Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding the causes of packet delivery success and failure in dense wireless sensor networks

We present empirical measurements of the packet delivery performance of the Telos and MicaZ sensor platforms. At a high level, their behavior is similar to that of earlier platforms. They exhibit a reception "grey region," and temporal variations in packet loss. Looking more deeply, however, there are subtle differences, and looking deeper still, the patterns behind these complexities become clear. Environmental noise (802.11b) has high spatial correlation. Packet loss occurs when a receiver operating near its noise floor experiences a small decrease in received signal strength, rather than an increase in environmental noise. These variations cause the reception "grey region. " Packet losses are highly correlated over short time periods, but are independent over longer periods. Based on these findings, current practices could be easily changed that would greatly improve efficiency and performance.
Evaluating emergency response models of radiological dispersion in complex terrain

Operational airborne releases of trace quantities of the radioactive noble gas 41Ar from the HIFAR Nuclear Research Reactor located in Sydney, Australia, are valuable for evaluating emergency response models incorporating radiological dispersion. A network of meteorological stations and GR-150 environmental gamma dose detectors are placed in the complex terrain within a 5 km radius of the site. Predictions from the model combination LSMC/RIMPUFF are evaluated using 15 min 41Ar peak observations from the detector network during 2002–2003 under a range of atmospheric stability conditions. Statistical analyses are carried out to compare the results against previous evaluations.
Performance Comparisions of ICA Algorithms to DS-CDMA Detection

Commercial cellular networks, like the systems based on DS-CDMA, face many types of interferences such as multi-user interference inside each sector in a cell to interoperate interference. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been used as an advanced preprocessing tool for blind suppression of interfering signals in DS-CDMA communication systems. The role of ICA is to provide an interference-mitigated signal to the conventional detection. This paper evaluates the performance of some major ICA algorithms like Cardoso's joint approximate diagonalization of eigen matrices (JADE), Hyvarinen's fixed point algorithm and Comon's algorithm to solve the symbol estimation problem of the multi users in a DS- CDMA communication system. The main focus is on blind separation of convolved CDMA mixture and the improvement of the downlink symbol estimation. The results of numerical experiment are compared with those obtained by the Single User Detection (SUD) receiver, ICA detector and combined SUD-ICA detector.
Electrosensory Midbrain Neurons Display Feature Invariant Responses to Natural Communication Stimuli

Neurons that respond selectively but in an invariant manner to a given feature of natural stimuli have been observed across species and systems. Such responses emerge in higher brain areas, thereby suggesting that they occur by integrating afferent input. However, the mechanisms by which such integration occurs are poorly understood. Here we show that midbrain electrosensory neurons can respond selectively and in an invariant manner to heterogeneity in behaviorally relevant stimulus waveforms. Such invariant responses were not seen in hindbrain electrosensory neurons providing afferent input to these midbrain neurons, suggesting that response invariance results from nonlinear integration of such input. To test this hypothesis, we built a model based on the Hodgkin-Huxley formalism that received realistic afferent input. We found that multiple combinations of parameter values could give rise to invariant responses matching those seen experimentally. Our model thus shows that there are multiple solutions towards achieving invariant responses and reveals how subthreshold membrane conductances help promote robust and invariant firing in response to heterogeneous stimulus waveforms associated with behaviorally relevant stimuli. We discuss the implications of our findings for the electrosensory and other systems.
Atomic-binding-energy oscillations.

We investigate the oscillatory supplement to the statistical nonrelativistic binding-energy formula for neutral atoms. The semiclassical approach proves capable of deriving these oscillations. It turns out that their amplitude is proportional to ${Z}^{4/3}$ (Z is the number of electrons), and that their period is determined by the maximum angular momentum available in Thomas-Fermi atoms, i.e., 0.928${Z}^{1/3}$. Our calculation also provides an understanding of the peculiar shape of the oscillations, which show sharp minima and wide, structured maxima.
Programming for GPUs: The Directive-Based Approach

In the last years, hardware accelerators, such as GPUs have become ubiquitous in the HPC landscape and GPGPU has been massively adopted by the HPC research community. If something is slowing down further expansion of this technology are its difficulties in terms of programmability. Although several libraries and applications providing GPU support are available, the need of implementing new algorithms from scratch, or adapting sequential programs to accelerators, still exist. Writing programs to be executed on accelerators is not easy, particularly for non-expert developers coming from the science or engineering fields, as it requires deep understanding of the underlying architecture. Different alternatives have appeared aimed to diminish the GPU programming effort. In the wake of the success of OpenMP, several directive-oriented programming models have been created. Although future OpenMP releases will integrate accelerators, tools are needed in the meantime. In this work, we present a comparison of directive-based approaches for GPU platforms, hiCUDA, PGI Accelerator and OpenACC. For the last, in addition to the two commercial compilers available, we include results using accULL, our own OpenACC implementation. To illustrate the portability of these alternatives, we show performance figures for both Fermi and Kepler NVIDIA cards.
Vaccination of hormone‐refractory prostate cancer patients with peptide cocktail‐loaded dendritic cells: Results of a phase I clinical trial

Immunotherapies might represent promising alternatives for the treatment of patients with hormone‐refractory prostate cancer (HRPC). In a Phase I clinical trial, we evaluated a vaccination with dendritic cells (DCs) loaded with a cocktail consisting of HLA‐A*0201‐restricted peptides derived from five different prostate cancer‐associated antigens [prostate‐specific antigen (PSA), prostate‐specific membrane antigen (PSMA), survivin, prostein, transient receptor potential p8 (trp‐p8)].
Signal transduction and gene regulation through the phosphorylation of two regulatory components: the molecular basis for the osmotic regulation of the porin genes

Expression of Escherichia coli outer‐membrane porin proteins (OmpF and OmpC) is regulated by the osmolarity of the medium. EnvZ and OmpR, which are positive regulatory factors for the transcriptional osmotic regulation of the ompF and ompC genes, belong to a group of two‐component regulatory factors that respond to a variety of environmental stimuli in bacteria. EnvZ‐OmpR phosphotransfer was revealed to be involved in signal transduction in response to an osmotic stimulus, and to play a crucial physiological role in the consequent osmotic activation of the porin genes. Based on the various lines of experimental evidence, a model is proposed for the molecular mechanism underlying the osmotic regulation through phosphorylation of the activator (OmpR) by the membrane‐locate kinase (EnvZ).
Visual saliency detection by DCT coefficient dissimilarity

Visual saliency detection has recently become a highly active topic in image processing, due to its wide range of applications. This paper proposes a novel saliency detection model based on discrete cosine transform (DCT). The dissimilarity between image patches is evaluated using DCT low-frequency coefficients and is inversely weighted by the spatial distance between patches. An additional weighting mechanism is deployed that reflects the bias of human fixations towards the image center. The proposed visual saliency prediction model has been extensively evaluated on three image eye-tracking datasets and one video eye-tracking dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed saliency detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art models.
Location Independent Remote Execution in NEST

We consider a computing environment consisting of a network of autonomous, yet cooperating personal computer workstations and shared servers. Computing cycles in such an environment can be shared by creating a pool of compute servers in the network that may be used by the workstations to supplement their computing needs. Some processors may be permanently designated to be the compute servers. In addition, through an advertisement mechanism, any workstation may make itself temporarily available for a specific duration of time to be used as a compute server. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a scheme for augmenting the UNIX® operating system with the location independent remote execution capability. This capability allows processes to be offloaded to the compute servers and preserves the execution environment of these processes as if they were still executing locally at the originating machine. Our model provides execution location independence of processes by preserving the process view of the file system, parent-child relationships, process groups, and process signaling across machine boundaries in a transparent way. We also present our scheme that allows processors to advertise themselves as available to some or all nodes in the network and withdraw as a compute server in a distributed manner. The scheme is robust in presence of node failures.
Performance evaluation of 2D to 3D fingerprint recognition

Fingerprint has been one of the most successful biometrics applied in both forensic law enforcement and security applications. Fingerprint acquisition, for many years, has been accomplished by first pressing a finger on a hard plane and then converting the image into a digital form. Recent developments in fingerprint acquisition technology have resulted in touchless live scan devices that generate 3D representation of fingerprints. To be compatible with legacy 2D fingerprint recognition techniques, the common way to develop an Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) using 3D fingerprints is to unwrap 3D fingerprints into 2D equivalent images, then the existing algorithms for 2D fingerprint processing can be utilized. In this paper, we present some observations of 2D to 3D (unraveled 2D equivalent images from 3D model) fingerprints recognition on a small database collected using commercial scanners. False reject rate is adopted to measure the recognition performance and a commercial software VeriFinger is used for recognition. According to our experiments, the general performance of 2D to 3D fingerprints recognition is not comparable to that of 2D fingerprint recognition, specifically, the false reject rate is very high and the number of falsely extracted minutiae is large. Besides, we have analyzed possible reasons for the poor performance and pointed out some future directions regarding 3D fingerprint technology.
Microstrip slow-wave open-loop resonator filters

Microstrip slow-wave open-loop resonators allow various filter configurations including those of elliptic or quasi-elliptic function response to be realised. The filters are not only compact in size due to the slow-wave effect, but also have a wider upper stopband resulting from the dispersion effects. These attractive features mean the microstrip slow-wave open-loop resonator filters hold promise for mobile communications, superconducting and other applications.
Semi-supervised Learning with Induced Word Senses for State of the Art Word Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to determine the meaning of a word in context, and successful approaches are known to benefit many applications in Natural Language Processing. Although supervised learning has been shown to provide superior WSD performance, current sense-annotated corpora do not contain a sufficient number of instances per word type to train supervised systems for all words. While unsupervised techniques have been proposed to overcome this data sparsity problem, such techniques have not outperformed supervised methods. In this paper, we propose a new approach to building semi-supervised WSD systems that combines a small amount of sense-annotated data with information from Word Sense Induction, a fully-unsupervised technique that automatically learns the different senses of a word based on how it is used. In three experiments, we show how sense induction models may be effectively combined to ultimately produce high-performance semi-supervised WSD systems that exceed the performance of state-of-the-art supervised WSD techniques trained on the same sense-annotated data. We anticipate that our results and released software will also benefit evaluation practices for sense induction systems and those working in low-resource languages by demonstrating how to quickly produce accurate WSD systems with minimal annotation effort.
Automatic Extraction of Textual Elements from News Web Pages

In this paper we present an algorithm for automatic extraction of textual elements, namely titles and full text, associated with news stories in news web pages. We propose a supervised machine learning classification technique based on the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to extract the desired textual elements. The technique uses internal structural features of a webpage without relying on the Document Object Model to which many content authors fail to adhere. The classifier uses a set of features which rely on the length of text, the percentage of hypertext, etc. The resulting classifier is nearly perfect on previously unseen news pages from different sites. The proposed technique is successfully employed in Alzoa.com, which is the largest Arabic news aggregator on the web.
The Concept of Performativity in Narratology

This essay traces the travelling concept of performativity across the field of narratology. Distinguishing different forms of interdisciplinary transfer, the text offers a definition of performativity in narratology and attempts to give a systematic account of how the concept has been adapted to narratological research. I argue that the concept of performativity can refer to two distinct levels of the narratological investigation – to the story level and to the narrator's agency or act of narration, and that this act can also be considered in a wider pragmatic and cultural context. Special attention is given to the relation between the concepts of performativity and performance on the one hand, and the relation between performativity and speech act theory on the other.
Training medical practitioners: which comes first, the generalist or the specialist?

In the 19th century, every doctor could be expected to have comprehensive skills and knowledge. An individual practitioner could have a sound grasp of the whole scope of medical science and deliver care across the whole spectrum of disease. John Snow (1813– 1858), who is chiefly remembered today for his contributions to public health by his identification of the Broad Street pump as the source of a cholera outbreak was a general practitioner throughout his career. He was also a pioneer in anaesthesia, who anaesthetised Queen Victoria for the birth of her last two children. As the science and practice of medicine progressed, it became more and more difficult for a single individual to be at the forefront of practice for all conditions. By the beginning of the 20th century, medicine, surgery and obstetrics had developed into separate disciplines. The process of fragmentation continued. The first surgical subspecialty to gain recognition as an independent entity probably was orthopaedic surgery led by pioneers such as Hugh Owen Thomas (1834–1891) and his nephew Robert Jones in Liverpool. The process of subspecialisation continues and now within orthopaedic surgery there are recognised subspecialties for the spine, the hand and each of the major joints. Subspecialisation of the traditional disciplines has been paralleled by the emergence of new disciplines as medical science has advanced. As a result, there are now more than 60 specialities and subspecialties with training curricula recognised by the Postgraduate Board of the GMC. There are good reasons why this change took place. Common sense suggests that the more often you do something, the better you will get at it. This idea is supported by empirical evidence that patient outcomes are better for those treated in specialised units. However, the case for subspecialisation may not be as strong as it seems at first. Simple repetition of a task is not sufficient. Improvement in performance occurs as a result of deliberate practice which includes reflection on the task as performed, preferably with a mentor or coach. This is more likely to happen in a specialised unit but sheer volume of throughput is not enough to guarantee expertise. The improved results in specialist units may relate to the use of evidence-based protocols and formal multidisciplinary team meetings rather than the experience of individual specialists. Super-specialisation results in the care of the patient becoming fragmented. Dame Philippa Russell, Chair of the Standing Commission on Carers, regards this as deleterious:
Viewpoint-oriented human activity recognition in a cluttered outdoor environment

Motion analysis in a cluttered outdoor scenario is a real challenging task. In this paper, a suitable human activity recognition approach is proposed that adapts with the noisy environment and with variable viewpoints. The recognition approach encompasses some motion processing methodologies having high precision for specific analysis, among those are: motion segmentation, optical flow computation, Motion History Image (MHI) generation, structured database development, and so on. Estimating the subject's moving body region, 4-directional MHIs of each activity are generated. An efficient pre-developed motion database aids in recognition of the activities. The proposed approach proves its significant precision in recognition for various activities from varying viewpoints.
Effects of chromatic dispersion on optical coherent-detection systems

Chromatic dispersion induces to a phase-modulated optical signal a constant phase rotation that was never included in most previous studies. When the constant phase shift is removed by a phase-locked loop, the dispersion tolerance of a coherent-detection system is increased. The dispersion tolerance of phase-shift keying (PSK) signal is compared with differential PSK (DPSK) signals by numerical simulation and experimental measurement. Contrary to conventional belief, PSK signal has larger dispersion tolerance than DPSK signal.
Reductive Dechlorination of Chlorinated Ethenes and 1,2-Dichloroethane by “Dehalococcoides ethenogenes” 195

ABSTRACT “Dehalococcoides ethenogenes” 195 can reductively dechlorinate tetrachloroethene (PCE) completely to ethene (ETH). When PCE-grown strain 195 was transferred (2% [vol/vol] inoculum) into growth medium amended with trichloroethene (TCE),cis-dichloroethene (DCE), 1,1-DCE, or 1,2-dichloroethane (DCA) as an electron acceptor, these chlorinated compounds were consumed at increasing rates over time, which indicated that growth occurred. Moreover, the number of cells increased when TCE, 1,1-DCE, or DCA was present. PCE, TCE, 1,1-DCE, and cis-DCE were converted mainly to vinyl chloride (VC) and then to ETH, while DCA was converted to ca. 99% ETH and 1% VC. cis-DCE was used at lower rates than PCE, TCE, 1,1-DCE, or DCA was used. When PCE-grown cultures were transferred to media containing VC ortrans-DCE, products accumulated slowly, and there was no increase in the rate, which indicated that these two compounds did not support growth. When the intermediates in PCE dechlorination by strain 195 were monitored, TCE was detected first, followed bycis-DCE. After a lag, VC, 1,1-DCE, andtrans-DCE accumulated, which is consistent with the hypothesis that cis-DCE is the precursor of these compounds. Both cis-DCE and 1,1-DCE were eventually consumed, and both of these compounds could be considered intermediates in PCE dechlorination, whereas the small amount oftrans-DCE that was produced persisted. Cultures grown on TCE, 1,1-DCE, or DCA could immediately dechlorinate PCE, which indicated that PCE reductive dehalogenase activity was constitutive when these electron acceptors were used.
A practical method for monitoring general practice mortality in the UK: findings from a pilot study in a health board of Northern Ireland.

BACKGROUND The Baker report into Dr Harold Shipman's murders recommended monitoring mortality in general practice, but there is currently no practical method available to implement this. AIM To monitor mortality rates in response to the Baker report and to use the data to improve quality of care. DESIGN OF STUDY Prospective mortality monitoring study. SETTING Eastern Health and Social Services Board, Northern Ireland. METHOD Linked quarterly mortality data from 1994-2001 were compiled for 114 general practices in Eastern Health and Social Services Board in Northern Ireland. Cross-sectional control charts compared crude and adjusted mortality rates across all the practices. Longitudinal control charts analysed quarterly mortality rates over 28 quarters within each practice. Practices were sent their own control charts and invited to feedback workshops. Special cause variation in mortality was investigated as follows: checks on data, case-mix, practice structures, processes of care and finally individual carers. RESULTS Age, sex and deprivation adjusted cross-sectional control charts identified 18 practices as showing special cause variation in their mortality (11 high and 7 low). Assignable causes were found for all high special cause practices: large numbers of nursing home patients (six practices), very high levels of deprivation and high morbidity not captured by our case-mix adjustment (five practices). For three of seven low special cause practices, case-mix adjustment underestimated affluence and overestimated morbidity levels. Feedback indicated widespread support for the principle of monitoring, but concerns about the public disclosure of mortality data. CONCLUSIONS We have successfully developed and piloted a general practice mortality monitoring system with the support and participation of local stakeholders. This used control charts for analysis and followed a scientific strategy for investigating special cause variation.
Suzaku observation of IGR J16318-4848

We report on the first Suzaku observation of IGR J16318-4848, the most extreme example of a new group of highly absorbed X-ray binaries that have recently been discovered by the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory INTEGRAL. The Suzaku observation was carried out between 2006 August 14 and 17, with a net exposure time of 97 ks. The average X-ray spectrum of the source can be well described with a continuum model typical for neutron stars i.e., a strongly absorbed power law continuum with a photon index of 0.676(42) and an exponential cutoff at 20.5(6) keV. The absorbing column is 1.95(3)x10e24 cm-2. Consistent with earlier work, strong fluorescent emission lines of Fe Kalpha, Fe Kbeta, and Ni Kalpha are observed. Despite the large absorbing column, no Compton shoulder is seen in the lines, arguing for a non-spherical and inhomogeneous absorber. Seen at an average 5-60 keV absorbed flux of 3.4x10e-10 erg cm-2 s-1, the source exhibits significant variability on timescales of hours.