Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Source localization based on particle swarm optimization for wireless sensor network

In this paper, a particle swarm optimization approach for the energy-based acoustic source localization of a wireless sensor network is presented. For this work, it is assumed that there is one acoustic source with unknown localizations which transmit acoustic signals that can be received by the nodes. The only available information to the system is the received signal energy which is not very accurate in general because of the attenuation in the process of propagation. To obtain better estimated localization of the acoustic source, maximum likelihood method is applied to transform it into extremal function, the particle swarm optimization scheme searches the optimal solution. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has the advantages of higher precision and lower computational complexity.
Evolutionary Scheduling of Dynamic Multitasking Workloads for Elastic Cloud Computing

—Scheduling of dynamic and multitasking workloads in cloud computing is a challenging issue. The difficulty lies in the tradeoff between the large amount of time to obtain an optimal solution and the responsiveness to workload dynamicity. In dynamic scenarios, e.g. virtual clusters in cloud computing, scheduling has to be processed fast enough to keep pace with the fluctuation of workloads so that overall system performance can be optimized. In this work, ordinal optimization using rough models and fast simulation is introduced to obtain suboptimal solutions in a much shorter time frame. While the scheduling solution for each period may not be the best, ordinal optimization can be processed fast in an iterative and evolutionary way to capture the nature of workload dynamism. Experimental results show that our evolutionary approach (compared with existing methods, e.g. Monte Carlo and Blind Pick) can achieve higher overall average scheduling performance (e.g. throughput) in real-world applications with dynamic workloads. Note to Practitioners—Cloud computing has become a mainstream computing paradigm for many business and scientific applications. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all provide large-scale public cloud services. By elastic resource provisioning among various services and applications with dynamic workloads, on-demand workload scheduling become critical. In this paper, ordinal optimization is adopted to obtain suboptimal yet satisfactory solutions for multitasking workload scheduling in much shorter intervals. While ordinal optimization may not result in the best scheduling solution within each period, our approach can achieve an overall higher performance by applying ordinal optimization in an iterative and evolutionary way.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension in France: results from a national registry.

RATIONALE Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is an orphan disease for which the trend is for management in designated centers with multidisciplinary teams working in a shared-care approach. OBJECTIVE To describe clinical and hemodynamic parameters and to provide estimates for the prevalence of patients diagnosed for PAH according to a standardized definition. METHODS The registry was initiated in 17 university hospitals following at least five newly diagnosed patients per year. All consecutive adult (> or = 18 yr) patients seen between October 2002 and October 2003 were to be included. MAIN RESULTS A total of 674 patients (mean +/- SD age, 50 +/- 15 yr; range, 18-85 yr) were entered in the registry. Idiopathic, familial, anorexigen, connective tissue diseases, congenital heart diseases, portal hypertension, and HIV-associated PAH accounted for 39.2, 3.9, 9.5, 15.3, 11.3, 10.4, and 6.2% of the population, respectively. At diagnosis, 75% of patients were in New York Heart Association functional class III or IV. Six-minute walk test was 329 +/- 109 m. Mean pulmonary artery pressure, cardiac index, and pulmonary vascular resistance index were 55 +/- 15 mm Hg, 2.5 +/- 0.8 L/min/m(2), and 20.5 +/- 10.2 mm Hg/L/min/m(2), respectively. The low estimates of prevalence and incidence of PAH in France were 15.0 cases/million of adult inhabitants and 2.4 cases/million of adult inhabitants/yr. One-year survival was 88% in the incident cohort. CONCLUSIONS This contemporary registry highlights current practice and shows that PAH is detected late in the course of the disease, with a majority of patients displaying severe functional and hemodynamic compromise.
1 Command and Control of Unmanned Vehicles - where are we going?

The utilization and expectations of unmanned systems is mushrooming following in the success of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Focus on operational usefulness of these systems highlights inadequacies in current command and control designs. Current systems require two operators to control a single unmanned vehicle (UV), however future concepts indicate requirements for single operator control of multiple UV’s. The control problem is amplified when UV’s are considered as force multipliers for combat manned systems, such as on the DARPA UCAR program. In this case operators in high workload environments are asked to bear the burden of the additional tasks required to control UV’s. Recent studies indicate that operators are unable to accommodate UV control with current design paradigms because of the significant increase in workload. Technologies such as autonomous behavior capabilities, innovative human machine interface (HMI) concepts, and networked dissemination of data offer potential components for the solution to UV control. The promise of autonomous systems brings with it a new problem that must be addressed, that of maintaining operator situational awareness. The purpose of this paper is to review the challenges that confront UV designs as they evolve to a single/operator/multiple vehicle paradigm.
A fine-grain nonlocal weighted average method for image CS reconstruction

Compressive sensing can acquire a signal at a sampling rate far below the Nyquist sampling rate if signal is sparse in some domain. However, signal reconstruction from its observations is challenging because it is an implicit ill-pose problem in practice. As classical CS reconstruction methods, total variation (TV) and iteratively reweighted TV (ReTV) methods only exploit local image information, which results in some loss of image structures and causes blocking effect. In this paper, we observe there are abundant nonlocal repetitive structures in nature image, so we propose a novel fine-grain nonlocal weighted average method for nature image CS reconstruction, and we take full use of the nonlocal repetitive structures to recover image from the observations. Besides, an efficient iterative bound optimization algorithm which is stably convergent in our experiments is applied to the above CS reconstruction. The experimental results of different nature images demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can outperform the existing classical nature image CS reconstruction algorithms in Peak-Signal-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) and subjective evaluation.
Methyl jasmonate-induced cell death in grapevine requires both lipoxygenase activity and functional octadecanoid biosynthetic pathway

Grapevine (Vitis vinifera L., cv. Limberger) leaf tissues and suspension-cultured cells were induced to undergo programmed cell death (PCD) by exogenously added methyl jasmonate (MeJA). The elicitor signaling pathway involved in MeJA-induced PCD was further investigated using pharmacological, biochemical and histological approaches. Pharmacological dissection of the early events preceding the execution of MeJA-triggered PCD indicated that this process strongly depends on both, de novo protein and mRNA synthesis. Treatment of leaf discs and cell suspensions with lipase inhibitor Ebelactone B and specific lipoxygenase inhibitor Phenidone blocked MeJA-induced PCD. These results suggest that some chloroplast membrane-derived compound(s) is required for MeJA-induced PCD in grapevine. The progression of MeJAtriggered PCD may be further inhibited by the use of metabolic inhibitors of key enzymes of octadecanoid biosynthesis including AOS, AOC, and OPR indicating that the functional jasmonate biosynthetic pathway is an integral part of the MeJA-induced signal transduction cascade that results in the coordinate expression of events leading to PCD. Finally, the activation of the octadecanoid pathway, as a critical point in MeJA-induced PCD, was independently demonstrated with cellulysin, a macromolecular elicitor acting via octadecanoid signaling. The cellulysin was shown to be a very potent enhancer of MeJA-triggered PCD in grapevine cells.
Brain Reorganization in Late Adulthood: Rapid Left-to-Right Switch of Handedness Through Memory-Drawing Training

The neural correlates of hand preference are still debatable, and the very few studies on the mechanisms of enforced change of handedness from left to right are all restricted to early childhood. We were able to address the question of retraining handedness in late adulthood for the first time, well outside the accepted critical period for brain plastic ity, through a unique training utilizing the complex motor task of blind memory-guided drawing, in a totally blind, congenitally left-handed man. Ten hours of this Cognitive-Kinesthetic Drawing Training, which the author initially developed to drive neuroplas- ticity in blindness rehabilitation, was sufficient to generate a profound switch in the cortical lateralization of motor control. This study provides new insights into the neu- roplasticity of motor control architecture. The results are of high relevance to the long-standing debate about the sources of hemispheric asymmetry. The unprecedented effect on handedness of the rapid Cognitive-Kinesthetic Drawing Training implies a powerful potential of this training for further rehabilitation domains, such as the rehabilitation of stroke or trauma affecting hand control.
Economic and Clinical Impact of Multiple Myeloma to Managed Care

BACKGROUND: Because of the development of novel agents such as immunomodulators, proteasome inhibitors, and bisphosphonates, the standards of care for the multiple myeloma (MM) patient have changed. The costs associated with current and emerging therapies, as well as supportive care, are significant and pose a tremendous financial burden to both patients and managed care. OBJECTIVES: To review the economic impact of MM and to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of current treatments in bringing value for prolonged life versus the cost of treatment. This chapter will also discuss the need for thorough data review and pharmacoeconomic analyses to determine the most cost-effective therapies. SUMMARY: Although MM accounts for only a small percentage of all cancer types, the costs associated with treating and managing it are among the highest. Recent developments in diagnosing, treating, and managing myeloma have led to novel treatment strategies. Immunomodulators, proteasome inhibitors, and bisphosphonates are improving response rates and preserving quality of life. However, these agents are not replacing older treatment modalities, but being used in addition to them. Intensive chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and supportive care are all important components in achieving treatment goals. Costs associated with stem cell transplants and complications of the disease add to the economic burden of myeloma. Additional costs for routine diagnostics to measure the progression of the disease or response to treatment need to be considered. Complications (e.g., lytic bone disease, infection, anemia, and renal failure) also add to morbidity and mortality, thus increasing the burden to the patient and the health care system as a whole. Financial and time constraints of caregivers must also be considered, as well as the added administrative burdens to health care providers. CONCLUSIONS: New standards of care in the treatment and management of myeloma are likely to lead to significant increases in costs. Although costs are not the only elements to be considered, they are crucial in the management of this already costly disease. All aspects of myeloma treatment and supportive care must be evaluated and analyzed. Cost of pharmaceuticals alone must not be a driving factor in treatment decisions. Economic analyses can be used to demonstrate that the least expensive alternative is not always the most economical, and that it may not produce an optimal outcome for both the health plan and the patient. Although cost containment is clearly an important objective, quality of care is the first priority, and managed care organizations have the challenge of making balanced cost and benefit assessments.
Semantic Cage Generation for FE Mesh Editing

In this paper, we present an approach to semantic cage generating and semantic cage based finite element mesh editing to allow users to conduct the required editing on complex finite element mesh effectively and efficiently through cage-based deformation during product design. In the approach, design semantics involved in a finite element mesh are incorporated with its cage to enable the cage based and semantic based editing of the finite element mesh. Firstly, the design semantics including semantic features and semantic relations are extracted from the original mesh, and a simplified mesh with the semantics preserved is constructed. Then, the semantic cage without cage-model intersection is automatically created by offsetting the simplified mesh and mapping the semantics from the original mesh to the cage. Finally, the editing manipulation is directly imposed on the semantic features rather than single vertex or face of the cage to achieve the required modification on the mesh. The experimental results show the effectiveness and potentials of the proposed approach.
Impaired theory of mind for moral judgment in high-functioning autism

High-functioning autism (ASD) is characterized by real-life difficulties in social interaction; however, these individuals often succeed on laboratory tests that require an understanding of another person's beliefs and intentions. This paradox suggests a theory of mind (ToM) deficit in adults with ASD that has yet to be demonstrated in an experimental task eliciting ToM judgments. We tested whether ASD adults would show atypical moral judgments when they need to consider both the intentions (based on ToM) and outcomes of a person's actions. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical (NT) participants performed a ToM task designed to test false belief understanding. In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of NT participants judged the moral permissibility of actions, in a 2 (intention: neutral/negative) × 2 (outcome: neutral/negative) design. Though there was no difference between groups on the false belief task, there was a selective difference in the moral judgment task for judgments of accidental harms, but not neutral acts, attempted harms, or intentional harms. Unlike the NT group, which judged accidental harms less morally wrong than attempted harms, the ASD group did not reliably judge accidental and attempted harms as morally different. In judging accidental harms, ASD participants appeared to show an underreliance on information about a person's innocent intention and, as a direct result, an overreliance on the action's negative outcome. These findings reveal impairments in integrating mental state information (e.g., beliefs, intentions) for moral judgment.
Typed Syntax Macros

Using parser combinators we can dynamically generate parsers. We show how this property is used to define or to extend the syntax of a programming language from within a program itself, thus bringing the idea of “Syntax Macros” to life again. Part of the context-sensitive constraints that consequently have to be obeyed are enforced by dynamically constructing new parsers that only accept languages conforming to such constraints. One of the main goals of this paper is to show how this can be done in the context of a strongly typed language, without the need to explicitly encode and decode data. Because we use the parser combinators that analyse themselves, there is no speed penalty and the resulting parsers are error-repairing.
Secure consensus averaging in sensor networks using random offsets

In this work, we have examined the distributed consensus averaging problem from a novel point of view considering the need for privacy and anonymity. We have proposed a method for incorporating security into the scalable average consensus mechanisms proposed in the literature. Random Offsets Method (ROM) is lightweight, transparent and flexible since it is not based on cryptography, does not require any change in the fusion system and can be used optionally by some nodes who care about their privacy. In this method, which is based on noisification of nodes' information, we achieve robustness against n - 1 colluding adversaries in a network of in nodes, which is maximum level of robustness against collusions. Convergence and collusion robustness of ROM are analyzed mathematically and through simulation.
Clean Application Compartmentalization with SOAAP

Application compartmentalization, a vulnerability mitigation technique employed in programs such as OpenSSH and the Chromium web browser, decomposes software into isolated components to limit privileges leaked or otherwise available to attackers. However, compartmentalizing applications -- and maintaining that compartmentalization -- is hindered by ad hoc methodologies and significantly increased programming effort. In practice, programmers stumble through (rather than overtly reason about) compartmentalization spaces of possible decompositions, unknowingly trading off correctness, security, complexity, and performance. We present a new conceptual framework embodied in an LLVM-based tool: the Security-Oriented Analysis of Application Programs (SOAAP) that allows programmers to reason about compartmentalization using source-code annotations (compartmentalization hypotheses). We demonstrate considerable benefit when creating new compartmentalizations for complex applications, and analyze existing compartmentalized applications to discover design faults and maintenance issues arising from application evolution.
Perception and positionality: Adult refugee and migrant students' understandings of the global citizen identity in British society

In an increasingly globalized world there is continued debate within educational research about the existence and identity of the global citizen. This article contributes to this exploration by locating the debate within the further education (FE) and skills sector. It is based on the author's MA dissertation and examines the understandings of the global citizen identity as held by adult students from refugee and migrant backgrounds at a large FE college in London. It also investigates the extent to which these students perceive themselves as global citizens in British society. A qualitative study is used to explore these perspectives through student focus groups and the theme of positionality. This article argues that the global citizen identity is largely understood as an aspirational identity that is implicated with orientations of power and that there is an overall absence of a critical approach in relation to understandings of the global citizen identity. Increased criticality is therefore essential in enabling an exploration of this identity as necessarily multifaceted and complex.
EFFICIENT SELECTIVE MULTI-CHANNEL MEMORY PROTECTION

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) is used as the main form of storage in main memory. DRAM is susceptible to cosmic radiation, alpha particles, voltage variations and aging. All of these factors might cause bit faults, word faults, and even entire chip faults. As more main memory is needed on desktops, servers and supercomputers, the chances of finding faults on DRAM will also increase. Redundant Array of Independent Memories (RAIM) is an approach to protect DRAM. By adding additional parity channels to the main memory, RAIM is able to protect main memory against the failure of an entire channel, which makes the main memory a lot more robust compared to memory systems with only Error-Correcting Code (ECC) protection. In this paper, we examine the impact on performance and energy that RAIM schemes have on a system, while also proposing a new type of RAIM implementation that reduces onand off-chip traffic and energy consumption. Compared to contemporary RAIM implementations, our proposed scheme can reduce traffic and energy consumption by more than 2x.
The X-Ray Spectral Variability of Markarian 766

Analysis results from ASCA and ROSAT observations of the narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 766 are reported. In the ASCA observation we observed rapid variability with a doubling time scale of 1000 seconds. A spectral variability event was observed in which the spectrum softened and hardened above and below ~1 keV, respectively, as the flux increased. The spectra could be modeled with 5 components: a power law, warm absorber, iron K(alpha) line and soft excess component flux. The spectral variability resulted from a highly significant change in the intrinsic photon law index from Gamma ~1.6 to ~2.0, an increase in the warm absorber ionization, and a marginally significant decrease in the soft component normalization. A ~100 eV equivalent width narrow iron K(alpha) line was detected in the high state spectrum. Spectral hardening during flux increases was observed in three ROSAT observations. The change in intrinsic photon index and disappearance of the soft excess component in the ASCA spectra can be explained as a transition from a first order pair reprocessed spectrum to a pair cascade brought about by a sudden increase in the injected electron Lorentz factor. The change in the ionization of the warm absorber, though model dependent, could correspond to the increase in flux at the oxygen edges resulting from the spectral index change. The ROSAT spectral variability can be interpreted by variable intensity hard power law and a relatively nonvarying soft component, possibly primary disk emission. These results are compared with those reported from other narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies.
Content Distribution in P2P Systems

The report provides a literature review of the state-of-the-art for content distribution. The report's contributions are of threefold. First, it gives more insight into traditional Content Distribution Networks (CDN), their requirements and open issues. Second, it discusses Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems as a cheap and scalable alternative for CDN and extracts their design challenges. Finally, it evaluates the existing P2P systems dedicated for content distribution according to the identied requirements and challenges.