Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transmission characterization of glucose solutions at Ku-band for non-invasive glucose monitoring

The transmission characteristics including the amplitude and phase responses of the glucose solutions with different concentrations are studied for non-invasive glucose monitoring. Two glucose solutions using saline and distilled water are investigated at Ku-band of 17 GHz with simulation and measurement. It is found that the transmission phase of the glucose solutions exhibits linear response to the glucose concentration from hypoglycemia to hyperglycemia, which shows high potential in developing non-invasive glucose monitoring system using microwave technology at Ku-band.
Pressure Ulcers or Moisture Lesions: The Theatre Perspective

Pressure ulcers continue to be a cause for concern in the healthcare industry (IHI 2015). Unfortunately older patients are at a greater risk of developing pressure ulcers (Kottner et al 2013); moisture lesions and the presence of other comorbidities could have long term effects on the patient's health and recovery.
Engaging therapeutic citizenship and clientship: Untangling the reasons for therapeutic pacifism among people living with HIV in urban Zambia

ABSTRACT This article explores the reasons for therapeutic pacifism among people living with HIV (PLHIVs) in urban Zambia. It contributes to a growing ethnography on global health, biosociality, and patient-provider dynamics. Therapeutic citizenship is a biopolitical citizenship that includes claims and ethical projects that emerge from techniques to control and manage bodies. In some contexts, therapeutic citizenship has included activism and claims-making against local, national, and international power brokers. This article investigates therapeutic citizenship in the specific context of impoverished urban Zambian compounds, sites of food insecurity, unemployment, and political exclusion, as well as targets for donor, NGO, and faith-based organisation projects and PLHIV support group proliferation. The article utilises data from participant observations at two Lusaka AIDS clinics, interviews, and focused discussions with support groups of PLHIVs. It argues that PLHIVs continuously negotiate subjectivities related to kinship, clientship, religious belief, and political citizenship in processes that complicate therapeutic citizenship. Rather than fostering participation in PLHIV support groups or challenging ‘politics as usual’ through activist claims-making to institutions of biopower, these processes lead to therapeutic pacifism.
Hybrid composites with natural fibres

The primary aim of this study was to demonstrate that bamboo and coir fibres, with an epoxy resin matrix, can be fabricated to produce unidirectional composites. A secondary aim was to demonstrate the production of intra-ply hybrids with unidirectional bamboo fibres and spread E-glass fibres. The methods explored in this work to produce the unidirectional arrays of bamboo and coir fibre preforms involved the use of a carding process to align the as-received bamboo fibres. A new method for spreading E-glass bundles or tows was developed in the author’s research group. The feasibility of using the spread E-glass fibre bundles with the uni-directional bamboo preforms to manufacture a new class of intra-fibre hybrids was undertaken. A resin infusion fabrication method was used to manufacture the uni-directional bamboo and E-glass/bamboo. Tensile testing was used to determine the mechanical properties of the bamboo and E-glass/bamboo hybrid composites. The as-fabricated cross-sections and the post-tensile tested fracture surfaces were characterised using optical and scanning electron microscopy respectively. This study developed and demonstrated a method to fabricate uni-directional arrays of bamboo and coir fibre preforms and a technique to produce intra-ply hybrid bamboo/E-glass composites.
Error Probability Analysis of OFDM-IM With Carrier Frequency Offset

OFDM-IM, which uses the indices of active subcarriers to carry additional information bits, is a novel multi-carrier transmission technique. In this letter, by exploiting the special design of OFDM-IM, we propose an analytical approach to evaluate the error probability of OFDM-IM subject to carrier frequency offset (CFO) in fading channels, where the inter-carrier interference (ICI) is properly divided into two parts: the intra-subblock ICI and the inter-subblocks ICI. Simulation results illustrate that the results of theoretical analysis are quite accurate, and OFDM-IM outperforms the conventional OFDM when CFO exists.
Involvement of the def-1 Mutation in the Response of Tomato Plants to Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Symbiosis Under Well-Watered and Drought Conditions

Jasmonic acid (JA) and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses are known to protect plants against abiotic and biotic stresses, but are also involved in the regulation of root hydraulic conductance (L). The objective of this experiment was to elucidate the role of JA in the water relations and hormonal regulation of AM plants under drought by using tomato plants defective in the synthesis of JA (def-1). Our results showed that JA is involved in the uptake and transport of water through its effect on both physiological parameters (stomatal conductance and L) and molecular parameters, mainly by controlling the expression and abundance of aquaporins. We observed that def-1 plants increased the expression of seven plant aquaporin genes under well-watered conditions in the absence of AM fungus, which partly explain the increment of L by this mutation under well-watered conditions. In addition, the effects of the AM symbiosis on plants were modified by the def-1 mutation, with the expression of some aquaporins and plant hormone concentration being disturbed. On the other hand, methyl salicylate (MeSA) content was increased in non-mycorrhizal def-1 plants, suggesting that MeSA and JA can act together in the regulation of L. In a complementary experiment, it was found that exogenous MeSA increased L, confirming our hypothesis. Likewise, we confirmed that JA, ABA and SA are hormones involved in plant mechanisms to cope with stressful situations, their concentrations being controlled by the AM symbiosis. In conclusion, under well-watered conditions, the def-1 mutation mimics the effects of AM symbiosis, but under drought conditions the def-1 mutation changed the effects of the AM symbiosis on plants.
Perception of disturbing sounds

Åsa Skagerstrand (2018): Perception of disturbing sounds: Studies from The Swedish Institute for Disability Research 89. The present thesis concerns the daily sound environment and the human perception of the same. The sound environment affects the possibility to be active in a communication. With background noise, it may be harder to hear desired signals, and when suffering from a hearing loss, negative effects of the background noise increase. Previous research has explored, that persons with hearing loss benefit from hearing aid usage, but there is a risk of non-usage due to low sound quality. The non-usage of hearing aids has furthermore been described as a cause of isolation and social withdrawal for persons with hearing loss. The general aim of the present thesis is to explore the concept of disturbing sounds in a daily sound environment and to examine the influence of hearing loss and hearing aid usage. Disturbing sounds were investigated in means of perception of loudness and annoyance, where loudness concerned the acoustical properties, mainly sound level, whereas annoyance concerned the psychological phenomenon, defined as an individual adverse reaction to noise. The results of studies I and II showed, that hearing aid users experience disturbing sounds more or less daily, and that those sounds resulted in a decreased usage of hearing aids. The effect of disturbing sounds seemed to rely on several factors, acoustical as well as psychological, and there was not one single factor providing a full explanation of disturbance. In study III and IV, the perception of sounds in normal hearing and hearing impaired persons were thoroughly examined and revealed that hearing thresholds affect the perceived loudness and annoyance. Furthermore, the effect of hearing aids on loudness and annoyance perception was investigated. The results showed that hearing aids restored the loudness and annoyance to levels comparable to people with normal hearing function. The results of the studies stress that additional research should focus on the implementation of knowledge of disturbing sounds in audiological rehabilitation, in order to increase the benefit of hearing aid usage.
Could Clinical Profile Influence CSF Biomarkers in Early-onset Alzheimer Disease?

In common forms of Alzheimer disease (AD), anterograde memory impairment is the first deficit to occur. However, the disease, especially in its presenile forms, may also manifest itself through initial deficits that are predominantly of a nonmemory type. These distinct clinical profiles, which reflect the distinct topography of the underlying pathologic processes, may also differ in terms of their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) markers. The aim of this study was to assess the levels of total tau, phosphorylated tau, and amyloid-β 42 peptide in the CSF of “atypical” (nonmemory) early-onset AD patients. CSF biomarkers were evaluated in 22 atypical patients, and compared with those from a group of 13 “typical” patients, with a memory onset form of the disease. Our results show that independently of age, disease duration, education level, and clinical severity indices, patients with an atypical onset have significantly higher levels of total tau in the CSF (P=0.023). These findings indicate that an assessment of CSF biomarkers may be of particular use in the clinical diagnosis of “atypical-onset” forms of early-onset AD in which the initial symptoms involve language and visuospatial abilities rather than memory. In addition, they highlight the heterogeneity of pathologic processes in AD, suggesting more intense degeneration in the forms of the disease that primarily involve neocortical structures.
Disability and haptic mobile media

This article examines haptic media from the standpoint of disability media studies. Its central case study is the smartphone moment, in which mobile communication emerges as a mass haptic media form. The smartphone as a form of haptic media engages dynamics of disability, including touch, vibration and proprioception. In particular, vibration is an important contribution of the smartphone to haptic media. Overall, the article argues that we need to understand the socio-technical dynamics of disability, and its complex relationships with senses and technology, in order to understand the histories that constitute current media – as well as to imagine future haptic mobile media.
No need to learn from each other? — Potentials of knowledge modeling in autonomous vehicle systems engineering towards new methods in multidisciplinary contexts

Engineering autonomous driving functions has become a dramatic challenge in automotive engineering since it is now required to integrate knowledge from multi-disciplinary domains. In this context, the widespread engineering methods are showing their limit since they mainly integrate technological centered point of view. Thus, these new requirements lead naturally to the design of new method for engineering in automotive field. The goal of this paper is to sketch an overview of the possible improvements that Knowledge Modeling and ontologies can bring to Systems Engineering and especially in the case of Autonomous Driving functions.
Simmelian backbones: Amplifying hidden homophily in Facebook networks

Empirical social networks are often aggregate proxies for several heterogeneous relations. In online social networks, for instance, interactions related to friendship, kinship, business, interests, and other relationships may all be represented as catchall “friendships. ” Because several relations are mingled into one, the resulting networks exhibit relatively high and uniform density. As a consequence, the variation in positional differences and local cohesion may be too small for reliable analysis. We introduce a method to identify the essential relationships in networks representing social interactions. Our method is based on a novel concept of triadic cohesion that is motivated by Simmel's concept of membership in social groups. We demonstrate that our Simmelian backbones are capable of extracting structure from Facebook interaction networks that makes them easy to visualize and analyze. Since all computations are local, the method can be restricted to partial networks such as ego networks, and scales to big data.
What causes the greater perceived similarity of consonant-transposed nonwords?

Nonwords created by transposing two non-adjacent orthographic consonants (CONDISER) have been reported to produce more priming for their baseword (CONSIDER), and to be classified as a nonword less readily than nonwords created by transposing two orthographic vowels (CINSODER). We investigate the origin of this difference and its relevance for theories of letter position coding. In the unprimed versions of the lexical decision and same–different tasks, a consonant–vowel difference was found in the transposition condition, not when those letters are substituted (Experiment 1). We found that when transpositions involved the disruption of a consonant cluster (OPMITAL), reaction times were slowed compared to when transpositions involved only letters that are separated (CHOLOCATE; Experiment 2). As transpositions more frequently disrupt in consonant clusters than vowel clusters, this introduces a confound in studies investigating consonant and vowel transposition effects. Consistent with the idea that letter order is harder to resolve in clusters, the difference between consonants and vowels was eliminated when transpositions involve singleton consonants or vowels rather than those in clusters (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the precision of position coding does not differ between consonants and vowels, but that consonant–vowel status plays a role in structuring orthographic representations.
Entropy Guided Spectrum Based Bug Localization Using Statistical Language Model

Locating bugs is challenging but one of the most important activities in software development and maintenance phase because there are no certain rules to identify all types of bugs. Existing automatic bug localization tools use various heuristics based on test coverage, pre-determined buggy patterns, or textual similarity with bug report, to rank suspicious program elements. However, since these techniques rely on information from single source, they often suffer when the respective source information is inadequate. For instance, the popular spectrum based bug localization may not work well under poorly written test suite. In this paper, we propose a new approach, EnSpec, that guides spectrum based bug localization using code entropy, a metric that basically represents naturalness of code derived from a statistical language model. Our intuition is that since buggy code are high entropic, spectrum based bug localization with code entropy would be more robust in discriminating buggy lines vs. non-buggy lines. We realize our idea in a prototype, and performed an extensive evaluation on two popular publicly available benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that EnSpec outperforms a state-of-the-art spectrum based bug localization technique.
Genome analysis of two novel Pseudomonas strains exhibiting differential hypersensitivity reactions on tobacco seedlings reveals differences in nonflagellar T3SS organization and predicted effector proteins

Multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) of two new biological control strains (S1E40 and S3E12) of Pseudomonas was performed to assess their taxonomic position relative to close lineages, and comparative genomics employed to investigate whether these strains differ in key genetic features involved in hypersensitivity responses (HRs). Strain S3E12, at high concentration, incites HRs on tobacco and corn plantlets while S1E40 does not. Phylogenies based on individual genes and 16S rRNA‐gyrB‐rpoB‐rpoD concatenated sequence data show strains S1E40 and S3E12 clustering in distinct groups. Strain S3E12 consistently clustered with Pseudomonas marginalis, a bacterium causing soft rots on plant tissues. MLSA data suggest that strains S1E40 and S3E12 are novel genotypes. This is consistent with the data of genome‐based DNA‐DNA homology values that are below the proposed cutoff species boundary. Comparative genomics analysis of the two strains revealed major differences in the type III secretion systems (T3SS) as well as the predicted T3SS secreted effector proteins (T3Es). One nonflagellar (NF‐T3SS) and two flagellar T3SSs (F‐T3SS) clusters were identified in both strains. While F‐T3SS clusters in both strains were relatively conserved, the NF‐T3SS clusters differed in the number of core components present. The predicted T3Es also differed in the type and number of CDSs with both strains having unique predicted protease‐related effectors. In addition, the T1SS organization of the S3E12 genome has protein‐coding sequences (CDSs) encoding for key factors such as T1SS secreted agglutinin repeats‐toxins (a group of cytolysins and cytotoxins), a membrane fusion protein (LapC), a T1SS ATPase of LssB family (LapB), and T1SS‐associated transglutaminase‐like cysteine proteinase (LapP). In contrast, strain S1E40 has all CDSs for the seven‐gene operon (pelA‐pelG) required for Pel biosynthesis but not S3E12, suggesting that biofilm formation in these strains is modulated differently. The data presented here provide an insight of the genome organization of these two phytobacterial strains.
Nicotinic activity layer specifically modulates synaptic potentiation in the mouse insular cortex

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in the insular cortex play an important role in nicotine addiction, but its cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying nicotine addiction still remain unresolved. In layer 5 pyramidal neurons of the mouse insular cortex, activation of nAChRs suppresses synaptic potentiation through enhancing GABAergic synaptic transmission via activation of β2‐containing nAChRs in non‐fast‐spiking (non‐FS) interneurons. However, it has not been addressed whether and how activation of nAChRs modulates synaptic plasticity in layers 3 and 6 pyramidal neurons of the insular cortex. In this study, I demonstrate that activation of nAChRs oppositely modulates synaptic potentiation in layers 3 and 6 pyramidal neurons of the insular cortex. In layer 3 pyramidal neurons, activation of nAChRs depressed synaptic potentiation induced by combination of presynaptic stimulation with postsynaptic depolarization (paired training) through enhancing GABAergic synaptic transmission via activation of β2‐containing nAChRs in non‐FS interneurons. By contrast, in layer 6 pyramidal neurons, activation of nAChRs enhanced synaptic potentiation through activating postsynaptic β2‐containing nAChRs. These results indicate, in different layers of the mouse insular cortex, paired training‐induced synaptic potentiation is oppositely regulated by activation of nAChRs which are located on GABAergic interneurons (layer 3) and on pyramidal neurons (layer 6). Thus, layer‐specific modulation of synaptic potentiation may be involved in cellular and synaptic mechanisms of insular cortical changes in nicotine addiction.
Fault Tolerance and Temperature Stability: The Dynamic Error Estimation in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

Quantum-dot cellular automata is a transistorless quantum-scale computational approach which perceives the digital logic operations by fastest quantum tunneling. This paper contributes a proficient comparator layout and a decoder segment design without involving any wire crossing. The proposed 32 cells comparator has realized by Layered T gate approach of QCA, which has 19.20% less effective area as reported in paper. The fault tolerance analysis of proposed comparator has graphically analyzed to exhibit the robustness of the proposed comparator. Furthermore, one 2 to 4 line decoder has proposed which exhibits 37.82 % optimization in area occupancy compared to earlier decoder design. Temperature stability factor is proposed for recognizing the circuit dynamic faults. Dynamic temperature stability of the 2 to 4 line proposed decoder has been analyzed which estimates the circuit stability and specifies the suitable operating temperature zone. This contribution proposes a novel technique for estimating the dynamic errors in quantum-dot cellular automata circuits. QCADesigner 2.0. 3 an open source software for QCA circuit simulation have used in purpose of all the circuit simulations in this paper.
Just between us: Exclusive communications in online social networks

ABSTRACT Social media websites such as Facebook are used for relationship development and maintenance often through self-disclosure and sharing of personal information. However, not all forms of social media communication may be equally suitable for this task. This paper explores users’ norms about the appropriateness of using private vs. public Facebook messages to communicate different kinds of personal information, and the effectiveness of these types of communication in building relationships. Study 1, a survey, revealed that users endorse conflicting expectations about preferences for receiving information publicly or privately. Study 2, a field experiment testing the effects of private versus public Facebook communications on actual relationship development using participants’ own Facebook pages, suggested that private messages lead to greater closeness.
Endotracheal intubation under video laryngoscopic guidance during upper gastrointestinal endoscopic surgery in the left lateral position

Background: Patients undergoing upper gastrointestinal endoscopic surgeries are generally placed in the left lateral position and require endotracheal intubation to maintain airway patency. We conducted a prospective, randomized, controlled study to evaluate the feasibility of intubation under video laryngoscopic guidance in the left lateral position during upper gastrointestinal endoscopic surgery. Methods: We compared the data of patients (n = 120) who underwent intubation under video laryngoscopic guidance in the supine or left lateral position. Patients in Group S (n = 59) were initially placed in the supine position and then shifted to the left lateral position after airway establishment. Patients in Group L (n = 61) were placed in the left decubitus position during both induction and intubation. Laryngoscopic view, intubation time, success rate, hemodynamic changes, adverse effects, and complications of intubation were compared between the groups. Results: The 2 groups showed no difference in terms of time required for intubation (Group L, 23.95 ± 4.43 seconds and Group S, 23.44 ± 4.78 seconds; P = .545) and number of intubation attempts. Further, the overall rate of intubation success was 100% in both groups. However, Group S exhibited significant hemodynamic changes during shift of decubitus (P < .001) and severe sore throat (P = .030). The incidences of other adverse effects such as productive cough, dryness of mouth, hoarseness, oral mucosal injury, dental injury, and hypoxia in the 2 groups were comparable. Conclusion: We concluded that intubation in the lateral position under video laryngoscopic guidance is safe and feasible performed in the left lateral position and prevents the hemodynamic change and sore throat resulting from change in decubitus.