Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analyzing Conversations : Realizability , Synchronizability , and Verification

Conversations provide an intuitive and simple model for analyzing interactions among composite web services. A conversation is the global sequence of messages exchanged among the peers participating to a composite web service. Interactions in a composite web service can be analyzed by investigating the temporal properties of its conversations. Conversations can be specified in a top-down or bottom-up manner. In a top-down conversation specification, the set of conversations is specified first, without specifying the individual behaviors of the peers. In a bottom-up conversation specification, on the other hand, behavior of each peer is specified separately and the conversation set is defined implicitly as the set of conversations generated by these peers. For both top-down and bottom-up specification approaches we are interested in the following: 1) Automatically verifying properties of conversations, and 2) Investigating the effect of asynchronous communication on the conversation behavior. These two issues are closely related since asynchronous communication with unbounded queues increases the difficulty of automated verification significantly. In this paper, we give an overview of our earlier results on analysis and verification of conversations. We discuss two analysis techniques for identifying bottom-up and top-down conversation specifications that can be automatically verified. Synchronizability analysis identifies bottom-up conversation specifications for which the conversation set remains the same for asynchronous and synchronous communication. Realizability analysis, on the other hand, identifies top-down conversation specifications which can be implemented by a set of finite state peers interacting with asynchronous communication. We discuss sufficient conditions for synchronizability and realizability analyses which are implemented in our Web Service Analysis Tool (WSAT). WSAT can be used for verification of LTL properties of both top-down and bottom-up conversation specifications.
Eccentric training for hamstring injury, and its relationship to strength and flexibility: A case-series

BACKGROUND: Reduced strength and flexibility are commonly hypothesised risk factors for the development of hamstring injury, and both are improved with eccentric training in non-injured populations. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the effect of eccentric training on strength and flexibility among previously injured athletes. This study examined the effects of a modified eccentric hamstring strength program on strength and flexibility in previously injured athletes. METHODS: Ten participants (8 Male, 2 Female) ranging from 18–36 years of age were recruited from the local community to participate in the study. All participants demonstrated a previous history of hamstring injury but had since returned to their chosen sport of Gaelic football, hurling, soccer or rugby. A single group repeated measures intervention study was carried out. Two strength parameters; peak torque (PT) and angle of peak torque (AngPT), as well as two flexibility parameters; stretch tolerance (ST) and extensibility were assessed before and after a six week eccentric hamstring strength program. Muscle soreness was recorded using a likert scale. Paired samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests compared strength and flexibility before and after the eccentric program. RESULTS: There was a significant increase in eccentric hamstring PT (p < 0.001) and eccentric hamstring AngPT (p = 0.001) following the intervention. The results also indicated a significant increase in ST (p ≤ 0.001), but not extensibility (p = 0.892), following the eccentric intervention. Mean(±SD) muscle soreness with the exercise programme was minimal (1.85 ± 0.84) with 100% compliance during the eccentric programme. CONCLUSIONS: Significant changes in PT, AngPT and ST were observed after the eccentric training programme, consistent with previous research among uninjured populations. Extensibility was unchanged after the intervention. Eccentric training programmes similar to that performed in the current study have been associated with reduced injury rates when progressed gradually throughout a season. This study adds support to the hypothesis that eccentric training can improve both strength and flexibility parameters. However further well designed randomised control trials (RCTs) and field-based studies, which include injury outcomes, are needed.
A Novel Adaptive Wavelet Fuzzy Cerebellar Model Articulation Control System Design for Voice Coil Motors

In this paper, a novel adaptive wavelet fuzzy cerebellar model articulation control system is developed for the trajectory tracking control of voice coil motors (VCMs). Since the precise model of the VCM is difficult to obtain, a model-free intelligent control system is developed for the precise trajectory tracking of VCMs. This control system comprises a wavelet fuzzy cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) (WFCMAC) and a fuzzy compensator. The novel WFCMAC incorporates the wavelet decomposition property with a fuzzy CMAC fast learning ability, and it is used to imitate an ideal controller. This WFCMAC is a generalization network. In some special cases, it can be reduced to a fuzzy neural network (NN), a wavelet NN, and a CMAC. Moreover, the fuzzy compensator is developed to attenuate the effect of the approximation error caused by the WFCMAC approximator. The online learning algorithm of the controller's parameters is derived based on the Lyapunov function; thus, the stability of the system can be guaranteed. Finally, the developed control system is applied to the trajectory tracking control of a VCM. From the experimental results, it is verified that the proposed WFCMAC control scheme can achieve favorable tracking performance even if the system model of the VCM is unknown. Furthermore, the salient merits are also indicated in comparison with a proportional-integral-derivative controller.
Análise Comparativa de Artigos Científicos da Área de Saúde

This paper compares scientific articles in six sub-areas of Health Studies. The articles were written in Portuguese and English by Brazilians or in English by native speakers of English. The analysis includes quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of hedging. The results suggest that Brazilians have a tendency to use a greater quantity and variety of hedges in English, quantitatively exceeding the hedging used by native speakers of English. It was also found that there are preferences in terms of the purposes with which these hedges are used in the two languages, with an inclination of Brazilians to use this resource mainly in the formulation of hypotheses.
Survey of Scan Chain Diagnosis

Scan-based testing has proven to be a cost-effective method for achieving good test coverage in digital circuits. The Achilles heel in the application of scan-based testing is the integrity of the scan chains. The amount of die area consumed by scan elements, chain connections, and control circuitry varies with different designs. Typically, each scan cell in a scan chain has an index number. The cells in the chain are sequentially numbered from scan output to scan input, starting with 0. A chain pattern (sometimes called a flush pattern) is a pattern consisting of shift-in and shift-out operations without pulsing capture clocks. The purpose of chain patterns is to test scan chain integrity. A scan pattern (also known as a logic test pattern) is a pattern consisting of a shift-in operation, one or multiple capture clock cycles, and a shift-out operation. The purpose of scan patterns is to test system logic. The scan cells between the scan chain input and a scan cell's scan input terminal are called the upstream cells of that scan cell. The scan cells between the scan chain output and a scan cell's scan output terminal are called the downstream cells of that scan cell.
Trespasses: Selected Writings

Trespasses presents key writings of the Tokyo-born literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, one of the most important postwar intellectuals to link culture with politics and a remarkable critical voice within the academy. For more than four decades, Miyoshi worked outside the mainstream, trespassing into new fields, making previously unseen connections, and upending naive assumptions. With an impeccable sense of when a topic or discussion had lost its critical momentum, he moved on to the next question, and then the next after that, taking on matters of literary form, cross-cultural relations, globalization, art and architecture, the corporatization of the university, and the threat of ecological disaster. Trespasses reveals the tremendous range of Miyoshi's thought and interests, shows how his thinking transformed over time, and highlights his recurring concerns. This volume brings together eleven selections of Miyoshi's previously published writing, a major new essay, a critical introduction to his life and work, and an interview in which Miyoshi reflects on the trajectory of his thought and the institutional history of modern Japan studies. In the new essay, "Literary Elaborations," he provides a masterful overview of the nature of the contemporary university, closing with a call for a global environmental protection studies that would radically reconfigure academic disciplines and merge the hard sciences with the humanities and the social sciences. In the other, chronologically arranged selections, Miyoshi addresses cross-culture relations between Japan and the United States, English literary studies in Japan, and Japan studies in the U.S., as well as the organization of urban space and the integrity of art and architecture in aggressively marketed-oriented environments. Trespasses is an invaluable introduction to the work of a fearless cultural critic.
Modulation of dendritic spine remodeling in the motor cortex following spinal cord injury: Effects of environmental enrichment and combinatorial treatment with transplants and neurotrophin‐3

Incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI) elicits structural plasticity of the spared motor system, including the motor cortex, which may underlie some of the spontaneous recovery of motor function seen after injury. Promoting structural plasticity may become an important component of future strategies to improve functional outcomes. We have recently observed dynamic changes in the density and morphology of dendritic spines in the motor cortex following SCI. The present study sought to test whether SCI‐induced changes in spine density and morphology could be modulated by potential strategies to enhance functional recovery. We examined the effects of enriched environment, transplants, and neurotrophin‐3 on the plasticity of synaptic structures in the motor cortex following SCI. Housing rats in an enriched environment increased spine density in the motor cortex regardless of injury. SCI led to a more slender and elongated spine morphology. Enriched housing mitigated the SCI‐induced morphological alterations, suggesting that the environmental modification facilitates maturation of synaptic structures. Transplantation of embryonic spinal cord tissue and delivery of neurotrophin‐3 at the injury site further increased spine density when combined with enriched housing. This combinatorial treatment completely abolished the injury‐induced changes, restoring a preinjury pattern of spine morphology. These results demonstrated that remodeling of dendritic spines in the motor cortex after SCI can be modulated by enriched housing, and the combinatorial treatment with embryonic transplants and neurotrophin‐3 can potentiate the effects of enriched housing. We suggest that synaptic remodeling processes in the motor cortex can be targeted for an intervention to enhance functional recovery after SCI. J. Comp. Neurol. 507:473–486, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cooperating air traffic control agents

The key aim of cooperating air traffic control agents (CAT CA) was to comparatively analyze and evaluate the success of a multiagent system (MAS) and a single agent system (SAS) at addressing a given set of goals in a problem domain amenable to the utilization of either a MAS or SAS. The problem domain selected was air traffic control (AT C). The success of the MAS and SAS was evaluated in accordance with a set of objective criteria. The results attained support a hypothesis that the MAS is successful at addressing the given set of goals for simulation scenarios utilizing a large number of aircraft, and the SAS is successful at addressing the sameset of goals in simulation scenarios utilizing a small number of aircraft. The term success is defined as the number of cases within a given simulation scenario, where an agent detects and resolves potential air traffic conflicts, and directs aircraft adhering to expected aircraft flight times. The results attained are applicable in problem domains other than AT C, such as intelligent hospital scheduling (Decker, 1996), and road traffic congestion and traffic jam simulation (Cremer, et al., 1994).
Acoustic image estimation using fast transforms

The estimation of acoustic images is a computationally-intensive task for large microphone arrays. One of the most popular algorithms for acoustic image estimation, delay-and-sum beamforming (DAS), has low computational complexity, but low spatial resolution. Several methods have been developed to obtain higher resolution, among which compressive beamforming, which is based on sparse estimation. Although this method does achieve higher resolution, its computational complexity is significantly higher than that of DAS. In this paper we describe the use of the Kronecker array transform (KAT) to accelerate DAS and specific algorithms for sparse estimation, in particular matching pursuit (MP) and the spectral projected-gradient algorithm SPGL1. In addition, we describe how the nonequispaced fast Fourier transform (NFFT) can be used to provide further acceleration.
Location of the corticospinal tract in the internal capsule at MR imaging.

PURPOSE To examine whether hyperintense foci in the posterior internal capsule (IC) on T2-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images represent fibers of the corticospinal tract (CST). MATERIALS AND METHODS The authors reviewed MR images of 100 control subjects and 35 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and brain specimens from seven control subjects and five ALS patients. RESULTS In the posterior IC, the brain specimens from control subjects demonstrated a pale area with large axons and thick myelin sheaths. In five ALS patients, the brain specimens showed degeneration of the CST in the same region. MR images demonstrated abnormal hyperintensity that represented degeneration of the CST in five of 35 ALS patients. In the same region, hyperintense foci were found in the control subjects. CONCLUSION Normal hyperintense foci in the IC represent the fibers of the CST. The presence of large fibers with thick myelin sheaths may play an important role in these signal intensity variations.
Medición de constructos bipolares mediante escalas tipo Likert:¿por qué aparecen factores monopolares?

Measuring bipolar constructs but finding monopolar factors. The structure of bipolar constructs is often studied using counterbalanced Likert-type scales. Answers obtained by means of these scales have been submitted to factor analysis, and contrary to expectations, the results frequently have shown that the obtained factor structure is not bipolar, but made up by two monopolar factors. Recently, Van Shuur and colleagues (1994, 1995) proposed an explanation for this phenomenon, arguing that the emergence of monopolar factors is due to the fact that this kind of data fits to the unfolding model, not to the factor analysis model. This paper presents and tests a new explanation: the reformulation of the bipolar model under the "two halves hypothesis". Under this hypothesis the bipolar dimensions split into two monopolar factors because the items of counterbalanced Likert-type scales do not measure the intended bipolar dimension. On the contrary, they only are indicators of one half of the dimension. From this point of view the emergence of monopolar factors barely related do not invalidate the bipolarity of the underlying dimension. The empirical evidence presented here has been obtained in a sample of 298 subjects who responded to the Warr's (1990) scales of affective well-being. This evidence supports the explanation offered in this paper.
PolyLens: software for map-based visualisation and analysis of genome-scale polymorphism data

Software tools for the flexible examination of genomic sequence information derived from populations of organisms in a geospatial context are few in number, closely tied to Web-based resources, generally focused on one or a few loci or haplotypes, and typically produce a global phylogeny as a summary of relatedness. We sought instead to produce a portable, self-contained analysis tool that is efficiently focused on a geospatial display of specifically chosen polymorphism frequencies or combination frequencies from very large data sets of genome-scale sequence from multiple individuals. PolyLens is a Java-based, integral visual analytical toolkit which can systematically process population genomic data, visualise geographic distributions of genealogical lineages, and display allele distribution patterns. PolyLens is designed for users to visualise specific DNA sequences within each individual and its related location information in the existing data set.
Visual search performance in dyslexia.

According to the magnocellular theory of dyslexia, otherwise intelligent children may fail to learn to read because of abnormalities in the magnocellular layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus (mLGN). If this were the case, one would predict that dyslexic subjects who show a deficit on low-level psychophysical tasks which tax the magnocellular system would also have deficits on higher-level visual tasks which do not rely on the properties of mLGN cells but depend upon the functioning of areas whose main inputs originate in the mLGN. In other words, magnocellular deficits should be traceable at later stages of visual processing. One area where such later processing is thought to occur is the posterior parietal cortex, damage to which impairs function on some classes of visual search. To test this hypothesis, we tested two groups of dyslexic subjects and a group of non-dyslexic controls on a range of visual search tasks. One group of dyslexic subjects had elevated motion coherence thresholds, a sign of deficits at the early levels (e.g. mLGN) of visual processing, and the other group had normal motion coherence thresholds. If the magnocellular deficits extended to the parietal cortex, it follows that the subjects with elevated motion coherence thresholds should have deficit in visual search, whereas those with normal motion coherence thresholds should not. The dyslexics with a motion coherence deficit were also impaired on serial visual search tasks but not on a parallel search. The dyslexics with normal motion coherence performance were unimpaired on visual search. The deficit was expressed as an elevation in reaction times, but there was no difference between the groups either in error rates or in the way the tasks were ranked according to difficulty. The results suggest that those dyslexics who have visual problems related to magnocellular functions also have visual-attentional problems related to the functions of areas such as the parietal cortex, which are dominated by inputs originating in the magnocellular LGN.
Socioeconomic Status and Psychological Well-Being Predict Cross-Time Change in Glycosylated Hemoglobin in Older Women Without Diabetes

Objective: To investigate whether socioeconomic status and psychological well-being (eudaimonic and hedonic aspects) predicted nondiabetic levels of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) over time, after adjusting for covariates and baseline level of HbA1c. Methods: These questions were investigated with a longitudinal sample (n = 97; age = 61–91 years) of older women without diabetes. Socioeconomic status, well-being, and health behaviors were assessed using self-administered questionnaires. Fasting blood samples for assays of HbA1c were obtained before 7 AM during the respondents’ overnight stay at the General Clinical Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All measurements were obtained at baseline and 2-year follow-up. Results: Regression analyses showed that higher income and positive affect predicted lower levels of HbA1c, after controlling for baseline HbA1c and health factors. Additionally, three well-being measures (purpose in life, personal growth, and positive affect) moderated the relationship between income and HbA1c. Conclusion: These results suggest that psychological well-being and socioeconomic status interact in important ways in influencing nondiabetic glucose metabolism. HbA1c = glycosylated hemoglobin; SES = socioeconomic status; MASQ = Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire; GCRC = General Clinical Research Center; WHR = waist-to-hip ratio.
net Continuous Query Processing for Mobile Users

In this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable query processing framework for continuous spatial queries (range and knearest-neighbor queries) in mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) environments, where no fixed communication infrastructure or centralized/distributed servers are available. Due to the limitations in mobile P2P environment s[1], for example, user mobility, limited battery power, limited communication range, and scarce communication bandwidth, it is costly to maintain the exact answer of continuous spatial queries. To this end, our framework enables the user to find an approximate answer with quality guarantees. In particular, we design two key features to adapt continuous spatial query processing to mobile P2P environments. (1) Each mobile user can specify the desired quality of services (QoS) for query answers in a personalized QoS profile. The QoS profile consists of two parameters, namely, coverage and accuracy. The coverage parameter indicates the desired level of completeness of the available information for computing an approximate answer, and the accuracy parameter indicates the desired level of accuracy of the approximate answer. (2) We design a continuous answer maintenance scheme to enable the user to collaborate with other peers to continuously maintain her query answer. With these two features in our framework, the user can obtain a query answer from her local cache if the answer satisfies her QoS[2] requirements. Otherwise, the user enlists neighbors for help to share their cached information to refine the answer. If the re_ned answer still cannot satisfy the QoS requirements, the user broadcasts the query to the peers residing within the required search area of the query to find the most accurate answer. Experimental results show that our framework is efficient and scalable andprovides an effective tradeoff between the communication overhead and the quality of query answers.