Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Meeting the needs of local communities and businesses: From transactional to eco-leadership in the English further education sector

Leadership in the post-incorporation English further education system has not been distributed in nature, but transactional, driven by the external demands of funding and inspection regimes. However, in the light of the current rhetoric of localism in further education policy there is a view that distributed leadership would be an appropriate alternative form of leadership within this context. This article reviews the education literature and argues that distributed leadership should be introduced to the sector, but that on its own this will be insufficient for addressing the government’s agenda of meeting the human capital needs of businesses, needs-based equity for disadvantaged adults, or the wider benefits of education. This is because distributed leadership, whilst involving a dispersion of responsibility, may not equate to a dispersion of power. To disperse power to local areas and to facilitate an authentic distributed leadership focused on local stakeholders a policy of localism that encourages self-governance and open systems is needed. More specifically flexible accountability arrangements are required that encourage strategy and leadership at the local level. Such distributed leadership embedded within a local governance that facilitates dispersed power to key local stakeholders is similar to what is described as eco-leadership in the leadership literature.
An asymmetric 2×2 space-time code with linear maximum-likelihood decoder complexity

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques have been incorporated in all of the recently developed wireless communications systems standards including the IEEE 802.11 n standard for local area networks and the IEEE 802.16 e standard on which mobile WiMAX systems are based. The main criteria in conventional space-time code (STC) design for MIMO systems are the code rate, diversity order, and coding gain. Recently, the optimum decoder complexity was added to this list of criteria and the attention was turned to the design of STCs with low decoder complexity. Specifically, the effort in full-rate 2times2 STC design focused on designing codes whose optimum decoder complexity grows only quadratically with the size of the signal constellation, and such a design was proposed by the present authors. Proceeding further, a related STC of rate-3/4 and whose optimum decoder complexity grows only linearly with the constellation size was also proposed. In the present paper, we introduce another interesting high-rate and low complexity 2times2 STC design. The new code has a linear optimum decoding complexity and its rate is higher than 3/4.
Comparative Analysis of the Internet AS-Level Topologies Extracted from Different Data Sources

We calculate vital statistics of Internet AS-level topologies extracted from the four data sources used by the research community: traceroute measurements, BGP tables, BGP updates, and WHOIS database. We find that topologies derived from BGP tables and BGP updates are virtually identical, but differ from the traceroute topology in terms of the vital statistics that we present in this paper. The WHOIS topology is substantially different from the three other topology graphs. We introduce the concept of dimensionality of graph randomness to evaluate the accuracy of topology generators. We show that power-law random graph generators cannot capture the full spectrum of critical topological characteristics of tracerouteand BGP-derived graphs. However, the random graph model reproducing the joint degree distribution of the respective graphs (traceroute, BGP, WHOIS) better approximates the actual topology for traceroute data than for the other data sources. These observations have direct implications for the development of new and credibility of existing network topology generators. Finally, we release to the community both the input topologies and the output of our calculations, which will allow researchers to make a more informed selection of topology data for their specific needs.
Distinct mPTP activation mechanisms in ischaemia-reperfusion: contributions of Ca2+, ROS, pH, and inorganic polyphosphate.

AIMS The mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) plays a central role for tissue damage and cell death during ischaemia-reperfusion (I/R). We investigated the contribution of mitochondrial inorganic polyphosphate (polyP), a potent activator of Ca(2+)-induced mPTP opening, towards mPTP activation and cardiac cell death in I/R. METHODS AND RESULTS A significant increase in mitochondrial free calcium concentration ([Ca(2+)]m), reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, mitochondrial membrane potential depolarization (ΔΨm), and mPTP activity, but no cell death, was observed after 20 min of ischaemia. The [Ca(2+)]m increase during ischaemia was partially prevented by the mitochondrial Ca(2+) uniporter (MCU) inhibitor Ru360 and completely abolished by the combination of Ru360 and the ryanodine receptor type 1 blocker dantrolene, suggesting two complimentary Ca(2+) uptake mechanisms. In the absence of Ru360 and dantrolene, mPTP closing by polyP depletion or CSA decreased mitochondrial Ca(2+) uptake, suggesting that during ischaemia Ca(2+) can enter mitochondria through mPTP. During reperfusion, a burst of endogenous polyP production coincided with a decrease in [Ca(2+)]m, a decline in superoxide generation, and an acceleration of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) production. An increase in H2O2 correlated with restoration of mitochondrial pHm and an increase in cell death. mPTP opening and cell death on reperfusion were prevented by antioxidants Trolox and MnTBAP [Mn (III) tetrakis (4-benzoic acid) porphyrin chloride]. Enzymatic polyP depletion did not affect mPTP opening during reperfusion, but increased ROS generation and cell death, suggesting that polyP plays a protective role in cellular stress response. CONCLUSIONS Transient Ca(2+)/polyP-mediated mPTP opening during ischaemia may serve to protect cells against cytosolic Ca(2+) overload, whereas ROS/pH-mediated sustained mPTP opening on reperfusion induces cell death.
Enabling open innovation in a world of ubiquitous computing

The present paper deals with the implementation of Open Innovation through ensuring open access to semantically enriched information about virtual and physical objects. This so-called object information integrates publicly available information and information gathered by smart objects or sensor networks. The design of an infrastructure architecture referred to as Open Object Information Infrastructure (OOII) is presented, which can be used as a publicly accessible information source. We assert that this consistently open approach favors a remarkably strong climate of innovation, fostering the development of new and innovative ambient applications and services.
Experimental Models of Brain Ischemia: A Review of Techniques, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and Investigational Cell-Based Therapies

Stroke continues to be a significant cause of death and disability worldwide. Although major advances have been made in the past decades in prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, enormous challenges remain in the way of translating new therapeutic approaches from bench to bedside. Thrombolysis, while routinely used for ischemic stroke, is only a viable option within a narrow time window. Recently, progress in stem cell biology has opened up avenues to therapeutic strategies aimed at supporting and replacing neural cells in infarcted areas. Realistic experimental animal models are crucial to understand the mechanisms of neuronal survival following ischemic brain injury and to develop therapeutic interventions. Current studies on experimental stroke therapies evaluate the efficiency of neuroprotective agents and cell-based approaches using primarily rodent models of permanent or transient focal cerebral ischemia. In parallel, advancements in imaging techniques permit better mapping of the spatial-temporal evolution of the lesioned cortex and its functional responses. This review provides a condensed conceptual review of the state of the art of this field, from models and magnetic resonance imaging techniques through to stem cell therapies.
A twin study of the neuropsychological consequences of stimulant abuse.

BACKGROUND Previous studies document neuropsychological deficits associated with stimulant abuse, but findings are inconsistent. METHODS We identified 50 twin pairs in which only 1 member had heavy stimulant abuse (cocaine and/or amphetamines) ending at least 1 year before the evaluation. The co-twin control research design controls for familial vulnerability and makes it easier to identify neuropsychological deficits that are consequences of stimulant abuse. Subjects were administered an extensive neuropsychological test battery organized into the following 5 functions: attention, executive functioning, motor skills, intelligence, and memory. RESULTS Multivariate tests showed that abusers performed significantly worse than nonabusers on functions of attention and motor skills. Within each of these functions, univariate tests showed that abusers performed significantly worse on certain tests of motor skills and attention. In contrast, abusers performed significantly better on one test of attention measuring visual vigilance. Within the abuser group, higher levels of stimulant use were largely uncorrelated with neuropsychological test scores, although a few significant correlations indicated better functioning with more stimulant use. CONCLUSIONS With ideal controls, this study demonstrates that deficits in attention and motor skills persist after 1 year of abstinence from stimulant use and raises hypotheses regarding relative strengths on a vigilance task among abusers.
A Medium Resolution Near-Infrared Spectral Atlas of O and Early-B Stars

We present intermediate-resolution (R ~ 8000-12,000) high signal-to-noise (S/N) H- and K-band spectroscopy of a sample of 37 optically visible stars, ranging in spectral type from O3 to B3 and representing most luminosity classes. Spectra of this quality can be used to constrain the temperature, luminosity, and general wind properties of OB stars, when used in conjunction with sophisticated atmospheric model codes. Most important is the need for moderately high resolutions (R ≥ 5000) and very high signal-to-noise (S/N ≥ 150) spectra for a meaningful profile analysis. When using near-infrared spectra for a classification system, moderately high signal-to-noise (S/N ~ 100) is still required, though the resolution can be relaxed to just a thousand or two. In the Appendix we provide a set of very high-quality near-infrared spectra of Brackett lines in six early-A dwarfs. These can be used to aid in the modeling and removal of such lines when early-A dwarfs are used for telluric spectroscopic standards.
COLOMBOS v3.0: leveraging gene expression compendia for cross-species analyses

COLOMBOS is a database that integrates publicly available transcriptomics data for several prokaryotic model organisms. Compared to the previous version it has more than doubled in size, both in terms of species and data available. The manually curated condition annotation has been overhauled as well, giving more complete information about samples’ experimental conditions and their differences. Functionality-wise cross-species analyses now enable users to analyse expression data for all species simultaneously, and identify candidate genes with evolutionary conserved expression behaviour. All the expression-based query tools have undergone a substantial improvement, overcoming the limit of enforced co-expression data retrieval and instead enabling the return of more complex patterns of expression behaviour. COLOMBOS is freely available through a web application at http://colombos.net/. The complete database is also accessible via REST API or downloadable as tab-delimited text files.
Efficient Massive Sharing of Content Among Peers ( Extended Abstract )

—In this paper we focus on the design of high performance peer-to-peer content sharing systems. In particular, our goal is to achieve global load balancing and short user-request response times. This is a formidable challenge, given the requirement to respect the autonomy of peers, their heterogeneity in terms of processing and storage capacities, their different content contributions, the huge system scale, and the dynamic system environment. Our approach exploits the semantic categorization of published documents and constructs clusters of peers. We provide a formal formulation for the problem of load balancing in our setting and prove that it is NP-complete. We also present a greedy polynomial time algorithm that achieve s nearly optimal load balancing as shown by our experimental results.
A Modbus traffic generator for evaluating the security of SCADA systems

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are used to monitor and control several industrial functions such as: oil & gas, electricity, water, nuclear fusion, etc. Recently, the Internet connectivity to SCADA systems introduced new vulnerabilities to these systems and made it a target for immense amount of attacks. In the literature, several solutions have been developed to secure SCADA systems; however; the literature is lacking work directed at the development of tools to evaluate the effectiveness of such solutions. An essential requirement of such tools is the generation of normal and malicious SCADA traffic. In this paper, we present an automated tool to generate a malicious SCADA traffic to be used to evaluate such systems. We consider the traffic generation of the popular SCADA Modbus protocol. The characteristics of the generated traffic are derived from Snort network intrusion detection system (NIDS) Modbus rules. The tool uses Scapy to generate packets based on the extracted traffic features. We present the testing results for our tool. The tool is used to read a Snort rule file that contains Modbus rules to extract the required traffic features.
Using Simplicity to Control Complexity

Improving the reliability and availability of increasingly complex software is a serious challenge, especially in efforts to protect society's critical functions. Is it true that building diverse, redundant systems provides robustness? This article investigates the relationship between software complexity, reliability, and development resources. It also presents a forward-recovery approach based on the idea of using simplicity to control complexity as a way to improve the robustness of complex software systems.
Asking for a second opinion: Re-querying of noisy multi-class labels

In this paper, we propose a new maximum margin-based, active learning algorithm for identifying incorrectly labeled training data. The algorithm combines a round-robin approach for investigating each class with a simple, yet effective ranking metric called maximum negative margin (MNM). Samples are given to an expert for re-evaluation to determine if they are indeed mislabeled. We also propose using five active learning metrics, including uncertainty sampling with margin sampling (USMS) and minimum margin, for the noisy label task which have previously been used in the standard active learning setting for identifying new samples to label. USMS is very competitive with maximum negative margin. In addition, we consider other information theoretic objective criteria for this new task including uncertainty sampling with entropy, query-by-committee with voting entropy, and K-nearest neighbor with voting entropy, but these consistently perform worse than MNM and USMS. The MNM noisy label active learning algorithm can be useful in several different scenarios including data cleansing as a preprocessing step before training and identifying mislabeled examples in the test set.
A Local Search Algorithm Based on Clonal Selection and Genetic Mutation for Global Optimization

The purpose of this paper is to show a local search algorithm mixing features of Hill-Climbing, Clonal Selection and Genetic Algorithms. Hill climbing is considered because only the best solution is used. Clonal Selection because the best solution is cloned. Afterwards, individuals are muted using random mutation or non-uniform mutation of genetic algorithms. Four different ways of producing neighborhood solutions have been used in the mutation operator. In the first one (HR), the number of elements are randomly chosen based on the current generation number and muted using random mutation in a certain domain. In the second one (HNU), the number of elements are randomly chosen and muted using non-uniform mutation. In the third one (HRNU), the number of elements are chosen in the same previous way, however the random mutation is used in the initial generations and non-uniform mutation is applied in the last generations. Finally (HNURT), a random number of the elements are muted based on the current generation number, using non-uniform mutation. The performance of the hybrid algorithms is evaluated by means of six multimodal benchmark functions. The results show that HNU and HNURT have better performance. A comparison between the hybrid algorithms and traditional ones, such as, evolutionary strategies, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization and differential evolution is presented, as well.
Image Inpainting Approaches - A Review

Image inpainting is an ancient art. There may be different factors which cause deterioration of images including environmental factors, chemical processing, improper storage and more. Inpainting is the process which restores the deteriorated parts of the image. This paper proposes two major types of inpainting approaches i.e. 2D image inpainting and depth map inpainting. Image inpainting refers to recover corrupted parts of images by applying structural, textural or both the methods simultaneously. Whereas, depth map inpainting mainly used to improve the 3D visualization effect by improving the depth map associated with scene. Some of the image inpainting approaches can also be applied to depth maps. This paper gives overview of such approaches as well as those which are specifically meant for depth maps.
Towards a Proteomic Catalogue and Differential Annotation of Salivary Gland Proteins in Blood Fed Malaria Vector Anopheles culicifacies by Mass Spectrometry

In order to understand the importance of functional proteins in mosquito behavior, following blood meal, a baseline proteomic dataset is essential for providing insights into the physiology of blood feeding. Therefore, in this study as first step, in solution and 1-D electrophoresis digestion approach combined with tandem mass spectrometry (nano LC-MS/MS) and computational bioinformatics for data mining was used to prepare a baseline proteomic catalogue of salivary gland proteins of sugar fed An. culicifacies mosquitoes. A total of 106 proteins were identified and analyzed by SEQUEST algorithm against mosquito protein database from Uniprot/NCBI. Importantly, D7r1, D7r2, D7r4, salivary apyrase, anti-platelet protein, calreticulin, antigen 5 family proteins were identified and grouped on the basis of biological and functional roles. Secondly, differential protein expression and annotations between salivary glands of sugar fed vs blood fed mosquitoes was analyzed using 2-Delectrophoresis combined with MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. The alterations in the differential expression of total 38 proteins was observed out of which 29 proteins like beclin-1, phosphorylating proteins, heme oxygenase 1, ferritin, apoptotic proteins, coagulation and immunity like, serine proteases, serpins, c-type lectin and protein in regulation of blood feeding behavior were found to be up regulated while 9 proteins related to blood feeding, juvenile hormone epoxide hydrolase ii, odorant binding proteins and energy metabolic enzymes were found to be down regulated. To our knowledge, this study provides a first time baseline proteomic dataset and functional annotations of An. culicifacies salivary gland proteins that may be involved during the blood feeding. Identification of differential salivary proteins between sugar fed and blood fed mosquitoes and their plausible role may provide insights into the physiological processes associated with feeding behavior and sporozoite transmission during the process of blood feeding.
Evaluation of a School-Based Gambling Prevention Program for Adolescents: Efficacy of Using the Theory of Planned Behaviour

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the concept of negative anticipated emotions (NAEs) have attracted research attention in the formulation of effective preventive interventions. This approach has identified several key constructs of the TPB (i.e., intentions, attitudes, subjective norms, perceptions of behavioural control) and NAEs as valid predictors of gambling behaviours and problems. However, no empirical investigation has used these constructs in the design or evaluation of a preventive intervention for adolescent problem gambling. The current research aimed to assess the efficacy of targeting NAEs and key TPB constructs in a prevention video for modifying gambling beliefs, intentions, and behaviours. A sample of 280 high school students were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control condition. Participants were assessed at pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 3-month follow-up. Results reveal that the video was not effective in producing desired changes in NAEs, the key constructs of the TPB, or the frequency of gambling behaviour. The findings suggest that the video, delivered as a universal preventive intervention, may be insufficient for modifying NAEs and other TPB key constructs, or for changing gambling behaviours. Pour la formulation d’interventions preventives efficaces, l’attention de chercheurs s’est portee sur la theorie du comportement planifie et le concept d’emotions negatives anticipees. Cette approche a permis de relever plusieurs constructions cles de la theorie du comportement planifie (soit, les intentions, attitudes, normes subjectives, perceptions du controle comportemental) et des emotions negatives anticipees comme indicateurs valides de comportements et de problemes lies au jeu. Cependant, aucune etude empirique n’a utilise ces constructions dans la conception ou l’evaluation d’une intervention preventive pour le jeu des adolescents. La recherche actuelle visait donc a evaluer dans quelle mesure il etait efficace de cibler les emotions negatives anticipees et les constructions cles du comportement planifie dans une video de prevention afin de modifier les croyances, les intentions et les comportements du jeu. Un echantillon de 280 eleves du secondaire a ete affecte au hasard a une condition d’intervention ou de controle. Les participants ont ete evalues avant et apres l’intervention et au suivi, trois mois plus tard. Les resultats revelent que la video n’a pas ete efficace pour produire les changements souhaites dans le cas des emotions negatives anticipees, les constructions cles du comportement planifie ou la frequence du comportement du jeu. Les resultats permettent de conclure que la video presentee comme intervention preventive universelle ne suffit pas a modifier les emotions negatives anticipees ni d’autres constructions cles du comportement planifie ou des comportements de jeu.