Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sport, physical activity and educational achievement – towards an explanatory model

Abstract Sport and other forms of physical activities have traditionally held an ambiguous place within schooling, often being pushed to the margins. At the same time, there is a consensus that such activities are necessary for the healthy development of young people. This was proven during the second half of the last century, representing a revolution in the understanding of health. Recent developments in neurology, psychology and related sciences hint at a second revolution in which a strict distinction between mind and body has become redundant. This article examines the case that sport and physical activity can make distinctive contributions to educational achievement, and a host of wider benefits. Focusing on cognitive functioning, psychosocial development, school engagement and general educational attainment, the article reviews the available evidence and concludes that there is sufficient reason to believe that sports and physical activity can make useful contributions to educational achievement.
Bidirectional Appearance Distribution Function for Stylized Shading

We define a new shading tool called a Bidirectional Appearance Distribution Function (BADF) tailored to the direct control of stylized appearance. A BADF can be thought of as defining the appearance of a sphere from all possible illumination directions. Our BADF formulation generalizes and improves upon previous stylized shading techniques by enabling the direct control of shading profiles in screen space, exaggerating surface features in a flexible manner, and letting users control stylized appearance from multiple lighting or viewing directions. This allows users to start from a simple shading behavior, and refine from there towards greater stylization. Our GPU implementation works in real-time, which benefits both editing, and rendering in interactive systems. These features make BADFs an efficient tool for many applications in artistic and scientific illustration domains.
A framework for the choreography of intelligent e-services

In this paper a framework for the choreography of intelligent electronic services (e-services) that follows the Service-Oriented Architecture principle is presented. The composition abilities of intelligent e-services in the framework enable them to match a user's request for service consumption. The framework is based on a dynamic model of message query-based with casual knowledge-based expansion. A practical illustration of the application of the framework relies on a domain-specific e-service aggregation following an e-mentoring business scenario. The e-mentoring scenario is chosen in order to take advantage of the innovative features offered by the current World Wide Web, which has evolved into a provider of services.
100 Million DHT replies

Crawling a DHT allows researchers to monitor the behaviour of peers, determine their geographic location, etc. However, it has always been an error-prone process as it is not feasible to capture a full snapshot of the Mainline DHT in a timely manner. Therefore, researchers have developed approximation methods which can run on subsets of the DHT and extrapolate those in order to reason on the size and structure of the complete DHT. However, in this paper we introduce a new method of collecting information on peers connected to a DHT. We exploit the caches present at bootstrap servers to collect information on peers which are currently connected. Originally added to the bootstrap servers in order to be able to withstand more than 20,000 requests for peers each second, we now use the same mechanism as peers bootstrapping into the DHT to discover more than 20 Million peers in less than 2 hours. Using the bootstrap servers, we discover more than twice as many peers as BitMon, which crawls a subset of the DHT and then extrapolates. Moreover, in contrast to related work which often require highly customized/tuned BitTorrent clients, our script consists of 90 lines of Python code and runs on a simple laptop.
Ee-Leach ( Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy ) Modified Protocol

A wireless sensor network is made by many homogeneous and/or nodes which can sense data and communicate to each other. As energy is a scarce resource in WSN, the main issue is energy efficient routing. Many flat and hierarchical protocols have been projected to enhance the network lifetime. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is a basic energy efficient hierarchical routing protocol in WSN. In LEACH, cluster heads are selected and cluster is formed by joining non cluster head nodes. Member nodes transmit the data to respective cluster head and the cluster head is conscientious to transmit the gathered and aggregated data directly to the base station. This paper examines the performance of the conventional LEACH protocol and gives an enhancement to it for energy efficiency. The proposed protocol considers many parameters like residual energy and distance from base station etc. for cluster head selection and energy efficient routing. Keywords— Prof. Chandresh R. Parekh
Alpha oscillations in the pedunculopontine nucleus correlate with gait performance in parkinsonism

The pedunculopontine nucleus, a component of the reticular formation, is topographically organized in animal models and implicated in locomotor control. In Parkinson's disease, pedunculopontine nucleus stimulation is an emerging treatment for gait freezing. Local field potentials recorded from pedunculopontine nucleus electrodes in such patients have demonstrated oscillations in the alpha and beta frequency bands, reactive to self-paced movement. Whether these oscillations are topographically organized or relevant to locomotion is unknown. Here, we recorded local field potentials from the pedunculopontine nucleus in parkinsonian patients during rest and unconstrained walking. Relative gait speed was assessed with trunk accelerometry. Peaks of alpha power were present at rest and during gait, when they correlated with gait speed. Gait freezing was associated with attenuation of alpha activity. Beta peaks were less consistently observed across rest and gait, and did not correlate with gait speed. Alpha power was maximal in the caudal pedunculopontine nucleus region and beta power was maximal rostrally. These results indicate a topographic distribution of neuronal activity in the pedunculopontine nucleus region and concur with animal data suggesting that the caudal subregion has particular relevance to gait. Alpha synchronization, proposed to suppress ‘task irrelevant’ distraction, has previously been demonstrated to correlate with performance of cognitive tasks. Here, we demonstrate a correlation between alpha oscillations and improved gait performance. The results raise the possibility that stimulation of caudal and rostral pedunculopontine nucleus regions may differ in their clinical effects.
RT-Xen: Towards real-time hypervisor scheduling in Xen

As system integration becomes an increasingly important challenge for complex real-time systems, there has been a significant demand for supporting real-time systems in virtualized environments. This paper presents RT-Xen, the first real-time hypervisor scheduling framework for Xen, the most widely used open-source virtual machine monitor (VMM). RT-Xen bridges the gap between real-time scheduling theory and Xen, whose wide-spread adoption makes it an attractive platform for integrating a broad range of real-time and embedded systems. Moreover, RT-Xen provides an open-source platform for researchers and integrators to develop and evaluate real-time scheduling techniques, which to date have been studied predominantly via analysis and simulations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the feasibility, efficiency, and efficacy of fixed-priority hierarchical real-time scheduling in RT-Xen. RT-Xen instantiates a suite of fixed-priority servers (Deferrable Server, Periodic Server, Polling Server, and Sporadic Server). While the server algorithms are not new, this empirical study represents the first comprehensive experimental comparison of these algorithms within the same virtualization platform. Our empirical evaluation shows that RT-Xen can provide effective real-time scheduling to guest Linux operating systems at a 1ms quantum, while incurring only moderate overhead for all the fixed-priority server algorithms. While more complex algorithms such as Sporadic Server do incur higher overhead, none of the overhead differences among different server algorithms are significant. Deferrable Server generally delivers better soft real-time performance than the other server algorithms, while Periodic Server incurs high deadline miss ratios in overloaded situations.
Integrating the Human Recommendations in the Decision Process of Autonomous Agents: A Goal Biased Markov Decision Process

In this paper, we address the problem of computing the policy of an autonomous agent, taking human recommendations into account which could be appropriate for mixed initiative, or adjustable autonomy. For this purpose, we present Goal Biased Markov Decision Process (GBMDP) which assume two kinds of recommendation. The human recommends to the agent to avoid some situations (represented by undesirable states), or he recommends favorable situations represented by desirable states. The agent takes those recommendations into account by updating its policy (only updating the states concerned by the recommendations, not the whole policy). We show that GBMDP is efficient and it improves the human's intervention by reducing its time of attention paid to the agent. Moreover, GBMDP optimizes robot's computation time by updating only the necessary states. We also show how GBMDP can consider more than one recommendation. Finally, our experiments show how we update policies which are intractable by standard approaches.
Performance study of MIMO systems in a clustered multipath channel

Fading correlation is one of the fundamental limits on the performance of multi-antenna systems. Accurate modeling of the angular power distribution (pdf) is essential for accurate prediction of correlation. Previous studies were limited to the case of single-cluster distribution or uniform pdf. Measurements indicate that multipath often arrives in several angular clusters and with a non-uniform angular cluster pdf. We begin with the popular Salz-Winters model and extend it to the case of a multi-cluster channel and to the case of a non-uniform cluster pdf. The generic model, as well as various approximations which result in compact closed-from expressions, are studied in detail. It is shown that the correlation in a two clusters channel has an oscillatory behavior as antenna spacing increases, regardless of multipath AOA distributions; the envelope of correlation is determined by a single cluster angular spread while the oscillations within the envelope are determined by the inter-cluster angular spread. There exist two types of correlation zeros, which can be beneficially used in system design. The cluster angular pdf has negligible impact on the MIMO capacity and, hence, a simpler uniform model can be used without degradation in accuracy.
A novel method for jammer localization in large scale sensor networks

Sensor networks, by their very nature, are vulnerable to network security threats, with Denial of Service by radio jamming being one of the most common. It is more useful to detect jamming reactively than to proactively avoid it. We describe a method of countering jamming wherein some nodes just outside the jammed region form groups and transmit their locations to the Base Station for localization. These nodes are downstream in the hop-count based gradient broadcast routing sense. We also estimate the exact position of the jammer using the centre of curvature method. Simulation results show that the error in estimation of the jammer location is as low as 1.03m, accurate enough for real-time response.
The effect of methods addressing the class imbalance problem on P300 detection

This paper studies empirically the effect of different sampling methods on training classifiers on the imbalanced data of the BCI P300 Speller. Both over-sampling and under-sampling are considered. Besides some existing methods like SMOTE that have been shown to be effective in addressing the class imbalance problem we also proposed a new under-sampling technology, namely, instance-remove algorithm which is based on the property of P300 data sets. The classifiers for testing are FLDA and linear SVM. Experimental results suggest that not all of the sampling methods are effective in P300 detection, and even the same method may have different influence on different classifiers. It reveals that the SMOTE technique which is a variant of over-sampling is very effective in training an FLDA classifier while other methods are slightly effective or ineffective both in training FLDA and Linear SVM. The study also suggests that the over-sampling is more effective than under-sampling on both classifiers.
An investigation into the paradox of organisational flexibility versus security: A research project overview

The trend towards utilising geographically and temporally dispersed personnel has grown quickly over the past decade; enabled by swift advances in computing, telecommunications, and networking technologies. The impact of these developments on corporate strategies and forms has manifested itself in a move to de-legitimise the rigid structure of a traditional bureaucracy and move towards one that is more flexible. These new technologies and organisational structures, however, also bring with them Information Security threats and risks. It is critical that managers become informed and equipped to deal with these issues. This paper presents an ongoing study designed to determine the major Information Security Management issues in implementing Distributed Work Groups, compared to those found in other organisational structures. It considers how best to manage these issues through the development of an ideal model, using a Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) approach.
A biopsychosocial approach to asthma in adolescents encountering child protective services.

OBJECTIVE To further test the validity of the Biobehavioral Family Model (BBFM), a biopsychosocial approach to explaining the effects of family processes on illness, by testing the model with adolescents with asthma involved in child protective services (CPS), a sample for whom the model's constructs are highly relevant. METHODS Data are from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, CPS sample (n = 5,501). Adolescents with asthma (n = 101, ages 11-15 years) self-reported their negative family emotional climate (NFEC; caregiver psychological aggression and caregiver relationship quality), caregiver-adolescent relational security, and depressive symptoms. Caregivers rated adolescent health quality. Models were tested using path analyses and bootstrapping. RESULTS Path analyses and bootstrapping results demonstrate support for the BBFM in explaining health quality for this sample. CONCLUSIONS Applying the BBFM to families involved with CPS demonstrates pathways by which family processes affect health quality of adolescents with asthma, underscoring the need for biopsychosocial assessments and services.
Lumican Accelerates Wound Healing by Enhancing α2β1 Integrin-Mediated Fibroblast Contractility

Lumican is a dermatan sulfate proteoglycan highly expressed in connective tissue and has the ability to regulate collagen fibril assembly. Previous studies have shown that lumican is involved in wound healing, but the precise effects of lumican on reepithelialization and wound contraction, the two pivotal aspects of skin wound healing, have not been investigated. Here we explored the roles of lumican in fibroblast contractility, a main aspect of skin wound healing, by adopting mice skin wound healing model and the corresponding in vitro cellular experiments. Our results showed that lumican can promote skin wound healing by facilitating wound fibroblast activation and contraction but not by promoting keratinocyte proliferation and migration. Silencing of integrin α2 completely abolished the pro-contractility of lumican, indicating lumican enhances fibroblast contractility via integrin α2. Our study for the first time demonstrated that lumican can affect fibroblast’s mechanical property, which is pivotal for many important pathological processes, such as wound healing, fibrosis, and tumor development, suggesting that lumican might have a potential to be used to modulate these processes.
Influence of iron supplementation frequency on absorption efficiency and mucosal ferritin in anaemic rats

It is believed that frequent Fe doses decrease the efficiency of absorption as a consequence of the loading of intestinal mucosal cells with Fe from the previous supplemental dose. We examined this premise in thirty anaemic Sprague-Dawley rats given Fe supplements as FeSO4 in 1 g preparations of a 50:50 (w/w mixture of low-Fe diet and sucrose under one of the following regimens: one 3 mg Fe dose daily for 3d, four 0.75mg doses daily at 6h intervals for 3d, and one 9mg dose on day 1 followed by two placebo (low-Fe diet) doses on days 2 and 3. All groups were fed on two low-Fe meals daily (8.3 mg Fe/kg diet). After an overnight fast rats were dosed with 1 ml of an 59Fe-labelled ferric nitrilotriacetic acid solution (37 kBq 59Fe, 50 μg Fe) orally and killed 10 h later. Absorption of 59Fe was measured as the percentage of the 59Fe retained by the carcass without the gastrointestinal tract 10 h after dosing relative to the initial 59Fe dose. Haemoglobin-Fe gain, liver non-haem-Fe, and mucosal duodenal ferritin were determined after the 3 d supplementation period. Absorption of the test dose in rats supplemented once 3 d before assessment of Fe absorption was 2.6-fold greater than those supplemented with daily single doses and 1.9-fold greater than those supplemented with daily multiple doses. Our data indicate that both mucosal ferritin and liver Fe levels account for the higher absorption efficiency found in rats supplemented once to simulate intermittent regimens.
Peer-Mediated Leap to Efficiency: Cost-Benefit Analysis in the Selection of Efficient Strategies

There is ample evidence that computer users often do not progress from novice to expert levels of performance, particularly when efficiency is included in the definition of performance. This paper describes a theoretical argument that one of the pieces missing in the understanding of this process is an accurate assessment of how people calculate a cost/benefit analysis (CBA) of learning and using new techniques and strategies. While there are many explanations for why people often do not use accurate methods of calculating this ratio, there is little discussion describing why some people do. We suggest that an important and predictable influence on whether an individual uses an accurate CBA is the observation of others using efficient techniques. We propose that with a more full understanding of the CBA calculation process, it will be possible to predict when users will and will not utilize a more efficient technique.
Survey of nonlinear attitude estimation methods

This paper provides a survey of modern nonlinear filtering methods for attitude estimation. Early applications relied mostly on the extended Kalman filter for attitude estimation. Since these applications, several new approaches have been developed that have proven to be superior to the extended Kalman filter. Several of these approaches maintain the basic structure of the extended Kalman filter, but employ various modifications in order to provide better convergence or improve other performance characteristics. Examples of such approaches include: filter QUEST, extended QUEST and the backwards-smoothing extended Kalman filter. Filters that propagate and update a discrete set of sigma points rather than using linearized equations for the mean and covariance are also reviewed. A twostep approach is discussed with a first-step state that linearizes the measurement model and an iterative second step to recover the desired attitude states. These approaches are all based on the Gaussian assumption that the probability density function is adequately specified by its mean and covariance. Other approaches that do not require this assumption are reviewed, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Email: johnc@eng.buffalo. edu. Associate Fellow AIAA. Aerospace Engineer, Guidance, Navigation and Control Systems Engineering Branch. Email: Landis.Markley@nasa.gov. Fellow AIAA. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. Email: cheng3@eng.buffalo. edu. Member AIAA.
Permissive Transcriptional Activity at the Centromere through Pockets of DNA Hypomethylation

DNA methylation is a hallmark of transcriptional silencing, yet transcription has been reported at the centromere. To address this apparent paradox, we employed a fully sequence-defined ectopic human centromere (or neocentromere) to investigate the relationship between DNA methylation and transcription. We used sodium bisulfite PCR and sequencing to determine the methylation status of 2,041 CpG dinucleotides distributed across a 6.76-Mbp chromosomal region containing a neocentromere. These CpG dinucleotides were associated with conventional and nonconventional CpG islands. We found an overall hypermethylation of the neocentric DNA at nonconventional CpG islands that we designated as CpG islets and CpG orphans. The observed hypermethylation was consistent with the presence of a presumed transcriptionally silent chromatin state at the neocentromere. Within this neocentric chromatin, specific sites of active transcription and the centromeric chromatin boundary are defined by DNA hypomethylation. Our data demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a correlation between DNA methylation and centromere formation in mammals, and that transcription and “chromatin-boundary activity” are permissible at the centromere through the selective hypomethylation of pockets of sequences without compromising the overall silent chromatin state and function of the centromere.
Simulation-based optimization over discrete sets with noisy constraints

We consider a constrained optimization problem over a discrete set where noise-corrupted observations of the objective and constraints are available. The problem is challenging because the feasibility of a solution cannot be known for certain, due to the noisy measurements of the constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a new method that converts constrained optimization into the unconstrained optimization problem of finding a saddle point of the Lagrangian. The method applies stochastic approximation to the Lagrangian in search of the saddle point. The proposed method is shown to converge, under suitable conditions, to the optimal solution almost surely (a.s.) as the number of iterations grows. We present the effectiveness of the proposed method numerically in two settings: (1) inventory control in a periodic review system, and (2) staffing in a call center.
Precomputing avatar behavior from human motion data

Creating controllable, responsive avatars is an important problem in computer games and virtual environments. Recently, large collections of motion capture data have been exploited for increased realism in avatar animation and control. Large motion sets have the advantage of accommodating a broad variety of natural human motion. However, when a motion set is large, the time required to identify an appropriate sequence of motions is the bottleneck for achieving interactive avatar control. In this paper, we present a novel method of precomputing avatar behavior from unlabelled motion data in order to animate and control avatars at minimal runtime cost. Based on dynamic programming, our method finds a control policy that indicates how the avatar should act in any given situation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through examples that include avatars interacting with each other and with the user.