Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing and the Performance Estimation of Wireless Communication Systems using LDPC codes using Sum Product algorithm and Bit-flipping algorithm

Binary coded modulation is bandwidthefficient and integrates channel coding and modulation into one single unit to improve the performance. It also maintains the same spectral efficiency as compared to un-coded modulation. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are the most dominant error correcting block codes (ECCs). These codes approach the Shannon’s limit & having a low decoding complexity. In our research work we have taken LDPC codes as an Error Correcting Codes and we have studied the performance of LDPC codes with the BPSK system in AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) atmosphere and analyzed various types of characteristics of this type of system. LDPC code system contains two parts i.e. (i) Encoder part and (ii) Decoder part. LDPC code encoder encodes the provided data and sends this data through the channel or medium. The performance of LDPC encoder mostly depends on the Parity matrix manners. We have studied the performance distinctiveness according to these characteristics and find the performance variation in terms of SNR performance. The decoder utilizes the encoded data from the channel and then decodes it. A LDPC code decoding algorithm in MIMO system with the AWGN faded channel and BPSK modulation with ½ code rate is proposed in this work. Finally a plot between the Bit error rate of the code and the Frame error rate (FER) is plotted w. r. t. input SNR and has been considered as an output performance parameter of proposed methodology. Both parameters are considered for different number of frames and for different iterations. The performance of the proposed method i.e. Log domain sum product algorithm (SPA) is also compared with bit-flipping algorithm and Linear Programming algorithm. All simulation work has been implemented in MATLAB R2013a using its wireless communication toolbox and general MATLAB tool box.
Gravity Variation in Siberia: GRACE Observation and Possible Causes

We report the finding, from the GRACE observation, of an increasing trend in the gravity anomaly in Siberia at the rate of up to 0.5 μgal yr -1 during 2003/1 - 2009/12, in the backdrop of a negative anomaly of magnitude on the order of ~-10 mgal. In consideration of the non-uniqueness of the gravitational inverse problem, we examine in some detail the various possible geophysical causes to explain the increasing gravity signal. We find two geophysical mechanisms being the most plausible, namely the melting of permafrost and the GIA post-glacial rebound. We conclude that these two mechanisms cannot be ruled out as causes for the regional gravity increase in Siberia, based on gravity data and in want of ancillary geophysical data in the region. More definitive identification of the contributions of the various causes awaits further studies.
The effect of pH decline rate on the meat and eating quality of beef carcasses

An experiment was undertaken to examine the effect of rapid pH fall at a high muscle temperature on meat and eating quality of two beef cuts (striploin and cube roll). From 115 beef steer carcasses of which the right side of each carcass was subjected to electrical stimulation, 25 carcasses which exhibited the largest difference in the rate of pH fall in the M. longissimus between sides were selected for subsequent sampling. All of the stimulated sides missed the ‘ideal’ pH/temperature window (defined as temperature at pH 6 in the M. longissimus 12°C) at the upper end, as did several of the non-stimulated sides. The mean temperature at pH 6 for stimulated sides from modelling was 40.9 versus 33.3°C for non-stimulated sides. Despite the significant effect of stimulation on pH decline there was no statistically significant impact on shear force or sensory traits of the M. longissimus, but there was a significant effect of aging on these traits. There was no effect of stimulation or pH decline on drip loss of the striploin. After 14 days of aging there was no effect of stimulation or ultimate pH on striploin purge, but there was a significant effect of pH decline. This was not, however, evident for purge of the cube roll aged for either 4 or 42 days. The redness of the cube rolls as reflected by a* values declined with days of display, with the decline more rapid for samples aged for 42 days compared with those aged for 4 days. For meat aged and displayed identically, the a* values were on average significantly lower for meat from non-stimulated carcasses, but apart from aging there was no effect on the wavelength ratio 630/580 nm, an indicator of the formation of metmyoglobin. There was also evidence that a rapid decline in pH increased the onset of lipid oxidation.
Quantum optics in Maxwell's fish eye lens with single atoms and photons

We investigate the quantum optical properties of Maxwell's two-dimensional fish eye lens at the single-photon and single-atom level. We show that such a system mediates effectively infinite-range dipole-dipole interactions between atomic qubits, which can be used to entangle multiple pairs of distant qubits. We find that the rate of the photon exchange between two atoms, which are detuned from the cavity resonances, is well described by a model, where the photon is focused to a diffraction-limited area during absorption. We consider the effect of losses on the system and study the fidelity of the entangling operation via dipole-dipole interaction. We derive our results analytically using perturbation theory and the Born-Markov approximation and then confirm their validity by numerical simulations. We also discuss how the two-dimensional Maxwell's fish eye lens could be realized experimentally using transformational plasmon optics.
Activity-based sampling of Twitter users for temporal prediction models

Increasingly more applications rely on crowd-sourced data from social media. Some of these applications are concerned with real-time data streams, while others are more focused on acquiring temporal footprints from historical timelines of users. Nevertheless, determining the subset of "credible" users is crucial. While the majority of sampling approaches focus on individuals' static networks, dynamic user activity over time is usually not considered, which may result in activity gaps in the collected data. Models based on noisy and missing data can significantly degrade in performance. In this study, we demonstrate how to sample Twitter users in order to produce more credible data for temporal prediction models. We present an activity-based sampling approach where users are selected based on their historical activities in Twitter. The predictability of the collected content from activity-based and random sampling is compared in a user-centric temporal model. The results indicate the importance of an activity-oriented sampling method for the acquisition of more credible content for temporal models.
Attitude towards Premarital Sex among Higher Secondary Students in Pokhara Sub-Metropolitan City

Background: Premarital sex is a sexual activity practiced by persons who are unmarried. This has been recognized a taboo in Nepalese culture. Despite this fact, unmarried Nepalese students, in higher-level secondary schools, are increasingly reporting being engaged in sexual activities. Unprotected Premarital sex among adolescents and youths predispose them to unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, pregnancy-related complications, and sexually transmitted infections (STI) including HIV/AIDS. Objective: The objective of this survey was to assess the attitude of higher secondary school adolescents in the Pokhara sub-metropolitan city. Methodology: This survey adopted a design of an institution-based descriptive cross-sectional study. A pretested structured questionnaire sealed in an envelope was distributed among all consenting 522 higher secondary school adolescent students. Result: The study shows that more than eighty percent of the respondents affirmed premarital sex while the rest of the twenty percent of the respondents reported that engaging in premarital sex is inappropriate. Nearly twenty-five percent (24.6%) of study respondent have had premarital sex. Respondents who had discussed sexual matters with friends had a 2.62 times higher chance of having premarital sex than those who had not. Conclusion: Though Nepalese society doesn’t accept the sexual activities outside marriage young people are challenging these social norms and values. However, young men and women in Nepal have a different perspective and feel more comfortable in each other’s company and also initiate sexual relations before marriage.
Simultaneous Discrimination of Speed is More Difficult than Simultaneous Discrimination of Size for Both Pigeons and People

Previous reports suggest that pigeons are highly sensitive to speed of motion (Cook, Beale, Koban, 2011; Herbranson, Fremouw, & Shimp, 2002). In contrast, we found that pigeons required more extensive training to learn speed discrimination than size discrimination (Lazareva, Young, & Wasserman, 2014). However, our results were based on a comparison of two experiments conducted in different laboratories, complicating the interpretation of the data. Here, we trained pigeons to perform size discrimination or speed discrimination in a two-alternative simultaneous discrimination task using a within-subject design. All birds acquired size discrimination much faster than speed discrimination, confirming our prior report. We further explored pigeons’ sensitivity to differences in speed and size by training them to discriminate two end-point stimuli in a two-alternative forced-choice task and then presenting a wide range of testing stimuli located between the training end-point stimuli. The results again indicated weaker control by the differences in speed in comparison to size; comparable results were obtained for human participants.
Robust Control of a 3D Space Robot with an Initial Angular Momentum based on the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Method

This paper considers robust control problems for a 3D space robot of two rigid bodies connected by a universal joint with an initial angular momentum. It is particularly difficult to measure an initial angular momentum in parameters of space robots since the value of an initial angular momentum depends on the situations. Hence, the main purpose of this paper is to develop a robust controller with respect to initial angular momenta for the 3D space robot. First, a mathematical model, some characteristics, and two types of control problems for the 3D space robot are presented. Next, for the robust attitude stabilization control problem of the 3D space robot, a numerical simulation is performed by using the nonlinear model predictive control method. Then, for the robust trajectory tracking control problem of the 3D space robot, another numerical simulation is carried out. As a result, it turns out that this approach can realize robust control on initial angular momenta for the two control problems. In addition, computation amount is reduced by this approach and real-time control of the 3D space robot can be achieved.
Modeling and assessing inference exposure in encrypted databases

The scope and character of today's computing environments are progressively shifting from traditional, one-on-one client-server interaction to the new cooperative paradigm. It then becomes of primary importance to provide means of protecting the secrecy of the information, while guaranteeing its availability to legitimate clients. Operating online querying services securely on open networks is very difficult; therefore many enterprises outsource their data center operations to external application service providers. A promising direction toward prevention of unauthorized access to outsourced data is represented by encryption. However, data encryption is often supported for the sole purpose of protecting the data in storage while allowing access to plaintext values by the server, which decrypts data for query execution. In this paper, we present a simple yet robust single-server solution for remote querying of encrypted databases on external servers. Our approach is based on the use of indexing information attached to the encrypted database, which can be used by the server to select the data to be returned in response to a query without the need of accessing the plaintext database content. Our indexes balance the trade-off between efficiency requirements in query execution and protection requirements due to possible inference attacks exploiting indexing information. We investigate quantitative measures to model inference exposure and provide some related experimental results.
Intervention using global postural reeducation method in patients with musculoskeletal diseases: systematic review

Background: Stretching represent a therapeutic modality used in physical stress conditions, such as sport performance and musculoskeletal disorders. Different methods of stretching exist to improve flexibility in any of these contexts. Among them Global Postural Reeducation emerges as an integral, full-body approach. Objective: To critically analyze previously published literature to gather the documented effectiveness of GPR method in musculoskeletal disorders in the traumatology and rheumatology areas. Design: Systematic review. Methods: Computerized literature searches were performed in Pubmed, Health and Medical Complete, PEDro and Scopus from 2004-2014. Methodological quality was assessed using the PEDro scale. The level of scientific evidence was evaluated for each study. Results: Of 73 relevant studies, only 14 met the inclusion criteria. Five (36%) of these studies were assessed to be of high quality. The mean PEDro score was 4.57 ranging from 2 to 8. According to the best evidence synthesis, there is moderate evidence that GPR is efficacious for musculoskeletal disorders when compared with other treatment options. Conclusions: GPR method has shown benefits, but these depend on the pathology and symptoms being treated. There is a need for more, well-designed, good quality randomized trials to answer several remaining questions related to this intervention and increase the precision of future systematic reviews. Correspondence to: Ivan Medina-Porqueres, Physical Therapy Section, Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, University o Malaga, Arquitecto Francisco Peñalosa St, 29010. Malaga, Spain, Tel: 951 952 858; Fax: 951 952 864, E-mail: imp@uma.es
Thinking Developmentally from Constructivism to Neuroconstructivism Introduction: Karmiloff-Smith from Piaget to neuroconstructivisim A history of ideas

Annette Karmiloff-Smith was a seminal thinker in the field of child development in a career spanning more than 45 years. She was the recipient of many awards, including the European Science Foundation Latsis Prize for Cognitive Sciences (the first woman to be awarded this prize), Fellowships of the British Academy, the Cognitive Science Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Royal Society of Arts, as well as honorary doctorates from universities across the world. She was awarded a CBE for services to cognitive development in the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Annette passed away in December 2016, but she had already selected a set of papers that charted the evolution of her ideas, which are collected in this volume.
Generating a Spanish affective dictionary with supervised learning techniques

Nowadays, machine learning techniques are being used in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Opinion Mining (OM). OM is used to analyse and determine the affective orientation of texts. Usually, OM approaches use affective dictionaries in order to conduct sentiment analysis. These lexicons are labeled manually with affective orientation (polarity) of words such as positive or negative. There are few dictionaries of affective orientation for Spanish; also, the size of these dictionaries is small. Thus, we propose a method for building a large affective Spanish dictionary for subjectivity and sentiment analysis. Supervised learning techniques are used to classify the entries from a lexical dictionary according to their affective orientations based on their definitions. We combine three classifiers (decision trees, naive Bayes, and a support vector machine) to determine the final polarity of each entry, that is, positive or negative.
Chapter 2 Protein Sample Characterization

Mostbiophysical experiments require protein samplesofhighquality and accurately determined concentration. This chapter attempts to compile basic information on the most common methods to assess the purity, dispersity, and stability of protein samples. It also reminds of methods to measure protein concentration and of their limits. The idea is to make aware and remind of the range of methods available and of commonly overlooked pitfalls. The aim is to enable experimenters to fully characterize their preparations of soluble or membrane proteins and gain reliable and reproducible results from their experimental work.
ESTIMATING SITE OCCUPANCY, COLONIZATION, AND LOCAL EXTINCTION WHEN A SPECIES IS DETECTED IMPERFECTLY

Few species are likely to be so evident that they will always be detected when present. Failing to allow for the possibility that a target species was present, but undetected, at a site will lead to biased estimates of site occupancy, colonization, and local extinction probabilities. These population vital rates are often of interest in long-term monitoring programs and metapopulation studies. We present a model that enables direct estimation of these parameters when the probability of detecting the species is less than 1. The model does not require any assumptions of process stationarity, as do some previous methods, but does require detection/nondetection data to be collected in a manner similar to Pollock's robust design as used in mark-recapture studies. Via simulation, we show that the model provides good estimates of parameters for most scenarios considered. We illustrate the method with data from monitoring programs of Northern Spotted Owls ( Strix occiden- talis caurina) in northern California and tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) in Min- nesota, USA.
Local Residential Sorting and Public Goods Provision: A Classroom Demonstration

This classroom exercise illustrates the Tiebout (1956) hypothesis that residential sorting across multiple jurisdictions leads to a more efficient allocation of local public goods. The exercise places students with heterogeneous preferences over a public good into a single classroom community. A simple voting mechanism determines the level of public good provision in the community. Next, the classroom is divided in two, and students may choose to move between the two smaller communities, sorting themselves according to their preferences for public goods. The exercise places cost on movement at first, then allows for costless sorting. Students have the opportunity to observe how social welfare rises through successive rounds of the exercise, as sorting becomes more complete. They may also observe how immobile individuals can become worse off because of incomplete sorting when the Tiebout assumptions do not hold perfectly.
RRPP: An r package for fitting linear models to high‐dimensional data using residual randomization

Residual randomization in permutation procedures (RRPP) is an appropriate means of generating empirical sampling distributions for ANOVA statistics and linear model coefficients, using ordinary or generalized least‐squares estimation. This is an especially useful approach for high‐dimensional (multivariate) data. Here, we present an r package that provides a comprehensive suite of tools for applying RRPP to linear models. Important available features include choices for OLS or GLS coefficient estimation, data or dissimilarity matrix analysis capability, choice among types I, II, or III sums of squares and cross‐products, various effect size estimation methods, and an ability to perform mixed‐model ANOVA. The lm.rrpp function is similar to the lm function in many regards, but provides coefficient and ANOVA statistics estimates over many random permutations. The S3 generic functions commonly used with lm also work with lm.rrpp. Additionally, a pairwise function provides statistical tests for comparisons of least‐squares means or slopes, among designated groups. Users have many options for varying random permutations. Compared to similar available packages and functions, RRPP is extremely fast and yields comprehensive results for downstream analyses and graphics, following model fits with lm.rrpp. The RRPP package facilitates analysis of both univariate and multivariate response data, even when the number of variables exceeds the number of observations.
Recovery of Hypoglycemia Awareness in Long-standing Type 1 Diabetes: A Multicenter 2 × 2 Factorial Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Insulin Pump With Multiple Daily Injections and Continuous With Conventional Glucose Self-monitoring (HypoCOMPaSS)

OBJECTIVE To determine whether impaired awareness of hypoglycemia (IAH) can be improved and severe hypoglycemia (SH) prevented in type 1 diabetes, we compared an insulin pump (continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion [CSII]) with multiple daily injections (MDIs) and adjuvant real-time continuous glucose monitoring (RT) with conventional self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A 24-week 2 × 2 factorial randomized controlled trial in adults with type 1 diabetes and IAH was conducted. All received comparable education, support, and congruent therapeutic targets aimed at rigorous avoidance of biochemical hypoglycemia without relaxing overall control. Primary end point was between-intervention difference in 24-week hypoglycemia awareness (Gold score). RESULTS A total of 96 participants (mean diabetes duration 29 years) were randomized. Overall, biochemical hypoglycemia (≤3.0 mmol/L) decreased (53 ± 63 to 24 ± 56 min/24 h; P = 0.004 [t test]) without deterioration in HbA1c. Hypoglycemia awareness improved (5.1 ± 1.1 to 4.1 ± 1.6; P = 0.0001 [t test]) with decreased SH (8.9 ± 13.4 to 0.8 ± 1.8 episodes/patient-year; P = 0.0001 [t test]). At 24 weeks, there was no significant difference in awareness comparing CSII with MDI (4.1 ± 1.6 vs. 4.2 ± 1.7; difference 0.1; 95% CI −0.6 to 0.8) and RT with SMBG (4.3 ± 1.6 vs. 4.0 ± 1.7; difference −0.3; 95% CI −1.0 to 0.4). Between-group analyses demonstrated comparable reductions in SH, fear of hypoglycemia, and insulin doses with equivalent HbA1c. Treatment satisfaction was higher with CSII than MDI (32 ± 3 vs. 29 ± 6; P = 0.0003 [t test]), but comparable with SMBG and RT (30 ± 5 vs. 30 ± 5; P = 0.79 [t test]). CONCLUSIONS Hypoglycemia awareness can be improved and recurrent SH prevented in long-standing type 1 diabetes without relaxing HbA1c. Similar biomedical outcomes can be attained with conventional MDI and SMBG regimens compared with CSII/RT, although satisfaction was higher with CSII.
Studying the Evolution of Content Providers in the Internet Core

There is recent evidence that the core of the Internet, which was formerly dominated by large transit providers, has been reshaped after the transition to a multimedia-oriented network, first by general-purpose CDNs and now by private CDNs. In this work we use k-cores, an element of graph theory, to define which ASes compose the core of the Internet and to track the evolution of the core since 1999. Specifically, we investigate whether large players in the Internet content and CDN ecosystem belong to the core and, if so, since when. We further investigate regional differences in the evolution of large content providers. Finally, we show that the core of the Internet has incorporated an increasing number of content ASes in recent years. To enable reproducibility of this work, we provide a website to allow interactive analysis of our datasets to detect, for example, “up and coming” ASes using customized queries.