Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Haptic interaction with virtual geometry on robotic touch surface

Touch screens are rapidly penetrating our daily life. Even general users are enjoying various applications such as drawing sketches and playing games with their mobile phones. In particular, the improvement of graphics capabilities with large display screens now allows easy access at any location to 3D environments including 3D games, animation, and augmented reality applications that were formerly limited to desktop environments. Touch screen devices have distinct features compared with previous mobile phones: the screen is widened and the device is mainly operated with touch input. As a natural consequence, users want to be able to feel the touched objects in many cases. From the viewpoint of haptics on surfaces, a variety of haptic rendering/interaction techniques have been proposed to make interactions on surface richer and more natural. One approach to lend applications tactility is to provide frictional feedback on touch surfaces [Bau and Poupyrev 2012; Kim et al. 2013; Winfield et al. 2007]. These technologies plausibly reproduce finetuned textures, such as craters on the surface of the Moon and the lines on the palm of a hand. However, the technologies are not suitable to reproduce the object surface with contours that extend beyond the fingertip, such as the large-scaled geometry of the Moon and the palm. To handle such issues, a recent work proposed a lateral haptic display that can provide two-dimensional force feedback slightly above the screen [Saga and Deguchi 2012]. They exploited the phenomenon that people tend to have the perception of touching 3D objects if they receive force feedback in/against the direction of movement on a 2D surface. A similar technique was applied to image-based haptic interaction in another recent work [Kim and Kwon 2013]. This type of feeling can be reproduced by considering one important feature of haptics: collocation, which is often ignored in the context of surface interaction in that interaction space is limited to a 2D surface. This is a substantially different setup from that used for conventional haptic rendering, which generally collocates haptic information in the real interaction space. A recent study dealt with this issue by proposing a 1-dimensional translational robot system [Sinclair et al. 2013]. Their robotic touch display allows users to explore virtual 3D content such as volumetric medical images by moving the display surface along the z-axis perpendicular to the display surface. This trial has significant meaning as the first work to take collocation into consideration in the context of surface haptics. Another recent study addressed this issue by proposing a haptic stylus with a variable tip length. The proposed system is designed to give users the illusion that some part of the stylus is immersed in virtual space, enabling the direct touch of virtual objects displayed on the flat surface [Withana et al. 2010].
A Dynamic Charging System With Reduced Output Power Pulsation for Electric Vehicles

This paper proposes a continuous dynamic wireless power transfer system for electric vehicles that reduces power pulsations during the charging process. Multiple rectangular unipolar coils are used at the primary side as the transmitters, and another unipolar coil works as a receiver at the secondary side. The transmitters are placed closely together to reduce the variation of magnetic fields along the moving track of the receiver. This structure induces self-coupling between the adjacent transmitters. An LCC-compensated circuit topology is utilized, and a compensation parameter design is provided which considers self-coupling between the primary coils. Finite-element analysis of the dynamic charging system is performed using Maxwell. The receiver size is optimized to reduce the variation of the coupling coefficient. A 1.4-kW dynamic charging prototype is constructed according to the designed coil structure and circuit parameters. There are six transmitters, each with dimensions 388 mm×400 mm, and one receiver with dimensions 485 mm×400 mm. Experimental results show that the output power pulsation is within ±7.5% in the dynamic charging process, and the maximum efficiency is 89.78%. If the edge effects of the transmitters are neglected, then the power pulsation is within ±2.9%.
Nuclear entry of a cGMP-dependent kinase converts transient into long-lasting olfactory adaptation

To navigate a complex and changing environment, an animal's sensory neurons must continually adapt to persistent cues while remaining responsive to novel stimuli. Long-term exposure to an inherently attractive odor causes Caenorhabditis elegans to ignore that odor, a process termed odor adaptation. Odor adaptation is likely to begin within the sensory neuron, because it requires factors that act within these cells at the time of odor exposure. The process by which an olfactory sensory neuron makes a decisive shift over time from a receptive state to a lasting unresponsive one remains obscure. In C. elegans, adaptation to odors sensed by the AWC pair of olfactory neurons requires the cGMP-dependent protein kinase EGL-4. Using a fully functional, GFP-tagged EGL-4, we show here that prolonged odor exposure sends EGL-4 into the nucleus of the stimulated AWC neuron. This odor-induced nuclear translocation correlates temporally with the stable dampening of chemotaxis that is indicative of long-term adaptation. Long-term adaptation requires cGMP binding residues as well as an active EGL-4 kinase. We show here that EGL-4 nuclear accumulation is both necessary and sufficient to induce long-lasting odor adaptation. After it is in the AWC nucleus, EGL-4 decreases the animal's responsiveness to AWC-sensed odors by acting downstream of the primary sensory transduction. Thus, the EGL-4 protein kinase acts as a sensor that integrates odor signaling over time, and its nuclear translocation is an instructive switch that allows the animal to ignore persistent odors.
Menstrual and reproductive factors and Gastric‐cancer risk in women

To understand possible correlates of the systematically higher gastric‐cancer rates in males than in females, we investigated the role of menstrual, reproductive and hormonal factors in females, using data from a case‐control study conducted in Northern Italy. Cases were 229 post‐menopausal women with incident, histologically confirmed gastric cancer, and controls were 614 post‐menopausal women in hospital for acute, nonneoplastic, non‐digestive‐tract conditions. After allowance for age, education, family history, and selected dietary correlates of stomach cancer, a reduced gastric‐cancer risk was observed in women with later menopause (odds ratio, OR = 0.6, p value for trend <0.05), and longer duration of fertile life (OR = 0.7, but the trend in risk was not significant). The risk of gastric cancer was elevated in multiparous women (OR = 1.7 for 3 and 1.9 for ≥ 4 births as compared to nulliparae). No association was observed with age at menarche, age at first birth, and with number of spontaneous or induced abortions. Ever‐users of oral contraceptives had a non‐significant increased risk (OR = 1.3), and users of oestrogen‐replacement treatment a non‐significant reduced risk (OR = 0.5). Although the association with each factor was moderate, and the interpretation of these findings is not straightforward, these results are compatible with the hypothesis that some role is played by (endogenous and exogenous) female hormones in the process of gastric carcinogenesis.
Yeast Glyoxalase I Is a Monomeric Enzyme with Two Active Sites*

The tertiary structure of the monomeric yeast glyoxalase I has been modeled based on the crystal structure of the dimeric human glyoxalase I and a sequence alignment of the two enzymes. The model suggests that yeast glyoxalase I has two active sites contained in a single polypeptide. To investigate this, a recombinant expression clone of yeast glyoxalase I was constructed for overproduction of the enzyme in Escherichia coli. Each putative active site was inactivated by site-directed mutagenesis. According to the alignment, glutamate 163 and glutamate 318 in yeast glyoxalase I correspond to glutamate 172 in human glyoxalase I, a Zn(II) ligand and proposed general base in the catalytic mechanism. The residues were each replaced by glutamine and a double mutant containing both mutations was also constructed. Steady-state kinetics and metal analyses of the recombinant enzymes corroborate that yeast glyoxalase I has two functional active sites. The activities of the catalytic sites seem to be somewhat different. The metal ions bound in the active sites are probably one Fe(II) and one Zn(II), but Mn(II) may replace Zn(II). Yeast glyoxalase I appears to be one of the few enzymes that are present as a single polypeptide with two active sites that catalyze the same reaction.
Supervised Discriminant Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Method

In this paper, a Supervised Discriminant NMF (SDNMF) model is investigated. The idea is to incorporate the discriminate and the class information preserving constraints into the NMF decomposition in order to extract latent semantic spaces that enforce the discriminate and class information preserving properties. Finally, experimental evaluation is performed on the SECTOR data set.
Recombineering and Conjugation as Tools for Targeted Genomic Cloning

The ability to obtain DNA clones of genes that normally reside in microbial genomes was a huge technical advance in molecular biology. At first, cloning genes utilized approaches involving the complementation of mutants or the screening of genomic libraries to find sequences that hybridized to homologous DNA probes. Typically, this involved using restriction enzymes to clone random genomic fragments followed by subcloning of a smaller piece of the original clone. Then the development of PCR and genomic sequencing allowed specific genomic sequences to be amplified and cloned with more convenience. Now genes are able to be synthesized “from scratch” and ordered from various companies or institutions. However, if many genes contained on a contiguous large genomic segment are required to be cloned, significant technical barriers exist. For the purposes of this discussion, we will establish that a “large” genomic segment constitutes greater than 10 kilobases, since PCR and man-made DNA synthesis become technically challenging and/or costly above this DNA size. Therefore, a convenient, reproducible, and cost-efficient technique to clone large sections of microbial genomes would be highly advantageous.
Temporal Bone Histopathology Case of the Month Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss as First Presenting Symptom of Unifocal Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis in the Temporal Bone *

Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) is a rare neoplastic proliferation of Langerhans cells and belongs to a group of histiolytic disorders of unknown cause. The term histiocytosis X was first used in 1953 by Liechtenstein to describe spectrum of conditions characterized by idiopathic proliferation of histiocytes (1). Until today, 3 forms of LCH have been described in the literature: 1) eosinophilic granuloma (single organ involvement), 2) Hand-SchullerChristian disease (triad of the following symptoms: exophthalmia, diabetes insipidus, and bone lesions), and (3) Letterer-Siwe syndrome (aggressive, multisystem form seen in children, with liver and spleen involvement). Since 1987, the term Langerhans cell histiocytosis is used to refer to all 3 mentioned forms of the disease. LCH primarily affects children younger than 4 years, with incidence of 0.5 to 5 cases per million per year, but the occurrence of the disease in adult individuals becomes more frequent (2). The most common form of the disease is unifocal eosinophilic bone granuloma, characterized by excellent prognosis. On the other side of the spectrum, the disease involves multiple organs and soft tissues, including skin, pituitary, lungs, liver, and hematopoietic system. Temporal bone lesions can be seen in multifocal disease, although rarely, or as an isolated lesions of mastoid and temporal bone. Otologic manifestations of LCH may be misinterpreted because they may mimic other common diseases, such as otitis externa or otitis media, ear polyps, acute mastoiditis, chronic otitis media, and even temporal
Multi-step ahead forecasting for fault prognosis using Hidden Markov Model

With the development of the system scale and complexity, the demand for reliability and safety of dynamic system grows rapidly. Fault prognosis, aimed at predicting the future health condition of the system, plays an important role in system safety and reliability. In this paper, we present two multi-step ahead forecasting methods for fault prognosis using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). One predicts each state applying a one-step ahead forecasting model recursively and uses the predicted value to determine the next time step value, and the other one predicts each state independently from the others just using the previous known observations. The proposed methods are exploited to estimate the next long-term system states and predict the development trends of a fault in Tennessee Eastman (TE) chemical process. We perform a comparative study on the prediction performance of these two approaches. And our methods are proved to be effective for fault prognosis from the experimental application.
Zoledronic acid for the treatment of osteopenia in pediatric Crohn's disease

Background: Pediatric patients with Crohn's disease often have low bone mass (osteopenia) for age. No randomized, placebo‐controlled trials using zoledronic acid have ever been performed in this population. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of zoledronic acid in children with Crohn's disease and osteopenia.
Éclosion d'infections à la bactérie Salmonella Chailey associée à des morceaux de noix de coco précoupés — États-Unis et Canada, 2017

On estime que la salmonellose d'origine alimentaire atteint un million de personnes et cause 400 décès annuellement aux États-Unis. Du mois de mars à mai 2017, une éclosion impliquant 19 cas de la bactérie Salmonella Chailey associée à des morceaux de noix de coco précoupés provenant d’une seule chaîne d’alimentation s’est déclarée aux États-Unis et au Canada. La chaîne d’alimentation a volontairement rappelé les morceaux de noix de coco précoupés. C’était la première fois que la noix de coco était associée à une éclosion de Salmonelle aux États-Unis ou au Canada. Au cours des dernières années, des éclosions de salmonellose ont été causées par des aliments qui ne sont pas typiquement associés avec la Salmonelle. La noix de coco crue devrait maintenant être prise en considération dans les enquêtes portant sur les éclosions de Salmonelle chez les consommateurs d’aliments frais. Affiliations
Expression and regulation of vitamin D3 upregulated protein 1 (VDUP1) is conserved in mammalian and insect brain

Originally characterized as a cell‐cycle inhibitor induced by vitamin D3, the tumor suppressor vitamin‐D3 upregulated protein 1 (VDUP1) has increasingly been shown to play major physiological roles in cell differentiation and glucose metabolism. Here we show evolutionarily conserved expression patterns of VDUP1 in Drosophila and rat nervous systems, including subcellular localization—cytoplasmic enrichment in neurons and nuclear expression in glia. These anatomical correlates suggested conservation of VDUP1 regulation, which was investigated both functionally and through promoter studies. Characterization of orthologous vdup1 cis‐regulatory regions identified evolutionarily conserved sequence blocks (CSBs) with similarities to neural enhancers, including basic helix‐loop‐helix (bHLH) transcription factor Neurogenin/Math/atonal and Mash/achaete‐scute family members. E‐boxes (CANNTG), the binding sites for bHLH proteins, were associated with these CSBs as well, including E‐boxes known to mediate glucose‐dependent upregulation of VDUP1 in nonneuronal cells. Hyperglycemia‐induced upregulation of VDUP1 was observed in brain tumor cells and in the Drosophila nervous system, which resulted in developmental arrest. Taken together, these data demonstrate evolutionary conservation of VDUP1 regulation and function, and suggest an expanding role for VDUP1 in nervous system development. J. Comp. Neurol. 517:581–600, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Visibility vs. biomass in flowers: exploring corolla allocation in Mediterranean entomophilous plants.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS While pollinators may in general select for large, morphologically uniform floral phenotypes, drought stress has been proposed as a destabilizing force that may favour small flowers and/or promote floral variation within species. METHODS The general validity of this concept was checked by surveying a taxonomically diverse array of 38 insect-pollinated Mediterranean species. The interplay between fresh biomass investment, linear size and percentage corolla allocation was studied. Allometric relationships between traits were investigated by reduced major-axis regression, and qualitative correlates of floral variation explored using general linear-model MANOVA. KEY RESULTS Across species, flowers were perfectly isometrical with regard to corolla allocation (i.e. larger flowers were just scaled-up versions of smaller ones and vice versa). In contrast, linear size and biomass varied allometrically (i.e. there were shape variations, in addition to variations in size). Most floral variables correlated positively and significantly across species, except corolla allocation, which was largely determined by family membership and floral symmetry. On average, species with bilateral flowers allocated more to the corolla than those with radial flowers. Plant life-form was immaterial to all of the studied traits. Flower linear size variation was in general low among conspecifics (coefficients of variation around 10 %), whereas biomass was in general less uniform (e.g. 200-400 mg in Cistus salvifolius). Significant among-population differences were detected for all major quantitative floral traits. CONCLUSIONS Flower miniaturization can allow an improved use of reproductive resources under prevailingly stressful conditions. The hypothesis that flower size reflects a compromise between pollinator attraction, water requirements and allometric constraints among floral parts is discussed.
Sublethal Toxicity Effects of P-CNB on POD and CAT Activity in Liver of Brocarded Carp

Two kinds of antioxidant activities in liver of fish were investigated. Fish was exposed to different concentrations (1/6LC 50 ,1/4LC 50 ,1/3LC 50 ,1/2LC 50 ) and killed at 3, 7,14, 21 and 28 day after exposure. The activities of Peroxidase (POD) and Catalase (CAT) in liver tissue were analyzed. The results indicated the activities of POD and CAT were induced from the third day in all treatment groups at post-exposures, they were higher than those of the control group (p Brocarded Carp might be the promising biomarker of p-CNB exposure. Therefore it was suggested that the couple index of POD and CAT could be used as biomarker of nitroaromatics compounds, when their pollutions affected living beings in aquatic environment.
Mutual information approximation of CSI-T MIMO precoders based on minimal distance probability

The linear closed-loop MIMO precoding technique employs the channel state information at both sides of the link to optimize various criteria such as the capacity, the mean square error, the mutual information. However, the cost is generally an increased complexity and the theoretical study of such a system can be difficult, i.e. obtain criteria such as the Bit Error Rate or Logarithm of Likelihood Ratio (LLR). Some studies are available for diagonal form precoders, but it is often difficult to deal with a precoder that chooses between different forms to adapt to the channel state, as in the case for the max-dmin precoder. In this paper, we propose a new approximation of the mutual information (MI) which is expressed as a function of the minimal distance. Indeed, our recent works permit us to obtain the probability density function of the minimal distance, and, this is the main point, to deal with the multi-forms. The MI can then be averaged over the statistics of the channel and the result is available for any MIMO system and any modulation size for the example of max-dmin.
Talent Relationship Management

Inhaltlich unveranderte Neuauflage. Die aktuellen Entwicklungen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt lassen fur die nachsten Jahre einen zunehmenden Fach- und Fuhrungskraftemangel befurchten. Infolge der demographischen Entwicklung wird nicht nur die Anzahl poten­zieller Arbeitnehmer sinken, sondern die Internationalisierung der Arbeitswelt und der technologische Fortschritt bewirken zudem ein rasches Ansteigen der Anforderungen der Unternehmen an die Bewerber. Da das Qualifikations­niveau der Bewerber nicht in gleichem Mase wie die Erwartungen ansteigt, werden Personalmarketing und Personalauswahl in den kommenden Jahren zu einem fortschreitend schwierigen Unterfangen. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird in diesem Buch ein innovatives Konzept des Personalmarketings, das Talent Relationship Management, vorgestellt. Dieses beschaftigt sich speziell mit dem Problem der Kontaktanbahnung zu potenziellen Bewerbern und der Beziehungspflege zu noch nicht eingestellten oder fur eine bestimmte Position abgelehnten High Potentials. Das Buch besticht besonders durch die zahlreichen Praxisbeispiele, die die Uberlegungen anreichern und konkrete Ansatzpunkte fur Verbesserungen liefern.
Eradication of Staphylococcus aureus Biofilm Infections Using Synthetic Antimicrobial Peptides

Here, we demonstrate that antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are an effective antibiofilm treatment when applied as catheter lock solutions (CLSs) against S. aureus biofilm infections. The activity of synthetic AMPs (Bac8c, HB43, P18, Omiganan, WMR, Ranalexin, and Polyphemusin) was measured against early and mature biofilms produced by methicillin-resistant S. aureus and methicillin-susceptible S. aureus isolates from patients with device-related infections grown under in vivo-relevant biofilm conditions. The cytotoxic and hemolytic activities of the AMPs against human cells and their immunomodulatory potential in human blood were also characterized. The D-Bac8c2,5Leu variant emerged as the most effective AMP during in vitro studies and was also highly effective in eradicating S. aureus biofilm infection when used in a CLS rat central venous catheter infection model. These data support the potential use of D-Bac8c2,5Leu, alone or in combination with other AMPs, in the treatment of S. aureus intravenous catheter infections.
Filtering based upon the distribution and interleaving of signals

The distribution and interleaving of signals represents a simple method, which can be used successfully for general purpose filtering. Presently it is commonly utilized in switched mode power converters. The mathematical formulation of the method is presented and widened to cover more general situations; moreover with the help of a system simulator the cases of low pass and band pass filters are studied to illustrate the performance of the distributed and interleaving system.