Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Verification of energy model of solar-powered UAV using virtual flight evaluation

In this paper, using the virtual flight evaluation system, the verification of energy model of a solar-powered UAV considering the flight motion is conducted. The energy sources of a solar-powered UAV are the solar energy and rechargeable batteries. The acquired energy of solar-powered UAV is determined by the sun position and the attitude of a UAV. Therefore, the energy acquisition and consumption model of a solar-powered UAV is presented. For the virtual flight experiment, the state of charge of the battery is measured using the electronic load instrument. Also, the virtual flight experiment was carried out using the ground testbed for about 27 hours. The virtual flight system is composed of the measurement system, propulsion system, power system and wings covered with solar cells. To verify the energy model of a solar-powered UAV, the experimental result was compared and analyzed with the simulation.
Computationally-efficient endpointing features for natural spoken interaction with personal-assistant systems

Current speech-input systems typically use a nonspeech threshold for end-of-utterance detection. While usually sufficient for short utterances, the approach can cut speakers off during pauses in more complex utterances. We elicit personal-assistant speech (reminders, calendar entries, messaging, search) using a recognizer with a dramatically increased endpoint threshold, and find frequent nonfinal pauses. A standard endpointer with a 500 ms threshold (latency) results in a 36% cutoff rate for this corpus. Based on the new data, we develop low-cost acoustic features to discriminate nonfinal from final pauses. Features capture periodicity, speaking rate, spectral constancy, duration/intensity, and pitch of prepausal speech - using no speech recognition, speaker or session information. Classification experiments yield 20% EER at a 100 ms latency, thereby reducing both cutoffs and latency compared with the threshold-only baseline. Additional results on computational cost, feature importance, and speaker differences are discussed.
Coping with Loneliness: Methods Young People Often Prefer1

Loneliness is one of the most common distressing experiences that humans encounter and it is defined as “exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy”. Although common to all people, it is accepted that the nature of loneliness is a subjective experience that varies from person to person, occurring under many conditions with a multitude of causes, results and consequences. The aim of this study is to understand how common loneliness is among university students and to reveal which methods they prefer in order to cope with loneliness. With this aim, the UCLA Loneliness Scale and Coping with Loneliness Scale developed by Rokach (1989) was implemented on 429 university students. The Coping with Loneliness Scale consists of six factors including creating a social support network, distancing, acceptance and transformation, self- development and gaining awareness, ignoring, taking shelter in religion and belief, and increasing the number of activities. Results show that students prefer methods such as acceptance and transformation, self-development, gaining awareness, and increasing the number of activities. Moreover, in the research, it has been found that there is a relationship between the loneliness and avoidance and negligence positively, while it is negatively with increasing activity and creating a social support network. Among the methods for dealing with the loneliness which are used by man and woman university students, it has been found that there is a meaningful difference in favour of the men in only the avoidance and negligence. The results have been considered with literature findings. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014. v4n6p111
Searching microblogs: coping with sparsity and document quality

Two of the main challenges in retrieval on microblogs are the inherent sparsity of the documents and difficulties in assessing their quality. The feature sparsity is immanent to the restriction of the medium to short texts. Quality assessment is necessary as the microblog documents range from spam over trivia and personal chatter to news broadcasts, information dissemination and reports of current hot topics. In this paper we analyze how these challenges can influence standard retrieval models and propose methods to overcome the problems they pose. We consider the sparsity's effect on document length normalization and introduce "interestingness" as static quality measure. Our results show that deliberately ignoring length normalization yields better retrieval results in general and that interestingness improves retrieval for underspecified queries.
AN APPROACH TO THE SUPPORTING SYSTEM FOR EVENT PLANNING - TOWARD A KNOWLEDGE RECONSTRUCTION ENGINE -

The main goal of our research is to establish “a methodology for investigation of an event” and to construct “a knowledge reconstruction system” for designing effective and attractive events. The methodology described here is to articulate gaps between event planners’ intention and event visitors’ mental impression from real event sites. The visitors’ interactions with event objects were observed and their behavior and verbal reports (protocol data) were recorded with wearable computers and a video camera, incorporation with Dentsu Inc. Their cognitive processes were analyzed with the “retrospective report method” of protocol analysis. It is innovative to apply wearable computers and protocol analysis to real world problems to investigate humanenvironment interaction to grasp their cognitive processes microscopically in a real event site. In this paper, we are going to describe the methodology adopted for investigating their mental transition processes (Visitors’ Mental Transition: VMT) in the real world and some examples of obtained results. From analysis of the data, we obtained a prospect that our microscopic and detailed approach is useful and effective toward actual event plannins. The concept and prototype of “knowledge reconstruction system” is described.
Aplicación de métodos estadísticos para la traducción de voz a Lengua de Signos

This paper presents a set of experiments used to develop a statistical system from translating speech to sign language for deaf people. This system is composed of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, followed by a statistical translation module and an animated agent that represents the different signs. Two different approaches have been used to perform the translations: a phrase-based system and a finite state transducer. The best results were obtained with the finite state transducer, with a word error rate of 26.06% for the reference text, and 33.42% using the ASR output.
Ex Corde Ecclesiae and American Catholic Higher Education: Dead on Arrival?

On August 15, 1990, Pope John Paul II, exercising his Magisterial1 authority in the Roman Catholic Church,2 promulgated the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae3 to revitalize teaching in Catholic colleges and universities.4 Over several years, controversy relating to the possible implementation of Ex Corde in the United States accelerated.5 The major sticking point in the conflict is over the requirement that professors of theological disciplines6 obtain a mandatum, fundamentally an acknowledgment by a local bishop, that a Catholic professor is in full communion with the Catholic Church.7 In the meantime, critics, both inside and outside of the Catholic Church, have raised questions about the potential impact of Ex Corde on American Catholic universities. Ex Corde’s potential impact is significant, especially for faculty members at Catholic universities, by far the largest segment of religiously affiliated instititions of higher learning in the United States. This article is divided into four sections. The first part highlights Ex Corde’s salient features. The next section examines the current status of the non-implementation of Ex Corde. The third part of the article reviews critiques of Ex Corde, noting the opposition by university leaders and the reluctance to act on the part of the Bishops. 8 The final section reflects on the status of Ex Corde and why a fully implemented Ex Corde should play a key role in revivification of religious identity in American Catholic universities.
Type II restriction endonucleases — a historical perspective and more

This article continues the series of Surveys and Summaries on restriction endonucleases (REases) begun this year in Nucleic Acids Research. Here we discuss ‘Type II’ REases, the kind used for DNA analysis and cloning. We focus on their biochemistry: what they are, what they do, and how they do it. Type II REases are produced by prokaryotes to combat bacteriophages. With extreme accuracy, each recognizes a particular sequence in double-stranded DNA and cleaves at a fixed position within or nearby. The discoveries of these enzymes in the 1970s, and of the uses to which they could be put, have since impacted every corner of the life sciences. They became the enabling tools of molecular biology, genetics and biotechnology, and made analysis at the most fundamental levels routine. Hundreds of different REases have been discovered and are available commercially. Their genes have been cloned, sequenced and overexpressed. Most have been characterized to some extent, but few have been studied in depth. Here, we describe the original discoveries in this field, and the properties of the first Type II REases investigated. We discuss the mechanisms of sequence recognition and catalysis, and the varied oligomeric modes in which Type II REases act. We describe the surprising heterogeneity revealed by comparisons of their sequences and structures.
Hysteresis in gait transition induced by changing waist joint stiffness of a quadruped robot driven by nonlinear oscillators with phase resetting

In this paper, we investigated the locomotion of a quadruped robot whose front and rear bodies are connected by a roll joint. The legs of the robot are controlled by nonlinear oscillators with phase resetting. Based on numerical simulations, we showed that the robot produces various gait patterns through dynamical interactions among the robot mechanical system, oscillator control system, and environment and establishes gait transition induced by the change of the roll joint stiffness. In addition, we demonstrated that a hysteresis with respect to gait pattern occurs during the gait transition similarly to humans and animals, and we examined the mechanisms of the hysteresis from a dynamic viewpoint.
Beyond Skeleton Parsing: Producing a Comprehensive Large-Scale General-English Treebank With Full Grammatical Analysis

A treebank is a body of natural language text which has been grammatically annotated by hand, in terms of some previously-established scheme of grammatical analysis. Treebanks have been used within the field of natural language processing as a source of training data for statistical part og speech taggers (Black et al., 1992; Brill, 1994; Merialdo, 1994; Weischedel et al., 1993) and for statistical parsers (Black et al., 1993; Brill, 1993; aelinek et al., 1994; Magerman, 1995; Magerman and Marcus, 1991). In this article, we present the AT'R/Lancaster 7'reebauk of American English, a new resource tbr natural-language-, processing research, which has been prepared by Lancaster University (UK)'s Unit for Computer Research on the English Language, according to specifications provided by ATR (Japan)'s Statistical Parsing Group. First we provide a "static" description, with (a) a discussion of the mode of selection and initial processing of text for inclusion in the treebank, and (b) an explanation of the scheme of grammatical annotation we then apply to the text. Sec.ond, we supply a "process" description of the treebank, in which we detail the physical and computational mechanisms by which we have created it. Finally, we lay out plans for the further development of this new treebank. All of the features of the ATR/Lancaster Treebank that are described below represent a radical departure from extant large-scale (Eyes and Leech, 1993; Garside and McEnery, 1993; Marcus et al., 1993) treebanks. We have chosen in this article to present our treebank in some detail, rather than to compare and contrast it with other treebanks. But the major differences between this and earlier treebanks can easily be grasped via a corn-
Robust SIFT-based feature matching using Kendall's rank correlation measure

The Scale Invariant Feature Transform, SIFT, is one of the most efficient image matching techniques based on local features. It has been applied to various scientific domains such as machine vision, robot navigation, object recognition, etc. In this work, a SIFT improvement is proposed that makes feature matching more robust in the presence of different types of image noise. Thus, Kendall's rank correlation measure is employed to improve the performance of feature matching. Its exploitation reduces the number of erroneous SIFT feature matches without adding significantly to the execution time. The results of the SIFT improvement are validated through matching examples between similar images.
Post-disaster Community Recovery in Heterogeneous, Loosely Connected Communities

Abstract Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on 29 August 2005, leaving a great deal of destruction, pain, and uncertainty in its wake. Post-disaster community rebound is a collective action problem where every individual's decision to rebuild is impacted by the likelihood that others in the community will rebuild. The literature on post-disaster recovery suggests that homogenous, tight-knit communities will have an advantage over more diverse, less-connected communities in solving this collective action problem and bringing about community rebound and redevelopment. Consequently, these studies have tended to underappreciate the capacity of loosely knit, heterogeneous communities to overcome the challenges associated with community recovery after a disaster. This article hopes to fill this gap in the literature by examining how loosely knit, heterogeneous communities can facilitate post-disaster community recovery and redevelopment. To examine this, we highlight the importance of community-based organizations and focus on the recovery efforts of Broadmoor after Hurricane Katrina.
BPaaS: A Platform for Artifact-centric Business Process Customization in Cloud Computing

As a new service paradigm of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS),Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS). BPaaS is used to build a cost-effective Business Process Management (BPM) system. Based on universal Artifacts, we develop a framework named SeGA (Self-Guided Artifact). In SeGA, a BPM system is capable of executing business processes from multiple clients, and responding query at runtime. what's more, by the template-based cascading data mapping method, entity to be synchronized with database automatically, so each BP instance can modify its process entity without worrying about the database access. In this paper, we conduct a deep research and implement a prototype system for Artifact process design.
Simulation of Accuracy Performance for Wireless Sensor‐Based Construction Asset Tracking

Abstract: Today's mobile and remote construction applications, such as tracking of materials, equipment, and workers, demand high reliability and scalability of wireless sensor networks for a large‐scale construction site. In particular, identifying the location of distributed mobile entities throughout wireless communications becomes the primary task to realize the remote tracking and monitoring of the construction assets. Even though several alternative solutions have been introduced by utilizing recent technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and the global positioning system (GPS), they could not provide a solid direction to accurate and scalable tracking frameworks in large‐scale construction domains due to limited capability and inflexible networking architectures. This article introduces a new tracking architecture using wireless sensor modules and shows an accuracy performance using a numerical simulation approach based on the time‐of‐flight method. By combining radio frequency (RF) and ultrasound (US) signals, the simulation results showed an enhanced accuracy performance over the utilization of an RF signal only. The proposed approach can provide potential guidelines for further exploration of hardware/software design and for experimental analysis to implement the framework of tracking construction assets.
Social influences on the sexual behavior of youth at risk for HIV exposure.

OBJECTIVES Adolescents are increasingly at risk for infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted diseases, especially in poor urban minority communities. To aid the design of interventions in these communities, this study investigated the role of knowledge, attitudes, perceived parental monitoring, and peer behavior in the onset and progression of sexual behavior in children at risk for exposure to HIV. METHODS A computerized personal interview was administered to 300 African-American 9- to 15-year-old children living in six public housing developments in a large US city. RESULTS Although children's knowledge about the hazards of sex increased with age, their sexual activity also increased (from 12% sexually experienced at 9 years of age to more than 80% experienced at 15 years of age). Parental monitoring appeared able to influence sexual activity. However, the perceived behavior of friends was associated with the rate at which sexual activity progressed with age and the degree to which condom use was maintained with age. CONCLUSIONS The early onset and prevalence of sexual behavior and the importance of peer group influence call for early interventions that simultaneously influence the parents and peers in children's social networks.
Conserved Non-Coding Sequences are Associated with Rates of mRNA Decay in Arabidopsis

Steady-state mRNA levels are tightly regulated through a combination of transcriptional and post-transcriptional control mechanisms. The discovery of cis-acting DNA elements that encode these control mechanisms is of high importance. We have investigated the influence of conserved non-coding sequences (CNSs), DNA patterns retained after an ancient whole genome duplication event, on the breadth of gene expression and the rates of mRNA decay in Arabidopsis thaliana. The absence of CNSs near α duplicate genes was associated with a decrease in breadth of gene expression and slower mRNA decay rates while the presence CNSs near α duplicates was associated with an increase in breadth of gene expression and faster mRNA decay rates. The observed difference in mRNA decay rate was fastest in genes with CNSs in both non-transcribed and transcribed regions, albeit through an unknown mechanism. This study supports the notion that some Arabidopsis CNSs regulate the steady-state mRNA levels through post-transcriptional control mechanisms and that CNSs also play a role in controlling the breadth of gene expression.
Stroke Rehabilitation in Canada: A Work in Progress

Abstract Stroke rehabilitation in Canada continues to function under models and practices that have changed little in the last four decades and struggles to implement new evidence-based or best practices. Ontario, Canada’s largest province, has had a coordinated stroke strategy since 2000. The Ontario Stroke System has developed an extensive infrastructure of research syntheses, consensus panel recommendations, practice guidelines, standards of care, and centralized data collection across the continuum of stroke care. This has produced a solid foundation upon which an evidence-based stroke rehabilitation system can be developed. However, failure to invest in stroke rehabilitation or provide incentives to implement change has resulted in the stroke rehabilitation system and critical outcomes remaining largely unchanged. Improvements in time to admission have been countered by rising admission FIM™ scores such that severe stroke patients often cannot access the stroke rehabilitation system. Many stroke patients are still rehabilitated on general rehabilitation units, therapy intensities remain unacceptably low, and many outpatient programs are being reduced or even closed. Although there are pockets of innovation, the stroke rehabilitation system continues to function more according to traditional ways of practicing. The hope is that with appropriate investments and incentives, Canadians and Ontarians can build upon the existing infrastructure to ensure stroke patients receive optimal rehabilitative care based on best evidence. In the meantime, stroke rehabilitation in Canada remains a work in progress.
The Significance of the Fluctuations Experienced in Observing Ambiguous Figures and in Binocular Rivalry

Resume Les resultats de cette etude indiquent qu'il y a un facteur commun qui joue un role dans la determination de la vitesse du renversement eprouve dans l'observation des figures ambigues et dans la rivalite binoculaire; aussi que ce meme facteur est important pour determiner les resultats faits sur une echelle d'evaluation des introvertis et des extrovertis quand cette echelle est construite pour mesurer les differences en degres de la force d'expression, la base primaire sur laquelle le Dr. William McDougall fait la distinction entre un introverti et un extroverti. Les introvertis ont de grandes vitesses et les extrovertis ont de petites vitesses de fluctuation. Les resultats sont bases sur les resultats obtenus de trois tests comprenant des figures ambiguea et deux tests de rivalite binoculaire, avec une echelle d'evaluation appropriee pour l'introversion et l'extroversion. Les resultats des tests comprenant des figures ambigues quand on les compare aux resultats des tests comprenant la rivalite bin.
Human papillomavirus oncogenic mRNA testing for cervical cancer screening: baseline and longitudinal results from the CLEAR study.

OBJECTIVES This study determined the longitudinal clinical performance of a high-risk human papillomavirus (HR-HPV) E6/E7 RNA assay (Aptima HPV [AHPV]; Hologic, San Diego, CA) compared with an HR-HPV DNA assay (Hybrid Capture 2 [HC2]; Qiagen, Gaithersburg, MD) as an adjunctive method for cervical cancer screening. METHODS Women 30 years or older with a negative result for intraepithelial lesions or malignancy cytology (n = 10,860) positive by AHPV and/or HC2 assays and randomly selected women negative by both assays were referred to colposcopy at baseline. Women without baseline cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) grade 2 or higher (CIN2+) continued into the 3-year follow-up. RESULTS The specificity of AHPV for CIN2 or lower was significantly greater at 96.3% compared with HC2 specificity of 94.8% (P < .001). Estimated sensitivities and risks for detection of CIN2+ were similar between the two assays. After 3 years of follow-up, women negative by either human papillomavirus test had a very low risk of CIN2+ (<0.3%) compared with CIN2+ risk in women with positive AHPV results (6.3%) or positive HC2 results (5.1%). CONCLUSIONS These results support the use of AHPV as a safe and effective adjunctive cervical cancer screening method.