Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Routing protocol metrics for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) play an important role in today communication and they could take more portion of wireless communication in near future. WMN’s research area challenges on some problems such as low throughput and high delays. Routing Protocols in WMNs have a vital role in data communication and the main key in all routing protocols is metric. In this paper, most of the metrics in WMNs are considered in different categories. Link-quality and Load-dependant metrics are covered most of the metrics and then later metrics for multi channels networks are considered. Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as a famous link-quality metric with all its divisions have been studied and then more metrics which consider more wireless parameters such as intra and inter interferences have been added. In the last sections, some metrics which provide for multi channel networks and multi interface devices are mentioned and also metric for cognitive radio environment. In the end of the paper, conclusion with a comparison table has been provided to compare metrics in WMNs.
Improving speech synthesis for noisy environments

Speech Synthesizers have traditionally been built on carefully read speech that is recorded in studio environment. Such voices are suboptimal for use in noisy conditions, which is inevitable in a majority of deployed speech systems. In this work, we attempt to modify the output of the speech synthesizers to make it more appropriate for noisy environments. Comparison of spectral and prosodic features of speech in noise and results of some conversion techniques are presented.
Forms, effects, function: LIS students' attitudes towards portable e-book readers

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the use of a popular portable e‐reader device, the Kindle 2, among library and information science (LIS) students and its effects on individual reading practices and the potential applications for library services.Design/methodology/approach – Using journal logs and diary‐interviews as methods of data collection, the study analyzes the use of the Kindle over a one‐week period by a pool of 20 LIS students at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science.Findings – The findings reveal four key areas that provide a framework for data interpretation: usage patterns, user interaction, effect on reading habits, and future applications. One major finding is that the portability of the device and its convenience of use anywhere and any time is pivotal for enhancing the students' reading experience and outweighs the limitations of the device's usability.Research limitations/implications – Results may not be generalizable due to the small size and homogeneity o.
Fault detection effectiveness of spathic test data

This paper presents an approach for generating test data for unit-level, and possibly integration-level, testing based on sampling over intervals of the input probability distribution, i.e., one that has been divided or layered according to criteria. Our approach is termed "spathic" as it selects random values felt to be most likely or least likely to occur from a segmented input probability distribution. Also, it allows the layers to be further segmented if additional test data is required later in the test cycle. The spathic approach finds a middle ground between the more difficult to achieve adequacy criteria and random test data generation, and requires less effort on the part of the tester. It can be viewed as guided random testing, with the tester specifying some information about expected input. The spathic test data generation approach can be used to augment "intelligent" manual unit-level testing. An initial case study suggests that spathic test sets defect more faults than random test data sets, and achieve higher levels of statement and branch coverage.
A scanning bi-static SODAR

Field results are given from a bi-static SODAR which uses a single central vertical transmission and three distributed microphone array receivers. Fourier transform delay methods are applied to data sampled from each microphone to retrospectively scan in angle and follow the transmitted pulse. Advantages of sampling a narrow atmospheric column, rather than distributed volumes are discussed.
Phase Coupling in Simulated Chains of Coupled Oscillators Representing the Lamprey Spinal Cord

Previous application of a mathematical theory of chains of coupled oscillators to the results of experiments on the lamprey spinal cord led to conclusions about the mechanisms of intersegmental coordination in the lamprey. The theory provides no direct link, however, to electrophysiological data obtained at the cellular level, nor are the details of the neuronal circuitry in the lamprey known. In this paper, a variant of the theory is developed for which the relevant variables can potentially be measured. This theory will be applied to measurements on simulated oscillators, based on a network that has been postulated to constitute the basic circuitry of the segmental oscillator in the lamprey. A linear approximation to the equations is derived, and it will be shown that the behavior of simulated chains of these oscillators obeys the predictions of this approximation.
Friend or frenemy?: predicting signed ties in social networks

We study the problem of labeling the edges of a social network graph (e.g., acquaintance connections in Facebook) as either positive (i.e., trust, true friendship) or negative (i.e., distrust, possible frenemy) relations. Such signed relations provide much stronger signal in tying the behavior of online users than the unipolar Homophily effect, yet are largely unavailable as most social graphs only contain unsigned edges. We show the surprising fact that it is possible to infer signed social ties with good accuracy solely based on users' behavior of decision making (or using only a small fraction of supervision information) via unsupervised and semi-supervised algorithms. This work hereby makes it possible to turn an unsigned acquaintance network (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) into a signed trust-distrust network (e.g. Epinion, Slashdot). Our results are based on a mixed effects framework that simultaneously captures users' behavior, social interactions as well as the interplay between the two. The framework includes a series of latent factor models and it also encodes the principles of balance and status from Social psychology. Experiments on Epinion and Yahoo! Pulse networks illustrate that (1) signed social ties can be predicted with high-accuracy even in fully unsupervised settings, and (2) the predicted signed ties are significantly more useful for social behavior prediction than simple Homophily.
“ UNFINISHED DRAFT ” A REAL OPTIONS THEORY OF STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank C. Traditional HR architecture, which views different employee groups as a portfolio based on specificity and value, is static and insufficient under uncertainty. We develop an alternative real options portfolio framework based on human capital (HC) flexibility or adaptive capability to respond to a range of future contingent landscapes. Linkage between dynamic capabilities and HC options enables transforming HR (make, buy, lease, or ally) strategies into flexible ones. This dynamic portfolio framework guides allocating, valuing and inter-temporally managing HC in a contingent landscape. In dynamic environments there is strategic flexibility value in maintaining active presence in a variety of employment modes, both base and flexible ones. Both the initial allocation among the modes matters as well as their contingent reallocation and management across time. The flexible modes act as a buffer, contracting or expanding in response to external demand or unexpected environmental shocks with less cost and time delays. This explains the recent rise in flexible workforce and delays in permanent hiring following uncertain down markets. We develop testable propositions about HC portfolio management with implications for staged internal development, the timing and type of market hiring in up or down markets, subcontracting and outsourcing policy, HR alliances, and multinational operations. Firms should develop adaptive firm-specific skills and manage HC flexibility for base employees, leveraged by utilizing flexible strategies involving a changing mix of external workers across organizational boundaries.
Enhanced text steganography by changing word's spelling

Digitization of electronic signals has brought a stir in the telecommunication field. From copper wire to fiber optics, technology has gone through a mammoth change rendering a variety of communication media available for use by people, at the cheapest of rates possible, to communicate in a nearly perfect error-free environment. Consumers can now freely exchange or distribute digital contents at any time and anywhere in the world. The situation where a perfect replica of digital content can easily be made has raised serious security concerns prompting for the protection of rights of intellectual ownership and apprehension of unauthorized tampering of digital information for mala fide usage. On the other hand, the way multimedia contents are being tempered with has also made it an important subject of technological research. This paper suggests an enhanced method for secretly exchanging real time or off line information by using differently spelled words in British and American Language. The concept has been implemented via software applications developed in Visual Basic 6 programming language.
White matter consequences of retinal receptor and ganglion cell damage.

PURPOSE Patients with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) and cone-rod dystrophy (CRD) have central vision loss; but CRD damages the retinal photoreceptor layer, and LHON damages the retinal ganglion cell (RGC) layer. Using diffusion MRI, we measured how these two types of retinal damage affect the optic tract (ganglion cell axons) and optic radiation (geniculo-striate axons). METHODS Adult onset CRD (n = 5), LHON (n = 6), and healthy controls (n = 14) participated in the study. We used probabilistic fiber tractography to identify the optic tract and the optic radiation. We compared axial and radial diffusivity at many positions along the optic tract and the optic radiation. RESULTS In both types of patients, diffusion measures within the optic tract and the optic radiation differ from controls. The optic tract change is principally a decrease in axial diffusivity; the optic radiation change is principally an increase in radial diffusivity. CONCLUSIONS Both photoreceptor layer (CRD) and retinal ganglion cell (LHON) retinal disease causes substantial change in the visual white matter. These changes can be measured using diffusion MRI. The diffusion changes measured in the optic tract and the optic radiation differ, suggesting that they are caused by different biological mechanisms.
Integrative gene expression analysis of lung cancer based on a technology-merging approach

Nowadays there are many microarray gene expression datasets which are available by means of public repositories. Nevertheless, the fact is that most of them are low-scale analysis with a little number of samples. Consequently, integrating different data from several independent studies which try to treat a similar disease may be seen as a good option to tackle with the scarce number of samples that can be collected by only one study. In this paper we take a step beyond this approach and we merge also datasets from different microarray technologies, namely both Illumina and Affymetrix. Thanks to that we achieve a bigger database of lung cancer studies in order to obtain more significantly expressed genes in the differential gene expression analysis.
Multiple Lyrics Alignment: Automatic Retrieval of Song Lyrics

We present an approach to automatically retrieve and extract lyrics of arbitrary songs from the Internet. It is intended to provide easy and convenient access to lyrics for users, as well as a basis for further research based on lyrics, e.g. semantic analysis. Due to the fact that many lyrics found on the web suffer from individual errors like typos, we make use of multiple versions from different sources to eliminate mistakes. This is accomplished by Multiple Sequence Alignment. The different sites are aligned and examined for matching sequences of words, finding those parts on the pages that are likely to contain the lyrics. This provides a means to find the most probable version of lyrics, i.e. a version with highest consensus among different sources.
Generic Centralized Multi Sensor Data Fusion Based on Probabilistic Sensor and Environment Models for Driver Assistance Systems

Modern driver assistance and safety systems are using a combination of two or more sensors for reliable tracking and classification of relevant road users like vehicles, trucks, cars and others. In these systems, processing and fusion stages are optimized for the properties of the sensor combination and the application requirements. A change of either sensor hardware or application involves expensive redesign and evaluation cycles. In this contribution, we present a multi sensor fusion system which is implemented to be independent of both sensor hardware properties and application requirements. This supports changes in sensor combination or application requirements. Furthermore, the environmental model can be used by more than one application at the same time. A probabilistic approach for this generic fusion system is presented and discussed.
Cloning of a Novel Prolyl 4-Hydroxylase Subunit Expressed in the Fibrous Cap of Human Atherosclerotic Plaque

Background—The production of collagen is fundamental to atherosclerosis and critically dependent on posttranslational modification by prolyl 4-hydroxylase. Methods and Results—We report the cloning of a novel prolyl 4-hydroxylase catalytic (&agr;) subunit from human vascular smooth muscle cells. The peptide displayed conservation of critical residues for interacting with Fe2+ and 2-oxoglutarate, essential cosubstrates for prolyl 4-hydroxylase activity. Furthermore, when the recombinant protein was expressed in cells, it associated with the &bgr;-subunit of prolyl 4-hydroxylase and could catalyze prolyl 4-hydroxylation of a collagen-like peptide. The tissue distribution was dissimilar from that of the 2 previously cloned &agr;-subunits, suggesting a role beyond redundancy. Importantly, the novel gene was expressed in the fibrous cap of human carotid atherosclerotic lesions. Conclusions—The discovery of a novel prolyl 4-hydroxylase &agr;-subunit, here termed the &agr;(III)-subunit, suggests a new participant in collagen synthesis that, in view of the expression findings, may be relevant to atherosclerotic disease.
An improved method for the expression screening of membrane protein-GFP fusions in yeast

The expression and purification of membrane proteins is an extremely challenging area of work within Protein Science. Membrane proteins are required for compound screening and structure determination in industry. Here we describe some new and innovative methodology in developing the membrane protein GFP fusion primary expression screening in yeast. This methodology enables the expression of membrane proteins fused to GFP in both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia pastoris systems. This capability helps facilitate screening of constructs to establish which are suitable for membrane protein production for compound screening and structure determination In terms of the primary screening work, we have developed both agar plate and liquid plate expression methodology in yeast. The two approaches correspond well, but the agar plate method is more rapid and we have shown it to have the advantage of allowing cells to be taken directly into confocal microscopy for immediate cell localisation data. Innovative work to extend the methanol induction time in the Pichia agar plate method established good differentiation from the background. A novel agar plate method was also developed for S.cerevisiae which is also presented. These screening methods allow triaging of constructs for either membrane protein preps for biochemical assays or progression to fluorescence size exclusion chromatography; where various detergents can be screened to determine the most appropriate for membrane protein solubilisation, the starting point for purification, crystallisation and structure determination. Membrane targets depicted to demonstrate the improved primary screening methodology are a copper transporter Ctr1p from S.cerevisiae and a water transporter Aqp4 from human origin. Highlights An improved method for the production of recombinant MP-GFP fusions in yeast is presented using agar plates. An agar plate method for MP-GFP expression screening is described for Pichia pastoris, with improved induction methodology by the simple addition of methanol, allowing longer induction times for expression clarity. A new simple rapid agar plate method for MP-GFP expression screening is described for Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Cells can be taken directly from agar plates into confocal microscopy studies for immediate cell localisation data and triaging. Liquid plate based screening methods are also described for both yeasts in comparison, to show there is corresponding data, helping validate the new agar plate methods.
Two-degree-of-freedom LPV control for a through-the-road hybrid electric vehicle via torque vectoring

This paper presents an application of linear-Parameter-Varying (LPV) control to solve the torque vectoring problem of a through-the-road hybrid electric vehicle (TtR-HEV). To achieve high performance both in reference tracking and disturbance rejection, a two-degree-of-freedom LPV self-scheduled controller is synthesized by using mixed sensitivity loop shaping. The controller is based on a single Lyapunov function and guarantees stability and a level of control performance for all admissible trajectories of varying parameters. Moreover, an anti-windup control scheme is derived by employing a two-step design procedure. Finally the designed controller is tested in various driving maneuvers and compared with a flatness-based controller.
A New Approach for Understanding of Structure of Printed Mathematical Expression

This paper introduces a new approach for automatic understanding of structure of printed mathematical expression (ME). The method is consisted of three periods, i.e. matrix analysis, sub-expression analysis and script expression analysis. In matrix analysis (sub-expression analysis), a ME (sub-expression) is decomposed into several basic matrixes (sub-expressions) and some sub-expressions (script expressions) by reconstructing the ME global structure, and then every basic matrix (sub-expression) is analyzed from bottom to up. In script analysis, graph rewriting algorithm is adopted to build script relation trees among symbols within a script expression. In order to calculate spatial relations' confidence between two symbols, spatial relation model is built based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The experiments were implemented on a database with 3268 images and the results show that the proposed method works well. Top-1 prefect analysis accuracy reaches 92.3%.
A Dynamic Ensemble Framework for Mining Textual Streams with Class Imbalance

Textual stream classification has become a realistic and challenging issue since large-scale, high-dimensional, and non-stationary streams with class imbalance have been widely used in various real-life applications. According to the characters of textual streams, it is technically difficult to deal with the classification of textual stream, especially in imbalanced environment. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble framework, clustering forest, for learning from the textual imbalanced stream with concept drift (CFIM). The CFIM is based on ensemble learning by integrating a set of clustering trees (CTs). An adaptive selection method, which flexibly chooses the useful CTs by the property of the stream, is presented in CFIM. In particular, to deal with the problem of class imbalance, we collect and reuse both rare-class instances and misclassified instances from the historical chunks. Compared to most existing approaches, it is worth pointing out that our approach assumes that both majority class and rareclass may suffer from concept drift. Thus the distribution of resampled instances is similar to the current concept. The effectiveness of CFIM is examined in five real-world textual streams under an imbalanced nonstationary environment. Experimental results demonstrate that CFIM achieves better performance than four state-of-the-art ensemble models.
On the effects of battery imperfections in an energy harvesting device

Energy Harvesting allows the devices in a Wireless Sensor Network to recharge their batteries through environmental energy sources. While in the literature the main focus is on devices with ideal batteries, in reality several inefficiencies have to be considered to correctly design the operating regimes of an Energy Harvesting Device (EHD). In this work we describe how the throughput optimization problem changes under real battery constraints in an EHD. In particular, we consider imperfect knowledge of the state of charge of the battery and storage inefficiencies, i.e., part of the harvested energy is wasted in the battery recharging process. We formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process, basing our model on some realistic observations about transmission, consumption and harvesting power. We find the performance upper bound with a real battery and numerically discuss the novelty introduced by the real battery effects. We show that using the old policies obtained without considering the real battery effects is strongly suboptimal and may even result in zero throughput.
Depressive signs and cognitive performance in patients with a right hemisphere stroke.

PURPOSE This study investigated the influence of suggestive signs of depression (SSD) in right-hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) patients following a stroke on their cognitive performance measured by a brief neuropsychological assessment battery. METHODS Forty-two adults with RHD after a single episode of stroke and 84 matched controls participated in this study. They were assessed by means of the Geriatric Depression Scale and by Brief Neuropsychological Assessment Battery NEUPSILIN. RESULTS Almost half of the patients showed SSD. The RHD group with SSD (RHD+) showed poorer performance in at least one task among all evaluated cognitive domains (concentrated attention, visual perception, working memory, episodic verbal memory and semantic memory, auditory and written language, constructional praxia and verbal fluency). CONCLUSION The association of depression and RHD seems to enhance the occurrence and the severity of cognitive déficits. A brief neuropsychological assessment can be useful to identify cognitive impairment caused by this neuropsychiatric disorder.
Natural gradient based blind multiuser detection

In this paper, novel structures for dynamic removal of multiuser interference are proposed. The natural gradient (NG) is used either to compute whitening matrices in linear blind minimum MSE or to develop new structures. As a result, we propose a family of centralized and non-centralized multiuser detectors (MUDs). The NG provides the MUDs with the equivariant and superfficiency properties, making them near-far resistant by construction and their convergence optimal. Moreover, the complexity of these structures is significantly reduced. These novel solutions are successfully applied to the multiuser synchronous CDMA channel.