Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statistical estimation of TCP packet loss rate from sampled ACK packets

The appearance of various quality-sensitive applications has greatly changed the requirements for network management. To manage the quality of these applications, monitoring of individual traffic flows, as well as aggregated traffic statistics, has become more important. Since per-flow monitoring involves a high processing cost, especially in emerging high-speed links, packet sampling techniques have been attracting considerable attention. However, existing sampling techniques, such as NetFlow and sFlow, have mainly targeted traffic volume monitoring and there has been little discussion on the monitoring of quality indexes including packet loss rate. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the TCP packet loss rate from sampled packets. The proposed method detects packet loss events by monitoring duplicate ACK events induced by a TCP receiver indicating the loss events. Since only a portion of packet loss events can be detected from the sampled packets, the correct packet loss rate is estimated by means of statistical approximation. Simulation results show that the proposed method accurately estimates the TCP packet loss rate from 10% of sampled packets.
Factor V Leiden mutation is a risk factor for cerebral venous thrombosis: a case-control study of 55 patients.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Different coagulation disorders have been associated with cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT). Until now, fewer than 50 patients have been reported with CVT and the factor V Leiden (FVL) mutation. Although the prevalence of FVL-positive patients with CVT ranged from 10% to 25%, it was as low as 0.5% to 3% in the control groups. Most other studies had not systematically searched for concomitant risk factors or previous thromboembolic events. To better define the relevance of the FVL mutation in conjunction with additional risk factors in CVT, we conducted the present case-control study. METHODS Fifty-five patients with CVT were compared with 272 healthy controls. A standardized interview regarding established risk factors for venous thrombosis and the patients' and their families' histories for thromboembolic events was performed. The presence of the FVL mutation was determined by polymerase chain reaction on DNA obtained from peripheral blood leukocytes. RESULTS Of 55 patients, 8 (14.5%) were heterozygous for the FVL mutation compared with 17 of 272 controls (6.25%). The relative risk for the presence of FVL was 2.55 (95% confidence interval, 1.04 to 6.26; P=0.04). Additional risk factors for CVT were frequently found in both the presence and absence of FVL. Recurrence of venous thromboembolic events was more frequent in patients with the FVL mutation (5 of 8 patients, 62.5%) than in those without this anomaly (8 of 47 patients, 17%; P<0.005). CONCLUSIONS Our study confirms the FVL mutation as the most relevant hereditary risk factor for CVT. Coexisting risk factors are usually involved in the initiation of CVT. Patients with the FVL mutation are at an increased risk for recurrent venous thrombosis.
Inpatient Fall Prevention Programs as a Patient Safety Strategy

Falls are common among inpatients. Several reviews, including 4 meta-analyses involving 19 studies, show that multicomponent programs to prevent falls among inpatients reduce relative risk for falls by as much as 30%. The purpose of this updated review is to reassess the benefits and harms of fall prevention programs in acute care settings and to identify factors associated with successful implementation of these programs. We searched for new evidence using PubMed from 2005 to September 2012. Two new, large, randomized, controlled trials supported the conclusions of the existing meta-analyses. An optimal bundle of components was not identified. Harms were not systematically examined, but potential harms included increased use of restraints and sedating drugs and decreased efforts to mobilize patients. Eleven studies showed that the following themes were associated with successful implementation: leadership support, engagement of front-line staff in program design, guidance of the prevention program by a multidisciplinary committee, pilot-testing interventions, use of information technology systems to provide data about falls, staff education and training, and changes in nihilistic attitudes about fall prevention. Future research would advance knowledge by identifying optimal bundles of component interventions for particular patients and by determining whether effectiveness relies more on the mix of the components or use of certain implementation strategies.
Expression of a new cell surface antigen on activated murine macrophages

A macrophage cell-surface antigen associated with pyran and Corynebacterium parvum-activated macrophages and P388D1 cells but not detectable on normal or glycogen and thioglycollate-elicited murine macrophages has been described. The antigen was demonstrated both by complement-mediated cytotoxicity and immunofluorescence, using an appropriately absorbed rabbit antiserum to P388D1. This antiserum should enable the characterization of activated macrophage cell populations on an individual cell basis and should be a useful probe to study the interactions of macrophages with tumor cells and the relationship of activation to cell-surface changes.
Parameter estimation of a building system model and impact of estimation error on closed-loop performance

Predictive-control methods have been recently employed for demand-response control of building and district-level HVAC systems. Such approaches rely on models and parameter estimates to meet comfort constraints and to achieve the theoretical system-efficiency gains. In this paper we present a methodology that establishes achievable targets for control-model parameter estimation errors based on closed-loop performance sensitivity. The control algorithm is designed as a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) that uses perturbed building-model parameters. We perform simulations to estimate the dependency of energy cost and constraint infringement time on the magnitude of these perturbations. The simulation results are used to define targets for the parameter estimation errors, which in turn are applied to specify the character of excitation and model structure used for identification. We design a parameter estimator and perform Monte-Carlo simulations for a model that includes sensor noise and load uncertainty. The distribution of the estimation errors are used to demonstrate that the established targets are met.
How to measure RNA expression in rare senescent cells expressing any specific protein such as p16Ink4a

Here we describe a carefully optimized method for the preparation of high quality RNA by flow sorting of formaldehyde fixed senescent cells immunostained for any intracellular antigen. Replicative cellular senescence is a phenomenon of irreversible growth arrest triggered by the accumulation of a discrete number of cell divisions. The underlying cause of senescence due to replicative exhaustion is telomere shortening. We document here a spontaneous and apparently stochastic process that continuously generates senescent cells in cultures fully immortalized with telomerase. In the course of studying this phenomenon we developed a preparative fluorescence activated flow sorting method based on immunofluorescent staining of intracellular antigens that can also deliver RNA suitable for quantitative analysis of global gene expression. The protocols were developed using normal human diploid fibroblasts (HDF) and up to 5×107 cells could be conveniently processed in a single experiment. The methodology is based on formaldehyde crosslinking of cells, followed by permeabilization, antibody staining, flow sorting, reversal of the crosslinks, and recovery of the RNA. We explored key parameters such as crosslink reversal that affect the fragmentation of RNA. The recovered RNA is of high quality for downstream molecular applications based on short range sequence analysis, such qPCR, hybridization microarrays, and next generation sequencing. The RNA was analyzed by Affymetrix Gene Chip expression profiling and compared to RNA prepared by the direct lysis of cells. The correlation between the data sets was very high, indicating that the procedure does not introduce systematic changes in the mRNA transcriptome. The methods presented in this communication should be of interest to many investigators working in diverse model systems.
Scheduling and power allocation in self-backhauled full duplex small cells

Full duplex (FD) communications, which increases spectral efficiency through simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency band, is a promising technology to meet the demand of next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the application of such FD communication to self-backhauled small cells. We consider a FD capable small cell base station (BS) being wirelessly backhauled by a FD capable macro-cell BS. FD communication enables simultaneous back-haul and access transmissions at small cell BSs, which reduces the need to orthogonalize allocated spectrum between access and backhaul. However, in such simultaneous operations, all the links experience higher interference, which significantly suppresses the gains of FD operations. We propose an interference-aware scheduling method to maximize the FD gain across multiple UEs in both uplink and downlink directions, while maintaining a level of fairness between all UEs. It jointly schedules the appropriate links and traffic based on the back-pressure algorithm, and allocates appropriate transmission powers to the scheduled links using Geometric Programming. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheduler nearly doubles the throughput of small cells compared to traditional half-duplex self-backhauling, even when the uplink/downlink traffic is asymmetric.
A home study-based spirituality education program decreases emotional distress and increases quality of life--a randomized, controlled trial.

CONTEXT Although epidemiological studies have reported protective effects of religion and spirituality on mental health, it is unknown whether spirituality can be used as an intervention to improve psychological well-being. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of a home study-based spirituality program on mood disturbance in emotionally distressed patients. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A non-blinded, randomized, wait list-controlled trial of 165 individuals with mood disturbance [score of >40 on the Profile of Mood States (POMS)] were recruited from primary care clinics in a Canadian city between August 2000 and March 2001. INTERVENTIONS Participants were randomized to a spirituality group (an 8-week audiotaped spirituality home-study program), a mindfulness meditation-based stress reduction group (attendance at facilitated classes for 8 weeks), or a wait-list control group (no intervention for 12 weeks). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Primary outcomes were mood disturbance, measured using POMS, and quality of life, measured using the SF-36, a short-form health survey with 36 questions. The POMS and the SF-36 were completed at baseline, at 8 weeks, and at 12 weeks. RESULTS At the end of the 8-week intervention period, the mean POMS score improvement was -43.1 (-45.7%) for the spirituality group, -22.6 (-26.3%) for the meditation group, and -10.3 (11.3%) for the control group (P<.001 for spirituality vs control group; P=.034 for spirituality vs meditation group). Mean improvement in the SF-36 mental component summary score was 14.4 (48.6%) for the spirituality group, 7.1 (22.3%) for the meditation group, and 4.7 (16.1%) for the control group (P<.001 for spirituality vs control group; P=.029 for spirituality vs meditation group). At 12 weeks, POMS and SF-36 scores remained significantly different from baseline for the spirituality group.
Visually-Derived Wiener Filters for Speech Enhancement

This work begins by examining the correlation between audio and visual speech features and reveals higher correlation to exist within individual phoneme sounds rather than globally across all speech. Utilising this correlation, a visually-derived Wiener filter is proposed in which clean power spectrum estimates are obtained from visual speech features. Two methods of extracting clean power spectrum estimates are made; first from a global estimate using a single Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and second from phoneme-specific estimates using a hidden Markov model (HMM)-GMM structure. Measurement of estimation accuracy reveals that the phoneme-specific (HMM-GMM) system leads to lower estimation errors than the global (GMM) system. Finally, the effectiveness of visually-derived Wiener filtering is examined.
Arti Cial Chemistries—a Review Peter Dittrich

This article review s the growing body of scientic work in articial chemistry. First, common motivations and fundamental concepts are introduced. Second, current research activities are discussed along three application dimensions: modeling, information processing, and optimization. Finally, common phenomena among the different systems are summarized. It is argued here that articial chemistries are " the right stuff " for the study of prebiotic and biochemical evolution, and they provide a productive framework for questions regarding the origin and evolution of organizations in general. Furthermore, articial chemistries have a broad application range of practical problems, as shown in this review. Information should be generated from information just as organisms from organisms. The pieces should fertilize each other, they should be crossed over, they should be mutated, that is, varied to a small degree, but also to a larger degree by radical changes not known in genetics. This could perhaps happen in some vessels where reactions between " information-carrying molecules " take place, molecules that carry information in a similar way as chromosomes carry the features of organisms. 1 Arti cial Life and Arti cial Chemistry One of the main driving forces of science is the quest for understanding the origin and nature of life. For centuries, this quest has caused scientists to collect and systematically describe the diversity of life found everywhere around us. Over many years an impressive collection of data about the processes of life has been amassed. Biology as a traditional life science has sorted and classied the data, and—in the course of a century—has made considerable inroads into the understanding of certain aspects of life. The informational perspective, however, has not been the center of interest in biological attempts to approach the issue of life's essence. Articial life (AL) research , on the other hand, abstracts from specic examples of living processes and tries to integrate different approaches into one interdisciplinary attempt to extract the rst principles of life. The working hypothesis of AL research is that biotic phenomena can be modeled by using complex systems of many interacting components. The complex system approach toward an explanation of life employs emergence as a central concept. Emergence is used to deduce global properties of a system from the local interactions between its subsystems. These local interactions may follow simple effective rules that cause global behavior of the system to emerge, but cannot be predicted
RAMZzz: Rank-aware DRAM power management with dynamic migrations and demotions

Main memory is a significant energy consumer which may contribute to over 40% of the total system power, and will become more significant for server machines with more main memory. In this paper, we propose a novel memory system design named RAMZzz with rank-aware energy saving optimizations. Specifically, we rely on a memory controller to monitor the memory access locality, and group the pages with similar access locality into the same rank. We further develop dynamic page migrations to adapt to data access patterns, and a prediction model to estimate the demotion time for accurate control on power state transitions. We experimentally compare our algorithm with other energy saving policies with cycle-accurate simulation. Experiments with benchmark workloads show that RAMZzz achieves significant improvement on energy-delay2 and energy consumption over other power saving techniques.
Clinical reasoning process underlying choice of teaching strategies: a framework to improve occupational therapists' transfer skill interventions.

BACKGROUND/AIM Clinical reasoning, a critical skill influenced by education and practice context, determines how occupational therapists teach transfer skills. Teaching strategies affect intervention efficacy. Although knowledge about the way teaching strategies are chosen could help improve interventions, few studies have considered this aspect. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the clinical reasoning process of occupational therapists underlying the choice of strategies to teach older adults transfer skills. METHODS A grounded theory study was carried out with eleven community occupational therapists recruited in six Health and Social Services Centres in Québec, Canada. Data were collected through observations of teaching situations (n = 31), in-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 12) and memos, and were analysed using constant comparative methods. Memos were also used to raise codes to conceptual categories, leading to an integrative framework. Rigour was assured by following scientific criteria for qualitative studies. RESULTS The integrative framework includes the clinical reasoning process, consisting of eight stages, and its factors of influence. These factors are internal (experiences and elements of personal context) and external (type of transfer, clients' and their environment's characteristics and practice context). CONCLUSIONS The clinical reasoning process underlying the choice of strategies to teach transfer skills was conceptualised into an integrative framework. Such a framework supports clinicians' reflective practice, highlights the importance of theory and practice of pedagogy in occupational therapists' education, and encourages consideration and better documentation of the possible influence of practice context on teaching interventions. As such, this integrative framework could improve occupational therapists' transfer skill interventions with older adults.
Thermal Management of Solar Cells

The focus on solar cells as a source of photovoltaic energy is rapidly increasing nowadays. The amount of sun's energy entering earth surface in one hour is more than the world consume in one year. The photovoltaic market has been increasing by more than 20% annually since 2002. Improving solar cells aims at increasing the power conversion efficiency and reducing manufacturing costs. Crystalline silicon is the most commonly used material in making solar cells with more than 90% market use. Solar cells manufactured in 2011 are capable or converting about 15% of its absorbed light energy into output electricity. Solar cells panels that employ optical concentrators can convert up to 30% of absorbed light into electricity. The remaining 70% of absorbed energy is turned into heat inside the solar cell. The continuous decrease in solar cells size coupled with the increase in their energy absorption generates more heat inside the solar cells and raise their temperature. The increasing the solar cell temperature negatively affect its power conversion efficiency and can damage it. Therefore, it is important to control the solar cell temperature and effectively remove the unwanted heat. Most solar cells utilize passive cooling technologies. A basic heat sink can reduce the solar cell temperature by about 15°C, which increases the output power by 6%. When a heat sink is attached to a solar cell, a thermal resistance between the two interfaces can limit the amount of heat transferred between the solar cell and heat sink. This resistance is a result of the small air gaps in between the joined surfaces and caused by the surfaces imperfections. Since air is a poor thermal conductor, we need to fill these gaps with a material that has better thermal conductivity. Thermal interface materials (TIMs) do this task and improves the interfacial contact by decreasing the thermal resistance. The goal of this research is to achieve a better thermal management of solar cells by improving the interface contact between the solar cell and a passively cooled heat sink.
Resilience in Bolivia: Impact evaluation of supporting communities to adapt to changing weather patterns and improve their livelihoods

This evaluation is presented as part of the Effectiveness Review Series 2015/16, selected for review under the resilience thematic area. This report documents the findings of a quasi-experimental evaluation carried out in April 2015 of the ‘Supporting communities in Bolivia to adapt to changing weather patterns and improve their livelihoods’ project. It sought to assess the success the project had in enabling households that directly participated in the camellones to strengthen their livelihoods, to minimise risk from shocks and to adapt to emerging trends and uncertainty. The project was carried out by Oxfam in partnership with the Kenneth Lee Foundation in several communities of the municipality of Trinidad in the Beni Region of Bolivia between 2010 and 2013. The key activities of this project (together with its predecessor, launched in 2008) were to construct and promote the use of ‘camellones’, an indigenous land-management system intended to protect livelihoods (agriculture and fish farming) against drought or flood. Read more about Oxfam's Effectiveness Reviews .
Nervous System Targets of RNA Editing Identified by Comparative Genomics

An unknown number of precursor messenger RNAs undergo genetic recoding by modification of adenosine to inosine, a reaction catalyzed by the adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs). Discovery of these edited transcripts has always been serendipitous. Using comparative genomics, we identified a phylogenetic signature of RNA editing. We report the identification and experimental verification of 16 previously unknown ADAR target genes in the fruit fly Drosophila and one in humans—more than the sum total previously reported. All of these genes are involved in rapid electrical and chemical neurotransmission, and many of the edited sites recode conserved and functionally important amino acids. These results point to a pivotal role for RNA editing in nervous system function.
Embedded based Remote Control Application using Mobile Phone in Irrigation

This paper provides the development of mobile phones as remote control application for the induction motor-pump which is used in the agriculture for irrigation. Due to frequent power cuts and abnormal voltage conditions in India, it is necessary to distribute water efficiently to the fields during normal conditions. This is carried out by exchanging the information between the user phone and GSM in the form of missed calls and messages. This system is developed with PIC16F877A Microcontroller which in connected to the GSM, sensors and the motor. The temperature sensor is used to detect the temperature of the environment and capacitive sensor to sense the water flow in the pipe. The microcontroller includes the protection against over-current, dry running and single phasing. It is expected that this application provides easy access of motor to a great extent.