Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
50 Years Ago: Duncan Ironmonger’s New Commodities and Consumer Behaviour and Its Relationship with Lancaster’s ‘New Approach’ to Consumer Behaviour

Abstract This paper explores the origins, contributions, limitations, and impact of Duncan Ironmonger’s book New Commodities and Consumer Behaviour (published in 1972), and its similarities with, and differences from, Kelvin Lancaster’s ‘new approach’ to consumer behaviour. It does this with the aid of material from an interview given by Ironmonger to one of the authors in 2015, reviews of his book, its citation details, and a re-reading of the book in light of the interview. It argues that there are substantial differences between the analyses offered by Ironmonger and Lancaster and that, despite them both offering models of choice focused on product attributes, their methods were profoundly different. The paper concludes by considering lessons of their different publication strategies, and their different impacts, for early-career researchers.
Role of the Window Length for Myoelectric Pattern Recognition in Detecting User Intent of Motion

In this study, the problem of electromyographic (EMG) based motion intention detection (MID) of upper limb was addressed, investigating the role of the window length for feature extraction. Two pattern recognition experiments were performed taking into account eight healthy subjects. The first involved the direct comparison of classification performances using feature computed over 150, 100 and 50 ms window length for eight class of shoulder movements. In the second one, a feature fusing scheme, based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA), was used to investigate whether pattern recognition architectures (PRAs), i.e. support vector machine, were able to boost their performances when 50 ms features were used as testing set. The rationale behind such investigations grounds on the lack of consensus regarding the most suitable window length for myoelectic pattern recognition. No drop of accuracy was observed in the first experiment for the three different windows length, maintaining values around 90%. Moreover, as observed in the second experiment, the CCA feature fusing scheme enhanced the performances of the PRAs when working over 50 ms features, reaching comparable results with feature at 150 ms. The proposed approach can be suitable for MID in real-time scenario, where the computational represents a central issue.
Comparing Traditional Commerce to E-Commerce and IoT and the Understanding of Trust for the Consumer

The scenario has changed during the last few years. Introducing an “e” in front of another function in the organization appears to be the golden formula for a never-ending meteoric rise. The development of E-commerce is due to this huge transformation. It is an Internet-based commerce system that allows you to purchase and sell things electronically. It is the technology’s most important application. It lowers the transaction expenses associated with buying. It benefits the globalization. It also cuts minimizing the amount of hours spent buying. Commerce is defined as an activity of buying and selling without the use of any communications technology aid. Despite all of the aforementioned characteristics of E-commerce, conventional commerce in India has not loosened its grip on the market. Consumers choose between the two types of commerce based on their preferences. However, the question arises as to which of the two methods of purchase is more trusted by the majority of buyers. To understand customer confidence in the two types of commerce, this study, entitled “Comparative Study of E-Commerce and Commerce Related to Customer Trust,” provides information about the economic situation in which we are tracking ourselves. Provide. While establishing trust in an electronic commerce system is more troublesome than it is in friendly buying, it is significantly more basic for success. Trust is a drawn-out asset that is hard to earn and simple to lose. The aim of this work is to propose a novel conceptual framework for consumer purchasing trust that emphasizes the stages involved in establishing online customer trust. The interactions between consumers, suppliers, and referees that must occur prior to moving from one stage to the next from one stage of trust to the next this model can assist us in better understanding cybertrust. Provide techniques for business owners to gain customer trust, and point them in the right direction in the future fact checking in this effective technological field.
New Results - Dissipation-induced continuous quantum error correction for superconducting circuits

Quantum error correction (QEC) is a crucial step towards long coherence times required for efficient quantum information processing. One major challenge in this direction concerns the fast real-time analysis of error syndrome measurements and the associated feedback control. Recent proposals on autonomous QEC (AQEC) have opened new perspectives to overcome this difficulty. Here, we design an AQEC scheme based on quantum reservoir engineering adapted to superconducting qubits. We focus on a three-qubit bit-flip code, where three transmon qubits are dispersively coupled to a few low-$Q$ resonator modes. By applying only continuous-wave drives of fixed but well-chosen frequencies and amplitudes, we engineer an effective interaction Hamiltonian to evacuate the entropy created by eventual bit-flip errors. We provide a full analytical and numerical study of the protocol while introducing the main limitations on the achievable error correction rates.
A Dual-Arm Robot That Manipulates Heavy Plates With the Support of a Vacuum Lifter

A vacuum lifter is widely used to hold and pick up large, heavy, and flat objects. Conventionally, when using a vacuum lifter, a human worker watches the state of a running vacuum lifter and adjusts the object’s pose to maintain balance. In this work, we propose using a dual-arm robot to replace the human workers and develop planning and control methods for a dual-arm robot to raise a heavy plate with the help of a vacuum lifter. The methods help the robot determine its actions by considering the vacuum lifer’s suction position and suction force limits. The essence of the methods is two-fold. First, we build a Manipulation State Graph (MSG) to store the weighted logical relations of various plate contact states and robot/vacuum lifter configurations, and search the graph to plan efficient and low-cost robot manipulation sequences. Second, we develop a velocity-based impedance controller to coordinate the robot and the vacuum lifter when lifting an object. With its help, a robot can follow the vacuum lifter’s motion and realize compliant robot-vacuum lifter collaboration. Real-world experiments are carried out to investigate the proposed planning and control methods. The results show that a robot can effectively and flexibly work together with a vacuum lifter to manipulate large and heavy plate-like objects with the methods’ support. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the vacuum lifters used for transporting heavy plates in a factory that produces building materials. In the factory, a human worker attaches the suction cup of a vacuum lifter to a plate and controls the vacuum lifter to pull the plate up. Meanwhile, another human worker moves and lifts the plate to a goal pose, following the vacuum lifter while maintaining balance. The job is dangerous as the plate is heavy, and the vacuum lifter is not always strong enough to hold the plate firmly. Inspired by the usage and safety problem, we in this paper develop a planning and control method for a dual-arm robot to replace humans. The robot coordinates its motion to work with the vacuum lifter and performs lifting tasks. The vacuum lifter could remain operated by a human worker or be actuated by signals from the dual-arm robot or other third-party machines. The work is complementary to our previous study that developed planners for robots to use pulley blocks. They together provide extensive knowledge for using low-payload collaboratively robots to manipulate heavy plates.
Hankel Matrix Based Algorithm for Cardiac Pulse Wave Base and Peak Lines Correction

In the paper we proposed a new method for the cardiac pulse wave base lines and peak lines estimation and correction. The proposed method is mainly directed, but not limited, to the Electrical Bio-Impedance (EBI) and Central Aortic Pressure (CAP) signals. However, the method can be extended to other signal kinds and application fields. Definitely, the proposed method can be applied to the PPG signals and blood pressure waveforms measured from different body locations, not only central aortic pressure. The base line correction approach, instead of filtering, is selected due to the physiological peculiarities of the cardiac cycle. The minimum value of a cardiac signal, which is the diastolic blood pressure (minimum pressure in the cardiac cycle), varies much less than the systolic peak value. Thus, in our research work we use the base line correction (subtraction) instead of mean value subtraction (filtering) to get cardiac signal's component. The proposed method is based on combination of the mathematical morphology and on the Hankel matrix. The method does not need separate estimates of peaks and valleys of the waveforms. Moreover, for correctly estimated signal frequency, the proposed method estimates the base line and the peak line as a piecewise lines between signal's minima or maxima. The result is a corrected cardiac signal that does not need additional processing, based on piecewise estimates of the base and peak lines.
Implementation of an Interactive Crowd-Enhanced Content Management System for Tourism Development

This paper investigated the role of interactive tourist mobile apps in tourism development. The researchers presented the e-Tracer application, which was developed taking into consideration the recent advantages in mobile computing, the importance of user-generated content and the needs of northern Greece and the lower Balkan countries. Apart from crowd-based content creation, a new generation of apps for tourism development may include additional components like serious games for tourists, map-based navigation systems and augmented/virtual reality applications, in order to offer memorable user experiences for tourists. An agile content management system design methodology was followed by taking into account the needs of alternative tourist destinations, small to medium sized real-world museums and driver rest areas located around highways which connect cross-country destinations in the lower Balkan countries and Turkey. This work positioned the role of interactive crowd-enhanced platforms for content management of tourist-related information in tourism development, economic growth and sustainability of the Egnatia motorway surrounding areas in Greece. Keywords: mobile computing, content management systems, recommender systems, serious games, virtual/augmented reality, tourism development
A New Reconfigured Electricity Market Bidding Strategy in View of Players' Concerns

The electricity market has become a competitive model due to generation, transmission, distribution, and large-scale investments in microgrids where no electricity supplier intends to set the price. However, the competition itself provides opportunities for the buyer to be able to experience more profit. Based on the available optimal bidding model, the supplier can only offer the final bid. Hence, active participation on the demand side creates an efficient and reasonable electricity market, and also promotes additional optimal allocation of economic resources. This article has concentrated over the final marginal bidding price and creating an optimal bidding strategy for consumers. It has specifically focused and proposed a new optimized model for electricity market bidding to improve and obtain a maximum turnover and profit for players. Since the solution of the aforementioned issue is inadequate due to multiple decision variables in mathematical and classical methods; a new enhanced Harris Hawks optimization (HHO) is proposed. Trapping into local optimum point can be occurred in different optimization algorithms, while the proposed model has simple and efficient structure, without derivative operator, which is integrated with mathematical techniques to increase local and global search abilities. The standard HHO algorithm is utilized to increase the probability of entrapment in local optima through increasing the number of optimization variables; however, the challenge of large number of variables is resolved through proposing a novel local/global operators. The proposed model is examined with a standard IEEE system in 2-scenarios, with symmetric and asymmetric information through finding the optimal solution desirably.
Starbursts Triggers, Nature, and Evolution Les Houches School, September 17-27, 1996

Fundamental Aspects of Star Formation in Galaxies. - From Giant Molecular Clouds to Compact Cores. - Elements of Hydrodynmaics Applied to the Interstellar Medium. - Isolated and Clustered Star Formation: Observations and Theoretical Models. - Stellar Physics and Starburst Evolution. - Starburst Triggering and Environmental Effects. - From Star to Galaxy Formation.
Integrating corpus-based and NLP approach to extract terminology and domain-oriented information: an example of US military corpus

Within the modern information, communication and technology (ICT), seeking high efficient and accurate corpus-based approaches to process natural language data (NLD) is critical. Traditional corpus-based approaches for processing corpus (i.e. the collected NLD) mainly focused on quantifying and ranking words for assisting human in extracting keywords. However, traditional corpus-based approaches cannot identify the meanings behind the words to properly extract terminologies nor their information. To address this issue, the main objective of this paper is to propose an integrated linguistic analysis approach that combines two corpus-based approaches and a rule-based natural language processing (NLP) approach to extract and identify terminologies and create the text database for extracting deeper domain-oriented information by using the terminologies as channels to retrieve core information from the target corpus. Military domain is an uncommon research field and often classified as confidential data, which caused little researches to focus on. Nevertheless, military information is vital to national security and should not be ignored. Hence, to verify the proposed approach in extracting terminologies and information of the terminologies, the researchers adopt the US Army field manual (FM) 8-10-6 as the target corpus and empirical case. Compared with AntConc 3.5. 8 and Tongpoon-Patanasorn’s hybrid approach, the results indicate that from the perspectives of terminology identification, texts database creation, domain knowledge extraction, only the proposed approach can handle all these issues.
Polymer Dispersed Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Mixtures for Optical Time–Temperature Integrators

Low molecular weight cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) can be trapped as droplets or particles inside a polymer binder, forming polymer dispersed cholesteric liquid crystal (PDCLC) systems, which are typically used for smart windows, displays, and optical sensors. While dispersing a single CLC mixture via emulsification, rendering reflective PDCLC films upon drying with a stable optical response, is well studied, the incorporation of distinct microdroplets inside a PDCLC coating is barely explored. Here, structural colored PDCLC coatings are prepared by mixing distinctive thermosensitive photonic microdroplets, featuring an optical time–temperature response that is visualized as a reflective color loss or shift dependent on the composition of the CLC mixtures. The presented optical time–temperature response is induced by diffusion of CLCs between adjacent liquid crystal domains via interconnecting passageways, causing an irreversible optical response until homogeneous mixing is attained. Hence, blending distinct CLC microdroplets in a polymer matrix provides a facile and scalable method for fabricating optical time–temperature integrators; moreover, alternative optical time–temperature responses can be realized when adjusting the composition of the photonic mixtures, demonstrating the potential of this method to acquire novel photonic applications based on low molecular weight CLCs.
Analysis of hospital website contents for promoting medical tourism among accredited and non-Accredited hospitals

Hospital websites act as significant marketing channels for promoting and showing medical destinations, amenities, medical personnel, and services. It is believed that the accreditation status of hospitals assures the provision of quality care and adherence to high standards of patient safety practices. Hence, a cross-sectional analysis of hospital websites is performed to examine the association between the status of accreditation and hospital website content in promoting medical tourism. The contents of 111 hospitals’ websites were coded using an ‘ad-hoc Codebook’ that has five categories of website information summing to a total of 38 items and the total evaluation scores were calculated for each hospital. The findings show a significant difference in the 3 groups of hospitals. JCI accredited hospitals displayed most of the information on their websites significantly, followed by NABH accredited hospitals. Minimum information such as accommodation/travel arrangements and photos of the facilities were predominantly displayed on the websites of non-accredited hospitals. A high percentage of hospitals need improvement in the areas of admission and medical services follow-up through phone calls, email, or real-time chats.
A 32-Gb/s High-Swing PAM-4 Current-Mode Driver with Current-Bleeding Cascode Technique and Capacitive-Coupled Pre-drivers in 40-nm CMOS for Short-Reach Wireline Communications

This paper describes a 32-Gb/s high-swing PAM4 transmit driver for short-reach wireline communications. The proposed current-mode transmitter utilizes the current-bleeding cascode technique to achieve the 1.4-V differential peak-to-peak swing without violating breakdown constraints. The transmitter bandwidth is enhanced by capacitive-coupled pre-drivers to maximize the cursor amplitude and signal-to-noise ratio. The transmitter test chip is fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS process and occupies 0.004 mm2. The design achieves a 32-Gb/s data rate with 157-mV eye height and 2.3-pJ/bit energy efficiency.
Cointegration Rank Tests In Vector ARMA Models

This paper proposes several parametric hypothesis tests to determine the cointegration rank in multivariate time series expressed as vector ARMA models. The tests are constructed based on the instrumental variables (IV) method. It is established that adopting critical values for the standard Johansen likelihood ratio (LR) test is valid in that the same limiting distribution reached. Some Monte Carlo experiments also show that the proposed tests exhibit sufficiently desirable finite sample performances. JEL classification numbers: C32, C52.
Early Night Fog Prediction Using Liquid Water Content Measurement in the Monterey Bay Area

Fog is challenging to predict, and the accuracy of fog prediction may depend on location and time of day. Furthermore, accurate detection of fog is difficult, since, historically, it is often carried out based on visual observations which can be biased and are often not very frequent. Furthermore, visual observations are more challenging to make during the night. To overcome these limitations, we detected fog using FM-120 instruments, which continuously measured liquid water content in the air in the Monterey, California (USA), area. We used and compared the prediction performance of logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF) models each evening between 5 pm and 9 pm, which is often the time when advection fog is generated in this coastal region. The relative performances of the models depended on the hours between 5 pm and 9 pm, and the two models often generated different predictions. In such cases, a consensus approach was considered by revisiting the past performance of each model and weighting more heavily the more trustworthy model for a given hour. The LR resulted in a higher sensitivity (hit rate) than the RF model early in the evening, but the overall performance of the RF was usually better than that of the LR. The consensus approach provided more robust prediction performance (closer to a better accuracy level between the two methods). It was difficult to conclude which of the LR and RF models was superior consistently, and the consensus approach provided robustness in 3 and 2 h forecasts.
Polarization-multiplexed, dual-comb all-fiber mode-locked laser

Mode-locked fiber lasers that can simultaneously generate two asynchronous ultrashort pulse trains could play an attractive role as the alternative light sources for low-complexity dual-comb metrology applications. Although a few multiplexing schemes to realize such lasers have been proposed and demonstrated, here we investigate the lasing characteristics of a passively mode-locked fiber laser with a finite amount of intracavity birefringence. By introducing a section of polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber into the otherwise-non-PM-single-mode cavity, dual asynchronous pulses with nearly orthogonal states of polarization are generated. With a repetition rate difference of hundreds of hertz, the pulses have well-overlapped spectra and show typical features of polarization-locked vector solitons. It is demonstrated that under an anomalous or net normal dispersion regime, either dual vector solitons or dual dissipative vector solitons can be generated, respectively. Such polarization-multiplexed single single-cavity dual-comb lasers could find further uses in various applications in need of simple dual-comb system solutions.
Smart Prosthetic Knee for Above-Knee Amputees

In this paper, we proposed a smart prosthetic knee that is driven by a novel cam-leaf spring-MR damper mechanism (a) (CLS-MRD) and a DC motor. The DC motor can work as a generator to harvest energy and as an actuator to actively regulate the knee angle or provide positive work. The CLS-MRD can work in three modes by controlling the MR damper. When the MR damper is powered on to be knocked, the leaf spring is deformed by the cam to store energy and provide a bias torque to bear body weight (in the early stance phase). When the MR damper is powered on, but there is a relative motion between the damper piston and the damper housing, the CLS-MRD provides an adjustable damping force (in the late stance phase). When the MR damper is powered off, the CLS-MRD is released (in the swing phase). We have conducted preliminary testing on an above-knee amputee to validate the design.