Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Horizons in Pilot Training: Desktop Tutoring Systems

A passive treadmill having a governor to adjustably limit the rate of speed of the treadmill belt. Resilient flexible rotating blades flex due to the centrifugal force developed during rotation, the magnitude of the centrifugal force being a function of the linear speed of the treadmill belt. Brake pads mounted on the flexible blades move into sliding engagement with an annular stationary surface to limit the linear speed of the treadmill belt. A rotatably mounted cam is manually adjustable to adjust the spacing between the aforesaid slidably engageable surfaces to adjust the governor. The governor assembly is of relatively small size and volume and the moving components of the governor are mounted within a compact casing. The rollers, which rollingly support the treadmill belt, are rotatably mounted within elongated openings provided in each of a pair of mounting rails. Roller support shafts are inserted into slots arranged at spaced intervals along the support rails and a compressible rope is arranged between the support shafts and the upper interior surface of the support rail elongated openings. A single elongated rod in the elongated opening of each rail supports all of the associated shafts, providing the dual functions of securing said roller shafts in position and rotatably supporting all of the roller shafts at a uniform height. The compressible rope compensates for any tolerances between the parts and prevents the roller shafts, and hence the rollers, from experiencing any undesirable movement and/or vibration.
Stroke- the most important cause of the newly d iagnosed epilepsy in the elderly

About 35% of all newly diagnosed epileptic seizures in people o lder than 60 years are caused by stroke. The incidence of the early epileptic seizures is 2.4–5.4%, and for the late seizures 3–4.5%. Seizures after stroke are most often simple partial seizures with or without secondary generalization, and less often complex partial seizures. In early seizure these are acute biochemical cellular changes, and in late seizures gliosis. Althoung the risk for developing epilepsy was 17–35% after early seizures, the risk of developing epilepsy after late seizures increased to 65–90%. Combination of coronary heart disease, hypertonia and cardiovascular disease occur in 65% of patients over 75 year old. Intrahospital mortality in patients with stroke with epileptic seizures was 37.9% compared to patients without seizures (14.4%). Early seizures cause higher mortality than late seizures which can be explained by sinergistic effect of of the damaged tissue due to the seizure and vascular ischaemia. European authors in 2007 indicate that lavetiracetam, lamotrigine and gabapentin were first line drugs, followed by topiramate and valproate in elderly patients. Oxcarbazepine and carbamazepine were not highly recommended because of the associated hyponatremia, cardiac disorders and interaction potentials. The standard antiepileptic drug for focal epilepsy is still carbamazepine, and valproate is most commonly used for generalized epilepsy- even in older patients. Epidemiological studies on epilepsy treatment in the elderly show steady increase in the number of patients. Therefore, elderly patients require special attention. Monotherapy in low doses is often sufficient, enzyme inducing drug are used too frequently.
Online Scheduling of Flexible Flow Shop Manufacturing

The flexible flow shop refers to such a manufacturing environment in which jobs are to be processed through serial stages, with one or multiple machines available at each stage. It is usually a complex task when specific objective is demanded such as minimum cost, minimum time, etc. Static scheduling of such problems has been much researched, however, little efforts have been made on realtime scheduling when the release time of each job is unknown. In this paper, some online scheduling methods are presented to deal with the tough problem of realtime Just-In-Time manufacturing. In addition to applicable dispatching rules, agent-based approaches are also proposed featuring feedback, learning, and realtime prediction. The simulation result reveals that the presented distributed learning approach, especially when combined with realtime prediction, delivers a high performance.
A theoretical approach to pneumatic muscle mechanics

The mechanical response of pneumatic artificial muscles is analyzed assuming the inextensibility of the sheathing braids and taking into account the stress field inside the rubber bladder, which is regarded as a Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic material. The end effects are simulated by heuristically profiling the meridian section. After estimating the constitutive parameters by traction tests on rubber specimens, the theoretical results are compared with experiments and a satisfactory accordance may be detected.
Brain responses to odor mixtures with sub-threshold components

Although most odorants we encounter in daily life are mixtures of several chemical substances, we still lack significant information on how we perceive and how the brain processes mixtures of odorants. We aimed to investigate the processing of odor mixtures using behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The odor mixture contained a target odor (ambroxan) in a concentration at which it could be perceived by half of the subjects (sensitive group); the other half could not perceive the odor (insensitive group). In line with previous findings on multi-component odor mixtures, both groups of subjects were not able to distinguish a complex odor mixture containing or not containing the target odor. However, sensitive subjects had stronger activations than insensitive subjects in chemosensory processing areas such as the insula when exposed to the mixture containing the target odor. Furthermore, the sensitive group exhibited larger brain activations when presented with the odor mixture containing the target odor compared to the odor mixture without the target odor; this difference was smaller, though present for the insensitive group. In conclusion, we show that a target odor presented within a mixture of odors can influence brain activations although on a psychophysical level subjects are not able to distinguish the mixture with and without the target. On the practical side these results suggest that the addition of a certain compound to a mixture of odors may not be detected on a cognitive level; however, this additional odor may significantly change the cerebral processing of this mixture. In this context, FMRI offers unique possibilities to look at the subliminal effects of odors.
First-Class Functions for First-Order Database Engines

We describe Query Defunctionalization which enables off-the-shelf first-order database engines to process queries over first-class functions. Support for first-class functions is characterized by the ability to treat functions like regular data items that can be constructed at query runtime, passed to or returned from other (higher-order) functions, assigned to variables, and stored in persistent data structures. Query defunctionalization is a non-invasive approach that transforms such function-centric queries into the data-centric operations implemented by common query processors. Experiments with XQuery and PL/SQL database systems demonstrate that first-order database engines can faithfully and efficiently support the expressive "functions as data" paradigm.
Modeling Distribution Options and Constraints for Smart Power Systems with Variable Renewable Energy 1

We propose a linear programming framework to model distribution network characteristics, and market clearing processes for flexible load and distributed energy resources providing reserve and reactive power compensation. We first show that the Nash equilibrium solution representing the interaction between utility and customers for demand response and distributed reserve transactions can be approximated by a linear program when the players (i.e. the customers) are numerous and tend to become infinitesimal. Then we provide a linear program to reveal the market prices, corresponding to the marginal cost for the utility. The goal in developing this model is to provide a new module for a regional long term model of development of smart energy systems. This module will then introduce in the modeling of energy transition, the new options and constraints that are provided by a penetration of renewables with the possibility of implementing distributed markets for demand response and system services permitted by the development of th cyber-physical layer. A case study of a potential smart urban distribution network in Europe is carried out and provides numerical results that illustrate the proposed framework.
A robust technique for text extraction in mixed-type binary documents

A crucial preprocessing stage in applications such as OCR is text extraction from mixed-type documents. The present work, in contrast to most until now, successfully faces the problem of varying text orientation and size. The technique first identifies marks using a contour following technique, followed by a PCA (principal component analyzer) which determines the direction of the main axis of each mark. Next, a nearest-neighbor technique is employed to find the shortest distances between marks, and a feature vector is formed based on calculated mark dimensions and distances, which is then fed into a SOFM (self organizing feature map) which defines homogeneous mark clusters. Resulting cluster weights and variances are used to form a set of fuzzy rules, and a fuzzy classification scheme identifies marks as characters or non-characters. The technique succeeds in correctly and quickly extracting text areas in a variety of mixed-type documents.
Towards Adaptive Blind Extraction of Post-Nonlinearly Mixed Signals

A novel approach which extends blind source extraction (BSE) of one or group of sources to the case of post-nonlinear mixtures is proposed. This is achieved by an adaptive algorithm in which the cost function jointly estimates the kurtosis and a measure of nonlinearity. The analysis of both the quantitative and qualitative performance is provided, and simulation results are presented which illustrate the validity of the proposed approach.
Process–outcome studies.

If the effectiveness of psychotherapy is to increase, we need to understand exactly what processes lead to better client outcomes. This is the core challenge and potential contribution of process–outcome research in clinical psychology. In this chapter, we provide a succinct overview of process–outcome as a research approach. Even 10 years ago it was estimated that more than 2,000 process–outcome studies had been published (Orlinsky, Ronnestad, & Willutzki, 2004). Several comprehensive reviews of this literature have already been published (e.g., Crits-Christoph, Gibbons, & Mukherjee, 2013; Gibbons et al., 2002; Orlinsky et al., 2004), so in this chapter we draw on these works and a number of other reviews. Our focus is primarily on psychotherapy, but readers will see that the same methods and principles are also applicable across the wider discipline of clinical psychology.
New similarity index based on the aggregation of membership functions through OWA operator

In the field of data analysis, the use of metrics is a classical way to assess pairwise similarity. Unfortunately the popular distances are often inoperative because of the noise, the multidimensionality and the heterogeneous nature of data. These drawbacks lead us to propose a similarity index based on fuzzy set theory. Each object of the dataset is described with the vector of its fuzzy attributes. Thanks to aggregation operators, the object is fuzzified by using the fuzzy attributes. Thus each object becomes a fuzzy subset within the dataset. The similarity of a reference object compared to another one is assessed through the membership function of the fuzzified reference object and an aggregation method using OWA operator.
2D kinematics of simulated disc merger remnants

We present a 2D kinematic analysis for a sample of simulated binary disc merger remnants with mass ratios 1:1 and 3:1. For the progenitor discs we used pure stellar models as well as models with 10 per cent of their mass in gas. A multitude of phenomena also observed in real galaxies are found in the simulations. These include misaligned rotation, embedded discs, gas rings, counter-rotating cores (CRCs) and kinematic misaligned discs. Using the 2D maps we illustrate projection effects and the change in properties of a merger remnant when gas is included in the merger. We find that kinematic peculiar subsystems are preferably formed in equal-mass mergers. Equal-mass collisionless remnants can show almost no rotation, regular rotation or strong kinematic misalignment. The inclusion of gas makes the remnants appear more round (1:1) and axisymmetric (3:1). CRCs are almost exclusively formed in equal-mass mergers with a dissipational component. 3:1 remnants show a much more regular structure. We quantify these properties by applying the kinemetric methods recently developed by Krajnovic et al. This work will help to understand observations of elliptical galaxies with integral field spectrographs, like SAURON.
Infrared Neural Stimulation: Influence of Stimulation Site Spacing and Repetition Rates on Heating

A model to simulate heating as a result of pulse repetitions during infrared neural stimulation (INS), with both single- and multiple-emitters is presented. This model allows the temperature increases from pulse trains rather than single pulses to be considered. The model predicts that using a stimulation rate of 250 Hz with typical laser parameters at a single stimulation site results in a temperature increase of 2.3°C. When multiple stimulation sites are used in analogy to cochlear implants, the temperature increases further depending upon the spacing between emitters. However, when the light is more localized at multiple stimulation sites the temperature increase is reduced.
Neural mechanisms of cognitive control / Mecanismos neurales de control cognitivo

Abstract Understanding the neural basis of cognitive control is a central issue in cognitive neuroscience, given its core importance for the flexibility that characterizes human behaviour. This review integrates the main findings in the field, underscoring the role of fronto-parietal regions in both proactive (representing tasks in anticipation to prepare the system for action) and reactive (detecting and resolving conflicts in processing) control. In addition, we review the dynamics of interaction between these areas and other brain regions in the range of slow frequencies. Finally, we highlight central questions in the field that have yet to be answered.
A two-element UWB-MIMO antenna with quad narrowband frequency rejection characteristics

A two-element ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna with quad narrowband frequency rejection characteristics is presented in this communication. A pair of L-shaped slots (LSSs) and a pair of square ring short stub loaded resonators (SRSSLRs) are utilized to produce four notched bands, including 3.1GHz-3.7GHz for WiMAX, 4.2GHz-4.7GHz for C-band, 5.6GHz-5.9 GHz for WLAN and 7.9GHz-8.3GHz for X-band applications. The proposed antenna consisting of two identical UWB antennas has a small size of 40×40×0.5 mm3. The simulated results show that it covers entire UWB band except the four frequency stop-bands with respect to VSWR.
Analyzing and Deconstructing Psychopathology

This review discusses two books. Philosophical Psychopathology is an anthology of articles by philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition who address themselves to a disparate assortment of topics—including schizophrenia, MPD, autism, blindsight, diagnostic classification and the problem of despair. In general, the articles display admirable conceptual rigor, but are often accompanied by a distant and rather abstract grasp of psychopathological phenomena. Detailed criticisms are offered of an interesting discussion, by the volume editors, of thought insertion in schizophrenia. Deconstructing Psychopathology, written by five British authors, offers a wide-ranging but somewhat predictable critique, from a politically and epistemologically radical perspective (influenced by Foucault, Derrida, etc.), of medical-model and other mainstream approaches to ‘mental illness’—a concept whose validity the authors deny and whose political effects they deplore.
Rethinking the Ocean’s Role in the Southern Oscillation

AbstractThe Southern Oscillation (SO) is usually described as the atmospheric component of the dynamically coupled El Nino–Southern Oscillation phenomenon. The contention in this work, however, is that dynamical coupling is not required to produce the SO. Simulations with atmospheric general circulation models that have varying degrees of coupling to the ocean are used to show that the SO emerges as a dominant mode of variability if the atmosphere and ocean are coupled only through heat and moisture fluxes. Herein this mode of variability is called the thermally coupled Walker (TCW) mode. It is a robust feature of simulations with atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs) coupled to simple ocean mixed layers. Despite the absence of interactive ocean dynamics in these simulations, the spatial patterns of sea level pressure, surface temperature, and precipitation variability associated with the TCW are remarkably realistic. This mode has a red spectrum indicating persistence on interannual to decadal ti.
Performance Comparison of Iterative Decoding Algorithm Using the Extrinsic Information Transfer Chart

The Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart is a powerful tool to design and optimize iterative systems, which visualizes the exchange of mutual information in an iterative system. Bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) is a bandwidth efficient transmission scheme. We study the performance and iterative behavior of the decoding algorithm for BICM-ID system with the tool of EXIT chart. Analysis and simulation results show that fixed-const-log-APP algorithm has the lowest decoding complexity in terms of number of iterations, max-log-APP follows it and log-APP has the highest decoding complexity, but their performance is in inverse order. With the increase of the channel signal-to-noise ratio, their performances come close to each other and it takes fewer iterations for them to get a low bit error rate performance.
REVIEW ARTICLE Zygotic embryogenesis versus somatic embryogenesis

This review will summarize molecular and genetic analyses aimed at identifying the mechanisms underlying the sequence of events during plant zygotic embryogenesis. These events are being studied in parallel with the histological and morphological analyses of somatic embryogenesis. The strength and limitations of somatic embryogenesis as a model system will be discussed briefly. The formation of the zygotic embryo has been described in some detail, but the molecular mechanisms controlling the differentiation of the various cell types are not understood. In recent years plant molecular and genetic studies have led to the identification and characterization of genes controlling the establishment of polarity, tissue differentiation and elaboration of patterns during embryo development. An investigation of the developmental basis of a number of mutant phenotypes has enabled the identification of gene activities promoting (1) asymmetric cell division and polarization leading to heterogeneous partitioning of the cytoplasmic determinants necessary for the initiation of embryogenesis (e.g. GNOM), (2) the determination of the apical-basal organization which is established independently of the differentiation of the tissues of the radial pattern elements (e.g. KNOLLE, FACKEL, ZWILLE), (3) the differentiation of meristems (e.g. SHOOT-MERISTEMLESS), and (4) the formation of a mature embryo characterized by the accumulation of LEA and storage proteins. The accumulation of these two types of proteins is controlled by ABA-dependent regulatory mechanisms as shown using both ABA-deficient and ABA-insensitive mutants (e.g. ABA, ABI3). Both types of embryogenesis have been studied by different techniques and common features have been identified between them. In spite of the relative difficulty of identifying the original cells involved in the developmental processes of somatic embryogenesis, common regulatory mechanisms are probably involved in the first stages up to the globular form. Signal molecules, such as growth regulators, have been shown to play a role during development of both types of embryos. The most promising method for identifying regulatory mechanisms responsible for the key events of embryogenesis will come from molecular and genetic analyses. The mutations already identified will shed light on the nature of the genes that affect developmental processes as well as elucidating the role of the various regulatory genes that control plant embryogenesis.
Choice of Contact Points during Multidigit Grasping: Effect of Predictability of Object Center of Mass Location

It has been shown that when subjects can predict object properties [e.g., weight or center of mass (CM)], fingertip forces are appropriately scaled before the object is lifted, i.e., before somatosensory feedback can be processed. However, it is not known whether subjects, in addition to these anticipatory force mechanisms, exploit the ability to choose where digits can be placed to facilitate object manipulation. We addressed this question by asking subjects to reach and grasp an object whose CM was changed to the left, center, or right of the object in either a predictable or unpredictable manner. The only task requirement was to minimize object roll during lift. We hypothesized that subjects would modulate contact points but only when object CM location could be predicted. As expected, object roll was significantly smaller in the predictable condition. This experimental condition was also associated with statistically distinct spatial distributions of contact points as a function of object CM location but primarily when large torques had to be counteracted, i.e., for right and left CM locations. In contrast, when subjects could not anticipate CM location, a “default” distribution of contact points was used, this being statistically indistinguishable from that adopted for the center CM location in the predictable condition. We conclude that choice of contact points is integrated with anticipatory force control mechanisms to facilitate object manipulation. These results demonstrate that planning of digit placement is an important component of grasp control.
Perspectives in measuring frame-dragging after the approval of the LARES mission

The recently approved LARES satellite, to be launched with a VEGA rocket at the end of 2008, will be used to measure the general relativistic gravitomagnetic Lense-Thirring effect in the gravitational field of the Earth by suitably combining its data with those of the existing LAGEOS and LAGEOS II satellites. An accuracy of about 1% is claimed. In this paper we will show that such an expectation may be optimistic because of the orbital configuration in which LARES will be launched (altitude h = 1200 km, inclination to the Earth's equator i = 71 deg, eccentricity e = 0) and of the impact of the mismodelling in the even zonal harmonic coefficients J_L, L = 2,4,6,. of the Newtonian multipolar expansion of the terrestrial gravitational potential. By using nine different global solutions for the static part of the geopotential obtained by five different international institutions, mainly from multi-year data records of the dedicated GRACE mission, it turns out that, according to computations up to degree L = 60 based on the well known Kaula's approach, the bias amounts to 25-35% with peaks of 45-50%. Such estimates may be optimistic because of numerical instability in computing the classical orbital perturbations on LARES for degree L > 60.