Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geoscience and decarbonization: current status and future directions

At the 2015 United Nations International Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21), 197 national parties committed to limit global warming to well below 2°C. But current plans and pace of progress are still far from sufficient to achieve this objective. Here we review the role that geoscience and the subsurface could play in decarbonizing electricity production, industry, transport and heating to meet UK and international climate change targets, based on contributions to the 2019 Bryan Lovell meeting held at the Geological Society of London. Technologies discussed at the meeting involved decarbonization of electricity production via renewable sources of power generation, substitution of domestic heating using geothermal energy, use of carbon capture and storage (CCS), and more ambitious technologies such as bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS) that target negative emissions. It was noted also that growth in renewable energy supply will lead to increased demand for geological materials to sustain the electrification of the vehicle fleet and other low-carbon technologies. The overall conclusion reached at the 2019 Bryan Lovell meeting was that geoscience is critical to decarbonization, but that the geoscience community must influence decision-makers so that the value of the subsurface to decarbonization is understood.
Effect of Irrigation Intervals and Kaolin Particle Film Applications on Growth, Yield and some Water Relations of Eggplant

The present study was conducted during consecutive summer season of 2014 and 2015 at a private farm in Kafrelsheikh Governorate, Egypt. This study aimed mainly to investigate the effect of irrigation intervals i.e., 7, 11 and 15 days among irrigations and kaolin foliar application with different concentrations, 0, 2 and 4% on Eggplant cv. Sawad EL Laiel. The shortest irrigation interval 7 days increased the all plant growth parameters under study namely, stem length, branche number, leaf number, leaf area, plant fresh weight and yield components as well as increased the parameters of fruit quality and productivity of irrigation. The kaolin foliar application concentrations improved plant growth, yield and fruit parameters. The highest early and total yields with favorable quality were attained under the shortest period (7 days) with kaolin foliar application at (2%), while the kaolin concentration at 4% under water stress condition (irrigation at 11 or 15 days period) was the best for plant growth, yield, and productivity irrigation with water saving the seasonal applied water than without kaolin or 2% treatments.
THE DISCREPANCY OF STATISTICS ON THE NUMBER OF ROAD TRAFFIC DEATHS AND INJURED ACCORDING TO OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS OF VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS

Every year on the Earth, as a result of road accidents (road traffic accidents), 1.25 million people are die and 50 million are injured of varying degrees of severity, of which more than 30% of the dead are people of working age. This dictates the adoption of decisive measures in the field of prevention and elimination of the consequences of accidents, which requires detailed and reliable statistical data. Aim: to compare statistical data on the dead and injured in road accidents in the Udmurt Republic for 2011-2016. Materials and methods. Statistical data was obtained from the official databases of the Budgetary Healthcare Institution of the Udmurt Republic “Republican Medical Information and Analytical Center of the Ministry of Health of the Udmurt Republic” (“RMIAC of the UR”, MH of the UR) and the official website of Traffic police “Main Traffic Safety Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation” (“MTSD of the RF”, TP). The calculation of the indicators was carried out using the calculation of the arithmetic mean of simple, errors of representativeness, the reliability of differences of indicators by the Student’s t -test was determined. Results. It has been established that the data of the “MTSD of the RF” and “RMIAC of the UR” for the dead and injured in road accidents differ significantly. According to TP for 2011-2016 years 1471 people died on the roads of the Udmurt Republic, according to the MH of the UR - 1165 people, which, when converted to 100 thousand people, this figure differs 1.3 times ( p < 0.05). On average, over the five-year period, according to official data of the traffic police, non-fatal injuries of 120.0 ± 22.6 per 100 thousand people annually get on the roads of the Udmurt Republic, according to the Ministry of Health of the Udmurt Republic - 2 times more often ( p < 0.05) (230.4 ± 38,1 per 100 thousand population). Conclusion: A comparative analysis of road traffic injuries “MTSD of the RF” and “RMIAC of the UR” showed a discrepancy in statistical data on the dead and injured, which requires a revision of the system of accounting for accidents and changes in the scheme of information transfer.
Friend recommendation in social multimedia networks

With the rapid development of computer science and internet technologies, social media and social network has experienced explosive growth over the last decades. Social websites, such as Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, have billions of users who share photos, videos and opinions, they also make friends on these websites. On-line friendship is an emerging topic that attracts the attentions from both economists and sociologists. The study of the on-line friendship, on one hand, can help the on-line merchants to find their potential customers, and thus make more precise recommendations; on the other hand, it helps to get a deep understanding of the relationships among different people. However, individuals’ on-line friend making behaviour is relatively complex and may be affected by many different factors. For example, an individual might make on-line friends with others because they discuss a hard mathematical problem, or it is possible that he/she makes a friend because they both enjoy a film. The reasons for friend making behaviours are likely to be diverse. Traditional friend recommendations that have been widely applied by Facebook and Twitter are often based on common friends and similar profiles such as having the same hobbies or working on a similar topic, which usually can not make a precise recommendation, due to the complexity of the problem. In this thesis, I, with my collaborators, try to give some solutions of on-line social friend recommendation from several aspects. In general, I contribute more than 85% of this thesis. One problem for social friend recommendation is that how shall we find the important social features that would highly influence individuals’ friend
Fast Biases in Monsoon Rainfall over Southern and Central India in the Met Office Unified Model

The Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) is known to produce too little total rainfall on average over India during the summer monsoon period, when assessed for multiyear climate simulations. We investigate how quickly this dry bias appears by assessing the 5-day operational forecasts produced by the MetUM for six different years. It is found that the MetUM shows a drying tendency across the five days of the forecasts, for all of the six years (which correspond to two different model versions). We then calculate each term in the moisture budget, for a region covering southern and central India, where the dry bias is worst in both climate simulations and weather forecasts. By looking at how the terms vary with forecast lead time, we are able to identify biases in the weather forecasts that have been previously identified in climate simulations using the same model, and we attempt to quantify how these biases lead to a reduction in total rainfall. In particular, an anticyclonic bias develops to the east of India throughout the forecast, and it has a complex effect on the moisture available over the peninsula, and a reduction in the wind speed into the west of the region appears after about 3 days, indicative of upstream effects. In addition, we find a new bias that the air advected from the west is too dry from very early in the forecast, and this has an important effect on the rainfall.
Three-dimensional desktop morphometric models for the Arctic Ocean floor

Abstract. We present results of the first phase of an ongoing project to create a system for three-dimensional (3D) geomorphometric modeling of the Arctic Ocean submarine topography. In this phase, we developed a testing, lowresolution desktop version of the system. We utilized a small, 5-km gridded digital elevation model (DEM) extracted from the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) version 3.0. From the smoothed DEM, we derived digital models of several morphometric variables: horizontal, vertical, minimal, and maximal curvatures, catchment and dispersive areas, as well as topographic and stream power indices. To construct and visualize 3D morphometric models, we applied an original approach for 3D terrain modeling in the environment of the Blender package, free and open-source software. Finally, we present a series of 3D morphometric models with perspective views from the Atlantic, Eurasia, the Pacific, and North America. The experiment showed that the approach is efficient and can be used for creating next, desktop and web versions of the system for visualizing 3D morphometric models of higher resolutions.
Drinking Water Bags Based on Chitosan Forward Osmosis Membranes for Emergency Drinking Water Supply

A fast and simple method and technologies in drinking water supply are strongly needed in an emergency situation. One alternative method is based on membrane forwards osmosis (FO) technology. In this study, chitosan-based FO membranes have been developed into drinking water bags used as purification media for dirty water and seawater. The chitosan membrane used for the assembly of drinking water bags has a thickness of 0.043 mm, the porosity of 30.3%, the tensile strength of 28.83 kgf / mm2, swelling degree of 43.5% and elongation of 7.16%. The drinking water bags are made from a combination of polypropylene plastic (PP) and aluminum foil plastic with the interface of the FO membrane inside. The drinking water bag can be applied to purify dirty water and seawater into energy drinking water, which can be used for drinking water supply in an emergency situation. Energy drinks water is produced from the FO process using a variety of draw solution, specifically glucose, fructose, and sucrose. The highest drinking water flux was obtained by using 3M sucrose concentration as a draw solution. The clean water fluxes for dirty water and seawater samples were 5.25 L/m2hour and 4.25 L/m2hour respectively. The parameters drinking water quality test are proved that pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), salinity, electrical conductivity, heavy metals and the content of Escherichia coli bacteria are agreed with drinking water quality standards based on PERMENKES regulations No. 492/MENKES/Per/IV/2010. The FO drinking water bag based chitosan membrane has the potential to be used as an alternative solution for energy drinking water supply in an emergency.
The Bilingual Competence of Local Council Staffers in the Centre and Littoral Regions of Cameroon

This work sets out to appraise the state of individual bilingualism in francophone local councils in Cameroon. The work checks the use of English by francophone local council workers and of French by their anglophone mates with the focus on the four communicative language skills, i.e., speaking, reading, writing and listening. The ethnographic approach to data collection was adopted, and self-rating through a questionnaire was the major tool used. The eight-item questionnaire was administered to 192 local council staffers. They were 177 (91.14% of 192) francophone workers selected out of a pool of over 500 workers in six local councils situated in two big francophone towns i.e., Douala and Yaounde on the one hand, and 15 (8.85% of 192) out of a total of 16 anglophone workers in these same localities. The analysis of the data collected revealed that very low percentages of francophone workers could perform the following tasks using English: discuss office issues with their bosses (10.16% of 177 subjects), read out a speech (8.47%), write a letter to their collaborators (4.51%), and listen to someone with understanding (20.33%). Conversely, a high proportion of anglophone workers were able to perform these same tasks using French i.e., discuss office issues with their bosses (73.33% of 15 subjects), read out a speech (20%), write a letter to a collaborator (33.33%), and listen to someone with understanding (80%). In short, 63.28% of 177 francophone workers reported having a low performance in receptive skills in English as opposed to 20% of 15 anglophone workers who said the same for French; similarly, 7.34% of 177 francophones claimed to have a good command of productive skills in English as opposed to 53.33% of 15 anglophones who claimed to have a command of French. The implications for the study are that official French-English bilingualism in Cameroon is a mere political wish which is not a reality on the field.
What if a figure skating team event had been held at past Winter Olympic Games? An analysis of a hypothetical competition

A new figure skating competition was introduced at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games (WOG) – the team event. The introduction of this new competition raises questions of what would have happened if a team event had been contested in past WOG. This paper develops a method for determining which teams might have earned medals if the team event had been held in the past, and applies the method to a hypothetical competition for 2010. This paper also identifies relative contributions of skaters to their countries’ teams in the hypothetical competition. These methods can be useful for fans and for electors who vote on candidates for figure skating halls of fame.
A Brief Introduction to the First Natural-Like Fishway Project in Fujian Province, China

Due to the strengthening of the concept of ecological protection in China, many fishway projects are under construction. There is no natural-like fishway project in Fujian province before. In this study, different fish pass structures are described, and the important factors of the fishway design are illustrated. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages for different fish pass structures are discussed. Finally, the first natural-like fishway project in Fujian province is briefly introduced, including the project background, the project location, and the design information. This project will significantly improve the drinking water quality of people in Fuzhou city. More importantly, it will protect the fish species in Minjiang river.
Transforming and Optimizing Irregular Applications for Parallel Architectures

Parallel architectures, including multi-core processors, many-core processors, and multi-node systems, have become commonplace, as it is no longer feasible to improve single-core performance through increasing its operating clock frequency. Furthermore, to keep up with the exponentially growing desire for more and more computational power, the number of cores/nodes in parallel architectures has continued to dramatically increase. On the other hand, many applications in well-established and emerging fields, such as bioinformatics, social network analysis, and graph processing, exhibit increasing irregularities in memory access, control flow, and communication patterns. While multiple techniques have been introduced into modern parallel architectures to tolerate these irregularities, many irregular applications still execute poorly on current parallel architectures, as their irregularities exceed the capabilities of these techniques. Therefore, it is critical to resolve irregularities in applications for parallel architectures. However, this is a very challenging task, as the irregularities are dynamic, and hence, unknown until runtime. To optimize irregular applications, many approaches have been proposed to improve data locality and reduce irregularities through computational and data transformations. However, there are two major drawbacks in these existing approaches that prevent them from achieving optimal performance. First, these approaches use local optimizations that exploit data locality and regularity locally within a loop or kernel. However, in many applications, there is hidden locality across loops or kernels. Second, these approaches use “one-size-fits-all” methods that treat all irregular patterns equally and resolve them with a single method. However, many irregular applications have complex irregularities, which are mixtures of different types of irregularities and need differentiated optimizations. To overcome these two drawbacks, we propose a general methodology that includes a taxonomy of irregularities to help us analyze the irregular patterns in an application, and a set of adaptive transformations to reorder data and computation based on the characteristics of the application and architecture. By extending our adaptive data-reordering transformation on a single node, we propose a datapartitioning framework to resolve the load imbalance problem of irregular applications on multinode systems. Unlike existing frameworks, which use “one-size-fits-all” methods to partition the input data by a single property, our framework provides a set of operations to transform the input data by multiple properties and generates the desired data-partitioning codes by composing these operations into a workflow. Transforming and Optimizing Irregular Applications for Parallel Architectures
Homogenization of fault frictional properties

The frictional properties of large faults are expected to vary in space. However, fault models often assume that properties are homogeneous, or nearly so. We investigate the conditions under which the details of variations may be neglected and properties homogenized. We do so by examining the behaviour of nonlinear solutions for unstably accelerating fault slip under frictional heterogeneity. We consider a rate- and state-dependent fault friction in which the characteristic wavelength for the property variations is a problem parameter. We find that homogenization is permissible only when that wavelength shows scale separation from an elasto-frictional length scale. However, fault models also often include property transitions that occur over distances comparable to the elasto-frictional length. We show that under such comparable variations, the dynamics of earthquake-nucleating instabilities is controlled by the properties’ spatial distribution.
Bees may drive the sexual reproduction of four sympatrically distributed cacti in a vanishing coastal Mediterranean ecosystem

Background. Sympatric plant species that share pollinators may have similar mating systems because their floral traits are subject to comparable canalization imposed by pollinators. However, if each sympatric species bears specialized floral morphology, each species may attract different pollinators. Our study aims to describe the pollinator diversity and pollination systems of four taxa of Eriosyce that co-occur in an endangered coastal Mediterranean ecosystem in Central Chile. We took two approaches in our study: we assessed the composition and similarity of flower visitors among taxa, and we characterized the breeding systems to determine dependence on pollinators and self-compatibility. Methods. We performed field observations to characterized pollinators during two consecutive years (2016-2017). Additionally, we performed pollination experiments to elucidate reproductive modes using three treatments: manual cross-pollination, automatic self-pollination, and control (unmanipulated individuals). Results. We observed one bird species (Giant hummingbird Patagona gigas only visiting E. subgibbosa) and 14 bee species (13 natives plus Apis mellifera) visiting cacti of the genus Eriosyce. We observed variation in the similarity of intra-specific pollinator composition between years and among Eriosyce species within the same year. Individuals of E. subgibbosa were visited by less number of species (2016 = 4; 2017 = 2), while E. chilensis (2016 = 4; 2017 = 8), E. chilensis var. albidiflora (2016 = 7; 2017 = 4) and E. curvispina var. mutabilis (2016 = 7; 2017 = 6) were visited by a richest guild of visitors (up to 10 bee species each). Autonomous pollination was unfeasible inE. chilensis, which depend on bees to achieve their reproductive success. Eriosyce subgibbosa, visited mainly by the Giant hummingbird, depends on pollinators to achieve reproductive success. Both E. chilensis var. albidiflora and E. curvispina var. mutabilis were visited by a diverse assemblage of non-social native bees, showing some degree of autonomous pollination and self-compatibility. Discussion. Pollinator diversity analyses showed considerable pollinator differences between the species with ornithophilous flowers (E. subgibbosa) and remain taxa which solely dependent on Apoidea species for pollen transfer. The high diversity of native bees among sympatric Eriosyce may be a caused by their microclimatic differences at spatial (differences among cacti microhabitats) and temporal levels (differences of climatic conditions between August to December when different Eriosyce species bloom). Our study contributes to unveiling the evolutionary mechanisms for pollinator partitioning of sympatric close-related plant species. Furthermore, it improves understanding of threatened species reproductive system and ecological interactions, especially to E. chilensis and E. chilensis var. albidiflora, whose studied populations are the only known for these taxa.
Narrow and broad functions of negation in a miniature artificial language

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Tracking performance of NPID controller for cutting force disturbance of ball screw drive

The high demand in tracking performance is crucial in machine tools application.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to design a Nonlinear PID (NPID) controller for improvement of tracking performance via cutting force.The method was then compared with another method which was conventional PID controller.The configuration included different cutting force disturbances of 1500rpm,2500rpm and 3500rpm.The parameters were set to 0.4Hz and 0.7Hz frequency for every 10mm and 20mm of amplitude, respectively.The investigation was centred on a comparative study of these two techniques which focused on x-axis of Googol Tech XY ball screw drive system. Results between the designed controllers were validated based on two types of errors;the maximum tracking error and root mean square error.Results showed that the NPID controller recorded better tracking performance compared to PID controller with an error reduction of about 33%. In addition,the results proved that NPID controller is highly practical and suitable to be used for ball screw drive.The controller can be further improved with the implementation of observer such as disturbance observer to compensate the cutting forces.