Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Energy-Efficiency Analysis and Optimization for Virtual-MIMO Systems

Virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems using multiple antennas at the transmitter and a single antenna at each of the receivers have recently emerged as an alternative to point-to-point MIMO systems. This paper investigates the relationship between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) for a virtual-MIMO system that has one destination and one relay using compress-and-forward (CF) cooperation. To capture the cost of cooperation, the power allocation (between the transmitter and the relay) and the bandwidth allocation (between the data and cooperation channels) are studied. This paper derives a tight upper bound for the overall system EE as a function of SE, which exhibits good accuracy for a wide range of SE values. The EE upper bound is used to formulate an EE optimization problem. Given a target SE, the optimal power and bandwidth allocation can be derived such that the overall EE is maximized. Results indicate that the EE performance of virtual-MIMO is sensitive to many factors, including resource-allocation schemes and channel characteristics. When an out-of-band cooperation channel is considered, the performance of virtual-MIMO is close to that of the MIMO case in terms of EE. Considering a shared-band cooperation channel, virtual-MIMO with optimal power and bandwidth allocation is more energy efficient than the noncooperation case under most SE values.
Determination of three amino acids causing alteration of proteolytic activities of staphylococcal glutamyl endopeptidases

Abstract Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Staphylococcus warneri secrete glutamyl endopeptidases, designated GluV8, GluSE, and GluSW, respectively. The order of their protease activities is GluSE<GluSW<<GluV8. In the present study, we investigated the mechanism that causes these differences. Expression of chimeric proteins between GluV8 and GluSE revealed that the difference is primarily attributed to amino acid residues 170–195, which define the intrinsic protease activity, and additionally to residues 119–169, which affect the proteolytic sensitivity. Among nine substitutions present in residues 170–195 of the three proteases, the substitutions at positions 185, 188, and 189 were responsible for the changes in their activities, and the combination of W185, V188, and P189, which naturally occurs in GluV8, exerts the highest protease activity. W185 and P189 were indispensable for full activity, but V188 could be replaced by hydrophobic amino acids. These three amino acid residues appear to create a substrate-binding pocket together with the catalytic triad and the N-terminal V1, and therefore define the K m values of the proteases. We also describe a method to produce a chimeric form of GluSE and GluV8 that is resistant to proteolysis, and therefore possesses 4-fold higher activity than the wild-type recombinant GluV8.
Improving Web Server Performance by Caching Dynamic Data

Dynamic Web pages can seriously reduce the performance of Web servers. One technique for improving performance is to cache dynamic Web pages. We have developed the Dynamic Web cache which is particularly well-suited for dynamic pages. Our cache has improved performance significantly at several commercial Web sites. This paper analyzes the design and performance of the DynamicWeb cache. It also presents a model for analyzing overall system performance in the presence of caching. Our cache can satisfy several hundred requests per second. On systems which invoke server programs via CGI, the DynamicWeb cache results in near-optimal performance, where optimal performance is that which would be achieved by a hypothetical cache which consumed no CPU cycles. On a system we tested which invoked server programs via ICAPI which has significantly less overhead than CGI, the DynamicWeb cache resulted in near-optimal performance for many cases and 58% of optimal performance in the worst case. The DynamicWeb cache achieved a hit rate of around 80% when it was deployed to support the official Internet Web site for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games.
Environmental Exposure to Dioxins, Dibenzofurans, Bisphenol A, and Phthalates in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder Living near the Gulf of Mexico

Environmental exposure to organic endocrine disrupting chemicals, including dioxins, dibenzofurans, bisphenol A (BPA), and phthalates has been associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We conducted a pilot monitoring study of 30 ASD cases and 10 typically developing (TD) controls ages 2–8 years from communities along the Gulf of Mexico near Alabama, which houses 14 Superfund sites, to assess the concentrations of dioxins and dibenzofurans in serum, and BPA and phthalate ester metabolites in urine. Based on General Linear Models, the lipid- or creatinine-adjusted geometric mean concentrations of the aforementioned chemicals did not differ between the ASD case and TD control groups (all p ≥ 0.27). We compared our findings to the adjusted means as reported by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, survey years 2011–2012, and found that TD controls in our study had lower BPA (59%) and MEHHP (26%) concentrations, higher MBP (50%) concentration, and comparable (<20% difference) MEP, MBZP, MEOHP, and MCPP concentrations. We also conducted a preliminary investigation of dietary exposures and found that the consumption of certain types of fish may be associated with higher OCDD concentrations, and the consumption of soft drinks and juices may be associated with lower BPA and MEOHP concentrations, respectively.
Mesh Decomposition with Cross‐Boundary Brushes

We present a new intuitive UI, which we call cross‐boundary brushes, for interactive mesh decomposition. The user roughly draws one or more strokes across a desired cut and our system automatically returns a best cut running through all the strokes. By the different natures of part components (i.e., semantic parts) and patch components (i.e., flatter surface patches) in general models, we design two corresponding brushes: part‐brush and patch‐brush. These two types of brushes share a common user interface, enabling easy switch between them. The part‐brush executes a cut along an isoline of a harmonic field driven by the user‐specified strokes. We show that the inherent smoothness of the harmonic field together with a carefully designed isoline selection scheme lead to segmentation results that are insensitive to noise, pose, tessellation and variation in user's strokes. Our patch‐brush uses a novel facet‐based surface metric that alleviates sensitivity to noise and fine details common in region‐growing algorithms. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our cutting tools can produce user‐desired segmentations for a wide variety of models even with single strokes. We also show that our tools outperform the state‐of‐art interactive segmentation tools in terms of ease of use and segmentation quality.
Characterization of N-Linked Protein Glycosylation in Helicobacter pullorum

ABSTRACT The first bacterial N-linked glycosylation system was discovered in Campylobacter jejuni, and the key enzyme involved in the coupling of glycan to asparagine residues within the acceptor sequon of the glycoprotein is the oligosaccharyltransferase PglB. Emerging genome sequence data have revealed that pglB orthologues are present in a subset of species from the Deltaproteobacteria and Epsilonproteobacteria, including three Helicobacter species: H. pullorum, H. canadensis, and H. winghamensis. In contrast to C. jejuni, in which a single pglB gene is located within a larger gene cluster encoding the enzymes required for the biosynthesis of the N-linked glycan, these Helicobacter species contain two unrelated pglB genes (pglB1 and pglB2), neither of which is located within a larger locus involved in protein glycosylation. In complementation experiments, the H. pullorum PglB1 protein, but not PglB2, was able to transfer C. jejuni N-linked glycan onto an acceptor protein in Escherichia coli. Analysis of the characterized C. jejuni N-glycosylation system with an in vitro oligosaccharyltransferase assay followed by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry demonstrated the utility of this approach, and when applied to H. pullorum, PglB1-dependent N glycosylation with a linear pentasaccharide was observed. This reaction required an acidic residue at the −2 position of the N-glycosylation sequon, as for C. jejuni. Attempted insertional knockout mutagenesis of the H. pullorum pglB2 gene was unsuccessful, suggesting that it is essential. These first data on N-linked glycosylation in a second bacterial species demonstrate the similarities to, and fundamental differences from, the well-studied C. jejuni system.
Media consumption and the contexts of physical culture:Methodological reflections on a 'Third Generation' study of media audiences

In this paper we argue that sport media research would be enhanced by: (a) engagement with the audience research tradition, including “third generation” audience studies that emphasize relationships between viewer interpretations of media and everyday social practices; and (b) the adoption of multimethod research approaches that are sensitive to contradictions and complexities that exist in media consumption. To support this argument, we reflect on the benefits of a multimethod research design used in a recent audience study conducted by the authors on youth interpretations of media and performances of masculinity in physical education (Millington & Wilson, in press). These benefits include: enriching researcher understandings of social/cultural contexts; illuminating social hierarchies; and revealing lived contradictions. We conclude with reflections on epistemological issues and suggestions for future audience projects.
Attribute-Based Key-Insulated Encryption

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an exciting alternative to public-key encryption, as ABE develops encryption systems with high expressiveness, without the need for a public key infrastructure (PKI) that makes publicly available the mapping between identities (sets of attributes), public keys, and validity of the latter. Any setting, PKI or attribute-based, must provide a means to revoke users from the system. To mitigate the limitation of ABE with regard to revocation, we propose an attribute-based key-insulated encryption (ABKIE) scheme, which is a novel ABE scheme. In our ABKIE scheme, a private key can be renewed without having to make changes to its public key (a set of attributes). The scheme is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks. The formal proof of security is presented under the Selective-ID security model, i.e. without random oracles, assuming the decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem is computationally hard. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ABKIE scheme up to now. Further, this is also the first concrete ABE construction with regard to revocation.
A small-gain-like theorem for large-scale systems

The behavior of the solutions of large-scale nonlinear dynamical systems close to their omega-limit sets is studied. Exploiting small-gain like conditions we extend the results in [1], considering the interconnection of p of subsystems, and the results in [2], presenting a block version of the weak nested Matrosov theorem.
Globalization in a small island context: creating and marketing competitive advantage for offshore financial services

Economic globalization is a modem phenomenon well documented in a variety of literatures. Increasing fluidity of financial systems in conjunction with advancements in telecommunications support the seamless movement of assets and capital from place to place. Most attention on issues of global finance has been focused upon large places particularly the world financial centres of London, New York, and Tokyo but how do little places carve a niche to enable themselves to successfully participate in the new global economy? Why do many multinational companies choose to locate in small places? What competitive advantages may be forged from small jurisdictions? The answer to these questions will be pursued by analysing one relatively underexplored facet of the new global economy: offshore financial services.
Auto-WEKA 2.0: Automatic model selection and hyperparameter optimization in WEKA

WEKA is a widely used, open-source machine learning platform. Due to its intuitive interface, it is particularly popular with novice users. However, such users often ﬁnd it hard to identify the best approach for their particular dataset among the many available. We describe the new version of Auto-WEKA , a system designed to help such users by automatically searching through the joint space of WEKA’s learning algorithms and their respective hyperparameter settings to maximize performance, using a state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization method. Our new package is tightly integrated with WEKA, making it just as accessible to end users as any other learning algorithm
‘I’m loving life’: Adolescents’ empowering experiences of living with a mental illness

Objective: Self-stigma is a common phenomenon among adolescents suffering from psychiatric disorders; however, this important research area has received little attention. Furthermore, there is a lack of clarity in the current literature on what makes individuals more or less likely to experience self-stigma. The objectives of our article are to identify the external conditions that help promote empowerment and present a model that explicates the process of those adolescents who do not self-stigmatize. Methods: In this qualitative study, we examine the cases of three adolescents between the ages of 12–17 who were taking psychiatric medication. We gathered adolescents’ experiences and perceptions of psychiatric treatment using the TeenSEMI, coded responses, utilized Atlas.ti software to connect and hyperlink the codes, and constructed individual narratives that ultimately elicited an empowerment process among the adolescents. Results: We identified themes that helped adolescents to buffer against self-stigma; and categorized the components of the empowerment process as: diminish, normalize and attribute. Conclusion and implications for practice: We compare our empowerment model with an adolescent self-stigma model and identify key differences that may mitigate the effects of self-stigma. Although there are limitations to the generalizability of the study, authors recommend interventions applicable to youths with mental illness, as well as family and peers. This study indicates positive outcomes among adolescents who adhere to and are engaged in treatment.
Generalized AMOC Curves For Evaluation and Improvement of Event Surveillance

We introduce Generalized Activity Monitoring Operating Characteristic (G-AMOC) curves, a new framework for evaluation of outbreak detection systems. G-AMOC curves provide a new approach to evaluating and improving the timeliness of disease outbreak detection by taking the user's response protocol into account and considering when the user will initiate an investigation in response to the system's alerts. The standard AMOC curve is a special case of G-AMOC curves that assumes a trivial response protocol (initiating a new and separate investigation in response to each alert signal). Practical application of a surveillance system is often improved, however, by using more elaborate response protocols, such as grouping alerts or ignoring isolated signals. We present results of experiments demonstrating that we can use G-AMOC curves as 1) a descriptive tool, to provide a more accurate comparison of systems than the standard AMOC curve, and 2) as a prescriptive tool, to choose appropriate response protocols for a detection system, and thus improve its performance.
Forest Reranking through Subtree Ranking

We propose the subtree ranking approach to parse forest reranking which is a generalization of current perceptron-based reranking methods. For the training of the reranker, we extract competing local subtrees, hence the training instances (candidate subtree sets) are very similar to those used during beam-search parsing. This leads to better parameter optimization. Another chief advantage of the framework is that arbitrary learning to rank methods can be applied. We evaluated our reranking approach on German and English phrase structure parsing tasks and compared it to various state-of-the-art reranking approaches such as the perceptron-based forest reranker. The subtree ranking approach with a Maximum Entropy model significantly outperformed the other approaches.
Living in History in Lebanon: The influence of chronic social upheaval on the organisation of autobiographical memories

The Living in History (LiH) effect is a litmus test for the degree to which historical events reorganise autobiographical memory. The LiH effect was studied in two Lebanese samples: a Beiruti sample that lived in the epicentre of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and another group from the Bi'qa region who lived in an area that was indirectly exposed for most of the civil war but experienced one short-term period of war during the Israeli invasion. Using the two-phase word-cueing task to elicit dated autobiographical memories, we observed a significantly stronger LiH effect in the Beirut sample but also a significant yet weaker LiH effect in the Bi'qa sample. In addition to the main finding we offer evidence that the LiH effect waxes and wanes with the level of conflict in an area and that reported personal experiences of war exposure predict the strength of the LiH effect. Our findings suggest that collective transitional events which produce a marked change in the fabric of daily living engender historically defined autobiographical periods which give structure and organisation to how individuals remember their past.
Text-mess in the Medical Retrieval ImageCLEF08 Task

This paper describes our participation in the Medical Retrieval task at ImageCLEF 2008. We present the joint work of two teams belonging to the TEXT-MESS project using a new system that combines the 2 individual systems of these teams. The aim of the experiments performed is to figure out if there are techniques used in one of the two systems which can complement the other system in order to improve their performance. The best results obtained in the training phase and in the competition has been reached with a configuration which uses the IR-n system with a negative query expansion based on the acquisition type of the image mixed with the SINAI system with a MeSH based query expansion. We have obtained a MAP of 0.2777 for our best run, obtaining the 5th place in the ranking of textual participant runs submitted, and the 6th place in the global classification.
“If I Had a New Notebook, I Know Things Would Change”: Bright Underachieving Young Men in Urban Classrooms

Despite a preponderance of research on students who fail academically in urban schools, few studies have examined the academic experience of high-ability students in urban schools, particularly those who do not reach their potential. The study described in this article examined what happens to intelligent urban teenagers when they achieve academically. Through a qualitative research design that integrated case study and ethnographic research, the investigation examined the lives of 6 high-ability males in an inner-city high school to understand how their urban life experiences influenced their underachievement. The 6 cases reported in this study are a subset of 12 cases (Hébert, 1993) that contributed to a larger study (Reis, Hérbert, Diaz, Maxfield, & Ratley, 1995) of talented students in an urban high school. Major findings uncovered in chronicling the lives of 6 underachievers included: inappropriate curricular and counseling experiences, problematic family issues, a negative peer group and environmental influences, and discipline problems. Implications of these findings are presented, as are suggestions for meeting the educational needs of high-ability underachieving young men in urban secondary schools.
Learners' goal profiles and their learning patterns over an academic year

The present study aimed to examine distance learners’ goal profiles and their contrasting patterns of learning and achievements at three different points during an academic year, i.e. in the beginning of the course in relation to learners’ general orientations to learning, at the middle of the course in relation to learners’ completion of an assignment, and towards the end of the course in relation to learners’ preparation for course examination. Two hundred seventy-six adult distance learners completed three survey questionnaires that assessed their motivation and learning at these three learning points. Using person-centred analytical procedures, this study located four groups of learners based on different combinations of mastery and performance-approach goals. MANOVA results have shown that multiple-goal learners (High mastery/High performance, HH) who held strong mastery and performance-approach goals used more deep and regulatory strategies and showed a higher level of learning interest across three waves of surveys than did those focusing solely on mastery (HL) or performance-approach goals (LH). However, the multiple-goal learners did not have better achievement levels compared to those focusing solely on mastery goals (HL). Given that multiple goal learners learnt with a more engaged pattern, it is less likely that these motivated learners will drop out of distance learning courses and programs. Future studies should explore how these goals can be promoted simultaneously in distance learning.
StatPlayground: Exploring Statistics through Visualizations

Statistical analysis is a crucial part of many research fields: it is used by the researcher to validate her hypothesis and to communicate her findings to the community. Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), a commonly used statistical analysis approach in many research fields, has been criticized over the years due to the prevalence of misconceptions and improper practice. We introduce StatPlayground, an exploratory tool as a viable solution to the root problem of statistical illiteracy. StatPlayground allows users to control data characteristics (e.g., mean, variance of distributions) by directly manipulating visualizations (e.g., box plots) to see the effect on the resulting inferential statistics (e.g., p-value, effect size) and vice versa. We believe that StatPlayground has the potential to help users improve certain statistical literacy skills. We elaborate on the motivation behind this tool and demonstrate its features through use cases.
Learning force concepts using visual trajectory and haptic force information at the elementary school level

The present study investigated the use of visual trajectory and haptic force information in learning concepts involving force. Specifically, learning modules for instructing buoyant forces were developed for use with a computer monitor and a force feedback device. Students from an elementary school at the fourth and sixth grades were recruited to participate in the study. The students were separated into visual and visuohaptic groups to measure the possible benefits haptic feedback might provide as compared to the vision-alone condition. A 10-question content test was developed and administered before and after the learning activities. The pretest and posttest scores showed that all students benefited from the computer simulations. The visuohaptic group did not perform significantly better than the visual group. An important finding was that the fourth graders learned as much as the sixth graders, despite their younger age and little prior exposure to concepts such as density and volume, which are important for understanding buoyancy. Future work will design instructional and assessment materials that focus more on the haptic modality.