Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Delay-constrained Scheduling in Multi-radio , Multi-channel Wireless Mesh

In this work, we consider the goal of scheduling the maximum number of voice calls in a TDMA-based multi-radio, multi-channel mesh network. One of main challenges to achieve this goal is the difficulty in providing strict (packet-level) delay guarantees for voice traffic in capacity limited multi-hop wireless networks. In this respect, we propose DelayCheck, an online centralized scheduling and call-admission-control (CAC) algorithm which effectively schedules constant-bit-rate voice traffic in TDMAbased mesh networks. DelayCheck solves the joint routing, channel assignment and link scheduling problem along with delay constraint. We formulate a relaxed version of this scheduling problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP), the LP version of which gives us an optimality upper bound. We compare the output of DelayCheck with the LP-based upper bound as well as with two state-of-the-art prior scheduling algorithms. DelayCheck performs remarkably well, accepting about 93% of voice calls as compared to LP-based upper bound. As compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, DelayCheck improves scheduler efficiency by more than 34% and reduces call rejections by 2 fold. We also demonstrate that DelayCheck efficiently exploits the number of channels available for scheduling. With implementation optimizations, we show that DelayCheck has low memory and CPU requirements, thus making it practical.
Total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and nutrient limitation in lakes and oceans: Is there a common relationship?

Total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) measurements and contemporaneous measurements of chlorophyll a (Chl a) and phytoplankton nutrient deficiency have been made across a broad range of lakes and ocean sites using common methods. The ocean environment was nutrient rich in terms of TN and TP when compared with most lakes in the study, although Lake Victoria had the highest values of TN and TP. TN concentrations in lakes rose rapidly with TP concentrations, from low values to TN concentrations that are similar to those associated with the ocean sites. In contrast, the TN concentrations in the oceans were relatively homogeneous and independent of TP concentrations. The hyperbolic shape of the TN:TP relationship created a broad range of TN:TP values for both lakes and oceans. The TN:TP ratios of the surface ocean sites were usually well in excess of the Redfield ratio that is noted in the deep ocean. Phytoplankton biomass, as indicated by Chl a, was strongly dependent upon TP in the lakes, and there was a weaker relationship with TN. Oceanic Chl a values showed a positive relationship with TP, but at much higher TP values than were observed in the lakes; there was no relation with TN.P‐deficient phytoplankton growth was inferred using independent indicators when TP was >0.5 µmol L−1 at both freshwater and marine sites. N‐deficiency indicators were highly variable and did not show any clear dependence on TN concentration. The TN:TP ratio was indicative of which nutrient would become limiting for growth in both lakes and oceans. When all sites are compared, N‐deficient growth was apparent at TN:TP µ 20 (molar), whereas P‐deficient growth consistently occurred when TN:TP µ 50 (molar). At intermediate TN:TP ratios, either N or P can become deficient. We conclude that N or P limitation of algal growth is a product of the TN and TP concentration and the TN:TP ratio rather than a product of whether the system of study is marine or freshwater.
Detection of melanoma from dermoscopic images of naevi acquired under uncontrolled conditions

Background and objective: Several systems for the diagnosis of melanoma from images of naevi obtained under controlled conditions have demonstrated comparable efficiency with dermatologists. However, their robustness to analyze daily routine images was sometimes questionable. The purpose of this work is to investigate to what extent the automatic melanoma diagnosis may be achieved from the analysis of uncontrolled images of pigmented skin lesions.
Adapting Heuristics for the Mobile Panorama

Expert-based usability inspection methods are well established; the heuristic method in particular is widely known for being fast, relatively inexpensive and easy to learn. However, traditional heuristics are not easily applied to the mobile panorama. This paper is concerned with preliminary work in the design of a set of heuristics that are tailored to the evaluation of native smartphone applications. In this work, Nielsen's original set of heuristics as well as research in the field of usability evaluation for mobile computing were analysed and used to derive a set of heuristics for the evaluation of native smartphone applications.
Relationship between service quality, academic quality and satisfaction among students of Southern Thailand government universities: The moderating effect of value

In the context of higher education institutions, particularly those located in southern Thailand, achieving student satisfaction is imperative for a number of reasons. Firstly, higher education institutions in this region are currently faced with situations that result in decreasing numbers of students. Secondly, competition tends to increase every year from both within and outside the country. Hence, low student satisfaction becomes an essential issue for higher education institutions to resolve. Moreover, indepth investigation on student satisfaction in this region is under-researched. Past studies have shown that student satisfaction is influenced by a variety of factors, including aspects related to quality and value. Therefore, this study sought to assess the relationship between service quality and academic quality on student satisfaction, and also to gauge the moderating effect of value using a multi-items measurement. Important instruments, such as the SERVPERF and the PERVAL scales, were used in this study. The respondents for this study were students enrolled in ten (10) government universities in the southern region of Thailand. A total of 768 questionnaires were distributed, and only 346 of them were usable. Approximately, 14 hypotheses were developed and tested with multiple regression and hierarchical regression analyses. The results indicated that several dimensions of service quality and academic quality were significantly related to student satisfaction, and the explanation power of the model increased from 25.6% to 33.5% when value moderated the relationship which explained the moderating effect of value. Plausible reasons for the findings were discussed within the context of the study. Both practical and theoretical contributions as well as recommendations for future research were made.
Residents’ Attitudes towards Sustainable Tourism Development in a Historical-Cultural Village: Influence of Perceived Impacts, Sense of Place and Tourism Development Potential

This study aims to assess the residents’ support for sustainable tourism development in a destination that is in the initial tourism development stage. Residents’ perception of sustainable tourism development potential, sense of place, perceived tourism impacts, and tourism development support were involved in this study. A total of 331 completed questionnaire surveys were collected in Luozhou, a historical-cultural village in China. The empirical data were analyzed using a structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, and the results revealed that perceived collective benefits had a significant positive effect on tourism development support, whereas the other three perceived impacts’ influence were not significant. The relationship between residents’ sense of place and perceived collective and personal benefits, perceived personal costs and tourism development support, were significant. Additionally, residents’ perceptions of tourism development potential had a significant influence on perceived impact and tourism development support except for perceived personal benefits. Some practical implications of those findings for tourism planning and development are also discussed.
Adaptive linear prediction for lossless video coding

Linear prediction is an efficient tool for lossless video coding; however data overfitting and context dilution often occur which reduce the prediction efficiency, especially in occlude and large motion image area. In this paper, we will adopt intra and inter two liner prediction modes to eliminate the redundancy among temporal and spatial neighbor pixels. The two prediction modes can be adaptively switched based on their prediction accuracy evaluation in predefined neighborhood region. Experiment results shows that our proposed method can improve prediction efficiency up to 0.27dB.
Role of Polyphosphate Kinase in Biofilm Formation by Porphyromonas gingivalis

ABSTRACT In order to assess the role of polyphosphate kinase (PPK) in the physiology of Porphyromonas gingivalis, a ppk gene mutant, CW120, was constructed and characterized. P. gingivalis was demonstrated to synthesize short-chain polyphosphate (polyP) but not long-chain polyP. CW120 failed to survive in the stationary phase as well as the parental cell did, and it was attenuated in biofilm formation on polyvinylchloride and glass surfaces. Furthermore, the complementation by insertion of an intact copy of the ppk gene into the mutant CW120 restored its biofilm formation and stationary-phase survival. These results suggest that PPK may be important for incorporation of these organisms into subgingival plaque in the human oral cavity.
New spatially constrained source separation using tensor decomposition

In this paper common spatial patterns filter has been combined with conventional PARAFAC2 tensor decomposition in the design of a new spatially constrained source separation system. This approach is particularly useful in separation of weak intermittent signal components such as interictal discharges originated from deep brain sources. The results of applying the method to synthetic data show that it outperforms conventional blind source separation methods which are often unable to separate weak intermittent nonstationary sources.
Video forgery detection and localization based on 3D patchmatch

A new algorithm is proposed for the detection and accurate localization of copy-move video forgeries. Major ingredients of the proposed algorithm are i) noise-resilient rotation-invariant features, ii) dense-field matching over the whole video by means of a suitably modified fast algorithm for approximate nearest neighbor search, iii) ad hoc fast post-processing for forgery detection and false alarm removal. Experiments carried out on a dataset publicly available for this task show promising results, suggesting also a number of directions for future research.
Construction of discontinuous Galerkin time domain methods for Maxwell's equations on staggered grids

We propose a class of DG methods for the solution of Maxwell's equations in the time domain using staggered grid discretization. The method can be regarded as a generalization of the well-known FDTD technique. The present approach, however, applies to high order approximations as well. In terms of numerical properties, the method shares the energy conservation property with central flux DG formulations. On the other hand, the method is optimally convergent as is the case for dissipative DG methods using upwind fluxes. We perform a Bloch wave dispersion analysis in the one dimensional case. It shows that grid staggering allows to eliminate the spurious mode solutions originating from odd-even decoupling which are otherwise present in common DG formulations.
Does the Internet Change the Competition of Scholarly Communities? - Evidence from a Citation Analysis

Recent research on search costs in electronic markets documents that the wide use of Internet has reduced consumer search costs and has increased market efficiency. This study, considering scholarly publications as a special type of product, investigates the Internet’s impact on knowledge usage and transfer in academic communities. Based on the work on search theory and knowledge transfer, this paper proposes that lower search costs of scientific publications can increase scholars’ knowledge usage and change their capability or means to compete in the scientific marketplace for audiences. Scholarly articles not freely available online may be quoted less because of the easy and free access to a growing number of substitutable publications. Analysis of randomly selected publications from the ACM digital library provides preliminary support for my propositions. In addition, results also suggest that the Internet has a major impact on the speed of knowledge transfer among scholars.
Transmission strategies selection for cellular networks

For cellular networks, the users' location and transmit power greatly influence the strength of interference caused to neighbor cells. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the approximate sum rate performance of singular value decomposition and interference alignment transmission strategies. Based on the analysis, a novel combined transmission strategy using strategies selection is presented to improve the system performance. And this novel combined transmission strategy could highly reduce the system complexity and the demand of instant channel state information.
Teleoperation of free-floating space manipulator systems

Free-flying space robotic devices, in which manipulators are mounted on a thruster-equipped spacecraft, will assist in the construction, repair and maintenance of satellites and future space stations. Operation in a free-floating mode, in which spacecraft thrusters are turned off, increases a system's life. The teleoperation of free-floating systems is complicated due to the dynamic coupling between a system's manipulator and its spacecraft. Controlling such a system using visual feedback is not straightforward, especially when the task is to move the end-effector with respect to an inertially fixed target. In addition, free-floating systems are subject to path-dependent Dynamic Singularities, which restrict the paths by which Path Dependent Workspace points can be reached. These characteristics can result in increased operator burden during system teleoperation. A teleoperation planning system to assist the operator of a free-floating space robot is presented. Given an initial and a target end-effector location, and an optimal connecting path, this system examines the feasibility of reaching the target from the initial location. If a problem is detected, the system proposes an alternative feasible path. An example demonstrates the value of such a teleoperator planning aid.
Cross-region collaborative filtering for new point-of-interest recommendation

With the rapid growth of location-based social networks (LBSNs), Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is in increasingly higher demand these years. In this paper, our aim is to recommend new POIs to a user in regions where he has rarely been before. Different from the classical memory-based recommendation algorithms using user rating data to compute similarity between users or items to make recommendation, we propose a cross-region collaborative filtering method based on hidden topics mined from user check-in records to recommend new POIs. Experimental results on a real-world LBSNs dataset show that our method consistently outperforms naive CF method.
In Silico Molecular Docking Studies and Design of Dengue Virus Inhibitors

Dengue fever is an infectious tropical disease which is caused by the dengue virus. Dengue infection is one of the most significant mosquito-transmitted infections which is common in >100 tropical and subtropical countries. Dengue fever is becoming a serious health risk these days and it shortly needs treatment against the increasing problems around the globe and the existence of resisting mutants of dengue virus. In this study the problem of designing an anti-dengue drug with more effectiveness has been solved by using computer aided drug designing. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) entails the use of biochemical information of ligand- receptor interaction sequentially to hypothesize the drugs refinements. Docking of selected ligands, having anti- dengue activity with the active-site of protein 2FOM, was done to find the biochemical information. Docking interactions were interpreted in the form of hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic and ionic interactions. On the basis of this interaction analysis and IC50 value, one of the ligand was recognized as 'lead compound'. Seven analogues of the lead compound were designed and docked with the active site of protein. Interactions of the analogues with the active site of 2FOM protein were analyzed. On the basis of activity and high binding interactions these compounds will be suggested for clinical testing and synthesis in laboratory as a future plan. Keywords: Anti-Dengue Agents; Lead Compound; Computer Aided Drug Design(CADD); IC50; Ligand- Receptor Interactions; Analogs; DENV-proteases like NS3/NS2B protease receptor (2FOM); Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR). Abbreviations: DENV=Dengue Virus; ADE=Antibody-Dependent Enhancement; CADD= Computer Aided Drug Design; QSAR= Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship; IC50= The half maximal inhibitory concentration.
SheBelieves, but does she? Complicating white women’s understandings of the postfeminist-neoliberal empowerment discourse

Abstract Though the academic literature focused on postfeminism, neoliberalism, and the relationship between the two is considerable, there is little exploration of these conjoined discourses as they relate to leisure culture in general, and women’s sporting lives in particular. At the level of lived experience, scholars have yet to empirically examine how women engage and are affected by the empowerment discourse punctuating many aspects of postfeminism. This study uses the U.S. Soccer Federation’s 2015 SheBelieves Campaign as an empirical site for critically examining women’s attitudes toward, and experiences of, issues of empowerment, feminism, and sexism associated with what scholars have labelled the postfeminist-neoliberal moment (McRobbie, 2009; Rottenberg, 2014). Working at the intersection of leisure studies, feminism, and physical cultural studies, this research provides a window into the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, ways women view and experience neoliberal empowerment discourses within and through sporting elements of their leisure lifestyles.
Activity of norepinephrine-containing locus coeruleus neurons in behaving rats anticipates fluctuations in the sleep-waking cycle

Spontaneous discharge of norepinephrine-containing locus coeruleus (NE- LC) neurons was examined during the sleep-walking cycle (S-WC) in behaving rats. Single unit and multiple unit extracellular recordings yielded a consistent set of characteristic discharge properties. (1) Tonic discharge co-varied with stages of the S-WC, being highest during waking, lower during slow wave sleep, and virtually absent during paradoxical sleep. (2) Discharge anticipated S-WC stages as well as phasic cortical activity, such as spindles, during slow wave sleep. (3) Discharge decreased within active waking during grooming and sweet water consumption. (4) Bursts of impulses accompanied spontaneous or sensory-evoked interruptions of sleep, grooming, consumption, or other such ongoing behavior. (5) These characteristic discharge properties were topographically homogeneous for recordings throughout the NE-LC. (6) Phasic robust activity was synchronized markedly among neurons in multiple unit populations. (7) Field potentials occurred spontaneously in the NE-LC and were synchronized with bursts of unit activity from the same electrodes. (8) Field potentials became dissociated from unit activity during paradoxical sleep, exhibiting their highest rates in the virtual absence of impulses. These results are generally consistent with previous proposals that the NE-LC system is involved in regulating cortical and behavioral arousal. On the basis of the present data and those described in the following report (Aston-Jones, G., and F. E. Bloom (1981) J. Neurosci.1: 887–900), we conclude that these neurons may mediate a specific function within the general arousal framework. In brief, the NE-LC system may globally bias the responsiveness of target neurons and thereby influence overall behavioral orientation.
Non-Linear Mechanics and Collisions for Subdivision Surfaces

Numerically accurate simulation of the mechanical behavior of thin flexible structures is important in application areas ranging from engineering design to animation special effects. Subdivision surfaces provide a unique opportunity to integrate geometric modeling with concurrent finite element analysis of thin flexible structures. Their mechanics are governed by the so-called thin-shell equations. We present a concise treatment of thin-shell equations including dynamic behavior, scalable material models, and the treatment of collisions (detection as well as response). The resulting energy minimization problem is non-linear and in turn able to capture effects of far more realism than linear models. We demonstrate these claims with a number of simulations which exhibit characteristic effects of real world experiments.
In Vitro Antimicrobial Activity of Ethanolic Extract of Polish Propolis against Biofilm Forming Staphylococcus epidermidis Strains

The aim of the presented study was to examine the antimicrobial activity of ethanol extract of Polish propolis (EEPP) against biofilm-forming CoNS strains in vitro. Our results revealed that EEPP displayed varying degrees of activity against CoNS with MIC values ranging from 1.56 to 0.78 mg/mL. The average MIC was 1.13 ± 0.39 mg/mL while calculated MIC50 and MIC90 values were 0.78 mg/mL and 1.56 mg/mL, respectively. The biofilm formation ability by all tested S. epidermidis strains was inhibited at EEPP concentrations ranging from 0.39 to 1.56 mg/mL. The degree of reduction of AlamarBlue was directly associated with the proliferation of S. epidermidis strains. The increased proliferation of S. epidermidis strains was observed after 12 and 24 hours of incubation in the presence of EEPP concentrations ranging from 0.025 to 0.39 mg/mL. These results suggest that antimicrobial activities of EEPP against S. epidermidis expressed as the reduction of bacterial growth, reduction of biofilm formation ability, and the intensity of proliferation were significantly affected by incubation time and EEPP concentration used as well as the interactions between these factors.
Efficient single-pass index construction for text databases

Efficient construction of inverted indexes is essential to provision of search over large collections of text data. In this article, we review the principal approaches to inversion, analyze their theoretical cost, and present experimental results. We identify the drawbacks of existing inversion approaches and propose a single-pass inversion method that, in contrast to previous approaches, does not require the complete vocabulary of the indexed collection in main memory, can operate within limited resources, and does not sacrifice speed with high temporary storage requirements. We show that the performance of the single-pass approach can be improved by constructing inverted files in segments, reducing the cost of disk accesses during inversion of large volumes of data.
Insider cyber threat situational awareness framwork using dynamic Bayesian networks

Insider cyber threat is a serious problem in resent years. Many traditional methods such as intrusion detection system and prevention system can not effectively deal with insider attack problems because they lack of dynamic inference capability to acquire and understand cyber situational awareness. This paper presented a framework model based on DBN to capture the dynamic user behavior and establish and improve inference ability. This model has used transition relationship of DBN and HMM and its better performance inference algorithm to infer next activity. Those performances are verified and compared by the experiments in the end.