Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Generic Tendon Routing on Tension Loss of Tendon-Driven Continuum Manipulators With Planar Deformation

We present a novel physically-intuitive mathematical formulation to investigate the effects of a fully-constrained generic tendon routing (GTR) on the correlation between tension loss and deformation behavior of a variable-curvature tendon-driven continuum manipulator (TD-CM). The proposed model can account for distributed friction forces/moments along a GTR path that have been typically ignored in the previous approaches (e.g., the well-known frictionless Cosserat rod model). For the first time, the internal distributed forces on a GTR are expressed using three physically-intuitive generic functions. Solely relying on the known actuation input(s), the proposed mathematical formulation can also solve the entangled and unknown correlation between GTR, internal distributed forces, tension loss and deformation behavior of TD-CMs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we performed various simulation studies using eight different GTR paths. Additionally, we fabricated two different types of TD-CMs with different GTRs to experimentally evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed mathematical framework. The results demonstrate the proposed model can successfully and accurately (i.e., about $< $10% error) capture the trends of substantial tension loss (e.g., about $< $50%) on fully constrained GTRs, which reveals the importance of considering tension loss in modeling these TD-CMs.
Along‐Dip Segmentation of the Slip Behavior and Rheology of the Copiapó Ridge Subducted in North‐Central Chile

We studied the along‐dip influence of the Copiapó ridge subduction in the Atacama region, North‐Central Chile by building a new seismicity catalog, including similar events and non‐volcanic tremors (NVTs). We also obtained a 3‐D tomographic model for P and S‐waves velocity (and the implied Vp/Vs ratio). We identify along‐dip segmentation involving four distinct segments: a locked seismogenic zone hosting ordinary seismicity and clusters of similar events; a transition zone with NVTs and low seismicity; an aseismic zone with slow‐slip events; and a deep zone with abundant intraslab seismicity. The velocity models show differences among these zones, with low velocity anomalies of Vp and Vs coinciding with aseismic slip zones, indicating the possible presence of fluids. Due to the spatial distribution along‐strike and along‐dip of the aseismic zones, we propose that these differences in seismogenic behavior are generated by subduction of the heterogeneous seamounts associated with the Copiapó ridge.
Yoga travellers’ experiences in guided tours: a multiple case study approach

ABSTRACT This study investigates yoga travellers’ experiences in guided tours organized by the renowned online travel platform, Tripaneer. Travellers’ online narratives (N = 880) regarding three main yoga destinations were collected and examined through content analysis. Six main components were revealed: yoga facilities and services, a sense of awe, the overall benefits of yoga, a memorable experience, social interaction and learning about the local culture.
Impact of Corporate Governance on Performance of Selected Commercial Banks in Bangladesh: A Comparative Approach

This study tries to determine the impact of Corporate Governance (CG) on the performance of Commercial Banks (CB) in Bangladesh. Data are collected from different banks listed under DSE for the period starting from 2015 to 2020. For analyzing the data and testing hypothesis Pearson’s correlation and OLS regression models are used to assess the relationship among the performance of the banks and CG related predictor variables like Board Size (BS), Board Independence (BI), Audit Committee (AC), Risk Management Committee (RMC), and some control variables like Firm Age (FA), Firm Size (FS) and Market Capitalization (MC). The regression analysis results showed a mixed result. The BS and BI are significantly affirmatively related with ROE and positively correlated with ROA. The BS is affirmatively related with Tobin’s Q, but BI is significantly negatively related. No significant positive connection is found between the AC, RMC and ROE, ROA. The RMC is significant affirmatively related with Tobin’s Q, but no significant association between the AC and Tobin’s Q. The theoretical part of this paper has focused about a brief discussion about different variables related with Corporate Governance. The empirical part is based on a survey made on twenty commercial banks listed with DSE.
User-Centric Design Methodology for mHealth Apps. The PainApp Paradigm for Chronic Pain

The paper presents a user-centric methodology in order to design successful mobile health (mHealth) applications. In addition to the theoretical background, such an example is presented with an application targeting chronic pain. The pain domain was decided due to its significance in many aspects: its complexity, dispersion in the population, the financial burden it causes, etc. The paper presents a step-by-step plan in order to build mobile health applications. Participatory design and interdisciplinarity are only some of the critical issues towards the desired result. In the given example (development of the PainApp), a participatory design was followed with a team of seventeen stakeholders that drove the design and development phases. Three physicians, one behavioral scientist, three IT and UX experts, and ten patients collaborated together to develop the final solution. The several features implemented in the PainApp solution are presented in details. The application is threefold: it supports the management, reporting, and treatment effectiveness monitoring. The paper is giving details on the methodological approach while presenting insights on the actual plan and the steps followed for having a patient-centric solution. Key success factors and barriers to mobile health applications that support the need for such an approach are also presented.
Understanding the Structure of Knowledge Graphs with Abstat Profiles

While there has been a trend in the last decades for publishing large-scale and highly-interconnected Knowledge Graphs (KGs), their users often get overwhelmed by the task of understanding their content as a result of their size and complexity. Data profiling approaches have been proposed to summarize large KGs into concise and meaningful representations, so that they can be better explored, processed, and managed. Profiles based on schema patterns represent each triple in a KG with its schema-level counterpart, thus covering the entire KG with profiles of considerable size. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that profiles based on schema patterns, if explored with suitable mechanisms, can be useful to help users understand the content of big and complex KGs. ABSTAT provides concise pattern-based profiles and comes with faceted interfaces for profile exploration. Using this tool we present a user study based on query completion tasks. We demonstrate that users who look at ABSTAT profiles formulate their queries better and faster than users browsing the ontology of the KGs. The latter is a pretty strong baseline considering that many KGs do not even come with a specific ontology to be explored by the users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to investigate the impact of profiling techniques on tasks related to knowledge graph understanding with a user study.
Transformer Models in the Home Improvement Domain

To find answers for subjective questions about many topics through Q\&A forums, questioners and answerers can cooperatively help themselves by sharing their doubts or answers based on their background and life experiences. These experiences can help machines redirect questioners to find better answers based on community question-answering models. This work proposes a comparative analysis of the pairwise community answer retrieval models in the home improvement domain considering different kinds of user question context information. Community Question-Answering (CQA) models must rank candidate answers in decreasing order of relevance for a user question. Our contribution consists of transformer-based language models using different kinds of user information to accurate the model generalisation. To train our model, we propose a proper CQA dataset in the home improvement domain that consists of information extracted from community forums, including question context information. We evaluate our approach by comparing the performance of each baseline model based on rank-aware evaluation measures.
Morphology and Formation Mechanisms of Cellular Vesicles Harvested from Blood

Theoretical and experimental evidence on cellular vesicles (CVs) isolated from blood is presented. It is suggested that comparison of the observed shapes with theoretical shapes obtained by minimization of membrane-free energy in combination with electron microscopy is key in the assessment of CV identity. We found that shapes of CVs isolated from blood by repetitive centrifugation (up to 20.000 g) and washing, and observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) agreed well with theoretically observed shapes. It is indicated that these CVs are colloids deriving from residual blood cells, mostly platelets. SEM images of washed erythrocytes undergoing budding and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images of isolated erythrocyte microvesicles likewise showed smooth shapes that we described as characteristic for colloidal CVs. Besides these, the CV isolates may contain other small particles, such as exosomes and viruses, as observed in isolates from tomato homogenate, however, we could not identify such particles in isolates from healthy human blood. Theory of deviatoric elasticity underlaying minimization of the membrane free energy and simulated two-component vesicles with the orientational ordering of anisotropic constituents are presented to indicate the interdependence of curvature—sorting of membrane constituents and their orientational ordering in strongly anisotropically curved regions.
Novel anode Schottky trench contact controlled SOI LIGBT with low loss and snapback-free

The novel shorted-anode silicon-on-insulator lateral insulated gate bipolar transistor (SOI LIGBT) with low loss and snapback-free is proposed and studied by numerical simulation, named the anode Schottky trench contact (ASTC) LIGBT in this paper. Due to the fixed anode resistance, the conventional shorted-anode LIGBT structure has the contradiction between the snapback-free and high forward voltage drop ( V F ). The novelty of proposed device is that, it makes full use of the lateral space charge region formed by the Schottky trench contact, so as to introduce the changed anode resistance by varying the anode voltage bias ( V AC ). The low V AC in the on-state achieves completely snapback-free with fully occupied channel by depletion region. The high V AC value in case of the turn-off process achieves fully opening of electron flowing channel with the disappearance of depletion region, which is conducive to the realization of barrier-free process for the electron extraction. Under the same V F of 1.42V at the anode current density J AC =100A/cm 2 , the turn-off time and turn-off loss ( E off ) of proposed ASTC LIGBT is reduced by 41.5% and 37.9%, respectively, compared with the conventional LIGBT. Therefore, it can be concluded that the proposed ASTC LIGBT achieves the best trade-off performance between V F and E off . words:
Long Persistent Luminescent HDPE Composites with Strontium Aluminate and Their Phosphorescence, Thermal, Mechanical, and Rheological Characteristics

In this work, HDPE/strontium aluminate-based auto glowing composites (SrAl2O4: Eu, Dy (AG1) and Sr4Al14O25: Eu, Dy (AG2)) were prepared, and their phosphorescence studies were conducted. In HDPE/AG1 composites, the green emission was observed at ~500 nm after the UV excitation at 320 nm. The HDPE/AG2 has a blue emission at ~490 nm and, in both cases, the intensity of emission is proportional to the AG1 and AG2 content. The DSC data show that the total crystallinity of both the composites was decreased but with a more decreasing effect with the bulky AG2 filler. The melting and crystallization temperatures were intact, which shows the absence of any chemical modification during high shear and temperature processing. This observation is further supported by the ATR-FTIR studies where no new peaks appeared or disappeared from the HDPE peaks. The tensile strength and modulus of HDPE, HDPE/AG1, and HDPE/AG2 composites were improved with the AG1 and AG2 fillers. The rheological studies show the improvement in the complex viscosity and accordingly the storage modulus of the studied phosphorescent HDPE composites. The SEM images indicate better filler dispersion and filler–matrix adhesion, which improves the mechanical characteristics of the studied HDPE composites. The ageing studies in the glowing composites show that there is a decrease in the intensity of phosphorescence emission on exposure to drastic atmospheric conditions for a longer period and the composites become more brittle.
The Effect of Statins on Mortality of Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease Based on Data of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP-CDM) and Korea National Health Insurance Claims Database

The role of statins in chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been extensively evaluated, but it remains controversial in specific population such as dialysis-dependent CKD. This study examined the effect of statins on mortality in CKD patients using two large databases. In data from the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model (OMOP-CDM) from two hospitals, CKD was defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate < 60 mL/min/m2; we compared survival between patients with or without statin treatment. As a sensitivity analysis, the results were validated with the Korea National Health Insurance (KNHI) claims database. In the analysis of CDM datasets, statin users showed significantly lower risks of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in both hospitals, compared to non-users. Similar results were observed in CKD patients from the KNHI claims database. Lower mortality in the statin group was consistently evident in all subgroup analyses, including patients on dialysis and low-risk young patients. In conclusion, we found that statins were associated with lower mortality in CKD patients, regardless of dialysis status or other risk factors.
Co-Circularly Polarized Planar Antenna With Highly Decoupled Ports for S-Band Full Duplex Applications

This work presents a unidirectional, co-circularly polarized (CP), printed antenna with highly decoupled or isolated transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) ports for 2.4 GHz in-band full duplex (IBFD) applications. The presented antenna topology is based on four similar and sequentially rotated trimmed patches with right hand circular polarized (RHCP) characteristics. The symmetrical placement of two Tx patches with respect to both Rx elements results in equal levels of self interference (SI) which was suppressed through balanced excitation of Tx mode. This mechanism results in effective suppression of SI at each Rx patch. The residual SI is suppressed further through a second balanced feeding network deployed at Rxport of proposed antenna topology. The employed balanced feeding networks provide superior performance of ≤ 0.5 dB and 6° magnitude and phase imbalances respectively between the two balanced output ports over the bandwidth of interest. The measured results for prototype of presented antenna achieve -10 dB bandwidth of better than 100 MHz for both Tx and Rxports. The measured interport coupling for validation model ≤ −70 dB across the entire bandwidth of 100 MHz. As per best of authors’ knowledge, the presented antenna is the first one to report such reduced levels of interport coupling over the whole impedance bandwidth of planar antenna with unidirectional radiation patterns and co-RHCP characteristics for both Tx and Rx modes across the overlapped bandwidth.
The Rotterdam way: a new take on urban tourism management

While most of the popular urban tourism destinations of North-Western Europe are famed for their historic city centres, a growing number of destinations, such as Rotterdam, challenge the conditionality of having a picturesque historic centre for being a successful tourist destination. The city of Rotterdam, which is shaped by its industrial past as well as a significant scar left by carpet bombings during World War II, is currently witnessing an urban revival. While just decades ago the city was mostly shunned because it was described as rough, edgy and even boring (Kasteleijn & Maas, 1995), present day visitors appreciate the diverse and iconic modern architecture, as well as the creative and vibrant atmosphere in which the roughness and edginess actually seem to work in Rotterdam’s favour (Richards & Wilson, 2004). In this light, the city is acclaimed by the international media as a must-visit destination, with Rotterdam featuring in Lonely Planet’s “best in travel list” of 2016, describing it as a “metropolitan jewel of the Netherlands riding a wave of urban development, redevelopment and regeneration” (Lonely Planet, 2016).
Case Report: Preemptive Treatment With Low-Dose PD-1 Blockade and Azacitidine for Molecular Relapsed Acute Myeloid Leukemia With RUNX1-RUNX1T1 After Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients who develop hematological relapse (HR) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) generally have dismal clinical outcomes. Measurable residual disease (MRD)-directed preemptive interventions are effective approaches to prevent disease progression and improve prognosis for molecular relapsed patients with warning signs of impending HR. In this situation, boosting the graft-vs-leukemia (GVL) effect with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) might be a promising prevention strategy, despite the potential for causing severe graft-vs-host disease (GVHD). In the present study, we reported for the first time an AML patient with RUNX1-RUNX1T1 who underwent preemptive treatment with the combined application of tislelizumab (an anti-PD-1 antibody) and azacitidine to avoid HR following allo-HSCT. On day +81, molecular relapse with MRD depicted by RUNX1-RUN1T1-positivity as well as mixed donor chimerism occurred in the patient. On day +95, with no signs of GVHD and an excellent eastern cooperative oncology group performance status (ECOG PS), the patient thus was administered with 100 mg of tislelizumab on day 1 and 100 mg of azacitidine on days 1-7. After the combination therapy, complete remission was successfully achieved with significant improvement in hematologic response, and the MRD marker RUNX1-RUNX1T1 turned negative, along with a complete donor chimerism in bone marrow. Meanwhile, the patient experienced moderate GVHD and immune-related adverse events (irAEs), successively involving the lung, liver, lower digestive tract and urinary system, which were well controlled by immunosuppressive therapies. As far as we know, this case is the first one to report the use of tislelizumab in combination with azacitidine to prevent post-transplant relapse in AML. In summary, the application of ICIs in MRD positive patients might be an attractive strategy for immune modulation in the future to reduce the incidence of HR in the post-transplant setting, but safer clinical application schedules need to be explored.
Some Unsolved Problems in Stability and Optimal Control Theory of Stochastic Systems

In spite of the fact that the theory of stability and optimal control for different types of stochastic systems is well developed and very popular in research, there are some simply and clearly formulated problems, solutions of which have not been found so far. To the readers’ attention six open stability problems for stochastic differential equations with delay, for stochastic difference equations with discrete and continuous time and one open optimal control problem for stochastic hyperbolic equation with two-parameter white noise are offered.
Indoor Navigation and Tracking Using WLAN-Fingerprinting Technique and K-Inverse Harmonic Means Clustering on Mobile Device

This work evaluated the indoor navigation with the WLAN-fingerprinting technique and k-inverse harmonic mean clustering. During offline phase, the RSS of references node are grouped by KIHM clustering algorithm. In addition, the flag parameter that means the member of each cluster will be added to database. Then, the KIHM membership values will be used to find the cluster and using fingerprinting technique to estimate the target node positions. The best result derived from the KIHM clustering techniques with 3 clusters. The average distance error is approximate 3.73 meters with the 18.41% no error estimated position.
Cities' systems and networks' proximities: toward a multiplex approach

: This chapter discusses the deep co-constructive relations between cities and proximities through networks, in a multi-dimensional and multi-level perspective. The proposed “ multiplex ” framework combines the multi-dimensional contribution of the Evolutionary Economic Geography with the multi-level theory of evolutionary cities’ syst ems. This combination highlights the properties of the evolutive levels of organization (meso and macro) in multiple dimensions of networks, and describes how the induced proximities interact between these dimensions. The meso levels, where proximities are higher, create a high potential of networks’ development and retention. In addition, t he interactions between levels constitute an essential factor of dynamics. The diffusion processes occurring between levels and between dimensions define adaptive cycles which evolve in interaction all together. The multiplex proximity framework, shaping entangled cycles of dimensions and levels, is useful to better understanding and modeling cross-level and cross-dimensional policies in order to better support adaptation of cities ’ economies to global change.
The Effect of B, Al, N, and P Impurities on the Electronic Structure of Si0.3Sn0.7Ge alloy: A First-Principles Approach

This study examines the effect of doping Si0.3Sn0. 7Ge with an impurity element X (B, Al, N, or P) on the Sn site, using first-principle calculations based on the fully self-consistent Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method with the coherent potential approximation (KKR-CPA). To treat several forms of chemical disorders of Si0.3Sn0. 7Ge, X-doping was carried out by substituting small amounts of Sn with each element X, which gives rise to the alloy Si0.3Sn0. 7-yXyGe. As the X content increases from y = 0.01 to 0.06, the Fermi level maintains its position in the conduction band edge. While the number of states at the Fermi level decreases. With 1% X impurity added to the alloy Si0.3Sn0. 7-yXyGe, the number of carriers (electron and hole) states was generally enhanced. For the case of X = P, when compared to the parent material Si0.3Sn0. 7Ge, an enhancement of 0.04 states/eV was observed. Due to the increase in the number of states, which indicates an improvement in thermopower, these alloys Si0.3Sn0. 7-yXyGe are promising for application as n-type electrodes in a thermoelectric generator (TEG).