Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reduction of the available area for aqueous humor outflow and increase in meshwork herniations into collector channels following acute IOP elevation in bovine eyes.

PURPOSE To understand how hydrodynamic and morphologic changes in the aqueous humor outflow pathway contribute to decreased aqueous humor outflow facility after acute elevation of intraocular pressure (IOP) in bovine eyes. METHODS Enucleated bovine eyes were perfused at 1 of 4 different pressures (7, 15, 30, 45 mm Hg) while outflow facility was continuously recorded. Dulbecco PBS + 5.5 mM glucose containing fluorescent microspheres (0.5 mum, 0.002% vol/vol) was perfused to outline aqueous outflow patterns, followed by perfusion-fixation. Confocal images were taken along the inner wall (IW) of the aqueous plexus (AP) in radial and frontal sections. Percentage effective filtration length (PEFL; IW length exhibiting tracer labeling/total length of IW) was measured. Herniations of IW into collector channel (CC) ostia were examined and graded for each eye by light microscopy. RESULTS Increasing IOP from 7 to 45 mm Hg coincided with a twofold decrease in outflow facility (P < 0.0001), a 33% to 57% decrease in PEFL with tracer confined more to the vicinity of CC ostia, progressive collapse of the AP, and increasing percentage of CC ostia exhibiting herniations (from 15.6% +/- 6.5% at 7 mm Hg to 95% +/- 2.3% at 30 mm Hg [P < 10(-4)], reaching 100% at 45 mm Hg). CONCLUSIONS Decreasing outflow facility during acute IOP elevation coincides with a reduction in available area for aqueous humor outflow and the confinement of outflow to the vicinity of CC ostia. These hydrodynamic changes are likely driven by morphologic changes associated with AP collapse and herniation of IW of AP into CC ostia.
Recent Progress in Piezoelectric Conversion and Energy Harvesting Using Nonlinear Electronic Interfaces and Issues in Small Scale Implementation

This paper aims at providing an up-to-date review of nonlinear electronic interfaces for energy harvesting from mechanical vibrations using piezoelectric coupling. The basic principles and the direct application to energy harvesting of nonlinear treatment of the output voltage of the transducers for conversion enhancement will be recalled, and extensions of this approach presented. Latest advances in this field will be exposed, such as the use of intermediate energy tanks for decoupling or initial energy injection for conversion magnification. A comparative analysis of each of these techniques will be performed, highlighting the advantages and drawbacks of the methods, in terms of efficiency, performance under several excitation conditions, complexity of implementation and so on. Finally, a special focus of their implementation in the case of low voltage output transducers (as in the case of microsystems) will be presented.
Visual Exploration of High-Dimensional Data : Subspace Analysis through Dynamic Projections

Understanding high-dimensional data is rapidly becoming a central challenge in many areas of science and engineering. Most current techniques either rely on manifold learning based techniques which typically create a single embedding of the data or on subspace selection to find subsets of the original attributes that highlight the structure. However, the former creates a single, difficult-to-interpret view and assumes the data to be drawn from a single manifold, while the latter is limited to axis-aligned projections with restrictive viewing angles. Instead, we introduce ideas based on subspace clustering that can faithfully represent more complex data than the axis-aligned projections, yet do not assume the data to lie on a single manifold. In particular, subspace clustering assumes that the data can be represented by a union of low-dimensional subspaces, which can subsequently be used for analysis and visualization. In this paper, we introduce new techniques to reliably estimate both the intrinsic dimension and the linear basis of a mixture of subspaces extracted through subspace clustering. We show that the resulting bases represent the high-dimensional structures more reliably than traditional approaches. Subsequently, we use the bases to define different viewpoints, i.e., different projections onto pairs of basis vectors, from which to visualize the data. While more intuitive than non-linear projections, interpreting linear subspaces in terms of the original dimensions can still be challenging. To address this problem, we present new, animated transitions between different views to help the user navigate and explore the high-dimensional space. More specifically, we introduce the view transition graph which contains nodes for each subspace viewpoint and edges for potential transition between views. The transition graph enables users to explore both the structure within a subspace and the relations between different subspaces, for better understanding of the data. Using a number of case studies on well-know reference datasets, we demonstrate that the interactive exploration through such dynamic projections provides additional insights not readily available from existing
MERGING SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL LOGIC FOR DISCRETE EVENT CONTROL

This paper presents an adaptation of the logic CTL [5] for specifying properties of controllers and controlled discrete event systems. The class of systems is fully described in the textbook by Cassandras and Lafortune [4]. Our logic is an alternative to Pinchinat and Riedweg’s formalization [8] of quantified loop-μ-calculus, itself a response to the paper of Arnold et al. [1] on “games for synthesis of controllers with partial observation. ” The basic problem is the following. We are given a “plant”, represented as a finite automaton. We desire to automatically synthesise, if possible, a finite controller automaton which, when run in parallel with the plant, will realize a certain overall behavior, given by a logical formula. The papers just cited accomplish this, using the modal μcalculus [6] as a logical language for such specifications. We wanted to understand these results in the the simpler setting of the logic CTL. We selected this branching-time logic because certain natural control problems could be easily stated in it. Our version of CTL is first of all one which regards satisfying models as deterministic transition systems. It is also a modal logic with modalities corresponding to discrete actions; in this respect it is a deterministic version of modal μ-calculus [6]. But (in a small way) we incorporate a new kind of logic, in which you can specify not only behavior, but something of the actual structure of the target controllers and/or systems. This is called “spatial logic”, a subject which has become recently popular in concurrency theory see, e.g., [3], or [9]. Our presentation follows Caires and Cardelli [2] in basic syntax and semantics. Our technical result is a proof, using tree automata, of the finite model property for a fragment of this logic. We obtain a synthesis method for centralized controllers of discrete event systems under partial observation, given a specification for their behavior in our logic. The controller can be synthesized in time exponential in the size of the specification. We only sketch the standard part of the proof of the synthesis algorithm and complexity bound. It is obtained using the theory of games and tree automata, using the fact that a “Streett tree automaton” can be simulated by a “parity tree automaton” and then by the fact that if a parity tree automaton accepts any tree, then it accepts a rational tree. This rational tree has to be subjected to a “knobbification” procedure (adding self-loops) at its nodes, because the requirement of correctness under partial observation is that an unobservable transition of the plant cannot lead a controller to change its own state. The knobbified tree then gives us our finite model directly. The contributions of the research so far are first, the introduction of a simple yet quite flexible specification logic for controller synthesis; and second, merging of two strands of research in computational logic – the CTL-μ-calculus strand, and the emerging strand of work in spatial logic. In
BLACKBOX : A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving toProblem

It has often been observed that the classical AI planning problem (that is, planning with complete and certain information) is a form of logical deduction. Because early attempts to use general theorem provers to solve planning problems proved impractical, research became focused on specialized planning algorithms. Sometimes the relationship to inference was explicitly acknowledged: for example, the STRIPS system (Fikes and Nilsson 1971) was originally described as a way to to make theorem-proving practical. In other work the relationship to deduction was developed after the fact. For example, Chapman's (1985) work on TWEAK clariied the logic behind one variety of non-linear planning. The belief that planning required specialized deduc-tive algorithms was challenged by our work on planning as propositional satissability testing (Kautz and Selman 1992, 1996). SATPLAN showed that a general propositional theorem prover could indeed be competitive with some of the best specialized planning systems. The success of SATPLAN can be attributed to two factors: The use of a logical representation that has good computational properties. Both the fact that SAT-PLAN uses propositional logic instead of rst-order logic, and the particular conventions we suggested for representing time and actions, are signiicant. Diierently declarative representations that are semantically equivalent can still have quite distinct computational prooles. (For this reason we believe that the search for epistemologically satisfactory representations (McCarthy and Hayes 1969) should go hand-in-hand with the study of practical reasoning algorithms, rather than being carried out as a separate activity. ) The use of powerful new general reasoning algorithms such as Walksat (Selman, Kautz, and Cohen 1994). Many researchers in diierent areas of computer science are creating faster SAT engines every year. Furthermore, these researchers have settled on common representations that allow algorithms and code to be freely shared and ne-tuned. As a result, at any point in time the best general SAT engines tend to be faster (in terms of raw inferences per second) than the best specialized planning engines. In principle, of course, these same improvements could be applied to the specialized engines; but by the time that is done, there will be a new crop of general systems. An approach that shares a number of features with with the SATPLAN strategy is the Graphlan system, developed independently by Blum and Furst (1995). Graphplan broke previous records in terms of raw planning speed, and has become a popular planning framework. Comparisons to SATPLAN show that neither algorithm is …
Empirical Comparison of MIMO and Beamforming Schemes

We present an empirically based comparative study of spectral efficiency for a variety of transmission systems applicable to a fixed or repositionable wireless environment, in the context of Wi-Fi, WiMAX or MuniNet systems. A narrowband 4times4 Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel sounder has been constructed and a series of outdoor to indoor measurements have been carried out, in multiple locations and with different array configurations. The channel measurements have been used to compute the spectral efficiency of different systems that could be deployed in such scenarios, ranging from a full MIMO system with perfect Channel State Information (CSI) at both ends to simple diversity schemes such as classical beamforming. We show comparisons between the different transmit/receive configurations operating in a representative variety of indoor receive locations. Our results indicate that for low values of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR, in the range of 5dB), simple schemes can achieve capacities as high as 80% of that of MIMO with complete CSI.
Temporal dynamics of lung aeration determined by dynamic CT in a porcine model of ARDS.

We used dynamic CT to identify two different time constants of lung aeration and their individual contribution to the total increase in cross-sectional lung area in healthy and experimentally damaged lungs. In five healthy pigs, inflation and deflation between 0 and 50 cm H2O was imposed during dynamic (250 ms/image) CT acquisition, and repeated after experimental lung injury by saline lavage. The fractional areas of density ranges, which represent aerated lung parenchyma, were determined planimetrically, and their time for expansion during the manoeuvre was fitted using a bi-exponential model. Thus, two compartments, their sizes, i.e. their relative contributions to lung area aerated by the manoeuvre, and their specific time constants (tau) were sought. Healthy lungs were characterized best by a one-compartmental behaviour with one tau only, both during inflation (median tau=0.5 s; range 0.4-0.6 s) and deflation (1.2 s; 1.1-1.3 s). In damaged lungs two compartments were found both during inspiration and expiration, with 86% (78-87%) of the recruitable lung area following a short tau of 0.5 s (0.5-0.6), and 14% (13-22%) following a longer tau of 9.1 s (8-16.8 s) during inflation. During expiration, damaged lungs had a short tau of 0.8 s (0.5-1.0 s) for 94% (84-100%) of deflated lung area, and a longer tau of 26.5 s (7.1-34.3 s) for 6% (0-16%). We conclude that dynamic CT indicates the relative size and temporal behaviour of functional compartments in normal and abnormal lungs. Our findings suggest that after lung damage, cyclic ventilation with inspiratory periods of <10 s duration will not achieve maximum recruitment for a chosen inspiratory pressure. In ARDS, the short expiratory tau predisposes to atelectasis formation if expiratory times are >1 s.
Comparison Between 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test and Multistage Field Test on Physiological Responses in Wheelchair Basketball Players

The intermittent nature of wheelchair court sports suggests using a similar protocol to assess repeated shuttles and recovery abilities. This study aimed to compare performances, physiological responses and perceived rating exertion obtained from the continuous multistage field test (MFT) and the 30-15 intermittent field test (30-15IFT). Eighteen trained wheelchair basketball players (WBP) (WBP: 32.0 ± 5.7 y, IWBF classification: 2.9 ± 1.1 points) performed both incremental field tests in randomized order. Time to exhaustion, maximal rolling velocity (MRV), VO2peak and the peak values of minute ventilation (VEpeak), respiratory frequency (RF) and heart rate (HRpeak) were measured throughout both tests; peak and net blood lactate (Δ[Lact−] = peak–rest values) and perceived rating exertion (RPE) values at the end of each exercise. No significant difference in VO2peak, VEpeak, and RF was found between both tests. 30-15IFT was shorter (12.4 ± 2.4 vs. 14.9 ± 5.1 min, P < 0.05) but induced higher values of MRV and Δ[Lact−] compared to MFT (14.2 ± 1.8 vs. 11.1 ± 1.9 km·h−1 and 8.3 ± 4.2 vs. 6.9 ± 3.3 mmol·L−1, P < 0.05). However, HRpeak and RPE values were higher during MFT than 30-15IFT(172.8 ± 14.0 vs. 166.8 ± 13.8 bpm and 15.3 ± 3.8 vs.13.8 ± 3.5, respectively, P < 0.05). The intermittent shuttles intercepted with rest period occurred during the 30-15IFT could explain a greater anaerobic solicitation. The higher HR and overall RPE values measured at the end of MFT could be explained by its longer duration and a continuous load stress compared to 30-15IFT. In conclusion, 30-15IFT has some advantages over MFT for assess in addition physical fitness and technical performance in WBP.
Religious Impact on the Performance of Entrepreneurs: A Comparative Study of Male and Female in Sub-Saharan Africa

Religion is a very abstract and complicated concept. Although a lot of works have examined the relationship between religion and entrepreneurial activities, few studies tested the impact of religion on gender entrepreneurial performance. In this study, we use Ghana as a sample to empirically explore how religion impacts on gender entrepreneurial performance from three dimensions i.e. marital life, inheritance system and societal perception in sub-Saharan Africa. Our empirical findings suggest there are inequalities from the impact of religion on the performance of male and female entrepreneurs. This research revealed a significant impact of religion through marital life and societal perception on male entrepreneur’s performance as compared to their female counterparts. In contrast, inheritance system had no significant impact on gender which deviates from the norm in the sub-Saharan African community. Implications of the findings have been discussed and recommendations are made at the end of the paper. Keywords: Entrepreneurs, Gender, Religious Impact, Sub-Saharan Africa
The right of persons with disabilities bill, 2014 - An Appraisal

According to the Census of India, 2011 disable persons constitute of 2.21% of India’s population. Currently, the laws such as the Mental Health Act, 1987, the National Trust Act for the Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation and Multiple Disabilities Act, 1999 and the Rehabilitation Council of India Act, 1992 and the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 provides protection to the rights of persons with disabilities. The rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 7th February, 2013. The paper critically analyses the Bill.
When is a fashion a fashion ? The institutionalisation of management fashions as a process of professionalisation

The mainstream literature on management fashions assumes that fashions appear and disappear without having lasting effects. This article identifies the conditions under which management fashions become institutionalised and hence entrenched as management practices. Professionalisation is proposed as a mechanism through which fashions can become legitimate and accepted practice. The argument is developed by identifying the necessary components of professionalisation processes, i.e. (a) the creation and operationalisation of a body of expertise, (b) the establishment and expansion of a professional jurisdiction, and (c) field-wide anchoring via field-wide organisations and networks. In reference to the institutionalist literature on organisational change, it is suggested that this constitutes the emergence of an institutionalised practice via a process of ‘partaking’. The main points are illustrated with primary and secondary evidence on a particular management fashion, Knowledge Management. Management fashion – Management Practice – Profession – Professionalisation – Institutionalisation Knowledge Management
Coordinated multi-user transmission in distributed antenna-based spectrum-sharing systems

In a spectrum-sharing system (SSS), deploying the antennas in a distributed manner can provide a new spatial dimension for the efficient reuse of licensed frequency bands. In order to improve the sum rate of multiple secondary-users (SUs), this paper addresses the problem of coordinated multi-SU spectrum sharing in a distributed antenna-based SSS. By adopting the Hungarian method and the primal decomposition method, we propose a joint antenna selection and power allocation algorithm, so as to maximize the sum-rate of SUs. Simulation results show that the proposed method can dramatically improve the system performance at a relatively low complexity.
03 01 06 9 v 1 6 J an 2 00 3 Jeans solutions for triaxial galaxies

The Jeans equations relate the second-order velocity moments to the density and potential of a stellar system. For general three-dimensional stellar systems, there are three equations, but these are not very helpful, as they contain six independent moments. By assuming that the potential is triaxial and of separable Stäckel form, the mixed moments vanish in confocal ellipsoidal coordinates. The three Jeans equations and three remaining non-vanishing moments form a closed system of three highly-symmetric coupled first-order partial differential equations in three variables. They were first derived by Lynden–Bell in 1960, but have resisted solution by standard methods. Here we present the general solution by superposition of singular solutions.
Ultrasonic phased array device for real-time acoustic imaging in air

A real-time acoustic imaging system is developed as a prototype electronic travel aid (ETA) device. The design is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). A 6 channel transmit and 4 channel receive digital beamforming algorithm with dynamic focusing is accommodated in a FPGA. The developed system consists of a FPGA, pulser and receiver circuitry and separate transmitter and receiver arrays, which are constructed by using commercially available transducers. The transducer elements have a physical dimension of 1.9 wavelengths and a half-power beamwidth of 43deg at 40.8 kHz center frequency. The transmitter array is formed by aligning the transducers with minimum spacing between the elements, which is 2 wavelengths. Obviously, more than one wavelength inter-element spacing leads to the occurrence of grating lobes in the array response and decreases the Field of View (FOV) below the half-power beamwidth of transducers. To extend the FOV and eliminate the grating lobe, the receiver array is formed with 3 wavelength inter-element spacing. The non-identical element spacing makes the grating lobes of transmitter and receiver array to appear at different places. The described placement strategy and the functionality of the system is tested with several experiments. The results of these experiments prove the grating lobe suppression capability of the applied placement strategy.