Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hourly Elemental Composition and Source Identification by Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) of Fine and Coarse Particulate Matter in the High Polluted Industrial Area of Taranto (Italy)

In the framework of an extensive environmental investigation, promoted by the Italian Health Ministry, the ISPESL (Istituto Superiore per la Prevenzione e la Sicurezza del Lavoro) and the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca), aerosol samples were collected in Taranto (one of the most industrialized towns in southern Italy) with high time resolution and analyzed by PIXE. The samples were collected in two periods (February–March and June 2004) and in two different sites: an urban district close to the industrial area and a small town 7 km N-NW of Taranto. The use of ‘‘streaker’’ samplers (by PIXE International Corporation) allowed for the simultaneous collection of the fine (<2.5 μm) and coarse (2.5–10 μm) fractions of particulate matter. PIXE analyses were performed with a 3 MeV proton beam from the 3 MV Tandetron accelerator of the INFN-LABEC laboratory. Particulate emissions as well as their atmospheric transport and dilution processes change within a few hours, but most of the results in literature are limited to daily time resolution of the input samples that are not suitable for tracking these rapid changes. Furthermore, since source apportionment receptor models need a series of samples containing material from the same set of sources in different proportions, a higher variability between samples can be obtained by increasing the temporal resolution rather than with samples integrated over a longer time. In this study, the high time resolution of the adopted approach allowed us to follow in detail the changes in the aerosol elemental composition due to both the time evolution of the industrial emissions and the time changes in meteorological conditions, and thus, transport pathways. Moreover, the location of the sampling sites, along the prevalent wind direction and in opposite positions with respect to the industrial site, allowed us to follow the impact of the industrial plume as a function of wind direction. Positive matrix factorization (PMF) analysis on the elemental hourly concentrations identified eight sources in the fine fraction and six sources in the coarse one.
Model-Based Robust Pose Estimation for a Multi-Segment, Programmable Bevel-Tip Steerable Needle

Bevel-tip steerable needles for percutaneous intervention are prone to torsion determined by the interaction forces with the human tissue. If disregarded, torsion can affect the insertion accuracy inducing a change in the needle tip orientation, which is generally undetectable by tracking devices because of the small diameter of the needle. This letter presents a method for estimating the tip pose (i.e. position and orientation) of a programmable bevel-tip needle using a 2-D kinematic based Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), where the tip position of the two steering segments is used as input measurement. Simulation trials and experiments in phantom-brain gelatin were performed to prove the performance of the method and mimic real case scenarios. The solution presented shows state-of-the-art performance in needle pose estimation with a bounded positional error of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$< \! \text{1 mm}$</tex-math></inline-formula> and orientation error of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$< \! \text{5}^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>.
The Value of Simple Heuristics for Virtualized Network Function Placement

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can lower the CAPEX and/or OPEX for service providers and allow for quick deployment of services. Along with the advantages come some challenges. The main challenge in the use of Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) is the VNFs’ placement in the network. There is a wide range of mathematical models proposed to place the Network Functions (NF) optimally. However, the critical problem of mathematical models is that they are NP-hard, and consequently not applicable to larger networks. In wireless networks, we are considering the scarcity of Bandwidth (BW) as another constraint that is due to the presence of interference. While there exist many efforts in designing a heuristic model that can provide solutions in a timely manner, the primary focus with such heuristics was almost always whether they provide results almost as good as optimal solution. Consequently, the heuristics themselves become quite non-trivial, and solving the placement problem for larger networks still takes a significant amount of time. In this paper, in contrast, we focus on designing a simple and scalable heuristic. We propose four heuristics, which are gradually becoming more complex. We compare their performance with each other, a related heuristic proposed in the literature, and a mathematical optimization model. Our results demonstrate that while more complex placement heuristics do not improve the performance of the algorithm in terms of the number of accepted placement requests, they take longer to solve and therefore are not applicable to larger networks.In contrast, a very simple heuristic can find near-optimal solutions much faster than the other more complicated heuristics while keeping the number of accepted requests close to the results achieved with an NP-hard optimization model.
We Begin with a “Trivial” Condition on Massive Gravitons, and Use That to Examine Nonsingular Starts to Inflation, for GW, with GW Strength and Possible Polarization States?

Our Methodology is to construct using a “trivial” solution to massive gravitons, and a nonsingular start for expansion of the universe. Our methodology has many unintended consequences, not the least is a relationship between a small time step, t, the minimum scale factor and even the tension or property values of the initial space-time wall, and that is a consequence of a “trivial” solution taking into account “massive” gravitons. I.e. this solution has a mass term times the partial derivative with respect to time of an expression in brackets. The expression in brackets is the cube of a scale factor minus the square of the scale factor. Bonus that this equation is set to zero. It is deemed trivial due to the insistence of having a singular solution. If that is dropped, we have a different venue. In addition, the Friedman equation for nonsingular cosmology can have a quadratic dependence upon a density (of space-time), leading to a way to incorporate right at the surface of the initial “space-time” bubble an uncertainty principle. From there we suggest a first principle Schrodinger equation, with the caveat that time does not exist, within the space-time nonsingular bubble, but is formed right afterwards. From there we again form solutions for strength of GW signals and suggestions as to polarization states. Our quest is motivated by our last articles question, where “We conclude by stating the following question. Can extra dimensions come from a Multiverse feed into Pre-Planckian space-time? See Theorem at the end of this publication. Our answer is in the affirmative, and it has intellectual similarities to George Chapline’s work with Black hole physics”. From there we next will in future articles postulate conditions for experimental detectors for subsequent data sets to obtain falsifiable data sets.
Fundamentals of Electrochemical Deposition

Preface to the Second Edition. Preface to the First Edition. 1. Overview. 2. Water and Ionic Solutions. 3. Metals and Metal Sufaces. 4. Metal-Solution Interphase. 5. Equilibrium Electrode Potential. 6. Kinetics and Mechanism of Electrodeposition. 7. Nucleation and Growth Models. 8. Electroless Deposition. 9. Displacement Deposition. 10. Effect of Additives. 11. Electrodeposition of Alloys. 12. Metal Deposit and Current Distribution. 13. Characterization of metallic Surfaces and Thin Films. 14. In Situ Characterization of Deposition. 15. Mathematical Modeling in Electrochemistry. 16. Structure anad Properties of Deposits. 17. Electrodeposited Multilayers. 18. Interdiffusion in Thin Films. 19. Applications in Semiconductors Technology. 20. Applications in the Fields of Magnetism and Microelectronics. 21. Frontiers in Applications: Applications in the Field of Medicine. Index.
Using Kano Two-Dimensional Model to Analyze the Attributes of Rehabilitation Bus Service Quality for the Disabled

The statistics shows that the elderly population exceeds 14% of overall Taiwan population in 2018. The government predicts that by 2025 Taiwan will become a super-aged society with an elderly population accounting for more than 20% of national population. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW), in 2016 the number of people with physical and mental disabilities in Taiwan exceeded 1.17 million, of which more than 460,000 were over 65 years old, accounting for more than 40% of the disabled population. The number of the disabled population over the age of 65 is expected to exceed 600,000 in 2020. A more convenient and accessible transportation service is therefore of great importance. In spite of their growing prevalence in cities around Taiwan, low-floor buses still pose serious challenges to wheelchair users, i.e., the disabled and the elderly. For them, rehab bus that provides door-to-door transit service is obviously a better choice. However, while rehab bus service is essential for the wheelchair-dependent population, only a few studies investigated users’ assessment of and satisfaction with the service quality. Most prior studies focused on the problem of insufficient supply without looking into the needs or expectations of rehab bus users. This study used the Kano two-dimensional quality model to investigate the service needs of the rehab bus users in Taiwan. The investigator divided the rehab bus users into two groups: the disabled and the elderly (hereinafter referred to as “the disabled/elderly”) and their families and caregivers (referred to as “their families”). The main research objectives were to identify and classify the service attributes expected by rehab bus users and understand how the surveyed disabled/elderly and their families rate the identified attributes.
Managing knowledge in the context of smart cities: An organizational cultural perspective

Smart cities need to take advantage of the opportunities that the knowledge-based economy and society can bring to the city. Therefore, cities planners and decision makers need to develop cities that take advantage of local knowledge and the intellectual capital of the population. Organizational culture is widely held to be a major barrier to creating and leveraging knowledge. Successful implementation of knowledge management (KM) almost always requires a culture change in order to promote a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Hence, organizations implementing smart cities need to place great emphasis on the need to change organizational culture to pursue effective KM and its successful implementation. However, the management of culture change is a complicated task; its precise nature in smart-city development and the strategies required to be adopted remains underspecified. This study aimed to explore organizational cultural transformation needed for managing knowledge in the context of smart cities. The methodological approach for this study is a systematic review, covering publications on smart cities, KM, and organizational culture. The method used in this study involved three stages: planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting and disseminating the results. The findings revealed three key themes which are: organizational perspectives of smart cities; organizational change, innovation, and digital transformation; and the relationship between organizational culture and KM. The paper concludes that the cultural transformation required for the development of smart cities needs to facilitate the ability to integrate, create and reconfigure both internal and external competences to manage knowledge that originates from within and beyond projects boundaries. This study provides an insight into urban policymakers, planners, and scholars to prepare for the challenges that organizations face in their efforts to manage and implement smart cities successfully.
Riesz potential, Marcinkiewicz integral and their commutators on mixed Morrey spaces

This paper deals with the boundedness of integral operators and their commutators in the framework of mixed Morrey spaces. Precisely, we study the mixed boundedness of the commutator [b,I? ], where I? denotes the fractional integral operator of order ? and b belongs to a suitable homogeneous Lipschitz class. Some results related to the higher order commutator [b,I? ]k are also shown. Furthermore, we examine some boundedness properties of the Marcinkiewicz-type integral ? and the commutator [b,? ] when b belongs to the BMO class.
RETRACTED ARTICLE: A novel alpha power transformed exponential distribution with real-life applications

We, the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Journal of Applied Statistics have retracted the following article, which was due to appear in a special issue: Muhammad Ijaz, Wali Khan Mashwani, Atilla Göktaş & Yuksel Akay Unvan (2021): A novel alpha power transformed exponential distribution with real-life applications, Journal of Applied Statistics. DOI: 10.1080/02664763.2020. 1870673. The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher are cognisant of clear evidence that the findings presented are unreliable. The probability distribution is only valid if α > 1 and numerous mathematical properties in Section 2 have been shown to be incorrect. This has then impacted at least two figures in the article. We are further cognisant that the article contained a number of similarities to previously published papers where some of the findings had been published without proper cross-referencing including: Gupta, R.D. and Kundu, D. (2001), Exponentiated Exponential Family: An Alternative to Gamma and Weibull Distributions. Biom. J., 43: 117–130. https://doi.org/10.1002/1521-4036(200102)43:1<117::AID-BIMJ117>3.0. CO;2-R. We have been informed in our decision-making by our corrections and editorial policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on retractions. The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’. The Editor-in-Chief and the Publisher would like to thank the anonymous reader/s for their comments which alerted JAS to these major errors in the first instance.
Ion Pairs for Transdermal and Dermal Drug Delivery: A Review

Ion pairing is a strategy used to increase the permeation of topically applied ionised drugs. Formation occurs when the electrostatic energy of attraction between oppositely charged ions exceeds their mean thermal energy, making it possible for them to draw together and attain a critical distance. These ions then behave as a neutral species, allowing them to partition more readily into a lipid environment. Partition coefficient studies may be used to determine the potential of ions to pair and partition into an organic phase but cannot be relied upon to predict flux. Early researchers indicated that temperature, size of ions and dielectric constant of the solvent system all contributed to the formation of ion pairs. While size is important, this may be outweighed by improved lipophilicity of the counter ion due to increased length of the carbon chain. Organic counter ions are more effective than inorganic moieties in forming ion pairs. In addition to being used to increase permeation, ion pairs have been used to control and even prevent permeation of the active ingredient. They have also been used to stabilise solid lipid nanoparticle formulations. Ion pairs have been used in conjunction with permeation enhancers, and permeation enhancers have been used as counter ions in ion pairing. This review attempts to show the various ways in which ion pairs have been used in drug delivery via the skin. It also endeavours to extract and consolidate common approaches in order to inform future formulations for topical and transdermal delivery.
A Temperature Monitoring Method for Power Electronic Converter Based on Infrared Image and Object Detection Algorithm

Power electronic converters are more and more widely used, and abnormal temperature of converter components is the most important factor of converter failure. In order to improve the reliability of the converter design, it is necessary to monitor the temperature of key components in the converter during the prototype test stage. The temperature measurement method of infrared thermal images has rich temperature information, wide coverage, and does not affect the original circuit design. It is widely used in circuit temperature measurement occasions. However, in the current automatic temperature measurement methods, it is necessary to manually establish a standard matching template for the infrared thermal image of the circuit to be tested, which indicates a large workload and poor versatility. This paper proposes a method for fully automatic temperature monitoring of converter components. This method is based on a deep learning target detection algorithm, which can automatically identify the type of converter components, obtain partial infrared thermal images of components through heterogeneous image registration, and achieve accurate component temperature monitoring. The advantages of this method are: 1) there is no need to manually establish a standard template for each converter, and the versatility is good; 2) it is fully automatically when the monitoring the temperature of converter components without manual intervention; 3) it is easy to implement and promote due to low cost of hardware system. Finally, the experimental results verify the feasibility and accuracy of this method.
Mobile Element Integration Reveals a Chromosome Dimer Resolution System in Legionellales

The maintenance of circular chromosomes depends on the ability to resolve aberrant chromosome dimers after they form. In most proteobacteria, broadly conserved Xer recombinases catalyze single crossovers at short, species-specific dif sites located near the replication terminus. ABSTRACT In bacteria, the mechanisms used to repair DNA lesions during genome replication include homologous recombination between sister chromosomes. This can lead to the formation of chromosome dimers if an odd number of crossover events occurs. The dimers must be resolved before cell separation to ensure genomic stability and cell viability. Dimer resolution is achieved by the broadly conserved dif/Xer system, which catalyzes one additional crossover event immediately prior to cell separation. While dif/Xer systems have been characterized or predicted in the vast majority of proteobacteria, no homologs to dif or xer have been identified in the order Legionellales. Here, we report the discovery of a distinct single-recombinase dif/Xer system in the intracellular pathogen Legionella pneumophila. The dif site was uncovered by our analysis of Legionella mobile element-1 (LME-1), which harbors a dif site mimic and integrates into the L. pneumophila genome via site-specific recombination. We demonstrate that lpg1867 (here named xerL) encodes a tyrosine recombinase that is necessary and sufficient for catalyzing recombination at the dif site and that deletion of dif or xerL causes filamentation along with extracellular and intracellular growth defects. We show that the dif/XerL system is present throughout Legionellales and that Coxiella burnetii XerL and its cognate dif site can functionally substitute for the native system in L. pneumophila. Finally, we describe an unexpected link between C. burnetii dif/Xer and the maintenance of its virulence plasmids. IMPORTANCE The maintenance of circular chromosomes depends on the ability to resolve aberrant chromosome dimers after they form. In most proteobacteria, broadly conserved Xer recombinases catalyze single crossovers at short, species-specific dif sites located near the replication terminus. Chromosomal dimerization leads to the formation of two copies of dif within the same molecule, leading to rapid site-specific recombination and conversion back into chromosome monomers. The apparent absence of chromosome dimer resolution mechanisms in Legionellales has been a mystery to date. By studying a phage-like mobile genetic element, LME-1, we have identified a previously unknown single-recombinase dif/Xer system that is not only widespread across Legionellales but whose activity is linked to virulence in two important human pathogens.
Best Representation Branch Model for Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

Remote sensing image scene classification is an important method for understanding the high-resolution remote sensing images. Based on convolutional neural network, various classification methods have been applied into this field and achieved remarkable results. These methods mainly rely on the semantic information to improve the classification performance. However, as the network goes deeper, the highly abstract and global semantic information makes it difficult for the network to accurately classify scene images with similar layout and structures, limiting further improvement of classification accuracy. Relying on the semantic information only is not sufficient to effectively classify these similar scene images and the network needs spatial information to enhance the classification capability. To solve this dilemma, this article proposes a best representation branch model, which reaches the optimal balance point where the network can make use of both the semantic information and spatial information to improve the final classification accuracy. In the proposed method, ResNet50 pretrained on the ImageNet dataset is first divided into four branches with different depths to extract feature maps and a capsule network is used as the classifier. The Grad-CAM algorithm is adopted to explain the mechanism of the optimal balance point from the perspective of attention and guide the further feature fusion. In addition, ablation studies are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our method and extensive experiments are conducted on three public benchmark remote sensing datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve competitive classification performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
A new global toolpath linking algorithm for different subregions with Travelling Saleman problem solver

ABSTRACT In CNC toolpath generation process, the operation of linking toolpaths from different sub-machining regions is common and inevitable. Apparently, the jumping toolpath between machining regions is invalid. They do not contribute to the machining process but only waste valuable manufacturing time; therefore, these toolpaths should be as short as possible. Many methods have been used to link toolpaths, such as the Genetic Algorithm (GA), the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) or even the greedy algorithm. However, GA and PSO require multiple iterations to find the global optimum, while greedy algorithm selects the current shortest connection each time without considering the global optimum. To reduce the total length of non-productive toolpaths and save computing time, in this paper, a new method is proposed by modeling the toolpath linking problem purely as a traveling salesman problem (TSP). The initial toolpaths in different subregions are generated in ordinary ways. Each toolpath of a subregion has two endpoints, which can be simplified as a line segment. In this way, the toolpath linking problem can be considered as a segment TSP: finding the shortest tour through all the segments. In this paper, the efficient TSP solver using Lin-Kernighan–Helsgaun (LKH) algorithm is employed and modified for the segment TSP application. The distance function between ‘cities’ is redefined to adapt the segments TSP. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified with several examples. The comparison with the result of traditional greedy algorithm proves the superiority of the proposed method.