Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Improved Current Control Strategy for a Grid-Connected Inverter under Distorted Grid Conditions

This paper presents an improved current control strategy for a three-phase grid-connected inverter under distorted grid conditions. The main challenge associated with the grid-connected inverter in distributed generation (DG) systems is to maintain the harmonic contents in output current below the specified values even when the grid is subject to uncertain disturbances such as harmonic distortion. To overcome such a challenge, an improved current control scheme is proposed for a grid-connected inverter, in which the fundamental and harmonic currents are independently controlled by a proportional-integral (PI) decoupling controller and a predictive basis controller, respectively. The controller design approach is based on the model decomposition method, where the measured inverter currents and grid voltages are divided into the fundamental and harmonic components by means of moving average filters (MAFs). Moreover, to detect the angular displacement and angular frequency with better accuracy, even in the presence of the grid disturbance, the MAF is also introduced to implement an enhanced phase-lock loop (PLL) structure. Theoretical analyses as well as comparative simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control scheme can effectively compensate the uncertainties caused by the grid voltages with fast transient response. To validate the feasibility of the proposed scheme, the whole control algorithms are implemented on 2 kVA three-phase grid-connected inverter system using 32-bit floating-point DSP TMS320F28335. As a result, the proposed scheme is an attractive way to control a grid-connected inverter under adverse grid conditions.
Two-Step Spectral Clustering Controlled Islanding Algorithm

Controlled islanding is an active and effective way of avoiding catastrophic wide area blackouts. It is usually considered as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem. However, the combinatorial explosion of the solution space that occurs for large power systems increases the complexity of solving it. This paper proposes a two-step controlled islanding algorithm that uses spectral clustering to find a suitable islanding solution for preventing the initiation of wide area blackouts by un-damped electromechanical oscillations. The objective function used in this controlled islanding algorithm is the minimal power-flow disruption. The sole constraint applied to this solution is related to generator coherency. In the first step of the algorithm, the generator nodes are grouped using normalized spectral clustering, based on their dynamic models, to produce groups of coherent generators. In the second step of the algorithm, the islanding solution that provides the minimum power-flow disruption while satisfying the constraint of coherent generator groups is determined by grouping all nodes using constrained spectral clustering. Simulation results, obtained using the IEEE 9-, 39-, and 118-bus test systems, show that the proposed algorithm is computationally efficient when solving the controlled islanding problem, particularly in the case of a large power system.
On the role of subspace zeros in retrospective cost adaptive control of non-square plants

We consider adaptive control of non-square plants, that is, plants that have an unequal number of inputs and outputs. In particular, we focus on retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC), which is a direct, discrete-time adaptive control algorithm that is applicable to stabilisation, command following, disturbance rejection, and model reference control problems. Previous studies on RCAC have focused on control of square plants. In the square case, RCAC requires knowledge of the first non-zero Markov parameter and the non-minimum-phase (NMP) transmission zeros of the plant, if any. No additional information about the plant or the exogenous signals need be known. The goal of the present paper is to consider RCAC for non-square plants. Unlike the square case, we show that the assumption that the non-square plant is minimum phase does not guarantee closed-loop stability and signal boundedness. The main purpose of this paper is to establish the existence of time-invariant input and output subspaces corresponding to the adaptive controller. In particular, we show that RCAC implicitly squares down non-square plants through pre-/post-compensation of the non-square plant with a constant matrix. We show that, for wide plants, the control input generated by RCAC lies in a time-invariant ‘input subspace’, which is equivalent to pre-compensating the plant with a constant matrix. On the other hand, for tall plants, we show that the controller update is driven by the output of the plant post-compensated with a constant matrix. Accordingly, in either case, signal boundedness properties of the closed-loop system are determined by the transmission zeros of the squared system, which we call the ‘subspace zeros’. To deal with NMP subspace zeros, we introduce a robustness modification, which prevents RCAC from cancelling the NMP subspace zeros.
A Framework for Multi-Domain Sketch Recognition

People use sketches to express and record their ideas in many domains, including mechanical engineering, software design, and information architecture. Unfortunately, most computer programs cannot interpret free-hand sketches; designers transfer their sketches into computer design tools through menu-based interfaces. The few existing sketch recognition systems either tightly constrain the user’s drawing style or are fragile and difficult to construct. In previous work we found that domain knowledge can aid recognition. Here we present an architecture to support the development of robust recognition systems across multiple domains. Our architecture maintains a separation between low-level shape information and high-level domain-specific context information, but uses the two sources of information together to improve recognition accuracy.
Impact of device scaling and material composition on the soft error rates in avionic systems

The soft error rate (SER) of CMOS device models due to atmospheric neutrons for technologies between 1992 and 2011 were computed at various altitudes and latitudes. Model predictions of the SER for 350 and 600 nm CMOS representative of 1992 and 1994 were 1.8 and 3 upsets per day. Predictions of 9.8 and 11.6 upsets per day were made for 100 and 50 nm CMOS devices representing the technologies of 2005 and 2011. These observations taken together indicated that the SER slowly increased with decreasing feature size at a rate less than linear for sizes below 100 nm.
The Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor PAI-1 Controls in Vivo Tumor Vascularization by Interaction with Proteases, Not Vitronectin

The plasminogen (Plg)/plasminogen activator (PA) system plays a key role in cancer progression, presumably via mediating extracellular matrix degradation and tumor cell migration. Consequently, urokinase-type PA (uPA)/plasmin antagonists are currently being developed for suppression of tumor growth and angiogenesis. Paradoxically, however, high levels of PA inhibitor 1 (PAI-1) are predictive of a poor prognosis for survival of patients with cancer. We demonstrated previously that PAI-1 promoted tumor angiogenesis, but by an unresolved mechanism. We anticipated that PAI-1 facilitated endothelial cell migration via its known interaction with vitronectin (VN) and integrins. However, using adenoviral gene transfer of PAI-1 mutants, we observed that PAI-1 promoted tumor angiogenesis, not by interacting with VN, but rather by inhibiting proteolytic activity, suggesting that excessive plasmin proteolysis prevents assembly of tumor vessels. Single deficiency of uPA, tissue-type PA (tPA), uPA receptor, or VN, as well as combined deficiencies of uPA and tPA did not impair tumor angiogenesis, whereas lack of Plg reduced it. Overall, these data indicate that plasmin proteolysis, even though essential, must be tightly controlled during tumor angiogenesis, probably to allow vessel stabilization and maturation. These data provide insights into the clinical paradox whereby PAI-1 promotes tumor progression and warrant against the uncontrolled use of uPA/plasmin antagonists as tumor angiogenesis inhibitors.
International Journal of Molecular Sciences the Use of Gene Modification and Advanced Molecular Structure Analyses towards Improving Alfalfa Forage

Alfalfa is one of the most important legume forage crops in the world. In spite of its agronomic and nutritive advantages, alfalfa has some limitations in the usage of pasture forage and hay supplement. High rapid degradation of protein in alfalfa poses a risk of rumen bloat to ruminants which could cause huge economic losses for farmers. Coupled with the relatively high lignin content, which impedes the degradation of carbohydrate in rumen, alfalfa has unbalanced and asynchronous degradation ratio of nitrogen to carbohydrate (N/CHO) in rumen. Genetic engineering approaches have been used to manipulate the expression of genes involved in important metabolic pathways for the purpose of improving the nutritive value, forage yield, and the ability to resist abiotic stress. Such gene modification could bring molecular structural changes in alfalfa that are detectable by advanced structural analytical techniques. These structural analyses have been employed in assessing alfalfa forage characteristics, allowing for rapid, convenient and cost-effective analysis of alfalfa forage quality. In this article, we review two major obstacles facing alfalfa utilization, namely poor protein utilization and relatively high lignin content, and highlight genetic studies that were performed to overcome these drawbacks, as well as to introduce other improvements to alfalfa quality. We also review the use of advanced molecular structural analysis in the assessment of alfalfa forage for its potential usage in quality selection in alfalfa breeding.
Effects of dietary copper on production and egg cholesterol content in laying hens

1. This experiment was carried out to determine the effects of diets supplemented with different amounts of copper on egg production, food intake, food conversion ratio, egg weight, damaged egg ratio, specific gravity, mortality and cholesterol concentration in yolk. The experiment lasted 90 d and 400 Hisex-Brown hens, aged 27 weeks at the start of the study, were used. 2. There were no statistically significant effects of supplementary copper on egg production, food intake or food conversion efficiency. 3. There were no statistically significant differences between the groups in terms of damaged eggs, egg weight, specific gravity and live weight. 4. At the end of the experiment, the lowest yolk cholesterol concentrations were obtained in the 150 kg/kg copper group and the greatest concentrations were in the control group. 5. Consequently, the use of supplementary copper to provide 150 kg/kg in poultry diets was concluded to decrease yolk cholesterol concentrations without any effect on production performance.
PRN Medication for Psychiatric Inpatients *

Little is known about the extent of the use of prn psychotropic medication in psychiatric inpatient units. A survey of the prn prescription and administration of psychotropic drugs in a psychiatric teaching hospital revealed that a large number of inpatients were prescribed and administered such drugs on a prn basis. Although 50% of the prescriptions were never administered, only 25% were actively discontinued by physicians. A diagnosis of personality disorder was the factor most frequently associated with the rate of prn prescriptions and of administrations. A large number of prn prescriptions had no instructions for indications, minimum time spacing between doses or maximum daily dosage. It is suggested that hospitals monitor the prn use of psychotropic medications in their inpatient units, and explore the reasons for such use. Psychotropic drug use on a prn basis should preferably be reserved for emergencies, and the instructions of prn prescriptions should be clear and detailed.
Effect of Maize Lines on Larval Fitness Costs of Cry1F Resistance in the European Corn Borer (Lepidoptera: Crambidae)

ABSTRACT Crops producing insecticidal toxins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) are widely planted and enable management of key insect pests while reducing the use of conventional insecticides. However, the evolution of Bt resistance could diminish these benefits. Fitness costs of Bt resistance occur in the absence of Bt toxin when individuals with resistance alleles show a reduction in fitness relative to susceptible individuals, and they can delay the evolution of resistance. Ecological factors including host-plant variety can affect the magnitude of fitness costs, and consequently, the degree to which fitness costs delay resistance. In this study, we measured fitness costs of resistance to Bt toxin Cry1F in the European corn borer Ostrinia nubilalis Hübner (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) using Cry1F-resistant and Cry1F-susceptible strains sharing a similar genetic background. Fitness costs were tested on three lines of maize, Zea mays L. , by measuring larval survival and development in two greenhouse experiments with plants in either the vegetative or reproductive stage. Both experiments showed that maize line significantly affected larval survival and developmental rate. However, larval survival, mass, and developmental rate did not differ between the Cry1F-resistant and susceptible strains, indicating a lack of fitness costs of resistance to Cry1F for the larval fitness components measured in this experiment. Future experiments should test for fitness costs of Cry1F resistance affecting survival to adulthood and adult life-history parameters.
BOLD fMRI identifies limbic, paralimbic, and cerebellar activation during air hunger.

Air hunger (uncomfortable urge to breathe) is a component of dyspnea (shortness of breath). Three human H(2)(15)O positron emission tomography (PET) studies have identified activation of phylogenetically ancient structures in limbic and paralimbic regions during dyspnea. Other studies have shown activation of these structures during other sensations that alert the organism to urgent homeostatic imbalance: pain, thirst, and hunger for food. We employed blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine activation during air hunger. fMRI conferred several advantages over PET: enhanced signal-to-noise, greater spatial resolution, and lack of ionizing radiation, enabling a greater number of trials in each subject. Six healthy men and women were mechanically ventilated at 12-14 breaths/min. The primary experiment was conducted at mean end-tidal PCO(2) of 41 Torr. Moderate to severe air hunger was evoked during 42-s epochs of lower tidal volume (mean = 0.75 L). Subjects described the sensation as "like breath-hold," "urge to breathe," and "starved for air. " In the baseline condition, air hunger was consistently relieved by epochs of higher tidal volume (mean = 1.47 L). A control experiment in the same subjects under a background of mild hypocapnia (mean end-tidal PCO(2) = 33 Torr) employed similar tidal volumes but did not evoke air hunger, controlling for stimulus variables not related to dyspnea. During each experiment, we maintained constant end-tidal PCO(2) and PO(2) to avoid systematic changes in global cerebral blood flow. Whole-brain images were acquired every 5 s (T2*, 56 slices, voxel resolution 3 x 3 x 3 mm). Activations associated with air hunger were determined using voxel-based interaction analysis of covariance that compared data between primary and control experiments (SPM99). We detected activations not seen in the earlier PET study using a similar air hunger stimulus (Banzett et al. 2000). Limbic and paralimbic loci activated in the present study were within anterior insula (seen in all 3 published studies of dyspnea), anterior cingulate, operculum, cerebellum, amygdala, thalamus, and basal ganglia. Elements of frontoparietal attentional networks were also identified. The consistency of anterior insular activation across subjects in this study and across published studies suggests that the insula is essential to dyspnea perception, although present data suggest that the insula acts in concert with a larger neural network.
Heterogeneity of health disparities among African American, Hispanic, and Asian American women: unrecognized influences of sexual orientation.

OBJECTIVES This study compared health indicators among self-identified lesbians/bisexual women and heterosexual women residing in Los Angeles County. METHODS Respondents were English-speaking Hispanic, African American, and Asian American women. Health status, behavioral risks, access barriers, and indicators of health care were assessed. RESULTS Prevalence rates of chronic health conditions were similar among women in the 3 racial/ethnic groups. However, lesbians and bisexual women evidenced higher behavioral risks and lower rates of preventive care than heterosexual women. CONCLUSIONS Among racial/ethnic minority women, minority sexual orientation is associated with increased health risks. The effects of sexual minority status need to be considered in addressing health disparities affecting this population.
The Social Cost of Near-Rational Investment

We show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient, and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically reduce welfare. We solve a macroeconomic model in which information about fundamentals is dispersed and households make small, correlated errors when forming expectations about future productivity. As information aggregates in the market, these errors amplify and crowd out the information content of stock prices. When prices reflect less information, the conditional variance of stock returns rises, causing an increase in uncertainty and costly distortions in consumption, capital accumulation, and labor supply.
Task-driven Visual Saliency and Attention-based Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering (VQA) has witnessed great progress since May, 2015 as a classic problem unifying visual and textual data into a system. Many enlightening VQA works explore deep into the image and question encodings and fusing methods, of which attention is the most effective and infusive mechanism. Current attention based methods focus on adequate fusion of visual and textual features, but lack the attention to where people focus to ask questions about the image. Traditional attention based methods attach a single value to the feature at each spatial location, which losses many useful information. To remedy these problems, we propose a general method to perform saliency-like pre-selection on overlapped region features by the interrelation of bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and use a novel element-wise multiplication based attention method to capture more competent correlation information between visual and textual features. We conduct experiments on the large-scale COCO-VQA dataset and analyze the effectiveness of our model demonstrated by strong empirical results.
Intelligent Actor Mobility with Event Tracking in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

A wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN) refers to a heterogeneous network primarily composed of sensor and actor nodes. A sensor is the part of the wireless network to sense the event to be occurred in the network. While actor is the entity that performs the networking related functionalities like receiving, transmitting and processing the data. The idea of mobile actor is the new concept in the WSANs research, which helps to take the most efficient action and provides energy and time efficient data collection. Two intelligent models were introduced previously, the static mobility model which uses the cluster information of a sparsely connected networks and another is dynamic mobility model designed on the basis of statistical model for the fixed duration events. Therefore, transmission of event detection information to the actors is one of the major concerns of WSANs. So, the Coordination and Communication between the actors must be managed properly. This paper addresses the actor-actor coordination for the timely responses to the events reported by the sensors in sparsely connected network of WSAN. Furthermore, this paper provides an event tracking algorithm to target the maximum tracked events.
Association Between Genetic Variants on Chromosome 15q25 Locus and Objective Measures of Tobacco Exposure

Background Two single-nucleotide polymorphisms, rs1051730 and rs16969968, located within the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor gene cluster on chromosome 15q25 locus, are associated with heaviness of smoking, risk for lung cancer, and other smoking-related health outcomes. Previous studies have typically relied on self-reported smoking behavior, which may not fully capture interindividual variation in tobacco exposure. Methods We investigated the association of rs1051730 and rs16969968 genotype (referred to as rs1051730–rs16969968, because these are in perfect linkage disequilibrium and interchangeable) with both self-reported daily cigarette consumption and biochemically measured plasma or serum cotinine levels among cigarette smokers. Summary estimates and descriptive statistical data for 12 364 subjects were obtained from six independent studies, and 2932 smokers were included in the analyses. Linear regression was used to calculate the per-allele association of rs1051730–rs16969968 genotype with cigarette consumption and cotinine levels in current smokers for each study. Meta-analysis of per-allele associations was conducted using a random effects method. The likely resulting association between genotype and lung cancer risk was assessed using published data on the association between cotinine levels and lung cancer risk. All statistical tests were two-sided. Results Pooled per-allele associations showed that current smokers with one or two copies of the rs1051730–rs16969968 risk allele had increased self-reported cigarette consumption (mean increase in unadjusted number of cigarettes per day per allele = 1.0 cigarette, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.57 to 1.43 cigarettes, P = 5.22 × 10−6) and cotinine levels (mean increase in unadjusted cotinine levels per allele = 138.72 nmol/L, 95% CI = 97.91 to 179.53 nmol/L, P = 2.71 × 10−11). The increase in cotinine levels indicated an increased risk of lung cancer with each additional copy of the rs1051730–rs16969968 risk allele (per-allele odds ratio = 1.31, 95% CI = 1.21 to 1.42). Conclusions Our data show a stronger association of rs1051730–rs16969968 genotype with objective measures of tobacco exposure compared with self-reported cigarette consumption. The association of these variants with lung cancer risk is likely to be mediated largely, if not wholly, via tobacco exposure.