Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analyzing stability of haptic interface using linear matrix inequality approach

This paper presents a use of the linear matrix inequality approach to analyze stability of haptic device in the interaction with a virtual wall. The haptic device is modeled as a 1-DoF (Degree of Freedom) linear mechanical system composed of masses, springs and dampers. The virtual wall is modeled as a mechanical system composed of a virtual spring and damper. The paper investigates a discrete-time state-space representation of the haptic system by taken into account the effect of ZOH (Zero Order Holder). The second method of Lyapunov is applied to determine stability boundaries. These boundaries are characterized by the critical virtual stiffness, for several values of delay and virtual damping. The qualitative modification of stable region of the haptic interface under the influence of the flexible mode, the human operator model and the time delay are also presented.
Numerical solution of an inverse medium scattering problem with a stochastic source

This paper is concerned with the inverse medium scattering problem with a stochastic source, the reconstruction of the refractive index of an inhomogeneous medium from the boundary measurements of the scattered field. As an inverse problem, there are two major difficulties in addition to being highly nonlinear: the ill-posedness and the presence of many local minima. To overcome these difficulties, a stable and efficient recursive linearization method has been recently developed for solving the inverse medium scattering problem with a deterministic source. Compared to classical inverse problems, stochastic inverse problems, referred to as inverse problems involving uncertainties, have substantially more difficulties due to randomness and uncertainties. Based on the Wiener chaos expansion, the stochastic problem is converted into a set of decoupled deterministic problems. The strategy developed is a new hybrid method combining the WCE with the recursive linearization method for solving the inverse medium problem with a stochastic source. Numerical experiments are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Towards interlanguage POS annotation for eﬀective learner corpora in SLA and FLT

Learner corpora can serve as a teaching resource for Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) and contribute empirical insights for Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. To support eﬀective querying for the speciﬁc classes of data which are relevant under the FLT and SLA perspectives, learner corpora ideally should include linguistic annotation. We argue for an approach to Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging of learner corpora that systematically encodes the distributional, morphological, and lexical aspects spe-ciﬁc to such interlanguage. Based on NOCE, an English learner corpus by Spanish learners, we characterize areas where the properties of learner language systematically diﬀer from those assumed by POS annotation schemes developed for native language.
Resection after preoperative chemotherapy versus synchronous liver resection of colorectal cancer liver metastases

Abstract This study aimed to determine the prognostic effects of preoperative chemotherapy for colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CLM). We retrospectively evaluated 2 groups of patients between January 2006 and August 2012. A total of 53 patients who had ≥3 hepatic metastases underwent resection after preoperative chemotherapy (preoperative chemotherapy group), whereas 96 patients who had ≥3 hepatic metastases underwent resection with a curative intent before chemotherapy for CLM (primary resection group). A propensity score (PS) model was used to compare the both groups. The 3-year disease-free survival (DFS) rates were 31.7% and 20.4% in the preoperative chemotherapy and primary resection groups, respectively (log-rank = 0.015). Analyzing 32 PS matched pairs, we found that the DFS rate was significantly higher in the preoperative chemotherapy group than in the primary resection group (3-year DFS rates were 34.2% and 16.8%, respectively [log-rank = 0.019]). Preoperative chemotherapy group patients had better DFSs than primary resection group patients in various multivariate analyses, including crude, multivariable, average treatment effect with inverse probability of treatment weighting model and PS matching. Responses to chemotherapy are as important as achieving complete resection in cases of multiple hepatic metastases. Preoperative chemotherapy may therefore be preferentially considered for patients who experience difficulty undergoing complete resection for multiple hepatic metastases.
High-resolution organic polymer light-emitting pixels fabricated by imprinting technique

We have developed an approach to fabricate pixelated organic polymer light-emitting devices (OPLED) using an imprinting technique. The pixel array pattern was first defined in an insulating polymer layer on indium tin oxide glass by direct imprinting, followed by the spin-coating of OPLED polymers and cathode metal deposition. We demonstrated successful fabrication and operation of OPLED pixels of sizes from 50 μm down to 2 μm. Optoelectronic characterization is performed on these devices, and measured results show comparable device performance with OPLED pixels patterned by other methods. This fabrication scheme holds many merits such as easy to process, low-cost, high yield, expandable to flexible substrate, capable of repeated imprinting for large area arrays, and the potential to pattern submicron and nanoscale organic polymer light emitters.
Petri Net Model Based Implementation of Hierarchical and Distributed Control for Discrete Event Robotic Manufacturing Cells

Manufacturing systems, where the materials which are handled are mainly composed of discrete entities, for example parts that are machined and/or assembled, are called discrete manufacturing systems. The rapid development of industrial techniques makes the manufacturing systems larger and more complex, in which system control is divided into a hierarchy of control levels: planning, scheduling, coordination and local control (Silva, 1990). At the upper level, the global system is considered and its representation is strongly aggregated. Each low level is a disaggregation of the upper one; the portion of the system considered is smaller, but more details are taken into account. The time horizon of the low level is shorter, and real-time constraints are progressively hard. At the coordination level (shop, cell), the function is to update the state representation of the workshop in real-time, to supervise it, and make real-time decisions. The decision making system has to schedule and synchronize the machine utilizations to decide at each instant what has to be done and on which machine. Frequently, a flexible manufacturing system is structured into manufacturing cells. A cell is an elementary manufacturing system consisting of flexible machine tools (or assembly devices), some local storage facilities for tools and parts and some handling devices such as robots in order to transfer parts and tools between the cell and the global transport system. Elementary manufacturing cells are called workstations. In a manufacturing cell, some devices operate concurrently and cooperatively or interfere to each other. Conventional representation methods such as time chart and state transition graph can not cope with the system like this. So a powerful method which can represent a discrete event system including nondeterministic parallel and concurrent action is desired. As computer technology has been continuing to be upgraded to higher level year by year, the control system architecture has changed from centralized processing to distributed processing in order to reduce the development cost and to improve reliability. In developing distributed processing systems, major difficulties are that adequate expression methods and analyzing techniques for control mechanisms have not sufficiently been established. In the field of manufacturing systems that are typical examples of the event driven system, demands for the automatic control has diversified and the control logic has become extremely complicated. To deal with the complexity, a new methodology on control system design based on the discrete event driven system is necessary.
Selecting A Virtualization System For Grid/P2P Large Scale Emulation

Virtualization tools are becoming popular in the context of Grid Computing because they allow running multiple operating systems on a single host and provide a confined execution environment. Emulators and experimental tools like Microgrid and PlanetLab use multiple virtual nodes on every platedorm nodes. Thus, to build a large scale emulator for Grid/P2P experiments, developers have to select a virtualization tool among the available ones. In this paper, we first present a set of metrics and related methodologies for performances and for usability evaluation. We use thesemetrics to compare 4 virtual machine technologies (Vserver, Xen, UML and VMware), in the context of large scale emulation. The results of this study demonstrate that all the compared tools present different behaviors with respect to usability, and scalability in terms of overhead, resource occupation and isolation. Thus this work will help user to select tools according to their application characteristics.
Damage Detection Based on Static Strain Responses Using FBG in a Wind Turbine Blade

The damage detection of a wind turbine blade enables better operation of the turbines, and provides an early alert to the destroyed events of the blade in order to avoid catastrophic losses. A new non-baseline damage detection method based on the Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) in a wind turbine blade is developed in this paper. Firstly, the Chi-square distribution is proven to be an effective damage-sensitive feature which is adopted as the individual information source for the local decision. In order to obtain the global and optimal decision for the damage detection, the feature information fusion (FIF) method is proposed to fuse and optimize information in above individual information sources, and the damage is detected accurately through of the global decision. Then a 13.2 m wind turbine blade with the distributed strain sensor system is adopted to describe the feasibility of the proposed method, and the strain energy method (SEM) is used to describe the advantage of the proposed method. Finally results show that the proposed method can deliver encouraging results of the damage detection in the wind turbine blade.
Cross-linguistic variation in children's multimodal utterances

Our ability to use language is multimodal and requires tight coordination between what is expressed in speech and in gesture, such as pointing or iconic gestures that convey semantic, syntactic and pragmatic information related to speakers' messages. Interestingly, what is expressed in gesture and how it is coordinated with speech differs in speakers of different languages. This paper discusses recent findings on the development of children's multimodal expressions taking cross-linguistic variation into account. Although some aspects of speech-gesture development show language-specificity from an early age, it might still take children until nine years of age to exhibit fully adult patterns of cross-linguistic variation. These findings reveal insights about how children coordinate different levels of representations given that their development is constrained by patterns that are specific to their languages.
Parallel Program Debugging based on Data-Replay

Nondeterministic nature of parallel programs is the major difficulty in debugging. Order-replay, a technique to solve this problem, is widely used because of its small overhead. It has, however, several serious drawbacks: all processes of the parallelprogram have toparticipatein replayeven when some of them are clearly not involved with the bug; and the programmer cannot stop the process being debugged at an arbitrary point. We adopt another method for deterministic replay, Data-replay, which logs contents of the events rather than their order, and makes it possible to run and stop each process independently. Data-replay is well able to cooperate with reverse execution mechanisms. We applied the Data-replay mechanism to MPI based parallel programs. The result of our experiment with NAS Parallel Benchmarks shows that our mechanism works at a practical cost. Logging communicated data incurs only 24% overhead while it accelerates replayed execution by 38%, both in average.
New Fossil Lepidoptera (Insecta: Amphiesmenoptera) from the Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation of Northeastern China

Background The early history of the Lepidoptera is poorly known, a feature attributable to an inadequate preservational potential and an exceptionally low occurrence of moth fossils in relevant mid-Mesozoic deposits. In this study, we examine a particularly rich assemblage of morphologically basal moths that contribute significantly toward the understanding of early lepidopteran biodiversity. Methodology/Principal Findings Our documentation of early fossil moths involved light- and scanning electron microscopic examination of specimens, supported by various illumination and specimen contrast techniques. A total of 20 moths were collected from the late Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation in Northeastern China. Our principal results were the recognition and description of seven new genera and seven new species assigned to the Eolepidopterigidae; one new genus with four new species assigned to the Mesokristenseniidae; three new genera with three new species assigned to the Ascololepidopterigidae fam. nov.; and one specimen unassigned to family. Lepidopteran assignment of these taxa is supported by apomorphies of extant lineages, including the M1 vein, after separation from the M2 vein, subtending an angle greater than 60 degrees that is sharply angulate at the junction with the r–m crossvein (variable in Trichoptera); presence of a foretibial epiphysis; the forewing M vein often bearing three branches; and the presence of piliform scales along wing veins. Conclusions/Significance The diversity of these late Middle Jurassic lepidopterans supports a conclusion that the Lepidoptera–Trichoptera divergence occurred by the Early Jurassic.
Leading indicators of CAD experience

Current interfaces and help facilities of CAD systems are not designed to respond to a user's performance. To develop such adaptive environments, a better understanding of the indicators of CAD experience is required. This paper discusses the results of studying behavior patterns of different types and levels of CAD users for a specific drawing task. The results show that the type and experience of the CAD user has a clear correlation to the pattern of commands used, the time taken, and the quality of drawing produced. By using the experimental data to train a neural network, the paper demonstrates a connectionist approach for experience assessment. This information, it is proposed, can provide input to an adaptive interface which generates unobtrusive interception to improve the performance of a CAD user. Future experiments to explore the issues of generality and interception are presented.
Evaluation of a histogram-based image quality measure for X-ray computed tomography

This paper presents the evaluation of an image quality measure for X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scans. This quality measure can aid XCT users in selecting scans with optimised quality, which finally objectify their selection. The proposed measure is calculated on the base of a grey value histogram which leads to a global quality criterion that is able to rate scans of single- as well as multi-material objects. Several micro-XCT scans of different specimens with varying image quality are used to verify the proposed image quality measure.
Coordinated precoding for downlink multi-user MIMO relay network

Relay communication network has been widely studied in recent years due to their ability to provide more reliable communication through enhanced diversity. In this work, we consider a downlink multiuser multi-input-multi-output (MU-MIMO) relay network under amplify and forward (AF) protocol. Coordinated relay system can provide the additional diversity gain due to adding the relay station (RS) compared to the direct transmit system. Assuming that the channel state information (CSI) at the base station (BS) is available, we propose a precoding method considering equivalent channel between the BS, RS and user equipment (UE), named as maximum-signal-leakage-and-noise-ratio (SLNRmax) that can effectively suppress the co-channel interference (CCI) and noise at the UE. And we also analyze the influence of increasing the number of the UEs on the sum-rate in the MU-MIMO relay network. Theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulation results show the un-coded BER and the sum-rate performance with coordinated relay outperforms that without relay.
Implementation and verification of simulation methods to determine Radar Cross Section of simple targets

This paper analyses the method of measuring Radar Cross Section(RCS) of different target geometries through computer simulation as well as theoretical calculations. The measurements have been done in the frequency range of 7¿10 GHz at varying aspect angles of the targets. The simulated and theoretically obtained results showed profound agreement with each other. The used simulation methodology can be implemented for carrying out further research on radar cross section reduction mechanisms at minimum expenses.
A Message-Passing and Adaptive Implementation of the Randomized Test-and-Set Object

This paper presents a solution to the well-known Test-and-Set operation in asynchronous systems prone to process crashes. Test-and-Set is a synchronization operation that, when invoked by a set of processes, returns "yes" to a unique process and returns "no" to all the others. Recently many advances in implementing Test and Set objects have been achieved, however all of them uniquely target the shared memory model. In this paper we propose an implementation of a Test-and-Set object for message passing distributed systems. This implementation can be invoked by any number p of processes. It has an expected step complexity in O(p) and an expected message complexity in O(np), where n is the total number of processes in the system. The proposed Test and Set object is built atop a new basic building block that allows to select a winning group among two groups of processes.
rotations: An R Package for SO(3) Data

In this article we introduce the rotations package which provides users with the ability to simulate, analyze and visualize three-dimensional rotation data. More specifically it includes four commonly used distributions from which to simulate data, four estimators of the central orientation, six confidence region estimation procedures and two approaches to visualizing rotation data. All of these features are available for two different parameterizations of rotations: three-by-three matrices and quaternions. In addition, two datasets are included that illustrate the use of rotation data in practice.
Behavioral Drive versus Behavioral Inertia in Evolution: A Null Model Approach

Some biologists embrace the classical view that changes in behavior inevitably initiate or drive evolutionary changes in other traits, yet others note that behavior sometimes inhibits evolutionary changes. Here we develop a null model that quantifies the impact of regulatory behaviors (specifically, thermoregulatory behaviors) on body temperature and on performance of ectotherms. We apply the model to data on a lizard (Anolis cristatellus) and show that thermoregulatory behaviors likely inhibit selection for evolutionary shifts in thermal physiology with altitude. Because behavioral adjustments are commonly used by ectotherms to regulate physiological performance, regulatory behaviors should generally constrain rather than drive evolution, a phenomenon we call the “Bogert effect. ” We briefly review a few other examples that contradict the classical view of behavior as the inevitable driving force in evolution. Overall, our analysis and brief review challenge the classical view that behavior is invariably the driving force in evolution, and instead our work supports the alternative view that behavior has diverse—and sometimes conflicting—effects on the directions and rates at which other traits evolve.
Effects of Ethinylestradiol and the fungicide Prochloraz on metamorphosis and thyroid gland morphology in Rana temporaria

Several environmental xenobiotics have been found to affect the metamorphosis of amphibians. In this study we exposed tadpoles of the Common frog Rana temporaria from hatching to metamorphosis to two known endocrine disruptors, the estrogenic pharmaceutical 17� -ethinylestradiol and the antiandrogenic/antiestrogenic fungicide prochloraz to determine their effect on 1) days to metamorphosis and size at metamorphosis, 2) body concentrations of triiodothyronine (T3) and corticosterone, and 3) thyroid morphology. We found effects of both compounds on each of these response variables. A low dose of prochloraz (115 μg/l) and all doses of ethinylestradiol also caused a delay in metamorphosis. T3 levels were elevated in metamorphs exposed to high concentration of prochloraz (252 μg/l) but the group showed a delay in metamorphosis. A low dose of prochloraz (115 μg/l) and all doses of ethinylestradiol also caused a delay in metamorphosis but no changes in T3 levels. The delayed metamorphs weighed more than controls. Thyroid histology revealed significant differences in the high prochloraz exposure group only. Ethinylestradiol and prochloraz, however not in environmentally relevant doses, may therefore impact the thyroid axis, and may cause other sublethal effects especially in combination with other stressors likely encountered.
Notes on a Late Jim Crow Life, Unredacted: Class and the Dignity of Teaching in Gaines and Resnick

In Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, a dying man’s salvation is contrasted with his education as a human being with dignity. Using Gaines’s parable of a dying man’s education while on death row to reflect on what mattered to Stephen Resnick in the classroom, this essay explores what it is to imagine and then see the world differently than what we’re accustomed to, examining what teaching is from the perspective of what is learned, what is produced in a classroom knowledge process. Resnick, in his reading of Marx’s Capital, cultivated capacities in his students by questioning class and “naturalized” capitalism. His pedagogical insight points students toward the value of dignity and worth in human life and labor.
Comparing Laser Ray Tracing, the Spatially Resolved Refractometer, and the Hartmann-Shack Sensor to Measure the Ocular Wave Aberration

Purpose. To compare quantitatively three techniques to measure the optical aberrations of the human eye: laser ray tracing (LRT), the Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor (H-S), and the spatially resolved refractometer (SRR). LRT and H-S are objective imaging techniques, whereas SRR is psychophysical. Methods. Wave aberrations were measured in two normal subjects with all three techniques implemented in two different laboratories. Results. We compared the experimental variability of the results obtained with each technique with the overall variability across the three methods. For the two subjects measured (RMS wavefront error 0.5 &mgr;m and 0.9 &mgr;m, respectively), we found a close agreement; the average standard deviation of the Zernike coefficients within a given method was 0.07 &mgr;m, whereas the average global standard deviation across techniques was 0.09 &mgr;m, which is only slightly higher. Conclusions. There is a close match between the Zernike coefficients obtained by LRT, H-S, and SRR. Thus, all three techniques provide similar information concerning wave aberration when applied to normal human eyes. However, the methods are operationally different, and each has advantages and disadvantages depending on the particular application.