Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel DTC-SVM method using matrix converter fed induction motor

This paper presents a novel DTC-SVM method for matrix converter fed induction motor. The advantages of DTC method are combined with the advantages of the matrix converter based on the direct space vector modulation (DSVM) technique. This proposed method provides a precious input power factor control capability beside the high control performances. Furthermore, the FFT spectrum analysis of the input current shows the better harmonic contents as compared to the conventional DTC method. The simulation results of 5HP induction motor control at both steady state and transient state are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Short‐term splenic impact of single‐strand DNA functionalized multi‐walled carbon nanotubes intraperitoneally injected in rats

In recent years, a great deal of studies have focused on the possible toxicity of carbon nanotubes (CNT), as a result of their potential applications in the field of nanotechnologies. The investigation of spleen toxicity is part of the carbon nanotubes‐induced toxicity assessment. In this study, we investigated the possible toxic effects of CNT on the rat spleen, after intraperitoneally (i.p.) administration of a single dose [1.5 ml; 2 mg multi‐walled (MW) CNT per body weight (bw)] of multi‐walled carbon nanotubes (exterior diameter 15–25 nm, interior diameter 10–15 nm, surface 88 m2 g–1) functionalized 1:1 with single‐strand DNA (ss‐DNA‐MWCNT, 270 mg l–1). CNT functionalization with DNA determines a stable dispersion in the body fluids. For the detection of carbon nanotubes in the spleen, Raman spectroscopy, histopathologic examination, confocal microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were performed at different time points (1, 6, 24, 48 and 144 h) after MWCNT administration. The dynamics of oxidative stress parameters (malondialdehyde, protein carbonyls and reduced glutathione), along with nitrosative stress parameters (nitric oxide, inducible NO synthase), the pro‐inflammatory cytokines [interleukin‐(IL)‐1β] and the number of cells expressing caspase 3 and proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) were assessed. Our results indicate that, after i.p. administration, MWCNT translocate progressively in the spleen, with a peak of concentration after 48 h, and determine lymphoid hyperplasia and an increase in the number of cells which undergo apoptosis, in parallel with the enhancement of the mitosis in the white pulp and with transient alterations of oxidative stress and inflammation that need further investigations for a longer period of monitoring. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Ensemble strategies in Compact Differential Evolution

Differential Evolution is a population based stochastic algorithm with less number of parameters to tune. However, the performance of DE is sensitive to the mutation and crossover strategies and their associated parameters. To obtain optimal performance, DE requires time consuming trial and error parameter tuning. To overcome the computationally expensive parameter tuning different adaptive/self-adaptive techniques have been proposed. Recently the idea of ensemble strategies in DE has been proposed and favorably compared with some of the state-of-the-art self-adaptive techniques. Compact Differential Evolution (cDE) is modified version of DE algorithm which can be effectively used to solve real world problems where sufficient computational resources are not available. cDE can be implemented on devices such as micro controllers or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which have limited memory. In this paper we introduced the idea of ensemble into cDE to improve its performance. The proposed algorithm is tested on the 30D version of 14 benchmark problems of Conference on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2005. The employment of ensemble strategies for the cDE algorithms appears to be beneficial and leads, for some problems, to competitive results with respect to the-state-of-the-art DE based algorithms
A Coherent Multiple Beamforming Network for a Non-uniform Circular Antenna Array

This work proposes and describes a modular and innovative beamforming network (BFN) to feed a nonequally spaced circular antenna array. The structure is based on a set of alternated power combiners and dividers that delivers a Gaussian-like amplitude distribution and coherent (in-phase) signals. A multiple beam antenna system to generate two main beams in the same aperture with a coherent network for a nonuniform array with beam shaping and beam steering properties is simulated and analyzed. Furthermore, a comparative analysis based on uniform and nonuniform circular antenna arrays fed by the proposed coherent network is conducted. The complex signals and the nonuniform circular aperture are optimized using the well known differential evolution technique. Numerical experiments show the efficiency and improvement of the coherent network with a nonuniform aperture over uniform, with an advantage in average equal to 1.8dB of directivity and -2dB of side lobe level. Moreover, the simulation results exhibit an aperture reuse and complexity reduction of the proposed coherent network configuration compared with a conventional antenna array with direct feeding, where each main beam is shaped and steered with the half of control signal inputs.
Institutional Aspects of Systems Development

This paper reports on research into how a systems development methodology (SDM) operates as an institution: specifically - an institutional carrier in the process of systems development. The case study develops the argument that institutional structures (such as authority, norms, symbolic values, and routine ways of doing things) embedded within the methodology are active forces in the systems development process, and therefore constitutes 'institution'. We ground our argument on the findings from a study of an in-house developed SDM in a large IT department within a major bank in Australia. The findings show how the SDM exerts its influence in the bank through a combination of shared regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements. As a second contribution to research, the study operationalises a framework derived from new institutional theory that integrates elements of a social actor model outside its original domain to provide a deeper understanding of the institutional forces at play in information systems development. All these findings are significant in that they draw attention to the role of institutional carriers, control structures, conflicting interests, and power that appear largely outside the domain of the systems developer.
Improvement of power quality for three-phase grids using single-phase DG with active filter function units

As a solution for reducing the harmonic current from low-power single-phase applications, distributed generation (DG) units with a harmonic compensation function have been discussed. It is expected that this technology contributes to improvement in power quality of power distribution grids. On the other hand, it has been reported that conventional active filters is not always effective in improving the power quality in power distribution system. This paper presents a harmonic current suppression method using single-phase DG units in three-phase three-wire systems. The purpose of the proposed method is to suppress harmonic currents in a three-phase grid, not a single-phase grid. To validate the proposed harmonic compensation method, simulated and experimental results are presented. In addition, it will be discussed a total power rating of the single-phase active filters.
Delayed Endovascular Revascularization in a Patient With Progressive Neurological Deterioration From Bilateral Intracranial Vertebral Artery Occlusions: Case Report

BACKGROUND AND IMPORTANCE:This article describes delayed endovascular revascularization in a patient with clinical and radiographic evidence of posterior circulation hemodynamic failure in the setting of intracranial occlusive lesions. CLINICAL PRESENTATION:A 48-year-old man presented with a 6-week history of progressive headache, nausea, and ataxia. Bilateral intracranial vertebral artery occlusions and a left posterior inferior cerebellar artery stroke were diagnosed, and the patient began warfarin therapy. Despite these measures, the patient developed dense lower cranial neuropathies, including severe dysarthria, decreased left-sided hearing acuity, and left facial droop. He presented at this point for endovascular evaluation. The patient underwent successful revascularization with intravascular Wingspan stents (Boston Scientific, Natick, Massachusetts) in a delayed fashion (approximately 6 weeks after his initial stroke presentation). His neurological syndrome stabilized and began to improve slowly. CONCLUSION:Patients with arterial occlusion should be evaluated acutely for potential revascularization. In the posterior circulation, clinical progression may supplant physiological imaging in the assessment of hemodynamic collapse. A subpopulation of patients will present with progressive deficits distinct from extracranial manifestations of vertebrobasilar insufficiency; these patients should be considered for delayed revascularization.
Influenza Forecasting with Google Flu Trends

Objective We sought to develop a practical influenza forecast model, based on real-time, geographically focused, and easy to access data, to provide individual medical centers with advanced warning of the number of influenza cases, thus allowing sufficient time to implement an intervention. Secondly, we evaluated how the addition of a real-time influenza surveillance system, Google Flu Trends, would impact the forecasting capabilities of this model. Introduction Each year, influenza results in increased Emergency Department crowding which can be mitigated through early detection linked to an appropriate response. Although current surveillance systems, such as Google Flu Trends, yield near real-time influenza surveillance, few demonstrate ability to forecast impending influenza cases. Methods Forecasting models designed to predict one week in advance were developed from weekly counts of confirmed influenza cases over seven seasons (2004 – 2011) divided into training and out-of-sample verification sets. Forecasting procedures using classical Box-Jenkins, generalized linear, and autoregressive methods were employed to develop the final model and assess the relative contribution of external variables such as, Google Flu Trends, meteorological data, and temporal information. Models were developed and evaluated through statistical measures of global deviance and log-likelihood ratio tests. An additional measure of forecast confidence, defined as the percentage of forecast values, during an influenza peak, that are within 7 influenza cases of the actual data, was examined to demonstrate practical utility of the model. Results A generalized autoregressive Poisson (GARMA) forecast model integrating previous influenza cases with Google Flu Trends information provided the most accurate influenza case predictions. Google Flu Trend data was the only source of external information providing significant forecast improvements (p = 0.00002). The final model, a GARMA intercept model with the addition of Google Flu Trends, predicted weekly influenza cases during 4 out-of-sample outbreaks within 7 cases for 80% of estimates (Figure 1). Conclusions Integer-valued autoregression of influenza cases provides a strong base forecast model, which is enhanced by the addition of Google Flu Trends confirming the predictive capabilities of search query based syndromic surveillance. This accessible and flexible forecast model can be used by individual medical centers to provide advanced warning of future influenza cases.
Brain Imaging and Neurodevelopment in HIV-uninfected Thai Children Born to HIV-infected Mothers

Background: Perinatal use of combination antiretroviral therapy dramatically reduces vertical (mother-to-child) transmission of HIV but has led to a growing population of children with perinatal HIV-exposure but uninfected (HEU). HIV can cause neurological injury among children born with infection, but the neuroanatomical and developmental effects in HEU children are poorly understood. Methods: We used structural magnetic resonance imaging with diffusion tensor imaging to compare brain anatomy between 30 HEU and 33 age-matched HIV-unexposed and uninfected (HUU) children from Thailand. Maps of brain volume and microstructural anatomy were compared across groups; associations were tested between neuroimaging measures and concurrent neuropsychological test performance. Results: Mean (standard deviation) age of children was 10.3 (2.8) years, and 58% were male. All were enrolled in school and lived with family members. Intelligence quotient (IQ) did not differ between groups. Caretaker education levels did not differ, but income was higher for HUU (P < 0.001). We did not detect group differences in brain volume or diffusion tensor imaging metrics, after controlling for sociodemographic factors. The mean (95% confidence interval) fractional anisotropy in the corpus callosum was 0.375 (0.368–0.381) in HEU compared with 0.370 (0.364–0.375) in HUU. Higher fractional anisotropy and lower mean diffusivity were each associated with higher IQ scores in analyses with both groups combined. Conclusions: No differences in neuroanatomical or brain integrity measures were detectable in HEU children compared with age-matched and sex-matched controls (HUU children). Expected associations between brain integrity measures and IQ scores were identified suggesting sufficient power to detect subtle associations that were present.
Interface metaphors and logical analogues: A question of terminology

The A. explores the view that interface metaphor is a term which carries with it a range of connotations, some of which have implications inimical to the design of effective interfaces. The study findings indicate that use of the term interface metaphor has influenced designers to assume that the insights offered by a metaphor more than offswet any problems arising from its limitations. It is argued here that, while this is correct from the designer's perspective, it is incorrect from that of the user. Part 1 discusses the emergence of, and theoretical justification for, the interface metaphor design principle ; part 2 discussed roles for tropes in the communication of new concepts and information ; part 3 reviews the cas study on which the paper is based ; part 4 discusses findings from the case study ; part 5 presents the conclusions, and some recommendations for future research
Recognizing Engagement Behaviors in Human-Robot Interaction

Based on analysis of human-human interactions, we have developed an initial model of engagement for human-robot interaction which includes the concept of connection events, consisting of: directed gaze, mutual facial gaze, conversational adjacency pairs, and backchannels. We implemented the model in the open source Robot Operating System and conducted a humanrobot interaction experiment to evaluate it.
Introducing motion information in dense feature classifiers

Semantic concept detection in large scale video collections is mostly achieved through a static analysis of selected keyframes. A popular choice for representing the visual content of an image is based on the pooling of local descriptors such as Dense SIFT. However, simple motion features such as optic flow can be extracted relatively easy from such keyframes. In this paper we propose an efficient addition to the DSIFT approach by including information derived from optic flow. Based on optic flow magnitude, we can estimate for each DSIFT patch whether it is static or moving. We modify the bag of words model used traditionally with DSIFT by creating two separate occurrence histograms instead of one: one for static patches and one for dynamic patches. We further refine this method by studying different separation thresholds and soft assign-ment, as well as different normalization techniques. Classifier score fusion is used to maximize the average precision of all these variants. Experimental results on the TRECVID Semantic Indexing collection show that by means of classifier fusion our method increases overall mean average precision of the DSIFT classifier from 0.061 to 0.106.
Very Young Children's Body Image: Bodies and Minds Under Construction

In recent years research has recognised that notions of body image, body image ideals and body dissatisfaction develop much earlier than was once thought. Forty-seven children (25 male; 22 female) aged between 5 and 6 years were interviewed on three occasions over 12 months regarding their perceptions of body image. The interviews revealed strong negative perceptions of fatness. However, being overweight or even obese was not always correlated with being unhealthy. Conversely, the desire towards cultural ideals of thinness, while apparent, was not as clear.
Describing Protein Folding Kinetics by Molecular Dynamics Simulations. 1. Theory

A rigorous formalism for the extraction of state-to-state transition functions from a Boltzmann-weighted ensemble of microcanonical molecular dynamics simulations has been developed as a way to study the kinetics of protein folding in the context of a Markov chain. Analysis of these transition functions for signatures of Markovian behavior is described. The method has been applied to an example problem that is based on an underlying Markov process. The example problem shows that when an instance of the process is analyzed under the assumption that the underlying states have been aggregated into macrostates, a procedure known as lumping, the resulting chain appears to have been produced by a non-Markovian process when viewed at high temporal resolution. However, when viewed on longer time scales, and for appropriately lumped macrostates, Markovian behavior can be recovered. The potential for extracting the long time scale behavior of the folding process from a large number of short, independent molecular dynamics simulations is also explored.
Multilocus Sequence Typing Breathes Life into a Microbial Metagenome

Shot-gun sequencing of DNA isolated from the environment and the assembly of metagenomes from the resulting data has considerably advanced the study of microbial diversity. However, the subsequent matching of these hypothetical metagenomes to cultivable microorganisms is a limitation of such cultivation-independent methods of population analysis. Using a nucleotide sequence-based genetic typing method, multilocus sequence typing, we were able for the first time to match clonal cultivable isolates to a published and controversial bacterial metagenome, Burkholderia SAR-1, which derived from analysis of the Sargasso Sea. The matching cultivable isolates were all associated with infection and geographically widely distributed; taxonomic analysis demonstrated they were members of Burkholderia cepacia complex Group K. Comparison of the Burkholderia SAR-1 metagenome to closely related B. cepacia complex genomes indicated that it was greater than 98% intact in terms of conserved genes, and it also shared complete sequence identity with the cultivable isolates at random loci beyond the genes sampled by the multilocus sequence typing. Two features of the extant cultivable clones support the argument that the Burkholderia SAR-1 sequence may have been a contaminant in the original metagenomic survey: (i) their growth in conditions reflective of sea water was poor, suggesting the ocean was not their preferred habitat, and (ii) several of the matching isolates were epidemiologically linked to outbreaks of infection that resulted from contaminated medical devices or products, indicating an adaptive fitness of this bacterial strain towards contamination-associated environments. The ability to match identical cultivable strains of bacteria to a hypothetical metagenome is a unique feature of nucleotide sequence-based microbial typing methods; such matching would not have been possible with more traditional methods of genetic typing, such as those based on pattern matching of genomic restriction fragments or amplified DNA fragments. Overall, we have taken the first steps in moving the status of the Burkholderia SAR-1 metagenome from a hypothetical entity towards the basis for life of cultivable strains that may now be analysed in conjunction with the assembled metagenomic sequence data by the wider scientific community.
Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) Modelling of Aquaculture Net Cage

The number of good sites in less exposed locations for aquaculture farming is limited. Trends are now that the fish cages are increasing in both width and depth, as well as more weather-exposed locations, are taken into use. As the net cages continue to increase in size, so does the material costs. The design of the sea cages should be modified for safe and reliable use in remote offshore locations. Fish farms located in more exposed areas will be subject to more energetic waves and stronger currents, which will cause large net deformations. This is a challenge as fish welfare depends on a certain minimum volume within the net cage. Changing and maintaining net cages are some of the main expenses for fish farms. If the lifetime of the net cages is extended by introducing stronger, longer lasting materials, the overall costs of the nets will be reduced. The traditional nets are produced in nylon, while the promising solid PET-wire has been introduced to the aquaculture industry. In this paper, we introduce polyurethane to the aquaculture net cages, which will be studied together with nylon and PET-wire. The study is carried out using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) weakly coupled with structure mechanics (FEM). ANSYS® software is employed in the study. We will look at the materials that show the most promising results for aquaculture purposes.
Bactericidal effects of triclosan in soap both in vitro and in vivo.

OBJECTIVES On December 2013, the US FDA proposed a rule stating that manufacturers must provide data to demonstrate that antibacterial soap is more effective than plain soap or water. The objective of the present study was to examine the in vitro and in vivo bactericidal effect of triclosan (the most widely used antiseptic agent in soap) in soap. METHODS Twenty bacterial strains (proposed by the FDA) were exposed to plain and antibacterial soaps (the same formulation as plain soap, but containing 0.3% triclosan) for 20 s at 22°C (room temperature) and 40°C (warm temperature). The temperature and time were selected to simulate the hand washing conditions and procedures used by consumers. The triclosan concentration of 0.3% is the maximum allowed by law. The decontamination efficacy of plain soap and antibacterial soap was also examined in vivo: the hands of volunteers were artificially inoculated with Serratia marcescens. RESULTS There was no significant difference (P > 0.05) in bactericidal activity between plain soap and antibacterial soap at either test temperature. However, antibacterial soap showed significantly greater bactericidal effects after 9 h. These results suggest that although triclosan-containing soap does have antibacterial activity, the effects are not apparent during the short time required for hand washing. CONCLUSIONS Antibacterial soap containing triclosan (0.3%) was no more effective than plain soap at reducing bacterial contamination when used under 'real-life' conditions. The present study provides practical information that may prove useful for both industry and governments.