Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Sustainability” in higher education: from doublethink and newspeak to critical thinking and meaningful learning

It is higher education's responsibility continuously to challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio-scientific disputes. The ill-defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability—its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it—pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This article explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.
iStore: Towards the Optimization of Federation File Systems

With the growing volumes of data, many organizations are deploying geo-distributed edge servers and building federations atop of edge servers to improve data sharing, effective collaborations, and analytics. Multiple federation file systems are designed to satisfy such needs, but due to application-specific architectures, these federations neglect some important features that can improve the overall federation performance. In this paper, we address the important challenges of federated file systems, in particular, global namespace, optimal data placement and analysis, efficient data migration across edge servers, and metadata optimizations. To further investigate these challenges, we prototyped the federation file system iStore to emulate the federation and showed the significance of the afore-mentioned key challenges in the federation. The iStore provides unified global namespace atop of geo-distributed edge servers with a generic job and resource-aware data storage and placement algorithm (JRAP), which minimizes the job execution time by considering resources at each edge server. Furthermore, to enable effective data migration, we employed direct channel file layout-aware data transfer and designed a batch-based metadata scheme for federations to reduce the metadata contention with increasing clients. We evaluated the efficacy of various big data applications from data generation to storage and analysis using the iStore on real testbed and simulation.
An Innovative Framework for Supporting Social Network Polluting-content Detection and Analysis

In last years we are witnessing a growing interest in tools for analyzing big data gathered from social networks in order to find common opinions. In this context, content polluters on social networks make the opinion mining process difficult to browse valuable contents. In this paper we propose a method aimed to discriminate between pollute and real information from a semantic point of view. We exploit a combination of word embedding and deep learning techniques to categorize semantic similarities between (pollute and real) linguistic sentences. We experiment the proposed method on a data set of real-world sentences obtaining interesting results in terms of precision and recall.
Decoupling Multivariate Polynomials for Nonlinear State-Space Models

Multivariate polynomials are omnipresent in black-box modelling. They are praised for their flexibility and ease of manipulation yet typically fall short in terms of insight and interpretability. Hence, often an alternative representation is desired. Translating the coupled polynomials into a decoupled form, containing only univariate polynomials has hence become a popular option. In this letter, two new polynomial decoupling techniques are introduced. The features and performance of both methods are illustrated on a nonlinear state-space model identified from data of the forced Duffing oscillator.
Second-order contexts from lexical substitutes for few-shot learning of word representations

There is a growing awareness of the need to handle rare and unseen words in word representation modelling. In this paper, we focus on few-shot learning of emerging concepts that fully exploits only a few available contexts. We introduce a substitute-based context representation technique that can be applied on an existing word embedding space. Previous context-based approaches to modelling unseen words only consider bag-of-word first-order contexts, whereas our method aggregates contexts as second-order substitutes that are produced by a sequence-aware sentence completion model. We experimented with three tasks that aim to test the modelling of emerging concepts. We found that these tasks show different emphasis on first and second order contexts, and our substitute-based method achieves superior performance on naturally-occurring contexts from corpora.
Suppression of E-Plane Sidelobes Using a Double Slit Layer in a Corporate-Feed Waveguide Slot Array Antenna Consisting of $2\times2$ -Element Radiating Units

The E-plane sidelobe level at tilts around 30°−40° in a Taylor distribution due to tapered excitation of units of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> radiating slots is suppressed by introducing a double slit layer in a corporate-feed waveguide slot array antenna. The double slit layer act in averaging the excitation of the adjacent radiating slots for the sidelobe suppression and suppression of reflection. A <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16 \times 16$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-element array in the 70 GHz band is fabricated. At the design frequency, the sidelobe level at tilts around 30°−40° is suppressed to −30.0 dB from −25.4 dB. Compared to the conventional antenna, the sidelobe levels of the proposed antenna are suppressed over 71.0–76.0 GHz frequencies.
Conductivity of HVDC Cable Insulation Materials: Case Study between XLPE Nanocomposite and Polymer Filled XLPE

Extruded HVDC power cables have been aroused intensive attention in the recent years and a rapid rise in voltage level for cable systems highlights the electrical tolerance of insulation materials. As one of the key factors for HVDC cable insulation design, conductivity is required to be low enough to reduce thermal runaway. Various methods have been used to decrease conductivity of crosslinked polyethylene (XLPE). However, a significant obstacle for conductivity measurement is to obtain a representative results from a short time test. In this study, based on the same low density polyethylene (LDPE), conductivity of a nano Al2O3/XLPE composite and a polymer filled XLPE from 30°C to 90°C were investigated. It reveals that recorded current curves of nano composite show a similar behavior to ordinary XLPE, which differs significantly from that of the polymer filled XLPE. The reason may lie in space charge behaviors in these samples. And calculated conductivity of polymer filled XLPE is much lower than that of nano Al2O3/XLPE composite below 70°C and ordinary XLPE. Addition of polymer fillers increases thermal activation energy more significantly than nano-fillers does. These results may give an inspiration for the measurement of conductivity and development for HVDC cable insulation materials.
Antenna-in-Package Technology: Its Early Development [Historical Corner]

A ntenna-in-package (AiP) technology integrates an antenna or antennas with a radio or radar transceiver die (or dies) into a standard surface-mount package. AiP technology balances performance, size, and cost well. Thus, it has been widely adopted by chipmakers for radios and radars. Many papers and patents are devoted to AiP technology. However, little is known about the history of this important antenna and packaging technology. This article aims to fill this void with a general description of early efforts that drove the development of AiP technology as we know it today.
Building Situational Awareness in the Age of Service Ecosystems

We discuss the little-explored construct of situational awareness, which will arguably become increasingly important for strategic decision-making in the age of distributed service ecosystems, digital infrastructures, and microservices. Guided by a design science approach, we introduce a mapping artefact with the ability to enhance situational awareness within, and across, horizontal value chains, and evaluate its application in the field amongst both IS practitioners and IS researchers. We make suggestions for further research into both construct and artefact, and provide insights on their use in practice.
Smart Healthcare and Ethical Issues

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the medical field has begun to use this technology to better serve the society. The users’ data can be accurately collected and analyzed, and people can get the same quality of medical services without shuttling back and forth between hospitals and their homes. Smart healthcare not only reduces the social burden, but it also lowers the financial burden on end users. However, the collection and upload of massive data still have concerning data security risk, which may lead to various ethical problems and endanger the vital interests of users. By analyzing the causes of ethical issues, we can provide suggestions on what actions users and developers should take and the role that governments play. How to balance the user experiences and ethical security is always a hot topic. In this paper, we present our review and recommendations to balance both the use of IoT technologies, smart healthcare and ethics for delivering smart medical services.
Use Cases of the Application Reference Model in IRAN

In this article, the main elements of the Iranian Application Reference Model, called INARM, are briefly introduced. This model includes three levels of systems, application components, and interfaces. In the “system” section of this model, there are 11 system groups, 74 systems and more than 250 modules. The section of application components contains 4 application component groups, 36 application components and more than 100 modules. Finally, the section of interfaces contains 16 interfaces. The mere provision of the application reference model is not very helpful, and it is necessary to specify the use cases of the model. It is also necessary to make clear the considerations and risks of using the model for government agencies. In this regard, this paper describes 10 use cases for the INARM. As a specific use case, the government’s participation in procuring public software for the agencies (based on INARM and with the aim of cost reduction in system’s procurement and maintenance, and increasing system quality) is explained.
Performance Study of Cooperative Non-orthogonal Multiple Access with Energy Harvesting

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a candidate channel access technique for the future generation wireless communication systems. It exploits the power domain to enable simultaneous access for multiple users. In this paper, a NOMA system with a base station (BS) and two users is studied. A novel scheme where the near user (UE 1) harvests energy from the signals sent from BS and relays the previously decoded message of the far user (UE 2) is proposed. It includes two common energy harvesting schemes, namely, power splitting and time switching, as special cases. The performance is evaluated by the achievable data rate of UE 2 under different requirements on the data rate of UE 1. Numerical simulations and analysis reveal that when the channel conditions between BS and UE 1, and between UE 1 and UE 2 are good, while that between BS and UE 2 is bad, the proposed scheme works the best and has a significant gain over the conventional NOMA scheme without cooperation. In addition, for the sake of simplicity, the power splitting scheme can be used to replace the generalized scheme for energy extraction without jeopardizing the performance gain much.
Comparison of Passive 2-D and 3-D Ring Arrays for Medical Telemetry Focusing

In this letter, we investigate the performance of subdermal ring designs for focusing electromagnetic fields inside the body for next-generation implantable medical devices. We will concentrate on the Medical Implant Communications Service band <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(\text{402} \text{--}\text{405 MHz})$</tex-math></inline-formula>, but prepare our design at <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{433 MHz}$</tex-math></inline-formula>, the nearest Industrial, Scientific, Medical band. The designs include two-dimensional (2-D or coplanar) and 3-D arrays of circular rings and 3-D arrays of ellipses. The 3-D ring and ellipse arrays focus the fields more effectively than 2-D designs, through constructive coupling between the rings. Compared to the case where no rings are used, the power available from the focused field 20 mm below the skin is 2.24 times and 3.12 times larger if 3-D rings and 3-D ellipses are utilized, respectively. Rings can be used for circular polarization applications, and ellipses are more optimal for linear polarization applications.
Fetal-Maternal Electrocardiograms Mixtures Characterization Based on Time Analysis

Monitoring the baby's heart with electrocardiography (ECG) during labor provides moderate support for mothers and babies when continuous monitoring is needed. Strong uterine contractions during labor reduce the flow of maternal blood to the placenta. The umbilical cord may also be compressed during labor, especially if the membranes rupture. Usually the baby has a sufficient supply to support this effect, but some may be suffering. Electronic monitoring of heart rate may be suggested if doctors believe that the baby may be hypoxic. Two different monitoring methods can be used. An ECG measures the electrical activity of the heart and the profile of the heartbeat. This implies that an electrode is introduced into the mother's neck and attached to the baby's head. This review of six randomized controlled trials, including a total of 16,295 women, found that monitoring the baby with the ECG decreased the number of blood samples to be taken from the baby's scalp and surgical assistance during the birth. There was no difference in the number of cesarean deliveries and very little evidence suggesting that babies were in better condition at birth. This paper presents a theoretical resolution of a problem of blind separation of fetal and maternal ECG signals in the case of a linear stationary mixture with only two electrodes. Validation of the theoretical results is done by MATLAB simulation
Gain Equalized Shared-Aperture Antenna Using Dual-Polarized ZIM for mmWave 5G Base Stations

A shared-aperture antenna with orthogonal pattern diversity is proposed in this letter. Both the ports have high gain and beam integrity for the operational bandwidth 27–30 GHz intended for the future mmWave 5G base stations. The measured mutual coupling is −18 dB at 28 GHz, and the endfire gains for the individual ports are 7–8 dBi in the band of interest. Hence, in order to achieve gain enhancement and equalization between the ports, a dual-polarized zero-index metamaterial is proposed and is strategically loaded with the shared-aperture antenna for simultaneous gain enhancement in both the ports. The measured mutual coupling post-integration is less than −22 dB at 28 GHz. The endfire gains for the orthogonal ports are in the range of 9.2–9.6 dBi and 1 dB gain bandwidth of 35% with an effective radiating volume of 0. 09λ03. Detailed simulated and measured results are presented.
Local Aspects of Avian Non-REM and REM Sleep

Birds exhibit two types of sleep that are in many respects similar to mammalian rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. As in mammals, several aspects of avian sleep can occur in a local manner within the brain. Electrophysiological evidence of NREM sleep occurring more deeply in one hemisphere, or only in one hemisphere – the latter being a phenomenon most pronounced in dolphins – was actually first described in birds. Such asymmetric or unihemispheric NREM sleep occurs with one eye open, enabling birds to visually monitor their environment for predators. Frigatebirds primarily engage in this form of sleep in flight, perhaps to avoid collisions with other birds. In addition to interhemispheric differences in NREM sleep intensity, the intensity of NREM sleep is homeostatically regulated in a local, use-depended manner within each hemisphere. Furthermore, the intensity and temporo-spatial distribution of NREM sleep-related slow waves varies across layers of the avian hyperpallium – a primary visual area – with the slow waves occurring first in, and propagating through and outward from, thalamic input layers. Slow waves also have the greatest amplitude in these layers. Although most research has focused on NREM sleep, there are also local aspects to avian REM sleep. REM sleep-related reductions in skeletal muscle tone appear largely restricted to muscles involved in maintaining head posture. Other local aspects of sleep manifest as a mixture of features of NREM and REM sleep occurring simultaneously in different parts of the neuroaxis. Like monotreme mammals, ostriches often exhibit brainstem-mediated features of REM sleep (muscle atonia and REMs) while the hyperpallium shows EEG slow waves typical of NREM sleep. Finally, although mice show slow waves in thalamic input layers of primary sensory cortices during REM sleep, this is not the case in the hyperpallium of pigeons, suggesting that this phenomenon is not a universal feature of REM sleep. Collectively, the local aspects of sleep described in birds and mammals reveal that wakefulness, NREM sleep, and REM sleep are not always discrete states.
Dielectric and Mechanical Properties Evaluation of Polypropylene Containing Nitride-based Nanoparticles

Polypropylene (PP) which is recyclable and easy to process, has the potential to be a promising alternative for conventional cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) for using in high voltage power cable insulation. This paper aims to determine the effects of different types of nitride-based nanoparticles on the dielectric and mechanical properties of PP. Thus, three nitride-based fillers, boron nitride, aluminium nitride and silicon nitride are selected. To evaluate the influence of different filler concentrations, PP nanocomposite systems containing 5 or 10 wt. % of nitride-based nanoparticles were prepared by a modified solution blending method. Meanwhile, 5 g of neat PP was made with the same procedure to be the reference system. For determining the most suitable fillers in terms of electromechanical properties, three experiments namely, AC breakdown, dielectric spectroscopy and tensile test were conducted. The results of these experiments indicate PP with 5 wt. % of boron nitride has the best performance on dielectric and mechanical properties among nanocomposites.
Global miRNA, lncRNA, and mRNA Transcriptome Profiling of Endometrial Epithelial Cells Reveals Genes Related to Porcine Reproductive Failure Caused by Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) can cause respiratory disease and reproductive failure in pregnant pigs. Previous transcriptome analyses in susceptive cells have mainly concentrated on pulmonary alveolar macrophages (PAM) and Marc-145 cells, and on the respiratory system. Some studies reported that apoptosis of placental cells and pig endometrial epithelial cells (PECs) is an obvious sign linked to reproductive failure in pregnant sows, but the mechanism is still unknown. In this study, Sn-positive PECs were isolated and apoptosis rates were assessed by flow cytometry. PRRSV-infected PECs exhibited apoptosis, indicative of their susceptibility to PRRSV. Subsequently, the whole transcriptome was compared between mock- and PRRSV-infected PECs and 54 differentially expressed microRNAs (DEmiRNAs), 104 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), 22 differentially expressed lncRNAs (DElncRNAs), and 109 isoforms were obtained, which were mainly enriched in apoptosis, necroptosis, and p53 signal pathways. Integration analysis of DEmiRNA and DEG profiles revealed two microRNAs (ssc-miR-339-5p and ssc-miR-181d-5p) and five genes (SLA-DQB1, THBS1, SLC3A1, ZFP37, and LOC100517161) participating in the apoptosis signal, of which THBS1 and SLC3A1 were mainly linked to the p53 pathway. Integration analysis of DEGs with DElncRNA profiles identified genes involved in apoptosis signal pathway are regulated by LTCONS_00010766 and LTCONS_00045988. Pathway enrichment revealed that the phagosome and p53 pathways are the two main signals causing apoptosis of PECs, and functional analysis revealed a role of miR-339-5p in regulating apoptosis of PECs after PRRSV inoculation.
Do they Really Care about Targeted Political Ads? Investigation of User Privacy Concerns and Preferences

Reliance on targeted political ads has skyrocketed in recent years, leading to negative reactions in media and society. Nonetheless, only few studies investigate user privacy concerns and their role in user acceptance decisions in the context of online political targeting. To fill this gap, in this study we explore the magnitude of privacy concerns towards targeted political ads compared to “traditional” targeting in the product context. Surprisingly, we find no notable differences in privacy concerns between these use purposes. In the next step, user preferences over ad types are elicited with the help of a discrete choice experiment in the mobile app adoption context. Among others, our findings from simulations on the basis of a mixed logit model cautiously suggest that while targeted political advertising is perceived as somewhat less desirable by respondents, its presence does not consequentially deter users from choosing such an app, with user preferences being highly volatile. Together, these results contribute to a better understanding of users’ privacy concerns and preferences in the context of targeted political advertising online.
Effect of Surface Smoothness on Electrical Tree Characteristics at XLPE-SIR Interface

Cable accessories are the weakest parts in the whole cable system. The performance matching of the insulating materials on the interface is very important, and the same important is the smoothing of the insulation surfaces. The surface smoothness of the cable insulation depends on the peeling and smoothing techniques applied on site in a less well-controlled environment. The effect of surface smoothness of XLPE cable insulation on the electrical treeing characteristics at the XLPE-SIR interface was investigated in this paper. XLPE and SIR samples were pressed together under different interfacial pressures by a specific pressing device, with the surface of the XLPE sample roughed by using abrasive papers. AC voltages were applied on a set of pin-plane electrodes placed at the interface. The pin-plane distance was 2 mm. The needle diameter was 0.25 mm and the tip curvature radius was $(10\pm 1)\ \boldsymbol{\mu} \mathbf{m}$. Under different interfacial pressures, the voltages for electrical trees to initiate were recorded and statistically analyzed for both smooth and rough XLPE surfaces. Meanwhile, the tree morphology and breakdown channel were also captured by using a digital microimaging system. It was shown that when the XLPE surface was smooth, electrical trees would initiate and grow along the interface at a low pressure, while they tended to grow into SIR side at a higher pressure. When the XLPE surface was rough, however, breakdown occurred directly at a low pressure; and at a higher pressure, electrical trees initiated and grew along the scratches on interface mostly. Besides, the electrical tree initiation voltages of the smooth surfaces were all higher than those of rough surfaces. It was indicated that a smooth insulating surface and an appropriate high interfacial pressure can effectively suppress the initiation of electrical trees.