Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic stability of smart sandwich beams with electro-rheological core resting on elastic foundation

This article focuses on dynamic stability of smart sandwich beams resting on Winkler elastic foundation subjected to harmonic axial loads. To increase the dynamic buckling load and the stability region of the beam, an electro-rheological layer is adhered as a core. The finite element method is employed to derive a three layer smart sandwich beam element. By inspecting dynamic response of the beam in different load amplitudes, critical dynamic loads are calculated. Parametric study is done to investigate effects of various parameters such as beam geometry, foundation stiffness, static load, applied voltage and properties of core layer on critical dynamic loads and stability regions of the beam. This study indicates that by applying electric field to the electro-rheological core, dynamic critical load and consequently, dynamic stability of the beam increase efficiently. Furthermore, the elastic foundation reduces the unstable region and increases the critical dynamic load of the smart beam. Proper use of these parameters makes the beam less sensitive to axial harmonic loading by relocating the instability region.
Cooperative Q-learning techniques for distributed online power allocation in femtocell networks

In this paper, we address the problem of distributed interference management of femtocells that share the same frequency band with macrocells using distributed multi-agent Q-learning. We formulate and solve two problems representing two different Q-learning algorithms, namely, femto-based distributed and sub-carrier-based distributed power controls using Q-learning FBDPC-Q and SBDPC-Q. FBDPC-Q is a multi-agent algorithm that works on a global basis, for example, deals with the aggregate macrocell and femtocell capacities. Its complexity increases exponentially with the number of sub-carriers in the system. Also, it does not take into consideration the sub-carrier macrocell capacity as a constraint. To overcome these problems, SBDPC-Q is proposed, which is a multi-agent algorithm that works on a sub-carrier basis, for example, sub-carrier macrocell and femtocell capacities. Each of FBDPC-Q and SBDPC-Q works in three different learning paradigms: independent IL, cooperative CL, and weighted cooperative WCL. IL is considered the simplest form for applying Q-learning in multi-agent scenarios, where all the femtocells learn independently. CL and WCL are the proposed schemes in which femtocells share partial information during the learning process in order to strike a balance between practical relevance and performance. We prove the convergence of the CL paradigm when used in the FBDPC-Q algorithm. We show via simulations that the CL paradigm outperforms the IL paradigm in terms of the aggregate femtocell capacity, especially in networks with large number of femtocells and large number of power levels. In addition, we propose WCL to address the CL limitations. Finally, we evaluate the robustness and scalability of both FBDPC-Q and SBDPC-Q, against several typical dynamics of plausible wireless scenarios fading, path loss, random activity of femtocells, etc. We show that the CL paradigm is the most scalable to large number of femtocells and robust to the network dynamics compared with the IL and WCL paradigms. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Higher Protein Intake Does Not Improve Lean Mass Gain When Compared with RDA Recommendation in Postmenopausal Women Following Resistance Exercise Protocol: A Randomized Clinical Trial

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of a higher protein intake on lean body mass (LBM) gain in postmenopausal women practicing resistance exercise and compare it to the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) recommendation. Twenty-three postmenopausal women (63.2 ± 7.8 years) were randomized into two groups. The group with higher protein intake (n = 11) (HP) received a dietary plan with ~1.2 g·kg−1·day−1 of protein, while the normal protein (NP) group (n = 12) was instructed to ingest ~0.8 g·kg−1·day−1 of protein (RDA recommendation). Both groups performed the same resistance training protocol, 3 times a week, with progression of the number of sets (from 1 to 6 sets) and 8–12 repetitions. The intervention occurred over 10 weeks. Body composition evaluation was performed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The diet was evaluated by nine 24-h food recall summaries over the course of the study. During the intervention period, the HP group presented a higher protein (1.18 ± 0.3 vs. 0.87 ± 0.2 g·kg−1·day−1, p = 0.008) and leucine (6.0 ± 1.4 vs. 4.3 ± 0.9 g/day, p < 0.001) intake than the NP group, respectively. At the end of the intervention, there were increases in LBM both in HP (37.1 ± 6.2 to 38.4 ± 6.5 kg, p = 0.004) and in NP (37.6 ± 6.2 to 38.8 ± 6.4 kg, p < 0.001), with no differences between the groups (p = 0.572). In conclusion, increased protein intake did not promote higher LBM gain when compared to RDA recommendation in postmenopausal women performing resistance exercise during 10 weeks. This trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT03024125.
Propagating online social networks via different kinds of weak ties

Over the years, online social networks (OSNs) have become popular form of networks for people to create and maintain networks of friends, to share knowledge/interests, and to publish content on a massive scale. The popularity of such OSNs has formed a virtual platform for viral marketing of contents, products, target advertising, and political campaigns. The amount of work dedicated to studying information diffusion in OSNs has increased in recent years. Past research has clearly shown that diffusion of information in social networks depends on both the nature of the information and the structure of the network. In this study, we focus on one of the structural properties, tie strength, in the flow of information through social networks. Several studies have shown that weak ties can act as bridges, linking disconnected groups in the network, which, in turn, allows information to diffuse between subgroups. However, not all weak ties are “good” weak ties in the network. In this study, we want to prove that a weak tie helps in the spread of information, when a “good” weak tie is selected. Specifically, we proposed a simple mechanism to select “good” weak ties in each step of the propagation process. We simulate our mechanism on data collected from two blog networks (wretch.cc and tribe.com) and a Facebook network, and found that an appropriate weak tie can improve the diffusion of information.
Classification and characteristics of Floquet factorisations in linear continuous-time periodic systems

This article has two purposes. Firstly, the article is devoted to collecting basic facts about the Floquet theorem and various Floquet factorisation algorithms claimed for finite-dimensional linear continuous-time periodic (FDLCP) systems. Secondly, the article presents a unified representation framework for various Floquet factorisations in FDLCP systems, while structural and analytic characteristics about them are examined as well. More precisely, the following aspects are considered: (i) algorithms for Floquet factorisations; (ii) characteristics of Floquet factors; (iii) relationships and properties among Floquet factorisations. Most results are reported for the first time, while the others are generalised versions of existing ones.
Salsify: Low-Latency Network Video through Tighter Integration between a Video Codec and a Transport Protocol

1 We present Salsify, a system for real-time Internet video 2 transmission that achieves 3.9× lower delay and 2.7 dB 3 higher visual quality on average when compared with 4 five existing systems: FaceTime, Hangouts, Skype, and 5 WebRTC with and without scalable video coding. 6 Salsify achieves these gains through a joint design of 7 the video codec and transport protocol that features a 8 tighter integration between these components. The design 9 includes three major improvements. First, Salsify’s trans10 port protocol is video-aware and accounts for the fact that 11 video encoders send data in bursts rather than “full throt12 tle. ” Second, Salsify’s video codec exposes its internal 13 state to the application, allowing it to be saved and re14 stored. Salsify uses this to explore two compression levels 15 for every frame, sending the frame that best matches the 16 network conditions after compression. Third, Salsify com17 bines the video codec’s and transport protocol’s control 18 loops so that both components run in lockstep, and frames 19 are encoded when the network can accommodate them. 20 This improves responsiveness on variable network paths. 21
Document heading doi : Modeling seasonal leptospirosis transmission and its association with rainfall and temperature in Thailand using time-series and ARIMAX analyses

Biophysics Group, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science Mahidol University, Rama VI, Ratchathewi District, Bangkok Thailand ThEP Center CHE, 328 Si Ayutthaya Road, Bangkok, Thailand Centre of Excellence in Mathematics, CHE, 328 Si Ayutthaya Road, Bangkok, Thailand Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science Mahidol University, Rama VI, Ratchathewi District, Bangkok Thailand Bureau of Epidemiology, Department of Disease Control, Ministry of Public Health, Tivanond Road, Nonthaburi, Thailand Institute for Innovative Learning Mahidol University, 999, Phuttamonthon 4 Road, Salaya, Nakorn Pathom Thailand
SBFR: A search based approach for reproducing failures of programs with grammar based input

Reproducing field failures in-house, a step developers must perform when assigned a bug report, is an arduous task. In most cases, developers must be able to reproduce a reported failure using only a stack trace and/or some informal description of the failure. The problem becomes even harder for the large class of programs whose input is highly structured and strictly specified by a grammar. To address this problem, we present SBFR, a search-based failure-reproduction technique for programs with structured input. SBFR formulates failure reproduction as a search problem. Starting from a reported failure and a limited amount of dynamic information about the failure, SBFR exploits the potential of genetic programming to iteratively find legal inputs that can trigger the failure.
FREEZING AND THAWING TESTS OF CONCRETE

THE SCOPE AND PURPOSE OF THIS INVESTIGATION ARE COVERED BY THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS: (1) WHAT WEATHERING CONDITIONS ARE THE MAJOR FACTORS CAUSING DETERIORATION OF CONCRETE? , (2) TO WHAT CYCLE OF FREEZING AND THAWING MAY CONCRETE BE SUBJECTED IN SERVICE? , (3) HOW SHALL THE DETERIORATION OF CONCRETE SUBJECTED TO FREEZING AND THAWING BE MEASURED? , (4) WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF VARIOUS CURING TREATMENTS PRIOR TO FREEZING? (5) WHAT CYCLE OF FREEZING AND THAWING SHOULD BE USED? , AND (6) CAN THE EFFECT OF AGGREGATES ON THE DURABILITY OF CONCRETE BE PREDICTED BY A FREEZING AND THAWING TEST? THE REPORT OFFERS SOME DATA OBTAINED IN CONNECTION WITH RESEARCH DIRECTED TOWARD PRODUCING A YARDSTICK BY WHICH SOME ACCELERATED MEASURE OF CONCRETE DURABILITY MAY BE OBTAINED. THE DATA PRESENTED ARE BASED ON TESTS MADE ON CONCRETES FABRICATED FROM A FIXED MORTAR OF GOOD QUALITY AND COARSE AGGREGATES OF VARYING QUALITY. THE FREEZING THAWING CYCLE USED IS OF A FIXED LENGTH OF 12 HOURS, USING VARYING THAWING AND FREEZING TEMPERATURES. THE NEEDS FOR COOPERATIVE STANDARDIZATION WORK IN THIS FIELD AND ACCURATE CONTROL OF TEST CONDITIONS ARE STRESSED. /AUTHOR/
Betrayals in Emerging Adulthood: A Developmental Perspective of Infidelity

Infidelity is associated with considerable distress and discord in dating relationships. The current mixed methods study examined both the written narratives and survey responses of 104 (59.6% women) emerging adults to investigate reasons for engaging in infidelity (i.e., sexual and emotional infidelity). Emerging adults’ reasons for engaging in infidelity were attributed primarily to their primary relationships and/or their romantic partners not fulfilling their needs for interdependence and thus feeling motivated to fulfill these needs elsewhere. Although the majority of participants provided independence and/or interdependence reasons for their infidelity, a large proportion of responses (40%) referenced alternative reasons. These responses included (a) the opportunity to become intimate with an infidelity partner while under the influence of alcohol, (b) attraction to an infidelity partner, and (c) the excitement and novelty that the infidelity experience provided. Those who reported engaging in infidelity because of unmet interdependence needs, and intimacy needs in particular, were more avoidantly attached than those who did not reference unmet interdependence needs. Those who reported engaging in infidelity because of unmet independence needs were more anxiously attached than those who did not reference unmet independence needs. Implications for the developmental importance of infidelity in terms of research and applied work are discussed.
Agent-Based Distributed Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow

The need for the coordination of distributed energy resources in the future electric power system provides motivation to move from the current highly centralized control of resources toward a more distributed control structure. This paper presents an agent-based fully distributed dc security constrained optimal power flow (DC-SCOPF) approach. The algorithm is based on a multi-agent system, in which geographically distributed network entities are designated as agents with local sensing, communication, and computation abilities as envisioned for a smart grid. This distributed approach is based on solving the first order optimality conditions associated with DC-SCOPF formulation through an iterative process. At each iteration, each agent updates a few local variables through simple computations, and exchanges information with its neighboring agents. In particular, the updates for each agent incorporate local information such as the Lagrange multipliers, as well as enforcing the supply/demand balance through a local innovation term. Also, the performance is evaluated using the IEEE test systems with 14 and 57 buses and a 944-bus system consisting of eight IEEE 118-bus systems. Finally, analytical arguments concerning the convergence of the proposed method to the optimal solution of the DC-SCOPF are provided.
An Empiric HIV Risk Scoring Tool to Predict HIV-1 Acquisition in African Women

Objective:To develop and validate an HIV risk assessment tool to predict HIV acquisition among African women. Design:Data were analyzed from 3 randomized trials of biomedical HIV prevention interventions among African women (VOICE, HPTN 035, and FEM-PrEP). Methods:We implemented standard methods for the development of clinical prediction rules to generate a risk-scoring tool to predict HIV acquisition over the course of 1 year. Performance of the score was assessed through internal and external validations. Results:The final risk score resulting from multivariable modeling included age, married/living with a partner, partner provides financial or material support, partner has other partners, alcohol use, detection of a curable sexually transmitted infection, and herpes simplex virus 2 serostatus. Point values for each factor ranged from 0 to 2, with a maximum possible total score of 11. Scores ≥5 were associated with HIV incidence >5 per 100 person-years and identified 91% of incident HIV infections from among only 64% of women. The area under the curve (AUC) for predictive ability of the score was 0.71 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.68 to 0.74), indicating good predictive ability. Risk score performance was generally similar with internal cross-validation (AUC = 0.69; 95% CI: 0.66 to 0.73) and external validation in HPTN 035 (AUC = 0.70; 95% CI: 0.65 to 0.75) and FEM-PrEP (AUC = 0.58; 95% CI: 0.51 to 0.65). Conclusions:A discrete set of characteristics that can be easily assessed in clinical and research settings was predictive of HIV acquisition over 1 year. The use of a validated risk score could improve efficiency of recruitment into HIV prevention research and inform scale-up of HIV prevention strategies in women at highest risk.
Physical and electroresponsive characteristics of the intercalated styrene-acrylonitrile copolymer/clay nanocomposite under applied electric fields

Styrene-acrylonitrile copolymer (SAN)/clay nanocomposites were synthesized through an emulsion copolymerization of styrene and acrylonitrile in the presence of sodium montmorillonite, and their physical properties and electroresponsiveness under an applied electric field were characterized. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) showed that the thermal stability of the synthesized polymer was sustained. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis confirmed the insertion of SAN into the interlayers of clay, whose separation consequently increased, as compared to those of the pristine clay. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to observe the suspended state of clay. Dry-base electrorheological (ER) fluids were prepared by mixing intercalated SAN nanocomposite particles into silicone oil. Typical ER behavior, i.e., enhancement of shear and yield stresses in the presence of an applied electric field, was observed using a rotational rheometer equipped with a high-voltage generator. A universal yield stress scaling equation was also found to fit our experimental data well. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 89: 821–827, 2003
Uplink-downlink duality for integer-forcing

Consider a MIMO uplink channel with channel matrix H and a MIMO downlink channel with channel matrix Hτ. It is well-known that any rate tuple that is achievable on the uplink is also achievable on the downlink under the same total power constraint, i.e., there is an uplink-downlink duality relationship. In this paper, we consider the integer-forcing strategy, in which users steer the channel towards an integer-valued effective channel matrix so that the receiver(s) can decode integer-linear combinations of the transmitted codewords. Recent efforts have demonstrated the benefits of this strategy for uplink, downlink, and interference alignment scenarios. Here, we establish that uplink-downlink duality holds for integer-forcing. Specifically, in the uplink, L transmitters communicate over channel matrix H to an L-antenna receiver with target integer matrix A. In the downlink, an L-antenna transmitter communicates over channel matrix Hτ to L single-antenna receivers with target integer matrix Aτ. We show that any computation rate tuple that is achievable in the uplink is achievable for the same total power in the downlink and vice versa.
Intrusion detection and prevention of web service attacks for software as a service: Fuzzy association rules vs fuzzy associative patterns

Cloud computing inherits all the systems, networks as well asWeb Services’ security vulnerabilities, in particular for software as a service (SaaS), where business applications or services are provided over the Cloud as Web Service (WS). Hence, WS-based applications must be protected against loss of integrity, confidentiality and availability when they are deployed over to the Cloud environment. Many existing IDP systems address only attacks mostly occurring at PaaS and IaaS. In this paper, we present our fuzzy association rule-based (FAR) and fuzzy associative pattern-based (FAP) intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) systems in defending against WS attacks at the SaaS level. Our experimental results have validated the capabilities of these two IDP systems in terms of detection of known attacks and prediction of newvariant attacks with accuracy close to 100%. For each transaction transacted over the Cloud platform, detection, prevention or prediction is carried out in less than five seconds. For load and volume testing on the SaaS where the system is under stress (at a work load of 5000 concurrent users submitting normal, suspicious and malicious transactions over a time interval of 300 seconds), the FAR IDP system provides close to 95% service availability to normal transactions. Future work involves determining more quality attributes besides service availability, such as latency, throughput and accountability for a more trustworthy SaaS.
Damage Monitoring of Composite Materials Using Pulsed Phase Thermography and Thermoelastic Stress Analysis

The current paper presents a new combined technique for damage detection, localisation and establishing damage severity. The technique is based on the use of two infrared detection approaches: Pulsed Phase Thermography (PPT) and Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA). A methodology is described that allows the technique to be applied to fibre reinforced composites. The usefulness of the technique is demonstrated on delaminated glass epoxy laminates. A means of developing controlled delamination damage in such specimens is developed so that real sub surface damage is evaluated in the paper.
Role of salt bridges in the dimer interface of 14-3-3ζ in dimer dynamics, N-terminal α-helical order, and molecular chaperone activity

The 14-3-3 family of intracellular proteins are dimeric, multifunctional adaptor proteins that bind to and regulate the activities of many important signaling proteins. The subunits within 14-3-3 dimers are predicted to be stabilized by salt bridges that are largely conserved across the 14-3-3 protein family and allow the different isoforms to form heterodimers. Here, we have examined the contributions of conserved salt-bridging residues in stabilizing the dimeric state of 14-3-3ζ. Using analytical ultracentrifugation, our results revealed that Asp21 and Glu89 both play key roles in dimer dynamics and contribute to dimer stability. Furthermore, hydrogen-deuterium exchange coupled with mass spectrometry showed that mutation of Asp21 promoted disorder in the N-terminal helices of 14-3-3ζ, suggesting that this residue plays an important role in maintaining structure across the dimer interface. Intriguingly, a D21N 14-3-3ζ mutant exhibited enhanced molecular chaperone ability that prevented amorphous protein aggregation, suggesting a potential role for N-terminal disorder in 14-3-3ζ's poorly understood chaperone action. Taken together, these results imply that disorder in the N-terminal helices of 14-3-3ζ is a consequence of the dimer–monomer dynamics and may play a role in conferring chaperone function to 14-3-3ζ protein.