Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Light‐Controlled, High‐Resolution Patterning of Living Engineered Bacteria Onto Textiles, Ceramics, and Plastic

Living cells can impart materials with advanced functions, such as sense‐and‐respond, chemical production, toxin remediation, energy generation and storage, self‐destruction, and self‐healing. Here, an approach is presented to use light to pattern Escherichia coli onto diverse materials by controlling the expression of curli fibers that anchor the formation of a biofilm. Different colors of light are used to express variants of the structural protein CsgA fused to different peptide tags. By projecting color images onto the material containing bacteria, this system can be used to pattern the growth of composite materials, including layers of protein and gold nanoparticles. This is used to pattern cells onto materials used for 3D printing, plastics (polystyrene), and textiles (cotton). Further, the adhered cells are demonstrated to respond to sensory information, including small molecules (IPTG and DAPG) and light from light‐emitting diodes. This work advances the capacity to engineer responsive living materials in which cells provide diverse functionality.
Modeling and control of a low speed flywheel driving system for pulsed load mitigation in DC distribution networks

This paper introduces the modeling and an improved controller design for a driving system for a DC Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS). The Driving system is based on a Bi-directional Buck-Boost converter, the accurate modeling of the system including the parasitic resistances for all the components is carried out. In this model, the equivalent circuit of the machine is integrated in the converter state space model for improved accuracy and controllability. The system has two operating modes; when the machine is charging, the converter is operated in the buck mode. A controller is designed to regulate the charging rate through controlling the machine terminal voltage. In the discharging mode, the converter is operating in the boost mode, a current controller is taking over to control the injected current from the machine to the DC bus. The detailed design of both control loops is explained. Simulation results show the accuracy of the derived model and the enhanced performance of the FESS. Further, it is shown that the reversal of power flow direction is done seamlessly.
Relationship of combined frequency of hypertension and diabetes mellitus to socioeconomic status: A comparative study in Anambra State of Nigeria

There are conflicting reports on the relationship between hypertension and diabetes mellitus (DM) with socioeconomic status. This study explores this relationship individually and jointly. This is a cross sectional comparative study. Adults that participated in medical outreach organized for high and low socioeconomic status (SES) were tested for hypertension and DM. Mean age in years for high and low SES was 58.69 (± 10.26) and 57.77 (± 15.54), respectively. Widows were significantly more than widowers (P < 0.001). Frequency of hypertension in middle age (45 to 64 years in high and low SES) was 58.0 and 71.9%, respectively (P = 0.009). Frequency of DM was 19.2 and 7.3% in high and low SES respectively (P < 0.001). Combined frequency of hypertension and DM was 14.0 and 6.0% in high and low SES respectively (P = 0.002) and 13.8 and 5.9% in the middle age group in high and low SES respectively (P = 0.034). Severity of hypertension was more in low than high SES (P = 0.001). The prevalence and severity of hypertension among middle age in low SES is higher than in high SES. Combined frequency of hypertension and DM is more in high than low SES. Key words: Socioeconomic status, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, combined frequency.
Roadside verges and cemeteries: Comparative analysis of anthropogenic orchid habitats in the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract Several important habitats have become threatened in the last few centuries in the Mediterranean Basin due to major changes adopted in land‐use practices. The consequent loss of natural and seminatural orchid habitats leads to the appreciation of small anthropogenic habitats, such as cemeteries and roadside verges. Colonization of cemeteries and roadside verges by orchids has long been known, but no study to date compared the suitability of these two anthropogenic habitats for orchids. Therefore, in this paper our aim was to survey cemeteries and roadside verges and to compare these two habitats regarding their role in conserving Mediterranean terrestrial orchids. We conducted field surveys in three Mediterranean islands, Cyprus, Crete, and Lesbos, where both cemeteries and roadside verges were sampled on a geographically representative scale. We found a total of almost 7,000 orchid individuals, belonging to 77 species in the two anthropogenic habitat types. Roadside verges hosted significantly more individuals than cemeteries in Crete and Lesbos, and significantly more species across all three islands. Our results suggest that although cemeteries have a great potential conservation value in other parts of the world, intensive maintenance practices that characterized cemeteries in these three islands renders them unable to sustain valuable plant communities. On the other hand, roadside verges play a prominent role in the conservation of Mediterranean orchids in Cyprus and Greece. The pioneer status of roadside verges facilitates their fast colonization, while roads serve as ecological corridors in fragmented landscapes.
Co-constructing Writing Pedagogy with Two-and-Three-Year-Old Children

Research over the past four decades confirms that by the age of three years old children already understand some of the functions and purpose of writing. Evidence also suggests that some children are capable of articulating this understanding. From a developmental perspective it therefore makes sense that the literate performances of three-year-old children have their roots in much earlier writing experiences. Building on this premise, and further evidence to suggest that children as young as two years old are beginning to understand the symbolic nature of print, the research reported in this dissertation focused on discourse of writing, through recording children’s and adults’ conceptualisations, the pedagogical approaches of the children’s pre-school setting, and approaches to writing in the home environment. Foucaultian theory of truth and shifting power relations provided a framework for understanding and interpreting the discourse of writing that emerged. The study investigated the writing practices of nine families and their two-year-old and-three-year old children in an early years pre-school setting in the east of England. The first aim of the research was to develop a clear understanding of what children of this age already know about the functions and purpose of writing. To this end the children themselves contributed to the process of discovery, through revealing what they knew about writing and how they communicated through this medium. Second, the research sought to develop joint understanding amongst parents and the early years setting of how two-year-old and-three-year-old children express themselves through writing. The research found that most adults did not perceive that the children could write, a perception that was rooted in the conceptualisation of writing as necessarily formed of conventional text, and a skill to be developed and taught at a later age. In direct contrast to this the research found that children were not only writing, but that they were writing despite adult conceptualisations. The participant children were engaging in their own discourse of writing, driven by self-belief in what they were able to achieve through using writing as a medium for recording and sharing information. It is argued that if children as young as two years old perceive themselves to be writing, a responsive writing pedagogy can only be effective following a reframing of how writing is understood in relation to children in early years’ settings and homes.
Robust estimation of time-of-flight shear wave speed using a Radon sum transformation

Time-of-flight methods allow quantitative measurement of shear wave speed (SWS) from ultrasonically tracked displacements following impulsive excitation in tissue. However, application of these methods to in vivo data is challenging due to the presence of gross outlier data resulting from sources such as physiological motion or spatial in homogeneities. This paper describes a new method for estimating SWS by considering a solution space of trajectories and evaluating each trajectory using a metric that characterizes wave motion along the entire trajectory. The metric used here is found by summing displacement data along the trajectory as in the calculation of projection data in the Radon transformation. The algorithm is evaluated using data acquired in calibrated phantoms and in vivo human liver. Results are compared to SWS estimates using a random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm described by Wang, et al. Good agreement is found between the Radon sum and RANSAC SWS estimates with a correlation coefficient of greater than 0.99 for phantom data and 0.91 for in vivo liver data. The Radon sum transformation is suitable for use in situations requiring realtime feedback and is comparably robust to the RANSAC algorithm with respect to outlier data.
Binary Mutation Analysis of Tests Using Reassembleable Disassembly

—Good tests are important in software development, but it can be hard to tell whether tests will reveal future faults that are themselves unknown. Mutation analysis, which checks whether tests reveal inserted changes in a program, is a strong measure of test suite adequacy, but common source-or compiler-level approaches to mutation testing are not applicable to software available only in binary form. We explore mutation analysis as an application of the reassembleable disassembly approach to binary rewriting, building a tool for x86 binaries on top of the previously-developed Uroboros system, and apply it to the C benchmarks from SPEC CPU 2006 and to ﬁve examples of embedded control software. The results demonstrate that our approach works effectively across these software domains: as expected, tests designed for performance benchmarking reveal fewer mutants than tests generated to achieve high code coverage, but mutation scores indicate differences in test origins and features such as code size and fault-tolerance. Our binary-level tool also achieves comparable results to source-level mutation analysis despite supporting a more limited set of mutation operators. More generally we also argue that our experience shows how reassembleable disassembly is a valuable approach for constructing novel binary rewriting tools.
A Survey of Modern Cryptography Techniques for Digital Content Protection

This paper presents is to introduce the concept of Cryptography, History of Cryptography , Modern Cryptography and analyze how digital content for mobile phones can be protected in an effective way in the context of OMA-DRM. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) provides specifications for content distribution for mobile phones. White-box cryptography (WBC), which focuses on software implementations of cryptographic primitives (such as encryption schemes). Traditionally, cryptographic primitives are designed to protect data and keys against black-box attacks. In such a context, an adversary has knowledge of the algorithm and may examine various inputs to and outputs from the system, but has no access to the internal details of the execution of a key instantiated primitive. In contrast, the goal of white-box implementations is to provide a degree of robustness against attacks from the execution environment. In such an environment, an adversary has unrestricted access to the software implementation. We will analyze the problem in the white-box attack context where the attacker has total visibility into software implementation and execution. From these techniques we choose to focus on a relatively new technique: white-box cryptography. We can apply this technique to AES keys, by hiding the AES key in lookup tables. This prevents an attacker from finding secret keys in the implementation. The result is a functionally equivalent program in which the key is no longer visible. However, white-box cryptography increases the amount of storage space for the white-box tables, and it causes a performance slowdown. An application of white-box cryptography in which we split the set of white-box tables into a dynamic part and a static part. Each client has a unique set of static tables which can only be used in combination with a unique set of dynamic tables which are transmitted to him. The result is that whenever a key needs to be updated, no longer the whole set of tables needs to be updated.
Towards Source Code Clone Search via Information Retrieval

—Finding both pattern and content similarities in source code constitutes the core of several research domains such as plagiarism and clone detection. Recently, code clone search as a new research branch has emerged aiming to provide similarity search functionality for code fragments. Scalability, short response time, and the ability to search for Type-1, 2 and 3 clones are some of the major challenges which have to be dealt with by the clone search community. We introduce a clone search model, based on clone detection and information retrieval that not only provides scalability, short response times, and Type-1, 2 and 3 detection, but also supports result ranking. Ranking of result sets is a key functionality, which has been widely overlooked previously by the clone search community. For our approach, the ranking not only forms the basis for ordering result sets based on their similarity to a given query but also introduces an important quality concept in clone search beyond traditional precision and recall measures. Our model takes advantage of a non-positional multi-level indexing approach to achieve a search that is scalable with a high recall. Result sets are ranked using two information retrieval ranking approaches: Jaccard similarity coefficient and cosine similarity. Both ranking approaches exploit code patterns' and not tokens to derive local and global frequencies. We studied the performance of our search engine through 40 candidate search schemata for Type-1, 2, and 3 clones on a dataset covering 25,000 projects. Through benchmarking and various measures, we observed that clone search via information retrieval is capable to deliver scalability with high precision and recall in near real-time.
A bi-level program for the planning of an islanded microgrid including CAES

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) can mitigate the fluctuations of renewable energy output due to its large scale storage capacities, high ramp rate, and quick start-up time. It has become a novel choice for the energy storage in microgrids. An islanded microgrid which consists of the wind turbine, photovoltaic array, diesel generators, and CAES is investigated in this paper. The constant-pressure CAES is modelled considering the trade-off between reflections of its main characteristics and flexibility in microgrid operation analysis. A bi-level program is proposed for the microgrid planning problem. The model entails one problem embedded within another: the sizing problem is formulated on the upper level, while the unit commitment problem with spinning reserve requirement for the microgrid is described on the lower level. The effectiveness of the approach is validated by case studies where the proposed methodology is compared with other similar ones.
Finding meaning in the clouds: Illusory pattern perception predicts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit

Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across three experiments (N = 627) and four distinct measures of pattern perception. We further demonstrate that this observed relation is restricted to illusory pattern perception, with participants displaying greater endorsement of non-illusory patterns being no more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. Additionally, this relation is not a product of a general proclivity to rate all statements as profound and is not accounted for by individual differences in analytic thinking. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals with a tendency to go beyond the available data such that they uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist are also more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. These findings are discussed in the context of a proposed framework that views individuals’ receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: that of pattern perception.
Indigenous tree and shrub species for fodder production in Galessa and Jeldu areas, West Shewa, Ethiopia

The foliage of indigenous tree and shrub species are used as source of supplemental animal feed in Galessa-Jeldu areas. A study was carried to identify and prioritise indigenous species for fodder production, and to evaluate chemical composition and anti-nutritional factors in the foliage and flower bud of indigenous fodder tree and shrub species. The species studied were Hagenia abyssinica, Dombeya torrida, Buddleja polystachya and Chamaecytisus palmensis. The chemical composition, tannin content and in vitro dry matter digestibility of foliage and flower bud samples were determined. The content of P in the foliage and flower bud of the four species ranged from 2.50 to 4.71mg g-1 and 2.24 to 5.37mg g-1 dry matter, respectively. The sodium content of the foliage and flower bud in the four species was not adequate to fulfill the minimum requirement of all classes of animals. The crude protein content of the foliage and flower bud in the four fodder species was much higher than the minimum required level. B. polystachya had a high content of acid detergent lignin and condensed tannin in the foliage. The in vitro dry matter digestibility of the foliage and flower bud from H. abyssinica and C. palmensis was reasonably high. The foliage and flower bud of all investigated woody species are potential to be used as sources of fodder with a proper feeding management scheme.
Adding context to multi-touch region selections

As applications originating on desktop computers find their way onto multi-touch enabled mobile devices many interaction tasks that were designed for computer mice spread to new touch-based environments. One example is region selection, for instance in image editing applications. Several studies already investigated multi-touch object selections however, region selections have not been closely examined. Our proposed selection technique was designed for multi-touch interaction and better suits mobile devices. Taking advantage of multiple touches enables the user to easily extend, modify and refine selections based on the order and relative position---the context---of touches. We were concerned that controlling more degrees of freedom with our technique could negatively impact simple selections. To evaluate its performance we present a user study that compares it to currently used techniques. Results show that our multi-touch region selection represents a good compromise of speed and precision, while providing the possibility to easily refine the selected region.
Comparison of different motion estimation methods for vessel cross-sectional shear wave imaging

In most studies on vascular shear wave imaging (SWI), longitudinal section is mainly concerned, and the radial motion and reflected waves are not considered in cross section. It is important to investigate the SWI in cross section when evaluating the anisotropy of the vessel wall or the complete plaque composition. In our previous study, a novel method based on coordinate transformation and directional filtering was proposed to achieve vessel cross-sectional shear wave imaging (VCS-SWI), where the radial motion was directly estimated in the polar coordinates of the vessel (referred to as the proposed method). The radial motion can also be calculated from the axial and lateral motions estimated in the Cartesian coordinate system of the transducer (referred as to Method 1), or from multiple axial motions with spatial angular compounding (referred as to Method 2). In this study, a comparison of the three methods for VCS-SWI was performed in simulations. The root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of the estimated radial motions showed that the performance of radial motion estimation by using Method 1 is the worst due to the poor lateral motion estimation. With angular compounding, the radial motion can be well obtained, but at the cost of lower frame rate. The performance of the proposed method is similar to that of spatial angular compounding. In conclusion, the proposed method could obtain high-quality VCS-SWI without sacrificing the frame rate.
NOVEL METHOD FOR GENERATING ELECTROMAGNETIC VORTEX WAVE

Electromagnetic (EM) vortex wave carries orbital angular momentum (OAM), which has been proposed for improve anti-interference performance, spectral efficiency, and message capacity in radio communications. Multiple sub-channels of propagation are achieved by different twisting degrees of EM wave. In order to develop the theory and technique of the OAM, works must be done to study the generation of vortex wave. There exist several devices to generate vortex wave, such as phase plate, holographic diffraction gratings, spiral reflectors, and antenna arrays. In this paper, based on typical parabolic antenna, a new approach to generate vortex wave carrying OAM in radio frequency through coating specific controllable complex dielectric constant material on parabolic antenna is introduced. From the results of the proposed antenna, we conclude that parabolic antenna with materials arranged by a specific rule on the reflector has capacity of generating an EM wave with clockwise and anti-clockwise phase distributions around beam-axis. The new method generating OAM is simple and suitable to be well applied in wireless electronic technology.
Analysis and design of a high-frequency isolated dual-tank LCL resonant AC-DC converter

An integrated single-phase single-stage high-frequency (HF) isolated dual-tank LCL-type series resonant ac-dc converter with fixed frequency, phase-shift control strategy is presented. The circuit configuration combines a diode rectifier, boost converter and two identical half-bridge dc-dc LCL resonant converters. A high power factor (PF) and low total harmonic distortion (THD) is achieved by discontinuous current mode (DCM) operation of the front-end power factor correction (PFC) circuit. The output voltage is regulated by fixed-frequency, phase-shift between two identical half-bridge LCL resonant converters. Soft-switching operation is achieved for all the switches. The operation of intervals and steady-state analysis are presented briefly. Design example of a 100 W proposed converter is given together with its simulated and experimental results for different input voltages.