Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A mapping method based on EKF and point-segment matching for indoor environment

A map construction method based on point-segment (PS) feature with laser scanner is presented in this paper to accomplish the indoor mobile robot SLAM. The preprocessed sensor data is divided into objective set through dynamic threshold segmentation. To fit the feature, improved Hough-transform is adopted to pick out the short segments from the objective set and an incorporating method is applied to merge the segments belonging to the same feature set. Then, a segment phase matching method is used to establish the global map, during which the EKF along with the matching technique is employed to estimate the optimal pose. Finally, experiment is implemented on the robot ATR1 in the given environment. Though the robot deviated from its planning path up to -177.38mm in Y-direction and 124.56mm in X-direction, the constructed map still shows the rationality and effectiveness of the method.
Active Galactic Nuclei with Double-peaked Narrow Lines: Are They Dual AGNs?

Double-peaked [O III]5007, profiles in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) may provide evidence for the existence of dual AGNs, but a good diagnostic for selecting them is currently lacking. Starting from $\sim$ 7000 active galaxies in SDSS DR7, we assemble a sample of 87 type 2 AGNs with double-peaked [O III]5007, profiles. The nuclear obscuration in the type 2 AGNs allows us to determine redshifts of host galaxies through stellar absorption lines. We typically find that one peak is redshifted and another is blueshifted relative to the host galaxy. We find a strong correlation between the ratios of the shifts and the double peak fluxes. The correlation can be naturally explained by the Keplerian relation predicted by models of co-rotating dual AGNs. The current sample statistically favors that most of the [O III] double-peaked sources are dual AGNs and disfavors other explanations, such as rotating disk and outflows. These dual AGNs have a separation distance at $\sim 1$ kpc scale, showing an intermediate phase of merging systems. The appearance of dual AGNs is about $\sim 10^{-2}$, impacting on the current observational deficit of binary supermassive black holes with a probability of $\sim 10^{-4}$ (Boroson&Lauer).
Impulse control, diabetes-specific self-efficacy, and diabetes management among emerging adults with type 1 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE To explore the relationships among impulse control, diabetes-specific self-efficacy, and diabetes management behaviors among emerging adults with type 1 diabetes. METHODS A total of 204 high school seniors (M = 18.25 years, SD = .45, 55.9% females) with type 1 diabetes self-reported on impulse control, diabetes-specific self-efficacy, and diabetes management behaviors during the past 3 months. Mediation and path analyses were used to address aims. RESULTS Greater impulse control was associated with better diabetes management among these emerging adults. In addition, diabetes-specific self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between impulse control and diabetes management. CONCLUSIONS Impulse control and diabetes-specific self-efficacy may be important in the management of type 1 diabetes among emerging adults. Diabetes-specific self-efficacy may play an important role in successful diabetes management among youth with lower impulse control.
Non-linear reflectance model for bidirectional texture function synthesis

A rough texture modelling involves a huge image data-set - the bidirectional texture function (BTF). This 6-dimensional function depends on planar texture coordinates as well as on view and illumination angles. We propose a new non-linear reflectance model, based on a Lafortune reflectance model improvement, which restores all BTF database images independently for each view position and herewith significantly reduces stored BTF data size. The extension consists in introducing several spectral parameters for each BTF image which are linearly estimated in the second estimation step according to the original data. The model parameters are computed for every surface reflectance field contained in the original BFT data. This technique allows BTF data compression by the ratio 1:15 while the synthesised images are almost indiscernible from the originals. The method is universal, and easily implementable in a graphical hardware for the purpose of real-time BTF rendering.
Binding, migration, and scalability in CORBA

This article explains how CORBA binds requests to object implementations with the help of an implementation repository. The design of the implementation repository has profound influence on the flexibility, performance, scalability, and fault tolerance of an ORB, and we illustrate some of the trade-offs involved in various repository designs. Implementation repositories play an important role in building scalable object systems; we point out some issues that CORBA will need to address in the future to continue to scale and remain at the forefront of distributed object technology. One Repository to register them all, One Repository to find them, One Repository to start them all, and with IIOP bind them In the land of CORBA where the Objects lie.
Visual localization of non-stationary sound sources

Sound source can be visually localized by analyzing the correlation between audio and visual data. To correctly analyze this correlation, the sound source is required to be stationary in a scene to date. We introduce a technique that localizes the non-stationary sound sources to overcome this limitation. The problem is formulated as finding the optimal visual trajectories that best represent the movement of the sound source over the pixels in a spatio-temporal volume. Using a beam search, we search these optimal visual trajectories by maximizing the correlation between the newly introduced audiovisual features of inconsistency. An incremental correlation evaluation with mutual information is developed here, which significantly reduces the computational cost. The correlations computed along the optimal trajectories are finally incorporated into a segmentation technique to localize a sound source region in the first visual frame of the current time window. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Forced Running Endurance Is Influenced by Gene(s) on Mouse Chromosome 10

Phenotypic diversity between laboratory mouse strains provides a model for studying the underlying genetic mechanisms. The A/J strain performs poorly in various endurance exercise models. The aim of the study was to test if endurance capacity and contractility of the fast- and slow-twitch muscles are affected by the genes on mouse chromosome 10. The C57BL/6J (B6) strain and C57BL/6J-Chr 10A/J/NaJ (B6.A10) consomic strain which carries the A/J chromosome 10 on a B6 strain background were compared. The B6.A10 mice compared to B6 were larger in body weight (p < 0.02): 27.2 ± 1.9 vs. 23.8 ± 2.7 and 23.4 ± 1.9 vs. 22.9 ± 2.3 g, for males and females, respectively, and in male soleus weight (p < 0.02): 9.7 ± 0.4 vs. 8.6 ± 0.9 mg. In the forced running test the B6.A10 mice completed only 64% of the B6 covered distance (p < 0.0001). However, there was no difference in voluntary wheel running (p = 0.6) or in fatigability of isolated soleus (p = 0.24) or extensor digitorum longus (EDL, p = 0.7) muscles. We conclude that chromosome 10 of the A/J strain contributes to reduced endurance performance. We also discuss physiological mechanisms and methodological aspects relevant to interpretation of these findings.
Entropy and Gaussianity - Measures of Deterministic Dynamics of Heart Rate and Blood Pressure Signals of Rats

Heart rate and blood pressure short-term variability analysis represent promising quantitative measures of the cardiovascular autonomic controls. The analysis includes traditional statistical analytical tools and a number of methods based on nonlinear system theory, recently developed to give better insight into complex HR and BP time series. These methods might reveal abnormalities that may not be uncovered by traditional measures. This paper investigates the measure of entropy of HR and BP time series as a consequence of the involvement of the autonomic nervous system, assessed in conscious telemetred rats under blockade of beta-adrenergic, oc-adrenergic and M-cholinergic receptors.
A comparative analysis of VoIP support for HT transmission mechanisms in WLAN

The high throughput (HT) 802.11n architecture is mainly aimed at exchanging large chunks of data using bit rates of 216 Mbps in 20 MHz and 432 Mbps (or even higher) in 40 MHz bandwidth respectively. However, for real-time data streams with small payloads like VoIP the performance of 802.11n is not very impressive and performs worse than 802.11a, as we show in this report. In order to overcome this and to accelerate QoS packet transmission to multiple users simultaneously, TGnSync proposed a mechanism for multiuser packet aggregation in the downlink with multiple uplinking responses known as multi response multiple receiver aggregate (MR-MRA). With the closure of the TGnSync group and the emergence of the EWC, an Intel backed 802.lln group, a second mechanism known as power save multiple poll (PSMP) to describe the down link transmission (DLT) and up link transmission (ULT) was introduced [2]. This report presents an analysis on the support for VoIP by an alternative virtual MIMO uplink mechanism that we call simultaneous coordinated channel access (SCCA) and the use of SCCA as a complimentary mechanism in the uplink to the MR-MRA and PSMP schemes to improve the throughput for multiuser transmissions. We show that the combined mechanisms MRA- SCCA and PSMP-SCCA are attractive solutions to meet the demand for QoS capacity over WLANs.
Synthesis and Antibacterial Evaluation of New Sulfone Derivatives Containing 2-Aroxymethyl-1,3,4-Oxadiazole/Thiadiazole Moiety

Sulfones are one of the most important classes of agricultural fungicides. To discover new lead compounds with high antibacterial activity, a series of new sulfone derivatives were designed and synthesized by introducing the aroxymethyl moiety into the scaffold of 1,3,4-oxadiazole/thiadiazole sulfones. Antibacterial activities against three phytopathogens (Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, Ralstonia solanacearum, Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri.) were assayed in vitro. As compared to the control of commercial fungicides and some reported sulfone fungicides, seven compounds 5I-1–5I-7 exerted remarkably higher activities with EC50 values ranging from 0.45–1.86 μg/mL against X. oryzae and 1.97–20.15 μg/mL against R. solanacearum. Exhilaratingly, 5I-1, 5I-2 and 5I-4 displayed significant in vivo activity against X. oryzae with protective effect of 90.4%, 77.7%, and 81.1% at 200 μg/mL, respectively, much higher than that exhibited by Bismerthiazol (25.6%) and Thiadiazole-copper (32.0%). And the differential phytotoxicity of active derivatives was preliminarily checked. The results demonstrated that derivative of 2-aroxymethyl-1,3,4-oxadiazole/thiadiazole sulfone can serve as potential alternative bactericides for the management of plant bacterial diseases.
The instructor’s face in video instruction: Evidence from two large-scale field studies.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 107(3) of Journal of Educational Psychology (see record 2015-17245-001). In the article, “value” was inadvertently included after “p” in the first column of both Tables 2 and 3. ] Multimedia learning research has established several principles for the effective design of audiovisual instruction. The image principle suggests that showing the instructor’s face in multimedia instruction does not promote learning, because the potential benefits from inducing social responses are outweighed by the cost of additional cognitive processing. In an 8-week observational field study (N = 2,951), online learners chose to watch video lectures either with or without the instructor’s face. Although learners who saw the face reported having a better lecture experience than those who chose not to see the face, 35% watched videos without the face for self-reported reasons including avoiding distraction. Building on these insights, the authors developed a video presentation style that strategically shows the face to reduce distraction while preserving occasional social cues. A 10-week field experiment (N = 12,468) compared the constant with the strategic presentation of the face and provided evidence consistent with the image principle. Cognitive load and perceived social presence were higher in the strategic than in the constant condition, but learning outcomes and attrition did not differ. Learners who expressed a verbal learning preference experienced substantially lower attrition and cognitive load with the constant than the strategic presentation. The findings highlight the value of social cues for motivation and caution against one-size-fits-all approaches to instructional design that fail to account for individual differences in multimedia instruction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Group Peer Review

Invitation to review a manuscript for publication marks an exciting milestone in graduate and postgraduate students’ training. Yet, peer reviewing is seldom explicitly taught. First-time reviewers approaching this task often lack mentorship, guidelines, and confidence. The ongoing debate about how to judge the quality of qualitative research can further complicate the task. In this article, we introduce an innovative model for conducting group peer reviews in the context of qualitative research training. After setting out the model's principles and process, we discuss its merits and reflect on our experiences as trainees and supervisor using the approach. In addition to providing opportunities for mentorship in appraisal methods, writing strategies, and approaches for framing constructive feedback, we suggest the model has the potential to advance trainees’ development as collegial peers and their overall learning as qualitative researchers. Finally, we discuss potential ways forward to extend the model in other contexts.
Real Exchange Rates and the Relative Prices of Non-Traded and Traded Goods: An Empirical Analysis

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the decomposition of UK real exchange rates into the relative price of traded goods and the ratio of the relative price of non-traded to traded goods, and tests the prediction that deviations from the law of one price in tradable goods dominate real exchange rate variability only in the short run. UK bilateral real exchange rates are examined relative to a sample of six main OECD partners. The existence of a long-run relationship between real exchange rates and these corresponding relative price ratios is analysed using cointegrated vector autoregressive models. These show only limited evidence of a cointegrating relationship. The paper quantifies the severity of the deviations from the law of one price, and shows that these deviations are persistent relative to the length of the sample period. This motivates the use of a multi-country panel cointegration-testing framework, which produces evidence of a long-run relationship between the real exchange rate and the non-tradable component.
LVDC Grid Based on PV Energy Sources and Multiple Electrochemical Storage Technologies

In the global context of the electric power grid modernization, storage of electricity is a crucial issue. Nowadays, energy storage systems (ESS) are used more, more in positive energy buildings in conjunction with new Low Voltage Direct Current (LVDC) grids. However, the impact of renewable energy sources (RES) on ESS is not well known. The main objective of this article is to determine a systematic methodology to study energy data from a positive energy building in order to determine the impact on ESS dedicated to be included in smart-grids. The aim is to obtain comparative results in normalized working conditions, determine charge/discharge cycles. Clustering methods were compared to choose the more adapted one to treat the stored data of energy production, consumption during more than three years in our experimental platform in LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse. Each type of cycle will help further study in order to estimate its impact on efficiency, lifetime of ESS, then choose the more adapted element for each application.
Asymmetry of subinsular anisotropy by in vivo diffusion tensor imaging

The cortical regions specialized in speech–language exhibit a left–right asymmetry, e.g., a larger cortical size in the left auditory cortex and Wernicke's area. The possibility of developmental asymmetry in axonal fibers interconnecting speech–language cortical areas can be investigated by in vivo diffusion tensor imaging. Fifteen right‐handed native English speakers showed a markedly significant asymmetry (P < 0. 0005) in the relative anisotropy of water diffusion in the subinsular white matter, greater on the left. Additionally, the first principal diffusivity was greater and the second and third principal diffusivities were smaller on the left than right side. These results suggest the subinsular axonal structures developed differently between the left and right sides. A possible association between the hemispheric specialization in language and speech and the subinsular axonal fiber development is discussed. Hum. Brain Mapp. 20:82–90, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Real-world evaluation of Sensor Context-aware Adaptive Duty-cycled opportunistic routing

Energy is of primary concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Low power transmission makes the wireless links unreliable, which leads to frequent topology changes. Resulting packet retransmissions aggravate the energy consumption. Beaconless routing approaches, such as opportunistic routing (OR) choose packet forwarders after data transmissions, and are promising to support dynamic features of WSNs. This paper proposes SCAD - Sensor Context-aware Adaptive Duty-cycled beaconless OR for WSNs. SCAD is a cross-layer routing solution and it brings the concept of beaconless OR into WSNs. SCAD selects packet forwarders based on multiple types of network contexts. To achieve a balance between performance and energy efficiency, SCAD adapts duty-cycles of sensors based on real-time traffic loads and energy drain rates. We implemented SCAD in TinyOS running on top of Tmote Sky sensor motes. Real-world evaluations show that SCAD outperforms other protocols in terms of both throughput and network lifetime.
First-order transient response of DC-DC converter with peak current mode control for low-voltage application

POL with peak current mode control has first-order response depending on the controller design, and the overshoot and undershoot donpsilat appear in transient response. This feature is the chief advantage of peak current mode control. However, there is no example of the design that employed this feature efficiently. This paper investigates the design consideration for first-order response of peak current mode control in low-voltage application.
A Multi-Objective Endocrine PSO Algorithm

A novel endocrine particle swarm optimization algorithm(EPSO) base on the idea of general PSO algorithm and endocrine is proposed in the paper. In the method, particles are grouped by stimulation hormones(SH) of endocrine system, and the best positions of classes are used to update the positions of particles which controlled by them. The new positions of particles are not only determined by the best position which it achieved so far and the global best position in current generation, but also influenced by the best position of class which is belonged to the global information and local information are combined completely. The simulation experiments with three typical multi-objective functions are used to indicate the effectiveness of the method with compared to MOPSO-DC.
Beacon-enabled cognitive access for dynamic spectrum access

In dynamic spectrum access networks, the unused licensed spectrum used by primary users (PU) is opened to unlicensed secondary users (SU) for improving spectrum efficiency. We design a simple time-based threshold policy for collective protection of PUs, enabled by an out-of-band channel. In particular, multiple SUs may be widely distributed in a geographic location. The interference that collocated SUs cause to each other, termed self-interference, becomes a major source that may degrade the SUs communication performance. We establish an analytical framework for carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) based coexistence mechanisms when integrated into a family of time based threshold policies, and study its performance though theoretical analysis.
Personalized Web Search Using Trust Based Hubs And Authorities

In this paper method has been proposed to improve the precision of Personalized Web Search (PWS) using Trust based Hubs and Authorities(HA) where Hubs are the high quality resource pages and Authorities are the high quality content pages in the specific topic generated using HyperlinkInduced Topic Search (HITS). The Trust is used in HITS for increasing the reliability of HITS in identifying the good hubs and authorities for effective web search and overcome the problem of topic drift found in HITS. Experimental Study was conducted on the data set of web query sessions to test the effectiveness of PWS with Trust based HA in domains Academics, Entertainment and Sport. The experimental results were compared on the basis of improvement in average precision using PWS with HA (with/without Trust). The results verified statistically show the significant improvement in precision using PWS with HA (with Trust).
0 A ug 2 00 9 MeV Mass Gluonic Colour Singlets in QCD

It has long been textbook ’knowledge’ that quarks and gluons exist exclusively inside of hadrons and glueballs because of colour confinement. However the SU(N) group contains N − 1 Abelian generators. We argue that since the Abelian components of the gluon field can be meaningfully isolated by the ChoFaddeev-Niemi-Shabanov decomposition, the corresponding gluon excitations are physical entities of neutral colour charge that can propagate freely. Their mass can be estimated on dimensional grounds and is similar to the pion mass.
Airborne measurements of trace gases and aerosols over the London metropolitan region

The Emissions around the M25 motorway (EM25) campaign took place over the megacity of London in the United Kingdom in June 2009 with the aim of characterising trace gas and aerosol composition and properties entering and emitted from the urban region. It featured two mobile platforms, the UK BAe-146 Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) research aircraft and a ground-based mobile lidar van, both travelling in circuits around London, roughly following the path of the M25 motorway circling the city. We present an overview of findings from the project, which took place during typical UK summertime pollution conditions. Emission ratios of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from the London region were consistent with measurements in and downwind of other large urban areas and indicated traffic and associated fuel evaporation were major sources. Sub-micron aerosol composition was dominated by secondary species including sulphate (24% of sub-micron mass in the London plume and 30% in the background aerosol), nitrate (24% plume; 18% background) and organic aerosol (30% plume; 30% background). The primary sub-micron aerosol emissions from London were minor compared to the larger regional background, with only limited increases in aerosol mass in the urban plume compared to the background (15% mass increase on average). Black carbon mass was the major exception, which more than doubled in the urban plume and lead to a decrease in the single scattering albedo from 0.91 in the background aerosol to 0.86 in the London plume, on average. Our observations indicated that regional aerosol appeared to dominate urban sources, at least during typical summertime conditions, meaning future efforts to reduce PM levels in London must account for regional as well as local aerosol sources.