Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast filtering with new sparse transition Markov chains

We put forward a novel Markov chain approximation method with regard to the filtering problem. The novelty consists in making use of the sparse grid theory to deal with the curse of dimensionality. Our method imitates the marginal distribution of the latent continuous process with a discrete probability distribution on a sparse grid. The grid points may be seen as the states of a Markov chain. We construct such a Markov chain to imitate the whole process. The transition probabilities are then chosen to preserve the joint moments of the underlying continuous process. We provide a simulation study of a multivariate stochastic volatility filtering problem where we compare the proposed methodology with a similar technique and with the particle filtering.
Sociocognitive Inquiry

This chapter describes techniques for sociocognitive inquiry based on conceptual grid elicitation and analysis using web-based tools, such as WebGrid, which are designed to elicit conceptual models from those participating in a networked community. These techniques provide an interactive web-based experience with immediate payback from online graphic analysis, that provides an attractive alternative to, or component of, conventional web-based surveys. In particular, they support targeted follow-up studies based on passive data mining of the by-products of web-based community activities, allowing the phenomena modeled through data mining to be investigated in greater depth. The foundations in cognitive sociology and psychology are briefly surveyed, a case study is provided to illustrate how web-based conceptual modeling services can be customized to integrate with a social networking site and support a focused study, and the implications for future research are discussed.
Meditation and the scope of mental action

ABSTRACT While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson’s account of mental action, the most well developed extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one’s field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to triggering content delivery. In this article, we argue that meditation provides a useful model for understanding a wider range of types of mental action than heretofore recognized. Conclusions yielded by two distinct bodies of current psychological research on meditation and cognition, and meditation and introspection, buttress meditation’s suitability for this role.
iPhone and iPod Location Spoofing: Attacks on Public WLAN-based Positioning Systems

In this work, we study the security of public WLAN-based positioning systems. Specifically, we investigate the Skyhook positioning system [41], available on PCs and used on a number of mobile platforms, including Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone [1]. We demonstrate that this system is vulnerable to location spoofing and location database manipulation attacks. We further discuss approaches for securing Skyhoo and similar WLAN-based positioning systems.
Interferometry In Dissipative Media: Addressing the Shallow Sea Problem For Seabed Logging Applications

We derive interferometric field representations that are valid for diffusive field methods. The method retrieves the reflection response of the earth, as if the domain above the receiver depth level is homogeneous. It is represented as the flux-normalized up going field deconvolved by the down going field. The deconvolution step can be seen as a weighted crosscorrelation step, which is the usual operation in interferometric methods. Because the method effectively redatums the source depth level to the receiver depth level and removes the overburden effects, the shallow sea problem that exists for frequency domain Seabed Logging applications is solved in theory.
Solar-like Oscillations of Semiregular Variables

Oscillations of the Sun and solar-like stars are believed to be excited stochastically by convection near the stellar surface. Theoretical modeling predicts that the resulting amplitude increases rapidly with the luminosity of the star. Thus, one might expect oscillations of substantial amplitudes in red giants with high luminosities and vigorous convection. Here we present evidence that such oscillations may in fact have been detected in the so-called semiregular variables, extensive observations of which have been made by amateur astronomers in the American Association for Variable Star Observers. This may offer a new opportunity for studying the physical processes that give rise to the oscillations, possibly leading to further information about the properties of convection in these stars.
Compliant Modular Shape Memory Alloy Actuators

We have presented a simple but effective method to design flexible actuators. This process relies on understanding the behavior of a simple unit cell element built out of SMA sheet. The unit cell effectively uses the properties of flat SMA sheets: it operates in the bent region where more force is generated; it minimizes the nonbent SMA; and it heats up only the bent regions. However, the force generated by this unit cell does not scale up well, and an array of them is needed to increase the force generated. Building an actuator out of an array of unit cells increases its complexity but provides advantages, including the control of expansion length, trajectory, and generated force. Given the current technologies, including 3-D printing and laser cutting, a variety of support structures can be built to create an actuator with a given behavior. We have shown three types of configurations: linear, rotational, and surface. The linear actuator has been tested for endurance and can easily perform over 10,000 repetitions under load without breaking. These actuators have been tested in actual systems, such as the battery-operated HexRoller robot that uses six actuators connected in a chain. The robot demonstrates that this SMA actuator is power efficient compared with other SMA designs that cannot operate with batteries. We have also showed that a rotational version of this type of actuator is comparable with an electromagnetic motor.
Anti-colonial critiques of sport mega-events

ABSTRACT The paper reviews several theories about coloniality/modernity, Indigenous land, global securitisation and decolonial feminism in relation to sport mega-events. We use this special issue as an opportunity to reflect[1] which aspects of our own research may have been decolonial, and what is more accurately described as anti-colonial or anti-settlercolonial critique. In this paper, we review four different decolonial theories – coloniality/modernity, Indigenous land; global securitisation and decolonial feminism. We illustrate, and reflect upon, ways we have used these theories in our recent research about the Olympics, FIFA and Egyptian Ultras soccer fans. What became clear was that different decolonial theories helped us produce critiques of colonialism and settler colonialism in sport, but this raised the question whether our critiques of colonialism and settler colonialism are part of decolonisation. Some decolonial feminists suggest that decolonisation happens in the intersubjective, embodied realm of social erotics and queer affinity beyond coloniality. We conclude that, for us, decolonisation only happens within our relationality and process of doing research, from our social locations as queer arabyyah and white researchers respectively, working with and across our colonial differences.
From Sensors to Human Spatial Concepts: An Annotated Data Set

An annotated data set is presented meant to help researchers in developing, evaluating, and comparing various approaches in robotics for building space representations appropriate for communicating with humans. The data consist of omnidirectional images, laser range scans, sonar readings, and robot odometry. A set of base-level human spatial concepts is used to annotate the data.
Determining the motion character of loose materials in the system of continuous action «hopper – reciprocating plate feeder»

This paper reports methods for modeling the movement of bulk material in dispensing equipment of continuous action. It was established that modeling the pulsations and fractures in the flow of bulk material can be performed using the discrete element method. On its basis, a model has been constructed of the system consisting of a cylindrically-conically-shaped hopper and a reciprocating plate feeder of continuous action. Particles of bulk material are represented in the form of spheres with a constant radius between which the forces of friction and elasticity act. The result of modeling is the determined movement speed and position of each particle in the transverse section of the system «hopper‒ reciprocating plate feeder» and at the surface of a feeder’s plate. The regions have been defined with typical movement speeds of bulk material, as well as the system’s performance. The maximum speed of the particles is observed in the region of the outlet branch pipe of the hopper, along its central axis, and in the outer layer of the material that is found at the surface of a plate. Minimum speeds are observed near the walls of the hopper and at the center of a plate. It was established that in the course of a feeder’s operation there is an increase in the radius of the cone of bulk material that resides at the surface of a plate, by 15.2 %. The system was experimentally studied using a testing bench, consisting of a conical-cylindrical hopper, a reciprocating plate feeder of continuous operation, and a data acquisition system. The feeder’s performance under a steady operation mode has been determined. It was established that it is pulsating in character that matches the results from analytical calculations based on the constructed model. The conclusion about correspondence of the obtained results has been drawn based on the equality of variances in performance, which was checked using a Fisher criterion. The resulting model could be applied in order to analyze steady operational modes of reciprocating plate feeders of continuous action for the case when bulk material arrives to the center of a plate
Coding and modulation for the additive exponential noise channel

Communication across an additive exponential noise (AEN) channel is studied. Constellations are designed for low signal-to-noise ratio, where the minimum energy per bit is not universally attained by all modulations, and for high signal-to-noise ratio, where an equiprobable non-uniform constellation 0.76 dB away from capacity is described. The pairwise error probability for binary codes is similar to that in an equivalent discrete-time Gaussian channel of identical signal-to-noise ratio.
Routing inference based on pseudo traffic matrix estimation

Routing information is so crucial to an operational network that it is always regarded as confidential by network administrators. This paper proposes a novel routing inference method that only needs the knowledge of the network topology and the link counts, both of which can be obtained from MRTG (multi-router traffic grahper) data. The insight is that the traffic observed on each link arises from the superposition of the traffic demands between the origin-destination (OD) pairs and each traffic demand corresponds to a unique path. The method employs expectation maximization (EM) algorithm cooperating with a hypothetic pseudo routing scheme, which is expected to embrace the real routing, to compute a pseudo traffic matrix. The real routing then can be conjectured from this pseudo traffic matrix. This method is applied to a real IP network, and the results show that it correctly infers the routings for 87% OD pairs.
Which Moments to Match?

We describe an intuitive, simple, and systematic approach to generating moment conditions for generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation of the parameters of a structural model. The idea is to use the score of a density that has an analytic expression to define the GMM criterion. The auxiliary model that generates the score should closely approximate the distribution' of the observed data but is not required to nest it. If the auxiliary model nests the structural model then the estimator is as efficient as maximum likelihood. The estimator is advantageous when expectations under a structural model can be computed by simulation, by quadrature, or by analytic expressions but the likelihood cannot be computed easily.
A "hitchhiker's" guide to fast and efficient data reconstruction in erasure-coded data centers

Erasure codes such as Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are being extensively deployed in data centers since they offer significantly higher reliability than data replication methods at much lower storage overheads. These codes however mandate much higher resources with respect to network bandwidth and disk IO during reconstruction of data that is missing or otherwise unavailable. Existing solutions to this problem either demand additional storage space or severely limit the choice of the system parameters. In this paper, we present "Hitchhiker", a new erasure-coded storage system that reduces both network traffic and disk IO by around 25% to 45% during reconstruction of missing or otherwise unavailable data, with no additional storage, the same fault tolerance, and arbitrary flexibility in the choice of parameters, as compared to RS-based systems. Hitchhiker 'rides' on top of RS codes, and is based on novel encoding and decoding techniques that will be presented in this paper. We have implemented Hitchhiker in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). When evaluating various metrics on the data-warehouse cluster in production at Facebook with real-time traffic and workloads, during reconstruction, we observe a 36% reduction in the computation time and a 32% reduction in the data read time, in addition to the 35% reduction in network traffic and disk IO. Hitchhiker can thus reduce the latency of degraded reads and perform faster recovery from failed or decommissioned machines.
Apoptosis in budding yeast caused by defects in initiation of DNA replication

Apoptosis in metazoans is often accompanied by the destruction of DNA replication initiation proteins, inactivation of checkpoints and activation of cyclin-dependent kinases, which are inhibited by checkpoints that directly or indirectly require initiation proteins. Here we show that, in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mutations in initiation proteins that attenuate both the initiation of DNA replication and checkpoints also induce features of apoptosis similar to those observed in metazoans. The apoptosis-like phenotype of initiation mutants includes the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and activation of the budding-yeast metacaspase Yca1p. In contrast to a recent report that activation of Yca1p only occurs in lysed cells and does not contribute to cell death, we found that, in at least one initiation mutant, Yca1p activation occurs at an early stage of cell death (before cell lysis) and contributes to the lethal effects of the mutation harbored by this strain. Apoptosis in initiation mutants is probably caused by DNA damage associated with the combined effects of insufficient DNA replication forks to completely replicate the genome and defective checkpoints that depend on initiation proteins and/or replication forks to restrain subsequent cell-cycle events until DNA replication is complete. A similar mechanism might underlie the proapoptotic effects associated with the destruction of initiation and checkpoint proteins during apoptosis in mammals, as well as genome instability in initiation mutants of budding yeast.
“It Was Really Tough”—Exploring the Feelings of Isolation and Cultural Dissonance With Black American Males at a Predominantly White Institution

Black American males and low socioeconomic status students face a gauntlet of obstacles when pursuing their college degrees. These young men do not earn degrees at the same rate as their peers. As campus engagement, recreation, and leisure play pivotal roles in students’ experiences, investigating their influence relative to social integration might facilitate a better understanding of the issues they face. This study explored how Black American male undergraduates from low socioeconomic status backgrounds perceived the roles that campus engagement, recreation, and leisure played in their social integration. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development guided the qualitative approach to this study. Seventeen participants were interviewed, and interwoven themes related to feelings of isolation and cultural dissonance emerged. Theorizing about the complex roles leisure plays, in some cases, creating isolation and cultural dissonance and, in others, helping students navigate the challenges of college are presented.
Inverting the spherical Radon transform for physically meaningful functions

In this paper we refer to the reconstruction formulas given in L. -E. Andersson's On the determination of a function from spherical averages, which are often used in applications such as SAR and SONAR. We demonstrate that the first one of these formulas does not converge given physically reasonable assumptions. An alternative is proposed and it is shown that the second reconstruction formula is well-defined but might be difficult to compute numerically.
PREDICTING THE ELECTRIC STRENGTH OF PROPOSED SF6 REPLACEMENT GASES BY MEANS OF DENSITY FUNCTIONAL THEORY

We computationally estimate the electric strength (ES) and the boiling point (TB) of 2611 carbonyl compounds. Namely we systematically analyze the groups of hydrofluoro-ketones, -aldehydes and acyl fluorides as well as perfluoro-ketones and – aldehydes. The elemental composition is restricted to solely hydrogen, fluorine, a single oxygen atom and 3 to 5 carbon atoms. Our method is based on the strong correlations between the ES of electronegative gases and certain predictors [1]. Predictors are simple functions of molecular properties, which are calculated ab-initio by means of density functional theory (DFT). We use the same method to estimate TB of the gas samples [1]. Recently certain C5and C6-perfluoroketones were proposed as dielectric insulation medium in electrical power system equipment [2-4]. We compare our calculated values of the ES and TB of these compounds with other carbonyl compounds. We detect influence of the chemical structure on the ES and TB of a species and we identify other hydroand per-fluoro carbonyl compounds of similar or even better insulation properties.
Verifying the Mondex Case Study

The Mondex Case study is still the most substantial contribution to the Grand Challenge repository. It has been the target of a number of formal verification efforts. Those efforts concentrated on correctness proofs for refinement steps of the specification in various specification formalisms using different verification tools. In this paper we report on a Java Card implementation of the Mondex protocol and on proving its correctness using the KeY tool. The security properties to be proved are formalised in the Java Modelling Language and follow as closely as possible the concrete layer of the previous Z specification. This work demonstrates that with an appropriate specification language and verification tool, it is possible to bridge the gap between specification and implementation ensuring a fully verified result.
Diagnostic Value of Simultaneous Measurement of Procalcitonin, Interleukin-6 and hs-CRP in Prediction of Early-Onset Neonatal Sepsis

Neonatal sepsis is a major cause of morbidities and mortalities mostly remarkable in the third world nations.We aimed to assess the value of simultaneous measurement of procalcitonin (PCT) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in association with high sensitive- C reactive protein(hs-CRP) in prediction of early neonatal sepsis. A follow-up study was performed on 95 neonates who were below 12 hours (h) of age and had clinical signs of sepsis or maternal risk factors for sepsis. Neonates were assigned to 4 groups including “proven early-onset sepsis”, “clinical early-onset sepsis”, “negative infectious status”, and “uncertain infectious status”. Blood samples were obtained within the first 12 h of birth repeated between 24 hours and 36 hours of age for determination of serum levels of PCT, IL-6, hs-CRP, and white blood cell (WBC) count. On admission, neonates with sepsis had a higher WBC count, IL-6, PCT, and hs-CRP levels compared with those neonates without sepsis. This remained significant even after 12–24 hours of admission. Also, patients with clinical evidences of sepsis had a higher serum level of PCT and IL-6 within 12–24 hours after admission compared to the patients with uncertain sepsis. The combination of PCT and IL-6 yielded had a sensitivity of 88% and PCT and CRP (using the cutoff value of 8 mg/L) a sensitivity of 82%. The areas under the ROC curve for the two periods were 0.801, and 0.819 respectively. In final The combination of IL-6, hs-CRP, and PCT seems to be predictive in diagnosis of early onset neonatal sepsis.
Development of robot hand with multi-directional variable stiffness for human-care services

This paper describes a novel human-sized robot hand that has the ability to adjust its joint stiffness and sense external forces. This robot hand consists of four fingers, each with three joints. To downsize the finger modules, the DIP and PIP joints are coupled with a linkage mechanism and actuated by a single motor. In addition, for the MP joint, two kinds of silicone rubber cushion, SRCtrans and SRCstiff , are inserted between the motor and the output link. The elasticity of the SRCtrans provides softness to the joint. On the other hand, the SRCstiff compresses the SRCtrans by its expansion and as a result controls the stiffness of the joint. Furthermore, the MP joint can estimate the direction and magnitude of the forces exerted from multiple directions by measuring the pressure inside the SRCtrans. In this paper, we present the detailed mechanism of the robot fingers and examine their basic performance for an adjustable range of joint stiffness, controllability, output, and sensing of external forces. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of this hand for human-care by applying it to a human massage.
Crucial Role of Inhibitor of DNA Binding/Differentiation in the Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor-Induced Activation and Angiogenic Processes of Human Endothelial Cells1

Angiogenesis plays a pivotal role in the aggressive proliferation of synovial cells in rheumatoid arthritis. We have previously reported the overexpression of inhibitor of DNA binding/differentiation (Id) in the endothelial cells within the synovial tissues of rheumatoid arthritis. In this study, we investigated the role of Id in inflammation and angiogenesis in an in vitro model using HUVECs. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and TGFβ induced the expression of Id1 and Id3 in HUVECs. Forced expression of Id induced proliferative activity in HUVECs accompanied by down-regulation of p16INK4a. Overexpression of Id enhanced expression of ICAM-1 and E-selectin, and induced angiogenic processes such as transmigration, matrix metalloproteinase-2 and -9 expression, and tube formation. In contrast, knockdown of Id1 and Id3 with RNA interference abolished proliferation, activation, and angiogenic processes of HUVECs induced by VEGF. These results indicated that Id plays a crucial role in VEGF-induced signals of endothelial cells by causing activation and potentiation of angiogenic processes. Based on these findings, it was proposed that inhibition of expression and/or function of Id1 and Id3 may potentially be of therapeutic value for conditions associated with pathological angiogenesis.