Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Matchstick: A room-to-room thermal model for predicting indoor temperature from wireless sensor data

In this paper we present a room-to-room thermal model used to accurately predict temperatures in residential buildings. We evaluate the accuracy of this model with ground truth data from four occupied family homes (two in the UK and two in the US). The homes have differing construction and a range of heating infrastructure (wall-mounted radiators, underfloor heating, and furnace-driven forced-air). Data was gathered using a network of simple and sparse (one per room) temperature sensors, a gas meter sensor, and an outdoor temperature sensor. We show that our model can predict future indoor temperature trends with a 90th percentile aggregate error between 0.61-1.50°C, when given boiler or furnace actuation times and outdoor temperature forecasts. Two existing models were also implemented and then evaluated on our dataset alongside Matchstick. As a proof of concept, we used data from a previous control study to show that when Matchstick is used to predict temperatures (rather than assuming a preset linear heating rate) the possible gas savings increase by up to 3%.
Chemopreventive Potential of Synergy1 and Soybean in Reducing Azoxymethane-Induced Aberrant Crypt Foci in Fisher 344 Male Rats

Synergy1, a prebiotic composed of Inulin and Oligofructose (1 : 1). Soybean meal is a natural source of isoflavones. The objective was to investigate the effects of feeding Synergy1 and SM on the incidence of azoxymethane- (AOM-) induced aberrant crypt foci (ACF) in Fisher 344 male rats. Rats (54) were randomly assigned to 9 groups (n = 6). Control group (C) was fed AIN-93G and treatment groups Syn1 and SM at 5% and 10% singly and in combinations. Rats were injected with two s/c injections of AOM at 7 and 8 weeks of age at 16 mg/kg body weight and killed at 17 weeks by CO2 asphyxiation. Colonic ACF enumeration and hepatic enzyme activities were measured. Reductions (%) in total ACF among treatment groups fed combinations were higher (67–77) compared to groups fed singly (52–64). Synergistic mechanisms among phytochemicals may be responsible suggesting protective role in colon carcinogenesis with implications in food product development.
Bioactive compounds and medicinal properties of Aloe vera L.: An update

The practice of using Aloe vera extract as a herbal medicine basically depend on folklore and by experiences of people over a long period of time. Extensive research, especially in the area of basic biochemical characterization and elucidation of bioactivities has been conducted in a systematic manner. This has resulted in the characterization of many biochemical compounds from Aloe vera, predominantly using the techniques of spectroscopy and chromatography. Many biochemical compounds have been characterized from the Aloe vera using spectroscopy and chromatography techniques. Today, In addition to the well documented wound healing properties of Aloe vera extracts in burns, the antioxidant, antimicrobial and antidiabetic activities were tapped and hence formed the central core of bioactivity research on this plant in recent years. There have been preliminary reports on immune modulatory and other functions. The biochemical compounds and their bioactivity mechanisms from Aloe extracts, compounded by the bottlenecks in large scale cultivation represents a fascinating challenge to near complete exploitation and improvements in this pharmacologically important medicinal plant. This review is an effort to update our current knowledge on this plant based on many recent findings and to review the status for further exploration in pharmacology.
A note on the class of weakly coupled problems of non‐stationary piezoelectricity

In this paper we deal with a model of coupled non-stationary electroelasticity with displacements and potential given on the boundary of a body. We construct a numerical scheme for modelling electromechanical interactions in the body, and present a spectrum of a priori estimates for the solution of this scheme. Such estimates allow us to prove the convergence of the scheme to a generalized solution of the differential problem from W 2 2 (Q T ) with the second order of accuracy in a weaker than L 2 metric.
NLK Is a Novel Therapeutic Target for PTEN Deficient Tumour Cells

PTEN (Phosphatase and tensin homolog) is a tumour suppressor gene commonly defective in human cancer, and is thus a potentially important therapeutic target. Targeting tumour suppressor loss-of-function is possible by exploiting the genetic concept of synthetic lethality (SL). By combining the use of isogenic models of PTEN deficiency with high-throughput RNA interference (RNAi) screening, we have identified Nemo-Like Kinase (NLK) inhibition as being synthetically lethal with PTEN deficiency. This SL is likely mediated by the transcription factor FOXO1 (Forkhead box O1), an NLK substrate, as the selectivity of NLK gene silencing for PTEN deficient cells can be reversed by FOXO1 knockdown. In addition, we provide evidence that PTEN defective cells targeted by NLK gene depletion undergo senescence, suggesting that NLK function is critical for the continued proliferation of PTEN deficient cells. Taken together, these data provide new insight into the potential of targeting of NLK to treat a range of tumourigenic conditions characterised by PTEN deficiency.
Player Dynamics in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Millions of people now participate in Massively-Multiplay er Online Games (MMOGs), placing tremendous and often unpredictable maintenance burdens on their operators. Thus, understanding the dynamic nature of MMOG players is critical for the design ers and implementers of the systems and networks that host MMOGs. This paper improves our unders tanding of player dynamics in MMOGs by collecting and analyzing a 5-month long measuremen t study of World of Warcraft, a leading commercial MMOG. Our novel findings include the fol lowing: First, the distribution of player session lengths is similar to that of peer-to-peer fil sharing sessions, despite a game’s interactive nature, but has a shorter tail. Second, we find se veral good predictors of session length, such as in-game character level or age. Third, despite the so cial nature of MMOGs, interactivity between players accounts for little of the dependence betwe en s ssions of different players, and most sessions are not correlated at long time scales. Fourth , changes to a game’s virtual world can cause dramatic shifts in the population densities of ingame locations, which are otherwise relatively stable.
STRATEGIC PLANNING AND DECISION MAKING IN STATE DEPARTMENTS OF TRANSPORTATION

This report examines the experience of state and provincial departments of transportation (DOTs) with strategic planning and synthesizes current approaches to linking strategic planning with other decision-making processes, including operational and tactical planning, resource allocation, performance management, and performance measurement. It will be of interest primarily to chief executive officers, executive team members, and other officials who are responsible for developing, supporting, and using strategic management systems in state and provincial DOTs. The report is intended to help these industry leaders strengthen the overall performance of their organizations by examining exemplary practices in various DOTs. Case studies are also provided documenting one transportation agency that has used strategic planning over an extended period and one that recently implemented strategic planning. This synthesis report contains information drawn from survey responses from U.S. state and Canadian provincial transportation agencies. Follow-up telephone interviews were conducted with relevant personnel from many of those agencies that responded to the survey and some that did not to clarify responses and probe additional issues. A review of the relevant literature was also undertaken to provide background on the topic, help define the overall approach, and discuss the limitations of strategic planning.
Online estimation of secondary path in active noise control systems using Generalized Levinson Durbin algorithm

A novel online secondary path modeling scheme for active noise control (ANC) systems based on the Generalized Levinson Durbin (GLD) algorithm is proposed in this paper. A short duration zero mean white Gaussian noise is injected into the system using an active loudspeaker and the GLD algorithm is employed to recursively estimate the secondary path. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that obtained by filtered-x least mean square (FxLMS) algorithm based ANC system and Eriksson's method in terms of ensemble mean square error and convergence rate. The new scheme is shown to effectively model the secondary path even without prior knowledge of its order.
Depth-based real time head pose tracking using 3D template matching

In this paper, we propose a system to estimate head poses only using depth information in real-time. An optimization method based on 3D model fitting is developed. We iteratively minimize the distance between source and target point clouds of a user's head. The method give fully real-time responses (30fps) without the GPU speedup. We adopt a commodity depth sensor named Microsoft Kinect as well as Asus Xtion, and use the depth image as the only input so that our system will not be affected by illumination variations. However, the simplicity of this acquisition device comes at the cost of frequent noises in the acquired data. We demonstrate that 6 degrees of freedom real-time head motion tracking in 3D space can be achieved with such noisy depth data.
Visual Understanding of a Scene by Automatic Movement of a Camera

A method for visual understanding of a scene by efficient automatic movement of a camera is presented in this paper. The purpose of this method is to choose a trajectory for a virtual camera, allowing the user to have a good knowledge of the scene at the end of a minimal flying over. The method is based on techniques for computing a good point of view, used together with various heuristics, in order to have smooth movement of the camera and to avoid fast returns to the starting point, due to local maxima. So, starting from a good view point, the virtual camera moves on the surface of a sphere surrounding the scene, combining good view, smooth camera movement and distance from the starting point based heuristics.
Robot Vision in the Language of Geometric Algebra

In recent years, robot vision became an attractive scientific discipline. From a technological point of view, its aim is to endow robots with visual capabilities comparable to those of human beings. Although there is considerable endeavour, the progress is only slowly proceeding, especially in comparison to the level of behavior of human beings in natural environments. This has its reason in lacking insight into the organization principles of cognitive systems. Therefore, from a scientific point of view, robot vision is a test bed for understanding more on cognitive architectures and the mutual support of vision and action in cognitive systems. While in natural systems self-organization of structures and data flow is responsible for their success, in case of technical systems, the designer has to model cognitive systems. Modeling needs a theoretical base which is rooted in the state-of-art knowledge in science, mathematics and engineering. The most difficult problem to be solved is the design of a useful cognitive architecture. This concerns e.g. the gathering and use of world knowledge, controlling the interplay of perception and action, the representation of equivalence classes, invariants and concepts. Besides, hard real-time requirements have to be considered. The most attractive approach to the design of a cognitive architecture is the framework of behavior-based systems (Sommer, 1997). A behavior is represented by a perception-action cycle. Remarkable features of such architecture are the tight coupling of perception and action, and learning the required competences (Pauli, 2001) from experience. Another problem to be coped with in designing robot vision systems is the diversity of contributing disciplines. These are signal theory and image processing, pattern recognition including learning theory, robotics, computer vision and computing science. Because these disciplines developed separately, they are using different mathematical languages as modeling frameworks. Besides, their modeling capabilities are limited. These limitations are caused to a large extend by the dominant use of vector algebra. Fortunately, geometric algebras (GA) as the geometrically interpreted version of Clifford algebras (CA) (Hestenes & Sobczyk, 1984) deliver a reasonable alternative to vector algebra. The aim of this contribution is to promote the use of geometric algebra in robot vision systems based on own successful experience over one decade of research. The application of GA within a behavior based design of cognitive systems is the long-term research topic of the Kiel Cognitive Systems Group (Sommer, 1999). Such a coherent system has to be an
Consistency in 3D

Comparisons of different consistency models often try to place them in a linear strong-to-weak order. However this view is clearly inadequate, since it is well known, for instance, that Snapshot Isolation and Serialisability are incomparable. In the interest of a better understanding, we propose a new classification, along three dimensions, related to: a total order of writes, a causal order of reads, and transactional composition of multiple operations. A model may be stronger than another on one dimension and weaker on another. We believe that this new classification scheme is both scientifically sound and has good explicative value. The current paper presents the three-dimensional design space intuitively.
Tree Insertion Grammar: A Cubic-Time, Parsable Formalism that Lexicalizes Context-Free Grammar without Changing the Trees Produced

Tree insertion grammar (TIG) is a tree-based formalism that makes use of tree substitution and tree adjunction. TIG is related to tree adjoining grammar. However, the adjunction permitted in TIG is sufficiently restricted that TIGs only derive context-free languages and TIGs have the same cubic-time worst-case complexity bounds for recognition and parsing as context-free grammars. An efficient Earley-style parser for TIGs is presented. Any context-free grammar (CFG) can be converted into a lexicalized tree insertion grammar (LTIG) that generates the same trees. A constructive procedure is presented for converting a CFG into a left anchored (i.e., word initial) LTIG that preserves ambiguity and generates the same trees. The L,TIG created can be represented compactly by taking advantage of sharing between the elementary trees in it. Methods of converting CFGs into left anchored CFGs, e.g., the methods of Greibach and Rosenkrantz, do not preserve the trees produced and result in very large output grammars. For the purpose of experimental evaluation, the LTIG lexicalization procedure was applied to eight different CFGs for subsets of English. The LTIGs created were smaller than the original CFGs. Using an implementation of the Earley-style TIG parser that was specialized for left anchored LTIGs, it was possible to parse more quickly with the LTIGs than with the original CFGs.
Improving the accuracy of snoop filtering using stream registers

Multi-core processors have become mainstream; they provide parallelism with relatively low complexity. As true on-chip SMPs evolve, coherence traffic between cores is becoming problematic, both in terms of performance and power. The negative effects of coherence (snoop) traffic can be significantly mitigated through snoop filtering. Shielding each cache with a device that can squash snoop requests for addresses known not to be in cache improves performance significantly for caches that cannot perform normal load and snoop lookups simultaneously. In addition, reducing snoop lookups yields power savings. This paper introduces Stream Register snoop filtering, which captures the spatial locality of multiple memory reference streams in a few registers. We propose a snoop filter that combines Stream Registers with "snoop caching", a mechanism that captures the temporal locality of frequently accessed addresses. Simulations of Splash- 2 benchmarks on a 4-core multiprocessor illustrate tradeoffs and strengths of these two techniques. Their combination is most effective, eliminating 94-99% of all snoop requests using very few stream registers and snoop cache lines.
Compact Planar Monopole UWB Antenna with Quadruple Band-Notched Characteristics

A compact planar monopole UWB antenna with quadruple band-notched characteristics is analyzed and presented. By introducing a C-shaped slot, nested C-shaped slot in the radiating patch and U-shaped slot in the feed line, quadruple band-notched characteristics are achieved at frequencies of 2.5, 3.7, 5.8 and 8.2GHz. The proposed antenna has been fabricated and tested. Measured impedance bandwidth of the antenna is 2.35{12GHz, which covers Bluetooth and UWB band, for VSWR 2, for rejecting 2.5/3.5GHz WiMAX, WLAN and ITU 8GHz band signals, respectively. The average gain of this antenna is 4.30dBi with a variation of §1:8dBi over the whole impedance bandwidth. Signiflcant gain reduction over the rejected band is also observed. The antenna shows good omnidirectional radiation patterns in the passband with a compact size of 40mm £ 34mm.
The Strategy to Survive Primary Malaria Infection: An Experimental Study on Behavioural Changes in Parasitized Birds

Avian malaria parasites (Haemosporida, Plasmodium) are of cosmopolitan distribution, and they have a significant impact on vertebrate host fitness. Experimental studies show that high parasitemia often develops during primary malaria infections. However, field studies only occasionally reveal high parasitemia in free-living birds sampled using the traditional methods of mist-netting or trapping, and light chronic infections predominate. The reason for this discrepancy between field observation and experimental data remains insufficiently understood. Since mist-netting is a passive capture method, two main parameters determine its success in sampling infected birds in wildlife, i. e. the presence of parasitized birds at a study site and their mobility. In other words, the trapping probability depends on the survival rate of birds and their locomotor activity during infection. Here we test (1) the mortality rate of wild birds infected with Plasmodium relictum (the lineage pSGS1), (2) the changes in their behaviour during presence of an aerial predator, and (3) the changes in their locomotor activity at the stage of high primary parasitemia.We show that some behavioural features which might affect a bird's survival during a predator attack (time of reaction, speed of flush flight and take off angle) did not change significantly during primary infection. However, the locomotor activity of infected birds was almost halved compared to control (non-infected) birds during the peak of parasitemia. We report (1) the markedly reduced mobility and (2) the 20% mortality rate caused by P. relictum and conclude that these factors are responsible for the underrepresentation of birds in mist nets and traps during the stage of high primary parasitemia in wildlife. This study indicates that the widespread parasite, P. relictum (pSGS1) influences the behaviour of birds during primary parasitemia. Experimental studies combined with field observations are needed to better understand the mechanisms of pathogenicity of avian malaria parasites and their influence on bird populations.
The effects of subunit composition on the inhibition of nicotinic receptors by the amphipathic blocker TMPH

The therapeutic targeting of nicotinic receptors in the brain will benefit from the identification of drugs which may be selective for their ability to activate or inhibit a limited range of nicotine acetylcholine receptor subtypes. In the present study we describe the effects of 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-4-yl heptanoate (TMPH), a novel compound that is a potent inhibitor of neuronal nicotinic receptors. Evaluation of nAChR subunits expressed in Xenopus oocytes indicated that TMPH can produce a potent and long-lasting inhibition of neuronal nAChR formed by the pairwise combination of the most abundant neuronal alpha (i.e. α3 and α4 ) and beta subunits ( β2 and β4 ), with relatively little effect, due to rapid reversibility of inhibition, on muscle-type ( α1β1γδ ) or α7 receptors. However, the inhibition of neuronal beta subunit-containing receptors was also decreased if any of the nonessential subunits α5 , α6, or β3 were coexpressed. This decrease in inhibition is shown to be associated with a single amino acid present in the second transmembrane domain of these subunits. Our data indicate a great potential utility for TMPH to help relate the diverse CNS effects to specific nAChR subtypes.
Control-oriented energy-profiling and modelling of urban electric vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) are attracting more and more attention as a means to reach the desired reduction in transport-induced greenhouse emissions. To ensure an effective energetic management of these vehicles, especially in urban areas, dedicated control strategies are needed that correctly deal with the constraints related to the battery usage while preserving a good driving feeling. A preliminary step for the design of an effective controller is to get a reliable model of the vehicle dynamics of interest and thorough understanding of the energy flows in the vehicle itself. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic way to perform an energy-profiling of urban EVs and addresses the modelling and identification steps needed to achieve a control-oriented description of the vehicle longitudinal dynamics. Validation results are provided from data measured on a light electric two-wheeled vehicle.
Psychosocial Interventions for Parents with Incurable End‐Stage Cancer: A Rapid Evidence Assessment

Objective Parenting is a primary concern for patients with minor children facing palliative‐stage cancer, yet psychosocial support addressing parenting concerns during end‐stage cancer is not routinely provided in the healthcare setting. The purpose of this review is to: (a) identify evaluation studies describing psychosocial interventions for parents with incurable end‐stage cancer; and (b) review the effectiveness evidence. Method This review was based on a rapid evidence assessment using transparent and comprehensive search terms and narrative synthesis. Inclusion criteria were broad and consisted of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method studies that focused on psychosocial interventions for parents with advanced cancer. Results Four studies were identified, but only one of these reported results specific to parents with end‐stage cancer. A child‐centred and family‐focused approach was central to all program interventions. All programs encompassed a structured format with the majority being dedicated to providing both individual and family sessions. The studies varied in methodological quality and all used small, non‐representative samples limiting the generalisability of the findings. There were no high quality quantitative studies that specifically address outcomes for this parent group and few qualitative studies that detail parents’ intervention experience. Conclusions The findings suggest that targeted, child‐centred, family‐focused psychosocial interventions are sometimes used to support adult patients with parenting during end‐stage cancer. These purport to promote child‐parent communication and to contribute to parent psychosocial wellbeing. Further research using larger parent populations from diverse sociodemographic backgrounds is required. More importantly, comparative effectiveness studies are needed that test the timing, delivery, and content of these interventions.