Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Workspace Trajectory Generation Method for Humanoid Adaptive Walking With Dynamic Motion Primitives

To properly function in real-world environments, a humanoid robot must be able to adapt its walking gait to new situations. In this paper, an adaptive bipedal walking control method that uses sensory feedback to modulate dynamic movement primitive (DMP) parameters is presented. This work addresses the challenge of adaptive locomotion by implementing DMPs in the workspace of a humanoid robot. This workspace formulation allows new movements to be created such that the DMP parameters, including the stride, height of the hip joint, foot clearance and forward velocity, are directly related to the walking pattern. One set of DMPs is applied to generate the foot trajectory, and a second set is used to generate the CoM (centre of mass) trajectory in an online fashion. Sensory feedback information is utilized to modify the generated CoM and foot trajectories to improve the walking quality. Furthermore, a staged evolutionary algorithm (EA) is designed to optimize the parameters of the control system to enhance the walking performance. The presented control strategy is demonstrated through simulations and real experiments that focus on the adaptation of the robot’s walking pattern over sloped terrain.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

DeFi (‘decentralized finance’) has joined FinTech (‘financial technology’), RegTech (‘regulatory technology’), cryptocurrencies, and digital assets as one of the most discussed emerging technological evolutions in global finance. Yet little is really understood about its meaning, legal implications, and policy consequences. In this article we introduce DeFi, put DeFi in the context of the traditional financial economy, connect DeFi to open banking, and end with some policy considerations. We suggest that decentralization has the potential to undermine traditional forms of accountability and erode the effectiveness of traditional financial regulation and enforcement. At the same time, we find that where parts of the financial services value chain are decentralized, there will be a reconcentration in a different (but possibly less regulated, less visible, and less transparent) part of the value chain. DeFi regulation could, and should, focus on this reconcentrated portion of the value chain to ensure effective oversight and risk control. Rather than eliminating the need for regulation, in fact DeFi requires regulation in order to achieve its core objective of decentralization. Furthermore, DeFi potentially offers an opportunity for the development of an entirely new way to design regulation: the idea of ‘embedded regulation’. Regulatory approaches could be built into the design of DeFi, thus potentially decentralizing both finance and its regulation, in the ultimate expression of RegTech.
Accuracy assessment of several classification algorithms with and without hue saturation intensity input features on object analyses on benthic habitat mapping in the Pajenekang Island Waters, South Sulawesi

Object-based image analysis (OBIA) method has been proven to improve the accuracy value on benthic habitat mapping. The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of several classification algorithms on benthic habitat mapping based on OBIA method with and without input feature of Hue Saturation Intensity (HSI) in the Pajenekang island waters, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Sentinel-2A satellite imagery with 10 m2 spatial resolution acquired on 3 September 2018 was used in this study. During OBIA analyses, we segmented the object into 5, 10, and 15 classes and treated each of them with input features of mean+ratio vs mean+ratio+hue saturation intensity (HSI). We later classified the benthic habitat by applying several classification algorithms such as the Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree (DT). The results showed that the Bayes algorithm produced highest accuracy of 78.35% within 10 segmentation classes and input features of mean+ratio+HSI followed by the KNN of 71.13% with 5 segmentation classes and input features of mean+ration+HSI. The addition of HSI input features into OBIA analyses increased the accuracy of benthic habitat classification mapping of 4.13% with the Bayes classification algorithm.
Minimum emission pathways to triple Africa’s cereal production by 2050

This info note summarizes results of three recent studies that assessed whether SSA can be self-sufficient in cereals by 2050 under different scenarios of intensification on existing cereal area. For each scenario,yield increases and area expansion to meet cereal demand by 2050 were assessed. Increased demands for fertiliser use and associated GHG emissions were quantified.
Mountain bike tourism economic impacts: A critical analysis of academic and practitioner studies

Mountain biking as a sport and recreational activity has grown rapidly over the previous two decades. Consequently, there has been growth recently in efforts aimed at stimulating mountain bike tourism through the development and marketing of mountain bike trails and parks. Various community advocates, academics, and industry practitioners have sought to quantify the economic impacts of mountain bike tourism to garner public and other financial assistance to aid the development of mountain bike tourism. This research critically reviewed 33 academic and practitioner studies reporting on mountain bike tourism economic impacts. Analysis revealed widespread inconsistency in instrumentation and variable measurement contributing to a fragmented body of knowledge pertaining to economic impacts of mountain bike tourism. Recommendations for improved rigor and consistency in future research measuring mountain bike tourism impacts are provided.
Life-cycle Specific Comprehensive Women's Health and Maternal Child Health

Objectives: The purpose of this review article is to explore the life-cyle specific comprehensive women’s health issues and maternal child health. Methods: Life-cycle specific women’s health issues were investigated in terms of perspectives of preventive medicine and health promotion. Development of women’s health policy should be to maximize women’s happiness by effective allocation and utilization of available resources for women’s whole life-cycle. Results: Maternal outcomes and women’s health are influenced by complex web of socioeconomic and environmental factors that precede pregnancy, and by generation which is a continuum of women’s life-cycle specific health. Chronic conditions place women at increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcome as well as complications of pregnancy have impact on a women’s long term health and quality of life. The period of childbearing is much shorter than the duration of childbearing in women’s lives. Nevertheless, women’s health are usually measured only by immediate pregnancy consequences. More woman years are outside the reproductive age. Women’s health should be valued as a continuity of care and access to services before, during, after, and independent of childbearing. Conclusions: Comprehensive health needs should be met through more holistic approach including health care policy for women. Women’s health in MCH (Maternal Child Health) includes importance of considering childbearing as critical periods of risk for the health of earlier and later in women’s lives. Close attention to life-cycle specific women’s health needs is the essential for happiness of women and society.
An evaluation of the New Opportunities Fund ICT Training Programme for Public Library Staff, UK

Public library staff in the UK are being trained on an unprecedented scale. The ICT Training Programme for Public Library Staff is financed by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) and aims to equip staff with the ICT skills essential to assist the public. The programme consists of eight outcomes and aims to develop competence with ICT, including the Internet. This paper considers some of the training methods for the Internet received by staff. Specifically, the results of a study at Loughborough University, which included surveys, focus groups and interviews with managers, are described in relation to staff training preferences and perceived strengths and weaknesses of a variety of methods. A survey completed by staff from 14 public library authorities found that external training was rated most favourably. The use of online delivery in one training course is detailed and the potential of the online delivery of training for public library staff is considered.
A Distance Measure for Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets and Its Application to Pattern Classification Problems

As a generation of fuzzy sets, intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) have a more powerful ability to represent and address the uncertainty of information. Therefore, IFSs have been used in many areas. However, the distance measure between the IFSs indicating the difference or discrepancy grade is still an open question that has attracted considerable attention over the past few decades. Although various measurement methods have been developed, some problems still exist regarding the unsatisfactory axioms of distance measure or that lack discernment and cause counterintuitive cases. To address the above issues, in this article, we propose a new distance measure between IFSs based on the Jensen–Shannon divergence. This new IFS distance measure can not only satisfy the axiomatic definition of distance measure but also has nonlinear characteristics. As a result, it can better discriminate the discrepancies between IFSs, and it generates more reasonable results than do other existing measure methods; these advantages are illustrated by several numerical examples. Based on these qualities, an algorithm for pattern classification is designed that provides a promising solution for addressing inference problems.
Electric vehicle routing with flexible time windows: a column generation solution approach

ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Flexible Time Windows (EVRPFTW) in which vehicles are allowed to serve customers before and after the earliest and latest time window bounds, respectively. The objective of this problem is to assign electric vehicles to feasible routes and make schedules with minimum total cost that includes the traveling costs, the costs of using electric vehicles and the penalty costs incurred for earliness and lateness. The proposed mathematical model is solved by a column generation procedure. To generate an integer solution, we solve an integer programming problem using the routes constructed by the column generation algorithm. We further develop a linear programming model to compute the optimal times to start service at each customer for the selected routes. A number of well-known benchmark instances is solved by our solution procedure to evaluate the operational gains obtained by employing flexible time windows.
Self-medication prevalence and related factors among medical university students, 2015

Background: Self-medication is one of the main health problems. Given the high prevalence of self-medicationin society and between students, the aim of this study was to assess the rate of self-medication among Ardabil medical students. Methods: This cross–sectional study has been done on 150 students which selected randomly from Ardabil Medical University Science students. Data collected by a questionnaire and then analyzed by statistical method in SPSS.19. Results: The rate of self-medication among students was 65%. Most of usage drug was sedatives with 77.1%. 7.2% of students were prepared drugs from places other than pharmacies and most of self-medication was the existence of drug free market with 71%. Conclusions: Given the high prevalence of self-medication among students it is necessary to promote a culture of drug use among students, education in the field of self-medication and its side effects are given to students.
Emotion Regulation Therapy and Its Potential Role in the Treatment of Chronic Stress-Related Pathology Across Disorders

Although stress is an inevitable part of everyday life, its chronicity, severity, and perceived burden can result in enduring distress, which may manifest as heightened emotionality, contributing to a number of self-regulatory failures. Specifically, distress disorders are characterized, in part, by heightened sensitivity to underlying motivational systems related to threat/safety, reward/loss, or both. Further, individuals suffering from these conditions typically engage in perseverate negative thinking (e.g., worry, rumination, self-criticism) in an effort to manage motivationally relevant distress and often utilize these processes at the detriment of engaging in new contextual learning. Distress disorders are often brought on by enduring chronic stress, coupled with these maladaptive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses and ensuing impairment which contribute to and in turn worsen the deficits from these purported mechanisms. Emotion regulation therapy is a theoretically derived treatment that is based upon affective science to offer a blueprint for improving intervention by focusing on targeting the motivational responses and corresponding regulatory failures of individuals with distress disorders. Open and randomized controlled trials have demonstrated considerable preliminary evidence for the utility of emotion regulation therapy and its proposed mechanisms in treating the distress conditions.
Antimicrobial stewardship in South Africa: a scoping review of the published literature

Abstract Objectives To map published data of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) interventions that are currently being carried out in hospitals and clinics in the public and private health sectors of South Africa in line with the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) strategy of South Africa. Methods A systematic scoping review was conducted to identify AMS initiatives in the public and private health sectors of South Africa for the period 1 January 2000 to 31 March 2019. An electronic search of databases was made including PubMed, Scopus, a key medical journal (South African Medical Journal), University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) WorldCat iCatalogue and AMR networks: Federation of Infectious Diseases Societies in South Africa (FIDSSA). Reference lists of published articles were also reviewed for inclusion. Keywords included ‘antimicrobial antibiotic stewardship South Africa’. Findings Of a total of 411 articles, using a stepwise screening process, 18 articles were selected for inclusion in the review. The interventions/initiatives were divided into four broad categories: (i) AMS intervention: prescription audits and usage; (ii) AMS intervention: education and its impact; (iii) other AMS interventions; and (iv) the role of different healthcare professionals in AMS. Conclusions The data identifies a need for and the value of AMS in both the public and private health sectors of South Africa. Initiatives are carried out across both sectors but more attention needs to be focused on AMS implementation in line with the National AMR Strategy of South Africa. Collaboration between the different sectors will aid in overcoming the AMR challenge.
Accelerating low-voltage SAR ADC operation via comparator timing assisted and circuit adaptive tuning techniques

This work presents techniques that effectively utilise comparator timing information to accelerate low-voltage successive approximation register (SAR) analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) operation. Compared to existing approaches that only exploit the prolonged comparator decision time in the events of metastability, the proposed techniques are effective in a broader voltage range and can extract more information about the voltages being compared. To cope with large variations associated with comparator delay, this work proposes robust timing measurement circuit, uncertainty-tolerant search algorithm and circuit adaptive tuning techniques. The adaptive tuning technique enables ADC to autonomously find voltage levels corresponding to the outputs of the timing measurement circuit as well as to adjust the uncertainty ranges used in the search algorithm. This eliminates the need of post-silicon calibration for the timing measurement circuits, which are typically required in existing approaches. The developed techniques are used in the design of a 9-bit 0.45 V SAR ADC circuit with a 130 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. Measurement results from the prototype chip indicate that for most input levels the proposed ADC completes conversion in six or seven conversion cycles. At 200 KS/s sampling rate, its power dissipation is 2.88 μW and it achieves a signal-to-noise distortion ratio of 50.66 dB with a figure of merit of 51.8 fJ/c. -s.
Exploiting Shangri-La: Assessing the Tibetan Plateau’s Natural Resources and the Work of Karl Wittfogel

This paper applies Karl Wittfogel' s theory of hydraulic societies to China’s relationship with Tibet. It argues that the Chinese are interested in control over Tibet not only for its land, location, or wealth of natural resources, but also for control of its headwaters. Hundreds of millions of people rely on the numerous large rivers that start in the Tibetan plateau, making the region a critically important water supply for Asia. Wittfogel’s work theorizes that China’s territory and authority has expanded with the need to secure water for its large population and food production. The paper contains two sections- the first summarizes Wittfogel’s arguments, a history of Tibet, and China’s control of it; the second describes China’s attempts to modernize Tibet, specifically through river development, and the environmental damage caused by such efforts. Tibet’s rivers are crucial for the entirety of Asia, and the Plateau’s massive supplies of water are just one of its many resources. By focusing on rivers, this article describes the importance of Tibet and how increasing levels of resource extraction legitimatize Chinese centralized authority.
No title, no theme: The joined neural space between speakers and listeners during production and comprehension of multi-sentence discourse

Speakers and listeners usually interact in larger discourses than single words or even single sentences. The goal of the present study was to identify the neural bases reflecting how the mental representation of the situation denoted in a multi-sentence discourse (situation model) is constructed and shared between speakers and listeners. An fMRI study using a variant of the ambiguous text paradigm was designed. Speakers produced ambiguous texts in the scanner and listeners subsequently listened to these texts in different states of ambiguity: preceded by a highly informative, intermediately informative or no title at all. Conventional BOLD activation analyses in listeners, as well as inter-subject correlation analyses between the speakers’ and the listeners’ hemodynamic time courses were performed. Critically, only the processing of disambiguated, coherent discourse with an intelligible situation model representation involved (shared) activation in bilateral lateral parietal and medial prefrontal regions. This shared spatiotemporal pattern of brain activation between the speaker and the listener suggests that the process of memory retrieval in medial prefrontal regions and the binding of retrieved information in the lateral parietal cortex constitutes a core mechanism underlying the communication of complex conceptual representations.
Validation of melomind™ signal quality: a proof of concept resting-state and ERPs study

Wearable EEG systems have become accessible to researchers and clinicians over the last decade, thus requiring neurotechnology companies to seek for outstanding EEG signal quality. Here, we show that the melomind™ headset equipped with dry electrodes (myBrain Technologies, Paris, France) allows the recording of reliable electro-cortical dynamics as compared to a wet-based standard-EEG system (actiCAP, Brain Products GmbH, Gilching, Germany). EEGs were acquired simultaneously from the two systems while thirteen subjects underwent a visual oddball, a steady-state visually-evoked potentials (SSVEPs) and two resting-state (RS) tasks. RS were acquired with eyes-closed and eyes-open (2 minutes each) and repeated twice (before and after the cognitive tasks). During the oddball task, participants responded on a gamepad when a target-stimulus was displayed. In the SSVEPs, visual responses were elicited at 15 and 20 Hz through a series of 15-second stimuli presented 5 times each. The power of theta- [4-8 Hz], alpha- [8-13 Hz], and beta- [13-30 Hz] band was extracted from the two RS. The signal-to-noise-ratio in the 15 (± 1) and 20 (± 1) Hz range was computed from the SSVEPs. The shape of the N2/P300 complex was analysed from the oddball task. Strong correlations resulted between the parameters obtained from the two EEG systems (0.53 < Pearson’s r < 0.97). Bland and Altman analysis revealed small dissimilarities between the two systems, with values laying in the 95% confidence interval in all the tasks. Our results demonstrate that the melomind™ is an affordable solution to reliably assess humans’ electro-cortical dynamics at-rest and during cognitive tasks, thus paving the way to its use in neuroscience studies and brain-computer interfaces.
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Detection of elemental magnetization reversal events in a micro-patterned Nd-Fe-B hot-deformed magnet

Magnetization reversal in a permanent magnet takes place through multiple and simultaneous events of nucleation and domain wall depinning. Thus, detection and analysis of elemental magnetization reversal events are essentially important to understand the coercivity mechanism of a permanent magnet. In this study, we have fabricated a micro-patterned Nd-Fe-B hot-deformed magnet using mechanical polishing and focused ion beam, and anomalous Hall effect (AHE) detection has been adopted to measure the magnetization reversal of the sample. During the micro-patterning process, the degradation of magnetic property is carefully evaluated. Consequently, the micro-patterned Nd-Fe-B hot-deformed magnet with the thick of 5 μm and the width of 13 μm is fabricated, and subsequently, the discrete steps on the AHE curve are successfully detected. The magnetization reversal unit size estimated from the step height is ∼1 μm2, which is almost the same as observed in the magneto-optical Kerr microscopy. We have clearly demons.