Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design of a wide input range DC-DC converter with a robust power control scheme suitable for fuel cell power conversion

This paper analysis and design of a wide input range DC-DC converter is proposed along with a robust power control scheme. The proposed converter and its control is designed to be compatible to a fuel cell power source, which exhibits 2:1 voltage variation as well as a slow transient response. The proposed approach consists of two stages: a conventional boost converter stage cascaded with a current-fed two-inductor boost converter topology, which has a higher voltage gain and isolation from the input source. The function of the first boost converter stage is to maintain a constant voltage at the input of the cascaded DC-DC converter to ensure optimal performance characteristics with high efficiency. At the output of the first boost converter a battery or ultracapacitor energy storage is connected to take care of the fuel cell slow transient response (200 watts/min). The robust features of the proposed control system ensure a constant output DC voltage for a variety of load fluctuations, thus limiting the power being delivered by the fuel cell during a load transient. Moreover, the proposed configuration simplifies the power control management and can interact with the fuel cell controller. The simulation results and the preliminary experimental results confirm the feasibility of the proposed system.
Personality and judgements of abstract, pop art, and representational paintings

This study was concerned with the question of which personality variables are most predictive of judgements of particular types of painting. One hundred and twenty‐one participants rated 24 slides of abstract, pop art, and representational paintings. They then completed two questionnaires which measured sensation seeking (SS) and the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions. Thrill and Adventure Seeking was positively correlated with a liking of representational art while Disinhibition was associated with positive ratings of abstract art and pop art. Neuroticism was positively correlated with positive ratings of abstract and pop art, while conscientiousness was linked to liking of representational art. Openness to Experience was linked to positive ratings of all three art types. Agreeableness was negatively linked to liking of pop art. It was also found that art education and frequency of visits to art galleries were linked to positive ratings of abstract paintings. Regressional analyses showed about a fifth of the variance could be accounted for by personality and demographic variables. Personality variables were most strongly linked to positive judgements of representational art and least related to ratings of pop art. Overall the sensation seeking variables accounted for more of the variance than the big five dimensions. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A New Question Answering System for the Arabic Language

We depict the architecture of a question answering system and methodically evaluate contributions of different system components to accuracy. The system differs from most question answering systems in its dependency on data redundancy rather than complicated linguistic analyses of either questions or contender answers. Because a wrong answer is often worse than no answer. A Question Answering (QA) system is a system that takes natural language questions expressed in the Arabic language then attempts to provide short answers. In order to handle this problem, traditional information retrieval techniques joined with a sophisticated natural language processing approach have been used in this research work. Using keyword matching, simple structures extracted from both the question and the candidate documents selected by the IR system were used in the process of identifying the answer. In order to perform this process, we used an existing tagger to identify proper names and other crucial lexical items and build lexical entries. Also provide an analysis of Arabic question forms and attempt to formulate better kinds of answers that users find more appropriate.
Nitrogen capture by plants grown in N-rich organic patches of contrasting size and strength

which vary spatially and temporally (Fitter, 1994). However, despite the well-known morphological and This study investigated the response of root prolifera- physiological responses of roots to patches (reviewed by tion, plant N capture and soil microbial activity in a Robinson, 1994; Robinson and van Vuuren, 1998), little Lolium perenne sward to L-lysine (15N/13C dual- is known about how attributes of the patch (i.e. size, labelled) patches of contrasting size and strength. concentration, duration, frequency, etc.) influence Three patch treatments provided the same quantity (c. resource capture by plants. This is partly because most 5.6 mg) of N, but at different concentrations (i.e. studies investigating the response of plants to non200 mM◊1 ml; 100 mM◊2 ml; 40 mM◊5 ml), while uniform resources have been conducted using solution the other two treatments provided five times (1 culture where nutrient concentrations were continuously M◊1 ml) or 0.2 (40 mM◊1 ml) as much N. Control maintained (Drew and Saker, 1975, 1978; Granato and patches were added as 1 ml H 2 O. Root production Raper, 1989; Campbell et al., 1991). In the soil, patches and root mortality in the patch addition zone were are typically of organic material with a finite life span measured in situ using mini-rhizotron tubes and were and are sites of increased microbial activity (GriYths found to differ between the various treatments. et al., 1993; GriYths and Caul, 1993); under these condiInstantaneous root birth rates were significantly tions the extent and speed of the response by the plant (P<0.05) greater in the highest N added patch (1 root system will be important for successful resource M◊1 ml) at day 14 only, indicating a more marked capture. Some studies suggest that nutrient capture by proliferation response in this treatment compared to plants is not simply related to the ability to proliferate those containing less N. However, of the total N avail- roots within a nutrient-rich zone (van Vuuren et al., 1996; able, roots in the 1 M◊ 1m l L-lysine patch captured Fransen et al., 1998). Similarly, it is shown that for five significantly (P<0.05) less (29%) than in the other four grass species grown in monoculture, capture of N from a treatments (40‐47%), which did not differ significantly decomposing organic residue was not related to the degree from each other. Microbial activity was significantly of proliferation within the patch (Hodge et al., 1998). (P<0.05) greater in the highest N added patch (1 However, when two of these grass species competed for M◊1 ml) than in all other treatments. The response N in the same residue, the ability to proliferate roots of roots and micro-organisms in relation to N capture there did confer an advantage: the species which proliferis discussed.
Hybrid Genetic Algorithm Based Image Enhancement Technology

In image enhancement, Tubbs proposed a normalized incomplete Beta function to represent several kinds of commonly used non-linear transform functions to do the research on image enhancement. But how to define the coefficients of the Beta function is still a problem. We proposed a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm which combines the Differential Evolution to the Genetic Algorithm in the image enhancement process and utilize the quickly searching ability of the algorithm to carry out the adaptive mutation and searches. Finally we use the Simulation experiment to prove the effectiveness of the method.
What Went Wrong? - Western Impact And Middle Eastern Response

MISCELLANEOUSBernard LewisOxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, xii, 180pp, US$23.00, ISBN 0-19-514420-1Ninety per cent of this book consists of a study of interactions between Europe and the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. After briefly describing the Ottoman expansion through southern Europe and the Balkans 'to the gates of Vienna,' Bernard Lewis discusses the difficulties the Turks subsequently experienced in coming to grips with new intellectual and other currents emanating from Europe. In one sphere after another the creativity and dynamism of Europe challenged the Turks - commerce and enterprise, science and technology, military organization and equipment, the measurement of time and space. Even more daunting was the dissemination of European thinking on political freedom, human rights, gender equality, a free press, and above all secularism. In the end, the challenges proved insurmountable, an increasingly moribund Ottoman empire shrank and then collapsed, and a triumphant Europe reasserted or asserted its control over most of the lands once ruled by the Sultan.So far, so good. Lewis brings to his task the scholarship and talents that have distinguished his work as a historian of the Middle East for over 50 years. (One of his early works, The Arabs in History, first published in 1950, is still widely read today, and deservedly so.) He demonstrates an impressive command of Turkish sources, illustrating his points with a judicious selection of extracts from Ottoman documents, memoirs, and letters. The writing is clear, elegant, and persuasive. While his judgements of Ottoman failings are often severe, they are neither unfounded nor unfair. Indeed, if this were all there was to this book, it could readily be saluted and recommended as a fine piece of historical writing.Unfortunately, Lewis has chosen to draw from his study a series of lessons and conclusions of supposedly contemporary relevance about what he calls 'the long struggle between Islam and Christendom. ' In so doing, he manages to avoid neither of the twin pitfalls of oversimplification and overgeneralization.To portray the expansion of the Ottoman empire simply as a civilizational or ideological contest between the worlds of Christianity and Islam is at best misleading. As their empire spread, the Ottomans conquered as many Muslim Arab lands (from Baghdad to Mecca to Algiers) as they did Christian European lands. …
A c k n 5-Approximation Algorithm for Treewidth

We give an algorithm that for an input n-vertex graph G and integer k > 0, in time O(cn) either outputs that the treewidth of G is larger than k, or gives a tree decomposition of G of width at most 5k + 4. This is the first algorithm providing a constant factor approximation for treewidth which runs in time single-exponential in k and linear in n. Treewidth based computations are subroutines of numerous algorithms. Our algorithm can be used to speed up many such algorithms to work in time which is single-exponential in the treewidth and linear in the input size.
A behavioural measure of environmental decision-making for social surveys

There is great benefit in using measures of environmentally significant behaviour – rather than just behavioural intentions or self-reported behaviour – if we are to advance our understanding of the individual and structural factors that influence environmental decision-making. Along these lines, to supplement the use of behavioural intention and self-reported behaviour measures in environmental decision-making research, we identify and validate a simple measure of one form of environmentally significant behaviour: financial support for environmental movement organizations. Using the values-beliefs-norms theoretical framework, we conducted an experiment to examine the performance of this measure of actual behaviour. This behavioural measure meets multiple dimensions of validity – including face, concurrent criterion-related, and construct – as a measure of environmentally significant behaviour in environmental decision-making research. As would be expected, we find that actual donations are smaller than hypothetical donations; hypothetical donations overestimate what would actually be donated by approximately 27%. Also, while environmental beliefs better predict hypothetical donation and willingness to act, key values measures (i.e. biospheric altruism and self-interest) better predict actual donation. We suggest that scholars consider using actual behavioural measures such as the one we test here in future scholarship on environmental decision-making.
Graph-Based Dependency Parsing Using Dynamic Features in Korean

In this paper, we propose a graph-based dependency parsing model using dynamic features. The dynamic features, which are derived from the partial tree during bottom-up chart parsing, play an important role in finding the correct heads. Based on the beneficial aspects of the head-final property of Korean, we suggest a variant of the CYK parsing algorithm with an O(n3) complexity which has the ability to search for the maximum spanning tree (MST) from all projective trees. Compared to Eisner's algorithm, this algorithm is time-efficient in parsing all other head-final languages. We also explain why the graph-based approaches are seldom attempted in parsing morphologically rich languages (MRLs) and suggest a morpheme-level dependency representation as a solution. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on the KAIST corpus using two discriminative online learning methods (the averaged perceptron algorithm and passive-aggressive algorithm) and show that the trained parser achieves the best reported parsing ac.
Speeding up dynamic programming

A number of important computational problems in molecular biology, geology, speech recognition, and other areas can be expressed as recurrences which have typically been solved with dynamic programming. By using more sophisticated data structures, and by taking advantage of further structure from the applications, the authors speed up the computation of several of these recurrences by one or two orders of magnitude. The algorithms used are simple and practical. <<ETX>>
The Traditional Approach to Speech Processing

One of the most natural communication tool used by humans is t he r voice. It is hence natural that a lot of research has been devoted to analyze and underst and human uttered speech for various applications. The most obvious one is automatic speech recognition, where the goal is to transcribe a recorded speech utterance into its co rresponding sequence of words. Other applications include speaker recognition, where the goal is to either determine the claimed identity of the speaker (verification) or who is spea king (identification), and speaker segmentation or diarization, where the goal is to segment an acoustic sequence in terms of the underlying speakers (such as during a dialog). Although enormous amount of research has been devoted to spe ech processing, there appear to be some form of local optimum in terms of the fundame ntal tools used to approach these problems. The aim of this book is to introduce the speec h r searcher community with radically different approaches based on more recent ke rnel based machine learning approaches. In this introduction, we first briefly remind the main speech processing approach, based on hidden Markov models, as well as its known problems, then introduce the most well known kernel based approach, the Support Vector Machine (SV M), and finally opens to the various contributions of this book.
Cellular basis for the Brugada syndrome and other mechanisms of arrhythmogenesis associated with ST-segment elevation.

BACKGROUND The Brugada syndrome is characterized by marked ST-segment elevation in the right precordial ECG leads and is associated with a high incidence of sudden and unexpected arrhythmic death. Our study examines the cellular basis for this syndrome. METHODS AND RESULTS Using arterially perfused wedges of canine right ventricle (RV), we simultaneously recorded transmembrane action potentials from 2 epicardial and 1 endocardial sites, together with unipolar electrograms and a transmural ECG. Loss of the action potential dome in epicardium but not endocardium after exposure to pinacidil (2 to 5 micromol/L), a K(+) channel opener, or the combination of a Na(+) channel blocker (flecainide, 7 micromol/L) and acetylcholine (ACh, 2 to 3 micromol/L) resulted in an abbreviation of epicardial response and a transmural dispersion of repolarization, which caused an ST-segment elevation in the ECG. ACh facilitated loss of the action potential dome, whereas isoproterenol (0.1 to 1 micromol/L) restored the epicardial dome, thus reducing or eliminating the ST-segment elevation. Heterogeneous loss of the dome caused a marked dispersion of repolarization within the epicardium and transmurally, thus giving rise to phase 2 reentrant extrasystole, which precipitated ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF). Transient outward current (I(to)) block with 4-aminopyridine (1 to 2 mmol/L) or quinidine (5 micromol/L) restored the dome, normalized the ST segment, and prevented VT/VF. Conclusions-Depression or loss of the action potential dome in RV epicardium creates a transmural voltage gradient that may be responsible for the ST-segment elevation observed in the Brugada syndrome and other syndromes exhibiting similar ECG manifestations. Our results also demonstrate that extrasystolic activity due to phase 2 reentry can arise in the intact wall of the canine RV and serve as the trigger for VT/VF. Our data point to I(to) block (4-aminopyridine, quinidine) as an effective pharmacological treatment.
Diagnostic tests for antiribosomal p protein antibodies: a comparative evaluation of immunoblotting and ELISA assays.

We compared the clinical sensitivity and specificity of three different methods for the detection of serum antiribosomal P protein (anti-P) antibodies in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Sera from 60 unselected SLE patients, 100 healthy subjects and 100 patients with other rheumatic inflammatory diseases were screened for anti-P antibodies by immunoblotting (IB) on P proteins from Raji cells and by two ELISA assays, one using the C-terminal 22 aminoacid long synthetic peptide (C-22) of P proteins, the other using a multiple antigen peptide (MAP) carrying four copies of the C-terminal 13 aminoacid long P peptide.Anti-P antibodies were found in 20% lupus sera by IB, 16.7% by MAP ELISA and 11.7% by C-22 ELISA. The specificity for SLE diagnosis of the three tests in healthy subjects and other rheumatic diseases was: 100% by IB, 100% (vs healthy subjects) and 97% (vs rheumatic diseases) by C-22 ELISA, 100% by MAP ELISA. The agreement between methods was good; differences in concordance rates were restricted to weak positivities. We observed a high concordance in the results of IB and ELISA methods for anti-P antibody detection. IB on P proteins extracted from human lymphoid cells is more sensitive than both ELISAs; IB and MAP ELISA perform better than the C-22 ELISA in determining weakly positive sera.
Momentum in Music Teacher Education

20(1) 1 –3 © MENC: The National Association for Music Education 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1057083710382523 http://jmte.sagepub.com JMT38252 3 JMTXXX10.1177/1057083710382523BarrettJournal of Music Teacher Education © MENC: The National Association for Music Education 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Reality-monitoring characteristics in confirmed and doubtful allegations of child sexual abuse

According to reality-monitoring theory, memories of experienced and imagined events are qualitatively different, and can be distinguished by children from the age of 3. Across three studies, a total of 119 allegations of sexual abuse by younger (aged 3-8) and older (aged 9-16) children were analysed for developmental differences in the presence of reality-monitoring criteria, which should characterise descriptions of experienced events. Statements were deemed likely or unlikely to be descriptions of actual incidents using independent case information (e.g. medical evidence). Accounts by older children consistently contained more reality-monitoring criteria than those provided by younger children, and age differences were particularly strong when the cases were deemed doubtful (Studies 1 and 2). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en
A new model of proliferative vitreoretinopathy.

PURPOSE To design a new model of proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) that would not rely on the addition of exogenous cells. The release of endogenous cells from surrounding attachments seems to be an early event in the pathogenesis of PVR. Because the proteolytic enzyme dispase dissociates tissues, the hypothesis was that an intraocular injection of dispase could trigger events that would cause PVR. The requirement for a surgical retinal break at the time of dispase injection was also examined. METHODS One eye of Dutch Belted rabbits was injected with 0.003 U to 1.0 U dispase in the subretinal space or vitreous cavity. Control rabbits received a saline injection. An intentional retinal tear was created in animals in some groups. Observations were made for at least 10 weeks after surgery. RESULTS Proliferative vitreoretinopathy developed in response to subretinal or intravitreal dispase, with or without creation of a controlled retinal break. Increased severity of PVR correlated with increasing doses of dispase. Evidence of PVR included preretinal membranes, distortion of myelin wings and retinal vessels, fixed retinal folds, and traction retinal detachment. Proliferative vitreoretinopathy did not develop in saline-treated control animals. CONCLUSIONS Dispase initiated the development of PVR without the addition of exogenous cells, growth factors, or cytokines typically found in PVR membranes. A cascade of events was probably triggered by dispase, causing native cells and factors to produce PVR. The dispase model of PVR was technically easy to perform, permitted a clear view of the retina, and had a high success rate in development of PVR.
Quality indicators for colonoscopy and the risk of interval cancer.

BACKGROUND Although rates of detection of adenomatous lesions (tumors or polyps) and cecal intubation are recommended for use as quality indicators for screening colonoscopy, these measurements have not been validated, and their importance remains uncertain. METHODS We used a multivariate Cox proportional-hazards regression model to evaluate the influence of quality indicators for colonoscopy on the risk of interval cancer. Data were collected from 186 endoscopists who were involved in a colonoscopy-based colorectal-cancer screening program involving 45,026 subjects. Interval cancer was defined as colorectal adenocarcinoma that was diagnosed between the time of screening colonoscopy and the scheduled time of surveillance colonoscopy. We derived data on quality indicators for colonoscopy from the screening program's database and data on interval cancers from cancer registries. The primary aim of the study was to assess the association between quality indicators for colonoscopy and the risk of interval cancer. RESULTS A total of 42 interval colorectal cancers were identified during a period of 188,788 person-years. The endoscopist's rate of detection of adenomas was significantly associated with the risk of interval colorectal cancer (P=0.008), whereas the rate of cecal intubation was not significantly associated with this risk (P=0.50). The hazard ratios for adenoma detection rates of less than 11.0%, 11.0 to 14.9%, and 15.0 to 19.9%, as compared with a rate of 20.0% or higher, were 10.94 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.37 to 87.01), 10.75 (95% CI, 1.36 to 85.06), and 12.50 (95% CI, 1.51 to 103.43), respectively (P=0.02 for all comparisons). CONCLUSIONS The adenoma detection rate is an independent predictor of the risk of interval colorectal cancer after screening colonoscopy.