Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Duty Cycle Control with Queue Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a control-based approach to the duty cycle adaptation for wireless sensor networks. The proposed method controls the duty cycle through the queue management to achieve high-performance under variable traffic rates. To have energy efficiency while minimizing the delay, we design a feedback controller, which adapts the sleep time to the traffic change dynamically by constraining the queue length at a predetermined value. In addition, we propose an efficient synchronization scheme using an active pattern, which represents the active time slot schedule for synchronization among sensor nodes, without affecting neighboring schedules. Based on the control theory, we analyze the adaptation behavior of the proposed controller and demonstrate system stability. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms existing schemes by achieving more power savings while minimizing the delay.
Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Analyzing the Characteristics of Academically Disengaged Students: Results From UCUES 2010

We theorize 5 dimensions of academic disengagement based on students’ values, motivations, study behaviors, academic interactions, and competing involvements. Using 2010 survey data from the University of California, we find support for this conceptualization. The size of disengaged populations varied between 5% and 25%, depending on the measure used. On most measures, male students, upper-division students, students with low college GPAs, and students in the humanities and social sciences were significantly more likely, net of covariates, to be among academically disengaged populations. Students with high SAT scores were also more likely to be among academically disengaged populations.
Assimilation of GPS radio occultation data for numerical weather prediction

With the availability of approximately 4,000 radio occultation soundings per day within three hours of observation, COSMIC has the potential to contribute significantly to global and regional weather analysis and prediction. However, the basic radio occultation measurements (phase delays) are very different from traditional meteorological measurements (i.e., temperature, water vapor), and to effectively assimilate them into weather prediction models is a challenging task. Over the past five years, considerable progress has been made in the development of an effective strategy for the assimilation of GPS radio occultation data. In this paper, we (1) review the measurement and data reduction procedures, (2) discuss the error characteristics of the GPS radio occultation data, (3) discuss the various strategies for data assimilation, (4) review results from recent data assimilation research, and (5) provide suggestions for future research. Results from recent studies have led to the conclusion that the best strategy to assimilate GPS radio occultation data is a mixture of bending angles below 10 km and refractivity above 10 km using a variational approach. The assimilation of GPS radio occultation data is likely to have a significant positive impact on global and regional weather prediction through improved definition of water vapor, temperature and wind fields. Although refractivity and bending angles are not directly related to the winds, the assimilation of GPS data leads to improvements in the wind analysis through internal model dynamic adjustments. In order to make optimal use of GPS radio occultation data in weather analysis and prediction, considerable research is needed in: (l) better characterization of GPS measurement errors, particularly in the lower troposphere, (2) improving the computational efficiency and optimizing the strategy of bending angle and refractivity assimilation, and (3) performing a set of observing system simulation experiments with realistic simulation of GPS radio occultation data. These research tasks should be conducted prior to the launch of the COSMIC satellites, so that we can fully realize the potential of COSMIC data in global and regional weather prediction.
A Whole Cell Assay to Measure Caspase-6 Activity by Detecting Cleavage of Lamin A/C

Caspase-6 is a cysteinyl protease implicated in neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease making it an attractive target for therapeutic intervention. A greater understanding of the role of caspase-6 in disease has been hampered by a lack of suitable cellular assays capable of specifically detecting caspase-6 activity in an intact cell environment. This is mainly due to the use of commercially available peptide substrates and inhibitors which lack the required specificity to facilitate development of this type of assay. We report here a 384-well whole-cell chemiluminescent ELISA assay that monitors the proteolytic degradation of endogenously expressed lamin A/C during the early stages of caspase-dependent apoptosis. The specificity of lamin A/C proteolysis by caspase-6 was demonstrated against recombinant caspase family members and further confirmed in genetic deletion studies. In the assay, plasma membrane integrity remained intact as assessed by release of lactate dehydrogenase from the intracellular environment and the exclusion of cell impermeable peptide inhibitors, despite the induction of an apoptotic state. The method described here is a robust tool to support drug discovery efforts targeting caspase-6 and is the first reported to specifically monitor endogenous caspase-6 activity in a cellular context.
Using System Analysis and Personas for e-Health Interaction Design

Today, designers obtain more central roles in product and service development (Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). They have to deal with increasingly complicated problems, like integrating the needs of various stakeholders while taking care about social, ethical and ecological consequences of their designs. To deal with this demanding design situation, they need to apply new methods to organize the available information and to negotiate the stakeholder’s perspectives. This paper describes how systems analysis supports the design process in a complex environment. In a case study, we demonstrate how this method enables designers to describe user requirements for complex design environments while considering the perspectives of various stakeholders. We present a design research project applying cybernetic systems analysis using the software ''System-Tools'' (Vester, 2002). Results from the analysis were taken to inform the design of an electronic patient record (EPR), considering the particularities of the German health care system. Based on the analysis, we developed a set of requirements for every stakeholder group, detailing the patients' perspective with persona descriptions. We then picked a main persona as reference for the EPR design. We describe the resulting design sketch and discuss the value of cybernetic systems analysis as a tool to deal with complex social environments. The result shows how the method helps designers to structure and organize information about the context and identify fruitful intervention opportunities for design. Keywords: E-Health; System Analysis, Cybernetics; Personas.
Validity of two brief primary care physical activity questionnaires with accelerometry in clinic staff

Background: To date, no physical activity (PA) questionnaires intended for primary care have been compared against a criterion measure of PA and current (2008) aerobic PA recommendations of the American College of Sports Medicine/American Heart Association (ACSM/AHA). Aim: This study evaluated preliminary evidence for criterion validity of two brief (<1 min) PA questionnaires with accelerometry, and their ability to identify if individuals meet ACSM/AHA PA recommendations. Methods: 45 health clinic staff wore an accelerometer for seven consecutive days and afterwards completed two brief PA questionnaires, the Physical Activity Vital Sign (PAVS), and the Speedy Nutrition and Physical Activity Assessment (SNAP). Agreement and descriptive statistics were calculated between the PAVS or SNAP and accelerometry in order to measure each questionnaire’s ability to quantify the number of days participants achieved ⩾30 min of moderate–vigorous PA (MVPA) performed in bouts of ⩾10 continuous minutes. Participants with <5 days of ⩾30 bout-min of MVPA were considered insufficiently active according to PA recommendations. Findings: There was a significant positive correlation between number of days with ⩾30 bout-min MVPA and the PAVS (r=0.52, P<0.001), and SNAP (r=0.31, P<0.05). The PAVS had moderate agreement with accelerometry for identifying if individuals met or did not meet PA recommendations (κ=0.46, P<0.001), whereas SNAP had poor agreement (κ=0.12, P<0.05). Conclusions: This study provides preliminary evidence of criterion validity of the PAVS and SNAP with accelerometry and agreement identifying if respondents meet current (2008) ACSM/AHA aerobic PA recommendations. The PAVS and SNAP should be evaluated further for repeatability, and in populations varying in PA levels, age, gender, and ethnicity.
Why Not Simply Use the Best Theory? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Notion of Plurality in Three Texts Used at a Teacher Education Institution in Sweden

Drawing on ambitions to contest violence in education, this article challenges ideas that student teachers only need to rely on evidence-based theory in their future profession. This is accomplished by analysing and comparing theories of plurality as described in three texts used in courses at one teacher education institution in Sweden. The texts express three different theoretical discourses of approaching social challenges regarding violence, plurality in education, and teacher expectations. Hence, since violence is played out in a variety of ways, the logic of evidence-based research is insufficient when it comes to handling plurality.
Towards Confidence in the Truth: A Bootstrapping based Truth Discovery Approach

The demand for automatic extraction of true information (i.e., truths) from conflicting multi-source data has soared recently. A variety of truth discovery methods have witnessed great successes via jointly estimating source reliability and truths. All existing truth discovery methods focus on providing a point estimator for each object's truth, but in many real-world applications, confidence interval estimation of truths is more desirable, since confidence interval contains richer information. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel truth discovery method (ETCIBoot) to construct confidence interval estimates as well as identify truths, where the bootstrapping techniques are nicely integrated into the truth discovery procedure. Due to the properties of bootstrapping, the estimators obtained by ETCIBoot are more accurate and robust compared with the state-of-the-art truth discovery approaches. Theoretically, we prove the asymptotical consistency of the confidence interval obtained by ETCIBoot. Experimentally, we demonstrate that ETCIBoot is not only effective in constructing confidence intervals but also able to obtain better truth estimates.
A Robust Algorithm for Segmenting and Tracking Clustered Cells in Time-Lapse Fluorescent Microscopy

We present herein a robust algorithm for cell tracking in a sequence of time-lapse 2-D fluorescent microscopy images. Tracking is performed automatically via a multiphase active contours algorithm adapted to the segmentation of clustered nuclei with obscure boundaries. An ellipse fitting method is applied to avoid problems typically associated with clustered, overlapping, or dying cells, and to obtain more accurate segmentation and tracking results. We provide quantitative validation of results obtained with this new algorithm by comparing them to the results obtained from the established CellProfiler, MTrack2 (plugin for Fiji), and LSetCellTracker software.
Modeling of patient flows in a large-scale outpatient hospital ward by making use of electronic medical records

All departments of an outpatient hospital ward of Nagoya University hospital were simulated to examine patient flows and congestion. The method of gathering the required data on times for all outpatients and their routes is described in the performing simulation, especially by making use of the electronic medical records. An outpatient visits one or more clinical departments and/or one or more test/inspection rooms, the reception area, and the payment department. In this procedure, a series of data of terminal units and of test/inspection terminals was used to obtain the required input data for performing simulation as well as the electronic medical records. It was found that the proposed procedure was quite effective to perform a simulation of a large-scale hospital to examine patient flows by applying an actual case.
Evaluation of heavy-tailed mutation operator on maximum flow test generation problem

The general recommendation for the mutation rate in standard-bit mutation is 1/n, which gives asymptotically optimal expected optimization times for several simple test problems. Recently, Doerr et al. have shown that such mutation rate is not ideal, and is far from optimal for multimodal problems. They proposed the heavy-tailed mutation operator fmutβ which significantly improves performance of the (1+1) evolutionary algorithm on Jump problem and yields similar speed-ups for the vertex cover problem in bipartite graphs and the matching problem in general graphs. We evaluate the fmutβ mutation operator on the problem of hard test generation for the maximum flow algorithms. Experiments show that the fmutβ mutation operator greatly increases performance of the (1+1) evolutionary algorithm. It also achieves performance improvement, although less drastic, on a simple population based algorithm, but hinders performance of a crossover based genetic algorithm.
Changes in Balance Strategy and Neuromuscular Control during a Fatiguing Balance Task—A Study in Perturbed Unilateral Stance

Fatigue impairs sensorimotor performance, reduces spinal reflexes and affects the interaction of antagonistic muscles in complex motor tasks. Although there is literature dealing with the interference of fatigue and postural control, the interpretation is confounded by the variety of paradigms used to study it. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of postural fatigue on balance control and strategy, as well as on neuromuscular modulation, in response to postural perturbation (PERT) during a fatiguing balance task. A fatigue protocol consisting of continuous exposure to perturbations until exhaustion was executed in 24 subjects. Number of failed attempts, paths of center of pressure displacement (COP), ankle, knee, and hip joint kinematics, electromyographic activity of the soleus (SOL), tibialis anterior (TA), rectus femoris (RF), vastus lateralis (VL), biceps femoris (BF), and gluteus maximus muscles (GM) and spinal excitability of SOL at the peak of the short-latency responses (SLR) were recorded after posterior PERT. The co-contraction index (CCI) was calculated for TA_SOL, VL_BF and RF_GM. (1) The number of failed attempts significantly increased while COP amplitude and velocity, as well as angular excursion at the ankle, knee and hip joints, decreased with fatigue (P < 0.05). (2) Concomitantly, CCI of SOL_TA, VL_BF and RF_GM increased and spinal excitability in SOL declined. (3) Adaptations progressively augmented with progressing exhaustion and occurred in the distal prior to proximal segment. Distinctly deteriorated balance ability was accompanied by a modified neuromuscular control—the increase in co-contraction reflected by simultaneously activated antagonists is accompanied by smaller knee and hip joint excursions, indicating an elevated level of articular stiffness. These changes may be associated with an exaggerated postural rigidity and could have caused the delayed and reduced postural reactions that are reflected in the changes in COP displacement when compensating for sudden PERT. The reduction in spinal excitability may either be caused by fatigue itself or by an increase in reciprocal inhibition due to augmented TA activity.
Error patterns of Mandarin disyllabic tones by Japanese learners

Previous studies on Mandarin tone production indicate that there is no agreement on which tones are most difficult for L2 learners. Much of previous research on L2 learning of Mandarin tones has focused on monosyllables. In modern Mandarin, however, it is disyllabic words that dominate the vocabulary. This research investigates the production of Mandarin disyllabic tones by Japanese learners. In the current study, 25 Japanese learners of Mandarin were requested to produce 80 Mandarin disyllabic words with all tonal combinations (except for the neutral tone). The overall results showed a hierarchy of difficulty: Tone 3 > Tone 2 > Tone 1 = Tone 4. Most errors in the first syllable were found for Tone 2 and Tone 3 when followed by Tone 1 or Tone 4 (both start with a high pitch). In the second syllable, most errors were found for Tone 3 (misproduced as Tone 2). The findings are discussed in terms of the phonetic nature of Mandarin lexical tones and the interference from Japanese phonology.
Serum levels of the immune activation marker neopterin change with age and gender and are modified by race, BMI, and percentage of body fat.

BACKGROUND Neopterin, a GTP metabolite expressed by macrophages, is a marker of immune activation. We hypothesize that levels of this serum marker alter with donor age, reflecting increased chronic immune activation in normal aging. In addition to age, we assessed gender, race, body mass index (BMI), and percentage of body fat (%fat) as potential covariates. METHODS Serum was obtained from 426 healthy participants whose age ranged from 18 to 87 years. Anthropometric measures included %fat and BMI. Neopterin concentrations were measured by competitive ELISA. The paired associations between neopterin and age, BMI, or %fat were analyzed by Spearman's correlation or by linear regression of log-transformed neopterin, whereas overall associations were modeled by multiple regression of log-transformed neopterin as a function of age, gender, race, BMI, %fat, and interaction terms. RESULTS Across all participants, neopterin exhibited a positive association with age, BMI, and %fat. Multiple regression modeling of neopterin in women and men as a function of age, BMI, and race revealed that each covariate contributed significantly to neopterin values and that optimal modeling required an interaction term between race and BMI. The covariate %fat was highly correlated with BMI and could be substituted for BMI to yield similar regression coefficients. CONCLUSION The association of age and gender with neopterin levels and their modification by race, BMI, or %fat reflect the biology underlying chronic immune activation and perhaps gender differences in disease incidence, morbidity, and mortality.
Functional variant analyses (FVAs) predict pathogenicity in the BRCA1 DNA double-strand break repair pathway.

Heritable mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 and other genes in the DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair pathway disrupt binding of the encoded proteins, transport into the nucleus and initiation of homologous recombination, thereby increasing cancer risk [Scully, R. , Chen, J., Plug, A. , Xiao, Y. , Weaver, D. , Feunteun, J., Ashley, T. and Livingston, D.M. (1997) Association of BRCA1 with Rad51 in mitotic and meiotic cells. Cell, 88, 265-275, Chen, J., Silver, D.P., Walpita, D. , Cantor, S.B. , Gazdar, A.F. , Tomlinson, G. , Couch, F.J., Weber, B.L. , Ashley, T. , Livingston, D.M. et al. (1998) Stable interaction between the products of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 tumor suppressor genes in mitotic and meiotic cells. Mol. Cell, 2, 317-328]. To meet the challenge of correct classification, flow cytometry-based functional variant analyses (FVAs) were developed to determine whether variants in DSB repair genes disrupted the binding of BRCA1 to BARD1, PALB2, BRCA2 and FANCD2, phosphorylation of p53 or BRCA1 nuclear localization in response to DNA damage caused by diepoxybutane, mitomycin C and bleomycin. Lymphoblastoid cells from individuals with BRCA1 pathogenic mutations, benign variants, and variants of uncertain significance or with known BRCA2, FANCC or NBN mutations were tested. Mutations in BRCA1 decreased nuclear localization of BRCA1 in response to individual or combination drug treatment. Mutations in BRCA1 reduced binding to co-factors, PALB2 and FANCD2 and decreased phosphorylation of p53. Mutations in BRCA2, FANCC and NBN decreased nuclear localization of BRCA1 in response to drug treatment, cofactors binding and p53 phosphorylation. Unsupervised cluster analysis of all and as few as two assays demonstrated two apparent clusters, high-risk BRCA1 mutations and phenocopies and low-risk, fully sequenced controls and variants of uncertain significance (VUS). Thus, two FVA assays distinguish BRCA1 mutations and phenocopies from benign variants and categorize most VUS as benign. Mutations in other DSB repair pathway genes produce molecular phenocopies. FVA assays may represent an adjunct to sequencing for categorizing VUS or may represent a stand-alone measure for assessing breast cancer risk.
Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms for Trapping and Activating Emotional Memories

Recent findings suggest that memory allocation to specific neurons (i.e., neuronal allocation) in the amygdala is not random, but rather the transcription factor cAMP-response element binding protein (CREB) modulates this process, perhaps by regulating the transcription of channels that control neuronal excitability. Here, optogenetic studies in the mouse lateral amygdala (LA) were used to demonstrate that CREB and neuronal excitability regulate which neurons encode an emotional memory. To test the role of CREB in memory allocation, we overexpressed CREB in the lateral amygdala to recruit the encoding of an auditory-fear conditioning (AFC) memory to a subset of neurons. Then, post-training activation of these neurons with Channelrhodopsin-2 was sufficient to trigger recall of the memory for AFC, suggesting that CREB regulates memory allocation. To test the role of neuronal excitability in memory allocation, we used a step function opsin (SFO) to transiently increase neuronal excitability in a subset of LA neurons during AFC. Post-training activation of these neurons with Volvox Channelrhodopsin-1 was able to trigger recall of that memory. Importantly, our studies show that activation of the SFO did not affect AFC by either increasing anxiety or by strengthening the unconditioned stimulus. Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that CREB regulates memory allocation by modulating neuronal excitability.