Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Theoretical study and mathematical modelling on the reaction rates in the SiMn-production process

The reduction rate of MnO and SiO2 in the furnace stage of metallurgical silicomanganese production has been studied to increase the current understanding of the SiMn-alloy production process. Using thermodynamic data and experimental values, a computational model has been constructed in MATLAB R2016B, based on the general relations for the reaction rates of the most prominent reactions found in the process. Furthermore, general formulas for the activities of MnO, SiO2, Mn and Si, as well as the carbon saturation in the metal, were created based of data from FACTSAGE. The formulas for activities and carbon saturation were found to be able to replicate the values from FACTSAGE to a very high degree for the concentrations found during the silicomanganese production process. The model was found to be able to replicate most of the experiments to a very high degree, producing slag and metal concentrations that were within a tens of a percent of the experimental value through the application of our knowledge of the thermodynamics and kinetics of the system. From the comparison of three experiments with Assmang ore and three with Comilog ore, Assmang ore was found to reduce faster and at a lower temperature compared to Comilog ore. The foaming phenomena was studied and the rate of reaction was found to increase several fold during the foaming. This was believed to be due to an increased reaction area between the carbon in the crucible wall and the coke, and the slag. HeFeMn was found to reduce the temperature at which Assmang ore and quartz starts reducing with abour 75 ◦C.
Infected Cell Killing by HIV-1 Protease Promotes NF-κB Dependent HIV-1 Replication

Acute HIV-1 infection of CD4 T cells often results in apoptotic death of infected cells, yet it is unclear what evolutionary advantage this offers to HIV-1. Given the independent observations that acute T cell HIV-1 infection results in (1) NF-κB activation, (2) caspase 8 dependent apoptosis, and that (3) caspase 8 directly activates NF-κB, we questioned whether these three events might be interrelated. We first show that HIV-1 infected T cell apoptosis, NF-κB activation, and caspase 8 cleavage by HIV-1 protease are coincident. Next we show that HIV-1 protease not only cleaves procaspase 8, producing Casp8p41, but also independently stimulates NF-κB activity. Finally, we demonstrate that the HIV protease cleavage of caspase 8 is necessary for optimal NF-κB activation and that the HIV-1 protease specific cleavage fragment Casp8p41 is sufficient to stimulate HIV-1 replication through NF-κB dependent HIV-LTR activation both in vitro as well as in cells from HIV infected donors. Consequently, the molecular events which promote death of HIV-1 infected T cells function dually to promote HIV-1 replication, thereby favoring the propagation and survival of HIV-1.
Prevalence of Low Back Pain among Undergraduate Physiotherapy Students in Nigeria

Background. Low back pain (LBP) is a major cause of disability and the most common work-related musculoskeletal disorder among physiotherapists. This study examined the prevalence of low back pain among students undergoing training to become physiotherapists. Methods. Participants were 207 undergraduate clinical physiotherapy students at three universities in Nigeria. A modified version of a questionnaire used in a previous study was utilized to obtain demographic, educational activities, and LBP data. Prevalence of LBP was examined with descriptive statistics while factors associated with prevalence were explored using chi-square statistics. Results. More male students (53.1%) and those in the penultimate year of study (53.1%) participated in the study. Lifetime, 12-month, 1-month, and 7-day prevalence of LBP were 45.5%, 32.5%, 17.7%, and 11.5%, respectively. Prevalence of LBP was not significantly associated with any of the demographic variables. Educational activities, namely, “having techniques practiced on self for ≤10 hours” and “treating patients for ≥30 hours,” a month prior to the study were significantly (P < 0.05) associated with higher 1-month and 7-day LBP prevalence, respectively. Conclusions. Although the prevalence of LBP was comparatively low, its association with educational activities emphasizes the need to incorporate effective LBP preventive strategies in the training of physiotherapy students.
BCG Skin Infection Triggers IL-1R-MyD88-Dependent Migration of EpCAMlow CD11bhigh Skin Dendritic cells to Draining Lymph Node During CD4+ T-Cell Priming

The transport of antigen from the periphery to the draining lymph node (DLN) is critical for T-cell priming but remains poorly studied during infection with Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG). To address this we employed a mouse model to track the traffic of Dendritic cells (DCs) and mycobacteria from the BCG inoculation site in the skin to the DLN. Detection of BCG in the DLN was concomitant with the priming of antigen-specific CD4+ T cells at that site. We found EpCAMlow CD11bhigh migratory skin DCs to be mobilized during the transport of BCG to the DLN. Migratory skin DCs distributed to the T-cell area of the LN, co-localized with BCG and were found in close apposition to antigen-specific CD4+ T cells. Consequently, blockade of skin DC traffic into DLN dramatically reduced mycobacterial entry into DLN and muted T-cell priming. Interestingly, DC and mycobacterial entry into the DLN was dependent on IL-1R-I, MyD88, TNFR-I and IL-12p40. In addition, we found using DC adoptive transfers that the requirement for MyD88 in BCG-triggered migration was not restricted to the migrating DC itself and that hematopoietic expression of MyD88 was needed in part for full-fledged migration. Our observations thus identify a population of DCs that contribute towards the priming of CD4+ T cells to BCG infection by transporting bacilli into the DLN in an IL-1R-MyD88-dependent manner and reveal both DC-intrinsic and -extrinsic requirements for MyD88 in DC migration.
Probing the Limits of PON Monitoring Using Periodic Coding Technology

We probe the limits, both experimentally and analytically, of passive optical network (PON) monitoring using periodic coding technology. The experimental demonstration focuses on a 16 customer PON with a 20 km feeder fiber followed by either a single cluster or a tiered hierarchy. A directly modulated laser modulated at 1 GHz was used to generate the monitoring probe signals. The measured data from the experimental setup was fed to a reduced complexity maximum likelihood sequence estimation (RC-MLSE) algorithm to detect and localize the customers. Three different PON deployments were tested. We demonstrate improved monitoring robustness when using a variable threshold for networks with a tiered geographic distribution. While only a 16 customer PON was tested, our experimental setup had 18 dB margin in the total loss budget corresponding to splitting losses for 64 customers. We investigate analytically the total permissible loss budget of the monitoring system operating in the 1650 nm waveband as a function of receiver specifications. We examine the effect of resolution in the analog-to-digital conversion on the correlation peaks that form sufficient statistics for the RC-MLSE algorithm. Resolution affects both the RC-MLSE algorithm and the use of signal averaging to improve signal-to-noise ratio. We find that the monitoring system is able to monitor current PON standards with inexpensive, commercially available electronics.
Vaccinia Virus 4c (A26L) Protein on Intracellular Mature Virus Binds to the Extracellular Cellular Matrix Laminin

ABSTRACT Vaccinia virus intracellular mature virus (IMV) binds to glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) on cells via three virion proteins, H3L, A27L, and D8L. In this study, we demonstrated that binding of IMV to BSC40 cells was competitively inhibited by soluble laminin but not by fibronectin or collagen V, suggesting that this cell surface extracellular matrix (ECM) protein may play a role in vaccinia virus entry. Moreover, IMV infection of GAG− sog9 cells was also inhibited by laminin, demonstrating that virion binding to laminin does not involve a prior interaction with GAGs. Furthermore, comparative envelope protein analyses of wild-type vaccinia virus strain Western Reserve, which binds to laminin, and of a mutant virus, IA27L, which does not, showed that the A26L open reading frame (ORF), encoding an envelope protein, was mutated in IA27L, resulting in A26L being absent from the IMV. Expression of the wild-type A26L ORF in IA27L resulted in laminin binding activity. Moreover, recombinant A26L protein bound to laminin in vitro with a high affinity, providing direct evidence that A26L is the laminin binding protein on IMV. In summary, these results reveal a novel role for the vaccinia viral envelope protein A26L in binding to the ECM protein laminin, an association that is proposed to facilitate IMV entry.
Decision-Theoretic Approach for Controlling and Coordinating multiple Active Cameras in Surveillance ( Extended Abstract )

This research presents a novel decision-theoretic approach to control and coordinate multiple active (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras to achieve high-quality surveillance. The decision-theoretic approaches provide robust mathematical frameworks that can model the interactions between the active camera network and the surveillance environment. It offers advantage of planning optimal control decisions for active cameras to achieve the desired surveillance task, in presence of uncertainties like targets’ motion, location, etc. In this work, we provide an overview of proposed framework in which a surveillance tasks can be posed as stochastic optimization problems. Specifically we propose solutions for two novel problems/tradeoffs in active camera surveillance: (i) Maximizing the number of targets observed in active cameras while maintaining the guaranteed resolution of these targets and (ii) Maximizing the number of targets observed in active cameras while minimizing the location uncertainty of the targets that are currently not observed in any of the active cameras. By exploiting the structure and properties that are inherently present in the surveillance problem, we have reduced the exponential policy computation time to polynomial time. This makes the decision-theoretic approach feasible for the surveillance applications.
Socially Acceptable Robot Navigation in the Presence of Humans

Considering the widespread use of mobile robots in different parts of society, it is important to provide them with the capability to behave in a socially acceptable manner. Therefore, a research topic of great importance recently has been the study of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In this work we propose a methodology to dynamically adapt the robot's behavior during its navigation considering a possible encounter with humans in the environment. The method is divided into two basic steps. The first one is based upon Computer Vision techniques and executes the recognition and analysis of the scene, considering characteristics such as the presence of humans, quantity, and distance to the robot. Considering the information from the previous stage, the methodology decides whether the navigation should undergo some modification. Among the possible adaptation are changing the current trajectory and reduction in speed. Different trials on a real-world scenario were executed, providing a thorough evaluation and validation of the methodology.
Can the intensity of game load affect the shooting performance in basketball

Victory in a basketball game depends on many factors. One of the main factors that determine game performance of the team is the successfulness of basketball shooting. The aim of this study is to determine the influence of the game load intensity on basketball shooting performance. Ten senior female basketball players (2 nd division) participated in this study. Bleep test was used to set the maximal heart rate (HR max ) of each player. The intensity of game load was classified as follows: 95 % of HR max . During the two competitive games and the bleep test the HR was monitored by telemetric device. In the 1 st zone no field goal attempt was recorded. In the 2 nd zone the successfulness of shooting was 60%, in the 3 rd zone 37.5% and in the 4 th zone 45.2%. The relation between the successfulness of shooting and the individual zones was statistically insignificant ( χ 2 =2.786; df =2; p =0.24). Calculated Cramer’s contingency coefficient ( V =0.149) shows weak strength of association. Based on the results we may conclude that the shooting performance in basketball game is not dependent on the intensity of game load. Besides the intensity of game load, the shooting performance can also be affected by many other factors. What is relevant for training process is that the 88.1% of all field goal attempts were made with HR over 85% of HR max . This fact should be taken into consideration by coaches when planning shooting practice sessions.
The Prevalence of Pedagogy-Related Research in Applied Linguistics: Extending the Debate

In this article, we respond to the special issue ‘Definitions for Applied Linguistics’, where the past and future of applied linguistics are discussed, and the place of pedagogy in the field’s scope is debated. In the issue, Hellermann (2015) uses data from 1980 to 1984 and 2009 to 2013 to show a shift in the field towards an emerging range of language-related problems, coupled with the declining prominence of pedagogy-related research in the journal. In this article, we extend Hellerman’s work to investigate whether this trend is reflective of other published work in applied linguistics. In our investigation, 336 research papers published in 2015 were analysed from 10 self-identified applied linguistics journals. Data revealed language-pedagogy-related studies constituted 32 per cent of all empirical research, although this representation was unevenly distributed across the journals. Findings suggest a number of practice-oriented journals now take the lion’s share of pedagogical research, allowing other key applied linguistics journals to focus on a diverse range of non-pedagogy-related language problems. Nevertheless, in general, pedagogy remains a key topic in the field.
Interactive Scalable Abstraction of Reverse Engineered UML Class Diagrams

A large fraction of the time consumed in software development and maintenance is spent on understanding the software, which indicates it is a critical activity. Software documentation, including software architecture design documentation, is an important aid in software comprehension. However, keeping documentation up to date with evolving source code is often challenging and absence of up date or more comprehensive design-level documentation is not uncommon. As a solution, software architecture design may be recovered using reverse engineering techniques. However, existing reverse engineering methods produce complete design diagrams that include all the details that exist in the source code. The absence of abstraction from implementation details limits the usefulness of existing reverse engineering techniques for understanding software. This paper aims to address this problem by providing a method and tool that interactively allows developers to interactively explore a reverse engineered class diagram at scalable levels of abstraction. To this end, we propose a Software Architecure Abstraction (SAAbs) framework and an automated tool which implements the SAAbs framework. The SAAbs framework applies a machine learning scoring algorithm to produce a class importance ranking for class diagrams, this ranking is the basis for software architecture abstraction and visualization. We validate this framework by validating the SAAbs tool using a semi-structured survey. On average, 30 respondents of this survey rated 5.40 out of 6 points, which indicate that this is a useful tool to assist software developers in understanding a system.
Factor Structure and Basic Psychometric Properties of the Transition Assessment and Goal Generator

We examined the theoretical factor structure fit and psychometric properties of the Transition Assessment and Goal Generator (TAGG). In the first study, 349 transition-aged students with disabilities, their special educators, and family members completed TAGG assessments, and using exploratory factor analysis (EFA)/confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), a simple eight-factor structure emerged. In 2 subsequent years, independent samples of students with disabilities (Study II, N = 257; Study III, N = 846), their special educators, and family members completed the TAGG, and the TAGG structure replicated in both years across all versions using CFAs. The results provide evidence of construct validity and reliability. We discuss implications of the results and identify future research needs.
Classification using Multi-SOMs and Multi-Neural Gas

Within this paper we present the extension of two neural network paradigms for clustering tasks. The Self Organizing feature Maps (SOM) are extended to the Multi SOM approach, and the Neural Gas is extended to a Multi Neural Gas. Some common cluster analysis coefficients (Silhouette Coefficient, Gap Statistics, Calinski-Harabasz Coefficient) have been adapted for the new paradigms. Both new neural clustering methods are described and evaluated briefly using exemplary data sets.
Psychometric Properties of Two Measures of Crisis and Distress in Parents of Children With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

ABSTRACT Introduction: Parents and their children with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) are under significant amounts of stress (Lecavalier, Leone & Wiltz, 2006). When stress escalates to crisis, some children with IDD are admitted to the emergency department or an inpatient unit. While existing measures evaluate stress over time, we lack a valid measure to assess the experience of crisis. The current study aimed to validate a measure of crisis in a clinical sample of parents of children with IDD. Validating such a measure will provide a precise depiction of a family’s perception of crisis and their relative distress, and improve communication between clinicians and families. Methods: Parents and caregivers of children and adolescents, age 5 to 17 and diagnosed with IDD including autism spectrum disorder completed measures, reporting on their level of caregiver strain (using the Caregiver Strain Questionnaire-CGSQ) and their current level of crisis (using the Brief Family Distress Scale-BFDS). Psychometric data from the BFDS and CGSQ were analyzed to examine aspects of reliability and validity. Results: Results from analyses indicated significant associations between the CGSQ and BFDS and excellent overall internal consistency within the CGSQ. Additionally, the BFDS detected differences between inpatient and outpatient conditions and validly categorized participants into crisis groups. Conclusions: Validation of the BFDS further demonstrates its clinical utility and continues to clarify the experience of parents of children with IDD in times of crisis. Future research should examine the role of problem behavior in crisis and the utility of the BFDS as a measure of change.
Relationships among metacognitive skills, listening, and academic reading in English as a foreign language

Pae, Hye K. , Rose A. Sevcik, Daphne Greenberg, and Sun-A Kim. 2016. Relationships among metacognitive skills, listening, and academic reading in English as a foreign language. Linguistic Research 33(Special Edition), 1-27. This study examined relationships among metacognitive skills, including inference, summarizing skills, fluency and memory, listening, and academic reading in English as a foreign language (FL). As a secondary analysis of the field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic, a total of 585 nonnative speakers’ academic language and reading skills were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. One-factor and four-factor models were tested using 12 observed variables and four latent constructs for structural equation modeling to establish a model of reading in English as an FL. The model of reading was tenable for nonnative speakers’ skills in English for academic purposes. Consistent with previous findings, listening skills were found to be important for reading skills. Other metacognitive skills, such as inference, summarizing, and fluency and memory, were also robust predictors of efficient academic reading. Of the given variables, the most dominant variable in FL reading for academic purposes was fluency and memory. (University of Cincinnati.Georgia State University.The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Mineralogy and chemistry of cobbles at Meridiani Planum, Mars, investigated by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity

Numerous loose rocks with dimensions of a few centimeters to tens of centimeters and with no obvious physical relationship to outcrop rocks have been observed along the traverse of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. To date, about a dozen of these rocks have been analyzed with Opportunity’s contact instruments, providing information about elemental chemistry (Alpha Particle X‐ray Spectrometer), iron mineralogy and oxidation states (Mossbauer Spectrometer) and texture (Microscopic Imager). These "cobbles" appear to be impact related, and three distinct groups can be identified on the basis of chemistry and mineralogy. The first group comprises bright fragments of the sulfate‐rich bedrock that are compositionally and texturally indistinguishable from outcrop rocks. All other cobbles are dark and are divided into two groups, referred to as the "Barberton group" and the "Arkansas group," after the first specimen of each that was encountered by Opportunity. Barberton group cobbles are interpreted as meteorites with an overall chemistry and mineralogy consistent with a mesosiderite silicate clast composition. Arkansas group cobbles appear to be related to Meridiani outcrop and contain an additional basaltic component. They have brecciated textures, pointing to an impact‐related origin during which local bedrock and basaltic material were mixed.
Designexpert: a Knowledge-based Toolfor Developing System-wide Properties

Many failures of software systems may be traced to inadequate development of system-wide attributes, such as system security, reliability, and usability. Despite the recognized importance of system-wide requirements, commercially available computer-aided software engineering CASE tools do not provide any special assistance for satisfying them, instead concentrating on support for developing and rapidly prototyping a system's functionality. This paper presents DesignExpert, a knowledge-based tool intended to aid system developers and other stakeholders to eeectively address system-wide requirements. The tool elicits requirements, analyzes needs, generates design alternatives, and suggests evaluation strategies.
Exact Finite-Dimensional Filters for Maximum Likelihood Parameter Estimation of Continuous-time Linear Gaussian Systems

In this paper, we derive a new class of finite-dimensional filters for integrals and stochastic integrals of moments of the state for continuous-time linear Gaussian systems. Apart from being of significant mathematical interest, these new filters can be used with the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to yield maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters.
Homomorphic encryption based cancelable biometrics secure against replay and its related attack

Hattori et al. proposed provably-secure cancelable biometric authentication protocols based on homomorphic encryption such as the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption scheme or the Okamoto-Takashima encryption scheme (Journal on Information Processing, 20(2):496-507, 2012). However, their protocols have a security issue that the replay attack is applicable. In this paper, we propose a variant of the Hattori et al. protocols by combining challenge-response authentication with additive homomorphicity, and show that our protocol are secure against not only the replay attack but also its related attack with homomorphic properties.