Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MOND effects in the inner Solar system

I pinpoint a previously unrecognized MOND effect that may act in the inner Solar system, and is due to the galactic acceleration gg = ηa 0 : a byproduct of the MOND external-field effect. Predictions of the effect are not generic to the MOND paradigm, but depend on the particular MOND formulation at hand. However, the modified Poisson formulation, on which I concentrate, uniquely predicts a subtle anomaly that may be detected in planetary and spacecraft motions (and perhaps in other precision systems, such as binary pulsars), despite their very high accelerations, and even if the MOND interpolating function is arbitrarily close to unity at high accelerations. Near the Sun, this anomaly appears as a quadrupole field, with the acceleration at position u from the Sun being g a i (u) = -q a ij u j , with q a ij diagonal, axisymmetric and traceless: -2q a xx = -2q a yy = q a zz = q(η)(a 0 /R M ,), where R M = (M ⊙ G/a 0 ) 1/2 ≈ 8 × 10 3 au is the MOND transition radius of the Sun. The anomaly is described and analysed as the Newtonian field of the fictitious cloud of 'phantom matter' that hovers around the Sun. I find, for the relevant range of η values and for a range of interpolating functions, μ(x), values of 10 -2 ≤ -q ≤ 0.3, which turn out to be sensitive to the form of μ(x) around the MOND-to-Newtonian transition. This range verges on the present bounds from Solar system measurements. There might thus exist favourable prospects for either measuring the effect or constraining the theory and relevant parameters. Probing this anomaly may also help distinguish between modified-inertia and modified-gravity formulations of MOND. I also discuss briefly an anomaly that is generic to MOND in all its formulations, and competes with the quadrupole anomaly in the special case that 1 - μ(x) vanishes as x -3/2 as x → ∞.
Review of the International Literature

Abstract Batty, M.J., Bonnington, S. , Tang, B. , Hawken, M.B, & Gruzelier, J.H. (2006). Relaxation strategies and enhancement of hypnotic susceptibility: EEG neurofeedback, progressive muscle relaxation and self-hypnosis. Brain Research Bulletin, 71 (1–3),83–90. Brown, R.J. (2006). Different types of “dissociation” have different psychological mechanisms. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 7 (4), 7–28. Diamond, S.G. , Davis, O.C. , Schaechter, J.D. , & Howe, R.D. (2006). Hypnosis for rehabilitation after stroke: Six case studies. Contemporary Hypnosis, 23 (4), 173–180. Ferrell, M.D., Beach, R.L. , Szeverenyi, N.M. , Krch, M. , & Fernhall, B. (2006). An fMRI analysis of neural activity during perceived zone-state performance. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 28 (4), 421–433. Gay, M. (2007). Effectiveness of hypnosis in reducing mild essential hypertension: A one-year follow-up. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 55(1), 67–83. Guzman-Hosta L. , Martinez-Taboas A. , Rodriguez-Gomez J. .
Quantifying Incentive Compatibility of Ranking Systems

Reasoning about agent preferences on a set of alternatives, and the aggregation of such preferences into some social ranking is a fundamental issue in reasoning about multi-agent systems. When the set of agents and the set of alternatives coincide, we get the ranking systems setting. A famous type of ranking systems are page ranking systems in the context of search engines. Such ranking systems do not exist in empty space, and therefore agents' incentives should be carefully considered. In this paper we define three measures for quantifying the incentive compatibility of ranking systems. We apply these measures to several known ranking systems, such as PageRank, and prove tight bounds on the level of incentive compatibility under two basic properties: strong monotonicity and non-imposition. We also introduce two novel nonimposing ranking systems, one general, and the other for the case of systems with three participants. A full axiomatization is provided for the latter.
ContextLogger 2 A Tool for Smartphone Data Gathering

Researchers often want to gather activity-related data available on mobile phones. Based on our experience with data collection in numerous field studies, we identified a number of requirements for a smartphone data logger, and set out to create logging software fulfilling those requirements. Our software—named ContextLogger2— now comes close to meeting the goals set for it. Furthermore, it has portable technologies in its core, potentially serving as a basis for logger implementations for a variety of platforms.
Robot-assisted gait training improves brachial–ankle pulse wave velocity and peak aerobic capacity in subacute stroke patients with totally dependent ambulation

Objective: Brachial–ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) evaluates arterial stiffness and also predicts early outcome in stroke patients. The objectives of this study were to investigate arterial stiffness of subacute nonfunctional ambulatory stroke patients and to compare the effects of robot-assisted gait therapy (RAGT) combined with rehabilitation therapy (RT) on arterial stiffness and functional recovery with those of RT alone. Method: The RAGT group (N = 30) received 30 minutes of robot-assisted gait therapy and 30 minutes of conventional RT, and the control group (N = 26) received 60 minutes of RT, 5 times a week for 4 weeks. baPWV was measured and calculated using an automated device. The patients also performed a symptom-limited graded exercise stress test using a bicycle ergometer, and parameters of cardiopulmonary fitness were recorded. Clinical outcome measures were categorized into 4 categories: activities of daily living, balance, ambulatory function, and paretic leg motor function and were evaluated before and after the 4-week intervention. Results: Both groups exhibited significant functional recovery in all clinical outcome measures after the 4-week intervention. However, peak aerobic capacity, peak heart rate, exercise tolerance test duration, and baPWV improved only in the RAGT group, and the improvements in baPWV and peak aerobic capacity were more noticeable in the RAGT group than in the control group. Conclusion: Robot-assisted gait therapy combined with conventional rehabilitation therapy represents an effective method for reversing arterial stiffness and improving peak aerobic capacity in subacute stroke patients with totally dependent ambulation. However, further large-scale studies with longer term follow-up periods are warranted to measure the effects of RAGT on secondary prevention after stroke.
ATRMiner : A system for automatic biomedical named entities recognition

The recognition of biomedical entities in natural text is a key step for automatic analysis of textual resources. Biomedical entities recognition tools are a prerequisite for many applications working on text. In this paper, we develop a biomedical entities recognition tool named ATRMiner. Using natural language processing technology, ATRMiner can identify five classes biomedical entities, namely gene, disease, cellular components, molecular functions and biological process based on gene ontology. Our system achieved a recall 83%, a precision 92%, and an F-score 87.2% aiming at test datasets. This shows our system is promising for practical application.
Multi-loop PI-based control strategies for the Activated Sludge Process

This paper proposes a multi loop decentralized control strategy for the control of a wastewater treatment plant based on an Activated Sludge (ASP) model. The ASP is a described by means of a nonlinear model and results on a Two-Input Two-Output multivariable system. Even though advanced control strategies have been presented in the literature, the proposal of this paper is to show that by appropriate tuning of decentralized PI controllers, it is possible to get comparable performance as with other approaches. With this purpose the paper proposes a way of addressing the design of the decentralized controllers as well as a regulation based tuning for a PI controller. Simulations are carried out on the nonlinear model showing the performance of the proposed approach.
Book Review: The Quick Test (QT): Provisional Manual

think, but little has been accomplished in actually undertaking any steps to achieve this goal. The authors of this plan deserve commendation for their creation of a plan for transmitting to students the skills of systematic thinking toward valid goals. It would seem to be imperative that those responsible for the creation of educational and psychological tests and measurements forthwith assume responsibility for exploring the intellectual approach presented in the Brodbeck-Jones Plan in its application to the validation of educational goals and in the appraisal of educational practices. If this is done, the future will reveal that the award-winning plan presented in Television and Human Behavior has created a distinguished landmark in the history of education. V. C. ARNSPIGER East Texas State College
Equine laminitis: induced by 48 h hyperinsulinaemia in Standardbred horses.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY Hyperinsulinaemia is known to induce laminitis experimentally in healthy ponies with no history of the condition. Horses are more insulin sensitive than ponies and whether prolonged hyperinsulinaemia and euglycaemia would have a similar laminitogenic effect requires study. OBJECTIVES To determine if laminitis results when the prolonged euglycaemic hyperinsulinaemic clamp technique (p-EHC) is applied to clinically normal Standardbred horses, and to monitor hoof wall temperature seeking an association between vascular activity and laminitis development. METHODS Eight young, clinically normal Standardbred horses were assigned into 4 pairs and within each pair, one was assigned randomly to either treatment (n = 4) or control (n = 4) groups. Treated horses received continuous infusions of insulin and glucose until clinical signs of laminitis developed, at which point the horses were subjected to euthanasia. Control horses received an equivalent volume of a balanced electrolyte infusion for the same period. Hoof wall surface temperature (HWST) was monitored continuously throughout the experimental period. RESULTS All horses in the treatment group were calculated to have normal insulin sensitivity. All treated horses, and none in the control group, developed laminitis (P = 0.01). Pronounced digital pulses were a feature of the treatment group, while insignificant digital pulses occurred in control horses. HWST was higher and less variable in treated horses once hyperinsulinaemia was established. CONCLUSIONS Healthy Standardbred horses subjected to prolonged hyperinsulinaemia develop laminitis within 48 h, demonstrating that laminitis in horses can be triggered by insulin. POTENTIAL RELEVANCE Insulin resistance and the associated hyperinsulinaemia place horses and ponies at risk of developing laminitis. This study demonstrates a need for prompt management of the persistent hyperinsulinaemia seen in some endocrinopathies.
Latent fingerprint from multiple surfaces: Database and quality analysis

Latent fingerprints are lifted from multiple types of surfaces, which vary in material type, texture, color, and shape. These differences in the surfaces introduce significant intra-class variations in the lifted prints such as availability of partial print, background noise, and poor ridge structure quality. Due to these observed variations, the overall quality and the matching performance of latent fingerprints vary with respect to surface properties. Thus, characterizing the performance of latent fingerprints according to the surfaces they are lifted from is an important research problem that needs attention. In this research, we create a novel multi-surface latent fingerprint database and make it publicly available for the research community. The database consists of 551 latent fingerprints from 51 subjects lifted from eight different surfaces. Using existing algorithms, we characterize the quality of latent fingerprints and compute the matching performance to analyze the effect of different surfaces.
Laterality Across the Lifespan: The Effects of Task Complexity

The current study aimed to build on the work of Gooderham & Bryden (2013) by comparing the effects of task complexity on hand selection across the lifespan. It was hypothesized that the increasing complexity of a task would override a biomechanically efficient movement such that participants would use only the preferred hand to complete the task. It was also hypothesized that older adults would perform similarly to young children with respect to switch points in space. Four age groups of participants (3-7 year olds, 8-12 year olds, 18-25 year olds and adults over 70 years) completed the newly designed Hand Selection Complexity Task (HSCT) which is an observational method designed to investigate the effects of task difficulty on hand selection in terms of Fitts’ Law. The measures allows for the proximity of reaches to remain the same, while manipulating task difficulty. Participants also completed the Long Pegboard (Bryden, et al., 1994), which measured the behavioural preference of hand selection. Finally, participants completed the Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire, to determine hand preference. Results indicated that young children and older adults required an increased amount of time to complete the HSCT at all difficulty (ID) levels. However, with respect to a complexity switch point, no significant differences were found between young adults and older adults indicating a similar performance. Young children and adolescents preferred to switch to using their preferred hand to complete the task, regardless of spatial location. Conversely, both the young and older adults utilized the hand in closest proximity to the task. Results for the Long Pegboard task again indicated that young children and older adults required significantly more time to complete the task compared to the other two populations. The results of this study will be discussed in light current theories of hand selection.
Towards Big Data for Activity Recognition: A Novel Database Fusion Strategy

Activity recognition is mandatory in order to provide feedback about the individual quality of life. Usually, activity recognition algorithms are evaluated on one specific database which is limited in the number of subjects, sensors and type of activities. In this paper, a novel database fusion strategy was proposed which fused three different publicly available databases to one large database consisting of 42 subjects. The fusion of databases addresses the two attributes high volume and high variety of the term "big data". Furthermore, an algorithm was developed which can deal with multiple databases varying in the number of sensors and activities. Nine features were computed in sliding windows of inertial data of several sensor positions. Decision-level fusion was performed in order to combine the information of different sensor positions. The proposed classification system achieved an overall mean classification rate of 85.8 % and allows an easy integration of new databases. Using big data is necessary to develop robust and stable activity recognition algorithms in the future.
Markov Determinantal Point Processes

A determinantal point process (DPP) is a random process useful for modeling the combinatorial problem of subset selection. In particular, DPPs encourage a random subset Y to contain a diverse set of items selected from a base set Y. For example, we might use a DPP to display a set of news headlines that are relevant to a user's interests while covering a variety of topics. Suppose, however, that we are asked to sequentially select multiple diverse sets of items, for example, displaying new headlines day-by-day. We might want these sets to be diverse not just individually but also through time, offering headlines today that are unlike the ones shown yesterday. In this paper, we construct a Markov DPP (M-DPP) that models a sequence of random sets {Yt}. The proposed M-DPP defines a stationary process that maintains DPP margins. Crucially, the induced union process Zt = Yt u Yt-1 is also marginally DPP-distributed. Jointly, these properties imply that the sequence of random sets are encouraged to be diverse both at a given time step as well as across time steps. We describe an exact, efficient sampling procedure, and a method for incrementally learning a quality measure over items in the base set Y based on external preferences. We apply the M-DPP to the task of sequentially displaying diverse and relevant news articles to a user with topic preferences.
Afro-Derived Amazonian Populations: Inferring Continental Ancestry and Population Substructure

Abstract A panel of Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) was used to identify population substructure and estimate individual and overall interethnic admixture in 294 individuals from seven African-derived communities of the Brazilian Amazon. A panel of 48 biallelic markers, representing the insertion (IN) or the deletion (DEL) of small DNA fragments, was employed for this purpose. Overall interethnic admixture estimates showed high miscegenation with other ethnic groups in all populations (between 46% and 64%). The proportion of ancestral genes varied significantly among individuals of the sample: the contribution of African genes varied between 12% and 75%; of European genes between 10% and 73%; and of Amerindians genes between 8% and 66%. The obtained data reveal a high contribution of Amerindian genes in these communities, unlike in other African-derived communities of the Northeast and the South of Brazil. In addition, the majority of the Amerindian contribution may result from the preferential inclusion of indigenous women in the African descent groups. High heterogeneity of the proportion of interethnic admixture among analyzed individuals was found when the proportion of ancestral genes of each individual of the sample was estimated. This heterogeneity is reflected in the fact that four populations can be considered as substructured and that the global African descent sample is possibly formed by two subpopulations.
Fingerprint Recognition using MATLAB Graduation project

Acknowledgement I would like to extend my heartiest gratitude to Dr. Allam A. Mousa, my project supervisor, for his invaluable guidance, inspirations and timely suggestions which facilitated the entire process of bringing out this project on " fingerprint recognition using Matlab ". It would have been really hard to complete this project successfully without the directions of Dr. Mousa. Also, I would like to express my deepest thanks to the dear Miss Nuha Odeh, for her help which was a huge contribution to the completion of this project; I really couldn't have done it without her. Abstract Human fingerprints are rich in details called minutiae, which can be used as identification marks for fingerprint verification. The goal of this project is to develop a complete system for fingerprint verification through extracting and matching minutiae. To achieve good minutiae extraction in fingerprints with varying quality, preprocessing in form of image enhancement and binarization is first applied on fingerprints before they are evaluated. Many methods have been combined to build a minutia extractor and a minutia matcher. Minutia-marking with false minutiae removal methods are used in the work. An alignment-based elastic matching algorithm has been developed for minutia matching. This algorithm is capable of finding the correspondences between input minutia pattern and the stored template minutia pattern without resorting to exhaustive search. Performance of the developed system is then evaluated on a database with fingerprints from different people. Personal identification is to associate a particular individual with an identity. It plays a critical role in our society, in which questions related to identity of an individual such as " Is this the person who he or she claims to be? " , " Has this applicant been here before? " , " Should this individual be given access to our system? " " Does this employee have authorization to perform this transaction? " etc are asked millions of times every day by hundreds of thousands of organizations in financial services, health care, electronic commerce, telecommunication, government, etc. With the rapid evolution of information technology, people are becoming even more and more electronically connected. As a result, the ability to achieve highly accurate automatic personal identification is becoming more critical. A wide variety of systems require reliable personal authentication schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of individuals requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered …
Background Knowledge and Its Effect on Standardized Reading Comprehension Test Performance

Author(s): Awabdy, Graziella Whipple | Advisor(s): Pearson, P. David | Abstract: An investigation of the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension performance on standardized reading tests (the California STAR Test) was conducted with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade ethnic minority children from low-income backgrounds (N = 68). Predictor variables examined included perceived background knowledge (overall and topic-specific), GPA, basic literacy skills, reading self-concept, race and ethnicity, language background, gender, and grade level. Research questions addressed participants' familiarity with topics discussed in STAR test reading passages and about the predictive nature of participant rankings and ratings of passages, as measured by the Topic Familiarity Ranking Measure and the Topic Familiarity Rating Scale. Results indicated that background knowledge of passage topics had a significant positive association (p l .05) with reading comprehension performance for 30% of the CST passages, for seventh and eighth-grade participants. Hierarchical regression analyses conducted on three of the passages showed that between 7% and 16% of the variance in reading comprehension performance was accounted for by background knowledge, as measured by the Topic Familiarity Rating Scale.
Genetic algorithms with self-organized criticality for dynamic optimization problems

This paper proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) with random immigrants for dynamic optimization problems where the worst individual and its neighbours are replaced every generation. In this GA, the individuals interact with each other and, when their fitness is close, as in the case where the diversity level is low, one single replacement can affect a large number of individuals. This simple approach can take the system to a kind of self-organization behavior, known as self-organized criticality (SOC), which is useful to maintain the diversity of the population in dynamic environments and hence allows the GA to escape from local optima when the problem changes. The experimental results show that the proposed GA presents the phenomenon of SOC.