Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation study for clustering in wireless sensor networks

Typically, wireless sensor nodes are battery-powered. The network's lifetime depends on the energy consumption of the sensor nodes. Transmitting messages causes a good portion of this energy consumption. Clustering the sensor nodes may reduce energy consumption through local communication and aggregation. Many clustering algorithms exist, but corresponding simulation results are hardly comparable. This paper conducts an extensive simulation study. We compare five popular clustering algorithms in four different scenarios under strictly uniform conditions. Our results indicate that two criteria for clustering algorithms are particularly important: considering residual energy for cluster head selection, and small communication overhead during cluster formation.
Glyceroneogenesis comes of age

Glyceroneogenesis is a generally ignored metabolic pathway that occurs in adipose tissues and liver of mammalian species. This short review highlights a series of recent discoveries showing that glyceroneogenesis is important in lipid homeostasis. —Beale, E. G. , Hammer, R. E. , Antoine, B. , Forest, C. Glyceroneogenesis comes of age. FASEB J. 16, 1695–1696 (2002)
What ’ s new with the amnesic patient

PERSPECTIVES its November 1998 publication, whereas Scoville and Milner's paper has had 258 citations since that date, attesting to the latter's long-lasting prominence and influence. Scoville and Milner's title reflected their belief that the lesion of the hippocampus, as opposed to the other structures that were excised, was the culprit behind H.M. 's amnesia, and they concluded that the severity of amnesia is related to the size of the hippocampal removal. This view, which was unchallenged for decades, derived, in part, from converging evidence from two other cases that were described by Penfield and Milner 3. Both of their patients became amnesic after a left temporal lobectomy that included a large hip-pocampal removal, and both showed con-comitant electrographic abnormality in the right MTL, indicating that, like H.M. 's, their amnesia resulted from a bilateral lesion. This hypothesis was confirmed in one of the patients who later came to autopsy 4. The goals of this article are to provide a brief overview of published results obtained with H.M. over several decades, to present some new data on putative information storage in extrahippocampal sites, and to consider the effect that H.M. 's condition has on his personal identity.
The Effects of Tai Chi on the Renal and Cardiac Functions of Patients with Chronic Kidney and Cardiovascular Diseases

[Purpose] To assess the effects of Tai Chi on the renal and cardiac functions of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-one patients with CKD and CVD were randomly divided into control and exercise groups. The exercise group performed Tai Chi training for 30 minutes three to five times a week for 12 weeks, while the control group did not. All patients’ renal and cardiac functions and blood lipid parameters were measured at baseline and after 12 weeks. [Results] The 12 weeks Tai Chi intervention improved the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), and the high density lipoprotein (HDL) level, and decreased the serum creatintine (Scr) level, heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and the total cholesterol (CH), triglyceride (TG) and low density lipoprotein (LDL) levels. The change in eGFR correlated negatively with the changes in CH, TG and LDL, and positively with the change in HDL. In addition, the change in SBP correlated positively with the changes in CH, TG and LDL, and negatively with the change in HDL. [Conclusion] Tai Chi training might improve the renal and cardiac functions of CKD and CVD patients via improved regulation of lipid metabolism.
QSAR study of anti-prion activity of 2-aminothiazoles

2-aminothiazoles is a class of compounds capable of treating life-threatening prion diseases. QSAR studies on a set of forty-seven 2-aminothiazole derivatives possessing anti-prion activity were performed using multivariate analysis, which comprised of multiple linear regression (MLR), artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM). The results indicated that MLR afforded reasonable performance with a correlation coefficient (r) and root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.9073 and 0.2977, respectively, as obtained from leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV). More sophisticated learning methods such as SVM provided models with the highest accuracy with r and RMSE of 0.9471 and 0.2264, respectively, while ANN gave reasonable performance with r and RMSE of 0.9023 and 0.3043, respectively, as obtained LOO-CV calculations. Descriptor analysis from the regression coefficients of the MLR model suggested that compounds should be asymmetrical molecule with low propensity to form hydrogen bonds and high frequency of N content at topological distance 02 in order to provide good activities. Insights from QSAR studies is anticipated to be useful in the design of novel derivatives based on the 2-aminothiazole scaffold as potent therapeutic agents against prion diseases.
EXHAUSTIVE TESTING AS A VERIFICATION TECHNIQUE †

For a safety-critical system, i.e., a system whose consequences of failure are very high, it is not possible to rely upon testing to provide the necessary verification. The difficulties arise mainly from the shear number of tests that are required to permit statistically meaningful conclusions to be drawn about the system. Other difficulties with testing include failure to observe erroneous output when it occurs and incorrectly defining the operational profile from which to select inputs. Goodenough and Gerhart observed that exhaustive testing of a software system amounts to a proof of the software. This is an appealing thought for safety-critical systems because establishing proofs of system properties by more traditional techniques is difficult at best and often depends on questionable assumptions such as assuming correct translation by a compiler. Unfortunately, however, if testing that yields a statistical conclusion is infeasible it would seem that exhaustive testing would be also. In general, exhaustive testing is infeasible. However, this infeasibility is a direct result of the goal of testing for overall functional correctness. In considering the general issue of how safety-critical systems might be tested, we have concluded that a different view of testing is required. The view we advocate is that testing should be used to show significant properties of safety-critical software systems rather than overall correctness. This approach to testing is analogous to the use of formal verification to demonstrate properties rather that correctness. When testing is used as a technique to establish a property, the property of interest determines in large part the number of tests required. This is the case no matter whether the goal is to establish properties in a statistical sense or in the sense of a proof using exhaustive testing. By careful definition of the property and by the application of a technique calledspecification limitation, we have been able to prove a number of significant properties of a large software system by exhaustive testing. In this paper we formalize the notion of specification limitation and show how it can be applied in practice. We present the details of a complex software system and associated properties that were established by applying the technique. Exhaustive Testing As A Verification Technique
Using context and phonetic features in models of etymological sound change

This paper presents a novel method for aligning etymological data, which models context-sensitive rules governing sound change, and utilizes phonetic features of the sounds. The goal is, for a given corpus of cognate sets, to find the best alignment at the sound level. We introduce an imputation procedure to compare the goodness of the resulting models, as well as the goodness of the data sets. We present evaluations to demonstrate that the new model yields improvements in performance, compared to previously reported models.
EVALUATION OF BACTERIAL ISOLATES FROM SALTY SOILS AND BACILLUS THURINGIENSIS STRAINS FOR THE BIOCONTROL OF FUSARIUM DRY ROT OF POTATO TUBERS

SUMMARY A total of 83 spore-forming bacteria belonging to the genus Bacillus was isolated from Tunisian salty soils. These isolates as well as five additional strains of Bacillus thuringiensis, previously selected for their efficiency against insects, were tested in vitro and in vivo against Fusarium roseum var. sambucinum, the causal agent of dry rot of potato tubers. Results of the in vitro dual culture screening revealed that more than 50% of Bacillus spp. isolated from salty soils inhibited the growth of the pathogen in vitro. By contrast, all five B. thuringiensis strains failed to inhibit the growth of the pathogen in vitro. On wounded potato tubers, the most effective isolates obtained from salty soils were X7, X9, X16, I32 and G7, with a percentage of dry rot reduction ranging from 66 to 89%. These effective Bacillus isolates were identified as belonging to one of the species B. cereus (X9, X16 and G7), B. lentimorbus (X7) or B. licheniformis (I32). Although ineffective in vitro, B. thuringiensis strains inhibited dry rot development in vivo, with percentage inhibition scores ranging from 41 to 52%. While Bacillus isolates selected from salty soils best inhibited dry rot development when applied as young cultures (24 h), B. thuringiensis strains generally performed better as older cultures (48-72 h). The cell-filtrates of Bacillus spp. were unable to inhibit the growth of Fusarium. By contrast, volatiles liberated by the antagonists seem to contribute to the inhibition of the pathogen. The two isolates X16 of B. cereus and I32 of B. licheniformis as well as all 3 tested strains of B. thuringiensis (1T, 10T and 55T) were able to degrade colloidal chitin. Our experiments with the chromogenic chito-oligosaccharides indicated also that B. cereus (X16) and B. thuringiensis (55T) are able to produce N-acetyl-β-D-glucosaminidases, chitobiosidases and endochitinases. The isolate X16 of B. cereus consistently showed a chitinase activity 2 to 3 fold higher than that of strain 55T of B. thuringiensis. The hydrolysis of
An Adaptive MIMO Scheme for E-MBMS in Point-to-Multipoint Transmission Mode

Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), also called enhanced MBMS (e-MBMS) in LTE terminology, was introduced in the release 6 of the 3GPP standard to deliver multimedia content to a large group of users. The main requirement during the provision of MBMS services is to make an efficient overall usage of radio and network resources. There are two wireless transmission modes defined in LTE, i.e. Point-to-Point (P-t-P) and Point-to-Multipoint (P-t-M) transmission modes. MIMO systems promise high performance gains over conventional single antenna systems. It is expected to be an important component of the LTE particularly for the MBMS. In this paper, an adaptive MIMO scheme for E-MBMS in P-t-M transmission mode is presented and analyzed. Both spatial multiplexing and diversity techniques are focused on. Different spatial techniques are adaptively used depending on the different users' distributions in one MBMS section. Spatial diversity technique is used to enhance signal strength of the cell edge users; and spatial multiplexing technique is used to increase the data rate of the users with good signal strength. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the BER performance of the cell edge users, and increase the transmit data rate and data throughput.
Critical Configurations for 1D Retina Vision

In this paper we investigate, determine and classify the critical conﬁgurations for solving structure and motion problems for 1D retina vision. We give a complete categorization of all ambiguous conﬁgurations for a 1D perspective camera irrespective of the number of points and views. Several examples and illustrations are provided to explain the results and to provide geometrical insight.
CRIP1 expression is correlated with a favorable outcome and less metastases in osteosarcoma patients

Predicting the clinical course of osteosarcoma patients is a crucial prerequisite for a better treatment stratification in these highly aggressive neoplasms of bone. In search of new and reliable biomarkers we recently identified cysteine-rich intestinal protein 1 (CRIP1) to have significant prognostic impact in gastric cancer and therefore decided to investigate its role also in osteosarcoma. For this purpose we analyzed 223 pretherapeutic and well characterized osteosarcoma samples for their immunohistochemical expression of CRIP1 and correlated our findings with clinico-pathological parameters including follow-up, systemic spread and response to chemotherapy. Interestingly and contrarily to gastric cancer, we found CRIP1 expression more frequently in patients with long-term survival (10-year survival 73% in positive vs. 54% in negative cases, p = 0.0433) and without metastases (p = 0.0108) indicating a favorable prognostic effect. CRIP1 therefore seems to represent a promising new biomarker in osteosarcoma patients which should be considered for a prospective validation.
Automatic Melodic Reduction Using a Supervised Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar

This research explores a Natural Language Processing technique utilized for the automatic reduction of melodies: the Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG). Automatic melodic reduction was previously explored by means of a probabilistic grammar [11] [1]. However, each of these methods used unsupervised learning to estimate the probabilities for the grammar rules, and thus a corpus-based evaluation was not performed. A dataset of analyses using the Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) exists [13], which contains 300 Western tonal melodies and their corresponding melodic reductions in tree format. In this work, supervised learning is used to train a PCFG for the task of melodic reduction, using the tree analyses provided by the GTTM dataset. The resulting model is evaluated on its ability to create accurate reduction trees, based on a node-by-node comparison with ground-truth trees. Multiple data representations are explored, and example output reductions are shown. Motivations for performing melodic reduction include melodic identiﬁcation and similarity, efﬁcient storage of melodies, automatic composition, variation matching, and automatic harmonic analysis.
An approach to path planning and real-time redundancy control for human-robot collaboration

This paper presents a control system for redundant robot manipulators that handles the path planning and redundancy control in two separate loops. The goal is to simplify industrial programming of redundant robots, by decomosing it to a familiar path planning loop, and an autonomous redundant control loop. The familiar path planning is done using an industrial robots native control system, which is already known to the operator. An external feedback loop acts as a secondary task control loop so that the redundancy in the robot is used automatically. The secondary task control is expanded from the null space projection method to a method where a parallel space to task space is modeled in joint space. The system was implemented and experimentally verified on a NACHI MR20 7-axes industrial robot with AX20 Controller. The secondary task in the experiments was an obstacle avoidance task that was tested in unknown dynamic and static environments.
On a Generalized Framework for Modeling the Effects of Process Variations on Circuit Delay Performance Using Response Surface Methodology

A generalized methodology for modeling the effects of process variations on circuit delay performance is proposed by directly relating the variations in process parameters to variations in delay metric of a digital circuit. The 2-input nand gate is used as a library element for 65 nm gate length technology, whose delay is extensively characterized by mixed-mode simulations. This information is then used in a general-purpose circuit simulator SEQUEL, by incorporating appropriate templates for the nand gate library. A 4-bit times 4-bit Wallace tree multiplier circuit, consisting of about 300 2-input nand gates, is used as a representative combinational circuit to demonstrate the proposed methodology. The variation in the multiplier delay is characterized by an extensive Monte Carlo analysis. To extend this methodology for a generic technology library with a variety of library elements, modeling of nand gate delays by response surface methodology (RSM), in terms of process parameters, is carried out using design of experiments (DOE). A simple piecewise quadratic model, based on the least squares method (LSM), is proposed for one-parameter variation to address significant cubic effects observed in the delay response function. Then, a hybrid model for gate delays is generated by superimposing the interaction terms of DOE-RSM model upon the quadratic model of one-parameter variation to address the generalized case of simultaneous variations in multiple process parameters. The proposed methodology has been demonstrated for nand gate library with 266 gates, and the simplicity and generality of the approach make it equally applicable to a large library of cells for both statistical timing analysis and statistical circuit simulation at the gate level
On the use of phase information-based joint factor analysis for speaker verification under channel mismatch condition

Recent studies have shown that phase information contains speaker characteristics. A new extraction method to extract pitch synchronous phase information has been proposed and shown that it was very effective under channel matched condition. However, phase changes between different channels. Therefore, the speaker recognition performance is drastically degraded under channel mismatch condition. On the other hand, joint factor analysis (JFA) is an approach that is robust for channel variability. In this paper, we propose phase information-based JFA for speaker verification under channel mismatch condition. Speaker verification experiments were performed using the NIST 2003 SRE database. Phase information-based JFA achieved a relative equal error rate reduction of 20.9% for male and 17.4% for female compared to the traditional system based on Gaussian mixture model and Universal background model (GMM-UBM) that influenced by channel variability. Furthermore, by combining phase information-based method with the MFCC-based method, we obtained the better result than that of the only MFCC-based method.
Latex allergens in tire dust and airborne particles.

The prevalence and severity of latex allergy has increased dramatically in the last 15 years due to exposure to natural rubber products. Although historically this health risk has been elevated in hospital personnel and patients, a recent survey has indicated a significant potential risk for the general population. To obtain a wide-spread source for latex exposure, we have considered tire debris. We have searched for the presence of latex allergens in passenger car and truck tire tread, in debris deposited from the atmosphere near a freeway, and in airborne particulate matter samples representative of the entire year 1993 at two sites in the Los Angeles basin (California). After extraction of the samples with phosphate buffered saline, a modified-ELISA inhibition assay was used to measure relative allergen potency and Western blot analyses were used to identify latex allergens. The inhibition studies with the human IgE latex assay revealed inhibition by the tire tread source samples and ambient freeway dust, as well as by control latex sap and latex glove extracts. Levels of extractable latex allergen per unit of protein extracted were about two orders of magnitude lower for tire tread as compared to latex gloves. Western blot analyses using binding of human IgE from latex-sensitive patients showed a band at 34-36 kDa in all tire and ambient samples. Long Beach and Los Angeles, California, air samples showed four additional bands between 50 and 135 kDa. Alternative Western blot analyses using rabbit IgG raised against latex proteins showed a broad band at 30-50 kDa in all samples, with additional bands in the urban air samples similar to the IgE results. A latex cross-reactive material was identified in mountain cedar. In conclusion, the latex allergens or latex cross-reactive material present in sedimented and airborne particulate material, derived from tire debris, and generated by heavy urban vehicle traffic could be important factors in producing latex allergy and asthma symptoms associated with air pollution particles. ImagesFigure 1.Figure 2. AFigure 2. BFigure 3.Figure 4.
A Wireless Sensor Node Architecture for Exploring Distributed Sensor Network Applications DRAFT-Work in Progress

This document describes a new versatile generalpurpose wireless sensor node architecture designed around the OKI ARM ML67Q500x microprocessor and the IEEE 802.15. 4 compliant CC2420 radio from Chipcon. This platform designed for experimentation, educational projects and preliminary deployment in industrial environments. The XYZ node architecture is described in the context of a 3-D testbed recently installed at ENALAB to facilitate wireless sensor experiments at scale. In the next few months, this testbed will host approximately 100 wireless devices, and it will form a flexible environment for instrumenting and testing complex sensor network scenarios prior to their deployment. The primary set of applications to be implemented on the testbed includes, node localization in 3-D space, sensor calibration and a set of controlled mobility applications such as boundary estimation.
Do text transcoders improve usability for disabled users?

Text transcoders are web--server systems that produce, on the fly, a text-only version of a web page requested by a user of a browser. Although the potential benefits of text transcoders axe multifaceted and discussions on appropriateness of text transcoders to produce accessible versions of web sites are still ongoing, at the moment the impact of transcoded pages on disabled web users has not been scientifically studied yet.This paper describes an experiment aimed at evaluating usability of web pages processed by a text transcoder and used by 29 disabled persons. Results based on subjective and objective data show how usability changes, and which results can be generalized to a wider population.
Paper on HydroThermal Scheduling

This paper presents a study of various researches which were come out in last few decades on hydro thermal scheduling problems. As we know that the Operation of mix both hydro and thermal plants is far more complex and is of much more importance in a modern power system. The aim of the hydrothermal scheduling problem is to optimize the electricity production and minimized the cost of power. This paper tells us an important review of a hydro thermal scheduling system. The paper demonstrates overview of various approaches and analytical methods applied on hydrothermal scheduling problem . All the assumptions made and a brief description of the solution methods is presented in the paper. The paper provides helpful information and resources for the future studies for researchers those interested in the problem or to do additional research in this area.