nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Fracture investigation in starch based foods
Venue: Interface Focus

The study of oral processing and specifically cutting of the food piece during mastication can lead towards optimization of products for humans or animals. Food materials are complex biocomposites with a highly nonlinear constitutive response. Their fracture properties have not been largely investigated, while the need for models capable of predicting food breakdown increases. In this study, the blade cutting and the essential work of fracture (EWF) methodologies assessed the fracture behaviour of starch based pet food. Tensile tests revealed rate dependent stiffness and stress softening effects, attributed to viscoplasticity and micro cracking, respectively. Cutting data were collected for 5, 10 and 30 mm s 1 sample feed rates, whereas the EWF tests were conducted at 1.7, 3.3 and 8.3 mm s 1 crosshead speeds corresponding to average crack speeds of 4, 7 and 15 mm s 1, respectively. A reasonable agreement was achieved between cutting and EWF, reporting 1.26, 1.78, 1.76 kJ m 2 and 1.52, 1.37, 1.45 kJ m 2 values, respectively, for the corresponding crack speeds. These toughness data were used in a novel numerical model simulating the 'first' bite mastication process. A viscoplastic material model is adopted for the food piece, combined with a damage law that enabled predicting fracture patterns in the product.
Development and performance evaluation of a hemp starch composite

This article describes the results of a research project carried out at the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne. The aim of this article is to develop a new insulating material produced by bonding hemp shives with wheat starch as a binder and to characterize its physical properties such as sorption isotherm, water vapour permeability, thermal conductivity, heat capacity and porosity. The equations of coupled heat and moisture transfer within the panels are introduced. These governing equations are applied on the room level in order to assess the hygrothermal behaviour of the panels and its impact on energy consumption and indoor comfort. Simulations are performed for Nancy (France) winter conditions with the simulation environment Simulation Problem Analysis and Research Kernel (SPARK) suited for complex problems.
Preparation and Properties of Cassava Starch based Wood Adhesives

A biodegradable, environmentally friendly starch based wood adhesive with cassava starch as a raw material and butyl acrylate (BA) as a co monomer was synthesized. Results revealed that this cassava starch based wood adhesive (SWA) was more stable than corn starch based wood adhesive, and its bonding performance was close to that of commercial PVAc emulsion, even after 90 days of storage. Further analysis found that the improved stability of the adhesive could be attributed to its low minimum film forming temperature (MFFT) and glass transition temperature (Tg) of cassava starch. Moreover, the amount of total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) emitted by the cassava starch based wood adhesive were much lower than the Chinese national standard control criteria. Therefore, cassava SWA might be a potential alternative to traditional petrochemical based wood adhesives.
Association between Zika virus infection and microcephaly in Brazil, January to May, 2016: preliminary report of a case control study.
Venue: The Lancet. Infectious diseases

The microcephaly epidemic, which started in Brazil in 2015, was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO in 2016. We report the preliminary results of a case control study investigating the association between microcephaly and Zika virus infection during pregnancy.  We did this case control study in eight public hospitals in Recife, Brazil. Cases were neonates with microcephaly. Two controls (neonates without microcephaly) matched by expected date of delivery and area of residence, were selected for each case. Serum samples of cases and controls and cerebrospinal fluid samples of cases were tested for Zika virus specific IgM and by quantitative RT PCR. Laboratory confirmed Zika virus infection during pregnancy was defined as detection of Zika virus specific IgM or a positive RT PCR result in neonates. Maternal serum samples were tested by plaque reduction neutralisation assay for Zika virus and dengue virus. We estimated crude odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs using a median unbiased estimator for binary data in an unconditional logistic regression model. We estimated ORs separately for cases with and without radiological evidence of brain abnormalities.  Between Jan 15, 2016, and May 2, 2016, we prospectively recruited 32 cases and 62 controls. 24 (80% of 30 mothers of cases had Zika virus infection compared with 39 (64% of 61 mothers of controls (p=0*12) 13 (41% of 32 cases and none of 62 controls had laboratory confirmed Zika virus infection; crude overall OR 55*5 (95% CI 8*6 OR 113*3 (95% CI 14*5 for seven cases with brain abnormalities; and OR 24*7 (95% CI 2*9 for four cases without brain abnormalities.  Our data suggest that the microcephaly epidemic is a result of congenital Zika virus infection. We await further data from this ongoing study to assess other potential risk factors and to confirm the strength of association in a larger sample size.  Activity in Epidemic Situations.
The SCARE Statement: Consensus based surgical case report guidelines.
Venue: International journal of surgery

Case reports have been a long held tradition within the surgical literature. Reporting guidelines can improve transparency and reporting quality. However, recent consensus based guidelines for case reports (CARE) are not surgically focused. Our objective was to develop surgical case report guidelines.  The CARE statement was used as the basis for a Delphi consensus. The Delphi questionnaire was administered via Google Forms and conducted using standard Delphi methodology. A multidisciplinary group of surgeons and others with expertise in the reporting of case reports were invited to participate. In round one, participants stated how each item of the CARE statement should be changed and what additional items were needed. Revised and additional items from round one were put forward into a further round, where participants voted on the extent of their agreement with each item, using a nine point Likert scale, as proposed by the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) working group.  In round one, there was a 64% (38/59) response rate. Following adjustment of the guideline with the incorporation of recommended changes, round two commenced and there was an 83% (49/59) response rate. All but one of the items were approved by the participants, with Likert scores 7 9 awarded by >70% of respondents. The final guideline consists of a 14 item checklist.  We present the SCARE Guideline, consisting of a 14 item checklist that will improve the reporting quality of surgical case reports.
Self bound droplets of a dilute magnetic quantum liquid
Venue: Nature

Self bound many body systems are formed through a balance of attractive and repulsive forces and occur in many physical scenarios. Liquid droplets are an example of a self bound system, formed by a balance of the mutual attractive and repulsive forces that derive from different components of the inter particle potential. It has been suggested that self bound ensembles of ultracold atoms should exist for atom number densities that are 108 times lower than in a helium droplet, which is formed from a dense quantum liquid. However, such ensembles have been elusive up to now because they require forces other than the usual zero range contact interaction, which is either attractive or repulsive but never both. On the basis of the recent finding that an unstable bosonic dipolar gas can be stabilized by a repulsive many body term, it was predicted that three dimensional self bound quantum droplets of magnetic atoms should exist. Here we report the observation of such droplets in a trap free levitation field. We find that this dilute magnetic quantum liquid requires a minimum, critical number of atoms, below which the liquid evaporates into an expanding gas as a result of the quantum pressure of the individual constituents. Consequently, around this critical atom number we observe an interaction driven phase transition between a gas and a self bound liquid in the quantum degenerate regime with ultracold atoms. These droplets are the dilute counterpart of strongly correlated self bound systems such as atomic nuclei and helium droplets.
Comparison of mortality rates and functional results after transtibial and transfemoral amputations due to diabetes in elderly patients a retrospective study.
Venue: International journal of surgery

This study aimed to compare mortality rates and functional results of transtibial and transfemoral amputations in elderly patients with diabetes.  (62.1% transtibial and 33 (37.9% transfemoral] were included. Mean ages were 70.7 and 69.3 years in transfemoral and transtibial groups, respectively. Mean follow up time was 41.8 months. Amputee Mobility Predictor scores (with and without prosthesis) and Barthel Daily Living Index were used for functional evaluation of the survivors.  First year mortality rates were 29.6% and 30.3% in transtibial and transfemoral groups, respectively. Overall mortality rate of both groups was 65.5% (66.7% in transtibial and 63.6% in transfemoral group) There was no difference between mortality rates of two groups. Duration between surgery and death was significantly shorter in transfemoral group. The mean Amputee Mobility Predictor scores (with prosthesis) of the transtibial and transfemoral groups were 32.3 and 26.9 points, respectively. The average Amputee Mobility Predictor scores (without prosthesis) of the transtibial and transfemoral groups were 29.5 and 22.7 points respectively. The differences between two groups' scores were significant. The mean Barthel Daily Living Index scores of the transtibial and transfemoral groups were 82.5 and 80.2 points respectively. The difference was not significant.  High mortality rates and morbidities after major lower limb amputations emphasize the importance of preventive measures and foot care in patients with diabetes.
BER analysis of optical space shift keying with gamma gamma fading and pointing error
Venue: 2016 International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications (ATC)

Space shift keying (SSK) is a technique where the antenna indices are used to transfer the information. In this paper, we investigate optical SSK (OSSK) system under the combined effects of atmospheric turbulence (AT) and pointing error (PE) We introduce an analytical framework to obtain average pair wise error probability and average bit error rate of OSSK scheme. It is observed that for small PE jitter, degradation in error performance is very small, while for high PE jitter, the degradation is significantly high. Furthermore, the effect of PE with moderate and strong AT conditions is more dominant than the weak AT condition. Also, the performance of the OSSK system under strong and moderate AT regimes remains same, which makes the considered system nearly independent of turbulence between moderate to strong turbulence conditions.
The good, the bad, and the ugly: which Australian terrestrial mammal species attract most research?

The Australian mammalian fauna is marked by high endemism and evolutionary distinctiveness and comprises monotreme, marsupial, and eutherian (placental' native species. It has suffered the highest extinction rate of any mammalian fauna in any global region; surviving species are threatened by competition and predation from a range of introduced mammal species, and receive low levels of conservation oriented funding compared with species in many other countries. We investigated research foci on this unique fauna by using species h indices (SHI) and identified both taxonomic bias and subject bias in research effort and research impact for 331 Australian terrestrial mammal species. Species broadly fell into categories we labelled as the good' the bad' and the ugly' The majority of studies on monotremes and marsupials (the good' are directed towards their physiology and anatomy, with a smaller ecological focus. By contrast, introduced eutherians (the bad' have attracted greater attention in terms of ecological research, with greater emphasis on methods and technique studies for population control. Despite making up 45% of the 331 species studied, native rodents and bats (the ugly' have attracted disproportionately little study. While research on invasive species is directed towards problem solving, many Australian native species of conservation significance have attracted little research effort, little recognition, and little funding. Current global and national conservation funding largely overlooks non charismatic species, and yet these species may arguably be most in need of scientific and management research effort.
Dictionary based Filling of the Missing Wedge in Electron Tomography
Venue: Microscopy and Microanalysis

A new method for dealing with electron tomography data from incomplete projection sets is proposed. The approach is inspired by exemplar based inpainting techniques in image processing  and heuristically generates data for missing projection directions. The method has also been extended to work on three dimensional data. In general, electron tomography reconstructions suffer from elongation artifacts along the beam direction at 0deg tilt. These artifacts can be seen in the corresponding Fourier domain as a missing wedge. The new method synthetically generates projections for these missing directions with the help of a dictionary based approach that is able to convey both structure and texture at the same time. It constitutes a preprocessing step that can be combined with any tomographic reconstruction algorithm. The new algorithm was applied to the well known Shepp Logan phantom. Visually, the synthetic projections, reconstructions, and corresponding Fourier power spectra showed a decrease of the typical missing wedge artifacts. Quantitatively, the inpainting method is capable to reduce missing wedge artifacts and improves tomogram quality with respect to several figures of merit.
Object Aware Dictionary Learning with Deep Features
Venue: ACCV

Visual dictionary learning has the capacity to determine sparse representations of input images in a data driven manner using over complete bases. Sparsity allows robustness to distractors and resistance against over fitting, two valuable attributes of a competent classification solution. Its data driven nature is comparable to deep convolutional neural networks, which elegantly blend global and local information through progressively more specific filter layers with increasingly extending receptive fields. One shortcoming of dictionary learning is that it does not explicitly select and focus on important regions, instead it generates responses on uniform grid of patches or entire image. To address this, we present an object aware dictionary learning framework that systematically incorporates region proposals and deep features in order to improve the discriminative power of the combined classifier. Rather than extracting a dictionary from all fixed sized image windows, our methods concentrates on a small set of object candidates, which enables consolidation of semantic information. We formulate this as an optimization problem on a new objective function and propose an iterative solver. Our results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which is shown to be superior to the state of the art dictionary learning and deep learning based image classification approaches.
Corporate Bond Guarantees and The Value of Financial Flexibility

We examine the effects of the decision of parent companies to guarantee bonds issued by their subsidiaries. The market value of the parent firm's outstanding bonds drops two times more when it issues a guarantee for subsidiary debt than when it issues a new bond in its own name. This effect is exacerbated when the parent is financially constrained, or when its bonds are less liquid. Subsidiary guaranteed debt has less stringent covenant protection, and a longer maturity, consistent with subsidiary guaranteed debt providing greater flexibility to the parent. Our estimates imply a value of financial flexibility, measured as the difference in the impact on bond yield spreads between parent and subsidiary guaranteed bonds, of about 30 bps.
Proactive Leverage Increases and the Value of Financial Flexibility

Traditional tradeoff models of corporate capital structure, although still featured prominently in finance textbooks and widely accepted by practitioners, have been criticized by financial economists for doing a poor job of explaining observed debt ratios. Moreover, the observed ratios are far less stable than what would be predicted by the standard tradeoff models. In a study published several years ago in the Review of Financial Studies, the authors of this article aimed to shed more light on the underlying forces governing capital structure decisions by analyzing a set of major changes in capital structure in which companies initiated large increases in leverage through substantial new borrowings. They then attempted to explain why these companies chose to increase leverage and how their capital structures changed during the years after the large debt issues. As summarized in this article, the authors' findings indicate, first of all, that the large debt financings were used primarily to fund major corporate investments and not, for example, to make large distributions to shareholders. And the changes in leverage ratios that came after the debt offerings were driven far more by the evolution of the companies' realized cash flows and their investment opportunities than by deliberate or decisive attempts to rebalance their capital structures toward a stationary target. In fact, many of the companies chose to take on even more debt when faced with cash flow deficits, despite operating with leverage that was already well above any reasonable estimate of their estimated target leverage. At the same time, companies that generated financial surpluses used them to reduce debt, even when their leverage had fallen well below their estimated targets. Taken as a whole, the findings of the authors' study support the idea that unused debt capacity represents an important source of financial flexibility, and that preserving such flexibility and making use of it when valuable investment opportunities materialize may well be the critical missing link in connecting capital structure theory with observed corporate behavior.
Industrial water pollution, water environment treatment, and health risks in China.
Venue: Environmental pollution

The negative health effects of water pollution remain a major source of morbidity and mortality in China. The Chinese government is making great efforts to strengthen water environment treatment; however, no studies have evaluated the effects of water treatment on human health by water pollution in China. This study evaluated the association between water pollution and health outcomes, and determined the extent to which environmental regulations on water pollution may lead to health benefits. Data were extracted from the 2011 and 2013 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) Random effects model and random effects Logit model were applied to study the relationship between health and water pollution, while a Mediator model was used to estimate the effects of environmental water treatment on health outcomes by the intensity of water pollution. Unsurprisingly, water pollution was negatively associated with health outcomes, and the common pollutants in industrial wastewater had differential impacts on health outcomes. The effects were stronger for low income respondents. Water environment treatment led to improved health outcomes among Chinese people. Reduced water pollution mediated the associations between water environment treatment and health outcomes. The results of this study offer compelling evidence to support treatment of water pollution in China.
Deep challenges for China's war on water pollution.
Venue: Environmental pollution

China's Central government has released an ambitious plan to tackle the nation's water pollution crisis. However, this is inhibited by a lack of data, particularly for groundwater. We compiled and analyzed water quality classification data from publicly available government sources, further revealing the scale and extent of the crisis. We also compiled nitrate data in shallow and deep groundwater from a range of literature sources, covering 52 of China's groundwater systems; the most comprehensive national scale assessment yet. Nitrate pollution at levels exceeding the US EPA's maximum contaminant level (10 mg/L NO3N) occurs at the 90th percentile in 25 of 36 shallow aquifers and 10 out of 37 deep or karst aquifers. Isotopic compositions of groundwater nitrate (d15N and d18ONO3 values ranging from 14.9%0 to 35.5%0 and 8.1%0 to 51.0%0, respectively) indicate many nitrate sources including soil nitrogen, agricultural fertilizers, untreated wastewater and/or manure, and locally show evidence of de nitrification. From these data, it is clear that contaminated groundwater is ubiquitous in deep aquifers as well as shallow groundwater (and surface water) Deep aquifers contain water recharged tens of thousands of years before present, long before widespread anthropogenic nitrate contamination. This groundwater has therefore likely been contaminated due to rapid bypass flow along wells or other conduits. Addressing the issue of well condition is urgently needed to stop further pollution of China's deep aquifers, which are some of China's most important drinking water sources. China's new 10 point Water Pollution Plan addresses previous shortcomings, however, control and remediation of deep groundwater pollution will take decades of sustained effort.
Smartphone based floor detection in unstructured and structured environments
Venue: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops)

Fall related injuries are one of the biggest problem the elderly and the visually impaired populations face everyday. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about one third of Americans over the age of 65 fall every year. And according to the American Foundation for the Blind, 25 million Americans suffer from total or partial vision loss, which are twice as likely to fall as their sighted counterparts. This creates a need for preventative systems that would allow for the detection of objects that may constitute a tripping hazard. This paper relates to the implementation of a component that will be part of a much larger system that will allow elderly and visually impaired people navigate safely in indoors environments using off the shelf smartphones. The component refers to a floor detection module that will identify the floor ahead of the walking person in structured and unstructured environments in real time. A structured environment is an area with a well defined shape such as hallway, and an unstructured environment is an area without a known shape (not all rooms are the same) Floor detection is a challenging task considering the real time nature of the system, and the use of resource constrained devices such as smartphones. The evaluation of the system showed that it can work in real time with a run time of 1s. The accuracy of the floor detection module in unstructured environments was measured at 87.6% and 93% in structured environment.