Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perspective future, stratégies d'adaptation et planification : un modèle de mesure

Cette etude eprouve un modele de mesure de conduites qui presentent toutes une orientation future. Sept composants sont consideres. Ils participent de la definition de trois concepts : la perspective temporelle future, le type d'adaptation au futur et la planification. Ces trois concepts sont reunis sous les termes generiques d'orientation future. On en propose alors une representation hierarchique. Ce modele complete un precedent publie dans la litterature, comportant trois composants. Le test de l'adequation entre notre modele theorique et les donnees empiriques vise egalement a eprouver des hypotheses relatives a la signification de quatre aspects essentiels de la perspective future, un concept du modele, a partir de leurs liaisons avec d'autres conduites possedant une orientation vers le futur. La perspective future d'un individu est consideree comme un espace cognitif dans lequel les contenus du futur sont representes et structures. On suppose que la perspective future differe suivant les individus, selon que leurs conduites adaptatives s'effectuent plutot par a priori en fonction des anticipations, ou plutot a posteriori en fonction des evenements de vie et des situations vecus. Les quatre composants de la perspective future, qui sont qualitativement differents, sont supposes s'ordonner selon des niveaux d'engagement plus ou moins empreints de considerations realistes tout en se distinguant des conduites de planification.
The effect of maternal age and planned place of birth on intrapartum outcomes in healthy women with straightforward pregnancies: secondary analysis of the Birthplace national prospective cohort study

Objectives To describe the relationship between maternal age and intrapartum outcomes in ‘low-risk’ women; and to evaluate whether the relationship between maternal age and intrapartum interventions and adverse outcomes differs by planned place of birth. Design Prospective cohort study. Setting Obstetric units (OUs), midwifery units and planned home births in England. Participants 63 371 women aged over 16 without known medical or obstetric risk factors, with singleton pregnancies, planning vaginal birth. Methods Log Poisson regression was used to evaluate the association between maternal age, modelled as a continuous and categorical variable, and risk of intrapartum interventions and adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes. Main outcome measures Intrapartum caesarean section, instrumental delivery, syntocinon augmentation and a composite measure of maternal interventions/adverse outcomes requiring obstetric care encompassing augmentation, instrumental delivery, intrapartum caesarean section, general anaesthesia, blood transfusion, third-degree/fourth-degree tear, maternal admission; adverse perinatal outcome (encompassing neonatal unit admission or perinatal death). Results Interventions and adverse maternal outcomes requiring obstetric care generally increased with age, particularly in nulliparous women. For nulliparous women aged 16–40, the risk of experiencing an intervention or adverse outcome requiring obstetric care increased more steeply with age in planned non-OU births than in planned OU births (adjusted RR 1.21 per 5-year increase in age, 95% CI 1.18 to 1.25 vs adjusted RR 1.12, 95% CI 1.10 to 1.15) but absolute risks were lower in planned non-OU births at all ages. The risk of neonatal unit admission or perinatal death was significantly raised in nulliparous women aged 40+ relative to women aged 25–29 (adjusted RR 2.29, 95% CI 1.28 to 4.09). Conclusions At all ages, ‘low-risk’ women who plan birth in a non-OU setting tend to experience lower intervention rates than comparable women who plan birth in an OU. Younger nulliparous women appear to benefit more from this reduction than older nulliparous women.
Taxonomies of Regular Tree Algorithms

Algorithms for acceptance, pattern matching and parsing of regular trees and the tree automata used in these algorithms have many applications, including instruction selection in compilers, implementation of term rewriting systems, and model checking. Many such tree algorithms and constructions for such tree automata appear in the literature, but some deficiencies existed, including: inaccessibility of theory and algorithms; difficulty of comparing algorithms due to variations in presentation style and level of formality; and lack of reference to the theory in many publications. An algorithm taxonomy is an effective means of bringing order to such a field. We report on two taxonomies of regular tree algorithms that we have constructed to deal with the deficiencies. The complete work has been presented in the PhD thesis of the first author.
Predicting grasp inertia with a geometric model

Controlling finger impedance is critical for successful grasping. Understanding how humans achieve this is of great interest for learning about human motor control, as well as for applications in robotic grasping. There have been a number of studies on finger impedance in both the robotics and biological fields. They almost exclusively consider only stiffness and viscosity. However, inertia may play an important role in certain grasps, and is important for calculation of the other impedance properties. This paper reports current progress of a project to create a geometric model of the hand for predicting hand/grasp inertia at different configurations (sensed by a glove that measures joint angles) during a variety of tasks.
Demand-Driven Pointer Analysis with Strong Updates via Value-Flow Refinement

We present a new demand-driven flow- and context-sensitive pointer analysis with strong updates for C programs, called SUPA, that enables computing points-to information via value-flow refinement, in environments with small time and memory budgets such as IDEs. We formulate SUPA by solving a graph reachability problem on an inter-procedural value-flow graph representing a program's def-use chains, which are pre-computed efficiently but over-approximately. To answer a client query (a request for a variable's points-to set), SUPA reasons about the flow of values along the pre-computed def-use chains sparsely (rather than across all program points), by performing only the work necessary for the query (rather than analyzing the whole program). In particular, strong updates are performed to filter out spurious def-use chains through value-flow refinement as long as the total budget is not exhausted. SUPA facilitates efficiency and precision tradeoffs by applying different pointer analyses in a hybrid multi-stage analysis framework. We have implemented SUPA in LLVM (3.5.0) and evaluate it by choosing uninitialized pointer detection as a major client on 18 open-source C programs. As the analysis budget increases, SUPA achieves improved precision, with its single-stage flow-sensitive analysis reaching 97.4% of that achieved by whole-program flow-sensitive analysis by consuming about 0.18 seconds and 65KB of memory per query, on average (with a budget of at most 10000 value-flow edges per query). With context-sensitivity also considered, SUPA's two- stage analysis becomes more precise for some programs but also incurs more analysis times. SUPA is also amenable to parallelization. A parallel implementation of its single-stage flow-sensitive analysis achieves a speedup of up to 6.9x with an average of 3.05x a 8-core machine with respect its sequential version.
A Novel Multimodal Biometric System based on Iris and Face

With the wide application, the recognition accuracy of unimodal biometric systems has to contend with a variety of problems such as background noise, signal noise and distortion, and environment or device variations. This paper combines face and iris features for developing a multimode biometric system, which is able to diminish the above mentioned problems of unimodal biometrics as well as to improve the performance of authentication system. We adopt an efficient feature-level fusion scheme for iris feature and face feature in series, and normalize the original features of iris and face using zscore model to eliminate the unbalance of magnitude and the distribution between two different kinds of feature vectors. Fisher discriminant analysis is used to select the distinguishing character of the fused feature in order to further enhance the performance of the system. The proposed algorithm is tested using CASIA iris database and two face databases (ORL database and Yale database). Experimental results reveal the multimodal biometrics verification is much more reliable and precise than unimodal biometric system.
The NICE guideline on the treatment of child and adolescent depression: a meta-review of the evidence for individual CBT

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the UK published its guideline on the treatment of children and adolescents who have been diagnosed with depression in 2005. Although the guideline has not been updated since, it is widely used in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in England and Wales to advocate that all children and young people who have been diagnosed with depression should have access to individual cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) through the Children and Adolescent Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP-IAPT) project. This article critically reviews the guideline in terms of the evidence that NICE cites for the efficacy of individual CBT. In particular, it provides a meta-review of four randomised control trials where the effectiveness of individual CBT was compared to another psychological therapy intervention, a non-specific control intervention and/or a wait-list. Each trial is considered separately, before looking at the overall evidence that they provide when the findings are considered as a whole. A trial comparing individual CBT to a non-psychological intervention (medication) is discussed separately. This review found that on present evidence, individual CBT cannot be viewed as evidence-based psychological therapy for children and young people who have been diagnosed with depression.
Network Traffic Classification Based on Message Statistics

Accurate and efficient network traffic classification is an important network management task. Two way messages in a session follow the underlying application protocol to exchange information. In this paper, we propose a novel application classification method based on message statistics, concisely representing the protocols' unique characteristics. We present algorithms using SVD-based and information gain based algorithms to select the proper message feature set. As shown by the evaluation experiments, using the selected message features, a simple decision tree is able to reach the classification accuracy over 99%, which is comparable to other more sophisticated machine learning results.
Ethical Business between Venality and Sacrifice Executive Summary

2 This paper originates from discussion with Henri-Claude de Bettignies and from my work on a model of rationality that would combine procedural and consequential dimensions. I am also grateful to the This paper argues that economic rationality and ethical behavior cannot be reduced one to the other, casting doubts on the validity of formulas like " profit is ethical " or " ethics pays ". In order to express ethical dilemmas as opposing economic interest with ethical concerns, we propose a model of rational behavior that combines these two irreducible dimensions in an open but not arbitrary manner. Behaviors that are neither ethical nor profitable are considered irrational (non-arbitrariness). However, behaviors that are profitable but unethical, and behaviors that are ethical but not profitable, are all treated as rational (openness). Combining ethical concerns with economic interest, ethical business is in turn an optimal form of rationality between venality and sacrifice. Because every one prefers to communicate that he acts ethically, ethical business remains ambiguous until some economic interest is actually sacrificed. We argue however that ethical business has an interest in demonstrating its consistency between communication and behavior by a transparent attitude. On the other hand, venal behaviors must remain confidential to hide the corresponding lack of consistency. This discursive approach based on transparency and confidentiality helps to further distinguish between ethical and unethical business behaviors. JEL A13, M14 Ethical Business between Venality and Sacrifice Page 3/13 "He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow-citizens. " Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Implementation of Alamouti Encoder Using FPGA for Mimo Testbed

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a generic technique that promises to be a strong contender for 4G wireless systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Space Time Block Coding (STBC) encoder that is based on Alamouti scheme on a Xilinx® Virtex™-4 XC4VLX60 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) device. This encoder is a part of MIMO testbed, equipped with multiple element antennas (MEA) at both ends of the link. The task of this Alamouti encoder is to appropriately encode the modulated symbols to achieve both time and spatial diversity. In this paper, a comprehensive explanation of the complete design process is provided, including an illustration of the tools used in its development. The encoder for the MIMO testbed is developed based on modular design which simplifies system design, reduces development time, eases hardware update and facilitates testing the various modules in an independent manner.
Detection-free Bayesian Multi-object Tracking via Spatio-Temporal Video Bundles Grouping

This paper presents a conceptually simple but effective approach to track multi-object in videos without requiring elaborate supervision (i.e. training object detectors or templates offline). Our framework performs a bi-layer inference of spatio-temporal grouping to exploit rich appearance and motion information in the observed sequence. First, we generate a robust middle-level video representation based on clustered point tracks, namely video bundles. Each bundle encapsulates a chunk of point tracks satisfying both spatial proximity and temporal coherency. Taking the video bundles as vertices, we build a spatio-temporal graph that incorporates both the competitive and compatible relations among vertices. The multi-object tracking can be then phrased as a graph partition problem under the Bayesian framework, and we solve it by developing a robust belief propagation (RBP) algorithm. This algorithm improves the traditional belief propagation method by allowing a converged solution to be reconfigured during optimization, so that the inference can be re-activated once it gets stuck in local minima and thus conduct more reliable results. In the experiments, we demonstrate the superior performances of our approach on the challenging benchmarks compared with state-of-the-arts.
Factors affecting on life satisfaction of university students : Focusing on the moderating effects of ego-resilience

This study examined the relationships among stress, childhood traumatic experience, ego-resilience, and life satisfaction of university students to explore the moderating effects of ego-resilience on those variables. The survey participants were 459 university students in Gyeonggi province. The collected data were analyzed using frequency, Pearson correlation coefficient, stepwise multiple regression, and moderated multiple regression by SPSS. The results were as follows. Stress, childhood traumatic experience and ego resilience had correlations with the life satisfaction. Ego resilience and stress were significant effective variables on the life satisfaction. Moderated multiple regression analysis also showed that a positive future orientation, which is a sub factor of ego-resilience, influenced the stress level. Based on these findings, it is important to lower the stress levels to increase the students' life satisfaction level. To do so, a strategy to enhance the positive future orientation is recommended.
Sensor Fault Detection and Isolation of an Air Quality Monitoring Network Using Nonlinear Principal component Analysis

Recently, fault detection and process monitoring using principal component analysis (PCA) were studied intensively and largely applied to industrial process. PCA is the optimal linear transformation with respect to minimizing the mean squared prediction error. If the data have nonlinear dependencies, an important issue is to develop a technique which can take into account this kind of dependencies. Recognizing the shortcomings of PCA, a nonlinear extension of PCA is developed. This paper proposes an application for sensor failure detection and isolation (FDI) to an air quality monitoring network via nonlinear principal component analysis (NLPCA). The NLPCA model is obtained by using two cascade three layer RBF-Networks. For training these two networks separately, the outputs of the first network are estimated using principal curve algorithm [7] and the problem is transformed as two nonlinear regression problems.
THE INFLUENCE OF DYNAMICS MODEL SIMPLIFICATIONS ON AN ELECTROHYDRAULIC STEWART PLATFORM MODEL-BASED CONTROL PROCESS

A simulational model of 6 dof Stewart platform type parallel manipulator is presented. The manipulator is driven by electrohydraulic actuators. A novel invariant error dynamics controller is used. The developed control scheme employs the dynamic and hydraulic model of the system. The manipulator model consists of the rigid body equations of motion and the hydraulic dynamics of the main elements. Friction is included in the model. Two well-known software packages, one designed to perform control system simulation and the other dedicated to multibody simulation, are simultaneously used to conduct the study. The aim of the study is to check, what is the impact of dynamics model accuracy on the quality of control process. The simplifications of the model and the problems with finding accurate values of its parameters (especially friction parameters) are considered. The study helps to predict what are the possible results of inaccurate determination of the crucial model parameters. The simulation results show, that inverse dynamics model simplifications consisting in neglecting the mass of actuators have relatively little influence on the control quality. The effects of actuators masses neglecting can be reduced by appropriate changes in the modeled mass of the platform. The study shows that friction effects should be introduced to the inverse dynamics model and the friction parameters should be identified with possibly big accuracy. The parameters describing stiction-friction transition effects are the crucial ones.
Comparison of closed loop control for three-level and five-level inverter for photovoltaic system

This paper analyses the harmonic reduction of multilevel inverter for grid connected solar system. Solar array is controlled and maximum power is obtained by FLC MPPT algorithm. Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) is used to control the inverter and simulation is achieved through MATLAB/Simulink. The simulation results of three phase three-level and five-level inverter is compared and low THD rate is achieved for high level inverter.
Linden Labs Second Life: Understanding the Business Model and Sources of Commercial and Social Success or Decline of Second Life

The online virtual world, Second Life, has been described by its developers, Linden Lab, as a ‘free’ online Virtual reality application with which residents (users) can imagine and create their respective virtual worlds. The degree of ‘freedom’ of use of Second Life by residents as described by the developers comes into question as it would rather imply that it is a charity-based online application; therefore, creating a lacuna as to how its existence is being sustained. This paper discusses the business model of Second Life as it affects its potential sources of commercial and social success and decline, and we have skewed our discourse more to the potential sources of decline than that of success, with some solutions offered along the lines.
Study on slime robot: development of the mobile robot prototype model using bridle bellows

Slim slime robot (SSR), looks like an active cord mechanism (the snake-like robot) and composes units that can stretch, shrink and bend actively, is for several tasks in narrow spaces such as to move under collapsed houses or for inspection of pipelines in plants. In this paper, we propose the new concept, which is named "bridle drive". We developed the prototype model of the units of the SSR-2.3. Each unit has a bridle bellows composed of a large caliber bellows and wire lock system. The use of bridle bellows allows to produce a high output using air pressure, its shape can be changed by controlling the length of the wires.
VLA observation of dMe stars

We present new VLA radio observations of a sample of dMe stars in X, U, K, and Q bands (from 8.4 to 43 GHz) ob- tained during an observing campaign in 1996 April-June. The aim of the project was to determine the spectral energy distri- butions of late-type dwarf flare stars to investigate the possible existence of an inversion of the spectrum slope at frequencies higher than 8 GHz. We also tried to constrain the possible emis- sion mechanism at radio frequencies. We have detections in X band (8.4 GHz), for three sources (UV Cet, V 1054 Oph, and EV Lac), while all of our other measurements are upper limits. We discuss how the weak radio emission of some sources (e.g. AU Mic) and the coronal plasma properties deduced from X-ray observations constrain the coronal magnetic field properties.
A New Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation Using CP-ICA Scheme in OFDM Systems

A well-known problem of OFDM is its sensitivity to carrier frequency offset which leads to inter-carrier interference (ICI) in the OFDM symbol. This ICI causes severe degradation of the BER performance of the OFDM receiver. In this paper, we propose a new ICI cancellation algorithm which estimates frequency offset at the time-domain by using cyclic prefix-independent component analysis (CP-ICA) method to the received subcarriers phase rotation. This algorithm is based on a statistical blind estimation method, which mainly utilizes the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD), rotating phasor and the 4th cumulants.
Autophagy sensitivity of neuroendocrine lung tumor cells

Neuroendocrine (NE) phenotypes characterize a spectrum of lung tumors, including low-grade typical and intermediate-grade atypical carcinoid, high-grade large-cell NE carcinoma and small cell lung carcinoma. Currently, no effective treatments are available to cure NE lung tumors, demanding identification of biological features specific to these tumors. Here, we report that autophagy has an important role for NE lung tumor cell proliferation and survival. We found that the expression levels of the autophagy marker LC3 are relatively high in a panel of lung tumor cell lines expressing high levels of neuron-specific enolase (NSE), a key NE marker in lung tumors. In response to bafilomycin A1 and chloroquine, NE lung tumor cells exhibited cytotoxicity whereas non-NE lung tumor cells exhibited cytostasis, indicating a distinct role of autophagy for NE lung tumor cell survival. Intriguingly, in certain NE lung tumor cell lines, the levels of processed LC3 (LC3-II) were inversely correlated with AKT activity. When AKT activity was inhibited using AKTi or MK2206, the levels of LC3-II and SQSTM1/p62 were increased. In contrast, torin 1, rapamycin or mTOR knockdown increased p62 levels, suggesting that these two pathways have opposing effects on autophagy in certain NE lung tumors. Moreover, inhibition of one pathway resulted in reduced activity of the other, suggesting that these two pathways crosstalk in the tumors. These results suggest that NE lung tumor cells share a common feature of autophagy and are more sensitive to autophagy inhibition than non-NE lung tumor cells.