Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Private Key Agreement Scheme Based on Fluactions of BER in wireless Communications

This paper proposes a private key agreement scheme using the fluctuations of BER (bit error rate). It utilizes the received BER at both authorized users as the common information between them. BER is an appropriate indicator to characterize the wireless channel because it includes all factors to generate bit errors such as fluctuations of amplitude and phase, effect of delayed waves etc. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, numerical simulations are carried out assuming IEEE 802.11a system configurations and parameters. The results of the simulations show that the proposed scheme successfully achieves the key agreement at SN ratio of 15 dB when it is combined with data deletion and error correction schemes.
Combined loss of cRel/p50 subunits of NF-κB leads to impaired innate host response in sepsis

NF-κB, which comprises homo- and hetero-dimers of the five members of the Rel family, plays a crucial role in immunity to infection. The cRel and p50 subunits have been implicated in the development and function of the immune cells, but their in vivo importance remains poorly explored in sepsis. We aimed to study the impact of the combined loss of these two subunits on the innate response to infection in a cecal ligation and puncture model of sepsis. We have explored the possible defects in host defense, including pathogen clearance, bacterial phagocytosis and cytokine plasma release. We also performed gene profiling of cRel−/−p50−/− and wild-type LPS-stimulated peritoneal macrophages. Deficiency of cRel and p50 led to enhanced mortality to sepsis that was associated with defective macrophages phagocytosis, decreased bacterial clearance and moderate cytokine response. Transcription profile analysis revealed a common inflammatory response but a significant down-regulated transcription of genes encoding for pathogen recognition receptors and antimicrobial molecules, supporting the in vivo findings in mice. In conclusion, the cRel and p50 subunits of NF-κB play an important combined role in the innate response and are crucial for survival and pathogen clearance in polymicrobial sepsis.
The Irrepressible Rod Rhodes:Contesting Traditions and Blurring Genres

Rod Rhodes spent 25 years as the Editor of Public Administration before he retired from that role at the end of 2010. These essays in his honour are intended to celebrate the achievement of those 25 years and reflect on his contribution to the worlds of public administration and political science. Rod has now consolidated the standing of the journal as one of the most significant locations for work on public administration. At the same time, over his career, he has prodded and probed, challenged and innovated, in a wide range of areas. The essays in this special edition have been designed around his intellectual interests over the 40 years of his career, from local government, and networks, to ethnography and narratives. Each author was asked, as appropriate, to identify Rhodes' impact and to assess the present state of the literature. Three articles consider the state of the discipline in the UK, the USA and in the world of comparative politics. Rod is then given the opportunity to reflect on his career and where his interests might lead. As ever he wants the last word! This introduction provides the context for his career and charts in broad terms his intellectual trajectory and contribution.
Aalborg Universitet Hierarchical Control with Virtual Resistance Optimization for Efficiency Enhancement and State-of-Charge Balancing in DC

This paper proposes a hierarchical control scheme which applies optimization method into DC microgrids in order to improve the system overall efficiency while considering the State-of-Charge (SoC) balancing at the same time. Primary droop controller, secondary voltage restoration controller and tertiary optimization tool formulate the complete hierarchical control system. Virtual resistances are taken as the decision variables for achieving the objective. simulation results are presented to verify the proposed approach. Keywords—hierarchical control; state-of-charge; efficiency; genetic algorithm; consensus algorithm
Online Fault Detection of Permanent Magnet Demagnetization for IPMSMs by Nonsingular Fast Terminal-Sliding-Mode Observer

To prevent irreversible demagnetization of a permanent magnet (PM) for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs) by flux-weakening control, a robust PM flux-linkage nonsingular fast terminal-sliding-mode observer (NFTSMO) is proposed to detect demagnetization faults. First, the IPMSM mathematical model of demagnetization is presented. Second, the construction of the NFTSMO to estimate PM demagnetization faults in IPMSM is described, and a proof of observer stability is given. The fault decision criteria and fault-processing method are also presented. Finally, the proposed scheme was simulated using MATLAB/Simulink and implemented on the RT-LAB platform. A number of robustness tests have been carried out. The scheme shows good performance in spite of speed fluctuations, torque ripples and the uncertainties of stator resistance.
Avoiding constraints redundancy in predictive control optimization routines

This note concentrates on removing redundancy in the set of constraints for the multiparametric quadratic problems (mpQP) related with the constrained predictive control. The feasible domain is treated as a parameterized polyhedron with a focus on its parameterized vertices. The goal is to find a splitting of the parameters (state) space corresponding to domains with regular shape (nonredundant constraints), resulting in a table of regions where the constraints have a minimal representation, so that the online optimization routines can act with better performances. The procedure can be seen as a preprocessor either for the classical QP methods or for the routines based on explicit solutions. For important degrees of redundancy, the proposed technique may bring computational gains for real-time application or on the complexity of the positioning mechanism for evaluating the explicit solution.
Product involvement: an application in clothing

The paper examines the dimensionality of involvement with clothing. The extant literature is reviewed to show the origins, application and classification of involvement. The discussion focuses on enduring, situational and response involvement, emphasising the dimensionality of the construct. The research examines enduring involvement with clothing, using a scale of 15 Likert-type statements to operationalise the concept. The findings suggest that involvement with clothing stems from: (1) pleasure and enjoyment derived from shopping and (2) the importance consumers attach to the product, which relates to the symbolic nature of clothing as a means of self-expression.
Creating hierarchical porosity hydroxyapatite scaffolds with osteoinduction by three-dimensional printing and microwave sintering

Hierarchical porosity, which includes micropores and macropores in scaffolds, contributes to important multiple biological functions for tissue regeneration. This paper introduces a two-step method of combining three-dimensional printing (3DP) and microwave sintering to fabricate two-level hierarchical porous scaffolds. The results showed that 3D printing made the macroporous structure well-controlled and microwave sintering generated micropores on the macropore surface. The resulting hierarchical macro/microporous hydroxyapatite scaffold induced bone formation following intramuscular implantation. Moreover, when comparing the hierarchical macro/microporous hydroxyapatite scaffold to the non-osteoinductive hydroxyapatite scaffolds (either 3D printed or H2O2 foamed) subjected to muffle sintering which do not have micropores, the critical role of micropores in material-driven bone formation was shown. The findings presented herein could be useful for the further optimization of bone grafting materials for bone regeneration.
When Do Individual Differences Matter? A Paradoxical Theory of Personality Coherence

We propose that individual differences in personality should be studied during periods of environmental change because these periods provide an opportunity to discern the general mechanisms that govern the functions and processes of personality. We delineate the circumstances wherein personality differences are accentuated and then specify the conditions whereby change is produced. Personality differences are likely to be revealed during transitions into unpredictable new situations, when there is a press to behave but no information about how to behave adaptively. Dispositional differences are thus accentuated as each person seeks to transform novel, ambiguous, and uncertain circumstances into familiar, clear, and expectable social encounters. Our theory also accounts for turning points in behavioral development: Systematic change is likely to occur during transitions into new situations, when there is a press to behave and when previous responses are actively discouraged while clear information is provi.
No Refuge: Flawed Status Determination and the Failures of South Africa's Refugee System to Provide Protection

Because South Africas immigration framework provides little opportunity for legal economic migration from Africa economic migrants have turned to the countrys asylum system in overwhelming numbers. As demand on the system exceeds its capacity to function the gaps in immigration policy have hindered the effective functioning of the refugee system. As a result the protective nature of the refugee system has been transformed into one of control - motivated by the need to reduce the numbers of economic migrants. In response to the tremendous demand on the system government efforts have focused on efficiency. Because of these efforts individuals are being routinely denied refugee status in accordance with refugee and administrative law without proper consideration of their asylum claims.This article describes the findings of a review of 324 negative status determination decisions from South Africas refugee reception offices. The review uncovered serious flaws in the status determination process. Decisions were characterized by errors of law an absence of reasons a lack of individualized decision making and a general failure to apply the mind or to use sound reasoning. Unthinking and non-contextualized cutting and pasting both from other decisions and from internet sources was also rampant and many claimants received identical decisions regardless of the details of their claims. The review demonstrates that South Africas refugee system is failing to fulfill its core function - identifying those in need of protection as refugees. The current system influenced by larger immigration policy is giving rise to grave human rights violations as the status determination process fails to uphold the non-refoulement principle.
Empowered skills

Robot Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms return a policy that maximizes a global cumulative reward signal but typically do not create diverse behaviors. Hence, the policy will typically only capture a single solution of a task. However, many motor tasks have a large variety of solutions and the knowledge about these solutions can have several advantages. For example, in an adversarial setting such as robot table tennis, the lack of diversity renders the behavior predictable and hence easy to counter for the opponent. In an interactive setting such as learning from human feedback, an emphasis on diversity gives the human more opportunity for guiding the robot and to avoid the latter to be stuck in local optima of the task. In order to increase diversity of the learned behaviors, we leverage prior work on intrinsic motivation and empowerment. We derive a new intrinsic motivation signal by enriching the description of a task with an outcome space, representing interesting aspects of a sensorimotor stream. For example, in table tennis, the outcome space could be given by the return position and return ball speed. The intrinsic motivation is now given by the diversity of future outcomes, a concept also known as empowerment. We derive a new policy search algorithm that maximizes a trade-off between the extrinsic reward and this intrinsic motivation criterion. Experiments on a planar reaching task and simulated robot table tennis demonstrate that our algorithm can learn a diverse set of behaviors within the area of interest of the tasks.
Interactive interfaces of Treecube for browsing 3D multimedia data

The authors of this paper have already proposed Treecube which is a visualization tool for browsing 3D multimedia data. In this paper, the authors also propose its interactive interfaces for efficiently browsing 3D multimedia data. Treecube is regarded as a 3D extension of treemap, which is a visualization tool for hierarchical information proposed by Ben Shneiderman et al. in 1992. For treemap, there are several layout algorithms: slice-and-dice, ordered treemap, strip treemap and so on. Furthermore, quantum treemap exists. It means a quantization version of these treemap layout algorithms. The authors implemented mainly three layout algorithms, i.e., slice-and-dice, ordered and strip treecube algorithm, and implemented their quantization version. Practically sophisticated interfaces are necessary for efficiently browsing 3D multimedia data. In this paper, the authors also propose such interfaces. The authors implemented mainly five interface functionalities for the following operations. (1) "Cutting plane" concept to solve the occlusion problem, i.e., nodes located before the plane are hidden to make it easy to see inside nodes. (2) The control of node frames, i.e., their brightness and thickness, for easily understanding the hierarchical structure of nodes. (3) Standard operations for the translation and the rotation of an eye position, and for the zoom in/out. (4) Particular operations for the extraction of the user focus node and for the backward/forward for browsing such node. The authors also implemented (5) a function to assign color information to any node properties because color is the most important factor of the visual display properties.
Police Perceptions of Sexual Assault Victims

This study explores variation in the perception of sexual assault victims among male and female police officers in a Midwestern police agency. Surveys that include both qualitative and quantitative questions are completed by 100 patrol officers. An analysis of qualitative data revealed some support for the Intra-Female Gender Hostility Thesis, which posits that female officers subscribe to rape myths and victim blaming more than male officers. Quantitative analysis showed no significant differences in the way that male and female officers perceived sexual assault victims. Policy implications based on these findings are presented and discussed at the end of this article.
The Antimicrobial Efficacy of Elaeis guineensis: Characterization, in Vitro and in Vivo Studies

The urgent need to treat multi-drug resistant pathogenic microorganisms in chronically infected patients has given rise to the development of new antimicrobials from natural resources. We have tested Elaeis guineensis Jacq (Arecaceae) methanol extract against a variety of bacterial, fungal and yeast strains associated with infections. Our studies have demonstrated that E. guineensis exhibits excellent antimicrobial activity in vitro and in vivo against the bacterial and fungal strains tested. A marked inhibitory effect of the E. guineensis extracts was observed against C. albicans whereby E. guineensis extract at ½, 1, or 2 times the MIC significantly inhibited C. albicans growth with a noticeable drop in optical density (OD) of the bacterial culture. This finding confirmed the anticandidal activity of the extract on C. albicans. Imaging using scanning (SEM) and transmission (TEM) electron microscopy was done to determine the major alterations in the microstructure of the extract-treated C. albicans. The main abnormalities noted via SEM and TEM studies were the alteration in morphology of the yeast cells. In vivo antimicrobial activity was studied in mice that had been inoculated with C. albicans and exhibited good anticandidal activity. The authors conclude that the extract may be used as a candidate for the development of anticandidal agent.
Joint desmoking and denoising of laparoscopy images

Laparoscopic images in minimally invasive surgery get corrupted by surgical smoke and noise. This degrades the quality of the surgery and the results of subsequent processing for, say, segmentation and tracking. Algorithms for desmoking and denoising laparoscopic images seem to be missing in the medical vision literature. This paper formulates the problem of joint desmoking and denoising of laparoscopic images as a Bayesian inference problem. It relies on a novel probabilistic graphical model of the images, which includes novel prior models on the uncorrupted color image as well as the transmission-map image that indicates color attenuation due to smoke. The results on simulated and real-world laparoscopic images, including clinical expert evaluation, shows the advantages of the proposed method over the state of the art.
Techniques for Machine Understanding of Live Drum Performances

This dissertation covers machine listening techniques for the automated real-time analysis of live drum performances. Onset detection, drum detection, beat tracking, and drum pattern analysis are combined into a system that provides rhythmic information useful in performance analysis, synchronization, and retrieval. The techniques are designed with real-time use in mind but can easily be adapted for offline batch use for large scale rhythm analysis. At the front end of the system, onset and drum detection provide the locations, types, and amplitudes of percussive events. The onset detector uses an adaptive, causal threshold in order to remain robust to large dynamic swings. For drum detection, a gamma mixture model is used to compute multiple spectral templates per drum onto which onset events can be decomposed using a technique based on non-negative matrix factorization. Unlike classification-based approaches to drum detection, this approach provides amplitude information which is invaluable in the analysis of rhythm. In addition, the decay of drum events are modeled using "tail" templates , which when used with multiple spectral templates per drum, reduce detection errors by 42%. The beat tracking component uses multiple period hypotheses and an ambiguity measure in order to choose a reliable pulse estimate. Results show that using multiple hypotheses significantly improves tracking accuracy compared to a single period model. The drum pattern analysis component uses the amplitudes of the detected drum onsets and the metric grid defined by the beat tracker as inputs to a generatively pre-trained deep neural network in order to estimate high-level rhythmic information. The network is tested with beat alignment tasks, including downbeat detection, and reduces alignment errors compared to a simple template correlation approach by up to 59%.
Effect of fibre orientation on diastolic mechanics of human ventricle

Fibre orientation of myocardial wall plays a significant role in ventricular wall stress, which is assumed to be responsible for many cardiac mechanics, including ventricular remodelling, associated with heart failure. Previous studies, conducted to identify the effects of fibre orientation on left -ventricle (LV) diastolic mechanics, used only animal's myocardium properties (no human data) and therefore, may not apply for predicting human cardiac mechanics. In the present study, computational modelling of LV diastole was carried out to investigate the effects of fibre orientation on LV end diastolic pressure volume relation (EDPVR) and wall stress distribution using subject-specific in vivo passive properties of human myocardium for two human hearts. Results indicated that LV inflation increased when fibres were aligned more towards LV longitudinal axis and the effect was more notable when the fibre angle was higher in endocardium than epicardium wall. Changes in fibre angle distribution considerably altered fibre stress distribution of LV wall and the changes were significant in anterior and lateral regions of equatorial and apical locations. Furthermore, the regions of high fibre stress from midwall to endocardium were gradually confined towards endocardium with the decrease in fibre angle. Such information will be useful for future studies/diagnoses of LV mechanics in normal and pathological conditions.
A distributed augmented Lagrangian method for model predictive control

In this paper we present a distributed Augmented Lagrangian (AL) algorithm to solve model predictive control (MPC) problems that involve a finite number of subsystems which interact with each other via a general network. We focus on discrete-time control systems with time-varying linear dynamics. Our method relies on the Accelerated Distributed Augmented Lagrangian (ADAL) algorithm, which can handle globally coupled linear constraints in a distributed manner based on a locally estimated AL. We prove that the theoretical complexity of ADAL to reach an ε-optimal solution both in terms of primal optimality gap and feasibility residual is O(1/ε) iterations. As suggested by our numerical analysis, ADAL achieves very fast convergence rates compared to the popular ADMM for distributed MPC.
An on-chip security guard based on zero-power authentication for implantable medical devices

In order to fight against severe risks of security and privacy for implantable medical devices, an on-chip security guard based on zero-power authentication is proposed and verified in this paper. The conception of `zero-power' is realized by virtue of wireless power recovery instead of fetching power from primary battery. The security guard recovers both data and clock from external wireless signals based on amplitude shift keying pulse width modulation. It features a wireless data rate of 500 Kbps and no need for on-chip clock generator. The Hash encryption is adopted in authentication and features a 32-bit ALU to speed up the SHA-1 computation with an estimated peak power of about only 1 mW, which is affordable by wireless power recovery which has a capacity of several mW. FPGA and chip implementation verify the feasibility of this system.
Reassessment of Developmental Constraints on Children’s Science Instruction

Science curricula at the elementary school level frequently emphasize the “concrete,” with a focus on the processes of observation, ordering, and categorization of the directly perceivable. Within this approach, abstract ideas and the planning of investigations and analysis of their results are in large part postponed until higher grades. This practice stems from purported developmental constraints on children’s thinking. This article analyzes these constraints in light of the writings of Piaget, to whom they are frequently attributed, and contemporary developmental theory and research. Neither the Piagetian nor the non-Piagetian research supports the validity of these developmental assumptions. The article also identifies several intrinsic problematic aspects of this approach to children’s science, including the failure to appreciate the challenge of adequate scientific description, the liabilities of decontextualization, and the epistemological messages it conveys to children. Both Piagetian and non-Piagetian literatures support the feasibility of children’s science curricula in which the processes previously approached as ends become tools in contextualized and authentic scientific inquiry.