Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adding more PHY to the MAC: Exploiting Physical Layer Effects in Wireless Networks

Traditional wireless algorithms all too often ignore the special qualities of the wireless medium. In this thesis, we propose new wireless transmission primitives for various applications and evaluate each of them on a wireless sensor network. In particular, we focus on integrating two properties into our primitives: the availability of transmission power control and the capture effect. First, we consider the problems of traffic prioritization and running multiple wireless algorithms in parallel. We propose a technique allowing to simultaneously run multiple algorithms of different priorities, with minimal overhead in terms of bandwidth and latency. This is done by assigning each priority a range of admissible received signal strengths at each node, and employing the capture effect to automatically enable reception of only the strongest incoming signal. The setup is transparent to the algorithms: each appears to have complete access to the network’s resources as long as no algorithm of a higher priority wishes to use them. We discuss which properties of the network graph and the wireless hardware are beneficial to our technique. Second, we demonstrate the feasibility of achieving constructive interference using commodity wireless sensor nodes. In contrast to previous work, our technique does not rely on global external events as reference, but instead aims to minimize the errors in clock synchronization and transmission timing. Our evaluation shows that our technique is able to achieve constructive interference in over 30% of cases, even after multiple minutes of sleep. Third, we propose a class of transmission primitives which decouple packets’ synchronization headers from their payloads, such that two or more different senders may contribute to a single received packet. We explore 2 applications: 1) enabling reception attempts of very weak packets, e.g., across a network chasm, and 2) the injection of shorter packets into longer ongoing transmissions. We investigate ways to vastly reduce the problems incurred by using a mismatching synchronization header for reception. In practice, we are able to successfully decode up to 30% of cross-chasm packets and up to 70% of injected packets. Fourth, we examine how transmission power control can improve wireless schedules. Based on the classic RAND scheduling algorithm we develop a version employing power control called PowerRAND. The schedules generated by PowerRAND are 20–25% shorter, i.e., achieve a 25–33% higher throughput than RAND. Our practical evaluation shows that these schedules are just as feasible in practice. Further, we discuss how power control provides flexibility to schedules in the face of changing environments.
History of medical ultrasound [Compact Disc]

CD includes a selection of key historical papers published in the journal Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, books, reports, and other journals as well as the lecture presented by R. Kondratas during the 10th Congress of the World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 2003, Montreal, Canada.
An Improved Dominant Brightness Level Analysis (DBLA) Approach for Image Contrast Enhancement

Image enhancement has originated to be one of the most significant visualization applications for the reason that it has capability to improve the visibility of images. It improves the quality of low contrast images. Distinctive procedures have been estimated so far for getting better the feature of the digital images. To improve picture superiority image enhancement can explicitly recover and bound some data accessible in the input image. In this paper, the performance of dominant brightness level based image enhancement technique has been evaluated. By using image processing toolbox, the design and implementation has been done in MATLAB. The comparison among the dominant brightness level, histogram equalization and the adaptive histogram equalization has shown that the dominant brightness level outperforms over the histogram based image enhancement.
Silencing and institutional racism in settler-colonial education

Twenty years ago, Charles Mills argued that a Racial Contract underwrites and guides the social contract and assigns political, economic, and social privileges based on race. This thesis argues that a settler manifestation of the Racial Contract operates through processes and structures of silencing in the New Zealand education system. Silencing is a racial discourse aligned with state ideologies about biculturalism that supports ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation. Within schools, a state narrative of biculturalism advances the notion of harmonious settler-colonial race relations by marginalising or denying violent colonial histories and their consequences in the present. Silencing in the education system is examined through the lived experiences of Māori teachers of English language as they teach New Zealand literature in secondary school classrooms. Interviews with nineteen teachers and observations of four teachers' classroom practices (with follow up interviews from the teachers and some of their students) reveal that everyday classroom interactions perpetuate silencing through a hidden curriculum. This hidden curriculum appeals to settler sensibilities by: drawing on teaching pedagogies that soften or mute historical harm, validating “lovely” knowledge about Māori society and assessment approaches that privilege settler-colonial imperatives. This thesis identifies that harmonious notions of biculturalism circulate through the spatial and temporal dimensions of secondary schools because epistemological structures (policy, curriculum, and pedagogy) silence the meanings and effects of colonisation. In this way, a Settler Contract operates to sustain institutional racism in the New Zealand education system and white supremacy in settler-colonial societies.
Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing: Towards a Comprehensive Framework

Cloud computing paradigm has recently gained tremendous momentum. It has been found very promising for significant cost reduction and the increased operating efficiencies in computing. However, security and privacy issues pose as the key roadblock to its rapid adoption. In this chapter, the authors present the security and privacy challenges in Cloud computing environments and discuss how they are related to various delivery and deployment models, and are exacerbated by the unique aspects of Clouds. The authors also propose a comprehensive security framework for Cloud computing environments and discuss various approaches to address the challenges, existing solutions and future work needed to provide a trustworthy Cloud computing environment. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2854-0.ch007
Observing Resources in CoAP

The state of a resource can change over time. We want to give clients of the CoRE WG CoAP protocol the ability to observe this change. This short I-D provides an example design for such an addition to CoAP, in order to be able to discuss the design alternatives in specific terms.
How Skill Requirements Affect the Likelihood of Recruitment of Older Workers in Poland: The Indirect Role of Age Stereotypes

This article analyses the role of age stereotypes in the employability of older people. Unlike in existing studies, we shift emphasis from a direct consideration of stereotypes, focusing instead on skill requirements during recruitment. Using five waves of an employer survey from Poland, we assess how the likelihood of recruiting people over 50 years old depends on the skill requirements of the post. This study uses a real-life framework by referring to existing vacancies and actual requirements that reflect labour demands at the scale of an entire national labour market. The results suggest that some requirements lead to age bias during recruitment, and the chances of an older candidate being hired are especially hindered in jobs requiring computer, physical, social, creative and training skills. By illustrating an indirect link between age stereotypes and age discrimination, this study contributes to an understanding of the mechanisms that reduce employability of older people.
Reality over web: Pervasive computing meets the web

Reality over Web (RoW) is a novel concept, where a window on the web corresponds to a window onto a real space. Once the correspondence is established, users should be able to interact or manipulate the objects or people in the real space through the web window. In this paper, we introduce the RoW concept and highlight the principles that govern its design and implementation. A system architecture for realizing the RoW concept is described along with a proof-of-concept prototype that implements portions of the RoW concept. One essential part of an RoW implementation is accurate locationing of objects and people in a video frame. The locationing problem becomes particularly challenging because we want to reuse existing infrastructure as much as possible. We developed a high-frequency sound-based locationing scheme and implemented it on the prototype. The results from initial experiments performed on the locationing scheme are reported here.
Teaching With Simulations

This dissertation focuses on whole-class science teaching with computer simulations. Computer simulations display dynamic, visual representations of natural phenomena and can make a great contribution to the science classroom. Simulations can be used in multiple ways. Teachers who have an interactive whiteboard at their disposal have the opportunity to support their teaching with simulations in front of the class. It is also possible to let students work individually with simulations, in a computer room, using laptops or –more recently– tablets. However, the required planning and time are a barrier for learning with simulations individually or in small groups. Use of computer simulations in whole-class teaching and controlled primarily by the teacher has its own particular dynamics compared to the more small-scale settings. This thesis explores those dynamics in relation to control, initiative and activity. In particular, involving students in whole-class interaction around simulations is studied.
Evaluation of the safety and efficacy of the organic acids lactic and acetic acids to reduce microbiological surface contamination on pork carcasses and pork cuts

Abstract Studies evaluating the safety and efficacy of lactic and acetic acids to reduce microbiological surface contamination on pork carcasses pre‐chill and pork meat cuts post‐chill were assessed. Lactic acid treatments consisted of 2–5% solutions at temperatures of up to 80°C applied to carcasses by spraying or up to 55°C applied on cuts by spraying or dipping. Acetic acid treatments consisted of 2–4% solutions at temperatures of up to 40°C applied on carcasses by spraying or on cuts by spraying or dipping. The maximum treatment duration was 30 s. The Panel concluded that: [1] the treatments are of no safety concern, provided that the substances comply with the European Union specifications for food additives; [2] spraying of pork carcasses pre‐chill with lactic acid was efficacious compared to untreated control, but based on the available data, the Panel could not conclude whether lactic acid was more efficacious than water treatment when spraying of pork carcasses pre‐chill or pork meat cuts post‐chill. The Panel concluded that dipping of pork meat cuts post‐chill in lactic acid was more efficacious than water treatment. However, it could not conclude on the efficacy of acetic acid treatment of pork carcasses pre‐chill and/or pork meat cuts post‐chill; [3] the potential selection and emergence of bacteria with reduced susceptibility to biocides and/or resistance to therapeutic antimicrobials linked to the use of the substances is unlikely as long as Good Hygienic Practices are implemented; and [4] the release of both organic acids is not of concern for the environment, assuming that wastewaters released by the slaughterhouses are treated, if necessary, to counter the potentially low pH caused by lactic or acetic acid, in compliance with local rules.
Classification and Associative Classification Rule Discovery Using Ant Colony Optimization

The primary goal of this research is to investigate the suitability of ant colony optimization, a swarm intelligence based meta-heuristic developed by mimicking some aspects of the food foraging behavior of ants, for building accurate and comprehensible classifiers which can be learned in reasonable time even for large datasets. Towards this end, a novel classification rule discovery algorithm called AntMiner-C and its variants are proposed.Various aspects and parameters of the proposed algorithms are investigated by experimentation on a number of benchmark datasets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach builds more accurate models when compared with commonly used classification algorithms.It is also computationally less expensive than previously available ant colony algorithm based classification rules discovery algorithms. A hybrid classifier using ant colony optimization is also proposed that combines association rules mining and supervised classification. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has the ability to discover high quality rules. Furthermore, it has the advantage that association rules of each class can be mined in parallel if distributed processing is used. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid classifier achieves higher accuracy rates when compared with other commonly used classification algorithms. A feature subset selection algorithm is also proposed which is based on ant colony optimization and decision trees.Experiments show that better accuracy is achieved if the subset of features selected by the proposed approach is used instead of full feature set and number of rules is also decreased substantially.
The -alis/-aris allomorphy revisited

The -alis/aris allomorphy has often been the object of detailed investigation, though the nature of its patterns and their interaction with phonotactics are not fully appreciated. A corpus-based analysis of the distribution of liquids reveals asymmetries between r and l and also important differences in repetition patterns. For l the constraint is that its occurrences must be separated by at least one non-coronal consonant; the productive diminutive formation is a saliently exceptional pattern. The case of the -alis/aris dissimilation falls under this constraint: liquid dissimilation is not only blocked by an intervening r but also by any non-coronal consonant. The distance between the two liquids is also relevant. The case of r is different. In final syllables only r V r , in non-final syllables only r VV r occurs. While this receives a partial diachronic explanation, the interesting and non-obvious fact is that Latin word forms generally conform to this pattern even where this is not warranted diachronically. We explain the exceptions to this generalisation with reference to two different morphophonological factors.
Analysis of Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer

The analysis of capacitive wireless power transfer was conducted in a general manner. The circuit model of a capacitive wireless power transfer chain was presented. The derivation of the power transfer efficiency through the chain in question as well as the active power delivered to the appliance terminating this chain was shown. Both the case of the maximal efficiency and the one of the maximal appliance power were treated and conditions for these optima were found in both cases. The appliance power corresponding to the maximal efficiency and the efficiency corresponding to the maximal appliance power were also expressed. The total admittance of the capacitive wireless power transfer chain was calculated. For both optimal conditions, the appliance power and total admittance were written in the normalized form, which enabled to express them as functions of single variable in the same way as the efficiency.
Safety and Efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders: Protocol for a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has been reported to be effective in the treatment of some psychiatric disorders. It remains uncertain, however, whether ACT is safe and effective in treating schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders (e.g., psychosis). This protocol describes the methodology for a systematic review and meta-analysis of the safety and efficacy of ACT in the treatment of psychosis. The review will be guided by the standards set by the Cochrane Collaboration. We will search the Allied and Complementary Medicine Database (AMED), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Excerpta Medica database (EMBASE), EMCARE, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), MEDLINE, and PsycINFO databases for randomized controlled trials, whose arms are ACT and any comparator, as well as ClinicalTrials.gov, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR), and Current Controlled Trials (ISRCTN), for unpublished and ongoing trials. The primary outcome will be any standard (or surrogate) measure of psychotic pathology. The meta-analysis will summarize short-term and long-term effects and different control conditions with or without treatment as usual or comparative to other interventions. In cases where heterogeneity is detected (via χ2 and I2), we will adopt the random effects model for computation.
Use of Noninvasive Ventilation to Improve Pre-oxygenation Before Intubation of Hypoxemic Patients

Critically ill patients are predisposed to severe oxyhemoglobin desaturation during intubation due to many factors, including the limited physiologic oxygen reserve and the high complexity of intubation. In the intensive care unit, the usual preoxygenation is marginally effective especially in hypoxemic patients. In this short review, we discuss controversies surrounding preoxygenation in hypoxemic critically ill patients. Noninvasive ventilation (NIV), as a preoxygenation method, increases both the contents (FAO2) and the container (functional residual capacity) and could be viewed as one of the best ways to enhance the oxygen stores before apnea. A short application (3 min) of NIV is more effective at reducing arterial oxyhemoglobin desaturation than using a non-rebreather bag-valve mask with reservoir in hypoxemic patients. The impact of NIV on morbidity or mortality is currently being investigated. Careful analysis of the risks and benefits on individual basis should hence be made until further studies are available for the intensivist dealing with hypoxemic critically ill patients.
Time Well Wasted? Online Procrastination During Times of Unemployment

This article examines the argument regarding whether perceived social exclusion during unemployment leads to procrastination through online media, which in turn lessens the job search efforts of the unemployed. Based on data from 386 unemployed Internet users, we argue that online procrastination plays an important role in the lives of the unemployed but has no immediate effects on their perceived job search efforts. Contextual factors play an important role; that is, the amount of motivational control that the unemployed can muster exerts a strong effect on job search efforts. Generally, unemployed Internet users with low motivational control struggle more with their job search efforts. Thus, the recreational use of online media as such is not necessarily detrimental to the efforts invested in finding a job; instead, online skill-building and motivational support are key antecedents to better empower the unemployed to use the Internet productively for finding reemployment.
A Review of MPPT Algorithms Employedin Wind Energy Conversion Systems

The depleting nature of fossil fuels and the environmental threats have resulted in the emergence of renewable energy sources (RESs) as alternative and accessible energy resources. Amongst various RESs, wind energy is one of the fastest growing distributed energy resources because of its zero-carbon emission and cost efficient generation. Although wind energy is plentiful, it is of intermittent nature, i.e., the wind speed is not constant throughout. So, the strategy followed is to harness maximum output power from this variable wind as when it is available, and various algorithms for maximum power operating point tracking (MPPT) have been proposed and implemented successfully. However, choosing an exact MPPT algorithm for a particular application requires a high degree of skill as each algorithm has its pros and cons. This paper presents a review of various MPPT algorithms suggested in the literature.
Large eddy simulation of a nonpremixed reacting jet: Application and assessment of subgrid-scale combustion models

Results from large eddy simulations (LES) and direct numerical simulations (DNS) of a two-dimensional, spatially developing, compressible planar free jet undergoing an idealized, exothermic, chemical reaction of the type F+rOx→(1+r)P are presented in order to assess several subgrid-scale (SGS) combustion models. Both a priori and a posteriori assessments are conducted. The SGS turbulence model used is the dynamic Smagorinsky model (DSM). Two classes of SGS combustion models are employed in this study. These include the conserved scalar approach and the direct closure approach. Specifically, the SGS combustion models involve several forms of direct filtered reaction rate closures, including a scale similarity filtered reaction rate model (SSFRRM), and a mixing controlled strained laminar flamelet model (SLFM) in the form of thermochemical state relationships, obtained from the DNS, and two assumed forms for the subgrid mixture fraction filtered density function (FDF). In general, LES results are in reasona.
Molecular event extraction from Link Grammar parse trees

We present an approach for extracting molecular events from literature based on a deep parser, using in a query language for parse trees. Detected events range from gene expression to protein localization, and cover a multitude of different entity types, including genes/proteins, binding sites, and locations. Furthermore, our approach is capable of recognizing negation and the speculative character of extracted statements. We first parse documents using Link Grammar (BioLG) and store the parse trees in a database. Events are extracted using a newly developed query language with traverses the BioLG linkages between trigger terms, arguments, and events. The concrete queries are learnt from an annotated corpus. On BioNLP Shared Task data, we achieve an overall F1-measure of 29.6%.