Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tendon-driven continuum robots with extensible sections—A model-based evaluation of path-following motions

Continuum robots are highly miniaturizable, exhibit non-linear shapes with several curves, and are flexible and compliant. In particular, concentric-tube and tendon-driven continuum robots can be designed on a small scale with diameters of below 10 mm. A small diameter-to-length ratio enables insertion of these robots through small entry points in order to reach hardly accessible regions by avoiding obstacles. This scenario can often be found in minimally invasive surgery and technical inspections. However, to reach the target region, a deployment along a narrow tortuous path is often required. Common tendon-driven continuum robots are intrinsically incapable of such deployment and concentric-tube continuum robots require special path conditions and intensive parameter optimization. Other proposed robot types, such as hyper-redundant and pneumatically actuated robots, exhibit less favorable diameter-to-length ratios and are thus not suitable for those tasks. Since the limiting factors are found in the design of continuum robots, we propose a novel tendon-driven continuum robot design, which features an additional degree of freedom in each robot section. The backbone is composed of straight, concentrically arranged tubes, each of which composes a section and is used to adapt its length. We present a three-section continuum robot prototype with a diameter of 7 mm, determine its follow-the-leader capabilities theoretically, and validate the results experimentally using model-based control. For our 165 mm long robot prototype, the repeatability is below 2.38 mm. The model accuracy reaches a median of 3.16% over 25 configurations with respect to robot length. The path-following error over five curvilinear paths results in median errors of 2.59% with respect to robot length.
Effects of contaminants on genetic patterns in aquatic organisms: a review

There is increasing awareness of the need to evaluate the effects of contaminants at the population level. Genetic techniques offer a powerful approach to assess contaminant-induced changes in populations. Yet studies to date are relatively few and not always carefully designed to maximize the utility inherent in this approach. We present a summary of contemporary genetic assessment methods and a review of published studies of genetic effects in field-exposed aquatic organisms. We discuss evaluations of genetic patterns that use genetic adaptation, allozyme variation, and molecular genetic (DNA) variation. Direct tests of genetic adaptation are very effective in establishing a concrete, and potentially deleterious population-level effect of contaminant exposure, but they are difficult to accomplish with most field-exposed organisms. Allozyme surveys are relatively simple and common, and may provide data that are suggestive of contaminant effects. However, these are rarely conclusive, primarily because few allozyme loci are variable and these few loci represent extremely small portions of the genome. Molecular genetic techniques have the potential to be very effective. But, there is a tendency to emphasize the power of the techniques, rather than the underlying causes of the molecular genetic patterns observed. The strength of the conclusions of each study varies widely, partially derived from variation in the strength of the techniques. We caution that all these approaches are greatly improved by careful experimental design that includes adequate numbers of reference and contaminated sites and sample size. In addition, careful exposure assessment is required, including site and tissue chemistry, biomarker responses, and measures of potentially deleterious effects, such as DNA damage, or reduced reproductive output or survival. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
A Recent, Large Multi-Impact Event on the Moon

D. A. Paige, B. T. Greenhagen, E. J. Speyerer, R. R. Ghent, Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA (jpierre@mars.ucla.edu), Space Sciences Institute, Boulder CO, USA, Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Lab, Laurel MD, USA, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Arizona State Univ., Tempe AZ, USA, University of Toronto, Earth Sciences, Toronto ON, Canada.
Exploring Opportunities of Adopting Biophilic Cities Concept into Mixed-Use Development Project in Malaysia

Mixed-use development project in urban area emerged to cater the increase of population in the region. Due to rapid urbanisation, many research recommended the engagement of human with nature in cities development, including the mixed-use development project since nature and human are holistically created to complement each other. This is where the United Nation (UN) under its sustainable development programme has established 17 development goals that amongst all cover both sustainable cities and communities. This shows the urgency of having cities that best fit human nature. However, although many mixed-use development projects were constructed with senses of nature, many of these projects are harmful to environment as they are unable to sustain the natural habitat as well as human needs. Hence, there are many attempts to connect human with nature in Malaysia via sustainable cities and green cities concepts although no specific guidelines on these have been established. Recently, emerged the term biophilic cities, a new concept combining sustainable and resilient cities, which are also seen as the panacea to these mixed-use development project issues despite the efforts done via the former concepts of sustainable and green cities alone. Generally, biophilic cities resemble green cities with a few enhanced greener criteria that affiliate human to nature as opposed to green and sustainable cities that merely bring nature to human. Therefore, this paper aims at investigating the elements of biophilic cities that can be adopted for mixed-use development project in Malaysia. Via systematic literature review, this paper listed the criteria of biophilic cities from previous studies, which are then used in designing the questionnaires distributed to 173 construction players in the mixed-use development projects in Malaysia. It is found that biophilic cities encompass four main criteria that are important to be adopted in mixed-use development project in Malaysia, namely “building”, “block”, “street” and “neighbourhood”, with a total of eight design elements. As biophilic cities are closer to human needs and environment whilst able to manage the rapid urbanisation and increased world population that is meant to be tackled by the mixed-use development project, construction players should start to consider adopting the biophilic cities concept in their mixed-use development project in Malaysia.
Toward an Integrated History to Govern the Commons: Using the Archive to Enhance Local Knowledge

Communities that have used common-pool resources (CPRs) for generations often preserve a valuable ‘institutional memory’. It can be understood as a subset of local knowledge concerning strategies, norms, and rules used by the community to deal with CPR problems (e.g. overexploitation) in different time periods. Scholars have argued that institutional memory is useful in two aspects of CPR governance: as focal point to encourage users to sustain and to undertake collective action, and as support knowledge to design new policies. However, institutional memory is constrained by personal and social memories, and therefore it must be considered not as fully cumulative but subject to a steady process of adjustment according to experience. When communities have recorded their regulations in writing, e.g. in village bylaws, it is possible to undertake a learning process to recover and take advantage of their institutional memory. One way is to carry out participatory workshops to compare the historical and present-day bylaws of the community. However, the comparison of these sources is not an easy task, because, on the one hand, they constitute a large body of rules and, on the other, they have been designed using different epistemologies (e.g. concrete vs. abstract) and linguistic forms (e.g. early modern vs. contemporary grammars). In this paper we use an approach based on the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework to compare the historical and present-day bylaws of a community located in Cantabria (Spain). The utility of the IAD framework is verified. It enables one not only to undertake a systematic comparison of the bylaws, but also to easily display the results in participatory workshops. The use of the archive as a source of local information to enhance users’ knowledge is an uncommon procedure among CPR scholars and practitioners, and therefore we dedicate a specific section of the paper to discussing this utility.
RFID Harmonic for Vibration Sensing

Conventional vibration sensing systems, equipped with specific sensors (e.g., accelerometer) and communication modules, are either expensive or cumbersome to deploy. Recently research community revisits this classic topic by taking advantage of off-the-shelf RFIDs. However, limited by low reading rate and long wavelength, current RFID based solutions can only sense low-frequency (e.g., below 100 Hz) mechanical vibrations with larger amplitude (e.g., <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$>\! \! 5$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mo>></mml:mo><mml:mspace width="-0.166667em"/><mml:mspace width="-0.166667em"/><mml:mn>5</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="li-ieq1-2963152.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> mm). To address the issue, this work presents TagSound, an RFID-based vibration sensing system that explores a tag's harmonic backscattering to recover high-frequency and tiny mechanical vibrations accurately. The key innovations are in two aspects: <italic>harmonics based sensing</italic> and <italic>a new recovery scheme</italic>. We implement TagSound with USRP platforms. Our comprehensive evaluation shows (i) TagSound can achieve a mean error of 0.37 Hz when detecting vibrations at frequencies below 100 Hz, and a mean error of 4.2 Hz even when the vibration frequency is up to 2500 Hz. (ii) TagSound can achieve a Hz-level frequency estimation even when the vibration amplitude is only 2 mm.
Translating Clinical Questions by Physicians Into Searchable Queries: Analytical Survey Study

Background Staying up to date and answering clinical questions with current best evidence from health research is challenging. Evidence-based clinical texts, databases, and tools can help, but clinicians first need to translate their clinical questions into searchable queries. MacPLUS FS (McMaster Premium LiteratUre Service Federated Search) is an online search engine that allows clinicians to explore multiple resources simultaneously and retrieves one single output that includes the following: (1) evidence from summaries (eg, UpToDate and DynaMed), (2) preappraised research (eg, EvidenceAlerts), and (3) non-preappraised research (eg, PubMed), with and without validated bibliographic search filters. MacPLUS FS can also be used as a laboratory to explore clinical questions and evidence retrieval. Objective Our primary objective was to examine how clinicians formulate their queries on a federated search engine, according to the population, intervention, comparison, and outcome (PICO) framework. Our secondary objective was to assess which resources were accessed by clinicians to answer their questions. Methods We performed an analytical survey among 908 clinicians who used MacPLUS FS in the context of a randomized controlled trial on search retrieval. Recording account log-ins and usage, we extracted all 1085 queries performed during a 6-month period and classified each search term according to the PICO framework. We further categorized queries into background (eg, “What is porphyria? ”) and foreground questions (eg, “Does treatment A work better than B? ”). We then analyzed the type of resources that clinicians accessed. Results There were 695 structured queries, after exclusion of meaningless queries and iterations of similar searches. We classified 56.5% (393/695) of these queries as background questions and 43.5% (302/695) as foreground questions, the majority of which were related to questions about therapy (213/695, 30.6%), followed by diagnosis (48/695, 6.9%), etiology (24/695, 3.5%), and prognosis (17/695, 2.5%). This distribution did not significantly differ between postgraduate residents and medical faculty physicians (P=.51). Queries included a median of 3 search terms (IQR 2-4), most often related to the population and intervention or test, rarely related to the outcome, and never related to the comparator. About half of the resources accessed (314/610, 51.5%) were summaries, 24.4% (149/610) were preappraised research, and 24.1% were (147/610) non-preappraised research. Conclusions Our results, from a large sample of real-life queries, could guide the development of educational interventions to improve clinicians’ retrieval skills, as well as inform the design of more useful evidence-based resources for clinical practice. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02038439; https://www.clinicaltrials. gov/ct2/show/NCT02038439
Advertising Appeals

The advertising appeal sits at the heart of advertising creative to connect the brand to consumer wants and needs. The appeal is the sticky glue that hooks the reader or viewer to the advertising message. Rational appeals such as value, economy, popularity, convenience, health, performance, or durability emphasize the functional value of the brand. Emotional appeals such as humor, sex, guilt, nostalgia, pride, joy, or security stir feelings around the brand message. A relevant and potent appeal establishes the creative context for the brand message. Moreover, it drives consistency within the campaign. Consider for a moment how global brands such as Lynx/Axe, Ikea, Bud Light, and Toyota have established an advertising appeal that provides a consistent creative platform for their brand communication. Notably, in this digital era, advertising creative may be varied to test ad effectiveness via stable metrics such as search activity, interactivity, and commercial transaction. Advertisers now have a powerful, real-life digital platform to pinpoint which appeal associates with the greatest commercial advantage. The papers selected for this special issue are based on their contribution to advancing knowledge and understanding of the role played by advertising appeals in driving advertising effectiveness. Several interesting appeals are addressed across the featured papers, including fear, wisdom, violence, and green appeals. This special issue aims to provoke discussion around the topic of advertising appeals. Four papers focus directly on the application of advertising appeals, while two papers address the framing of messages within the area of advertising appeals. With sociological concerns surrounding violence in video games and movies, violence used to grab attention and sell products is a controversial advertising issue. David S. Waller, Sameer Deshpande, and B. Zafer Erdogan present a cross-national study across six countries to establish the influence of personal and attitudinal factors on attitudes toward advertisements that portray violent imagery. Barbara Czarnecka and Jeff Evans report on wisdom appeals in the context of UK financial services advertising. This paper offers insights into how mathematical imagery is applied in financial services advertising across
Abundane of macropods in north-eastern New South Wales, and the logistics of broad-scale ground surveys

A broad-scale ground survey of macropod abundance in north-eastern New South Wales was undertaken in 1989-90. The survey area was stratified into an eastern and western region, and within regions by habitat on the basis of vegetation and topographic criteria. Macropod density in each stratum was estimated from walked line transect counts for five species: Macropus giganteus, Macropus robustus, Macropus parryi, Macropus rufogriseus and Wallabia bicolor. Within sampled strata, macropod density was substantially higher in the western region than in the eastern region. Macropus parryi occurred in only trace numbers in the eastern region, with the number of sightings too small for reliable density estimation. No M. parryi were sighted in the western region. Macropus giganteus and M. rufogriseus were the dominant species in sampled strata in the eastern region, while M. giganteus and M. robustus were dominant in the west. Overall, pre-survey activities of habitat digitising and liaison with landholders required approximately the same effort as actual survey work. Liaison with landholders required relatively more time in the eastern region, where human population was higher, than in the western region. Incomplete coverage of planned transect routes, due mainly to impenetrable vegetation, lead to a positive bias of no more than 10-20% in population estimation for M. giganteus and M. robustus, and an unknown bias for the other species. The use of broad vegetation information on 1 : 100 000 map sheets for habitat stratification limited the scale at which analysis of sightability could be undertaken. Macropus giganteus and M. robustus are commercially harvested in the western region. Annual commercial harvest rates in the three years prior to the survey were conservatively estimated to be less than 0.9% for M. robustus and less than 5.4% for M. giganteus.
DHCFL: Dual Head Clustering Based on Fuzzy Logic for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are constructed by interconnecting miniature sensor nodes for monitoring the environment uninterrupted. These miniature nodes are having the sensing, processing and communication capability in a smaller scale powered by a battery unit. Proper energy conservation is required for the entire system. Clustering mechanism in WSN advances the lifetime and stability in the network. It achieves data aggregation and reduces the number of data transmission to the Base station (BS). But the Cluster Head (CH) nodes are affected by rapid energy depletion problem due to overload. A CH node spends its energy for receiving data from its member nodes, aggregation and transmission to the BS. In CH election, multiple overlapping factors makes it difficult and inefficient which costs the lifetime of the network. In recent years, Fuzzy Logic is widely used for CH election mechanism for WSN. But the underlying problem of the CHs node continues. In this research work, a new clustering algorithm DHCFL is proposed which elects two CHs for a cluster which shares the load of a conventional CH node. Data reception and aggregation will be done by CH aggregator (CH-A) node and data transmission to the BS will be carried over by CH relay (CH-R) node. Both CH-A and CH-R nodes are elected through fuzzy logic which addresses the uncertainty in the network too. The proposed algorithm DHCFL is compared and tested in different network scenarios with existing clustering algorithms and it is observed that DHCFL outperforms other algorithms in all the network scenarios.
Eccentric binary black hole mergers in globular clusters hosting intermediate-mass black holes

Globular clusters (GCs) may harbour intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) at their centres. In these dynamically active environments, stellar-mass black holes (SBHs) sink to the centre soon after formation, due to dynamical friction and start interacting among themselves and with the central IMBH. Likely, some of the SBHs will form bound systems with the IMBH. A fraction of those will be triple systems composed of binary SBHs and the IMBH acting as a third distant perturber. If the SBH binary orbit is sufficiently inclined, it can develop Lidov–Kozai (LK) oscillations, which can drive the system to high eccentricities and eventually to a merger due to gravitational wave (GW) emission on short time-scales. In this work, we focus on the dynamics of the IMBH–SBH–SBH triples and illustrate that these systems can be possible sources of GWs. A distinctive signature of this scenario is that a considerable fraction of these mergers are highly eccentric when entering the LIGO band (10 Hz). Assuming that $\sim 20{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of GCs host IMBHs and a GC density in the range $n_{{\rm GC}}=0.32\! -\! 2.31\, \mathrm{Mpc}^{-3}$, we have estimated a rate $\Gamma =0.06\! -\! 0.46\, \mathrm{Gpc}^{-3}\, \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$ of these events. This suggests that dynamically driven binary SBH mergers in this scenario could contribute to the merger events observed by LIGO/VIRGO. Full N-body simulations of GCs harbouring IMBHs are highly desirable to give a more precise constrain on this scenario.
Suicide & Homosexual Teens

My fight to live the life I want, and I see it in my gayfriends' lives, is so hard. My parents refuse to accept me. Their religion comes before me. I feel like they don't care about how I feel. It really gets lonely. My parents have told me if I live this lifestyle they would rather be dead. They told me that they wish that I was never born. I've run away several times, I've used drugs to satisfy my needs for love, but the drugs became overwhelming. I really need someone to talk to. Next school year I'm going back to my old school where everyone knows I'm gay. It's gonna be so hard. All of this pressure has drove me over the wall to where life seems meaningless. I'm so confused. I'm on so much medication for depression and anxiety, I've been to mental institutions for suicide. It's just the confusion that is getting to me. I'm trapped in a room with windows and doors, but they're all locked and barred. E-mail message posted by a 17-year-old boy; edited for space (from Bagley & Tremblay 1997a).
Therapeutic Options in Retinopathy of Prematurity

Preterm babies may develop retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) in various stages. Most of them regress spontaneously without treatment, and a small proportion develops severe ROP that can lead to visual loss if not treated promptly. Less than 10% of the ROP cases require treatment worldwide. Before 1980, the only treatment for ROP was vitreoretinal surgery for retinal detachment in advanced stages of the disease. Around this time, cryotherapy started to be used in order to ablate the peripheral retina and interrupt the pathogenic chain in ROP, but there were no indications correlated with the severity of the disease. Few years later, cryotherapy was replaced by indirect laser photocoagulation of the nonvascular retina that became the golden standard of treatment for ROP. During the last years, efforts have been made in order to find therapeutic methods to induce the regression of new vessels with minimal side effects. Among these, intravitreal injections of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) became increasingly popular in the treatment of ROP worldwide. Personal experience in treating aggressive posterior ROP (APROP) with laser versus intravitreal anti-VEGF is presented. Intravitreal anti-VEGF proved its superiority in treating APROP as compared to laser, with no systemic and/or local side effects in our series.