Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A SSSC based damping controller for stability enhancement of power system

Application of static synchronous series compensator (SSSC) based damping controller for enhancement of power system stability is throughout investigated in this paper. SSSC is effectively utilized for power flow control in the power system. A SSSC-based damping controller is proposed for rotor angle stability enhancement and to eliminate the power oscillation damping in power system. To improve the rotor angle stability and power oscillation damping in system an supplementary signal can be superimposed as a power flow control signal for SSSC damping controller. Speed deviation of rotor is taken as the input signal to the SSSC damping controller. A single machine infinite bus system (SMIB) with SSSC is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink software. Simulation results shows the effectiveness of this controller for power system stability enhancement under different fault conditions.
Cloning of the Rat Ecotropic Retroviral Receptor and Studies of Its Expression in Intestinal Tissues

Abstract A long-term goal of our laboratory is to establish a rat model to study the feasibility of using the intestinal tract as a site for somatic gene therapy. As a step toward that goal, the current study reports the cloning of the rat ecotropic retroviral receptor (EcoR) cDNA and the study of various aspects of its expression in the intestinal tissues. The cDNA for rat EcoR was cloned by screening a size-selected rat intestinal cDNA library with mouse EcoR cDNA. A clone of approximately 7 kb, designated MP10, was obtained. Partial sequencing of MP10 from the 5'end revealed a level of similarity of 92% compared with mouse EcoR. The presence of a 5'untranslated region and a 3'poly(A) tract, together with the overall size of the cDNA, suggest that is very close to being a full-length cDNA for this large transcript. Northern blots with MP10 showed an RNA of approximately 7.9 kb present along the entire length of the small intestine and somewhat less abundant in the colon. Developmental studies showed high levels of EcoR in fetal rat intestine, a decline in the early postnatal period, then a gradual rise to adulthood. Caco-2 cells were used to assess the expression of EcoR in proliferating compared with differentiated intestinal epithelial cells. EcoR mRNA was found to be very much more abundant in nondifferentiated cells and declined to low levels as the cells underwent spontaneous differentiation. These patterns of EcoR expression indicate that ecotropic retroviruses should be suitable vectors with which to attempt gene transfer into the intestinal epithelium. In addition, since the endogenous role of EcoR is as the y+ cationic amino acid transporter, these data have significance for understanding patterns of amino acid transport in the intestinal epithelium.
Does Bone Mineral Density Have an Effect on Hearing Loss in Postmenopausal Patients?

Objectives An age-related decline in the bone mineral density (BMD) of the temporal bone, specifically in the segments that house the middle and inner ear, has been suggested as an additional risk factor for sensorineural hearing loss. We evaluated the effect of BMD on hearing loss in postmenopausal patients. Methods This study involved 120 postmenopausal women who were referred between May 1, 2012, and September 1, 2012. The age range was 50 to 55 years (mean, 52.7 ± 2.3 years). The subjects were divided into three groups according to the results of BMD measurements. Of these, 30 were control subjects with normal BMD values, 45 had osteopenia, and 45 had osteoporosis. Each subject was tested with low- and high-frequency audiometry by a single experienced investigator under standard audiometric testing conditions. For each set of tests, mean values of air and bone conduction at each frequency and tympanometric values were calculated for the osteopenia, osteoporosis, and control groups. Results All three groups were designed to have similar mean ages and roughly equal durations of menopause and body mass indexes. At low frequencies (0.25, 0.5, 1, and 2 kHz), the differences in the mean air conduction threshold values among the three groups were not statistically significant (p > 0.05). At high frequencies (4,6, and 8 kHz), the difference in the mean air conduction threshold values between the osteopenia and control groups was not statistically significant (p > 0.05), but that in the osteoporosis group was statistically significantly higher than those in the osteopenia and control groups (p < 0.05). At low frequencies (0.5, 1, and 2 kHz), the differences in the mean bone conduction threshold values among the three groups were not statistically significant (p > 0.05). At 4 kHz, the difference in the mean bone conduction threshold values between the osteopenia and control groups was not statistically significant (p > 0.05), but that in the osteoporosis group was statistically significantly higher than those in the osteopenia and control groups (p < 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference among the three groups in tympanometric values (p > 0.05). Conclusions We conclude that patients with low BMD values should routinely be counseled for an audiological assessment to detect any change in hearing thresholds.
Focal Firms as Technological Gatakeepers within Industrial Districts Knowledge Creation and Dissemination in the Italian Packaging Machinery Industry

Despite the diffusion of communication tools and boundary spanning technologies, knowledge flows in innovation processes retain a distinct localized nature in many industries and geographical clusters emerge as critical areas to foster technological diffusion. In this paper we focus on the role of focal firms in industrial clusters as “gatekeepers” introducing external technological novelties in the cluster and enacting new useful knowledge production locally, thus enhancing international competitive capabilities of all firms in the cluster. We analyze a longitudinal dataset of 720 patents 1 Corresponding Author www.druid. dk granted by USPTO between 1990 and 2003 to firms in the automatic packaging machinery industrial district of Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy, and a matched-sample to control for the uneven geographical distribution of R&D and patenting activities. Our results show that firms within the cluster use local knowledge to a greater extent and more rapidly than knowledge from the outside than it would be expected given the geographic distribution of innovative activity in the industry. Moreover, focal firms use external knowledge to a greater extent than other firms operating in the cluster, and other (non focal) firms within the cluster use knowledge from focal firms to a greater extent than would be expected given the geographic distribution of innovative activity in the industry. Implications for research on the geographical distribution of innovation activities are discussed.
The Meaning-Enhancing Properties of Psychedelics and Their Mediator Role in Psychedelic Therapy, Spirituality, and Creativity

Past research has demonstrated to the ability of psychedelics to enhance suggestibility, and pointed to their ability to amplify perception of meaning. This paper examines the existing evidence for the meaning-enhancing properties of psychedelics, and argues that the tendency of these agents to enhance the perception of significance offers valuable clues to explaining their reported ability to stimulate a variety of therapeutic processes, enhance creativity, and instigate mystical-type experiences. Building upon previous research, which suggested the potential role of psychedelic meaning-enhancement in enhancing placebo response, the paper explores the mechanisms by which the meaning-amplifying properties of psychedelics might also play a role in enhancing creativity, as well as in effecting mystical-type experiences. The wider social and public-health implications of this hypothesis are discussed, and suggestions are made as to the various ways in which scientific understanding of the meaning-enhancing properties of psychedelics might be advanced and utilized.
Transcriptome Profiling Reveals Disruption of Innate Immunity in Chronic Heavy Ethanol Consuming Female Rhesus Macaques

It is well established that heavy ethanol consumption interferes with the immune system and inflammatory processes, resulting in increased risk for infectious and chronic diseases. However, these processes have yet to be systematically studied in a dose and sex-dependent manner. In this study, we investigated the impact of chronic heavy ethanol consumption on gene expression using RNA-seq in peripheral blood mononuclear cells isolated from female rhesus macaques with daily consumption of 4% ethanol available 22hr/day for 12 months resulting in average ethanol consumption of 4.3 g/kg/day (considered heavy drinking). Differential gene expression analysis was performed using edgeR and gene enrichment analysis using MetaCore™. We identified 1106 differentially expressed genes, meeting the criterion of ≥ two-fold change and p-value ≤ 0.05 in expression (445 up- and 661 down-regulated). Pathway analysis of the 879 genes with characterized identifiers showed that the most enriched gene ontology processes were “response to wounding”, “blood coagulation”, “immune system process”, and “regulation of signaling”. Changes in gene expression were seen despite the lack of differences in the frequency of any major immune cell subtype between ethanol and controls, suggesting that heavy ethanol consumption modulates gene expression at the cellular level rather than altering the distribution of peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Collectively, these observations provide mechanisms to explain the higher incidence of infection, delay in wound healing, and increase in cardiovascular disease seen in subjects with Alcohol use disorder.
Clonal spread of staphylococci among patients with peritonitis associated with continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis.

BACKGROUND Peritonitis is the most important complication of continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD). Coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) are the most common causes of peritonitis, only limited information is available regarding the distribution and epidemiology of different CNS species associated with CAPD peritonitis. METHODS CNS isolated from dialysis effluent from CAPD patients with peritonitis was identified by species and further analyzed with pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). RESULTS A total of 216 microorganisms (206 bacteria and 10 Candida species) were isolated from 196 consecutive culture-positive CAPD samples obtained from 75 patients. One hundred and twenty-one (56%) isolates represented staphylococci. The four most frequently isolated staphylococcal species were Staphylococcus epidermidis (70 isolates), Staphylococcus aureus (31 isolates), Staphylococcus hemolyticus (10 isolates), and Staphylococcus hominis (4 isolates). PFGE analysis revealed the clonal spread among patients of three different clones of S. epidermidis and one clone of S. aureus among the investigated patients. Indistinguishable isolates of either S. epidermidis, S. hominis, or S. aureus were also isolated in repeated samples from several patients. CONCLUSION PFGE is a useful method for the epidemiological evaluation of staphylococci-associated CAPD infections and should replace older and less accurate methods, such as antibiotic sensitivity patterns. We recommend that CNS isolates from patients with CAPD-associated peritonitis should be saved for future investigations and typing, which would aid in the management of this patient category.
Radio's Impact on Public Spending

If informed voters receive favorable policies, then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not. These ideas are developed in a voting model. The model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major New Deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio. The main empirical finding is that U. S. counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds. More funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment, but controlling for these and other variables, the effects of radio are large and highly significant.
Experimental investigation into the cushioning properties of honeycomb paperboard

The cushioning properties of honeycomb paperboards are studied by means of experimental analysis. Experimental results indicate that the cushioning behaviour of paper honeycombs with and without liners are similar, but the cushioning capability is significantly larger for the material with liners. Experiment and theory show that the relative density of paper honeycomb core has a significant effect on the cushioning properties of honeycomb paperboards; however, the basis weight of the liner has only little effect. Experimental results also show that the energy absorption properties of multilayer honeycomb paperboards are not always higher than those of monolayer honeycomb paperboards, and that the height of honeycomb paperboard has an effect on its cushioning properties. These results can be used to characterize and improve the cushioning properties of honeycomb paperboard pads efficiently. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
No-scale D = 5 supergravity from Scherk-Schwarz reduction of D = 6 theories

We perform a generalized dimensional reduction of six dimensional supergravity theories to five dimensions. We consider the minimal (2,0) and the maximal (4,4) theories. In each case the reduction allows us to obtain gauged supergravities of no-scale type in dimension five with gauge groups that escape previous classifications. In the minimal case, the geometric data of the reduced theory correspond to particular cases of the D = 5 real special geometry. In the maximal case we find a four parameter solution which allows partial breaking of supersymmetry.
Giardia intestinalis escapes oxidative stress by colonizing the small intestine: A molecular hypothesis

Giardia intestinalis is the microaerophilic protozoon causing giardiasis, a common infectious intestinal disease. Giardia possesses an O2‐scavenging activity likely essential for survival in the host. We report that Giardia trophozoites express the O2‐detoxifying flavodiiron protein (FDP), detected by immunoblotting, and are able to reduce O2 to H2O rapidly (∼3 μM O2 × min × 106 cells at 37 °C) and with high affinity (C50 = 3.4 ± 0.7 μM O2). Following a short‐term (minutes) exposure to H2O2 ≥ 100 μM, the O2 consumption by the parasites is irreversibly impaired, and the FDP undergoes a degradation, prevented by the proteasome‐inhibitor MG132. Instead, H2O2 does not cause degradation or inactivation of the isolated FDP. On the basis of the elevated susceptibility of Giardia to oxidative stress, we hypothesize that the parasite preferentially colonizes the small intestine since, compared with colon, it is characterized by a greater capacity for redox buffering and a lower propensity to oxidative stress. © 2011 IUBMB IUBMB Life, 63(1): 21–25, 2011
Generalizing pouring actions between objects using warped parameters

One of the key challenges for learning manipulation skills is generalizing between different objects. The robot should adapt both its actions and the task constraints to the geometry of the object being manipulated. In this paper, we propose computing geometric parameters of novel objects by warping known objects to match their shape. We refer to the parameters computed in this manner as warped parameters, as they are defined as functions of the warped object's point cloud. The warped parameters form the basis of the features for the motor skill learning process, and they are used to generalize between different objects. The proposed method was successfully evaluated on a pouring task both in simulation and on a real robot.
Exact GP schema theory for headless chicken crossover and subtree mutation

A new general genetic programming (GP) schema theory for headless chicken crossover and subtree mutation is presented. The theory gives an exact formulation for the expected number of instances of a schema at the next generation, either in terms of microscopic quantities or in terms of macroscopic ones. This paper gives examples which show how the theory can be specialised to specific operators.
Superinsulating heat transfer surfaces for microfluidic channels

In microreactors and lab-on-a-chip devices it is often important to heat a liquid above ambient temperature while it flows through thermally insulated microfluidic channels. In this paper we introduce, for the first time, the heat transfer analogue of pressure drop reduction associated with patterned superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces, by showing how there is an also significant reduction in the convective heat transfer coefficient between the liquid and the SH surface. We use experiments and computational fluid dynamics to simulate a variety of surface patterns and wall thermal conductivities to investigate the effect of SH surfaces on heat transfer rate. We demonstrate that without altering the bulk material properties the interfacial thermal resistance can be significantly increased. The effect is shown to be highly dependent on a variety of conditions including the Peclet number, the thermal conductivity of the wall and the shear free area. Under certain conditions we demonstrate heat transfer reductions of up to 67% using glass walls relative to a smooth surface Thus we call such surfaces superinsulating.
Geodesic planes in the convex core of an acylindrical 3-manifold

Let $M$ be a convex cocompact acylindrical hyperbolic 3-manifold of infinite volume, and let $M^*$ denote the interior of the convex core of $M$. In this paper we show that any geodesic plane in $M^*$ is either closed or dense. We also show that only countably many planes are closed. There are the first rigidity theorems for planes in convex cocompact 3-manifolds of infinite volume that depend only on the topology of M.
FliW and FliS Function Independently To Control Cytoplasmic Flagellin Levels in Bacillus subtilis

ABSTRACT The cytoplasmic level of flagellin (called Hag) is homeostatically regulated in the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis by a partner-switching mechanism between the protein FliW and either the Hag structural protein or CsrA, an RNA binding protein that represses hag translation. Here we show that FliW and the putative secretion chaperone FliS bind to Hag simultaneously but control Hag translation by different mechanisms. While FliW directly inhibits CsrA activity, FliS antagonizes CsrA indirectly by binding to Hag, enhancing Hag secretion, and depleting Hag in the cytoplasm to trigger the FliW partner switch. Consistent with a role for FliS in potentiating Hag secretion, the mutation of fliS crippled both motility and flagellar filament assembly, and both phenotypes could be partially rescued by artificially increasing the concentration of the Hag substrate through the absence of CsrA. Furthermore, the absence of FliS resulted in an approximately 30-fold reduction in extracellular Hag accumulation in cells mutated for CsrA (to relieve homeostatic control) and the filament cap protein FliD (to secrete flagellin into the supernatant). Thus, we mechanistically discriminate between the FliW regulator and the FliS chaperone to show that secretion disrupts flagellin homeostasis and promotes high-level flagellin synthesis during the period of filament assembly in B. subtilis.
Building Competitive Direct Acoustics-to-Word Models for English Conversational Speech Recognition

Direct acoustics-to-word (A2W) models in the end-to-end paradigm have received increasing attention compared to conventional subword based automatic speech recognition models using phones, characters, or context-dependent hidden Markov model states. This is because A2W models recognize words from speech without any decoder, pronunciation lexicon, or externally-trained language model, making training and decoding with such models simple. Prior work has shown that A2W models require orders of magnitude more training data in order to perform comparably to conventional models. Our work also showed this accuracy gap when using the English Switchboard-Fisher data set. This paper describes a recipe to train an A2W model that closes this gap and is at-par with state-of-the-art sub-word based models. We achieve a word error rate of 8.8. 8%/13.9% on the Hub5-2000 Switchboard/CallHome test sets without any decoder or language model. We find that model initialization, training data order, and regularization have the most impact on the A2W model performance. Next, we present a joint word-character A2W model that learns to first spell the word and then recognize it. This model provides a rich output to the user instead of simple word hypotheses, making it especially useful in the case of words unseen or rarely-seen during training.
The crystal structure of the catalytic core domain of endoglucanase I from Trichoderma reesei at 3.6 A resolution, and a comparison with related enzymes.

Cellulose is the most abundant polymer in the biosphere. Although generally resistant to degradation, it may be hydrolysed by cellulolytic organisms that have evolved a variety of structurally distinct enzymes, cellobiohydrolases and endoglucanases, for this purpose. Endoglucanase I (EG I) is the major endoglucanase produced by the cellulolytic fungus Trichoderma reesei, accounting for 5 to 10% of the total amount of cellulases produced by this organism. Together with EG I from Humicola insolens and T. reesei cellobiohydrolase I (CBH I), the enzyme is classified into family 7 of the glycosyl hydrolases, and it catalyses hydrolysis with a net retention of the anomeric configuration. The structure of the catalytic core domain (residues 1 to 371) of EG I from T. reesei has been determined at 3.6 A resolution by the molecular replacement method using the structures of T. reesei CBH I and H. insolens EG I as search models. By employing the 2-fold non-crystallographic symmetry (NCS), the structure was refined successfully, despite the limited resolution. The final model has an R-factor of 0.201 (Rfree 0.258). The structure of EG I reveals an extended, open substrate-binding cleft, rather than a tunnel as found in the homologous cellobiohydrolase CBH I. This confirms the earlier proposal that the tunnel-forming loops in CBH I have been deleted in EG I, which has resulted in an open active site in EG I, enabling it to function as an endoglucanase. Comparison of the structure of EG I with several related enzymes reveals structural similarities, and differences that relate to their biological function in degrading particular substrates. A possible structural explanation of the drastically different pH profiles of T. reesei and H. insolens EG I is proposed.