Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vector fields for task-level distributed manipulation: experiments with organic micro actuator arrays

Distributed manipulation experiments were performed using a massively-parallel, microfabricated actuator array. An organic ciliary array of thin-film polyimide bimorph microactuators exploiting combined thermal and electrostatic control was employed to implement task-level, sensorless manipulation strategies for macroscopic objects. The tasks of parts-translation, -rotation, -orientation, and -centering were demonstrated using small integrated circuit (IC) dice. Strategies were programmed in a fine-grained SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) fashion by specifying planar force vector fields. When a part is placed on the array, the programmed vector field induces a force and moment upon it. The part's equilibrium states may be predicted and cascaded (using a sequence of fields) to bring the part to a desired final state. Vector fields with and without potential were tested in experiments, and the behavior of parts in the fields was compared with the theory of programmable vector fields. These fields were implemented by actuating the organic cilia in a cyclic, gait-like fashion. Motion in non-principal (e.g. diagonal) directions was effected by a pairwise coupling of the cilia to implement virtual cilia. These experiments suggest that MEMS actuator arrays are useful for parts-orientation, -posing, -transfer, -singulation, and -sorting.
L'avènement de l'entreprise communicationnelle

Pour l’auteur, le developpement de la communication au sein de l’entreprise fait du langage un veritable outil de travail necessaire a l’evolution des organisations. Il etablit une typologie des couts de discussion et de conversation. Il pense que l’avenement de cette entreprise communicationnelle passe par une nouvelle politique de l’emploi et d’encouragement a la motivation au sein meme des firmes.
An improvement of key frame processing by an integration of compressive sensing and intra prediction of H.264/AVC

A scheme of key frame encoding/decoding is presented for video coding by means of distributed compressive video sensing. The proposed method is referred to as video compressive sensing by intra predictive coding. The experimental result shows that the proposed method reduces the data size of the key frame information transmitted between an encoder and a decoder. It is demonstrated that the method outperforms the conventional DCVS with respect to the code bit size and noise immunity.
Impression Management of Sexually Motivated Behavior

Summary One hundred and thirty college males were unobtrusively observed buying “girlie” magazines. It was hypothesized that the buying of such magazines would be accompanied by additional behaviors designed to avoid anticipated negative reactions on the part of others. Results indicate that subjects who bought “girlie” magazines in comparison to those buying other kinds of magazines significantly more often requested a bag or also bought other merchandise. These findings were discussed in the context of the sex-guilt and face-saving literature.
Visualization of low Dimensional Structure in tonal pitch Space

In his 2001 monograph Tonal Pitch Space, Fred Lerdahl defined a distance function over tonal and post-tonal harmonies distilled from years of research on music cognition. Although this work references the toroidal structure commonly associated with harmonic space, it stops short of presenting an explicit embedding of this torus. It is possible to use statistical techniques to recreate such an embedding from the distance function, yielding a more complex structure than the standard toroidal model has heretofore assumed. Nonlinear techniques can reduce the dimensionality of this structure and be tuned to emphasize global or local anatomy. The resulting manifolds highlight the relationships inherent in the tonal system and offer a basis for future work in machine-assisted analysis and music theory. Comments Presented at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2005 : free sound), Paper ID 1200, held in Barcelona, September 5-9, 2005. http://www.icmc2005. org/index.php? selectedPage=119 This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_papers/193 VISUALIZATION OF LOW DIMENSIONAL STRUCTURE IN TONAL PITCH SPACE J. Ashley Burgoyne and Lawrence K. Saul Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania {burgoyne,lsaul}@cis.upenn. edu
A Method for the Direct Determination of Organic Nitrogen by the Kjeldahl Process.

One of the most conspicuous recent advances made in sewage analysis in this country may be said to be the development of a direct process for the determination of the nitrogen as ammonia.1 The greater simplicity of the technique, the greater economy of time effected by the elimination of distillation, and the relatively greater accuracy of the process are salient advantages of the direct method which surely cannot fail to be of moment in the routine work of sewage laboratories. To be able to apply a direct process to the determination of the ammonia formed in the determination of total organic nitrogen by the Kjeldahl process seemed the next step toward greater simplicity and rapidity of execution. During a considerable portion of the work at Columbus a direct process was in daily use for the determination of the nitrogen as ammonia, and a more intimate knowledge was gained of local conditions as to the disturbing factor of turbidity, to which, as we all know, has been chiefly due the indifferent success attending earlier attempts at the direct nesslerization of the acid digestate of the Kjeldahl process. Under such circumstances it was thought that a direct method for determinating nitrogen by the Kjeldahl process might be successfully developed. Working along lines by which a direct process for the determination of the nitrogen as free ammonia was successful under such unusually hard water conditions as prevailed at Columbus, a method was finally obtained by which the disturbing turbidity was completely eliminated. It is our purpose to discuss the several factors which have to do with the turbidity occurring in nesslerized tubes, and further to describe a direct method for determination of nitrogen by the Kjeldahl process, found applicable under Columbus condi-
Carbon Nanotube Flow Sensors

We report that the flow of a liquid on single-walled carbon nanotube bundles induces a voltage in the sample along the direction of the flow. The voltage that was produced fit a logarithmic velocity dependence over nearly six decades of velocity. The magnitude of the voltage depended sensitively on the ionic conductivity and on the polar nature of the liquid. Our measurements suggest that the dominant mechanism responsible for this highly nonlinear response involves a direct forcing of the free charge carriers in the nanotubes by the fluctuating Coulombic field of the liquid flowing past the nanotubes. We propose an explanation based on pulsating asymmetric ratchets. Our work highlights the device potential for nanotubes as sensitive flow sensors and for energy conversion.
Trip Coil Signature Measurement and Analysis Techniques for Circuit Breaker

The Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is a maintenance strategy that uses the actual condition of the asset to decide what maintenance needs to be done. The trip coil signature analysis for circuit breaker offers a cost-effective methodology in fulfilling the CBM requirement. In this paper, analysis of trip coil signature in circuit breakers is discussed together with different perspectives in implementing their methodologies. This analysis provides the essential insights from the perspective of mechanical degradation and control circuit reliability in assessing the performance of circuit breaker operation in switchgear. Finally, this paper disseminates the knowledge of the trip coil signature analysis methods, which leads to more effective switchgear maintenance practice in CBM.
Parameter Extraction for Neuron Model Simulation of Action Potential in Earthworm Giant Nerve Fiber

Proper modeling of neuron plays an important role in biophysical description of action potential of nerve fibers. Measurement in giant axon has historical importance as squid giant axon was used extensively for voltage clamp experiments performed by Hodgkin and Huxley in 1952. This paper presents the application of Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLAB in extracting parameters for neuron modeling. The model parameters are determined based on the measurement of action potential in earthworm giant nerve fiber with the help of Power Lab 4/25T supplied by ADINSTRUMENTS.
High Density Lipoprotein Structural Changes and Drug Response in Lipidomic Profiles following the Long-Term Fenofibrate Therapy in the FIELD Substudy

In a recent FIELD study the fenofibrate therapy surprisingly failed to achieve significant benefit over placebo in the primary endpoint of coronary heart disease events. Increased levels of atherogenic homocysteine were observed in some patients assigned to fenofibrate therapy but the molecular mechanisms behind this are poorly understood. Herein we investigated HDL lipidomic profiles associated with fenofibrate treatment and the drug-induced Hcy levels in the FIELD substudy. We found that fenofibrate leads to complex HDL compositional changes including increased apoA-II, diminishment of lysophosphatidylcholines and increase of sphingomyelins. Ethanolamine plasmalogens were diminished only in a subgroup of fenofibrate-treated patients with elevated homocysteine levels. Finally we performed molecular dynamics simulations to qualitatively reconstitute HDL particles in silico. We found that increased number of apoA-II excludes neutral lipids from HDL surface and apoA-II is more deeply buried in the lipid matrix than apoA-I. In conclusion, a detailed molecular characterization of HDL may provide surrogates for predictors of drug response and thus help identify the patients who might benefit from fenofibrate treatment.
Parallel Molecular Sequence Analysis on Workstations in the Internet

We present a highly scalable approach to distributed parallel computing on workstations in the Internet which provides signiicant speedup to molecular biology sequence analysis. Recent developments show that smaller numbers of workstations connected via a local area network can be used eeciently for parallel computing. We show that a massively parallel approach using several hundred workstations, dispersed over all continents, can successfully be applied for solving problems with low requirements on communication bandwidth. We calculated the optimal local alignment scores between a single genetic sequence and all sequences of a genetic sequence database using the ssearch code which is well known among molecular biologists. In a heterogeneous network with more than 800 workstations this job terminated after several minutes, in contrast to several days it would have taken on a single machine.
Theoretical analysis of a MAP based blind frame synchronizer

We have recently proposed in a blind frame synchronization method based on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach. In this letter, we study the properties of this method and show that this synchronization technique is well suitable for codes having a sparse parity check matrix, such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We also find the probability distributions involved in our synchronization criterion and expand the analytical expression of the probability of false synchronization. Through computer simulations we validate our theoretical results and show that this synchronization technique has excellent performance when applied to LDPC codes. We also show that this method outperforms another approach of blind frame synchronization that computes hard values of the syndrome instead of its log-likelihood ratios (LLR).
Broadening the horizon: toddlers’ strategies for learning mathematics

The aim of this study is to analyse and discuss those strategies for learning that are essential for toddlers’ development of an understanding of basic aspects of mathematics. Analysis focuses on authentic episodes where toddlers aged one to three are interacting with other people. The settings chosen for the qualitative analysis emanate from a variation theory of learning approach. In such an approach, learning is defined as a change in understanding, and in order to change a person’s understanding of a certain phenomenon, various aspects must be focused on simultaneously. Accordingly, critical aspects that a learner has not been previously able to focus on may emerge during interaction with others since such settings provide an opportunity for the problemisation of differing aspects and perspectives. This study seeks to discern toddlers’ strategies for learning through the observation of those strategies that the toddlers themselves initiate, which may reveal the competence for learning that young children possess.
M-sequence family from cultured neural circuits

We have already shown its feasibility by computer simulations that show a loop circuit can be copied to another area by back-propagation learning algorithm; this is a key function of brain intelligence, which includes functions such as memory, association, reasoning, and abstraction. We also have found M-sequences in spike trains of cultured neuronal networks. In this paper, we report that we found family or fragment of M-sequence responses also in the instantaneous firing rates (PSTH's) from cultured neural networks of published data and our own data, which suggest the existence of loop circuits with a feedback link composed of 3 to 5 neuron cells or equivalent circuits.
Characterization and Inference of Graph Diffusion Processes From Observations of Stationary Signals

Many tools from the field of graph signal processing exploit knowledge of the underlying graph's structure (e.g., as encoded in the Laplacian matrix) to process signals on the graph. Therefore, in the case when no graph is available, graph signal processing tools cannot be used anymore. Researchers have proposed approaches to infer a graph topology from observations of signals on its vertices. Since the problem is ill-posed, these approaches make assumptions, such as smoothness of the signals on the graph, or sparsity priors. In this paper, we propose a characterization of the space of valid graphs, in the sense that they can explain stationary signals. To simplify the exposition in this paper, we focus here on the case where signals were i.i. d. at some point back in time and were observed after diffusion on a graph. We show that the set of graphs verifying this assumption has a strong connection with the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix, and forms a convex set. Along with a theoretical study in which these eigenvectors are assumed to be known, we consider the practical case when the observations are noisy, and experimentally observe how fast the set of valid graphs converges to the set obtained when the exact eigenvectors are known, as the number of observations grows. To illustrate how this characterization can be used for graph recovery, we present two methods for selecting a particular point in this set under chosen criteria, namely graph simplicity and sparsity. Additionally, we introduce a measure to evaluate how much a graph is adapted to signals under a stationarity assumption. Finally, we evaluate how state-of-the-art methods relate to this framework through experiments on a dataset of temperatures.
Detection of microsporidial spores in fecal specimens from patients diagnosed with cryptosporidiosis

Patients infected with Cryptosporidium parvum may have concurrent infections with microsporidia. Two modified trichrome stains and a polyclonal indirect fluorescent-antibody procedure were used for the detection of microsporidia; the Merifluor Cryptosporidium-Giardia monoclonal direct immunofluorescence detection kit was used for the detection of C. parvum. Formalinized stool specimens from 60 immunocompromised patients strongly suspected of having or previously diagnosed with cryptosporidiosis or microsporidiosis were examined. All patients were positive for one or both parasites, 18 (30%) with C. parvum only, 25 (42%) with microsporidia only, and 17 (28%) with both C. parvum and microsporidia. These findings emphasize the importance of considering both organisms as potential causative agents of diarrhea in compromised patients.
Unsupervised Restoration of Hair-Occluded Lesion in Dermoscopic Images

The presence of artefacts such as hair shaft, thin blood vessel, ruler marking and air bubble in medical images makes the diagnosis of skin-related medical images very difficult. This paper uses a two-stage artefact detection termed Fast Image Restoration (FIR) via Canny algorithm and Line Segment Detection (LSD) operation for effective detection of artefacts. The Fast Marching Method (FMM) was applied at each stage for the removal of artefacts from a dermoscopic image in an unsupervised environment while ensuring morphological features of the lesion areas of the image data are preserved. Statistical Analysis performed to determine the accuracy of artefact recognition and repair validation of our method yields a Sensitivity of 98.27%, Specificity of 93.75% and Diagnostic Accuracy of 96.10%. These results indicate that our method gives an acceptable level of accuracy.
Linear discriminant analysis of MPF for face recognition

In face recognition literature, major approaches based on holistic templates and geometrical local features have been taken. Both approaches have certain advantages and disadvantages. We explore a method which integrates the above two approaches. Among many specific systems, we select LDA (linear discriminant analysis) and MPF (matching pursuit filter) as the representative from the first type approach and the second type approach respectively. We treat MPF as the feature representation of the original input and LDA as the pattern classifier. We compare the performances of MPF system, LDA system and the hybrid LDA-MPF system for face recognition.
Measuring Developers' Design Contributions in Evolved Software Projects

The work presented in this paper measures the contribution of developers towards evolved structural design of software systems. Measuring the contribution of developers is useful for project managers who manage the development process. Project managers can empirically identify developers who made changes to the structural design and compare among them based on their contributions. The proposed measures help to understand the nature of developers’ code changes activities. The process of calculating the measures is based on the historical code changes committed by developers. Specifically, code changes that affect the corresponding UML class diagram representation of the source code. Both type and amount of previous changes to class elements are used to measure the design contributions. The proposed measures are helpful for open source projects where no detailed information is available about various developers involved in the development process. A tool has been developed to automatically measure the contributions based on archived historical code changes. The measures have been applied on two open source projects. Results showed that only small number of developers have the major design contributions.
Environmental Surveillance of Poliovirus in Sewage Water around the Introduction Period for Inactivated Polio Vaccine in Japan

ABSTRACT Environmental virus surveillance was conducted at two independent sewage plants from urban and rural areas in the northern prefecture of the Kyushu district, Japan, to trace polioviruses (PVs) within communities. Consequently, 83 PVs were isolated over a 34-month period from April 2010 to January 2013. The frequency of PV isolation at the urban plant was 1.5 times higher than that at the rural plant. Molecular sequence analysis of the viral VP1 gene identified all three serotypes among the PV isolates, with the most prevalent serotype being type 2 (46%). Nearly all poliovirus isolates exhibited more than one nucleotide mutation from the Sabin vaccine strains. During this study, inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) was introduced for routine immunization on 1 September 2012, replacing the live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). Interestingly, the frequency of PV isolation from sewage waters declined before OPV cessation at both sites. Our study highlights the importance of environmental surveillance for the detection of the excretion of PVs from an OPV-immunized population in a highly sensitive manner, during the OPV-to-IPV transition period.
Endogenous rhythm generation in the pre‐Bötzinger complex and ionic currents: modelling and in vitro studies

The pre‐Bötzinger complex is a small region in the mammalian brainstem involved in generation of the respiratory rhythm. As shown in vitro, this region, under certain conditions, can generate endogenous rhythmic bursting activity. Our investigation focused on the conditions that may induce this bursting behaviour. A computational model of a population of pacemaker neurons in the pre‐Bötzinger complex was developed and analysed. Each neuron was modelled in the Hodgkin–Huxley style and included persistent sodium and delayed‐rectifier potassium currents. We found that the firing behaviour of the model strongly depended on the expression of these currents. Specifically, bursting in the model could be induced by a suppression of delayed‐rectifier potassium current (either directly or via an increase in extracellular potassium concentration, [K+]o) or by an augmentation of persistent sodium current. To test our modelling predictions, we recorded endogenous population activity of the pre‐Bötzinger complex and activity of the hypoglossal (XII) nerve from in vitro transverse brainstem slices (700 µm) of neonatal rats (P0–P4). Rhythmic activity was absent at 3 mm[K+]o but could be triggered by either the elevation of [K+]o to 5–7 mm or application of potassium current blockers (4‐AP, 50–200 µm, or TEA, 2 or 4 mm), or by blocking aerobic metabolism with NaCN (2 mm). This rhythmic activity could be abolished by the persistent sodium current blocker riluzole (25 or 50 µm). These findings are discussed in the context of the role of endogenous bursting activity in the respiratory rhythm generation in vivo vs. in vitro and during normal breathing in vivo vs. gasping.
Presenting ADHD symptoms and subtypes in clinically referred adults with ADHD

Objective: Despite the increasing recognition of persistent ADHD into adulthood, there is a paucity of information available on its clinical presentation in adults. To this end, we evaluated ADHD symptoms in a large group of outpatient adults with ADHD attending to issues of psychiatric comorbidity, gender, and age. Methods: We assessed 149 clinically referred outpatient ADHD adults (mean age [±SD] of 37 ±11 years) using structured diagnostic interviews for psychopathology including current and childhood ADHD symptoms. Using DSM III-R symptoms, we determined DSM-IV subtypes by proxy. Results: Inattentive symptoms were most frequently endorsed in over 90% of ADHD adults. An assessment of current ADHD symptoms showed that 56% of adults had the combined ADHD subtype, 37% the inattentive only subtype, and 2% the hyperactive/impulsive subtype. Psychiatric comorbidity with ADHD was more prominent in adults with hyperactivity-impulsivity as part of their clinical picture. Whereas females had fewer childhood hyperactive-impulsive symptoms than males, there were no gender differences in their current ADHD presentation. Conclusion: Findings from the current study suggest that the vast majority of adults with ADHD present with prominent symptoms of inattention. Given that ADHD adults are presenting from multiple domains, clinicians should carefully query for the inattentive aspects of ADHD when evaluating these individuals.