Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Deborah Number

In 1928 I came from Palestine to Easton, Pa. , to assist Eugene Cook Bingham at the birth of Rheology. I felt strangely at home. There was Bethlehem quite near, there was a river Jordan and a village called little Egypt. The situation was, however, also slightly confusing. To go from Bethlehem to Egypt, one had to cross the river Jordan, a topological feature which did not conform to the original. Then there were, here, places such as Allen town to which there was no analogy. And this could lead to strange situations, such as when a girl at school was asked where Christ was born and replied, “In Allentown”. When corrected by “No, in Bethlehem,” she remarked, “I knew it was somewhere around here. ”
Outliers in process modeling and identification

Model-based control strategies like model predictive control (MPC) require models of process dynamics accurate enough that the resulting controllers perform adequately in practice. Often, these models are obtained by fitting convenient model structures (e.g., linear finite impulse response (FIR) models, linear pole-zero models, nonlinear Hammerstein or Wiener models, etc.) to observed input-output data. Real measurement data records frequently contain "outliers" or "anomalous data points," which can badly degrade the results of an otherwise reasonable empirical model identification procedure. This paper considers some real datasets containing outliers, examines the influence of outliers on linear and nonlinear system identification, and discusses the problems of outlier detection and data cleaning. Although no single strategy is universally applicable, the Hampel filter described here is often extremely effective in practice.
La teoría más refutada del mundo

Sanders, Parsons y Santley [1979] introdujeron una teoria del origen del Estado que intentaba explicar el desarrollo del estado teotihuacano en la cuenca de Mexico. Era el producto de mas de 15 anos de trabajo de campo que fueron a su vez campo de pruebas no solamente de la teoria, sino de nuevas tecnicas de reconocimiento de superficie. El libro fue reconocido inicialmente como una contribucion importante, excepto por una resena particular que resulto, a la larga, tener una influencia decisiva: la de Richard Blanton, quien habia sido parte del equipo de investigacion de Sanders, pero quien tenia una vision diferente del papel de la presion demografica, y como Sanders y compania habian incorporado elementos de teorias previas (incluyendo las de Carneiro, Wittfogel y otras), teorias que investigadores de la Universidad de Michigan decian haber refutado, el entusiasmo inicial por el libro pronto se torno en un escepticismo distante, y luego, en la idea de que la teoria era "la mas refutada del mundo". En este ensayo se narra, en un tono personal, la historia de como es que conoci y tuve oportunidad de iniciar una amistad con Sanders, de como, mas tarde, me entere de las criticas que se hicieron a su teoria, y de como y por que decidi, hace mas de 25 anos, dedicar buena parte de mi trabajo academico para mostrar no solamente que la teoria no estaba refutada, sino que pudo haber sido la mejor contendiente en ese momento (1981–1982). Para lograrlo, primero fue necesario desarrollar un procedimiento de analisis teorico que permitiera una consideracion mas cuidadosa de cualquier teoria en arqueologia, y cuando se podia decir que estaba refutada o corroborada. Esta busqueda se convirtio en una obsesion personal que espero termine con mi tesis doctoral [2008], en la que el procedimiento se explica en detalle y se aplica a la teoria, y quede finiquitada con el presente trabajo que relaciona esta obsesion a la apreci
Functional magnetic resonance imaging of brightness induction in the human visual cortex

A grey surface on a bright background appears to be darker than the same surface on a dark background. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study this phenomenon called brightness induction. While being scanned, participants viewed centre–surround displays in which either centre or surround luminance was modulated in time. In both cases, participants perceive similar brightness changes in the central surface. In the region of the visual cortex encoding this central surface, both modulations evoked comparable functional magnetic resonance imaging responses. However, the surround modulation signal showed a considerable delay relative to the onset of the brightness percept. This suggests that, although correlated, the functional magnetic resonance imaging signals do not bear a direct relationship with perceived brightness. We conclude that retinotopically organized visual cortex does not represent brightness per se.
Economic growth in Europe since 1945: West German growth and institutions, 1945–90

Introduction Popular perceptions of West German economic growth are polarized: either it is the miracle economy of the postwar era, the ‘strong-man’ of Europe, or it is a sclerotic economy, typifying Europe's inflexibility in labour and capital markets relative to the United States. One way of reconciling these apparently contradictory views is to depict West Germany as ‘the fading miracle’, as Giersch et al. (1992) have done. From this perspective, the miracle has long since gone and memories have lingered far behind the reality. But in Michel Albert's recent popular account of postwar capitalism (1993), Germany's reputation for dynamism and adaptability remains untarnished. One aim of this chapter is to put these contrasting interpretations into a longer-term and explicitly comparative perspective. Throughout, Germany's performance will be compared with that of the other three large European economies, the UK, France and Italy. It is useful to begin by looking at attempts to identify a common OECD pattern of growth over the long run, and then at the extent to which West Germany fits this pattern. As a starting point, two such studies are used to provide a benchmark for the assessment of German growth. First is an endogenous growth model based on Scott (1989) and estimated by van de Klundert and van Shaik (1993; henceforth, KS) for a group of eight OECD economies from 1870, extended to sixteen for the postwar period. The second study is that of Dowrick and Nguyen (1989; henceforth, DN) which is a Solow-type model with exogenous technical progress, augmented with catch-up estimated for a group of twenty-four OECD countries for the postwar period.
MedX3D: Standards Enabled Desktop Medical 3D

This paper reports on the work of the Web3D Consortium's Medical Working Group to specify and implement MedX3D -- an extension to the X3D standard that will support advanced medical visualization functionality and medical data exchange. This initiative covers volume rendering, ontology support, and data import/export, for standalone applications and web-based plug-ins. It is our hypothesis that such a 3D medical standard will provide better access to data, and enable improvements in medical care.
System architecture of a mobile message transport system

Many scenarios of beyond-3G mobile communications describe the integration of various access technologies into one system. Being always best connected under certain optimisation criteria will be a crucial point for network operators and mobile users and requires network changes of mobile devices at runtime, the so-called vertical handovers. For those, bandwidth fluctuations up to the order of one or two magnitudes, e.g., when changing from an IEEE 802.11 to a GPRS System, have to be expected, and applications have to cope with them in an user friendly way. Multi-modality and flexible data representations exploiting weights and semantic of transmitted data as means for making applications resource adaptive are currently under investigation. On top of that, device and system-wide adaptation control instances are needed to solve cross-layer and inter-application issues. This requires a rethinking of the classical communication paradigm of OSI-like protocol layering. In this paper, an overview on adaptation in communications is presented and an experimental framework providing system support for application adaptation and adaptation control is introduced as part of the discussion.
Flocking control of multi-agents based on self-adaptively weighting observers driven only by local position measurements

The most methods to achieve flocking control of multi-agent systems take both position and speed information of all the multi-agents into the control laws. However, various factors and their magnitudes, related to mutual position difference vectors, between the multi-agents are neglected. In this paper, based on distributed observers, flocking control algorithms driven only by local position measurements and with self-adaptively weighting coefficients are proposed. The suggested algorithms are sketched as follows. Firstly, distributed observers are introduced to each individual agent to estimate its speed only by local position measurements of the agents locating in the corresponding neighborhoods. Secondly, by self-adaptively adjusted weighting coefficients to the observers, possible attraction/dispersion force variations caused by position measurement uncertainties are exploited for facilitating flocking formation. Moreover, major properties of the suggested flocking algorithms are analyzed rigorously, and numerical simulations are shown to verify effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Laboratory and outdoor availability and spatial coherence tests of wireless optical links

Wireless optical links can bring new added technologic approach atop of today's wireless networks forming their backbones and subparts. However several measurements have to be performed in order to get close insight on their availability within infrastructures. The paper reports recent tests at the Czech Technical University in Prague in cooperation with Northumbria University. New testbeds have been developed for outdoor and indoor measurements. Together with reports from packet and BER measurements, paper introduces complementary results on spatial coherence measurements for single link influenced by turbulence.
Developmental Perception and Cognitive Styles: From Young Children to Master Artists

The perceptual skills and cognitive styles of 30 master artists are compared to those of non-artist groups of different ages, beginning with 84 kindergarten children, and including an adult comparison group of 32. Criteria for master artists were first, handcrafted productions; second, major economic support derived from their art; third, shows in museums or good galleries; and fourth, positive peer evaluation. The test battery contained one intelligence test, two vision tests, three perceptual-discrimination measures, and five perceptual-cognitive style measures. Results show artists are significantly more flexible, accurate, variable, and field independent than all other groups. Artists, non-artist adults, and young children (60 high school sophomores, 60 children in Grade 5, 84 kindergarteners) each have differing cognitive styles. The relationship between cognitive style and artists' and non-artists' instrumental competency is discussed. Last, the extensive differences between artists' and children's performances are discussed in terms of developmental theory.
Post‐thrombotic syndrome after central venous catheter removal in childhood cancer survivors: A prospective cohort study

Although the use of central venous catheters (CVCs) has greatly improved the quality of care of children with cancer, these catheters increase the risk of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and the potential long‐term complication of post‐thrombotic syndrome (PTS). We aimed to study PTS post‐CVC removal using physical, functional and health related quality of life (HRQoL) domains in childhood cancer and bone marrow transplantation (BMT) survivors.
Nitric oxide synthesis influences the renal vascular response to heme oxygenase inhibition.

We studied the effects of the heme oxygenase (HO) inhibitor stannous mesoporphyrin (SnMP; 40 micromol/kg i.v.) on renal hemodynamics in anesthetized rats with and without 48-h pretreatment with N(G)-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME), an inhibitor of nitric oxide (NO) synthesis. SnMP decreased renal blood flow (RBF) and increased renal vascular resistance (RVR) in both groups. The SnMP-induced reduction of RBF in L-NAME-pretreated rats was more prominent than in rats without pretreatment (43 +/- 7 vs. 13 +/- 3%) as was the SnMP-induced elevation of RVR (87 +/- 31 vs. 14 +/- 5%). The renal vasoconstrictor effect of SnMP is linked, in part, to amplification of prevailing neurohormonal constrictor mechanisms, since in L-NAME-pretreated rats it was prevented by concurrent administration of prazosin or losartan. However, SnMP (15 micromol/l) also elicits vasoconstriction in isolated, pressurized renal interlobular arteries and the response is more intense in vessels obtained from L-NAME-pretreated rats than from rats without pretreatment. These data indicate that the status of NO synthesis conditions the vascular response to HO inhibition in the rat kidney.
Conversion to everolimus in a patient with arterial hypertension and recurrent cutaneous neoplasia--a case report.

Calcineurin inhibitors (CNIs) are frequently associated with side effects such as nephrotoxicity and hypertension, so CNI withdrawal from immunosuppressive regimens is desirable in certain cases. The proliferation signal inhibitors/mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitors everolimus and sirolimus may play an important role in achieving CNI withdrawal. Studies on sirolimus have shown that conversion from CNIs is associated with improvements in renal function and hypertension. A case report is presented of a renal transplant recipient who experienced hypertension and recurrent cutaneous neoplasia while receiving a ciclosporin (CsA)-based immunosuppressive regimen. After transplantation, the patient received full-dose CsA and prednisolone. After 7 years, the patient's serum creatinine increased from 1.9 mg/dl to 2.5 mg/dl, and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF, 1000 mg/day) was introduced, enabling the CsA dose to be reduced to 100 mg b.i. d. The patient also required resection of five cutaneous neoplastic lesions; this led to the decision to stop CsA and start treatment with everolimus 1.5 mg/day, which was increased to 3.0 mg/day to achieve target trough blood levels of 3 ng/ml. To avoid over-immunosuppression, the MMF dose was reduced to 500 mg/day. After conversion, the patient experienced a substantial improvement in blood pressure, from 175/85 mmHg to 155/70 mmHg. Serum creatinine levels decreased to 1.6 mg/dl, and there has been no recurrence of cutaneous neoplasia in 9 months of follow-up. Therefore, conversion to everolimus from CsA in a renal transplant recipient led to improvements in blood pressure and resolution of recurrent cutaneous neoplasia, with no evidence of rejection or changes in renal function.
The Oxidizing Capacity of the Earth's Atmosphere: Probable Past and Future Changes

The principal oxidants in the lower atmosphere are ozone (O3) and two by-products of O3 photodissociation, the hydroxyl radical (OH) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). A number of critical atmospheric chemical problems depend on the earth's "oxidizing capacity," which is essentially the global burden of these oxidants. There is limited direct when, because of industrial and population growth, increasing amounts of O3 precursor trace gases (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons) have been released into the atmosphere. The concentrations of O3 and possibly H2O2 have increased over large regions. Models predict that tropospheric O3 will increase ∼0.3 to 1% per year over the next 50 years with both positive and negative trends possible for OH and H2O2. Models and the observational network for oxidants are improving, but validation of global models is still at an early stage.
Rapid Detection of Escherichia coli O157:H7 with Multiplex Real-Time PCR Assays

ABSTRACT A SYBR Green LightCycler PCR assay using a single primer pair allowed simultaneous detection of stx1 and/or stx2 of Escherichia coli O157:H7. A distinct sequence of the Shiga-like toxin genes was amplified to yield products of 227 and/or 224 bp, respectively. The two products were distinguished by melting point curve analysis.
Diversidad y actividad procariótica en ecosistemas marinos

La historia evolutiva de los microorganismos se remonta a mas de 3500 millones de anos y una parte importante de esta ha ocurrido en el medio marino. Desde entonces, los microorganismos constituyen un componente esencial de las redes troficas de los ecosistemas marinos, con una gran abundancia y biomasa, contribuyendo a la regeneracion de nutrientes e interactuando con una amplia gama de organismos. Dado que un 70% de la superficie global del planeta corresponde a masas de agua y que la profundidad media de los oceanos es de 4000 m, es obvio que el estudio de las comunidades procarioticas presentes en este ambiente tiene una enorme relevancia en cuanto al conocimiento de la diversidad biologica global y de los ciclos biogeoquimicos que tienen lugar en nuestro planeta. Es cierto que la densidad de las poblaciones procarioticas decrece significativamente con la profundidad pero sin embargo, integrando todos los datos para el total de la columna de agua, el oceano contiene mas celulas procarioticas que cualquier otro habitat acuatico siendo, por unidad de biomasa, mas productivo que los ecosistemas terrestres.
Designing Data Mining Droplets: New Interface Objects for the Humanities Scholar

In this paper, we describe the design of a number of alternative interface “droplets” that are intended for use by humanities scholars interested in applying data mining and information visualization tools to the task of hypothesis formulation. The trained droplets provide several functions. Their primary purpose is to encapsulate the results of the software training phase. They can be saved for future re-use against other collections or combinations of collections. They can be modified by having the user accept or reject features identified by the data mining software. Finally, they can also contain choices for how to display and organize items in the collection. The opportunity to develop a new interface object presents the designer with the challenge of effectively communicating what the tool is good for and how it is used. This paper outlines the design process we followed in creating the visual representations of these interface objects, describes the communicative strengths and weaknesses of a number of alternative designs, and discusses the importance of the study of new interface objects as the means of providing the user with new interface affordances.
TOPSIS-Based Nonlinear-Programming Methodology for Multiattribute Decision Making With Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets

Interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) sets are useful to deal with fuzziness inherent in decision data and decision-making processes. The aim of this paper is to develop a nonlinear-programming methodology that is based on the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution to solve multiattribute decision-making (MADM) problems with both ratings of alternatives on attributes and weights of attributes expressed with IVIF sets. In this methodology, nonlinear-programming models are constructed on the basis of the concepts of the relative-closeness coefficient and the weighted-Euclidean distance. Simpler auxiliary nonlinear-programming models are further deduced to calculate relative-closeness of IF sets of alternatives to the IVIF-positive ideal solution, which can be used to generate the ranking order of alternatives. The proposed methodology is validated and compared with other similar methods. A real example is examined to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the methodology proposed in this paper.
Planar array for signal tracking using sliding window approach

The problem of determining the directions of arrival (DOAs) of multiple sources arises in a number of radar applications. Most of the direction-finding (DF) algorithms have been presented in the context of estimating a single angle per source (e.g., azimuth only), generalizations to the azimuth-elevation case are very important. The main goal of this paper is to develop a planar array model for beamforming and estimating movement parameters of the targets as a generalization to the local polynomial approximation (LPA) approach. So, the problem of narrowband direction of arrival tracking using sliding window is applied using LPA technique. The LPA beamformer performance expressions and the problem of window length choice are studied. The optimization of window length is based on the bias-to-variance tradeoff. This is valid for a wide class of time-varying single source cases, as well as multiple source cases with a sufficient source separation in angle or angular velocity.
Herpesvirus Entry Mediator and Nectin-1 Mediate Herpes Simplex Virus 1 Infection of the Murine Cornea

ABSTRACT Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is a ubiquitous human pathogen that enters cells by the receptor-mediated fusion of the viral envelope with a host cell membrane. The envelope glycoprotein gD of HSV must bind to one of its receptors for entry to take place. Recent studies using knockout (KO) mice demonstrated that the gD receptors herpesvirus entry mediator (HVEM) and nectin-1 are the primary entry receptors for HSV-2 in the mouse vagina and brain. Nectin-1 was most crucial for the neuronal spread of HSV-2, particularly in the brain. HVEM was dispensable for infection in these models, but when both HVEM and nectin-1 were absent, infection was completely prevented. We sought to determine the receptor requirements of HSV-1 in an ocular model of infection using knockout mice. Wild-type, HVEM KO, nectin-1 KO, and HVEM/nectin-1 double-KO mice were infected via corneal scarification and monitored for clinical signs of infection and viral replication in various tissues. We report that either HVEM or nectin-1 must be present for HSV-1 infection of the cornea. Additionally, we observed that the infection was attenuated in both HVEM KO and nectin-1 KO mice. This is in contrast to what was reported for studies of HSV-2 in vagina and brain and suggests that receptor requirements for HSV vary depending on the route of inoculation and/or serotype.
Range shifts or extinction? Ancient DNA and distribution modelling reveal past and future responses to climate warming in cold‐adapted birds

Global warming is predicted to cause substantial habitat rearrangements, with the most severe effects expected to occur in high‐latitude biomes. However, one major uncertainty is whether species will be able to shift their ranges to keep pace with climate‐driven environmental changes. Many recent studies on mammals have shown that past range contractions have been associated with local extinctions rather than survival by habitat tracking. Here, we have used an interdisciplinary approach that combines ancient DNA techniques, coalescent simulations and species distribution modelling, to investigate how two common cold‐adapted bird species, willow and rock ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus and Lagopus muta), respond to long‐term climate warming. Contrary to previous findings in mammals, we demonstrate a genetic continuity in Europe over the last 20 millennia. Results from back‐casted species distribution models suggest that this continuity may have been facilitated by uninterrupted habitat availability and potentially also the greater dispersal ability of birds. However, our predictions show that in the near future, some isolated regions will have little suitable habitat left, implying a future decrease in local populations at a scale unprecedented since the last glacial maximum.