Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Content analysis of the crew communication with external communicants under prolonged isolation.

BACKGROUND The communication between space crews and outside monitoring personnel in Mission Control gives us valuable information about crewmember psychological health. Studying the formal parameters of similar communication during ground-based space simulation missions helps us understand the psychological climate of confined groups over time, and this information can be applied to long-term space missions. HYPOTHESES We hypothesized that psychological closing and information filtration will be observed in a confined crew as the mission progresses and will differ by the type of communication (e.g., audio vs. computer-generated) with the outside monitors in the simulated Mission Control (MC). In addition, communication patterns will vary with the specific group of people on-duty outside. METHOD Audio and computer communications between space simulation crews and MC teams were analyzed during two isolation studies lasting 135 and 90 d at the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. A number of temporal, content and quantitative parameters of verbal activity were examined. RESULTS The total intensity of communication dropped after month 1 of the missions. The Commander had the highest intensity of communication. There was evidence for the presence of psychological closing and information filtration in the crews over time, with some variation based on type of communication. Communication patterns differed with different outside teams. CONCLUSIONS The communication between confined groups and outside monitoring personnel is affected by psychological closing and information filtration and by the make-up of the teams that comprise the monitoring groups.
Scalable Hybrid Unstructured and Structured Grid Raycasting

This paper presents a scalable framework for real-time raycasting of large unstructured volumes that employs a hybrid bricking approach. It adaptively combines original unstructured bricks in important (focus) regions, with structured bricks that are resampled on demand in less important (context) regions. The basis of this focus+context approach is interactive specification of a scalar degree of interest (DOI) function. Thus, rendering always considers two volumes simultaneously: a scalar data volume, and the current DOI volume. The crucial problem of visibility sorting is solved by raycasting individual bricks and compositing in visibility order from front to back. In order to minimize visual errors at the grid boundary, it is always rendered accurately, even for resampled bricks. A variety of different rendering modes can be combined, including contour enhancement. A very important property of our approach is that it supports a variety of cell types natively, i.e., it is not constrained to tetrahedral grids, even when interpolation within cells is used. Moreover, our framework can handle multi-variate data, e.g., multiple scalar channels such as temperature or pressure, as well as time-dependent data. The combination of unstructured and structured bricks with different quality characteristics such as the type of interpolation or resampling resolution in conjunction with custom texture memory management yields a very scalable system.
COMPARISON OF RADIOGRAPHIC MEASUREMENTS OBTAINED WITH CONVENTIONAL AND INDIRECT DIGITAL IMAGING DURING ENDODONTIC TREATMENT

The aims of this study were to evaluate the quality of indirect digitized radiographic images taken during endodontic procedures and to compare the measurements recorded with this technique to those obtained from conventional radiographs. Two-hundred conventional periapical radiographs taken at the undergraduate Endodontics Clinic of the Dental School of Bauru were digitized. The conventional and indirect digitized images were compared by three examiners as to the quality and accuracy of the measurements recorded during endodontic treatment, in canal length determination, gutta-percha adaptation, lateral condensation and final obturation. The conventional radiographs were observed on a film viewer, surrounded by a dark card, and measured with magnifying glass and a millimeter ruler; the indirect digitized images were evaluated on the Digora® for Windows software, with free utilization of the bright/contrast tool. Unlike the conventional radiographic images, all indirect digitized images were considered as having a high quality. The distance between the filling material and the root apex was 0.117 mm larger, on average, for the Digora® system (p<0.01). The measurements achieved by the investigated radiographic methods were clinically similar and they are thus equivalent. Changes in brightness and contrast of the images using Digora® software improved the diagnosis.
Second Order Methods for Optimal Control of Time-Dependent Fluid Flow

Second order methods for open loop optimal control problems governed by the two-dimensional instationary Navier--Stokes equations are investigated. Optimality systems based on a Lagrangian formulation and adjoint equations are derived. The Newton and quasi-Newton methods as well as various variants of SQP methods are developed for applications to optimal flow control, and their complexity in terms of system solves is discussed. Local convergence and rate of convergence are proved. A numerical example illustrates the feasibility of solving optimal control problems for two-dimensional instationary Navier--Stokes equations by second order numerical methods in a standard workstation environment.
Neuromorphic walking gait control

We present a neuromorphic pattern generator for controlling the walking gaits of four-legged robots which is inspired by central pattern generators found in the nervous system and which is implemented as a very large scale integrated (VLSI) chip. The chip contains oscillator circuits that mimic the output of motor neurons in a strongly simplified way. We show that four coupled oscillators can produce rhythmic patterns with phase relationships that are appropriate to generate all four-legged animal walking gaits. These phase relationships together with frequency and duty cycle of the oscillators determine the walking behavior of a robot driven by the chip, and they depend on a small set of stationary bias voltages. We give analytic expressions for these dependencies. This chip reduces the complex, dynamic inter-leg control problem associated with walking gait generation to the problem of setting a few stationary parameters. It provides a compact and low power solution for walking gait control in robots.
An unconditionally secure key management scheme for large-scale heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Key establishment in sensor networks becomes a challenging problem because of the resource limitations of the sensors and also due to vulnerability to physical capture of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose an unconditionally secure probabilistic group-based key pre-distribution scheme for a heterogeneous wireless sensor network. The proposed scheme always guarantees that no matter how many sensor nodes are compromised, the non-compromised nodes can still communicate with 100% secrecy, i.e., the proposed scheme is always unconditionally secure against node capture attacks. Moreover, it provides significantly better trade-off between communication overhead, computational overhead, network connectivity and security against node capture as compared to the existing key pre-distribution schemes. It also supports dynamic node addition after the initial deployment of the nodes in the network.
Evaluation of part of speech tagging on Persian text

One of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing is part of speech (POS) tagging. A POS tagger is a piece of software that reads text in some language and assigns a part of speech tag to each one of the words. Our main interest in this research was to see how easy it is to apply methods used in a language such as English to a new and different language such as Persian (Farsi) and what would be the performance of such approaches. This paper presents evaluation of several part of speech tagging methods on Persian text. These are a statistical tagging method, a memory based tagging approach and two different versions of Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) tagging on Persian text. The two MLE versions differ in the way they handle the unknown words. We also demonstrate the value of simple heuristics and post-processing in improving the accuracy of these methods. These experiments have been conducted on a manually part of speech tagged Persian corpus with over two million tagged words. The results of the experiments are encouraging and comparable with the other languages such as English, German or Spanish.
Aging Populations, Globalization and the Labor Market: Comparing Late Working Life and Retirement in Modern Societies

Contents: Preface Foreword PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Aging Populations, Globalization and the Labor Market: Comparing Late Working Life and Retirement in Modern Societies Sandra Buchholz, Annika Rinklake, Julia Schilling, Karin Kurz, Paul Schmelzer and Hans-Peter Blossfeld PART II: COUNTRY-SPECIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS 2. Increasing Inequalities in Germany: Older People's Employment Lives and Income Conditions Since the Mid-1980s Annika Rinklake and Sandra Buchholz 3. Late Career Instability and the Transition into Retirement of Older Workers in the Netherlands Maurice Gesthuizen and Maarten H.J. Wolbers 4. Retirement in Italy: Rising Inequalities Across Generations Paolo Barbieri and Stefani Scherer 5. Pathways from Work to Retirement and Old Age Inequality in Spain Jonas Radl and Fabrizio Bernardi 6. How 'Flexicure' are Older Danes? The Development of Social Inequality in Later Life Since the 1980s Julia Schilling and Mona Larsen 7. Social Inequality in the Late Career and Old Age Income between 1981 and 2007: The Case of the Swedish Welfare State Gabriella Sjogren Lindquist 8. Late Careers in Hungary: Coping with the Transformation from a Socialist to a Market Economy Alberto Veira-Ramos and Erzsebet Bukodi 9. Increasing Social Inequality in Later Life Since the 1980s in Estonia Kadri Taht, Ellu Saar and Marge Unt 10. Income Development of Older People: Consequences of Pension Reforms and Unstable Careers in the UK Paul Schmelzer 11. Late Employment Careers, Transitions to Retirement and Retirement Income in the United States Angela M. O'Rand and Jenifer Hamil-Luker PART III: CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION 12. Comparing Late Working Life and Retirement in Europe and the US: The Development of Social Inequalities in Times of Globalization and Aging Societies Karin Kurz, Sandra Buchholz, Alberto Veira-Ramos, Annika Rinklake and Hans-Peter Blossfeld Index
An ste20 Homologue in Ustilago maydis Plays a Role in Mating and Pathogenicity

ABSTRACT The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways are conserved from fungi to humans and have been shown to play important roles in mating and filamentous growth for both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and dimorphic fungi and in infectivity for pathogenic fungi. STE20 encodes a protein kinase of the p21-activated protein kinase family that regulates more than one of these cascades in yeasts. We hypothesized that an Ste20p homologue would play a similar role in the dimorphic plant pathogen Ustilago maydis. The full-length copy of the U. maydis gene was obtained from a genomic library; it lacked introns and was predicted to encode a protein of 826 amino acids, whose sequence confirmed its identity as the first Ste20p homologue to be isolated from a plant pathogen. The predicted protein contained both an N-terminal regulatory Cdc42-Rac interactive binding domain and a C-terminal catalytic kinase domain. Disruption of the gene smu1 resulted in a delayed mating response in a mating-type-specific manner and also in a severe reduction in disease production on maize. Unlike the Ustilago bypass of cyclase (ubc) mutations previously identified in genes in the pheromone-responsive MAPK cascade, mutation of smu1 does not by itself act as an extragenic suppressor of the filamentous phenotype of a uac1 mutant. Thus, the direct connection of Smu1p to MAPK cascade function has yet to be established. Even so, Smu1, though not absolutely required for mating, is necessary for wild-type mating and pathogenicity.
Literature Review: Better Outcomes for Children and Young People Experiencing Domestic Abuse--Directions for Good Practice

Chapters include: Review of the research evidence on children, young people and domestic abuse.Evidence from children and young people themselves, their perspectives on domestic abuse, what helps or does not help, and their solutions.Evidence that for children to be safe there needs to be multiagency collaboration; a focus on intervention with perpetrators; linked but separate protection of children and their mothers.The need for services for pregnant women and infants, to strengthen the mother/child relationship, for informal, individual and group support.Action to ensure all children and young people are equal, respected and responsible - to prevent abuse in the future and in their own young relationships. The authors provide directions for good practice at the end of each chapter. Written by Professor Cathy Humphreys, Claire Houghton and Dr Jane Ellis Published by The Scottish Government, Edinburgh 2008
Why it takes so long to connect to a WiFi access point

Today's WiFi networks deliver a large fraction of traffic. However, the performance and quality of WiFi networks are still far from satisfactory. Among many popular quality metrics (throughput, latency), the probability of successfully connecting to WiFi APs and the time cost of the WiFi connection set-up process are the two of the most critical metrics that affect WiFi users' experience. To understand the WiFi connection set-up process in real-world settings, we carry out measurement studies on 5 million mobile users from 4 representative cities associating with 7 million APs in 0.4 billion WiFi sessions, collected from a mobile “WiFi Manager” App that tops the Android/iOS App market. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to do such large scale study on: how large the WiFi connection set-up time cost is, what factors affect the WiFi connection set-up process, and what can be done to reduce the WiFi connection set-up time cost. Based on our data-driven measurement and analysis, we reveal the insights as follows: (1) Connection set-up failure and large connection set-up time cost are common in today's WiFi use. As large as 45% of the users suffer connection set-up failures, and 15% (5%) of them have large connection set-up time costs over 5 seconds (10 seconds). (2) Contrary to the state-of-the-art work, scan, one of the subphase of four phases in the connection set-up process, contributes the most (47%) to the overall connection set-up time cost. (3) Mobile device model and AP model can greatly help us to predict the connection set-up time cost if we can make good use of the hidden information. Based on the measurement analysis, we develop a machine learning based AP selection strategy that can significantly improve WiFi connection set-up performance, against the conventional strategy purely based on signal strength, by reducing the connection set-up failures from 33% to 3.6% and reducing 80% time costs of the connection set-up processes by more than 10 times.
HMM-Based Multi Oriented Text Recognition in Natural Scene Image

Recognition of curved text in natural scene image is a challenging task. Due to complex background and unpredictable characteristics of scene text and noise, text characters in strings are often touching that affects the performance of segmentation and recognition. This paper presents a novel approach for curved text recognition using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). From curved text, a path of sliding window is estimated and features extracted from the sliding window are fed to the HMM system for recognition. We evaluate two frame-wise feature extraction algorithms namely Marti-Bunk and local gradient histogram. The proposed approach has been tested on different natural scene benchmark as well as video databases, e.g. ICDAR-2003competition scene images, MSRA-TD500 and NUS. We have achieved word recognition accuracy of about 63.28%, 58.41% and 53.62%y for horizontal text, non-horizontal text and curved text, respectively.
Abundances of microRNAs in human cells can be estimated as a function of the abundances of YRHB and RHHK tetranucleotides in these microRNAs as an ill-posed inverse problem solution

Mature microRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous non-coding RNAs 18–25 nt in length. They program the RNA Induced Silencing Complex (RISC) to make it inhibit either messenger RNAs or promoter DNAs. We have found that the mean abundance of miRNAs in Arabidopsis is correlated with the abundance of DRYD tetranucleotides near the 3′-end and the abundance of WRHB tetranucleotides in the center of the miRNA sequence. Based on this correlation, we have estimated miRNA abundances in seven organs of this plant, namely: inflorescences, stems, siliques, seedlings, roots, cauline, and rosette leaves. We have also found that the mean affinity of miRNAs for two proteins in the Argonaute family (Ago2 and Ago3) in man is correlated with the abundance of YRHB tetranucleotides near the 3′-end and that the preference of miRNAs for Ago2 is correlated with the abundance of RHHK tetranucleotides in the center of the miRNA sequence. This allowed us to obtain statistically significant estimates of miRNA abundances in human embryonic kidney cells, HEK293T. These findings in relation to two taxonomically distant entities (man and Arabidopsis) fit one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which allowed us to heuristically generalize them and state that the miRNA abundance in the human brain may be determined by the abundance of YRHB and RHHK tetranucleotides in these miRNAs.
Identification of the Mitochondrial NAD+ Transporter in Saccharomyces cerevisiae*

The mitochondrial carriers are a family of transport proteins that shuttle metabolites, nucleotides, and cofactors across the inner mitochondrial membrane. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, NAD+ is synthesized outside the mitochondria and must be imported across the permeability barrier of the inner mitochondrial membrane. However, no protein responsible for this transport activity has ever been isolated or identified. In this report, the identification and functional characterization of the mitochondrial NAD+ carrier protein (Ndt1p) is described. The NDT1 gene was overexpressed in bacteria. The purified protein was reconstituted into liposomes, and its transport properties and kinetic parameters were characterized. It transported NAD+ and, to a lesser extent, (d)AMP and (d)GMP but virtually not α-NAD+, NADH, NADP+, or NADPH. Transport was saturable with an apparent Km of 0.38 mm for NAD+. The Ndt1p-GFP was found to be targeted to mitochondria. Consistently with Ndt1p localization and its function as a NAD+ transporter, cells lacking NDT1 had reduced levels of NAD+ and NADH in their mitochondria and reduced activity of mitochondrial NAD+-requiring enzymes. Similar results were also found in the mitochondria of cells lacking NDT2 that encodes a protein (Ndt2p) displaying 70% homology with Ndt1p. The Δndt1 Δndt2 double mutant exhibited lower mitochondrial NAD+ and NADH levels than the single deletants and a more pronounced delay in growth on nonfermentable carbon sources. The main role of Ndt1p and Ndt2p is to import NAD+ into mitochondria by unidirectional transport or by exchange with intramitochondrially generated (d)AMP and (d)GMP.
The effects of ability- and effort-based praise on task persistence and task performance

A pervasive idea among many school professionals is that verbal praise for ability may have several undesirable consequences relative to verbal praise for effort. Despite these arguments, past research has produced conflicting results. The present study utilized single-subject research methods with seven students ages 9 to 12 to examine the potential effects of ability- and effort-based verbal praise statements on task performance and task persistence. For four of the seven participants, only very small differences, if any, in task persistence were noted between conditions. For the remaining participants, results were mixed with two participants demonstrating more task persistence during the effort-based condition and one demonstrating more task persistence during the ability-based condition. For task performance, results were also mixed with some participants performing better during the ability-based condition and others performing better during the effort-based condition. Results of this study do not support the criticism uniformly leveled against ability-based verbal praise. Limitations, possible explanations of the results, and directions for future research are discussed.
Slowing of Motor Imagery after a Right Hemispheric Stroke

The temporal congruence between real and imagined movements is not always preserved after stroke. We investigated the dependence of temporal incongruence on the side of the hemispheric lesion and its link with working memory deficits. Thirty-seven persons with a chronic stroke after a right or left hemispheric lesion (RHL : n = 19; LHL : n = 18) and 32 age-matched healthy persons (CTL) were administered a motor imagery questionnaire, mental chronometry and working memory tests. In contrast to persons in the CTL group and LHL subgroup, persons with a RHL had longer movement times during the imagination than the physical execution of stepping movements on both sides, indicating a reduced ability to predict movement duration (temporal incongruence). While motor imagery vividness was good in both subgroups, the RHL group had greater visuospatial working memory deficits. The bilateral slowing of stepping movements in the RHL group indicates that temporal congruence during motor imagery is impaired after a right hemispheric stroke and is also associated with greater visuospatial working memory deficits. Findings emphasize the need to use mental chronometry to control for movement representation during motor imagery training and may indicate that mental practice through motor imagery will have limitations in patients with a right hemispheric stroke.
Traveling wave based protection for medium voltage grids with distributed generation

High penetrations of distributed generation in distribution grids may cause malfunctioning of conventional protection systems due to bidirectional flows and highly variable short-circuit levels. While there has been extensive research on this topic, developing a reliable cost-efficient protection system for active distribution grids remains a challenging task. This paper presents a new protection algorithm for medium voltage lines based on Traveling Wave theory. The fault direction is determined by analyzing differential equations that describe the behavior of fault-induced current waves in the vicinity of the protection terminal. The distinction between external and internal faults is performed by classifiers based on Neural Networks. The protection algorithm uses only current measurements as inputs and does not require any information exchange, which makes it a potentially low-cost yet reliable solution. The algorithm's performance is evaluated on the IEEE 34-bus test distribution system.