Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple coding and space-time multi-user detection in multiple antenna systems

We study transmit power adaption and capacity-approaching coding/decoding in multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fading channels under the assumption that perfect channel state information is known at both the transmitter and the receiver. The capacity of MIMO systems with transmitter channel state information can be achieved via two schemes: a multiple coding scheme with temporal and spatial water filling and a single coding scheme with temporal and spatial water filling. The former requires an infinite number of different codes and the latter requires inter-block coding and therefore a very long code. We propose three different simple, but powerful, methods for transforming the MIMO fading channel into a set of additive white noise Gaussian channels, to which standard codes for the Gaussian channel can then be applied. We show through a number of examples that these methods can closely approach channel capacity. The code length of the proposed multiple-coding scheme can be much shorter since it can adapt its rate to fading conditions. Also the code length is determined solely by the length of codes chosen for the AWGN channel(s), not the fading dynamics. We study the applications of space-time block codes in DS-CDMA system. We propose subspace-based blind decoders for the downlink which can blindly suppress the multiple access interferences from other users and exploit the advantages provided by multiple antennas simultaneously. Our schemes can be used for quite a few existing space-time block codes because we borrow the structure of linear dispersion codes. We also propose non-coherent blind decoders for the downlink of DS-CDMA system equipped with multiple antennas. Our non-coherent blind decoders can suppress the multiple access interferences and exploit diversity gain without knowing the channel state information either at the base station or at the mobile station. Our simulations results show that the proposed blind decoders significantly outperform the traditional method currently used.
Low Threshold Lasing of GaN-Based VCSELs With Sub-Nanometer Roughness Polishing

Low threshold lasing at room temperature was achieved in optically pumped GaN-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) with sub-nanometer roughness polishing. The cavity region sandwiched by two dielectric distributed Bragg reflectors, incorporating InGaN/GaN multiquantum wells, a p-type AlGaN layer, and n- and p-type GaN layers, is a typical structure for electrically driven VCSELs. We observed lasing at a wavelength of 431.0 nm with a low threshold pumping energy density of ~ 3.2 mJ/cm2 and a high spontaneous emission coupling factor of ~ 0.09. These results were attributed to the significant reduction of the internal cavity loss by the removal of the high-dislocation GaN region, the reduction of cavity length, and the achievement of sub-nanometer level surface roughness (root mean square roughness of 0.3 nm) via inductively coupled plasma etching and chemical mechanical polishing. The loss mechanism is discussed and loss is quantitatively calculated in this letter.
Tissue concentrations of clofazimine (B663) in man.

Abstract Clofazimine (B663) has been the subject of considerable study in the experimental animal because of its antimycobacterial activity. This is the first study of the tissue distribution of B663 in man. Three leprosy patients were studied at autopsy; a skin biopsy was studied in a fourth patient. Tissue concentrations were analyzed by a simple chemical method. Tissue coloration was observed in the internal organs. Initially, the subcutaneous tissues appeared gray to opaque, but within minutes of exposure to the air began turning a yellow-orange color; after some ten minutes, tissues high in fat content were orange-red. Highest concentrations of B663 were observed in tissues with high fat content and in the bile. Tissues with a reticuloendothelial component or high vascularity also showed relatively high concentrations. High levels were present also in the liver and in the gall bladder.
Line Distillation: Increasing Cache Capacity by Filtering Unused Words in Cache Lines

Caches are organized at a line-size granularity to exploit spatial locality. However, when spatial locality is low, many words in the cache line are not used. Unused words occupy cache space but do not contribute to cache hits. Filtering these words can allow the cache to store more cache lines. We show that unused words in a cache line are unlikely to be accessed in the less recent part of the LRU stack. We propose line distillation (LDIS), a technique that retains only the used words and evicts the unused words in a cache line. We also propose distill cache, a cache organization to utilize the capacity created by LDIS. Our experiments with 16 memory-intensive benchmarks show that LDIS reduces the average misses for a 1MB 8-way L2 cache by 30% and improves the average IPC by 12%
Using interviews as research instruments

Research differs in a number of aspects but they do have some commonalities. Many facets are involved in conducting research. One very essential factor is collecting data. Data collection can be gathered from a number of sources, which include documents, the workplace, the Internet surveys, focus groups, field notes, questionnaires and taped social interaction or interviews. This article focuses on interviews as a method of data collection—namely structured interviews, semi-structured interviews, unstructured interviews and non-directive interviews, and some of the ethical issues involved in conducting interviews.
Identification of a Glutamic Acid and an Aspartic Acid Residue Essential for Catalytic Activity of Aspergillopepsin II, a Non-pepsin Type Acid Proteinase*

Aspergillopepsin II from Aspergillus niger var. macrosporus is a non-pepsin type or pepstatin-insensitive acid proteinase. To identify the catalytic residues of the enzyme, all acidic residues that are conserved in the homologous proteinases of family A4 were replaced with Asn, Gln, or Ala using site-directed mutagenesis. The wild-type and mutant pro-enzymes were heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli and refolded in vitro. The wild-type pro-enzyme was shown to be processed into a two-chain active enzyme under acidic conditions. Most of the recombinant mutant pro-enzymes showed significant activity under acidic conditions because of autocatalytic activation except for the D123N, D123A, E219Q, and E219A mutants. The D123A, E219Q, and E219A mutants showed neither enzymatic activity nor autoprocessing activity under acidic conditions. The circular dichroism spectra of the mutant pro- and mature enzymes were essentially the same as those of the wild-type pro- and mature enzyme, respectively, indicating that the mutant pro-enzymes were correctly folded. In addition, two single and one double mutant pro-enzyme, D123E, E219D, and D123E/E219D, did not show enzymatic activity under acidic conditions. Taken together, Glu-219 and Asp-123 are deduced to be the catalytic residues of aspergillopepsin II.
Formaldehyde Exposure and Irritative Effects on Medical Examiners, Pathologic Anatomy Post-Graduate Students and Technicians

Background: Exposure to formaldehyde (FA) causes irritative effects and induces nasopharyngeal cancer; the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, Lyon) classified FA as carcinogenic to humans, Group 1. Many studies have been published so far concerning the occupational exposure of industrial workers, embalmers, pathologists and anatomists to FA but very few data regarding medical examiners are available. Methods: To assess the extent to which subjects were exposed to FA, airborne concentrations of this chemical were measured by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). In September–October 2006 we examined the personnel, which worked in an autopsy room (medical examiners) and in three laboratories of pathologic anatomy of the University Medical School of Bari, Policlinico Hospital, Southern Italy. Irritative effects were also investigated. Results: All the personal exposure data obtained exceeded the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Threshold Limit Value-Time Weighted Average (NIOSH TLV-TWA: 0.02 mg/m3) and, in a few cases, even the American Conference of Industrial Hygienists Threshold Limit Value-Ceiling level (ACGIH TLV-C: 0.37 mg/m3). Conclusion: Irritative effects in more than 50% of the workers enrolled, increasing the risk of injuries.
An Efficient Key Management Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advances in integrated circuit technologies, microprocessor hardware, wireless communications, embedded systems and technologies as well as the emergence of Ad-hoc networking, made up the concept of wireless sensor networks. Regarding the nature of sensors and the nature of the environment of deployment sensor networks are exposed to many attacks more than any other networks, therefore new strategies and protocols of security must be defined for these networks taking into consideration the characteristics of sensors as well as the architecture of the network. In this paper we propose a lightweight implementation of public key infrastructure called cluster based public infrastructure (CBPKI), CBPKI is based on the security and the authenticity of the base station for executing a set of handshakes intended to establish session keys between the base station and sensors over the network used for ensuring data confidentiality and integrity.
Gene Conversion-Like Events in the Diversification of Human Rearranged IGHV3-23*01 Gene Sequences

Gene conversion (GCV), a mechanism mediated by activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) is well established as a mechanism of immunoglobulin diversification in a few species. However, definitive evidence of GCV-like events in human immunoglobulin genes is scarce. The lack of evidence of GCV in human rearranged immunoglobulin gene sequences is puzzling given the presence of highly similar germline donors and the presence of all the enzymatic machinery required for GCV. In this study, we undertook a computational analysis of rearranged IGHV3-23*01 gene sequences from common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) patients, AID-deficient patients, and healthy individuals to survey “GCV-like” activities. We analyzed rearranged IGHV3-23*01 gene sequences obtained from total PBMC RNA and single-cell polymerase chain reaction of individual B cell lysates. Our search identified strong evidence of GCV-like activity. We observed that GCV-like tracts are flanked by AID hotspot motifs. Structural modeling of IGHV3-23*01 gene sequence revealed that hypermutable bases flanking GCV-like tracts are in the single stranded DNA (ssDNA) of stable stem-loop structures (SLSs). ssDNA is inherently fragile and also an optimal target for AID. We speculate that GCV could have been initiated by the targeting of hypermutable bases in ssDNA state in stable SLSs, plausibly by AID. We have observed that the frequency of GCV-like events is significantly higher in rearranged IGHV3-23-*01 sequences from healthy individuals compared to that of CVID patients. We did not observe GCV-like events in rearranged IGHV3-23-*01 sequences from AID-deficient patients. GCV, unlike somatic hypermutation (SHM), can result in multiple base substitutions that can alter many amino acids. The extensive changes in antibody affinity by GCV-like events would be instrumental in protecting humans against pathogens that diversify their genome by antigenic shift.
Invasion team sports: strategy and match modeling

Performance in invasion team sports (ITS) is highly dependent on the appropriate execution of an efficient team strategy by the players. Strategy enables individual and group actions to be organized in order to produce collective execution, increasing the diversity and unpredictability of the team’s actions. Nonetheless, the scientific literature has mainly analyzed match events without integrating information regarding the observed behavioral patterns and team strategies. As neither match dynamics nor its relation with strategy has been modeled, this study accomplishes these goals through the following steps. First, the organization of collective play was defined by modeling the strategic control of players’ actions and the coordination of cooperative actions between two or more players. Second, a model was constructed that supports the design of strategies, including constraints that ensure effective usefulness of the strategy. Third, the integration between the strategy model and the dynamical structure of the confront was established through the match model. The presented model may provide insight for team training, match analysis, support the development of intelligent software to help coaches design team strategies and as prior information about the collective movements of the team players acquired from automatic player recognition using digital video images.
Sprout: A Functional Caching Approach to Minimize Service Latency in Erasure-Coded Storage

Modern distributed storage systems often use erasure codes to protect against disk and node failures to increase reliability, while trying to meet the latency requirements of the applications and clients. Storage systems may have caches at the proxy or client ends in order to reduce the latency. In this paper, we consider a novel caching framework with erasure code called functional caching. Functional caching involves using erasure-coded chunks in the cache such that the code formed by the chunks in storage nodes and cache combined are maximal-distance-separable erasure codes. Based on the arrival rates of different files, placement of file chunks on the servers, and the service time distribution of storage servers, an optimal functional caching placement and the access probabilities of the file request from different disks are considered. The proposed algorithm gives significant latency improvement in both simulations and a prototyped solution in an open-source, cloud storage deployment.
Gossip-based peer sampling

Gossip-based communication protocols are appealing in large-scale distributed applications such as information dissemination, aggregation, and overlay topology management. This paper factors out a fundamental mechanism at the heart of all these protocols: the peer-sampling service. In short, this service provides every node with peers to gossip with. We promote this service to the level of a first-class abstraction of a large-scale distributed system, similar to a name service being a first-class abstraction of a local-area system. We present a generic framework to implement a peer-sampling service in a decentralized manner by constructing and maintaining dynamic unstructured overlays through gossiping membership information itself. Our framework generalizes existing approaches and makes it easy to discover new ones. We use this framework to empirically explore and compare several implementations of the peer-sampling service. Through extensive simulation experiments we show that---although all protocols provide a good quality uniform random stream of peers to each node locally---traditional theoretical assumptions about the randomness of the unstructured overlays as a whole do not hold in any of the instances. We also show that different design decisions result in severe differences from the point of view of two crucial aspects: load balancing and fault tolerance. Our simulations are validated by means of a wide-area implementation.
Consistent sequential activity across diverse forms of UP states under ketamine anesthesia

During slow‐wave sleep, the neocortex shows complex, self‐organized spontaneous activity. Similar slow‐wave oscillations are present under anesthesia where massive, persistent network activity (UP states) alternates with periods of generalized neural silence (DOWN states). To investigate the neuronal activity patterns occurring during UP states, we recorded simultaneously from populations of cells in neocortical layer V of ketamine/xylazine‐anesthetized rats. UP states formed a diverse class. In particular, simultaneous‐onset UP states were typically accompanied by sharp field potentials and 10–14 Hz modulation, and were often grouped in a 3 Hz (‘delta’) pattern. Longer, slow‐onset UP states did not exhibit 10–14 Hz modulation, and showed a slow propagation across recording electrodes (‘traveling waves’). Despite this diversity, the temporal patterns of spiking activity were similar across different UP state types. Analysis of cross‐correlograms revealed conserved temporal relationships among neurons, with each neuron having specific timing during UP states. As a group, putative interneurons were most active at the beginning of UP states and putative pyramidal cells were active uniformly throughout the duration of UP states. These results show that UP states under ketamine anesthesia have a stable, fine‐structured firing pattern despite a large variability in global structure.
Developmental Origins of Limb Developmental Instability in Human Fetuses: Many Abnormalities Make the Difference

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is the small random deviation from perfect symmetry in bilateral traits and is often used to assess developmental instability (DI) experienced by organisms. In this study, with a unique dataset of 1389 deceased human fetuses, we investigated the relationship between abnormal development and human limb FA in different ways, using a more fundamental approach than usually done. We studied whether there is an underlying developmental basis of DI, as measured by FA, by investigating, first, whether limb FA can be attributed to developmental abnormalities associated with specific organ systems, germ layers or patterning processes, and second, whether limb FA increases with increasing number of developmental abnormalities either gradually, or in a threshold-like fashion. Limb FA was found to increase in fetuses with cardiovascular and nervous system abnormalities. Fetuses with ectoderm-derived abnormalities were also found to have significantly higher limb FA, but no other germ layers were found to be associated. We found no significant correlation between specific developmental processes, such as neural crest development, segmentation, midline and left-right patterning and limb FA. Although only some congenital abnormalities were correlated with limb FA, our results do suggest that limb FA increases when an increasing number of organ systems, germ layers or developmental pathways are disrupted. Therefore, we conclude that limb FA is mainly a good indicator for DI in the case of particularly severe perturbations of development and that FA does not reflect the subtler deviations from developmental stability.
Clinical-pathological Characteristics and Prognostic Factors for Papillary Thyroid Microcarcinoma in the Elderly

Background: The incidence of papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) has increased dramatically over the past three decades worldwide. The annual rate of increase in the elderly (≥65) PTMC patients is 1.4 times higher than that in the adult (<65) PTMC patients. The aim of the present study is to identify the clinical-pathological characteristics and prognostic factors in the elderly PTMC patients. Methods: The source population is PTMC patients whose information is available in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database (2004-2013). We analyzed specific selected clinical-pathological parameters and prognostic factors for the PTMC patients who were aged 65 or above (N=4812). Results: Within the elderly group, the male patients, in comparison to the females, had a higher percentage of lymph-node metastases (5.29% vs. 12.27%, P < 0.001), distant metastasis (0.27% vs. 1.07%, P < 0.001), and stage III-IV tumors (9.19% vs. 15.85%, P < 0.001). Moreover, the elderly patients had a lower median cause-specific survival (CSS) compared with the adult patients (P < 0.001). Stage III-IV disease (hazard ratio (HR): 8.064, P < 0.001) was a strong risk factor for PTMC CSS. Being female (HR: 0.440, P = 0.011), total thyroidectomy (HR: 0.057, P = 0.001), and lobectomy (HR: 0.058, P < 0.001) were all strong protectors of PTMC CSS. Conclusion: Thyroidectomy improved CSS of the elderly PTMC patients. Compared with thyroid lobectomy, total thyroidectomy did not increase CSS for the elderly PTMC patients. The elderly PTMC patients who received radio therapy did not experience an increase in CSS.
Acute Heat-Evoked Temperature Sensation Is Impaired but Not Abolished in Mice Lacking TRPV1 and TRPV3 Channels

The discovery of heat-sensitive Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid ion channels (ThermoTRPVs) greatly advanced our molecular understanding of acute and injury-evoked heat temperature sensation. ThermoTRPV channels are activated by partially overlapping temperatures ranging from warm to supra-threshold noxious heat. TRPV1 is activated by noxious heat temperature whereas TRPV3 can be activated by warm as well as noxious heat temperatures. Loss-of-function studies in single TRPV1 and TRPV3 knock-out mice have shown that heat temperature sensation is not completely abolished suggesting functional redundancies among these two channels and highlighting the need of a detailed analysis of TRPV1::TRPV3 double knock-out mice (V1V3dKO) which is hampered by the close proximity of the loci expressing the two channels. Here we describe the generation of a novel mouse model in which trpv1 and trpv3 genes have been inactivated using bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC)-based homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells. In these mice, using classical thermosensory tests such hot plate, tail flick and the thermotaxis gradient paradigms, we confirm that TRPV1 is the master channel for sensing noxious heat temperatures and identify a cooperative role of TRPV1 and TRPV3 for sensing a well-defined window of acute moderate heat temperature. Using the dynamic hot plate assay, we unravel an intriguing and unexpected pronounced escape behavior in TRPV1 knock-out mice that was attenuated in the V1V3dKO. Together, and in agreement with the temperature activation overlap between TRPV1 and TRPV3 channels, our data provide in vivo evidence of a cooperative role between skin-derived TRPV3 and primary sensory neurons-enriched TRPV1 in modulation of moderate and noxious heat temperature sensation and suggest that other mechanisms are required for heat temperature sensation.