Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing Grace: Can an introductory programming language support the teaching of software engineering?

Many programming language constructs that support software engineering in the large - explicit variable declarations, explicit external dependencies, static types, information hiding, invariants-provide little benefit to the small programs written by novice programmers, where every extra syntactic token has to be explained and understood before novices can succeed in running even the simplest program. We are designing Grace, a new educational object-oriented language that we hope will prove useful for teaching both programming and software engineering. This paper describes some of the tradeoffs between teaching programming and teaching software engineering that we faced while designing Grace, and our attempts to address those tradeoffs.
CTCF and Rad21 Act as Host Cell Restriction Factors for Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus (KSHV) Lytic Replication by Modulating Viral Gene Transcription

Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is a human herpesvirus that causes Kaposi's sarcoma and is associated with the development of lymphoproliferative diseases. KSHV reactivation from latency and virion production is dependent on efficient transcription of over eighty lytic cycle genes and viral DNA replication. CTCF and cohesin, cellular proteins that cooperatively regulate gene expression and mediate long-range DNA interactions, have been shown to bind at specific sites in herpesvirus genomes. CTCF and cohesin regulate KSHV gene expression during latency and may also control lytic reactivation, although their role in lytic gene expression remains incompletely characterized. Here, we analyze the dynamic changes in CTCF and cohesin binding that occur during the process of KSHV viral reactivation and virion production by high resolution chromatin immunoprecipitation and deep sequencing (ChIP-Seq) and show that both proteins dissociate from viral genomes in kinetically and spatially distinct patterns. By utilizing siRNAs to specifically deplete CTCF and Rad21, a cohesin component, we demonstrate that both proteins are potent restriction factors for KSHV replication, with cohesin knockdown leading to hundred-fold increases in viral yield. High-throughput RNA sequencing was used to characterize the transcriptional effects of CTCF and cohesin depletion, and demonstrated that both proteins have complex and global effects on KSHV lytic transcription. Specifically, both proteins act as positive factors for viral transcription initially but subsequently inhibit KSHV lytic transcription, such that their net effect is to limit KSHV RNA accumulation. Cohesin is a more potent inhibitor of KSHV transcription than CTCF but both proteins are also required for efficient transcription of a subset of KSHV genes. These data reveal novel effects of CTCF and cohesin on transcription from a relatively small genome that resemble their effects on the cellular genome by acting as gene-specific activators of some promoters, but differ in acting as global negative regulators of transcription.
Loading standardization of postendodontic restorations in vitro: impact of restorative stage, static loading, and dynamic loading.

OBJECTIVE The load capability of post-restored endodontically treated teeth (ETT) can be determined at different restorative stages. It was the aim of this study to compare the load capability of ETT at these stages. MATERIALS AND METHODS Maxillary central incisors were divided into 4 groups (n=10) and endodontically treated. Specimens were restored with: (I) only glass fiber posts (GFP); (II) GFP and composite build-up with 2 mm ferrule; (III and IV) with additional adhesively luted all-ceramic crowns. Group (I) to (III) were statically loaded, and group (IV) was exposed to thermomechanical loading (TML) and subsequent static loading. RESULTS The lowest median load level of 73 N was determined for group (I). The maximum median load value of 331 N was found for group (III). The comparison of Fmax [N] of group (I), (II) and (III) revealed significant differences between the groups (p<0.001). The specimens of group (IV) failed at significantly lower load values (p<0.005) as similarly restored specimens of group (III) which were only statically loaded. The stage of restoration and TML loading prior to static loading had a significant impact on fracture patterns (p=0.006). CONCLUSION Every additional restorative step torwards a final crown-restored ETT significantly increased the load capability. TML prior to load-to-fracture testing of the complete restorative complex, ie. post, core and crown, significantly decreased maximum load capability.
Neutronics and Safety Studies on a Research Reactor Concept for an Advanced Neutron Source

Abstract This paper presents preliminary neutronics and thermal hydraulics safety analysis results for a low-enriched uranium (LEU) fueled research reactor concept being studied at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The main goal of this research reactor is to provide advanced sources for neutron scattering experiments with a particular emphasis given to high intensity cold neutron sources (CNSs). A tank-in-pool type reactor with an innovative horizontally split compact core was developed in order to maximize the yield of the thermal flux trap in the reflector area. The reactor concept considered a 20 MW thermal power and a 30-day operating cycle. For non-proliferation purposes, a LEU fuel (U3Si2-Al) with 19.75 wt% enrichment was used. The core performance characteristics of an equilibrium cycle with several representative burnup states—including startup and end of cycle—were obtained using the Monte Carlo–based code MCNP6. The estimated maximum perturbed thermal flux of the core is ~5.0 × 1014 n/cm2-s. The calculated brightness of the CNS demonstrates an average gain factor of ~4 compared to the current source operated at the existing NIST reactor. Sufficient reactivity control worth and shutdown margins were provided by hafnium control elements. Reactivity coefficients were evaluated to ensure negative feedback. Thermal hydraulics safety studies of the reactor were performed using the multi-channel safety analysis code PARET. Steady-state analysis shows that the peak cladding temperature and minimum critical heat flux ratio are less than design limits with sufficient safety margins. Detailed transient analyses for a couple of hypothetical design-basis accidents show that no fuel damage or cladding failure would occur with the protection of reactor scrams. All these study results suggest this new research reactor concept offers a demonstrable potential to greatly expand the cold neutron capability with a 20 MW power and certified LEU fuels.
Paravirtualizing Linux in a real-time hypervisor

This paper describes a new hypervisor built to run Linux in a virtual machine. This hypervisor is built inside Anaxagoros, a real-time microkernel designed to execute safely hard real-time and non real-time tasks. This allows the execution of hard real-time tasks in parallel with Linux virtual machines without interfering with the execution of the real-time tasks. We implemented this hypervisor and compared performances with other virtualization techniques. Our hypervisor does not yet provide high performance but gives correct results and we believe the design is solid enough to guarantee solid performances with its future implementation.
Singapore International Schools: Best practice in culturally diverse music education

This paper explores the preliminary outcomes of research into the place and role of cultural diversity in primary music classes at five International Schools in Singapore. It highlights the ways in which school philosophy, policy, curriculum and in-service training influence teacher practice. The research provides insights into the challenges teachers face when diversifying their music programmes in addition to the areas of support that allow a programme based on cultural diversity to flourish and remain successful. The results of interviews with music specialists at these schools suggest that music programmes at International Schools in Singapore provide examples of best practice in culturally diverse music education. The success of these programmes is due to several identifiable factors such as strong philosophical and curricula foundations, quality in-service training and the regular involvement of culture bearers and visiting artists.
Scalable Reactive Stream Processing Using DDS and Rx

Event-driven design is fundamental to developing resilient, responsive, and scalable reactive systems as it supports asynchrony and loose coupling. The OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a proven event-driven technology for building data-centric reactive systems because it provides the primitives for decoupling system components with respect to time, space, quality-of-service, and behavior. DDS, by design, supports distribution scalability. However, with increasing core count in CPUs, building multicore-scalable reactive systems remains a challenge. Towards that end, we investigate the use of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) for DDS applications. Specifically, this paper presents our experience in integrating and evaluating Microsoft . NET Reactive Extensions (Rx) as a programming model for DDS-based reactive stream processing applications. We used a publicly available challenge problem involving real-time complex analytics over high-speed sensor data captured during a soccer game. We compare the FRP solution with an imperative solution we implemented in C++11 along several dimensions including code size, state management, concurrency model, event synchronization, and fitness for the purpose of “stream processing. ” Our experience suggests that DDS and Rx together provide a powerful infrastructure for reactive stream processing, which allows declarative specification of concurrency and therefore dramatically simplifies multicore scalability.
What new instruments are required to measure how well our societies are performing?

Transfer 3-4/09 15 (3-4) 377-381 (Autumn-Winter 2009) Since the post-World War II period, our Western societies have adopted, as the virtually exclusive instrument for measurement of their progress, the rate of growth of the gross domestic product (GDP). The idea that a nation’s production is the primary determinant of its wellbeing and progress is actually much older for, as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, a nation’s annual revenue was regarded as a key indicator of its power and the ‘annual labour’ expended in production as the most suitable base on which to found a stable social order. In the wake of this understanding, the 19th century interpreted production and consumption as civilising acts par excellence. The 20th century drew attention to the limitations of this mode of reasoning when, during the 1970s, critics began to point out the risks inherent in the reduction of ‘progress’ to economic accumulation, the sense of meaninglessness spawned by societies forced to produce and consume in ever increasing quantities, and the difficulties entailed in making work a fulfilling activity in a technology-based civilisation. Attention was thus drawn to the shortcomings of GDP: its inability to capture the value of forms of work other than paid labour (activities including care of others, voluntary work, leisure pursuits, involvement in politics); its disregard for inequality in shares of production and consumption; its failure to take into account the damage inflicted on the natural and ‘social’2 capital. Yet the advent of relentlessly mounting unemployment soon halted attempts to find alternative indicators and, above all, to set aside development as the ‘fuel’ to drive job creation, redistribution, improvements to the welfare state, etc. An operation that we failed to perform when there was still time to think the situation through carefully has now become an emergency. It is urgent that we find ways of implementing a development model that ceases to regard as ‘free-for-all’ the natural and social ‘fund’ on which we have shamelessly drawn until today, and that we replace our obsolete indicators with new compasses able to guide us in forging a new form of development based on a radically What new instruments are required to measure how well our societies are performing?
Discriminatory power of handwritten words for writer recognition

Analysis of allographs (characters) and allograph combinations (words) is the key for the identification/verification of a writer's handwriting. While allographs are usually part of words and the segmentation of a word into allographs is a subjective process, analysis of handwritten words is a natural option, complementary to allograph and document-level analysis. We consider four different types of features obtained using both segmentation-based and segmentation-free approaches: (i) GSC (gradient, structural and concavity) features that are extracted from the cells of a grid superimposed on the word image (ii) WMR (word model recognizer) features, extracted from the cells of superimposed grids on the segmented characters (iii) SC (shape curvature) features that describe characters by the distribution of curvature values on their contours and (iv) SCON (shape context) features that measure the similarity between character contour shapes. Their individual and accumulated performance is evaluated for the writer identification and verification tasks on over 75000 words images, written by more than 1000 writers. Experimental results show that handwritten words are very effective in discriminating handwriting and that both segmentation-free and segmentation-based approaches are valid.
The differential impact of a basic communication course on perceived communication competencies in class, work, and social contexts

This study assessed the impact of a basic speech communication course on students’ perceptions of their communication competencies in class, work, and social settings. Analyses of pre‐ and post‐survey data obtained from students enrolled in a basic course indicated that the course had a differential impact based on communication context. While results showed perceived improvements for all three contexts, the improvements were significantly greater for the class context than for the work or social contexts. The differential impact of the course was found for perceived competencies related to public speaking, interpersonal communication, group communication, interviewing, and self‐confidence. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Molecular dynamics simulations of lysozyme–lipid systems: probing the early steps of protein aggregation

Using the molecular dynamics simulation, the role of lipids in the lysozyme transition into the aggregation-competent conformation has been clarified. Analysis of the changes of lysozyme secondary structure upon its interactions with the model bilayer membranes composed of phosphatidylcholine and its mixtures with phosphatidylglycerol (10, 40, and 80 mol%) within the time interval of 100 ns showed that lipid-bound protein is characterized by the increased content of β-structures. Along with this, the formation of protein–lipid complexes was accompanied by the increase in the gyration radius and the decrease in RMSD of polypeptide chain. The results obtained were interpreted in terms of the partial unfolding of lysozyme molecule on the lipid matrix, with the magnitude of this effect being increased with increasing the fraction of anionic lipids. Based on the results of molecular dynamics simulation, a hypothetical model of the nucleation of lysozyme amyloid fibrils in a membrane environment was suggested.
The Occurrence of Clustering in the Recall of Randomly Arranged Words of Different Frequencies-Of-Usage

Abstract : The study is closely related to one previously reported in that both deal with the influence of reinforcement on the incidence of clustering in the recall of randomly arranged words. Both employ the same hypotheses. They differ, however, in the techniques used for controlling reinforcement. The present study deals with differences in reinforcement during a pre-experimental phase whereas the earlier study undertook to manipulate reinforcement during the experimental phase. (Author)
Energy Efficient Election protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless a sensor network, which typically consist of large number of sensor nodes, is deployed in environmental fields for sensing and actuating applications. The protocols in WSNs play an important role in energy savings and the performance of WSNs could be improved by designing suitable MAC protocols. Energy efficiency is one of the important research themes while designing wireless sensor network nodes as WSNs are battery powered. MAC protocols are also used to minimize latency and maximize throughput in wireless sensor networks. Observably there are many MAC protocols available nowadays for WSNs but the actual objective is minimizing the energy consumption so that the lifetime is maximized. This paper is aimed at to summarize the key requirements for MAC protocol design and we have proposed a new protocol: Energy Efficient Election protocol (EEE-MAC) for WSNs. Our protocol is based on cluster based election algorithm and it can be implemented with any existing protocols. We have compared our proposed protocol with the existing contention-based S-MAC and T-MAC protocols. The simulation results show that our protocol has achieved better energy saving than the other three protocols.
ADP-Ribosylation Factor 6 Regulates Actin Cytoskeleton Remodeling in Coordination with Rac1 and RhoA

ABSTRACT In this study, we have documented an essential role for ADP-ribosylation factor 6 (ARF6) in cell surface remodeling in response to physiological stimulus and in the down regulation of stress fiber formation. We demonstrate that the G-protein-coupled receptor agonist bombesin triggers the redistribution of ARF6- and Rac1-containing endosomal vesicles to the cell surface. This membrane redistribution was accompanied by cortical actin rearrangements and was inhibited by dominant negative ARF6, implying that bombesin is a physiological trigger of ARF6 activation. Furthermore, these studies provide a new model for bombesin-induced Rac1 activation that involves ARF6-regulated endosomal recycling. The bombesin-elicited translocation of vesicular ARF6 was mimicked by activated Gαq and was partially inhibited by expression of RGS2, which down regulates Gq function. This suggests that Gq functions as an upstream regulator of ARF6 activation. The ARF6-induced peripheral cytoskeletal rearrangements were accompanied by a depletion of stress fibers. Moreover, cells expressing activated ARF6 resisted the formation of stress fibers induced by lysophosphatidic acid. We show that the ARF6-dependent inhibition of stress fiber formation was due to an inhibition of RhoA activation and was overcome by expression of a constitutively active RhoA mutant. The latter observations demonstrate that activation of ARF6 down regulates Rho signaling. Our findings underscore the potential roles of ARF6, Rac1, and RhoA in the coordinated regulation of cytoskeletal remodeling.
A Robust Eye Detection and Tracking Technique Using Gabor Filters

Eye detection is an important issue in the area of face recognition and vision based human-machine interface and so on. In this paper, we propose a robust eye (pupil) detection and tracking technique using Gabor filters. We first use Gabor filter and skin color information to detect the face and then an eye candidate region is automatically determined based on the geometric structure of human face. We then four Gabor filters with different directions (0, pi/4, pi/2, 3pi/4) to the eye candidate region. Since the pupil of eye do not have any directions, the pupil or the eye can be easily detected by combining the four responses of Gabor filters with a logical product. The proposed method is able to robustly detect and track eyes, and is insensitive to distance, pose and glass. In addition, the proposed method is also able to simultaneously detect and track multiple people.
Inclusion of pupils with intellectual disabilities: primary school teachers' attitudes and willingness in a rural area in Uganda

Teachers in regular schools have a responsibility to accommodate the needs and interests of all learners. The attitudes and willingness of teachers to include learners with intellectual disabilities in their classes in regular schools in a district with a semi-nomadic pastoral population in north-eastern Uganda was investigated. A survey of 125 school teachers was conducted, using an attitude scale and a willingness sub-scale. The results showed slightly more positive than negative attitudes, and more willingness than unwillingness to teach learners with intellectual disabilities. Attendance of workshops and seminars had a positive impact on teacher attitudes and willingness towards inclusive education. The findings are discussed with reference to historical–cultural characteristics of the district, as well as pupil and teacher characteristics.
MATHEMATICS OF A LADY TASTING TEA REVISITED

The British Standards Institution and the International Standards Organization specify that when mixtures of tea and milk are to be evaluated sensorially, the tea should be added to the milk. Four cups of tea prepared by pouring the tea into the cup first (TIF) and four cups prepared by placing the milk in the cup first (MIF) were presented to 155 panelists in the dark. They were instructed to select by taste the four cups containing the MIF tea. The frequency of correct selection was well above the chance level, indicating that the panelists had detected a difference in flavor. The same task was performed by 131 panelists except they evaluated the tea in light. The panelists were not highly trained tea tasters; in fact, most were not regular drinkers of hot tea. Notwithstanding that, their discriminating power was sufficient to resolve the subtle differences which did exist.
Community detection of complex network based on communication efficiency of nodes

Community detection is an important research topic in complex networks. We proposed the definition of communication efficiency of nodes, and the corresponding community detection algorithm. We consider community detection should be based on the essence of community. And the algorithm should have small amount of calculation and be suitable for practical application. The performance of the algorithm is tested on computer generated and real-world networks whose modular structure is already known or has been studied by means of other methods. The results show that our algorithm is very efficient and easy to implement.
Increasing pressure to be thin: 19 years of diet products in television commercials

Abstract The number of television commercials for diet foods and diet products shown on the three major American networks was tabulated for the years 1973–1991. A significant increase in both diet food commercials and diet product commercials was found during this period, and during the different time periods throughout the day. The findings index the pressure placed upon Americans to purchase diet food and diet products. The significance of these findings with respect to eating disorders is discussed.