Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DPW-LRU: An Efficient Buffer Management Policy Based on Dynamic Page Weight for Flash Memory in Cyber-Physical Systems

Owing to its high performance, small size, and low energy consumption, NAND flash memory has been extensively adopted in cyber-physical systems. However, the inherent characteristics of flash memory, including not-in-place update and asymmetric I/O latencies, present difficulties in the design of buffer management policies. In this paper, we propose an enhanced buffer management policy for the flash memory referred to as dynamic page weight least recently used (DPW-LRU), which considers temporal locality and simultaneously provides effective utilization of limited buffer resources. Page migration is further enhanced by identifying the page access mode and frequency while separating the buffer into two different regions. A novel eviction algorithm is also designed to reduce the write operations and maintain a high hit ratio of the buffer regions, combining dynamic temporal locality, real-time eviction cost, and recency of pages. The experimental results show that DPW-LRU improves the hit ratio by up to 8.3%, decreases the write operation by up to 22.6%, and reduces the overall latency by up to 18.8% relative to those of other state-of-the-art buffers management policies.
Patient experiences of caring and person‐centredness are associated with perceived nursing care quality

AIMS To explore the extent to which patient ratings of perceived caring and person-centredness are associated with perceived nursing care quality in an acute hospital sample of inpatients. BACKGROUND Self-reported patient experiences have had limited attention in conceptualizations of healthcare quality as described in policy and national standards, as well as in health and nursing care practice. The impact of central nursing concepts such as caring and person-centredness on patient ratings of nursing care quality is largely unknown. DESIGN A descriptive non-experimental correlational design was used to collect and analyse data from a sample of Australian acute hospital inpatients (n = 210) in December 2012. METHODS The study collected self-report patient data through a study survey including demographic data and the Caring Behaviours Inventory, the Person-centred Climate Questionnaire, the SF-36 and the Distress thermometer. Descriptive statistics together with Pearson correlation and hierarchical linear regression were used. FINDINGS Perceived caring behaviours of staff and the person-centredness of wards were significantly associated with nursing care quality as evidenced by Pearson correlations being significant and exceeding the pre-set cut-off of r > 0·5. Staff caring behaviours and ward person-centredness also accounted for more than half of the total variance in perceived nursing care quality as evidenced by the final regression model. Knowledgeable and communicable staff, timeliness of assistance and environmental support stood out as most significantly related to patient perceived nursing care quality. CONCLUSIONS Patient experiences of caring and person-centredness seem to have an influential role in the extent to which patients experience the quality of nursing care. Knowledgeable and communicable staff, timeliness of assistance and environmental support stand out as most significantly related to patient-perceived nursing care quality.
Inter-rater reliability of scales and tests used to measure mild cognitive impairment by general practitioners and psychologists

SUMMARY Background: This study was conducted to assess whether general practitioners (GPs) can be trained to use a simple battery of functional scales and neuropsychological tests to detect people likely to develop dementia as reliably as neuropsychologists in clinical practice. Methods: Fifty GPs with medium-sized practices in the Bordeaux area of France were recruited by monitors and trained to use a battery of tests (Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Isaacs Set Test (IST), Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) and Zazzo's Cancellation Test (ZCT)). Each GP was required to recruit one patient. The tests were administered first by the GP, and then by a trained psychologist. Results: Overall, the GPs showed interest in participating in the study. They had no difficulty in recruiting patients according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and none reported any difficulty in using the scales and tests battery. In total, 35 subjects were interviewed by both a trained GP and a psychologist. The scores obtained by the GPs and psychologists did not differ statistically for two of the four tests (IST, p = 0.6; BVRT, p = 0.7), but were statistically different for the other two tests (MMSE, p = 0.04; ZCT; p < 0.002). Conclusions: The results confirm the feasibility of conducting a study for detecting cognitive deficit in general practice. The GPs were interested and participated well, patient adherence was good, and the concordance correlation coefficients between the GPs' and psychologists' scores were satisfactory.
Spectral Vector Design for Gunfire Sound Classification System with a Smartphone using ANN

In this research, a system for classifying the gunfire sound has been studied. The system is designed to function with a smartphone, which has a limited resource. The input sound is converted from the analog format to the digital one. The digital gunfire sound is then processed and analyzed in frequency domain using the smartphone. It is shown that, with noise injection method, using Artificial Neural Network (or ANN) in the classification process, the obtained accuracy for classifying 6 different gunfire sounds is considerably increased compared to the results found in [1]. Additionally, in this work, the feature vector with different number of bins in frequency domain is deeply studied. It is found that with a proper number of bins in the classification, the classification accuracy is significantly improved. The 100%-accuracy can be achieved for the SNR down to 10 dB and a very high accuracy (that is, greater than 90%) can be obtained at the 0-dB SNR. Using an appropriate number of feature vectors can lead to a promising performance in terms of gunfire sound classification.
Microcontroller Based Digital AC Dimming Techniques for Light Intensity Control

This paper presents microcontroller based digital alternating current (AC) dimming techniques for controlling the ambient light intensity. In this work, the light intensity control is intelligently implemented by varying the AC voltage using the digitally isolated forward phase controlled gate pulses of bidirectional triode thyristor (TRIAC). The main objective of this work is to digitally control the firing angle delay of gate of TRIAC from both onsite and remote location using different methods that replaces the conventional AC dimmer. The dimming level signal is transmitted to the low cost microcontroller board from the capacitive touch sensor at the onsite location. At the remote location, dimming is performed using either the Bluetooth communication interface or web based dimming from the client computer to microcontroller board using NI (National Instruments) LabVIEW software. In order to perform onsite dimming, AC input voltage supplied to light source is varied in proportional to the time period elapsed during which the finger is placed over the capacitive touch sensor. To facilitate remote dimming, the dimming level signal is supplied from Android based smart phone having the application software for paring connection and data communication with Bluetooth transceiver interfaced with microcontroller and also the dimming signals are supplied from the client computer to microcontroller board using web publishing tool of LabVIEW.
Notch signalling restricts inflammation and serpine1 expression in the dynamic endocardium of the regenerating zebrafish heart

The zebrafish heart regenerates after ventricular damage through a process involving inflammation, fibrotic tissue deposition/removal and myocardial regeneration. Using 3D whole-mount imaging, we reveal a highly dynamic endocardium during cardiac regeneration, including changes in cell morphology, behaviour and gene expression. These events lay the foundation for an initial expansion of the endocardium that matures to form a coherent endocardial structure within the injury site. We studied two important endocardial molecules, Serpine1 and Notch, which are implicated in different aspects of endocardial regeneration. Notch signalling regulates developmental gene expression and features of endocardial maturation. Also, Notch manipulation interferes with attenuation of the inflammatory response and cardiomyocyte proliferation and dedifferentiation. serpine1 is strongly expressed very early in the wound endocardium, with decreasing expression at later time points. serpine1 expression persists in Notch-abrogated hearts, via what appears to be a conserved mechanism. Functional inhibition studies show that Serpine1 controls endocardial maturation and proliferation and cardiomyocyte proliferation. Thus, we describe a highly dynamic endocardium in the regenerating zebrafish heart, with two key endocardial players, Serpine1 and Notch signalling, regulating crucial regenerative processes. Summary: Three-dimensional confocal imaging reveals changes in cell morphology, behaviour and gene expression during cardiac regeneration following cryoinjury.
Routability-Driven Macro Placement with Embedded CNN-Based Prediction Model

With the dramatic shrink of feature size and the advance of semiconductor technology nodes, numerous and complicated design rules need to be followed, and a chip design can only be taped-out after passing design rule check (DRC). The high design complexity seriously deteriorates design routability, which can be measured by the number of DRC violations after the detailed routing stage. In addition, a modern large-scaled design typically consists of many huge macros due to the wide use of intellectual properties (IPs). Empirically, the placement of these macros greatly determines routability, while there exists no effective cost metric to directly evaluate a macro placement because of the extremely high complexity and unpredictability of cell placement and routing. In this paper, we propose the first work of routability-driven macro placement with deep learning. A convolutional neural network (CNN)-based routability prediction model is proposed and embedded into a macro placer such that a good macro placement with minimized DRC violations can be derived through a simulated annealing (SA) optimization process. Experimental results show the accuracy of the predictor and the effectiveness of the macro placer.
Propagation Channel Measurement at 38 GHz for 5G mm-wave communication Network

The use of the Millimeter Wave (mm-wave) frequency band brings various scattering, fading, atmospheric absorption and penetration losses issues. These issues can be mitigated easily if we can predict the behavior of the propagation channel, in a particular environment. In this regard, this paper studies the propagation characteristics of 38 GHz mm-wave band for semi-open corridor real environment for both Line of Sight (LOS) and Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) scenarios. The measurements have been conducted by using highly directional horn antenna at the transmitter and receiver side in University Technology Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur campus. It gives a comparison results, based on real measurement data for Close-In (CI) free space path loss and Floating-Intercept (FI) path loss models that are considered as the most potential and very common propagation model in order to characterize the large-scale fading propagation environment for 5G network. The results show that the CI is more appropriate for the semi-open corridor environment owing to its simplicity and accuracy.
A Miniaturized UHF-Band Rectenna for Power Transmission to Deep-Body Implantable Devices

This paper presents the design, simulation, and fabrication of a 50 Ohm miniaturized rectenna for wireless energy harvesting for leadless pacemakers. The paper evaluates the performance of each section separately and also while cascaded. The system is designed to work at ultra-low RF input power. When the rectenna is placed 5 cm away from the body surface in simulations, the amount of received power is approximately −20 dBm. The proposed antenna is a miniature spiral PIFA with circular polarization at 673 MHz. The measured results, in and outside sheep’s fat tissue, show that about 15 MHz bandwidth can be realized with $\vert S 11\vert $ below −10 dB and an axial ratio below 3 dB. Two types of rectifiers are fabricated and compared to choose the best one for such a system. Then, unlike most other researches which selected the doubler rectifier structure, this paper uses a single-diode rectifier structure at this power level. The rectenna can be encapsulated in a cylinder with a radius of 5 mm and a height of 3.2 mm. The efficiency of the rectenna reaches 40% at −20 dBm input power.
An analysis of harmonics from dimmable LED lamps

The purpose of this paper is to investigate harmonic generation from dimmable Light Emitting Diode lamps (LEDs) which are used in residential and commercial applications as an energy efficient lighting systems. It is done by conducting laboratory tests on various LED lamps and tapping the load current behavior under different conditions. Then the frequency domain analysis is performed to investigate the generated harmonics. Harmonic levels of different wattage, various branded dimmable LED bulbs are experimentally evaluated and compared. Experimental result shows that, all LED lamps generate very high levels of harmonics during dimming operation which may affect the power quality of AC mains.
Congenital heart defects and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.

OBJECTIVE Review of the prevalence of congenital heart defects (CHD) and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). DESIGN We conducted a search of the Medline and Pubmed databases to identify papers reporting the association. We then searched the reference lists of the papers and reference books for additional sources. RESULTS We found 29 studies that met our inclusion criteria. In the 12 case series studies of subjects with FASD, the proportion of cases with a CHD (atrial [ASD] and ventricular [VSD] septal defects, other defects, or unspecified CHD) ranged from 33% to 100%. From the 14 retrospective studies, the rate of septal defects was 21%, other structural defects 6% and unspecified defects was 12%. For the 2 case-control studies, the odds of CHD ranged from 1.0 (subjects with fetal alcohol effect) to 18.0 (subjects with fetal alcohol syndrome). In the 1 prospective study of CHD the OR for a child to have CHD and FASD was 1.0. KEY CONCLUSION Pediatric cardiologists may have frequent contact with children with FASD and increased levels of attention to prenatal alcohol exposure as a potential etiology of CHD is indicated.
A Framework for Improving the Sharing of Teaching Practices Through Web 2.0 Technology for Academic Instructors

Knowledge management (KM) has become significant for gaining a competitive advantage in many organizations, specifically higher education institutions (HEIs) which are knowledge-intensive environments. Instructors generate a considerable amount of valuable teaching-related knowledge that has accumulated through years of teaching, and needs to be gathered and shared among communities of instructors. Identifying and sharing teaching experiences means enhancing successes by helping instructors to learn from each other and deliver better quality teaching. Many universities still struggle in documenting, sharing and reusing the knowledge gained by instructors due to the absence of a collaborative platform where novices and experts can interact and collaborate. In this paper, we propose a knowledge management framework that aims to enhance the process of acquiring, sharing and reusing teaching practices. Meta-requirements are explored by conducting an investigative study with instructors who work in Saudi universities and then translating these requirements into design principles for efficient and effective knowledge management system development in the higher education context.
Time Series Analysis of Surface EMG Signal - Linear, Non Linear and Chaotic Approaches

EMG data analysis forms a crucial part of clinical diagnosis in patients suffering from movement disorders. Any movement involves a synchronized use of agonist and antagonist muscles. In patients suffering from movement disorders, this coordination between different groups of muscles can be a problem. EMG data is used to study muscle activity; and the measurements are significantly noisy. To study a complex movement, one needs to derive useful models from the EMG data (for different muscle groups). In this paper we present a detailed analysis of surface EMG signals from the perspective of linear segmentation, non-linear and chaotic approaches. Comparisons of the linear regression models of surface EMG suggest the ARIMA model to be the best. A chaotic analysis of surface emg signal to determine the maximum lyaopunov exponent, the embedding dimension and time lag has been discussed in the later part of the paper. The EMG signal is found to follow high dimensional chaotic dynamics from the positive value of the Maximum Lyapunov Exponent.
Electroluminescent Cooling in III–V Intracavity Diodes: Efficiency Bottlenecks

Recent advances in the photoluminescent cooling of doped glasses provoke the question of whether similar progress is possible in electroluminescent cooling (ELC), and if so, what are the conditions for observing it at high powers. Here, we establish a simulation framework for III–V intracavity double-diode structures (DDSs) intended for studying ELC and introduce and analyze the most relevant figures of merit for the recently measured devices exhibiting the highest reported quantum efficiency of 70%. In essence, the DDSs optically couple a GaInP/GaAs double heterojunction light-emitting diode (LED) and a GaAs p-n homojunction photodetector (PD), integrated as a single device. The modeling framework couples the drift-diffusion charge transport model with a photon transport model and uses our recent experimental measurements for validation and the extraction of important material parameters. Results show that the model can accurately describe the experimental behavior over many orders of magnitude and suggest that the internal efficiency of the LED already exceeds the cooling threshold. Directly observing cooling in the presently studied devices, however, is still hindered by bottlenecks arising from the surface recombination at the LED walls and recombination losses in the PD.
Presynaptic and postsynaptic GABAB receptors of neocortical neurons of the rat in vitro: Differences in pharmacology and ionic mechanisms

The properties of pre‐ and postsynaptic GABAB receptors were investigated with intracellular recordings from rat neocortical neurons in vitro. An antagonist of the GABAB receptor (CGP 35348) and ions or drugs interfering with GABAB receptor‐mediated K+ conductance (Ba2+, QX 314) were employed to delineate possible differences. CGP 35348 reduced the conductance of the late inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSPB) in a dose‐dependent manner. Neither the early GABAA receptor‐mediated inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSPA), nor resting membrane potential or direct excitability, were consistently affected by CGP 35348. Bath application of 100 μmol/l Ba2+ decreased IPSPB conductance to about 40% and increased IPSPA conductance to 130% of control. The depression of a second IPSP by a pair of stimuli (paired pulse depression, or PPD) was used as an index for presynaptic GABAB receptor activation. Neither CGP 35348 nor Ba2+ exerted significant effects on the PPD at intervals of 400 msec. The dependence of PPD on the latency of the interval of the stimulus pair was investigated after intracellular application of QX 314 had virtually abolished the IPSPB. Decreasing the stimulus interval from 500 msec to 100 msec revealed a stronger depression of the second IPSPA. Application of CGP 35348 alleviated PPD for stimulus intervals below 300 msec. The data indicate a distinct pharmacological difference between pre‐ and postsynaptic GABAB receptors. Moreover, we suggest that two temporally distinct presynaptic GABAB receptor effects contribute to PPD: a short‐lasting effect, sensitive to CGP 35348, and a long‐lasting effect, insensitive to CGP 35348. The latter is insensitive to Ba2+, implying that this component is not associated with a K− conductance mechanism. Synapse 25:62–72, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
T-cell-independent and T-cell-dependent B-cell responses to exposed variant surface glycoprotein epitopes in trypanosome-infected mice

The T-cell dependency of B-cell responses to variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) epitopes exposed in their native surface conformation on Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense clone LouTat 1 was investigated. T-cell requirements were examined by analyses of gamma globulin preparations derived from trypanosome-infected BALB/c nude (nu/nu) and thymus-intact (nu/+) mice. A radioimmunoassay was used to selectively quantitate antibody binding to native VSG 1 epitopes present on the surface of viable trypanosomes. Such analyses of VSG-specific antibody in infected mice demonstrated that in the absence of T cells there was a significant B-cell response to exposed VSG epitopes; however, in the presence of T cells these surface epitope-specific responses were greatly enhanced. In contrast to infection, immunization of mice with purified VSG 1 or paraformaldehyde-fixed parasites elicited significant VSG surface epitope-specific responses only in the presence of T cells (i.e., in nu/+ mice only). VSG-specific antibody responses in mice infected with three other clonal T. brucei rhodesiense populations (LouTat 1.2, 1.5, and 1.9) were found to be similar in this pattern, although not identical, to the anti-LouTat 1 responses. An important exception was that mice infected with LouTat 1.8 required T cells to produce VSG surface-specific antibody. Thus, the VSG surface epitope-specific B-cell responses in trypanosome-infected mice represent composite T-cell-independent and T-cell-dependent processes, and a significantly stronger response is made in the presence of T cells. However, immunization with VSG in the absence of infection elicited only T-cell-dependent responses. Since the relative contribution of T-cell-independent and T-cell-dependent processes to the total VSG-specific antibody produced during infection was variable (as seen with the absence of a T-cell-independent response to LouTat 1.8), this may reflect differences in the primary structure or display of VSG molecules on the trypanosome membrane or may represent active parasite interference with some epitope-specific B-cell responses.
Hybrid Video Coding with Trellis-Coded Quantization

In state-of-the-art video coding, the prediction error signals are transmitted using transform coding, which consists of an orthogonal transform, scalar quantization, and entropy coding of the quantization indexes. We show that the coding efficiency of transform coding can be improved by replacing scalar quantization with trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) and using advanced entropy coding techniques for coding the quantization indexes. The proposed approach was implemented into the first test model (VTM-1) of the new standardization project Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Our coding experiments yielded average bit-rate savings of 4.9% for intra-only coding and 3.3% for typical random access configurations, where bit-rate savings of 3.5% (intra-only) and 2.4% (random access) can be attributed to the usage of TCQ. These coding gains are obtained at a 5-10% increase in encoder run time and without any change in decoder run time.