Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 1.2–6.6GHz LNA using transformer feedback for wideband input matching and noise cancellation in 0.13µm CMOS

A novel transformer feedback featuring wideband input matching and noise cancellation is proposed and demonstrated in a wideband differential LNA for software-defined-radio (SDR) applications. Implemented in 0. 13μm CMOS with an area of 0.32mm2, the LNA prototype measures a wideband input matching S11 of less than -10dB from 1.2GHz to 6.6GHz and minimum NF of 1.8dB while consuming 11mA at 1.2V supply.
Use of Drosophila as an Evaluation Method Reveals imp as a Candidate Gene for Type 2 Diabetes in Rat Locus Niddm22

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is one of the most common human diseases. QTL analysis of the diabetic Otsuka Long-Evans Tokushima Fatty (OLETF) rats has identified numerous hyperglycemic loci. However, molecular characterization and/or gene identification largely remains to be elucidated due mostly to the weak genetic variances contributed by each locus. Here we utilized Drosophila melanogaster as a secondary model organism for functional evaluation of the candidate gene. We demonstrate that the tissue specific knockdown of a homologue of igf2bp2 RNA binding protein leads to increased sugar levels similar to that found in the OLETF rat. In the mutant, the expression of two of the insulin-like peptides encoded in the fly genome, dilp2 and dilp3, were found to be downregulated. Consistent with previous reports of dilp mutants, the imp mutant flies exhibited an extension of life span; in contrast, starvation tolerance was reduced. These results further reinforce the possibility that imp is involved in sugar metabolism by modulating insulin expression.
Position based visual servoing for catching a 3-D flying object using RLS trajectory estimation from a monocular image sequence

Online coordination of visual information with slow speed manipulator control is studied in the specific task of three dimensional robotic catching using position based visual servoing. The problem involves the design and application of a recursive algorithm to extract and predict the position of an object in a 3D environment from one feature correspondence from a monocular image sequence. Target translational model involves an object moving in a parabolic path using projectile physics. A state-space model is constructed incorporating kinematic states, and recursive techniques are used to estimate the state vector as a function of time. The measured data are the noisy image plane coordinates of object match taken from image in the sequence. Image plane noise levels are allowed and investigated. The target trajectory estimation is formulated as a tracking problem, which can use an arbitrary large number of images in a sequence and is done using Recursive Least Squares (RLS). Results are demonstrated by both simulations and experiments using a a real-time vision system and a six-degree-of-freedom robotic arm with speed capabilities of up to 1.0 m/s.
Compliance by Design: Industry Response to Energy Efficiency Standards*

Policies designed to improve industrial environmental performance are increasing in scope and stringency. These policies can significantly influence engineering design decisions as firms re-optimize their products and processes to meet compliance requirements at minimum cost. This paper demonstrates the importance of accounting for these design responses in the analysis of policy impacts. As a case in point, we model automotive firms' medium-run compliance choices under the reformed Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). Physics-based simulations are used to characterize the potential for improving fuel efficiency through design changes. These engineering simulation results are coupled with a partial-equilibrium, static oligopoly model in which firms choose prices and key vehicle design attributes. We simulate firms' pricing and medium-run design response to the CAFE regulation. Results indicate that firms rely primarily on changes to vehicle designs to meet the reformed standards, with a smaller contribution coming from pricing strategies designed to shift demand towards more fuel-efficient vehicles. The analysis draws attention to several factors that could offset fuel efficiency improvements achieved under the reformed CAFE standards, such as an increase in the market share of larger vehicles and the strategic response of firms choosing to violate the standard. for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Ashley Langer for valuable help with the demand estimation, Bart Frischknecht and Deokkyun Yoon for assistance with vehicle simulations, and Kevin Bolon for help managing the data sets. Financial support for this work is provided by the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School and is gratefully acknowledged. All findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the National Academy of Engineering.
Identifying Risk Factors Affecting Weather- and Disease-Related Losses in the U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish Industry

Two double-limit tobit models are used to identify significant risk factors that most affect farm-raised catfish losses from weather-related events and from disease outbreaks. Results of the weather loss model indicate that the variables for operator education level, number of ponds, pond water depth, production management strategy, past experience with severe losses from low oxygen levels from off-farm power outages, past experience with severe losses from diseases, and being in the South are statistically significant. Results of the disease loss model indicate that the variables for operator experience and pond water depth are significant. Development of models explaining weather and disease losses through observable variables provides a better understanding of the interrelation between the loss perils and explanatory variables so management strategies can be developed to mitigate losses from identified risk factors.
Finite Element Modeling of Orthogonal Machining of Brittle Materials Using an Embedded Cohesive Element Mesh

Machining of brittle materials is common in the manufacturing industry, but few modeling techniques are available to predict materials’ behavior in response to the cutting tool. The paper presents a fracture-based finite element model, named embedded cohesive zone–finite element method (ECZ–FEM). In ECZ–FEM, a network of cohesive zone (CZ) elements are embedded in the material body with regular elements to capture multiple randomized cracks during a cutting process. The CZ element is defined by the fracture energy and a scaling factor to control material ductility and chip behavior. The model is validated by an experimental study in terms of chip formation and cutting force with two different brittle materials and depths of cut. The results show that ECZ–FEM can capture various chip forms, such as dusty debris, irregular chips, and unstable crack propagation seen in the experimental cases. For the cutting force, the model can predict the relative difference among the experimental cases, but the force value is higher by 30–50%. The ECZ–FEM has demonstrated the feasibility of brittle cutting simulation with some limitations applied.
Simulation and Evaluation of Dust Emission with Polair 3 D-SIREAM Model over West Africa Focused on Ouagadougou ( Burkina Faso )

The study of air pollution is recent in West Africa. There is a lack of data on air pollution. However, some studies conducted in West Africa show that air quality is a concern. Population growth and massive vehicles imports are contributing to the deterioration of this air quality. In this work, we present the modelling of desert aerosols using a CTM Polair3D-SIREAM. The objective is to evaluate the ability of Polair3D-SIREAM to reproduce observations of PM10 and Aerosol Optical Thicknesses (AOT). A simulation with Polair3D-SIREAM was carried out in West Africa, focused on Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) for 2007. The model of Marticorena and Bergametti (1995), MB95, was used to estimate desert aerosols emissions. The total emission of dust modelled is 52.2 Tg. For the evaluation of PM10, the simulated averages remained within the same orders of magnitude as the observed averages. Correlations are low in all the observation sites. The other indicators are similar to those found by Schmechtig et al. (2011). Performance criteria of Boylan and Russel (2006) are met for the observation sites of Ouagadougou and Ilorin (Nigeria). For the AOTs, the correlations are significantly improved, in particular, at the sites of Ouagadougou and Ilorin. Performance criteria of Boylan are met for all observation sites. However, the performance goals are only achieved for Ouagadougou and Ilorin.
The Human Striatum is Necessary for Responding to Changes in Stimulus Relevance

Various lines of evidence suggest that the striatum is implicated in cognitive flexibility. The neuropsychological evidence has, for the most part, been based on research with patients with Parkinson's disease, which is accompanied by chemical disruption of both the striatum and the prefrontal cortex. The present study examined this issue by testing patients with focal lesions of the striatum on a task measuring two forms of cognitive switching. Patients with striatal, but not frontal lobe lesions, were impaired in switching between concrete sensory stimuli. By contrast, both patient groups were unimpaired when switching between abstract task rules relative to baseline nonswitch trials. These results reveal a dissociation between two distinct forms of cognitive f lexibility, providing converging evidence for a role of the striatum in f lexible control functions associated with the selection of behaviorally relevant stimuli.
Dissociation of Neural Substrates of Response Inhibition to Negative Information between Implicit and Explicit Facial Go/Nogo Tasks: Evidence from an Electrophysiological Study

Background Although ample evidence suggests that emotion and response inhibition are interrelated at the behavioral and neural levels, neural substrates of response inhibition to negative facial information remain unclear. Thus we used event-related potential (ERP) methods to explore the effects of explicit and implicit facial expression processing in response inhibition. Methods We used implicit (gender categorization) and explicit emotional Go/Nogo tasks (emotion categorization) in which neutral and sad faces were presented. Electrophysiological markers at the scalp and the voxel level were analyzed during the two tasks. Results We detected a task, emotion and trial type interaction effect in the Nogo-P3 stage. Larger Nogo-P3 amplitudes during sad conditions versus neutral conditions were detected with explicit tasks. However, the amplitude differences between the two conditions were not significant for implicit tasks. Source analyses on P3 component revealed that right inferior frontal junction (rIFJ) was involved during this stage. The current source density (CSD) of rIFJ was higher with sad conditions compared to neutral conditions for explicit tasks, rather than for implicit tasks. Conclusions The findings indicated that response inhibition was modulated by sad facial information at the action inhibition stage when facial expressions were processed explicitly rather than implicitly. The rIFJ may be a key brain region in emotion regulation.
Image Capturing and Pre-processing Character and Number ( C & N ) Segmentation Feature Extraction License Plate Recognition Licensee Plate Extraction

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has wide range of commercial applications such as finding stolen cars, controlling access to car parks and gathering traffic flow statistics. Existing Libyan License Plate Recognition (LLPR) methods are not presented promising results due to their inefficient features for the extracted characters and numbers. In this work, an improved LLPR method is presented. The method is composed of five stages: pre-processing, license plate extraction, character and numbers segmentation, feature extraction and license plate recognition. In the pre-processing, undesired data, such as background noises are removed. Then, the license plate is extracted using few mathematical morphologies, Connected Component Analysis (CCA) and Region of Interest (ROI) extraction. After that, characters and numbers from the image regions of the license plate are extracted. A combination of geometrical features and Gabor features are considered to represent each of the character and word in the plates. Then, the recognition is done by using a template matching and a Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classification. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and tested using 100 self-collected images of Libyan national license plates. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method has produced promising results and superior than other existing methods.
Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Simulated Car Racing

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has recently seen considerable success in playing certain types of games, most of which are discrete, fully observable zero-sum games. Consequently there is currently considerable interest within the research community in investigating what other games this algorithm might play well, and how it can be modiﬁed to achieve this. In this paper, we investigate the application of MCTS to simulated car racing, in particular the open-source racing game TORCS. The presented approach is based on the development of an efﬁcient forward model and the discretization of the action space. This combination allows the controller to effectively search the tree of potential future states. Results show that it is indeed possible to implement a competent MCTS-based racing controller. The controller generalizes to most road tracks as long as a warm-up period is provided.
Composition dependent intrinsic defect structures in SrTiO 3

Intrinsic point defect complexes in SrTiO3 under different chemical conditions are studied using density functional theory. The Schottky defect complex consisting of nominally charged Sr, Ti and O vacancies is predicted to be the most stable defect structure in stoichiometric SrTiO3, with a relatively low formation energy of 1.64 eV/defect. In addition, the mechanisms of defect complex formation in nonstoichiometric SrTiO3 are investigated. Excess SrO leads to the formation of the oxygen vacancies and a strontium-titanium antisite defect, while a strontium vacancy together with an oxygen vacancy and the titanium-strontium antisite defect are produced in an excess TiO2 environment. Since point defects, such as oxygen vacancies and cation antisite defects, are intimately related to the functionality of SrTiO3, these results provide guidelines for controlling the formation of intrinsic point defects and optimizing the functionality of SrTiO3 by controlling nonstoichiometric chemical compositions of SrO and TiO2 in experiments. Page 1 of 29 Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics P hy si ca lC he m is tr y C he m ic al P hy si cs A cc ep te d M an us cr ip t
11 Radiological Releases and Environmental Monitoring at Commercial Nuclear Power Plants

The generation of electricity from nuclear power has become increasingly important due to the growing concerns of global climate change. Nuclear energy has long been recognized as a leading energy source that produces minimal pollution to the environment that can contribute to this phenomenon. In addition, nuclear power offers an attractive option for countries looking for energy source diversification. Currently there are 442 commercial nuclear power reactors operating in the world (International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], 2010, 2011). These power plants contribute about 19% of the electricity production today. The United States of America (U.S.) has the largest commercial nuclear reactor fleet in the world with 104 operating reactors (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission [USNRC], 2010). Of these reactors, 69 are pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and 35 are boiling water reactors (BWRs), located on 65 sites around the country. These power plants contribute about 20% of the U.S. electricity production. Although it is known that commercial nuclear power plants release small amounts of radioactivity into the environment, there is still the potential for these releases to impact public health. This is especially important today as changes are occurring in nuclear power plant operations including: higher electric generating capacities, increased power levels due to mechanical uprates, and plant life extensions. Public health effects must be reexamined as new light water reactor designs are being considered for construction. In addition, recent events at multiple nuclear power plants in the U.S. involving unplanned releases, especially tritium (3H), have led to increased scrutiny on monitoring and evaluating releases. Changes in radiation protection recommendations and regulations also warrant further and continued investigations in these matters. Although Harris (2007) and Harris & Miller (2008) have performed numerous studies of nuclear power effluent releases and environmental monitoring, data collection and analysis must continue to be performed for the entire nuclear industry. This chapter focuses on recent research that has been conducted in the areas of commercial nuclear power radiological releases and environmental monitoring by the author. Although the emphasis will be on studies performed in the United States of America, international comparisons will be made where appropriate.
Both Acetate Kinase and Acetyl Coenzyme A Synthetase Are Involved in Acetate-Stimulated Change in the Direction of Flagellar Rotation in Escherichia coli

ABSTRACT Escherichia coli strains overproducing the response regulator CheY respond to acetate by increasing their clockwise bias of flagellar rotation, even when they lack other chemotaxis proteins. With acetate metabolism mutants, we demonstrate that both acetate kinase and acetyl coenzyme A synthetase are involved in this response. Thus, a response was observed when one of these enzymes was missing but not when both were absent.
A state‐space model for ocean drifter motions dominated by inertial oscillations

[1] Coincident ocean drifter position and surface wind time series observed on hourly timescales are used to estimate upper ocean dissipation and atmosphere-ocean coupling coefficients in the Labrador Sea. A discrete-process model based on finite differences is used to regress ocean accelerations on ocean velocity estimates but fails because errors in the discrete approximations for the ocean velocities are biased and accumulate over time. Model identification is achieved by fitting a stochastic differential equation model based on classical upper ocean physics to the drifter data via the Kalman filter. Ocean parameters are shown to be nonidentifiable in a direct application to the Labrador Sea data when the known Coriolis parameter is not identified by the model. To address this, the ocean parameters are estimated in an empirical sequence. Data from the Ocean Storms experiment are used to estimate ocean dissipation in isolation from complexities introduced by strong and variable winds. Given a realistic estimate of the ocean dissipation, a second application in the Labrador Sea successfully estimates atmosphere-ocean coupling coefficients and reproduces the Coriolis parameter. Model assessments demonstrate the robustness of the parameter estimates. The model parameter estimates are discussed in comparison with Ekman theory and results from analyses of the global ocean surface drifter data set.
Cooperative localisation with hybrid inertial navigation system/pedestrian dead reckoning tracking for GPS-denied environments

In this paper, we develop a novel probabilistic hybrid inertial navigation system (INS)/pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) measurement tracking algorithm, namely (PHIMTA), that provides high accuracy tracking in slow pedestrian scenarios. We then combine it with the latest localisation algorithms, such as grid-based belief propagation (GBP) and stop-and-go (SnG), that allow for improved accuracy in GPS-denied environments.
Dairy Cows Produce Less Milk and Modify Their Behaviour during the Transition between Tie-Stall to Free-Stall

Simple Summary The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of moving cows from the barn with stanchion-stall housing to free-stall housing on their behaviour and production. Cows lay down up to ten hours after removing. The cows in their second lactation and open cows tended to lie sooner after removing than cows in their first lactation and pregnant cows. The times of total lying and rumination were increasing from the first day to the tenth day after removing. Cows produced 23.3% less milk at the first day following the transfer than at the last day prior to moving (23.76 ± 7.20 kg vs. 30.97 ± 7.26 kg, p < 0.001). Loss of milk was gradually reduced and on the 14th day, cows achieved maximum production. The difference was found in milk losses due to the shift between cows in first and second lactation. Abstract Transfer of cattle to an unknown barn may result in a reduction in its welfare. Housing and management practices can result in signs of stress that include a long-term suppression of milk efficiency. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of moving cows from the stanchion-stall housing to free-stall housing on their behaviour and production. The Holstein cows were moved into the new facility with free-stall housing from the old barn with stanchion-stall housing. Cows lay down up to ten hours (596.3 ± 282.7 min) after removing. The cows in their second lactation and open cows tended to lie sooner after removing than cows in their first lactation and pregnant cows. The times of total lying and rumination were increasing from the first day to the tenth day after removing (23.76 ± 7.20 kg vs. 30.97 ± 7.26 kg, p < 0.001). Cows produced 23.3% less milk at the first day following the transfer than at the last day prior to moving (p < 0.001). Loss of milk was gradually reduced and maximum production was achieved on the 14th day. The difference was found in milk losses due to the shift between cows on the first and second lactation (p < 0.01). The results of this study suggest that removing from the tie-stall barn with a pipeline milking system into the barn with free-stall housing and a milking parlour caused a decline in the cows’ milk production. However, when the cows are moved to a better environment, they rapidly adapt to the change.
Ownership Structure and Debt Leverage: Empirical Test of a Trade-Off Hypothesis On French Firms

Debt may help to manage type II corporate agency conflicts because it is easier for controlling shareholders to modify the leverage ratio than to modify their share of capital. A sample of 112 firms listed on the French stock market over the period 1998-2009 is empirically tested. It supports an inverted U-shape relationship between shareholders' ownership and leverage. At low levels of ownership, controlling shareholders use more debt in order to inflate their stake in capital and to resist unfriendly takeovers attempts. When ownership reaches a certain point, controlling shareholders' objectives further converge with those of outside shareholders. Moreover, financial distress will prompt controlling shareholders to reduce the firm's leverage ratio. Empirically, it is shown that the inflection point where the sign of the relationship between ownership and debt changes is around 40%. Debts may help in curbing private appropriation and appears also as a governance variable.