Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DFT based spatial multiplexing and maximum ratio transmission for mm-wave large MIMO

By using large point-to-point multiple input multiple output (MIMO), spatial multiplexing of a large number of data streams in wireless communications using millimeter-waves (mm- waves) can be achieved. However, according to the antenna spacing and transmitter-receiver distance, the MIMO channel is likely to be ill-conditioned. In such conditions, highly complex schemes such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) are necessary. In this paper, we propose a new low complexity system called discrete Fourier transform based spatial multiplexing (DFT-SM) with maximum ratio transmission (DFT-SM-MRT). When the DFT-SM scheme alone is used, the data streams are either mapped onto different angles of departures in the case of aligned linear arrays, or mapped onto different orbital angular momentums in the case of aligned circular arrays. Maximum ratio transmission pre-equalizes the channel and compensates for arrays misalignments. Simulation results show that, although the DFT-SM-MRT scheme has a much lower complexity than the SVD scheme, it still achieves large spectral efficiencies and is robust to misalignment and reflection.
5 the Facets of Place Contents

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Prediction of link travel times in the context of Nottingham's urban road network

Traffic congestion is becoming a serious environmental threat that must be resolved quickly. Traditionally, travel information systems have been specific to a particular mode of transport. For instance, traffic information (road conditions broadcast) has been directed at drivers. Instead, travel information systems are now being developed which incorporate route guidance systems to divert drivers away from the congested areas either by change of travel mode or travel route. The mobile travel information system developed at The Nottingham Trent University enables progression from a passive mode of interaction between traffic control systems and road-users (one-way flow of information) to an active mode. The integration of data concerning traffic flows and individual journey plans thus makes it possible to perform optimisation of travel. We focus on the issue of provision of real-time information about urban travel and assistance with planning travel. Nottingham's SCOOT (split cycle offset optimisation techniqu
Support for the European Union and the Role of Inequality: a Cross-National Examination and the Case of the Republic of Ireland

Since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 national-level contextual factors matter in different ways for individuals in EU member states when assessing support for the EU. Individuals hypothesise that EU member states economic affluence and quality of governance creates the salience of issues. This influences the criteria adopted by them when determining attitudinal factors towards the EU. When applied to individuals in less affluent EU member states individuals evaluate the EU on the basis of economic prospects, while in more affluent EU member states individuals rely on political criteria to evaluate the EU. In the least affluent EU member states individuals generalise their perceptions of national and personal economic conditions to the EU level believing that the EU does not represent their economic interests. In the most affluent EU member states individuals are equally critical of the EU but centre their judgements on the comparative quality of national governments and EU institutions. For individuals the assumption remains that further EU expansion implies continued market liberalisation. However since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis what individuals regard as excessive inequality may have little to do with inequality per se but whether the liberal-market economy as a whole provides high living standards and dynamic economic development. Inequality as a macro-political and economic determinant bridges the gap between economic and political systems at the national and EU level. Using data from European Election Study (EES) 2009 and Standard Eurobarometer data from 2009-2013 this inquiry examines individual-level effects on perceptions of inequality and how this plays a significant role when analysing mass public opinion support for the EU. By using a Binary Logit Regression model, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Multiple Regression analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM) the analysis demonstrates two predominant findings. Firstly, individuals believe that the EU has a positive role to play in addressing inequality since the onset of the economic crisis. Secondly, the role to be played by the EU in addressing inequality supersedes that of the EU member states’ governments and reinforces support for the European integration project. Overall, this demonstrates that individuals in the EU believe that the EU is best placed to address market-generated inequality since the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 and as a result this produces increased support for the EU. These findings demonstrate a strong case for the inclusion of inequality as a determinant of mass public opinion support for the EU since the economic and financial crisis began in 2007/8.
CD154 Blockade Alters Innate Immune Cell Recruitment and Programs Alloreactive CD8+ T Cells into KLRG-1high Short-Lived Effector T Cells

CD154/CD40 blockade combined with donor specific transfusion remains one of the most effective therapies in prolonging allograft survival. Despite this, the mechanisms by which these pathways synergize to prevent rejection are not completely understood. Utilizing a BALB/c (H2-Kd) to B6 (H2-Kb) fully allogeneic skin transplant model system, we performed a detailed longitudinal analysis of the kinetics and magnitude of CD8+ T cell expansion and differentiation in the presence of CD154/CD40 pathway blockade. Results demonstrated that treatment with anti-CD154 vs. DST had distinct and opposing effects on activated CD44high CD62Llow CD8+ T cells in skin graft recipients. Specifically, CD154 blockade delayed alloreactive CD8+ T cell responses, while DST accelerated them. DST inhibited the differentiation of alloreactive CD8+ T cells into multi-cytokine producing effectors, while CD40/CD154 blockade led to the diminution of the KLRG-1low long-lived memory precursor population compared with either untreated or DST treated animals. Moreover, only CD154 blockade effectively inhibited CXCL1 expression and neutrophil recruitment into the graft. When combined, anti-CD154 and DST acted synergistically to profoundly diminish the absolute number of IFN-γ producing alloreactive CD8+ T cells, and intra-graft expression of inflammatory chemokines. These findings demonstrate that the previously described ability of anti-CD154 and DST to result in alloreactive T cell deletion involves both delayed kinetics of T cell expansion and differentiation and inhibited development of KLRG-1low memory precursor cells.
Religious Politicians and Creative Photographers: Automatic User Categorization in Twitter

Finding the ''right people'' is a central aspect of social media systems. Twitter has millions of users who have varied interests, professions and personalities. For those in fields such as advertising and marketing, it is important to identify certain characteristics of users to target. However, Twitter users do not generally provide sufficient information about themselves on their profile which makes this task difficult. In response, this work sets out to automatically infer professions (e.g., musicians, health sector workers, technicians) and personality related attributes (e.g., creative, innovative, funny) for Twitter users based on features extracted from their content, their interaction networks, attributes of their friends and their activity patterns. We develop a comprehensive set of latent features that are then employed to perform efficient classification of users along these two dimensions (profession and personality). Our experiments on a large sample of Twitter users demonstrate both a high overall accuracy in detecting profession and personality related attributes as well as highlighting the benefits and pitfalls of various types of features for particular categories of users.
Do Family Policies Matter for Educational Outcomes?

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to shed some light on the impact of family policies on educational mobility; this link has been often debated, but rarely measured. Another aim of this contribution is to build a bridge between social mobility research and social policy analysis. We investigate whether the level of expenditure on family services in the 1980s and 1990s has had a positive impact on educational achievements and mobility in 11 European countries, by closely looking at a cohort of young adults aged 25–35. To this end, multilevel logistic regression models that control for other policies that have an impact on educational mobility are presented; fixed effects models are also provided. Our results suggest that, in terms of the likelihood of going to university, these policies seem to have reduced the gap between individuals whose parents are well educated, and those who have a more modest background.
Object Boundary Detection and Foreground / Background Segmentation by Integrating Information from Low-level to High-level ∗

Object boundary detection and foreground/background segmentation are central problems in computer vision. The importance of combining low-, mid-, and high-level cues has been realized in recent literature. However, it is unclear how to efficiently and effectively engage and fuse different levels of information. In this paper, we emphasize a learning based approach to explore different levels of information, both implicitly and explicitly. First, we learn lowlevel cues for object boundaries and interior regions using a probabilistic boosting tree (PBT) [ 33] algorithm. Second, we learn short and long range context information based on the results from the first stage. Both stages implicitly contain object-specific information such as texture and local geometry, and it is shown that this implicit knowledge is extremely powerful. Third, we use high-level shape information explicitly to further refine the object boundary, and this high-level shape information can be further employed to perform the tasks of foreground/background segmentation, object detection, and to parse the object into components. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested on challenging databases of horses [ 3] and cows [ 24], and the results obtained are very encouraging compared with other approaches. In detailed experiments we show significantly better performance (e.g. F-values of 0.70 compared to 0.66) than the best comparable reported performance on the horse dataset [ 27]. Furthermore, the system only needs 1.5 minutes for a typical image. Although our system is illustrated on horse and cow images, the approach can be directly applied to detecting/segmenting/parsing other types of objects.
Capsaicin Responses in Heat-Sensitive and Heat-Insensitive A-Fiber Nociceptors

The recently cloned vanilloid receptor (VR1) is postulated to account for heat and capsaicin sensitivity in unmyelinated afferents. We sought to determine whether heat and capsaicin sensitivity also coexist in myelinated nociceptive afferents. Action potential (AP) activity was recorded from single A-fiber nociceptors that innervated the hairy skin in monkey. Before intradermal injection of capsaicin (10 μg/10 μl) into the receptive field, nociceptors were classified as heat-sensitive (threshold, ≤53°C, 1 sec) or heat-insensitive afferents and as mechanically sensitive (von Frey threshold, <6 bar) or mechanically insensitive afferents. All heat-sensitive afferents (n = 16) were insensitive to mechanical stimuli but responded to the intradermal injection of capsaicin (69 ± 7 APs in 10 min). Responsiveness to mechanical stimuli, thermal stimuli, and capsaicin varied in their receptive fields; the majority of receptive field sites (24 of 36) were responsive to only one or two stimulus modalities, whereas only eight sites responded to all three modalities. For most heat-insensitive afferents, the activity induced by the capsaicin injection did not exceed the activity induced by needle insertion alone. However, the largest response to capsaicin (314 ± 98 APs in 10 min) was observed for five afferents that were insensitive to heat as well as mechanical stimuli and therefore may be classified as cutaneous chemoreceptors. These results suggest that A-fiber nociceptors play a role in the pain and hyperalgesia associated with capsaicin injection. Our finding that a subgroup of capsaicin-sensitive A-fiber nociceptors are insensitive to heat predicts the existence of heat-insensitive capsaicin receptors.
Focus Group Study Exploring Factors Related to Frequent Sickness Absence

Introduction Research investigating frequent sickness absence (3 or more episodes per year) is scarce and qualitative research from the perspective of frequent absentees themselves is lacking. The aim of the current study is to explore awareness, determinants of and solutions to frequent sickness absence from the perspective of frequent absentees themselves. Methods We performed a qualitative study of 3 focus group discussions involving a total of 15 frequent absentees. Focus group discussions were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Results were analyzed with the Graneheim method using the Job Demands Resources (JD–R) model as theoretical framework. Results Many participants were not aware of their frequent sickness absence and the risk of future long-term sickness absence. As determinants, participants mentioned job demands, job resources, home demands, poor health, chronic illness, unhealthy lifestyles, and diminished feeling of responsibility to attend work in cases of low job resources. Managing these factors and improving communication (skills) were regarded as solutions to reduce frequent sickness absence. Conclusions The JD–R model provided a framework for determinants of and solutions to frequent sickness absence. Additional determinants were poor health, chronic illness, unhealthy lifestyles, and diminished feeling of responsibility to attend work in cases of low job resources. Frequent sickness absence should be regarded as a signal that something is wrong. Managers, supervisors, and occupational health care providers should advise and support frequent absentees to accommodate job demands, increase both job and personal resources, and improve health rather than express disapproval of frequent sickness absence and apply pressure regarding work attendance.
A controlled trial of timed bright light and negative air ionization for treatment of winter depression.

BACKGROUND Artificial bright light presents a promising nonpharmacological treatment for seasonal affective disorder. Past studies, however, have lacked adequate placebo controls or sufficient power to detect group differences. The importance of time of day of treatment--specifically, morning light superiority--has remained controversial. METHODS This study used a morning x evening light crossover design balanced by parallel-group controls, in addition to a nonphotic control, negative air ionization. Subjects with seasonal affective disorder (N = 158) were randomly assigned to 6 groups for 2 consecutive treatment periods, each 10 to 14 days. Light treatment sequences were morning-evening, evening-morning, morning-morning, and evening-evening (10,000 lux, 30 min/d). Ion density was 2.7 x 10(6) (high) or 1.0 x 10(4) (low) ions per cubic centimeter (high-high and low-low sequences, 30 min/d in the morning). RESULTS Analysis of depression scale percentage change scores showed low-density ion response to be inferior to all other groups, with no other group differences. Response to evening light was reduced when preceded by treatment with morning light, the sole sequence effect. Stringent remission criteria, however, showed significantly higher response to morning than evening light, regardless of treatment sequence. CONCLUSIONS Bright light and high-density negative air ionization both appear to act as specific antidepressants in patients with seasonal affective disorder. Whether clinical improvement would be further enhanced by their use in combination, or as adjuvants to medication, awaits investigation.
A novel PV sub-module-level power-balancing topology for maximum power point tracking under partial shading and mismatch conditions

Partial shading and mismatch conditions among the series-connected modules/sub-modules suffer from a nonconvex power curve with multiple local maxima and decreased peak power for the whole string. Energy transfer between the sub-modules brings them to the same operating voltage, and this collective operation produces a convex power curve, which results in increased peak power for the string. The proposed topology benefits from the switched-capacitor (SC) converter concept and is an application for sub-module-level power balancing with some novelties, including stopping the switching in absence of shading, string-level extension, and a reduced number of power electronics components as compared to those in the literature. Reduction in the number of power electronics components is realized by the fact that two sub-modules share one SC converter. This leads to reduced power electronics losses as well as less cost and volume of the converter circuit. Insertion loss analysis of the topology is presented. The proposed topology is simulated in the PSpice environment, and a prototype is built for experimental verification. Both simulation and experimental results confirm the loss analysis. This proves that with the proposed topology it is possible to extract almost all the power available on the partially shaded string and transfer it to the load side.
Side population of a murine mantle cell lymphoma model contains tumour-initiating cells responsible for lymphoma maintenance and dissemination

‘Cancer stem cells’ or ‘tumour initiating cells’ in B‐cell non‐Hodgkin lymphomas have not been demonstrated, although some studies focused on other cancer types suggest that such populations exist and represent tumour cells resistant to therapy and involved in relapse. These cells may also represent a putative neoplastic ‘cell of origin’ in lymphomas, but there is little substantive data to support this suggestion. Using cell lines derived from a recently established murine IL‐14α× c‐Myc double transgenic/mantle cell lymphoma‐blastoid variant model, heretofore referred to as DTG cell lines, we identified a subset of cells within the side population (SP) with features of ‘tumour‐initiating cells’. These features include higher expression of ABCG2 and BCL‐2, longer telomere length, greater self‐renewal ability and higher in vitro clonogenic and in vivo tumorigenic capacities compared with non‐SP. In addition, in vitro viability studies demonstrated that the non‐SP lymphoma subpopulation has a limited lifespan in comparison with the SP fraction. Syngenic transplant studies showed that non‐SP derived tumours, in comparison to the SP‐derived tumours, exhibit greater necrosis/apoptosis and less systemic dissemination capability. In conclusion, our data support the interpretation that the DTG SP fraction contains a cell population highly capable of tumour maintenance and systemic dissemination and lends support to the concept that ‘tumour‐initiating cells’ occur in lymphomas.
Altered Anatomical Network in Early Blindness Revealed by Diffusion Tensor Tractography

The topological architecture of the cerebral anatomical network reflects the structural organization of the human brain. Recently, topological measures based on graph theory have provided new approaches for quantifying large-scale anatomical networks. Diffusion MRI studies have revealed the efficient small-world properties and modular structure of the anatomical network in normal subjects. However, no previous study has used diffusion MRI to reveal changes in the brain anatomical network in early blindness. Here, we utilized diffusion tensor imaging to construct binary anatomical networks for 17 early blind subjects and 17 age- and gender-matched sighted controls. We established the existence of structural connections between any pair of the 90 cortical and sub-cortical regions using deterministic tractography. Compared with controls, early blind subjects showed a decreased degree of connectivity, a reduced global efficiency, and an increased characteristic path length in their brain anatomical network, especially in the visual cortex. Moreover, we revealed some regions with motor or somatosensory function have increased connections with other brain regions in the early blind, which suggested experience-dependent compensatory plasticity. This study is the first to show alterations in the topological properties of the anatomical network in early blindness. From the results, we suggest that analyzing the brain's anatomical network obtained using diffusion MRI data provides new insights into the understanding of the brain's re-organization in the specific population with early visual deprivation.
Interleukin-22 Ameliorates Cerulein-Induced Pancreatitis in Mice by Inhibiting the Autophagic Pathway

Pancreatitis occurs when digestive enzymes are activated in the pancreas. Severe pancreatitis has a 10-30% mortality rate. No specific treatments for pancreatitis exist now. Here, we discovered that interleukin-22 (IL-22) may have therapeutic potential in treating acute and chronic pancreatitis. Wild-type and IL-22 knockout mice were equally susceptible to cerulein-induced acute and chronic pancreatitis, whereas liver-specific IL-22 transgenic mice were completely resistant to cerulein-induced elevation of serum digestive enzymes, pancreatic necrosis and apoptosis, and inflammatory cell infiltration. Treatment of wild-type mice with recombinant IL-22 or adenovirus IL-22 markedly attenuated the severity of cerulein-induced acute and chronic pancreatitis. Mechanistically, we show that the protective effect of IL-22 on pancreatitis was mediated via the induction of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL, which bind to Beclin-1 and subsequently inhibit autophagosome formation to ameliorate pancreatitis. In conclusion, IL-22 ameliorates cerulein-induced pancreatitis by inhibiting the autophagic pathway. IL-22 could be a promising therapeutic drug to treat pancreatitis.