Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Why History: the Meanings and Uses of Tradition

Researchers of traditional environments can benefit from understanding the themes of their work in a historical context. Take the ideas embodied in the title of the 1992. IAsTEconference. Reflection reveals that "development" implies both the inevitability and the appropriateness of growth and the obligation to arrive at some logical value system for choosing what to retain and allow to change in any physical setting. "Tradition" involves two other ideas: the existence of a past of a culture which is dead and exists only as a memory, and the parallel ex iste nce of a body of beliefs that draw from that memory and facilitate judgments about "development. " One can immediately see that tradition and development are often incompatible ; development can proceed only when tradition is "forgotten. " Nevertheless, it is only through traditions, real or fictitious relationships to half-forgotten and largely misunderstood pasts, that people recognize themselves. The value of a built environment, therefore, is a conglomerate of its actual physical existence and the historical memories and myths people attach to it, bring to it, and project on it from other, often distant, places. Considering the complex, contradictory nature of this process, is it not appropriate to imagine a bill of rights for built environments? A full historical consciousness of what tradition is may require that we go beyond local ideas of restoration and identify more universal moral norms to regulate our concerns. OLEG GRABAR is a distinguished historian of Islamic art and architecture and cu"mtly a Fellow at the of specialists in traditional environments. Yet, being relatively unfamiliar with the contemporary problems in this field, and knowi ng that this paper should be more than a mere recapitulation of related histories of art and architecture, I wondered what di rection of thought, what kind of meditation on my part, would interest an interdisciplinary audience concerned with such a topic. I concluded that the most ap
A two-stage estimation method for depth estimation of facial landmarks

To address the problem of 3D face modeling based on a set of landmarks on images, the traditional feature-based morphable model, using face class-specific information, makes direct use of these 2D points to infer a dense 3D face surface. However, the unknown depth of landmarks degrades accuracy considerably. A promising solution is to predict the depth of landmarks at first. Bases on this idea, a two-stage estimation method is proposed to compute the depth value of landmarks from two images. And then, the estimated 3D landmarks are applied to a deformation algorithm to make a precise 3D dense facial shape. Test results on synthesized images with known ground-truth show that the proposed two-stage estimation method can obtain landmarks' depth both effectively and efficiently, and further that the reconstructed accuracy is greatly enhanced with the estimated 3D landmarks. Reconstruction results of real-world photos are rather realistic.
Controversies of Conversions: The Potential Terrorist Threat of European Converts to Islam

This article summarising some findings from a doctoral dissertation discusses European converts to Islam. It explores the conditions under which conversion leads to radicalisation and terrorist violence; it analyses recrudescent concomitances of causal mechanisms of this phenomenon. Furthermore, it explores possible pathways existing between conversion, radicalisation and terrorist violence; identifies key variables pertaining to causal pathways and processes; provides hypotheses regarding the radicalisation pathways, and establishes a typology that can serve as a basis for further studies. By dispelling stereotypes on European New Muslims (ENM) this research note offers a new, contextual approach to the issue under consideration. In doing so it invites the reader to reconsider the concepts of “convert”, “radicalisation” and “potential”- concepts crucial for questioning the widely expressed assumptions that European converts to Islam are a homogenous “risk group” and a security threat.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Searching biomedical ontologies based on content Conference Item

As more ontologies become publicly available, finding the “right” ontologies becomes much harder. In this paper, we introduce a new ontology search technique which is based on corpus analysis. In particular, we look at the case when users search for ontologies relevant to a particular topic (e.g., an ontology about anatomy). Our experiments demonstrate that using our method for query expansion improves retrieval results by a 113%, compared to the tools that search only for the user query terms and consider only class and property names.
Enhancing Locality Sensitive Hashing with Peek Probing and Nearest Neighbor Links

In this work, we consider search in high dimensional data and propose two optimization techniques for Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). LSH has been successfully applied to search in multi-media databases or to duplicate detection in large Web or XML collections. LSH maps objects from a high-dimensional feature space to a set of buckets, using a hash function likely to cause hash collisions for similar objects. The rst enhancement of LSH is based on additionally introduced links for each point in the feature space. These links refer to the exact nearest neighbor. The second approach is coined Peek-Probing, where LSH buckets are only fully read if they indicate a certain amount of useful information. The techniques are fully orthogonal and, hence, can be used in a combined way for further improved performance. We study the suitability of our approaches based on a series of experiments using high-dimensional image features of dierent avor. We report on performance numbers for our algorithms and baseline competitors when tuned to provide answers of a minimum accuracy.
Signal analysis with Zetasizer on the effect of Poly (Ethylene Glycol) (PEG) to stabilize and unify colloidal gold nanoparticles

This paper reports a study on the effect of the Poly (Ethylene Glycol) (PEG) on the stability and uniformity of the colloidal gold nanoparticles. Sodium Borohydride (NaBH<sub>4</sub>) and Trisodium Citrate (Na<sub>3</sub>C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>5</sub>O<sub>7</sub>) were utilized as the reducing agents to produce gold nanoparticles in this paper. Comparison of the two reducing agents has showed the Na<sub>3</sub>C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>5</sub>O<sub>7</sub> produces more stable gold nanoparticles solution. With the PEG1000, the gold nanoparticles showed obviously higher uniformity, which produce a desirable monodispersed gold nanoparticles solution.
Context-Specific Proportion Congruency Effects: An Episodic Learning Account and Computational Model

In the Stroop task, participants identify the print color of color words. The congruency effect is the observation that response times and errors are increased when the word and color are incongruent (e.g., the word “red” in green ink) relative to when they are congruent (e.g., “red” in red). The proportion congruent (PC) effect is the finding that congruency effects are reduced when trials are mostly incongruent rather than mostly congruent. This PC effect can be context-specific. For instance, if trials are mostly incongruent when presented in one location and mostly congruent when presented in another location, the congruency effect is smaller for the former location. Typically, PC effects are interpreted in terms of strategic control of attention in response to conflict, termed conflict adaptation or conflict monitoring. In the present manuscript, however, an episodic learning account is presented for context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effects. In particular, it is argued that context-specific contingency learning can explain part of the effect, and context-specific rhythmic responding can explain the rest. Both contingency-based and temporal-based learning can parsimoniously be conceptualized within an episodic learning framework. An adaptation of the Parallel Episodic Processing model is presented. This model successfully simulates CSPC effects, both for contingency-biased and contingency-unbiased (transfer) items. The same fixed-parameter model can explain a range of other findings from the learning, timing, binding, practice, and attentional control domains.
Catch Rates, Composition and Fish Size from Reefs Managed with Periodically-Harvested Closures

Periodically-harvested closures are commonly employed within co-management frameworks to help manage small-scale, multi-species fisheries in the Indo-Pacific. Despite their widespread use, the benefits of periodic harvesting strategies for multi-species fisheries have, to date, been largely untested. We examine catch and effort data from four periodically-harvested reef areas and 55 continuously-fished reefs in Solomon Islands. We test the hypothesis that fishing in periodically-harvested closures would yield: (a) higher catch rates, (b) proportionally more short lived, fast growing, sedentary taxa, and (c) larger finfish and invertebrates, compared to catches from reefs continuously open to fishing. Our study showed that catch rates were significantly higher from periodically-harvested closures for gleaning of invertebrates, but not for line and spear fishing. The family level composition of catches did not vary significantly between open reefs and periodically-harvested closures. Fish captured from periodically-harvested closures were slightly larger, but Trochus niloticus were significantly smaller than those from continuously open reefs. In one case of intense and prolonged harvesting, gleaning catch rates significantly declined, suggesting invertebrate stocks were substantially depleted in the early stages of the open period. Our study suggests periodically-harvested closures can have some short term benefits via increasing harvesting efficiency. However, we did not find evidence that the strategy had substantially benefited multi-species fin-fisheries.
Left ventricular volume estimation for real-time three-dimensional echocardiography

The application of level set techniques to echocardiographic data is presented. This method allows semiautomatic segmentation of heart chambers, which regularizes the shapes and improves edge fidelity, especially in the presence of gaps, as is common in ultrasound data. The task of the study was to reconstruct left ventricular shape and to evaluate left ventricular volume. Data were acquired with a real-time three-dimensional (3-D) echocardiographic system. The method was applied directly in the three-dimensional domain and was based on a geometric-driven scheme. The numerical scheme for solving the proposed partial differential equation is borrowed from numerical methods for conservation law. Results refer to in vitro and human in vivo acquired 3-D+time echocardiographic data. Quantitative validation was performed on in vitro balloon phantoms. Clinical application of this segmentation technique is reported for 20 patient cases providing measures of left ventricular volumes and ejection fraction.
Factor analysed hidden Markov models

This paper presents a general form of acoustic model for speech recognition. The model is based on an extension to factor analysis where the low dimensional subspace is modelled with a mixture of Gaussians hidden Markov model (HMM) and the observation noise by a Gaussian mixture model. Here the HMM output vectors are the latent variables of a general factor analyser. The model combines shared factor analysis with a dynamic version of independent factor analysis. This factor analysed HMM (FAHMM) provides an alternative, compact, model to handle intra-frame correlation. Furthermore, it allows variable dimension subspaces to be explored. A variety of model configurations and sharing schemes are examined, some of which correspond to standard systems. The training and recognition algorithms for FAHMMs are described and some initial result with Switchboard are presented.
Exploratory Study of Basement Moisture During Operation of ASD Radon Control Systems December 6 , 2007 Contractor Report

The technique most commonly used to control radon in buildings, active soil depressurization (ASD), has been investigated for its impact on basement moisture levels and ventilation. As part of an exploratory study, three houses near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania have been intensively monitored over an 18-month period for moisture indicators, radon levels, building operations, and other environmental parameters while ASD systems were cycled on and off. To implement this intensive monitoring program, novel protocols and study design were developed. A conceptual model suggested that the ASD systems can cause important changes in basement ventilation and interzonal air flows – therefore these parameters were periodically measured. Moisture levels were measured in walls and slab floors, indoor and outdoor air, surrounding soil, and wood framing members in the basement. The participating houses have unfinished basements: one having poured foundation walls, and the others having foundation walls of open and partially-filled concrete block. Results from these three houses indicate that ASD operation can produce significant moisture reductions in the basement air and walls, especially during non-summer months, and caused the predicted changes in air flow patterns. Both high and more typical flow and pressure configurations show this effect, although moisture reductions tend to be greater at higher system flows and pressures. Moisture reductions were diminished somewhat during the warm and humid summer months. Due to the long response time of moisture levels in foundation and soil materials, continuous operation of the ASD systems may cause greater reductions. The findings are consistent with anecdotal reports of drying and odor improvement in basements during ASD operation, and suggest that microbial growth may also be reduced. These effects may be different in other climates and house construction types.
A two-stage particle swarm optimization based cooperative transmit beamforming for multiuser MIMO systems

In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective two-stage particle swarm optimization (PSO) based cooperative transmit beamforming (CTBF) scheme for the uplink of multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed scheme first uses the conventional PSO method to iteratively update the CTBF for the maximization of system capacity. After that, the proposed scheme conducts the second stage's PSO mechanism to find the final results of the CTBF. Especially, for the initialization of the second stage's PSO, the proposed scheme remains the results of the global best CTBF found in the first stage's PSO unchanged. In addition, other settings such as each particle's velocity are reset to the initial values of the first stage's PSO. The proposed scheme adopts this reset step in the second stage in order to avoid the CTBF updates of the PSO to trap into the local solutions. Simulation results show that the proposed new two-stage PSO scheme provides better bit error rate (BER) performance than the previous works.
Design and theoretical analysis of throughput enhanced spatial reuse distributed coordination function for IEEE 802.11

The IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) employs a carrier sensing mechanism, a simple and effective mechanism to mitigate collisions in wireless networks. But the carrier sensing mechanism is inefficient in terms of shared channel use because an overcautious channel assessment approach is used to estimate interference at a receiver. A DCF node simply blocks its transmission when it senses that the channel is busy. However, in many cases this channel assessing node's own transmission may not generate enough interference to disrupt the ongoing transmission at the receiver. This overcautious channel assessment unnecessarily blocks transmission attempts, and thus degrades the overall network throughput. To avoid this unnecessary blocking, the authors propose a spatial reuse DCF (SRDCF), which utilises location information and transmission parameters to make accurate channel assessments and to permit concurrent transmissions by adjusting the transmission power. SRDCF also resolves the contention between opportunistic concurrent transmissions with a secondary backoff counter. Consequently, the proposed scheme improves the overall network throughput because of more concurrent transmissions. The authors theoretically analyse the performance enhancement of SRDCF over the original IEEE 802.11 DCF by using a Markov chain model and verify it through simulations.
Role of Macrophage Inflammatory Protein-1α in T-Cell-Mediated Immunity to Viral Infection

ABSTRACT The immune response to lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus in mice lacking macrophage inflammatory protein-1α (MIP-1α) was evaluated. Generation of virus-specific effector T cells is unimpaired in MIP-1α-deficient mice. Furthermore, MIP-1α is not required for T-cell-mediated virus control or virus-induced T-cell-dependent inflammation. Thus, MIP-1α is not mandatory for T-cell-mediated antiviral immunity.
Pono Kaulike: Reducing Violence with Restorative Justice and Solution - Focused Approaches

Pono Kaulike is a pilot program for people who plead guilty to criminal offenses, the people hurt by the crimes, and their supporters. The program was piloted in Honoluluʼs District Court of the First Circuit and has been previously described (Walker & Hayashi, 2004 & 2007). “Pono Kaulike uses the solution-focused brief therapy approach, which carefully uses language, and appreciates the importance of relationships in assisting troubled people to find their own solutions to problems” (Walker & Hayashi, 2007 p. 20). Solution-focused approaches are empowering and considered a best practice by the federal government (OJJDP, 2008).
Distributed security policy for IPv6 deployment

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a next generation protocol that is designed to solve the problem of the current Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) depletion. With IPv6, almost anything in the world can be assigned an IPv6 address which makes communication between every single person to another possible. Besides, monitoring and sensing every single node or instrument can be done due to each item has its own IPv6 address. Realizing the features of IPv6, enterprise networks have begun deploying IPv6. Although they have not decided to deploy IPv6, IPv6 packet is possibly already in the network due to the most present operating systems supporting IPv6 and IPv6 enable is set as default. Deploying IPv6 in the existing IPv4 network results in coexistence of both protocols in the network. Thus, the coexistence condition exposed enterprise's network to higher probability of vulnerabilities and attacks. Hence, several security policies should be created to maintain security for both IPv4 and IPv6. A proper mechanism to manage the policies to ensure a secure IPv6 deployment is a necessity. Since enterprises have many branches and counterparts, it is essential to have a mechanism to distribute the policies among their branches or subnets. Therefore, the proper mechanism to distribute the security policy which will also support the green computing environment should be formed.
Self‐Esteem and Loneliness in Relation to Cyberbullying in Three European Countries

Edited by Qing Li, Donna Cross, and Peter K. Smith. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The continuous expansion of electronic space gives adolescents the opportunity to free themselves from restrictions relating to their age and offers them easy access to a world which is beyond that of their families and schools. Recent European surveys show that the diffusion of the Internet is a worldwide phenomenon, compared to the Internet diffusion reported 10 years ago. Italy reports an Internet penetration of 51.7% and a 127.5% percentage increase compared to the former data collection; the UK reports an Internet diffusion of around 82.5% and a percentage increase of 234.0%; and in Spain the rate of increase is even higher, at 440.0%, reaching 62.6% of the population (source: www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). The possibility of establishing virtual social interactions has become increasingly important for 10–13-year-olds. In the first years of adolescence, numerous friendships are created and young people want to manifest their own identity in terms of their relations with others (Arcuri, 2008), and new technologies offer immense opportunities to do this. Young people use these means as a form of expression to communicate information about themselves. Some scholars consider the Internet to be a means by which young people can explore and build their own identity (Calvert, 2002) and experiment with diverse roles in interactive games (Turkle, 1995; McDonald & Kim, 2001). They can explore various ways of presenting themselves (Harter, 1998), find useful information, receive, and send instant messages (IM), create personal web pages (Schmitt, Dayanim, & Matthias, 2008), or write blogs (Huffaker & Calvert, 2005). In a US study, Schmitt, Dayanim, & Matthias (2008) interviewed 500 preadolescents 3
pH‐induced folding of an apoptotic coiled coil

Par‐4 is a 38‐kD protein pivotal to the apoptotic pathways of various cell types, most notably prostate cells and neurons, where it has been linked to prostate cancer and various neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases and HIV encephalitis. The C‐terminal region of Par‐4 is responsible for homodimerization and the ability of Par‐4 to interact with proposed effector molecules. In this study, we show that the C‐terminal 47 residues of Par‐4 are natively unfolded at physiological pH and temperature. Evidence is rapidly accumulating that natively unfolded proteins play an important role in various cellular functions and signaling pathways, and that folding can often be induced on complexation with effector molecules or alteration of environment. Here we use primarily CD studies to show that changes in the environment, particularly pH and temperature, can induce the Par‐4 C terminus to form a self‐associated coiled coil.
Pseudospectral motion planning for autonomous bicycles

Motion planning for the autonomous bicycles offers considerable challenges to the area of robotics due to the platform's nonholonomic, underactuated and nonminimum-phase properties. Instability and nontrivial dynamic coupling make the motion planning of the bicycles a rather complex task. In this paper, the motion planning for the autonomous bicycle is formulated as a dynamic constrained optimization problem subject to the dynamic constraints and the path constraints. The cost function is designed as the integral of the square of the bicycle's roll angle, in order to acquire a motion trajectory with sufficiently small roll angles, which can increase the balance stability of the bicycle. This optimization problem is solved by the Gauss pseudospectral method (GPM). Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.