Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identifying precursors and aqueous organic aerosol formation pathways during the SOAS campaign

Abstract. Aqueous multiphase chemistry in the atmosphere can lead to rapid transformation of organic compounds, forming highly oxidized, low-volatility organic aerosol and, in some cases, light-absorbing (brown) carbon. Because liquid water is globally abundant, this chemistry could substantially impact climate, air quality, and health. Gas-phase precursors released from biogenic and anthropogenic sources are oxidized and fragmented, forming water-soluble gases that can undergo reactions in the aqueous phase (in clouds, fogs, and wet aerosols), leading to the formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOAAQ). Recent studies have highlighted the role of certain precursors like glyoxal, methylglyoxal, glycolaldehyde, acetic acid, acetone, and epoxides in the formation of SOAAQ. The goal of this work is to identify additional precursors and products that may be atmospherically important. In this study, ambient mixtures of water-soluble gases were scrubbed from the atmosphere into water at Brent, Alabama, during the 2013 Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study (SOAS). Hydroxyl (OH⚫) radical oxidation experiments were conducted with the aqueous mixtures collected from SOAS to better understand the formation of SOA through gas-phase followed by aqueous-phase chemistry. Total aqueous-phase organic carbon concentrations for these mixtures ranged from 92 to 179 µM-C, relevant for cloud and fog waters. Aqueous OH-reactive compounds were primarily observed as odd ions in the positive ion mode by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). Ultra high-resolution Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS) spectra and tandem MS (MS–MS) fragmentation of these ions were consistent with the presence of carbonyls and tetrols. Products were observed in the negative ion mode and included pyruvate and oxalate, which were confirmed by ion chromatography. Pyruvate and oxalate have been found in the particle phase in many locations (as salts and complexes). Thus, formation of pyruvate/oxalate suggests the potential for aqueous processing of these ambient mixtures to form SOAAQ.
Supercooling and the crystallization of plagioclase, olivine, and clinopyroxene from basaltic magmas

Abstract Effects of supercooling have been studied in a range of basaltic melts by isothermal and constant cooling rate experiments at one-atmosphere, using the wire-loop container method. The nucleation of plagioclase in these melts is systematically controlled by supercooling (-ΔT), time below the liquidus temperature, and initial superheating (+ΔT). The temperature at which the melt is initially superheated prior to supercooling controls the temperature at which crystal nucleation first takes place in a supercooled melt undergoing cooling; the greater the + ΔT the larger the degree of supercooling required prior to nucleation of the liquidus phase during cooling. In all six compositions investigated there are at least two fields in time-temperature space, one in which the liquidus phase always fails to nucleate on supercooling (favoured by small -ΔT) and one (favoured by large -ΔT) in which it always nucleates. These two fields may be separated by another in which the liquidus phase may or may not crystallize. Supercooling phenomena are not restricted to the liquidus phase but can also occur when the melt becomes saturated with subsequent phases. It is shown that the composition of plagioclase varies systematically with -ΔT and it is demonstrated that isothermal supercooling ‘lines’ can be used with a relatively high degree of accuracy to predict when nucleation of the liquidus phase will take place during constant cooling rate experiments.
N ov 2 01 8 Gradient Descent Finds Global Minima of Deep Neural Networks

Gradient descent finds a global minimum in training deep neural networks despite the objective function being non-convex. The current paper proves gradient descent achieves zero training loss in polynomial time for a deep over-parameterized neural network with residual connections (ResNet). Our analysis relies on the particular structure of the Gram matrix induced by the neural network architecture. This structure allows us to show the Gram matrix is stable throughout the training process and this stability implies the global optimality of the gradient descent algorithm. Our bounds also shed light on the advantage of using ResNet over the fully connected feedforward architecture; our bound requires the number of neurons per layer scaling exponentially with depth for feedforward networks whereas for ResNet the bound only requires the number of neurons per layer scaling polynomially with depth. We further extend our analysis to deep residual convolutional neural networks and obtain a similar convergence result.
Query Learning of Residual Symbolic Automata

Extended abstract of the 14th International Conference on Grammatical Inference ICGI’18, September 5–7, 2018, Wrocław, Poland. Abstract We propose a learning algorithm for residual symbolic finite-state automata (RSFA) under the minimally adequate teacher (MAT) model [1]. MAT learning algorithms for residual finite-state automata (RFA) [4] and deterministic symbolic finite state automata (SFA) [6] have been proposed in [3] and [2], respectively. This work extends these works.
Determination of Partition Coefficients of Selected Model Migrants between Polyethylene and Polypropylene and Nanocomposite Polypropylene

Studies on nanoparticles have focused the attention of the researchers because they can produce nanocomposites that exhibit unexpected hybrid properties. Polymeric materials are commonly used in food packaging, but from the standpoint of food safety, one of the main concerns on the use of these materials is the potential migration of low molecular substances from the packaging into the food. The key parameters of this phenomenon are the diffusion and partition coefficients. Studies on migration from food packaging with nanomaterials are very scarce. This study is focused on the determination of partition coefficients of different model migrants between the low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and polypropylene (PP) and between LDPE and nanocomposite polypropylene (naPP). The results show that the incorporation of nanoparticles in polypropylene increases the mass transport of model migrants from LDPE to naPP. This quantity of migrants absorbed into PP and naPP depends partially on the nature of the polymer and slightly on the chemical features of the migrant. Relation () between partition coefficient and partition coefficient at 60°C and 80°C shows that only BHT at 60°C has a less than 1. On the other hand, bisphenol A has the highest with approximately 50 times more.
Quantification of lignin oxidation products as vegetation biomarkers in speleothems and cave drip water

Abstract. Here we present a sensitive method to analyze lignin oxidation products (LOPs) in speleothems and cave drip water to provide a new tool for paleo-vegetation reconstruction. Speleothems are valuable climate archives. However, compared to other terrestrial climate archives, such as lake sediments, speleothems contain very little organic matter. Therefore, very few studies on organic biomarkers in speleothems are available. Our new sensitive method allows us to use LOPs as vegetation biomarkers in speleothems. Our method consists of acid digestion of the speleothem sample followed by solid-phase extraction (SPE) of the organic matter. The extracted polymeric lignin is degraded in a microwave-assisted alkaline CuO oxidation step to yield monomeric LOPs. The LOPs are extracted via SPE and finally analyzed via ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled to electrospray ionization (ESI) and high-resolution Orbitrap mass spectrometry (HRMS). The method was applied to stalagmite samples with a sample size of 3–5 g and cave drip water samples with a sample size of 100–200 mL from the Herbstlabyrinth-Advent Cave in Germany. In addition, fresh plant samples, soil water, and powdered lignin samples were analyzed for comparison. The concentration of the sum of eight LOPs (Σ8) was in the range of 20–84 ng g−1 for the stalagmite samples and 230–440 ng L−1 for the cave drip water samples. The limits of quantification for the individual LOPs ranged from 0.3–8.2 ng per sample or 1.5–41.0 ng mL−1 of the final sample solution. Our method represents a new and powerful analytical tool for paleo-vegetation studies and has great potential to identify the pathways of lignin incorporation into speleothems.
Sustainability reporting in the Nordic real estate companies : Empirical evidence from Finland

The purpose of our study was to investigate the content of sustainability reporting issued by real estate sector. Content analysis was employed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of sustainability information provided by sample companies. The content analysis structure considered both quantity and quality of information simultaneously. Our results show an inconsistency in the form, extent and quality of sustainability reports. In addition, our findings recognise a lack of clear approach to embrace materiality, external assurance, and further engagement of stakeholders in the sample reports. It seems that most of the sample companies were engaged in issuing sustainability reports to fulfil the legislative requirement and avoiding financial or legal risks. Our study provides information on the current status of sustainability reporting to real estate professionals. In addition it contributes in decreasing the financial and legal risks, and increasing the corporate reputational capital, by revealing the common weaknesses prevalent in the sustainability reports.
3 Lithium Enhances Synaptic Plasticity : Implication for Treatment of Bipolar Disorder

Although lithium has remained as the drug of choice in the treatment of bipolar disorder over the past 50 years, the mechanism by which it exerts its therapeutic effects is not well understood. A large body of evidence from molecular, cellular and clinical studies proposes that lithium have positive actions in enhancing neuroplasticity and synaptic plasticity, and these actions are associated with its efficacy in the treatment of bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disorders (Manji et al. 1999; Manji and Duman 2001; Rowe and Chuang 2004; Tsaltas et al. 2009). Lithium modulates intracellular signal transduction pathways involved in the activation of transcription factors (PEBP-2β, P53, and CREB) and the gene expression of diverse neurotrophic and neuroprotective factors (Chalecka-Franaszek and Chuang 1999; Grimes and Jope 2001; Jope and Roh 2006; Manji et al. 1999; Manji and Duman 2001). Among these factors, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), B-cell CLL/lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) and cyclic adenosine monophosphate response element-binding protein (CREB) have been the most extensively studied (Angelucci et al. 2003; Chuang et al. 2002; Fukumoto et al. 2001; Manji and Chen 2002). It is well known that BDNF, Bcl-2 and CREB play important roles in maintaining normal synaptic plasticity in diverse ways (Adams and Cory 1998; McAllister et al. 1999; ; Shaywitz and Greenberg 1999; Silva et al. 1998). Evidence from brain imaging and postmortem studies and studies with animal models suggests that in patients with bipolar disorder, diverse pathological changes in neuroplastic processes lead to impairment in synaptic communications in neuronal circuits involved in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder. Lithium may enhance synaptic plasticity and thereby restore normal synaptic communications in the circuits by up-regulating neurotrophic and neuroprotective factor such as BDNF, Bcl-2 and activating CREB, the major transcription factor of gene expression of BDNF and Bcl-2, and this action may be associated with the efficacy of the drug. However, this theory has been developed primarily based on molecular biological and clinical studies. This theory has never been fully tested by directly examining the effects of lithium exposure on synaptic plasticity. Only few studies have specifically focused on the effects of lithium exposure on synaptic plasticity.
Multiband light curves of tidal disruption events

Unambiguous detection of the tidal disruption of a star would allow an assessment of the presence and masses of supermassive black holes in quiescent galaxies. It would also provide invaluable information on bulge-scale stellar processes (such as two-body relaxation) via the rate at which stars are injected into the tidal sphere of influence of the black holes. This rate, in turn, is essential to predict gravitational radiation emission by compact object inspirals. The signature of a tidal disruption event is thought to be a fallback rate for the stellar debris on to the black hole that decreases as t -5/3 . This mass flux is often assumed to yield a luminous signal that decreases in time at the same rate. In this paper, we calculate the monochromatic light curves arising from such an accretion event. Differently from previous studies, we adopt a more realistic description of the fallback rate and of the super-Eddington accretion physics. We also provide simultaneous light curves in optical, ultraviolet (UV) and X-rays. We show that, after a few months, optical and UV light curves scale as t -5/12 , and are thus substantially flatter than the t -5/3 behaviour, which is a prerogative of the bolometric light curve, only. At earlier times and for black hole masses < 10 7 M ⊙ , the wind emission dominates: after reaching a peak of 10 41 -10 43 erg s -1 at roughly a month, the light curve decreases steeply as ~t -2.6 , until the disc contribution takes over. The X-ray band, instead, is the best place to detect the t -5/3 'smoking gun' behaviour, although it is displayed only for roughly a year, before the emission steepens exponentially.
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS: A BUSINESS STRATEGY FOR GROWTH AND CONSOLIDATION: A CASE STUDY OF EMB

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, building and construction industries across the globe have struggled to realise any substantial form of recovery with subdued activity forecast by most economists (Lembo, 2013). In this environment, EMB, a predominantly building company is looking towards a merger and acquisition opportunity to realise sustained revenue streams and growth through the acquisition of a construction company predominantly involved in civil engineering disciplines. The objective is to increase their participation in the construction industry, from their current expertise and involvement in large commercial type building, to the inclusion of civil construction works, such as roads and large scale concrete works. The study assessed mergers and acquisitions as an appropriate strategy for growth and consolidation within the South African construction industry and found a particular target company to have the potential to meet all the merger and acquisition requirements pertaining to EMB.
/U/-FRONTING IN RP: A LINK BETWEEN SOUND CHANGE AND DIMINISHED PERCEPTUAL COMPENSATION FOR COARTICULATION?

The present study is concerned with a perceptual analysis of /u/-fronting in Southern British English, Received Pronunciation and with whether there is an age-dependent difference in perceptual judgments to synthetic /i-u/ continua. A second aim was to test the hypothesis that younger listeners would be less likely to attribute a fronted /u/ perceptually to the coarticulatory fronting effects of the left context. We synthesized /i-u/ continua and embedded them in two contexts: firstly, 'yeastused', in which the initial /j/ exerts a marked effect on /u/-fronting; and secondly 'sweep-swoop' in which the preceding /w/ is likely to induce /u/backing. Taken together, the results of responses to these continua so far suggest that young and old listeners respond differently to a sound change in progress and also that /u/-fronting in RP may be related to a perceptual reinterpration of coarticulatory-induced /u/-fronting.
Perceptual Prediction Error Detection Learning Signal Learning Signal

Temporal segmentation of long videos is an important problem, that has largely been tackled through supervised learning, often requiring large amounts of annotated training data. In this paper, we tackle the problem of selfsupervised temporal segmentation of long videos that alleviate the need for any supervision. We introduce a selfsupervised, predictive learning framework that draws inspiration from cognitive psychology to segment long, visually complex videos into individual, stable segments that share the same semantics. We also introduce a new adaptive learning paradigm that helps reduce the effect of catastrophic forgetting in recurrent neural networks. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets Breakfast Actions, 50 Salads, and INRIA Instructional Videos datasets show the efficacy of the proposed approach. We show that the proposed approach is able to outperform weaklysupervised and other unsupervised learning approaches by up to 24% and have competitive performance compared to fully supervised approaches. We also show that the proposed approach is able to learn highly discriminative features that help improve action recognition when used in a representation learning paradigm.
Genetic aspects of food allergy

The increasing prevalence of food allergy is a growing problem. This review examines recent developments in the genetic factors of food allergy. The use of genomic information, accelerated by the sequencing of the human genome and the advent of new tools and technologies, has raised widespread hope that food allergy genetics can significantly contribute to the prediction, prevention, and treatment of food allergy.
Performance evaluation of 3 DTV systems

The image quality circle is a commonly accepted framework to model the relation between the technology variables of a display and the resulting image quality. 3D-TV systems, however, go beyond the concept of image quality. Research has shown that, although 3D scenes are clearly more appreciated by subjects, the concept ’image quality’ does not take this added value of depth into account. Concepts as ’naturalness’ and ’viewing experience’ have turned out to be more useful when assessing the overall performance of 3D displays. In this paper, experiments are described that test ’perceived depth’, ’perceived image quality’ and ’perceived naturalness’ in images with different levels of blur and different depth levels. Results show that naturalness incorporates both blur level as well as depth level, while image quality does not include depth level. These results confirm that image quality is not a good measure to assess the overall performance of 3D displays. Naturalness is a more promising concept.
Incorporating the Sampling Variability from an Employee Perception Survey into the Ranking Process of U . S . Government Agencies

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey is administered yearly to U.S. Federal employees by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to gauge a variety of factors pertaining to the workplace environment and employee satisfaction. Responses to four thematically-grouped subsets of attitudinal questions are combined to form indices upon which 37 agencies are ranked. The four themes are motivated by the Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework put forth by the Chief Human Capital Officers Act of 2002. Currently, there is no formal procedure to incorporate the sampling error inherent in the indices when assigning ranks. Instead, an ad-hoc rounding technique has historically been used. This paper proposes two methods to approximate index variability, one based on Taylor series linearization and one based on replication. Two alternative rank assignment procedures utilizing these measures of index variability are introduced. No major differences were found between the two variance approximation techniques, but evidence from the alternative rank assignment procedures suggests the current method may be imposing rank boundaries where, statistically speaking, they do not belong.
Reconstruction of non-degenerate homogeneous depth three circuits

A homogeneous depth three circuit C computes a polynomial f = T1 + T2 + . + Ts, where each Ti is a product of d linear forms in n variables over some underlying field F. Given black-box access to f, can we efficiently reconstruct (i.e. proper learn) a homogeneous depth three circuit computing f? Learning various subclasses of circuits is natural and interesting from both theoretical and practical standpoints and in particular, properly learning homogeneous depth three circuits efficiently is stated as an open problem in a work by Klivans and Shpilka (COLT 2003) and is well-studied. Unfortunately, there is substantial amount of evidence to show that this is a hard problem in the worst case. We give a (randomized) poly(n,d,s)-time algorithm to reconstruct non-degenerate homogeneous depth three circuits for n = Ω(d2) (with some additional mild requirements on s and the characteristic of F). We call a circuit C as non-degenerate if the dimension of the partial derivative space of f equals the sum of the dimensions of the partial derivative spaces of the terms T1, T2, …, Ts. In this sense, the terms are “independent” of each other in a non-degenerate circuit. A random homogeneous depth three circuit (where the coefficients of the linear forms are chosen according to the uniform distribution or any other reasonable distribution) is almost surely non-degenerate. In comparison, previous learning algorithms for this circuit class were either improper (with an exponential dependence on d), or they only worked for s < n (with a doubly exponential dependence of the running time on s). The main contribution of this work is to formulate the following paradigm for efficiently handling addition gates and to successfully implement it for the class of homogeneous depth three circuits. The problem of finding the children of an addition gate with large fan-in s is first reduced to the problem of decomposing a suitable vector space U into a (direct) sum of simpler subspaces U1, U2, …, Us. One then constructs a suitable space of operators S consisting of linear maps acting on U such that analyzing the simultaneous global structure of S enables us to efficiently decompose U. In our case, we exploit the structure of the set of low rank matrices in S and of the invariant subspaces of U induced by S. We feel that this paradigm is novel and powerful: it should lead to efficient reconstruction of many other subclasses of circuits for which the efficient reconstruction problem had hitherto looked unapproachable because of the presence of large fan-in addition gates.
Macroeconomic Volatility and the Current Account: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic volatility and the current account. Using quarterly data for a panel of OECD economies, time-varying relative volatility measures are constructed for GDP, net output, and government consumption. The empirical evidence suggests that current account balances are positively affected by all three volatility measures. Moreover, the current account balance is found to be related positively to output growth and negatively to the growth of government consumption. Evidence from saving and investment rates also suggests that the precautionary saving motive is part of (though perhaps not the entire) mechanism that relates output volatility and the current account. Broadly consistent with the predictions of the standard theoretical model, these estimates are sizable, statistically significant, and robust.