Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of dynamic compression to probe semiconductor response at large strains

Large strains in semiconductors are expected to be more common in future electronic devices utilizing nanostructure components. Hydrostatic pressure (HP) and uniaxial stress (US) loading have inherent limitations for probing the desired strain conditions. Uniaxial strain loading, achieved in dynamic compression experiments, is particularly attractive for attaining well‐defined, large strains and to complement HP and US loading. Recent dynamic compression studies on III–V semiconductors (GaN, GaP, and GaAs) are summarized to review notable findings ranging from improved deformation potentials to free carrier properties. These findings demonstrate the benefits of dynamic compression experiments for semiconductor research.
Alcohol , Drugs , Mental Il lness , and Gun Violence

CDC’s Injury and Violence Prevention and Control: http://www.cdc. gov/injury/ Conducts and reports on research related to a variety of causes of violence and injury, including motor vehicle crashes, falls, homicides, illnesses, and more. The CDC’s firearms-related injury research was defunded by Congress in 1996 (see Kellermann & Rivara, 2012 in Public Health Policy & Law section below) and only recently reestablished, however some firearms-related statistics are available via the agency’s National Violent Death Reporting System. Februar y 2013 INFO Brief ADAI IB 2013-01
Numerical study of the hydrodynamics of robotic fish jumping out-of-water in vertical manner

This paper studies the hydrodynamics of robotic fish jumping out-of-water motion in a vertical manner numerically. By solving the kinetic course of three-dimensional (3D) robotic fish from gradually accelerating from the static state under the water to the final out-of-water state, time history variations of the kinematics and the energetics parameters in the vertical jumping out-of-water motion are discussed. The swimming performance of the robotic fish jumping out-of-water motion is studied by changing its motion frequency. The results show that the pressure contours of fish in different time reflects its stress condition in the vertical jumping out-of-water motion clearly; increasing motion frequency can improve its swimming speed, and then increasing its jumping height. The findings can lay a good foundation for the understood of the actual course of fish jumping out-of-water motion and broaden the motion space of the future robotic fish.
Severe Imported Falciparum Malaria: A Cohort Study in 400 Critically Ill Adults

Background Large studies on severe imported malaria in non-endemic industrialized countries are lacking. We sought to describe the clinical spectrum of severe imported malaria in French adults and to identify risk factors for mortality at admission to the intensive care unit. Methodology and Principal Findings Retrospective review of severe Plasmodium falciparum malaria episodes according to the 2000 World Health Organization definition and requiring admission to the intensive care unit. Data were collected from medical charts using standardised case-report forms, in 45 French intensive care units in 2000–2006. Risk factors for in-hospital mortality were identified by univariate and multivariate analyses. Data from 400 adults admitted to the intensive care unit were analysed, representing the largest series of severe imported malaria to date. Median age was 45 years; 60% of patients were white, 96% acquired the disease in sub-Saharan Africa, and 65% had not taken antimalarial chemoprophylaxis. Curative quinine treatment was used in 97% of patients. Intensive care unit mortality was 10.5% (42 deaths). By multivariate analysis, three variables at intensive care unit admission were independently associated with hospital death: older age (per 10-year increment, odds ratio [OR], 1.72; 95% confidence interval [95%CI], 1.28–2.32; P = 0.0004), Glasgow Coma Scale score (per 1-point decrease, OR, 1.32; 95%CI, 1.20–1.45; P<0.0001), and higher parasitemia (per 5% increment, OR, 1.41; 95%CI, 1.22–1.62; P<0.0001). Conclusions and Significance In a large population of adults treated in a non-endemic industrialized country, severe malaria still carried a high mortality rate. Our data, including predictors of death, can probably be generalized to other non-endemic countries where high-quality healthcare is available.
The role of problematic technology use for adolescents: The importance of sleep for wellbeing

Peer social-networks increase in their salience through adolescence. With access to technology, adolescents extend face-to-face peer interactions to the online environment. Adolescents’ heavy engagement in technology, however, can pose risks to their wellbeing. This thesis examines one potential mechanism through which this may occur, vis-a-vis problematic sleep. Two features of adolescents’ technology use were measured that related to peer interactions on-line, social-networking and mobile-phone use. Cross-sectional and longitudinal data were drawn from a representative sample of adolescents. Study-1 used cross-sectional data including a new social-networking investment measure, and Study-2 and Study-3 used longitudinal data including students across Years 8 to 11. Study-1 investigated adolescents’ problematic social-networking using structural-equation-modeling. A serial mediation pathway was shown in which adolescents’ overinvestment in social-networking was associated with increased sleep disturbances and adverse perceptions of sleep quality, which in turn were associated with decreased school satisfaction. These results suggest that minimizing sleep disturbances from problematic social-networking could arguably improve adolescent school experiences. Study-2 examined a mediational process using latent trajectories; problematic social-networking was associated with a trajectory of disturbed sleep, which in turn associated with psychopathology (depressed mood, externalizing). Adolescents who increasingly invested in social-networking also increased in their depressed mood; half of this association was explained by the mediating role of increased sleep disruption. Adolescents who increasingly invested in social-networking also reported increased externalizing behavior (13% via sleep disruption). Again, these findings point to an important role of sleep disruption in adolescent wellbeing. Study-3 tested how adolescents’ problematic use of mobile-phones linked to a range of wellbeing indicators: depressed mood, externalizing behavior, self-esteem, and coping. Increases in problematic mobile-phone use predicted later increases in externalizing and subsequent decreases in self-esteem and coping. Importantly, changes in sleep behavior mediated the relation between early changes in problematic mobile-phone use and later increases in depressed mood and externalizing and later declines in self-esteem and coping. These results advocate for monitoring of and education about adolescents’ late-night mobile-phone use as well as further attention to pervasive effects of disrupted sleep on adolescent functioning.
Procrastination, Stress and Coping in Students and Employees

Throughout history, procrastination is seen as an unwanted behavior that can bring about negative consequences. Researches show that procrastinators have higher levels of stress than people who do not procrastinate and thus, lower levels of well-being. The findings of this research show that the participants who tend to procrastinate frequently are more likely to feel higher levels of stress, are less prone to use proactive coping and engage more frequently in avoidance coping. Students tend to procrastinate more than employees and have higher levels of stress.
Caring for Elderly Parents: A New Commitment of the Third Age

The article explores the practices of elderly care in the Czech Republic from the life-course perspective, using qualitative research methodology: biographical interviews with women providing everyday care to their parents. The case of elderly care presents an opportunity to critically examine the concepts of the 'third age' and 'young old', that have figured prominently in theoretical and political debates concerning the life stage in which the need to care for one´s parents seems most likely to arise. In the 'collective story' based on the narratives of women aged 50-66 who provided everyday care for their elderly mother, I identify and describe the factors that influence how this stage in life unfolds and the decisions women make about their life/life course. I argue that in contemporary Czech society 'young old age' cannot be defined in terms of the absence of work commitments or the absence family care commitments, and that the original concepts dealing with this new period in life did not take the new commitments of care or the gendered aspect of them into consideration.
Complex Orthogonal Matching Pursuit and Its Exact Recovery Conditions

In this paper, we present new results on using orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), to solve the sparse approximation problem over redundant dictionaries for complex cases (i.e., complex measurement vector, complex dictionary and complex additive white Gaussian noise (CAWGN)). A sufficient condition that OMP can recover the optimal representation of an exactly sparse signal in the complex cases is proposed both in noiseless and bound Gaussian noise settings. Similar to exact recovery condition (ERC) results in real cases, we extend them to complex case and derivate the corresponding ERC in the paper. It leverages this theory to show that OMP succeed for k-sparse signal from a class of complex dictionary. Besides, an application with geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) model is presented for complex cases. Finally, simulation experiments illustrate the validity of the theoretical analysis.
Multiscale Modelling and Analysis of Collective Decision Making in Swarm Robotics

We present a unified approach to describing certain types of collective decision making in swarm robotics that bridges from a microscopic individual-based description to aggregate properties. Our approach encompasses robot swarm experiments, microscopic and probabilistic macroscopic-discrete simulations as well as an analytic mathematical model. Following up on previous work, we identify the symmetry parameter, a measure of the progress of the swarm towards a decision, as a fundamental integrated swarm property and formulate its time evolution as a continuous-time Markov process. Contrary to previous work, which justified this approach only empirically and a posteriori, we justify it from first principles and derive hard limits on the parameter regime in which it is applicable.
Mammography Classification By an Association Rule-based Classifier

This paper proposes a new classification method based on association rule mining. This association rule-based classifier is experimented on a real dataset; a database of medical images. The system we propose consists of: a preprocessing phase, a phase for mining the resulted transactional database, and a final phase to organize the resulted association rules in a classification model. The experimental results show that the method performs well reaching over 80% in accuracy. Moreover, this paper illustrates, by comparison to other published research, how important the data cleaning phase is in building an accurate data mining architecture for image classification.
Modular Self-reconfigurable Robot Systems: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future

T he field of modular self-reconfigurable robotic systems addresses the design, fabrication , motion planning, and control of autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Beyond conventional actuation, sensing, and control typically found in fixed-morphology robots, self-reconfigurable robots are also able to deliberately change their own shape by rearranging the connectivity of their parts in order to adapt to new circumstances, perform new tasks, or recover from damage. Over the last two decades, the field of modular robotics has advanced from proof-of-concept systems to elaborate physical implementations and simulations. The goal of this article is to outline some of this progress and identify key challenges and opportunities that lay ahead. Modular robots are usually composed of multiple building blocks of a relatively small repertoire, with uniform docking interfaces that allow transfer of mechanical forces and moments, electrical power, and communication throughout the robot. The modular building blocks often consist of some primary structural actuated unit and potentially some additional specialized units such as grippers, feet, wheels, cameras, payload, and energy storage and generation units. Figure 1 illustrates such a system in the context of a potential application. Modular self-reconfigurable robotic systems can be generally classified into several architectural groups by the geometric arrangement of their units. Several systems exhibit hybrid properties. ◆ Lattice Architectures: Lattice architectures have units that are arranged and connected in some regular, three-dimensional pattern, such as a simple cubic or hexagonal grid. Control and motion can be executed in parallel. Lattice architectures usually offer simpler reconfiguration, as modules move to a discrete set of neighboring locations in which motions can be made open-loop. The computational representation can also be more easily scaled to more complex systems. ◆ Chain/Tree Architectures: Chain/tree architectures have units that are connected together in a string or tree topology. This chain or tree can fold up to become space filling, but the underlying architecture is serial. Through articulation, chain architectures can potentially reach any point or orientation in space, and are therefore more versatile but computationally more difficult to represent and analyze and more difficult to control. ◆ Mobile Architectures: Mobile architectures have units that use the environment to maneuver around and can either hook up to form complex chains or lattices or form a number of smaller robots that execute coordinated movements and together form a larger " virtual " network. Control of all three types of modular systems can be centralized …
A NURBS-Based Technique for the Segmentation of Medical Images

Extracting the human brain from magnetic resonance head scans is difficult because of its highly convoluted and nonuniform geometry. A technique based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and energy minimising deformable models to extract the brain surface accurately from MR head scans is presented. The weighting parameter that comes with the NURBS definition is explored to attract the surface into the regions showing high curvature. The weight at each control point is adjusted automatically according to the curvature properties of the evolving surface. This process facilitates a deformable surface with increased local flexibility that adapts to complex geometrical features of the brain. The results show that the proposed model is capable of capturing the correct brain surface with a higher accuracy than the existing techniques.
Pattern matching with wildcards based on key character location

Pattern matching with wildcards is a complex problem and this problem has wide potential application in text search, biological sequences and information security etc. We propose a new algorithm called Quicksearch, for pattern matching with wildcards and length constraints based on key character location and subspace partition. This new algorithm increases by 40%–60% searching efficiency in comparison with SAIL when characters of pattern P in text T are unevenly distributed.
Effective Creation of Self-Referencing Citation Records

Acquiring citation records from online resources has become a popular approach to building a bibliography for one's publication. L AT E X document preparation system is the most popular platform for typesetting publications in academia. It uses BibTeX as a tool used to describe and process lists of references. In this article we present a simple method that allows the automatic creation of a full self-referencing citation record for a collection of papers typeset and published within one proceedings of a conference. This greatly facilitates access to the bibliography entries for anyone who wishes to use them as part of their own publication.
A Self-Management Model for Managing IT Environment Based on Autonomous Computing

In this paper, a self-management model is proposed for IT environment which is intended to reduce overhead of central node and increase IT systems' efficiency based on distributed systems approach and neighborhood-based networks. In order to reduce energy consumption and less computational load, Neighborhood-based networks can adopt with changes by means of environmental reactions. Based on Autonomous computing approach, proposed model facilitates management of many tasks using intelligent agents, cooperation between them and also learning ability. Based on the proposed model, processing and computational load of the central element reduce and computing ability will be allocated to every agent which has self-management ability. Computational power of agents is to be less comparing with the central node because agents have less communication and also less access to resources. Using autonomous computing, proposed model can increase efficiency and answer challenges like elements management and resources allocation.
Intelligent bidirectional power switch module for matrix converter applications

This work proposes a new intelligent power module integrating the bidirectional switch function with fast switching times, optimized for matrix converter applications. It includes the power transistors gate drivers, galvanic isolation between control and power stages, over-voltage protection devices, floating voltage power supplies and a control circuitry providing smart switching sequences for the current commutation strategy. In addition, its modular design allows easy replacement of damaged BDSs in an entire matrix converter and makes the power and signals interconnections easier. The structure of the bidirectional switch consists of a power substrate containing the power circuit and components (diodes, IGBTs, etc.) and a PCB on top with the control circuits. From the user's point of view, the proposed module shows two power terminals (bidirectional switch function), two pins corresponding to the voltage power supply of the high-level control circuits, the bidirectional switch logic control signal pin (turn-on / turn-off) and other auxiliary control pins depending on the implemented commutation strategy (for example, the sign of the load current).
Advanced image coding and its comparison with various codecs

JPEG is a popular DCT-based still image compression standard, which has played an important role in image storage and transmission since its development. Advanced Image Coding (AIC) is a still image compression system which combines the intra frame block prediction from H.264 with a JPEG-based discrete cosine transform followed by context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC). It performs much better than JPEG and has the best performance at low bit rates. In this paper, we propose a modified AIC (M-AIC) by replacing the CABAC in AIC with a Huffman coder and an adaptive arithmetic coder. The results are compared with other image compression techniques like JPEG, JPEG2000, JPEG-LS, JPEG-XR and H.264 on various sets of test images. This paper considers only main and (FRExt) high profiles in H.264/AVC I-frame coding, JPEG using baseline method and all the codecs are considered in lossy compression. Simulation results are evaluated in terms of bit-rate, qualityPSNR and structural similarity index (SSIM).
Numerical computations with the trace formula and the Selberg eigenvalue conjecture

Abstract We verify the Selberg eigenvalue conjecture for congruence groups of small squarefree conductor, improving on a result of Huxley [M. N. Huxley, Introduction to Kloostermania, in: Elementary and analytic theory of numbers, Banach Center Publ. 17, Warsaw (1985), 217–306. ]. The main tool is the Selberg trace formula which, unlike previous geometric methods, allows for treatment of cases where the eigenvalue 1/4 is present. We present a few other sample applications, including the classification of even 2-dimensional Galois representations of small squarefree conductor.
Efficient structure from motion with weak position and orientation priors

In this paper we present an approach that leverages prior information from global positioning systems and inertial measurement units to speedup structure from motion computation. We propose a view selection strategy that advances vocabulary tree based coarse matching by also considering the geometric configuration between weakly oriented images. Furthermore, we introduce a fast and scalable reconstruction approach that relies on global rotation registration and robust bundle adjustment. Real world experiments are performed using data acquired by a micro aerial vehicle attached with GPS/INS sensors. Our proposed algorithm achieves orientation results that are sub-pixel accurate and the precision is on a par with results from incremental structure from motion approaches. Moreover, the method is scalable and computationally more efficient than previous approaches.
Sliding Mode Control Based on Backstepping Approach for an UAV Type-Quadrotor

In this paper; we are interested principally in dynamic modelling of quadrotor while taking into account the high-order nonholonomic constraints in order to develop a new control scheme as well as the various physical phenomena, which can influence the dynamics of a flying structure. These permit us to introduce a new state-space representation. After, the use of Backstepping approach for the synthesis of tracking errors and Lyapunov functions, a sliding mode controller is developed in order to ensure Lyapunov stability, the handling of all system nonlinearities and desired tracking trajectories. Finally simulation results are also provided in order to illustrate the performances of the proposed controller. Keywords—Dynamic modelling, nonholonomic constraints, Backstepping, Sliding mode.
From the Ordinary to Corruption in Higher Education

Major environmental changes and recurring pressures have made universities in the United States that educate health care professionals vulnerable to corruption. Based on the experiences of one large, state-supported university, this essay argues that, in adapting to pressures, universities rely on the ordinary structures and processes characteristic of large formal organizations. Hierarchy becomes an opening to corruption when it is associated with low levels of transparency, a culture of deference that discourages questioning, and the absence of countervailing centers of authority. Where the need for resources is great and access is uncertain, these can become incentives to ensure access through corrupt means. Embeddedness opens opportunities for misconduct by fostering relations based on narrow loyalties. The ordinariness of the pathways to corruption in higher education can obscure timely recognition of misconduct even by members working in affected organizations. But, once recognized, it is also possible to find equally ordinary solutions.