Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 19.6 ps, FPGA-Based TDC With Multiple Channels for Open Source Applications

This work presents a multi-channel, time-to-digital converter (TDC) based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A thorough characterization of the TDC, based on a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA, is presented and several performance parameters are described, including distortions due to the FPGA architecture, temperature effects, intra-chip position variation, and chip-to-chip variation. An optimized TDC exhibits 10 ps LSB duration, an integral non-linearity range of 3.86 LSB, and an input range longer than 100 μs. Total time uncertainty (single-shot jitter) is measured to be 19.6 ps at a time difference of 40 ns, and less than 400 ps at a time difference larger than 100 μs.
A systematic review of studies in the contributions of the work environment to ischaemic heart disease development

Background: There is need for an updated systematic review of associations between occupational exposures and ischaemic heart disease (IHD), using the GRADE system. Methods: Inclusion criteria: (i) publication in English in peer-reviewed journal between 1985 and 2014, (ii) quantified relationship between occupational exposure (psychosocial, organizational, physical and other ergonomic job factors) and IHD outcome, (iii) cohort studies with at least 1000 participants or comparable case-control studies with at least 50 + 50 participants, (iv) assessments of exposure and outcome at baseline as well as at follow-up and (v) gender and age analysis. Relevance and quality were assessed using predefined criteria. Level of evidence was then assessed using the GRADE system. Consistency of findings was examined for a number of confounders. Possible publication bias was discussed. Results: Ninety-six articles of high or medium high scientific quality were finally included. There was moderately strong evidence (grade 3 out of 4) for a relationship between job strain and small decision latitude on one hand and IHD incidence on the other hand. Limited evidence (grade 2) was found for iso-strain, pressing work, effort-reward imbalance, low support, lack of justice, lack of skill discretion, insecure employment, night work, long working week and noise in relation to IHD. No difference between men and women with regard to the effect of adverse job conditions on IHD incidence. Conclusions: There is scientific evidence that employees, both men and women, who report specific occupational exposures, such as low decision latitude, job strain or noise, have an increased incidence of IHD.
Activity-based Authentication by Ambient Wi-Fi Fingerprint Sensing

Preserving a good balance between security and usability is often an important issue in many ubiquitous computing applications. This paper proposes a new user interface model for security based on device’s activity history by environmental Wi-Fi fingerprint sensing. If a device periodically senses and records Wi-Fi fingerprint, such record represents the device’s location and activity history. This information can be used to detect whether this device is in a normal situation or in an unusual (abnormal) situation. If two devices compare these activity logs, it is also possible to determine whether these devices are moved together or not. Then the system changes its security level based on such activity information. Unlike other Wi-Fi positioning systems, geological Wi-Fi access point information is not always necessary, because only fingerprint matching is enough for authentication purpose. This feature makes our security model more scalable; it works even though a Wi-Fi access point location database is not provided. (This paper describes new user interface model for security based on this idea, and reports initial experimental results.
Robust ILC design using Möbius transformations

Abstract: In this paper a general ILC algorithm is examined and it is found that the filters involved can be selected to satisfy frequency-wise uncertainty limits on the plant model. The probability of the plant model being at a given point in the uncertainty space is specified, and the filters are then chosen to maximise the convergence rate that can be expected in practice. The magnitude of the change in input over successive trials and the residual error have also been incorporated into the cost function. Experimental results are presented using a non-minimum phase test facility to show the effectiveness of the design method.
Identifying Topics from Micropost Collections using Linked Open Data

The extensive use of social media for sharing and obtaining information has resulted in the development of topic detection models to facilitate the comprehension of the overwhelming amount of short and distributed posts. Probabilistic topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet allocation, represent topics as sets of terms that are useful for many automated processes. However, the determination of what a topic is about is left as a further task. Alternatively, techniques that produce summaries are human comprehensible, but less suitable for automated processing. This work proposes an approach that utilizes Linked Open Data (LOD) resources to extract semantically represented topics from collections of microposts. The proposed approach utilizes entity linking to identify the elements of topics from microposts. The elements are related through co-occurrence graphs, which are processed to yield topics. The topics are represented using an ontology that is introduced for this purpose. A prototype of the approach is used to identify topics from 11 datasets consisting of more than one million posts collected from Twitter during various events, such as the 2016 US election debates and the death of Carrie Fisher. The characteristics of the approach and more than 5 thousand generated topics are described in detail. A human evaluation of topics from 30 randomly selected intervals resulted in a precision of 81.0% and F1 score of 93.3%. Furthermore, they are compared with topics generated from the same datasets with two different kinds of topic models. The potentials of semantic topics in revealing information, that is not otherwise easily observable, is demonstrated with semantic queries of various complexities.
Reply to anonymous referee

Well-preserved fault gouge along brittle faults in Paleoproterozoic, volcano-sedimentary rocks of the Raipas GroupSupergroup exposed in the Alta-–Kvænangen tectonic window in northern Norway yielded latest Mesoproterozoic (ca. 1050 ± 15 Ma) to mid Neoproterozoic (ca. 825-–810 ± 18 Ma) K/–Ar ages. Pressure-temperature estimates from microtextural and 15 mineralogy analyses of fault-rocks indicate that brittle faulting may have initiated at depth of 5-– 10 km during the opening of the Asgard Sea in the latest Mesoproterozoic-–early Neoproterozoic (ca. 1050-–945 Ma), and continued with a phase of shallow faulting during to the opening of the Iapetus Ocean-–Ægir Sea and the initial breakup of Rodinia in the mid Neoproterozoic (ca. 825-– 810 Ma). The predominance and preservation of synkinematic smectite and subsidiary illite in 20 cohesive and non-cohesive fault-rocks indicate that Paleoproterozoic basement rocks of the Alta-– Kvænangen tectonic window remained at shallow crustal levels (< 3.5 km) and were not reactivated since mid Neoproterozoic times. Slow exhumation rate estimates for the early-–mid Neoproterozoic (ca 10-–75 m per MaMyr) suggest a period of tectonic quiescence between the opening of the Asgard Sea and the breakup of Rodinia. In the Paleozoic, basement rocks in NW 25 Finnmark were overthrusted by Caledonian nappes along low-angle thrust detachments during the closing of the Iapetus Ocean-–Ægir Sea. K/–Ar dating of non-cohesive fault-rocks and microtexture-mineralogy of cohesive fault-rock truncating Caledonian nappe units show that brittle (reverse) faulting potentially initiated along low-angle Caledonian thrusts during the latest stages of the Caledonian Orogeny in the Silurian (ca. 425 Ma) and was accompanied by epidote/chlorite30
The Role of Acculturation on Bosnian Refugee Adult Child Mate Selection

OF THESIS THE ROLE OF ACCULTURATION ON BOSNIAN REFUGEE ADULT CHILD MATE SELECTION Forced by the atrocities of war from their native country, Bosnian families came to United States seeking refuge and a new life. Like many refugees that immigrated, Bosnians sought to adapt to the American way of life, while keeping their traditional ethnic customs, practices, and religion (Val & Iain-Walker, 2003). Many Bosnian refugee parents worked to keep the Bosnian practices prevalent in their first and second generation Bosnian American children. By doing so, Bosnian parents imbedded into their children the original customs, practices, and traditions of the Bosnian culture. Moreover, they raised their children to have great pride in their native country. Part of keeping the native culture alive, as an adult child of a refugee, involved marrying someone of the same ethnic and religious background (Inman, Howard, Beaumont, &Walker, 2007). Using Communication Acculturation Theory, this study examined the relationship between the degree of acculturation of Bosnian refugees in the United States and their preference and stress level in relational partner selection taking into consideration parental pressure and ethnic group community expectations. Results from this study find that acculturation is negatively correlated with the preference for a Bosnian mate but only the amount of interpersonal intimate communication the Bosnian members has with Bosnians and non-Bosnians is indicative of any mate selection stress experienced. Further, ethnic group community expectations and parental pressure are positively correlated with preference for a Bosnian mate, but only the expectations of the ethnic group and not pressure from parents was correlated with any stress the individual feels to find a Bosnian mate.
Estimating a Missing Examination Score.

In science and engineering courses, instructors administer multiple examinations as major assessments of students’ learning. When a student is unable to take an exam, the instructor might estimate the missing exam score to calculate the student’s course grade. Using exam score data from multiple offerings of two large courses at a public university, we compared the accuracy of four methods to estimate an exam score, including linear regression methods. To measure accuracy, we calculated the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE). We found that the NRMSE values for linear models with equal weights were close to the NRMSE values for ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. For both the OLS and equal weight models, using normalized exam scores generally yielded more accurate estimates than using raw exam scores. The results indicate that instructors should use the equal weight model with normalized scores to estimate a missing exam score.
Understanding the High Prevalence of Diabetes in U.S. South Asians Compared With Four Racial/Ethnic Groups: The MASALA and MESA Studies

OBJECTIVE We compared South Asians with four other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. to determine whether sociodemographic, lifestyle, or metabolic factors could explain the higher diabetes prevalence and whether insulin resistance and β-cell dysfunction occurred at younger ages and/or lower adiposity levels compared with other groups. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We performed a cross-sectional analysis of two community-based cohorts, the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA); all participants had no known cardiovascular disease and were between 44 and 84 years of age. We compared 799 South Asians with 2,611 whites, 1,879 African Americans, 1,493 Latinos, and 801 Chinese Americans. Type 2 diabetes was classified by fasting plasma glucose ≥126 mg/dL or use of a diabetes medication. Insulin resistance was estimated by the homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) and β-cell function was measured by the HOMA-β model. RESULTS South Asians had significantly higher age-adjusted prevalence of diabetes (23%) than the MESA ethnic groups (6% in whites, 18% in African Americans, 17% in Latinos, and 13% in Chinese Americans). This difference increased further after adjustment for potential confounders. HOMA of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) levels were significantly higher and HOMA-β levels were lower among South Asians compared with all other racial/ethnic groups after adjustment for age and adiposity. CONCLUSIONS The higher prevalence of diabetes in South Asians is not explained by traditionally measured risk factors. South Asians may have lower β-cell function and an inability to compensate adequately for higher glucose levels from insulin resistance.
Experimental implementation of smart glove incorporating piezoelectric actuator for hand tremor control

This paper examines the effectiveness of a glove specifically designed to compensate human hand tremor by incorporating a type of piezoelectric actuator. In this paper, the experimental results are divided into two parts involving actual human hand tremor and model hand-arm tremor. Both experiments were done using same measurement equipments, experimental setup and programming to evaluate the effectiveness of the glove in reducing the hand tremor. The initial experiment was done by measuring human hand tremor to determine the coherence frequency while other was performed on a hand-arm model with artificial vibration exciter to validate the response of the actual hand tremor. A number of selected sample frequencies were chosen for the experiment. Next, a piezoelectric actuator was employed as the main active element for the compensation of the tremors in both systems. The results presented both in time and frequency domains show that most tremors are readily suppressed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed systems. They are considered as useful data that can be used for further investigation into the technique of effective human hand tremor suppression, particularly applicable to patients suffering from uncontrollable shaking or trembling such as in Parkinson's disease, white hand syndrome, etc. Subsequently, the output of this investigation can be also used to assist in developing advanced control strategies that involve the generation of controlled signals as the input for the piezoelectric actuator or other similar device to suppress the hand tremor. The presented system is notable for simplicity and low cost.
Relationship between Randomness and Coefficient Alpha: A Monte Carlo Simulation Study

Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient is the most popular method of examining reliability. It is typically used when the researcher has several Likert-type items that are summed or averaged to make a composite score. Distribution of alpha coefficient has been subjected of many studies. In this study relationship between randomness and Cronbach alpha coefficient were investigated and in this context, present study was examined the question“What is the distribution of the coefficient alpha when a Likert-type scale is answered randomly? ” Data were generated in the form of five point Likert-type items and Monte Carlosimulation was run for 5000 times for different item numbers.
The Perception of Time Is Underestimated in Adolescents With Anorexia Nervosa

Research has revealed reduced temporal discounting (i.e., increased capacity to delay reward) and altered interoceptive awareness in anorexia nervosa (AN). In line with the research linking temporal underestimation with a reduced tendency to devalue a reward and reduced interoceptive awareness, we tested the hypothesis that time duration might be underestimated in AN. Our findings revealed that patients with AN displayed lower timing accuracy in the form of timing underestimation compared with controls. These results were not predicted by clinical, demographic factors, attention, and working memory performance of the participants. The evidence of a temporal underestimation bias in AN might be clinically relevant to explain their abnormal motivation in pursuing a long-term restrictive diet, in line with the evidence that increasing the subjective temporal proximity of remote future goals can boost motivation and the actual behavior to reach them.
Are rural and urban newly licensed nurses different? A longitudinal study of a nurse residency programme.

AIM This study aimed to compare rural and urban nurse residency programme participants' personal and job characteristics and perceptions of decision-making, job satisfaction, job stress, nursing performance and organisational commitment over time. BACKGROUND Nurse residency programmes are an evolving strategy to foster transition to practice for new nurses. However, there are limited data available for programme outcomes particularly for rural nurses. METHOD A longitudinal design sampled 382 urban and 86 rural newly licensed hospital nurses during a 12-month nurse residency programme. Data were collected at the start of the programme, at 6 months and the end of the programme. RESULTS At the end of the programme, rural nurses had significantly higher job satisfaction and lower job stress compared with urban nurses. Across all time-periods rural nurses had significantly lower levels of stress caused by the physical work environment and at the end of the programme had less stress related to staffing compared with urban nurses. Perceptions of their organisational commitment and competency to make decisions and perform role elements were similar. CONCLUSIONS Differences in these outcomes may be result from unique characteristics of rural vs. urban nursing practice that need further exploration. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT Providing a nurse residency programme in rural and urban hospitals can be a useful recruitment and retention strategy.
The Finding and Dynamic Detection of Opinion Leaders in Social Network

It is valuable for the real world to find the opinion leaders. Because different data sources usually have different characteristics, there does not exist a standard algorithm to find and detect the opinion leaders in different data sources. Every data source has its own structural characteristics, and also has its own detection algorithm to find the opinion leaders. Experimental results show the opinion leaders and theirs characteristics can be found among the comments from the Weibo social network of China, which is like Facebook or Twitter in USA.
Robonaut Mobile Autonomy: Initial Experiments

A mobile version of the NASA/DARPA Robonaut humanoid recently completed initial autonomy trials working directly with humans in cluttered environments. This compact robot combines the upper body of the Robonaut system with a Segway ™ Robotic Mobility Platform yielding a dexterous, maneuverable humanoid ideal for interacting with human co-workers in a range of environments. This system uses stereovision to locate human teammates and tools and a navigation system that uses laser range and vision data to follow humans while avoiding obstacles. Tactile sensors provide information to grasping algorithms for efficient tool exchanges. The autonomous architecture utilizes these pre-programmed skills to form complex behaviors. The initial behavior demonstrates a robust capability to assist a human by acquiring a tool from a remotely located individual and then following the human in a cluttered environment with the tool for future use.
Involving mosques in health promotion programmes: a qualitative exploration of the MCLASS intervention on smoking in the home

Abstract Second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure is high among UK Bangladeshi and Pakistani populations, reflecting higher male smoking prevalence and fewer home smoking restrictions than the general population. The Muslim Communities Learning About Second-hand Smoke (MCLASS) study explored the feasibility and acceptability of implementing SHS education in 14 UK mosques. Religious teachers (RTs) in seven intervention mosques were trained and provided with a culturally appropriate educational package. After the intervention, mosque leaders, RTs and congregants’ experiences and perceptions of the intervention were explored through interviews and focus group discussions. Delivery of the intervention varied across mosques. Facilitators and barriers included: mosque diversity (congregation size, organizational structure, educational activities, women’s role and involvement); degree of trust between researchers and personnel; and views on SHS. Most participants thought mosques’ involvement in SHS health promotion was appropriate, but the perceived importance of SHS differed. We found that a health promotion programme delivered within Islamic religious settings that engages RTs in the process of facilitation, can be acceptable and feasible, but care must be taken to explore the culture and ethos of the institution, including its organizational structure, management committee, RTs and congregation.
A coordinated synchronous and asynchronous parallel routing approach for FPGAs

Routing is a time-consuming process in the FPGA design flow. Parallelization is a promising direction to accelerate the routing. While synchronous parallelization can converge a feasible solution, the ideal speedup is rarely achieved due to excessive communication overheads. Asynchronous parallelization can provide an almost linear speedup, but it is difficult to converge in the limited number of iterations due to net dependency. In this paper we propose SAPRoute, which coordinates synchronous and asynchronous parallelism on distributed multiprocessing environment to accelerate the routing for FPGAs. The objective is to boost the more speedup of parallel routing algorithm under the requirement of convergence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the impact of synchronization and asynchronization during parallelization. Experimental results show that our approach have negligible explicit synchronization overhead and achieves significant speedup improvement over a set of commonly used benchmarks. Notably, SAPRoute produces the speedup of 24.27 x on average compared to the default serial solution.