Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the definition of externality as a missing market

Abstract Within the general equilibrium framework, externalities are regarded as missing markets which invalidate the first theorem of welfare economics. As witnessed by some authors’ positions in the 1970s, this definition does not highlight whether or not it is an exogenous and an unintended effect. These ambiguities raise the issue of the relation between the basic formalisation of an externality (a dependence of individual objective functions) and its economic meaning (a missing market). Finally, they also raise the more general issue of the dilution of externality in the larger notion of individual interaction.
Linear matrix inequality-based robust model predictive control for time-delayed systems

This work addresses the solution to the problem of robust model predictive control (MPC) of systems with model uncertainty. The case of zone control of multi-variable stable systems with multiple time delays is considered. The usual approach of dealing with this kind of problem is through the inclusion of non-linear cost constraint in the control problem. The control action is then obtained at each sampling time as the solution to a non-linear programming (NLP) problem that for high-order systems can be computationally expensive. Here, the robust MPC problem is formulated as a linear matrix inequality problem that can be solved in real time with a fraction of the computer effort. The proposed approach is compared with the conventional robust MPC and tested through the simulation of a reactor system of the process industry.
In Silico Identification of Putative Proton Binding Sites of a Plasma Membrane H + -ATPase Isoform of Arabidopsis Thaliana , AHA1

The plasma membrane potential and secondary transport systems in all eukaryotes are energized by the activity of P-type ATPase membrane proteins: H + ATPase (the proton pump) in plants and fungi and Na + , K + - ATPase (the sodium-potassium pump) in animals. The overall shape of proton pumps has been revealed by electron microscopy. The crystal structure of AHA2, a plasma membrane H + -ATPase isoform of Arabidopsis thaliana, by X-ray crystallography at 3.6 A was available. The isoform is expressed mainly in root. In the present study homology modeling along with transmembrane topology predictions has been used to build the atomic model of AHA1, another plasma membrane H + -ATPase isoform of Arabidopsis thaliana expressing in both root and shoot. AHA2 was used as the template. The homology modeling was done using the MODELLER9v2 software. The model energy was minimized by applying molecular mechanics method. The root mean square deviation (RMSD) for C � atoms between the X-ray and the homology-modeled structures was 0.4 A. Ten transmembrane helices (TM1TM10) in the model were identified. The final model obtained by molecular mechanics and dynamics method was assessed by PROCHECK and VERIFY 3D graph, which showed that the final refined model is reliable. Asp 684 of AHA1 is suggested to act as an essential proton acceptor during proton translocation. The residue may also participate in defining the E 1 proton-binding site. Despite difference in the tissue-specific expression of the two proteins, no remarkable difference in their structure was observed, suggesting that the enzyme isoform evolution may not be linked to its tissue-specific expression.
Variations in the Concentrations of Cu and Zn and in the Ratio of Cu to Zn in Whole Blood and Hair Samples from Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients and from Healthy Controls in Taiwan

Abstract An atomic absorption spectrophotometer was used to determine concentrations of copper and zinc and the ratio of Cu to Zn in samples of whole blood and hair from hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients (n=51) and from healthy controls (n=50) in Taiwan. Our results indicate that the HCC patients have higher copper concentrations and higher ratios of Cu to Zn than do the healthy controls both in whole blood and hair samples, but only the concentration of copper and the ratio of Cu to Zn in whole blood were significantly different (p<0.001 and p<0.05). Conversely, a lower concentration of zinc was found in whole blood and hair samples of HCC patients. Similarly, only the concentration of zinc in whole blood showed a significant difference (p<0.001). We concluded that the whole blood concentrations of copper and zinc and the ratio of Cu to Zn seemed to have a higher correlation with HCC. Thus, we suggest that a sample of whole blood may be a more suitable diagnostic sample than is a hair sample for HCC.
Measurement of the cosmic ray energy spectrum with IceTop-73

We report on the measurement of the all-particle cosmic ray energy spectrum with the IceTop air shower array in the energy range from 1.58 PeV to 1.26 EeV. The IceTop air shower array is the surface component of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the geographical South Pole. The analysis was performed using only information from IceTop. The data used in this work were taken from June 1, 2010 to May 13, 2011. During that period the IceTop array consisted of 73 stations, compared to 81 in its final configuration. The measured spectrum exhibits a clear deviation from a single power law above the knee around 4 PeV and below 1 EeV. We observe spectral hardening around 18 PeV and steepening around 130 PeV.
Debugging Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Seq2Seq-Vis

Neural attention-based sequence-to-sequence models (seq2seq) (Sutskever et al., 2014; Bahdanau et al., 2014) have proven to be accurate and robust for many sequence prediction tasks. They have become the standard approach for automatic translation of text, at the cost of increased model complexity and uncertainty. End-to-end trained neural models act as a black box, which makes it difficult to examine model decisions and attribute errors to a specific part of a model. The highly connected and high-dimensional internal representations pose a challenge for analysis and visualization tools. The development of methods to understand seq2seq predictions is crucial for systems in production settings, as mistakes involving language are often very apparent to human readers. For instance, a widely publicized incident resulted from a translation system mistakenly translating “good morning” into “attack them” leading to a wrongful arrest (Hern, 2017).
Multi-focus Image Fusion with Cartoon-Texture Image Decomposition

Multi-focus image fusion can fuse multiple source images with different focus settings into a single image that appears sharper. How to effectively and completely represent the source images is the key to multi-focus image fusion. A multi-component fusion method is proposed for multi-focus image fusion. The registered source images are decomposed into cartoon and texture components by cartoon-texture image decomposition. The salient features are selected from the cartoon and texture components respectively to form a composite feature space. The local features that represent the salient information of the source images are integrated to construct the fused image. According to the visual perception and objective evaluations on the fused images, the proposed method works better in extracting the focused regions and improving the fusion quality, compared with the other existing single-component fusion methods.
TelePose : a Teleoperation Robotic System based on External Range Sensing – Application on the Centaur-like Robot CENTAURO

In this short paper, we present the TelePose system, which is a real-time, bi-manual teleoperation method to control limbed robots, through their end effectors, in the Cartesian space. This is done with an external to the robot RGBD sensor that tracks the skeleton of a human to be imitated. The methods splits into two steps. First, an RGB image of a human is used to extract its skeleton, using the recently developed OpenPose package. Secondly, the depth of the human hand poses are extracted using the corresponding depth image. The extracted 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) hand poses are fed into a whole-body Cartesian control system of the robot’s endeffectors to drive their goal pose. We demonstrate some results on the newly developed centaur-like robot CENTAURO, where a human is using TelePose to control the robot from distance and to drive some manipulation tasks.
Empirical Study of Achievable Bandwidth Capacity of VoIP Infrastructure in an Intranet with Open Source Tools

This paper presents an empirical study of achievable bandwidth/concurrent calls capacity of an open source Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Server deployed on an Intranet with open source tools. Network readiness in IPv4 and IPv6 environments was evaluated using Iperf while VoIP calls were simulated with open source SIPp (Session Initiation Protocol performance-tester). Voipmonitor, another open source software, was used to measure the bandwidth capacity and maximum concurrent calls handling capacity of the Asterisk Server over fast Ethernet Local Area Network. It can be deduced that the concurrent calls capacity of a VoIP server is dependent on a number of factors such as the VoIP readiness / bandwidth of the network and hardware specifications of the VoIP server. The result from experimental values shows that the achievable bandwidth otherwise called TCP throughput (for the 100Mbps LAN) for IPv4 and IPv6 traffics in dual stack configuration is 86.8Mbps and 87.4Mbps respectively. While that of UDP bandwidth measurement gives 50Mbps, jitter value of 1.794ms and packet loss of 0.59% for IPv4 traffic and 49.7Mbps bandwidth, 0.592ms jitter with packet loss of 0.22% for IPv6 traffic. At the maximum concurrent calls handling capacity, the processor of the VoIP server was observed to have 100% loading or utilization measure. It is recommended that the VoIP server should not be loaded continuously at this maximum processor load for optimum performance and longevity of life.
Researching the Impact of Student Mentoring in the Community

This research explores the impact of mentoring relationships on student mentors at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). More specifically, it looks at student experiences, personal and professional development from mentoring in the community over one academic year. This interpretive, methodological approach incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to draw comparisons and detailed insight into the interactions of all parties involved in the mentoring programme, including the mentor, the mentee and the community organisation. The findings revealed that mentors receive an ‘invisible gift’ that is not formally acknowledged. The ‘gift’ is manifested as key skills for lifelong learning and employability. Also, the findings highlighted that mentoring has a significant impact on the mentee regarding enhancing confidence, self esteem, skill development and engagement in pro-social behavior; thus, identifying ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ outcomes from UCLan Students engaging with the community in a mentoring capacity. This research concludes that the mentoring process utilises a ‘mentee-centred approach. ’ A balance of both ‘instrumental and ‘expressive’ processes in order to support, encourage and guide mentees to achieve their full potential.
The Fast Track Project : Preventing Severe Conduct Problems in School-Age Youth Conduct Problems Prevention

This chapter is adaptated and expanded from material in CPPRG (2006) and Slough, McMahon, and CPPRG (2008). In this chapter, we provide an overview of the Fast Track project as an illustration of one new direction in prevention science. In 1993 Coie et al. described prevention science as a new research discipline being formed at the interface of a number of professional emphases and disciplines, including psychopathology, criminology, psychiatric epidemiology, human development, and education. Prevention science represents an effort to examine risk factors, change processes and intervention effects, using rigorous methodology, thus providing an empirical basis for early prevention
Dynamic Truth Discovery on Numerical Data

Truth discovery aims at obtaining the most credible information from multiple sources that provide noisy and conflicting values. Due to the ubiquitous existence of data conflict in practice, truth discovery has been attracting a lot of research attention recently. Unfortunately, existing truth discovery models all miss an important issue of truth discovery - the truth evolution problem. In many real-life scenarios, the latent true value often keeps changing dynamically over time instead of staying static. We study the dynamic truth discovery problem in the space of numerical truth discovery. This problem cannot be addressed by existing models because of the new challenges of capturing time-evolving source dependency in a continuous space as well as handling missing data on the fly. We propose a model named EvolvT for dynamic truth discovery on numerical data. With the hidden Markov framework, EvolvT captures three key aspects of dynamic truth discovery with a unified model: truth transition regularity, source quality, and source dependency. The most distinguishable feature of the modeling part of EvolvT is that it employs Kalman filtering to model truth evolution. As such, EvolvT not only can principally infer source dependency in a continuous space, but also can handle missing data in a natural way. We establish an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for parameter inference of EvolvT and present an efficient online version for the parameter inference procedure. Our experiments on real-world applications demonstrate its advantages over the state-of-the-art truth discovery approaches.
The Role Of Maternal Attributions In Treatment Outcomes For Children With Adhd

THE ROLE OF MATERNAL ATTRIBUTIONS IN TREATMENT OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN WITH ADHD Kelsey A. Weinberger, B.A. Marquette University, 2013 The goal of the present study was to examine the role that maternal attributions play in predicting treatment outcomes for families of children with ADHD. Specifically, we examined if maternal attributions at the beginning of a psychosocial intervention predicted successful completion of treatment, as well as statistically significant and reliable change in maternal functioning following treatment. Participants included 41 families seeking services for their child from a university-based ADHD clinic; 31 of whom completed treatment. A series of written vignettes were used to assess four domains of causal attributions (i.e., locus of control, global/stable, intentional, controllable). In general, analyses indicated that maternal attributions for negative child behaviors did not significantly predict treatment completion, nor did they predict statistically significant improvements in maternal functioning or reliable change in maternal parenting stress following treatment. There are several potential explanations for these null findings, including the type of cognitions examined, the lack of variability in maternal attributions, characteristics of the sample, and sample size. Although the current findings do not provide support for the influence of maternal attributions, future work with a larger sample would allow for the relation between attributions and treatment outcomes to be further assessed to determine if targeting parental cognitions in standard behavioral parent training is needed.
Hypoglycaemic and Hypolipidemic Effects of Root Extracts of Albizzia chevalieri in Alloxan Induced Diabetic Rats.

The research investigated the hypoglycaemic and hypolipidaemic effects of aqueous and organic solvents extracts of Albizzia chevalieri root in alloxan-induced diabetic rats. The aqueous extract was administered at 100, 200 and 300mg/kg body weight while the organic solvent fractions of the aqueous extract were administered at 100mg/kg body weight. The 300mg/kg body weight of the aqueous crude extract caused a 24% reduction of serum glucose level of the diabetic rats. The chloroform and hexane fractions caused 25 and 24% reduction of serum glucose level of the diabetic rats. The results were comparable to 28% reduction obtained for treatment with 3.57mg/kg body weight of chlorpropamide. The petroleum ether fraction decreased serum total cholesterol, triaclglyceride, and very low density lipoprotein cholesterol levels significantly (P Key words: Hypoglycaemia, hypolipidaemia, Albizzia chevalieri, root extract, alloxan-induced diabetic rats.
Expressive Talking Head for Interactive Conversational Systems

The objective of this project is to develop an expressive speech facial animation synthesis methodology capable of improving the videorealism of the current state-of-the-art expressive talking heads in terms of the range of the expressed emotional states and the ability of reproducing non-verbal communication signaling, with the ultimate goal of creating animated faces capable of inspiring user thrust and empathy . We aim at applications where intelligent systems are capable of emulating our natural and intuitive face-to-face communication mechanisms in which the talking head act as an embodied conversational agent (ECA), (Figure 1). Objectives that run in parallel are: to obtain a pilot implementation of a Brazilian Portuguese expressive talking head and to contribute with an comprehensive audiovisual expressive speech corpus for this language. Figure 1: Intelligent system face-to-face communication metaphor.
Linear friction welding of aluminium to copper

The joining of dissimilar materials is attaining increasing importance as there is a drive to utilise hybrid structures and reduce the weight or cost of products. The present work therefore studied the linear friction welding of commercially pure grades of aluminium to copper (AA 1050 to C101) for potential power transmission applications. Results showed that welds with very good mechanical and electrical properties can be produced. The weld microstructure was analysed using optical microscopy, backscattered scanning electron microscopy, hardness testing and high energy synchrotron X-ray diffraction. These techniques were used in order to identify any cross-weld grain size variations and possible formation of intermetallic phases close to the weld line.
Thiol-Mediated Chemoselective Strategies for In Situ Formation of Hydrogels

Hydrogels are three-dimensional networks composed of hydrated polymer chains and have been a material of choice for many biomedical applications such as drug delivery, biosensing, and tissue engineering due to their unique biocompatibility, tunable physical characteristics, flexible methods of synthesis, and range of constituents. In many cases, methods for crosslinking polymer precursors to form hydrogels would benefit from being highly selective in order to avoid cross-reactivity with components of biological systems leading to adverse effects. Crosslinking reactions involving the thiol group (SH) offer unique opportunities to construct hydrogel materials of diverse properties under mild conditions. This article reviews and comments on thiol-mediated chemoselective and biocompatible strategies for crosslinking natural and synthetic macromolecules to form injectable hydrogels for applications in drug delivery and cell encapsulation.
Mentoring as a Supportive Way for Novice Teachers in Foreign Language Teacher Development : A Case Study in an Ethnic College in China

Mentoring has been explored from various perspectives under different theoretical frameworks. The situation-based mentoring brings a lot of possibilities and sustainabilities to the student teachers. Given the overview on the literature of mentoring, it can be found that the research about mentoring mainly is concerned with English-speaking countries such as US and UK and populates in general teacher education. The research in subject-specific field receives scant attention, such as in Foreign Language Teacher Development (hereafter, FLTD). Finding few reports from China, especially about the novices in ethnical colleges, the empirical study running through one year from in an ethnic college shows that mentoring is a supportive way in FLTD for supporting novices. Under the framework of sociocultural theory, we found that, in addition to improving of teaching skills, mentoring can (1) lessen novices’ stress and ‘reality shock’ in teaching and strengthen the sense of belongings; (2) facilitate novice teachers’ reflection ability and (3) foster novice teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching.
Modeling and Identification of Urban Bus Dynamics Internship Report-DC 2017

Autonomous vehicles are the result of growing interest in safe, intelligent and convenient transportation. Over the last years, many automotive manufacturers have shown their investments on developing autonomous commercial vehicles. Hence, controllers are needed for dealing with such systems. In order to design these controllers, understanding the dynamics of the vehicle is a must. This internship is focused on modeling and identification of the dynamics of an urban bus. As the first step, different vehicle models are investigated; one of which has been chosen to provide the required accuracy to give the states of the vehicle. Furthermore, the model has been extended and adapted for the dynamics of the bus by adding roll and pitch motions to the equations of motion. Dugoff tire model has been selected to obtain the tire lateral forces. Also for identification purposes, it was necessary to simplify the model to only longitudinal, lateral, roll or pitch motion. After modeling, identification methods are used to find the unknown model parameters. Hence, some tests were done with the vehicle in order to acquire the required identification data. After obtaining the parameter values, the model output has been validated using experimental data. The validation shows that the model can simulate the dynamic responses of the test vehicle by an acceptable accuracy. However, due to lack of equipment to measure the model inputs, the inputs were estimated in order to simulate the same input signals as in the experiments. Modeling and Identification of Urban Bus Dynamics iii
Tephrostratigraphy and tephrochronology of lakes Ohrid and Prespa, Balkans

Abstract. Four cores from Balkans lakes Ohrid and Prespa were examined for recognition of tephra layers and cryptotephras, and the results presented along with the review of data from other two already published cores from Lake Ohrid. The six cores provide a previously unrealised tephrostratigraphic framework of the two lakes, and provide a new tephrostratigraphic profile (composite) for the Balkans, which spans from the end of the Middle Pleistocene to the AD 472. A total of 12 tephra layers and cryptotephras were recognised in the cores. One is of Middle Pleistocene age (131 ka) and correlated to the marine tephra layer P-11 from Pantelleria Island. Eight volcanic layers are Upper Pleistocene in age, and encompass the period between ca. 107 ka and ca. 31 ka. This interval contains some of the main regional volcanic markers of the central Mediterranean area, including X-6, X-5, Y-5 and Y-3 tephra layers. The other layers of this interval have been related to the marine tephra layers C20, Y-6 and C10, while one was for the first time recognised in distal areas and correlated to the Taurano eruption of probable Vesuvian origin. Three cryptotephras were of Holocene age. Two of which have been correlated to Mercato and AD 472 eruptions of Somma-Vesuvius, while the third has been correlated to the FL eruption from Mount Etna. These recognitions provide a link of the Ohrid and Prespa lacustrine successions to other archives of the central Mediterranean area, like south Adriatic, Ionian, and south Tyrrhenian seas, lakes of southern Italy (Lago Grande di Monticchio, Pantano di San Gregorio Magno and Lago di Pergusa) and Balkans (Lake Shkodra).