Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The application of tactile, audible, and ultrasonic forces to human fingertips using broadband electroadhesion

We report an approach to controlling friction forces on sliding human fingertips in order to produce simultaneous vibrations across an exceedingly broad range of tactile, audible, and ultrasonic frequencies. Vibrations in the skin can be felt directly by the fingertip, and vibrations in the air can be heard emanating from the proximity of the finger. We introduce and detail an experimental apparatus capable of recording friction forces up to a frequency of 6 kHz, and describe a custom designed electroadhesive amplifier and system with a flat current to force magnitude response throughout this entire measurement range. Recordings with a MEMS microphone confirm the existence of ultrasonic forces applied to the finger and further reveal the ultra wideband capability of broadband electroadhesion. Implications for the design of surface haptic and general audio-haptic displays are discussed.
A review of aripiprazole in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia or bipolar I disorder

Aripiprazole has been approved by regulatory agencies for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder. Although it is a dopamine partial agonist, it also has substantial binding affinity for the serotonin 5HT2A receptor. Several double-blind randomized clinical trials have established the efficacy and tolerability of aripiprazole within the dose range of 10–30 mg/day for schizophrenia, and 15–30 mg/day for manic or mixed states associated with bipolar I disorder. Relatively few comparative trials with other second-generation antipsychotics have been published for schizophrenia, with none available for bipolar disorder. The evidence so far suggests that in terms of efficacy for schizophrenia, aripiprazole is superior to placebo and haloperidol (long term), similar to perphenazine and risperidone, and inferior to olanzapine. Its tolerability profile in patients with schizophrenia appears superior to haloperidol, perphenazine, risperidone, and olanzapine. Efficacy in treating manic or mixed states was established in placebo-controlled trials. Among some patients with bipolar disorder, akathisia and gastrointestinal (GI) complaints can emerge at the start of treatment; however, the GI symptoms were time-limited in many instances. Appropriate dosing may also be important in individualizing therapy to improve tolerability, with lower starting doses becoming more important when adding to, or switching from, another antipsychotic. Aripiprazole appears to have a low propensity for weight gain, a favorable metabolic profile, and no association with hyperprolactinemia.
A Study on Image Edge Detection Using the Gradients

A study on image edge detection using gradients is presented in this paper. In image processing and image analysis edge detection is one of the most common operations. Edges form the outline of an object and also it is the boundary between an object and the background. Detecting accurate edges are very important for analyzing the basic properties associated with an image such as area, perimeter, and shape. The software tool that has been used is MATLAB 7.0.
Handling the problems and opportunities posed by multiple on-chip memory controllers

Modern processors such as Tilera's Tile64, Intel's Nehalem, and AMD's Opteron are migrating memory controllers (MCs) on-chip, while maintaining a large, at memory address space. This trend to utilize multiple MCs will likely continue and a core or socket will consequently need to route memory requests to the appropriate MC via an inter- or intra-socket interconnect fabric similar to AMD's HyperTransport™, or Intel's Quick-Path Interconnect™. Such systems are therefore subject to non-uniform memory access (NUMA) latencies because of the time spent traveling to remote MCs. Each MC will act as the gateway to a particular piece of the physical memory. Data placement will therefore become increasingly critical in minimizing memory access latencies. To date, no prior work has examined the effects of data placement among multiple MCs in such systems. Future chip-multiprocessors are likely to comprise multiple MCs and an even larger number of cores. This trend will increase the memory access latency variation in these systems. Proper allocation of workload data to the appropriate MC will be important in reducing the latency of memory service requests. The allocation strategy will need to be aware of queuing delays, on-chip latencies, and row-buffer hit-rates for each MC. In this paper, we propose dynamic mechanisms that take these factors into account when placing data in appropriate slices of the physical memory. We introduce adaptive first-touch page placement, and dynamic page-migration mechanisms to reduce DRAM access delays for multi-MC systems. These policies yield average performance improvements of 17% for adaptive first-touch page-placement, and 35% for a dynamic page-migration policy.
Reliability and energy loss in full-scale wind power converter considering grid codes and wind classes

With the increasing penetration of the wind power, reliable operation and cost-effective wind energy production are of more and more importance. As one of the promising configurations, the cost on reliability and production losses of permanent-magnet synchronous generator based full-scale wind power converter is studied considering the grid code with reactive power production as well as the annual wind profile. Regarding the reliability, it is found that either the OverExcited (OE) or the Under-Excited (UE) reactive power injection threatens the lifespan under all wind classes. Meanwhile, if the specific designed wind turbine system operates at different wind classes, it can be seen that higher wind class level results in lower lifetime of the power converter. In respect to the cost of the reactive power, either the OE or the UE reactive power increases the energy loss per year significantly if they are provided all year around, in which the OE reactive power injection even has a worse scenario. Moreover, it is also concluded that in order to realize an energy loss saving of the wind turbine system, the constant power factor control strategy is more preferred compared to an extreme reactive power injection.
Moore's Law: The First Ending and a New Beginning

Moore's law has accurately predicted roughly biennial doubling of component capacity at minimal cost for almost 50 years. Recent flash memory scaling exhibits increased density, but reduced write and read lifetimes effectively constitute an ending of Moore's law. However, new resilience techniques, including adaptive management algorithms, and storage technologies based on information theory could maintain progress for a decade or more.
Synchronization of a Group of Mobile Agents With Variable Speeds Over Proximity Nets

This paper focuses on the synchronization analysis of a class of multiagent systems, where both speed and heading of each agent depend on the states of its local neighbors. The neighbors are defined through the distance between agents and all agents are interconnected via proximity nets. In the variable speed model, the speed of each agent depends on the polarization order of its neighbors in a power-law manner, and the heading is updated according to the average heading of its neighbors. Therefore, the speeds, headings, and positions of all agents are strongly coupled together. For the uniformly and independently distributed initial states, we provide sufficient conditions, imposed only on model parameters, to guarantee synchronization of the variable speed model in the following two cases: 1) the maximum speed and the neighborhood radius are fixed constants and 2) the maximum speed and the neighborhood radius are changing with the population size. Our results reveal that the permitted maximum speed in the variable speed model can be larger than that in the relevant constant speed model.
Quantum Random Access Codes with Shared Randomness

We consider a communication method, where the sender encodes n classical bits into 1 qubit and sends it to the receiver who performs a certain measurement depending on which of the initial bits must be recovered. This procedure is called (n,1,p) quantum random access code (QRAC) where p > 1/2 is its success probability. It is known that (2,1,0.85) and (3,1,0.79) QRACs (with no classical counterparts) exist and that (4,1,p) QRAC with p > 1/2 is not possible. We extend this model with shared randomness (SR) that is accessible to both parties. Then (n,1,p) QRAC with SR and p > 1/2 exists for any n > 0. We give an upper bound on its success probability (the known (2,1,0.85) and (3,1,0.79) QRACs match this upper bound). We discuss some particular constructions for several small values of n. We also study the classical counterpart of this model where n bits are encoded into 1 bit instead of 1 qubit and SR is used. We give an optimal construction for such codes and find their success probability exactly--it is less than in the quantum case. Interactive 3D quantum random access codes are available on-line at this http URL .
Transcriptomic responses to high water temperature in two species of Pacific salmon

Characterizing the cellular stress response (CSR) of species at ecologically relevant temperatures is useful for determining whether populations and species can successfully respond to current climatic extremes and future warming. In this study, populations of wild‐caught adult pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka) salmon from the Fraser River, British Columbia, Canada, were experimentally treated to ecologically relevant ‘cool’ or ‘warm’ water temperatures to uncover common transcriptomic responses to elevated water temperature in non‐lethally sampled gill tissue. We detected the differential expression of 49 microarray features (29 unique annotated genes and one gene with unknown function) associated with protein folding, protein synthesis, metabolism, oxidative stress and ion transport that were common between populations and species of Pacific salmon held at 19°C compared with fish held at a cooler temperature (13 or 14°C). There was higher mortality in fish held at 19°C, which suggests a possible relationship between a temperature‐induced CSR and mortality in these species. Our results suggest that frequently encountered water temperatures ≥19°C, which are capable of inducing a common CSR across species and populations, may increase risk of upstream spawning migration failure for pink and sockeye salmon.
SMAFramework: Arcabouço para Integração de Dados Urbanos Cientes da Correlação Espaço-Temporal

Redes sociais, dispositivos móveis, redes veiculares e de sensores são utilizados como coletores de dados em centros urbanos; dados esses que podem ser utilizados para melhor compreender as dinâmicas das cidades. Muitos estudos tem focado em explorar essas fontes de dados, porém individualmente. A fim de reduzir o impacto na análise de dados urbanos causada por essa limitação foi desenvolvido o SMAFramework, para realizar a coleta e integração de dados de mobilidade urbana de fontes heterogêneas. Foi proposta uma metodologia para padronizar dados com anotações espaço-temporais provenientes de várias fontes de acordo com um modelo único de dados (i.e., Grafo Multi Aspecto). A ferramenta apresentada ainda permite que se realize diferentes tarefas de análise de dados. Para avaliar o arcabouço desenvolvido, experimentos foram realizados com dados reais. O primeiro experimento combinou dados de mídias sociais com dados de viagens de táxi a fim de avaliar a correlação espaço temporal entre essas fontes de dados. Em um segundo experimento dados de táxi foram combinados com informações de transito, rotas de transporte público e modelos de experiência de usuário a fim de avaliar como diferentes meios de transporte poderiam ser combinados a fim de melhorar a mobilidade urbana. Ferramentas e metodologias foram desenvolvidas para a execução de cada um desses experimentos, contribuindo com o avanço do estado da arte.
A DSP-Based HEVC decoder implementation using an actor language dataflow model

During the last decades, new video compression standards arose every few years with always higher compression gains and considerable increases on the computational cost. Single core processors have reached their limit and multicore processors are there to overcome this issue to give more processing power. In order to accelerate the implementation of new video coding standards, MPEG has standardized an alternative framework to describe video decoders. It is based on reference decoders written in the RVC CAL dataflow actor language. From these descriptions, a compiler - Open RVC CAL compiler (Orcc) - allows the automatic generation of C code dedicated to the target processor. In this paper, a DSP based decoder compliant with the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been implemented using a CAL RVC model as a starting point. This is the first implementation of an HEVC decoder with DSP technology based on a HEVC RVC CAL model. The decoder has been compared in performance with a GPP implementation, also based on the RVC CAL model, and outperforms it by more than 50%. Additionally, the performance of this decoder is compared with that of other DSP-based HEVC decoders implemented without using the Orcc infrastructure1.
Producing wrong data without doing anything obviously wrong!

This paper presents a surprising result: changing a seemingly innocuous aspect of an experimental setup can cause a systems researcher to draw wrong conclusions from an experiment. What appears to be an innocuous aspect in the experimental setup may in fact introduce a significant bias in an evaluation. This phenomenon is called measurement bias in the natural and social sciences. Our results demonstrate that measurement bias is significant and commonplace in computer system evaluation. By significant we mean that measurement bias can lead to a performance analysis that either over-states an effect or even yields an incorrect conclusion. By commonplace we mean that measurement bias occurs in all architectures that we tried (Pentium 4, Core 2, and m5 O3CPU), both compilers that we tried (gcc and Intel's C compiler), and most of the SPEC CPU2006 C programs. Thus, we cannot ignore measurement bias. Nevertheless, in a literature survey of 133 recent papers from ASPLOS, PACT, PLDI, and CGO, we determined that none of the papers with experimental results adequately consider measurement bias. Inspired by similar problems and their solutions in other sciences, we describe and demonstrate two methods, one for detecting (causal analysis) and one for avoiding (setup randomization) measurement bias.
Ad Hoc Cloudlet Based Cooperative Cloud Gaming

As the game industry matures, processing complex game logics in a timely manner is no longer an insurmountable problem. Many researchers are now trying to find ways to optimize the gaming system regarding the network usage, local resource utilization, and energy consumption. However, current cloud-based mobile gaming solutions are limited by their relatively high requirements on Internet resources. Also, they typically do not consider the geographical locations of nearby mobile users and thus ignore the potential cooperation among users. Therefore, inspired by existing cloud computing techniques and the concept of ad-hoc cloudlet computing, in this paper, we propose an ad-hoc cloudlet based gaming architecture. Two modules of the architecture are introduced: 1) progressive game resources download, by which mobile users can adaptively download gaming resources from cloud servers or nearby mobile users according to the gaming progress, and 2) ad-hoc cloudlet-based cooperative task allocation, by which gaming components can be executed dynamically over local devices, nearby devices, or cloud servers. We also formulate the mechanism for both modules as an optimization problem and propose several algorithms for both modules, which are later used for evaluation purposes. We carry out simulations based on real mobility traces, and the results show that our system's performance depends highly on the ad-hoc network environment (the more concurrent and balanced connections within the ad-hoc network, the lower the energy costs). Also, regardless of the network environment, our system has lower energy costs while utilizing resources of nearby devices, compared to the cloud-based gaming architecture.
The Ontogeny of Plant Defense and Herbivory: Characterizing General Patterns Using Meta‐Analysis

Defense against herbivores often changes dramatically as plants develop. Hypotheses based on allocation theory and herbivore selection patterns predict that defense should increase or decrease, respectively, across ontogeny, and previous research partly supports both predictions. Thus, it remains unclear which pattern is more common and what factors contribute to variability among studies. We conducted a meta‐analysis of 116 published studies reporting ontogenetic patterns in plant defense traits and herbivory. Patterns varied depending on plant life form (woody, herbaceous, grass), type of herbivore (insect, mollusk, mammal), and type of defense trait (secondary chemistry, physical defense, tolerance). In woody plants, chemical defense increased during the seedling stage, followed by an increase in physical defenses during the vegetative juvenile stage. Mammalian herbivores showed a strong preference for mature compared to juvenile tissues in woody plants. Herbs experienced a significant increase in secondary chemistry across the entire ontogenetic trajectory, although the magnitude of increase was greatest during the seedling stage. Correspondingly, mollusks preferred young compared to older herbs. Future research investigating growth/defense trade‐offs, allometry, herbivore selection patterns, and ecological costs would shed light on the mechanisms driving the ontogenetic patterns observed.
[Treatment of oral dryness in Sjögren's syndrome].

PURPOSE In Sjögren's syndrome (SS), oral dryness is frequently the most bothersome symptom of sicca syndrome with negative affects on quality of life. A review of treatments of oral dryness is proposed. CURRENT KNOWLEDGE AND KEY POINTS To date, so specific DMARD has demonstrated its efficacy in SS. Hydroxychloroquine is frequently used but did not demonstrate any clinical benefit in te only small randomized control study versus placebo available. Thus, the only treatments are symptomatic. The most recent data show that systemic cholinergic agonist (pilocarpine and cevimeline) are effective in the symptomatic treatment of dryness. Pilocarpine (Salagen) is the only systemic cholinergic agonist available in Europe. It has been agreed in France since July 2003. FUTURE PROSPECTS AND PROJECTS Use of immunosuppressive drugs may be useful in some complications of SS. Unfortunately, promising results from an open study with infliximab (Remicade) were not confirmed by a large randomized control study involving more than 100 patients. New control studies with old drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, or new ones such as rituximab, are mandatory.
Assessing tissue viability with MR diffusion and perfusion imaging.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Diffusion- (DW) and perfusion-weighted (PW) MR imaging reflect neurophysiologic changes during stroke evolution. We sought to determine parameters that distinguish regions of brain destined for infarction from those that will survive despite hypoperfusion. METHODS DW and PW images were obtained in 30 patients at 1-12 hours after symptom onset. Relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV), flow (rCBF), mean transit time (MTT), apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), DW image signal intensity, and fractional anisotropy (FA) lesion-contralateral normal region ratios were obtained in the following regions: 1) infarct core with hyperintensity on DW image, abnormality on rCBF and MTT images, and follow-up abnormality; 2) infarcted penumbra with normal DW image, abnormal rCBF and MTT images, and follow-up abnormality; and 3) hypoperfused tissue that remained viable, with normal DW image, abnormal rCBF and MTT images, and normal follow-up. RESULTS rCBF ratios for regions 1, 2, and 3 were 0.32 +/- 0.11, 0.46 +/- 0.13, and 0.58 +/- 0.12, respectively, and were significantly different. DW image intensity and ADC ratios were significantly different among all regions, but were more similar than rCBF ratios. rCBV and FA ratios were not significantly different between regions 2 and 3. No MTT ratios were significantly different. No region of interest with an rCBF ratio less than 0.36, an rCBV ratio less than 0.53, an ADC ratio less than 0.85, a DW image intensity ratio greater than 1.23, or an FA ratio greater than 1.10 remained viable. No region of interest with an rCBF ratio greater than 0.79 infarcted. CONCLUSIONS Differences among mean ratios of three regions investigated were greatest for the rCBF ratio. The rCBF ratio may be the most useful parameter in differentiating viable tissue that is likely to infarct without intervention, from tissue that will survive despite hypoperfusion. ADC, DW intensity, FA, and rCBV ratios may provide adjunctive information.
An Approximation of Gaussian Pulses

A new technique for generating an approximate replica of Gaussian pulses with good accuracy is proposed and investigated. The Gaussian function is approximated with a waveform that results from the convolution of two triangles. The proposed pulse performs better than other previously reported pulse. The results show good agreement not only for the Gaussian pulse but also for its first and second derivatives. As the triangular pulse generator is standard and widely used, the proposed technique needs besides it an appropriate filter.
Microbial control over carbon cycling in soil

A major thrust of terrestrial microbial ecology is focused on understanding when and how the composition of the microbial community affects the functioning of biogeochemical processes at the ecosystem scale (meters-to-kilometers and days-to-years). While research has demonstrated these linkages for physiologically and phylogenetically “narrow” processes such as trace gas emissions and nitrification, there is less conclusive evidence that microbial community composition influences the “broad” processes of decomposition and organic matter (OM) turnover in soil. In this paper, we consider how soil microbial community structure influences C cycling. We consider the phylogenetic level at which microbes form meaningful guilds, based on overall life history strategies, and suggest that these are associated with deep evolutionary divergences, while much of the species-level diversity probably reflects functional redundancy. We then consider under what conditions it is possible for differences among microbes to affect process dynamics, and argue that while microbial community structure may be important in the rate of OM breakdown in the rhizosphere and in detritus, it is likely not important in the mineral soil. In mineral soil, physical access to occluded or sorbed substrates is the rate-limiting process. Microbial community influences on OM turnover in mineral soils are based on how organisms allocate the C they take up – not only do the fates of the molecules differ, but they can affect the soil system differently as well. For example, extracellular enzymes and extracellular polysaccharides can be key controls on soil structure and function. How microbes allocate C may also be particularly important for understanding the long-term fate of C in soil – is it sequestered or not?