Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Climatology of the three coastal Antarctic stations Dumont D'urville, Neumayer and Halley

Long term air and snowfall chemistry measurements have been performed at the three coastal Antarctic stations Dumont d'Urville (66°40′S, 140°1′E), Neumayer (70°39′S, 8°15′W), and Halley (75°35′S, 26°19′W). The results have to be interpreted and compared with respect to the regional meteorological conditions. In this study the 3-hourly synoptic surface observations taken at the three stations between 1991 and 1995, as well as the daily upper air soundings from 1993, are analyzed to describe the aspects of station climatologies relevant for the air and snowfall chemistry measurements discussed in the papers of this special section. Although the three stations are comparable, being situated close to the coastline of Antarctica, the meteorological conditions differ. While at Dumont d'Urville katabatic winds cause predominant strong and relatively dry surface winds from the interior of Antarctica, Neumayer and Halley are frequently influenced by easterly winds associated mostly with eastward moving cyclones. From April through October the wind field above 5 km is governed by a circumpolar vortex with westerly winds increasing in intensity with height. Dumont d'Urville represents a station at the edge of this vortex with extreme stratospheric wind velocities up to above 50 m s−1. Neumayer and Halley are mostly situated within the vortex and isolated from air masses advecting from lower latitudes into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere during the Austral winter.
Thucydides and Democratic Peace

Abstract Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides remarked on this competition and was aware of the inter-democratic affinities, but did not seem to think them salient in city-state decisions of war and peace. The failure of democratic peace to develop may relate to the environment of the Greek city-state, which privileged local interests over broader constitutional ideals.
Video Captioning with Listwise Supervision

Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental challenging that has received increasing attention. However, existing techniques restrict the model learning on the pairs of each video and its own sentences, and thus fail to capture more holistically semantic relationships among all sentences. In this paper, we propose to model relative relationships of different video-sentence pairs and present a novel framework, named Long Short-Term Memory with Listwise Supervision (LSTM-LS), for video captioning. Given each video in training data, we obtain a ranking list of sentences w.r. t. a given sentence associated with the video using nearest-neighbor search. The ranking information is represented by a set of rank triplets that can be used to assess the quality of ranking list. The video captioning problem is then solved by learning LSTM model for sentence generation, through maximizing the ranking quality over all the sentences in the list. The experiments on MSVD dataset show that our proposed LSTM-LS produces better performance than the state of the art in generating natural sentences: 51.1% and 32.6% in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. Superior performances are also reported on the movie description M-VAD dataset.
Perceptual Learning of Motion Leads to Faster Flicker Perception

Critical flicker fusion thresholds (CFFT) describe when quick amplitude modulations of a light source become undetectable as the frequency of the modulation increases. The threshold at which CFF occurs has been shown to remain constant under repeated testing. Additionally, CFF thresholds are correlated with various measures of intelligence, and have been regarded by clinicians as a general measure of cortical processing capacity. For these reasons, CFF is used as a cognitive indicator in drug studies, as a measure of fatigue, and has been suggested as a diagnostic measure for various brain diseases. Here we report that CFFT increases dramatically in subjects who are trained with a motion-direction learning procedure. Control tasks demonstrate that CFFT changes are tightly coupled with improvements in discriminating the direction of motion stimuli, and are likely related to plasticity in low-level visual areas that are specialized to process motion signals. This plasticity is long-lasting and is retained for at least one year after training. Combined, these results show that CFFT relates to a specialized sensory process and bring into question that CFFT is a measure of high-level, or general, processes.
Runup of Tsunamis with Transient Wave Profiles Incident on a Conical Island

Based on the linear long wave theory, analytical solutions are obtained for the propagation of tsunamis with an arbitrary incident wave profile around a conical island. The validity of the theory is verified through comparisons with two laboratory datasets. Effects of incident wave profile on the distribution of runup height and on the maximum runup height along the coastline of an island axe discussed on the basis of this theory.
A Recursive Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Converter Achieving $2^{N}-1$ Ratios With High Efficiency Over a Wide Output Voltage Range

A Recursive Switched-Capacitor (RSC) topology is introduced that enables reconfiguration among 2 N-1 conversion ratios while achieving minimal capacitive charge-sharing loss for a given silicon area. All 2 N-1 ratios are realized by strategically interconnecting N 2:1 SC cells either in series, in parallel, or in a stacked configuration such that the number of input and ground connections are maximized in order to minimize cascaded losses. Importantly, all ratios are dynamically reconfigurable without disconnecting a single capacitor, all while ensuring optimal capacitance/conductance relative-sizing. The RSC topology is inherently regular, enabling recursive inter-cell connection and recursive binary-slicing that implement ratio-reconfiguration with minimum complexity and losses. A scalable all-digital binary search controller is employed to perform ratio-reconfiguration among the available 2 N-1 ratios without using any ratio-threshold generation circuitry. To validate the topology, a 4 bit RSC is fully integrated in 0.25 μm bulk CMOS using MIM capacitors, achieving greater than 70% efficiency over a 0.8-2.2 V output voltage range with 85.8% peak-efficiency from a 2.5V input supply. Compared to a co-fabricated three-ratio (1/3, 1/2, 2/3) Series-Parallel SC converter, the RSC achieves a 40.4% larger output operating range (from 0.04 to 2.2 V), and fills the efficiency-drops in-between the three-ratios by 8% with a 940 Ω load.
Scalable exploration of functional dependency by interpolation and incremental SAT solving

Functional dependency is concerned with rewriting a Boolean function f as a function h over a set of base functions {g1, . , gn), i.e. f = h(g1, ., gn). It plays an important role in many aspects of electronic design automation (EDA), ranging from logic synthesis to formal verification. Prior approaches to the exploration of functional dependency are based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs), which may not be easily scalable to large designs. This paper proposes a novel reformulation that extensively exploits the capability of modern satisfiability (SAT) solvers. Thereby, functional dependency is detected effectively through incremental SAT solving, and the dependency function h, if it exists, is obtained through Craig interpolation. The main strengths of the proposed approach include: (1) fast detection of functional dependency with modest memory consumption and thus scalable to large designs, (2) a full capacity to handle a large set of base functions and thus discovering dependency whenever exists, and (3) potential application to large-scale logic optimization and verification reduction. Experimental results show the proposed method is far superior to prior work and scales well in dealing with the largest ISCAS89 and ITC99 benchmark circuits with up to 200 K gates.
Interpreting Hemoglobin A1C in Combination With Conventional Risk Factors for Prediction of Cardiovascular Risk

Background—Hemoglobin A1C (HbA1C) is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events, but its use for prediction of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events in combination with conventional risk factors has not been well defined. Methods and Results—To understand the effect of HbA1C on CVD risk in the context of other CVD risk factors, we analyzed HbA1C and other CVD risk factor measurements in 2000 individuals aged 40 to 79 years without pre-existing diabetes mellitus or CVD from the 2011 to 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys survey. The resulting regression model was used to predict the HbA1C distribution based on individual patient characteristics. We then calculated post-test 10-year atherosclerotic CVD risk incorporating the actual versus predicted HbA1C, according to established methods, for a set of example scenarios. Age, sex, race/ethnicity, and traditional cardiovascular risk factors were significant predictors of HbA1C in our model, with the expected HbA1C distribution being significantly higher in non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic individuals than that in non-Hispanic white/other individuals. Incorporating the expected HbA1C distribution into pretest atherosclerotic CVD risk has a modest effect on post-test atherosclerotic CVD risk. In the patient examples, we assessed that having an HbA1C of <5.7% reduced post-test risk by 0.4% to 2.0% points, whereas having an HbA1C of ≥6.5% increased post-test risk by 1.0% to 2.5% points, depending on the scenario. The post-test risk increase from having an HbA1C of ≥6.5% tends to approximate the risk increase from being 5 years older. Conclusions—HbA1C has modest effects on predicted atherosclerotic CVD risk when considered in the context of conventional risk factors.
A Meta-protocol and Type system for the Dynamic Coupling of Binary Components

We introduce a new type system, where the type of a component consists of two protocols — a call and a use protocol. We model these protocols by finite automata and show how those reflect component enhancement and adaption. Coupling is controlled by a meta-protocol, which calls the adaption and enhancement algorithms. These algorithms require type information of the components involved. This type information is provided by the meta-protocol using reflection. This mechanism allows automatic adaption of components in changing environments.
Modification by oxygen free radical scavengers of the metabolic and cardiovascular effects of endotoxin infusion in conscious rats.

Since oxygen free radicals may have a role in the pathophysiology of endotoxin shock, we have studied the effects of a wide range of compounds (alpha-tocopherol, reduced glutathione, allopurinol, superoxide dismutase (alone or in combination with catalase) and phenyl butylnitrone) that can act either to remove free radicals as they are generated or to prevent their generation. The effects of these substances on the metabolic and cardiovascular responses to endotoxin were examined in conscious rats. The intravenous infusion of endotoxin (10 mg/kg i.v. given over 4 h) resulted in systemic hypotension, transient tachycardia, an increase in plasma lactate, and an initial hyperglycemia followed, in those rats that died before 24 h, by hypoglycemia. The hypotension and tachycardia produced by endotoxin were not significantly modified by alpha-tocopherol, allopurinol, or superoxide dismutase, alone or in combination with catalase. The tachycardia was attenuated by reduced glutathione and phenyl butylnitrone. alpha-Tocopherol attenuated the initial hyperglycemia produced by endotoxin whilst alpha-tocopherol, allopurinol, and phenyl butylnitrone all significantly attenuated the endotoxin-induced increase in plasma lactate. Among the free radical scavenging systems studied, only alpha-tocopherol and phenyl butylnitrone improved survival. These results suggest a contribution from oxygen-free radicals to the pathophysiology of endotoxemia.
Pulsatility and the Risk of Nonsurgical Bleeding in Patients Supported With the Continuous-Flow Left Ventricular Assist Device HeartMate II

Background—Bleeding is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with continuous-flow left ventricular assist devices (LVADs). Reduced pulsatility has been implicated as a contributing cause. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of different degrees of pulsatility on the incidence of nonsurgical bleeding. Methods and Results—The Utah Transplantation Affiliated Hospitals (U.T.A.H.) heart failure and transplant program databases were queried for patients with end-stage heart failure who required support with the continuous-flow LVAD HeartMate II (Thoratec Corp, Pleasanton, CA) between 2004 and 2012. Pulsatility was evaluated by means of the LVAD parameter pulsatility index (PI) and by the echocardiographic assessment of aortic valve opening during the first 3 months of LVAD support. PI was analyzed as a continuous variable and also stratified according to tertiles of all the PI measurements during the study period (low PI: <4.6, intermediate PI: 4.6–5.2, and high PI: >5.2). Major nonsurgical bleeding associated with a decrease in hemoglobin ≥2 g/dL (in the absence of hemolysis) was the primary end point. A total of 134 patients (median age of 60 [interquartile range: 49–68] years, 78% men) were included. Major bleeding occurred in 33 (25%) patients (70% gastrointestinal, 21% epistaxis, 3% genitourinary, and 6% intracranial). In multivariable analysis, PI examined either as a categorical variable, low versus high PI (hazard ratio, 4.06; 95% confidence interval, 1.35–12.21; P=0.04), or as a continuous variable (hazard ratio, 0.60; 95% confidence interval, 0.40–0.92; P=0.02) was associated with an increased risk of bleeding. Conclusions—Reduced pulsatility in patients supported with the continuous-flow LVAD HeartMate II is associated with an increased risk of nonsurgical bleeding, as evaluated by PI.
2 1/2 D visual servoing: a possible solution to improve image-based and position-based visual servoings

We describe in this paper potential problems that may appear in image-based visual servoing when the initial camera position is far away from its desired position. We show by concrete examples that local minima or a singularity of the image Jacobian can be reached during the servoing. We then recall recent results obtained to avoid these drawbacks. It consists in combining visual features obtained directly from the image, and position-based features. This approach, called 2 1/2 D visual servoing, also provides supplementary advantages with regard to the mean the features are combined with.
ISLANDS INCREASE GENETIC SUBDIVISION AND DISRUPT PATTERNS OF CONNECTIVITY OF INTERTIDAL SNAILS IN A COMPLEX ARCHIPELAGO

Abstract The view that marine species with planktonic dispersal have highly connected, demographically open populations is giving way to recognition that populations may often be largely self-recruiting, or demographically closed. This raises the question of what local conditions might favor isolation of populations. To test the importance of islands for local isolation in species with planktonic larvae, we examined allozyme variation among 35 populations of the intertidal snail Austrocochlea constricta in the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, Western Australia, spanning 60 km. Heterogeneity of allozyme frequencies among populations was high, with average FST of 0.237, indicating highly localized populations. Increased subdivision was associated with islands at different scales: between island groups, separated by deep water gaps, and between disconnected sets of islands within groups. At short distances, up to two km, subdivision increased fivefold between islands compared with that between populations on the same island. Along 11 km of continuous, sheltered shore, there was isolation by distance but among a linear series of islands over similar distance, there was greater subdivision at short distances but no association with distance. These patterns had been seen previously in the direct-developing snail Bembicium vittatum, but its finding in A. constricta confirms for a planktonic disperser the importance of this complex archipelago for both retention of locally produced larvae and disruption of patterns of connectivity. Taken together, these results indicate that islands can increase both the “open” and the “closed” components of recruitment and that applicable models of genetic connectivity depend substantially on local conditions.
Robotic link position control using brain computer interface

Brain computer interfacing is a new paradigm to provide an alternative path of communication for those, who have lost their sensory, motor and autonomous function limb movement from spinal cord injury or other neuronal disorder. To increase living standard of them, a thought controlled robot or robotic arm can be of great importance for their better communication to external world. This paper proposes a novel approach towards electroencephalogram based random order control of a robot manipulator. Here steady state visual evoked potential has been used to select the desired robot link and motor imagery signal has been used to control the motion of robot link. Left and Right hand motor imagery signal has been used in this purpose. Event related error potential is used for feedback purpose and to correct the positional error of link created by motor imagery. The robot link here is realigned by experimental offset. Power spectral density, common spatial pattern and moving average, have been used as feature extractor and support vector machine with linear kernel function has been used as the classifier. At first, the subject has been trained in offline experiment and then online session performance has been evaluated.
Complete Genome Sequence of Dyella japonica Strain A8 Isolated from Malaysian Tropical Soil

ABSTRACT We previously identified and presented the draft genome of a Xanthomonadaceae bacterial strain Dyella japonica A8 which shows quorum-quenching activity. Here, we report the complete, closed genome sequence of this bacterium. This complete genome may help to further investigate the comparative quorum-quenching activity among D. japonica strains.
Collaborative use of different learning styles through 3D printing

This work aims to study the contribution of 3D printing technologies as collaborative resource in higher education teaching. The study reports two years of observations of the behavior and experience, in the classroom, of student groups in classes of the 2nd year of an industrial design degree, when placed in contact with artefacts obtained by 3D printing which are used for an experimental test in the class. This was conducted in the course “Physics of materials”, in which we analyzed the contribution of practical experience in the learning process. The study aims to assess the degree of interest, motivation and understanding by students on academic content, which is often abstract, and of which practical demonstrations with resources prepared by 3D printing can become a learning facilitator. To this end, the learning styles of students were determined through the Honey-Alonso Learning Styles Questionnaire (CHAEA). This questionnaire allows teachers and students to know the learning styles and how each student interacts and relates in group activities. It includes a section on practical experience, motivation and the acquisition of knowledge of the students, who were unanimous in ranking high the importance of 3D printing technology in teaching activities in the classroom. As a collaborative learning resource, it is concluded that 3D printing can positively help teachers establish an improved teaching environment for students by including different methodological styles in the learning process. This is particularly effective in courses with a significant theoretical content. The increasing availability of 3D printing combined with the motivational aspect of its usage as a learning facilitator establish a revolutionary and powerful resource for active learning.
Wireless transmission of images using JPEG2000

A novel scheme is proposed for the transmission of JPEG2000 image streams over wireless channels. The proposed scheme exploits the block-based coding structure of the JPEG2000 streams and employs optimized product codes consisting of Turbo codes and Reed-Solomon codes in order to deal effectively with burst errors. The optimization is based on information extracted directly from the compressed JPEG2000 streams. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme outperform other recent algorithms for the wireless transmission of images.
A Web-Trained Extraction Summarization System

A serious bottleneck in the development of trainable text summarization systems is the shortage of training data. Constructing such data is a very tedious task, especially because there are in general many different correct ways to summarize a text. Fortunately we can utilize the Internet as a source of suitable training data. In this paper, we present a summarization system that uses the web as the source of training data. The procedure involves structuring the articles downloaded from various websites, building adequate corpora of (summary, text) and (extract, text) pairs, training on positive and negative data, and automatically learning to perform the task of extraction-based summarization at a level comparable to the best DUC systems.
A suspended sediment stratification correction for combined wave and current flows

A simple model for the near-bottom combined wave and current flow over a moveable sediment bed is presented. The model is an extension of the Grant and Madsen (1979) combined wave and current model, with moveable bed effects on the physical bottom roughness included as by Grant and Madsen (1982). The unsteady conservation of fluid momentum and sediment mass equations, which are coupled through an eddy diffusivity closure scheme, are solved for the wave and current velocity profiles, along with the suspended sediment concentration and transport profiles. Sample runs are presented to illustrate the effect of varying wave conditions on the current, the mean sediment concentration, and the mean sediment transport. Results show that for fine to medium sands, self-stratification of the flow can be important during storms owing to the large amount of sediment suspended by the waves and the enhanced turbulent mixing associated with the wave-current interaction. The theory easily can be generalized for inclusion in a full Ekman layer model.