Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces for Underwater Visible Light Communications

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) offer paradigm shift towards enhancing the capabilities of wireless communications. The use of this emerging technology in the realm of underwater wireless systems is a promising solution to overcome the limitations pertinent to such challenging environments. In this paper, we quantify the performance enhancement offered by the integration of IRS technology in the context of underwater optical wireless communication (OWC). Specifically, we derive a closed-form expression for the outage probability over log-normal channels, taking into consideration the underwater attenuation, pointing error, and turbulence effects. The underwater turbulent medium is characterized by the recently introduced Oceanic Turbulence Optical Power Spectrum (OTOPS) model that uses the practical values of average temperature and salinity concentration in earth basins. The presented numerical results take into account the effects of the turbulent medium as well as the communication system parameters (i.e., communication range, receiver aperture diameter, number of IRS). Our results show that IRSs can offer significant enhancement in the reliability of underwater OWC systems under attenuation, beam displacement, and turbulence effects. Moreover, the combined effect of using a large number of reflecting surfaces and a larger aperture diameter yields a more noticeable improvement.
Modeling of the Evaporation and Condensation Phase-Change Problems with FLUENT

Based on the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method in the FLUENT code, many phase-change models have been proposed and applied to simulate evaporation and condensation problems. To further improve the accuracy, in this article a new phase-change model is built using user-defined functions (UDFs). The accuracy of this new phase-change model is verified by two evaporation problems (a one-dimensional Stefan problem and a two-dimensional film boiling problem) and one condensation problem (single steam bubble condensation in subcooled water). The simulation results of this new model show good agreement with the classical analytical or numerical results, proving its accuracy and feasibility.
Hybrid particle methods in frictionless impact‐contact problems

The dual particle dynamic (DPD) methods which employ two sets of particles have been demonstrated to have better accuracy and stability than the co‐locational particle methods, such as the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH). The hybrid particle method (HPM) is an extension of the DPD method. Besides the advantages of the DPD method, the HPM possesses features which better facilitate the simulation of large deformations. This paper presents the continued development of the HPM for the numerical solution of two‐dimensional frictionless contact problems. The interface contact force algorithm which employs a modified kinematic constraints method is used to determine the contact tractions. In this method, both the impenetrability condition and the traction condition are simultaneously enforced. In the original kinematic constraints method, only the former condition is satisfied. A new formulation to find stress derivatives at stress‐free corners by imposing stress‐free boundary conditions is also developed. The results for 1‐D and 2‐D contact problems indicate good accuracy for the contact formulation as well as the corner treatment when compared to analytical solutions and explicit finite element results using the commercial code LS‐DYNA. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Comparison of GCM-Simulated Daily Maximum Temperatures with Observations in South Moravia

Three-dimensional global circulation models (GCMS) are the 'state of the art' tools for projecting possible changes in climate. GCM simulations of the present climate have frequently been validated against observations in terms of time averaged variables, while time series, particularly daily series, have not been studied extensively. In this paper, 30-year simulations of daily maximum grid point temperatures are compared with the 30-year series recorded in Moravia. Attention is focused on annual cycles and autocorrelation functions. In estimating the autocorrelation coefficients, the standard procedure and jack-knife method are applied to the series with and without seasonal decomposition. It is shown that the jack-knife estimates of variance are generally smaller than those assessed by a standard technique for the series with seasonal cycle. However, if seasonal cycle is removed from the series, the jack-knife estimates of variance may become larger. The t-statistic shows that differences in autocorrelation among the stations as well as among the grid points are not statistically significant while differences between the stations and grid points proved to be statistically significant.
Propriétés électroniques et schémas de bandes dans les semi-conducteurs amorphes. II. Etude des phénomènes de transport

Nous presentons de facon detaillee l'etude theorique de trois importants parametres electriques susceptibles de caracteriser un semi-conducteur amorphe. Le schema de bande retenu est celui de Mott - Davis et les trois parametres : conductivite continue, pouvoir thermoelectrique et conductivite alternative sont determines en particulier en fonction de la temperature : nous nous sommes attaches a presenter les calculs sous leur forme la plus generale possible en faisant intervenir successivement les differents mecanismes relatifs aux differents niveaux d'energie (energie relative aux etats delocalises, localises dans les queues de bande, localises au voisinage du niveau de Fermi). Les representations schematiques, classiques pour la conductivite continue et a un degre moindre pour la conductivite alternative, sont proposees : nous detaillons en particulier celle du pouvoir thermoelectrique S dont l'etude est en fait essentielle car le signe de S (cf. Mott) est une des seules caracterisations fiables du type de semi-conducteur amorphe etudie.
DOES STELLAR FEEDBACK CREATE H i HOLES? A HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/VERY LARGE ARRAY STUDY OF HOLMBERG II

We use deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) F555W and F814W photometry of resolved stars in the M81 Group dwarf irregular galaxy Ho II to study the hypothesis that the holes identified in the neutral interstellar medium (H i) are created by stellar feedback. From the deep photometry, we construct color–magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and measure the star formation histories (SFHs) for stars contained in H i holes from two independent holes catalogs, as well as select control fields, i.e., similar sized regions that span a range of H i column densities. The CMDs reveal young (< 200 Myr) stellar populations inside all H i holes, which contain very few bright OB stars with ages less than 10 Myr, indicating they are not reliable tracers of H i hole locations while the recent SFHs confirm multiple episodes of star formation within most holes. Converting the recent SFHs into stellar feedback energies, we find that enough energy has been generated to have created all holes. However, the required energy is not always produced over a timescale that is less than the estimated kinematic age of the hole. A similar analysis of stars in the control fields finds that the stellar populations of the control fields and H i holes are statistically indistinguishable. However, because we are only sensitive to holes ∼100 pc in diameter, we cannot tell if there are smaller holes inside the control fields. The combination of the CMDs, recent SFHs, and locations of young stars shows that the stellar populations inside H i holes are not coherent, single-aged, stellar clusters, as previously suggested, but rather multi-age populations distributed across each hole. From a comparison of the modeled and observed integrated magnitudes, and the locations and energetics of stars inside of H i holes, we propose a potential new model: a viable mechanism for creating the observed H i holes in Ho ii is stellar feedback from multiple generations of SF spread out over tens or hundreds of Myr, and thus, the concept of an age for an H i hole is intrinsically ambiguous. For H i holes in the outer parts of Ho ii, located beyond the HST/ACS coverage, we use Monte Carlo simulations of expected stellar populations to show that low level SF could provide the energy necessary to form these holes. Applying the same method to the SMC, we find that the holes that appear to be void of stars could have formed via stellar feedback from low level SF. We further find that Hα and 24 μm emission, tracers of the most recent star formation, do not correlate well with the positions of the H i holes. However, UV emission, which traces star formation over roughly the last 100 Myr, shows a much better correlation with the locations of the H i holes.
Design and Implementation of Burst Buffer Over-Subscription Scheme for HPC Storage Systems

Burst Buffer is widely used in supercomputer centers to bridge the performance gap between computational power and the high-performance I/O systems. The primary role of Burst Buffer is to temporarily absorb the bursty I/O and reduce the heavy access on Parallel File System (PFS). However, the job resource manager on High-Performance Computer (HPC) systems prefers to use a dedicated Burst Buffer allocation approach, which eventually leads to the severely underutilized Burst Buffer resource. To improve the efficiency of using the expensive Burst Buffer resource, we analyze the I/O patterns on Burst Buffer in depth. We propose Burst Buffer over-subscription allocation method, which improves Burst Buffer utilization by allowing each job to access Burst Buffer only during its I/O phases so that the jobs can overlap each other. Furthermore, we develop a new I/O congestion-aware scheduler and a transparent data management system between Burst Buffer and PFS. Our approach also reduces the memory overhead and improves the data persistence of the data management system by adapting the persistent memory. With the proposed approach, not only the Burst Buffer utilization can be improved, but also HPC applications can achieve high I/O performance by exploiting the powerful Burst Buffer hardware capabilities. Experimental results show that BBOS can improve Burst Buffer utilization by up to 120% while more stable and higher checkpoint performance is guaranteed even under high I/O loads compared to other state-of-the-art schedulers. Besides, our approach can improve the hit ratio of restart requests by up to 96.4% and provides up to 210% higher restart throughput on Burst Buffer.
Stellar wind collision and dust formation in long-period, heavily interacting Wolf-Rayet binaries.

The rate of mass loss in the from of cold dense gas from a wide Wolf-Rayet binary like WR 140 is estimated. At some distance from the binary, this gas can form a dust shell and reradiate the UV radiation in the IR region. In the case of WR 140 which has a high eccentricity the observed IR outbursts may be caused by the strong increase of the cold dense gas outflow from WR 140 at the periastron
Electromagnetic and Mechanical Topology Optimization for SynRM Rotors Considering High Dimensional Constraints

The knowledge-based parametric design process of the rotor topology of the synchronous reluctance motor (SynRM) requires a tedious parameter definition, selection, and searching process until an optimal design can be obtained. This research proposes a topology optimization approach based on solid isotropic material with penalization method for the SynRM rotor topology design. The aim is to pursue a more intelligent and automatic design process. Specifically, the proposed method aims to generate the SynRM rotor design of high output torque profile. Meanwhile, the mechanical constraints including structural compliance and stress are also considered for promising the structural reliability of the rotor. Considering the high dimensional constraints caused by the multiphysics performances, the augmented Lagrangian method based optimization framework is developed to solve the minimization problem in a compact scheme. To prove the effectiveness of the developed method, simulations, and analysis on the topology optimization of SynRMs are performed in this article. Prototyping and experiment are also conducted for verifying the performance of the optimized structure.
D-S Augmentation: Density-Semantics Augmentation for 3-D Object Detection

Cameras and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors are commonly used together in autonomous vehicles to provide rich color and texture information and information on the location of objects, respectively. However, fusing image and point-cloud information remains a key challenge. In this article, we propose D-S augmentation as a 3-D object detection method based on point-cloud density and semantic augmentation. Our proposed approach first performs 2-D bounding box detection and instance segmentation on an image. Then, a LiDAR point cloud is projected onto an instance segmentation mask, and a fixed number of random points are generated. Finally, a global ${N}$ -nearest neighbor clustering is used to associate random and projected points to give depth to virtual points and complete point-cloud density augmentation (P-DA). Then, point-cloud semantic augmentation (P-SA) is performed, in which the instance segmentation mask of an object is used to associate it with the point cloud. The instance-segmented class labels and segmentation scores are assigned to the projected cloud, and the projection points added with 1-D features are inversely mapped to the point-cloud space to obtain a semantically augmented point cloud. We conducted extensive experiments on the nuScenes (Caesar et al., 2020) and KITTI (Geiger et al., 2012) datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Notably, D-S augmentation outperformed a LiDAR-only baseline detector by +7.9% in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and +5.1% in terms of nuScenes detection score (NDS) and outperformed the state-of-the-art multimodal fusion-based methods. We also present the results of ablation studies to show that the fusion module improved the performance of a baseline detector.
Perspectives of reentry and desistance: a comparison of individuals convicted of general and sexual offenses

Abstract While there is a wealth of literature on recidivism following release from correctional facilities, it remains unclear whether this desistance process varies across offender types. Specifically, individuals convicted of sexual offenses (ICSOs) may face unique challenges upon return to the community and thus, it is important to explore how ICSOs plans for transitioning to the community and remaining crime free differ from individuals convicted of general (non-sexual) offenses’(ICGOs). To this end, the present mixed-methods study aimed to explore both ICSOs and ICGOs perceptions of reentry and desistance upon release from prison. A sample of male ICGOs (n = 139) and ICSOs (n = 106) nearing release from a maximum-security prison were interviewed about their crimes and expectations upon release. Overall, ICSOs and ICGOs reported similar levels of preparedness for reentry and obstacles to desistence (e.g., negative influences, employment/schooling). However, ICSOs anticipated difficulty complying with restrictions, which may be a result of the unique legislation they are subject to upon release. Overall, this study sheds light on the importance of programming and transition services to prepare those being released from correctional facilities for reentry, particularly those convicted of a sexual offense who may face additional barriers when returning to their communities.
Oxygen-vacancy-related dielectric relaxations in SrTiO3 at high temperatures

We herein present comparative investigation on the dielectric properties of both ceramic and single crystal SrTiO3 samples in the temperature from room temperature to 1073 K. Two relaxations were observed in both samples. They behave as Debye-like and relaxor-like relaxations in ceramic and single crystal samples, respectively. These relaxations were found to be bulk effect related to oxygen-vacancy. In single crystal sample, the relaxations result from the long-range conduction associated with singly and doubly charged oxygen vacancies. In ceramic sample, the oxygen vacancies are more strongly localized in relation to the crystal. This leads to a new phenomenon of formation and dissociation of oxygen vacancy clusters before the vacancies make contribution to the long-range conduction. The low-temperature relaxation in ceramic sample was determined by the clustering and dissociating processes of the oxygen vacancies. The high-temperature relaxation in ceramic sample was found to share the same mechanism a.
A Millisecond Pulsar Progenitor to an Ultracompact Low-mass X-Ray Binary

With a pulsar timing baseline of 10 years, the orbital period decay due to gravitational radiation will be measurable for the recently discovered short orbital period millisecond pulsar PSR J0751+1807. This is the first white dwarf-neutron star binary system with an orbit compact enough for such a measurement to be possible. The cooling age of the white dwarf in this system will be impossible to measure due to the possible effect of heating by the pulsar emission. After 7 billion years of orbital decay, when the orbital period reaches about 5 minutes, PSR J0751+1807 will enter an ultracompact low-mass X-ray binary phase. Its predicted observational X-ray parameters are very similar to the ultracompact low-mass X-ray binary 1820-303. The ultimate fate of the system after Roche lobe overflow is unknown. One possibility is that the companion may eventually tidally disrupt, leaving a disk of material that could form into planets.
On a result for finite Markov chains

In an undergraduate course on stochastic processes, Markov chains are discussed in great detail. Textbooks on stochastic processes provide interesting properties of finite Markov chains. This note discusses one such property regarding the number of steps in which a state is reachable or accessible from another state in a finite Markov chain with M (≥ 2) states.
An improved YOLO model for detecting trees suffering from pine wilt disease at different stages of infection

ABSTRACT Pine wilt disease (PWD) is one of the most destructive forest diseases in the world. Therefore, timely monitoring of PWD is essential to the preservation of the ecological environment. However, the complex topography of PWD-outbreak locations affords many limitations in the manual detection of the disease. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep learning technology to detect PWD-infected trees has gained popularity in recent years. In this study, we configured the You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) model according to the characteristics of the three disease stages of PWD and proposed an improved model called Effi_YOLO_v3. The results revealed that the improved model achieved good detection performance. The proposed model yielded a mean average precision (mAP) of 94.39%, and the classification of the different infection stages was relatively accurate. The recall values for the classifications of trees in the early-infection, late-infection, and death stages were 89.15%, 86.13%, and 86.77%, respectively. This indicates that the model offers good applicability in detecting different stages of PWD in trees.
A Review of Hybrid Supply Modulators in CMOS Technologies for Envelope Tracking PAs

This article reviews trends, architectures, and recent developments in CMOS-based supply modulators (SM) used for envelope-tracking power amplifiers (ET-PAs). This review details the most commonly used hybrid supply modulator (HSM) architecture in CMOS and discusses its performance requirements and design challenges. The importance of efficiency, speed, linearity, and output power in HSM design is delineated and different methods that focus on maximizing these performance parameters are presented. Finally, the design challenges of envelope tracking systems are discussed, and an overview of device technologies for implementing SM and ET-PAs is given.
Extension of Goulden–Jackson cluster method on pattern occurrences in random sequences and comparison with Régnier–Szpankowski method

The Goulden–Jackson cluster method is a powerful method to find generating functions of pattern occurrences in random sequences [1]. The method is clearly explained, extended and implemented by Noonan and Zeilberger [2]. In this paper, we elaborate on one of the several extensions in [2], namely the extension from symmetrical Bernoulli sequences where the occurrences of each symbol have equal probability, to asymmetrical Bernoulli sequences with different probabilities of symbol generations. An explicit formula is derived for the extension, which is implicitly embedded in the treatment of [2]. The extended result is then compared with the method of Régnier–Szpankowski [3], a method which was developed independently to tackle the same problem. By manipulating some matrix inversions, we show that the Régnier–Szpankowski method can be simplified to the extended Goulden–Jackson method.
Comment on `Quantum-mechanical Carnot engine'

The equations governing adiabatic and isothermal quantum processes involved in an ideal two-state quantum heat engine are modified when the ideality restriction is removed. We seek and study a few situations to determine the nature and magnitude of the modifications. If one confines such systems well within the classical turning point, we show how one can profitably employ the Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization rule to estimate the leading correction terms due to non-ideality. The endeavour is likely to be important in studies on practical quantum engines.
Multi-Pulse-Width Modulated Control of Linear Systems

A method is presented to convert a parent discrete time control into a multi-pulse-width modulated equivalent. It is shown that such an equivalence can be established by matching the system state response at each sampling intervalandthat,providedasufe cientnumberofpulsespersamplingintervalareused,thedegreeofapproximation can be as high as desired even if a relatively slow sampling frequency is adopted. A numerical example on a simple fourth-order system provides the basis for understanding the pros and cons of the method, which is then applied to a more complex aerospace problem: the stabilization of coupled thermoelastic vibrations of a space structure.
Are Viscoelastometric Assays of Old Generation Ready for Disposal? Comment on Volod et al. Viscoelastic Hemostatic Assays: A Primer on Legacy and New Generation Devices. J. Clin. Med. 2022, 11, 860

With the advent of new viscoelastometric hemostatic assay (VHA) devices, with ready-to-use cartridge reagents allowing for their use by people without special laboratory skills, the appreciation of the actual clinical value of VHAs in settings such as severe trauma, post-partum hemorrhage, cardiac surgery and liver transplantation still needs to be fully validated. While two of the newest versions remain based on a ‘cup and pin’ system (ROTEM® sigma, ClotPro®), two other new devices (TEG® 6s, Quantra®) rely on very different technologies: clotting blood is no longer in contact with the probe and challenged by oscillation of one of the components but explored with ultrasound exposure. A systematic literature search (including Sonoclot®) retrieved 20 observational studies (19 prospective). Most studies pointed to imperfect agreements, highlighting the non-interchangeability of devices. Only a few studies, often with a limited number of patients enrolled, used a clinical outcome. No study compared VHA results with conventional laboratory assays obtained through a rapid tests panel. Clinical evidence of the utility of the new VHAs largely remains to be proven through randomized clinical trials, with clinically relevant outcomes, and compared to rapid panel hemostasis testing. The availability of new, improved VHA devices provides an impetus and an opportunity to do so.