Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A particle swarm optimization-threshold accepting hybrid algorithm for unconstrained optimization

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid metaheuristic algorithm, which integrates a Threshold Accepting algorithm (TA) with a traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. We used the TA as a catalyst in speeding up convergence of PSO towards the optimal solution. In this hybrid, at the end of every iteration of PSO, the TA is invoked probabilistically to refine the worst particle that lags in the race of finding the solution for that iteration. Consequently the worst particle will be refined in the next iteration. The robustness of the proposed approach has been tested on 34 unconstrained optimization problems taken from the literature. The proposed hybrid demonstrates superior preference in terms of functional evaluations and success rate for 30 simulations conducted.
Component-based Content Development for E-Learning Systems

Following the definitions of Rosenberg (Rosenberg, 2001), e-learning refers to the use of internet technologies to deliver a broad array of solutions to support self-directed, open and distance education. But e-learning is more than delivering available content by technical media, it also encompasses new didactical concepts. After the first hype in the mid 1990s it became clear, that the requirements of e-learning systems (exchangeable and reusable learning units, system independent courses) cannot be achieved by just using hyperlink-technology. Various companies and organisations engage in the development of standards and concepts to assure that e-learning resources will be identified easily, are reusable and portable among different platforms. While component reuse is state of the art in software development, it is still a dream of course-authors to write content only once and to reuse it wherever and whenever needed. To support this kind of modularisation, standards (cf. SCORM or LOM, see http://www.adlnet.org and http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12) are evolving. The general goal is to generate basic learning items (also called e-learning objects, shareable content units, or simply components) that are interoperable, reusable, durable, extendable and, manageable.
Self-induced emotions as alternative paradigm for driving brain–computer interfaces

Abstract A Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) uses measurements of the voluntary brain activity for driving a communication system; it requires the activation of mental tasks. In the last few years, a new paradigm of activation has been used, consisting in the autonomous brain activation through self-induced emotions, remembered on autobiographical basis. In the present paper, such paradigm is implemented and the resulting BCI system is described, from the classification strategy to the graphic user interface necessary for synchronising mental tasks and collecting EEG signals derived by emotions. Moreover, the proposed BCI is used for collecting and classifying signals, from 10 healthy subjects, of two different emotional states: the disgust produced by remembering a bad odour and the good sensation produced by remembering the odour of a good fragrance, with respect to relax. The classifications are performed in a binary mode, by recognising disgust from relax and good sensation from relax, yielding an accuracy greater than 85%.
Energy Efficient Scheduling of Servers with Multi-Sleep Modes for Cloud Data Center

In a cloud data center, servers are always over-provisioned in an active state to meet the peak demand of requests, wasting a large amount of energy as a result. One of the options to reduce the power consumption of data centers is to reduce the number of idle servers, or to switch idle servers into low-power sleep states. However, the servers cannot process the requests immediately when transiting to an active state. There are delays and extra power consumption during the transition. In this paper, we consider using state-of-the-art servers with multi-sleep modes. The sleep modes with smaller transition delays usually consume more power when sleeping. Given the arrival of incoming requests, our goal is to minimize the energy consumption of a cloud data center by the scheduling of servers with multi-sleep modes. We formulate this problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem during the whole period of time with millions of decision variables. To solve this problem, we divide it into sub-problems with smaller periods while ensuring the feasibility and transition continuity for each sub-problem through a Backtrack-and-Update technique. We also consider using DVFS to adjust the frequency of active servers, so that the requests can be processed with the least power. Our simulations are based on traces from real world. Experiments show that our method can significantly reduce the power consumption for a cloud data center.
The Student-Physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education.

Anyone interested in teaching medical students should read "The Student-Physician. " He will have to be very much interested in it to read the whole thing, because at least parts of it are written as though the writer were paid a bonus for superfluous words. Here is an example: "But whatever the consequences of these differences and these remain to be identified, it can be seen that the criteria and procedures for admission not only have the manifest function of selecting individuals more or less suited to the role of physician but also the indirect and latent function of producing a distinctive social environment for each student. In other words, the procedures and criteria of selection not only involve the psychological consideration of the personal qualities of each individual student but also the sociological consideration of the composition of the total student body. " Far too many of the words are padding
Liver failure after partial hepatic resection: pathophysiology,risk factors and treatment

Liver failure is a dreaded and often fatal complication that sometimes follows partial hepatectomy.This article reviews the pathophysiology, risk factors and treatment of post-resectional liver failure (PLF). An inadequate quantity or quality of residual liver mass are the key event in its pathogenesis. The major risk factors are small remnant liver volume (RLV), excessive blood loss or transfusion, ICGR15 of greater than 20%, and F4/F3 liver cirrhosis. It is essential to identify these risk factors during the pre-operative assessment. Preventive measures should be applied whenever possible as options of curative treatment for PLF are limited. Artificial liver and/or liver transplantation are the important treatment alternatives for hepatic failure after hepatectomy. Key words: Hepatectomy; Hepatic failure; Treatment
Methods to optimize whole body surveys with the C-PET camera

An optimized FDG PET survey of the human body should acquire data near peak camera performance. This is achieved by a knowledge of patient activity distributions and tumor uptake as well as camera performance characteristics. The C-PET camera has been used to perform both patient-matched phantom and clinical measurements. Phantom measurements of camera resolution, countrates, noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast have been performed as a function of activity and scan duration. Measurements of body countrates and normal organ, whole body and tumor activity have been performed on patient data as a function of dose, uptake period and volume in the FOV. Peak NEC is reached at a singles countrate of 5 Mcps. However, image nonuniformity, contrast and SNR are optimal at 3 Mcps. At this countrate camera resolution is not significantly degraded while measured SNR and contrast for a torso-sized phantom are near their optimal values. Noise for head and leg matched phantoms are lower due to the reduced attenuation and scatter for these objects. Emission scan durations of 4 mins for the head and torso and 2 min for the legs result in only moderately reduced SNR compared to 10 min scans. Torso SUVs are constant across patients and uptake periods. Normal lung, liver, heart and kidney uptake remain constant to /spl plusmn/10% between 70 and 120 mins post-injection, while tumor uptakes increase by 30% over this period, showing the value of delayed imaging. In conclusion, an optimized FDG PET survey requires injection of 2.6 MBq/kg of /sup 18/F, a 60 minute uptake period and survey from knees to head (140 cm axially) within 60 minutes. In this way overall activities, countrates and SNRs are optimized. At the same time tumor uptakes are sampled near their peak while background activities are saturated or declining.
Syntactic and Semantic Analysis and Visualization of Unstructured English Texts

People have complex thoughts, and they often express their thoughts with complex sentences using natural languages. This complexity may facilitate efficient communications among the audience with the same knowledge base. But on the other hand, for a different or new audience this composition becomes cumbersome to understand and analyze. Analysis of such compositions using syntactic or semantic measures is a challenging job and defines the base step for natural language processing. In this dissertation I explore and propose a number of new techniques to analyze and visualize the syntactic and semantic patterns of unstructured English texts. The syntactic analysis is done through a proposed visualization technique which categorizes and compares different English compositions based on their different reading complexity metrics. For the semantic analysis I use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to analyze the hidden patterns in complex compositions. I have used this technique to analyze comments from a social visualization web site for detecting the irrelevant ones (e.g., spam). The patterns of collaborations are also studied through statistical analysis. Word sense disambiguation is used to figure out the correct sense of a word in a sentence or composition. Using textual similarity measure, based on the different word similarity measures and word sense disambiguation on collaborative text snippets from social collaborative environment, reveals a direction to untie the knots of complex hidden patterns of collaboration. INDEX WORDS: Readability, Complexity depth of field, Grammatical structure, Visualization, Chernoff faces, Web mining, Web information retrieval, Online social visualization, Recommendation, Composition style, Matrix, Latent Semantic Analysis, Online collaborative web site, Social media, Co-occurrence frequency, Pattern searching, Statistical analysis, Categorical data, Semantic similarity, Word sense disambiguation, Natural text, Natural Language, Social network. SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC ANALYSIS AND VISUALIZATION OF UNSTRUCTURED ENGLISH TEXTS
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

Kurt Vonnegut, described by Graham Greene as "One of the best living American writers", is equally well known as an essayist and commentator on American society as he is as a novelist. This volume brings together the best of his shorter work - essays, stories, speeches, letters, articles and autobiography.
Variations on the act of listening: Twenty-one orchestra audience development events in light of John Dewwy's 'art as experience' metaphor

This thesis is a contribution to a critical debate about the role and impact of audience development theory on the organisation of orchestra concerts. It suggests that the conventional analysis of orchestra audience development, which is influenced by a marketing management tradition that favours the metaphor of 'customer comfort', is too reductive and that it gives the listening subject too limited a role in the process of music. In reaction to this, John Dewey's idea of 'art as experience' is introduced to open up the debate and explore the underlying assumptions of the prevailing arts marketing model of audience development. The thesis calls for a reform of the dominant audience development paradigm and the 'toolbox' conception of arts management. This thesis is based on the pragmatist aesthetic reading and interpretation of 21 orchestra events, concerts and educational performances, involving eight symphony orchestras. The orchestras are: the Berlin Philharmonic, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. The 21 musical events were chosen on the basis of their diversity and representation of the variety of audience development activity that the symphony orchestras promote. Furthermore, the events have critical potential since they raise issues that are important to the understanding of what changes to the concert structure might mean in terms of a different understanding of audience development. The events are realisations of the fact that there are various ways of perceiving music through performance and listening. From the pragmatist perspective it is important that these variations on the classical concert form are not viewed or constructed as ideal, or more valuable in some abstract sense, but rather as alterations that create different ways of perceiving music for both performers and listeners. In conclusion, I suggest that audience development is a much broader subject than is usually recognised and far too important for the future of the art form to be theorised solely in terms of dominant marketing conceptions. A possible re-definition is proposed in which 'audience development' is understood in a more musical and pragmatist sense of a 'variation on the act of listening'.
Negation handling in sentiment classification using rule-based adapted from Indonesian language syntactic for Indonesian text in Twitter

The presence of the word negation is able to change the polarity of the text if it is not handled properly it will affect the performance of the sentiment classification. Negation words in Indonesian are ‘tidak’, ‘bukan’, ‘belum’ and ‘jangan’. Also, there is a conjunction word that able to reverse the actual values, as the word ‘tetapi’, or ‘tapi’. Unigram has shortcomings in dealing with the existence of negation because it treats negation word and the negated words as separate words. A general approach for negation handling in English text gives the tag ‘NEG_’ for following words after negation until the first punctuation. But this may gives the tag to un-negated, and this approach does not handle negation and conjunction in one sentences. The rule-based method to determine what words negated by adapting the rules of Indonesian language syntactic of negation to determine the scope of negation was proposed in this study. With adapting syntactic rules and tagging “NEG_” using SVM classifier with RBF kernel has better performance results than the other experiments. Considering the average F1-score value, the performance of this proposed method can be improved against baseline equal to 1.79% (baseline without negation handling) and 5% (baseline with existing negation handling) for a dataset that all tweets contain negation words. And also for the second dataset that has the various number of negation words in document tweet. It can be improved against baseline at 2.69% (without negation handling) and 3.17% (with existing negation handling).
Identificación de CHIP y Ataxina-2 como modificadores de la toxicidad inducida por la Ataxina-1 utilizando un modelo de ataxia espinocerebelosa tipo 1 en "Drosophila melanogaster"

Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) are a genetically heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders sharing atrophy of the cerebellum as a common feature. SCA1 and SCA2 are two ataxias caused by expansion of polyglutamine tracts in Ataxin-1 and Ataxin-2 respectively, two proteins otherwise unrelated. Here we use a Drosophila model of SCA1 to unveil molecular mechanisms linking Ataxin-1 with Ataxin-2 during SCA1 pathogenesis. We show that wild-type Ataxin-2 is a major genetic modifier of expanded Ataxin-1 (Ataxin-1[82Q]) toxicity. Increased Ataxin-2 levels enhance, and more importantly, decreased Ataxin-2 levels suppress Ataxin-1[82Q]-induced neurodegeneration, thereby ruling out a pathogenic mechanism by depletion of Ataxin-2. Although Ataxin-2 normally accumulates in the cytoplasm and Ataxin-1[82Q] is nuclear, we show that both proteins physically interact. Furthermore, we show that expanded Ataxin-1 induces intranuclear accumulation of Ataxin-2 in both Drosophila and SCA1 postmortem neurons. These observations suggest that nuclear accumulation of Ataxin-2 contributes to expanded Ataxin-1-induced toxicity. We tested this hypothesis engineering Ataxin-2 transgenes with nuclear localization and nuclear export signals. We find that NLS-Ataxin-2, but not NES-Ataxin-2, mimics the neurodegenerative phenotypes caused by Ataxin-1[82Q] including repression of the proneural factor Senseless. Altogether, these findings reveal a previously unknown functional link between neurodegenerative disorders with common clinical features but different etiology.
A Review Paper on Overly Architecture for throughput Optimal Multipath Routing

: Bequest networks are frequently planned to operate with plain single-path routing, like the shortest path, which is known to be throughput suboptimal. On the other hand, earlier proposed throughput optimal policies (i.e., backpressure) need each machine in the network to make active routing decisions. We study overlay architecture for dynamic routing; only a subset of devices (overlay nodes) require to make the dynamic routing decisions. We conclude the necessary compilation of nodes that must bifurcate traffic for achieving the utmost multi-commodity network throughput. We relate our best possible node assignment algorithm to a number of graphs and the consequences demonstrate that a small fraction of overlay nodes is sufficient for achieving highest throughput. Finally, we propose a threshold-based policy (BP-T) and a heuristic policy (OBP), which animatedly control traffic bifurcations at overlay nodes. Policy BP-T is proved to make the most of throughput for the case when underlay paths do not partly cover. In all considered simulation scenarios, OBP not only achieves full throughput but also reduces delay in contrast to the throughput optimal backpressure routing.
Decision trees for phonological rules in continuous speech

The authors present an automatic method for modeling phonological variation using decision trees. For each phone they construct a decision tree that specifies the acoustic realization of the phone as a function of the context in which it appears. Several-thousand sentences from a natural language corpus spoken by several speakers are used to construct these decision trees. Experimental results on a 5000-word vocabulary natural language speech recognition task are presented. <<ETX>>
Effect of Hydrogen Content and Bonding Environment on Mechanical Properties of Hydrogenated Silicon Films Deposited by High-Frequency PECVD Process

The mechanical properties of hydrogenated silicon thin films deposited using high-frequency PECVD process were studied, which certainly have importance for optoelectronic devices particularly for getting stability and long operating lifetime in harsh conditions. Nanoindentation technique was used to measure the load versus displacement curves, hardness (H), elastic modulus (E), plastic resistance parameter (H/E), elastic recovery (ER), and plastic deformation energy (𝑈𝑟), while laser scanning stress measurement setup was used to measure the intrinsic stress of these films. The concentration of bonded hydrogen in these films was found in the range of 3.6 to 6.5 at. % which was estimated using integrated intensity of IR absorption peak near 640 cm−1. Dependence of mechanical properties of these films on hydrogen content and bonding environment has been investigated. The film containing minimum hydrogen content (3.6%) shows the maximum elastic recovery (52.76%) and minimum plastic deformation energy (3.95×10−10 J). Surface roughness measured by AFM was found to decrease with the increase in hydrogen content in the film. The dependency of stress on the plasma frequency and applied power has also been discussed.
Visually Immersive Theater with CaveUT 2.5

CaveUT is a set of tools and methods which modifies the game UT2004 to display a single virtual world across multiple monitors or projections. With CaveUT the educator can arrange these views in any configuration around the user/audience, usually to produce a single panoramic view of the virtual world. CaveUT is free and open source, and UT2004 is cheap and runs on standard Windows PCs. CaveUT has been available since 2001, used in a variety of educational projects. In colleges, CaveUT has been used for teaching the basics of VR technology, perception, and 3D representations. In museums, hospitals, and research settings CaveUT supports interactive VR environments. The new CaveUT (version 2.5) offers greatly improved separation of movement and selection/firing, control of viewpoint via a UDP connection, easier setup, support for multi-projector dome displays, and other new features. It is available to the public at http://publicvr.org/CaveUT.
Torque-based steering assistance for collision avoidance during lane changes

Lane changing is a cognitively demanding task that drivers perform frequently while driving on highways at high speed. This paper presents a predictive control framework which prevents collisions during lane change maneuvers. Approaches based on steering angle control are commonly used in the literature. These approaches may inadvertently take away the ultimate control authority of the driver. Also they involve a separate lower level steering control that requires subjective and complex steering feel calibration and steering torque constraints. The method proposed in this paper is based on a corrective torque formulation which incorporates the steering dynamics and driver response in the model. We tested the proposed controller in an experimental vehicle with a human driver. The results demonstrate that the proposed method avoids collision threats with minimum intervention.
Targeted Path Scanning: An Emerging Method for Recording Fast Changing Network Dynamics across Large Distances

Attention is being increasingly focused on the dynamical behavior of large networks of neurons and astrocytes and the changes in these dynamics that occur during the progression of diseases like epilepsy. Recording from large numbers of identified cell types has been traditionally difficult, but the advent of fluorescent indicators capable of detecting changes in the internal calcium levels of cells has led to the ability to visually record the activity of large numbers of cells. However, for most imaging techniques the temporal resolution is sharply limited by the time it takes lasers to traverse the typical raster scan. As network dynamics can evolve quite rapidly, this is a serious limitation. The present paper describes the Targeted Path Scan technique, which dramatically increases the scanning frequency by allowing the user selection of trajectories through cells of interest. TPS is discussed in the context of a study of altered network dynamics in a common rat model of epilepsy. In this study, traveling waves of calcium transients that were frequently encountered in astrocytes imaged in brain slices obtained from control rats were dramatically reduced in astrocytes imaged in brain slices obtained from rats that had experienced status epilepticus. The speed of these traveling waves would have made them impossible to identify using traditional scanning techniques.