Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Swift Observations of X-ray supernovae

ABSTRACT WepresentaresultofX-raysupernovae(SNe)surveyusingtheSwift satellitepublicarchive.An automatic searching programwas designed to search X-ray SNe amongall of the Swift archival observations between November 2004 and February 2011.Using the C++ program, 24 X-ray detectable supernovae have been found in thearchiveand3ofthemwerenewly-discoveredinX-rayswhichareSN1986L,SN2003lx,and SN 2007od. In addition, SN 2003lx is a Type Ia supernova which may be thesecond X-ray detectable Type Ia after SN 2005ke (Immleretal. 2006). Calibrateddata of luminous type Ib/c supernovae was consistent to the X-ray emission modeldonebyChevalierF Chevalier & Fransson 2006). According to the circum-stellar interaction model by Chevalier & Fransson (1994),cooling shell and forward/reverse shocks pair are formed asthe ejecta collides with the CSM. In most cases, the forwardshocks heat up the CSM to emit hard X-ray (& 10 keV)while the reverse shocks interact with the ejecta to emit softX-ray (. 5 keV). In the early time, the X-ray opaque cooldense shell between the shocks blocks the soft X-ray fromthe reverse shocked region. After several days or weeks, theexpanding cool shell becomes optically thin which allowsthe pass through of the soft X-ray. Since there is a rela-tively high density in the reverse shocked region, soft X-rayis strong and therefore dominates the entire X-ray emission.One of the oldest X-ray supernova detected was SN 1970Gby a Chandra deep image of M101 in 2005, 35 years afterthe explosion (Tru¨mper 2008). The luminosity of this SNwas∼ 10
Spectrum Analysis Tutorial, Part 1: The Discrete Fourier Transform

This tutorial is an outgrowth of a course in signal processing given by Julius O. Smith at Stanford University in the fall of 1984 (see Smith 1981, as well). It provides an elementary mathematical introduction to spectrum analysis. This is the first of two parts. In part one, the discrete Fourier transform is introduced and analyzed in depth. In part two, some fundamental spectrum analysis theorems and applications are discussed. The only mathematical background assumed is high school trigonometry, algebra, and geometry. No calculus is required. Familiarity with summation formulae, complex numbers, and vectors is helpful, although not essential.
Dialock® Subcutaneous Port for Hemodialysis: A Twelve-Month Experience in a Single Center

Background The arteriovenous fistula (AVF) is still considered the golden standard form of vascular access for hemodialysis. However, the increasing use of central venous catheters mirrors the growing difficulty in planning an AVF. A totally implantable new device, the Dialock® system (Biolink Corporation, Norwell, MA), allowed us to conduct the first Italian experience. Methods From February 1st 2000 to January 31st 2001, we implanted 21 devices in 12 males and 9 females, median age 66±12 years, with a dialysis duration ranging from 0 to 22 years. In 6 cases the Dialock® was first choice access, in 5 it replaced a malfunctioning tunneled central venous catheter, and in 10 cases it was the rescue access after previous AVF failures. Results On average, the device was accessed 3.5 days after implantation. Median duration of use was 142 days (range 29–365), for a global observation period of 118.2 pt-months. Nineteen devices are currently working without any problem. One port was removed after 60 days due to thrombosis, and another after 9 months of use due to sepsis. Another patient had a systemic infection with cardiac and vertebral involvement with complete remission after 4 months of antibiotic therapy and salvage of the device. The infection rate was 1.3 per 1000 catheter-days. Prescribed blood flow was achieved in 95.7% of the sessions. Conclusion Our short-term results confirm the efficacy and reliability of the new device. In order to assess the true indication for implanting Dialock®, a more prolonged observation period is needed.
The Relationship Between Scale and Strategy in Search-Based Wayfinding

We present the results of a study that investigated the interaction of strategy and scale on search quality and efficiency for vista-scale spaces. The experiment was designed such that sighted participants were required to locate “invisible” objects whose locations were marked only with audio cues, thus enabling sight to be used for search coordination, but not for object detection. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: a small indoor space (~20 m 2 ), a medium-sized outdoor space (~250 m 2 ), or a large outdoor space (~1000 m 2 ), and the entire search for each participant was recorded either by a laser tracking system (indoor) or by GPS (outdoor). Results revealed a clear relationship between the size of space and search strategy. Individuals were likely to use ad-hoc methods in smaller spaces, but they were much more likely to search large spaces in a systematic fashion. In the smallest space, 21.5% of individuals used a systematic gridline search, but the rate increased to 56.2% for the medium-sized space, and 66.7% for the large-sized space. Similarly, individuals were much more likely to revisit previously found locations in small spaces, but avoided doing so in large spaces, instead devoting proportionally more time to search. Our results suggest that even within vista-scale spaces, perceived transport costs increase at a decreasing rate with distance, resulting in a distinct shift in exploration strategy type.
An Analysis of Written Grammatical Errors of Arab Learners of English as a Foreign Language at Alzaytoonah Private University of Jordan

The study was conducted in order to investigate and classify the grammatical errors in the writings of 62 students of the Department of English Literature and Translation at Alzaytoonah Private University of Jordan. The students enrolled in a paragraph writing course in the first semester of the academic year 2009/2010. These errors were first classified into six major categories and then they were divided into subcategories. It was observed that the category that included the largest number of errors was the errors of prepositions, which comprised 26% of the total errors. The following most problematic areas were respectively: morphological errors, articles, verbs, active and passive and tenses. On the basis of the students' results, the researcher has included some pedagogical implications for teachers, syllabus designers, textbook writers and text developers.
A transimpedance amplifier with DC-coupled differential photodiode current sensing for wireless optical communications

A transimpedance amplifier with differential DC-coupled photocurrent sensing was integrated in a standard 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS process. It achieves 33 k/spl Omega/ transimpedance gain and a bandwidth of 255 MHz with a 2 pF photodiode capacitance. This design exhibits 40 dB power supply rejection ratio and an average input noise of (6.8pA)/(/spl radic/Hz). Power dissipation is 30 mW from a 3 V supply.
A bipolar low-voltage quarter-square multiplier with a resistive-input based on the bias offset technique

A bipolar low-voltage quarter-square multiplier is presented. The proposed multiplier is very simple because the multiplier cell is built from four identical emitter-coupled pairs connected in parallel and its input system is realized using resistive dividers. Therefore, it is also very practical because it is easy to implement the circuit on a large scale integration (LSI). The fundamental characteristics at a 1 V supply voltage were verified on a breadboard using transistor-arrays and discrete components, it is, furthermore, very suitable for low-power operation.
Galangin Prevents Acute Hepatorenal Toxicity in Novel Propacetamol-Induced Acetaminophen-Overdosed Mice.

Abstract Acetaminophen (APAP) overdose causes severe liver and kidney damage. APAP-induced liver injury (AILI) represents the most frequent cause of drug-induced liver failure. APAP is relatively insoluble and can only be taken orally; however, its prodrug, propacetamol, is water soluble and usually injected directly. In this study, we examined the time-dependent effects of AILI after propacetamol injection in mice. After analyses of alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase activities and liver histopathology, we demonstrated that a novel AILI mouse model can be established by single propacetamol injection. Furthermore, we compared the protective and therapeutic effects of galangin with a known liver protective extract, silymarin, and the only clinical agent for treating APAP toxicity, N-acetylcysteine (NAC), at the same dose in the model mice. We observed that galangin and silymarin were more effective than NAC for protecting against AILI. However, only NAC greatly improved both the surviv.
Recursive hierarchical fully-connected networks: a class of low-degree small-diameter interconnection networks

The authors propose a new class of interconnection networks called recursive hierarchical fully-connected (RHFC) networks for high-performance parallel processing. The degree of a partially linked RHFC network is equal to that of its nucleus graph plus a fixed integer, leading to the scalability of such networks. The diameters of suitably constructed RHFC networks are asymptotically optimal within a small constant factor with respect to their node degrees. They then present the construction of recursive hierarchical swapped (RES) networks and multi-dimensional hypernets, both of which are subclasses of RHFC networks and can emulate a hypercube efficiently. They conclude that RHFC networks are highly modularized, make the use of fixed-degree building blocks possible for any practically realizable system, and lead to the construction of high-performance interconnection networks with reasonable cost.
Game theory and optimization in boosting

Boosting is a central technique of machine learning, the branch of artificial intelligence concerned with designing computer programs that can build increasingly better models of reality as they are presented with more data. The theory of boosting is based on the observation that combining several models with low predictive power can often lead to a significant boost in the accuracy of the combined meta-model. This approach, introduced about twenty years ago, has been a prolific area of research, and has proved immensely successful in practice. However, despite extensive work, many basic questions about boosting remain unanswered. In this thesis, we increase our understanding of three such theoretical aspects of boosting. In Chapter 2 we study the convergence properties of the most well known boosting algorithm, AdaBoost. Rate bounds for this important algorithm are known for only special situations that rarely hold in practice. Our work guarantees fast rates hold under all situations, and the bounds we provide are optimal. Apart from being important for practitioners, this bound also has implications for the statistical properties of AdaBoost. Like AdaBoost, most boosting algorithms are used for classification tasks, where the object is to create a model that can categorize relevant input data into one of a finite number of different classes. The most commonly studied setting is binary classification, when there are only two possible classes, although the tasks arising in practice are almost always multiclass in nature. In Chapter 3 we provide a broad and general framework for studying boosting for multiclass classification. Using this approach, we are able to identify for the first time the minimum assumptions under which boosting the accuracy is possible in the multiclass setting. Such theory existed previously for boosting for binary classification, but straightforward extensions of that to the multiclass setting lead to assumptions that are either too strong or too weak for boosting to be effectively possible. We also design boosting algorithms using these minimal assumptions, which work in more general situations than previous algorithms that assumed too much. In the final chapter, we study the problem of learning from expert advice which is closely related to boosting. The goal is to extract useful advice from the opinions of a group of experts even when there is no consensus among the experts themselves. Although algorithms for this task enjoying excellent guarantees have existed in the past, these were only approximately optimal, and exactly optimal strategies were known only when the experts gave binary "yes/no" opinions. Our work derives exactly optimal strategies when the experts provide probabilistic opinions, which can be more nuanced than deterministic ones. In terms of boosting, this provides the optimal way of combining individual models that attach confidence rating to their predictions indicating predictive quality.
Balancing Quality and Workload in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Win- Win Approach for Students and Instructors

The challenge addressed in this article is how to achieve a win-win balance between quality and workload for students and instructors participating in asynchronous online discussions. A Discussion Guideline document including minimum requirements and best practices was developed to address this need. The approach covers three phases: design and development, setting up expectations, and launch and management. The goals of the approach, based on a commitment shared by all full time and adjunct faculty, are high quality of education as well as retention of both students and qualified instructors.
AUTOMATIC HUMAN STRESS DETECTION BASED ON WEBCAM PHOTOPLETHYSMOGRAPHIC SIGNALS

One of the goals of affective computing field is to provide to computers the ability to recognize automatically the affective state of the user in order to have more intuitive human–machine communication. This paper aims to detect automatically the stress user when he is interacting with computer. The developed system is based on instantaneous pulse rate (PR) signal extracted from imaging photoplethysmography (PPG). Seven features from time and frequency domain are extracted from PR signal and processed by learning pattern recognition systems. Two methods based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are used and compared to classify the user’s emotional state. A computer application based on “Stroop color word Test” is developed to elicit emotional stress in the subject. The proposed method can achieve the overall average classification accuracy of 94.42% and 91.10% with SVM and LDA, respectively. Current results indicate that our approach is effective for stress classification.
The Effect of Linguistic Explicitness and English Language Proficiency on the Credibility of Online Medical Information

The Effect of Explicitness and English Language Proficiency on the Credibility of Online Medical Information Alexandra L. Bartell Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Jan Spyridakis Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering Perceived credibility is important to consumers of online medical information because it frequently forms the basis for making treatment choices. While credibility is important to users around the globe, most medical Web sites have been designed primarily for audiences within specific cultural contexts. Many medical Web sites created by low-context Western institutions may lack the graphics or interactivity that users from high-context Eastern cultures expect, forcing these users to depend on the words of a site for meaning rather than the context of the communicative situation. The Formality/Contextuality continuum model suggests that communicative situations with less context have a greater need for linguistic precision. Moreover, the preference for the level of explicitness has been shown to differ among nonnative users of a second language where those with less proficiency prefer more explicit communications and those with greater proficiency prefer more implicit communications. This exploratory study analyzed the effect of linguistic explicitness in an experimental medical text on the credibility of 102 Japanese Internet users who had different levels of English language proficiency. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions where they read a medical text with one of two levels of explicitness and then answered a survey designed to measure their credibility perceptions. This study added to the theory and practical applications of credibility research by showing that style in the form of explicitness does affect the credibility judgments of online medical information for high-context readers. Participants found the explicit text significantly more credible than the implicit text; however, their English proficiency levels did not appear to affect their credibility perceptions. These results suggest that increasing the explicitness level by increasing the frequency of nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and articles may enrich the context of a text and fill in the communicative gap for nonnative English readers who come from high-context cultures, thus improving their credibility perceptions. More studies should be conducted with larger samples, different types of readers, and other communication media to ascertain how the credibility of online medical information can be enhanced by increasing the explicitness of texts and reducing extraneous cognitive load. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter
[The university stage does not favor the healthy life style in women students from Granada].

OBJECTIVE The university stage involves a series of emotional, physiological and environmental changes that will determine consumer patterns that, in many cases, will be maintained and will affect their health. The aim of this study is to analyze the lifestyle (alcohol and tobacco consumption, and levels of physical activity) of female students at the University of Granada. Several authors have noted that the student population is particularly vulnerable to develop risk customs and habits, since the period of university studies is often the time when students take first responsibility for determining their own styles and customs, which in many cases will be maintained throughout its entire life. METHODOLOGY This is a cross / descriptive and analytical study in which 55 students participated in two age groups (18-24 and 25-31 years). A lifestyle-questionnaire was applied to evaluate the type and frequency of alcohol consumption, number of cigarettes smoked daily and physical activity levels (sedentary, light, moderate and severe). RESULTS Alcohol consumption is higher in the older group, and preferably drinks beer and wine; however the younger group shows a pattern of consumption centered on the weekends being preferably consumed distilled beverages. A third of the population smokes with an increase in the number of cigarettes as age increases. There is a positive correlation between snuff and alcohol. A direct positive correlation between tobacco and alcohol was observed. The 88.9% of lesser age group and 52.7% of higher age group show a sedentary-low physical activity. CONCLUSION The need to sensitize the college female population on the benefits of no-consumption of alcohol and snuff, and regular physical exercise is suggested. It would also be advisable to develop protocols of educational intervention in universities promoting healthy living habits.
A method of describing the development of an engineering project

The aim of this paper is to suggest a method of describing and analyzing the progress of an engineering project. The major purpose of such a description is to facilitate a study of how the problem-solving processes involved are influenced by various kinds of impulses. The method is based on a few postulates about the nature of engineering work — engineering activity is assumed to consist mainly of heuristic problem solving. Several aspects or dimensions might be of interest in a description of project status or project progress. For the understanding of the administration of the project three sets of aspects seem to be of particular interest. One is the requirements of the customer. A second consists of various dimensions which influence the problem-solving process. A third is the suggested design of the product. All these aspects of the project change during the progress of the project. Although the reliability of such a descriptive method could not be tested, the experience gained was encouraging, above all because the scheme used for classification seemed to fit in well with the general perceptions of the engineers interviewed as to the progress of the project. The authors conclude that further research along these lines is indicated.
Design of an HPF compiler - A compilation framework for a data-parallel language

I Acknowledgments In mid 1992, I first encountered the challenges of compiler design when I started to work on the European ESPRIT-project PREPARE. Thanks to Edwin Paalvast who introduced me to this project. At the time, we were both working at the Institute for Applied Information Technology of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO-ITI). The PREPARE project aimed at building a programming environment for a parallel machine. During the project, I learned more about managing the different aspects of a large project. Martijn de Lange CEO of ACE showed me the art of how to maneuver the project members into the direction of the ever changing targets. Arthur Veen, as the technical director of the project, responsible for the technical realization and coherence of the different deliverables, taught me the balance between enthusiasm and realization as scheduled. He also showed that his hobby of being an actor also helped to achieve its goals. They were a great help in the many discussions about how to model data distributions. The national successor project FUTURE focused at the proliferation of data-parallel compiler technology among the research institutes and educational infrastructure. Together with Rob Kurver of ACE I learned that market considerations, politics, and sometimes just plain luck can have a much larger effect on the success of a product than maturity, robustness, and efficiency of the developed technology. I specially want to thank my promoter Henk Sips who has introduced me into the small and exclusive world of compiler developers in the United States and Europe. I really enjoyed the open atmosphere and pleasant competition in the discussions between the compiler experts. In numerous occasions, the tray-tables of the airplanes were far to small to write down our ideas of how to extend our compilation model. The long times that it took to travel, were sometimes not enough to complete the discussions. I would like to thank Kees van Reeuwijk and Vincent Korstanje for their critical feedback in our brainstorm sessions. These lively discussions were sometimes both at a high technical level and at a high audio level. So, I also want to thank my colleges at TPD working the offices in the same corridor, for not complaining. Kees van Reeuwijk helped me a lot in properly describing the methods and principles we had found. Vincent Korstanje did a lot of benchmarking of our PRE-HPF compiler, thereby finding a lot …