Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
$E^{2}$ -MAC: Energy Efficient Medium Access for Massive M2M Communications

In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient clustering and medium access control for cellular-based machine-to-machine (M2M) networks to minimize device energy consumption and prolong network battery lifetime. First, we present an accurate energy consumption model that considers both static and dynamic energy consumptions, and utilize this model to derive the network lifetime. Second, we find the cluster size to maximize the network lifetime and develop an energy-efficient cluster-head selection scheme. Furthermore, we find feasible regions where clustering is beneficial in enhancing network lifetime. We further investigate communications protocols for both intra- and inter-cluster communications. While inter-cluster communications use conventional cellular access schemes, we develop an energy-efficient and load-adaptive multiple access scheme, called n-phase carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), which provides a tunable tradeoff between energy efficiency, delay, and spectral efficiency of the network. The simulation results show that the proposed clustering, cluster-head selection, and communications protocol design outperform the others in energy saving and significantly prolong the lifetimes of both individual nodes and the whole M2M network.
Nanoparticulate carriers for the treatment of coronary restenosis

The current treatment for coronary restenosis following balloon angioplasty involves the use of a mechanical or a drug-eluting stent. Despite the high usage of commercially-available drug-eluting stents in the cardiac field, there are a number of limitations. This review will present the background of restenosis, go briefly into the molecular and cellular mechanisms of restenosis, the use of mechanical stents in coronary restenosis, and will provide an overview of the drugs and genes tested to treat restenosis. The primary focus of this article is to present a comprehensive overview on the use of nanoparticulate delivery systems in the treatment of restenosis both in-vitro and in-vivo. Nanocarriers have been tested in a variety of animal models and in human clinical trials with favorable results. Polymer-based nanoparticles, liposomes, and micelles will be discussed, in addition to the findings presented in the field of cardiovascular drug targeting. Nanocarrier-based delivery presents a viable alternative to the current stent based therapies.
A Synopsis and Perspective of Concerns and Challenges for the International Community of University Museums

University museums and their collections are among the oldest and most significant in the world, yet their role and future is being questioned. They have critical needs for facilities, staff, and support. At risk are millions of objects that document our natural and cultural history and programs for research, teaching, and public education and exhibits. The museums are attempting to redefine, reposition, and clarify their educational mission. Museums such as the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural history are successfully meeting the challenges through strategic planning and funding for new facilities. Other museums are finding solutions with partnerships, links, and tailor-made service programs. New leadership and management will need to emerge for university museums to reestablish their stature and relevance. Physical and intellectual access to the museums and their objects is a key to their future. The new technologies are tools that museums can use to improve their interpretive programs and increase the depth of their research. Facing shared concerns and challenges, the museums are generating a growning sense of collective urgency and a call for intenational organization, advocacy, and cooperation, resulting in formation of the International Committee for University Museums and Collections.
Human gait-based bipedal walking robot design in progress

This work presents the mechanical human gait-based 3D bipedal walking robot. The robot mimics human walking through the push-off mechanism at the ankle, the passive knee bending mechanism, and the simple lateral balance control. To generate walking, it uses simple waveforms which are derived from human gait data. The preliminary experiment demonstrates that the robot walks stably.
A Qualitative Analysis of Pediatric Patient Attitudes Regarding Family-Centered Rounds.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends family-centered rounds (FCR) as standard practice for the inpatient setting. To date, there is limited research investigating the attitudes of pediatric patients regarding this shift in practice. The goal of this study was to explore pediatric patients' perspectives of their experiences during FCR. METHODS We conducted a qualitative descriptive study based on results from 22 semi-structured interviews of school-aged and adolescent inpatients from September 2012 through October 2013. English-speaking patients, aged 7 to 18 years, who participated in FCR were eligible for inclusion. Transcripts were initially analyzed by using a constant comparative method. After completion of this initial analysis, a third reviewer independently reviewed all transcripts to verify the accuracy of the final coding scheme. RESULTS The final coding scheme consisted of 5 main themes: team size, medical team interactions, content discussed on FCR, setting expectations, and timing and location of FCR. In general, patients expressed a wide array of positive, negative, and neutral impressions within each theme relating to their experiences with FCR. CONCLUSIONS Patient comments regarding their experience with FCR offer unique perspectives from previously studied participants, including physicians, nurses, students, and parents. Future research aimed at evaluating the bedside rounding process should incorporate patients' views to realize the complete FCR experience.
Parents' and Teachers' Interventions in Children's Reading

The practice of children reading school books with their parents at home is being widely advocated as a means of raising literacy standards in the UK. However, little is known about what parents actually do when listening to their children read. This paper describes a study in which 32 children (mean age 6 years 4 months) were observed reading with a parent at home and with their teacher at school. Three analyses are reported. The first analysis showed that parents were more likely to intervene in children's reading to support their decoding of the text, while teachers were more likely to read to the children or to discuss the text with them—an activity we termed ‘conversing’. This analysis also found large differences between parents in the amount of conversing in which they engaged. The second analysis described in more detail four main Junctions of conversing—responding to the text, labelling and identifying, making sense, and priming. The third analysis showed systematic differences in parents’ views on literacy according to their levels of conversing: parents in the high-conversing group were more likely to regard reading as a valuable and enjoyable activity for its own sake, while parents in the low-conversing group were more likely to see literacy in instrumental terms. These findings are discussed in terms of their relation to previous research and their implications for policy and practice.
Pupil stress and standard assessment tasks

Abstract The article is based on a paper delivered to the AWCEBD KEYWORDS Conference at Cirencester in 1999, where the focus was upon staff emotional support. The article proposes that some of the causes of teacher and intelligence; worker stress are organizational factors and perceptual bias, and that staff support; stress is an inevitable consequence of working in an environment supervision where human relationships are critical for the successful management of young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.The author suggests that one way of alleviating this stress is through the introduction of supervision to the educational field. Supervision in other helping professions has been successful in providing support, changing perceptions, managing emotions and coping with stressful situations, and in so doing has improved relationships with others and work performance.
Mortality predictors in liver transplant recipients with recurrent hepatitis C cirrhosis

Abstract: Background/Aim: Recipients of orthotopic liver transplant for hepatitis C (HCV) invariably develop recurrent disease. The risk factors for death and retransplantation following the development of cirrhosis from HCV are unclear. The aim of this study was to identify predictors of survival in liver transplant recipients who develop cirrhosis from recurrent HCV.
Parenting styles, communication and child/adolescent diets and weight status: let's talk about it

Parenting styles have been associated with health-related behaviours in children and adolescents. We present a series of studies. Study 1 investigated parenting styles and parent–child communication styles as cross-sectional predictors of dietary patterns in children, and study 2 as cross-sectional predictors of weight status in adolescents. Data were collected from parents of 382 children aged 2–12 in study 1, and from parents of 72 adolescent children aged 12–18 in study 2. Controlling for confounders, laxness and over-reactivity predicted lower fruit/vegetable and higher non-core food consumption in study 1. Incendiary parent–adolescent communication predicted higher adolescent body mass index in study 2. These findings suggest that different parent–child parenting styles are associated with diet and weight in children and adolescents. Improving ways in which parents communicate with their children may be an important consideration in the development of effective parent-targeted treatment programmes for child diet quality and subsequent adolescent overweight/obesity.
Multistage combined image enhancement technique

Image denoising techniques developed so far, have shown successful noise reduction results. As far as the results are considered, noise contents are only targeted to show that denoising is successful. After denoising most of the time as most pixel values are approximated to their neighboring pixels for denoising, image sharpness and appearance is altered up to considerable extent. Hence after denoising if image enhancement in terms of its resolution is required, then obtained results can show that quality is enhanced and quality is up to nearer to noiseless image even after noise reduction from noisy image. This paper indicates the combined approach of denoising and resolution enhancement followed by existing retinex technique for better presentation quality of image. The results obtained show that quality is better in terms of PSNR.
A novel approach to Deal with Salient Region Detection Problem

While considering the image processing operation estimation of Saliency become important parameter. Now a day several methods are exist for the Saliency estimation but no single method can achieve full accuracy or performance. In this Paperbased on reconsideration about existing methoda clear algorithm is proposed for saliency detection. The phases of algorithm comprises of Decomposition of image into compact and homogeneous elements which possess some spatial relationship corresponding to each other. Then compute the two parameter Uniqueness and Color Spatial Distribution. The parameter allows to preparation of Saliency map which capture the overall area of the Salient Object. In the detail experimental evaluation analysis of the all possible feature done and state out that the proposed method performs well on the all available method. General Terms Image Processing, Computer Vision, Image Retrieval etc.
The MRC Psycholinguistic Database

This paper describes a computerised database of psycholinguistic information. Semantic, syntactic, phonological and orthographic information about some or all of the 98,538 words in the database is accessible, by using a specially-written and very simple programming language. Word-association data are also included in the database. Some examples are given of the use of the database for selection of stimuli to be used in psycholinguistic experimentation or linguistic research.
Playing With Hitler: Downfall and Its Ludic Uptake

A few years after the release of the film Downfall (2004), which portrays Adolf Hitler's final stand and the subsequent fall of the Third Reich, so-called “Downfall parodies” overtook YouTube. The bulk of the parodies riff on a scene that has Hitler holed up in an underground bunker learning of the Russian army's breach of Berlin, recasting Hitler's outcry with subtitles that encompass the most politically consequential topics as well as the most trivial social matters. Given their multiplicity, plus their singular standpoints, the parodies constitute a unique instance in which the value of rhetorical play with Hitler can be examined in terms of representational (and, to be sure, misrepresentational) politics. This essay approaches the image of Hitler as a complex and collective articulation on which numerous representations converge. I argue in particular that, in playing with (texts) of Hitler, Downfall parodies trouble a powerful cultural configuration that operates on a dynamic, and indeed disturbing, interplay of dour historical realism and utter drollery.
Using Online Corpora Databases to Improve ESL Writing

This paper summerizes the technical specifications and design principles of an online search tool we developed to help English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in certain aspects of writing. The problem we identified is the confusion caused by either first language interference (L1 interference) whereby literal translation erroneously combines with English words, or because certain words in English come together without a clear rule governing their combination such as collocations. The tool designed employs databases of authentic English texts (corpora) in addition to texts from trusted websites such as governmental and educational websites.
Analytic Implementations of the Cardinalized Probability Hypothesis Density Filter

The probability hypothesis density (PHD) recursion propagates the posterior intensity of the random finite set (RFS) of targets in time. The cardinalized PHD (CPHD) recursion is a generalization of the PHD recursion, which jointly propagates the posterior intensity and the posterior cardinality distribution. In general, the CPHD recursion is computationally intractable. This paper proposes a closed-form solution to the CPHD recursion under linear Gaussian assumptions on the target dynamics and birth process. Based on this solution, an effective multitarget tracking algorithm is developed. Extensions of the proposed closed-form recursion to accommodate nonlinear models are also given using linearization and unscented transform techniques. The proposed CPHD implementations not only sidestep the need to perform data association found in traditional methods, but also dramatically improve the accuracy of individual state estimates as well as the variance of the estimated number of targets when compared to the standard PHD filter. Our implementations only have a cubic complexity, but simulations suggest favorable performance compared to the standard Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) filter which has a nonpolynomial complexity.
Protein cysteine phosphorylation of SarA/MgrA family transcriptional regulators mediates bacterial virulence and antibiotic resistance

Protein posttranslational modifications (PTMs), particularly phosphorylation, dramatically expand the complexity of cellular regulatory networks. Although cysteine (Cys) in various proteins can be subject to multiple PTMs, its phosphorylation was previously considered a rare PTM with almost no regulatory role assigned. We report here that phosphorylation occurs to a reactive cysteine residue conserved in the staphylococcal accessary regulator A (SarA)/MarR family global transcriptional regulator A (MgrA) family of proteins, and is mediated by the eukaryotic-like kinase-phosphatase pair Stk1-Stp1 in Staphylococcus aureus. Cys-phosphorylation is crucial in regulating virulence determinant production and bacterial resistance to vancomycin. Cell wall-targeting antibiotics, such as vancomycin and ceftriaxone, inhibit the kinase activity of Stk1 and lead to decreased Cys-phosphorylation of SarA and MgrA. An in vivo mouse model of infection established that the absence of stp1, which results in elevated protein Cys-phosphorylation, significantly reduces staphylococcal virulence. Our data indicate that Cys-phosphorylation is a unique PTM that can play crucial roles in bacterial signaling and regulation.
Normative Data for Healthy Middle-Aged and Elderly Performance on the Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination-Revised

Objective:To provide normative data for healthy middle-aged and elderly Brazilians' performance on the Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination-Revised (ACE-R) and to investigate the effects of age, sex, and schooling on test performance. Background:The ACE-R is a brief cognitive battery that assesses various aspects of cognition. Its 5 subdomains (Attention and Orientation, Memory, Verbal Fluency, Language, and Visuospatial Abilities) are commonly impaired in Alzheimer disease or frontotemporal dementia. Methods:We evaluated 144 cognitively healthy volunteers (50% men, 50% women) aged 50 to 93 years, with 4 to 24 years of schooling. We divided the participants into 4 age groups, each of which was then stratified into 3 groups according to years of education. We assessed all participants with the ACE-R, the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale, and the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia. Results:Years of education affected all ACE-R subscores. Age influenced the Verbal Fluency subscore (P<0.001) and the ACE-R total score (P<0.05). Sex affected the Attention and Orientation (P=0.037) and Mini-Mental State Examination subscores (P=0.048), but not the ACE-R total score (P>0.05). Conclusions:The performance of healthy middle-aged and elderly individuals on the ACE-R battery is strongly influenced by education and, to a lesser extent, by age. These findings are of special relevance in countries with populations that have marked heterogeneity in educational levels.
Identification of a Regulatory Acidic Motif as the Determinant of Membrane Localization of TICAM-2

TLR4 triggers LPS signaling through the adaptors Toll/IL-1R domain–containing adaptor molecule (TICAM)-2 (also called TRAM) and TICAM-1 (also called TRIF), together with Toll/IL-1R domain–containing adaptor protein (TIRAP) and MyD88. The MyD88 pathway mediates early phase responses to LPS on the plasma membrane, whereas the TICAM pathway mediates late-phase responses, which induce the production of type I IFN and activation of inflammasomes. TICAM-2 bridges TLR4 and TICAM-1 for LPS signaling in the endosome. Recently, we identified an acidic motif, E87/D88/D89 in TICAM-2, that provides the interaction surfaces between TICAM-2 and TICAM-1. In the present study, we found additional D91/E92 in TICAM-2, conserved across species, that is crucial for TICAM-1 activation. The D91A/E92A mutant protein was distributed largely to the cytosol, despite myristoylation, suggesting its importance for assistance of membrane localization of TICAM-2. An ectopically expressed D91A/E92A mutant per se failed to activate TICAM-1, unlike its wild-type counterpart that forms self-aggregation, but it still retained the ability to pass LPS-mediated IFN regulatory factor (IRF)3 activation. In a TICAM-2 knockout human cell line expressing TLR4/MD-2 with or without CD14, overexpression of the D91A/E92A mutant did not activate IRF3, but upon LPS stimulation, it induced sufficient TLR4-mediated IRF3 activation with high coefficient colocalization. Hence, the D91/E92 motif guides TICAM-2 membrane localization and self-activation for signaling. Our results suggest the presence of two distinct steps underlying endosomal LPS signaling on TICAM-2 for TICAM-1 activation: TICAM-2 assembling in TLR4 and/or TICAM-2 self-activation. D91A/E92A of TICAM-2 selectively associates the TLR4-dependent TICAM-2 assembling, but not cytosolic TICAM-2 self-aggregation, to activate TICAM-1.
Specificity of Postconcussion Symptoms at 3 Months After Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Results From a Comparative Cohort Study

Objective:To assess the specificity of symptoms included in various symptom lists used to identify postconcussion syndrome (PCS), by using follow-up data comparing patients with mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) and control patients during the month prior to injury and 3 months later. Setting:The adult emergency department of a teaching hospital in Bordeaux, France. Participants:A cohort of patients with MTBI (n = 536) and a comparison group with nonhead injuries (n = 946). Main measures:Postconcussion symptoms listed in the Rivermead Postconcussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPQ), the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), and the 10th International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). Results:Analyses were performed comparing symptom occurrence in patients with MTBI and controls, before and 3 months after injury. Eight symptoms were identified as being specific to MTBI: headache, dizziness, intolerance of stress, forgetfulness, poor concentration, taking longer to think, blurred vision, and personality change. Conclusion:The relevance of symptoms proposed to constitute PCS should be reviewed. A more specific definition of PCS would make diagnosis easier and facilitate prevention as well as treatment of patients with MTBI.
Terrorism in the Eyes of the Beholder: The Impact of Causal Attributions on Perceptions of Violence

This research examined the effect of attributions on attitudes toward terrorism. Participants (111 Israeli Jews and 91 Israeli Palestinians) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 violent scenarios (i.e., a Jew shooting a Palestinian or a Palestinian shooting a Jew) and answered questions on attributions and denunciation of violence. Results indicated that Palestinians attributed more external, local, and unstable motivations to perpetrators compared to Jews. Moreover, Palestinians expressed tolerance of violence when the perpetrator was a Palestinian who was perceived to be motivated by external motivations. However, Palestinians also expressed greater support of peace. The discussion examines the role of attributions in ethnic conflict.