Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Edge Illumination and Imaging of Extended Reflectors

We use the singular value decomposition of the array response matrix, frequency by frequency, to image selectively the edges of extended reflectors in a homogeneous medium. We show with numerical simulations in an ultrasound regime, and analytically in the Fraunhofer diffraction regime, that information about the edges is contained in the singular vectors for singular values that are intermediate between the large ones and zero. These transition singular vectors beamform selectively from the array onto the edges of the reflector cross-section facing the array, so that these edges are enhanced in imaging with travel-time migration. Moreover, the illumination with the transition singular vectors is done from the sources at the edges of the array. The theoretical analysis in the Fraunhofer regime shows that the singular values transition to zero at the index $N^\star(\om) = |{\cal A}||{\cal B}|/(\lambda L)^2 $. Here $|{\cal A}|$ and $|{\cal B}|$ are the areas of the array and the reflector cross-section, respectively, $\omega$ is the frequency, $\lambda$ is the wavelength, and $L$ is the range. Since $(\lambda L)^2/|{\cal A}|$ is the area of the focal spot size at range $L$, we see that $N^\star(\om)$ is the number of focal spots contained in the reflector cross-section. The ultrasound simulations are in an extended Fraunhofer regime. The simulation results are, however, qualitatively similar to those obtained theoretically in the Fraunhofer regime. The numerical simulations indicate, in addition, that the subspaces spanned by the transition singular vectors are robust with respect to additive noise when the array has a large number of elements.
Spectral Matting

We present spectral matting: a new approach to natural image matting that automatically computes a set of fundamental fuzzy matting components from the smallest eigenvectors of a suitably defined Laplacian matrix. Thus, our approach extends spectral segmentation techniques, whose goal is to extract hard segments, to the extraction of soft matting components. These components may then be used as building blocks to easily construct semantically meaningful foreground mattes, either in an unsupervised fashion, or based on a small amount of user input.
A comparison of audio-free speech recognition error prediction methods

Predicting possible speech recognition errors can be invaluable for a number of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications. In this study, we extend a Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST) framework for error prediction to facilitate a comparison between two approaches of predicting confusable words: examining recognition errors on the training set to learn phone confusions and utilizing distances between the phonetic acoustic models for the prediction task. We also expand the framework to deal with continuous word recognition and we can accurately predict 60% of the misrecognized sentences (with an average words-per-sentence count of 15) and a little over 70% of the total number of errors from the unseen test data where no acoustic information related to the test data is utilized. Index Terms: Finite State Transducer, Automatic Speech Recognition, Error prediction
Runt homology domain proteins in osteoblast differentiation: AML3/CBFA1 is a major component of a bone‐specific complex

The AML/CBFA family of runt homology domain (rhd) transcription factors regulates expression of mammalian genes of the hematopoietic lineage. AML1, AML2, and AML3 are the three AML genes identified to date which influence myeloid cell growth and differentiation. Recently, AML‐related proteins were identified in an osteoblast‐specific promoter binding complex that functionally modulates bone‐restricted transcription of the osteocalcin gene. In the present study we demonstrate that in primary rat osteoblasts AML‐3 is the AML family member present in the osteoblast‐specific complex. Antibody specific for AML‐3 completely supershifts this complex, in contrast to antibodies with specificity for AML‐1 or AML‐2. AML‐3 is present as a single 5.4 kb transcript in bone tissues. To establish the functional involvement of AML factors in osteoblast differentiation, we pursued antisense strategies to alter expression of rhd genes. Treatment of osteoblast cultures with rhd antisense oligonucleotides significantly decreased three parameters which are linked to differentiation of normal diploid osteoblasts: the representation of alkaline phosphatase–positive cells, osteocalcin production, and the formation of mineralized nodules. Our findings indicate that AML‐3 is a key transcription factor in bone cells and that the activity of rhd proteins is required for completion of osteoblast differentiation. J. Cell. Biochem. 66:1–8, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Isolated in-band communication for distributed SDN controllers

Control planes of Software-defined Networks consist of multiple interconnected controllers to provide scalability and reliability. Existing approaches for distributed control planes add high complexity and neglect in-band connectivity issues. Subsequently, in this work, we propose a low-cost inter-controller communication service, which (i) requires only few resources in terms of state, communication overhead, and computational complexity and (ii) provides isolation between control and production traffic using shared in-band channels.
Factors affecting athletes’ motor behavior after the observation of scenes of cooperation and competition in competitive sport: the effect of sport attitude

Aim: This study delineated how observing sports scenes of cooperation or competition modulated an action of interaction, in expert athletes, depending on their specific sport attitude. Method: In a kinematic study, athletes were divided into two groups depending on their attitude toward teammates (cooperative or competitive). Participants observed sport scenes of cooperation and competition (basketball, soccer, water polo, volleyball, and rugby) and then they reached for, picked up, and placed an object on the hand of a conspecific (giving action). Mixed-design ANOVAs were carried out on the mean values of grasping-reaching parameters. Results: Data showed that the type of scene observed as well as the athletes’ attitude affected reach-to-grasp actions to give. In particular, the cooperative athletes were speeded when they observed scenes of cooperation compared to when they observed scenes of competition. Discussion: Participants were speeded when executing a giving action after observing actions of cooperation. This occurred only when they had a cooperative attitude. A match between attitude and intended action seems to be a necessary prerequisite for observing an effect of the observed type of scene on the performed action. It is possible that the observation of scenes of competition activated motor strategies which interfered with the strategies adopted by the cooperative participants to execute a cooperative (giving) sequence.
Benchmarking FALCON's MATLAB-to-Fortran 90 Compiler on an SGI Power Challenge

This paper presents an overview of the FALCON MATLAB-to-Fortran 90 compiler. FALCON is a programming environment for the development of high-performance scientific programa. It combines static and dynamic inference methods to translate MATLAB programa into Fortran 90. The static inference is supported with advanced value propagation techniques and symbolic algorithms for subscript analysis. The experiments presented in this paper show that FALCON's MATLAB compiler can generate code that performs more than 1000 times faster than the interpreted version of MATLAB and substantially faster than a commercially-available MATLAB compiler on one processor of an SGI Power Challenge. Furthermore, for most of the programs we have tested, the compiler-generated codes are as fast as the corresponding hand-written programa.
Natural Interviewing Equilibria for Stable Matching

Stable matching problems are ubiquitous, though much of the work on stable matching assumes that both sides of the market are able to fully specify their preference orderings. However, as the size of matching markets grow, this assumption becomes unrealistic, and so there has been interest in understanding how agents may use interviews to refine their preferences over subsets of alternatives. In this paper we study a market where one side (hospital residency programs) maintains a common preference master list, while the other side (residents) have idiosyncratic preferences which they can refine by conducting a limited number of interviews. The question we study is How should residents choose their interview sets, given the choices of others? We provide a payoff function for this imperfect information game, and find that this game always has a pure strategy equilibrium. Moreover, when residents are restricted to two interviews and their preferences are distributed according to a φ-Mallows model with low dispersion, there is a unique Bayesian equilibrium in which residents interview assortatively: each resident pair r2j , r2j+1 interviews with hospitals h2j , h2j+1. We observe that with high dispersion, assortative interviewing is not an equilibrium.
Task constraints and minimization of muscle effort result in a small number of muscle synergies during gait

Finding muscle activity generating a given motion is a redundant problem, since there are many more muscles than degrees of freedom. The control strategies determining muscle recruitment from a redundant set are still poorly understood. One theory of motor control suggests that motion is produced through activating a small number of muscle synergies, i.e., muscle groups that are activated in a fixed ratio by a single input signal. Because of the reduced number of input signals, synergy-based control is low dimensional. But a major criticism on the theory of synergy-based control of muscles is that muscle synergies might reflect task constraints rather than a neural control strategy. Another theory of motor control suggests that muscles are recruited by optimizing performance. Optimization of performance has been widely used to calculate muscle recruitment underlying a given motion while assuming independent recruitment of muscles. If synergies indeed determine muscle recruitment underlying a given motion, optimization approaches that do not model synergy-based control could result in muscle activations that do not show the synergistic muscle action observed through electromyography (EMG). If, however, synergistic muscle action results from performance optimization and task constraints (joint kinematics and external forces), such optimization approaches are expected to result in low-dimensional synergistic muscle activations that are similar to EMG-based synergies. We calculated muscle recruitment underlying experimentally measured gait patterns by optimizing performance assuming independent recruitment of muscles. We found that the muscle activations calculated without any reference to synergies can be accurately explained by on average four synergies. These synergies are similar to EMG-based synergies. We therefore conclude that task constraints and performance optimization explain synergistic muscle recruitment from a redundant set of muscles.
The Tension of Metallic Films Deposited by Electrolysis

It is well known that metallic films deposited electrolytically are in many cases liable to peel off if deposited to any considerable thickness. This is the case with nickel which, when deposited over a certain thickness, will curl up into beautiful close rolls, especially if it does not adhere very tightly to the body on which it is deposited. For example, if a piece of glass is silvered by any of the usual silvering solutions, and then nickel is deposited on the silver, it is found that the nickel and silver peel off the glass in close tight rolls almost at once. In ‘Practical Electro-Chemistry,' by Bertram Blount, reference is made on pp. 114 and 272 to the tendency of nickel to peel off, and it is stated that it “will peel—spontaneously and without assignable cause” (p. 272), but that a thick coating can be obtained by keeping the solution at between 50° and 90°C. The late Earl of Rosse tried, about 1865, to make flat mirrors by coating glass with silver chemically, and then electroplating with copper; but he found that, owing to the “contraction” of the copper film, it became detached from the glass. I have had the' same experience in protecting silver 61ms in searchlight reflectors by a film of electro-deposited copper, it being found that if the film of copper is more than 0.01 mm. thick peeling is apt to take place.
The effects of political violence on Palestinian children's behavior problems: a risk accumulation model.

Interviews with 150 Palestinian mothers and their children living amidst the Intifada in the West Bank were conducted to assess exposure to political violence and family negativity as risk factors associated with behavioral problems as measured by the Child Behavior Checklist. The number of risks present in the child's life was significantly correlated with the number of behavioral problems the child exhibited (R = .53, p < .001). The analysis further examined the role of gender, age, and community context in moderating the impact of high levels of accumulated risk on children's behavioral problems. Under conditions of high accumulated risk, boys evidenced more problems than girls, and younger children exhibited more problems than older children. Community context (as indicated by a high or low level of political violence) was a significant factor for girls but not for boys.
Cyclic Dinitroureas As Self-Remediating Munition Charges

Abstract : As a potential solution to persistent environmental problems posed by conventional nitramines in unexploded ordnance (UXO), we investigated certain cyclic N,N'-dinitrourea derivatives: tetranitroglycoluril (TNGU) and hexanitrohexaazatricyclododecanedione (HHTDD), comparable in performance to HMX and CL-20. A property these compounds have in common that has kept them from widespread adoption by most weapons systems is a property that makes them attractive in specific systems that are susceptible to causing environmental problems as UXO: they are more hydrolytically reactive than simple alicyclic nitramines such as RDX. We quantified these ingredients' susceptibility to environmental hydrolysis in order to demonstrate that they show acceptable stability for processing into munitions but also suitable reactivity with environmental elements that they would undergo sufficiently rapid "spontaneous" (environmentally adventitious) degradation as to constitute "self-remediation. " The kinetics of ingredient degradation were determined under several environmental conditions. TNGU and HHTDD were seen to be stable enough in humidity-controlled air to manufacture and process; in moist soil and even in humid air, however, they degrade over hours to a very few days, and kinetic analysis shows the hydrolysis to be autocatalytic in mechanism. It is concluded that this class of ingredients does offer suitable replacements for conventional nitramines in venues that are susceptible to UXO formation.
CSNIPPEX: automated synthesis of compilable code snippets from Q&A sites

Popular Q&A sites like StackOverflow have collected numerous code snippets. However, many of them do not have complete type information, making them uncompilable and inapplicable to various software engineering tasks. This paper analyzes this problem, and proposes a technique CSNIPPEX to automatically convert code snippets into compilable Java source code files by resolving external dependencies, generating import declarations, and fixing syntactic errors. We implemented CSNIPPEX as a plug-in for Eclipse and evaluated it with 242,175 StackOverflow posts that contain code snippets. CSNIPPEX successfully synthesized compilable Java files for 40,410 of them. It was also able to effectively recover import declarations for each post with a precision of 91.04% in a couple of seconds.
Tri‐ and tetranucleotide microsatellites in dhufish Glaucosoma hebracium (Perciformes)

Thirteen polymorphic tri‐ and tetranucleotide microsatellite markers are reported for the exploited marine dhufish (Glaucosoma hebracium) from southwestern Australia. Variation was assessed among 48 individuals collected from a single locality. Most loci had 2–5 alleles, although one had more than 20 alleles, with corresponding observed heterozygosities of 0.02–0.81. These loci were also polymorphic in congeneric species.
Models and Representations for Fractal Social Organizations

Our subject is oriented towards investigation of potential ways of societal organization, that allow for collective intelligent organization and management of resources. The main objective of such organizations is the exploration of the social energy from the existing societies. We conjecture that an organizational model that fulfills the mentioned requirements is the Fractal Social Organization (FSO). Our goal is to prove and verify the effectiveness of this model by performing various simulations using the NetLogo environment, a tool that allows agent-based rapid prototyping. We begin by simulating trivial real life activities that demonstrate the main properties of the core unit of the FSO, namely the SoC. Further, more complex scenarios involving various nested SoCs are simulated. Two main simulation models are presented, allowing us to obtain preliminary results using the FSO concepts as a potential solution. In the first simulation model we demonstrate that by the use of FSO properties the individuals may benefit by receiving more qualitative healthcare services, while in the second simulation model we show how it might be possible to improve the fall detection systems by the use of FSO mechanism.
A New Class of Genetic Element, Staphylococcus Cassette Chromosome mec, Encodes Methicillin Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT We have previously shown that the methicillin-resistance genemecA of Staphylococcus aureus strain N315 is localized within a large (52-kb) DNA cassette (designated the staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec[SCCmec]) inserted in the chromosome. By sequence determination of the entire DNA, we identified two novel genes (designated cassette chromosome recombinase genes [ccrAand ccrB]) encoding polypeptides having a partial homology to recombinases of the invertase/resolvase family. The open reading frames were found to catalyze precise excision of the SCCmec from the methicillin-resistant S. aureuschromosome and site-specific as well as orientation-specific integration of the SCCmec into the S. aureuschromosome when introduced into the cells as a recombinant multicopy plasmid. We propose that SCCmec driven by a novel set of recombinases represents a new family of staphylococcal genomic elements.
Ultrasonic frequency-dependent amplitude attenuation characteristics technique for nondestructive evaluation of concrete

This paper presents a new ultrasonic method, frequency-dependent amplitude attenuation characteristics technique (FACT), for studying the effects of grain size and distributed microvoid damage upon the P-wave amplitude attenuation characteristics of concrete, while performing the contact-type, through-transmission nondestructive evaluation. It is demonstrated that the normalized amplitude attenuation characteristics under a wide range of exciting frequencies using the proposed FACT method are essentially not affected by the ultrasonic power amplifier system setting or the uncontrollable external disturbances, such as the concrete cylindrical surface contact conditions and forces. In addition, the proposed FACT methodology is significantly more sensitive on detecting the internal microstructural changes caused by distributed microvoid damage than the P-wave velocity method. Laboratory-cast concrete cylinders with various aggregate sizes are tested to demonstrate the grain size effects on the normalized P-wave amplitude attenuation profile. Furthermore, different volume fractions of small Styrofoam particles are mixed into laboratory-cast mortar and concrete cylinders to elucidate the effects of different degrees of controlled damage on the normalized P-wave amplitude attenuation characteristics. All ultrasonic amplitude measurements are obtained with a pair of broadband piezoelectric transducers with frequencies ranging from 100 to 1000 kHz. FACT is highly repeatable and consistent at the same material points and, therefore, appears promising for the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of concrete.
Adverse childhood experience and asthma onset: a systematic review

Adverse childhood experiences such as abuse and neglect are associated with subsequent immune dysregulation. Some studies show an association between adverse childhood experiences and asthma onset, although significant disparity in results exists in the published literature. We aimed to review available studies employing a prospective design that investigates associations between adverse childhood experience and asthma. A search protocol was developed and studies were drawn from four electronic journal databases. Studies were selected in accordance with pre-set inclusion criteria and relevant data were extracted. 12 studies, assessing data from a total of 31 524 individuals, were identified that investigate the impact of a range of adverse childhood experiences on the likelihood of developing asthma. Evidence suggests that chronic stress exposure and maternal distress in pregnancy operate synergistically with known triggers such as traffic-related air pollution to increase asthma risk. Chronic stress in early life is associated with an increased risk of asthma onset. There is evidence that adverse childhood experience increases the impact of traffic-related air pollution and inconsistent evidence that adverse childhood experience has an independent effect on asthma onset. Chronic stress in early life is associated with an increased risk of asthma onset http://ow.ly/KiDUK
Programming the Home and Enterprise WiFi with OpenSDWN

The quickly growing demand for wireless networks and the numerous application-specific requirements stand in stark contrast to today's inflexible management and operation of WiFi networks. In this paper, we present and evaluate OpenSDWN, a novel WiFi architecture based on an SDN/NFV approach. OpenSDWN exploits datapath programmability to enable service differentiation and fine-grained transmission control, facilitating the prioritization of critical applications. OpenSDWN implements per-client virtual access points and per-client virtual middleboxes, to render network functions more flexible and support mobility and seamless migration. OpenSDWN can also be used to out-source the control over the home network to a participatory interface or to an Internet Service Provider.