Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gas Distribution Modeling using Sparse Gaussian Process Mixture Models

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a two dimensional spatial model of a gas distribution with a mobile robot. Building maps that can be used to accurately predict the gas concentration at query locations is a challenging task due to the chaotic nature of gas dispersal. We present an approach that formulates this task as a regression problem. To deal with the specific properties of typical gas distributions, we propose a sparse Gaussian process mixture model. This allows us to accurately represent the smooth background signal as well as areas of high concentration. We integrate the sparsification of the training data into an EM procedure used for learning the mixture components and the gating function. Our approach has been implemented and tested using datasets recorded with a real mobile robot equipped with an electronic nose. We demonstrate that our models are well suited for predicting gas concentrations at new query locations and that they outperform alternative methods used in robotics to carry out in this task.
C-Nap 1 , a Novel Centrosomal Coiled-Coil Protein and Candidate Substrate of the Cell Cycle – regulated Protein Kinase Nek 2

Nek2 (for NIMA-related kinase 2) is a mammalian cell cycle–regulated kinase structurally related to the mitotic regulator NIMA of Aspergillus nidulans . In human cells, Nek2 associates with centrosomes, and overexpression of active Nek2 has drastic consequences for centrosome structure. Here, we describe the molecular characterization of a novel human centrosomal protein, C-Nap1 (for centrosomal Nek2-associated protein 1), first identified as a Nek2-interacting protein in a yeast two-hybrid screen. Antibodies raised against recombinant C-Nap1 produced strong labeling of centrosomes by immunofluorescence, and immunoelectron microscopy revealed that C-Nap1 is associated specifically with the proximal ends of both mother and daughter centrioles. On Western blots, anti–C-Nap1 antibodies recognized a large protein ( . 250 kD) that was highly enriched in centrosome preparations. Sequencing of overlapping cDNAs showed that C-Nap1 has a calculated molecular mass of 281 kD and comprises extended domains of predicted coiled-coil structure. Whereas C-Nap1 was concentrated at centrosomes in all interphase cells, immunoreactivity at mitotic spindle poles was strongly diminished. Finally, the COOH-terminal domain of C-Nap1 could readily be phosphorylated by Nek2 in vitro, as well as after coexpression of the two proteins in vivo. Based on these findings, we propose a model implicating both Nek2 and C-Nap1 in the regulation of centriole–centriole cohesion during
ARQ security in Wi-Fi and RFID networks

In this paper, we present two practical ARQ-Based security schemes for Wi-Fi and RFID networks. Our proposed schemes enhance the confidentiality and authenticity functions of these networks, respectively. Both schemes build on the same idea; by exploiting the statistical independence between the multipath fading experienced by the legitimate nodes and potential adversaries, secret keys are established and then are continuously updated. The continuous key update property of both schemes makes them capable of defending against all of the passive eavesdropping attacks and most of the currently-known active attacks against either Wi-Fi or RFID networks. However, each scheme is tailored to best suit the requirements of its respective paradigm. In Wi-Fi networks, we overlay, rather than completely replace, the current Wi-Fi security protocols. Thus, our Wi-Fi scheme can be readily implemented via only minor modifications over the IEEE 802.11 standards. On the other hand, the proposed RFID scheme introduces the first provably secure low cost RFID authentication protocol. The proposed schemes impose a throughput-security tradeoff that is shown, through our analytical and experimental results, to be practically acceptable.
Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre

A study of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and of its relevance for contemporary sociology. Dr Craib sees Sartre as a central figure in modern European thought - providing links between Husserl and Heidegger on the one hand and Marxists and Structuralists on the other. He is concerned to relate Sartre's apparently abstract and often obscure philosophical work to methodological and other research problems in sociology; in particular he uses Sartrean philsophy to criticize the very influential work of Gouldner, Goffman and Garfinkel. In the first part of the book Dr Craib concentrates on Being and Nothingness and considers the way in which Sartre's brand of phenomenology can inform studies of inter-personal relationships. In the second part, he examines La Critique de la raison dialectique, which deals with the wider structure of society, the nature of social classes and the development of history. He goes on to investigate the connections between these two levels of analysis, and the complex inter-relationships between the sociologist, his fellows, his objects of study and his theoretical work.
Semi-classical description of shell effects in finite fermion systems

A short survey of the semi-classical periodic orbit theory, initiated by Gutzwiller and generalized by many other authors, is given. Via so-called semi-classical trace formulae, gross-shell effects in bound fermion systems can be interpreted in terms of a few periodic orbits of the corresponding classical systems. In integrable systems, these are usually the shortest members of the most degenerate families or orbits, but in some systems also less degenerate orbits can determine the gross-shell structure. Applications to nuclei, metal clusters, semiconductor nanostructures and trapped dilute atom gases are discussed.
Unitarity in the presence of closed timelike curves

We conjecture that, in certain cases, quantum dynamics is consistent in the presence of closed timelike curves. We consider time dependent orbifolds of three dimensional Minkowski space describing, in the limit of large AdS radius, BTZ black holes inside the horizon. Although perturbative unitarity fails, we show that, for discrete values of the gravitational coupling, particle propagation is consistent with unitarity. This quantization corresponds to the quantization of the black hole angular momentum. We perform the computation at very low energies, where string effects are irrelevant and interactions are dominated by graviton exchange in the eikonal regime.
The relationship between apoptosis and aging

Apoptosis is involved in aging and age-related disease, with respect to aging, apoptosis acting in a celltype-specific manner. The rate of apoptosis is elevated in-most types of aging cell populations and organs. In stable cells and certain continuously dividing cells, apoptosisserves to eliminate presumably dysfunctional cellsthat show homeostatic failure due to oxidative stress, glycation, and DNA damage, thereby maintaining homeostasis in the body. What’smore, apoptosis, at least in part, plays some important role inthe regulation of aging process and anti-tumorigenesis in mammals. Age-enhanced apoptosis may be aninnateprotective mechanism against age-associated tumorigenesis. There is clear evidence to indicate that senescentcells are remarkably resistant to apoptosis. The intensity of global apoptosis and autophagy clearance significantly declines in humans during aging, as aging repress the apoptotic response. In this paper, we will review the relationship between apoptosis and aging, and outline how are they interact each other.
Super‐gentrification in Barnsbury, London: globalization and gentrifying global elites at the neighbourhood level

In this paper we argue that a process of super-gentrification, similar to that first identified by Lees (2003 Urban Studies 40 2487–509) in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, is occurring in the already gentrified, inner London neighbourhood of Barnsbury. A new group of super wealthy professionals working in the City of London is slowly imposing its mark on this inner London housing market in a way that differentiates it and them both from traditional gentrifiers and from the traditional urban upper classes. We suggest that there is a close interaction between work in the newly globalizing industries of the financial services economy, elite forms of education, particularly Oxbridge, and residence in Barnsbury which is very different from other areas of gentrified inner London.
Reconceptualizing and repositioning festival exhibitors within tourism research

Purpose – Researchers studying festivals have overlooked exhibitors as a population within tourism research. Instead, researchers focus primarily on examining festival visitors' economic impacts and motivations for attending. Festival exhibitors have been overlooked because they are considered a part of the overall festival product. The purpose of this paper is to propose a research agenda for festival exhibitors by analyzing embedded relationships created from their festival participation.Design/methodology/approach – A literature review was conducted to explore why exhibitors have not been studied in festival research. A search of publications in other relevant fields was also conducted in order to review how exhibitors have been studied. An analytical framework was developed to analyze embedded relationships within festival exhibitors.Findings – The analytical framework developed revealed that the exhibitor relationship with the festival can be divided into three dimensions: the festival, the market pl.
Organizational simulation of complex process engineering projects in the chemical industry

In this paper, we demonstrate that, with a suitable instrument for project engineering, the project structure and resource allocations can be modeled and simulated even for weakly structured and distributed development projects. The instrument was developed with the goal of providing project planners and project leaders with a simple tool for fast and intuitive model development for project planning. For this reason the tool should make the comparison of different work organizational project constellations under the consideration of various boundary conditions possible. First results from industrial application of the instrument indicate that project concepts can be compared with each other and then optimized with regard to selected target criteria.
Making our Students More ‘fit for Purpose’: A Commentary on ‘A Role for the Compulsory Study of Literature in Accounting Education’

In this article, the author discusses the study of R. J. Lister on the role of obligatory study of literature in the study of accounting. The author is critical on the application of separate liberal arts in accounting in which he argues that Lister did not consider whether accounting is a separate discipline. He also believes that though many accounting degrees benefit from inclusion of Liberal Arts, students will not benefit from its greater inclusion to develop their critical thinking.
Ultrasound assisted extraction for determination of mobile fractions of copper in soil.

BACKGROUND For evaluation of the mobility of metals present in soil various approaches based on sequential extraction procedures (Tessier's, BCR or modified BCR) have been proposed, but they are very laborious and time-consuming. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a new fast extraction procedure for the determination of mobile fractions of copper in soil. MATERIAL AND METHODS The samples of soil that vary in terms of physicochemical properties and certified reference material (BCR-701) were used in this study. The three-stage modified BCR procedure used for fractionation of copper in soil was accelerated by ultrasound irradiation using an ultrasonic probe. The content of copper in soil extracts was determined by electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ETAAS). RESULTS The extraction conditions for separation of mobile fractions of copper from soil with the use of ultrasonic probe were optimized. The working parameters of the probe were as follows: the power was 15 W for all fractions while the sonication time was 7 min, 10 min and 6 min for fraction I, fraction II and fraction III, respectively. The developed procedure was validated; linearity of calibration graphs, limit of detection and limit of quantification, accuracy and repeatability of the procedure were evaluated. The content of copper in fraction I-III in soil samples collected from Podlaskie Voivodeship was at the level of 0.09-1.92 mg x kg(-1), whereas its pseudo-total content was in the range 2.75-9.75 mg x kg(-1). CONCLUSIONS; The developed ultrasound assisted sequential extraction procedure allowed for shortening the total extraction time from 48 h to 27 minutes in comparison to conventional modified BCR procedure. The studied soil contains a low pool of copper bioavailable to plants because a sum of mobile fractions (FI-FIII) represents only 22-46% of its pseudo-total content.
Chapter 1 Looking Back at Dense Linear Algebra Software

Over the years, computational physics and chemistry served as an ongoing source of problems that demanded the ever increasing performance from hardware as well as the software that ran on top of it. Most of these problems could be translated into solutions for systems of linear equations: the very topic of numerical linear algebra. Seemingly then, a set of efficient linear solvers could be solving important scientific problems for years to come. We argue that dramatic changes in hardware designs precipitated by the shifting nature of the marketplace of computer hardware had a continuous effect on the software for numerical linear algebra. The extraction of high percentages of peak performance continues to require adaptation of software. If the past history of this adaptive nature of linear algebra software is any guide then the future theme will feature changes as well – changes aimed at harnessing the incredible advances of the evolving hardware infrastructure.
[Home delivery].

Home delivery, although unconventional, has not totally disappeared. It sometimes results from the desire to "demedicalise" an event deemed natural and is sometimes the consequence of government policy and hence approved by medical authorities. This is the unique situation of Holland, where a highly efficient home delivery system has been created, with the possibility of transfer of the mother at any time to rapidly available emergency medical teams. In fact the large majority of home deliveries are accidental, unprepared and take place in the absence of any medical or paramedical assistance. All available studies show that perinatal and maternal morbidity associated with these accidental deliveries is greater than that of hospital deliveries, and this despite the setting up of emergency services responding as soon as a distress call is received. Home delivery should remain the exception at present since it is unable to guarantee a birth as undangerous as possible.
Arteriolar Hyalinization Predicts Delayed Graft Function in Deceased Donor Renal Transplantation

Delayed renal graft function (DGF) remains a largely unpredictable and burdensome consequence of deceased donor renal transplantation. There is growing evidence that histologic and molecular analyses of baseline donor kidney biopsies can predict both short- and long-term graft outcome. We performed histologic analyses of 172 preimplantation kidney biopsies to determine reliable histologic risk factors for DGF. Fifty-six recipients presented a DGF (incidence 32%). Univariate analysis revealed that arteriolar hyalinization (P=0.019), arterial intima fibrosis (0.004), donor age (P=0.001), duration of cold ischemia time (P=0.001), and recipient age (P=0.001) were significantly associated with DGF. Multivariate analysis revealed that the only independent histologic factor was arteriolar hyalinization (P=0.036). This histologic predictive factor, together with previously identified clinical risk factors, could guide clinical decisions regarding use, allocation, or immunosuppression protocols for minimization of DGF.
A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems

Market price systems constitute a well-understood class of mechanisms that under certain conditions provide effective decentralization of decision making with minimal communication overhead. In a market-oriented programming approach to distributed problem solving, we derive the activities and resource allocations for a set of computational agents by computing the competitive equilibrium of an artificial economy. WALRAS provides basic constructs for defining computational market structures, and protocols for deriving their corresponding price equilibria. In a particular realization of this approach for a form of multicommodity flow problem, we see that careful construction of the decision process according to economic principles can lead to efficient distributed resource allocation, and that the behavior of the system can be meaningfully analyzed in economic terms.
Sampling Rate Distortion

Consider a discrete memoryless multiple source with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> components of which <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k \leq m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> possibly different sources are sampled at each time instant and jointly compressed in order to reconstruct all the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> sources under a given distortion criterion. A new notion of sampling rate distortion function is introduced, and is characterized first for the case of fixed-set sampling. Next, for independent random sampling performed without knowledge of the source outputs, it is shown that the sampling rate distortion function is the same regardless of whether or not the decoder is informed of the sequence of sampled sets. Furthermore, memoryless random sampling is considered with the sampler depending on the source outputs and with an informed decoder. It is shown that deterministic sampling, characterized by a conditional point-mass, is optimal and suffices to achieve the sampling rate distortion function. For memoryless random sampling with an uninformed decoder, an upper bound for the sampling rate distortion function is seen to possess a similar property of conditional point-mass optimality. It is shown by example that memoryless sampling with an informed decoder can outperform strictly any independent random sampler, and that memoryless sampling can do strictly better with an informed decoder than without.
Dynamic Frame skip Deep Q Network

Deep Reinforcement Learning methods have achieved state of the art performance in learning control policies for the games in the Atari 2600 domain. One of the important parameters in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is the frame skip rate. It decides the granularity at which agents can control game play. A frame skip value of $k$ allows the agent to repeat a selected action $k$ number of times. The current state of the art architectures like Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Dueling Network Architectures (DuDQN) consist of a framework with a static frame skip rate, where the action output from the network is repeated for a fixed number of frames regardless of the current state. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, Dynamic Frame skip Deep Q-Network (DFDQN) which makes the frame skip rate a dynamic learnable parameter. This allows us to choose the number of times an action is to be repeated based on the current state. We show empirically that such a setting improves the performance on relatively harder games like Seaquest.
Investigating Use of a Parent Report Tool to Measure Vocabulary Development in Deaf Greek-speaking Children with Cochlear Implants

Objective: There are very few measures of language development in spoken Greek that can be used with young deaf children. This study investigated the use of Cyprus Lexical List (CYLEX), a receptive and expressive vocabulary assessment based on parent report that has recently been adapted to Standard Greek, to measure the vocabulary development of deaf Greek-speaking children with cochlear implants. Design: A Standard Greek version of CYLEX was used to collect data on receptive and expressive vocabulary development from parents of thirteen deaf children with cochlear implants aged between 21 and 71 months. These data were compared with data collected previously from typically developing hearing Greek-speaking children. Results: Use of the test by parents of deaf children was found to be reliable. No correlation was found between children's vocabulary scores and chronological age. A positive correlation was however found between children's post-implant age and expressive vocabulary. The vocabulary skills of implanted children with a mean post-implant age of 20 months were not significantly different from those of typically developing hearing children of similar chronological age. Conclusion: CYLEX is a reliable and useful tool for exploring vocabulary development with this clinical group. Findings confirm the results of other studies in indicating that the vocabulary size of implanted pre-school-aged deaf children is related to the amount of time that children have used their implant, rather than chronological age.
High-bandwidth control design for a piezoelectric nanopositioning stage

To achieve fast and accurate tracking of a wideband reference trajectory, the piezoelectric (PZT) actuator requires a high-bandwidth control system, which is however restricted by the resonant mode of the PZT positioning stage. In this paper, we study two resonant compensation techniques to damp the resonant mode for increased servo bandwidth. First, we present a feedback control system using a conventional notch filter (NF). Subsequently, we develop a complex lead compensator (CLC) using the phase-stabilized compensation method. Unlike the NF that is aimed at reducing the resonant peak gain, the CLC specializes in shaping the phase of open-loop system at the resonant frequency. The analysis shows that the closed-loop bandwidth achieved by the CLC is around four times higher than that of the NF without sacrificing the stability margin. Finally, we propose a multi-resonant filter (MRF) to suppress periodic tracking errors by significantly attenuating the gains at specified frequencies in the sensitivity function. The experimental results verify that the CLC is superior in disturbance compensation and periodic trajectory tracking as compared to the NF, and the add-on MRF can greatly reduce the tracking error.