Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrasound imaging for hand prosthesis control: a comparative study of features and classification methods

Controlling a robotic rehabilitation artefact such as a hand prosthesis is yet a rather open problem. Particularly, the choice of a human-machine interface (HMI) to enable natural control is still debatable. The traditional choice, i.e. surface electromyography (sEMG), suffers from a number of problems (electrode displacement, sweat, fatigue) which cannot be easily solved. One of its main drawbacks is the inherent low spatial resolution, at least in the standard settings. To overcome this hindrance, several novel HMIs have been proposed to substitute or augment sEMG; among them, pressure and tactile sensing, and ultrasound imaging (US). In this paper we propose an advancement towards the usage of US as a HMI for hand prosthetics; namely, we compare traditional US image features with Histograms of Oriented Gradients used as input for three classifiers, and show that a high number of hand configurations and grasping force levels can be classified way above chance level by choosing the right combination of features and classifier. In an experiment involving three intact human subjects, a classification accuracy of 80% was obtained; when classifying three different levels of grip force for four grasps, the performance reduces to 60%. These results confirm the usability of US imaging as a HMI for hand prosthetics, and pave the way to its practical usage as a means of natural prosthetic control.
Coverage-Driven Stimuli Generation

Simulation-based verification is still one of the most important methods to validate the correctness of System-on-Chips. Here, explicitly specified stimuli need to be generated which trigger certain scenarios of the design. However, so far stimuli generation is mainly performed independently of the desired coverage. In this work, we propose approaches for coverage-driven stimuli generation. Despite a naive method, we introduce and discuss automatic and interactive methods for an improved stimuli generation. We show that explicitly considering coverage metrics leads to smaller and complete sets of stimuli.
Role of Principal Supervision on the Relationship between Students’ Personnel Services and Academic Achievement in Secondary Schools: A Preliminary Report

This study investigates the role principal supervision on the relationship between students’ personnel services and academic achievement in secondary school via mixed-method approaches (quantitative and qualitative). Sample size of 100 students in one of the secondary schools formed the respondents for the quantitative study, while principals (junior and senior section) of the selected school formed the informants for the qualitative study. Questionnaire tagged “Students’ Personnel Services and Supervision Questionnaire (SPSPQ)” was used to elicit data from students while interview protocol tagged “Principal Supervision, Students’ Personnel Services and Academic Achievement (PSA)” was used to collect relevant data from the principals. Data collected through quantitative study was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Partial Least Square (PLS software) were used to assess the psychometric properties of the constructs, an Nvivo software (version 10) was used for coding and thematic analysis of the data collected. Quantitative findings revealed that the individual item reliability of the constructs had loadings between . 709 and . 956 while the composite reliability coefficients of the latent constructs had loadings between . 81 and . 98. Similarly, the average variance explained of showed high loadings (minimum of .68 and maxmum of .78 ) on their respective constructs. In addition, qualitative findings showed that services are provided for students in secondary schools. Conclusively, the preliminary results from the two studies are reliable , therefore it demonstrates the potency for the conduct of the main study on the role of principal supervision on the relationship between students’ personnel services and academic achievement in secondary schools.
Divisible-good uniform price auctions: The role of allocation rules and communication among bidders

We use laboratory experiments to compare allocation rules in uniform price divisible good auctions. “Standard” and “uniform” allocation rules admit different types of low-price equilibria, which are eliminated by a “hybrid” rule. We observe little evidence of revenue differences among the allocation rules. Under all three allocation rules, prices are competitive when bidders cannot explicitly communicate, and collusive when bidders can explicitly communicate. With explicit communication we find that collusive agreements are more fragile when the gain from a unilateral deviation is larger. We also find that the standard allocation rule is particularly vulnerable to collusive equilibria.
The effects of two different auditory stimuli on functional arm movement in persons with Parkinson's disease: a dual-task paradigm

Objective: To examine, in a dual-task paradigm, the effect of auditory stimuli on people with Parkinson's disease. Design: A counterbalanced repeated-measures design. Setting: A motor control laboratory in a university setting. Subjects: Twenty individuals with Parkinson's disease. Experimental conditions: Each participant did two experiments (marching music experiment and weather forecast experiment). In each experiment, the participant performed an upper extremity functional task as the primary task and listened to an auditory stimulus (marching music or weather forecast) as the concurrent task. Each experiment had three conditions: listening to the auditory stimulus, ignoring the auditory stimulus and no auditory stimulus. Main measures: Kinematic variables of arm movement, including movement time, peak velocity, deceleration time and number of movement units. Results: We found that performances of the participants were similar across the three conditions for the marching music experiment, but were significantly different for the weather forecast experiment. The comparison of condition effects between the two experiments indicated that the effect of weather forecast was (marginally) significantly greater than that of marching music. Conclusions: The results suggest that the type of auditory stimulus is important to the degree of interference with upper extremity performance in people with Parkinson's disease. Auditory stimuli that require semantic processing (e.g. weather forecast) may distract attention from the primary task, and thus cause a decline in performance.
The Multiple Pronunciations of Japanese Kanji: A Masked Priming Investigation

English words with an inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or with more than one pronunciation (“homographic heterophones”; e.g., “lead”–/l∊d/, /lid/) are read aloud more slowly than matched controls, presumably due to competition processes. In Japanese kanji, the majority of the characters have multiple readings for the same orthographic unit: the native Japanese reading (KUN) and the derived Chinese reading (ON). This leads to the question of whether reading these characters also shows processing costs. Studies examining this issue have provided mixed evidence. The current study addressed the question of whether processing of these kanji characters leads to the simultaneous activation of their KUN and ON reading, This was measured in a direct way in a masked priming paradigm. In addition, we assessed whether the relative frequencies of the KUN and ON pronunciations (“dominance ratio”, measured in compound words) affect the amount of priming. The results of two experiments showed that: (a) a single kanji, presented as a masked prime, facilitates the reading of the (katakana transcriptions of) their KUN and ON pronunciations; however, (b) this was most consistently found when the dominance ratio was around 50% (no strong dominance towards either pronunciation) and when the dominance was towards the ON reading (high-ON group). When the dominance was towards the KUN reading (high-KUN group), no significant priming for the ON reading was observed. Implications for models of kanji processing are discussed.
Preparation and Application of Phosphorylated Xylan as a Flocculant for Cationic Ethyl Violet Dye

In this study, phosphorylated birchwood xylan was produced under alkali conditions using trisodium trimetaphosphate. Three single-factor experiments were used to explore the influences of time, temperature, and the molar ratio of trisodium trimetaphosphate to xylan on the degree of substitution (DS) and charge density of xylan. The response surface methodology was used to explore the interaction of these three factors. Phosphorylated xylan with a maximum DS of 0.79 and a charge density of −3.40 mmol/g was produced under the optimal conditions of 80 °C, 4 h, and a molar ratio of xylan/sodium trimetaphosphate (STMP) of 1/3. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), ascorbic acid method analyses, and inductively coupled plasma–atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES) analyses confirmed that the phosphate groups were successfully attached to xylan. Thermogravimetric analysis confirmed that phosphorylated xylan was less stable than birchwood xylan. Furthermore, the phosphorylated xylan was applied as a flocculant for removing ethyl violet dye from a simulated dye solution. The results indicated that more than 95% of the dye was removed from the solution. The theoretical and experimental values of charge neutralization for the dye removal were close to one another, confirming that charge neutralization was the main mechanism for the interaction of dye and phosphorylated xylan. The impacts of salts on the flocculation efficiency of phosphorylated xylan were also analyzed.
Spatial patterns and links between microbial community composition and function in cyanobacterial mats

We imaged reflectance and variable fluorescence in 25 cyanobacterial mats from four distant sites around the globe to assess, at different scales of resolution, spatial variabilities in the physiological parameters characterizing their photosynthetic capacity, including the absorptivity by chlorophyll a (Achl), maximum quantum yield of photosynthesis (Ymax), and light acclimation irradiance (Ik). Generally, these parameters significantly varied within individual mats on a sub-millimeter scale, with about 2-fold higher variability in the vertical than in the horizontal direction. The average vertical profiles of Ymax and Ik decreased with depth in the mat, while Achl exhibited a sub-surface maximum. The within-mat variability was comparable to, but often larger than, the between-sites variability, whereas the within-site variabilities (i.e., between samples from the same site) were generally lowest. When compared based on averaged values of their photosynthetic parameters, mats clustered according to their site of origin. Similar clustering was found when the community composition of the mats' cyanobacterial layers were compared by automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA), indicating a significant link between the microbial community composition and function. Although this link is likely the result of community adaptation to the prevailing site-specific environmental conditions, our present data is insufficient to identify the main factors determining these patterns. Nevertheless, this study demonstrates that the spatial variability in the photosynthetic capacity and light acclimation of benthic phototrophic microbial communities is at least as large on a sub-millimeter scale as it is on a global scale, and suggests that this pattern of variability scaling is similar for the microbial community composition.
A Supportive Approach to Supervising Students Reading for a Phd in Systems and Software Engineering

Supervising a PhD student is a complex teaching task as it involves a very unstructured environment and many intellectual challenges and stimuli, and it often requires a compatible student/supervisor relationship for successful outcomes. It is therefore not surprising that it has been reported that an aspect of teaching and learning that has been overlooked in higher education is research student supervision. Typical problems of poor supervision include: high rates of dissatisfaction with supervisors and high attrition rates and slow rates of completion for students. It has also been reported that there is no set prescription on appropriate and successful supervision; rather, the interactions between quality and style of supervision, and the field of study have all to be considered. It is not easy to know what a student and his/her supervisor should be doing in order to succeed. We are thus motivated to present in this paper our approach to supervising students reading for a PhD in systems and software engineering. This approach is centered on motivating students to learn and to do research by having supervisory activities that support their development throughout their candidature.
Macroinvertebrates Collected From Seven Oklahoma Springs

We collected macroinvertebrates, measured physicochemical conditions, and visually observed the microhabitats of seven springs located across Oklahoma. Fifty-four species were collected from the seven springs. No single taxon was found in all seven sites and only four species were observed in over half of the sites. This indicates that many of the macroinvertebrates occurring in these springs are not truly spring invertebrates, but are local species able to exist in these environments. The number of taxa collected was directly related to the various microhabitats present and the concentration of dissolved oxygen. Based on the macroinvertebrate community, Sorensen’s similarity coefficient revealed that Boiling Springs and Big Spring were most similar, with both containing abundant microhabitats. Desperado Spring and Cattlewash Spring were least similar, having a large difference in dissolved oxygen concentrations. Four of the seven springs were sampled previously. Only 17% of macroinvertebrate species had been previously recorded from a particular site, indicating that a large turnover of species occurs in these spring habitats. © 2000 Oklahoma Academy of Science
An Overview on Fuzzy Modelling of Complex Linguistic Preferences in Decision Making

AbstractDecision makers involved in complex decision making problems usually provide information about their preferences by eliciting their knowledge with different assessments. Usually, the complexity of these decision problems implies uncertainty that in many occasions has been successfully modelled by means of linguistic information, mainly based on fuzzy based linguistic approaches. However, classically these approaches just allow the elicitation of simple assessments composed by either one label or a modifier with a label. Nevertheless, the necessity of more complex linguistic expressions for eliciting decision makers’ knowledge has led to some extensions of classical approaches that allow the construction of expressions and elicitation of preferences in a closer way to human beings cognitive process. This paper provides an overview of the broadest fuzzy linguistic approaches for modelling complex linguistic preferences together some challenges that future proposals should achieve to improve complex .
Exploring the relationships between the understandability of components in architectural component models and component level metrics

Architectural component models represent high level designs and are frequently used as a central view of architectural descriptions of software systems. The components in those models represent important high level organization units that group other components and classes in object-oriented design views. Hence, understandability of components and their interactions plays a key role in supporting the architectural understanding of a software system. In this paper we present a study we carried out to examine the relationships between the effort required to understand a component, measured through the time that participants spent on studying a component, and component level metrics that describe component's size, complexity and coupling in terms of the number of classes in a component and the classes' relationships. The participants were 49 master students, and they had to fully understand the components' functionalities in order to answer 4 true/false questions for each of the 7 components in the architecture of the Soomla Android store system. Correlation, collinearity and multivariate regression analysis were performed. The results of the analysis show a statistically significant correlation between three of the metrics, number of classes, number of incoming dependencies, and number of internal dependencies, on one side, and the effort required to understand a component, on the other side. In a multivariate regression analysis we obtained 3 reasonably well-fitting models that can be used to estimate the effort required to understand a component. In our future work we plan to study more components and investigate more metrics and their relationships to the understandability of components and architectural component models.
Estimating Combined Correlation Functions for Dipoles in Rayleigh-Fading Scenarios

While the spatial correlation function between two dipoles is well known, the angular correlation function for different arbitrary inclination angles in transmission and reception is not available in the literature. In this paper, a novel angular correlation function is proposed for two dipoles with arbitrary inclination angles between transmission and reception, which is useful for true polarization diversity schemes. Likewise, two original functions for estimating combined spatial-angular correlation are proposed. The novel functions are used with previously reported results and validated for Rayleigh-fading scenarios with isotropic scattering using a reverberation chamber.
Pathogenicity of the Nodavirus Detected from Diseased Sevenband Grouper Epinephelus septemfasciatus

Viral nervous necrosis (VNN) of sevenband grouper Epinephelus septemfasciatus at grow-out stages, which was characterized by upside down swimming or floating behavior, has been spreading in Japan. The present study describes pathogenicity of a nodavirus found in diseased sevenband grouper. When young sevenband grouper or juvenile redspotted grouper E. akaara were challenged by an intramuscular injection with the filtered homogenate of infected organs (brain and eye), abnormal swimming behavior and mortality were produced, but some affected fish recovered from the disease after exhibiting the characterized behavior. Necrosis and vacuolation of the brain and retinal tissues, characteristic to VNN, were produced in the dead and abnormally-swimming fish and the viral antigens were detected in the degenerated nerve cells by FAT with an anti-SJNNV (striped jack nervous necrosis virus) serum. The infection experiment with redspotted grouper also indicated that rearing water temperature (16-28°C ) influenced development of the disease : higher mortality and earlier appearance of the disease signs were observed at higher water temperatures.
Pride and prejudice: the context of reception for Muslims in the United States

Public opinion surveys suggest that Americans increasingly have negative perceptions of Muslims especially following the tragic attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11. The widespread negative attitudes towards Muslims suggest potential challenges for Muslim immigrants' integration into American society. Drawing from theory and prior research on prejudice and using data from the nationally representative Religion and Diversity Survey, this study uncovers variation in prejudice towards Muslims in the United States. Specifically, this study investigates whether nativist attitudes towards immigrants – such as beliefs that nothing in other countries can beat the American way of life, immigrants are a threat to traditional American values and immigrants should give up their foreign ways and learn to be like other Americans – fear of terrorism and contact with Muslims can account for the prejudice against Muslims in the United States. The findings suggest that strongest predictor of prejudice towards Muslims is not the fear of terrorism, but nativist attitudes towards immigrants and lack of contact with Muslims.
MYB72-dependent coumarin exudation shapes root microbiome assembly to promote plant health

Significance Plant roots nurture a large diversity of soil microbes via exudation of chemical compounds into the rhizosphere. In turn, beneficial root microbiota promote plant growth and immunity. The root-specific transcription factor MYB72 has emerged as a central regulator in this process. Here, we show that MYB72 regulates the excretion of the coumarin scopoletin, an iron-mobilizing phenolic compound with selective antimicrobial activity that shapes the root-associated microbial community. Selected soil-borne fungal pathogens appeared to be highly sensitive to the antimicrobial activity of scopoletin, while two MYB72-inducing beneficial rhizobacteria were tolerant. Our results suggest that probiotic root-associated microbes that activate the iron-deficiency response during colonization stimulate MYB72-dependent excretion of scopoletin, thereby potentially improving their niche establishment and enhancing plant growth and protection. Plant roots nurture a tremendous diversity of microbes via exudation of photosynthetically fixed carbon sources. In turn, probiotic members of the root microbiome promote plant growth and protect the host plant against pathogens and pests. In the Arabidopsis thaliana–Pseudomonas simiae WCS417 model system the root-specific transcription factor MYB72 and the MYB72-controlled β-glucosidase BGLU42 emerged as important regulators of beneficial rhizobacteria-induced systemic resistance (ISR) and iron-uptake responses. MYB72 regulates the biosynthesis of iron-mobilizing fluorescent phenolic compounds, after which BGLU42 activity is required for their excretion into the rhizosphere. Metabolite fingerprinting revealed the antimicrobial coumarin scopoletin as a dominant metabolite that is produced in the roots and excreted into the rhizosphere in a MYB72- and BGLU42-dependent manner. Shotgun-metagenome sequencing of root-associated microbiota of Col-0, myb72, and the scopoletin biosynthesis mutant f6′h1 showed that scopoletin selectively impacts the assembly of the microbial community in the rhizosphere. We show that scopoletin selectively inhibits the soil-borne fungal pathogens Fusarium oxysporum and Verticillium dahliae, while the growth-promoting and ISR-inducing rhizobacteria P. simiae WCS417 and Pseudomonas capeferrum WCS358 are highly tolerant of the antimicrobial effect of scopoletin. Collectively, our results demonstrate a role for coumarins in microbiome assembly and point to a scenario in which plants and probiotic rhizobacteria join forces to trigger MYB72/BGLU42-dependent scopolin production and scopoletin excretion, resulting in improved niche establishment for the microbial partner and growth and immunity benefits for the host plant.