Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scheduling strategies for service admission in Powerline Communication access networks with QoS support

A broadband powerline communications (BPLC) access network is a master-slave system, where a base station controls all the medium accesses of its slaves. Since this BPLC system supports for multi-users with multiple services, it requires a scheduler to manage the available network transmission capacity via a bandwidth broker, delivers the access right to the users based on their requests. The scheduler has to assure the QoS guarantee for each type of service in accordance with its requirements. In a system utilizing the TDMA access scheme, like the OPERA system, the resource that the base station assigns to each user is the duration of the time slot for accessing the network. The problem of the scheduler arises when there is not enough available transmission capacity to satisfy all the requests from the users at the same time. Therefore, scheduling strategies are studied and proposed to find a good way to distribute resource to users and requested services. A heuristic algorithm to solve this scheduling problem is also proposed and analyzed.
Drinking-Water Nitrate, Methemoglobinemia, and Global Burden of Disease: A Discussion

On behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), I have undertaken a series of literature-based investigations examining the global burden of disease related to a number of environmental risk factors associated with drinking water. In this article I outline the investigation of drinking-water nitrate concentration and methemoglobinemia. The exposure assessment was based on levels of nitrate in drinking water greater than the WHO guideline value of 50 mg/L. No exposure–response relationship, however, could be identified that related drinking-water nitrate level to methemoglobinemia. Indeed, although it has previously been accepted that consumption of drinking water high in nitrates causes methemoglobinemia in infants, it appears now that nitrate may be one of a number of co-factors that play a sometimes complex role in causing the disease. I conclude that, given the apparently low incidence of possible water-related methemoglobinemia, the complex nature of the role of nitrates, and that of individual behavior, it is currently inappropriate to attempt to link illness rates with drinking-water nitrate levels.
A Walking Velocity Update technique for pedestrian dead-reckoning applications

Inertial sensors for pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) have been attracting considerable attention recently. Since accelerometers are prone to the accumulation of errors, a “Zero Velocity Update” (Z-UPT) technique [1], [2] was proposed as a means to calibrate the velocity of pedestrians. However, these inertial sensors must be mounted on the bottom of the foot, resulting in excessive vibration and errors when measuring speed or orientation. This paper proposes a self-calibrating PDR solution using two inertial sensors in conjunction with a novel concept called “Walking Velocity Update” (W-UPT). One inertial sensor is mounted on the lower leg to identify a point suitable for calibrating the walking velocity of the user (when its pitch value becomes zero), while another sensor is mounted on the upper body to track the velocity and orientation. We have developed a working prototype and tested the proposed system using actual data.
Control of cable-driven parallel robot for gait rehabilitation

We report the control and simulation of a planar cable-driven parallel robot with four cables. The application of the robot is to fully control the lower limb, shank, for gait rehabilitation. The main challenge in control of the cable-driven parallel robot is to avoid negative cable tensions during dynamic motions. For this purpose a redundant robot with capability to exert a general wrench on the target limb with only positive cable tensions for all the poses of the limb near to the trajectory in the gait cycle is used. It is explained that the proposed robot can control both rotational and translational degree of freedom of the shank without slack cable conditions in the gait cycle. Then the dynamic model and control of the robot is proposed with a strategy to choose the forces of cables in order to avoid the negative tension. Examples of simulation are presented to demonstrate the capability of the robot in efficiently tracking the trajectory.
Taxes and subsidies for pollution-intensive industries as trade policy

Abstract This paper constructs a model of international oligopoly with negative externalities in production, in which optimal environmental policy responses to foreign emission tax and subsidy programs can be calculated. It is shown that by granting subsidies for abatement efforts or for a heavily taxed polluting input, domestic net welfare is improved by capturing a greater share of the world market. Since the subsidy programs are supposed to improve the quality of the global environment, they can be justified on environmental grounds. In addition, we show that a Pigouvion emission tax restores efficiency in natural resource allocation, whereas subsidy programs are in principle used as instruments in imperfectly competitive international markets.
Dynamic Modeling of the Microalgae Cultivation Phase for Energy Production in Open Raceway Ponds and Flat Panel Photobioreactors

A dynamic model of microalgae cultivation phase is presented in this work. Two cultivation technologies are taken into account: the open raceway pond and the flat panel photobioreactor. For each technology, the model is able to evaluate the microalgae areal and volumetric productivity and the energy production and consumption. Differently from the most common existing models in literature, which deal with a specific part of the overall cultivation process, the model presented here includes all physical and chemical quantities that mostly affect microalgae growth: the equation of the specific growth rate for the microalgae is influenced by CO2 and nutrients concentration in the water, light intensity, temperature of the water in the reactor and by the microalgae species being considered. All these input parameters can be tuned to obtain reliable predictions. A comparison with experimental data taken from the literature shows that the predictions are consistent, slightly overestimating the productivity in case of closed photobioreactor. The results obtained by the simulation runs are consistent with those found in literature, being the areal productivity for the open raceway pond between 50 and 70 t/(ha*year) in Southern Spain (Sevilla) and Brazil (Petrolina) and between 250 and 350 t/(ha*year) for the flat panel photobioreactor in the same locations.
Enhancing Automated Program Repair with Deductive Verification

Automated program repair (APR) is a challenging process of detecting bugs, localizing buggy code, generating fix candidates and validating the fixes. Effectiveness of program repair methods relies on the generated fix candidates, and the methods used to traverse the space of generated candidates to search for the best ones. Existing approaches generate fix candidates based on either syntactic searches over source code or semantic analysis of specification, e.g., test cases. In this paper, we propose to combine both syntactic and semantic fix candidates to enhance the search space of APR, and provide a function to effectively traverse the search space. We present an automated repair method based on structured specifications, deductive verification and genetic programming. Given a function with its specification, we utilize a modular verifier to detect bugs and localize both program statements and sub-formulas in the specification that relate to those bugs. While the former are identified as buggy code, the latter are transformed as semantic fix candidates. We additionally generate syntactic fix candidates via various mutation operators. Best candidates, which receives fewer warnings via a static verification, are selected for evolution though genetic programming until we find one satisfying the specification. Another interesting feature of our proposed approach is that we efficiently ensure the soundness of repaired code through modular (or compositional) verification. We implemented our proposal and tested it on C programs taken from the SIR benchmark that are seeded with bugs, achieving promising results.
Physella acuta: atypical mitochondrial gene order among panpulmonates (Gastropoda)

Mitochondrial (mt) sequences are frequently used for phylogenetic reconstruction and for identification of species of molluscs. This study expands the phylogenetic range of Hygrophila (Panpulmonata) for which such sequence data are available by characterizing the full mt genome of the invasive freshwater snail Physella acuta (Physidae). The mt genome sequences of two P. acuta isolates from Stubblefield Lake, New Mexico, USA, differed in length (14,490 vs 14,314 bp) and showed 11.49% sequence divergence, whereas ITS1 and ITS2 sequences from the nuclear genome differed by 1.75%. The mt gene order of P. acuta (cox1, P, nad6, nad5, nad1, D, F, cox2, Y, W, nad4L, C, Q, atp6, R, E, rrnS, M, T, cox3, I, nad2, K, V, rrnL, L1, A, cytb, G, H, L2, atp8, N, nad2, S1, S2, nad4) differs considerably from the relatively conserved gene order within Panpulmonata. Phylogenetic trees show that the 13 protein-encoding mt gene sequences (equivalent codons) of P. acuta group according to gastropod phylogeny, yet branch lengths and dN/dS ratios for P. acuta indicate elevated amino acid substitutions relative to other gastropods. This study indicates that mt sequences of P. acuta are phylogenetically informative despite a considerable intraspecific divergence and the atypical gene order in its mt genome.
The Impact of ICT Investment on UK Productive Potential 1986-2000: New Statistical Methods and Tests

The effect of information and communications technology (ICT) and other investment on the UK's GDP potential is analysed and tests of the standard assumptions are provided. It is found that, in the absence of hedonic price series for the UK ICT sector, it is acceptable to use surrogates based on the law of one price. The investment data are consistent with the assumptions of optimality and homotheticity. So, in the absence of quality–adjusted measures of labour supply, it is legitimate to assess the contribution of investment to GDP potential independently. Capital investment increased UK GDP potential by about 1½ per cent per annum during 1985–2000.
Emotion Classification through Lower Facial Expressions using Adaptive Support Vector Machines

Emotion classification is a task that the human vision system seems to perform almost effortlessly, yet the goal of building computer-based systems with the ability to perceive and respond to human nonverbal communication has proven to be difficult. The task implicitly requires the ability to recognize the superior expression of the human face. Classification of the unknown emotion is another task that would be accomplished. This study presents the image-based approach to emotion classification through lower facial expression. This study employed a set of feature points in the lower face image according to the particular face model used and considers their motion across each emotive expression of images. The vector of displacements of all feature points input to the Adaptive Support Vector Machines (A-SVMs) classifier that classify it into seven basic emotions scheme, namely neutral, angry, disgust, fear, happy, sad and surprise. The system was tested on the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) dataset of frontal view facial expressions [7]. The experiments on emotion classification through lower facial expressions demonstrate the robustness of Adaptive SVM classifier and verify the high efficiency of the study.
Review of Device and Reliability Physics of Dielectrics in Electrostatically Driven MEMS Devices

After decades of improving semiconductor-device reliability, dielectric failure rates resulting from surface-charge accumulation, dielectric breakdown, and charge injection have been reduced to an almost imperceptible range. However, the influence of dielectric properties and behavior on device performance in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is still poorly understood and a substantial contributor to device failure. The difference is primarily due to two factors. First, the characteristic length scale and electrical stress of dielectrics in MEMS are often an order of magnitude or more than in semiconductor devices. Lateral dimensions of tens of micrometers increase the probability of including defect sites, and higher applied voltages increase the probability of dielectric breakdown. Second, dielectrics in MEMS are often designed to fulfill multiple functions, often with no equivalent in semiconductor devices. The use of dielectrics as structural material puts substantial emphasis on material properties other than the classic dielectric properties. The use of freestanding elements in MEMS causes large interfacial surfaces between the dielectric and air which in turn provides various charge trap mechanisms. The same surfaces, when allowed to come in contact, could lead to a failure mechanism called stiction, where the surfaces cannot be separated after contact. This paper provides a review of the most prevalent failure mechanisms resulting from the use of dielectrics in electrostatically driven MEMS devices and methods to characterize both their material properties and impact on reliability performance.
Wide-Field Weak Lensing by RX J1347–1145

We present an analysis of weak-lensing observations for RX J1347-1145 over a 43′ × 43′ field taken in B and R filters on the Blanco 4 m telescope at CTIO. RX J1347-1145 is a massive cluster at redshift z = 0.45. Using a population of galaxies with 20 < R < 26, we detect a weak-lensing signal at the p < 0.0005 level, finding best-fit parameters of σv = 1400 km s-1 for a singular isothermal sphere model and r200 = 3.5 Mpc with c = 15 for an NFW model in an Ωm = 0.3, ΩΛ = 0.7 cosmology. In addition, a mass-to-light ratio M/LR = 90 ± 20 M☉/LR☉ was determined. These values are consistent with the previous weak-lensing study of RX J1347-1145 by Fischer & Tyson, giving strong evidence that systemic bias was not introduced by the relatively small field of view in that study. Our best-fit parameter values are also consistent with recent X-ray studies by Allen et al. and Ettori et al. but are not consistent with recent optical velocity dispersion measurements by Cohen & Kneib.
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations in Knowledge Organization Systems

Classical knowledge representation methods have been successfully working for years with established ― but in a way restricted and vague ― relations such as synonymy, hierarchy (meronymy, hyponymy) and unspecified associations. Recent developments like ontologies and folksonomies show new forms of collaboration, indexing and knowledge representation and encourage the reconsideration of standard knowledge relationships for pratical use. In a summarizing overview we show which relations are currently used in knowledge organization systems (controlled vocabularies, ontologies and folkosonomies) and which relations are expressed explicity or which may be inherently hidden in them.
Obtaining information from eyewitnesses : effects of retrieval support in eyewitness interviews

In many police cases eyewitness statements are the only available evidence. Hence, whether a crime can be solved may critically depend on the statement quality. Seeking to improve the reliability of eyewitness statements, the thesis examined the effectiveness of retrieval support during the interview when the witnessing conditions were suboptimal (e.g., experience of stress during the crime), as well as retrieval support through repeated interviews. Retrieval support refers to techniques that help witnesses get access to their recollections (e.g., asking the witness to picture the incident in his/her mind). The results showed that retrieval support improves recall performance only after some suboptimal conditions. Furthermore, recall performance can be enhanced when witnesses are interviewed several times. Unfortunately, police detectives in the Netherlands are not aware of the latter, as this research has shown. Therefore, interview trainings need to be revised to improve police detectives’ knowledge about human memory.
Dietary patterns of children and adolescents analyzed from 2001 Korea National Health and Nutrition Survey

The purpose of this study was to identify dietary patterns among children and adolescents in Korea and to examine their associations with obesity and some blood profiles. One day food consumption data measured by 24-hour recalls on 2704 subjects aged 1 to 19 were used from 2001 Korea National Health and Nutrition Survey. The data of blood profiles available in the ages of 10 or older was also used. After categorizing each food consumed into 29 food or food groups, five dietary patterns were derived through a factor analysis and subjects were classified into three major dietary patterns via a cluster analysis using the factor scores. Three dietary patterns were identified as 'traditional diet' (25.6%), 'westernized-fast food' (6.2%), and 'mixed diet' (68.2%). The 'traditional diet' pattern had a higher percentage in boys. Both the 'traditional diet' and the 'westernized-fast food' had higher proportions of adolescents (12-19 y) than younger children, while the 'mixed diet' had a higher percentage of preschool children (1-5 y). Obesity rate analyzed within each age group showed no differences among 3 dietary pattern clusters. Blood pressure and all plasma profiles were not different among dietary patterns when adjusted with age and gender. Conclusively, children and adolescents in Korea had three distinct dietary patterns, which were associated with gender and age. These patterns could be useful to plan nutrition interventions for teenager health promotion.
Positional Cloning of the Werner's Syndrome Gene

Werner's syndrome (WS) is an inherited disease with clinical symptoms resembling premature aging. Early susceptibility to a number of major age-related diseases is a key feature of this disorder. The gene responsible for WS (known as WRN) was identified by positional cloning. The predicted protein is 1432 amino acids in length and shows significant similarity to DNA helicases. Four mutations in WS patients were identified. Two of the mutations are splice-junction mutations, with the predicted result being the exclusion of exons from the final messenger RNA. One of these mutations, which results in a frameshift and a predicted truncated protein, was found in the homozygous state in 60 percent of Japanese WS patients examined. The other two mutations are nonsense mutations. The identification of a mutated putative helicase as the gene product of the WS gene suggests that defective DNA metabolism is involved in the complex process of aging in WS patients.
MIMO-SAR ground moving target imaging in HRWS mode

This paper proposes a novel method for MIMO-SAR ground moving target imaging in HRWS Mode. In order to compensate the periodically modulated error signal in Doppler history due to the radial velocity of moving target, the compressed sensing theory is used to estimate radial velocity in undersampled signal firstly. Then, the compensation signal is formed with radical velocity to remove error signal in the whole Doppler signal. Finally, ground moving target imaging is achieved by using focusing function of moving target. The numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Market Crowd's Trading Conditioning and its Measurement - Presentation Slides

To introduce a notion of trading conditioning for the first time in terms of operant conditioning in psychology;To use transaction volume probability in a transaction volume-price probability wave equation in econophysics to measure the intensity of market crowd trading conditioning; To test correlation between the rate of mean return and the change in the intensity of trading conditioning subject to the return, using high frequency data in China stock market;To study market crowd’s learning and psychology behavior by correlation analysis, and explain their “abnormal” trading behavior by conditioning.
Load balancing through efficient distributed content placement

The concept of content distribution networks (CDNs) has recently been introduced to enhance the delivery of bandwidth-intensive multimedia content to end users. In a CDN architecture, the content is replicated from the origin server to so-called surrogate servers at the edge of the Internet, to improve the quality of service and optimise network bandwidth usage. The introduction of peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, where all nodes fundamentally play equal roles, enables self-organisation of the CDN and automatic recovery in case of node failures. To optimise the distribution of the content over the different surrogate servers, replica placement algorithms (RPAs) have been developed. In this paper, we present two distributed RPAs for CDNs. We will demonstrate that they further improve CDN performance by reducing the server load and the bandwidth usage. The introduction of link costs allows these algorithms to additionally support load balancing on the network links.
Social Change in Western Europe

Introduction Prologue: The End of the European Millennium 1. The Making of Contemporary Europe PART I: THE FATE OF INDUSTRIALISM: INDUSTRIALIZING, INDUSTRIAL OR POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES? 2. Work, Households and Occupations 3. The Organization of Working Life: Between Stability and Flexibility 4. The Sectors of Employment PART II: CHANGES AND DIVERSITY IN THE CHARACTER OF CAPITALISM 5. Capitalism and Inequality in Work 6. The Institutions of Modern Capitalism PART III: SOCIOLOGICAL LIBERALISM AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF TRADITIONAL COMMUNITY 7. The Family 8. Families, Education, and Social Mobility 9. The Paradox of Religion 10. Nations, Cultures and Ethnicities PART IV: CITIZENSHIP 11. Democracy and Mass Participation 12. The Organization of Social Interests 13. Mass Citizenship and Welfare States CONCLUSIONS 14. Is There a Western European Society? 15. What Type of Society are We Now Inhabiting?
TREE HEIGHT ESTIMATION FROM MULTI-TEMPORAL ERS SAR INTERFEROMETRIC PHASE

Multi-temporal sets of ERS-1/2 SAR interferometric (InSAR) phase have been evaluated at several test sites in Europe for tree height estimation. Atmospheric artefacts affected a large number of image pairs. These were generally well compensated in case of large-scale artefacts over small forests, whereas for large forests their effect could only be assessed. Hence, the amount of pairs utilizable for further investigation considerably decreased. The interferometric tree height, i.e. the forest “topography” seen by an InSAR system, did not show temporal consistency because of the target phase noise, ranging from slightly below the ground level to slightly above the true tree height. With a multi-temporal combination, the estimates were below the true tree height, depending on the canopy closure. To retrieve the total true height from InSAR tree height measurements, the Interferometric Water Cloud Model was used. Modelled InSAR tree heights resulted generally in reasonable agreement with observations. Nevertheless, because of the strong noise components and the weak contrast between ground and vegetation coherence, the compensated tree height showed an almost constant value, independent of the true height. Hence, the several sources of error and uncertainty strongly limit the usefulness of C-band repeat-pass SAR interferometry for tree height estimation.