Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beyond the looking glass… What could ‘fit-for-future-purpose’ governance operating models look like in the future?

This study builds further on the paper presented at Virtus Corporate Governance Conference in May 20201, which explored the suitability and current relevance of board operating models. That paper highlighted challenges relating to the suitability of prevailing board operating models and posited some alternative board governance models as a provocation. While a considerable amount of academic and commercial research focuses on current board issues, performance drivers, etc., there is little apparent futuristic thinking, i.e., consideration of the broader changes that will be likely that could inform, modify, accelerate or possibly negate current thinking on what boards should be doing to be effective.
A method for fault diagnosis of power system of carrier rocket engine based on linear-quadratic receding time-domain algorithm

The article studies the fault diagnosis of the first-stage power system of a carrier rocket made up of multiple engines. It establishes the simplified 6-DOF nonlinear model and uses the extended Kalman filter to generate residual errors. The quadratic receding time-domain algorithm is used to detect faults, and estimation vector fault characteristics are used to estimate precisely the thrust loss degree. Faults are located with the direction of abrupt change in overload fault. The simulation results show that the method can quickly detect engine faults, estimate the thrust loss degree with fault estimation values, and locate precisely the serial number of the faulty engine of the power system made up of multiple engines. The method boosts the development of the online health management technology of the power system of a carrier rocket.
A Novel Approach to Global Positioning System Accuracy Assessment, Verified on LiDAR Alignment of One Million Kilometers at a Continent Scale, as a Foundation for Autonomous DRIVING Safety Analysis

This paper concerns a new methodology for accuracy assessment of GPS (Global Positioning System) verified experimentally with LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data alignment at continent scale for autonomous driving safety analysis. Accuracy of an autonomous driving vehicle positioning within a lane on the road is one of the key safety considerations and the main focus of this paper. The accuracy of GPS positioning is checked by comparing it with mobile mapping tracks in the recorded high-definition source. The aim of the comparison is to see if the GPS positioning remains accurate up to the dimensions of the lane where the vehicle is driving. The goal is to align all the available LiDAR car trajectories to confirm the of accuracy of GNSS + INS (Global Navigation Satellite System + Inertial Navigation System). For this reason, the use of LiDAR metric measurements for data alignment implemented using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) was investigated, assuring no systematic drift by applying GNSS+INS constraints. The methodology was verified experimentally using arbitrarily chosen measurement instruments (NovAtel GNSS + INS, Velodyne HDL32 LiDAR) mounted onto mobile mapping systems. The accuracy was assessed and confirmed by the alignment of 32,785 trajectories with a total length of 1,159,956.9 km and a total of 186.4 × 109 optimized parameters (six degrees of freedom of poses) that cover the United States region in the 2016–2019 period. The alignment improves the trajectories; thus the final map is consistent. The proposed methodology extends the existing methods of global positioning system accuracy assessment, focusing on realistic environmental and driving conditions. The impact of global positioning system accuracy on autonomous car safety is discussed. It is shown that 99% of the assessed data satisfy the safety requirements (driving within lanes of 3.6 m) for Mid-Size (width 1.85 m, length 4.87 m) vehicles and 95% for Six-Wheel Pickup (width 2.03–2.43 m, length 5.32–6.76 m). The conclusion is that this methodology has great potential for global positioning accuracy assessment at the global scale for autonomous driving applications. LiDAR data alignment is introduced as a novel approach to GNSS + INS accuracy confirmation. Further research is needed to solve the identified challenges.
Impacts of Continuously Increasing Urbanization Ratios on Warming Rates and Temperature Extremes Observed Over the Beijing Area

Evaluations of the impacts of increasing urbanization ratios on air temperatures are less quantitative and accurate due to the lack of high‐resolution land cover data sets. Here, based on the latest released high‐resolution (30‐m) land cover data from 1985 to 2017, annual urbanization ratios around each station in Beijing were calculated. Warming rates and temperature extremes were compared between nonrural stations (17 stations with continuously increasing urbanization ratios) and purely rural stations (3 stations with continuous urbanization ratios of zero). Although urbanized areas only occupied 22.2% of the total area in Beijing, urbanization ratios at nonrural stations already reached an average of 62.4% (10 km2)−1 in 2017, and their average rate reached 15.1% (10 km2)−1 decade−1. From 1985 to 2017, each 10% increase in the urbanization ratio with 10 km2 had led to additional annual warming of 0.14 ± 0.11, 0.17 ± 0.08, and 0.30 ± 0.17°C at nonrural stations for daily maximum (Tmax), mean (Tmean), and minimum (Tmin) air temperatures, respectively. Meanwhile, each 10% increase in the urbanization ratio with 10 km2 had led to additional changes of 11.6 ± 5.1, 12.7 ± 5.8, and −11.1 ± 5.2 days at nonrural stations for hot days, hot nights, and chilly nights, respectively. Additionally, the inner‐annual urbanization contributions to the warming increased significantly at rates of 10.7% decade−1 and 14.1% decade−1 for Tmean and Tmin, and reached 49.0% and 52.6% in 2017, respectively. The inner‐annual urbanization contributions to the increasing hot nights and the decreasing chilly nights changed at rates of 16.7% decade−1 and 15.6% decade−1, and reached 57.8% and 53.1% in 2017, respectively.
Cross-Modal Guidance for Hyperfluorescence Segmentation in Fundus Fluorescein Angiography

For lesions required segmentation are very similar to other background tissues, existing methods often incorrectly segment these tissues into foregrounds. As the fact that diagnostic descriptions can improve the performance of lesion segmentation, but existing methods do not sufficiently capture the correlations between images and the corresponding diagnostic descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal mutual-aware network which utilizes diagnostic descriptions to guide lesion segmentation. Concretely, the proposed network integrates several mutually aware feature fusion module to learn the co-relationship between visual and linguistic features at multiple levels, yielding the final mask which are more closely to the descriptions. We have carried out experiments on an internal dataset and the experimental results show a significant performance improvement compared to other traditional and cross-modal approaches.
Two of the most eventful years in the history of the South African Reserve Bank: William Henry Clegg and Johannes Postmus and the 1931–1932 crisis

ABSTRACT The SA Reserve Bank (SARB) was created as a result of an earlier gold standard monetary crisis that unfolded after World War I. From 1919, South Africa nominally maintained the gold standard, but not the conversion of banknotes into gold. This article seeks to discuss the SARB's views on the gold standard controversy, and to highlight the different attitudes of the first two governors, Clegg and Postmus, attitudes that have not previously been examined in the literature. It will also discuss the way in which the Bank of England misled Clegg, and how the views expressed privately differed from those in the SARB's Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) documentation. This paper considers the irony that Clegg was selected from the ranks of the Bank of England and was loyal to Threadneedle Street, but defended a monetary policy which aided one of the biggest constituencies of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party – Afrikaner farmers. By contrast, Postmus was previously at the Nederlandsche Bankvoor Zuid-Afrika, and supported the National Party position that South Africa should return to, and remain on, a gold standard independent of Britain. Despite this, Postmus's policy turned out to be disastrous for the mostly Afrikaner farmers affected by the 1931–1932 crisis.
Activation of Glassy Carbon Electrodes by Dispersed Metal Oxide Particles I . Ascorbic Acid Oxidation

Divers oxydes metalliques (Mox) sont disperses a la surface du carbone vitreux pour catalyser l'oxydation de l'acide ascorbique (AH 2 ). L'etude realisee sur 37 Mox montre que c'est les oxydes dont le metal est de valence+3 ou plus qui presentent le plus grand degre d'activation
Some properties of K-convex mappings in variable ordering settings

We consider a generalization of standard vector optimization which is called vector optimization with variable ordering structures. The problem class under consideration is characterized by a point-dependent proper cone-valued mapping: here, the concept of K-convexity of the incorporated mapping plays an important role. We present and discuss several properties of this class such as the cone of separations and the minimal variable K-convexification. The latter one refers to a general approach for generating a variable ordering mapping for which a given mapping is K-convex. Finally, this approach is applied to a particular case.
Common complications post-kidney transplantation: a literature review

The most efficacious management modality for patients with end-stage renal disease is kidney transplantation. Although dialysis of the conditions and obstacles might be a temporary solution, it has been previously correlated with increased risk of many complications, including mortality and reduced health-related quality of life. In this literature review, the aim to discuss the commonly reported complications of post-kidney transplant, including complications that are usually caused by immune-mediated pathologies and non-immunological. Nevertheless, allograft rejection post-kidney transplant is the most common reported immunological complication following transplantation because it can be acute, subacute, accelerated, or chronic. However, after induction of the immunosuppressive modalities, the rates of graft rejections were significantly reduced but many other drug-related complications and have emerged as post-transplantation DM, malignancies, cardiovascular diseases, and infections. Many risk factors for developing post-transplant DM have been reported in the literature, such as the type of the administered immunosuppressive modality, obesity, ethnicity, hypomagnesemia, cytomegalovirus (CMV), and hepatitis C viral (HCV) infections. Early identification and adjustment of the risk factors for these modalities might be associated with significant improvement in prognostic outcomes. The most commonly diagnosed post-transplant carcinomas, including renal cell carcinoma, squamous cell cancer of the lip and skin, salivary gland cancer, and cholangiocarcinoma. Besides, HCV, CMV, and BK virus were the most commonly reported infections following kidney transplantation.
Effect of Taylor dispersion on the thermo-diffusive instabilities of flames in a Hele–Shaw burner

We investigate the effect of Taylor dispersion on the thermo-diffusive instabilities of premixed flames. This is a physically interesting and analytically tractable problem within a relatively unexplored class of problems pertaining to the interaction between Taylor dispersion (or flow-enhanced diffusion) and Turing-like instabilities in reaction–diffusion systems. The analysis is carried out in the Hele–Shaw burner configuration and adopts a constant density and negligible heat-loss assumptions. These simplifying assumptions allow to isolate the effect of Taylor dispersion on flame stability (by switching off the Darrieus–Landau instability and experimentally challenging extinction phenomena) while keeping the problem analytically tractable. Starting from a 3D formulation, depth-averaged equations are first obtained leading to a 2D model which accounts for enhanced diffusion in the flow direction and shows that diffusion is effectively anisotropic. A linear stability analysis of the travelling wave solutions of the 2D problem leads to a simple dispersion relation which generalises a classical one obtained by Sivashinsky to incorporate the effect of the flow Peclet number coupled to that of the mixture's Lewis number. Based on the new dispersion relation, stability-bifurcation diagrams are drawn in terms of the Peclet and Lewis numbers and their physical implications are discussed. In particular, the study clearly demonstrates the ability of Taylor dispersion to significantly affect the flame thermo-diffusive instabilities, whether these are of the cellular or oscillatory types, with the effect on the latter being more pronounced. It is found that Taylor dispersion typically promotes the cellular instability and hampers the oscillatory instability. This is the first stability analysis accounting for Taylor dispersion in the context of combustion and has thus a fundamental value, both in combustion and in other reaction–diffusion areas, independent of the fact that the phenomena predicted may well be difficult to reproduce experimentally.
Molecular Environment-Specific Atomic Charges Improve Binding Affinity Predictions of SAMPL5 Host-Guest Systems

Host-guest systems are widely used in benchmarks as model systems to improve computational methods for absolute binding free energy predictions. Recent advances in sampling algorithms for alchemical free energy calculations and the increase in computational power have made their binding affinity prediction primarily dependent on the quality of the force field. Here, we propose a new methodology to derive the atomic charges of host-guest systems based on quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics calculations and minimal basis iterative stockholder (MBIS) partitioning of the polarized electron density. A newly developed interface between the OpenMM and ORCA software packages provides D-MBIS charges that represent the guest's average electrostatic interactions in the hosts or the solvent. The simulation workflow also calculates the average energy required to polarize the guest in the bound and unbound state. Alchemical free energy calculations using the general Amber force field parameters with D-MBIS charges improve the binding affinity prediction of six guests bound to two octa acid hosts compared to the AM1-BCC charge set after correction with the average energetic polarization cost. This correction originates from the difference in potential energy that is required to polarize the guest in the bound and unbound state and contributes significantly to the binding affinity of anionic guests.
Caregiver Distress in Cancer

Cancer is a chronic disease with associated physical, emotional, social, financial and spiritual problems. The primary caregiver takes care of all these cancer-related issues for the patient. In India, usually a family member or loved one is the caregiver of the patient. The caregivers themselves feel distress and many factors may be associated with their psychological well-being. Pattern of distress may vary according to phases of the disease like at diagnosis, during ongoing oncological treatment, recovery period, remission period, recurrence of cancer, during end of life care and bereavement. Identifying and understanding caregiver distress is the first step. Active listening and good communication is important to unearth the real concerns and fears in order to relieve the distress. This chapter covers components of caregiver distress, assessment, physical, psychosocial and spiritual factors associated with distress and its management. Lastly, some recent literature related to prevalence and factors associated with caregiver distress.
Recreation of a hair follicle regenerative microenvironment: Successes and pitfalls

Abstract The hair follicle (HF) is an exquisite skin appendage endowed with cyclical regenerative capacity; however, de novo follicle formation does not naturally occur. Consequently, patients suffering from extensive skin damage or hair loss are deprived of the HF critical physiological and/or aesthetic functions, severally compromising skin function and the individual's psychosocial well‐being. Translation of regenerative strategies has been prevented by the loss of trichogenic capacity that relevant cell populations undergo in culture and by the lack of suitable human‐based in vitro testing platforms. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the major difficulties associated with HF regeneration and the approaches used to overcome these drawbacks. We describe key cellular requirements and discuss the importance of the HF extracellular matrix and associated signaling for HF regeneration. Finally, we summarize the strategies proposed so far to bioengineer human HF or hair‐bearing skin models and disclose future trends for the field.
Coprime array‐adaptive beamforming via atomic‐norm‐based sparse recovery

Coprime arrays (CPAs) have been found to be an effective configuration for adaptive beamforming (ABF). However, most ABF methods for CPAs are embedded with the spatial spectrum estimation technique, and therefore they usually deteriorate in the case of low signal ‐ to ‐ noise ratio (SNR), especially without prior information of interferences. To address this issue,a robust ABF method for CPAs via atomic ‐ norm ‐ based sparse recovery is proposed. This method begins with initialised virtual array interpolation to avoid aperture loss caused by ‘holes’, which is subsequently transformed to a matrix completion and denoising issue via a Toeplitz step. With the matrix’s Hermitian Toeplitz structure and the intrinsic sparsity of interferences, sparse recovery for the interference covariance matrix is introduced by subtracting the target signal and noise from the received signal and implemented by atomic ‐ norm minimisation. Concretely, this non ‐ convex process is decomposed into two convex steps and solved iteratively. Unlike previous methods, this method can interpolate the virtual array and estimate the steering vector of the target and the noise power simultaneously; consequently, the interference ‐ plus ‐ noise covariance matrix is reconstructed with merely some trivial entry selections without the need for the spatial
Bursty Impulsive Noise Mitigation in NOMA: A MAP Receiver-Based Approach

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) was recently proposed as a promising multiple access technique that can enable improved spectral efficiency, massive connectivity, and low latency. In this letter, we analyze the performance of power domain NOMA in the presence of impulsive noise, which is encountered in various practical applications, such as smart-grid communications. Such noise is known to degrade overall system performance. Moreover, since the noise in question is bursty, it is an arduous task to detect the signals with conventional receivers. Therefore, this letter sheds light on the performance degradation and mitigation of bursty impulsive noise, modeled by a two-state Markov-Gaussian process, in the context of uplink NOMA systems. More specifically, we propose a maximum a posteriori (MAP) receiver combined with successive interference cancellation to mitigate the effect of impulsive noise on the detection of the different users’ signals. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed MAP-based bursty impulsive noise mitigation scheme in terms of bit error rate.
An Effective Hybrid and Adaptive Caching Network Framework Approach In Time-to–Live (TTL) Based Data Item for Peripatetic Computing Environment

Caching is a well established technique to improve the efficiency of data access. This research paper introduces a Hybrid and Adaptive Caching (HAC) approach to cache the data item based on the varying size, and, Time-to-Live (TTL) based invalidation of the data item in a mobile computing environment. Mobile nodes establish single-hop communication with the base station and ad-hoc peer to peer communication with other neighbor nodes in the network to access data items. The proposed work adjusts the caching functionality level based on the size of the data item and stores the cached data item in two different storage systems. The cache of each node is separated into Temporary Buffer (TB) and Permanent Buffer (PB) to improve the data access efficiency. This approach is based on the fact that the smaller size data (e.g. stocks) are updated for shorter Time-to-Live (TTL) whereas the larger size data (e.g. video) are updated only for longer TTL. This proposed work also suggests an adaptive cache replacement and cache invalidation technique to resolve the issues regarding bandwidth utilization and data availability. In cache replacement technique, the cached data item is effectively replaced based on the size of the data item and TTL value. A timestamp-based cache invalidation strategy where the cached data is validated according to the update history of the data items has also been introduced in this paper. The threshold values have greater impact on the system performance. Therefore, the threshold values are fine tuned such that they do not affect the system performance. The proposed approaches significantly improve the query latency, cache hit ratio and efficiently utilize the broadcast bandwidth. The simulation result proves that the proposed work outperforms the existing caching techniques.
Sechelleptus arborivagus sp. nov., a new arboreal spirostreptid millipede (Diplopoda, Spirostreptidae) endemic to Mayotte Island (Comoros Archipelago), Indian Ocean

A new millipede species of the genus Sechelleptus Mauries, 1980 is described and illustrated from Mayotte Island, Indian Ocean. This new species, S. arborivagus sp. nov., found on trees, looks particularly similar to the sympatric S. variabilis VandenSpiegel & Golovatch, 2007, but is much larger and has a very different ecological behavior. Phylogenetic analyses based on a concatenated dataset of the COI and 16S rRNA genes and including nine species of Spirostreptidae (including Sechelleptus, Doratogonus Attems, 1914, Bicoxidens Attems, 1928 and Spirostreptus Brandt, 1833), strongly support the monophyly of Sechelleptus. Despite the similarity of their genitalia, the molecular analyses also reveal a clear-cut genetic divergence between S. arborivagus sp. nov. and S. variabilis (22.55% for COI and 6.63% for 16SrRNA) and further suggest the presence of a higher diversity within the genus Sechelleptus on Mayotte.
Financial and Social Performance of Indonesia's State-Owned Islamic Banks

The government has started the process of merging three state-owned bank's sharia subsidiaries to accelerate the growth of Islamic banking in Indonesia. This study was conducted to see the effect of financial performance as measured by Return on Assets (ROA) and Firm Size on social performance as measured by Islamic Social Reporting (ISR) index. This study uses data that form of annual reports published by Bank Syariah Mandiri (BSM), Bank Negara Indonesia Syariah (BNIS) and Bank Rakyat Indonesia Syariah (BRIS) in 2010-2019. Islamic Social Reporting (ISR) is the dependent variable with Return on Assets (ROA) and Firm Size as independent variable. Fixed effect model is better than random effect model in this research. ROA have no effect on ISR. Whereas Firm Size have positive effect on ISR. It means thath the larger banking size the better the social performance. The new state-owned Islamic bank with the bigger size also improve social performance.