Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Convolution algorithm for implementing 2D discrete wavelet transform on the FPGA

Nowadays, the two dimensional discrete wavelet transform 2D-DWT has become a very important tool in the field of image processing. Several architectures for implementing DWT are proposed. In this paper we present an architecture for implementing the DWT based on the convolution algorithm. This implementation is fully described in VHDL and implemented in an FPGA component.
Some New Results on Average Worst Case Carry

The previous bound on average worst case carry in a two's complement adder found by Burks et al. [1] is tightened, a bound is established for one's complement adders, and exact expressions for average worst case carry are derived and "experimentally" tested. It is found that an n-bit ripple-carry two's complement adder with carry-completion detection is potentially as fast, on the average, as the old bound indicated an n/√2-bit adder of the same kind would be.
Cell-SELEX Based Identification of an RNA Aptamer for Escherichia coli and Its Use in Various Detection Formats

Escherichia coli are important indicator organisms, used routinely for the monitoring of water and food safety. For quick, sensitive and real-time detection of E. coli we developed a 2′F modified RNA aptamer Ec3, by Cell-SELEX. The 31 nucleotide truncated Ec3 demonstrated improved binding and low nano-molar affinity to E. coli. The aptamer developed by us out-performs the commercial antibody and aptamer used for E. coli detection. Ec3(31) aptamer based E. coli detection was done using three different detection formats and the assay sensitivities were determined. Conventional Ec3(31)-biotin-streptavidin magnetic separation could detect E. coli with a limit of detection of 1.3 × 106 CFU/ml. Although, optical analytic technique, biolayer interferometry, did not improve the sensitivity of detection for whole cells, a very significant improvement in the detection was seen with the E. coli cell lysate (5 × 104 CFU/ml). Finally we developed Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) gap capacitance biosensor that has detection limits of 2 × 104 CFU/mL of E. coli cells, without any labeling and signal amplification techniques. We believe that our developed method can step towards more complex and real sample application.
Design and Analysis of Incentive and Reputation Mechanisms for Online Crowdsourcing Systems

Today, online crowdsourcing services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, UpWork, and Yahoo! Answers are gaining in popularity. For such online services, it is important to attract “workers” to provide high-quality solutions to the “tasks” outsourced by “requesters. ” The challenge is that workers have different skill sets and can provide different amounts of effort. In this article, we design a class of incentive and reputation mechanisms to solicit high-quality solutions from workers. Our incentive mechanism allows multiple workers to solve a task, splits the reward among workers based on requester evaluations of the solution quality, and guarantees that high-skilled workers provide high-quality solutions. However, our incentive mechanism suffers the potential risk that a requester will eventually collects low-quality solutions due to fundamental limitations in task assigning accuracy. Our reputation mechanism ensures that low-skilled workers do not provide low-quality solutions by tracking workers’ historical contributions and penalizing those workers having poor reputations. We show that by coupling our reputation mechanism with our incentive mechanism, a requester can collect at least one high-quality solution. We present an optimization framework to select parameters for our reputation mechanism. We show that there is a trade-off between system efficiency (i.e., the number of tasks that can be solved for a given reward) and revenue (i.e., the amount of transaction fees), and we present the optimal trade-off curve between system efficiency and revenue. We demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our mechanisms through experiments using a real-world dataset from UpWork. We infer model parameters from this data, use them to determine proper rewards, and select the parameters of our incentive and reputation mechanisms for UpWork. Experimental results show that our incentive and reputation mechanisms achieve 98.82% of the maximum system efficiency while only sacrificing 4% of revenue.
Keeping Families Together: The Homebuilders Model

When a family's problems become so severe that traditional community resources are unable to help them effectively, caseworkers are usually advised to place children outside the home. Family preservation services such as Homebuilders are designed to give caseworkers and families another option: services that are more intensive, accessible, flexible, and goal-oriented than conventional supports. Instead of relieving family pressure by removing a child, the approach described here adds resources to alleviate pressure and to facilitate the development of a nurturing environment for children within the context of the family. Whereas crisis intervention attempts to resolve immediate problems their approach enables the family to function better after the crisis than before. In addition to their obvious social benefits, family preservation services are cost effective. Straightforward and practice-oriented, Keeping Families Together profiles the kinds of families that are assisted by prevention services such as this, tracing the salient features of its innovative approach to crisis intervention, its organizational features, and its knowledge and research base. Rich in actual examples drawn from family practice, this book will be of great interest to beginning students as well as practitioners in family and children's services. The book is also intended for those who are considering beginning their own Family Preservation Services to evaluate whether or not the approach will be a good fit for them, to become aware of some of the complexities of program design and training so that they can make informed decisions. When the book first appeared, Contemporary Psychology said that it "speaks for itself as a wonderful description of how to be of help to families in crisis. "
Fast in-place binning of laser range-scanned point sets

Laser range scanning is commonly used in cultural heritage to create digital models of real-world artefacts. A large scanning campaign can produce billions of point samples—too many to be manipulated in memory on most computers. It is thus necessary to spatially partition the data so that it can be processed in bins or slices. We introduce a novel compression mechanism that exploits spatial coherence in the data to allow the bins to be computed with only 1.01 bytes of I/O traffic for each byte of input, compared to 2 or more for previous schemes. Additionally, the bins are loaded from the original files for processing rather than from a sorted copy, thus minimizing disk space requirements. We demonstrate that our method yields performance improvements in a typical point-processing task, while also using little memory and guaranteeing an upper bound on the number of samples held in-core.
Applying Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle for Laboratory Education

This paper describes a model for laboratory education based on Kolb's experiential learning theory. The method is implemented using modern teaching technologies and a combination of remote, virtual, and hands‐on laboratory sessions and have been applied to the teaching of the undergraduate process control laboratory at the Chemical Engineering Department at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. An argument that poor learning in the laboratory is due to insufficient activation of the prehension dimension of Kolb's cycle was suggested and verified, providing a pedagogical explanation. The quantitative analysis showed significant enhancement of the learning outcomes of the experimental group compared with the control group. Apart from the hands‐on session, the proposed model involves additional activities, such as pre‐ and post‐lab tests and virtual laboratory sessions, which are associated with Kolb's cycle to facilitate constructivist learning. The paper provides the first laboratory education model that builds thoroughly on Kolb's experiential learning theory.
Relação entre esgotamento e satisfação em jovens praticantes desportivos

RESUMO O presente estudo procura estabelecer a relação entre esgotamento e satisfação em praticantes desportivos. A amostra era constituída por 266 praticantes, 213 do género masculino e 53 do feminino (média de idades de 20.01 ± 5.357). Os participantes responderam às versões portuguesas de duas escalas de avaliação [Athlete Burnout Questionnaire de Raedeke & Smith(25) e Athlete Satisfaction Questionnaire (Riemer & Chelladurai(28)]. Realizou-se a análise de componentes principais e a análise da consistência interna dos factores. Os resultados evidenciam suporte parcial para a validade e fidelidade da escala de esgotamento quando usada com a população de jovens desportistas portugueses e um suporte global para as dimensões da escala de satisfação. Os resultados evidenciam níveis absolutos elevados de satisfação em todas as dimensões e níveis baixos a moderados de esgotamento, sendo os níveis mais elevados de satisfação encontrados entre os praticantes do género feminino e entre os praticantes seniores. Considerando a totalidade da amostra, verifica-se que a satisfação é, em parte, predita pelo esgotamento embora essa associação seja, no essencial, fraca e relativa a uma dimensão particular do esgotamento. As variáveis género e nível de prática moderam as relações entre satisfação e esgotamento.
Integrating Reinforcement-Learning and Accumulator Models to Study Decision Making and Reaching Behaviours

This paper presents a model of organisms’ sensorimotor system based on the idea that complex behaviors are build on the basis of repertoires of sensorimotor primitives organised around specific goals (in this case, arm postures). The architecture of the model incorporates an actor-critic reinforcement learning system, enhanced with an “accumulator model” for decision making, capable of selecting sensorimotor primitives to accomplish a discrimination reaching task that has been used in physiological studies of monkeys’ premotor cortex. The results show that the proposed architecture is a first important step towards the construction of a biologically-sound integrated model of the primitive-based hierarchical organization of organisms’ sensorimotor systems.
In Vitro Analysis of Tobramycin-Treated Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilms on Cystic Fibrosis-Derived Airway Epithelial Cells

ABSTRACT P. aeruginosa forms biofilms in the lungs of individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF); however, there have been no effective model systems for studying biofilm formation in the CF lung. We have developed a tissue culture system for growth of P. aeruginosa biofilms on CF-derived human airway cells that promotes the formation of highly antibiotic-resistant microcolonies, which produce an extracellular polysaccharide matrix and require the known abiotic biofilm formation genes flgK and pilB. Treatment of P. aeruginosa biofilms with tobramycin reduced the virulence of the biofilms both by reducing bacterial numbers and by altering virulence gene expression. We performed microarray analysis of these biofilms on epithelial cells after treatment with tobramycin, and we compared these results with gene expression of (i) tobramycin-treated planktonic P. aeruginosa and (ii) tobramycin-treated P. aeruginosa biofilms on an abiotic surface. Despite the conservation in functions required to form a biofilm, our results show that the responses to tobramycin treatment of biofilms grown on biotic versus abiotic surfaces are different, as exemplified by downregulation of genes involved in Pseudomonas quinolone signal biosynthesis specifically in epithelial cell-grown biofilms versus plastic-grown biofilms. We also identified the gene PA0913, which is upregulated by tobramycin specifically in biofilms grown on CF airway cells and codes for a probable magnesium transporter, MgtE. Mutation of the PA0913 gene increased the bacterial virulence of biofilms on the epithelial cells, consistent with a role for the gene in the suppression of bacterial virulence. Taken together, our data show that analysis of biofilms on airway cells provides new insights into the interaction of these microbial communities with the host.
Versión reducida del Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ): propiedades psicométricas preliminares

El objetivo de este estudio es presentar un modelo reducido de la version espanola del Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ). Una version reducida permite tiempos de aplicacion menores, lo cual reduce efectos nocivos de cuestionarios mas largos, como la fatiga, la falta de motivacion, etc. El ABQ original se compone de 15 items que miden tres dimensiones de burnout: agotamiento fisico/emocional (AFE), reducida sensacion de logro (RSL) y devaluacion del deporte (D). La version espanola fue aplicada a 1101 deportistas de ambos sexos con edades entre 13 y 37 anos (M= 19.35; DT= 4.52). Se analizo la validez interna del cuestionario a traves de una validacion cruzada, usando analisis exploratorios y confirmatorios. Tambien se realizo analisis de items y de consistencia interna de los factores. Se ofrecen dos versiones reducidas: una de 12 items (4 items por factor) y otro de 9 items (3 items por factor). Los resultados muestran buenos indicadores de validez, tanto de la version original, como de las dos versiones reducidas.
Adaptable query evaluation using QBF

This work shows how to provide adaptable query evaluation using QBF, a query broker framework that provides a set of tools facilitating the design and implementation of query function in data-intensive distributed applications. The framework allows the use of multiple mechanisms to adaptively evaluate queries according to application requirements and its execution context. The smallest query evaluation unit built on the framework is called a query broker. Query brokers can be organized in hierarchies for evaluating distributed queries. This paper concentrates on the adaptability of query brokers so as to illustrate query processing strategies supported by QBF.
Selecting postoperative adjuvant systemic therapy for early stage breast cancer: A critical assessment of commercially available gene expression assays

Risk stratification of patients with early stage breast cancer may support adjuvant chemotherapy decision‐making. This review details the development and validation of six multi‐gene classifiers, each of which claims to provide useful prognostic and possibly predictive information for early stage breast cancer patients. A careful assessment is presented of each test's analytical validity, clinical validity, and clinical utility, as well as the quality of evidence supporting its use.
Contraction duration affects metabolic energy cost and fatigue in skeletal muscle

Hogan, Michael C. , Erica Ingham, and S. Sadi Kurdak. Contraction duration affects metabolic energy cost and fatigue in skeletal muscle. Am. J. Physiol. 274 (Endocrinol. Metab. 37): E397–E402, 1998. —It has been suggested that during a skeletal muscle contraction the metabolic energy cost at the onset may be greater than the energy cost related to holding steady-state force. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of contraction duration on the metabolic energy cost and fatigue process in fully perfused contracting muscle in situ. Canine gastrocnemius muscle (n 5 6) was isolated, and two contractile periods (3 min of isometric, tetanic contractions with 45-min rest between) were conducted by each muscle in a balanced order design. The two contractile periods had stimulation patterns that resulted in a 1:3 contraction-to-rest ratio, with the difference in the two contractile periods being in the duration of each contraction: short duration 0.25-s stimulation/0.75-s rest vs. long duration 1-s stimulation/3-s rest. These stimulation patterns resulted in the same total time of stimulation, number of stimulation pulses, and total time in contraction for each 3-min period. Muscle O2 uptake, the fall in developed force (fatigue), the O2 cost of developed force, and the estimated total energy cost (ATP utilization) of developed force were significantly greater (P , 0.05) with contractions of short duration. Lactate efflux from the working muscle and muscle lactate concentration were significantly greater with contractions of short duration, such that the calculated energy derived from glycolysis was three times greater in this condition. These results demonstrate that contraction duration can significantly affect both the aerobic and anaerobic metabolic energy cost and fatigue in contracting muscle. In addition, it is likely that the greater rate of fatigue with more rapid contractions was a result of elevated glycolytic production of lactic acid.
Custom fractional factorial designs to develop atorvastatin self-nanoemulsifying and nanosuspension delivery systems – enhancement of oral bioavailability

Poor water solubility of a drug is a major challenge in drug delivery research and a main cause for limited bioavailability and pharmacokinetic parameters. This work aims to utilize custom fractional factorial design to assess the development of self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems (SNEDDS) and solid nanosuspensions (NS) in order to enhance the oral delivery of atorvastatin (ATR). According to the design, 14 experimental runs of ATR SNEDDS were formulated utilizing the highly ATR solubilizing SNEDDS components: oleic acid, Tween 80, and propylene glycol. In addition, 12 runs of NS were formulated by the antisolvent precipitation–ultrasonication method. Optimized formulations of SNEDDS and solid NS, deduced from the design, were characterized. Optimized SNEDDS formula exhibited mean globule size of 73.5 nm, zeta potential magnitude of −24.1 mV, and 13.5 μs/cm of electrical conductivity. Optimized solid NS formula exhibited mean particle size of 260.3 nm, 7.4 mV of zeta potential, and 93.2% of yield percentage. Transmission electron microscopy showed SNEDDS droplets formula as discrete spheres. The solid NS morphology showed flaky nanoparticles with irregular shapes using scanning electron microscopy. The release behavior of the optimized SNEDDS formula showed 56.78% of cumulative ATR release after 10 minutes. Solid NS formula showed lower rate of release in the first 30 minutes. Bioavailability estimation in Wistar albino rats revealed an augmentation in ATR bioavailability, relative to ATR suspension and the commercial tablets, from optimized ATR SNEDDS and NS formulations by 193.81% and 155.31%, respectively. The findings of this work showed that the optimized nanocarriers enhance the oral delivery and pharmacokinetic profile of ATR.
Navigation Performance With a Virtual Auditory Display: Effects of Beacon Sound, Capture Radius, and Practice

Objective: We examined whether spatialized nonspeech beacons could guide navigation and how sound timbre, waypoint capture radius, and practice affect performance. Background: Auditory displays may assist mobility and wayfinding for those with temporary or permanent visual impairment, but they remain understudied. Previous systems have used speech-based interfaces. Method: Participants (108 undergraduates) navigated three maps, guided by one of three beacons (pink noise, sonar ping, or 1000-Hz pure tone) spatialized by a virtual reality engine. Dependent measures were efficiency of time and path length. Results: Overall navigation was very successful, with significant effects of practice and capture radius, and interactions with beacon sound. Overshooting and subsequent hunting for waypoints was exacerbated for small radius conditions. A human-scale capture radius (1.5 m) and sonar-like beacon yielded the optimal combination for safety and efficiency. Conclusion: The selection of beacon sound and capture radius depend on the specific application, including whether speed of travel or adherence to path are of primary concern. Extended use affects sound preferences and quickly leads to improvements in both speed and accuracy. Application: These findings should lead to improved wayfinding systems for the visually impaired as well as for first responders (e.g., firefighters) and soldiers.
Constrained interpolation for guided logic synthesis

Craig interpolation is a known method for expressing a target function f as a function of a given set of base functions G. The resulting interpolant represents the dependency function h, such that f = h(G). Generally, the set G contains enough base functions to enable the existence of multiple dependency functions whose quality mainly depends on which base functions were selected for reconstruction. The interpolation is not an optimisation problem and thus, often, it selects some random base functions and, particularly, omits others potentially required for an optimal implementation of the target function. Mainly, it is impossible to impose that the interpolant uses a specific base function. In this paper, we propose a method that forces a specific base function gi as a primary input of a dependency function. Such a dependency function is built as a Shannon expansion of two constrained Craig interpolants for the assignments of the primary inputs for which gi evaluates to 0 and 1, respectively. We also introduce a method that iteratively imposes a predefined set of base functions. In each iteration, we generate a new dependency function for use as the target function of the next iteration in order to force the use of a base function. We show that, unlike the standard Craig interpolation method, our carving method succeeds to impose the desired base functions with very high probability. It recomposes single-output logic circuits as their delay- or area-optimised implementations regardless of the input implementation. The proposed methods can be efficiently employed for rewriting circuits in some synthesis-based algorithms.
A Bibliometric Study of Authorship Characteristics in Four International Information Science Journals.

Authorship characteristics in four major information science journals were examined to determine the details of their authors, such as sex, occupation, affiliation, geographic distribution, and institutional affiliation. A total of 163 articles written by 294 authors were analyzed. Findings indicate that males (206 or 70.0%) publish 3.0 times more compared to females (69 or 23.5%), and the school of library and information science contributed the most male (39 or 78%), and female (11 or 22%) authors. Maximum number of authors (148 or 50.3%) were located in the U.S.A. with the Midwest (37 or 25.0%) region claiming the largest share. Academic libraries (110 or 37.4%) account for the major share of publication. Thirteen library and information science schools from the U.S.A. contributed 32 authors(50.0%). Assistant professors (25 or 39.1%) publish the most in library schools. Male library and information science school authors publish 1.6 times more in comparison to their female counterpart