Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controller tuning and nonlinear compensation based on multilayer neural networks

This paper presents a controller tuning method for nonlinear systems by using the so-called virtual reference feedback tuning method and nonlinear compensation based on multilayer neural networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method, simulation is carried out for systems with nonlinearities such as hysteresis, cubic functions, and dead zones. Moreover, architectures and computational efficiency of neural networks are investigated through a widely-used deep learning framework.
Why do Internet services fail, and what can be done about it? 1

We describe the architecture, operational practices, and failure characteristics of three very large-scale Internet services. Our research on architecture and operational practices took the form of interviews with architects and operations staff at those (and several other) services. Our research on component and service failure took the form of examining the operations problem tracking databases from two of the services and a log of service failure post-mortem reports from the third. Architecturally, we find convergence on a common structure: division of nodes into service front-ends and back-ends, multiple levels of redundancy and load-balancing, and use of custom-written software for both production services and administrative tools. Operationally, we find a thin line between service developers and operators, and a need to coordinate problem detection and repair across administrative domains. With respect to failures, we find that operator errors are their primary cause, operator error is the most difficult type of failure to mask, service front-ends are responsible for more problems than service back-ends but fewer minutes of unavailability, and that online testing and more thoroughly exposing and detecting component failures could reduce system failure rates for at least one service.
Factorbird - a Parameter Server Approach to Distributed Matrix Factorization

We present Factorbird, a prototype of a parameter server approach for factorizing large matrices with Stochastic Gradient Descent-based algorithms. We designed Factorbird to meet the following desiderata: (a) scalability to tall and wide matrices with dozens of billions of non-zeros, (b) extensibility to different kinds of models and loss functions as long as they can be optimized using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and (c) adaptability to both batch and streaming scenarios. Factorbird uses a parameter server in order to scale to models that exceed the memory of an individual machine, and employs lock-free Hogwild! -style learning with a special partitioning scheme to drastically reduce conflicting updates. We also discuss other aspects of the design of our system such as how to efficiently grid search for hyperparameters at scale. We present experiments of Factorbird on a matrix built from a subset of Twitter's interaction graph, consisting of more than 38 billion non-zeros and about 200 million rows and columns, which is to the best of our knowledge the largest matrix on which factorization results have been reported in the literature.
Professionalizing the PTO: Race, Class, and Shifting Norms of Parental Engagement in a City Public School

A growing number of parents—particularly middle- and upper-middle-class parents—are working to fill budgetary gaps through their fundraising, grant writing, and volunteerism in urban public schools. Yet little is known about how this may shape norms and practices related to parental engagement within particular schools. Drawing from a case study of an elementary school undergoing demographic shifts in its student population, this article examines the scope and consequences of middle-class parents’ collective engagement. The research reveals that parents brought new resources and educational opportunities to the school, yet their engagement through the parent-teacher organization (PTO) and the school’s reliance on their contributions engendered tensions and exacerbated existing status positions among parents. The findings highlight the limitations of positioning middle-class parental engagement as a key intervention strategy in urban education.
Cognitive and Behavioural Characteristics of Primary Hypochondriasis

Abstract Although primary hypochondriasis is a distressing condition, existing treatment is unsatisfactory and prognosis is poor. Understanding of the condition and hence development of satisfactory treatment is likely to be furthered by investigation of the psychological processes which may be involved in the aetiology and maintenance of the condition. The Illness Questionnaire, based on a cognitive-behavioural formulation of hypochondriasis, was administered to cases of DSM-III hypochondriasis and to normal controls. Cases of hypochondriasis were found to differ significantly from normal subjects, having more frequent fears about their health, more abnormal beliefs about illness and more frequent illness related behaviours.
Associations between physical examination, laboratory, and radiographic findings and outcome and subsequent racing performance of foals with Rhodococcus equi infection: 115 cases (1984-1992).

OBJECTIVE To determine whether physical examination, laboratory, or radiographic abnormalities in foals with Rhodococcus equi infection were associated with survival, ability to race at least once after recovery, or, for foals that survived and went on to race, subsequent racing performance. DESIGN Retrospective study. ANIMALS 49 Thoroughbreds and 66 Standardbreds admitted to 1 of 6 veterinary teaching hospitals between 1984 and 1992 in which R equi infection was positively diagnosed. PROCEDURE Results of physical examination, laboratory testing, and thoracic radiography were reviewed. Indices of racing performance were obtained for foals that recovered and eventually raced and compared with values for the US racing population. RESULTS 83 (72%) foals survived. Foals that did not survive were more likely to have extreme tachycardia (heart rate > 100 beats/min), be in respiratory distress, and have severe radiographic abnormalities on thoracic radiographs at the time of initial examination than were foals that survived. Clinicopathologic abnormalities were not associated with whether foals did or did not survive. Forty-five of the 83 surviving foals (54%) eventually raced at least once, but none of the factors examined was associated with whether foals went on to race. Racing performance of foals that raced as adults was not significantly different from that of the US racing population. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS R equi infection in foals is associated with a decreased chance of racing as an adult; however, foals that eventually go on to race perform comparably to the US racing population.
Effect of Fruit Juice on Cholesterol and Blood Pressure in Adults: A Meta-Analysis of 19 Randomized Controlled Trials

Background The effect of fruit juice on serum cholesterol and blood pressure in humans has generated inconsistent results. We aimed to quantitatively evaluate the effect of fruit juice on serum cholesterol and blood pressure in adults. Methods We performed a strategic literature search of PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library (updated to October, 2012) for randomized controlled trials that evaluated the effects of fruit juice on serum cholesterol and blood pressure. Study quality was assessed by using the Jadad scale. Weighted mean differences were calculated for net changes in cholesterol and blood pressure by using fixed-effects model. Prespecified subgroup and sensitivity analyses were conducted to explore the potential heterogeneity. Results Nineteen trials comprising a total of 618 subjects were included in this meta-analysis. Fruit juice consumption borderlinely reduced the diastolic blood pressure (DBP) by 2.07 mm Hg (95% CI: −3.75, −0.39 mm Hg; p = 0.02), but did not show significant effects on total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) concentrations or systolic blood pressure (SBP) values. A significant reduction of TC concentration was observed in low-median intake of total polyphenols group. Subgroup analyses for HDL-C and LDL-C concentrations did not show statistically significant results. No significant heterogeneity was detected for all the measures. Conclusion This meta-analysis suggested that fruit juice had a borderline significant effect on reducing DBP, but had no effect on TC, HDL-C, LDL-C concentrations or SBP.
Protective effect of zinc preconditioning against renal ischemia reperfusion injury is dose dependent

Objectives Ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) is a major cause of acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease. Two promising preconditioning methods for the kidney, intermittent arterial clamping (IC) and treatment with the hypoxia mimetic cobalt chloride, have never been directly compared. Furthermore, the protective efficacy of the chemically related transition metal Zn2+ against renal IRI is unclear. Although Co2+ ions have been shown to protect the kidney via hypoxia inducible factor (HIF), the effect of Zn2+ ions on the induction of HIF1α, HIF2α and HIF3α has not been investigated previously. Materials and methods The efficacy of different preconditioning techniques was assessed using a Sprague-Dawley rat model of renal IRI. Induction of HIF proteins following Zn2+ treatment of the human kidney cell lines HK-2 (immortalized normal tubular cells) and ACHN (renal cancer) was measured using Western Blot. Results Following 40 minutes of renal ischemia in rats, cobalt preconditioning offered greater protection against renal IRI than IC as evidenced by lower peak serum creatinine and urea concentrations. ZnCl2 (10 mg/kg) significantly lowered the creatinine and urea concentrations compared to saline-treated control rats following a clinically relevant 60 minutes of ischemia. Zn2+ induced expression of HIF1α and HIF2α but not HIF3α in HK-2 and ACHN cells. Conclusion ZnCl2 preconditioning protects against renal IRI in a dose-dependent manner. Further studies are warranted to determine the possible mechanisms involved, and to assess the benefit of ZnCl2 preconditioning for clinical applications.
Hugging the Teacher: Reading Bodily Practice in an Israeli Kindergarten.

This paper, based on an ethnographic study of an Israeli kindergarten, describes the practice of hugging, by the girls, of the teacher, and the latter's response to the girls' initiative. Based on Bourdieu's concept of habitus and the assumption that embodiment is crucial to social–cultural learning, the paper demonstrates the complex interweaving of social meanings that may be experienced through, and read into, the practice of hugging. By focusing on this single bodily practice, and endeavouring to reveal some of the richness of interpretation that emerges out of such a focus, the paper aims to show how the educational researcher, in setting out an array of possible readings, may provide teachers with innovative ways of seeing the routine practices of classroom life.
Most apparent distortion: full-reference image quality assessment and the role of strategy

The mainstream approach to image quality assessment has centered around accurately modeling the single most relevant strategy employed by the human visual system (HVS) when judging image quality (e.g., detecting visible differences, and extracting image structure/information). In this work, we suggest that a single strategy may not be sufficient; rather, we advocate that the HVS uses multiple strategies to determine image quality. For images containing near-threshold distortions, the image is most apparent, and thus the HVS attempts to look past the image and look for the distortions (a detection-based strategy). For images containing clearly visible distortions, the distortions are most apparent, and thus the HVS attempts to look past the distortion and look for the image's subject matter (an appearance-based strategy). Here, we present a quality assessment method [most apparent distortion (MAD)], which attempts to explicitly model these two separate strategies. Local luminance and contrast masking are used to estimate detection-based perceived distortion in high-quality images, whereas changes in the local statistics of spatial-frequency components are used to estimate appearance-based perceived distortion in low-quality images. We show that a combination of these two measures can perform well in predicting subjective ratings of image quality.
A Functional Analysis of the Spacer of V(D)J Recombination Signal Sequences

During lymphocyte development, V(D)J recombination assembles antigen receptor genes from component V, D, and J gene segments. These gene segments are flanked by a recombination signal sequence (RSS), which serves as the binding site for the recombination machinery. The murine Jβ2. 6 gene segment is a recombinationally inactive pseudogene, but examination of its RSS reveals no obvious reason for its failure to recombine. Mutagenesis of the Jβ2. 6 RSS demonstrates that the sequences of the heptamer, nonamer, and spacer are all important. Strikingly, changes solely in the spacer sequence can result in dramatic differences in the level of recombination. The subsequent analysis of a library of more than 4,000 spacer variants revealed that spacer residues of particular functional importance are correlated with their degree of conservation. Biochemical assays indicate distinct cooperation between the spacer and heptamer/nonamer along each step of the reaction pathway. The results suggest that the spacer serves not only to ensure the appropriate distance between the heptamer and nonamer but also regulates RSS activity by providing additional RAG:RSS interaction surfaces. We conclude that while RSSs are defined by a “digital” requirement for absolutely conserved nucleotides, the quality of RSS function is determined in an “analog” manner by numerous complex interactions between the RAG proteins and the less-well conserved nucleotides in the heptamer, the nonamer, and, importantly, the spacer. Those modulatory effects are accurately predicted by a new computational algorithm for “RSS information content. ” The interplay between such binary and multiplicative modes of interactions provides a general model for analyzing protein–DNA interactions in various biological systems.
Slicing concurrent programs

Slicing is a well-known program analysis technique for analyzing sequential programs and found useful in debugging, testing and reverse engineering. This paper extends the notion of slicing to concurrent programs with shared memory, interleaving semantics and mutual exclusion. Interference among concurrent threads or processes complicates the computation of slices of concurrent programs. Further, unlike slicing of sequential programs, a slicing algorithm for concurrent programs needs to differentiate between loop-independent data dependence and certain loop-carried data dependences. We show why previous methods do not give precise solutions in the presence of nested threads and loops and describe our solution that correctly and efficiently computes precise slices. Though the complexity of this algorithm is exponential on the number of threads, a number of optimizations are suggested. Using these optimizations, we are able to get near linear behavior for many practical concurrent programs.
A practical method for combining multivariate data in radio environment mapping

In a cognitive radio system, awareness of the prevailing radio environment of the primary network, such as digital terrestrial television, is important since it governs the emission limits for the secondary system devices. Field strength estimates of the primary network are typically computed using terrain based radio propagation models, or by using univariate interpolation techniques to approximate the field strength from measurement samples. However, the limited geographical information or small numbers of measurement samples sets a restriction on the accuracy of the field strength estimates. In this paper, we propose a multivariate interpolation method for incorporating field measurements into radio propagation models. The proposed method shows considerable increase in estimation accuracy compared to previously presented methods. The model is verified using field measurement data from an operational digital terrestrial television network.
Effects of ConditionedMediumuponProliferation , Deoxynucleotide Metabolism , and AntimetaboliteSensitivityof Promyelocytic LeukemicCells in Vitro ' 1

In order to investigate the interaction of factors from leukocyteconditioned medium with leukemic cells, effects of an ammonium sulfate-precipitated conditioned medium concentrate were tested upon HL-60 cells. This preparation increased tritiated thymidine incorporation into DNA of HL-60 cells markedly, an effect which was found to be attributable in large part to greater thymidine accumulation in the intracellular nucleotide triphosphate pool. A modestly expanded population of DNA synthetic phase cells was also demonstrated by flow cytometry. Similar effects were noted of the K562 and KG-1 cell lines and were also demonstrable with giant cell tumor-conditioned medium. These effects were not demonstrable with a purified preparation of granulocyte-monocyte colony-stimulated factor. Because of the altered pattern of nucleotide metabolism noted, the effect of the conditioned medium concentrate upon 5-fluorouracil sensitiv ity was tested. Following continuous 24-h exposure to 5-fluo rouracil at 5 x 10~6 M, tritiated thymidine incorporation of HL-60 cells increased in parallel with depletion of endogenous thymidylate. Conditioned medium concentrate markedly sensitized cells to this effect of 5-fluorouracil and also increased growth retardation, cytotoxicity, and cell cycle arrest as assessed by flow cytometry. These studies thus demonstrated marked effects of a factor in conditioned medium on deoxynucleotide uptake and metabolism of the HL-60 line. These effects occurred in conjunction with, but were relatively more marked than, effects upon cell cycle distribution and were found to influence chemo therapy sensitivity.
A feature-assisted search strategy for block motion estimation

Block motion estimation using the exhaustive full search is computationally intensive. Previous fast search algorithms tend to reduce the computation by limiting the number of locations to be searched. Nearly all of these algorithms rely on the assumption: the mean absolute distortion (MAD) function increases monotonically as the search location moves away from the global minimum. Unfortunately, this is usually not true in real-world video signals. However, we can reasonably assume that it is monotonic in a small neighbourhood around the global minimum. Consequently, one simple, but perhaps the most efficient and reliable strategy, is to put the checking point as close as possible to the global minimum. In this paper, some image features are suggested to locate the initial search points. Such a guided scheme is based on the location of some feature points. After a feature detecting process was applied to each frame to extract a set of feature points as matching primitives, we studied extensively the statistical behaviour of these matching primitives and found that they are highly correlated with the MAD error surface of real-world motion vectors. These correlation characteristics are extremely useful for fast search algorithms. The results are robust and the implementation could be very efficient.
Local multiple orientations estimation using k-medoids

Estimation of local multiple orientations plays an important role in many image processing and computer vision tasks. It has been shown that the detection of orientations in an image patch corresponds to fitting multiple axes to its Fourier transform. In this paper, k-medoids are introduced to detect local multiple orientations in the Fourier domain. Medoids are related to a well-known matrix eigenvector problem. A hierarchical schema with eigensystem and energy distribution analysis is employed to determine the number of orientations in an image patch. The proposed approach detects two types of orientation structure (ridges and edges) without difference. Experimental results on synthetic and real images show that the proposed method can detect multiple orientations with high accuracy and is robust against noise.
Classification of ECG Signals Using Extreme Learning Machine

An Electrocardiogram or ECG is an electrical recording of the heart and is used in the investigation of heart disease. This ECG can be classified as normal and abnormal signals. The classification of the ECG signals is presently performed with the support vector machine. The generalization performance of the SVM classifier is not sufficient for the correct classification of ECG signals. To overcome this problem the ELM classifier is used which works by searching for the best value of the parameters that tune its discriminant function, and upstream by looking for the best subset of features that feed the classifier. The experiments were conducted on the ECG data from the Physionet arrhythmia database to classify five kinds of abnormal waveforms and normal beats. In this paper a thorough experimental study was done to show the superiority of the generalization capability of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is presented and compared with support vector machine (SVM) approach in the automatic classification of ECG beats. In particular, the sensitivity of the ELM classifier is tested and that is compared with SVM combined with two classifiers, they are the k-nearest neighbor classifier (kNN) and the radial basis function neural network classifier (RBF), with respect to the curse of dimensionality and the number of available training beats. The obtained results clearly confirm the superiority of the ELM approach as compared to traditional classifiers.
A method of estimating the relative volumes of water flowing over the different gills of a freshwater fish.

1. A technique is described which uses marker parasites to estimate the relative volumes of water flowing over the different gills of a freshwater fish. 2. It was found that in brown trout from Windermere most of the respiratory current flows over the second and third pairs of gills, less flows over the first pair on each side and least of all across the most posterior pairs of gill. Similarly, the median pair of gill slits carries more of the respiratory current than any of the other slits whereas first and fifth pairs of gill slits together carry only about one-sixth of the total water flow. 3. Hatchery-bred brown trout showed a slight but significant difference in pattern of water movement over their gills following vigorous exercise. Possible reasons for this are discussed.
Super Janus

We propose and study a supersymmetric version of the Janus domain wall solution of type IIB supergravity. Janus is dual to N = 4 super Yang Mills theory with a coupling constant that jumps across an interface. While the interface in the Janus ﬁeld theory completely breaks all supersymmetries, it was found earlier that some supersymmetry can be restored in the ﬁeld theory at the cost of breaking the SO (6) R-symmetry down to at least SU (3). We ﬁnd the gravity dual to this supersymmetric interface theory by studying the SU(3) invariant subsector of N = 8 gauged supergravity in 5d, which is described by 5D N = 2 gauged supergravity with one hypermultiplet.