Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fingers Crossed! An Investigation of Somatotopic Representations Using Spatial Directional Judgements

Processing of tactile stimuli requires both localising the stimuli on the body surface and combining this information with a representation of the current posture. When tactile stimuli are applied to crossed hands, the system first assumes a prototypical (e.g. uncrossed) positioning of the limbs. Remapping to include the crossed posture occurs within about 300 ms. Since fingers have been suggested to be represented in a mainly somatotopic reference frame we were interested in how the processing of tactile stimuli applied to the fingers would be affected by an unusual posture of the fingers. We asked participants to report the direction of movement of two tactile stimuli, applied successively to the crossed or uncrossed index and middle fingers of one hand at different inter-stimulus intervals (15 to 700 ms). Participants almost consistently reported perceiving the stimulus direction as opposite to what it was in the fingers crossed condition, even with SOAs of 700 ms, suggesting that on average they did not incorporate the unusual relative finger positions. Therefore our results are in agreement with the idea that, by default, the processing of tactile stimuli assumes a prototypical positioning of body parts. However, in contrast to what is generally found with tactile perception with crossed hands, performance did not improve with SOAs as long as 700 ms. This suggests that the localization of stimuli in a somatotopic reference and the integration of this representation with postural information are two separate processes that apply differently to the hands and fingers.
The Quality of Fiscal Adjustments in Transition Economies

An analysis of fiscal adjustment patterns in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia is conducted here, including recent years. The main question addressed in the article is whether sustainable fiscal adjustment has been achieved primarily through downsizing potentially less productive public expenditure, or possibly at the expense of potentially growth-promoting expenditure. In addition, the article also addresses a related issue of whether fiscal policy has been managed in a sufficiently counter-cyclical way in the countries in question.
A 60GHz CMOS VCO Using On-Chip Resonator with Embedded Artificial Dielectric for Size, Loss and Noise Reduction

An on-chip resonator with artificial dielectric in place of the LC tank yields reduced metal/substrate losses, higher resonator Q and alambda/4 length reduction of 4.7 times. The VCO uses 90nm CMOS, with 0.015mm2 area, consumes 1.9mW and has a measured phase noise of -100dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset. The FOM is -193dBc/Hz
Proteolytic Processing of the P2/Nucleocapsid Cleavage Site Is Critical for Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 RNA Dimer Maturation

ABSTRACT Differences in virion RNA dimer stability between mature and protease-defective (immature) forms of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) suggest that maturation of the viral RNA dimer is regulated by the proteolytic processing of the HIV-1 Gag and Gag-Pol precursor proteins. However, the proteolytic processing of these proteins occurs in several steps denoted primary, secondary, and tertiary cleavage events and, to date, the processing step associated with formation of stable HIV-1 RNA dimers has not been identified. We show here that a mutation in the primary cleavage site (p2/nucleocapsid [NC]) hinders formation of stable virion RNA dimers, while dimer stability is unaffected by mutations in the secondary (matrix/capsid [CA], p1/p6) or a tertiary cleavage site (CA/p2). By introducing mutations in a shared cleavage site of either Gag or Gag-Pol, we also show that the cleavage of the p2/NC site in Gag is more important for dimer formation and stability than p2/NC cleavage in Gag-Pol. Electron microscopy analysis of viral particles shows that mutations in the primary cleavage site in Gag but not in Gag-Pol inhibit viral particle maturation. We conclude that virion RNA dimer maturation is dependent on proteolytic processing of the primary cleavage site and is associated with virion core formation.
Paving the Way for Speech: Voice-Training-Induced Plasticity in Chronic Aphasia and Apraxia of Speech—Three Single Cases

Difficulties with temporal coordination or sequencing of speech movements are frequently reported in aphasia patients with concomitant apraxia of speech (AOS). Our major objective was to investigate the effects of specific rhythmic-melodic voice training on brain activation of those patients. Three patients with severe chronic nonfluent aphasia and AOS were included in this study. Before and after therapy, patients underwent the same fMRI procedure as 30 healthy control subjects in our prestudy, which investigated the neural substrates of sung vowel changes in untrained rhythm sequences. A main finding was that post-minus pretreatment imaging data yielded significant perilesional activations in all patients for example, in the left superior temporal gyrus, whereas the reverse subtraction revealed either no significant activation or right hemisphere activation. Likewise, pre- and posttreatment assessments of patients' vocal rhythm production, language, and speech motor performance yielded significant improvements for all patients. Our results suggest that changes in brain activation due to the applied training might indicate specific processes of reorganization, for example, improved temporal sequencing of sublexical speech components. In this context, a training that focuses on rhythmic singing with differently demanding complexity levels as concerns motor and cognitive capabilities seems to support paving the way for speech.
Study Regarding the Ways of Measuring Cities Competitiveness

Given that more than 50% of the world population lives in urban areas, tackling the problem of urban development is placed in the context of recognizing the role of cities as economic engines, a role undergoing through permanent and changing demand. As globalization intensifies, cities enter into a fierce competition to gain attention, influence, sales markets, investment, to attract businesses, visitors, residents, talent and, last but not least, major events; obviously, competition is not anymore represented by neighbouring areas, but by regions and countries located anywhere in the world. In this context, it is necessary to characterize and prioritize urban areas within a country, to use a number of criteria and indicators showing the economic and social development achieved by the various cities. The conclusions drawn from the analysis of indicators generated by a particular type depending on a number of criteria can represent the starting point in formulating strategies and objectives established through strategies and programs that target urban and regional planning.
Reasoning about sentience and animacy: Children's and adults' inferences about the properties of unseen entities

One striking finding in developmental and cognitive psychology is that people make rich inferences about the intentions and experiences of objects that look nothing like humans or animals. What makes these scenarios appear social, not just mechanical? Three studies explore this foundational level of social cognition: the detection of sentience. We probe inferences among what we posit to be core components of the concept of sentience—affect, autonomy, and perception—as well as physical markers of inanimacy. We find that children and adults share the belief that a fact about one of these three “sentient properties” implies the presence of others, to a moderate degree. Meanwhile, information about sentience blocks inferences of inanimacy. This link between sentience and animacy is particularly strong for US adults and White children, while people from other cultural backgrounds demonstrate a more flexible construal of what kinds of objects might be sentient.
Validation of C-band SRTM DEM and its application for Orthorectification

In the present paper, the position and elevation accuracy assessment of SRTM C-band DEM (90 m resolution) has been evaluated. An accurate aerial photogrammetric DEM and orthophoto have been used as reference data. The aerial DEM is generated using conventional photgrammetric methods by incorporating break lines and mass points. The aerial DEM at 25 m posting interval and aerial orthophoto 0.25 m resolution are generated in WGS-84 ellipsoid, UTM projection. The aerial DEM 25 m is resampled to 90 m posting interval for comparsion with SRTM DEM. The validation of SRTM DEM is carried out by three methods viz. Contour Validation, Profile Validation and DEM Differencing A positional bias of 100 m and vertical accuracy of 8 m linear error (LE90) have been observed. Further, the utility of the SRTM DEM has been studied for orthorectification of medium resolution IRS-PAN 5 m data and high resolution Ikonos 1m data. The validation of IRSPAN orthoimage is carried out by comparing it with the coordinated from aerial orthophoto. The validation of Ikonos orthoimage is carried out by comparing the coordinates of DGPS derived control points. In both cases, the outputs have met the requirements for base mapping at 1:25,000 and 1:10,000 scale respectively.
Fast direct solver for Poisson equation in a 2D elliptical domain

In this article, we extend our previous work M. ‐C. Lai and W. ‐C. Wang, Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 18:56–68, 2002 for developing some fast Poisson solvers on 2D polar and spherical geometries to an elliptical domain. Instead of solving the equation in an irregular Cartesian geometry, we formulate the equation in elliptical coordinates. The solver relies on representing the solution as a truncated Fourier series, then solving the differential equations of Fourier coefficients by finite difference discretizations. Using a grid by shifting half mesh away from the pole and incorporating the derived numerical boundary value, the difficulty of coordinate singularity can be elevated easily. Unlike the case of 2D disk domain, the present difference equation for each Fourier mode is coupled with its conjugate mode through the numerical boundary value near the pole; thus, those two modes are solved simultaneously. Both second‐ and fourth‐order accurate schemes for Dirichlet and Neumann problems are presented. In particular, the fourth‐order accuracy can be achieved by a three‐point compact stencil which is in contrast to a five‐point long stencil for the disk case. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 20: 72–81, 2004
Robust feature selection via simultaneous capped ℓ2-norm and ℓ2,1-norm minimization

High dimension is one of the key characters of big data. Feature selection plays a significant role in many machine learning applications dealing with high-dimensional data. To improve the robustness of feature selection, we propose a new robust feature selection method with emphasizing Simultaneous Capped ℓ2-norm loss and ℓ2,1-norm regularizer Minimization (SCM). The capped ℓ2-norm based loss function can effectively eliminate the influence of noise and outliers in regression and the ℓ2,1-norm regularization is used to select features across data sets with joint sparsity. Meanwhile, we propose an effective approach to solve the formulated minimization problem. Experimental studies on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with other popular feature selection methods.
Attributes Selection in Chinese Ontology Acquisition with FCA

An ontology can be seen as a hierarchical description of concepts in a specific domain. One of the key issues in ontology construction is the acquisition of ontology hierarchy. Manual construction of ontology by experts is time-consuming and costly, and timely update is also difficult. In automatic or semi-automatic methods, the general procedure of ontology construction is to obtain domain specific terms first and then acquire the relations among them. Terms can be obtained through terminology extraction. Relationship among terms can then be acquired to construct an appropriate ontology hierarchy. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is an effective tool for the acquisition and visualization of ontology structure. In using FCA to acquire ontology structure, some existing methods are inclined to use a single type of attributes such as verbs or nouns or adjectives in the context of a term. This paper investigates the use of context words including nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as well as their combination. Experiments on a general corpus and a domain specific corpus show that the combined attributes of content word types give the best performance. Contrary to the belief that verbs serve as the best single type of attributes, nouns are better to use as they have overall better average performance over the whole spectrum of threshold values. Another experiment is conducted to examine context words which are qualified as domain specific terms from a so-called Core Term List which is acquired separately. The Core Term List contains terms complying with some specific standards as qualified domain terms. Experiments show a comparable or even better performance of using the Core Term List as context than using dynamically acquired nouns. In fact the core Term List approach gives comparable result to the combined content words. Thus, simple domain knowledge acquired apriori can serve as a good alternative attribute set especially in resource limited cases.
Extracting Fundamental Periods to Segment Biomedical Signals

We address the problem of segmenting nearly periodic time series into period-like segments. We introduce a definition of nearly periodic time series via triplets 〈basic shape, shape transformation, time scaling〉 that covers a wide range of time series. To split the time series into periods, we select a pair of principal components of the Hankel matrix. We then cut the trajectory of the selected principal components by its symmetry axis and, thus, obtaining half-periods that are merged into segments. We describe a method of automatic selection of periodic pairs of principal components, corresponding to the fundamental periodicity. We demonstrate the application of the proposed method to the problem of period extraction for accelerometric time series of human gait. We see the automatic segmentation into periods as a problem of major importance for human activity recognition problem, since it allows to obtain interpretable segments: each extracted period can be seen as an ultimate entity of gait. The method we propose is more general compared to the application specific methods and can be used for any nearly periodical time series. We compare its performance to classical mathematical methods of period extraction and find that it is not only comparable to the alternatives, but in some cases performs better.
Inulae Flos and Its Compounds Inhibit TNF-α- and IFN-γ-Induced Chemokine Production in HaCaT Human Keratinocytes

The present study is to investigate which kinds of solvent extracts of Inulae Flos inhibit the chemokine productions in HaCaT cell and whether the inhibitory capacity of Inulae Flos is related with constitutional compounds. The 70% methanol extract showed comparatively higher inhibition of thymus and activation-regulated chemokine (TARC/CCL17) in HaCaT cells, therefore this extract was further partitioned with n-hexane, chloroform, ethyl acetate, butanol, and water. The ethyl acetate fraction inhibited TARC, macrophage-derived chemokine (MDC/CCL22), and regulated on activation of normal T-cell-expressed and -secreted (RANTES/CCL5) production in HaCaT cells better than the other fractions. The compounds of Inulae Flos, such as 1,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid and luteolin, inhibited TARC, MDC, and RANTES production in HaCaT cells. 1,5-Dicaffeoylquinic acid was contained at the highest concentrations both in the 70% methanol extract and ethyl acetate fraction and inhibited the secretion of chemokines dose-dependently more than the other compounds. Luteolin also represented dose-dependent inhibition on chemokine productions although it was contained at lower levels in 70% methanol extract and solvent fractions. These results suggest that the inhibitory effects of Inulae Flos on chemokine production in HaCaT cell could be related with constituent compounds contained, especially 1,5-dicaffeoylquinic acid and luteolin.
Mid-tier caching: the TimesTen approach

TimesTen is an in-memory, application-tier data manager that delivers low response time and high throughput. Applications may create tables and manage them exclusively in TimesTen, and they may optionally cache frequently used subsets of a disk-based relational database in TimesTen. Cached tables and tables managed exclusively by TimesTen may coexist in the same database. Queries and updates to the cache are performed by the application through SQL. Applications running on different mid-tier servers may cache different or overlapping subsets of the same back-end database. TimesTen keeps the caches synchronized with each other and with the back-end database.
A survey on Efficient Enhanced K-Means Clustering Algorithm

Data mining is the process of using technology to identify patterns and prospects from large amount of information. In Data Mining, Clustering is an important research topic and wide range of unverified classification application. Clustering is technique which divides a data into meaningful groups. K-means clustering is a method of cluster analysis which aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean. In this paper, we present the comparison of different K-means clustering algorithms.
Dear search engine: what's your opinion about...?: sentiment analysis for semantic enrichment of web search results

Search Engines have become the main entry point to Web content, and a large part of the "visible" Web consists in what is presented by them as top retrieved results. Therefore, it would be desirable if the first few results were a representative sample of the entire result set. This paper provides a preliminary study about opinions contained in search engine results for controversial queries such as "cloning" or "immigration". To this end, we extract sentiment metadata from web pages, and compare search engine results for several queries. Furthermore, we compare opinions expressed in the top results to those in other retrieved results to examine whether the top-ranked pages are a good sample of all results from an opinion perspective. In a preliminary empirical analysis, we compare up to 50 results from 3 commercial search engines on 14 controversial queries to study the relation between sentiments, topics, and rankings.
Continuous path planning and implementation in internet- based robot arm system

Continuous path (CP) control was researched on an Internet-based two degrees-of-freedom robot arm in this paper. First, the condition needed to realize the continuous path control was analyzed. The important parameter “the highest resultant speed” was calculated considering the existence of network-delay. Then the relation between the linear interpolation numbers and errors of the four-leaf rose curve was derived. The remote control experiment in the actual robot arm system was carried out, and the effects of the interpolation point number to control precision and drawing time were also discussed. At last, a constant compensation method was applied to eliminate the mechanical effects existed in the system and improve the precision of the path-tracking further.
Saving Behavior in Low- and Middle-Income Developing Countries: A Comparison

The relationship between real interest rates, saving, and gre is a cen tral issue in development economics. Using iflaCrOecOnOFflic data for c cross-section of countries, we estimate a model in %i’hlc/I 1/ic intertemporal elasticity of subsutution varies with the level of wealth. The estimated pa ranieters are used to calculate, in the context of a simple endogenous g rowt/i model, the responsiveness of saving to real interest rate c/ian ges for countries at differing stages of developmnent. The hypothesis f/mat the saving rate, and its sensitivity to time interest rate, are a risinq function of income finds strong empirical support.
The Architecture of an Integrated RTSP , RTP and SDP Library

We describe architecture and implementation issues of a software library for transport and control of multimedia content over IP networks. The library uses RTSP and SDP as control protocols and RTP for the content transport. All these three protocols are tightly integrated, which simplifies very much the use of the library. Its architecture allows an easy extension of the RTSP and SDP protocols for interoperability with other implementations. RTP profiles can also be added very easy. The library’s API is very flexible, allowing easy mapping to other protocols or to simpler interface. The library was already successfully used in several applications.
PHYSICALLY-BASED OPERATORS FOR VIRTUAL CLAY MODELING IN A COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL DESIGN ENVIRONMENT

Virtual claying has become a preferred method of computer aided shape conceptualization. Nevertheless, the current implementations do not support collaborative design by remote participants. This paper reports on an implementation of virtual claying in a collaborative virtual design environment where ideas and actions of the stylists and the designers are converted to a model by physically-based operators. The basis of the model is a vague discrete modeling kernel. Physical operators are implemented on class and instance levels. The classes contain the generic support constraints and external forces, which can be combined to deform the shape. The instances of a physical operator class are able to model specific effects by various load-support arrangements. The fix, hinge, roller, and slide support operators represent typical mechanical supports. We defined concentrated and distributed forces, both static and dynamic, based on the principles of the Newtonian physics. We implemented the stretch, squash, bend and torque operators as the instances of the generic deformation operator. This paper presents the definitions and implementation of the operators, together with a comprehensive application example, which shows the capabilities of physically-based operators.