Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Levels of detail (LOD) engineering of VR objects

For real-time performance, virtual reality systems often employ various performance optimization techniques. One of the most popular methods is using geometric models with different “Levels of Detail (LOD)”. In a previous paper by this author [1], we have proposed to use software engineering principles such as the concept of hierarchical and incremental modeling, and simultaneous consideration of form, function and behavior for modeling VR objects. Each refinement stage driven by such a modeling philosophy produces step-by-step form, function and behavior specifications of a VR object. We can make good use of these by-products as LOD for adaptive display and simulation by additionally specifying conditions for LOD switching. These specifications can be simulated and analyzed in advance for an estimation of performance for a given VR execution environment. Such an engineering process deals with behavior and geometry together; different geometric LOD may possess different behaviors and vice versa. A certain function or behavior might dictate an inclusion of a particular geometric feature that may not be possible to preserve, if the geometric LOD were to created in a bottom-up fashion (e.g. using the mesh simplification algorithms). We demonstrate our approach by modeling an automobile object with three levels of geometric and behavior detail in a top-down manner, simulate their instances in a small virtual town, and based on the simulation result, make predictions to the maximum allowable number of vehicles that will maintain an acceptable frame rate if executed in a faster simulation environment. We believe that our approach combines the idea of hierarchical refinement of virtual objects and the use of LOD in a very natural and intuitive manner.
Motor synergies and mental representations of grasping movements

We investigated hand kinematics of grasping movements towards spherical objects that systematically varied in size. Kinematic data was analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) in order to extract movement synergies. On top of this we also analysed mental representations of grasping movements using a hierarchical sorting paradigm called Structure Dimensional Analysis in order to draw comparisons between the observed physical synergies and mental representations of those synergies. Results indicate that very early in the movement it is possible to distinguish different end grasps in a low dimensional PC space. We found that 82% of the variance was described by the first two PCs, and this rose to 92% when a third PC was added. Grasps used for the smallest objects were clearly separated from grasps used for medium and larger objects, and a clear separation of grasps used for small objects and larger objects was also found in the results of the analysis of mental representation of grasps. This supports the notion that grasping movements are strongly influenced in a top-down manner by conceptual factors.
Histological asymmetries of primary motor cortex predict handedness in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Like humans, chimpanzees display robust and consistent hand preferences during the performance of certain tasks. Although correlations have been demonstrated between gross anatomic measures of primary motor cortex asymmetry and handedness in captive chimpanzees, the relationship between histological architecture and behavioral lateralization has not yet been investigated. Therefore, we examined interhemispheric asymmetry of several different microstructural characteristics of the primary motor cortex in the region of hand representation from 18 chimpanzees tested on a coordinated bimanual task before death. At the population level our data showed leftward bias for higher layer II/III neuron density. Of note, however, there was no population‐level asymmetry in the areal fraction of Nissl‐stained cell bodies, a finding that differs from previous studies of this cortical region in humans. Nonetheless, we found that asymmetry in the density of layer II/III parvalbumin‐immunoreactive interneurons was the best predictor of individual hand preference. These results suggest that histological asymmetries are related to handedness in chimpanzees, while overall patterns of asymmetry at the population level might differ from humans. J. Comp. Neurol. 503:525–537, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Bilateral transfer phenomenon: A functional magnetic resonance imaging pilot study of healthy subjects

Background The bilateral transfer of a motor skill is a physiological phenomenon: the development of a motor skill with one hand can trigger the development of the same ability of the other hand. Objective The purpose of this study was to verify whether bilateral transfer is associated with a specific brain activation pattern using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods The motor task was implemented as the execution of the Nine Hole Peg Test. Fifteen healthy subjects (10 right-handers and five left-handers) underwent two identical fMRI runs performing the motor task with the non-dominant hand. Between the first and the second run, each subject was intensively trained for five minutes to perform the same motor task with the dominant hand. Results Comparing the two functional scans across the pool of subjects, a change of the motor activation pattern was observed. In particular, we observed, in the second run, a change in the activation pattern both in the cerebellum and in the cerebral cortex. We found activations in cortical areas involved in somatosensory integration, areas involved in procedural memory. Conclusions Our study shows, in a small group of healthy subjects, the modification of the fMRI activation pathway of a motor task performed by the non-dominant hand after intensive exercise performing the same task with the dominant hand.
The Experience of Chinese Couples Undergoing In Vitro Fertilization Treatment: Perception of the Treatment Process and Partner Support

Background Couples undergoing In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Treatment suffer as dyads from the stressful experience of the painful treatment and the fear that the IVF cycle will fail. They are likely to report that their marital relationship has become unstable due to the prolonged period of treatment. Methods This is a qualitative study that was conducted to explore the experiences that Chinese couples have had with IVF treatment, especially their perceptions of the process and the support between couples. Results The interviews revealed that couples suffered from the process, experiencing physical and emotional pain, struggling with the urgency and inflexibility of bearing a child, and experiencing disturbances in their daily routines and work. The participants described how they endured the hardships as a couple and how it affected their relationship. The couples felt that sharing feelings and supporting each other contribute to psychological well-being and improves the marital relationship. They also identified some unfavorable aspects in their partner relationship. They were ambivalent about receiving social support from friends and family members. Conclusions With the couples indicating that the support that they received from each other affected their experience during the treatment process, it is suggested that a supportive intervention that focuses on enhancing the partnership of the couples and dealing with their inflexibility on the issue of bearing a child might result in improvements in the psychological status and marital relationship of infertile couples undergoing IVF treatment.
Why Looking Isn’t Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming

“A picture is worth a thousand words’’—isn’t it? And hence graphical representation is by its nature universally superior to text—isn’t it? Why then isn’t the anecdote itself expressed graphically? Perhaps anecdotes don’t lend themselves to purely graphical presentation. Perhaps this phrase is too simplistic to be appropriate in the context of graphical notations. Nevertheless, many writers on visual programming argue in just this way: graphical representations are better simply because they are graphical (e.g., [22]). This article argues otherwise: that text and graphMany believe that visual programming techniques are quite close to developers. This article reports on some fascinating research focusing on understanding how textual and visual representations for software differ in effectiveness. Among other things, it is determined that the differences lie not so much in the textual-visual distinction as in the degree to which specific representations support the conventions experts expect.
Solder joint reliability model vath modified Darveaux's equations for the micro smd wafer level-chip scale package family

Historically, energy-based solder fatigue lie models have been used primarily for PBGA or similar package configurations. In this paper, we extend the energy-based method to newly emerged Wafer Level, Chip Scale Package (WL-CSP). National Semiconductor’s micro SMD package family was chosen as the test vehicle. Among all energybased methods, Darveaux’s model is arguably the most popular one due to its well-documented good correlation with the actual tests. To maintain consistency in results, Darveaux suggested that the solder joint be meshed such that the element size in its height direction has fixed value. However, we found in our study that Darveaux’s model faired poorly in capturing the package fatigue life, even though the mesh size issue was carefully addressed. In view of the drastic difference in solder ball size between WL-CSP and PBGA, on which Darveaux’s model is based, we argue that in addition to the element size in the solder height direction, the f~te element calculation of inelastic dissipation may also depend on other meshing parameters, which may vary depending on the specific geometry of the solder bump. Consequently, we proposed a revised empirical equation to calculate the package fatigue life for micro SMD. The new equation is derived from correlating the simulation results with the test data. We also demonstrated that the new equation was capable of achieving a similar accuracy level as compared with Darveaux’s model for PBGA packages. The study also provided for the first time a good parametric model scalable to larger micro Sh4D VO count. In addition, the impact of different modeling schemes was also evaluated in terms of their accuracy and eficiency.
Towards better understanding of medium access control for multiuser beamforming systems

The paper investigates a single-cell multiuser system with a linear antenna array at the base station. We consider both the downlink and the uplink. The quality of service (QoS) parameter of interest depends monotonically on the signal-to-interference+noise ratio (SINR) through a given QoS-SINR mapping. In the case of no power constraints, the set of all QoS parameter values that can be supported by the system is determined by the spectral radius of a certain nonnegative irreducible matrix. The paper's main result shows that if the spectral radius is required to be a convex function of the QoS parameter values for an arbitrary link gain matrix, then the inverse of the QoS-SINR mapping must be log-convex, which is, in general, stronger than the convexity property. We show that the log-convexity requirement can be dropped in two special cases of link gain matrices. These results provide a theoretical framework for the design of medium access control strategies.
Mouse Cortical Neurons: Implications for Upregulates IL-1 Receptor Antagonist in Gemfibrozil, a Lipid-Lowering Drug,

Grant T. Corbett, Avik Roy and Kalipada Pahanol.1102624http://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2012/06/15/jimmunJ Immunol€ published online 15 June 2012Subscriptionshttp://jimmunol.org/subscriptionsInformation about subscribing to The Journal of Immunology is online at: Permissionshttp://www.aai. org/ji/copyright.htmlSubmit copyright permission requests at: Email Alertshttp://jimmunol.org/cgi/alerts/etocReceive free email-alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up at:
Competition-based networks for expert finding

Finding experts in question answering platforms has important applications, such as question routing or identification of best answers. Addressing the problem of ranking users with respect to their expertise, we propose Competition-Based Expertise Networks (CBEN), a novel community expertise network structure based on the principle of competition among the answerers of a question. We evaluate our approach on a very large dataset from Yahoo! Answers using a variety of centrality measures. We show that it outperforms state-of-the-art network structures and, unlike previous methods, is able to consistly outperform simple metrics like best answer count. We also analyse question answering forums in Yahoo! Answers, and show that they can be characterised by factual or subjective information seeking behavior, social discussions and the conducting of polls or surveys. We find that the ability to identify experts greatly depends on the type of forum, which is directly reflected in the structural properties of the expertise networks.
Towards Learning Stochastic Logic Programs from Proof-Banks

Stochastic logic programs combine ideas from probabilistic grammars with the expressive power of definite clause logic; as such they can be considered as an extension of probabilistic context-free grammars. Motivated by an analogy with learning tree-bank grammars, we study how to learn stochastic logic programs from proof-trees. Using proof-trees as examples imposes strong logical constraints on the structure of the target stochastic logic program. These constraints can be integrated in the least general generalization (lgg) operator, which is employed to traverse the search space. Our implementation employs a greedy search guided by the maximum likelihood principle and failure-adjusted maximization. We also report on a number of simple experiments that show the promise of the approach.
A Strong Sector at the LHC: Top Partners in Same-Sign Dileptons

Heavy partners of the top quark are a common prediction of many models in which a new strongly-coupled sector is responsible for the breaking of the electroweak symmetry. In this paper, we investigate their experimental signature at the LHC, focusing on the particularly clean channel of same-sign dileptons. We show that, thanks to a strong interaction with the top quark which allows them to be singly produced at a sizable rate, the top partners will be discovered at the LHC if their mass is below 1.5 TeV, higher masses being possible in particularly favorable (but plausible) situations. Since the partners are expected to be lighter in both the Higgsless and composite-Higgs scenarios, then one of same-sign dileptons is found to be a very promising channel in which these models could be tested. We also discuss several experimental signatures which would allow, after the discovery of the excess, to attribute it uniquely to the top partners production and to measure the relevant physical parameters, i.e. the top partners' masses and couplings. We believe that our results constitute a valid starting point for a more detailed experimental study.
A Review on Macroscopic Pedestrian Flow Modelling

This paper reviews several various approaches to macroscopic pedestrian modelling. It describes hydrodynamic models based on similarity of pedestrian flow with fluids and gases; first-order flow models that use fundamental diagrams and conservation equation; and a model similar to LWR vehicular traffic model, which allows non-classical shocks. At the end of the paper there is stated a comparison of described models, intended to find appropriate macroscopic model to eventually be a part of a hybrid model. The future work of the author is outlined.
Optimizing semantic granularity for NLP – report on a lexicographic experiment

Experiments with semantic annotation based on the Corpus pattern Analysis and the lexical resource PDEV (Hanks and Pustejovsky, 2005), revealed a need of an evaluation measure that would identify the optimum relation between the semantic granularity of the semantic categories in the description of a verb and the reliability of the annotation expressed by the interannotator agreement (IAA). We have introduced the Reliable Information Gain (RG), which computes this relation for each tag selected by the annotators and relates it to the entry as a whole, suggesting merges of unreliable tags whenever it would increase the information gain of the entire tagset (the number of semantic categories in an entry). The merges suggested in our 19-verb sample correspond with common sense. One of the possible applications of this measure is quality management of the entries in a lexical resource.
Quantitative 31P HR‐MAS MR spectroscopy for detection of response to PI3K/mTOR inhibition in breast cancer xenografts

Phospholipid metabolites are of importance in cancer studies, and have been suggested as candidate metabolic biomarkers for response to targeted anticancer drugs. The purpose of this study was to develop a phosphorus (31P) high resolution magic angle spinning magnetic resonance spectroscopy protocol for quantification of phosphorylated metabolites in intact cancer tissue.
Suppression of nonlinear distortion in few-mode fibres using strong mode coupling

In this paper, we investigate the impact of linear mode coupling on the efficiency of intermodal four-wave mixing and on the group delay statistics in few-mode fibres. The investigation will include not only the weak or strong linear coupling regimes, but also the transition region between them, the intermediate coupling regime. This analysis will allow to assess the level of coupling strength require to suppress the nonlinear distortion in a few-mode fibre below the level of distortion for single-mode propagation without mode coupling.
Examining moisture and temperature sensitivity of soil organic matter decomposition in a temperate coniferous forest soil

Abstract. Temperature and moisture are primary environmental drivers of soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition, and the development of a better understanding fo their roles in this process through depth in soils is needed. The objective of this research is to independently assess the roles of temperature and moisture in driving heterotrophic soil respiration for shallow and deep soils in a temperate red spruce forest. Minimally disturbed soil cores from shallow (0–25 cm) and deep (25–50 cm) layers were extracted from a 20 yr old red spruce stand and were then transferred to a climate chamber where they were incubated for 3 months under constant and diurnal temperature regimes. Soils were subjected to different watering treatments representing a full range of water contents. Temperature, moisture, and CO2 surface flux were assessed daily for all soils and continuously on a subset of the microcosms. The results from this study indicate that shallow soils dominate the contribution to surface flux (90%) and respond more predictably to moisture than deep soils. An optimum moisture range of 0.15 to 0.60 water-filled pore space was observed for microbial SOM decomposition in shallow cores across which a relatively invariant temperature sensitivity was observed. For soil moisture conditions experienced by most field sites in this region, flux-temperature relationships alone can be used to reasonably estimate heterotrophic respiration, as in this range moisture does not alter flux, with the exception of rewetting events along the lower part of this optimal range. Outside this range, however, soil moisture determines SOM decomposition rates.
Specific Disruption of Tsc1 in Ovarian Granulosa Cells Promotes Ovulation and Causes Progressive Accumulation of Corpora Lutea

Tuberous sclerosis complex 1 (Tsc1) is a tumor suppressor negatively regulating mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1). It is reported that mice lacking Tsc1 gene in oocytes show depletion of primordial follicles, resulting in premature ovarian failure and subsequent infertility. A recent study indicated that deletion of Tsc1 in somatic cells of the reproductive tract caused infertility of female mice. However, it is not known whether specific disruption of Tsc1 in granulosa cells influences the reproductive activity of female mice. To clarify this problem, we mated Tsc1flox/flox mice with transgenic mice strain expressing cyp19-cre which exclusively expresses in granulosa cells of the ovary. Our results demonstrated that Tsc1flox/flox; cyp19-cre mutant mice were fertile, ovulating more oocytes and giving birth to more pups than control Tsc1flox/flox mice. Progressive accumulation of corpora lutea occurred in the Tsc1flox/flox; cyp19-cre mutant mice with advanced age. These phenotypes could be explained by the elevated activity of mTORC1, as indicated by increased phosphorylation of rpS6, a substrate of S6 in the Tsc1flox/flox; cyp19-cre mutant granulosa cells. In addition, rapamycin, a specific mTORC1 inhibitor, effectively rescued the phenotype caused by increased mTORC1 activity in the Tsc1cko ovaries. Our data suggest that conditional knockout of Tsc1 in granulosa cells promotes reproductive activity in mice.
An open-source architecture for control and coordination of a swarm of micro-quadrotors

This work presents the design of an open-source control architecture specifically tailored to the rapid development and testing of control and coordination algorithms on micro quadrotors. The proposed design extends an existing open-source and open-hardware quadrotor project, i.e., the Crazyflie nano quadrotor, by adding the guidance, navigation and control layers required to accomplish autonomous flight. The control layer, in particular, is based on a cascade control algorithm able to globally stabilize the position and the attitude of the vehicle. The global property guaranteed by the algorithm allows the quadrotors to perform aggressive maneuvers. The guidance layer is designed to coordinate simultaneously multiple vehicles by generating suitable reference trajectories. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design.
Anatomical markers for the subdivisions of the barn owl's inferior‐collicular complex and adjacent peri‐ and subventricular structures

The anatomy of the inferior‐collicular complex of the barn owl, situated below the fourth ventricle in the tectal lobe, was studied by determining the distribution of antigens with antibodies directed against tyrosine hydroxylase, γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA)Aβ, dopamine‐ and cyclic AMP‐regulated phosphoprotein (DARPP‐32), calretinin, and calbindin. Additionally, the somata were stained with cresyl violet, and fibers were marked according to the Gallyas procedure. These markers were chosen to allow for an easy delineation of the boundaries between the subnuclei of the inferior colliculus. We could discriminate eight structures that belong to the three subnuclei of the inferior colliculus [the central nucleus (ICC), the superficial nucleus (ICS), the external nucleus (ICX)] and to the optic tectum. Periventricular tectal layers 15a and 15b stained well with all the antibodies used. The ICS, embedded in tectal layer 15a, may be divided into a dorsal and a ventral lamina. It does not have direct contact with the other nuclei of the inferior colliculus. The border between tectal layer 15a and ICX was well marked by all antibodies, but less so in Gallyas and cresyl violet stains. The ICC consists of a core and a medial and lateral shell. The core was clearly demarcated with antibodies against calretinin and calbindin. The border between the lateral shell and the ICX was marked less well than the borders between ICX and 15a, but the somata were much more darkly labeled with the DARPP‐32 antibody in ICX than in the lateral shell of ICC. None of the markers delineated the border between the medial and lateral shell of ICC. J. Comp. Neurol. 465:145–159, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.