Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Text-to-Speech Synthesis provides a complete, end-to-end account of the process of generating speech by computer. Giving an in-depth explanation of all aspects of current speech synthesis technology, it assumes no specialized prior knowledge. Introductory chapters on linguistics, phonetics, signal processing and speech signals lay the foundation, with subsequent material explaining how this knowledge is put to use in building practical systems that generate speech. Including coverage of the very latest techniques such as unit selection, hidden Markov model synthesis, and statistical text analysis, explanations of the more traditional techniques such as format synthesis and synthesis by rule are also provided. Weaving together the various strands of this multidisciplinary field, the book is designed for graduate students in electrical engineering, computer science, and linguistics. It is also an ideal reference for practitioners in the fields of human communication interaction and telephony.
One-sided communication and synchronization for non-coherent memory-coupled cores

The trend towards the integration of many cores per chip will raise the demand for new many-core architectures if established multi-core techniques such as hardware implemented cache-coherence limit scalability. Parallel applications especially with dynamically changing access pattern can benefit from software supported weaker memory consistency models in combination with one-sided communication. The realization of one-sided communication through direct access of non-coherent shared memory requires flush operations and synchronization points. In this paper, we analyze the effect of low-overhead hardware-supported synchronization methods for shared memory windows with different memory models as described by the one-sided communication extensions of MPI-3. Moreover, we compare this approach with common message passing based implementation.
DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR MIGRAINE AND PSYCHOGENIC HEADACHE IN CHILDREN

The headache histories obtained from 214 children were analysed by computer to see whether it was possible to identify and classify migraine, and to distinguish children with psychogenic headache. During headache attacks, most children had no or very few associated symptoms. For classification, 175 patients were divided into four homogeneous groups; the remaining 39 could not be grouped. An overlap between the different groups was found. Psychogenic headache emerged as a clearly definable syndrome, characterised by psychological problems and daily headache for a period of at least one month (10 patients). When the 214 patients were grouped according to the classification of the Headache Classification Committee of the International Headache Society, distinguishing those children with psychogenic headache was no longer possible.
Molecular Rotors as Switches

The use of a functional molecular unit acting as a state variable provides an attractive alternative for the next generations of nanoscale electronics. It may help overcome the limits of conventional MOSFETd due to their potential scalability, low-cost, low variability, and highly integratable characteristics as well as the capability to exploit bottom-up self-assembly processes. This bottom-up construction and the operation of nanoscale machines/devices, in which the molecular motion can be controlled to perform functions, have been studied for their functionalities. Being triggered by external stimuli such as light, electricity or chemical reagents, these devices have shown various functions including those of diodes, rectifiers, memories, resonant tunnel junctions and single settable molecular switches that can be electronically configured for logic gates. Molecule-specific electronic switching has also been reported for several of these device structures, including nanopores containing oligo(phenylene ethynylene) monolayers, and planar junctions incorporating rotaxane and catenane monolayers for the construction and operation of complex molecular machines. A specific electrically driven surface mounted molecular rotor is described in detail in this review. The rotor is comprised of a monolayer of redox-active ligated copper compounds sandwiched between a gold electrode and a highly-doped P+ Si. This electrically driven sandwich-type monolayer molecular rotor device showed an on/off ratio of approximately 104, a read window of about 2.5 V, and a retention time of greater than 104 s. The rotation speed of this type of molecular rotor has been reported to be in the picosecond timescale, which provides a potential of high switching speed applications. Current-voltage spectroscopy (I-V) revealed a temperature-dependent negative differential resistance (NDR) associated with the device. The analysis of the device I–V characteristics suggests the source of the observed switching effects to be the result of the redox-induced ligand rotation around the copper metal center and this attribution of switching is consistent with the observed temperature dependence of the switching behavior as well as the proposed energy diagram of the device. The observed resistance switching shows the potential for future non-volatile memories and logic devices applications. This review will discuss the progress and provide a perspective of molecular motion for nanoelectronics and other applications.
Quasi‐optimal preconditioners for finite element approximations of diffusion dominated convection–diffusion equations on (nearly) equilateral triangle meshes

The paper is devoted to the spectral analysis of effective preconditioners for linear systems obtained via a finite element approximation to diffusion‐dominated convection–diffusion equations. We consider a model setting in which the structured finite element partition is made by equilateral triangles. Under such assumptions, if the problem is coercive and the diffusive and convective coefficients are regular enough, then the proposed preconditioned matrix sequences exhibit a strong eigenvalue clustering at unity, the preconditioning matrix sequence and the original matrix sequence are spectrally equivalent, and under the constant coefficients assumption, the eigenvector matrices have a mild conditioning. The obtained results allow to prove the conjugate gradient optimality and the generalized minimal residual quasi‐optimality in the case of structured uniform meshes. The interest of such a study relies on the observation that automatic grid generators tend to construct equilateral triangles when the mesh is fine enough. Numerical tests, both on the model setting and in the non‐structured case, show the effectiveness of the proposal and the correctness of the theoretical findings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cerenkov radiation imaging as a method for quantitative measurements of beta particles in a microfluidic chip

It has been observed that microfluidic chips used for synthesizing 18F-labeled compounds demonstrate visible light emission without nearby scintillators or fluorescent materials. The origin of the light was investigated and found to be consistent with the emission characteristics from Cerenkov radiation. Since 18F decays through the emission of high-energy positrons, the energy threshold for beta particles, i.e. electrons or positrons, to generate Cerenkov radiation was calculated for water and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), the most commonly used polymer-based material for microfluidic chips. Beta particles emitted from 18F have a continuous energy spectrum, with a maximum energy that exceeds this energy threshold for both water and PDMS. In addition, the spectral characteristics of the emitted light from 18F in distilled water were also measured, yielding a broad distribution from 300 nm to 700 nm, with higher intensity at shorter wavelengths. A photograph of the 18F solution showed a bluish-white light emitted from the solution, further suggesting Cerenkov radiation. In this study, the feasibility of using this Cerenkov light emission as a method for quantitative measurements of the radioactivity within the microfluidic chip in situ was evaluated. A detector previously developed for imaging microfluidic platforms was used. The detector consisted of a charge-coupled device (CCD) optically coupled to a lens. The system spatial resolution, minimum detectable activity and dynamic range were evaluated. In addition, the calibration of a Cerenkov signal versus activity concentration in the microfluidic chip was determined. This novel method of Cerenkov radiation measurements will provide researchers with a simple yet robust quantitative imaging tool for microfluidic applications utilizing beta particles.
Cloud-Assisted Mobile-Access of Health Data With Privacy and Auditability

Motivated by the privacy issues, curbing the adoption of electronic healthcare systems and the wild success of cloud service models, we propose to build privacy into mobile healthcare systems with the help of the private cloud. Our system offers salient features including efficient key management, privacy-preserving data storage, and retrieval, especially for retrieval at emergencies, and auditability for misusing health data. Specifically, we propose to integrate key management from pseudorandom number generator for unlinkability, a secure indexing method for privacy-preserving keyword search which hides both search and access patterns based on redundancy, and integrate the concept of attribute-based encryption with threshold signing for providing role-based access control with auditability to prevent potential misbehavior, in both normal and emergency cases.
The Use of Antiepileptic Drugs—Principles and Practice

Summary: Up to 70% of people developing epilepsy may expect to become seizure free with optimum antiepileptic drug (AED) therapy. The remaining 30% are the most difficult to treat. Most patients are controlled on a single AED, but a small proportion requires a combination of two agents. Add‐on therapy with a second drug, rather than substitution, may be a viable and rational approach in some patients, particularly if the first drug is relatively well tolerated. Precise classification of the type of seizures, as well as the epilepsy syndrome, together with careful recording of both seizures and adverse effects, are essential if rational management decisions are to be made. The goal of therapy should be complete seizure freedom with a single drug taken once or twice a day and without adverse effects. If control is difficult to achieve, the maximum tolerated dose of each drug should be explored, but a balance needs to be struck between adverse effects and control of seizures. In patients in whom treatment appears to be ineffective, the diagnosis of epilepsy and adherence to therapy should be reviewed. Drugs used in combination must be carefully selected, as poor adherence, drug interactions, and toxicity are more likely if more than one drug is prescribed. Agents are usually chosen according to seizure type, patient characteristics, and often by clinician preference. Those that are better tolerated have a low potential for pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic interactions, and those that can be easily introduced without any complicated titration schedule have an advantage.
Axonal Collateral Branching of Neurones in the Inferior Olive Projecting to the Cerebellar Paramedian Lobule in the Rabbit

The double fluorescent retrograde technique was employed to examine the distribution of the inferior olive (IO) neurones projecting to the cortex of the rostral and caudal parts of the paramedian lobule (PML) in the rabbit cerebellum, known to be the face-forelimb and hindlimb receiving areas, respectively. Moreover, this technique was also used to investigate the possibility that IO projections reaching these two somatotopically non-homologous PML regions are collaterals of the same axones. No other reports have addressed this question. After non-overlapping unilateral injections of the cytoplasmic tracer fast blue (FB) and the nuclear dye diamidino yellow (DY) into the rostral and caudal PML, respectively, numerous single FB- or DY-labelled cells were found in the defined regions of the contralateral IO. These regions showed considerable overlap, apart from the dorsal accessory olive where a clear spatial separation of labelled cell groups was observed. Furthermore, double FB + DY-labelled neurones (n = 310) were seen in the medial accessory olive, the dorsal and ventral laminas of the principal olive, in the dorsomedial cell column and the β nucleus. It suggests that IO neurones may branch to supply the two functionally different PML regions and in this way participate in the mechanisms of forelimb-hindlimb coordination.
Generation, Diversity Determination, and Application to Antibody Selection of a Human Naïve Fab Library

We constructed a large naïve human Fab library (3 × 1010 colonies) from the lymphocytes of 809 human donors, assessed available diversities of the heavy-chain variable (VH) and κ light-chain variable (VK) domain repertoires, and validated the library by selecting Fabs against 10 therapeutically relevant antigens by phage display. We obtained a database of unique 7,373 VH and 41,804 VK sequences by 454 pyrosequencing, and analyzed the repertoires. The distribution of VH and VK subfamilies and germline genes in our antibody repertoires slightly differed from those in earlier published natural antibody libraries. The frequency of somatic hypermutations (SHMs) in heavy-chain complementarity determining region (HCDR)1 and HCDR2 are higher compared with the natural IgM repertoire. Analysis of position-specific SHMs in CDRs indicates that asparagine, threonine, arginine, aspartate and phenylalanine are the most frequent non-germline residues on the antibody-antigen interface and are converted mostly from the germline residues, which are highly represented in germline SHM hotspots. The amino acid composition and length-dependent changes in amino acid frequencies of HCDR3 are similar to those in previous reports, except that frequencies of aspartate and phenylalanine are a little higher in our repertoire. Taken together, the results show that this antibody library shares common features of natural antibody repertoires and also has unique features. The antibody library will be useful in the generation of human antibodies against diverse antigens, and the information about the diversity of natural antibody repertoires will be valuable in the future design of synthetic human antibody libraries with high functional diversity.
Computer Navigation Allows for Accurate Reduction of Femoral Fractures

Femoral nailing for reduction and stabilization of femoral fractures is a common orthopaedic procedure. However, angular and rotational malalignment is not an infrequent result, and extensive use of fluoroscopy is commonly involved. We tested the accuracy of a computerized navigation system to enhance multiplanar fracture reduction and to decrease the requirement for fluoroscopy. We used a cadaveric femur fixed in a simulator and optically tracked. After obtaining five fluoroscopic images for each reduction attempt, accuracy measurements were taken. We first measured alignment of the intact bone using the navigation system, followed by open and blind reduction of simple and segmental fractures. For the blind, closed reduction trials, the accuracy of restoration of femoral length was 1.2 ± 0.4 mm (mean ± standard deviation) for a simple fracture and 1.9 ± 1.8 mm for a segmental fracture. Rotational accuracy was 1.7° ± 1.9° and 2.5° ± 1.8°, respectively. Open reduction using this model yielded no difference between the reduced fracture and the intact bone in coronal and rotational alignment. Computerized navigation has the potential for increasing precision in fracture reduction while minimizing fluoroscopic requirements.
Source characteristics and geological implications of the January 2016 induced earthquake swarm near Crooked Lake, Alberta

Ruijia Wang,1 Yu Jeffrey Gu,1 Ryan Schultz,2 Miao Zhang3 and Ahyi Kim4 1Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. E-mail: ruijia3@ualberta.ca 2Alberta Geological Survey, Edmonton, Canada 3Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA 4Department of Material System Science, Yokohama City University, Yokohama City, Japan
Dendritic cells and MPIF‐1: chemotactic activity and inhibition of endogenous chemokine production by IFN‐γ and CD40 ligation

We have examined the biological activity of the CC chemokine myeloid progenitor inhibitory factor 1 (MPIF‐1) on human dendritic cells. MPIF‐1 has chemotactic activity on dendritic cells derived from either peripheral blood monocytes or cord blood CD34+ progenitors. However, chemokine treatment did not induce further cell activation or maturation. In addition, MPIF‐1 is constitutively released by monocyte‐derived dendritic cells but not macrophages or monocytes (resting or stimulated). The proinflammatory stimuli lipopolysaccharide and tumor necrosis factor α, which induced the release of monocyte chemotactic protein‐1, macrophage inflammatory protein‐1α (MIP‐1α), MIP‐1β, and interleukin‐8, did not affect MPIF‐1 release. In contrast, CD40 ligation and interferon‐γ treatment, while stimulating the production of the other chemokines, caused a pronounced reduction of MPIF‐1 transcript and protein release. Thus, in dendritic cells the regulation of the production and release of MPIF‐1 is distinct in comparison to other CC and CXC chemokines. J. Leukoc. Biol. 65: 822–828; 1999.
Binding Preferences, Surface Attachment, Diffusivity, and Orientation of a Family 1 Carbohydrate-binding Module on Cellulose

Background: Family 1 carbohydrate-binding modules (CBMs) bind selectively to the hydrophobic surfaces of cellulose. Results: Simulations have shown that the planar face of the CBM binds preferentially to the hydrophobic face. Conclusion: Thermodynamic driving forces enable transfer of the CBM from the hydrophilic to hydrophobic surfaces. Significance: Selectivity of CBM provides access of cellulases to active surfaces of cellulose. Cellulase enzymes often contain carbohydrate-binding modules (CBMs) for binding to cellulose. The mechanisms by which CBMs recognize specific surfaces of cellulose and aid in deconstruction are essential to understand cellulase action. The Family 1 CBM from the Trichoderma reesei Family 7 cellobiohydrolase, Cel7A, is known to selectively bind to hydrophobic surfaces of native cellulose. It is most commonly suggested that three aromatic residues identify the planar binding face of this CBM, but several recent studies have challenged this hypothesis. Here, we use molecular simulation to study the CBM binding orientation and affinity on hydrophilic and hydrophobic cellulose surfaces. Roughly 43 μs of molecular dynamics simulations were conducted, which enables statistically significant observations. We quantify the fractions of the CBMs that detach from crystal surfaces or diffuse to other surfaces, the diffusivity along the hydrophobic surface, and the overall orientation of the CBM on both hydrophobic and hydrophilic faces. The simulations demonstrate that there is a thermodynamic driving force for the Cel7A CBM to bind preferentially to the hydrophobic surface of cellulose relative to hydrophilic surfaces. In addition, the simulations demonstrate that the CBM can diffuse from hydrophilic surfaces to the hydrophobic surface, whereas the reverse transition is not observed. Lastly, our simulations suggest that the flat faces of Family 1 CBMs are the preferred binding surfaces. These results enhance our understanding of how Family 1 CBMs interact with and recognize specific cellulose surfaces and provide insights into the initial events of cellulase adsorption and diffusion on cellulose.
AN OVERVIEW OF GROUP KEY MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN IEEE 802.16E NETWORKS

The computer industry has defined the IEEE 802.16 family of standards that will enable mobile devices to access a broadband network as an alternative to digital subscriber line technology. As the mobile devices join and leave a network, security measures must be taken to ensure the safety of the network against unauthorized usage by encryption and group key management. IEEE 802.16e uses Multicast and Broadcast Service (MBS) as an efficient mechanism to distribute the same data concurrently to Multiple mobile Stations (MSs) through one Base Station (BS). To generate, update and distribute the group keys, the MBS applies Multicast and Broadcast Rekeying Algorithm (MBRA). The main performance parameters of group key management schemes are typically communications, computation and storage cost as well as scalability. The purpose of this paper is to review and investigate the challenges and security issues of performance parameters in different group key managements in IEEE 802.16e.
Effects of anabolic steroids on diaphragm impairment induced by methylprednisolone in emphysematous hamsters.

This study was designed to investigate whether the administration of the anabolic steroid nandrolone decanoate is able to antagonize the loss in diaphragm function induced by long-term administration of a low-dose of methylprednisolone in emphysematous hamsters. Normal and emphysematous male hamsters were randomized to receive either saline or methylprednisolone 0.2 mg x kg(-1) x day(-1) for 9 months, with or without nandrolone decanoate 1 mg x kg(-1) x week(-1) i.m. during the final 3 months. Diaphragm contractile properties and myosin heavy chain composition were determined. Compared to control hamsters, the force generating capacity of isolated diaphragm strips decreased by approximately 12% in the emphysema group and by approximately 22% in the emphysema plus methylprednisolone group. Addition of nandrolone decanoate to the emphysema plus methylprednisolone hamsters significantly improved force generation. The atrophy of type IIa and IIx diaphragm fibres in the emphysema plus methylprednisolone group was completely reversed to the level of control hamsters by the addition of nandrolone decanoate. In conclusion, nandrolone decanoate in part reversed the loss in diaphragm force-generating capacity in emphysematous hamsters treated with methylprednisolone, and reversed type IIa and IIx fibre atrophy completely.
Effect on plasma lipid levels of different classes of mutations in the low-density lipoprotein receptor gene in patients with familial hypercholesterolemia.

We used the single-strand conformational polymorphism method to screen 311 patients with familial hypercholesterolemia from London lipid clinics and Southampton and South West Hampshire health district for mutations in the 3' part of exon 4 of the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor gene. This part of the gene codes for repeat 5 of the binding domain of the LDL receptor, which is known to be critical for the receptor-mediated removal of both triglyceride-rich lipoprotein remnants and LDL. Six previously described mutations were identified in 29 apparently unrelated individuals (9.3%), with the mutations all lying within a 50-bp fragment of the gene. Three of the mutations are null alleles producing no protein, and the other three lead to production of a defective protein. The effect of the different gene mutations on lipid levels was examined, after the data were combined with information on previously reported mutations in this patient group. Mean LDL cholesterol levels were highest in those individuals with a mutation creating a null allele (9.54 mmol/L) and were similar to levels in those individuals with a mutation affecting repeat 5 that resulted in the production of a defective protein (9.37 mmol/L). In this sample, previously identified patients with a defective protein mutation outside repeat 5 had lower mean levels of LDL cholesterol (7.78 mmol/L), which were similar to levels seen in patients in whom the specific mutation had not been identified (7.31 mmol/L). Overall, these differences were highly statistically significant (P < .001). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)