Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long range metal mountable tag antenna for passive UHF RFID systems

Development of a long range platform tolerant metal mountable patch-type tag antenna for passive ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) systems is discussed. Results from full-wave electromagnetic simulations are presented to explain the design procedure and to evaluate the performance of the prototype tag antenna. The design uncertainty is quantified based on the expected maximum variations in the tag antenna and tag chip impedance. Wireless RFID measurements based on the EPC Generation 2 protocol are used in experimental tag design verification. The prototype tag achieves 25-meter maximum theoretical line of sight read range on metallic objects at 915 MHz.
A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Caries Prediction

There are striking disparities in the prevalence of dental disease by income. Poor children suffer twice as much dental caries as their more affluent peers, but are less likely to receive treatment. This paper presents an experimental study of the application of machine learning methods to the problem of caries prediction. For this paper a data set collected from interviews with children under five years of age, in 2006, in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil, was built. Four different data mining techniques were applied to this problem and their results were confronted in terms of the classification error and area under the ROC curve (AUC). Results showed that the MLP neural network classifier out performed the other machine learning methods employed in the experiments, followed by the support vector machine (SVM) predictor. In addition, the results also show that some rules (extracted by decision tress) may be useful for understanding the most important factors that influence the occurrence of caries in children.
Enhanced route planning for mobile anchors in localization of WSN

Distributed sensors deployed in huge numbers in the observant field forming an ad hoc network is called as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The issue of uncertainty of location of a sensor node is called as localization. For identifying the location of a sensor node, a single mobile anchor has been utilized. The path of the mobile anchor is based on SCAN algorithm. Localization with single mobile anchor does not exhibit much accuracy. The data transfer of the gathered information is low. In our paper we propose a mechanism by customizing two mobile anchors in the same observant field. Our proposed method will achieve efficient data transfer rate and optimal localization of all the anchor nodes.
Indigenous Culture as an Asset for Student Academic Success: A Formative Mixed Method Case Study to Examine School Leaders' Roles in Policy Development, Adoption and Application in Schools Serving American Indian Students

The purpose of this study was to explore one Midwestern public school engaged in comprehensive systemic school improvement and construct understanding of leadership effect on policy articulation into application supporting the Indian student population toward academic achievement. Data were collected from the Hi’ishnay Nation Public School, serving American Indian students located on the tribe’s Midwestern reservation. Primary data were collected during multiple site visits between June 2011 and August 2011 providing sequential opportunities to collect School Culture Survey (SCS) (Gruenert, 1998) data and follow-up interviews with stakeholder groups. The SCS gathered data about cultural values and beliefs, patterns of behavior and relationships in the school. Interviews were conducted with multiple stakeholder groups. Secondary data included school report cards, the school website, Board of Education meeting minutes, school enrollment forms, professional development in-service training documents and miscellaneous supply lists and informational memos. Several conclusions were drawn from this study. First, the data identified and described the school’s CSSIP’s key strengths including unity of purpose, collaborative and transformational leadership, faculty collaboration, professional development, equality development, contiguous and v complimentary language and culture departmental support, and the new school building. Secondly, the conscious and unconscious needs identified areas of strength in terms of the SCS factors recognized by all stakeholders as important. Thirdly, the data identified and described the robust array of tangible assets of lands, enterprises, and the school, and the intangible assets that are the people and their unique culture. Areas of concern were historical expectation of failure, equity in measures of achievement, parent involvement and knowledge of school curriculum, discipline processes, health services, a culture clash between the school and community, attendance by students and faculty, and utility and communication infrastructure. This study brought together American scholarly expertise and indigenous scholarly expertise from the United States, New Zealand and Canada. The findings suggest a formative comprehensive systemic school improvement plan process can be developed as recommended practice for replication in other schools serving American Indian children across North America.
A Reconfigurable Micromachined Switching Filter Using Periodic Structures

In this paper, a reconfigurable filter using micromachined switches is designed, fabricated, and experimented. An equivalent-circuit model is derived for the reconfigurable cell structure. Extracted parameters show the characteristics of both bandpass and bandstop filters, which can be accurately analyzed using circuit analysis. Coplanar waveguide transmission lines for the reconfigurable filter are also analyzed. The bandpass filter is formed by cascading the unit cell structure. This bandpass filter can be switched to bandstop filter using the micromachined switches and p-i-n diode. Dispersion characteristics are obtained to investigate the electromagnetic wave behavior within the unit cell using Floquet's theorem. Measurement results with micromachined switches show that insertion loss is 1.55 dB for the bandpass filter whereas band rejection level is >20 dB and the insertion loss in the passband is 1.2 dB for the bandstop filter. With the p-i-n diode, the insertion loss is 2.1 dB and the 3-dB bandwidth is 5.2 GHz for the bandpass filter, the 20-dB rejection bandwidth is 5.3 GHz, and the insertion loss in the passband is 1.6 dB for the bandstop filter.
Teaching cryptography with open-source software

Cryptography has become an important topic in undergraduate curricula in mathematics and computer science, not just for its intrinsic interest---``about the most fun you can have with mathematics''\cite{ferg04, but for its current standing as the basis for almost all computer security. From wireless networking to secure email to password protection, cryptographic methods are used to secure information, to protect users, and to protect data. At Victoria University, cryptography has been taught as part of a mathematics and computer science degree for several years. The students all have had at least a year of tertiary mathematics, and some exposure to a computer algebra system (Maple). However, the cost of Maple, and the current licensing agreement, means that students are unable to experiment with the software away from the computer laboratories at the University. For this reason we have decided to investigate the use of open-source computer algebra systems Maxima and Axiom. Although not as full-featured and powerful as the commercial systems Maple and Mathematica, we show they are in fact admirably suited for a subject such as cryptography. In some ways Maxima and Axiom even surpass Maple and Mathematica. Student response to the introduction of these systems has been very positive.
A Domain Decomposition Method Based on Weighted Interior Penalties for Advection-Diffusion-Reaction Problems

We propose a domain decomposition method for advection-diffusion-reaction equations based on Nitsche's transmission conditions. The advection-dominated case is stabilized using a continuous interior penalty approach based on the jumps in the gradient over element boundaries. We prove the convergence of the finite element solutions of the discrete problem to the exact solution and propose a parallelizable iterative method. The convergence of the resulting domain decomposition method is proved, and this result holds true uniformly with respect to the diffusion parameter. The numerical scheme that we propose here can thus be applied straightforwardly to diffusion-dominated, advection-dominated, and hyperbolic problems. Some numerical examples are presented in different flow regimes showing the influence of the stabilization parameter on the performance of the iterative method, and we compare our method with some other domain decomposition techniques for advection-diffusion equations.
Securing a Better Deal From Investors in Public Infrastructure Projects

Abstract The return on capital is a major contributor to the cost of design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) contracts, under which public infrastructure is financed and delivered by private companies. The article presents a method for evaluating the rates of return targeted by bidders and applies this to 10 contracts commissioned by the UK National Health Service. The presence of significant excess returns is identified in each case. We argue that, if the rate of return projected by an investor exceeds a benchmark cost of capital, derived using standard capital budgeting techniques, then a reduction in the fee to be paid by the public authority is justified.
Non-Sagittal Knee Joint Kinematics and Kinetics during Gait on Level and Sloped Grounds with Unicompartmental and Total Knee Arthroplasty Patients

After knee arthroplasty (KA) surgery, patients experience abnormal kinematics and kinetics during numerous activities of daily living. Biomechanical investigations have focused primarily on level walking, whereas walking on sloped surfaces, which is stated to affect knee kinematics and kinetics considerably, has been neglected to this day. This study aimed to analyze over-ground walking on level and sloped surfaces with a special focus on transverse and frontal plane knee kinematics and kinetics in patients with KA. A three-dimensional (3D) motion analysis was performed by means of optoelectronic stereophogrammetry 1.8 ± 0.4 years following total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and unicompartmental arthroplasty surgery (UKA). AnyBody™ Modeling System was used to conduct inverse dynamics. The TKA group negotiated the decline walking task with reduced peak knee internal rotation angles compared with a healthy control group (CG). First-peak knee adduction moments were diminished by 27% (TKA group) and 22% (UKA group) compared with the CG during decline walking. No significant differences were detected between the TKA and UKA groups, regardless of the locomotion task. Decline walking exposed apparently more abnormal knee frontal and transverse plane adjustments in KA patients than level walking compared with the CG. Hence, walking on sloped surfaces should be included in further motion analysis studies investigating KA patients in order to detect potential deficits that might be not obvious during level walking.
Kernel Dimensionality Reduction evaluation on various dimensions of effective subspaces for cancer patient survival analysis

In this research, we have extended the use of Kernel Dimensionality Reduction (KDR) in the context of semi supervised learning in particular for micro-array DNA clustering application. We have proposed a new model call K-means-KDR for survival analysis which we aimed to improve the genes classification performance and study the dimension of effective subspaces in cancer patient survival analysis. KDR method was extended and combined with the K-means clustering technique, Cox's proportional hazards regression model and log rank test where KDR contributes in gene classification to determine subgroups from the patient's group. Results from the experiments have indicated that our model has outperformed Support Vector Machines (SVM) in gene classification. We also observed that the best value for dimension of effective subspaces (K) for microarray DNA data is between 10%–20% of the total patients.
Body Disfigurement and the Quality of Life of Adolescents with Pectus Excavatum: Effects of the Nuss Procedure.

This article takes a comprehensive look at the effects of pectus excavatum, a congenital deformity with psychosocial and physical ramifications, and the Nuss procedure on the quality of life of adolescents. The Nuss procedure is a minimally invasive corrective surgery. Twenty-five participants from Calgary, Alberta were interviewed (10 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 16, 8 mothers, and 7 fathers) regarding their experiences with pectus excavatum before, during recovery, and after surgery. We gathered qualitative data on four areas of quality of life: well-being, social belonging, satisfaction, and empowerment. Pectus excavatum had a negative effect on quality of life, with participants demonstrating decreased self-confidence, increased feelings of self-consciousness, and a variety of avoidance and concealment behaviors. After the Nuss procedure, all areas of adolescent quality of life improved. Adolescent and parent recommendations are provided. We also explore theoretical implications in relation to body disfigurement research, qual21 #2493—Physical Disabilities V24 N2 File: 24204-roberts
Concealed Data Aggregation in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks using Privacy Homomorphism

Data aggregation is implemented in wireless sensor networks to reduce data redundancy and to summarize relevant and necessary information without requiring all pieces of the data. The benefit of data aggregation can be maximized by implementing it at every data aggregator on the path to the base station. However, data confidentiality requires sensor nodes to encrypt their data prior to transmission. Moreover, once data is encrypted by a sensor node, it should be decrypted at the base station to maintain end-to-end security. This makes the implementation of data aggregation very difficult because data aggregation algorithms require encrypted data to be decrypted. Consequently, data aggregation and secure communication have conflicts in their implementation. To achieve data aggregation and secure communication together, this paper employs privacy homomorphism which offers end-to-end concealment of data and ability to operate on ciphertexts. In the proposed protocol, the computational overhead imposed by the privacy homomorphic encryption functions is tolerated by employing a set of powerful nodes, called AGGNODEs.
Power-Efficient Adaptable Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks represent a new data collection paradigm in which adaptability plays an important role. Typical sensor network scenarios involve scattering a large number of wireless nodes from an aircraft across an area of interest. The nodes then form a network through which collected data is routed to a base station. Adaptation is necessary to deal with the unpredictable network topologies that result from sensor node scatters and to manage resources (energy in particular) efficiently in response to changing conditions and requirements. The hardware flexibility required for dynamic adaptation is traditionally achieved with softwarebased processors or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), both of which come with significant energy, area and performance costs when compared to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). We therefore introduce a smallscale reconfigurable design technique that minimizes these costs by efficiently integrating small amounts of applicationspecific reconfigurable logic within primarily fixed-logic circuitry. This technique provides the flexibility necessary for the adaptations required of wireless sensor networks without the penalties associated with processors and FPGAs. This paper makes the case for small-scale reconfigurability by investigating several different types of adaptation in wireless sensor network applications that allow applications to deal with unpredictable network topologies and tradeoff between network longevity and fidelity, security and latency.
Universal coding for lossy complementary delivery problem

This paper deals with a universal lossy coding problem for a certain kind of multiterminal source coding network called a complementary delivery system. A universal coding scheme based on Wyner-Ziv codes is proposed. While the proposed scheme cannot attain the optimal rate-distortion trade off in general, the rate-loss is upper bounded by a universal constant under some mild conditions. Moreover, the proposed scheme allows us to apply (non-universal) Wyner-Ziv codes to construct a universal lossy complementary delivery code.
Job Creation and Destruction

Job Creation and Destruction is the culmination of a long, ongoing research program at the Center for Economic Studies. Using the most complete plant- level data source currently available--the Longitudinal Research Data constructed by the Census Bureau--it focuses on the U.S. manufacturing sector from 1972 to 1988 and develops a statistical portrait of the microeconomic adjustments to the many economic events that affect businesses and workers. The picture that emerges is one of large, persistent, and highly concentrated gross job flows, with job destruction dominating the cyclical feaures of net job flows. The authors describe in detail those characteristics that destroy and create jobs over time (including industry of origin, wage payments, international trade exposure, factor intensity, size, age, and productivity performance), while also providing a broader measure of the process that will be directly relevant to macroeconomists and policymakers.
WEB 2 . 0 AND POLITICS : THE 2008 U . S . PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND AN E-POLITICS RESEARCH AGENDA 1

The Internet was a major factor in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and has become an important tool for political communication and persuasion. Yet, information systems research is generally silent on the role of the Internet in politics. In this paper, we argue that IS is positioned to enhance understanding of the influence of the Internet on politics, and, more specifically, the process of election campaigning using Internet-based technologies such as Web 2.0. In this paper, we discuss how these technologies can change the nature of competition in politics and replace or complement traditional media. Our empirical study on how Web 2.0 technologies were used by the candidates leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential primaries sheds light on how these technologies influenced candidate performance. Finally, we outline a research agenda highlighting where IS can contribute to the academic discourse on e-politics.
Apoptosis inducing ability of silver decorated highly reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites in A549 lung cancer

Recently, graphene and graphene-based materials have been increasingly used for various biological applications due to their extraordinary physicochemical properties. Here, we demonstrate the anticancer properties and apoptosis-inducing ability of silver doped highly reduced graphene oxide nanocomposites synthesized by employing green approach. These nano composites (PGE-HRG-Ag) were synthesized by using Pulicaria glutinosa extract (PGE) as a reducing agent and were evaluated for their anticancer properties against various human cancer cell lines with tamoxifen as the reference drug. A correlation between the amount of Ag nanoparticles on the surface of highly reduced graphene oxide (HRG) and the anticancer activity of nanocomposite was observed, wherein an increase in the concentration of Ag nanoparticles on the surface of HRG led to the enhanced anticancer activity of the nanocomposite. The nanocomposite PGE-HRG-Ag-2 exhibited more potent cytotoxicity than standard drug in A549 cells, a human lung cancer cell line. A detailed investigation was undertaken and Fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis demonstrated that the nanocomposite PGE-HRG-Ag-2 showed G0/G1 phase cell cycle arrest and induced apoptosis in A549 cells. Studies such as, measurement of mitochondrial membrane potential, generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and Annexin V-FITC staining assay suggested that this compound induced apoptosis in human lung cancer cells.
After-school arts programs: Effective programs for at-risk adolescent Hispanic women to enhance academic achievement

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of after-school arts programs and their potential to build a better sense of self and foster creative expression for at-risk adolescent Hispanic women. This study examined the positive characteristics associated with participation in after-school arts programs that may contribute to enhancing the academic performance of Hispanic women. An after-school arts program in Santa Ana, California was selected for a case study in order to reveal the effectiveness of after-school arts programs. This Master’s project was completed in partial fulfillment for a Master of Arts degree in Arts Management from the University of Oregon.
Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition Using Kinematic Features Based on Improved Dynamic Time Warping ?

The use of hand gesture provides an attractive alternative to cumbersome interface devices for human computer interface. In our research, we exploit multiple cues including divergence features, vorticity features and hand motion direction vector. Divergence and vorticity are derived from the optical flow for hand gesture recognition in videos. The hand tracking algorithm finds the centroids of the moving hand regions, computes hand motion direction vector. For efficient recognition of gestures made at varying rates, an improved dynamic time warping method be introduced to our experiments where we have 12 isolated gestures and a library of 300 gestures videos. Those experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach yields a satisfactory and higher recognition rate.
Differential Effects of Synaptic and Extrasynaptic NMDA Receptors on Aβ-Induced Nitric Oxide Production in Cerebrocortical Neurons

Oligomerized amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide is thought to contribute to synaptic damage, resulting in dysfunctional neuronal networks in patients with Alzheimer's disease. It has been previously suggested that Aβ may be detrimental to neuronal health, at least in part, by triggering oxidative/nitrosative stress. However, the mechanisms underlying this process remain to be elucidated. Here, using rat primary cerebrocortical cultures, we demonstrate that Aβ1–42 oligomers trigger a dramatic increase in intracellular nitric oxide (NO) concentration via a process mediated by activation of NMDA-type glutamate receptors (NMDARs). Considering that synaptic NMDARs and extrasynaptic NMDARs (eNMDARs) can have opposite effects on neuronal viability, we explored their respective roles in Aβ-induced increases in NO levels. Surprisingly, after pharmacological isolation of eNMDARs, we discovered that eNMDARs are primarily responsible for the increase in neuronal NO triggered by Aβ oligomers. Moreover, we found that the eNMDAR-mediated increase in NO can produce S-nitrosylation of Drp1 (dynamin-related protein 1) and Cdk5 (cyclin-dependent kinase 5), targets known to contribute to Aβ-induced synaptic damage. These results suggest that pharmacological intervention specifically aimed at eNMDARs may decrease Aβ-induced nitrosative stress and thus ameliorate neurotoxic damage to synapses.