Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Database of Multichannel In-Ear and Behind-the-Ear Head-Related and Binaural Room Impulse Responses

An eight-channel database of head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) and binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) is introduced. The impulse responses (IRs) were measured with three-channel behind-the-ear (BTEs) hearing aids and an in-ear microphone at both ears of a human head and torso simulator. The database aims at providing a tool for the evaluation of multichannel hearing aid algorithms in hearing aid research. In addition to the HRIRs derived from measurements in an anechoic chamber, sets of BRIRs for multiple, realistic head and sound-source positions in four natural environments reflecting daily-life communication situations with different reverberation times are provided. For comparison, analytically derived IRs for a rigid acoustic sphere were computed at the multichannel microphone positions of the BTEs and differences to real HRIRs were examined. The scenes' natural acoustic background was also recorded in each of the real-world environments for all eight channels. Overall, the present database allows for a realistic construction of simulated sound fields for hearing instrument research and, consequently, for a realistic evaluation of hearing instrument algorithms.
Nicotinic versus muscarinic blockade alters verbal working memory-related brain activity in older women.

OBJECTIVES An important aspect of furthering our understanding of the central nervous system function after menopause is to examine the cerebral circuitry that appears to be influenced by cholinergic antagonist drugs in the presence and absence of estrogen. This pilot study investigated the effects of two anticholinergic drugs on brain activation and working memory performance in postmenopausal women not taking estrogen. This approach simulates the effects of age- or disease-related neuroreceptor or neuronal loss by temporarily blocking pre- and postsynaptic muscarinic and nicotinic cholinergic receptors. DESIGN Six healthy postmenopausal women took part in three drug challenges using the antinicotinic drug mecamylamine (MECA, 20 mg, oral), the antimuscarinic drug scopolamine (SCOP, 2.5 microg/kg, i.v.), and placebo during functional magnetic resonance imaging. The cognitive measure was a visually presented verbal N-back test of working memory. RESULTS Neither MECA nor SCOP significantly impaired performance on the verbal N-back. Functional magnetic resonance imaging results showed greater increases in frontal lobe activation in the placebo condition relative to each drug condition with different specific regional activation for MECA and SCOP. CONCLUSIONS These preliminary results suggest that brain activation patterns are sensitive to cholinergic modulation in postmenopausal women and that differential effects may be observed following nicotinic versus muscarinic blockade. This approach offers a potentially valuable method for modeling age-related changes in brain function, and the findings may have implications for cholinergic contributions to normal and pathologic aging.
An emerging research framework for studying informal learning and schools

In recognition of the fact that science centers and other informal educational institutions can play a role in the reform of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, several major research and professional programs are currently underway. This article discusses one such effort, the Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), a collaboration of the Exploratorium, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and King's College, London and the need for a theoretical framework based on socio-cultural theory to link discussion of varied efforts characterizing science learning in informal settings. The article discusses two key problematics related to developments in the science education field of the past decade: (1) integrating studies that are undertaken from multiple disciplinary perspectives, namely, science education, developmental psychology, and cultural studies, and (2) characterizing critical properties of informal learning in museums. It reviews work that has been conducted in nonschool settings and, using examples from research conducted by the Center for Informal Learning and Schools, it reviews questions currently under investigation. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed88(Suppl. 1):S71–S82, 2004
Characteristics of the Florida Cognitive Activities Scale in Older African Americans

Substantial research effort has recently focused on the potential protective effect of cognitively demanding activities on cognitive decline in late life. A significant methodological issue in this effort has been the lack of consistency in approaches to the operational measurement of cognitive activity. In this study, data in support of the reliability and construct validity of the recently developed Florida Cognitive Activities Scale (FCAS) in a sample of 223 African American older adults are provided. Consistent with the findings of the Schinka et al. study using a sample of Whites, the FCAS full scale showed a reasonably high level of internal consistency, small negative correlations with age and a measure of depressive symptomatology, and moderate positive correlations with years of education and neuropsychological measures of overall cognitive functioning, memory, and executive functioning. Even after controlling for the effects of age, education, and gender, the full scale score contributed significantly to the prediction of global cognitive functioning. The results of this study suggest that the FCAS is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive activities in older African Americans and provides additional, although not causative, evidence in support of the hypothesis of a protective effect of cognitive activity against cognitive decline regardless of ethnicity or race.
Research Commentary: Technology-Mediated Learning - A Call for Greater Depth and Breadth of Research

Universities and corporate training facilities have been investing in information technologies to improve education and training at an increasing rate during the past decade. Many new companies are emerging to provide tools and services to enable the effective design of IT-based learning solutions. Although research on technology-mediated learning has increased in recent years, it still lags behind developments in practice. This essay suggests potential research avenues in the area of technology-mediated learning. It seeks to motivate greater depth of research into the question of how technology enhances learning. This question requires an explicit consideration of relationships among technology capabilities, instructional strategy, psychological processes, and contextual factors involved in learning. The essay also recommends attention to a greater breadth of research questions, including issues of how technology-mediated learning affects program design and what structures and processes universities can employ to facilitate innovation.
Leaders of school technology innovation: A confirmatory factor analysis of the Change Facilitator Style Questionnaire (CFSQ)

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a construct validation study of the Change Facilitator Style Questionnaire (CFSQ), an instrument designed to measure the leadership style of school principals as change facilitators.Design/methodology/approach – Participants included 614 K‐12 teachers across the state of Florida involved in the Enhancing Education Through Technology competitive grant program. Teachers completed the CFSQ to assess their overall perceptions of their principals in supporting a technology integration initiative. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed and carried out to verify the instrument factor structure. Five models were developed based on theory and practice, and were tested using CFA.Findings – The results showed the evidence of the CFSQ's reliability and validity.Research limitations/implications – Further research was recommended based on the results and limitations of this study.Originality/value – Little research has connected principal style to classroom technology ado.
A spatiotemporal visualization approach for the analysis of gameplay data

Contemporary video games are highly complex systems with many interacting variables. To make sure that a game provides a satisfying experience, a meaningful analysis of gameplay data is crucial, particularly because the quality of a game directly relates to the experience a user gains from playing it. Automatic instrumentation techniques are increasingly used to record data during playtests. However, the evaluation of the data requires strong analytical skills and experience. The visualization of such gameplay data is essentially an information visualization problem, where a large number of variables have to be displayed in a comprehensible way in order to be able to make global judgments. This paper presents a visualization tool to assist the analytical process. It visualizes the game space as a set of nodes which players visit over the course of a game and is also suitable to observe time-dependent information, such as player distribution. Our tool is not tailored to a specific type of genre. To show the flexibility of our approach we use two different kinds of games as case studies.
Essential role of B-Raf in oligodendrocyte maturation and myelination during postnatal central nervous system development

Mutations in the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathway, particularly in the mitogen-activated protein kinase/ERK kinase (MEK) activator B-Raf, are associated with human tumorigenesis and genetic disorders. Hence, B-Raf is a prime target for molecule-based therapies, and understanding its essential biological functions is crucial for their success. B-Raf is expressed preferentially in cells of neuronal origin. Here, we show that in mice, conditional ablation of B-Raf in neuronal precursors leads to severe dysmyelination, defective oligodendrocyte differentiation, and reduced ERK activation in brain. Both B-Raf ablation and chemical inhibition of MEK impair oligodendrocyte differentiation in vitro. In glial cell cultures, we find B-Raf in a complex with MEK, Raf-1, and kinase suppressor of Ras. In B-Raf–deficient cells, more Raf-1 is recruited to MEK, yet MEK/ERK phosphorylation is impaired. These data define B-Raf as the rate-limiting MEK/ERK activator in oligodendrocyte differentiation and myelination and have implications for the design and use of Raf inhibitors.
Priming in the attentional blink: Perception without awareness?

The attentional blink refers to a reduction in accuracy that occurs when observers are required to identify the second of two rapidly sequential targets. Even when the second target cannot be reported, however, it is still capable of priming the response to a subsequent related item. At issue in the present work was whether this priming is attributable mainly to conscious or unconscious processes. To answer this question, we used an exclusion procedure that permitted an assessment of the relative dominance of conscious and unconscious processes. The results showed that second targets that are identified incorrectly are nonetheless processed extensively outside of awareness. Moreover, this processing is sufficient to prime a subsequent response for at least 1 s after the onset of the prime.
Notch Signaling Regulates Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor-β Expression in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells

Notch signaling is critically important for proper architecture of the vascular system, and mutations in NOTCH3 are associated with CADASIL, a stroke and dementia syndrome with vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) dysfunction. In this report, we link Notch signaling to platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) signaling, a key determinant of VSMC biology, and show that PDGF receptor (PDGFR)-β is a novel immediate Notch target gene. PDGFR-β expression was upregulated by Notch ligand induction or by activated forms of the Notch receptor. Moreover, upregulation of PDGFR-β expression in response to Notch activation critically required the Notch signal integrator CSL. In primary VSMCs, PDGFR-β expression was robustly upregulated by Notch signaling, leading to an augmented intracellular response to PDGF stimulation. In newborn Notch3-deficient mice, PDGFR-β expression was strongly reduced in the VSMCs that later develop an aberrant morphology. In keeping with this, PDGFR-β upregulation in response to Notch activation was reduced also in Notch3-deficient embryonic stem cells. Finally, in VSMCs from a CADASIL patient carrying a NOTCH3 missense mutation, upregulation of PDGFR-β mRNA and protein in response to ligand-induced Notch activation was significantly reduced. In sum, these data reveal a hierarchy for 2 important signaling systems, Notch and PDGF, in the vasculature and provide insights into how dysregulated Notch signaling perturbs VSMC differentiation and function.
Separate Movement Planning and Spatial Assimilation Effects in Sequential Bimanual Aiming Movements

This study extended earlier work by showing spatial assimilations in sequential bimanual aiming movements when the participant preplanned only the first movement of a two-movement sequence. Right-handed participants (n = 20, aged 18 to 22 years) made rapid lever reversals of 20° and 60° singly and sequentially with an intermovement interval of 2.5 sec. Following blocked single practice of both movements in each hand (15 trials each), two sets of 30 sequential practice trials were completed. The sequences began with either the long or the short movement and the participant always knew the goal of the first movement. During the intermovement interval, the experimenter gave instructions to complete the sequence with a short movement, a long movement, or no movement in a random order. Compared to the single trials, both movements in the sequence overshot the short-distance and undershot the longdistance goal. Spatial errors increased when a change in the movement goal was required for the second movement in the sequence. The experiment demonstrated that separate planning of sequential aiming movements can reduce spatial assimilation effects, but interference due to practice organization and switching the task's goal must also be overcome in order to produce accurate aiming movements.
Dynamic data replication: an approach to providing fault-tolerant shared memory clusters

A challenging issue in today's server systems is to transparently deal with failures and application-imposed requirements for continuous operation. In this paper we address this problem in shared virtual memory (SVM) clusters at the programming abstraction layer. We design extensions to an existing SVM protocol that has been tuned for low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects and SMP nodes and we achieve reliability through dynamic replication of application shared data and protocol information. Our extensions allow us to tolerate single (or multiple, but not simultaneous) node failures. We implement our extensions on a state-of-the-art cluster and we evaluate the common, failure-free case. We find that, although the complexity of our protocol is substantially higher than its failure-free counterpart, by taking advantage of architectural features of modern systems our approach imposes low overhead and can be employed for transparently dealing with system failures.
Watermarking Techniques Applied to H264/AVC Video Standard

Video watermarking describes the process of embedding information in video to satisfy applications such as the protection of intellectual property and the control of video authentication. In this field, researchers orient their investigations towards the new video standard H264/AVC which is increasingly used because of the coding efficiency it provides comparing to the previous standards. The different modules of this standard are exploited to embed watermark while responding to the application demands in terms of fragility or robustness to certain attacks and in terms of maintaining video quality and video bit rate. The aim of this paper is to give a global vision on the H264/AVC and to present some robust and fragile watermarking techniques applied to this video standard.
Topic Knowledge, Text Coherence, and Interest: How They Interact in Learning From Instructional Texts

Abstract The effects of topic knowledge, text coherence, and topic interest on learning from text were examined. One hundred sixty high school students participated in 1 of 4 groups according to their levels of topic knowledge and interest. Participants read 1 of 3 versions of a scientific text: minimally coherent, locally coherent, and locally and globally coherent. Text comprehension was examined by tasks aimed at tapping both textbase and situation-model levels. The contribution of topic interest seemed to increase according to the quantity of learners' topic knowledge. High-knowledge and high-interest students performed significantly better than those in the other 3 groups in all tasks. Text version differentiated students' performance on all measures but 1. The expected Group x Version interactions did not emerge.
Testing Closeness With Unequal Sized Samples

We consider the problem of closeness testing for two discrete distributions in the practically relevant setting of \emph{unequal} sized samples drawn from each of them. Specifically, given a target error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, $m_1$ independent draws from an unknown distribution $p,$ and $m_2$ draws from an unknown distribution $q$, we describe a test for distinguishing the case that $p=q$ from the case that $||p-q||_1 \geq \varepsilon$. If $p$ and $q$ are supported on at most $n$ elements, then our test is successful with high probability provided $m_1\geq n^{2/3}/\varepsilon^{4/3}$ and $m_2 = \Omega(\max\{\frac{n}{\sqrt m_1\varepsilon^2}, \frac{\sqrt n}{\varepsilon^2}\});$ we show that this tradeoff is optimal throughout this range, to constant factors. These results extend the recent work of Chan et al. who established the sample complexity when the two samples have equal sizes, and tightens the results of Acharya et al. by polynomials factors in both $n$ and $\varepsilon$. As a consequence, we obtain an algorithm for estimating the mixing time of a Markov chain on $n$ states up to a $\log n$ factor that uses $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2} \tau_{mix})$ queries to a "next node" oracle, improving upon the $\tilde{O}(n^{5/3}\tau_{mix})$ query algorithm of Batu et al. Finally, we note that the core of our testing algorithm is a relatively simple statistic that seems to perform well in practice, both on synthetic data and on natural language data.
Position Paper: Can the Web Really Use Secure Hardware?

The Web has become the platform of choice for providing services to users in a range of different environments. These services can have drastically differing security requirements; for more sensitive services, it is attractive to take advantage of the wide deployment of secure hardware in the consumer space. However, the applicability of that hardware to any given security problem is not always obvious. This paper explores which use cases are appropriate, and which are not.
Optimistic Concurrency Control for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

With the inclusion of actuation capabilities, emerging wireless sensor applications are much less tolerant to inco nsistencies in decisions compared to passive sensing applic tions. Multi-hop networks suffer from these problems more profoundly as they cannot directly utilize atomic broadcas t operations for coordination. In this study, we provide a lightweight single hop primitive, Read-All-Write-Self (RAWS), that achieves optimistic concurrency control. RAWS guarantees serializability, which simplifies implementation and verification of dis tributed algorithms, compared to the low level message pass ing model. We also present a self-stabilizing multi-hop extension of RAWS, called Multi-hop Optimistic Concurrency Control Algorithm (MOCCA), to address the challenges of multi-hop networks. MOCCA improves the performance of RAWS transactions in multi-hop networks while maintaining serializability. We implement MOCCA in JProwler simulator using TDMAand CSMA-based MAC layers and compare it against a lightweight locking scheme and serial execution of transactions. Our results indicate that concurrent execution in MOCCA can outperform serial execution in task completion time via better utilization of broadcasts and co ncurrent execution. Finally, we also show that under heavy loads optimistic concurrency control provides much better performance compared to locking schemes.
Beam pointing error of wideband phased array antennas with reduced true-time-delay devices

Phased array antennas have primarily been used for narrowband systems such as radar. However, in recent years, these systems have been increasingly used for wideband applications, such as satellite communication. In this paper, we describe the beam shift principle of a wideband linear phased array antenna with reduced true-time-delay devices, as well as a simple formula for calculating the beam pointing error. The results obtained from the application of the formula were in concurrence with the simulation results. We also propose a simple method for compensating for the pointing error, and report the simulation results.
Fusion of Nonlinear Measures in Fronto-normal Gait Recognition

Human gait is an emerging biometric showing promise in its use. It incorporates time implicitly which allows a wide range of temporally based analyses to be applied. Currently, most dynamic analyses of gait employ the fronto-parallel view where people walk in a plane parallel to a camera. They employ linear signal decomposition techniques to obtain features that can be used for human recognition such as frequency and phase. The gait signal is assumed to be statistically stationary. However, most biological signals are not so well specified, many studies showing that they are nonlinear and nonstationary especially in the fronto-normal (FN) view which is more commonly encountered. We provide a novel combination of two different nonlinear measures, one exploiting chaosity and another representing regularity, which can be used to identify a person using gait. This opens up new avenues for research in gait recognition, employing nonlinear analyses on temporal features in FN gait as a biometric.
Recent Legal Developments in the Field of Human Trafficking: A Critical Review of the 2005 European Convention and Related Instruments

In terms of both speed and substance, the development in human trafficking related norms and standards over the past several years is almost unprecedented in international law. This article examines the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking and the various legal and policy developments that led up to or otherwise intersect with this watershed agreement. The analysis focuses special attention on the issues of international obligation and responsibility around trafficking, particularly in relation to its important human rights dimensions. What exactly is required of States under the new European treaty in terms of specific actions and responses? How do these obligations compare to those contained in the UN Trafficking Protocol, adopted by the General Assembly five years earlier? How do they relate to other agreements developed within the European institutions? To what extent has the new European Convention remedied weaknesses in the international legal regime especially those related to protection of victims of trafficking? What are the main challenges ahead and is the Convention and its various implementing mechanisms up to meeting these challenges and thereby contributing to a more effective international law around trafficking?