Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A forward link performance study of the 1×EV-DO rev. 0 system using field measurements and simulations

Following the unprecedented growth of voice applications in wireless mobile communication, high-speed wireless data applications have started to proliferate. One system that has attracted considerable attention is the 1×EV-DO high-speed data system. Extensive analyses indicate that the spectral efficiency of a wireless data application can be increased significantly compared to that of a wireless voice application by means of a number innovative techniques, including turbo coding, rate adaptation, early completion, packet scheduling, and receive diversity. In this paper, we offer extensive field measurements to quantify the gains provided by these techniques. We also provide estimates of the throughput and capacity of the 1×EV-DO system that are validated by both field measurements and simulations.
Antiapoptotic properties of α-crystallin-derived peptide chaperones and characterization of their uptake transporters in human RPE cells.

PURPOSE The chaperone proteins, α-crystallins, also possess antiapoptotic properties. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether 19 to 20-mer α-crystallin-derived mini-chaperone peptides (α-crystallin mini-chaperone) are antiapoptotic, and to identify their putative transporters in human fetal RPE (hfRPE) cells. METHODS Cell death and caspase-3 activation induced by oxidative stress were quantified in early passage hfRPE cells in the presence of 19 to 20-mer αA- or αB-crystallin-derived or scrambled peptides. Cellular uptake of fluorescein-labeled, α-crystallin-derived mini-peptides and recombinant full-length αB-crystallin was determined in confluent hfRPE. The entry mechanism in hfRPE cells for α-crystallin mini-peptides was investigated. The protective role of polycaprolactone (PCL) nanoparticle encapsulated αB-crystallin mini-chaperone peptides from H2O2-induced cell death was studied. RESULTS Primary hfRPE cells exposed to oxidative stress and either αA- or αB-crystallin mini-chaperones remained viable and showed marked inhibition of both cell death and activation of caspase-3. Uptake of full-length αB-crystallin was minimal while a time-dependent uptake of αB-crystallin-derived peptide was observed. The mini-peptides entered the hfRPE cells via the sodium-coupled oligopeptide transporters 1 and 2 (SOPT1, SOPT2). PCL nanoparticles containing αB-crystallin mini-chaperone were also taken up and protected hfRPE from H2O2-induced cell death at significantly lower concentrations than free αB-crystallin mini-chaperone peptide. CONCLUSIONS αA- and αB-crystallin mini-chaperones offer protection to hfRPE cells and inhibit caspase-3 activation. The oligopeptide transporters SOPT1 and SOPT2 mediate the uptake of these peptides in RPE cells. Nanodelivery of αB-crystallin-derived mini-chaperone peptide offers an alternative approach for protection of hfRPE cells from oxidant injury.
Integrating contextual factors into topic-centric retrieval models for finding similar experts

Expert finding has been addressed from multiple viewpoints, including expertise seeking and expert retrieval. The focus of expertise seeking has mostly been on descriptive or predictive models, for example to identify what factors affect human decisions on locating and selecting experts. In expert retrieval the focus has been on algorithms similar to document search, which identify topical matches based on the content of documents associated with experts. We report on a pilot study on an expert finding task in which we explore how contextual factors identified by expertise seeking models can be integrated with topic-centric retrieval algorithms and examine whether they can improve retrieval performance for this task. We focus on the task of similar expert finding: given a small number of example experts, find similar experts. Our main finding is that, while topical knowledge is the most important factor, human subjects also consider other factors, such as reliability, up-to-dateness, and organizational structure. We find that integrating these factors into topical retrieval models can significantly improve retrieval performance.
A GC-rich sequence feature in the 3′ UTR directs UPF1-dependent mRNA decay in mammalian cells

Up-frameshift protein 1 (UPF1) is an ATP-dependent RNA helicase that has essential roles in RNA surveillance and in post-transcriptional gene regulation by promoting the degradation of mRNAs. Previous studies revealed that UPF1 is associated with the 3′ untranslated region (UTR) of target mRNAs via as-yet-unknown sequence features. Herein, we aimed to identify characteristic sequence features of UPF1 targets. We identified 246 UPF1 targets by measuring RNA stabilization upon UPF1 depletion and by identifying mRNAs that associate with UPF1. By analyzing RNA footprint data of phosphorylated UPF1 and two CLIP-seq data of UPF1, we found that 3′ UTR but not 5′ UTRs or open reading frames of UPF1 targets have GC-rich motifs embedded in high GC-content regions. Reporter gene experiments revealed that GC-rich motifs in UPF1 targets were indispensable for UPF1-mediated mRNA decay. These findings highlight the important features of UPF1 target 3′ UTRs.
Landslides detection and volume estimation in Jinbu area of Korea

ABSTRACT Shallow landslides triggered by heavy rainfall are common phenomena in mountainous areas of temperate monsoon regions. On July 2006 intensive shallow landslides occurred in Jinbu area, Korea triggered by heavy rainfall. An inventory of 1412 shallow landslides was constructed from intensive field works and interpretation of web-based aerial photographs, and all landslides detected were mapped across the study area. The measurements were geometrical properties (landslide length, landslide width, landslide depth) of individual landslides to establish the relationship linking landslide area to landslide volume. The relationship linking landslide area to landslide volume was obtained from the inventory of 930 landslides and is a power law function with a scaling exponent γ = 1.02, covers four orders of magnitude of landslide area and landslide volume, and is in reasonable agreement with existing relationships obtained from small scale shallow landslide events. The relationship can be used to estimate the volume of individual landslides with shallow soil depth when the area of landslide is known. However, geological and geomorphological setting should be considered to calculate accurate landslide volume with respect to disaster prevention.
Fast and Automatic Activation of an Abstract Representation of Money in the Human Ventral Visual Pathway

Money, when used as an incentive, activates the same neural circuits as rewards associated with physiological needs. However, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts: how are monetary stimuli identified in the first place? How and when does the brain identify a valid coin, i.e. a disc of metal that is, by social agreement, endowed with monetary properties? We took advantage of the changes in the Euro area in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (Euros, Australian Dollars) with neural responses to invalid coins that have lost all monetary properties (French Francs, Finnish Marks). We show in magneto-encephalographic recordings, that the ventral visual pathway automatically distinguishes between valid and invalid coins, within only ∼150 ms. This automatic categorization operates as well on coins subjects were familiar with as on unfamiliar coins. No difference between neural responses to scrambled controls could be detected. These results could suggest the existence of a generic, all-purpose neural representation of money that is independent of experience. This finding is reminiscent of a central assumption in economics, money fungibility, or the fact that a unit of money is substitutable to another. From a neural point of view, our findings may indicate that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, could also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region suggested here could constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money's cultural emergence and success.
- 1-A COMPARISON OF THREE DATA-DRIVEN TECHNIQUES FOR PROGNOSTICS

In situations where the cost/benefit analysis of using physics-based damage propagation algorithms is not favorable and when sufficient test data are available that map out the damage space, one can employ data-driven approaches. In this investigation, we evaluate different algorithms for their suitability in those circumstances. We are interested in assessing the trade-off that arises from the ability to support uncertainty management, and the accuracy of the predictions. We compare here a Relevance Vector Machine (RVM), Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), and a Neural Network-based approach and employ them on relatively sparse training sets with very high noise content. Results show that while all methods can provide remaining life estimates although different damage estimates of the data (diagnostic output) changes the outcome considerably. In addition, we found that there is a need for performance metrics that provide a comprehensive and objective assessment of prognostics algorithm performance.
Correlation of cumulative corticosteroid treatment with magnetic resonance imaging assessment of avascular femoral head necrosis in patients with multiple sclerosis

Increased risk of osteoporosis, fractures, and avascular necrosis (AVN) has been suggested in multiple sclerosis (MS). Patients with MS are often exposed to corticosteroid treatment (CST) during the disease course and conflicting reports exist regarding complications of CST. Our study aims to investigate the association between cumulative doses of CST and radiographic evaluation of AVN of the femoral head in MS. Twenty-six MS patients (mean age, 38.4±10 yr) were enrolled and prospectively evaluated for AVN by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The mean disease duration was 11.5±8.5 years and mean expanded disability status scale (EDSS) score was 3±2. The cumulative dosage of CST varied between 20 g and 60 g; patients were grouped into two categories: 1) CST between 20–40 g, 17 (65%) patients; 2) CST ≥40 g; 9 (35%) patients. The relationship between cumulative CST dosage and MRI diagnosis of AVN was statistically insignificant (P>0.9). Clarification of the cumulative effect of CST in the development of AVN is of great importance for future long-term steroid treatment strategies.
Cross-contamination aware design methodology for pin-constrained digital microfluidic biochips

Digital microfluidic biochips have emerged as a popular alternative for laboratory experiments. Pin-count reduction and cross-contamination avoidance are key design considerations for practical applications with different droplets being transported and manipulated on highly integrated biochips. We present in this paper the first design automation flow that considers the cross-contamination problems on pin-constrained biochips. We explore the factors that make the problems harder on pin-constrained biochips. To cope with these cross contaminations, we propose (1) early crossing minimization algorithms during placement, and (2) systematic wash droplet scheduling and routing that require only one extra control pin and zero assay completion time overhead for practical bioassays. Experimental results show the effectiveness and scalability of our algorithms for practical bioassays.
The speed of technology adoption with imperfect information in equity markets

Why is the speed of technology adoption di¤erent across countries? Equity markets have an important role in facilitating ownership transfers from entrepreneurs, who invest in the initial stage of technology adoption, to managers who run these rms after technology is adopted. This paper argues that technology adoption decisions of the entrepreneurs are a¤ected by their expectations of the market value of their rms. When market participants have imperfect information, two opposite forces emerge. First, uncertain and low expected market value discourages the entrepreneur from adopting the most recent technology. Second, by investing in the newest technology, an entrepreneur can send a positive signal about the pro tability of his rm, and thus increase its market value. When the number of informed investors is low, the rst force dominates and technology is adopted slowly. Fast technology adoption is most likely at an intermediate number of informed investors, where the expected gains from sending a positive signal to uninformed investors are the highest. The link between the speed of technology adoption and policies that facilitate access to information is analyzed when extending the basic model to allow for an endogenous number of informed investors. JEL classi cation: F4, G1, 03 Keywords: Technology adoption, nancial market imperfections, capital ows, transparency k.tinn@lse.ac. uk I would like to thank Margaret Bray, Francesco Caselli, Afonso Goncalves da Silva, Christian Julliard, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Danny Quah, Rachel Ngai, Manisha Shah, Evangelia Vourvachaki and participants in EBRD Lunchtime seminar and in the Financial Markets Group PhD students seminar in LSE for helpful comments.
Canopy nitrogen, carbon assimilation, and albedo in temperate and boreal forests: Functional relations and potential climate feedbacks

The availability of nitrogen represents a key constraint on carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, and it is largely in this capacity that the role of N in the Earth's climate system has been considered. Despite this, few studies have included continuous variation in plant N status as a driver of broad-scale carbon cycle analyses. This is partly because of uncertainties in how leaf-level physiological relationships scale to whole ecosystems and because methods for regional to continental detection of plant N concentrations have yet to be developed. Here, we show that ecosystem CO2 uptake capacity in temperate and boreal forests scales directly with whole-canopy N concentrations, mirroring a leaf-level trend that has been observed for woody plants worldwide. We further show that both CO2 uptake capacity and canopy N concentration are strongly and positively correlated with shortwave surface albedo. These results suggest that N plays an additional, and overlooked, role in the climate system via its influence on vegetation reflectivity and shortwave surface energy exchange. We also demonstrate that much of the spatial variation in canopy N can be detected by using broad-band satellite sensors, offering a means through which these findings can be applied toward improved application of coupled carbon cycle–climate models.
Convergent modelling of past soil organic carbon stocks but divergent projections

Abstract. Soil carbon (C) models are important tools for understanding soil C balance and projecting C stocks in terrestrial ecosystems, particularly under global change. The initialization and/or parameterization of soil C models can vary among studies even when the same model and data set are used, causing potential uncertainties in projections. Although a few studies have assessed such uncertainties, it is yet unclear what these uncertainties are correlated with and how they change across varying environmental and management conditions. Here, applying a process-based biogeochemical model to 90 individual field experiments (ranging from 5 to 82 years of experimental duration) across the Australian cereal-growing regions, we demonstrated that well-designed optimization procedures enabled the model to accurately simulate changes in measured C stocks, but did not guarantee convergent forward projections (100 years). Major causes of the projection uncertainty were due to insufficient understanding of how microbial processes and soil C pool change to modulate C turnover. For a given site, the uncertainty significantly increased with the magnitude of future C input and years of the projection. Across sites, the uncertainty correlated positively with temperature but negatively with rainfall. On average, a 331 % uncertainty in projected C sequestration ability can be inferred in Australian agricultural soils. This uncertainty would increase further if projections were made for future warming and drying conditions. Future improvement in soil C modelling should focus on how the microbial community and its C use efficiency change in response to environmental changes, and better conceptualization of heterogeneous soil C pools and the C transformation among those pools.
A specific polysaccharide from Mycoplasma mycoides.

SUMMARY: Washed suspensions of Mycoplasma mycoides var. mycoides were found to contain c. 10 % by weight of carbohydrate. The only sugars detected in hydrolysates were galactose and ribose. A galactan was obtained by extraction with warm aqueous phenol. The galactan was separated from ribonucleic acid by ultracentrifugation or by treatment with an ion-exchange resin. The product was rapidly hydrolysed by acid, releasing galactose and c. 4 % of CHC13-soluble lipid. It formed precipitates with specific antiserum and could be used to sensitize sheep erythrocytes to agglutination by the antiserum. It was not pyrogenic for rabbits and had little in common with the lipopolysaccharides of typical Gram-negative bacteria.
Identifying Urdu Complex Predication via Bigram Extraction

A problem that crops up repeatedly in shallow and deep syntactic parsing approaches to South Asian languages like Urdu/Hindi is the proper treatment of complex predications. Problems for the NLP of complex predications are posed by their productiveness and the ill understood nature of the range of their combinatorial possibilities. This paper presents an investigation into whether fine-grained information about the distributional properties of nouns in N+V CPs can be identified by the comparatively simple process of extracting bigrams from a large “raw” corpus of Urdu. In gathering the relevant properties, we were aided by visual analytics in that we coupled our computational data analysis with interactive visual components in the analysis of the large data sets. The visualization component proved to be an essential part of our data analysis, particular for the easy visual identification of outliers and false positives. Another essential component turned out to be our language-particular knowledge and access to existing language-particular resources. Overall, we were indeed able to identify high frequency N-V complex predications as well as pick out combinations we had not been aware of before. However, a manual inspection of our results also pointed to a problem of data sparsity, despite the use of a large corpus.
Effect of insulin resistance, apoE2 allele, and smoking on combined hyperlipidemia.

Combined hyperlipidemia may result from the interaction of several metabolic and environmental factors. We explored to what extent fasting insulin concentration, apolipoprotein (apo) E2 frequency, and cigarette smoking explained the serum levels of triglyceride and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) in patients with combined hyperlipidemia. Forty-nine untreated patients with combined hyperlipidemia were compared with 49 hypercholesterolemic patients who were matched for gender, age, and body mass index. All laboratory values were obtained after 9 weeks of standardized dietary intake and after an overnight fast. The patients with combined hyperlipidemia had a significantly higher (33 pmol/L, 50%) mean insulin concentration than matched hypercholesterolemic control subjects, indicating that the combined hyperlipidemic patients were more insulin resistant. However, the differences in the fasting insulin and triglyceride concentrations within the pairs were only slightly correlated (adjusted r = .29). The combined hyperlipidemic patients were also characterized by a higher frequency of apoE2 alleles (25% versus 6%) and smokers (41% versus 16%). In a matched multiple linear regression model, the differences in insulin concentration, apoE2 allele frequency, and smoking explained 12%, 8%, and 9%, respectively, of the mean paired difference in triglyceride concentration. The differences in insulin concentration or apoE2 allele frequency did not significantly explain the mean paired difference in HDL-C concentration, whereas smoking explained 17% of the difference. In conclusion, fasting insulin concentration, the presence of the apoE2 allele, and smoking may explain 30% of the hypertriglyceridemia and the low levels of HDL-C in nonobese patients with combined hyperlipidemia. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Describing spatial transitions using mereotopological relations over histories

Muller (1998) develops a language of motion and shape change in terms of topological relations and temporal order relations between regions of space-time (histories). He uses this language to state and prove the transition rules developed in (Randell, Cui, and Cohn, 1992) that constrain the changes in spatial relations possible for objects whose shape changes continuously. Unfortunately, Muller’s statement of the transition rules is inadequate. This paper presents an alternative statement of these transition rules. In an important and elegant paper, Philippe Muller (1998) develops a theory of motion based on the geometry of four-dimensional regions of space-time, called “histories”. This approach was suggested in Hayes’ “Naive Physics Manifesto” (1979), but Muller’s paper was the first to explore it systematically. Muller’s language is a first-order language over the universe of histories. Muller’s paper admits both regions that are regular and those that are “regular and open”; i.e. the interior of regular regions. I will modify this here to include only regular regions; this restriction does not affect the issues under discussion here, and it simplifies the presentation. The language contains three primitive binary relations: Cxy – Regions x and y are connected; that is, they share at least one point. x < y — Region x strictly precedes region y temporally. x> <y — The temporal projections of regions x and y share at least one instant. Other relations between regions are defined in terms of non-recursive first-order formulas over these. Muller proposes the following definition (D4.2) for continuity: Region w represents a continuous function from time to space if it is satisfies the following: ∗This research was supported in part by NSF grant #IRI-9625859. This paper began as the last section of (Davis, 2001). However, the reviewers of that paper felt, with some justification, that this material was peripheral to the primary purposes of that paper, and should be deleted. That left me in a quandary as to what to do with this. The material here is not really substantive enough to warrant separate publication; on the other hand, it would be a pity to discard it entirely. I decided, therefore, to publish it just as a technical note on the Web. I have not attempted to turn it into an independent work; rather, it should be considered as an addendum to (Davis, 2001). 1A region is regular if it is equal to the closure of its interior 2This paper follows Muller’s notational conventions: a variable is a single lower-case letter; predicates are either prefix or infix; atomic formulas are strings of symbols without further punctuation.