Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morphology and evolution of simulated and optical clusters: a comparative analysis

We have made a comparative study of morphological evolution in simulated dark matter (DM) haloes and X-ray brightness distribution, and in optical clusters. Samples of simulated clusters include star formation with supernovae feedback, radiative cooling and simulation in the adiabatic limit at three different redshifts, z= 0.0, 0.10 and 0.25. The optical sample contains 208 Abell, Corwin & Olowin (ACO) clusters within redshift, z≤ 0.25. Cluster morphology, within 0.5 and 1.0 h−1 Mpc from cluster centre, is quantified by multiplicity and ellipticity. We find that the distribution of the DM haloes in the adiabatic simulation appears to be more elongated than the galaxy clusters. Radiative cooling brings halo shapes in excellent agreement with observed clusters; however, cooling along with feedback mechanism makes the haloes more flattened. Our results indicate relatively stronger structural evolution and more clumpy distributions in observed clusters than in the structure of simulated clusters, and slower increase in simulated cluster shapes compared to those in the observed one. Within z≤ 0.1, we note an interesting agreement in the shapes of clusters obtained from the cooling simulations and observation. We also note that the different samples of observed clusters differ significantly in morphological evolution with redshift. We highlight a few possibilities responsible for the discrepancy in morphological evolution of simulated and observed clusters.
Pachmarhi Array of Čerenkov Telescopes

Pachmarhi Array of Cerenkov Telescopes (PACT) has been designed to search for celestial TeV γ-rays using the wavefront sampling technique. PACT consists of 25 telescopes deployed over an area of 80 m×100 m. A telescope consists of 7 parabolic reflectors, each viewed by a fast phototube behind a 3° mask at the focus. The density and arrival time of photons at the PMT are measured. The energy threshold and collection area of the array are estimated, from Monte Carlo simulations, to be ∼1 TeV and 105 m2 respectively. The accuracy in determination of arrival angle of a shower was estimated to be 0.1° in the near vertical direction. About 99% of the off-axis hadronic events could be rejected from directional information alone. Further, nearly 75% of the on-axis hadronic events could be rejected using species sensitive measurements like the photon density fluctuations. These cuts on data to reject back-ground would retain ∼44% of the γ-ray signal. The sensitivity of the array for a 5σ detection of γ-ray signal .
Collaborative Feature-Combination Recommender Exploiting Explicit and Implicit User Feedback

Collaborative filtering (CF) is currently the most popular technique used in commercial recommender systems. Algorithms of this type derive personalized product propositions for customers by exploitingstatistics derived from vast amounts of transaction data.Traditionally, basic CF algorithms have exploited a single category of ratings despite the fact that on many platforms a variety of different forms of user feedback are available for personalization and recommendation. In this paper we explore a collaborative feature-combination algorithm that concurrently exploits multiple aspects of the user model like clickstream data, sales transactions and explicit user requirements to overcome some known shortcomingsof CF like the cold-start problem for new users. We validate our contribution by evaluating it against the standard user-to-user CF algorithm using a dataset from a commercial Web shop. Evaluation results indicate considerable improvements in terms of user coverageand accuracy.
Learning Sentence Reduction Rules for Brazilian Portuguese

We present in this paper a method for sentence reduction with summarization purposes. The task is modeled as a machine learning problem, relying on shallow and linguistic features, in order to automatically learn symbolic patterns/rules that produce good sentence reductions. We evaluate our results with Brazilian Portuguese texts and show that we achieve high accuracy and produce better results than the existing solution for this language.
Exploring hybrid character-words representational unit in Classical-to-Modern Chinese machine translation

This paper investigates hybrid representational unit in statistical machine translation from Classical to Modern Chinese where the basic unit of Modern Chinese is mixture of Chinese characters and words while characters unit for Classical Chinese. We explore several approaches to hybrid the characters and words in SMT. the best method achieves gains of 0.33 BLEU points or 1.2% relative over the best SMT baseline system which is modeled by different representational granularities. Further more, we find changing distortion limit in SMT has a relatively small effect on enhancing the quality of our hybrid character-words unit system.
Post-Fledging Dispersal of King Penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) from Two Breeding Sites in the South Atlantic

Most studies concerning the foraging ecology of marine vertebrates are limited to breeding adults, although other life history stages might comprise half the total population. For penguins, little is known about juvenile dispersal, a period when individuals may be susceptible to increased mortality given their naïve foraging behaviour. Therefore, we used satellite telemetry to study king penguin fledglings (n = 18) from two sites in the Southwest Atlantic in December 2007. The two sites differed with respect to climate and proximity to the Antarctic Polar Front (APF), a key oceanographic feature generally thought to be important for king penguin foraging success. Accordingly, birds from both sites foraged predominantly in the vicinity of the APF. Eight king penguins were tracked for periods greater than 120 days; seven of these (three from the Falkland Islands and four from South Georgia) migrated into the Pacific. Only one bird from the Falkland Islands moved into the Indian Ocean, visiting the northern limit of the winter pack-ice. Three others from the Falkland Islands migrated to the eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego before travelling south. Derived tracking parameters describing their migratory behaviour showed no significant differences between sites. Nevertheless, generalized linear habitat modelling revealed that juveniles from the Falkland Islands spent more time in comparatively shallow waters with low sea surface temperature, sea surface height and chlorophyll variability. Birds from South Georgia spent more time in deeper waters with low sea surface temperature and sea surface height, but high concentrations of chlorophyll. Our results indicate that inexperienced king penguins, irrespective of the location of their natal site in relation to the position of the APF, develop their foraging skills progressively over time, including specific adaptations to the environment around their prospective breeding site.
Exploring academic dishonesty in the Middle East: a qualitative analysis of students’ perceptions

ABSTRACT Most previous studies of academic dishonesty have been conducted in North America and Europe, and have focused on the contextual, institutional, and individual factors that influence students’ propensity to cheat. While such studies offer useful background and structure to this endemic problem, this study aimed to gain deeper insights into student perceptions of academic dishonesty in a multi-cultural context. Our study sample was sourced from a large private university based in the United Arab Emirates, in which there is a culturally diverse mix of national and international students (Arab and non-Arab). From our data, while a number of student perceptions were similar to those reported in other studies, several new socio-cultural themes emerged. In particular, Arab students perceived: peer student obligations; patriarchal pressure; shame avoidance; and a Fahlawi [Fahlawi – derives from ‘fellahin’ or quick-witted individual. This Arab cultural term references a person with a highly adaptive attitude and an ability to achieve things with minimal effort] mind-set, as being influential on their academic dishonesty attitudes and behaviours.
Who are the most influential users in a recommender system?

Collaborative filtering (CF) is a popular method for personalizing product recommendations for e-commerce applications. In order to recommend a product to a user and predict her preference, CF utilizes product evaluation ratings of the like-minded users. This process of finding the like-minded users causes a social network to be formed among all users. In this social network, each link between a couple of users presents an implicit connection between them. Here, there are some users who have more connections with others and are called the most influential users. This paper attempts to model and analyze the behavior of these users by employing data mining techniques. First, the most important features which present a user's influence were selected with a linear regression method, and then, the modeling was performed by a decision tree. Based on our results, the most influential users are users who show more interest to rate more than average number of items with low frequency. Moreover, other most influentials are users who rate in moderation items which have been seen in moderation. In addition, these items are rated with good degree of agreement with other users' rates on the items. We achieved a high accuracy with this model.
FPGA design and implementation of Digital Up-Converter using quadrature oscillator

In this paper we design and implement a complex Digital Up-Converter (DUC) using a Xilinx Virtex6 FPGA. All the steps necessary to build such circuits are thoroughly described and some valuable hints on how to overcome problems during the design time are presented. We introduce a new approach for oscillator circuits, which are an important part of any DUC design. Such oscillator approach is stable, clean, accurate and easily tunable. It is also RAM memory efficient, consuming no block RAM and a small amount of logic.
Evaluation of walking capacity over time in 500 patients with intermittent claudication who underwent clinical treatment.

BACKGROUND The use of physical training in the treatment of intermittent claudication is well established. However, current data do not provide enough information about the prognosis for each case, and there are no data on how walking distances evolve over time with conservative treatment. The goal of this study was to evaluate improvement in walking capacity among patients with intermittent claudication who underwent unsupervised clinical treatment, observing whether sustained treatment would increase or decrease maximum walking distance, whether after 6 months there was a change in the maximum distance, and whether abstinence from smoking and well-conducted walking exercise had independent effects on the outcome. METHODS Five hundred patients with intermittent claudication were surveyed in a prospective, nonrandomized, and uncontrolled study. Maximum walking distance and treatment compliance over time were analyzed. RESULTS Nonsmoking patients who walked achieved a mean increase during the first 6 months of 33.70 m/mo and a mean increase thereafter of 4.24 m/mo. Smokers who walked achieved an increase during the first 6 months only (mean, 42.92 m/mo). Patients who did not practice physical training exhibited no effect (smokers) or negligible effect (nonsmokers) from the treatment (mean, 7.58 m/mo). CONCLUSIONS Patients who adhered to physical training exhibited a significant increase in maximum walking distance during the first 6 months of treatment only. Patients who did not practice physical training exhibited no effect (smokers) or negligible effect (ex-smokers) from the treatment.
Optimum design of a class of fault tolerant isotropic Gough-Stewart platforms

Optimal geometric design is of key importance to the performance of a manipulator. First, this paper extends the work in Y. Yi, et al., (2004) to generate a class of isotropic Gough-Stewart platforms (GSPs) with an odd number of struts. Then, it develops methods for finding a highly fault tolerant GSP from that class. Two optimization criteria are considered, isotropy and fault tolerance. To meet the mission critical needs imposed by laser weapons applications, nine-strut isotropic GSPs that retain kinematic stability despite the loss of any three struts are found. First, we develop methods for generating a five parameter class of isotropic nine-strut GSPs. Next, new measures of fault tolerance are introduced and used to optimize the free parameter space. The optimized design is much more fault tolerant than the GSP currently baselined for the airborne laser.
KEGGprofile: Application Examples

Abstract: In this vignette, we demonstrate the application of KEGGprofile as an annotation and visualization tool in analysis of multi-types and multi-groups high-throughput expression data. Superior to existing approaches, KEGGprofile combined the KEGG pathway map with expression profiles of genes in that pathway and facilitated more detailed analysis about the specific function changes inner pathway or temporal correlations in different genes and samples. Here we introduce the data preparation and functions used for pathway gene expression profile visualization. In this vignette, we demonstrate the application of KEGGprofile as an annotation and visualization tool in analysis of multi-types and multi-groups high-throughput expression data. Superior to existing approaches, KEGGprofile combined the KEGG pathway map with expression profiles of genes in that pathway and facilitated more detailed analysis about the specific function changes inner pathway or temporal correlations in different genes and samples. Here we introduce the data preparation and functions used for pathway gene expression profile visualization.
Keyword Search in Graphs: Finding r-cliques

Keyword search over a graph finds a substructure of the graph containing all or some of the input keywords. Most of previous methods in this area find connected minimal trees that cover all the query keywords. Recently, it has been shown that finding subgraphs rather than trees can be more useful and informative for the users. However, the current tree or graph based methods may produce answers in which some content nodes (i.e., nodes that contain input keywords) are not very close to each other. In addition, when searching for answers, these methods may explore the whole graph rather than only the content nodes. This may lead to poor performance in execution time. To address the above problems, we propose the problem of finding r-cliques in graphs. An r-clique is a group of content nodes that cover all the input keywords and the distance between each two nodes is less than or equal to r. An exact algorithm is proposed that finds all r-cliques in the input graph. In addition, an approximation algorithm that produces r-cliques with 2-approximation in polynomial delay is proposed. Extensive performance studies using two large real data sets confirm the efficiency and accuracy of finding r-cliques in graphs.
Parallel Architecture for High Throughput DFA-Based Deep Packet Inspection

Multi-pattern matching is a key technique for implementing network security applications such as Network Intrusion Detection/Protection Systems (NIDS/NIPSes) where every packet is inspected against predefined attack signatures written in regular expressions (regexes). To this end, Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) is widely used for multi-regex matching, but existing DFAbased researches have claimed high throughput at an expenses of extremely high memory cost. In this paper, we propose a parallel architecture of DFA called Parallel DFA (PDFA), using multiple flow aggregations to increase the throughput with nearly no extra memory cost. The basic idea is to selectively store the DFA in multiple memory modules which can be accessed in parallel and to explore the potential parallelism. The memory cost of our system in both the average cases and the worst cases is analyzed, optimized and evaluated by numerical results. The evaluation shows that we obtain an average speedup of about 0.5k to 0.7k where k is the number of parallel memory modules under our synthetic trace and compressed real trace in a statistical average case, compared with the traditional DFA-based matching approaches.
Chronic stress decreases the expression of sympathetic markers in the pineal gland and increases plasma melatonin concentration in rats

Chronic stress affects brain areas involved in learning and emotional responses. Although most studies have concentrated on the effect of stress on limbic‐related brain structures, in this study we investigated whether chronic stress might induce impairments in diencephalic structures associated with limbic components of the stress response. Specifically, we analyzed the effect of chronic immobilization stress on the expression of sympathetic markers in the rat epithalamic pineal gland by immunohistochemistry and western blot, whereas the plasma melatonin concentration was determined by radioimmunoassay. We found that chronic stress decreased the expression of three sympathetic markers in the pineal gland, tyrosine hydroxylase, the p75 neurotrophin receptor and α‐tubulin, while the same treatment did not affect the expression of the non‐specific sympathetic markers Erk1 and Erk2, and glyceraldehyde‐3‐phosphate dehydrogenase. Furthermore, these results were correlated with a significant increase in plasma melatonin concentration in stressed rats when compared with control animals. Our findings indicate that stress may impair pineal sympathetic inputs, leading to an abnormal melatonin release that may contribute to environmental maladaptation. In addition, we propose that the pineal gland is a target of glucocorticoid damage during stress.
The Guided Tour: A Research Technique for the Study of Situated, Embodied Information

Abstract:This article introduces the guided tour as an appropriate research technique for studying situated and embodied information. The guided tour hybridizes aspects of observation and interviews, and involves a researcher's relatively shortened, nonspontaneous entry into a field site. During a guided tour, a participant leads the researcher through the location (often one that is personally meaningful for him or her) while describing and explaining its features, thinking-aloud the ideas, thoughts, and feelings to which it gives rise, and responding to the researcher's gentle inquiries. This article begins with a sustained background to the technique and descriptive breakdown of it in terms of other, related methods and techniques. It then reviews prior use of the guided tour in the information and library science field, where it is not prevalent per se, but has been used on an ongoing basis for at least three decades. It delineates practical steps and tips for carrying out a guided tour as well as strengths and limitations of the technique for studying situated, embodied information and information phenomena in general. The article concludes by briefly discussing researchers as embodied research instruments and the role of reflexivity in qualitative research.
Antibacterial, antiprotozoal and antioxidant activity of five plants used in Izabal for infectious diseases

Methanol and aqueous extracts from ﬁve plant species, used in traditional medicine in Guatemala for the treatment of microbial infections, were tested in vitro for their ability to scavenge DPPH, OH· and O2‐ radicals and to inhibit lipoperoxidation (LPO) in order to establish a relationship between their antioxidant activities and their effects against infectious agents. Acalypha guatemalensis, Ocimum micranthum and Smilax spinosa possessed a signiﬁcant activity against both the three free radicals assayed and LPO; Guazuma ulmifolia showed effects against DPPH and OH·. Piper auritum showed no activity. These extracts were also evaluated for antibacterial and antiprotozoal activities. A. guatemalensis showed activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa; S. spinosa was active against Salmonella typhi, and A. guatemalensis, and S. spinosa against Trypanosoma cruzi or Leishmania spp. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Adaptive Fuzzy PI Controller for TCPST to improve power system Stability Optimized by Ant Colony method

Increasing electric power demand can cause powers systems to reach stress conditions, resulting in undesirable voltage and frequency condition. Nowadays it is well recognized that by applying the Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) controllers, the stability limits can be enhanced significantly. In this paper an optimized Self Tuning Fuzzy PI Controller (STFPIC) is proposed for the TCPST to improve system dynamic performance. The Fuzzy PI Controller (FPIC) is designed in the first step and then the gains of this controller are optimized by Ant Colony System (ACS). FPIC performs well for the base operating condition of the system, but in another operating conditions, it will not show suitable results. Thus, another controller is added to tune the output gain of the main controller and convert it to a self tuning controller. From the simulation studies it is observed that the STPIC TCPST has better performance in different conditions.
Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Mathematics Textbooks

Despite the lip service that publishers have given to thinking skills, math textbooks have had a poor track record for the last 25 years. Until this situation is rectified, educators are going to have to rely on supplementary methods and materials. tudent acquisition of problem solving and higher-order thinking skills has long been a goal of schools in general and of mathematics educators specifically Thus, it is im perative that the tools we use to teach those skills he equal to the challenge of this goal In 1984 Steven Willoughby, Presi dent of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, averred that the most important factor in determining what mathematics is taught is the textbook used" U nfortunatelv, mathemat ics textbooks are not doing enough to actively involve students in the development , practice, and acquisition of higher-order thinking skills Analytical Tool and Procedures Based on a studv of earlier schemes for analyzing and evaluating textbooks 1 designed an analysis scheme to overcome some of their weaknesses and to be consistent with the needs of educational evalua tors and purchasers. One such need is the availability of descriptive data to use in their decision-making and se lection process Robert F Nicel, lr, i Associrate Professor of Education and (,oordinator of Continut ing Educatton and (ommonuealth Rela tions, The Pennvanlrta State (neritritl'.