Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-scale analysis of shell growth increments using wavelet transform

Shell increments contain information related to the evolution of the environment in which the organism grew during its biomineralization. To extract the information from variations in shell topography, a new and promising technique is presented, involving multi-scale analysis of the shell topography using a B-spline wavelet transform. An accurate non-contact optical system, based on laser triangulation, is used to map the shell surface. The resulting range image is treated as a grey-level image by using a multi-resolution approach based on the generalization of the cascade algorithm. This method allows reconstruction of non-subsampled images that correspond to the projection onto the space of the chosen scale of detail. This new approach provides an ecient tool for analyzing multi-scale information contained in growth increment rings and/or within quasi-periodic features. In conclusion, this approach can be applied to any 3D object, in order to extract features such as rhythmic information, color variations or object envelope.
Segregation Landscape: A New View on the Schelling Segregation Space

Thomas C. Schelling showed that global aggregation may occur, even if it does not correspond to agent preferences; thus, to some extent his model supported the view that segregation is unavoidable, whatever the tolerance is. The segregation landscape approach proposed in this paper is seriously weakening this hypothesis; here, we radically change the perspective and propose using the landscape metaphor to represent emergent segregated communities. A segregation landscape is a mapping from situated individuals into an extra dimension which represents the degree of segregation of everyone. This paper uncovers how to interpret hills and valleys, and whether these interpretations are congruent with the intuitive notion of frontier. Such a representation allows to describe both the static properties of a segregation space as well their impact on how does information propagate between segregated communities. In order to assess the explanatory power of the landscape metaphor, we devise agent-based simulations. First, we establish the link between the micro-level quanti ed by individual tolerance and the macro-structure represented by the landscape; then we show how "geographic" properties impact the dynamical behavior on such a population landscape.
Instructions for use Title Rational Design Optimization Method for Reducing Cost and Improving Performance

Title Rational Design Optimization Method for Reducing Cost and Improving Performance of Commonalized IPM Motors Author(s) Noguchi, So; Matsutomo, Shinya Citation IEEE transactions on magnetics, 51(3): 7202904 Issue Date 2015-03 Doc URL http://hdl.handle. net/2115/59382 Right © 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Type article (author version)
A Cellular Automata based test scheme for TSVs in 3D ICs

A three-dimensional (3D) IC containing multiple dies, connected by through silicon vias (TSV) offers many benefits over current 2D ICs. Reliability and accuracy of 3D integration using thousands of TSVs has to be ensured. However, 3D testing has found to be more difficult compared to that of 2D. This work proposes an elegant test scheme for high speed stuck-at-fault detection in such a system. It ensures a quick decision on the presence of faults in TSVs with just a single comparison. The solution is based on the modular structure of Cellular Automata (CA). A special class of CA referred to as the SACA (single length single cycle attractor cellular automata) has been introduced to achieve a cost-effective realization of the hardware. The SACA based unconventional scheme ensures minimum computation, easy hardware implementation of the test logic, as well as high scalability.
SOLVENT RECOVERY FROM A MULTICOMPONENT MIXTURE BY BATCH EXTRACTIVE DISTILLATION AND HYBRID PROCESS

The performance of the basic and a modified operational policy of batch extractive distillation (BED) and the hybrid process (HP; absorption+distillation) for the recovery of tetrahydrofuran (THF) from a five-component industrial waste solvent mixture were investigated with laboratory experiments and rigorous simulations. The components (methanol, THF, acetonitrile, water, pyridine) of the mixture form seven azeotropes. The prescribed separation task (production of aqueous THF with limited content of organic pollutants) was not feasible with batch rectification, but we were able to produce THF of desired quality by BED and HP using water as entrainer. The highest recovery and production rate were achieved with the HP, while the least efficient process was the basic policy of BED.
Structural Differences between the Lignin-Carbohydrate Complexes (LCCs) from 2- and 24-Month-Old Bamboo (Neosinocalamus affinis)

The lignin-carbohydrate complex (LCC) was isolated from milled wood lignin of 2- and 24-month-old crude bamboo (Neosinocalamus affinis) culms using acetic acid (AcOH) and then characterized. The results have shown that the LCC preparation from 2-month-old bamboo (L2) exhibited a slightly lower molecular weight than the LCC preparation from the 24-month-old bamboo (L24). Further studies using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and heteronuclear single quantum coherence (2D-HSQC) NMR spectra analyses indicate that the LCC preparations included glucuronoarabinoxylan and G-S-H lignin-type with G>S>>H. The content of the S lignin units of LCC in the mature bamboo was always higher than in the young bamboo. Combined with sugar composition analysis, the contents of phenyl glycoside and ether linkages in the L24 preparation were higher than in the L2 preparation; however, there was a reverse relationship of ester LCC bonds in L2 and L24. Lignin–xylan was the main type of LCC linkage in bamboo LCCs. Lignin–lignin linkages in the LCC preparations included β-β, β-5 and β-1 carbon-to-carbon, as well as β-O-4 ether linkages, but β-1 linkages were not present in L2.
Effects of Habitual Low-Impact Dance on the Balance and Torque of the Knees of Older Female Individuals

Backgroud: Despite of many people engaging in aerobic dance activities, little knowledge was reported regarding the effects of low-impact dance on the balance, torque and range of motion (ROM) of joints of the lower extremities. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine whether any differences existed in terms of the aforementioned variables between older females who regularly engaged in low-impact dance and those who were physically inactive. Method: In total, 38 older females comprised the subjects of this study, which consisted of a dance group (DG) and a control group (CG). The extension torque of the knees, dynamic and static balance, and ROMs of the hip and ankles of all participants were measured. Results: Dynamic balance in the DG was significantly higher than that in the CG (13.0 ± 4.7 vs. 5.5 ± 7.8 times, p <0.05). Although the knee extension torque for both legs was higher in the DG than in the CG, a significant difference was only found in the non-dominant leg. A few ROMs of lower-extremities joints in the dominant leg, ankle inversion, plantiflexion and dorsiflexion were significantly higher in the DG than the CG (p < 0.05). In addition, ankle inversion of the non-dominant leg in the DG was also significantly higher than that in the CG. Conclusions: Compared to their physically inactive counterparts, older females who habitually engage in low-impact dance had significantly higher dynamic balance, knee extension in the non-dominant leg, and ROMs of several joints of the lower extremities. Although this research was not an intervention study, these positive results should encourage further studies, because the aforementioned parameters are associated with risk factors for and reductions in falls.
On Coresets for Logistic Regression

Coresets are one of the central methods to facilitate the analysis of large data sets. We continue a recent line of research applying the theory of coresets to logistic regression. First, we show a negative result, namely, that no strongly sublinear sized coresets exist for logistic regression. To deal with intractable worst-case instances we introduce a complexity measure $\mu(X)$, which quantifies the hardness of compressing a data set for logistic regression. $\mu(X)$ has an intuitive statistical interpretation that may be of independent interest. For data sets with bounded $\mu(X)$-complexity, we show that a novel sensitivity sampling scheme produces the first provably sublinear $(1\pm\varepsilon)$-coreset. We illustrate the performance of our method by comparing to uniform sampling as well as to state of the art methods in the area. The experiments are conducted on real world benchmark data for logistic regression.
An innovative toolkit: increasing the role and value of patient and public involvement in the dissemination of research findings

Background: Evidence of patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research dissemination is weak and the development of mechanisms to assist the adoption and diffusion of PPI outcomes into research findings, patient experience and clinical practice is at an early stage. Aim: This paper seeks directly to address this weakness by increasing researchers’ awareness and understanding of the potential value of PPI in dissemination and identifying practical strategies that could improve the quality and impact of PPI by connecting the process with the wider innovation literature on adoption and diffusion. The toolkit: Guidance for these strategies is provided in the form of a toolkit that elevates the importance of PPI in dissemination of research and blends it with good practice in diffusion of innovations. It highlights how planning for PPI and dissemination at each stage of the research cycle facilitates the diffusion of research findings, while generating a culture of knowledge exchange with important stakeholders. Conclusions: Establishing and improving PPI dissemination in the research process has similarities with introducing any new innovation into a social context. Therefore, understanding and integrating insights from the literature on adoption and diffusion and linking them to PPI and the research cycle provides a different frame of reference for developing our approach in healthcare. Here we connect PPI to the adoption literature and suggest that a strong focus on the social nature of innovation will increase the reach and impact of research dissemination. This challenges the traditional research culture and suggests a need for a more open and continuous web of PPI relationships that are characterised by well balanced, timely contact and consist of appropriate and flexible interactions, planned into the whole research cycle. Implications for practice : This paper highlights the value of taking a structured approach to PPI and the importance of investing time in developing productive PPI relationships at the beginning of a project. Similarly, dissemination should be planned for and undertaken at key points and in different ways throughout the process in order to maximise its potential impact. The key implications are the value of: • Widening the scope of PPI dissemination into the whole research cycle • Opening up routes to improved research impact through better quality patient involvement • Challenging the stereotypical relationship between researcher and patient • Introducing innovation adoption concepts into PPI dissemination
Privacy preservation in k-means clustering by cluster rotation

The use of clustering as a data analysis tool has raised concerns about the violation of individual privacy. This paper proposes a data perturbation technique for privacy preservation in k-means clustering. Data objects that have been partitioned into clusters using k-means clustering are perturbed by performing geometric transformations on the clusters in such a way that the object membership of each cluster and orientation of objects within a cluster remain the same. This geometric transformation is achieved through cluster rotation, i.e., every cluster is rotated about its own centroid. The clusters are first displaced away from the mean of the entire dataset so that no two clusters overlap after the subsequent cluster rotation. We analyze the privacy measure offered by this data perturbation technique and prove that a dataset perturbed by this method cannot be easily reverse engineered, yet is still relevant for cluster analysis.
A security assessment for slow coherency based defensive islanding

Among the power system corrective controls, defensive islanding is considered as the last resort to secure the system from severe cascading contingencies. The primary motive of defensive islanding is to limit the affected areas as soon as possible to maintain the stability of the resulting subsystems and to reduce the total loss of load in the system. The design of the defensive islanding must address the questions of where and when to island the system to ensure minimum impact and the recovery of the affected portion of the system. In this paper, the critical islanding time is explored as a security index for applying the defensive islanding where the boundaries of the islands are decided by using the slow coherency concept between generators. The computations are performed on a test system to specify the maximum allowed time for operators to apply islanding before falling in blackout due to some critical contingencies.
Iterative learning control for discrete-time systems with quantized measurements

In this paper, the problem of iterative learning control (ILC) for discrete-time systems with quantized output measurements is considered. Here, a logarithmic quantizer is introduced and an ILC scheme is constructed by using output signals with only a finite number of quantization levels. By using sector bound method to deal with the quantization error, a learning condition of ILC that guarantees the convergence of tracking error is derived through rigorous analysis. It is shown that the convergence condition is determined by quantization level, and the tracking error converges to a bound depending on quantization density. Finally, an illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the theoretical results.
An investigation to transplant emotional expressions in DNN-based TTS synthesis

In this paper, we investigate deep neural network (DNN) architectures to transplant emotional expressions to improve the expressiveness of DNN-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. DNN is expected to have potential power in mapping between linguistic information and acoustic features. From multispeaker and/or multi-language perspectives, several types of DNN architecture have been proposed and have shown good performances. We tried to expand the idea to transplant emotion, constructing shared emotion-dependent mappings. The following three types of DNN architecture are examined; (1) the parallel model (PM) with an output layer consisting of both speaker- dependent layers and emotion-dependent layers, (2) the serial model (SM) with an output layer consisting of emotion-dependent layers preceded by speaker-dependent hidden layers, (3) the auxiliary input model (AIM) with an input layer consisting of emotion and speaker IDs as well as linguistics feature vectors. The DNNs were trained using neutral speech uttered by 24 speakers, and sad speech and joyful speech uttered by 3 speakers from those 24 speakers. In terms of unseen emotional synthesis, subjective evaluation tests showed that the PM performs much better than the SM and slightly better than the AIM. In addition, this test showed that the SM is the best of the three models when training data includes emotional speech uttered by the target speaker.
Insulin Resistance and Adiponectin Levels in Drug-Free Patients with Schizophrenia: A Preliminary Report

Objective: To compare the insulin sensitivity and adiponectin levels of medication-free patients suffering from schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder with that of matched healthy volunteers. Method: We evaluated 9 nondiabetic patients aged 26.6 years (median 26 years, range 17 to 41 years) and matched volunteers, using the frequently sampled intravenous glucose tolerance test, minimal model analysis, and fasting adiponectin levels. Results: The mean insulin sensitivity index of the patients was 42% lower than that of the healthy volunteers (P = 0.026), with inadequate compensation in insulin secretion. Patients with schizophrenia tended to have reduced adiponectin levels (P = 0.055). Conclusions: By direct measurement, this study provides evidence of insulin resistance and susceptibility to type 2 diabetes in patients with schizophrenia who are free of antipsychotic drugs.
Analytical design of circular CMUT cells in immersion

Analytical design of Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers gives insight on the effect of geometrical parameters and material properties of CMUT on its performance. I. Wygant et al. presented at IEEE IUS 2009 equations for design of circular CMUT cell based on desired resonance frequency, quality factor and pull-in voltage. In this paper, we extend their work by capturing the impact of spring softening on resonance frequency. We propose a simple method to calculate CMUT 3-dB bandwidth in immersion utilizing equivalent circuit. Finally, A design flow is presented based on optimizing CMUT performance in immersion. Design of 50 MHz CMUT is illustrated using analytical approach. FEM results supports the validity of proposed design equations and design methodology in shown cases.
A power sharing method for inverters in microgrid based on the virtual power and virtual impedance control

The virtual power method can effectively decouple the inverter output active and reactive power. However, in case of parallel operation the output powers may not be shared very well because of the line impedances mismatching. Therefore, if the system impedances are set to be equal through the virtual impedance loop, then the virtual power loop can successfully share the power. This simply means unifying the parallel inverters equivalent impedance magnitude and angle. Simulation results are presented to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control method.
Observable canonical forms of multi-machine power systems using dq0 signals

This paper proposes a dynamic model of large symmetric power networks presented in s-domain and using the dq0 reference frame. The model is constructed for symmetric networks based on the network admittance matrix, and includes analytic expressions for the proper transfer functions. Further, based on the developed model we derive the observable state-space realization, which may contribute to stability analysis of large multi-machine power systems.
Geometry optimization of magnetic shunts in power transformers based on a particular hybrid finite-element boundary-element model and sensitivity analysis

In this paper, the influence of magnetic shunt geometry on the transformer leakage field and short-circuit impedance is examined. The magnetic-field computation is conducted with the use of a particular hybrid finite-element method (FEM) boundary-element method (BEM) formulation, facilitating the parametric investigation of magnetic shunt effects through application of appropriate boundary conditions. A design sensitivity analysis for the optimization of the shunt geometry ensuring a desired change in short-circuit impedance and shunt losses has also been developed, in conjunction with the magnetic-field model.
EXPERIMENTAL PHARMACOLOGICAL MODEL OF DIABETES INDUCTION WITH ALOXAN IN RAT

An experimental pharmacological model of diabetes induced with aloxan in white, male and female Wistar rats was designed. A collectivity of 312 animals was used, with an initial mean weight of 225.1 ± 31.48 g-bw and basal mean glycaemia of 103.0 ± 34.22 mg/dL. Diabetes was induced by administering intraperitoneally a dose of 130 mg/kg-bw alloxan. Experimental results showed that, in the tested collectivity, 66.34% of animals became diabetic, with a mean glycaemic value of 450.4 ± 129.7 mg/dL. For the diabetic group, decreases in the enzymatic activity were registered for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase and hexokinase, accompanied by increases in the activity of glucose-6phosphatase, as evidentiated in the experimental model of streptozotocin-induced diabetes. The alloxanic diabetes induced significant alterations of lipidic profiles in rat compared to the non-diabetic group, as follows: total cholesterol increased by 51.19%, plasma triglycerids increased by 50.30% and LDL-cholesterol increased by 59.46%. The designed pharmacological model can assist further in determining the antidiabetic potential of newly synthesized compounds or plant extracts. Rezumat
Investigation on the heat flow field and heat-exchange surface optimization in the cylinder type natural gas heater

The great need for exploitation and application of natural gas over the long period of time boosts enormous demand for heating equipments. So it's extremely important to design and manufacture energy-saving and efficient natural gas heaters. Therefore, the present paper explores the structural characteristics of the widely used cylinder type natural gas heater. Theoretical and experimental investigations on the flow condition and temperature distribution of the intermediate heat-carrying medium in the cylinder were carried out. On the basis of this, a simple and effective improved structure of rotation type cylindrical natural gas heater is put forward so as to optimize the relative positions of fire tube, flue tube bundle and convective tube bundle, thus improving the thermal efficiency of natural gas heater and saving preliminary investment.
Cooperative control for coupled multi-agent systems with parallel estimators and adaptive controllers

This paper is concerned with the decentralized and distributed estimation and control problem for a formation of agents with strongly couplings. The collected agents of the formation are modeled by a class of uncertain nonlinear systems communicating information between each other through unidirectional links with a fixed communication topology. Carrying an estimate of the entire formation state in each agent, the proposed hybrid control strategy relies on the possibility of making discrete on-line adjustments of parameter in the updating law of gain by a monitor signal. By a Lyapunov-based analysis of closed-loop equilibrium dynamics, a constructive design procedure results in the consensus of the estimation error dynamics and the stability of all signals in the closed-loop systems simultaneously.
Using Satellite Ocean Color Data to Derive an Empirical Model for the Penetration Depth of Solar Radiation (Hp) in the Tropical Pacific Ocean

AbstractSatellite-based ocean color measurements indicate clear evidence for bioclimate interactions in the tropical Pacific associated with El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Recent modeling studies have demonstrated that ocean biology can potentially affect the climate through the penetration depth of solar radiation in the upper ocean (Hp), a primary parameter in coupling biology to physics in the ocean. At present, interannual variability in Hp and its related bioclimate feedback effects have not been adequately represented in coupled ocean–atmosphere models. In this work, chlorophyll (Chl) concentration data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), available since 1997, are used to characterize interannual Hp variability in the tropical Pacific and to quantify its relationships with physical fields, including sea surface temperature (SST) and sea level (SL). It is found that interannual Hp variability is dominated by ENSO signals, with the largest variability located in the central.