Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An SbOx/Reduced Graphene Oxide Composite as a High-Rate Anode Material for Sodium-Ion Batteries

Antimony has attracted enormous attention as anode materials for sodium-ion batteries owing to its high theoretical gravimetric capacity (∼660 mA h g–1). Despite the outstanding gravimetric capacity advantage, antimony suffers from unsatisfactory electrochemical performance originating from its huge volume changes during repeated sodium insertion/extraction. Herein, we synthesize an SbOx/reduced graphene oxide (SbOx/RGO) composite through a wet-milling approach accompanied by redox reaction between Sb and GO. When used as an anode material for sodium-ion batteries, SbOx/RGO exhibits high rate capability and stable cycling performance. A reversible capacity of 352 mA h g–1 was obtained even at a current density of 5 A g–1. More than 95% capacity retention (409 mA h g–1) was achieved after 100 cycles at a current density of 1 A g–1. The excellent electrochemical performance is due to the Sb–O bonding between nanometer-sized SbOx particles surface and highly conductive RGO, which can not only effectively pre.
Current Levels of Pu Isotopes and 137Cs at the Former Soviet Union's Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site

This paper is a report on our survey of residual radioactivity in the soil of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in the former USSR. The soil was sampled at approximately 30 sites along the roads connecting Kurchatov City, ground zero for the first USSR nuclear test, Balapan, Degelen Mountain and Salzhal settlement. The radioactivity levels of Cs, Pu and -Pu as well as the ^Pu/^ 'Pu atomic ratios in the soil were determined. Although Cs was within typical environmental levels except for an area near ground zero, 'Pu was at elevated levels contaminated with weapons-grade plutonium in all areas we visited.
Identifying Factors of Job Stress That Affect Job Performance among Employees in Sarawak Corporation, Malaysia

Job stress is very prominent that always happens in any organizations or companies nowadays. Many factors lead to job stress, such as personal problems, financial, low salary, and others. These factors can affect employees’ productivity, commitment, and professionalism to perform their task. This study explores the predictive ability of Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation (STIDC) employees’ job stress on job performance of employees by using a sample of 80 respondents. The framework for this study was adapted and constructed based on the Job Demands-Control (JDC) Model. The data were obtained using a questionnaire with a 10-Likert scale and was distributed to all staff in the company. Based on the findings, all the independent variables have a significant association with job performance. Nevertheless, from the analysis of multiple linear regression, the results showed that time pressure and skill discretion significantly correlated to predict job performance.
A Theoretical, In Vitro, and In Vivo Study

Antacids used to decrease phosphorus absorption in patients with renal failure may be toxic. To find more efficient or less toxic binders, a three-part study was conducted. First, theoretical calculations showed that phosphorus binding occurs in the following order of avidity: Al3+ > H+ > Ca2+ > Mg2+. In the presence of acid (as in the stomach), aluminum can therefore bind phosphorus better than calcium or magnesium. Second, in vitro studies showed that the time required to reach equilibrium varied from 10 min to 3 wk among different compounds, depending upon solubility in acid and neutral solutions. Third, the relative order of effectiveness of binders in vivo was accurately predicted from theoretical and in vitro results; specifically, calcium acetate and aluminum carbonate gel were superior to calcium carbonate or calcium citrate in inhibiting dietary phosphorus absorption in normal subjects. We concluded that: (a) inhibition of phosphorus absorption by binders involves a complex interplay between chemical reactions and ion transport processes in the stomach and small intestine; (b) theoretical and in vitro studies can identify potentially better in vivo phosphorus binders; and (c) calcium acetate, not previously used for medical purposes, is approximately as efficient as aluminum carbonate gel and more efficient as a phosphorus binder than other currently used calcium salts.
Learning Direction Fields for Quad Mesh Generation

State of the art quadrangulation methods are able to reliably and robustly convert triangle meshes into quad meshes. Most of these methods rely on a dense direction field that is used to align a parametrization from which a quad mesh can be extracted. In this context, the aforementioned direction field is of particular importance, as it plays a key role in determining the structure of the generated quad mesh. If there are no user‐provided directions available, the direction field is usually interpolated from a subset of principal curvature directions. To this end, a number of heuristics that aim to identify significant surface regions have been proposed. Unfortunately, the resulting fields often fail to capture the structure found in meshes created by human experts. This is due to the fact that experienced designers can leverage their domain knowledge in order to optimize a mesh for a specific application. In the context of physics simulation, for example, a designer might prefer an alignment and local refinement that facilitates a more accurate numerical simulation. Similarly, a character artist may prefer an alignment that makes the resulting mesh easier to animate. Crucially, this higher level domain knowledge cannot be easily extracted from local curvature information alone. Motivated by this issue, we propose a data‐driven approach to the computation of direction fields that allows us to mimic the structure found in existing meshes, which could originate from human experts or other sources. More specifically, we make use of a neural network that aggregates global and local shape information in order to compute a direction field that can be used to guide a parametrization‐based quad meshing method. Our approach is a first step towards addressing this challenging problem with a fully automatic learning‐based method. We show that compared to classical techniques our data‐driven approach combined with a robust model‐driven method, is able to produce results that more closely exhibit the ground truth structure of a synthetic dataset (i.e. a manually designed quad mesh template fitted to a variety of human body types in a set of different poses).
A Robust Multimodal Biometric Authentication Scheme with Voice and Face Recognition

This paper proposes a multimodal biometric scheme for human authentication based on fusion of voice and face recognition. For voice recognition, three categories of features (statistical coefficients, cepstral coefficients and voice timbre) are used and compared. The voice identification modality is carried out using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). For face recognition, three recognition methods (Eigenface, Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA), and Gabor filter) are used and compared. The combination of voice and face biometrics systems into a single multimodal biometrics system is performed using features fusion and scores fusion. This study shows that the best results are obtained using all the features (cepstral coefficients, statistical coefficients and voice timbre features) for voice recognition, LDA face recognition method and scores fusion for the multimodal biometrics system.
A Comprehensive way of finding Top-K Competitors using C-Miner Algorithm

– In order to get success in any business environment it is important to attract the customers than the competitor. A number of difficulties arise in the perspective of this task that is to find a method to formalize and compute the competitiveness relationship between two items and to find the true competitors of a given item also to know the features of an item that most affects its competitiveness. Despite the impact and relevance of this problem to many domains, only a limited amount of work has been devoted toward an efficient solution. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the competitiveness between two items. An efficient method is presented for evaluating competitiveness between items in large datasets and address the natural problem of displaying the top-k competitors of a given item. Our approach is evaluated against strong baselines via a user study and experiments on multiple datasets from various domains.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF VARIOUS CONTROLLERS FOR CRUISE CONTROL OF AN ELECTRICAL VEHICLE DRIVE

Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) have emerged as a good alternative for the conventional IC engine vehicles due to the depleting levels of low-cost fossil fuels and ever increasing environmental pollution. There are, however, some issues related to the eﬀective power conversions due to power controllers, energy-saving and good battery management in the electrical vehicles. PID controllers are presently most widely used in EVs due to their simplicity and ease of implementation. Owing to numerous advantages, the modern controllers oﬀer, implementation of these controllers cut is the need of the hour to improve the dynamics of the EV drive and increase its eﬃciency. This paper presents a comparative analysis of various controllers, viz. PID controller, Fuzzy Logic controller, Artiﬁciial Neural Network (ANN) controller, Sliding Mode Controller (SMC), Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) controller and Model Predictive Controller (MPC) in cruise control of an EV. The aim is to control the speed of an EV drive and increase its eﬃciency using advanced control strategies. MATLAB simulation of the EV drive has been carried out to understand its dynamic characteristics.
Integrated Membrane Systems as an Innovative Approach for the Recovery of High Value-Added Compounds from Agro- Food By-Products

The valorization of available food manufacturing waste with high potential to manufacture value-added products, in line with the main goal of the circular economy, is actually one of the current challenges for scientists. Membrane-based processes are an emerging tool to improve the currently adopted valorisation protocols of agro-food by-products, within a sustainable biorefinery strategy, with remarkable improvements of the environmental and economical sustainability of the overall approach. This work aims at providing a critical overview of the on ongoing research studies for the recovery of high value-added compounds from agro-food by-products such as olive mill wastewaters, citrus by-products and wastes from the wine industry by membrane-based operations. In particular, the development of integrated membrane systems on lab-scale unit for the separation, fractionation and concentration of phenolic compounds and their derivatives from these sources will be presented and discussed. Experimental results clearly indicate that the combination of membrane unit operations in integrated systems offers interesting perspectives in terms of recovery of primary resources, reduction of the environmental impact, formulation of innovative food products and rationalization of conventional food manufacturing processes.
Montaje experimental para el estudio de la mezcla generada por penachos turbulentos An experimental setup for the research of turbulent plumes mixing

A simple laboratory model of turbulent mixing between two miscible fluids under an initial situation of top heavy stratification in a gravitational field has been performed. The mixing processes are generated by the evolution of a discrete set of unstable forced turbulent plumes. We describe the experimental setup, the laboratory instruments and the way the mixing processes are. We also describe the characteristic and construction of the instruments that are classified in 3 groups: fluid flow instruments, electric instruments and video-digitalisation instruments. This laboratory model lets the corresponding turbulent mixing processes measuring the density profiles and the heights of the fluid layers by means of shadowgraph and direct flow visualization. words: Turbulent mixing; turbulent plumes; experimental setup; conductivity probes; shadowgraph; venturimeter; digitalisation.
Extending the Linking Capabilities of Resources in the Web of Data

—This paper investigates the possibility of extending web resource linkings with other linking methodologies besides the unidirectional one. The process of interlinking web resources nowadays is done through hypertext references which allow only unidirectional coupling. We explore the extension of the linking process in the web of data through the use of XML Linking Technologies (XLink) applied to web documents or other resources. With the proposed approach, the linking structure of web resources can be substantially enriched and as a result, access to more resources and resource entities is achieved. The initial experimental results also indicate that by using the proposed approach, a substantial improvement and increase of linking process between web resources is evident. We envision that this outline will potentially improve future of information extraction and resource linking for automatically generate knowledge bases and various assertions on such linked resources.
Hybrid optimization between iterative and network fine-tuning reconstructions for fast quantitative susceptibility mapping

A Hybrid Optimization Between Iterative and network ﬁne-Tuning (HOBIT) reconstruction method is proposed to solve quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) inverse problem in MRI. In HOBIT, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is ﬁrst trained on healthy subjects’ data with gold standard labels. Domain adaptation to patients’ data with hemorrhagic lesions is then deployed by minimizing ﬁdelity loss on the patient training dataset. During test time, a ﬁdelity loss is imposed on each patient test case, where alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) is used to split the time consuming ﬁdelity imposed network update into iterative reconstruction and network update subproblems alternatively in ADMM, and only a subnet of the pre-trained CNN is updated during the process. Compared to the method FINE where such ﬁdelity imposing strategy was initially proposed to solve QSM, HOBIT achieved both performance gain of reconstruction accuracy and vast reduction of computational time. Our code is available at https: //github.com/Jinwei1209/HOBIT .
A New Deformation-Assisted Joining Process for Fixing Sheets to Tubes

This dissertation proposes a new concept for a joining by forming process for joining sheets to tubes away from the tube's end. The sheet-tube connection is obtained by squeezing the sheet adjacent to the outer tube radius, instead of applying direct loading on the tube itself as it was done before in the previous joining by forming processes. The development compares both experimental and finite element modelling results in order to identify the main operating parameters. A deep understanding of their influence in plastic flow allows to characterize the different modes of deformation leading to acceptable and unacceptable joints. Utilization of a deformation-zone geometry parameter to characterize plastic flow inside sheet thickness leads to the conclusion that combination of inhomogeneous and homogeneous deformation through the squeezing depth is necessary for obtaining sound joints with good pull -out destructive forces. Further investigation regarding the influence of the squeezing depth on the joint's performance and the interdependence between the main parameters will allow for the validation of the concept. Moreover, further investigation was made in relation to the new surface formation mechanism, the forces involved in the process and some characteristic behaviours found in this new technique such as the excessive sheet bending.
Ligase Pellino3 Regulates Macrophage Action and Survival in Response to VSV Infection in RIG-I-Dependent Path

Sensing of viral particles and elements that initiate mechanisms of immune response is an intrinsic ability of mammalian cells. Regulatory cytokines and antiviral mediators are released after triggering of complex signaling cascades in response to interaction of pathogen particles with pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) leading to the production of interferons (IFN) and proinflammatory cytokines. Viral RNA in the cytoplasm constitute a potent danger molecule that recognition is performed by RIG-I-like receptors, the most common group of receptors in mammalian cells, capable to recognize a foreign RNA. It is known that the E3 ubiquitin ligase Pellino3 plays an important role in antibacterial and antiviral response, but its involvement in the RLR pathways remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigate the molecular mechanisms of the innate immune response in BMDMs (immortalized macrophages from mouse bone marrow) during VSV infection. Here, we present evidence that the activation of the RIG-I/Pellino3/ERK1/2 pathway in BMDMs is crucial for the protection against VSV. We demonstrate that during infection, viral particles replicate in Pellino3 knockout BMDMs more effectively than in wild-type cells. Increased viral replication resulting in cell lysis and death is aid by impaired synthesis of IFN-I and inflammatory cytokines as a consequence of disturbances in the ERK1/2 pathway regulation.
Anaemia Associated with Trypanosomes Infections in Cattle of West Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Background African animal trypanosomosis is a major veterinary problem over a large area of the tsetse belt region of Africa. Anaemia is a cardinal sign of trypanosome infections. The mechanism of anaemia due to trypanosomosis is complex and multifactorial in origin. Packed cell volume (PCV) usually gives an indication of the anaemia and disease status of a trypanosome-infected animal. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted from December 2017 to January 2018 in West Gojjam zone, Northwest Ethiopia, to determine the trypanosome infections rate and the possible correlation between parasitic infection and anaemia using the dark ground buffy coat technique, Giemsa-stained thin blood smear, and PCV reading on a haematocrit reader. Results The overall trypanosomosis prevalence was 7.81%, 95% CI = 7.45–8.17. Trypanosoma congolense (4.25%) and T. vivax (3.56%) were the trypanosomes species identified in the studied area. PCV for all sampled cattle was analysed to estimate the degree of anaemia. From the total examined animals (N = 730), 356 (48.77%) were anaemic and 374 (51.23%) were nonanaemic. The mean PCV of parasitemic cattle was significantly lower (21.09%, 95% CI = 20.13–22.05) than that of aparasitemic ones (25.96%, 95% CI = 25.68–26.24). There was a positive association between trypanosome infection and anaemia. Although both trypanosome species are significantly associated with a decreased herd mean PCV (<24), the mean PCV of cattle infected with T. congolense (19.45%) was lower than that of infected with T. vivax (23.04%). The herd mean PCV was not significantly associated to locations, age, and sex of the studied animals. Conclusions The study confirms that the prevalence of trypanosomes infections and herd mean PCV has a significant association. The mean herd PCV can be a useful cheap tool to screen for possible trypanosome infection. However, there were cattle positive for trypanosomes having mean PCV within the reference interval and negative animals with anaemia. Furthermore, PCV reading should be confirmed by other diagnostic techniques to accurately conclude that trypanosomosis is the only cause of anaemia.
Assessing the Work Activities Related to Musculoskeletal Disorder among Critical Care Nurses

Nurses are physically exhausted with an incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), especially those working in critical care units that require exhaustive physical efforts to fulfill patients' needs. The current study aims to assess work activities related to the occurrence of MSDs in nurses working in critical care units. A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 100 nurses of critical care units, and the data were collected via a survey questionnaire. The study was conducted at King Fahad University Hospital for three months from February to April 2019. The study findings revealed that work activities related to MSD were associated with sociodemographic data, age, and neck pain (rho = 0.063) (p=0.03) and lower back pain (rho = 0.89) (p=0.03); education level with hip/thigh pain (rho = 0.64) (p=0.03); standing time with shoulder pain (rho = 0.66) (p=0.04), wrist/hand pain (rho = −0.75) (p=0.05), hip/thigh pain (rho = −0.78) (p=0.004), and knee pain (rho = −0.77) (p=0.005). An increased prevalence of MSDs with lower back pain (92%) and upper back pain (56%) was estimated among the nurses, and a negative impact of work-related MSDs on occupational health and daily life activities of the nurses was also observed. The study concluded that the occurrence of MSDs is significantly associated with sociodemographic data: age, BMI experience level, and educational level of nurses of critical care units.
Noise-Induced Hearing Loss: Updates on Molecular Targets and Potential Interventions

Noise overexposure leads to hair cell loss, synaptic ribbon reduction, and auditory nerve deterioration, resulting in transient or permanent hearing loss depending on the exposure severity. Oxidative stress, inflammation, calcium overload, glutamate excitotoxicity, and energy metabolism disturbance are the main contributors to noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) up to now. Gene variations are also identified as NIHL related. Glucocorticoid is the only approved medication for NIHL treatment. New pharmaceuticals targeting oxidative stress, inflammation, or noise-induced neuropathy are emerging, highlighted by the nanoparticle-based drug delivery system. Given the complexity of the pathogenesis behind NIHL, deeper and more comprehensive studies still need to be fulfilled.
Effectiveness of Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Deep Breathing, and Guided Imagery in Promoting Psychological and Physiological States of Relaxation

Research suggests that multiple forms of relaxation training (e.g., progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, breathing exercises, visualization, and autogenics) can help individuals reduce stress, enhance relaxation states, and improve overall well-being. We examined three different, commonly used approaches to stress relaxation—progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, and guided imagery—and evaluated them in a head-to-head comparison against each other and a control condition. Sixty healthy undergraduate participants were randomized to one of the four conditions and completed 20 minutes of progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, or guided imagery training that was delivered by recorded audio instruction. Baseline and follow-up assessment of psychological relaxation states were completed. Physiological relaxation was also assessed continuously using measures of electrodermal activity and heart rate. Results showed that progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, and guided imagery all increased the state of relaxation for participants in those groups, compared to participants in the control group. In each case, the increase was statistically significant and although the groups did not differ on relaxation before training, all groups were significantly higher on relaxation after training, as compared to the control group. Progressive muscle relaxation and guided imagery showed an immediate linear trend toward physiological relaxation, compared to the control group, and the deep breathing group showed an immediate increase in physiological arousal followed quickly by a return to initial levels. Our results lend support to the body of research showing that stress relaxation training can be effective in improving relaxation states at both the psychological and physiological level. Future research could examine stress relaxation techniques in a similar manner using designs where multiple techniques can be compared in the same samples.