Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Solution of partial differential equations using reconfigurable computing

This research undergone is an inter-disciplinary project with the Civil Engineering Department, which focuses on acceleration of the numerical solutions of Partial differential equations (PDEs) describing continuous solid bodies (e.g. a dam or an aircraft wing). Numerical techniques for solutions to PDEs are generally computationally demanding and data intensive. One approach to acceleration of their numerical solutions is to use FPGA based reconfigurable computing boards. The aim of this research is to investigate the features of various algorithms for the numerical solution of Laplace’s equation (the targeted PDE problem) in order to establish how well they can be mapped onto reconfigurable hardware accelerators. Finite difference methods and finite element methods are used to solve the PDE and they are characterized in terms of their operation count, sequential and parallel content, communication requirements and amenability to domain decomposition. These are then matched to abstract models of the capabilities of FPGA-based reconfigurable computing platforms. The performance of different algorithms is compared and discussed. The resulting hardware design will be suitable for platforms ranging from single board add-ins for general PCs to reconfigurable supercomputers such as the Cray XD1. However, the principal aim in this research has been to seek methods that perform well on low-cost platforms. In this thesis, several algorithms of solving the PDE are implemented on FPGA-based reconfigurable computing systems. Domain decomposition is used to take advantage of the embedded memory within the FPGA, which is used as a cache to store the data for the current sub-domain in order to eliminate communication and synchronization delays between the sub-domains and to support a very large number of parallel pipelines. Using Fourier decomposition, the 32bit floating-point hardware/software design can achieve a speed-up of 38 for 3-D 256x256x256 finite difference method on a single FPGA board (based on a Virtex2V6000 FPGA) compared to a software solution implemented in the same algorithm on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 PC which supports SSE2. The 32 bit floating-point hardware-software coprocessor for the 3D tetrahedral finite element problem with 48,000 elements using the preconditioned conjugate gradient method can achieve a speed-up of 40 for a single FPGA board (based on a Virtex4VLX160 FPGA) compared to a software solution.
Comparison of treatment compliance and nutritional outcomes among patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma with and without percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy during chemoradiation.

AIMS The study aimed to compare treatment compliance and nutritional outcomes in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients during chemoradiation. METHODS Clinical information of patients with NPC that underwent chemoradiation during 2004-2009 were retrieved from the hospital database and retrospectively reviewed. Patients were categorised into a prophylactic percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PPEG) group and a non-PPEG group. Clinical information including treatment compliance, weight, haematological and renal toxicity was compared. RESULTS A total of 219 patients were reviewed and categorised into PPEG (n=77) and non-PPEG (n=142). Significant differences in absolute percentage weight loss between groups were found from the 3rd cycle of chemotherapy. There were 24.2, 20.3 and 24.8% in the third, the fourth and the fifth cycles of chemotherapy, respectively. Migration of grade 2 to grade 3 weight loss was obviously seen in the 3rd cycle as well. A significant difference of grade 3 or more hypokalemia was found with values of 14.3% and 50% in the PPEG and non-PPEG groups, respectively. Other toxicity parameters and treatment compliance were not different between the groups. CONCLUSIONS Use of PPEG resulted in decreased severe weight loss, reduced migration from grade 2 to grade 3 weight loss and reduced hypokalaemia. However, benefits in treatment compliance could not be detected. So consideration of PPEG in NPC patients requires care.
Estimating the dynamic power requirements for controllable energy storage on PV microgrid

This paper investigates the dynamic power requirements for controllable energy storage systems used for stabilization of standalone three-phase low-voltage microgrids with high penetration of PV energy. It uses recorded data of fluctuating Photo-voltaic (PV) sources and fluctuating loads to determine how an ideal controllable energy storage can be used to stabilize a microgrid with 100% PV energy penetration. Using the data recorded for a typical bad day in Johannesburg, the sampling time required to capture the dynamics in PV sources was found to be 2 seconds. However this report uses sampling time of 1 second to calculate the ramp rate required for the energy storage to stabilize a PV microgrid. For the case considered in this paper, the ramp rate was found to be 0.4 pu/second.
A 20 mW 3.24  ${\hbox {mm}}^{2}$ Fully Integrated GPS Radio for Location Based Services

The challenges in the co-existence of a GPS receiver with cellular phones for location based services are addressed in this paper. A fully integrated GPS radio, realized in a 0.18 mum SiGe technology, demonstrates a 1 dB gain desensitization at 1.9 GHz of -8 dBm, a noise figure of 5 dB, with 20 mW power consumption. Chip area is 3.24 mm2. The receiver includes a highly selective LNA, key to minimize desensitization and reciprocal mixing due to the large cellphone leakage, a novel quadrature VCO topology capable of directly driving quadrature passive mixer with high swing and low power consumption, complex bandpass filter, variable gain amplifier, automatic gain control, 2-bit quantizer, and a fractional-N sigma-delta-based PLL that can lock to any crystal frequency.
Axonemal adenosine triphosphatases from flagella of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Purification of two dyneins.

Two dyneins have been purified from 35S-labeled Chlamydomonas axonemes, and the composition of each has been determined by two complementary electrophoretic methods capable of resolving more than 170 axonemal polypeptides. The two enzymes were extracted in the presence of MgATP by a brief exposure of axonemes to a reducing agent and a high salt-containing buffer. The treatment solubilizes nearly all Mg’*-dependent ATPase activity present in the axoneme and approximately 60 polypeptides. Electron microscopic analysis of the insoluble residue revealed that outer and inner arm, together with one of the central pair microtubules, were absent. Ten polypeptides of molecular weight ranging from 330,000 to 300,000, which are likely to include dynein subunits, were completely solubilized. The separation of these high molecular weight polypeptides into three fractions was achieved by chromatography on hydroxyapatite column. All the fractions contained Mg’+-dependent ATPase activities which were further purified by DEAE-Sepharose chromatography or sedimentation on a sucrose density gradient. A dynein with specific activity of 6 ~01 of Pi per min per mg, sedimenting at 12 S, was found associated with two polypeptides of molecular weight 315,000 and 19,000, which were in a 1:l ratio. A second dynein with specific activity of 5.4 was found sedimenting at 17 to 18 S. In its most purified form it contained 13 polypeptides of molecular weights ranging between 330,000 and less than 15,000. A third ATPase of specific activity 1.3 was present in a fraction which did not contain any of the polypeptides forming the 12 S and 18 S dyneins.
Longitudinal associations across vocabulary modalities in children with autism and typical development

We examined differences between children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children over an 8-month period in: (a) longitudinal associations between expressive and receptive vocabulary and (b) the extent to which caregiver utterances provided within an “optimal” engagement state mediated the pathway from early expressive to later receptive vocabulary. In total, 59 children (28–53 months at Time 1) comprised the autism spectrum disorder group and 46 children (8–24 months at Time 1) comprised the typically developing group. Groups were matched on initial vocabulary sizes. Results showed that the association between early expressive and later receptive vocabulary was moderated by group. A moderated mediation effect was also found, indicating linguistic input provided within an optimal engagement state only mediated associations for the autism spectrum disorder group.
Planar Ultrawideband Antennas With Multiple Notched Bands Based on Etched Slots on the Patch and/or Split Ring Resonators on the Feed Line

Three types of ultrawideband (UWB) antennas with triple notched bands are proposed and investigated for UWB communication applications. The proposed antennas consist of a planar circular patch monopole UWB antenna and multiple etched slots on the patch and/or split ring resonators (SRRs) coupled to the feed line. Good agreement is achieved between the simulated and measured results. These techniques are significant for designing UWB antennas with multiple narrow frequency notched bands or for designing multiband antennas.
MMC05-4: On the Optimality of Threshold Scheduling Policies for Video Transmission in Markovian Fading Wireless Channels with Channel-Aware ARQ

We consider the problem of optimal transmission scheduling for real time multimedia (video) data transmission over wireless communication links. It is assumed that the wireless channel is Rayleigh fading and can be represented by a finite state Markov chain (FSMC) model, and that retransmissions are allowed via the use of an ARQ protocol. Due to a delay constraint, there is a limit on the number of time slots that may be used to transmit some (pre-designed) number of packets. The problem of optimal transmission scheduling is formulated as a finite horizon Markov decision process (MDP) with a cost function that takes into account the transmission cost and a penalty cost on the packet loss rate. Using the concept of supermodularity and convexity on the optimal cost and immediate cost functions, we prove that the optimal transmission scheduling policy is a threshold function of time and buffer size. These threshold policies are applicable for any delay-sensitive real time packet transmission system. Finally, the theoretical results are illustrated via numerical examples.
Diabetes Increases the Analgesia and Tolerance to Morphine in Acute Pain, but Not in Chronic Pain, While it Attenuates the Dependency in Rats

hanges in the concentration of either brain or blood glucose level appear to modulate antinociceptive and basal nociceptive processes. There are some contradictory data about the effect of diabetes on morphine antinociception. In this study the effects of alloxan-induced diabetes on morphine analgesia, tolerance and dependency were investigated, with a view to clarify the contradictions. Materials and Methods: Experimental diabetes was induced by a single injection of alloxan (120 mg/kg S.C.) in rats. Administration of morphine sulfate (7mg/kg i.p., 5 days) developed tolerance in animals. Acute and chronic pain in morphine treated diabetic and non-diabetic animals were evaluated using hot-plate and formalin tests respectively. In tolerant animals withdrawal signs (jumping, chewing, urine and feces) were recorded for ten minutes by the use of naloxone (2mg/kg i.p.). Results: Our results show that in the acute pain model, the antinociceptive effect of a morphine single dose was significantly enhanced (P < 0.001) in the diabetic group as compared to nondiabetic rats whereas, in diabetic tolerant rats in comparison with the non-diabetic tolerant ones morphine analgesia was extremely reduced (P<0.001). In the chronic pain model after a single dose administration, the only antinociceptive potency of morphine was enhanced (P<0.05) in the early phase, whereas after the induction of tolerance it was markedly reduced (P<0.01) in the early phase; was slightly enhanced (P<0.05) in the late phase in the diabetic rats compared to the non-diabetics. The withdrawal signs were significantly decreased (P<0.001) in the diabetic compared to the non-diabetic animals. Conclusion: It appears that the effects of hyperglycemia on pain thresholds differ in specific regions, using different tests and by duration of diabetes. Thus during the progress of diabetes, hyperglycemia might diminish the analgesic effect of morphine, blunt the development of dependency and alter the induction of tolerance.
Hazard regression modeling for robotic performance prediction

Robotic systems are widely applied in process industry to reduce manufacturing labor costs and increase production productivity. Due to the uncertainties existed in the manufacturing environment, the performance improvement of the assembly process is important yet challenging. This paper proposes a regression-based method to predict the performance of the robotic assembly process. Statistical hazard models are introduced to quantify the influence of possible controllable parameters on the process performance metrics. A real-world case study of an assembly production process is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Collective intelligence & sentimental analysis of twitter data by using StandfordNLP libraries with software as a service (SaaS)

Social Networking sites are the resources which contains huge data. For example, Twitter produces millions of bytes of the data. These data can be used for business or social purpose. Analyzing data from these social networking web sites is one of the new buzzword for many business strategies. Election campaigns, World health issues, Technical concepts, inventions, Entertainment, Natural resources can be effectively handle by using sentimental analysis. Our proposed work evaluates sentimental analysis of twitter data using StandfordNLP Libraries implemented in SaaS (cloud) which will handle all current affairs in the world. Cloud implementation will give process efficiency, result growth and improvement in time to market.
Exploring and Following Students' Strategies When Completing Their Weekly Tasks

In this paper, we explore methods of analysing data obtained from an autograding system involving weekly tasks and a finite set of possible strategies for completing these tasks. We present an approach to handling partially missing information and also investigate the usefulness of a sliding window rule mining technique in following changes in student strategy over time.
A ranking approach to summarising Twitter home timelines

The rise of social media services has changed the ways in which users can communicate and consume content online. Whilst online social networks allow for fast and convenient delivery of knowledge, users are prone to information overload when too much information is presented for them to read and process. Automatic text summarisation is a tool to help mitigate information overload. In automatic text summarisation, short summaries are generated algorithmically from extended text, such as news articles or scientific papers. This thesis addresses the challenges in applying text summarisation to the Twitter social network. It also goes beyond text, exploiting additional information that is unique to social networks to create summaries which are personal to an intended reader. Unlike previous work in tweet summarisation, the experiments here address the home timelines of readers, which contain the incoming posts from authors to whom they have explicitly subscribed. A novel contribution is made in this work the form of a large gold standard ($19,350$ tweets), the majority of which will be shared with the research community. The gold standard is a collection of timelines that have been subjectively annotated by the readers to whom they belong, allowing fair evaluation of summaries which are not limited to tweets of general interest, but which are specific to the reader. Where the home timeline is used by professional users for social media analysis, automatic text summarisation can be applied to give results which beat all baselines. In the general case, where no limitation is placed on the types of readers, personalisation features which exploit the relationship between author and reader and the reader's own previous posts, were shown to outperform both automatic text summarisation and all baselines.
Quench Simulation in Cable-in-Conduit Conductor Using Runge-Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method

The need of high magnetic field facilities has raised the question of accurate analysis of stability and quench characteristics of forced-flow cooled cable-in-conduit conductor (CICC). The supercritical helium flow is considered in the model of quench propagation in CICC, which is described by Euler equations. In this paper, a scheme named Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin finite element method, was introduced to simulate the quench propagation. We used Gauss-Legendre method to solve the integration in discreted equations, and Lax-Friedrichs fluxes were applied to replace the numerical fluxes at the boundary between elements. The simulated results were compared with experimental data, and they were in good agreement.
Role of cholecystokinin and the cholinergic system in intestinal stimulation of gallbladder contraction in man

To determine the role of cholecystokinin and the cholinergic system in intestinal stimulation of gallbladder contraction, we studied the effects of atropine on plasma cholecystokinin and gallbladder contraction in six healthy volunteers (four men and two women aged 20 to 27 yr). Effects were noted after intraduodenal fat instillation and after dosage with exogenous cholecystokinin inducing plasma cholecystokinin concentrations similar to those after intraduodenal fat instillation. At regular intervals before and after administration of each stimulus, plasma cholecystokinin concentrations and gallbladder volumes were measured by radioimmunoassay and real‐time ultrasonography, respectively. Intraduodenal infusion of 250 ml 20% Intralipid induced a peak plasma cholecystokinin increment of 10.2 ± 1.6 pmol/L compared with 10.7 ± 0.7 pmol/L during infusion of 1 Ivy dog unit per kilogram per hour of cholecystokinin. The increases in plasma cholecystokinin after fat and exogenous cholecystokinin administration were accompanied by similar decreases in gallbladder volume. Integrated gallbladder contraction after fat instillation was 3,939% ± 288%. min compared with 3,301% ± 359%. min during cholecystokinin infusion (NS). Atropine (0.015 mg/kg as bolus followed by 0.005 mg/kg/hr) did not change plasma cholecystokinin concentrations but induced similar inhibition of gallbladder contraction to 2,296% ± 511%. min (p < 0.05) after intraduodenal fat instillation and to 1,756% ± 456%. min (p < 0.05) during cholecystokinin infusion. We conclude that cholecystokinin is of major importance in intestinal stimulation of gallbladder contraction. Atropine inhibits the gallbladder response to intraduodenal fat. This inhibition is not due to a reduction in cholecystokinin secretion but to a diminished gallbladder response to cholecystokinin.
Analyses of the Anatomy of the Ureter near Ureterovesical Junction on the Unenhanced CT

Purpose: There has been no report evaluating the anatomy of the ureter on CT images. The purpose of this study was to retrospectively evaluate the anatomy of the ureter near the ureterovesical junction on preoperative CT. Methods: Forty patients were analyzed the craniocaudal level of the ureterovesical junction, the transverse distance from the medial line of the body to the ureterovesical junction, the direction of the ureter from the ureterovesical junction, and the length of the ureter from the point of turning medially to the ureterovesical junction. Results: The ureterovesical junction was almost at the level of the upper or middle of the left femoral head. The mean transverse distance on the right and left side was 19.0 and 19.3 mm. The direction of the ureter was almost posterior, lateral, and cranial, but had a wide range of angles. The mean length of the ureter on the right and left side was 24.0 and 23.9 mm. Conclusions: We can evaluate the anatomy of the ureter near the ureterovesical junction on preoperative CT.
Collaborative practice: development, implementation, and evaluation of a weaning protocol for patients receiving mechanical ventilation.

BACKGROUND Use of protocols to reduce weaning time for patients receiving mechanical ventilation helps reduce cost and length of stay. However, implementation of this type of protocol is not easy and requires a consistent collaborative effort. OBJECTIVE To provide a systematic approach to the weaning process by developing, implementing, and evaluating a protocol for weaning patients from mechanical ventilation in a medical respiratory intensive care unit. METHODS The weaning protocol used was a modification of a protocol developed by Ely et al. Modifications included a more aggressive approach in proceeding to the spontaneous breathing trial, inclusion of the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale, and documentation of the production of secretions. RESULTS Implementation of the protocol significantly reduced the duration of mechanical ventilation as measured by 8-hour shifts and ventilator days. Although length of stay in the intensive care unit was not significantly reduced (P = .29), a continuing downward trend occurred, from a mean of 8.6 days before the protocol was implemented to 7.9 days during the last 6 months of data collection (P = .07). CONCLUSIONS The need to provide efficient care requires the collaboration of all disciplines involved in providing patients' care. The weaning protocol introduced in this study demonstrates the benefits of using a collaborative team to identify best practices and implement them in a practice setting.
Aid, Political Business Cycles and Growth in Africa

This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2012, we test first, whether aid and institutional quality factors have an effect on growth. We find evidence to support the most recent studies showing that aid has a positive impact on growth. We however, do not find evidence to support the proposition that institutional quality is a sine qua non conditional for aid to achieve impact on growth. Second, we test whether donor aid facilitates political business cycles, and investigates their effect on growth. We find evidence that donors, through guaranteeing support to incumbent governments, unwittingly do instigate political business cycles. Forbearance, and sometimes complicity by donors, aid seems to allow incumbent governments to instigate macroeconomic stimuli that ensure electoral victory with no fear of losing aid.
Requirements for an L-band SAR-mission for global monitoring of tectonic activities

SAR interferometry is a well established technology for mapping tectonic activities from space. In this study a mission concept is investigated that provides a global monitoring capability of geo-tectonic threads. Due to the requirement of long-time interferometric coherence of the mapped surfaces an L-band system is proposed. Four scenarios are defined and the respective product requirements are given for each of them: tectonics/earthquakes, tectonics/volcanoes, landslides, and urban subsidence.