Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Virtual laboratory learning media development to improve science literacy skills of mechanical engineering students on basic physics concept of material measurement

This study aims to determine the description of virtual laboratory learning media development to improve science literacy skills of Mechanical Engineering students on the concept of basic Physics. Quasi experimental method was employed in this research. The participants of this research were first semester students of mechanical engineering in Majalengka University. The research instrument was readability test of instructional media. The results of virtual laboratory learning media readability test show that the average score is 78.5%. It indicates that virtual laboratory learning media development are feasible to be used in improving science literacy skill of Mechanical Engineering students in Majalengka University, specifically on basic Physics concepts of material measurement.
Raptor codes

This paper exhibits a class of universal Raptor codes: for a given integer k, and any real /spl epsiv/>0, Raptor codes in this class produce a potentially infinite stream of symbols such that any subset of symbols of size k(1 + /spl epsiv/) is sufficient to recover the original k symbols, with high probability. Each output symbol is generated using O(log(1//spl epsiv/)) operations, and the original symbols are recovered from the collected ones with O(klog(1//spl epsiv/)) operations.
Analysis of propagation effects in LANs and WANs by FDTD and ray tracing techniques

In typical urban areas WLAN, mobile phone and TV signals reflect, refract and diffract from many objects between the transmitter and receiver. Ray tracing and FDTD when combined offer the possibility of accurately modeling propagation over these urban areas to include large scale and small scale features. Studies here highlight some of the features that can be extracted from such analysis to give a more informed knowledge of urban propagation. In particular the features of ground reflection in dry and wet conditions are examined and very significant variations in received signal levels are seen with ground moisture content.
Elimination of Impulsive Disturbances From Stereo Audio Recordings Using Vector Autoregressive Modeling and Variable-order Kalman Filtering

This paper presents a new approach to elimination of impulsive disturbances from stereo audio recordings. The proposed solution is based on vector autoregressive modeling of audio signals. Online tracking of signal model parameters is performed using the exponentially weighted least squares algorithm. Detection of noise pulses and model-based interpolation of the irrevocably distorted samples is realized using an adaptive, variable-order Kalman filter. The proposed approach is evaluated on a set of clean audio signals contaminated with real click waveforms extracted from old gramophone recordings.
The cause of search for meaning in life: Life affirming or deficit correcting

: The search for meaning in life refers to the motivation and effort in understanding one’s own life, finding or establishing life purpose, or accomplishing life significance. Unfortunately, consensus is still lacking on its cause. Deficit correcting hypothesis holds that, meaning search primarily originates from its absence or deficit, and once meaning restored, the search would decay. As opposed, Life affirming hypothesis maintains that, meaning search stems from the motivation to consolidate and strengthen life experience, and therefore the effort is always incessant. This article discusses the evidence, deficiencies and applicable situations of above two perspectives, and on this base proposes an "antecedent factor model" to account for the determinants of search for meaning in life. This model hypothesizes meaning need as the premise of meaning search, and believe the motive to search for meaning would arise as long as the current "meaning level" is perceived to be lower or higher than the original state. Future research should develop multidimensional meaning search scales, strengthen experimental research, and explore factors that influence meaning search judgment.
Routine Endoscopy for Esophageal Cancer Is Suggestive for Patients with Oral, Oropharyngeal and Hypopharyngeal Cancer

Background This study attempted to reveal the incidence and risk of synchronous and metachronous esophageal cancer in subjects with oral, oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer based on a population-wide database in Taiwan. Methods We retrieved data for this cross-sectional study from the Taiwanese Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000. The study group included 2,965 subjects who had received their first-time diagnosis of oral/oropharyngeal/hypopharyngeal cancer in 2002∼2009. We assigned the date of their first diagnosis of oral/oropharyngeal/hypopharyngeal cancer as the index date. We also randomly retrieved 29,650 comparison subjects matched with the study subjects in terms of gender and age group. We assigned their first medical utilization that occurred in the index year as the index date for the comparison group. We further performed a conditional logistic regression to investigate the association between esophageal cancer and oral cancer. Results Results showed that prevalences of esophageal cancer within 3 months before and after the index date were respectively 2.19% and 0.04% for the study and comparison groups. A conditional logistic regression revealed that the odds ratio (OR) of esophageal cancer for subjects with oral/oropharyngeal/hypopharyngeal cancer was 55.33 (95% confidence interval (CI): 29.86∼102.52) compared to comparison subjects. Furthermore, compared to comparison subjects, ORs for esophageal cancer were respectively 18.41 (95% CI: 8.50–39.85), 40.49 (95% CI: 15.11∼108.64), and 240.96 (95% CI: 125.49–462.69) for study subjects with a malignancy of the oral cavity, oropharynx, and hypopharynx. Conclusion We concluded that there were relatively high chances for synchronous and metachronous esophageal cancers being detected through panendoscopy in patients with oral, oropharyngeal, and hypopharyngeal cancers. The routine use of panendoscopy in such patients should be encouraged with a higher priority.
Metaanalysis of the relative nephrotoxicity of high- and low-osmolality iodinated contrast media.

To determine whether low-osmolality contrast media (LOCM) are less nephrotoxic than high-osmolality contrast media (HOCM), the authors searched MEDLINE and EMBASE databases and other sources to find randomized trials with data collected on changes in glomerular filtration rate or serum creatinine (SCr) level with LOCM and HOCM. Forty-five trials were found. Data were unavailable from 14 trials. When the P values from the other 31 trials were pooled, an overall P value of . 02 was found. Among 24 trials with available data, the mean change in SCr was 0.2-6.2 mumol/L less with LOCM than HOCM. Among 25 trials with available data, the pooled odds of a rise in SCr level of more than 44 mumol/L with LOCM was 0.61 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.77) times that after HOCM. For patients with existing renal failure, this odds ratio was 0.5 (CI, 0.36-0.68), while it was 0.75 (CI, 0.52-1.1) in patients without prior renal failure. Greater changes in SCr level occurred only in those with existing renal failure and were less common with LOCM (odds ratio, 0.44; CI, 0.26-0.73). Use of LOCM may be beneficial in patients with existing renal failure.
An exploration of interactions between the antiarrhythmic drug dronedarone and hERG potassium channel pore

Dronedarone is a non-iodinated analogue of the Class III antiarrhythmic agent amiodarone. It exerts potent inhibition of “hERG” potassium channels that underpin the cardiac rapid delayed rectifier potassium current, IKr. This study aimed to extend understanding of interactions between dronedarone and the hERG channel. Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were made at 37? C of hERG channel current (IhERG) from HEK-293 cells expressing wild-type (WT) hERG or alanine mutants of residues in the channel’s pore-helix/selectivity filter region (T623, S624, V625) or S6 helices (S649, Y652, F656, V659). Molecular docking simulations were performed using a cryo-EM structure of hERG and a MthK-based homology model. The half-maximal inhibitory (IC50) value for WT IhERG inhibition by dronedarone was 42.6 ± 3.9 nM (n= at least 5 cells for each of 6 concentrations). 600 nM dronedarone exerted reduced WT IhERG block when the direction of K+ flux was reversed, consistent with interactions between the drug and permeant ion. In contrast with recently reported data for amiodarone, the S624A mutation did not attenuate IhERG blockade, whilst T623A and V625A channels exhibited modestly attenuated block. The S649A mutation was without significant effect and the Y652A and F656A mutations exhibited modest reductions in block. The V659A mutation produced the most marked effect on dronedarone action. Docking simulations were generally consistent with modest interactions with canonical binding residues and suggested an indirect rather than direct effect of the V659A mutation on the drug’s action. These findings leave open the possibility that as yet unexplored residue(s) could act as key determinants of high affinity hERG channel block by dronedarone.
Synthesis and antimicrobial activity of copper nanoparticle loaded regenerated bacterial cellulose membranes

A series of copper nanoparticle (CuNP) loaded regenerated bacterial cellulose (RC) membranes were fabricated. The prepared membranes were characterized in terms of their morphology and chemical composition. The results of SEM, EDS and elemental mapping indicated that CuNPs were successfully loaded into the RC matrix and RC–Cu membranes exhibited a homogeneous structure. XPS and XRD results showed copper is mainly present in the form of nanoparticles in the RC membranes. Antibacterial activity was evaluated against S. aureus ATCC 6538, B. subtilis ATCC 9372, C. albicans CMCC(F) 98001, E. coli ATCC 25922 and P. aeruginosa ATCC 27853 in vitro and RC–Cu membranes showed a significant antibacterial activity influenced by the CuNP content. Hence, RC–Cu membranes might have a great potential for use in the wound dressings and other biomedical areas.
Cyclodextrin/Paclitaxel Complex in Biodegradable Capsules for Breast Cancer Treatment

A novel type of biocompatible hollow capsules that combine severable favorable features as a hydrophobic drug carrier, including host–guest complexation in the shell, the unique biological functions of hyaluronic acid (HA), and transport properties of the multilayer shell, was designed and prepared. These capsules were generated by layer-by-layer (LbL) deposition of HA modified with β-cyclodextrin (CD) molecules and poly(l-lysine) (PLL) on calcium carbonate particles. Simultaneously, paclitaxel (PTX) was loaded in the LbL wall via host–guest interaction. Under physiological conditions, the incorporated anticancer drug was slowly released, and the capsules remained stable. Because the PTX molecules are selectively complexed by CD in the shell, their release can be triggered by the addition of competitive cyclodextrin molecules in the external medium. By incubating the capsules with breast cancer cells (MDA-MB-231), it was found that the cells bound specifically to the capsules through the CD44 receptor of .
Aid, Policies, and Growth: Revisiting the Evidence

The authors revisit the relationship between aid and growth using a new data set focusing on the 1990s. The evidence supports the view that the impact of aid depends on the quality of state institutions and policies. The authors use an overall measure of institutions and policies popular in the empirical growth literature. The interaction of aid and institutional quality has a robust positive relationship with growth that is strongest in instrumental variable regressions. There is no support for the competing hypothesis that aid has the same positive effect everywhere.The authors also show that in the 1990s the allocation of aid to low-income countries favored those with better institutional quality. This"selectivity"is sensible if aid in fact is more productive in sound institutional and policy environments. The cross-country evidence on aid effectiveness is supported by other types of information as well: case studies, project-level evidence, and opinion polls support the view that corrupt institutions and weak policies limit the impact of financial assistance for development.
Self-Calibrating Polarising Radiometric Calibration

We present a self-calibrating polarising radiometric calibration method. From a set of images taken from a single viewpoint under different unknown polarising angles, we recover the inverse camera response function and the polarising angles relative to the first angle. The problem is solved in an integrated manner, recovering both of the unknowns simultaneously. The method exploits the fact that the intensity of polarised light should vary sinusoidally as the polarising filter is rotated, provided that the response is linear. It offers the first solution to demonstrate the possibility of radiometric calibration through polarisation. We evaluate the accuracy of our proposed method using synthetic data and real world objects captured using different cameras. The self-calibrated results were found to be comparable with those from multiple exposure sequence.
Bounding HFE with SRA

The Hidden Field Equation cryptosystem (HFE) is a public key encryption scheme whose security relies on the hardness of solving a system of polynomial equations over the finite field F2. This scheme and its generalizations have attracted a lot of attention by the cryptographic community. It is known that HFE polynomial systems are much easier to solve than generic systems, and in fact the parameters proposed in the original HFE cryptosystem can be broken in practice using Gröbner basis algorithms. Several theoretical explanations have been provided for this property, but all of them have so far relied on some plausible conjectures or heuristic assumptions. In this paper, we provide a rigourous bound on the complexity of solving a general class of polynomial systems including HFE systems. Our proof connects the polynomials constructed by Gröbner basis algorithms to the partial computation results of the Successive Resultants Algorithm (SRA), a recently introduced algorithm for finding roots of polynomials over finite fields. Besides, we provide a variant of SRA that may be of independent interest. We believe that our approach could have further applications on similar systems that were recently introduced in connection to the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem over small characteristic fields.
Correlated structural distributions in silica glass

Ochemical shift, quadrupolar coupling constant, and quadrupolar coupling asymmetry parameter for the bridgingoxygen was obtained. Using existing correlations between NMR parameters and local structure, the distribu-tion in quadrupolar coupling parameters was mapped into two-dimensional histograms correlating the Si-O-Si angle with Si-O distance, the Si-O-Si angle with Si-Si distance, and the Si-O distance with Si-Si distance.While the peak values for the Si-O-Si angle, the Si-O distance, and Si-Si distance distributions, at 147°,1.59 A, and 3.05 A, respectively, are consistent within the precision of the NMR measurement with previousdiffraction studies, the distribution widths are narrower than previous diffraction studies. The two-dimensionalhistogram reveals an unexpected strong positive correlation between the Si-O-Si angle and Si-O distance in theglass, running opposite to the trend generally found in crystalline silica polymorphs.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.70. 064202 PACS number(s): 61.43. Fs, 61.18. FsI. OVERVIEW
Quarterly Progress and Status Report The ability of hearing-impaired users to understand synthetic speech

Synthetic speech is commonly used in Sweden by persons with visual andlor speech defects. However, many of the users are elderly persons with deteriorating hearing, and the intelligibility of the synthesis-by-rule system with regard to hearing impairment in general has never been evaluated. In consideration of the fact that 10% of the population are hearing-impaired, this is a significant problem that ought to be observed. The Infovox system used in Sweden is based on a text-to-speech system that transforms text to synthetic speech by means of rules implemented in the system. These rules can be changed easily. This makes it possible to adjust the synthetic speech to the hearing impairment, for instance by changing speech rate, pitch, spectrum ox e.g , fricative sounds and extent and speed of transitions. This paper will report results of eight elderly hearing-impaired persons' ability to understand synthetic speech at a natural rate, a low rate as well as at a high rate. The speech material was constructed to expose dzfferent aspects of the synthetic speech. It consisted of 17 Swedish consonants embedded in an /a-it/ context, words and sentences in the form of simple questions (Helen-sentences). The preferred rate of some sentences was investigated through a synthesis production experiment. Results are also reported of eight younger normal-hearing persons with a simulated hearingloss at highfrequencies, who were listening to the same material at the three dzflerent rates. The simulation model was created in a block diagram programming tool, ALADDIN. The segmental intelligibility test (aCa) was also given to the subjects with normal hearing without the hearing-loss simulation.
No Training Hurdles: Fast Training-Agnostic Attacks to Infer Your Typing

Traditional methods to eavesdrop keystrokes leverage some malware installed in a target computer to record the keystrokes for an adversary. Existing research work has identified a new class of attacks that can eavesdrop the keystrokes in a non-invasive way without infecting the target computer to install a malware. The common idea is that pressing a key of a keyboard can cause a unique and subtle environmental change, which can be captured and analyzed by the eavesdropper to learn the keystrokes. For these attacks, however, a training phase must be accomplished to establish the relationship between an observed environmental change and the action of pressing a specific key. This significantly limits the impact and practicality of these attacks. In this paper, we discover that it is possible to design keystroke eavesdropping attacks without requiring the training phase. We create this attack based on the channel state information extracted from wireless signal. To eavesdrop keystrokes, we establish a mapping between typing each letter and its respective environmental change by exploiting the correlation among observed changes and known structures of dictionary words. We implement this attack on software-defined radio platforms and conduct a suite of experiments to validate the impact of this attack. We point out that this paper does not propose to use wireless signal for inferring keystrokes, since such work already exists. Instead, the main goal of this paper is to propose new techniques to remove the training process, which can make existing work unpractical.
Truth Telling Under Oath

Oath taking for senior executives has been promoted as a means to enhance honesty within and toward organizations. Herein we explore whether people who voluntarily sign a solemn truth-telling oath are more committed to sincere behavior when offered the chance to lie. We design an experiment to test how the oath affects truth telling in two contexts: a neutral context replicating the typical experiment in the literature, and a “loaded” context in which we remind subjects that “a lie is a lie. ” We consider four payoff configurations, with differential monetary incentives to lie, implemented as within-subjects treatment variables. The results are reinforced by robustness investigations in which each subject made only one lying decision. Our results show that the oath reduces lying, especially in the loaded environment—falsehoods are reduced by 50%. The oath, however, has a weaker effect on lying in the neutral environment. The oath did affect decision times in all instances: the average person takes significantly more time deciding whether to lie under oath. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Fuzzy Surrogates in Fitness Function Approximation for Evolutionary Structure Design

Evolutionary design of large-scale structures has been the topic of much recent research; however, such designs are usually hampered by the time consuming stage of prototype evaluations using standard finite element analysis (FEA). In this paper, a novel granulation based fitness approximation scheme is proposed in order to approximate the fitness function for substituting the time consuming large-scale problem analysis (L-SPA) by FEA. The proposed method is applied to two different hardware design problems that are evaluated using finite element analysis i.e. 3-layer composite beam and Airplane wing. In comparison with standard application of evolutionary algorithms, statistical analysis confirms that the proposed approach demonstrates an ability to reduce the computational complexity of the design problem without sacrificing performance.
Multi-Azimuth Failure Mechanisms in Phosphor-Coated White LEDs by Current Aging Stresses

We have experimentally analyzed multi-azimuth degradation mechanisms that govern failures of commercially-available high-power (1 Watt) phosphor-coated white (hppc-W) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) covered with peanut-shaped lenses under three current-stress aging (CSA) conditions. Comprehensive analyses focus on photometric, chromatic, electrical, thermal and packaging characteristics. At the packaging level, (a) the decrease of the phosphor-conversion efficiency; (b) the yellow-browning of the optical lens; and (c) the darkening of the silver-coated reflective layer deposited with extraneous chemical elements (e.g., C, O, Si, Mg, and Cu, respectively) contribute collectively to the integral degradation of the optical power. By contrast, Ohmic contacts, thermal properties, and angles of maximum intensity remain unchanged after 3840 h aging in three cases. Particularly at the chip level, the formation of point defects increases the number of non-radiative recombination centers, and thus decreases the optical power during aging stages. Nevertheless, in view of the change of the ideality factor, the Mg dopant activation and the annealing effect facilitate the increase of the optical power in two specific aging stages (192 h~384 h and 768 h~1536 h). This work offers a systematic guidance for the development of reliable LED-based light sources in general-lighting areas.