Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gaussian Spectral Line Profiles of Astrophysical Masers

Calculations are performed to demonstrate the deviations from Gaussian that occur in the spectral line profiles of a linear maser as a result of the amplification process. Near-Gaussian profiles are presented for bright, interstellar 22 GHz water masers obtained from high-resolution Very Long Baseline Array observations of W3 IRS 5. For the profiles to be so close to Gaussian, the calculations indicate that these masers must originate in quite hot gas with temperatures greater than 1200 K—a conclusion that is supportive of C-type shocks as the origin of these masers. In addition, the degree of saturation of these masers must be less than approximately one-third, from which it follows that the beaming angles are less than about 10-4 sr and the actual luminosities are modest. If spectral profiles that are as close to Gaussian as the profiles presented in this initial investigation are found to occur widely, they can be valuable diagnostics for the environments of astrophysical masers.
Power Consumption versus Traffic and Deployment in CDMA Based Wireless Networks

The deployment of new networks based on 3G and beyond as well as Long Term Evolution (LTE) technologies is accelerating worldwide to satisfy the ever-increasing user appetite for higher data rates. The new deployed base stations and power amplifier requirements are exerting pressure on the relative electrical grids as well as increasing the CO2 emissions substantially. It has been reported that more than one half of the network operating cost is in the form of electrical energy. Therefore, reducing cellular networks power consumption is becoming one of the hot topics of today's deployment of heterogeneous radio access networks. It makes sense from economical as well as environmental point of view. Among other factors, power consumption is impacted directly by the service requests and load delivered. In this paper, the required power consumption for each service as defined by the 3GPP standards is analyzed and simulation results will be presented for power consumption of different UMTS services. The results allow establishing the relationship between the power requirements and the traffic volume. Additionally, the relationship between power and cell size is analyzed.
Caching and Prefetching Techniques for the Web

The World-Wide Web (WWW) continues its remarkable and seemingly unregulated growth. The rapid growth in the number of users and hosts, information servers and network traffic have seen a corresponding increase in network loads and user response times [Beebee 1994]. Of course, these are hardly problems unique to the WWW. Computer scientists have proposed many solutions for improving the retrieval rate of large distributed documents. Common methods are caching and prefetching. Reference streams exhibiting temporal locality can benefit from caching and those exhibiting spatial locality can benefit from prefetching. Combining both techniques in implementing a web server can improve the latency of document requests.
Recovering quasi-real occlusion-free textures for facade models by exploiting fusion of image and laser street data and image inpainting

In this paper we present relevant results for the texturing of 3D urban facade models by exploiting the fusion of terrestrial multi-source data acquired by a Mobile Mapping System (MMS) and image inpainting. Current 3D urban facade models are often textured by using images that contain parts of urban objects that belong to the street. These urban objects represent in this case occlusions since they are located between the acquisition system and the facades. We show the potential use of georeferenced images and 3D point clouds that are acquired at street level by the MMS in generating occlusion-free facade textures. We describe a methodology for reconstructing quasi-real textures of facades that are highly occluded by wide frontal objects.
Tessellation and rendering of trimmed NURBS models in scene graph systems

Today scene graphs are ubiquitous in computer graphics: since they provide both a well suited data structure and an abstraction layer, almost all modern graphics applications employ some sort of scene graph. Unfortunately most scene graphs do not support higher order primitives (such as trimmed NURBS) adequately, even though in Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems the de facto standard surface representation is trimmed NURBS surfaces. This thesis describes how the trimmed NURBS representation can be seamlessly integrated into a scene graph system. For rendering purposes, geometries in the trimmed NURBS representation are almost always transformed into a polygonal representation. However, since this process is quite complicated if trimming is involved, creating a robust implementation is not straightforward. Another related problem is that when exporting complex NURBS models from CAD/CAM systems the topology information is sometimes lost and is usually very hard to reconstruct. This may result in annoying rendering artifacts when two adjacent surfaces do not join seamlessly. If rendering is fillrate-limited (e.g. because of the usage of expensive fragment shaders) overdraw can also become a significant problem. One solution for example is to use the occlusion culling capabilities of modern graphics hardware. However, due to the fact that occlusion queries require a complete pipeline flush using too many such queries can even slow down rendering, if the depth complexity of the scene is low. This thesis focuses on these problems: First a robust tessellation method for individual trimmed NURBS surfaces is presented which guarantees a geometric error threshold between the polygonal representation and the original analytic surface. For dealing with the rendering artifacts caused by incompatible patch boundaries two methods are presented: the first method is based on reconstructing the topological information using the guaranteed geometric tolerance of the tessellation method, and sewing the adjacent surfaces together, producing a watertight (but possibly non-manifold) mesh. The second presented method avoids rendering artifacts between adjacent surfaces by rendering small billboards at surface boundaries using programmable graphics hardware. This method keeps the scene graph hierarchy intact and allows further modifications, but does not produce a single watertight mesh. To deal with the overdraw problem an occlusion culling method is presented, which performs well even in extremely low depth complexity situations and performs at least on par with state of the art occlusion culling methods for high depth complexity scenes. Finally an overview is given on how the most widely used scene graphs support high level primitives (e.g. trimmed NURBS) and the integration into the OpenSG scene graph is discussed.
Registration of Multimodal Imagery with Occluding Objects using Mutual Information

In this paper we introduce and analyze a method for registering multimodal images with occluding objects in the scene. An analysis of multimodal image registration gives insight into the limitations of assumptions made in current approaches and motivates the methodology of the developed algorithm. Using calibrated stereo imagery, we use maximization of mutual information in sliding correspondence windows that inform a disparity voting algorithm to demonstrate successful registration of objects in color and thermal imagery where there is significant occlusion. Extensive testing of scenes with multiple objects at different depths and levels of occlusion shows high rates of successful registration. Ground truth experiments demonstrate the utility of disparity voting techniques for multimodal registration by yielding qualitative and quantitative results that outperform approaches that do not consider occlusions.
New extended atomic data in cool star model atmospheres - Using Kurucz's new iron data in MAFAGS-OS models

Context. Cool star model atmospheres are a common tool for the investigation of stellar masses, ages and elemental abundance composition. Theoretical atmospheric models strongly depend on the atomic data used when calculating them. Aims. We present the changes in flux and temperature stratification when changing from iron data computed by R.L. Kurucz in the mid 90s to the Kurucz 2009 iron computations. Methods. MAFAGS-OS opacity sampling atmospheres were recomputed with Kurucz 2009 iron atomic data as implemented in the VALD database by Ryabchikova. Temperature stratification and emergent flux distribution of the new version, called MAFAGS-OS9, is compared to the former version and to solar flux measurements. Results. Using the Kurucz line lists converted into the VALD format and new bound-free opacities for Mg i and Al i leads to changes in the solar temperature stratification by not more than 28 K. At the same time, the calculated solar flux distribution shows significantly better agreement between observations and theoretical solar models. These changes in the temperature stratification of the corresponding models are small, but nevertheless of a magnitude that affects stellar parameter determinations and abundance analysis.
VANET Routing Protocols: Pros and Cons

VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc Network) is a new technology which has taken enormous attention in the recent years. Due to rapid topology changing and frequent disconnection makes it difficult to design an efficient routing protocol for routing data among vehicles, called V2V or vehicle to vehicle communication and vehicle to road side infrastructure, called V2I. The existing routing protocols for VANET are not efficient to meet every traffic scenarios. Thus design of an efficient routing protocol has taken significant attention. So, it is very necessary to identify the pros and cons of routing protocols which can be used for further improvement or development of any new routing protocol. This paper presents the pros and cons of VANET routing protocols for inter vehicle communication.
Robust and Scalable Consensus for Sharded Distributed Ledgers

ByzCoin, a promising alternative of Bitcoin, is a scalable consensus protocol used as a building block of many research and enterprise level decentralized systems. In this paper we show that ByzCoin is unsuitable for deployment in an open, adversarial network and instead introduce MOTOR. MOTOR is designed as a secure, robust, and scalable consensus suitable for permisionless sharded blockchains. MOTOR achieves these properties by making four key design choices: (a) it prioritizes robustness in adversarial environments while maintaining adequate scalability, (b) it employees provably correct cryptography that resists DoS attacks from individual nodes, (c) it deploys unpredictable rotating leaders to defend against mildly-adaptive adversaries and prevents censorship, and (d) it creates an incentive compatible reward mechanism. These choices are materialized as (a) a “rotating subleader” communication pattern that balances the scalability needs with the robustness requirements under failures, (b) deployment of provable secure BLS multi-signatures, (c) use of deterministic threshold signatures as source of randomness and (d) careful design of the reward allocation mechanism. We have implemented MOTOR and compare it with ByzCoin. We show that MOTOR can scale similar to ByzCoin with an at most 2x overhead whereas it maintains good performance even under highpercentage of faults, unlike ByzCoin.
Molecular mechanisms and mode of tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women around the globe Tamoxifen is used for the last 40 years as an endocrine therapy for breast cancer. This resulted in the reduction of mortality rate by 30% and it still remains one of the most effective therapies against breast cancer. However, resistance against tamoxifen is still one of the major hurdles in the effective management of breast cancer. Intense research has been conducted in the past decade to further explore its resistance mechanism, but still a lot of research will be needed to effectively alleviate this problem. Several biochemical factors and molecular pathways, such as the modulation of ER signaling, upregulation of growth factors had been observed as key factors for tamoxifen resistance (TR). After, initial therapy of five to ten years, breast cancer patients develops resistance towards this drug. The resistance leads to the development of other cancers like uterine cancer. Here, we briefly explore all the molecular events related to tamoxifen resistance and focus on its mechanism of action as well as other pharmacological approaches to better its beneficial effects in the treatment of breast carcinoma.
Learners TV”,(What Does It Do To EFL Students’ Pronunciation)

In recent years, a great tendency towards the use of technology in teaching has gaineda great importance. Particularly, the use of video as an audio-visual material in foreign language teachingclassrooms has grown rapidly because of the increasing emphasis on communicative techniques. It is obvious that the use of video is a great help for foreign language teachers in stimulating and facilitating the targetlanguage, however it still lacks of language teacher’s attention, especially in teaching pronunciation. In many English language classrooms, teaching pronunciation is granted the least attention. When EFL teachers defend the poor pronunciation skills of their students, their arguments could be described as an excuse with respect to their inability to find an appropriate and interesting media to teach their students properly. This issue has offered an opportunity to develop the new model of teaching pronunciation by using audio-visual media.Keeping all this in mind, the researcher then conducted a research entitled “Learners TV”, (What Does It Do To EFL Students’ Pronunciation). This research was aimed to investigate the benefit of the use of Learners TV video in helping students in improving theirpronunciation.The experimental research was conducted to examine the hypothesis of this study along with the students’ responses towardthe use of Learners TV in teaching pronunciation. students of Department of English Education batch 2015 were randomly chosen as the participants of this study. The instruments used in this study were; pre-test, post-test and questionnaire. The tests were analyzed by using statistical formula and the independent sample of t-test to examine hypothesis. The findings revealed that there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test. The mean score of pre-test was 55 and post-test was 82 indicating that Learners TV improve EFL students’ pronunciation.Besides, the questionnaire also confirmed that the findings of students’ responses were in favor of using Learners TV to help students in learning pronunciation.Overall the findings indicated that teaching pronunciation using Learners TV videocan help students in improving their pronunciation.
Distribution of the Linear Combination of Stochastic Variables Pertaining to Special Functions

V.B. L. CHAURASIA , DEVENDRA KUMAR * Department of Mathematics, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur-302055, Rajasthan, India Department of Mathematics, Jagannath Gupta Institute of Engineering and Technology, Jaipur-302022, Rajasthan, India email address: devendra.maths@ gmail.com Abstract The aim of the present paper is to obtain a general distribution of the linear combinations of independent non-negative Stochastic variables. This result generalizes a class of distribution of the linear combination of independent non-negative Stochastic variables and further the result of Mathai and Saxena ([8], p.163) as a particular case of the general distribution is discussed. It is also shown that the result of Srivastava ([11], p.64) is particular case of our result. The result obtained here is quite general in nature and is capable of yielding a large number of corresponding results merely by specializing the parameters involved therein. To illustrate, we give two new special cases of our main result in the form of corollaries.
Current Methods in the Molecular Typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Other Mycobacteria

In the epidemiology of tuberculosis (TB) and nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) diseases, as in all infectious diseases, the key issue is to define the source of infection and to disclose its routes of transmission and dissemination in the environment. For this to be accomplished, the ability of discerning and tracking individual Mycobacterium strains is of critical importance. Molecular typing methods have greatly improved our understanding of the biology of mycobacteria and provide powerful tools to combat the diseases caused by these pathogens. The utility of various typing methods depends on the Mycobacterium species under investigation as well as on the research question. For tuberculosis, different methods have different roles in phylogenetic analyses and person-to-person transmission studies. In NTM diseases, most investigations involve the search for environmental sources or phylogenetic relationships. Here, too, the type of setting determines which methodology is most suitable. Within this review, we summarize currently available molecular methods for strain typing of M. tuberculosis and some NTM species, most commonly associated with human disease. For the various methods, technical practicalities as well as discriminatory power and accomplishments are reviewed.
Real-time tracking of blue whales using DIFAR sonobuoys

Passive acoustic tracking of blue whales has been proposed as a key component in a strategy to obtain a circumpolar abundance for Antarctic blue whale as proposed in a project of the IWC Southern Ocean Research Partnership. While a theoretical basis for passive tracking of blue whales has been demonstrated, there are substantial differences between these theoretical scenarios and a fully-operational, dedicated, real-time, tracking program. Because passive acoustic tracking relies upon the use of complex electronic systems, it is important to understand the capabilities and limitations of the hardware and software that comprise the system in order to understand what constitutes sensible use. We present preliminary results from two research voyages where a fully-operational, dedicated, real-time tracking system was used to locate blue whales over distances of more than 60 km. In order to test the tracking system locally before embarking upon an expensive Antarctic voyage, pygmy blue whales in Northern Bass Strait were used as a surrogate for Antarctic blue whales in the Southern Ocean. The core element of the acoustic tracking system consisted of DIFAR sonobuoys, VHF radio receivers, and custom analysis software driven round the clock by a team of acousticians. The tracking system operated continuously during the voyages, recording nearly 500 hours of audio, while acousticians processed over 7000 blue whale calls all in “real-time”. During the 20 days at sea 32 vocalising blue whales were “targeted” and, of these, 29 yielded visual sightings of one or more blue whales giving a combined success rate greater than 90%. While there are many differences between the Bass Strait and the colder waters around Antarctica, acoustic detection ranges of blue whales in the Southern Ocean far outstrip visual sighting ranges, so real-time acoustic tracking may be able to increase the total number of whale encounters, thus making more efficient use of expensive ship time. The success of the real-time tracking system during these two voyages supports the use of acoustics as a key tool in determining the circumpolar abundance of blue whales in the Southern Ocean.
“I Don’t Know and I Don’t Want to Know”: A Qualitative Examination of Older African American Women’s Knowledge and Experiences With HIV

While older African American women (e.g., aged 50 years and older) comprise only 11% of the female population in the United States, they account for 50% of HIV diagnoses among women in this age group. Unique sociocultural factors, including a lack of HIV knowledge and stigma, contribute to HIV risk among older African American women. The goal of this qualitative study was to obtain a nuanced perspective from older African American women about HIV knowledge and experiences with HIV using the framework of intersectionality theory. Focus groups were conducted with 35 African American women who were 50 years and older, nonpartnered, and heterosexual. Women were asked what they knew about HIV and if they thought older women were at risk for HIV. A thematic analysis using NVivo 11 yielded two central themes and three subthemes: HIV knowledge, including experiential knowledge, superficial knowledge, and no knowledge, and stigma around HIV in the Black church. Implications for developing HIV prevention programs and testing messages are discussed.
THE ADAPTATION OF PARENT-CHILD INTERNET ADDICTION SCALE INTO TURKISH: THE STUDY OF VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

Internet addiction is a form of technology addiction which can have symptoms such as inability to limit internet use, keep using internet even when it causes social and academic problems, and having anxiety when internet access is limited. There are few number of internet addiction surveys that individuals can rate themselves in the related literature and also there are some attempts to adopt these into Turkish. In addition, there was a survey that parents can rate their child’s internet addiction in the literature. This study aims to adopt the Parent- Child Internet Addiction Test, PCIAT20 survey into Turkish, which can be used to measure parents’ perceptions on their child’s internet addiction, and to implement the scale on parents after its reliability and validity is established. Parents of 480 children with the ages of 12-17 are the participants of this study. The reliability coefficient Cronbach’s alpha was calculated as 0.91 and Spearman Brown value was calculated as 0.89. Test’s test retest reliability coefficient was . 93. In order to establish structural validity an exploratory factor analysis has been used and to ensure the factor selection was valid a confirmatory factor analysis was used. Based on the analysis 20 items were grouped under four factors. Parent- Child Internet Addiction Test was implemented on 1433 parents after its reliability and validity was established. Based on the findings item analysis was conducted for the test; lower and upper 27% group scores and total item correlations coefficients were calculated. Parent- Child Internet Addiction Test Turkish adoption reliability and validity analysis was reevaluated and concluded that the values was in the determined ranges.