Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategy-Proof Resource Allocation Mechanism for Multi-Flow Wireless Multicast

Wireless multicast is a promising technology for delivering information from a server to multiple users. Through wireless multicast, the server can fulfill the data requirement of multiple users by simply transmitting a single copy of data contents, which increases the efficient usage of radio resources. This paper considers a multi-flow multicast scenario where a base station (BS) is capable of sending multiple data flows to multiple multicast groups. To configure the multicast and achieve optimal resource allocation, the BS may require the feedback of the channel-quality information (CQI) from the users. The CQI is, in general, the users' private information as only the users can directly measure their channel qualities. However, the selfish users may manipulate the multicast configuration through untruthful feedback to increase their own performance. Regarding this issue, we propose a multicast resource allocation mechanism with the designs of the pricing scheme and the weighted water-filling resource allocation. Our analysis shows that the proposed mechanism can elicit the true CQI from the users (strategy-proofness), avoiding any manipulation of multicast configuration and thereby guaranteeing efficient and fair network operation.
Synthesis and antiplasmodial activity of a cysteine protease-inhibiting biotinylated aziridine-2,3-dicarboxylate

Abstract Cysteine proteases have been implicated in a variety of processes essential for the survival and progression of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Here, we synthesized a cysteine protease inhibitor that contains the electrophilic aziridine-2,3-dicarboxylic acid as the reactive agent and biotin as a targeting label. Diethyl ester and dibenzyl ester derivatives of the inhibitor were active against cathepsin L and the plasmodial protease falcipain 2, but only the latter displayed potent antiplasmodial activity against viable parasites. The morphological changes observed during the intraerythrocytic life stages of Plasmodium suggest that degradation of hemoglobin of the host cell is seriously affected, eventually leading to growth arrest and cell death of the parasites. After incubation of infected erythrocytes with the compound plasmodial proteins were captured, with the biotinyl group of the inhibitor serving as an affinity tag. Among these the cysteine proteases falcipain 2 and falcipain 3 were identified as potential target proteins of the compound as evidenced by tandem mass spectrometry. Apparently, the compound gets access to intracellular compartments and therein targets plasmodial cysteine proteases. Accordingly, the reagent described here appears to be a valuable template to develop cell-permeable, nonradioactive reagents that selectively target enzymes involved in pathogenicity of the parasite.
THE EFFECTS OF BUREAUCRACY ON THE DELIVERY OF SERVICES WITHIN THE CITY OF JOHANNESBURG

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, government programmes have improved the quality of lives and living standards of the poorest South Africans, the majority of whom were previously disadvantaged by apartheid segregation policies. On face value, racism and prejudice seem to have declined. Thus society seems to be slowly integrating as equals. However, the legacies of apartheid, combined with poor budgetary and financial management skills, a massive backlog in basic services and infrastructure, regional inequalities in the provision thereof, and sometimes tense social relationships, continue to limit opportunities for social and economic development. Additionally, despite progress made, many people remain vulnerable with poverty, unemployment, and health issues remaining a factor that continues to promote dependency on government The ability of government, municipalities in particular, to deliver such services and meet the expectations of the communities remains a contested notion. Capacity, a lack of suitable skills, bureaucracy and outsourcing of government functions to consultants has been widely blamed for what has been viewed as “shabby service delivery” by municipalities. These they believe are as a result of poor leadership skills, lack of vision and an inability to deliver while outsourcing its functions to unqualified, less experienced contractors who do not have the government’s development goals as their aim. The primary purpose of this research therefore is to determine the effects of internal bureaucracy on the provision of services within the City of Johannesburg. The research will further investigate how that impacts negatively on the City’s quest to provide quality services to its residence. These are leadership role, citizen engagement and governance. With reference to the ongoing public protests in various parts of the City, this ii research will in addition explore and attempt to understand how the City intends to address public violence linked to service delivery demands, and the impact that current internal institutional arrangements, leadership challenges and management systems have on realising the vision to achieve a world class African City that is well governed, resilient, sustainable and liveable for all. Recommendations informed by participant’s views and management theories will be also be made.
Dendritic Localization of the Translational Repressor Pumilio 2 and Its Contribution to Dendritic Stress Granules

Pumilio (Pum) protein acts as a translational inhibitor in several organisms including yeast, Drosophila, Xenopus, and mammals. Two Pumilio genes, Pum1 and Pum2, have been identified in mammals, but their function in neurons has not been identified. In this study, we found that Pum2 mRNA is expressed during neuronal development and that the protein is found in discrete particles in both the cell body and the dendritic compartment of fully polarized neurons. This finding indicates that Pum2 is a novel candidate of dendritically localized ribonucleoparticles (RNPs). During metabolic stress, Pum2 is present in stress granules (SGs), which are subsequently detected in the somatodendritic domain. It remains excluded from processing bodies under all conditions. When overexpressed in neurons and fibroblasts, Pum2 induces the formation of SGs that also contain T-cell intracellular antigen 1 (TIA-1)-related protein, eukaryotic initiation factor 4E, poly(A)-binding protein, TIA-1, and other RNA-binding proteins including Staufen1 and Barentsz. This induction of SGs is dependent on the RNA-binding domain and a glutamine-rich region in the N terminus of Pum2. This glutamine-rich region behaves in a similar manner as TIA-1 and prion protein, two molecules with known roles in protein aggregation. Pum2 downregulation in neurons via RNA interference (RNAi) interferes with the formation of SGs during metabolic stress. Cotransfection with an RNAi-resistant portion of the Pum2 mRNA restores SG formation. These results suggest a role for Pum2 in dendritic RNPs and SG formation in mammalian neurons.
A novel small molecule inhibitor of FAK decreases growth of human pancreatic cancer

Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is a cytoplasmic tyrosine kinase that is overexpressed in many types of tumors, including pancreatic cancer, and plays an important role in cell adhesion and survival signaling. Pancreatic cancer is a lethal disease and is very resistant to chemotherapy, and FAK has been shown recently to assist in tumor cell survival. Therefore, FAK is an excellent potential target for anti-cancer therapy. We identified a novel small molecule inhibitor (1,2,4,5-Benzenetetraamine tetrahydrochloride, that we called Y15) targeting the main autophosphorylation site of FAK and hypothesized that it would be an effective treatment strategy against human pancreatic cancer. Y15 specifically blocked phosphorylation of Y397-FAK and total phosphorylation of FAK. It directly inhibited FAK autophosphorylation in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Furthermore, Y15 increased pancreatic cancer cell detachment and inhibited cell adhesion in a dose-dependent manner. Y15 effectively caused human pancreatic tumor regression in vivo, when administered alone and its effects were synergistic with gemcitabine chemotherapy. This was accompanied by a decrease in Y397-phosphorylation of FAK in the tumors treated with Y15. Thus, targeting the Y397 site of FAK in pancreatic cancer with the small molecule inhibitor, 1,2,4,5-Benzenetetraamine tetrahydrochloride, is a potentially effective treatment strategy in this deadly disease.
A Novel Full-Duplex Spectrum Sensing Algorithm for OFDM Signals in Cognitive Radio Networks

Full duplex (FD) capability enables a ``listen and talk" protocol for spectrum sensing that has been used as a new paradigm to increase the spectrum utilization in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). However, the spectrum sensing performance suffers from the imperfect self-interference suppression (SIS). This could significantly degrade the performance of FD systems in CRNs. In this paper, we investigate the issue of spectrum sensing with imperfect SIS in FD systems. By drawing support from a cyclic prefix (CP) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation (OFDM) signals, we propose a novel spectrum sensing mechanism that is robust to self- interference. Comparing with other conventional sensing approaches in FD systems, the proposed method is independent of timing delay. That significantly improves the sensing performance, even without requiring a complex process for timing delay estimation. As a result, it also reduces the overhead of spectrum sensing. Extensive simulation results indicate that even with serious self-interference and timing delay, the presented approach is still able to achieve much higher performance than the conventional energy detection and waveform-based detection approaches.
Forecasting volatility in the New Zealand stock market

This study evaluates the performance of nine alternative models for predicting stock price volatility using daily New Zealand data. The competing models contain both simple models such as the random walk and smoothing models and complex models such as ARCH-type models and a stochastic volatility model. Four different measures are used to evaluate the forecasting accuracy. The main results are the following: (1) the stochastic volatility model provides the best performance among all the candidates; (2) ARCH-type models can perform well or badly depending on the form chosen: the performance of the GARCH(3,2) model, the best model within the ARCH family, is sensitive to the choice of assessment measures; and (3) the regression and exponentially weighted moving average models do not perform well according to any assessment measure, in contrast to the results found in various markets.
A wideband polarization reconfigurable antenna for WLAN applications

This paper proposes a wideband polarization reconfigurable antenna design for WLAN applications. It consists of a shorted annular patch (SAP) antenna as the source, a partially reflective surface (PRS) structure to enhance the gain, and a reconfigurable Wilkinson power divider as the feed network. The antenna can electronically alter its polarization between linear polarization (LP), left-hand circular polarization (LHCP), and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP),achieving an overlapped 10dB impedance bandwidth and 3 dB axial-ratio bandwidth of 4.68-5.33 GHz (13%), thus outperforming most of the reported polarization reconfigurable antennas in terms of the frequency bandwidth.
Historical reconstruction of climatic and elevation preferences and the evolution of cloud forest-adapted tree ferns in Mesoamerica

Background Cloud forests, characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud cover and fragmented distribution, are one of the most threatened habitats, especially in the Neotropics. Tree ferns are among the most conspicuous elements in these forests, and ferns are restricted to regions in which minimum temperatures rarely drop below freezing and rainfall is high and evenly distributed around the year. Current phylogeographic data suggest that some of the cloud forest-adapted species remained in situ or expanded to the lowlands during glacial cycles and contracted allopatrically during the interglacials. Although the observed genetic signals of population size changes of cloud forest-adapted species including tree ferns correspond to predicted changes by Pleistocene climate change dynamics, the observed patterns of intraspecific lineage divergence showed temporal incongruence. Methods Here we combined phylogenetic analyses, ancestral area reconstruction, and divergence time estimates with climatic and altitudinal data (environmental space) for phenotypic traits of tree fern species to make inferences about evolutionary processes in deep time. We used phylogenetic Bayesian inference and geographic and altitudinal distribution of tree ferns to investigate ancestral area and elevation and environmental preferences of Mesoamerican tree ferns. The phylogeny was then used to estimate divergence times and ask whether the ancestral area and elevation and environmental shifts were linked to climatic events and historical climatic preferences. Results Bayesian trees retrieved Cyathea, Alsophyla, Gymnosphaera and Sphaeropteris in monophyletic clades. Splits for species in these genera found in Mesoamerican cloud forests are recent, from the Neogene to the Quaternary, Australia was identified as the ancestral area for the clades of these genera, except for Gymnosphaera that was Mesoamerica. Climate tolerance was not divergent from hypothesized ancestors for the most significant variables or elevation. For elevational shifts, we found repeated change from low to high elevations. Conclusions Our data suggest that representatives of Cyatheaceae main lineages migrated from Australia to Mesoamerican cloud forests in different times and have persisted in these environmentally unstable areas but extant species diverged recentrly from their ancestors.
Morphological and Biochemical Investigation of Nitric Oxide Synthase and Related Enzymes in the Rat and Pig Urothelium

We investigated the enzymes involved in the NADPH-diaphorase (d) reaction in the rat and pig bladder urothelium. The urothelial cell layer displayed intense and uniform NADPH-d activity. Preincubation with the flavoprotein inhibitor diphenyleneiodionium chloride (DPI) and the alkaline phosphatase inhibitor levamisole concentration-dependently decreased the urothelial NADPH-d activity. Immunoreactivities to neuronal (n), endothelial (e), or inducible (i) nitric oxide synthase (NOS) were not detected in rat or pig urothelial cells. In rats, the urothelium was uniformly immunoreactive for NADPH cytochrome P450 reductase, whereas the pig urothelium displayed inconsistent labeling. In lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-treated rats, the bladder urothelium showed positive iNOS immunoreactivity. The iNOS labeling was found predominantly in cells located in the basal layer of the urothelium. In the pig bladder mucosa, a Ca2+ -dependent NOS activity was evident in cytosolic and particulate fractions that was quantitatively comparable to the NOS activity found in the smooth muscle. In ultrastructural studies of urothelial cells, NADPH-d reaction products were found predominantly on membranes of the nuclear envelope, endoplasmatic reticulum and mitochondria. In conclusion, NADPH-d staining of the urothelium cannot be taken as an indicator for the presence of constitutively expressed NOS. Activity of alkaline phosphatase and cytochrome P450 reductase may account for part of the NADPH-d reaction in urothelial cells. However, LPS treatment of rats caused expression of iNOS in urothelial cells.
300 GHz Integrated Heterodyne Receiver and Transmitter With On-Chip Fundamental Local Oscillator and Mixers

A 300 GHz integrated heterodyne receiver and transmitter for wideband communication and imaging applications have been developed in a 250 nm InP double-heterojunction bipolar transistor (DHBT) process. The receiver integrates a 300 GHz RF amplifier with a balun, a down-conversion mixer with an IF amplifier, and a local oscillator, all on a single chip. The transmitter is composed of the identical circuit blocks of RF amplifier and oscillator in addition to an up-conversion mixer. Compared to previous integrated receivers and transmitters reported at above 200 GHz, the proposed work includes the on-chip local oscillator and mixers operating at a fundamental mode. This simplifies the system architecture, thus not only reducing the chip area and DC consumption but also improving the RF performance such as high conversion gain, low spurious levels, and low noise figure. The receiver exhibits a peak conversion gain of 26 dB at 298 GHz, 3-dB bandwidth of 20 GHz, and noise figure of 12.0-16.3 dB at IF frequency from 1.1 to 7.7 GHz. The transmitter exhibits peak conversion gain of 25 dB, 3 dB bandwidth of 18 GHz, and output power of -2.3 dBm. The DC power consumption of the receiver and transmitter are 482 and 452 mW, respectively.
Facilitating involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous during out-patient treatment: a randomized clinical trial.

AIM This study evaluated two strategies to facilitate involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)--a 12-Step-based directive approach and a motivational enhancement approach--during skills-focused individual treatment. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial with assessments at baseline, end of treatment and 3, 6, 9 and 12 months after treatment. PARTICIPANTS, SETTING AND INTERVENTION: A total of 169 alcoholic out-patients (57 women) assigned randomly to one of three conditions: a directive approach to facilitating AA, a motivational enhancement approach to facilitating AA or treatment as usual, with no special emphasis on AA. MEASUREMENTS Self-report of AA meeting attendance and involvement, alcohol consumption (percentage of days abstinent, percentage of days heavy drinking) and negative alcohol consequences. FINDINGS Participants exposed to the 12-Step directive condition for facilitating AA involvement reported more AA meeting attendance, more evidence of active involvement in AA and a higher percentage of days abstinent relative to participants in the treatment-as-usual comparison group. Evidence also suggested that the effect of the directive strategy on abstinent days was mediated partially through AA involvement. The motivational enhancement approach to facilitating AA had no effect on outcome measures. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that treatment providers can use a 12-Step-based directive approach to effectively facilitate involvement in AA and thereby improve client outcome.
Mobile HolstenTour: contextualized multimedia museum guide

Modern museums provide visitors with mobile, context-aware information and guidance systems. Unfortunately, these systems often suffer from several technological drawbacks: expensive infrastructure, complex maintenance and content modification, difficult to learn user interfaces, manual location specification requirements, etc. Visitors have to rent, learn, carry and return yet another mobile device. On the other hand, most modern nomadics already own high-performance mobile devices: smart-phones. But acceptance to install museum software on a personal device is rather limited. In this paper, a novel mobile, context-aware museum information system is introduced that runs on the visitors' mobile phones without any prior installation. We outline the technical principles of the underlying Medient infrastructure and present HolstenTour as an example service instantiation for the famous Museum Holstentor in Luebeck, Germany.
Public Opinion and Global Justice

The concept of global justice has been developed to stress the worldwide implications of moral problems. Not much, however, has been written about the actual politics of global justice. This article focuses on public opinion and argues that attitudes about international redistribution are not a simple projection of attitudes about the domestic situation. In countries where domestic income redistribution is seen as an important priority, foreign aid is less popular; where this is less so, there is more concern for the fate of the poor in the South. Far from reflecting a lack of coherence in public opinion, these counterintuitive results need to be understood in connection with policy achievements in donor countries. The authors' empirical findings suggest that although the commitment to redistribute is stronger at the national level, relationships of solidarity do not stop at national boundaries. The achievement of justice at home in fact sustains justice abroad.
DBN-ivector Framework for Acoustic Emotion Recognition

Deep learning and i-vectors have been successfully used in speech and speaker recognition recently. In this work we propose a framework based on deep belief network (DBN) and ivector space modeling for acoustic emotion recognition. We use two types of labels for frame level DBN training. The first one is the vector of posterior probabilities calculated from the GMM universal background model (UBM). The second one is the predicted label based on the GMMs. The DBN is trained to minimize errors for both types. After DBN training, we use the vector of posterior probabilities estimated by DBN to replace the UBM for i-vector extraction. Finally the extracted i-vectors are used in backend classifiers for emotion recognition. Our experiments on the USC IEMOCAP data show the effectiveness of our proposed DBN-ivector framework. In particular, with decision level combination, our proposed system yields significant improvement on both unweighted and weighted accuracy.
Understanding the "Few that Matter" in Online Social Production Communities: The Case of Wikipedia

Several past studies have commented on the uneven distribution of contributions in online social production communities while at the same time highlighting the successful end products of many such communities. These two seemingly paradoxical situations are made possible through smaller groups of highly devoted volunteers who act as catalysts in organizing and maintaining community outputs. These volunteers have been referred to as “knowledge janitors. ” There is currently limited understanding of how the group composition and interaction patterns of knowledge janitors affect social production quality outcomes. This study provides answers to these questions in the context of Wikipedia. By analyzing 11,359 changes in Wikipedia article quality, we found that cohesiveness, diversity, and equal distribution of communication turn-taking of an article’s janitors increase the likelihood of that article’s quality improvement. These main findings are further refined by considering how the main effects differ at different development stages of an article. The study’s contributions to research and implications to practice are discussed.
An efficient load flow algorithm for radial distribution networks

This paper presents an efficient load flow algorithm, specifically tailored for Radial distribution networks, which employ special recursive techniques for load flow owing to their radial topology and high (R/X) ratios of its transmission lines. The proposed methodology models the load flow problem into a convex optimization problem, which is solved using primal-dual interior-point algorithm in polynomial time. Moreover, the time draining LU decomposition techniques and forward/backward substitution algorithms of the Jacobian matrix or admittance matrix essential for the traditional load flow methods are no longer needed. A comparison between the proposed algorithm and another validated algorithm in literature has been provided to verify the computational precision of the adopted algorithm. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has shown clear competitiveness in terms of computational efficiency.