Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technology and Architecture Education in Uganda

Architecture education is a relatively new undertaking in Uganda. Despite this opportunity to develop an updated curriculum and pedagogy, an old paradigm continues to persist; isolating the teaching of architectural technology from ‘main stream’ design studios. The consequential inability by graduates to link architectural design and architectural technology in design is evident throughout Uganda, often with disastrous outcomes. This paper discusses the implementation of integrated design studios in the architecture programme at the Uganda Martyrs University. Using a Project-Based Learning approach, these studios sought to introduce architecture technology as an integral part of the design studio, enabling students to build a holistic view of their designs. Two studios are the focus of this paper, Architecture Studio I, the first studio in the Bachelor of Architecture graduate programme which had a fully integrated studio, and Design Studio III, a second year studio in the undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Building Design and Technology. The outcomes of the studios suggest students are better able to understand and apply technology in their projects and derive meaningful design outcomes if they are presented with the information as related to the design project, rather than as secondary information are given in support courses. Students will come to care about the constructed world only if academic staff can show them why this is worthwhile. Simply telling students to think about and experience the built realm differently (or to have them arrive at this through abstract design exercises) will have little long-term effect – as the contemporary constructed environment all too often confirms. (Coleman, 2003:353) Conference theme: Education of future architects
Glucose Tolerance and Physical Activity in a Mexican Indigenous Population

OBJECTIVE To assess diabetes prevalence and physical activity among an indigenous population in Mexico. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 101 adult (mean age = 38 years) Mixtec Indians living on the outskirts of Huajuapan de Leon, Oaxaca, Mexico, volunteered to be measured for height, weight, blood pressure, glucose tolerance, and physical activity. RESULTS According to World Health Organization criteria, 2 women were diabetic and 42 subjects (15 men, 27 women) had impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Although the population was generally lean, with a mean ± SD body mass index (BMI) of 23.0 ± 2.7 kg/m2 for men (n = 47) and 22.8 ± 3.0 kg/m2 for women (n = 54), the group with normal glucose tolerance had a significantly lower BMI than those with abnormal glucose tolerance (IGT or diabetes). Men were significantly more physically active than women, and a larger percentage of women (54%) than men (32%) had abnormal glucose tolerance. However, within gender groups, there was not a significant effect of physical activity on status of glucose tolerance. CONCLUSIONS The Mixtec population may be genetically predisposed to non-insulin-dependent diabetes, although their current lifestyle provides a protective effect. Less of a protective effect is seen for females, however. It is expected that further environmental changes impacting energy balance will have the most damaging repercussions for diabetes prevalence among Mixtec women.
Implementing Sorting Networks with Spiking Neural P Systems

Spiking neural P systems simulate the behavior of neurons sending signals through axons. Recently, some applications concerning Boolean circuits and sorting algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we study the ability of such systems to simulate a well known parallel sorting model, sorting networks. First, we construct spiking neural P systems which act as comparators of two values, and then show how to assemble these building blocks according to the topology of a sorting network of N values. In the second part of the paper, we formalize a framework to transform any sorting network into a network composed of comparators which sort n values, 2 < n < N, having the same behaviour as the original sorting network, but using fewer neurons and synapses than the direct simulation. A comparison between the two models proposed here and the sorting model of Ionescu and Sburlan is also given.
Cellulose solvent‐based biomass pretreatment breaks highly ordered hydrogen bonds in cellulose fibers of switchgrass

The switchgrass (SG) samples pretreated by cellulose solvent‐ and organic solvent‐based lignocellulose fractionation were characterized by enzymatic hydrolysis, substrate accessibility assay, scanning electron microscopy, X‐ray diffraction (XRD), cross polarization/magic angle spinning (CP/MAS) 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Glucan digestibility of the pretreated SG was 89% at hour 36 at one filter paper unit of cellulase per gram of glucan. Crystallinity index (CrI) of pure cellulosic materials and SG before and after cellulose solvent‐based pretreatment were determined by XRD and NMR. CrI values varied greatly depending on measurement techniques, calculation approaches, and sample drying conditions, suggesting that the effects of CrI data obtained from dried samples on enzymatic hydrolysis of hydrated cellulosic materials should be interpreted with caution. Fast hydrolysis rates and high glucan digestibilities for pretreated SG were mainly attributed to a 16.3‐fold increase in cellulose accessibility to cellulase from 0.49 to 8.0 m2/g biomass, because the highly ordered hydrogen‐bonding networks in cellulose fibers of biomass were broken through cellulose dissolution in a cellulose solvent, as evidenced by CP/MAS 13C‐NMR and FTIR. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2011; 108:521–529. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Understanding the User: Personomy Translation for Tag Recommendation

This paper describes our approach to the challenge of graph-based tag recommendation in social bookmarking services. Along the ECML PKDD 2009 Discovery Challenge, we design a tag recommender that accurately predicts the tagging behavior of users within the Bibsonomy bookmarking service. We find that the tagging vocabularies among folksonomy users differ radically due to multilingual aspects as well as heterogeneous tagging habits. Our model overcomes the prediction problem resulting from these heterogeneities by translating user vocabularies, so called personomies, to the global folksonomy vocabulary and vice versa. Furthermore we combine our user-centric translation approach with item-centric methods to achieve more accurate solutions. Since our method is purely graph-based, it can also readily be applied to other folksonomies.
Reliable modeling of CPU usage in an office worker environment

In this paper, we present a novel and realistic model for modelling CPU usage of virtual machines on a cloud. The model is based on considering the CPU consumption of a virtual machine as a one generated from a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The model assumes that the hidden layer (Markov chain) is inhomogeneous and depends on the time of day. In addition the model assumes that the observations follow an autoregressive process. The deviations from standard HMMs are motivated by the properties of real CPU consumption data. The HMM model replicate the properties of the real CPU consumption data in a very realistic way and outperform both AR(1) and AR(2) models in predicting time ahead CPU consumption. Cloud computing Contextual software domains Software infrastructure Virtual machines Distributed systems organizing principles Cloud computing Stochastic processes Markov processes.
Estimating the Heterogeneous Welfare Effects of Choice Architecture: An Application to the Medicare Prescription Drug Insurance Market

We develop a structural model for bounding welfare effects of policies that alter the design of differentiated product markets when some consumers may be misinformed about product characteristics and inertia in consumer behavior reflects a mixture of latent preferences, information costs, switching costs and psychological biases. We use the model to analyze three proposals to redesign markets for Medicare prescription drug insurance: (1) reducing the number of plans, (2) providing personalized information, and (3) defaulting consumers to cheap plans. First we combine administrative and survey data to determine which consumers make informed enrollment decisions. Then we analyze the welfare effects of each proposal, using revealed preferences of informed consumers to proxy for concealed preferences of misinformed consumers. Results suggest that each policy produces large gains and losses for some consumers, but the menu reduction would unambiguously harm most consumers whereas personalized information would unambiguously benefit most consumers.
Authentication in distributed systems: theory and practice

We describe a theory of authentication and a system that implements it. Our theory is based on the notion of principal and a “speaks for” relation between principals. A simple principal either has a name or is a communication channel; a compound principal can express an adopted role or delegated authority. The theory shows how to reason about a principal's authority by deducing the other principals that it can speak for; authenticating a channel is one important application. We use the theory to explain many existing and proposed security mechanisms. In particular, we describe the system we have built. It passes principals efficiently as arguments or results of remote procedure calls, and it handles public and shared key encryption, name lookup in a large name space, groups of principals, program loading, delegation, access control, and revocation.
World’s earliest ground-edge axe production coincides with human colonisation of Australia

Abstract We report evidence for the world’s earliest ground-edge axe, 44–49,000 years old. Its antiquity coincides with or immediately follows the arrival of humans on the Australian landmass. Ground/polished axes are not associated with the eastward dispersal of Homo sapiens across Eurasia and the discovery of axes in Australia at the point of colonisation exemplifies a diversification of technological practices that occurred as modern humans dispersed from Africa. Ground-edge axes are now known from two different colonised lands at the time humans arrived and hence we argue that these technological strategies are associated with the adaptation of economies and social practices to new environmental contexts.
Hardware accelerated aerial image simulation by FPGA

This paper describes a hardware implementation of aerial image simulation in lithography using FPGA. However, such simulators are presently performed using mainly software-based techniques on dedicated computers. The Hopkins partially coherent imaging equation is decomposed numerically by using singular value decomposition (SVD). The data input is a function which is consisting of rectangles as Manhattan geometry mask. For the convolution of mask functions with arbitrary kernels, a table lookup technique is used. For each single point intensity computation, it needs computation in the number of rectangles within a bounded window and the approximation order of the optical system adopted. This computation is done by FPGA on the order of O(R) instead of O(A·R) which is the case in temporal machines. It is clearly shown how FPGA can be utilized efficiently to reduce the cost of computation.
HAWKERS AND THE URBAN INFORMAL SECTOR : A STUDY OF STREET VENDING IN SEVEN CITIES Prepared by Sharit K . Bhowmik for National Alliance of Street Vendors of India ( NASVI )

This report is based on a study of hawkers and street vendors conducted in seven cities in India. It was initiated by the National Alliance of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) and as such it is not merely an academic exercise in understanding the problems of this section of the work force. The purpose of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it tries to objectively understand the problems of street vendors in urban areas. Its scope is not restricted to street vendors alone but it tries to relate the profession in the wider urban context by examining the legal status of hawkers, their contribution to the urban economy, the problems they face, the perceptions of the urban population towards them, and the their position in urban society. Secondly, based on the above information this report attempts to examine and understand the problems faced by the street vendors and the possible means of overcoming these.
Platelet-derived Growth Factor Primes Cancer-associated Fibroblasts for Apoptosis*

Background: Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF) are primed for apoptosis by an unknown mechanism. Results: PDGF, which activates CAF, increases cellular Puma levels, sensitizing CAF to Bak activation and enhanced apoptosis by BH3 mimetics in vitro and in vivo. Conclusion: These observations elucidate the mechanisms underlying apoptotic priming of CAF. Significance: BH3 mimetic-induced Bak activation with CAF apoptosis is a therapeutic strategy for treating desmoplastic cancers. Desmoplastic malignancies such as cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) are characterized by a dense stroma containing an abundance of myofibroblasts termed cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF). The CAF phenotype represents an “activated state” in which cells are primed for cell death triggered by BH3 mimetics. Accordingly, this primed state may be therapeutically exploited. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying this poorly understood apoptotic priming, we examined the role of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) in CAF priming for cell death given its prominent role in CAF activation. PDGF isomers PDGF-B and PDGF-D are abundantly expressed in CCA cells derived from human specimens. Either isomer sensitizes myofibroblasts to cell death triggered by BH3 mimetics. Similar apoptotic sensitization was observed with co-culture of myofibroblasts and CCA cells. Profiling of Bcl-2 proteins expressed by PDGF-primed myofibroblasts demonstrated an increase in cellular levels of Puma. PDGF-mediated increases in cellular Puma levels induced proapoptotic changes in Bak, which resulted in its binding to Bcl-2. Short hairpin RNA-mediated down-regulation of Puma conferred resistance to PDGF-mediated apoptotic priming. Conversely, the BH3 mimetic navitoclax disrupted Bcl-2/Bak heterodimers, allowing Bak to execute the cell death program. Treatment with a Bcl-2-specific BH3 mimetic, ABT-199, reduced tumor formation and tumor burden in a murine model of cholangiocarcinoma. Collectively, these findings indicate that apoptotic priming of CAF by PDGF occurs via Puma-mediated Bak activation, which can be converted to active full-blown apoptosis by navitoclax or ABT-199 for therapeutic benefit.
A multilevel approach to intelligent information filtering: model, system, and evaluation

In information-filtering environments, uncertainties associated with changing interests of the user and the dynamic document stream must be handled efficiently. In this article, a filtering model is proposed that decomposes the overall task into subsystem functionalities and highlights the need for multiple adaptation techniques to cope with uncertainties. A filtering system, SIFTER, has been implemented based on the model, using established techniques in information retrieval and artificial intelligence. These techniques include document representation by a vector-space model, document classification by unsupervised learning, and user modeling by reinforcement learning. The system can filter information based on content and a user's specific interests. The user's interests are automatically learned with only limited user intervention in the form of optional relevance feedback for documents. We also describe experimental studies conducted with SIFTER to filter computer and information science documents collected from the Internet and commercial database services. The experimental results demonstrate that the system performs very well in filtering documents in a realistic problem setting.
Evolutionary and functional analysis of the tailless enhancer in Musca domestica and Drosophila melanogaster

To further understand the evolutionary dynamics of the regulatory interactions underlying development, we expand on our previous analysis of hunchback and compare the structure and function of the tailless enhancer between Musca domestica and Drosophila melanogaster. Our analysis shows that although the expression patterns and functional protein domains of tll are conserved between Musca and Drosophila, the enhancer sequences are unalignable. Upon closer investigation, we find that these highly diverged enhancer sequences encode the same regulatory information necessary for Bicoid, Dorsal, and the terminal system to drive tll expression. The binding sites for these transcription factors differ in the sequence, number, spacing, and position between the Drosophila and Musca tll enhancers, and we were unable to establish homology between binding sites from each species. This implies that the Musca and Drosophila Bcd‐binding sites have evolved de novo in the 100 million years since these species diverged. However, in transgenic Drosophila embryos the Musca tll enhancer is able to drive the same expression pattern as endogenous Drosophila tll. Therefore, during the rapid evolution of enhancer sequences individual binding sites are continually lost and gained, but the transcriptional output is maintained by compensatory mutations in cis and in trans.
The Contribution of Voice Quality to Politeness in Japanese

This study investigates the contribution of voice quality to the expression of “positive politeness” under varying conditions of relative social status between male speakers of Japanese. In previous studies, suprasegmental features have been found to express politeness. Bandwidth of the first formant (BW1) was also found to be relevant to perceived politeness. However, the association between BW1 and voice quality is complex. BW1 could be a parameter indicating breathiness, whispering, or nasality. In order to clarify the contribution of voice quality, in this study, spectral tilt and aspiration noise in high frequency region were observed as the focus of interest. Vowel data (/a/) extracted from natural utterances produced by two male native speakers of Tokyo dialect were observed. For measurement of breathiness, the method suggested by Hanson (1995) was employed in order to avoid known disadvantages of inverse filtering. Acoustic parameters were observed separately between two speakers, one whose overall BW1 was wide and whose speech were perceived as polite, and the other whose BW1 showed negative correlation with perceived politeness. The result indicates two tendencies. Firstly, when a speaker had overall wide BW1 and was rated polite overall, the ratings with aspiration noise in high frequency region showed positive correlation with politeness. Secondly, when a speaker showed negative correlation between BW1 and politeness, the speaker also showed negative correlation between spectral tilt and politeness, but showed no correlation with aspiration noise rated. Overall, it seems that when a speaker is rated polite, the speaker’s politeness is associated more with aspiration noise, and therefore related to breathiness.
Toward a Taxonomy of Clones in Source Code: A Case Study

Code cloning — that is, the gratuitous duplication of source code within a software system — is an endemic problem in large, industrial systems [9, 7]. While there has been much research into techniques for clone detection and analysis, there has been relatively little empirical study on characterizing how, where, and why clones occur in industrial software systems. In this paper, we present a preliminary categorization scheme for code clones, and we discuss how we have applied this taxonomy in a case study performed on the file system subsystem of the Linux operating system. Our case study yielded many surprising results, including that cloning is rampant both within particular file system implementations and across different ones, and that as many as 13% of the 4407 functions that are more than six lines long were involved in a clone-pair relationship.
In-plane coupling effect in InAs/GaAs quantum dots arrays for intermediate band solar cell

Laterally coupled semiconductor quantum dot (QD) arrays emerged recently as promising structures for the next generation of high efficiency intermediate band solar cell (IBSC), due to their ability to facilitate the formation of in-plane minibands with large vertical inter-layer distance to prevent the strain field from influencing its neighboring QD array layers. The lateral quantum coupling effect, which exists between states in QDs of an array, influences the electronic and optical properties of such structures. We present here a method based on multi-band k·p Hamiltonian combined with periodic boundary conditions, applied to predict the electronic and optical properties of InAs/GaAs QDs based lateral QD arrays. The absorption coefficients under different in-plane coupling strength were derived and the corresponding photovoltaic conversion efficiencies were also estimated using drift-diffusion transportation theory. Special attention was paid on the transition between IB to continuum states in conduction band.
Sensory Deprivation during Early Postnatal Period Alters the Density of Interneurons in the Mouse Prefrontal Cortex

Early loss of one sensory system can cause improved function of other sensory systems. However, both the time course and neuronal mechanism of cross-modal plasticity remain elusive. Recent study using functional MRI in humans suggests a role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in cross-modal plasticity. Since this phenomenon is assumed to be associated with altered GABAergic inhibition in the PFC, we have tested the hypothesis that early postnatal sensory deprivation causes the changes of inhibitory neuronal circuit in different regions of the PFC of the mice. We determined the effects of sensory deprivation from birth to postnatal day 28 (P28) or P58 on the density of parvalbumin (PV), calbindin (CB), and calretinin (CR) neurons in the prelimbic, infralimbic, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices. The density of PV and CB neurons was significantly increased in layer 5/6 (L5/6). Moreover, the density of CR neurons was higher in L2/3 in sensory deprived mice compared to intact mice. These changes were more prominent at P56 than at P28. These results suggest that long-term sensory deprivation causes the changes of intracortical inhibitory networks in the PFC and the changes of inhibitory networks in the PFC may contribute to cross-modal plasticity.
From privileged to thwarted stakeholders – Polish migrants’ perceptions of the Scottish Independence Referendum 2014 and the UK General Election in 2015

Abstract Scotland in 2014 and 2015 provides an ideal context for examining EU citizenship political rights as established in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 from the perspective of Polish migrants resident in Scotland. We argue that the contrast between Polish migrants’ full enfranchisement in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 to then being disenfranchised from the UK General Election in 2015 is a significant site for observing how EU laws interact with state-centric and also ‘post-national’ notions of citizenship. Our participants’ experiences of voting in the Referendum and subsequently not being able to vote in the General Election were articulated in the following terms: (a) the justification of their political rights in terms of their stake and contribution in the UK; (b) their frustrations with regards to anti-migration rhetoric and the limitations of European citizenship; and for some, (c) their plans of apply for British citizenship in the context of EU membership uncertainty.