Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implementation of adaptive and synthetic-aperture processing schemes in integrated active-passive sonar systems

Progress in the implementation of state-of-the-art signal processing schemes in sonar systems is limited mainly by the moderate advance made in sonar computing architectures and the lack of operational evaluation of the advanced processing schemes. Until recently, matrix-based processing techniques, such as adaptive and synthetic-aperture processing, could not be efficiently implemented in the current type of sonar systems, even though it is widely believed that they have advantages that can address the requirements associated with the difficult operational problems that next-generation sonars will have to solve. Interestingly, adaptive and synthetic-aperture techniques may be viewed by other disciplines as conventional schemes. For the sonar technology discipline, however, they are considered as advanced schemes because of the very limited progress that has been made in their implementation in sonar systems. This paper is intended to address issues of implementation of advanced processing schemes in sonar systems and also to serve as a brief overview to the principles and applications of advanced sonar signal processing. The main development reported in this paper deals with the definition of a generic beam-forming structure that allows the implementation of nonconventional signal-processing techniques in integrated active-passive sonar systems. These schemes are adaptive and synthetic-aperture beam formers that have been shown experimentally to provide improvements in array gain for signals embedded in partially correlated noise fields. Using target tracking and localization results as performance criteria, the impact and merits of these techniques are contrasted with those obtained using the conventional beam former.
Inflammatory Cytokines as Risk Factors for a First Venous Thrombosis: A Prospective Population-Based Study

Background In case-control studies, elevated levels of interleukins 6 and 8 have been found to be associated with an increased risk of venous thrombosis (VT). Because of the design of these studies, it remained uncertain whether these alterations were a cause or a result of the VT. In order to distinguish between the two, we set out to measure the levels of six inflammatory markers prior to thrombosis in a population-based cohort using a nested case-cohort design. Methods and Findings Between August 1995 and June 1997, blood was collected from 66,140 people in the second Norwegian Health Study of Nord-Trøndelag (HUNT2). We identified venous thrombotic events occurring between entry and 1 January 2002. By this date we had registered 506 cases with a first VT; an age- and sex-stratified random sample of 1,464 controls without previous VT was drawn from the original cohort. Levels of interleukins 1β, 6, 8, 10, 12p70, and tumour necrosis factor-α were measured in the baseline sample that was taken 2 d to 75 mo before the event (median 33 mo). Cut-off points for levels were the 80th, 90th, and 95th percentile in the control group. With odds ratios ranging from 0.9 (95% CI: 0.6–1.5) to 1.1 (95% CI: 0.7–1.8), we did not find evidence for a relationship between VT and an altered inflammatory profile. Conclusions The results from this population sample show that an altered inflammatory profile is more likely to be a result rather than a cause of VT, although short-term effects of transiently elevated levels cannot be ruled out.
Protective Role of Transient Pore Openings in Calcium Handling by Cardiac Mitochondria*

Long-lasting mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) openings damage mitochondria, but transient mPTP openings protect against chronic cardiac stress. To probe the mechanism, we subjected isolated cardiac mitochondria to gradual Ca2+ loading, which, in the absence of BSA, induced long-lasting mPTP opening, causing matrix depolarization. However, with BSA present to mimic cytoplasmic fatty acid-binding proteins, the mitochondrial population remained polarized and functional, even after matrix Ca2+ release caused an extramitochondrial free [Ca2+] increase to >10 μm, unless mPTP openings were inhibited. These findings could be explained by asynchronous transient mPTP openings allowing individual mitochondria to depolarize long enough to flush accumulated matrix Ca2+ and then to repolarize rapidly after pore closure. Because subsequent matrix Ca2+ reuptake via the Ca2+ uniporter is estimated to be >100-fold slower than matrix Ca2+ release via mPTP, only a tiny fraction of mitochondria (<1%) are depolarized at any given time. Our results show that transient mPTP openings allow cardiac mitochondria to defend themselves collectively against elevated cytoplasmic Ca2+ levels as long as respiratory chain activity is able to balance proton influx with proton pumping. We found that transient mPTP openings also stimulated reactive oxygen species production, which may engage reactive oxygen species-dependent cardioprotective signaling.
A substantial fraction of phytoplankton-derived DON is resistant to degradation by a metabolically versatile, widely distributed marine bacterium

The capacity of bacteria for degrading dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) and remineralising ammonium is of importance for marine ecosystems, as nitrogen availability frequently limits productivity. Here, we assess the capacity of a widely distributed and metabolically versatile marine bacterium to degrade phytoplankton-derived dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and nitrogen. To achieve this, we lysed exponentially growing diatoms and used the derived dissolved organic matter (DOM) to support an axenic culture of Alteromonas sp. Bacterial biomass (as particulate carbon and nitrogen) was monitored for 70 days while growth dynamics (cell count), DOM (DOC, DON) and dissolved nutrient concentrations were monitored for up to 208 days. Bacterial biomass increased rapidly within the first 7 days prior to a period of growth/death cycles potentially linked to rapid nutrient recycling. We found that ≈75% of the initial DOC and ≈35% of the initial DON were consumed by bacteria within 40 and 4 days respectively, leaving a significant fraction of DOM resilient to degradation by this bacterial species. The different rates and extents to which DOC and DON were accessed resulted in changes in DOM stoichiometry and the iterative relationship between DOM quality and bacterial growth over time influenced bacterial cell C:N molar ratio. C:N values increased to 10 during the growth phase before decreasing to values of ≈5, indicating a change from relative N-limitation/C-sufficiency to relative C-limitation/N-sufficiency. Consequently, despite its reported metabolic versatility, we demonstrate that Alteromonas sp. was unable to access all phytoplankton derived DOM and that a bacterial community is likely to be required. By making the relatively simple assumption that an experimentally derived fraction of DOM remains resilient to bacterial degradation, these experimental results were corroborated by numerical simulations using a previously published model describing the interaction between DOM and bacteria in marine systems, thus supporting our hypothesis.
Decentralized H ∞ Controller Design for Large-scale Civil Structures

Complexities inherent to large-scale modern civil structures pose as great challenges in the design of feedback structural control systems for dynamic response mitigation. For example, system designers now face the difficulty of constructing complicated structural control systems which may contain hundreds, or even thousands, of sensors and control devices in a single system. Key issues in such large-scale structural control systems include reduced system reliability, increasing requirements on communication, and longer latencies in the feedback loop. To effectively address these issues, decentralized control strategies provide promising solutions that allow control systems to operate at high nodal counts. This paper examines the feasibility of designing a decentralized controller that minimizes the H∞ norm of the closed-loop system. H∞ control is a natural choice for decentralization because imposition of decentralized architectures is easy to achieve when posing the controller design using linear matrix inequalities. Decentralized control solutions are proposed herein for both continuous-time and discrete-time H∞ formulations. Detailed procedures for the design of the decentralized H∞ controller are first illustrated through a 3-story structure. Performance of the decentralized H∞ controller is compared to the performance of another decentralized controller based on the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) optimization criteria. Numerical simulations of the decentralized H∞ control solution are then conducted for a 20-story benchmark structure using different decentralized system architectures. Simulations using both ideal and realistic structural control devices illustrate the feasibility of the decentralized H∞ control solution.
A Person-Organization Discontinuity in Contract Perception: Why Corporations Can Get Away with Breaking Contracts But Individuals Cannot

Most legal systems in the world follow the principle of corporate personhood, which grants organizations the same legal status as natural persons. Although debate over the notion of corporate personhood has been fierce, whether and how this principle is applied in people's beliefs and intuitions has yet to be empirically examined. This work addresses the gap in the literature, in the context of formal contracts. While contracts are typically seen as either morally binding promises or morally neutral business instruments, the data presented here show that contracts of individuals are associated more strongly with promises than are contracts of organizations. As a result, breach of contract by an individual is seen as a moral transgression. The same behavior by an organization, however, is viewed more as a legitimate business decision. This paper also finds that contractual obligations should be phrased in “promise” terms to eliminate this person--organization discontinuity. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi. org/10.1287/mnsc.2013. 1745 . This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.
Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Maternal and Newborn Health

Maternal and newborn health (MNH) is a high priority for global health and is included among the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, the slow decline in maternal and newborn mortality jeopardizes achievements of the targets of MDGs. According to UNICEF, 60 million women give birth outside of health facilities, and family planning needs are satisfied for only 50%. Further, skilled birth attendance and the use of antenatal care are most inequitably distributed in maternal and newborn health interventions in low- and middle-income countries. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes have been shown to increase health service utilization among the poorest but little is written on the effects of such programmes on maternal and newborn health. We carried out a systematic review of studies on CCT that report maternal and newborn health outcomes, including studies from 8 countries. The CCT programmes have increased antenatal visits, skilled attendance at birth, delivery at a health facility, and tetanus toxoid vaccination for mothers and reduced the incidence of low birthweight. The programmes have not had a significant impact on fertility while the impact on maternal and newborn mortality has not been well-documented thus far. Given these positive effects, we make the case for further investment in CCT programmes for maternal and newborn health, noting gaps in knowledge and providing recommendations for better design and evaluation of such programmes. We recommend more rigorous impact evaluations that document impact pathways and take factors, such as cost-effectiveness, into account.
Onset of genetic obesity in the absence of hyperphagia during the first week of life in the Zucker rat (fa/fa).

The aim of this study was to discover which of three major abnormalities of the genetically obese Zucker rat (fa/fa), namely hyperphagia, excess adiposity, and hyperlipidemia, is the first to appear prior to manifest obesity, i.e., before weaning. Suckling fa/fa rats, bred from heterozygous parents, were detected by sizing fat cells obtained from an inguinal fat pad biopsy. Cell hypertrophy was observed in fa/fa rats, compared to Fa/-littermates of the same sex, as soon as 5-7 days after birth. Prediction of fa/fa genotype at this age by this method was assessed using a series of 80 pups and proved to be totally successful. The identity of the "predicted" obese pups was confirmed morphologically at 6 weeks of age. Food (milk) intake was estimated from water turnover rates determined on 86 pups aged 2-8 days using tritiated water. The results show that 7-day-old fa/fa rats had heavier inguinal fat pads with larger adipocytes and higher lipoprotein lipase activity than their lean controls. There was no genotype effect on water intake adjusted to body weight during the first week of life. Moreover weight of stomach contents and triglyceridemia were similar in all animals at 7 days. These results show that excess adiposity develops in the fa/fa rat during the first week of life, before hypertriglyceridemia and hyperphagia, and raises the question of whether this adiposity results from a defect in energy expenditure or an abnormality of fat cell storage capacity, or both.
Bullying and Cyberbullying : History , Statistics , Law , Prevention and Analysis

Bullying has been engrained in American society since the country’s founding. Bred from a capitalistic economy and competitive social hierarchy, bullying has remained a relevant issue through the years. Technological bullying, known today as cyberbullying, has allowed the problem to expand, become more elusive, and even harder to define. A thorough analysis of various case studies, statistical research, law cases, and news articles was conducted to understand the issue of cyberbullying and to find preventative measures that should be taken. This paper illuminates the background situation, current legal struggles, clinical implications, and potential preventative steps concerning bullying and cyberbullying alike.
Discovering discriminative action parts from mid-level video representations

We describe a mid-level approach for action recognition. From an input video, we extract salient spatio-temporal structures by forming clusters of trajectories that serve as candidates for the parts of an action. The assembly of these clusters into an action class is governed by a graphical model that incorporates appearance and motion constraints for the individual parts and pairwise constraints for the spatio-temporal dependencies among them. During training, we estimate the model parameters discriminatively. During classification, we efficiently match the model to a video using discrete optimization. We validate the model's classification ability in standard benchmark datasets and illustrate its potential to support a fine-grained analysis that not only gives a label to a video, but also identifies and localizes its constituent parts.
WhereToGo: Personalized Travel Recommendation for Individuals and Groups

With the rapid development of GPS-enabled mobile devices, huge amounts of user-contributed data with location information can be collected from the Internet. With this kind of data, one promising application is travel recommendation, which has attracted a considerable number of researches recently. However, most of the previous studies only focus on one aspect of the relations among users and locations or make a coarse linear combination of the relations. Moreover, all the existing work on travel recommendation do not consider recommendation to groups, which is an important characteristic of travelers' behavior. In this paper, we present a personalized travel recommendation system named Where to Go. The novelty of the system is a 3R model which can unify user-location relation, user-user relation and location-location relation into a single framework and perform random walk with restart to analyze the model. We further extend our approach to provide recommendations for groups. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use random walk with restart for group recommendation. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation using a real dataset collected from Flickr, which is one of the most popular online photo-sharing sites. Experimental results show that our approach provides significantly superior recommendation quality compared to other state-of-the-art travel recommendation approaches for both individuals and groups.
Mesodinium rubrum: the phytoplankter that wasn't

Recent reports suggest that the potential phototrophic role of plastidic ciliates in marine ecosystems may be considerable. A critical review of the literature demonstrates some confusion surrounding acceptance of the trophic position of even a well-established example of a photosynthetic c~liate, Mesodinium rubrum. Despite good evidence of obligate phototrophy from bloom studies, this species has, until recently, been omitted from the majority of routine phytoplankton counts, and has either been assigned to the microzooplankton or completely overlooked. Moreover, problems involved with sampling, enumeration and estimates of productivity for M. rubrum are also highlighted from the literature. These principally result from extremes of fragility, motility and vertical aggregation, which are commonly noted for this ciliate. Several recent studies, which have minimized some of these sampling problems and grouped the microplankton into more meaningful ecological categories, suggest that M. rubrum has an extremely widespread distribution and can be a very significant member of the phytoplankton. The combination of trophic and methodological difficulties appear to have compounded a serious underestimation of the contribution of M. rubrum to the primary productivity of coastal, estuarine and upwelling ecosystems, during both bloom, and perhaps more significantly, non-bloom conditions.
National Institutional Structures, Transaction Cost Economizing and Competitive Advantage: The Case of Japan

Japan’s economic success since World War II has been striking. Modern Japan was the first major industrial economy to emerge from outside the Western tradition. Economically devastated in 1945, by 1990 Japan had the world’s second largest economy and a GDP per head 20 percent greater than that of the United States. In this paper it is argued that one reason for Japan’s success is that the costs of achieving cooperation and specialization are lower in Japan than in the West. Cooperation and specialization have been acknowledged to have a beneficial impact upon productivity ever since Adam Smith wrote about cooperative specialization in the context of the division of labor. Modern economic theory, however, suggest that in a world of self-interested individuals the costs of achieving cooperation and specialization are substantial. In this paper it is argued that the cultural value system that Japan has inherited from its preindustrial past, and particularly the Tokugawa period, helps facilitate cooperation between individuals and encourages them to undertake productivity-enhancing investments in specialization. This lowers the costs of achieving cooperative specialization. In turn, the lower costs of achieving cooperative specialization have helped Japanese enterprises adopt practices such as self-managing work teams and long-term supplier relations that are consistent with obtaining a productivity-based competitive advantage in the world economy.
Irrelevant Components and Exact Computation of the Diameter Constrained Reliability

Let G = (V;E) be a simple graph with jVj = n nodes and jEj = m links, a subset K V of terminals, a vector p = (p1;:::;pm)2 [0; 1] m and a positive integer d, called diameter. We assume nodes are perfect but links fail stochastically and independently, with probabilities qi = 1 pi. The diameter-constrained reliability (DCR for short), is the probability that the terminals of the resulting subgraph remain connected by paths composed by d links, or less. This number is denoted by R d(p). The general computation of the parameter R d K;G(p) belongs to the class of NP-Hard problems, since is subsumes the complexity that a random graph is connected. A discussion of the computational complexity for DCR-subproblems is provided in terms of the number of terminal nodes k =jKj and diameter d. Either when d = 1 or when d = 2 and k is xed, the DCR is inside
Effective Model of the Fluid Flow through Elastic Tube with Variable Radius

We study the flow of an incompressible viscous Newtonian fluid through a tube with compliant walls. The tube is assumed to be straight, long, with circular cross--sections of variable radius. Elastic properties of the tube wall are described by the linear membrane shell equations. The flow is driven by the pulsatile inlet and outlet dynamic pressure data. Applying asymptotic techniques we derive a closed reduced model. The model is of mixed hyperbolic-parabolic type with memory effects. This two dimensional model can be solved as a system of two one--dimensional problems, so it has the complexity of one-dimensional problems. This provides an efficient numerical algorithm for a model that captures leading order 2-dimensional effects.
The effect of the level of dietary protein, carbohydrate and fat on urea kinetics in young children during rapid catch-up weight gain

The kinetics of urea metabolism were measured in children recovering from severe malnutrition. For a period of up to 10 d they received one of four diets which provided 711 kJ (170 kcal)/kg per d. Two groups received a diet with a high protein: energy (P:E) ratio of 10.6% (HP), enriched with either fat (HP/F) or maize starch and sucrose (HP/C). Two groups received a diet with a low P:E ratio of 8.8% (LP), enriched with either fat (LP/F) or maize starch and sucrose (LP/C). The rate of weight gain on the HP diets was significantly greater than on the LP diets. There was no difference in urea production between any of the four diets: HP/F 1.23 (SE 0.12), HP/C 1.37 (SE 0.14), LP/F 1.64 (SE 0.22), LP/C 1.15 (SE 0.15) mmol nitrogen/kg per h. On the HP diets urea excretion was 0.77 (SE 0.07) mmol N/kg per h. 61 % of production. There was significantly less urea excreted in the urine on diet LP/C than on LP/F (0.36 (SE 0.05) and 0.64 (SE 0.04) mmol N/kg per h respectively). A significantly greater percentage of the urea production was hydrolysed on the LP diets (61 %) compared with the HP diets (39 %), with the consequence that 50% of urea-N produced was available for synthetic activity on the LP diets compared with 30% on the HP diets. The increase in the urea hydrolysed on the LP diets was equivalent in magnitude to the decreased intake of N, so that overall intake plus hydrolysis did not differ between the LP and the HP diets. Crude N balance was similar on diets HP/F, HP/C and LP/C, but was significantly reduced on diet LP/F. These results show that there is an accommodation in urea kinetics during rapid catch-up weight gain, which becomes evident when the P:E ratio of the diet falls to 8.8%. It is proposed that, for a P:E ratio of 8.8%, protein is limiting for catch-up growth. When the intake has a P:E ratio of 8.8% the pattern of urea kinetics can be modified by the relative proportions of fat and carbohydrate in the diet. The measurement of urea kinetics provides a useful approach to the definition of the adequacy of the protein in the diet.