Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Atmospheric Ionizing Radiation and Human Exposure

ABSTRACT Atmospheric ionizing radiation is of interest, apart from its main concern of aircraft exposures, because it is a prin-cipal source of human exposure to radiations with high linear energy transfer (LET). The ionizing radiations of the lower atmosphere near the Earth’s surface tend to be dominated by the terrestrial radioisotopes. especially along the coastal plain and interior low lands, and have only minor contributions from neutrons (11 percent). The world av-erage is substantially larger but the high altitude cities especially have substantial contributions from neutrons (25 to 45 percent). Understanding the world distribution of neutron exposures requires an improved understanding of the latitudinal, longitudinal, altitude and spectral distribution that depends on local terrain and time. These issues are being investigated in a combined experimental and theoretical program. This paper will give an overview of human exposures and describe the development of improved environmental models.
Auditory fitness for duty: a review.

BACKGROUND Auditory fitness for duty (AFFD) refers to the possession of hearing abilities sufficient for safe and effective job performance. In jobs such as law enforcement and piloting, where the ability to hear is critical to job performance and safety, hearing loss can decrease performance, even to the point of being hazardous to self and others. Tests of AFFD should provide an employer with a valid assessment of an employee's ability to perform the job safely, without discriminating against the employee purely on the basis of hearing loss. PURPOSE The purpose of this review is to provide a basic description of the functional hearing abilities required in hearing-critical occupations, and a summary of current practices in AFFD evaluation. In addition, we suggest directions for research and standardization to ensure best practices in the evaluation of AFFD in the future. RESEARCH DESIGN We conducted a systematic review of the English-language peer-reviewed literature in AFFD. "Popular" search engines were consulted for governmental regulations and trade journal articles. We also contacted professionals with expertise in AFFD regarding research projects, unpublished material, and current standards. RESULTS The literature review provided information regarding the functional hearing abilities required to perform hearing-critical tasks, the development of and characteristics of AFFD protocols, and the current implementation of AFFD protocols. CONCLUSIONS This review paper provides evidence of the need to institute job-specific AFFD protocols, move beyond the pure-tone audiogram, and establish the validity of test protocols. These needs are arguably greater now than in times past.
Elevated mantle temperature beneath East Africa

The causes of magmatism at magmatic rifted margins and large igneous provinces (LIPs) are uncertain because the condition of the mantle that underlay them during formation can no longer be directly observed. Therefore, whether the mantle was characterized by elevated potential temperatures ( T P ), small-scale convection, or anomalously fertile composition is debated. East Africa is an ideal area in which to address this problem because it contains both the young African-Arabian LIP and the tectonically and magmatically active East African Rift system. Here we present mantle T P estimates for 53 primitive magmas from throughout the region to reveal that thermal anomalies currently peak in Djibouti (140 °C above ambient upper mantle). Slightly warmer conditions accompanied the Oligocene African-Arabian LIP, when the T P anomaly was 170 °C. These values are toward the low end of the global temperature range of LIPs, despite the markedly slow seismic velocity mantle that underlies the region. Mantle seismic velocity anomalies in East Africa cannot, therefore, as is often assumed, be attributed simply to elevated mantle temperatures. We conclude that CO 2 -assisted melt production in the African superplume contributes to the markedly slow seismic velocities below East Africa.
The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To empirically disentangle alternative determinants of location choices, we use Berlin's division and reunification as a source of exogenous variation in the surrounding concentration of economic activity. Using disaggregated data on land prices, workplace employment and residence employment for thousands of city blocks for 1936, 1986 and 2006, we find that the model can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure.
Congruency effects in conceptualizing for speech

In naming a picture at the basic level, a semantically related distractor word induces interference in comparison to an unrelated word. When the task is changed from basic-level naming to categorization, however, this effect reverses to semantic facilitation. In previous studies, this semantic facilitation effect was attributed to “message congruency” at the conceptual level. The present study examines the nature of this message congruency effect: Is it due to competition between two activated category concepts in the incongruent condition or is it due to convergence of activity on a single category concept in the congruent condition? Two experiments show that neither the strength with which the context stimulus activates an incongruent category concept nor the semantic distance between the category concepts activated by target and distractor affect target categorization speed. We conclude that the message congruency effect is most likely due to convergence on a single category concept in the category-congruent condition.
Efficient Raman Amplification in Cladding-Pumped Silicon Waveguides

In this paper, we showed that the maximum achievable total gain of silicon Raman amplifiers can be significantly increased by injecting the pump power into a surrounding cladding instead of directly into the silicon core. The underlying principle is that the pump power is guided primarily in an optically linear cladding surrounding the silicon core and thus propagates relatively unimpaired by free-carrier absorption. This permits longer amplifier lengths and higher pump powers, which leads to a larger possible total gain
Reweighted laplace prior based hyperspectral compressive sensing for unknown sparsity

Compressive sensing(CS) has been exploited for hype-spectral image(HSI) compression in recent years. Though it can greatly reduce the costs of computation and storage, the reconstruction of HSI from a few linear measurements is challenging. The underlying sparsity of HSI is crucial to improve the reconstruction accuracy. However, the sparsity of HSI is unknown in reality and varied with different noise, which makes the sparsity estimation difficult. To address this problem, a novel reweighted Laplace prior based hyperspectral compressive sensing method is proposed in this study. First, the reweighted Laplace prior is proposed to model the distribution of sparsity in HSI. Second, the latent variable Bayes model is employed to learn the optimal configuration of the reweighted Laplace prior from the measurements. The model unifies signal recovery, prior learning and noise estimation into a variational framework to infer the parameters automatically. The learned sparsity prior can represent the underlying structure of the sparse signal very well and is adaptive to the unknown noise, which improves the reconstruction accuracy of HSI. The experimental results on three hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art hyperspectral CS methods on the reconstruction accuracy.
The Roles of Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Pathways in TGF-β-Induced Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition

The mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway allows cells to interpret external signals and respond appropriately, especially during the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). EMT is an important process during embryonic development, fibrosis, and tumor progression in which epithelial cells acquire mesenchymal, fibroblast-like properties and show reduced intercellular adhesion and increased motility. TGF-β signaling is the first pathway to be described as an inducer of EMT, and its relationship with the Smad family is already well characterized. Studies of four members of the MAPK family in different biological systems have shown that the MAPK and TGF-β signaling pathways interact with each other and have a synergistic effect on the secretion of additional growth factors and cytokines that in turn promote EMT. In this paper, we present background on the regulation and function of MAPKs and their cascades, highlight the mechanisms of MAPK crosstalk with TGF-β signaling, and discuss the roles of MAPKs in EMT.
Maximum conditional mutual information projection for speech recognition

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in its original modelfree formulation is best suited to classification problems with equal-covariance classes. Heteroscedastic discriminant analysis (HDA) removes this equal covariance constraint, and therefore is more suitable for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, maximizing HDA objective function does not correspond directly to minimizing the recognition error. In its original formulation, HDA solves a maximum likelihood estimation problem in the original feature space to calculate the HDAtransformationmatrix. Sincethedimensionoftheoriginal feature space in ASR problems is usually high, the estimation of the HDA transformation matrix becomes computationally expensive and requires a large amount of training data. This paper presentsageneralizationofLDAthatsolvesthesetwoproblems. We start with showing that the calculation of the LDA projection matrix is a maximum mutual information estimation probleminthelower-dimensionalspacewithsomeconstraintsonthe modelofthejointconditionalandunconditionalprobabilitydensity functions (PDF) of the features, and then, by relaxing these constraints,wedevelopadimensionalityreductionapproachthat maximizestheconditionalmutualinformationbetweentheclass identity and the feature vector in the lower-dimensional space given the recognizer model. Using this approach, we achieved 1% improvement in phoneme recognition accuracy compared to the baseline system. Improvement in recognition accuracy compared to both LDA and HDA approaches is also achieved .
Fast and Tiny Structural Self-Indexes for XML

XML document markup is highly repetitive and therefore well compressible using dictionary-based methods such as DAGs or grammars. In the context of selectivity estimation, grammar-compressed trees were used before as synopsis for structural XPath queries. Here a fully-fledged index over such grammars is presented. The index allows to execute arbitrary tree algorithms with a slow-down that is comparable to the space improvement. More interestingly, certain algorithms execute much faster over the index (because no decompression occurs). E.g., for structural XPath count queries, evaluating over the index is faster than previous XPath implementations, often by two orders of magnitude. The index also allows to serialize XML results (including texts) faster than previous systems, by a factor of ca. 2-3. This is due to efficient copy handling of grammar repetitions, and because materialization is totally avoided. In order to compare with twig join implementations, we implemented a materializer which writes out pre-order numbers of result nodes, and show its competitiveness.
Profound Prevention of Experimental Brain Metastases of Breast Cancer by Temozolomide in an MGMT-Dependent Manner

Purpose: Brain metastases of breast cancer cause neurocognitive damage and are incurable. We evaluated a role for temozolomide in the prevention of brain metastases of breast cancer in experimental brain metastasis models. Experimental Design: Temozolomide was administered in mice following earlier injection of brain-tropic HER2–positive JIMT-1-BR3 and triple-negative 231-BR-EGFP sublines, the latter with and without expression of O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT). In addition, the percentage of MGMT-positive tumor cells in 62 patient-matched sets of breast cancer primary tumors and resected brain metastases was determined immunohistochemically. Results: Temozolomide, when dosed at 50, 25, 10, or 5 mg/kg, 5 days per week, beginning 3 days after inoculation, completely prevented the formation of experimental brain metastases from MGMT-negative 231-BR-EGFP cells. At a 1 mg/kg dose, temozolomide prevented 68% of large brain metastases, and was ineffective at a dose of 0.5 mg/kg. When the 50 mg/kg dose was administered beginning on days 18 or 24, temozolomide efficacy was reduced or absent. Temozolomide was ineffective at preventing brain metastases in MGMT-transduced 231-BR-EGFP and MGMT-expressing JIMT-1-BR3 sublines. In 62 patient-matched sets of primary breast tumors and resected brain metastases, 43.5% of the specimens had concordant low MGMT expression, whereas in another 14.5% of sets high MGMT staining in the primary tumor corresponded with low staining in the brain metastasis. Conclusions: Temozolomide profoundly prevented the outgrowth of experimental brain metastases of breast cancer in an MGMT-dependent manner. These data provide compelling rationale for investigating the preventive efficacy of temozolomide in a clinical setting. Clin Cancer Res; 20(10); 2727–39. ©2014 AACR.
Antigenic analysis of Campylobacter species and an intracellular Campylobacter-like organism associated with porcine proliferative enteropathies

Whole-cell and outer membrane preparations of Campylobacter mucosalis, C. hyointestinalis, C. jejuni, and C. coli isolated from porcine intestines were compared with preparations of intracellular Campylobacter-like organisms extracted directly from the lesions of pigs with proliferative enteropathy. By gradient polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, outer membrane and total protein profiles of C. mucosalis, C. hyointestinalis, C. jejuni, and C. coli were significantly different from each other and from those of the Campylobacter-like organisms. Immunoblotting of these preparations with rabbit antisera or monoclonal antibodies prepared against the intracellular Campylobacter-like organisms showed strong reactions only with a 25,000- to 27,000-molecular-weight component of preparations of the intracellular organisms. Antisera to cultivable Campylobacter species isolates did not react with preparations of intracellular organisms. Isoelectric focusing of sonicated preparations showed protein profile differences and an immune-reactive component in the intracellular organisms with a pI of 4.5. This study suggests that the intracellular Campylobacter-like organism associated with proliferative enteropathy may be a novel bacterium with significant antigenic differences from the Campylobacter species previously associated with the disease.
Statistics of Stokes variables for correlated Gaussian fields.

The joint and marginal probability distribution functions of the Stokes variables are derived for correlated Gaussian fields [an extension of D. Eliyahu, Phys. Rev. E 47, 2881 (1993)]. The statistics depend only on the first moment (averaged) Stokes variables and have a universal form for [ital S][sub 1], [ital S][sub 2], and [ital S][sub 3]. The statistics of the variables describing the Cartesian coordinates of the Poincare sphere are given also.
Experimental Study of Uniaxial-Stress Effects on DC Characteristics of nMOSFETs

Stress-induced shifts of the direct current characteristics on n-type metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (nMOSFETs) were investigated experimentally. The stress sensitivities of nMOSFET characteristics were measured by the 4-point bending method, and the gate-length dependence of transconductance shifts caused by uniaxial stress was evaluated. As a result, it is shown that the gate-length dependence of transconductance shifts is attributed to parasitic resistance of the nMOSFETs. Also, this paper verified the electron-mobility model proposed in the previous study that includes stress effects in comparison with the experimental results. As a result, several improvements for the electron-mobility model are proposed in this paper. We describe the change of the conduction-band energy induced by the shear deformation of silicon. The shear deformation with a uniaxial stress along the direction of silicon should be considered in the change of the conduction-band energy.
Human Activity Dampens the Benefits of Group Size on Vigilance in Khulan (Equus hemionus) in Western China

Animals receive anti-predator benefits from social behavior. As part of a group, individuals spend less time being vigilant, and vigilance decreases with increasing group size. This phenomenon, called “the many-eyes effect”, together with the “encounter dilution effect”, is considered among the most important factors determining individual vigilance behavior. However, in addition to group size, other social and environmental factors also influence the degree of vigilance, including disturbance from human activities. In our study, we examined vigilance behavior of Khulans (Equus hemionus) in the Xinjiang Province in western China to test whether and how human disturbance and group size affect vigilance. According to our results, Khulan showed a negative correlation between group size and the percentage time spent vigilant, although this negative correlation depended on the groups’ disturbance level. Khulan in the more disturbed area had a dampened benefit from increases in group size, compared to those in the undisturbed core areas. Provision of continuous areas of high-quality habitat for Khulans will allow them to form larger undisturbed aggregations and to gain foraging benefits through reduced individual vigilance, as well as anti-predator benefits through increased probability of predator detection.
Bone healing at bicortically installed implants with different surface configurations. An experimental study in rabbits.

OBJECTIVE To study the sequential healing at bicortically installed implants with surface modifications by the use of fluoroboric acid and/or H2 O2 . MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty-eight albino New Zealand rabbits were used. Two recipient sites were prepared in the tibiae bilaterally, one in the metaphysis and the second in the diaphysis regions. Four implants with different surface characteristics were randomly installed with bicortical stabilization: (i) sandblasted and acid-etched; (ii) same surface as i, but with a substitution of the hydrofluoric acid with fluoroboric acid; (iii) same surface as i, additionally treated with H2 O2 ; and (iv) same surface modified as ii, additionally treated with H2 O2 . The animals were killed after 5, 8, 15, and 30 days. Ground sections were prepared for histological analyses. RESULTS No statistically significant differences in osseointegration were found among various surfaces at any of the healing periods. A higher degree of osseointegration was observed at the implants placed in the metaphysis compared to those placed in the diaphysis, especially during early healing. A higher degree of osseointegration was found at sites with proximity to compact (cortical) bone when compared to the middle portion of the implants, especially in the diaphysis region. CONCLUSIONS Surfaces modified with different acids or H2 O2 resulted in similar osseointegration compared to a standard sandblasted and acid-etched surface. The portion of the bicortically installed implants in close contact with the cortical compartment presented a higher percentage of osseointegration compared with the region in contact with the bone marrow compartment.
Failure to find asymmetry in auditory gap detection

Several previous studies have demonstrated a right ear advantage in the detection of a brief silent gap in a broadband noise, with one study indicating that such an asymmetry does not exist. If such an asymmetry reflects more efficient temporal processing of auditory stimuli in the left hemisphere of the brain, then an asymmetry may be expected to exist regardless of the experimental procedure. Three sequential studies are summarised that use both adaptive threshold measurements and yes/no procedures to assess auditory gap detection performance both with and without the presence of a dichotic masker. These studies fail to reveal any systematic bias in performance towards one ear, and it is suggested that the right ear advantage demonstrated in previous studies may not reflect auditory gap detection performance per se, but may reflect the participants’ response bias in the particular type of tasks used.
High blood pressure-lowering and vasoprotective effects of milk products in experimental hypertension

Milk casein-derived angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE)-inhibitory tripeptides isoleucine-proline-proline (Ile-Pro-Pro) and valine-proline-proline (Val-Pro-Pro) have been shown to have antihypertensive effects in human subjects and to attenuate the development of hypertension in experimental models. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of a fermented milk product containing Ile-Pro-Pro and Val-Pro-Pro and plant sterols on already established hypertension, endothelial dysfunction and aortic gene expression. Male spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) with baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP) of 195 mmHg were given either active milk (tripeptides and plant sterols), milk or water ad libitum for 6 weeks. SBP was measured weekly by the tail-cuff method. The endothelial function of mesenteric arteries was investigated at the end of the study. Aortas were collected for DNA microarray study (Affymetrix Rat Gene 1.0 ST Array). The main finding was that active milk decreased SBP by 16 mmHg compared with water (178 (sem 3) v. 195 (sem 3) mmHg; P < 0·001). Milk also had an antihypertensive effect. Active milk improved mesenteric artery endothelial dysfunction by NO-dependent and endothelium-derived hyperpolarising factor-dependent mechanisms. Treatment with active milk caused mild changes in aortic gene expression; twenty-seven genes were up-regulated and eighty-two down-regulated. Using the criteria for fold change (fc) < 0·833 or > 1·2 and P < 0·05, the most affected (down-regulated) signalling pathways were hedgehog, chemokine and leucocyte transendothelial migration pathways. ACE expression was also slightly decreased (fc 0·86; P = 0·047). In conclusion, long-term treatment with fermented milk enriched with tripeptides and plant sterols decreases SBP, improves endothelial dysfunction and affects signalling pathways related to inflammatory responses in SHR.
The April 2017 Mw6.5 Botswana Earthquake: An Intraplate Event Triggered by Deep Fluids

Large earthquakes in stable continental regions remain puzzling as; unlike at plate boundaries, they do not result from the local buildup of strain driven by plate tectonics. The 2017 Mw6.5, Bostwana normal faulting earthquake occurred in a region devoid from recent tectonic activity and where present‐day deformation is negligible. The depth of the event (29 ± 4 km), in a felsic lower crust where ductile deformation is expected, likely requires a transient pulse of fluids from a deep source to activate brittle faulting. The mainshock was preceded by two foreshock swarm‐like sequences that may be further evidence for fluid movement in a critically loaded fault network. Contrary to plate boundary events, the Mw6.5 Botswana earthquake did not require prior localized stress or strain accumulation. We propose that the crust in stable continental regions, even long after the last tectonic episode, constitutes a reservoir of elastic stress that can be released episodically, for instance, as a result of deep fluid migration.