Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Building portals for evidence-informed education: lessons from the dead. A case study of the development of a national portal intended to enhance evidence informed professionalism in education

Access to high-quality evidence has been cited as central to the enhancement of teacher professionalism. This is not a given and teacher access to high-quality evidence requires significant planning and effort. This paper considers the creation of quality-assured reviews to build sustainable quality-assured evidence sources that inform the training and professional development of new and experienced teachers. The case study makes use of the experience and evaluations of portals developed in England as part of the Teacher Training Resource Bank (TTRB). The TTRB was developed by a consortium of universities supported by a software company and funded by a government agency responsible for what it called ‘Teacher Training’. This project began in 2006 and ended in 2010 due to a change of government. The project was then ‘archived’ in a very restrictive manner. The paper explores the lessons learned from the project as a case study.
State of the art of undisturbed sampling of cohesionless soils. Final report

An important phase of any major site investigation is the obtaining of high-quality undisturbed samples of the subsurface materials. This report describes the current state of the art in obtaining undisturbed samples of cohesionless material--specifically, sands, silts, gravels, and mixtures--primarily as it is reflected in the experience of the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) and of others on the North American continent. The report discusses general considerations in planning an undisturbed sampling program; methods of access to the soil materials for sampling, testing, or observation; and methods of sampling cohesionless soil. It is concluded that: (a) high-quality, undisturbed samples of many sands can be obtained with a fixed-piston sampler and drilling mud, with proper care and attention to details of sampling, handling, and transportation (this sampling process yields very good samples of medium dense sands, but tends to densify loose sands and loosen dense sands); (b) the use of radiographs is recommended as a nondestructive method of evaluating sample disturbance; (c) in gravels, the only proven means of recovering undisturbed samples is by hand-carving block samples; and (d) recent studies indicate that freezing in situ, followed by coring, offers a promise for obtaining undisturbed samples of much higher quality than ismore » presently possible. « less
Safety and Efficacy of Pediatric Sedation Protocols for Painless Diagnostic Examination in A Pediatric Emergency Room of A Single Tertiary Hospital

Background: Pediatric patients undergoing diagnostic tests in the pediatric emergency room are frequently sedated. Although efforts are made to prevent adverse events, no sedation protocol has specified the optimal regimen, dosage, and interval of medication to prevent adverse events. This study analyzed the safety and efficacy of sequential pediatric sedation protocols for pediatric patients undergoing diagnostic tests in the pediatric emergency room of a single tertiary medical center.Methods: The medical records of patients aged <18 years who visited the pediatric emergency room of Seoul Asan Medical Center between January and December 2019 for diagnostic testing were retrospectively reviewed. Sedation protocols consisted of 50 and 25 mg/kg chloral hydrate, 0.1 and 0.1 mg/kg midazolam, and 1 and 0.5–1 mg/kg ketamine, administered sequentially at intervals of 30, 20, 10, 10, and 10 min, respectively. Patients were assessed prior to sedation, and adverse events were investigated.Results: Of the 289 included patients, 20 (6.9%) experienced adverse events, none serious, and nine (3.1%) failed to reach the depth of sedation required to complete the test. The regimen (P=0.622) and dosage (P=0.777) of the sedatives were unrelated to the occurrence of adverse events when sedation was performed according to protocol.Conclusion: The sedation protocol used in these patients, consisting of sequential administration of minimum dosages, achieved a sufficient depth of sedation with relatively few adverse events, indicating that this protocol can be used safely and effectively for painless sedation in pediatric patients undergoing diagnostic testing.
Nanoscale SRAM Variability and Optimization

Robust SRAM design is one of the key challenges of process technology scaling. The steady pace of process technology scaling allows doubling memory array sizes, which requires thorough characterization of the impact of sources of process variability on SRAM operation. SRAM arrays are traditionally designed using static noise margins which are known to be optimistic in writeability and pessimistic in read stability. This work presents techniques for characterizing SRAM using dynamic stability metrics, which better represent actual SRAM operating conditions. Quantitative relationships between static and dynamic stability metrics are explored through statistical circuit simulations. Nano-scale SRAM design is traditionally complicated by sources of variability related to physical variability in the structure of the transistors, such as random dopant distribution. This work identifies temporal sources of variability in transistor intrinsic parameters, caused by random telegraph signaling (RTS) noise, which is directly correlated with fluctuation in SRAM performance. A large-scale dynamic stability characterization architecture is introduced and implemented in an early commercial low-power 45 nm CMOS process. This is used to experimentally verify the expected correlations between static and dynamic stability metrics. Outliers of up to 100X which are not correlated between static and dynamic stability metrics were observed and identified to be due to enhanced sensitivity of dynamic stability metrics to variability. Measurement techniques for characterizing temporal sources of variability caused by RTS noise, with particular emphasis on the large-signal bias change response typically encountered in SRAM operation, are used to collect large-scale statistics and to estimate the statistical impact of RTS noise on large SRAM arrays.An importance sampling algorithm adapted for dynamic stability metrics is developed in this work. This algorithm is used to estimate improvements in SRAM robustness expected from new process technology options such as FDSOI, different bitcell designs such as the 8T-SRAM, as well as several read-assist and write-assist techniques. An optimization framework enabled by this importance sampling algorithm is used to design SRAM arrays with maximum array efficiency through joint-optimization between process technology, bitcell design, and array organization. In conclusion, this dissertation identifies important sources of variability in nano-scale SRAM and also introduces the relevant optimization tools for performing variability-aware SRAM design.
The Automation of Air Traffic Control

Experience gained in the automation of air traffic control is of interest from more than one point of view, and not only because of the range and diversity of new and delicate problems to which this application of automation has given rise, and for which it is necessary to find simultaneous solutions. It has been necessary to design and develop new methods for the acquisition, processing and display of information and to link them with digital computers, for which a complex and voluminous ‘real-time’ software has had to be compiled and brought up to date without interrupting the procedure. But it is when it comes to visualizing the total pattern that the most difficult problems arise because the major decisions determining the success or failure of the operation have had to be taken without the possibility of acquiring any preliminary experience. Man and the computer have to work together in real time as harmoniously as possible to obtain the best results from the modern data processing systems that it was proposed to employ; it was therefore essential to consider very deeply the complementary roles which each was intended to play. To describe this research in detail or the solutions arrived at would not be of great interest to those other than specialists.
Electric Smart Vehicle Design for the Suburban Area of Shanghai

Public transport service is a prevailing assistance for peoples’ daily traveling, and however numerous residents are confronting the unsatisfied traffic situation in Shanghai, particularly in suburbs which has not been holistically covered by public transport network. As one of the biggest metropolis in China, Shanghai will constantly absorb migrate residents, and the emerging population often distributes in suburb. While, that unbalanced distribution require more improvement on public traffic, especially the promotion on daily commuting for the migrate workers. The idealized aim of this master thesis project was to alleviate the constantly increased traffic pressure, and to optimize the current public transport system in order to cope with the upcoming population and urbanization. The concrete goal in this thesis was therefore to develop a more appropriate transportation and corresponded service for commuters in suburbs. Advantages and deficiency of current public traffic service were investigated through literature studies, and the survey on intended users had indicated the features and essential requirement. The design research had established the intended product and its specification. Subsequently, concerned the knowledge on automotive manufacture, a conceptual urban transportation was generated according to the insight of intended users and limitations. In the end, the ultimate conceptual vehicle was tiny vehicles that worked in a renting service system. These vehicles would be served dedicated for the residents, in particular the commuters in suburbs of Shanghai. The final result served more flexible, reliable vehicles that extended the service for current public transport system. A final conclusion was enhancing the diversity in public transport service with merging smaller, flexible and sustainable alternatives would be beneficial for the dense city in the future.
Mobile Remote Photoplethysmography: A Real-Time Realization Perspective

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) sensors have attracted a significant amount of attention as they enable the remote monitoring of instantaneous heart rates (HRs) and thus do not require any additional devices to be worn on fingers or wrists. In this study, we mounted rPPG sensors on a robot for active and autonomous instantaneous HR (R-AAIH) estimation. Subsequently, we proposed the algorithm providing accurate instantaneous HRs, which can be performed in real time with vision and robot manipulation algorithms. By simplifying the extraction of facial skin images using saturation (S) values in the HSV color space, and selecting pixels based on the most frequent S value on the face image, we achieved reliable HR assessment. The results of the proposed algorithm using the R-AAIH were evaluated by rigorous comparison with the results of existing algorithms on the UBFC-RPPG dataset (n = 42). Our algorithm exhibited an average absolute error (AAE) of 0.71 beats per minute (bpm). The developed algorithm is simple and the processing time is less than 1 s (275 ms for an 8-s window). The algorithm was further validated on our own dataset (BAMI-RPPG dataset [n = 14]) with an AAE of 0.82 bpm.
System architecture for wireless sensor networks

In this thesis we present and operating system and three generations of a hardware platform designed to address the needs of wireless sensor networks. Our operating system, called TinyOS uses an event based execution model to provide support for fine-grained concurrency and incorporates a highly efficient component model. TinyOS enables us to use a hardware architecture that has a single processor time shared between both application and protocol processing. We show how a virtual partitioning of computational resources not only leads to efficient resource utilization but allows for a rich interface between application and protocol processing. This rich interface, in turn, allows developers to exploit application specific communication protocols that significantly improve system performance. The hardware platforms we develop are used to validate a generalized architecture that is technology independent. Our general architecture contains a single central controller that performs both application and protocol-level processing. For flexibility, this controller is directly connected to the RF transceiver. For efficiency, the controller is supported by a collection of hardware accelerators that provide basic communication primitives that can be flexibility composed into application specific protocols. The three hardware platforms we present are instances of this general architecture with varying degrees of hardware sophistication. The Rene platform serves as a baseline and does not contain any hardware accelerators. It allows us to develop the TinyOS operating system concepts and refine its concurrency mechanisms. The Mica node incorporates hardware accelerators that improve communication rates and synchronization accuracy within the constraints of current microcontrollers. As an approximation of our general architecture, we use Mica to validate the underlying architectural principles. The Mica platform has become the foundation for hundreds of wireless sensor network research efforts around the world. It has been sold to more than 250 organizations. Spec is the most advanced node presented and represents the full realization of our general architecture. It is a 2.5 mm x 2.5 mm CMOS chip that includes processing, storage, wireless communications and hardware accelerators. We show how the careful selection of the correct accelerators can lead to orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency without sacrificing flexibility. In addition to performing a theoretical analysis on the strengths of our architecture, we demonstrate its capabilities through a collection of real-world application deployments.
A Novel System Using Enhanced Digital Maps and WAAS for a Lane Level Positioning

The Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project of the European Commission aims to create a unified technical solution that allows all vehicles and infrastructure elements to communicate with each other in a continuous and transparent way, using a variety of media and with enhanced localization. However, accurate real-time positioning, i.e. at the lane level, is a big challenge for a lot of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) currently under study or development. This paper reports on the POMA (Positioning and Mapping) sub-project of the CVIS, which has been undertaken to research, develop, test, and validate advanced positioning and mapping solutions in order to provide a set of services that will run across CVIS entities, including vehicles, roadside equipment, and service centers. The authors stress that, to reach the sub-meter accuracy necessary for the lane discrimination, the best from the existing technologies and state-of-the-art data fusion algorithms must be used, keeping in mind that the final commercial solution will have to be available at an acceptable price for the customer. The authors present the choices that have been made: European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS, the European equivalent of the American Wide Area Augmentation System, WAAS) for the main positioning technology, a new model of enhanced digital maps compliant with the lane-level objective (Emap model), and an innovative particle filter proposed by the LCPC team to merge sensor and map data into a unique positioning and map-matching process. The authors conclude by briefly outlining the advantages of this three-component system and describing the next level of experimental assessment that needs to be conducted on this technique of lane-level positioning using enhanced digital maps.
Skin Temperatures During Unaided Egress: Unsuited and While Wearing the NASA Launch and Entry or Advanced Crew Escape Suits

The two flight suits currently worn by crew members during Shuttle launch and landing, the Launch and Entry Suit (LES) and the Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES), are designed to protect crew members in the case of emergency. Although the Liquid Cooling Garment (LCG) worn under the flight suits was designed to counteract the heat storage of the suits, the suits may increase thermal stress and limit the astronaut's egress capabilities. The purpose of this study was to assess the thermal loads experienced by crew members during a simulated emergency egress before and after spaceflight. Comparisons of skin temperatures were made between the preflight unsuited and suited conditions. between the pre- and postflight suited conditions, and between the two flight suits.
A Low Power and Small Die-Size Phase-Locked Loop Circuit Using Semi-Digital Storage

A conventional low-bandwidth Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) requires an external capacitor and a large on-chip ripple capacitor. A new PLL architecture is proposed in this paper, which replaces the large external capacitor in the loop filter by semi-digital storage cells. PVT compensation is achieved using the information stored digitally in the storage cells. Since the total value of the on-chip capacitor is reduced drastically, the proposed PLL architecture has a small chip size and a very low power consumption. The design is validated by a silicon implementation. The proposed architecture can also be extended to the design of high bandwidth PLLs.
Form-finding in Digital Architecture – A Case Study of Tower Designs

Form-finding has been facilitated by the rapid development in digital modeling and simulation, leading to unexpected geometries. The paper aims to identify how the digital computation can assist form-finding at the conceptual stage of tower design. A review of published works on form-finding in virtual and real practices was conducted. A framework for form-finding in digital design was developed including methods, the sources of decision making, processes, and techniques. Digital form-finding is investigated in five contemporary tower designs which showed that form-finding method is a process-oriented or (and) outcome-oriented, guided by intuition or (and) rationality, acting dually as generative and modification processes, and using simulation for testing and verification besides other form-finding techniques.
Active and Passive Multimedia Forensics

Thanks to their huge expressive capability, coupled with the widespread use of the Internet and of affordable and high quality cameras and computers, digital multimedia represent nowadays one of the principal means of communication. Besides the many benefits, the wide proliferation of such contents has lead to problematic issues regarding their authen- ticity and security. To cope with such problems, the scientific community has focused its attention on digital forensic techniques. The objective of this doctoral study is to actively contribute to this field of research, developing efficient techniques to protect digital contents and verify their integrity. Digital Watermarking has been initially proposed as a valuable instrument to prove con- tent ownership, protect copyright and verify integrity, by imperceptibly embedding a mes- sage into a documents. Such message can later be detected and used to disclose possible copyrights violations or manipulations. For specific applications, such as copyright pro- tection, the watermark is required to be as robust as possible, surviving possible attack a malevolent user may be willing to apply. In light of this, we developed a novel watermark- ing benchmarking tool able to evaluate the robustness of watermarking techniques under the attack of multiple processing operators. On the other hand, for specific applications, such as forensic and medical, the robustness requirement is overtaken by integrity preser- vation. To cope with this aim, fragile watermarking has been developed, assuming that the watermark is modified whenever a tampering occurs, thus its absence can be taken as ev- idence of manipulation. Among this class of techniques, we developed a prediction-based reversible watermarking algorithm, which allows a perfect recovery of both the original content and the watermark. More recently, passive forensics approaches, which work in absence of any watermark or special hardware, have been proposed for authentication purposes. The basic idea is that the manipulation of a digital media, if performed properly, may not leave any visual trace of its occurrence, but it alters the statistics of the content. Without any prior knowledge about the content, such alterations can be revealed and taken as evidence of forgery. We focused our study on geometric-based forensic techniques both for images and videos au- thentication. Firstly we proposed a method for authenticating text on signs and billboards, based on the assumption that text on a planar surface is imaged under perspective projec- tion, but it is unlikely to satisfy such geometric mapping when manipulated. Finally, we proposed a novel geometric technique to detect physically implausible trajectories of ob- jects in video sequences. This technique explicitly models the three-dimensional trajectory of objects in free-flight and the corresponding two-dimensional projection into the image plane. Deviations from this model provide evidence of manipulation.
Effect of Two Major Health Reforms on Health Care Cost and Utilization in Iran: Family Physician Program and Health Transformation Plan

Background: Family physician program (FPP) and health transformation plan (HTP) are two major reforms that have been implemented in Iran's health system in recent. The present study aimed at evaluating the impact of these two reforms on the level of service utilization and cost of health care services. Methods: This longitudinal study was conducted on people insured by social security organization in Fars province during 2009-2016. The data on the utilization of services and costs of general practitioner visits, specialist visits, medications, imaging, laboratory tests, and hospitalization were collected. Interrupted time series analysis was used to analyze the effect of the two mentioned reforms. Results: FPP resulted in a significant reduction in the number of specialist visits, imaging, and laboratory tests in the short term, and in the number of radiology services, laboratory tests, and hospitalization in the long term. In contrast, HTP significantly increased the utilization of radiology services and laboratory tests both in the short term and long term. Concerning the costs, FPP resulted in a reduction in costs in the short term, but in an increase in costs in the long term. However, HTP resulted in an increase in health care costs in both of the studied time periods. Conclusions: FPP has been successful in rationalizing the utilization of services. On the other hand, HTP has improved people’s access to services by increasing the utilization; but it has increased health care costs. Therefore, policy makers must adopt an agenda to revise and re-design the plan.