Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Caloric vestibular stimulation and postural control in patients with spatial neglect following stroke

The impact of spatial neglect remains a substantial challenge to patients undergoing rehabilitation following stroke. Beyond the relatively well-described implications for visuospatial function, neglect is increasingly shown to have a negative impact on the wider aspects of sensori-motor performance with corresponding implications for activities including gait and balance. Caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) administered to the contralesional ear has previously been shown to improve performance in patients with spatial neglect. Here, in Experiment One, we investigated the effect of CVS on clinical measures of spatial neglect and postural control in three groups of patients following stroke; left brain damaged patients (LBD, n = 6), right brain damaged patients without neglect (RBD–, n = 6), and right brain damaged patients with neglect (RBD+ , n = 6). While post-stimulation scores demonstrated an improvement for participants with spatial neglect, further analysis of postural scores indicated that improvement was selective for asymmetrical activities, with symmetrical activities remaining unchanged. We interpret these results with reference to the related problem of extinction which predicts that activities demanding synchronous bilateral activity (symmetrical activities) would cause greater difficulties for patients with neglect. In Experiment Two, we tested a further six RBD+ patients on the same measures following CVS to the ipsilesional (right) ear. There was no significant improvement in perceptual or postural scores. Our findings are supportive of previous studies that demonstrate improvement in perception and movement for patients with spatial neglect following contralesional CVS and suggest that these improvements may have clinical benefits.
Supporting component presence notifications in software development

One of the current approaches to software engineering is Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE). As its name implies, CBSE has to do with the development of open and distributed systems by assembling a set of components. However in practice it is difficult to follow the characteristics demanded by this working philosophy because when developers want to update or modify a component, they do not have the required and sufficient information to determine the degree of impact that a change will have. In order to understand the management of components in CBSE ten experts in software development were interviewed. With the information obtained, the requirements for a system that we call Component Presence Notifier were defined. This system supports the extraction of information from different repositories of the organization and presents it as elements of a graphical user interface (GUI). This information is provided to the developer while working with any of the registered components in order to increase his/her awareness of the impact of the proposed modification. As future work, this prototype will be evaluated for usability by a group of distributed software developers.
Human-guided robotic manipulation: Theory and experiments

Emerging applications of robot systems that involve close physical interaction with human have opened up new challenges in robot control. For these applications, it is important to consider the stability and coordination of human-robot interaction. While various control techniques have been developed for human-robot interaction, existing methods do not take the advantages of human ability in responding and adapting to unknown environment. In this paper, a human-guided manipulation problem which is able to take advantages of both the human knowledge and the robot's ability, is formulated and solved. The workspace is divided into a human region, where human play a more active role in the manipulation task, and a robot region, where the robot is more dominant in the manipulation. The proposed formulation allows the involvement of human control action to deal with unforeseen changes or uncertainty in the real world. We present a theoretical foundation that allows the stability and coordination of the human-guided manipulation problem to be analyzed. Based on the human region and the robot region, an adaptive tracking controller is developed. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed control method.
Beobot 2.0: Cluster architecture for mobile robotics

With the recent proliferation of robust but computationally demanding robotic algorithms, there is now a need for a mobile robot platform equipped with powerful computing facilities. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Beobot 2.0, an affordable research‐level mobile robot equipped with a cluster of 16 2.2‐GHz processing cores. Beobot 2.0 uses compact Computer on Module (COM) processors with modest power requirements, thus accommodating various robot design constraints while still satisfying the requirement for computationally intensive algorithms. We discuss issues involved in utilizing multiple COM Express modules on a mobile platform, such as interprocessor communication, power consumption, cooling, and protection from shocks, vibrations, and other environmental hazards such as dust and moisture. We have applied Beobot 2.0 to the following computationally demanding tasks: laser‐based robot navigation, scale‐invariant feature transform (SIFT) object recognition, finding objects in a cluttered scene using visual saliency, and vision‐based localization, wherein the robot has to identify landmarks from a large database of images in a timely manner. For the last task, we tested the localization system in three large‐scale outdoor environments, which provide 3,583, 6,006, and 8,823 test frames, respectively. The localization errors for the three environments were 1.26, 2.38, and 4.08 m, respectively. The per‐frame processing times were 421.45, 794.31, and 884.74 ms respectively, representing speedup factors of 2.80, 3.00, and 3.58 when compared to a single dual‐core computer performing localization. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Plasticity of language-related brain function during recovery from stroke.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study was undertaken to correlate functional recovery from aphasia after acute stroke with the temporal evolution of the anatomic, physiological, and functional changes as measured by MRI. METHODS Blood oxygenation level-dependent contrast and echo-planar MRI were used to map language comprehension in 6 normal adults and in 2 adult patients during recovery from acute stroke presenting with aphasia. Perfusion, diffusion, sodium, and conventional anatomic MRI were used to follow physiological and structural changes. RESULTS The normal activation pattern for language comprehension showed activation predominately in left-sided Wernicke's and Broca's areas, with laterality ratios of 0.8 and 0.3, respectively. Recovery of the patient confirmed as having a completed stroke affecting Broca's area occurred rapidly with a shift of activation to the homologous region in the right hemisphere within 3 days, with continued rightward lateralization over 6 months. In the second patient, in whom mapping was performed fortuitously before stroke, recovery of a Wernicke's aphasia showed a similar increasing rightward shift in activation recruitment over 9 months after the event. CONCLUSIONS Recovery of aphasia in adults can occur rapidly and is concomitant with an activation pattern that changes from left to a homologous right hemispheric pattern. Such recovery occurs even when the stroke evolves to completion. Such plasticity must be considered when evaluating stroke interventions based on behavioral and neurological measurements.
A novel robust design for LPMSM with minimum motor current THD based on improved space vector modulation technique

In this paper a new servo drive system for controlling permanent magnet linear synchronous motor is designed. In the design process, a special space vector modulation technique is applied to obtain a robust system against load disturbance. It also minimizes the current total harmonic distortion in the motor. A desirable and fast drive system with high quality speed tracking is proposed. Simulation results provide a reference frame for software and hardware design which can be implemented in elevators, automations and other linear applications.
3.6 GHz CMOS ring oscillator with low tune voltage sensitivity and temperature compensation

In this paper we present the design of a temperature compensated low-tune-voltage-sensitive CMOS ring oscillator in 40nm standard CMOS technology. The oscillator has an overall frequency range from 3.1 GHz to 3.6 GHz. The effect of temperature variations on the frequency span has been tuned out by an IPTAT (inversely proportional to absolute temperature) current reference. In this work, using a coarse-fine tuning mechanism lowers the tune range sensitivity of the oscillator, which is usually represented as KVCO. The achieved KVCO is around 490 MHz/V with 400 mV tune voltage sweep. The area and the power consumption of the ring oscillator are 0.0056 mm2 and 0.9 mW.
A Measure of Perceived Auditor ERP Systems Expertise: Development, Assessment, and Uses

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop, assess, and provide uses for a measure of perceived enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems expertise for financial statement auditors. ERP systems are the dominant system used by the public company clients of audit firms. In such settings, the Theory of Planned Behavior suggests that auditor perceptions of their own ERP systems expertise should influence their perceived behavioral control and, in turn, explain auditor behavior.Design/methodology/approach – A five‐item measure of perceived ERP systems expertise is developed from a review of audit expertise studies and the Theory of Planned Behavior.Findings – An assessment of the measure shows that it possesses a high level of reliability and construct validity (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity). Factor analysis results indicate that all five items satisfactorily load on one factor. The results also suggest that auditors' perceptions of ERP systems expertise are not simply a by‐product of gene.
Variational level set segmentation for forest based on MCMC sampling

Environmental protection is one of the themes of today's world. The forest is a recycler of carbon dioxide and natural oxygen bar. Protection of forests, monitoring of forest growth is long-term task of environmental protection. It is very important to automatically statistic the forest coverage rate using optical remote sensing images and the computer, by which we can timely understand the status of the forest of an area, and can be freed from tedious manual statistics. Towards the problem of computational complexity of the global optimization using convexification, this paper proposes a level set segmentation method based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and applies it to forest segmentation in remote sensing images. The presented method needs not to do any convexity transformation for the energy functional of the goal, and uses MCMC sampling method with global optimization capability instead. The possible local minima occurring by using gradient descent method is also avoided. There are three major contributions in the paper. Firstly, by using MCMC sampling, the convexity of the energy functional is no longer necessary and global optimization can still be achieved. Secondly, taking advantage of the data (texture) and knowledge (a priori color) to guide the construction of Markov chain, the convergence rate of Markov chains is improved significantly. Finally, the level set segmentation method by integrating a priori color and texture for forest is proposed. The experiments show that our method can efficiently and accurately segment forest in remote sensing images.
Profiling tropospheric water vapour with a coherent infrared differential absorption lidar: a sensitivity analysis

In the last decade the precision of coherent Doppler differential absorption lidar (DIAL) has been greatly improved in near and middle infra-red domains for measuring greenhouse gases such as CO2, CH4 and winds. The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan) has developed and is operating a CO2 and wind measuring ground-based coherent DIAL at 2.05 μm (4878 cm-1). The application of this technology from space is now considered. In this analysis we study the use of the NICT DIAL for profiling tropospheric water vapour from space. We present the methodology to select the spectral lines and summarized the results of the selected lines between 4000 and 7000 cm-1. The choice of the frequency offset, the pulse energy and repetition frequency are discussed. Retrieval simulations from the line at 4580 cm-1 (2.18 μm) suitable for the boundary layer and the stronger one at 5621 cm-1 (1.78 μm) for sounding the boundary layer and the middle troposphere, are shown.
Traffic Measurement on Multiple Drive Lanes with Wireless Ultrasonic Sensors

An automated traffic measuring system for use on multiple drive lanes is proposed in this paper. This system, which uses ultrasonic sensors and a lateral scanning method, is suitable for use on real traffic roads. The proposed system can be easily established and maintained in various roadway environments. In addition, the system can be adjusted to measure traffic volumes according to the size and number of drive lanes. This paper describes the results of an experiment that the lateral scanning method can be easily applied to real traffic roads and provide a low error rate and real-time responses. This system can play an important role in accurately measuring traffic volumes as part of an intelligent transportation system.
Bayesian and DF-GLS unit root tests of real exchange rates over the current floating period

In an analysis of purchasing power parity, the Phillips-Ploberger (1994) Bayesian model selection and unit root test procedure is applied to 53 real exchange rates over the current floating exchange rate period. The DF-GLS unit root test of Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996) is also applied. The Bayesian test provides very little support for the stationarity of the real exchange rates, while the DF-GLS test provides somewhat more support.
Design of mixed Luenberger and sliding continuous mode observer using sampled output information

Most of state estimators implemented in real systems are not able to measure the information continuously. The sliding observers are not an exception. Nevertheless, when state observers are used in real applications or even in real systems, one must implement a sampled based observer. This means that output is obtained with an Analogical/Digital Converter and using the sampling-holding device. Using a zero order hold, one can reconstruct the sampled signal until the next measure. In this way, the output information is continuous within the next sampling period. In this paper, a sampled output based second order sliding mode and Luenberger-like observer (SOSML) is developed. A new class of Lyapunov functions is used to prove stability. This so-called strong Lyapunov function was used to demonstrate practical stability leading to define a convergence zone depending on the sampling period. So, this paper introduces the observer design and analyzes the sampling effect on the estimation quality. The result was tested for a simple pendulum system. The efficiency of the suggested SOSML is compared with the a similar sampled version of the so called super-twisting algorithm. The observer performance was evaluated for several sampled times.
Design and implementation of the Relationlog deductive database system

We describe the design and implementation of Relationlog, a persistent deductive database system. Unlike other related systems such as Aditi, CORAL, LDL, LOLA and Glue-Nail, Relationlog supports effective storage, efficient access and inference of large amounts of data with complex structures and provides a declarative query language that can define recursive views involving complex data and also a declarative data manipulation language to update databases.
Striped marsh frog (Limnodynastes peronii) tadpoles do not acclimate metabolic performance to thermal variability

SUMMARY Human-induced climate change is predicted to affect not only the mean temperature of the environment but also the variability and frequency of extreme climatic events. Variability in an organism's developmental environment has the potential to markedly affect an individual's growth trajectory and physiological function, leading to impacts on individual fitness and population dynamics. Thus, it is important to consider the consequences of thermal variability on developing organisms and understand their capacity to respond to such increased variation. We investigated the capacity of larval striped marsh frogs (Limnodynastes peronii) to initiate a response to increases in the thermal variability of their developmental environment by reducing the sensitivity of their physiological rate functions to changes in temperature. In variable environments, we expected the thermal sensitivity of rate functions to decrease and their performance breadth to widen so as to buffer the effect of thermal variability. We raised larvae in stable (24°C), narrowly variable (22–26°C; mean 24°C) and widely variable (14–34°C; mean 24°C) thermal environments and measured the thermal sensitivity of their locomotor performance, heart rate, oxygen consumption and activities of two metabolic enzymes, lactate dehydrogenase and cytochrome c oxidase. We found that the temperature-dependent relationships of these physiological functions did not differ between tadpoles raised in stable or variable thermal conditions. Furthermore, the Q10 values of each response variable were virtually unaffected by treatment when measured over the entire thermal range. Our results reveal that larval amphibians exhibit little plasticity in metabolic traits to thermal variability. This lack of plasticity may have important implications for the growth and population dynamics of organisms in environments that are beginning to experience increased thermal variability.
Comparison Between Boussinesq and Shallow-Water Models in Predicting Solitary Wave Runup on Plane Beaches

The nonlinear shallow water equations and Boussinesq equations have been widely used for analyzing the solitary wave runup phenomenon. In order to quantitatively assess the merits and limitations of these two approaches, a shock-capturing scheme has been applied to numerically solve both sets of equations for predicting the runup processes over plane beaches. The analytical and experimental data available in the literature have been used as references in the assessment. In this study, the uniform sloping beach is preceded by a length of flat seafloor. When incident solitary waves are specified close to the slope, the two approaches are found to produce almost identical results for nonbreaking waves. For breaking waves, the Boussinesq equations give a better representation of the wave evolution prior to the breaking point, whereas they overestimate the short undulations accompanying the breaking process. If incoming solitary waves need to travel a long distance over a flat bed before reaching the slope, the shallow water equations cannot capture the correct waveform transformation, and the predicted runup depends heavily on the length of the flat-bed section. As this length approaches zero, however, the shallow water equations somehow give roughly the same maximum runup heights as those predicted by the Boussinesq model. The bed friction has little effect on the runup for small waves, but becomes important for large waves. The roughness coefficient needs to be calibrated to reproduce the measured runup heights of breaking waves.
Teredinid-bored Araucariaceae logs preserved in shoreface sediments, Wangaloa Formation (Paleocene), Otago, New Zealand

Abstract Bored, calcite-cemented, and partly carbonised Araucariaceae logs (? Agathis sp.) occur within a concretionary shellbed in Wangaloa Formation shallow marine sandstone exposed near Mitchells Rocks, southeast Otago. Dense concentrations of carbonate-lined and sand-infilled teredinid tubes occur in the sapwood of four logs. Conspicuous sedimentation features such as shell lags, truncated and reworked Ophiomorpha burrows, and low-angle hummocky and swaley crossstratification exposed in strata at Mitchells Rocks, indicate shoreface or storm deposition close to fairweather wave base. The logs probably endured only a brief period of sea-floor exposure and decay before final burial and cementation.
Improving robustness and precision in mobile robot localization by using laser range finding and monocular vision

The paper discusses mobile robot localization by means of geometric features from a laser range finder and a CCD camera. The features are line segments from the laser scanner and vertical edges from the camera. Emphasis is put on sensor models with a strong physical basis. For both sensors, uncertainties in the calibration and measurement process are adequately modeled and propagated through the feature extractors. This yields observations with their first order covariance estimates which are passed to an extended Kalman filter for fusion and position estimation. Experiments on a real platform show that, opposed to the use of the laser range finder only, the multisensor setup allows the uncertainty to stay bounded in difficult localization situations like long corridors, and contributes to an important reduction of uncertainty, particularly in the orientation. The experiments further demonstrate the applicability of such a multisensor localization system in real time on a fully autonomous robot.
Temporal precipitation estimation from nearby radar reflectivity using dynamic factor analysis in the mountainous watershed – a case during Typhoon Morakot

The radar reflectivity (Z)–rain intensity (R) relationship fluctuates in both temporal and spatial scales. The dynamic factor analysis (DFA) and min/max autocorrelation factor analysis (MAFA) was specifically designed for considering various space–time integrations of gauge rainfall and radar reflectivity. We detect representative radar reflectivity observed around rainfall stations that were most responsible for rainfall intensity and identify the crucial patterns of the radar reflectivity in the Kaoping River watershed during Typhoon Morakot. Result shows that the MAFA and DFA can reduce the uncertainty of the dynamic Z‐R relationship effectively. The MAFA separates an entire area into two subareas (southern and northern areas) according to the relationships between the radar reflectivity and min/max autocorrelation factor (MAF) axes. For both areas, the different extents of temporal rainfall correlated with the radar reflectivity were determined using DFA. Especially in the northern area, the radar reflectivity was significantly related to the rainfall intensity for most stations without mountain blockage. Mountain blockages associated with the presence of terrain and wind direction were inferred the major factors that affected the relationship between radar reflectivity and rainfall intensity in the mountainous watershed. Further study can consider the terrain effect and meteorological information, such as wind speed and direction in the DFA model, with the dominant radar reflectivity to estimate the temporal rainfall patterns. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.