Comparison of level discrimination, increment detection, and comodulation masking release in the audio- and envelope-frequency domains

In general, the temporal structure of stimuli must be considered to account for certain observations made in detection and masking experiments in the audio-frequency domain. Two such phenomena are (1) a heightened sensitivity to amplitude increments with a temporal fringe compared to gated level discrimination performance and (2) lower tone-in-noise detection thresholds using a modulated masker compared to those using an unmodulated masker. In the current study, translations of these two experiments were carried out to test the hypothesis that analogous cues might be used in the envelope-frequency domain. Pure-tone carrier amplitude-modulation (AM) depth-discrimination thresholds were found to be similar using both traditional gated stimuli and using a temporally modulated fringe for a fixed standard depth (m(s)=0.25) and a range of AM frequencies (4-64 Hz). In a second experiment, masked sinusoidal AM detection thresholds were compared in conditions with and without slow and regular fluctuations imposed on the instantaneous masker AM depth. Release from masking was obtained only for very slow masker fluctuations (less than 2 Hz). A physiologically motivated model that effectively acts as a first-order envelope change detector accounted for several, but not all, of the key aspects of the data

Detection of Spirocerca lupi and an unknown Trichinella-like nematode in raccoon (Procyon lotor).

The raccoon Procyon lotor (Carnivora: Procyonidae) is an invasive species of growing importance for the introduction of alien pathogens or as additional hosts for autochthonous pathogens in Europe, including zoonotic parasites. As the population is steadily increasing and outcompeting the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) in Germany, the consumption of raccoon meat raises concerns about pathogens they may transmit. Therefore the presence of Trichinella larvae was here investigated in muscle samples (n = 904) of raccoons from northern Germany. No Trichinella larvae were found, thus confirming the general low occurrence of this parasite in Germany. However, Spirocerca lupi (n = 12) and an unidentified Trichinella-like nematode (n = 1) were accidently detected in the examined samples. The first is not a zoonotic parasite but has a high veterinary relevance as it can cause severe diseases in dogs. It is the first documented autochthonous infection of this nematode in Germany. The larvae of an unidentified Trichinella-like nematode were found in high abundance in all examined muscles of one raccoon, though they could not be identified to species level. Histological investigation revealed intramuscular cystic structures. This is the largest study investigating muscular parasites of raccoons in Europe so far, which suggests that this invasive animal species is infected by S. lupi and by a yet unknown Trichinella -like parasite

ATHLETIC: An exoskeleton countermeasure exercise device forresistive and plyometric training in deep-space missions

Prolong exposure to weightlessness leads to loss of muscle and bone mass. Therefore, astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) currently perform mandatory daily exercises. ISS missions usually last 6 months, and future missions will become significantly longer when going, for example, to Mars. To that purpose, an exoskeleton-based exercise device, called ATHLETIC, was developed. The functionality and relevance of this device was evaluated in this study. Ten participants performed resistance exercises (squats) and plyometric exercises (countermovement jumps, reactive hops). Results showed that all participants were technically able to perform the intended exercises on ATHLETIC, albeit with reduced loading as compared to the reference exercises. This resulted in less mechanical performance and muscle activity. Due to the unfamiliar horizontal training axis, some participants had difficulty performing the movements correctly. Follow-up studies are required testing, whether an adequate number of practicing sessions could enable persons to approach the performances of reference measurements, and whether further improvements of the device are needed to improve the exercise performance

FUmanoid team description 2009

Abstract. This document describes hardware and software of the robots developed by the "FUmanoid" Team for the RoboCup competitions to be held in Graz, Austria 2009. The robot has 22 actuated degrees of freedom based on Dynamixel RX28, and RX64 servos. Central Processing, including Machine vision, Planning and control is performed using a Gumstix Verdex 6LP which is an ARM based 600MHz platform. Planning algorithms are organized in a new structure called Concurrent Scenario based Planning (CSBP). This paper explains the software and hardware used for the robot as well as control and stabilization methods developed by our team

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A model-based approach to solve decision problems caused by the complexity of the architectures of IT infrastructure in financial services

Diese Arbeit stellt ein begründetes Gestaltungskonzept vor, das die Infrastrukturarchitekten eines Finanzdienstleisters beim Entwurf neuer IT-Architekturen unterstützt. Das Gestaltungskonzept fokussiert primär die drei Problemdimensionen Komplexität der Infrastrukturarchitektur, Wissens-komplexität und Wissensvolumen sowie Historische Entwicklung der Finanzdienstleistungsinformatik. Durch die Adaption des Wiederverwendungskonzepts reduziert das vorgestellte Konzept zunächst die Komplexität des Architekturentwurfs im Einzelnen, um später die Komplexität der Infrastruktur im Ganzen reduzieren zu können. Hierzu wird die historisch gewachsene IT-Architekturlandschaft eines Finanzdienstleisters erfasst, dekomponiert und kategorisiert. In einem zweiten Schritt wird aus der Vielzahl der Infrastrukturkomponenten eine Selektion der zukünftig zu verwendenden Komponenten ausgewählt und durch qualitative Eigenschaften beschrieben. Die einzelnen Infrastrukturkomponenten werden in einem dritten Schritt zu qualitativ beschriebenen Architekturmustern komponiert, die den Plattformen des klassischen Maschinenbaus ähneln und der Konfiguration neuer Architekturen dienen. Zur Darstellung der Zusammenhänge der Infrastrukturarchitektur wird ein Meta-Modell entwickelt, dessen Anwendung durch ein Prozessmodell beschrieben wird. Das Prozessmodell besteht aus den drei entkoppelten Phasen Einfüh-rung, Anwendung und Pflege der Methodik. Der Eintritt in eine jeweilige Phase ist Ereignisgesteuert, so dass eine kontinuierliche Pflege der Architekturmuster erfolgt. Das Ergebnis des wiederholten Phasendurchlaufs ist ein Standard-Infrastruktur-Katalog, der zum einen die zu konfigurierbaren Architekturmustern komponierten, vorselektierten Infrastrukturkomponenten qualitativ (d. h. typisch, architektonisch und leistungstechnisch) beschreibt, und der zum anderen den Infrastrukturkomponenten und Architekturmustern strategische Entscheidungsregeln zuweist.This document presents a reasonable methodology with the indent to assist IT infrastructure architects creating new architectural blueprints. The methodology primarily focuses on the following three dimensions of the research problem: complexity of the IT infrastructure architecture, knowledge complexity and evolution of information management in Fi-nancial Services. Adapting the concept of reuse in general the introduced concept re-duces the complexity of an individual architectural blueprint first before reducing the complexity of the IT infrastructure enterprise wide. To achieve this goal, the concept identifies the the historical groth of the IT infrastructure of a financial services institute, then decomposes and categorizes it into its most fundamental building blocks. The second step involves identifying key, sustainable infrastructure components then qualifying and classifying them by quality attributes. Within a third step the concept composes the preselected infrastructure components to architectural patterns that are similar to the platforms known in classical engineering and that are used to configure new architectures. To describe the coherences inside the architectural blue-print the introduced concept creates a meta model which appliance is described by a process model. The process model consists of three decoupled stages: initialization, utilization and maintenance of the methodology. Entering a stage is event-driven. Thus, the continuous maintance of architectural patterns is guaranteed. The result of a repeated stage passing is a standardized infrastructure catalogue which describes the configurable architectural patterns composed by preselected infrastructure components on a qualitative level (i. e. type based, architecture based and capacity based). Additionally the methodology presented assigns strategic deci-sion rules to infrastructure components and architectural patterns