Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of temperature, pressure, and composition on dc resistivity and AC conductivity of conductive styrene-butadiene rubber-particulate metal alloy nanocomposites

Conductive nanocomposites were prepared using styrene butadiene rubber as the polymer matrix and nanosized powder of copper–nickel (Cu–Ni) alloy as the filler. The filler loading was varied from 0 to 40 phr. The electrical conductivity of filled polymer composites is due to the formation of some continuous conductive networks in the polymer matrix. Atomic force microscopy was used to determine the particle size of the nanofiller and its nature of dispersion in the rubber matrix. The DC volume resistivity was measured against the loading of the nanofiller to check the percolation limit. The effect of temperature, applied pressure, time duration under constant compressive stress on the DC resistivity and AC conductivity of the composites with different filler loading were investigated. The change in DC resistivity and AC conductivity against temperature of these composites exhibited positive coefficient of temperature. With the change in applied pressure and time duration under constant compressive stress the DC resistivity undergoes an exponential decrease. The effect of AC field frequency on the AC conductivity was investigated. POLYM. COMPOS. 28:696–704, 2007. © 2007 Society of Plastics Engineers
Data stream mining for wireless sensor networks environment: energy efficient fuzzy clustering algorithm

This paper proposes a distributed wireless sensor network data stream clustering algorithm to minimise energy consumption and consequently extend the network lifetime. The efficiency in energy usage is as a result of trading-off communication for computation through distributed clustering and successive transmission of local clusters. We present the development of our algorithm, subtractive fuzzy cluster means (SUBFCM), and analyse its energy efficiency as well as clustering performance in comparison with state-of-the-art standard data clustering algorithms such as fuzzy C-means and K-means algorithms. The significance of the SUBFCM algorithm in terms of energy efficiency and clustering performance is proved through simulations as well as experiments.
Incremental development of a passive-dynamics-based walking machine

Passive-dynamic walkers are mechanical devices that walk down a slope without motors or controllers. In this paper we present in detail the incremental development of one such walker, the design stages we went through and its experimental results. We built a four-legged planar passive-dynamic walking machine with its inner and outer legs connected rigidly two by two, making it equivalent to a biped machine in terms of dynamics. We conducted our experiments with two different knee designs: first, with a magnetic knee-locking mechanism, and the second, with a knee-locking mechanism featuring active release. Both mechanisms were designed in an attempt to create a simpler and easier to adjust knee-locking mechanism, instead of the more common knee-locking via suction cups mechanism. We conducted series of experiments in which we counted the steps the walker made while walking down an incline. We compared the results achieved with the two knee-locking mechanisms and assessed their effectiveness. The second model made an increased number of successful walks down the slope from which we concluded that the newer active release mechanism is more reliable and easy to use and set up.
Evaluation of Mechanical Properties of Coconut Coir Fiber Reinforced Polymer Matrix Composites

Fiber-reinforced polymer composites have played a dominant role for a longtime in a variety of applications for their high specific strength and modulus. The fiber which serves as a reinforcement in reinforced plastics may be synthetic or natural. Past studies show that only synthetic fibers such as glass, carbon etc., have been used in fiber-reinforced plastics. Although glass and other synthetic fiber-reinforced plastics possess high specific strength, their fields of application are very limited because of their inherent higher cost of production. An attempt has been made to utilize the coir, as natural fiber abundantly available in India. Natural fibers are not only strong and lightweight but also relatively very cheap. The present work describes the development and characterization of a new set of natural fiber based polyester composites consisting of coir as reinforcement and epoxy resin. Coir composites are developed and their mechanical properties are evaluated, at five different volume fractions and tests were carried out and the results were presented. Experimental results showed tensile, static and Dynamic properties of the composites are greatly influenced by increasing the percentage of reinforcement, and indicate coir can be used as potential reinforcing material for many structural and non-structural applications.
Network coding for reliable safety message communication in vehicular Ad-Hoc networks: a review

Advancements in hardware, software, and computing technologies make the design and application of series and diverse kinds of networks deployment in several environments possible. An instance of such networks greeted with the enormous interest in research and industries is the vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Currently, information dissemination in the practical communication networks is achieved by routing. However, network coding can be thought of as the hopeful generalisation of routing that has further potential to network changing situations. Despite the existence of numerous studies on the applicability of network coding to broadcasting communications for mobile ad-hoc networks, there are few broadcasting protocols designed for VANETs that applied network coding. This paper reviews some of the applications of network coding for reliable safety message communication in VANETs, classifying them based on the transmission orientation and divulging the gain realized when the method is used. A summary table presenting the comparative study of the protocols is provided.
Themis: Enforcing Titanium Consistency on the NOW

Titanium is a single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming language based on Java. Titanium defines a data consistency model equivalent to the Java specification. This consistency model calls for locally sequential consistency, with global consistency attained at synchronization points and arbitrary write reordering. The Titanium language is targeted at homogeneous multiprocessors on distributed memory architectures. Accesses to distant memory locations may result in communication over a network. The Themis system builds a Titaniumcompliant consistency interface for Active Messages running on a NOW. This paper examines several methods for designing a Themis system that performs well for Titanium applications. Microbenchmark tests and a Conjugate Gradient Method test show the viability of each of these designs. One of the methods, a caching mechanism called OrderCache, displays promise for reducing communication loads and exploiting the locality of data within applications.
Obesity: A Stubbornly Obvious Target for Stroke Prevention

Obesity has been described as “the great humbler” because so many investigators have anticipated finding an easy cure only to learn that it is stubbornly difficult to treat.1 With the exception of bariatric surgery, no major treatment breakthroughs have emerged despite decades of scientific inquiry. All this may change as a result of research that has begun to identify the humoral and behavioral forces that sustain body weight and limit the losses achievable with dietary modification.2,3 As these investigations unfold, there is reason to anticipate new therapies that safely modify appetite and eating behaviors and change how we manage obesity. As effective treatment become feasible, obesity may constitute an important frontier for neurologists and other clinicians caring for stroke patients. This highly prevalent risk factor for stroke afflicts a large proportion of adults4 and represents a logical target for both primary and secondary prevention. In this article, we provide a narrative review of salient research that supports the optimistic view that obesity treatment will substantially reduce the burden of stroke. The prevalence of obesity among adults in the United States (defined as a body mass index [BMI] ≥30 kg/m2) has increased from 13% to 34% over the past half-century.4 A similar trend has been observed in other countries although the absolute prevalence of obesity varies considerably.5,6 For example, compared with the United States, current obesity rates are lower in Canada (24%), Germany (23%), and China (4%). Over 40 published studies, between 1983 and 2011, have examined the association between obesity and cerebrovascular disease. Almost all measured obesity with the BMI; some also used measures of central obesity such as the waist-to-hip ratio or waist circumference. With few exceptions, each study reported at least one measure of adiposity to be significantly …
Survey of Intrusion Detection Systems towards an End to End Secure Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the largest technological evolutions of computing, by 2022 it is estimated that a trillion IP addresses (objects) will be connected to the Internet. The obscurity and low accessibility of many of these devices in this vast heterogeneous network will make it difficult to holistically monitor information flow. Nonetheless, to safeguard networks, unauthorized intruders must be detected within the constraints of each type of device or subnetwork before any system information can be disseminated. In this paper, a survey of the Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) using the most recent ideas and methods proposed for the IoT is presented. To understand and illustrate IDS platform differences and the current research trend towards a universal, cross-platform distributed approach, the survey starts with an historical examination of intrusion detection systems. This examination of the foundations of IDS research based on the components that make up the IoT is followed by a look at the current holistic trend and an analysis of these schemes. Finally, guidelines to potential IDS in the IoT are proposed before identifying the open research problems.
The case for virtual register machines

Virtual machines (VMs) are a popular target for language implementers. Conventional wisdom tells us that virtual stack architectures can be implemented with an interpreter more efficiently, since the location of operands is implicit in the stack pointer. In contrast, the operands of register machine instructions must be specified explicitly. In this paper, we present a working system for translating stack-based Java virtual machine (JVM) code to a simple register code. We describe the translation process, the complicated parts of the JVM which make translation more difficult, and the optimisations needed to eliminate copy instructions. Experimental results show that a register format reduces the number of executed instructions by 34.88%, while increasing the number of bytecode loads by an average of 44.81%. Overall, this corresponds to an increase of 2.32 loads for each dispatch removed. We believe that the high cost of dispatches makes register machines attractive even at the cost of increased loads.
Altitudinal Patterns of Spider Sociality and the Biology of a New Midelevation Social Anelosimus Species in Ecuador

To the extent that geography correlates with particular environmental parameters, the geographical distribution of phylogenetically related social and nonsocial organisms should shed light on the conditions that lead to sociality versus nonsociality. Social spiders are notorious for being concentrated in tropical regions of the world, occupying a set of habitats more restricted than those available to the phylogenetic lineages in which they occur. Here we document a parallel pattern involving elevation in the spider genus Anelosimus in America and describe the biology of a newly discovered social species found at what appears to be the altitudinal edge of sociality in the genus. We show that this is a cooperative permanent‐social species with highly female‐biased sex ratios but colonies that are one to two orders of magnitude smaller than those of a low‐elevation congener of similar body size. We suggest that the absence of subsocial Anelosimus species in the lowland rain forest may be due to an increased probability of maternal death in this habitat due to greater predation and/or precipitation, while absence of a sufficient supply of large insects at high elevations or latitudes may restrict social species to low‐ to midelevation tropical moist forests. We refer to these as the “maternal survival” and “prey size” hypotheses, respectively, and suggest that both in combination may explain the geographical distribution of sociality in the genus.
Expressive Data Storage Policies for Multi-cloud Storage Configurations

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers increasingly rely on multi-cloud setups to leverage the combined benefits of different enabling technologies and third-party providers. Especially, in the context of NoSQL storage systems, which are characterized by heterogeneity and quick technological evolution, adopting the multi-cloud paradigm is a promising way to deal with different data storage requirements. Existing data access middleware platforms that support this type of setup (polyglot persistence) commonly rely on (i) configuration models that describe the multi-cloud setup, and (ii) the hard-coded logic in the application source code or the data storage policies that define how the middleware platforms should store data across different storage systems. In practice, however, both models are tightly coupled, i.e. the hard-coded logic in the application source code and data storage policies refer to specific configuration model elements, leads to fragility issues (ripple effects) and hinders reusability. More specifically, in multi-cloud configurations that change often (e.g., in dynamic cloud federations), this is a key problem. In this paper, we present a more expressive way to specify storage policies, that involves (i) enriching the configuration models with metadata about the technical capabilities of the storage systems, (ii) referring to the desired capabilities of the storage system in the storage policies, and (iii) leaving actual resolution to the policy engine. Our validation in the context of a realistic SaaS application shows how the policies accommodate such changes for a number of realistic policy change scenarios. In addition, we evaluate the performance overhead, showing that policy evaluation is on average less than 2% of the total execution time.
Critical Issues in Interviewing People with Traumatic Brain Injury

People with cognitive impairments often cannot effectively recall and articulate experiences, feelings, and perceptions. Therefore, interviewing them can be fraught with pragmatic and methodological difficulties. Given this situation, the authors’ experience in a study on the allocation of rehabilitative services to survivors of traumatic brain injury is discussed. Participants had physiological impairments affecting their ability to focus on interview questions. The authors discuss the unique challenges, including participants’ recall of events, intolerance to stimuli, and image management and offer strategies for mitigating these concerns. The traditional view that reality is captured only in the subjective accounts of articulate people who can remember events in a precise and reflective manner is challenged.
The lysophospholipid mediator sphingosine-1-phosphate promotes angiogenesis in vivo in ischaemic hindlimbs of mice.

AIMS The lysophospholipid mediator sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) acts on vascular endothelial cells to stimulate migration, proliferation, and capillary-like tube formation in vitro. It is unknown whether S1P stimulates in vivo angiogenesis induced under tissue ischaemia. We investigated the effects of both exogenously and endogenously overproduced S1P on post-ischaemic angiogenesis in murine hindlimbs. METHODS AND RESULTS The effects of locally injected S1P on blood flow recovery, angiogenesis, and vascular permeability in mouse ischaemic hindlimbs that underwent femoral arteriectomy were assessed by a laser Doppler blood flow (LDBF) analysis, anti-CD31 immunohistochemistry, and Miles assay, respectively, and compared with those induced by fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-2. Blood flow recovery and angiogenesis in sphingosine kinase 1-transgenic mice that overproduce S1P endogenously were also assessed and compared with wild-type mice. The LDBF analysis showed that daily intramuscular administration of S1P dose-dependently stimulated blood flow recovery, resulting in up to twice as much blood flow when compared with vehicle control, which was accompanied by 1.7-fold increase in the capillary density. The optimal S1P effects were comparable with those obtained with FGF-2. S1P injection did not increase vascular permeability. The post-ischaemic blood flow recovery and angiogenesis were accelerated in sphingosine kinase 1-transgenic mice, which showed 40-fold higher sphingosine kinase activity and 1.8-fold higher S1P content in skeletal muscle than in wild-type (WT) mice, without an increase in the vascular permeability when compared with WT mice. CONCLUSION These results indicate that either local exogenous S1P administration or endogenous S1P overproduction promotes post-ischaemic angiogenesis and blood flow recovery. These observations suggest potential therapeutic usefulness of S1P for tissue ischaemia.
Fuzzy logic based Adaptive Modulation Using Non Data Aided SNR Estimation for OFDM system

As demand for high quality transmission increases increase of spectrum efficiency and an improvement of error performance in wireless communication systems are important . One of the promising approaches to 4G is adaptive OFDM (AOFDM) . Fixed modulation systems uses only one type of modulation scheme (or order), so that either performance or capacity should be compromised Adaptive modulated systems are superior to fixed modulated systems, since they change modulation order depending on present SNR. In an adaptive modulation system SNR estimation is important since performance of adaptive modulated system depends of estimated SNR. Non-data-Aided (NDA) SNR estimation systems are gaining importance in recent days since they estimate SNR range and requires less data as input . In this paper we propose an adaptive modulated OFDM system which uses NDA(Non-data Aided) SNR estimation using fuzzy logic interface.The proposed system is simulated in Matlab 7.4 and The results of computer simulation show the improvement in system capacity .
Static evaluation of functional programs

Static evaluation underlies essentially all techniques for a priori semantic program manipulation, i.e. those that stop short of fully general execution. Included are such activities as type checking, partial evaluation, and, ultimately, optimized compilation. This paper describes a novel approach to static evaluation of programs in functional languages involving infinite data objects, i.e. those using normal order or “lazy” evaluation. Its principal features are abstract interpretation on a domain of demand patterns, and a notion of function “reversal”. The latter associates with each function f a derived function f' mapping demand patterns on f to demand patterns on its formal parameter. This is used for a comprehensive form of strictness analysis, aiding in efficient compilation. This analysis leads to a revised notion of basic block, appropriate as an intermediate representation for a normal order functional language. An implementation of the analysis technique in Prolog is sketched, as well as an effort currently underway to apply the technique to the generation of optimized G-machine code.
Agriculture's role in the Indian enigma: Help or hindrance to the undernutrition crisis?

In recent decades India has achieved one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world, yet its progress against both child and adult undernutrition has been sluggish at best. While this Indian variant of the so-called Asian enigma presents many puzzles, one of the puzzles pertains to agriculture's role. In this paper we reassess agriculture's role in the Indian enigma by exploring two key pathways, an income–consumption pathway and an employment–time use pathway, linking agricultural conditions to nutrition outcomes. On the income–consumption front, we assess whether rising incomes are improving diets and how agriculture and income growth are influencing the Indian diet. In terms of time use, we explore whether agricultural livelihoods hinder childcare practices and the health status of mothers. We conclude with a brief overview of nonagricultural constraints to improved nutrition and some analysis of the implications of our findings for agricultural policies in India.
Optimal Strategy of Service Recovery for On-line Shops: Based on Infinitely Repeated Game

Service optimization in e-commerce is an important research field of service science. In which, service failures are unavoidable for on-line shops because of their particularities. Certain deals being applied to win the customers satisfactory when service failures happen can benefit on-line shops to be more competitive. In order to explore the optimal service recovery strategies of online shops, models of single-stage game, two-stage game and infinitely repeated game are used in this paper. Theoretical results show that service recovery is not the best choice for any online shops in one-term transaction, while the optimum compensation coefficient of these shops is proportional to the value of goods sold and the discount factor, and inversely proportional to their probability having no failures and their expected disutility to customers, in repeated transaction. These results are in good agreement with the real life.
Influence of the Starting Materials and Sintering Conditions on Composition of a Macroporous Adsorbent as Permeable Reactive Barrier

In this investigation, we observed surface morphology and porosity of a macroporous adsorbent made of Na-bentonite and Ca-bentonite as structure formation materials and grounded waste paper as macropore forming material for the development of a permeable reactive barrier to remove heavy metals in groundwater. Therefore, we selected minerals having higher cation exchange capacity among 2:1 clay minerals and other industrial minerals because sintering can significantly influence cation exchange capacity, resulting in drastic decrease in removal of heavy metals. The results showed that the increasing sintering temperature drastically decreased CEC by less than 10 % of the indigenous CEC carried by the selected minerals. One axial compressibility test results showed that the highest value was obtained from 5% newspaper waste pulp for both structure formation materials of Na-bentonite and Ca-bentonite although there were not much difference in bulk density among treatments. The pore formation influenced by sintering temperature and period contributes removal of heavy metals passing through the sintered macroporous media having different water retention capacity.