Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New C4D Sensor with a Simulated Inductor

A new capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D) sensor with an improved simulated inductor is developed in this work. The improved simulated inductor is designed on the basis of the Riordan-type floating simulated inductor. With the improved simulated inductor, the negative influence of the coupling capacitances is overcome and the conductivity measurement is implemented by the series resonance principle. The conductivity measurement experiments are carried out in three pipes with different inner diameters of 3.0 mm, 4.6 mm and 6.4 mm, respectively. The experimental results show that the designs of the new C4D sensor and the improved simulated inductor are successful. The maximum relative error of the conductivity measurement is less than 5%. Compared with the C4D sensors using practical inductors, the measurement accuracy of the new C4D sensor is comparable. The research results also indicate that the adjustability of a simulated inductor can reduce the requirement for the AC source and guarantee the interchangeableness. Meanwhile, it is recommended that making the potential of one terminal of a simulated inductor stable is beneficial to the running stability. Furthermore, this work indirectly verifies the possibility and feasibility of the miniaturization of the C4D sensor by using the simulated inductor technique and lays a good foundation for future research work.
Injuries in men's international ice hockey: a 7-year study of the International Ice Hockey Federation Adult World Championship Tournaments and Olympic Winter Games

Background Information on ice hockey injuries at the international level is very limited. The aim of the study was to analyse the incidence, type, mechanism and severity of ice hockey injuries in men's international ice hockey tournaments. Methods All the injuries in men's International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship tournaments over a 7-year period were analysed using a strict definition of injury, standardised reporting strategies and an injury diagnosis made by a team physician. Results 528 injuries were recorded in games resulting in an injury rate of 14.2 per 1000 player-games (52.1/1000 player-game hours). Additionally, 27 injuries occurred during practice. For WC A-pool Tournaments and Olympic Winter Games (OWG) the injury rate was 16.3/1000 player-games (59.6/1000 player-game hours). Body checking, and stick and puck contact caused 60.7% of the injuries. The most common types of injuries were lacerations, sprains, contusions and fractures. A laceration was the most common facial injury and was typically caused by a stick. The knee was the most frequently injured part of the lower body and the shoulder was the most common site of an upper body injury. Arenas with flexible boards and glass reduced the risk of injury by 29% (IRR 0.71, (95% CI 0.56 to 0.91)). Conclusions The incidence of injury during international ice hockey competition is relatively high. Arena characteristics, such as flexible boards and glass, appeared to reduce the risk of injury.
Aligning Semi-Improvised Music Audio with Its Lead Sheet

Existing audio-score alignment methods assume that the audio performance is faithful to a fully-notated MIDI score. For semi-improvised music (e.g. jazz), this assumption is strongly violated. In this paper, we address the problem of aligning semi-improvised music audio with a lead sheet. Ourapproachdoesnotrequirepriortrainingonperformances of the lead sheet to be aligned. We start by analyzing the problem and propose to represent the lead sheet as a MIDI file together with a structural information file. Then we propose a dynamic-programming-based system to align the chromagram representations of the audio performance and the MIDI score. Techniques are proposed to address the chromagramscaling, keytranspositionandstructuralchange (e.g. a performer unexpectedly repeats a section) problems. We test our system on 3 jazz lead sheets. For each sheet we align a set of solo piano performances and a set of fullband commercial recordings with different instrumentation and styles. Results show that our system achieves promising results on some highly improvised music.
Synthesis and oxidation stability of monosized and monocrystalline Pr nanoparticles

This study reports the synthesis of monosized Pr nanoparticles with a controllable size ranging from 5 to 20 nm. Pr agglomerates generated by a spark generator, first sizeselected by a differential mobility analyzer and subsequently sintered in-flight at different temperatures result in spherical and monocrystalline Pr nanoparticles. The dependence of size and size distribution of Pr nanoparticles has been studied as a function of deposition parameters related to spark generator, differential mobility analyzer, and sintering. Transmission electron microscopy, energy-dispersive x-ray analysis, glancing angle x-ray diffraction, and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy studies confirm that initial Pr agglomerates and the resulting nanoparticles are metallic with d-hexagonal structure and remain stable in air during post-deposition exposure. Incomplete or partially sintered nanoparticles were found to be oxidized, resulting in the formation of amorphous oxide phase due to enhanced oxidation at grain boundaries.
The face is not an empty canvas: how facial expressions interact with facial appearance

Faces are not simply blank canvases upon which facial expressions write their emotional messages. In fact, facial appearance and facial movement are both important social signalling systems in their own right. We here provide multiple lines of evidence for the notion that the social signals derived from facial appearance on the one hand and facial movement on the other interact in a complex manner, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting one another. Faces provide information on who a person is. Sex, age, ethnicity, personality and other characteristics that can define a person and the social group the person belongs to can all be derived from the face alone. The present article argues that faces interact with the perception of emotion expressions because this information informs a decoder's expectations regarding an expresser's probable emotional reactions. Facial appearance also interacts more directly with the interpretation of facial movement because some of the features that are used to derive personality or sex information are also features that closely resemble certain emotional expressions, thereby enhancing or diluting the perceived strength of particular expressions.
Natural Genetic Variation of Integrin Alpha L (Itgal) Modulates Ischemic Brain Injury in Stroke

During ischemic stroke, occlusion of the cerebrovasculature causes neuronal cell death (infarction), but naturally occurring genetic factors modulating infarction have been difficult to identify in human populations. In a surgically induced mouse model of ischemic stroke, we have previously mapped Civq1 to distal chromosome 7 as a quantitative trait locus determining infarct volume. In this study, genome-wide association mapping using 32 inbred mouse strains and an additional linkage scan for infarct volume confirmed that the size of the infarct is determined by ancestral alleles of the causative gene(s). The genetically isolated Civq1 locus in reciprocal recombinant congenic mice refined the critical interval and demonstrated that infarct size is determined by both vascular (collateral vessel anatomy) and non-vascular (neuroprotection) effects. Through the use of interval-specific SNP haplotype analysis, we further refined the Civq1 locus and identified integrin alpha L (Itgal) as one of the causative genes for Civq1. Itgal is the only gene that exhibits both strain-specific amino acid substitutions and expression differences. Coding SNPs, a 5-bp insertion in exon 30b, and increased mRNA and protein expression of a splice variant of the gene (Itgal-003, ENSMUST00000120857), all segregate with infarct volume. Mice lacking Itgal show increased neuronal cell death in both ex vivo brain slice and in vivo focal cerebral ischemia. Our data demonstrate that sequence variation in Itgal modulates ischemic brain injury, and that infarct volume is determined by both vascular and non-vascular mechanisms.
Strong password-only authenticated key exchange

A new simple password exponential key exchange method (SPEKE) is described. It belongs to an exclusive class of methods which provide authentication and key establishment over an insecure channel using only a small password, without risk of offline dictionary attack. SPEKE and the closely-related Diffie-Hellman Encrypted Key Exchange (DH-EKE) are examined in light of both known and new attacks, along with sufficient preventive constraints. Although SPEKE and DH-EKE are similar, the constraints are different. The class of strong password-only methods is compared to other authentication schemes. Benefits, limitations, and tradeoffs between efficiency and security are discussed. These methods are important for several uses, including replacement of obsolete systems, and building hybrid two-factor systems where independent password-only and key-based methods can survive a single event of either key theft or password compromise.
Determining Rates of Change and Evaluating Group-Level Resiliency Differences in Hyporheic Microbial Communities in Response to Fluvial Heavy-Metal Deposition

ABSTRACT Prior field studies by our group have demonstrated a relationship between fluvial deposition of heavy metals and hyporheic-zone microbial community structure. Here, we determined the rates of change in hyporheic microbial communities in response to heavy-metal contamination and assessed group-level differences in resiliency in response to heavy metals. A controlled laboratory study was performed using 20 flowthrough river mesocosms and a repeated-measurement factorial design. A single hyporheic microbial community was exposed to five different levels of an environmentally relevant metal treatment (0, 4, 8, 16, and 30% sterilized contaminated sediments). Community-level responses were monitored at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 12 weeks via denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and quantitative PCR using group-specific primer sets for indigenous populations most closely related to the α-, β-, and γ-proteobacteria. There was a consistent, strong curvilinear relationship between community composition and heavy-metal contamination (R2 = 0.83; P < 0.001), which was evident after only 7 days of metal exposure (i.e., short-term response). The abundance of each phylogenetic group was negatively affected by the heavy-metal treatments; however, each group recovered from the metal treatments to a different extent and at a unique rate during the course of the experiment. The structure of hyporheic microbial communities responded rapidly and at contamination levels an order of magnitude lower than those shown to elicit a response in aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages. These studies indicate that hyporheic microbial communities are a sensitive and useful indicator of heavy-metal contamination in streams.
A content-based traffic engineering policy for Information-Centric Networks

Information-Centric Networks offer an opportunity to re-think traffic engineering, by allowing to schedule resource at the granularity of content. We describe an architecture for performing content-based path selection and resource allocation. It assigns content objects to paths in the network by considering the time it will take to deliver the existing objects in the network and optimizes with respect to this objective. We have extensively simulated this mechanism to demonstrate significant gain up to 72% in response time when compared with minimum backlog policy (MBP), round-robin format (RRF), and the traffic engineering policy which minimizes the maximum link utilization (minMLU).
Specific identification of fibrin(ogen) degradation products in plasma and serum using blotting and peroxidase labeled antiserum

We describe a method for identifying fibrinogen and fibrin split products using electrophoresis on agarose gel with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) followed by blotting in nitrocellulose paper. Detection of these derivatives after blotting is accomplished with per‐oxidase‐conjugated rather than by isotopically labeled antibodies. This technique can detect diverse fibrinogen derivatives produced in vivo or in vitro by the combined action of thrombin, plasmin, and factor XIII. This methodology is applicable to plasma, serum, and other body fluids including urine and ascitic fluid. This sensitive and specific assay, distinguishing the products of cross‐linked fibrin from those of fibrinogen and detecting fibrin polymers in plasma, can be achieved without the use of radioactivity.
Skilloscopy: Bayesian Modeling of Decision Makers' Skill

This paper proposes and demonstrates Skilloscopy as an approach to the assessment of decision makers. In an increasingly sophisticated, connected, and information-rich world, decision making is becoming both more important and more difficult. At the same time, modeling decision making on computers is becoming more feasible and of interest, partly because the information input to those decisions is increasingly on record. The aims of Skilloscopy are to rate and rank decision makers in a domain relative to each other; these aims do not include an analysis of why a decision is wrong or suboptimal, nor the modeling of the underlying cognitive process of making the decisions. In the proposed method, a decision-maker is characterized by a probability distribution of its competence in choosing among quantifiable alternatives. This probability distribution is derived by classic Bayesian inference from a combination of prior belief and evidence of the decisions. Thus, decision makers' skills may be better compared, rated, and ranked. The proposed method is applied and evaluated in the game domain of chess. A large set of games by players across a broad range of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) Elo ratings has been used to infer the distribution of players' rating directly from the moves they play rather than from game outcomes. Demonstration applications address questions frequently asked by the chess community regarding the stability of the Elo rating scale, the comparison of players of different eras and/or leagues, and controversial incidents possibly involving fraud. The method of Skilloscopy may be applied in any decision domain where the value of the decision-options can be quantified.
A Holistic Approach to Bilingual Sentence Fragment Extraction from Comparable Corpora

Achieving accurate translation, especially in multiple domain documents with statistical machine translation systems, requires more and more bilingual texts and this need becomes more critical when training such systems for language pairs with scarce training data. In the recent years, there have been some researches on new sources of parallel texts that are documents which are not necessarily parallel but are comparable. Since these methods search for possible translation equivalences in a greedy manner, they are unable to consider all possible parallel texts in comparable documents. This paper investigates a different approach for this need by considering relationships between all words of two comparable documents, which works fairly well even in the worst case of comparability. We represent each document pair in a matrix and then transform it to a new space to find parallel fragments. Evaluations show that the system is successful in extraction of useful fragment pairs.
WebView materialization

A WebView is a web page automatically created from base data typically stored in a DBMS. Given the multi-tiered architecture behind database-backed web servers, we have the option of materializing a WebView inside the DBMS, at the web server, or not at all, always computing it on the fly (virtual). Since WebViews must be up to date, materialized WebViews are immediately refreshed with every update on the base data. In this paper we compare the three materialization policies (materialized inside the DBMS, materialized at the web server and virtual) analytically, through a detailed cost model, and quantitatively, through extensive experiments on an implemented system. Our results indicate that materializing at the web server is a more scalable solution and can facilitate an order of magnitude more users than the virtual and materialized inside the DBMS policies, even under high update workloads.
Unequal Error Protected Image Transmission and Recovery Using Trellis Coding

A new UEP technique for image transmission using trellis code based on Hamming distance criterion has been proposed. The simulation results comparing the image quality and bit-rate for UEP and EEP have been provided. The results show that UEP performs better than EEP in terms of bit-rate without any significant depreciation in image quality. key words: trellis code, unequal error protection, Hamming
Transport Accessibility Analysis Using GIS: Assessing Sustainable Transport in London

Transport accessibility is an important driver of urban growth and key to the sustainable development of cities. This paper presents a simple GIS-based tool developed to allow the rapid analysis of accessibility by different transport modes. Designed to be flexible and use publicly-available data, this tool (built in ArcGIS) uses generalized cost to measure transport costs across networks including monetary and distance components. The utility of the tool is demonstrated on London, UK, showing the differing patterns of accessibility across the city by different modes. It is shown that these patterns can be examined spatially, by accessibility to particular destinations (e.g., employment locations), or as a global measure across a whole city system. A number of future infrastructure scenarios are tested, examining the potential for increasing the use of low-carbon forms of transport. It is shown that private car journeys are still the least cost mode choice in London, but that infrastructure investments can play a part in reducing the cost of more sustainable transport options.
A Table Detection Method for PDF Documents Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Because of the better performance of deep learning on many computer vision tasks, researchers in the area of document analysis and recognition begin to adopt this technique into their work. In this paper, we propose a novel method for table detection in PDF documents based on convolutional neutral networks, one of the most popular deep learning models. In the proposed method, some table-like areas are selected first by some loose rules, and then the convolutional networks are built and refined to determine whether the selected areas are tables or not. Besides, the visual features of table areas are directly extracted and utilized through the convolutional networks, while the non-visual information (e.g. characters, rendering instructions) contained in original PDF documents is also taken into consideration to help achieve better recognition results. The primary experimental results show that the approach is effective in table detection.
Unraveling the distributed neural code of facial identity through spatiotemporal pattern analysis

Face individuation is one of the most impressive achievements of our visual system, and yet uncovering the neural mechanisms subserving this feat appears to elude traditional approaches to functional brain data analysis. The present study investigates the neural code of facial identity perception with the aim of ascertaining its distributed nature and informational basis. To this end, we use a sequence of multivariate pattern analyses applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. First, we combine information-based brain mapping and dynamic discrimination analysis to locate spatiotemporal patterns that support face classification at the individual level. This analysis reveals a network of fusiform and anterior temporal areas that carry information about facial identity and provides evidence that the fusiform face area responds with distinct patterns of activation to different face identities. Second, we assess the information structure of the network using recursive feature elimination. We find that diagnostic information is distributed evenly among anterior regions of the mapped network and that a right anterior region of the fusiform gyrus plays a central role within the information network mediating face individuation. These findings serve to map out and characterize a cortical system responsible for individuation. More generally, in the context of functionally defined networks, they provide an account of distributed processing grounded in information-based architectures.
Multiple trapping and micromanipulation of dielectric particles with optical tweezers

In this paper we are going to present some results regarding the optical trapping and manipulation of dielectric microparticles immersed in fluids. The experiments will be done in Mie regime, i.e diameter of the particles is larger than the laser wavelength. We will report optical trapping of multiple particles and their manipulation by means of optical tweezers setup. To catch microobjects we will use a Gaussian laser beam and to manipulate them we are going to calculate diffractive optical elements (DOEs) by iterative algorithm and spherical wave method.
Use of NSAIDs for osteoarthritis amongst older-aged primary care patients: engagement with information and perceptions of risk.

BACKGROUND non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are used commonly to treat osteoarthritis in older patients. OBJECTIVE to explore the understandings of risk that older-aged primary care patients have in the context of the use of oral NSAIDs to treat osteoarthritis. METHOD semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 patients who were recruited from four general practices located in Sydney, Australia. Patients were aged at least 65 years and were currently taking, or in the past 2 years had taken, an NSAID for osteoarthritis. Emergent themes were identified from the transcripts and were compared within and across transcripts to develop more abstract concepts. RESULTS patients demonstrated three key 'modes of disengagement' from medication-specific risk information, each of which could also be a mode of modulating a sense of danger and each of which would demand a unique clinical response. These were: 'transference of responsibility'-transferring the responsibility to their GP, 'general versus specific risk'-considering the risk of taking medicine in general as opposed to the specific risk of taking an NSAID, and 'personal immunity'-some patients with a long history of NSAID use without apparent toxicity believed they were, therefore, not at risk of future adverse effects, while a few patients believed they were immune to adverse effects of drugs in general. CONCLUSION there is a need for greater recognition of these 'modes of disengagement'/'hazard modulation' in order to attain a clinical response leading to safer, more effective and more ethical use of medicines.
ψ-s correlation and dynamic time warping: two methods for tracking ice floes in SAR images

The authors present two algorithms for performing shape matching on ice floe boundaries in SAR (synthetic aperture radar) images. These algorithms quickly produce a set of ice motion and rotation vectors that can be used to guide a pixel value correlator. The algorithms match a shape descriptor known as the psi -s curve. The first algorithm uses normalized correlation to match the psi -s curves, while the second uses dynamic programming to compute an elastic match that better accommodates ice floe deformation. Some empirical data on the performance of the algorithms on Seasat SAR images are presented. >