Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intelligent stabilization control to an arbitrary equilibrium point of double pendulum

This study aims at establishing a robust and an effective intelligent control method for nonlinear and complicated systems. In the method, an integrator neural network acquires suitable switching and integration of several controllers for a different local purpose by calculating the fitness function based on the system objective using the genetic algorithm. The proposed method is applied to an equilibrium point transfer and stabilization control of a double pendulum that possesses four equilibrium points. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, computational simulations and experiments using a real apparatus were carried out. As a result, it was demonstrated that the integrated intelligent controllers could transfer and stabilize the double pendulum from an arbitrary equilibrium point to a desired unstable equilibrium point without touching the cart position limit.
[Determination of flavonoids in buds of Herba Artemisiae Scopariae by HPLC].

OBJECTIVE To develop a quantitative method for the determination of four flavonoids in buds of Herba Artemisiae Scopariae. METHOD The sample was extracted by ultrasonic with ethyl acetate for 30 minutes and separated on kromasil ODS column with mobile phase of acetonitrile-tetrahydrofuran-1% acetic acid solution (2.5:21.5:76) and detection wavelength was 347 nm. RESULT The arcapillin, cirsiliol, cirsimaritin and cirsilineol in bud extract were well separated by this method. Linearities of arcapillin, cirsiliol, cirsimaritin and cirsilineol were good (r = 0.9992, 0.9999, 0.9997, 0.9997) in ranges of 0.035-0.56, 0.043-0.69, 0.040-0.64 and 0.040-0.64 microg, respectively. The average recoveries were 96.8%, 97.3%, 96.8%, 98.5% and RSD the values of repeatability were 2.5%, 3.0%, 1.5%, 3.2%, respectively. CONCLUSION The method validation data indicated that the method is reliable and it can be used for quality control of Herba Artemisiae Scopariae and its preparations.
Overcoming Data Challenges Examining Oral Health Disparities in Appalachia

Objective The objective of our study of oral health disparities in Appalachia was to use existing data sources to geographically analyze suspected disparities in oral health status in the 420 counties of Appalachia, and to make sub-state comparisons within Appalachia and to the rest of the nation. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the methods used to overcome challenges associated with using limited oral health data to make inferences about oral health status. Methods: Oral health data were obtained from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Because the BRFSS was designed for state-level analysis, there were inadequate numbers of responses to study Appalachia by county. We set out to determine the smallest possible unit we could use, aggregating data to satisfy CDC minimum requirements for spatially identified responses. For sub-state comparisons, data were first aggregated to Appalachian and non-Appalachian regions within Appalachian states. Next, urban versus rural areas within Appalachian and non-Appalachian regions were examined. Beale codes were used to define metropolitan and non-metropolitan statistical regions for the United States. Results: Aggregating the data as described proved useful for smoothing the data used to analyze oral health disparities, while still revealing important sub-state differences. Using geographic information systems to map data throughout the process was very useful for determining an effective approach for our analysis. Discussion: Studying oral health disparities on a regional or national level is difficult given a lack of appropriate data. The BRFSS can be adapted for this purpose; however, there is a limited number of oral health questions and because they are also optional, they are not routinely asked by all states. Expanding the BRFSS to include a larger sampling frame would be very helpful for studying oral health disparities. Conclusions: Novel techniques were introduced to use BRFSS data to study oral health disparities in Appalachia, which provided informative sub-state results, useful to health planners for targeting intervention strategies.
Performers' emotions in expressive performance : sound, movement, and perception

Van Zijl, Anemone G. W. Performers’ Emotions in Expressive Performance: Sound, Movement, and Perception Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2014, 67 p. (Jyvaskyla Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4323; 222) ISBN 978-951-39-5565-6 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-5566-3 (PDF) Performing musicians face the question of how to best achieve an expressive performance. Should they, for instance, feel the emotions present in the music, or should they rather rely on the use of appropriate technical means, such as tempo, dynamics, articulation, and timbre? Moreover, does their focus have an effect on the characteristics and perception of their performances? The research compiled in this thesis investigates the role of performers’ experienced emotions in practice and performance, as well as the effect of performers’ focus on the sound, movement, and perception of their performances. To this end, five studies were conducted encompassing a range of research methods. Study I revealed that performers’ emotions involved in the practice process consist of both perceived and felt emotions, the latter further subdivided into music-related and practice-related emotions. Importantly, the prevalence of performers’ experienced emotions was found to change over the duration of the practice process. Studies II and III revealed that a focus on technique, expressivity, or felt emotions results in different movement and auditory performance characteristics. Study IV revealed that audience members preferred expressive performances to technical and emotional ones, but rated emotional performances as being most expressive of the intended emotion. Study V revealed that performers’ emotions involved in the performance process consist of both performance-related and music-related emotions, the latter detailing a complex relationship between the performer and the music. Expressive and emotional playing were conceptualised differently. On stage, performers aimed for expressive playing rather than for emotional playing. These findings indicate that performers’ experienced emotions play a role in the practice and performance process of an expressive performance. In addition, they reveal that a performer’s focus has a significant effect on both performance characteristics and audience perception. The research compiled in this thesis supports the validity of distinguishing between emotional and expressive playing, and is valuable for both research and artistic practice and pedagogy.
Approximate Map Matching with respect to the Fréchet Distance

We extend recent results using curve simplification for approximating the Frechet distance of realistic curves in near linear time to map matching: the problem of matching a curve in an embedded graph. We show that the theoretical bounds on the running time of the previous result still hold if only one of the curves is simplified during the course of the approximation algorithm. This enables our extension to the case of map matching under the assumption that the graph is p-low density for a constant p. We present experimental evidence for this assumption and implement the extended approximate matching algorithm. We show that it performs well on real world data, such as GPS traces and road networks of urban areas. In particular, it is able to perform matching tasks that took several hours with the exact matching algorithm in under a second.
Mixture of Poses for human behavior understanding

In this study, a global shape descriptor that we call Mixture of Poses (MoP) is proposed to solve human behavior understanding problem. Firstly, the Shape Context Descriptor (SCD) is obtained for each frame. SCD is a low level feature representing a single pose, that is the shape at a single frame. PCA is used for data reduction while obtaining SCDs. The collection of SCDs obtained in a video of a single action are clustered by a version of k-medoids algorithm. Center Poses, which are cluster medoids, are used in turn to initialize the mixture of Gaussians to be trained by expectation maximization algorithm. MoPs are these mixtures of Gaussians representing the distribution of SCDs. Number of mixtures in MoGs are found automatically by the system, since more clusters are emerged by itself for more complex actions undergoing with more different poses. Experiments are conducted on Weizmann dataset and quite encouraging results are obtained.
Comparison of iPad applications with traditional activities using person-centred care approach: Impact on well-being for persons with dementia

Professionals working with people with dementia need to develop new activities that occupy patients and increase positive emotions. Dementia care mapping is a reliable method of measuring well-being during activities with people with dementia. The iPad has many applications that may be suitable as a group activity for persons with dementia. Six people with dementia took part in two traditional and two iPad activities over two days. Well-being was recorded using dementia care mapping. Subjects displayed similar or better levels of well-being during iPad activities than traditional activities. A larger variation of behaviors was seen during iPad activities than traditional activities. With detailed planning using a person-centred care approach, iPad group activity has the potential to be as effective and engaging as other conventional activities in achieving well-being.
Development of Mastery during Adolescence: The Role of Family Problem-solving∗

A sense of mastery is an important component of psychological health and well-being across the life-span; however, relatively little is known about the development of mastery during childhood and adolescence. Utilizing prospective, longitudinal data from 444 adolescent sibling pairs and their parents, our conceptual model proposes that family socioeconomic status (SES) in the form of parental education promotes effective family problem-solving, which, in turn, fosters adolescent mastery. Results show: (1) a significant increase in mastery for younger and older siblings, (2) parental education promoted effective problem-solving between parents and adolescents and between siblings but not between the parents themselves, and (3) all forms of effective family problem-solving predicted greater adolescent mastery. Parental education had a direct effect on adolescent mastery as well as the hypothesized indirect effect through problem-solving effectiveness, suggesting both a social structural and social process influence on the development of mastery during adolescence.
What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness

How, why, and when consciousness evolved remain hotly debated topics. Addressing these issues requires considering the distribution of consciousness across the animal phylogenetic tree. Here we propose that at least one invertebrate clade, the insects, has a capacity for the most basic aspect of consciousness: subjective experience. In vertebrates the capacity for subjective experience is supported by integrated structures in the midbrain that create a neural simulation of the state of the mobile animal in space. This integrated and egocentric representation of the world from the animal’s perspective is sufficient for subjective experience. Structures in the insect brain perform analogous functions. Therefore, we argue the insect brain also supports a capacity for subjective experience. In both vertebrates and insects this form of behavioral control system evolved as an efficient solution to basic problems of sensory reafference and true navigation. The brain structures that support subjective experience in vertebrates and insects are very different from each other, but in both cases they are basal to each clade. Hence we propose the origins of subjective experience can be traced to the Cambrian.
Safety Auxiliary Feedback Element for the Artificial Pancreas in Type 1 Diabetes

The artificial pancreas aims at the automatic delivery of insulin for glycemic control in patients with type 1 diabetes, i.e., closed-loop glucose control. One of the challenges of the artificial pancreas is to avoid controller overreaction leading to hypoglycemia, especially in the late postprandial period. In this study, an original proposal based on sliding mode reference conditioning ideas is presented as a way to reduce hypoglycemia events induced by a closed-loop glucose controller. The method is inspired in the intuitive advantages of two-step constrained control algorithms. It acts on the glucose reference sent to the main controller shaping it so as to avoid violating given constraints on the insulin-on-board. Some distinctive features of the proposed strategy are that 1) it provides a safety layer which can be adjusted according to medical criteria; 2) it can be added to closed-loop controllers of any nature; 3) it is robust against sensor failures and overestimated prandial insulin doses; and 4) it can handle nonlinear models. The method is evaluated in silico with the ten adult patients available in the FDA-accepted UVA simulator.
Interactions between the neural networks for escape and swimming in goldfish

Interactions between neural networks for different motor behaviors occur frequently in nature; however, there are few vertebrate models for studying these interactions. One potentially useful model involves the interactions between escape and swimming behaviors in fish. Fish can produce escape bends while swimming, using some of the same axial muscles for both behaviors. Here we study the interactions between escape and swimming in a paralyzed goldfish preparation in which we can activate the networks for both behaviors. Fictive swimming was elicited by electrical stimulation in the midbrain locomotor region. During the swimming, we fired a single action potential in the reticulospinal Mauthner (M) cell, which initiates the escape behavior (Zottoli, 1977). Firing the M cell overrode the swimming motor output to produce an output appropriate for escape regardless of the phase of swimming at which it was fired. The M cell also could reset the swimming rhythm dramatically in a way that led to a smooth transition from an escape bend to one side into subsequent swimming. Both the override and reset supported predictions based on previous studies of the organization of the M-cell network. They apparently allow for a well coordinated motor output when a fish must produce an escape while swimming. The potent effects of one action potential in a single, identifiable reticulospinal neuron make this an attractive model system for future studies of the cellular basis of interactions between descending pathways and spinal rhythm-generating networks.
Comprar Neutrophil Methods and Protocols | Quinn, Mark T. | 9781588297884 | Springer

Tienda online donde Comprar Neutrophil Methods and Protocols al precio 120,39 € de Quinn, Mark T. | DeLeo, Frank R. | Bokoch, Gary M. , tienda de Libros de Medicina, Libros de Medicina Familiar y Comunitaria/General - Medicina general
Noninvasive blood glucose monitoring with optical coherence tomography: a pilot study in human subjects.

OBJECTIVE To study the feasibility of noninvasive blood glucose monitoring using optical coherence tomography (OCT) technique in healthy volunteers. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS An OCT system with the wavelength of 1,300 nm was used in 15 healthy subjects in 18 clinical experiments. Standard oral glucose tolerance tests were performed to induce changes in blood glucose concentration. Blood samples were taken from the right arm vein every 5 or 15 min. OCT images were taken every 10-20 s from the left forearm over a total period of 3 h. The slope of the signals was calculated at the depth of 200-600 micro m from the skin surface. RESULTS A total of 426 blood samples and 8,437 OCT images and signals were collected and analyzed in these experiments. There was a good correlation between changes in the slope of noninvasively measured OCT signals and blood glucose concentrations throughout the duration of the experiments. The slope of OCT signals changed significantly (up to 2.8% per 10 mg/dl) with variation of plasma glucose values. The good correlation obtained between the OCT signal slope and blood glucose concentration is due to the coherent detection of backscattered photons, which allows measurements of OCT signal from a specific tissue layer without unwanted signal from other tissue layers. CONCLUSIONS This pilot study demonstrated the capability of the OCT technique to monitor blood glucose concentration noninvasively in human subjects. Further studies with a larger number of subjects including diabetic subjects are planned to validate these preliminary results.
Mouse Behavior Recognition with The Wisdom of

In this thesis, we designed and implemented a crowdsourcing system to annotate mouse behaviors in videos; this involves the development of a novel clip-based video labeling tools, that is more efficient than traditional labeling tools in crowdsourcing platform, as well as the design of probabilistic inference algorithms that predict the true labels and the workers’ expertise from multiple workers’ responses. Our algorithms are shown to perform better than majority vote heuristic. We also carried out extensive experiments to determine the effectiveness of our labeling tool, inference algorithms and the overall system. Thesis Supervisor: Tomaso Poggio Title: Professor
UNBNLP at SemEval-2016 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity: A Unified Framework for Semantic Processing and Evaluation

In this paper we consider several approaches to predicting semantic textual similarity us-ing word embeddings, as well as methods for forming embeddings for larger units of text. We compare these methods to several base-lines, and ﬁnd that none of them outperform the baselines. We then consider both a supervised and unsupervised approach to combining these methods which achieve modest improvements over the baselines.
A unified approach for unconstrained off-angle iris recognition

Improving the performance of non-idealistic iris recognition has recently become one of the main focus in iris biometric research. In real-world iris image acquisitions, it is common and unavoidable to capture off-angle iris images. Such off-angle iris images are categorized as non-idealistic because they substantially degrade the performance of iris recognition. In this paper, we present a unified framework designed to improve off-angle iris recognition performance. We propose combination of least square ellipse fitting (LSEF) technique and the geometric calibration (GC) technique for the iris segmentation. For off-angle images, the improper location of iris and pupil interferes with the ability to effectively segment the inner boundary and outer boundary of the iris image. With the proposed techniques, inner and outer boundaries are fitted iteratively. For feature extraction, we propose a NeuWave Network (inspired by the Haar wavelet decomposition and neural network). The iris features are represented using the wavelet coefficients. Each different angle of the iris have its own significant coefficient and these coefficient, with a set of weights, then forms the iris template. The approach is evaluated based on recognition accuracy measured by the false rejection, false acceptance rate, and decidability index. We evaluate the algorithms with WVU-IBIDC datasets.
Untangling critical thinking in educational cyberspace

This study was methodologically situated within two cycles of insider action research and informed by the blending of the philosophical underpinnings of the interpretive and the praxis paradigms. It was conducted by one nurse-educator-researcher exploring the perspectives of eleven undergraduate student nurses, who engaged with Nursing Journeys: Virtual Reflective Centre, a researcher-developed virtual, simulation instrument designed to promote critical thinking, while enrolled in a first-year nursing course in a college in British Columbia over a 12-week semester. The study participants kept a reflective journal for the duration of the study and interviews were conducted at the end of the semester. While interviews and journal excerpts were the primary sources of data, participant-observation, field notes and online dialogue transcripts were also used as data collection techniques. The analytic strategy chosen for this study was grounded theory. This study also traced a self-reflective journey of practice as research in an attempt to develop a greater understanding of the teaching and learning process in educational cyberspace. The findings of the study suggested that participants were able to articulate their definition of critical thinking and use this definition to work through the case narratives while role-playing the various virtual characters. The study participants were also able to recognize that they were only beginning to understand critical thinking and that it was not necessarily learned and actualized in a linear, individual fashion. The findings of the study also suggested the facilitation of critical thinking was contingent on a pattern of a way of knowing: Cyber-textual Mediated Knowing and several other factors: time, trust, facilitation, reflection, purposeful decision making in design. Although NJVRC may have properties that have the potential to promote critical thinking, its cognitive dimension was significantly more developed than the affective dispositions of critical thinking. Finally, this study illustrated that the insider action research was a fitting methodology as it offered a systematic approach for educators to unravel the connections made between pedagogy, research and change. Its applicability as an appropriate methodology also served to support the emerging trend of moving nursing research toward an evidence-based model as the basis for advancing educational practices in nursing education.
Overview of the Entity Relations (REL) supporting task of BioNLP Shared Task 2011

This paper presents the Entity Relations (REL) task, a supporting task of the BioNLP Shared Task 2011. The task concerns the extraction of two types of part-of relations between a gene/protein and an associated entity. Four teams submitted final results for the REL task, with the highest-performing system achieving 57.7% F-score. While experiments suggest use of the data can help improve event extraction performance, the task data has so far received only limited use in support of event extraction. The REL task continues as an open challenge, with all resources available from the shared task website.
Fragile watermarking of three-dimensional objects

There have been many works on watermarking of 2D images and video. However, watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects has received little attentions. We introduce and investigate the watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects as compared to 2D images, study the watermarking of objects represented by polygonal models, and propose a new fragile watermarking technique that enables the verification of 3D polygonal models for detecting unauthorized alterations. Our proposed technique consists of a watermark encoding process which embeds a sequence of data bits by perturbing coordinates of the vertices in a 3D model, and a watermark decoding process which extracts bit information from 3D geometry, using secure verification keys. Fast 2D visualization of unauthorized modification to 3D objects is also proposed.