Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Value and Wastes in Manufacturing. An Overview and a New Perspective Based on Eco-Efficiency

In the last century, the evolution of manufacturing was characterized by several innovations, concerning technologies, processes, but also entire production systems, with radical changes in strategies, product design, and management of organizations. Cost, time, and quality are the pillars on which was based the industrial competitiveness during that era. In the most recent years, a renewed interest in environmental issues and socio-ethical values has gradually promoted the transition towards the so-called low impact economies . Producers are then required to pursue a more rational and eco-efficient use of resources and reduce production wastes to survive; also the concept of value chain has been often associated with the terms environmental/green or sustainable. Various studies have been carried out to encourage companies in including the environment in their strategic and operational decisions making. Industrial Ecology (IE) represents the latest and most ambitious attempt to reach this goal; however, a great deal of work remains to be done to achieve this goal. As a result, enhancing companies to integrate efficiency and sustainable practices still has a long way to go. This study presents an overview on the evolutionary dynamics of manufacturing in the industrial age, and offers a discussion about the potential synergies in integrating IE approaches and tools in Lean Manufacturing, by introducing the environmental load as a further type of Muda ; the systematic actions to reduce this waste can build up the basis for improving competitiveness through the eco-efficiency.
Analytics‐as‐a‐service in a multi‐cloud environment through semantically‐enabled hierarchical data processing

A large number of cloud middleware platforms and tools are deployed to support a variety of internet‐of‐things (IoT) data analytics tasks. It is a common practice that such cloud platforms are only used by its owners to achieve their primary and predefined objectives, where raw and processed data are only consumed by them. However, allowing third parties to access processed data to achieve their own objectives significantly increases integration and cooperation and can also lead to innovative use of the data. Multi‐cloud, privacy‐aware environments facilitate such data access, allowing different parties to share processed data to reduce computation resource consumption collectively. However, there are interoperability issues in such environments that involve heterogeneous data and analytics‐as‐a‐service providers. There is a lack of both architectural blueprints that can support such diverse, multi‐cloud environments and corresponding empirical studies that show feasibility of such architectures. In this paper, we have outlined an innovative hierarchical data‐processing architecture that utilises semantics at all the levels of IoT stack in multi‐cloud environments. We demonstrate the feasibility of such architecture by building a system based on this architecture using OpenIoT as a middleware, and Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure as cloud environments. The evaluation shows that the system is scalable and has no significant limitations or overheads. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Teaching Retirement Financial Literacy in an Undergraduate Gerontology Classroom: Broadening the Concept of the Tripod or Three-Legged Stool of Retirement Income Utilizing Active Learning

The three-legged stool concept is widely used in gerontological and geriatric education as an explanation on how one should fiscally approach his or her retirement. Financial managers, planners, retirees, business owners, even the Social Security Administration uses this metaphor of fiscal soundness in retirement planning. Gerontologists are moving away from the “tripod of retirement income” and “three-legged stool” term, as more often market work is needed for financial security. This activity focuses on the tripod or three-legged stool concepts of retirement planning using active learning, allowing the students to work collaboratively in a group, reflect upon the activity, and most importantly have fun. The game also allows for an expansion of the tripod concepts into the four pillars of economic security, broaching the use of personal assets and the possible need for longer employment. Game scenarios also emphasize macro- and microlevel forces, such as race, gender, health status, education, or marital status, which can influence timing of retirement or the level of retirement income available. The authors include instructions on how to set up the learning experience including worksheets, as well as reflection questions posed throughout the process.
Self-healing BPEL processes with Dynamo and the JBoss rule engine

Many emerging domains such as ambient intelligence, context-aware applications, and pervasive computing are embracing the assumption that their software applications will be deployed in an open-world. By adopting the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, and in particular its Web service based implementation, they are capable of leveraging components that are remote and not under their jurisdication, i.e. services. However, the distributed nature of these systems, the presence of many stakeholders, and the fact that no one has a complete knowledge of the system preclude classic static verification techniques. The capability to "self-heal" has become paramount. In this paper we present our solution to self-healing BPEL compositions called Dynamo. It is an assertion-based solution, that provides special purpose languages (WSCoL and WSReL) for defining monitoring and recovery activities. These are executed using Dynamo, which consists of an AOP-extended version of the ActiveBPEL orchestration engine, and which leverages the JBoss Rule Engine to ensure self-healing capabilities. The approach is exemplified on a complex case study.
Locality discriminative coding for image classification

The Bag-of-Words (BOW) based methods are widely used in image classification. However, huge number of visual information is omitted inevitably in the quantization step of the BOW. Recently, NBNN and its improved methods like Local NBNN were proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, these methods do not perform better than the state-of-the-art BOW based methods. In this paper, based on the advantages of BOW and Local NBNN, we introduce a novel locality discriminative coding (LDC) method. We convert each low level local feature, such as SIFT, into code vector using the Local Feature-to-Class distance other than by k-means quantization. Extensive experimental results on 4 challenging benchmark datasets show that our LDC method outperforms 6 state-of-the-art image classification methods (3 based on NBNN, 3 based on BOW).
Perspectives in Psychological Experimentation: Toward the Year 2000

Some people may be laughing when looking at you reading in your spare time. Some may be admired of you. And some may want be like you who have reading hobby. What about your own feel? Have you felt right? Reading is a need and a hobby at once. This condition is the on that will make you feel that you must read. If you know are looking for the book enPDFd perspectives in psychological experimentation toward the year 2000 as the choice of reading, you can find here.
Effect of Calibration Error on Reconstruction Accuracy of Stereovision System

This paper investigates the relation between the calibration error and reconstruction accuracy of stereovision system through simulation experiment. According to the model of a typical non-parallel stereovision system, an array of points in the common view field of the two cameras is projected onto the image plane of the left and right camera respec- tively, forming the left image and right image. After changing the calibration parameter slightly around its ground truth, the array of points is reconstructed. By comparing the reconstruction result of the points in the array with their original position, the major factors affecting reconstruction accuracy are summarized, which include the abscissa of the principal point, the component of the rotation vector along the ordinate axis, the first order radial distortion coefficient, the compo- nent of the translation vector along the abscissa axis, and the abscissa of the principal length. Especially, the abscissa of the principal point and the component of the rotation vector along the ordinate axis have prominent effect on reconstruc- tion accuracy. In the process of calibration, the error of the major factors must be controlled strictly, so that the accuracy requirement of the stereovision system can be satisfied.
Late Potentials of the Auditory System

CONTENTSForeword by Laszlo K. Stein, Ph.D. Preface. Historical Development of Auditory Evoked Potentials. Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potentials. The Neurophysiological Basis of Auditory Evoked Potentials. Acquisition of the Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potentials. Clinical Application of the Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potentials. Neuropathological Findings of the Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potentials. Glossary. References. Index.
Subjective Measurement of Mental Workload.

Abstract : Although there is widespread agreement that an important component of mental workload is the subjective judgement of how difficult the task seems, and how loaded the human operator feels, there have been rather few attempts to measure subjective load directly. This paper reviews those attempts and discusses what variables in the task seem to be responsible for the ratings given by the operator. Some suggestions for future research are given. (Author)
The Toxoplasma gondii kinetochore is required for centrosome association with the centrocone (spindle pole)

The kinetochore is a multi‐protein structure assembled on eukaryotic centromeres mediating chromosome attachment to spindle microtubules. Here we identified the kinetochore proteins Nuf2 and Ndc80 in the apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Localization revealed that kinetochores remain clustered throughout the cell cycle and colocalize with clustered centromeres at the centrocone, a structure containing the spindle pole embedded in the nuclear envelope. Pharmacological disruption of microtubules resulted in partial loss of some kinetochore and centromere clustering, indicating microtubules are necessary but not strictly required for kinetochore clustering. Generation of a TgNuf2 conditional knock‐down strain revealed it is essential for chromosome segregation, but dispensable for centromere clustering. The centromeres actually remained associated with the centrocone suggesting microtubule binding is not required for their interaction with the spindle pole. The most striking observation upon TgNuf2 depletion was that the centrosome behaved normally, but that it lost its association with the centrocone. This suggests that microtubules are essential to maintain contact between the centrosome and chromosomes, and this interaction is critical for the partitioning of the nuclei into the two daughter parasites. Finally, genetic complementation experiments with mutated TgNuf2 constructs highlighted an apicomplexan‐specific motif with a putative role in nuclear localization.
Effect of Dietary Taurine on Fecal Bile Salt Excretion in Rats and Hamsters Fed Cholestyramine

Summary When fed with 2 or 4% cholestyramine, 0.5 and 1.0% dietary taurine increased fecal bile salt excretion by 44 to 56% in rats and by as much as 80% in hamsters. Taurine also increased bile salt excretion 30-44% in rats fed 0.07-1.68% cholestyramine. Dietary taurine increased the percentage of gallbladder bile salts conjugated with taurine in hamsters fed cholestyramine. These findings are consistent with in vitro findings that cholestyramine has a greater affinity for taurine-conjugated bile salts than for the corresponding glycine conjugates, and may provide a feasible means of improving the in vivo efficiency of the resin.
Adaptive Tabu Search for Traveling Salesman Problems

One of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics and combinatorial optimization is the traveling salesman problem (TSP). The TSP is classified and considered as the class of the NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems. By literatures, many algorithms and approaches have been launched to solve such the TSP. However, no current algorithms can provide the exactly optimal solution of the TSP problem. This article proposes the application of adaptive tabu search (ATS), one of the most powerful AI search techniques, to solve the TSP problems. The ATS is tested against ten benchmark real-world TSP problems. Results obtained by the ATS will be compared with those obtained by the genetic algorithms (GA) and the tabu search (TS). As results, the ATS, TS, and GA can provide very satisfactory solutions for all TSP problems. Among them, the ATS outperforms other algorithms. Keywords—Adaptive tabu search, genetic algorithm, tabu search, traveling salesman problem.
Cloud-Based Mobile Multimedia Recommendation System With User Behavior Information

Facing massive multimedia services and contents in the Internet, mobile users usually waste a lot of time to obtain their interests. Therefore, various context-aware recommendation systems have been proposed. Most of those proposed systems deploy a large number of context collectors at terminals and access networks. However, the context collecting and exchanging result in heavy network overhead, and the context processing consumes huge computation. In this paper, a cloud-based mobile multimedia recommendation system which can reduce network overhead and speed up the recommendation process is proposed. The users are classified into several groups according to their context types and values. With the accurate classification rules, the context details are not necessary to compute, and the huge network overhead is reduced. Moreover, user contexts, user relationships, and user profiles are collected from video-sharing websites to generate multimedia recommendation rules based on the Hadoop platform. When a new user request arrives, the rules will be extended and optimized to make real-time recommendation. The results show that the proposed approach can recommend desired services with high precision, high recall, and low response delay.
On the distributivity of LTL specifications

In this article, we investigate LTL specifications where γ[ϕ ∧ ψ] is equivalent to γ[ϕ] ∧ γ[ψ] independent of ϕ and ψ. Formulas γ with this property are called <i>distributive queries</i> because they naturally arise in Chan's seminal approach to temporal logic query solving [Chan 2000]. As recognizing distributive LTL queries is PSpace-complete, we consider distributive fragments of LTL defined by templates as in Buccafurri et al. [2001]. Our main result is a syntactic characterization of distributive LTL queries in terms of LTL templates: we construct a context-free template grammar LTLQ<sup><i>x</i></sup> which guarantees that all specifications obtained from LTLQ<sup><i>x</i></sup> are distributive, and all templates not obtained from LTLQ<sup><i>x</i></sup> have simple nondistributive instantiations.
Hb St. Truiden [α68(E17)Asn→His] and Hb Westeinde [α125(H8)Leu→Gln]: Two New Abnormalities of the α2-Globin Gene

We report two new abnormal hemoglobins (Hbs) caused by mutations on the α2 gene. One resulted into an Asn→His substitution at position 68, the other in a Leu→Gln substitution at position 125. The first mutation was observed in a 61-year-old North European Belgian male during Hb A1c analysis and subsequently in other members of his family. The variant was expressed at a normal level and caused no hematological abnormalities in the carriers. The second was found in a 27-year-old Turkish male living in The Hague, The Netherlands, who presented with microcytic hypochromic parameters without iron deficiency and was also carrier of the common α2 IVS-I (–5 nt) deletion.
Validity of bioconjugated silica nanoparticles in comparison with direct smear, culture, and polymerase chain reaction for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in sputum specimens

Background Tuberculosis is a public health problem worldwide, and new easy to perform diagnostic methods with high accuracy are necessary for optimal control of the disease. Recently, fluorescent silica nanoparticles (FSNP) has attracted immense interest for the detection of pathogenic microorganisms. The aim of this study was to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in clinical samples using bioconjugated FSNP compared with microscopic examination, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), nested PCR, and culture as the gold standard. Methods In total, 152 sputum specimens were obtained from patients who were suspected to have pulmonary tuberculosis. All samples were examined by the four techniques described. Results The assay showed 97.1% sensitivity (95% confidence interval [CI] 91–99.2) and 91.35% specificity (CI 78.3–97.1). Furthermore, assays using variable bacterial concentrations indicated that 100 colony forming units/mL of M. tuberculosis could be detected. There were no differences between the results obtained from two types of mouse monoclonal antibody against Hsp-65 and 16 KDa antigens. Conclusion We performed this assay in a large number of clinical samples to confirm the diagnostic specificity and sensitivity of the test and can recommend its application for diagnosis of M. tuberculosis. We believe that this method is more convenient for routine diagnosis of M. tuberculosis in sputum and will be more easily applicable in the field, and with sufficient sensitivity.
Cryo-Immunogold Electron Microscopy for Prions: Toward Identification of a Conversion Site

Prion diseases are caused by accumulation of an abnormally folded isoform (PrPSc) of the cellular prion protein (PrPC). The subcellular distribution of PrPSc and the site of its formation in brain are still unclear. We performed quantitative cryo-immunogold electron microscopy on hippocampal sections from mice infected with the Rocky Mountain Laboratory strain of prions. Two antibodies were used: R2, which recognizes both PrPC and PrPSc; and F4–31, which only detects PrPC in undenatured sections. At a late subclinical stage of prion infection, both PrPC and PrPSc were detected principally on neuronal plasma membranes and on vesicles resembling early endocytic or recycling vesicles in the neuropil. The R2 labeling was approximately six times higher in the infected than the uninfected hippocampus and gold clusters were only evident in infected tissue. The biggest increase in labeling density (24-fold) was found on the early/recycling endosome-like vesicles of small-diameter neurites, suggesting these as possible sites of conversion. Trypsin digestion of infected hippocampal sections resulted in a reduction in R2 labeling of >85%, which suggests that a high proportion of PrPSc may be oligomeric, protease-sensitive PrPSc.
Speed-dependent chemotactic precision in marine bacteria

Significance Our understanding of bacterial chemotaxis, a fundamental nutrient-seeking strategy in the microbial world, mainly derives from Escherichia coli. However, it has become clear that marine bacteria evolved fundamentally different chemotaxis adaptations, often allowing them to accumulate at resource peaks more tightly and rapidly than E. coli. We studied the origin of this high chemotactic precision and found that it lies in an unexpected dependence of chemotaxis on swimming speed: faster cells have substantially higher precision, counter to all known models of chemotaxis. We elucidate this finding through a combination of single-cell tracking of thousands of marine bacteria in microfluidic gradients and a mathematical model of chemotaxis that explicitly accounts for swimming speed in the chemotaxis pathway. Chemotaxis underpins important ecological processes in marine bacteria, from the association with primary producers to the colonization of particles and hosts. Marine bacteria often swim with a single flagellum at high speeds, alternating “runs” with either 180° reversals or ∼90° “flicks,” the latter resulting from a buckling instability of the flagellum. These adaptations diverge from Escherichia coli’s classic run-and-tumble motility, yet how they relate to the strong and rapid chemotaxis characteristic of marine bacteria has remained unknown. We investigated the relationship between swimming speed, run–reverse–flick motility, and high-performance chemotaxis by tracking thousands of Vibrio alginolyticus cells in microfluidic gradients. At odds with current chemotaxis models, we found that chemotactic precision—the strength of accumulation of cells at the peak of a gradient—is swimming-speed dependent in V. alginolyticus. Faster cells accumulate twofold more tightly by chemotaxis compared with slower cells, attaining an advantage in the exploitation of a resource additional to that of faster gradient climbing. Trajectory analysis and an agent-based mathematical model revealed that this unexpected advantage originates from a speed dependence of reorientation frequency and flicking, which were higher for faster cells, and was compounded by chemokinesis, an increase in speed with resource concentration. The absence of any one of these adaptations led to a 65–70% reduction in the population-level resource exposure. These findings indicate that, contrary to what occurs in E. coli, swimming speed can be a fundamental determinant of the gradient-seeking capabilities of marine bacteria, and suggest a new model of bacterial chemotaxis.
Robust Design Optimization

Within the robust design optimization, the statistical variability of the design parameter is considered. The most general method for solving optimization problems under uncertainties is the well established Monte Carlo simulation method. However, the major shortcoming of this approach is its vast need of computational resources (the number of solver runs required), and these cannot be presumed in general situations. This paper reviews theories and methodologies that have been developed to solve optimization problems under uncertainties. In the first part the paper gives an overview over the state of the art in stochastic optimization methods such as robust design and reliability-based design optimization. In addition, new adaptive response surface techniques as well as evolutionary algorithm in combination with first order reliability methods in robust design optimization and reliability-based optimization are developed. A numerical example from structural analysis under static and dynamic loading conditions shows the applicability of these concepts. The probabilistic and structural analysis tasks are performed with the optiSLang and SLang software packages.
Physical Activity and Screen Time in Metabolically Healthy Obese Phenotypes in Adolescents and Adults

Introduction. The purpose of this study was to examine levels of physical activity (PA) and screen time (ST) in metabolically healthy obese (MHO) and metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO) adolescents and adults. Methods. NHANES data from obese adolescents (12–18 years, BMI z-score ≥ 95th percentile) and adults (19–85 years, BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2) were pooled from 2003–2005 cycles. Metabolic phenotypes were categorized as MHO (0 or 1 cardiometabolic risk factor; triglycerides, HDL-C, blood pressure, or glucose) or MUO (≥2 cardiometabolic risk factors). Logistic regression models estimated associations between phenotype and PA/ST adjusted for age, gender, BMI, race/ethnicity, menopausal status, and NHANES cycle. Results. Among adolescents, PA was not associated with MHO. In contrast, MHO adults 19–44 years were 85% more likely to engage in active transportation and 2.7 times more likely to be involved in light intensity usual daily activity versus sitting. For each minute per day, adults 45–85 years were 36% more likely to have the MHO phenotype with higher levels of moderate PA. ST was not associated with metabolic phenotypes in adolescents or adults. Conclusion. The current study provides evidence that PA, but not ST, differs between MHO and MUO in adults, but not in adolescents. Future studies are needed to confirm results.