Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability of ventilatory parameters during cycle ergometry in multicentre trials in COPD

We studied the distribution profiles and repeatability of key exercise performance parameters in the first large multicentre trials to include these measurements in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). After a screening visit, 463 subjects with COPD (mean±sd forced expiratory volume in 1 s 43±13% predicted) completed two run-in visits before treatment randomisation. At the run-in visits, measurements were conducted at rest, at a standardised time near end-exercise (isotime) and at peak exercise during constant work rate (CWR) cycle tests at 75% of each individual’s maximum work capacity. The intraclass correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the test-retest repeatability of measurements of endurance time (ET), inspiratory capacity (IC), ventilation and dyspnoea intensity (Borg scale) during exercise. IC, ventilation and dyspnoea ratings were normally distributed; ET showed rightward skew (median<mean, skewness of 10.9 (much greater than zero)) with 16% of the sample exceeding 1 sd of the mean. ET was highly repeatable across run-in visits: 7.9±4.8 and 8.4±5.1 min (R = 0.84). IC values at rest, isotime and peak exercise were all highly repeatable (R≥0.87). Ventilation was repeatable over the same time-points (R≥0.92), as was dyspnoea intensity at isotime (R = 0.79) and at peak exercise (R = 0.81). In conclusion, key perceptual and ventilatory parameters can be reliably measured during CWR cycle exercise in multicentre clinical trials in moderate to very severe COPD.
Edge-Enhanced Error Diffusion Halftoning using Human Visual Properties

Digital halftoning is the technique to obtain a bilevel-toned image from continuous-toned image. Among halftoning methods, the error diffusion method gives better subjective quality than other halftoning ones. But it also makes edges of objects blurred. To overcome the defect, we proposes the modified error diffusion to enhance the edges using the property that human vision perceives the local average luminance and doesn't perceive a little variation of the spatial information. The proposed method computes a local activity measure, which is the difference between a pixel luminance and the average of its 3times3 neighborhood pixels' luminance weighted according to the spatial positioning. The system also uses information of edge enhancement (IEE), which is computed from the normalized spatial activity measure multiplied by the average luminance. The IEE is added to the quantizer's input pixel and feeds into the halftoning quantizer. The quantizer produces the halftone image having the enhanced edge. The computer experimental results show that the proposed method produces clearer bilevel-toned images than conventional methods and the edge of objects is preserved well. Also the performance of the proposed method is improved, compared with that of the conventional method by measuring the edge correlation and the local average accordance at some ranges of viewing distance
ENHANCING POWER SYSTEM STABILITY BY USING Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator

Passivitybased controller is designed for the thyristor controlled series capacitor (TCSC) aimed at enhancing power system stability. The design problem formulated as optimization Problem and then particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique was used to search for optimal parameters. The proposed control and technique are employed on test system under different cases and location of TCSC. To validate the effectiveness of the TCSC on enhancing system stability, Eigen values analysis and nonlinear time-domain simulation implemented on SMIB equipped with TCSC. The eigenvalue analysis and simulation results show the effectiveness and robustness of proposed controllers to improve the stability performance of power system by efficient damping of low frequency oscillations under various disturbances.
Social-aware visualized exploration of tourist behaviours

The popularity of social media has generated an abundance of publicly available data about tourist behaviour. We aim to exploit this to provide a snapshot of customized routes for pre-trip tourists and help the tourism industry understand the real behaviour of tourists for better policy making. Therefore, we propose an analytic framework that is able to automatically collect, clean and integrate all forms of tourists' activity data from various social media sites, and provides an interactive yet visualized analysis to facilitate users' exploration of underlying data. Specifically, it is able to (1) support multidimensional views of tourists' trajectory data, e.g. temporally, spatially, textually, etc; (2) support multi-granularity visualization where the trajectory of either a group of tourists or a single tourist can be efficiently retrieved.
China: Toward a Consumption-Driven Growth Path

China's decision to transition away from growth driven by investment and a growing global trade surplus toward one more dependent on domestic consumption is laudable. But to date China's initiatives have been too modest to change its underlying growth dynamic. China's external surplus continues to balloon and, short of a US recession, seems likely to expand further in 2007. Household consumption as a share of GDP continued to decline in the first half of 2006. Despite much lip service to increasing budget outlays on social services, little evidence of a fundamental shift in government spending has emerged. So Chinese households' precautionary saving persists. There is little evidence of a more flexible exchange rate and increased independence of monetary policy that would allow higher domestic interest rates. These and other factors suggest that China's transition toward more consumption-driven growth is likely to be substantially delayed.
How Will 401 ( k ) Pension Plans Affect Retirement Income ?

Two decades ago, most workers with pensions had a defined benefit (DB) plan. The employer made necessary contributions and investments to meet promised pension benefit payments when the employee retired. By 1993, the tide had turned; more than half of covered employees participated primarily in defined contribution (DC) pensions such as 401(k) plans [Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), 19971. This dramatic shift was associated as well with growing concerns about the emerging 401 (k) plans. Some viewed 40 1 (k) plans as a crisis waiting to happen when current generations, having made minimal (or no) contributions to their DC plan, retired with inadequate pension asset balances (Karen Ferguson and Kate Blackwell, 1995; Anne Willette, 1995). Another concern was that workers switching jobs would use the lump-sum distributions for houses, boats, or other purchases rather than reinvesting them in another retirement account [Ellen E. Schultz, 1995; U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL), 1998al. In a similar vein, newly retired workers may not roll over the assets into an annuity and therefore risk "spending down" their retirement wealth too early (e.g., Jeffrey R. Brown and Mark J. Warshawsky, 2001). The most serious charge against 401(k) plans,
BUILDING A SECURE AND RESILIENT SUPPLY NETWORK.

SUBTITLE: FOR MANY COMPANIES, THE ONLY THING STANDING BETWEEN THEM AND A DISASTROUS SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTION IS LUCK. BUT, AS ANY GAMBLER KNOWS, YOUR LUCK EVENTUALLY RUNS OUT. IN TODAY'S BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT, YOU NEED A SUPPLY NETWORK THAT HAS COMPREHENSIVE SECURITY PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES IN PLACE AND IS RESILIENT ENOUGH TO BOUNCE BACK FROM ANY DISRUPTIONS THAT DO HAPPEN. LUCK PLAYS NO PART IN THE EQUATION.
Bile Acid Recognition by the Clostridium difficile Germinant Receptor, CspC, Is Important for Establishing Infection

Clostridium difficile spores must germinate in vivo to become actively growing bacteria in order to produce the toxins that are necessary for disease. C. difficile spores germinate in vitro in response to certain bile acids and glycine. In other sporulating bacteria, proteins embedded within the inner membrane of the spore sense the presence of germinants and trigger the release of Ca++-dipicolinic acid (Ca++-DPA) from the spore core and subsequent hydrolysis of the spore cortex, a specialized peptidoglycan. Based upon homology searches of known germinant receptors from other spore-forming bacteria, C. difficile likely uses unique mechanisms to recognize germinants. Here, we identify the germination-specific protease, CspC, as the C. difficile bile acid germinant receptor and show that bile acid-mediated germination is important for establishing C. difficile disease in the hamster model of infection. These results highlight the importance of bile acids in triggering in vivo germination and provide the first description of a C. difficile spore germinant receptor. Blocking the interaction of bile acids with the C. difficile spore may represent an attractive target for novel therapeutics.
NetComm: a network analysis tool based on communicability

MOTIVATION Set-based network similarity metrics are increasingly used to productively analyze genome-wide data. Conventional approaches, such as mean shortest path and clique-based metrics, have been useful but are not well suited to all applications. Computational scientists in other disciplines have developed communicability as a complementary metric. Network communicability considers all paths of all lengths between two network members. Given the success of previous network analyses of protein-protein interactions, we applied the concepts of network communicability to this problem. Here we show that our communicability implementation has advantages over traditional approaches. Overall, analyses suggest network communicability has considerable utility in analysis of large-scale biological networks. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION We provide our method as an R package for use in both human protein-protein interaction network analyses and analyses of arbitrary networks along with a tutorial at http://www.shawlab. org/NetComm/.
Why Migrating to Triple DES is Not Easy

Financial institutions are performing large scale migrations of their systems from DES to triple-DES. In this white paper we describe the basic characteristics of DES and triple-DES and look at the security properties that a financial transaction system will want to achieve. We then look at the problems related with a migration from DES to triple-DES, enumerating and discussing several points that we suggest should be considered. Finally, we give some suggestions that will help ease the problems of migration.
Predicting Movement from Multiunit Activity

Previous studies have shown that intracortical activity can be used to operate prosthetic devices such as an artificial limb. Previously used neuronal signals were either the activity of tens to hundreds of spiking neurons, which are difficult to record for long periods of time, or local field potentials, which are highly correlated with each other. Here, we show that by estimating multiunit activity (MUA), the superimposed activity of many neurons around a microelectrode, and using a small number of electrodes, an accurate prediction of the upcoming movement is obtained. Compared with single-unit spikes, single MUA recordings are obtained more easily and the recordings are more stable over time. Compared with local field potentials, pairs of MUA recordings are considerably less redundant. Compared with any other intracortical signal, single MUA recordings are more informative. MUA is informative even in the absence of spikes. By combining information from multielectrode recordings from the motor cortices of monkeys that performed either discrete prehension or continuous tracing movements, we demonstrate that predictions based on multichannel MUA are superior to those based on either spikes or local field potentials. These results demonstrate that considerable information is retained in the superimposed activity of multiple neurons, and therefore suggest that neurons within the same locality process similar information. They also illustrate that complex movements can be predicted using relatively simple signal processing without the detection of spikes and, thus, hold the potential to greatly expedite the development of motor-cortical prosthetic devices.
Preeclampsia-Like Symptoms Induced in Mice by Fetoplacental Expression of STOX1 Are Reversed by Aspirin Treatment

Preeclampsia (PE) is a common human-specific pregnancy disorder defined by hypertension and proteinuria during gestation and responsible for maternal and fetal morbimortality. STOX1, encoding a transcription factor, was the first gene associated with PE as identified by positional cloning approaches. Its overexpression in choriocarcinoma cells mimics the transcriptional consequences of PE in the human placenta. Here, we created transgenic mouse strains overexpressing human STOX1. Wild-type female mice crossed with transgenic male mice reproduce accurately the symptoms of severe PE: gestational hypertension, proteinuria, and elevated plasma levels of soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 and soluble endoglin. Placental and kidney histology were altered. Symptoms were prevented or alleviated by aspirin treatment. STOX1-overexpressing mice constitute a unique model for studying PE, allow testing therapeutic approaches, and assessing the long-term effects of the preeclamptic syndrome.
SSL / TLS Session-Aware User Authentication : A Lightweight Alternative to Client-Side Certificates

Many SSL/TLS-based e-commerce applications employ traditional authentication mechanisms on the client side. These mechanisms—if decoupled from SSL/TLS session establishment—are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this article, we examine the feasibility of such attacks, survey countermeasures, and explain the rationale behind SSL/TLS session-aware user authentication as a lightweight and privacy-enhancing alternative to the deployment and use of public key certificates on the client side. We also present different possibilities for making deployed user authentication mechanismsSSL/TLS sessionaware.
A 1 Tb/s 3 W Inductive-Coupling Transceiver for 3D-Stacked Inter-Chip Clock and Data Link

A 1 Tb/s 3 W inter-chip transceiver transmits clock and data by inductive coupling at a clock rate of 1 GHz and data rate of 1 Gb/s per channel. 1024 data transceivers are arranged with a pitch of 30 mum in a layout area of 1 mm2. The total layout area including 16 clock transceivers is 2 mm2 in 0.18 mum CMOS and the chip thickness is reduced to 10 mum. Bi-phase modulation (BPM) is employed for the data link to improve noise immunity, reducing power in the transceiver. Four-phase time division multiple access (TDMA) reduces crosstalk and the bit-error rate (BER) is lower than 10-13
A Hybrid Approach to Placement of Tenants for Service-Based Multi-tenant SaaS Application

In a service-based multi-tenant SaaS application, the number of servers on which Web service instances are deployed are limited, and tenants share the same application and services. With the purpose of lowering cost of ownership by high economies of scale, we must solve the problem that how to optimally place tenants with end users to maximize the total number of tenants without violating their Service Level Agreement (SLA). This paper proposes a hybrid approach to solve placement of tenants which is called Tenant Placement Strategy (TPS). The TPS uses a combination of resource consumption estimation model, service selection with genetic algorithm (GA), case-based reasoning (CBR) and heuristic approach. CBR is proposed for matching existing execution plans which are generated by GA. In order to fully use all types of resources of the servers, a heuristic approach is proposed for selecting the optimal execution plan based on the distance of the tenant resources consumption vector and the server residual resource vector. The results of simulated experiments show that the strategy proposed in this paper is effective in placing tenants.
A Distributed Text Mining System for Online Web Textual Data Analysis

Real world Web mining applications usually have different requirements, such as massive data processing, low system latency, and high scalability. In order to meet these different requirements, we proposed a distributed text mining system with a layered architecture that divides the system functions into three layers, namely, the crawling and storage layer, the basic mining layer, and the analysis service layer. Message-oriented middleware are used between these layer components and services to make the communication in a loosely-coupled way. To conquer the data-intensive and storage failure problems, a distributed file system is used to store and manage the raw text data and various indexes. As a case study and example, the design and implementation of an experimental online topic detection application, which can be scaled to handle thousands of Internet news and forum channels and perform online analysis, is also discussed.
Nonlinear Edge-Preserving Smoothing of Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are subject to prominent speckle noise, which is generally considered a purely multiplicative noise process. One interesting property of this multiplicative noise is that the ratio of the standard deviation to the signal value, the “coefficient of variation,” is theoretically constant at every point in a SAR image. We use this property in conjunction with a new nonlinear filter structure based on mathematical morphology, the value-and-criterion structure, to design a filter that removes speckle noise from SAR images without blurring edges. First, the sample coefficient of variation at each point in the image is computed. In areas where there are changes in the signal, the sample coefficient of variation will be greater than the expected theoretical value. By using the new filter structure, a low-pass filter to remove speckle noise can be directed to operate only over regions where the coefficient of variation is close to the expected value. These regions are less likely to contain significant features or edges which would be distorted by low-pass filtering. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new filtering method by comparing it to established speckle noise removal techniques on both phantom images with simulated speckle noise and real SAR images.
Analyzing Intraorganizational Knowledge Management

Managing organizational knowledge is especially important in knowledge intensive work where the inputs and outputs of work are often knowledge. Information and knowledge are raw material for knowledge workers, and their task is to process that knowledge. Availability of relevant information and knowledge is therefore essential for knowledge workers’ productivity. An empirical study of obstacles of knowledge flow was conducted in a knowledge intensive organization. This study shows how different obstacles of knowledge flow can impede work in knowledge intensive organization. In addition, some managerial actions are recommended to facilitate knowledge flow in organizations.
The Cost of Synchronizing Multiple-Access Channels

Multiple access channel is a communication model in which many users, also called stations, could exchange information. Since it offers limited capacity, some information sent through it might be lost due to signal interference (collision). Therefore, successful message delivery to a station requires breaking symmetry on the channel. In this work we consider the channel-synchronization problem on non-synchronized channels: assuming stations with messages wake-up dynamically on the channel, what is the minimum (expected) time needed for all stations to receive at least one message each. Historically, the first considered "classical" channel assumed that whenever two or more stations transmit simultaneously, the transmitted information is lost, otherwise it is delivered to all stations. In the seminal paper, Kushilevitz and Mansour proved that the first successful transmission on the channel with n contending stations may require, in the worst case, Ω(log n) expected communication rounds for any protocol. The result, however, holds under assumption that all contenders start their protocols at the same round. We prove that in more general scenario, in which the stations may have different local clocks and start the protocol at arbitrary times, the lower bound increases quadratically to Ω(log2 n) expected rounds. Both lower bounds are matched by corresponding algorithms developed in previous papers. Therefore, our lower bound proves the polynomial impact of synchronization on the classical multiple-access channels. Recently, more accurate channels based on Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) were proposed and studied. The advantage of the SINR-based channel is that, apart of being closer to realistic physical scenario, some more demanding communication patterns could be scheduled in a single round. We support this intuition by showing that on such channel delivery of a message could be done faster than on the classical channel, mainly, in O(log2 n/log log n) expected number of rounds, thus separating the classical channel model from the SINR one. (The same time bound also holds with high probability.) Finally, we prove that for deterministic protocols receiving a message on the SINR channel requires time Ω(n), which surprisingly drops nearly exponentially to O(log2 n) if the stations have access to the global clock, which also separates SINR channel from the classic one, due to the lower bound Ω(n log n) on the latter. We also match the latter bound by corresponding lower bound. This together with our O(log2/log log n) round randomized algorithm, also proves a gap between deterministic and randomized solutions to the synchronization problem.
PaperDude: a virtual reality cycling exergame

In this paper, we present a Virtual Reality cycling based exergame system inspired by the arcade game Paperboy. We implemented our system using an Oculus Rift VR headset, a Trek FX bicycle attached to a Kickr power trainer, and a Microsoft Kinect camera, to allow for gesture input. Users bike down a virtual suburban street attempting to throw newspapers into neighbourhood mailboxes. The user's pedaling speed is tracked by the power trainer and controls the speed of the virtual bike. The user's upper body is tracked using the Kinect Camera and detects when a user throws a newspaper. Our demonstration shows how head mounted virtual reality and exergaming can be combined to increase immersion and provide novel gaming input methods that are natural to the user, while reducing motion sickness associated with Virtual Reality.
Changing Family Practices with Assistive Technology: MOBERO Improves Morning and Bedtime Routines for Children with ADHD

Families of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often report morning and bedtime routines to be stressful and frustrating. Through a design process involving domain professionals and families we designed MOBERO, a smartphone-based system that assists families in establishing healthy morning and bedtime routines with the aim to assist the child in becoming independent and lowering the parents' frustration levels. In a two-week intervention with 13 children with ADHD and their families, MOBERO significantly improved children's independence and reduced parents' frustration levels. Additionally, use of MOBERO was associated with a 16.5% reduction in core ADHD symptoms and an 8.3% improvement in the child's sleep habits, both measured by standardized questionnaires. Our study highlights the potential of assistive technologies to change the everyday practices of families of children with ADHD.