Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual-Surface input: augmenting one-handed interaction with coordinated front and behind-the-screen input

Interaction patterns with handheld mobile devices are constantly evolving. Researchers observed that users prefer to interact with mobile device using one hand. However, only few interaction techniques support this mode of operation. We show that one-handed operations can be enhanced with coordinated interaction using for input the front and back of a mobile device, which we term as Dual-Surface interaction. We present some of the design rationale for introducing coordinated Dual-Surface interactions. We demonstrate that several tasks, including target selection, benefit from Dual-Surface input which allows users to rapidly select small targets in locations that are less accessible when interacting using the thumb with one-handed input. Furthermore, we demonstrate the benefits of virtual enhancements that are possible with behind-the-display relative input to perform complex tasks, such as steering. Our results show that Dual-Surface interactions offer numerous benefits that are not available with input on the front or the back alone.
Implementing the Concept of Product-Driven Control Using Wireless Sensor Networks: Some Experiments

In the dynamically moving context of mass-customization of products, new manufacturing control architectures, based on the consideration of highly distributed, autonomous, adaptable and efficiently cooperating units integrated by a plug-and-operate approach, seem to be efficient alternatives. Amongst them, the concept of a product-driven distributed control promotes an active role of the product in its own manufacturing. This paper focuses on the possibilities to implement this concept on a case study using wireless sensor networks.
Enduring Relationships in an Economy with Capital and Private Information

We introduce capital accumulation into an economy where individuals have private information with respect to productivity shocks. Efficient, incentive-compatible risk-sharing is achieved by conditioning current and future payoffs on the history of productivity reports. We develop a notion of efficiency, similar to that of Atkeson and Lucas (1992). The capital stock in the economy is endogenous in periods after date zero, so our notion of efficiency is minimizing the initial capital stock that is required to attain an initial distribution of promised utility. Under constant relative risk aversion and linear technology, we find that the planner allocates more capital to agents with a history of high productivity reports relative to agents with a history of low productivity reports. This higher allocation of capital occurs despite the fact that the expected marginal product of capital is the same across all agents. In contrast to the unobservable endowment model, the agent's welfare in the private information economy exceeds the value of autarchy in every period. Hence, the contract exhibits voluntary long-term participation by the agent. Risk-sharing does not require net transfers across different wealth groups, so the efficient allocation exhibits scale invariance. The allocation allows a simple decentralization through a sequence of actuarially fair insurance contracts. An alternative, long-run decentralization has implications for the risk-free interest rate in our economy.
A Single Model Explains both Visual and Auditory Precortical Coding

Precortical neural systems encode information collected by the senses, but the driving principles of the encoding used have remained a subject of debate. We present a model of retinal coding that is based on three constraints: information preservation, minimization of the neural wiring, and response equalization. The resulting novel version of sparse principal components analysis successfully captures a number of known characteristics of the retinal coding system, such as center-surround receptive fields, color opponency channels, and spatiotemporal responses that correspond to magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. Furthermore, when trained on auditory data, the same model learns receptive fields well fit by gammatone filters, commonly used to model precortical auditory coding. This suggests that efficient coding may be a unifying principle of precortical encoding across modalities.
A new pension control approach to observer-based fault detection systems intelligent designing

In this paper, the pension control approach to observer-based fault detection systems intelligent designing is discussed. Considering the L2-gain of residual system, this paper deals the observer-based fault detection problem. By using of H¿ control theory, a linear matrix inequality approach to design fault detection observer is given. The residual generating observer is designed under the L2 gain performance index. A numerical example is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Influence of Norepinephrine and Digitalis on Myocardial Oxygen Consumption in the Newborn Lamb

The relationships between cardiac performance and oxygen usage were explored in 19 newborn lambs (5 hours to 8 days old), and the influence of inotropic stimulation was studied. A preparation was developed to measure coronary sinus flow and myocardial oxygen consumption (MVo2) under controlled hemodynamic conditions. Using a gelatin injection technique, we determined that more than 90% of the measured sinus flow originated from left heart tissue; less than 10% was derived from right ventricular myocardium. Changes in contractility were produced by intravenous infusion of norepinephrine or acetylstrophanthidin. Norepinephrine (1–2.4 μg/min kg−1) or acetylstrophanthidin (5 μg/min kg−1) produced increases in the maximal rate of rise of left ventricular pressure and large reductions in left ventricular enddiastolic pressure, but the changes in MVo2 in lambs with constant aortic blood pressure, cardiac output, and heart rate were minimal. Ventricular function curves demonstrated a significant relationship between end-diastolic pressure and MVo2 (P < 0.01). For a given left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, MVo2 was approximately 3 ml/min 100 g−1 left ventricle greater during the infusion of norepinephrine. Therefore, net changes in MVo2 with inotropic stimulation represented a balance between reciprocal changes in diastolic pressure (and volume) and contractility. The enhanced oxygen cost of increased contractility might be masked by a reduction in heart size (reduced wall stress). Ventricular function was reduced below initial control values following the infusion of norepinephrine in 3 lambs. This reduction correlated with a concomitant reduction in MVo2 and percent extraction but not with a reduction in flow. Lambs that did not show mechanical depression demonstrated no reduction in MVo2. These findings suggest a metabolic basis for catechol dependence which might have special importance for the newborn lamb with its incompletely developed catechol enzyme systems.
Reply Theories and measures of consciousness develop together q

Persaud, McLeod, and Cowey (2007b) dispute my claim that ‘‘post-decision wagering [PDW] cannot supply a direct behavioral measure of consciousness’’ (Seth, 2007), in which a ‘‘direct measure’’ is one that transparently reflects its target property, as a ruler directly measures length. Here I defend this claim and argue in favour of a virtuous circularity among measures, theories, and data. Behavioral measures of consciousness come in two flavours, subjective and objective. Subjective measures leverage introspective capabilities, for example by a person verbally reporting the content of her conscious experience or expressing her level of confidence in a previous decision or discrimination. Introspection always involves metacognition because introspective reports consist of judgments about mental states. Therefore, subjective measures are always indirect and can be vulnerable to many biases (e.g., reluctance to report uncertain experiences). Also, because metacognitive conscious content assumes primary (sensory) consciousness but not vice versa, subjective measures risk incorrectly rejecting the presence of sensory consciousness based on the absence of metacognition. Objective measures do not require introspection and instead use some other behavior, for example forcedchoice decision accuracy, as a proxy. Although objective measures need not involve metacognition they are also always indirect, for two reasons. First, they still require a response criterion, for example whether to push a button or not. Second, they may not measure consciousness at all because many behavioral proxies— forced-choice decision accuracy being a good example—are capable of being learned unconsciously. So the simple reason why PDW cannot supply a direct measure of consciousness is that no behavioral measure, subjective or objective, is up to the job. Indeed, the fact that consciousness is ontologically subjective precludes direct behavioral access to conscious content. This does not however mandate pessimism: A science of consciousness is made possible in the first place by adopting epistemologically objective attitudes towards ontologically subjective phenomena (Searle, 1992). Importantly, both subjective and objective measures are epistemologically objective because both produce data that can be shared publicly. Persaud et al. raise two other issues in support of PDW being a direct measure: its intuitiveness for subjects, and evidence that it doesn’t affect the conscious states that it supposedly measures, at least not as much as some subjective measures do. However, both conscious and unconscious behaviors can be intuitive and indeed the phenomenology of intuition is often associated with unconscious knowledge (Dienes & Scott, 2005). And having a measure of X that doesn’t affect X is a prerequisite for a good measure of X, one which may be necessary but is by no means sufficient for establishing directness.
Journal of Neuroinflammation Activation of Microglial Nadph Oxidase Is Synergistic with Glial Inos Expression in Inducing Neuronal Death: a Dual-key Mechanism of Inflammatory Neurodegeneration

Background: Inflammation-activated glia are seen in many CNS pathologies and may kill neurons through the release of cytotoxic mediators, such as nitric oxide from inducible NO synthase (iNOS), and possibly superoxide from NADPH oxidase (NOX). We set out to determine the relative role of these species in inducing neuronal death, and to test the dual-key hypothesis that the production of both species simultaneously is required for significant neuronal death.
Sysman: A Virtual File System for Managing Clusters

Sysman is a system management infrastructure for clusters and data centers similar to the /proc file system. It provides a familiar yet powerful interface for the management of servers, storage systems, and other devices. In the Sysman virtual file system each managed entity (e.g., power on/off button of a server, CPU utilization of a server, a LUN on a storage device), is represented by a file. Reading from Sysman files obtains active information from devices being managed by Sysman. Writing to Sysman files initiates tasks such as turning on/off server blades, discovering new devices, and changing the boot order of a blade. The combination of the file access semantics and existing UNIX utilities such as grep and find that operate on multiple files allow the creation of very short but powerful system management procedures for large clusters. Sysman is an extensible framework and has a simple interface through which new system management procedures can be easily added. We show that by using a few lines of Linux commands system management operations can be issued to more than 2000 servers in one second and the results can be collected at a rate of more than seven servers per second. We have been using Sysman (and its earlier implementations) in a cluster of Intel and PowerPC blade servers containing hundreds of blades with various software configurations.
Mathematical modeling of water uptake through diffusion in 3D inhomogeneous swelling substrates

Diffusion-driven water uptake in a substrate (imbibition) is a subject of great interest in the field of food technology. This is a particular challenge for rice grains that are preprocessed to accelerate the water uptake, i.e., to reduce the cooking time. Rice preprocessing disrupts the mesostructural order of starch and induces a microporous structure in the grains. The meso- and microstructural length scales have not been considered in joint approach until now. The (re)hydration of rice grains can be modeled by free (concentration-driven) diffusion or by water demand-driven diffusion. The latter is driven by the ceiling moisture content related to the extent of gelatinization of the rice substrate network. This network can be regarded as a fractal structure. As the spatial resolution of our models is limited, we choose to model the apparent water transport by a set of coupled partial differential equations (PDEs). Current models of water uptake are often limited to a single dimension, and the swelling of the substrate is not taken into account. In this article, we derive a set of PDEs to model water uptake in a three-dimensional (3D) inhomogeneous substrate for different types of water diffusion as well as the swelling of the substrate during water uptake. We will present simulation results for different 3D (macroscopic) structures and diffusion models and compare these results, qualitatively, with the experimental results acquired from magnetic resonance imaging. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009
The LBFGS quasi-Newtonian method for molecular modeling prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils

Experimental X-ray crystallography, NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectroscopy, dual polarization interferometry, etc. are indeed very powerful tools to determine the 3-Dimensional structure of a protein (including the membrane protein); theoretical mathematical and physical computational approaches can also allow us to obtain a description of the protein 3D structure at a submicroscopic level for some unstable, noncrystalline and insoluble proteins. X-ray crystallography finds the X-ray final structure of a protein, which usually need refinements using theoretical protocols in order to produce a better structure. This means theoretical methods are also important in determinations of protein structures. Optimization is always needed in the computer-aided drug design, structure-based drug design, molecular dynamics, and quantum and molecular mechanics. This paper introduces some optimization algorithms used in these research fields and presents a new theoretical computational method—an improved LBFGS Quasi-Newtonian mathematical optimization method—to produce 3D structures of prion AGAAAAGA amyloid fibrils (which are unstable, noncrystalline and insoluble), from the potential energy minimization point of view. Because the NMR or X-ray structure of the hydrophobic region AGAAAAGA of prion proteins has not yet been determined, the model constructed by this paper can be used as a reference for experimental studies on this region, and may be useful in furthering the goals of medicinal chemistry in this field.
An efficient LBP-based descriptor for real-time object detection

This paper presents a novel method for interest region description which is based on the idea that the appearance of an interest region can be well characterized by the distribution of its local features. We introduce a new texture feature called Grid of Local Binary Patterns (GoLBP) that is a modified version of the well-known Local Binary Pattern (LBP) feature. Experiments show that, the proposed descriptor can be used for the real-time vehicle detection in Vietnam.
Exploring the influence of pre-training factors on training effectiveness-moderating role of trainees’ reaction: a study in the public sector in India

ABSTRACT Organizations invest in training initiative with an objective to improve the performance of its employees and ultimately organizational performance. However, training literature highlights the gap between the learning and the transfer of learning at the workplace. Thus, there is a need to have a deeper understanding of those variables which contributes to training transfer/effectiveness. This study is an attempt to understand those organizational factors that can help in improving training effectiveness. Data was collected at three different points of time (before training, immediately at the end of training and after some time of training) to determine the antecedents of motivation to learn and the training effectiveness. Findings of the study reveal that motivation to learn mediates the relationship between the predictor variables – training needs analysis, training information and type of training, and the resultant variable training effectiveness. Also, trainees’ reaction towards training was found to moderate the relationship between trainees’ motivation to learn and training effectiveness. The study reinforces the significance of organizational factors in ensuring motivation to learn and training effectiveness. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed in the paper.
Overweight, Obesity and Meningioma Risk: A Meta-Analysis

Background and Objectives Studies of the association between excess body weight and risk of meningioma have produced inconsistent results. Therefore, a meta-analysis of published studies was performed to better assess the association between meningioma and excess body weight. Methods A literature search was conducted in the PubMed and EMBASE databases without any limitations. The reference lists of identified articles were also screened for additional studies. The summary relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated using fixed- or random-effects models. Results A total of 6 studies provided risk estimates for overweight or obesity. Overall, the combined RRs were 1.12 (95% CI = 0.98–1.28) for overweight and 1.45 (95% CI = 1.26–1.67) for obesity. After stratification by gender, no significant association was observed for obese men (RR = 1.30, 95% CI = 0.64–2.62), while significant association was detected for obese women (RR = 1.46, 95% CI = 1.26–1.69). No substantial differences emerged across strata of study design and geographic areas. Conclusion The results of this meta-analysis suggest that obesity but not overweight is associated with an increased risk of meningioma. Due to the limited number of studies, further research is needed to confirm the association.
Comparison of Efficacy of Long‐term Oral Treatment with Telmisartan and Benazepril in Cats with Chronic Kidney Disease

Background The efficacy and benefits of telmisartan in cats with chronic kidney disease (CKD) have not previously been reported. Hypothesis Long‐term treatment of cats with CKD using telmisartan decreases urine protein‐to‐creatinine ratio (UP/C) similar to benazepril. Animals Two‐hundred and twenty‐four client‐owned adult cats with CKD. Methods Prospective, multicenter, controlled, randomized, parallel group, blinded clinical trial with noninferiority design. Cats were allocated in a 1 : 1 ratio to either telmisartan (1 mg/kg; n = 112) or benazepril (0.5–1.0 mg/kg; n = 112) PO q24 h. The primary endpoint was prospectively defined as the change in proteinuria (benazepril:telmisartan) based on a log transformed weighted average of UP/C change from baseline (AUC 0→t/t) as a percentage compared using a confidence interval (CI) approach. Changes of UP/C from baseline were assessed on all study days and corrected for multiple comparisons. Results Telmisartan proved noninferior to benazepril in controlling proteinuria (CI, −0.035 to 0.268). At Day 180, UP/C compared to baseline in the telmisartan group was significantly lower (−0.05 ± 0.31; P = .016), whereas in the benazepril group the change (−0.02 ± 0.48) was not statistically significant (P = .136). Similar results were obtained at all assessment points with significant decrease in UP/C occurring with telmisartan but not benazepril. Conclusion and Clinical Importance Both telmisartan and benazepril were well tolerated and safe. Telmisartan proved to be noninferior to benazepril and significantly decreased proteinuria relative to baseline at all assessment points whereas benazepril did not.
Histopathological Alterations In Gills Of Fingerlings Of Clarias Gariepinus (Burchell, 1822) Following Sublethal Acute Exposure To Hevea Brasiliensis

Studies on the toxic effects of water soluble fraction (WSF) of Hevea brasiliensis on the histology of the gills of Clarias gariepinus fingerlings showed severe impacts on the gills of the test organisms. Six concentrations were prepared from the water soluble fraction of the latex (0, 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70mg/l) for histopathological examination on the gills of the species. In the control group there was no histological change on the test organism. Gill samples for histological examination were prepared from the concentrations which toxic manifestation of the toxicant was observed. There was no toxic manifestation on the control (0mg/l), 30mg/l and in the 40mg/l of concentration, whereas the test organism in the 50mg/l, 60mg/l and 70mg/l concentration exhibited various reactions which included, erratic movement, vertical swimming position, colour changes, weaken swimming motions, and changes in opercula rate. In the 50mg/l concentration the gill showed disintegration of cells in gill, in the 60mg/l concentration it was observed to show Lamellae erosion and fusion of cells and in the 70mg/l concentration Pronounced lamellae erosion was observed in gill ray. Therefore, if latex obtained from Hevea brasiliensis finds its way into the aquatic environment as would be expected, it will cause deleterious ecological effects to both terrestrial and aquatic biota at the long term. Realizing the tremendous adverse effects associated with WSF of the latex from H. brasilensis, safety measures should be adhere by companies using rubber latex has their raw material.
Cooperation with Network Monitoring

This paper studies the maximum level of cooperation that can be sustained in perfect Bayesian equilibrium in repeated games with network monitoring, where players observe each other's actions either perfectly or not at all. The foundational result is that the maximum level of cooperation can be robustly sustained in grim trigger strategies. If players are equally well monitored, comparative statics on the maximum level of cooperation are highly tractable and depend on the monitoring technology only through a simple statistic, its effective contagiousness. Typically, cooperation in the provision of pure public goods is greater in larger groups, while cooperation in the provision of divisible public goods is greater in smaller groups, and making monitoring less uncertain in the second-order stochastic dominance sense increases cooperation. For fixed monitoring networks, a new notion of network centrality is developed, which determines which players cooperate more in a given network, as well as which networks support greater cooperation. Copyright , Oxford University Press.