Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using tactile sensors and IMUs with an unsupervised feature-learning approach for robotic grasp stability assessment

In a world where industry has a need for ever more complex automated machines, robot grasping is still far from human capabilities. Despite recent innovations in computer vision and grasping planning, it is still a challenge for a robot to pick never-before-seen objects. Researchers are trying to combine vision with tactile sensing to augment the performance of modern intelligent machines. In this thesis, we will present a novel way to improve robotic grasping using tactile sensors and an unsupervised feature-learning algorithm. Using a test bench and sensors at the Control and Robotics (CoRo) laboratory of the ETS, we have developed and tested a series of classifiers to predict the outcome of a robotic grasp. Our method improves upon the results of hand-crafted feature learning. We have collected data from 100 different everyday objects, executing 10 grasping attemps per object, for a total of 1000 grasping attemps. The optimal system we developed recognized grasp failures 84.23% of the time.
Morphology and significance of programmed cell death in the developing limb bud of the vertebrate embryo

Cell death constitutes a basic mechanism accounting for many morphogenetic and histogenetic events during normal and abnormal development of embryonic organs and tissues. This article focuses on the major areas of mesodermal cell death occurring during vertebrate limb development. In early stages of limb development, cell death appears to reduce the amount of mesodermal tissue destined to form the anlage of the autopodium. In later stages, cell death plays a role sculpturing the shape of the digits. The morphology of the dying cells corresponds with apoptosis, but internucleosomal DNA fragmentation by endonuclease activation does not appear to be a precocious feature. The cell death program can be inhibited in vivo and in vitro by changing the environmental conditions of the prospective dying cells up to 6–10 h before death. In this review, we survey possible factors controlling the establishment of the cell death program. Information concerning the biochemical basis of cell death in the developing limb is also revised. Finally, the possible role of genes whose pattern of expression is coincident with the dying processes is discussed. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cortical and Subcortical Abnormalities in Late-Onset Depression With History of Suicide Attempts Investigated With MRI and Voxel-Based Morphometry

Late-onset major depression is thought to have a biological (vascular) basis, which could be a result of brain structure change. Vascular lesions can affect both the gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM), while most previous studies addressed WM abnormality. This study explored the disease- and symptom (history of suicide attempt) -related GM morphometry in elderly male patients with late-onset depression. A total of 70 patients with depression admitted to our geriatric psychiatric ward were investigated, and 26 age-matched males were recruited as controls. We used T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to obtain cerebral structural information and adopted voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate brain volume change related to disease (depression vs control) and symptom (depression with history of suicide attempt vs depression without history of suicide attempt). Late-onset depression was associated with smaller volumes in several regions of GM (insula and the posterior cingulate region) and WM (subcallosal cingulate cortex, floor of lateral ventricles, parahippocampal region, insula, and the cerebellum). Compared with nonsuicidal counterpart, suicidal depression was associated with decreased GM and WM volume in the frontal, parietal, and temporal regions, and the insula, lentiform nucleus, midbrain, and the cerebellum. Marked regional volume reduction was noticed at dorsal medial prefrontal cortex. Our results demonstrate that the development of suicidal behaviors in major depression is related to widespread but discrete volume reduction in several cortical and subcortical structures, fitting with the hypothesis that decreased cerebral volume in certain regions renders biological susceptibility to attempt suicide during depressive states.
Understanding and Interpreting Dominant Frequency Analysis of AF Electrograms

Dominant frequency analysis of atrial electrograms has been used to understand the pathophysiology of atrial fibrillation (AF). Although dominant frequency is an effective tool to estimate activation rate during AF, other factors besides activation rate may alter the results. Therefore, an adequate conceptual understanding of frequency domain analysis is required to properly use this technique and interpret the results. This review, while avoiding the use of formulas and equations, aims to explain fundamental theory of how signals can be decomposed into sine waves and how these sine waves relate to the activation rate detected from the electrograms. Through a series of examples and illustrations this relationship can be easily conceptualized. This will in turn allow the strengths and limitations of dominant frequency analysis to be better understood and improve its applicability to potential clinical usages.
N-(2-Methoxy-6-oxo-1,6-dihydropyrimidin-4-yl)formamide: hydrogen-bonded sheets of centrosymmetric R(2)2 (8) and R(6)4 (28) rings.

Molecules of the title compound, C6H7N3O3, are linked into sheets of centrosymmetric R(2)2 (8) and R(6)4 (28) rings by two nearly linear N-H.O hydrogen bonds [H.O = 1.91 and 1.98 A, N.O = 2.786 (3) and 2.862 (3) A, and N-H.O = 175 and 177 degrees ].
Control‐value theory: Using achievement emotions to improve understanding of motivation, learning, and performance in medical education: AMEE Guide No. 64

In this AMEE Guide, we consider the emergent theoretical and empirical work on human emotion and how this work can inform the theory, research, and practice of medical education. In the Guide, we define emotion, in general, and achievement emotions, more specifically. We describe one of the leading contemporary theories of achievement emotions, control‐value theory (Pekrun ), and we distinguish between different types of achievement emotions, their proximal antecedents, and their consequences for motivation, learning, and performance. Next, we review the empirical support for control‐value theory from non‐medical fields and suggest several important implications for educational practice. In this section, we highlight the importance of designing learning environments that foster a high degree of control and value for students. Finally, we end with a discussion of the need for more research on achievement emotions in medical education, and we propose several key research questions we believe will facilitate our understanding of achievement emotions and their impact on important educational outcomes.
A microgrid energy management system for inducing optimal demand response

This paper focuses on optimal operation schedule of a Microgrid that is interconnected to the power grid. We develop a mathematical model to compute the optimal operation schedule that embodies demand response. Integer Programming optimization is used to this end. Our model incorporates the electricity load into three types: fixed, transferable, and user-action loads. The transferable load plays a key role in molding demand response. Experimental results show that the proposed model exploits the demand elasticity and significantly reduces the total operation cost. Also observed from the experiments are the impact of the uncertainty in renewable distributed generators on operation schedule and total cost and the role of power storages for enhancing the demand elasticity with respect to user-action loads and for reserving power against high price.
Physically constrained short-term vehicle trajectory forecasting with naive semantic maps

Urban environments manifest a high level of complexity, and therefore it is of vital importance for safety systems embedded within autonomous vehicles (AVs) to be able to accurately predict the short-term future motion of nearby agents. This problem can be further understood as generating a sequence of future coordinates for a given agent based on its past motion data e.g. position, velocity, acceleration etc, and whilst current approaches demonstrate plausible results they have a propensity to neglect a scene's physical constrains. In this paper we propose the model based on a combination of the CNN and LSTM encoder-decoder architecture that learns to extract a relevant road features from semantic maps as well as general motion of agents and uses this learned representation to predict their short-term future trajectories. We train and validate the model on the publicly available dataset that provides data from urban areas, allowing us to examine it in challenging and uncertain scenarios. We show that our model is not only capable of anticipating future motion whilst taking into consideration road boundaries, but can also effectively and precisely predict trajectories for a longer time horizon than initially trained for.
structural RNAs LocARNA-P : Accurate boundary prediction and improved detection of Material Supplemental

Current genomic screens for noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) predict a large number of genomic regions containing potential structural ncRNAs. The analysis of these data requires highly accurate prediction of ncRNA boundaries and discrimination of promising candidate ncRNAs from weak predictions. Existing methods struggle with these goals because they rely on sequencebased multiple sequence alignments, which regularly misalign RNA structure and therefore do not support identification of structural similarities. To overcome this limitation, we compute columnwise and global reliabilities of alignments based on sequence and structure similarity; we refer to these structure-based alignment reliabilities as STARs. The columnwise STARs of alignments, or STAR profiles, provide a versatile tool for the manual and automatic analysis of ncRNAs. In particular, we improve the boundary prediction of the widely used ncRNA gene finder RNAz by a factor of 3 from a median deviation of 47 to 13 nt. Post-processing RNAz predictions, LocARNA-P’s STAR score allows much stronger discrimination between trueand false-positive predictions than RNAz’s own evaluation. The improved accuracy, in this scenario increased from AUC 0.71 to AUC 0.87, significantly reduces the cost of successive analysis steps. The ready-to-use software tool LocARNA-P produces structure-based multiple RNA alignments with associated columnwise STARs and predicts ncRNA boundaries. We provide additional results, a web server for LocARNA/LocARNA-P, and the software package, including documentation and a pipeline for refining screens for structural ncRNA, at http://www.bioinf. uni-freiburg.de/Supplements/LocARNA-P/.
Discriminative state-dependent weightings of duration-based state transition model through minimum classification error training

This paper describes a new duration-based state transition model that incorporates a discriminative weighting parameter. The serious problem of acoustical/temporal variation in different speakers utterances has long made it difficult to design a robust speech recognition model. To cope with this problem, we integrate state-dependent weighting parameters into the structure of the durationbased state transition model and control the score for the accompanying temporal segment. These state-dependent weightings absorb local variations in an utterance and provide discriminative ability that can directly influence the total score for the speech pattern. Moreover, a durationbased matching procedure precludes stiff dynamic warping that involves excessive time stretching or compression. We train all of the model parameters including proposed parameters, by using a minimum classification error criterion. Minimum classification error training is implemented by a generalized probabilistic descent method that can directly minimize the number of recognition errors between competing models. We also discuss the relationship of this model to a conventional hidden Markov model, and applicability of the minimum-classification-error/generalizedprobabilistic-descent training to the hidden Markov model. The experimental results of spotting-based speaker-independent word recognition show that both state-dependent weightings and duration control helped to improve recognition performance. Furthermore, for low-performance speakers, the recognition rate was raised from 65.5% to 92.0% after speaker adaptation using the training, proving that the training was effective. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 31(4): 98108, 2000
Three-dimensional wakes behind cylinders of square and circular cross-section: early and long-time dynamics

The flow in the near wake of a square cylinder at Reynolds numbers of 205 and 225, corresponding to three-dimensional wake instability modes $A$ and $B$ , respectively, and that of the square’s circumscribed circular cylinder are examined by using three-dimensional Navier–Stokes numerical simulations. At small times, prior to the streamwise vortex shedding, a self-similar velocity is observed in the wake and no significant difference is observed in the dynamics of the flows past the square and the circular cylinders. The exponential growth of the three-dimensional instability reaches a saturation regime during this early time for the considered Reynolds numbers. Vortical structures in the wake at long times and shedding frequencies are very close for the square and the circular cylinders. The flow separation on the forward top and bottom corners of the square cylinder have the effect of increasing its effective width, making it comparable with the diameter of the circumscribed circular cylinder. Thus, Floquet multipliers and modes of the associated three-dimensional instabilities are shown to be very close for the two cylinders when using the circumscribed circular cylinder as the basis for a characteristic length scale. Most importantly, the wavenumber with the maximum growth rate, for modes $A$ and $B$ , is approximately identical for the two cylinders.
The taste of origin in a lady beetle: do males discriminate between females based on cuticular hydrocarbons?

The Asian lady beetle Harmonia axyridis originates from Asia and has established invasive populations worldwide. Recent population genetic studies trace their invasion routes and demonstrate that bottlenecks in population size have reduced their genetic diversity. Consequently, phenotypical differences are highlighted between native and invasive populations. Among phenotypical traits, cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) might reflect the geographical origin of a lady beetle, especially because of their genetic basis. The present study investigates whether (i) the CHC profiles qualitatively and quantitatively differ between females of H. axyridis from native and invasive populations and (ii) males discriminate females from native and invasive populations using CHC profiles. CHCs are solvent‐extracted before being quantified and identified by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. In total, 17 CHCs are detected from female elytra, including six alkanes, three polyunsaturated and eight monounsaturated alkenes. The total quantity of CHCs differs among the populations, with lady beetles from Tai'an (China) displaying higher CHC concentrations than lady beetles from Gembloux (Belgium) and from Beijing (China) populations. Multivariate analyses detect differences in CHC qualitative profiles, with females from Tai'an being different from the two other populations. Finally, behavioural assays show that females originating from the native Tai'an population are less preferred by males, whereas females from the invasive population are mounted more often. The behavioural assays suggest that CHCs are not involved in discrimination of mating partners based on their origin.
Familial Resemblance of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) and Calcaneal Ultrasound Attenuation: The BMD in Mothers and Daughters Study

The familial resemblance in bone mineral density (BMD) and calcaneal broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA) was examined in 207 mother‐daughter pairs. Mothers were participants in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. Three groups of daughters were recruited based on their maternal history of “fracture,” “low BMD” without fracture (< 0.58 g/cm2, t‐score < −2.5), and “normal BMD” without fracture (> 0.67 g/cm2, t‐score > −1.6). Data on other potentially heritable factors known to influence BMD and BUA were also collected. BMD was measured at the hip, spine, whole body, and calcaneus. Calcaneal BUA was assessed using the Walker‐Sonix UBA 575. Total hip and femoral neck BMD were significantly lower (5.0–8.0%, p < 0.017) among daughters, in particular premenopausal daughters, of mothers with established osteoporosis (“fracture” or “low BMD”) compared with daughters of mothers at lower risk of osteoporosis (“normal BMD”). BUA did not differ across daughter groups. Lifestyle characteristics (dietary calcium, smoking, physical activity) were not highly correlated in mothers and daughters. Height, weight, and body composition were significantly correlated within mother‐daughter pairs and could be a potential mechanism by which BMD is inherited. Among pre‐ and postmenopausal daughters, heritability estimates ranged from 50–63% and 34–48%, respectively. Heritability for calcaneal BUA (53%) was evident among postmenopausal daughters only. In conclusion, familial association in BMD was strongest among premenopausal daughters. Estimates of heritability suggest that maternal BMD and BUA are important independent predictors of BMD and BUA among daughters, reinforcing the importance of prevention and early intervention among women with a positive family history of osteoporosis. (J Bone Miner Res 1999;14: 102–110)
Differences in clinical presentation of non-small cell lung cancer in never-smokers versus smokers.

OBJECTIVES This study was conducted to evaluate whether or not tumor spread and the diagnostic process in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is different based on smoking history. METHODS Associations between smoking status and clinical presentation were evaluated controlling for the effect of histology. Lung cancer with delayed diagnosis (LCDD) and incidental detection (LCID) were determined based on medical records. RESULTS Of 914 patients, frequency of distant metastases was more common in never-smokers than in smokers (59% and 36%, respectively; P<0.001). Although never-smokers were more likely to have LCDD than smokers (18% and 11%, respectively; P=0.038), LCDD were not significantly associated with frequency of distant metastases [49% (LCDD) vs. 42% (non-LCDD); P=0.189] as well as tumor [29% (T3-4) vs. 24% (T1-2); P=0.134] and node [43% (N2-3) vs. 44% (N0-1); P=0.838] stage. Interestingly, never-smokers are more likely to have LCID than smokers (31% and 19%, respectively; P=0.010). In survival analysis, LCID (P=0.001; HR, 0.63) remained a prognostic factor, while LCDD did not. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests distinct metastatic pattern and diagnostic processes of never-smokers. The link between survival and incidental detection was also indicated.
Low-dose growth hormone supplementation increases clinical pregnancy rate in poor responders undergoing in vitro fertilisation

Abstract Poor ovarian response (POR) often means low success rates after in vitro fertilisation (IVF). We aim to study the impact of a low-dose growth hormone (GH) supplementation in pregnancy rates in poor responders in a prospective, self-controlled study of 64 poor responders to previous IVF cycles, who failed to achieve pregnancy and were supplemented with low-doses of GH in a subsequent cycle using the same gonadotropin dose and protocol. Our primary endpoint was the clinical pregnancy rate (CPR), considering secondary endpoints, the number of retrieved oocytes, embryos, embryo quality and the proportion of cycles with embryo transfer. CPR in the GH group was 34.4%. Significant differences were observed for the GH group both in the number of top quality embryos (0.64 ± 0.88 versus 1.03 ± 1.17, p < 0.05) and cryopreserved embryos (0.3 ± 0.81 versus 0.85 ± 1.49, p < 0.05). This is, to our knowledge, the first clinical trial to use a low dose of GH as a supplement for IVF in POR patients. Despite this low dose, we achieved excellent success rates in patients with a very poor prognosis, at a reasonable cost and without side effects, which makes this a safe and cost-effective alternative.
Alternative Earnings Measures , Key Performance Indicators and Firm Value in the IT Professional Services Sector

In recent years, there has been an increase in the use of alternative measures of earnings. For example, companies describe “pro forma” earnings in their earnings releases and analysts have developed different “street” measures of earnings. Both groups argue that these alternative, non-GAAP, earnings are intended to measure operating performance or sustainable earnings which provides better information about the value and future performance of the firm. In addition, there has been an increase in the use of non-financial measures in particular industries, such as telecommunications and internet companies. The motivation for the use of non-financial measures is to provide better information about operations of the firm. Some have raised concern that the increase in the use of these alternative earnings and non-financial measures suggest that GAAP-based financial information does not adequately provide investors with information needed to assess company value. We address this concern by examining two questions. First, what summary measure of earnings best explains firm value? Second, do concurrently released non-financial measures supplement or supplant the information in the summary earnings measures? In October 1999, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt constituted a task force to examine whether current GAAP-based financial information adequately provides investors with
Lebenszyklusorientierte Analyse der ökologischen Eigenschaften von Niedrigstenergiewohngebäuden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gebäudetechnik

In dieser Doktorarbeit werden okologische Eigenschaften von Niedrigstenergiewohngebauden, besonders der Gebaudetechnik uber den Lebenszyklus analysiert; hieraus wird ein vereinfachtes Verfahren zur Ermittlung der umweltbezogenen Auswirkungen der Gebaudetechnik entwickelt. Das life cycle assessment (LCA = Okobilanz) verdeutlicht zum einen die Notwendigkeit, die okologischen Eigenschaften von Wohngebauden im Niedrigstenergiestandard zu berucksichtigen; zum anderen die Relevanz, die Gebaudetechnik hierbei zu beachten.