Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accuracy in fixing ship’s positions by camera survey of bearings

The paper presents the results of research on the possibilities of fixing ship position coordinates based on results of surveying bearings on navigational marks with the use of the CCD camera. Accuracy of the determination of ship position coordinates, expressed in terms of the mean error, was assumed to be the basic criterion of this estimation. The first part of the paper describes the method of the determination of the resolution and the mean error of the angle measurement, taken with a camera, and also the method of the determination of the mean error of position coordinates when two or more bearings were measured. There have been defined three software applications assigned for the development of navigational sea charts with accuracy areas mapped on. The second part contains the results of studying accuracy in fixing ship position coordinates, carried out in the Gulf of Gdansk, with the use of bearings taken obtained with the Rolleiflex and Sony cameras. The results are presented in a form of diagrams of the mean error of angle measurement, also in the form of navigational charts with accuracy fields mapped on. In the final part, basing on results obtained, the applicability of CCD cameras in automation of coastal navigation performance process is discussed.
Performance tradeoffs of dynamically controlled grid-connected inverters in low inertia power systems

Implementing frequency response using grid-connected inverters is one of the popular proposed alternatives to mitigate the dynamic degradation experienced in low inertia power systems. However, such solution faces several challenges as inverters do not intrinsically possess the natural response to power fluctuations that synchronous generators have. Thus, to synthetically generate this response, inverters need to take frequency measurements, which are usually noisy, and subsequently make changes in the output power, which are therefore delayed. This paper explores the system-wide performance tradeoffs that arise when measurement noise, delayed actions, and power disturbances are considered in the design of dynamic controllers for grid-connected inverters. Using a recently proposed dynamic droop (iDroop) control for grid-connected inverters that is inspired by classical first order lead-lag compensation, we show that the sets of parameters that result in highest noise attenuation, power disturbance mitigation, and delay robustness do not necessarily have a common intersection. In particular, lead compensation is desired in systems where power disturbances are the predominant source of degradation, while lag compensation is a better alternative when the system is dominated by delays or frequency noise. Our analysis further shows that iDroop can outperform the standard droop alternative in both joint noise and disturbance mitigation, and delay robustness.
Application of Ripple Mapping to Visualize Slow Conduction Channels Within the Infarct-Related Left Ventricular Scar

Background—Ripple mapping (RM) displays each electrogram at its 3-dimensional coordinate as a bar changing in length according to its voltage–time relationship with a fiduciary reference. We applied RM to left ventricular ischemic scar for evidence of slow-conducting channels that may act as ventricular tachycardia (VT) substrate. Methods and Results—CARTO-3© (Biosense Webster Inc, Diamond Bar, CA) maps in patient undergoing VT ablation were analyzed on an offline MatLab RM system. Scar was assessed for sequential movement of ripple bars, during sinus rhythm or pacing, which were distinct from surrounding tissue and termed RM conduction channels (RMCC). Conduction velocity was measured within RMCCs and compared with the healthy myocardium (>1.5 mV). In 21 maps, 77 RMCCs were identified. Conduction velocity in RMCCs was slower when compared with normal left ventricular myocardium (median, 54 [interquartile range, 40–86] versus 150 [interquartile range, 120–160] cm/s; P<0.001). All 7 sites meeting conventional criteria for diastolic pathways coincided with an RMCC. Seven patients had ablation colocating to all identified RMCCs with no VT recurrence during follow-up (median, 480 [interquartile range, 438–841] days). Fourteen patients had ≥1 RMCC with no ablation lesions. Five had recurrence during follow-up (median, 466 [interquartile range, 395–694] days). One of the 2 patients with no RMCC locations ablated had VT recurrence at 605 days post procedure. RMCCs were sensitive (100%; negative predictive value, 100%) for VT recurrence but the specificity (43%; positive predictive value, 35.7%) may be limited by blind alleys channels. Conclusions—RM identifies slow conduction channels within ischemic scar and needs further prospective investigation to understand the role of RMCCs in determining the VT substrate.
Influence of local and remote wind forcing in the Gulf of Guinea

SEQUAL/FOCAL (Seasonal equatorial Atlantic/Programme Francais Ocean et Climat dans l'Atlantique Equatorial) data are analyzed to investigate the question of the relative importance of local and remote wind forcing in the equatorial Gulf of Guinea. The difference in the timing and rate of intensification of the winds in the eastern and western equatorial Atlantic Ocean for 1983 and 1984 is used to distinguish local and remote forcing efforts. It is found that, although asymmetry of the mixed layer thermal structure in the Gulf of Guinea can be attributed to the shallow circulation driven by the local meridional wind, the rapid cooling and the formation of a sharp thermal front at the equator and a local sea surface temperature (SST) minimum just south of the equator are correlated with the shoaling of the thermocline and this in turn is attributed to the remote forcing effect of the zonal wind intensification to the west. These results provide credence for previous conclusions by Servain et al. (1982) that the Gulf of Guinea SST is more strongly correlated with wind stress in the western equatorial Atlantic Ocean.
Paromomycin for the Treatment of Visceral Leishmaniasis in Sudan: A Randomized, Open-Label, Dose-Finding Study

Background A recent study has shown that treatment of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) with the standard dose of 15 mg/kg/day of paromomycin sulphate (PM) for 21 days was not efficacious in patients in Sudan. We therefore decided to test the efficacy of paramomycin for a longer treatment duration (15 mg/kg/day for 28 days) and at the higher dose of 20 mg/kg/day for 21 days. Methods This randomized, open-label, dose-finding, phase II study assessed the two above high-dose PM treatment regimens. Patients with clinical features and positive bone-marrow aspirates for VL were enrolled. All patients received their assigned courses of PM intramuscularly and adverse events were monitored. Parasite clearance in bone-marrow aspirates was tested by microscopy at end of treatment (EOT, primary efficacy endpoint), 3 months (in patients who were not clinically well) and 6 months after EOT (secondary efficacy endpoint). Pharmacokinetic data were obtained from a subset of patients weighing over 30 kg. Findings 42 patients (21 per group) aged between 4 and 60 years were enrolled. At EOT, 85% of patients (95% confidence interval [CI]: 63.7% to 97.0%) in the 20 mg/kg/day group and 90% of patients (95% CI: 69.6% to 98.8%) in the 15 mg/kg/day group had parasite clearance. Six months after treatment, efficacy was 80.0% (95% CI: 56.3% to 94.3%) and 81.0% (95% CI: 58.1% to 94.6%) in the 20 mg/kg/day and 15 mg/kg/day groups, respectively. There were no serious adverse events. Pharmacokinetic profiles suggested a difference between the two doses, although numbers of patients recruited were too few to make it significant (n = 3 and n = 6 in the 20 mg/kg/day and 15 mg/kg/day groups, respectively). Conclusion Data suggest that both high dose regimens were more efficacious than the standard 15 mg/kg/day PM for 21 days and could be further evaluated in phase III studies in East Africa. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00255567
A comparative study of no-time-counter and majorant collision frequency numerical schemes in DSMC

The direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method is a stochastic approach to solve the Boltzmann equation and is built on various numerical schemes for transport, collision and sampling. This work aims to compare and contrast two popular O(N) DSMC collision schemes - no-time-counter (NTC) and majorant collision frequency (MCF) - with the goal of identifying the fundamental differences. MCF and NTC schemes are used in DSMC simulations of a spatially homogeneous equilibrium gas to study convergence with respect to various collision parameters. While the MCF scheme forces the reproduction of the exponential distribution of time between collisions, the NTC scheme requires larger number of simulators per cell to reproduce this Poisson process. The two collision schemes are also applied to the spatially homogeneous relaxation from an isotropic non-Maxwellian given by the Bobylev exact solution to the Boltzmann equation. While the two schemes produce identical results at large times, the initial relaxation shows some differences during the first few timesteps.
Observed temperature changes in Emilia-Romagna: mean values and extremes

Temporal and spatial variability of temperature in Emilia-Romagna is described using daily maximum and minimum temperature at 40 stations covering the period 1958 to 2000. Before use, data were quality controlled and tested for inhomogeneity using standard techniques. First, a description of climatological values of maximum and minimum temperature and of their temporal variability is given. Then, frequency of extreme events in temperature is described using 4 indices: 10th percentile of minimum temperature, 90th percentile of maximum temperature, number of frost days and heat wave duration. These indices are based on daily temperature and were computed for all seasons. For each season and each index, the magnitude of trends was estimated by linear regres- sion, while statistical significance was evaluated by Kendall's τ. The analysis reveals the presence of an increase in mean maximum and minimum temperature, especially during winter and summer. Trends were significant in the plain and hill area. Similar tendencies were also observed in the 10th percentile of daily minimum temperature in both seasons, accompanied by a reduction in the num- ber of frost days during winter. Positive trends were detected in the 90th percentile of daily maximum temperature during winter, spring and summer, leading to an increase in the heat wave duration index. These results were significant over almost the whole region, summer being the season charac- terised by the greatest number of stations with significant trends. The spatial variability of frequency of extreme events was analysed using cluster techniques. Finally, the relationship between winter frequency of extreme temperature events in Emilia-Romagna and large-scale Euro-Atlantic circula- tion patterns is briefly described. The results show the presence of significant values of correlation with some of the patterns considered, namely the Eastern Atlantic and European Blocking pattern.
A maximum likelihood equalization technique for robust speech recognition in adverse environments

In this paper, we study the problem of robust speech recognition in adverse environments. We focus our attention to the following two types of distortions: 1) the additive noise distortion, 2) the channel mismatch distortion. The maximum likelihood (ML) equalization technique is used to compensate for these distortions. Performance of the ML technique is compared with the following channel equalization techniques: the global mean subtraction (GMS) technique, the local mean subtraction (LMS) technique, the finite impulse response (FIR) highpass filtering technique, the infinite impulse response (IIR) highpass filtering technique, the RASTA (bandpass) filtering technique, and the masking-based filtering technique. These techniques have been recently proposed in the literature and are computationally much simpler than the ML equalization technique. It is shown that the ML equalization technique does not offer any significant advantage over the other channel equalization techniques in terms of recognition performance.
Kinetic Separation Lists for Continuous Collision Detection of Deformable Objects

We present a new acceleration scheme for continuous collision detection of objects under arbitrary deformations. Both pairwise and self collision detection are presented. This scheme is facilitated by a new acceleration data structure, the kinetic separation list. The event-based approach of our kinetic separation list enables us to transform the continuous problem into a discrete one. Thus, the number of updates of the bounding volume hierarchies as well as the number of bounding volume checks can be reduced significantly. We performed a comparison of our kinetic approaches with the classical swept volume algorithm. The results show that our algorithm performs up to fifty times faster in practically relevant scenarios.
Rac Mediates Cytoskeletal Rearrangements and Increased Cell Motility Induced by Urokinase-Type Plasminogen Activator Receptor Binding to Vitronectin

The urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) is involved in the regulation of cell motility in a variety of cell types. We show here that expression of human uPAR in growing murine fibroblasts leads to a dramatic reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton. uPAR expression induces multiple rapidly advancing protrusions that resemble the leading edge of migrating cells. The cytoskeletal changes are independent of uPA and activation of the RGD-binding activity of integrins but require uPAR binding to vitronectin (VN). The actin reorganization is blocked by coexpression of dominant negative versions of either Rac (N17Rac) or p130Cas, but not by inhibitors of Cdc42 or Rho, and is accompanied by a Rac-dependent increase in cell motility. In addition, a fourfold increase in the level of activated Rac is induced by uPAR expression. We conclude that uPAR interacts with VN both to initiate a p130Cas/Rac-dependent signaling pathway leading to actin reorganization and increased cell motility and to act as an adhesion receptor required for these responses. This mechanism may play a role in uPAR-mediated regulation of cell motility at sites where VN and uPAR are co-expressed, such as malignant tumors.
An improved derivation of the top‐of‐atmosphere albedo from POLDER/ADEOS‐2: Narrowband albedos

[1] The narrowband albedos derived from Polarization and Directionality of Earth Reflectances (POLDER) measurements have been described in a companion paper (Buriez et al., 2005). Here, they are used to estimate the broadband shortwave albedo. Except for the gaseous absorption, the albedos at 443 and 670 nm are considered as representative of the UV-visible range, and the albedo at 865 nm is considered as representative of the near infrared. The gaseous absorption is estimated from TOMS data and from the POLDER 910- to 865-nm reflectance ratio. In a previous approach, the respective weights of the three narrowband albedos were based on radiative transfer simulations. Now, we take advantage of spatiotemporal coincidences between the second Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS-2) and Terra to adjust these weights from the comparison between POLDER narrowband and CERES broadband reflectances. With no adjustment, the POLDER albedos are underestimated by 2% (in relative value) whereas the associated reflectances are underestimated by 4%. With an adjustment to the CERES reflectances, the POLDER shortwave albedos are overestimated by 2%. With or without adjustment the RMS difference between the POLDER and the CERES 1°-regional instantaneous shortwave albedos is 6%; this is quite satisfactory since it is comparable to the CERES SW albedo consistency between nadir and oblique viewing zenith angles. When considering only homogeneous areas, the agreement between POLDER and CERES estimates was rather less good in the previous approach; it is now more than twice better. The difference between POLDER and CERES shortwave albedo estimates appears, for a large part, due to our plane-parallel assumption that is crucial for the heterogeneous liquid water clouds. It results in a bias in monthly mean shortwave flux around 2 W m−2 that is found to present only small variations in latitude.
Temporal difference learning with eligibility traces for the game connect four

Systems that learn to play board games are often trained by self-play on the basis of temporal difference (TD) learning. Successful examples include Tesauro's well known TD-Gammon and Lucas' Othello agent. For other board games of moderate complexity like Connect Four, we found in previous work that a successful system requires a very rich initial feature set with more than half a million of weights and several millions of training games. In this work we study the benefits of eligibility traces added to this system. To the best of our knowledge, eligibility traces have not been used before for such a large system. Different versions of eligibility traces (standard, resetting, and replacing traces) are compared. We show that eligibility traces speed up the learning by a factor of two and that they increase the asymptotic playing strength.
Identification and characterization of avian hepatitis E virus in 2013 outbreaks of hepatitis-splenomegaly syndrome in two US layer operations

Two commercial Midwestern egg-type chicken flocks experienced significant increases in mortality rates in April 2013 with clinical signs appearing in 17-week-old pullets on Farm A and in 46-week-old hens on Farm B. Average weekly mortality was 0.44% over a 4-week period on Farm A and 0.17% over an 8-week period on Farm B. On Farm A, flocks in the affected house had a 45% decrease in daily egg production from weeks 19 to 27 when compared with standard egg production curves (P < 0.01) while no decrease in egg production was noticed on Farm B. Post-mortem examination revealed changes consistent with hepatitis-splenomegaly syndrome, including hepatomegaly with serosanguineous fluid in the coelomic cavity and hepatic subcapsular haemorrhages. Microscopic lesions were characterized by multifocal necrotizing hepatitis and intrahepatic haemorrhage. No significant bacteria were recovered from liver samples, but 72 to 100% of the liver samples from affected chickens on Farm A (8/11) and Farm B (7/7) contained detectable amounts of avian hepatitis E virus (aHEV) RNA as determined by polymerase chain reaction. Sequencing and phylogenetic analysis of a 361-base-pair fragment of the helicase gene demonstrated 98.6 to 100% nucleotide identity between the aHEV genomes from Farm A and Farm B, whereas identities ranged from 74.6 to 90.5% when compared with other representative sequences. Sequences from this study clustered within aHEV genotype 2 previously recognized in the USA. In contrast to other reported aHEV outbreaks that occurred in 30-week-old to 80-week-old chickens, in the present investigation clinical aHEV was identified in 17-week-old chickens on one of the farms.
DINSAR experiments using a free processing chain

Nowadays, several free or commercial tools for INSAR, DINSAR and even PS INSAR exist. A brief inventory of current suites is drawn and shows their main capabilities. The objective of this work is the handling and the validation of our use of DORIS, a free processing suite. For this purpose, the organization of the processing is studied and compared to another one (SARSCAPE, a commercial software). It appears that both chains contain identical or similar steps but, some stages are missing or are replaced by a different one. Experiments are then held with DORIS and SARSCAPE using the same data set: two ASAR images covering the 2003 Bam (Iran) earthquake and a SRTM3 DEM. Using DORIS and SARSCAPE, it leads to comparable results, which allows validating our use of DORIS (and also SARSCAPE). However, linear and non linear residual differences occur. In the same way, dissimilarities are observed with other published results. These dispecrancies are interpreted as resulting from residual geometric inaccuracies. One solution to reduce these artefacts is a simple surface compensation but the orbital parameters are then not corrected. Finally, this work may give some help for a better understanding of any DINSAR processing chain.
Opportunistic Channel Estimation for Implicit 802.11af MU-MIMO

Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) linear channel coding can greatly increase wireless system capacity when Stations (STAs) have fewer antennas than the Access Point (AP), but it comes at the cost of significant Channel State Information (CSI) estimation overhead. Previous work has suggested that 802.11af MU-MIMO systems might benefit from long channel coherence time, extending the useful duration of CSI. In this paper, we propose and analyze an opportunistic channel sounding policy that avoids sounding overhead in wireless channels by gathering implicit CSI opportunistically. This policy not only avoids CSI overhead, but also has the potential to enable efficient interoperability of multi-user APs with legacy single-stream STAs. To investigate the performance of this new policy, we implement a new mobile channel sounding framework on a custom 802.11af Software-Defined Radio (SDR) system designed for UHF-band experimentation and evaluate channel sounding performance in indoor and outdoor environments under various mobility modes. Additional protocol analysis shows that in UHF channels with sufficient channel coherence time, an opportunistic channel sounding policy offers significant protocol optimization while improving the scalability of next-generation MU-MIMO systems.
Parallel Numerical Simulation of Visual Neurons for Analysis of Optical Illusion

Detailed mechanism of optical illusion caused by visual neurons in human brain has not been well understood, and its numerical simulation is helpful to analyze visual system of humans. This paper describes implementation techniques of parallel numerical simulation to help understanding optical illusion by using a GPU-accelerated PC cluster. Our parallel acceleration techniques include following three points. Firstly, input images of the numerical simulation is efficiently calculated by dividing it images for multiple computation nodes using MPI (Message Passing Interface). Secondly, convolution, which is dominated computation for the optical flow, is accelerated by GPU. Finally, an algorithm to compute convolution specified to analyze optical illusion is proposed to speed up the simulation. Our experimental results show an interesting insight that values of optical flow for images causing optical illusion are quite different compared to that does not cause the optical illusion. We also demonstrate that our implementation of simulation works efficiently on the GPU-accelerated PC cluster.
Using Redundancy Reduction in Summarization to Improve Text Classification by SVMs

In this paper, we investigate the use of summarization technique to improve text classification. As summarization inherently assign more weights to the more important sentences in an article, this may improve the accuracy of classification of the article. Redundancy in summaries was reduced to different levels and its effect on classification performance was investigated. The classification algorithm used here was Support Vector Machines (SVMs) which has proven to be very effective and robust for text classification problem. Experimental results showed that summaries with lowest redundancy could improve the classification performance of Reuters corpus with more than 6% increase on average F1 measure. In order to explain why summarization can improve the performance while feature selection makes no sense for SVMs, a further experiment was conducted to demonstrate the difference between summarization and traditional feature selection techniques.