Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asynchronous learning networks as a virtual classroom

omputer-mediated communication can enable people with shared interests to form and sustain relationships and communities. Compared to communities offline, computer-supported communities tend to be larger, more dispersed in space and time, more densely knit, and to have members with more heterogeneous social characteristics but with more homogeneous attitudes. Despite earlier fears to the contrary by those who worry about the possible dehumanizing effects of computers, online communities provide emotional support and sociability as well as information and instrumental aid related to shared tasks. Online virtual classrooms combine the characteristics of online communities and computer-supported workgroups. New software tools and systems for coordinating interaction may alleviate some of the problems of interacting online, like information overload and normless behavior. What kinds of communities are most suited to the virtual environment of computer networks? How does the medium affect interaction in online communities and the types of social structures emerging in postindustrial societies, like North America and Europe? To address these questions, we provide historical perspective; define “community” as a social network; summarize studies of how computer-mediated communication (CMC) affects community interaction; survey examples of different kinds of communities communicating through the Internet; and look at asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) as an example of an online community. With development of computer networks, the standalone computer was transformed into a technology that sustains the social networks of work and community. However, some of the debates about the nature of the Internet have continued the longstanding exchange between computerphiles and computerphobes. For example, John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has proclaimed, “With the development of the Internet and with the increasing pervasiveness of communication between networked computers, we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire” [1, p. 40]. On the other side, an ad for Mark Slouka’s 1995 book War of the Worlds warned, “Face-to-face communication is Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Barry Wellman
Mimicry Honeypot: A Brief Introduction

The paper firstly analyzes the limitation of traditional defense methods, including the firewall and the IDS. Then the paper discusses the traditional honeypot system in detail. Unfortunately, the traditional honeypot is a passive active defense mechanism in nature, and could be unfavorable for cyber defense. Inspired by the mimetic phenomenon of the nature, we introduce the mimicry concept into the network defense, define the concept of protective coloration and warning coloration for cyber defense, and then formalize a mimicry honeypot model, which could perceive and adaptive the change of the network service and perform better camouflage. Several important issues are discussed in this paper. So far as we know, this is the first paper about the mimicry honeypot.
The Counterbalance Mechanism of Blockholders and the Effectiveness of Internal Control: A Case Study Based on the Listed Liquor Companies in China

Among the special environment of corporate governance in China, previous researches mainly focused on the concept of the internal control framework, and none of those studies considered the counterbalance mechanism of block holders as an important factor. Based on the case study of three listed liquor companies, and from the aspects of the characteristics of holding (counterbalance) shareholders and the effectiveness of the counterbalance, this paper analyzed the ways to improve the effectiveness of internal control mechanism in China's listed companies. The research results show that if the actual controlling shareholders are state-controlled, the introduction of non-state-controlled shareholders who conduct counterbalance will achieve the optimum of internal control, but the internal control with the introduction of state-controlled shareholders who conduct counterbalance is only slightly better than the one with the high ownership concentration, and their effectiveness is not obvious.
Heterodimensional field effect transistors for ultra low power applications

We describe a new class of field effect transistors (FETs) based on a heterodimensional contact between a three-dimensional gate (metal or semiconductor) and a two-dimensional electron gas. The heterodimensional FET family (2D MESFET, 2DI MESFET, and 2D JFET) has shown significant promise for future high speed, ultra low power applications. We review the recent developments, and report on a new fully ion implanted quasi-heterodimensional FET, the coax-2D JFET.
Design constraints for the inductive power and data link of an implanted body sensor

In this paper the basic system design constraints for the inductive power and data link are shown. The limiting factors for the choice of quality factors, coil inductance and carrier frequency are evaluated through analytical methods and simulations. The impact of the analysis on the required rectifier structure is also discussed. The analysis is focused on the development of a miniature biomedical sensor device whose outer dimensions shall not exceed 5-by-5 mm.
Acute Toxicity Assessment of New Algicides of Thiazolidinediones Derivatives, TD53 and TD49, Using Ulva pertusa Kjellman

Objectives : This study was aimed to examine the acute toxicity assessment of two new algicides, thiazolidinediones derivatives (TD53 and TD49), which were synthesized to selectively control red tide, to the marine ecosystem. Methods : The assessment employed by a new method using Ulva pertusa Kjellman which has been recently accepted as a standard method of ISO. The toxicity was assessed by calculating the EC50 (Effective Concentration of 50%), NOEC (No Observed Effect Concentration) and PNEC (Predicted No Effect Concentration) using acute toxicity data obtained from exposure experiments. EC50 value of TD49 and TD53 was examined by 96-hrs exposure together with Solutol as a TD49 dispersing agent and DMSO as a TD53 solvent. Results : EC50 value of TD53 was 1.65 μM. From the results, values of NOEC and PNEC were calculated to be 0.63 μM and 1.65 nM, respectively. DMSO under the range of 0~10 μM, which is same solvent concentration used in examining TD53, showed no toxic effect. EC50 value of TD49 was 0.18μM and that of Solutol was 1.70 μM. NOEC and PNEC of TD49 were 0.08 μM and 0.18 nM, respectively and those for Solutol were 1.25 μM and 1.25 nM, respectively. Conclusions : From the values of NOEC, PNEC of TD53 and TD49, TD49 showed 9 times stronger toxicity than TD53. On the other hand, DMSO showed no toxicity on the Ulva pertusa Kjellman, but Solutol was found to be a considerable toxicity by itself.
Basic Characteristics of Glutamates and Umami Sensing in the Oral Cavity and the Gut Chemosensory Signal Transduction in Paramecium

Paramecia are ciliated single-cell eukaryotic organisms that can respond to chemical cues in their environment. Glutamate is among those cues, which attract cells. We describe briefly here the following attributes of glutamate chemoresponse: 1) Cells are attracted to L-glutamate relative to KCl at high concentrations of glutamate. 2) There are at least two specific, relatively low affinity glutamate binding sites on the cell surface. Glutamate can be displaced from only one of the binding sites by inosine monophosphate (IMP), and quisqualate displaces glutamate from the second site, which is likely to be the glutamate receptor involved in attraction to glutamate. 3) IMP is a repellent and does not act synergistically with glutamate, whereas guanosine monophosphate (GMP) does. 4) Similarly, glutathione is an attractant, but glutamate and glutathione appear to use different transduction pathways. 5) Glutamate hyperpolarizes the cell. The ionic mechanism is not yet verified, but is likely to involve a K conductance. 6) Glutamate induces a rapid and robust increase in cAMP in the cell. Protein kinase A (PKA) is possibly involved in the transduction pathway because kinase inhibitors such as H7 and H8 inhibit glutamate response, but do not affect responses to other attractants, such as acetate and ammonium. Activation of PKA by the rapid rise in cAMP may sustain the hyperpolarization phosphorylation and activation of the plasma membrane calcium pump. 7) Candidate glutamate binding proteins are being identified among the cell surface proteins with the use of affinity chromatography. J. Nutr. 130: 946S–949S, 2000.
Sniff and Embark Protocol for QoS Enhancement in Wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11e standard defines the enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF) to improve the quality of service (QoS) in a wireless local area network (WLAN). The EDCF is a CSMA/CA based protocol, where stations compete for the medium with prioritized contention parameters. Also defined in the 802.11e standard is the polling mode of the hybrid coordination function (HCF - polling), which is a centralized QoS mechanism. The primary purpose of the 802.11e HCF is to decrease the average queuing delay. The EDCF fails to scale well at high loads due to increase in collisions, while the HCF polling compromises on throughput to achieve lower delay and has the disadvantage of being centrally controlled. In this paper, we propose an adaptive sniffing based protocol (sniff and embark protocol) that works around the deficiencies of the IEEE 802.11e standard. The simulations show that sniff and embark protocol outperforms the EDCF in terms of providing higher throughput and lower average delay.
The 2003 Bam (Iran) earthquake: Rupture of a blind strike‐slip fault

An Mw 6.5 earthquake devastated the town of Bam in southeast Iran on 26 December 2003. Surface displacements and decorrelation effects, mapped using Envisat radar data, reveal that over 2 m of slip occurred at depth on a fault that had not previously been identified. It is common for earthquakes to occur on blind faults which, despite their name, usually produce long‐term surface effects by which their existence may be recognised. However, in this case there is a complete absence of morphological features associated with the seismogenic fault that destroyed Bam.
50-54 THINKING.indd

Architectural design – the art and science of designing space, building and the built environment – is a creative and complex task. It involves considerations of form (shapes, structure and configurations) and function (purposes and utilities). Whether form precedes function or vice versa (Janson, 1982; Anderson, 1987), the training and education of architects posits that successful design should combine form and function. Tasks include spatial arrangement (massing, volume, space) for programmatic requirement (capacity, cost, lighting, acoustic) and tectonics (details, material, construction and technology) at various scales from urban design to details. In architecture, drawings are the primary form of representation, carrying a design from conception to construction. The drawings the architect makes to explore and evaluate alternatives are more abstract and less precise than the working drawing handed to the builder specifying what to make. The earliest representations in this process are diagrams. The use of drawings to design buildings is a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of architecture. Although full-scale templates of columns are carved in stone at the Temple of Apollo (Haselberger, 1985), it appears that drawing (and hence diagrams) as a vehicle for making decisions about what to build emerged during the Renaissance. See Herbert (1993) for a general discussion; Ackermann (1997) and Branner (1960) for medieval design methods and the development of drawing-based design. Designers think with diagrams. All design is done with drawings and drawings are done in every design. There are many forms of design drawing. We distinguish between diagrams and other forms of drawing – the sketch, the more formal schematic drawing – and study the relations between drawing forms and various design activities. Designers start by making diagrams and sketches to explore ideas and solutions. Trained to use paper and pencil to develop conceptual designs, they draw to develop ideas and communicate their thinking. Design drawing is an iterative and interactive act involving recording ideas, recognising functions and meaning in the drawings, and finding new forms and adapting them into the design. Drawing educator Betty Figure 1-diagrams showing spatial layout bubbles with labels and annotations.
Effective and efficient?: bilingual sentiment lexicon extraction using collocation alignment

Bilingual sentiment lexicon is fundamental resource for cross-language sentiment analysis but its compilation remains a major bottleneck in computational linguistics. Traditional word alignment algorithm faces with the status of large alignment space, which may introduce redundant computations as well as alignment errors. In this paper, we use collocation alignment to extract bilingual sentiment lexicon overcoming the drawbacks of word alignment. The idea of collocation alignment is inspired by the strong cohesion between feature words and opinion words in sentiment corpus. Experimental results show that our approach not only decreases the computing time dramatically but also improves the precision of extracted bilingual word pairs due to the smaller alignment space.
Anomaly-mediation and sequestering from a higher-dimensional viewpoint

We study a five-dimensional supergravity model with boundary-localized visible sector exhibiting anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking, in which the central requirements of sequestering and radius stabilization are achieved perturbatively. This makes it possible to understand these various mechanisms in a more integrated and transparent fashion, mostly from the higher-dimensional viewpoint. Local supersymmetry, in the presence of visible sector quantum effects, is enforced by the formalism of the five-dimensional superconformal tensor calculus. The construction results in only mild warping, which allows a natural supersymmetry-breaking mediation mechanism of (finite) boundary-to-boundary gravity loops to co-dominate with anomaly-mediation, thereby solving the latter's tachyonic slepton problem. We make the non-trivial check that this can occur while dangerous loops of stabilizing fields remain highly suppressed. Our discussion is a well-controlled starting point for considering other generalizations of anomaly-mediation, or for string theory realizations.
Localization and characterization of melatonin receptors in rodent brain by in vitro autoradiography

Little is known of the neural sites of action for the pineal hormone, melatonin. Thus, we developed an in vitro autoradiographic method using 125I-labeled melatonin (I-MEL) to study putative melatonin receptors in rodent brain. We first determined optimal in vitro labeling conditions for autoradiographic detection of I-MEL binding sites in rat median eminence, the most intensely labeled area in the rat brain. We then assessed the pharmacologic and kinetic properties of I-MEL binding sites in rat median eminence by quantitative autoradiography. These sites have high affinity for I-MEL (equilibrium dissociation constant = 43 pM). I-MEL binding was inhibited by nanomolar concentrations of melatonin or 6-chloromelatonin, but was not inhibited by serotonin, dopamine, or norepinephrine (100 microM). These results suggest that I- MEL binding sites identified by in vitro autoradiography represent specific, high-affinity melatonin receptors. Studies of the distribution of I-MEL binding in rat, Syrian hamster, and Djungarian hamster brain confirm that the median eminence and suprachiasmatic nucleus are major sites of I-MEL binding in rodent brain; other brain areas labeled in one or more of these species were the thalamus (paraventricular, anteroventral, and reuniens nuclei, nucleus of the stria medullaris, and medial part of the lateral habenular nucleus), hypothalamus (dorsomedial nucleus), subiculum, and area postrema. The presence of putative melatonin receptors in the suprachiasmatic nuclei and median eminence of these rodent species suggests that these brain regions are important loci for melatonin effects on circadian rhythms and reproduction.
SnS Thin Film Solar Cells: Perspectives and Limitations

Thin film solar cells have reached commercial maturity and extraordinarily high efficiency that make them competitive even with the cheaper Chinese crystalline silicon modules. However, some issues (connected with presence of toxic and/or rare elements) are still limiting their market diffusion. For this reason new thin film materials, such as Cu2ZnSnS4 or SnS, have been introduced so that expensive In and Te, and toxic elements Se and Cd, are substituted, respectively, in CuInGaSe2 and CdTe. To overcome the abundance limitation of Te and In, in recent times new thin film materials, such as Cu2ZnSnS4 or SnS, have been investigated. In this paper we analyze the limitations of SnS deposition in terms of reproducibility and reliability. SnS deposited by thermal evaporation is analyzed by X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy. The raw material is also analyzed and a different composition is observed according to the different number of evaporation (runs). The sulfur loss represents one of the major challenges of SnS solar cell technology.
Enhancing the quality of hermeneutic research: decision trail.

BACKGROUND Researchers have ethical and professional obligations to produce research of a high standard. The constituents of quality in research appear to differ between authors, leaving readers unsure about which pathway to follow. This can reflect inadequate consideration of the theoretical framework guiding the study. Many papers fail to consider the theoretical underpinnings of the methodology chosen and the link between these and the methods employed. These need to be accessible to readers in order to assess the trustworthiness of the research. AIM This paper discusses the development of trustworthiness in hermeneutic phenomenological research. DISCUSSION Referring to a study on lived experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/myalgic encephalitis, I describe the decision trail and discuss the strengths and limitations of the choices made throughout the study. CONCLUSION The methodology focused my approach more fully on the importance of recognizing the influences that I brought to the study and the impact of these in generating the data. It highlighted the fact that the process of setting out my horizon can never be complete, the importance of analysing the data at a macro and micro level, acknowledging the evolution of the data over time, and ensuring that analysis does not move beyond the data and out of the hermeneutic circle. In seeking to make the decision trail clear to others, researchers must distill the philosophical principles of the methodology and set these out in a way that is accessible and open to scrutiny.
Empirical Establishment of Oligonucleotide Probe Design Criteria

ABSTRACT Criteria for the design of gene-specific and group-specific oligonucleotide probes were established experimentally via an oligonucleotide array that contained perfect match (PM) and mismatch probes (50-mers and 70-mers) based upon four genes. The effects of probe-target identity, continuous stretch, mismatch position, and hybridization free energy on specificity were tested. Little hybridization was observed at a probe-target identity of ≤85% for both 50-mer and 70-mer probes. PM signal intensities (33 to 48%) were detected at a probe-target identity of 94% for 50-mer oligonucleotides and 43 to 55% for 70-mer probes at a probe-target identity of 96%. When the effects of sequence identity and continuous stretch were considered independently, a stretch probe (>15 bases) contributed an additional 9% of the PM signal intensity compared to a nonstretch probe (≤15 bases) at the same identity level. Cross-hybridization increased as the length of continuous stretch increased. A 35-base stretch for 50-mer probes or a 50-base stretch for 70-mer probes had approximately 55% of the PM signal. Little cross-hybridization was observed for probes with a minimal binding free energy greater than −30 kcal/mol for 50-mer probes or −40 kcal/mol for 70-mer probes. Based on the experimental results, a set of criteria are suggested for the design of gene-specific and group-specific oligonucleotide probes, and the experimentally established criteria should provide valuable information for new software and algorithms for microarray-based studies.
An evaluation of mesh model algorithms for direct feature detection on compressed image representations

Recent developments in mesh modelling of images have provided algorithms that can achieve accurate and efficient image representations without the high computational cost associated with earlier optimisation-based methods. Hence nonuniform sampling of images combined with the use of irregular content-based meshing has provided a successful basis for recent developments in image compression techniques. The evaluation of these techniques has focussed on the accuracy and efficiency with which the mesh model can represent the image. For real-time applications, the usefulness of a mesh model may be assessed by its ability to yield compressed image representations that can be processed directly to provide output that is sufficiently accurate. Hence we present an evaluation of mesh model algorithms that is based on feature detection on the associated compressed image representations. Such an approach is built on the recent development of systematic design procedures for scalable and adaptive image processing operators that can be applied directly to non-uniformly sampled images. We demonstrate the approach using image derivative operators on compressed images.
A flexible framework for deriving assertions from electronic medical records

OBJECTIVE This paper describes natural-language-processing techniques for two tasks: identification of medical concepts in clinical text, and classification of assertions, which indicate the existence, absence, or uncertainty of a medical problem. Because so many resources are available for processing clinical texts, there is interest in developing a framework in which features derived from these resources can be optimally selected for the two tasks of interest. MATERIALS AND METHODS The authors used two machine-learning (ML) classifiers: support vector machines (SVMs) and conditional random fields (CRFs). Because SVMs and CRFs can operate on a large set of features extracted from both clinical texts and external resources, the authors address the following research question: Which features need to be selected for obtaining optimal results? To this end, the authors devise feature-selection techniques which greatly reduce the amount of manual experimentation and improve performance. RESULTS The authors evaluated their approaches on the 2010 i2b2/VA challenge data. Concept extraction achieves 79.59 micro F-measure. Assertion classification achieves 93.94 micro F-measure. DISCUSSION Approaching medical concept extraction and assertion classification through ML-based techniques has the advantage of easily adapting to new data sets and new medical informatics tasks. However, ML-based techniques perform best when optimal features are selected. By devising promising feature-selection techniques, the authors obtain results that outperform the current state of the art. CONCLUSION This paper presents two ML-based approaches for processing language in the clinical texts evaluated in the 2010 i2b2/VA challenge. By using novel feature-selection methods, the techniques presented in this paper are unique among the i2b2 participants.