Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iterative Decoding and Soft Interference Cancellation in Fast Frequency Hopping Multiuser System Using Clipped Combining

Iterative decoding (ID) aided fast frequency hopping (FFH), M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) using clipped combining in multiple access (MA) channels is investigated. All users' data are convolutionally encoded and the encoded bits are interleaved and converted to M-ary symbols, which are transmitted using FFH-MFSK modulation. The soft metrics to be passed from the demodulator to the decoder are derived assuming a Rayleigh fading channel. We also propose a novel multiuser detection (MUD) scheme which employs joint soft decoding as well as successive interference cancellation (SIC), the receiver exploiting the soft information fed back by the decoder to the demodulator in order to cancel the interference imposed by reliable symbols. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme is capable of combatting multiuser interference and outperforms the conventional ID by about 3dB.
Serotonin activation of the ERK pathway in Hermissenda: contribution of calcium‐dependent protein kinase C

The mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade is an important contributor to synaptic plasticity and learning in both vertebrates and invertebrates. In the nudibranch mollusk Hermissenda, phosphorylation and activation of the extracellular signal‐regulated protein kinase (ERK), a key member of a MAPK cascade, is produced by one‐trial and multitrial Pavlovian conditioning. Several signal transduction pathways that are activated by 5‐hydroxytryptamine (5‐HT) and may contribute to conditioning have been identified in type B photoreceptors. However, the regulation of ERK activity by ‘upstream’ signaling molecules has not been previously investigated in Hermissenda. In the present study we examined the role of protein kinase C (PKC) in the serotonin (5‐HT) activation of the ERK pathway. The phorbol ester TPA produced an increase in ERK phosphorylation that was blocked by the PKC inhibitors GF109203X or Gö6976. TPA‐dependent ERK phosphorylation was also blocked by the MEK1 inhibitors PD098059 or U0126. The increased phosphorylation of ERK by 5‐HT was reduced but not blocked by pretreatment with the calcium chelator BAPTA‐AM or pretreatment with Gö6976 or GF109203X. These results indicate that Ca2+‐dependent PKC activation contributes to ERK phosphorylation, although a PKC‐independent pathway is also involved in 5‐HT‐dependent ERK phosphorylation and activation.
Noise figure optimization of inductively degenerated CMOS LNAs with integrated gate inductors

This paper discusses noise figure optimization techniques for inductively degenerated cascode CMOS low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) with on-chip gate inductors. Seven different optimizations techniques are discussed. Of these, five new cases provide power match and balance the transistor noise contribution and the noise contribution from all parasitic resistances in the gate circuit to achieve the best noise performance under the constraints of integrated gate inductor quality factor, power consumption, and gain. Three of the power matched techniques (two power constrained optimizations and a gain-and-power constrained optimization) are recommended as design strategies. These three optimization techniques significantly improve the noise figures for LNA designs that are to employ on-chip gate inductors.
Sequential phosphorylation of the phosphoprotein of vesicular stomatitis virus by cellular and viral protein kinases is essential for transcription activation

The phosphoprotein (P) and the large protein (L) constitute the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). We show that phosphate-free P protein expressed in bacteria is transcriptionally inactive when reconstituted with L protein and viral N-RNA template free of cellular protein kinase. Phosphorylation of P protein by a cellular kinase(s) was essential for transcription as well as for further phosphorylation by an L-associated kinase, the two kinases acting in a sequential (cascade) manner. Phosphate groups introduced by cell kinase were stable, whereas those due to L kinase underwent a turnover which was coupled to ongoing transcription. We present a model for the phosphorylation pathway of P protein and propose that continued phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of P protein may represent a transcriptional regulatory (on-off) switch of nonsegmented negative-strand RNA viruses.
2 Research and Politics The psychological effects of group discussions

Group discussions matter in politics—they affect individuals’ attitudes as well as their political participation. But how do discussions influence the strength of attitudes? This is a question that has received scant attention, despite its relevance to both empirical and normative theories of democracy. We argue that group discussion generates strong attitudes via psychological elaboration. For many, this is a positive outcome. But we also show that discussion has a downside. Specifically, homogenous group discussions—which are the norm—strengthen partisan identities, which can increase partisan bias and motivated reasoning. Using an original experiment, we find strong support for our predictions. Our results, then, underline a tension in the political effects of group discussion: while it produces normatively desirable strong attitudes, it also creates more entrenched and potentially biased partisans.
Detrimental Contribution of the Immuno-Inhibitor B7-H1 to Rabies Virus Encephalitis1

Rabies virus is the etiological agent of an acute encephalitis, which in absence of post exposure treatment is fatal in almost all cases. Virus lethality rests on its ability to evade the immune response. In this study, we analyzed the role of the immuno-inhibitory molecule B7-H1 in this virus strategy. We showed that in the brain and spinal cord of mice, rabies virus infection resulted in significant up-regulation of B7-H1 expression, which is specifically expressed in infected neurons. Correlatively, clinical rabies in B7-H1−/− mice is markedly less severe than in wild-type mice. B7-H1−/− mice display resistance to rabies. Virus invasion is reduced and the level of migratory CD8 T cells increases into the nervous system, while CD4/CD8 ratio remains unchanged in the periphery. In vivo, neuronal B7-H1 expression is critically depending on TLR3 signaling and IFN-β, because TLR3−/− mice—in which IFN-β production is reduced—showed only a limited increase of B7-H1 transcripts after infection. These data provide evidence that neurons can express the B7-H1 molecule after viral stress or exposure to a particular cytokine environment. They show that the B7-H1/PD-1 pathway can be exploited locally and in an organ specific manner—here the nervous system—by a neurotropic virus to promote successful host invasion.
Amplitude differences in high-frequency fMRI signals between eyes open and eyes closed resting states

Recent studies employing rapid sampling techniques have demonstrated that the resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) signal exhibits synchronized activities at frequencies much higher than the conventional frequency range (<0.1 Hz). However, little work has investigated the changes in the high-frequency fluctuations between different resting states. Here, we acquired rs-fMRI data at a high sampling rate (TR = 400 ms) from subjects with both eyes open (EO) and eyes closed (EC), and compared the amplitude of fluctuation (AF) between EO and EC for both the low- and high-frequency components. In addition to robust AF differences in the conventional low frequency band (<0.1 Hz) in visual cortex, primary auditory cortex and primary sensorimotor cortex (PSMC), we also detected high-frequency (primarily in 0.1–0.35 Hz) differences. The high-frequency results without covariates regression exhibited noisy patterns. For the data with nuisance covariates regression, we found a significant and reproducible reduction in high-frequency AF between EO and EC in the bilateral PSMC and the supplementary motor area (SMA), and an increase in high-frequency AF in the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG). Furthermore, we investigated the effect of sampling rate by down-sampling the data to effective TR = 2 s. Briefly, by using the rapid sampling rate, we were able to detect more regions with significant differences while identifying fewer artifactual differences in the high-frequency bands as compared to the down-sampled dataset. We concluded that (1) high-frequency fluctuations of rs-fMRI signals can be modulated by different resting states and thus may be of physiological importance; and (2) the regression of covariates and the use of fast sampling rates are superior for revealing high-frequency differences in rs-fMRI signals.
Climate change and household dynamics: beyond consumption, unbounding sustainability

Scientists increasingly realise that now methodologies for modelling climate change have been refined, what is needed is geographically sensitive research on its social and cultural dimensions (Hulme 2008). As a recent editorial in Science acknowledged, ‘Natural sciences should no longer dictate the Earth system research agenda; social sciences will be at least as important in its next phase’ (Reid et al. 2009, 245). In this essay, we seek to seize this moment of interdisciplinary convergence by raising fresh questions about much-needed research on the social and cultural geographical dimensions of climate change. Specifically, we ask whether key conceptual boundaries – often too comfortably framed around ‘sustainability’ and ‘consumption’ – require dismantling, and what might be necessary to move beyond them. As a team of researchers based in a regional city at the heart of the Australian coal and steel industries, we are using close survey and ethnographic work on the everyday practices of households in the context of climate change and sustainability talk. Wollongong is a location we have dubbed ‘carbon central’, where coal and steel industries remain integral to the economy and imaginary of a community and region – a place where the conventional distancing of climate change among the general population (cf. Lorenzoni et al. 2007) might be expected to occur in novel and unanticipated ways, if at all. We see two boundaries constraining research into social and cultural geographical dimensions of climate change: one around consumption as the main lens through which household sustainability is understood (which we argue needs to be transgressed, invoking a wider understanding of consumers also as producers); and a second around notions of sustainability that risk becoming unhelpfully normative. We advance a notion of cultural economy that identifies articulations between households, industry and government, and traces how responsibilities are shared and structured amongst these actors. We are mindful of Diana Liverman’s (2008) question about how to ‘upscale’ social research to match scientific datasets, if social and cultural researchers (including human geographers) are to claim a rightful place in the sandpit of policy debate over climate change adaptation and mitigation. We seek to enhance discussions before particular understandings of household sustainability and scale become too reified. For example, we note Reid et al.’s (2009) theorisation of the household as a significant scale of analysis in relation to proenvironmental behaviour. However, the conceptualisation of what constitutes pro-environmental behaviour remains opaque. Further, households are understood primarily as sites of consumption, rather than also production (and ⁄ or having their own complex internal economies). Much is at stake from challenging the conceptual boundaries that are rapidly forming around households, consumption and sustainability.
An efficient algorithm for the “optimal” stable marriage

In an instance of size n of the stable marriage problem, each of n men and n women ranks the members of the opposite sex in order of preference. A stable matching is a complete matching of men and women such that no man and woman who are not partners both prefer each other to their actual partners under the matching. It is well known [2] that at least one stable matching exists for every stable marriage instance. However, the classical Gale-Shapley algorithm produces a marriage that greatly favors the men at the expense of the women, or vice versa. The problem arises of finding a stable matching that is optimal under some more equitable or egalitarian criterion of optimality. This problem was posed by Knuth [6] and has remained unsolved for some time. Here, the objective of maximizing the average (or, equivalently, the total) “satisfaction” of all people is used. This objective is achieved when a person's satisfaction is measured by the position of his/her partner in his/her preference list. By exploiting the structure of the set of all stable matchings, and using graph-theoretic methods, an O(n4) algorithm for this problem is derived.
A testicular-interstitial-cell-stimulating gonadotrophin in a child with hepatoblastoma and sexular precocity.

ABSTRACT A gonadotrophin with testicular interstitial-cell-stimulating activity was detected in extracts of hepatoblastoma and a pulmonary metastasis and in the urine of a 3-yr-old male with isosexual precocity manifested by advanced skeletal maturation (bone age 4 yr), adult urinary testosterone excretion (62 μg/day) and Ley dig cell hyperplasia. The gonadotrophin content of the hepatoblastoma, measured by the ventral prostate weight method in immature, hypophysectomized male rats, was 2.6 IU/g. This gonadotrophin was immunologically similar to the luteinizing principle in the Second International Reference Preparation of Human Menopausal Gonadotrophin (2nd IRP-HMG) in a double-antibody radioimmunoassay employing guinea pig antiserum to human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG), purified human pituitary luteinizing hormone (LH)-131I as tracer and the 2nd IRP-HMG as standard. The standard curves obtained utilizing the 2nd IRP-HMG, pituitary LH and HCG were parallel in this assay. Extracts of normal liver, of li.
The perceptual saliency of fearful eyes and smiles: A signal detection study

Facial features differ in the amount of expressive information they convey. Specifically, eyes are argued to be essential for fear recognition, while smiles are crucial for recognising happy expressions. In three experiments, we tested whether expression modulates the perceptual saliency of diagnostic facial features and whether the feature’s saliency depends on the face configuration. Participants were presented with masked facial features or noise at perceptual conscious threshold. The task was to indicate whether eyes (experiments 1-3A) or a mouth (experiment 3B) was present. The expression of the face and its configuration (i.e. spatial arrangement of the features) were manipulated. Experiment 1 compared fearful with neutral expressions, experiments 2 and 3 compared fearful versus happy expressions. The detection accuracy data was analysed using Signal Detection Theory (SDT), to examine the effects of expression and configuration on perceptual precision (d’) and response bias (c), separately. Across all three experiments, fearful eyes were detected better (higher d’) than neutral and happy eyes. Eyes were more precisely detected than mouths, whereas smiles were detected better than fearful mouths. The configuration of the features had no consistent effects across the experiments on the ability to detect expressive features. But facial configuration affected consistently the response bias. Participants used a more liberal criterion for detecting the eyes in canonical configuration and fearful expression. Finally, the power in low spatial frequency of a feature predicted its discriminability index. The results suggest that expressive features are perceptually more salient with a higher d’ due to changes at the low-level visual properties, with emotions and configuration affecting perception through top-down processes, as reflected by the response bias.
Purchasing Scarce Products Under Dynamic Pricing: An Experimental Investigation

Whereas theoretical studies on dynamic pricing typically assume that consumers are either fully strategic or fully myopic, systematic empirical investigations into how consumers behave under dynamic pricing contexts are relatively rare. Focusing on scarce products, we constructed and experimentally tested a two-stage model in which a firm sells a seasonal good under exogenous inventory constraints to a market of strategic buyers. In our experiment, subjects assigned the role of buyers made purchase decisions in response to prices set by an automated seller. We find that equilibrium predictions assuming fully strategic buyers largely accounted for aggregate behavior in the experiment, and the ex post optimal decisions for subjects were overwhelmingly consistent with equilibrium prescriptions. Moreover, subjects tended to become individually more strategic as the session progressed. However, there were also nuanced systematic patterns of deviations from equilibrium that had profit and pricing implications f.
The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis

This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, emancipative cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social progress - a syndrome whose common focus has not been properly specified by classical modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as 'human development', arguing that its three components have a common focus on broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development gives people the objective means of choice by increasing individual resources; rising emancipative values strengthen people's subjective orientation towards choice; and democratization provides legal guarantees of choice by institutionalizing freedom rights. Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates that the linkage between individual resources, emancipative values and freedom rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; that this human development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect of individual resources and emancipative values on freedom rights; and that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity, as the factor which makes freedom rights effective.
Individuelle und institutionelle Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase

Der Beitrag behandelt den Ubergang in die Hochschule mit Blick auf die Passung individueller Studienvoraussetzungen und institutioneller Studienangebote. Dies wird zunachst theoretisch begrundet, bevor die besonderen Herausforderungen der Studieneingangsphase anhand einer qualitativen Interviewstudie analysiert werden. Die Ergebnisse bieten einen systematischen Uberblick kritischer Studienanforderungen, weisen ihre individuellen und institutionellen Entstehungsbedingungen aus und illustrieren ihre komplexe Verknupfung im Studienalltag. Die differenzierte Betrachtung der Studieneingangsphase mundet in Perspektiven fur eine evidenzbasierte Lehr- und Hochschulentwicklung. 19.12. 2014 | Elke Bosse & Caroline Trautwein (Hamburg)
Heterogeneous data integration by tree‐augmented naïve Bayes for protein–protein interactions prediction

Most proteins execute their functions through interacting with other proteins. Thus, understanding protein–protein interactions (PPIs) is essential to decipher biological functions in a living cell. To predict large‐scale PPIs, effective and efficient computational approaches are desirable to integrate heterogeneous data sources provided by advanced technologies. In this paper, we extend our previous work on a Bayesian classifier for human PPI predictions from model organisms, by introducing a tree‐augmented naïve Bayes (TAN) classifier. TAN maintains the simplicity and robustness of a naïve Bayes classifier while allows for the dependence among variables. Our empirical results show that by integrating features extracted from microarray expression measurements, Gene Ontology values, and orthologous scores, TAN achieves higher classification accuracy than the manually constructed Bayesian network classifier and naïve Bayes. For human PPI prediction, TAN obtains 88% sensitivity while keeping a reasonable 70% specificity on testing samples.
ATP independent type IB topoisomerase of Leishmania donovani is stimulated by ATP: an insight into the functional mechanism

Most type IB topoisomerases do not require ATP and Mg2+ for activity. However, as shown previously for vaccinia topoisomerase I, we demonstrate that ATP stimulates the relaxation activity of the unusual heterodimeric type IB topoisomerase from Leishmania donovani (LdTOP1L/S) in the absence of Mg2+. The stimulation is independent of ATP hydrolysis but requires salt as a co-activator. ATP binds to LdTOP1L/S and increases its rate of strand rotation. Docking studies indicate that the amino acid residues His93, Tyr95, Arg188 and Arg190 of the large subunit may be involved in ATP binding. Site directed mutagenesis of these four residues individually to alanine and subsequent relaxation assays reveal that the R190A mutant topoisomerase is unable to exhibit ATP-mediated stimulation in the absence of Mg2+. However, the ATP-independent relaxation activities of all the four mutant enzymes remain unaffected. Additionally, we provide evidence that ATP binds LdTOP1L/S and modulates the activity of the otherwise ATP-independent enzyme. This study establishes ATP as an activator of LdTOP1L/S in the absence of Mg2+.
Role of prostanoids in cerebrovascular responses to asphyxia and reventilation in newborn pigs.

Cerebral hemodynamics during asphyxia and reventilation were investigated in normothermic, hypothermic (35 degrees C), and indomethacin-pretreated (5 mg/kg iv) anesthetized, newborn pigs. In the normothermic group, total cerebral blood flow (CBF) measured with radioactive microspheres was 57 +/- 12 ml.min-1 x 100 g-1 during baseline, 104 +/- 19 at 1 min of asphyxia, 39 +/- 5 at 5 min of asphyxia, 186 +/- 16 at 8 min of reventilation, and 95 +/- 20 at 16 min of reventilation. During asphyxia and reventilation blood flow to brain stem was better regulated than to cerebrum or cerebellum. Baseline CBF was similar in the indomethacin and hypothermic groups (32 +/- 2 and 41 +/- 5 ml.min-1 x 100 g-1, respectively; n = 5 for each group). However, during asphyxia, blood flow was never less in either one of these groups than in the normothermic group in spite of a lack of arterial hypercapnia at 1 min in the hypothermia group. During reventilation, blood flow was sometimes lower in the hypothermic and indomethacin groups than the normothermic group but never lower when considered on a percentage change from baseline basis. We conclude that inhibition of prostanoid production with indomethacin did not limit vasodilation during these conditions.
Efficient algorithms for sequence detection in non-Gaussian noise with intersymbol interference

Sequence detection is studied for communication channels with intersymbol interference and non-Gaussian noise using a novel adaptive receiver structure. The receiver adapts itself to the noise environment using an algorithm which employs a Gaussian mixture distribution model and the expectation maximization algorithm. Two alternate procedures are studied for sequence detection. These are a procedure based on the Viterbi (1967) algorithm and a symbol-by-symbol detection procedure. The Viterbi algorithm minimizes the probability the sequence is in error and the symbol-by-symbol detector minimizes symbol error rate, which are different.