Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Innovative 8-shaped inductors integrated in an advanced BiCMOS technology

As integrated inductors are a key component for RF circuits, these devices are mainly highlighted because of an imposing size and disturbing radiations. This article focuses on two innovative 8-shaped inductors presenting size reduction and low radiation capability. 8-shaped devices are compared to octagonal inductors by the way of measurements and simulations. 8-shaped inductors, even if presenting slightly lower electrical performances (lower size but lower quality factor), show interesting coupling reduction, with improvements from 7 to 20 dB depending of inductor design and orientation. Future works will consist of optimizing 2/3-turn 8-shaped layouts and test designs in circuit applications.
Effect of irrigation regimes on yield and quality of grapes (Vitis vinifera L. cv. ‘Makutupora red’) in Dodoma, Tanzania

Application of water to vines at a lower amount than the crop water requirement has shown to improve grape quality in some grapevine cultivars depending on the drought resistance and tolerance of the cultivars. In order to know the amount of water that can be lowered it is necessary to know the exact amount of water that is required by the plant. The daily transpiration (ET b ) of mature Vitis vinifera L. cv. ‘Makutupora red’ grown in Dodoma-Tanzania for wine production during two growing seasons (2014 and 2015) was measured by compensation heat pulse method. Average daily transpiration was found to be 4.46 liters per plant in 2015 and 4.54 liters per plant in 2014. Water lost through evaporation (ET e ) was also determined on daily basis by using soil moisture probes (DFM Software Solution). The average daily evaporation found to be 0.46 liters per plant in 2015 and 0.42 liters per plant in 2014. After the determination of crop water requirement, the vines were subjected to different irrigation regimes in order to study their effects on grape yield and quality. Three different drip irrigation methods conversional drip irrigation (CDI), partial rootzone drying ( PRD) and root zone deficit rationing (RDR) together with four levels of water at 100% of crop evapotranspiration (ET c ), 63.5% of ET c , 56.3% of ET c and 48.9% of ET c were interacted in order to determine a combination that would give good grape yield and quality. The results showed that a decrease in the amount of water applied to the vines caused an improvement in grape quality and a decrease in grape yield. Conventional drip irrigation CDI was observed to be the best option for optimum grape yield and high grape quality at 63.5% of crop evapotranspiration. Conventional deficit irrigation at 56.3% of crop evapotranspiration was found to be a good option for very high quality grapes but with a decrease in grape yield. Key words : Grape yield, grape quality, deficit irrigation.
Volunteering, polygenic risk for Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive functioning among older adults.

OBJECTIVE In the context of the public health burden posed by increases in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) prevalence around the globe and the related research efforts to identify modifiable risk factors for the disease, we sought to provide an empirical test of earlier claims that volunteering may be considered as a health intervention that could help to prevent or delay the onset of AD. METHOD Using nine waves of panel data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (n=9,697), we examined whether volunteering conferred cognitive health benefits in later life and whether volunteering served a gene-regulatory function to help alleviate cognitive decline associated with polygenic risk for AD. Multilevel models were used to estimate associations between volunteering, polygenic risk for AD, and cognitive functioning over time. RESULTS We found robust within-person associations between volunteering (assessed as volunteer status and time commitment) and cognitive functioning over time, such that volunteering was associated with higher levels of cognitive functioning and slower cognitive decline. The findings also provided evidence that the within-person associations for volunteering and cognitive decline were more pronounced for older adults at higher genetic risk for developing AD. CONCLUSIONS Our findings are in line with a growing body of theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence suggesting that prosocial behaviors are directly associated with biological systems and may modify gene regulation to confer health benefits. The analytic approach taken in this study also provided a useful framework for investigating the effectiveness of other modifiable risk factors that vary over time in the context of cognitive decline related to genetic risk for AD.
Biophysics of Malarial Parasite Exit from Infected Erythrocytes

Upon infection and development within human erythrocytes, P. falciparum induces alterations to the infected RBC morphology and bio-mechanical properties to eventually rupture the host cells through parasitic and host derived proteases of cysteine and serine families. We used previously reported broad-spectrum inhibitors (E64d, EGTA-AM and chymostatin) to inhibit these proteases and impede rupture to analyze mechanical signatures associated with parasite escape. Treatment of late-stage iRBCs with E64d and EGTA-AM prevented rupture, resulted in no major RBC cytoskeletal reconfiguration but altered schizont morphology followed by dramatic re-distribution of three-dimensional refractive index (3D-RI) within the iRBC. These phenotypes demonstrated several-fold increased iRBC membrane flickering. In contrast, chymostatin treatment showed no 3D-RI changes and caused elevated fluctuations solely within the parasitophorous vacuole. We show that E64d and EGTA-AM supported PV breakdown and the resulting elevated fluctuations followed non-Gaussian pattern that resulted from direct merozoite impingement against the iRBC membrane. Optical trapping experiments highlighted reduced deformability of the iRBC membranes upon rupture-arrest, more specifically in the treatments that facilitated PV breakdown. Taken together, our experiments provide novel mechanistic interpretations on the role of parasitophorous vacuole in maintaining the spherical schizont morphology, the impact of PV breakdown on iRBC membrane fluctuations leading to eventual parasite escape and the evolution of membrane stiffness properties of host cells in which merozoites were irreversibly trapped, recourse to protease inhibitors. These findings provide a comprehensive, previously unavailable, body of information on the combined effects of biochemical and biophysical factors on parasite egress from iRBCs.
Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration: The Minimum Description Length Approach

The principled non-rigid registration of groups of images requires a fully groupwise objective function. We consider the problem as one of finding the optimal dense correspondence between the images in the set, where optimality is defined using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, that the transmission of a model of the data, together with the parameters of that model, should be as short as possible. We demonstrate that this approach provides a suitable objective function by applying it to the task of non-rigid registration of a set of 2D T1-weighted MR images of the human brain. Furthermore, we show that even in the case when substantial portions of the images are missing, the algorithm not only converges to the correct solution, but also allows meaningful integration of image data across the training set, allowing the original image to be reconstructed.
complex-value recurrent neural networks for global optimization of beamforming in multi-symbol MIMO communication systems

Multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver can be used to improve communication efficiency by canceling channel noises using the correlated information among the signals transmitted from different antennas. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for this problem for another interesting case where multiple symbols are used to make the best use of the multiple antenna channel. Such an issue cannot be converted into a convex optimization problem. It can be considered as a generalization of the vector optimization problem on Grassmannian manifold to that one a complex Stiefel manifold, which has not been well considered yet. The proposed algorithm is based on the gradient search on a complex Stiefel manifold of a non-convex problem to maximize the system signal to noise ratio. With appropriately defined Riemannian metric on this manifold, a neat formula has been developed for the gradient function. It is proved that the proposed algorithm converges to the global optimum. This algorithm can also be implemented into recurrent neural network to facilitate real-time computation. Its parallel structure can be realized using analog circuits. Furthermore, a modified gradient flow defined on the non-compact Stiefel manifold is also developed, which is robust against any initial condition error. The corresponding recurrent neural network is also discussed. Simulation experiments are included to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithms.
The Effect of Work-Family Conflict on Job Satisfaction and Employee Performance

Stress is a condition in the workplace can be affect job satisfaction and employee performance. The aims of this research to analysis the effect of job stress on job satisfaction job stress on employee performance, and job satisfaction on employee performance. In this study, the observation data taken from 46 employees by using sampling technique. The descriptive and inferential analysis with partial least square (PLS) to test the hypotheses is used to obtain result. The result of the research shows that job stress has negative and significant effect on job satisfaction, job stress has negative and significant effect on employee performance, and job satisfaction has negative significant effect on employee performance. Furthermore, Job satisfaction cannot mediate relationship between job stresses on employee performance.
Mechanical Intelligence : Collected Works of AM Turing Universal Turing Machine

Scholars agree that autonomous communication are an interesting new topic in the field of trainable software engineeri ng, and security experts concur. Given the current status of col laborative methodologies, steganographers famously desi re the study of flip-flop gates. In this work we validate that writeahead logging and object-oriented languages can interact t o solve this issue.
Image denoising using bivariate α-stable distributions in the complex wavelet domain

Recently, the dual-tree complex wavelet transform has been proposed as an analysis tool featuring near shift-invariance and improved directional selectivity compared to the standard wavelet transform. Within this framework, we describe a novel technique for removing noise from digital images. We design a bivariate maximum a posteriori estimator, which relies on the family of isotropic α-stable distributions. Using this relatively new statistical model we are able to better capture the heavy-tailed nature of the data as well as the interscale dependencies of wavelet coefficients. We test our algorithm for the Cauchy case, in comparison with several recently published methods. The simulation results show that our proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of root mean squared (RMS) error.
Topical review: sluggish cognitive tempo: research findings and relevance for pediatric psychology.

OBJECTIVE To summarize recent research on sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) and consider the potential relevance of SCT for the field of pediatric psychology. METHODS Literature review. RESULTS Recent empirical evidence shows SCT symptoms consisting of sluggish/sleepy and daydreamy behaviors to be distinct from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms. SCT is associated with psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents, including internalizing symptoms, social withdrawal, and, possibly, academic impairment. CONCLUSIONS The recent findings reviewed suggest that SCT is an important construct for pediatric psychologists to be aware of and may also be directly useful for the research and practice of pediatric psychology.
Relationship of preexisting dengue virus (DV) neutralizing antibody levels to viremia and severity of disease in a prospective cohort study of DV infection in Thailand.

BACKGROUND Infection with any 1 of the 4 dengue viruses (DVs) can produce several illnesses, ranging from a mild febrile illness to classic dengue fever (DF) to dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), a potentially life-threatening disease. Most DHF cases occur after sequential heterotypic DV infections. The role of preexisting humoral immunity in modifying severity of dengue disease is not well understood. METHODS We conducted a prospective cohort study of children in a region where dengue disease is hyperendemic and examined the role of preexisting neutralizing anti-DV antibodies (Abs) in modifying secondary dengue-3 virus (D3V), dengue-2 virus (D2V), and dengue-1 virus (D1V) infections. RESULTS In secondary D3V infection, higher levels of preexisting neutralizing Ab directed against D3V (reference virus strain and patient's virus isolate) were associated with lower viremia levels and milder disease. Preexisting neutralizing Ab levels against D2V were not associated with severity of secondary D2V infection. The levels of preexisting neutralizing Ab against the infecting virus isolates were not associated with viremia levels in secondary D2V or D1V infections. CONCLUSIONS Cross-reactive memory humoral immune responses appear to be beneficial in symptomatic secondary D3V infection, but not in secondary D2V or D1V infection. These results may have important implications for the development of live attenuated tetravalent dengue vaccines.
Adaptive Mesh Expansion Model (AMEM) for Liver Segmentation from CT Image

This study proposes a novel adaptive mesh expansion model (AMEM) for liver segmentation from computed tomography images. The virtual deformable simplex model (DSM) is introduced to represent the mesh, in which the motion of each vertex can be easily manipulated. The balloon, edge, and gradient forces are combined with the binary image to construct the external force of the deformable model, which can rapidly drive the DSM to approach the target liver boundaries. Moreover, tangential and normal forces are combined with the gradient image to control the internal force, such that the DSM degree of smoothness can be precisely controlled. The triangular facet of the DSM is adaptively decomposed into smaller triangular components, which can significantly improve the segmentation accuracy of the irregularly sharp corners of the liver. The proposed method is evaluated on the basis of different criteria applied to 10 clinical data sets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed AMEM algorithm is effective and robust and thus outperforms six other up-to-date algorithms. Moreover, AMEM can achieve a mean overlap error of 6.8% and a mean volume difference of 2.7%, whereas the average symmetric surface distance and the root mean square symmetric surface distance can reach 1.3 mm and 2.7 mm, respectively.
Belief propagation for optimal edge-cover in the random complete graph

We apply the objective method of Aldous to the problem of finding the minimum-cost edge cover of the complete graph with random independent and identically distributed edge costs. The limit, as the number of vertices goes to infinity, of the expected minimum cost for this problem is known via a combinatorial approach of Hessler and W\"{a}stlund. We provide a proof of this result using the machinery of the objective method and local weak convergence, which was used to prove the $\zeta(2)$ limit of the random assignment problem. A proof via the objective method is useful because it provides us with more information on the nature of the edge's incident on a typical root in the minimum-cost edge cover. We further show that a belief propagation algorithm converges asymptotically to the optimal solution. This can be applied in a computational linguistics problem of semantic projection. The belief propagation algorithm yields a near optimal solution with lesser complexity than the known best algorithms designed for optimality in worst-case settings.
Acute anterior uveitis and other extra-articular manifestations of spondyloarthritis

Background: Spondyloarthritis (SpA) is associated with an array of peripheral manifestations. Our study aims to evaluate extra-articular manifestations of SpA in a Romanian academic clinical setting and to observe their associations with different disease measures. Methods: The study was designed to note the extra-articular manifestations of SpA patients in a cross-sectional and retrospective manner. Records included demographics, inflammation markers, SpA clinical characteristics, treatment regimes, associated osteoporosis and cardiovascular morbidity. Data were assessed by using appropriate non-parametric tests. Results: A total of 126 SpA patients were included. The most common extra-articular manifestations were skin involvement in the form of psoriasis (34.1%), eye involvement in the form of acute anterior uveitis (8.7%) and dactylitis (7.2%). Compared to patients with no record of uveitis, uveitis-affected cases were more frequently males, more frequently diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, but less frequently dyslipidemic and diagnosed with psoriasis. Psoriasis-affected patients were older and had a higher prevalence of peripheral SpA diagnosis, but a lower prevalence of radiographic sacroiliitis. Conclusions:Acute anterior uveitis in SpA predominantly affects males with AS. This is relevant both to clinical and fundamental science, since its management requires both ophthalmology and rheumatology clinical settings. Psoriasis was associated more frequently with peripheral SpA. Abbreviations: AHT = arterial hypertension, AS = ankylosing spondylitis, ASAS = Assessment in SpondyloArthritis international Society, aSpA = axial spondyloarthritis, BASFI = Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Functional Index, BASDAI = Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index, CRP = C-reactive protein, ESR = erythrocyte sedimentation rate, DM2 = type 2 diabetes mellitus, HLA = human leukocyte antigen, IBD = inflammatory bowel disease, MRI = magnetic resonance imaging, mSpA = mixed (peripheral and axial) spondyloarthritis, NSAIDs = non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, pSpA = peripheral spondyloarthritis, PsA = psoriatic arthritis, ReA = reactive arthritis, SD = standard deviation, SI = sacroiliitis, SpA = spondyloarthritis, UDSpA = undifferentiated spondyloarthritis.
Modeling Tropical Precipitation in a Single Column

Abstract A modified formulation of the traditional single column model for representing a limited area near the equator is proposed. This formulation can also be considered a two-column model in the limit as the area represented by one of the columns becomes very large compared to the other. Only a single column is explicitly modeled, but its free tropospheric temperature, rather than its mean vertical velocity, is prescribed. This allows the precipitation and vertical velocity to be true prognostic variables, as in prior analytical theories of tropical precipitation. Two models developed by other authors are modified according to the proposed formulation. The first is the intermediate atmospheric model of J. D. Neelin and N. Zeng, but with the horizontal connections between columns broken, rendering it a set of disconnected column models. The second is the column model of N. O. Renno, K. A. Emanuel, and P. H. Stone. In the first model, the set of disconnected column models is run with a fixed temperature.
Size resolved mass concentration and elemental composition of atmospheric aerosols over the Eastern Mediterranean area

Abstract. A Berner low pressure impactor was used to collect size-segregated aerosol samples at Finokalia, located on the north-eastern coast of Crete, Greece during July 2000 and January 2001. Several samples were also collected during the summer campaign aboard the research vessel "AEGAIEO" in the Aegean Sea. Gravimetric analysis and inversion techniques yielded daily PM1 and PM10 mass concentrations. The samples were also analysed by PIXE giving the elemental size distributions of Al, Si, K, Ca, Ti, Mn, Fe, Sr, S, Cl, Ni, V, Cu, Cr, Zn, and Pb. The crustal elements and sea-salt had a unimodal supermicron size distribution. Sulphur was found predominantly in submicron fractions. K, V, and Ni exhibited a bimodal distribution with a submicron mode produced by forest fires and oil combustion. The anthropogenic elements had broad and not well-defined distributions. The time series for PM1 and PM10 mass and elemental concentrations showed both daily and seasonal variation. Higher mass concentrations were observed during two incursions of Saharan dust, whilst higher concentrations of S, Cu, Zn, and Pb were encountered in samples collected in air masses arriving from northern Greece or the western coast of Turkey. Elevated concentrations of chlorine were found in samples with air masses either originating above the Atlantic Ocean and arriving at Finokalia via western Europe or recirculating over the western coast of the Black Sea.
Influence of the practice of Physical Activity on schoolchildren’s Aggressiveness-Harassment

Bullying is one of the main problems throughout the educational period in recent times. The objective of this study is to determine the relationship between the practice of Physical Activity and bullying amongst schoolchildren, using a questionnaire translated into Spanish and validated by expert judgment. In terms of results, there are statistically significant differences between children performing physical activity and bullying, with the main conclusion that the situations of bullying fluctuate according to age and the practice of Physical Activity.