Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generation of functional human hepatic endoderm from human induced pluripotent stem cells

With the advent of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, it is now feasible to generate iPSCs with a defined genotype or disease state. When coupled with direct differentiation to a defined lineage, such as hepatic endoderm (HE), iPSCs would revolutionize the way we study human liver biology and generate efficient “off the shelf” models of human liver disease. Here, we show the “proof of concept” that iPSC lines representing both male and female sexes and two ethnic origins can be differentiated to HE at efficiencies of between 70%–90%, using a method mimicking physiological relevant condition. The iPSC‐derived HE exhibited hepatic morphology and expressed the hepatic markers albumin and E‐cadherin, as assessed by immunohistochemistry. They also expressed alpha‐fetoprotein, hepatocyte nuclear factor‐4a, and a metabolic marker, cytochrome P450 7A1 (Cyp7A1), demonstrating a definitive endodermal lineage differentiation. Furthermore, iPSC‐derived hepatocytes produced and secreted the plasma proteins, fibrinogen, fibronectin, transthyretin, and alpha‐fetoprotein, an essential feature for functional HE. Additionally iPSC‐derived HE supported both CYP1A2 and CYP3A4 metabolism, which is essential for drug and toxicology testing. Conclusion: This work is first to demonstrate the efficient generation of hepatic endodermal lineage from human iPSCs that exhibits key attributes of hepatocytes, and the potential application of iPSC‐derived HE in studying human liver biology. In particular, iPSCs from individuals representing highly polymorphic variants in metabolic genes and different ethnic groups will provide pharmaceutical development and toxicology studies a unique opportunity to revolutionize predictive drug toxicology assays and allow the creation of in vitro hepatic disease models. (HEPATOLOGY 2009.)
Explaining Changes in Female Labor Supply in a Life-Cycle Model

We study the life cycle labour force participation of three cohorts of American women: those born in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. We document the large shifts in labour supply behaviour among these three cohorts, then use a life cycle model with endogenous female labour force participation, consumption and saving choices to search for an explanation. The dynamics of labour supply depends on child costs (relative to earnings), returns to experience and the rate of depreciation of human capital when out of the labour market. We calibrate the model to match the behaviour of the middle cohorts and investigate which changes in the main determinants of labour supply could have accounted for the substantial increase in labour supply in the early part of the life cycle observed for the youngest cohort. We conclude that shifts in the cost of children relative to life-time earnings are the most likely explanation.
‘You can't Write that’: The Challenges of Written Communication between Preschools and Schools

RECENT REFORMS IN AUSTRALIA have brought an increasing expectation on early childhood educators to work together across settings at times of children's transition. In particular, the transition to school has been identified as an important time when educators are required to collaborate in order to support children, families and communities. Written forms of communication have been encouraged, and in some cases mandated, as a basis for transferring information about children from preschools to schools. The premise of such initiatives is that the information will enhance children's transitions by assisting schools to build on children's prior experiences. However, there has been little research into the practice of preschool–school communication including issues that impact on it. This article reports the challenges preschool and school educators identified in using written channels to transfer information between settings. The results indicate that written communication can be problematic. Several issues are identified that shape written communication practices and limit their effectiveness as a support for children and as a means of developing positive relationships between settings.
Infrared face recognition based on DWT and BP neural network

An efficient infrared face recognition method by combining discrete wavelet transformation(DWT) and BP neural network was proposed. Firstly, to get the principle information and reduce the dimensions of face, each infrared face image was decomposed into DWT coefficients by using two-level DWT. Then, the DWT coefficients was used to extract the useful features. Finally, based on the useful features extracted by DWT coefficients, the recognition result was getten by training of the BP neural network. The experiments conducted illustrate that the method proposed in this paper has better performance.
Theoretical properties of multimoves in metaheuristics in aspect of involutions

New properties of swap multimoves, applied successfully to neighborhood search forms of local search metaheuristics, are presented in this work. We prove the theorem which states that any permutation can be transformed into any other permutation executing at most two multimoves. Applying multimoves to metaheuristic algorithms allows us to obtain the best known results for the most diﬃcult scheduling problems considered in literature ([2, 3]).
ORVPF - the Model and its DNC Implementation

Vector Product Format (VPF) based databases store geographical data in a relational framework, where individual VPF files are arranged hierarchically in a directory tree structure. Access and update of the VPF data can become difficult due to fragmentation of data among multiple tables. This paper presents an object-oriented model for the management of a VPF database, which provides easy access and automatic update for the VPF data, and is compatible with ESRI ArcView. This model has been successfully implemented in Java, for Digital Nautical Charts (DNC).
JAT: A Test Automation Framework for Multi-Agent Systems

Automated tests have been widely used as a supporting mechanism during software development and maintenance activities. It improves the confidence on software releases as it seeks to uncover regression bugs, and serves as a live documentation which is very useful when evolving systems. Concerning multi agent systems (MASs), some characteristics such as agent autonomy and asynchronous message-based interaction bring a degree of non-determinism which presents new testing challenges. This paper proposes JAT, a framework for building and running MASs test scenarios, which relies on the use of aspect-oriented techniques to monitor the autonomous agents during tests and control the test input of asynchronous test cases. The tool has been developed on top of JADE, a widely used agent platform implemented in Java. We have used JAT on testing 3 different MASs. Our experience shows that JAT can be used to build test scenarios which can achieve high fault-detection effectiveness.
Themis: an I/O-efficient MapReduce

"Big Data" computing increasingly utilizes the MapReduce programming model for scalable processing of large data collections. Many MapReduce jobs are I/O-bound, and so minimizing the number of I/O operations is critical to improving their performance. In this work, we present Themis, a MapReduce implementation that reads and writes data records to disk exactly twice, which is the minimum amount possible for data sets that cannot fit in memory. In order to minimize I/O, Themis makes fundamentally different design decisions from previous MapReduce implementations. Themis performs a wide variety of MapReduce jobs -- including click log analysis, DNA read sequence alignment, and PageRank -- at nearly the speed of TritonSort's record-setting sort performance [29].
Dietary Supplementation of Phoenix dactylifera Seeds Enhances Performance, Immune Response, and Antioxidant Status in Broilers

The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) seeds were utilized in some traditional medical remedies and have been investigated for their possible health benefits. This proposed study wanted to assess the effect of date palm seeds (DPS) dietary supplementation in comparison to mannan-oligosaccharides (Bio-Mos®) and β-glucan over antioxidant and immunity events that have effect on growth and carcass performances of broilers. An aggregate of 180, one-day-old, chicks were raised in the wire-floored cages and allotted into control, Bio-Mos (0.1% Bio-Mos), β-glucan (0.1% β-glucan), DPS2 (2% date crushed seeds), DPS4 (4% date crushed seeds), and DPS6 (6% date crushed seeds) groups. Broilers in DPS2 and DPS4 groups showed significant variations (P < 0.05) in relative growth rate (RGR), feed conversion ratio (FCR), and efficiency of energy utilization in comparison to control group. Moreover, all DPS fed groups showed significant increases (P < 0.05) in serum reduced glutathione (GSH) values. Meanwhile, both serum interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) and interleukin-2 (IL-2) levels were significantly increased (P < 0.05) in DPS2. Consequently, obtained data revealed a substantial enhancement of performance, immunity, and antioxidant status by DPS supplementation in broiler that might be related to the antioxidant and immune-stimulant constituents of P. dactylifera seeds.
Recent changes in U.S. family finances: evidence from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances

Reviews changes in the income and wealth of U.S. families between 2001 and 2004. The discussion draws on data from the Federal Reserve Board's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances for those years and also uses evidence from earlier years of the survey to place the 2001-04 changes in a broader context.
Implementation and performance evaluation of SPAM particle code with OpenMP-MPI hybrid programming

In this paper, we implement a SPAM (Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics) code in both pure MPI and MPI-OpenMP hybrid manner, then compare and analize the performance of them on an SMPPC cluster. Our SPAM code is described to handle any mapping of spatial cells on to parallel MPI processes to exploit well load-balancing even with a relatively high communication cost. First we implement a parallelized version of the code with MPI, then parallelize each MPI process with OpenMP parallel-do feature. In the overall performance results, the performance of MPI-only code exceeds that of MPIOpenMP hybrid code except with a single node execution. We analized the detail of execution time and cache hit ratio on each processor, and found that the advantage of low communication cost between threads overcomes the disadvantage of low cache miss-hit ratio caused by the data localization problem in OpenMP. Another issue of this code is load imbalancing caused with the setting in our target problem mode. We consider a better cell mapping suitable for hybrid code and discuss the di culty to exploit high performance on this kind of hybrid programming.
Internet and Mobile Phone Addiction

The Internet is a largely social, interactive and information-driven medium that makes it easy for us to engage in social and academic activities, including business and entertainment. Over the last decade, mobile phones have actually turned into so-called “smartphones,” and they now support a wide variety of services related to the Internet, multimedia, business, gaming, photography, etc. These networks have had a great impact on young people. On the one hand, the Internet has provided many benefits to users (Echeburúa & de Corral, 2010). On the other, some people have become obsessed with it and are unable to control their use. In some cases, people have lost control of their Internet and Mobile Phone usage to the degree that their behavior has jeopardized their jobs and relationships. This problematic Internet and Mobile Phone use (PIU) can affect users’ physical, mental and psychological health (Bener & Bhugra, 2013). Some researchers have confirmed that excessive Internet use, which is considered a behavioral addiction, can generate symptoms associated with dependence in a similar way as substance abuse. According to Beranuy, Carbonell, and Griffiths (2013), problematic Internet and Mobile phone users can suffer mood modification, loss of control, relapse, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, among others (Kuss, Griffiths, & Binder, 2013). As a consequence, particular kinds of behavior may arise in relation with overuse (Puerta-Cortés, Carbonell, & Chamarro, 2014). In general the problematic use of the Internet and mobile phones can be defined as an inability to regulate one’s use which eventually involves negative consequences in daily life (Billieux, 2012) including on health and on social and financial aspects of life.
Electron induced dissociation of trimethyl (methylcyclopentadienyl) platinum (IV): Total cross section as a function of incident electron energy

The total cross section has been measured for the electron induced dissociation of trimethyl (methylcyclopentadienyl) platinum (IV) [MeCpPt(IV)Me3], a Pt precursor often used in focused electron beam induced processing (FEBIP), for incident electron energies ranging between 3–3 keV. Measurements were performed for the precursor in the adsorbed state under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. The techniques used in this study were temperature programmed desorption, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Two surfaces were used in these experiments, amorphous carbon overlayers containing embedded Pt atoms (a:C-Pt), formed by the electron decomposition of the Pt precursor, and atomically clean Au. The results from these three experiments revealed a comparatively low total cross section at 8 eV (4.2+/-0.3xE? 17 cm2 on the a:C-Pt and 1.4+/-0.1xE? 17 cm2 on the Au) that increases with increasing incident electron energy, reaching a maximum at around 150 eV (4.1+/-0.5xE? 16 cm2 on the a:C-Pt and 2.3+/-0.2xE? 16 cm2 on the clean Au), before decreasing at higher incident electron energies, up to 3000 eV. Differences in the measured cross sections between Au and a:C-Pt surfaces demonstrate that the substrate can influence the reaction cross section of adsorbed species. Temperature programmed desorption was also used to measure the adsorption energy of MeCpPt(IV)Me3, which was found to depend on both the substrate and the adsorbate coverage. The work in this paper demonstrates that surface science techniques can be used to quantitatively determine the total cross section of adsorbed FEBIP precursors for electron induced dissociation as a function of incident electron energy. These total cross section values are necessary to obtain quantitatively accurate information from FEBIP models and to compare the reaction efficiencies of different precursors on a quantitative basis. (doi:10.1063/1.3225091)
Student perceptions regarding the use of rubrics in writing assignments

Lindsay C. O'Neill STUDENT PERCEPTIONS REGARDING THE USE OF RUBRICS IN WRITING ASSIGNMENTS 2007 Dr. David Hespe Master of Science in Teaching The purpose of this study is to explore student perceptions regarding the use of rubrics in writing assignments. This qualitative research study was conducted with 16 students in a first grade classroom. I have conducted 4 mini-lessons on different writing components with the class. As a class we created a scoring rubric that includes important parts of the assignment and a number scale to further weigh the importance. The students were a part of creating the rubric and were given the rubric prior to their writing assignment. During the assignment I observed how the students use their knowledge of the rubric to complete their writing assignment. Upon the completion of the assignment I asked the students questions about the rubric, if they liked it or not, and why. This research supports the idea that students feel better about a writing assignment knowing exactly what they will be graded on prior to the assignment and these implications are discussed. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people who believed in me and supported me through writing my thesis. This never would have been possible without the continuous love and support from my father who for the past six years always told me I could do it. My roommate Jill who survived a year during this process and still remained positive. My boyfriend Justin who will never stop believing in me. My extended family and friends who were always encouraging. I love you all. Dr. Hespe, thank you so much for your guidance and support and making this goal attainable for me. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of tables CHAPTER
Dynamo: Facebook's Data Center-Wide Power Management System

Data center power is a scarce resource that often goes underutilized due to conservative planning. This is because the penalty for overloading the data center power delivery hierarchy and tripping a circuit breaker is very high, potentially causing long service outages. Recently, dynamic server power capping, which limits the amount of power consumed by a server, has been proposed and studied as a way to reduce this penalty, enabling more aggressive utilization of provisioned data center power. However, no real at-scale solution for data center-wide power monitoring and control has been presented in the literature. In this paper, we describe Dynamo -- a data center-wide power management system that monitors the entire power hierarchy and makes coordinated control decisions to safely and efficiently use provisioned data center power. Dynamo has been developed and deployed across all of Facebook's data centers for the past three years. Our key insight is that in real-world data centers, different power and performance constraints at different levels in the power hierarchy necessitate coordinated data center-wide power management. We make three main contributions. First, to understand the design space of Dynamo, we provide a characterization of power variation in data centers running a diverse set of modern workloads. This characterization uses fine-grained power samples from tens of thousands of servers and spanning a period of over six months. Second, we present the detailed design of Dynamo. Our design addresses several key issues not addressed by previous simulation-based studies. Third, the proposed techniques and design have been deployed and evaluated in large scale data centers serving billions of users. We present production results showing that Dynamo has prevented 18 potential power outages in the past 6 months due to unexpected power surges, that Dynamo enables optimizations leading to a 13% performance boost for a production Hadoop cluster and a nearly 40% performance increase for a search cluster, and that Dynamo has already enabled an 8% increase in the power capacity utilization of one of our data centers with more aggressive power subscription measures underway.
COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HEURISTIC ALGORITHMS FOR PARALLEL MACHINE SCHEDULING WITH SEQUENCE-DEPENDENT SETUPS AND RELEASE TIMES

This paper considers the application of heuristic algorithms to analyze the results obtained for the parallel machine scheduling problem with release times and sequence-dependent setups times. Since this problem is known to be strongly NP-hard for the case of minimizing the makespan, we resolved it with different heuristics and their performance is compared with a solution obtained using a lower bound. Such heuristics are based on either dispatching rules or random schedule generation strategies. Computational experiments are performed using random-generated data taken from the literature. Our results show that the heuristics perform very well compared against the lower bound, and requiring short computational time.
A Triclustering Approach for Time Evolving Graphs

This paper introduces a novel technique to track structures in time evolving graphs. The method is based on a parameter free approach for three-dimensional co-clustering of the source vertices, the target vertices and the time. All these features are simultaneously segmented in order to build time segments and clusters of vertices whose edge distributions are similar and evolve in the same way over the time segments. The main novelty of this approach lies in that the time segments are directly inferred from the evolution of the edge distribution between the vertices, thus not requiring the user to make an a priori discretization. Experiments conducted on a synthetic dataset illustrate the good behaviour of the technique, and a study of a real-life dataset shows the potential of the proposed approach for exploratory data analysis.
Developing a Software Architecture for Graceful Degradation in an Elevator Control System

Many embedded systems have high safety and dependability requirements, which makes ensuring software robustness a top priority in these systems. As embedded computer systems become more complex and incorporate increasing functionality, their software systems become increasingly more difficult to design, build, and maintain. One approach to achieving software robustness is graceful degradation. However, graceful degradation is a difficult property to define or construct. Traditional hardware redundancy is not enough to achieve software safety and dependability. The system's software architecture may be the key to building graceful degradation into a software system. This paper describes a proposal for a software architecture that may enhance graceful degradation for an example elevator control system, and discussion about implementing and evaluating the architecture.
Self-interference mitigation for in-band mmWave wireless backhaul

Next generation wireless backhaul systems may provide data rates exceeding 10 Gb/s using large bandwidth available at mmWave frequencies, and support features such as point-to-multipoint communication, non-line-of-sight communication, in-band operation (shared spectrum with access) and inter-BS coordination. We explore the feasibility of an “in-band” mmWave wireless base-station with the option of enabling backhaul transmission on one panel while simultaneously receiving access or backhaul on an adjacent panel. We show using simulations and lab measurement validation, that for a prototype 28 GHz mmWave system, the self-interference from the TX sector panel to the adjacent RX panel is around -70 to -80 dB and an additional 35-50 dB isolation is needed for enabling reception on adjacent RX panel that may be achieved through full duplex interference cancellation techniques.