Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stability conditions and crepant small resolutions

In this paper, we describe the spaces of stability conditions on the triangulated categories associated to three dimensional crepant small resolutions. The resulting spaces have chamber structures such that each chamber corresponds to a birational model together with a special Fourier-Mukai transform. We observe that these spaces are covering spaces over certain open subsets of finite dimensional vector spaces and determine their deck transformations.
An Epistemic Analysis of the Precautionary Principle Un análisis epistémico del principio de precaución

In democratic societies restriction of persons’ freedom by the state or any legal authority is justified only in highly limited contexts and for strictly specified purposes. Among these, the first (and for liberalist thinkers, the only legitimate) one is the prevention of unacceptable harm to entities worth of protection. Violation of the privacy right in any form requires also a strong evidence basis that the person’s activity indeed leads to the expected harm. The causal link must be certain. The precautionary principle constitutes an amendment to this clause in that it relaxes the requirement of certain causal link in the face of relevant threat for the human or animal health or for the environment (see Jensen, 2002 for a theoretical and Di Fabio, 1994 as well as Kriebel et al., 2001 for a historical contextualization).
Input-to-state dynamical stability and its Lyapunov function characterization

We present a new variant of the input-to-state stability (ISS) property which is based on using a one-dimensional dynamical system for building the class /spl Kscr//spl Lscr/ function for the decay estimate and for describing the influence of the perturbation. We show the relation to the original ISS formulation and describe characterizations by means of suitable Lyapunov functions. As applications, we derive quantitative results on stability margins for nonlinear systems and a quantitative version of a small gain theorem for nonlinear systems.
Influence of Playability and Usability in a Mobile Human Computation Game

Human Computation Games (HCGs) are applications that harness human intelligence to generate content using the element of fun. Originating in the Web environment, HCGs have now appeared on mobile devices with the advent of global positioning systems, wireless Internet access and multimedia capabilities. In this research, we study usability and playability factors that influence a mobile HCG, known as Glob, by comparing it with the non-game based mobile content sharing application known as Geo Topic. The applications were evaluated based on satisfaction, ease of use and usefulness aspects of usability, as well as the leisure, social interaction and challenge aspects of playability. Results suggested that Glob scored significantly better in terms of playability for leisure and social interaction. Further, Geo Topic scored significantly better in terms of the ease of use aspect of usability.
A Cps-semantics for a Typed -calculus of Exception Handling with X-point

We propose to add a xed-point combinator to a-calculus of exceptions handling whose type system corresponds to classical logic through the Curry-Howard isomorphism. To this end, we here give a CPS-semantics to the calculus and show that for non-exceptional terms, this semantics possesses the property of computational adequacy.
Persistent inward currents in motoneuron dendrites: Implications for motor output

The dendrites of motoneurons are not, as once thought, passive conduits for synaptic inputs. Instead they have voltage‐dependent channels that provide the capacity to generate a very strong persistent inward current (PIC). The amplitude of the PIC is proportional to the level of neuromodulatory input from the brainstem, which is mediated primarily by the monoamines serotonin and norepinephrine. During normal motor behavior, monoaminergic drive is likely to be moderately strong and the dendritic PIC generates many of the characteristic features of motor unit firing patterns. Most of the PIC activates at or below recruitment threshold and thus motor unit firing patterns exhibit a linear increase just above recruitment. The dendritic PIC allows motor unit derecruitment to occur at a lower input level than recruitment, thus providing sustained tonic firing with little or no synaptic input, especially in low‐threshold units. However the dendritic PIC can be readily deactivated by synaptic inhibition. The overall amplification due to the dendritic PIC and other effects of monoamines on motoneurons greatly increases the input–output gain of the motor pool. Thus the brainstem neuromodulatory input provides a mechanism by which the excitability of motoneurons can be varied for different motor behaviors. This control system is lost in spinal cord injury but PICs nonetheless recover near‐normal amplitudes in the months following the initial injury. The relationship of these findings to the cause of the spasticity syndrome developing after spinal cord injury is discussed. Muscle Nerve, 2005
Recombineering in Corynebacterium glutamicum combined with optical nanosensors: a general strategy for fast producer strain generation

Recombineering in bacteria is a powerful technique for genome reconstruction, but until now, it was not generally applicable for development of small-molecule producers because of the inconspicuous phenotype of most compounds of biotechnological relevance. Here, we establish recombineering for Corynebacterium glutamicum using RecT of prophage Rac and combine this with our recently developed nanosensor technology, which enables the detection and isolation of productive mutants at the single-cell level via fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). We call this new technology RecFACS, which we use for genomic site-directed saturation mutagenesis without relying on pre-constructed libraries to directly isolate l-lysine-producing cells. A mixture of 19 different oligonucleotides was used targeting codon 81 in murE of the wild-type, at a locus where one single mutation is known to cause l-lysine production. Using RecFACS, productive mutants were screened and isolated. Sequencing revealed 12 different amino acid exchanges in the targeted murE codon, which caused different l-lysine production titers. Apart from introducing a rapid genome construction technology for C. glutamicum, the present work demonstrates that RecFACS is suitable to simply create producers as well as genetic diversity in one single step, thus establishing a new general concept in synthetic biology.
Considering Efficacy of an Outdoor Environmental Education Program: Facilitating Elementary Students’ Environmental Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviours

Various sources have sought to consider the educational interventions that foster changes in perception of and attitudes toward nature, with the ultimate intent of understanding how education can be used to encourage environmentally responsible behaviours. With these in mind, the current study identified an outdoor environmental education program incorporating these empirically supported interventions, and assessed its ability to influence environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Specifically, this study considered the following research questions: 1) To what degree can participation in this outdoor education program foster environmental knowledge and encourage pro-environmental attitudes and self-reported pro-environmental behaviours? 2) How is this effect different among students of different genders, and those who have different prior experiences in nature? Two motivational frameworks guided inquiry in the current study: the Value-Belief-Norm Model of Environmentalism (VBN) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The study employed a quantitative survey methodology, combining contemporary data measuring knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours with archived data collected by program staff, reflecting frequency of environmentally responsible behaviour. Further, a single qualitative item was included for which students provided “the first three words that [came] to mind when [they] think of the word nature. ” Terms provided before and after the program were compared for differences in theme to detect subtle or underlying changes. Quantitative results indicated no significant change in student knowledge or attitudes through the outdoor environmental education program. However, a significant change in self-reported behaviour was identified from both the contemporary and archived data. This agreement in positive findings across the two data sets, collected using different measures and different participants, lends evidence of the program’s ability to encourage self-reported pro-environmental behaviour. Further, qualitative results showed some change in students’ perceptions of nature through the program, providing direction for future research. These findings suggest that this particular outdoor education program was successful in encouraging students’ self-reported environmentally responsible behaviour. This change was achieved without significant change in knowledge or environmental attitudes, suggesting that external factors not measured in this study might have played a role in affecting behaviour.
Communicating with Diagrams and Gestures

There are many ways to communicate. Some forms of communication, like words, are symbolic; the relationship between the content and the form of a message is arbitrary. Other forms, like visualizations and gesture, are at least in part iconic; the relationship between the content and the form can be resemblance. Resemblance confers an immediacy to communications; they can be directly understood rather than through symbolic mappings. Visualizations and gestures share iconicity, though the former primarily uses space and the other primarily time. They differ in other ways; indeed, they can complement each other so that integrating both enhances communication. To see how, we first consider how visualizations communicate.
Complement System Dysregulation and Inflammation in the Retinal Pigment Epithelium of a Mouse Model for Stargardt Macular Degeneration*

Accumulation of vitamin A-derived lipofuscin fluorophores in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) is a pathologic feature of recessive Stargardt macular dystrophy, a blinding disease caused by dysfunction or loss of the ABCA4 transporter in rods and cones. Age-related macular degeneration, a prevalent blinding disease of the elderly, is strongly associated with mutations in the genes for complement regulatory proteins (CRP), causing chronic inflammation of the RPE. Here we explore the possible relationship between lipofuscin accumulation and complement activation in vivo. Using the abca4−/− mouse model for recessive Stargardt, we investigated the role of lipofuscin fluorophores (A2E-lipofuscin) on oxidative stress and complement activation. We observed higher expression of oxidative-stress genes and elevated products of lipid peroxidation in eyes from abca4−/− versus wild-type mice. We also observed higher levels of complement-activation products in abca4−/− RPE cells. Unexpectedly, expression of multiple CRPs, which protect cells from attack by the complement system, were lower in abca4−/− versus wild-type RPE. To test whether acute exposure of healthy RPE cells to A2E-lipofuscin affects oxidative stress and expression of CRPs, we fed cultured fetal-derived human RPE cells with rod outer segments from wild-type or abca4−/− retinas. In contrast to RPE cells in abca4−/− mice, human RPE cells exposed to abca4−/− rod outer segments adaptively increased expression of both oxidative-stress and CRP genes. These results suggest that A2E accumulation causes oxidative stress, complement activation, and down-regulation of protective CRP in the Stargardt mouse model. Thus, Stargardt disease and age-related macular degeneration may both be caused by chronic inflammation of the RPE.
Skill Reuse in Lifelong Developmental Learning

Development requires learning skills using previously learned skills as building blocks. For maximum flexibility, the developing agent should be able to learn these skills without being provided an explicit task or subtasks. We have developed a method that allows an agent to simultaneously learn hierarchical actions and important distinctions autonomously without being specified a task. This ability to learn new distinctions allows it to work in continuous environments, and allows an agent to learn its first actions from motor primitives. In this paper we demonstrate that our method can use experience from one set of variables to more quickly learn a task that requires additional new variables. It does this by learning actions in a developmental progression. In addition, we demonstrate this developmental progression by showing that actions that are mainly used for exploration when first learned are later used as subactions for other actions.
Early developmental changes in sleep in infants: the impact of maternal depression.

OBJECTIVES This study evaluated whether sleep over the first 6 months of life was more disturbed in infants born to mothers who were depressed compared with infants from nondepressed mothers. DESIGN Actigraphy was recorded for 7 consecutive days starting at 2 weeks postpartum and monthly thereafter until 6 months of age. Mothers completed daily sleep/wake diaries. Sleep data at 2 weeks and 6 months postpartum are presented here. SETTING The home environment. PARTICIPANTS Eighteen healthy, full-term infants, 9 males and 9 females. Seven infants were born to women with no personal or family history of depression; 11 infants were born to women diagnosed with depression or with elevated levels of depression symptoms. INTERVENTIONS N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Total sleep time, sleep latency, sleep efficiency, and number and duration of sleep episodes were computed for nocturnal and daytime sleep in each 24-hour block. Data were coded for risk group (1 = low risk, 2 = high risk), and repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance contrasted changes in sleep measures at Week 2 and Week 24, between risk groups. The high-risk infants took longer to fall asleep, had lower sleep efficiencies, and had more sleep bouts in the nocturnal sleep period than did low-risk infants. These effects persisted at 6 months postpartum. CONCLUSIONS Maternal depression is associated with significant sleep disturbance in infancy at 2 weeks postpartum that continues through 24 weeks. It remains to be determined if sleep disturbance in infancy confers a greater risk of developing early-onset depression in childhood.
An Interactive Platform for Multilingual Linguistic Resource Enrichment

The world is extremely diverse and its diversity is obvious in the cultural differences and the large number of spoken languages being used all over the world. In this sense, we need to collect and organize a huge amount of knowledge obtained from multiple resources differing from one another in many aspects. A possible approach for doing that is to think of designing effective tools for construction and maintenance of linguistic resources based on well-defined knowledge representation methodologies capable of dealing with diversity and the continuous evolvement of human knowledge. In this paper, we present a linguistic resource management platform which allows for knowledge organization in a language-independent manner and provides the appropriate mapping from a language independent concept to one or more language specific lexicalization. The paper explains the knowledge representation methodology used in constructing the platform together with the iterative process followed in designing and implementing the first version of the platform, named UKC-1 and the updated refined version, named UKC-2.
Interannual variability in tropospheric nitrous oxide

Observations of tropospheric N2O mixing ratio show significant variability on interannual timescales (0.2 ppb, 1 standard deviation). We found that interannual variability in N2O is weakly correlated with that in CFC‐12 and SF6 for the northern extratropics and more strongly correlated for the southern extratropics, suggesting that interannual variability in all these species is influenced by large‐scale atmospheric circulation changes and, for SF6 in particular, interhemispheric transport. N2O interannual variability was not, however, correlated with polar lower stratospheric temperature, which is used as a proxy for stratosphere‐to‐troposphere transport in the extratropics. This suggests that stratosphere‐to‐troposphere transport is not a dominant factor in year‐to‐year variations in N2O growth rate. Instead, we found strong correlations of N2O interannual variability with the Multivariate ENSO Index. The climate variables, precipitation, soil moisture, and temperature were also found to be significantly correlated with N2O interannual variability, suggesting that climate‐driven changes in soil N2O flux may be important for variations in N2O growth rate.
Solving polynomial static output feedback problems with PENBMI

An algebraic formulation is proposed for the static output feedback (SOF) problem: the Hermite stability criterion is applied on the closed-loop characteristic polynomial, resulting in a non-convex bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) optimization problem for SIMO or MISO systems. As a result, the BMI problem is formulated directly in the controller parameters, without additional Lyapunov variables. The publicly available solver PENBMI 2.0 interfaced with YALMIP 3.0 is then applied to solve benchmark examples. Implementation and numerical aspects are widely discussed.
A 4 ns BiCMOS translation-lookaside buffer

A 64-entry, fully associative translation lookaside buffer (TLB) which has pin-to-pin address translation time of 3.6 ns is described. This translation speed is achieved with a BiCMOS content addressable memory (CAM) and static-random-access-memory (SRAM) arrays that maintain small signal swings throughout the critical translation path. The TLB has been integrated as a stand-alone chip in a 0.8- mu m BiCMOS technology. The circuit operates from a 5.2-V supply with emitter-coupled-logic (ECL) compatible input and output levels. The power dissipation, excluding the power dissipated in the physical address output buffers, is less than 600 mW. <<ETX>>
The role of lipocalin 2 in Alzheimer's disease and depression

De meeste mensen, zo niet alle mensen die deze samenvatting lezen, hebbcn persoonlijk iemand onrmoet of weten van iemand die gediagnosticeerd is met de ziekte van Alzheimer. De ziekte van Alzheimer is een neurodegeneratieve ziekte die voornamelijk voorkomt bij oudere mensen. De eerste tekenen van de ziekte van Alzheimer bestaan uit geheugenproblemen die geleidelijk ernstiger worden over de tijd, waama andere functies die aangcdreven worden door hersenen aangetast raken zoals het taalvermogen en de lichaamsfuncties, uiteindelijk leidend tot de dood. De beschrijving van deze ziekte toont aan waarom de ziekte van Alzheimer een van de meest gevreesde ziektes is. Bovendien is het op dit moment nog niet mogelijk om de ziekte van Alzheimer te genezen, voornamelijk omdat we de etiologie van laat beginnende Alzheimer's nog niet ontcijferd hcbben. Dit heeft veel interesse opgewekt in fundamentele en klinische onderzoeksgebieden om biologische en psychiatrische veranderingen in kaart te brengen. met als uiteindelijke doel om oorzakelijkc factoren te identificeren en om de ziekte van Alzheimer te kunnen diagnosticeren in een stadium waarin er nog geen klinische symptomen zijn. De diagnose van de ziekte van Alzheimer wordt op dit moment gesteld door middel van neuropsychologisch onderzoek. De vroegste klinische diagnose voor potentiele Alzheimer's wordt gedefinieerd als een milde cognitieve beperking. Dit wordt gekenmerkt door symptomen van achteruitgang in het geheugen dat afhankelijk is van een belangrijk hersengebied, de hippocampus. Neurobiologische studies hcbben aangetonnd dar de pathologie van de ziekte van Alzheimer al decennia lang aanwezig kan zijn voordat er klinische symptomen ontstaan. Het is claarom van groot belang om afwijkingingen in een vroeg stadium te identificeren, omdat dit onze kennis van de etiologie van de ziekte van Alzheimer zal vergroten. Dit zal ons in staat stellen om nieuwe therapeutische aangrijpingspunten te identificeren en de huidige diagnostische methoden voor deze ziekte te verbeteren. Onderzoekers hebben al substantieIe vooruitgang geboekt in het identificeren van pathofysiologische processen die een rol spelen bij de ziekte van Alzheimer. Er zijn namelijk chronischc afwijkingen gevonden in de werking van het immuunsysteem in het bloed en de hersenen, die een belangrijke rol spelen in het beloop van de ziekte van Alzheimer. Dit uit zich door een toegenomen activatie van het immuunsysteem die ook wel inflammatie genoemd wordt, in het bijzonder neuro-inflammatie in het zenuwstelsel. Het voornaamste doel van het onderzoek dat uitgevoerd is voor deze these was om verder te onderzoeken wat de rol van inflammatie en in het bijzonder neuro·inflammarie is in de ziekte van Alzheimer, om nieuwe mechanismen en aangrijpingspunten te identificeren die een nieuw stukje kunncn toevoegen aan de grote puzzel van de etiologie van de ziekte van Alzheimer.
User experience analysis on urban interaction and information service in smart city nodes

Numerous information communication technologies (ICTs) are adopted in urban nodes to broadcast messages, convey urban expressions, and create urban interaction for certain locations in smart city development. However, evaluation of these new applications is lacking from a user perspective. By incorporating service design, which provides a broader perspective on user needs, this study analyzes user experiences created by new urban interaction and information service at smart city nodes. Based on the participant observation method, activities, social interactions, space attributes and other related phenomena are mapped out to identify the unique strengths and limitations of this urban node. Additionally, a case study involving an installed digital signage array and floor QR code information tags near a smart city node is performed to analyze user experiences. Moreover, two perspectives on user experience are proposed. Analysis results indicate that besides developing ICT applications, user experiences of urban interaction and information service should also be incorporated in smart city development. Thus, the smart city nodes can offer more opportunities to improve the quality of interaction and service. Results of this study contribute to interdisciplinary studies involving service design, user experience analysis and smart city development.
The Examination of the laboratory anxiety, state and trait anxiety of university students in high voltage laboratory

With this study were aimed the investigation of the state and trait anxiety levels of Electric-Electronic Engineering students on High Voltage Laboratory anxiety. This research is designed as relational scanning model. The samples of the study comprised 113 students from Electric-Electronic Engineering in Engineering Faculty. In the study; “High Voltage Laboratory Anxiety Scale” with three factors which was developed by Gunes and Ozsoy-Gunes (2015) and “The State and Trait Anxiety Scale” was developed by Spielberger and his colleagues (1970), adapted to Turkish by Oner and Le Compte (1985) are used as tool of data collection. In order to analyze the data, SPSS 20.00, Pearson correlation coefficient techniques and regression analysis techniques are used. At the end of the study, between all scales has a positive relation. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that the trait anxiety and laboratory anxiety of students has been found to be effective on the state anxiety of students.