Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An automatic motion planning system for a convex polygonal mobile robot in 2-dimensional polygonal space

We present an automatic system for planning the (translational and rotational) collision-free motion of a convex polygonal body <italic>B</italic> in two-dimensional space bounded by a collection of polygonal obstacles. The system consists of a (combinatorial, non-heuristic) motion planning algorithm, based on sophisticated algorithmic and combinatorial techniques in computational geometry, and is implemented on a Cartesian robot system equipped with a 2-D vision system. Our algorithm runs in the worst-case in time <italic>&Ogr;</italic>(<italic>kn</italic>λ<subscrpt>6</subscrpt>(<italic>kn</italic>) log <italic>kn</italic>), where <italic>k</italic> is the number of sides of <italic>B</italic>, <italic>n</italic> is the total number of obstacle edges, and λ<subscrpt>6</subscrpt>(<italic>r</italic>) is the (nearly-linear) maximum length of an (<italic>r</italic>, 6) Davenport Schinzel sequence. Our implemented system provides an “intelligent” robot that, using its attached vision system, can acquire a geometric description of the robot and its polygonal environment, and then, given a high-level motion command from the user, can plan a collision-free path (if one exists), and then go ahead and execute that motion.
Prevalence and risk factors for obstructive respiratory conditions among textile industry workers in Zimbabwe, 2006

Introduction: Workers in the cotton processing industries risk developing obstructive respiratory conditions due to prolonged exposure to cotton dust. We noted a tenfold increase in asthma among workers in a Textile Manufacturing Company. We determined the prevalence of respiratory obstructive conditions among workers in various sections. Methods We conducted a cross sectional analytic study. Workers were randomly sampled and data was collected using interviewer-administered questionnaires. Respiratory function was assessed using spirometry and chest auscultation. A walk through survey was conducted and a checklist was used to capture hazards and control measures in the work place. Results A total of 194 workers participated. The prevalence of severe respiratory obstruction was 27.8%. It was 50.0% among the blowers, 35.3% in waste recovery, 32.5% in carders, 15.0% in spinners and 7.5% among weavers. The mean years of exposure between the affected and the non-affected were significantly different (T =2.20; p< 0.05). Working in the blowing department was significantly associated with developing respiratory obstruction (OR=3.53; 95% CI= 1.61-7.79) but working in the weaving department was significantly protective (OR 0.16; CI 0.04-0.59). Working in a department for less than 10 years was protective (OR =0.94; 95% CI= 0.48-1.85), but not significant. Conclusion Obstructive respiratory conditions are common among textile workers, with those in blowing and waste recovery sections being the most affected. We recommended worker rotation every six months, regular spirometric screening employment of a medical officer.
Therapeutic Value of Painting and Human Psychology in Nigeria

The study examines the therapeutic value of painting and human psychology in Nigeria and it is intended toidentify the emotional qualities derived from paintings through identification of the respondents’ socio-economiccharacteristics, motivating factors, perception, benefits derived from paintings and to investigate the constraints toprocurement of paintings. A stratified random sampling technique was employed to select respondents who haveexperienced emotional trauma, physical violence, domestic abuse, anxiety and depression from hospitals, privatemental health offices, schools and community organization in Nigeria. The findings show that significantrelationships exist between the selected socio-economic characteristics of the respondents and the perception of therespondents to the therapeutic value of painting. It was discovered that beauty was the major motivating factor totherapeutic value of painting and human psychology (WMS 2.6), while majority of the respondents haveencountered one form of physical violence or the other (90.9%) and mood elevation was the principal perceptionfactor (WMS 3.90). Improved aesthetic value (61.8%) was derived by the respondent and finance was the majorconstraint to procurement of painting (60%). The paper concludes that a colourful and calming environmentencourage patient to express themselves and using various forms of creative art could help divert patient attentionfrom their pains and respond to treatment better.
Relation of Early Hemodynamic Changes to Final Cardiac Phenotpe and Survival After Neural Crest Ablation in Chick Embryos

BackgroundMicrocinephotography was used to study a model of persistent truncus arteriosus created in chick embryos by ablation of premigratory neural crest destined for the third and fourth aortic arch arteries as well as the septum of the cardiac outflow tract. Methods and ResultsTwenty-five control embryos and 105 of 202 experimental embryos were filmed on day 3 of incubation and then reincubated. The remaining 97 experimental embryos were not filmed because of twisting of the embryos, but they were reincubated. There was no difference in either the survival rate (p > 0.23) from day 3 to day 11 of incubation or the incidence of persistent truncus arteriosus (p > 0.08) between the filmed and the nonfilmed embryos. Incomplete looping of the cardiac tube observed in experimental embryos during early cardiogenesis correlated with a right ventricular origin of the outflow vessels in the definitive heart. Hemodynamic measurements indicated that there was no difference in heart rate, ejection fraction, systolic and diastolic areas, stroke volume, and cardiac output between controls and the experimental group as a whole. However, embryos that did not survive to day 11 had decreased stroke volume (p < 0.001) and cardiac output (p < 0.001), whereas embryos that survived to day 11 with cardiac malformations had increased stroke volume and cardiac output in early embryogenesis. ConclusionsIncreased stroke volume and cardiac output may be necessary factors for survival in embryos with cardiac dysmorphogenesis and probably are associated with dilation of the ventricular portion of the cardiac tube, which leads to malalignment of the outflow vessel or vessels.
The value perceived and the sacrifice perceived by vegetarian food consumers

This study aimed to identify what are the items that make up the categories of value and sacrifice perceived by the consumer of vegetarian food. Fifteen consumers were interviewed through a structured interview script and the data were analyzed by means of content analysis. The results indicate that exists functional, social, emotional, conditional and monetary values for consumer of vegetarian food. Besides exists sacrifices too, in the same dimensions of functional, social, emotional, conditional and monetary sacrifices. This study improves the components knowledge of perceived consumer value and perceived sacrifice value with consumer vegetarian serving as a base of research.
Commonly Uncommon: Semantic Sparsity in Situation Recognition

Semantic sparsity is a common challenge in structured visual classification problems, when the output space is complex, the vast majority of the possible predictions are rarely, if ever, seen in the training set. This paper studies semantic sparsity in situation recognition, the task of producing structured summaries of what is happening in images, including activities, objects and the roles objects play within the activity. For this problem, we find empirically that most substructures required for prediction are rare, and current state-of-the-art model performance dramatically decreases if even one such rare substructure exists in the target output. We avoid many such errors by (1) introducing a novel tensor composition function that learns to share examples across substructures more effectively and (2) semantically augmenting our training data with automatically gathered examples of rarely observed outputs using web data. When integrated within a complete CRF-based structured prediction model, the tensor-based approach outperforms existing state of the art by a relative improvement of 2.11% and 4.40% on top-5 verb and noun-role accuracy, respectively. Adding 5 million images with our semantic augmentation techniques gives further relative improvements of 6.23% and 9.57% on top-5 verb and noun-role accuracy.
Fire Sale Acquisitions: Myth vs. Reality

We provide empirical evidence on the conjecture that in economic crises, firms could be forced to sell at deep discounts, or fire sale prices. Using the conventional stock price near the announcement date, we find instead distressed firms in crisis periods receive a 30% higher offer premium than distressed firms in normal periods; they also receive a 34% higher premium than non-distressed firms in crisis periods. Acquirers also do not gain, at announcement and over the long-term. Acquirers, however, may perceive they realize fire sale discounts if the reference is the targets' highest price in the previous 52Â weeks.
Gauge-Invariant Decomposition of Nucleon Spin

I introduce a gauge invariant decomposition of the nucleon spin into quark helicity, quark orbital, and gluon contributions. The total quark (and hence the quark orbital) contribution is shown to be measurable through virtual Compton scattering in a special kinematic region where single quark scattering dominates. This deeply-virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) has much potential to unravel the quark and gluon structure of the nucleon.
Reduction without fusion: Grammaticalization and wordhood in Turkish

Abstract Despite ample evidence that grammaticalization is accompanied by phonological reduction and ultimately morphological fusion, the latter process is remarkably less common in Turkish – hence its prototypically agglutinating morphology. Since vowel harmony is a means of articulatory reduction, Turkish, as a vowel-harmonic language, therefore shows reduction but (virtually) no fusion. One morphosyntactic consequence of agglutination is that Turkish “suffixes” in many ways continue to behave like free words. To compensate for the resulting lack of clear-cut suffixes, vowel harmony and stress are co-opted to perform affixal functions such as the demarcation of words and encoding of relationships among morphemes. Due to the grammatical function of suffix vowels, however, even grammaticalized items must then remain at least monosyllabic, which constrains the extent of fusion possible. This situation suggests that theories of grammaticalization that do not sufficiently distinguish between reduction and fusion need to be refined. In addition, it highlights the need for language-specific analyses on the diachronic dimension and restores the status of morphological typology as a predictor of certain linguistic variables.
0-knowledge fuzzing

Nowadays fuzzing is a pretty common technique used both by attackers and software developers. Currently known techniques usually involve knowing the protocol/format that needs to be fuzzed and having a basic understanding of how the user input is processed inside the binary. In the past since fuzzing was little-used obtaining good results with a small amount of eort was possible.
Convexity in complex networks

Abstract Metric graph properties lie in the heart of the analysis of complex networks, while in this paper we study their convexity through mathematical definition of a convex subgraph. A subgraph is convex if every geodesic path between the nodes of the subgraph lies entirely within the subgraph. According to our perception of convexity, convex network is such in which every connected subset of nodes induces a convex subgraph. We show that convexity is an inherent property of many networks that is not present in a random graph. Most convex are spatial infrastructure networks and social collaboration graphs due to their tree-like or clique-like structure, whereas the food web is the only network studied that is truly non-convex. Core–periphery networks are regionally convex as they can be divided into a non-convex core surrounded by a convex periphery. Random graphs, however, are only locally convex meaning that any connected subgraph of size smaller than the average geodesic distance between the nodes is almost certainly convex. We present different measures of network convexity and discuss its applications in the study of networks.
Cross-Skill Redistribution and the Tradeoff between Unemployment Benefits and Employment Protection

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labor market risk. Different countries' locations along this trade-off represent stable, hard to modify, politico-economic equilibria. We develop a model in which voters are required to cast a ballot over the strictness of EPL, the generosity of UBs and the amount of redistribution involved by the financing of unemployment insurance. Agents are heterogeneous along two dimensions: employment status - insiders and outsiders - and skills - low and high. Unlike previous work on EPL, we model employment protection as an institution redistributing among insiders, notably in favour of the low-skill workers. A key implication of the model is that configurations with strict EPL and low UB should emerge in presence of compressed wage structures. Micro data on wage premia on educational attainments and on the strictness of EPL are in line with our results. We also find empirical support to the substantive assumptions of the model on the effects of EPL.
Other-regarding preferences and management styles

We use a laboratory experiment to examine whether and to what extent other-regarding preferences (efficiency, inequality aversion and maximin concerns) of team managers influence their management style in choice under risk. We find that managers who prefer efficiency are more likely to exercise an autocratic management style by ignoring preferences of their team members. Equality concerns have no significant impact on management styles. Elected managers have a higher propensity than exogenously assigned managers to use a democratic management style by reaching team consensus. We also find that male managers employ a democratic style more often than women.
The Beholder’s Eyes: Audience Reactions to Organizational Self-claims of Authenticity

Organizations normally benefit from being perceived as authentic. Yet an ongoing puzzle persists about self-claims of authenticity: although the weight of findings suggests that individuals will devalue organizations touting themselves as authentic, some findings suggest that such self-claims may be rewarded. The authors suggest that this puzzle can be answered, at least partly, by considering two fundamental but different meanings of authenticity. The authors posit that individuals will react negatively when claims concern being true to a category (“type authenticity”), whereas they will react positively when claims concern being true to the organization’s values (“moral authenticity”). A major part of this reasoning involves the emotional reactions evoked by moral claims. In study 1, authenticity claims made in the texts of 1,393 restaurant menus and corresponding ratings of 449,919 online reviews from 2009 to 2016 were analyzed. Study 2 involved an experiment to examine reactions to the two kinds of claims separately. The findings generally support the argument and apparently help explain audience reactions to organizational self-claims about authenticity.
TLR7 and TLR8 Gene Variations and Susceptibility to Hepatitis C Virus Infection

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play pivotal roles in the innate immune system and control inflammatory responses and adaptive immunity. We previously evaluated associations between TLR7 and TLR8 gene SNPs and susceptibility to hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. Our results suggested that TLR7IVS2-151G and TLR8-129G alleles were present at higher frequency in males of an HCV-infected group as compared to a control group (24.1% vs. 14.4%, p = 0.028; 17.6% vs. 6.8%, p = 0.004, respectively). Based upon their recognition of single stranded viral RNA, this suggested that TLR7 and TLR8 played a significant role in anti-HCV immune responses. Here, we studied the functional effects of these polymorphisms by analyzing the mRNA expressions of TLR7 and TLR8 and cytokine production induced ex vivo by TLR7- and TLR8-specific agonists using whole blood of subjects with different genotypes. The percentage of CD14+ cells from those with an AG haplotype that expressed TLR7 and TLR8 was significantly lower, but higher in intensity compared to cells from those with GG and AC haplotypes. Cells from those with an AG haplotype produced more IFN-α and less amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines upon stimulation. This suggests that variations in TLR7 and TLR8 genes might impair immune responses during HCV infection.
Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis Presenting as an Acute Psychotic Episode in a Young Woman: An Underdiagnosed yet Treatable Disorder

Anti-NMDA receptor (NMDAR) encephalitis is a recently identified autoimmune disorder with prominent psychiatric symptoms. Patients usually present with acute behavioral change, psychosis, catatonic symptoms, memory deficits, seizures, dyskinesias, and autonomic instability. In female patients an ovarian teratoma is often identified. We describe a 32-year-old woman who presented with acute psychosis. Shortly after admission, she developed generalized seizures and deteriorated into a catatonic state. Although ancillary tests including MRI, electroencephalogram, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis were unremarkable, the presentation of acute psychosis in combination with recurrent seizures and a relentless course suggested autoimmune encephalitis. The patient underwent pelvic ultrasound which disclosed a dermoid cyst and which led to an urgent cystectomy. Plasmapheresis was then initiated, yielding partial response over the next two weeks. Following the detection of high titers of anti-NMDAR antibodies in the CSF, the patient ultimately received second line immunosuppressive treatment with rituximab. Over several months of cognitive rehabilitation a profound improvement was eventually noted, although minor anterograde memory deficits remained. In this report we call for attention to the inclusion of anti-NMDAR encephalitis in the differential diagnosis of acute psychosis. Prompt diagnosis is critical as early immunotherapy and tumor removal could dramatically affect outcomes.
Measuring experiential well-being among older adults

ABSTRACT Experienced well-being measures tap a distinct form of subjective well-being (SWB) and have different age-related properties than the more widely studied evaluations of life satisfaction. Unlike evaluations of the quality of life as a whole, experiential measures capture affective reactions soon after they occur. Recent advances in measurement have allowed for the inclusion of such experiential measures even in large-scale studies. However, respondent burden remains a concern; hence, surveys have also employed shorter experiential modules. The psychometric properties of these brief measures are not well understood. We examine the psychometric characteristics, including the factor structure and correlations with theoretically relevant criteria, of experienced wellbeing measures included in two supplements to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The first supplement included a detailed time diary whereas the second included a brief review of the prior day. Results show that for the detailed time diaries a single index of affective experience provides a useful summary of the associations among individual affect items, both within and between participants. For the abbreviated method, two or more subscales better describe the underlying structure.
Domain Independent Sentiment Classification with Many Lexicons

Sentiment lexicons are language resources widely used in opinion mining and important tools in unsupervised sentiment classification. We present a comparative study of sentiment classification of reviews on six different domains using sentiment lexicons from different sources. Our results highlight the tendency of a lexicon’s performance to be imbalanced towards one class, and indicate lexicon accuracy varies with the target domain. We propose an approach that combines information from different lexicons to make classification decisions and achieve more robust results that consistently improve our baseline across all domains tested. These are further refined by a domain independent score adjustment that mitigates the effect of the precision imbalance seen on some of the results.
Quantifying tumour heterogeneity with CT

Abstract Heterogeneity is a key feature of malignancy associated with adverse tumour biology. Quantifying heterogeneity could provide a useful non-invasive imaging biomarker. Heterogeneity on computed tomography (CT) can be quantified using texture analysis which extracts spatial information from CT images (unenhanced, contrast-enhanced and derived images such as CT perfusion) that may not be perceptible to the naked eye. The main components of texture analysis can be categorized into image transformation and quantification. Image transformation filters the conventional image into its basic components (spatial, frequency, etc.) to produce derived subimages. Texture quantification techniques include structural-, model- (fractal dimensions), statistical- and frequency-based methods. The underlying tumour biology that CT texture analysis may reflect includes (but is not limited to) tumour hypoxia and angiogenesis. Emerging studies show that CT texture analysis has the potential to be a useful adjunct in clinical oncologic imaging, providing important information about tumour characterization, prognosis and treatment prediction and response.
Dopamine D2 gene expression interacts with environmental enrichment to impact lifespan and behavior

Aging produces cellular, molecular, and behavioral changes affecting many areas of the brain. The dopamine (DA) system is known to be vulnerable to the effects of aging, which regulate behavioral functions such as locomotor activity, body weight, and reward and cognition. In particular, age-related DA D2 receptor (D2R) changes have been of particular interest given its relationship with addiction and other rewarding behavioral properties. Male and female wild-type (Drd2 +/+), heterozygous (Drd2 +/−) and knockout (Drd2 −/−) mice were reared post-weaning in either an enriched environment (EE) or a deprived environment (DE). Over the course of their lifespan, body weight and locomotor activity was assessed. While an EE was generally found to be correlated with longer lifespan, these increases were only found in mice with normal or decreased expression of the D2 gene. Drd2 +/+ EE mice lived nearly 16% longer than their DE counterparts. Drd2 +/+ and Drd2 +/− EE mice lived 22% and 21% longer than Drd2 −/− EE mice, respectively. Moreover, both body weight and locomotor activity were moderated by environmental factors. In addition, EE mice show greater behavioral variability between genotypes compared to DE mice with respect to body weight and locomotor activity.