Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Manufacturing Trees

We consider the process of manufacturing a product from a given number of elementary components. By assembling intermediate products, the target product can be manufactured in a variety of processes, each modeled by a tree. We are interested in manufacturing turnaround: the time between receiving an order at the root and its completion. We express the turnaround time of each manufacturing process (tree) with a formula that incorporates three parameters: the time required to create elementary components, the time required to assemble a product from its components and the time required to deliver the product to its procurer (another manufacturer). We show that this turnaround formula is optimized in a manufacturing process that corresponds to a perfect (or nearly perfect) tree. The degree of the optimal tree (i.e., the ideal number of components in each sub-assembly) is shown to be independent of the number of elementary components, suggesting that in each manufacturing environment there is an ideal assembly size, which is optimal for the manufacturing of products of any scale.
An agronomic assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from major cereal crops

Agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contribute approximately 12% to total global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Cereals (rice, wheat, and maize) are the largest source of human calories, and it is estimated that world cereal production must increase by 1.3% annually to 2025 to meet growing demand. Sustainable intensification of cereal production systems will require maintaining high yields while reducing environmental costs. We conducted a meta‐analysis (57 published studies consisting of 62 study sites and 328 observations) to test the hypothesis that the global warming potential (GWP) of CH4 and N2O emissions from rice, wheat, and maize, when expressed per ton of grain (yield‐scaled GWP), is similar, and that the lowest value for each cereal is achieved at near optimal yields. Results show that the GWP of CH4 and N2O emissions from rice (3757 kg CO2 eq ha−1 season−1) was higher than wheat (662 kg CO2 eq ha−1 season−1) and maize (1399 kg CO2 eq ha−1 season−1). The yield‐scaled GWP of rice was about four times higher (657 kg CO2 eq Mg−1) than wheat (166 kg CO2 eq Mg−1) and maize (185 kg CO2 eq Mg−1). Across cereals, the lowest yield‐scaled GWP values were achieved at 92% of maximal yield and were about twice as high for rice (279 kg CO2 eq Mg−1) than wheat (102 kg CO2 eq Mg−1) or maize (140 kg CO2 eq Mg−1), suggesting greater mitigation opportunities for rice systems. In rice, wheat and maize, 0.68%, 1.21%, and 1.06% of N applied was emitted as N2O, respectively. In rice systems, there was no correlation between CH4 emissions and N rate. In addition, when evaluating issues related to food security and environmental sustainability, other factors including cultural significance, the provisioning of ecosystem services, and human health and well‐being must also be considered.
Polynomial Time Algorithms

Energy consumption of digital circuits has become a primary constraint in electronic design. The increasing popularity of the portable devices like smart phone, ipad, tablet and notebook has created an overwhelming demand for extended battery life of these devices. Numerous methods for energy reduction in CMOS circuits have been proposed in the literature. Power reduction techniques at various levels of abstraction are used in modern digital designs. Most popular techniques used include power gating, clock gating, multiple-supply voltages, multiple threshold devices. In this work we propose a technique to use dual supply voltages in digital designs in order to get a reduction in energy consumption. Three new algorithms are proposed for finding and assigning low voltage in dual voltage designs. Given a circuit and a supply voltage, the first algorithm finds a suitable value for a lower supply voltage and the other two algorithms assign that lower voltage to individual gates. A linear time algorithm described in the literature is used for computing slacks for all gates in a circuit for a given supply voltage. The slack of a gate is the difference between the critical path delay and the delay of the longest path though that gate. A positive slack for a gate implies that the timing constraints are met, thus making a negative slack undesirable. An optimal lower supply voltage that maximizes the dynamic power savings is first found. For the computed gate slacks and the lower supply voltage, the gates in the circuit are divided into three groups. No gate in the first group can be assigned the lower supply without violating the positive slack condition. All gates in the second group can be simultaneously set to lower supply voltage while maintaining positive slack for all gates. The gates in the third group are assigned low voltage in small subgroups satisfying the condition that the sum of the delay increases due to voltage lowering for all gates in the subgroup is less
Effects of wind-induced tall building vibrations on human motor performance

Prolonged exposure to wind-induced vibrations in tall buildings can cause discomfort, impair task performance, and even trigger motion sickness symptoms. To evaluate the influence of wind-induced vibrations on human motor performance, a dual-axis tall building motion simulator that simulated sinusoidal vibrations while participants performed a Fitts’ Law type of task was used. Participants experienced a static condition, and motion conditions with acceleration levels of 8 and 30 milli-g, at frequencies of 0.125, 0.25 and 0.5 Hz, in fore-aft and lateral postural orientations. The results showed that increases in frequency, and particularly, magnitude of acceleration level leads to measureable performance degradation.
Three-phase Infinite Level Inverter

Pulse width modulated voltage source inverters (PWM-VSI) have many advantages over the traditional bridge inverters; yet there are some challenges encountered by PWM inverters. As power and voltage rating increases; device constraint as well ashigh switching loss creates serious problems. Various pulse width modulated strategies like sinusoidal; 3rd harmonic injection and space vector PWM (SVPWM) employs high frequency switching to obtain quality output voltage with less ripple. Increasing number of voltage levels in a multi-level inverter requires an increase in number of active switches and passive elements. The problem of dead time requirement and shoot-through in PWM inverters distorts the output waveform and transfers less energy to load. A new type of three-phase VSI called three-phase Infinite Level Inverter (ILI) is proposed to mitigate all the above problems to a large extent. The device constraint and switching loss at high frequency is substantially reduced due to lower input DC supply. To get same output voltage; the proposed inverter requires only half of the DC link voltage compared to sine PWM inverter. Also; ILI takes only 0.576 times the input DC voltage compared to 3rd harmonic-injection or SVPWM. This shows that the proposed inverter has the maximum DC link utilization. The number of active switches and passive elements are same for any number of voltage levels. This topology is a multi-level inverter as there are many levels in the output voltage. Shoot-through problem is avoided and thus the proposed inverter doesn't need a dead time; leading to a better system reliability. Hysteresis current control is used for closed loop control. Results obtained from experimental setup and computer simulation using MATLAB/Simulink are presented to verify the above scheme.
A new mechanism for pulsar gamma‐ray emission

Gamma-ray emission in pulsar magnetospheres is attributed to synchrotron radiation, which tends to decrease the pitch angle of the particle, being balanced by plasma processes tending to increase the pitch angle. The plasma processes are non-resonant instabilities that drive non-resonant quasilinear diffusion (NQD), thereby pumping energy from waves and the parallel motion of the particle into the perpendicular motion of the particle. It is shown that NQD can maintain the pitch angles for particles near the light-cylinder such that they radiate synchrotron radiation at MeV energies. Compared to conventional emission mechanisms (such as polar cap or outer gap models), the resulting spectrum has a relatively low upper cut-off from about a few to 100 MeV. Possible observational consequences of this mechanism are discussed.
Teaching a Humanoid : A User Study with HOAP-3 on Learning by Demonstration

—This article reports on the results of a user study investigating the satisfaction of naïve users conducting two learning by demonstration tasks with the HOAP-3 robot. The main goal of this study was to gain insights on how to ensure a successful as well as satisfactory experience for naïve users. Participants performed two tasks: They taught the robot to (1) push a box, and to (2) close a box. The user study was accompanied by three pre-structured questionnaires, addressing the users' satisfaction with HOAP-3, the user's affect toward the robot following from the interaction, and the user's attitude towards robots. Furthermore, a retrospective think aloud was conducted to gain a better understanding of what influences the users' satisfaction in learning by demonstration tasks. The results stress that learning by demonstration is a promising approach for naïve users to learn the interaction with a robot, as a high task completion and final satisfaction rate could be observed. Moreover, the short term interaction with HOAP-3 led to a positive affect higher than the normative average on half of the female users.
Subsidiary Integration as Identity Construction and Institution Building: A Political Sensemaking Approach

This paper develops a political sensemaking approach to the post-acquisition integration process, which directs attention to how powerful social actors construct the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their multiple local contexts. This political, processual, and actor-centred perspective explores subsidiary integration as identity construction and institution building. The different characteristics that local and head office managers attribute to the subsidiary establish diverse interests in and political stances towards it and, through actions to resolve these differences, senior decision makers shape the subsidiary's strategic and structural location in the MNE. We illustrate this argumentation with reference to post-socialist acquisitions by Western multinationals, whose contrasting institutional and management experiences put the problem of multiple contexts and subsidiary integration into sharp relief. This approach complements mainstream international business research by attending directly to the neglected processual nature of subsidiary integration and examining different socio-political dynamics resulting from sensemaking and sensegiving interactions between key actors in the MNE.
Studies in transformation-based adaptation

This paper studies the use of transformation-based speaker adaptation in improving the performance of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems. We present a formulation of the adaptation procedure that is simpler than existing methods. Our experiments demonstrate that speaker normalization continues to be important even after significant amounts of speaker adaptation. An automatic clustering algorithm is compared to human expertise in sorting output distributions into collections that share the same transformation. We quantify improvements over standard Bayesian (by maximum a posteriori or MAP) adaptation in terms of (a) speed of adaptation, and (b) robustness to transcription errors. Finally, we discuss the use of speaker transformations in the training process.
Brain-Inspired Motion Programming for Hobby-Use Humanoid Robots

Dynamic motion of hobby-use humanoid robots is defined by a sequence of static poses. Each pose is defined by specifying joint angles numerically for each joint. This is a difficult task, because typical hobby-use humanoid robots have more than 20 joints. We need a way to program robot motions easier. Our brain employs a different strategy for motion programming. Instead of specifying each joint angle or each muscle tone, the primary motor cortex has a set of primitive motions called motor primitives, and higher cortical areas and the basal ganglia generates a sequence of combinations of such motor primitives. Thus, our brain uses more abstract form to compose dynamic motions. In this article, we employ self-organizing maps (SOMs), which is an unsupervised learning algorithm used in machine learning and computational neuroscience communities, to extract motor primitives from a set of motion data of a hobbyuse humanoid robot. Then, we reprogram the original dynamic motions by the sequence of combinations of extracted primitives. We are able to reproduce the same motions by the proposed method. These results suggest that our brain-inspired method provides an easier means to program hobby-use humanoid robots than existing software bundled with the robots.
Improved Pedestrian Dead Reckoning positioning with gait parameter learning

We consider personal navigation systems in devices equipped with inertial sensors and Global Positioning System (GPS), where we propose an improved Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) algorithm that learns gait parameters in time intervals when position estimates are available, for instance from GPS or an indoor positioning system (IPS). A novel filtering approach is proposed that is able to learn internal gait parameters in the PDR algorithm, such as the step length and the step detection threshold. Our approach is based on a multi-rate Kalman filter bank that estimates the gait parameters when position measurements are available, which improves PDR in time intervals when the position is not available, for instance when passing from outdoor to indoor environments where IPS is not available. The effectiveness of the new approach is illustrated on several real world experiments.
Federal Justice Statistics, 2014 - Statistical Tables

This report describes criminal caseprocessing in the federal justice system in 2015, including arrest and booking through sentencing and corrections.1 These statistical tables present the number of suspects arrested and booked by the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), suspects in matters investigated and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, defendants adjudicated and sentenced in U.S. district courts, and characteristics of federal prisoners and offenders under federal supervision.
Social Capital and Educational Attainment Among Rural Community in Malaysia

The determinants of educational attainment among children have become one of the main research agenda among scholars, educationists and economists alike.In most studies, the focus is on the relationship between educational attainment and factors such as the quality of teachers, schools, educational technologies, curriculum design, the financial and human capital aspect of the families and the ability of children themselves. Recently, the focus has been expanded to explore the relationship between social capital and educational attainment.As an addition to the existing literature, this paper attempts to investigate the impact of social capital on educational attainment using a regression analysis based on a sample of 2500 households, gathered from a rural community in Terengganu, Malaysia. Six domains of social capital are used to arrive at the index of social capital.The argument advanced in this paper is that social capital, which could be viewed as the outcome of networking, cooperation and trust at the household level, is expected to have a positive impact on a child’s educational attainment.Towards this end, we regress children’s education attainment on social capital along with other relevant independent variables, i.e. family, children, school and neighbourhood characteristics. Interestingly, the result of our study reveals that the level of social capital that a family has, is found to be significant and has the expected positive sign. This finding implies that social capital at the household level appear to be a critical factor in determining a child’s educational attainment. Thus, our finding lends support to the idea that social capital is a good predictor of children’s is educational attainment.
Computerizing a machine readable dictionary

Current research in natural language processing is characterized by the development of theories of grammar which strongly depend on the lexicon to drive parsing systems (e.g. Lexical Function Grammar, General Phrase Structured Grammar, Functional Unification Grammar). These requirements go far beyond the typical small, hand-coded vocabularies developed for theoretical or demonstration purposes. Many researchers have independently discovered the rich, though unstructured, knowledge sources that machine readable dictionaries offer. This paper reports on an attempt to impose structure to the Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary, by means of a parser written in Turbo Pascal, using a mixed approach of pattern matching and transition networks. The resulting computerized dictionary is 95 % accurate, but correcting the final 5% incorrectly parsed involves painstakingly scrutinizing the output and modifying the parser to handle exceptional cases that occur only once or twice in the entire MRD, or editing the machine readable dictionary to remove errors introduced by the OCR process.
Automatic parameter determination in subspace clustering with gravitation function

Data mining is a process of discovering and exploiting hidden patterns from data. Clustering as an important task of data mining divides the observations into groups (clusters), which is according to the principle that the observations in the same cluster are similar, and the ones from different clusters are dissimilar to each other. Subspace clustering enables clustering in subspaces within a data set, which means the clusters could be found not only in the whole space but also in subspaces. The well-known subspace clustering methods have a common problem with determination of parameters. To face this issue, a new subspace clustering method based on bottom-up method is introduced in this article. In contrast to other methods, this approach applies a gravitation function to select data and dimensions by using a self-comparison technique. The new method can determine parameters simply and independently of amount of the data, which makes the subspace clustering more practical.
Extractors for Circuit Sources

We obtain the first deterministic extractors for sources generated (or sampled) by small circuits of bounded depth. Our main results are:(1) We extract k poly( k / n d ) bits with exponentially small error from n-bit sources of min-entropy k that are generated by functions that are d-local, i.e., each output bit depends on at most d input bits. In particular, we extract from NC-zero sources, corresponding to d = O(1). (2) We extract k poly( k / n^(1.001) ) bits with super-polynomially small error from n-bit sources of min-entropy k that are generated by poly(n)-size AC-zero circuits. As our starting point, we revisit the connection by Trevisan and Vadhan (FOCS 2000) between circuit lower bounds and extractors for sources generated by circuits. We note that such extractors (with very weak parameters) are equivalent to lower bounds for generating distributions (FOCS 2010; with Lovett, CCC 2011). Building on those bounds, we prove that the sources in (1) and (2) are (close to) a convex combination of high-entropy "bit-block"sources. Introduced here, such sources are a special case of affine ones. As extractors for (1) and (2) one can use the extractor for low-weight affine sources by Rao (CCC 2009). Along the way, we exhibit an explicit n-bit boolean function bsuch that poly(n)-size AC-zero circuits cannot generate the distribution(X,b(X)), solving a problem about the complexity of distributions. Independently, De and Watson (RANDOM 2011) obtain a result similar to (1) in the special case d = o(log n).
Identification and characterization of mitochondrial abasic (AP)-endonuclease in mammalian cells

Abasic (AP)-endonuclease (APE) is responsible for repair of AP sites, and single-strand DNA breaks with 3′ blocking groups that are generated either spontaneously or during repair of damaged or abnormal bases via the DNA base excision repair (BER) pathway in both nucleus and mitochondria. Mammalian cells express only one nuclear APE, 36 kDa APE1, which is essential for survival. Mammalian mitochondrial (mt) BER enzymes other than mtAPE have been characterized. In order to identify and characterize mtAPE, we purified the APE activity from beef liver mitochondria to near homogeneity, and showed that the mtAPE which has 3-fold higher specific activity relative to APE1 is derived from the latter with deletion of 33 N-terminal residues which contain the nuclear localization signal. The mtAPE-sized product could be generated by incubating 35S-labeled APE1 with crude mitochondrial extract, but not with cytosolic or nuclear extract, suggesting that cleavage of APE1 by a specific mitochondria-associated N-terminal peptidase is a prerequisite for mitochondrial import. The low abundance of mtAPE, particularly in cultured cells might be the reason for its earlier lack of detection by western analysis.
Can Smartphones Enhance Telephone-Based Cognitive Assessment (TBCA)?

TBCA has emerged to solve the limitations of administering cognitive assessments face-to-face. The recent development of telephones and knowledge advances in the area of cognitive impairment may affect the development of TBCA. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how smartphones can be used to enhance the applicability of TBCA, which has previously been administered by conventional telephone. This paper will first review, describe and critique the existing TBCA instruments. It will then discuss the recent developments in tele-technology, the popularity of tele-technology among the elderly, potential benefits and challenges in using smartphones for cognitive assessment, and possible future developments in this technology. In the systematic review, eighteen TBCA instruments were identified. They were found to be valid in differentiating between people with and without dementia. TBCA was previously found to be launched on a conventional telephone platform. The advances in understanding of cognitive impairment may demand that telephones be equipped with more advanced features. Recently, the development and penetration of smartphones among the elderly has been rapid. This may allow the smartphone to enhance its TBCA applicability by overcoming the limitations of the conventional telephone, rendering the TBCA more efficient in addressing the increasing demand and complexity of cognitive assessments in the future. However, more research and technology developments are needed before smartphones can become a valid platform for TBCA.
Polarization Impact in TanDEM-X Data Over Vertical-Oriented Vegetation: The Paddy-Rice Case Study

It has been recently shown that the TanDEM-X mission is capable of tracking the plant growth of rice paddies. The precision of the elevation measure depends on the physical interaction between the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signal and the canopy. In this letter, this interaction is studied by considering the signal polarization. In particular, the vertical and horizontal wave polarizations are compared, and their performance in the temporal mapping of the crop height is analyzed. The temporal elevation difference analysis shows a monotonically increasing trend within the reproductive stage of the canopy, with maximum height discrepancies between polarizations of about 9 cm. From an operational point of view of InSAR-based vegetation height measurements, this letter demonstrates that the oriented structure of the canopy shall be considered not only in polarimetric InSAR studies but also in the interpretation of bistatic spaceborne interferometric elevation models.