Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PI controller design based on generalized stability boundary locus

The paper introduces a generalized approach to identify all stabilizing PI controllers for processes with time delay. The approach depends on modeling higher order plant transfer functions by a first order plus dead time model. Then, the normalized form of the obtained model and controller transfer functions are used for plotting the stability boundary locus plane. After that, the all stabilizing values of tuning parameters for PI controllers are being calculated from the obtained plots. This approach brings the advantage of not needing to plot the stability boundary locus each time when the process transfer function changes, which is the case for the so far reported studies in the literature. Simulation examples are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.
Lipid Lowering and HDL Raising Gene Transfer Increase Endothelial Progenitor Cells, Enhance Myocardial Vascularity, and Improve Diastolic Function

Background Hypercholesterolemia and low high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol contribute to coronary heart disease but little is known about their direct effects on myocardial function. Low HDL and raised non-HDL cholesterol levels carried increased risk for heart failure development in the Framingham study, independent of any association with myocardial infarction. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that increased endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) number and function after lipid lowering or HDL raising gene transfer in C57BL/6 low density lipoprotein receptor deficient (LDLr−/−) mice may be associated with an enhanced relative vascularity in the myocardium and an improved cardiac function. Methodology/principal findings Lipid lowering and HDL raising gene transfer were performed using the E1E3E4-deleted LDLr expressing adenoviral vector AdLDLr and the human apolipoprotein A-I expressing vector AdA-I, respectively. AdLDLr transfer in C57BL/6 LDLr−/− mice resulted in a 2.0-fold (p<0.05) increase of the circulating number of EPCs and in an improvement of EPC function as assessed by ex vivo EPC migration and EPC adhesion. Capillary density and relative vascularity in the myocardium were 28% (p<0.01) and 22% (p<0.05) higher, respectively, in AdLDLr mice compared to control mice. The peak rate of isovolumetric relaxation was increased by 12% (p<0.05) and the time constant of isovolumetric relaxation was decreased by 14% (p<0.05) after AdLDLr transfer. Similarly, HDL raising gene transfer increased EPC number and function and raised both capillary density and relative vascularity in the myocardium by 24% (p<0.05). The peak rate of isovolumetric relaxation was increased by 16% (p<0.05) in AdA-I mice compared to control mice. Conclusions/Significance Both lipid lowering and HDL raising gene transfer have beneficial effects on EPC biology, relative myocardial vascularity, and diastolic function. These findings raise concerns over the external validity of studies evaluating myocardial biology and cardiac repair in normocholesterolemic animals.
Kinetics of Circulating MicroRNAs in Response to Cardiac Stress in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease

Background Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs/miRs) are regulated in patients with coronary artery disease. The impact of transient coronary ischemia on circulating miRNA levels is unknown. We aimed to investigate circulating miRNA kinetics in response to cardiac stress in patients with or without significant coronary stenosis. Methods and Results Eighty of 105 screened patients with stable coronary artery disease underwent dobutamine stress echocardiography before coronary angiography. Nine circulating vascular miRNAs (miRNA‐21, miRNA‐26, miRNA‐27a, miRNA‐92a, miRNA‐126‐3p, miRNA‐133a, miRNA‐222, miRNA‐223, and miRNA‐199‐5p) were quantified in plasma by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction before, immediately after, and 4 and 24 hours after dobutamine stress echocardiography. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction revealed increased miRNA‐21, miRNA‐126‐3p, and miRNA‐222 levels at 24 hours after dobutamine stress echocardiography in all patients. On coronary angiography, significant coronary artery stenoses (>80% diameter stenosis) were found in 41 patients. Stratifying patients according to the prevalence of significant stenoses, patients with stenosis showed an increase of circulating miRNA‐21, miRNA‐126‐3p, and miRNA‐222 in response to cardiac stress. In patients without significant stenoses (<50% diameter stenosis), miRNA‐92a levels gradually increased in response to cardiac stress. Conclusions miRNAs are distinctly released into the circulation in response to cardiac stress depending on the prevalence of significant coronary stenoses.
Chip placement in a reticle for multiple-project wafer fabrication

Chip placement in a reticle is crucial to the cost of a multiproject wafer run. In this article we develop several chip placement methods based on the volume-driven compatibility optimization (VOCO) concept, which maximizes dicing compatibility among chips with large-volume requirements while minimizing reticle dimensions. Our mixed-integer linear programming models with VOCO are too complex to render good solutions for large test cases. Our B*-tree with VOCO and HQ with VOCO use 16%∼ 29% fewer wafers and 8%∼ 19% less reticle area than the hierarchical quadrisection (HQ) method proposed by Kahng et al. [2005]
Addressing the barriers to accessing therapy services in rural and remote areas

Abstract Purpose: Throughout the world, people with a disability who live in rural and remote areas experience difficulty accessing a range of community-based services including speech-, physio- and occupational therapy. This paper draws on information gathered from carers and adults with a disability living in a rural area in New South Wales (NSW), Australia to determine the extent to which people living in rural areas may receive a person-centred therapy service. Methods: As part of a larger study in rural NSW into the delivery of therapy services, focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with 78 carers and 10 adults with a disability. Data were analysed using constant comparison and thematic analysis. Results: Three related themes emerged: (i) travelling to access therapy; (ii) waiting a long time to get therapy; and (iii) limited access to therapy past early childhood. The themes overlaid the problems of recruiting and retaining sufficient therapists to work in rural areas. Conclusions: Community-based rehabilitation principles offer possibilities for increasing person-centred therapy services. We propose a person-centred and place-based approach that builds on existing service delivery models in the region and involves four inter-related strategies aimed at reducing travel and waiting times and with applicability across the life course. Implications for Rehabilitation Therapy service delivery in rural and remote areas requires: Place-based and person centred strategies to build local capacity in communities. Responsive outreach programs working with individuals and local communities. Recognition of the need to support families who must travel to access remotely located specialist services. Innovative use of technology to supplement and enhance service delivery.
Few Ways to Love, But Many Ways to Hate: Attribute Ambiguity and the Positivity Effect in Agent Evaluation

Recent research has identified a positivity effect in consumers' evaluations of agents, such as friends and professional critics, who provide word-of-mouth evaluations and recommendations. Specifically, agreement with an agent on previously loved alternatives is perceived as more diagnostic of the agent's suitability than agreement on previously hated alternatives. This article argues that the positivity effect arises from greater ambiguity about attribute ratings of hated versus loved alternatives. Three studies support this by showing that the effect is moderated by the number of attributes, the number of alternatives, and the revelation of an agent's attribute ratings, and is mediated by attribute ambiguity. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
Risk Aversion and the Value of Risk to Life

The standard literature on the value of life relies on Yaari’s (1965) model, which includes an implicit assumption of risk neutrality with respect to life duration. To overpass this limitation, we extend the theory to a simple variety of preferences which are not necessarily additively separable. The enlargement we propose is relevant for the evaluation of life-saving programs: current practice, we estimate, puts too little weight on mortality risk reduction of the young. Our correction exceeds in magnitude that introduced by the switch from the notion of number of lives saved to the notion of years of life saved.
Learning relevant features of data with multi-scale tensor networks

Inspired by coarse-graining approaches used in physics, we show how similar algorithms can be adapted for data. The resulting algorithms are based on layered tree tensor networks and scale linearly with both the dimension of the input and the training set size. Computing most of the layers with an unsupervised algorithm, then optimizing just the top layer for supervised classification of the MNIST and fashion MNIST data sets gives very good results. We also discuss mixing a prior guess for supervised weights together with an unsupervised representation of the data, yielding a smaller number of features nevertheless able to give good performance.
A formal approach to the generation of visual language environments supporting multiple views

In this paper we present a formal approach, based on meta-modelling and graph transformation, to the generation of environments for visual languages (VLs) supporting multiple views. The VL syntax is defined by means of a meta-model. Views for the VL are created by selecting the classes, associations, attributes and constraints that are part of them. Once the environment is generated, the view models are translated into a global, unique model where consistency checking and further analysis can be performed by means of graph grammars. These ideas have been newly implemented in the AToM/sup 3/ tool.
Phototherapy for Improvement of Performance and Exercise Recovery: Comparison of 3 Commercially Available Devices.

CONTEXT Recent studies suggest the prophylactic use of low-powered laser/light has ergogenic effects on athletic performance and postactivity recovery. Manufacturers of high-powered lasers/light devices claim that these can produce the same clinical benefits with increased power and decreased irradiation time; however, research with high-powered lasers is lacking. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the magnitude of observed phototherapeutic effects with 3 commercially available devices. DESIGN Randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study. SETTING Laboratory. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS Forty healthy untrained male participants. INTERVENTION(S) Participants were randomized into 4 groups: placebo, high-powered continuous laser/light, low-powered continuous laser/light, or low-powered pulsed laser/light (comprising both lasers and light-emitting diodes). A single dose of 180 J or placebo was applied to the quadriceps. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Maximum voluntary contraction, delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and creatine kinase (CK) activity from baseline to 96 hours after the eccentric exercise protocol. RESULTS Maximum voluntary contraction was maintained in the low-powered pulsed laser/light group compared with placebo and high-powered continuous laser/light groups in all time points (P < .05). Low-powered pulsed laser/light demonstrated less DOMS than all groups at all time points (P < .05). High-powered continuous laser/light did not demonstrate any positive effects on maximum voluntary contraction, CK activity, or DOMS compared with any group at any time point. Creatine kinase activity was decreased in low-powered pulsed laser/light compared with placebo (P < .05) and high-powered continuous laser/light (P < .05) at all time points. High-powered continuous laser/light resulted in increased CK activity compared with placebo from 1 to 24 hours (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS Low-powered pulsed laser/light demonstrated better results than either low-powered continuous laser/light or high-powered continuous laser/light in all outcome measures when compared with placebo. The increase in CK activity using the high-powered continuous laser/light compared with placebo warrants further research to investigate its effect on other factors related to muscle damage.
ARKref: a rule-based coreference resolution system

ARKref is a tool for noun phrase coreference. It is a deterministic, rule-based system that uses syntactic information from a constituent parser, and semantic information from an entity recognition component. Its architecture is based on the work of Haghighi and Klein (2009). ARKref was originally written in 2009. At the time of writing, the last released version was in March 2011. This document describes that version, which is open-source and publicly available at: this http URL
Cognate Recognition and L3 Vocabulary Acquisition

One of the new trends in applied linguistics is concerned with third or multilingual language acquisition. Several linguists suggest that prior language knowledge should be taken into consideration and relied on in third language (L3) vocabulary teaching. Starting from these suggestions, the present study aims to verify the positive effect of cognate recognition and cognate-based instruction in the process of third language acquisition. For this purpose, an English vocabulary test was carried out among Hungarian high school students with Romanian as a second language (L2) and learning English as an L3. Before the test, the study group was presented with the structural similarities between the L2 and L3 lexical items. The results show that the study group obtained slightly higher scores on the vocabulary test than the control group. Following instruction on cognate target words, the difference between the two groups became more accentuated. Furthermore, a positive correlation was found between the L2 proficiency and the L3 vocabulary test scores. The results of this study confirm the expectations that cognate-based instruction can positively influence third language acquisition for which a necessary prerequisite is a good command of the previously learnt languages.
Adversarial Sequence Tagging

Providing sequence tagging that minimize Hamming loss is a challenging, but important, task. Directly minimizing this loss over a training sample is generally an NP-hard problem. Instead, existing sequence tagging methods minimize a convex upper bound that upper bounds the Hamming loss. Unfortunately, this often either leads to inconsistent predictors (e.g., max-margin methods) or predictions that are mismatched on the Hamming loss (e.g., conditional random fields). We present adversarial sequence tagging, a consistent structured prediction framework for minimizing Hamming loss by pessimistically viewing uncertainty. Our approach pessimistically approximates the training data, yielding an adversarial game between the sequence tag predictor and the sequence labeler. We demonstrate the benefits of the approach on activity recognition and information extraction/segmentation tasks.
Supporting narrative understanding of children with autism: A story interface with autonomous autobiographic agents

Recent studies in education for children with autism demonstrated that computer assisted learning can increase children's narrative understanding. However, software interfaces which include autonomous intelligent agents have yet to be explored in this context. In this paper we investigate how a narrative storytelling environment which is populated with virtual characters may help children with autism to understand narrative structure and to remember meaningful events within in a story. The behaviours of characters in the narrative storytelling environment are driven by a cognitive agent architecture and, in particular, a specially designed computational autobiographic memory (AM) which allows the virtual characters to remember and express emotional experiences. An application named Virtual Agent Story Interface (VASI) has been developed to visualise the agents' AMs and to help the children to reconstruct their own version of a story. In this paper we describe related research in the area, the overall design rationale of VASI, details of the VASI software design and the preliminary evaluation study.
Wheezing, a significant clinical phenotype of COPD: experience from the Taiwan Obstructive Lung Disease Study

Background COPD is an important public health challenge with significant heterogeneity of clinical presentation and disease progression. Clinicians have been trying to find phenotypes that may be linked to distinct prognoses and different therapeutic choices. Not all patients with COPD present with wheezing, a possible clinical phenotype that can help differentiate patient subgroups. Methods The Taiwan Obstructive Lung Disease study was a retrospective, multicenter research study to investigate the treatment patterns of COPD after the implementation of the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease 2011 guidelines. Between November 2012 and August 2013, medical records were retrieved from patients with COPD aged ≥40 years; patients diagnosed with asthma were excluded. Demographic data, lung function, symptom scores, and acute exacerbation were recorded and analyzed, and the differences between patients with and without wheezing were evaluated. Results Of the 1,096 patients with COPD, 424 (38.7%) had the wheezing phenotype. The wheezing group had significantly higher COPD Assessment Test scores (12.4±7.8 versus 10.5±6.7, P<0.001), higher modified Medical Research Council grade (2.0±1.0 versus 1.7±0.9, P<0.001), and more acute exacerbations within the past year (0.9±1.3 versus 0.4±0.9, P<0.001) than the nonwheezing group. The postbronchodilator forced expiratory volume in 1 second was lower in wheezing patients (1.2±0.5 L versus 1.5±0.6 L, P<0.001). Even in patients with maintenance treatment fitting the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease 2011 guidelines, the wheezing group still had worse symptom scores and more exacerbations. Conclusion Wheezing is an important phenotype in patients with COPD. Patients with COPD having the wheezing phenotype are associated with worse symptoms, more exacerbations, and worse lung function.
Comparison of marginal and internal adaptation of copings fabricated from three different fabrication techniques: An in vitro study

Aim: The purpose of this study was to compare the marginal and internal adaptation of cobalt-chromium (Co-Cr) copings fabricated from conventional wax pattern, three-dimensional (3D)-printed resin pattern, and laser sintering technique. Materials and Methods: A total of thirty copings were made, out of which ten copings were made from 3D-printed resin pattern (Group A), ten from inlay wax pattern (Group B), and ten copings were obtained from direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) technique (Group C). All the thirty samples were seated on their respective dies and sectioned carefully using a laser jet cutter and were evaluated for marginal and internal gaps at the predetermined areas using a stereomicroscope. The values were then analyzed using one-way ANOVA test and post hoc Bonferroni test. Results: One-way ANOVA showed lowest mean marginal discrepancy for DMLS and highest value for copings fabricated from inlay wax. The values for internal discrepancy were highest for DMLS (169.38) and lowest for 3D-printed resin pattern fabricated copings (133.87). Post hoc Bonferroni test for both marginal and internal discrepancies showed nonsignificant difference when Group A was compared to Group B (P > 0.05) and significant when Group A was compared with Group C (P < 0.05). Group B showed significant difference (P < 0.05) when compared with Group C. Conclusion: Marginal and internal discrepancies of all the three casting techniques were within clinically acceptable values. Marginal fit of DMLS was superior as compared to other two techniques, whereas when internal fit was evaluated, conventional technique showed the best internal fit.
New Measure of Insulin Sensitivity Predicts Cardiovascular Disease Better than HOMA Estimated Insulin Resistance

Context Accurate assessment of insulin sensitivity may better identify individuals at increased risk of cardio-metabolic diseases. Objectives To examine whether a combination of anthropometric, biochemical and imaging measures can better estimate insulin sensitivity index (ISI) and provide improved prediction of cardio-metabolic risk, in comparison to HOMA-IR. Design and participants Healthy male volunteers (96 Chinese, 80 Malay, 77 Indian), 21 to 40 years, body mass index 18−30 kg/m2. Predicted ISI (ISI-cal) was generated using 45 randomly selected Chinese through stepwise multiple linear regression, and validated in the rest using non-parametric correlation (Kendall's tau τ). In an independent longitudinal cohort, ISI-cal and HOMA-IR were compared for prediction of diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD), using ROC curves. Setting The study was conducted in a university academic medical centre. Outcome measures ISI measured by hyperinsulinemic euglycemic glucose clamp, along with anthropometric measurements, biochemical assessment and imaging; incident diabetes and CVD. Results A combination of fasting insulin, serum triglycerides and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) provided the best estimate of clamp-derived ISI (adjusted R2 0.58 versus 0.32 HOMA-IR). In an independent cohort, ROC areas under the curve were 0.77±0.02 ISI-cal versus 0.76±0.02 HOMA-IR (p>0.05) for incident diabetes, and 0.74±0.03 ISI-cal versus 0.61±0.03 HOMA-IR (p<0.001) for incident CVD. ISI-cal also had greater sensitivity than defined metabolic syndrome in predicting CVD, with a four-fold increase in the risk of CVD independent of metabolic syndrome. Conclusions Triglycerides and WHR, combined with fasting insulin levels, provide a better estimate of current insulin resistance state and improved identification of individuals with future risk of CVD, compared to HOMA-IR. This may be useful for estimating insulin sensitivity and cardio-metabolic risk in clinical and epidemiological settings.