Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pattern Formations in Dielectric Barrier Discharges

Dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs) occur in homogeneous and filamentary forms, depending on discharge conditions such as gas composition, pressure, and voltage. With the filamentary form, a seemingly self-organized pattern formation has been reported in several instances in experiments. In this paper, images of filamentary discharges from multidimensional DBD simulations are presented.
Training load structure of young soccer players in a typical training microcycle during the competitive and the transition period

Background: The aims of this study were: (1) to characterize the training load structure and the applied training means in typical microcycles of the transition period and the competitive season administered to young soccer players, and (2) to present exemplary training units of the competitive and the transition periods. Material/Methods: 20 young soccer players (12–13 years old) took part in the study. Jastrzebski’s method based on Sozanski and Śledziewski was applied to register and monitor the training load. Data was analyzed regarding the information range (general or specific drills) as well as energetic zones (aerobic, mixed aerobic-anaerobic, anaerobic lactate or anaerobic alactate drills). Results: The results of study show crucial differences in the applied training means in the analyzed microcycles. In a typical microcycle of the transition period general drills predominate, while during the competitive period – specific drills prevail. The total effective time of training was longer in the competitive season microcycle. It is a proper relationship according to the theory of sport training. Conclusions: The range of the training load registered in the competitive season is in line with other authors’ research where league matches and small-sided games were used particularly often. The studied microcycles in the competitive season can be model ones and can be used in the training process of young football players.
Finally, a Use for Componentized Transport Protocols

This paper argues a new relevance for an old idea: decomposing transport protocols into a set of resuable building blocks that can be recomposed in different ways depending on application requirements. We conjecture that point-to-point applications may well be adequately served by the existing suite of monolithic protocol implementations, but widely-distributed peer-to-peer systems such as overlays are not: the design space of transport protocols between nodes in a large, highly coordinated system is much larger. We provide several examples of existing systems that have implemented a diverse range of transport protocols, and show how a building-block approach covers these systems well, enabling simple specification of hybrids and variants of the protocols. In particular, we show how all of our examples can be implemented in the networking stack of P2, a multipurpose system for building overlay networks from declarative specifications.
On the Discursive Construction of ‘The Chinese Learner’

Characterisations of ‘the Chinese learner’ in education and applied linguistics have frequently taken a ‘large culture’ approach, which involves describing the values, attitudes and learning practices of individuals in terms of fixed, homogeneous, reified national cultures. A shared Confucian cultural heritage is offered by way of explanation for supposedly consistent Chinese behaviours in Western classrooms. This paper examines some features of the deficit model of Chinese learner discourse attributed to Confucian cultural heritage (passive, lacking critical thinking, reliant on simplistic rote memorisation strategies resulting in surface learning, unwilling to participate in classroom talk), and refers to research findings which propose alternative characterisations and alternative explanations rooted in social and contextual factors. An alternative approach based on post-structuralist, critical pedagogy and cultural studies perspectives is considered which focuses on ‘small culture’ explanations for the behaviours of Chinese learners abroad. Situated identity is a key concept in this approach; the influence of national culture on individual values and behaviour through socialisation in shared educational practices is moderated or disrupted as the individual learner is transplanted into a different context. Agency is recognised as learners attempt to negotiate new identities for themselves in a more or less alien environment.
Toward deeply adaptive societies of digital systems

Modern societies are pervaded by computerized, heterogeneous devices designed for specific purposes, but also more and more often capable of interacting with other devices for entirely different purposes. For example, a cell phone could be used to purchase a train ticket on-line that could later be printed by a vending machine at the train station. This type of open environment is what we call a society of digital systems. In this paper, we outline the characteristics of societies of digital systems, and argue that they call for a new approach to cope with unforeseen interactions, possible incompatibilities, failures, and emergent behaviors. We argue that designers can not assume a closed or homogeneous world, and must instead naturally accommodate dynamic adaptations. Furthermore, self-adaptability, that is, the ability to adapt autonomically to a changing environment, also poses problems, as different adaptation strategies may interfere negatively, leading to unstable behaviors. As an initial concrete contribution to solve this problem, we propose a method to support the graceful integration of devices and software systems in an open environment. The method uses management information, and is specifically centered on the idea of expressing self-adaptation operations as change sets over the management information base.
Can Animals Act For Reasons?

Abstract This essay argues that non-linguistic animals qualify not just for externalist notions of rationality (maximizing biological fitness or utility), but also for internal ones. They can act for reasons in several senses: their behaviour is subject to intentional explanations, they can act in the light of reasons – provided that the latter are conceived as objective facts rather than subjective mental states – and they can deliberate. Finally, even if they could not, it would still be misguided to maintain that animals are capable only of (mechanical) behaviour, not of (intentional) action.
An in-plane thermal unimorph using confined polymers

This paper presents the design, simulation and characterization of a new type of in-plane thermal unimorph, which utilizes composite SU-8/silicon microstructures. The unimorph consists of a silicon skeleton and SU-8 photoresist, which encapsulates the silicon skeleton. The silicon skeleton is asymmetric in shape, consisting of a straight segment and a meandering segment. Gaps and surrounds of the skeleton are filled with the SU-8 polymer. Bonds between the polymer filling and the sidewalls of the silicon microstructure enhance thermal expansion and stiffness of the polymer in a transverse direction. Therefore, this unimorph design delivers excellent actuation performance. The composite actuator bends laterally when electro-thermally activated. A 530 µm long, 90 µm wide and 50 µm thick micro-machined device achieves a maximum lateral displacement of 25 µm at a 1.75 V driving voltage and at 17.8 mW input power, at an average temperature below 200 °C. It has a simulated lateral stiffness of 1.2 kN m−1. At 1.75 V, it is estimated to produce a 30 mN lateral blocked force that is high compared to other micro-actuators.
A VLSI implementation of mixed-signal mode bipolar neuron circuitry

Neuron circuits have parallel operation features. VLSI implemented neuron networks are suitable for high speed and low power consumption applications. Digital implementations have good noise immunity while analog neuron circuits have smaller size. This paper presents a mixed-signal neuron design. It uses digital input, output and weight signals while keeps analog internal operation. Thus, this circuit has both good noise immunity and small size features. Clock signal is used to synchronize the neuron circuit operation. Simulation shows it has sigmoid activation function. This circuit is suitable for being used if feed-forward type neural networks.
Experimental Yersinia enterocolitica 0:3 arthritis in rats.

Diseases caused by I h s i n i o enterocolitica serotype 0:3 in humans are often coniplicated by reactive inflammations ofjoints [l-31. I t is known that the temperature regulation of yersinia virulence factors plays an important role in the pathogenesis of these infections [3,5]. I t is not clear, however, whether differences in temperature-dependent properties of Y entevocolitica 0:3 are connected with the appearance of their arthritogenicity. I: enterocolitica 0:3 301/86 plasmid-positive strain isolated from a patient [6] was used. The bacteria were cultured in tryptic soy agar (Difco, Detroit, Michigan, USA) at different temperatures (75OC and 37OC) and used as separate inocula. The experimental adult Lewis rats weighing 200-250 g (five in a group) were intraarticularly inoculated with 3 x lo4 bacteria in 0.1 mL saline. Synovial fluid aspirates were obtained from rats killed at 1, 3, 7, 14, 21, 43 and 60 days after challenge.
Denotational semantics for lazy initialization of letrec black holes as exceptions rather than divergence

We present a denotational semantics for a simply typed call-by-need letrec calculus, which distinguishes direct cycles, such as let rec x = x in x and let rec x = y and y = x+ 1 in x, and looping recursion, such as let rec f = λx. f x in f 0. In this semantics the former denote an exception whereas the latter denotes divergence. The distinction is motivated by “lazy evaluation” as implemented in OCaml via lazy/force and Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) via delay/force: when a delayed variable is dereferenced for the first time, it is first pre-initialized to an exception-raising thunk and is updated afterward by the value obtained by evaluating the expression bound to the variable. Any attempt to dereference the variable during the initialization raises an exception rather than diverges. This way, lazy evaluation provides a useful measure to initialize recursive bindings by exploring a successful initialization order of the bindings at runtime and by signaling an exception when there is no such order. It is also used for the initialization semantics of the object system in the F# programming language. The denotational semantics is proved adequate with respect to a referential operational semantics.
A loss-free multipathing solution for data center network using software-defined networking approach

Conventional Ethernet protocols struggle to meet the scalability and performance requirements of data centers. Viable replacements have been proposed for Data Center Ethernet (DCE): link-layer multipathing (MP) is deployed to replace Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and thus improves network throughput; end-to-end link-layer congestion control (CC) is proposed to better guarantee loss-free frame delivery for Ethernet. However, little work has been done to incorporate MP and CC to offer a more comprehensive solution for DCE. In this paper, we propose a two-tier solution by integrating our Dynamic Load Balancing MultiPath (DLBMP) scheme with CC. Instead of using two separate parameters, i.e. path load and buffer level, to trigger MP and CC, our solution only needs to monitor path load metric to manage MP and CC in an integrated way. Different from a pure CC mechanism, which generates notifications from network core, our integrated CC can make use of link load information in edge switches which directly inform sources to control traffic admission. To minimize overhead and accelerate update, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) techniques are employed in our implementation, which decouples routing intelligence from data transmission. Hence, data sources can react more rapidly to congestions and network can be guaranteed with loss-free delivery. In addition, our MP scheme is further improved by introducing application-layer flow differentiation. With such a fine flow differentiation (FFD) mechanism, traffic can be more evenly distributed along multipaths, resulting in better bandwidth utilization. Simulation results show that our combined solution can further improve network throughput with FFD mechanism and guarantee loss-free delivery with integrated CC.
Recognition of Voice and Hand activities through Fusion of Acceleration and Speech 1

Hand activity and speech comprise the most important modalities of human-to-agent interaction. So a multimodal interface can achieve more natural and effective human-agent interaction. In this paper, we suggest a novel technique for improving the performance of accelerometer-based hand activity recognition system using fusion of speech. The speech data is used in our experiment as the complementary sensor data to the acceleration data in an attempt to improve the performance of hand activity recognizer. This recognizer is designed to be capable of classifying nineteen hand activities. It consists of 10 natural gestures, e.g., 'go left', 'over here' and 9 emotional expressions by hand activity, e.g., 'I feel hot', 'I love you'. To improve performance of hand activity recognition using feature fusion, we propose a modified Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) architecture with a dedicated fusion layer and a time normalization layer. Our experimental result shows that the performance of this system yields an improvement of about 6.96% compared to the use of accelerometers alone.
An alternative congestion control using an enhanced contention based forwarding for vehicular networks

Many ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) applications require multi-hop forwarding of Decentralised Event Notification Message (DENM). If not well designed, multi-hop forwarding algorithms provide negative impact on the IEEE 802.11p vehicular systems, which already suffer from channel congestion caused by e.g., Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM). In this paper, we propose an enhancement of the contention based forwarding (CBF) by a congestion control functionality. Specifically, we propose CBF2C packet forwarding algorithm, which is designed to fit into the distributed congestion control (DCC) framework specified by ETSI. In order to efficiently utilise the channel, CBF2C adapts retransmission count based on channel load status. Extensive simulation evaluations on communication performances and channel utilisation are carried out targeting scenarios, where the wireless channel is shared by DENM and CAM packets. The performances of CBF2C is compared against those of an enhanced flooding and an ETSI-standardised scheme, CBF-RT. Moreover, two cases, with and without congestion control on the CAM rate, are considered in the performance evaluations. The simulation results show a positive impact of the dual DCC, CAM rate control at the facilities layer and DENM retransmission count control at the networking layer.
Characterization and genetic complementation of a Brucella abortus high-temperature-requirement A (htrA) deletion mutant

In order to evaluate the biological function of the Brucella abortus high-temperature-requirement A (HtrA) stress response protein homolog, the majority of the htrA gene was deleted from the chromosome of B. abortus 2308 via gene replacement. In contrast to the parental strain, the resulting htrA deletion mutant, designated PHE1, failed to grow on solid medium at 40 degrees C and demonstrated increased sensitivity to killing by H2O2 and O2- in disk sensitivity assays. BALB/c mice were infected with strains 2308 and PHE1 to assess the effect of the htrA mutation on virulence, and significantly fewer brucellae were recovered from the spleens of mice infected with PHE1 than from those of mice infected with 2308 at 1 week postinfection. Genetic complementation studies were performed to confirm the relationship between the htrA mutation and the phenotype observed for PHE1. Plasmid pRIE1 was constructed by inserting a 1.9-kb EcoRI fragment encoding the B. abortus htrA gene into the broad-host-range plasmid pBBR1MCS. Introduction of pRIE1 into PHE1 relieved the temperature- and H2O2-sensitive phenotypes of this mutant in vitro, and PHE1(pRIE1) colonized the spleens of BALB/c mice at levels equivalent to those of the parental 2308 strain at 1 week postinfection. These results support our previous proposal that the B. abortus htrA gene product functions as a stress response protein and further suggest that this protein contributes to virulence. These studies also demonstrate the utility of the broad-host-range plasmid pBBR1MCS for genetic complementation studies in Brucella spp. , establishing a key reagent for more detailed genetic analysis of this important zoonotic pathogen.
Extracellular Calcium Modulates Persistent Sodium Current-Dependent Burst-Firing in Hippocampal Pyramidal Neurons

The generation of high-frequency spike bursts (“complex spikes”), either spontaneously or in response to depolarizing stimuli applied to the soma, is a notable feature in intracellular recordings from hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells (PCs) in vivo. There is compelling evidence that the bursts are intrinsically generated by summation of large spike afterdepolarizations (ADPs). Using intracellular recordings in adult rat hippocampal slices, we show that intrinsic burst-firing in CA1 PCs is strongly dependent on the extracellular concentration of Ca2+([Ca2+]o). Thus, lowering [Ca2+]o (by equimolar substitution with Mn2+ or Mg2+) induced intrinsic bursting in nonbursters, whereas raising [Ca2+]o suppressed intrinsic bursting in native bursters. The induction of intrinsic bursting by low [Ca2+]o was associated with enlargement of the spike ADP. Low [Ca2+]o-induced intrinsic bursts and their underlying ADPs were suppressed by drugs that reduce the persistent Na+ current (INaP), indicating that this current mediates the slow burst depolarization. Blocking Ca2+-activated K+ currents with extracellular Ni2+ or intracellular chelation of Ca2+ did not induce intrinsic bursting. This and other evidence suggest that lowering [Ca2+]o may induce intrinsic bursting by augmenting INaP. Because repetitive neuronal activity in the hippocampus is associated with marked decreases in [Ca2+]o, the regulation of intrinsic bursting by extracellular Ca2+ may provide a mechanism for preferential recruitment of this firing mode during certain forms of hippocampal activation.
The reliability and validity of the arthritis self-efficacy scale in a UK context

Abstract The aim of this research was to examine the comprehensibility, reliability and validity of the Arthritis Self-Efficacy Scale (ASE), amongst British people with arthritis in the context of community-based Arthritis Self-Management Programmes (ASMP). The ASE scale is designed to measure perceived ability to control various aspects of arthritis. Data were drawn from four studies: Study 1 tested the comprehensibility of the ASE; and Studies 2, 3 and 4 examined the reliability and validity of the scale. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaires mailed to participants. Reliability and structure of the ASE were examined using standard item analysis, internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha), and factor analyses. Construct, concurrent and predictive validity were examined in relation to demographic variables, physical health status, psychosocial well-being and generalized self-efficacy beliefs. The ASE had a two-dimensional structure: ASE: Pain and ASE: Other symptoms. As expected, highe.
Dilemmas in providing psychological therapy as an integral component of mental health care

Our notions of what constitutes a good therapeutic relationship come from models developed for people with high levels of personal resources who actively choose therapy in preference to other ways of addressing their problems. The context is quite different for those with more severe and enduring mental health problems, when therapy can be one of many interventions being provided. Some of the dilemmas that arise within the therapeutic relationship in such cases can be understood in terms of the therapeutic relationship being conceived of within the dynamics of a dyad, when the actual situation is more akin to a triadic relationship comprising the client, the therapist and others involved in the client's care. Examples of threats to the therapeutic alliance, which I encounter quite frequently in my work, are explored from the perspective of the therapeutic couple within three-person space, as well as from the perspective of the differing, and sometimes conflicting, functions of mental health care. The implications of this for the provision of psychological therapy for people with severe mental health problems within the NHS are then considered.
Issues unique to the masters athlete

As our population ages, promotion of physical activity as a tool to prevent and treat disease will become increasingly important. A number of physiologic changes occur with aging that may impact athletic performance, including decrease in muscle mass, decrease in maximum heart rate, and decrease in VO2max. These changes are not completely age-related, however, and losses are diminished with continued physical training. Exercise modestly improves bone density, improves function in osteoarthritis, and is vital for patients with coronary artery disease. Preparticipation evaluation should include screening for cardiovascular disease in high-risk populations. Very few contraindications for exercise in the elderly exist. Exercise in the older population is safe, healthy, and should be encouraged.
Revisiting pitch slope and height effects on perceived duration

The shape of pitch contours has been shown to have an effect on the perceived duration of vowels. For instance, vowels with high level pitch and vowels with falling contours sound longer than vowels with low level pitch. Depending on whether the comparison is between level pitches or between level and dynamic contours, these findings have been interpreted in two ways. For inter-level comparisons, where the duration results are the reverse of production results, a hypercorrection strategy in production has been proposed [1]. By contrast, for comparisons between level pitches and dynamic contours, the longer production data for dynamic contours have been held responsible. We report an experiment with Dutch and Chinese listeners which aimed to show that production data and perception data are each other’s opposites for high, low, falling and rising contours. We explain the results, which are consistent with earlier findings, in terms of the compensatory listening strategy of [2], arguing that the perception effects are due to a perceptual compensation of articulatory strategies and constraints, rather than that differences in production compensate for psycho-acoustic perception effects.
How much is too much? (Part 1) International Olympic Committee consensus statement on load in sport and risk of injury

Athletes participating in elite sports are exposed to high training loads and increasingly saturated competition calendars. Emerging evidence indicates that poor load management is a major risk factor for injury. The International Olympic Committee convened an expert group to review the scientific evidence for the relationship of load (defined broadly to include rapid changes in training and competition load, competition calendar congestion, psychological load and travel) and health outcomes in sport. We summarise the results linking load to risk of injury in athletes, and provide athletes, coaches and support staff with practical guidelines to manage load in sport. This consensus statement includes guidelines for (1) prescription of training and competition load, as well as for (2) monitoring of training, competition and psychological load, athlete well-being and injury. In the process, we identified research priorities.