Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Universal polar codes for more capable and less noisy channels and sources

We prove two results on the universality of polar codes for source coding and channel communication. First, we show that for any polar code built for a source PX,Z there exists a slightly modified polar code-having the same rate, the same encoding and decoding complexity and the same error rate-that is universal for every source PX,Y when using successive cancellation decoding, at least when the channel PY|X is more capable than PZ|X and PX is such that it maximizes I(X; Y )-I(X;Z) for the given channels PY|X and PZ|X. This result extends to channel coding for discrete memoryless channels. Second, we prove that polar codes using successive cancellation decoding are universal for less noisy discrete memoryless channels.
Prediction of Attitude toward Substance Use on the Basis of Positive Youth Development and Life Satisfaction among Adolescents

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship of positive youth development and life satisfaction with attitude toward substance use in high school students of Qom city. Method: This study was a descriptive research, which falls within the category of correlational studies. The senior high school students of Qom city constituted the statistical population of this study, among whom the number of 385 students (198 girls and 187 boys) was selected through multistage cluster sampling. The participants completed Geldhof et al.'s Positive Youth Development Scale, Diener et al.'s Satisfaction with Life Scale, and Rezaee et al.'s Attitude toward Substance Use Questionnaire. Results: Pearson correlation results indicated that the components of positive youth development has a significant negative relationship with attitude toward substance use. In addition, a significant negative relationship was observed between the components of attitude toward substance use and life satisfaction. Stepwise regression analysis revealed that the components of positive youth development (connection, character, and caring) and life satisfaction respectively make the highest contribution to the prediction of attitude toward substance use. Conclusion: The current research findings emphasized the need for attention to the assets and resources of positive youth development and life satisfaction as the effective factors in reducing addiction and substance use among students.
VIBRATION SUPPRESSION USING MECHATRONIC SYSTEMS

Vibration suppression has always been an important issue in developing efficient motion control systems. Traditionally, in a mechanical system, the vibrations are suppressed by adding more material to the system in order to increase the rigidity. However, recent advancements in mechatronics, has provided with many alternative solution that avoids excess material addition and increased performance. This paper attempts to summarize various methods that are being developed for vibration detection and suppression. The techniques included in this paper are motion control strategies based on sensors, sensor-actuator and sensorless controllers. Keywords-Vibration suppression; Sensorless control technique; piezoelectric; shape memory alloy;PID; Input shaping
Flow Labelled IP: Connectionless ATM Under IP

IP traffic on the Internet and private enterprise networks has been growing exponentially for some time. This growth is beginning to stress the traditional, processor based design of current day routers. Switching technology offers much higher aggregate bandwidth but presently only offers a bridging solution. Various proposals are under way to support IP routing over ATM switching technology; however, these proposals hide the real network topology from the IP layer by treating the data-link layer as a large, opaque, network cloud. We argue that this leads to complexity, inefficiency and duplication of functionality in the resulting network. We propose an alternative in which we discard the connection oriented nature of ATM and integrate fast ATM hardware directly with IP, preserving the connectionless nature of IP. We use “soft” state in the ATM hardware to cache the IP forwarding decision. This enables further traffic on the same IP flow to be switched by the ATM hardware rather than forwarded by IP software. We claim that this approach combines the simplicity, scalability, and robustness of IP with the speed, capacity, and multiservice traffic capabilities of ATM.
Peltier-based freeze-thaw connector for waterborne self-assembly systems

We present a novel type of inter-module connection mechanism for waterborne modular robotic systems. The proposed mechanism exploits the thermoelectric effect to cool down and freeze the water between two modules thus causes them to attach to each other. We validate the feasibility of this mechanism by embedding a Peltier heat pump (m = 0.8 g) in two types of cm scale self-assembly systems, one in which the modules are free to move and one in which the modules are linked together by hinges. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Peltier-based connector has (a) a high bond strength/weight ratio for a rather large range of temperatures and (b) is rather robust against misalignments between docking modules, making it a useful alternative to current connection mechanisms for small scale low autonomy self-assembly systems.
Perception of anger and happiness from resynthesized speech with size-related manipulations

Recent research has shown that listeners can hear anger and happiness from articulatorily synthesized vowels with body-size-related manipulations. In the present study we explore the possibility that direct manipulation of spectrum and F0 of naturally produced speech along the size dimension can also lead to perception of certain emotions. Ten English digits spoken in a neutral emotion by a native speaker of British English were resynthesized with spectral and F0 manipulations to simulate changes in auditory impression of body size. Seven native listeners judged the size and emotion of the speaker. Results show that they heard digits with lower F0 and/or smaller spectral dispersion as said by a large or angry speaker, and digits with higher F0 and/or larger spectral dispersion as by a small or happy speaker. These results are consistent with a previous finding based on synthetic speech. This is further evidence that size projection is a basic encoding mechanism for anger and happiness in the vocal expression of emotions.
Generic programming for high‐performance scientific applications

We present case studies that apply generic programming to the development of high‐performance parallel code for solving two archetypal partial differential equations (PDEs). We examine the overall structure of the example scientific codes and consider their generic implementation. With a generic approach it is a straightforward matter to reuse software components from different sources; implementations with components from the Iterative Template Library (ITL), the Matrix Template Library (MTL), Blitz++, A++/P++, and Fortran BLAS are presented. Our newly developed Generic Message Passing library is used for communication. We compare the generic implementations with equivalent implementations developed with alternative libraries and languages and discuss performance as well as software engineering issues. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Timely identification of people with intellectual disabilities in need of palliative care

There is a growing attention for improving palliative care in people with intellectual disabilities. This is needed because compared to general palliative care knowledge and products are lacking in this population. Furthermore, existing knowledge and products may not be applicable to people with intellectual disabilities because of the specific care characteristics of this group. In order to provide good palliative care it is essential that care professionals are able to identify the need for this care. This seems to be a major problem in the care for people with intellectual disabilities. Therefore, in this thesis we describe the development and evaluation of PALLI: a screening tool (checklist) that supports care professionals in timely identifying people with intellectual disabilities who may benefit from palliative care. PALLI was developed using knowledge from daily practice has been tested on applicability, feasibility and validity. PALLI is valuable as it may help to attain the highest level of the quality of end-of-life for the person with IDs.
Open Reduction and Internal Fixation of Mandibular Fracture without Rigid Maxillomandibular Fixation

Abstract Introduction The ability to treat fracture with open reduction and internal fixation (OR/IF) has dramatically revolutionized the approach to mandible fracture. With OR/IF, the postoperative role of rigid maxillomandibular fixation (MMF) has declined, but it is used to maintain proper occlusion until internal fixation of the fracture is achieved. Objective To assess intraoperative manual MMF during OR/IF of selected cases of mandibular fractures. Methods This prospective study was conducted on 80 patients with isolated mandibular fractures managed by OR/IF using two titanium miniplates. The patients were classified into two groups: a control group (40 patients) treated by OR/IF after intraoperative rigid MMF followed by immediate MMF removal, and a study group (40 patients) treated by rigid MMF, which was replaced by temporary intraoperative manual MMF (3MF) until plate fixation. Results There were no significant differences of the postoperative complication and dental occlusion, although a highly significant reduction of operative time was achieved in the 3MF group. Patient who received the 3MF technique had statistically significantly better average intrinsic vertical mouth opening in the early postoperative period (1 week after surgery), and normal mouth opening could be achieved in all cases in both groups 8 weeks after surgery. Conclusions Intraoperative rigid MMF is not mandatory and can be replaced in selected cases of fracture mandible by manual maintenance of proper dental occlusion until hardware fixation, gaining the advantages of shorter operative time and less risk of blood-transmitted diseases to the surgical team and the patient in addition to the benefits of immediate postoperative mandible mobilization.
Triosephosphate Isomerase Gene Characterization and Potential Zoonotic Transmission of Giardia duodenalis

To address the source of infection in humans and public health importance of Giardia duodenalis parasites from animals, nucleotide sequences of the triosephosphate isomerase (TPI) gene were generated for 37 human isolates, 15 dog isolates, 8 muskrat isolates, 7 isolates each from cattle and beavers, and 1 isolate each from a rat and a rabbit. Distinct genotypes were found in humans, cattle, beavers, dogs, muskrats, and rats. TPI and small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) gene sequences of G. microti from muskrats were also generated and analyzed. Phylogenetic analysis on the TPI sequences confirmed the formation of distinct groups. Nevertheless, a major group (assemblage B) contained most of the human and muskrat isolates, all beaver isolates, and the rabbit isolate. These data confirm that G. duodenalis from certain animals can potentially infect humans and should be useful in the detection, differentiation, and taxonomy of Giardia spp.
Iterative Decoding Based on the Concave-Convex Procedure

New decoding algorithms for binary linear codes based on the concave-convex procedure are presented. Numerical experiments show that the proposed decoding algorithms surpass Belief Propagation (BP) decoding in error performance. Average computational complexity of one of the proposed decoding algorithms is only a few times greater than that of the BP decoding.
Jigg: A Framework for an Easy Natural Language Processing Pipeline

We present Jigg, a Scala (or JVMbased) NLP annotation pipeline framework, which is easy to use and is extensible. Jigg supports a very simple interface similar to Stanford CoreNLP, the most successful NLP pipeline toolkit, but has more flexibility to adapt to new types of annotation. On this framework, system developers can easily integrate their downstream system into a NLP pipeline from a raw text by just preparing a wrapper of it.
Development and Validation of a Questionnaire to Measure Quality of Life in Caregivers of Patients with Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (SAC-QoL)

Background: Severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and affective disorders, have considerable effects on the life of not only patients, but also their caregivers. Objective: The aim of this study was to develop a self-administered quality of life (QoL) questionnaire for the assessment of QoL in caregivers of patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders. Methods: Based on a mixed method approach and purposive sampling method, a sample consisting of 196 caregivers was recruited from 2 psychiatric hospitals in Tehran and Kerman, Iran, as well as a charity center in Kerman during 2015 - 16. A 67-item questionnaire was developed in the qualitative phase of the study, consisting of semi-structured interviews with 45 caregivers, comments of an expert panel, and some items from other relevant questionnaires. The item reduction in the quantitative phase was based on item distribution, missing data per item, inter-item correlation, and factor analysis. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) was calculated for all the dimensions. Convergent validity was assessed by Pearson’s correlation coefficient test, and discriminant validity was analyzed, using student’s t test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results: The final version of the questionnaire included 21 items and 7 dimensions: emotional burden (5 items); dealing with patient symptoms (3 items); relationship with the therapeutic team (3 items); relationship with family (2 items); financial burden (3 items); relationship with the extended family and friends (2 items); and latent worry (3 items). The 7 dimensions could explain 78.45% of the total variance. Item internal consistency was satisfactory for all the dimensions, ranging from 0.77 to 0.96 for each item. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient ranged from 0.74 to 0.89 in the whole sample. The SAC-QoL index was significantly correlated with all the dimensions of the world health organization QoL-BREF (WHOQoL-BREF) scale (r, 0.32 - 0.65). Also, the predefined hypotheses confirmed the discriminant validity (P < 0.01). Conclusions: The SAC-QoL questionnaire revealed acceptable psychometric properties. Therefore, it can be considered as a valid and reliable measure of QoL in caregivers of patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders. Moreover, it would be useful for clinicians and authorities to focus on caregivers who are primary providers of healthcare services.
Estimating Body Pose of Infants in Depth Images Using Random Ferns

In recent years, many systems for motion analysis of infants have been developed which either use markers or lack 3D information. We propose a system that can be trained fast and flexibly to fit the requirements of markerless 3D movement analysis of infants. Random Ferns are used as an efficient and robust alternative to Random Forests to find the 3D positions of body joints in single depth images. The training time is reduced by several orders of magnitude compared to the Kinect approach using a similar amount of data. Our system is trained in 9 hours on a 32 core workstation opposed to 24 hours on a 1000 core cluster, achieving comparable accuracy to the Kinect SDK on a publicly available pose estimation benchmark dataset containing adults. On manually annotated recordings of an infant, we obtain an average distance error over all joints of 41 mm. Building on the proposed approach, we aim to develop an automated, unintrusive, cheap and objective system for the early detection of infantile movement disorders like cerebral palsy using 3D motion analysis techniques.
The role of cytochrome c in caspase activation in Drosophila melanogaster cells

The release of cytochrome c from mitochondria is necessary for the formation of the Apaf-1 apoptosome and subsequent activation of caspase-9 in mammalian cells. However, the role of cytochrome c in caspase activation in Drosophila cells is not well understood. We demonstrate here that cytochrome c remains associated with mitochondria during apoptosis of Drosophila cells and that the initiator caspase DRONC and effector caspase DRICE are activated after various death stimuli without any significant release of cytochrome c in the cytosol. Ectopic expression of the proapoptotic Bcl-2 protein, DEBCL, also fails to show any cytochrome c release from mitochondria. A significant proportion of cellular DRONC and DRICE appears to localize near mitochondria, suggesting that an apoptosome may form in the vicinity of mitochondria in the absence of cytochrome c release. In vitro, DRONC was recruited to a >700-kD complex, similar to the mammalian apoptosome in cell extracts supplemented with cytochrome c and dATP. These results suggest that caspase activation in insects follows a more primitive mechanism that may be the precursor to the caspase activation pathways in mammals.
Activity-related biometric authentication

This project aims at developing a biometric authentication system exploiting new features extracted by analysing the dynamic nature of various modalities, including motion analysis during ordinary tasks performed in front of a computer, analysis of speech, continous face and facial movement analysis, and even patterns for grasping objects. We test the potential and contribution of each of these modalities for biometric authentication in the face of natural, uncontrolled environments, as well as their fusion.
Hierarchical Summarizing and Evaluating for Web Pages

In this investigation we propose a novel summarization method of Web pages using hierarchical expression. We discuss close relationship between summarization and hierarchical clustering to obtain the results, and we examine how to evaluate hierarchical summarization based on both correlation and structural aspects. We describe some experimental results using NTCIR Web documents to examine our method.
Capturing and retaining knowledge to improve design group performance

This article explores the management and organisational context for capturing and retaining knowledge transferred through the design process. It is widely acknowledged that our ability to successfully organise and transfer design knowledge is dependant upon the context in which it is situated. However the knowledge generated through the creative process is often viewed from the perspective of the artefact, and the outcome of its production, rather than the process itself.
Randomized study of reduced-intensity chemotherapy combined with imatinib in adults with Ph-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

In this study, we randomly compared high doses of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor imatinib combined with reduced-intensity chemotherapy (arm A) to standard imatinib/hyperCVAD (cyclophosphamide/vincristine/doxorubicin/dexamethasone) therapy (arm B) in 268 adults (median age, 47 years) with Philadelphia chromosome-positive (Ph+) acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The primary objective was the major molecular response (MMolR) rate after cycle 2, patients being then eligible for allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT) if they had a donor, or autologous SCT if in MMolR and no donor. With fewer induction deaths, the complete remission (CR) rate was higher in arm A than in arm B (98% vs 91%; P = .006), whereas the MMolR rate was similar in both arms (66% vs 64%). With a median follow-up of 4.8 years, 5-year event-free survival and overall survival (OS) rates were estimated at 37.1% and 45.6%, respectively, without difference between the arms. Allogeneic transplantation was associated with a significant benefit in relapse-free survival (hazard ratio [HR], 0.69; P = .036) and OS (HR, 0.64; P = .02), with initial white blood cell count being the only factor significantly interacting with this SCT effect. In patients achieving MMolR, outcome was similar after autologous and allogeneic transplantation. This study validates an induction regimen combining reduced-intensity chemotherapy and imatinib in Ph+ ALL adult patients and suggests that SCT in first CR is still a good option for Ph+ ALL adult patients. This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials. gov as #NCT00327678.
Rapid Recovery for Systems with Scarce Faults

Our goal is to achieve a high degree of fault tolerance through the control of a safety critical systems. This reduces to solving a game between a malicious environment that injects failures and a controller who tries to establish a correct behavior. We suggest a new control objective for such systems that offers a better balance between complexity and precision: we seek systems that are k-resilient. In order to be k-resilient, a system needs to be able to rapidly recover from a small number, up to k, of local faults infinitely many times, provided that blocks of up to k faults are separated by short recovery periods in which no fault occurs. k-resilience is a simple but powerful abstraction from the precise distribution of local faults, but much more refined than the traditional objective to maximize the number of local faults. We argue why we believe this to be the right level of abstraction for safety critical systems when local faults are few and far between. We show that the computational complexity of constructing optimal control with respect to resilience is low and demonstrate the feasibility through an implementation and experimental results.
Design of a new flexure-based XYZ parallel nanopositioning stage

This paper concentrates on the mechanism design of a new compact parallel flexure stage with three DOFs. First of all, a bridge-principle amplifier is proposed by a serial connection of two fundamental bridge amplifiers. Then, an analytical study of amplifiers in terms of two-stage amplifiers is conducted by performing finite-element analysis (FEA) simulations. Later, a PPR flexure joint is demonstrated to reduce the cross-axis error. Owing to a larger amplification ratio and flexures, the two-stage amplifier is then employed to devise an XYZ parallel stage with decoupled motion. Driven by three low-voltage piezoelectric stacks, the XYZ stage provides larger decoupled motions by using the two-stacked amplifiers, which directly connect the actuators and output platform with the PPR joints. The performance of the designed stage is verified by FEA simulation study.
Web-based calibration of observers using MRI of the temporomandibular joint.

OBJECTIVES Research diagnostic criteria for temporomandibular disorders (RDC/TMDs) were proposed in 1992 with the aim of standardizing and testing methods for diagnosing TMDs. RDC/TMDs have so far been lacking standardized methods for imaging and criteria for imaging diagnosis of disorders of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). Criteria for disorders of the TMJ have recently been proposed for MRI. The aim of this study was to publish MR images of the TMJ on the web and to test the agreement of five observers using the criteria. METHODS 20 cases of MRI of the TMJ were published on the web together with the criteria. The MR images were taken in closed and open mouth positions, and sagittal and coronal views. Five observers diagnosed disc position, disc shape, joint effusion and loose calcified bodies in the TMJ. RESULTS In all cases except one, three or more observers agreed upon the diagnosis. All agreed on whether a loose calcified body was present or not. The second best agreement was obtained for disc position in the sagittal view, where all observers agreed in 16 of the 20 cases. For disc position in the coronal view and the evaluation of the disc shape, observer agreement was lower. CONCLUSION Criteria were useful in order to standardize and simplify evaluation and thereby probably increase the diagnostic outcome among different observers for MRI of the TMJ. We recommend that the criteria be used internationally to facilitate comparisons between different studies.