Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Syndrome of allergy, apraxia, and malabsorption: characterization of a neurodevelopmental phenotype that responds to omega 3 and vitamin E supplementation.

OBJECTIVE Verbal apraxia is a neurologically based motor planning speech disorder of unknown etiology common in autism spectrum disorders. Vitamin E deficiency causes symptoms that overlap those of verbal apraxia. Polyunsaturated fatty acids in the cell membrane are vulnerable to lipid peroxidation and early destruction if vitamin E is not readily available, potentially leading to neurological sequelae. Inflammation of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and malabsorption of nutrients such as vitamin E and carnitine may contribute to neurological abnormalities. The goal of this investigation was to characterize symptoms and metabolic anomalies of a subset of children with verbal apraxia who may respond to nutritional interventions. DESIGN AND PATIENTS A total of 187 children with verbal apraxia received vitamin E + polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation. A celiac panel, fat-soluble vitamin test, and carnitine level were obtained in patients having blood analyzed. RESULTS A common clinical phenotype of male predominance, autism, sensory issues, low muscle tone, coordination difficulties, food allergy, and GI symptoms emerged. In all, 181 families (97%) reported dramatic improvements in a number of areas including speech, imitation, coordination, eye contact, behavior, sensory issues, and development of pain sensation. Plasma vitamin E levels varied in children tested; however, pretreatment levels did not reflect clinical response. Low carnitine (20/26), high antigliadin antibodies (15/21), gluten-sensitivity HLA alleles (10/10), and zinc (2/2) and vitamin D deficiencies (4/7) were common abnormalities. Fat malabsorption was identified in 8 of 11 boys screened. CONCLUSION We characterize a novel apraxia phenotype that responds to polyunsaturated fatty acids and vitamin E. The association of carnitine deficiency, gluten sensitivity/food allergy, and fat malabsorption with the apraxia phenotype suggests that a comprehensive metabolic workup is warranted. Appropriate screening may identify a subgroup of children with a previously unrecognized syndrome of allergy, apraxia, and malabsorption who are responsive to nutritional interventions in addition to traditional speech and occupational therapy. Controlled trials in apraxia and autism spectrum disorders are warranted.
Performance Analysis of Low Power CSVCO for PLL Architecture

This paper describes the performance analysis of an ultra low power, low phase noise current starved CMOS VCO for PLL architecture. This CSVCO is applicable for PLL application such as in, frequency control, frequency multipliers, tracking generators, clock generation and recovery etc. Transient response and phase noise analysis of CSVCO is performed and after simulation the phase noise at 1MHz is-104.0dBc/Hz with supply voltage of 1 V with a centre frequency of 2GHz. It is performed using cadence virtuoso gpdk045 nm CMOS technology.
Crafting labor policy : techniques and lessons from Latin America

Nothing impacts the welfare of individuals and households more directly than employment and earnings opportunities. In developing countries, labor market reform is a crucial component for the success of overall economic policy reforms. Despite success in other areas of economic reform over the past ten years, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile continue to face significant labor policy issues. To reduce the rhetoric around the issues - in Argentina, a high level of unemployment exists; in Brazil, the high costs of public employment have created large government deficits and public debt; and in Chile, there is a growing income inequality and uncertainty of employment - the book uses a systematically quantitative approach. The value of the quantitative methods in analysis is that they can provide frameworks to better understand the effects of various policy actions. The results can then be translated into benefits and costs that policy makers can more easily explain to their constituents. The policy recommendations resulting from the issues analyzed in Crafting Labor Policy: Techniques and Lessons from Latin America may be beneficial to other developing countries enacting labor market reforms.
Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker's Politics and the Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis

The learned editors of whom Byron writes were trying to safeguard the questionable innocence of adolescent schoolboy readers while at the same time remaining faithful to their Greek and Latin authors a hopelessly self-contradictory enterprise. All that their transplanting accomplished was to facilitate their readers' gorging themselves on the forbidden fruit, now conveniently gathered into one place. Such editions, by the way, really existed and in fact still do, and in our own
Blended Learning Environments in Higher Education: A Case Study of How Professors Make It Happen

Blended learning has become a prominent method of course content delivery in higher education. Researchers have found that motivation, communication, and course design are three factors that contribute to the overall success of blended learning courses and students’ satisfaction with blended learning courses. This qualitative study also found that course preparation emerged through the participant interviews as a contributing factor. What remains unclear, however, is whether faculty take these factors into consideration when preparing to teach a blended learning course and, if so, how. In this study, a collective case study of five faculty of blended learning courses was conducted to investigate how they prepared to teach a blended learning course and how they considered course preparation, course design, communication, and motivation. The findings suggest that the faculty did consider these four factors to varying degrees.
FINANCIAL PLANNING WITH 0-1 KNAPSACK PROBLEMS , PART II : USING DOMINATION RESULTS TO SOLVE KNAPSACK PROBLEMS

Part II uses domination results in knapsack problems to assist in generating solutions more rapidly and with less work. In particular, domination results are used to: (1) generate smaller problems so that less work is needed to solve the problems, and (2) speed up solution by pruning the variable sets that must be examined. Three solution processes are examined in Part II. Domination resultS are used on branch and bound algorithms, dynamic programming algorithm and epsilon-approximate algorithms. Use of domination concepts can substantially reduce the computational demands of a solution process. Advanees in Mathematical Programming and Financial Planning, Volume 4, pages 151-1". Copyright © 1995 hy JAI Press Ine. AU rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 1-55'38-724-6
Pragmatic rules for real-time control of the dynamic walking of an under-actuated biped robot

In this paper, we propose a control strategy allowing us to perform the transition of velocities included in [0 m/s; 1 m/s] for the dynamic walking of an under-actuated robot (RABBIT) without reference trajectories. This strategy of control also enables us to carry out the transition from stop towards walking and the reverse process. The interest of this method resides in the fact that on one hand the intrinsic dynamics of the system are exploited by using a succession of active and passive phases and on the other hand that the control strategy is very easy to implement on-line.
Interactive Interface Agents as Recommender Systems

This paper presents a model for more interactive interface agents. Using learning interface agents is one strategy for designing recommender systems. The more interactive style of agents presented in this paper aims to increase the trust and understanding between the user and the agent, by allowing the agent to solicit further input from the user under certain conditions. We illustrate our design for more interactive interface agents by including some examples in the domain of electronic mail. We then discuss why the model is also applicable to designing recommender systems, in general.
The Prevalence of Psychological Distress among Adolescents: An Initial Study of Adolescents’ Mental Health in Malang, Indonesia

This study is aimed to investigate the prevalence and risk estimate of psychological distress among adolescents in Malang, Indonesia. Gender-related patterns were examined in this study. This study used the Hopkins Symptoms Check-List 25 (HSCL 25) to measure psychological distress (“case” score ≥1.75) , and a demographic questionnaire recorded age and gender of the participants. The study only ranged the City of Malang where nine high-schools were randomly selected to participate in this study, both private and public high-schools registered at the Department of Education in Malang. A total of 515 students between 14 – 19 years old had been participated. There is a significant difference in psychological distress level among male and female adolescents in the City of Malang (p<0.05). Female adolescents tend to score higher level of psychological distress compared to their male counterparts. There are 53.2% adolescents reported high-level of psychological distress. The prevalence of psychological distress among adolescents in the City of Malang is distressing. Also, female adolescents are at higher risk to experience high psychological distress level compared to the males.
Improving Multimedia Performance over Lossy Networks via SCTP

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new Internet standards track transport layer protocol. SCTP was designed to transport PSTN signaling messages over IP networks, but SCTP is also capable of serving as a generalized transport protocol. As such, SCTP provides an alternative to the traditional transport protocols, TCP and UDP, that may be better able to satisfy the requirements of future battleeeld networks. Unlike traditional transport protocols, SCTP allows multiple streams of messages within a single connection (or, in SCTP terminology, a single association). As the results in this paper show, this ability is particularly helpful in reducing latency for streaming multimedia in high loss environments. a
A QoS routing and admission control scheme for 802.11 ad hoc networks

This paper presents an admission control mechanism for multirate wireless ad hoc networks. Admission control depends on precise estimates of bandwidth available in the network and the bandwidth required by a new flow. Estimating these parameters in wireless ad hoc networks is challenging due to the shared and open nature of the wireless channel. Available bandwidth can only be determined by also considering interference at neighboring nodes. Also, due to self-interference of flows the required bandwidth of a flow varies for each link of a route. The proposed admission control mechanisms is integrated with a hop-by-hop ad hoc routing protocol, thus enabling it to identify alternate routes if the shortest path is congested. Each node measures available channel bandwidth through passive monitoring of the channel. The mechanism improves estimation accuracy by using a formula that considers possible spatial reuse from parallel transmissions. The protocol also uses temporal accounting to enable bandwidth estimation across links using different bit-rates. Simulation results support that the admission control mechanism can effectively control the traffic load and that considering parallel transmission leads to improved bandwidth estimation accuracy. The admission control mechanism can admit more traffic while maintaining QoS.
Reconstructing Individual Mobility from Smart Card Transactions: A Space Alignment Approach

Smart card transactions capture rich information of human mobility and urban dynamics, therefore are of particular interest to urban planners and location-based service providers. However, since most transaction systems are only designated for billing purpose, typically, fine-grained location information, such as the exact boarding and alighting stops of a bus trip, is only partially or not available at all, which blocks deep exploitation of this rich and valuable data at individual level. This paper presents a "space alignment" framework to reconstruct individual mobility history from a large-scale smart card transaction dataset pertaining to a metropolitan city. Specifically, we show that by delicately aligning the monetary space and geospatial space with the temporal space, we are able to extrapolate a series of critical domain specific constraints. Later, these constraints are naturally incorporated into a semi-supervised conditional random field to infer the exact boarding and alighting stops of all transit routes with a surprisingly high accuracy, e.g., given only 10% trips with known alighting/boarding stops, we successfully inferred more than 78% alighting and boarding stops from all unlabeled trips. In addition, we demonstrated that the smart card data enriched by the proposed approach dramatically improved the performance of a conventional method for identifying users' home and work places (with 88% improvement on home detection and 35% improvement on work place detection). The proposed method offers the possibility to mine individual mobility from common public transit transactions, and showcases how uncertain data can be leveraged with domain knowledge and constraints, to support cross-application data mining tasks.
A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Wrapping PDF Documents

The PDF format represents the de facto standard for print-oriented documents. In this paper, we address the problem of wrapping PDF documents, which raises new challenges in several contexts of text data management. Our proposal is based on a novel bottom-up hierarchical wrapping approach that exploits fuzzy logic to handle the “uncertainty” which is intrinsic to the structure and presentation of PDF documents. A PDF wrapper is defined by specifying a set of group type definitions that impose a target structure to groups of tokens containing the required information. Constraints on token groupings are formulated as fuzzy conditions, which are defined on spatial and content predicates of tokens. We define a formal semantics for PDF wrappers and propose an algorithm for wrapper evaluation working in polynomial time with respect to the size of a PDF document. The proposed approach has been implemented in a wrapper generation system that offers visual capabilities to assist the designer in specifying and evaluating a PDF wrapper. Experimental results have shown good accuracy and applicability of our system to PDF documents of various domains.
Green ICT Readiness Model for Developing Economies: Case of Kenya

There has been growing concerns about the rising costs of doing business and environmental degradation world over. Green ICT has been proposed to provide solutions to the two issues yet it is not being implemented fully in developing economies like Kenya. For its implementation, it is critical to establish the level of green ICT readiness of organisations to inform where to start and where to put more emphasis. Over the past few years this has been done using Molla's G-readiness model. However this model assumes the basic level of G- readiness to be same for both developed and developing economies to be the same with regard to ICT personnel preparedness. Based on green ICT readiness in Kenya, the relationship between ICT personnel's gender, age and training with the G-readiness variables as proposed in Molla's G- readiness model was investigated. The study surveyed ICT personnel in four cases using a questionnaire on a seven scale likert scale. It established that there exists a significant relationship between the ICT personnel related variables and the G-readiness variables. Based on the findings on the relationship, the study extended Molla's G-readiness model to include a sixth dimension of personnel readiness.
Boosting density-based clustering algorithm by mean approximation on grids

Many applications require clustering of large amount of data. Most clustering algorithms, however, do not work and efficiently when facing such kind of dataset. This paper presents an approach to boost density-based clustering algorithms by mean grids. We show that the method of adjusted mean approximation on the grid is not only a powerful tool to relieve the burden of heavy computation and memory usage, but also a close proximity of the original algorithm. An adjusted mean approximation on grids using density-based clustering algorithm (AMADC) is constructed which exploits more advantages from the grid partition mechanism. Results of experiments also demonstrate promising performance of this approach.
Making the Right Impression for Corporate Reputation: Analyzing Impression Management of Financial Institutions in Social Media

The concept of corporate reputation reflects the standing of a firm based on the public perception. Firms with high corporate reputation are better able to sustain superior performance. During the financial crisis, the corporate reputation of financial institutions has decreased resulting in a bad perception of the financial sector by the public. However, improving their corporate reputation is of major importance for financial institutions as they are heavily dependent on the trust of the market participants. Thus, managing the public perception about a financial institution is of critical importance. Therefore, firms can deploy organizational impression management tactics to influence how the public perceives them. In this research, we obtained data from 54 corporate Twitter accounts of 36 financial institutions broadcasting more than 21,000 messages between October 2012 and June 2013 to the public. Thereby, we combine two former separately discussed theories in a single research approach and examine which organizational impression management tactics can be identified based on the social media messages regarding corporate reputation. The results indicate that based on the different dimensions of corporate reputation financial institutions deploy different organizational impression management tactics in social media to manage their reputation.
A Review Paper on Big Data and Hadoop

The term 'Big Data' describes innovative techniques and technologies to capture, store, distribute, manage and analyze petabyte- or larger-sized datasets with high-velocity and different structures. Big data can be structured, unstructured or semi-structured, resulting in incapability of conventional data management methods. Data is generated from various different sources and can arrive in the system at various rates. In order to process these large amounts of data in an inexpensive and efficient way, parallelism is used. Big Data is a data whose scale, diversity, and complexity require new architecture, techniques, algorithms, and analytics to manage it and extract value and hidden knowledge from it. Hadoop is the core platform for structuring Big Data, and solves the problem of making it useful for analytics purposes. Hadoop is an open source software project that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers. It is designed to scale up from a single server to thousands of machines, with a very high degree of fault tolerance.
Improving Software Quality through Refactoring by means of Didactical Augmented Experience

In agile software development refactoring is an important phase for the continuous improvement of software quality. Unfortunately, the application of refactorings is very subjective and heavily based on the expertise of the developers resulting in an unstable quality assurance. In this paper, we present an experiencebased approach for the semi-automatic and goal-oriented refactoring of software systems based on didactical augmented experiences, following the experience factory paradigm. This approach promises the accelerated acquisition, (re-) use, and learning of knowledge in the refactoring process.
Catalytic Conversion of Cellulose to Levulinic Acid by Metal Chlorides

The catalytic performance of various metal chlorides in the conversion of cellulose to levulinic acid in liquid water at high temperatures was investigated. The effects of reaction parameters on the yield of levulinic acid were also explored. The results showed that alkali and alkaline earth metal chlorides were not effective in conversion of cellulose, while transition metal chlorides, especially CrCl3, FeCl3 and CuCl2 and a group IIIA metal chloride (AlCl3), exhibited high catalytic activity. The catalytic performance was correlated with the acidity of the reaction system due to the addition of the metal chlorides, but more dependent on the type of metal chloride. Among those metal chlorides, chromium chloride was found to be exceptionally effective for the conversion of cellulose to levulinic acid, affording an optimum yield of 67 mol % after a reaction time of 180 min, at 200 °C, with a catalyst dosage of 0.02 M and substrate concentration of 50 wt %. Chromium metal, most of which was present in its oxide form in the solid sample and only a small part in solution as Cr3+ ion, can be easily separated from the resulting product mixture and recycled. Finally, a plausible reaction scheme for the chromium chloride catalyzed conversion of cellulose in water was proposed.
Content peering in content centric networks

The settlement-free peering relationships play a vital role in today's Internet, notably in helping ISPs cope with the dramatic increase in traffic load caused by the recent surge in the demand for videos and user generated content. Because of the added caching capability of CCN, peering in CCN can be expanded to encompass not only content that is permanently stored in the ISP's network, but also content that is temporarily cached at CCN routers in the ISP's network. Intuitively, this content-level peering is likely to benefit the networks involved in the peering relationship; however, this comes at a non-trivial cost. In this paper, we try to answer the question of whether the additional overhead and complexity to extend content-level peering is justifiable in view of the benefits it brings. To this end, we formulate the content-level peering problem as an optimization problem to study its maximum potential benefit. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to evaluate the potential peering benefit under realistic AS-level peering graphs, using realistic video traffic. The experimental results show that the interconnectivity of the peering graph significantly affects the maximum benefit of content-level peering. Compared to local greedy caching, cooperative caching can bring higher peering benefits; yet it is sensitive to parameters like the peering link bandwidth and the AS-level cache size.
An integrated cross layer approach for throughput improvement in wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a controlling approach to improve throughput using cross layer integration. Now a days communication networks require minimal interference and maximum accuracy with a faster data rate. Throughput improvement has become a vital issue in deploying broadband wireless sensor networks. Based on integration of optimum power allocation and memory blockage a novel approach of cross layer integration mechanism is proposed. This method of communication provides higher data rate, with lower consumption of energy resources over wireless sensor networks. Extensive simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposed architecture. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can improve the communication throughput of the wireless sensor network.