Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analytical and experimental issues in Ni-Mn-Ga transducers

Ferromagnetic shape memory martensites in the Ni-Mn-Ga system have been demonstrated to achieve a number of the criteria required for next generation actuators including the production of large theoretical strains up to 6%. The large strain originates in the rotation of twin variants and associated twin boundary motion which occurs in response to magnetic fields. The magnetic activation holds promise in actuator design because it can lead to higher bandwidths than those achieved through pure martensite-austenite phase transformation, as is the case with thermally-activated shape memory alloys. In this paper, we report on experimental measurements collected from a cylindrical Ni49.0Mn30. 0Ga21.0sample alloy, driven as cast by a collinear magnetic field-stress pair. Despite the lack of a known restoring force and the fact that no "training" procedures are applied, quasi-static strains as large as 4300 micro-strain are shown. Furthermore, dynamic results in the DC-20kHz range are presented which would suggest the presence of a Delta-E effect similar to that seen in Terfenol-D but exhibiting an opposite dependence of stiffness with DC field. The potential implications of the results for the design and control of dynamic structures based on Ni-Mn-Ga are very significant.
Design Methods to Engage Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities and their Families

In this position paper, I describe the process of adapting and combining traditional design methods to design assistive technology with and for individuals with cognitive disabilities and their family caregivers. First, I will present a research project to design a remote communication system with families with a young adult with cognitive disabilities. I will then discuss design methods that contributed to this research. BACKGROUND Today, many individuals with moderate cognitive disabilities live with their parents as children and young adults. When these individuals graduate from the school system, parents find themselves with the added responsibilities of acting as their grown child’s primary caregiver and social coordinator, managing their child’s schedule as well as their own [5]. New supports are needed for this family-based care model, such that parents feel secure and confident letting their adult children go out into the community, and know they are safely reaching their potential as active community members. Remote communication can potentially play a dramatic role in increasing the independence of young adults with cognitive disabilities [10]. Yet there are significant HCI problems for this population with off-the-shelf mobile phones, and there is little research to understand the requirements for a remote communication system for individuals with cognitive disabilities. RESEARCH GOAL In this research, I co-designed a picture-based, handheld remote communication system with young adults with cognitive disabilities and their family caregivers. The system has simple mobile phone capabilities. The user sends and receives calls through a picture and audio-based interface (see Figure 1). The system also supports remote communication tasks specific to the needs of the families, and the system interface and functionality is customized for the needs of each user. The platform is a Windows Mobile 5.0 handheld phone. The goal of this research was to design an effective remote communication system for each family, and to understand the dimensions of customization that the system would need to support to become a meta-design environment, to evolve with users’ needs and abilities. Figure 1: Remote communication system for the care recipient. A) Making a call; B) Receiving a call.
Professional Perception and Expert Action: Scaffolding Embodied Practices in Professional Education

From vocational education to neurosurgery residencies, apprenticeship training is characteristic of how people are acculturated to a profession. One of the primary goals of professional education is to develop skillful performance. Expert skill includes an integrated set of perceptual and motor abilities. During practical teaching, instructors deploy a set of discursive practices that nurture skilled performance in trainees. These practices scaffold particular patterns of movement, patterns that students can assimilate and subsequently use to guide or govern tool-based actions. We conducted in-depth ethnographic research in a dental hygiene program to gain a deeper understanding of the hands-on training environment: the activities in which participants engage, the circumstances they typically encounter, and the tools and technologies they rely upon in accomplishing their work. The primary data are video recordings of naturally occurring instructional interactions, chosen to be representative of broad classes of interactions observed. This article documents three practices used to entrain students with professional perception and scaffold expert action: guidance, demonstration and modeling, and embodied conceptual metaphor.
CRYPTOCOCCAL MENINGITIS IN PATIENTS NOT INFECTED WITH HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS

A retrospective study was carried out at Maharaj Nakorn Chiang Mai Hospital from January 1997 to December 2003 to assess the clinical features, laboratory data, and clinical outcome of 12 non-HIV infected patients with cryptococcal meningitis. There were 5 men and 7 women; the mean age was 50.8 years (range, 19-77 years). Eight patients did not have any underlying disease. The most common presentations were fever and headache. Stiffness of neck was found in half of the patients. Five of eleven patients had a positive India ink test. All patients were treated with amphotericin B. Two patients died. Both of them had severely impaired consciousness at the time of admission. Chiang Mai Med Bull 2006; 45(3):119-125.
Andersen–Tawil syndrome: Report of 3 novel mutations and high risk of symptomatic cardiac involvement

Introduction: Andersen–Tawil syndrome (ATS) is a potassium channelopathy affecting cardiac and skeletal muscle. Periodic paralysis is a presenting symptom in some patients, whereas, in others, symptomatic arrhythmias or prolongation of QT in echocardiographic recordings will lead to diagnosis of ATS. Striking intrafamilial variability of expression of KCNJ2 mutations and rarity of the syndrome may lead to misdiagnosis. Methods: We report 15 patients from 8 Polish families with ATS, including 3 with novel KCNJ2 mutations. Results: All patients had dysmorphic features; periodic paralysis affected males more frequently than females (80% vs. 20%), and most attacks were normokalemic. Two patients (with T75M and T309I mutations) had aborted sudden cardiac death. An implantable cardioverter‐defibrillator was utilized in 40% of cases. Conclusions: KCNJ2 mutations cause a variable phenotype, with dysmorphic features seen in all patients studied, a high penetrance of periodic paralysis in males and ventricular arrhythmia with a risk of sudden cardiac death. Muscle Nerve 51: 192–196, 2015
Load balancing for cellular/WLAN integrated networks

The interworking between heterogeneous third-generation cellular networks and wireless local area networks is one promising evolution approach to fourth-generation wireless networks, which can exploit the complementary advantages of the cellular network and WLANs. Resource management for the 4G-oriented cellular/WLAN integrated network is an important open issue that deserves more research efforts. In this article we present a policy framework for resource management in a loosely coupled cellular/WLAN integrated network, where load balancing policies are designed to efficiently utilize the pooled resources of the network. A two-phase control strategy is adopted in the load balancing policies, in which call assignment is used to provide a statistical quality of service guarantee during the admission phase, and dynamic vertical handoff during the traffic service phase is used to minimize the performance variations. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed load balancing solution achieves significant performance improvement over two other reference schemes
3D CAD Model Retrieval Based on Multiple Levels of Detail

This paper describes a new 3D model retrieval approach, which represents a 3D shape at three distinct levels of detail: contour level, silhouette level, and drawing level. This 3D-to-2D representation is supported by a 3D pose determination algorithm; to compute the similarity between 2D shapes at these levels, a combination of two different 2D shape descriptors is used to achieve a better performance. In addition, the results from the three levels were combined in five different schemes for obtaining the final ranked retrieval. In the prototype system, users can adjust the weights and interact with the different views and levels to emphasize the search intent more precisely. Based on average precision, the combination of the methods achieved 6-8% improvement over the individual levels. The proposed method which uses only three orthogonal views also performs comparably (avg. precision of 50.24%) with respect to the current best Light Field Descriptor method (50.68%).
An Efficient Low-Cost Time-Hopping Impulse Radio for High Data Rate Transmission

We present an efficient, low-cost implementation of time-hopping impulse radio that fulfills the spectral mask mandated by the FCC and is suitable for high-data-rate, short-range communications. The system was proposed to the IEEE 802.15. 3a group for standardization as high-datarate personal-area network (PAN). Key features are: (i) all-baseband implementation obviates the need for local oscillators and other passband components, (ii) all sampling and digital signal processing is done at 200MHz, (iii) fast acquisition is accomplished by novel search algorithms,(iv) the spectral can be shaped adaptively to accommodate different spectrum regulations and interference environments. We show that this system can provide 110Mbit/s at 7-10m distance, as well as higher data rates at shorter distances. Due to the spreading concept of time-hopping impulse radio, the system can sustain multiple piconets, and can suppress narrowband interference effectively.
XMM-Newton spectroscopy of an X-ray selected sample of RL AGNs

This paper presents the X-ray spectroscopy of an X-ray selected sample of 25 radio-loud (RL) AGNs extracted from the XMM- Newton Bright Serendipitous Survey (XBSS). The main goal of the work is to assess and study the origin of the X-ray spectral differences usually observed between radio-loud and radio-quiet (RQ) AGNs. To this end, a comparison sample of 53 RQ AGNs has been also extracted from the same XBSS sample and studied together with the sample of RL AGNs. Since there are many claims in the literature that RL AGNs have, on average, a flatter spectral index when compared to the RQ AGNs, we have focused the analysis on the distribution of the X-ray spectral indices of the power-law component that models the large majority of the spectra in both samples. We find that the mean X-ray energy spectral index is very similar in the 2 samples and close to $\alpha_{\rm X}\sim1$. However, the intrinsic distribution of the spectral indices is significantly broader in the sample of RL AGNs. In order to investigate the origin of this difference, we have divided the RL AGNs into blazars (i.e. BL Lac objects and FSRQs) and “non-blazars” (i.e. radiogalaxies and SSRQs), on the basis of the available optical and radio information. Although the number of sources is small, we find strong evidence that the broad distribution observed in the RL AGN sample is mainly due to the presence of the blazars. Furthermore, within the blazar class we have found a link between the X-ray spectral index and the value of the radio-to-X-ray spectral index ($\alpha_{\rm RX}$) suggesting that the observed X-ray emission is directly connected to the emission of the relativistic jet. This trend is not observed among the “non-blazars” RL AGNs. This favours the hypothesis that, in these latter sources, the X-ray emission is not significantly influenced by the jet emission and it has probably an origin similar to the RQ AGNs. Overall, the results presented here indicate that the observed distribution of the X-ray spectral indices in a given sample of RL AGNs is strongly dependent on the amount of relativistic beaming present in the selected sources, i.e. on the relative fraction of blazars and “non-blazars”.
Topology of Legionella pneumophila DotA: an inner membrane protein required for replication in macrophages

The Legionella pneumophila dotA gene is required for intracellular growth of the bacterium in macrophages. In this study, a structure-function analysis of the DotA protein was conducted to elucidate the role of this protein in L. pneumophila pathogenesis. Translational fusions of dotA to the Escherichia coli phoA and lacZ genes indicated that DotA is an integral cytoplasmic membrane protein with eight membrane-spanning domains. DotA contains two large periplasmic domains of approximately 503 and 73 amino acids and a carboxyl-terminal cytoplasmic domain of 122 amino acids. Protein fractionation studies were consistent with DotA residing in the inner membrane. An alkaline phosphatase fusion located 9 amino acids upstream from the C terminus of DotA still retained function and was able to restore intracellular growth when harbored by two L. pneumophila dotA mutants. A hybrid protein from which the carboxyl-terminal 48 amino acids of DotA were deleted was unable to complement the intracellular growth defect in the dotA mutants, indicating that this cytoplasmic region is required for function.
Multimodal Neural Language Models

We introduce two multimodal neural language models: models of natural language that can be conditioned on other modalities. An image-text multimodal neural language model can be used to retrieve images given complex sentence queries, retrieve phrase descriptions given image queries, as well as generate text conditioned on images. We show that in the case of image-text modelling we can jointly learn word representations and image features by training our models together with a convolutional network. Unlike many of the existing methods, our approach can generate sentence descriptions for images without the use of templates, structured prediction, and/or syntactic trees. While we focus on imagetext modelling, our algorithms can be easily applied to other modalities such as audio.
Linkages in the New ICT Clusters of Latin America: Evidence from Costa Rica

Abstract This paper studies the obstacles that hinder the formation of linkages among local firms, multinational corporations and universities in the Costa Rican information and communication technologies cluster. It examines both the social and the economic reasons for forming or participating in linkages, ranging from the capabilities of potential partners to compliance with customs. The research is based on qualitative information collected over four years through more than 150 direct and detailed interviews with different stakeholders in the cluster. Costa Rica is often used as a positive benchmark of cluster policy in Latin America, but it is argued here that linkages among firms in the sector have developed much more slowly than anticipated. Spanish abstract Este artículo estudia los obstáculos que dificultan la formación de vínculos inter-organizativos de colaboración entre firmas locales, corporaciones multinacionales y universidades en las agrupaciones de tecnologías de información y comunicación. El material examina las razones tanto sociales como económicas para formar o participar en tales vínculos, que van desde la capacidad de los asociados potenciales hasta el acatar las costumbres de los miembros participantes. La investigación se basa en información cualitativa recolectada durante más de cuatro años a través de más de 150 entrevistas directas y detalladas con diferentes participantes en la agrupación. Costa Rica es utilizada con frecuencia como un punto positivo de comparación sobre las políticas de asociaciones en Latinoamérica, pero se señala aquí que los vínculos entre las firmas en el sector se han desarrollado más lentamente de lo anticipado. Portuguese abstract Este artigo estuda os obstáculos que impedem a formação de conexões inter-organizacionais colaborativas entre empresas locais, corporações multinacionais e universidades no cluster (‘agrupamento’) de tecnologia da informação e comunicação de Costa Rica. Examina tanto motivações sociais quanto econômicas para criar ou participar em conexões que variam desde as capacidades de parceiros em potencial à observância de costumes. A pesquisa baseia-se em informações qualitativas coletadas ao longo de quatro anos através de mais de 150 entrevistas diretas e detalhadas com diversas partes interessadas no cluster. Costa Rica frequentemente é citada como exemplo positivo de políticas cluster para a América Latina, porém argumenta-se aqui que conexões entre empresas no setor têm sido desenvolvidas em rítmo muito mais lento do que o previsto.
Induced plant defence and the evolution of counter-defences in herbivores

We examine how induced plant defences affect the evolution of resistance in herbivores (i.e. the ability to overcome plant defences) compared with constitutive defence strategies. Since resistance of herbivores may evolve as a result of major monogenic and/or quantitative (polygenic or gene amplification) genetic sources, and the selective pressure imposed by plant defences affects the rate of evolution of each genetic source of resistance, we incorporate both into a model of herbivore evolution. We combine Mendelian single-locus and quantitative genetic models with a logistic population growth model based on an empirical plant–herbivore system. Induced defences may delay the evolution of both quantitative and major gene resistance and thus depress herbivore population size for more than 50 herbivore generations longer than constitutive defences. This increased longevity in the effectiveness of plant defence is associated with the production of substantially less plant defence over the long term, hence maximizing the benefit to cost ratio from the plant’s perspective.
Confirmation of HIV-like sequences in respiratory tract bacteria of Cambodian and Kenyan HIV-positive pediatric patients

Summary Background Bacteria and yeasts isolated from respiratory tracts of 39 Cambodian and 28 Kenyan HIV-positive children were tested for the presence of HIV-1 sequences. Material/Methods Bacteria and yeasts from the respiratory tract (nose, pharyngeal swabs) were isolated from 39 Cambodian and 28 Kenyan HIV-positive children. Bacterial chromosomal DNA was prepared by standard protocol and by Qiagen kit. The PCR specific for HIV sequences was carried out using HIV-1-specific primers. The analysis was performed by colony and dot-blot hybridization using HIV-1-specific primers which represent gag, pol and env genes of the virus. The sequencing of some PCR products was performed on the ABI 373 DNA Sequencer. Results The majority of microbes were characterized as Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and resp. Candida albicans. In some cases E. coli, Streptococcus pyogenes, Proteus mirabilis and Candida tropicalis were identified. Bacteria of 16 Cambodian (41%) and 8 Kenyan (31%) children were found to be positive in colony and dot-blot DNA hybridization. By the sequencing of PCR products synthesized on the template of patients’ bacterial DNA using primers 68;69 for env HIV-1 gene, homology of greater than 90% with HIV-1 isolate HXB2 (HIVHXB2CG) was revealed. Conclusions Bacteria and yeasts from the respiratory tract of 41% of Cambodian and 31% of Kenyan HIV-positive children bear HIV-like sequences. The role of bacteria in the HIV disease process is discussed.
Wideband characterization of a Doherty amplifier using behavioral modeling

A Doherty amplifier was investigated using behavioral amplifier modeling techniques. A measurement system for simultaneous wide bandwidth (>100 MHz) and large dynamic range (-70 dBc ACLR) sampled measurements that are needed for the behavioral modeling is presented. Both the measurement system and the performance of the Doherty amplifier are described. The findings are that the well known and widely used parallel Hammerstein model, also denoted the memory polynomial model, is well suitable also for modeling and predistortion of Doherty amplifiers, and that a Doherty amplifier can be designed with only minor memory effects. This is seen in the modeling error, which is reduced by 13 dB, compared with a constant gain, using a memoryless polynomial model and only 6 dB further by adding memory to the model.
New Perspectives on the N -body Problem

The problem of the motion of N ≥ 2 point–masses (i.e., ideal bodies with no physical dimension identified with points in the Euclidean three–dimensional space) interacting only through Newton’s law of mutual gravitational attraction, has been a central issue in astronomy, physics and mathematics since the early developments of modern calculus. When N = 2 the problem has been completely solved (“integrated”) by Newton: the motion takes place on conics, whose focus is occupied by the center of mass of the two bodies; but for N ≥ 3 a complete understanding of the problem is still far away, notwithstanding the efforts of many excellent mathematicians over the last centuries (Newton, Euler, d’Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace followed by H. Poincare, G.D. Birkhoff, C.L. Siegel, J.K. Moser, V.I. Arnold, M. Herman,.) The dynamics f the N–body problem has the fascinating feature of hosting regular and chaotic regimes and has often inspired the elaboration of new mathematical theories of local, perturbative and global nature. Indeed, to be attacked efficiently, it requires a sophisticated mixture of algebraic, analytical, geometrical, topological and probabilistic techniques. While the original impulse, coming from astronomy, has been somehow shaded by the massive use of machines for computing orbits of celestial bodies or satellites, the mathematical richness and beauty of the N–body problem has retained most of its original attraction, and still may be considered as one of the most fascinating and difficult branch of mathematics (see, below, for a list of recent excellent contributions, most of the authors being present at this conference).
Could Vikings have navigated under foggy and cloudy conditions by skylight polarization? On the atmospheric optical prerequisites of polarimetric Viking navigation under foggy and cloudy skies

In sunshine, the Vikings navigated on the open sea using sundials. According to a widespread hypothesis, when the Sun was occluded by fog or clouds the Vikings might have navigated by skylight polarization detected with an enigmatic birefringent crystal (sunstone). There are two atmospheric optical prerequisites for this alleged polarimetric Viking navigation under foggy/cloudy skies: (1) the degree of linear polarization p of skylight should be high enough and (2) at a given Sun position, the pattern of the angle of polarization α of the foggy/cloudy sky should be similar to that of the clear sky. Until now, these prerequisites have not been investigated. Using full-sky imaging polarimetry, we measured the p- and α-patterns of Arctic foggy and cloudy skies when the Sun was invisible. These patterns were compared with the polarization patterns of clear Arctic skies. We show here that although prerequisite (2) is always fulfilled under both foggy and cloudy conditions, if the fog layer is illuminated by direct sunlight, prerequisite (1) is usually satisfied only for cloudy skies. In sunlit fog, the Vikings could have navigated by polarization only, if p of light from the foggy sky was sufficiently high.