Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human-Robot Interaction in the Coordinated Manipulation of an Object

Robotic arms become more common in daily life. However, the physical human-robot interaction still needs to be improved. Therefore, I examined which algorithms can improve the interaction in a joint task of a robotic agent and a human, in which they moved an object together. Three algorithms were examined on a robotic manipulandum, namely the first where the robotic agent produced forces towards the human, the second towards the goal and the third towards both the human and the goal. The results show that the algorithm that produced forces towards the goal scores the best in terms of both the trial time and the subjective performance measures (the questionnaire). The algorithm that produced forces towards both the goal and the human scores slightly better in terms of the stability, though in terms of the trial time this algorithm scores the worst. The algorithm that produced forces towards the human scores the worst in terms of both the stability and subjective performance measures. The ranking of the algorithms does not depend on the object size, although a large object (radius 1.5 cm) is easier to manipulate than a small object (radius 0.5 cm), indicated both by the trial time and the subjective performance measures. The ranking of the algorithms does depend on the goal location, which is indicated both by the objective (trial time and stability) and the subjective performance measures. To conclude, the physical interaction between a human and a robotic agent is most effective if the agent produces forces only towards the goal, not towards the human.
The influence of wind energy market share on market clearing p rices, wind park revenues and bid performance

Wind energy presence has a strong influence on market clearin g prices in day-ahead markets and imbalance prices. Considering the growing market share of wind energy the importance of this influence is increasing. When the influence on the Market Clearing Price (MCP) increases, this directly affects wind park revenues. This can be observed in both short-term day-ahead bids and long-term income. We present a model for wind gencos that optimizes bids in the day-ahead market by minimizing their imbalance costs. In this effort, the model takes into account the gencos influence on the MCP. This way a new perspective on wind park revenue forecasting is provided. Wind speed forecast data is used to calculate the influence of growing market shar es of wind parks on their expected revenues. The expected revenues of wind gencos are then assessed in multiple market configurations in order to determine the influence of wind energy market share, wind speeds and imbalance prices on the expected revenue of wind gencos.
preclinical models of reinstatement , various forms of stress precipitate relapse to drug use ( Shaham

A challenging question that continues unanswered in the field of addiction is why some individuals are more vulnerable to substance use disorders than others. Numerous risk factors for alcohol and other drugs of abuse, including exposure to various forms of stress, have been identified in clinical studies. However, the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie this relationship remain unclear. Critical neurotransmitters, hormones and neurobiological sites have been recognized, which may provide the substrates that convey individual differences in vulnerability to addiction. With the advent of more sophisticated measures of brain function in humans, such as functional imaging technology, the mechanisms and neural pathways involved in the interactions between drugs of abuse, the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system and stress systems are beginning to be characterized. This review provides a neuroadaptive perspective regarding the role of the hormonal and brain stress systems in drug addiction with a focus on the changes that occur during the transition from occasional drug use to drug dependence. We also review factors that contribute to different levels of hormonal/ brain stress activation, which has implications for understanding individual vulnerability to drug dependence. Ultimately, these efforts may improve our chances of designing treatment strategies that target addiction at the core of the disorder.
Persuasion, Probity, and Paltering: The Prudential Crisis

In July, 1996, The Prudential Insurance Company agreed to pay a $35 million fine for misleading sales practices after a task force of insurance regulators from 11 states and the District of Columbia found that Prudential agents had engaged in misconduct. This article examines Prudential's actions, its response to the ethi cal crisis, and the ways in which the organization communicated its response to stakeholders. Many of Prudential's sins were rhetorical: Agents misrepresented some products to customers. Charges of misrepresenting products to clients stem back to problems with its securities division, then known as Prudential-Bache. Prudential is making amends to its customers who were harmed by egregious sales practices, but it may take the organization a long time to recover customer goodwill and the damage incurred to its reputation.
Movement of Sterile Male Bactrocera cucurbitae (Diptera: Tephritidae) in a Hawaiian Agroecosystem

Abstract The melon fly, Bactrocera cucurbitae Coquillett, invaded the Hawaiian Island chain in 1895. In 1999, a program sponsored by the USDA–ARS to control melon fly and other tephritid pests in Hawaii over a wide area was initiated on the islands of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu. To control these flies in an areawide setting, understanding how flies move within the landscape is important. To explore the movement of this fly, we examined the movement of marked, male, sterile, laboratory-reared B. cucurbitae on the island of Hawaii in an agricultural setting. Two releases of dyed, sterile flies consisting of ≈15,000 flies, were released 6 wk apart. Released flies were trapped back by using Moroccan traps baited with a male attractant. These two releases suggest that in the Hawaiian agricultural areas where the areawide control is being sought, melon flies do not move extensively when there are abundant larval host and adult roosting sites. Over the course of this study, only one fly made it the maximum distance that we could detect fly movement (≈2,000 m in 2 wk). From these data, it seems that the flies dispersed throughout the study area but then moved very little thereafter. This is very apparent in the second release where the recovery rate after the second week was still fairly high, suggesting that if there are plenty of host fields and roosting sites the flies are unlikely to move.
Enriched tool support for Probabilistic Specification Mining (ProSpecMi)

Specification Mining describes the process of creating a specification from a (probably unknown) program using sample executions. Most of the current specification miners are deterministic. This thesis aims to create a probabilistic specification miner. Therefor, a specification miner with three different probabililistic approaches has been implemented and added to the LearnLib-Framework. The implementation has been validated by letting the specification miner rebuild a predefined specification to compare the template and the result, by running a hypothesis-test to compare the used approaches to calculate the probabilities against another and by letting it mine the usage of a real API from n tests and validate them with m more tests. Specification Mining beschreibt den Vorgang, eine probabilistische Spezifikation eines (moglicherweise unbekannten) Programms unter Verwendung von Beispielausfuhrungen zu erstellen. Die meisten der aktuellen Specification Miners sind deterministisch. Ziel dieser Ausarbeitung ist ein probabilistischer Specification Miner. Dafur wurde ein Specification Miner mit drei verschiedenen probabilistischen Ansatzen implementiert und dem LearnLib-Framework hinzugefugt. Die Implementierung wurde validiert, indem der Specification Miner eine vorgegebene Spezification nachgebaut hat, um die Vorlage mit dem Ergebnis zu vergleichen, durch einen Hypothesen-Test, der die benutzten Ansatze zur Berechnung der Wahrscheinlichkeiten untereinander verglicht und indem der Specification Miner eine Spezifikation fur die Benutzung einer realen API aus n tests erstellt, die mit m weiteren Tests validiert wird.
Feasibility and safety of a novel dedicated device for one‐step EUS‐guided biliary drainage: A randomized trial

EUS‐guided biliary drainage (EUS‐BD) has been proposed as an alternative for patients after failed ERCP. To date, the evaluation of dedicated device for one‐step EUS‐BD has been limited. To determine feasibility and safety of a newly designed 7F stent introducer with tapered metal tip as a push‐type dilator for one‐step metal stent placement without additional fistula dilation in EUS‐BD.
The CURE scale: a multidimensional measure of service recovery strategy

Purpose – This paper aims to address the gaps in service recovery strategy assessment. An effective service recovery strategy that prevents customer defection after a service failure is a powerful managerial instrument. The literature to date does not present a comprehensive assessment of service recovery strategy. It also lacks a clear picture of the service recovery actions at managers’ disposal in case of failure and the effectiveness of individual strategies on customer outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – Based on service recovery theory, this paper proposes a formative index of service recovery strategy and empirically validates this measure using partial least-squares path modelling with survey data from 437 complainants in the telecommunications industry in Egypt. Findings – The CURE scale (CUstomer REcovery scale) presents evidence of reliability as well as convergent, discriminant and nomological validity. Findings also reveal that problem-solving, speed of response, effort, facilitation and .
Induced measures in the space of mixed quantum states

We analyse several product measures in the space of mixed quantum states. In particular, we study measures induced by the operation of partial tracing. The natural, rotationally invariant measure on the set of all pure states of a N×K composite system, induces a unique measure in the space of N×N mixed states (or in the space of K×K mixed states, if the reduction takes place with respect to the first subsystem). For K = N the induced measure is equal to the Hilbert-Schmidt measure, which is shown to coincide with the measure induced by singular values of non-Hermitian random Gaussian matrices pertaining to the Ginibre ensemble. We compute several averages with respect to this measure and show that the mean entanglement of N×N pure states behaves as lnN-1/2.
Characterization of the role of pneumococcal beta-galactosidase , BgaA , in adherence

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a major human pathogen that causes over 1.6 million deaths worldwide each year through such diseases as pneumonia, meningitis, and otitis media (1). Adherence of S. pneumoniae to the airway is essential for colonization which is a precursor to disease; however, adherence mechanisms are poorly understood. We discovered a novel mechanism that involves the adherence of beta-galactosidase, BgaA (a sugar-cleaving enzyme) to the epithelial cell surface. Preliminary studies suggest that the epithelial cell receptor for BgaA is a glycosphingolipid. Asialo-GM1, a glycosphingolipid previously proposed as a receptor for S. pneumoniae, was tested as a possible receptor for BgaA; however, the addition of neither purified asialo-GM1 nor anti-asialo-GM1 was able to reduce adherence of S. pneumoniae to epithelial cells, indicating that asialo-GM1 is likely not a receptor for BgaA. When demonstrating clinical relevance of this novel mechanism, some clinical isolates were found to be reduced in adherence after the addition of recombinant BgaA (rBgaA), whereas other clinical isolates were not. Differences in adherence could be attributed to allelic diversity within the gene or differences in enzyme expression, among other possibilities. To determine if allelic diversity may contribute to BgaA-mediated adherence, the gene was sequenced. Predicted amino acid differences were found between two strains reduced in adherence upon the addition of rBgaA and two strains that were not, indicating that these differences could contribute to the ability of BgaA to act as an adhesin. The BgaA alleles were exchanged between strains; however, these mutants did not show an exchange in phenotype, indicating that these sequence differences are not responsible for the ability of BgaA to act as an adhesin. To determine if increased levels of BgaA expression contribute to adherence, beta-galactosidase activity was tested and used as an indicator of possible expression level differences. Strains reduced in
Evaluation of a Novel, Noninvasive, Objective Test of Auditory Nerve Function in Cochlear Implant Candidates

Objective: To investigate whether the objective noninvasive recording of the electrically evoked amplitude modulation following response (EAMFR) can be applied for the assessment of auditory nerve function before cochlear implant surgery. Study Design: Prospective clinical study from January 2005 to August 2008. Setting: Cochlear Implant Program at the Charité University Hospital (Berlin, Germany). Patients: One hundred twenty-one patients with severe to total bilateral sensorineural hearing impairment. Intervention: Diagnostic. Main Outcome Measures: All EAMFR thresholds were correlated with the mean intraoperative electrically evoked compound action potential (ECAP) thresholds. In a subgroup of 16 patients, the objective thresholds of the EAMFR were compared with the subjective auditory thresholds for the electrical stimuli applied. The intraindividual left-right concordance of the EAMFR and ECAP thresholds was investigated in 22 patients with bilateral implants. Results: The EAMFR-auditory nerve function test produced clear responses in all patients examined. The threshold of auditory perception for the applied stimuli correlated highly significantly with the EAMFR threshold (r = 0.89, p < 0.01). The correlation between the EAMFR and mean ECAP thresholds was again highly significant (r = 0.49, p < 0.01). In all patients with bilateral implants, the ear with the lower preoperative EAMFR threshold was also the one with the lower intraoperative mean ECAP threshold. Conclusion: These results indicate that the objective noninvasive recording of EAMFR seems to be a useful diagnostic tool for the evaluation of the auditory nerve function in cochlear implant candidates, especially in children or in adult patients who require objective examination.
Are Consumer Goods Manufacturers and Retailers Favored by the Same Inventory Policy? The Case of Port Harcourt

The paper was poised to ascertain if manufacturers and retailers of consumer goods in Port Harcourt, Nigeria adopt the same type of inventory policy. To achieve this, a case study involving a consumer goods manufacturer – Vital Products Industries Limited, and a top Class consumer goods retailing firm – EveryDay Supermarket, both of which operate in Port Harcourt,was conducted using ideographic methodology. Personal interview was used in qualitative data collection from these firms. It was found that the consumer goods manufacturer prefers a hybrid inventory policy that consists of predominantly periodic review and a slight application of re-order point for its raw materials, work-in-progress and semi-finished goods respectively. But the consumer goods retailer endorses only re-order level policy in its finished goods inventory. It appears that consumer goods manufacturing firms adopt more of periodic review inventory policy because of the physical characteristics of their raw materials and fluctuations in suppliers’ lead time caused by seasonal changes and weather conditions. But consumer goods retailers view re-order level of inventory as the best policy that can help them satisfy their customers and achieve their desired customer service level. The paper therefore, concludes that consumer goods manufacturers are not favored by inventory policies that are found effective among consumer good retailers and vice versa.
Selective activators of thyroid hormone receptors

An excess of thyroid hormone (TH) leads to a mix of deleterious (increased heart rate, muscle wasting and osteoporosis) and beneficial effects (reduced serum cholesterol and lipoprotein A and weight loss). All of these actions are mediated by nuclear thyroid hormone receptors (TRs), however, genetic evidence suggests that different TR isoforms do not contribute equally to individual TH effects. Thus, TR isoform selective activators could mimic the beneficial aspects of TH excess while avoiding the harmful effects. This article reviews new selective TR activators, their mechanism of action (they work by targeting the TR-β isoform) and their actions in animal models. It is clear that these compounds represent a promising new avenue for the treatment of lipid disorders and obesity.
Empagliflozin, a sodium glucose co-transporter 2 inhibitor, in the treatment of type 1 diabetes

Introduction: Available anti-hyperglycemic therapy in type 1 diabetes (T1DM) is currently restricted to insulin, pramlintide, and pancreas or islet cell transplantation. The imperfect replication of normal insulin secretion and glucose control has been a driver for development of other anti-hyperglycemic agents for this population. Empagliflozin, a sodium glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, is currently under investigation as an add-on therapy to insulin in T1DM. Areas covered: Within the drug evaluation, the authors describe the mechanism of action of SGLT2 inhibitors and preliminary results from studies investigating treatment in rodent models and in individuals with T1DM. Expert opinion: Studies on adjunct therapeutic effects of empagliflozin in individuals with T1DM are limited, but initial reports show favorable effects on reducing HbA1c, body weight, total daily insulin dose and hypoglycemic events. Intriguingly, this drug may confer a degree of renal protection by reducing glomerular hyperfiltration that can arise in the diabetic state. Currently, the primary concern seems to be the presence of ketone levels indicating an under-insulinized state. Long-term effects can only be inferred from studies in type 2 diabetes mellitus at this time. Empagliflozin represents a novel non-insulin-mediated therapy that warrants further investigation.
The relationship between morphogenetic cell death and the development of congenital anophthalmia

Glücksmann ('51) observed that during normal mammalin ocular morphogenesis large numbers of cells become necrotic and are resorbed within the eye rudiment prior to and during invagination of the optic cup. Silver and Hughes ('73) observed that these resorptions are largely confined to the ventral aspect of the optic rudiment where the optic fissure subsequently forms. Evidence for the role of cell death during fissure formation and other morphogenetic events during eye development has remained unclear, however, since the quantity of degenerate cells cannot be selectively controlled in developing tissue by experimental means (Saunders, '66).
Pigeons on Par with Primates in Numerical Competence

Pigeons’ ability to use abstract numerical rules appears identical to that of monkeys. Although many animals are able to discriminate stimuli differing in numerosity, only primates are thought to share our ability to employ abstract numerical rules. Here, we show that this ability is present in pigeons and that their performance is indistinguishable from that displayed by monkeys.
Theoretical background for continental‐ and global‐scale full‐waveform inversion in the time–frequency domain

SUMMARY We propose a new approach to full seismic waveform inversion on continental and global scales. This is based on the time–frequency transform of both data and synthetic seismograms with the use of time- and frequency-dependent phase and envelope misfits. These misfits allow us to provide a complete quantification of the differences between data and synthetics while separating phase and amplitude information. The result is an efficient exploitation of waveform information that is robust and quasi-linearly related to Earth's structure. Thus, the phase and envelope misfits are usable for continental- and global-scale tomography, that is, in a scenario where the seismic wavefield is spatially undersampled and where a 3-D reference model is usually unavailable. Body waves, surface waves and interfering phases are naturally included in the analysis. We discuss and illustrate technical details of phase measurements such as the treatment of phase jumps and instability in the case of small amplitudes. The Frechet kernels for phase and envelope misfits can be expressed in terms of their corresponding adjoint wavefields and the forward wavefield. The adjoint wavefields are uniquely determined by their respective adjoint-source time functions. We derive the adjoint-source time functions for phase and envelope misfits. The adjoint sources can be expressed as inverse time–frequency transforms of a weighted phase difference or a weighted envelope difference. In a comparative study, we establish connections between the phase and envelope misfits and the following widely used measures of seismic waveform differences: (1) cross-correlation time-shifts; (2) relative rms amplitude differences; (3) generalized seismological data functionals and (4) the L2 distance between data and synthetics used in time-domain full-waveform inversion. We illustrate the computation of Frechet kernels for phase and envelope misfits with data from an event in the West Irian region of Indonesia, recorded on the Australian continent. The synthetic seismograms are computed for a heterogeneous 3-D velocity model of the Australian upper mantle, with a spectral-element method. The examples include P body waves, Rayleigh waves and S waves, interfering with higher-mode surface waves. All the kernels differ from the more familar kernels for cross-correlation time-shifts or relative rms amplitude differences. The differences arise from interference effects, 3-D Earth's structure and waveform dissimilarities that are due to waveform dispersion in the heterogeneous Earth.
Child–parent attachment following early institutional deprivation

Child–parent attachment quality with an adoptive caregiver at age 4 years was examined in a sample of 111 children adopted into the United Kingdom following early severe deprivation in Romania and a comparison group of 52 nondeprived within–United Kingdom adoptees. Findings indicated that, compared with nondeprived adoptees, children who experienced early severe deprivation were less likely to be securely attached and more likely to show atypical patterns of attachment behavior; ordinary forms of insecure attachment were not associated with deprivation. Within the sample of deprived adoptees, there was a dose–response association between duration of deprivation and disturbances in attachment behavior. In addition, a minority of children who experienced severe early deprivation were classified as avoidant, secure, or dependent using conventional classification strategies, despite also exhibiting atypical patterns of attachment behaviors, and this was also more likely among children exposed to prolonged deprivation. The results raise both theoretical and methodological implications for attachment research on very deprived children.