Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analytical model of IEEE 802.11s MCCAbased streaming in the presence of noise

In the paper, we present an analytical study of multimedia stream transmission with the reservation-based channel access method called MCCA in IEEE 802.11s mesh networks. Various aspects of MCCA have been already studied under the assumption that the reservation guarantees successful transmission, no retries are needed and the period of reserved times is equal to the inter-arrival time of the input stream. However, recent papers reveal the fact that two-hop advertisement of reservations, as adopted in MCCA, fails to completely defeat the interference affecting transmissions in addition to random noise. To keep the packet loss ratio (PLR) acceptable for a stream, period of reserved times may be shortened to allow packet retries. However, a packet of a stream is usually discarded when the packet delay reaches its threshold, making its contribution to the PLR. Also, additional reservations is a burden. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to find the maximal period of reserved times to keep the packet loss ratio and delay below thresholds, given the input stream bit rate and packet error rate.
Functional neuroimaging of theory of mind

In the decade since the last edition of Understanding Other Minds , the number of papers that use human neuroimaging tools to investigate the neural basis of theory of mind (ToM) has exploded from four (described in Frith & Frith’s 2000 chapter) to, as of 2013, well over 400. Studying ToM with neuroimaging works . Unlike many aspects of higher-level cognition, which tend to produce small and highly variable patterns of responses across individuals and tasks, ToM tasks generally elicit activity in an astonishingly robust and reliable group of brain regions. In fact, convergence on this answer came almost immediately. By 2000, Frith and Frith concluded that “studies in which volunteers have to make inferences about the mental states of others activate a number of brain areas, most notable the medial [pre]frontal cortex [(mPFC)] and temporo-parietal junction [(TPJ)]. ” These regions remain the focus of most neuroimaging studies of ToM and social cognition, more than a decade later (see Adolphs, 2009, 2010; Carrington & Bailey, 2009; Frith & Frith, 2012; and Van Overwalle, 2008 for some recent reviews). To our minds, this consensus is one of the most remarkable scientifi c contributions of human neuroimaging, and the one least foreshadowed by a century of animal neuroscience. Nevertheless, most of the fundamental questions about how our brains allow us to understand other minds remain unanswered; we have mainly discovered where to look next. We hope that this gap means the next decade of neuroimaging ToM will be even more exciting than the last one. In this chapter, we offer a perspective on the contribution that neuroimaging has made to the science of ToM in the last decade, and some thoughts on the contribution that it could make in the next one. The chapter has three sections: “Theory of mind and the brain” reviews the existing evidence for a basic association between thinking about people’s thoughts and feelings and activity in this group of brain regions. “A strong hypothesis” discusses some objections, both theoretical and empirical, to a strong interpretation of this association, and our responses. “Where next? ” highlights newer approaches to functional imaging data, which we expect will contribute to the future neuroscience of ToM, and their strengths and limitations.
ICT Skills and Attitude as Determinants of ICT Pedagogy Integration

In a developing country like India, the mismatch between the techno-centric culture mindedness and the teachers’ pedagogic culture results in the alienation of the teacher from the use of technology. The present paper focuses on examining teachers’ attitude towards ICT; level of their competence in ICT skills; their experiences with ICT; and how best they use ICT in their current educational practice. Maybe due to the overwhelming strength of different types and levels of ICT skills and attitudes possessed by teachers or due to their staunch commitment to various pedagogical inputs in the teaching-learning process, it is likely that the actual integration of ICT in pedagogy might not take place, both strengths-hanging loose by themselves. This study tries to explore how the proficiency in ICT skills and attitude towards technology can help in ICT-pedagogy integration. It reveals a strong positive relationship between the possession of ICT skills by teachers, their attitude towards ICT and actual implementation of ICT in their classroom teaching.
Micromechanical Thermal Assays of Ca2+-Regulated Thin-Filament Function and Modulation by Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Mutants of Human Cardiac Troponin

Microfabricated thermoelectric controllers can be employed to investigate mechanisms underlying myosin-driven sliding of Ca2+-regulated actin and disease-associated mutations in myofilament proteins. Specifically, we examined actin filament sliding—with or without human cardiac troponin (Tn) and α-tropomyosin (Tm)—propelled by rabbit skeletal heavy meromyosin, when temperature was varied continuously over a wide range (∼20–63°C). At the upper end of this temperature range, reversible dysregulation of thin filaments occurred at pCa 9 and 5; actomyosin function was unaffected. Tn-Tm enhanced sliding speed at pCa 5 and increased a transition temperature (Tt) between a high activation energy (Ea) but low temperature regime and a low Ea but high temperature regime. This was modulated by factors that alter cross-bridge number and kinetics. Three familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (FHC) mutations, cTnI R145G, cTnI K206Q, and cTnT R278C, cause dysregulation at temperatures ∼5–8°C lower; the latter two increased speed at pCa 5 at all temperatures.
Elementary students’ perceptions of classroom resilience-promoting factors in China and the United States

ABSTRACT This study used ClassMaps Survey to investigate third to fifth grade elementary students’ perceptions of five relational (e.g., teacher-student relationships and peer friendships) and three individual (e.g., academic self-efficacy and behavioral self-control) resilience-promoting factors in classrooms in China and the United States. Examination of measurement equivalence indicates that the seven-factor model excluding peer aggression has acceptable strong factorial measurement equivalence. Comparison of group means revealed common strengths in teacher–student relationships, peer friendships, challenges in behavioral self-control, and peer conflict across the two cultural groups. Interventions should be built upon positive relationships and target behavioral self-control and peer conflict.
Metabolite profile of a mouse model of Charcot–Marie–Tooth type 2D neuropathy: implications for disease mechanisms and interventions

ABSTRACT Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease encompasses a genetically heterogeneous class of heritable polyneuropathies that result in axonal degeneration in the peripheral nervous system. Charcot–Marie–Tooth type 2D neuropathy (CMT2D) is caused by dominant mutations in glycyl tRNA synthetase (GARS). Mutations in the mouse Gars gene result in a genetically and phenotypically valid animal model of CMT2D. How mutations in GARS lead to peripheral neuropathy remains controversial. To identify putative disease mechanisms, we compared metabolites isolated from the spinal cord of Gars mutant mice and their littermate controls. A profile of altered metabolites that distinguish the affected and unaffected tissue was determined. Ascorbic acid was decreased fourfold in the spinal cord of CMT2D mice, but was not altered in serum. Carnitine and its derivatives were also significantly reduced in spinal cord tissue of mutant mice, whereas glycine was elevated. Dietary supplementation with acetyl-L-carnitine improved gross motor performance of CMT2D mice, but neither acetyl-L-carnitine nor glycine supplementation altered the parameters directly assessing neuropathy. Other metabolite changes suggestive of liver and kidney dysfunction in the CMT2D mice were validated using clinical blood chemistry. These effects were not secondary to the neuromuscular phenotype, as determined by comparison with another, genetically unrelated mouse strain with similar neuromuscular dysfunction. However, these changes do not seem to be causative or consistent metabolites of CMT2D, because they were not observed in a second mouse Gars allele or in serum samples from CMT2D patients. Therefore, the metabolite ‘fingerprint’ we have identified for CMT2D improves our understanding of cellular biochemical changes associated with GARS mutations, but identification of efficacious treatment strategies and elucidation of the disease mechanism will require additional studies. Summary: A metabolomics analysis of a mouse model of Charcot–Marie–Tooth type 2D neuropathy revealed a clear distinction between mutant and control samples, and the therapeutic potential of a subset of these changes was explored.
FLUCTUATIONS IN THE IONIZING BACKGROUND DURING AND AFTER HELIUM REIONIZATION

The radiation background above the ionization edge of He II varies strongly during and after helium reionization, because the attenuation length of such photons is relatively short (≲40Mpc) and because the ionizing sources (quasars) are rare. Here we construct analytic and Monte Carlo models to examine these fluctuations, including, for the first time, those during the reionization era itself. In agreement with detailed numerical simulations, our analytic model for the post-reionization universe predicts order-of-magnitude fluctuations in the He II ionization rate Γ. Observations of the hardness ratio He II/H I show somewhat larger fluctuations, which may be due to more complicated radiative transfer effects. During reionization, the fluctuations are even stronger. In contrast to hydrogen reionization, our model predicts that regions with strong He II Lyα forest transmission should be reasonably common even during the beginning stages of reionization, because of strong illumination from nearby bright quasars. Partly because of this, the mean ionizing background does not evolve strongly during and after helium reionization; it is roughly proportional to the filling fraction of He III regions. On the other hand, regions full of He II and also “fossil-”ionized regions that contain no (or few) active sources appear as strong intergalactic absorbers. Their presence exaggerates the evolution of the hardness ratio, making it evolve more strongly than naively expected during the reionization era.
Revisiting SSL/TLS Implementations: New Bleichenbacher Side Channels and Attacks

As a countermeasure against the famous Bleichenbacher attack on RSA based ciphersuites, all TLS RFCs starting from RFC 2246 (TLS 1.0) propose "to treat incorrectly formatted messages in a manner indistinguishable from correctly formatted RSA blocks". In this paper we show that this objective has not been achieved yet (cf. Table 1): We present four new Bleichenbacher side channels, and three successful Bleichenbacher attacks against the Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) SSL/TLS implementation and against hardware security appliances using the Cavium NITROX SSL accelerator chip. Three of these side channels are timing-based, and two of them provide the first timing-based Bleichenbacher attacks on SSL/TLS described in the literature. Our measurements confirmed that all these side channels are observable over a switched network, with timing differences between 1 and 23 microseconds. We were able to successfully recover the PreMasterSecret using three of the four side channels in a realistic measurement setup.
Efficient event-based resource discovery

The ability to find services or resources that satisfy some criteria is an important aspect of distributed systems. This paper presents an event-based architecture to support more dynamic discovery scenarios, including efficient discovery of resources whose attributes can change, and continuous monitoring for resources that satisfy a set of constraints. Furthermore, algorithms are developed to optimize the discovery cost by reusing results among similar concurrent discovery requests. Detailed evaluations under various workload distributions demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture and show significant benefits of the optimizations in terms of network traffic and discovery processing time.
Seasonal Energetic Stress in a Tropical Forest Primate: Proximate Causes and Evolutionary Implications

Animals facing seasonal variation in food availability experience selective pressures that favor behavioral adjustments such as migration, changes in activity, or shifts in diet. Eclectic omnivores such as many primates can process low-quality fallback food when preferred food is unavailable. Such dietary flexibility, however, may be insufficient to eliminate constraints on reproduction even for species that live in relatively permissive environments, such as moist tropical forests. Focusing on a forest-dwelling primate with a flexible diet (Cercopithecus mitis) we investigated whether females experience seasonal energetic stress and how it may relate to reproductive seasonality. We used fecal glucocorticoids (fGCs) as an indicator of energetic stress, controlling for the potentially confounding effects of social interactions and reproductive state. We modeled within-female fGC variation with General Linear Mixed Models, evaluating changes in feeding behavior and food availability as main effects. Regardless of reproductive state, fGCs increased when females shifted their diet towards fallback foods (mature leaves and other non-preferred items) and when they spent more time feeding, while fGCs decreased with feeding time on preferred items (insects, fruits, young leaves) and with the availability of young leaves. Changes in fruit availability had no general effects on fGCs, likely because fruits were sought out regardless of availability. As predicted, females in the energetically demanding stages of late pregnancy and early lactation showed greater increases in fGCs between periods of low versus high availability of fruits and young leaves than females in other reproductive states. Potential social stressors had no measurable effects on fGCs. Preliminary evidence suggests that seasonal energetic stress may affect the timing of infant independence from mothers and contribute to unusually long inter-birth intervals compared to closely related species of similar body size. Our findings highlight how the study of stress responses can provide insights into the proximate control of reproductive strategies.
Factors influencing the adoption of M-commerce: An exploratory Analysis

Mobile Commerce, also known as, M-commerce is thought to be the next big phase in this technologically dependent society after E-commerce era. However, its adoption and level of use is low in Malaysia compared to others nations such as Korea, Singapore, and Japan. This study aims to identify some factors that affect the adoption of Mcommerce in Malaysia based on traditional technology models such as Theory of Reason Action (TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB),Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Diffusion Innovation theory (DOI). In this research, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on different measures to identify the underlying factors influencing the adoption of M-commerce. The findings revealed that all the thirteen (13) factors were statistically significant and can affect the adoption of m-commerce.
Continued maturation of the click-evoked auditory brainstem response in preschoolers.

BACKGROUND Click-evoked auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) are a valuable tool for probing auditory system function and development. Although it has long been thought that the human auditory brainstem is fully mature by age 2 yr, recent evidence indicates a prolonged developmental trajectory. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine the time course of ABR maturation in a preschool population and fill a gap in the knowledge of development. RESEARCH DESIGN Using a cross-sectional design, we investigated the effect of age on absolute latencies, interwave latencies, and amplitudes (waves I, III, V) of the click-evoked ABR. STUDY SAMPLE A total of 71 preschoolers (ages 3.12-4.99 yr) participated in the study. All had normal peripheral auditory function and IQ. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS ABRs to a rarefaction click stimulus presented at 31/sec and 80 dB SPL (73 dB nHL) were recorded monaurally using clinically-standard recording and filtering procedures while the participant sat watching a movie. Absolute latencies, interwave latencies, and amplitudes were then correlated to age. RESULTS Developmental changes were restricted to absolute latencies. Wave V latency decreased significantly with age, whereas wave I and III latencies remained stable, even in this restricted age range. CONCLUSIONS The ABR does not remain static after age 2 yr, as seen by a systematic decrease in wave V latency between ages 3 and 5 yr. This finding suggests that the human brainstem has a continued developmental time course during the preschool years. Latency changes in the age 3-5 yr range should be considered when using ABRs as a metric of hearing health.
Real time correlation-based stereo: algorithm, implementations and applications

This paper describes some of the work on stereo that has been going on at INRIA in the last four years. The work has concentrated on obtaining dense, accurate and reliable range maps of the environment at rates compatible with the real-time constraints of such applications as the navigation of mobile vehicles in man-made or natural environments. The class of algorithms which has been selected among several is the class of algorithms which has been selected among several is the class of correlation-based stereo algorithms because they are the only ones that can produce sufficiently dense range maps with an algoritmic structure which lends itself nicely to fast implementations because of the simplicity of the underlying computation. We describe the various improvements that we have brought to the original idea, including validation and characterization of the quality of the matches, a recursive implementation of the score computation which makes the method independent of the size of the correlation window and a calibration method which does not require the use of a calibration pattern. We then describe two implementations of this algorithm on two very different pieces of hardware. The first implementation is on a board with four digital signal processors designed jointly with Matra MSII. This implementation can produce 64x64 range maps at rate varying between 200 and 400 ms, depending upon the range of disparities. The second implementation is on a board developed by DEC-PRL and can perform the cross-correlation of two 256X256 images in 140 ms. The first implementation has been integrated in the navigation system of the INRIA cart and used to correct for inertial and odometric errors in navigation experiments both indoors and outdoors on road. This is the first application of our correlation-based algorithm which is described in the paper. The second application has been done jointly with people from the french national space agence (CNES) to study the possibility of using stereo on a future planetary rover for the construction of digital elevation maps. We have shown that real time stereo is possible today at low-cost and can be applied in real applications. The algorithm that has been described is not the most sophisticated available but we have made it robust and reliable thanks to a number of improvements. Evan though each of these improvements is not earth-shattering from the pure research point of view, altogether they have allowed us to go beyond a very important threshold. This threshold measures the difference between a program that runs in the laboratory on a few images and one that works continuously for hours on a sequence of stereo pairs and produces results at such rates and of such quality that they can be used to guide a real vehicle or to produce discrete elevation maps. We believe that this threshold has only been reached in a very small number of cases.
Help-seeking behaviour of problem gamblers: a narrative review

Abstract. Background: There is evidence for low rates of help-seeking among problem gamblers. Identifying reasons for and barriers to seeking help is essential for improving help supply and gamblers’ treatment utilisation. The present study examines treatment utilisation of problem or pathological gamblers and reviews the evidence related to motives for and barriers to seeking help. Methods: The databases Medline, PsycInfo, and PubMed were searched for English-, Swedish- and German-language studies published between 2000 and 2017. Furthermore relevant references of included studies were analysed. Results: After exclusion of non-relevant publications 34 journal articles and seven reports covering the prevalence of help-seeking among gamblers or self-reported reasons for/barriers to help-seeking were maintained. The proportion of problem gamblers seeking help was less than 10 % in most studies. Problem severity was found positively associated with treatment attendance. Financial issues, negative emotions and crises were identified as main motives for seeking treatment. Main barriers to seeking treatment were shame, problem denial and lack of treatment availability. The results were similar across the examined studies. Conclusion: Low rates of treatment utilisation by problem gamblers strongly indicate that treatment providers and the society should strive to eliminate structural barriers that hinder gamblers to seek help. To better match problem gamblers´ needs, low-threshold early intervention, increasing knowledge of treatment options and efforts to reduce stigmatisation are important strategies to enhance access to help offers.
Functional neural circuits for mental timekeeping

Theories of mental timekeeping suggest frontostriatal networks may mediate performance of tasks requiring precise timing. We assessed whether frontostriatal networks are functionally integrated during the performance of timing tasks. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 31 healthy adults were collected during performance of several different types of discrete interval timing tasks. Independent component analysis (ICA) was used to examine functional connectivity within frontostriatal circuits. ICA identifies groups of spatially discrete brain regions sharing similar patterns of hemodynamic signal change over time. The results confirm the existence of a frontostriatal neural timing circuit that includes anterior cingulate gyrus, supplementary motor area, bilateral anterior insula, bilateral putamen/globus pallidus, bilateral thalamus, and right superior temporal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Several other distinct neural circuits were identified that may represent the neurobiological substrates of different information processing stages of mental timekeeping. Small areas of right cerebellum were engaged in several of these circuits, suggesting that cerebellar function may be important in, but not the primary substrate of, the mental timing tasks used in this experiment. These findings are discussed within the context of current biological and information processing models of neural timekeeping. Hum. Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Descriptor : Long-term growth data of Escherichia coli at a single-cell level

Long-term, single-cell measurement of bacterial growth is extremely valuable information, particularly in the study of homeostatic aspects such as cell-size and growth rate control. Such measurement has recently become possible due to the development of microfluidic technology. Here we present data from single-cell measurements of Escherichia coli growth over 70 generations obtained for three different growth conditions. The data were recorded every minute, and contain time course data of cell length and fluorescent intensity of constitutively expressed yellow fluorescent protein.