Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of selective suppression of spatial frequency domain noise on visual detection of a sample object in an inhomogeneous background

This study aims to investigate the effect of selective suppression of spatial frequency (SF) domain Gaussian white noise on visibility of a sample object in inhomogeneous backgrounds. SF-specific variation in signal-to-noise ratio due to selective signal averaging in the SF domain is a consequence of some of MRI acquisition methods. This study models the potential effect on visibility of an object in a complex image. A single disc was randomly positioned in 25 of 50 synthetic clustered lumpy background images. Neutral, low mid and high frequency suppressed Gaussian white noise was added in the frequency domain to simulate SF-weighted MRI signal averaging. Twelve readers performed visual searching and localization tasks on ordered sets. Subjects were asked to detect and locate discs and to rank confidence level. Sensitivity, specificity and ROC analyses were performed. Readers achieved significantly higher ROC AUC - Azscores - (p<0.001) and case-based sensitivity (p<0.001) and target-based sensitivity (p<0.001) with images in which low SF noise was suppressed. Also, significant higher cased-based sensitivity (p=0.005), target-based sensitivity (p=0.022) and Az-values (p=0.01) were scored under mid SF noise filtration. No significant differences were observed when images with SF-neutral noise suppression were compared with high SF noise suppression. In conclusion, increase of low and also mid SF signal signal-to-noise ratio significantly improves human performance in visual detection of simple targets in inhomogeneous backgrounds and suggests that a low SF bias in MRI signal averaging may enhance diagnostic quality.
Computational Complexity as a Source of Thermodynamic Irreversibility

In spite of the fact that the Newtonian dynsmics of the underlying molecules do not seem to favor one direction of time over its opposite, the non-decreasing entropy of macroscopic physical systems provides a unique direction to 'the arrow of time'. This paper proposes that the directionality of time arises from the intrinsic computational complexity of molecular dynamics. In particular, the following question about a hard sphere gas is proven to be Np-complete: Given a set of input signals, in which TRUE is represented by an actual sphere trajectory and FALSE is represented by a trajectory that is not followed because an input signal is not TRUE; a set of 'routing' spheres that follow the same trajectory for all choices of input signals and that collide with the signal trajectories at pre-specified points; does there exist a set of inputs that would produce a specified final configuration? The time asymmetry arises because the computational effort, and thus the actual time required to determine the final configuration from the starting configuration grows only linearly with the number of particles, N, but the computational effort required to determine the answer to the above Np-complete problem probably grows faster than any polynomial in N. We conclude by arguing that, as N approaches infinity, the resulting temporal asymmetry is sufficient to justify the molecular chaos assumption (Stosszahlansatz) used in deriving the Boltzmann equation.
Scattering in Water Clouds: The Impact of the Spatial Correlation of Particles on The Backscattered Mean Power

In the present work scattering theory in water clouds has been studied. Alternative forms for Maxwell equations have been developed and discretized in order to calculate backscattered mean powers from cloud particles. With simplified discretized equations the backscattered electric field has been approximated for a single particle. This approximation of the electric field is the same as Rayleigh approximation used in meteorological literature. The discretized equations have been implemented in computer code to calculate backscattered power from particles inside a small box, located in the far field of radar. In current radar approach, incoherent Rayleigh approximation is used as the standard scattering theory to retrieve cloud properties. To validate this theory the correlation between particles has been studied. In order to study the influence of inter-particle displacement on correlation between particles, a new idea has been deployed to create turbulence among particles. For different turbulence settings the randomness of the medium has been quantified by the real part of the correlation matrix. In the last chapter both exact and incoherent Rayleigh backscattered mean powers from particles have been calculated. It has been shown that Rayleigh backscattered mean powers are good approximation for uncorrelated particles and both are distributed normally around the same mean value. In case of correlated particles the exact backscattered mean powers have shown to be distributed lognormally. Depending on the degree of correlation their distribution shifts from lognormal to normal, respectively for highly correlated and uncorrelated particles. With statistical results it has been concluded that for correlated water cloud particles, the exact backscattered mean powers will be smaller than the incoherent approximation.
The Disk Accretion Rate for Dynamo-generated Turbulence

Dynamo-generated turbulence is simulated in a modified shearing box approximation that removes scale invariance and allows finite accretion rates for a given distance from the central object. The effective Shakura-Sunyaev viscosity parameter, αSS, is estimated in three different ways using the resulting mass accretion rate, the heating rate, and the horizontal components of the Maxwell and Reynolds stress tensors. The results are still resolution dependent: doubling the resolution leads to 1.4-1.6 times larger values for the viscosity parameter. For 63 × 127 × 64 meshpoints we find that αSS = 0.007.
Effectiveness of Periarticular Cocktail Injection in Pain Management of Patients Undergoing Total Knee Arthroplasty

Introduction: Total knee arthroplasty is a procedure that can improve quality of life, and it is performed in increasing numbers every year because of the increase in the elderly population due to improved medical technology. However, the problem is that patients avoid this operation because of postoperative pain, which affects patient satisfaction and delays recovery and rehabilitation. There are many modalities to improve operative pain control, such as femoral nerve blocks, epidural anaesthesia, and periarticular injections. These modalities have been shown to reduce post-operative pain and increase patient satisfaction. Periarticular injection was reported to have good efficacy in controlling pain, cost-effectiveness, a few side effects, and ease of use. This method can be used by every surgeon without further training, unlike techniques like epidural anaesthesia or femoral nerve blocks, which require experience and further training. Material and Methods: The study was conducted in the Department of Orthopaedics at SCB Medical College & Hospital, Cuttack, Odisha. All the IPD patients who got admitted to the Dept. of Orthopaedics were taken as the study subject total of 30 cases were selected during study period out of which 15 were cases and 15 controls. Observation and Discussion: In Group A, R/L TKA was done in 3/12 patients and in Group B, R/L TKA was done in 8/7. All the Group A patients experienced less pain than the baseline parameters(p<0.05) following TKA. Post-operative evaluation of Range of motion in between 2 Groups there was significant difference in between the two Groups A and B as it was comparatively more in POD1, POD2, POD3, POD7, DOD AND 3 months after follow up in Cocktail Group A. Knee Society Score in POD3 was found to be 100 and 90 in Group A and Group B respectively. Conclusion: This study has several strengths. First, it is a well powered, randomized study. Second, we included follow-up beyond the initial hospitalization. Third, the injection medications we used are available through any hospital pharmacy and are easily administered during the surgical procedure, so our findings could be generalized for any joint reconstruction surgeon. Keywords: Total knee replacement, Periarticular injection, Pain management
Dynamic integrated path-protection algorithms in IP over WDM networks under shared-risk-link-groups constraints

The Shared Risk Link Groups (SRLG) concept is an extension of physical-disjoint, e.g. link/node-disjoint. It is defined as a group of links that share a common risk component whose failure can potentially cause the failure of all the links in the group. SRLG can be identified by a SRLG identifier. Different SRLG identifiers can be assigned to each link by network administrator in optical Traffic Engineering (TE) to satisfy connection's reliability requirement. A dependable connection can be achieved by establishing two SRLG-disjoint paths. A new dynamic integrated routing algorithm for shared path-protection based on SRLG-disjoint is presented in this paper. It provides the same level of protection against single SRLG failure as dedicated path-protection scheme. Moreover it is superior to dedicated path-protection scheme in network utilization. Network performance, based on dynamic traffic with different load, is investigated via simulations. The results show that the scheme can improve the performance of the network significantly.
Asymptotics of Quantiles and Rank Scores in Nonlinear Time Series

This paper extends the concept of regression and autoregression quantiles and rank scores to a very general nonlinear time series model. The asymptotic linearizations of these nonlinear quantiles are then used to obtain the limiting distributions of a class of L‐estimators of the parameters. In particular, the limiting distributions of the least absolute deviation estimator and trimmed estimators are obtained. These estimators turn out to be asymptotically more efficient than the widely used conditional least squares estimator for heavy‐tailed error distributions. The results are applicable to linear and nonlinear regression and autoregressive models including self‐exciting threshold autoregressive models with known threshold.
Lasers in medicine

It is hard to imagine that a narrow, one-way, coherent, moving, amplified beam of light fired by excited atoms is powerful enough to slice through steel. In 1917, Albert Einstein speculated that under certain conditions atoms could absorb light and be stimulated to shed their borrowed energy. Charles Townes coined the term laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) in 1951. Theodore Maiman investigated the glare of a flash lamp in a rod of synthetic ruby, creating the first human-made laser in 1960. The laser involves exciting atoms and passing them through a medium such as crystal, gas or liquid. As the cascade of photon energy sweeps through the medium, bouncing off mirrors, it is reflected back and forth, and gains energy to produce a high wattage beam of light. Although lasers are today used by a large variety of professions, one of the most meaningful applications of laser technology has been through its use in medicine. Being faster and less invasive with a high precision, lasers have penetrated into most medical disciplines during the last half century including dermatology, ophthalmology, dentistry, otolaryngology, gastroenterology, urology, gynaecology, cardiology, neurosurgery and orthopaedics. In many ways the laser has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of a disease. As a surgical tool the laser is capable of three basic functions. When focused on a point it can cauterize deeply as it cuts, reducing the surgical trauma caused by a knife. It can vaporize the surface of a tissue. Or, through optical fibres, it can permit a doctor to see inside the body. Lasers have also become an indispensable tool in biological applications from high-resolution microscopy to subcellular nanosurgery. Indeed, medical lasers are a prime example of how the movement of an idea can truly change the medical world. This review will survey various applications of lasers in medicine including four major categories: types of lasers, laser-tissue interactions, therapeutics and diagnostics.
Do College Admissions Criteria Matter? Evidence from Discretionary vs. Grade-Based Admission Policies

IZA DP No. 15748 NOVEMBER 2022 Do College Admissions Criteria Matter? Evidence from Discretionary vs. GradeBased Admission Policies This paper examines the implications of college admissions criteria on students’ academic and non-academic performance in university and their labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique feature of the admissions system at a large university that has two admission tracks – a regular admission track where admission is based exclusively on academic performance and a discretionary admission (DA) track where applicants can instead gain admission on the basis of demonstrated non-academic qualities. Comparing students admitted through each track, we find that DA students fare similarly in terms of academic performance in university as marginal students admitted through the regular route. However, they are significantly more likely to be involved in optional academic and non-academic college activities and earn substantially higher labor market earnings up to three years after graduation. These results are not driven by the DA process differentially selecting students on the basis of family background or unobserved academic ability. JEL Classification: I21, I23, J31
Efficient full‐wave characterization of arrays of antennas embedded in finite dielectric volumes

This paper shows how the Macro Basis Functions (MBFs) approach can be applied to the solution of arrays of complex elements, made of metallic parts embedded in disconnected dielectric volumes. It is shown how the reduced system of equations can be obtained very efficiently with the help of a multipole approach. We also provide a subsequent formulation for the array impedance matrix and a fast method for the computation of embedded element patterns, with the help of a decomposition into a finite series of pattern multiplication problems, for which the fast Fourier transform can be exploited. Examples are provided for arrays of tapered slot antennas in separate dielectric boards. Comparisons are provided with brute‐force solutions for a 4 × 4 array and increasing number of MBFs, and with the infinite‐array solution for a 16 × 16 array. An appendix provides new insight into the problem of completeness of the MBFs bases by establishing a link between the MBF approach and Krylov subspaces.
2.5‐THz frequency difference measurements in the visible using metal‐insulator‐metal diodes

Using point‐contact metal‐insulator‐metal diodes, we have demonstrated heterodyne detection of visible laser radiation at frequency differences up to 2.5 THz (generated by a 119‐μm laser). The signal to noise on the observed rf beat falls off at 2.3 dB/octave of laser frequency difference and would seem to indicate that 30‐THz difference beats will be obervable with improved laser stability or signal averaging. While the diode detector ‘‘bandwidth’’ per se has not been evaluated, these measurements demonstrate an increase in the frequency difference which can be measured in the visible by more than an order of magnitude over that previously reported.
Materials used in industrial workwear for hot workplace environments: Thermal and moisture management attributes

Materials used in personal protective clothing (PPC) are important from both protection and thermal management perspectives, particularly as PPC frequently covers more than 90% of the wearer’s body. There is extensive literature on the risk factors that contribute to thermal load and the related functional characteristics of the PPC, especially in high-risk categories such as fire fighting and the military. In contrast, research on PPC materials in low-risk categories such as mining and construction and their thermal management attributes is scarce. Nevertheless, workers who wear this type of PPC represent a significant proportion of the industrial workforce, and are commonly required to work in hot and/or humid thermal environments. This study provides new knowledge of the thermal management attributes of materials used in low-level risk PPC by evaluating a selection of 19 workwear materials that are used in low-risk PPC worldwide. In addition, four civilian/corporate wear summer materials were tested to compare against the PPC materials. This study identifies relationships between the structure, physical parameters and functional attributes of materials, providing direction for development of new and improved PPC materials. The results show that there are opportunities to substantially reduce PPC material mass and thickness, whilst still maintaining protective compliance requirements. Further, thermal and moisture management attributes of PPC materials can also be significantly improved to reduce thermal burden.
Effect of renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors on survival outcomes in cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Effect of renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system inhibitors (RAASIs) in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) on prognoses in cancer patients remains controversial. This study systematically evaluated the effect of RAASIs on survival outcomes in cancer patients receiving ICIs treatment and provided an evidence-based reference for the rational use of RAASIs and ICIs combination therapy in clinical practice. Methods Studies evaluating the prognosis of RAASIs-used versus RAASIs-free in cancer patients receiving ICIs treatment from inception to 1 November 2022 were retrieved by searching PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase, and major conference proceedings. Studies in English reporting hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for overall survival (OS) and/or progression-free survival (PFS) were included. Statistical analyses were conducted using the software Stata 17.0. Results A total of 12 studies containing 11739 patients were included, comprising ~4861 patients in the RAASIs-used and ICIs-treated group and ~6878 patients in RAASIs-free and ICIs-treated group. The pooled HR was 0.85 (95%CI, 0.75–0.96; P = 0.009) for OS and 0.91 (95%CI, 0.76–1.09; P = 0.296) for PFS, indicating a positive effect of RAASIs concomitant with ICIs on cancer patients. This effect was observed especially in patients with urothelial carcinoma (HR, 0.53; 95%CI, 0.31-0.89; P = 0.018) and renal cell carcinoma (HR, 0.56; 95%CI, 0.37-0.84; P = 0.005) on OS. Conclusion Concomitant use of RAASIs and ICIs enhanced the efficacy of ICIs and this combination regimen was associated with significantly improved OS and a trend towards better PFS. RAASIs can be considered as adjuvant drugs when hypertensive patients receive ICIs treatment. Our results provide an evidence-based reference for the rational use of the RAASIs and ICIs combination therapy to improve the efficacy of ICIs in clinical practice. Systematic review registration https://www.crd. york.ac. uk/prospero/, identifier CRD42022372636; https://inplasy.com/, identifier INPLASY2022110136.
COTA 2.0: an Automatic Corrector of Tunisian Arabic Social Media Texts

In written text, orthographic noise is a common concern for NLP, especially when operating social network comments and raw documents. This is mainly due to its orthographic conventions and morphological ambiguity. We propose to automatically normalize the social media dialect corpora by following CODA-TUN, the Conventional Orthography for Tunisian Arabic (TA). The existing system developed for TA <<COTA Orthography 1.0>> is not able to handle all forms of TA. Therefore, we propose to extend its rules and lexicons to address the peculiarities of social media dialect. In certain words, the COTA Orthography 1.0 system provides the user with several correction possibilities. Therefore, in the new version, we incorporated a trigram language model to automatically select the right correction. Our results show that the system can reduce transcription errors by 95.72%.
The role of amorphous silicon and tunneling in heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer (HIT) solar cells

This work analyzes heterojunction with intrinsic thin layer (HIT) solar cells using numerical simulations. The differences between the device physics of cells with p- and n-type crystalline silicon (c-Si) wafers are substantial. HIT solar cells with n-type wafers essentially form a n/p/n structure, where tunneling across the junction heterointerfaces is a critical transport mechanism required to attain performance exceeding 20%. For HIT cells with p-type wafers, only tunneling at the back-contact barrier may be important. For p-wafer cells, the hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) between the indium tin oxide (ITO) and crystalline silicon may act as a passivating buffer layer but, otherwise, does not significantly contribute to device performance. For n-wafer cells, the carrier concentration and band alignment of this a-Si:H layer are critical to device performance.
Performance Analysis of an Electrostatic Switched Radiator Using Heat-Flux-Based Emissivity Measurement

The heat-flux-based emissivity measurement technique developed in our earlier work has been used to study the performance of an electrostatic switched radiator. The capability of fast and accurate measurement of the real-time changes in emissivity enabled by this technique allowed understanding of the transient behavior during activation, as well as identification of a major failure mode of the second-generation electrostatic radiator. A solution for resolution of this failure mode was then proposed and successfully tested, producing accurate and repeatable results over many cycles. A change in emissivity of 0.52 was achieved with 280 V applied, among the best consistent results achieved through electrostatic technology. The current work offers further understanding of electrostatic radiator performance and its application to space vehicles.
The optimization of perceptually-based features for speaker identification

Results of an experimental study and the optimization of features for a conventional vector-quantization codebook-based automatic speaker identification (ASI) system are presented. Standard LPC (linear predictive coding) and a perceptually weighted feature termed PLP (perceptually based linear prediction) are compared using appropriate distance measures, namely, the log-likelihood, and three cepstral variants: constant weighting, the robot-power-sum, and the inverse variance. PLP features combined with a weighted cepstral measure are found to be consistently the best in a number of different digit-independent ASI experiments. Results support the hypothesis that the higher orders of PLP (>5) contain significant speaker-specific information, with ASI performance improving rapidly up to order 8, and then far more slowly yet consistently up to order 16. A similar pattern is seen for codebook size, with fast improvements up to size 64, with more gradual gains thereafter. <<ETX>>
On Berry-Esseen bounds of summability transforms

Let Y n,k , k = 0, 1, 2, . , n ≥ 1, be a collection of random variables, where for each n, Y n,k , k = 0, 1, 2 . , are independent. Let A = [p n,k ] be a regular summability method. We provide some rates of convergence (Berry-Esseen type bounds) for the weak convergence of summability transform (AY). We show that when A = [p n,k ] is the classical Cesaro summability method, the rate of convergence of the resulting central limit theorem is best possible among all regular triangular summability methods with rows adding up to one. We further provide some summability results concerning l 2 -negligibility. An application of these results characterizes the rate of convergence of Schnabl operators while approximating Lipschitz continuous functions.