Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semantic-Based Enhancement of ISO/IEC 14543-3 EIB/KNX Standard for Building Automation

Current technologies for Home and Building Automation (HBA) basically require an explicit interaction with the user and allow a static set of operational scenarios defined during system implementation. On the contrary, novel HBA solutions should enable so-called ambient intelligence, deriving from a flexible and automatic control of appliances and subsystems dipped into an environment. To this aim, this paper proposes backward-compatible enhancements to one of the most widespread domotic standards, i.e., EIB/KNX ISO/IEC 14543-3, able to support advanced, knowledge-based and context-aware functionalities, grounded on the semantic annotation of both user profiles and device capabilities. Such an approach enables novel resource discovery, matchmaking, and decision support features in HBA. Main benefits are in: (i) determining the most suitable services/functionalities according to implicit and explicit user needs and (ii) allowing device-driven interaction for autonomous adaptation of the environment to context modification. A case study is presented to better clarify the proposed framework also highlighting main characteristics, while performance evaluation is provided to assess its effectiveness.
The Probability Distribution Function of Column Density in Molecular Clouds

We discuss the probability distribution function (PDF) of column density resulting from density fields with lognormal PDFs, applicable to isothermal gas (e.g., probably molecular clouds). For magnetic and nonmagnetic numerical simulations of compressible, isothermal turbulence forced at intermediate scales ( of the box size), we find that the autocorrelation function (ACF) of the density field decays over relatively short distances compared to the simulation size. We suggest that a "decorrelation length" can be defined as the distance over which the density ACF has decayed to, for example, 10% of its zero-lag value, so that the density "events" along a line of sight can be assumed to be independent over distances larger than this, and the central limit theorem should be applicable. However, using random realizations of lognormal fields, we show that the convergence to a Gaussian is extremely slow in the high-density tail. As a consequence, the column density PDF is not expected to exhibit a unique functional shape, but to transit instead from a lognormal to a Gaussian form as the ratio η of the column length to the decorrelation length (i.e., the number of independent events in the cloud) increases. Simultaneously, the variance of the PDF decreases. For intermediate values of η, the column density PDF assumes a nearly exponential decay. For cases with a density contrast of 104, as found in intermediate-resolution simulations, and expected from giant molecular clouds (GMCs) to dense molecular cores, the required value of η for convergence to a Gaussian is at least a few hundred, or, for 106, several thousand. We then discuss the density power spectrum and the expected value of η in actual molecular clouds, concluding that they are uncertain since they may depend on several physical parameters. Observationally, our results suggest that η may be inferred from the shape and width of the column density PDF in optically thin line or extinction studies. Our results should also hold for gas with finite-extent power-law underlying density PDFs, which should be characteristic of the diffuse, nonisothermal neutral medium (with temperatures ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand degrees). Finally, we note that for η ≳ 100, the dynamic range in column density is small (less than a factor of 10), but this is only an averaging effect, with no implication on the dynamic range of the underlying density distribution.
Epigenetics and child health: basic principles

Epigenetic mechanisms are believed to play an important role in disease, development and ageing with early life representing a window of particular epigenomic plasticity. The knowledge upon which these claims are based is beginning to expand. This review summarises evidence pointing to the determinants of epigenetic patterns, their juxtaposition at the interface of the environment, their influence on gene function and the relevance of this information to child health.
Depression, Self-Esteem and Sociodemographic Determinants of Suicidal Ideation Among University Undergraduates

The study examined the direct effects and interaction effects of depression, self-esteem, age and religious affiliation on suicidal ideation. A total of 241 (Mean age=18.89; female=52.7%) university undergraduates in a Nigerian university that were selected through convenient sampling procedure responded to the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Beck Depression Scale (Short form) and Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire. Results of the Two-Way ANOVA revealed a between subject significant main effect of depression, (F = 11.27, p<.05, ƞp = .089) and a non-significant main effects of self-esteem, (F= 1.82, p>.05, ƞp = .015) on suicidal ideation. The interaction effect was not found to be significant (F= .49, p<.05, ƞp = .008). however, age (F = 8.06, p<.01, ƞp = .064) and religious affiliation (F = 9.41, p<.05, ƞp = .038) were also found to have significant main effects and interaction effects (F = 40.85, p<.01, ƞp = .045) on respondents’ suicidal ideation. The study concluded that depression, age and religious affiliation influenced suicidal ideation among college students.
The Application of Epstein’s Model in the Implementation of Career Transition Programme for Students with Learning Disabilities

The career transition programme is a programme implemented to prepare students with special needs (SSN) to face future working environment. Parents are among the factors contributing to the successful completion of SSN’s career transition programme. This survey was conducted to identify the level of involvement of SSN parents in the implementation of career transition programmes in schools. The instrument used in this study was a questionnaire consists of 48 items with five points Likert scale. This questionnaire was developed based on six elements of Epstein’s Parental Involvement Model: i) parenting, ii) communication, iii) decision making, iv) learning at home, v) collaboration with the community and vi) voluntary assistance. This study involved 30 respondents comprising parents of SSN who had undergone a career transition programme at Special Education Integrated Program (PPKI) at four secondary schools in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. The data were analysed descriptively using SPSS software. The findings show that parents’ involvement is high in terms of communication and voluntary assistance while their involvement in parenting, decision-making, home-based learning, and collaboration with the community is at moderate level. Parents’ education level was found to have no significant relationship with the level of parental involvement except for communication and voluntary aspects. The findings of this study can give some insights to policy makers to increase parents’ level of involvement in the context of planning and the implementation of programmes to support SSN’s readiness for the career realm. Parents are encouraged to improve their advocacy skills and awareness on the importance of their roles in the career transition. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.17977/um029v5i12018p007
A comparison of real and simulated designs for vibratory parts feeding

The design of industrial parts feeders is a long, trial-and-error process that can take months-even for the design of feeders that orient only one type of part. This paper describes the use of dynamic simulation to expedite the design and prototyping of parts feeders. We give probabilistic descriptions of vibratory parts feeding behavior and we present a comparison between simulated design experiments and physical experiments done using a real industrial vibratory bowl feeder. Our findings show strong similarities between the results of the two types of experiments. We believe that dynamic simulation is a promising approach for expediting the parts feeder analysis and design process.
Quantitative correlation between ability to compute and student performance in a primary school

Many studies have provided qualitative arguments for the premise that the ability to compute is fundamental and therefore should be treated at all levels of education. This work presents a quantitative indication of the validity of this premise for primary school students. In order to precisely define what ability a student should have to use a model of computation to compute, this work reports an experimental study that shows a significant correlation between the student's ability to compute and his/her academic performance in a primary school.
Bug-Finding in Distributed Applications : Dealing with Exponential Path Explosion

Recently dynamic testing schemes have been proposed to automatically find very subtle errors in program code. These tools exploit the program flow information contained in the program itself in order to generate high-coverage test cases. However when applying these techniques to find bugs in distributed systems new challenges arise. The non-deterministic scheduling of events in distributed systems introduces some serious scalability challenges, because of the exponentially growing search space. In this paper we will look into this problem and sketch possible solutions.
Blind Source Separation With Parameter-Free Adaptive Step-Size Method for Robot Audition

This paper proposes an adaptive step-size method for blind source separation (BSS) suitable for robot audition systems. The design of the step-size parameter is a critical consideration when we apply BSS to real-world applications such as robot audition systems, because the surrounding environment dynamically changes in the real world. It is common to use a fixed step-size parameter that was obtained empirically. However, because of environmental changes and noise, the performance of BSS with a fixed step-size parameter deteriorates and the separation matrix sometimes diverges. Several adaptive step-size methods for BSS have been proposed. However, there are difficulties when applying them to robot audition systems for example, low-computational cost requirements, being free from manual parameter adjustment and so on. We propose an adaptive step-size method suitable for robot audition systems. The proposed method has the following merits: 1) low computational cost; 2) no parameters to be adjusted manually; and 3) no additional preprocessing requirements. We applied our method to six different BSS algorithms for an eight-channel microphone array embedded in Honda's ASIMO robot. The method improved the performance of all six algorithms in experiments on separation and recognition of simultaneous speech. Moreover, the method increased the amount of calculation by less than 10% compared with the original calculation used in most BSS algorithms.
Highly-multiplexed barcode sequencing: an efficient method for parallel analysis of pooled samples

Next-generation sequencing has proven an extremely effective technology for molecular counting applications where the number of sequence reads provides a digital readout for RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, Tn-seq and other applications. The extremely large number of sequence reads that can be obtained per run permits the analysis of increasingly complex samples. For lower complexity samples, however, a point of diminishing returns is reached when the number of counts per sequence results in oversampling with no increase in data quality. A solution to making next-generation sequencing as efficient and affordable as possible involves assaying multiple samples in a single run. Here, we report the successful 96-plexing of complex pools of DNA barcoded yeast mutants and show that such ‘Bar-seq’ assessment of these samples is comparable with data provided by barcode microarrays, the current benchmark for this application. The cost reduction and increased throughput permitted by highly multiplexed sequencing will greatly expand the scope of chemogenomics assays and, equally importantly, the approach is suitable for other sequence counting applications that could benefit from massive parallelization.
Adaptive sensing system for human detecting with dynamic disposition

In this paper, we propose a novel human detecting system using several stationary and moving laser range finders(LRF). The occluded area where the stationary sensors cannot measure will be covered by the actively moving sensor. The occlusion is perceived by overlaying visible area of the stationary sensors. The moving sensor will move to the target position where the sensor can measure the occluded area. Finally, the measured information of all sensors will be merged for data fusion. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the system.
Individual Emotion Recognition and Subgroup Analysis from Psychophysiological Signals

This study involves intra- and inter-individual emotion classifications from psychophysiological signals and subgroup analysis on the influence of gender and age and their interaction on the emotion recognition. Individual classifications are conducted using a selection of feature optimization, classification and evaluation approaches. The subgroup analysis is based on the inter-individual classification. Emotion elicitation is conducted using standardized pictures in the Valence-Arousal-Dominance dimensions and affective states are classified into five different category classes. Advantageous intra-individual rates are obtained via multi-channel classification and the respiration best contributes to the recognition. High interindividual variances are obtained showing large variability in physiological responses between the subjects. Classification rates are significantly higher for women than for men for the 3-category-class of Valence. Compared to old subjects, young subjects have significantly higher rates for the 3-category-class and 2-category-class of Dominance. Moreover, young men’s classification performed the best among the other subgroups for the 5-category-class of Valence/Arousal.
Counteracting Oracle attacks

In the paper, we address oracle attacks for integrity watermarking in a communication setting. We show how an integrity verification algorithm can be modified in order to counteract an oracle attack. As an alternative to set up suitable communication protocols, we propose to counteract oracle attacks modifying integrity verification algorithms by adding a suitable temporal constraint.
MILD based sliding contention window mechanism for QoS in Wireless LANs

Multimedia applications and real time communications like audio, voice, and video over IEEE 802.11 WLANs requires quality of service (QoS). IEEE 802.11 does not have an in-built QoS supported MAC protocol. Existing work provides service differentiation based on contention window separation (CWS) or variation of the waiting time using Inter Frame Space (IFS). In CWS, the higher priority traffic receives a CW that results in a smaller Backoff Interval (BI) whereas lower priority receives a CW that results in longer BI. Nafaa et al. used Sliding Contention Window (SCW) with Linear-Increase Linear-Decrease (LILD) mechanism as the backoff algorithm. LILD does not provide strict service differentiation in case of high network congestion and suffers from fairness problem. In order to ensure firm service differentiation while maintaining maximum bandwidth utilization and provide fairness, this paper proposes a new MAC protocol for WLANs that uses SCW scheme for each network flow with Multiplicative-Increase Linear-Decrease (MILD) mechanism as the backoff algorithm. The simulation results show that SCW with MILD scheme provide strict service differentiation, increased throughput, decreased delay and better fairness in high network population and high congestion.
Oxidized low density lipoprotein inhibits the migration of aortic endothelial cells in vitro

Endothelial cell (EC) migration is a critical and initiating event in the formation of new blood vessels and in the repair of injured vessels. Compelling evidence suggests that oxidized low density lipoprotein (LDL) is present in atherosclerotic lesions, but its role in lesion formation has not been defined. We have examined the role of oxidized LDL in regulating the wound-healing response of vascular EC in vitro. Confluent cultures of bovine aortic EC were "wounded" with a razor, and migration was measured after 18 to 24 h as the number of cells moving into the wounded area and the mean distance of cells from the wound edge. Oxidized LDL markedly reduced migration in a concentration- and oxidation-dependent manner. Native LDL or oxidized LDL with a thiobarbituric acid (TBA) reactivity < 5 nmol malondialdehyde equivalents/mg cholesterol was not inhibitory; however, oxidized LDL with a TBA reactivity of 8-12 inhibited migration by 75- 100%. Inhibition was half-maximal at 250-300 micrograms cholesterol/ml and nearly complete at 350-400 micrograms/ml. The antimigratory activity was not due to cell death since it was completely reversed 16 h after removal of the lipoprotein. The inhibitor molecule was shown to be a lipid; organic solvent extracts of oxidized LDL inhibited migration to nearly the same extent as the intact particle. When LDL was variably oxidized by dialysis against FeSO4 or CuSO4, or by UV irradiation, the inhibitory activity correlated with TBA reactivity and total lipid peroxides, but not with electrophoretic mobility or fluorescence (360 ex/430 em). This indicates that a lipid hydroperoxide may be the active species. These results suggest the possibility that oxidized LDL may limit the healing response of the endothelium after injury.
Surge: A com-prehensive plug-in syntactic realisation component for text generation

A valve for mixing and controlling the flow of fluid from two different sources, e.g. hot and cold water, the valve including a liner having a port leading to a mixing and discharge chamber and a piston received within the liner for both reciprocating and rotating controlled movement, the piston including two ventricles each for receiving fluid from one source and each ventricle having a port which on controlled piston movement may be brought into register with the liner port to vary both the flow rate by reciprocating movement and to vary the mixture by rotating movement.
Relative importance of kidney and liver in synthesis of arginine by the rat.

FEATHERSTON, W. R. ,Q. R. ROGERS, AND R. A. FREEDLAND. Relative importance of kidney and liver in synthesis of arginine by the rat. Am. J. Physiol. 224(l) : Yl27-129. 1973. -The relative contributions of the kidneys and liver to the total synthesis of arginine in the rat were studied by following the conversion of intravenously injected L-citrulline-ureido-14C to L-arginine guanido-14C in intact controls or in rats with either the kidneys, or liver, or both completely ligated. The incorporation of the labeled arginine into the trichloroacetic acid-precipitable protein from liver, kidney, skeletal muscle, brain, and lung was determined. A greater decrease in the specific activity of skeletal muscle, lung, and liver protein was observed when the kidneys were ligated than occurred in the skeletal muscle, lung, and kidney protein when the liver was ligated. The specific activity of skeletal muscle protein was approximately 3.3 times higher when the liver was ligated than when the kidneys were ligated. Ligation of either the kidney, liver, or both had less of an effect on lowering the specific activity of brain protein than the ligation had on the specific activity of skeletal muscle protein indicating the brain may be synthesizing a portion of its own arginine from citrulline. The results provide evidence that the kidneys synthesize a considerably larger portion of the endogenous arginine used for body protein synthesis than does the liver.
Sustainable Development (1987-2005) - An Oxymoron Comes of Age

The essay began by arguing that 'sustainable development' had for some time been a property of different discourses. The term 'sustainable development' was an oxymoron, which prompted a number of discursive interpretations of the weight to attached to both 'development' and 'sustainability'. Only by exposing the assumptions, and conclusions, of these discourses could we hope to clarify the choices, and trade-offs, which beset environmental policy, and the environmental social sciences. Today 'sustainable development' needs to be linked to new material realities, the product of our science and technology, and associated shifts in consciousness.
CAPE suppresses migration and invasion of prostate cancer cells via activation of non-canonical Wnt signaling

Prostate cancer (PCa) was the fifth most common cancer overall in the world. More than 80% of patients died from PCa developed bone metastases. Caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) is a main bioactive component of honeybee hive propolis. Transwell and wound healing assays demonstrated that CAPE treatment suppressed the migration and invasion of PC-3 and DU-145 PCa cells. Gelatin zymography and Western blotting indicated that CAPE treatment reduced the abundance and activity of MMP-9 and MMP-2. Analysis using Micro-Western Array (MWA), a high-throughput antibody-based proteomics platform with 264 antibodies detecting signaling proteins involved in important pathways indicated that CAPE treatment induced receptor tyrosine kinase-like orphan receptor 2 (ROR2) in non-canonical Wnt signaling pathway but suppressed abundance of β-catenin, NF-κB activity, PI3K-Akt signaling, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Overexpression or knockdown of ROR2 suppressed or enhanced cell migration of PC-3 cells, respectively. TCF-LEF promoter binding assay revealed that CAPE treatment reduced canonical Wnt signaling. Intraperitoneal injection of CAPE reduced the metastasis of PC-3 xenografts in tail vein injection nude mice model. Immunohistochemical staining demonstrated that CAPE treatment increased abundance of ROR2 and Wnt5a but decreased protein expression of Ki67, Frizzle 4, NF-κB p65, MMP-9, Snail, β-catenin, and phosphorylation of IκBα. Clinical evidences suggested that genes affected by CAPE treatment (CTNNB1, RELA, FZD5, DVL3, MAPK9, SNAl1, ROR2, SMAD4, NFKBIA, DUSP6, and PLCB3) correlate with the aggressiveness of PCa. Our study suggested that CAPE may be a potential therapeutic agent for patients with advanced PCa.
Non-stationary multi-ring channel model for massive MIMO systems

This paper proposes a novel non-stationary multi-ring channel model for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. As the dimension of the antenna arrays comes to be huge in massive MIMO systems, farfield assumption used in conventional MIMO channel models is not considered in the proposed model. Thus, the spherical wavefront assumption and a birth-death process to model non-stationary properties on both time and array axes are adopted to the proposed model. In addition, the multi-ring geometry relationships which are relative to the delays of multipath components (MPCs) are assumed to mimic the distribution of the clusters in massive MIMO channels. The numerical results, such as received power levels over the array, antenna correlation and eigenvalue distributions show that the proposed channel model captures specific characteristics of the massive MIMO channel comparing with the measurements.