Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Comparative Study of Gray Model and Markov Model in Pavement Performance Prediction

Pavement performance prediction is an essential component of pavement maintenance management system, which directly affects the choice of maintenance measures and funds. Firstly, this paper uses the Gray theoretical model to predict the status of certain highway pavement damaged. Secondly, the Grey theory and Markov prediction method are combined to forecast it. Finally, the comparison of the results between Grey theory and Markov prediction method analyzes the similarities and differences . The results show that Grey theoretical model is more suitable for recent forecasting, while combination method is suitable for longer-term forecasting.
Oscillating Foils For Ship Propulsion

The high propulsive effi ciency, the fast manoeuvrability and the low noise production of the propulsion of marine animals inspired the development of a new ship propeller. This text describes the design of a fl apping foil ship propeller and the experiments performed on it. The fl apping foil propeller mimics the tail fi n of fi sh that swim at high speed, like tunas or sharks, in at least two ways: the hydrodynamics and the resonant driving mechanism. The motion of the foil is a combination of a heaving and a pitching oscillation, with a phase difference. The wake behind the tail of a fi sh has a special structure called the reversed von Karman street. If the motion parameters are well chosen, the wake behind the fl apping foil has a similar structure, resulting in positive thrust force and high propulsive effi ciency. The driving mechanism uses fl exibility to exclude the need for one of the two actuators. The infl uence of the free surface and the oscillation frequency on the performance is investigated.
ARTADE2DB: Improved Statistical Inferences for Arabidopsis Gene Functions and Structure Predictions by Dynamic Structure-Based Dynamic Expression (DSDE) Analyses

Recent advances in technologies for observing high-resolution genomic activities, such as whole-genome tiling arrays and high-throughput sequencers, provide detailed information for understanding genome functions. However, the functions of 50% of known Arabidopsis thaliana genes remain unknown or are annotated only on the basis of static analyses such as protein motifs or similarities. In this paper, we describe dynamic structure-based dynamic expression (DSDE) analysis, which sequentially predicts both structural and functional features of transcripts. We show that DSDE analysis inferred gene functions 12% more precisely than static structure-based dynamic expression (SSDE) analysis or conventional co-expression analysis based on previously determined gene structures of A. thaliana. This result suggests that more precise structural information than the fixed conventional annotated structures is crucial for co-expression analysis in systems biology of transcriptional regulation and dynamics. Our DSDE method, ARabidopsis Tiling-Array-based Detection of Exons version 2 and over-representation analysis (ARTADE2-ORA), precisely predicts each gene structure by combining two statistical analyses: a probe-wise co-expression analysis of multiple transcriptome measurements and a Markov model analysis of genome sequences. ARTADE2-ORA successfully identified the true functions of about 90% of functionally annotated genes, inferred the functions of 98% of functionally unknown genes and predicted 1,489 new gene structures and functions. We developed a database ARTADE2DB that integrates not only the information predicted by ARTADE2-ORA but also annotations and other functional information, such as phenotypes and literature citations, and is expected to contribute to the study of the functional genomics of A. thaliana. URL: http://artade.org.
Convergence Analysis of Hopfield Neural Networks

—In this paper, we analyze the convergence and stability properties of Hopfield Neural Networks (HNN). The global convergence and asymptotic stability of HNN have successful various applications in computing and optimization problems. After determining the mathematical model of the network, we do some analysis on the model. This analysis base on Lyapunov Stability Theorem. Firstly, we define positive definite energy function for the system, then investigate the first derivative of this function. According to the Lyapunov Stability Theorem, the first derivative of function must be negative. We do some mathematical processes while proofing the theorem. At the end, we give a sufficient condition in the Theorem-1 for HNN which guarantees the convergence of the system. We give the definition of Lyapunov Stability Theorem and use it for the proof steps. Finally, we give some simulation results for the globally asymptotically stable system. It can be easily observed that the equilibrium point for the system goes to zero. Derived conditions are also supported by the previous results in the literature and the analyses contribute new sufficient condition to the literature.
Detecting Careless Responses to Self-Reported Questionnaires

Problem Statement: The use of self-report questionnaires may lead to biases such as careless responses that distort the research outcomes. Early detection of careless responses in self-report questionnaires may reduce error, but little guidance exists in the literature regarding techniques for detecting such careless or random responses in self-report questionnaires. Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this study was to examine whether the respondent‟s goodness-of-fit test score (RGF) can be used to indicate careless responses in completing self-report questionnaires. It is hypothesized that there is a significant difference of RGF between careless responses and true responses and that RGF of careless responses is higher than RGF for true responses. Method: An experimental research design that made use of a self-reported questionnaire was conducted with 205 respondents divided into two groups. The first group responded truthfully to the questionnaire while the second group responded carelessly to the questionnaire. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire had been tested. One hundred and eighty five respondents were selected as the group of true responses, while another 20 respondents comprised the group of careless responses. T-test of independent sample was used to evaluate the different RGF among true responses and careless responses. Findings: After comparing the mean scores of RGF between careless responses and true responses, a significant difference was found. The frequency distribution of true responses tends to be normally distributed while the existence of careless responses creates a skewed distribution to the right. The RGF of careless responses is higher than the RGF of true responses. Conclusion and Recommendations: RGF may be used as an indicator of respondent‟s careless responses in self-report questionnaires in which more accurate data are expected. Social science research that makes use of self-report questionnaire in measuring affective domain may compute RGF to determine whether careless responses exist. Keywords: Careless response, Questionnaire development, Random response, Goodness-of-fit.
What contributes to low achievement of middle school students: Evidence from multigroup structural equation modeling

ABSTRACT The authors' purpose was to examine the degree to which low achievement is related to ontogenetic factors (i.e., personal psychological traits expressed as attention and depression) or microsystemic factors (i.e., socioeconomic status, parenting, relationship with peers and teachers), using a total of 721 middle school students in South Korea. Based on the percentile rank, low-achieving students (bottom 15%; n = 323) and high-achieving students (top 15%; n = 398) were grouped, and a multigroup structural equation modeling was employed to determine which ecological factor(s) contribute to predict low achievement of middle school students. Results from multigroup structural equation modeling showed that 3 of the 6 ecological and ontological factors had significant direct or indirect effect on low achievement: socioeconomic status (direct effect), attention (direct effect), parenting (indirect effect). The findings are discussed in terms of the intertwined influences of ecological factors on low achievement, finally leading to the discussion on the limitations and future directions for research.
The Representation of Function in Computer-Based Design

This paper proposes a standardized representation of function for use by the research community, industry, and eventually commercial software vendors. This includes schemata (information models) for representation of function and associated flows, as well as an initial attempt at developing taxonomies of functions and flows. The objective of the latter effort is to generate taxonomies that are as small as possible, yet generic enough to allow modeling of a broad variety of engineering artifacts. This representation is intended to provide a generic infrastructure that will facilitate the capture and exchange of function information among researchers at present, and eventually in industry by contributing to interoperability between design systems, be they commercial or developed internally within a company.
Renormalization group flow equations with full momentum dependence

After a short elementary introduction to the exact renormalization group for the effective action, I discuss a particular truncation of the hierarchy of flow equations that allows for the determination of the full momentum of the n-point functions. Applications are then briefly presented, to critical O(N) models, to Bose–Einstein condensation and to finite-temperature field theory.
The ROS-induced cytotoxicity of ascorbate is attenuated by hypoxia and HIF-1alpha in the NCI60 cancer cell lines

Intravenous application of high‐dose ascorbate is used in complementary palliative medicine to treat cancer patients. Pharmacological doses of ascorbate in the mM range induce cytotoxicity in cancer cells mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS), namely hydrogen peroxide and ascorbyl radicals. However, little is known about intrinsic or extrinsic factors modulating this ascorbate‐mediated cytotoxicity. Under normoxia and hypoxia, ascorbate IC50 values were determined on the NCI60 cancer cells. The cell cycle, the influence of cobalt chloride‐induced hypoxia‐inducible factor‐1α (HIF‐1α) and the glucose transporter 1 (GLUT‐1) expression (a pro‐survival HIF‐1α‐downstream‐target) were analysed after ascorbate exposure under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. The amount of ascorbyl radicals increased with rising serum concentrations. Hypoxia (0.1% O2) globally increased the IC50 of ascorbate in the 60 cancer cell lines from 4.5 ± 3.6 mM to 10.1 ± 5.9 mM (2.2‐fold increase, P < 0.001, Mann–Whitney t‐test), thus inducing cellular resistance towards ascorbate. This ascorbate resistance depended on HIF‐1α‐signalling, but did not correlate with cell line‐specific expression of the ascorbate transporter GLUT‐1. However, under normoxic and hypoxic conditions, ascorbate treatment at the individual IC50 reduced the expression of GLUT‐1 in the cancer cells. Our data show a ROS‐induced, HIF‐1α‐ and O2‐dependent cytotoxicity of ascorbate on 60 different cancer cells. This suggests that for clinical application, cancer patients should additionally be oxygenized to increase the cytotoxic efficacy of ascorbate.
Development and Characterization of 1,906 EST-SSR Markers from Unigenes in Jute (Corchorus spp.)

Jute, comprising white and dark jute, is the second important natural fiber crop after cotton worldwide. However, the lack of expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) markers has resulted in a large gap in the improvement of jute. Previously, de novo 48,914 unigenes from white jute were assembled. In this study, 1,906 EST-SSRs were identified from these assembled uingenes. Among these markers, di-, tri- and tetra-nucleotide repeat types were the abundant types (12.0%, 56.9% and 21.6% respectively). The AG-rich or GA-rich nucleotide repeats were the predominant. Subsequently, a sample of 116 SSRs, located in genes encoding transcription factors and cellulose synthases, were selected to survey polymorphisms among12 diverse jute accessions. Of these, 83.6% successfully amplified at least one fragment and detected polymorphism among the 12diverse genotypes, indicating that the newly developed SSRs are of good quality. Furthermore, the genetic similarity coefficients of all the 12 accessions were evaluated using 97 polymorphic SSRs. The cluster analysis divided the jute accessions into two main groups with genetic similarity coefficient of 0.61. These EST-SSR markers not only enrich molecular markers of jute genome, but also facilitate genetic and genomic researches in jute.
Maskless projection lithography for the fast and flexible generation of grayscale protein patterns.

Protein patterns of different shapes and densities are useful tools for studies of cell behavior and to create biomaterials that induce specific cellular responses. Up to now the dominant techniques for creating protein patterns are mostly based on serial writing processes or require templates such as photomasks or elastomer stamps. Only a few of these techniques permit the creation of grayscale patterns. Herein, the development of a lithography system using a digital mirror device which allows fast patterning of proteins by immobilizing fluorescently labeled molecules via photobleaching is reported. Grayscale patterns of biotin with pixel sizes in the range of 2.5 μm are generated within 10 s of exposure on an area of about 5 mm(2) . This maskless projection lithography method permits the rapid and inexpensive generation of protein patterns definable by any user-defined grayscale digital image on substrate areas in the mm(2) to cm(2) range.
Predictive Model Based on Genetic Algorithm-Neural Network for Fatigue Performances of Pre-Corroded Aluminum Alloys

In the paper, genetic algorithm is introduced in the study of network authority values of BP neural network, and a GA-NN algorithm is established. Based on this genetic algorithm-neural network method, a predictive model for fatigue performances of the pre-corroded aluminum alloys under a varied corrosion environmental spectrum was developed by means of training from the testing dada, and the fatigue performances of pre-corroded aluminum alloys can be predicted. The results indicate that genetic algorithm-neural network algorithm can be employed to predict the underlying fatigue performances of the pre-corroded aluminum alloy precisely, compared with traditional neural network.
Becoming Nonfiction Authors: Engaging in Science Inquiry

This article describes how second-grade students’ literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the theoretical practices of project-based learning that informed the teacher's instruction. Then, the author explores how the teacher guided her students to an understanding of the genre and positioned her students as authors of nonfiction, taking readers through an outline of the students’ process of creating research questions, writing in their own words, establishing a purpose for their writing, and conveying scientific information through multiple modes. As a result, students had a deeper understanding of the genre of nonfiction and were engaged in scientific inquiry, learning how to convey and share nonfiction information through multimodal books.
Adaptive role switching for fair and efficient battery usage in device-to-device communication

By leveraging device-to-device communication, opportunistic networks promise to complement infrastructure-based networks, by enabling communication in remote areas or during disaster and emergency situations, as well as by giving rise to novel applications, such as location-based sharing. Yet, to become feasible in practice and accepted by users, it is crucial that opportunistic communication be energy-efficient. Through extensive and detailed measurements and analysis, we show in this paper, that all of today's device-to-device communication technologies suffer from two grave energy consumption problems: very expensive neighbor discovery and unfair connection maintenance. We consider the two most well-known technologies -- Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth, and a third solution based on the WLAN access point mode -- WLAN-Opp. We carefully design a measurement setup which allows us to isolate the energy consumption of individual operations (e.g. CPU sleeping/waking up, scanning/listening for neighbors etc) for thesetechnologies and compare the technologies based on these measurements. Our analysis reveals that neighbor discovery can quickly drain a device's battery, depending on the required scanning frequency. In addition, once a connection is established, the "host" of the connection consumes two to five times the energy needed by a "client". To solve this unfairness problem, we propose a strategy that periodically alternates the hosting role among the peers. Further, we minimize the cost of the role switching operation by using the distribution of the residual connection time of two peers to calculate an adaptive switching period. We examine the trade-off between fairness and switching cost on real-world connection traces and show that our scheme largely outperforms static role switching. Finally, we demonstrate that our fair role switching scheme is also effective when run on real devices.
Tone reproduction of High Dynamic Image

High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) is a type of images with wide luminosity levels in real scenes. It is very important to fuse the multiple photographs into a single HDRI. A method that constructs HDRI through recovering response curve of camera imaging system is proposed. The method can make effect of several important parameters to the synthesis results, and get a synthesis result for images missing the information of exposure time. As for the HDRI tone reproduction, an improved algorithm is presented in last part of the paper for processing HDRI and getting good performance
Construction and iterative threshold decoding for low rates Quasi-Cyclic One Step Majority logic decodable codes

This paper investigates the construction and iterative threshold decoding of low rate Quasi-Cyclic One Step Majority logic codes based on combinatorial designs. These codes are constructed with two type of difference family: cyclic disjoint difference sets and cyclic disjoint difference family. They can be encoded with low complexity, and perform very well when decoded with the Iterative threshold decoding (ITD) algorithm. We present an amelioration of ITD algorithm for decoding these codes. This algorithm modification can be applicable for every code rate. The performances of this algorithm for decoding these codes on Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, is investigated.
A Hybrid Approach in the Development of Behavior Based Robotics

In this paper we present the development of a method that combines the evolutionary robotics approach with action selection. A collection task is set in an arena where a Khepera robot has to collect cylinders that simulate food. Furthermore, two basic motivations, labeled as 'fear' and 'hunger', both affect the selection of the behavioral repertoire. In this paper we propose an initial evolutionary stage where behavioral modules are designed as separate selectable modules. Next, we use evolution for optimizing the motivated selection network employed for behavioral switching. Finally, we compare evolved selection with hand-coded selection, which offers some interesting results that support the use of a hybrid approach in the development of behavior-based robotics.
Agreement between mothers' and fathers' beliefs and child rearing strategies in relation to the child's social behavior

Agreement between mothers’ and fathers’ beliefs and chuld reanng strategies in relation to the chuld’s social behavior Inter-parental agreement on parents’ global beliefs and specific beliefs was investigated in relation to parents’ child reanng strategies and the child’s social behavior. The study also examined the chuld’s perception ofhis or her mother’s and father’s global beliefs, specific beliefs, and child rearing strategies in relation to mother’s and father’s perception ofthe chuld’s social behavior. Sixty intact, middle class families with their eleven to twelve year old children (grades 5 and 6) participated in the study. Global beliefs were measured with the Personal-Social Development Questionnaire (PSDQ; McGillicuddy-DeLisi, 1992) as a measure of parents’ perception ofthe source of their child’s personal-social development. Specific Beliefs were investigated with a measure developed for this research following the studies of Dix et al. (1986, 1989), Mills and Rubin (1990, 1992), Rubin and Mills (1990), and Normandeau and Lanvée (1997) to explain parents’ causal attributions for their child’s behavior. Parents provided ratings on the Child-rearing Strategies Questionnaire (CRSQ; Kochanska, Kuczynski, & Radke-Yarrow, 1989) as a measure oftheir child reanng strategies. finally, parents’ perception ofthe child’s social behavior was assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1986). In turn, children’s perception oftheir parents’ global beliefs, specific beliefs, and child reanng strategies were investigated with the same measures
A Unilateral Negative Feedback Loop Between miR-200 microRNAs and Sox2/E2F3 Controls Neural Progenitor Cell-Cycle Exit and Differentiation

MicroRNAs have emerged as key posttranscriptional regulators of gene expression during vertebrate development. We show that the miR-200 family plays a crucial role for the proper generation and survival of ventral neuronal populations in the murine midbrain/hindbrain region, including midbrain dopaminergic neurons, by directly targeting the pluripotency factor Sox2 and the cell-cycle regulator E2F3 in neural stem/progenitor cells. The lack of a negative regulation of Sox2 and E2F3 by miR-200 in conditional Dicer1 mutants (En1+/Cre; Dicer1flox/flox mice) and after miR-200 knockdown in vitro leads to a strongly reduced cell-cycle exit and neuronal differentiation of ventral midbrain/hindbrain (vMH) neural progenitors, whereas the opposite effect is seen after miR-200 overexpression in primary vMH cells. Expression of miR-200 is in turn directly regulated by Sox2 and E2F3, thereby establishing a unilateral negative feedback loop required for the cell-cycle exit and neuronal differentiation of neural stem/progenitor cells. Our findings suggest that the posttranscriptional regulation of Sox2 and E2F3 by miR-200 family members might be a general mechanism to control the transition from a pluripotent/multipotent stem/progenitor cell to a postmitotic and more differentiated cell.