Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Heuristic on Job Scheduling in Grid Computing Environment

This paper introduces a model and a job scheduling algorithm in grid computing environments. In grid computing several applications require numerous resources for execution which are not often available for them, thus presence of a scheduling system to allocate resources to input jobs is vital. The resource selection criteria in the proposed algorithm are based on input jobs, communication links and resource computational capability. Then, the proposed algorithm will be assessed in simulated grid environment with statistical patterns of job insertion into system which each of them follow the normal, Poisson and exponential distribution. The results show that the new proposed algorithm has a better efficiency in comparison with the results obtained from other known algorithms.
Algorithm of Image Encryption based on Permutation Information Entropy

Criterion for choosing chaos map to drive image bit permutation based on chaos permutation information entropy is proposed. An algorithm for image bit permutation is designed based on the fact that the output trajectory of chaotic system is very unpredictable. Image smallest granularity scrambling, namely, bit space maximum scrambling is implemented by applying the chaos that has been selected. Image substitution algorithm according to the principle of chaos map stretch and fold is designed to finish image encryption transformation to enhance the ability to resist attack. The algorithm's key space and resistance to differential attack, and the digital characteristics of cipher-image have been analyzed. Theoretical analyses and computer simulations both confirmed that the proposed algorithm is better than Ye's and Huang's algorithms in the ability of scrambling, decorrelation and anti-differential attack, can protect digital image effectively. Keywords-chaos; permutation information entropy; sorting transformation
Dense areas femtocell deployment: Access types and challenges

In large open dense areas, high numbers of people use their smart phones to share pictures or data and download other information. This behavior creates traffic profiles that differ from those typically seen in the traditional network in less dense areas where less uplink traffic and less frequent packet transmission will be experienced. Thus planning for these dense network conditions must consider the uplink capacity and control plane dimensioning. Reducing the cell size has always been the best way to increase capacity. But smaller cells introduce the cost of more interference control, capacity and mobility management. This paper will compare the access types of femtocells in case of dense area networks and present the related challenges in terms of femtocell interference, offloading and mobility management. A comparison of existing schemes that consider the above mentioned challenges is presented and a road map is given to point out the main protocols and access type that should be adopted in case of dense areas planning.
SUPERMAP GIS 6R: A REAL SPACE GIS

: We present a novel GIS, Real Space GIS, which is a 2D & 3D integration GIS. Real Space GIS is based on Real Space which is 3D geographical space and 2D map space which is based on geographical sphere or ellipsoid comparing to Paper Space GIS which is based on traditional Paper Space based on paper map coordinates. Real Space GIS mainly integrates data structure, data model, data storage, data visualization, data analysis of 2D GIS and 3D GIS. Real Space GIS provides users with the advantages of 3D GIS while remaining the features of 2D GIS. Real Space GIS also is compatible with Paper Space GIS. SuperMap GIS 6R based on SuperMap Universal GIS Core (UGC) is a Real Space GIS. SuperMap GIS 6R is a technology system not a single product and has been applied to some applications and greatly reduces the cost of building a 3D GIS system based on an existing 2D GIS system.
Photonic Crystal Sensors

The paper deals with the possibility of using photonic crystals for sensing purpose. The optical properties of photonic crystals allow to realize sensing devices characterized by a high degree of compactness and a good resolution of the quantity to detect. A particular attention is devoted to force/pressure sensors and the design of a PhC microcavity pressure sensor is reported
A comparison between two lingual orthodontic brackets in terms of speech performance and patients' acceptance in correcting Class II, Division 1 malocclusion: a randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT Objective: To compare speech performance and levels of oral impairment between two types of lingual brackets. Methods: A parallel-group randomized controlled trial was carried out on patients with Class II, Division 1 malocclusion treated at the University of Hama School of Dentistry in Hama, Syria. A total of 46 participants (mean age: 22.3 ± 2.3 years) with maxillary dentoalveolar protrusion were randomly distributed into two groups with 23 patients each (1:1 allocation ratio). Either STb (Ormco) or 7th Generation (Ormco) lingual brackets were applied. Fricative sound/s/ spectrograms were analyzed directly before intervention (T0), one week following premolar extraction prior to bracket placement (T1), within 24 hours of bracket bonding (T2), one month after (T3), and three months after (T4) bracket placement. Patients′ acceptance was assessed by means of standardized questionnaires. Results: After bracket placement, significant deterioration in articulation was recorded at all assessment times in the 7th Generation group, and up to T3 in the STb group. Significant intergroup differences were detected at T2 and T3. No statistically significant differences were found between the two groups in reported tongue irritation levels, whereas chewing difficulty was significantly higher in the 7th Generation group one month after bracket placement. Conclusions: 7th Generation brackets have more interaction with sound production than STb ones. Although patients in both groups complained of some degree of oral impairment, STb appliances appeared to be more comfortable than the 7th Generation ones, particularly within the first month of treatment.
An encoder for a 5GS/s 4-bit flash ADC in 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS

In this paper, a high-speed encoder intended for a 5GS/S 4-bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. To meet the speed and power targets of the ADC, low-swing signaling is used in all the internal sub-blocks of the ADC including the encoder. To further enhance the speed performance of the encoder, 2-stage pipelining is utilized. In addition, the encoder is implemented in current mode logic (CML). The circuit is designed and simulated in a 0.18 mum CMOS technology. It consumes 4 mW from a 1.8 V supply while operating at 5 GHz
Model based test validation and oracles for data acquisition systems

This paper presents an automated, model based test validation and oracle approach for systems with complex input and output structures, such as Data Acquisition (DAQ) systems, which are common in many sectors including the satellite communications industry. We present a customised modelling methodology for such systems and a tool that automatically validates test inputs and, after test execution, applies an oracle that is based on mappings between the input and output. We also apply our proposed approach and tool to a complex industrial DAQ system and investigate the scalability and effectiveness of the approach in validating test cases, the DAQ system, or its specifications (captured as models). The results of the case study show that the approach is indeed scalable with respect to two dimensions: (1) model size and (2) test validation and oracle execution time. The size of the model for the DAQ system under study remains within practical bounds, and far below that of typical system models, as it includes a class diagram with 68 classes and 49 constraints. The developed test validation and oracles tool can handle satellite transmission files up to two GB within practical time constraints, taking, on a standard PC, less than three minutes for test validation and less than 50 minutes for applying the oracle. The approach was also effective in automatically applying the oracle successfully for the actual test suite of the DAQ system, accurately identifying all issues and violations that were expected, thus showing that an approach based on models can be sufficiently accurate.
Gender equality, development, and cross-national sex gaps in life expectancy

Female life expectancy exceeds male life expectancy in almost every country throughout the world. Nevertheless, cross-national variation in the sex gap suggests that social factors, such as gender equality, may directly affect or mediate an underlying biological component. In this article, we examine the association between gender equality and the sex gap in mortality. Previous research has not addressed this question from an international perspective with countries at different levels of development. We examine 131 countries using a broad measure of national gender equality that is applicable in both Less Developed Countries (LDCs) and Highly Developed Countries (HDCs). We find that the influence of gender equality is conditional on level of development. While gender equality is associated with divergence between female and male life expectancies in LDCs, it is associated with convergence in HDCs. The relationship between gender equality and the sex gap in mortality in HDCs strongly relates to, but is not explained by, sex differences in lung cancer mortality. Finally, we find that divergence in LDCs is primarily driven by a strong positive association between gender equality and female life expectancy. In HDCs, convergence is potentially related to a weak negative association between gender equality and female life expectancy, though findings are not statistically significant.
An effective 3D blind watermarking algorithm based on local roughness meaurement

For ensuring robustness and minimizing the distortion of a 3D mesh model, an effective 3D blind watermarking algorithm is proposed. The roughness of a 3D mesh model is iteratively computed by some constraints at first. The constraints consist of a mesh curvature measurement and the angle between adjacent surfaces designed to embed the watermark with the minimal visual quality degradation. The experiment results proved the efficiency of the proposed method.
Sampling sea surfaces with SESAMO: an autonomous craft for the study of sea-air interactions

This paper presents the system design, sea trials and Antartic exploitation of the SESAMO platform. The SESAMO (sea surface autonomous modular unit) prototype robot was especially designed to collect data and samples for the study of the sea-air interface. At sea, operations showed that a relatively simple robot could satisfactorily work in a natural, outdoor environment, dramatically facilitating the job of the human operator. To achieve high quality sampling of the surface microlayer, however, requires a large amount of time, leading to significant demands on logistics resources, mainly in terms of operating time of the support vessel.
OBSERVING AND PRODUCING PITCH GESTURES FACILITATES THE LEARNING OF MANDARIN CHINESE TONES AND WORDS

Abstract This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called pitch gesture, in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and produce (Experiment 2) pitch gestures during a short multimodal training session on Chinese tones and words. In both experiments they were tested on (a) tone identification and (b) word learning. Results showed the positive effect of a training session with pitch gesture observation compared to a training session without it (Experiment 1) and the benefits of producing gestures compared to only observing them and repeating the words aloud (Experiment 2). A comparison of the results of the two experiments revealed that there was no significant difference between the simple observation of pitch gestures and the production of speech accompanied by pitch gestures in facilitating lexical tone identification and word learning. Thus, both perception and production tasks with pitch gestures can be regarded as beneficial learning strategies for the initial stages of tones acquisition in the Chinese as a Second Language classroom.
Identification of heart disease-prone personality using oscillometric blood pressure measurements.

BACKGROUND By using the conventional method of measuring two-points (systolic and diastolic) blood pressure, it is difficult to differentiate a heart disease-prone personality from normals. Recently, an oscillometric method that reflects the personalized trait of blood pressure was developed by one author. OBJECTIVE By using this new measurement technique, this study intended to test the possibility of differentiating a heart disease-prone personality (type A or type D) from normal people. METHODS TPA scale in MMPI-2 and DS14 were used for screening type A and D. Oscillometric waveforms created by the cuff pressure were segmented into window blocks based on a single beat at a minimum, allowing this method to extract maximal top and bottom amplitudes in each window block. Then, a spectrogram using a short-time Fourier transform was applied to discriminate between character types in extracted blood pressure patterns with linear discriminant analysis. RESULTS Compared to a normal personality, type A and type D personalities displayed a lower frequency response on STFT with maximum negative amplitudes than normals. In particular, the type D personality showed a lower frequency response than the type A personality. CONCLUSION These results could provide a new qualitative method for measuring different biological indices between type A or D personalities and normals.
Speckle Noise Reduction in Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound imaging is a widely used medical imaging modality because it is safe, allows real-time visualization of moving structures, and is relatively inexpensive. But the major issue with ultrasound images is the presence of speckle noise, which is an inherent limitation of ultrasound images. Various filters are used to reduce the speckle noise and to enhance the quality of the image. This work focuses on the study of various filters used for image enhancement.
Real-time non-rigid driver head tracking for driver mental state estimation

The non-rigid motion of a driver’s head (i.e. the motion of their mouth, eye-brows, cheeks, etc) can tell us a lot about their mental state; e.g. whether they are drowsy, alert, aggressive, comfortable, tense, distracted, etc. In this paper, we describe our recent research on nonrigid face tracking. In particular, we present both 2D and 3D algorithms for tracking the non-rigid motion of the driver’s head using an Active Appearance Model. Both algorithms operate at over 200 frames per second. We also present algorithms for converting a 2D model into a 3D model and for fitting with occlusion and large pose variation. INTRODUCTION Tracking the driver’s head has a wide variety of applications and is one of the most important tasks for an intelligent vehicle. Two types of head tracking can be distinguished: rigid and non-rigid. In rigid tracking such as [7, 9], the head is tracked as a rigid object with 6 degrees of freedom, 3 translations and 3 rotations. In non-rigid tracking, the motion of the mouth, eye-brows, cheeks, etc, (i.e. the facial expression) are also tracked independently of the motion of the head itself. Non-rigid tracking is a more general, and far harder, problem than rigid tracking. It also has a number of applications that are not possible with rigid tracking alone. In particular, the non-rigid motion of the driver’s face can tell us a lot about their mental state; i.e. whether they are drowsy, alert, aggressive, comfortable, tense, distracted, etc. In this paper, we describe our recent work on non-rigid face tracking. In particular, we have been working with Active Appearance Models (AAMs) [5]. AAMs are a well studied face model consisting of separate linear shape and appearance components. 2D AAMs can model
Suppression of La Antigen Exerts Potential Antiviral Effects against Hepatitis A Virus

Background Despite the development and availability of hepatitis A virus (HAV) vaccine, HAV infection is still a major cause of acute hepatitis that occasionally leads to fatal liver disease. HAV internal ribosomal entry-site (IRES) is one of the attractive targets of antiviral agents against HAV. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the impact of La, one of the cellular proteins, on HAV IRES-mediated translation and HAV replication. Methods and Findings We investigated the therapeutic feasibility of siRNAs specific for cellular cofactors for HAV IRES-mediated translation in cell culture. It was revealed that siRNA against La could inhibit HAV IRES activities as well as HAV subgenomic replication. We also found that the Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors SD-1029 and AG490, which reduce La expression, could inhibit HAV IRES activities as well as HAV replication. Conclusions Inhibition of La by siRNAs and chemical agents could lead to the efficient inhibition of HAV IRES-mediated translation and HAV replication in cell culture models. La might play important roles in HAV replication and is being exploited as one of the therapeutic targets of host-targeting antivirals.
A 2.2–2.4 GHz self-aligned sub-harmonically injection-locked phase-locked loop using 65 nm CMOS process

A 2.2-2.4 GHz self-aligned sub-harmonically injection-locked phase-locked loop (PLL) using 65 nm CMOS process is presented in this paper. A delay-locked loop is employed in the proposed PLL to automatically align the phase difference between the injection signal and the sub-harmonically injection-locked voltage controlled oscillator. At 2.3 GHz, the measured phase noises at 1 kHz, 10 kHz, 100 kHz, and 1 MHz offset are better than -110, -112, -122 and -128.4 dBc/Hz, respectively, with an rms jitter of 228 fs. This work demonstrates low phase noise, low jitter, and good robustness over frequency and temperature variations.
A nG-HPR : Analysis of n-Gram based human Promoter Recognition

We describe a promoter recognition method named An-HPR to locate eukaryotic promoter regions and predict transcription start sites (TSSs). We computed n-gram features are extracted and used in promoter prediction. We computed n-grams (n=2, 3, 4, 5) as features and created frequency features to extract informative and discriminative features for effective classification. Neural network classifiers with these n-grams as features are used to identify promoters in a human genome. Analysis of nGram based (AnG) is applied to the feature Extraction and a subset of principal components (PCs) are selected for classification. Our system uses three neural network classifiers to distinguish promoters versus exons, promoters versus introns, and promoters versus 3' untranslated region (3'UTR). We compared AnGHPR with four well-known existing promoter prediction systems such as DragonGSF, Eponine and FirstEF, PCA-HPR. Validation shows that AnG-HPR achieves the best performance with three test sets for all the four predictive systems. Keywords— promoter recognition; sequence feature; transcription start sites, Biological data sets, neural networks, Binary classification, cascaded classifiers.
Efficacy of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions on low sexual interest/arousal of peri- and post-menopausal women: a meta-analysis

ABSTRACT The aim of our study was to investigate the therapeutic efficacy of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions on low sexual interest/arousal of peri- and post-menopausal women. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, randomized clinical trials (RCTs) that published up to 22 June 2016 were retrieved from several online electronic databases, including Cochrane Library, PubMed, Ovid, Scopus, Medline, CINHAL, and EBSCO. Fifty-seven studies were included in the meta-analysis. The results showed that both pharmacological interventions (mean difference (MD) = –0.86, 95% confidence interval (CI) = –1.49 to –0.90, p = 0.0001) and non-pharmacological interventions (MD = –0.92, 95% CI = –1.35 to –0.49, p = 0.0001) had statistically significant effects on improving sexual interest/arousal. Among pharmacological interventions, hormone therapy with dehydroepiandrosterone, testosterone, tibolone and estrogen in combination with progesterone, estrogen in combination with testosterone as well as estrogen in combination with progesterone and testosterone were found to be effective. Non-hormonal medications including flibanserin and sildenafil as well as herbal medicines were also shown to be effective. However, due to high heterogeneity of the findings and scarcity of the studies in certain domains, there is uncertainty of their true effect. So, further well-designed RCTs with larger samples are required to ascertain the long-term effects of studies.
Improved energy contrast image fusion based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform

An improved image fusion method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the source image was decomposed into the lowpass and directional band-pass coefficients by non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) for multi-sensor image fusion of the same scene. The low-pass part uses the fusion method of improved the energy contrast, it fully takes into account the energy contrast of coefficient as well as the neighboring coefficient characteristics. The value of the coefficient in the directional band-pass coefficient is related to its surrounding coefficients, and the directional band-pass coefficient uses the fusion method based on context. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the quality of fusion image compared with regional energy maximum and regional variance maximum. The proposed method can not only keep the energy of the image, but can also save the edge information of image.
Impact of Construction Lands Expansion on Wetlands in Hangzhou

Based on remote sensing images and urban planning data, this paper analyzed the planned conversion of wetlands to urban construction lands from 2005 to 2020 and the potential risk to wetlands using GIS spatial model. The results indicate that: (1) There are many wetlands resources in Hangzhou, most of which are paddy fields with construction land patches enchased at Xiaoshan and Yuhang. (2) According to present planning, construction lands will expand rapidly from 2005 to 2020, especially at Xiaoshan and Yuhang. The occupied wetlands will be paddy fields and aquiculture ponds, and the construction lands mainly converted from paddy fields. (3) On the whole, the potential risk to wetlands is high and the tendency of wetlands occupation by urban construction lands will increase from 2005 to 2020. We can conclude that the increase extent and the layout of construction lands had important effect on the decrease of wetlands and proper layout can reduce the loss of wetlands. Adjustment of urban planning is significant to wetlands protection since the destruction to wetlands by construction is irreversible.
Mind-Body Dualism and Health Revisited: How Belief in Dualism Shapes Health Behavior

Does a sound mind require a sound body? Whether or not lay people subscribe to this notion depends on their belief in mind-body dualism and critically shapes their health-related behaviors. Six studies (N = 1,710) revisit the relation between dualism and health. We replicate the negative correlation between belief in dualism and health behavior (Study 1) and extend it to behavior in the field (Study 2). Studies 3a and 3b investigate how belief in dualism shapes intuitions about the material origin of psychological well-being, while Studies 4a and 4b examine how these intuitions determine health-related outcomes. In sum, construing minds as different from bodies entails the intuition that mental well-being has little material substrate which in turn attenuates health-sustaining behaviors.