Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discrete-Time Modeling of Acoustic Tubes Using Fractional Delay Filters

This work deals with digital waveguide modeling of acoustic tubes, such as bores of musical woodwind instruments or the human vocal tract. The acoustic tube systems considered in this work are those consisting of a straight cylindrical or conical tube section or of a concatenation of several cylindrical or conical tube sections. Also, the junction of three tube sections is studied. Of special interest for our application are junctions where a side branch is connected to a cylindrical or conical tube since these are needed in the simulation of woodwind instrument bores. Basic waveguide models are generalized by employing the concept of fractional delay, which means a fraction of the unit sample interval. A fractional delay is implemented using bandlimited interpolation. A novel discrete-time signal processing technique, deinterpolation, is defined. Applying fractional delay filtering techniques, a spatially discretized waveguide model is turned into a spatially continuous one. This implies that the length of the digital waveguide can be adjusted as accurately as required, and a change of the impedance of a waveguide may occur at any desired point between sampling points. This kind of a system is called a fractional delay waveguide filter (FDWF). It is a discrete-time structure but yet a spatially continuous model for a physical system. The basic principles of digital waveguide modeling are first reviewed. Modeling techniques for cylindrical and conical acoustic tubes are described, as well as methods to simulate junctions of two or more of these sections. Different design methods for both FIR and IIR (allpass) fractional delay filters are reviewed and the theoretical foundations of FDWFs are studied. Fractional delay extensions for acoustic tube model structures are discussed and approximation errors due to fractional delay filters are analyzed. In addition, a new technique for eliminating transients due to time-varying filter coefficients in recursive filters is introduced. The models described in this work are directly applicable to physical modeling and model-based sound synthesis of speech and wind instruments.
Attachment style and respiratory sinus arrhythmia predict post‐treatment quality of life in breast cancer survivors

Breast cancer is the most frequent malignant tumor among women in the industrialized world. The vast majority of these tumors can now be successfully treated. A subset of breast cancer survivors report quality of life (QOL) difficulties well after treatment is completed. The current study examined how individual differences in attachment style and self‐regulatory capacity (as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)) were associated QOL among post‐treatment breast cancer survivors.
Phrase detection Project proposal for Machine Learning course project

Queries made to search engines are normally longer than a sin gle word in length. In fact, [3] show in an analysis of Altavista query logs that approxim ately more than half of the queries have length more than one. Conventional IR methods p ropose intersection of the occurence lists for each word in a phrase, using various meth ods to reduce the time required for this task. Thus, the average response time of a search eng ine can be reduced by indexing terms which have length more than one. However, in a index whi ch as N words, there are potentiallyN bigram phrases and N trigram phrases and so on. Clearly it would be infeasible to index all possible bigrams, trigrams etc. We w ould therefore like to obtain such phrases which are “meaningful”which we define as their co-occurence being not merely due to chance.We will explore a probabilistic method of finding meaningful phrases in the Twenty-Newsgroups text corpus.
Prefrontal Plasticity and Stress Inoculation-Induced Resilience

Coping with mild early life stress tends to make subsequent coping efforts more effective and therefore more likely to be used as a means of arousal regulation and resilience. Here we show that this developmental learning-like process of stress inoculation increases ventromedial prefrontal cortical volumes in peripubertal monkeys. Larger volumes do not reflect increased cortical thickness but instead represent surface area expansion of ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Expansion of ventromedial prefrontal cortex coincides with increased white matter myelination inferred from diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging. These findings suggest that the process of coping with early life stress increases prefrontal myelination and expands a region of cortex that broadly controls arousal regulation and resilience.
Preservice Music Teacher Voice Use, Vocal Health, and Voice Function Before and During Student Teaching

Preservice music teachers often use their voices differently during the semesters leading up to student teaching as compared to during the semester itself. Vocal demands often increase and change as students move from a student role to full-time teacher role. Consequently, music student teachers frequently experience vocal distress symptoms that may arise from overuse and increased demand. The purpose of this descriptive study was to obtain self-reports of voice use and health, in addition to acoustical measures of voice function prior to and during student teaching. Data comparisons showed self-reported speaking and singing time increased while acoustic measures of voice function were normal. Participants reported changes in vocal health, difficulty with voice function, vocal fatigue, and increased effort in the falsetto register. Diminished vocal health was mainly attributed to wellness concerns and repetitive overuse as part of the instructional day as well as voice use outside of the instructional day.
Orion MinAngle: A flexure-based, double-tilting parallel kinematics for ultra-high precision applications requiring high angles of rotation

If you need to design ultra-high precision devices for mechanisms with multiple axes there are not a lot of ways leading around flexure-based joints. Using this type of articulations totally eliminates backlash and friction and is, by this, providing an accurate mechanical foundation for your device. The most important disadvantage of this technology is the low range of motion. The basic joint types, blades and circular hinges, have angular limits which strongly depend on the targeted stiffness, the quantity of motion cycles and the elastic limit of the material. This article will introduce novel parallel kinematics which are totally based on 1 dof flexures and whose angular range of motion is determined by twice the range of the single joint. It is a 3 dof parallel kinematic based on 3 identical kinematic chains which produce movements in θx, θy and z. The model has been designed to constitute the left hand of a machine tool that requires orienting the workpiece in a very precise manner and with high rotation amplitudes. Additionally to this it presents very interesting characteristics of Remote-Center-of-Motion (RCM) mechanisms. This is a vital feature for applications where the linear movements are highly limited and should not be consumed by parasitic movements of other axes. All these features, combined with the advantages of parallel kinematics, make the Orion MinAngle a very interesting concept. The model has been designed with joints achieving ±7.6° leading to an output angle of ±15° on both rotation axes. The study has shown really promising results concerning the mechanical properties, the high rotation angles and the RCM capabilities. The paper presents the kinematics and its optimization method which is used to guarantee a nearly perfect division of the output angle on all pivots of the mechanism. The next chapters talk about the dimensioning of the flexible joints and generally about the design of the robot. The last part of the paper verifies the optimization trough kinematic modeling of the robot and computes the mechanical properties like stiffness, internal strains and mechanical Eigenfrequencies. At the end we propose a realistic application as a 5-axes parallel-kinematic machine tool and we come to a conclusion about the potential of the Orion MinAngle mechanism.
Vehicular Traffic Monitoring Using Bluetooth Scanning Over a Wireless Sensor Network

The ubiquitous nature of Bluetooth equipped devices has made it opportunistic to scavenge information that can be repurposed for applications other than initially intended. One such opportunity is in vehicular traffic monitoring, whereby sampling of Bluetooth radios serve as proxies for vehicles and consequently for traffic density and flow. This paper discusses a complete data collection system developed at the University of Manitoba that utilizes a variety of wireless networking technologies and devices to collect inferred traffic data at an intersection along a major thoroughfare in an urban setting. Specifically, a wireless sensor network of slave probes was designed and implemented with the objective to collect Bluetooth device information for this purpose. To facilitate easy setup and a long battery life, a solar-powered probe design was investigated. Data from each slave probe is communicated to a master node through XBee communication, where it is stored on a secure digital (SD) memory card before being transmitted to a central server every five minutes over a global system for mobile communications (GSM) cellular network. The server parses the data received and stores it in a database. Consumer and corporate websites may then access this database to display archived data or current data in real-time to various users.
Internal Coordinate Molecular Dynamics: A Foundation for Multiscale Dynamics

Internal coordinates such as bond lengths, bond angles, and torsion angles (BAT) are natural coordinates for describing a bonded molecular system. However, the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation methods that are widely used for proteins, DNA, and polymers are based on Cartesian coordinates owing to the mathematical simplicity of the equations of motion. However, constraints are often needed with Cartesian MD simulations to enhance the conformational sampling. This makes the equations of motion in the Cartesian coordinates differential-algebraic, which adversely impacts the complexity and the robustness of the simulations. On the other hand, constraints can be easily placed in BAT coordinates by removing the degrees of freedom that need to be constrained. Thus, the internal coordinate MD (ICMD) offers an attractive alternative to Cartesian coordinate MD for developing multiscale MD method. The torsional MD method is a special adaptation of the ICMD method, where all the bond lengths and bond angles are kept rigid. The advantages of ICMD simulation methods are the longer time step size afforded by freezing high frequency degrees of freedom and performing a conformational search in the more important low frequency torsional degrees of freedom. However, the advancements in the ICMD simulations have been slow and stifled by long-standing mathematical bottlenecks. In this review, we summarize the recent mathematical advancements we have made based on spatial operator algebra, in developing a robust long time scale ICMD simulation toolkit useful for various applications. We also present the applications of ICMD simulations to study conformational changes in proteins and protein structure refinement. We review the advantages of the ICMD simulations over the Cartesian simulations when used with enhanced sampling methods and project the future use of ICMD simulations in protein dynamics.
Subcellular Synaptic Connectivity of Layer 2 Pyramidal Neurons in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Pyramidal neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are important for the control of cognitive and emotional behavior. The medial PFC (mPFC) receives diverse long-range excitatory inputs from the midline thalamus, contralateral mPFC, basolateral amygdala, and ventral hippocampus. While axons from these different regions have distinct distributions in the mPFC, their functional connections at the cellular and subcellular levels remain unknown. Here, we use optogenetics to show that layer 2 pyramidal neurons in acute slices of the mouse mPFC receive excitatory inputs from each of these regions. Using a combination of optogenetics and two-photon microscopy, we then determine the subcellular properties of these inputs. We find that different types of inputs make selective contacts at the levels of both dendrites and spines. Using two-photon uncaging, we show that this subcellular targeting strongly influences synaptic efficacy in these neurons. Together, our results show that functional connectivity is finely tuned, with important implications for signal processing in the mPFC.
Design and implementation of a requirements clustering analyzer for software system decomposition

Requirements clustering is a rww apprc)ach to system decomposition which is an important activity in developing large and complex software systems. It enables one IO divide a system into user-recognizable components where each component can bc used to satisfy part of the user’s needs. This paper clcscribcs the underlying concept of requirements clustering, and ciiscusses the design and implementation of the Requirements Clustering Analyzer that is an automated decomposition tool supporting requirements clustering. An example is presented to demonstrate the usage of the analyzer. Iuturc directions of the research are also suggested to improve the protot ypc system.
A-D-E quivers and baryonic operators

We study baryonic operators of the gauge theory on multiple D3-branes at the tip of the conifold orbifolded by a discrete subgroup Γ of SU(2). The string theory analysis predicts that the number and the order of the fixed points of Γ acting on S2 are directly reflected in the spectrum of baryonic operators on the corresponding quiver gauge theory constructed from two Dynkin diagrams of the corresponding type. We confirm the prediction by utilizing techniques to enumerate baryonic operators of the quiver gauge theory which includes the gauge groups with different ranks. We also find that the Seiberg dualities act on the baryonic operators in a non-Abelian fashion.
Evidence for a Selective Sweep in the wapl Region of Drosophila melanogaster

A scan of the X chromosome of a European Drosophila melanogaster population revealed evidence for the recent action of positive directional selection at individual loci. In this study we analyze one such region that showed no polymorphism in the genome scan (located in cytological division 2C10–2E1). We detect a 60.5-kb stretch of DNA encompassing the genes ph-d, ph-p, CG3835, bcn92, Pgd, wapl, and Cyp4d1, which almost completely lacks variation in the European sample. Loci flanking this region show a skewed frequency spectrum at segregating sites, strong haplotype structure, and high levels of linkage disequilibrium. Neutrality tests reveal that these data are unlikely under both the neutral equilibrium model and the simple bottleneck scenarios. In contrast, newly developed maximum-likelihood ratio tests suggest that strong selection has acted recently on the region under investigation, causing a selective sweep. Evidence that this sweep may have originated in an ancestral population in Africa is presented.
Passive crawling of a soft robot

In this paper, we describe passive crawling of deformable circular objects. Deformable circular objects crawl stably along a slope with no energy source other than gravity. Such passive crawling provides an efficient locomotion of a soft robot. Additionally, a passive crawling object can climb over a hurdle without any control. This paper explores the passive crawling through physical simulation and experiments. First, we examine the behavior of objects passively along a slope. Second, we analyze passive crawling experimentally. Finally, we formulate the shape of circular objects based on differential geometry for dynamic simulation of a passive crawling.
Water Assisted Growth of C60 Rods and Tubes by Liquid–Liquid Interfacial Precipitation Method

C60 nanorods with hexagonal cross sections are grown using a static liquid–liquid interfacial precipitation method in a system of C60/m-dichlorobenzene solution and ethanol. Adding water to the ethanol phase leads instead to C60 tubes where both length and diameter of the C60 tubes can be controlled by the water content in the ethanol. Based on our observations we find that the diameter of the rods/tubes strongly depends on the nucleation step. We propose a liquid-liquid interface growth model of C60 rods and tubes based on the diffusion rate of the good C60 containing solvent into the poor solvent as well as on the size of the crystal seeds formed at the interface between the two solvents. The grown rods and tubes exhibit a hexagonal solvate crystal structure with m-dichlorobenzene solvent molecules incorporated into the crystal structure, independent of the water content. An annealing step at 200 °C at a pressure <1 kPa transforms the grown structures into a solvent-free face centered cubic structure. Both the hexagonal and the face centered cubic structures are very stable and neither morphology nor structure shows any signs of degradation after three months of storage.
Attribution processes in mother-adolescent conflict

The present study aimed to (1) determine whether negative mother and adolescent attributions about one another are associated with increased conflict levels in a heterogeneous sample, (2) examine the possible differential predictive power of certain negative attribution types for different groups within the sample, (3) determine whether level of negative attribution, SES, or daily stress level are significant predictors of conflict, and (4) examine the potential mediating role of negative attributions in the relationship between SES and conflict level, as well as the relationship between and daily stress and conflict level. One hundred forty-five mother-adolescent dyads from various racial and SES backgrounds of a moderately large urban area in southeast United States completed self-report measures of attributions associated with negative behaviors of the other, stress levels, and conflict levels. Analyses indicated that negative attributions were significantly associated with increased conflict. African American mothers presented with a nonsignificant different attribution style than all other mother groups. Motherreported negative attributions, SES level, and mother-reported daily stress were significant predictors of both motherand adolescent-reported conflict. Negative attributions were not found to be a mediator in the relationships between daily stress and conflict level, as well as SES level and conflict level. Clinical implications of these data
Modeling backscattering variations due to flooding over vegetated surfaces

The objective of this study is to evaluate the possibility to identify floods when soil is covered by vegetation, recognizing differences in backscattering between SAR measurements acquired before and after the event. To this end, the electromagnetic model developed at Tor Vergata University is run for an early stage and a fully grown wheat field, at L, C and X band. Theoretical results show that flooding can be detected at all frequencies in presence of short vegetation, while L band is the most suitable one for developed crops. Results obtained in the case of early stage are in reasonable agreement with ERS data collected over grass fields before and after the strong flooding occurred in Alessandria (North Italy) in 1994.
Patterns of Change in User-Generated Social Media Behavior among Service Members Who Die by Suicide

Abstract : This is a secondary analysis of a retrospective study examining social media posts made by military Service members 1 year prior to their deaths. The sample consisted of 700 randomly selected military Service members who died by suicide and a demographically-matched control group of 700 military Service members who died of causes other than suicide. Social media data were previously coded by staff and students at the University of Utahs National Center for Veterans Studies (NCVS). The present study used data analytic methods consistent with dynamic systems modeling and were aimed at identifying suicide-specific change processes that could predict manner of death (suicide vs. control) and the imminence of suicide death (6 months prior to 1 day prior). Findings identified long-term, medium-term, and imminent signatures of emerging suicide death, suggesting there may be observable change processes in social media behavior that could signal eventual suicide.
An improved connectivity-based boundary detection algorithm in wireless sensor networks

This paper tackles the problem of boundary detection by proposing a simple, distributed and connectivity-based algorithm. Our algorithm examines the 2-hop iso-contour of each node, and outperforms existing algorithms examining iso-contours. Specifically, the proposed algorithm makes a rough decision on a suspected boundary node by examining its 2-hop iso-contour, and then refines the decision based on a heuristic operation, which significantly reduces the size of the suspected boundary node set. More importantly, boundary cycles corresponding to inner and outer boundaries are identified and provide valuable knowledge to various applications. A thorough evaluation shows that our algorithm is applicable to dense as well as sparse WSNs.
Full calculation of clumpiness boost factors for antimatter cosmic rays in the light of Lambda-CDM N-body simulation results

Anti-proton and positron Galactic cosmic ray spectra are among the key targets for indirect detection of dark matter. The boost factors, corresponding to an enhancement of the signal and linked to the clumpiness properties of the dark matter distribution, have been taken as high as thousands in the past. The dramatic impact of these boost factors for indirect detection of antiparticles, for instance with the PAMELA satellite or the coming AMS-02 experiment, asks for their detailed calculation. We take into account the results of high resolution N-body dark matter simulations to calculate the most likely energy dependent boost factors linked to the cosmic ray propagation properties, for anti-protons and positrons. Starting from the mass and space distributions of sub-halos, the anti-proton and positron propagators are used to calculate the mean value and the variance of the boost factor for the primary fluxes. We take advantage of the statistical method introduced in Lavalle et al. (2007) and cross-check the results with Monte Carlo computations. By spanning some extreme configurations of sub-halo and propagation properties, we find that the average contribution of the clumps is negligible compared to that of the smooth dark matter component. Sub-halos do not lead to enhancement of the signals, unless they are taken with some extreme (unexpected) properties. This result is independent of the nature of the self-annihilating dark matter candidate considered, and provides precise estimates of the theoretical and the statistical uncertainties of the antimatter flux from dark matter substructures. Spectral distortions can still be expected in antimatter flux measurements, but scenarios invoking large and even mild clumpiness boost factors are strongly disfavoured by our analysis.