Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cardboard Machine Kit: Modules for the Rapid Prototyping of Rapid Prototyping Machines

Digital fabrication machines (such as laser cutters or 3D printers) can be instructed to produce any part geometry within their application space. However, machines' application spaces are not easily modified or extended. How can we enable the production of application-specific computer-controlled machines by machine building novices? How can we facilitate rapid prototyping of rapid prototyping tools? We propose a novel set of modules, the Cardboard Machine Kit, for the construction of digital fabrication machines. These open-source modules are implemented using cardboard frames, stepper motors, and networked electronics controlled through a Python library. We evaluated the kit both through machine building workshops and by studying the usage of the kit in the wild. In the wild we observed more than 500 novice machine builders who built 125 different machines for 15 different application types. We argue that this breadth demonstrates the efficacy of this modular approach. Finally we discuss the limitations of the Cardboard Machine Kit and discuss how it could inform future machine building infrastructure.
Generalization of tacting actions in children with autism.

This intervention compared the effects of two procedures on the generalization of a tacting repertoire (labeling) in 6 children with autism spectrum disorder. In one procedure the verbal antecedent stimulus "What is she doing? " appeared together with a person performing an action; in the other procedure, the antecedent stimulus was just the presence of the action. In initial tests, children emitted tacts only when the action was presented with the verbal antecedent. Thereafter, they learned to tact an action without the verbal antecedent and received tests to evaluate generalization to another action. Results indicated that in order to obtain generalization of tacting actions, it was necessary to learn to tact other actions without the verbal antecedent as well as learning to tact the action with the verbal antecedent. These findings have relevance for generalization of tacting actions from control by verbal antecedents to natural conditions and the production of spontaneous language.
Role of Sympathetic Activity in Blood Pressure Reduction With Low Calorie Regimen

To investigate the effects of a low calorie regimen on sympathetic function and its relation to blood pressure response, 22 untreated obese essential hypertensive patients (50±2 years, body mass index 29 ±1 kg/m2) were hospitalized and a diet was prescribed of 2,000 kcal/day for 5 days (control period) followed by 800 kcal/day for 21 days without changing salt intake (8-10 g/day). The dose of intravenous phenylephrine infusion needed to elevate systolic blood pressure 20 mm Hg (CD20) and the 24-hour urinary excretion of norepinephrine (UNE) were measured. During the low calorie period, blood pressure normalized in 14 patients (responder group, 124±3/79±4 mm Hg) and eight remained hypertensive (poor responder group, 158±6/103±3 mm Hg). At the control period, blood pressure and body mass index were similar, but the responder group had higher UNE (134±15 μ/day) and CD20 (127±11 μg) than the poor responder group (89±6 μ/day and 79±13 μ, respectively). During the low calorie period, both UNE (87±15 μg/day) and CD20 (74±10 μ) decreased in the responder group; no change was seen in the poor responder group. Changes in UNE and systolic blood pressure were correlated (r=0.6, p<0.05). In conclusion, suppression of sympathetic activity plays a role in blood pressure reduction during moderate caloric restriction.
Strategic Analysis of Employee Turnover

Under the background of economic globalization, enterprise's original employment relationship system is facing serious challenge and retaining reasonable turnover rates is becoming more important. This paper analyzes the concept of employee turnover, turnover cost as well as occupation distributing character. In addition, this paper makes analysis and discussion on each influencing factor in the model of employee turnover . Finally ,this paper discusses how to minimize the negative influence of demographic factors, controllable factors and uncontrollable factors in order to achieve win-win between enterprise and employee.
Plasma Volume Prior to and Following Volume Loading During Shock Complicating Acute Myocardial Infarction

Blood volume was measured following onset of shock in 19 patients who had sustained acute myocardial infarction. The plasma volume was measured by dilution technique utilizing R125ISA and the red cell mass by (51Cr) red cell tag, at the time of admission.The plasma volume in six survivors was 41.1 ± 3.3 ml/kg; in 13 fatal cases it was 44.7 ± 4.0 ml/kg; this difference was not significant. The red cell mass in four survivors was 27.2 ± 1.75 ml/kg and in four fatal cases, 24.7 ± 1.60 ml/kg. Since these measurements are within normal ranges, we excluded absolute hypovolemia as a significant factor in accounting for the circulatory failure. Infusion of fluids in amounts which maintained a positive fluid balance selectively increased the plasma volume (57.1 ± 4.4 ml/kg), cardiac index, stroke volume and central blood volume in survivors, and reversed arterial vasoconstriction and lactic acidosis. However, the plasma volume was unaffected in the fatal cases (44.4 ± 4.0 ml/kg) and this was associated with progressive hemodynamic and metabolic deterioration.These observations support the hypothesis that recovery from shock is associated with expansion of plasma volume. To the contrary, during fatal progression of shock, plasma volume expansion does not occur despite volume loading.
Competitive Translation Efficiency at the Picornavirus Type 1 Internal Ribosome Entry Site Facilitated by Viral cis and trans Factors

ABSTRACT Enteroviruses (EVs) overcome their host cells by usurping the translation machinery to benefit viral gene expression. This is accomplished through alternative translation initiation in a cap-independent manner at the viral internal ribosomal entry site (IRES). We have investigated the role of cis- and trans-acting viral factors in EV IRES translation in living cells. We observed that considerable portions of the viral genome, including the 5′-proximal open reading frame and the 3′ untranslated region, contribute to stimulation of IRES-mediated translation. With the IRES in proper context, translation via internal initiation in uninfected cells is as efficient as at capped messages with short, unstructured 5′ untranslated regions. IRES function is enhanced in cells infected with the EV coxsackievirus B3, but the related poliovirus has no significant stimulatory activity. This differential is due to the inherent properties of their 2A protease and is not coupled to 2A-mediated proteolytic degradation of the eukaryotic initiation factor 4G. Our results suggest that the efficiency of alternative translation initiation at EV IRESs depends on a properly configured template rather than on targeted alterations of the host cell translation machinery.
Elimination of power line noise from EMG signals using an efficient adaptive Laguerre filter

In this paper a novel algorithm is proposed for cancelling the Power Line Interference (PLI) and its harmonics from Electromyography (EMG) signals using an adaptive IIR Laguerre filter. This algorithm is independent of power line information and reference noise for Laguerre structure is constructed mathematically. The Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithm is used to optimize the filter weights. This Laguerre filter consumes significantly less computational load than adaptive FIR filters and also has better stability than IIR filters. Our simulations and practical experiments indicated that proposed structure has improved Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) up to 10dB which is significantly more than adaptive FIR filters.
Graph-Based Term Weighting Scheme for Topic Modeling

LSI and LDA are widely used techniques to uncover the underlying topical structure of text. They traditionally rely on bag-of-words representation of documents and term frequency-based (TF) weighting schemes. In this paper, we represent documents as graph-of-words to capture the relationships between close words and propose the number of contexts of co-occurrences as alternative term weights (TW). Experiments with a downstream supervised task show that counting the importance of a node inside the graph results in statistically significant higher accuracy and macro-averaged F1score than with TF-based LSI and LDA.
Patients presenting with somatic complaints: epidemiology, psychiatric co‐morbidity and management

Somatic symptoms are the leading cause of outpatient medical visits and also the predominant reason why patients with common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety initially present in primary care. At least 33% of somatic symptoms are medically unexplained, and these symptoms are chronic or recurrent in 20% to 25% of patients. Unexplained or multiple somatic symptoms are strongly associated with coexisting depressive and anxiety disorders. Other predictors of psychiatric co‐morbidity include recent stress, lower self‐rated health and higher somatic symptom severity, as well as high healthcare utilization, difficult patient encounters as perceived by the physician, and chronic medical disorders. Antidepressants and cognitive‐behavioural therapy are both effective for treatment of somatic symptoms, as well as for functional somatic syndromes such as irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, pain disorders, and chronic headache. A stepped care approach is described, which consists of three phases that may be useful in the care of patients with somatic symptoms. Copyright © 2003 Whurr Publishers Ltd.
KapB is a lipoprotein required for KinB signal transduction and activation of the phosphorelay to sporulation in Bacillus subtilis

KinB is one of the two major histidine kinases that provide phosphate input in the phosphorelay to produce Spo0A∼P, the key transcription factor controlling the initiation of sporulation. A search for insertion mutants affected in activation of KinB‐dependent sporulation led to the identification of the lgt locus encoding the lipoprotein glyceryltransferase required for the lipid modification of prolipoproteins before their cleavage and translocation across the cytoplasmic membrane. In parallel, a putative lipoprotein signal peptide cleavage site was detected in KapB, known to be strictly required for KinB‐mediated sporulation and located downstream of KinB in a single transcription unit. Using PhoA peptide fusions, we have shown that KapB signal‐peptide can direct active alkaline phosphatase to the outer surface of the cytoplasmic membrane in an LGT‐dependent manner, strongly suggesting that KapB is a lipoprotein tethered to the outer face of the cytoplasmic membrane via a lipid anchor. As KapB proved to be dispensable for expression of the kinBkapB operon, a chimeric kinase was built consisting of KinA sensor domain fused to KinB kinase domain (KinA′‐′B) to assess (i) the involvement of KapB in catalysis of the kinase reaction, and (ii) the ability of KinB to phosphorylate Spo0F in vitro. It was shown that KapB is dispensable for both in vivo and in vitro activation of the phosphorelay by the KinA′‐′B chimera and that KinA′‐′B phosphorylates Spo0F directly in vitro. Models for the role of KapB in regulating KinB activity are discussed.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health Depressive Symptoms from Kindergarten to Early School Age: Longitudinal Associations with Social Skills Deficits and Peer Victimization

Background: Depressive symptoms in children are associated with social skills deficits and problems with peers. We propose a model which suggests different mechanisms for the impact of deficits in self-oriented social skills (assertiveness and social participation) and other-oriented social skills (pro-social, cooperative and non-aggressive behaviors) on children's depressive symptoms. We hypothesized that deficits in self-oriented social skills have a direct impact on children's depressive symptoms because these children have non-rewarding interactions with peers, whereas the impact of deficits in other-oriented social skills on depressive symptoms is mediated through negative reactions from peers such as peer victimization.
Compact microstrip lowpass filter with wide stopband using nonuniform radial stubs

A compact microstrip lowpass filter with a wide stopband is proposed in this paper. To achieve wide stopband suppression and compact size, nonuniform radial stubs are adopted. The proposed lowpass filter is composed of four nonuniform radial stubs, four transmission lines, and two standard ports. A filter with the 3-dB cutoff frequency of 900 MHz is fabricated and measured. The fabricated lowpass filter is able to suppress the ninth-harmonic frequency response with a stopband rejection from 1.65 GHz to 8.5 GHz better than 20 dB. In addition, there is a good agreement between the simulated and measured results.
Can the Atlantic Ocean drive the observed multidecadal variability in Northern Hemisphere mean temperature?

While the Northern Hemisphere mean surface temperature has clearly warmed over the 20th century due in large part to increasing greenhouse gases, this warming has not been monotonic. The departures from steady warming on multidecadal timescales might be associated in part with radiative forcing, especially solar irradiance, volcanoes, and anthropogenic aerosols. It is also possible that internal oceanic variability explains a part of this variation. We report here on simulations with a climate model in which the Atlantic Ocean is constrained to produce multidecadal fluctuations similar to observations by redistributing heat within the Atlantic, with other oceans left free to adjust to these Atlantic perturbations. The model generates multidecadal variability in Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures similar in phase and magnitude to detrended observations. The results suggest that variability in the Atlantic is a viable explanation for a portion of the multidecadal variability in the Northern Hemisphere mean temperature record.
Representation of spectrum in the auditory system

†: School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. ‡: MRC Institute of Hearing Research Nottingham University Section, University Park, Nottingham,NG7 2RD, UK. §: Laboratory of Mechanics of Fluids and Acoustics, Ecole Centrale de Lion, France. ¶: Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, SE14 6NW, UK.Author for correspondence is S. Coombes. e-mail: stephen.coombes@nottingham.ac. uk
Multi-Agent Learning Model with Bargaining

Decision problems with the features of prisoner's dilemma are quite common. A general solution to this kind of social dilemma is that the agents cooperate to play a joint action. The Nash bargaining solution is an attractive approach to such cooperative games. In this paper, a multi-agent learning algorithm based on the Nash bargaining solution is presented. Different experiments are conducted on a testbed of stochastic games. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm converges to the policies of the Nash bargaining solution. Compared with the learning algorithms based on a non-cooperative equilibrium, this algorithm is fast and its complexity is linear with respect to the number of agents and number of iterations. In addition, it avoids the disturbing problem of equilibrium selection
Towards automatic performance optimisation of componentised systems

Use of hardware-based memory protection to implement a componentised system is an effective way to enforce isolation between untrusted software components. Unfortunately this type of system design can lead to poor performance. Manual optimisation is error-prone and difficult. Instead, we describe a system to perform automatic optimisation of components, relying on three major functional units: a method to reconfigure the component system, simulations of each component in order to determine performance characteristics, and a system simulator that makes use of those characteristics to construct a ranking of optimisations. We start with a simple model and iteratively expand it until it is suitable for a wide variety of performance-measurement scenarios, and show that a small amount of information provided with each component allows for a wide variety of optimisation checks, such as scheduling, threading, and cache performance. We present our initial results with this system and discuss a number of interesting extensions.
2-stage approach for continuous time identification using step response estimates

This paper presents the 2-stage identification approach. The first stage is the identification of the system step response from the experimental data using the frequency sampling filter approach. This first stage is also referred as data compression stage in which the raw data will be analyzed in order to obtain a parameter that describes the empirical model of the analyzed data. The second stage is the identification of a continuous time state space model using subspace methods from the identified step response. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated to identify the simulated systems and the real system of magnetic bearing apparatus.
Verification of the sensitivity and resolution dependence on the incidence angle for slit–slat collimation

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) can be performed with various collimator types, which have an inherent tradeoff between the properties of sensitivity, resolution, field of view and complete sampling. Slit–slat collimation, which has seen recent interest in the literature, combines a slit parallel to the axis of rotation of a gamma camera with a set of septa perpendicular to the slit. This collimator geometry exhibits properties that may enhance some SPECT imaging applications, specifically imaging of the breast, limbs and medium-sized animals. However, a complete description of its system response is critical for a comparison to other collimator types and for accurate reconstruction of projection data. Herein, experimental and Monte Carlo methods are used to determine the sensitivity and transaxial and axial resolutions as a function of the incidence angle θ, which is the angle formed by the line from the photon source to the center of the slit and the plane of the slit, to compare to theoretical expectations. Four configurations are investigated by varying the slit width, septal spacing and septal height. Monte Carlo sensitivity data not modeling penetration and scatter exhibit a sin3θ dependence. Experimental and Monte Carlo-derived sensitivity data modeling scatter and penetration are consistent with each other and have a sinxθ dependence, where x is greater than 3. Transaxial resolution data show a small dependence on θ, and axial resolution data are consistent with no angular dependence.
ROBOT THE PUBLIC ANEMONE ROBOT WITHOUT ITS SILICONE SKIN

ENTERTAINMENT ROBOTICS MIGHT BE VIEWED as a relatively new field, but the idea of building lifelike machines that entertain has fascinated humans for at least the past five hundreds of years—certainly as far back as 1515 when Leonardo da Vinci (commissioned by the Medici) built an ingenious self-propelled walking mechanical lion that opened and presented its breast full of lilies to Francis I, King of France, as a token of friendship from the Medici. The practice of creating mechanical automata blossomed in the 16th century when mechanical clock makers in Western Europe began to extend their craft to building mechanical animals. The 18th century craze also in Western Europe for animated objects produced a number of impressive mechanical humanoid automata, including the Jaquet-Droz Writer that emulated a young boy writing a letter at his desk and Joseph Faber's Euphonia, a mechanical talking head an operator could reputedly make speak in several European languages. Some of the best-known examples of modern entertainment robots include anima-tronics in theme parks performing fully automated (though fixed and noninteractive) routines and puppeteered animatronics performing with human actors in such Holly-wood movies as Jurassic Park (the dinosaurs) and A.I. (Teddy). The most sophisticated are designed to look like living creatures and perform highly expressive movements. Less well-known examples include live performance troupes in which remote-controlled robots play a part in theatrical performances—either with human actors, as in Omnicircus (www.omnicircus.com), and with other robots, as in the robotic spectacles of Survival Research Laboratories (www.srl.org) The field of entertainment robotics continues to find new applications as increasingly sophisticated and lifelike autonomous robotic technologies mature. Whereas complex animatronic robots are often not designed to walk, small mobile robots (such as the Ullanta performance robotics [12] and the Carnegie-Mellon robot Improv) with built-in navigational skills have been used in live performances [12]. A number of university projects have explored the use of speech recognition and dialogue systems to allow people to have simple verbal interactions with animatronics [6] and mobile robot performers to have simple " improvisational " dialogues [3]. New tools for managing real-time interactive show control [6, 10], authoring nonlinear narrative, and capturing puppeteer
Extrapolating non-target risk of Bt crops from laboratory to field

The tiered approach to assessing ecological risk of insect-resistant transgenic crops assumes that lower tier laboratory studies, which expose surrogate non-target organisms to high doses of insecticidal proteins, can detect harmful effects that might be manifested in the field. To test this assumption, we performed meta-analyses comparing results for non-target invertebrates exposed to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) Cry proteins in laboratory studies with results derived from independent field studies examining effects on the abundance of non-target invertebrates. For Lepidopteran-active Cry proteins, laboratory studies correctly predicted the reduced field abundance of non-target Lepidoptera. However, laboratory studies incorporating tri-trophic interactions of Bt plants, herbivores and parasitoids were better correlated with the decreased field abundance of parasitoids than were direct-exposure assays. For predators, laboratory tri-trophic studies predicted reduced abundances that were not realized in field studies and thus overestimated ecological risk. Exposure to Coleopteran-active Cry proteins did not significantly reduce the laboratory survival or field abundance of any functional group examined. Our findings support the assumption that laboratory studies of transgenic insecticidal crops show effects that are either consistent with, or more conservative than, those found in field studies, with the important caveat that laboratory studies should explore all ecologically relevant routes of exposure.