Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are They Talking to Me? Cognitive and Affective Effects of Interactivity in Politicians' Twitter Communication

The present study investigated when and how the level of interactivity in politicians' Twitter communication affects the public's cognitive and affective reactions. In a Web-based experiment (n=264), participants viewed a high profile male politician's Twitter page, wherein he was either actively responding to his followers' questions (high interactivity) or mostly posting messages on his own (low interactivity). Exposure to the high-interactivity Twitter page induced a stronger sense of direct conversation with the candidate (social presence), but only among less affiliative individuals who usually avoid social interaction. Heightened social presence, in turn, led to more positive overall evaluations of the candidate and a stronger intention to vote for him. Although those in the high-interactivity condition generated more positive thoughts, they had fewer issue-related thoughts and exhibited poorer recognition of the issues mentioned by the candidate.
Ultrasound-Propelled Nanocups for Drug Delivery

Ultrasound-induced bubble activity (cavitation) has been recently shown to actively transport and improve the distribution of therapeutic agents in tumors. However, existing cavitation-promoting agents are micron-sized and cannot sustain cavitation activity over prolonged time periods because they are rapidly destroyed upon ultrasound exposure. A novel ultrasound-responsive single-cavity polymeric nanoparticle (nanocup) capable of trapping and stabilizing gas against dissolution in the bloodstream is reported. Upon ultrasound exposure at frequencies and intensities achievable with existing diagnostic and therapeutic systems, nanocups initiate and sustain readily detectable cavitation activity for at least four times longer than existing microbubble constructs in an in vivo tumor model. As a proof-of-concept of their ability to enhance the delivery of unmodified therapeutics, intravenously injected nanocups are also found to improve the distribution of a freely circulating IgG mouse antibody when the tumor is exposed to ultrasound. Quantification of the delivery distance and concentration of both the nanocups and coadministered model therapeutic in an in vitro flow phantom shows that the ultrasound-propelled nanocups travel further than the model therapeutic, which is itself delivered to hundreds of microns from the vessel wall. Thus nanocups offer considerable potential for enhanced drug delivery and treatment monitoring in oncological and other biomedical applications.
The Effect of Phasor Measurement Units on the Accuracy of the Network Estimated Variables

The most commonly used weighted least square state estimator in power industry is nonlinear and formulated by using conventional measurements such as line flow and injection measurements. PMUs (Phasor Measurement Units) are gradually adding them to improve the state estimation process. In this paper the way of corporation the PMU data to the conventional measurements and a linear formulation of the state estimation using only PMU measured data are investigated. Six cases are tested while gradually increasing the number of PMUs which are added to the measurement set and the effect of PMUs on the accuracy of variables are illustrated and compared by applying them on IEEE 14, 30 test systems.
A DTI-Derived Measure of Cortico-Cortical Connectivity

We arm researchers with a simple method to chart a macroscopic cortico-cortical connectivity network in living human subjects. The researcher provides a diffusion-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data set and N cortical regions of interest. In return, we provide an N times N structural adjacency matrix (SAM) quantifying the relative connectivity between all cortical region pairs. We also return a connectivity map for each pair to enable visualization of interconnecting fiber bundles. The measure of connectivity we devise is: 1) free of length bias, 2) proportional to fiber bundle cross-sectional area, and 3) invariant to an exchange of seed and target. We construct a 3-D lattice scaffolding (graph) for white-matter by drawing a link between each pair of voxels in a 26-voxel neighborhood for which their two respective principal eigenvectors form a sufficiently small angle. The connectivity between a cortical region pair is then measured as the maximum number of link-disjoint paths that can be established between them in the white-matter graph. We devise an efficient Edmonds-Karp-like algorithm to compute a conservative bound on the maximum number of link-disjoint paths. Using both simulated and authentic diffusion-tensor imaging data, we demonstrate that the number of link-disjoint paths as a measure of connectivity satisfies properties 1)-3), unlike the fraction of intersecting streamlines-the measure intrinsic to most existing probabilistic tracking algorithms. Finally, we present connectivity maps of some notoriously difficult to track longitudinal and contralateral fasciculi.
JOE: a mobile, inverted pendulum

The Industrial Electronics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland, has built a prototype of a revolutionary two-wheeled vehicle. Due to its configuration with two coaxial wheels, each of which is coupled to a DC motor, the vehicle is able to do stationary U-turns. A control system, made up of two decoupled state-space controllers, pilots the motors so as to keep the system in equilibrium.
Ellipsoidal topographic potential: New solutions for spectral forward gravity modeling of topography with respect to a reference ellipsoid

Forward gravity modeling in the spectral domain traditionally relies on spherical approximation. However, this level of approximation is insufficient for some present day high‐accuracy applications. Here we present two solutions that avoid the traditional spherical approximation in spectral forward gravity modeling. The first solution (the extended integration method) applies integration over masses from a reference sphere to the topography and applies a correction for the masses between ellipsoid and sphere. The second solution (the harmonic combination method) computes topographic potential coefficients from a combination of surface spherical harmonic coefficients of topographic heights above the ellipsoid, based on a relation among spherical harmonic functions introduced by Claessens (2005). Using a degree 2160 spherical harmonic model of the topographic masses, both methods are applied to derive the Earth's ellipsoidal topographic potential in spherical harmonics. The harmonic combination method converges fastest and—akin to the EGM2008 geopotential model—generates additional spherical harmonic coefficients in spectral band 2161 to 2190 which are found crucial for accurate evaluation of the ellipsoidal topographic potential at high degrees. Therefore, we recommend use of the harmonic combination method to model ellipticity in spectral‐domain forward modeling. The method yields ellipsoidal topographic potential coefficients which are “compatible” with global Earth geopotential models constructed in ellipsoidal approximation, such as EGM2008. It shows that the spherical approximation significantly underestimates degree correlation coefficients among geopotential and topographic potential. The topographic potential model is, for example, of immediate value for the calculation of Bouguer gravity anomalies in fully ellipsoidal approximation.
Public Key Steganography

In this paper, a new method will be introduced for hiding information in images by using a public key method for ciphering the text before hiding information as well as this public key will be used in determining the position where the information will be hidden by using the last position in finding the new position, symmetric key also will be used in hiding process for deciding the number of bits that will be used from each pixel in the image, the combination of steganography and cryptography provide much strong method for keeping information secured and undiscovered from unwanted persons.
Fourth-order blind identification of underdetermined mixtures of sources (FOBIUM)

For about two decades, numerous methods have been developed to blindly identify overdetermined (P/spl les/N) mixtures of P statistically independent narrowband (NB) sources received by an array of N sensors. These methods exploit the information contained in the second-order (SO), the fourth-order (FO) or both the SO and FO statistics of the data. However, in practical situations, the probability of receiving more sources than sensors increases with the reception bandwidth and the use of blind identification (BI) methods able to process underdetermined mixtures of sources, for which P>N may be required. Although such methods have been developed over the past few years, they all present serious limitations in practical situations related to the radiocommunications context. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new attractive BI method, exploiting the information contained in the FO data statistics only, that is able to process underdetermined mixtures of sources without the main limitations of the existing methods, provided that the sources have different trispectrum and nonzero kurtosis with the same sign. A new performance criterion that is able to quantify the identification quality of a given source and allowing the quantitative comparison of two BI methods for each source, is also proposed in the paper. Finally, an application of the proposed method is presented through the introduction of a powerful direction-finding method built from the blindly identified mixture matrix.
The Backdoor Key: A Path to Understanding Problem Hardness

We introduce our work on the backdoor key, a concept that shows promise for characterizing problem hardness in backtracking search algorithms. The general notion of backdoors was recently introduced to explain the source of heavy-tailed behaviors in backtracking algorithms (Williams, Gomes, & Selman 2003a; 2003b). We describe empirical studies that show that the key faction, i.e., the ratio of the key size to the corresponding backdoor size, is a good predictor of problem hardness of ensembles and individual instances within an ensemble for structure domains with large key fraction.
Regionalization of Groundwater Residence Time Using Metamodeling

Groundwater residence‐time distributions (RTDs) are critical for assessing susceptibility of water resources to degradation. A novel combination of numerical modeling and statistical methods allows estimation of regional RTDs with unprecedented speed. In this method, particle RTDs are generated in 30 type locales in the northeastern glaciated U.S. by using automated generalized finite‐difference groundwater flow and advective transport models. Targets for statistical learning were created from particle RTDs by fitting Weibull, gamma, and inverse Gaussian distributions. Whole‐basin flux‐weighted RTDs were well fit by one‐component Weibull distributions. Flux‐weighted RTDs at stressed receptors such as wells often produced more complicated RTDs that required a two‐component mixture to fit. A Multitask LASSO regression was trained on the parametric RTDs using hydrogeographic features of the modeled areas as explanatory features. In this way, RTDs are regionalized with mappable physical features such as recharge and aquifer volume. The shape, location, and scale parameters of the parametric RTDs are strongly related to the mean exponential age. The shape parameter of the distribution, which controls deviation from exponential, is additionally a function of aquifer heterogeneity and hydrologic features. Regionalized RTDs provide useful metrics with respect to groundwater lag times and solute loading to streams. The lag time between input and output contained in the RTD is critical to understanding the relation between the land surface and human and ecological receptors.
Functional Connectivity and Tuning Curves in Populations of Simultaneously Recorded Neurons

How interactions between neurons relate to tuned neural responses is a longstanding question in systems neuroscience. Here we use statistical modeling and simultaneous multi-electrode recordings to explore the relationship between these interactions and tuning curves in six different brain areas. We find that, in most cases, functional interactions between neurons provide an explanation of spiking that complements and, in some cases, surpasses the influence of canonical tuning curves. Modeling functional interactions improves both encoding and decoding accuracy by accounting for noise correlations and features of the external world that tuning curves fail to capture. In cortex, modeling coupling alone allows spikes to be predicted more accurately than tuning curve models based on external variables. These results suggest that statistical models of functional interactions between even relatively small numbers of neurons may provide a useful framework for examining neural coding.
Heuristic Cut Separation in a Branch&Cut Approach for the Bounded Diameter Minimum Spanning Tree Problem

The bounded diameter minimum spanning tree problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem arising for example in network design when quality of service is of concern. We solve a strong integer linear programming formulation based on so-called jump cuts by a novel branch&cut algorithm, using various heuristics including tabu search to solve the separation problem.
Integrating personal media and Digital TV with QoS guarantees using virtualized set-top boxes: Architecture and performance measurements

Nowadays, users consume a lot of functionality in their home coming from a service provider located in the Internet. While the home network is typically shielded off as much as possible from the ‘outside world’, the supplied services could be greatly extended if it was possible to use local information. In this article, an extended service is presented that integrates the user's multimedia content, scattered over multiple devices in the home network, into the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of the Digital TV. We propose to virtualize the set-top box, by migrating all functionality except user interfacing to the service provider infrastructure. The media in the home network is discovered through standard Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), of which the QoS functionality is exploited to ensure high quality playback over the home network, that basically is out of the control of the service provider. The performance of the subsystems are analysed.
An Evaluation of the Effect of Automatic Preprocessing on Syntactic Parsing for Biomedical Relation Extraction

Relation extraction (RE) is an important text mining task which is the basis for further complex and advanced tasks. In state-of-the-art RE approaches, syntactic information obtained through parsing plays a crucial role. In the context of biomedical RE previous studies report usage of various automatic preprocessing techniques applied before parsing the input text. However, these studies do not specify to what extent such techniques improve RE results and to what extent they are corpus specific as well as parser specific. In this paper, we aim at addressing these issues by using various preprocessing techniques, two syntactic tree kernel based RE approaches and two different parsers on 5 widely used benchmark biomedical corpora of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction task. We also provide analyses of various corpus characteristics to verify whether there are correlations between these characteristics and the RE results obtained. These analyses of corpus characteristics can be exploited to compare the 5 PPI corpora.
Microbial and Geochemical Investigation down to 2000 m Deep Triassic Rock (Meuse/Haute Marne, France)

In 2008, as part of a feasibility study for radioactive waste disposal in deep geological formations, the French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (ANDRA) drilled several boreholes in the transposition zone in order to define the potential variations in the properties of the Callovo–Oxfordian claystone formation. This consisted of a rare opportunity to investigate the deep continental biosphere that is still poorly known. Four rock cores, from 1709, 1804, 1865, and 1935 m below land surface, were collected from Lower and Middle Triassic formations in the Paris Basin (France) to investigate their microbial and geochemical composition. Rock leachates showed high salinities ranging from 100 to 365 g·L−1 NaCl, current temperatures averaging 65 °C, no detectable organic matter, and very fine porosity. Microbial composition was studied using a dual cultural and molecular approach. While the broad-spectrum cultural media that was used to activate microbial communities was unsuccessful, the genetic investigation of the dominant 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed eight bacterial genera considered as truly indigenous to the Triassic cores. Retrieved taxa were affiliated to aerobic and facultative anaerobic taxon, mostly unknown to grow in very saline media, except for one taxon related to Halomonas. They included Firmicutes and α-, β-, and γ-Proteobacteria members that are known from many subsurface environments and deep terrestrial and marine ecosystems. As suggested by geochemical analyses of rocks and rock leachates, part of the indigenous bacterial community may originate from a cold paleo-recharge of the Trias aquifer with water originating from ice melting. Thus, retrieved DNA would be fossil DNA. As previously put forward to explain the lack of evidence of microbial life in deep sandstone, another hypothesis is a possible paleo-sterilisation that is based on the poly-extremophilic character of the confined Triassic sandstones, which present high salinity and temperature.
Animating Lava Flows

Animating lava flowing down the slopes of a volcano brings several challenges: modeling the mechanical features of lava and how they evolve over time depending on temperature; computing, in a reasonable time, the interactions inside the flow, and between the flow and a complex terrain data-base; and lastly, rendering the visual aspect of the flow. The methods described rely on smoothed particles governed by a state equation for animating the flow. We adapt this model to the animation of lava by linking viscosity to a temperature field and by simulating heat transfers. We propose particular data-structures that lead to linear computational time with respect to the number of particles. Lastly, we study a model based on a color-and-displacement procedural texture controlled by the flow for the realistic rendering of lava.
Potential of remote-sensing images to study the effect of natural vegetation on the spatial distribution of greyback canegrub, Dermolepida albohirtum, in Australia

Greyback canegrub, Dermolepida albohirtum (Scarabaeidae), is the major pest of the sugarcane industry in Queensland, Australia. Assuming that the vegetation and especially tree species and structure may influence the presence and the dispersal behavior of this pest and thus the spatial variation of damage to sugarcane fields, we analyzed the relationships between landscape indices derived from very high spatial resolution imagery and the occurrence of canegrub damage occurrence. Firstly, we applied object-based image processing techniques on a GeoEye satellite image to produce a detailed land-cover map of the study area in Mulgrave. Secondly, based on the knowledge of canegrub ecology, six landscape attributes were defined and computed from the land-cover map. Thirdly, the relationships between landscape attributes and canegrub damage collected from 2008 to 2013 were analyzed through a generalized linear model. Finally, the best statistical model according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) was used to map areas at risk for canegrub infestation. Among the derived landscape variables, the tree density index around the sugarcane fields, the proximity to forest, and the proximity to palm plantations were all positively correlated with canegrub damage (p<0.001), confirming the importance of trees in the damage occurrence. Our results highlighted the potential of very high spatial resolution remote sensing to identify environmental risk factors and generate risk maps for canegrub damage. (Resume d'auteur)
Tree age estimation by tree diameter measurement using digital close range photogrammetry (DCRP)

The digital close range photogrammetry (DCRP) approach has been used for tree's age estimation from its photographs with image analysis. Age of a tree can be determined using diameter or from the circumference, then convert it into diameter of a tree. The aim of this study is to determine the age of a tree by measuring tree diameter using close range photogrammetry technique. Conventional method was used to estimate the age of a tree by determining diameter at breast height (DBH) by using a measuring tape. Three jelutong trees with a different size were used in this study. Finding of the results shows the 3D representation of three sample trees with their circumference and diameter measurement compared to the conventional reading. From the analysis it was found that the different between conventional and DCRP method on tree age estimation on tree id 020, 047 and 053 yields 0.313%, 0.850% and 0.424% respectively.
Smart-device environmental control systems: experiences of people with cervical spinal cord injuries

Abstract Background: Environmental control systems (ECS) are devices that enable people with severe physical limitations to independently control household appliances. Recent advancements in the area of environmental control technology have led to the development of ECS that can be controlled through mainstream smart-devices. There is limited research on ECS within Australia and no known research addressing smart-device ECS. The current study sought to explore users’ experiences with smart-device ECS within Australia. Methods: The study followed a single embedded case study method. Participants (n = 5) were existing ECS users with a cervical spinal cord injury. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with participants, reflexive journals and field notes. An inductive approach was used to analyze the data thematically. Results and Conclusions: The experience of using a smart-device ECS presented both opportunities and costs to users. The opportunities included: independent control, choice, peace of mind, connection, effective resource use, and control over smart-phone functions and applications. The associated costs included: financial, time, frustration, and technical limitations. While findings are similar to previous research into traditional ECS this study indicates that smart-device ECS also offered a new opportunity for users to access mainstream smart-device functions and applications. Future research should investigate methods and resources that practitioners could utilize to better support new users of smart-device ECS. Implications for Rehabilitation As with traditional environmental control systems, users of smart environmental control systems report increased independence, choice and control. Smart-device environmental control systems provide users with access to mainstream smart-device functions and applications, which facilitate connection to family and the outside world. The costs to the user of smart-device environmental control systems include monetary and time investment, dealing with technical limitations and resulting frustration. Prescribers and installers must consider ways to mitigate these costs experienced by users.