nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
El valor de la lectura en tiempos del Quijote
Year: 2017

En el siglo XVI, epoca en que vivio Cervantes, fue un siglo de destacados cambios, politicos y sociales, con la introduccion de la censura en las publicaciones, llevadas a cabo por el Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion. La mayor parte de la poblacion no sabia leer ni escribir. Analizamos a partir de textos publicados, principalmente, cual era la preocupacion por el aprendizaje de la escritura y la lectura en el Siglo XVI, y que importancia le daban los autores que dieron alguna opinion sobre esta cuestion. Despues analizamos, desde la obra del Quijote, que posible opinion tenia Cervantes sobre la lectura en general, y si se pronuncio o indico alguna cosa sobre la censura de libros. Se concluye que el valor de la lectura radicaba, como opinion mas generalizada, para el uso profesional y para el disfrute de las historias contadas, ademas de favorecer el conocimiento para el desarrollo personal, pero Cervantes no hizo ninguna referencia al grave periodo de falta de libertad de expresion como consecuencia de la censura mas severa que acaecio en Espana implantada por el Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion.
Local public service productivity and performance measurement
Year: 2018

A premise of new public management (NPM) is that productivity in public services is lower than the private sector, justifying the transfer of tools and techniques born in private sector manufacturing. Our focus is on public service effectiveness i.e. performance, while recognising that efficiency is always important. We believe attention to effectiveness will grow since new public governances (NPG; Osborne et al. 2010, 2015) including the service management perspective (Normann, 2002) are likely to result in new performance metrics including innovative ways of cross departmental and inter organisational working to deliver integrated services. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to suggest a new performance framework for evaluating local public service productivity and performance: efficiency and effectiveness. We follow Carrillo and Batra (2012) in rejecting the reduction of performance simply to financial metrics. Our contribution is to suggest ways in which public value as a metric of performance can be measured by socially (and contextually) migrating public values into performance value.
Spatial preferential attachment networks: Power laws and clustering coefficients
Year: 2012

We define a class of growing networks in which new nodes are given a spatial position and are connected to existing nodes with a probability mechanism favoring short distances and high degrees. The competition of preferential attachment and spatial clustering gives this model a range of interesting properties. Empirical degree distributions converge to a limit law, which can be a power law with any exponent \tau>2$ The average clustering coefficient of the networks converges to a positive limit. Finally, a phase transition occurs in the global clustering coefficients and empirical distribution of edge lengths when the power law exponent crosses the critical value \tau=3$ Our main tool in the proof of these results is a general weak law of large numbers in the spirit of Penrose and Yukich.
Plenty of Room at the Bottom Nanotechnology as Solution to an Old Issue in Enhanced Oil Recovery
Year: 2018

During the past half century, the prefix "nano" attached to several words, such as "technology" "motors" "device" and so on has denoted cutting edge research fields and topics at the forefront of classical scientific disciplines. Possible application fields have been frequently evoked, even if real life examples are still difficult to find. The present review analyzes how nanotechnology is utilized in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes so as to increase the efficiency of mature oilfields. Nanotechnology in EOR is classified into three categories: nanoparticles/nanofluids, nanoemulsions, and nanocatalysts. The advantages at the nanoscale are also described and discussed, including an overview of manufacturing methods as well as the concerns about their possible environmental impacts. Clearly, nanotechnology has the potential to boost EOR techniques, although there are still many questions and drawbacks to be tackled.
ExploreQC: A toolbox for MRI quality control in the EPAD multicentre study
Year: 2020

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the brain is prone to artefacts that may worsen image quality and subsequent analyses. Despite the growing number of large scale multi institutional imaging studies, standardized approaches for defining inclusion and exclusion criteria on the basis of image data quality are still lacking and quality assessment is often based on visual inspection. We introduce ExploreQC, a MATLAB based toolbox which implements a semi automatic pipeline to assess QC metrics, select the most relevant parameters, and to derive informed inclusion thresholds.
Waiting for a miracle: a survey of Stanley Kubrick's unrealized projects
Year: 2017

A survey of Stanley Kubrick's unfinished films generally includes Napoleon, Aryan Papers and A.I. Artificial Intelligence A few extra projects are commonly included as well: One Eyed Jacks, The German Lieutenant and The Burning Secret Three more scripts have enjoyed media recognition recently, after the announcement of their tentative production: Lunatic at Large, The Down Slopeand and God Fearing Man But this only scratches the surface of the extensive range of cinematic interests that Kubrick manifested. The following article lists all the projects the director considered, developed and abandoned in his career. A study of Kubrick's work that encompasses his unsuccessful endeavors could help us better understand his tastes, methodology and the necessary ingredients that would make a good film according to Stanley Kubrick.
The Need for the Right Socio Economic and Cultural Fit in the COVID 19 Response in Sub Saharan Africa: Examining Demographic, Economic Political, Health, and Socio Cultural Differentials in COVID 19 Morbidity and Mortality
Venue: International journal of environmental research and public health
Year: 2020

The coronavirus disease (COVID 19) has spread quickly across the globe with devastating effects on the global economy as well as the regional and societies' socio economic fabrics and the way of life for vast populations. The nonhomogeneous continent faces local contextual complexities that require locally relevant and culturally appropriate COVID 19 interventions. This paper examines demographic, economic, political, health, and socio cultural differentials in COVID 19 morbidity and mortality. The health systems need to be strengthened through extending the health workforce by mobilizing and engaging the diaspora, and implementing the International Health Regulations (2005) core capacities. In the absence of adequate social protection and welfare programs targeting the poor during the pandemic, sub Saharan African countries need to put in place flexible but effective policies and legislation approaches that harness and formalise the informal trade and remove supply chain barriers. This could include strengthening cross border trade facilities such as adequate pro poor, gender sensitive, and streamlined cross border customs, tax regimes, and information flow. The emphasis should be on cross border infrastructure that not only facilitates trade through efficient border administration but can also effectively manage cross border health threats. There is an urgent need to strengthen social protection systems to make them responsive to crises, and embed them within human rights based approaches to better support vulnerable populations and enact health and social security benefits. The COVI 19 response needs to adhere to the well established 'do no harm' principle to prevent further damage or suffering as a result of the pandemic and examined through local lenses to inform peace building initiatives that may yield long term gains in the post COVID 19 recovery efforts.
Learning a Discriminative Filter Bank Within a CNN for Fine Grained Recognition
Venue: 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Year: 2018

Compared to earlier multistage frameworks using CNN features, recent end to end deep approaches for fine grained recognition essentially enhance the mid level learning capability of CNNs. Previous approaches achieve this by introducing an auxiliary network to infuse localization information into the main classification network, or a sophisticated feature encoding method to capture higher order feature statistics. We show that mid level representation learning can be enhanced within the CNN framework, by learning a bank of convolutional filters that capture class specific discriminative patches without extra part or bounding box annotations. Such a filter bank is well structured, properly initialized and discriminatively learned through a novel asymmetric multi stream architecture with convolutional filter supervision and a non random layer initialization. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state of the art on three publicly available fine grained recognition datasets (CUB 200 2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC Aircraft) Ablation studies and visualizations are provided to understand our approach.
National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (NMVCCS) SAS Analytical Users Manual
Year: 2008

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA's) National Center for Statistics and Analysis has completed the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (NMVCCS) It was a Congressionally required nationwide survey of crashes involving light passenger vehicles, with a focus on the factors related to pre crash events. A total of 6,949 crashes were investigated between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2007. Of these, 5,470 cases comprise a nationally representative sample. The remaining 1,479 cases are suitable for clinical study. The data collected through the investigated crashes will better assist NHTSA and other safety advocates in evaluating and developing vehicle related crash avoidance technologies. Each investigated crash involved at least one light passenger vehicle that was towed due to damage. Data were collected on scene for at least 600 data elements in the crash to capture information related to the drivers, vehicles, roadways, and environment. In addition, the NMVCCS database includes crash narratives, photographs, schematic diagrams, vehicle information, as well as event data recorder data when available. This document describes the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) analysis file that is available.
Exploration with Unreliable Intrinsic Reward in Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: ArXiv
Year: 2019

This paper investigates the use of intrinsic reward to guide exploration in multi agent reinforcement learning. We discuss the challenges in applying intrinsic reward to multiple collaborative agents and demonstrate how unreliable reward can prevent decentralized agents from learning the optimal policy. We address this problem with a novel framework, Independent Centrally assisted Q learning (ICQL) in which decentralized agents share control and an experience replay buffer with a centralized agent. Only the centralized agent is intrinsically rewarded, but the decentralized agents still benefit from improved exploration, without the distraction of unreliable incentives.
A Study on Accounts Receivables in Retail Industry
Year: 2020

The study was conducted on the retail sector, it is mainly focused on its accounts receivables and its regulations over data collection and its collection period, descriptive research design is used in the study where the secondary data is been collected from the retail firm for the past three financial years. The study was analysed using the debt collection period and accounts receivable turnover ratio which is also known as debtors turnover ratio in order to determine its circulation over the periods and the number of times the debt is been collected within a year. The records receivables turnover proportion is utilized to locate the aggregate sum of money balance which an industry or a firm retains to provide for the owing organization.
Effects of Mechanical and Chemical Pretreatments of Zirconia or Fiber Posts on Resin Cement Bonding
Venue: PloS one
Year: 2015

The bonding strength between resin cement and posts is important for post and core restorations. An important method of improving the bonding strength is the use of various surface pretreatments of the post. In this study, the surfaces of zirconia (fiber) posts were treated by mechanical and/or chemical methods such as sandblasting and silanization. The bonding strength between the zirconia (fiber) post and the resin cement was measured by a push out method after thermocycling based on the adhesion to Panavia F 2.0 resin cement. The zirconia and fiber posts exhibited different bonding strengths after sandblasting and/or silanization because of the different strengths and chemical structures. The zirconia post showed a high bonding strength of up to 17.1 MPa after a combined treatment of sandblasting and silanization because of the rough surface and covalent bonds at the interface. This effect was also enhanced by using 1,2 bis(trimethoxysilyl)ethane for the formation of a flexible layer at the interface. In contrast, a high bonding strength of 13.9 MPa was obtained for the fiber post treated by silane agents because the sandblasting treatment resulted in damage to the fiber post, as observed by scanning electron microscopy. The results indicated that the improvement in the bonding strength between the post and the resin cement could be controlled by different chemical and/or mechanical treatments. Enhanced bonding strength depended on covalent bonding and the surface roughness. A zirconia post with high bonding strength could potentially be used for the restoration of teeth in the future.
Influence of Caralluma adscendens Var. attenuata cold cream on UV B damaged skin epidermal cells: a novel approach
Venue: 3 Biotech
Year: 2021

Ultraviolet radiation induced sunburns are characterized by pigmented, wrinkled, and dried skin, with rashes and red spots. Chemical sunscreen lotion shows beneficial effects, but it shows the adverse side effect while in continuous usage. Natural substances of plant origin are deemed a possible cause of UV radiation through sunscreen resources. On this basis, we formulated the cold cream from the Caralluma adscendens Var. attenuata (CAVA) plant extract. The phytocompounds were studied by using GC MS. The antioxidant potential of the plant extract was determined, and the CAVA showed cytotoxicity on A375 skin melanoma cells determined by MTT assay. The FT IR spectra analysis confirmed the chemical nature of crude and crosslinking between cold creams. The cream was applied topically to rats pre exposed to UV B radiation (32,800 J/m2) four times/week (on alternate days) UV B exposed without any treatment rats showed increased red spots or wrinkles (5 cm2) In contrast, the cold cream treatment application on irradiated skin has significantly reduced the size of rashes and red spots and the wound was contracted in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, histopathology of the experimental rat skin confirmed that CAVA cream treatment significantly reduced the epidermal thickening, damage in dermis and epidermis layers, and restructured the hair follicles. This study suggests that the cream formulated using CAVA can alleviate the damages caused by the UV B irradiation at a high level and safeguard the skin tissues.
Neural Machine Translation for Low resource English Bangla
Venue: Journal of Computer Science
Year: 2019

Neural machine translation has recently been able to gain state of the art translation quality for many language pairs. However, neural machine translation has been less tested for English Bangla language pair, two linguistically distant and widely spoken languages. In this paper, we apply neural machine translation to the task of English Bangla translation in both directions and compare it against a standard phrase based statistical machine translation system. We obtain up to +0.30 and +4.95 BLEU improvement over phrase based statistical machine translation for English to Bangla and Bangla to English respectively. Due to low resource and morphological richness of Bangla, English Bangla translation task produces a large number of rare words. We apply subword segmentation with byte pair encoding to handle this rare words issue. We obtain up to +0.69 and +0.30 BLEU improvement over baseline neural machine translation for English to Bangla and Bangla to English respectively. We further investigate our system output for several challenging linguistic properties like subject verb agreement, noun inflection, long distance reordering and rare words translation. We observe that neural machine translation with and without subword segmentation significantly outperform the phrase based statistical machine translation system, thus establishing itself as the state of the art technology for low resource English Bangla machine translation.
Biological synthesis of gold nanoparticles using endophytic fungi
Year: 2015

The myriad uses of gold nanoparticles in the field of medicine have forwarded research to find the best possible way to synthesize them with better size manipulation. Biological synthesis of nanoparticles has attracted lot of attention in the recent past as this offers a convenient procedure of synthesizing them in a "green and facile manner" In the present study, the less explored endophytic fungi were employed in the synthesis of gold nanoparticles. Extracellular gold nanoparticle formation was observed by the change in colour of the solution to dark pink. This was followed by characterizing the nanoparticles using various instrumental analyses like UV Vis spectroscopy, TEM and FTIR. The obtained gold nanoparticles were found to be spherical with slight aggregation and their size was found to be in the range of 15 35 nm. Their biocompatibility has been assessed using cytotoxicity assay and the results have shown that these biogenic gold nanoparticles do not induce significant cytotoxicity in normal and cancer cell lines. This study highlights the use of endophytic fungi as potential synthesizers of biocompatible gold nanoparticles in a benign fashion.
Helical edge states of topological photonic crystals with line defects.
Venue: Applied optics
Year: 2019

Topologically protected edge states of honeycomb photonic crystals (PCs) have been extensively studied in recent years. Here we propose several optimized two dimensional PC configurations with distinct line defects introduced by breaking the C6 symmetry of each topological lattice along the interfaces between two different topologies. The spin flipping nature of the defect modes of these PC configurations is measured, which is expected to offer a novel realization mechanism of quantum spin Hall effect. The line defects can be treated as unidirectional air waveguides due to the characteristic topological properties. We manipulate the coupling effect of two helical edge states with tunable waveguide widths. It shows that the air waveguide has possibility for practical applications because of its suppression of backward scattering and considerable transmission efficiency.
An efficient two stage method for optimal sensor placement using graph theoretical partitioning and evolutionary algorithms
Year: 2019

Struct Control Health Monit. 2019;e2325.   This paper presents a two stage optimal sensor placement method for modal identification of structures. At the first stage, using a graph theoretical technique, the structure is partitioned into equal substructures. At the second stage, a preset number of triaxial sensors are proportionately allocated to the substructures. The location of sensors is determined using an evolutionary optimization algorithm, which optimizes the triaxial modal assurance criterion of the structure. The first stage leads to the even distribution of the sensors. This stage not only improves the mode shape visualization as the secondary criterion but also accelerates the optimization process by space reduction. Here, various graph theoretical methods including k means, k means+ and spectral partitioning are examined as the partitioning techniques. In addition, a dynamic version for quantum inspired evolutionary optimization algorithm (DQEA) is proposed and applied to find the placement of triaxial sensors, along with the standard version of quantum inspired evolutionary algorithm and genetic algorithm. In order to examine the efficiency of the methods, the bridge model of the University of Central Florida, USA, is considered as the benchmark structure. The results show that the proposed method efficiently satisfies both criteria. Moreover, the introduced optimization algorithm (DQEA) outperforms other algorithms.
Bacterial indicators and antibiotic resistance of Escherichia coli in groundwater
Year: 2017

The aim of this research was to investigate the groundwater quality in El Barreal basin (Cordoba, Argentina) through bacteriological analysis and antibiotic resistance of fecal bacteria indicators and their relationship with geochemical and land uses characteristics. Groundwater samples were collected in 36 wells and the following parameters were determined: major chemical components, heterotrophic plate counts, total and fecal coliforms, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Antibiotic resistance of E. coli was analyzed using standard methods. The chemical and bacteriological analysis showed that more than 80 of samples were unfit for human consumption. Bacteriological contamination was significant in 36 of samples. The multivariate analysis between bacterial and geochemical variables explained local contamination conditions, evidenced by the arrival of bacteria and some typical indicators (NO3 Cl y HCO3 to groundwater. No significant correlation between NO3 and bacterial counts was observed, which let us to interpret that part of NO3 contents can be supplied by inorganic fertilizers. Total and fecal coliforms were linked to a local increase of Cl and HCO3 and a decrease of pH and dissolved oxygen, indicating the arrival and degradation of organic matter into groundwater. The resistance pattern of total E. coli isolates (n=12) showed that the highest percentages were observed for antibiotics of animal use (ampicillin, tetracycline and cephalothin) The analysis of results revealed the impact of land uses demonstrating that livestock activities are the main punctual contaminant sources in this sedimentary aquifer.