Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to navigate through obstacles?

Given a set of obstacles and two points, is there a path between the two points that does not cross more than $k$ different obstacles? This is a fundamental problem that has undergone a tremendous amount of work. It is known to be NP-hard, even when the obstacles are very simple geometric shapes (e.g., unit-length line segments). The problem can be generalized into the following graph problem: Given a planar graph $G$ whose vertices are colored by color sets, two designated vertices $s, t \in V(G)$, and $k \in \mathbb{N}$, is there an $s$-$t$ path in $G$ that uses at most $k$ colors? If each obstacle is connected, the resulting graph satisfies the color-connectivity property, namely that each color induces a connected subgraph. We study the complexity and design algorithms for the above graph problem with an eye on its geometric applications. We prove that without the color-connectivity property, the problem is W[SAT]-hard parameterized by $k$. A corollary of this result is that, unless W[2] $=$ FPT, the problem cannot be approximated in FPT time to within a factor that is a function of $k$. By describing a generic plane embedding of the graph instances, we show that our hardness results translate to the geometric instances of the problem. We then focus on graphs satisfying the color-connectivity property. By exploiting the planarity of the graph and the connectivity of the colors, we develop topological results to "represent" the valid $s$-$t$ paths containing subsets of colors from any vertex $v$. We employ these results to design an FPT algorithm for the problem parameterized by both $k$ and the treewidth of the graph, and extend this result to obtain an FPT algorithm for the parameterization by both $k$ and the length of the path. The latter result directly implies previous FPT results for various obstacle shapes, such as unit disks and fat regions.
Gender, age, and race differences on overt integrity tests: Results across four large-scale job applicant datasets.

Group differences on overt integrity tests were examined. Gender, age, and race differences were investigated using 724,806 job applicants. Women scored higher on overt integrity tests than men. There were very small differences between older job applicants (40 years old and older) and younger job applicants (younger than 40). No appreciable age-gender interactions were detected. Race differences were examined by comparing mean scores of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians with those of Whites and were found to be trivial. Implications for adverse impact, test construction, and personality measurement are discussed.
HW-SW emulation framework for temperature-aware design in MPSoCs

New tendencies envisage multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs) as a promising solution for the consumer electronics market. MPSoCs are complex to design, as they must execute multiple applications (games, video) while meeting additional design constraints (energy consumption, time-to-market). Moreover, the rise of temperature in the die for MPSoCs can seriously affect their final performance and reliability. In this article, we present a new hardware-software emulation framework that allows designers a complete exploration of the thermal behavior of final MPSoC designs early in the design flow. The proposed framework uses FPGA emulation as the key element to model hardware components of the considered MPSoC platform at multimegahertz speeds. It automatically extracts detailed system statistics that are used as input to our software thermal library running in a host computer. This library calculates at runtime the temperature of on-chip components, based on the collected statistics from the emulated system and final floorplan of the MPSoC. This enables fast testing of various thermal management techniques. Our results show speedups of three orders of magnitude compared to cycle-accurate MPSoC simulators.
Activation of secure zones in many-core systems with dynamic rerouting

Many-core architectures provide massive parallelism and high performance to the users. They also introduce key challenges regarding security. The main threat rises from the resource sharing. Adoption of firewalls, encryption mechanisms and resource isolation (processor or memory) are common strategies to treat the security threats. The two first strategies present high hardware cost, while the resource isolation does not protect the communication infrastructure. This paper proposes to protect communication and computation simultaneously, creating continuous Secure Zones (SZ) at runtime. The SZ is an isolated area in the system, preventing traffic flows to cross the boundaries of the zone, reserving the Processing Elements (PEs) inside the SZ to execute a secure application (Appsec). The Appsec traffic is enclosed inside the SZ, and any other traffic crossing the SZ is rerouted to the outside of the SZ. Experiments evaluate the cost to close and open an SZ, the impact in the packet latency with and without the SZ in the presence of malicious flows, and the performance penalty in non-secure applications due to the rerouting process when an SZ is closed. Results show that: (1) the latency to start an Appsec is small, 1.2 μs for an SZ with 25 PEs; (2)the isolation process prevents Deny-of-Service (DoS), timing, and spoofing attacks and guarantees confidentiality and integrity;(3)the overhead in the non-secure applications' execution time is also small, being the worst-case 2.56% longer.
MGDB: crossing the marker genes of a user microarray with a database of public-microarrays marker genes

Summary: The microarrays performed by scientific teams grow exponentially. These microarray data could be useful for researchers around the world, but unfortunately they are underused. To fully exploit these data, it is necessary (i) to extract these data from a repository of the high-throughput gene expression data like Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and (ii) to make the data from different microarrays comparable with tools easy to use for scientists. We have developed these two solutions in our server, implementing a database of microarray marker genes (Marker Genes Data Base). This database contains the marker genes of all GEO microarray datasets and it is updated monthly with the new microarrays from GEO. Thus, researchers can see whether the marker genes of their microarray are marker genes in other microarrays in the database, expanding the analysis of their microarray to the rest of the public microarrays. This solution helps not only to corroborate the conclusions regarding a researcher's microarray but also to identify the phenotype of different subsets of individuals under investigation, to frame the results with microarray experiments from other species, pathologies or tissues, to search for drugs that promote the transition between the studied phenotypes, to detect undesirable side effects of the treatment applied, etc. Thus, the researcher can quickly add relevant information to his/her studies from all of the previous analyses performed in other studies as long as they have been deposited in public repositories. Availability: Marker-gene database tool: http://ibb.uab. es/mgdb Contact: jcedano@unorte.edu. uy
Religiosity as a Predictor of Successful Post-Treatment Abstinence for African-American Clients

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine the role of religiosity as a predictor of post-treatment abstinence. A sample of 96 African-American clients receiving community-based outpatient alcoholism treatment were interviewed at treatment entry and three months later. Achieving complete abstinence was predicted from client gender and 17 other predictors, including 6 substance-related factors, 7 psychosocial and health variables, and 4 religiosity/spirituality measures. Bivariate analyses showed that abstainers drank less prior to treatment, had more prior formal treatment and AA involvement, practiced their religion more regularly, and scored higher on measures of both spirituality and extrinsic religiosity. In addition, women were more likely to achieve abstinence. Forward entry binary logistic regression revealed that, controlling for client gender and pre-treatment consumption, only regular practice of one's religion/faith significantly predicted abstinence. Recommendations include (1) the need for research to evaluate if the current findings can be generalized across race/ethnicity and religious affiliation and (2) directing more attention to clients' religiosity in alcoholism treatment.
Veiled Emotions

The present study explores the relative absence of expressive cues and the effect of contextual cues on the perception of emotions and its effect on attitudes. The visibility of expressive cues was manipulated by showing films displaying female targets whose faces were either fully visible, covered by a niqab, or partially visible (control condition). Targets expressed anger, shame, and happiness in the three different face conditions. Results show that perception of emotions is mainly affected by an absence of expressive cues: Covering the lower part of the face results in the perception of less happiness in happy videos and of more intense negative emotions in both happy and shame videos. This bias toward the perception of more negative emotions in covered faces mediates a negative attitude toward niqabs.
Direct Comparison of Dll1- and Dll4-Mediated Notch Activation Levels Shows Differential Lymphomyeloid Lineage Commitment Outcomes

In the thymus, Notch signaling is essential for T lymphopoiesis, with Delta-like (Dll)4 uniquely involved in this process. However, using cocultures, either Dll4 or Dll1 were shown to support T lymphopoiesis. To address which Dll is more effective at inducing hematopoietic progenitor cells to give rise to T lineage cells in vitro, we generated OP9 cells expressing a series of incrementally discrete and equivalent levels of Dll1 or Dll4. In keeping with previous findings, OP9 cells expressing high levels of either Dll1 or Dll4 gave rise to T lineage cells with similar efficacy, and prevented the differentiation of B and myeloid-lineage cells. However, at limiting levels, Dll4 maintained its ability to inhibit B lineage choice and induce T lineage commitment and differentiation at lower levels than Dll1. This manifest property of Dll4 is evident despite lower levels of steady-state surface expression than Dll1 on OP9 cells. The heightened effectiveness of Dll4 over Dll1 also corresponded to the induction of Notch target genes, and inhibition of B and myeloid-specific transcription factors. Furthermore, we show that OP9 cells expressing levels of Dll4 equivalent to those present in thymic epithelial cells, as expected, gave rise to T lineage cells, but were also permissive for the differentiation of myeloid cells; whereas, still inhibiting B lymphopoiesis. Our findings show that Dll4 expressed at physiological levels on OP9 cells is functionally distinct from similarly expressed levels of Dll1, illustrating the unique properties of Dll4 in supporting the combined T lineage and specific myeloid-lineage outcomes that underpin its function within the thymus.
Time-Wise Change in Neck Pain in Response to Rehabilitation with Specific Resistance Training: Implications for Exercise Prescription

Purpose To determine the time-wise effect of specific resistance training on neck pain among industrial technicians with frequent neck pain symptoms. Methods Secondary analysis of a parallel-group cluster randomized controlled trial of 20 weeks performed at two large industrial production units in Copenhagen, Denmark. Women with neck pain >30 mm VAS (N = 131) were included in the present analysis. The training group (N = 77) performed specific resistance training for the neck/shoulder muscles three times a week, and the control group (N = 54) received advice to stay active. Participants of both groups registered neck pain intensity (0–100 mm VAS) once a week. Results Neck pain intensity was 55 mm (SD 23) at baseline. There was a significant group by time interaction for neck pain (F-value 2.61, P<0.001, DF = 19). Between-group differences in neck pain reached significance after 4 weeks (11 mm, 95% CI 2 to 20). The time-wise change in pain showed three phases; a rapid decrease in the training group compared with the control group during the initial 7 weeks, a slower decrease in pain during the following weeks (week 8–15), and a plateau during the last weeks (week 16–20). Adherence to training followed a two-phase pattern, i.e. weekly participation rate was between 70–86% during the initial 7 weeks, dropping towards 55–63% during the latter half of the training period. Conclusion Four weeks of specific resistance training reduced neck pain significantly, but 15 weeks is required to achieve maximal pain reduction. The time-wise change in pain followed a three-phase pattern with a rapid effect during the initial 7 weeks followed by a slower but still positive effect, and finally a plateau from week 15 and onwards. Decreased participation rate may explain the decreased efficacy during the latter phase of the intervention.
Teachers' Thinking About Instruction

Complex cognitive processes underlie the thoughts and decision making of teachers engaged in planning and carrying out instruction. Research on teacher planning is summarized with respect to reasons for planning, how teachers plan, influential factors, and differences between experienced and inexperienced teachers' planning. Research on teachers' interactive decision making is summarized with respect to the conceptions, components, antecedents, and decision making of experienced and inexperienced teachers. Research investigating the relation between teachers' decisions and student outcomes is presented. A cognitive psychological framework for analyzing teacher thinking is presented and applied to existing research on teacher planning and decision making. Finally, new directions for research on teacher thinking are explored.
An improved indirect holographic method for antenna near-field phase reconstruction

A new approach is proposed in this work for antenna near-field phase recovery. Indirect holographic technique is adopted, but combining the signals directly in the spatial domain, thus avoiding the indesired overlapping between the spectral components of hologram, usually occurring in the standard approach. The effectiveness of the improved technique is confirmed by numerical simulations on a 21 elements X-band antenna array.
Placement blogging: the benefits and limitations of online journaling

Abstract The use of weblogs (blogs) as student learning journals has become increasingly popular in class-based courses, but little attention has been given to their use in supporting experiential learning activities off-campus. This article explores the advantages and limitations of placement blogging which emerged from a major research project on placement learning for students of politics. It found that blogging can encourage reflective learning due to its public nature. The article includes short videos of post-placement interviews in which students discuss issues surrounding their use of online journaling.
Self-Sustainable Communications With RF Energy Harvesting: Ginibre Point Process Modeling and Analysis

RF-enabled wireless power transfer and energy harvesting has recently emerged as a promising technique to provision perpetual energy replenishment for low-power wireless networks. The network devices are replenished by the RF energy harvested from the transmission of ambient RF transmitters, which offers a practical and promising solution to enable self-sustainable communications. This paper adopts a stochastic geometry framework based on the Ginibre model to analyze the performance of self-sustainable communications over cellular networks with general fading channels. Specifically, we consider the point-to-point downlink transmission between an access point and a battery-free device in the cellular networks, where the ambient RF transmitters are randomly distributed following a repulsive point process, called Ginibre α-determinantal point process (DPP). Two practical RF energy harvesting receiver architectures, namely time-switching and power-splitting, are investigated. We perform an analytical study on the RF-powered device and derive the expectation of the RF energy harvesting rate, the energy outage probability and the transmission outage probability over Nakagami-m fading channels. These are expressed in terms of so-called Fredholm determinants, which we compute efficiently with modern techniques from numerical analysis. Our analytical results are corroborated by the numerical simulations, and the efficiency of our approximations is demonstrated. In practice, the accurate simulation of any of the Fredholm determinant appearing in the manuscript is a matter of seconds. An interesting finding is that a smaller value of α (corresponding to larger repulsion) yields a better transmission outage performance when the density of the ambient RF transmitters is small. However, it yields a lower transmission outage probability when the density of the ambient RF transmitters is large. We also show analytically that the power-splitting architecture outperforms the time-switching architecture in terms of transmission outage performances. Lastly, our analysis provides guidelines for setting the time-switching and power-splitting coefficients at their optimal values.
Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase Up‐Regulation in a Transgenic Mouse Model of Familial Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Abstract: Mutations in copper/zinc superoxide dismutase (SOD1) are associated with a familial form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and their expression in transgenic mice produces an ALS‐like syndrome. Here we show that, during the course of the disease, the spinal cord of transgenic mice expressing mutant SOD1 (mSOD1) is the site not only of a progressive loss of motor neurons, but also of a dramatic gliosis characterized by reactive astrocytes and activated microglial cells. These changes are absent from the spinal cord of age‐matched transgenic mice expressing normal SOD1 and of wild‐type mice. We also demonstrate that, during the course of the disease, the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) increases. In both early symptomatic and end‐stage transgenic mSOD1 mice, numerous cells with the appearance of glial cells are strongly iNOS‐immunoreactive. In addition, iNOS mRNA level and catalytic activity are increased significantly in the spinal cord of these transgenic mSOD1 mice. None of these alterations are seen in the cerebellum of these animals, a region un‐affected by mSOD1. Similarly, no up‐regulation of iNOS is detected in the spinal cord of age‐matched transgenic mice expressing normal SOD1 or of wild‐type mice. The time course of the spinal cord gliosis and iNOS up‐regulation parallels that of motor neuronal loss in transgenic mSOD1 mice. Neuronal nitric oxide synthase expression is only seen in neurons in the spinal cord of transgenic mSOD1 mice, regardless of the stage of the disease, and of age‐matched transgenic mice expressing normal SOD1 and wild‐type mice. Collectively, these data suggest that the observed alterations do not initiate the death of motor neurons, but may contribute to the propagation of the neurodegenerative process. Furthermore, the up‐regulation of iNOS, which in turn may stimulate the production of nitric oxide, provides further support to the presumed deleterious role of nitric oxide in the pathogenesis of ALS. This observation also suggests that iNOS may represent a valuable target for the development of new therapeutic avenues for ALS.
A Bilingual Discourse Corpus and Its Applications

Existing discourse research only focuses on the monolingual languages and the inconsistency between languages limits the power of the discourse theory in multilingual applications such as machine translation. To address this issue, we design and build a bilingual discource corpus in which we are currently defining and annotating the bilingual elementary discourse units (BEDUs). The BEDUs are then organized into hierarchical structures. Using this discourse style, we have annotated nearly 20K LDC sentences. Finally, we design a bilingual discourse based method for machine translation evaluation and show the effectiveness of our bilingual discourse annotations.
Application of Apriori Algorithm in Oracle Bone Inscription Explication

Oracle Bone Inscription (OBI) is one of the oldest writing in the world, but of all 6000 words found till now there are only about 1500 words that can be explicated explicitly. So explication for OBI is a key and open problem in this field. Exploring the correlation between the OBI words by Association Rules algorithm can aid in the research of explication for OBI.Firstly the OBI data extracted from our OBI corpus are preprocessed; with these processed data as input for Apriori algorithm [1] we get the frequent itemset. And combined by the interestingness measurement the strong association rules between OBI words are produced. Experimental results on our OBI corpus demonstrate that our proposed method is feasible and effective in finding semantic correlation for OBI.
A new algorithm based on saturation and desaturation in the xy chromaticity diagram for enhancement and re-rendition of color images

This paper presents a new algorithm for color contrast enhancement which adopts the xy chromaticity diagram and consists of two steps. All the "chromatic" colors are first maximally saturated within a certain gamut; the opportune desaturation operation which follows is based on the center of gravity law for color mixture. This prevents the introduction of unnatural colors and, in combination with a suitable manipulation of the brightness value, turns out to increase the image sharpness and to provide more appealing results Our technique can also be applied to re-rendition a color image since it can easily simulate the change of the illuminant(s) of the scene portrayed in the image, this could find useful applications in image and video editing. Some examples of the performance of the algorithm are reported and discussed.
Chinese and US Middle-School Science Teachers' Autonomy, Motivation, and Instructional Practices

This study examined Chinese and US middle-school science teachers' perceptions of autonomy support. Previous research has documented the link between teachers' perceptions of autonomy and the use of student-oriented teaching practices for US teachers. But is not clear how the perception of autonomy may differ for teachers from different cultures or more specifically how motivation factors differ across cultures. The survey measured teachers' motivation, perceptions of constraints at work, perceptions of students' motivation, and level of autonomy support for students. Exploratory factor analysis of responses for the combined teacher sample (n = 201) was carried out for each of the survey assessments. Significance testing for Chinese (n = 107) and US (n = 94) teachers revealed significant differences in teachers' motivation and perceptions of constraints at work and no significant differences for perceptions of students' motivation or their level of autonomy support for students. Chinese teachers' perceptions of constraints at work, work motivation, and perceptions of student motivation were found to significantly predict teachers' autonomy support. For the US teachers, teacher motivation was the only significant predictor of teachers' autonomy support. A sub-sample of teachers (n = 19) was interviewed and results showed that teachers in both countries reported that autonomy was important to their motivation and the quality of science instruction they provided to students. The primary constraints on teaching reported by the US teachers related to materials and laboratory space while the Chinese teachers reported constraints related to the science curriculum and standards.