Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of the RPL routing protocol for smart grid communications

Advanced communication/networking technologies should be integrated in next-generation power systems (a.k.a. smart grids) to improve their resilience, efficiency, adaptability, and sustainability. Many believe that the smart grid communication infrastructure will emerge from the interconnection of a large number of small-scale networks organized into a hierarchical architecture covering larger geographic areas. In this article, first we carry out a thorough analysis of the key components of the smart grid communication architecture, discussing the different network topologies and communication technologies that could be employed. Special emphasis is given to the advanced metering infrastructure, which will be used to interconnect the smart meters deployed at customers' premises with data aggregators and control centers. The design of scalable, reliable, and efficient networking solutions for AMI systems is an important research problem because these networks are composed of thousands of resource-constrained embedded devices usually interconnected with communication technologies that can provide only low-bandwidth and unreliable links. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks was recently standardized by the IETF to specifically meet the requirements of typical AMI applications. In this article we present a thorough overview of the protocol, and we critically analyze its advantages and potential limits in AMI applications. We also conduct a performance evaluation of RPL using a Contiki-based prototype of the RPL standard and a network emulator. Our results indicate that although average performance may appear reasonable for AMI networks, a few RPL nodes may suffer from severe unreliability issues and experience high packet loss rates due to the selection of suboptimal paths with highly unreliable links.
Blind Compressed Sensing Enables 3-Dimensional Dynamic Free Breathing Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Lung Volumes and Diaphragm Motion

ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to increase the spatial and temporal resolution of dynamic 3-dimensional (3D) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of lung volumes and diaphragm motion. To achieve this goal, we evaluate the utility of the proposed blind compressed sensing (BCS) algorithm to recover data from highly undersampled measurements. Materials and MethodsWe evaluated the performance of the BCS scheme to recover dynamic data sets from retrospectively and prospectively undersampled measurements. We also compared its performance against that of view-sharing, the nuclear norm minimization scheme, and the l1 Fourier sparsity regularization scheme. Quantitative experiments were performed on a healthy subject using a fully sampled 2D data set with uniform radial sampling, which was retrospectively undersampled with 16 radial spokes per frame to correspond to an undersampling factor of 8. The images obtained from the 4 reconstruction schemes were compared with the fully sampled data using mean square error and normalized high-frequency error metrics. The schemes were also compared using prospective 3D data acquired on a Siemens 3 T TIM TRIO MRI scanner on 8 healthy subjects during free breathing. Two expert cardiothoracic radiologists (R1 and R2) qualitatively evaluated the reconstructed 3D data sets using a 5-point scale (0-4) on the basis of spatial resolution, temporal resolution, and presence of aliasing artifacts. ResultsThe BCS scheme gives better reconstructions (mean square error = 0.0232 and normalized high frequency = 0.133) than the other schemes in the 2D retrospective undersampling experiments, producing minimally distorted reconstructions up to an acceleration factor of 8 (16 radial spokes per frame). The prospective 3D experiments show that the BCS scheme provides visually improved reconstructions than the other schemes do. The BCS scheme provides improved qualitative scores over nuclear norm and l1 Fourier sparsity regularization schemes in the temporal blurring and spatial blurring categories. The qualitative scores for aliasing artifacts in the images reconstructed by nuclear norm scheme and BCS scheme are comparable.The comparisons of the tidal volume changes also show that the BCS scheme has less temporal blurring as compared with the nuclear norm minimization scheme and the l1 Fourier sparsity regularization scheme. The minute ventilation estimated by BCS for tidal breathing in supine position (4 L/min) and the measured supine inspiratory capacity (1.5 L) is in good correlation with the literature. The improved performance of BCS can be explained by its ability to efficiently adapt to the data, thus providing a richer representation of the signal. ConclusionThe feasibility of the BCS scheme was demonstrated for dynamic 3D free breathing MRI of lung volumes and diaphragm motion. A temporal resolution of ∼500 milliseconds, spatial resolution of 2.7 × 2.7 × 10 mm3, with whole lung coverage (16 slices) was achieved using the BCS scheme.
Does self-monitoring reduce blood pressure? Meta-analysis with meta-regression of randomized controlled trials

Abstract Introduction. Self-monitoring of blood pressure (BP) is an increasingly common part of hypertension management. The objectives of this systematic review were to evaluate the systolic and diastolic BP reduction, and achievement of target BP, associated with self-monitoring. Methods. MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane database of systematic reviews, database of abstracts of clinical effectiveness, the health technology assessment database, the NHS economic evaluation database, and the TRIP database were searched for studies where the intervention included self-monitoring of BP and the outcome was change in office/ambulatory BP or proportion with controlled BP. Two reviewers independently extracted data. Meta-analysis using a random effects model was combined with meta-regression to investigate heterogeneity in effect sizes. Results. A total of 25 eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (27 comparisons) were identified. Office systolic BP (20 RCTs, 21 comparisons, 5,898 patients) and diastolic BP (23 RCTs, 25 comparisons, 6,038 patients) were significantly reduced in those who self-monitored compared to usual care (weighted mean difference (WMD) systolic −3.82 mmHg (95% confidence interval −5.61 to −2.03), diastolic −1.45 mmHg (−1.95 to −0.94)). Self-monitoring increased the chance of meeting office BP targets (12 RCTs, 13 comparisons, 2,260 patients, relative risk = 1.09 (1.02 to 1.16)). There was significant heterogeneity between studies for all three comparisons, which could be partially accounted for by the use of additional co-interventions. Conclusion. Self-monitoring reduces blood pressure by a small but significant amount. Meta-regression could only account for part of the observed heterogeneity.
Assimilation of active microwave measurements for soil moisture profile retrieval under laboratory conditions

The authors discuss the potential of retrieving information on the soil moisture profile from measurements of the surface soil moisture content through active microwave observations. They use active microwave observations of the surface soil moisture content in a data assimilation framework to show that this allows the retrieval of the entire soil moisture profile. The data assimilation procedure demonstrated is based on the Kalman filter technique. Kalman filtering allows reconstruction of the state vector when at least part of the state variables are observed regularly. The dynamic model of the system used is based on the 1D Richards equation. The observation equation is based on the integral equation model of A. K. Fung et al. (1992) and is used to link the radar observations to surface soil moisture content. Recently, M. Mancini et al. (1999) reported about laboratory experiments investigating the use of active microwave observations to estimate surface soil moisture content. The present authors apply the data assimilation scheme to the radar measurements of these experiments to retrieve the entire soil moisture profile in the soil sample used, and compare these results with the soil moisture profile measurements (using TDR). It is shown that with a limited number of radar measurements accurate retrieval of the entire soil moisture profile is possible.
Yoga for Low-Income Older Adults: Silver Age Yoga

Objectives: Lower-income older adults are more likely to be sedentary and can benefit from interventions that increase mobility and physical function. Although many interventions may help sedentary older adults, yoga may be able to produce broader changes and impact multiple health outcomes simultaneously. Other features of yoga such as transportability, home practice, social interaction, and spirituality may increase its appeal to older adults. Methods: Silver Age Yoga Community Outreach (SAYCO) provides free yoga programs to older adults who have limited resources and who reside at community senior centers. The yoga program consists of weekly 60-minute sessions that are specifically designed for inactive older adults. A gentle pace and props are used to make it accessible to all functional levels. Volunteer instructors are recruited to sustain the programs as long as possible. Participants at four new SAYCO programs were invited to complete questionnaires before their first class and again 3 month later. Questionnaires included measures of pain, functional status (HAQ), depression (CESD-10), fatigue, and health-related quality of life (EQ5D). Paired t-tests were used to compare baseline scores to those at the 10- week follow-up for the single group, pre-post design. Results: Baseline and follow-up data were available for 31 participants who were 81% female, 23% Hispanic, 77% white, 48% had a college degree; median annual income was $20-39K and mean age was 69.1 years. Participants tended to be quite healthy, as assessed by baselines health status. (EQ5D=0.778) Despite the small sample size, significant decreases were found for depression (p=0.025) and pain frequency (p=0.040). Conclusions: The data suggest that inactive older adults derive health benefits from free weekly yoga programs. However, the limitations of a small, unfunded, single-group study make conclusions tentative. A larger randomized, controlled trial of the yoga for older adults can answer these questions more definitively
The harmonic decision matrix: a subtle model of the natural neuron

The definition of the right goal constitutes an essential part in evolutionary algorithms. The best EA is no use if the defined and calculated purpose does not correspond to a real need. Human needs are generally complex. That is the reason why users of EAs should be interested in utility theory and psychological mechanisms, up to the core of the single neuron. In this paper we show that the harmonic decision matrix opens a new way to model human decisions and basically, neuronal computation, that goes beyond the weighted sum and the polynomials.
Combined In Silico and In Vivo Analyses Reveal Role of Hes1 in Taste Cell Differentiation

The sense of taste is of critical importance to animal survival. Although studies of taste signal transduction mechanisms have provided detailed information regarding taste receptor calcium signaling molecules (TRCSMs, required for sweet/bitter/umami taste signal transduction), the ontogeny of taste cells is still largely unknown. We used a novel approach to investigate the molecular regulation of taste system development in mice by combining in silico and in vivo analyses. After discovering that TRCSMs colocalized within developing circumvallate papillae (CVP), we used computational analysis of the upstream regulatory regions of TRCSMs to investigate the possibility of a common regulatory network for TRCSM transcription. Based on this analysis, we identified Hes1 as a likely common regulatory factor, and examined its function in vivo. Expression profile analyses revealed that decreased expression of nuclear HES1 correlated with expression of type II taste cell markers. After stage E18, the CVP of Hes1−/ − mutants displayed over 5-fold more TRCSM-immunoreactive cells than did the CVP of their wild-type littermates. Thus, according to our composite analyses, Hes1 is likely to play a role in orchestrating taste cell differentiation in developing taste buds.
Mänskliga rättigheter som värdefundament, kunskapsobjekt och inflytande : en läroplansanalys

This paper analyses the Swedish national curricula for preschool and school with the purpose of clarifying how the responsibility of educational institutions regarding human rights for children and young people is expressed. Framed by rights theory and educational philosophy, the paper examines (i) how human rights for children and young people are articulated as relevant for preschools and schools, and (ii) what expectations on preschools and schools that are indicated. The analysis shows that many human rights aspects appear in the curricula and are articulated as relevant in terms of values, objects of knowledge and children’s influence. The curricula indicate that preschools and schools are expected to use human rights as guidance, ensure that pupils learn about rights and develop the capacity to act in accordance with human rights. The analysis also shows a lack of explicit rights terminology, which means that rights are not always easy to identify in the curricula.
Full-wave PEEC time-domain method for the modeling of on-chipinterconnects

With the advances in the speed of high-performance chips, inductance effects in some on-chip interconnects have become significant. Specific networks such as clock distributions and other highly optimized circuits are especially impacted by inductance. Several difficult aspects have to be overcome to obtain valid waveforms for problems where inductances contribute significantly. Mainly, the geometries are very complex and the interactions between the capacitive and inductive currents have to be taken into account simultaneously. In this paper, we show that a full-wave partial element equivalent circuit method, which includes the delays among the partial elements, leads to an efficient solver enabling the analysis of large meaningful problems. Applying this method to several examples leads to helpful insights for realistic very large scale integration wiring problems. It is shown in this paper that the impact overshoot, reflections, and inductive coupling are critical for the design of critical on-chip interconnects.
VAGUE: a graphical user interface for the Velvet assembler

SUMMARY Velvet is a popular open-source de novo genome assembly software tool, which is run from the Unix command line. Most of the problems experienced by new users of Velvet revolve around constructing syntactically and semantically correct command lines, getting input files into acceptable formats and assessing the output. Here, we present Velvet Assembler Graphical User Environment (VAGUE), a multi-platform graphical front-end for Velvet. VAGUE aims to make sequence assembly accessible to a wider audience and to facilitate better usage amongst existing users of Velvet. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION VAGUE is implemented in JRuby and targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is available under an open-source GPLv2 licence from http://www.vicbioinformatics. com/. CONTACT torsten.seemann@monash.edu.
Apparent diffusion coefficients from high angular resolution diffusion imaging: Estimation and applications

High angular resolution diffusion imaging has recently been of great interest in characterizing non‐Gaussian diffusion processes. One important goal is to obtain more accurate fits of the apparent diffusion processes in these non‐Gaussian regions, thus overcoming the limitations of classical diffusion tensor imaging. This paper presents an extensive study of high‐order models for apparent diffusion coefficient estimation and illustrates some of their applications. Using a meaningful modified spherical harmonics basis to capture the physical constraints of the problem, a new regularization algorithm is proposed. The new smoothing term is based on the Laplace–Beltrami operator and its closed form implementation is used in the fitting procedure. Next, the linear transformation between the coefficients of a spherical harmonic series of order ℓ and independent elements of a rank‐ℓ high‐order diffusion tensor is explicitly derived. This relation allows comparison of the state‐of‐the‐art anisotropy measures computed from spherical harmonics and tensor coefficients. Published results are reproduced accurately and it is also possible to recover voxels with isotropic, single fiber anisotropic, and multiple fiber anisotropic diffusion. Validation is performed on apparent diffusion coefficients from synthetic data, from a biological phantom, and from a human brain dataset. Magn Reson Med, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Designing a generalized 3D carousel view

In this paper we describe a 3D carousel view design. We take the basic carousel model and elaborate it to hold an arbitrary number of items in an efficient manner. We equip this model with various interaction methods and a novel component: the termination marker. We also explore more detailed design issues, like animation, by implementing a prototype. We report essential user feedback and how it affected our design.
Dissection and Culture of Embryonic Spinal Commissural Neurons

Studies of spinal commissural neurons have provided substantial insight into the mechanisms that regulate axon guidance. Explants of embryonic spinal cords and isolated spinal commissural neurons have been important experimental tools for the identification and characterization of several guidance cues, including netrins, semaphorins, slits, sonic hedgehog, BMPs, and wnts. In this unit, protocols are provided for establishing these explant assays to assess the outgrowth and turning capacity of commissural axons. In addition, methods are included for preparing cultures highly enriched with embryonic commissural neurons, which have been used to probe the biochemical signaling mechanisms regulating axon guidance. Curr. Protoc. Neurosci. 43:3.20. 1‐3.20. 17. © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Physical and sports activities, and healthy and active ageing: Establishing a frame of reference for public action

Since the 1960s, there has been a change in the portrayal of older people. This change has resulted in the promotion of an active way of life that led, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to the development by international bodies of standard guidelines relating to active or healthy ageing. This article examines the place of guidelines on physical activity in the perception of ageing reflected in French public policies developed in accordance with international directives. After explaining how healthy and active ageing are defined in different international and national plans and official guidelines, the growing importance of physical activity is highlighted. From a very general invitation to remain active, precise instructions for physical activities were established addressing the detrimental effects of ageing. Finally, this study points out how the increasing focus on physical activity has contributed to the creation of a frame of reference in public policy that emphasizes the responsibility of each individual for their own health.
Improving robot reactivity to passers-by with a faster people detector

Perceptual systems deployed in embedded intelligent systems are handicapped with limited computation resources. As a result, they require explicit computation time consideration during design time. In this paper, we investigate the impact a visual person detector explicitly optimized to minimize computational time has on an exemplar robotic application - navigation in human shared environments. The experimental results attest the improved perceptual frame rate leads to significant improvements in vision system performance and robotic mission success rate.
Three-level approach for Passage Retrieval in Arabic Question/Answering Systems

This paper describes a three-level approach for improving the Passage Retrieval (PR) stage in the context of the Arabic Question/Answering (Q/A) task. This approach proposes to use a semantic reasoning on top of keyword- based and structure-based levels. Results of experiments conducted with a set of CLEF and TREC questions show an improvement of the Accuracy and the Mean Reciprocal Rank measures. An example shows also how the re-ranking based on the semantic score and Conceptual Graphs (CG) operations is even more relevant.
MIIP accelerates epidermal growth factor receptor protein turnover and attenuates proliferation in non-small cell lung cancer

The migration and invasion inhibitory protein (MIIP) has been discovered recently to have inhibitory functions in cell proliferation and migration. Overexpression of MIIP reduced the intracellular steady-state level of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) protein in lung cancer cells with no effect on EGFR mRNA expression compared to that in the control cells. This MIIP-promoted EGFR protein degradation was reversed by proteasome and lysosome inhibitors, suggesting the involvement of both proteasomal and lysosomal pathways in this degradation. This finding was further validated by pulse-chase experiments using 35S-methionine metabolic labeling. We found that MIIP accelerates EGFR protein turnover via proteasomal degradation in the endoplasmic reticulum and then via the lysosomal pathway after its entry into endocytic trafficking. MIIP-stimulated downregulation of EGFR inhibits downstream activation of Ras and blocks the MEK signal transduction pathway, resulting in inhibition of cell proliferation. The negative correlation between MIIP and EGFR protein expression was validated in lung adenocarcinoma samples. Furthermore, the higher MIIP protein expression predicts a better overall survival of Stage IA-IIIA lung adenocarcinoma patients who underwent radical surgery. These findings reveal a new mechanism by which MIIP inhibits cell proliferation.
Applicability of Probablistic Data Structures for Filtering Tasks in Data Loss Prevention Systems

The paper studies the applicability of a probabilistic data structure known as Bloom Filter (BF) in the content analysis component of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Systems. The study shows that Bus may serve as preliminary selection mechanism in content analysis. The goal of such mechanism is to quickly pre-select documents that may be similar to the one being checked. This selection should be accompanied by more detailed comparison to cope with false positive results produced by BFs. Specialized form of the filter called Matrix BF has been found particularly helpful for the content analysis task as it provides search localization and allows the filter to grow along with the document database and maintain liner search time. The paper outlined theoretical threshold for false positives for comparison of two rows in the Matrix BF. The threshold was confirmed by experiments. The experiments also indicated acceptable performance in terms of computational performance and level of false positives. Tests with obfuscated texts revealed some limitations of the proposed approach.
Robust adaptive control for robot manipulators using a combined method

The authors present a control scheme which combines a direct adaptive control (DAC) law with a variable structure adaptive control (VSAC) law for a nonlinear robot manipulator system. The DAC law assures asymptotical stability, while the VSAC law improves the transient behavior of the robot system. The combined method improves the transient behavior and robustness to external input disturbances and unmodeled dynamics and also overcomes the chattering problem which is the main drawback of the variable-structure method. The fact that a skew-symmetric matrix is not used in the control scheme increases its flexibility. Fast tracking convergence and robustness are confirmed by extensive computer simulations. <<ETX>>