Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technological Journey Towards Reliable Microheater Development for MEMS Gas Sensors: A Review

Micromachined silicon platforms, owing to some of its inherent advantages including miniaturized dimensions, ultralow power consumption, reduced batch fabrication cost, long-term reliability, and compatibility with standard CMOS fabrication technology, attracted the attention of solid-state gas sensor researchers, particularly since the last decade. As the semiconducting gas sensing thin film on top of micromachined platforms often needs an elevated temperature to activate the sensing mechanism, the suitable electrothermal and structural design of a microheater, i.e., having fast response, uniform temperature distribution over sensing area, and minimal residual/thermal-stress-induced membrane deflection, are of prime concern. In this paper, the technological developments related to the various designs and geometries of microheaters and their fabrication technology employing different suitable heating materials, for closed- and suspended-type silicon membranes have been discussed critically with particular emphasis on the relative merits and demerits with reference to heater parameters such as power consumption, temperature distribution, response time, and mechanical stability/reliability.
Feeding Time Synchronizes Clock Gene Rhythmic Expression in Brain and Liver of Goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Little is known about the feeding time dependence of clock gene expression in fish. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether a scheduled feeding time can entrain the rhythmic expression of several clock genes (period and cryptocrome) in the brain and liver of a teleost, the goldfish. Fish maintained under continuous light (LL) conditions were divided into 3 groups. Two groups were fed daily at 1000 h and 2200 h, respectively, and the third group was subjected to a random schedule regime. After 30 days, the fishes under 24-h food deprivation were sacrificed through a 24-h cycle, and clock gene expression in the optic tectum, hypothalamus, and liver was quantified by real-time PCR. The findings pointed to differences between the central and peripheral tissues studied. In the absence of a light-dark cycle (constant light), a scheduled feeding regime was necessary and sufficient to maintain both the rhythmic expression of several clock genes in the optic tectum and hypothalamus, as well as daily rhythms in locomotor activity. In contrast, neither locomotor activity nor clock gene expression in brain tissues was synchronized in randomly fed fish. However, in the liver, most of the clock genes studied presented significant daily rhythms in phase (related to the time of the last meal) in all 3 experimental groups, suggesting that the daily rhythm of clock genes in this organ only depends on the last meal time. The data suggest that, as in mammals, the smooth running of the food entrainable oscillator (FEO) in fish involves the rhythmic expression of several clock genes (Per1 and Cry3) in the central and peripheral structures. The results also indicate that the food anticipatory activity (FAA) in goldfish is not only the result of rhythmic clock gene expression in the liver because rhythmic clock gene expression was observed in randomly fed fishes, while FAA was not observed.
English Language Proficiency among the Foreign Born in the United States, 1980–2007: Duration, Age, Cohort Effects 1

This study employs pooled data from the 1980 through 2000 censuses and 2001 through 2007 American Community Survey data to study English language proficiency among foreign-born in a dynamic framework. Our findings show continuing significance of duration of stay and age at migration and declining English language proficiency across successive cohorts. Additionally, analysis enabled by availability of single-year data from 2000 to 2007 indicates acquisition of language proficiency as steepest during first 9 years upon arrival and for migrating age group 6–17. Further, we find significant differences by education, regions of origin, racial groups, and by regions of residence.
Gastrointestinal metabolism of a vegetable-oil emulsion in healthy subjects.

BACKGROUND Given the growing prevalence of overweight and obesity, weight-management strategies could be developed based on the effect of specific food ingredients on the gastrointestinal system to reduce food intake. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanisms by which a vegetable-oil emulsion may exert its effect on satiety by applying a multilumen tube to investigate digestion and absorption of lipids in the stomach and proximal jejunum. DESIGN We gave 16 healthy, normal-weight subjects (in a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design) a test product (yogurt with a vegetable-oil emulsion) or an equal-calorie control by intragastric administration on 2 separate occasions. Gastric and intestinal samples were collected from the proximal jejunum during 180 min. RESULTS We observed almost double amounts (P < 0.05) of total lipids, mainly as free fatty acids, from the test product (450 +/- 119 mg) in the proximal jejunum compared with amounts of total lipids from the control product (230 +/- 50 mg), and an over-time difference of free fatty acid concentrations was observed between the products (P < 0.05). To our knowledge, a novel and unexpected finding was the appearance of needle-shaped crystals in the jejunal samples that originated from the vegetable-oil emulsion and consisted of saturated fatty acids. Crystals were only rarely seen in the control samples. CONCLUSION The higher amount of lipids in the proximal jejunum and the recovery of crystals in the intestinal samples after test-product infusion provide a plausible physiologic explanation for the ileal brake mechanism that leads to the increased satiety observed for this test product.
A Vision Interface Framework for Intuitive Gesture Recognition using Color based Blob Detection

facing the user. The user uses two different color markers on the fingers and when the mouse emulation is started using the graphical user interface provided with the software, the software tracks those markers using the camera. And this information is used to move the mouse pointer on screen. The user can also execute mouse events using gestures. The events that can be executed are left click, right click and scroll. In the following parts we talk about, Gesture Recognition – Here we elaborate the framework that has been developed, using diagrams and algorithms; Software Implementation – We discuss about various components, libraries and language used to develop the software; and finally, Conclusion – Here we conclude with what we could achieve with our research so far and what might be the future possibilities.
Free Associations Mirroring Self- and World-Related Concepts: Implications for Personal Construct Theory, Psycholinguistics and Philosophical Psychology

People construe reality by using words as basic units of meaningful categorization. The present theory-driven study applied the method of a free association task to explore how people express the concepts of the world and the self in words. The respondents were asked to recall any five words relating with the word world. Afterward they were asked to recall any five words relating with the word self. The method of free association provided the respondents with absolute freedom to choose any words they wanted. Such free recall task is suggested as being a relatively direct approach to the respondents’ self- and world-related conceptual categories, without enormous rational processing. The results provide us, first, with associative ranges for constructs of the world and the self, where some associative dimensions are defined by semantic polarities in the meanings of peripheral categories (e.g., Nature vs. Culture). Second, our analysis showed that some groups of verbal categories that were associated with the words world and self are central, while others are peripheral with respect to the central position. Third, the analysis of category networks revealed that some categories play the role of a transmitter, mediating the pathway between other categories in the network.
Detection of Rotor Faults in Field Oriented Controlled Induction Machines

This work proposes an online method to diagnose rotor faults due to broken bars in induction machines controlled by a field oriented control scheme. First, control variables are analyzed under the presence of rotor faults. Then, the torque related stator current is proposed as the most suitable indicator. Sensitivity and reliability of this indicator are tested within the normal range of operation. Simulated and experimental results corroborate the proposal
Chinese Named Entity Recognition with a Multi-Phase Model

Chinese named entity recognition is one of the difficult and challenging tasks of NLP. In this paper, we present a Chinese named entity recognition system using a multi-phase model. First, we segment the text with a character-level CRF model. Then we apply three word-level CRF models to the labeling person names, location names and organization names in the segmentation results, respectively. Our systems participated in the NER tests on open and closed tracks of Microsoft Research (MSRA). The actual evaluation results show that our system performs well on both the open tracks and closed tracks.
Simulazione del processo di ripiegamento di una proteina utilizzando un sistema ad agenti Agent-based Protein Folding Simulation

SOMMARIO/ABSTRACT A protein is identified by a finite sequence of amino acids, each of them chosen from a set of 20 elements. The Protein Structure Prediction Problem is the problem of predicting the 3D native conformation of a protein, when its sequence of amino acids is known. This problem is fundamental for biological and pharmaceutical research. All current mathematical models of the problem are affected by intrinsic computational limits. In particular, simulation-based techniques that handle every chemical interaction between all atoms in the amino acids (and the solvent) are not feasible due to the huge amount of computations involved. These programs are typically written in imperative languages and hard to be parallelized. Moreover, each approach is based on a particular energy function. In the literature there are various proposals and there is no common agreement on which is the most reliable. In this paper we present a novel agent-based framework for ab-initio simulations. Each amino acid of an input protein is viewed as an independent agent that communicates with the others. The framework allows a modular representation of the problem and it is easily extensible for further refinements. Simulations at this level of abstraction allow faster calculation, distributed on each agent. We provide an implementation using the Linda package of SICStus Pro-log, to show the feasibility and the power of the method. The code is intrinsically concurrent and thus natural to be parallelized.
Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign

"Voting" is an examination of the factors that make people vote the way they do. Based on the famous Elmira Study, carried out by a team of skilled social scientists during the 1948 presidential campaign, it shows how voting is affected by social class, religious background, family loyalties, on-the-job relationships, local pressure groups, mass communication media, and other factors. Still highly relevant, "Voting" is one of the most frequently cited books in the field of voting behavior.
Sequential body composition analysis by bioimpedance early post‐kidney transplantation

Background: While chronic renal failure patients present disturbed body water composition, few studies have been done on its behavior following kidney grafting (Tx). We report the changes associated with a successful Tx on body composition evaluated by bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). Methods: Twelve Tx (seven males, five females) were studied. The BIA was assessed before Tx, at month 1 and at month 3 post‐Tx. Total body water (TBW), extracellular water (ECW), intracellular water (ICW), Na:K exchange rate (Nae:Ke) and phase angle (PA) were studied. An healthy group and a HD group were evaluated three times in a year interval. Results: Comparing before Tx with month 1 post‐Tx, TBW, ECW and Nae:Ke increased, while ICW and PA decreased significantly. Comparing month 1 with month 3 post‐Tx, ECW decreased, while ICW and PA increased. On comparing month 1 post‐Tx with the healthy group, Nae:Ke was greater and PA was lower at month 1. Conclusions: The BIA showed that the different body water compartments of Tx recipients quickly match the constitution of normal individuals, overcoming drug therapy side effects.
STARBRIGHT World: Effects of an Electronic Network on the Social Environment of Children With Life-Threatening Illnesses

STARBRIGHT World (SBW) is a virtual environment designed to link seriously ill children into an interactive online community in which they can play games, learn about their medical condition, or talk with other chronically ill children. This study evaluated the impact of SBW on pain, mood, anger, loneliness, problem behavior, and willingness to return for treatment of children receiving outpatient treatment at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). To test the hypothesis that SBW provides benefit through distraction, a restricted alternating treatments design was utilized to measure anger, pain, and mood. To test the more long-term benefits of SBW, loneliness and problem behavior were measured at baseline and at the end of the study. Willingness to return was measured at each hospital visit made during the study. Process information was also collected during each SBW session (e.g., ease of use, frustration, and general enjoyment of the system). Thirty-two children participating in pediatric clinical trials at the NIH and their caregivers participated in the study. Seventy-eight percent of participants, ages 8 to 19 years, were HIV infected and the remaining 22% had varied, but potentially life-threatening, illnesses. Children reported significantly less loneliness and were significantly more willing to return to the hospital for treatment from baseline to follow-up. They were marginally less worried after using SBW than after using the regular playroom. Parents reported that their children experienced significantly less withdrawn behavior and needed significantly less help with both anxiety and resistance in returning to the hospital for treatment after using SBW. They also reported that SBW helped their children to feel decreases in loneliness and depressed mood, and increases in energetic mood. SBW is a potentially useful tool to improve the hospital experience for seriously ill children, reduce their feelings of loneliness and isolation, and help them to be less socially withdrawn.
Expatriate career intentions of women on foreign assignments and their adjustment

Despite an increasing demand for international executives, only the most determined women may get assigned abroad. Will this resolve for a career abroad also help them to become successful in their foreign assignment? To answer this question, Western female business expatriates in Hong Kong responded to a mail survey about their expatriate career intentions and their international adjustment. Controlling for the time they had been assigned to Hong Kong, the results show that the more determined the women are to pursue an expatriate career, the better is their interaction adjustment. This is a fundamental finding, as both the other two dimensions of sociocultural adjustment, general adjustment and work adjustment, are based on interpersonal interactions. Implications of these findings for globalizing firms as well as for their female employees are discussed.
Antidepressant-like effect of milk-derived lactoferrin in the repeated forced-swim stress mouse model

We investigated the antidepressant-like effect of lactoferrin (Lf) in a repeated forced-swim test (FST) stress mouse model. FST was performed on days 1, 2, 7 and 14. Bovine Lf (bLf) or bovine serum albumin (BSA) was supplemented at 1% to the commercial diet after the first FST throughout the experimental period. The FST-control and FST+BSA group showed a marked increase in immobility time on day 2, which remained increased up to the 14th day, while the FST+bLf group showed a significant lower immobility time. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) content in the hippocampus significantly decreased in all of FST treated groups. These results suggest that bLf may improve the depressive-like symptoms induced by repeated FST.
Exploring Unsupervised Learning Towards Extractive Summarization of User Reviews

Mobile app reviews are important as a crowdsource to improve the quality of these softwares. App stores, which have app reviews, provide a wealth of information derived from users. These information help developers to fix bugs and implement new features desired by users. Despite the reviews usefulness, one of the challenges of application developers is the huge number of reviews published daily, making manual analysis laborious. Hence, the delay in satisfying users may influence the loss of customers. Current researches into this topic have adopted a supervised approach to classify the reviews of the users. In this paper, we used an unsupervised approach to categorize the reviews aiming to generate a summary of the main bugs and new features pointed by users, assisting the application developers to improve the quality their apps. We evaluated the approach empirically and obtained promising results to generate user reviews summaries.
Query Segmentation and Resource Disambiguation Leveraging Background Knowledge

Accessing the wealth of structured data available on the Data Web is still a key challenge for lay users. Keyword search is the most convenient way for users to access information (e.g., from data reposito- ries). In this paper we introduce a novel approach for determining the correct resources for user-supplied keyword queries based on a hidden Markov model. In our approach the user-supplied query is modeled as the observed data and the background knowledge is used for parameter estimation. Instead of learning parameter estimation from training data, we leverage the semantic relationships between data items for comput- ing the parameter estimations. In order to maximize accuracy and us- ability, query segmentation and resource disambiguation are mutually tightly interwoven. First, an initial set of potential segmentations is ob- tained leveraging the underlying knowledge base; then the nal correct set of segments is determined after the most likely resource mapping was computed using a scoring function. While linguistic methods like named entity, multi-word unit recognition and POS-tagging fail in the case of an incomplete sentences (e.g. for keyword-based queries), we will show that our statistical approach is robust with regard to query expression variance. Our experimental results when employing the hidden Markov model for resource identication in keyword queries reveal very promising results.
Distributed link scheduling in wireless networks with interference cancellation capabilities

This paper considers the problem of link scheduling in wireless networks with interference cancellation (IC) capabilities and under the physical SINR interference model. We first present a cross layer formulation and then use duality theory to decompose the joint design problem into congestion control and routing/scheduling subproblems, which interact through congestion prices. Given that the problem of scheduling with IC and under the SINR interference regime has been shown to be NP-complete, this paper develops a decentralized approach which allows links to coordinate their transmissions and therefore efficiently solving the link scheduling problem. We show that our decentralized algorithm achieves very close performance to other centralized methods (e.g., greedy maximal scheduling). We also study the performance gains that IC brings to wireless networks and we show that flows in the network achieve up to twice their rates in most instances, in comparisons with networks without interference cancellation capabilities. These gains are attributed to the capabilities of SIC in better managing the interference in the network and promoting higher spatial reuse among contending links.
The Effects of Distributed Learning on Enhanced Cognitive Interview Training

Interview training for police officers is generally limited and, when it occurs, rarely translates into optimal interviews. Training ineffectiveness may be partly due to the structure of the training programme. In the present study, 60 participants received two hours of training on the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI), in either a massed (one two-hour session) or spaced (two one-hour sessions) format. Following training, participants conducted an ECI. Advantages for spaced training were found in open-ended prompt use, perpetrator-specific details elicited from open prompts, and the utilization of two critical ECI components. These results suggest that a simple alteration in training protocols could improve forensic interviewing skills.
Chopping in continuous-time sigma-delta modulators

This paper discusses the use of chopping in continuous-time sigma-delta modulators where 1/f noise and offset need to be suppressed by continuous-time methods. An intuitive analysis of the artifacts related to chopping is presented. Aliasing of quantization noise is found to be the main problem, especially for chopping frequencies lower than the modulator's sampling frequency (fs). Correctly timed return-to-zero and switched-capacitor DACs are proposed as a solution to the aliasing problem. In both cases, the key idea is to synchronize DAC transitions with moments when the quantization noise at the input of the first integrator is low. Circuit level simulations are presented to validate the proposed techniques.
Dynamic threshold model based probabilistic latent semantic analysis

Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis(PLSA) is the one of the main methods for texture analysis and computer vision. In practice, PLSA will result in overfitting problems, including the circumstance of unclear membership of topics and the case of high similarity between different topics. In this paper, we describe a dynamic threshold model based PLSA(dPLSA). It can make the ambiguous topic information more clear and objectified. Meanwhile, dPLSA can dynamically determine whether to merge the similar topics, in terms of the potential similarity between different topics. Experimental results on image data sets show that the proposed method outperforms its rival ones for solving the overfitting problems.
Measuring The Performance of Information Systems Using Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper reviews the system of the evaluation methods for performance of information system (IS) and their deficiencies. Based on these, the feasibility and necessity to measure the performance from the input/output viewpoint are emphasized. Then, this paper introduces four basic models of data envelopment analysis and selects YMK-DEA and C 2 GS 2 -ISS models for the evaluation of performance of complex information systems. Referring the balanced scorecard, evaluation indexes for IS performance are presented from four perspectives, including finance, customer, internal processes and learning and growth. Taking the information systems of 30 steel sale enterprises as examples, this paper uses YMK-DEA and C 2 GS 2 -ISS models to analyze the IS performance of enterprises from the angles of both technical efficiency and scale efficiency and compares the results with those from C 2 R and C 2 GS 2 models. Finally, some suggestions for IS improvement are given.