Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transition delay using control theory

This review gives an account of recent research efforts to use feedback control for the delay of laminar–turbulent transition in wall-bounded shear flows. The emphasis is on reducing the growth of small-amplitude disturbances in the boundary layer using numerical simulations and a linear control approach. Starting with the application of classical control theory to two-dimensional perturbations developing in spatially invariant flows, flow control based on control theory has progressed towards more realistic three-dimensional, spatially inhomogeneous flow configurations with localized sensing/actuation. The development of low-dimensional models of the Navier–Stokes equations has played a key role in this progress. Moreover, shortcomings and future challenges, as well as recent experimental advances in this multi-disciplinary field, are discussed.
A Self-Esteem Threat Perspective on the Downstream Customer Consequences of Customer Mistreatment

A Self-Esteem Threat Perspective on the Downstream Customer Consequences of Customer Mistreatment A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The Australian National University, 2016 Committee Co-chairs: Professor Prashant Bordia and Professor Simon Lloyd D. Restubog Committee Members: Dr Deshani Ganegoda and Dr Vinh Lu Customer mistreatment encompasses a broad range of poor interpersonal treatment that employees receive from customers such as verbal abuse and rudeness (Wang, Liao, Zhan, & Shi, 2011). Subjected to customer mistreatment, employees perform poorly, feel angry and psychologically distressed, and withdraw from their work (Skarlicki, van Jaarsveld, & Walker, 2008; Baranik, Wang, Gong, & Shi, in press; Sliter, Sliter, & Jex, 2012). While much is known about the psychological experience of customer mistreatment of the employee—fairness and resource loss— less is known about the implications of customer mistreatment for the employee’s sense of self. Customer mistreatment conveys contempt and disregard for employees, that they are unworthy of respect and dignified treatment in the eyes of the customer. In this way, customer mistreatment may serve as a self-esteem threat, or a challenge to employees’ positive views of their worth (vanDellen, Campbell, Hoyle, & Bradfield, 2011). High self-esteem employees may compensate for the blow to their ego during subsequent customer encounters in ways that are detrimental to service delivery. While the possibility of a “spiral out” effect of customer mistreatment to subsequent customers has been raised (Groth & Grandey, 2012), little is known
Neonatal Perirhinal Lesions in Rhesus Macaques Alter Performance on Working Memory Tasks with High Proactive Interference

The lateral prefrontal cortex is known for its contribution to working memory (WM) processes in both humans and animals. Yet, recent studies indicate that the prefrontal cortex is part of a broader network of interconnected brain areas involved in WM. Within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures, the perirhinal cortex, which has extensive direct interactions with the lateral and orbital prefrontal cortex, is required to form active/flexible representations of familiar objects. However, its participation in WM processes has not be fully explored. The goal of this study was to assess the effects of neonatal perirhinal lesions on maintenance and monitoring WM processes. As adults, animals with neonatal perirhinal lesions and their matched controls were tested in three object-based (non-spatial) WM tasks that tapped different WM processing domains, e.g., maintenance only (Session-unique Delayed-nonmatching-to Sample, SU-DNMS), and maintenance and monitoring (Object-Self-Order, OBJ-SO; Serial Order Memory Task, SOMT). Neonatal perirhinal lesions transiently impaired the acquisition of SU-DNMS at a short (5 s) delay, but not when re-tested with a longer delay (30 s). The same neonatal lesions severely impacted acquisition of OBJ-SO task, and the impairment was characterized by a sharp increase in perseverative errors. By contrast, neonatal perirhinal lesion spared the ability to monitor the temporal order of items in WM as measured by the SOMT. Contrary to the SU-DNMS and OBJ-SO, which re-use the same stimuli across trials and thus produce proactive interference, the SOMT uses novel objects on each trial and is devoid of interference. Therefore, the impairment of monkeys with neonatal perirhinal lesions on SU-DNMS and OBJ-SO tasks is likely to be caused by an inability to solve working memory tasks with high proactive interference. The sparing of performance on the SOMT demonstrates that neonatal perirhinal lesions do not alter working memory processes per se but rather impact processes modulating impulse control and/or behavioral flexibility.
Radial Lowner equation and dispersionless cmKP hierarchy

It has been shown that the dispersionless KP hierarchy (or the Benney hierarchy) is reduced to the chordal Lowner equation. We show that the radial Lowner equation also gives reduction of a dispersionless type integrable system. The resulting system acquires another degree of freedom and becomes the dcmKP hierarchy, which is a ``half'' of the dispersionless Toda hierarchy. The results of this article was announced in nlin.SI/0512008.
Performance Modeling of Next-Generation Wireless Networks

The industry is satisfying the increasing demand for wireless bandwidth by densely deploying a large number of access points which are centrally managed, e.g. enterprise WiFi networks deployed in university campuses, companies, airports etc. This small cell architecture is gaining traction in the cellular world as well, as witnessed by the direction in which 4G+ and 5G standardization is moving. Prior academic work in analyzing such large-scale wireless networks either uses oversimplified models for the physical layer, or ignores other important, real-world aspects of the problem, like MAC layer considerations, topology characteristics, and protocol overhead. On the other hand, the industry is using for deployment purposes on-site surveys and simulation tools which do not scale, cannot efficiently optimize the design of such a network, and do not explain why one design choice is better than another. In this paper we introduce a simple yet accurate analytical model which combines the realism and practicality of industrial simulation tools with the ability to scale, analyze the effect of various design parameters, and optimize the performance of real- world deployments. The model takes into account all central system parameters, including channelization, power allocation, user scheduling, load balancing, MAC, advanced PHY techniques (single and multi user MIMO as well as cooperative transmission from multiple access points), topological characteristics and protocol overhead. The accuracy of the model is verified via extensive simulations and the model is used to study a wide range of real world scenarios, providing design guidelines on the effect of various design parameters on performance.
Noninvasive coronary angiography with 16-detector row CT: effect of heart rate.

PURPOSE To evaluate the effect of heart rate on the quality of coronary angiograms obtained with 16-detector row computed tomography (CT) by using temporally enhanced three-dimensional (3D) approaches. MATERIALS AND METHODS The local ethics committee approved the study, and informed consent was obtained from all patients. Fifty patients underwent coronary CT angiography (heart rate range, 45-103 beats per minute). Raw data from helical CT and electrocardiography (ECG) were saved in a combined data set. Retrospectively ECG-gated images were reconstructed at preselected phases (50% and 80%) of the cardiac cycle. A 3D voxel-based approach with cardiac phase weighting was used for reconstruction. Testing for correlation between heart rate, cardiac phase reconstruction window, and image quality was performed with Kruskal-Wallis analysis. Image quality (freedom from cardiac motion-related artifacts) was referenced against findings at conventional angiography in a secondary evaluation step. Regression analysis was performed to calculate heart rate thresholds for future beta-blocker application. RESULTS A significant negative correlation was observed between heart rate and image quality (r = 0.80, P < .001). Motion artifact-free images were available for 44 (88%) patients and were achieved consistently at a heart rate of 80 or fewer beats per minute (n = 39). Best image quality was achieved at 75 or fewer beats per minute. Segmental analysis revealed that 97% of arterial segments (diameter > or = 1.5 mm according to conventional angiography) were assessable at 80 or fewer beats per minute. Premature ventricular contractions and rate-contained arrhythmia did not impede diagnostic assessment of the coronary arteries in 10 (83%) of the 12 patients affected. CONCLUSION Motion-free coronary angiograms can be obtained consistently with 16-detector row CT scanners and adaptive multicyclic reconstruction algorithms in patients with heart rates of less than 80 beats per minute.
Communication between oocytes and somatic cells regulates volatile pheromone production in Caenorhabditis elegans

Significance It has been shown that males of Caenorhabditis elegans are more likely to be attracted to females and hermaphrodites that do not harbor sperm, and that females and hermaphrodites behave differently depending on whether or not they harbor mature sperm, but the mechanism that links sperm status to behavior and attraction remains unknown. In this paper, we show that oocyte–somatic communication is responsible for controlling the production of a mate-attracting pheromone by C. elegans hermaphrodites. This volatile pheromone, whose production is suppressed by oocyte–somatic communication, is the first volatile pheromone described in C. elegans. Our study of its control provides a detailed description of pheromone regulation in a nematode. Males of the androdioecious species Caenorhabditis elegans are more likely to attempt to mate with and successfully inseminate C. elegans hermaphrodites that do not concurrently harbor sperm. Although a small number of genes have been implicated in this effect, the mechanism by which it arises remains unknown. In the context of the battle of the sexes, it is also unknown whether this effect is to the benefit of the male, the hermaphrodite, or both. We report that successful contact between mature sperm and oocyte in the C. elegans gonad at the start of fertilization causes the oocyte to release a signal that is transmitted to somatic cells in its mother, with the ultimate effect of reducing her attractiveness to males. Changes in hermaphrodite attractiveness are tied to the production of a volatile pheromone, the first such pheromone described in C. elegans.
A Cooperative Game Theoretical Approach to Distributed Iterative Command Governor Schemes

Abstract A novel distributed Command Governor (CG) supervision strategy relying on cooperative game theoretical concepts is presented for multi-agent networked systems subject to pointwise-in-time coordination constraints. Unlike non-cooperative distributed CG schemes, here all agents contribute individually to the minimization of a global performance index. As a result, these methods are able to achieve Pareto-optimal solutions, not only in steady-state conditions as the non-cooperative ones, but also during transients and are not hampered by the presence of undesirable non-Pareto Nash-equilibria or deadlock situations. Other noticeable difference with respect to non-cooperative methods is that all agents need to exchange data among them several times within a decision step in order to coordinate their local optimization procedures and arrive to the optimal solution. The properties of the algorithm are fully investigated. A final example is presented where the proposed distributed solution is contrasted with both centralized CG solutions and distributed CG methods based on non-cooperative game theoretical concepts.
Diurnal Intermittent Fasting during Ramadan: The Effects on Leptin and Ghrelin Levels

We aimed to assess the effect of Islamic intermittent fasting, during and outside of Ramadan, on plasma levels of leptin and ghrelin while controlling for several potential confounding variables. Eight healthy male volunteers with a mean age of 26.6±4.9 years reported to the sleep disorders center (SDC) at King Saud University on four occasions: 1) adaptation; 2) 4 weeks before Ramadan while performing Islamic fasting for 1 week (baseline fasting) (BLF); 3) 1 week before Ramadan (non-fasting baseline) (BL); and 4) during the second week of Ramadan while fasting. Plasma leptin and ghrelin levels were measured using enzyme-linked immunoassays at 22:00, 02:00, 04:00, 06:00, and 11:00. During BLF, there were significant reductions in plasma leptin concentrations at 22:00 and 02:00 compared with the baseline concentrations (at 22:00: 194.2±177.2 vs. 146.7±174.5; at 02:00: 203.8±189.5 vs. 168.1±178.1; p<0.05). During Ramadan, there was a significant reduction in plasma leptin levels at 22:00 (194.2±177.2 vs. 132.6±130.4, p<0.05). No significant difference in plasma ghrelin concentrations was detected during the BL, BLF, or Ramadan periods. Cosinor analyses of leptin and ghrelin plasma levels revealed no significant changes in the acrophases of the hormones during the three periods. The nocturnal reduction in plasma leptin levels during fasting may be the result of the changes in meal times during fasting.
DHSNet: Deep Hierarchical Saliency Network for Salient Object Detection

Traditional salient object detection models often use hand-crafted features to formulate contrast and various prior knowledge, and then combine them artificially. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end deep hierarchical saliency network (DHSNet) based on convolutional neural networks for detecting salient objects. DHSNet first makes a coarse global prediction by automatically learning various global structured saliency cues, including global contrast, objectness, compactness, and their optimal combination. Then a novel hierarchical recurrent convolutional neural network (HRCNN) is adopted to further hierarchically and progressively refine the details of saliency maps step by step via integrating local context information. The whole architecture works in a global to local and coarse to fine manner. DHSNet is directly trained using whole images and corresponding ground truth saliency masks. When testing, saliency maps can be generated by directly and efficiently feed forwarding testing images through the network, without relying on any other techniques. Evaluations on four benchmark datasets and comparisons with other 11 state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate that DHSNet not only shows its significant superiority in terms of performance, but also achieves a real-time speed of 23 FPS on modern GPUs.
Welfare regimes and social cohesion regimes: do they express the same values?

ABSTRACT Welfare regime types are classified according to the role played by three main institutions, namely the market, the state and the family. They can be reinterpreted as systems of exchanges for providing resources based on the main principles of liberty, equality and solidarity. Depending on the different possible dialectical relations between these three principles, they lead to different social cohesion regimes. This paper is the first attempt to empirically test this hypothesis at a European level by elaborating a measure of social cohesion based on values and creating a typology of social cohesion regimes. In comparison to welfare regimes, it invites to go one step further by considering the articulation between the three main principles and proposes a more precise classification for countries. The results invite further research on the links between welfare and social cohesion regimes. The analysis is based on data from the 2008 European Values Study (EVS) in 43 countries using principal component analysis, multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses.
Eye Movements in Code Reading: Relaxing the Linear Order

Code reading is an important skill in programming. Inspired by the linearity that people exhibit while natural language text reading, we designed local and global gaze-based measures to characterize linearity (left-to-right and top-to-bottom) in reading source code. Unlike natural language text, source code is executable and requires a specific reading approach. To validate these measures, we compared the eye movements of novice and expert programmers who were asked to read and comprehend short snippets of natural language text and Java programs. Our results show that novices read source code less linearly than natural language text. Moreover, experts read code less linearly than novices. These findings indicate that there are specific differences between reading natural language and source code, and suggest that non-linear reading skills increase with expertise. We discuss the implications for practitioners and educators.
Not everything that competes means something: Evidence for competition among word-forms in a novel-word learning paradigm

Recommended Citation Kapnoula, Efthymia Evangelia. "Not everything that competes means something: evidence for competition among word-forms in a novel-word learning paradigm. ii στην Πιπίτσα iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Drs Bob McMurray and Prahlad Gupta for their invaluable guidance throughout the implementation of this project, as well as Dr Susan Wagner Cook for all her help. I would also like to thank Stephanie Packard for her hard work during the first steps of this project. Many thanks also go to Libo Zhao and Jamie Tisdale, as well as all the wonderful members of the MACLab, specifically, Marcus Galle, for recording the stimuli, and Keith Apfelbaum and Dan McEchron for their help in all steps of this project. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for all the patience and support. iv ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to investigate whether learning a meaningless phonological word-form, can affect its ability to compete with other words shortly after it was learned. According to previous experimental work we expected that a semantic referent (Leach & Samuel, 2007), and/or consolidation over a significant amount of time (Gaskell & Dumay, 2003) are necessary for a novel word-form to be able to engage in lateral inhibition with other words. In order to examine this we used the experimental design that was used by Dahan, Magnuson, Tanenhaus and Hogan (2001). Experiment 1 was a replication of the Dahan et al (2001) study. In Experiment 2 we added a condition in which a novel word was now assigned the role of the competitor, by inserting a nonword learning task (that was performed right before the Dahan task). The goal was to see whether any differences would arise between this new novel-word condition and the nonword condition. The results from Experiment 2 were inconclusive due to the stimulus set and this is why we conducted Experiment 3, which was similar to Experiment 2, but had a different stimulus set. The results of Experiment 3 showed that, in contrast to the predictions, a novel word can compete with other words, even if it does not have meaning and, moreover, this happens immediately after training. These findings indicate that 1) a word does not have to be complete (i.e. include semantic information) in order to compete with other words and 2) connections between novel and known words can form faster than what has been suggested.
Asymptotic results for maximum likelihood estimators in joint analysis of repeated measurements and survival time

Maximum likelihood estimation has been extensively used in the joint analysis of repeated measurements and survival time. However, there is a lack of theoretical justification of the asymptotic properties for the maximum likelihood estimators. This paper intends to fill this gap. Specifically, we prove the consistency of the maximum likelihood estimators and derive their asymptotic distributions. The maximum likelihood estimators are shown to be semiparametrically efficient.
Household Labor Supply, Sharing Rule and the Marriage Market

In this paper we estimate a model of household labor supply based on the collective approach developed by Chiappori (JPE, 1992). This approach assumes that the intra-household decision process leads to Pareto efficient outcomes. Our model extends this theory by allowing the marriage market, and especially the sex ratio, to affect the sharing rule and the household labor supplies. We show that our model imposes new restrictions on the parameters of the labor supply functions. Also, individual preferences and the sharing rule are recovered using an identification procedure that is both simpler and more robust than in Chiappori's initial approach. The model is estimated using PSID data for the year 1988. Our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model. Moreover, the sex ratio influences the sharing rule and the labor supply behavior in the directions predicted by the theory. Finally, the impact of individual wage rates suggests that spouses behave in an altruistic manner within the household.
Resting-State Connectivity of the Sustained Attention Network Correlates with Disease Duration in Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsy

Introduction In idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE), a normal electroencephalogram between generalized spike and wave (GSW) discharges is believed to reflect normal brain function. However, some studies indicate that even excluding GSW-related errors, IGE patients perform poorly on sustained attention task, the deficit being worse as a function of disease duration. We hypothesized that at least in a subset of structures which are normally involved in sustained attention, resting-state functional connectivity (FC) is different in IGE patients compared to controls and that some of the changes are related to disease duration. Method Seeds were selected based on a sustained attention study in controls. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data was obtained from 14 IGE patients and 14 matched controls. After physiological noise removal, the mean time-series of each seed was used as a regressor in a general linear model to detect regions that showed correlation with the seed. In patients, duration factor was defined based on epilepsy duration. Between-group differences weighted by the duration factor were evaluated with mixed-effects model. Correlation was then evaluated in IGE patients between the FC, averaged over each significant cluster, and the duration factor. Results Eight of 18 seeds showed significant difference in FC across groups. However, only for seeds in the medial superior frontal and precentral gyri and in the medial prefrontal area, average FC taken over significant clusters showed high correlation with the duration factor. These 3 seeds showed changes in FC respectively with the premotor and superior frontal gyrus, the dorsal premotor, and the supplementary motor area plus precentral gyrus. Conclusion Alterations of FC in IGE patients are not limited to the frontal areas. However, as indicated by specificity analysis, patients with long history of disease show changes in FC mainly within the frontal areas.