nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Ultra thin CdS for highly performing chalcogenides thin film based solar cells

Ultra thin CdS layers non intentionally doped and doped with Cu were grown by chemical bath deposition and applied as buffer layers for chalcogenide CuIn 1 x Ga x Se 2 and Cu 2 ZnSnSe 4 (CZTSe) based solar cells. We demonstrate that the use of Cu as dopant allows to reduce the CdS thickness below 30 nm while keeping the same efficiency levels as those obtained with conventional 70 nm in thickness undoped CdS. This is mainly explained by the improved V OC values when Cu doped CdS is employed, obtaining voltages among the highest reported values, especially for CZTSe devices. We propose the formation of a metal insulator semiconductor (MIS) type device for explaining the observed experimental behavior based in indirect optoelectronic characterization of the layers and devices. This opens the possibility to use ultra thin buffer layers for high efficiency chalcogenide based solar cells, reducing the environmental impact of the CdS buffer deposition, without detrimental impact on the optoelectronic properties of the devices.
A Mouse Model of Visual Perceptual Learning Reveals Alterations in Neuronal Coding and Dendritic Spine Density in the Visual Cortex
Venue: Front. Behav. Neurosci.

Visual perceptual learning (VPL) can improve spatial vision in normally sighted and visually impaired individuals. Although previous studies of humans and large animals have explored the neural basis of VPL, elucidation of the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms remains a challenge. Owing to the advantages of molecular genetic and optogenetic manipulations, the mouse is a promising model for providing a mechanistic understanding of VPL. Here, we thoroughly evaluated the effects and properties of VPL on spatial vision in C57BL/6J mice using a two alternative, forced choice visual water task. Briefly, the mice underwent prolonged training at near the individual threshold of contrast or spatial frequency (SF) for pattern discrimination or visual detection for 35 consecutive days. Following training, the contrast threshold trained mice showed an 87% improvement in contrast sensitivity (CS) and a 55% gain in visual acuity (VA) Similarly, the SF threshold trained mice exhibited comparable and long lasting improvements in VA and significant gains in CS over a wide range of SFs. Furthermore, learning largely transferred across eyes and stimulus orientations. Interestingly, learning could transfer from a pattern discrimination task to a visual detection task, but not vice versa. We validated that this VPL fully restored VA in adult amblyopic mice and old mice. Taken together, these data indicate that mice, as a species, exhibit reliable VPL. Intrinsic signal optical imaging revealed that mice with perceptual training had higher cut off SFs in primary visual cortex (V1) than those without perceptual training. Moreover, perceptual training induced an increase in the dendritic spine density in layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons of V1. These results indicated functional and structural alterations in V1 during VPL. Overall, our VPL mouse model will provide a platform for investigating the neurobiological basis of VPL.
Czech copreneur orientations to business and family responsibilities: A mixed embeddedness perspective

This paper aims to utilize a mixed embeddedness approach to examine how state welfare policies, employment conditions and gender norms shape orientations to divisions of business and domestic labor among Czech copreneurs, i.e. romantic couples involved in businesses together.  Twelve copreneur couples were interviewed; male and female partners were interviewed separately. Women's narratives are centered in analyzing motivations for business, divisions of labor, orientation to business/family and state policies. After detailing women's orientations, correspondence with male partner orientations is considered.  Analysis reveals how state policies, employment conditions and gender norms inform copreneur narratives about business and family life in the Czech Republic. Female respondents expressed three orientations: business as opportunity, business for family and business/home as teamwork. Women tended both business and family, whereas most male partners focused exclusively on business.  Although the small, purposive sample was not representative of all Czech copreneurs, findings detail how social context frames business/family dynamics.  This mixed embeddedness perspective demonstrates how gender norms, state taxation and welfare shape the organization of Czech copreneurships and can support or discourage women's entrepreneurship.  Mechanisms producing gender inequality in copreneur businesses are revealed.  Findings identify connections between female copreneur business/family orientations and the context of gender regimes, state policy and employment practices in a post socialist country. Also revealed are changing orientations across family and business stages.
Harmonics Generation by Surface Plasmon Polaritons on Single Nanowires
Venue: ACS photonics

We present experimental observations of visible wavelength second and third harmonic generation on single plasmonic nanowires of variable widths. We identify that near infrared surface plasmon polaritons, which are guided along the nanowire, act as the source of the harmonics generation. We discuss the underlying mechanism of this nonlinear process, using a combination of spatially resolved measurements and numerical simulations to show that the visible harmonics are generated via a combination of both local and propagating plasmonic modes. Our results provide the first demonstration of nanoscale nonlinear optics with guided, propagating plasmonic modes on a lithographically defined chip, opening up new routes toward integrated optical circuits for information processing.
Semantic Context Aware Recommendation via Topic Models Leveraging Linked Open Data
Venue: WISE

Context aware recommendation systems are used to provide personalized recommendations by exploiting contextual situation. They take into account not only user preferences, but also additional relevant information (context) Statistical topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have been extensively used for discovering latent semantic topics in text documents. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic topic model that incorporates user interests, item representation and context information in a single framework. In our approach, the contextual information is represented as a subset of the items feature space which is acquired from the knowledge available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) We use DBpedia, a well known knowledge base in LOD, to utilize the context information in recommendation. Our proposed recommendation framework computes the conditional probability of each item given the user preferences and the additional context. We use these probabilities as recommendation scores to find top n items for recommendations. The performed experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and shows that leveraging semantic context from the Linked Open Data can improve the quality of the recommendations.
Whistling in 1929: Ramsey and Wittgenstein on the Infinite

Cora Diamond has recently criticised as mere legend the interpretation of a quip of Ramsey's, contained in the epigraph below, which takes him to be objecting to or rejecting Wittgenstein's Tractarian distinction between saying and showing. Whilst I agree with Diamond's discussion of the legend, I argue that her interpretation of the quip has little evidential support, and runs foul of a criticism sometimes made against intuitionism. Rather than seeing Ramsey as making a claim about the nature of propositions, as Diamond does, we should understand him as making a claim about the grammar of the logical connectives. Such a view coheres with the extant evidence of the nature of Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's 1929 philosophical encounters. It is also compatible with attributing to Ramsey a recognition of Wittgenstein's distinction and with denying that criticising it is the lesson of the quip.
Opening the Social: Sociological Imagination in Life Course Studies

The life course perspective originated with the recognition that an adequate understanding of "lives through time" requires attention to the importance of social context. Since those origins, extensive evidence of ways in which context shapes and organizes life course outcomes has been presented. Yet the problem of formulating an adequate theoretical understanding of context's role in life course processes and outcomes persists, and remains unresolved. This paper suggests that life course scholarship, even while paying attention to context, has frequently relied on theoretical assumptions based in functionalism that restrict exploration of the full explanatory power of social forces. Contextual factors are "contained" through what we term a functional developmental nexus. We illustrate this tension by examining three domains of life course inquiry: (1) a consideration of the place of agency in life course studies, (2) research on the early life influences on the life course and (3) the study of gene environment interactions over the life course.
Crystal Engineering Gone Awry. What a Difference a Few Methyl Groups Make in Fullerene/Porphyrin Cocrystallization

Two related nickel(II) porphyrins, etioporphyrin I (Etio I) and octaethylporphyrin (OEP) were cocrystallized with C70 to produce the new cocrystal structures C70*Ni(Etio I)*2C6H6 and C70*Ni(OEP)*2C6H6. Etio I is a variant of OEP, where four alternating ethyl groups from OEP are replaced with methyl substituents. This isomer of etioporphyrin has the potential to act as an agent in chiral sorting of asymmetric fullerenes. However, the replacement of four ethyl groups has nontrivial structural consequences. Further host guest investigation of M(Etio I) (M Co, Ni, Cu, Zn) with C60 or C70 was conducted, producing new X ray structures of Co(Etio I) and Zn(Etio I) and a redetermination of Ni(Etio I) Despite numerous and varied attempts, C60 cocrystallized with M(Etio I) could not be obtained.
Drought Tolerant Corn Hybrids Yield More in Drought Stressed Environments with No Penalty in Non stressed Environments
Venue: Front. Plant Sci.

The potential benefit of drought tolerant (DT) corn (Zea mays L. hybrids may depend on drought intensity, duration, crop growth stage (timing) and the array of drought tolerance mechanisms present in selected hybrids. We hypothesized that corn hybrids containing DT traits would produce more consistent yields compared to non DT hybrids in the presence of drought stress. The objective of this study was to define types of production environments where DT hybrids have a yield advantage compared to non DT hybrids. Drought tolerant and non DT hybrid pairs of similar maturity were planted in six site years with different soil types, seasonal evapotranspiration (ET) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) representing a range of macro environments. Irrigation regimes and seeding rates were used to create several micro environments within each macro environment. Hybrid response to the range of macro and micro environmental stresses were characterized in terms of water use efficiency, grain yield, and environmental index. Yield advantage of DT hybrids was positively correlated with environment ET and VPD. Drought tolerant hybrids yielded 5 to 7% more than non DT hybrids in high and medium ET environments >430 mm ET) corresponding to seasonal VPD greater than 1200 Pa. Environmental index analysis confirmed that DT hybrids were superior in stressful environments. Yield advantage for DT hybrids appeared as yield dropped below 10.8 Mg ha 1 and averaged as much as 0.6 1 Mg ha 1 at the low yield range. Hybrids with DT technology can offer a degree of buffering against drought stress by minimizing yield reduction, but also maintaining a comparable yield potential in high yielding environments. Further studies should focus on the physiological mechanisms presented in the commercially available corn drought tolerant hybrids.
Comparative Assessment of Safety Indicators for Vehicle Trajectories on Highways

Safety measurement and its analysis have been challenging and well researched topics in transportation. Conventionally, surrogate safety measures have been used as safety indicators in simulation models for safety assessment, in control formulations for driver assistance systems, and in data analysis of naturalistic driving studies. However, surrogate indicators give partial insights on traffic safety; that is, these indicators only indicate a predetermined set of possible precrash situations for an interacting vehicle pair. Recently, a safety indicator called the "driving safety field," based on field theory, was proposed for two dimensional vehicle interactions. However, the objectivity of its functional form and its validity have yet to be tested. A qualitative and quantitative comparison of different safety indicators was provided as a risk measure to demarcate their mathematical properties and evaluate their usefulness in quantifying trajectory risk. Five relevant safety indicators were compared: inverse time to collision, postencroachment time, potential indicator of collision with urgent decceleration, warning index, and safety field force. Their formulations were mathematically analyzed to yield qualitative insights and their values over simulated vehicle trajectories were evaluated to yield quantitative insights. The results acknowledge the limitations and demarcate the functional utilities of the selected safety indicators.
Computer Security ESORICS 2016
Venue: Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Recent convergence of telephony with the Internet offers malicious actors the ability to craft cross channel attacks that leverage both telephony and Internet resources. Bulk messaging services can be used to send unsolicited SMS messages to phone numbers. While the long term properties of email spam tactics have been extensively studied, such behavior for SMS spam is not well understood. In this paper, we discuss a novel SMS abuse attribution system called CHURN. The proposed system is able to collect data about large SMS abuse campaigns and analyze their passive DNS records and supporting website properties. We used CHURN to systematically conduct attribution around the domain names and IP addresses used in such SMS spam operations over a five year time period. Using CHURN, we were able to make the following observations about SMS spam campaigns: (1) only 1 of SMS abuse domains ever appeared in public domain blacklists and more than 94 of the blacklisted domain names did not appear in such public blacklists for several weeks or even months after they were first reported in abuse complaints, (2) more than 40% of the SMS spam domains were active for over 100 days, and (3) the infrastructure that supports the abuse is surprisingly stable. That is, the same SMS spam domain names were used for several weeks and the IP infrastructure that supports these campaigns can be identified in a few networks and a small number of IPs, for several months of abusive activities. Through this study, we aim to increase the situational awareness around SMS spam abuse, by studying this phenomenon over a period of five years.
Computer Security ESORICS 2016
Venue: Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Software implementations of block ciphers are widely used to perform critical operations such as disk encryption or TLS traffic protection. To speed up cipher execution, many implementations rely on pre computed lookup tables, which makes them vulnerable to cachetiming attacks on modern processors. For time driven attacks, the overall execution time of a cipher is sufficient to recover the secret key. Testing cryptographic software on actual hardware is consequently essential for vulnerability and risk assessment. In this work, we investigate the efficient and robust evaluation of cryptographic software on modern processors under a time driven attack. Using a practical case study, we discuss necessary adaptations to the original attack and identify promising new micro architectural side channels for it. To leverage the leakage of multiple side channels, we propose a simple, heuristic way to combine their corresponding attacks. As an additional benefit, combined attacks simplify a comprehensive evaluation of cryptographic software across multiple different processors. We finally formulate practical evaluation suggestions based on the results of our case study.
Physical Therapy for Intervertebral Disk Disease: A Practical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment

Patients with pain emanating from their spines represent some of the most frequent and challenging cases for physical therapists. Here is a comprehensive and practical introduction to the management of back pain and restricted spinal function caused by intervertebral disk damage. The authors provide evidence based, clinically oriented strategies for the diagnosis and therapeutic treatment of disk injury in the lumbar, thoracic, and cervical spinal regions. The text gives an overview of research studies on the effects of physical therapy on back pain, step by step guidance on examination and conservative and postoperative physical therapy procedures, and detailed discussion of rehabilitation and prevention of further disk damage. Extensive coverage of examination, from patient history to tests for assessing spinal movement to nerve conduction *Precise instructions and useful pointers on treatment methods aid in daily practice *Chapter on basic principles of anatomy, physiology, and epidemiology offer foundational knowledge *Crucial information on approaches for rehabilitation and injury prevention, including strengthening, coordination exercises, and conditioning *Case studies present clinical examples that guide the reader through the full course of therapy *70 clear line drawings illustrate how to maintain correct posture; avoid poor posture; and protect and train muscles, nerves, and joints Physical Therapy for Intervertebral Disk Disease is a complete guide to the diagnosis and physiotherapeutic treatment of problems resulting from intervertebral disk damage. Practitioners and students of physical therapy, rehabilitation medicine, and occupational therapy will read this book cover to cover and refer to it regularly when working to relieve back pain and restore full capacity in their patients.
A Hybrid Vehicle Detection Method Based on Viola Jones and HOG SVM from UAV Images
Venue: Sensors

A new hybrid vehicle detection scheme which integrates the Viola Jones (V J) and linear SVM classifier with HOG feature (HOG SVM) methods is proposed for vehicle detection from low altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. As both V J and HOG SVM are sensitive to on road vehicles' in plane rotation, the proposed scheme first adopts a roadway orientation adjustment method, which rotates each UAV image to align the roads with the horizontal direction so the original V J or HOG SVM method can be directly applied to achieve fast detection and high accuracy. To address the issue of descending detection speed for V J and HOG SVM, the proposed scheme further develops an adaptive switching strategy which sophistically integrates V J and HOG SVM methods based on their different descending trends of detection speed to improve detection efficiency. A comprehensive evaluation shows that the switching strategy, combined with the road orientation adjustment method, can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the vehicle detection from UAV images. The results also show that the proposed vehicle detection method is competitive compared with other existing vehicle detection methods. Furthermore, since the proposed vehicle detection method can be performed on videos captured from moving UAV platforms without the need of image registration or additional road database, it has great potentials of field applications. Future research will be focusing on expanding the current method for detecting other transportation modes such as buses, trucks, motors, bicycles, and pedestrians.
An Energy Management Strategy to concurrently optimise fuel consumption PEM fuel cell lifetime in a hybrid vehicle

The cost and reliability of fuel cells are major obstructions preventing fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle (FCHEV) from entering the mainstream market. However, many of the degradation methods are strongly affected by the operating conditions of the fuel cell and therefore can be mitigated by optimisation of the Energy Management Strategy (EMS) The major causes of fuel cell degradation are identified from the literature and a model is produced in order to estimate the effect of the EMS on the fuel cell degradation. This is used to produce an optimal strategy for a low speed campus vehicle using Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) The SDP controller attempts to minimise the total running cost of the fuel cell, inclusive of both fuel consumption and degradation, each weighted by their respective costs. The new strategy is shown to increase the lifetime of the fuel cell by 14% with only a 3.5% increase in fuel consumption, largely by avoiding transient loading on the fuel cell stack.
Learning from Norwegian Battery Electric and Plug in Hybrid Vehicle users: Results from a survey of vehicle owners

Battery electric vehicles are more energy efficient, pollute less and emit fewer greenhouse gases than vehicles powered by fossil fuels. Plug in hybrid vehicles are in a mid position, capable of prolonged driving in electric mode with electricity charged from the grid or the use of fossil fuel in an internal combustion engine. A survey of over 8000 vehicle owners show that plug in hybrids drive electrically with power from the grid 55% of the time but battery electric vehicles are driven more in total and in everyday traffic. Buyers are different but motivated by economy of use and environment, whereas battery electric vehicle owners also are motivated by the free toll road incentive. Battery electric vehicle owners are younger, have more children, longer distance to work and own more vehicles than other vehicle owners. Normally diesel and gasoline vehicles are replaced but a larger share of battery electric vehicles become extra vehicles in households. These owners could belong to an age group and family type where such behaviour is more common or indicate a rebound effect. The vehicles are mainly charged at home, partly at work and rarely elsewhere. Fast charging is used for irregular trips where users plan to use fast chargers to accomplish the trip or to solve a problem on the go. Most battery electric vehicle owners manage everyday life well and are satisfied with the vehicle which in combination with attractive local incentives not available to other vehicle users, may explain why these two vehicle types do not seem to compete for the same customer.