Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Taxonomic Status of Oryzomys curasoae McFarlane and Debrot, 2001, (Rodentia: Cricetidae: Sigmodontinae) with Remarks on the Phylogenetic Relationships of O. gorgasi Hershkovitz, 1971

Abstract. The type material of Oryzomys curasoae McFarlane and Debrot, 2001, an allegedly extinct species from the island of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, is morphologically indistinguishable from O. gorgasi Hershkovitz, 1971, a Recent mangrove-inhabiting species from mainland Venezuela. A phylogenetic analysis suggests that the latter belongs to the genus Oryzomys in its strictest sense, and that “curasoae” is not close to Oecomys (formerly ranked as a subgenus of Oryzomys) as previously suggested. Evidence that Rattus rattus may now be displacing O. gorgasi from coastal habitats in Venezuela suggests that black rats might have been directly responsible for the extinction of the insular population of O. gorgasi on Curaçao.
On factorization of separating maps on noncommutative Lp-spaces by

For any semifinite von Neumann algebra M and any 1 ≤ p <∞, we introduce a natutal S-valued noncommutative L-space L(M;S). We say that a bounded map T : L(M) → L(N ) is S-bounded (resp. S-contractive) if T ⊗ IS1 extends to a bounded (resp. contractive) map T⊗IS1 from L(M;S) into L(N ;S). We show that any completely positive map is S-bounded, with ‖T⊗IS1‖ = ‖T‖. We use the above as a tool to investigate the separating maps T : L(M)→ L(N ) which admit a direct Yeadon type factorization, that is, maps for which there exist a w∗-continuous ∗-homomorphism J : M→N , a partial isometry w ∈ N and a positive operator B affiliated with N such that w∗w = J(1) = s(B), B commutes with the range of J , and T (x) = wBJ(x) for any x ∈ M ∩ L(M). Given a separating isometry T : L(M) → L(N ), we show that T is S-contractive if and only if it admits a direct Yeadon type factorization. We further show that if p 6= 2, the above holds true if and only if T is completely contractive.
Hierarchical Structures Incorporating Carbon and Zeolite to Remove Radioactive Contamination

Synthesis, characterization and application of hierarchical zeolites are becoming a subject of an increasing interest among scientists and researchers. Hierarchical structures incorporating zeolites possess secondary porosity at mesoand macrolevel to overcome problem of mass transport, which occurs with using conventional zeolites. In this study, the porous carbon surface was prepared by carbonization of the locally available agricultural waste of the Iraqi Nut shell (NS) using a carbonization method in a tubular furnace at 900 ̊C for two hours. Hierarchicalpours structures including zeolite were prepared by the mechanical activation of the carbon surface using ultrasonication with a nanoparticles suspension of ground commercial zeolite type 4A. Zeolite was milled using 0.3-0.4 mm diameter glass balls as grinding media to prepare nanoparticles seeding, which increases the crystallization of the amorphous aluminosilica gel on the modified carbon surface during the hydrothermal method. The Product of the syntheses of zeolite 4A and the hierarchal composite material were characterized using X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Nitrogen-Adsorption /desorption isotherms (BET), Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDX), and Thermo Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) to determine the structure, morphology, surface area, chemical composition, and percentage weight of zeolite on carbon, respectively. The products were applied to remove the radioactive hazardous cesium isotope Cs 137 from the radioactive wastewater provided by the destroyed building of Radiochemistry laboratories (RCL) in AL-Tuwaitha Nuclear Site. Gamma spectroscopy system with high purity germanium detector (HPGe) was used to measure the activity concentration for the contamination water before and after the treatment. The results showed that the activity concentration decreased from 4800 Bq/L to 186Bq/L and 100Bq/L using pure zeolite 4A and NSZ.respectively. The results also showed that the composite materials could be used effectively to remove radioactive 137 Cs from a real wastewater, with ease of separation and recovery from the solution compared with the pure zeolite 4A.
Patterns of water stress and temperature for Australian chickpea production

Abstract. The environment is the largest component of the phenotypic variance of crop yield, hence the importance of its quantitative characterisation. Many studies focussed on the patterns of water deficit for specific crops and regions, but concurrent water and thermal characterisations have not been reported. To quantify the types, spatial patterns, frequency and distribution of both water stress and thermal regimes for chickpea in Australia, we combined trial and modelled data. Data from National Variety Trials including sowing time, yield and weather from 295 production environments were entered into simulations. Associations between actual yield, in a range from 0.2 to 5.2 t/ha, actual temperature and modelled crop water stress were explored. Yield correlated positively with minimum temperature in the 800 degree-days window bracketing flowering and the correlation shifted to negative after flowering. A negative correlation between maximum temperature over 30°C and yield was found from flowering through to 1000 degree-days after flowering. Yield was negatively correlated with simulated water stress from flowering until 800 degree-days after flowering. Cluster analysis from 3905 environments (71 locations × 55 years between 1958 and 2013) identified three dominant patterns for both maximum and minimum temperature accounting for 77% and 61% of the overall variation, and four dominant patterns for water stress accounting for 87% of total variation. The most frequent environments for minimum and maximum temperature were associated with low actual yield (1.5–1.8 t/ha) whereas the most frequent water-stress environment was associated with the second lowest actual yield (1.75 t/ha). For all temperature and water-stress types, we found significant spatial variation that is relevant to the allocation of effort in breeding programs.
Stochastic Optimization Approaches for Elective Surgery Scheduling and Downstream Capacity Planning: Models, Challenges, and Opportunities

Elective surgery patients receive surgery in the operating room (OR) and then recover in one or more subsequent downstream recovery units for several consecutive hours or days after surgery. Indeed, upstream scheduling that focuses on OR alone or a resource-constrained scheduling approach that fails to account for the inherent uncertainty in surgery durations and postoperative downstream recovery times yield sub-optimal or infeasible schedules and, consequently, higher cost and reduced quality of care. However, modeling such uncertainties at multiple levels is challenging, especially with limited reliable data on the random parameters in the models. Moreover, sequencing of surgical and recovery activities, and the multiple conflicting objectives of all parties involved (including management, clinicians, patients), lead to a class of complex combinatorial and multi- criteria stochastic optimization problems. In this review, we focus on stochastic optimization (SO) approaches for elective surgery scheduling and downstream capacity planning. We describe the art of formulating and solving such a class of stochastic resource-constrained scheduling problems, provide an analysis of existing SO approaches and their challenges, and highlight areas of opportunity for developing tractable, implementable, and data-driven approaches that might be applicable within and outside healthcare operations, particularly where multiple entities/jobs share the same downstream limited resources.
Design of EV Charger with Cuk Converter to Improve Power Quality

1PG student, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, RV college of Engineering, Bengaluru 2Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, RV college of Engineering, Bengaluru ---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------Abstract A Cuk converter based EV (Electric Vehicle) battery charger is designed and developed in this work. It provides low cost and high-power density-based charging solution for EV. This charger incorporates less number of devices operating over one switching cycle, which reduces the additional conduction loss incurred by a diode bridge rectifier of conventional charger and hence, improves the charger efficiency. During constant current and constant voltage regions, the commands for battery charging, are synchronized by a flyback converter. The proposed charger draws a sinusoidal current from AC mains along with the total harmonic distortion (THD) in supply current is reduced to the limits as per the IEC 61000-3-2 standard. The proposed charger is designed in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) with the desirable inherent zero current switching operation and low reverse recovery losses in circuit diodes. The proposed charger is tested to demonstrate the improved power quality. Test results confirm the improved performance of the proposed charger.
Gender difference in mathematics anxiety at secondary school teachers of Bangladesh

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of gender of secondary teachers on mathematics anxiety. The participants in the study were 242 in-service secondary school teachers who taught mathematics at secondary level where 193 (79.8%) of them were male teachers and 49 (20.2%) were female teachers. McAnallen Anxiety in Mathematics Teaching Survey (MAMTS, 2010) was used as the instrument containing 25 items where 13 items were related to the professional mathematics anxiety and 12 items were related to the personal mathematics anxiety. Out of 25 items of MAMTS, 12 items were positively worded and 13 items were negatively worded. The positive and negative items were not arranged in the original scale serially. Piloting was done to ensure the validity and reliability of the tools for data collection. There was a significant difference of personal math anxiety scores between male and female teachers where females had more anxiety levels than males in mathematics. But there was no enough evidence in favor of difference between male and female teachers in math teaching anxiety. Specifically females were more anxious than males in the category of high level but males were more anxious than females at moderate level for both personal mathematics anxiety and in mathematics teaching anxiety. It can be concluded that females were not always behind from males in respect of mathematics anxiety. We need to consider females equally as males for training in mathematics. Girls should be encouraged to take mathematics at every level.
Identificación de marcadores cromosómicos en pacientes con leucemia linfoblástica aguda

Introduction. Acute leukemia is a malignancy of the hematopoietic system, which presents the highest diagnosis in patients of three to five years of age in 80% of cases. Material and methods. We analyzed 50 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) subtypes L1 and L2 of Hospital Juarez de Mexico. The cytogenetic study (EC) was performed by GTG-banding and reported according to criteria of the International System of Cytogenetic Nomenclature (ISCN, 2010). In cases where the result of EC was not obtained was applied the technique of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) were used probes unique sequence BCR/ABL and TEL/AML1 for identifying t(9;22) or Ph+ chromosome or t(12;21), which was applied. Results. The results of the EC in 74% of cases where 20/37 were normal karyotype and 17/37 abnormal karyotype. seven cases had abnormalities of numerical and structural type 10 cases, with the most frequent alterations tetraploidy and t(9; 22). The analysis of BCR / ABL showed 8/23 resulted with alterations in genes BCR and / or ABL, of which 7/23 showed the BCR/ABL, 5/7 showed besides the BCR / ABL fusion deletions in the loci BCR and / or ABL. TEL/AML1 analysis (ES) was 4/19 cases had abnormalities TEL and/or AML1, of which one quarter was positive for TEL/AML1 fusion and three quarters showed gains of loci TEL and / or AML1, but without melting. FISH is a useful technique for such conditions as it brought up the result in 16% of cases but also showed limitations as patients who were negative for both the t(9;22) and for t(12;21), could be associated with other abnormalities unparsed such probes. Conclusions. With conventional cytogenetic alterations could be identified prognostic numerical and structural ALL patients also with FISH was able to identify gains and losses of the loci BCR and/or ABL, and TEL and AML1.
How do Lawyers Engineer and Develop LegalTech Projects? A Story of Opportunities, Platforms, Creative Rationalities, and Strategies

Over the last 15 years, the working context of lawyers has undergone many changes. Evolving in an increasingly competitive, deregulated, and globalized market, they are subject to higher tax pressure while being exposed to unbridled technological innovation. Indeed, a growing number of entrepreneurs are using digital solutions to provide online legal services that are supposed to be faster and cheaper. If many of them are nonlawyer legal entrepreneurs, many lawyers are also engineering innovative projects and launching their own start-up companies, known as “LegalTech” or “LawTech. ” However, few studies—or none to our limited knowledge—provide an empirically grounded analysis of such projects, leaving some questions unanswered. Who are these entrepreneurial lawyers? How and why do they engineer and develop LegalTech projects? How do they challenge the legal profession? To answer these questions, this article draws on a qualitative study of three contrasted start-ups Belgian lawyers have recently developed. The research methodology combines gray and scientific literature reviews, web-document (hereafter “manifestos”) analysis, and semi-directive interviews led with the start-up’s founders (n = 5), the Bar Association’s representatives (n = 3), and some members of the main Belgian LegalTech network (n = 4).
A Nonsmooth Dynamical Systems Perspective on Accelerated Extensions of ADMM

Recently, there has been great interest in connections between continuous-time dynamical systems and optimization methods, notably in the context of accelerated methods for smooth and unconstrained problems. In this article, we extend this perspective to nonsmooth and constrained problems by obtaining differential inclusions associated with novel accelerated variants of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Through a Lyapunov analysis, we derive rates of convergence for these dynamical systems in different settings that illustrate an interesting tradeoff between decaying versus constant damping strategies. We also obtain modified equations capturing fine-grained details of these methods, which have improved stability and preserve the leading-order convergence rates. An extension to general nonlinear equality and inequality constraints in connection with singular perturbation theory is provided.
Effects of a falls exercise intervention on strength, power, functional ability and bone in older frequent fallers: FaME (Falls Management Exercise) RCT secondary analysis

Abstract Objectives: Falls Management Exercise (FaME) has been shown to reduce falls in frequent fallers and in lower risk sedentary older people. The effects of FaME on the strength, power, physical function and bone health of frequently falling older women are yet to be established. Methods: This paper reports secondary analysis of data from the original randomised controlled trial of FaME in 100 community dwelling women aged ≥65 years with a history of ≥3 falls in the previous year. Intervention was group delivered, weekly one hour tailored dynamic balance and strength exercise classes and home exercise for nine months. Outcome measures included: strength (handgrip, quadriceps, hamstrings, hip abductors, ankles), lower limb explosive power and functional tests (timed up and go, functional reach, timed floor rise and balance), analysed using Linear Mixed Model analysis. Bone Mineral Density (BMD) at hip and spine was measured in a smaller sub-group and analysed using t-tests. Results: Significant time*group interactions in all measures of strength, except isometric ankle dorsiflexion, concentric hamstring and eccentric quadriceps strength. These improvements in strength equated to average improvements of 7-45%. There were also significant improvements in explosive power (W/kg) (18%, p=0.000), timed up and go (16%, p=0.000), functional reach (17%, p=0.000), floor rise (10%, p=0.002) and eyes closed static balance (56%, p=0.000). There was a significant loss of hip BMD in the control group (neck of femur p<0.05; ward’s triangle p<0.02). Conclusion: The FaME intervention improves lower limb strength, power and clinically relevant functional outcomes in frequently falling older women.
Quasi-Autoregressive Residual (QuAR) Flows

Normalizing Flows are a powerful technique for learning and modeling probability distributions given samples from those distributions. The current state of the art results are built upon residual flows as these can model a larger hypothesis space than coupling layers. However, residual flows are extremely computationally expensive both to train and to use, which limits their applicability in practice. In this paper, we introduce a simplification to residual flows using a Quasi-Autoregressive (QuAR) approach. Compared to the standard residual flow approach, this simplification retains many of the benefits of residual flows while dramatically reducing the compute time and memory requirements, thus making flow-based modeling approaches far more tractable and broadening their potential applicability.
On the Rényi entropy of Lifshitz and hyperscaling violating black holes

We study Rényi entropies for geometries with Lifshitz scaling and hyperscaling violation. We calculate them for specific values of the Lifshitz parameter, and analyze the dual spectrum of the ground state. In the large d − θ limit they show that the ground state is unique in specific parameter ranges. We also calculate the Rényi entropies perturbatively around n = 1, and derive constraints using the Rényi entropy inequalities, which correspond to the thermodynamic stability of the black holes.
Theory of Mind with Guilt Aversion Facilitates Cooperative Reinforcement Learning

Guilt aversion induces experience of a utility loss in people if they believe they have disappointed others, and this promotes cooperative behaviour in human. In psychological game theory, guilt aversion necessitates modelling of agents that have theory about what other agents think, also known as Theory of Mind (ToM). We aim to build a new kind of affective reinforcement learning agents, called Theory of Mind Agents with Guilt Aversion (ToMAGA), which are equipped with an ability to think about the wellbeing of others instead of just self-interest. To validate the agent design, we use a general-sum game known as Stag Hunt as a test bed. As standard reinforcement learning agents could learn suboptimal policies in social dilemmas like Stag Hunt, we propose to use belief-based guilt aversion as a reward shaping mechanism. We show that our belief-based guilt averse agents can efficiently learn cooperative behaviours in Stag Hunt Games.
A Unified Approach to Synchronization Problems over Subgroups of the Orthogonal Group

Given a group $\mathcal{G}$, the problem of synchronization over the group $\mathcal{G}$ is a constrained estimation problem where a collection of group elements $G^*_1, \dots, G^*_n \in \mathcal{G}$ are estimated based on noisy observations of pairwise ratios $G^*_i {G^*_j}^{-1}$ for an incomplete set of index pairs $(i,j)$. This problem has gained much attention recently and finds lots of applications due to its appearance in a wide range of scientific and engineering areas. In this paper, we consider the class of synchronization problems over a closed subgroup of the orthogonal group, which covers many instances of group synchronization problems that arise in practice. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a unified approach to solve this class of group synchronization problems, which consists of a suitable initialization and an iterative refinement procedure via the generalized power method. Second, we derive a master theorem on the performance guarantee of the proposed approach. Under certain conditions on the subgroup, the measurement model, the noise model and the initialization, the estimation error of the iterates of our approach decreases geometrically. As our third contribution, we study concrete examples of the subgroup (including the orthogonal group, the special orthogonal group, the permutation group and the cyclic group), the measurement model, the noise model and the initialization. The validity of the related conditions in the master theorem are proved for these specific examples. Numerical experiments are also presented. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms existing approaches in terms of computational speed, scalability and estimation error.
Reasoning about Goals, Steps, and Temporal Ordering with WikiHow

We propose a suite of reasoning tasks on two types of relations between procedural events: goal-step relations ("learn poses" is a step in the larger goal of "doing yoga") and step-step temporal relations ("buy a yoga mat" typically precedes "learn poses"). We introduce a dataset targeting these two relations based on wikiHow, a website of instructional how-to articles. Our human-validated test set serves as a reliable benchmark for commonsense inference, with a gap of about 10% to 20% between the performance of state-of-the-art transformer models and human performance. Our automatically-generated training set allows models to effectively transfer to out-of-domain tasks requiring knowledge of procedural events, with greatly improved performances on SWAG, Snips, and the Story Cloze Test in zero- and few-shot settings.
Transport, Destruction, and Growth of Pebbles in the Gas Envelope of a Protoplanet

We analyze the size evolution of pebbles accreted into the gaseous envelope of a protoplanet growing in a protoplanetary disk, taking into account collisions driven by the relative sedimentation speed as well as the convective gas motion. Using a simple estimate of the convective gas speed based on the pebble accretion luminosity, we find that the speed of the convective gas is higher than the sedimentation speed for all particles smaller than 1 mm. This implies that both pebbles and pebble fragments are strongly affected by the convective gas motion and will be transported by large-scale convection cells both toward and away from the protoplanet’s surface. We present a simple scheme for evolving the characteristic size of the pebbles, taking into account the effects of erosion, mass transfer, and fragmentation. Including the downwards motion of convective cells for the transport of pebbles with an initial radius of 1 mm, we find pebble sizes between 100 μm and 1 mm near the surface of the protoplanet. These sizes are generally amenable to accretion at the base of the convection flow. Small protoplanets far from the star (>30 au) nevertheless erode their pebbles to sizes below 10 μm; future hydrodynamical simulations will be needed to determine whether such small fragments can detach from the convection flow and become accreted by the protoplanet.