Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning of Hybrid Fuzzy Controller for the Optical Data Storage Device

A hybrid track-seeking fuzzy controller for an optical disk drive (ODD) is proposed in this paper. The proposed hybrid fuzzy controller (HFC) smoothes the voltage applied to the sled motor and improves the track-seeking efficiency. The HFC consists of two subsystems including an intelligent time switch and a driving force controller. Both subsystems are designed based on fuzzy logic inferences. The main functions of the proposed HFC are to drive the optical head unit (OHU) to the target track neighborhood as fast as possible and smoothly park the OHU in the least time in the target track neighborhood. An automatic learning approach based on genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed for learning the fuzzy rules for both the intelligent time switch and driving force controller. Modulated orthogonal membership functions are utilized in both fuzzy controllers to improve the GA learning efficiency. The number of parameters needed to parameterize the fuzzy rule base is greatly reduced with the modulated orthogonal membership functions. Compared to the conventional track-seeking controller currently utilized in most ODDs that employ a speed profile as the reference signal for the track-seeking feedback control system, the proposed HFC outperforms the conventional track-seeking control schemes. Experiments are performed to justify the performance comparison.
P2X1 and P2X3 receptors form stable trimers: a novel structural motif of ligand‐gated ion channels

P2X receptors are cation channels gated by extracellular ATP. The seven known P2X isoforms possess no sequence homology with other proteins. Here we studied the quaternary structure of P2X receptors by chemical cross‐linking and blue native PAGE. P2X1 and P2X3 were N‐terminally tagged with six histidine residues to allow for non‐denaturing receptor isolation from cRNA‐injected, [35S]methionine‐labeled oocytes. The His‐tag did not change the electrophysiological properties of the P2X1 receptor. His‐P2X1 was found to carry four N‐glycans per polypeptide chain, only one of which acquired Endo H resistance en route to the plasma membrane. 3,3′‐Dithiobis(sulfosuccinimidylpropionate) (DTSSP) and two of three bifunctional analogues of the P2X receptor antagonist pyridoxalphosphate‐6‐azophenyl‐2′,4′‐disulfonic acid (PPADS) cross‐linked digitonin‐solubilized His‐P2X1 and His‐P2X3 quantitatively to homo‐trimers. Likewise, when analyzed by blue native PAGE, P2X receptors purified in digitonin or dodecyl‐β‐D‐maltoside migrated entirely as non‐covalently linked homo‐trimers, whereas the α2βγδ nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (used as a positive control) migrated as the expected pentamer. P2X monomers remained undetected soon after synthesis, indicating that trimerization occurred in the endoplasmic reticulum. The plasma membrane form of His‐P2X1 was also identified as a homo‐trimer. If n‐octylglucoside was used for P2X receptor solubilization, homo‐hexamers were observed, suggesting that trimers can aggregate to form larger complexes. We conclude that trimers represent an essential element of P2X receptor structure.
Comprehensive Monte Carlo study of patient doses from cone-beam CT imaging in radiotherapy

Accurate knowledge of ionizing radiation dose from cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging in radiotherapy is important to allow concomitant risks to be estimated and for justification of imaging exposures. This study uses a Monte Carlo CBCT model to calculate imaging dose for a wide range of imaging protocols for male and female patients. The Elekta XVI CBCT system was modeled using GATE and simulated doses were validated against measurements in a water tank and thorax phantom. Imaging dose was simulated in the male and female ICRP voxel phantoms for a variety of anatomical sites and imager settings (different collimators, filters, full and partial rotation). The resulting dose distributions were used to calculate effective doses for each scan protocol. The Monte Carlo simulated doses agree with validation measurements within 5% and 10% for water tank and thorax phantom respectively. Effective dose for head CBCT scans was generally lower for scans centred on the pituitary than the larynx (0.03 mSv versus 0.06 mSv for male ICRP phantom). Pelvis CBCT scan effective dose was higher for the female than male phantom (5.11 mSv versus 2.80 mSv for M15 collimator scan), principally due to the higher dose received by gonads for the female scan. Medium field of view thorax scan effective doses ranged from 1.38–3.19 mSv depending on scan length and phantom sex. Effective dose for half rotation thorax scans with offset isocentre varied by almost a factor of three depending on laterality of the isocentre, patient sex and imaged field length. The CBCT imaging doses simulated here reveal large variations in dose depending on imaging isocentre T E Marchant and K D Joshi Monte Carlo study of CBCT dose Printed in the UK 13 JRPREA © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd 37 J. Radiol. Prot.
The Impact of the Aortic Pulse Wave Velocity on the Cardiovascular Outcomes of Hemodialysis Patients

The aims of our study were to identify the risk factors for an increased aortic pulse wave velocity (AoPWV) and to assess the impact of the AoPWV on the cerebro-cardiovascular (CV) outcomes of hemodialysis (HD) patients. Seventy two HD patients were included, and the AoPWV, the echocardiography and the biochemical parameters were measured. After dividing the patients into tertiles according to the AoPWV values, we defined the low, the middle and the high AoPWV groups. The patients in the high AoPWV group showed a significantly higher age and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level, a greater prevalence of diabetes and statin use, left ventricular hypertrophy, average pulse pressure (PP), AoPWV and left ventricular mass index and a lower serum albumin level than those in the low AoPWV group (p<0.05). On multivariate regression analysis of the AoPWV, age and the average PP were independently related to the AoPWV (p<0.05). On the multivariate Cox analysis for CV outcomes, the AoPWV and the average PP remained significant independent predictors of CV events. Our data suggest that an increased AoPWV is an independent predictor for the CV outcomes of HD patients.
Gender Differences in the Development of Sexual Excitation and Inhibition Through the Life Course: Preliminary Findings from a Representative Study in Flanders

The dual control model proposes that there are individual differences in the propensity for sexual excitation and sexual inhibition. Research to date has considered the effect of age on these traits as a simple linear effect, and studies examining gender differences in age effects are lacking. There are, however, indications that the associations of age with excitation and inhibition are nonlinear and that there might be gender differences in these associations. The aim of this study was to examine how these traits develop through an individual’s life and whether there are gender differences in this development. In this study we applied polynomial regression analyses to examine the interaction effects of age and gender on sexual excitation and inhibition. We used data from a representative cross-sectional survey on sexual health in Flanders (N = 1,825; mean age = 43.77; SD = 17.98). Most of the associations of excitation and inhibition with age were nonlinear, and there were substantial gender differences in these associations. This indicates that the interplay between age, gender, and excitation and inhibition should be taken into account in research on (dys)functional sexuality.
Lactational capacity of marginally nourished mothers: relationships between maternal nutritional status and quantity and proximate composition of milk.

Longitudinal studies of the nutritional status of 60 lactating Bangladeshi mothers from an underprivileged, periurban community and of the quantity and composition of their milk were completed to determine the relationships between maternal nutritional status and lactational capacity. Daily milk production was estimated by 24-hour test-weighing; the nitrogen, fat, lactose, and total energy concentrations of extracted milk samples were analyzed at various stages of lactation to estimate total milk nutrient production. Although the mothers were poorly nourished compared with international reference populations, their lactational capacity was not severely impaired. Average milk production peaked at 750 g/d when the infants were between 5 and 7 months of age. Nitrogen and fat concentrations declined with (log) infant age; lactose concentration increased with (log) infant age (P less than .001). Average concentrations of milk nutrients when the infants were 3 months of age were: nitrogen, 0.161 g/dL; fat, 2.804 g/dL; lactose, 7.92 g/dL; energy, 61.0 kcal/dL. Fat and energy concentrations were significantly greater, and fat and energy amounts tended to be greater, for mothers with larger triceps skinfold thickness or arm circumference. Changes in nutritional status within individual women were also significantly related to the amount and composition of their milk: within-woman increases in triceps skinfold thickness were associated with increases in fat and energy concentrations (P less than .01) and within-woman increases in body weight were associated with increases in the amounts of milk and all major nutrients (P less than .01). Milk production declined significantly during certain months of the year, just before the major harvest period. The findings suggest that, despite their remarkably good lactational capacity, the mothers' milk production was limited to some extent by their nutritional status and may, therefore, be further increased with nutritional improvement.
Markov Random Fields and Maximum Entropy Modeling for Music Information Retrieval

Music information retrieval is characterized by a number of various user information needs. Systems are being developed that allow searchers to nd melodies, rhythms, genres, and singers or artists, to name but a few. At the heart of all these systems is the need to nd models or measures that answer the question ihow similar are two given pieces of musici. However, similarity has a variety of meanings depending on the nature of the system being developed. More importantly, the features extracted from a music source are often either single-dimensional (i.e.: only pitch, or only rhythm, or only timbre) or else assumed to be orthogonal. In this paper we present a framework for developing systems which combine a wide variety of non-independent features without having to make the independence assumption. As evidence of effectiveness, we evaluate the system on the polyphonic theme similarity task over symbolic data. Nevertheless, we emphasize that the framework is general, and can handle a range of music information retrieval tasks.
The Effect of Using Co-Located Care-of Addresses on Macro Handover Latency

Using the Internet as an infrastructure for mobile personal communication is an attractive goal as well as a challenging task. Adding wireless access points to private and public data networks will affect the quality as well as the price of wireless communication services. Although most handovers between access points will be performed without involving the IP layer, handover across IP subnets (macro handover) is still likely to be frequent in such a heterogeneous environment. The Mobile IP protocol [15] allows the use of either a foreign agent care-of address or a co-located care-of address. This study concerns the latency related to the retrieval of a co-located care-of address by use of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) [9]. Our main result is that the address conflict checking mechanism recommended for DHCP significantly adds to the handover delay. We suggest that it should be left out of the care-of address retrieval process, and be performed by the DHCP server as a background process. Without address conflict checking, measurements in an Ethernet environment resulted in an address retrieval delay of 103 ms on average.
Biosynthesis, characterization, and antimicrobial applications of silver nanoparticles

In the present study, the strain Brevibacterium frigoritolerans DC2 was explored for the efficient and extracellular synthesis of silver nanoparticles. These biosynthesized silver nanoparticles were characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, which detected the formation of silver nanoparticles in the reaction mixture and showed a maximum absorbance at 420 nm. In addition, field emission transmission electron microscopy revealed the spherical shape of the nanoparticles. The dynamic light scattering results indicated the average particle size of the product was 97 nm with a 0.191 polydispersity index. Furthermore, the product was analyzed by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and elemental mapping, which displayed the presence of elemental silver in the product. Moreover, on a medical platform, the product was checked against pathogenic microorganisms including Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Salmonella enterica, Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus cereus, Escherichia coli, and Candida albicans. The nanoparticles demonstrated antimicrobial activity against all of these pathogenic microorganisms. Additionally, the silver nanoparticles were evaluated for their combined effects with the commercial antibiotics lincomycin, oleandomycin, vancomycin, novobiocin, penicillin G, and rifampicin against these pathogenic microorganisms. These results indicated that the combination of antibiotics with biosynthesized silver nanoparticles enhanced the antimicrobial effects of antibiotics. Therefore, the current study is a demonstration of an efficient biological synthesis of silver nanoparticles by B. frigoritolerans DC2 and its effect on the enhancement of the antmicrobial efficacy of well-known commercial antibiotics.
Poverty and child emotional and behavioral problems: Racial/ethnic differences in processes and effects

Using a sample of four to nine year-old children from the 1992 wave of the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data set, we evaluated racial and ethnic differences in the effects of current poverty and the persistence of poverty on child emotional and behavioral problems, and in the variables responsible for those effects. We considered three sets of variables in the latter analysis-mother's early characteristics and behaviors; correlated sociodemographic characteristics; and mediators (neighborhood problems, mother's psychological resources, and characteristics of the home environment) -and evaluated their relevance across three racial/ethnic subgroups (blacks, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites). Consistent with our expectations, we observed a significantly stronger effect of the persistence of poverty on child problems for whites than for blacks, an effect that is attributable to the relatively strong association between poverty and mother's prior history of delinquency and current marital status among whites. The effect of poverty on child problems was substantially explainedfor blacks by mother 's early self-esteem, whereas mediating processes took on greater relevance for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. Our results support the conclusion that there are racial/ethnic differences in the selection processes and proximal conditions that are responsible for the diminished psychological well-being ofpoor children.
Using road topology to improve cyclist path prediction

We learn motion models for cyclist path prediction on real-world tracks obtained from a moving vehicle, and propose to exploit the local road topology to obtain better predictive distributions. The tracks are extracted from the Tsinghua-Daimler Cyclist Benchmark for cyclist detection, and corrected for vehicle egomotion. Tracks are then spatially aligned to local curves and crossings in the road. We study a standard approach for path prediction in the literature based on Kalman Filters, as well as a mixture of specialized filters related to specific road orientations at junctions. Our experiments demonstrate an improved prediction accuracy (up to 20% on sharp turns) of mixing specialized motion models for canonical directions, and prior knowledge on the road topology. The new track data complements the existing video, disparity and annotation data of the original benchmark, and will be made publicly available.
Dance/movement therapy for improving psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients.

BACKGROUND Current cancer care increasingly incorporates psychosocial interventions. Cancer patients use dance/movement therapy to learn to accept and reconnect with their bodies, build new self-confidence, enhance self-expression, address feelings of isolation, depression, anger and fear and to strengthen personal resources. OBJECTIVES To compare the effects of dance/movement therapy and standard care with standard care alone or standard care and other interventions in patients with cancer. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library 2011, Issue 2), MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, LILACS, Science Citation Index, CancerLit, International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance, Proquest Digital Dissertations, ClinicalTrials.gov, Current Controlled Trials and the National Research Register (all to March 2011). We handsearched dance/movement therapy and related topics journals, reviewed reference lists and contacted experts. There was no language restriction. SELECTION CRITERIA We included all randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials of dance/movement therapy interventions for improving psychological and physical outcomes in patients with cancer. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two review authors independently extracted the data and assessed the methodological quality. Results were presented using standardized mean differences. MAIN RESULTS We included two studies with a total of 68 participants. No evidence was found for an effect of dance/movement therapy on body image in women with breast cancer. The data of one study with moderate risk of bias suggested that dance/movement therapy had a large beneficial effect on participants' quality of life (QoL). The second trial reported a large beneficial effect on fatigue. However, this trial was at high risk of bias. The individual studies did not find support for an effect of dance/movement therapy on mood, distress,and mental health. It is unclear whether this was due to ineffectiveness of the treatment or limited power of the trials. Finally, the results of one study did not find evidence for an effect of dance/movement therapy on shoulder range of motion (ROM) or arm circumference in women who underwent a lumpectomy or breast surgery. However, this was likely due to large within-group variability for shoulder ROM and a limited number of participants with lymphedema. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS We did not find support for an effect of dance/movement therapy on body image. The findings of one study suggest that dance/movement therapy may have a beneficial effect on QoL. However, the limited number of studies prevents us from drawing conclusions concerning the effects of dance/movement therapy on psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients.
In vivo RNA interference in oyster –vasa silencing inhibits germ cell development

This study investigated the potential of RNA interference, which is technically challenging in bivalve mollusc species, to assess gene function in the oyster Crassostrea gigas. We designed dsRNA targeting the oyster vasa‐like gene (Oyvlg), specifically expressed in oyster germ cells. In vivo injection of oyvl‐dsRNA into the gonad provokes a knockdown phenotype corresponding to germ cell underproliferation and prematurely arrested meiosis througout the organ. The most severe phenotype observed is sterile. This knockdown phenotype is associated with a decrease in Oyvlg mRNA level of between 39% and 87%, and a strong reduction in OYVLG protein, to an undetectable level. Therefore, Oyvlg appears to be essential for germ cell development in Crassostrea gigas, particularly for mitotic proliferation and early meiosis. Our results demonstrate for the first time that in vivo RNA interference works efficiently in a bivalve species, opening major perspectives for functional genetic studies.
Robust switching output-feedback control of time-varying polytopic uncertain systems

ABSTRACT The problem of designing a globally optimal robust output feedback controller for time-varying polytopic uncertain systems is a well-known non-convex optimisation problem. In this paper, new sufficient conditions for both robust and switching output-feedback control syntheses are proposed in terms of bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs) under the multiple Lyapunov function framework. This set of synthesis conditions is further reduced to a special type of BMIs, which can be solved effectively using linear matrix inequality optimisation plus a line search. The associated robust output-feedback controller is constructed as a switching-type full-order dynamic output-feedback controller, consisting of a family of linear time-invariant subcontrollers and a min-switching logic. The proposed approach features the important property of computational efficiency with stringent performance. Its effectiveness and advantages have been demonstrated through extensive numerical studies.
Implications of Climate Change for Ghana's Economy

Long-run economic development in Ghana is potentially vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change given the country’s dependence on rain-fed agriculture, hydropower and unpaved rural roads. We use a computable general equilibrium model, informed by detailed sector studies, to estimate the economy-wide impacts of climate change under four climate projections. Climate change is found to always reduce national welfare, with poor and urban households and the northern Savannah zone being the worst affected. However, there is wide variation across scenarios in the size of climate impacts and in the relative importance of sectoral impact channels, thus underscoring the need for multi-sector approaches that account for climate uncertainty. Our analysis of adaptation options indicates that investing in agricultural research and extension, and improved road surfaces, are potentially cost-effective means of mitigating most of the damages from climate change in Ghana.
Reversible logic synthesis by quantum rotation gates

A rotation-based synthesis framework for reversible logic is proposed. We develop a canonical representation based on binary decision diagrams and introduce operators to manipulate the developed representation model. Furthermore, a recursive functional bi-decomposition approach is proposed to automatically synthesize a given function. While Boolean reversible logic is particularly addressed, our framework constructs intermediate quantum states that may be in superposition, hence we combine techniques from reversible Boolean logic and quantum computation. The proposed approach results in quadratic gate count for multiple-control Toffoli gates without ancillae, linear depth for quantum carry-ripple adder, and quasilinear size for quantum multiplexer.
Combining Locations from Working Memory and Long-Term Memory into a Common Spatial Image

Abstract This research uses a novel integration paradigm to investigate whether target locations read in from long-term memory (LTM) differ from perceptually encoded inputs in spatial working-memory (SWM) with respect to systematic spatial error and/or noise, and whether SWM can simultaneously encompass both of these sources. Our results provide evidence for a composite representation of space in SWM derived from both perception and LTM, albeit with a loss in spatial precision of locations retrieved from LTM. More generally, the data support the concept of a spatial image in working memory and extend its potential sources to representations retrieved from LTM.