Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks for Wide Area Large Scale Environmental Monitoring

In this paper, we propose a new energy aware medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks with wide-area large scale environmental monitoring applications. The proposed MAC scheme is specifically designed for wireless sensor networks that follow a query-based data gathering paradigm and at the same time takes into consideration event-based data packets. Latency and energy studies are detailed for analysis. The proposed wireless sensor network MAC protocol is tested using simulations
An efficient non-interactive deniable authentication protocol with anonymous sender protection

Abstract Deniable authentication protocols satisfy two basic properties: Deniability and the specifiable receiver properties. However, the deniability also damages the sender right. To protect senders, Hwang and Ma first proposed deniable authentication with anonymous sender protection. The sender’s anonymity is also used to protect the sender’s privacy. To reduce the computation cost, an efficient deniable authentication protocol is proposed. Our new protocol not only achieves the two properties but also provides the protection of sender and receiver to keep the privacy of the sender and receiver. Though the sent message is forgeable by receivers, but the sender can provide evidence to prove the message was really sent by him/her. Due to the efficient performance, our protocol is more practical than the other protocols in the real world.
An Online Load Balancing Algorithm for Virtual Machine Allocation with Fixed Process Intervals

To improve the performance and reliability of resource in Cloud data centers, it is significant to apply load balancing strategy for resource scheduling. In a dynamic changing traffic environment, workload of a Cloud data center has real-time and fixed process time characteristic. One of the challenging scheduling problems in Cloud datacenters is to take the real-time allocation and migration of reconfigurable virtual machines as well as the integrated features of hosting physical machines into consideration. In general, load-balance scheduling is NP-hard problem as proved in many open literatures. We introduce an Online Load-balance Resource Scheduling Algorithm (OLRSA) for Cloud datacenters considering realtime and multi-dimensional resources. Unlike traditional load balance scheduling algorithms which often do not consider lifecycle and fixed interval constraints, OLRSA treats life cycles and fixed intervals for both physical machines and virtual machines. We develop and apply integrated measurement for each server and a Cloud datacenter. New metrics such as integrated imbalance level, capacity makespan, capacity skew are defined for Cloud data centers. Simulation results show that OLRSA has better performance than a few related load balancing algorithms with regard to total imbalance level, makespan, overall load efficiency as well as capacity makespan.
The Mediating Role of Self-Regulation Between Digital Literacy and Learning Outcomes in the Digital Textbook for Middle School English

Digital textbooks draw attention as a new format of educational material, using the advantages of information technology; this innovative learning tool requires consideration as a part of successful and effective learning. The main purpose of the article is to investigate the mediating role of self-regulation between digital literacy and learning outcomes (academic performance and learning motivation) when using digital textbooks as a learning tool in Middle School English. Both descriptive and regression analysis were used as data analyses methods. The main findings of this study were as follows: first, digital literacy and self-regulation significantly predicted academic performance and learning motivation; second, self-regulation fully mediated between digital literacy and academic performance; third, self-regulation partially mediated between digital literacy and learning motivation. The research results proved the effects of digital literacy and self-regulation on the learning outcomes and mediating role of self-regulation between digital literacy and learning outcomes. These results help to design and implement effective lessons when using a digital textbook in Middle school English.
The Introduction of the Magnetophon

This chapter contains sections titled: The Birth of Coated Magnetic Tape Joint Development of the Magnetophon Recorder and Tape The Debut of the Magnetophon Tape Recorder The Magnetophon Goes into Production The Main Users of the Magnetophon The Magnetophon's Recording Performance The Big Leap in Quality: AC Bias Recording Wartime Developments Postwar Developments The Birth of the Consumer Market Sources
The BNC Handbook: Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA

This textbook is designed to provide a detailed understanding of the principles and practices underlying the use of large language corpora in exploratory learning and English language teaching and research. It focuses on the largest and most representative corpus of spoken and written data yet compiled - the British National Corpus - and on the search tool SARA (SGML Aware Retrieval Application). The method adopted is to provide a graded series of exercises, each introducing at the same time new features of the software and new techniques or applications for computer-assisted language learning. The book also includes an overview of previous work in corpus linguistics, a bibliography, and a reference manual for the SARA software. * Graded self-paced tutorials * Suggestions for further work * Thorough coverage of corpus linguistics theories and practices * State-of-the-art software * Accessible non-specialist style
Grapheme-to-phoneme conversions in Xhosa

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversions underlie, inter alia, computer-assisted investigations into the nature of the phonotactic structures and into the occurrence and distribution of phonetic and phonemic elements of a specific language. Prior to any such investigation, large text corpora need to be transcribed phonetically and/or phonemically. In this article a computer-assisted system developed to transcribe Xhosa texts phonetically is described. Prerequisites for setting up such a system are described, specific transcription rules for Xhosa are presented, and the effectiveness of the system is discussed.
An adaptive routine mechanism for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks

An adaptive routing mechanism is described that generates routing paths dynamically for a network of ad hoc wireless sensor nodes. The mechanism enables sensor nodes to minimize route cost by varying their transmission range, and by experimenting with the neighbours from which they forward data. Three route cost functions were compared. The route cost function that sums the link costs was found to give the worst performance, both in the proportion of packets delivered and the standard deviation of packet origins.
Are stereograms holograms? A human perception analysis of sampled perspective holography

In this paper, we analyze the optical performance of a commonly used 1-step recording geometry for stereograms and compare it to the fully fringe rendered case, taking a published optical model of the human eye into account. We compare our results to a model that conserves wavefront curvature. We then demonstrate how to optimize hogel sampling parameters as a function of image depth, size, and viewer distance. We conclude that stereograms suffer from little degradation from a viewing distance larger than 2 meters, but that nearer field images can significantly benefit by adding a second order phase correction.
Detecting Polymorphic Buffer Overflow Exploits with a Static Analysis Approach

Remote exploit attacks are the most serious threats in network security area. Polymorphism is a kind of codemodifying technique used to evade detection. A novel approach using static analysis methods is proposed to discover the polymorphic exploit codes hiding in network data flows. The idea of abstract execution is firstly adopted to construct control flow graph, then both symbolic execution and taint analysis are used to detect exploit payloads, at last predefined length of NOOP instruction sequence is recognized to help detection. Experimental results show that the approach is capable of correctly distinguishing the exploit codes from regular network flows.
A Semi-automatic Approach for Annotating Extractive Reference Summaries of Spontaneous Speech ⋆

We propose a semi-automatic approach to generate gold standard reference summaries for spontaneous speech by using Relaxed Dynamic Time Warping (RDTW) alignment between spontaneous speech and its accompanied rhetorical units. Most state-of-the-art speech summarization systems are trained by a large amount of document and human reference summaries. However, there is no clear guideline for compiling a gold standard reference summary. We show that, by following the rhetorical structure of speech, our semi-automatic approach can produce “gold standard” reference summaries with very high inter-labeler agreement.
Association between congenital nephron deficit and susceptibility to diabetic nephropathy and hypertension

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is the most prevalent and severe complication of diabetes, affecting up to one-third of diabetics. Normally, it takes many years to develop DN since the first diagnosis of diabetes; however, a subset of diabetic population develops DN at an early stage, independent of diabetic control. Therefore, development of a mechanism to identify patients that have higher risk of rapid renal deterioration is essential. It has long been speculated that individuals who are born with low nephron numbers are more susceptible to the development of hypertension and acquired renal disease later in life. In humans, heterozygous mutation of the PAX2 gene are associated with reduced congenital nephron number and progressive renal insufficiency in childhood. In mice, heterozygous Pax2 mutations were shown to reduce nephron number by interfering with branching morphogenesis of the ureteric bud (UB). Therefore, we postulated that diabetic individuals with suboptimal nephron number will exhibit accelerated progression of DN. To establish proof of concept, we developed a mouse model by crossing mice with heterozygous null Pax2 mutation (Pax21Neu) and type I diabetic mice (Ins2Akita), carrying a heterozygous mutation in the insulin2 gene. We demonstrate that mice with both Pax2 and Ins2 develop hypertension and albuminuria, early signs of DN, before any other genotype littermates with only one of the mutations or none. We further validated the effect of reduced nephron number on early manifestation of DN by rescuing the reduced nephron number caused by Pax2 mutation. Furthermore, we investigated whether common polymorphisms of PAX2 gene associated with subtle renal hypoplasia result in early manifestation of DN. We tested the association between these PAX2 SNPs and markers of DN in diabetic cohort who have been diagnosed with diabetes for 15 years or less. We demonstrated a significant association between PAX2 SNPs in diabetic patients and onset of albuminuria, the earliest marker of DN. PAX2 SNPs did not increase the likelihood of diabetic patients to develop hypertension and to exhibit progressive loss of GFR. In summary, these observations suggest that congenital nephron deficit accelerates the progression of DN. %%%%La nephropathie diabetique (DN) est la complication la plus frequente et la plus severe du diabete, touchant jusqu'a un tiers des diabetiques. Normalement, il faut plusieurs annees pour developper le DN depuis le premier diagnostic de diabete; Cependant, un sous-ensemble de la population diabetique developpe DN a un stade precoce, independant du controle diabetique. Par consequent, le developpement d'un mecanisme permettant d'identifier les patients presentant un risque plus eleve de deterioration renale rapide est essentiel. Il a longtemps ete specule que les individus qui sont nes avec de faibles nombres de nephrons sont plus sensibles au developpement de l'hypertension et de la maladie renale acquise plus tard dans la vie. Chez l'homme, la mutation heterozygote du gene PAX2 est associee a un nombre…
Location And Mapping Of Hydrofractures FromArrival Times At Wells

We combine a fast eikonal solver with two optimization algorithms to locate and map fractures caused by injection in the secondary recovery of hydrocarbons. The data used is arrival times on wells, although the method is applicable to other problems and acquisition geometries. We describe the problem and the various processes involved and illustrate the numerical behavior with a synthetic data example.
Student interactivity and teacher participation: an application of legitimate peripheral participation in higher education online learning environments

Lave and Wenger’s legitimate peripheral participation is an important aspect of online learning environments. It is common for teachers to scaffold varying levels of online participation in Web 2.0 contexts, such as online discussion forums and blogs. This study argues that legitimate peripheral participation needs to be redefined in response to students’ decentralised multiple interactions and non-linear engagement in hyperlinked learning environments. The study examines students’ levels of participation in online learning through theories of interactivity, distinguishing between five levels of student participation in the context of a first-year university course delivered via a learning management system. The data collection was implemented through two instruments: i) a questionnaire about students’ interactivity perception in the online reflective learning (n = 238) and then ii) an open discussion on the reason for the diverse perceptions of interactivity (n = 34). The study findings indicate that student participants, other than those who were active, need high levels of teacher or moderator intervention, which better enables legitimate peripheral participation to occur in online learning contexts.
MicroRNA-937 inhibits the malignant phenotypes of breast cancer by directly targeting and downregulating forkhead box Q1

Purpose: Numerous microRNAs (miRNAs) are aberrantly expressed in breast cancer, and the dysregulation of miRNAs may affect the aggressiveness of this cancer. Aberrant expression of miRNA-937 (miR-937) in gastric and lung cancers has been reported, which plays tumor-suppressive or oncogenic roles in carcinogenesis including cancer progression. Our purpose was to investigate the involvement of miR-937 in breast cancer progression. Patients and methods: The expression profile of miR-937 in breast cancer was assessed by reverse-transcription quantitative PCR. Biological effects of miR-937 upregulation on the malignant characteristics of breast cancer cells were determined in a series of functional experiments. The direct target of miR-937 in breast cancer cells was also identified. Results: Herein, the expression levels of miR-937 were notably lower in breast cancer, and its underexpression was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. Patients with breast cancer underexpressing miR-937 showed shorter overall survival than did patients with breast cancer overexpressing miR-937. Proliferation, migration, and invasiveness of breast cancer cells were evidently suppressed by miR-937 upregulation. In addition, ectopic miR-937 expression hindered breast cancer tumor growth in vivo. Forkhead box Q1 (FOXQ1) mRNA was found to be a direct target of miR-937 in breast cancer. FOXQ1 turned out to be overexpressed in breast cancer tissues, and its overexpression negatively correlated with miR-937 expression. Moreover, silencing of FOXQ1 recapitulated the tumor-suppressive effects of miR-937 overexpression on breast cancer cells. Notably, FOXQ1 restoration abrogated the miR-937-mediated suppression of proliferation, migration, and invasiveness of breast cancer cells. Conclusion: These results collectively revealed that miR-937 acts as a tumor suppressor in breast cancer and restrains cancer progression by directly targeting FOXQ1 mRNA. These data suggest that targeting of the novel miR-937–FOXQ1 axis is an attractive therapeutic method against breast cancer.
Dynamic Lesson Planning in EFL Reading Classes through a New e-Learning System.

This paper illustrates how lesson plans, teaching styles and assessment can be dynamically adapted on a real-time basis during an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading classroom session by using a new e-learning system named iBELLEs (interactive Blended English Language Learning Enhancement system). iBELLEs plays a crucial role in filling the gaps between the teacher’s expectations and students’ needs. iBELLEs is used as a feasible tool to help teachers in upper-intermediate level Japanese EFL reading classes gauge students’ comprehension of current reading materials, choose appropriate teaching styles and make dynamic assessments to pursue particular sub-goals before reaching the final goal of a given classroom session. iBELLEs is built on a database technology and is used as an electronic textbook equipped with a bidirectional communication facility in face-to-face EFL reading classrooms that are supported by a robust Language Management System (LMS) called WebOCMnext. By obtaining immediate feedback from the students, the teacher can determine an appropriate level of mediation that should be carefully, but quickly adjusted to satisfy individual student’s needs. The current study tries to explore how simultaneous feedback from the students can help teachers make dynamic lesson planning and assessment during a single EFL reading classroom.
The Use of Integrated Pulmonary Index in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Recent studies have shown that various biomedical devices are used for return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC). End-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2) measurement in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is also included in the guidelines as the gold standard for ROSC (1). Kalkan et al., (2) measured the blood flow in abdominal organs and the brain using near infrared spectrophotometry in CPR and demonstrated the importance of increasing values in showing ROSC. One of these devices, Capnostream 20p (Capnostream® 20, Oridion, Jerusalem, Israel) measures respiratory rate, pulse rate, saturation and ETCO2, and gives a mathematical value [integrated pulmonary index (IPI)] for assessing the patient’s ventilation level and associated tissue perfusion. This device provides numerical values between 1 and 10. Values less than 7 indicate worsening of breathing and tissue perfusion, and advanced airway requirements (3). Studies have also reported that patients with an IPI score less than 4 require advanced airway support (4). Our study was planned on the basis that ETCO2 is used to calculate IPI values and is capable of predicting spontaneous circulation. Our aim was to investigate initial IPI values in cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, together with the IPI trend during CPR and its association with absence of presence of ROSC. We planned to enroll 50 patients with or without ROSC. Our aim was to measure IPI values in patients with non-hospital cardiac arrest and to analyze whether these were predictive of ROSC. Our basic hypothesis is that IPI values at time of admission are low. We anticipated that these would increase after proper CPR, and that as IPI values increased, tissue perfusion would be established and spontaneous circulation would be restored. Spontaneous circulation was not restored in six of the first eight patients. IPI values during admission and throughout CPR were measured as 1 (however, ETCO2 values were increasing, showing that these patients had no intubation problems). ROSC was achieved in the remaining two patients, but IPI values were still 1. No increase was observed in measured values in any of our patients. However, under normal conditions, appropriate CPR establishes both respiration and circulation. Measurements may be expected to increase in the absence of any pulmonary pathology. We therefore suspected the possibility of an error in our methodology, and we have reviewed the details of the IPI. By using Ambu-bag, we ventilate the patient 8-10 times per minute and ensure the respiratory rate among the four parameters considered in IPI. We also provide heart rate with active heart massage and saturation by giving oxygen with advanced airway. The ETCO2 level is obtained with variable values in the trend graph. IPI values being a constant 1, although different levels might be expected with different practitioners, derives from the fact that the IPI shows the presence of a vital critical level, at the same algorithmic level, in the loss of one of these four functions in the patient. We do not think IPI will also be LETTER to the EDITOR
Latest trends in Image Media Quality Assessment Technologies

映像メディアの符号化技術の進展,通信ネットワークのブ ロードバンド化に伴い,様々な映像通信サービスが急速に普 及してきた. これにより,ディジタル化に伴う符号化処理の 高度化や様々な端末の出現,通信ネットワークに伴う映像劣 化など多くの品質劣化が発生し得る環境になっている. 技術やサービス競争の進展により安価な映像通信サービス が提供されるとしても,適切な視聴ができなければそのサー ビスは受け入れられない. そのため,ユーザに満足頂ける品 質のサービスを提供することが重要となる. このためには, 符号化パラメータの最適化や端末の品質設計とともに,サー ビス開始後の品質監視やサービス品質レベルの維持(品質管 理)も重要となる. このような品質設計・最適化・管理を行うためには,映像 通信サービスのQoE(Quality of Experience)を適切に評価する 技術が不可欠である. QoEとは,各種通信サービス(動画像 配信など)を享受するユーザが体感する品質のことである. 映像メディアのQoEを評価する技術やその尺度は国際的に 統一された方法として整備されることが望まれることから, 国連の組織であるITU(International Telecommunication Union) において,電気通信の標準化に対して ITU-T(International Telecommunication Union – Telecommunication standardization sector),無線通信の標準化に対して ITU-R(International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication sector)に分か れて国際標準化が進められている. また,通信と放送の連携 を視野に両分野の専門家が共同で品質評価技術の標準化に 取り組む必要があることから ITU-T/R横断的にVQEG(Video Quality Experts Group)が設立され,各組織の緊密な連携の 下,技術検証などの具体的な検討が進められている(図1). 本論文では映像メディアに対する主観品質評価の実施 法や,最新の映像メディア品質客観評価法について,ITU/ 映像メディア品質評価技術の最新動向
Assessment of thickness and echogenic pattern of masseter in subjects with OSMF, chewers and healthy controls- An ultrasound study

Introduction: Oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF), a potentially malignant disorder is associated with prolonged chewing of arecanut which results in fibrosis of the lamina propria. A positive correlation has been observed between masseter thickness and clinical progression of OSMF in previous studies. The increased thickness of the masseter may in turn alter the echogenic pattern of the muscle. Hence, the aim of the present study was to assess the thickness and echogenecity of the masseter in subjects with OSMF and chewers, by ultrasonography and compare with controls. Materials and Methods: Fifteen subjects with OSMF, fifteen subjects with history of chewing arecanut without OSMF and thirty controls were included in the study. The thickness and the internal echogenic pattern of the masseter were evaluated in all the subjects. The echogenic pattern was classified as Types I, II and III. The data obtained was tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis. Results: The mean thickness of masseter was highest in the OSMF group followed by chewers and controls, although the difference was not statistically significant. Type II was the most common echogenic pattern observed in all the study groups, followed by Type I(the difference was not significant). None of the groups presented with Type III. Conclusion: The masseter thickness may be used as an additional diagnostic criterion in OSMF subjects. Studies with larger sample and use of a high resolution ultrasound machine may give a better understanding of the echogenic pattern of masseter in subjects with OSMF. Ultrasonography was found to be a reliable and a reproducible method for evaluating the masseter. Keywords: Oral Submucous Fibrosis, Ultrasonography, Masseter Thickness, Echogenic Pattern