Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Social Support and HIV-Related Stigma on Depression in HIV/AIDS Patients

Effect of Social Support and HIV-Related Stigma on Depression in HIV/AIDS Patients by Chinedu Anthony Umeadi MPH, University of Liverpool, 2006 MBBS, Abia State University, 2000 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Public Health Walden University October 2015 Abstract HIV has remained a public health problem in Nigeria. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the effect of social support and HIV-related stigma on depression in people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and to examine the moderating effect of sociodemographic factors, Quality of Life (QOL), and time since HIV diagnosis on this relationship. This study was based on the social cognitive theory. Data were collectedHIV has remained a public health problem in Nigeria. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the effect of social support and HIV-related stigma on depression in people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and to examine the moderating effect of sociodemographic factors, Quality of Life (QOL), and time since HIV diagnosis on this relationship. This study was based on the social cognitive theory. Data were collected from 98 PLWHA attending the antiretroviral clinic of Federal Medical Center, Umuahia, Nigeria. Regression analyses were used to examine the relationships between the variables. Some 24.5% of the study participants were depressed. Significant relationships identified included negative relationships between depression and social support, positive relationships between depression and negative self-image, and a combination of poor social support and HIV-related stigma having synergic effects in predicting depression. Sociodemographic variables, quality of life, and time since HIV diagnosis did not have a moderating effect on the relationship between social support, HIV-related stigma, and depression in PLWHA. There is a need to improve social support and reduce HIV-related stigma in PLWHA in order to improve their mental health. These findings can help in bringing about positive social change by informing the development of public health initiatives aimed at improving the mental health of PLWHA. Effect of Social Support and HIV-Related Stigma on Depression in HIV/AIDS Patients by Chinedu Anthony Umeadi MPH, University of Liverpool, 2006 MBBS, Abia State University, 2000 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

Software systems are getting more and more complex. To cope with their complexity, one often divides a system in a number of autonomous components whose work is coordinated. Component and service coordination is one of the main challenges in software engineering. Two important application fields of coordination are grid computing and workflow management. Grid computing is mostly used in computational science while workflow management is used for business applications. Therefore, we try to bridge the gap between these areas in order to make further progress in both of them.
The Magnetic Signatures of the M2, N2, and O1 Oceanic Tides Observed in Swarm and CHAMP Satellite Magnetic Data

This paper reports on new results in the determination of magnetic signals produced by oceanic tides as estimated from satellite magnetic measurements. We find that combining data from the past CHAMP (2000–2010) and the present Swarm (since 2013) satellite missions significantly improves the quality of the extracted tidal signals, in particular if along‐track and cross‐track magnetic “gradient” data are utilized. This allows us to determine the magnetic signature not only of the M2 tide but also of the much weaker N2 and O1 tidal constituents. To minimize disturbances from magnetospheric and ionospheric currents, we only use data from the nightside region during geomagnetic quiet conditions and remove core, crustal, and magnetospheric field contributions as given by the CHAOS geomagnetic field model. Despite their small magnitudes, all determined tidal constituents show sensitivity to the electrical conductivity profile of the underlying mantle, enabling imaging the upper mantle below the oceans.
Learning and 1-bit Compressed Sensing under Asymmetric Noise

We study the approximate recovery problem: Given corrupted 1-bit measurements of the form sign(w^*⋅x_i), recover a vector w that is a good approximation to w^* ∈ R^d. This problem has been studied by both the learning theory and signal processing communities. In learning theory, this is known as the problem of learning halfspaces with noise, and in signal processing, as 1-bit compressed sensing, in which there is an additional assumption that w^* is t-sparse. The challenge in both cases is to design computationally efficient algorithms that are tolerant to large amounts of noise under realistic noise models. Furthermore, in the case of 1-bit compressed sensing, we require the number of measurements x_i to scale polynomially in t and only polylogarithmically in d, the ambient dimension. In this work, we introduce algorithms with nearly optimal guarantees for both problems under two realistic noise models, bounded (Massart) noise and adversarial (agnostic) noise, when the measurements x_i’s are drawn from any isotropic log-concave distribution. In bounded (Massart) noise, an adversary can flip the measurement of each point x with probability η(x)≤η
Discipline and Participation

This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health data set to evaluate the long-term influence of school discipline and security on political and civic participation. We find that young adults with a history of school suspension are less likely than others to vote and volunteer in civic activities years later, suggesting that suspension negatively impacts the likelihood that youth engage in future political and civic activities. These findings are consistent with prior theory and research highlighting the long-term negative implications of punitive disciplinary policies and the role schools play in preparing youth to participate in a democratic polity. We conclude that suspension undermines the development of the individual skills and capacities necessary for a democratic society by substituting collaborative problem solving for the exclusion and physical removal of students. The research lends empirical grounds for recommending the reform of school governance and the implementation of more constructive models of discipline.
Blind precoding in line-of-sight MIMO channels

As we move towards densified networks for mobile access, with a larger number of access points, the need for high performance wireless backhaul increases drastically. In this respect, line-of-sight (LoS) multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) communication is a promising technique which can enable spatial diversity gains in such links, without increasing the allocated bandwith or overstepping requirements in radiated power. In this paper, we show that under practical conditions, the LoS MIMO channel matrix with dual-polarized (DP) antennas is block-circulant with circulant blocks (BCCB). This fact allows one to blindly diagonalize the channel, even in the absence of channel side-information (CSI) at the transmitter. In this case we show that appropriate precoding steps can greatly improve the performance of non-linear decoding in the LoS MIMO channel.
Nearly Optimal Minimax Tree Search?

Knuth and Moore presented a theoretical lower bound on the number of leaves that any fixed-depth minimax tree-search algorithm traversing a uniform tree must explore, the so-called minimal tree. Since real-life minimax trees are not uniform, the exact size of this tree is not known for most applications. Further, most games have transpositions, implying that there exists a minimal graph which is smaller than the minimal tree. For three games (chess, Othello and checkers) we compute the size of the minimal tree and the minimal graph. Empirical evidence shows that in all three games, enhanced Alpha-Beta search is capable of building a tree that is close in size to that of the minimal graph. Hence, it appears game-playing programs build nearly optimal search trees. However, the conventional definition of the minimal graph is wrong. There are ways in which the size of the minimal graph can be reduced: by maximizing the number of transpositions in the search, and generating cutoffs using branches that lead to smaller search trees. The conventional definition of the minimal graph is just a left-most approximation. Calculating the size of the real minimal graph is too computationally intensive. However, upper bound approximations show it to be significantly smaller than the left-most minimal graph. Hence, it appears that game-playing programs are not searching as efficiently as is widely believed. Understanding the left-most and real minimal search graphs leads to some new ideas for enhancing Alpha-Beta search. One of them, enhanced transposition cutoffs, is shown to significantly reduce search tree size.
An integrated battery charger/discharger with power-factor correction

Distributed power supply systems are an attractive solution to meeting the requirements (redundancy, modularity, battery backup, etc.) for the next generation of power supply systems. In addition, the normalization regarding power factor and total harmonic distortion (THD) makes it necessary to include power factor correction in the input stage in such architectures. This paper presents a novel approach of an integrated battery charger/discharger which offers power factor correction and battery galvanic isolation in a simple structure. Placing the battery in the primary side overcomes the need of galvanic isolation integration in each of the DC/DC on-board power converters when this topology is used as part of a distributed power supply system.
Arrhythmia Detection System using the Data-Flow Architecture 1

In recent days, smartphones offer more advanced computing ability and connectivity than in the past. A smartphone has a lot of on-the-phone sensors, such as GPS, accelerometer, microphone, camera etc. In addition, a smartphone application can employ remote wireless body sensors, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors or temperature skin sensors to track a user’s behavior and provide useful information for his health. There have been studies where a smartphone was tracking the sensor’s raw data and was processing them on the phone-side. However, now we can use “smart” sensors, which can do some computation on sensor-side and feed the smartphone with processed data. In such a way, the overall performance will be better as some computation would be done much closer to the hardware (on sensor-side). In this paper, the design of a dynamic, data-flow architecture for extracting context-aware information is presented. In the proposed design, the whole process of tracking and handling the sensor’s data is provided to the smartphone’s applications as a Data-Flow Service and is totally separated from the smartphone’s application itself. The user can remotely turn-on/off the sampling of the sensor’s signal and dynamically choose whether the computation will be done on the sensor-side or on the phone-side. In order to present the data-flow architecture, an application on Android HTC Wildfire has been implemented. It uses the DFS, tracks ECG data from a remote ECG sensor and determines if the user has arrhythmia or not.
Guidelines for industrially-based multiple case studies in software engineering

Without careful methodological guidance, case studies in software engineering are difficult to plan, design and execute. While there are a number of broad guidelines for case study research, there are none that specifically address the needs of a software engineer undertaking multiple case studies in an industrial setting. Through a synthesis of existing best practices in case study research, we provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for conducting multiple case studies in software engineering research. Our guidelines can assist software engineering researchers with all stages of multiple case study research, although in this paper we concentrate on the early phases, such as focusing the case study and detailed plan design. To date, three exploratory research projects found our guidelines very useful. We illustrate our guidelines with examples from one of these projects.
A Novel Coupling Structure for Dielectric Resonator Filters

In this paper, a novel coupling structure with both an iris and a probe is proposed to make it easier to tune negative coupling, because that the total coupling coefficient can be negative and tuning the iris screw would change the coupling coefficient of such mix coupling structure. This coupling structure is applied to a DR filter, the simulated frequency responses are in good agreement with the expectation
Multi-omics enrichment analysis using the GeneTrail2 web service

MOTIVATION Gene set analysis has revolutionized the interpretation of high-throughput transcriptomic data. Nowadays, with comprehensive studies that measure multiple -omics from the same sample, powerful tools for the integrative analysis of multi-omics datasets are required. RESULTS Here, we present GeneTrail2, a web service allowing the integrated analysis of transcriptomic, miRNomic, genomic and proteomic datasets. It offers multiple statistical tests, a large number of predefined reference sets, as well as a comprehensive collection of biological categories and enables direct comparisons between the computed results. We used GeneTrail2 to explore pathogenic mechanisms of Wilms tumors. We not only succeeded in revealing signaling cascades that may contribute to the malignancy of blastemal subtype tumors but also identified potential biomarkers for nephroblastoma with adverse prognosis. The presented use-case demonstrates that GeneTrail2 is well equipped for the integrative analysis of comprehensive -omics data and may help to shed light on complex pathogenic mechanisms in cancer and other diseases. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION GeneTrail2 can be freely accessed under https://genetrail2.bioinf.uni-sb.de CONTACT : dstoeckel@bioinf.uni-sb.de SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Smart mobile phone based gait assessment of patients with low back pain

Smart mobile phones have become a ubiquitous device that many people have access to and are commonly used in daily living. This paper explores the iPhone as a device, which can potentially be a feasible alternative to the conventional methods of data collection for gait analysis and assessment. Within the iPhone, the internal accelerometer is a micro electro-mechanical system (MEMS) based sensor. This study compared the phone sensor against a commercial standalone accelerometer, Minimod developed by McRoberts. One of the most common and costly conditions that people may encounter at one point in their lives is non-specific chronic low back pain (nscLBP). Due to the nature of the condition, it is difficult to determine the aetiology and assess the status of recovery. Machine learning (ML) algorithms were implemented to determine whether patients with LBP and healthy controls could be classified based on gait characteristics recorded by the smart phone. The results show that 85.7% accuracy can be achieved from the features extracted from the iPhone accelerometer, with improvements of 88.8% when feature selection methods are applied. To investigate the feasibility of using iPhone embedded MEMS sensors, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were performed to determine the agreement between the features extracted from the portable devices. A Mann-Whitney U-Test was employed to determine whether features were significantly different between the groups of subjects. It can be concluded from this study that, using the iPhone accelerometer, features can be successfully extracted with high agreement. Classification is achieved with significant accuracy to differentiate between patient and control groups. The experiments demonstrate that the iPhone and smart phone equivalents can provide an accurate and precise measurement that can be used for gait assessment and analysis.
Transcriptional control by Drosophila gap genes

Summary The segmented body pattern along the longitudinal axis of the Drosophila embryo is established by a cascade of specific transcription factor activities. This cascade is initiated by maternal gene products that are localized at the polar regions of the egg. The initial long-range positional information of the maternal factors, which are transcription factors (or are factors which activate or localize transcription factors), is transferred through the activity of the zygotic segmentation genes. The gap genes act at the top of this regulatory hierarchy. Expression of the gap genes occurs in discrete domains along the longitudinal axis of the preblastoderm and defines specific, overlapping sets of segment primordia. Their protein products, which are DNA-binding transcription factors mostly of the zinc finger type, form broad and overlapping concentration gradients which are controlled by maternal factors and by mutual interactions between the gap genes themselves. Once established, these overlapping gap protein gradients provide spatial cues which generate the repeated pattern of the subordinate pair-rule gene expression, thereby blue-printing the pattern of segmental units in the blastoderm embryo. Our results show different strategies by which maternal gene products, in combination with various gap gene proteins, provide position-dependent sets of transcriptional activator/repressor systems which regulate the spatial pattern of specific gap gene expression. Region-specific combinations of different transcription factors that derive from localized gap gene expression eventually generate the periodic pattern of pair-rule gene expression by the direct interaction with individual cis-acting “stripe elements” of particular pair-rule gene promotors. Thus, the developmental fate of blastoderm cells is programmed according to their position within the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo: maternal transcription factors regulate the region-specific expression of first zygotic transcription factors which, by their specific and unique combinations, control subordinate zygotic transcription factors, thereby subdividing the embryo into increasingly smaller units later seen in the larva.
Application of Merrill's First Principles of Instruction in a Museum Education Context

Abstract In an effort to support a solid grounding in educational theory within the field of museum education, three texts considered essential reading for museum educators were surveyed for correlations with Merrill's First Principles of Instruction, an influential work in the field of instructional design. Each of five First Principles were found to be represented, sustaining Merrill's claim that First Principles are true “regardless of program or practice,” and providing prescriptive tools for successful learning in museums.
An SVM-based classification approach to musical audio

This paper describes an automatic hierarchical music classification approach based on support vector machines (SVM). Based on the proposed method, the music is classified into coursed classes such as vocal, instrumental or vocal mixed with instrumental music. These main classes are further sub-classed according to gender and instrument type. A novel method, Correction Algorithm for Music Sequence (CAMS) has been developed to improve the classification efficiency.
Positioning of Symmetric and Nonsymmetric Parts Using Radial and Constant Fields: Computation of All Equilibrium Configurations

Programmable force fields have been used as an abstraction to represent a whole new class of devices that have been proposed for part manipulation. The general idea behind these devices is that a force field is implemented in a plane upon which the part is placed. The forces and torques exerted on the contact surface of the part translate and rotate the part. Manipulation plans for these devices can therefore be considered as strategies for applying a sequence of force fields to bring parts to some desired configuration. Instances of these novel devices are currently implemented using microelectromechanical systems technology, small airjets, vibration, and small motors. Manipulation in this case is sensorless and nonprehensile and promises to address the handling of very small or very fragile parts, such as electronics components, that cannot be handled with conventional pick-and-place robotics techniques. In this paper, the authors consider the problem of bringing a part to a stable equilibrium configuration using force fields. The authors study the combination of a unit radial field with a small constant field. A part placed on the radial field moves toward the origin of the radial field but cannot be oriented due to symmetry. Perturbing the radial field with a constant force field breaks the symmetry and gives rise to a finite number of equilibria. Under certain conditions, there is a unique stable equilibrium configuration. For the case in which these conditions are not fulfilled, the authors provide a comprehensive and unified analysis of the problem that leads to an algorithm to compute all stable equilibrium configurations. The paper contains a detailed discussion on how to implement the algorithm for any part. In the analysis, the authors make extensive use of potential fields. Using the theory of potential fields, the stable equilibrium configurations of a part are equivalent to the local minima of a scalar function. The work presented in this paper leads to the design of a new generation of efficient, open-loop part feeders that can bring a part to a desired orientation from any initial orientation without the need of sensing or a clock.
Automated P.falciparum Detection System for Post-Treatment Malaria Diagnosis Using Modified Annular Ring Ratio Method

The gametocytes of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum are highly resistant to antimalarial drugs. Its presence in the blood can be detected even after a successful malaria treatment. This paper explains a modified Annular Ring Ratio method which successfully locates and differentiates gametocytes of P. falciparum species in thin blood film images. The method can be used as an efficient tool for gametocyte detection for post-treatment malaria diagnosis. It also identifies the presence of any White Blood Cells (WBCs) in the image, and discards other artifacts and non infected cells. It utilizes the information based on structure, color and geometry of the cells and does not require any segmentation or non-illumination correction techniques that are commonly used for cell detection.
Transform coefficient coding in HEVC

ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG have undertaken a joint standardization activity on video coding called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). This paper describes the transform coefficient coding in the HEVC Test Model (WD5) and the motivations driving the design. The coefficient coding description encompasses the scan patterns and the coding methods of the last significant coefficient, significance map and coefficient level. Special focus is given to the method for coding the last significant coefficient in the block.
Causal memory meets the consistency and performance needs of distributed applications!

In order to provide acceptable performance in large scale distributed systems, shared data must be cached at or close to nodes where it is accessed. Maintaining the consistency of such cached data is an important problem in distributed systems. We claim that causal memory, which defines consistency of shared data based on causal orderings between data accesses, provides strong enough consistency guarantees to be usable yet it allows efficient, and scalable implementations. In this paper, we describe some results of our recent work that support this claim.