Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MULTI CHANNEL MAC FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

In this work, Sensor Multi Channel (SMC) Medium Access Control (MAC) has been proposed for wireless sensor networks. The SMC MAC uses a dedicated control channel and multiple data channels. The effective solution for the multi channel hidden terminal problem and missing receiver problem has been proposed in this work. The performance of the SMC MAC has been compared with that of the single channel CSMA/CA MAC by taking the throughput and latency as performance metrics. It has been shown that the multi channel MAC gives high throughput and less latency in high traffic conditions.
Examining the Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Visual and Mental Workload Using Ocular Activity Variables

Abstract : The Mental Workload construct is examined along with Visual Workload in order to discriminate the relationship between the converging constructs. Six ocular activity variables were measured in order to test their diagnostic and sensitivity properties with regards to Visual and Mental Workload in a UH-60M upgrade simulated flight test. Three pilot crews flew six flight scenarios in which subjective and physiological mental workload measures were implemented across Task Difficulty and Task Differences (pilot on-controls versus pilot off-controls). Results indicate less subjective mental workload for the Hover task compared to the Action on Contact task and greater fixation duration variability for the lower difficulty task. Blink interval was greater for the pilot on-controls and saccadic extent was greater for the pilot off-controls. Results suggest that blink interval and saccadic extent are diagnostic of different aspects of visual workload, whereas fixation duration variability is sensitive to mental workload.
Customers’ perceived justice, emotions, direct and indirect reactions to service recovery: Moderating effects of recovery efforts

ABSTRACT This study investigates customers’ direct and indirect reactions to different levels of service recovery efforts using a proposed model incorporating perceived justice and emotions. This research proposes two forms of customers’ direct reactions after a service recovery: condemnation and praise. Based on a scenario-based online experiment with 395 casual dining customers in the United States, this research finds that distributive justice and procedural justice influence customers’ indirect reactions (e.g., revisit intention, word-of-mouth) both directly and indirectly via emotions. Interactional justice influences customers’ direct reactions both directly and indirectly through its prior effects on emotions. The moderating test on levels of service recovery efforts reveals that a high level of service recovery efforts significantly reduces the negative effects of emotions on customers’ intention to condemn and increases their intention to praise compared with a low level of service recovery efforts.
Wireless solutions for improving health and safety working conditions in industrial environments

Wireless communications will play a key role in the development of the Factories of the Future. Most applications are initially foreseen to manage and control industrial processes and equipment. However, wireless industrial communications can also have a major impact in improving the workers' health and safety conditions. To demonstrate such impact, this paper presents an heterogeneous wireless industrial testbed and the implementation of two safety use cases (collision avoidance and working at height). The use cases have been tested in a factory where the potential of wireless industrial communications to improve health and safety has been demonstrated.
Hiding cusps in cores: kinematics of disc galaxies in triaxial dark matter haloes

We study the kinematics of gaseous discs in triaxial dark matter haloes using the closed-loop orbit solutions in non-axisymmetric potentials. The orbits are in general non-circular and, for a given triaxiality, their ellipticity depends on the ratio of escape to circular velocities, V 2 esc /V 2 c . This ratio increases steeply towards the centre for cold dark matter (CDM) halo density profiles, implying that even minor deviations from spherical symmetry may induce large deviations from circular orbits in the velocity field of a gaseous disc, especially near the centre. This result suggests that caution should be exercised when interpreting constraints on the presence of density cusps in the dark halo derived from the innermost velocity profile. Simulated long-slit rotation curves vary greatly in shape, depending primarily on the viewing angle of the disc and on its orientation relative to the principal axes of the potential. 'Solid-body' rotation curves - typically interpreted as a signature of a constant density core in the dark matter distribution - are often obtained when the slit samples velocities near the major axis of the closed-loop orbits. Triaxial potentials imprint specific symmetries in 2D velocity fields, generally inducing 'twists' in the isovelocity contours and antisymmetric patterns in opposite quadrants. We suggest that triaxial haloes may be responsible for the variety of shapes of long-slit rotation curves of low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies, as well as for the complex central kinematics of LSBs, which are sometimes ascribed to the presence of 'radial motions' in the gas. We argue that LSB rotation curves might be reconciled with the structure of CDM haloes once the effects of halo triaxiality on the dynamics of gaseous discs are properly taken into account.
Magnetic resonance imaging of sacroiliitis in early seronegative spondylarthropathy. Abnormalities correlated to clinical and laboratory findings.

OBJECTIVE To compare a new MRI scoring system of the sacroiliac joints (SIJs) in early spondylarthropathy (SpA) with clinical and laboratory parameters. METHODS Forty-one patients (24 males, 17 females) with a median age of 26 yr and a median duration of inflammatory low back pain of 19 months were included. They all fulfilled the ESSG-criteria for SpA. The patients were examined by MRI of the SIJs using a new scoring system. Clinical examinations, biochemical tests, functional score (BASFI), and pain score (BASDAI) were also performed. RESULTS 95% of the patients had inflammation and/or destructive bone changes of the SIJs at MRI. No correlation was found between MRI pathology and clinical findings. MRI demonstrated significantly greater severity of both inflammation and destruction of the SIJs in HLA B27 positive patients than in the HLA B27 negative patients. CONCLUSIONS In patients with early SpA, MRI was able to detect inflammatory and destructive changes of the SIJs, but the changes were not associated to clinical findings. Our results suggest a role of MRI in the detection of early-stage sacroiliitis.
The Major Immediate-Early Protein IE2 of Human Cytomegalovirus Is Sufficient to Induce Proteasomal Degradation of CD83 on Mature Dendritic Cells

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is the prototypic beta-herpesvirus and widespread throughout the human population. While infection is asymptomatic in healthy individuals, it can lead to high morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised persons. Importantly, HCMV evolved multiple strategies to interfere with immune cell function in order to establish latency in infected individuals. As mature DCs (mDCs) are antigen-presenting cells able to activate naïve T cells they play a crucial role during induction of effective antiviral immune responses. Interestingly, earlier studies demonstrated that the functionally important mDC surface molecule CD83 is down-regulated upon HCMV infection resulting in a reduced T cell stimulatory capacity of the infected cells. However, the viral effector protein and the precise mechanism of HCMV-mediated CD83 reduction remain to be discovered. Using flow cytometric analyses, we observed significant down-modulation of CD83 surface expression becoming significant already 12 h after HCMV infection. Moreover, Western bot analyses revealed that, in sharp contrast to previous studies, loss of CD83 is not restricted to the membrane-bound molecule, but also occurs intracellularly. Furthermore, inhibition of the proteasome almost completely restored CD83 surface expression during HCMV infection. Results of infection kinetics and cycloheximide-actinomycin D-chase experiments, strongly suggested that an HCMV immediate early gene product is responsible for the induction of CD83 down-modulation. Consequently, we were able to identify the major immediate early protein IE2 as the viral effector protein that induces proteasomal CD83 degradation.
Varicocele and male infertility: an evidence based review

Varicoceles are present in 15% of the normal male population and in approximately 40% of men presenting with infertility. The preponderance of experimental data from clinical and animal models demonstrates a deleterious effect of varicoceles on spermatogenesis. Testicular temperature elevation and oxidative stress appear to play an important role in varicocele-induced testicular dysfunction, although the exact pathophysiology is not yet completely understood. The American Urological Association and American Society of Reproductive Medicine jointly convened Best Policy Practice Groups for Male Infertility and recently stated, “Varicocele repairs may be considered the primary treatment option when a man with a varicocele has suboptimal semen quality and a normal female partner. ” They considered percutaneous embolization and surgery for varicocele treatment and noted that most experts performed inguinal or subinguinal microsurgical repairs to maximize preservation of arterial and lymphatic vessels while reducing the chances of persistence or recurrence. Although these comments represent the considered opinion of 12 experts and 125 consultants in the field of male infertility, anyone familiar with varicoceles knows that discussion of the pathophysiology and management continues to be hotly debated. This review offers recommendations regarding the best infertility treatment for the man with a varicocele: assisted reproduction or varicocelectomy.
Cosmology from cosmic shear with Dark Energy Survey science verification data

We present the first constraints on cosmology from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), using weak lensing measurements from the preliminary Science Verification (SV) data. We use 139 square degrees of SV data, which is less than 3% of the full DES survey area. Using cosmic shear 2-point measurements over three redshift bins we find sigma8(Omegam/0.3 )0.5=0.81 ±0.06 (68% confidence), after marginalizing over 7 systematics parameters and 3 other cosmological parameters. We examine the robustness of our results to the choice of data vector and systematics assumed, and find them to be stable. About 20% of our error bar comes from marginalizing over shear and photometric redshift calibration uncertainties. The current state-of-the-art cosmic shear measurements from CFHTLenS are mildly discrepant with the cosmological constraints from Planck CMB data; our results are consistent with both data sets. Our uncertainties are ˜30 % larger than those from CFHTLenS when we carry out a comparable analysis of the two data sets, which we attribute largely to the lower number density of our shear catalogue. We investigate constraints on dark energy and find that, with this small fraction of the full survey, the DES SV constraints make negligible impact on the Planck constraints. The moderate disagreement between the CFHTLenS and Planck values of sigma8(Omegam/0.3 )0.5 is present regardless of the value of w .
Beta cell function after weight loss: a clinical trial comparing gastric bypass surgery and intensive lifestyle intervention

Objective The effects of various weight loss strategies on pancreatic beta cell function remain unclear. We aimed to compare the effect of intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI) and Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (RYGB) on beta cell function. Design One year controlled clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT00273104). Methods One hundred and nineteen morbidly obese participants without known diabetes from the MOBIL study (mean (s.d.) age 43.6 (10.8) years, body mass index (BMI) 45.5 (5.6) kg/m2, 84 women) were allocated to RYGB (n=64) or ILI (n=55). The patients underwent repeated oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTTs) and were categorised as having either normal (NGT) or abnormal glucose tolerance (AGT). Twenty-nine normal-weight subjects with NGT (age 42.6 (8.7) years, BMI 22.6 (1.5) kg/m2, 19 women) served as controls. OGTT-based indices of beta cell function were calculated. Results One year weight reduction was 30 % (8) after RYGB and 9 % (10) after ILI (P<0.001). Disposition index (DI) increased in all treatment groups (all P<0.05), although more in the surgery groups (both P<0.001). Stimulated proinsulin-to-insulin (PI/I) ratio decreased in both surgery groups (both P<0.001), but to a greater extent in the surgery group with AGT at baseline (P<0.001). Post surgery, patients with NGT at baseline had higher DI and lower stimulated PI/I ratio than controls (both P<0.027). Conclusions Gastric bypass surgery improved beta cell function to a significantly greater extent than ILI. Supra-physiological insulin secretion and proinsulin processing may indicate excessive beta cell function after gastric bypass surgery.
Robust Decentralized Detection and Social Learning in Tandem Networks

We study a tandem of agents who make decisions about an underlying binary hypothesis, where the distribution of the agent observations under each hypothesis comes from an uncertainty class defined by a 2-alternating capacity. We investigate both decentralized detection rules, where agents collaborate to minimize the error probability of the final agent, and social learning rules, where each agent minimizes its own local minimax error probability. We then extend our results to the infinite tandem network, and derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the uncertainty classes for the minimax error probability to converge to zero when agents know their positions in the tandem. On the other hand, when agents do not know their positions in the network, we study the cases where agents collaborate to minimize the asymptotic minimax error probability, and where agents seek to minimize their worst-case minimax error probability (over all possible positions in the tandem). We show that asymptotic learning of the true hypothesis is no longer possible in these cases, and derive characterizations for the minimax error performance.
Decreasing the false alarm rate of arrhythmias in intensive care using a machine learning approach

We present a novel algorithm for classifying true and false alarms of five life-threatening arrhythmias in intensive care. This algorithm was entered in the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2015 Reducing False Arrhythmia Alarms in the ICU. The algorithm performs a binary classification of the alarms for a specified arrhythmia type by combining signal quality information and physiological features from multiple sources, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), photoplethysmogram (PPG), and arterial blood pressure (ABP). Signals were selected for feature computation by first assessing the quality for available signals. Random Forest classifiers were trained separately for every type of arrhythmia with arrhythmia-specific features. Hence, the complete algorithm leverages five different predictive models. Classification sensitivities of true alarms 75-99 % (average 93 %) on the training set with cross-validation and 22-100 %(average 90 %) on the unrevealed test set. Classification specificities on the training and test set were 76-94% (average 80%) and 75-100% (average 82%), respectively. The best performance was for extreme bradycardia, whereas the poorest results were for ventricular arrhythmias. The results are for the real-time category when only information prior to the alarm is considered. The final challenge score was 75.54.
Neurological complications in Chikungunya fever.

OBJECTIVE The present prospective study was undertaken to study the clinical manifestations and mainly neurological complication of an acute febrile illness termed chikungunya which has recently attacked india after 43 years. METHOD This prospective study has been conducted in hospitalised patients admitted in government and private hospitals of Kota city from August 2006 to October 2006. Patients showing neurological involvement with typical clinical picture of chikungunya infection were studied in detail and followed up for improvement and any permanent damage or death. RESULTS Apart from typical clinical triad of high grade fever, arthralgia and rash of chikungunya infection we have observed a spectrum of neurological abnormalities in terms of altered mental functions, seizures, focal neurological deficit with abnormal CT scan of head and altered CSF biochemistry. Permanent neurological sequelae and even death has occurred. CONCLUSION Typical clinical history of chikungunya infection, neurological complications with associated CSF abnormalities, supportive laboratory evidences, positive chikungunya IgM card test, exclusion of other causes and known predilection of arboviruses for CNS infection allows us to conclude the diagnosis of study cases as Chikungunya Encephalitis.
On evaluating the impact of the refactoring of architectural problems on software quality

We can improve software quality in different ways and by removing different kinds of problems. In this paper, we focus our attention on architectural problems, as architectural smells or antipatterns represent, we remove some of these problems through refactoring steps and we check the impact that the refactoring has on different quality metrics. In particular, we focus our attention on some Quality Indexes computed by four tools. These tools are used also for the detection of the architectural problems. We present the results and outline different issues related to the impact of the refactoring of these architectural problems on the Quality Indexes and the difficulties in the choice of the problems to be refactored.
Upper limit on the flux of photons with energies above 1019 eV using the Telescope Array surface detector

We search for ultra-high energy photons by analyzing geometrical properties of shower fronts of events registered by the Telescope Array surface detector. By making use of an event-by-event statistical method, we derive upper limits on the absolute flux of primary photons with energies above 1019, 1019.5, and 1020 eV based on the first three years of data taken. © 2013 American Physical Society.
Extension Preservation Theorems on Classes of Acyclic Finite Structures

A class of structures satisfies the extension preservation theorem if, on this class, every first-order sentence is preserved under extensions iff it is equivalent to an existential sentence. We consider different acyclicity notions for hypergraphs ($\gamma$-, $\beta$-, and $\alpha$-acyclicity and also acyclicity on hypergraph quotients) and estimate their influence on the validity of the extension preservation theorem on classes of finite structures. More precisely, we prove that the extension preservation theorem is satisfied for classes of finite structures having a $\gamma$-acyclic $k$-quotient that are closed under induced substructures and disjoint unions. We show that this is not the case for classes of $\beta$-acyclic structures. To achieve this, we make logical reductions from finite structures to their $k$-quotients and from $\gamma$-acyclic hypergraphs to acyclic graphs.
Hubs and Authorities in the World Trade Network Using a Weighted HITS Algorithm

We investigate the economic hubs and authorities of the world trade network (WTN) from to , an era of rapid economic globalization. Using a well-defined weighted hyperlink-induced topic search (HITS) algorithm, we can calculate the values of the weighted HITS hub and authority for each country in a conjugate way. In the context of the WTN, authority values are large for countries with significant imports from large hub countries, and hub values are large for countries with significant exports to high-authority countries. The United States was the largest economic authority in the WTN from to . The authority value of the United States has declined since , and China has now become the largest hub in the WTN. At the same time, China's authority value has grown as China is transforming itself from the “factory of the world” to the “market of the world. ” European countries show a tendency to trade mostly within the European Union, which has decreased Europe's hub and authority values. Japan's authority value has increased slowly, while its hub value has declined. These changes are consistent with Japan's transition from being an export-driven economy in its high economic growth era in the latter half of the twentieth century to being a more mature, economically balanced nation.
CisMapper: predicting regulatory interactions from transcription factor ChIP-seq data

Abstract Identifying the genomic regions and regulatory factors that control the transcription of genes is an important, unsolved problem. The current method of choice predicts transcription factor (TF) binding sites using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq), and then links the binding sites to putative target genes solely on the basis of the genomic distance between them. Evidence from chromatin conformation capture experiments shows that this approach is inadequate due to long-distance regulation via chromatin looping. We present CisMapper, which predicts the regulatory targets of a TF using the correlation between a histone mark at the TF's bound sites and the expression of each gene across a panel of tissues. Using both chromatin conformation capture and differential expression data, we show that CisMapper is more accurate at predicting the target genes of a TF than the distance-based approaches currently used, and is particularly advantageous for predicting the long-range regulatory interactions typical of tissue-specific gene expression. CisMapper also predicts which TF binding sites regulate a given gene more accurately than using genomic distance. Unlike distance-based methods, CisMapper can predict which transcription start site of a gene is regulated by a particular binding site of the TF.
Listening and Experiences of Interpersonal Transcendence

Interpersonal transcendence is a phenomenon marked by total immersion in an interaction, a deep sense of understanding, feelings of mutuality, new insight, and playfulness. Such experiences can be exhilarating, memorable, and rare. This study examines relationships between various listening dispositions and people’s propensity to experience interpersonal transcendence. Participants (N = 300) completed the Interpersonal Transcendence Scale (ITS) along with the Listening Styles Inventory (LSI), the Active Empathic Listening scale (AEL), and the Listening Styles Profile–Revised (LSP-R). Results indicated substantial relationships between ITS responses and the LSI and AEL. The LSP-R dimensions of Relational Listening and Analytical Listening were also related to ITS responses. Other results indicate that propensity to experience interpersonal transcendence is associated with minority group status and age.