Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resistance, paradox and professional identity in speech-language pathologists’ perceptions of working with assistants

Allied health workforce shortages are a feature of Australian and international health care, which prioritises workforce innovation to meet increasing clinical need while maintaining clinical outcomes. Working with assistants has the potential to be an economically viable and professionally sustainable solution. This exploratory study is aimed at understanding perceptions of speech-language pathologists working within an established clinical model to a workforce redesign involving assistants. Our findings provide insight into professional acceptance of this vocationally trained group and highlight discrepancies between perceptions and actualities which may influence the way assistants are utilised within the profession. While assistants were seen as augmenting existing capacity, findings also demonstrated ambivalence towards their utilisation. The introduction of assistants was perceived (Bach et al., 2007) as both empowering and degrading; it presented both potential relief alongside dilution of the professional role. Thorough understanding of these consequences is required to influence the success of these new roles.
Invariant Matching of Texture for Content-BasedImage

Texture-based image retrieval is a very diicult task, especially for retrieving images of natural scene. Such images contain multiple texture patterns that may vary in intensity, scale, and orientation but still look the same to humans. Existing methods have been successful in retrieving images that contain single uniform texture but their performance deteriorates when retrieving natural scene images. This article presents an invariant texture matching method that can retrieve images containing texture patterns that diier in intensity, scale, and orientation from the query texture. Experimental results show that the invariant method performs better than existing methods especially in retrieving natural scene images.
Object shape recognition and grasping by five-fingered robotic hand based on E-ANFIS model

This paper presents a method for object shape recognition and the real-time grasping of unknown plane objects only using the positions information of robotic hand fingers. We aim to recover the shape, position and orientation of the grasped object by random five grasping points and the vision system in Cartesian space. A highly intelligent information fusion model which is combined with the Expert system and multiple ANFIS models (E-ANFIS model) is presented to solve the problem above and the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations.
Assembly of non-contractile dorsal stress fibers requires &agr;-actinin-1 and Rac1 in migrating and spreading cells

Summary Cell migration and spreading is driven by actin polymerization and actin stress fibers. Actin stress fibers are considered to contain &agr;-actinin crosslinkers and nonmuscle myosin II motors. Although several actin stress fiber subtypes have been identified in migrating and spreading cells, the degree of molecular diversity of their composition and the signaling pathways regulating fiber subtypes remain largely uncharacterized. In the present study we identify that dorsal stress fiber assembly requires &agr;-actinin-1. Loss of dorsal stress fibers in &agr;-actinin-1-depleted cells results in defective maturation of leading edge focal adhesions. This is accompanied by a delay in early cell spreading and slower cell migration without noticeable alterations in myosin light chain phosphorylation. In agreement with the unaltered myosin II activity, dorsal stress fiber trunks lack myosin II and are resistant to myosin II ATPase inhibition. Furthermore, the non-contractility of dorsal stress fibers is supported by the finding that Rac1 induces dorsal stress fiber assembly whereas contractile ventral stress fibers are induced by RhoA. Loss of dorsal stress fibers either by depleting &agr;-actinin-1 or Rac1 results in a &bgr;-actin accumulation at the leading edge in migrating and spreading cells. These findings molecularly specify dorsal stress fibers from other actin stress fiber subtypes. Furthermore, we propose that non-contractile dorsal stress fibers promote cell migration and early cell spreading through Rac1-induced actin polymerization.
Analyzing microblogs with affinity propagation

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in analyzing inherent structures in posts on microblogs such as Twitter. While many works utilize a well-known topic modeling technique, we instead propose to apply Affinity Propagation [4] (AP) to analyze such a corpus, and we hypothesize that AP may provide different perspective to the traditional approach. Our preliminary analysis raises some interesting facts and issues, which suggest future research directions.
A Comparative Analysis of MAPK and Akt Phosphorylation in Prostate Cancer Tissues

Background: Prostate cancer is a common male urogenital system malignant tumor which is increasing worldwide. Molecular markers for early diagnosis and target therapy of it are not yet clinically available.Methods: A total of 71 prostate cancer and 10 benign prostatic hyperplasia tissues were collected for immunohistochemistry and Western blot assay of phosphorylated MAPK (Thr202) and Akt (Ser473) levels.Results: Gleason grading resulted in classifying 15 prostate cancer tissues as well-differentiated, 25 as moderately-differentiated, and 31 as poorly-differentiated. Immunohistochemical staining showed that levels of phosphorylated Akt level were higher, and phosphorylated MAPK were lower, in prostate cancer tissues compared to benign prostatic hyperplasia tissues. Elevated p-Akt/Akt, and reduced p-MAPK/MAPK ratios correlated with poor differentiation of prostate cancer.Conclusion: In prostate cancer tissues, p-Akt levels were elevated and p-MAPK protein levels were lowered. Low p-MAPK protein levels may be caused by higher p-Akt levels. p-Akt/p-MAPK ratio increases may provide a diagnostic marker for early prostate cancer diagnosis.
Native-like processing of prominence cues in L2 written discourse comprehension: Evidence from font emphasis

ABSTRACT Understanding alternatives to prominent information contributes to successful native language discourse comprehension. Several past studies have suggested that the way second language (L2) learners encode and represent an alternative set in L2 speech is not exactly native-like. However, because these studies involved contrastive pitch accents in running speech, these native language–second language differences may reflect the demands of comprehending running speech in L2 rather than intrinsic deficit in discourse processing per se. Here, we tested L2 learners’ discourse encoding and representation using a different cue to prominence: font emphasis in self-paced reading. We found that, in this temporally less demanding modality, L2 learners’ encoding of salient alternatives became native-like. Font emphasis facilitated L2 learners’ memory for the discourse by ruling out salient alternatives, just as how it facilitates native speakers’. L2 learners were also similar to native speakers in using the situation model to constrain an alternative set. The results suggest that L2 learners can show native-like processing of prominence and that previous underuse of contrastive accents in L2 comprehension could reflect cognitive demands of processing running speech in L2.
Serpentine Robot Locomotion: Implementation through Simulation

Machine locomotion using wheels, tracks or legs is common where as generating locomotion in a limbless, wheelless system is more challenging. Wheeled locomotion and legged locomotion have already been studied by many researchers in detail. On the contrary the limbless locomotion has drawn very limited degree of interest. In limbless locomotion (of a serpent) the cyclic changes in the body shape allow it to locomote. This paper considers the development of a hyper redundant un-tethered serpentine robot for implementation of various serpentine and non serpentine gaits. A highly optimized 3D model of the robot was prepared and exported to CAE environment for kinematic and dynamic analysis. Parameters so obtained through simulation were implemented on the robot for demonstration of serpentine locomotion.
Towards Integrated Provisioning of QoS Overlay Networks

The Internet is one of the most successful technologies in last century. Within less than four decades (starting from the first packet-switched computer network, ARPAnet), it has evolved into an extremely popular commercial infrastructure, and has a significant impact on almost all aspects of our lives and our society. With the dramatic advances in multimedia technologies and the increasing popularity of real-time applications, recently, quality of service (QoS) support in the Internet has been in a great demand. However, due to many historical reasons, today’s Internet primarily provides best-effort connectivity service. To enhance the best-effort service model to provide QoS, researchers have proposed many seminal architectures, represented by IntServ [26] and DiffServ [25]. Unfortunately, due to many critical factors, realizing these QoS architectures in the Internet is unlikely to be feasible in the long run. In addition, there are no right economic models for these proposed architectures: although some ISPs might be interested in providing QoS in their own domains, there are no strong incentives for them to support QoS for users in other domains which are not their customers. Then, a challenging question faced by the researchers in the community is: what would be a practical solution for QoS support in the Internet? In the past few years, overlay networks have emerged as an alternative mechanism for supporting valueadded services such as fault tolerance [9], multicasting [38], and security [72]. Many of these overlays are end-user overlays, namely, overlays are constructed purely among the end hosts without support from any other intermediate nodes. Due to the difficulties of supporting end-to-end QoS purely in end-user overlays, some recent works [47, 58, 92, 144] propose to use backbone overlays for QoS support, where overlays are managed by a third party provider, such as an ISP. In this project, we adopt the approach of backbone overlays, and propose an integrated QoS overlay architecture, referred to as IQORA, for scalable, efficient, and practical QoS support. In IQORA, we advocate the notion of a QoS overlay network (referred to as QSON) as the backbone service domain. A QSON consists of service nodes or proxies, which are strategically deployed by a QSON provider (or a higher tier ISP). The design of QSON relies on well-defined business relationships between the QSON provider, network service providers (i.e., the underlying network domains which we also refer to as lower tier ISPs, or underlying ISPs for short), and end users: the QSON provider dimensions its overlay network according to end user requests, purchases bandwidth from the network service providers based on their service level agreements (SLAs), and sells its QoS services to end users via
Properties of Retail Distribution and the Implications for Antitrust Analysis

Economic models of products sold in the retail channel typically only control for whether a product is available in at least one store in a given market, i.e., variation along the extensive margin. We demonstrate that it is also important to control for intensive margin variation regarding the depth of a product’s availability. Looking at five grocery categories, we show that (a) many products are distributed in only a limited number of stores; (b) distribution undergoes significant variation over time; and (c) distribution’s effect on sales is approximately constant returns to scale. These findings not only demonstrate that retail distribution is an important determinant of sales, but also displays significant variation that is not controlled for using only an extensive margin measure. We consider two applications where the importance of retail distribution has been under-appreciated: antitrust analysis and demand estimation.
Genotyping of single-nucleotide polymorphisms by high-resolution melting of small amplicons.

BACKGROUND High-resolution melting of PCR amplicons with the DNA dye LCGreen I was recently introduced as a homogeneous, closed-tube method of genotyping that does not require probes or real-time PCR. We adapted this system to genotype single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) after rapid-cycle PCR (12 min) of small amplicons (</=50 bp). METHODS Engineered plasmids were used to study all possible SNP base changes. In addition, clinical protocols for factor V (Leiden) 1691G>A, prothrombin 20210G>A, methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) 1298A>C, hemochromatosis (HFE) 187C>G, and beta-globin (hemoglobin S) 17A>T were developed. LCGreen I was included in the reaction mixture before PCR, and high-resolution melting was obtained within 2 min after amplification. RESULTS In all cases, heterozygotes were easily identified because heteroduplexes altered the shape of the melting curves. Approximately 84% of human SNPs involve a base exchange between A::T and G::C base pairs, and the homozygotes are easily genotyped by melting temperatures (T(m)s) that differ by 0.8-1.4 degrees C. However, in approximately 16% of SNPs, the bases only switch strands and preserve the base pair, producing very small T(m) differences between homozygotes (<0.4 degrees C). Although most of these cases can be genotyped by T(m), one-fourth (4% of total SNPs) show nearest-neighbor symmetry, and, as predicted, the homozygotes cannot be resolved from each other. In these cases, adding 15% of a known homozygous genotype to unknown samples allows melting curve separation of all three genotypes. This approach was used for the HFE 187C>G protocol, but, as predicted from the sequence changes, was not needed for the other four clinical protocols. CONCLUSIONS SNP genotyping by high-resolution melting analysis is simple, rapid, and inexpensive, requiring only PCR, a DNA dye, and melting instrumentation. The method is closed-tube, performed without probes or real-time PCR, and can be completed in less than 2 min after completion of PCR.
F/M-CIP: Implementing Flash Memory Cache Using Conservative Insertion and Promotion

Flash memory SSD has emerged as a promising storage media and fits naturally as a cache between the system RAM and the disk due to its performance/cost characteristics. Managing such an SSD cache is challenging and traditional cache replacements do not work well because of SSDs asymmetric read/write performances and wearing issues. This paper presents a new cache replacement algorithm referred to as F/M-CIP that accelerates disk I/O greatly. The idea is dividing the traditional LRU list into 4 parts: candidate-list, SSD-list, RAM-list and eviction-buffer-list. Upon a cache miss, the metadata of the missed block is conservatively inserted into the candidate-list but the data itself is not cached. The block in the candidate-list is then conservatively promoted to the RAM-list upon the k-th miss. At the bottom of the RAM-list, the eviction-buffer accumulates LRU blocks to be written into the SSD cache in batches to exploit the internal parallelism of SSD. The SSD-list is managed using a combination of regency and frequency replacement policies by means of conservative promotion upon hits. To quantitatively evaluate the performance of F/M-CIP, a prototype has been built on Linux kernel at the generic block layer. Experimental results on standard benchmarks and real world traces have shown that F/M-CIP accelerates disk I/O performance up to an order of magnitude compared to the traditional hard disk storage and up to a factor of 3 compared to the traditional SSD cache algorithm in terms of application execution time. Furthermore, F/M-CIP substantially reduces write operations to the SSD implying prolonged durability.
QoS support in WMNs using temporal resource reservation and traffic regulation schemes

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged as a promising technology for next-generation of wireless communications. In WMNs, admission control is deployed to control traffic loads and to prevent the wireless mesh backbone from being overloaded. Existing admission control protocols could be classified as either stateful or stateless approaches, based on network state information. Both the approaches have their limitations; the stateful models suffer from the scalability issue, while the stateless ones have the false admission problem. This paper introduces a hybrid admission control model for WMNs, based on a temporal resource reservation and three traffic regulation schemes. In particular, we propose an analytical model to compute the appropriate regulation ratio for accepted flows and to guarantee that the congestion at intermediate nodes does not exceed a threshold value. In our model, the congested node may specify the moment of session re-establishment, besides of the new rate at which the session should transmit its data packets. Using extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our model achieves high resource utilization by computing new sessions rates in a dynamic traffic-load environment, and by satisfying the quality of service (QoS) constraints in terms of delay and packets loss.
Ontology Alignment with OLA

Using ontologies is the standard way to achieve interoperability of heterogeneous systems within the Semantic web. However, as the ontologies underlying two systems are not necessarily compatible, they may in turn need to be aligned. Similarity-based approaches to alignment seems to be both powerful and flexible enough to match the expressive power of languages like OWL. We present an alignment tool that follows the similarity-based paradigm, called OLA. OLA relies on a universal measure for comparing the entities of two ontologies that combines in a homogeneous way the entire amount of knowledge used in entity descriptions. The measure is computed by an iterative fixed-point-bound process producing subsequent approximations of the target solution. The alignments produce by OLA on the contest ontology pairs and the way they relate to the expected alignments is discussed and some preliminary conclusions about the relevance of the similarity-based approach as well as about the experimental settings of the contest are drawn.
Automatic Multi Document Summarization Approaches

Problem statement: Text summarization can be of different nature ranging from indicative summary that identifies the topics of the document to informative summary which is meant to represent the concise description of the original document, providing an idea of what the whole content of document is all about. Approach: Single document summary seems to capture both the information well but it has not been the case for multi document summary where the overall comprehensive quality in presenting informative summary often lacks. It is found that most of the existing methods tend to focus on sentence scoring and less consideration is given to the contextual information content in multiple documents. Results: In this study, some survey on multi document summarization approaches has been presented. We will direct our focus notably on four well known approaches to multi document summarization namely the feature based method, cluster based method, graph based method and knowledge based method. The general ideas behind these methods have been described. Conclusion: Besides the general idea and concept, we discuss the benefits and limitations concerning these methods. With the aim of enhancing multi document summarization, specifically news documents, a novel type of approach is outlined to be developed in the future, taking into account the generic components of a news story in order to generate a better summary.
Using Wireless Link Dynamics to Extract a Secret Key in Vehicular Scenarios

Securing a wireless channel between any two vehicles is a crucial component of vehicular networks security. This can be done by using a secret key to encrypt the messages. We propose a scheme to allow two cars to extract a shared secret from RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) values in such a way that nearby cars cannot obtain the same key. The key is information-theoretically secure, i.e., it is secure against an adversary with unlimited computing power. Although there are existing solutions of key extraction in the indoor or low-speed environments, the unique channel conditions make them inapplicable to vehicular environments. Our scheme effectively and efficiently handles the high noise and mismatch features of the measured samples so that it can be executed in the noisy vehicular environment. We also propose an online parameter learning mechanism to adapt to different channel conditions. Extensive real-world experiments are conducted to validate our solution.
A multi-sensor network for the protection of cultural heritage

The paper presents a novel automatic early warning system to remotely monitor areas of archaeological and cultural interest from the risk of fire. Since these areas have been treasured and tended for very long periods of time, they are usually surrounded by old and valuable vegetation or situated close to forest regions, which exposes them to an increased risk of fire. The proposed system takes advantage of recent advances in multi-sensor surveillance technologies, using optical and infrared cameras, wireless sensor networks capable of monitoring different modalities (e.g. temperature and humidity) as well as local weather stations on the deployment site. The signals collected from these sensors are transmitted to a monitoring centre, which employs intelligent computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms as well as data fusion techniques to automatically analyze sensor information. The system is capable of generating automatic warning signals for local authorities whenever a dangerous situation arises, as well as estimating the propagation of the fire based on the fuel model of the area and other important parameters such as wind speed, slope, and aspect of the ground surface.
Structure and evolution of NGRRS-1, a complex, repeated element in the genome of Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234

Much of the remarkable ability of Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234 to nodulate at least 110 genera of legumes, as well as the nonlegume Parasponia andersonii, stems from the more than 80 different Nod factors it secretes. Except for nodE, nodG, and nodPQ, which are on the chromosome, most Nod factor biosynthesis genes are dispersed over the 536,165-bp symbiotic plasmid, pNGR234a. Mosaic sequences and insertion sequences (ISs) comprise 18% of pNGR234a. Many of them are clustered, and these IS islands divide the replicon into large blocks of functionally related genes. At 6 kb, NGRRS-1 is a striking example: there is one copy on pNGR234a and three others on the chromosome. DNA sequence comparisons of two NGRRS-1 elements identified three types of IS, NGRIS-2, NGRIS-4, and NGRIS-10. Here we show that all four copies of NGRRS-1 probably originated from transposition of NGRIS-4 into a more ancient IS-like sequence, NGRIS-10. Remarkably, all nine copies of NGRIS-4 have transposed into other ISs. It is unclear whether the accumulation of potentially mutagenic sequences in large clusters is due to the nature of the IS involved or to some selection process. Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the preferential targeting of transposons into such IS islands is to minimize the likelihood of disrupting vital functions.