snacks. The amino acid profile was more adequate in the cookie than in the snack type. Except for true digestibility the protein value indexes were higher for the cookies. Acceptability of the two types of biscuits was tested for athlets of both sexes related to overall acceptability, surface color, odor, taste, crispness and hardness. Acceptability rated 98% for the snacks and 81% for the cookies. cookies and snacks had the same acceptability for both men and women but the snacks had higher acceptability by men (52.7%) against 37.8% by the women. Microbiological analysis revealed an acceptable profile for both types of biscuit.
Blitz: Secure Multi-Hop Payments Without Two-Phase Commits

Payment-channel networks (PCN) are the most prominent approach to tackle the scalability issues of current permis-sionless blockchains. A PCN reduces the load on-chain by allowing arbitrarily many off-chain multi-hop payments (MHP) between any two users connected through a path of payment channels. Unfortunately, current protocols for MHP are far from satisfactory. One round MHP (e.g., Interledger) are inse-cure as a malicious intermediary can steal the payment funds. Two-round MHP (e.g., Lightning Network (LN)) follow the 2-phase-commit paradigm as in databases to overcome this issue. However, when tied with economical incentives, 2-phase-commit brings other security threats (i.e., wormhole attacks), staggered collateral (i.e., funds are locked for a time proportional to the payment path length) and dependency on speciﬁc scripting language functionality (e.g., hash time lock contracts) that hinders a wider deployment in practice. We present Blitz, a novel MHP protocol that demonstrates for the ﬁrst time that we can achieve the best of the two worlds: a single round MHP where no malicious intermediary can steal coins. Moreover, Blitz provides privacy for sender and receiver, it is not prone to the wormhole attack and it requires only constant collateral. Additionally, we construct MHP us-ing only digital signatures and a timelock functionality, both available at the core of virtually every cryptocurrency today. We provide the cryptographic details of Blitz and we formally prove its security. Furthermore, our experimental evaluation on an LN snapshot shows that the LN collateral results in between 4x and 33x more unsuccessful payments than the
Designing Tweakable Enciphering Schemes Using Public Permutations

A tweakable enciphering scheme (TES) is a length preserving (tweakable) encryption scheme that provides (tweakable) strong pseudorandom permutation security on arbitrarily long messages. TES is traditionally built using block ciphers and the security of the mode depends on the strong pseudorandom permutation security of the underlying block cipher. In this paper, we construct TESs using public random permutations. Public random permutations are being considered as a replacement of block cipher in several cryptographic schemes including AEs, MACs, etc. However, to our knowledge, a systematic study of constructing TES using public random permutations is missing. In this paper, we give a generic construction of a TES which uses a public random permutation, a length expanding public permutation based PRF and a hash function which is both almost xor universal and almost regular. Further, we propose a concrete length expanding public permutation based PRF construction. We also propose a single keyed TES using a public random permutation and an AXU and almost regular hash function.
Florida International University - University of Miami TRECVID 2020 DSDI Track

This paper presents the framework and results from the team “Florida International University-University of Miami (FIU-UM)” in the TRECVID 2020 Disaster Scene Description and Indexing (DSDI) task. We submitted four runs, each applying the same framework but using different score aggregation methods to rank each video shot. The score aggregation methods used in these runs are summarized as follows.
A Generalized Rayleigh-Plesset Equation for Ions with Solvent Fluctuations

We introduce a mathematical modeling framework for the conformational dynamics of charged molecules (i.e., solutes) in an aqueous solvent (i.e., water or salted water). The solvent is treated as an incompressible fluid and its fluctuating motion is described by the Stokes equation with the Landau–Lifschitz stochastic stress. The motion of the solute-solvent interface (i.e., the dielectric boundary) is determined by the fluid velocity together with the balance of all the viscous, hydrostatic pressure, surface tension, solute-solvent van der Waals interaction, and electrostatic force. The electrostatic interactions are described by the dielectric Poisson–Boltzmann theory. Within such a framework, we derive a generalized Rayleigh–Plesset equation, a nonlinear stochastic ordinary differential equation (SODE), for the radius of a spherical charged molecule such as an ion. The spherical average of the stochastic stress leads to a multiplicative noise. We design and test numerical methods for solving the SODE, and use the equation, together with explicit-solvent molecular dynamics simulations, to study the effective radius of a single ion. Potentially, our general modeling framework can be used to efficiently determine the solute-solvent interfacial structures and predict the free energies of more complex molecular systems.
Working Length Determination Using Apex Locator and Cone Beam Computed Tomography in Presence of Three Irrigating Solutions in Primary Teeth: An in Vitro Comparative Study

The purpose of the present study was to determine the working length using electronic apex locator in various intracanal mediums and cone beam computed tomography scan and to compare the lengths with the actual length of the tooth. Methods: In an in vitro setting, a total of 45 primary molar roots were decoronated till the cemento enamel junction for standardization, working length was measured with the Apex DSP (Septodont, France) at the ‘apex’ in presence of three different irrigating solutions namely 0.9 % saline, 0.2 % chlorhexidine and 2.5 % sodium hypochlorite. The radiological working length was then calculated with cone beam computed tomography scans. The collected data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Independent‘t’ test was done to compare the working length between the groups. Results: Findings showed there was significant difference in working length determination using apex locator in presence of saline and chlorhexidine when compared to sodium hypochlorite. Also working length determination with cone beam computed tomography compared to actual length did not show any significant difference. Conclusion: Apex DSP can be considered to be accurate across a variety of irrigants commonly used in the pediatric endodontic practice. A CBCT scan can be used as a diagnostic tool for pulpal treatment when treating multiple carious lesions.
Solar Power Forecast Using Artificial Neural Network Techniques

Solar energy is a clean, available and renewable source of energy. Deployment of photovoltaic panels is trending to take advantage of solar energy for electrical power generation. Intermittent nature of solar energy results in variable generated power. This uncertainty could be alleviated by taking advantage of energy storage systems and accurate solar power forecast. This thesis aims to implement a solar forecast module to take part in an optimized Energy Management System (EMS). Different solar power prediction methods are studied including statistical methods, sky imagers, satellite imaging and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). Artificial neural networks (ANNs) which are a subset of statistical methods are chosen as prediction method to satisfy requirements imposed by EMS. The requirements include precise forecast in short-term prediction horizon for proper functionality of the EMS. Prediction horizon is amount of time in future for which prediction is needed. Multiple ANN architectures suitable for time-series prediction are investigated and compared, including Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), Longand Short-term Time Series Network (LSTNet) and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Although all the aforementioned methods have acceptable performance, TCN architecture shows more promising results. In order to further improve the prediction accuracy, effect of clustering the dataset into sunny and cloudy sub-datasets and using a dedicated prediction module for each subdataset is studied. Results show that prediction accuracy is improved by clustering the dataset for all the models. Moreover, simulation results on datasets of multiple geographical locations with different climate conditions show that prediction accuracy is higher in locations having more stable weather and sunny days. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is implemented to simplify working with the forecast module. Service is made available to users through exposing REST APIs on a remote server to facilitate user interactions with the forecast service.
Graph-Based Construction for Non-Malleable Codes

Non-malleable codes are introduced to protect the communication against adversarial tampering of data, as a relaxation of the error-correcting codes and error-detecting codes. To explicitly construct non-malleable codes is a central and challenging problem which has drawn considerable attention and been extensively studied in the past few years. Recently, Rasmussen and Sahai built an interesting connection between non-malleable codes and (non-bipartite) expander graphs, which is the first explicit construction of non-malleable codes based on graph theory other than the typically exploited extractors. So far, there is no other graph-based construction for non-malleable codes yet. In this paper, we aim to explore more connections between non-malleable codes and graph theory. Specifically, we first extend the Rasmussen-Sahai construction to bipartite expander graphs. Accordingly, we establish several explicit constructions for non-malleable codes based on Lubotzky-Phillips-Sarnak Ramanujan graphs and generalized quadrangles, respectively. It is shown that the resulting codes can either work for a more flexible split-state model or have better code rate in comparison with the existing results.
TWO ALGORITHMS FOR GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION OF ONE-VARIABLE FUNCTIONS BASED ON THE SMALLEST ESTIMATE DISTANCES BETWEEN EXTREMES AND THEIR NUMBER

Contex. Making managerial decisions is often associated with solving one-dimensional global optimization problems. The most important property of global optimization methods is their speed, which is determined by the number of calls to the objective function in the optimization process. Objective. Development of high-performance algorithms global for optimizing the function of one variable, based on conditions that allow you to bring the problem to a form that opens up the practical possibility of obtaining a solution with a given accuracy. Method. Two algorithms of conditional global optimization of a function of one variable are considered. The first is based on estimating the smallest distance between neighboring local extrema and allows you to find the global minimum of the goal function and, if necessary, all its local extrema. The second is suitable for finding the global minimum of a function if the number of local extrema in the uncertainty interval is known in advance. Both algorithms are based on segmentation methods of the initial uncertainty segment. The local extremum on a segment is determined by three or four points. An approach is proposed that, in most cases, allows localization of the extremum at three points, which provides savings in the calculation of digital filters, thereby contributing to an increase in the speed of the algorithm. Results. The results of solving optimization problems and data on the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are presented. A comparative analysis of the speed of the developed algorithms and well-known algorithms is carried out on the example of solving test problems used in world practice to assess the effectiveness of global optimization algorithms. Examples of the practical use of algorithms are given. The analysis of the data obtained showed that according to the number of calls to the objective function, the algorithms in the sequential computing mode work several times faster than modern high-speed algorithms with which they were compared. Conclusions. The data presented indicate the efficiency and high speed of the proposed algorithms. Their speed will be even higher if the stated ideas of algorithmization are extended to parallel computations. This suggests that the proposed algorithms can find practical application in the global optimization of functions of the considered classes of problems.
High-sensitivity, quasi-optically-coupled semimetal-semiconductor detectors at 104 GHz

We report experimental results for the optical responsivity and noise-equivalent power (NEP) of quasi-optically coupled, room-temperature ErAs-InGaAlAs rectifier diodes. Four-micron-diameter diodes were flip-chip coupled to self-complementary log-periodic and square-spiral antennas, and characterized with a 104-GHz Gunn diode oscillator coupled to the rectifiers through variable attenuators, a feedhorn, an aspherical polymeric lens, and a Si hyperhemisphere. The log-periodic mounted device displayed a responsivity and specific NEP' of 0.9x103 V/W and 1.2x10-12 W/Hz1/2, respectively. The square-spiral mounted device displayed a responsivity and NEP' of 1.2x103 V/W and 2.0x10-12 W/Hz 1/2, respectively. All values were measured at a post-detection center frequency of 33 Hz.
Evaluating the Canada Child Benefit

While poverty afflicts many demographic groups, child poverty is typically viewed with particular concern. In response, governments in many countries have designed social programs to provide resources to families with young children. These take various forms including targeted means-tested cash transfers, in-kind transfers, vouchers for services, or services themselves. Which of these alternatives is the most successful at reducing child poverty while at the same time being affordable remains an open question. This paper attempts to answer this question by examining the effect of the introduction of the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) on child poverty and family labour supply. Our analysis indicates that there was a decline in poverty, with much of the relative decline being confined to a reduction in the poverty rate of single mothers. However, this appears to be due to an increase in poverty in single women without children. We find no evidence of a labour supply response to either of the program reforms on either the extensive or intensive margin.