Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Special Education in Saudi Arabia: A Synthesis of Literature Written in English.

Special education in Saudi Arabia was formally established in 1962. The earliest cited literature on special education written in English was a 1970 government report. This article presents results from the first synthesis of internationally published Saudi special education literature over a 44-year period. This synthesis yielded information about the types of publication, topics of interest, populations of interest, types of research, trends over time, and research gaps. One hundred and sixteen citations were uncovered, 45.7% of which were published in the last 5 years. The themes that emerged on models of disability, policy-research incubation period, and stages in research, indicated a developmental rather than a cultural growth perspective, implying the global nature of special education research. Insights to inform countries with a developing special education system include the need to balance research from both medical and social perspectives, and to increase intervention-based research to inform instructional practices.
The establishment of a speech output communication system for a non-verbal child with severe behavioural and cognitive disabilities

This study investigates the ability of a seven year old non-verbal girl (Mary), who has multiple physical and cognitive disabilities, to learn to make requests using an electronic augmentative communication device (Apple IIGS computer with Unicorn Expanded Keyboard). This study will show how Mary learned to use symbols combined with speech output to request food in a natural setting, and in the absence of suggested communication intervention prerequisites. Data were collected during forty-three sessions, each 15 minutes long. Verbal and physical prompts were used to teach Mary to touch a photograph symbol resulting in the activation of the synthesized speech. The number of both prompted and unprompted activations were recorded. Data were collected to determine if Mary generalized this skill to a play situation. The results indicate that Mary was able to learn to make food selections using the communication device. Her instances of unprompted selections increased over the duration of the study. ii -
Bee-based IP traceback

IP traceback to the origin of denial of service (DoS) attack is extremely hard and most existing methods such as marking and logging based approaches are not practical and need changes in infrastructure. The flow-based IP traceback is a new approach which can use the advantages of metaheuristic algorithms. In this paper, a bee colony algorithm is applied to find the DoS attack source. The traffic flows are considered as the food sources that must be explored by bees. The simulation result shows the efficiency of this method. Besides, this method needs little storage space and requires no changes in routing infrastructure.
Online Clustering Algorithms

We introduce a set of clustering algorithms whose performance function is such that the algorithms overcome one of the weaknesses of K-means, its sensitivity to initial conditions which leads it to converge to a local optimum rather than the global optimum. We derive online learning algorithms and illustrate their convergence to optimal solutions which K-means fails to find. We then extend the algorithm by underpinning it with a latent space which enables a topology preserving mapping to be found. We show visualisation results on some standard data sets.
Going Deeper for Multilingual Visual Sentiment Detection

This technical report details several improvements to the visual concept detector banks built on images from the Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology (MVSO). The detector banks are trained to detect a total of 9,918 sentiment-biased visual concepts from six major languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and Chinese. In the original MVSO release, adjective-noun pair (ANP) detectors were trained for the six languages using an AlexNet-styled architecture by fine-tuning from DeepSentiBank. Here, through a more extensive set of experiments, parameter tuning, and training runs, we detail and release higher accuracy models for detecting ANPs across six languages from the same image pool and setting as in the original release using a more modern architecture, GoogLeNet, providing comparable or better performance with reduced network parameter cost. In addition, since the image pool in MVSO can be corrupted by user noise from social interactions, we partitioned out a sub-corpus of MVSO images based on tag-restricted queries for higher fidelity labels. We show that as a result of these higher fidelity labels, higher performing AlexNet-styled ANP detectors can be trained using the tag-restricted image subset as compared to the models in full corpus. We release all these newly trained models for public research use along with the list of tag-restricted images from the MVSO dataset.
Porites superfusa mortality and recovery from a bleaching event at Palmyra Atoll, USA

Background The demography of a coral colony is not a binary trajectory of life and death. Based on the flexibility afforded by colonial organization, most reef-building corals employ a variety of dynamic survival strategies, including growth and shrinkage. The demographic flexibility affects coral size, shape and reproductive output, among other factors. It is thus critical to quantify the relative importance of key dynamics of recruitment, mortality, growth and shrinkage in changing the overall cover of coral on a reef. Methods Using fixed photographic quadrats, we tracked the patterns of change in the cover of one common central Pacific coral, Porites superfusa, before and after the 2009 ENSO event. Results Coral colonies suffered both whole and partial colony mortality, although larger colonies were more likely to survive. In subsequent years, recruitment of new colonies and regrowth of surviving colonies both contributed to the modest recovery of P. superfusa. Discussion This study is unique in its quantitative comparisons of coral recruitment versus regrowth during periods of areal expansion. Our data suggest that recovery is not limited simply to the long pathway of settlement, recruitment and early growth of new colonies but is accelerated by means of regrowth of already established colonies having suffered partial mortality.
A Study of the Populations of X-Ray Sources in the Small Magellanic Cloud with ASCA

The Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA) has made multiple observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). X-ray mosaic images in the soft (0.7-2.0 keV) and hard (2.0-7.0 keV) bands are separately constructed, and the latter provides the first hard X-ray view of the SMC. We extract 39 sources from the two-band images with a criterion of S/N > 5 and conduct timing and spectral analyses for all of these sources. Coherent pulsations are detected from 12 X-ray sources, five of which are new discoveries. Most of the 12 X-ray pulsars are found to exhibit long-term flux variabilities; hence they are likely to be X-ray binary pulsars (XBPs). On the other hand, we classify four supernova remnants (SNRs) as thermal SNRs, because their spectra exhibit emission lines from highly ionized atoms. We find that XBPs and thermal SNRs in the SMC can be clearly separated by their hardness ratio (the ratio of the count rate between the hard and soft bands). Using this empirical grouping, we find many XBP candidates in the SMC, although no pulsations have yet been detected from these sources. Possible implications on the star formation history and evolution of the SMC are presented by a comparison of the source populations in the SMC and our Galaxy.
Presented at the 21st European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, Dresden,Germany, 4-8 September 2006 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PV ELECTRICITY GENERATION - A CRITICAL COMPARISON OF ENERGY SUPPLY OPTIONS

An overview is given of the environmental impacts of different PV technologies both at the present status of technology and for future technology. Crystalline silicon PV systems presently have energy pay-back times of 1.5-2 years for South-European locations and 2.7-3.5 yr for Middle-European locations. For silicon technology clear prospects for a reduction of energy input exist, and an energy pay-back of 1 year may be possible within a few years. Thin film technologies now have energy pay-back times in the range of 1-1.5 years (S.Europe). Greenhouse gas emissions are now in the range of 25-32 g/kWh and this could decrease to 15 g/kWh in the future. Therefore PV energy systems have a very good potential as a low-carbon energy supply technology.
Laboratory Phonology: Past successes and current questions, challenges, and goals

Laboratory Phonology, both as a series of conferences and as a particular approach to the investigation of human sounds and sound systems, has been active for over twenty years. In this paper, I consider the goals and successes of Laboratory Phonology as well as the current challenges. I conclude that the success of Laboratory Phonology is that those issues which at first were defined in the effort to bridge phonology and phonetics are now understood in a richer multidisciplinary way: The central question of understanding the relationship between the cognitive and physical aspects of human speech is now defined as a question of cognitive science. I also explore a series of foundational assumptions and argue that we need to be willing to be critical of our working assumptions. To fully accomplish the work ahead of us, we need to extend our integrated methodologies to truly integrated models. Because the very nature of language is so complex, an adequate model will be complex. The model needs to enable us to accurately model adult grammar, not as epiphenomena, but as a system of knowledge, while also modeling acquisition, language use, and language change.
Language identification of character images using machine learning techniques

In this paper, we propose a new approach for identifying the language type of character images. We do this by classifying individual character images to determine the language boundaries in multilingual documents. Two effective methods are considered for this purpose: the prototype classification method and support vector machines (SVM). Due to the large size of our training data set, we further propose a technique to speed up the training process for both methods. Applying the two methods to classifying characters into Chinese, English, and Japanese (including Hiragana and Katakana) has produced very accurate and comparable test results.
Randomized search strategies with imperfect sensors

In two previous papers we explored some of the systems aspects of applying large numbers of inexpensive robots to real world applications. The concept of coverage can help the user of such a system visualize its overall function and performance in mission-relevant terms, and thereby support necessary system command control functions. An important class of coverage applications are those that involve a search, in which a number of searching elements move about within a prescribed search area in order to find one or more target objects, which may be stationary or mobile. A simple analytical framework was employed in the previous work to demonstrate that the design of a cost-effective many-robot search system can depend sensitively on the interplay of sensor cost and performance levels with mission-specific functional and performance requirements. In the current paper we extend these results: we consider additional measures of effectiveness for area search systems to provide a broader basis for a tradeoff of coordinated versus random search models, and we explore how to deliberately achieve effectively randomized search strategies that provide uniform search coverage over a specified area.
Capturing and Verifying Dynamic Program Behaviour Using UML Communication Diagrams and Pi-Calculus

UML is a semi-formal modeling language for object oriented systems. It is successfully used to assist all phases of software development process. With growing support by CASE tools, its applications become more and more widespread in real word projects. In fact, these tools allow code-generation from UML diagrams and reverse-engineering. In other hand, picalculus is a flexible formal theory with several applications especially for distributed systems. It offers a rich theory and tools for verification purposes. Thus, this paper presents an approach for capturing and verifying the dynamic behavior of programs using UML communication diagrams (collaboration diagrams in UML 1.x) and pi-calculus. We illustrate our approach by an example in order to explain the general purpose usability of our approach. Then we tackle another small example to show the verification capabilities provided by the approach.
Dendritic Cell Response to HIV-1 Is Controlled by Differentiation Programs in the Cells and Strain-Specific Properties of the Virus

Dendritic cells (DCs) are potent antigen-presenting cells that might play contradictory roles during HIV-1 infection, contributing not only to antiviral immunity but also to viral dissemination and immune evasion. Although DCs are characterized by enormous functional diversity, it has not been analyzed how differentially programmed DCs interact with HIV-1. We have previously described the reprogramming of DC development by endogenously produced lactic acid that accumulated in a cell culture density-dependent manner and provided a long-lasting anti-inflammatory signal to the cells. By exploiting this mechanism, we generated immunostimulatory DCs characterized by the production of TH1 polarizing and inflammatory mediators or, alternatively, suppressed DCs that produce IL-10 upon activation, and we tested the interaction of these DC types with different HIV-1 strains. Cytokine patterns were monitored in HIV-1-exposed DC cultures. Our results showed that DCs receiving suppressive developmental program strongly upregulated their capacity to produce the TH1 polarizing cytokine IL-12 and the inflammatory chemokines CCL2 and CCL7 upon interaction with HIV-1 strains IIIB and SF162. On the contrary, HIV-1 abolished cytokine production in the more inflammatory DC types. Preincubation of the cells with the HIV-1 proteins gp120 and Nef could inhibit IL-12 production irrespectively of the tested DC types, whereas MyD88- and TRIF-dependent signals stimulated IL-12 production in the suppressed DC type only. Rewiring of DC cytokines did not require DC infections or ligation of the HIV-1 receptor CD209. A third HIV-1 strain, BaL, could not modulate DC cytokines in a similar manner indicating that individual HIV-1 strains can differ in their capacity to influence DCs. Our results demonstrated that HIV-1 could not induce definite and invariable modulatory programs in DCs. Instead, interaction with the virus triggered different responses in different DC types. Thus, the outcome of DC-HIV-1 interactions might be highly variable, shaped by endogenous features of the cells and diversity of the virus.
Why is “SXSW” trending? Exploring Multiple Text Sources for Twitter Topic Summarization

User-contributed content is creating a surge on the Internet. A list of "buzzing topics" can effectively monitor the surge and lead people to their topics of interest. Yet a topic phrase alone, such as "SXSW", can rarely present the information clearly. In this paper, we propose to explore a variety of text sources for summarizing the Twitter topics, including the tweets, normalized tweets via a dedicated tweet normalization system, web contents linked from the tweets, as well as integration of different text sources. We employ the concept-based optimization framework for topic summarization, and conduct both automatic and human evaluation regarding the summary quality. Performance differences are observed for different input sources and types of topics. We also provide a comprehensive analysis regarding the task challenges.
Partial discharge characteristics of spherical metal particle in mineral oil and PFAE under AC voltage

This paper reported the partial discharge of free spherical metal particle in mineral oil and Palm Fatty Acid Ester Oil (PFAE) under quasi-uniform field of AC applied voltage in transformer. The partial discharge inception voltage (PDIV) for the single particle was measured to be 11kV and 15kV for PFAE and mineral, respectively. The Phase-Resolved Partial Discharge (PRPD) pattern for both oils shows that during early stage of applied voltage, the PDs are mostly occur at the adjacent of zero cross point. PRPD pattern under increment of applied voltage in mineral oil has shown a slow scattering distribution with larger number of PD compared to PFAE. PDs in mineral oil start to scatter at 21kV and concentrate at 90° and 270° of positive and negative half cycle, respectively. Meanwhile, PDs in PFAE shows to scatter at 15kV and with increasing voltage, the PDs show to distribute around 100° in positive half cycle and 290° in negative half cycle. At 21kV, mineral oil has shown to have approximately 1.5 times more number of PDs compared to PFAE. The observation on spherical metal particle movement revealed that there were different stages of motion process involved in these two different oils.
Use of ketamine in acute severe asthma

Two patients with acute severe asthma, who failed to respond to conventional therapy, were given intravenous ketamine in sub‐anaesthetic doses with good results. A bolus dose of 0.75 mg/kg was followed by the same dose over 10 min with relief of bronchospasm in both cases. An infusion of ketamine at a rate of 0.15 mg/kg/h was used in each case to prevent recurrence of bronchospasm. Intravenous ketamine can be used to relieve acute intractable bronchospasm provided expert anaesthetic help is at hand. A review of the literature concerning its use in such situations is also presented.
Design of class-EM power amplifier with one input signal

This paper presents a class-EM amplifier with one input signal, along with its design procedure and experimental results. In the proposed amplifier, the main circuit is operated by the feedback voltage from the output voltage. Moreover, the ZVS class-E frequency doubler is applied to the auxiliary circuit. Therefore, the proposed class-EM amplifier can be operated by one input signal whose frequency is the same as that of output voltage. Experimental results agree with the calculated one quantitatively, which denotes the validity of the design procedure. In the laboratory experiment, the proposed class-EM amplifier achieved 92.5 % power conversion efficiency at 13.3 W output power and 3.5 MHz frequency operation.
Cyber-Physical Co-Simulation Framework for Smart Cells in Scalable Battery Packs

This article introduces a Cyber-physical Co-Simulation Framework (CPCSF) for design and analysis of smart cells that enable scalable battery pack and Battery Management System (BMS) architectures. In contrast to conventional cells in battery packs, where all cells are monitored and controlled centrally, each smart cell is equipped with its own electronics in the form of a Cell Management Unit (CMU). The CMU maintains the cell in a safe and healthy operating state, while system-level battery management functions are performed by cooperation of the smart cells via communication. Here, the smart cells collaborate in a self-organizing fashion without a central controller instance. This enables maximum scalability and modularity, significantly simplifying integration of battery packs. However, for this emerging architecture, system-level design methodologies and tools have not been investigated yet. By contrast, components are developed individually and then manually tested in a hardware development platform. Consequently, the systematic design of the hardware/software architecture of smart cells requires a cyber-physical multi-level co-simulation of the network of smart cells that has to include all the components from the software, electronic, electric, and electrochemical domains. This comprises distributed BMS algorithms running on the CMUs, the communication network, control circuitry, cell balancing hardware, and battery cell behavior. For this purpose, we introduce a CPCSF that enables rapid design and analysis of smart cell hardware/software architectures. Our framework is then applied to investigate request-driven active cell balancing strategies that make use of the decentralized system architecture. In an exhaustive analysis on a realistic 21.6kW h Electric Vehicle (EV) battery pack containing 96 smart cells in series, the CPCSF is able to simulate hundreds of balancing runs together with all system characteristics, using the proposed request-driven balancing strategies at highest accuracy within an overall time frame of several hours. Consequently, the presented CPCSF for the first time allows us to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the behavior of smart cell architectures for real-world applications.
Silencing disease genes in the laboratory and the clinic

Synthetic nucleic acids are commonly used laboratory tools for modulating gene expression and have the potential to be widely used in the clinic. Progress towards nucleic acid drugs, however, has been slow and many challenges remain to be overcome before their full impact on patient care can be understood. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are the two most widely used strategies for silencing gene expression. We first describe these two approaches and contrast their relative strengths and weaknesses for laboratory applications. We then review the choices faced during development of clinical candidates and the current state of clinical trials. Attitudes towards clinical development of nucleic acid silencing strategies have repeatedly swung from optimism to depression during the past 20 years. Our goal is to provide the information needed to design robust studies with oligonucleotides, making use of the strengths of each oligonucleotide technology. Copyright © 2011 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Performance of Downlink Frequency Domain Packet Scheduling for the UTRAN Long Term Evolution

In this paper we investigate the potential of downlink frequency domain packet scheduling (FDPS) for the 3GPP UTRAN long-term evolution. Utilizing frequency-domain channel quality reports, the scheduler flexibly multiplexes users on different portions of the system bandwidth. Compared to frequency-blind, but time-opportunistic scheduling, FDPS shows gains in both average system capacity and cell-edge data rates on the order of 40%. However, the FDPS performance is shown to depend significantly on the frequency-domain scheduling resolution as well as the accuracy of the channel state reports. Assuming typical urban channel profile, studies show that the scheduling resolution should preferably be as low as 375 kHz to yield significant FDPS gain with two-branch receive diversity and in 20 MHz. Further, to have convincing FDPS gain the std. of error of radio state reports needs to be kept within 1.5-2 dB