Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Phase-Shifted-PWM D-STATCOM Using a Modular Multilevel Cascade Converter (SSBC)—Part I: Modeling, Analysis, and Design of Current Control

This paper presents and discusses a phase-shifted-PWM distribution static synchronous compensator (D-STATCOM) using the modular multilevel cascade converter based on single-star bridge cells (MMCC-SSBC). A three-phase 140-V 10-kVA SSBC-based STATCOM with a cascade count N=6 is designed, constructed, and tested for verifying the performance and functionality of the medium-voltage D-STATCOM in both steady and transient states. The 13-level line-to-neutral (25-level line-to-line) voltage at the ac side yields an almost sinusoidal line current with a total harmonic distortion value of 1.7%. An analytical model for the phase-shifted PWM is proposed to design the current control gains. Two phase-shifted PWM methods, which are named as one-cell and all-cells update methods, are theoretically and experimentally compared. The all-cells update method can reduce the inherent time delay, thus resulting in a faster and more stable system response than the one-cell update method.
Discrete feature transform for low-complexity single-image super-resolution

Dictionary-based super-resolution is actively studied with successful achievements. However, previous dictionary-based super-resolution methods exploit optimization or nearest neighbor search which has high complexity. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity super-resolution method called the discrete feature transform which performs feature extraction and nearest neighbor search at once. As a result, the proposed method achieves the lowest complexity among dictionary-based super-resolution methods with a comparable performance.
Factors influencing first childbearing timing decisions among men: Path analysis

Background: Factors that influence men’s childbearing intentions have been relatively unexplored in the literature. Objective: This study aimed to determine the influencing factors about the first childbearing timing decisions of men. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 300 men who were referred to private and governmental healthcare centers in Shahrood, Iran were randomly recruited from April to September 2014. Data were collected using a demographic questionnaire, the Quality of Life Questionnaire; ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Questionnaire, Synder’s Hope Scale, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. Results: After removing the statistically insignificant paths, men’s age at marriage had the highest direct effect (β=0.86) on their first childbearing decision. Marital satisfaction (β=-0.09), social support (β=0.06), economic status (β=0.06), and quality of life (β=-0.08) were other effective factors on men’s first childbearing decisions. Moreover, marital satisfaction and social support had significant indirect effects on men’s childbearing decisions (β=-0.04 and -0.01, respectively). Conclusion: Many factors, including personal factors (age at marriage and quality of life), family factors (marital satisfaction), and social factors (social support), can affect men’s decision to have a child. Policymakers are hence required to develop strategies to promote the socioeconomic and family conditions of the couples and to encourage them to have as many children as they desire at an appropriate time.
New Representations for the Madelung Constant

From a modern theta-function identity of G. E. Andrews we derive new representations for the celebrated Madelung constant and various of its analytic relatives. The method leads to connections with the modern theory of multiple zeta sums, generates an apparently entire “η series” representation, and, for the Madelung constant in particular, yields a finite-integral representation. These analyses suggest variants of the Andrews identity, leading in turn to number-theoretical results concerning sums of three squares.
Measuring the Public Accountability of New Modes of Governance

We present an encompassing research endeavour on the public accountability of new modes of governance in Europe. The aim of this project is to measure the salience, tonality and framing of regulatory bodies and public interest organisations in newspaper coverage and parliamentary debates over the last 15 years. In order to achieve this, we use language technology which is still underused in political science text analyses. Institutionally, the project has emerged from a collaboration between a computational linguistics and a political science department.
Spa2p Interacts with Cell Polarity Proteins and Signaling Components Involved in Yeast Cell Morphogenesis

ABSTRACT The yeast protein Spa2p localizes to growth sites and is important for polarized morphogenesis during budding, mating, and pseudohyphal growth. To better understand the role of Spa2p in polarized growth, we analyzed regions of the protein important for its function and proteins that interact with Spa2p. Spa2p interacts with Pea2p and Bud6p (Aip3p) as determined by the two-hybrid system; all of these proteins exhibit similar localization patterns, and spa2Δ,pea2Δ, and bud6Δ mutants display similar phenotypes, suggesting that these three proteins are involved in the same biological processes. Coimmunoprecipitation experiments demonstrate that Spa2p and Pea2p are tightly associated with each other in vivo. Velocity sedimentation experiments suggest that a significant portion of Spa2p, Pea2p, and Bud6p cosediment, raising the possibility that these proteins form a large, 12S multiprotein complex. Bud6p has been shown previously to interact with actin, suggesting that the 12S complex functions to regulate the actin cytoskeleton. Deletion analysis revealed that multiple regions of Spa2p are involved in its localization to growth sites. One of the regions involved in Spa2p stability and localization interacts with Pea2p; this region contains a conserved domain, SHD-II. Although a portion of Spa2p is sufficient for localization of itself and Pea2p to growth sites, only the full-length protein is capable of complementing spa2 mutant defects, suggesting that other regions are required for Spa2p function. By using the two-hybrid system, Spa2p and Bud6p were also found to interact with components of two mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways important for polarized cell growth. Spa2p interacts with Ste11p (MAPK kinase [MEK] kinase) and Ste7p (MEK) of the mating signaling pathway as well as with the MEKs Mkk1p and Mkk2p of the Slt2p (Mpk1p) MAPK pathway; for both Mkk1p and Ste7p, the Spa2p-interacting region was mapped to the N-terminal putative regulatory domain. Bud6p interacts with Ste11p. The MEK-interacting region of Spa2p corresponds to the highly conserved SHD-I domain, which is shown to be important for mating and MAPK signaling. spa2 mutants exhibit reduced levels of pheromone signaling and an elevated level of Slt2p kinase activity. We thus propose that Spa2p, Pea2p, and Bud6p function together, perhaps as a complex, to promote polarized morphogenesis through regulation of the actin cytoskeleton and signaling pathways.
Modeling and analysis of content delivery over satellite integrated cognitive radio networks

Although spectral resources are scarce while being critical for wireless system performance, their utilization in various frequency bands are shown to be very low. Cognitive radio (CR) concept, where licensed bands are allowed to be used by a secondary network, is proposed as a general paradigm to address this limitation. Moreover, the effects of this deficiency in spectral resource management have been aggravated with the exploding content consumption through wireless networks. In emerging 5G wireless systems, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and heterogeneous architectures composed of different network tiers are posed as two vital apparatus to alleviate the "capacity crunch". However, the interplay/integration of these different techniques and approaches are yet to be comprehensively explored by research efforts. In this work, we consider this issue and develop an analytical Markovian model for content delivery over satellite integrated cognitive radio networks which can utilize D2D operation mode. We focus on throughput and energy efficiency as key metrics for depicting the system operation. We also investigate the effects of various system parameters on the performance such as cache size, mode preference for content retrieval from different content holders and primary user activity.
Environmental Influences on Children's Physical Activity: Quantitative Estimates Using a Twin Design

Background Twin studies offer a ‘natural experiment’ that can estimate the magnitude of environmental and genetic effects on a target phenotype. We hypothesised that fidgetiness and enjoyment of activity would be heritable but that objectively-measured daily activity would show a strong shared environmental effect. Methodology/Principal Findings In a sample of 9–12 year-old same-sex twin pairs (234 individuals; 57 MZ, 60 DZ pairs) we assessed three dimensions of physical activity: i) objectively-measured physical activity using accelerometry, ii) ‘fidgetiness’ using a standard psychometric scale, and iii) enjoyment of physical activity from both parent ratings and children's self-reports. Shared environment effects explained the majority (73%) of the variance in objectively-measured total physical activity (95% confidence intervals (CI): 0.63–0.81) with a smaller unshared environmental effect (27%; CI: 0.19–0.37) and no significant genetic effect. In contrast, fidgetiness was primarily under genetic control, with additive genetic effects explaining 75% (CI: 62–84%) of the variance, as was parent's report of children's enjoyment of low 74% (CI: 61–82%), medium 80% (CI: 71–86%), and high impact activity (85%; CI: 78–90%), and children's expressed activity preferences (60%, CI: 42–72%). Conclusions Consistent with our hypothesis, the shared environment was the dominant influence on children's day-to-day activity levels. This finding gives a strong impetus to research into the specific environmental characteristics influencing children's activity, and supports the value of interventions focused on home or school environments.
Speaker adaptation based on confidence-weighted training

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the performance of traditional speaker adaptation algorithm using discriminative adaptation procedure based on a novel confidence measure and non-linear weighting. Regardless of the distributionof the adaptation data, traditional model adaptation methods incorporate the adaptation data undiscriminatingly. When the data size is small and the parameter tying is extensive, adaptation based on outliers can be detrimental. A way to discriminate the contribution of each data in the adaptation is to incorporate a confidence measure based on likelihood. We evaluate and compare the performances of the proposed weighted SMAP (WSMAP) which controls the contribution of each data by sigmoid weighting using a novel confidence measure. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is experimentally verified by adapting native speaker models to nonnative speaker environment using TIDIGIT.
Human Neuroscience

proposed that dopamine neurons generate a " prediction error " serving as a global learning signal (Montague et al., 1996; Schultz et al., 1997). Neuroimaging studies in humans have confi rmed corresponding responses in SN/VTA (Duzel et al., 2009) and the striatum (McClure et al., 2003). The VST among other frontal cor-tical areas has been shown to be involved in processing the deliv-Most of these fi ndings are in line with the hypothesis that VST responses signal errors in the prediction of rewards (McClure et al., 2004; Schultz, 2007). Little is known, however, about how these processes are altered in the aging brain. Behavioral evidence suggests that reward-based decision making is impaired in old age. In proba-bilistic reversal learning tasks, older participants are defi cient in the acquisition and reversal learning of reward associations Moreover, older participants show insuffi cient category learning and set shifting as assessed with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST, Ridderinkhof et al., 2002; Rhodes, 2004) and impaired decision making as assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (Denburg et al., 2005). Few human neuroimaging studies have focused on age-related neurofunctional changes of the reward system and reported striatal dysfunction in old age (Nagahama et al.
Kumbang Configurator – A Configuration Tool for Software Product Families ∗

This paper presents Kumbang Configurator, a prototype system for deriving product individuals from configurable software product families. Configurable software product families resemble configurable products in that they have a pre-defined structure and can be customised according to customer requirements in a routine manner. The conceptual basis underlying the configurator is Kumbang, a language for modelling configurable software product families from the feature and architectural points of view. Features represent the family from a requirements or functional point of view, and architecture from a technical or structural one. The configurator has been implemented in the Java programming language, and validated with two examples, one of which is based on an industrial case.
The relationship between psychological career resources and engagement at a South African software and services organisation

ii LIST OF TABLES . viii LIST OF FIGURES . x DECLARATION OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP . xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . xii CHAPTER 1: SCIENTIFIC OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH . 1 1.1 Background to and Motivation for the Research Study . 1 1.2 Problem Statement . 5 1.2. 1 Research questions with regard to the literature review . 6 1.2. 2 Research questions with regard to the empirical study . 6 1.2. 3 Hypotheses with regard to the empirical study . 7 1.3 Objectives/Aims of the Research Study . 8 1.3. 1 General aim . 8 1.3. 2 Specific aim . 9 1.4 Research Design . 10 1.4. 1 Exploratory and descriptive research . 10 1.4. 2 Implications of the research design for validity . 11 1.4. 3 Implications of the research design for reliability . 11 1.4. 4 Unit of analysis . 11 1.4. 5 Variables . 12 1.4. 6 Ethical considerations . 12 1.5 Research Methodology . 13 1.5. 1 Literature review . 13 1.5. 2 The empirical study . 14
Video Based Animation Synthesis with the Essential Graph

We propose a method to generate animations using video-based mesh sequences of elementary movements of a shape. New motions that satisfy high-level user-specified constraints are built by recombining and interpolating the frames in the observed mesh sequences. The interest of video based meshes is to provide real full shape information and to enable therefore realistic shape animations. A resulting issue lies, however, in the difficulty to combine and interpolate human poses without a parametric pose model, as with skeleton based animations. To address this issue, our method brings two innovations that contribute at different levels: Locally between two motion sequences, we introduce a new approach to generate realistic transitions using dynamic time warping, More globally, over a set of motion sequences, we propose the essential graph as an efficient structure to encode the most realistic transitions between all pairs of input shape poses. Graph search in the essential graph allows then to generate realistic motions that are optimal with respect to various user-defined constraints. We present both quantitative and qualitative results on various 3D video datasets. They show that our approach compares favourably with previous strategies in this field that use the motion graph.
The Performance of the Extended DSDV ( eDSDV ) MANET Routing Protocol and its Suitability in Integrated Internet-MANET

In this paper, an extended version DSDV (eDSDV) Protocol is proposed for Ad Hoc networks. eDSDV overcomes the problem of stale routes, and thereby improves the performance of regular DSDV. The proposed protocol has been implemented in the NCTUns Simulator and performance comparison has been made with regular DSDV. The performance metrics considered are packet-delivery ratio, end-end delay, dropped packets, routing overhead, route length. It has been found after analysis that the performance of eDSDV is superior to regular DSDV under different simulation scenarios. The proposed protocol is an extension of DSDV in terms of two-hop route-requests packets and dynamic buffer management algorithm which is used to avoid discarding of packets in case when the buffer associated with the destinations becomes full. Later in the paper an architecture for integrating MANET with Internet using eDSDV is presented KeywordsMobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), Routing, eDSDV, NCTUns
Path Planning for a Rotary Wing UAV using a Gaussian Process Occupancy Map

This paper presents a 3D online path planning algorithm for a 6DOF Rotary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RUAV) operating in a cluttered environment using a Gaussian Process (GP) occupancy map. Traditional grid-based occupancy maps suffer from the curse of dimensionality for platforms that operate in a high dimensional configuration space. In addition, the grid resolutions, shapes and orientations limit the flexibility of the path planner. A GP occupancy map however performs inference directly on the collected sensor data, removing the need of maintaining a full discrete map. It performs inference about the probability of collision for any query point in continuous 3D space that potentially maximizes the flexibility of the path planner. We embed the GP map approach into our previous work on smooth path planning and control for an aerial vehicle and present results in a simulated cluttered environment.
MoM - a process variation aware statistical capacitance extractor

With the advent of newer technologies, the underlying manufacturing processes are becoming more complicated. This results in substantial variations between mask and actual fabricated geometries of the conductors. These variations in geometries can lead to significant differences in the interconnect capacitances computed using mask and actual geometries. The sources for these variations could be many and the variations could be independent or correlated. We present a novel extension to the statistical Monte-Carlo capacitance extractor to take into account the statistical models of these variations. The variations are handled by an additional Monte-Carlo sampling; hence termed Monte-Carlo over Monte-Carlo (MoM). Our technique reports the expected value and the expected spread of the capacitances along with the co-variance among the different capacitances. We demonstrate the correctness, accuracy and scalability of our technique analytically and experimentally.
Suzaku Observations of the Centaurus Cluster: Absence of Bulk Motions in the Intracluster Medium

The Centaurus cluster (z=0.0104) was observed with the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS) onboard the Suzaku X-ray satellite in three pointings, one centered on the cluster core and the other two offset by +-8' in declination. To search for possible bulk motions of the intracluster medium, the central energy of He-like Fe-K line (at a rest-frame energy of 6.7 keV) was examined to look for a positional dependence. Over spatial scales of 50 kpc to 140 kpc around the cluster core, the central line energy was found to be constant within the calibration error of 15 eV. The 90% upper limit on the line-of-sight velocity difference is |Delta_v|< 1400 km/s, giving a tighter constraint than previous measurements. The significant velocity gradients inferred from a previous Chandra study were not detected between two pairs of rectangular regions near the cluster core. These results suggest that the bulk velocity does not largely exceed the thermal velocity of the gas in the central region of the Centaurus cluster. The mean redshift of the intracluster medium was determined to be 0.0097, in agreement with the optical redshift of the cluster within the calibration uncertainty. Implications of the present results for the estimation of the cluster mass are briefly discussed.
Mix Cascades vs. Peer-to-Peer: Is One Concept Superior?

After almost two decades of research on anonymous network communication the development has forked into two main directions, namely Mix cascades and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. As these design options have implications on the achievable anonymity and performance, this paper aims to elaborate the advantages and disadvantages of either concept. After clarifying the scope of the discussion, we present argu- ments for Mix cascades and P2P designs on multiple areas of interest: the level of anonymity, the incentives to cooperate, aspects of availabil- ity, and performance issues. Pointed thesis and antithesis are given for both sides, before a final synthesis tries to articulate the status quo of the discussion.
How hard should we run?

All evolutionary algorithms trade off exploration and exploitation in optimisation problems; dynamic problems are no exception. We investigate this trade-off, over a range of algorithm settings, on dynamic variants of three well-known optimisation problems (One Max, Royal Road and knapsack), using Yang's XOR method to vary the scale and rate of change. Extremely exploitative algorithm settings performed best for a surprisingly wide range of problems; even where they were not the most effective, they still performed competitively, and even in those cases, the best performers were still far more exploitative than most would anticipate.
A GPU Query Accelerator for Geospatial Coordinates Computation

People and things become mobile sensors that converge to our daily life. This has unwittingly collected humongous of time series of data with location. People are finding ways to turn this raw data into valuable information as a distinguished business analytic. Importantly, the demand of speedy computation with an appealing visualization is crucial to success. Thus, it reveals the potential economic benefits and becomes an overwhelming new research area that requiring sophisticated mechanisms and technologies to reach the demand. Over the past decade, there have attempts of using accelerators along with multicore CPUs in boosting large-scale data computation. We proposed an emerging SQL-like GPU query accelerator, Galactic a DB. In addition, we extended it to have the geo-spatial compute capabilities. The query operation executes parallelly with drawing support from a high performance and energy efficient NVIDIA Tesla technology. Our result has shown the significant speedup by using Galactic a DB.
Designing discipline-specific roles for interdisciplinary learning: two comparative cases in an afterschool STEM + L programme

ABSTRACT The current K-12 educational system often does not engage students in interdisciplinary learning. To address this need, we developed an integrated STEM + L (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Digital Literacies) afterschool programme in which middle school students took discipline-specific roles (writer, scientist, artist, and engineer) and worked in small groups to produce multimodal science fictions. The study aims to investigate the effect of discipline-specific roles on students’ interdisciplinary and collaborative learning processes. Two groups were chosen as comparison cases because their final products indicated low and high levels in integrating science and literacy respectively. Analysing and visualising students’ individual role-changing patterns and examining their discourse in role-specific interactions revealed the following features for high-quality interdisciplinary learning: (1) Students need to be willing and able to enact not only expected roles, but also other roles; (2) Students need to develop awareness of their own and others’ role enactment; (3) Collaboration between students with different roles may follow a possible trajectory from solo-construction, to co-construction, to re-construction. This study also proposes instructional strategies related to the design of discipline-specific roles to facilitate interdisciplinary learning in STEM education.