Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dependable localization strategy in dynamic real environments

Due to dynamic changes of an environment and various kinds of uncertainties in a real world, mobile robot localization is difficult to be solved by a single continuous algorithm. In order to achieve a practical localization solution generally, this paper proposes a strategy to deal with various uncertainties using explicit discretization of robot's status. Discrete status of localization is designed with three criteria as follows: (i) polygonal environment and non-polygonal environment; (ii) static environment and dynamic environment; and (iii) global positioning problem and local tracking problem are defined. An appropriate strategy is adopted according to the robot's status. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation results.
Toward Efficient Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Based on Textual Entailment

Peer-to-peer networks are gaining increasing attention from both the scientific and the larger Internet user community. Peer-to-peer systems are very large computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale information retrieval, like searching the Internet, is an attractive application for P2P systems. Data discovery and retrieval is of great importance to computer users and the broad Internet community. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to retrieve not only textual documents that have specified keywords, but also to discover semantically equivalent or entailed documents from given keywords. This approach is based on the recent natural language processing approach called the textual entailment approach
VIATRA - visual automated transformations for formal verification and validation of UML models

The VIATRA (visual automated model transformations) framework is the core of a transformation-based verification and validation environment for improving the quality of systems designed using the Unified Modeling Language by automatically checking consistency, completeness, and dependability requirements. In the current paper, we present an overview of (i) the major design goals and decisions, (ii) the underlying formal methodology based on metamodeling and graph transformation, (iii) the software architecture based upon the XMI standard, and (iv) several benchmark applications of the VIATRA framework.
Quantitative estimates of the distribution of homoserine dehydrogenase isozymes in maize tissues.

The low molecular weight threonine-resistant (class I) and the higher molecular weight threonine-sensitive (class II/III) isozymes of homoserine dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.3) isolated from Zea mays L. were shown to differ in stability during incubations in the presence of urea. Class II/III was inactivated by urea in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, with complete inactivation occurring within 24 hours at 5 degrees C in 4.0 m urea. Under identical conditions, neither the activity nor the properties of class I were affected. Therefore, it was possible to estimate the amounts and properties of both maize isozymes in crude mixtures by measurements of enzyme activity before and after treatment with urea.The relative amounts of the two isozymes proved to be tissue-specific. When shoots of etiolated seedlings were extracted under optimum conditions, the resultant preparations contained about 16% class I and 84% class II/III. This distribution of isozymes, as well as the regulatory properties of class II/III, were constant during growth of the seedlings between 4 and 13 days. Enzyme preparations isolated from shoots of light-grown plants contained higher proportions of class I. The two isozymes were not uniformly distributed within leaves, as the basal meristematic region contained high levels of II/III and small amounts of I. During leaf maturation, the amount of II/III declined while the level of I remained constant or increased slightly. As a result, nearly half of the enzyme extracted from leaf tips was class I. The synthesis of specific members of the aspartate family of amino acids might be expected to differ when the ratio of threonine-sensitive to threonine-resistant homoserine dehydrogenase is altered. However, additional information on the subcellular localization and the catalytic characteristics of the two enzymes is required for evaluation of this possibility.
Amazon is my hangout! Self-disclosure and community building in Amazon’s reviews

This study investigates patterns of self-disclosure in Amazon reviews measuring the level of sensitive information that different users revealed. Informed by Goffman’s work on the “presentation of self in everyday life”, this study investigates sensitivity of information by using the software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Using a crawler we collected 3,485 reviews from Amazon, for six products. Sensitivity was measured through five main LIWC categories that include the following: pronouns, social processes, affective processes, biological processes, and personal concerns. As a result, Amazon reviewers in the sample collected disclosed significantly higher levels of sensitive information in these categories: family, humans, affect, positive emotions, negative emotions, sadness, cognitive mechanisms, concerns related to work, achievements, leisure and money. Results seem to suggest that users experience Amazon as a community built around people, whose participants often show their humanity, their offline social circles, their affective processes, their emotions, and their concerns.
Dysprosody in Parkinson's disease: an investigation of intonation patterns

Acoustic research of intonation in dysprosody has often been restricted to overall measures - such as range and variability of fundamental frequency (F 0 ) - without consideration of the interactions between intonation contours and acoustic measurements. The aim of this acoustic study was to investigate three aspects of disordered intonation in hypokinetic dysarthria resulting from Parkinson's disease (PD): adequacy of accent patterns, timing of pitch accents, and the influence of levodopa-medication on peak height in fundamental frequency. Three PD speakers participated in a single-subject design study. Eighteen sentences were recorded at different times after ingestion of levodopa. Intonation contours were categorized and F 0 was measured at lows and highs of the observed contours. Compared to controls, PD speakers showed reduced peak height and placed F 0 peaks more often directly on the accented syllables. Medication caused a decrease of peak height in one of the accents in speaker 1, an increase of peak height in some accent patterns in speaker 2 and no changes in speaker 3.
Binocular fusion and invariant category learning due to predictive remapping during scanning of a depthful scene with eye movements

How does the brain maintain stable fusion of 3D scenes when the eyes move? Every eye movement causes each retinal position to process a different set of scenic features, and thus the brain needs to binocularly fuse new combinations of features at each position after an eye movement. Despite these breaks in retinotopic fusion due to each movement, previously fused representations of a scene in depth often appear stable. The 3D ARTSCAN neural model proposes how the brain does this by unifying concepts about how multiple cortical areas in the What and Where cortical streams interact to coordinate processes of 3D boundary and surface perception, spatial attention, invariant object category learning, predictive remapping, eye movement control, and learned coordinate transformations. The model explains data from single neuron and psychophysical studies of covert visual attention shifts prior to eye movements. The model further clarifies how perceptual, attentional, and cognitive interactions among multiple brain regions (LGN, V1, V2, V3A, V4, MT, MST, PPC, LIP, ITp, ITa, SC) may accomplish predictive remapping as part of the process whereby view-invariant object categories are learned. These results build upon earlier neural models of 3D vision and figure-ground separation and the learning of invariant object categories as the eyes freely scan a scene. A key process concerns how an object's surface representation generates a form-fitting distribution of spatial attention, or attentional shroud, in parietal cortex that helps maintain the stability of multiple perceptual and cognitive processes. Predictive eye movement signals maintain the stability of the shroud, as well as of binocularly fused perceptual boundaries and surface representations.
Aquatic Physical Therapy for Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis: Results of a Single-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial

Background and Purpose Aquatic physical therapy is frequently used in the management of patients with hip and knee osteoarthritis (OA), yet there is little research establishing its efficacy for this population. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of aquatic physical therapy on hip or knee OA. Subjects A total of 71 volunteers with symptomatic hip OA or knee OA participated in this study. Methods The study was designed as a randomized controlled trial in which participants randomly received 6 weeks of aquatic physical therapy or no aquatic physical therapy. Outcome measures included pain, physical function, physical activity levels, quality of life, and muscle strength. Results The intervention resulted in less pain and joint stiffness and greater physical function, quality of life, and hip muscle strength. Totals of 72% and 75% of participants reported improvements in pain and function, respectively, compared with only 17% (each) of control participants. Benefits were maintained 6 weeks after the completion of physical therapy, with 84% of participants continuing independently. Discussion and Conclusion Compared with no intervention, a 6-week program of aquatic physical therapy resulted in significantly less pain and improved physical function, strength, and quality of life. It is unclear whether the benefits were attributable to intervention effects or a placebo response.
Body Awareness: Construct and Self-Report Measures

Objectives Heightened body awareness can be adaptive and maladaptive. Improving body awareness has been suggested as an approach for treating patients with conditions such as chronic pain, obesity and post-traumatic stress disorder. We assessed the psychometric quality of selected self-report measures and examined their items for underlying definitions of the construct. Data sources PubMed, PsychINFO, HaPI, Embase, Digital Dissertations Database. Review methods Abstracts were screened; potentially relevant instruments were obtained and systematically reviewed. Instruments were excluded if they exclusively measured anxiety, covered emotions without related physical sensations, used observer ratings only, or were unobtainable. We restricted our study to the proprioceptive and interoceptive channels of body awareness. The psychometric properties of each scale were rated using a structured evaluation according to the method of McDowell. Following a working definition of the multi-dimensional construct, an inter-disciplinary team systematically examined the items of existing body awareness instruments, identified the dimensions queried and used an iterative qualitative process to refine the dimensions of the construct. Results From 1,825 abstracts, 39 instruments were screened. 12 were included for psychometric evaluation. Only two were rated as high standard for reliability, four for validity. Four domains of body awareness with 11 sub-domains emerged. Neither a single nor a compilation of several instruments covered all dimensions. Key domains that might potentially differentiate adaptive and maladaptive aspects of body awareness were missing in the reviewed instruments. Conclusion Existing self-report instruments do not address important domains of the construct of body awareness, are unable to discern between adaptive and maladaptive aspects of body awareness, or exhibit other psychometric limitations. Restricting the construct to its proprio- and interoceptive channels, we explore the current understanding of the multi-dimensional construct and suggest next steps for further research.
Estranged Wife, Other Man’s Beloved

Amid societal constraints, difficult repercussions, and double-standard morality on sexuality that favors the male members of their society, eight Filipino women engaged in extramarital affairs. To answer the question “Why did they commit and endure the affair? ” a phenomenological life-world approach explored their perspectives regarding the triggering and perpetuating factors of their extramarital relationships (EMR). The analysis revealed their standpoints that negatively perceived marital relationship quality, paternal neglect of children, increasing opportunities for EMR, that is, workplace and mobile technology, and positively perceived extramarital–alternative familial relationship quality emerged as the women’s reasons behind the decision to engage and endure in the affair.
Enhanced web search engines with query-concept bipartite graphs

With rapid growth of information on the Web, Web search engines have gained great momentum for exploiting valuable Web resources. Although keywords-based Web search engines provide relevant search results in response to users’ queries, future enhancement is still needed. Three important issues include (1) search results can be diverse because ambiguous keywords in queries can be interpreted to different meanings; (2) identifying keywords in long queries is difficult for search engines; and (3) generating query-specific Web page summaries is desirable for Web search results’ previews. Based on clickthrough data, this thesis proposes a query-concept bipartite graph for representing queries’ relations, and applies the queries’ relations to applications such as (1) personalized query suggestions, (2) long queries Web searches and (3) query-specific Web page summarization. Experimental results show that query-concept bipartite graphs are useful for performance improvement for the three applications. Index words. Queries, Query-concept bipartite graph, Web search engine, Text mining, Computational intelligence.
Demonstration of negative dispersion fibers for DWDM metropolitan area networks

We present a detailed experimental and theoretical study, showing that a novel nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber with negative dispersion enhances the capabilities of metropolitan area optical systems, while at the same time, reducing the system cost by eliminating the need of dispersion compensation. The performance of this dispersion-optimized fiber was studied using different types of optical transmitters for both 1310- and 1550-nm wavelength windows and for both 2.5-and 10-Gb/s bit rates. It is shown that this new fiber extends the nonregenerated distance up to 300 km when directly modulated distributed feedback (DFB) laser transmitters at 2.5 Gb/s are used. The negative dispersion characteristics of the fiber also enhance the transmission performance in metropolitan area networks with transmitters that use electroabsorption (EA) modulator integrated distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, which are biased for positive chirp. In the case of 10 Gb/s, externally modulated signals (using either EA-DFBs or external modulated lasers using Mach-Zehnder modulators), we predict that the maximum reach that can be accomplished without dispersion compensation is more than 200 km for both 100- and 200-GHz channel spacing. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the capabilities of a nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber with negative dispersion for metropolitan applications.
Linking climate information to livelihood strategies through ICTs: The role of integrated sustainable livelihoods framework

In this paper, we propose that an Integrated Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (I-SLF), that mainstreams ICT-driven climate information, provides the ideal means by which such information may be leveraged to ensure sustainable enhanced livelihoods. We focus on rural areas of Kitui County, Kenya. Guided by a range of theories such as Gender and Development (GAD), Bourdieu's ideas of social capital, and the Information Needs Assessment Model (INAM), we draw on the emerging variables to demonstrate that, while the SLF may have been formulated in a somewhat different context, its versatility is such that it remains the most appropriate tool for such studies in rural Kenya. Our view is that the continued access to, and use of, ICT tools like the mobile phone and radios offer diverse opportunities for rural communities to use timely and relevant climate information to enhance their livelihoods under the wider rubric of SLF. We hypothesize that rural communities' use ICT tools such as the mobile phones and the community radios to access localized climate information (weather, seasonal forecasts and agro-advisories) and that livelihood assets and livelihood strategies positively change with the increasing availability and use of the ICT-based climate information. The study is motivated by the increasing challenges of climate variability and climate change that affect Sub-Sahara Africa, creating problems such as food insecurity.
Dead-Beat Current Controller for Voltage-Source Converters With Improved Large-Signal Response

A digital dead-beat current controller for voltage source converters is presented in this paper. The control structure is specified in a digital hardware description language, synthesized, and deployed on a field-programmable gate array chip. By updating, with negligible computation delay, the duty cycle twice in a switching period, the reference current error is nulled in half a modulation period, so that the controller's small-signal bandwidth is maximized. In addition, due to a simple transient detection circuit, the large-signal response delay is reduced to a small fraction of the modulation period, which is determined by the chosen current signal oversampling rate. The controller can effectively support different voltage-source inverter applications, such as active filters, uninterruptible power supplies, microgrid distributed energy resource controllers, and dc-dc converter applications, including interface converters for renewable energy sources, laboratory battery chargers, and electronic welding machines.
A Longitudinal Study of Information Privacy on Mobile Devices

The real value of mobile applications is heavily dependent on consumers' trust in the privacy of their personal information and location data. However, research has generated few results based on actual information disclosure and even less that is based on longitudinal behavior. The purpose of this study is to execute a unique and authentic field experiment involving real risks and consumer behaviors regarding information disclosure over mobile devices. We compare two theoretical explanations of disclosure decisions: privacy calculus and prospect theory. Our results indicate that consumers are best modeled as "bounded" rational actors concerning their disclosure behavior. Also, actual information disclosure behavior over mobile applications is a more multifaceted issue than research has treated it thus far. For practice, mobile application providers should be aware that increasing the benefits of information disclosure via the app may have the counterintuitive effect of increasing perceived risk and reducing consumer disclosure.
(E)-Ethyl N′-(2-hydroxybenzylidene)hydrazinecarboxylate

There are two molecules in the asymmetric unit of the title compound, C10H12N2O3, with identical conformations. Each independent molecule is approximately planar and adopts a trans configuration with respect to the C=N double bond. Intramolecular O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds are observed in both molecules. The molecules are linked into a ribbon-like structure running along the b axis by intermolecular N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. The ribbons are arranged into layers parallel to (02).
Too Exciting to Fail, Too Sincere to Succeed: The Effects of Brand Personality on Sensory Disconfirmation

Across four studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers intuitively link disconfirmation, specifically sensory disconfirmation (when touch disconfirms expectations by sight), to a brand’s personality. Negative disconfirmation is often associated with negative posttrial evaluations. However, the authors find that when negative sensory disconfirmation is introduced by an exciting brand, the source of disconfirmation can sometimes be perceived positively. This occurs because consumers intuitively view disconfirmation as more authentic of an exciting personality. Similarly, despite the wealth of literature linking positive disconfirmation to positive posttrial evaluations, the authors find that sensory confirmation is more preferred for sincere brands because consumers intuitively view confirmation as more authentic of a sincere personality. The authors conclude by demonstrating the intuitive nature of this phenomenon by showing that the lay belief linking brand personality to disconfirmation does not activate in a context where sensory disconfirmation encourages a more deliberative assessment of the product.
A Contextual Approach to Modeling the Decision to Participate in a "Political" Issue

-) 1982 by Cornell University. 0001-8392/82/2701 -0000/$00.75 This paper examines the processes by which individuals both inside and outside an organization decide to become involved in organizational "political" issues. We use the theory of authority-task problems and expand it to include boundary-spanning authority-task problems. We assume that the contexts in which insiders and outsiders maketheir decisions influence their decision processes. Two models were developed to describe the contextual factors, one model for insiders, the otherfor outsiders. The models were tested using experienced university administrators and governance figures. Counterexamples were discovered in the course of the study, and the models were revised accordingly.
Improved localisation method based on multi-hop distance unbiased estimation

Range-free, distributed localisation method is a challenging issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Typical hop count-based localisation methods assume that the Hopsize for different hop count is the same. However, many observations in WSN indicate that this assumption does not always correspond to the practical situation. In this study, the authors propose an approximate distribution of k-hop node distance and derive the expectation of k-hop node distance under the above distribution. Furthermore, the authors propose a novel range-free localisation method based on the multi-hop distance unbiased estimation (MDUE), and the simulation results demonstrate that more accurate distance and localisation can be obtained by MDUE than the state-of-the-art methods.
Making graphic-based authentication secure against smudge attacks

Most of today's smartphones and tablet computers feature touchscreens as the main way of interaction. By using these touchscreens, oily residues of the users' fingers, smudge, remain on the device's display. As this smudge can be used to deduce formerly entered data, authentication tokens are jeopardized. Most notably, grid-based authentication methods, like the Android pattern scheme are prone to such attacks. Based on a thorough development process using low fidelity and high fidelity prototyping, we designed three graphic-based authentication methods in a way to leave smudge traces, which are not easy to interpret. We present one grid-based and two randomized graphical approaches and report on two user studies that we performed to prove the feasibility of these concepts. The authentication schemes were compared to the widely used Android pattern authentication and analyzed in terms of performance, usability and security. The results indicate that our concepts are significantly more secure against smudge attacks while keeping high input speed.