Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WHAT KIND OF IRREDUCIBILITY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT : DID VARELA SOLVE THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS ?

In the article I will defend the view that cognitive science needs to use firstand second-person methods more systematically, as part of everyday research practice, if it wants to understand the human mind in its full scope. Neurophenomenological programme proposed by Varela as a remedy for the hard problem of consciousness (i.e. the problem of experience) does not solve it on the ontological level. Nevertheless, it represents a good starting point of how to tackle the phenomenon of experience in a more systematic, methodologically sound way. On the other hand, Varela’s criterion of phenomenological reduction as a necessary condition for systematic investigation of experience is too strong. Regardless of that and some other problems that research of experience faces (e.g. the problem of training, the question of what kind of participants we want to study), it is becoming clear that investigating experience seriously – from firstand second-person perspective – is a necessary step cognitive science must take. This holds especially when researching phenomena that involve consciousness and/or where differentiation between conscious and unconscious processing is crucial. Furthermore, gathering experiential data is essential for interpreting experimental results gained purely by quantitative methods – especially when we are implicitly or explicitly referring to experience in our conclusions and interpretations. To support these claims some examples from the broader area of decision making will be given (the effect of deliberation-without-attention, cognitive reflection test).
Spondylolisthesis: a pictorial review.

Spondylolisthesis is often poorly understood by clinicians and radiologists. Incorrectly perceived as being chiefly related to pars defects, in reality spondylolisthesis has multiple aetiologies with differing clinical implications. This article addresses the salient radiological findings in the assessment of spondylolisthesis.
Shear Capacity of High-Strength Concrete Beams Reinforced with FRP Bars

This paper reports experimental data on the behavior and shear strength of high-strength concrete slender beams reinforced with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bars. Shear tests were conducted on six large-scale reinforced concrete beams without stirrups using high-strength concrete (f' c = 65 MPa) along with three beams using normal-strength concrete (f' c = 35 MPa). The beams measured 3250 mm long, 250 mm wide, and 400 mm deep, and were tested in four-point bending. The test variables were strength of concrete, and the reinforcement ratio and modulus of elasticity of the longitudinal reinforcing bars. Carbon and glass FRP bars and conventional steel bars were used as longitudinal reinforcement in this investigation. The experimental shear strengths of the FRP-reinforced concrete beams were compared to theoretical predictions provided by ACI 440.1R-03 and the modified form of this method proposed by the authors. The test results indicated that the high-strength concrete beams exhibited slightly lower relative shear strength compared to normal-strength concrete beams. In addition, the ACI 440.1R-03 design method provided very conservative predictions whereas the proposed modified equation gave better results.
Region Based Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Small Geospatial Object Extraction

The availability of high resolution aerial imagery makes it possible to identify small geospatial objects in dense urban areas. The challenge lies in the overlapping problem in the feature space of the object classes. In this paper, we propose a region-based maximum likelihood (RML) method for geospatial object extraction in urban areas. For accurate extraction of the object region, the target objects are segmented by SVM classification. And the colour distribution is subsequently compared against the SVM training data via a Mahalanobis colour distance and a ML approach is developed to distinguish between regions that might be overlapped in their feature space. A quantitative measure which evaluates the resulting extractions is presented. The experimental results show that the proposed approach yields intuitively correct as well as accurate extraction of objects in urban aerial images.
Processing and properties of hydroxyapatite-based biomaterials for use as hard tissue replacement implants

This paper reviews the past, present, and future of the hydroxyapatite (HAp)-based biomaterials from the point of view of preparation of hard tissue replacement implants. Properties of the hard tissues are also described. The mechanical reliability of the pure HAp ceramics is low, therefore it cannot be used as artificial teeth or bones. For these reasons, various HAp-based composites have been fabricated, but only the HAp-coated titanium alloys have found wide application. Among the others, the microstructurally controlled HAp ceramics such as fibers/whiskers-reinforced HAp, fibrous HAp-reinforced polymers, or biomimetically fabricated HAp/collagen composites seem to be the most suitable ceramic materials for the future hard tissue replacement implants.
High-speed technologies based on III-V compound semiconductors at Fraunhofer IAF

At the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (IAF) III-V compound semiconductors are used in high speed technologies. Here we focus on GaN-based Monolithic Millimeter-Wave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) for applications in the frequency regime between 2 GHz and 100 GHz and on metamorphic HEMT based MMICs for frequencies spanning from 100 GHz up to 600 GHz. Both technologies rely on state of the art epitaxial growth of suitable HEMT structures which is also carried out at the institute. As examples for the maturity of these technologies a GaN-based two-stage power amplifier operating in V-band is described and for the metamorphic HEMT technology a 300 GHz chip set for THz imaging applications as well as a broad-band six-stage amplifier operating around 600 GHz are presented.
Hydrolysis inhibition of complex biowaste

The increasing demand of renewable energy sources and reuse of wastes, challenges our society for better technological solutions for energy production. Co-digestion of agricultural biowaste, such as animal manure and plant residues, offers an interesting contribution to the renewable energy strategies. The biogas plants, where the complex substrates, such as agricultural biowaste, get converted into biogas, are then able to produce electricity and heat, which can be used in the farm and delivered to the main electricity grid. Moreover, due to its decentralised nature, the implementation of small-scale biogas plants can supply renewable energy to people without the need for large-scale infrastructural networks such as electricity grids, thereby solving part of the populations’ energy demands. The production of biogas from complex biowaste is rate-limited by the hydrolysis step of the anaerobic digestion process. However the hydrolysis step has been poorly described and not very well understood, resulting in non-optimized anaerobic digester volumes. Due to that, a review on the anaerobic hydrolysis step is in this thesis presented, together with ways to accelerate the hydrolysis, either by mitigating the revealed inhibiting compounds, by pre-treating difficultly hydrolysable substrates, or as is nowadays also applied, by adding hydrolytic enzymes to full scale biogas co-digestion plants. In this thesis two compounds were studied in terms of its inhibiting effect on hydrolysis: ammonia nitrogen and Humic Matter (HM). Ammonia nitrogen did not show an inhibiting effect on anaerobic hydrolysis. On the other hand Humic acids-like (HAL) and Fulvic acids-like (FAL) extracted from fesh cow manure and silage maize, and in this thesis extensively described in terms of its chemical characteristics, showed a strong inhibiting effect on the hydrolysis step. Plant matter is high in lignocellulosic biomass. Lignocellulosic biomass consists of lignin, which is resistant to anaerobic degradation, cellulose and hemicelluloses. Pre-treatment of plant material, is particularly important in order to increase biogas production during co-digestion of manure. Calcium hydroxide pre-treatment was shown, in this thesis, to improve the biodegradability of lignocellulosic biomass, especially for high lignin content substrates. Maleic acid generated the highest percentage of dissolved COD during pre-treatment, however its high market price makes it not so attractive as calcium hydroxyde. Enzyme addition has recently gained the attention of biogas plants’ operators in order to accelerate hydrolysis, however further research is needed.
Flow Characterization and Modeling of Strong Round Synthetic Jets in Crossflow

This study focuses on the flow field of a round synthetic jet issuing into a crossflow. Six cases are investigated in which the jet-to-freestream velocity ratios range between 2.8 and 8.3. This corresponds to a medium-to-strong transverse jet, which is characterized using both two-dimensional hot-wire anemometry and particle image velocimetry techniques. A self-similar model is developed for the centerline trajectory and velocity of a transverse synthetic jet. The resulting scaling laws are validated with experimental data. The scaling coefficients are found to be independent of the synthetic jet strength (characterized by the stroke ratio) for large-velocity-ratio cases, provided that the jet velocity is calculated based on the momentum flux of the leading vortex ring of the synthetic jet. Furthermore, the velocity component parallel to the crossflow is enhanced over the crossflow velocity in the near field and fundamentally different from continuous jets. This can be explained by the induced effect of t.
Effects of Pregnancy and Female Sex Steroid Hormones on Calcitonin Gene-Related Peptide Content of Mesenteric Artery in Rats1

Abstract Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) levels in plasma and the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) are increased during pregnancy and in ovariectomized rats injected with ovarian hormones. Vasodilatory responses to CGRP are also increased in these animals. In the present study, we hypothesized that pregnancy and ovarian hormones elevate the contents of CGRP in perivascular nerves. We assessed CGRP-dependent mesenteric vascular relaxation induced by electrical field stimulation (EFS) and arterial content of CGRP. Because the mesenteric artery represents resistance vessels, segments of mesenteric arteries collected from female rats at different stages of the estrous cycle, pregnancy, or postpartum and from male rats were used in this study. The EFS-induced relaxation in the presence and absence of CGRP8–37, an antagonist of CGRP, was used to measure CGRP-dependent relaxation, and radioimmunoassay (RIA) of tissue homogenates was used to assess changes in CGRP content in mesenteric branch arteries. The results show that CGRP-dependent, EFS-induced relaxation response was lower in female rats at diestrus and proestrus than in male rats, and no statistically significant differences were observed between Gestational Day 20 and Postpartum Day 2. The RIA revealed significantly lower mesenteric artery CGRP levels in female rats at proestrus, gestation, and postpartum than in female rats at diestrus or in male rats. We conclude that no correlation exists between CGRP-dependent, EFS-induced relaxation and CGRP content in the mesenteric arteries of these animal groups. Because both CGRP levels in DRG and serum are reported to be elevated, the reduced CGRP content in the vasculature during pregnancy and proestrus implicate enhanced basal release of CGRP at the nerve terminal in these animals.
Induction of cross-links in corneal tissue.

The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of induction of cross-links in corneal tissue in order to increase the stiffness as a basis for a future conservative treatment of keratectasia. Collagenous biomaterials can be stabilized by chemical and physical agents. The epithelium of enucleated porcine eyes was removed. Eight test groups, 10 eyes each, were treated with UV-light (lambda=254 nm), 0.5% riboflavin, 0.5% riboflavin and UV-light (365 nm) blue light (436 nm) and sunlight, and the chemical agents-glutaraldehyde (1% and 0.1%, 10 min) and Karnovsky's solution (0.1%, 10 min). Strips of 5 mm in width and 9 mm in length were cut from each cornea and the stress-strain behaviour of the strips was measured to assess the cross-linking process. For comparison, ten untreated corneas were measured by the same method. Compared to untreated corneas treatment with riboflavin and UV-irradiation as well as weak glutaraldehyde or Karnovsky's solutions resulted in an increased stiffness of the cornea. The biomechanical behaviour of the cornea can be altered by glutaraldehyde, Karnovsky's solution, and with riboflavin and UV-irradiation which offers the potential of a conservative treatment of keratoconus. To optimize this effect further investigation is necessary regarding the dose-response and in-vivo application.
Matrix Vesicle Enzyme Activity and Phospholipid Content in Endosteal Bone Following Implantation of Osseointegrating and Non-Osseointegrating Implant Materials.

Abstract : To date, little has been done to standardize testing procedures of implant materials for use in human prostheses. This series of experiments is part of an extensive study dealing with primary mineralization at the interface of osseointegrated and non-osseointegrated implant materials. The importance of this experiment is to ascertain the ability of a variety of materials to osseointegrate with bone, utilizing assays of matrix vesicle enzyme activity and lipid content. The process of osseointegration is dependent upon the chemical composition of the implant material, the physical properties of both the implant material and bone, the clinical/surgical procedures utilized, and any forces placed at the bone/implant interface. The surgical procedures and collection of marrow samples were performed prior to the initiation of the biochemical analysis. Four different implant materials were utilized (KG-Cera, Mina 13, KGy- 213, M 8/1) and evaluated for their effect on normal bone repair. Prior to placement of the implants, the tibial marrow space of the treatment leg was ablated. Evacuation of the marrow cavity prior to implant placement has been shown to activate endosteal bone repair.
Decisions under drift: Adapting binary decision thresholds to drifts in test distribution

Most predictive models built for binary decision problems compute a real valued score as an intermediate step and then apply a threshold on this score to make a final decision. Conventionally, the threshold is chosen which optimizes a desired performance metric (such as accuracy, F-score, precision@k, recall@k, etc.) on the training set. However very often in practice it so happens that the same threshold when applied to a test set, results in a sub-optimal performance because of drift in test distribution. In this work we propose a method that adaptively changes the threshold such that the optimal performance achieved on the training set is maintained. The method is completely unsupervised and is based on fitting a parametric mixture model to the test scores and choosing the threshold that optimizes a performance metric based on the corresponding parametric approximation.
Centrality metrics and localization in core-periphery networks

Two concepts of centrality have been defined in complex networks. The first considers the centrality of a node and many different metrics for it have been defined (e.g. eigenvector centrality, PageRank, non-backtracking centrality, etc). The second is related to large scale organization of the network, the core-periphery structure, composed by a dense core plus an outlying and loosely-connected periphery. In this paper we investigate the relation between these two concepts. We consider networks generated via the stochastic block model, or its degree corrected version, with a core-periphery structure and we investigate the centrality properties of the core nodes and the ability of several centrality metrics to identify them. We find that the three measures with the best performance are marginals obtained with belief propagation, PageRank, and degree centrality, while non-backtracking and eigenvector centrality (or MINRES [], showed to be equivalent to the latter in the large network limit) perform worse in the investigated networks.
Using interval arithmetic the calculate data sizes for compilation to multimedia instruction sets

Driven primarily by the needs of mdtimd~ a number of recent processors have instructions which operate in a S~~ fashion on multiple d2tavahtes packed into a sin#e machine word Here we oudine tuhniques which cotid be used by a compfler or interactive programming tool to detdate the sizes of such data to tie 2dvanmge of the available packd instruction sets. b our r~tdts we show three examples of programs in which variables and intermediate restits have been autornati~y cdcrdated by the compiler front-en& me compiler success~y deduces rttinimd irttermediate ranges and restdts in Al cases. In our colour conversion prm . ~~, for exrunplG the intermediate restdts are deducd to be 24 bits with a 16 bit fractional pm Ke3words: intend arithrneti~ packed atithmeti~ frxed poirt~ mtitimcdi~ compiler.
Beyond Reciprocity: A Conservation of Resources View on the Effects of Psychological Contract Violation on Third Parties

Building on conservation of resources theory, we cast resource depletion as a novel explanatory mechanism to explain why employees’ experience of psychological contract violation results in harm to third parties outside the employee-organization exchange dyad. This resource-based perspective extends and complements the dominant social exchange perspective which views employee reactions to psychological contract violation as targeting the source of the violation—the organization. The present article reports on 3 studies. Study 1 conducted an experiment with 109 participants and established the main effect of psychological contract violation on resource depletion. Study 2, using survey data from 315 medical employees and their immediate supervisors, found that after controlling for the social exchange mechanism (i.e., revenge cognitions toward the organization), resource depletion mediated the indirect effects of psychological contract violation on supervisory reports of employees’ interpersonal harming toward coworkers and decision-making vigilance for clients. Further, we found that organizational and professional identification played opposing moderating roles in the effects of violation on resource depletion and consequently behavioral outcomes, such that these mediated relationships were stronger when organizational identification was high, and weaker when professional identification was high. Study 3 replicated all the results obtained in Studies 1 and 2 with time-lagged data from 229 medical employees across 3 measurement points. The findings confirm that resource depletion is a more effective explanation of the consequences of violation on third parties than revenge cognitions, although both are useful in predicting organization-directed outcomes (i.e., civic virtue and organizational rule compliance).
Stable recombination hotspots in birds

Recombination: The birds and the yeast Apes and mice have a specific gene, PRDM9, that is associated with genomic regions with high rates of recombination, called hotspots. In species with PRDM9, hotspots move rapidly within the genome, varying among populations and closely related species (see the Perspective by Lichten). To investigate recombination hotspots in species lacking PRDM9, Singhal et al. examined bird genomes, which lack a PRDM9 gene. They looked closely at the genomes of finch species and found that recombination was localized to the promoter regions of genes and highly conserved over millions of years. Similarly, Lam and Keeney examined recombination localization within yeast, which also lacks PRDM9. They found a similar more-or-less fixed pattern of hotspots. Thus, recombination in species lacking a PRDM9 gene shows similar patterns of hotspot localization and evolution. Science, this issue p. 913, p. 928; see also p. 932 DNA recombination hotspots in birds are localized to gene regulatory sequences and show evolutionary conservation. [Also see Perspective by Lichten] The DNA-binding protein PRDM9 has a critical role in specifying meiotic recombination hotspots in mice and apes, but it appears to be absent from other vertebrate species, including birds. To study the evolution and determinants of recombination in species lacking the gene that encodes PRDM9, we inferred fine-scale genetic maps from population resequencing data for two bird species: the zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, and the long-tailed finch, Poephila acuticauda. We found that both species have recombination hotspots, which are enriched near functional genomic elements. Unlike in mice and apes, most hotspots are shared between the two species, and their conservation seems to extend over tens of millions of years. These observations suggest that in the absence of PRDM9, recombination targets functional features that both enable access to the genome and constrain its evolution.
Thermal properties of gypsum plasterboard at high temperatures

Light timber frame wall and floor assemblies typically use gypsum‐based boards as a lining to provide fire resistance. In order to model the thermal behaviour of such assemblies, the thermo‐physical properties of gypsum plasterboard must be determined. The relevant literature and the chemistry of the two consecutive endothermic dehydration reactions that gypsum undergoes when heated are reviewed. The values determined for the thermo‐physical properties are modified to create smooth enthalpy and thermal conductivity curves suitable for input into a finite element heat transfer model. These values are calibrated within a reasonable range and then validated using furnace and fire test data. The type of plasterboard used in these tests is an engineered product similar to the North American type C board. The temperature at which the second dehydration reaction occurs is altered to be consistent with later research with little apparent affect on the comparison with test results. Values for specific heat, mass loss rates and thermal conductivity for gypsum plasterboard that are suitable for use in finite element heat transfer modelling of light timber frame wall and floor assemblies are recommended. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On capacity for single-frequency spatial channels

We present information theoretic capacity results for information transfer in space, under the general assumption that the receiver applies a spatial filter to receive signals. Our work presents novel applications of linear, bounded, invariant operators to communication channels. We outline the procedure for calculating the information theoretic capacity for this restricted class of operator channels and apply this result to wireless information transfer.