Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cumulus parameterization theory in terms of feedback and control

The cumulus parameterization theory presented by Arakawa and Schubert (1974) describes the mutual interaction of a cumulus cloud ensemble with its large-scale environment. This mutual interaction can be subdivided into three interaction loops: feedback, static control, dynamic control. The mathematical formulation of each of these interaction loops is discussed. The feedback loop describes how the cumulus scale transport terms and source terms modify the large-scale temperature and moisture fields. The static control loop describes the normalized mass flux and the thermodynamic properties of each cloud type in terms of the large-scale temperature and moisture fields. The dynamic control loop describes how the large-scale fields control the total cloud ensemble vertical mass flux and its distribution among the various cloud types. The feedback, static control, and dynamic control loops constitute a closed parameterization theory. A simple formalism for the diagnostic use of the feedback and static control portions of the theory is presented. The relation of the subgrid scale flux forms and the detrainment forms of the large-scale heat and moisture budgets is also discussed.
Rorty Against Rorty: Climate Change, Rug-Pulling, and the Rhetoric of Philosophy

Abstract:As the leading contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty? ,” this essay asks why Rorty was so often taken to be saying things that he claimed he was not. The argument is that Rorty’s rhetorical approach and jargon engendered this confusion and undermined his effectiveness as a philosopher and public intellectual. The focus here is on two points: first, on how, in his eagerness to shut down attempts to claim a privileged path to Reality, he gave the impression of dismissing not only hierarchies but also distinctions; and second, on how his separation of causes and reasons retained a dualism of the “one world, many perspectives” model that elsewhere he rejected. This essay concludes that leading figures of science studies at the present time, notably Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway, better equip readers to move past the feeling of deprivation that comes from shedding centuries- old philosophical assumptions and that their explicit rejection of the nature/culture binary makes their work better suited to addressing the great problem of our time — climate change.
Ab initio study of samarium doped barium titanate

Abstract We used the density functional theory with spin polarization to investigate multifunctional properties of the Sm-doped BaTiO3 system (Ba1– x Sm x TiO3). The self-consistent calculation results were used to analyze the ferromagnetic and dielectric properties. The spontaneous electric polarization was estimated from the King-Smith and Vanderbilt theory and 1s core-hole absorbing atom was used to calculate the oxygen K-edge XANES spectra. The Hubbard correction has been considered over the rare-earth f-electrons. Results for x = 0.125 revealed a narrow band-gap energy, showing an enhanced ferroelectric character, with a spontaneous polarization higher than the reported for the pure tetragonal BaTiO3. On the other hand, the magnetic properties have been also confirmed, with a total magnetization value around 5.90 µB/cell, which have been mainly ascribed to the inclusion of the Sm cation into the BT crystalline structure.
Disposal of plastic waste in Ghana: the knowledge, attitude and practices of households in the Tamale metropolis

ABSTRACT The authors report a cross-sectional study in Tamale, Ghana, using a stratified simple random sample of 270 households to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of households, in relation to the disposal of plastic waste. Data gathered using a structured questionnaire and in-depth interviews revealed that 48% of respondents had moderate-to-high levels of knowledge, 87% of respondents showed a negative attitude, and 46% performed poor practices in plastic waste disposal. There was a statistically significant association of education level and employment status of residents with plastic waste disposal. The knowledge, attitude, and practices of households were unsatisfactory though not significantly associated with plastic waste disposal. There is a need to use formal and informal education on waste management and improve access to affordable waste disposal services.
Efficacy of a Pseudomonas aeruginosa serogroup O9 vaccine

ABSTRACT There are currently no approved vaccines against the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Among vaccine targets, the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) O antigen of P. aeruginosa is the most immunodominant protective candidate. There are 20 different O antigens composed of different repeat sugar structures conferring serogroup specificity, and 10 are found most frequently in infection. Thus, one approach to combat infection by P. aeruginosa could be to generate immunity with a vaccine cocktail that includes all these serogroups. Serogroup O9 is 1 of the 10 serogroups commonly found in infection, but it has never been developed into a vaccine, due in part to the acid-labile nature of the O9 polysaccharide. Our laboratory has previously shown that intranasal administration of an attenuated Salmonella strain expressing the P. aeruginosa serogroup O11 LPS O antigen was effective in clearing bacteria and preventing mortality in mice following intranasal challenge with serogroup O11 P. aeruginosa. Consequently, we set out to develop a P. aeruginosa serogroup O9 vaccine using a similar approach. Here, we show that Salmonella expressing serogroup O9 triggered an antibody-mediated immune response following intranasal administration to mice and that it conferred protection from P. aeruginosa serogroup O9 in a murine model of acute pneumonia.
Responses to COVID: Examining Faculty Perceptions and Black Student Experiences at HBCUs and HWCUs

Abstract:The impact of COVID-19 has unarguably changed many aspects of how society functions. Currently, one of the many debated aspects of COVID, evolves around the disruptions of educational practices and student experiences. COVID has unearthed the need to critically examine how pedagogical approaches have changed in order to accommodate students' academic pursuit and mental/social well-being. This study provides first-hand experiences of Black students transitioning from “face to face” learning to remote learning due to the ongoing pandemic. This study utilizes a qualitative phenomenological approach that pulls from the individualized and collective experiences of faculty, administrators, and Black students, and examines how they feel, act, and process during COVID. Findings from this study outline the vulnerabilities of Black students, and more particularly, how Black students attending historically Black colleges and universities were more likely to drop out of school while their peers at historically White colleges and universities experienced increased racism at their institution.
Droplet impact onto a solid sphere: Effect of wettability and impact velocity

Collision of a droplet onto a still spherical particle was experimentally investigated. The effect of droplet impact velocity and wettability of the particle surface on collision outcomes was studied (0.05 < V0 < 5.0 and θ = 70°, 90°, 118°). Compared to the literature, the range of Weber number variations was significantly extended (0.1 < We < 1146), and while focus of the previous works was on impacts in which particle is larger than the droplet (Dr < 1), the drop to particle diameter ratio in this work was larger than one. Therefore, formation of a thin liquid film, i.e., lamella, was observed due to impact of a relatively high velocity droplet onto a hydrophobic particle. Temporal variations of various geometrical parameters of collision outcomes including lamella length and lamella base diameter were investigated during the impact. It was also shown that for hydrophobic targets, the extent of hydrophobicity of the particle does not affect the lamella geometry. A comprehensive map of all the available .
Lock-Free Buffer Managers Do Not Require Delayed Memory Reclamation

High-performance data systems running on modern many-core CPUs should not require readers to acquire physical locks. There exist multiple synchronization schemes that allow this, but they all require a solution for concurrent memory reclamation. In this paper, we show that one can eschew such a scheme when a few basic requirements are fulfilled. We exploit this insight in our high-performance buffer manager implementation in LeanStore, which as a consequence got simpler, more robust, and more performant.
UXR-kit: An Ideation Method for Collaborative and User-Centered Design about eXtended Reality solutions.

Les méthodes actuelles de design centré utilisateurs offrent un large panel d’outils permettant de concevoir des interfaces 2D. En parallèle du récent essor des technologies immersives, de nouvelles approches commencent également à émerger concernant les technologies immersives telles que la Réalité Étendue (Extended Reality, ou XR). Néanmoins, ces nouvelles méthodes sont principalement centrées sur la phase de prototypage. Cet article s’intéresse à la phase en amont du prototypage : la phase d’idéation, encore peu explorée aujourd’hui pour la XR. Ainsi, nous proposons UXR-kit : une boîte à outils (toolkit) pour la co-conception d’idées pour systèmes de XR. Cette boîte à outil se base sur une approche inspirée des design studio et techniques génératives et met en avant les spécificités des systèmes immersifs. Les résultats d’une première étude expérimentale suggèrent que UXR-kit a aidé les participants à produire des idées relatives aux designs immersifs, particulièrement via des répliques miniatures d’environnements 3D (mini-mondes).
Is CUI Design Ready Yet? A Workshop on Community Practices and Gaps in CUI Design & Resource Development

As CUIs become more prevalent in both academic research and the commercial market, it becomes more essential to design usable and adoptable CUIs. While research has been growing on the methods for designing CUIs for commercial use, there has been little discussion on overall community practice of developing design resources to aid in practical CUI design. The aim of this workshop therefore is to bring the CUI community together to discuss the current practices for developing tools and resources for practical CUI design, the adoption (or non-adoption) of these tools and resources, and how these resources are utilized in the training and education of new CUI designers entering the field. This workshop will bring together all parts of the CUI community to have meaningful discussions on how CUI design resources are currently developed, and how we can improve these resources and tools to aid in their adoption in practical CUI design, and CUI academic & industry design training.
Towards Cross-Content Conversational Agents for Behaviour Change: Investigating Domain Independence and the Role of Lexical Features in Written Language Around Change

Valuable insights into an individual’s current thoughts and stance regarding behaviour change can be obtained by analysing the language they use, which can be conceptualized using Motivational Interviewing concepts. Training conversational agents (CAs) to detect and employ these concepts could help them provide more personalized and effective assistance. This study investigates the similarity of written language around behaviour change spanning diverse conversational and social contexts and change objectives. Drawing on previous research that applied MI concepts to texts about health behaviour change, we evaluate the performance of existing classifiers on six newly constructed datasets from diverse contexts. To gain insights in determining factors when identifying change language, we explore the impact of lexical features on classification. The results suggest that patterns of change language remain stable across contexts and domains, leading us to conclude that peer-to-peer online data may be sufficient to train CAs to understand user utterances related to behaviour change.
Large-scale operator-valued kernel regression

Many problems in Machine Learning can be cast into vector-valued approximation. Operator-Valued Kernels and vector-valued Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces provide a theoretical and practical framework to address that issue, extending nicely the well-known setting of scalar-valued kernels. However large scale applications are usually not affordable with these tools that require an important computational power along with a large memory capacity. In this thesis, we propose and study scalable methods to perform regression with Operator-Valued Kernels. To achieve this goal, we extend Random Fourier Features, an approximation technique originally introduced for scalar-valued kernels, to Operator-Valued Kernels. The idea is to take advantage of an approximated operator-valued feature map in order to come up with a linear model in a finite-dimensional space. This thesis is structured as follows. First we develop a general framework devoted to the approximation of shift-invariant MErcer kernels on Locally Compact Abelian groups and study their properties along with the complexity of the algorithms based on them. Second we show theoretical guarantees by bounding the error due to the approximation, with high probability. Third, we study various applications of Operator Random Fourier Features (ORFF) to different tasks of Machine learning such as multi-class classification, multi-task learning, time serie modelling, functionnal regression and anomaly detection. We also compare the proposed framework with other state of the art methods. Fourth, we conclude by drawing short-term and mid-term perspectives of this work.
AN INTERVAL ANALYSIS METHOD FOR WRENCH WORKSPACE DETERMINATION OF PARALLEL MANIPULATOR ARCHITECTURES

This paper deals with the wrench workspace (WW) determination of parallel manipulators. The WW is the set of end-effector poses (positions and orientations) for which the active joints are able to balance a set of external wrenches acting at the end-effector. The determination of the WW is important when selecting an appropriate manipulator design since the size and shape of the WW are dependent on the manipulator’s geometry (design) and selected actuators. Algorithms for the determination of the reachable workspace and the WW are presented. The algorithms are applicable to manipulator architectures utilizing actuators with positive and negative limits on the force/torque they can generate, as well as cable-driven parallel manipulator architectures which require nonnegative actuator limits to maintain positive cable tensions. The developed algorithms are demonstrated in case studies applied to a cable-driven parallel manipulator with 2-degrees-of-freedom and three cables and to a 3-RRR parallel manipulato.
Towards Meaningful Paragraph Embeddings for Data-Scarce Domains: A Case Study in the Legal Domain

Creating meaningful text embeddings using BERT-based language models involves pre-training on large amounts of data. For domain-specific use cases where data is scarce (e.g., the law enforcement domain) it might not be feasible to pre-train a whole new language model. In this paper, we examine how extending BERT-based tokenizers and further pre-training BERT-based models can benefit downstream classification tasks. As a proxy for domain-specific data, we use the European Convention of Human Rights (ECtHR) dataset. We find that for down-stream tasks, further pre-training a language model on a small domain dataset can rival models that are completely retrained on large domain datasets. This indicates that completely retraining a language model may not be necessary to improve down-stream task performance. Instead, small adaptions to existing state-of-the-art language models like BERT may suffice.
Improvement of pose imitation method: a signal processing perspective

Pose imitation is for two shapes to study pose from each other. It has been a hot area in shape deformation and we improve the original graphical pose imitation method by introducing signal thought. Laplace framework is often used in pose imitation and geometrical information involved Laplace operator performs better in preserving original shape’s mass smooth part by carrying much intrinsic information of graph. However, the two shapes’ bases in Laplace feature space need to be well mapped before utilizing classical pose imitation algorithm, which makes it an obstacle to introduce the geometry related Laplace operator. In our work, the problem is solved by proposing signal transfer algorithm and based on it, we put out an effective pose imitation framework using edge length related Laplace operator. Our method well suits to 2-dimension shape and good results of pose imitation have been achieved.
A 5-yr Climatology of Severe Convective Wind Events over China

AbstractA method using cloud-to-ground lightning was developed to retrieve severe convective wind (SCW) events from significant weather report data over China during the period 2010–14. The results showed that SCW events were a feature of local weather activity, and their distribution showed clear seasonal and diurnal variations. The SCW events mainly occurred over eastern China during the midafternoon in the warm season and rarely occurred over western China. The highest frequency of SCW events was recorded in north China and Guangdong Province. There was also a high frequency of SCW events in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. The most frequent occurrence of SCW events was in Guangdong Province in spring, while a high frequency of SCW events was observed in both north China and Guangdong Province during the summer months. The peak month for SCW events was July over the whole of China and June in north China. The pattern in Guangdong Province had a bimodal distribution, with the peak mont.
Counting points on the Fricke-Macbeath curve over finite fields

The Fricke-Macbeath curve is a smooth projective algebraic curve of genus 7 with automorphism group PSL₂(픽₈). We recall two models of it (introduced, respectively, by Maxim Hendriks and by Bradley Brock) defined over ℚ, and we establish an explicit isomorphism defined over ℚ( −7 ) between these models. Moreover, we decompose up to isogeny over ℚ the jacobian of one of these models. As a consequence we obtain a simple formula for the number of points over 픽q on (the reduction of) this model, in terms of the elliptic curve with equation y² = x³ + x² − 114x − 127. Moreover, twists by elements of PSL₂(픽₈) of the curve over finite fields are described. The curve leads to a number of new records as maintained on manYPoints of curves of genus 7 with many rational points over finite fields.
Multiwavelength surface contouring from phase-coded noisy diffraction patterns: wavelength-division optical setup

Abstract. We propose an algorithm for absolute phase retrieval from multiwavelength noisy phase coded diffraction patterns. A lensless optical system is considered with a set of successive single wavelength experiments (wavelength-division setup). The phase masks are applied for modulation of the multiwavelength object wavefronts. The algorithm uses the forward/backward propagation for coherent light beams and sparsely encoding wavefronts, which leads to the complex-domain block-matching three-dimensional filtering. The key-element of the algorithm is an original aggregation of the multiwavelength object wavefronts for high-dynamic-range absolute phase reconstruction. Simulation tests demonstrate that the developed approach leads to the effective solutions explicitly using the sparsity for noise suppression and high-accuracy object absolute phase reconstruction from noisy data.
Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) measures for auditory research

This presentation will focus on data collected across the globe on tablet computers using applications available for free download, built-in sound hardware, and calibrated consumer-grade headphones. Tests involve spatial release from speech-on-speech masking, binaural sensitivity, gap discrimination, temporal modulation, spectral modulation, and spectrotemporal modulation. The data will be compared across sites and with data from the published literature. The similarity of the obtained data to the expected values and the consistency across sites will help evaluate the potential of this relatively inexpensive and easily disseminated approach to psychoacoustical data collection. The extent to which valid performance can be obtained is a metric of the possibility that in the future such test methods could be used by researchers without access to a full laboratory, clinicians interested in evaluating auditory function beyond the audiogram, and students as part of their training, as well as many other uses not yet imagined.This presentation will focus on data collected across the globe on tablet computers using applications available for free download, built-in sound hardware, and calibrated consumer-grade headphones. Tests involve spatial release from speech-on-speech masking, binaural sensitivity, gap discrimination, temporal modulation, spectral modulation, and spectrotemporal modulation. The data will be compared across sites and with data from the published literature. The similarity of the obtained data to the expected values and the consistency across sites will help evaluate the potential of this relatively inexpensive and easily disseminated approach to psychoacoustical data collection. The extent to which valid performance can be obtained is a metric of the possibility that in the future such test methods could be used by researchers without access to a full laboratory, clinicians interested in evaluating auditory function beyond the audiogram, and students as part of their training, as well as many other uses not.
Robust H ∞ control for a class of non-linear discrete time-delay systems with controller failure: a probability-dependent method

: This study addresses the issue of robust H ∞ control for a class of discrete-time delayed non-linear systems in the presence of controller failure by using a probability-dependent method. Considering the stochasticity and inevitability of controller failure, they propose a notion of controller probabilistic failure. Based on the idea of switching, the studied systems are converted into a kind of stochastic switched systems. When the probability information is available, a probability-dependent switching strategy is developed by application of piecewise Lyapunov function and average dwell time approaches such that the system is exponentially mean square stable with weighted H ∞ performance. At the same time, a probability-dependent weighted H ∞ switching controller is designed. Moreover, the obtained results are also shown to be feasible when the probability information cannot be known accurately. Finally, two simulation examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Spam Message Detection Using Logistic Regression

:- The use of the internet is increasing day by day, and the spammers who consistently try to spam people by sending fraud mails and SMS. Mails and SMS are one of the most important and most used means of communication, because of which 2.4 billion messages are sent every one second. With the rise of such exchange of emails and messages, some find it an opportunity to fill other's inbox with preposterous messages that reduce internet speed and plunders our personal data. However, due to recent advancements in technology, it is possible to find solutions to all such problems easily. With the help of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, we can quickly detect spam messages. One of the crucial aspects of research in the world of machine learning applications is "NLP". In this paper, we have proposed a model where emails would be classified into the categories of Spam or Ham.