Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards the Performance Investigation of Automatic Melanoma Diagnosis Applications

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer, one of the fatal diseases, that appears as an abnormal growth of skin cells and the lesion part often looks like a mole on the skin. Early detection of melanoma from skin lesion by means of screening is an important step towards a reduction in mortality. For this purpose, numerous automatic melanoma diagnosis models based on image processing and machine learning techniques are available for computer-based applications (CBA) and smartphone-based applications (SBA). Since, the smartphones are available as most accessible and easiest methods with built-in camera option, SBA are preferred over CBA. In this paper, we explored the available literature and highlighted the challenges of SBA in terms of execution time due to the limited computing power of smartphones. To resolve this issue of storage of the smartphones, we proposed to develop an SBA that can seamlessly process the image data on the cloud instead of local hardware of the smartphone. Therefore, we designed a study to build a machine learning model of melanoma diagnosis to measure the time taken in preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification on the cloud and compared the results with the processing time on the smartphone’s local machine. The results showed there is a significant difference of p value <0.001 on the average processing time taken on both environments. As the processing on the cloud is more efficient. The findings of the proposed research will be helpful for the developers to decide the processing platform while developing smartphone applications for automatic melanoma diagnosis.
Development and Validation of HCAP 21 Scale.docx

Development and Validation of the High Capacity Model of Resilience and Well-being The research on resilience has been hampered from a lack of a specific definition that can operationalized for measurement. The High Capacity Model of Resilience and Well-Being (HCAP21) is a new theoretical model that defines specific traits that create states of resilience and well-being for use as a screening tool in clinical and non-clinical settings. Norming was completed across two studies with a total population of 1442 participants comprised of a clinical population of inpatient psychiatric patients and a non-clinical population of adult mid-career graduate students. A four-factor model represented by a 21-item scale was confirmed as a best fit. Individual subscales yielded alpha’s from . 75-. 92, convergent validity with the Resilience Scale and discriminatory validity with and Obsessive Passion subscale and the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Criterion-related validity exhibited a positive directional relationship between the subscales with the criterion (cumulative GPA) and significant correlations with the overall scale score and commitment subscale. However, the remaining subscales did not reach a level of significance with the criterion. Further exploration of the H-CAP 21 will expand the type and setting of the populations the instrument is assessed with to include clinical populations, military applications, self-regulation, and motivation. The H-CAP 21 is believed to have clinical utility as a psychometrically sound screening tool.
Pressure-induced photoluminescence in MnF 2 at Room Temperature

This work investigates the photoluminescence (PL) processes in MnF2 as a function of pressure and temperature. The aim is to understand the competition between radiative and non-radiative processes yielding PL quenching at room temperature, and how to modify them by applying pressure or reducing the MnF2 particle size. As salient feature, we have transformed non-PL MnF2 into PL at room temperature above 14.7 GPa. The two observed PL bands at 2.34 and 1.87 eV are assigned to Mn emissions in the cotunnite high-pressure phase. Their pressure shift and lifetime suggest that PL takes place from two Mn sites of different symmetry. The high-pressure structure seems to reduce the exciton transfer thus favouring trap PL. The microscopic origin of the two pressure-induced emissions is analysed.
Participation in Cardiovascular Health Awareness Program (CHAP) by the Elderly Residents of Social Housing in Quebec: Social Network Analysis

Background: The Cardiovascular Health Awareness Program (CHAP) was originally developed and evaluated as a community-based cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention program in small to medium size communities in Ontario. Recently, CHAP has been adapted to target older individuals living in 14 social housing buildings in Ontario (7) and Quebec (7). The participation rates in the 10-months program varied across buildings in Quebec from 23.5% to 49.1%. Social network analysis (SNA) has been successfully used to assess and strengthen participation in health promotion programs. We applied SNA methods to investigate whether interpersonal relationships between tenants within buildings influence the participation in CHAP. Methods: We used sociometric questionnaires and complete network analysis, supplemented by qualitative interviews to examine relational dynamics of two buildings in Quebec with a low and a high attendance rates. All residents of the two buildings were eligible to be interviewed for the sociometric questionnaire. The participants for the qualitative part of the study were selected at random. Results: In total, 69 seniors participated in the study, including qualitative interviews. Among study participants selected for qualitative interviews, 10 attended almost all CHAP sessions, 10 attended once and 12 did not attend any. Quantitative results helped to identify well-known and appreciated local leaders. In building 1 which had a high attendance rate (34.3%), there was a main leader (In-degree or ‘named by others’ frequency 23.2%) who attended all sessions. In building 2 which had a low attendance rate (23.9%), none of the leaders had participated in CHAP sessions. Qualitative analysis showed that tenants who did not attend CHAP sessions (or other activities in the building) generally preferred to avoid conflicts, retaliation and gossip and did not want to get involved in clans and politics within the buildings. Conclusion: In order to increase attendance at CHAP sessions among residents of subsidized housings for seniors, we identified 4 potential strategies: increase participant confidentiality; deploy community peer-networks to enhance recruitment; pair attendants to ensure their future participation; intervene through an opinion leader or through bridging individuals.
Lead Shock Velocity and Curvature Variation Across The Cellular Detonation Instability

Cellular instabilities occur for self-sustained detonation propagation in gaseous explosives. They are driven by acoustic-strength shocks propagating normal to the detonation shock surface in a Mach stem configuration. Experimental observations indicate that periodic transverse wave interactions are necessary for unsupported detonation propagation [1]. The instability cycle starts when transverse wave collisions locally increase the flow temperature, overdriving the shock, shortening the reaction zone (RZ), and tightly coupling the chemical RZ to the shock. The lead shock strength decays as it propagates and the transverse waves move further apart, resulting in gradual decoupling of the RZ until subsequent transverse wave interactions locally reinvigorate the flow and start the cycle anew. Early efforts [2–5] characterized the cellular cycle by measuring variations in the lead shock velocity with distance along the cell centerline. New cells exhibited highly overdriven centerline shock velocities (1.5 DCJ ), relative to the Champan-Jouguet solution, that rapidly and monotically decreased over the cell length (to near 0.6 DCJ ) in similar fashion to decaying inert shock wave [4]. The dynamics of off-centerline wavefront regions were not quantitatively examined and no comparisons were drawn to prior condensed-phase explosive research that developed relations between detonation velocity and shock front curvature [6–8].
An examination of convective moistening of the lower stratosphere using satellite data

In this paper, we use satellite data to test the hypothesis that deep convection moistens the lower stratosphere. Water vapor measurements from Earth Observing System‐Microwave Limb Sounder and Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment‐Fourier Transform Spectrometer over North America are binned according to the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project deep convection indices. The results show that in the North American region (50–112°W, 10–50°N) the convection‐impacted samples are significantly moister than the nonimpact samples in the lowermost stratospheric layer right above the tropopause, and a drier tendency is also noticed right above this moistened layer. Trajectory modeling is used to aid the identification of deep convection‐impacted water vapor samples. However, we find that a substantial fraction of high‐concentration (>8 ppmv) samples at 100 hPa cannot be attributed to nearby deep convections.
Abstraction and product categories as explanatory variables for food consumption

This study sets out to explore variation in the consumer choice structure in relation to three types of products with different levels of search, experience and credence attributes. The decision structures of rice, wine and functional food (experience, search and credence products) consumers were explored by means of laddering. The results suggest the presence of an emotional component in foods that increases in complexity (becomes more abstract) with the number of credence attributes. The findings recommend adjusting the complexity of advertising campaigns and product positioning to the type of product being promoted.
Study of Fluidization Regimes using OpenFOAM Computational Fluid Dynamics

The objective of this study was using computational fluid dynamics simulation with OpenFOAM to study the fluidization properties for four types of particles classified as Geldart A, B, C and D. Fluidization regimes were studied for particles with the same density but different diameters. The particle diameters were selected based on Geldart’s classification of particles. The simulation results were validated against experimental data. Pressure gradient, flow regime change, bubble rise, bubble splitting and bed expansion were studied for all four types of particles for different superficial velocities. Group-B and D particles easily produced bubbles. However, Group-C and A particles gave very high bed expansion, and no clear bubbles were observed. Bed with the Group-D particles, the bubbles was large and some of the bubbles reached the diameter of the bed. Group-B particles gave smaller and on average more stable bubbles than Group-D particles. There was no bubble formation from Group-C and Group-A until the inlet superficial velocity was 25 times and 5 times larger, respectively, than their minimum fluidization velocities.
Physical aspects of dust–plasma interactions

Low‐pressure gas discharge plasmas are known to be strongly affected by the presence of small dust particles. This issue plays a role in the investigations of dust particle‐forming plasmas, where the dust‐induced instabilities may affect the properties of synthesized dust particles. Also, gas discharges with large amounts of microparticles are used in microgravity experiments, where strongly coupled subsystems of charged microparticles represent particle‐resolved models of liquids and solids. In this field, deep understanding of dust–plasma interactions is required to construct the discharge configurations which would be able to model the desired generic condensed matter physics as well as, in the interpretation of experiments, to distinguish the plasma phenomena from the generic condensed matter physics phenomena. In this review, we address only physical aspects of dust–plasma interactions, that is, we always imply constant chemical composition of the plasma as well as constant size of the dust particles. We also restrict the review to two discharge types: dc discharge and capacitively coupled rf discharge. We describe the experimental methods used in the investigations of dust–plasma interactions and show the approaches to numerical modelling of the gas discharge plasmas with large amounts of dust. Starting from the basic physical principles governing the dust–plasma interactions, we discuss the state‐of‐the‐art understanding of such complicated, discharge‐type‐specific phenomena as dust‐induced stratification and transverse instability in a dc discharge or void formation and heartbeat instability in an rf discharge.
The spectral excess theorem for distance-regular graphs : a global ( over ) view

Distance-regularity of a graph is in general not determined by the spectrum of the graph. The spectral excess theorem states that a connected regular graph is distance-regular if for every vertex, the number of vertices at extremal distance (the excess) equals some given expression in terms of the spectrum of the graph. This result was proved by Fiol and Garriga [From local adjacency polynomials to locally pseudo-distance-regular graphs, J. Combinatorial Th. B 71 (1997), 162-183] using a local approach. This approach has the advantage that more general results can be proven, but the disadvantage that it is quite technical. The aim of the current paper is to give a less technical proof by taking a global approach.
Evolutionary Models of Red Supergiants: Evidence for A Metallicity-dependent Mixing Length and Implications for Type IIP Supernova Progenitors

Recent studies on the temperatures of red supergiants (RSGs) in the local universe provide us with an excellent observational constraint on RSG models. We calibrate the mixing length parameter by comparing model predictions with the empirical RSG temperatures in Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, Milky Way, and M31, which are inferred from the TiO band and the spectral energy distribution (SED). Although our RSG models are computed with the MESA code, our result may be applied to other stellar evolution codes, including the BEC and TWIN codes. We find evidence that the mixing length increases with increasing metallicity for both cases where the TiO and SED temperatures of RSGs are used for the calibration. Together with the recent finding of a similar correlation in low-mass red giants by Tayar et al., this implies that the metallicity dependence of the mixing length is a universal feature in post-main sequence stars of both low and high masses. Our result implies that typical Type IIP supernova (SN IIP) progenitors with initial masses of have a radius range of regardless of metallicity. As an auxiliary result of this study, we find that the hydrogen-rich envelope mass of SN IIP progenitors for a given initial mass is predicted to be largely independent of metallicity if the Ledoux criterion with slow semiconvection is adopted, while the Schwarzschild models predict systematically more massive hydrogen-rich envelopes for lower metallicity.
Far-infrared response of free charge carriers localized in semiconductor nanoparticles

A Monte Carlo method is employed to calculate the dynamical conductivity in the terahertz range of free charge carriers localized in semiconductor nanoparticles. The shape of the conductivity spectrum is essentially determined by the probability of carrier transition through interparticle boundaries and by the ratio of the nanoparticle size and carrier mean free path in the bulk. It is shown that the conductivity spectrum exhibits similar features as the classical extension of the Drude conductivity of electrons proposed by Smith [Phys. Rev. B 64, 155106 (2001)]. We find and discuss the link of this model to the results of our simulations which suggests an interpretation of the phenomenological parameters of the Drude-Smith model.
Beschluss

Der Düsseldorfer Kreis hat sich dafür eingesetzt, die Einwilligungsund Schweigepflichtentbindungserklärungen in der Versicherungswirtschaft transparenter zu gestalten. Gemeinsam mit dem Gesamtverband der deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft e. V. haben die Datenschutzaufsichtsbehörden eine Mustererklärung erarbeitet. Die Versicherungsunternehmen sind aufgefordert, die bisherigen Einwilligungstexte zeitnah durch neue zu ersetzen, die der Mustererklärung entsprechen. Der Text lautet wie folgt:
2021. Efficacy of Chronic Antimicrobial Suppressive Therapy in Ventricular Assist Device Infections

Abstract Background Ventricular assist devices (VAD) prolong life expectancy or serve as a bridge to heart transplant in end stage heart failure but are not without risks. These patients are at high risk for device-related infections with a propensity for relapse. Indications and efficacy of chronic antimicrobial suppression (CAS) to prevent relapse are not well defined. Methods We conducted a retrospective study of all adult patients with VAD infections at our institution between 1/1/2013 and 10/31/2020. VAD-specific or VAD-related infections were defined by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation criteria. Patients were stratified by receipt of CAS or no CAS after completing index infection treatment. Relapsed infections were defined as those recurred at the same site caused by the same organism seen in the index infection. Time-to-relapse infection was defined as the time in days between the index infection and first relapse. The primary outcome was CAS efficacy measured by time-to-relapse in VAD-specific or -related infections. Results A total of 83 patients were included with a documented VAD-specific (n = 68) or VAD-related (n = 15) infection. Driveline (n = 66) and bloodstream (n = 13) infections were the most common VAD-specific and VAD-related infections, respectively. For the index infection, all patients received antimicrobial treatment and 16.4% required incision and drainage. Staphylococcus aureus was most frequently isolated in 46 cases. Oral minocycline was the most commonly utilized agent in 22 of 47 patients receiving CAS. Agent-specific CAS efficacy was unable to be assessed due to the small sample. In patients who received CAS, 57% experienced a relapse infection compared to 81% in patients not receiving CAS (p = 0.03). The median time to relapse was 151 days (IQR 78-247) and 57 days (IQR 36-114) in the CAS and non-CAS groups, respectively (p < 0.01). Conclusion The incidence of relapse infection in the setting of CAS was lower compared to those not receiving CAS. Patients receiving CAS were relapse-free for a significantly longer duration. Larger studies are warranted to assess if one agent confers a benefit over another. Disclosures M. Rizwan Sohail, MD, Aziyo Biologics: Honoraria|Boston Scientific Corporation: Honoraria|Medtronic: Grant/Research Support|TRYX: Grant/Research Support.
Estimating the Volume of Oil Tanks Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

The purpose of this study is to obtain oil tank volumes from high-resolution satellite imagery to meet the need to measure oil tank volume globally. A preprocessed remote sensing HSV image is used to extract the shadow of the oil tank by Otsu thresholding, shadow area thresholding, and morphological closing. The oil tank shadow is crescent-shaped. Hence, a median method based on sub-pixel subdivision positioning is used to calculate the shadow length of the oil tank and then determine its height with high precision. The top of the tank and its radius in the image are identified using the Hough transform. The final tank volume is calculated using its height and radius. A high-resolution Gaofen 2 optical remote sensing image is used to evaluate the proposed method. The actual height and volume of the tank we tested were 21.8 m and 109,532 m3. The experimental results show that the mean absolute error of the height of the tank calculated by the median method is 0.238 m, the relative error is within 1.15%, and the RMES is 0.23. The result is better than the previous work. The absolute error between the calculated and the actual tank volumes ranges between 416 and 3050 m3, and the relative error ranges between 0.38% and 2.78%. These results indicate that the proposed method can calculate the volume of oil tanks with high precision and sufficient accuracy for practical applications.
Design and Development of an Omni-Directional Mobile Robot for Logistics of Printing Enterprise

Based on printing enterprise layout, an omni-directional mobile robot with zero torque is designed by the three Swedish wheels structure. First of all, we describe the mechanical design and the motion model of the robot in detail. A navigation logic system is proposed combining positioning of incremental photoelectric encoder and a path planning algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm. Then, taking the workshop logistics channel as an example, the path planning simulation is implemented on the MATLAB platform. The omni-directional autonomous motion of the robot is realized. It is an effective attempt to improve the intelligence of the logistics system.
HPLFlowNet: Hierarchical Permutohedral Lattice FlowNet for Scene Flow Estimation on Large-Scale Point Clouds

We present a novel deep neural network architecture for end-to-end scene flow estimation that directly operates on large-scale 3D point clouds. Inspired by Bilateral Convolutional Layers (BCL), we propose novel DownBCL, UpBCL, and CorrBCL operations that restore structural information from unstructured point clouds, and fuse information from two consecutive point clouds. Operating on discrete and sparse permutohedral lattice points, our architectural design is parsimonious in computational cost. Our model can efficiently process a pair of point cloud frames at once with a maximum of 86K points per frame. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FlyingThings3D and KITTI Scene Flow 2015 datasets. Moreover, trained on synthetic data, our approach shows great generalization ability on real-world data and on different point densities without fine-tuning.
Modeling chemical transport in the unsaturated zone of the subsurface.

Because of the increasing emphasis in agriculture on monocultures and the intensive breeding of animals for food, the unsaturated zones of many unconfined aquifers are receiving greater quantities of nitrate fertilisers and a wide variety of pesticides and herbicides designed to control the growth of unwanted plants, insects, and other invertebrates (Vrba and Romijn, 1986). In addition, the unsaturated zone has been used for many years for the disposal of a wide variety of synthetic organic chemicals and for storage tanks containing liquid chemicals and fuel. Because of continued overuse of agricultural chemicals and the leakage of chemicals from disposal sites and storage tanks, these chemicals have accumulated in the unsaturated zone. They have gradually migrated into underlying aquifers ultimately contaminating water resources used for drinking water, for irrigation of agricultural crops, and for many industrial uses (Pye, 1982). To prevent continued contamination of underlying groundwater resources and to develop more effective methods of cleaning up contaminated aquifers, it is necessary to have reliable mathematical models to describe chemical transport in the unsaturated zone of the subsurface. With these models, not only can concentrations of toxic chemicals in drinking water be predicted, but also a large number of possible modifications of present practices and possible reclamation strategies can be examined prior to actual field evaluation. A possible mathematical description of transport in the unsaturated zone is given in Appendix A. From these equations presented in integral form, transport in the unsaturated zone is certainly complex. Transport in the unsaturated zone involves the transport of more than one phase through an unconsolidated porous medium. Accurately describing transport in the unsaturated zone must include the simultaneous solution of field equations for transport of moisture, heat, and chemicals. The equations given in Appendix A represent a deterministic approach to describe these transport phenomena, and have been assembled from