Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Aging on Resilient Modulus of Hot Mix Asphalt Mixtures

Asphalt hardens as a result of an aging process. This study was undertaken to determine the effect of field aging simulated by laboratory aging method of different hot mix asphalt (HMA) mixture. Three types HMA mixtures were used for this study namely Asphaltic Concrete with 10 mm nominal maximum aggregate size (AC 10), Aspaltic Concrete 28 mm (AC 28) and Porous Asphalt 10 mm (PA 10). The resilient modulus test was carried out as an indicator of the performance at a 25 °C and 40 °C. Generally, all samples show similar trend which aged mixture produced slightly higher resilient modulus compared to unaged mixture while an increase in temperature from 25 °C to 40 °C might reduced the resilient modulus up to 88%. This study also found that the difference increment of resilient modulus after the aging process attributed by asphalt content, air void and gradation of respective mixtures.
A Novel Modulo Loss Suppression Scheme Employing Theoretical BER Formula for MU-MIMO THP Systems

This paper proposes a novel modulo loss suppression scheme employing a theoretical BER formula for multi- user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP) systems. The main feature of the proposed approach is to control the constellation distance by using the simple theoretical bit error rate (BER) formula in order to overcome the modulo loss. Behind this proposal, there is an interesting fact that the BER performance is dependent on the influence of both the thermal noise and the modulo loss and that its influence is determined by the constellation distance. In the proposed approach, we newly derive a theoretical simple BER formula for MU- MIMO THP and then find out the optimal constellation distance to suppress the modulo loss. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated in comparison to the traditional MU-MIMO THP with fixed distance by means of computer simulations.
ATTENUATION IN THE MANTLE AND RIGIDITY OF THE CORE FROM MULTIPLY REFLECTED CORE PHASES.

In 1956 Press reported on single and double reflections of shear waves at near normal incidence from the earth's core and was able to estimate the average dissipation constant of shear waves in the mantle and place an upper bound for the rigidity of the earth's outer core at the core-mantle boundary. However, because of excessive reverberations and the low sensitivity of the seismographs only a few usable seismograms were found in five years of continuous data. In this paper me report on a seismogram showing unusually clear, near-vertical multiple reflections of shear waves from the earth's core. We have been able further to reduce the upper bound on the rigidity of the core, to estimate the average dissipation coefficient for 20-30 sec shear waves in the mantle, and to estimate the dissipation in the regions of the mantle above and below the earthquake focus. In addition, we have recomputed the origin time and depth of focus from information contained in this single seismogram.
Implementation of video telehealth to improve access to evidence-based psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder.

BACKGROUND Increasing access to psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a primary focus of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system. Delivery of treatment via video telehealth can expand availability of treatment and be equally effective as in-person treatment. Despite VA efforts, barriers to establishing telehealth services remain, including both provider acceptance and organizational obstacles. Thus, development of specific strategies is needed to implement video telehealth services in complex healthcare systems, like the VA. MATERIALS AND METHODS This project was guided by the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services framework and used external facilitation to increase access to psychotherapy via video telehealth. The project was conducted at five VA Medical Centers and their associated community clinics across six states in the South Central United States. RESULTS Over a 21-month period, 27 video telehealth clinics were established to provide greater access to evidence-based psychotherapies for PTSD. Examination of change scores showed that participating sites averaged a 3.2-fold increase in unique patients and a 6.5-fold increase in psychotherapy sessions via video telehealth for PTSD. Differences between participating and nonparticipating sites in both unique patients and encounters were significant (p=0.041 and p=0.009, respectively). Two groups emerged, separated by degree of engagement in the facilitation intervention. Facilitation was perceived as useful by providers. CONCLUSIONS To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study of external facilitation as an implementation strategy for telehealth. Our findings suggest that external facilitation is an effective and acceptable strategy to support providers as they establish clinics and make complex practice changes, such as implementing video telehealth to deliver psychotherapy.
Concurrent associations between maternal behaviours and infant communication within a cohort of women and their infants experiencing adversity

Abstract Purpose: Evidence suggests that children living in adversity are at greater risk of poorer language than their peers with the quality of parental interactions potentially mediating this association. Studies typically measure the mediatory impact of generic interaction styles making it difficult to discern which particular aspects of the interaction are facilitating language. This study aims to bridge this gap by identifying specific maternal behaviours associated with concurrent infant communication, in a cohort of 12-month old infants and their mothers experiencing adversity. Method: A total of 249 mother–infant free-play videos were collected from women experiencing adversity in Victoria and Tasmania, Australia. From those videos, specific maternal behaviours, infant communication acts and the interaction quality were coded. Result: Maternal verbal imitations uniquely predicted concurrent use of infant vocalisations, total words and unique words. Furthermore, the more fluent and connected the mother–infant dyad, the stronger the association between imitations and all three infant measures. Conclusion: Frequent use of maternal imitations, within highly connected mother–infant dyads, may help mediate the impact of adversity on early communication. This information is important for early years professionals working with at-risk populations in augmenting current knowledge of risk and protective factors related to early language.
Demand for and Supply of Evaluations in Selected Sub-­‐ Saharan African Countries Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results Anglophone Africa (clear-­‐ Aa) Entire Publication © Graduate School of Public and Development

This report is an output funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as a public good. The views expressed are not necessarily those of DFID. i Executive Summary 1 This study argues that the political economy of a country conditions the opportunities for evaluation to be used in policy processes. Consequently, evaluation capacity development practices need to be undertaken in a manner that works towards development with the prevailing political economy. Political economy issues become less evident as analysis moves from the policy space towards technical delivery, but still impacts upon the way evaluation processes unfold. This argument has been developed through synthesising findings from the case studies in five African countries; namely, Ghana, Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia. These studies mapped evaluation demand and supply with consideration for the political economy. In undertaking the mapping, this study found that there is potential rather than actual technical capacity to manage, undertake and demand evaluations. This is a major constraint on the use of evaluation. High-quality evaluations are more often commissioned and managed by development partners than government, which means that they are less likely to be used in policy. There are, however, some notable examples development partner led evaluations being used. In some cases universities, think tanks and civil society actors in the country have some good technical capacity and can navigate the political context in a manner that promotes development rather than self-interest. Such technically good and politically savvy evaluation actors offer entry points to evaluation capacity development efforts. Background In Africa there is now evidence of emerging country-led demands for evaluation (Porter and Goldman 2013), consistent with the general emphasis of the Paris Declaration on the use of country owned systems. However, understanding of how to identify and connect evaluation supply to these demands remains limited. Often analyses have not considered a full range of opportunities, and have instead focused exclusively on technical strengthening of executive functions for evaluation or areas where monitoring information can more easily be generated. A framework has been developed from the findings of the five case studies which supports the application of a political economy analysis going forward. This framework, in alignment with the overall aims of the study, helps to understand in case countries: (i) The conditions under which demand is generated for evidence; and (ii) the areas in which supply can be strengthened to meet and foster this demand. …
Bag of Visual Words Method based on PLSA and Chi-Square Model for Object Category

The problem of visual words’ synonymy and ambiguity always exist in the conventional bag of visual words (BoVW) model based object category methods. Besides, the noisy visual words, so-called “visual stop-words” will degrade the semantic resolution of visual dictionary. In view of this, a novel bag of visual words method based on PLSA and chi-square model for object category is proposed. Firstly, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is used to analyze the semantic co-occurrence probability of visual words, infer the latent semantic topics in images, and get the latent topic distributions induced by the words. Secondly, the KL divergence is adopt to measure the semantic distance between visual words, which can get semantically related homoionym. Then, adaptive soft-assignment strategy is combined to realize the soft mapping between SIFT features and some homoionym. Finally, the chi-square model is introduced to eliminate the “visual stop-words” and reconstruct the visual vocabulary histograms. Moreover, SVM (Support Vector Machine) is applied to accomplish object classification. Experimental results indicated that the synonymy and ambiguity problems of visual words can be overcome effectively. The distinguish ability of visual semantic resolution as well as the object classification performance are substantially boosted compared with the traditional methods.
Convex lifted conditions for robust stability analysis and stabilization of linear discrete-time switched systems

Stability analysis of discrete-time switched systems under minimum dwell-time is studied using a new type of LMI conditions. These conditions are convex in the matrices of the system and shown to be equivalent to the nonconvex conditions proposed by Geromel and Colaneri. The convexification of the conditions is performed by a lifting process which introduces a moderate number of additional decision variables. The convexity of the conditions can be exploited to extend the results to uncertain systems, control design and $\ell_2$-gain computation without introducing additional conservatism. Several examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the approach.
A performance analysis of source routing-based multicast protocol (SRMP) using different mobility models

We focus on one critical issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that is multicast routing. In fact, optimal routes, stable links, power conservation, loop freedom, and reduced channel overhead are the main features to be addressed in a more efficient multicast mechanism. MANETs are often analyzed through simulations and their performance results depend slightly on simulation network parameters including traffic generation models, radio transmission parameters and mobility models. In this paper we evaluate the performance of our proposed multicast routing protocol, named source routing-based multicast protocol (SRMP). SRMP constructs a mesh to connect group members, providing robustness against mobility. It also provides stable paths based on links availability according to future prediction of links state, and higher battery life paths tending to power conserving. We present a full performance evaluation and analysis for SRMP under realistic conditions including, realistic movements of mobile nodes in the form of different mobility models. We present our simulation results that illustrate the importance of choosing a mobility model in the simulation. Specifically, we illustrate the effect of choosing the mobility model on the performance results.
Lattice Distortion Analysis Directly from High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy Images—the LADIA Program Package

Direct strain mapping from high resolution transmission electron microscopy images is possible for coherent structures.At proper imaging conditions the intensity peaks in the image have a constant spatial relationship with the projected atom columns.This allows the determination of the geometry of the projected unit cell without comparison with image simulations.The fast procedure is particularly suited for the analysis of large areas.The software package LADIA is written in the PV-WAVE code and provides all necessary tools for image processing and analysis.Image iintensity peaks are determined by a cross-correlation technique,which avoids problems from noise in the low spatial frequency renage.The lower limit of strain that can be detected at a sampling rate of 44 pixels/nm is ≈2%.
Only One Isoform of Drosophila melanogaster CTP Synthase Forms the Cytoophidium

CTP synthase is an essential enzyme that plays a key role in energy metabolism. Several independent studies have demonstrated that CTP synthase can form an evolutionarily conserved subcellular structure termed cytoophidium. In budding yeast, there are two isoforms of CTP synthase and both isoforms localize in cytoophidium. However, little is known about the distribution of CTP synthase isoforms in Drosophila melanogaster. Here, we report that three transcripts generated at the CTP synthase gene locus exhibit different expression profiles, and three isoforms encoded by this gene locus show a distinct subcellular distribution. While isoform A localizes in the nucleus, isoform B distributes diffusely in the cytoplasm, and only isoform C forms the cytoophidium. In the two isoform C-specific mutants, cytoophidia disappear in the germline cells. Although isoform A does not localize to the cytoophidium, a mutation disrupting mostly isoform A expression results in the disassembly of cytoophidia. Overexpression of isoform C can induce the growth of the cytoophidium in a cell-autonomous manner. Ectopic expression of the cytoophidium-forming isoform does not cause any defect in the embryos. In addition, we identify that a small segment at the amino terminus of isoform C is necessary but not sufficient for cytoophidium formation. Finally, we demonstrate that an excess of the synthetase domain of CTP synthase disrupts cytoophidium formation. Thus, the study of multiple isoforms of CTP synthase in Drosophila provides a good opportunity to dissect the biogenesis and function of the cytoophidum in a genetically tractable organism.
MicroRNA-144 Regulates Hepatic ATP Binding Cassette Transporter A1 and Plasma High-Density Lipoprotein After Activation of the Nuclear Receptor Farnesoid X Receptor

Rationale: The bile acid receptor farnesoid X receptor (FXR) regulates many aspects of lipid metabolism by variouscomplex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. We set out to investigate the molecular mechanisms for FXR-dependent regulation of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism. Objective: To identify FXR-regulated microRNAs that were subsequently involved in regulating lipid metabolism. Methods and Results: ATP binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) is a major determinant of plasma high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels. Here, we show that activation of the nuclear receptor FXR in vivo increases hepatic levels of miR-144, which in turn lowers hepatic ABCA1 and plasma HDL levels. We identified 2 complementary sequences to miR-144 in the 3′ untranslated region of ABCA1 mRNA that are necessary for miR-144–dependent regulation. Overexpression of miR-144 in vitro decreased both cellular ABCA1 protein and cholesterol efflux to lipid-poor apolipoprotein A-I protein, whereas overexpression in vivo reduced hepatic ABCA1 protein and plasma HDL-cholesterol. Conversely, silencing miR-144 in mice increased hepatic ABCA1 protein and HDL-cholesterol. In addition, we used tissue-specific FXR-deficient mice to show that induction of miR-144 and FXR-dependent hypolipidemia requires hepatic, but not intestinal, FXR. Finally, we identified functional FXR response elements upstream of the miR-144 locus, consistent with direct FXR regulation. Conclusions: We have identified a novel pathway involving FXR, miR-144, and ABCA1 that together regulate plasma HDL-cholesterol.
Application adaptive energy efficient clustered architectures

As clock frequency and die area increase, achieving energy efficiency, while distributing a low skew, global clock signal becomes increasingly difficult. Challenges imposed by deep-submicron technologies can be alleviated by using a multiple voltage/multiple frequency island design style, otherwise called the globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design paradigm. This paper proposes a clustered architecture that enables application-adaptive energy efficiency through the use of dynamic voltage scaling for application code that is rendered non-critical for the overall performance, at run-time. As opposed to task scheduling using dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) that exploits workload variations across applications, our approach targets workload variations within the same application, while on-the fly classifying code as critical or noncritical and adapting to changes in the criticality of such code portions. Our results show that application adaptive variable voltage/variable frequency clustered architectures are up to 22% better in energy and 11% better in energy-delay product than their non-adaptive counterparts, while providing up to 31% more energy savings when compared to DVS applied globally.
Binocular disparity can explain the orientation of ocular dominance stripes in primate V1

In the primate primary visual area (V1), the ocular dominance pattern consists of alternating monocular stripes. Stripe orientation follows systematic trends preserved across several species. I propose that these trends result from minimizing the length of intra-cortical wiring needed to recombine information from the two eyes in order to achieve the perception of depth. I argue that the stripe orientation at any point of V1 should follow the direction of binocular disparity in the corresponding point of the visual field. The optimal pattern of stripes determined from this argument agrees with the ocular dominance pattern of macaque and Cebus monkeys. This theory predicts that for any point in the visual field the limits of depth perception are greatest in the direction along the ocular dominance stripes at that point.
E-government portals best practices: a comprehensive survey

An e-government portal is a website that is offering various useful electronic services to the citizens. With the traditional government portals (offices), the services provided to the citizens need a lot of paperwork and many officers are required to conduct such services, and also the citizens need to be present personally, which means they have to leave their jobs for many hours. Thus, making these services as electronic ones through the web will result in great savings for governmental entities and citizens. This paper exploring the e-government portal's best practices collected from research and industry. Although these best practices exist in the literature, they are not classified or grouped in a logical way. In addition, this paper aims to provide a structured overview of these best practices according to three categories of best practices (i.e., back-end, front-end, and external).
FT-IR Spectroscopy and SEM-EDX Studies on Nano Copper Doped Conducting Polymer

Polypyrrole (PPy) based metal composites have obtained considerable attention due to its fascinating properties such as appreciable electronic conductivity. This study is based on the system, pure polypyrrole (PPy) and nano copper doped polypyrrole (n-CuPPy) which were prepared by chemical oxidative polymerization method. The properties of PPy and n-CuPPy have been investigated by FT-IR,SEM-EDX and conductivity measurements. The FT-IR spectra showed the presence of all characteristics absorption peaks of PPy that is 881cm-1(=C-H out of plane vibration),1043cm-1(=C-H in plane vibration), 1182cm-1 (N-C strech vibration ) and 1552cm-1 (pyrrole ring vibration). The morphological structures and semi quantification of elements present in the pure and nano copper doped composite have been analysed using Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy. The conductivity measurements have been measured using two probe technique. We compare the conductivities of pure PPy with nanocomposite. The conductivity of n-CuPPy is 2x10-3 S/cm and PPy is 2.5x10-5 S/cm. The conductivity of n-CuPPy have been increased by two order when compared with PPy. The increase in conductivity in composite materials than PPy is due to the incorporation of nano copper particles into the PPy matrix.
Massive MIMO in Real Propagation Environments: Do All Antennas Contribute Equally?

Massive MIMO can greatly increase both spectral and transmit-energy efficiency. This is achieved by allowing the number of antennas and RF chains to grow very large. However, the challenges include high system complexity and hardware energy consumption. Here we investigate the possibilities to reduce the required number of RF chains, by performing antenna selection. While this approach is not a very effective strategy for theoretical independent Rayleigh fading channels, a substantial reduction in the number of RF chains can be achieved for real massive MIMO channels, without significant performance loss. We evaluate antenna selection performance on measured channels at 2.6 GHz, using a linear and a cylindrical array, both having 128 elements. Sum-rate maximization is used as the criterion for antenna selection. A selection scheme based on convex optimization is nearly optimal and used as a benchmark. The achieved sum-rate is compared with that of a very simple scheme that selects the antennas with the highest received power. The power-based scheme gives performance close to the convex optimization scheme, for the measured channels. This observation indicates a potential for significant reductions of massive MIMO implementation complexity, by reducing the number of RF chains and performing antenna selection using simple algorithms.