Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed self-triggered control for multi-agent systems

It is desirable to limit the amount of communication and computation generated by each agent in a large multi-agent system. Event- and self-triggered control strategies have been recently proposed as alternatives to traditional time-triggered periodic sampling for feedback control systems. In this paper we consider self-triggered control applied to a multi-agent system with an agreement objective. Each agent computes its next update time instance at the previous time. This formulation extends considerably our recent work on event-based control, because in the self-triggered setting the agents do not have to keep track of the state error that triggers the actuation between consecutive update instants. Both a centralized and a distributed self-triggered control architecture are presented and shown to achieve the agreement objective. The results are illustrated through simulated examples.
Increased anxiety in mice lacking vitamin D receptor gene

Vitamin D is a steroid hormone with many important functions in the brain, mediated through the vitamin D nuclear receptor. Numerous human and animal data link vitamin D dysfunctions to various behavioural disorders. To examine this problem, we studied whether genetic ablation of vitamin D receptors in mice may be associated with altered emotional behaviours. Here we show that the receptor-deficient mice demonstrate increased anxiety-like behaviours when subjected to a battery of behavioural tests. These studies suggest that vitamin D and its receptors are an important factor in the brain, whose imbalance may significantly affect emotional behaviour.
Molecular evolution and the global reemergence of enterovirus D68 by genome-wide analysis

Abstract Human enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) was first reported in the United States in 1962; thereafter, a few cases were reported from 1970 to 2005, but 2 outbreaks occurred in the Philippines (2008) and the United States (2014). However, little is known regarding the molecular evolution of this globally reemerging virus due to a lack of whole-genome sequences and analyses. Here, all publically available sequences including 147 full and 1248 partial genomes from GenBank were collected and compared at the clade and subclade level; 11 whole genomes isolated in Taiwan (TW) in 2014 were also added to the database. Phylogenetic trees were constructed to identify a new subclade, B3, and represent clade circulations among strains. Nucleotide sequence identities of the VP1 gene were 94% to 95% based on a comparison of subclade B3 to B1 and B2 and 87% to 91% when comparing A, C, and D. The patterns of clade circulation need to be clarified to improve global monitoring of EV-D68, even though this virus showed lower diversity among clades compared with the common enterovirus EV-71. Notably, severe cases isolated from Taiwan and China in 2014 were found in subclade B3. One severe case from Taiwan occurred in a female patient with underlying angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, from whom a bronchoalveolar lavage specimen was obtained. Although host factors play a key role in disease severity, we cannot exclude the possibility that EV-D68 may trigger clinical symptoms or death. To further investigate the genetic diversity of EV-D68, we reported 34 amino acid (aa) polymorphisms identified by comparing subclade B3 to B1 and B2. Clade D strains had a 1-aa deletion and a 2-aa insertion in the VP1 gene, and 1 of our TW/2014 strains had a shorter deletion in the 5′ untranslated region than a previously reported deletion. In summary, a new subclade, genetic indels, and polymorphisms in global strains were discovered elucidating evolutionary and epidemiological trends of EV-D68, and 11 genomes were added to the database. Virus variants may contribute to disease severity and clinical manifestations, and further studies are needed to investigate the associations between genetic diversity and clinical outcomes.
A Prediction of Number of Antennas in a MIMO Correlated Channel

Motivated by the study of the optimization of the quality of service for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technique in a wireless communication system. The capacity of MIMO channel in independent Rayleigh channels grows linearly as the number of antennas. However, some limitations on the MIMO capacity is due to the correlation between individual sub-channels of the matrix channel. In this paper, we investigate the MIMO channel capacity in correlated channels using a new correlation matrix model. After some mathematical recalls we derive the general upper bound on the MIMO channel capacity. We give the analytical results, which measure the effect of correlation on the MIMO capacity for a proposal model. Then, we use the correlation matrix approach to compute the capacity of MIMO with respect to signal-to-noise (snr) and then predict the numbers of antennas. By fixing the snr variable to a specific value, we extract informations on the optimal numbers of MIMO antennas. Finally, we have given the variation of the MIMO capacity in the limiting case of N rarr infin for our proposal model and the exponential correlation matrix model.
Cross‐continental comparisons of butterfly assemblages in tropical rainforests: implications for biological monitoring

Abstract. 1. Standardised transect counts of butterflies in old‐growth rainforests in different biogeographical regions are lacking. Such data are needed to mitigate the influence of methodological and environmental factors within and between sites and, ultimately, to discriminate between long‐term trends and short‐term stochastic changes in abundance and community composition.
High income, employment, postgraduate education, and marriage: a suicidal cocktail among psychiatric patients.

CONTEXT Studies dating back over 100 years have shown that the risk of suicide in the general population is associated with low income, unemployment, educational underachievement, and singleness. However, little is known about the association between suicide risk and these factors in psychiatric patients. OBJECTIVE To estimate the association between suicide risk, socioeconomic position, and marital status in psychiatric patients. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Population-based cohort study of all first-ever psychiatric patients aged 16 to 65 years admitted from 1981 to 1998, with administrative longitudinal data on income, labor market affiliation, educational attainment, and marital and cohabitational status (96,369 patients, 256,619 admissions, and 2727 suicides). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Suicide risks after hospital discharge were depicted using Kaplan-Meier product-limit methods. Hazard ratios (HRs) for suicide from Cox proportional hazards regression and case-crossover/individually stratified analyses were calculated while adjusting for overall social drift. RESULTS Using Cox proportional hazards regression, compared with patients in the highest income quartile, the suicide HR decreased from 0.90 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.79-1.02) in the third lowest to 0.83 (95% CI, 0.73-0.93) in the second lowest and to 0.68 (95% CI, 0.61-0.76) in the lowest income group. Compared with the fully employed, the HR for unemployed patients was 0.85 (95% CI, 0.77-0.93); for social benefits' recipients, 0.58 (95% CI, 0.48-0.70); and for disability or age pensioners, 0.63 (95% CI, 0.55-0.71). Compared with postgraduate education, HRs (95% CIs) associated with a bachelor's degree, vocational school, or primary school education were 0.82 (0.67-1.02), 0.66 (0.55-0.80), and 0.54 (0.44-0.65), respectively. The HRs (95% CIs) for widowed, divorced, and never-married patients were 1.07 (0.89-1.30), 0.74 (0.66-0.84), and 0.88 (0.79-0.98), respectively. Using individually stratified analyses, HRs (95% CIs) for transition into the third lowest, the second lowest, and the lowest income quartile were 1.19 (0.76-1.86), 1.47 (0.92-2.34), and 1.84 (1.14-2.97), respectively. The HRs (95% CIs) for patients who became unemployed, social benefits' recipients, disability or age pensioners, widowed patients, and divorced patients were 1.41 (1.01-1.95), 1.73 (1.06-2.80), 1.45 (0.91-2.30), 2.59 (0.76-8.89), and 1.86 (1.07-3.21), respectively. CONCLUSIONS Suicide risk is generally associated with low income, unemployment, educational underachievement, and singleness, but this study suggests that the opposite is true among psychiatric patients. However, loss of income, labor market status, and marriage increase the suicide risk.
Globalisation and OECD consumer price inflation

Over the past 25 years inflation has moderated considerably in all OECD economies. At the same time, the production of many goods and services has become increasingly internationalised and the level of trade between the OECD and non-OECD economies has risen markedly. This paper investigates the extent to which the observed changes in the inflation process can be attributed to the increasing integration of non-OECD economies into the global economy. The results of the analysis show that i) import prices have become a more important driver of domestic consumer prices since the mid-1990s; ii) the sensitivity of inflation to domestic economic conditions has declined whereas the sensitivity to foreign economic conditions has risen, working through import prices; and iii) the strong GDP growth in the non-OECD economies over the past five years has contributed to the growth of real oil and metals prices. A scenario analysis shows that globalisation has put upward pressure on inflation via higher commodity prices and downward pressure via lower non-commodity import prices with the latter effect having dominated in most OECD economies.
A Review of Checkpointing Fault Tolerance Techniques in Distributed Mobile Systems

Fault Tolerance Techniques enable systems to perform tasks in the presence of faults. A checkpoint is a local state of a process saved on stable storage. In a distributed system, since the processes in the system do not share memory, a global state of the system is defined as a set of local states, one from each process. In case of a fault in distributed systems, checkpointing enables the execution of a program to be resumed from a previous consistent global state rather than resuming the execution from the beginning. In this way, the amount of useful processing lost because of the fault is significantly reduced. Checkpointing is an effective fault tolerant technique in distributed system as it avoids the domino effect and require minimum storage requirement. Most of the earlier coordinated checkpoint algorithms block their computation during checkpointing and forces minimum-process or nonblocking even though many of them may not be necessary or non-blocking minimum-process but takes useless checkpoints or reduced useless checkpoint but has higher synchronization message overhead or has high checkpoint request propagation time. In this paper, we discuss various issues related to the checkpointing for distributed systems and mobile computing environments. We also present a survey of some checkpointing algorithms for distributed systems.
Working Capital Management and Firm Profitability : Empirical Evidence from Manufacturing and Construction Firms Listed on Nairobi S ecurities Exchange, Kenya

Working capital management plays a significant role in improved profitability of firms. Firms can achieve optimal management of working capital by making the trade-off between profitability and liquidity. This paper analyzes the effect of working capital management on firm’s profitability in Kenya for the period 2003 to 2012. For this purpose, balanced panel data of five manufacturing and construction firms each which are listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) is used. Pearson’s correlation and Ordinary Least Squares regression models were used to establish the relationship between working capital management and firm’s profitability. The study finds a negative relationship between profitability and number of day’s accounts receivable and cash conversion cycle, but a positive relationship between profitability and number of days of inventory and number of day’s payable. Moreover, the financial leverage, sales growth, current ratio and firm size also have significant effects on the firm’s profitability. Based on the key findings from this study it has been concluded that the management of a firm can create value for their shareholders by reducing the number of day’s accounts receivable. The management can also create value for their shareholders by increasing their inventories to a reasonable level. Firms can also take long to pay their creditors in as far as they do not strain their relationships with these creditors. Firms are capable of gaining sustainable competitive advantage by means of effective and efficient utilization of the resources of the organization through a careful reduction of the cash conversion cycle to its minimum. In so doing, the profitability of the firms is expected to increase.
Techniques of vibration and end-point trajectory control of flexible manipulator

This paper presents investigations into the development of control schemes for end-point vibration suppression and input trajectory of a flexible manipulator. A constrained planar single-link flexible manipulator is considered and the dynamic model of the system is derived using the assumed mode method. To study the effectiveness of the controllers, initially a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is developed for control of rigid body motion. This is then extended to incorporate a non-collocated PID controller and a feedforward controller based on input shaping techniques for control of vibration (flexible motion) of the system. For feedforward controller, the positive input shapers are proposed and designed based on the properties of the system. Simulation results of the response of the manipulator with the controllers are presented in time and frequency domains. The performances of the control schemes are assessed in terms of level of vibration reduction, input tracking capability and time response specifications. Finally, a comparative assessment of the control techniques is presented and discussed.
Energy Profiles of Java Collections Classes

We created detailed profiles of the energy consumed by common operations done on Java List, Map, and Set abstractions. The results show that the alternative data types for these abstractions differ significantly in terms of energy consumption depending on the operations. For example, an ArrayList consumes less energy than a LinkedList if items are inserted at the middle or at the end, but consumes more energy than a LinkedList if items are inserted at the start of the list. To explain the results, we explored the memory usage and the bytecode executed during an operation. Expensive computation tasks in the analyzed bytecode traces appeared to have an energy impact, but memory usage did not contribute. We evaluated our profiles by using them to selectively replace Collections types used in six applications and libraries. We found that choosing the wrong Collections type, as indicated by our profiles, can cost even 300% more energy than the most efficient choice. Our work shows that the usage context of a data structure and our measured energy profiles can be used to decide between alternative Collections implementations.
Percolation on Sparse Random Graphs with Given Degree Sequence

We study the two most common types of percolation processes on a sparse random graph with a given degree sequence. Namely, we examine first a bond percolation process where the edges of the graph are retained with probability p, and afterwards we focus on site percolation where the vertices are retained with probability p. We establish critical values for p above which a giant component emerges in both cases. Moreover, we show that, in fact, these coincide. As a special case, our results apply to power-law random graphs. We obtain rigorous proofs for formulas derived by several physicists for such graphs.
Mandarin tone classification without pitch tracking

A deep neural network (DNN) based classifier achieved 27.38% frame error rate (FER) and 15.62% segment error rate (SER) in recognizing five tonal categories in Mandarin Chinese broadcast news, based on 40 mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). The same architecture scored substantially lower when trained and tested with F0 and amplitude parameters alone: 40.05% FER and 22.66% SER. These results are substantially better than the best previously-reported results on broadcast-news tone classification [1] and are also better than a human listener achieved in categorizing test stimuli created by amplitude- and frequency-modulating complex tones to match the extracted F0 and amplitude parameters.
Reported maternal tendencies predict the reward value of infant facial cuteness, but not cuteness detection

The factors that contribute to individual differences in the reward value of cute infant facial characteristics are poorly understood. Here we show that the effect of cuteness on a behavioural measure of the reward value of infant faces is greater among women reporting strong maternal tendencies. By contrast, maternal tendencies did not predict women's subjective ratings of the cuteness of these infant faces. These results show, for the first time, that the reward value of infant facial cuteness is greater among women who report being more interested in interacting with infants, implicating maternal tendencies in individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness. Moreover, our results indicate that the relationship between maternal tendencies and the reward value of infant facial cuteness is not due to individual differences in women's ability to detect infant cuteness. This latter result suggests that individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness are not simply a by-product of low-cost, functionless biases in the visual system.
Librarians' perceptions on the use of electronic resources at Catalan academic libraries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to expand on previous quantitative and qualitative research into the use of electronic information resources and its impact on the information behaviour of academics at Catalan universities.Design/methodology/approach – A focus group was set up, comprising seven members of the staff of five Catalan academic libraries.Findings – Participants confirmed the increase in the amount of journal reading among academics, due to the increase in the number of electronic journals available and the improvement in the tools for locating and accessing this information, especially off‐campus access. Librarians were well aware of the importance of internet search engines as the first information source for academics. They regretted having failed to provide users with a single interface to all information products. Academics' perceptions of the usefulness of bibliographic management software have increased dramatically during the last few years, especially among PhD students. Finally,.
Vitamin D: Pharmacokinetics and Safety When Used in Conjunction with the Pharmaceutical Drugs Used in Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review

Vitamin D has reported anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties modulated through gene transcription and non-genomic signaling cascades. The purpose of this review was to summarize the available research on interactions and pharmacokinetics between vitamin D and the pharmaceutical drugs used in patients with cancer. Hypercalcemia was the most frequently reported side effect that occurred in high dose calcitriol. The half-life of 25(OH)D3 and/or 1,25(OH)2D3 was found to be impacted by cimetidine; rosuvastatin; prednisone and possibly some chemotherapy drugs. No unusual adverse effects in cancer patients; beyond what is expected from high dose 1,25(OH)2D3 supplementation, were revealed through this review. While sufficient evidence is lacking, supplementation with 1,25(OH)2D3 during chemotherapy appears to have a low risk of interaction. Further interactions with vitamin D3 have not been studied.
Efficient Mining of Top-K Strongly Correlated Item Pairs using One Pass Technique

This paper presents an efficient one pass technique, k-SCOPE (Top k Strongly Correlated item Pair Extraction), which finds top-k strongly correlated item pairs from transaction database, without generating any candidate sets. The proposed technique uses a correlogram matrix based approach to compute support count of all the 1- and 2-itemset in a single scan over the database. From the correlogram matrix the correlation values of all the item pairs are computed and top-k correlated pairs are extracted very easily. The simplified logic structure makes the implementation of the proposed technique more attractive. We experimented with real and synthetic datasets and compared the performance of the proposed technique with its other counterparts and found satisfactory.
Functional neuroanatomy of Japanese writing systems

Background: Most of the brain imaging studies to date have addressed the skill of writing as a paradigm to examine the neural correlates for complex limb movements. Although these data have enriched our view of the functional organization of the brain for motor aspects of writing, there have been few attempts to discuss their relevance to aphasiology research. Aims: The aim of the present article is two-fold. First, we examined neuroimaging data on writing to provide an overview of the neurophysiological basis subserving the motor aspects of the skill. Second, while taking into consideration the framework provided by these data, we reviewed lesion and functional imaging studies of Japanese to discuss the possible difference in neural correlates that has been assumed for its two orthographic systems, kanji (logogram) and kana (syllabogram). Main Contributions: The fronto-parietal cortical circuit linking the premotor with posterior parietal areas in the left hemisphere seems to constitute a basic neural substrate for the motor act of writing. Lesion and imaging data with Japanese suggest that writing of kana utilises these structures in conjunction with the left perisylvian area for spoken language. In contrast, writing of kanji shares this network for the later phase of motor execution, but recruits the left basal temporal area as an additional device for the generation of motor output. Conclusions: The execution of writing, irrespective of the script type, is achieved by common brain structures used for a wide range of limb movements. Writing of kanji seems to differ from that of kana only in that the former needs the retrieval of visuospatial information of characters as an additional cognitive operation. This difference does not necessarily imply that the two kinds of script have distinct neural substrates.
Deformations of asymptotically cylindrical coassociative submanifolds with fixed boundary

McLean proved that the moduli space of coassociative deformations of a compact coassociative 4-submanifold C in a G_2-manifold (M,phi,g) is a smooth manifold of dimension equal to b^2_+(C). In this paper, we show that the moduli space of coassociative deformations of a noncompact, asymptotically cylindrical coassociative 4-fold C in an asymptotically cylindrical G_2-manifold (M,phi,g) is also a smooth manifold. Its dimension is the dimension of the positive subspace of the image of H^2_cs(C,R) in H^2(C,R).