Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An application of the spectral kurtosis for early detection of subterranean termites

This paper deals with termite detection in a noisy environment using higher-order statistics (HOS). The results could be extrapolated to all impulse-like insect emissions. Sliding higher-order cumulants offer distinctive time instances, as a complement to the sliding variance, which only reveals power excesses in the signal; even for low-amplitude impulses. The spectral kurtosis reveals non-Gaussian characteristics (the peakedness of the probability density function) associated to these non-stationary measurements, specially in the near ultrasound frequency band. Contrasted estimators have been used to compute the higher-order statistics.
The IBM wireless sensor networking testbed

This paper describes the wireless sensor networking testbed built at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. The testbed has been used to address a wealth of exciting research challenges. Performance evaluations have been carried out with short-range wireless communication technologies, which are highly relevant for sensor networking such as IEEE 802.15. 4/ZigBee networks, Bluetooth WPANs, and IEEE 802.11b WLANs. With the testbed, the merits of wireless mesh networking for range extension and reliability enhancement have been explored. New light-weight messaging protocols for communication between sensors and an application server have been tested which allow to bring messaging-oriented middleware down to very low-end sensors and actuators. In addition, the testbed has been used to develop sensor applications for remote metering and location-sensing
miRDeep*: an integrated application tool for miRNA identification from RNA sequencing data

miRDeep and its varieties are widely used to quantify known and novel micro RNA (miRNA) from small RNA sequencing (RNAseq). This article describes miRDeep*, our integrated miRNA identification tool, which is modeled off miRDeep, but the precision of detecting novel miRNAs is improved by introducing new strategies to identify precursor miRNAs. miRDeep* has a user-friendly graphic interface and accepts raw data in FastQ and Sequence Alignment Map (SAM) or the binary equivalent (BAM) format. Known and novel miRNA expression levels, as measured by the number of reads, are displayed in an interface, which shows each RNAseq read relative to the pre-miRNA hairpin. The secondary pre-miRNA structure and read locations for each predicted miRNA are shown and kept in a separate figure file. Moreover, the target genes of known and novel miRNAs are predicted using the TargetScan algorithm, and the targets are ranked according to the confidence score. miRDeep* is an integrated standalone application where sequence alignment, pre-miRNA secondary structure calculation and graphical display are purely Java coded. This application tool can be executed using a normal personal computer with 1.5 GB of memory. Further, we show that miRDeep* outperformed existing miRNA prediction tools using our LNCaP and other small RNAseq datasets. miRDeep* is freely available online at http://www.australianprostatecentre. org/research/software/mirdeep-star.
Glial Lipoproteins Stimulate Axon Growth of Central Nervous System Neurons in Compartmented Cultures*

The role of lipoproteins secreted by cortical glial cells in axon growth of central nervous system (CNS) neurons was investigated. We first established compartmented cultures of CNS neurons (retinal ganglion cells). Addition of glial cell-conditioned medium (GCM) to distal axons increased the rate of axon extension by ∼50%. Inhibition of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA reductase in glial cells diminished the secretion of cholesterol and apolipoprotein E, and prevented the growth stimulatory effect of GCM. When glia-derived lipoproteins containing apolipoprotein E were provided to distal axons, axon extension was stimulated to the same extent as by GCM. In contrast, addition of lipoproteins to cell bodies failed to enhance growth. The growth stimulatory effect of glial lipoproteins was abrogated in the presence of receptor-associated protein, RAP, indicating involvement of receptor(s) of the low density lipoprotein receptor family in stimulation of axonal extension. These observations suggest that glial cells stimulate axon growth of CNS neurons by providing lipoproteins containing cholesterol and apolipoprotein E to distal axons.
Model Predictive Control-Based Real-Time Power System Protection Schemes

The objective of power system controls is to keep the electrical flow as well as voltage magnitudes within acceptable limits in spite of the load and network topology changes. The control of voltage level is accomplished by controlling the production, absorption as well as flow of reactive power at various locations in the system. This paper presents an approach to determine a real-time system protection scheme to prevent voltage instability and maintain a desired amount of post-transient voltage stability margin (an index of system security) following the occurrence of a contingency by means of reactive power control. This approach is based on the model predictive control (MPC) theory. According to an economic criterion and control effectiveness, a control switching strategy consisting of a sequence of amounts of the shunt capacitors to switch is identified for voltage restoration. The effect of the capacitive control on voltage recovery is measured via trajectory sensitivity. The sensitivity of voltage stability margin with respect to the capacitive control is used to construct a security constraint for post-fault operation in the MPC formulation. The efficacy of the proposed approach is illustrated through applications to the WECC system for enhancing the voltage performance and to the 39-bus New England system for preventing voltage collapse.
Analysis of Important Gene Ontology Terms and Biological Pathways Related to Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is a serious disease that results in more than thirty thousand deaths around the world per year. To design effective treatments, many investigators have devoted themselves to the study of biological processes and mechanisms underlying this disease. However, it is far from complete. In this study, we tried to extract important gene ontology (GO) terms and KEGG pathways for pancreatic cancer by adopting some existing computational methods. Genes that have been validated to be related to pancreatic cancer and have not been validated were represented by features derived from GO terms and KEGG pathways using the enrichment theory. A popular feature selection method, minimum redundancy maximum relevance, was employed to analyze these features and extract important GO terms and KEGG pathways. An extensive analysis of the obtained GO terms and KEGG pathways was provided to confirm the correlations between them and pancreatic cancer.
An Experimental Study of the Effectiveness of Clustered AGgregation ( CAG ) Leveraging Spatial and Temporal Correlations in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensed data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) reflect the spatial and temporal correlations of physical attributes existing intrinsically in the environment. In our previous work, we proposed CAG (Clustered AGgregation) which exploits this spatial correlation to trade-off accuracy for efficiency during in-network aggregation. In this paper, we present the updated CAG algorithm that forms clusters of nodes sensing similar values within a given threshold (spatial correlation), and these clusters remain unchanged as long as the sensor values stay within a threshold over time (temporal correlation). With CAG, only one sensor reading per cluster is transmitted whereas with Tiny AGgregation (TAG) all the nodes in the network transmit the sensor readings. Thus, CAG provides energy efficient and approximate aggregation results where the error is bounded by a user-provided threshold. In this paper we extend our study in five directions: First, we design CAG for two modes of operations (interactive and streaming) to enable CAG to be used in different environments and for different purposes. Interactive mode is appropriate for dynamic and ad-hoc queries, whereas the streaming mode is appropriate for continuous queries. Second, we propose a fixed range clustering method which makes the performance of our system independent of the magnitude of sensor readings and the network topology. Third, using mica2 motes, we perform a largescale measurement of real environmental data (temperature and light, both indoor and outdoor) and the wireless radio reliability, which were used for both analytical modeling and simulation experiments. Fourth, we model the spatially correlated data using the properties of our real world measurements. Fifth, we investigate the effectiveness of CAG that exploits the temporal as well as spatial correlations using both the measured and modeled data. Our experimental result shows that CAG in the interactive mode, with the user-provided error threshold of 10%, can save 50% of energy over TAG with only 4% inaccuracy in the result. The streaming mode of CAG can save even more energy (up to 73.21%) over the interactive mode when data shows high temporal correlation. CAG is the first system that leverages spatial and temporal correlations to improve energy efficiency of in-network aggregation. This study analytically and empirically validates CAG’s effectiveness.
A Review of the Literature on the Status of Women and Minorities in the Professoriate in Higher Education

Over the past twenty years, the status of women in higher education has improved, but only marginally so. As the political and social climate of the country has become more conservative, the concepts of affirmative action and equal opportunity for women and minorities have been challenged more than ever. In addition, although women are flocking to graduate schools in record numbers, only a small percentage of them are encouraged to seek positions in higher education as administrators or professors. Statistically, the situation is worse, especially for black women. This status report focuses on the following: (1) the role of affirmative action in the hiring and retention of women in higher education; (2) the environment that exists in colleges and universities in regard to women and minorities; (3) policies that adversely affect black women in academia; (4) existing rank and salary inequities of minority male and female professors; (5) a specific look at male and female professors of educational administration; and (6) implications and recommendations.
A Novel Method for Supporting Locality in Peer-to-Peer Overlays Using Hypercube Topology

Today, peer-to-peer networks are become more popular among internet users and more than millions peers share high volume of data from anywhere. Sending and receiving these data increase the network traffics terribly. By improving the performance of these networks not only the efficiency of these networks increase but also the overall performance of the internet augments. To achieve high performance and resilience to failures, a peer can make connections with those other peers that are geographically closer to it. In this paper, we present a novel mechanism for placing peers on the overlay network, which supports locality without increasing network traffic seriously.
Long Term Follow-Up after a Randomized Integrated Educational and Psychosocial Intervention in Patient-Partner Dyads Affected by Heart Failure

Background To date, contemporary heart failure care remains patient-focused, but awareness of the partners’ and families’ situation is increasing. Randomized studies have mainly evaluated the short-term effects of dyadic interventions. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the 24-month effects of an intervention with psych-educational support in dyads of heart failure patients and their partners. Methods This study used a randomized study design and 155 patient-partner dyads were enrolled. The intervention included a nurse-led program of three sessions addressing psychoeducational support. Results The intervention did not have any effect on health, depressive symptoms or perceived control among the patient-partner dyads after 24 months. Furthermore, time to first event did not differ significantly between the intervention group and the control patients. Conclusion This study may be regarded as a first step in trying to understand dyads’ need for supportive care. Individualized and more targeted interventions seem necessary to achieve a higher impact on dyad outcomes. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02398799
Summarizing a Document by Trimming the Discourse Tree

Recent studies on extractive text summarization formulate it as a combinatorial optimization problem, extracting the optimal subset from a set of the textual units that maximizes an objective function without violating the length constraint. Although these methods successfully improve automatic evaluation scores, they do not consider the discourse structure in the source document. Thus, summaries generated by these methods may lack logical coherence. In previous work, we proposed a method that exploits a discourse tree structure to produce coherent summaries. By transforming a traditional discourse tree, namely a rhetorical structure theory-based discourse tree (RST-DT), into a dependency-based discourse tree (DEP-DT), we formulated the summarization procedure as a Tree Knapsack Problem whose tree corresponds to the DEP-DT. This paper extends the work with a detailed discussion of the approach together with a novel efficient dynamic programming algorithm for solving the Tree Knapsack Problem. Experiments show that our method not only achieved the highest score in both automatic and human evaluation, but also obtained good performance in terms of the linguistic qualities of the summaries.
Is There a Normal Phase of Synaesthesia in Development

Synaesthesia (one sense triggering another) has recently become amenable to scientific investigation. Recent findings are reviewed. Maurer's developmental theory of synaesthesia is then discussed. The theory states that all human neonates have synaesthesia, but that by about 4 months of age the senses have become modularized to the extent that we no longer have synaesthesia. Possible ways of testing this important theory are described, and the distinction between this account and cross-modal matching (Meltzoff) is clarified.
Gradient based optimization of support vector machines

In dieser Arbeit werden zwei unabhangige Probleme aus dem Bereich des Lernens mit Support-Vektor-Maschinen (SVM) mit Hilfe gradientenbasierter Optimierungstechniken gelost. Fur das erste Problem, das Training der Maschine, werden effiziente Algorithmen zur Losung hochdimensionaler quadratischer Programme benotigt. Das zweite Problem, das sogenannte Modellselektionsproblem, erfordert die Konstruktion einer geeigneten Zielfunktion und Methoden zur nicht-konvexen Optimierung. Es werden neue bzw. verbesserte iterative Algorithmen zum Training von Support-Vektor-Maschinen vorgestellt und die Konvergenz der Losung zur optimalen Losung bewiesen. Das Modellsekeltionsproblem wird mit Hilfe vollig neuartiger Ansatze bearbeitet. Die Ergebnisse werden durch eine Reihe theoretischer Ergebnisse sowie empirischer Untersuchungen gestutzt.
Automatic parsing as an efficient pre-annotation tool for historical texts

Historical treebanks tend to be manually annotated, which is not surprising, since state-of-the-art parsers are not accurate enough to ensure high-quality annotation for historical texts. We test whether automatic parsing can be an efficient pre-annotation tool for Old East Slavic texts. We use the TOROT treebank from the PROIEL treebank family. We convert the PROIEL format to the CONLL format and use MaltParser to create syntactic pre-annotation. Using the most conservative evaluation method, which takes into account PROIEL-specific features, MaltParser by itself yields 0.845 unlabelled attachment score, 0.779 labelled attachment score and 0.741 secondary dependency accuracy (note, though, that the test set comes from a relatively simple genre and contains rather short sentences). Experiments with human annotators show that preparsing, if limited to sentences where no changes to word or sentence boundaries are required, increases their annotation rate. For experienced annotators, the speed gain varies from 5.80% to 16.57%, for inexperienced annotators from 14.61% to 32.17% (using conservative estimates). There are no strong reliable differences in the annotation accuracy, which means that there is no reason to suspect that using preparsing might lower the final annotation quality.
New Perspectives in Amblyopia Therapy on Adults: A Critical Role for the Excitatory/Inhibitory Balance

Amblyopia is the most common form of impairment of visual function affecting one eye, with a prevalence of about 1–5% of the total world population. This pathology is caused by early abnormal visual experience with a functional imbalance between the two eyes owing to anisometropia, strabismus, or congenital cataract, resulting in a dramatic loss of visual acuity in an apparently healthy eye and various other perceptual abnormalities, including deficits in contrast sensitivity and in stereopsis. It is currently accepted that, due to a lack of sufficient plasticity within the brain, amblyopia is untreatable in adulthood. However, recent results obtained both in clinical trials and in animal models have challenged this traditional view, unmasking a previously unsuspected potential for promoting recovery after the end of the critical period for visual cortex plasticity. These studies point toward the intracortical inhibitory transmission as a crucial brake for therapeutic rehabilitation and recovery from amblyopia in the adult brain.
Subsumption and complementation as data fusion operators

The goal of data fusion is to combine several representations of one real world object into a single, consistent representation, e.g., in data integration. A very popular operator to perform data fusion is the minimum union operator. It is defined as the outer union and the subsequent removal of subsumed tuples. Minimum union is used in other applications as well, for instance in database query optimization to rewrite outer join queries, in the semantic web community in implementing Sparql's optional operator, etc. Despite its wide applicability, there are only few efficient implementations, and until now, minimum union is not a relational database primitive. This paper fills this gap as we present implementations of subsumption that serve as a building block for minimum union. Furthermore, we consider this operator as database primitive and show how to perform optimization of query plans in presence of subsumption and minimum union through rule-based plan transformations. Experiments on both artificial and real world data show that our algorithms outperform existing algorithms used for subsumption in terms of runtime and they scale to large volumes of data. In the context of data integration, we observe that performing data fusion calls for more than subsumption and minimum union. Therefore, another contribution of this paper is the definition of the complementation and complement union operators. Intuitively, these allow to merge tuples that have complementing values and thus eliminate unnecessary null-values.
Acoustic characteristics of Greek vowels produced by adults and children

To my knowledge, no research on the acoustic analysis of Greek children's speech has been published. At the same time, the need for an expanded knowl­edge base, which would include information on children, is underlined in the lit­erature (Deterding 1990, Kent and Read 1992, Clark and Yallop 1995, Henton 1995, Lass 1996, Lee et al. 1997). In response to this need, this study involves the acoustic analysis of Greek men's, women's and children's vowels —with an em­phasis on the last— and examines the relationship between adults' and chil­dren's acoustic data. Children's vowels are found to show higher formant fre­quencies than adults', as expected from English children's data, and the scat- tergrams of adults-versus-children's data reveal a relation that can be repre­sented by a linear model quite satisfactorily.
The usefulness of net-centric support tools for traffic incident management

In the last two decades traffic Incident Management (IM) has become an important tool to reduce and prevent congestion on the road network, especially in urban areas. IM involves the coordinated interactions of many public and private actors. To support their tasks in an effective way, information systems are becoming increasingly important. In particular, information and system quality and Situational Awareness (SA) have been identified as major hurdles for effective emergency response. This paper reports the results of an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of net-centric information systems to improve the cooperation between public and private IM organizations. A set of controlled experiments were conducted with 16 participants. Data on the responses of the participants were collected through questionnaires and observer notes. The analysis focused on: a comparison of the tools tested, in terms of the appreciation of information and system quality, a comparison of the communication and coordination of a test group and a control group of the emergency workers; the value of SA in the performance of the decision-making process; and, how scenario complexity can affect the design principles of net-centric systems.
A leap forward in geographic scale for forest ectomycorrhizal fungi

ConclusionThe functionally critical role of mycorrhizal fungi in forest ecosystems, and the imminent threat of climate change that may act to alter mycorrhizal functional biodiversity, means there is an urgent need for a regional to continental-scale assessment of mycorrhizal distributions. Until recently, it had not been possible to cost-effectively assess mycorrhizas precisely and accurately. A large-scale survey of ICP Forests plots would be only the first stage in answering many of the questions outlined above, but it is essential if future studies are going to address these questions with hypothesis-driven research in a cohesive manner, rather than remain independent for lack of a unified approach. The chance to utilise the vast network of biomonitoring plots at this time is a remarkable opportunity because it minimises the logistics and costs associated with achieving such an enormous effort and provides a rare stable — past and future — ground for forest ecosystem scientific investigation. In the face of rapid global change, we finally have an opportunity to accurately integrate mycorrhizal distribution data with long-term environmental monitoring, providing a basic understanding of functionally crucial organisms, and at the same time creating an invaluable resource for future research.
Showcasing transnational and bilingual expertise: A case study of a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual within an after-school program centering Latinx experiences

ABSTRACT Drawing on the concept of transnational funds of knowledge, this article examines how a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual engaged in an after-school literacy program that centered on Latinx experiences and Spanish-language resources. Through analysis of classroom observations, informal conversations with the focal student (Erica) and her peers, and student-created artifacts, we argue that a linguistically responsive curriculum enabled Erica to surface transnational knowledges, expand available bilingual identities, and mobilize her multilingual awareness to teach others. Our findings have implications for honoring transnational histories and bilingualism within the constraints of English-medium instruction and beyond bounded notions of cultural relevance.