Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS AND ROTATING SHIFT WORK: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS AND MANAGERS

This report is a general review of some of the current themes and practices regarding shift work for use by air traffic controllers, technicians and managers. Shift work is a difficult issue for managers because it easily can become emotionally charged. This report offers some new ideas and strategies for managers and controllers that may be helpful in dealing with difficulties arising from shift work, however there is not single simple solution to the problem. Circadian rhythm displacements are recognized and accepted by controllers as part of the job and are usually dealt with effectively on an individual basis. The Federal Aviation Administration's policies regarding shift work are found to be fair, flexible and democratic. No air traffic control safety problems are known to be related exclusively to circadian effects and no medical problems are known to result from rotating shift work. Shift work also offers some positive features, including premium night differential pay and daytime hours for other pursuits.
CULTIVATION CONDITIONS FOR PROTEASE PRODUCTION BY A THERMO-HALOSTABLE BACTERIAL ISOLATE PLS A

Polyextremophiles have increasingly been utilised to produce thermostable enzymes with better stability in multiple extreme conditions. This study reports the screening results of four new bacterial isolates (PLS A, PLS 75, PLS 76 and PLS 80), isolated from an under water hot springs, in producing thermo-halostable protease enzyme. Optimum cultivation conditions for the protease production were also studied. Screening of protease-producing isolates was conducted using Thermus solid medium enriched with 3% skim milk and 0.5% casein. The growth of the isolates showing protease activity was monitored by measuring the cell dry weight and protease activity during 24 h cultivation period. The activity was also measured at various cultivation conditions, i.e. temperature, pH and salt concentrations. Amongst the four isolates, only PLS A showed the ability to produce protease. The optimum cultivation conditions for protease production were observed at 65°C, pH 7 for 18 h incubation. The activity increased with the addition of 1% NaCl concentration (0.085 Unit/mL). The ability of PLS A isolate to produce thermo-halostable protease was encouraging as they could potentially be used in industries requiring the enzyme with multiple extremes.
Service Deployment in Heterogeneous Cloud-like Environments

The amount of power consumed by data centres world wide is increasing, and due to growing electricity bills, service providers aim more attention on energy-efficient management of their data centres. In order to achieve this goal, a service provider need to make smart decisions regarding the deployment of his services. At the same time, in order to satisfy his end-users, a service provider needs to focus on delivery of services complying with the quality of service (QoS) requirements. Consequently, he needs to make decisions related to replication level of his services, as well. In this thesis, I propose two interrelated mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models aiming at supporting service providers in their decision making. The first MILP concerns energy-efficient deployment of a service provider's services in his own virtualized data center, where the objective is to minimized the cost of energy usage, while satisfying the response time and availability requirements of the end-users. The second MILP introduces the flexibility of Cloud computing by letting the service provider have the opportunity to deploy services in a public cloud, and hence the objective is to minimize the total cost of deployment, while still, ensuring satisfactory QoS levels. The proposed MILP models are tested on test instances of varying size with the intention to discuss scalability issues and commenting on modelling choices. The results show that the second model is the hardest to solve, in terms of closing the optimality gap, but nevertheless, it is depicted that good solutions are found early in the branch and bound search. Furthermore, different modelling choices illustrate the trade-off between energy-efficient management of data center resources and service performance.
Need of Dormitory Environment Improvement and School-life Stress in the Special-purpose high school according to Residential Satisfaction in Dormitory and Housing

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence the need for improvements to dormitory environments and to study the stress from school-life according to residential satisfaction in dormitories and housing. For the purpose of this study, a survey was conducted including a questionnaire consisting of a residential satisfaction scale, a need of dormitory environment improvement scale, and a school-life stress scale. The subjects were 453 special purpose students in Daegu and Gyeongsangbuk-do who all live in a dormitory. Factor analysis, Cronbach' and MANOVA were employed for data analysis, and Scheffe test was used for post-hoc analysis. First, the lower group the satisfaction of a physical residential environment in a dormitory, the more likely it is that the dormitory environment need improvement. The result of this study suggests that dormitory students are much more sensitive to conditions relating to physical residential satisfaction than to sociopsychological residential satisfaction. Also, the residents believe that change to these physical residential conditions facilitate an improvement to sociopsychological residential satisfaction. Moreover, when the satisfaction of a physical residential environment is lower group, more perceptive stress occurs from academic, health and personal factors while a lower satisfaction for the sociopsychological residential environment results in a more perceptive stress from the environment. The result of this study suggests that dormitory conditions indicate the necessity of improving the environment to adapt well to school-life, thus reducing stress. Also when simply providing a supplementary physical residential environment the sociopsychological residential environment should be considered, as this can cause conflicts between roommates. Second, the lower group the satisfaction for a physical residential environment in housing, the more likely it is that the dormitory environment need improvement. The result of this study suggests that for environments of inadequate housing there is a strong urge towards needing more independence and a better living environment. Third, when group feel there is a more substantial difference in the physical residential environment between dormitories and housing, it is more likely it is that the dormitory environment need to be improved. Also, when they feel there is more substantial difference in the sociopsychological residential environment between dormitories and housing, a more perceptive stress is detected from the environment. The result of this study suggests that dormitory students want to have the same level of conditions as those provided in housing. Also, dormitory students want to need more physical environment improvement than sociopsychological environment improvement.
Non-Destructive Bio-Assay of Single Living Cell

For more than a decade, researchers are trying to find out practical commercial tool for particle/cell detection and characterization with portable, low cost, specific and sensitive characteristics. The advance of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and microfluidic technologies opened a major challenge for a large number of researchers, industrial health and bio companies to invest their time and budget into the avenue of point of care health instruments or devices helping the early detection of cancer cells within the human blood via circulating malignant cells. Actual existing commercial flow cytometer that detects and identifies the type and size of cells are costly, time consuming and need the assistance of highly qualified operators. Moreover, in certain research activities, micro cytometers are investigated and assessed with different detection techniques such as optical, impedance spectroscopy, electromagnetic spectroscopy and many other techniques. The aim of this research is to investigate an innovative mechanism that enables to characterize, identify and differentiate among various living cells including malignant tumor cells through the use of the electromagnetic energy detection technique. Cells are spatially centered in a microfluidic channel through dielectrophoresis technique then detected and characterized by measuring and interpreting the RF signal transmission of the cells passing one by one through the interrogation region in the microchannel. The outcome of this research might help the clinical end user to gain certain important information about the condition of the patient, establish personalized treatment or track the effect of a treatment. Detection and counting of tumor cells may help identification of early stages of illness and help patient with early care that may significantly cut the overall cost of cancer management.
Connexin-Based Channel Activity Is Not Specifically Altered by Hepatocarcinogenic Chemicals

Connexin-based channels play key roles in cellular communication and can be affected by deleterious chemicals. In this study, the effects of various genotoxic carcinogenic compounds, non-genotoxic carcinogenic compounds and non-carcinogenic compounds on the expression and functionality of connexin-based channels, both gap junctions and connexin hemichannels, were investigated in human hepatoma HepaRG cell cultures. Expression of connexin26, connexin32, and connexin43 was evaluated by means of real-time reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis, immunoblot analysis and in situ immunostaining. Gap junction functionality was assessed via a scrape loading/dye transfer assay. Opening of connexin hemichannels was monitored by measuring extracellular release of adenosine triphosphate. It was found that both genotoxic and non-genotoxic carcinogenic compounds negatively affect connexin32 expression. However, no specific effects related to chemical type were observed at gap junction or connexin hemichannel functionality level.
High Grade MEC Masquerading as Non Small Cell Lung Cancer

Mucoepidermoid Carcinoma (MEC) is a salivary gland tumor that rarely presents in the lungs and can be sometimes misclassified as squamous cell carcinoma. While surgical resection is the initial treatment of choice, its tendency to present as a proximal endobronchial lesion requires many patients to undergo lobectomies or pneumonectomies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only case of high grade MEC of the lung that was previously misdiagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma.
Plasticine: A Cross-layer Approximation Methodology for Multi-kernel Applications through Minimally Biased, High-throughput, and Energy-efficient SIMD Soft Multiplier-divider

The rapid evolution of error-resilient programs intertwined with their quest for high throughput has motivated the use of Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) components in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Particularly, to exploit the error-resiliency of such applications, Cross-layer approximation paradigm has recently gained traction, the ultimate goal of which is to efficiently exploit approximation potentials across layers of abstraction. From circuit- to application-level, valuable studies have proposed various approximation techniques, albeit linked to four drawbacks: First, most of approximate multipliers and dividers operate only in SISD mode. Second, imprecise units are often substituted, merely in a single kernel of a multi-kernel application, with an end-to-end analysis in Quality of Results (QoR) and not in the gained performance. Third, state-of-the-art (SoA) strategies neglect the fact that each kernel contributes differently to the end-to-end QoR and performance metrics. Therefore, they lack in adopting a generic methodology for adjusting the approximation knobs to maximize performance gains for a user-defined quality constraint. Finally, multi-level techniques lack in being efficiently supported, from application-, to architecture-, to circuit-level, in a cohesive cross-layer hierarchy. In this article, we propose Plasticine, a cross-layer methodology for multi-kernel applications, which addresses the aforementioned challenges by efficiently utilizing the synergistic effects of a chain of techniques across layers of abstraction. To this end, we propose an application sensitivity analysis and a heuristic that tailor the precision at constituent kernels of the application by finding the most tolerable degree of approximations for each of consecutive kernels, while also satisfying the ultimate user-defined QoR. The chain of approximations is also effectively enabled in a cross-layer hierarchy, from application- to architecture- to circuit-level, through the plasticity of SIMD multiplier-dividers, each supporting dynamic precision variability along with hybrid functionality. The end-to-end evaluations of Plasticine on three multi-kernel applications employed in bio-signal processing, image processing, and moving object tracking for Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) demonstrate 41%–64%, 39%–62%, and 70%–86% improvements in area, latency, and Area-Delay-Product (ADP), respectively, over 32-bit fixed precision, with negligible loss in QoR. To springboard future research in reconfigurable and approximate computing communities, our implementations will be available and open-sourced at https://cfaed.tu-dresden.de/pd-downloads.
NASA Aeropropulsion Research: Looking Forward

NASA has been researching new technology and system concepts to meet the requirements of aeropropulsion for 21st Century aircraft. The air transportation for the new millennium will require revolutionary solutions to meet public demand for improving safety, reliability, environmental compatibility, and affordability. Whereas the turbine engine revolution will continue during the next two decades, several new revolutions are required to achieve the dream of an affordable, emissionless, and silent aircraft. This paper reviews the continuing turbine engine revolution and explores the propulsion system impact of future revolutions in propulsion configuration, fuel infrastructure, and alternate energy systems. A number of promising concepts, ranging from the ultrahigh to fuel cell-powered distributed propulsion are also reviewed.
Circulating miRNAs as Potential Biomarkers Distinguishing Relapsing–Remitting from Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. A Review

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating neurodegenerative, highly heterogeneous disease with a variable course. The most common MS subtype is relapsing–remitting (RR), having interchanging periods of worsening and relative stabilization. After a decade, in most RR patients, it alters into the secondary progressive (SP) phase, the most debilitating one with no clear remissions, leading to progressive disability deterioration. Among the greatest challenges for clinicians is understanding disease progression molecular mechanisms, since RR is mainly characterized by inflammatory processes, while in SP, the neurodegeneration prevails. This is especially important because distinguishing RR from the SP subtype early will enable faster implementation of appropriate treatment. Currently, the MS course is not well-correlated with the biomarkers routinely used in clinical practice. Despite many studies, there are still no reliable indicators correlating with the disease stage and its activity degree. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) may be considered valuable molecules for the MS diagnosis and, presumably, helpful in predicting disease subtype. MiRNA expression dysregulation is commonly observed in the MS course. Moreover, knowledge of diverse miRNA panel expression between RRMS and SPMS may allow for deterring disability progression through successful treatment. Therefore, in this review, we address the current state of research on differences in miRNA panel expression between the phases.
IFDS: An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis System With Multisource Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Different Working Conditions

Intelligent fault diagnosis is an important subject of mechanical system maintenance. Domain adaptation is a method to solve the problem that the model trained on the training set (source domain) is not suitable for the test set (target domain) due to different working conditions in fault diagnosis. In industrial scenarios, there may be multiple-source domains. For this reason, we proposed an intelligent fault diagnosis system (IFDS) with multisource unsupervised domain adaptive network that adapts to single- or multiple-source domains. The proposed method considers the differences between sources and uses source domain data and a small amount of unlabeled target domain data to mine the feature information contained in the data. IFDS uses a feature extractor to learn the feature representations, constructs a domain discriminator for each source domain, and learns domain-invariant features through adversarial training to diagnose target domain faults. The validity of the method in fault diagnosis is verified by various transfer tasks of two public fault-bearing datasets.
The Astrophysical Variance in Gaia–Radial Velocity Spectrometer Spectra

Large surveys are providing a diversity of spectroscopic observations with Gaia alone set to deliver millions of Ca-triplet-region spectra across the Galaxy. We aim to understand the dimensionality of the chemical abundance information in the Gaia–Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) data to inform galactic archeology pursuits. We fit a quadratic model of four primary sources of variability, described by labels of T eff, logg , [Fe/H], and [α/Fe], to the normalized flux of 10,802 red-clump stars from the Gaia-RVS-like Abundances and Radial velocity Galactic Origins Survey (ARGOS). We examine the residuals between ARGOS spectra and the models and find that the models capture the flux variability across 85% of the wavelength region. The remaining residual variance is concentrated to the Ca-triplet features, at an amplitude up to 12% of the normalized flux. We use principal component analysis on the residuals and find orthogonal correlations in the Ca-triplet core and wings. This variability, not captured by our model, presumably marks departures from the completeness of the 1D LTE label description. To test the indication of low-dimensionality, we turn to abundance-space to infer how well we can predict measured [Si/H], [O/H], [Ca/H], [Ni/H], and [Al/H] abundances from the Gaia-RVS-like Radial Velocity Experiment survey with models of T eff, logg , [Fe/H], and [Mg/Fe]. We find that we can nearly entirely predict these abundances. Using high-precision Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment abundances, we determine that a measurement uncertainty of <0.03 dex is required to capture additional information from these elements. This indicates that a four-label model sufficiently describes chemical abundance variance for an approximate signal-to-noise ratio <200 per pixel, in Gaia-RVS spectra.
How to Run Your Own Online Business: A Gamification Experience in ESL

Notwithstanding the importance and relevance of gamification as a topical methodology in education, and after a literature review, there are just a few studies using role-playing games. In order to motivate and facilitate English as second language (ESL) learning of first year of Bachillerato (year 12) students at a public high school in the Region of Murcia (Spain) and following an action research methodology, we design, implement and evaluate a role-playing game, which consists of the creation and management of a company, The Tik Tok School. The results confirm that students felt more comfortable speaking in English because they were more motivated. They also state that during the experience they were more focused on learning rather than winning the game and that they prefer a gamification approach over traditional settings. Furthermore, they have been participating constantly using more English than Spanish. After the data analysis, we conclude that this methodology positively impacts motivation and the acquisition of a second language.
YOT-Net: YOLOv3 Combined Triplet Loss Network for Copper Elbow Surface Defect Detection

Copper elbows are an important product in industry. They are used to connect pipes for transferring gas, oil, and liquids. Defective copper elbows can lead to serious industrial accidents. In this paper, a novel model named YOT-Net (YOLOv3 combined triplet loss network) is proposed to automatically detect defective copper elbows. To increase the defect detection accuracy, triplet loss function is employed in YOT-Net. The triplet loss function is introduced into the loss module of YOT-Net, which utilizes image similarity to enhance feature extraction ability. The proposed method of YOT-Net shows outstanding performance in copper elbow surface defect detection.
Stimulated or Inhibited Response of Methane Flux to Nitrogen Addition Depends on Nitrogen Levels

Upland forest soil is significant atmospheric methane (CH4) sink that is suggested to be affected by increased nitrogen (N) availability, likely from N deposition or addition. However, the effect of N addition on upland soil CH4 uptake and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, in a montane forest, frequent in situ sampling over three years revealed that this forest soil was a sink of atmospheric CH4 with an uptake rate of 304.9 ± 26.9 mg CH4/m2/yr under ambient treatment. High N addition suppressed CH4 uptake by 23.2% compared to ambient conditions, whereas low N addition stimulated CH4 uptake by 35.6%. N addition did not change the monthly pattern of CH4 flux, which was quite similar to the pattern of leachate dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations from the organic layer. The linear relationship between the CH4 flux and DOC concentration indicated increased CH4 uptake with an increase in DOC. The induced decrease in CH4 uptake under high N addition was partly related to the high soil N availability and partly contributed to a decrease in DOC due to high N addition. In contrast, the increased CH4 uptake under temporarily low N addition was most likely correlated with a release in N limitation to CH4‐oxidizing bacteria. These results indicated that the effect of N addition on CH4 uptake was dependent on the level of N, and DOC could regulate CH4 uptake in upland soil, which should be investigated in depth when understanding the responses of dynamic CH4 fluxes to N additions.