Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bradford’s Law and Related Statistical Patterns k,-..-L. <()-----,. _’l~urnr.wr IY

From time to time, I refer to " Brad-ford's law. " Those connected with information science usually recognize this concept. Actually called Bradford's law of scatten " ng, it describes how the literature on a particular subject is scattered or distributed in the journals. I Bradford's law is one of several statistical expressions which try to describe the workings of science by mathematical means. While each " law " applies to a different specific phenomenon, they all tend to demonstrate one thing—that a few (journals, scientists, etc.) account for the many (articles, citations, etc.). In practical terms, this means that there are diminishing returns in trying to do anything exhaustively. For example, in information retrieval we know that neither a library nor a service like Current Corrtents$' (CC@) can cost-effectively cover every journal that might be relevant to a given area. z One of the statistical tools related to Bradford's law is the Pratt index. This index purports to measure the degree to which papers on a given subject are concentrated within a journal collection . J Then there's Lotka's law, which describes the productivity distribution among scientists, as, for example, how many scientists will author ten or more papers. ~ These measures are important for anyone interested in the sociology of science, but they are also similar to many concepts found in other fields. For example, the frequency distribution predicted by Bradford's law so closely resembles Zipf's law of word frequency~ that it is often referred to as the Mav 12. " IYWJ Bradford-Zipf distribution. ~ The Pratt index is virtually identical to the Gini index ,T which is known to economists as the measure of wealth concentration among members of a society . U And the formula for Lotka's law resembles another economic paradigm—Pareto's law of income distribution.9 (p. 49) Several years ago, Derek Price proposed a unifying theory for all of these statistical " laws. " ~o His paper, which appeared in the Journal of the A men'can Society for information Science, contained a formula which describes equally well such diverse behaviors as article scatter, frequency of word use, and even an article's citation accumulation.don, has also described " an empirical law of social behavior which pervades all social activities. " 11 These unifying theories may eventually render it inappropriate to discuss the above laws individually. Nevertheless, much continues to be written about all of them. Although we do not …
Toward a 3D video format for auto-stereoscopic displays

There has been increased momentum recently in the production of 3D content for cinema applications; for the most part, this has been limited to stereo content. There are also a variety of display technologies on the market that support 3DTV, each offering a different viewing experience and having different input requirements. More specifically, stereoscopic displays support stereo content and require glasses, while auto-stereoscopic displays avoid the need for glasses by rendering view-dependent stereo pairs for a multitude of viewing angles. To realize high quality auto-stereoscopic displays, multiple views of the video must either be provided as input to the display, or these views must be created locally at the display. The former approach has difficulties in that the production environment is typically limited to stereo, and transmission bandwidth for a large number of views is not likely to be available. This paper discusses an emerging 3D data format that enables the latter approach to be realized. A new framework for efficiently representing a 3D scene and enabling the reconstruction of an arbitrarily large number of views prior to rendering is introduced. Several design challenges are also highlighted through experimental results.
Decentralized Robust Control Approach for Coordinated Maneuvering of Vehicles in Platoons

In this paper, a decentralized sliding-mode control approach is applied to the control tasks of vehicles in platoons. Using the well-known bicycle model, a robust nonlinear observer is introduced to facilitate the controller design, which needs full-state measurements. The vehicles in platoons can be treated as an interconnected system with a special form. Observer gain and controller gain are properly designed. In addition, appropriate linear matrix inequality (LMI) stability conditions by the Lyapunov method are derived to ensure the stability of the system. The main advantages can be summarized as follows: (1) The linear approximation of the nonlinear vehicle model enables various advanced robust control possibilities. (2) The proposed robust control approach with the nonlinear observer ensures the convergence of the whole interconnected system, given that the system is operated within the stable region of linearization. (3) Stability conditions in the form of LMIs for both observer and controller are rigorously derived. Finally, simulation results for three identical vehicles based on the relative bicycle model are demonstrated to show the performance of the approach.
PHASE I BENCHMARK CONTROL PROBLEM FOR SEISMIC RESPONSE OF CABLE-STAYED BRIDGES

This paper presents the problem definition for the first generation of benchmark structural control problems for cable-stayed bridges. The benchmark problem is based on the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge that is currently under construction in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Construction of the bridge is expected to be completed in 2003. The goal of this study is to provide a testbed for the development of strategies for the control of cable-stayed bridges. Based on detailed drawings, a three-dimensional evaluation model has been developed to represent the complex behavior of the full scale benchmark bridge. The linear evaluation model is developed using the equations of motion generated around the deformed equilibrium position. Evaluation criteria are selected that are consistent with the goals of seismic response control of a cable-stayed bridge. Control constraints ensure that the results are representative of a control implementation on the physical structure. Each participant in this benchmark study is given.
A spectral conversion approach to the iterative Wiener filter for speech enhancement

The iterative Wiener filter (IWF) for speech enhancement in additive noise is an effective and simple algorithm to implement. One of its main disadvantages is the lack of proper criteria for convergence, which has been shown to introduce severe degradation to the estimated clean signal. Here, an improvement of the IWF algorithm is proposed, when additional information is available for the signal to be enhanced. If a small amount of clean speech data is available, spectral conversion techniques can be applied for estimating the clean short-term spectral envelope of the speech signal from the noisy signal, with significant noise reduction. Our results show an average improvement compared to the original IWF that can reach 2 dB in the segmental output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in low input SNRs, which is perceptually significant.
Recovering Baseline and Orientation from Essential Matrix

Certain approaches to the problem of relative orientation in binocular stereo (as well as long-range motion vision) lead to an encoding of the baseline (translation) and orientation (rotation) in a single 3 × 3 matrix called the “essential” matrix. The essential matrix is defined by E = BR, where B is the skew-symmetric matrix that satisfies Bv = b × v for any vector v, with b being the baseline and R the orientation. Shown here is a simple method for recovering the two solutions for the baseline and the orientation from a given essential matrix using elementary matrix operations. The two solutions for the baseline b can be obtained from the equality bbT = 1 2 Trace(EET )I− EET , where I is the 3× 3 identity matrix. The two solutions for the orientation can be found using (b · b)R = Cofactors(E)T − BE, where Cofactors(E) is the matrix of cofactors of E. There is no need to perform a singular value decomposition, to transform coordinates, or to use circular functions, and it is easy to see that there are exactly two solutions given a particular essential matrix. If the sign of E is reversed, an additional pair of solutions is obtained that are related the two already found in a simple fashion. This helps shed some light on the question of how many solutions a given relative orientation problem can have. 1. Coplanarity Condition in Relative Orientation Relative orientation is the well-known photogrammetric problem of recovering the position and orientation of one camera relative to another from five or more pairs of corresponding ray directions [Zeller 52] [Ghosh 72] [Slama et al. 80] [Wolf 83] [Horn 86, 87b]. Relative orientation has to be determined before binocular stereo information can be used to recover
Iterative PIC Detection and Channel Estimation for Satellite DS-CDMA Communications

This paper presents a Turbo Multiuser Detector for Turbo-Coded DS-CDMA systems, based on the utilization of a PIC and a bank of turbo decoders, in which the PIC performs interference cancellation after each constituent decoder of the turbo decoding scheme. Moreover, the soft output of turbo decoders are used iteratively to improve the updating step of the channel parameter estimation which is formally equivalent to one step of the expection-maximization algorithm. By means of computer simulations, we will show that the proposed receiver achieves performance comparable with systems which suppose perfect channel parameters knowledge for medium to high system loads, in AWGN channel. These results are obtained also in satellite channel, for different values of the elevation angle.
LGBT Demographics: Comparisons among population-based surveys

Author(s): Gates, Gary J | Abstract: This report uses four large, national, population-based surveys to consider the ways in which LGBT populations are demographically similar to or distinct from their non-LGBT counterparts in the United States. Comparisons of demographic characteristics are made among the surveys and, when possible, among sexual orientation identities to consider differences between those who identify as lesbian or gay and those who identify as bisexual (none of the surveys allow for separate identification of transgender individuals). Estimates of the percent of adults who identified as LGB or LGBT varied across surveys from between 2.2% and 4.0%, implying that between 5.2 million and 9.5 million individuals aged 18 and older are LGBT. Despite this variation in prevalence estimates, the analyzed surveys show many demographic similarities among respondents who choose to identify as LGB or LGBT. LGBT identity was more common among younger populations. LGBT populations generally shared the racial and ethnic characteristics of non-LGBT individuals. Adults were more likely to identify as LGBT in the Northeast and West than in the South and Midwest.
Improved differential phase spectrum processing for formant tracking

This study presents an improved version of our previously introduced formant tracking algorithm. The algorithm is based on processing the negative derivative of the argument of the chirp-z transform (termed as the differential phase spectrum) of a given speech signal. No modeling is included in the procedure but only peak picking on differential phase spectrum. We discuss the effects of roots of z-transform to differential phase spectrum and the need to ensure that all zeros are at some distance from the circle where chirp-z transform is computed. For that, we include an additional zero-decomposition step in our previously presented algorithm to improve its robustness. The final version of the algorithm is tested for analysis of synthetic speech and real speech signals and compared to two other formant tracking systems.
Interrupt-based feedback control over a shared communication medium

We investigate the simultaneous stabilization of a group of linear systems whose feedback loops are closed over an idealized shared medium. The capacity of that medium is constrained so that only a limited number of controller-plant connections can be accommodated at any one time. We introduce a feedback communication policy - inspired by previous work on queuing systems and real-time scheduling - for deciding which system(s) should be admitted into the network and for how long. The use of feedback in making communication decisions results in a set of autonomous dynamical systems which are coupled to one another due to the presence of communication constraints. We give conditions for the stability of the collection under the proposed communication policy and present simulation results that illustrate our ideas.
Live assessment of beat tracking for robot audition

In this paper we propose the integration of an online audio beat tracking system into the general framework of robot audition, to enable its application in musically-interactive robotic scenarios. To this purpose, we introduced a staterecovery mechanism into our beat tracking algorithm, for handling continuous musical stimuli, and applied different multi-channel preprocessing algorithms (e.g., beamforming, ego noise suppression) to enhance noisy auditory signals lively captured in a real environment. We assessed and compared the robustness of our audio beat tracker through a set of experimental setups, under different live acoustic conditions of incremental complexity. These included the presence of continuous musical stimuli, built of a set of concatenated musical pieces; the presence of noises of different natures (e.g., robot motion, speech); and the simultaneous processing of different audio sources on-the-fly, for music and speech. We successfully tackled all these challenging acoustic conditions and improved the beat tracking accuracy and reaction time to music transitions while simultaneously achieving robust automatic speech recognition.
Increase in tracheal investment with beetle size supports hypothesis of oxygen limitation on insect gigantism

Recent studies have suggested that Paleozoic hyperoxia enabled animal gigantism, and the subsequent hypoxia drove a reduction in animal size. This evolutionary hypothesis depends on the argument that gas exchange in many invertebrates and skin-breathing vertebrates becomes compromised at large sizes because of distance effects on diffusion. In contrast to vertebrates, which use respiratory and circulatory systems in series, gas exchange in insects is almost exclusively determined by the tracheal system, providing a particularly suitable model to investigate possible limitations of oxygen delivery on size. In this study, we used synchrotron x-ray phase–contrast imaging to visualize the tracheal system and quantify its dimensions in four species of darkling beetles varying in mass by 3 orders of magnitude. We document that, in striking contrast to the pattern observed in vertebrates, larger insects devote a greater fraction of their body to the respiratory system, as tracheal volume scaled with mass1.29. The trend is greatest in the legs; the cross-sectional area of the trachea penetrating the leg orifice scaled with mass1.02, whereas the cross-sectional area of the leg orifice scaled with mass0.77. These trends suggest the space available for tracheae within the leg may ultimately limit the maximum size of extant beetles. Because the size of the tracheal system can be reduced when oxygen supply is increased, hyperoxia, as occurred during late Carboniferous and early Permian, may have facilitated the evolution of giant insects by allowing limbs to reach larger sizes before the tracheal system became limited by spatial constraints.
Performance of A Burst-Frame-Based CSMA / CA Protocol for High Data Rate Ad Hoc Networks : Unsaturated Throughput Analysis

In high data rate wireless ad hoc networks, the throughput of MAC protocols is significantly limited by the overhead such as control messages. To improve the throughput in high data rate networks, we recently proposed [1] a general framework for MAC protocols based on the well-known CSMA/CA. The key idea of this framework is to aggregate multiple upper-layer packets into a larger burst frame at the MAC layer, thus the overhead can be substantially reduced. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the unsaturated throughput performance of a burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol, which is within the framework. The uniqueness of our analytical model is that we consider both the unsaturated traffic condition and a queueing system with bulk service, in which the burst service time depends on the number of packets in the burst and depends on the channel access condition. The This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under Faculty Early Career Development Award ANI-0093241. The authors are with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL-32611, USA. Email: lukejie@ieee.org, jfwang@ufl.edu, {wu, fang}@ece.ufl.edu. Please direct all correspondence to Prof. Dapeng Wu. Tel. (352) 392-4954, Fax (352) 392-0044, URL: http://www.wu. ece.ufl.edu, Email: wu@ece.ufl.edu.
On periodic bilinear processes

RESUME. ABSTRACT. This paper analyses the probabilistic structure of a subclass of periodic bilinear time series. The proposed class of stochastic processes, of which the linear model is a special case, is based on a generalized autoregressive representation. Under general and tractable assumptions, we examine the periodic stationarity, the existence of higher order moments and the geometric ergodicity of the periodic bilinear models.
How to Predict the Consequences of a Tick Value Change? Evidence from the Tokyo Stock Exchange Pilot Program

The tick value is a crucial component of market design and is often considered the most suitable tool to mitigate the effects of high frequency trading. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the approach introduced in Dayri and Rosenbaum (2015) allows for an ex ante assessment of the consequences of a tick value change on the microstructure of an asset. To that purpose, we analyze the pilot program on tick value modifications started in 2014 by the Tokyo Stock Exchange in light of this methodology. We focus on forecasting the future cost of market and limit orders after a tick value change and show that our predictions are very accurate. Furthermore, for each asset involved in the pilot program, we are able to define (ex ante) an optimal tick value. This enables us to classify the stocks according to the relevance of their tick value, before and after its modification.
A lysosome-centered view of nutrient homeostasis

ABSTRACT Lysosomes are highly acidic cellular organelles traditionally viewed as sacs of enzymes involved in digesting extracellular or intracellular macromolecules for the regeneration of basic building blocks, cellular housekeeping, or pathogen degradation. Bound by a single lipid bilayer, lysosomes receive their substrates by fusing with endosomes or autophagosomes, or through specialized translocation mechanisms such as chaperone-mediated autophagy or microautophagy. Lysosomes degrade their substrates using up to 60 different soluble hydrolases and release their products either to the cytosol through poorly defined exporting and efflux mechanisms or to the extracellular space by fusing with the plasma membrane. However, it is becoming evident that the role of the lysosome in nutrient homeostasis goes beyond the disposal of waste or the recycling of building blocks. The lysosome is emerging as a signaling hub that can integrate and relay external and internal nutritional information to promote cellular and organismal homeostasis, as well as a major contributor to the processing of energy-dense molecules like glycogen and triglycerides. Here we describe the current knowledge of the nutrient signaling pathways governing lysosomal function, the role of the lysosome in nutrient mobilization, and how lysosomes signal other organelles, distant tissues, and even themselves to ensure energy homeostasis in spite of fluctuations in energy intake. At the same time, we highlight the value of genomics approaches to the past and future discoveries of how the lysosome simultaneously executes and controls cellular homeostasis.
Analyzing efficiency of vegetable production in Benin

The objective of this research is to investigate the production technology and efficiency of vegetable production and marketing at the farm level in Benin. Using recent advances in cross sectional efficiency analysis, we analyze two samples of vegetable producers following different perspectives. First, the empirical results show that farms’ inefficiency in lowland farming systems is the most diverse. Second, the results suggest that vegetable producers are more inefficient with respect to marketing than production and that marketing inefficiency is affected by the type of marketing arrangements. Third, the analysis shows that vegetable producers have an incentive for specialization and that the degree of specialization has a positive effect on technical efficiency. Finally, the results on pesticide use provide evidence that pesticides are overused while there is no evidence of technical interdependence between pesticides and productive inputs
A key-dependent secure image hashing scheme by using Radon transform

The perceptual image hashing is an emerging technique which can be used in image authentication and content-based image retrieval. Recently, several image hashing schemes based on Radon transform are proposed for image authentication and retrieval. These schemes have no random information to strengthen the security with image hashing. In this paper, we propose a simple key-based secure image hashing scheme by using radon transform and 1-D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Particularly, we introduce a randomization on Radon transform and make the image hash more secure and more robust. Moreover, the discriminative capability is also confirmed in our experimental results.
Effects of anesthesia on fluid volume kinetics after infusion of colloid solution during blood donation

Background The fluid kinetics of intravenously infused colloid during inhalation anesthesia and hemorrhage have not been investigated. We therefore assessed fluid space changes during infusion of hydroxyethyl starch solution after hemorrhage in conscious and desflurane-anesthetized individuals. Methods Following the donation of 400 ml of blood, 500 ml of hydroxyethyl starch solution was infused over 20 minutes into wakeful and desflurane-anesthetized volunteers. Blood was repeatedly sampled to measure hemoglobin concentration, a marker of plasma dilution, and fluid kinetic analysis was performed to evaluate changes in fluid space. Results Using a fluid kinetic model, we found that the mean volume of fluid space was 7,724 ± 1,788 ml in wakeful volunteers and 6,818 ± 4,221 ml in anesthetized volunteers, and the elimination rate constants were 7.1 ± 3.5 ml/min and 19.4 ± 4.6 ml/min, respectively. Conclusions Infusion of colloid after mild hemorrhage resulted in similar expansions of plasma volume in desflurane-anesthetized and conscious individuals. During anesthesia, however, the expansion of plasma volume by colloid was decreased and of shorter duration than observed in conscious patients.