Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Emergency Response Communications and Associated Security Challenges

The natural or man-made disaster demands an efficient communication and coordination among first responders to save life and other community resources. Normally, the traditional communication infrastructures such as land line or cellular networks are damaged and don't provide adequate communication services to first responders for exchanging emergency related information. Wireless ad hoc networks such as mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks are the promising alternatives in such type of situations. The security requirements for emergency response communications include privacy, data integrity, authentication, key management, access control and availability. Various ad hoc communication frameworks have been proposed for emergency response situations. The majority of the proposed frameworks don't provide adequate security services for reliable and secure information exchange. This paper presents a survey of the proposed emergency response communication frameworks and the potential security services required by them to provide reliable and secure information exchange during emergency situations.
In Vitro Anti-diabetic Activity of Sclerocarya Birrea and Ziziphus Mucronata

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is on the increase worldwide. Current treatments possess undesirable side-effects and therefore investigations into alternative remedies, which may be cost-effective and devoid of such side-effects, are on-going. Aqueous and methanol extracts of the bark of Sclerocarya birrea (A. Rich.) Hochst. subsp. caffra (Sond.) Kokwaro (Anacardiaceae) and Ziziphus mucronata Willd. subsp. mucronata (Rhamnaceae) were subjected to testing in order to assess their in vitro anti-diabetic activity. Total polyphenolic content and antioxidant activity, as well as the effect on α-amylase, α-glucosidase and cytotoxicity, were measured. Furthermore, glucose uptake was evaluated in C2C12 myotubes, 3T3-L1 adipocytes and HepG2 hepatocarcinoma cells, and insulin secretion in RIN-m5F rat pancreatic β-cells. The extracts of both plants inhibited the activities of α-amylase and α-glucosidase in a concentration dependent manner, with results being comparable with the positive control, acarbose. All the extracts contained antioxidant activity, with the methanol extracts of S. birrea displaying the strongest free radical scavenging capacity (IC50 = 2.16 μg/mL). Most of the extracts were not cytotoxic to the cell lines with IC50 values > 100 μg/mL. Extracts of both plants significantly increased glucose uptake in C2C12, 3T3-L1 and HepG2 cells. However, insulin secretion from RIN-m5F cells was not altered. This study provides evidence that the plants possess in vitro anti-diabetic properties.
Using the HSE stress indicator tool in a military context

An assessment of the Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) stress indicator tool was conducted to determine whether it was suitable for use with Ministry of Defence (MoD) personnel. A total of 1031 respondents from the Army, Navy, Air Force and MoD civilians completed a questionnaire containing the HSE tool and supplementary measures of work–life balance, engagement, deployment, leave taken and hours of work. Six measures of adverse reaction to the stressors were also reported: perceptions of job stress, job stress and health, psychological strain, fatigue after work, work ability and quality of working life. The stressor scales, particularly the ‘demands’ and ‘relationships’ scales, were associated with adverse outcomes as was the work–life balance scale. The HSE tool had some validity when used with MoD personnel, but its content was too narrow. The content validity of the tool can be improved for use in a military context with the addition of a ‘work–life balance’ scale’. Practitioner Summary: The HSE stress tool was tested with a mixed sample of MoD employees. The ‘Demands and “Relationships” scales were associated with adverse outcomes. An additional Work–Life Balance’ scale improved the content validity, demonstrating the importance of assessing the psychometric qualities of scales when used within particular contexts to ensure validity.
Bringing the human arm reachable space to a virtual environment for its analysis

Human reaching in a 3D environment is an interesting matter of research due to its application to workplace or vehicle-interior design. We introduce a 3D environment where a virtual human performs reaching tasks over 3D objects in the world. This environment also provides tools to generate and visualize reachable volumes. Reachable spaces are approximated using adjacent box-shaped voxels. We define several strategies in order to model different types of reaching, and we employ our system to construct and analyze reachable spaces for these strategies. In general, different strategies do have reachable spaces that share a common region of intersection. Therefore, goals exists that can be reached using two or more strategies. For those goals, a high-level layer is responsible for selecting the most appropriate given a certain reaching task. As a practical application, this paper presents a comparison of two usual strategies to model standing and seated reaching. The generated reach spaces show that, for each of them, a strategy is clearly more adequate than the other.
Physician Decisions to Discontinue Long-Term Medications Using a Two-Stage Framework: The Case of Growth Hormone Therapy

Background:Physician decisions to discontinue prescription medications for chronic conditions are fundamental determinants of drug use but have been inadequately studied. The decision to stop growth hormone (GH) therapy is an important example because of high cost (approximately $26,000/y for a 48-kg child), complexity of treatment options, and expansion of patient populations. Aim:The aim of this study was to identify the factors that influence physician recommendations in the process of discontinuing therapy. Design:A random sample of half of U.S. pediatric endocrinologists (n = 265) was mailed a survey that included case scenarios of GH-deficient adolescents. Decision options involved a 2-stage framework to 1) initiate change in ongoing GH therapy (by discussing discontinuing GH with the family but not yet stopping treatment), and 2) take action to discontinue ongoing GH therapy (by terminating GH or reducing the dose to adult maintenance level). Main Outcome Measure:Physician recommendations. Results:The response rate was 83.8%. Physiological indices of growth potential (growth velocity, bone age) significantly influenced discontinuation decisions (both P < 0.001). However, family preference, child's height, and physician attitudes exerted independent effects (each P < 0.05). Treatment price had little influence. Together, these variables accounted for 60% to 70% of the variation in recommendations. Their relative influence differed by stage in the discontinuation process. Conclusion:The variables in our framework substantially explain discontinuation decisions. The data demonstrate the importance of both physiological and nonphysiological factors. The results suggest that physicians value even small gains as final height approaches, although an additional 20% expenditure may be needed to gain the last 1% to 3% of adult height.
Putting the Virtual into Reality: Assessing Object-Presence with Projection-Augmented Models

A projection-augmented model is a type of nonimmersive, coincident haptic and visual display that uses a physical model as a three-dimensional screen for projected visual information. Supporting all physiological depth cues and two sensory modalities should create a strong sense of the object's existence. However, conventional measures of presence have been defined only for displays that surround and isolate a user from the real world. The idea of object-presence is thus suggested to measure the subjective experience that a particular object exists in a user's environment, even when that object does not (Stevens & Jerrams-Smith, 2000). A correlation study was conducted to demonstrate the reliability and validity of objectpresence as a construct. The results of a modified Singer and Witmer Presence Questionnaire suggest the existence of a reliable construct that exhibits face validity. However, the Presence Questionnaire did not correlate significantly with a user's tendency to become immersed in traditional media, which would support the assertion that this construct was object-presence. Considering previous work, the results of the current correlation study exhibited a pattern evident in previous studies of presence suggesting that object-presence and presence could be gender biased by the task to be completed or by the presence measure.
Query-load balancing in structured overlays

Query-load (forwarding and answering) balancing in structured overlays is one of the most critical and least studied problems. It has been assumed that caching heuristics can take care of it. We expose that caching, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient. We then provide simple and effective load-aware variants of the standard greedy routing used in overlays, exploiting routing redundancy originally needed for fault-tolerance, to achieve very good query load-balancing.
Structuration du modèle acoustique pour améliorer les performance de reconnaissance automatique de la parole

Cette these se concentre sur la structuration du modele acoustique pour ameliorer la reconnaissance de la parole par modele de Markov. La structuration repose sur l’utilisation d’une classification non supervisee des phrases du corpus d’apprentissage pour tenir compte des variabilites dues aux locuteurs et aux canaux de transmission. L’idee est de regrouper automatiquement les phrases prononcees en classes correspondant a des donnees acoustiquement similaires. Pour la modelisation multiple, un modele acoustique independant du locuteur est adapte aux donnees de chaque classe. Quand le nombre de classes augmente, la quantite de donnees disponibles pour l’apprentissage du modele de chaque classe diminue, et cela peut rendre la modelisation moins fiable. Une facon de pallier ce probleme est de modifier le critere de classification applique sur les donnees d’apprentissage pour permettre a une phrase d’etre associee a plusieurs classes. Ceci est obtenu par l’introduction d’une marge de tolerance lors de la classification ; et cette approche est etudiee dans la premiere partie de la these. L’essentiel de la these est consacre a une nouvelle approche qui utilise la classification automatique des donnees d’apprentissage pour structurer le modele acoustique. Ainsi, au lieu d’adapter tous les parametres du modele HMM-GMM pour chaque classe de donnees, les informations de classe sont explicitement introduites dans la structure des GMM en associant chaque composante des densites multigaussiennes avec une classe. Pour exploiter efficacement cette structuration des composantes, deux types de modelisations sont proposes. Dans la premiere approche on propose de completer cette structuration des densites par des ponderations des composantes gaussiennes dependantes des classes de locuteurs. Pour cette modelisation, les composantes gaussiennes des melanges GMM sont structurees en fonction des classes et partagees entre toutes les classes, tandis que les ponderations des composantes des densites sont dependantes de la classe. Lors du decodage, le jeu de ponderations des gaussiennes est selectionne en fonction de la classe estimee. Dans une deuxieme approche, les ponderations des gaussiennes sont remplacees par des matrices de transition entre les composantes gaussiennes des densites. Les approches proposees dans cette these sont analysees et evaluees sur differents corpus de parole qui couvrent differentes sources de variabilite (âge, sexe, accent et bruit)
Keeping Avoider's Graph Almost Acyclic

We consider biased $(1:b)$ Avoider-Enforcer games in the monotone and strict versions. In particular, we show that Avoider can keep his graph being a forest for every but maybe the last round of the game if $b \geq 200 n \ln n$. By this we obtain essentially optimal upper bounds on the threshold biases for the non-planarity game, the non-$k$-colorability game, and the $K_t$-minor game thus addressing a question and improving the results of Hefetz, Krivelevich, Stojakovi c , and Szab o . Moreover, we give a slight improvement for the lower bound in the non-planarity game.
Conceptual Modeling of Product Information in e-Commerce

A well developed product information repository is an important part of an e-Commerce system. Product information contains rich semantics associated with product attributes and the relationships between products. We have presented an ontological model of product information which is both conceptual and formal. We employed extended entity relationship as a structural anchor for the conceptual and pictorial representation of the formal model. In this paper, we illustrate modeling scenarios to demonstrate the practical feasibility of our modeling approach in the domain. In addition, we survey the recent works on conceptual modeling and ontological approaches of product information.
The evolution of interfacial microstructure of Sn3.5Ag solder bump with Cu under-bump metallization

Low cost electrodeposited Sn3.5Ag solder bumps fabrication technology was developed for three-dimensional packaging applications. Effect of reflow time on interfacial reaction of electroplated Sn3.5Ag solder bumps with Cu under-bump metallization (UBM) was investigated. The microstructure of eutectic Sn3.5Ag is composed of β-Sn phase and Ag<inf>3</inf>Sn IMCs in the solder region. At the interface between solder and Cu, scallop-like Cu-Sn IMCs were formed toward solder region and were identified as Cu<inf>6</inf>Sn<inf>5</inf> IMCs by compositional measurement of EDX. XRD measurement identified that Cu<inf>6</inf>Sn<inf>5</inf> and Ag<inf>3</inf>Sn formed after reflowing for lmin, and as the reflow time extended the quantity of Ag<inf>3</inf>Sn almost remained the same while the quantity of Cu<inf>6</inf>Sn<inf>5</inf> increased. No Cu<inf>3</inf>Sn was detected, even after reflowing for 20min. EDX analysis was consistent with the XRD result.
Dealing with actuator saturation for active vibration control of a flexible structure piezo-actuated

We present a study on the active control of vibrations of a flexible mechanical structure in presence of saturation affecting the closed-loop control signal. The application we consider here is a system composed of a flexible beam with one edge clamped on a movable support and the other kinematically free. Two piezoelectric patches are bonded on the beam: one of them is used as an actuator and the other is used as a sensor. First, we show how we perform a linear ℋ2 synthesis for the design of a controller permitting the active vibration damping with good performances. Then, we analyse how a saturation of the control signal causes a degradation of these performances. The main goal of this work is to design an anti-windup compensator which, combined with the linear controller, permits to recover or to enhance some linear closed-loop performances in presence of this non-linearity.
Example Selection for Bootstrapping Statistical Parsers

This paper investigates bootstrapping for statistical parsers to reduce their reliance on manually annotated training data. We consider both a mostly-unsupervised approach, cotraining, in which two parsers are iteratively re-trained on each other's output; and a semi-supervised approach, corrected co-training, in which a human corrects each parser's output before adding it to the training data. The selection of labeled training examples is an integral part of both frameworks. We propose several selection methods based on the criteria of minimizing errors in the data and maximizing training utility. We show that incorporating the utility criterion into the selection method results in better parsers for both frameworks.
Prolonged grief: where to after Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition?

Purpose of review Although there is much evidence for the construct of prolonged grief, there was much controversy over the proposal to introduce a prolonged grief diagnosis into Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5), and it was finally rejected as a diagnosis in DSM-5. This review outlines the evidence for and against the diagnosis, and highlights the implications of the DSM-5 decision. Recent findings Convergent evidence indicates that prolonged grief characterized by persistently severe yearning for the deceased is a distinct construct from bereavement-related depression and anxiety, is associated with marked functional impairment, is responsive to targeted treatments for prolonged grief, and has been validated across different cultures, age groups, and types of bereavement. Although DSM-5 has rejected the construct as a formal diagnosis, evidence continues to emerge on related mechanisms, including maladaptive appraisals, memory and attentional processes, immunological and arousal responses, and neural circuitry. Summary It is most likely that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) will introduce a diagnosis to recognize prolonged grief, even though DSM-5 has decided against this option. It is probable that the DSM-5 decision may result in more prolonged grief patients being incorrectly diagnosed with depression after bereavement and possibly incorrectly treated. The DSM-5 decision is unlikely to impact on future research agendas.
Tranexamic acid in total knee replacement: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials evaluating the effect of tranexamic acid (TXA) upon blood loss and transfusion in primary total knee replacement. The review used the generic evaluation tool designed by the Cochrane Bone, Joint and Muscle Trauma Group. A total of 19 trials were eligible: 18 used intravenous administration, one also evaluated oral dosing and one trial evaluated topical use. TXA led to a significant reduction in the proportion of patients requiring blood transfusion (risk ratio (RR) 2.56, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.1 to 3.1, p < 0.001; heterogeneity I(2) = 75%; 14 trials, 824 patients). Using TXA also reduced total blood loss by a mean of 591 ml (95% CI 536 to 647, p < 0.001; I(2) = 78%; nine trials, 763 patients). The clinical interpretation of these findings is limited by substantial heterogeneity. However, subgroup analysis of high-dose (> 4 g) TXA showed a plausible consistent reduction in blood transfusion requirements (RR 5.33; 95% CI 2.44 to 11.65, p < 0.001; I(2) = 0%), a finding that should be confirmed by a further well-designed trial. The current evidence from trials does not support an increased risk of deep-vein thrombosis (13 trials, 801 patients) or pulmonary embolism (18 trials, 971 patients) due to TXA administration.
Word Semantics Based 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks for News Recommendation

Deep neural networks have yielded immense success in speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing. However, the exploration of deep neural networks for content based recommendation has received a relatively less amount of inspection. Also, different recommendation scenarios have their own issues which creates the need for different approaches for recommendation. One of the problems with news recommendation is that of handling temporal changes in user interests. Hence, modelling temporal behaviour in the domain of news recommendation becomes very important. In this work, we propose a recommendation model which uses semantic similarity between words as input to a 3-D Convolutional Neural Network in order to extract the temporal news reading pattern of the users. This in turn improves the quality of recommendations. We compare our model to a set of established baselines and the experimental results show that our model performs better than the state-of-the-art by 5.8% (Hit Ratio@10).
Cotranslational Protein Folding and Terminus Hydrophobicity

Peptides fold on a time scale that is much smaller than the time required for synthesis, whence all proteins potentially fold cotranslationally to some degree (followed by additional folding events after release from the ribosome). In this paper, in three different ways, we find that cotranslational folding success is associated with higher hydrophobicity at the N-terminus than at the C-terminus. First, we fold simple HP models on a square lattice and observe that HP sequences that fold better cotranslationally than from a fully extended state exhibit a positive difference (N−C) in terminus hydrophobicity. Second, we examine real proteins using a previously established measure of potential cotranslationality known as ALR (Average Logarithmic Ratio of the extent of previous contacts) and again find a correlation with the difference in terminus hydrophobicity. Finally, we use the cotranslational protein structure prediction program SAINT and again find that such an approach to folding is more successful for proteins with higher N-terminus than C-terminus hydrophobicity. All results indicate that cotranslational folding is promoted in part by a hydrophobic start and a less hydrophobic finish to the sequence.
The effect of wall heating on instability of channel flow

A comprehensive study of the effect of wall heating or cooling on the linear, transient and secondary growth of instability in channel flow is conducted. The effect of viscosity stratification, heat diffusivity and of buoyancy are estimated separately, with some unexpected results. From linear stability results, it has been accepted that heat diffusivity does not affect stability. However, we show that realistic Prandtl numbers cause a transient growth of disturbances that is an order of magnitude higher than at zero Prandtl number. Buoyancy, even at fairly low levels, gives rise to high levels of subcritical energy growth. Unusually for transient growth, both of these are spanwise-independent and not in the form of streamwise vortices. At moderate Grashof numbers, exponential growth dominates, with distinct Poiseuille–Rayleigh–Bénard and Tollmien–Schlichting modes for Grashof numbers up to ∼ 25 000, which merge thereafter. Wall heating has a converse effect on the secondary instability compared to the primary instability, destabilizing significantly when viscosity decreases towards the wall. It is hoped that the work will motivate experimental and numerical efforts to understand the role of wall heating in the control of channel and pipe flows.
Scalable Learning in Stochastic Games

Stochastic games are a general model of interaction between multiple agents. They have recently been the focus of a great deal of research in reinforcement learning as they are both descriptive and have a well-defined Nash equilibrium solution. Most of this recent work, although very general, has only been applied to small games with at most hundreds of states. On the other hand, there are landmark results of learning being successfully applied to specific large and complex games such as Checkers and Backgammon. In this paper we describe a scalable learning algorithm for stochastic games, that combines three separate ideas from reinforcement learning into a single algorithm. These ideas are tile coding for generalization, policy gradient ascent as the basic learning method, and our previous work on the WoLF (“Win or Learn Fast”) variable learning rate to encourage convergence. We apply this algorithm to the intractably sized game-theoretic card game Goofspiel, showing preliminary results of learning in self-play. We demonstrate that policy gradient ascent can learn even in this highly non-stationary problem with simultaneous learning. We also show that the WoLF principle continues to have a converging effect even in large problems with approximation and generalization.