Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From Learning Objects Repositories to Learning Design Repositories: The COSMOS Learning Design Repository

During the past years sharing and re-use of digital science education resources became a mainstream activity among science education communities. These resources bare the potential to support technology-enhanced science education by enabling science education teachers to improve their day-to-day science teaching. On the other hand, it has been identified that science education teachers could benefit from their participation in communities of best science teaching practices by sharing, not only digital educational resources, but learning designs that reflect their pedagogical practice. This has lead to efforts on moving beyond web-based repositories of digital educational content towards the development of web-based repositories of learning designs. Nevertheless, sharing learning designs requires tools and strategies, so as to facilitate the representation of these learning designs in a commonly understandable manner between humans and machines. To this end, we present the design and operation of the COSMOS web-based repository of Learning Designs for supporting Science Education Teacher Communities.
N-[(Morpholin-4-yl)carbonothioyl]-4-nitrobenzamide

In the title compound, C12H13N3O4S, the nitro group is slightly twisted [6.58 (11)°] from the benzene ring plane. The morpholine ring adopts a chair form. In the crystal, intermolecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the molecules into chains along [110]. There are also π–π contacts [centroid–centroid distance = 3.8301 (11) Å] and C—H⋯π interactions to stack neighbouring benzene rings and link the chains into a three-dimensional network. C—H⋯O and C—H⋯S interactions are also observed.
Application of 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the diagnosis and treatment of mild cognitive impairment

Objective: To investigate the role of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) in the diagnosis and treatment of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Methods: the MCI patients were randomly divided into experiment group and the control group. When grouping, the patients were performed the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scoring, 1H-MRS detection, and calculated the ratios of N-Acetylaspartate/creatine (NAA/Cr), N-Acetylaspartate/myo-inositol (NAA/mI) and choline-containing compounds/creatine (Cho/Cr). The experiment group was orally administrated the huperzine tablet for six months. The changes of MMSE score and 1H-MRS indicators were observed, and the follow up lasted a year to calculate the conversion ratio of MCI to dementia; according to whether existed the dementia conversion, the control group was divided into two subgroups for the analysis of differences in the 1H-MRS indicators when grouping. Results: The MMSE score, changes of 1H-MRS indicators and conversion ratio of dementia of the treatment group were statistically significant to the control group (P<0.01). The dementia-conversion subgroup had the statistical significance in 1H-MRS indicators than the non-conversion subgroup (P<0.01). Conclusions: Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy is helpful for the early diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment in dementia patients.
cx-Sim: A Metric Access Method for Similarity Queries with Additional Conditions

The fast growth of complex data repositories, such as images, videos and time series, in recent years is intensifying the importance of developing efficient search strategies over these data types. Applications that deal with complex data employ similarity queries to retrieve data, often combining similarity conditions with conditions over other associated attributes of traditional data types. There are several indexing structures for answering similarity queries, however most of them do not work when there are additional search conditions. The existing structures that answer queries combining conditions over complex and traditional attributes only support keyword-based conditions. This article presents a new metric access method to efficiently execute similarity queries with additional conditions over complex data. The proposed method, called the Condition-eXtended Similarity tree (cx-Sim tree), is a composite index that is able to answer similarity queries with general conditions (not only keyword-based), combining an ordered tree to store a traditional attribute with a forest of similarity trees to store a complex attribute. The article also presents results of experiments using three real datasets that show that our approach outperformed existing methods in a great extent.
The epidemiology of accidental poisoning in an urban population. III. The repeater problem in accidental poisoning.

A group of 100 children who had experienced one episode of accidental poisoning were studied. A group of matched controls were selected from a previous randomized population derived from the City of Syracuse. The composition of study and control groups was similar in all gross characteristics tested. The poisoned group was found to have many more subsequent episodes of poisoning than the control group. These children were more active and mischievous, were more likely to experience falls, had more frequent separation experiences from the parents, and the maternal-child relationships appeared to differ significantly in several characteristics. It would appear that the repeater concept in accidental poisoning is established and presents a challenge to those presently concerned with prevention of accidental poisoning in children.
The analysis of policy convergence, or: how to chase a black cat in a dark room

Political science research on policy convergence has largely remained inconclusive. While many studies found support for the convergence hypothesis, an almost equally large number of studies rejected it. Convergence thus could be a less general phenomenon than many theorists believe. This article identifies a second possible explanation. The variance approach, which dominates political science research on policy convergence, is likely to lead to wrong inferences. Analysing various artificially generated convergence processes, we find that neither the variance approach nor the coefficient of variation detects convergence when it is conditional or when theoretically unidentified convergence clubs exist. Our analysis suggests that researchers should estimate rather than measure convergence. By estimating convergence researchers may (a) test the causal relationship, (b) account for conditional convergence, (c) control for the existence of convergence clubs, and (d) examine convergence to an equilibrium level of a policy.
Teams, Autonomy, and the Financial Performance of Firms

I estimate a structural model of teams, autonomy, and financial performance, using a cross section of British establishments. My findings suggest that team production improves financial performance for the typical establishment but that autonomous teams do no better than closely supervised or nonautonomous teams. I find that unobserved factors increasing the propensity to adopt teams are positively correlated with unobserved determinants of financial performance, and that unobserved factors increasing the propensity to grant teams autonomy are negatively correlated with unobserved determinants of financial performance when teams are adopted.
Rosuvastatin may reduce the incidence of cardiovascular events in patients with acute coronary syndromes receiving percutaneous coronary intervention by suppressing miR-155/SHIP-1 signaling pathway.

PURPOSE The beneficial effect of rosuvastatin against percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) related procedural myocardial injury has been determined mostly in patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS). However, the detailed therapeutic mechanism has not been well studied. METHODS Patients with ACS receiving PCI (n = 159) were randomized to control group (placebo treatment) or to rosuvastatin group (20 mg 12 h before PCI, and a further 20 mg 2 h preprocedure dose). Levels of INF-γ, TNF-α, IL-6, miR-155/SHIP-1, and CD4(+)FoxP3(+)Treg in peripheral blood were detected before PCI and 24 h after PCI. Clinical data of these patients were also collected in this prospective study. RESULTS Compared with placebo, rosuvastatin treatment significantly reduced the incidence of periprocedural myocardial infarction (PMI) and levels of cardiac troponin I (cTnI) associated with decreased relative expression of serum miR-155, levels of inflammatory cytokines (INF-γ, TNF-α, and IL-6), increased SHIP-1 expression and CD4(+)FoxP3(+)Treg percentage values (P < 0.05). In addition, patients with rosuvastatin pretreatment also reduced incidence of 30 days major adverse cardiac events (MACE) compared to the patients with placebo treatment (16 patients vs. 28 patients, P = 0.038). CONCLUSIONS Our study suggests that high loading dose rosuvastatin pretreatment may reduce the incidence of cardiovascular events and levels of inflammatory markers in patients with ACS receiving PCI, which may be explained at least in part, by mechanism involving suppression of miR-155/SHIP-1 signaling pathway.
Prediction of quality in DCT-based lossy compression of noisy remote sensing images

This paper considers specific aspects of lossy compression of noisy remote sensing images. A method based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) in 32×32 pixels blocks is analyzed. Characteristics of noise assumed additive (in original data or after proper variance stabilizing transform), spatially uncorrelated and Gaussian are assumed a priori known. They are taken into consideration in setting quantization step (QS) that is supposed proportional to noise standard deviation. It is demonstrated that statistics of DCT coefficients determined in 8×8 pixel blocks can be employed for prediction of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and improvement (or reduction) of visual quality metric PSNR-HVS-M. Approximating curves are obtained by their regression into scatter-plots using low order polynomials. Coder performance prediction can be then used for setting its parameter (QS) for providing appropriate quality of compressed image. Applicability of the proposed prediction approach is proven by experiments with real-life images.
Inference on the Kumaraswamy distribution

Abstract Many lifetime distribution models have successfully served as population models for risk analysis and reliability mechanisms. The Kumaraswamy distribution is one of these distributions which is particularly useful to many natural phenomena whose outcomes have lower and upper bounds or bounded outcomes in the biomedical and epidemiological research. This article studies point estimation and interval estimation for the Kumaraswamy distribution. The inverse estimators (IEs) for the parameters of the Kumaraswamy distribution are derived. Numerical comparisons with maximum likelihood estimation and biased-corrected methods clearly indicate the proposed IEs are promising. Confidence intervals for the parameters and reliability characteristics of interest are constructed using pivotal or generalized pivotal quantities. Then, the results are extended to the stress–strength model involving two Kumaraswamy populations with different parameter values. Construction of confidence intervals for the stress–strength reliability is derived. Extensive simulations are used to demonstrate the performance of confidence intervals constructed using generalized pivotal quantities.
Mechanism of Action of 5-Nitrothiophenes against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

ABSTRACT On using the streptomycin-starved 18b strain as a model for nonreplicating Mycobacterium tuberculosis, we identified a 5-nitrothiophene compound as highly active but not cytotoxic. Mutants resistant to 5-nitrothiophenes were found be cross-resistant to the nitroimidazole PA-824 and unable to produce the F420 cofactor. Furthermore, 5-nitrothiophenes were shown to be activated by the F420-dependent nitroreductase Ddn and to release nitric oxide, a mechanism of action identical to that described for nitroimidazoles.
Evaluating the Failures of Data Centers in Cloud Computing

This letter presents a study on the various features of the cloud computing its models and services. Cloud computing has become the newest concern in IT world to provide various services via internet computing. Thus cloud computing is based on the internet based computing where indispensable collective servers offers software, infrastructure, platform, storage and other resources and presents to customers on a pay-as-you-use foundation. The overall objective of this work is to evaluate the various failures of the cloud data centers. To achieve the objectives a review has been conducted on the various research papers and the various failures has been presented.
A 0.1–8.5 GHz wideband CMOS LNA using forward body bias technology for SDR applications

A low power broad band CMOS LNA for software-defined radio (SDR) applications is presented. The LNA is based on the common source cascade amplifier with active feedback. To realize a high gain bandwidth, the inductor shunt peaking technology was used. In order to acquire a good S11 performance over a high frequency band range, a parallel RC network feedback was used too. By using the forward body bias technology, the cascade LNA can operate under 1V supply voltage to reduce the power consumption. The LNA was fabricated using a 90nm RF CMOS technology. The measurement results show that the LNA achieves a bandwidth of 8.4 GHz from 0.1-8.5GHz with a 16.3 dB voltage gain, noise figures from 2.7 dB to 3.9 dB across the whole band, and an input third-order intermodulation product (IIP3) of -4 dBm, the power consumption is about 10 mW without the buffer under the 1V supply voltage.
Cardiac contractility, motor function, and cross‐bridge kinetics in N47K‐RLC mutant mice

We have investigated the physiology and mechanical profiles of skinned papillary muscle fibers from transgenic mice expressing the N47K mutation in the myosin regulatory light chain (RLC), shown to cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in humans. The results were compared with wild‐type (WT) mice, both expressing the human ventricular RLC. Rate constants of a cross‐bridge (XB) cycle were deduced from tension transients induced by sinusoidal length changes during maximal Ca2+ activation, and were studied as a function of MgATP, MgADP, and Pi concentrations. N47K mutant showed slower XB cycles but higher actin‐activated ATPase activity compared with WT. Consequently, N47K exhibited larger tension than WT. K0 (ADP association constant) and K4 (equilibrium constant of force generation) were larger in N47K, and K1 (ATP association constant) was slightly larger in N47K vs. WT, demonstrating stronger nucleotide binding and force generation abilities of the mutant, but no changes in rigor acto‐myosin binding were observed. Tension per XB was similar among groups, but N47K exhibited more XB distribution in the attached state. Larger values of tension and higher ATPase in N47K suggested that more cross‐bridges participated in tension production in the mutant myocardium compared with WT. In vivo analysis of heart function, performed in ~ 12.5‐month‐old mice by echocardiography and invasive hemodynamics, demonstrated a significant decrease in dP/dtmax–end‐diastolic volume relationship, indicating a depression of ventricular contractility in N47K mice. Our findings suggest that the N47K mutation exerts its action through direct alterations of myosin motor function that ultimately result in pathological hypertrophic remodeling in N47K hearts.
Transient study of the dynamic response of the veselago-pendry superlens

Sub-wavelength imaging involves the interaction of electromagnetic fields with objects that have dimensions of the order of the wavelength. This is characteristic of microwave technology and thus calls for tools and concepts familiar to microwave engineers. We analyze the plasmonic surface modes of the superlens and their excitation by the evanescent modes of the object field using a waveguide model. The resolution of the superlens, determined by the highest spectral component transmitted, is limited by the settling time of the plasmonic response and on the dynamic range of the superresolution system. Other limiting effects, such as losses, are deliberately excluded to highlight the above phenomena.
Detecting DDoS Attacks in Cloud Computing Environment

This paper is focused on detecting and analyzing the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in cloud computing environments. This type of attacks is often the source of cloud services disruptions. Our solution is to combine the evidences obtained from Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) deployed in the virtual machines (VMs) of the cloud systems with a data fusion methodology in the front-end. Specifically, when the attacks appear, the VM-based IDS will yield alerts, which will be stored into the Mysql database placed within the Cloud Fusion Unit (CFU) of the front-end server. We propose a quantitative solution for analyzing alerts generated by the IDSs, using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) operations in 3-valued logic and the fault-tree analysis (FTA) for the mentioned flooding attacks. At the last step, our solution uses the Dempsters combination rule to fuse evidence from multiple independent sources.
Marine mammal sound anomaly and quality detection using multitaper spectrogram and hydrophone big data

This paper proposes a novel method for anomaly and quality detection of marine mammal sounds using multitaper spectrogram and hydrophone big data. The proposed method is aimed to automatically detect anomaly, such as high-frequency vessel noise, Doppler noise, in sperm whale (SPW) sound as well as the quality of the sound. A new signature function derived from a multi-taper spectrogram is able to detect the anomaly in the data and a new anomaly distortion measure can detect the sound quality into good/bad. The proposed method, is tested with 1905 minutes of data spanning a single year, and using a human operator's annotations. The experimental results reveal that the proposed multitaper spectrogram based approach is efficient in detecting anomaly as well as sperm whale sound quality for hydrophone big data and high detection accuracy (>85%) is achieved for raw input hydrophone data.
Runtime Slack Creation for Processor Performance Variability using System Scenarios

Modern microprocessors contain a variety of mechanisms used to mitigate errors in the logic and memory, referred to as Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) techniques. Many of these techniques, such as component disabling, come at a performance cost. With the aggressive downscaling of device dimensions, it is reasonable to expect that chip-wide error rates will intensify in the future and perhaps vary throughout system lifetime. As a result, it is important to reclaim the temporal RAS overheads in a systematic way and enable dependable performance. The current article presents a closed-loop control scheme that actuates processor’s frequency based on detected timing interference to ensure performance dependability. The concepts of slack and deadline vulnerability factor are introduced to support the formulation of a discrete time control problem. Default application timing is derived using the system scenario methodology, the applicability of which is demonstrated through simulations. Additionally, the proposed concept is demonstrated on a real platform and application: a Proportional-Integral-Differential controller, implemented within the application, actuates the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) framework of the Linux kernel to effectively reclaim temporal overheads injected at runtime. The current article discusses the responsiveness and energy efficiency of the proposed performance dependability scheme. Finally, additional formulation is introduced to predict the upper bound of timing interference that can be absorbed by actuating the DVFS of any processor and is also validated on a representative reduction to practice.
A multi-cell SC DC-DC converter controller with power aware output ripple reduction

This paper describes a method for reducing the output voltage ripple of a SC DC-DC converter. In a SC converter the clock frequency is proportional to the output power, meaning that for low power levels the resulting low frequency value translates into a large output voltage ripple. Since the clock frequency is inversely proportional to the flying capacitance value, it is possible to reduce the output voltage ripple by decreasing the flying capacitance when the output power is small. An asynchronous controller, uses the clock period to add or subtract capacitors (multi-cell) to the flying capacitance, maintaining a low ripple voltage. Simulation results show that this technique reduces the output voltage ripple by 6.2 times in the worst case, when compared to a single-cell converter, without any significant decrease in the overall efficiency.
An 80 × 25 pixel CMOS single-photon image sensor with sub-ns time gating for solid state 3D scanning

Imager topology with sub-ns time gating for 3D distance measurement application and first measurement results of the prototype are presented. The imager has a fully digital operating principle with single-photon avalanche diode detectors and on-chip narrow gating of pixel groups. The prototype detector has 80 × 25 pixels with a fill factor of 34 % in the sensor area. The chip has been fabricated in a 0.35 μm high-voltage process and occupies 5.69 × 5.02 mm2 area.
Fluctuations in blood flow to acral skin in humans: connection with heart rate and blood pressure variability.

1. Spontaneous fluctuations in blood flow in arteries supplying acral skin were investigated with Doppler ultrasound in human subjects. Finger blood pressure, heart rate (HR) and cardiac output were measured simultaneously and noninvasively. 2. Synchronous fluctuations in flow were found in arteries supplying the hands and feet. The fluctuations were larger and more rapid than the flow variations which have been demonstrated with other methods. The magnitude of the total flow fluctuations in the hands and feet was estimated to be 5‐10% of cardiac output in resting subjects. This range of flow fluctuations is made possible by spontaneous opening and closing of skin arteriovenous anastomoses (AVAs). 3. The fluctuations in skin blood flow were accompanied by inverse fluctuations in mean blood pressure (MAP). The power spectra of skin vascular conductance and MAP both contained maximum intensity at low frequencies, below 0.15 Hz, with high coherence. 4. The central circulatory events connected with the skin blood flow fluctuations were calculated from the experimental data with the use of transfer function analysis. There was a rise in HR, cardiac output and MAP starting 1‐4 s before a cutaneous vasoconstriction. This indicates that the HR and MAP responses are not only passive effects of changes in peripheral resistance, but are the result of a simultaneous activation of the peripheral vascular and cardiac efferent branches of the autonomic nervous system. The HR and MAP responses are then modified, probably by baroreceptor activation.
Modeling continuous windings under transients with TLM and ATP

This work presents the performance of the well-known program ATP-Alternative Transient Program applied to the simulation of continuous windings of transformer under the incidence of a voltage surge. The motivation for this analysis lies in the fact that once ATP is widely applied for circuit simulation in several conditions, it is expected that it can also be applicable to this problem that is of significant importance for transformer designer. If so, thanks to wide ATP availability designers will have available an easy and user friendly tool for helping in their designs. Basis of analysis is in new experimental data obtained by the authors as well as some other data presented in previously published paper, in which experimental data have also validated applicability of the TLM- Transmission Line Modeling Method for the same problem, known as a classical one for concerns of voltage insulation for transformer designers.