Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coverage Gain and Device-to-Device User Density: Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has huge potential for capacity and coverage enhancements for next generation cellular networks. The number of potential nodes for D2D communication is an important parameter that directly impacts the system capacity. In this letter, we derive an analytic expression for average coverage probability of cellular user and corresponding number of potential D2D users. In this context, mature framework of stochastic geometry and Poisson point process have been used. The retention probability has been incorporated in Laplace functional to capture reduced path-loss and shortest distance criterion based D2D pairing. The numerical results show a close match between analytic expression and simulation setup.
Novel hyaluronic acid-chitosan nanoparticles for ocular gene therapy.

PURPOSE Gene therapy offers a promising alternative for the treatment of ocular diseases. However, the implementation of this type of therapy is actually hampered by the lack of an efficient ocular gene delivery carrier. The main objective of the present work was to assess the effectiveness and investigate the mechanism of action of a new type of nanoparticle made of two bioadhesive polysaccharides, hyaluronic acid (HA) and chitosan (CS), intended for the delivery of genes to the cornea and conjunctiva. METHODS The nanoparticles were obtained by a very mild ionotropic gelation technique. They were loaded with either the model plasmid pEGFP or pbeta-gal. Transfection and toxicological studies were conducted in human corneal epithelial (HCE) and normal human conjunctival (IOBA-NHC) cell lines. The mechanism of internalization of the nanoparticles by the corneal and conjunctival cells was investigated by using fluorescence confocal microscopy. RESULTS The nanoparticles had a size in the range of 100 to 235 nm and a zeta-potential of -30 to +28 mV. The results of the transfection studies showed that HA-CS nanoparticles were able to provide high transfection levels (up to 15% of cells transfected), without affecting cell viability. The confocal images indicated that HA-CS nanoparticles were internalized by fluid endocytosis and that this endocytic process was mediated by the hyaluronan receptor CD44. CONCLUSIONS The results give evidence of the potential of HA-CS nanoparticles for the targeting and further transfer of genes to the ocular surface.
Perceptual Surfaces : Towards a Human and Object Sensitive Interactive Display

This paper reports on our initial results of realizing a computer augmented wall called the HoloWall and HoloTable. Using an infrared camera located behind the wall, this system allows a user to interact with this computerized wall using fingers, hands, their body, or even a physical object such as a document folder.
Multiuser receivers for randomly spread signals: Fundamental limits with and without decision-feedback

Synchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems with randomly chosen spreading sequences and capacity-achieving forward error correction coding are analyzed in terms of spectral efficiency. Emphasis is on the penalties paid by applying single-user coding in conjunction with suboptimal multiuser receivers as opposed to optimal joint decoding which involves complexity that is exponential in the number of users times the codeword length. The conventional, the decorrelating, and the (re-encoded) decorrelating decision-feedback detectors are analyzed in the nonasymptotic case for spherical random sequences. The re-encoded minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) decision-feedback receiver achieving the same performance as joint multiuser decoding for equal power users is shown to be suboptimal in the case of equal rates.
Agricultural Subsidies , Human Capital Development and Poverty Reduction : Evidence from Rural Mexico *

The Mexican Government initiated two innovative programs cash transfer schemes in the last decade: PROGRESA, which is a national anti-poverty scheme directed at chronic rural poverty, and PROCAMPO, a scheme designed to compensate farmers for the negative price effects of NAFTA. The schemes differ in that PROGRESA is targeted at women and conditioned on schooling and health outcomes and PROCAMPO is generally targeted at men and conditioned on land use. The analysis of data collected for an evaluation of PROGRESA suggests that the overall level of food consumption and schooling is lower among PROGRESA households that also participate in PROCAMPO, due primarily to lower outcome levels at baseline. In addition, PROGRESA households attain higher levels of human capital investment after only one year of program participation compared to PROCAMPO households who have been in that program for four years. And while PROCAMPO households have higher levels of investment spending, this does not lead to significantly higher levels of consumption relative to PROGRESA households. On the other hand, PROGRESA appears to have induced an increase in investment spending even though its focus is on consumption and human capital accumulation. The overall conclusions are that program conditionality does influence longer-term (human capital) and medium term (productive) investment decisions, and the receipt of multiple forms of treatment by beneficiaries can affect the overall impact of each individual program.
Finger-Vein Image Enhancement Based on Combination of Gray-Level Grouping and Circular Gabor Filter

tion. Generally, finger-vein images have low contrast and uneven illumination due to finger-vein imaging manner and finger-shape variation. So, finger-vein enhancement is indispensable for reliable finger-vein network extraction. This paper proposes a new method based on combination of Gray-Level Grouping (GLG) and Circular Gabor Filter (CGF) for finger-vein image enhancement. First, GLG is used to reduce illumination fluctuation and improve the contrast of finger-vein images. Then a circular Gabor filter is used to further strengthen vein ridges in images. The experimental results show that this proposed method is capable of enhancing finger-vein image effectively.
The Ergogenic Effect of Recombinant Human Erythropoietin on V̇O2max Depends on the Severity of Arterial Hypoxemia

Treatment with recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEpo) induces a rise in blood oxygen-carrying capacity (CaO2) that unequivocally enhances maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O2max) during exercise in normoxia, but not when exercise is carried out in severe acute hypoxia. This implies that there should be a threshold altitude at which V̇O2max is less dependent on CaO2. To ascertain which are the mechanisms explaining the interactions between hypoxia, CaO2 and V̇O2max we measured systemic and leg O2 transport and utilization during incremental exercise to exhaustion in normoxia and with different degrees of acute hypoxia in eight rhEpo-treated subjects. Following prolonged rhEpo treatment, the gain in systemic V̇O2max observed in normoxia (6–7%) persisted during mild hypoxia (8% at inspired O2 fraction (FIO2) of 0.173) and was even larger during moderate hypoxia (14–17% at FIO2 = 0.153–0.134). When hypoxia was further augmented to FIO2 = 0.115, there was no rhEpo-induced enhancement of systemic V̇O2max or peak leg V̇O2. The mechanism highlighted by our data is that besides its strong influence on CaO2, rhEpo was found to enhance leg V̇O2max in normoxia through a preferential redistribution of cardiac output toward the exercising legs, whereas this advantageous effect disappeared during severe hypoxia, leaving augmented CaO2 alone insufficient for improving peak leg O2 delivery and V̇O2. Finally, that V̇O2max was largely dependent on CaO2 during moderate hypoxia but became abruptly CaO2-independent by slightly increasing the severity of hypoxia could be an indirect evidence of the appearance of central fatigue.
Plasma leptin concentration in patients with Type 2 diabetes: relationship to cardiovascular disease risk factors and insulin resistance

Aims The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship of obesity, leptin, insulin resistance and C‐reactive protein (CRP) with coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors in patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) with CHD compared with those with Type 2 DM without CHD.
"Wogs, Westies and Writing in Western Sydney": The reappropriating of labels and the teaching of Academic English

Students and educators at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) have long had to confront issues of social isolation-division: geography, migration, class, welfare-capital inequities, wide variations in English-language competence and accent, and lower than national-average educational backgrounds. Various offensive labels have been invented, or re-applied, by the wider community to refer to the people who live in the suburban areas serviced by this university. These labels are symbolic of much deeper social divisions, but they can also be seen as derogatory referents to people with low social –including linguistic - capital. A new, linguistics-based approach to the teaching of Academic English at UWS seeks to reverse the stigma of offensive labelling as an impediment in the pursuit of literacy, motivation and, ultimately, social empowerment. Indeed, it may very well be true that, for many of these students, the perceived deficiencies in capital are actually linguistic and cognitive advantages which directly assist in their apprehension of the academic register of English.
Keeping One's Distance

Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people's thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects of distance into domains where construal-level theory is silent. Across four experiments, participants were primed with either spatial closeness or spatial distance by plotting an assigned set of points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. Compared with the closeness prime, the distance prime produced greater enjoyment of media depicting embarrassment (Study 1), less emotional distress from violent media (Study 2), lower estimates of the number of calories in unhealthy food (Study 3), and weaker reports of emotional attachments to family members and hometowns (Study 4). These results support a broader conceptualization of distance-mediated effects on judgment and affect.
Capacity bounds for large scale wireless ad hoc networks under Gaussian channel model

We study the capacity for both random and arbitrary wireless networks under Gaussian Channel model when all wireless nodes have the same constant transmission power P. During the transmission, the power decays along path with attenuation exponent beta > 2. We consider extended networks, where n wireless nodes {v<sub>1</sub>, v<sub>2</sub>,hellip, v<sub>n</sub>} are randomly or arbitrarily distributed in a square region B<sub>a</sub> with side-length a. We randomly choose n<sub>s</sub> multicast sessions. For each source node v<sub>i</sub>, we randomly select k points p<sub>i,j</sub> (1 les j les k) in B<sub>a</sub> and the node which is closest to p<sub>i,j</sub> will serve as a destination node of v<sub>i</sub>. We derive the achievable upper bounds on unicast capacity and an upper bound (partially achievable) on multicast capacity of the wireless networks under Gaussian Channel model. We found that the unicast (multicast) capacity for wireless networks under Gaussian Channel model has three regimes.
Source properties of dynamic rupture pulses with off‐fault plasticity

Large dynamic stresses near earthquake rupture fronts may induce an inelastic response of the surrounding materials, leading to increased energy absorption that may affect dynamic rupture. We systematically investigate the effects of off‐fault plastic energy dissipation in 2‐D in‐plane dynamic rupture simulations under velocity‐and‐state‐dependent friction with severe weakening at high slip velocity. We find that plasticity does not alter the nature of the transitions between different rupture styles (decaying versus growing, pulse‐like versus crack‐like, and subshear versus supershear ruptures) but increases their required background stress and nucleation size. We systematically quantify the effect of amplitude and orientation of background shear stresses on the asymptotic properties of self‐similar pulse‐like ruptures: peak slip rate, rupture speed, healing front speed, slip gradient, and the relative contribution of plastic strain to seismic moment. Peak slip velocity and rupture speed remain bounded. From fracture mechanics arguments, we derive a nonlinear relation between their limiting values, appropriate also for crack‐like and supershear ruptures. At low background stress, plasticity turns self‐similar pulses into steady state pulses, for which plastic strain contributes significantly to the seismic moment. We find that the closeness to failure of the background stress state is an adequate predictor of rupture speed for relatively slow events. Our proposed relations between state of stress and earthquake source properties in the presence of off‐fault plasticity may contribute to the improved interpretation of earthquake observations and to pseudodynamic source modeling for ground motion prediction.
Modifying the Medical Research Council grading system through Rasch analyses

The Medical Research Council grading system has served through decades for the evaluation of muscle strength and has been recognized as a cardinal feature of daily neurological, rehabilitation and general medicine examination of patients, despite being respectfully criticized due to the unequal width of its response options. No study has systematically examined, through modern psychometric approach, whether physicians are able to properly use the Medical Research Council grades. The objectives of this study were: (i) to investigate physicians’ ability to discriminate among the Medical Research Council categories in patients with different neuromuscular disorders and with various degrees of weakness through thresholds examination using Rasch analysis as a modern psychometric method; (ii) to examine possible factors influencing physicians’ ability to apply the Medical Research Council categories through differential item function analyses; and (iii) to examine whether the widely used Medical Research Council 12 muscles sum score in patients with Guillain–Barré syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy would meet Rasch model's expectations. A total of 1065 patients were included from nine cohorts with the following diseases: Guillain–Barré syndrome (n = 480); myotonic dystrophy type-1 (n = 169); chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (n = 139); limb-girdle muscular dystrophy (n = 105); multifocal motor neuropathy (n = 102); Pompe's disease (n = 62) and monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined related polyneuropathy (n = 8). Medical Research Council data of 72 muscles were collected. Rasch analyses were performed on Medical Research Council data for each cohort separately and after pooling data at the muscle level to increase category frequencies, and on the Medical Research Council sum score in patients with Guillain–Barré syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. Disordered thresholds were demonstrated in 74–79% of the muscles examined, indicating physicians’ inability to discriminate between most Medical Research Council categories. Factors such as physicians’ experience or illness type did not influence these findings. Thresholds were restored after rescoring the Medical Research Council grades from six to four options (0, paralysis; 1, severe weakness; 2, slight weakness; 3, normal strength). The Medical Research Council sum score acceptably fulfilled Rasch model expectations after rescoring the response options and creating subsets to resolve local dependency and item bias on diagnosis. In conclusion, a modified, Rasch-built four response category Medical Research Council grading system is proposed, resolving clinicians’ inability to differentiate among its original response categories and improving clinical applicability. A modified Medical Research Council sum score at the interval level is presented and is recommended for future studies in Guillain–Barré syndrome and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy.
Practical Guidelines and Activities for an Advanced Foreign Language Intensive Program.

approximately fifty percent of responding four-year institutions and thirteen percent of two-year colleges indicated offerings in various types of intensive language instruction. ' The types of program available, as summarized by Benseler and Schulz, vary broadly in scope and purpose and, for the most part, owe the basic intensive concept and the tenets of instruction to the Army Specialized Training Program developed during World War 1I.2 Intensive programs exist, for example, to teach or to review isolated or collective skills in a multiplicity of approaches and settings to audiences ranging from highschool students in a head-start program to business groups, the blind, the Peace Corps, graduate students, and teachers. There are on-campus or off-campus immersion programs and weekend, retreat, camp, and overseas experiences.3 Within the scope of traditional academic settings, approaches include the well-known Dartmouth model for beginners during an academic year, the same model implemented at a small liberal arts college, the summer Spanish program for beginners at Oklahoma State with eight hours of instruction a day for eight weeks, and the Middlebury summer program for advanced students.4 While there seems to be a proliferation of lower-division intensive courses and an increasing amount of literature focusing on various types of programs for beginners,5 only two intensive programs appear to be available on the advanced undergraduate level (third or fourth year). 6 One of these is to be found at Middlebury where students are provided six full-time instructors and a number of special social and cultural events over a seven-week period. The other advanced program is at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), and this program is the subject of this essay. Certainly, as Benseler and Schulz point out, an "area with potential for development is the intensive option at the advanced undergraduate level of college instruction. "7 In vi w of the success at UTA of the lowerlevel intensive program, which offers four semesters in one and which produces an average of six to eight new students each year for third-year classes, it seemed that an advanced intensive program in the summer immediately f llowing the lower-level intensive, which is offered only in the spring, would be attr ctive to students. My colleagues and I ho ed that students would then, upon completion of the summer program, continue into senior-level courses during the following fall semester. Motivated by a desire to provide an intensive program to advanced stude ts which could be taught within traditio al funding and teaching resources, I began an experimental program at UTA in the summer of 1975. The summer was con-
Looking ‘Beyond the Factory Gates’: Towards more Pluralist and Radical Approaches to Intraorganizational Trust Research

The aim of this paper is to suggest new avenues for trust research by critiquing the extant literature on this topic. We analyse the most influential research on intraorganizational trust from the perspective of a classic industrial sociology framework from the 1970s – Alan Fox’s work on frames of reference and trust dynamics. Our analysis of intraorganizational trust studies leads us to three conclusions. First, the large majority of intraorganizational trust research has strong unitarist underpinnings, which support a managerial agenda that is potentially detrimental to employees’ (and indeed managers’) long-term interests. Second, most of this research fails to explain how trust in organizations is embedded in societal and field-level institutions, hence it would benefit from looking ‘beyond the factory gates’ for a more complete understanding of trust dynamics in organizations. In this connection, we argue that Fox’s pluralist and radical perspectives, which are under-represented in intraorganizational trust research, could provide new lines of inquiry by locating internal trust relations in a wider institutional context. Third, Fox’s explanation of how low and high trust dynamics in organizations are embedded in wider society may help address the concerns about under-socialized, endogenous explanations and open the way for structure-agency analyses of building, maintaining and repairing intraorganizational trust.
Synthesis and Solid-State NMR Structural Characterization of 13C-Labeled Graphite Oxide

The detailed chemical structure of graphite oxide (GO), a layered material prepared from graphite almost 150 years ago and a precursor to chemically modified graphenes, has not been previously resolved because of the pseudo-random chemical functionalization of each layer, as well as variations in exact composition. Carbon-13 (13C) solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) spectra of GO for natural abundance 13C have poor signal-to-noise ratios. Approximately 100% 13C-labeled graphite was made and converted to 13C-labeled GO, and 13C SSNMR was used to reveal details of the chemical bonding network, including the chemical groups and their connections. Carbon-13–labeled graphite can be used to prepare chemically modified graphenes for 13C SSNMR analysis with enhanced sensitivity and for fundamental studies of 13C-labeled graphite and graphene.
A ‘Semi-Protected Oligonucleotide Recombination’ Assay for DNA Mismatch Repair in vivo Suggests Different Modes of Repair for Lagging Strand Mismatches

Abstract In Escherichia coli, a DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway corrects errors that occur during DNA replication by coordinating the excision and re-synthesis of a long tract of the newly-replicated DNA between an epigenetic signal (a hemi-methylated d(GATC) site or a single-stranded nick) and the replication error after the error is identified by protein MutS. Recent observations suggest that this ‘long-patch repair’ between these sites is coordinated in the same direction of replication by the replisome. Here, we have developed a new assay that uniquely allows us to introduce targeted ‘mismatches’ directly into the replication fork via oligonucleotide recombination, examine the directionality of MMR, and quantify the nucleotide-dependence, sequence context-dependence, and strand-dependence of their repair in vivo—something otherwise nearly impossible to achieve. We find that repair of genomic lagging strand mismatches occurs bi-directionally in E. coli and that, while all MutS-recognized mismatches had been thought to be repaired in a consistent manner, the directional bias of repair and the effects of mutations in MutS are dependent on the molecular species of the mismatch. Because oligonucleotide recombination is routinely performed in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, we expect this assay will be broadly applicable for investigating mechanisms of MMR in vivo.