Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Capacitance Model Involving Fringing Effects for Electret-Based Rotational Energy Harvesting Devices

Electret-based rotational energy harvesting (EBREH) technology is promising to overcome the electrostatically converted power limitation of velocity-damped resonance generators. Its structural parameter-dominated capacitance variation and parasitic capacitance should be correctly evaluated for the optimal design of EBREH devices regarding the high power output implement. Basically, finite-element analysis (FEA) seems the only access to predict capacitances across the complicated interdigitated electrodes in 3-D space because of partially or completely neglected fringing effects in currently available theoretical models. In this paper, we proposed a more efficient model for the capacitance of EBREH devices based on four-positioned capacitors, i.e., coplanar, parallel-plate, flat-plate nonparallel, and sector coplanar capacitors. Distinctively differing from other models, our model takes 3-D fringing effects associated with fringing fields into account properly in each type of the capacitor. In addition, the accuracy of the proposed model was much improved by combining parallel-wire capacitance theory and Schwarz–Christoffel mapping. Our model was verified through both the FEA and practical measurements with a fabricated EBREH structure. The measurement indicated that this novel capacitance model can be readily applicable to rotary and linear motion-driven EBREH devices and electrostatic sensors for further design optimizations with device parameters.
A Low Molecular Weight Protein from the Sea Anemone Anemonia viridis with an Anti-Angiogenic Activity

Sea anemones are a remarkable source of active principles due to a decentralized venom system. New blood vessel growth or angiogenesis is a very promising target against cancer, but the few available antiangiogenic compounds have limited efficacy. In this study, a protein fraction, purified from tentacles of Anemonia viridis, was able to limit endothelial cells proliferation and angiogenesis at low concentration (14 nM). Protein sequences were determined with Edman degradation and mass spectrometry in source decay and revealed homologies with Blood Depressing Substance (BDS) sea anemones. The presence of a two-turn alpha helix observed with circular dichroism and a trypsin activity inhibition suggested that the active principle could be a Kunitz-type inhibitor, which may interact with an integrin due to an Arginine Glycin Aspartate (RGD) motif. Molecular modeling showed that this RGD motif was well exposed to solvent. This active principle could improve antiangiogenic therapy from existing antiangiogenic compounds binding on the Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF).
Blasting through the Front-End Bottleneck with Shotgun

The front-end bottleneck is a well-established problem in server workloads owing to their deep software stacks and large instruction working sets. Despite years of research into effective L1-I and BTB prefetching, state-of-the-art techniques force a trade-off between performance and metadata storage costs. This work introduces Shotgun, a BTB-directed front-end prefetcher powered by a new BTB organization that maintains a logical map of an application's instruction footprint, which enables high-efficacy prefetching at low storage cost. To map active code regions, Shotgun precisely tracks an application's global control flow (e.g., function and trap routine entry points) and summarizes local control flow within each code region. Because the local control flow enjoys high spatial locality, with most functions comprised of a handful of instruction cache blocks, it lends itself to a compact region-based encoding. Meanwhile, the global control flow is naturally captured by the application's unconditional branch working set (calls, returns, traps). Based on these insights, Shotgun devotes the bulk of its BTB capacity to branches responsible for the global control flow and a spatial encoding of their target regions. By effectively capturing a map of the application's instruction footprint in the BTB, Shotgun enables highly effective BTB-directed prefetching. Using a storage budget equivalent to a conventional BTB, Shotgun outperforms the state-of-the-art BTB-directed front-end prefetcher by up to 14% on a set of varied commercial workloads.
Preference and Prey Switching in a Generalist Predator Attacking Local and Invasive Alien Pests

Invasive pest species may strongly affect biotic interactions in agro-ecosystems. The ability of generalist predators to prey on new invasive pests may result in drastic changes in the population dynamics of local pest species owing to predator-mediated indirect interactions among prey. On a short time scale, the nature and strength of such indirect interactions depend largely on preferences between prey and on predator behavior patterns. Under laboratory conditions we evaluated the prey preference of the generalist predator Macrolophus pygmaeus Rambur (Heteroptera: Miridae) when it encounters simultaneously the local tomato pest Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) and the invasive alien pest Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae). We tested various ratios of local vs. alien prey numbers, measuring switching by the predator from one prey to the other, and assessing what conditions (e.g. prey species abundance and prey development stage) may favor such prey switching. The total predation activity of M. pygmaeus was affected by the presence of T. absoluta in the prey complex with an opposite effect when comparing adult and juvenile predators. The predator showed similar preference toward T. absoluta eggs and B. tabaci nymphs, but T. absoluta larvae were clearly less attacked. However, prey preference strongly depended on prey relative abundance with a disproportionately high predation on the most abundant prey and disproportionately low predation on the rarest prey. Together with the findings of a recent companion study (Bompard et al. 2013, Population Ecology), the insight obtained on M. pygmaeus prey switching may be useful for Integrated Pest Management in tomato crops, notably for optimal simultaneous management of B. tabaci and T. absoluta, which very frequently co-occur on tomato.
An approach in deformation and stress analysis of elasto-plastic sandwich cylindrical shell panels based on harmonic differential quadrature method

Using harmonic differential quadrature method, an approach to analyze sandwich cylindrical shell panels with any sort of boundary conditions under a generally distributed static loading, undergoing elasto-plastic deformation is proposed. The faces of the sandwich shell panel are made of some isotropic materials with linear work hardening behavior while the core is assumed to be an isotropic material experiencing only elastic behavior. The faces are modeled as thin cylindrical shells obeying the Kirchhoff–Love assumptions. For the core material, it is assumed to be thick and the in-plane stresses are negligible. Upon application of an inner and outer general lateral loading, the governing equations are derived using the principle of virtual displacements. Using an iterative approach, named elasto-plastic harmonic differential quadrature method (EP-HDQM), the equations are solved. The obtained results are compared with the results from finite element software Ansys for different sandwich shell panel configurations. Then, the effects of changing different parameters on the stress and displacement components of sandwich cylindrical shell panels in different elasto-plastic conditions are investigated.
Assessment of Pressure Sources and Water Body Resilience: An Integrated Approach for Action Planning in a Polluted River Basin

The present study develops an integrated methodology combining the results of the water-quality classification, according to the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC—WFD, with those of a mathematical integrity model. It is able to analyse the potential anthropogenic impacts on the receiving water body and to help municipal decision-makers when selecting short/medium/long-term strategic mitigation actions to be performed in a territory. Among the most important causes of water-quality degradation in a river, the focus is placed on pollutants from urban wastewater. In particular, the proposed approach evaluates the efficiency and the accurate localisation of treatment plants in a basin, as well as the capacity of its river to bear the residual pollution loads after the treatment phase. The methodology is applied to a sample catchment area, located in northern Italy, where water quality is strongly affected by high population density and by the presence of agricultural and industrial activities. Nearly 10 years of water-quality data collected through official monitoring are considered for the implementation of the system. The sample basin shows different real and potential pollution conditions, according to the resilience of the river and surroundings, together with the point and diffuse pressure sources acting on the receiving body.
Intervening to promote statements of gratitude: Informative incongruity between intention and behavior

ABSTRACT Two studies examined interventions to increase the frequency of gratitude expression among college students in two large lecture classes of an Introduction to Psychology course at a large university in southwest Virginia. Both studies evaluated the impact of a writing exercise designed to increase intentions to express gratitude in a prescribed manner. In addition, participants in both studies were given one week to express gratitude to people who performed prosocial behavior. Gratitude expression was assessed by self-report on a survey administered during the psychology class. In both studies, intentions to thank another person for a kind act were significantly higher in the Intervention class than in the Control class, but self-reported expressions of gratitude were significantly higher in the Control class than in the Intervention class. This was an unexpected “countercontrol effect. ” Directions for future research are discussed, as well as theoretical/methodological explanations.
Toward Urban Electric Taxi Systems in Smart Cities: The Battery Swapping Challenge

Despite the clear benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and traditional energy consumptions, the popularization of EVs remains a challenge in the short run. There are currently two major ways of refueling electric taxicabs (ETs): recharging and battery swapping. ETs usually choose battery swapping so as not to waste precious time during their daily work. While previous studies focused on planning battery swapping stations for private EVs, we investigate ways of supporting the upgrade of an entire urban taxi system, with demands differing both in scale and nature. Furthermore, most ETs are fully charged in the early morning and need to swap battery in approximately the same time period of the day, which results in a bottleneck for battery swapping and hurts the quality of service (QoS) of the taxicab fleet. With this insight, we model the ET fleet as a mobile sensor network, analyze the historical sensing data of taxi routes, and evaluate the battery swapping demand profile and the power consumption of individual taxis, as well as the driving time between positions in the road network. Based on these inputs, we propose a method to calculate an optimized battery swapping station scheme, then describe a real-time algorithm to schedule a subset of the unoccupied taxicabs to swap batteries early by giving them allowances to avoid congestion. Our strategies are then evaluated via a real-world 366-day, 3 976-taxi dataset. The results demonstrate that compared to uniform deployment, our planning scheme reduces the average time cost by 67.2%; and based on our deployment, our scheduling strategy decreases the in-station queuing time by 45.63%, 52.26%, and 29.57%, and the average driving time cost to the stations by 42.3%, 43.69%, and 28.77% compared to actual taxicab refueling, random scheduling, and a static heuristic strategy, respectively. Furthermore, our approach reduces the number of battery swapping that last more than 30 min by 40.8%, which is a significant improvement on the QoS of the whole system.
Hypomorphic FANCA mutations correlate with mild mitochondrial and clinical phenotype in Fanconi anemia

Fanconi anemia is a rare disease characterized by congenital malformations, aplastic anemia, and predisposition to cancer. Despite the consolidated role of the Fanconi anemia proteins in DNA repair, their involvement in mitochondrial function is emerging. The purpose of this work was to assess whether the mitochondrial phenotype, independent of genomic integrity, could correlate with patient phenotype. We evaluated mitochondrial and clinical features of 11 affected individuals homozygous or compound heterozygous for p.His913Pro and p.Arg951Gln/Trp, the two residues of FANCA that are more frequently affected in our cohort of patients. Although p.His913Pro and p.Arg951Gln proteins are stably expressed in cytoplasm, they are unable to migrate in the nucleus, preventing cells from repairing DNA. In these cells, the electron transfer between respiring complex I–III is reduced and the ATP/AMP ratio is impaired with defective ATP production and AMP accumulation. These activities are intermediate between those observed in wild-type and FANCA−/− cells, suggesting that the variants at residues His913 and Arg951 are hypomorphic mutations. Consistent with these findings, the clinical phenotype of most of the patients carrying these mutations is mild. These data further support the recent finding that the Fanconi anemia proteins play a role in mitochondria, and open up possibilities for genotype/phenotype studies based on novel mitochondrial criteria.
Clinical Features of Respiratory Viral Infections Among Inpatients at a Major US Tertiary Care Hospital

Objectives Respiratory viral illnesses (RVI) are reliably diagnosed by respiratory viral panel using polymerase chain reaction (RVP-PCR); however, owing to the scant data, clinical presentation alone is unreliable in establishing viral etiology. The primary objective of this study was to characterize signs and symptoms of RVI among inpatients in a major tertiary care hospital. Methods Between 2013 and 2015, adult inpatients with RVI undergoing RVP-PCR were prospectively enrolled in our study. Clinical data were collected by interviews and electronic medical record reviews. Data analysis was performed using &khgr;2 testing, analysis of variance for continuous variables, and logistic regression modeling. Results Of 421 patients analyzed, 175 (41.7%) had a positive RVP-PCR. Patients were evenly matched at baseline except for renal disease. Multivariate logistic regression modeling demonstrated the following positive correlations: positive RVP-PCR with renal disease (odds ratio [OR] 2.08), cough (OR 2.28), and wheezing (OR 1.8); influenza with cough (OR 5.04), and renal disease (OR 2.17); metapneumovirus with age older than 65 (OR 3.24); respiratory syncytial viruses with wheezing (OR 3.42) and immunosuppression (OR 3.11); and parainfluenza with smoking (OR 3.16). Negative correlations included influenza with anosmia (OR 0.41); rhinovirus/enterovirus with feeling confined to bed (OR 0.3); metapneumovirus with smoking (OR 0.29); and parainfluenza with male sex (OR 0.22). Conclusions In this descriptive study, we noted specific viral associations with clinical signs and symptoms among 421 inpatients with RVIs. With increasing RVP-PCR use, studies similar to ours may be able to better define the clinical presentation of RVIs and lead to evidence-based, clinical presentation-guided diagnostic and management algorithms.
Outcomes of laparoscopic gastrectomy for gastric cancer in elderly patients.

PURPOSE This study aimed to compare the short- and longterm outcomes of elderly and middle-aged patients with gastric cancer who underwent laparoscopic gastrectomy. METHODS From January 2010 to February 2017, a total of 75 patients with gastric cancer aged ≥70 years (elderly group) underwent laparoscopic gastrectomy, and their short- and long-term outcomes were compared with those of 197 patients with gastric cancer aged 60-69 years (middleaged group) who underwent also laparoscopic gastrectomy during the same period. RESULTS With respect to the patients' preoperative baseline characteristics, the elderly group had a higher Charlson comorbidity index score, rate of previous abdominal operations, and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) classification score compared to middle-aged patient group. There were no significant differences in the other baseline characteristics. There were no significant between-groups differences in the duration of surgery, intraoperative blood loss, incidence and severity of 30-day postoperative complications, and pathological results. Long-term follow-up results showed that the tumor recurrence rates were similar between groups, as were the overall (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) rates. Multivariate analysis showed that age was not an independent predictor of OS and DFS. CONCLUSION In summary, laparoscopic gastrectomy in elderly patients with gastric cancer can achieve similar short- and long-term outcomes as those for middle-aged patients. Age is thus not a contraindication for laparoscopic gastrectomy.
Load-Aware Performance Analysis of Cell Center/Edge Users in Random HetNets

For real-time traffic, the link quality and call blocking probability (both derived from coverage probability) are realized to be poor for cell edge users (CEUs) compared to cell center users (CCUs) as the signal reception in the cell center region is better compared to the cell edge region. In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the uncoordinated channel access by different types of base stations determine the interference statistics that further arbitrates the coverage probability. Thus, the spectrum allocation techniques have major impact on the performance of CCU and CEU. In this paper, the performance of CCUs and CEUs in a random two-tier network is studied for two spectrum allocation techniques namely: 1) co-channel (CSA) and 2) shared (SSA). For performance analysis, the widely accepted conception of modeling the tiers of HetNet using independent homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) is considered to accommodate the spatial randomness in location of base stations. To incorporate the spatial randomness in the arrival of service and to aid the load-aware analysis, the cellular traffic is modeled using spatio-temporal PPP. Under this scenario, we have developed an analytical framework to evaluate the load-aware performance, including coverage and blocking probabilities, of CCUs and CEUs under both spectrum allocation techniques. Furthermore, we provide insight into achievable area energy efficiency for SSA and CSA. The developed analytical framework is validated through extensive simulations. Next, we demonstrate the impact of traffic load and femto access points density on the performance of CCUs/CEUs under CSA and SSA.
Structure and Function of the Photosystem Supercomplexes

Photosynthesis converts solar energy into chemical energy to sustain all life on earth by providing oxygen and food, and controlling the atmospheric carbon dioxide. During this process, the water-splitting and oxygen-evolving reaction is catalyzed by photosystem II (PSII), while photosystem I (PSI) generates the reducing power for the reduction of NADP+ to NADPH. Together with their peripheral light-harvesting complexes (LHCs), photosystems function as multisubunit supercomplexes located in the thylakoid membranes of cyanobacteria, algae, and plants. Recent advances in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM), X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) and other techniques have revealed unprecedented structural and catalytic details concerning the two supercomplexes. Several high-resolution structures of the complexes from plants were solved, and serial time-resolved crystallography and “radiation-damage-free” femtosecond XFEL also provided important insights into the mechanism of water oxidation. Here, we review these exciting advances in the studies of the photosystem supercomplexes with an emphasis on PSII-LHCII, propose presently unresolved problems in this field, and suggest potential tendencies for future studies.
The Insidious Effects of Sexual Stereotypes in Clinical Practice

The present study investigated the influence of sexual stereotyping on the diagnostic impressions and treatment expectations of gay and straight male patients. Italian male, straight, licensed psychotherapists (N = 152) were presented with clinical vignettes that described a gay (versus straight) male patient reporting either a straight-stereotypical disorder (i.e., rage dyscontrol) or a gay-stereotypical disorder (i.e., sexual compulsivity). Results revealed that treatment efficacy expectations were influenced by the patient’s sexual orientation and the stereotypicality of the disorder. Specifically, psychotherapists anticipated fewer benefits from psychotherapy when gay patients reported a sexual disorder rather than a rage disorder. Furthermore, explicit and implicit levels of sexual prejudice did not play any role in driving such results. Taken together, these findings reveal that sexual stereotyping might exert its subtle effects among clinicians by influencing their clinical evaluations.
Effective and Fast Estimation for Image Sensor Noise Via Constrained Weighted Least Squares

Noise estimation is crucial in many image processing algorithms such as image denoising. Conventionally, the noise is assumed as a signal-independent additive white Gaussian process. However, for the real raw data of image sensor, the present noise should be practically modeled as signal dependent. In this paper, we propose an effective and fast image sensor noise estimation method for a single raw image. The noise model parameters are estimated via constrained weighted least squares (WLS) fitting on a number of data samples, each of which is generated from a group of weakly textured patches. Specifically, we first design a fast scheme for selecting weakly textured patches, with the guidance of image histogram. To robustly fit the data samples, we then explicitly account for the credibility of each sample by measuring the texture strength of the grouped patches. The image sensor noise estimation is finally formulated as a constrained WLS optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that our method could run much faster than the existing schemes, while retaining the state-of-the-art estimation performance.