Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scalable Multicast Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Mobile wireless networks with intermittent connectivity, often called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), have recently received a lot of attention because of their applicability in various applications, including multicasting. To overcome intermittent connectivity, DTN routing protocols utilize mobilityassist routing by letting the nodes carry and forward the data. In this paper, we study the scalability of DTN multicast routing. As Gupta and Kumar showed that unicast routing is not scalable, recent reports on multicast routing also showed that the use of a multicast tree results in a poor scaling behavior. However, Grossglauser and Tse showed that in delay tolerant applications, the unicast routing overhead can be relaxed using the two-hop relay routing where a source forwards packets to relay nodes and the relay nodes in turn deliver packets to the destination via “mobility,” thus achieving a perfect scaling behavior of Θ(1). Inspired by this result, we seek to improve the throughput bound of wireless multicast in a delay tolerant setting using mobility-assist routing. To this end, we propose RelayCast, a routing scheme that extends the two-hop relay algorithm in the multicast scenario. Given that there are ns sources each of which is associated with nd random destinations, our results show that RelayCast can achieve the throughput upper bound of Θ(min(1, n nsnd )). We also analyze the impact of various network parameters and routing strategies (such as buffer size, multi-user diversity among multicast receivers, and delay constraints) on the throughput and delay scaling properties of RelayCast. Finally, we validate our analytical results with a simulation study.
Exploratory Study of Patients' Life Situation after a Stroke

Background. Brain diseases are a major health issue in modern societies, leading to multiple losses and disruptions. Objective. Based on the question “Are stroke patients’ quality of life and well-being also influenced by hospitalization and its duration and nature? ”, this study aimed to characterize the patients’ life situation upon returning home, assess the illness and recovery process, and understand how stroke patients experience hospital stay and discharge. Methodology. Qualitative, descriptive, exploratory study, using semi-structured interviews with a nonprobability sample of recent stroke patients. Results. Data were presented using three different approaches: a brief socio-demographic characteriza-tion; a description of the general meaning captured; and a detailed assessment of the themes identified. Mean age of 71 years (71.3±10.4); an average of 690 days since the ischemic episode; length of hospital stay between 9 and 61 days (x =21 days). Interviews were conducted in distinct contexts. The mRS and BI scores revealed significant functional preservation. Different experiences were found regarding the “length of hospital stay”, availability, attitude towards disease, recovery and after-effects, lifestyles, regaining control, and family involvement. The importance given to body functioning, organic dimension, and presence of pain are underlined. As aspects of quality of life, participants underlined the family unit, discrimination and “weight of the gaze”, and support network and its importance. Positive judgments were made and critical aspects were identified, such as fear and anxiety about the future. Hospitalization was perceived as necessary, while discharge triggered positive emotions and relief, despite being a source of concern and fear. Conclusions. In this study, patients expressed pain, discomfort and depressive mood (despite their good functional recovery). Small changes in their personal, family and social routines were significantly valued. Despite criticisms, patients assessed the care process as positive. Hospitalization was understood as virtuous, and discharge, though desired, was anticipated with concern and fear.
Beyond 2000: Future Directions for Adult Education.

This paper provides adult educators with information they can use to produce perspectives for the future of adult education (AE). Part 1 provides a perspective on the past and present of AE that falls under the aegis of the Federal Adult Education Act of 1966 and subsequent amendments. It paints a picture of AE from the mid-1960s to the present and reveals trends in funding of and participation in AE by certain segments of the adult population. Part 2 looks at trends and activities that may exert an influence on AE in the early part of the next century: social trends such as population and demographic changes; economic trends such as globalization of the work force, nature of work, and demands for intellectual skills that have affected the delivery system for AE; technological changes such as communications and computer technologies that affect how adults seek information and education; and brain and cognitive sciences research that offers new insights about the potential for childhood and adult cognitive development over the life span and intergenerational transfer of language and other cognitive skills. Part 3 examines government and legislative trends that reflect the idea of "devolution" of responsibility from the federal to the state and local levels. Part 4 discusses planning issues involved in moving the present AE system from a marginal to a mainstream position in the educational system. It looks at new data resources and technologies for planning and program analysis. Six pages of notes and literature citations are appended. (YLB) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** U.S, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office f Educational Research and Improvement EDU TIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) is document has been reproduced as eceived from the person or organization originating it. CI Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. 1 PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)
Moisture Accumulation and Its Impact on the Thermal Performance of Pipe Insulation for Chilled Water Pipes in High Performance Buildings

Mechanical pipe insulation systems are commonly applied to cold piping surfaces in most industrial and commercial buildings in order to limit the heat losses and prevent water vapor condensation on the pipe exterior surfaces. Due to the fact that the surface temperature of these pipelines is normally below the ambient dew point temperature, water vapor diffuses inside the pipe insulation systems and often condenses when it reaches the pipe exterior surfaces. The water droplets accumulated in the pipe insulation system increase its overall thermal conductivity by thermal bridging the cells or the fibers of the insulation material. The moisture ingress into pipe insulation threatens the thermal performance and the overall efficiency of the building mechanical system. This phenomenon is also responsible for the mold growth inside occupied spaces and causes the pipelines to be more vulnerable to corrosion. Although a wide range of vapor barriers are used for preventing water vapor penetration into pipe insulation, common experience in the field shows that water vapor will inevitably ingress into the insulation materials from the end joints or from the cracks created during insulation installation. How to account for the moisture ingress on pipe insulation service life and thermal performance is still an open question. Thermal conductivity is one of the most important properties for evaluating the thermal performance of the pipe insulation systems. Using a new test apparatus, the thermal conductivity of pipe insulation systems below ambient temperature and in wet conditions with moisture ingress was measured. Fiberglass and phenolic pipe insulation were tested to investigate the moisture effects on the material thermal conductivity. The data showed that these two types of pipe insulation systems had quite different water absorption rates due to different characteristics of the material and its structure. A serious degradation of fiberglass pipe insulation thermal performance was observed and the thermal conductivity increased by as much as 3 times when the moisture content was about 12 percent in volume. Tested at a different condition, the thermal conductivity of phenolic pipe insulation increased to 1.6 times of the original value and the moisture content was 5% in volume. Considering the gravity effect, the moisture content on the top and bottom C-shells were separately measured and discussed in this paper.
Recent Progress in Formal Theory 1. I Didn't Choose the Title 2. Perturbative Methods 2.1. Gauge Theory

This is a summary talk covering recent progress in perturbative methods for gauge theories and gravity, applications of AdS/CFT duality, vacuum energy, and string theory models of particle physics and cosmology. The organizers chose it. I'm not sure what 'formal theory' is supposed to cover, but they made the useful suggestion that my job is to summarize the parallel talks. There were 21 talks, covering a good range of interesting topics. With just a little squeezing the talks fall into four broad categories: perturbative methods in gauge theory and gravity, applications of AdS/CFT duality, vacuum energy, and string models of particle physics and cosmology. For reasons of space, I will cite the parallel talks rather than the original papers; please see those talks for detailed references. Feynman graphs are central to quantum field theory, but it is now a familiar idea, going back more than twenty years to Parke and Taylor, that even in perturbation theory there can be better ways to organize things. In particular there are major simplifications of the amplitudes that are not evident in the graphical expansion. For example, the n-gluon amplitude with maximally helicity violating (MHV) polarization would be given by a sum of thousands of terms from Feynman graphs, yet the final answer collapses into a single term. And progress continues, as reviewed by Britto [1]. For the next-to-MHV amplitude, the original spinor helicity methods give an expression that fits on a single slide. With twistor methods, this is reduced to a couple of lines, and with the newest residue methods one obtains an expression nearly as compact as for the MHV amplitudes. These techniques have wide applications, to Standard Model processes, to model systems like N = 4 supersym-metry, and to (supergravity). The Standard Model applications were discussed in Zanderighi's plenary talk [2], so I will focus on the more formal directions. A natural question is whether these ongoing simplifications are a sign of some deeper structure, like a symmetry. In Maldacena's talk [4], it was shown that the answer is 'yes', at least in part. To explain what he found, I need to recall the 1974 observation of 't Hooft, that to understand QCD we should think first about the limit where the number of colors N c is taken to be large, with α s N c held fixed. In this limit, only the planar Feynman graphs survive. One still has …
The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need

The Overspent American explores why so many of us feel materially dissatisfied, why we work staggeringly long hours and yet walk around with ever-present mental "wish lists" of things to buy or get, and why Americans save less than virtually anyone in the world. Unlike many experts, Harvard economist Juliet B. Schor does not blame consumers' lack of self-discipline. Nor does she blame advertisers. Instead she analyzes the crisis of the American consumer in a culture where spending has become the ultimate social art.
Stock Price Volatility: Tests Based on the Geometric Random Walk

The simplest variance-bounds inequality says that the price of stock should be less volatile than the present value of actual future dividends, assuming that the former can be taken to equal the conditional expectation of the latter. This is so because under the assumption just stated the price of stock equals the present value of dividends less a forecast error which, under rational expectations, is orthogonal to price. Therefore the variance of the present value of future dividends-the ex post rational stock price -should exceed the variance of the actual price by an amount equal to the variance of the forecast error. Despite the intuitive appeal of the variance inequality just stated, empirical implementation is far from straightforward. An important econometric problem is that if the unconditional population variances change over time then sample variances, not being consistent estimates of the population variances that are subject to the inequality, are uninterpretable from the viewpoint of the variance-bounds theorems. Sample variances are of interest only if some data transformation can be found which ensures that the relevant variables are stationary and which at the same time preserves the variance-bounds theorems. The original papers that formulated the variance-bounds relation, Robert J. Shiller (1979, 1981) and LeRoy and Richard D. Porter (1981), employed different corrections to attain stationarity. Shiller (1981) fitted a log-linear trend to stock prices and took the residuals from this trend to be the series restricted by the variance-bounds inequalities. LeRoy and Porter, on the other hand, assumed that the trend in prices was attributable to inflation and retained earnings and implemented a procedure to reverse the effects of these factors on stock prices. Subsequent criticism indicated that both procedures were flawed. Allan W. Kleidon (1986a) showed that if the underlying price series has a unit root, as does a random walk, then the supposedly trend-adjusted series as calculated by Shiller (1979, 1981) will still be nonstationary. Further, if the variance-bounds tests are implemented despite the nonstationarity of the underlying series, they will be strongly biased toward rejection. Kleidon's analysis obviously raised questions about the finding of excess volatility that Shiller reported. Kleidon (1983) also pointed out an error in LeRoy and Porter's implementation of the correction for earnings retention.1 Here we correct for trend in stock prices in an entirely different way: by dividing dividends into price. In other words, we conduct variance-bounds tests on the ratio of
The Trial-Heat Forecast of the 2008 Presidential Vote: Performance and Value Considerations in an Open-Seat Election

The trial-heat forecasting equation grew out of an examination of Gallup's trial-heat polls (“if the election were held today, who would you vote for? ”) at various points in election years as predictors of the November vote (Campbell and Wink 1990). My co-author Ken Wink and I found, not surprisingly, that polls as literal forecasts were not very accurate until just before the election, that taking the historical relationship between the polls and votes into account through a bivariate regression significantly increased their accuracy, and that taking the contemporary context of the election as measured by economic growth in the election year into account increased their accuracy even further. Corroborating Lewis-Beck and Rice's earlier finding (Lewis-Beck 1985, 58), we found that an equation combining the Labor Day trial-heat poll standing of the in-party candidate and the second-quarter growth rate in the economy produced the most accurate forecast of the national two-party popular vote.
Basic income : a transformative policy for India

Preface 1. The Transformative Challenge 2. Basic Income Defined 3. A Little More, How Much It Is 4. Escaping the Debt Trap 5. Creeping Towards Social Citizenship 6. From Subsidised Malnutrition to Healthy Development 7. Agency and Cultural Citizenship 8. Rolling Out Basic Income Bibliography Index
Convergence of ion channel genome content in early animal evolution

Significance The early evolution of animal nervous systems is poorly understood, but comparative genomics provides a new window into the past. One important controversy is about whether nervous systems evolved just once or independently in different animal lineages. In this work, we explore the history of the gene families most central to nervous system function: ion channels. We track when these gene families expanded in animal evolution and find that these gene families radiated on several occasions and, in some cases, underwent periods of contraction. The multiple origins of these gene families may signify large-scale convergent evolution of nervous system complexity. Multicellularity has evolved multiple times, but animals are the only multicellular lineage with nervous systems. This fact implies that the origin of nervous systems was an unlikely event, yet recent comparisons among extant taxa suggest that animal nervous systems may have evolved multiple times independently. Here, we use ancestral gene content reconstruction to track the timing of gene family expansions for the major families of ion-channel proteins that drive nervous system function. We find that animals with nervous systems have broadly similar complements of ion-channel types but that these complements likely evolved independently. We also find that ion-channel gene family evolution has included large loss events, two of which were immediately followed by rounds of duplication. Ctenophores, cnidarians, and bilaterians underwent independent bouts of gene expansion in channel families involved in synaptic transmission and action potential shaping. We suggest that expansions of these family types may represent a genomic signature of expanding nervous system complexity. Ancestral nodes in which nervous systems are currently hypothesized to have originated did not experience large expansions, making it difficult to distinguish among competing hypotheses of nervous system origins and suggesting that the origin of nerves was not attended by an immediate burst of complexity. Rather, the evolution of nervous system complexity appears to resemble a slow fuse in stem animals followed by many independent bouts of gene gain and loss.
Determinant factors of functional decentralisation and externalisation of local public services

[ES] El presente trabajo analiza los determinantes y efectos de los procesos de descentralizacion funcional y externalizacion de servicios publicos locales. Para ello, se creo una muestra con los municipios espanoles de mas de 50,000 habitantes (incluyendo todas las capitales de provincia) para el periodo 1999-2010. Primeramente, el analisis descriptivo muestra una tendencia hacia la descentralizacion funcional de todos los municipios, especialmente en las grandes ciudades, creando empresas publicas y organismos autonomos principalmente. Ademas, las fundaciones se incrementaron a partir del 2001. Posteriormente, se analiza la influencia de las caracteristicas presupuestarias y politicas sobre dichos procesos. Los resultados evidencian que los gobiernos de derechas utilizan en mayor medida la descentralizacion funcional para la prestacion de servicios, especialmente cuando la competencia politica es escasa y han sido elegidos por mayoria. No obstante, son los gobiernos de izquierdas los que presentan un mayor uso de entidades descentralizadas como forma de generar recursos via endeudamiento, generando ilusion fiscal. A partir de la imposicion de las restricciones legales al endeudamiento (2001), comienzan a crearse fundaciones porque estan excluidas de la consolidacion. Seguidamente, se comprobaron los efectos de estos procesos sobre la calidad de vida y eficiencia y transparencia de los gobiernos locales. Los resultados muestran que la descentralizacion funcional afecta positivamente a la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos. Asimismo, no hay evidencia sobre una mejora de la eficiencia gracias a la introduccion de las ideas del sector privado en la provision de servicios. No obstante, la combinacion de ambos sectores con creacion de empresas mixtas permite mejorar la variacion interanual de la eficiencia, cuando estas agencias son creadas por partidos de derechas. Finalmente, no se encuentra evidencia sobre la contribucion de la externalizacion en el fomento de casos de corrupcion, si bien los entes descentralizados permitirian mejorar los niveles de transparencia publica; [EN] This paper analyzes the determinants and effects of functional decentralization and local government outsourcing. To do this, we created a sample of Spanish municipalities with over 50,000 inhabitants (including all provincial capitals) for the period 1999-2010. First, the descriptive analysis shows a trend toward functional decentralization of all municipalities, especially in large cities, creating public corporations and autonomous agencies primarily. In addition, foundations increased since 2001. Subsequently, we analyze the influence of budgetary and political characteristics of such prosecutions. The results show that right-wing governments make greater use functional decentralization for service delivery, especially when political competition is scarce and have been elected by a majority. However, leftist governments are those with greater use of decentralized entities as a way to generate funds via debt, generating fiscal illusion. Since…
Acquisition of autonomy skills in adolescents with myelomeningocele

This study describes ages of acquisition (AOA) of typical adolescent autonomy skills in a regional cohort of individuals with myelomeningocele (MM), aged 12 to 18 years, with a mean age of 14 years 11 months (SD 2y 5mo). Prospectively collected data over 10 years were analyzed. Regression analysis, using Generalized Estimation Equation, provided 50th centile and 75th centile AOA for each skill. One hundred and fifty‐eight participants (90 males, 68 females) attended 378 annual patient visits. Patient contacts were equally distributed across age and physical severity groupings. Twenty‐four percent of participants had functional lesion levels at or above L2, and 38% between L3‐L5, 38% at S1 or below. Eighty‐four percent had shunted hydrocephalus, 24% were independent in ambulation, and 69% achieved toileting independence before adolescence. AOA for autonomy skills were delayed by 25 to 30% when compared with typically developing adolescents. Differences in cognitive ability explained the variance in median ages for skill acquisition (p=0.01) more than physical lesion level. Participants acquired community skills at a median age of 16 years 6 months. Twelve percent of 18‐year‐olds drove cars (9% with supervision, 3% independently), regardless of physical lesion severity. We conclude that adolescents with MM acquire the majority of autonomy skills 2 to 5 years later than their typically developing peers. This study establishes AOA timelines for autonomy skills in adolescents with MM.