Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hysteresis independent on-line capacitance measurement for piezoelectric stack actuators

Piezoelectric actuators are typically modeled as capacitive elements for control purposes. An important model parameter, clamped capacitance, is traditionally considered constant and obtained through offline measurements. However, the capacitance value changes with operating conditions such as electric fields, environmental temperatures, and aging. In addition, traditional capacitance measurements are not hysteresis free. In this research, a hysteresis independent real time capacitance measurement technique is proposed. This is achieved by superimposing a high frequency ripple over the normal control voltage signal and comparing the resulting current signal to the voltage ripple. Since the mechanical bandwidth of the actuator is much lower than the ripple voltage, no measurable movement is induced by the measurement technique, and a clamped capacitance is determined. It is demonstrated that the measurement is largely independent of hysteresis and it shows good agreement with an LCR meter. The on-line capacitance measurement is very useful for characterising piezoelectric actuators and for implementing more robust control schemes.
Limited Commitment, Firm Dynamics and Aggregate Fluctuations

Limitations in the punishment for default induce constraints in the credit of firms and a non-trivial dynamics for their growth. Those limitations can also shape the dynamic response of the overall economy in response to an aggregate shock. In this paper I consider a simple continuous time formulation of the optimal dynamic relationship between a banks and a firm and derive a simple and sharp characterization of the optimal contract, the implicit credit constraints (for an equivalent sequentail trading arrangment) and the implied firm dynamics. I analytically characterize the steady state firm size distribution and show how to solve the optimal contract under any arbitrary deterministic path of the economy-wide equilibrium prices. I use the results to study the aggregate response to interest rates and aggregate productivity fluctuations. I also study the output and welfare cost of limited commitment.
Adaptive Multicast Architecture For Streamed MPEG-4 over IP Networks

Currently multimedia is either downloaded before viewing, or streamed over a network. However, streaming real-time or near real-time applications with a specified Quality of Service (QoS) over best-effort IP networks is not yet a solved problem. The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) can be used to facilitate streaming, but also has the potential to support QoS. Multicast transmissions are currently quite static and inflexible as all users receive the same treatment and it is only the network behaviour which differentiates between their perceived QoS. By gathering network statistics during the session and defining different customer groups, we propose to adapt multicast multimedia streaming to a fluctuating network load and/or client requests, thereby providing adaptive QoS.
Incremental response of granular materials: DEM results

We systematically investigate the incremental response of various equilibrium states of dense 2D model granular materials, along the biaxial compression path (\sigma 11 < \sigma 22, \sigma 12 = 0). Stress increments are applied in arbitrary directions in 3- dimensional stress space (\sigma 11, \sigma 22, \sigma 12). In states with stable contact networks we compute the stiffness matrix and the elastic moduli, and separate elastic and irreversible strains in the range in which the latter are homogeneous functions of degree one of stress increments. Without principal stress axis rotation, the response abides by elastoplasticity with a Mohr-Coulomb criterion and a non-associated flow rule. However a nonelastic shear strain is also observed for increments of \sigma 12, and shear and in-plane responses couple. This behavior correlates to the distribution of friction mobilization and sliding at contacts.
Using Graphics and Animation to Visulize Instruction Pipelining and its Hazards

The breakthrough of pipelined microprocessors has brought about a need to teach instruction pipelining in electrical and computer engineering curricula at the undergraduate level to a considerable depth. Although the idea of pipelining is conceptually simple, students often find pipelining difficult to visualize. Only the most talented students assimilate the ideas of how hazard issues are eliminated. Based on the pedagogical approach used in the landmark book “Computer Architecture—A Quantitative Approach” by John Hennessy and David Patterson, we have developed a graphical tool that uses animation and other graphical techniques to visualize how a pipelined datapath and control unit work. In this paper, we describe the graphical tool and outline a laboratory that makes use of it.
Evolutionary approach to coverage testing of IEC 61499 function block applications

The paper addresses the problem of coverage testing of industrial automation software represented in the IEC 61499 standard, one of the recent standards for distributed control system design. Contrary to model-based testing (MBT), the paper focuses on implementation coverage, not model coverage. An approach based on evolutionary algorithms is presented which generates coverage test suites for both basic and composite IEC 61499 function blocks. It employs two third-party tools, FBDK and EvoSuite. The evaluation of the approach was performed on a set of control applications for two lab-scale demonstration plants. Results show that the approach is applicable and shows good performance at least on basic function blocks. The generated tests suites helped to discover several unreachable system parts, which pinpointed errors in the systems under test.
High-speed speaker adaptation using phoneme dependent tree-structured speaker clustering

The tree-structured speaker clustering was proposed as a highspeed speaker adaptation method. It can select the model which is most similar to a target speaker. However, this method does not consider speaker difference dependent on phoneme class. In this paper, we propose a speaker adaptation method based on speaker clustering by taking speaker difference dependent on phoneme class into account. The experimental results showed that the new method gave a better performance than the original method. Furthermore, we propose the improved method which use a tree-structure of a similar phoneme as the substitute for the phoneme which does not appear in the adaptation data. From the experimental results, the improved method gave a better performance than the method previously proposed.
Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society

PART 1: PRIVACY Soft Surveillance, Hard Consent: The Law and Psychology of Engineering Consent Approaches to Consent in Canadian Data Protection Law Learning from Data Protection Law at the Nexus of Copyright and Privacy A Heuristics Approach to Understanding Privacy-Protecting Behaviors in Digital Social Environments Ubiquitous Computing and Spatial Privacy Core Privacy: A Privacy for Predictive Data Mining Privacy Versus National Security: Clarifying the Trade-Off Privacy's Second Home: Building a New Home for Privacy under Section 15 of the Charter What Have You Done for Me Lately? Reflections on Redeeming Privacy for Battered Women Genetic Technologies and Medicine: Privacy, Identity and Informed Consent Reclaiming the Social Value of Privacy PART II: IDENTITY A Conceptual Analysis of Identity Identity: Difference and Categorization Identity Cards and Identity Romaticism What's in a Name? Who Benefits from the Publication Ban in Sexual Assault Trials? Life in the Fish Bowl: Feminist Interrogations of Webcamming Ubiquitous Computing, Spatiality, and the Construction of Identity: Directions for Policy Response Dignity and Selective Self-Presentation The Internet of People? Reflections on the Future Regulation of Human-Implantable Radio Frequency Identification Usig Biometrics to Re-Visualize the Canada-US Border Soul Train: The New Surveillance in Popular Music Exit Node Repudiation for Anonymity Networks TrackMeNot: Resisting Surveillance in Web Search PART III: ANONYMITY Anonymity and the Law in the USA Anonymity and the Law in the United Kingdom Anonymity and the Law in Canada Anonymity and the Law in the Netherlands Anonymity and the Law in Italy
OBJECT RECOGNITION USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION AND GENETIC ALGORITHM

Object recognition is an important research field of computer vision and has its application in a broad range of problems including image retrieval, compression, surveillance and medical diagnostics. The main goal of the object recognition problem is to recognize the objects of the same type even when they are viewed from different viewpoints. This goal, however, remains a challenge for computer vision to recognize objects having invariant features such as translation, rotation and scaling. Shape descriptors like Fourier and Moments are invariant with respect to transformation, rotation and scaling. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population based soft computing technique. Particle Swarm Optimization technique shares numerous similarities with evolutionary computation techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA). One of the most important tasks regarding to object recognition is how to find number of descriptors of a given object. The query that arises is what is the optimum number of descriptors to be used with maximum recognition rate? , Are descriptors having equal importance? Such reasons signify the importance of these descriptors and also selecting the best descriptor by applying optimization technique. We have introduced an evolutionary optimization technique known as Genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the optimization problem. GA assigns, for each of these descriptors, a weighting factor that reflects the relative importance of that descriptor.
Physiological measures and self-report to evaluate neutral virtual reality worlds

Using virtual reality technology for exposure therapy to treat patients with anxiety disorders is attracting considerable research attention. The ability to monitor patient anxiety level helps therapists to set appropriate anxiety arousing situations. Physiological measures have been put forward as objective indicators of anxiety levels. Because of individual variation, they need a baseline recording which is often conducted in neutral virtual worlds which do not include phobic stressors. Still because of the novelty of the virtual worlds, reports in the literature suggest that individuals already show some level of arousal when placed in these worlds. This paper presents two studies which look at the effect two different neutral virtual worlds can have on individuals. Findings suggest that a neutral world does not have to result in an increased level of arousal.
GPU Prefilter for Accurate Cubic B-spline Interpolation

Achieving accurate interpolation is an important requirement for many signal-processing applications. While nearest-neighbor and linear interpolation methods are popular due to their native GPU support, they unfortunately result in severe undesirable artifacts. Better interpolation methods are known but lack a native GPU support. Yet, a particularly attractive one is prefiltered cubic-spline interpolation. The signal it reconstructs from discrete samples has a much higher fidelity to the original data than what is achievable with nearest-neighbor and linear interpolation. At the same time, its computational load is moderate, provided a sequence of two operations is applied: first, prefilter the samples, and only then reconstruct the signal with the help of a B-spline basis. It has already been established in the literature that the reconstruction step can be implemented efficiently on a GPU. This article focuses on an efficient GPU implementation of the prefilter, on how to apply it to multidimensional samples (e.g. RGB color images), and on its performance aspects.
The rise of commodity speculation: from villainous to venerable.

Throughout history, food profiteering has been roundly condemned. Those engaging in speculation, hoarding or exploitation, or otherwise extracting money from sustenance have met with sharp rebuke, punishment or even execution. Until now. During the twenty-first century the once maligned food profiteer – particularly the commodity speculator – has been transformed into a generally positive and welcome force. Far from causing harm or havoc, the modern commodity speculator is often hailed as the new oracle of the food cycle, boldly wagering multi-million dollar bets on the direction of prices on mammoth futures exchanges. While pouring unprecedented amounts of money into trading commodities, speculators claim they are merely aiding what futures markets are meant to do – discovering the equilibrium price of goods at any moment in time. By providing “liquidity”, they deliver a societal good and, citing numerous supportive economic studies, they maintain that their trading activities have negligible impacts on global benchmark prices or affect the food security policies of nearly every commodity dependent country. In short, unlike speculators of the past, they have managed to raise themselves to a respected professional class, shielded to some extent from ethical inquiry.
MicroRNA-152 Regulates DNA Methyltransferase 1 and Is Involved in the Development and Lactation of Mammary Glands in Dairy Cows

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-coding, endogenous regulatory RNAs that function by controlling gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Using small RNA sequencing and qRT-PCR techniques, we found that the expression of miR-152 was significantly increased during lactation in the mammary glands of dairy cows producing high quality milk compared with that in cows producing low quality milk. Furthermore, DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1), which is a target of miR-152, was inversely correlated with the expression levels of miR-152 in the mammary glands of dairy cows. Dairy cow mammary epithelial cells (DCMECs) were used as in vitro cell models to study the function of miR-152. The forced expression of miR-152 in DCMECs resulted in a marked reduction of DNMT1 at both mRNA and protein levels. This in turn led to a decrease in global DNA methylation and increased the expression of two lactation-related genes, serine/threonine protein kinase Akt (Akt) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (Pparγ). In contrast, inhibition of miR-152 showed the opposite results. By using an electronic Coulter counter (CASY-TT) and flow cytometer, we discovered that miR-152 enhanced the viability and multiplication capacity of DCMECs. In conclusion, miR-152 plays an important role in the development and lactation processes in the mammary glands of dairy cows. Our data provide insights into dairy cow mammary gland development and lactation.
Nack-oriented Reliable Multicast Protocol (norm) Ta Ble of Contents

Status of this Memo This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.I tdoes not specify an Internet standardofany kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement arerequested. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which Iamawarehave been disclosed, and any of which I become awarewill be disclosed, in accordance with RFC 3668. Abstract This document describes the messages and procedures of the Negative-acknowledgment (NACK) Oriented Reliable Multicast (NORM) protocol. This protocol is designed to provide end-to-end reliable transport of bulk data objects or streams over generic IP multicast routing and forwarding services. NORM uses a selective, negative acknowledgment mechanism for transport reliability and offers additional protocol mechanisms to allow for operation with minimal "a priori" coordination among senders and receivers. A congestion control scheme is specified to allow the NORM protocol fairly shareavailable network bandwidth with other transport protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It is capable of operating with both reciprocal multicast routing among senders and receivers and with asymmetric connectivity (possibly a unicast return path) between the senders and receivers. The protocol offers a number of features to allow different types of applications or possibly other higher level transport protocols to utilize its service in different ways. The protocol leverages the use of FEC-based repair and other IETF reliable multicast transport (RMT) building blocks in its design.
UV electroluminescence from ITO/SRO/p-Si and ITO/SRN/SRO/p-Si structures

This work presents the electrical and electroluminescent properties of light emitting capacitors (LECs) using silicon rich oxide (SRO) and the effect of a thin silicon rich nitride (SRN) film on it (SRN/SRO) as active layers. LECs were fabricated using simple Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor (MIS) structures with indium tin oxide (ITO) and aluminum as gate and substrate electrodes, respectively. All devices exhibit a resistance switching (RS) behavior from a high conduction state (HCS) to a low conduction state (LCS), enhancing an intense ultraviolet-blue (UV-B) EL. This RS behavior produces structural changes in the active layer and probably in the ITO contact. Seven narrow bands with half-peak width of 7±0.6 nm at ~250, 270, 285, 305, 325, 415 and 450 nm are clearly observed once the low conduction state is reached. The red-near infrared EL at HCS is similar to the PL spectra indicating the same radiative process is involved. An increment of the EL band at ~590 nm in SRN/SRO is observed at both conduction states. This band has been observed before and attributed transitions from the minimum band conduction to K0 centers in SRN films. The UV-B emission appears at lower electric field when the SRN/SRO film is used as active layer.
The Particle Spectrum of Heterotic Compactifications

Techniques are presented for computing the cohomology of stable, holomorphic vector bundles over elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau threefolds. These cohomology groups explicitly determine the spectrum of the low energy, four-dimensional theory. Generic points in vector bundle moduli space manifest an identical spectrum. However, it is shown that on subsets of moduli space of co-dimension one or higher, the spectrum can abruptly jump to many different values. Both analytic and numerical data illustrating this phenomenon are presented. This result opens the possibility of tunneling or phase transitions between different particle spectra in the same heterotic compactification. In the course of this discussion, a classification of SU(5) GUT theories within a specific context is presented.
The institutional choice of refuse collection: Determining variables in the Netherlands

textabstractGeneral empirical evidence suggests that contracting out refuse collection results in a cost decrease in the order of 20%. However, although the method of contracting out refuse collection has become more popular, it is still less common than in-house provision. This paper investigates the reasons behind this phenomenon. Recently, L? pez-de-Silanes et al. (1997) tried to explain the reservedness of local authorities towards contracting out with US-data and show that political patronage is an important explanation. In this article we give such an empirical assessment using Dutch data. We base our empirical research on the combination of the theories around efficiency, interest group influence and ideology. To test these theories we model the choice between private and public provision of refuse collection on the one hand side and the choice between in-house and out-house provision on the other side. Data are available for nearly all Dutch municipalities. A most striking conclusion is that nearly all political parties in the Netherlands do have a preference for public and in-house provision of refuse collection. We find only modest evidence for the hypothesis that a high level of real estate tax (proxy for the soundness of municipal financial affairs, the efficiency argument) or a low level of unemployment (the interest group argument) raises the probability of private and out-house provision. We find more evidence for the assumed relation between the size of municipalities and private collection. In all cases a smaller municipality has a higher chance of private collection. Therefore, scale effects are important for the choice between public and private provision. For the choice between out-house and in-house collection in relation to scale less evidence exists. Compared with other studies we estimated more general models, allowing for higher order effects and heteroskedasticity. We show that the standard Logit model is too restrictive, both for the choice between private and public provision and the choice between in-house and out-house provision. Signs and significance do differ between the different models. Especially, for the choice between in-house and out-house provision the applied model matters. In this case, only unemployment and municipality size has influence. Thus, more attention is needed for the implications of model choice for the explanation of the raised questions.
Do Independent Analysts Provide Superior Stock Recommendations ? 1 Introduction

Many investors were upset with the losses they experienced by following the recommendations of stock analysts during the recent market downturn. Allegations that these recommendations were often tainted by investment banking relationships fueled their anger. This study examines the investment performance of stock recommendations made by analysts employed by lead underwriters as compared to analysts independent of investment banking. The results indicate that during the 1994-2003 time period, affiliated analysts offered inferior investment advice for all recommendation categories except Sell. The paper then examines possible causes and finds that investment banking conflict of interest is a more complete explanation than a selection bias. ∗Assistant Professor at the Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech. Phone: (540) 231-5061. Email: mcliff@vt.edu. A substantial part of the work on this paper was completed while the author was at Purdue University. The author thanks Mukesh Bajaj, Dave Denis, Michael Eames, Huseyin Gulen, John McConnell, Atulya Sarin, Vijay Singal, and seminar participants at the University of Arizona, Penn State, and Virginia Tech for their comments. Ken French kindly provided data on factor returns and Thomson Financial provided the I/B/E/S recommendations data. Ajay Bhootra provided valuable research assistance. Do Independent Analysts Provide Superior Stock Recommendations?
GHI Principle Paper on Integration in the Health Sector

PREFACE The purpose of this paper is to share information, experiences, ideas, resources, and challenges with U.S. Government (USG) country teams to help them better apply this principle in their programming across global health accounts and to expand the knowledge base for how this principle can advance a country's health goals. The paper is intended as a " living document, " which will be revised periodically based on emerging research and insights reported by USG field staff on integration successes and challenges in different settings under different circumstances. The paper is not formal guidance, a policy directive, a strategy, a user's manual, or a blueprint. The information and ideas in this paper are drawn from two USG-sponsored Cochrane Reviews, a cursory review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature on integration, anecdotal reports from the field, and comments and contributions on earlier versions of this paper from USG reviewers from multiple agencies (HHS/CDC, USAID, OGAC), and external stakeholders.