Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Gait Selection for Nonholonomic Locomotion Systems

This paper addresses the optimal control and selection of gaits in a class of nonholonomic locomotion systems that exhibit group symmetries. We study optimal gaits for the snakeboard, a representative example of this class of systems. We employ Lagrangian reduction techniques to simplify the optimal control problem and describe a general framework and an algorithm to obtain numerical solutions to this problem. This work employs optimal control techniques to study the optimality of gaits and issues involving gait transitions. The general framework provided in this paper can easily be applied to other examples of biological and robotic locomotion.
(Almost) Total Recall - SYDNEY CMCRC at TAC 2012

We explore unsupervised and supervised whole-document approaches to English NEL with naı̈ve and context clustering. Our best system uses unsupervised entity linking and naı̈ve clustering and scores 66.5% B+ F1 score. Our KB clustering score is competitive with the top systems at 65.6%.
Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells regulate the regeneration of their niche by secreting Angiopoietin-1

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are maintained by a perivascular niche in bone marrow but it is unclear whether the niche is reciprocally regulated by HSCs. Here, we systematically assessed the expression and function of Angiopoietin-1 (Angpt1) in bone marrow. Angpt1 was not expressed by osteoblasts. Angpt1 was most highly expressed by HSCs, and at lower levels by c-kit+ hematopoietic progenitors, megakaryocytes, and Leptin Receptor+ (LepR+) stromal cells. Global conditional deletion of Angpt1, or deletion from osteoblasts, LepR+ cells, Nes-cre-expressing cells, megakaryocytes, endothelial cells or hematopoietic cells in normal mice did not affect hematopoiesis, HSC maintenance, or HSC quiescence. Deletion of Angpt1 from hematopoietic cells and LepR+ cells had little effect on vasculature or HSC frequency under steady-state conditions but accelerated vascular and hematopoietic recovery after irradiation while increasing vascular leakiness. Hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells and LepR+ stromal cells regulate niche regeneration by secreting Angpt1, reducing vascular leakiness but slowing niche recovery. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.05521. 001
Calibration of ΣΔ analog-to-digital converters based on histogram test methods

In this paper we present a calibration technique for sigma-delta analog-to-digital converters (ΣΔADC) in which high-speed, low-resolution flash subADCs are used. The calibration technique as such is mainly targeting calibration of the flash subADC, but we also study how the correction depends on where in the ΣΔ modulator the calibration signals are applied.
Improving the Measurement of Psychological Variables: Ideal Point Models Rock!

Although there is no doubt that Likert scaling suffices for straightforward scale development and use, it is important to appropriately model the response process for more complex measurement problems. In this response, we comment on the response process and four applications: assessment of dimensionality, computerized adaptive testing, differential item functioning, and individual differences in responding. In each case, we argue that correctly modeling the psychology of responding is critical.
Sic Semper Tyrannis? Power, Repression, and Assassination Since the Second World War

The killing of a head of state is among the most severe and consequential forms of political violence. But to date, there have been no systematic studies of the incidence of such assassinations, with the few existing case studies tending to emphasize the uniqueness of those events. Drawing on existing theories of social protest and contentious politics, we argue instead that institutional and sociopolitical factors should be important correlates of assassination. We examine empirically the implications of this theory, using data on the incidence of assassinations of heads of state between 1946 and 2000. Our findings suggest that institutional factors related to leadership succession, institutionalized power, and levels of repression interact to influence the occurrence of such killings. Notable in this respect is our conclusion that, while repressive leaders are at greater risk for assassination, the effect of repression is moderated by executive power, such that weak, repressive leaders in nondemocratic systems face the highest risk of assassination. Our findings dovetail neatly with the broader literature on other forms of insurgency, suggesting that assassinations are but one manifestation of the larger phenomenon of political violence.
Generalization Process for Loose Topological Relations of Regions

-In Geographical Information System (GIS), we use principally three features, such as PolyLine, Point and loose region to represent the geographic object. The loose region is used to represent the area objects where they have a loose shape as building or green area. Loose regions can be seen as an extension of simple regions described in Egenhofer model. In this paper, we treat the mutation of the loose topological relations into others relations, when we need to change the scale the map. A new topological model is presented based on simple regions which are defined in Egenhofer model and also on the assertions of mutation of the topological relationships according certain criteria.
A robust adaptive beamformer for microphone arrays with a blocking matrix using constrained adaptive filters

This paper proposes a new robust adaptive beamformer applicable to microphone arrays. The proposed beamformer is a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) with a variable blocking matrix using coefficient-constrained adaptive digital filters (CCADFs). The CCADFs minimize leakage of target signal into the interference path of the GSC. Each coefficient of the CCADFs is constrained to avoid mistracking. The input signal to all the CCADFs is the output of a fixed beamformer. In a multiple-input canceller, leaky ADFs are used to decrease undesirable target-signal cancellation. The proposed beamformer can allow large look-direction error with almost no degradation in interference-reduction performance and can be implemented with a small number of microphones. The maximum allowable look-direction error can be specified by the user. Simulation results show that the proposed beamformer designed to allow about 20 degrees of look-direction error can suppress interference by more than 17 dB.
The neurobiology and neural circuitry of cognitive changes in Parkinson's disease revealed by functional neuroimaging

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) often develop a spectrum of cognitive symptoms that can evolve into dementia. Dopamine (DA) replacement medications, though improving motor symptoms, can exert both positive and negative effects on cognitive ability, depending on the severity of the disease and the specific skill being tested. By considering the behavioral and clinical aspects of disease‐ and treatment‐mediated changes in cognition alongside the pathophysiology of PD, an understanding of the factors that govern the heterogeneous expression of cognitive impairment in PD is beginning to emerge. Here, we review the neuroimaging studies revealing the neural correlates of cognitive changes after DA loss and DA replacement as well as those that may accompany the conversion from milder stages of cognitive impairment to frank dementia. © 2012 Movement Disorder Society
Posttranscriptional regulation of hsp70 expression in human cells: effects of heat shock, inhibition of protein synthesis, and adenovirus infection on translation and mRNA stability

We have examined the posttranscriptional regulation of hsp70 gene expression in two human cell lines, HeLa and 293 cells, which constitutively express high levels of HSP70. HSP70 mRNA translates with high efficiency in both control and heat-shocked cells. Therefore, heat shock is not required for the efficient translation of HSP70 mRNA. Rather, the main effect of heat shock on translation is to suppress the translatability of non-heat shock mRNAs. Heat shock, however, has a marked effect on the stability of HSP70 mRNA; in non-heat-shocked cells the half-life of HSP70 mRNA is approximately 50 min, and its stability increases at least 10-fold upon heat shock. Moreover, HSP70 mRNA is more stable in cells treated with protein synthesis inhibitors, suggesting that a heat shock-sensitive labile protein regulates its turnover. An additional effect on posttranscriptional regulation of hsp70 expression can be found in adenovirus-infected cells, in which HSP70 mRNA levels decline precipititously late during infection although hsp70 transcription continues unabated.
P Is for Happiness, N Is for Sadness: Universals in Sound Iconicity to Detect Emotions in Poetry

This article demonstrates the potential of sound iconicity for automatic text analysis. This study claims that—at least in poetic language—the ratio of plosive versus nasal sounds in a text predicts its emotional tone as it is perceived by readers; that is, poems that have a relatively high frequency of plosive sounds are more likely to express a pleasant mood with high activation, whereas a relatively high frequency of nasal sounds indicates an unpleasant mood with low activation. Moreover, these findings are universal (i.e., they are independent of specific languages or language families). This article presents the results of an intercultural study testing the previous hypothesis.
Detecting and Avoiding Wormhole Attacks in Optimized Link State Routing Protocol

A particularly severe attack on routing protocols in ad hoc networks is the so-called wormhole attack in which two or more colluding attacking nodes record packets at one location, and tunnel them to another location for a replay at that remote location. When this attack targets specifically routing control packets, the nodes that are close to the attackers are in effect shielded from finding any alternative routes to the remote location with more than one or two hops, and thus all the routes are directed to the wormhole established by the attackers. In optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR), if a wormhole attack is launched during the propagation of link state packets, the wrong link information propagates throughout the network, leading to routing disruption. In this paper, we devise an efficient method to detect and avoid wormhole attacks in the OLSR protocol. This method tries first to infer links that may potentially lead to wormhole tunnels. The proper wormhole detection was then be applied to suspicious links by means of an exchange of encrypted probing packets between the two supposed neighbors (endpoints of the wormhole). Our solution has several advantages since it does not require any time synchronization or location information and shows high detection rate under various scenarios.
Critical Discourse Analysis and Policy-Orientated Housing Research

Positivism continues to exert a powerful influence on housing research. To a limited extent, this began to change in the mid to late 1990s with a number of researchers in Europe and Australia employing critical and poststructural theories to investigate contemporary housing issues. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), in particular, started to be seen as a tool that could be used to analyse and critique policy debates about urban regeneration, housing policy reform and managerialism. This paper begins by positioning discourse analysis within the field of housing research. The second part of the paper uses an empirical case study of housing policy change in the Australian state of Queensland to illustrate the limitations and possibilities offered by critical discourse analysis. The conclusions drawn from the study indicate that critical discourse analysis is a valuable adjunct to the dominant positivist tradition in housing research. However, for this value to be fully realised, more work needs to be done in a number of areas, including the development of more explicit links between material and discursive practices and a closer integration of CDA with other social research methods.
Religious Placemaking and Community Building in Diaspora

Community and loss of community have received much scholarly attention, whereas community formation and placemaking have been less well studied. Similarly, several studies have documented the role of religion in the lives of new immigrants, but little has been written about religious placemaking and community formation. Through an empirical study of a new immigrant group—the Hindus of Southern California—this article shows how religious placemaking helped build community. It details three salient components, namely, place planning and organization, place design, and place rituals, and also how these helped form and sustain community. It describes some challenges encountered and strategies used to negotiate, mitigate, or minimize them. In providing these delineations, it shows how religio loci and place nostalgia influenced and aided community building.
Values of parents : interpreting results of a survey of parents in terms of contemporary social change and educational policy directions

A survey of the values of parents of children in a primary school in the Western Cape provided significant although limited empirical material for the discussion of contemporary social change and educational policy in South Africa. The parents surveyed were mostly white, higher middle income class parents, who experienced life and work as very competitive, perceived themselves to be competitive as well, had a high level of satisfaction in their working life, felt themselves to be free and were generally satisfied with life. It was found that these parents give the highest priority to the development of the self-confidence and imagination of their children. This was a consistent pattern in their expectations for home and school formation. This finding is interpreted to be consistent with Ulrich Beck's expectation of value change in Second Modernity. The finding is also interpreted to mean that one could expect a high level of resonance between an education system that is value driven and the priorities of the parents. If parents want children to have a high level of self-esteem and a developed imagination, an education system that is not value driven but rule governed and/or simply performance orientated would be in conflict with their values. However, a closer look at the National Department of Education's specification of a values-driven education revealed an important gap between the motives for the Department's interest in a values-driven education and those of the parents. This gap will have to be bridged if schools in pre-dominantly white middle class areas are to align themselves with the national Department of Education's ideals of value formation in schools.
Forward modelling the rubber hand: illusion of ownership modifies motor-sensory predictions by the brain

The question of how we attribute observed body parts as our own, and the consequences of this attribution on our sensory-motor processes, is fundamental to understand how our brain distinguishes between self and other. Previous studies have identified interactions between the illusion of ownership, and multi-sensory integration and cross-sensory predictions by the brain. Here we show that illusory ownership additionally modifies the motor-sensory predictions by the brain. In our preliminary experiments, we observed a new numbness illusion following the classical rubber-hand illusion (RHI); brushing only the rubber hand after induction of the RHI results in illusory numbness in one's real hand. Previous studies have shown that self-generated actions (like tickling) are attenuated by motor-sensory predictions by the so-called forward model. Motivated by this finding, here we examined whether the numbness illusion after the RHI is different when the rubber hand is brushed oneself, compared with when the brushing is performed by another. We observed that, all other conditions remaining the same, haptic perception in the real hand was lower (numbness higher) during self-generated brushing. Our result suggests that RHI reorganizes the forward model, such that we predict haptic consequences of self-generated motor actions on the rubber hand.
Using Aspect-Oriented Programming to Trace Imperative Transformations

With the advent of languages and tools dedicated to model-driven engineering (e.g., ATL, Kermeta, EMF), as well as reference metamodels (MOF, Ecore), model-driven development processes can be used easily. However, the maturity of a software engineering technology should be evaluated by the degree of use of trace ability practices. One of the first major challenges consists in generating automatically trace information during a transformation process. Our contribution is a tool dedicated to infer traces during the execution of a model transformation. This tool is based on aspect oriented programming which permits us to isolate management of traces and imperative transformations code in a Java/EMF environment. A meta-model of nested traces allows the visualisation of traces as nested graphs which represent the trace ability links and the control flow diagram of the execution. A model-to-model case study is proposed as an example to illustrate our contribution.
Training-Induced Brain Structure Changes in the Elderly

It has been suggested that learning is associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in healthy young volunteers. It is not clear whether and to what extent the aging brain is still able to exhibit such structural plasticity. We built on our original study, now focusing on healthy senior citizens. We observed that elderly persons were able to learn three-ball cascade juggling, but with less proficiency compared with 20-year-old adolescents. Similar to the young group, gray-matter changes in the older brain related to skill acquisition were observed in area hMT/V5 (middle temporal area of the visual cortex). In addition, elderly volunteers who learned to juggle showed transient increases in gray matter in the hippocampus on the left side and in the nucleus accumbens bilaterally.
The Influence of Diversity on Learning Outcomes among African American College Students: Measuring Sex Differences

National survey data from 594 African American college students were analyzed using descriptive and multivariate statistical techniques to measure the impact of diversity on educational outcomes. Two research questions guided the present study: (a) How do interactional diversity experiences affect learning and development outcomes for African American undergraduates attending 4-year institutions? (b) Does this relationship vary between Black men and women? Results suggest that interactional diversity experiences are positively associated with perceived student learning across all six domains; interactional diversity is one of the strongest, consistent predictors of perceived learning included in the statistical models. Models explain different proportions of the variance in dependent variables, ranging from 16% to 23%. Implications for future policy, practice, and research are discussed.
Can Indicators Bridge the Gap between Science and Policy? An Exploration into the (Non)Use and (Non)Influence of Indicators in EU and UK Policy Making

This article examines the various roles that indicators, as boundary objects, can play as a science-based evidence for policy processes. It presents two case studies from the EU-funded POINT project that examined the use and influence of two highly different types of indicators: composite indicators of sustainable development at the EU level and energy indicators in the UK. In both cases indicators failed as direct input to policy making, yet they generated various types of conceptual and political use and influence. The composite sustainable development indicators served as “framework indicators”, helping to advocate a specific vision of sustainable development, whereas the energy indicators produced various types of indirect influence, including through the process of indicator elaboration. Our case studies demonstrate the relatively limited importance of the characteristics and quality of indicators in determining the role of indicators, as compared with the crucial importance of “user factors” (characteristics of policy actors) and “policy factors” (policy context).
Writers develop skills through collaboration: an action research approach

Collaborative approaches designed to increase writing productivity (amount written) as well as writing quality were implemented over a period of six months with a small group of 12 six‐year‐olds in a Primary School in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. The study demonstrated the positive nature of peer interactions with an increase in quality and productivity of writing products. The classroom teacher employed action research approaches where observations informed action, which in turn was reflected upon. Some central themes emerged from this study. It was found that collaboration often meant that students shared strengths and expertise, provided encouragement and assistance, as well as provided opportunities for peer tutoring.
Online tutoring and emotional labour in the private sector

Purpose – What happens when computer software is designed to replace the teacher and the human role is to service the relationship between the software and the learner? Specifically, this paper aims to consider whether or not emotional labour is performed in contexts mediated by technology in the private sector.Design/methodology/approach – The research is a single site, the online tutoring centre, in a large global education company in Europe servicing learners based in companies elsewhere. It is a critical case study with strategic importance for understanding the effects of the transformations to the education work afforded by a work design based on digital Taylorism. Qualitative methods are used, including observation, analysis of tutor/student e‐mail exchanges over a ten‐month period and interviews with key personnel.Findings – It was found that in spite of the drive for standardisation and consistency, online tutors engaged in considerable levels of emotional labour, individualised in its performanc.
Resident Location-Recognition Algorithm Using a Bayesian Classifier in the PIR Sensor-Based Indoor Location-Aware System

Intelligent home service systems consist of ubiquitous sensors, a home network, and a context-aware computing system that together collect residential environment information and provide intelligent services such as controlling the environment or lighting. Determining a resident's location in the smart home or smart office is a key to such a system. This correspondence presents an enhanced location-recognition algorithm using a Bayesian classifier for the pyroelectric infrared sensor-based indoor location-aware system that is a nonterminal-based location-aware system proposed in a previous paper. This correspondence compares the conventional and enhanced location-recognition algorithms and their performance. The feasibility of the system is evaluated experimentally on a test bed.
Conflict-Driven Disjunctive Answer Set Solving

We elaborate a uniform approach to computing answer sets of disjunctive logic programs based on state-of-the-art Boolean constraint solving techniques. Starting from a constraint-based characterization of answer sets, we develop advanced solving algorithms, featuring backjumping and conflict-driven learning using the First-UIP scheme as well as sophisticated unfounded set checking. As a final result, we obtain a competitive solver for ΣP2-complete problems, taking advantage of Boolean constraint solving technology without using any legacy solvers as black boxes.