Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching C/C++ Programming with Lego Mindstorms

Computer programming is a skill required in many professions, not just computer science. Lego Mindstorms NXT can be incorporated into a programming course to add hands-on interactivity that will better engage a broader range of students. Chosing the most suitable programming language is difficult, and this paper summarizes some experiences in teaching students using RoboLab and NXT-G for Mindstorms NXT. The text-based language RobotC is recommended for beginner and intermediate level courses, and various code examples are provided to assist teachers in building lesson plans. It is suggested that advanced programming should be taught in C++, and an example of using the NXT++ library to control a robot arm is presented. Teaching all levels of programming, using robotics, is more enticing and stimulating for students, and teachers can justify the purchase of expensive robot hardware by employing it in multiple areas of the school curriculum. I. I NTRODUCTION
A Tutorial and Survey on Thermal-Aware VLSI Design: Tools and Techniques

The strongest challenge that a VLSI designer has to face today is the extremely high heat generation within a chip which not only degrades the performance but also the yield and reliability are greatly affected. The situation even became worse with the evolution of multi-core processors with billions of devices in a single chip and due to die-to-die temperature variations within the chip. This paper surveys the state-of-the art design methodologies, tools and techniques to estimate and minimize the heat dissipation within a chip. It emphasizes the thermal problems especially at the layout (including floorplanning, placement, routing, and clock distribution) level. The goal of the paper is to focus on the ongoing research in the field of thermal balanced design for nanometer ICs and to aware the challenges that are to be taken by the future VLSI designers. Index Terms—thermal-aware VLSI, floorplanning, placement, routing, temperature gradient
A Bayesian Approach to Person Fit Analysis in Item Response Theory Models

A Bayesian approach to the evaluation of person fit in item response theory (IRT) models is presented. In a posterior predictive check, the observed value on a discrepancy variable is positioned in its posterior distribution. In a Bayesian framework, a Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure can be used to generate samples of the posterior distribution of the parameters of interest. These draws can also be used to compute the posterior predictive distribution of the discrepancy variable. The procedure is worked out in detail for the three-parameter normal ogive model, but it is also shown that the procedure can be directly generalized to many other IRT models. Type I error rate and the power against some specific model violations are evaluated using a number of simulation studies. Index terms: Bayesian statistics, item response theory, person fit, model fit, 3-parameter normal ogive model, posterior predictive check, power studies, Type I error.
Dementia: involving patients in storytelling--a caring intervention. A pilot study.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to explore the potential therapeutic role of storytelling in patients with dementia and, if so, to formulate pedagogic implications for the field of nursing with the focus on dementia care. BACKGROUND The present study is part of a larger project, Drama-Ger (Lepp et al. 2003: Journal of Clinical Nursing 12, 873-881), consisting of a cultural drama programme designed for patients with dementia and their caregivers. The programme consisted of two groups (A and B). Group A focused on dance, rhythm and songs, group B focused on storytelling and conversations. The present pilot study deals with group B. DESIGN The study was an intervention study. METHODS Six strategically selected patients, five women and one man, with intermediate and severe dementia, and their three female paid caregivers participated in the programme. They met on six occasions for 1.5 hours once a week for two months. The leader of the group, a Registered Nurse, who was also trained as a symbol pedagogue/teacher, told stories that were related to Erikson's development theory. She continuously kept a reflective diary which was qualitatively analysed. RESULTS This pilot study clearly indicates that storytelling invited the patients to take part in associative conversations. The storytelling appeared to help them to remember and make associations with situations they had previously experienced in their lives. Erikson's stages of development could be traced in the conversations. The patients interacted with each other, their caregivers and the leader. CONCLUSIONS A drama programme using storytelling appears to stimulate patients with dementia to communicate and interact with other people. Ten implications four statements about storytelling as a pedagogic tool and six statements to facilitate a pedagogic approach have been drawn from this study. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE The implications can be used as a guide when using storytelling for caring intervention with the focus on dementia care.
Roles of tumor necrosis factor and macrophages in lipopolysaccharide-induced accumulation of neutrophils in cutaneous air pouches

The role of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) in macrophage-dependent neutrophil accumulation induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was examined through the use of cutaneous air pouches formed on the backs of mice. To investigate the possibility that TNF functions in LPS-induced neutrophil accumulation, we injected LPS into newly formed air pouches (containing relatively few endogenous macrophages), 48-h-old air pouches (containing large numbers of endogenous macrophages), or newly formed air pouches instilled with 10(6) alveolar macrophages (AM). Six hours after LPS injection, air pouches possessing either AM or endogenous macrophages contained large numbers of neutrophils. Infusion of anti-TNF immunoglobulin G into the air pouches inhibited LPS-induced neutrophil accumulation by 84% in air pouches containing AM and 71% in air pouches containing large numbers of endogenous macrophages. TNF was also capable of including neutrophil accumulation when injected into air pouches containing relatively large numbers of either endogenous or exogenous macrophages but not when injected into air pouches containing small numbers of macrophages. In addition, incubation of AM in vitro with TNF induced the AM to cause neutrophil accumulation upon injection into newly formed air pouches. These results indicate that TNF functions in LPS-induced neutrophil accumulation. Furthermore, the results indicate that TNF functions by enhancing the ability of macrophages to cause neutrophil emigration. This is consistent with the possibility that LPS induces TNF production and that TNF, in turn, induces macrophages to produce cytokines with inflammatory activities.
Normative data of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale 11 (BIS-11) for Brazilian adults.

OBJECTIVE The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) is a valid and reliable instrument, and one of the most often used tools to assess impulsivity. This study assesses the performance of a large sample of adults by using a version of BIS-11 adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. METHODS We assessed 3,053 adults from eight Brazilian states. Internal consistencies and performance data were presented for two correction criteria of BIS-11: original and the two-factor score. RESULTS The associations between age, sex, region, and education and the BIS-11 scores present very small effect sizes. Therefore, we provided a percentile rank parameter for the different BIS-11 subscores considering the whole sample. Given the internal consistency of the two correction systems, we found that only the two-factor system fulfills the psychometric criteria of Cronbach's alpha (cutoff value of at least 0.6). CONCLUSION Our results support the use of the Brazilian adaptation of BIS-11 in different regions of the country as a measure of impulsivity. Since high impulsiveness is a characteristic of several dysfunctional behaviors, the establishment of normative parameters is of utmost relevance and should be extended to other age ranges and populations in future studies.
Compatibility and stability of morphine sulphate and naloxone hydrochloride in 0.9% sodium chloride for injection.

BACKGROUND Naloxone may be administered in conjunction with morphine to reduce the risk of opioid-induced pruritis. Combining these drugs for coadministration may be beneficial, but little is known about their physical compatibility and stability in combined solutions. OBJECTIVE To describe the physical compatibility and stability of morphine sulphate and naloxone hydrochloride (at various concentrations) in IV admixtures. METHODS The physical compatibility and stability of admixtures of morphine 1000 μg/mL and naloxone 4 μg/mL, 12.5 μg/mL, and 25 μg/mL in 0.9% sodium chloride were studied. For each concentration of naloxone, one bag was stored at room temperature (22°C) for 72 h and one bag was stored under refrigeration (4°C) for 30 days. For all preparations, physical characteristics, including pH, colour, and formation of precipitate, were evaluated. The samples were also analyzed by a stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatographic method. Stability was defined as the retention of at least 90% of the initial concentration. RESULTS No notable changes in pH or colour and no macroprecipitation were observed in any of the preparations after storage at 22°C for up to 72 h or at 4°C for up to 30 days. All preparations maintained more than 90% of the initial concentrations of morphine and naloxone at the end of the respective study periods. The calculated lower limit of the 95% confidence interval also indicated that 90% or more of the initial concentration remained at the end of each study period. CONCLUSION Admixtures of morphine sulphate and naloxone hydrochloride were stable for 72 h at room temperature and for 30 days with refrigeration.
Reducers and other Cilk++ hyperobjects

This paper introduces hyperobjects, a linguistic mechanism that allows different branches of a multithreaded program to maintain coordinated local views of the same nonlocal variable. We have identified three kinds of hyperobjects that seem to be useful -- reducers, holders, and splitters -- and we have implemented reducers and holders in Cilk++, a set of extensions to the C++ programming language that enables "dynamic" multithreaded programming in the style of MIT Cilk. We analyze a randomized locking methodology for reducers and show that a work-stealing scheduler can support reducers without incurring significant overhead.
Measured performance of an Ethernet local network

The Ethernet communications network is a broadcast, multiaccess system for local computer networking, using the techniques of carrier sense and collision detection. Recently we have measured the actual performance and error characteristics of an existing Ethernet installation which provides communications services to over 120 directly connected hosts. This paper is a report on some of those measurements—characterizing “typical” traffic characteristics in this environment and demonstrating that the system works very well. About 300 million bytes traverse the network daily; under normal load, latency and error rates are extremely low and there are very few collisions. Under extremely heavy load—artificially generated—the system shows stable behavior, and channel utilization approaches 98 percent, as predicted.
Extraction of Citation Data from Websites based on Visual Cues Master ’ s Thesis

Every scientific article, be it an essay or a paper in a journal, provides citations and a bibliography to support its arguments. Publishers and universities require their academics to format their bibliography using predefined styles like APA, MLA or Harvard, to name just a few. Obviously it is a tedious job to do that by hand, which is why there is a multitude of software to format the references following style guides, provided the required information is present in a structured format. Some services (citation generators), like CiteThisForMe1, EasyBib2 or RefME3 even try to provide this information automatically, so the user only needs to enter an identifier like an ISBN, DOI or URL to add a specific work to the bibliography. This thesis focuses on the case, where a web resource needs to be referenced. One would have to open the website and find the relevant information, such as the title, author, date of publication and publisher, needed to reference this specific resource. In the scope of this work, this information will be called citation data. The aforementioned citation generators automate this process, so that one only needs to enter a URL. The software tries to extract data required to cite this article. For example, to reference a news article on BBC online, the citation generator 1) would open the URL, 2) extract the title, author, date of publication and publisher, and 3) finally return a properly formatted reference according to the selected style. In my work for RefME, a start-up creating a citation management platform, I created and enhanced the underlying scraper service, which, given a URL, fetches the HTML code of that website and, based on hard-coded identifiers, extracts citation data. This method is very sensitive to the way a website’s code is written, which inspired a different approach. Based on the experience gathered, it seems that using visual cues might improve the precision of the citation data extraction. The primary advantage is, that those are independent
Dicer suppresses cytoskeleton remodeling and tumorigenesis of colorectal epithelium by miR-324-5p mediated suppression of HMGXB3 and WASF-2

Emerging evidence indicates that microRNAs, a class of small and well-conserved noncoding RNAs, participate in many physiological and pathological processes. RNase III endonuclease DICER is one of the key enzymes for microRNA biogenesis. Here, we found that DICER was downregulated in tumor samples of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients at both mRNA and protein levels. Importantly, intestinal epithelial cell (IEC)-specific deletion of Dicer mice got more tumors after azoxymethane and dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) administration. Interestingly, IEC-specific deletion of Dicer led to severe chronic inflammation and epithelium layer remodeling in mice with or without DSS administration. Microarray analysis of 3 paired Dicer deletion CRC cell lines showed that miR-324-5p was one of the most significantly decreased miRNAs. In the intestinal epithelium of IEC-specific deletion of Dicer mice, miR-324-5p was also found to be markedly reduced. Mechanistically, miR-324-5p directly bound to the 3′untranslated regions (3′UTRs) of HMG-box containing 3 (HMGXB3) and WAS protein family member 2 (WASF-2), two key proteins participated in cell motility and cytoskeleton remodeling, to suppress their expressions. Intraperitoneal injection of miR-324-5p AgomiR (an agonist of miR-324-5p) curtailed chronic inflammation and cytoskeleton remodeling of colorectal epithelium and restored intestinal barrier function in IEC-specific deletion of Dicer mice induced by DSS. Therefore, our study reveals a key role of a DICER/miR-324-5p/HMGXB3/WASF-2 axis in tumorigenesis of CRC by regulation of cytoskeleton remodeling and maintaining integrity of intestinal barriers.
L'Ile de Groix. Etude structurale d'une série métamorphique à glaucophane en Bretagne méridionale

Die Insel Groix (Morbihan) verdankt ihre heutige Struktur der Uberpragung eines alten Faltensystems (liegende Falten nach W oder SW uberkippt) durch eine NW-SO gerichtete Faltung mit Seigerfalten oder nach NO geneigten Falten. Die synmetamorphe herzynische Entwicklung der jungen Faltung wird von bedeutenden Laminationserscheinungen und Boudinage begleitet, die sich auf Kosten der vorhergehenden Strukturen gebildet haben. ; In der sudlichen Bretagne hat die metamorphe und tektonische Analyse von Groix gezeigt, dass diese Insel an der Grenze von zwei tektonischen Stockwerken herzynischen Alters liegt. Im NO zeigt sich das tiefere, welches in der Albit-Epidot-Amphibolit-Fazies alte Strukturen erhalten hat, die subhorizontal geschert und gedehnt sind. Im SW sieht man das hohere Stockwerk, welches durch starke Wiederfaltung der alten Strukturen ausgezeichnet ist ; es besitzt epizonalen Charakter mit Griinschiefer-Fazies. ; In der Grenzzone zwischen den beiden Strukturtypen hat sich der Glaukophanmetamor-phismus entwickelt.
User acceptance of cell phone support for smoking cessation: a UK - Canada comparative empirical investigation

This paper presents a theoretical model of user reasons to adopt or resist the use of cell phones as a support tool in smoking cessation interventions and its empirical testing in two country settings with significantly different mobile phone penetration rate: the UK and Canada. A model comprising both factors favourable to adoption and resistance factors was constructed and tested simultaneously with 170 participants recruited across the UK and 252 participants recruited across Canada. Results show the model having motivation as favourable factor and perceived risk of using cell phones as a resistance factor was appropriate in explaining smokers’ intentions to use these devices as a support for smoking cessation if they decided to quit smoking. Although differences in perceptions between participants in UK and Canada were noticed, these were not statistically significant.
Semantic Instance Annotation of Street Scenes by 3D to 2D Label Transfer

Semantic annotations are vital for training models for object recognition, semantic segmentation or scene understanding. Unfortunately, pixelwise annotation of images at very large scale is labor-intensive and only little labeled data is available, particularly at instance level and for street scenes. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem by lifting the semantic instance labeling task from 2D into 3D. Given reconstructions from stereo or laser data, we annotate static 3D scene elements with rough bounding primitives and develop a model which transfers this information into the image domain. We leverage our method to obtain 2D labels for a novel suburban video dataset which we have collected, resulting in 400k semantic and instance image annotations. A comparison of our method to state-of the-art label transfer baselines reveals that 3D information enables more efficient annotation while at the same time resulting in improved accuracy and time-coherent labels.
Sparsity Potentials for Detecting Objects with the Hough Transform

Hough transform based object detectors divide an object into a number of patches and combine them using a shape model. For efficient combination of patches into the shape model, the individual patches are assumed to be independent of one another. Although this independence assumption is key for fast inference, it requires the individual patches to have a high discriminative power in predicting the class and location of objects. In this paper, we argue that the sparsity of the appearance of a patch in its neighborhood can be a very powerful measure to increase the discriminative power of a local patch and incorporate it as a sparsity potential for object detection. Further, we show that this potential shall depend on the appearance of the patch to adapt to the statistics of the neighborhood specific to the type of appearance (e.g. texture or structure) it represents. We have evaluated our method on challenging datasets including the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show that using the proposed sparsity potential result in a substantial improvement in the detection accuracy.
Reduced hippocampal MT 2 melatonin receptor expression in Alzheimer ’ s disease

The pineal secretory product melatonin provides a circadian and seasonal signal in vertebrates regulating responses to changes in day length [1–3]. The biological clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), entrained by the light-dark cycle, controls the rhythm of melatonin synthesis in the pineal gland with the highest levels of melatonin production occurring during the night [1–5]. Melatonin provides a hormonal signal of darkness. The physiological effects of melatonin include retinal [6], antioxidative [7], neuroprotective [8, 9], vasoactive [10–12], immunological [13] and oncostatic [14] properties. In mammals melatonin acts through two specific highaffinity membrane receptors, MT1 (previously termed Mel1a) and MT2 (previously termed Mel1b), which have been cloned and characterized [15–18]. They share a common seven-transmembrane structure and transduce signals via G protein-coupling. Whereas MT1 is coupled to different G proteins that mediate adenylyl cyclase inhibition and phospholipase Cb activation, MT2 is also coupled to inhibition of adenylyl cyclase and additionally inhibits cyclic GMP levels via the soluble guanylyl cyclase pathway [5, 19]. A third melatonin receptor, Mel1c, was cloned from Xenopus [20] and birds [21] but is not found in mammals, so that of the family of three melatonin receptor subtypes in vertebrates, only two are present in mammals [5]. MT1 mRNA distribution has been studied in different mammalian brains including rodents [22] and humans [23, 24]. In human central nervous system (CNS) MT1 mRNA is expressed in SCN [23], cerebellum, occipital, parietal, frontal and temporal cortex, thalamus and hippocampus [24]. There is also immunohistochemical evidence for the presence of MT1 in human hippocampus [24], cerebrovascular tissue [11] and retina [25]. The presence of MT2 mRNA in CNS, on the other hand, has been shown in rodent SCN using in situ hybridization [26] and quantitative receptor autoradiography [27]. Thus far, in the human CNS, MT2 mRNA has been found in the cerebellum [28], and RT-PCR revealed MT2 expression in the hippocampus [15]. However, the exact cellular distribution of MT2 in human CNS is still not known. As specific antibodies against MT2 have been developed recently [29], we studied MT2 distribution in human hippocampus using immunohistochemistry. The results were compared with findings in the hippocampus of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, because melatonin alterations may contribute to AD symptomatology and pathology, and hippocampus is a brain region highly implicated in AD-related neurodegeneration [3, 8, 9]. This study provides the first immunohistochemical description of MT2 distribution in human hippocampus and provides evidence for altered expression of MT2 in patients affected with AD.
Adaptive and Innate Immune Responsiveness to Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato in Exposed Asymptomatic Children and Children with Previous Clinical Lyme Borreliosis

Why some individuals develop clinical manifestations in Lyme borreliosis (LB) while others remain asymptomatic is largely unknown. Therefore, we wanted to investigate adaptive and innate immune responsiveness to Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato in exposed Borrelia-antibody-positive asymptomatic children (n = 20), children with previous clinical LB (n = 24), and controls (n = 20). Blood samples were analyzed for Borrelia-specific interferon (IFN)-γ, interleukin (IL)-4, and IL-17 secretion by ELISPOT and Borrelia-induced IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12(p70), and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) secretion by Luminex. We found no significant differences in cytokine secretion between groups, but a tendency towards an increased spontaneous secretion of IL-6 was found among children with previous clinical LB. In conclusion, the adaptive or innate immune responsiveness to Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato was similar in Borrelia-exposed asymptomatic children and children with previous clinical LB. Thus, the immunological mechanisms of importance for eradicating the spirochete effectively without developing clinical manifestations of LB remain unknown.