Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multilevel fast multipole algorithm enhanced by GPU parallel technique for electromagnetic scattering problems

Along with the development of graphics processing Units (GPUS) in floating point operations and programmability, GPU has increasingly become an attractive alternative to the central processing unit (CPU) for some of compute‐intensive and parallel tasks.In this article, the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) combined with graphics hardware acceleration technique is applied to analyze electromagnetic scattering from complex target. Although it is possible to perform scattering simulation of electrically large targets on a personal computer (PC) through the MLFMA, a large CPU time is required for the execution of aggregation, translation, and deaggregation operations. Thus GPU computing technique is used for the parallel processing of MLFMA and a significant speedup of matrix vector product (MVP) can be observed. Following the programming model of compute unified device architecture (CUDA), several kernel functions characterized by the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) mode are abstracted from components of the MLFMA and executed by multiple processors of the GPU. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of GPU accelerating technique for the MLFMA. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 52: 502–507, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24963
Exercise echocardiography in the detection of anthracycline cardiotoxicity

Twenty long‐term survivors of childhood cancer underwent exercise echocardiography to evaluate possible late anthracycline‐induced cardiac toxicity. Ten patients ages 10 to 20 years had received anthracyclines, and ten patients ages 8 to 27 years had not received anthracyclines as part of their medical regimen. Both groups had normal cardiac function at rest. Patients who had not received anthracyclines had a greater increase in M‐mode shortening fraction (P < 0.005), velocity of circumferential fiber shortening (P = 0.05), and Doppler aortic peak flow velocity (P = 0.01) than patients receiving anthracyclines. There were no significant differences in work performed, or increase in heart rate or blood pressure with exercise between the groups. These results suggest that subtle abnormalities in myocardial function exist which become apparent only after exercise in survivors of childhood cancer who have received anthracyclines and have normal resting cardiac function.
Fatty acid composition, fat globule size and reactive oxygen species-scavenging activity of mare milk: a longitudinal study

Mare milk is taken into account as a substitute for cow milk in case of allergy, especially in infant nutrition due to a composition similar to human milk. The aim of the work is to define some mare milk characteristics during lactation, from foaling to the 4 th month of lactation. All the parameters considered to describe fat globule dimensions vary significantly during the lactation period. Fatty acid composition generally changes within the first days of lactation and after 42-56 days, with different behavior when considering medium or higher carbon chains. The ROS-scavenging activity expresses a positive trend and reaches the zenith at day 84. Finally there is a number of correlations between fat globules dimensional parameters and fatty acid composition and between long chain unsaturated fatty acids and ROS-scavenging activity, while dimensional parameters and ROS-scavenging activity are not statistically related. Results could be useful in veterinary and human field as milk substitutes.
The effect of computer‐based multimedia instruction with Chinese character recognition

The purpose of this study was to examine second language learners’ learning achievement and attitudes toward two different types of dual coding designs (text group: image plus on‐screen text versus narration group: image plus narration) in Chinese character acquisition. A total of 66 college students who did not have prior knowledge of the Chinese language were randomly assigned to either the text group or narration group. The findings showed that there was no interaction between the treatments (text group versus narration group) and test occasions (immediate and delayed post‐tests), and there was no significant difference between two groups in the immediate post‐test and in the delayed post‐test. However, there was a significant difference between the test occasions. Furthermore, the results revealed that there was no significant difference between two groups in both the tutorial design factor and the cognitive load factor. Overall, participants in both groups achieved high scores in the post‐tests and showed positive attitudes toward the dual coding tutorials.
High-speed, high-reliability circuit design for megabit DRAM

Circuit techniques for improving the speed and reliability of submicrometer geometry CMOS DRAMs are described. Double-bootstrap voltages are eliminated with an internal voltage supply and a unique word-line driver, reducing stress on short-channel devices. A row and column redundancy technique equivalent to physical disconnect of word lines and bit lines solves leakage problems. Speed enhancements are achieved through bit-line isolation for accelerated column access, a high-speed SRAM-style data path, and by tailoring sensing currents within the limitations of package inductance. The design of a fast 1-Mb DRAM employing these circuits is outlined. >
Psychological consequences of exercise deprivation in habitual exercisers

Psychological consequences of exercise deprivation in habitual exercisers. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the influence of 3 d of exercise deprivation on selected psychological variables. Ten volunteers (4 female and 6 male) who regularly exercised 6-7 d.wk-1 for at least 45 min at a time participated in a 5-d study. Participants completed their regular workout on the first day of the study, refrained from physical activity for the next 3 d, and then resumed their regular exercise on the 5th d of the study. Participants reported to the lab on Monday following their regular workout and completed a series of questionnaires, and these same questionnaires were completed at the same time of day on the next 4 d. The dependent variables consisted of state and trait anxiety (STAI), and tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion, and overall mood (POMS). Increases in total mood disturbance, state anxiety, tension, depression, and confusion across days were significant (P < 0.05), and vigor decreased. The pattern of increasing mood disturbance with exercise deprivation was followed by mood improvement to baseline levels when exercise was resumed. We concluded that a brief period of exercise deprivation in habitual exercisers results in mood disturbance within 24-48 h.
International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (ICTLHE 2012) in conjunction with RCEE & RHED 2012 Assessing Students' Practical Skills in Basic Electronic Laboratory based on Psychomotor Domain Model

In engineering education, laboratory experiments or practical works are integrated in the curriculum to prepare students for engineering experience and practice prior to their graduation. Laboratory experiments provide students with knowledge and practical skills and expose them to the relevant engineering field. This paper investigates the levels of practical skills acquired by students after conducting the laboratory experiments with reference to Psychomotor Domain Taxonomy. This is achieved by administering a laboratory practical test at the end of the semester. A Skill Assessment Form was used as a checklist in identifying the levels of students’ practical skills. Four levels of students’ practical skills in Basic Electronic Laboratory were identified. The results indicate that there are some variations in students’ performance at each skill level.
Teaching Earth Signals Analysis Using the Java-DSP Earth Systems Edition: Modern and Past Climate Change

ABSTRACT Modern data collection in the Earth Sciences has propelled the need for understanding signal processing and time-series analysis techniques. However, there is an educational disconnect in the lack of instruction of time-series analysis techniques in many Earth Science academic departments. Furthermore, there are no platform-independent freeware tools available for teaching Earth signals analysis. In order to address these issues, we developed the Java-Digital Signal Processing/Earth Systems Edition (J-DSP/ESE), a platform-independent software tool that can be integrated with the Earth Science university curriculum for signal processing and analysis instruction. This tool has an intuitive block-based programming environment, and students do not need be familiar with any programming language to use it. In order to demonstrate the utility of this software in an instructional environment, we developed three tutorials related to basic signal processing, and signal analysis of modern and past climate change. The tutorials use published data to examine the relationship between 20th century atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, and the relationship between ocean temperature and solar radiation over the past 300,000 y. The tutorials were administered in two workshops with different communities of students in Earth Science and electrical engineering. Our technical assessments show that the students were able to comprehend basic signal processing and analysis of climate signals using J-DSP/ESE. In the subjective assessments, a vast majority of students stated that the software was easy to learn and use, and that it significantly improved their understanding of climate change.
Text recognition approaches for indoor robotics: a comparison

This paper evaluates the performance of different text recognition techniques for a mobile robot in an indoor (university campus) environment. We compared four dierent methods: our own approach using existing text detection methods (Minimally Stable Extremal Regions detector and Stroke Width Transform) combined with a convolutional neural network, two modes of the open source program Tesseract, and the experimental mobile app Google Goggles. The results show that a convolutional neural network combined with the Stroke Width Transform gives the best performance in correctly matched text on images with single characters whereas Google Goggles gives the best performance on images with multiple words. The dataset used for this work is released as well.
A decomposition-based approach to flexible flow shop scheduling under machine breakdown

Manufacturing systems in real-world production are generally dynamic and often subject to a wide range of uncertainties. Recently, research on production scheduling under uncertainty has attracted substantial attention. Although some methods have been developed to address this problem, scheduling under uncertainty remains inherently difficult to solve by any single approach. This article considers makespan optimisation of a flexible flow shop (FFS) scheduling problem under machine breakdown. It proposes a novel decomposition-based approach to decompose an FFS scheduling problem into several cluster scheduling problems which can be solved more easily by different approaches. A neighbouring K-means clustering algorithm is developed to first group the machines of an FFS into an appropriate number of machine clusters, based on a proposed machine allocation algorithm and weighted cluster validity indices. Two optimal back propagation networks, corresponding to the scenarios of simultaneous and non-simultaneous job arrivals, are then selectively adopted to assign either the shortest processing time (SPT) or the genetic algorithm (GA) to each machine cluster to solve cluster scheduling problems. If two neighbouring machine clusters are allocated with the same approach, they are subsequently merged. After machine grouping and approach assignment, an overall schedule is generated by integrating the solutions to the sub-problems. Computation results reveal that the proposed approach is superior to SPT and GA alone for FFS scheduling under machine breakdown.
The HDSL environment (high bit rate digital subscriber line)

The author presents a tutorial on the physical environment in which high bit rate digital subscriber line (HDSL) transceivers will have to evolve and succeed. Special attention is given to the most damaging impairments that are encountered in subscriber lines, such as propagation loss, linear distortion, crosstalk, bridged taps, and impulse noise. Somewhat less important impairments, such as change of gauge, temperature variation, and thermal noise, are also briefly described. The author concludes with a discussion of the capacity of a twisted-pair channel in a crosstalk-dominated environment. >
A citation analysis study of MA dissertations in the library and information science field in universities in Tehran

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze citation behaviors of students in the LIS field among a variety of local universities in Tehran.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 259 MA dissertations in Library and Information Science submitted to five universities in Tehran during 2003‐2008 are examined. These universities were selected based on their location and the authors' accessibility to their university libraries. Overall, five out of nine universities in Iran which have Masters Courses in Library and Information Science were selected for this study. The data were gathered using a checklist by the author, who personally attended in university libraries and counted all dissertation references.Findings – The study shows that students' citation behaviors are in favor of books, and Farsi e‐sources are lesser used by LIS students than English e‐sources. The total number of book citations is far more than total number of other formats. While this study could be useful in library acquisition deci.
A Modified Prandtl-Ishlinskii Model for Rate-dependent Hysteresis Nonlinearity Using mth-power Velocity Damping Mechanism

Hysteresis of piezoelectric actuators is rate-dependent at high frequencies, but most of the hysteresis models are rate-independent and cannot describe the rate-dependent hysteresis nonlinearity independently. In this paper, a modified Prandtl-Ishlinskii (P-I) model is proposed to characterize the rate-dependent hysteresis of piezoelectric actuators under sinusoidal excitation. This model is formulated by a mth-power velocity damping model in conjunction with the rate-independent P-I model. The parameter identification of this model is divided into two steps using different experimental data and algorithms. The particle swarm optimization is introduced first to identify the rate-independent parameters, and the nonlinear least square method is adopted afterwards to identify the rate-dependent parameters which are functions of the excitation frequency. Moreover, the proposed P-I model is developed to describe hysteresis nonlinearity under triangular excitation by introducing weighted functions, i.e., Λ i . Finally, the model results attained under the sinusoidal and triangular inputs at different frequencies are compared with the corresponding experimental data. The comparisons demonstrate that the proposed P-I model can well describe hysteresis nonlinearity under sinusoidal excitation up to 1,500 Hz and triangular excitation up to 250 Hz, respectively.
BotOnus: an online unsupervised method for Botnet detection

Botnets are recognized as one of the most dangerous threats to the Internet infrastructure. They are used for malicious activities such as launching distributed denial of service attacks, sending spam, and leaking personal information. Existing botnet detection methods produce a number of good ideas, but they are far from complete yet, since most of them cannot detect botnets in an early stage of their lifecycle; moreover, they depend on a particular command and control (C&C) protocol. In this paper, we address these issues and propose an online unsupervised method, called BotOnus , for botnet detection that does not require a priori knowledge of botnets. It extracts a set of flow feature vectors from the network traffic at the end of each time period, and then groups them to some flow clusters by a novel online fixed-width clustering algorithm. Flow clusters that have at least two members, and their intra-cluster similarity is above a similarity threshold, are identified as suspicious botnet clusters, and all hosts in such clusters are identified as bot infected. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BotOnus to detect various botnets including HTTP-, IRC-, and P2P-based botnets using a testbed network. The results of experiments show that it can successfully detect various botnets with an average detection rate of 94:33% and an average false alarm rate of 3:74%.
The Benefits and Challenges of Predictive Interval Forecasts and Verification Graphics for End Users

AbstractTwo behavioral experiments tested the use of predictive interval forecasts and verification graphics by nonexpert end users. Most participants were able to use a simple key to understand a predictive interval graphic, showing a bracket to indicate the upper and lower boundary values of the 80% predictive interval for temperature. In the context of a freeze warning task, the predictive interval forecast narrowed user expectations and alerted participants to the possibility of colder temperatures. As a result, participants using predictive intervals took precautionary action more often than did a control group using deterministic forecasts. Moreover, participants easily understood both deterministic and predictive interval verification graphics, based on simple keys, employing them to correctly identify better performing forecast periods. Importantly, participants with the predictive interval were more likely than those with the deterministic forecast to say they would use that forecast type in the .
Guidelines for EEG in encephalopathy related to ESES/CSWS in children

Electrical status epilepticus during slow sleep (ESES) or continuous spikes and waves during slow sleep (CSWS) is a phenomenon characterized by strong activation of epileptiform activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG) during sleep. The literature contains several small series of patients and many case reports. Large prospective studies are lacking. Definitions of the syndromes and EEG criteria and methods vary, as does their classification. The fluctuating clinical course and EEG findings complicate the diagnostic process and evaluation of effect of therapy. Studies describing quantitative aspects of the epileptiform abnormalities in EEG are overrepresented in literature, whereas qualitative aspects are relatively undervalued. Guidelines for evaluation of the EEG in these syndromes, which focus on both aspects, are presented.
Vocabulary Learning through Using Mechanical Techniques Vocabulary Learning Strategy

Vocabulary learning and teaching is a key issue that has always been one of the related subjects for both teachers and learners of foreign languages. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of vocabulary learning strategy of using Mechanical Techniques in reading comprehension as a Direct vocabulary learning strategy by Iranian EFL learners for their lexical knowledge improvement. To achieve the aim of the study, fifty-eight pre-intermediate language learners were elected and appointed into two experimental and control groups based on a vocabulary pre-test. During the period of the study the experimental group was taught Mechanical Technique vocabulary Learning Strategy and the second group was assigned as a control group. To assess the impact of vocabulary learning strategy the researchers have used the model proposed by Oxford (1990) “Strategies Inventory for Language Learning. At the end of the study, the students in experimental and control group participated in a post test. The results showed that using Mechanical Technique by the students in the experimental group is effective in enhancing their vocabulary storage. Measuring lexical improvement indicated that using Mechanical Techniques vocabulary learning strategy at pre- intermediate level can lead to higher achievement of vocabulary storage of Iranian pre-intermediate EFL undergraduate learners in reading comprehension skill.
[Prevalence of alcohol consumption among medical students at the Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile].

BACKGROUND Teenagers and university students are an especially vulnerable population towards unhealthy alcohol consumption. AIM To assess the actual consumption of alcohol among medical students at the Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile (UCM). MATERIAL AND METHODS A cross sectional study of students who entered medical school between years 2004 and 2010.We applied CAGE questionnaire along with questions about frequency of alcohol consumption. RESULTS From a universe of 317 students, 216 (age range 17-27 years, 54% females) answered the survey (68.8%), 64.2% admitted to consume alcohol and 6% had alcohol dependence. Seventy three percent of the alcohol drinkers were males. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of alcohol consumption in medical students of the UCM is significantly lower than the prevalence in students of another University surveyed in 2005 (74%) and it is similar to the national statistics. Alcohol consumption was higher in men that in women.
Neither endogenous nor inhaled nitric oxide influences the function of circulating platelets in healthy volunteers

: Experimental models have indicated prothrombotic effects of inhibition of nitric oxide (NO) production, and anti-thrombotic effects of inhaled NO, but the influence of NO on platelet function in vivo in humans is not well established. We therefore investigated the effects of systemic inhibition of NO synthesis by N(G)-monomethyl-L-arginine (L-NMMA) and of NO inhalation on platelet function in vivo. On two occasions, L-NMMA (13.5 mg/kg) or saline infusion was administered to 14 healthy volunteers in a double-blind cross-over study. After a 30 min infusion of L-NMMA or placebo, NO inhalation (30 p.p.m) was added during the remaining 30 min of infusion, on both occasions. Measurements included filtragometry ex vivo (reflecting platelet aggregability), flow-cytometric evaluation of platelets in whole blood (fibrinogen binding and P-selectin expression), plasma beta-thromboglobulin (reflecting platelet secretion), cGMP in platelets and plasma, thrombin generation markers (thrombin fragment 1+2 and thrombin-antithrombin complexes) in plasma, and bleeding time. L-NMMA increased blood pressure and decreased heart rate. NO inhalation did not influence blood pressure or heart rate, but caused a 3-fold elevation in plasma cGMP levels (P<0.001). Neither L-NMMA nor NO influenced filtragometry readings or flow-cytometric determinations of platelet fibrinogen binding and P-selectin expression. Furthermore, plasma beta-thromboglobulin, platelet cGMP and thrombin generation markers were not influenced by either treatment. Bleeding time was not influenced by L-NMMA compared with placebo, but was increased by approximately 25% during NO inhalation (P<0.01), whether NO synthesis had been inhibited or not. The prolongation of bleeding time by inhaled NO was not accompanied by any effect on the platelet variables assessed. The present results indicate that circulating platelets are not influenced by endogenous or inhaled NO, presumably due to the rapid inactivation of NO in the blood. This does not exclude possible effects of endothelial NO in the interface between the blood and the vessel wall.