Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Supervisory control of fuzzy discrete event systems: a formal approach

Fuzzy discrete event systems (DESs) were proposed recently by Lin and Ying, which may better cope with the real-world problems of fuzziness, impreciseness, and subjectivity such as those in biomedicine. As a continuation of, in this paper, we further develop fuzzy DESs by dealing with supervisory control of fuzzy DESs. More specifically: 1) we reformulate the parallel composition of crisp DESs, and then define the parallel composition of fuzzy DESs that is equivalent to that in . Max-product and max-min automata for modeling fuzzy DESs are considered, 2) we deal with a number of fundamental problems regarding supervisory control of fuzzy DESs, particularly demonstrate controllability theorem and nonblocking controllability theorem of fuzzy DESs, and thus, present the conditions for the existence of supervisors in fuzzy DESs; 3) we analyze the complexity for presenting a uniform criterion to test the fuzzy controllability condition of fuzzy DESs modeled by max-product automata; in particular, we present in detail a general computing method for checking whether or not the fuzzy controllability condition holds, if max-min automata are used to model fuzzy DESs, and by means of this method we can search for all possible fuzzy states reachable from initial fuzzy state in max-min automata. Also, we introduce the fuzzy n-controllability condition for some practical problems, and 4) a number of examples serving to illustrate the applications of the derived results and methods are described; some basic properties related to supervisory control of fuzzy DESs are investigated. To conclude, some related issues are raised for further consideration.
Acetylcholine compartments in mouse diaphragm. Comparison of the effects of black widow spider venom, electrical stimulation, and high concentrations of potassium

We have studied the effects of 25 mM potassium, electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve, and crude black widow spider venom on the ultrastructure, electrophysiology, and acetylcholine (ACh) contents of mouse diaphragms. About 65% of the ACh in diaphragms is contained in a depletable store in the nerve terminals. The rest of the ACh is contained in a nondepletable store that may correspond to the store that remains in denervated muscles and includes, in addition, ACh in the intramuscular branches of the phrenic nerve. About 4% of the ACh released from the depletable store at rest is secreted as quanta and may come from the vesicles, while 96% is secreted in a nonquantized form and comes from an extravesicular pool. The size of the extravesicular pool is uncertain: it could be less than 10%, or as great as 50%, of the depletable store. K causes a highly (but perhaps not perfectly) selective increase in the rate of quantal secretion so that quanta account for about 50% of the total ACh released from K- treated diaphragms. K, or electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve, depletes both the vesicular and extravesicular pools of ACh when hemicholinium no. 3 (HC-3) is present. However, most of the vesicles are retained under these conditions so that the diaphragms are able to increase slightly their rates of release of ACh when K is added. Venom depletes the terminals of their vesicles and abolishes the release of quanta of ACh. It depletes the vesicular pool of ACh (since it depletes the vesicles), but may only partially deplete the extravesicular pool (since it reduces resting release only 10--40%). The rate of release of ACh from the residual extravesicular pool does not increase when 25 mM K is added. Although we cannot exclude the possibility that stimulation may double the rate of release of ACh from the extravesicular pool, our results are compatible with the idea that the ACh released by stimulation comes mainly from the vesicles and that, when synthesis is inhibited by HC-3, ACh may be exchanged between the extravesicular pool and recycled vesicles.
Occurrence of ferredoxin:NAD+ oxidoreductase activity and its ion specificity in several Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria

A ferredoxin:NAD+ oxidoreductase was recently discovered as a redox-driven ion pump in the anaerobic, acetogenic bacterium Acetobacterium woodii. The enzyme is assumed to be encoded by the rnf genes. Since these genes are present in the genomes of many bacteria, we tested for ferredoxin:NAD+ oxidoreductase activity in cytoplasmic membranes from several different Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria that have annotated rnf genes. We found this activity in Clostridium tetanomorphum, Clostridium ljungdahlii, Bacteroides fragilis, and Vibrio cholerae but not in Escherichia coli and Rhodobacter capsulatus. As in A. woodii, the activity was Na+-dependent in C. tetanomorphum and B. fragilis but Na+-independent in C. ljungdahlii and V. cholerae. We deleted the rnf genes from B. fragilis and demonstrated that the mutant has greatly reduced ferredoxin:NAD+ oxidoreductase activity. This is the first genetic proof that the rnf genes indeed encode the reduced ferredoxin:NAD+ oxidoreductase activity.
A pilot trial of the alpha-1 adrenergic antagonist, prazosin, for alcohol dependence.

BACKGROUND Current medications for alcohol dependence (AD) show only modest efficacy. None target brain noradrenergic pathways. Theory and preclinical evidence suggest that noradrenergic circuits may be involved in alcohol reinforcement and relapse. We therefore tested the alpha-1 adrenergic receptor antagonist, prazosin, as a pharmacotherapy for AD. METHODS We randomized 24 participants with AD but without posttraumatic stress disorder to receive either prazosin or placebo in a 6-week, double-blind pilot study. Medication was titrated to a target dose of 4 mg QAM, 4 mg QPM, and 8 mg QHS by the end of week 2. Participants received 5 medical management treatment sessions. Participants were reminded 3 times each day via a text pager to take medications and to call a telephone monitoring system once daily to provide self-reports of alcohol consumption and craving, the primary outcome measures. Results were analyzed using mixed linear regression adjusted for drinking days per week at baseline and week number. RESULTS Twenty of the 24 (83%) subjects completed. Among the completers, the prazosin group reported fewer drinking days per week than the placebo group during the final 3 weeks of the study. Since only 1 woman was randomized to placebo and only three women completed the trial, the following results focus on the 17 male completers. The prazosin group reported fewer drinking days per week and fewer drinks per week during the final 3 weeks of the study; average total number of drinking days for the placebo group 5.7 (SEM 1.9) versus 0.9 (SEM 0.5) for the prazosin group, and average total number of drinks 20.8 (SEM 6.5) for the placebo group versus 2.6 (SEM 1.3) for the prazosin group. Rates of adverse events were equivalent across conditions. CONCLUSIONS Prazosin holds promise as a pharmacologic treatment for AD and deserves further evaluation in a larger controlled trial.
An approach to RAID-6 based on cyclic groups of a prime order

As the size of data storing arrays of disks grows, it becomes vital to protect data against double disk failures. A popular method of protection is via the Reed-Solomon (RS) code with two parity check symbols. In the present paper we construct alternative examples of linear block codes protecting against two erasures. Our construction is based on an abstract notion of cone. Concrete cones are constructed via matrix representations of cyclic groups of prime order. In particular, this construction produces EVENODD code. Interesting conditions on the prime number arise in our analysis of these codes. At the end, we analyse an assembly implementation of the corresponding system on a general purpose processor and compare its write and recovery speed with the standard DP-RAID system.
Induction of First-Order Decision Lists: Results on Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs

This paper presents a method for inducing logic programs from examples that learns a new class of concepts called first-order decision lists, defined as ordered lists of clauses each ending in a cut. The method, called Foidl, is based on Foil (Quinlan, 1990) but employs intensional background knowledge and avoids the need for explicit negative examples. It is particularly useful for problems that involve rules with specific exceptions, such as learning the past-tense of English verbs, a task widely studied in the context of the symbolic/connectionist debate. Foidl is able to learn concise, accurate programs for this problem from significantly fewer examples than previous methods (both connectionist and symbolic).
Wnt Signaling in Axial Patterning and Regeneration: Lessons from Planaria

Positional information generated by Wnt signaling determines whether heads or tails will form in wounded flatworms. Wnt signal transduction plays a crucial role in stem cell proliferation and regeneration. When canonical Wnt signaling is low, heads develop, and when it is high, tails are formed. In planarians, Wnt transcription is activated by wounding in a β-catenin−independent way. Hedgehog is one of the signals involved, because it induces regeneration of tails (instead of heads) through the activation of Wnt transcription. Depletion of Smad4 blocks regeneration entirely, which suggests that the bone morphogenetic protein signaling pathway and the Wnt pathway are required for regeneration and body patterning.
Investigating Delamination Migration in Composite Tape Laminates

A modification to a recently developed test specimen designed to investigate migration of a delamination between neighboring ply interfaces in tape laminates is presented. The specimen is a cross-ply laminated beam consisting of 40 plies with a polytetrafluoroethylene insert spanning part way along its length. The insert is located between a lower 0-degree ply (specimen length direction) and a stack of four 90-degree plies (specimen width direction). The modification involved a stacking sequence that promotes stable delamination growth prior to migration, and included a relocation of the insert from the specimen midplane to the interface between plies 14 and 15. Specimens were clamped at both ends onto a rigid baseplate and loaded on their upper surface via a piano hinge assembly, resulting in a predominantly flexural loading condition. Tests were conducted with the load-application point positioned at various locations along a specimen's span. This position affected the sequence of damage events during a test.
Enabling content-aware traffic engineering

Today, a large fraction of Internet traffic is originated by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). To cope with increasing demand for content, CDNs have deployed massively distributed infrastructures. These deployments pose challenges for CDNs as they have to dynamically map end-users to appropriate servers without being full+y aware of the network conditions within an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or the end-user location. On the other hand, ISPs struggle to cope with rapid traffic shifts caused by the dynamic server selection policies of the CDNs. The challenges that CDNs and ISPs face separately can be turned into an opportunity for collaboration. We argue that it is sufficient for CDNs and ISPs to coordinate only in server selection, not routing, in order to perform traffic engineering. To this end, we propose Content-aware Traffic Engineering (CaTE), which dynamically adapts server selection for content hosted by CDNs using ISP recommendations on small time scales. CaTE relies on the observation that by selecting an appropriate server among those available to deliver the content, the path of the traffic in the network can be influenced in a desired way. We present the design and implementation of a prototype to realize CaTE, and show how CDNs and ISPs can jointly take advantage of the already deployed distributed hosting infrastructures and path diversity, as well as the ISP detailed view of the network status without revealing sensitive operational information. By relying on tier-1 ISP traces, we show that CaTE allows CDNs to enhance the end-user experience while enabling an ISP to achieve several traffic engineering goals.
Dynamic Excitatory and Inhibitory Gain Modulation Can Produce Flexible, Robust and Optimal Decision-making

Behavioural and neurophysiological studies in primates have increasingly shown the involvement of urgency signals during the temporal integration of sensory evidence in perceptual decision-making. Neuronal correlates of such signals have been found in the parietal cortex, and in separate studies, demonstrated attention-induced gain modulation of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Although previous computational models of decision-making have incorporated gain modulation, their abstract forms do not permit an understanding of the contribution of inhibitory gain modulation. Thus, the effects of co-modulating both excitatory and inhibitory neuronal gains on decision-making dynamics and behavioural performance remain unclear. In this work, we incorporate time-dependent co-modulation of the gains of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons into our previous biologically based decision circuit model. We base our computational study in the context of two classic motion-discrimination tasks performed in animals. Our model shows that by simultaneously increasing the gains of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons, a variety of the observed dynamic neuronal firing activities can be replicated. In particular, the model can exhibit winner-take-all decision-making behaviour with higher firing rates and within a significantly more robust model parameter range. It also exhibits short-tailed reaction time distributions even when operating near a dynamical bifurcation point. The model further shows that neuronal gain modulation can compensate for weaker recurrent excitation in a decision neural circuit, and support decision formation and storage. Higher neuronal gain is also suggested in the more cognitively demanding reaction time than in the fixed delay version of the task. Using the exact temporal delays from the animal experiments, fast recruitment of gain co-modulation is shown to maximize reward rate, with a timescale that is surprisingly near the experimentally fitted value. Our work provides insights into the simultaneous and rapid modulation of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal gains, which enables flexible, robust, and optimal decision-making.
STUDY OF FRACTAL BOND CONNECTIVITY OF NEODYMIUM PHOSPHATE GLASSES BY ULTRASONIC TECHNIQUE

The elastic properties of neodymium phosphate xNd2O3(1-x)P2O5 glasses with different compositions containing from 10 to 25 mole % Nd2O3 has been studied by ultrasonic technique, as functions of temperature from 270 K to 303 K. The elastic properties like adiabatic elastic stiffness coefficients, C11, C44 and bulk modulus, B of the glasses have been determined using the experimental data. The temperature dependence of the elastic properties were used to explores useful information about the fractal bond connectivity of the neodymium phosphate glasses which lies between 2.00 and 2.70. This result indicates that the neodymium phosphate glasses were connected in an array between two and three dimensional network.
Enhancing Patient Safety: Improving the Patient Handoff Process Through Appreciative Inquiry

Patient transfers from one care giver to another are an area of high safety consequence, as is evident by many studies and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's Patient Safety Goals. The authors describe how one hospital made measurable improvements in a patient handoff process by using an unconventional approach to change called appreciative inquiry. Rather than identifying the root causes of ineffective handoffs, appreciative inquiry was used to engage staff in identifying and building on their most effective handoff experiences.
Periodontal health and diabetes awareness among Saudi diabetes patients

Purpose This study aimed to examine diabetic patients in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, regarding their general diabetic and oral health-related awareness and practices, their awareness of the association of diabetes with periodontal disease, and their sources of diabetes-related information. Methods Diabetic patients (n=454) who were receiving care at the diabetes clinic in King Abdulaziz University Hospital, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from October 2013 to May 2014, completed a six-part questionnaire assessing their sociodemographic characteristics, general and oral health awareness and practices, and sources of diabetes-related information. Descriptive statistics were used to report the results. Results The responses indicated inadequate health-related practices in the surveyed group: 22.2% brushed their teeth twice daily, 73.6% never flossed their teeth, and while 80.2% visited a physician in the past year, only 12.6% visited a dentist during the same year. Of the respondents, 94.8% reported that they had never received advice on oral hygiene tasks in relation to diabetes from a health professional. Awareness about the diabetes and periodontal disease association was limited: 46.7% knew that diabetics have gum problems more often if their blood sugar stays very high, and only 21.8% knew that gum disease makes it harder to control blood sugar in diabetic patients. A significant association (P<0.05) was found between a higher level of education and greater general and oral awareness, as well as a significant association (P<0.05) between longer duration of disease, regular exercise, and regular visits to the physician and awareness about diabetes mellitus. Additionally, a significant association (P<0.05) was found between regular dental visits and both periodontal disease and diabetes awareness. Family and friends were the main source of diabetes-related information, and the Internet was the least likely source. Conclusion Customized educational programs should be planned for diabetic patients according to community needs.
How Random is a Coin Toss? Bayesian Inference and the Symbolic Dynamics of Deterministic Chaos

Author(s): Strelioff, Christopher C; Crutchfield, James P | Abstract: Symbolic dynamics has proven to be an invaluable tool in analyzing the mechanisms that lead to unpredictability and random behavior in nonlinear dynamical systems. Surprisingly, a discrete partition of continuous state space can produce a coarse-grained description of the behavior that accurately describes the invariant properties of an underlying chaotic attractor. In particular, measures of the rate of information production--the topological and metric entropy rates--can be estimated from the outputs of Markov or generating partitions. Here we develop Bayesian inference for k-th order Markov chains as a method to finding generating partitions and estimating entropy rates from finite samples of discretized data produced by coarse-grained dynamical systems.
Selective corrosion of duplex stainless steel bars in acid. Part 2: Effect of the surface strain and numerical analysis

In the second part of this study, the effect of the strain level on the selective corrosion of the phases comprised in four different heavily strained duplex stainless steel (DSS) bars is analyzed. The corrosion behavior of the surface of bars with variable strain levels is analyzed and compared to the results of the less strained core of the same bars. For lean DSS bars (UNS S32304 and S32001 grades), an increase on the corrosion rate caused by the strains has been detected for the surface. For these DSS without Mo, ferrite has proved to be more sensitive to decrease on the corrosion resistance caused by the strain than austenite. In these cases, the strains expand the region of active corrosion toward higher potentials. On the other hand, when the grains are heavily strained parallel to the surface, if the most corrosion resistant phase has good corrosion behavior in the medium (UNS S32205 grades), the corrosion rate can be effectively slowed down, in spite of the microstructural defects.
A 1-μW 600-ppm/◦C Current Reference Circuit Consisting of Subthreshold CMOS Circuits

A low-power CMOS current reference circuit was developed using a 0.35-μm standard CMOS process technology. The circuit consists of MOSFET circuits operating in the subthreshold region and uses no resistors. It compensates for the temperature effect on mobility μ and threshold voltage VTH of MOSFETs and generates a reference current that is insensitive to temperature and supply voltage. Theoretical analyses and experimental results showed that the circuit generates a stable reference current of 100 nA. The temperature coefficient of the current was 520 ppm/◦C at best and 600 ppm/◦C on average in the range of 0 ◦C–80 ◦C. The line regulation was 0.2%/V in a supply voltage range of 1.8–3 V. The power dissipation was 1 μW, and the chip area was 0.015 mm. Our circuit would be suitable for use in subthreshold-operated power-aware large-scale integrations.
Theory of the time-lag diffusion method for the case of an outgassing solid

In the ordinary application of the time-lag method to the measurement of the diffusion coefficient of a gas passing through a plane sheet of an inert solid, the gas is pressurized on one side of the sheet and evacuated on the other. After decay of transients, the cumulative amount, Q ( t ), of gas diffused through the sheet in time, f, assumes the “time-lag” form, Q ( t ) = A ( t − L ). Measurements of the slope, A , and the intercept, L , can be used to determine the diffusion coefficient and the solubility of the gas in the solid. We have rederived this law for the case of a solid that is actively evolving this same gas at an arbitrary rate and have used it to predict the rate of outgassing of the solid upon standing. Practical applications of the theory include radioactive decay of minerals, rejection of plasticizers by plastics, and the decomposition of solid rocket propellants.
Layered fabrication of tool steel and functionally graded materials with a Nd:YAG pulsed laser

Rapid Prototyping technologies have been developed to transform three-dimensional computer models into physical prototypes within a compressed period of time. The problem of many existing laser and metal powder based techniques is the insufficient strength of parts to meet the practical requirements due to incomplete sintering or melting of powders. One of the research objectives was to melt tool steel powder completely and form fully dense fused structures with a 550 W Nd: YAG pulsed laser. The other objective was to produce material structures with graded composition, so-called Functionally Graded Materials (FGM). It is believed that this process could eventually produce preforms with complex material structures. Tungsten carbide was selected to be mixed with tool steel powder for possible wear resistance applications. The investigation on laser fusing tool steel was first carried out. The optimal process settings were concluded by measuring the contact angle, the surface roughness, bead height and variance of bead width of each single bead produced under various conditions. Fusing overlapped beads and multiple layers was then followed by studying the effects of scan spacings, scanning patterns and layer thickness. A scanning pattern was developed to effectively reduce porosity. Dense cubes of tool steel were then successfully produced with porosity of less than 1 %. Based on the findings from processing tool steel powder, different ratios of WC and tool steel were mixed and processed under the same processing conditions to produce FGMs. Various analysis techniques, including scanning electron microscopy, energy and wavelength dispersive X-ray were applied to examine the microstructures. WC was found partially dissolved in the matrix and evidence of liquid phase sintering was found in powder densification. Hardness, microhardness and nano-indentation testing were performed to show the hardness values in accordance with compositional changes in macro, micro, and nano-scales. The FGM of 80wt% H 10 and 20wt%WC showed an increase in hardness of at least 5-10% from the samples of H10.