Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interference alignment for two-user two-hop interference X-channel with delayed and No CSIT

Capacity approximation of multi-hop unicast and multi-hop multicast channels is one of unsolved problems in information theory. Recently some researches investigate Degrees of Freedom (DoF) characterization and Interference Alignment schemes for these channels. However most of them assumed perfect instantaneous Channel State Information (CSI) at the relays and the transmitters. Due to practical limitations, like the delay and the rate limitation in the feedback links and the fading channels, it is difficult to provide perfect instantaneous CSI at the transmitters and even the relays. Achievable DoF by the IA schemes collapses greatly with imperfect CSI. It has been shown that the delayed CSI at the Transmitter (CSIT) can help to achieve higher DoF. In this paper, we investigate the DoF in the two-user two-hop Interference X-channel (2×2×2-X) under two regimes of CSI availability: delayed CSIT and no CSIT. We present IA scenarios for each of these regimes which achieve the optimal Dof of 4/3. In no CSIT case, we apply suitable strategy at the relays, which have delayed CSI, to compensate the effect of CSI absence in the transmitters from DoF point of view.
Efficient conditional knockout targeting vector construction using co-selection BAC recombineering (CoSBR)

A simple and efficient strategy for Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) recombineering based on co-selection is described. We show that it is possible to efficiently modify two positions of a BAC simultaneously by co-transformation of a single-stranded DNA oligo and a double-stranded selection cassette. The use of co-selection BAC recombineering reduces the DNA manipulation needed to make a conditional knockout gene targeting vector to only two steps: a single round of BAC modification followed by a retrieval step.
Philosophy as the Science of Value: Neo-Kantianism as a Guide to Psychiatric Interviewing

Psychiatric interviewing highlights the apparent tension between psychiatry's quest for objectivity and its aim to chart the particular experiences and values of individuals. Neo-Kantian philosophy can help to shed light on this apparent tension. There need be no conflict between an exploration of individual values and scientific inquiry, not least because values play a central role in the selection of facts in scientific observation in general and psychiatric history taking in particular.
Blind modulation classification based on MLP and PNN

In this work, a pattern recognition system is investigated for blind automatic classification of digitally modulated communication signals. The proposed technique is able to discriminate the type of modulation scheme which is eventually used for demodulation followed by information extraction. The proposed system is composed of two subsystems namely feature extraction sub-system (FESS) and classifier sub-system (CSS). The FESS consists of continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for feature generation and principal component analysis (PCA) for selection of the feature subset which is rich in discriminatory information. The CSS uses the selected features to accurately classify the modulation class of the received signal. The proposed technique uses probabilistic neural network (PNN) and multilayer perceptron forward neural network (MLPFN) for comparative study of their recognition ability. PNN have been found to perform better in terms of classification accuracy as well as testing and training time than MLPFN. The proposed approach is robust to presence of phase offset and additive Gaussian noise.
Introducing the Infant Bookreading Database (IBDb)*

Abstract Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0–36 months who answered questions about the English-language books they most commonly read to their children. The inclusion of demographic information enables analysis of subsets of data based on age, sex, or caregivers’ education level. A comparison between our dataset and those used in previous analyses reveals that there is relatively little overlap between booklists gathered from proxies such as bestseller lists and the books caregivers reported reading to children in our survey. The IBDb is available for download for use by researchers at .
Withdrawal-associated injury site pain (WISP): a descriptive case series of an opioid cessation phenomenon

Abstract Withdrawal pain can be a barrier to opioid cessation. Yet, little is known about old injury site pain in this context. We conducted an exploratory mixed-methods descriptive case series using a web-based survey and in-person interviews with adults recruited from pain and addiction treatment and research settings. We included individuals who self-reported a past significant injury that was healed and pain-free before the initiation of opioids, which then became temporarily painful upon opioid cessation—a phenomenon we have named withdrawal-associated injury site pain (WISP). Screening identified WISP in 47 people, of whom 34 (72%) completed the descriptive survey, including 21 who completed qualitative interviews. Recalled pain severity scores for WISP were typically high (median: 8/10; interquartile range [IQR]: 2), emotionally and physically aversive, and took approximately 2 weeks to resolve (median: 14; IQR: 24 days). Withdrawal-associated injury site pain intensity was typically slightly less than participants' original injury pain (median: 10/10; IQR: 3), and more painful than other generalized withdrawal symptoms which also lasted approximately 2 weeks (median: 13; IQR: 25 days). Fifteen surveyed participants (44%) reported returning to opioid use because of WISP in the past. Participants developed theories about the etiology of WISP, including that the pain is the brain's way of communicating a desire for opioids. This research represents the first known documentation that previously healed, and pain-free injury sites can temporarily become painful again during opioid withdrawal, an experience which may be a barrier to opioid cessation, and a contributor to opioid reinitiation.
Assessment of Physical Activity, Exercise Self-Efficacy, and Stages of Change in College Students Using a Street-Based Survey Method

Abstract This study assessed the level of physical activity, exercise self-efficacy, and stages of change for exercise behavior among college students at a large midwestern university using a street-based survey method. The 50% response rate produced 925 student responses comprising 95% as young (≤24 years of age), 53% female, and 79% Caucasian. One-third of the students did not participate in vigorous physical activity (≤3 days/week). Based on the stages of change questionnaire, 41% of the women and 35% of the men reported they were in the precontemplation or contemplation stages, as they were not active or were not exercising on a regular basis (≤3 times per week for 20 min or longer). Exercise-self efficacy scores were significantly different as a function of exercise stage as predicted by the stages of change theory (R2=0.26, P<.0001). These results are consistent with earlier reports on college students and their level of physical activity. Therefore, the low cost, ease of data collection, and the short turnaround for availability of results support the usefulness of a street-based survey of young adults on a college campus to evaluate physical activity.
Antecedents and Consequences of Perceived Family Responsibilities Discrimination in the Workplace

Family responsibilities discrimination (FRD) is a fast-developing trend in employment law, with the number of successful lawsuits brought by family caregivers doubling since 2000. Although the legal field has tracked FRD for over 8 years, very little is known about how this form of discrimination impacts the workplace. As a result, the following research examined the antecedents (e.g., family-supportive organization perceptions, family-supportive supervisors, and family-supportive benefits) and consequences (e.g., employee and organizational outcomes) of perceived FRD among a sample of 496 employees. Research findings revealed that family-supportive organization perceptions and family-supportive supervisors had the strongest impact on perceived FRD over and above the number of family-supportive benefits offered by the organization. Perceived FRD was also associated with lower job satisfaction, lower organizational attachment, higher turnover intentions, higher work–family conflict, and lower benefit use.
Virtual Machines and Abstract Compilers - Towards a Compiler Pattern Language

Because of the increasing gap between modern high-level programming languages and existing hardware, it has often become necessary to introduce intermediate languages and to build virtual machines on top of the hardware. This paper describes the VIRTUAL MACHINE and the ABSTRACT COMPILER patterns, a proposal that captures the essential features underlying the compilation processes based on staging transformation of virtual machines. Having as a support the VIRTUAL MACHINE pattern, we set out the task of compiling as a stepwise-refinement process guided by the ABSTRACT COMPILER pattern, so that the piecemeal acquisition of highperformance properties is posed in terms of relationships between intermediate virtual machines. Each phase during the compilation makes explicit some new features that are added to the global compilation process. The equivalence between one machine and the next is preserved though out the process.
Exploring new ways of inservice teacher education: an action research project

Abstract The starting point of the paper is that there is a need to develop new ways of in service teacher education and to examine the nature of the university ‐ school partnerships in school development. In service teacher education needs to be participatory, based on a long‐term commitment to work together, moving from traditional teacher isolation towards a new, collaborative school culture. An essential idea in school development is that teachers take charge of curriculum development through an action research orientation. The process can be facilitated by university researchers in a relationship that is based on an equal status of the participants and mutual trust. These possibilities are explored in the OK school development project (1994‐98), conducted in collaboration with the University of Tampere and six schools in the Tampere region. The paper discusses the design of the project with reference to supporting the teacher's professional development towards interactive professionalism.
Propagation of localized optical waves in media with dispersion, in dispersionless media and in vacuum. Low diffractive regime

The applied method of the amplitude envelopes give us the possibility to describe a new class of amplitude equations governing the propagation of optical pulses in media with dispersion, dispersionless media and vacuum. We normalized these amplitude equations and obtained five dimensionless parameters that determine different linear and nonlinear regimes of the optical pulses evolution. Surprisingly, in linear regime the normalized amplitude equations for media with dispersion and the amplitude equations in dispersionless media and vacuum are equal with precise - material constants. The equations were solved for pulses with low intensity (linear regime), using the method of Fourier transforms. One unexpected new result was the relative stability of light bullets and light disks and the significant reduction of their diffraction enlargement. It is important to emphasize here the case of light disks, which turn out to be practically diffractionless over distances of more than hundred kilometers.
Off-line admission control for general scheduling problems

We consider a class of scheduling problems which includes a variety of problems that are exceedingly diicult to approximate (unless P=NP). In the face of very strong hardness results, we consider a relaxed notion of approximability and show that under this notion the problems yield constant-factor approximation algorithms (of a kind). Speciically we give a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm that, given an n-job instance whose optimal schedule has optimality criterion of value OPT, schedules a constant fraction of the n jobs within a constant factor times OPT. In many cases this can be converted to a fully polynomial-time algorithm. We then study the experimental performance of this algorithm and some additional heuristics. Speciically, we consider a set of instances of a one-machine scheduling problem that we have studied previously in the context of traditional approximation algorithms, where the goal is to optimize average weighted ow time. We show that for the instances that were hardest empirically for previous traditional approximation algorithms, a large fraction of the set of jobs can be scheduled using these techniques, with good performance. Our results are based on the existence of approximation algorithms for the nonpreemptive scheduling of jobs with release dates and due dates on one machine so as to maximize the (weighted) number of on-time jobs. As an additional contribution, we generalize the state of the art for such problems, giving the rst constant-factor approximation algorithms for the problem of scheduling jobs with resource requirements and release and due dates so as to optimize the weighted number of on-time jobs. In turn, this result further broadens the class of problems to which we can apply our relaxed-approximation result.
Stochastic optimization of adaptive enrichment designs for two subpopulations

ABSTRACT An adaptive enrichment design is a randomized trial that allows enrollment criteria to be modified at interim analyses, based on a preset decision rule. When there is prior uncertainty regarding treatment effect heterogeneity, these trial designs can provide improved power for detecting treatment effects in subpopulations. We present a simulated annealing approach to search over the space of decision rules and other parameters for an adaptive enrichment design. The goal is to minimize the expected number enrolled or expected duration, while preserving the appropriate power and Type I error rate. We also explore the benefits of parallel computation in the context of this goal. We find that optimized designs can be substantially more efficient than simpler designs using Pocock or O’Brien-Fleming boundaries.
To Cloud or Not to Cloud: Measuring the Performance of Mobile Gaming

Mobile cloud gaming allows gamers to play games on resource-constrained mobile devices, and a measurement study to quantity the client performance and energy consumption is crucial to attract and retain gamers. In this paper, we adopt an open source cloud gaming platform, GamingAnywhere, to conduct extensive experiments on real mobile devices. Our experiment results show several insights that are of interests to researchers, developers, and gamers. First, compared to native games, mobile cloud games save energy by up to 30%. Second, the hardware video coders achieve higher frame rates but suffer from a small unnecessary buffering delay, and thus is less ideal for fast-paced games. Third, the frame rate, bit rate, and resolution all affect the decoders' resource consumption, while frame rate imposes the highest impact. Last, cellular networks incur 30%-45% more energy consumption than WiFi networks, and the event processing of touch screens is also energy-hungry. These findings shed some light on further enhancements of the emerging mobile cloud gaming platforms.
Electronic characterization of the phenological stages of grapevine using a LIDAR sensor

Canopy characteristics and their variation at all growth stages, together with the spatial distribution of plants in the field need to be considered in determining the application volume rate in fruit crops. Spray volume calculation in a vineyard needs to take into account concepts such as tree row volume (TRV), leaf wall area (LWA) and leaf area index (LAI). The objective of this work was to develop one protocol to characterize the canopy geometry of grapevine to determine BBCH stages using data sets measured manually and with LIDAR scanning. With this aim, a package called PROcess TO LIdar Data v.0. 1 (PROTOLIDAR) was created in R environment to process the LIDAR scan information. Results showed a significant correlation between LIDAR impacts and LAI at each growth stage. The relationship between the estimated values of TRV or LWA, and the growth stage of the vine was statistically significant (R2=0.99 and R2=0.95, respectively). Finally, the geometry characterizations of the plants were represented in 2 or 3D maps in GRASS-GIS.
Evaluation of Staf-Sistem 18-R for identification of staphylococcal clinical isolates to the species level

The accuracy and efficiency of Staf-Sistem 18-R (Liofilchem s.r.l., Roseto degli Abruzzi, Teramo, Italy) were compared with those of conventional biochemical methods to identify 523 strains belonging to 16 different human Staphylococcus species. Overall, 491 strains (93.9%) were correctly identified (percentage of identification, > or = 90.0), with 28 (5.4%) requiring supplementary tests for complete identification. For 14 isolates (2.8%), the strains did not correspond to any key in the codebook and could not be identified by the manufacturer's computer service. Only 18 isolates (3.4%) were misidentified. The system is simple to use, is easy to handle, gives highly reproducible results, and is inexpensive. With the inclusion of more discriminating tests and adjustment in supplementary code numbers for some species, such as Staphylococcus lugdunensis and Staphylococcus schleiferi, Staf-Sistem 18-R is a suitable alternative for identification of human coagulase-positive and coagulase-negative Staphylococcus species in microbiological laboratories.
Exploring interactions between music and language during the early development of music cognition. A computational modelling approach

This dissertation concerns the computational modelling of early life development of music perception and cognition. Experimental psychology and neuroscience show results that suggest that the development of musical representations in infancy, whether concerning pitch or rhythm features, depend on exposure both to music and language. Early musical and linguistic skills seem to be, therefore, tangled in ways we are yet to characterize. In parallel, computational modelling has produced powerful frameworks for the study of learning and development. The use of these models for studying the development of music information perception and cognition, connecting music and language still remains to be explored. This way, we propose to produce computational solutions suitable for studying factors that contribute to shape our cognitive structure, building our predispositions that allow us to enjoy and make sense of music. We will also adopt a comparative approach to the study of early development of musical predispositions that involves both music and language, searching for possible interactions and correlations. We first address pitch representation (absolute vs relative) and its relations with development. Simulations have allowed us to observe a parallel between learning and the type of pitch information being used, where the type of encoding influenced the ability of the model to perform a discrimination task correctly. Next, we have performed a prosodic characterization of infant-directed speech and singing by comparing rhythmic and melodic patterning in two Portuguese (European and Brazilian) variants. In the computational experiments, rhythm related descriptors exhibited a strong predictive ability for both speech and singing language variants’ discrimination tasks, presenting different rhythmic patterning for each variant. This reveals that the prosody of the surrounding sonic environment of an infant is a source of rich information and rhythm as a key element for characterizing the prosody from language and songs from each culture. Finally, we built a computational model based on temporal information processing and representation for exploring how the temporal prosodic patterns of a specific culture influence the development of rhythmic representations and predispositions. The simulations show that exposure to the surrounding sound environment influences the development of temporal representations and that the structure of the exposure environment, specifically the lack of maternal songs, has an impact on how the model organizes its internal representations. We conclude that there is a reciprocal influence between music and language. The exposure to the structure of the sonic background influences the shaping of our cognitive structure, which supports our understanding of musical experience. Among the sonic background, language’s structure has a predominant role in biasing the building of musical predispositions and representations.
On LP-based approximability for strict CSPs

In a beautiful result, Raghavendra established optimal Unique Games Conjecture (UGC)-based inapproximability for a large class of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). In the class of CSPs he considers, of which Maximum Cut is a prominent example, the goal is to find an assignment which maximizes a weighted fraction of constraints satisfied. He gave a generic semi-definite program (SDP) for this class of problems and showed how the approximability of each problem is determined by the corresponding SDP (upto an arbitrarily small additive error) assuming the UGC. He noted that his techniques do no apply to CSPs with strict constraints (all of which must be satisfied) such as Vertex Cover. In this paper we address the approximability of these strict-CSPs. In the class of CSPs we consider, one is given a set of constraints over a set of variables, and a cost function over the assignments, the goal is to find an assignment to the variables of minimum cost which satisfies all the constraints. We present a generic linear program (LP) for a large class of strict-CSPs and give a systematic way to convert integrality gaps for this LP into UGC-based inapproximability results. Some important problems whose approximability our framework captures are Vertex Cover, Hypergraph Vertex Cover, k-partite-Hypergraph Vertex Cover, Independent Set and other covering and packing problems over q-ary alphabets, and a scheduling problem. For the covering and packing problems, which occur quite commonly in practice as well, we provide a matching rounding algorithm, thus settling their approximability upto an arbitrarily small additive error.