Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancement of Power System Stability and Performance Comparison of SSSC based Damping Controller Using Modified Genetic Algorithm

This paper proposes a new genetic based approach for optimal selection to damp power system oscillations by a Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) based controller. The design problem of the proposed controller is formulated as an optimization problem and modified Genetic Algorithm (MGA) is employed to search for the optimal controller parameters. The performances of the proposed controller are evaluated under different disturbances for single-machine infinite-bus power system. The system response being simulated during different faults applied to the terminals. This work is presented to improve the stability and to damp the oscillation by using SSSC with and without controller and compare their performance. Simulation results show that SSSC with controllers enhance the stability of single-machine power system effectively. Simulation results are presented and compared with the existing methods as discussed in the recent literature to show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
Bioinspiration lessons from a self-replicating machine concept in a constrained environment

We present an outline of a self-replicating machine concept that utilises in-situ resources on the Moon with which to construct itself — this represents the ultimate bio-inspired system. In attempting to deal with the practical engineering issues with such a machine, there are a number of biomimetics lessons to be learned, the most important being the requirement to synthesise itself from local raw materials. The self-replicator may be envisaged as a mobile rover mounting a suite of 3D printers, drills, etc — this bears similarities to the upcoming Resource Prospector mission to the Moon to demonstrate in-situ resource utilisation. 3D printing of mechatronic components will be key to 3D printing of robotic machines. It will be partially demonstrated that electric motors and neural circuits can be 3D printed. On the assumption that almost any functional structure can be 3D printed, 3D printing motors and electronics constitutes a demonstration of universal construction capability.
Risk factors for advancement of cytomegalovirus retinitis in patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Studies of Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group.

OBJECTIVE To identify ocular and systemic factors that predict advancement of cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis during treatment. METHODS Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome were enrolled in a multicenter clinical trial designed to evaluate foscarnet sodium and ganciclovir sodium as therapy for newly diagnosed CMV retinitis. Ocular characteristics at baseline and measurements of retinitis were assessed from fundus photographs by graders at a fundus photograph reading center. The following measures of advancement were assessed: (1) lesion border movement of at least 750 microm or development of a new lesion in involved eyes; (2) rate of increase in retinal area with CMV in involved eyes; and (3) development of retinitis in uninvolved eyes of patients with unilateral disease at baseline. RESULTS In eyes with retinitis, risk factors at baseline for advancement while receiving treatment included smaller area involved, active margins of retinitis, and posterior location. Risk factors for development of retinitis in uninvolved fellow eyes included blood and urine cultures positive for CMV and lower CD8(+) T-lymphocyte count. CONCLUSIONS Lesion characteristics can be used to predict advancement of preexisting disease, whereas only systemic factors are associated with development of bilateral disease. These analyses describe retinitis activity before the introduction of potent antiretroviral therapies but provide an important reference point for patients in whom CMV retinitis develops after failure or intolerance of antiretroviral agents. Arch Ophthalmol. 2000;118:1196-1204
Influences of dietary protein levels and phytate contents on zinc requirement in rats

This study investigates whether the effects of increased dietary levels of soy protein on zinc-deficient rats are due to the dietary protein content. Rats were fed two levels of demineralized soy protein (DP) diets and two levels of egg albumin (EA) diets including 7 ppm zinc (Experiment 1). Growth was depressed in rats fed a 20% DP diet (0.43% phytate) but not in those fed a 10% EA diet containing 7 ppm zinc. Zinc concentrations in the serum, femur and kidney were lower in rats fed the 20% DP diet than those fed a 10% DP (0.20% phytate) diet, and they were also lower in rats fed the 10% EA diet than those fed a 5% EA diet. Zinc concentrations in the serum and femur of rats fed the 10% DP diet or the 20% DP diet were decreased compared with those fed the 5% EA diet or the 10% EA diet, respectively. Under zinc-deficient conditions (<0.4 ppm Zn), the survival time shortened (Experiment 2) and the zinc concentration in the serum and femur decreased faster (Experiment 3) in rats fed the 10% EA diet compared with those fed the 5% EA diet. The survival times and time courses of these parameters show that the zinc requirements of rats increased with the dietary protein level. The increased zinc requirement of rats that accompanied increasing dietary soy protein was due to the dietary protein content as well as the dietary phytate content.
Circulating acylghrelin levels are suppressed by insulin and increase in response to hypoglycemia in healthy adult volunteers.

OBJECTIVE Ghrelin has glucoregulatory and orexigenic actions, but its role in acute hypoglycemia remains uncertain. We aimed to investigate circulating levels of acylghrelin (AG) and unacylated ghrelin (UAG) in response to hyperinsulinemia and to hypoglycemia. DESIGN A randomized, single-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study including 3 study days was performed at a university hospital clinical research center. METHODS Nine healthy men completed 3 study days: i) saline control (CTR), ii) hyperinsulinemic euglycemia (HE) (bolus insulin 0.1 IE/kg i.v. and glucose 20% i.v. for 105 min, plasma glucose ≈5 mmol/l), and iii) hyperinsulinemic hypoglycemia (HH) (bolus insulin 0.1 IE/kg i.v.). RESULTS HH and HE suppressed AG concentrations at t=45-60 min as compared with CTR (P<0.05). At t=90 min, a rebound increase in AG was observed in response to HH as compared with both HE and CTR (P<0.05). UAG also decreased during HH and HE at t=45 min (P<0.05), whereas the AG-to-UAG ratio remained unaffected. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that AG and UAG are directly suppressed by hyperinsulinemia and that AG concentrations increase after a latency of ≈1 h in response to hypoglycemia, suggesting a potential counterregulatory role of AG.
Strategies For Fuzzy Inference within Classifier Systems

When designing any type of fuzzy rule based system, considerable effort is placed in identifying the correct number of fuzzy sets and the fine tuning of the corresponding membership functions. Once a rule base has been formulated a fuzzy inference strategy must be applied in order to combine grades of membership. Considerable time and effort is spent trying to determine the number of fuzzy sets for a given system while substantially less time is invested in obtaining the most suitable inference strategy. This paper investigates a number of theoretical proven fuzzy inference strategies in order to assess the impact of these strategies on the performance of a fuzzy rule based classifier system. A fuzzy inference framework is proposed, which allows the investigation of five pure theoretical fuzzy inference operators in two real world applications. An additional two novel fuzzy-neural strategies are proposed and a comparative study is undertaken. The results show that the selection of the most suitable inference strategy for a given domain can lead to a significant improvement in performance.
3D face recognition based on histograms of local descriptors

Face recognition in an uncontrolled condition such as illumination and expression variations is a challenging task. Local descriptor is one of the most efficient methods used to deal with these problems. In this paper, we present an automatic 3D face recognition approach based on three local descriptors, local phase quantization (LPQ), Three-Patch Local Binary Patterns (TPLBP) and Four-Patch Local Binary Patterns (TPLBP). Facial images are passing through one of the three descriptors and divided into sub-regions or rectangular blocks. The histogram of each sub-region is extracted and concatenated into a single feature vector. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and EFM (Enhanced Fisher linear discriminant Model) are used to reduce the dimensionality of the resulting feature vectors. Finally, these vectors are sent to the classification step, when we use two methods; SVM (Support Victor Machine) and similarity measures. CASIA 3D face database is introduced to experimental evaluation. The experimental results illustrate a high recognition performance of the proposed approach.
Disambiguating Dynamic Sentiment Ambiguous Adjectives

Dynamic sentiment ambiguous adjectives (DSAAs) like "large, small, high, low" pose a challenging task on sentiment analysis. This paper proposes a knowledge-based method to automatically determine the semantic orientation of DSAAs within context. The task is reduced to sentiment classification of target nouns, which we refer to sentiment expectation instead of semantic orientation widely used in previous researches. We mine the Web using lexico-syntactic patterns to infer sentiment expectation of nouns, and then exploit character-sentiment model to reduce noises caused by the Web data. At sentence level, our method achieves promising result with an f-score of 78.52% that is substantially better than baselines. At document level, our method outperforms previous work in sentiment classification of product reviews.
A wavelet coding preprocessing algorithm based on Bayesian estimation for image compression

This paper presents a wavelet coding preprocessing algorithm which adopts threshold values based on Bayesian estimation for image compression. The proposed algorithm considers a modification to the quantization stage of set partioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) (Said and Pearman, 1996), which achieves better peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and visual quality performance than existing embedded wavelet coders and JPEG. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with extensive experimental results.
Frequency synthesizer and phase to analog converter for wireless power transfer applications

This article presents low power frequency synthesizer with phase to analog converter (PAC) and aperture phase detector (APD) to cut down noise and power and outcome lower reference spur. The proposed frequency synthesizer is build-in wireless power receiver system to meet low power requirement for transmission efficiency optimization. During locked condition, the synthesizer can catch to compare the reference and VCO produce results directly from APD and then PAC brings output to command the current amplitude of charge pump. After measure results of the synthesizer from 1.2 V supply voltage, a phase noise of −113.22 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset at 2.406 GHz, a tuning range of 9.5% from 2.256 to 2.481 GHz, a power consumption of 4.5 mW, and a reference spur of −60 dBc in synthesizer.
Handling PCM Resistance Drift with Device , Circuit , Architecture , and System Solutions

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is expected to be incorporated in future memory and storage hierarchies. In recent research, several efforts have been undertaken to overcome PCM limitations of write endurance and write energy. In this paper, we explore a lesser known challenge for PCM – Resistance Drift. Studies have shown that the resistance of a PCM cell increases over time, possibly yielding a wrong state upon read. This is expected to be a frequent source of “soft errors” in PCM devices. The problem is especially significant in multi-level cells (MLCs), where the resistance ranges for each state are more closely spaced. The effect of drift can be negated with a refresh operation that re-writes the contents of a line, similar to refreshes in DRAM devices. However, PCM writes are very expensive in terms of energy, delay, and their effect on endurance, thus making frequent writes infeasible. This paper proposes device, circuit, architecture, and system-level techniques to balance the overhead of refresh with error rate. At the device level, write mechanisms that favor write precision are likely more effective at minimizing the overall efficiency of writes. At the architecture level, we introduce a light-read operation and combine it with ECC support to reduce the need for expensive writes. This basic operation can be augmened with circuit, architectural, and system-level techniques to achieve various trade-offs between energy, latency, soft error rates, and hard error rates. We thus lay the framework for a large family of viable soft error management policies that span the entire system stack.
Cloning the Soil Metagenome: a Strategy for Accessing the Genetic and Functional Diversity of Uncultured Microorganisms

ABSTRACT Recent progress in molecular microbial ecology has revealed that traditional culturing methods fail to represent the scope of microbial diversity in nature, since only a small proportion of viable microorganisms in a sample are recovered by culturing techniques. To develop methods to investigate the full extent of microbial diversity, we used a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vector to construct libraries of genomic DNA isolated directly from soil (termed metagenomic libraries). To date, we have constructed two such libraries, which contain more than 1 Gbp of DNA. Phylogenetic analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences recovered from one of the libraries indicates that the BAC libraries contain DNA from a wide diversity of microbial phyla, including sequences from diverse taxa such as the low-G+C, gram-positive Acidobacterium,Cytophagales, and Proteobacteria. Initial screening of the libraries in Escherichia coli identified several clones that express heterologous genes from the inserts, confirming that the BAC vector can be used to maintain, express, and analyze environmental DNA. The phenotypes expressed by these clones include antibacterial, lipase, amylase, nuclease, and hemolytic activities. Metagenomic libraries are a powerful tool for exploring soil microbial diversity, providing access to the genetic information of uncultured soil microorganisms. Such libraries will be the basis of new initiatives to conduct genomic studies that link phylogenetic and functional information about the microbiota of environments dominated by microorganisms that are refractory to cultivation.
A CANONICAL - CORRELATION AMONG SERVANT LEADERSHIP, COMMITMENT AND PERFORMANCE

There are only very few studies to discuss about the servant leadership and performance. Moreover, there is a lack of study about the influence of commitment to increase the performance of the organisation. In the present study a model was created to find out the mediating role of commitment between servant leadership and performance investigated the correlation among them. Self-administered questionnaires that included a servant leadership scale, a commitment scale and a performance scale were used to collect data from 115 textile units at Coimbatore. The survey was conducted among 345 leaders selected through purposive sampling. The number of valid questionnaires was 318 and the response rate was 92%. Path analysis showed that commitment is mediating effectively between servant leadership and performance. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that organizational leaders would do well to develop a strategy by which they improve the commitment in their organizations, will make a positive effect on performance.
Closed-form optimized composite-order estimator for blind separation of instantaneous linear mixtures

In the field of blind source separation, formulation of closed-form estimators constitutes an important framework. In this work, we present an optimal composition of third- and fourth-order cumulants leading to a closed-form ICA estimator for a pair-wise blind source separation. We introduce a free weight parameter in combining the cumulants and evaluated its optimal value such that the mean-square estimation of Givens rotation is minimized. We have shown that the optimal value of weight parameter depends on the statistical knowledge of the mixing signals and additive Gaussian noise. Computer simulations have been performed to illustrate the behavior of the proposed optimized closed-form estimator for the maximization of the weighted contrast.
The development of memory in Children

Charting the development of several different facets of memory, "The Development of Memory in Children" shows how developmental changes in memory relate to more general cognitive changes. Robert Kail demonstrates that memory is not an isolated intellectual skill but a process involved in many intellectual and social activities. He also points out that memory is a convenient shorthand term for a collection of processes rather than a single discrete faculty. Changes to the third edition include additional discussions of memory in natural contexts, scripts and memory, and more on eye witness testimony by children - a subject that has been the focus of research attention and legal attention due to cases on abuse and related issues. Written in a jargon-free, nontechnical style, the book should be accessible to students with only an introductory course in psychology.
Software Architecture at Work Technical Report # 5 aSQA : Architectural Software Quality Assurance

In this paper, we present a novel technique for assessing and prioritizing architectural quality in large-scale software development projects. The technique can, after an initial investment, be applied with relatively little effort by software architects and the technique is therefore suited for agile development in which quality attributes are assessed and prioritized within each development sprint. We report on the benefits and liabilities of the technique based upon interviews and experiences from three companies and supplemented by a survey study. In conclusion, the technique is considered valuable and a viable tool, and have benefits both at the architectural, technical, level, as well as in a business and people context.
Sociocultural theory and the practice of teaching historical concepts

Learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with peers. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 90) In our teacher education courses, we discuss with the trainee teachers educationally relevant topics from the field of learning theory. One of these topics is the acquisition of historical concepts. Through practical experiences and classroom assignments, the trainee teachers become aware of some of the problems involved in the teaching of concepts. Often, they plan to teach concepts in a straightforward matter-of-fact manner using a transmission model of teaching. As teacher educators, we challenge this idea in order to replace this approach with more effective models. So, with our trainee teachers we discuss how secondary education students can achieve a deeper understanding of concepts. Two basic elements of helping trainee teachers teach for understanding are (1) methods to create powerful learning environments and (2) methods to present the historical subject matter in terms of a meaningful whole. This approach is influenced by a Vygotskian sociocultural theory of teaching and learning. In this perspective the creation of a learning environment can be conceived of as a shared problem space, inviting the students to participate in a process of negotiation and co-construction of knowledge. Lev Vygotsky, the founder of the sociocultural theory, developed a new framework for conceptualizing these educational dialogues, through which students acquire new modes of handling knowledge and solving problems.
Isolation and Characterization of Polymorphic Microsatellite Loci from Metapenaeopsis barbata Using PCR-Based Isolation of Microsatellite Arrays (PIMA)

The red-spot prawn, Metapenaeopsis barbata, is a commercially important, widely distributed demersal species in the Indo-West Pacific Ocean. Overfishing has made its populations decline in the past decade. To study conservation genetics, eight polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated. Genetic characteristics of the SSR (simple sequence repeat) fingerprints were estimated in 61 individuals from adjacent seas of Taiwan and China. The number of alleles, ranging from 2 to 4, as well as observed and expected heterozygosities in populations, ranging from 0.048 to 0.538, and 0.048 and 0.654, respectively, were detected. No deviation from Hardy–Weinberg expectations was detected at either locus. No significant linkage disequilibrium was detected in locus pairs. The polymorphic microsatellite loci will be useful for investigations of the genetic variation, population structure, and conservation genetics of this species.
A discriminative decision tree learning approach to acoustic modeling

The decision tree is a popular method to accomplish tying of the states of a set context dependent phone HMMs for efficient and effective training of the large acoustic models. A likelihood-based impurity function is commonly adopted. It is well known that maximizing likelihood does not result in the maximal separation between the distributions in the leaves of the tree. To improve robustness, a discriminative decision tree learning approach is proposed. It embeds the MCE-GPD formulation in defining the impurity function so that the discriminative information could be taken into account while optimizing the tree. We compare the proposed approach with the conventional tree building using a Mandarin syllable recognition task. Our preliminary results show that the separation between the divided subspaces in the tree nodes is clearly enhanced although there is a slight performance reduction.
Le « boom » des saisons dans l'espace sahélo-saharien

Le Sahel connait des crises structurelles sur lesquelles les acteurs formels n’ont guere de prise. La diffusion des printemps arabes vers le sud du continent a accelere et intensifie son integration dans les processus mondiaux, au point que la stabilite de la region tout entiere s’en trouve menacee. L’incapacite des Etats saheliens a innover sur le plan de la gouvernance et a satisfaire les attentes de leurs populations, conjuguee a la ruee sur les ressources naturelles, la radicalisation religieuse et l’« importation » de tensions exterieures, notamment, sont a l’origine de l’avenement d’une nouvelle ere mondiale ou des griefs locaux trouvent une tribune internationale.