Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Spectrum Monitoring Algorithm for OFDM-Based Cognitive Radio Networks

-This paper introduces a novel spectrum monitoring algorithm for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based cognitive radios so that the primary user activity can be detected during the secondary user transmission. The presented technique fully utilizes the performance of both primary and secondary networks. This is done by sensing the variations in signal power over a number of reserved OFDM sub-carriers so that the reappearance of the primary user is quickly detected and the throughput of both primary and secondary networks are kept high. Both analysis and simulation show that the energy ratio algorithm not only effectively and accurately detects the appearance of the primary user in frequency selective channels, but also offers immunity to the traditional OFDM challenges like the sensitivity of Inter Carrier Interference (ICI) effects.
Melanin Bleaching With Warm Hydrogen Peroxide and Integrated Immunohistochemical Analysis: An Automated Platform

Objective. Diagnosing melanocytic lesions is among the most challenging problems in the practice of pathology. The difficulty of physically masking melanin pigment and the similarity of its color to commonly used chromogens often complicate examination of the cytomorphology and immunohistochemical staining results for tumor cells. Melanin bleach can be very helpful for histopathological diagnosis of heavily pigmented melanocytic lesions. Although various depigmentation methods have been reported, no standardized methods have been developed. This study developed a fully automated platform that incorporates hydrogen peroxide–based melanin depigmentation in an automated immunohistochemical analysis. Methods and Materials. The utility of the method was tested in 1 cell block of malignant melanoma cells in pleural effusion, 10 ocular melanoma tissue samples, and 10 cutaneous melanoma tissue samples. Our results demonstrated that the proposed method, which can be performed in only 3 hours, effectively preserves cell cytomorphology and immunoreactivity. Results. The method is particularly effective for removing melanin pigment to facilitate histopathological examination of cytomorphology and for obtaining an unmasked tissue section for immunohistochemical analysis.
Should the WHO withdraw support for mass deworming?

1 World Bank, Washington DC, United States of America, 2 Harvard T. H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Center for Effective Global Action, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America, 4 Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America, 5 Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Going global with health and wellbeing analytics

Purpose – Medtronic needed a comprehensive, integrated, measurable and global approach to employee wellness. Its primary focus was putting the critical factors of prevention and early detection at the forefront of its employee health rewards. The ability to monitor and measure health and wellbeing across the organization was also vital in giving Medtronic key insight, through analytics, into the impact that employee health had on the business. This paper aims to examine this approach.Design/methodology/approach – Medtronic's Total Health global employee wellness brand focused on investing in health rather than the cost of treatment and improving employee health through behavior change. Seeing that the web was critical to delivery and collection of information in this environment it sought an online health and wellbeing platform with the capability to be deployed globally.Findings – Initial health assessments conducted through the online platform have provided essential baseline data to understand overall .
Resonant Frequency of Slotted Ring Resonator

The slotted ring resonator has some promising features for the realisation of compact microwave filters. For the first time, using the finite difference technique and conformal mapping method, the effects of geometrical parameters (i.e.: the resonator length, inner radius, gap width and wall thickness) on the resonant frequency of this resonator, are investigated. The fine tuning of the resonant frequency in practice, is also addressed and in this connection, experimental results are presented.
Reforming the World Health Organization: what influence do the BRICS wield?

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently undergoing fundamental reform that is intended to impact its programmes and priority setting and its financial and governing structures. Within the reform debates, new relations of powers are emerging among traditional donors and emerging economies such as the ‘BRICS’: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These five emerging economies have formally committed ‘to strengthen and legitimise the WHO as the coordinating authority in global health’ through the principle of multilateralism. In this paper, the results of a qualitative study – based on 21 key informant interviews – that seeks to better understand BRICS’ engagement in this organisation and the extent to which their action enables these countries to influence the reform process were presented. The results show that individual BRICS countries found natural pairings with each other on both particular elements of the reform, notably governance and WHO financing, and specific health issues. While numerous examples of individual BRICS countries seeking to raise the profile of specific health issues were found, some evidence of a coordinated effort to influence reform as a bloc was also found. Although this was largely limited to rhetorical announcements of support in formal Declarations and Communiqués, it nevertheless articulates a vision of the WHO as an organisation with a broad mandate delivered with sufficient, predictable funding.
Transfer Function of Piezoelectric Material

The study of piezoelectric material in the past was in T-Domain form; however, no one has studied piezoelectric material in the S-Domain form. This paper will present the piezoelectric material in the transfer function or S-Domain model. S-Domain is a well known mathematical model, used for analyzing the stability of the material and determining the stability limits. By using S-Domain in testing stability of piezoelectric material, it will provide a new tool for the scientific world to study this material in various forms. Keywords—Piezoelectric, Stability, S-Domain, Transfer function
Participants' Recommendations for the Ideal Grief Group: A Qualitative Study

Based on the results from the qualitative part of the study “Grief Groups in Norway” conducted in 2009–2011, this article focuses on grief group participants' recommendations for good or ideal grief groups. Participants have insightful observations about grief groups and how they can be improved, and taking their point of view seriously is one important way of ensuring that users of such group get an optimal experience from joining such groups. Using their experiences to adjust the structure and function of the groups, one can allow for practical solutions for organizations that have difficulties starting up grief support groups, for example, in areas where the population density is low. A major finding in this study was that grief group participants stressed the importance of thorough information before and at the start of grief groups. This concerned information about the aim, structure, organization, and possible effects and limitations of group participation.
Compressive sensing indoor localization

Location based services in wireless sensor networks are quite demanding applications especially in indoors, such that accurate localization of objects and people in indoor environments has long been considered as one of important building blocks in wireless systems. In this paper, we investigate sensor location estimation problem where a target sensor measures inconsistent signals as received-signal-strength or time-of-arrival from anchor sensors with known locations, whereas target sensor location must be estimated. We know that even in large scale wireless sensor networks, information are relatively sparse compared with the number of sensors. In such networks, the localization problem can be recast as a sparse signal recovery problem in the discrete spatial domain from a small number of linear measurements by solving an under-determined linear system. By exploiting the compressive sensing theory, sparse signals can be recovered from far fewer samples than Nyquist sampling rate. Our approach uses a few number of inconsistent measurements to find the wireless device location over a non-symmetric spatial grid. In this method, an ℓ1-norm minimization program is used to recover the wireless user location. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through simulations with synthetic and real measurements.
Diagnosis of Chlamydia trachomatis urethritis in men by polymerase chain reaction assay of first-catch urine

To determine the accuracy of a recently developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) urine assay to detect Chlamydia trachomatis urethral infection in men, we obtained urethral swabs and first-catch urine from 365 men attending a sexually transmitted diseases clinic. Thirty-three (9%) of the 365 men were infected with C. trachomatis as defined by urethral culture. Thirty-two of the 33 men with culture-positive urethral swabs also had PCR-positive urine assays. Of 332 patients with culture-negative urethral swabs, 325 had PCR-negative urine. Compared with chlamydia culture of urethral specimens, PCR assay of urine samples thus had a sensitivity of 97% and a specificity of 98%. The positive predictive value of the urine PCR assay was 82%, and the negative predictive value was 99%. Analysis of discrepant results indicated that six of seven PCR-positive, urethral culture-negative patients probably had chlamydial urethritis. All six patients had symptoms of urethritis and had either a positive urethral swab PCR or a positive urine PCR with a different amplification target. After resolution of discrepant results, (defining true positives as the 33 culture-positive patients and the 6 PCR-positive, culture-negative patients just described), the sensitivity and specificity of culture were 85% (33 of 39) and 100% (326 of 326), respectively. The revised sensitivity and specificity of PCR were 97% (38 of 39) and 99.7% (325 of 326), respectively. We conclude that this urine PCR assay provides a highly sensitive, noninvasive alternative method for the detection of C. trachomatis urethral infection in high-risk men attending a sexually transmitted diseases clinic. This assay could greatly facilitate the testing of larger numbers of male patients for chlamydial infection and should be studied in other settings.
Measurement of a planar 9-way metamaterial power combined amplifier

In this paper, a planar 9-way metamaterial power combined amplifier is presented. The power divider/combiner structure is a metamaterial lens composed of positive refractive index (PRI) material with right-handed unit cells and zero refractive index (ZRI) material with left-handed unit cells. A semi-circular interface is between PRI and ZRI materials. Due to its uniform isolation characteristics of the power divider/combiner, the graceful degradation performance of this power combined amplifier is shown to be independent of the amplifier failure sequence. The power combining of nine 1 W amplifiers gives an output power of 7.64 W with a combining efficiency of 85% at 1.008 GHz, and the graceful degradation characteristic of this power combined amplifier is experimentally demonstrated.
Implementation of Photonic Crystal Couplers

Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) analysis is effectively applied to investigate the transmission of the transverse electric polarized pulses in a 90deg bend photonic crystal waveguide. A comparison with a Time Domain Beam Propagation Method (BPM) based on finite clement scheme is made and excellent agreement is achieved. Moreover, a detailed study of photonic crystal couplers has been carried out. A series of simulations are performed to determine by how much the radius of holes would have to be tuned to result in realizing the functions of the truth tables of the proposed optical directional couplers.
Human pose tracking from monocular video by traversing an image motion mapped body pose manifold

Tracking human pose from monocular video sequences is a challenging problem due to the large number of independent parameters affecting image appearance and nonlinear relationships between generating parameters and the resultant images. Unlike the current practice of fitting interpolation functions to point correspondences between underlying pose parameters and image appearance, we exploit the relationship between pose parameters and image motion flow vectors in a physically meaningful way. Change in image appearance due to pose change is realized as navigating a low dimensional submanifold of the infinite dimensional Lie group of diffeomorphisms of the two dimensional sphere S2. For small changes in pose, image motion flow vectors lie on the tangent space of the submanifold. Any observed image motion flow vector field is decomposed into the basis motion vector flow fields on the tangent space and combination weights are used to update corresponding pose changes in the different dimensions of the pose parameter space. Image motion flow vectors are largely invariant to style changes in experiments with synthetic and real data where the subjects exhibit variation in appearance and clothing. The experiments demonstrate the robustness of our method (within ±4° of ground truth) to style variance.
A computational model of intracellular calcium oscillations in urinary bladder smooth muscle cells

This paper presents a computational model for calcium (Ca2+) oscillations in detrusor smooth muscle (DSM) cells. The proposed model simulates the temporal profile of oscillations by incorporating various cellular and subcellular components. The cellular components include calcium influx via membrane and the plasma membrane calcium ATPase (PMCA) pump. The subcellular components include ryanodine receptors (RyRs), inositol 1, 4, 5 trisphosphate receptors (IP3Rs) and the sarco/endoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase (SERCA) pump. The use of both cellular and subcellular components provides a better estimation of the origin and factors affecting these oscillations. Moreover, our work correlates these computational findings with associated physiology of the smooth muscle cell that aids our understanding of intracellular calcium oscillations and its inception in DSM. A deeper insight into calcium signalling in DSM cells is expected to provide a firmer basis for understanding the mechanical contractile activity.
Air traffic control speech recognition system cross-task & speaker adaptation

We present an overview of the most common techniques used in automatic speech recognition to adapt a general system to a different environment (known as cross-task adaptation) such as in an air traffic control system (ATC). The conditions present in ATC are very specific: very spontaneous, the presence of noise, and high speed speech. So, with a typical speech recognizer the recognition results are unsatisfactory. We have to decide on the best option for the modeling: to develop acoustic models specific to those conditions from scratch using the data available for the new environment, or to carry out cross-task adaptation starting from reliable HMM models (usually requiring less data in the target domain). We begin with a description of the main techniques considered for cross-task adaptation, namely maximum a posteriori (MAP), maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR), and the two together. We have applied each in two speech recognizers for air traffic control tasks, one for spontaneous speech and the other for a command interface. We show the performance of these techniques and compare them with the development of a new system from scratch. We also show the results obtained for speaker adaptation using a variable amount of adaptation data. The main conclusion is that MLLR can outperform MAP when a large number of transforms is used, and MLLR followed by MAP is the best option. All of these techniques are better than developing a new system from scratch, showing the effectiveness of mean and variance adaptation
The Economics of Trust, Norms and Networks

The theme of this paper is that trust, norms and networks are critical contributors to social capital, itself a critical determinant of economic growth. Numerous factors have contributed in recent years to the decline of social capital, restraining business and national competitiveness. It is in the interests and part of the responsibility of business to address this issue; this provides an economic imperative - complementary to the ethical imperative - for business to take socially responsible governance seriously.
Incorporation of Syntactic-Semantic Aspects in a LIBRAS Machine Translation Service to Multimedia Platforms

In scientific literature, there are some solutions that address the machine automatic of sign language contents. These solutions aim to reduce the communication and access to information barriers of deaf people in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). However, the most of these solutions do not explore syntactic and semantic aspects in the machine translation process, especially when they are designed to be general area. As a result, there is a limitation on the quality of the accessible generated contents, and a consequent resistance of deaf users for using these solutions. To reduce this problem, in this paper, we propose a solution that incorporates syntactic and semantic aspects in the translation of VLibras, a service of machine generation of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) content in for ICT (Digital TV, Web, Digital Cinema and mobile devices). This solution involves a formal rule description language modeled to create translation rules; the definition of a grammar exploiting these features; and their integration with the VLibras service. To evaluate the solution, some computational tests were performed using WER and BLEU metrics to assess the quality of the output generated by the solution. The results show that the proposed approach could improve the results of the current version of VLibras translator.
Analysing the effects of price changes on the cost of living of consumers using true indices

In this paper we analyse the effects of price changes on consumers' cost of living, using true indices for Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Sweden. We define these indices for a PIGLOG cost function and a dynamic specification of the LAIDS allows us to estimate them using aggregated time-series from 1964 to 1993. The calculated index numbers show that: (i) Spain presents the highest values for all groups, whereas the lowest appear in Germany and the UK, (ii) the highest values were in both oil crisis years, 1973 and 1979, whereas the lowest were generally in 1966 and in 1993, and (iii) the mean values reveal that Spain and France display the highest true cost-of-living indices, whereas Germany and the UK show the lowest.
Novel planar AMC for low profile antenna applications

In recent years, the realization of Artificial Magnetic Conductors (AMCs), also designed as high impedance surfaces (HISs) or Perfect Magnetic Conductors (PMCs), has been an active area of research as they can replace perfect electric conductors (PECs) for low profile antennas and other microwave applications. In this paper a planar AMC using circular split ring resonators (SRRs) printed on grounded dielectric substrate is proposed. The simulation results verify that the magnetic conductor is successfully accomplished over narrow bandwidth = 0.25 GHz. As an antenna application, the return loss of a horizontally positioned dipole antenna placed above the proposed AMC and the conventional PEC ground planes are investigated. The results confirm that the split ring resonators can successfully be used to replace the antenna conventional ground plane in order to improve the strength of the radiating fields and to reduce the global thickness of the low profile antennas. The performances of the proposed AMC are studied using finite element method ANSOFT-High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSSTM v.10) and numerical simulation model is developed to predict the reflection phase profile of such structures.
A timing-driven global routing algorithm with pin assignment, block reshaping, and positioning for building block layout

This paper presents a timing-driven global routing algorithm based on coarse pin assignment, block reshaping, and positioning for VLSI building block layout. As opposed to conventional approaches, we combine pin assignment and global routing problems into one problem. The proposed algorithm determines global routes, coarse pin assignments, and block shape and positions so as to minimize the chip area and total wire length of nets under the given timing constraints. It is based on an iterative improvement paradigm and performs rip-up and rerouting, block reshaping, and positioning in the manner of simulated evolution taking shapes of soft blocks and routing congestion into consideration until the solution is not improved. The Elmore delay model is adopted for the interconnection delay model. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
The role of skills as a major driver of corporate R&D

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of RD therefore, adequate education and training policies may indirectly induce an increase in corporate R&D investment. In terms of managerial implications, this means that HRM may be seen as an indirect strategy for improving a firm's R&D effort and ultimately for improving its performance through innovation. Originality/value - While there is a well-established literature investigating the so-called Skill Biased Technological Change, few microeconomic empirical studies have been devoted to test the reverse relationship. The paper aims to fill this gap, testing whether higher skills may induce higher R&D expenditures.
Pen pressure control in trajectory-based interaction

This study presents a series of three experiments that evaluate human capabilities and limitations in using pen-tip pressure as an additional channel of control information in carrying out trajectory tasks such as drawing, writing and gesturing on computer screen. The first experiment measured the natural range of force used in regular drawing and writing tasks. The second experiment tested human performance of maintaining pen-tip pressure at different levels with and without a visual display of the pen pressure. The third experiment, using the steering law paradigm, studied path steering performance as a function of the steering law index of difficulty, steering path type (linear and circular) and pressure precision tolerance interval. The main conclusions of our investigation are as follows. The natural range of pressure used in drawing and writing is concentrated in the 0.82 N (SI force unit Newton (N) is used in this article) to 3.16 N region. The resting force of the pen tip on the screen is between 0.78 N and 1.58 N. Pressure near or below the resting force is markedly more difficult to control. Visual feedback improves pressure-modulated trajectory tasks. Up to six layers of pressure can be controlled in steering tasks, but the error rate changed from 4.9% for one layer of pressure to 35% for six layers. The steering law holds for pressure steering tasks, which enables systematic prediction of successful steering time for a given path's length, width and pressure precision criterion. The steering time can also be modelled as a logarithmic function of pressure control precision ratio σ. Taken together, the current work provides a systematic body of empirical knowledge as basis for future research and design of digital pen applications.