Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A fault tolerant gait for a hexapod robot over uneven terrain

The fault tolerant gait of legged robots in static walking is a gait which maintains its stability against a fault event preventing a leg from having the support state. In this paper, a fault tolerant quadruped gait is proposed for a hexapod traversing uneven terrain with forbidden regions, which do not offer viable footholds but can be stepped over. By comparing performance of straight-line motion and crab walking over even terrain, it is shown that the proposed gait has better mobility and terrain adaptability than previously developed gaits. Based on the proposed gait, we present a method for the generation of the fault tolerant locomotion of a hexapod over uneven terrain with forbidden regions. The proposed method minimizes the number of legs on the ground during walking, and foot adjustment algorithm is used for avoiding steps on forbidden regions. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy over uneven terrain is demonstrated with a computer simulation.
Dopamine D2High receptors stimulated by phencyclidines, lysergic acid diethylamide, salvinorin A, and modafinil

Although it is commonly stated that phencyclidine is an antagonist at ionotropic glutamate receptors, there has been little measure of its potency on other receptors in brain tissue. Although we previously reported that phencyclidine stimulated cloned‐dopamine D2Long and D2Short receptors, others reported that phencyclidine did not stimulate D2 receptors in homogenates of rat brain striatum. This study, therefore, examined whether phencyclidine and other hallucinogens and psychostimulants could stimulate the incorporation of [35S]GTP‐γ‐S into D2 receptors in homogenates of rat brain striatum, using the same conditions as previously used to study the cloned D2 receptors. Using 10 μM dopamine to define 100% stimulation, phencyclidine elicited a maximum incorporation of 46% in rat striata, with a half‐maximum concentration of 70 nM for phencyclidine, when compared with 80 nM for dopamine, 89 nM for salvinorin A (48 nM for D2Long), 105 nM for lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 120 nM for R‐modafinil, 710 nM for dizocilpine, 1030 nM for ketamine, and >10,000 nM for S‐modafinil. These compounds also inhibited the binding of the D2‐selective ligand [3H]domperidone. The incorporation was inhibited by the presence of 200 μM guanylylimidodiphosphate and also by D2 blockade, using 10 μM S‐sulpiride, but not by D1 blockade with 10 μM SCH23390. Hypertonic buffer containing 150 mM NaCl inhibited the stimulation by phencyclidine, which may explain negative results by others. It is concluded that phencyclidine and other psychostimulants and hallucinogens can stimulate dopamine D2 receptors at concentrations related to their behavioral actions. Synapse 63:698–704, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The arginine methyltransferase PRMT6 regulates cell proliferation and senescence through transcriptional repression of tumor suppressor genes

The protein arginine methyltransferase 6 (PRMT6) is a coregulator of gene expression and executes its repressing as well as activating function by asymmetric dimethylation of histone H3 at R2 (H3 R2me2a). Given that elevated expression levels of PRMT6 have been reported in various cancer types, we explore here its role in cell proliferation and senescence. We find that knockdown of PRMT6 results in proliferation defects of transformed as well as non-transformed cells, causes G1-phase arrest and induces senescence. This phenotype is accompanied by transcriptional upregulation of important cell cycle regulators, most prominently the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor gene p21 (p21CIP1/WAF1, CDKN1A) and p16 (p16INK4A, CDKN2A). Chromatin immuno-precipitation analysis reveals that the p21 gene is a direct target of PRMT6 and the corresponding histone mark H3 R2me2a. Using a cell model of oncogene-induced senescence (OIS), in which p21 is an essential activator of the senescent phenotype, we show that PRMT6 expression declines upon induction of senescence and conversely p21 gene expression increases. Moreover, overexpression of PRMT6 leads to reduced levels of OIS. These findings indicate that the transcriptional repressor activity of PRMT6 facilitates cell proliferation and blocks senescence by regulation of tumor suppressor genes and that this might contribute to the oncogenic capacity of PRMT6.
Self-Esteem and Loneliness as Factors Affecting Distance Learning Students

Abstract This study aims at empirically examining the relation of self-esteem and loneliness with social presence, academic performance, satisfaction with the course and intention for academic drop out, in a blended distance learning environment in Greece. The study involved both undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Hellenic Open University (HOU). Data were collected via a four-section questionnaire. The correlational data analysis yielded a negative correlation between self-esteem and intention for academic drop out, while there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and satisfaction derived from the course. Results also suggested that there is no correlation between self-esteem and academic performance. Findings also revealed that there is no statistically significant correlation between loneliness and the other variables under examination. Furthermore, the results showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the examined variables in relation to the demographic features (gender, age, etc.). The findings of the present study are discussed in relation to the relevant literature, taking into consideration the blended learning educational format offered by the HOU which is based on methodologies used in other European institutions that offer distance learning courses. Finally, recommendations for further research are presented.
Program Specialization for Dynamic Optimizers

This paper describes a program specializer that can be implemented entirely within a dynamic optimizer. The specializer not only avoids the need for any programmer annotations or pre-runtime compilation, providing automatic and transparent specialization, it also exploits the knowledge of program’s memory state available only to a dynamic optimizer, enabling specialization of data structures that are merely semi-invariant (in both space and time). The specializer discovers the invariance needed for specialization with optimistic dynamic analysis whose correctness is ensured using either type safety (if it is guaranteed), or runtime guards, or both. While our dynamic analysis can be coupled with various specialization algorithms, we tested it with a specializer based on the Wegman-Zadeck conditional constant propagator extended with loop unrolling. The result is a light-weight specializer suitable for dynamic optimizers. Despite its transformational simplicity, it can speedup some programs by a factor of two.
Students' Perceptions of Learner-Learner Interactions that Weaken a Sense of Community in an Online Learning Environment

Despite the growth of its popularity in recent years, online learning has demonstrated high dropout rates compared to dropout rates in traditional face-to-face courses. Prior research attributes attrition to the physical isolation of students from one another and the lack of interaction between and among them—factors which foster feelings of alienation, isolation, and disconnection. The goal of this research study was to more deeply understand the causes of such negative feelings, which may eventually lead students to drop out of online courses. More specifically, this study adopted a qualitative approach by interviewing six graduate students to further explore which specific learner-learner interactions weaken online students’ sense of community. Seven learner-learner, interactions were identified: the keener, lack of meaningful data, selective listening, lack of attribution, going off on tangents, editing notes, and cultural exclusion.
San Duanmu, A theory of phonological features (Oxford Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 178.

One of the great achievements of linguistic study in the twentieth century is the awareness and development of the idea that speech sounds are decomposable into smaller properties – variously referred to as FEATURES (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968), ELEMENTS (e.g. Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud 1985, Harris 1994, Backley 2011), COMPONENTS (e.g. Anderson & Ewen 1987), PARTICLES (e.g. Schane 1984) and GESTURES (e.g. Anderson & Ewen 1987, Browman & Goldstein 1989). All these terms have been used to identify properties generally considered to be primitives, which form part of the phonological module of the language faculty. Furthermore, recent phonological theories take the position that it is these properties which function as the minimal units of phonological contrast, and regard each primitive as a category associated with its own stable phonetic signature. What is common to all scientific pursuits, however, is the inevitability of theoretical disagreement. And in the case of phonology, disagreement exists over the number and kinds of primitives that are assumed to be psychologically real. According to San Duanmu in his book A Theory of Phonological Features, this stems from two issues: (i) no existing theory has yet proposed a system of primitives which is based on a sufficient amount of data, such as those which are available from established sound inventory databases; and (ii) the data available in the phonology literature and from databases contain a substantial amount of phonetically vague (and not necessarily phonological) information, together with occasional clerical errors, which has led scholars to make bad choices when building a systematic model of primitives. To address (i), Duanmu closely examines two databases of transcribed sound inventories, UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database; 451 inventories, 13,966 phoneme tokens; Maddieson 1984, Maddieson & Precoda 1990) and P-base (628 inventories, 19,959 phoneme tokens; Mielke 2004–2007). With regard to (ii), as a
MOTION DETECTION BY CLASSIFICATION OF LOCAL STRUCTURES IN AIRBORNE THERMAL VIDEOS

In this paper we present a method to efficiently detect moving objects namely vehicles in airborne thermal videos. The motion of the sensor is estimated from the optical flow using projective planar homographies as transformation model. A three level classification process is proposed: On the first level we extract interest location applying the Foerstner - operator. These are subject to the second finer level of classification. Here we distinguish four classes: 1. Vehicles cues; 2. L-junctions and other proper fixed structure 3. Tjunctions and other risky fixed structure. 4. A rejection class containing all other locations. This classification is based on local features in the single images. Only structures from the L-junctions class are traced as correspondences through subsequent frames. Based on these the global optical flow is estimated that is caused by the platform movement. The flow is restricted to planar projective homographies which highly reduces the computational time. This opens the way for the third classification. The vehicle class is refined using motion as feature. Inconsistency with the estimated flow is a strong evidence for movement in the scene. This is done by computing a difference image between two sequent frames transformed by a homography to be taken from the same position. The difference images are pre-processed using vehicle properties and velocity.
General Cost Models for Evaluating Dimensionality Reduction in High-Dimensional Spaces

Similarity search usually encounters a serious problem in the high-dimensional space, known as the "curse of dimensionality". In order to speed up the retrieval efficiency, most previous approaches reduce the dimensionality of the entire data set to a fixed lower value before building indexes (referred to as global dimensionality reduction (GDR)). More recent works focus on locally reducing the dimensionality of data to different values (called the local dimensionality reduction (LDR)). In addition, random projection is proposed as an approximate dimensionality reduction (ADR) technique to answer the approximate similarity search instead of the exact one. However, so far little work has formally evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of GDR, LDR, and ADR for the range query. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose general cost models for evaluating the query performance over the reduced data sets by GDR, LDR, and ADR, in light of which we introduce a novel (A)LDR method, partitioning based on randomized search (PRANS). It can achieve high retrieval efficiency with the guarantee of optimality given by the formal models. Finally, a B+-tree index is constructed over the reduced partitions for fast similarity search. Extensive experiments validate the correctness of our cost models on both real and synthetic data sets and demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed PRANS method.
Detection and quantification of subsurface pesticide degrading microbial populations

The thesis is composed of a summary along with three journal papers and a technical note. The papers are not included in this www-version but can be obtained from the library at the 2007. Real-time PCR quantification of functional genes involved in degradation of the herbicide MCPP in aquifer sediment. Submitted. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude goes to the following persons: x My main supervisor Associate Professor Hans-Jørgen Albrechtsen for thorough and professional discussions on big as well as small issues and for prompt replies to my many questions. Also thanks to my co-supervisor, Associate Professor Jens E. Schmidt. x A special acknowledgement goes to Professor Carsten S. Jacobsen at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) for the opportunity to perform my experiments at GEUS and for professional guidance, interest and enthusiasm in my project. x My colleagues at E&R and GEUS, especially my fellow PhD students, for support, motivation and great times. x Special thanks to my family, friends and dear one who gave me unlimited support and encouragement. When is a man educated? " When he can look out upon the universe, now lucid and lovely, now dark and terrible, with a sense of his own littleness in the great scheme of things, and yet have faith and courage… and has in his heart a bit of a song. " – Joseph Fort Newton v ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the topic " Detection and quantification of subsurface pesticide degrading microbial populations " with special focus on the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and particularly quantitative real-time PCR, as a method to detect microbial phenoxyalcanoic acid herbicide degraders in aquifer sediment. Additionally, the Most Probable Number (MPN) method was also evaluated for enumeration of herbicide degraders in the subsurface. The thesis consists of a literature review, discussing the current available methods to detect and enumerate microbial contaminant degraders in the subsurface, followed by three journal papers and a technical note, describing the experimental work undertaken for this PhD project. Pesticide residue in groundwater is a world wide problem. Since microbial degradation is the most important process for complete removal of this contaminant, detection and quantification of the microbial degraders is necessary to determine the potential for degradation, to monitor a site undergoing bioremediation, and to determine the fate of the contaminants in the environment. There are two types of methods for enumeration of microorganisms. The cultivation dependent methods require growth …
Time-Reuse Partitioning with Blind Interference Management for Cellular Systems

This paper presents a cellular reuse scheme using interference aware time division scheduling coupled with transmit power control. The proposed scheme supports a time reuse of one for interference insensitive users and a time reuse of 1/3 for interference sensitive users. Unlike traditional reuse partitioning, the proposed scheme provides a blind intercell power coordination mechanism for the interference sensitive users. Thus, when a cell transmits data to interference sensitive users, neighboring cells reduce their transmission power, which enables blind intercell coordination and aggressive time reuse. Simulations show that approximately 22% capacity increase can be achieved by the proposed scheme compared with conventional reuse planning.
Residual Cajal bodies in coilin knockout mice fail to recruit Sm snRNPs and SMN, the spinal muscular atrophy gene product

Cajal bodies (CBs) are nuclear suborganelles involved in the biogenesis of small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs). In addition to snRNPs, they are highly enriched in basal transcription and cell cycle factors, the nucleolar proteins fibrillarin (Fb) and Nopp140 (Nopp), the survival motor neuron (SMN) protein complex, and the CB marker protein, p80 coilin. We report the generation of knockout mice lacking the COOH-terminal 487 amino acids of coilin. Northern and Western blot analyses demonstrate that we have successfully removed the full-length coilin protein from the knockout animals. Some homozygous mutant animals are viable, but their numbers are reduced significantly when crossed to inbred backgrounds. Analysis of tissues and cell lines from mutant animals reveals the presence of extranucleolar foci that contain Fb and Nopp but not other typical nucleolar markers. These so-called “residual” CBs neither condense Sm proteins nor recruit members of the SMN protein complex. Transient expression of wild-type mouse coilin in knockout cells results in formation of CBs and restores these missing epitopes. Our data demonstrate that full-length coilin is essential for proper formation and/or maintenance of CBs and that recruitment of snRNP and SMN complex proteins to these nuclear subdomains requires sequences within the coilin COOH terminus.
Process, Design and Materials for Unidirectionally Tilted Polymeric Micro/Nanohairs and Their Adhesion Characteristics

Recent research in the field of gecko-inspired dry adhesive has focused on modifying the material and structural properties of polymer-based nanohairs. Polymers such as polystyrene (PS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), ultraviolet curable epoxy (SU-8), polyurethane acrylate (PUA), polycarbonate (PC), and polydimethyl siloxane (PDMS) can fulfill many mechanical property requirements, are easily tunable, and can be produced via large-scale fabrication. However, the fabrication process for tilted structure remains challenging. The tilted structure is a crucial factor in high-degree conformal contact, which facilitates high adhesion, low effective modulus, and directional adhesion properties. Recent studies have attempted to create a tilted structure by applying beam irradiation, mechanical and thermal stress, and magnetic fields. This review provides a comprehensive investigation into advanced strategies for producing tilted polymeric nanostructures and their potential applications in the near future.
Using games with a purpose and bootstrapping to create domain-specific sentiment lexicons

Sentiment detection analyzes the positive or negative polarity of text. The field has received considerable attention in recent years, since it plays an important role in providing means to assess user opinions regarding an organization's products, services, or actions. Approaches towards sentiment detection include machine learning techniques as well as computationally less expensive methods. Both approaches rely on the use of language-specific sentiment lexicons, which are lists of sentiment terms with their corresponding sentiment value. The effort involved in creating, customizing, and extending sentiment lexicons is considerable, particularly if less common languages and domains are targeted without access to appropriate language resources. This paper proposes a semi-automatic approach for the creation of sentiment lexicons which assigns sentiment values to sentiment terms via crowd-sourcing. Furthermore, it introduces a bootstrapping process operating on unlabeled domain documents to extend the created lexicons, and to customize them according to the particular use case. This process considers sentiment terms as well as sentiment indicators occurring in the discourse surrounding a articular topic. Such indicators are associated with a positive or negative context in a particular domain, but might have a neutral connotation in other domains. A formal evaluation shows that bootstrapping considerably improves the method's recall. Automatically created lexicons yield a performance comparable to professionally created language resources such as the General Inquirer.
Robust compressive shift retrieval in linear time

Suppose two finite signals are related by an unknown cyclic shift. Fast algorithms for finding such a shift or variants thereof are of great importance in a number of applications, e.g., localization and target tracking using acoustic sensors. The standard solution, solving shift finding by maximizing the cross-correlation between the two signals, may be rather efficiently computed using fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). Inspired by compressive sensing, faster algorithms have been recently proposed based on sparse FFTs. In this paper, we transform the shift finding problem into the spectral domain as well. As a first contribution, by combining the Fourier Shift Theorem with the Bézout Identity from elementary number theory, we obtain explicit formulas for the unknown shift parameter. This leads to linear time algorithms for shift finding in the noise-free setting. As a second contribution, we extend this result to the fast recovery of weighted sums of two shifts. Furthermore, we introduce a novel iterative algorithm for estimation of the unknown shift parameter for the case of noisy signals and provide a sufficient criterion for exact shift recovery. A slightly relaxed criterion leads to a linear time median algorithm in the noisy setting with high recovery rates even for low SNRs.
Insights into the Relationship Between Hypertension and Albuminuria

Albuminuria is the increased excretion of the serum protein albumin into the urine. Albuminuria is classically seen as an important diagnostic marker of declining kidney function, however, more recently albuminuria has also been implicated as a marker for cardiovascular and peripheral vascular disease indicating an important link between processes governing both cardiovascular and renal function. This review will discuss i) a common mechanism for albuminuria that accounts for albuminuria seen in hypertension and other albuminuric states and ii) possible linking factors between albuminuria, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.