Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Alternate and New Brominated Flame Retardants Detected in U . S .

H E A T H E R M . S T A P L E T O N , * , † J O S E P H G . A L L E N , ‡ , § S H A N N O N M . K E L L Y , † A L E X K O N S T A N T I N O V , | S U S A N K L O S T E R H A U S , ⊥ D E B O R A H W A T K I N S , ‡ M I C H A E L D . M C C L E A N , ‡ A N D T H O M A S F . W E B S T E R ‡ Nicholas School of the Environment & Earth Sciences, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, Environmental Health & Engineering, Inc., Needham, Massachusetts, Wellington Laboratories Inc., Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and San Francisco Estuary Institute, Oakland, California
EEG data compression techniques

Electroencephalograph (EEG) and Holter EEG data compression techniques which allow perfect reconstruction of the recorded waveform from the compressed one are presented and discussed. Data compression permits one to achieve significant reduction in the space required to store signals and in transmission time. The Huffman coding technique in conjunction with derivative computation reaches high compression ratios (on average 49% on Holter and 58% on EEG signals) with low computational complexity. By exploiting this result a simple and fast encoder/decoder scheme capable of real-time performance on a PC was implemented. This simple technique is compared with other predictive transformations, vector quantization, discrete cosine transform (DCT), and repetition count compression methods. Finally, it is shown that the adoption of a collapsed Huffman tree for the encoding/decoding operations allows one to choose the maximum codeword length without significantly affecting the compression ratio. Therefore, low cost commercial microcontrollers and storage devices can be effectively used to store long Holter EEG's in a compressed format.
Unity in diversity, a systems approach to regulating plant cell physiology by 2-oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenases

Could a disjoint group of enzymes synchronize their activities and execute a complex multi-step, measurable, and reproducible response? Here, I surmise that the alpha-ketoglutarate dependent superfamily of non-haem iron (II) dioxygenases could influence cell physiology as a cohesive unit, and that the broad spectra of substrates transformed is an absolute necessity to this portrayal. This eclectic group comprises members from all major taxa, and participates in pesticide breakdown, hypoxia signaling, and osmotic stress neutralization. The oxidative decarboxylation of 2-oxoglutarate to succinate is coupled with a concomitant substrate hydroxylation and, in most cases, is followed by an additional specialized conversion. The domain profile of a protein sequence was used as an index of miscellaneous reaction chemistry and interpreted alongside existent kinetic data in a linear model of integrated function. Statistical parameters were inferred by the creation of a novel, empirically motivated flat-file database of over 3800 sequences (DB2OG) with putative 2-oxoglutarate dependent activity. The collated information was categorized on the basis of existing annotation schema. The data suggests that 2OG-dependent enzymes incorporate several desirable features of a systems level player. DB2OG, is free, accessible without a login to all users, and available at the following URL (http://comp-biol.theacms.in/DB2OG.html).
Two-photon dichroic atomic vapor laser lock using electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption

We demonstrate a technique to lock the frequency of a laser to a transition between two excited states in Rb vapor using a two-photon process in the presence of a weak magnetic field. We use a ladder configuration from specific hyperfine sublevels of the 5S1/2, 5P3/2, and 5D5/2 levels. This atomic configuration can show electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption processes. The error signal comes from the difference in the transparency or absorption felt by the two orthogonal polarizations of the probe beam. A simplified model is in good quantitative agreement with the observed signals for the experimental parameters. We have used this technique to lock the frequency of the laser up to 1.5 GHz off atomic resonance.
Effects of time-based Biases in Review Communities

[0.0] Abstract Prior work has used social biases to inform predictive models of evaluation-driven networks, but there still exist many opportunities to analyze and expand on frameworks for modeling the growth of review-based communities. In particular, we would like to more deeply explore the influence of the time of a review’s creation and the effect it has on other review metrics. In an observational study, we analyzed an Amazon Product Review data set to see if earlier reviews influenced successive, a behavior consistent with that of the Anchoring effect from work in social psychology. Our core analysis found that when there are a low number of reviews (~ 15), earlier reviews have a tendency of being closer to the mean than later reviews while this implies that there may indeed exist an anchoring effect, further analysis found that for the same fixed bounds in review number, earlier reviews also were generally deemed more helpful. Through a comparative study with the similarly 5-star scaled Beer Advocate beverage evaluation network review data set, we conclude that certain divergent trends found in the Amazon Review dataset can be attributed to its review helpfulness mechanism, rather than an inherent anchoring effect based simply on time.
Anthocyanins and other polyphenolics in American elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) and European elderberry (S. nigra) cultivars.

BACKGROUND Ten genotypes representing two elderberry species, Sambucus canadensis L. (eight genotypes) and S. nigra L. (two genotypes), were examined for their anthocyanins (ACY), total phenolics (TP),°Brix, titratable acidity (TA), and pH over two growing seasons. RESULTS Overall, fruit generally had higher ACY, TP, ACY/TP,°Brix, and pH in 2005 than 2004. All samples of S. canadensis had similar anthocyanin profiles to one another, but were distinctly different from S. nigra. Both species had cyanidin-based anthocyanins as major pigments. Previously unreported anthocyanins were identified in some samples in this study. Trace levels of delphinidin 3-rutinoside were present in all elderberry samples except cv. 'Korsør'. Also, petunidin 3-rutinoside was detected in cvs 'Adams 2', 'Johns', 'Scotia', 'York', and 'Netzer' (S. canadensis). The identified polyphenolics of both species were mainly composed of cinnamic acids and flavonol glycosides. The major polyphenolic compounds present in S. canadensis were neochlorogenic acid, chlorogenic acid, rutin, and isorhamnetin 3-rutinoside, while chlorogenic acid and rutin were found to be major polyphenolic compounds in S. nigra. CONCLUSION Sufficient variability was seen among these genotypes to suggest that a successful breeding program could be carried out to improve levels of the various compounds evaluated in this study. Copyright © 2007 Society of Chemical Industry.
Investigation of the Blackouts Complexity Regarding Spinning Reserve and Frequency Control in Interconnected Power Systems

The dynamics of power system blackouts and the associated Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) behavior is a subject that receives continuous attention in view of its inherent complexity and relevant consequences. Within this context, the paper focuses on the short-term dynamic and, more specifically, aims at studying the role of the spinning reserve and frequency control on the blackout mechanism. The main contribution is to study the influence of the power system interconnections on the pre and post blackout system behavior. For this investigation, a statistical procedure, based on the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) method, is proposed to perform a blackout risk analysis considering cascading outages and generators frequency responses. The proposed procedure is then applied to the IEEE 118 bus system as an interconnected network characterized by three areas. The distribution of the blackout size and the number of component outages are assessed for the whole system as well as for each area.
La experiencia Universitaria influye en el abandono de la Universidad

espanolSe ha realizado un estudio exploratorio textual acerca de la desercion estudiantil a nivel universitario. El abandono de los programas academicos es una preocupacion permanente, y a su vez esta se ve relacionada por la experiencia vivencial que el estudiante obtiene. La experiencia universitaria tiene relacion directa a la toma de decisiones y de continuidad en el sistema educativo. Se mencionan varios factores posibles relacionados a componentes personales, sociales, del entorno, entre otros. Se concluye con un detalle resumido de los principales aspectos que influyen directamente en la desercion academica a partir de la experiencia universitaria. EnglishAn exploratory textual study has been carried out on student dropout at university level. The abandonment of the academic programs is a permanent concern, and in turn this is related by the experiential experience that the student obtains. The university experience is directly related to decision making and continuity in the education system. Several possible factors related to personal, social, environmental components, among others, are mentioned. It concludes with a summary of the main aspects that directly influence the academic desertion from the university experience.
Enhancing tools' intelligence for improved program analysis tool usability

Program analysis tools can help developers produce high quality code by automating time-consuming tasks such as error-finding. Research has shown, however, that these tools are often not used by developers. Results from studies I have conducted provide insights into the difficulties programmers may encounter when using program analysis tools, leading to lower productivity and desire to use them. Based on these findings, my dissertation will research improving program analysis tools by enhancing tool intelligence with a programmer model that adapts notifications to programmers based on their experience with the concepts relevant to the notification.
Research Methods in a Laboratory Study of Personality, Emotion, and Physiological Activity: Considerations and Choices

The way individuals respond to emotional episodes may be influenced by their dispositional motivational tendencies. Of special interest are those interactions between emotion and motivational attributes that affect cardiovascular activity and may thereby contribute to the onset and development of cardiovascular disease. To determine the links between emotions, motivational attributes, and cardiovascular health, we recently conducted a study in which participants were asked to recall two events: one that made them feel angry and one that made them sad. Measures of blood pressure and heart rate were obtained while participants recalled and described these emotional events. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring motivational tendencies toward behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition. In this article, we discuss important methodical considerations that arose as we developed this study, including design choices that are relevant to many kinds of research questions (e.g., using continuous predictor variables and a within-subjects experimental design) and choices that were more specific to our particular research questions (e.g., how to induce emotions and assess cardiovascular responses to emotional provocation). The resulting methodological discussion therefore may help inform future research, particularly that utilizing individual difference predictors, experimental emotion inductions, and cardiovascular dependent measures.
LOW LATENCY ASYNCHRONOUS FIRST-IN-FIRST-OUT ( FIFO ) IN DUAL-SUPPLY SYSTEMS

Low latency asynchronous first-in-first-out (FIFO) in dual-supply systems is presented in this paper. A new asynchronous FIFO cell is proposed and can be used to communicate data items among modules not only at different clock frequencies for globallyasynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) systems but also in dual-supply systems. The properties of the asynchronous FIFO architecture with peripheral handshake circuits in asynchronous wrappers are low latency, low power and scalable. For FIFO size of eight, simulation shows that the latency is 1.38ns at VDDL=0.9V for sender’s module and VDDH=1.5V for receiver’s module and the power dissipation is reduced about 69% compared to the FIFO cell without level converters. The simulation results are based on the TSMC 0.13um CMOS technology.
Building an enhanced experience base for better decision-making in choosing appropriate software development methods

The growing interest in agile software development shows that rationalising traditional software development can be beneficial, but the field is relatively new and research is still in an initial state. One question that repeatedly has been illuminated, by both practitioners as well as academics, is the applicability of the agile methods, such as eXtreme Programming. In particular, questions about the suitability of these methods to particular development environments and application domains are often recurring in the field. More importantly, however, is that there is no work that has produced a structured approach to empirically assess the applicability of agile methods. In this paper, a proposal of a design for how to address this issue is presented. The aim of this work is to examine when, where, how and why agile methods are used to gain an understanding of their applicability in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. This understanding will then serve as a basis for identifying critical success factors to build an enhanced experience base for better decision-making, which will allow project managers, developers and other interested actors to guide their decisions on software development method selection.
Pitch transposition and breathiness modification using a glottal source model and its adapted vocal-tract filter

The transformation of the voiced segments of a speech recording has many applications such as expressivity synthesis or voice conversion. This paper addresses the pitch transposition and the modification of breathiness by means of an analytic description of the deterministic component of the voice source, a glottal model. Whereas this model is dedicated to voice production, most of the current methods can be applied to any pseudo-periodic signals. Using the described method, the synthesized voice is thus expected to better preserve some naturalness compared to a more generic method. Using preference tests, it is shown that this method is preferred for important pitch transposition (e.g. one octave) compared to two state of the art methods. Additionally, it is shown that the breathiness of two male utterances can be controlled.
Modern Approaches to Radio Network Modelling and Planning

The 3rd Generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) radio access network relies upon novel, more flexible and efficient communication methods, a consequence of which is that novel modelling and planning approaches become of prime importance to the network’s rollout success. In this chapter, we will briefly consider the historical developments of radio network modelling and planning, thereby highlighting the need for a more modern approach to the subject. Equally importantly, we alert the reader to the limitations of modelling tools. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the advantages, disadvantages and limitations of both manual and automated optimisation processes.
Applying Active Online- Tutoring to Motivate Online Learners in a Work Based Environment

The outcomes of any learning activity are significantly enhanced if this learning involves the application of knowledge related to projects from the learners' work situation. Such work-based learning deals with solving interdisciplinary "real-world" problems and requires a high level of communication and interaction between learners and experts. The following paper demonstrates how to design and apply the innovative method of active online-tutoring in a way that supports learners in such work-based, interdisciplinary online-learning. It shows findings from the authors' own research with e-learning for continuing education and relates them to aspects presented at an international conference recently held in Vienna.
Dense motion estimation of the heart based on cumulants

Mutual Information (MI) has been extensively studied as similarity measure for the registration of medical images, and it has been found to be especially robust for multimodal image registration. However, MI estimators are known i) to have a very high variance and ii) to be computationally costly. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new similarity measure based on the sum of squared cumulants. In addition, our measure can be easily derivated with respect to registration parameters leading to an optimization with a simple gradient rule. Such a scheme is presented for a non-rigid registration and its performance is studied through computer results in the context of cardiac multislice computed tomography.
Elastic and effective spatio-temporal query processing scheme on Hadoop

Geospatial applications have become prevalent in both scientific research and industry. Spatio-Temporal query processing is a fundamental issue for driving geospatial applications. However, the state-of-the-art spatio-temporal query processing methods are facing significant challenges as the data expand and concurrent users increase. In this paper we present a novel spatio-temporal querying scheme to provide efficient query processing over big geospatial data. The scheme improves query efficiency from three facets. Firstly, taking geographic proximity and storage locality into consideration, we propose a geospatial data organization approach to achieve high aggregate I/O throughput, and design a distributed indexing framework for efficient pruning of the search space. Furthermore, we design an indexing plus MapReduce query processing architecture to improve data retrieval efficiency and query computation efficiency. In addition, we design distributed caching model to accelerate the access response of hotspot spatial objects. We evaluate the effectiveness of our scheme with comprehensive experiments using real datasets and application scenarios.
A Hybrid Approach Using Particle Swarm Optimization and Parallel Simulated Annealing: A Case Study of n-Queens Problem

This paper presents a hybrid approach by a combination of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and parallel simulated annealing (PSA). PSO is a population based heuristic method that sometimes traps in local maximum. To cope with this problem, we used simulated annealing. However, since SA is extremely greedy regarding the number of iterations, a parallel approach can be used to decrease total iterations. In this article, we used discrete PSO to achieve a good local maximum. Then parallel SA (PSA) is employed to escape from this locality. Study on the n-queens problem shows that PSO-PSA is promising in solving constraint satisfaction problems. Keywordsparticle swarm optimization,constraint satisfaction, parallel simulated annealing
Fractional Supervised Orthogonal Local Linear Projection

In this paper, a subspace analysis method called the orthogonal local linear projection (OLLP) is proposed. OLLP is an unsupervised linear dimensionality reduction method with orthogonal basis functions. OLLP aims to find the projective map that optimally preserves the local structure of the data set. It shares many of the data representation properties of nonlinear techniques and resolves the out-of-sample problem. Furthermore, a fractional supervised variation on OLLP is also proposed by utilizing the class label information. Experimental results show that the proposed methods are effective for linear dimensionality reduction and achieve high recognition accuracy in facial expression recognition.
The economics of classification: error vs. complexity

Although usually classifier error is the main concern in publications, in real applications classifier evaluation complexity may play a large role as well. In the paper, a simple economic model is proposed with which a trade-off between classifier error and calculated evaluation complexity can be formulated. This trade-off can then be used to judge the necessity of increasing sample size or number of features to decrease classification error or, conversely, feature extraction or prototype selection to decrease evaluation complexity. The model is applied to the benchmark problem of handwritten digit recognition and is shown to lead to interesting conclusions, given certain assumptions.
Human-computer-intuition? Exploring the cognitive basis for intuition in embodied interaction

One of the claimed benefits of embodied interaction is that it is an intuitive form of human-computer interaction. While this claim seems to be widely accepted, few studies explore the underlying cognitive mechanisms of intuition in the context of tangible and embedded interaction design. What is intuitive interaction? What makes an interface intuitive to use? We explore these questions in the context of a responsive auditory environment. We propose that intuitive interaction can be facilitated by instantiating an embodied metaphor in the mapping layer between movement-based input actions and auditory system responses. We search for evidence of benefit through a comparative study of the same responsive auditory environment implemented with and without an embodied metaphor in the interactional mapping layer. Qualitative findings about the complexities and limitations of designing intuitive interaction are summarised and the implications for the design of embodied interaction discussed.