Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Melt characteristics, mechanical, and thermal properties of blown film from modified blends of poly(butylene adipate‐co‐terephthalate) and poly(lactide)

Blown films from poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) and poly(lactide) (PLA) blends were investigated. The blends were prepared in a twin-screw extruder, in the presence of small amounts of dicumyl peroxide (DCP). The influence of DCP concentration on film blowing, rheological, mechanical, and thermal properties of the blends is reported in this article. Rheological results showed a marked increase in polymer melt strength and elasticity with the addition of DCP. As a consequence, the film homogeneity and the stability of the bubble were improved. The modified blend films, compared with the unmodified blend, showed an improvement in tensile strength and modulus with a slight loss in elongation. Fourier transform infrared and gel results revealed that chain scission and branching were more significant than crosslinking when the DCP loadings in the blends were not higher than 0.7%. A reduction in melt temperatures of PLA was observed due to difficulty in chain crystallization. The concentrations of DCP strongly affected the melting temperatures but had an insignificant effect on the decomposition behavior of the blends. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2011
Shape Memory Polymers in Textiles

This paper highlight the most important areas and directions of shape memory polymers in textiles. The textiles of shape memory polymers involve fibre spinning (including wet-spinning, melt-spinning and electro-spinning), fabric, smart apparel, actively finishing technology and WVP investigation. Based on the molecular structure of shape memory polymer, the shape memory transformation from polymer to textiles and application theory are illustrated and stated. Additionally, the challenges of shape memory polymers in textiles are pointed out and some research directions are also suggested in this paper.
The Relationship Between Greater Prepubertal Adiposity, Subsequent Age of Maturation, and Bone Strength During Adolescence

This longitudinal study investigated whether greater prepubertal adiposity was associated with subsequent timing of maturation and bone strength during adolescence in 135 girls and 123 boys participating in the Iowa Bone Development Study. Greater adiposity was defined using body mass index (BMI) data at age 8 years to classify participants as overweight (OW, ≥85th percentile for age and sex) or healthy weight (HW). Maturation was defined as the estimated age of peak height velocity (PHV) based on a series of cross‐sectional estimates. Measurements were taken at ages 11, 13, 15, and 17 years for estimates of body composition by dual‐energy X‐ray absorptiometry (DXA), bone compression (bone strength index), and torsion strength (polar strength‐strain index) at the radius and tibia by pQCT, and femoral neck bending strength (section modulus) by hip structural analysis. Bone strength in OW versus HW were evaluated by fitting sex‐specific linear mixed models that included centered age (visit age – grand mean age of cohort) as the time variable and adjusted for change in fat mass, and limb length in model 1. Analyses were repeated using biological age (visit age – age PHV) as the time variable for model 1 with additional adjustment for lean mass in model 2. BMI was negatively associated with age of maturation (p < 0.05). OW versus HW girls had significantly greater bone strength (p < 0.001) in model 1, whereas OW versus HW boys had significantly greater bone strength (p < 0.001) at the tibia and femoral neck but not radius (p > 0.05). Analyses were repeated using biological age, which yielded reduced parameter estimates for girls but similar results for boys (model 1.) Differences were no longer present after adjustment for lean mass (model 2) in girls (p > 0.05) whereas differences at the tibia were sustained in boys (p < 0.05). These findings demonstrate sex‐ and site‐specific differences in the associations between adiposity, maturation, and bone strength. © 2016 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Associations between Feeling and Judging the Emotions of Happiness and Fear: Findings from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Background How do we recognize emotions from other people? One possibility is that our own emotional experiences guide us in the online recognition of emotion in others. A distinct but related possibility is that emotion experience helps us to learn how to recognize emotions in childhood. Methodology/Principal Findings We explored these ideas in a large sample of people (N = 4,608) ranging from 5 to over 50 years old. Participants were asked to rate the intensity of emotional experience in their own lives, as well as to perform a task of facial emotion recognition. Those who reported more intense experience of fear and happiness were significantly more accurate (closer to prototypical) in recognizing facial expressions of fear and happiness, respectively, and intense experience of fear was associated also with more accurate recognition of surprised and happy facial expressions. The associations held across all age groups. Conclusions These results suggest that the intensity of one's own emotional experience of fear and happiness correlates with the ability to recognize these emotions in others, and demonstrate such an association as early as age 5.
Tacticycle: a tactile display for supporting tourists on a bicycle trip

Cycling is a common leisure time sports in touristic regions. For us it was the question how tourists actually find their paths in the area and what kind of navigation aids might be helpful to them. In a requirements study on a touristic island we learned that tourists rather explore the environment spontaneously than efficiently navigating from on place to another such as the beach or the light house, and just cycle on without much map or navigation aid. While exploring the area, the cyclists however, sometimes lose their orientation which they compensate for by accepting detours. We designed and developed an orientation aid, Tacticycle that does not influence the cycling experience but improve the orientation and awareness of the overall direction. In order to ensure the cyclists' safety two vibrotactile actuators are used to indicate directions and announce the presence of interesting places. In two field studies we showed that despite the accuracy of the indicated direction being rather coarse, the tactile user interface allows cyclists to reach a presented destination easily. The visitor of the demo can experience a virtual cycling tour supported by the Tacticycle demonstrator.
Clustering-based threshold estimation for vortex extraction and visualization

Research efforts have been devoted to extraction and visualization of vortices in an unsteady (turbulent) flow. Characterizing the behaviors of the flow, vortices are identifiable as regions using a vortex detector known as the lambda2-criterion. Isosurface visualization renders vortex regions based on a chosen isovalue. However, it is highly challenging to choose one isovalue suitable for visualizing vortex regions of the entire flow field. A solution is the approach of maxima score that localizes vortex regions identified by the lambda2-criterion based on similarity scores relative to local extrema. The approach is however sensitive to noise or floating-point errors in the flow, leading to clutter in vortex visualization. As a feasibility study, this paper presents a threshold estimation to overcome this sensitivity. The estimation involves clustering on local minimum differences in lambda2 scalar values derived from the gradient tensor of the velocity field, and yields multiple values of the threshold without user intervention. Tested on several flows in various size and Reynolds number, the results of the threshold estimation confirmed overcoming the sensitivity of the maxima score approach. This indicates a potential of the threshold estimation to improve the robustness of the approach for vortex extraction and visualization.
Degraded Gaussian MIMO multi-receiver wiretap channel with public and confidential messages

We study the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel with public and confidential messages. In this channel, there is a transmitter that wishes to communicate with two legitimate users in the presence of an external eavesdropper. The legitimate users and the eavesdropper satisfy a certain degradation order. In this paper, we study this channel model for the scenario where the transmitter sends a pair of public and confidential messages to each legitimate user. While there are no secrecy constraints on the public messages, confidential messages need to be transmitted in perfect secrecy. First, we obtain an inner bound for the capacity region of the discrete memoryless channel by using an achievable scheme that uses superposition coding and binning. Next, we obtain an outer bound for the capacity region of the degraded discrete memoryless channel. We show that this outer bound partially matches the inner bound. Consequently, we provide a partial characterization of the capacity region of the degraded discrete memoryless channel. Finally, we consider the degraded Gaussian multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wiretap channel with public and confidential messages. We show that, to evaluate both the inner and outer bounds for the Gaussian MIMO case, considering only jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input is sufficient. Since the inner and outer bounds provided earlier for the degraded discrete memoryless channel partially match, these sufficiency results provide a partial characterization of the capacity region of the degraded Gaussian MIMO channel.
Improving Trajectory Modelling for DNN-Based Speech Synthesis by Using Stacked Bottleneck Features and Minimum Generation Error Training

We propose two novel techniques-stacking bottleneck features and minimum generation error (MGE) training criterion-to improve the performance of deep neural network (DNN)-based speech synthesis. The techniques address the related issues of frame-by-frame independence and ignorance of the relationship between static and dynamic features, within current typical DNN-based synthesis frameworks. Stacking bottleneck features, which are an acoustically informed linguistic representation, provides an efficient way to include more detailed linguistic context at the input. The MGE training criterion minimises overall output trajectory error across an utterance, rather than minimising the error per frame independently, and thus takes into account the interaction between static and dynamic features. The two techniques can be easily combined to further improve performance. We present both objective and subjective results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The subjective results show that combining the two techniques leads to significantly more natural synthetic speech than from conventional DNN or long short-term memory recurrent neural network systems.
Location aware decision engine to offload mobile computation to the cloud

The use of mobile devices for work and for entertainment is growing. However, some applications may consume too much battery or be too CPU intensive for those devices. One alternative is to dynamically offload parts of the computation of those applications to the Cloud, reducing the battery usage of the devices and improve the responsiveness of the applications. One of the biggest challenges in offloading is to decide whether offloading a certain computation should be performed or not, since the time and energy required to upload the code as well as the input parameters may be less advantageous than executing it locally. This paper proposes a location aware decision engine for mobile offloading. The proposed decision engine can be easily plugged into any offloading framework. Further, we propose a black-box approach to estimate a method's execution time using simple code annotations. An experimental evaluation indicates that location-aware offloading can reduce the energy usage by 50%, with a CPU overhead of approximately 10%.
The Tragedy of Betrayal: How the Design of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Elicits Emotion

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are two games of high critical acclaim that are well known for their emotional affect – particularly because some of those emotions are unusual amongst digital games. Analysis of emotion in video games often focuses on narrative and representative elements, and emotions regularly experienced by gamers such as frustration, victory, joy of discovery etc. This paper uses close textual analysis with support from cognitive theories of emotion to analyse the ludic and mechanical, in addition to representative and narrative, qualities of these games. By doing so it is shown how guilt, grief and loneliness have more chance of being elicited from the player, with emphasis on the use of ambiguity and violation of player expectations. It is hoped that this approach will encourage further work of this type in an area so that both theoretical work and future development might benefit.
Soft motion trajectory planner for service manipulator robot

Human interaction introduces two main constraints: safety and comfort. Therefore service robot manipulator canpsilat be controlled like industrial robotic manipulator where personnel is isolated from the robotpsilas work envelope. In this paper, we present a soft motion trajectory planner to try to ensure that these constraints are satisfied. This planner can be used on-line to establish visual and force control loop suitable in presence of human. The cubic trajectories build by this planner are good candidates as output of a manipulation task planner. The obtained system is then homogeneous from task planning to robot control. The soft motion trajectory planner limits jerk, acceleration and velocity in cartesian space using quaternion. Experimental results carried out on a Mitsubishi PA10-6CE arm are presented.
Adaptation and cross-layer issues in sensor networks

An intrinsic characteristic of current projects in the area of sensor networks is the heterogeneity of hardware and application requirements. In addition, the requirements of current applications are expected to change over time. This makes developing, deploying, and optimizing sensor network applications an extremely difficult task. In this paper, we present the architecture of TinyCubus, a flexible and adaptive cross-layer framework for TinyOS-based sensor networks that aims at providing the necessary infrastructure to cope with the complexity of such systems. TinyCubus consists of three parts: a data management framework that selects and adapts both system and data management components, a cross-layer framework that enables optimizations through cross-layer interactions, and a configuration engine that installs components dynamically. We show the feasibility of our architecture by describing and evaluating a code distribution algorithm that optimizes its behavior by using application knowledge about the sensor topology.
Analysis of the human integrin alpha11 gene (ITGA11) and its promoter.

Integrin alpha11beta1 is a collagen receptor which is expressed in a subset of mesenchymally-derived tissues during embryogenesis. Based on available human chromosome 15-derived sequences and genomic PCR, the complete exon structure of ITGA11, including the proximal promoter, was assembled into 30 exons. The inserted region (encoding amino acids 804-826) distinguishing alpha11 from other integrin alpha chains, was placed in the very beginning of exon 20. PCR data failed to show alternative splicing of RNA transcribed from this region. Using the oligo-capping technique a major transcription start site was mapped 30 nucleotides upstream of the translation start and identified as an abbreviated initiator sequence. Promoter sequence analysis in silico suggested the presence of multiple binding sites for transcription factors in the region upstream of the transcription start. 3 kb of the 5' flanking sequence was isolated and used to generate luciferase promoter constructs. In the fibrosarcoma cell line HT1080 a core promoter [nt (-)127-(+)25], a potential silencer region [nt (-)400-(-)127] and a potential enhancer region [nt (-)1519-(-)400], were identified as being important for alpha11 transcription in mesenchymal cells. Furthermore, studies of the promoter region will provide valuable information regarding the molecular mechanisms underlying the cell- and tissue- specific expression pattern of ITGA11.
An energy saving scheduling scheme for OFDMA two-hop relay systems

Being a new feature of next generation of wireless networks, MMR (Mobile Multi-hop Relay) is proposed for the purpose of coverage extension and throughput enhancement in IMT-Advanced, IEEE 802.16j/m. Besides, with the help of relay, the system energy consumption could be well saved. In this paper, an energy saving scheduling scheme is proposed for OFDMA based two-hop relay systems. The novel scheme adjusts the modulation and coding (MC) mode and allocates the transmitting power dynamically according to the resource usage. It can also guarantee the QoS of different services by setting the scheduling priority. The simulation results show that the novel scheduling scheme can not only save system energy but also achieve higher throughput.
Ulcerative Colitis Database: An Integrated Database and Toolkit for Gene Function and Medication Involved in Ulcerative Colitis

Background:Over the last decade, a massive amount of well-annotated genomic data has been accumulated on the pathogenesis and therapies for ulcerative colitis (UC). However, a comprehensive repository is not available yet. Methods:Ulcerative Colitis Database (UCDB) was constructed using text mining followed by manually curating on the literature to collect the reliable information of UC-related genes, drugs, and susceptibility loci. UC DNA microarray data were collected. R packages were used to implement gene expression analysis toolkit. Results:UCDB includes 4 separate but closely related components: “UC GENE,” “UC DRUG,” “UC LOCUS,” and “UC ANALYSIS. ” The UC GENE contains comprehensive information for 1151 UC-related genes manually curated from 2919 publications. The UC DRUG includes information for 248 drugs manually curated from 2344 publications. “UC LOCUS” includes 110 UC susceptibility SNP loci, which were collected from 12 Genome-Wide Association Studies. A comprehensive expression quantitative trait loci browser was also implemented. The UC ANALYSIS is an expression analysis toolkit for 37 UC expression array data sets, which contains 1098 samples. The toolkit can be used to do gene expression correlation, clustering, differentially expressed, and Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA). Conclusions:UCDB provides a comprehensive collection of well-curated UC-related genes and drugs, and straightforward interfaces for gene expression analyses. UCDB is a useful leading resource for both basic and clinical research and will benefit UC community worldwide. UCDB is freely accessible at http://seiwertlab.uchicago. edu/UCDB.
Performance of SAPS II and SAPS III scores in post-cardiac arrest.

BACKGROUND Cardiac arrest is a major public health issue affecting an estimated 300,000 patients in the United States each year. The American Heart Association has recommended the Simplified Acute Physiology Score II and III (SAPS) to assess severity of illness and to predict outcomes in the post-cardiac arrest population. Our objective was to determine if SAPS II and SAPS III scores predict outcomes in post-cardiac arrest patients. METHODS We performed an observational study of patients suffering cardiac arrest with return of spontaneous circulation. Data were collected prospectively and recorded in the Utstein style. SAPS II and SAPS III scores were calculated for each subject. Logistic regression was used to assess the relationship between the calculated severity of illness score and in-hospital mortality and poor neurologic outcome. RESULTS A total of 274 subjects were identified for analysis. SAPS II was a significant predictor of in-hospital mortality (OR: 1.05, 95% CI: 1.03-1.07) and poor-neurologic outcome (OR: 1.06, 95%CI: 1.04-1.08). SAPS III was a significant predictor of in-hospital mortality (OR: 1.04, 95%CI: 1.02-1.06) and poor neurologic outcome (OR: 1.04, 95%CI: 1.02-1.05). Both scores had moderate ability to discriminate survivors from non-survivors (SAPS II AUC: 0.70; SAPS III AUC: 0.66), and good neurologic outcome from poor neurologic outcome (SAPS II AUC: 0.71; SAPS III AUC: 0.65). CONCLUSION SAPS II and SAPS III scores have only moderate discrimination and are not clinically relevant tools to predict outcome in post-cardiac arrest patients. Further study is needed to identify a more reliable severity of illness score in the post-arrest population.
Tiered Tagging Revisited

In this paper we describe a new baseline tagset induction algorithm, which unlike the one described in previous work is fully automatic and produces tagsets with better performance than before. The algorithm is an information lossless transformation of the MULTEXT-EAST compliant lexical tags (MSD) into a reduced tagset that can be mapped back on the lexicon tagset fully deterministic. From the baseline tagsets, a corpus linguist, expert in the language in case, may further reduce the tagsets taking into account language distributional properties. As any further reduction of the baseline tagsets assumes losing information, adequate recovering rules should be designed for ensuring the final tagging in terms of lexicon encoding. The algorithm is described in details and the generated baseline tagsets for Czech, English, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian and Slovenean are evaluated. They are much smaller and systematically ensures better tagging accuracy than the corresponding MSDs.
Printed multi-turn loop antenna for RF biotelemetry

A novel printed multi-turn loop antenna for contact-less powering and RF telemetry from implantable bio-MEMS sensors at a design frequency of 300 MHz is demonstrated. In addition, computed values of input reactance, radiation resistance, skin effect resistance, and radiation efficiency for the printed multi-turn loop antenna are presented. The computed input reactance is compared with the measured values and shown to be in fair agreement. The computed radiation efficiency at the design frequency is about 24%.
Integral Geometry of Tensor Fields on a Class of Non-Simple Riemannian Manifolds

We study the geodesic X-ray transform IΓ of tensor fields on a compact Riemannian manifold M with non-necessarily convex boundary and with possible conjugate points. We assume that IΓ is known for geodesics belonging to an open set Γ with endpoints on the boundary. We prove generic s-injectivity and a stability estimate under some topological assumptions and under the condition that for any (x, ξ) ∈ T*M, there is a geodesic in Γ through x normal to ξ without conjugate points.