pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Exploiting partial or complete geometrical symmetry in 3D symmetric Galerkin indirect BEM formulations

Procedures based on group representation theory, allowing the exploitation of geometrical symmetry in symmetric Galerkin BEM formulations, are investigated. In particular, this investigation is based on the weaker assumption of partial geometrical symmetry, where the boundary has two disconnected components, one of which is symmetric; e.g. this can be very useful for defect identification problems. The main development is expounded in the context of 3D Neumann elastostatic problems, considered as model problems; and then extended to SGBIE formulations for Dirichlet and/or scalar problems. Both Abelian and non-Abelian finite symmetry groups are considered. The effectiveness of the present approach is demonstrated through numerical examples, where both partial and complete symmetry are considered, in connection with both Abelian and non-Abelian symmetry groups
Mandatory Disclosure about Environmental and Employee Matters in the Reports of Italian-Listed Corporate Groups

This paper analyses the impact of Italian Legislative Decree 32/2007 – following the 2003/51 European Directive – and the disclosure of environmental and employee matters in terms of overall volume, completeness of information, presence of bad/good news and target-oriented information. Content analysis has been applied to all Italian corporate groups that made public both the consolidated annual report and the stand-alone social and environmental report in 2005 and in 2010, for a total of 96 reports. The results show that despite the overall increase in sentences devoted to environmental and employee matters, the completeness of the information has not substantially improved, indicating that the 2007 regulation has been ineffective. The Italian experience could provide useful insights for European regulators. Such insights may inform policy recommendations to design a mandated social and environmental accountability process with the potential of providing information to societal stakeholders while facilitating accountability
Granite intrusion in a metamorphic core complex: The example of the Mykonos laccolith (Cyclades, Greece)

International audienceThe Aegean domain is a well-suited place to study the formation of metamorphic core complex (MCC) and to investigate the role of syn-tectonic granites on their development. In the northern Cyclades, the Mykonos-Delos-Rhenia MCC is characterised by the intrusion of a kilometer-scale Late Miocene pluton of I-type granitoids within a migmatitic gneiss dome. New combined AMS (Anisotropy of Magnetic Susceptibility) and microstructural studies on the Mykonos granitoids together with recently published thermochronological data allow us to use the granitoids as strain markers. The Mykonos granitoids form a laccolith-like intrusion with a N70°E long axis. The laccolith is strongly asymmetric with an outlying root zone to the SW and a major body mainly developed to the NE. The laccolith construction is due to successive pulses of more or less differentiated magma that intruded the Cycladic Blueschist Unit. The attitude of stretching markers suggests an important (about 60°) vertical-axis local rotation phenomenon in the cycladic upper crust during the exhumation of the Mykonos MCC. Structural data suggest a four-stage evolution of the Mykonos MCC: (i) a first stage characterized by flat shearing toward the N-NE and by the formation of a domal structure in migmatitic paragneisses with multi-scale generation of folds with axes either perpendicular or parallel to the regional stretching, as a result of the interplay between regional N20E°-directed extension and EW shortening; (ii) a second stage marked by the emplacement of the Mykonos laccolith at 13.5 ± 0.3 Ma at the top of the migmatitic paragneisses; (iii) the third stage corresponding to the development of protomylonitic foliations and lineations in the whole laccolith in high to medium temperature conditions; (iv) the late stage marked by an acceleration of the exhumation of the Mykonos MCC. This exhumation was accommodated by important rotations of upper crustal blocks. During the end of the exhumation processes, around 10 Ma, deformation localized at the top of the laccolith in semi-ductile conditions and then in brittle conditions in the major detachment plane. Our study shows that the Cycladic plutonism event had no role on the initiation of the MCC. However, the geometry of the Mykonos intrusion supports that the magmas are "sucked" into the direction of regional extension and that the intrusion of magmas has caused an acceleration of the last stages of the MCC development. This acceleration was marked by a very fast exhumation of the laccolith after its emplacement
Colloidal submicron-palladium particles stabilized with acetate

Palladium spherical particles 0.23 μm in diameter were synthesized by reducing palladium acetate with hydrazine in the presence of surfactant, with an aim of exhibiting both easy separation by filtration and easy dispersion for a catalyst. The particles in the suspension were sedimented slowly but not aggregated. The suspension showed voltammetric redox waves. The anodic wave was ascribed to the oxidation of Pd to Pd2+, whereas the cathodic one was to the reduction of the palladium acetate moiety to Pd. The current ratio of the anodic peak to the cathodic one, 4:1, was close to the ratios by the partial chemical oxidation with permanganate and by the thermogravimetry, suggesting the composition of 80 % palladium metal and 20 % palladium acetate in the molar ratio. Heating the palladium particles at 300 ℃ yielded palladium metal. The decomposition proceeded to the first-order reaction with the activation energy of 40 kJ mol-1. The particle catalyzed the reduction of methylene blue with hydrazine. The reaction rate was of the first-order with respect to methylene blue. The rate constant was proportional to the geometrical surface area of the palladium particle, suggesting a surface catalysis
Metabolic monitoring of advanced uterine cervical cancer neoadjuvant chemotherapy by using [F-18]-Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography: preliminary results in three patients

[Objective]
	The aim of this report is to describe the potential clinical utility of tracer [F-18]-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) uptake, quantitated as a standardized uptake value (SUV) by positron emission tomography (PET), to evaluate treatment response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in advanced uterine cervical cancer.
	
	[Methods]
	We briefly describe the clinical courses of three women with advanced cervical cancer who were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) prior to radical hysterectomy and who were analyzed for correlation with the decrease in tumor volume by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in SUV by FDG-PET, and by histologic response.
	
	[Results]
	In these individuals, tumor volume and SUV were decreased by NAC. The decrease in SUV by FDG-PET was better correlated to histologic response for NAC than MRI was in advanced cervical cancer.
	
	[Conclusions]
	Measurement of SUV by FDG-PET has clinical utility in evaluating treatment response for NAC in advanced cervical cancer. Although work in this field is still in the early stages, this report demonstrates that SUV by FDG-PET has the potential to become the new standard for monitoring the treatment response of NAC in cervical cancer. This monitoring approach must be proven in a larger number of patients for both primary and secondary lesions and should be further explored in another gynecologic cancer
Breaking the law: Patrick Pearse, cultural revival, and the site of sovereignty

This paper focuses on the intersections between Patrick Pearse’s revolutionary career as leader of the Easter Rising and his interests in the law and theatre. The paper opens with a discussion of the context of cultural revival and the emergent anti-colonial movements that so radically shaped Irish history in the early decades of the 20th century – a key suggestion here is that the idea of the law shadows much of this period’s discourse. It is in this context that Pearse’s political pamphlets are unpacked to reveal the manner in which he theorizes the problematic linkages between empire, sovereign power, and the law. The paper then moves to examine Pearse’s use of the theatre as a space for exploring the intimate connections between conceptions of the law and national identity. In all of this, Pearse’s work is seen as much more experimental, and perhaps even protomodernist, than is often suggested within a critical discourse that focuses on the Romantic-nationalist elements of his revolutionary activities
Semi-quantitative temperature accelerated life test (ALT) for the reliability qualification of concentrator solar cells and cell on carriers

An adequate qualification of concentrator photovoltaic solar cells and cell-on-carriers is essential to increase their industrial development. The lack of qualification tests for measuring their reliability together with the fact that conventional accelerated life tests are laborious and time consuming are open issues. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a semi-quantitative temperature-accelerated life test to qualify solar cells and cell-on-carriers that can assure a minimum life when failure mechanisms are accelerated by temperature under emulated nominal working conditions with an activation energy >0.9 eV. A properly designed semi-quantitative accelerated life test should be able to determine if the device under test will satisfy its reliability requirements with an acceptable uncertainty level. The applicability, procedure, and design of the proposed test are detailed in the paper
Development of new laboratory equipment for measuring the accelerated polishing of asphalt mixes

The skid resistance of pavements tends to decrease over time, resulting in greater risks for drivers.\ud
Currently, skid resistance and macrotexture values can only be determined for existing pavements.\ud
It would be of interest to be able to predict the evolution of the skid resistance of an asphalt mixture\ud
before its installation as a highway wearing course. This paper summarizes the experience gained and\ud
the results obtained during the development of a test procedure which has been applied in the\ud
laboratory to measure the evolution of the skid resistance of hot mix asphalts through a modified version of an accelerated polishing machine which is normally used to determine the polished stone value of aggregates
Virus population bottlenecks during within-host progression and host-to-host transmission

Despite rapidly growing to immense sizes, virus populations suffer repeated severe bottlenecks, both within hosts and when transmitted from host to host. The potential effect of bottlenecks has been theoretically and experimentally documented, but formal estimations of their actual sizes in natural situations are scarce. Bottlenecks during colonization of organs and during transmission are influenced by those occurring at the cellular level. The study of the multiplicity of cellular infection (MOI) thus appears central, and this trait may be differentially regulated by different virus species. The values of MOI and their putative regulation deserve important future efforts, in order to disentangle the complex interactions between the control of gene copy numbers and the populations dynamics/genetics of viruses
The use of participatory object-oriented Bayesian networks and agro-economic models for groundwater management in Spain

This paper describes the development of a participatory decision support system for water management in the Upper Guadiana basin in central Spain where there has long been competition for groundwater resources between the agricultural sector and the environment. In the last few decades the rapid development of irrigation has led to the over-exploitation of the Mancha Occidental aquifer, the main water source in the area; this in turn has led to the loss of ecologically important wetlands. Against this background the River Basin Authority (RBA) has designed a new water management plan aimed at reducing water consumption. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of these measures on both the environment and the agricultural sector. To this end stakeholders have been invited to actively participate in the development of a decision support system (DSS) based on the combination of an agro-economic model and an object-oriented Bayesian network. This DSS has been used to evaluate the trade-off between agriculture and the environment for different management options at different scales. Results indicate that achieving even a partial recovery of the aquifer water levels will require strict enforcement by the RBA of water restrictions on farmers combined with a high offer price for the purchase of water rights. However, compliance with water restrictions inevitably leads to losses in farm income, especially in small vineyard farms, unless additional measures are taken to compensate for those potential losses. The purchase of water rights alone is insufficient to ensure the recovery of water levels; accompanying measures included in the new regional management plan will also need to be undertaken
Electron-phonon energy transfer in hot-carrier solar cells

Hot-carrier solar cells may yield very high efficiency if the heat transfer from electrons to phonons is low enough. In this paper we calculate this heat transfer for the two inelastic mechanisms known to limit the electric conductivity: the multi-valley scattering in non-polar semiconductors and the coupling of electrons to longitudinal optical phonons in polar semiconductors. Heat transfer is ruled by matrix elements deduced from electric conductivity measurements. The cell power extracted from hot-carrier solar cells affected by this mechanism, but otherwise ideal, is deduced. It is found that Si and Ge solar cells, mainly under concentrated sun light, might lead to better efficiencies than conventional cells
Neurological Disease Detection and Monitoring from Voice Production

The dramatic impact of neurological degenerative pathologies in life quality is a growing concern. It is well known that many neurological diseases leave a fingerprint in voice and speech production. Many techniques have been designed for the detection, diagnose and monitoring the neurological disease. Most of them are costly or difficult to extend to primary attention medical services. Through the present paper it will be shown how some neurological diseases can be traced at the level of phonation. The detection procedure would be based on a simple voice test. The availability of advanced tools and methodologies to monitor the organic pathology of voice would facilitate the implantation of these tests. The paper hypothesizes that some of the underlying mechanisms affecting the production of voice produce measurable correlates in vocal fold biomechanics. A general description of the methodological foundations for the voice analysis system which can estimate correlates to the neurological disease is shown. Some study cases will be presented to illustrate the possibilities of the methodology to monitor neurological diseases by voic
Micromechanical modeling of the linear viscoelasticity of carbon-black filled styrene butadiene rubbers: the role of the rubber-filler interphase

Version éditeur : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167663612002190Micromechanics modeling of the linear viscoelasticity of carbon-black filled styrene butadiene rubbers (SBR) shows that a simple representation of a spherical rigid-phase surrounded by rubber gum and embedded in an homogeneous equivalent medium provides access to the effective volume fraction of fillers. This simple representation is successful for a significant range of filler amount, and for materials in the glassy state. For materials in the rubbery state, experimental results support the existence of a filler-rubber interphase with reduced mobility due to confinement. The 4-phase micromechanics model, which accounts for a bounded rubber layer coating the fillers,
provides satisfactory estimates of the linear viscoelasticity of filled rubbers from the rubbery state to the glassy state. It also provides access to the filler rubber interphase behavior that appears viscoelastic, and to an estimate of the interphase thickness.ANR MATETPRO AMUFIS
Local Convergence of the Affine-Scaling Interior-Point Algorithm for Nonlinear Programming

This paper addresses the local convergence properties of the affine-scaling interior-point algorithm for nonlinear programming. The analysis of local convergence is developed in terms of parameters that control the interior-point scheme and the size of the residual of the linear system that provides the step direction. The analysis follows the classical theory for quasi-Newton methods and addresses q-linear, q-superlinear, and q-quadratic rates of convergence.http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:100877492465
Stability of Sb line structures on Si(001)

Structure and stability of Sb-dimer linear chains on the Si(001) surface are studied by means of ab initio quantum-mechanical molecular dynamics using pseudopotentials. It is confirmed that the model comprising a double core of seven-membered rings of silicon for Bi/Si(001) nanolines is indeed one of the most stable structures energetically, and it also explains Sb/Si nanolines. Moreover, it is clear that stability of the odd-membered-ring (5-7-5) structure will decrease as the group-V adatom changes from Bi to Sb, and disappear for As/Si due to the size effect
Time resolved Nomarski interferometery of laser produced plasma plumes

We report results from optical interferometric probing of a laser generated Zn plasma plume. The experiment was  performed in a vacuum and O2 rich environments where the background pressure of O2 was maintained at 1000 Pa and the results from both regimes are compared. The focus of our work is very much on the early stages in the life of the plasma plume which remains, to date, a largely unexplored area of study, at least in the pulsed laser deposition research domain. It was found that the electron density\ud
profile normal to the target is different in the background gas at early times (30 ns) compared to that of\ud
the vacuum case. At later times (80 ns) both profiles have a very similar shape. We also observe the formation of a shock wave at the plasma–gas interface shortly after plasma breakdown (<15 ns)
Evaluation of essential trace and toxic elements in scalp hair samples of smokers and alcohol user hypertensive patients

The incidence of hypertension has been associated to cigarette smoking and consumption of alcohol. In the present study, trace and toxic elements were determined in scalp hair of patients diagnosed with hypertension who are smokers and habitual alcohol drinkers living in Dublin, Ireland. These results were compared with age- and sex-matched healthy, nonsmokers, nondrinking controls. The concentrations of trace and toxic elements were measured by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrophotometer after microwave-assisted acid digestion. The validity and accuracy of the methodology were checked using certified reference material (NCS ZC 81002b) and by the conventional wet acid digestion method on the same certified reference material and on real samples. The recovery of all the studied elements was found to be in the range of 97.5%–99.7% in certified reference material. The results of this study showed that the mean values of cadmium, copper, iron, nickel and lead were significantly higher in scalp hair samples of both smoker and nonsmoker hypertensive patients than referents (P < 0.001); whereas, the concentration of zinc was lower in the scalp hair samples of hypertensive patients of both genders. The deficiency of zinc and the high exposure of trace and toxic metals as a result of cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption may be synergistic with risk factors associated with hypertension
Signal analysis and feature generation for pattern identification of partial discharges in high-voltage equipment

This paper proposes a method for the identification of different partial discharges (PDs) sources through the analysis of a collection of PD signals acquired with a PD measurement system. This method, robust and sensitive enough to cope with noisy data and external interferences, combines the characterization of each signal from the collection, with a clustering procedure, the CLARA algorithm.\ud
Several features are proposed for the characterization of the signals, being the wavelet variances, the frequency estimated with the Prony method, and the energy, the most relevant for the performance of the clustering procedure.\ud
The result of the unsupervised classification is a set of clusters each containing those signals which are more similar to each other than to those in other clusters. The analysis of the classification results permits both the identification of different PD sources and the discrimination between original PD signals, reflections, noise and external interferences.\ud
The methods and graphical tools detailed in this paper have been coded and published as a contributed package of the R environment under a GNU/GPL license
Genetic characterization of chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) orchards and traditional nut varieties in El Bierzo, a glacial refuge and major cultivation site in Northwestern Spain

This paper presents a detailed genetic study of Castanea sativa in El Bierzo, a major nut production region with interesting features. It is located within a glacial refuge at one extreme of the distribution area (northwest Spain); it has a centenary tradition of chestnut management; and more importantly, it shows an unusual degree of genetic isolation. Seven nuclear microsatellite markers were selected to analyze the genetic variability and structure of 169 local trees grafted for nut production. We analyzed in the same manner 62 local nuts. The selected loci were highly discriminant for the genotypes studied, giving a combined probability of identity of 6.1 × 10−6. An unprecedented density of trees was sampled for this project over the entire region, and nuts were collected representing 18 cultivars marketed by local producers. Several instances of misclassification by local growers were detected. Fixation index estimates and analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) data are supportive of an unexpectedly high level of genetic differentiation in El Bierzo, larger than that estimated in a previous study with broader geographical scope but based on limited local sampling (Pereira-Lorenzo et al., Tree Genet Genomes 6: 701–715, 2010a). Likewise, we have determined that clonality due to grafting had been previously overestimated. In line with these observations, no significant spatial structure was found using both a model-based Bayesian procedure and Mantel’s tests. Taken together, our results evidence the need for more fine-scale genetic studies if conservation strategies are to be efficiently improved
Cu(In,Ga)Se2 absorber thinning and the homo-interface model: Influence of Mo back contact and 3-stage process on device characteristics

Thinning the absorber layer is one of the possibilities envisaged to further decrease the production costs of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGSe) thin films solar cell technology. In the present study, the electronic transport in submicron CIGSe-based devices has been investigated and compared to that of standard devices. It is observed that when the absorber is around 0.5 μm-thick, tunnelling enhanced interface recombination dominates, which harms cells energy conversion efficiency. It is also shown that by varying either the properties of the Mo back contact or the characteristics of 3-stage growth processing, one can shift the dominating recombination mechanism from interface to space charge region and thereby improve the cells efficiency. Discussions on these experimental facts led to the conclusions that 3-stage process implies the formation of a CIGSe/CIGSe homo-interface, whose location as well as properties rule the device operation; its influence is enhanced in submicron CIGSe based solar cells