Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diet-Induced Obesity Disturbs Microglial Immunometabolism in a Time-of-Day Manner

Background: Disturbance of immunometabolic signaling is a key process involved in the progression of obesity. Microglia—the resident immune cells in the brain, initiate local immune responses. It is known that hypercaloric diets lead to microglial activation. Previously, we observed that hypothalamic microglial cells from mice fed high-fat diet (HFD) lose their day/night rhythm and are constantly activated. However, little is known about daily rhythmicity in microglial circadian, immune and metabolic functions, either in lean or obese conditions. Therefore, we hypothesized that HFD disturbs microglial immunometabolism in a day/night-dependent manner. Methods: Obesity was induced in Wistar rats by feeding them HFD ad libitum for the duration of 8 weeks. Microglia were isolated from HFD- and chow-fed control animals at six time points during 24 h [every 4 h starting 2 h after lights on, i.e., Zeitgeber Time 2 (ZT2)]. Gene expression was evaluated using quantitative RT-PCR. JTK_Cycle software was used to estimate daily rhythmicity. Statistical analysis was performed with two-way ANOVA test. Results: Consumption of the obesogenic diet resulted in a 40 g significantly higher body weight gain in week 8, compared to chow diet (p < 0.0001), associated with increased adiposity. We observed significant rhythmicity of circadian clock genes in microglia under chow conditions, which was partially lost in diet-induced obesity (DIO). Microglial immune gene expression also showed time-of-day differences, which were disrupted in HFD-fed animals. Microglia responded to the obesogenic conditions by a shift of substrate utilization with decreased glutamate and glucose metabolism in the active period of the animals, and an overall increase of lipid metabolism, as indicated by gene expression evaluation. Additionally, data on mitochondria bioenergetics and dynamics suggested an increased energy production in microglia during the inactive period on HFD. Finally, evaluation of monocyte functional gene expression showed small or absent effect of HFD on peripheral myeloid cells, suggesting a cell-specific microglial inflammatory response in DIO. Conclusions: An obesogenic diet affects microglial immunometabolism in a time-of-day dependent manner. Given the central role of the brain in energy metabolism, a better knowledge of daily rhythms in microglial immunometabolism could lead to a better understanding of the pathogenesis of obesity.
Survey on Ranking Functions in Keyword Search over Graph-Structured Data

Keyword search is known as an attractive alternative for structured query languages in querying over graph-structured data. A keyword query is expressed by a set of keywords and respond by a set of connected structures from the database, which totally or partially cover the queried keywords. These results show how the queried keywords are related in the database. Since there may be numerous results to a given query, a ranking function is essential to present top-k more relevant results to the user. The effectiveness of this function directly affected the effectiveness of the keyword search system. In this paper, we survey the proposed ranking functions in the context of keyword search. First, the proposed models for the results of a keyword query are discussed and a categorization of them is presented. Next, the effective factors in determining the relevance of results are examined. Then, various ranking functions for ordering the results of a query are described and categorized based on their main view in determining the semantic of the results. Finally, we present an analysis of these classes and discuss the evolution of new research strategies to resolve the issues associated with the ranking of results in the keyword search domain.
Optical coherence tomography for retinal imaging

In this thesis, two new imaging modalities are proposed for the early detection of glaucoma. Both modalities are based on optical coherence tomography, a technology that uses low-coherence light to create two-dimensional images of the retina. Depth scans are made as reflections are detected as a function of path length difference by rapidly changing the reference arm length of an interferometer. The sensitive coherence window that is created rejects light returning from other depths.
The Blind Processor -- Embodying The Perspectives of an Interaction

Transforming an idea of an interaction to a functional programmed device requires defining the characteristics of the interaction, a task that typically falls between the designer and the engineer. The user and the computer that are interacting through an interface are typically represented and defined by using vastly different abstractions. The user might be moving a lever or pressing a button, while the computer uses numerical values without specific knowledge of the context. In this paper, we present The Blind Processor, a method for analysing interactions towards storyboard development and interaction design. Focusing on looking at an interaction, and separating the perspectives to that of The User, The Machine, and The Observer. By analysing these roles separately, we aim to find common ground about the essence of an interaction, feeding to interaction design. Theoretically, we aim to support the analysis of interaction complexity and technological mediation.
A comparison of multivariable control and sequential loop closure control in a dynamic structural test system-design and implementation

Structural test systems are used in aerospace and automotive industries to investigate the fatigue and vibration properties of engineering structures. Control schemes currently employed in these tests often ignore their inherent multivariable nature, using sequential closure of an array of PID loops to control the test. Previous work of Pratt et al. (1991, 1993) has investigated the design and implementation of multivariable frequency domain controllers for such tests using a laboratory-scale test rig. This paper continues that work comparing the design and implementation of both sequential loop closure and multivariable characteristic locus schemes for an industrial scale test rig. The performance achieved with the multivariable controller is shown to be far superior to that obtained with the sequential loop closure scheme.
GameLight - Gamification of the Outdoor Cycling Experience

GameLight is a smart bicycle light that overlays a virtual game projected on the ground, within the user's natural field of view while cycling. The system aims to enhance the cycling exertion experience by augmenting it with various game elements presented in two game modes: (1) an "Arcade" mode that implements a virtual coin collecting mechanic, and (2) a "Challenge" mode that provides timed effort challenges. The system consists of a pico-projector and mobile phone wirelessly connected to cadence, speed and heart rate sensors that serve as input to the virtually projected game to achieve a fun and playful effect while cycling in a controlled environment. This demo will be appealing to attendees interested in designing playful technology to support exertion.
Coordinated Multiple Views for Exploratory GeoVisualization

Over recent years researchers have developed many different visualization forms that display geographical information, from contour plots and choropleth maps to scatter plots of statistical information. Each of these diverse forms allows the user to see their data through different viewpoints. In fact, it is often the case that, when the user sees the information through different views and in different ways, they get a deeper understanding of the information. Geographical databases often hold a diverse range of different data and are thus complex to understand. For example, spatial data may be held that explains a particular geographical landscape, the land usage or details of buildings found on that land; non-spatial elements may also be stored which detail land ownership, the salary of the land owner and other statistical information about the land owner. The users’ goal is to gain knowledge of that information and make sense of a large volume of potentially diverse data with multiple components and different data types. Thus, to comprehensively understand the information contained within any complex geographical database, the user would need to select some information to display, present it in different forms, manipulate the results, compare objects and artefacts between views, roll back to previous scenarios or previous sessions, understand trends by seeing the data holistically as well as specifically, and finally take measurements of objects and areas in the display. Consequently, developers have created specific exploration environments that utilize coordinated multiple view techniques (CMV), where each of the views are linked together such that any user manipulation in one view is automatically coordinated to that
What Can We Expect from Navigating?: Exploring Navigation, Wearables and Data Through Critical Design Concepts

What is it to navigate or to be navigated? How, and through what, is information communicated to us? Do our interactions with space need to be limited to when we are moving through it? This paper describes a collection of design concepts generated as part of the initial stages of a research project that combines a critical design mindset and research through design process to explore these types of questions. The project seeks to problematise and diversify the discussion and understanding around pedestrian navigation, wearable technology, crowdsourcing and human data interaction. The goal is to develop one of the concepts using research through design as part of PhD research studies, leading to possible future applications.
Ageing Clouds: Novel yet Natural Support for Urban Exploration

We propose Ageing Clouds as a concept for urban exploration invoking freedom in navigation and strategy in planning. Wandering bound to a handheld smartphone is an obvious obstruction to the experience of explorers. Our approach is to construct a visual aid on mobile devices that roughly supports navigation without demanding continuous user attention. The interesting urban neighbourhoods of a city are represented as clouds on a mobile map. Post-visit, these clouds age and turn grey in the regions explored by the user. We present our initial steps to evolve mobile maps from rigid navigation to support unconstrained yet strategic urban exploration.
Designing calmworklight: Signaling Focus with a Desk Light

While working, we are not always in line with our ability to focus. Being more mindful of own cognitive abilities, including the ability to focus, may contribute to a more pleasant work experience. This paper presents calmworklight, an initial design proposal for dealing with this issue. calmworklight is a desktop lamp that responds to changes in peoples' focus strength as captured by a commercially available EEG device. The lamp's expression depends solely on the user's level of focus. If it is strong, the lamp returns a steady, calming warm light. If not, the light emission follows a breathing pattern, aiming to encourage the user to be more mindful of their breath and to cultivate a meditative focus. We conducted 3 user studies to get a better understanding of calmworklight's usage and benefits. The most striking outcome of the study is the worker's need for a regulating system that helps them plan when to socialize and when to focus, which should be considered for future workplace designs.
Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum

Each chapter begins with "Organizing Principle," "Chapter Overview," and "Frame of Mind" and concludes with "Looking Back, Looking Forward," "Minds-On," "Hands-On," and "Suggested Readings. " I. TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH TEXTS. 1. Reading Matters. Teachers, Students, and Text. Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum. Instructional Scaffolding. 2. Learning with Textbooks, Trade Books, and Electronic Texts. Textbook Use in Today's Classrooms. Rationale for Trade Books. Trade Books in the Classroom. Rationale for Electronic Texts. Electronic Texts in the Classroom: Connecting Literacy and Learning. 3. Making Authentic Assessments. High-Stakes and Authentic Approaches to Assessment. Portfolio Assessment. Assessing Text Difficulty. 4. Bringing Students and Texts Together. The Classroom Context. Visible and Invisible Aspects of Content Literacy Instruction. II. INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES. 5. Vocabulary and Concepts. Experiences, Concepts, and Words. Making Connections Among Key Concepts. Activating What Students Know About Words. Reinforcing and Extending Vocabulary Knowledge and Concepts. 6. Prereading strategies. Meaningful Learning, Schema, and Motivation. Arousing Curiosity. Making Predictions. Student-Generated Questions. 7. Talking to Learn. Encouraging Text-Talk Through Integrated Strategies. 8. Writing to Learn. Reading and Writing Together. Exploratory Writing. Journal Writing. Essay Writing. 9. Study Strategies. Textually and Contextually Important Ideas. Searching for and Using Text Structure. Graphic Representations. Writing Summaries. Making Notes. Taking Notes. 10. Study Guides. Three-Level Guides. Pattern Guides. Selective Reading Guides. III. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. 11. Struggling Readers. Scaffolding Instruction for Students Who Struggle with Texts. Comprehension Strategies. Vocabulary Strategies. 12. Growth and Reflection in the Teaching Profession. Purposes, Needs, and Guidelines. Professional Themes, Trends, and Challenges. Strategies for Successful Professional Development. Professional Development Plans. Appendix A. Internet Addresses for Content Areas. Appendix B. Graphic Representations with Text Frames. Appendix C. Affixes with Invariant Meanings. Appendix D. Commonly Used Prefixes with Varying Meanings. Bibliography. Name index. Subject index.
Honk ? Talk ! : Designing

Driving is a social task where drivers should constantly communicate with one another. However, existing driver-to-driver communication methods have mainly focused on safety-related issues, thereby overlooking the social aspect of drivers’ communication needs. We aim to shed light on drivers’ needs for richer driver-todriver (D2D) communication and design future D2D communication methods. Through scenario-based semi-structured interviews, we discovered that drivers wanted to utilize more social cues, deliver more information and vary the scope of their communication. Based on these findings, we derived design ideas for future D2D communication methods and are working on design prototypes.
A fast and efficient correlation calculation method

The correlation calculation is a kind of frequency calculation. It has been used in many application fields, such as: image processing and pattern recognition, control and robots, etc. We present a new and highly efficient algorithm. The algorithm, named variable parameter hierarchical discrete correlation (VPHDC), is an extension of HDC. It has some distinguishing features like HDC in its applications, such as efficiency, speed and so on, moreover it is more flexible than HDC, which makes complex correlation calculation fast and efficient. Because the windows can be increased to any size, it can be used for objects of all sizes. <<ETX>>
Seconday students' perceptions of instructional approaches: implications for mathematics learning

In NSW, Australia, a new course, General Mathematics, has been introduced for the Higher School Certificate replacing the two lowest level courses. Twenty-five thousand students study this course each year. This article reports on a study of 95 General Mathematics students in six schools where they were asked to comment on their learning preferences. Many of the benefits of collaborative learning with spreadsheets, were perceived by only a small number of students in this study, as many students do not envisage benefits of small group learning or learning with spreadsheets. These results have implications for mathematics learning.
A dynamic scheduling method for collaborated cloud with thick clients

Nowadays, the emergence of computation-intensive applications brings benefits to individuals and the commercial organization. However, it still faces many challenges due to the limited processing capacity of the local computing resources. Besides, the local computing resources require a lot of finance and human forces. This problem, fortunately, has been made less severe, thanks to the recent adoption of Cloud Computing (CC) platform. CC enables offloading heavy processing tasks up to the "cloud", leaving only simple jobs to the user-end capacity-limited clients. Conversely, as CC is a pay-as-you-go model, it is necessary to find out an approach that guarantees the highly efficient execution time of cloud systems as well as the monetary cost for cloud resource use. Heretofore, a lot of research studies have been carried out, trying to eradicate problems, but they have still proved to be trivial. In this paper, we present a novel architecture, which is a collaboration of the computing resources on cloud provider side and the local computing resources (thick clients) on client side. In addition, the main factor of this framework is the dynamic genetic task scheduling to globally minimize the completion time in cloud service, while taking into account network condition and cloud cost paid by customers. Our simulation and comparison with other scheduling approaches show that the proposal produces a reasonable performance together with a noteworthy cost saving for
A META DESCRIPTION LOGICS KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR ARABIC LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Description Logics (DLs) are successful knowledge representation formalisms, which can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well understood way. They are employed in various application domains, such as natural language processing, configuration, and databases . Sf. In this work we try to use this performance of DL systems to describe a Meta knowledge base defining the classes of the word in Arabic language and relation between them. This can be useful for syntactic categorisation of sentences which is very important for automatic language processing.
FPGA Prototype of Flexible Heterogeneous multi-ASIP NoC-based Unified Turbo Receiver

Recent and emerging wireless standards impose stringent requirements in terms of high throughput, error rate performance and flexibility. Although turbo processing in the receiver ensures error rate performance close to theoretical limits, due to its iterative nature, it creates a bottleneck in achieving high throughput. On the hardware side, the high throughput dedicated architectures cannot cope with the flexibility requirements hence some programmable, yet high throughput, architecture is mandatory for future wireless terminals. To address the three stated issues we are demonstrating FPGA prototype of a parallel, flexible and high throughput heterogeneous multi-ASIP NoC-based unified turbo receiver. The proposed prototype can be configured for required parameters by changing application programs of constituent ASIPs and one can extract required processing power by using adequate number of ASIP elements.
Parsing natural language

People have long been intrigued by the possibility of using a com puter to "understand" natural language. Most researchers attempting to solve this problem have begun their efforts by trying to have the com puter recognize the underlying syntactic form (the parse tree) of the sen tence. This thesis presents an overview of the history of syntactic parsing of natural language, and it compares the major methods that have been used. Linguistically, two recent grammars are described: transformational grammar and systemic grammar. Computationally, three parsing strategies are described and compared: top-down parsing, bottom-up parsing, and a combination of both of these methods. Several important natural language systems are described, including Woods' LUNAR program, Winograd's SHRDLU, and Marcus' PARSIFAL.
A novel approach to fast DOA estimation of multiple spatial narrowband signals

A novel approach, which is totally different from the traditional methods, for estimating directions-of-arrival of multiple spatial narrow-band signals is presented in this paper. Based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) of the sensor array output data, a relationship between the FFT spectrum and the direction-of-arrival (DOA) angles is established so that the angles can quickly be estimated through searching peaks in the FFT spectrum. In addition, the performance of the proposed approach with sensor gain and phase perturbations is also discussed. Computer simulations confirm the availability of the proposed approach.
The Effects of Restricting the Response Space and Self-evaluation on Letter Quality in Beginning and Experienced Handwriters.

This study analyzed the effects of restricting the response space and selfevaluation on students' handwriting quality in two beginning handwriters and two experienced handwriters. Students executed letters with and without using a transparent overlay, in a multiple-baseline-across-letters design. The use of the transparent overlay included drawing letters in a space restricted by the transparency; overlaying a model letter on top of the written letter and; evaluating if the two letters matched. Letter quality immediately improved when overlays were used, and handwriting quality maintained when the writing response was not restricted by the overlay transparency. Prompting and feedback were delivered contingent on on-task behavior. Analysis was based on three different measurement systems.
Analysis of Expression and Functional Activity of Aromatic L-Amino Acid Decarboxylase (DDC) and Serotonin Transporter (SERT) as Potential Sources of Serotonin in Mouse Ovary

The origin of serotonin in the ovary is the key question for understanding mechanisms of serotonergic regulation of reproductive function. We performed a study of the expression and functional activity of the serotonin transporter (SERT) and the enzyme for the synthesis of serotonin, aromatic l-amino acid decarboxylase (DDC) in mouse ovary. A pronounced peak of SERT mRNA expression occurs at the age of 14 days, but serotonin synthesis enzymes are expressed at the maximum level in the ovaries of newborn mice. SERT is detected immunohistochemically in all cellular compartments of the ovary with a maximum level of immunostaining in the oocytes of growing ovarian follicles. DDC immunolocalization, in contrast, is detected to a greater extent in primordial follicle oocytes, and decreases at the later stages of folliculogenesis. Serotonin synthesis in all cellular compartments occurs at very low levels, whereas specific serotonin uptake is clearly present, leading to a significant increase in serotonin content in the oocytes of growing primary and secondary follicles. These data indicate that the main mechanism of serotonin accumulation in mouse ovary is its uptake by the specific SERT membrane transporter, which is active in the oocytes of the growing ovarian follicles.