Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM TO IMPROVE HANDOFF IN MOBILITY SUPPORT FOR IPV 6 PROTOCOL

This paper describes an extension of the mobility support for the IPv6 protocol, which is currently an Internet Draft. We argue that by processing geographical data information a mobile node can efficiently switch between different LANs without disturbance to ongoing data sessions. Furthermore the number of location update messages diminishes as the mobile node transmits them only when switching to a new LAN. This extension requires that each router of the foreign networks the mobile node visits, advertises the GPS coordinates of x points that describe its region. It also requires that the mobile node is capable of receiving GPS signals. Once having collected this information the mobile node can safely figure whether it will continue to be served by the same LAN or it has to switch to a different one because soon it will be out of the old LAN’s range. Furthermore using this information the mobile node can also decide to which LAN it is preferable to switch. Lower-layer information, when it is available, such as signal strength or signal quality can be used as auxiliary indications for the switch decision.
A novel taylor series based approach for control computation in NN-ANARX structure based control of nonlinear systems

This paper presents an alternative approach for control computation in a closed loop of discrete-time nonlinear system and NN-ANARX based dynamic output feedback. Proposed technique is based on an application of Taylor series expansion for computation of control directly from neural network based model. Two modifications of the algorithm are proposed for both single-input single-output and multi-input multi-output nonlinear systems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on numerical examples.
Sarcoidosis Following Cushing's Syndrome: A Report of Two Cases and Review of the Literature

Cushing's syndrome is characterized by excessive elevation of glucocorticoid concentrations. In rare cases, the treatment of Cushing's syndrome may result in unmasking or aggravation of diseases responsive to glucocorticoid medication. We report two cases of sarcoidosis following Cushing's syndrome. A 43 year-old male developed cutaneous sarcoidosis and mediastinal lymphadenopathy after resection of an ACTH-secreting pituitary microadenoma. A 32 year-old female showed cutaneous sarcoidosis, arthralgia, mediastinal lymphadenopathy and elevation of angiotensin-converting enzyme and interleukin 2-receptor concentrations after traumatic adrenal bleeding, which ceased formerly undiagnosed hypercortisolism caused by an adrenal adenoma. Sarcoidosis seems to be a rare sequel following the treatment of hypercortisolism. Skin affections were present and suggestive for the diagnosis in all reported cases. As some cases are probably missed when skin affections are lacking, a more frequent evaluation of patients after Cushing's syndrome for the possible diagnosis of sarcoidosis might be necessary.
Evaluation of the Medicaid Buy-In Program in Washington State

This study examines the effectiveness of Washington State’s Medicaid Buy-In (MBI) program—Healthcare for Workers With Disabilities (HWD)—which gives workers with disabilities who earn too much for conventional Medicaid the opportunity to purchase full Medicaid coverage by paying a monthly premium based on a sliding income scale. The authors compare HWD enrollees who recently had conventional Medicaid coverage to a statistically matched group of individuals who had conventional Medicaid coverage in recent history and at baseline. Their findings suggest that MBI in Washington State is encouraging work, increasing earnings, and decreasing reliance on food stamps while providing medical coverage to a vulnerable population for whom continuous health insurance is particularly important.
THE SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH MODULE(S) FROM A SOCIAL WELFARE PERSPECTIVE

A once-off qualitative questionnaire was sent via e-mail to the social work various training institutions in South Africa. Various topics were covered in the empirical study and as far as possible theoretical substantiation of the findings were integrated with the findings. Topics such as the views of the lecturers and the students on the importance of the research module(s), number of credits allotted to the research module(s), the level of presentation, the limitations/challenges experienced in the operationalising of the research module(s), the link between the theoretical and empirical parts of the module(s), the various study units, and whether students do their research projects individually, in pairs or in groups were covered in this questionnaire.
Neural correlates of fingerspelling, text, and sign processing in deaf American Sign Language–English bilinguals

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural regions that support comprehension of fingerspelled words, printed words, and American Sign Language (ASL) signs in deaf ASL–English bilinguals. Participants made semantic judgements (concrete–abstract? ) to each lexical type, and hearing non-signers served as controls. All three lexical types engaged a left frontotemporal circuit associated with lexical semantic processing. Both printed and fingerspelled words activated the visual word form area for deaf signers only. Fingerspelled words were more left lateralised than signs, paralleling the difference between reading and listening for spoken language. Greater activation in left supramarginal gyrus was observed for signs compared to fingerspelled words, supporting its role in processing sign-specific phonology. Fingerspelling ability was negatively correlated with activation in left occipital cortex, while ASL ability was negatively correlated with activation in right angular gyrus. Overall, the results reveal both overlapping and distinct neural regions for comprehension of signs, text, and fingerspelling.
Accurate 3D object measurement and inspection using structured light systems

A Structured Light System (SLS) is a fast and flexible optical method for measuring the 3D shape of objects. The dense point cloud resulted accurately describes the shape information of the object. The information can be used in many applications, such as generating CAD models, measuring shapes and inspecting qualities. The desired geometrical information of positions, poses, distances, angles, profiles etc. can conveniently be extracted from the measurement result. It is also possible to calculate and visualize the deviation between a measurement and a CAD model. In this paper, we present techniques, which lead to development of practical 3D machine vision systems in a different way than traditional ones. We have developed low cost and user-friendly 3D machine vision systems with off-the-shelf components based on Structured Light Systems (also known as Fringe Projection Systems) suitable for automated quality inspection and shape measurement. Two cases are presented for demonstrating the successful implementation.
Esteya Vermicola, a Nematophagous Fungus Attacking the Pine Wood Nematode, Harbors a Bacterial Endosymbiont Affiliated with Gammaproteobacteria

Symbioses have played pivotal roles in biological, ecological, and evolutionary diversification. Symbiotic bacteria affect the biology of hosts in a number of ways. Esteya vermicola, an endoparasitic nematophagous fungus, has high infectivity in the pine wood nematode (PWN), which causes devastating ecological damage and economic losses in Asia and Europe. An integration of molecular, phylogenetic, and morphological analyses revealed that surface-sterilized E. vermicola with septate hyphae from different geographic locations harbor bacterial endosymbionts. 16S rRNA gene sequences from four fungal strains all clustered in a well-supported monophyletic clade that was the most closely related to Pseudomonas stutzeri and affiliated with Gammaproteobacteria. The existence and intracellular location of endobacteria was revealed by fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). Our results showed that endobacteria were coccoid, vertically inherited, as yet uncultured, and essential symbionts. Ultrastructural observations indicated that young and old endobacteria differed in cell size, cell wall thickness, and the degree of reproduction. The results of the present study provide a fundamental understanding of the endobacteria inside E. vermicola and raise questions regarding the impact of endobacteria on the biology, ecology, and evolution of their fungal host.
A Spatial Approach to Perception Identification in Editorials Enhanced with Anaphora Resolution

A method is proposed to annotate editorials and news articles for sentences that most accurately represent the opinion of the speaker towards the issue. The speaker’s point of view or level of discernment of the issue is whittled out. A list of informative and related keywords is extracted from the document based on their frequency of occurrence. Subsequently, pronominal anaphora is resolved at the document level based on minimum distance measures. Normalized Google Distance (NGD) is employed to resolve appositive instances. The Vector Space Model is then applied to the anaphora resolved document. Based on distance measures in high dimensional space, the cohesion between target word pairs is observed. Strongly cohesive word clusters qualify as opinion words. Results from a pilot collection of short opinion editorials and critical reviews from newspapers and manual annotation of perspective of up to 710 such sentences indicate an agreement of 76% in opinion annotation. Key wordsPerspective, Coreference, Normalized Google Distance, Vector space, Opinion.
Passive estimation of TCP round-trip times

We propose and evaluate a passive measurement methodology that estimates the distribution of Round-Trip Times (RTTs) for the TCP connections that flow through a network link. Such an RTT distribution is important in buffer provisioning, configuration of active queue management, and detection of congestion unresponsive traffic. The proposed methodology is based on two techniques. The first technique is applicable to TCP caller-to-callee flows, and it is based on the 3-way handshake messages. The second technique is applicable to callee-to-caller flows, when the callee transfers a number of MSS segments to the caller, and it is based on the slow-start phase of TCP. The complete estimation algorithm reports an RTT for 55-85% of the TCP workload, in terms of bytes, in the traces that we examined. Verification experiments show that about 90% of the passive measurements are within 10% or 5ms, whichever is larger, of the RTT that ping would measure. Also, measurements on several NLANR traces show that the two estimation techniques agree within 25ms for 70-80% of the processed TCP connections. We also apply the estimation methodology on a number of NLANR traces and examine the variability of the measured RTT distributions in both short and long timescales.
A Pragmatic Chinese Word Segmentation Approach Based on Mixing Models

A pragmatic Chinese word segmentation approach is presented in this paper based on mixing language models. Chinese word segmentation is composed of several hard sub-tasks, which usually encounter different difficulties. The authors apply the corresponding language model to solve each special sub-task, so as to take advantage of each model. First, a class-based trigram is adopted in basic word segmentation, which applies the Absolute Discount Smoothing algorithm to overcome data sparseness. The Maximum Entropy Model (ME) is also used to identify Named Entities. Second, the authors propose the application of rough sets and average mutual information, etc. to extract special features. Finally, some features are extended through the combination of the word cluster and the thesaurus. The authors' system participated in the Second International Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff, and achieved 96.7 and 97.2 in F-measure in the PKU and MSRA open tests, respectively.
Individual alpha peak frequency based features for subject dependent EEG workload classification

The individual alpha peak frequency (IAPF) is an important biological indicator in Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies, with many research publications linking it to various cognitive functions. In this paper, we propose novel Power Spectral Density (PSD) alpha features based on IAPF to classify 2 and 4 levels of EEG multitasking workload data. When optimized IAPF was considered, a 1.55% and 1.56% increase in average accuracy for 48 subjects' data, with 35 and 33 subjects showing improvement was observed for 2 and 4 class cases respectively. This trend suggests that individual specific features are able to improve classification performance compared to generalized features for subject dependent cases. The proposed features, which incorporates the biological meaning of the IAPF and provides subject specific information, can be considered as a viable alternative to the general alpha power feature when designing novel subject dependent feature sets for BCI workload recognition applications.
Can voice quality improve mandarin tone recognition?

We investigate several measures of voice quality (VQ) to improve tone recognition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that band energy measures such as spectral balance (Sluijter and van Heuven, 1996) work better than measures based on glottal flow estimation and harmonic-formant differences. We also determine a set of bands and measures that improve tone classification accuracy on broadcast news speech to 64.1% from 60.4% when added to a traditional pitch-duration-intensity set of features. Most improvement is for the neutral tone, for which the F score increases from 0.345 to 0.619.
Learning agreements and work‐based higher education

The goal of autonomous learning as preparation for being‐in‐the‐world‐of‐change has clear advantages for both individuals and society. Tomkins and McGraw declare, rather inspirationally, that the challenge for academics is leading ‘students to the wisdom of their own minds and setting them free on their own learning’. In this paper, the role of learning contracts in facilitating this change is investigated. Specifically, the paper discusses their use in the workplace in shifting relationships between student, teacher and university where the benefits for the three parties are; academic awards, successful degree supervision and accumulation of knowledge for practical purposes. The awards are professional awards at Master’s and Doctorate level. The argument is that by engaging in workplace study, both student and academic institution risk becoming normalised by commerce. The analysis is based on the learning contract documents of four UK universities.
Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes

Ten ethnic groups were placed in rank order by 60 Princeton students on the basis of preference for association with their members. The ranking was similar to the results reported by other investigators. Minor exceptions occurred in the case of the Jews and Japanese, who were placed somewhat lower and higher, respectively, than in other studies. A change in instructions designed to elicit private or personal responses as against public attitudes had a significant effect only in the case of the negroes, who were placed a rank higher in private than in public preferences. Students showed the greatest agreement in ranking the Americans, English, and Germans for both public and private preferences. The least agreement in public preferences occurred for the Jews, Japanese, and Chinese, and in private preferences for the negroes, Jews, and Chinese. A list of 84 traits given as the typical characteristics of the ten nationalities by a group of students was rated by another group of students on the basis of their desirability as associates. From these ratings scores were assigned to the ten nationalities, the relative weights of which agreed closely with the preferential private and public rank orders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)
Application of Information Centric Networking to NoSQL databases: The spatio-temporal use case

This paper explores methodologies, advantages and challenges related to the use of the Information Centric Network technology for developing NoSQL distributed databases, which are expected to play a central role in the forthcoming IoT and BigData era. ICN services make possible to simplify the development of the database software, improve performance, and provide data-level access control. We use our findings to design a NoSQL spatio-temporal database, named OpenGeoBase, and evaluate its performance by using a real data set relevant to Intelligent Transport System applications.
The Social Qualities of Being on Foot: A Theoretical Analysis of Pedestrian Activity, Community, and Culture

This article presents a theoretical framework for explaining how pedestrian activity broadens people's access to cultural meaning‐making processes. A lack of vital pedestrian activity constitutes a social problem because of lost opportunities for social interaction. According to a theory of the micro‐level production of culture, “Epistemological Culture Theory,” collaborative self‐expression in the course of interaction with others is essential for developing shared meanings (i.e., culture), a sense of community, and a sense of security in what we know. A review of urban planning and environmental psychology research on pedestrian environments finds significant appreciation for conditions conducive to such collaborative self‐expression. This literature presents a highly developed environmental (or technological) determinist perspective. This article complements previous research by focusing on the cultural significance of being on foot. Four concepts are introduced to help enrich the discussion: “breadth of experience,”“pausability,”“identity expression,” and “collaborative creativity. ” These concepts enable a better understanding of how pedestrian activity facilitates interaction. This exploration posits principles and raises questions about how these qualities may be sought out or even avoided in personal and cultural preferences regarding transportation and public life.
Genetically Engineered Mouse Models for Drug Development and Preclinical Trials

Drug development and preclinical trials are challenging processes and more than 80% to 90% of drug candidates fail to gain approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration. Predictive and efficient tools are required to discover high quality targets and increase the probability of success in the process of new drug development. One such solution to the challenges faced in the development of new drugs and combination therapies is the use of low-cost and experimentally manageable in vivo animal models. Since the 1980’s, scientists have been able to genetically modify the mouse genome by removing or replacing a specific gene, which has improved the identification and validation of target genes of interest. Now genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) are widely used and have proved to be a powerful tool in drug discovery processes. This review particularly covers recent fascinating technologies for drug discovery and preclinical trials, targeted transgenesis and RNAi mouse, including application and combination of inducible system. Improvements in technologies and the development of new GEMMs are expected to guide future applications of these models to drug discovery and preclinical trials.
Effect of Pheochromocytoma and Hypophysectomy on Blood Pressure and Catecholamines in NEDH Rats

The New England Deaconess Hospital (NEDH) rat provides a ratable model with which to study pbeochromocytoma (P); 59% of male rats 700 to 900 days old and 81% of those 900 days or older dereloped spontaneous P. One transplantable P (P259), when implanted into other NEDH rats, markedly increased plasma norepiuephrine and dopamine as well as blood pressure, and usually caused death within 4 weeks. Even without P, about 83% of NEDH rats became hypertensive by 13V4 weeks of age and remained moderately hypertensive until 2 years of age when some animals developed spontaneous P and hypertension became severe. Whether a common mechanism Is responsible for early appearance of hypertension and later development of P remains to be determined. Hypopfaysectomized NEDH rats remained normotensire or slightly hypotenslve despite marked elevations of plasma norepinephrine and dopamine caused by P259 implantation; furthermore, survival was prolonged to 3 months. Catecholamine concentrations in plasma and RBC were usually quite similar, indicating that red blood cells play a significant role in inactivating circulating catecholamines. Unlike the normal adrenal, P259 in NEDH rats contains mainly norepinephrine and dopamine with little epinephrine; it appears that P259 is deficient in the enzyme pbenylethanolaniine-N-methyltransferase (PNMT), which converts norepinephrine to epinephrine. Why hypophysectomy prevents hypertension and prolongs life in rats with P259 implants is unclear; adrenal cortical and thyroid deficiency may play a role. Preliminary observations indicate that hypophysectomy can prevent spontaneous development of P in NEDH rats. (Hypertension 4 (suppl II): II-2OO-II-207, 1982)
Illusions of consensus: New South Wales stakeholders' constructions of the identity of history

This article analyses the relationships between the perspectives of stakeholders involved in the development of the 1998 New South Wales Stages 4–5 history syllabus. It examined four key issues that emerged in the debates about history education during the review and found that stakeholders' views diverged significantly on three of these issues. While loose coalitions formed around particular issues, stakeholders provided different rationales for their positions, and coalitions re-formed on other debates. The analysis highlights the divergence between stakeholders and between the Commonwealth and state governments and stakeholders on the desirable content and goals of history education. The findings indicate that consultation might not produce consensus, and that even the appearance of consensus can be grounded in substantively and philosophically different premises. In practical terms, the findings suggest that if the purpose of consultation as a method of curriculum development is to produce a syllabus that reflects the diverse perspectives held by stakeholders, then the syllabus structure needs to make provision for content options as well as common core areas of study.