Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-term consequences for offspring of paternal diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Background. Recent studies have reported an increase in the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents. However, few have focused how diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome together in parents can influence on obesity and metabolic disturbances in offspring. Objective. To know the risk obesity and metabolic disturbance in children, adolescents, and young adults whose parents have diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome. Methods. A comparative survey was made in healthy children of parents with diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome compared with offspring of healthy parents. We performed anthropometry and evaluated blood pressure, glucose, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides levels in plasma. We registered parent antecedents to diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome and investigated the prevalence of overweight, obesity, and metabolic disturbances in offspring. Results. We studied 259 subjects of 7 to 20 years of age. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 27% and 37%, respectively. The highest proportion of BMI >95th of the entire group was found in offspring with both diabetic parents. Glucose and total cholesterol levels were lower in the group with healthy parents compared with the group with diabetic mother and metabolic syndrome but with healthy father. HDL cholesterol was higher in the group with both healthy parents than in the group with diabetic mother and metabolic syndrome but healthy father. Conclusions. The offspring of parents with diabetes plus metabolic syndrome showed higher proportion of variables related to metabolic syndrome compared with healthy parents.
New adaptive prediction scheme based on local area predictor evaluation (LAPE)

An efficient and robust approach to adaptive prediction is presented which uses a local causal area to evaluate a number of individual fixed sub-predictors. Various schemes are utilized to exploit the resulting information, including a rank-order based approach, a two stage adaptive selection technique utilizing median filtering, a technique for adaptive combination and a technique incorporating adaptive selection followed by adaptive combination. The respective selection and combination schemes display superior results for particular image types. When the proposed predictors are coupled with prediction error feedback and adaptive arithmetic coding, they produce results superior to CALIC. To produce a more robust predictor an additional stage based on one of the proposed selection schemes is proposed. The result is an adaptive prediction scheme which effectively utilizes the principles of predictor combination and selection. Different forms of the latter stage predictor are explored, which are shown to improve overall predictor performance. A selection based approach is also demonstrated to be more robust than combination based schemes.
Peformance analysis of pseudo-random sequence in digital watermarking

In this paper, comparative analysis on the characteristics of the Pseudo Random Sequence(PRS) and the Normal Random Sequence(NRS) which are used as a watermark for copyright protection and authentication about digital media in the conventional digital watermarking systems. From the analysis, it is found that in case of the NRS, the detection of the watermark might be difficult by many crosscorrelation peak values from other NRS codes because of the non-uniform distribution of 1 and 0 in those codes. However, in case of the PRS, since it has the uniform distribution of the random number in the generated codes, there exists very few crosscorrelation peaks. So the PRS is analyzed to be more robust against possible attacks such as JPEG image compression and Gaussian noise compared with the case of the NRS. Finally, in this paper, simulation results on the robustness of the PRS and NRS against some attacks such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise are also suggested.
Virtual Prototyping by Using Holographic Displays: But What About Large Data Problems?

The work reported in this paper is part of the research that explores the viability of using holographic displays as part of virtual prototyping package of supporting tools. The focus is principally on handling of large data problems, which are among the common problems of most volumetric displays. The paper first reviews related works. After describing the large data related problems that designers might face in using holographic displays and identifying the conceptual design tasks that could be supported by using these displays, a concept for handling the large data problems through elimination of irrelevant image details is introduced. An application example showing how some elements of the proposed concept function in the real world is also presented. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (i) we have demonstrated that through simplifications, visual abstractions, data clustering or other generalization methods, less complicated holographic images that require less computing resources but yet suitable 3D for some conceptual design tasks or virtual prototyping can be created; and (ii) we have defined the steps of a scalable high-level algorithm, that can be expanded or tuned to suit visualization demands in various conceptual design tasks. In the ongoing work, we aim to develop built in procedures within the proposed algorithm that would reduce the amount of image details without significantly affecting the appropriateness of the overall virtual model. And because of the reduced image details, it would be possible to display less complicated 3D virtual objects and in this way computing resources could be saved.Copyright © 2009 by ASME
A New Approach for Built‐in Self‐Test of 4.5 to 5.5 GHz Low‐Noise Amplifiers

This paper presents a low‐cost RF parameter estimation technique using a new RF built‐in self‐test (BIST) circuit and efficient DC measurement for 4.5 to 5.5 GHz low noise amplifiers (LNAs). The BIST circuit measures gain, noise figure, input impedance, and input return loss for an LNA. The BIST circuit is designed using 0.18 μm SiGe technology. The test technique utilizes input impedance matching and output DC voltage measurements. The technique is simple and inexpensive.
Directional noise removal from aerial imagery using wavelet X-ray transform

Oceanographic studies of large bodies of water usually require remotely acquired aerial imagery as the primary data source for analyses of sea bed depth, ocean current, etc. Removal of ocean wave clutters from these images is an important preprocessing step for accurate assessment of the oceanographic information. The objective of this paper is to make use of the wavelet-Radon (X-ray) transform for directional denoising along the propagational direction of ocean waves. Image pixels are projected to the the direction of wave propagation, to be denoised using wavelet thresholding techniques. As expected, the authors' experiments show that one can remove some amount of wave clutter with the least background distortion when the rotational transform is along the direction of ocean wave propogation.
JOB SHOPS SCHEDULING WITH DUE DATES

SUMMARY A simulation model is developed for a jobbing shop, which consists of two identical machines operating in parallel. Jobs, which have a Poissonian arrival, join a single queue and can be processed on either machine. The jobs have an estimated processing time, which is generated from a negative exponential distribution. The actual processing times, however, are subject to variation; deviations from the estimated times follow a normal distribution. Due dates for completing the jobs are quoted, based on estimated process times and on arrival times. The object of the study is first to compare five loading rules for several rates of arrivals, and secondly to suggest how more realistic due dates can be quoted.
A Study of the Factors in Influencing Satisfaction with the National Education Information System

As National Education Information Systems (NEIS) is supposed to broadly introduced all over the country, we need to understand factors that would affect its successful use. Studies regarding the NEIS have been made in terms of a social issue according to its introduction and use, however there has been only little research made in terms of the use of the system so far. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the factors that would have effect on a successful use of the NEIS. A research model of the study is based on the extended DeLone and McLean`s information systems success model with two characteristics of computer self-efficacy and perceived fairness. Based on the survey data from 168 subjects, the present study performs SEM analysis with PLS. The results show that perceived usefulness and computer self-efficacy improves the user satisfaction. However, the user` satisfaction does not cause system characteristics- system quality, information quality, service quality -and perceived fairness not effect. The study provides characteristics which can effectively and smoothly introduce the NEIS for its successful use on the upcoming full scale execution on the NEIS.
Toward energy-aware balancing of mobile graphics

In the area of computer graphics the design of hardware and software has primarily been driven by the need to achieve maximum performance. Energy efficiency was usually neglected, assuming that a stable always-on power source was available. However, the advent of the mobile era has brought into question these ideas and designs in computer graphics since mobile devices are both limited by their computational capabilities and their energy sources. Aligned to this emerging need in computer graphics for energy efficiency analysis we have setup a software framework to obtain power measurements from 3D scenes using off-the-shelf hardware that allows for sampling the energy consumption over the power rails of the CPU and GPU. Our experiments include geometric complexity, texture resolution and common CPU and GPU workloads. The goal of this work is to combine the knowledge obtained from these measurements into a prototype energy-aware balancer of processing resources. The balancer dynamically selects the rendering parameters and uses a simple framerate-based dynamic frequency scaling strategy. Our experimental results demonstrate that our power saving framework can achieve savings of approximately 40%.
Maximizing run time performance of deployed data flow graphs on a multiprocessor architecture

This paper discusses a practical solution for supporting the deployment of data flow graphs onto the Loral/Rolm Computer Systems, Inc. vector processing multi-processor architecture. It outlines the support software (both workstation hosted and target system hosted) that is required to design, debug, and maximize deployed data flow graph performance on the multiprocessor architecture. The deployment process guarantees real-time deadlines, minimizes run time scheduling overhead, and minimizes designer partitioning input. It is known that determining effective run time data flow graph node schedules for multi-processor architectures is an NP-complete class of problem not well suited to real-time systems. Loral/Rolm Computer Systems, Inc.'s vector processing toolset recognizes this problem and this paper discusses a prescheduling and pre-assignment approach for partitioning data flow graphs to available hardware resources. In particular the toolset components (which are based upon an enhanced data flow graph language) of workstation pre-assignment, prescheduling, run time gross allocation and local compute element dispatching are discussed in detail.
An Efficient Evolutionary Algorithm for Optimal Arrangement of RFID Reader Antenna

Incorrect deployment of RFID readers occurs reader-to-reader interferences in many applications using RFID technologies. Reader-to-reader interference occurs when a reader transmits a signal that interferes with the operation of another reader, thus preventing the second reader from communicating with tags in its interrogation zone. Interference detected by one reader and caused by another reader is referred to as a reader collision. In RFID systems, the reader collision problem is considered to be the bottleneck for the system throughput and reading efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel RFID reader anti-collision algorithm based on evolutionary algorithm(EA). First, we analyze characteristics of RFID antennas and build database. Also, we propose EA encoding algorithm, fitness algorithm and genetic operators to deploy antennas efficiently. To show superiority of our proposed algorithm, we simulated our proposed algorithm. In the result, our proposed algorithm obtains 95.45% coverage rate and 10.29% interference rate after about 100 generations.
The Employment of Dialogic Principles in Website, Facebook, and Twitter Platforms of Environmental Nonprofit Organizations

The present study conducts cross comparisons among nonprofits’ leading Internet platforms regarding use of dialogic principles and investigates relationships between this use and financial capacity. A content analysis was conducted of three Internet platforms (website, Facebook, and Twitter) of 60 U.S.-based environmental nonprofit organizations. The results reveal that (1) 85% of the organizations use either Facebook or Twitter, (2) the overall extent of dialogic principle employment is the highest for the website, followed by Facebook and Twitter, (3) positive correlations are found only between the website and Twitter in the dialogic principles of the dialogic loop and the usefulness of information to the public, and (4) organizational financial capacity is positively correlated only with Twitter in the overall dialogic principle employment. The results indicate that, although nonprofits operate multiple Internet platforms for relation building with the public, they substantially rely on their websites and use Facebook and Twitter to supplement particular dialogic features that are limited on websites.
A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO DEFINITENESS: FROM SPECIFIC TO GENERIC

This paper presents a study of the meaning of the English definite article using the framework of Cognitive Grammar developed by Ronald Langacker. What we focus on in particular is two kinds of non-specific usage: the generic definite and what we call the role definite. Our analysis in terms of Cognitive Grammar constructs and the newly introduced Identity Model will show that those definites designate imaginary individuals set up for expressive purposes. Definiteness itself is defined as the speech-act participants' mental access to the identity of the designatum. *
Coordination of Multiagent Systems with Fuzzy Clocks

An Object Petri Net (OPN) model for coordination of multiagent systems based on fuzzy clocks is introduced The OPN model takes a refined design-to-time approach in real-time scheduling of Concurrent Engineering (CE) projects Agent tasks are subdivided into required and optional subtasks to take advantage of the imprecise nature of the computation performed by an agent Concurrent with each agent is a fuzzy clock which measures the timeliness of an agent-task relative to temporal intervals and prescribed deadlines In the context of a CE project, agents cooperate with a coordinator in managing their time, and in periodically supplying tasking status reports for a blackboard The blackboard is handled by a subagent of the coordinator Performance is measured in terms of elapsed times, deadlines, Quality-of-Product statistics, capabil ity, consumption of resources, amount of work done, and difficulty of a task The coordinator also maintains a collection of concurrent, hybrid Fuzzy Watchdog Clocks (hFWC) which provide useful statistics (current fuzzy time, elapsed time, and percent of allowed time for each agent) posted on the blackboard The contribution of this article is the introduction of fuzzy clocks in constructing timetables for project tasks and in mak ing appropriate adjustments in the overall schedule whenever agents fail, disappear, or are in conflict
Robust gender and age estimation under varying facial pose

This paper presents a method for gender and age estimation which is robust to changing facial pose. We propose a feature point detection method, called the adapted retinal sampling method (ARSM), and a feature extraction method. A basic concept of the ARSM is to add knowledge about the facial structure to the retinal sampling method. In this method, feature points are detected on the basis of seven points corresponding to facial organs from a facial image. The reason why we used seven points as the basis of feature point detection is that facial organs are conspicuous in the facial region, and are comparatively easy to extract. As features robust to changing facial pose, skin texture, hue, and the Gabor jet are used for gender and age estimation. For classification of gender and estimation of age, we use a multilayered neural network. We also examine the left– right symmetry of faces in connection with gender and age estimation by the proposed method. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 91(7): 32– 40, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10125
An EFSM Approach to Software Design Based on the Supervisory Control Theory

The research of software design, based on the supervisory control theory, is an important content in software cybernetics. The existing software model used in the software design with the supervisory control theory is Polynomial Dynamic System (PDS), which is transformed from SIGNAL files. This obstructs its widespread application. Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM) model is widely applied in software engineering field and it may alleviate the state explosion problem of Finite State Machine (FSM) to some extent. In this paper, the EFSM model is suggested to study software design problem. This paper proposed two kinds of software design problems based on EFSM model. For the first problem, a necessary and sufficient condition for software existence is obtained. For the second problem, a necessary and sufficient condition for software existence and an optimal algorithm to such software design are presented.
RECONFIGURATION OF DISCRETELY CONTROLLED HYBRID SYSTEMS FOR CHANGING SPECIFICATIONS

Abstract This paper proposes a method for discrete controller reconfiguration of hybrid systems with uncertain linear dynamics to account for abrupt events such as the occurrence of actuator faults or changes in the product specifications. Starting from a hybrid plant model and a controller modeled as a finite state automaton, a new controller is obtained considering an updated specification or changes in the plant structure by switching among logic controllers determined offline. The automatic computation of the controllers is carried out using a controller synthesis approach, which employs the concept of model abstraction and refinement. The method is applied to a multi-tank example.
Phenotypic, Stress Tolerance and Plant Growth Promoting Characteristics of Rhizobial Isolates from Selected Wild Legumes of Semiarid Region, Tirupati, India

Rhizobia are vital for nitrogen input, fertility of soil and legume plant growth. Knowledge on rhizobial diversity from arid and semiarid areas is important for dry land agriculture in the context of climatic change and for economic utilization. This study provides morphological, biochemical, stress tolerance and plant growth promoting characteristics of fifteen rhizobial isolates from the nodules of same number of wild legumes and one isolate from cultivated Arachis hypogea from semi-arid region, Tirupati. The bacterial isolates were confirmed as rhizobia based on colony morphology and biochemical tests. Based on the colour change of YMA-BTB medium, eight isolates were identified as slow growers and six were fast growers. The isolates differed in growth pattern, colony morphology, antibiotic resistance at higher concentrations and uniformity in utilization of carbon and nitrogen sources. The isolates are tolerant to NaCl up to one percent, displayed normal growth at temperatures 28℃ - 30℃, at neutral pH and poor growth at pH 5and 9. The isolates varied in the production of EPS and IAA, positive for phosphate solubilization and siderophore formation. This functional diversity displayed by the isolates can be utilised for the legume crop production by cross inoculation.
Generational Technology of Computational Grid in Porous Media Based on Digital Image

Based on digital imaging processing technology, a generational method of computational grid of porous media is developed for numerical simulation. Transformation of original microscopical image from grayscale into binary one and vector-graph are used for reconstructing a geometric model of porous media. Computational grid of porous media geometry model by COMSOL Multiphysics software can provide an effective way for the latter finite element analysis of porous media.
Genetic Algorithm-based Fuzzy Expert System

In this paper fuzzy system is discussed in which the membership function shapes and types and the fuzzy rule set including the number of rules inside it are evolved using a genetic algorithm. In addition, the genetic operators are adapted by a fuzzy system. Benefits of the methodology are illustrated in the process of alarm handling in process plant.
Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence).
Corpus-Based Metonymy Analysis

In this article, we make the case for corpus-based metonymy analysis and show that many interesting linguistic and statistical questions can only be answered byworking with real texts. To facilitate such studies, we present a method for annotating metonymies in domain- and genre-independent text. We advocate an annotation scheme that builds on regularities in metonymic usage, that takes underspecification in metonymic reference into account, and that is organized hierarchically. We combine previous metonymy classification proposals with insights from a corpus study to present a fullyworked-out annotation scheme for location names, illustrating the previously mentioned principles.We present several experiments measuring annotation agreement and show that the annotation scheme is reliable and has wide coverage. We also provide a gold standard for annotations of this kind consisting of 2,000 annotated occurrences of country names in the British National Corpus.We use the resulting corpus to study metonymy distributions and the factors that influence the choice of literal versus metonymic readings in real texts.
The Risks of Software Innovation: a Case Study of the Harvard Lab

Innovation in cartography has come to depend on the design of software. This essay recounts two cycles of software development at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics which used different models for intellectual control. In retrospect, each model had its successes, but in neither period were there enough new professionals trained to expand the field of digital cartography.