Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the throughput performance of multirate IEEE 802.11 networks with variable-loaded stations: analysis, modeling, and a novel proportional fairness criterion

This paper focuses on multirate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN employing the mandatory Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) option. Its aim is threefold. Upon starting from the multi-dimensional Markovian state transition model proposed by Malone et.al. for characterizing the behavior of the IEEE 802.11 protocol at the Medium Access Control layer, it presents an extension accounting for packet transmission failures due to channel errors. Second, it establishes the conditions under which a network constituted by N stations, each station transmitting with its own bit rate, Rd(s), and packet rate, λs, can be assumed loaded. Finally, it proposes a modified Proportional Fairness (PF) criterion, suitable for mitigating the rate anomaly problem of multirate loaded IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs, employing the mandatory DCF option. Compared to the widely adopted assumption of saturated network, the proposed fairness criterion can be applied to general loaded networks. The throughput allocation resulting from the proposed algorithm is able to greatly increase the aggregate throughput of the DCF, while ensuring fairness levels among the stations of the same order as the ones guaranteed by the classical PF criterion. Simulation results are presented for some sample scenarios, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed criterion for optimized throughput allocation.
Prediction of Area Capacity in a Multilink MIMO Cellular Network with Guaranteed QoS

Multilink MIMO technique is a promising technology for cellular networks with a guaranteed quality-of-service. It will provide high capacity and wide coverage. The authors evaluated the downlink performance of the multilink MIMO system from the perspective of quality-of-service. The presence of Rayleigh fading, shadowing, and path loss is assumed. To evaluate the proposed system, the authors develop a performance measure for MIMO cellular systems. The measure is ergodic capacity taking into account area coverage. The numerical results show that the area coverage of proposed multilink MIMO system is greatly improved compared with that of the conventional singlelink MIMO system. Using the proposed measure, the authors also find that the multilink MIMO system could achieve high capacity with guaranteed QoS for a wide coverage.
Emulation of Transient Software Faults for Dependability Assessment: A Case Study

Fault Tolerance Mechanisms (FTMs) are extensively used in software systems to counteract software faults, in particular against faults that manifest transiently, namely Mandelbugs. In this scenario, Software Fault Injection (SFI) plays a key role for the verification and the improvement of FTMs. However, no previous work investigated whether SFI techniques are able to emulate Mandelbugs adequately. This is an important concern for assessing critical systems, since Mandelbugs are a major cause of failures, and FTMs are specifically tailored for this class of software faults. In this paper, we analyze an existing state-of-the-art SFI technique, namely G-SWFIT, in the context of a real-world fault-tolerant system for Air Traffic Control (ATC). The analysis highlights limitations of G-SWFIT regarding its ability to emulate the transient nature of Mandelbugs, because most of injected faults are activated in the early phase of execution, and they deterministically affect process replicas in the system. We also notice that G-SWFIT leaves untested the 35% of states of the considered system. Moreover, by means of an experiment, we show how emulation of Mandelbugs is useful to improve SFI. In particular, we emulate concurrency faults, which are a critical sub-class of Mandelbugs, in a fully representative way. We show that proper fault triggering can increase the confidence in FTMs' testing, since it is possible to reduce the amount of untested states down to 5%.
The leader and extremist in the Bounded Confidence Model on Flocking movement world

The Bounded Confidence Model has been largely applied to simulate many sociophysical phenomena. In this paper we present and analyze a model of Opinion Dynamics and Bounded Confidence on the Flocking movement world. We introduce some special agents with different character into the system and simulate the opinion formation process using the proposed model. As result, we obtained that the special agent can change the dynamics of system with small population. The extremist with different opinions leads to asymmetry polarization, deflection consensus and isolated polarization and the leader with different bounded confidence change dynamics of system from consensus to polarization.
Revisiting Ill-Definedness and the Consequences for ITSs

ITSs for ill-defined domains have attracted a lot of attention recently, which is well-deserved, as such ITSs are hard to develop. The first step towards such ITSs is reaching a wide agreement about the terminology used in the area. In this paper, we discuss the two important dimensions of ill-definedness: the domain and the instructional task. By the domain we assume declarative domain knowledge, or the domain theory, while the instructional task is the task the student is learning, in terms of problem-solving skills. It is possible to have a well-defined domain and still have ill-defined instructional tasks in the same domain. We look deeper at the features of ill-defined tasks, which all contribute to their ill/well defined nature. The paper discusses model-tracing and constraint-based modeling, in terms of their suitability for ill-defined tasks and domains. We show that constraint-based modeling can be used in both well-and illdefined domains, and illustrate our conclusion using several instructional tasks.
Strabismus requires Flamingo and Prickle function to regulate tissue polarity in the Drosophila eye

Tissue polarity in Drosophila is regulated by a number of genes that are thought to function in a complex, many of which interact genetically and/or physically, co-localize, and require other tissue polarity proteins for their localization. We report the enhancement of the strabismus tissue polarity phenotype by mutations in two other tissue polarity genes, flamingo and prickle. Flamingo is autonomously required for the establishment of ommatidial polarity. Its localization is dynamic throughout ommatidial development and is dependent on Frizzled and Notch. Flamingo and Strabismus co-localize for several rows posterior to the morphogenetic furrow and subsequently diverge. While neither of these proteins is required for the other's localization, Prickle localization is influenced by Strabismus function. Our data suggest that Strabismus, Flamingo and Prickle function together to regulate the establishment of tissue polarity in the Drosophila eye.
Learning to Segment Any Random Vector

We propose a method that takes observations of a random vector as input, and learns to segment each observation into two disjoint parts. We show how to use the internal coherence of segments to learn to segment almost any random variable. Coherence is formalized using the principle of autoprediction, i.e. two elements are similar if the observed values are similar to the predictions given by the elements for each other. To obtain a principled model and method, we formulate a generative model and show how it can be estimated in the limit of zero noise. The ensuing method is an abstract, adaptive (learning) generalization of well-known methods for image segmentation. It enables segmentation of random vectors in cases where intuitive prior information necessary for conventional segmentation methods is not available.
Anticipation versus adaptation in Evolutionary Algorithms: The case of Non-Stationary Clustering

From the technological point of view is usually more important to ensure the ability to react promptly to changing environmental conditions than to try to forecast them. Evolution Algorithms were proposed initially to drive the adaptation of complex systems to varying or uncertain environments. In the general setting, the adaptive-anticipatory dilemma reduces itself to the placement of the interaction with the environment in the computational schema. Adaptation consists of the estimation of the proper parameters from present data in order to react to a present environment situation. Anticipation consists of the estimation from present data in order to react to a future environment situation. This duality is expressed in the Evolutionary Computation paradigm by the precise location of the consideration of present data in the computation of the individuals fitness function. In this paper we consider several instances of Evolutionary Algorithms applied to precise problem and perform an experiment that test t.
Vitamin C Pretreatment Enhances the Antibacterial Effect of Cold Atmospheric Plasma

Bacterial biofilms are three-dimensional structures containing bacterial cells enveloped in a protective polymeric matrix, which renders them highly resistant to antibiotics and the human immune system. Therefore, the capacity to make biofilms is considered as a major virulence factor for pathogenic bacteria. Cold Atmospheric Plasma (CAP) is known to be quite efficient in eradicating planktonic bacteria, but its effectiveness against biofilms has not been thoroughly investigated. The goal of this study was to evaluate the effect of exposure of CAP against mature biofilm for different time intervals and to evaluate the effect of combined treatment with vitamin C. We demonstrate that CAP is not very effective against 48 h mature bacterial biofilms of several common opportunistic pathogens: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. However, if bacterial biofilms are pre-treated with vitamin C for 15 min before exposure to CAP, a significantly stronger bactericidal effect can be obtained. Vitamin C pretreatment enhances the bactericidal effect of cold plasma by reducing the viability from 10 to 2% in E. coli biofilm, 50 to 11% in P. aeruginosa, and 61 to 18% in S. epidermidis biofilm. Since it is not feasible to use extended CAP treatments in medical practice, we argue that the pre-treatment of infectious lesions with vitamin C prior to CAP exposure can be a viable route for efficient eradication of bacterial biofilms in many different applications.
Extending Web services with event-driven semantics

SOAP Web services have so far supported operation invocation semantics only. This paper proposes extensions for web services to support event-driven semantics. Our solution enables services to act as event producers and event consumers. We have identified and designed the required extensions to WSDL. We propose a flexible XML representation of the event payload data. We introduce event sinks, sources, and triggers.
SK4 K+ channels are therapeutic targets for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias

Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is a stress‐provoked ventricular arrhythmia, which also manifests sinoatrial node (SAN) dysfunction. We recently showed that SK4 calcium‐activated potassium channels are important for automaticity of cardiomyocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells. Here SK4 channels were identified in human induced pluripotent stem cell‐derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC‐CMs) from healthy and CPVT2 patients bearing a mutation in calsequestrin 2 (CASQ2‐D307H) and in SAN cells from WT and CASQ2‐D307H knock‐in (KI) mice. TRAM‐34, a selective blocker of SK4 channels, prominently reduced delayed afterdepolarizations and arrhythmic Ca2+ transients observed following application of the β‐adrenergic agonist isoproterenol in CPVT2‐derived hiPSC‐CMs and in SAN cells from KI mice. Strikingly, in vivo ECG recording showed that intraperitoneal injection of the SK4 channel blockers, TRAM‐34 or clotrimazole, greatly reduced the arrhythmic features of CASQ2‐D307H KI and CASQ2 knockout mice at rest and following exercise. This work demonstrates the critical role of SK4 Ca2+‐activated K+ channels in adult pacemaker function, making them promising therapeutic targets for the treatment of cardiac ventricular arrhythmias such as CPVT.
Implementing and Evaluating a Breadth-First Search in Cypher

This report covers the implementation and evaluation of a Breadth-First Search operand for the Neo4j graph database and the Cypher query language. The evaluation compared the pre-existing Depth-First Search operand with both a non-optimized and two different optimized Breadth-First Searches. The focus of this evaluation was the runtime and memory usage for the different operands and to find out for which kind of graph and query that each operand is the better choice. The evaluation was performed through different benchmarks and selfconstructed test cases. We concluded that using Breadth-First Search on graph databases is beneficial for smaller graphs where we got improvements up to 90% faster and that the Breadth-First Search uses more memory than Depth-First Search. The optimizations gave huge improvements, however they are harder to fit into real world usage. The Breadth-First Search operand should in theory be used on smaller graphs with smaller queries with more restrictions on the relationships. The better the machine the better results. Breadth-First Search should not be applied to the whole path, instead each relationship shall be evaluated case by case. (Less)
The Influence of the Task on Programmer Behaviour

Programmers performing a change task must understand the existing software in addition to performing the actual change. This process is likely to be affected by characteristics of the task. We investigated whether the nature of a task has any relationship with when a programmer edits code during a programming session. We characterized differences in editing behaviour with three types of editing styles: edit-first, edit-last, and edit-throughout. We based our analysis on the interaction history of over 4000 programming sessions collected as part of the development history of open source projects. Our results showed that an enhancement task (as opposed to a bug fix) was less likely to be associated with a high fraction of source code edit events at the beginning of the programming session. To our surprise, we also found that the presence of a stack trace in a bug report did not significantly effect the editing style of the programming session.
Quasi-Particles, Conformal Field Theory, and q-Series

We review recent results concerning the representation of conformal field theory characters in terms of fermionic quasi-particle excitations, and describe in detail their construction in the case of the integrable three-state Potts chain. These fermionic representations are q-series which are generalizations of the sums occurring in the Rogers-Ramanujan identities.
Neurotrophic in £ uences on neuropathic pain

Damage to peripheral nerves following trauma or disease has a number of consequences including the emergence of neuropathic pain. Commonly, neuropathic pain su¡erers experience spontaneous burning pain in and radiating from the area innervated by the damaged nerves, and an exquisite sensitivity to light touch stimuli, which are now perceived as painful. These neuropathic pains are often refractory to conventional analgesic therapy, with most patients obtaining at best only partial relief. Unfortunately, neuropathic pains are frequently also very persistent and do not resolve with time. Thus, neuropathic pain is often an extremely debilitating condition with a bleak outlook. In this paper we review the pathophysiological mechanisms that underlie these neuropathic pain states with particular emphasis on the therapeutic role of neurotrophic factors. 2004 Pathological pain: from molecular to clinical aspects. Wiley, Chichester (Novartis Foundation Symposium 261) p 68^102 The International Association for the Study of Pain de¢nes Neuropathic pain as ‘Pain initiated or caused by a primary lesion or dysfunction in the nervous system’ (Merskey & Bogduk 1994). Clearly, this is a very broad de¢nition and gives very little insight into the neurobiological mechanisms of such pains. Commonly, neuropathic pain su¡erers experience spontaneous burning pain within and radiating from the area innervated by the damaged nerves, and many report an exquisite sensitivity to light touch stimuli, which are now perceived as painful a condition known as allodynia. These neuropathic pains are often refractory to conventional analgesic therapy, with most patients obtaining only partial relief. Unfortunately, neuropathic pains are commonly very persistent and do not resolve with time. Thus, neuropathic pain is often an extremely debilitating condition with a bleak outlook. The diverse causes of neuropathic pain also o¡er only limited mechanistic understanding. Perhaps the most common form of neuropathic pain is that associated with metabolic abnormality, notably diabetes. Many diabetics, especially those with poor blood sugar control, ultimately develop a distal
Nonsmooth Duality, Sandwich, and Squeeze Theorems

Given a nonlinear function h separating a convex and a concave function, we provide various conditions under which there exists an affine separating function whose graph is somewhere almost parallel to the graph of h. Such results blend Fenchel duality with a variational principle and are closely related to the Clarke--Ledyaev mean value inequality.
Rectangles are Better than Chains for Encoding Partially Ordered Sets

Partial orders have applications in various areas in computer science such as distributed systems, object oriented languages, knowledge representation systems and databases. In this paper we present a new technique to encode partially ordered sets or posets. Specifically, we use the family of two-dimensional posets, which we refer to as rectangles, to encode a given poset; an element x is less than another element y in the partial order if and only if x is less than y in at least one of the rectangular orders and y is not less than x in any of the rectangular orders. The least number of rectangular orders needed to represent a poset is referred to as its rectangular dimension. We establish upper bounds on rectangular dimension of posets in general and special families of posets in particular. We also provide examples of families of posets that can be encoded optimally using our technique but require much larger number of bits per element using other techniques such as adjacency matrix, adjacency list and dimension theory.
Mobilities, Communication, and Asia| Mobile Media Photography and Intergenerational Families

The visuality of apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp is becoming more apparent, especially as part of emotional work in contemporary relationships. In families, informal intergenerational literacy can be found throughout mobile media practices. Often, the emotional work around these practices remains tacit. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which mobile media photography has become imbricated in making-do practices of maintaining intimacy in intergenerational family contexts. Drawing from literature on mobile media visuality and transnational family relationships, this article considers Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labor and “feeling rules” to consider how intergenerational familial genres in Australia and Japan are used to perform contemporary notions of familial intimacy and copresence. The article thus contributes a cross-cultural consideration of Hochschild’s emotion work to examine how the circulation of images reveals the ideals of familyhood and aspirations of contemporary The visuality of apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp is becoming more apparent, especially as part of emotional work in contemporary relationships. In families, informal intergenerational literacy can be found throughout mobile media practices. Often, the emotional work around these practices remains tacit. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which mobile media photography has become imbricated in making-do practices of maintaining intimacy in intergenerational family contexts. Drawing from literature on mobile media visuality and transnational family relationships, this article considers Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labor and “feeling rules” to consider how intergenerational familial genres in Australia and Japan are used to perform contemporary notions of familial intimacy and copresence. The article thus contributes a cross-cultural consideration of Hochschild’s emotion work to examine how the circulation of images reveals the ideals of familyhood and aspirations of contemporary Asian families in a multicultural and monocultural context. Asian families in a multicultural and monocultural context.
Inductive Effects on the Energetics of Prolyl Peptide Bond Isomerization: Implications for Collagen Folding and Stability.

The hydroxylation of proline residues in collagen enhances the stability of the collagen triple helix. Previous X-ray diffraction analyses had demonstrated that the presence of an electron-withdrawing substituent on the pyrrolidine ring of proline residues has significant structural consequences [Panasik, N. , Jr.; Eberhardt, E. S. ; Edison, A. S. ; Powell, D. R. ; Raines, R. T. Int. J. Pept. Protein Res.1994, 44, 262-269]. Here, NMR and FTIR spectroscopy were used to ascertain kinetic and thermodynamic properties of N-acetyl-[β,γ-(13)C]D,L-proline methylester (1); N-acetyl-4(R)-hydroxy-L-proline [(13)C]methylester (2); and N-acetyl-4(R)-fluoro-L-proline methylester (3). The pK(a)'s of the nitrogen atom in the parent amino acids decrease in the order: proline (10.8) > 4(R)-hydroxy-L-proline (9.68) > 4(R)-fluoro-L-proline (9.23). In water or dioxane, amide I vibrational modes decrease in the order: 1 > 2 > 3. At 37 °C in dioxane, the rate constants for amide bond isomerization are greater for 3 than 1. Each of these results is consistent with the traditional picture of amide resonance coupled with an inductive effect that results in a higher bond order in the amide C=O bond and a lower bond order in the amide C-N bond. Further, at 37 °C in water or dioxane equilibrium concentrations of the trans isomer increase in the order: 1 < 2 < 3. Inductive effects may therefore have a significant impact on the folding and stability of collagen, which has a preponderance of hydroxyproline residues, all with peptide bonds in the trans conformation.
5G: Towards secure ubiquitous connectivity beyond 2020

The growing demand for mobile Internet, and the increasing number of connected devices, has required significant advancements in radio technology and networks compared to the previous generations of mobile telecommunication. Security however has only seen incremental changes to the previous mobile telecommunication generation, with enhancements that mitigate new threats and address revealed weaknesses. 5G is expected to change this, as novel use-cases will demand new trust models and require novel security solutions. In this paper, we examine the state of 5G Security, and start by describing the new expectations, requirements and enablers in 5G and the design principles conferred by material presented in selected publications. Furthermore, we describe the historic development of the authentication and key agreement protocols, which were introduced with GSM (2G), as an example of the incremental improvements to security. Additionally, we present select published papers that suggest different types of attacks on the current generations of mobile networks, and solutions to the identified weaknesses, which must be taken into account in 5G security. Finally, we describe a proposed 5G Security architecture, which bring new models for authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) to 5G. The role of 5G security is clear, it must not only meet the basic security requirements in confidentiality, integrity and privacy, but also foster user confidence in mobile telecommunication.