Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clock-Controlled Alternating Step Generator

A new construction of a pseudorandom generator based on a simple combination of three feedback shift registers (FSRs) is introduced . The main characteristic of its structure is that he output of one of the three FSRs controls the clocking of the other two FSRs. This c onstruction allows users to generate alarge family of sequences using the same initial states and the same feedback functions of the three combined FSRs. The construction is related to the Alternating Step Generator that is a special ca se of this construction. The period, and the lower and upper bound of the li near complexity of the output sequences of the construction whose control FSR generates a de Bruijn sequence and the other two FSRs generate m-sequence s are established. Furthermore, it is established that the distributio n of short patterns in these output sequences occur equally likely and that hey are secure against correlation attacks. All these properties make it a suitable crypto-generator for stream cipher applications.
Image adaptive watermarking using fuzzy logic on FPGA

This paper presents novel hardware architecture for watermarking unit which can be used with the JPEG2000 compression standard. We have presented dual watermark detection which is also novelty of our algorithm. Hardware assisted watermarking offers advantages over the software implementations in terms of less area, power consumption, real time. The objective is to develop the real time low cost and robust watermarking hardware which can be incorporated with existing systems such as digital camera, scanners, camcorders etc. We have implemented CDF 5/3 wavelet filters with lifting scheme which requires less hardware and memory efficient. The present algorithm was tested with standard benchmark software StirMark. The experimental result shows that the proposed scheme of watermarking is robust against most of the geometric attacks scaling, rotation, remove lines and cropping.
Optimal Control of Two- and Three-Dimensional Incompressible Navier-Stokes Flows

The focus of this work is on the development of large-scale numerical optimization methods for optimal control of steady incompressible Navier? Stokes flows. The control is affected by the suction or injection of fluid on portions of the boundary, and the objective function represents the rate at which energy is dissipated in the fluid. We develop reduced Hessian sequential quadratic programming methods that avoid converging the flow equations at each iteration. Both quasi-Newton and Newton variants are developed and compared to the approach of eliminating the flow equations and variables, which is effectively the generalized reduced gradient method. Optimal control problems are solved for two-dimensional flow around a cylinder and three-dimensional flow around a sphere. The examples demonstrate at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in time taken, allowing the optimal solution of flow control problems in as little as half an hour on a desktop workstation.
A kinematic and morphological investigation of the asymmetric nebula around the LBV candidate WRA 751

WRA 751 is an evolved massive star in our Galaxy closely resembling Luminous Blue Variable stars (LBVs). It is surrounded by a nitrogen enriched nebula of ab out 23" diameter. A comparative study of the nebula's morphology and kinematics is presented, it supports - together with spectroscopical evidence - the classification of WRA 751 as a LBV. Images show that the nebula consists of a nearly spherical shell as well as a bipolar-like structure north and south of its main body, the Northern and Southern Caps. In contrast to the almost spherical appearance of the main body of the nebula, the kinematics shows a deviation even of this part from a classical spherical expansion pattern. From the present data it can be concluded that the main body expands asymmetrically (central expansion velocity ~26 km/s), with a thicker shell at the back side. A bump-like structure can be found to the west of the central star. In addition to the main body, bipolar kinematic components can be identified with the morphologically classified Caps. These results put WRA 751 into the class of LBVs which are surrounded by a nebula with bipolar components, albeit considerably less pronounced than, for instance, in the classical bipolar LBVs Eta Car and HR Car.
Amplitude and frequency modulation control of sound production in a mechanical model of the avian syrinx

SUMMARY Birdsong has developed into one of the important models for motor control of learned behaviour and shows many parallels with speech acquisition in humans. However, there are several experimental limitations to studying the vocal organ – the syrinx – in vivo. The multidisciplinary approach of combining experimental data and mathematical modelling has greatly improved the understanding of neural control and peripheral motor dynamics of sound generation in birds. Here, we present a simple mechanical model of the syrinx that facilitates detailed study of vibrations and sound production. Our model resembles the `starling resistor', a collapsible tube model, and consists of a tube with a single membrane in its casing, suspended in an external pressure chamber and driven by various pressure patterns. With this design, we can separately control `bronchial' pressure and tension in the oscillating membrane and generate a wide variety of `syllables' with simple sweeps of the control parameters. We show that the membrane exhibits high frequency, self-sustained oscillations in the audio range (>600 Hz fundamental frequency) using laser Doppler vibrometry, and systematically explore the conditions for sound production of the model in its control space. The fundamental frequency of the sound increases with tension in three membranes with different stiffness and mass. The lower-bound fundamental frequency increases with membrane mass. The membrane vibrations are strongly coupled to the resonance properties of the distal tube, most likely because of its reflective properties to sound waves. Our model is a gross simplification of the complex morphology found in birds, and more closely resembles mathematical models of the syrinx. Our results confirm several assumptions underlying existing mathematical models in a complex geometry.
Exchange Rate Pass-Through and Structural Macroeconomic Shocks in Developing Countries: An Empirical Investigation

This paper investigates the exchange rate pass-through in 12 developing countries during the period 1980-2001 by adopting a new formulation . Rather than considering the traditional approach based on the exogenous exchange rate movement through correlation between exchange rate and prices, we focus on fundamental macroeconomic shocks that a¤ect both exchange rate and prices. In order to do that, we employ long-run restrictions a la Blanchard and Quah (1989) to identify the di¤erent shocks through an open economic macroeconomic model (ISLM framework). We use two empirical methodology : Structural VECM methodology used by Jang and Ogaki (2004) and the common trends approach proposed by Warne et al (1992). This allows us to calculate the pass-through as the responses of the exchange rate, CPI and import prices to the supply, the relative demand, the nominal and the foreign prices shocks. We show that the pass-through ratio in developing countries is di¤erent when considering di¤erent structural shocks.
Funções efetivamente exercidas pela controladoria em empresas de médio porte: alinhamento entre a prática e a teoria

Partindo da premissa de que nem a teoria nem a pratica estao pacificadas, o estudo procura mapear as funcoes da controladoria e o alinhamento das praticas com as teorias, o que de fato ocorre, e como ocorre em determinado conjunto de empresas de medio porte. As empresas deste nicho tem se deparado com um progresso expressivo do seu grau de complexidade, o que por sua vez exigem novos mecanismos de controles organizacionais. Alem disso, o crescente interesse pela implementacao da controladoria nas empresas, e pela formacao de controllers em universidades e outros institutos. Essas e outras motivacoes merecem uma investigacao academica que oxigene os conceitos, apresente as funcoes da controladoria no seu dia-a-dia, nao sem antes abordar: o ordenamento da teoria vigente disciplinados pela categorizacao proposta, a analise da situacao hierarquica da controladoria nas organizacoes, a influencia da controladoria sobre a contabilidade, a sua competencia na gestao de riscos e a identificacao das praticas da controladoria no que diz respeito ao orcamento e ao composto estrategico. Para a execucao deste trabalho a pesquisa empirica conta com a participacao de seis empresas, todas de medio porte com caracteristicas heterogeneas, que enriqueceram e focalizaram, a partir de suas diferentes caracteristicas e abordagens, as praticas efetivamente exercidas pela controladoria, o que acabou por revelar tambem seu modelo de gestao. A metodologia empregada apresenta uma abordagem quantitativa e qualitativa, baseada em estudos de casos multiplos, com carater exploratorio. Apos o emprego de entrevistas semiestruturadas, foi aplicado o questionario em escala Likert e a pesquisa documental sobre os sujeitos da pesquisa: diretores, controladoria e profissionais adjuntos. Os resultados indicam que as funcoes ainda sao ditadas pelo entendimento dos gestores, contudo o carater transversal da controladoria e o conhecimento e as habilidades do controller sao determinantes. Por fim, a analise do alinhamento das evidencias desta pesquisa com a teoria fornece um tratado atualizado e aponta que a controladoria e estrategica, e quanto mais estrategica na organizacao, maior sera o beneficio.
The role of inactivation in the cumulative blockage of voltage-dependent sodium channels by local anesthetics and antiarrythmics.

Previously published results (Khodorov 1973; Khodorov et al. 1974, 1976; Zaborovskaya 1976) showed that along with a decrease in the maximum sodium permeability ('tonic block') the tertiary amine local anesthetics (LA), procaine and trimecain cause a drastic slowing of Na channel reactivation after membrane depolarization. This effect ("drug-induced slow Na inactivation") underlies a use-dependent Na current (JNa) inhibition during repetitive membrane depolarization. A detailed analysis of these data led Khodorov et al. (1976) to conclude that inactivation of Na channels increased their affinity to LA which in turn resulted in stabilization of the inactivated channel conformation. The aim of the present work was to test this hypothesis using chloramine-T as a reagent capable of removing the ordinary ('fast') Na channels inactivation (Wang 1983). We have examined the effect of chloramine T (CT) treatment of the nodal membrane on use-dependent (cumulative) inhibition of JNa by lidocaine, tetracain, and the antiarrhythmic compounds N-propyl ajmaline (NPA) and KC 3791 (KC) (see Fig. 2A).
Supervised acoustic topic model for unstructured audio information retrieval

We introduce a modified version of the acoustic topic model, which assumes an audio signal consists of latent acoustic topics and each topic can be interpreted as a distribution over acoustic words, for unstructured audio information retrieval applications. The proposed supervised acoustic topic model is based on supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) while the conventional acoustic topic model is built upon latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) which learns its parameters in an unsupervised manner. The experimental results with BBC Sound Effects Library indicate that the supervised acoustic model brings benefits in terms of classification accuracy by learning parameters with respect to corresponding categories of audio clips, i.e., semantic and onomatopoeic labels. Index Terms — audio information retrieval, acoustic topic model, unstructured audio, supervised LDA
Drawing connections: art, medicine and surgery

ABSTRACT In this essay, I introduce the concept of drawing not just as a noun but as a verb, an activity, that can be used as a tool to gain greater insight and understanding across a breadth of medical sciences. This is rooted within the act of slow looking, and slow drawing, taking the time to really look at phenomena and respond to it by observing closely, analysing and collecting visual data through the activity of drawing. Examples briefly outlined include the visual investigation of a rare congenital disease, aspects of the experiences of ageing, the role of human remains in museums and how drawing can be used as a pedagogical tool for those training in medicine.
Caregiver stress and outcomes of children with pediatric feeding disorders treated in an intensive interdisciplinary program.

OBJECTIVE This study investigated the impact of an intensive interdisciplinary feeding program on caregiver stress and child outcomes of children with feeding disorders across three categories. METHODS Children were categorized into either tube dependent, liquid dependent, or food selective groups. Outcomes for caregiver stress levels, child mealtime behaviors, weight, and calories were examined at admission and discharge for 121 children. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to examine differences pre- and post-treatment and across feeding categories. RESULTS Caregiver stress, child mealtime behaviors, weight, and caloric intake improved significantly following treatment in the intensive feeding program, regardless of category placement. CONCLUSIONS Few studies have examined the impact of an intensive interdisciplinary approach on caregiver stress, as well as on child outcome variables with such a diverse population. This study provides support that regardless of a child's medical and feeding history, an intensive interdisciplinary approach significantly improves caregiver stress and child outcomes.
Fast moving object detection from overlapping cameras

In this work, we address the problem of moving object detection from overlapping cameras. We based on homographic transformation of the foreground information from multiple cameras to reference image. We introduce a new algorithm based on Codebook to get each single views foreground information. This method integrates a region based information into the original codebook algorithm and uses CIE L*a*b* color space information. Once the foreground pixels are detected in each view, we approximate their contours with polygons and project them into the ground plane (or into the reference plane). After this, we fuse polygons in order to obtain foreground area. This fusion is based on geometric properties of the scene and on the quality of each camera detection. Assessment of experiments using public datasets proposed for the evaluation of single camera object detection demonstrate the performance of our codebook based method for moving object detection in single view. Results using multi-camera open dataset also prove the efficiency of our multi-view detection approach.
FacetZoom: a continuous multi-scale widget for navigating hierarchical metadata

Faceted browsing is a promising way to incrementally refine data sets. Current approaches do not scale well in terms of screen size and have shortcomings in interacting with hierarchical facets. This paper introduces FacetZoom, a novel multi-scale widget combining facet browsing with zoomable user interfaces. Hierarchical facets are displayed as space-filling widgets which allow a fast traversal across all levels while simultaneously maintaining context. We contribute both a seamless continuous navigation and a quick tap-and-center interaction. Two prototypes are described which successfully apply the space-structuring widget to continuous, sampled data and an information collection. A formative user study of the latter indicates that the interface scales well to small screens. FacetZoom is versatile and offers consistent searching and browsing behaviors in a multitude of applications and device settings.
Preserving Privacy in Social City Networks via Small Cells

An increasingly large amount of small cells – e.g. WiFi hotspots – is being deployed in residential areas to connect a plethora of smart devices to the Internet. In this paper, we present a social city network leveraging small cells for sharing content geographically and temporarily whilst preserving the privacy of its users. Unlike a social network built around friends, we propose a social city network addressing geographically co-located people and smart objects, e.g. residing in a street, on a square, around a building, etc. Our goal is to facilitate interaction with smart cities by easily sharing short-lived data fragments with others in a given area and for a limited time span. To this end, we designed an architecture in which small cells deliver location proofs that grant access to location-restricted content.
Evidence for a world circulation provided by the measurements of helium and water vapour distribution in the stratosphere

Information is now available regarding the vertical distribution of water vapour and helium in the lower stratosphere over southern England. The helium content of the air is found to be remarkably constant up to 20 km but the water content is found to fall very rapidly just above the tropopause, and in the lowest 1 km of the stratosphere the humidity mixing ratio falls through a ratio of 10—1. The helium distribution is not compatible with the view of a quiescent stratosphere free from turbulence or vertical motions. The water-vapour distribution is incompatible with a turbulent stratosphere unless some dynamic process maintains the dryness of the stratosphere. In view of the large wind shear which is normally found just above the tropopause it is unlikely that this region is free from turbulence. The observed distributions can be explained by the existence of a circulation in which air enters the stratosphere at the equator, where it is dried by condensation, travels in the stratosphere to temperate and polar regions, and sinks into the troposphere. The sinking, however, will warm the air unless it is being cooled by radiation and the idea of a stratosphere in radiative equilibrium must be abandoned. The cooling rate must lie between about 0.1 and 1.1°C per day but a value near 0.5°C per day seems most probable. At the equator the ascending air must be subject to heating by radiation. The circulation is quite reasonable on energy considerations. It is consistent with the existence of lower temperatures in the equatorial stratosphere than in polar and temperate regions, and if the flow can carry ozone from the equator to the poles then it gives a reasonable explanation of the high ozone values observed at high latitudes. The dynamic consequences of the circulation are not considered. It should however be noted that there is considerable difficulty to account for the smallness of the westerly winds in the stratosphere, as the rotation of the earth should convert the slow poleward movement into strong westerly winds.
High Speed Motion Control System With Predictive Observer and Its Parameters Optimization

The traditional control of high speed motion control system usually employs feedforward control to provide phase advance. In this paper, we proposed a predictive observer to compensate phase lags in the feedback loop. By employing the observer, the velocity and the position controller can be designed as for a plant does not have phase lag elements. Then, loop gains can be enlarged and motion speed can be improved. There are two sets of parameters need to be set, the controller's and the observer's. We applied lea st square algorithm for model estimation and simplex method for controller auto tuning. The algorithms were tested in simulations. The results show that the motion performance is extremely improved by the predictive observer. The accuracy of the estimated model has errors less than 2.5%. The preferred motion performance can be got according to the auto-tuned control parameters which implies that the strategy for parameters setting works well.
Spin(p + 1, p + 1) covariant Dp-brane bound states

We construct Spin(p + 1, p + 1) covariant Dp-brane bound states by using the fact that the potentials in the RR sector of toroidically compactified type II supergravity transform as a chiral spinor of the T duality group. As an application, we show the invariance of the zero-force condition for a probe D-brane under noncommutative deformations of the background, which gives a holographic proof of the stability of the corresponding field theory ground state under noncommutative deformations. We also identify the Spin(p + 1, p + 1) transformation laws by examining the covariance of the D-brane Lagrangians.
Transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation induces lasting fatigue resistance and enhances explosive vertical jump performance

Transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation (tsDCS) is a non-invasive neuromodulatory intervention that has been shown to modify excitability in spinal and supraspinal circuits in animals and humans. Our objective in this study was to explore the functional neuromodulatory potential of tsDCS by examining its immediate and lasting effects over the repeated performance of a whole body maximal exercise in healthy volunteers. Using a double-blind, randomized, crossover, sham-controlled design we investigated the effects of 15 min of anodal tsDCS on repeated vertical countermovement jump (VCJ) performance at 0, 20, 60, and 180 minutes post-stimulation. Measurements of peak and take-off velocity, vertical displacement, peak power and work done during countermovement and push-off VCJ phases were derived from changes in vertical ground reaction force (12 performance parameters) in 12 healthy participants. The magnitude and direction of change in VCJ performance from pre- to post-stimulation differed significantly between sham and active tsDCS for 7 of the 12 VCJ performance measures (P < 0.05). These differences comprised of a post-sham fatigue in VCJ displacement/work done, peak to peak power and take-off velocity, and a resilience to this fatigue effect post-active tsDCS. In addition there was also an enhancement of countermovement performance and total work done (P < 0.05). These changes did not vary across repeated VCJ performances over time post-tsDCS (P > 0.05). Our original findings demonstrate that one single session of anodal tsDCS in healthy subjects can prevent fatigue and maintain or enhance different aspects of whole body explosive motor power over repeated sets of VCJs performed over a period of three hours. The observed effects are discussed in relation to alterations in central fatigue mechanisms, muscle contraction mode during jump execution and changes in spinal cord excitability. These findings have important implications for power endurance sport performance and for neuromotor rehabilitation.