Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of Anti‐Brucella Antibodies in Llama (Lama glama)

Abstract Seven llamas were immunized with killed Brucella abortus S1119.3 cells and bled sequentially, resulting in 64 samples. An eighth llama was kept as a negative control. In addition, 299 llama and 2075 alpaca sera, submitted for diagnostic testing, were included. Sera from all llamas were tested by the buffered antigen plate agglutination test, the complement fixation test, and the indirect enzyme immunoassays using smooth and rough lipopolysaccharides. A competitive enzyme immunoassay and fluorescence polarization assays were also performed. The sensitivity values for llama sera ranged from 92.2% to 100% and the specificity values from 89.6% to 100%. No alpacas were immunized. The specificity values for alpaca sera ranged from 94.8% to 100% specific although some sera gave an ‘agglutination like’ reaction after about 10 minutes of incubation. The complement fixation test could not be used, as 31% of the sera were anticomplementary and 4% were false positive.
Children's Birthday Celebrations From the Lived Experiences of Low-Income Rural Mothers

This exploratory study investigates how low-income rural families celebrate children's birthdays, using interview data from 128 mothers residing in five states. Findings from a qualitative content analysis show that the mothers make special efforts to have birthday celebrations as other families do despite their financial constraints. Making the birthday child feel happy and “normal” is the central goal of the birthday celebrations. Many of the mothers desire big parties and expensive gifts, which are socially expected characteristics of birthday celebrations. These mothers adopt various strategies to acquire, create, and allocate resources they need, including reducing expenditures, planning, changing priorities, pooling resources, and receiving assistance from their social networks. However, some mothers cannot celebrate birthdays the way they want because of financial constraints and may feel unsatisfied with their celebrations.
Conceptions of development in higher education institutions

Increased attention to the support of individual, group and institutional development in UK universities has led to the growth of communities of development practitioners. An explanatory model is proposed that characterises communities, locating them in relation to four dimensions: integration, strategy, inclusion and scholarship. The model contains both the benefits of, and a number of potential issues in, particular ways of interpreting and implementing each of the dimensions. The usefulness of the model for analysing development approaches at a theoretical level is considered, together with its potential practical usefulness.
Mitigation Planning

Increasing interest in fostering resilient communities requires a more comprehensive approach to hazard mitigation planning that overcomes the limitations of traditional hazard assessments, notably the failure to explicitly incorporate an analysis of social vulnerability. We statistically analyzed a random sample of 1500 damage assessments of single-family homes collected following Hurricane Ike to assess the contributions of hazard exposure, structural vulnerability, and social vulnerability. The results indicate that hazard exposure, structural characteristics, and socioeconomic characteristics are significant predictors of structural damage. The implications suggest that comprehensive hazard assessments can provide additional insights for mitigation planning and community resiliency.
Spin‐coated epoxy resin embedding technique enables facile SEM/FIB thickness determination of porous metal oxide ultra‐thin films

A facile nonsubjective method was designed to measure porous nonconductive iron oxide film thickness using a combination of a focused ion beam (FIB) and scanning electron microscopy. Iron oxide films are inherently nonconductive and porous, therefore the objective of this investigation was to optimize a methodology that would increase the conductivity of the film to facilitate high resolution imaging with a scanning electron microscopy and to preserve the porous nature of the film that could potentially be damaged by the energy of the FIB. Sputter coating the sample with a thin layer of iridium before creating the cross section with the FIB decreased sample charging and drifting, but differentiating the iron layer from the iridium coating with backscattered electron imaging was not definitive, making accurate assumptions of the delineation between the two metals difficult. Moreover, the porous nature of the film was lost due to beam damage following the FIB process. A thin layer plastication technique was therefore used to embed the porous film in epoxy resin that would provide support for the film during the FIB process. However, the thickness of the resin created using conventional thin layer plastication processing varied across the sample, making the measuring process only possible in areas where the resin layer was at its thinnest. Such variation required navigating the area for ideal milling areas, which increased the subjectivity of the process. We present a method to create uniform thin resin layers, of controlled thickness, that are ideal for quantifying the thickness of porous nonconductive films with FIB/scanning electron microscopy.
Promoting Inclusive Sport and Leisure Participation: Evaluation of the Paralympic Day in the Schools Model

A field study was conducted to evaluate Paralympic Day in the Schools, a school-based visiting consultant model designed to encourage inclusive participation in sport and leisure. Information was sought relative to selected behaviors of respondents and perceptions of inclusive sport and leisure. Middle and high school respondents with and without disabilities (n = 704) were more alike than different relative to demographic and psychosocial variables. A commitment to sport and leisure was reported, and few participation constraints were noted. Respondents with disabilities, however, were less likely to agree that it was important for them to participate in these activities with their peers without disabilities (t=2.09, p < .05). Whereas the model demonstrated potential for facilitating inclusive participation, a lack of positive attitudinal change may be explained by the specific structure, leadership, and social context of the program.
A CMOS Pressure Sensor Tag Chip for Passive Wireless Applications

This paper presents a novel monolithic pressure sensor tag for passive wireless applications. The proposed pressure sensor tag is based on an ultra-high frequency RFID system. The pressure sensor element is implemented in the 0.18 µm CMOS process and the membrane gap is formed by sacrificial layer release, resulting in a sensitivity of 1.2 fF/kPa within the range from 0 to 600 kPa. A three-stage rectifier adopts a chain of auxiliary floating rectifier cells to boost the gate voltage of the switching transistors, resulting in a power conversion efficiency of 53% at the low input power of −20 dBm. The capacitive sensor interface, using phase-locked loop archietcture, employs fully-digital blocks, which results in a 7.4 bits resolution and 0.8 µW power dissipation at 0.8 V supply voltage. The proposed passive wireless pressure sensor tag costs a total 3.2 µW power dissipation.
A New Spatial Database Management System Using an Hyperbolic Tree

Spatial information processing has been a focus of research in the past decade. In spatial databases, data are associated with spatial coordinates and extents, and are retrieved based on spatial proximity. A formidable number of spatial indexes have been proposed to facilitate spatial data retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new scalable, reliable and consistent architecture for spatial database indexing based on hyperbolic topology. This structure uses a strategy that enables to avoid such an exhaustive search that is based on the use of a centralized index. Our architecture is comparable to the well-known Rtree structure, but uses the hyperbolic geometry properties with specific model called “Poincaré disk model”. It uses a distributed balanced Q-degree spatial tree that scales with spatial data objects insertions into potentially any number of storage servers through virtual hyperbolic coordinates taken in hyperbolic space. In other words, we propose a new model based on structured Distributed Hash Table (DHT) in which a user/application of each server is considered as a client node. Thus, a database server can connect to the system through a random database server that already addresses the tree with a free address given by one other database server of the system. Database servers addresses are associated with virtual hyperbolic coordinates computed by the system. In this paper, we consider a 3-regular Hyperbolic-tree in the hyperbolic plane; so, except for the root of this tree, others servers have in the best cases two addresses to give a new one (server’s father uses one address). In our work, we perform simulations and we analyze the practicability and reliability compared with other DHT, such as Chord, Pastry, Kademlia used in other spatial databases. The results show that our spatial architecture based on a hyperbolic tree is viable, consistent and has acceptable performances given the scalability and flexibility it could provide to distributed database applications. Keywords–Spatial Database; Management; Hyperbolic-Tree; Query; Storage.
CARESS Working Paper 99 – 11 Quantity Discounts for Taste – Varying Consumers

When a monopolist asks consumers to choose a particular nonlinear tariff option, consumers do not completely know their type. Their valuations of the good and/or optimal quantity purchases are only fully realized after the optional tariff has been subscribed. In order to characterize the menu of optimal nonlinear tariffs when consumers demands are stochastic, I assume that the distributions of the different components of consumers’ types are log–concave to prove that the convolution distribution of these components is increasing hazard rate. This result, together with very weak assumptions on demand (common to standard nonlinear pricing), ensures that the continuum of optional nonlinear tariffs is characterized by quantity discounts. I test nonparametrically the model using data directly linked to consumer types from the 1986 Kentucky telephone tariff experiment. I show that the distribution of actual calls second order stochastically dominates the distribution of expected calls, which fully supports the suggested type–varying theoretical model. Finally, I analyze possible welfare effects of the introduction of optional tariffs and their relative expected profitability using the empirical distribution of consumer types in two local exchanges with differentiated calling patterns. The evidence suggests that a menu of optional two–part tariffs dominate any other pricing strategy. JEL: D42, D82, L96.
Detection and Classification of Land Crude Oil Spills Using Color Segmentation and Texture Analysis

Crude oil spills have negative consequences on the economy, environment, health and society in which they occur, and the severity of the consequences depends on how quickly these spills are detected once they begin. Several methods have been employed for spill detection, including real time remote surveillance by flying aircrafts with surveillance teams. Other methods employ various sensors, including visible sensors. This paper presents an algorithm to automatically detect the presence of crude oil spills in images acquired using visible light sensors. Images of crude oil spills used in the development of the algorithm were obtained from the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) Nigeria website The major steps of the detection algorithm are image preprocessing, crude oil color segmentation, sky elimination segmentation, Region of Interest (ROI) extraction, ROI texture feature extraction, and ROI texture feature analysis and classification. The algorithm was developed using 25 sample images containing crude oil spills and demonstrated a sensitivity of 92% and an FPI of 1.43. The algorithm was further tested on a set of 56 case images and demonstrated a sensitivity of 82% and an FPI of 0.66. This algorithm can be incorporated into spill detection systems that utilize visible sensors for early detection of crude oil spills.
iPersea : The Improved Persea with Sybil Detection Mechanism

P2P systems are highly susceptible to Sybil attacks, in which an attacker creates a large number of identities and uses them to control a substantial fraction of the system. Persea is the most recent approach towards designing a social network based Sybil-resistant DHT. Unlike prior Sybil-resistant P2P systems based on social networks, Persea does not rely on two key assumptions: (i) that the social network is fast mixing, and (ii) that there is a small ratio of attack edges to honest peers. Both assumptions have been shown to be unreliable in real social networks. The hierarchical distribution of node IDs in Persea confines a large attacker botnet to a considerably smaller region of the ID space than in a normal P2P system and its replication mechanism lets a peer to retrieve the desired results even if a given region is occupied by attackers. However, Persea system suffers from certain limitations, since it cannot handle the scenario, where the malicious target returns an incorrect result instead of just ignoring the lookup request. In this paper, we address this major limitation of Persea through a Sybil detection mechanism built on top of Persea system, which accommodates inspection lookup, a specially designed lookup scheme to detect the Sybil nodes based on their responses to the lookup query. We design a scheme to filter those detected Sybils to ensure the participation of honest nodes on the lookup path during regular DHT lookup. Since the malicious nodes are opt-out from the lookup path in our system, they cannot return any incorrect result during regular lookup. We evaluate our system in simulations with social network datasets and the results show that catster, the largest network in our simulation with 149700 nodes and 5449275 edges, gains 100% lookup success rate, even when the number of attack edges is equal to the number of benign peers in the network.
A Bayesian missing value estimation method for gene expression profile data

MOTIVATION Gene expression profile analyses have been used in numerous studies covering a broad range of areas in biology. When unreliable measurements are excluded, missing values are introduced in gene expression profiles. Although existing multivariate analysis methods have difficulty with the treatment of missing values, this problem has received little attention. There are many options for dealing with missing values, each of which reaches drastically different results. Ignoring missing values is the simplest method and is frequently applied. This approach, however, has its flaws. In this article, we propose an estimation method for missing values, which is based on Bayesian principal component analysis (BPCA). Although the methodology that a probabilistic model and latent variables are estimated simultaneously within the framework of Bayes inference is not new in principle, actual BPCA implementation that makes it possible to estimate arbitrary missing variables is new in terms of statistical methodology. RESULTS When applied to DNA microarray data from various experimental conditions, the BPCA method exhibited markedly better estimation ability than other recently proposed methods, such as singular value decomposition and K-nearest neighbors. While the estimation performance of existing methods depends on model parameters whose determination is difficult, our BPCA method is free from this difficulty. Accordingly, the BPCA method provides accurate and convenient estimation for missing values. AVAILABILITY The software is available at http://hawaii.aist-nara.ac. jp/~shige-o/tools/.
Area Efficient Hardware Architecture for Implicitly-Defined Complex Events Processing

Complex Event Processing refers to different mechanisms such as event correlation and event patterns detection for processing multiple events with the goal of inferring the complicated ones. While a simple event may provide trivial information, combining several of them can help in deriving more useful information. Detecting the complex events requires huge processing capability. The existing hardware designs for complex events detection all target explicitly defined events. However, there are many scenarios that some of the events may not be explicitly known ahead of detection. To address this challenge, in this work we propose a general complex event detection methodology which is capable to deal with implicitly-defined events. The concepts of dynamic state machine, and context switching mechanism are introduced and an area-efficient iterative architecture is developed on FPGA to detect the implicitly-defined complex events. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed architecture.
Redshirting and Early Retention: Who Gets the "Gift of Time" and What Are Its Outcomes?

This paper describes the results of a study that examined the prevalence of the delay of kindergarten entry, also known as academic redshirting. Utilizing a representative sample of Wisconsin school district, the authors examined the school records of more than 8,000 students to depict patterns of school entry, promotion, subsequent special services, and student achievement. Results indicate that approximately 7% of the sample bad delayed school entry and that those children were primarily boys with birthdates immediately before the entrance cutoff. Redshirts and retainees are more likely to receive special education services than their peers who enter and are promoted on time. The achievement of redshirts is comparable to their normally entered peers; whereas retainees perform at lower levels. Although the interpretations of these results depend on the perspective taken on extra-year interventions, they can be read in the context of other literature on extra-year interventions. We suggest next steps for the development of empirical knowledge on redshirting and for evaluating the efficacy of this practice. Given its lack of empirical efficacy, we do not support widespread use of this strategy for increasing readiness.
Vision-Based Vehicle Surveillance and Parking Lot Management Using Multiple Cameras

This paper proposes a vision-based vehicle surveillance system for parking lot management in outdoor environments. Due to the limited field of view of camera, this system uses multiple cameras for monitoring a wide parking area. Then, an affine transformation is used for merging the scenes obtained from these multiple cameras. Two major components are included, i.e., vehicle counting and parking lot management. For the first one, this paper integrates three features, i.e., color, position, and motion together for well tracking vehicles across different cameras. Thus, even though vehicles are occluded together, they still can be well tracked and identified across different cameras and under different lighting changes. For the second one, we propose a model-based approach to model the color changes of parking ground for determining whether a parking space is vacant. Due to the perspective effects, the visibility of a parking space is often affected by the vehicle parking on its neighborhood. To tackle this problem, two geometrical models (ellipses and grids) are proposed for well representing a parking space. Then, with different weights, a hybrid scheme is then constructed for well determining whether a parking space is vacant. The experimental results reveal that our system works well and accurately under different lighting and occlusion conditions.
Paragons, Pariahs, and Pirates: A Spectrum-Based Theory of Enterprise

Americans have traditionally treated white-collar crime and organized crime as if they were two independent phenomena, but there is a growing awareness that they may not be that distinct and that a better appreciation of both problems would be possible if we had a single conceptual perspective through which to view them. Our alien conspiracy notions about organized crime are a major barrier to that understanding; they proceed from five underlying assumptions about the differences between business and crime. If instead of those differences we recognize a common thread of enterprise, and understand that it takes place across a spectrum includ ing legal and criminal businesses, then a single, unifying perspective can take shape. The distinctions along that spectrum are exemplified by three kinds of businessmen: the paragon, the pariah, and the pirate.
Perceived physical appearance and adjustment of adolescents with congenital/acquired limb deficiencies: A path-analytic model

Investigated perceived physical appearance as a hypothesized predictor of psychological adjustment in 44 adolescents with congenital or acquired limb deficiencies within a path-analytic conceptual model. Standardized assessment instruments measuring perceived physical appearance, depressive symptoms, trait anxiety, general self-esteem, perceived scholastic competence, athletic competence, social acceptance, and close friendship were completed by the adolescents. In support of the a priori conceptual model, path-analysis findings indicate that the effect of perceived physical appearance on psychological distress is mediated by general self-esteem. Exploratory analysis suggests that the effect of perceived physical appearance on general self-esteem may be attenuated by potentially modifiable perceived competence/adequacy domains. Strategies for enhancing adaptation within the conceptual model are discussed.
Evaluating location of memory controller in on-chip communication networks

Rapid increasing in the number of cores in a chip demands more memory bandwidth. Memory request pass hops to reach memory controllers. Therefore, memory controllers can be one of the main sources of contention on the chip. In this paper, first, we demonstrate that fewer channels load in the network does not always imply less average latency, thus, we consider a hierarchical approach in placing memory controllers to reduce latency by 20%. Second, we illustrate how by increasing the number of memory controllers the average latency and energy consumption can be significantly reduced. In addition, it is shown how for a constant number of memory controllers, their appropriate placement and suitable routing algorithms can reduce the latency. We further discuss the correlation between location of memory controllers and routing algorithms, and propose a heuristic algorithm for placement of memory controllers to reduce their space exploration.