Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal think aloud study of a novice programmer

Recent research from within a neo-Piagetian perspective proposes that novice programmers pass through the sensorimotor and preoperational stages before being able to reason at the concrete operational stage. However, academics traditionally teach and assess introductory programming as if students commence at the concrete operational stage. In this paper, we present results from a series of think aloud sessions with a single student, known by the pseudonym "Donald". We conducted the sessions mainly over one semester, with an additional session three semesters later. Donald first manifested predominately sensorimotor reasoning, followed by preoperational reasoning, and finally concrete operational reasoning. This longitudinal think aloud study of Donald is the first direct observational evidence of a novice programmer progressing through the neo-Piagetian stages.
Gradual Small-Bias Sample Spaces

A (k, e)-biased sample space is a distribution over {0, 1}n that e-fools every nonempty linear test of size at most k. Since they were introduced by Naor and Naor (SIAM J. Computing, 1993), these sample spaces have become a central notion in theoretical computer science with a variety of applications. When constructing such spaces, one usually attempts to minimize the seed length as a function of n, k and e. Given such a construction, if we reverse the roles and consider a fixed seed length, then the smaller we pick k, the better the bound on the bias e becomes. However, once the space is constructed we have a single bound on the bias of all tests of size at most k. In this work we initiate the study of a new pseudorandom object, which we call a gradual (k, e)-biased sample space. Roughly speaking, this is a sample space that e-fools linear tests of size exactly k and moreover, the bound on the bias for linear tests of size i ≤ k decays as i gets smaller. We show how to construct gradual (k, e)-biased sample spaces of size comparable to the (non-gradual) spaces constructed by Alon et al. (Random Structures and Algorithms, 1992), and prove a lower bound on their size. Our construction is based on the lossless expanders of Guruswami et al. (J. ACM, 2009), combined with the Quadratic Character Construction of Alon et al. (Random Structures and Algorithms, 1992) ∗Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. Email: avraham.ben-aroya@weizmann.ac. il. †Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. Email: gil.cohen@weizmann.ac. il. Research supported by Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant. ISSN 1433-8092 Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Revision 3 of Report No. 50 (2012)
0.13-$\mu$m CMOS Phase Shifters for X-, Ku-, and K-Band Phased Arrays

Two 4-bit active phase shifters integrated with all digital control circuitry in 0.13-mum RF CMOS technology are developed for X- and Ku-band (8-18 GHz) and K-band (18-26 GHz) phased arrays, respectively. The active digital phase shifters synthesize the required phase using a phase interpolation process by adding quadrature-phased input signals. The designs are based on a resonance-based quadrature all-pass filter for quadrature signaling with minimum loss and wide operation bandwidth. Both phase shifters can change phases with less than about 2 dB of RMS amplitude imbalance for all phase states through an associated DAC control. For the X- and Ku-band phase shifter, the RMS phase error is less than 10o over the entire 5-18 GHz range. The average insertion loss ranges from to at 5-20 GHz. The input for all 4-bit phase states is typically at -5.4 plusmn1.3 GHz in the X- and Ku-band phase shifter. The K-band phase shifter exhibits 6.5-13 of RMS phase error at 15-26 GHz. The average insertion loss is from 4.6 to at 15-26 GHz. The input of the K-band phase shifter is at 24 GHz. For both phase shifters, the core size excluding all the pads and the output 50 Omega matching circuits, inserted for measurement purpose only, is very small, 0.33times0. 43 mm2 . The total current consumption is 5.8 mA in the X- and Ku-band phase shifter and 7.8 mA in the K-band phase shifter, from a 1.5 V supply voltage.
High current CMOS operational amplifier

This paper describes a low voltage CMOS operational amplifier, which is capable of driving heavy resistive and capacitive loads. Robust and power efficient compensation is achieved by using Miller compensation together with a high bandwidth stage. Measurements show that the amplifier achieves 5.7 MHz unity gain frequency and 61/spl deg/ phase margin when driving 1nF/spl par/1k/spl Omega/ load, while drawing 2.4mA from 1.5V supply. At 3.0V supply the amplifier is able to source or sink more than 100 mA into 1nF/spl par/10/spl Omega/ load.
Drosophila Klp67A is required for proper chromosome congression and segregation during meiosis I

Drosophila Klp67A belongs to the Kip3 subfamily of Kinesin-type microtubule catastrophe factors. In primary spermatocytes, loss of klp67A leads to defects in karyokinesis and cytokinesis. We show that these cells formed disorganised, bipolar spindles that contained increased numbers of microtubules. The kinetochore fibres were wavy and bent, whereas astral microtubules appeared abnormally robust and formed cortical bundles. Time-lapse studies revealed that during biorientation, the chromosomes in klp67A mutant cells continued to reorient for about twice as long as those in control cells. Metaphase plates were poorly defined in the mutants and often formed at non-equatorial positions. Consistent with the above abnormalities in chromosome congression, we found that in wild-type cells Klp67A associated with prometaphase/metaphase kinetochores before redistributing to the central spindle at anaphase onset. Although the timing of this redistribution of kinetochores argues against a role in anaphase chromosome segregation, dyads in the mutants disjoined but exhibited greatly diminished poleward velocities. They travelled on average at approximately 34% of the velocity of their wild-type counterparts and often decondensed at non-polar locations. Hypomorphic mutations of klp67A may lead to segregation defects.
Cancer-selective, single agent chemoradiosensitising gold nanoparticles

Two nanometre gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), bearing sugar moieties and/or thiol-polyethylene glycol-amine (PEG-amine), were synthesised and evaluated for their in vitro toxicity and ability to radiosensitise cells with 220 kV and 6 MV X-rays, using four cell lines representing normal and cancerous skin and breast tissues. Acute 3 h exposure of cells to AuNPs, bearing PEG-amine only or a 50:50 ratio of alpha-galactose derivative and PEG-amine resulted in selective uptake and toxicity towards cancer cells at unprecedentedly low nanomolar concentrations. Chemotoxicity was prevented by co-administration of N-acetyl cysteine antioxidant, or partially prevented by the caspase inhibitor Z-VAD-FMK. In addition to their intrinsic cancer-selective chemotoxicity, these AuNPs acted as radiosensitisers in combination with 220 kV or 6 MV X-rays. The ability of AuNPs bearing simple ligands to act as cancer-selective chemoradiosensitisers at low concentrations is a novel discovery that holds great promise in developing low-cost cancer nanotherapeutics.
The DAily Home LIfe Activity Dataset: A High Semantic Activity Dataset for Online Recognition

In this article, we introduce the DAily Home LIfe Activity (DAHLIA) Dataset, a new dataset adapted to the context of smart-home or video-assistance. Videos were recorded in realistic conditions, with 3 KinectTMv2 sensors located as they would be in a real context. The very long-range activities were performed in an unconstrained way (participants received few instructions), and in a continuous (untrimmed) sequence, resulting in long videos (39 min in average per subject). Contrary to previously published databases, in which labeled actions are very short and with low-semantic level, this new database focuses on high-level semantic activities such as ”Preparing lunch” or ”House Working”. As a baseline, we evaluated several metrics on three different algorithms designed for online action recognition or detection.
The development of a conceptual model for online trust

Trust issue is developing into an important topic as the Internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous within everyday life. Although a great deal of studies focus on salient factors that persuade consumer trust towards online vendors, few studies address that online trust could be affected by consumers using cognitive information processes or simple cues to build their trust toward online vendors. The authors assert that there is a strong need for theoretical and empirical research on online trust within the field of information science. As an initial step, the present study develops a conceptual model of consumer trust in an online environment by integrating the Elaboration Likelihood Model with factors influencing online trust. The model proposes that consumers process trust-related information through peripheral or central routes in order to persuade their trust towards online vendors. Furthermore, it can better understand what kind of trust-related information is a better way to persuade consumer trust within personality traits.
RECOGNIZING STRONG AND WEAK OPINION CLAUSES

There has been a recent swell of interest in the automatic identification and extraction of opinions and emotions in text. In this paper, we present the first experimental results classifying the intensity of opinions and other types of subjectivity and classifying the subjectivity of deeply nested clauses. We use a wide range of features, including new syntactic features developed for opinion recognition. We vary the learning algorithm and the feature organization to explore the effect this has on the classification task. In 10‐fold cross‐validation experiments using support vector regression, we achieve improvements in mean‐squared error over baseline ranging from 49% to 51%. Using boosting, we achieve improvements in accuracy ranging from 23% to 96%.
Selection of Corrosion Resistant Materials for Nuclear Waste Repositories

Several countries are considering geological repositories to dispose of nuclear waste. The environment of most of the currently considered repositories will be reducing in nature, except for the repository in the US, which is going to be oxidizing. For the reducing repositories alloys such as carbon steel, stainless steels and titanium are being evaluated. For the repository in the US, some of the most corrosion resistant commercially available alloys are being investigated. This paper presents a summary of the behavior of the different materials under consideration for the repositories and the current understanding of the degradation modes of the proposed alloys in ground water environments from the point of view of general corrosion, localized corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking.
Topic regression multi-modal Latent Dirichlet Allocation for image annotation

We present topic-regression multi-modal Latent Dirich-let Allocation (tr-mmLDA), a novel statistical topic model for the task of image and video annotation. At the heart of our new annotation model lies a novel latent variable regression approach to capture correlations between image or video features and annotation texts. Instead of sharing a set of latent topics between the 2 data modalities as in the formulation of correspondence LDA in [2], our approach introduces a regression module to correlate the 2 sets of topics, which captures more general forms of association and allows the number of topics in the 2 data modalities to be different. We demonstrate the power of tr-mmLDA on 2 standard annotation datasets: a 5000-image subset of COREL and a 2687-image LabelMe dataset. The proposed association model shows improved performance over correspondence LDA as measured by caption perplexity.
Development and evaluation of the internal-controlled real-time PCR assay for Rhodococcus equi detection in various clinical specimens

Rhodococcus equi is the causative agent of rhodococcosis in horses, resulting in significant morbidity and mortality in foals. This bacterium has also been isolated from a variety of animals and is being increasingly reported as a cause of infection in humans, mainly in immunosuppressed individuals. Laboratory diagnostics of R. equi infections based only on conventional microbiological methods shows low accuracy and can lead to misidentification. The objective of the study was to develop and evaluate a real-time PCR assay for direct detection of R. equi in various clinical specimens, including tissue samples. The species-specific region of the gene encoding R. equi cholesterol oxidase, choE, was used as a qPCR-target. The diagnostic applicability of the assay was confirmed by testing various tissue specimens obtained from horses with clinical signs of rhodoccocal infection and swine submaxillary lymph nodes. The rate of R. equi detection in clinical specimens by the developed assay was higher in comparison to the culture method (90% vs. 60.0% of positive samples) and conventional PCR (90.0% vs. 20.0% of positive samples). In case of 13 samples that were negative in the culture-based method, R. equi was detected by the developed assay. Only in one case, it gave negative result for culture-positive sample. The assay may provide a simple and rapid tool to complement the classical methods of R. equi detection based on culture and phenotypic identification of isolates, as the performed evaluation indicated a high specificity and accuracy of the results.
Modeling oxygen transport in surgical tissue transfer

Reconstructive microsurgery is a clinical technique used to transfer large amounts of a patient's tissue from one location used to another in order to restore physical deformities caused by trauma, tumors, or congenital abnormalities. The trend in this field is to transfer tissue using increasingly smaller blood vessels, which decreases problems associated with tissue harvest but increases the possibility that blood supply to the transferred tissue may not be adequate for healing. It would thus be helpful to surgeons to understand the relationship between the tissue volume and blood vessel diameter to ensure success in these operations. As a first step towards addressing this question, we present a simple mathematical model that might be used to predict successful tissue transfer based on blood vessel diameter, tissue volume, and oxygen delivery.
The disintegrin/metalloproteinase Adam10 is essential for epidermal integrity and Notch-mediated signaling

The disintegrin and metalloproteinase Adam10 has been implicated in the regulation of key signaling pathways that determine skin morphogenesis and homeostasis. To address the in vivo relevance of Adam10 in the epidermis, we have selectively disrupted Adam10 during skin morphogenesis and in adult skin. K14-Cre driven epidermal Adam10 deletion leads to perinatal lethality, barrier impairment and absence of sebaceous glands. A reduction of spinous layers, not associated with differences in either proliferation or apoptosis, indicates that loss of Adam10 triggers a premature differentiation of spinous keratinocytes. The few surviving K14-Adam10-deleted mice and mice in which Adam10 was deleted postnatally showed loss of hair, malformed vibrissae, epidermal hyperproliferation, cyst formation, thymic atrophy and upregulation of the cytokine thymic stromal lymphopoetin (TSLP), thus indicating non cell-autonomous multi-organ disease resulting from a compromised barrier. Together, these phenotypes closely resemble skin specific Notch pathway loss-of-function phenotypes. Notch processing is indeed strongly reduced resulting in decreased levels of Notch intracellular domain fragment and functional Notch signaling. The data identify Adam10 as the major Site-2 processing enzyme for Notch in the epidermis in vivo, and thus as a central regulator of skin development and maintenance.
On the Development of the Algebra of Functional Programs

The development of the algebraic approach to reasoning about functional programs that was introduced by Backus in his Turing Award Lecture is furthered. Precise definitions for the foundations on which the algebra is based are given, and some new expansion theorems that broaden the class of functions for which this approach is applicable are proved. In particular, the class of "overruntolerant" forms, nonlinear forms that include some of the familiar divide-and-conquer program schemes, are defined; an expansion theorem for such forms is proved; and that theorem is used to show how to derive expansions for some programs deemed by nonlinear forms.
A survey and comparison of end-system overlay multicast solutions suitable for network-centric warfare

Multicasting at the IP layer has not been widely adopted due to a combination of technical and non-technical issues. End-system multicast (also called application-layer multicast) is an attractive alternative to IP layer multicast for reasons of user management (set-up and control) and attack avoidance. Sessions can be established on demand such that there are no static points of failure to target in advance. In end-system multicast, an overlay network is built on top of available network services and packets are multicasted at the application layer. The overlay is organized such that each end host participating in a multicast communication re-sendsmulticasted messages to some of its peers, but not all of them. Thus end-system multicast allows users to manage multicast sessions under varying network conditions without being dependent on specific network conditions or specific network equipment maintaining multicast state information. In this paper we describe a variety of proposed end-system multicast solutions and classify them according to characteristics such as overlay building technique, management, and scalability. Comparing these characteristics across different end-system multicast solutions is a step toward understanding which solutions are appropriate for different battlespace requirements and where further research is needed.
Metabolomics reveals an essential role for peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α in bile acid homeostasis[S]

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα) is a nuclear receptor that regulates fatty acid transport and metabolism. Previous studies revealed that PPARα can affect bile acid metabolism; however, the mechanism by which PPARα regulates bile acid homeostasis is not understood. In this study, an ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization qua dru pole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-ESI-QTOFMS)-based metabolomics approach was used to profile metabolites in urine, serum, and bile of wild-type and Ppara-null mice following cholic acid (CA) dietary challenge. Metabolomic analysis showed that the levels of several serum bile acids, such as CA (25-fold) and taurocholic acid (16-fold), were significantly increased in CA-treated Ppara-null mice compared with CA-treated wild-type mice. Phospholipid homeostasis, as revealed by decreased serum lysophos phati dylcholine (LPC) 16:0 (1.6-fold) and LPC 18:0 (1.6-fold), and corticosterone metabolism noted by increased urinary excretion of 11β-hydroxy-3,20-dioxopregn-4-en-21-oic acid (20-fold) and 11β,20α-dihydroxy-3-oxo-pregn-4-en-21-oic acid (3.6-fold), were disrupted in CA-treated Ppara-null mice. The hepatic levels of mRNA encoding transporters Abcb11, Abcb4, Abca1, Abcg5, and Abcg8 were diminished in Ppara-null mice, leading to the accumulation of bile acids in the liver during the CA challenge. These observations revealed that PPARα is an essential regulator of bile acid biosynthesis, transport, and secretion.
High‐Resolution Computed Tomographic Bronchiolography Using Perfluoroctylbromide (PFOB): An Experimental Model

The use of perfluoroctylbromide (PFOB), a liquid ventilatory agent, was evaluated as a computed tomographic contrast agent to visualize small airway anatomy to the level of the centrilobular bronchiole, normally not visible on high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT). A freshly excised neonatal lamb heart-lung preparation was tracheally intubated, suspended in a saline bath, and mechanically ventilated with gas. After obtaining HRCT control images with suspended respiration using continuous positive airway pressure, 30 ml of perfluoroctylbromide was instilled into the trachea and repeat scans were obtained. These images demonstrated PFOB filling and distending the airways to the level of the centrilobular bronchioles and their first order branches. There was only minimal spillage into air spaces, allowing excellent anatomic detail of the bronchiolar structures. A liquid ventilatory agent, PFOB is a superb candidate as a bronchographic contrast agent due to its promotion of gas exchange, low toxicity, low surface tension, radiopacity, and vaporized excretion via the lung. It has great potential to evaluate small airway disease when used in conjunction with HRCT.
Imaging of osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis by electron beam tomography

Aim: To describe the experience of using electron beam tomography (EBT) in imaging of osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis (OOKP) to identify early bone and dentine loss which may threaten the viability of the eye. Methods: Seven patients with an OOKP in one eye underwent EBT. The OOKP lamina dimensions were measured on EBT and compared to the manual measurements at the time of surgery. Results: There was a high degree of resolution of the OOKP lamina noted with EBT. In particular, it identified three patients with a marked degree of thinning of the lamina edges. Two of these patients had OOKP that were allografts. The mean time from surgery to examination was 3.6 years (range 1.2–5 years) while the mean age of the patients was 56 years (range 31–79 years). Conclusions: It is important to monitor regularly the dimensions and stability of the OOKP lamina as it will help detect cases that are at risk of extrusion of the optical cylinder and consequent endophthalmitis. Prophylactic measures can then be taken to prevent such serious complications from occurring. In this series, the authors found EBT to have excellent resolution and speed and they would support regular scanning of the OOKP lamina in all patients.
Mathematical Modeling for Economic Evaluation of Electric Vehicle to Smart Grid Interaction

The objective of this work is to develop a mathematical model for the integration of electric vehicle (EVs) to the grid. Integrating the EV with the grid would help in simultaneous charging of numerous EVs and provide peak hour energy to the grid (from EV). This bi-directional exchange of energy between the grid and EV results in a complex financial calculations. So a simple model has been proposed. The energy provided by the EV to the grid depends on the battery capacity. Battery capacity is affected by capacity losses (CL). The model includes the possible cases of CL, such as CL due to battery usage (discharge during vehicle transportation) and CL due to the grid interaction. The main cause for a higher per kilometer (Km) transportation cost in EV, when compared to conventional vehicle, is the high cost of the battery and its maintenance. In this model, the economic analysis has been done in such a way that the battery related liabilities do not become a financial burden to EV owners. The above scenario has been evaluated for different combinations of charge rate (Cr) and discharge rate (Dr) ranging from 1Cr-1Dr to 3Cr-3Dr. Finally the optimal cost of electricity is determined such that the grid, EV owners, and consumers (EV users) are benefitted.