Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seamless rate adaptation for wireless networking

This paper aims at designing a Seamless Rate Adaptation for wireless networking which achieves smooth rate adjustment in a broad dynamic range of channel conditions. Conventional rate adaptation can only achieve a stair-case rate adjustment. Even when combining with hybrid ARQ, it suffers from an irreconcilable conflict between throughput and dynamic range. We tackle this problem from a new perspective by relying on modulation, instead of channel coding, for rate adaptation. We propose rate compatible modulation (RCM), in which modulation signals are incrementally generated from information bits through weighted mapping. Rate adaptation is achieved through varying the number of modulated signals. As more signals are transmitted, information bits gradually accumulate energy. The weights in bit-to-symbol mapping are delicately designed to ensure fine-grained energy accumulation so that smoothness and efficiency can both be achieved. We design and implement a rate adaptation system, called SRA and evaluate its performance through a software radio testbed. Results show that, under highly dynamic channel conditions, SRA achieves over 80% throughput gain over 802.11a adaptive modulation and coding, and achieves 28.8% and 43.8% gain over HARQ systems implemented with Turbo code and Raptor code. We believe that the concept of rate compatible modulation opens up a fresh research avenue toward the wireless rate adaptation problem.
Braking the Gas in the β Pictoris Disk

The star β Pictoris hosts the best studied circumstellar disk to date. Nonetheless, a long-standing puzzle has been around since the detection of metallic gas in the disk: radiation pressure from the star should blow the gas away, yet the observed motion is consistent with Keplerian rotation. In this work we search for braking mechanisms that can resolve this discrepancy. We find that all species affected by radiation force are largely ionized and dynamically coupled into a single fluid by Coulomb collisions, reducing the radiation force on species feeling the strongest acceleration. For a gas of solar composition, the effective radiation force still exceeds gravity, while a gas of enhanced carbon abundance could be self-braking. We also explore two other braking agents: collisions with dust grains and neutral gas. Grains surrounding β Pic are photoelectrically charged to a positive electrostatic potential. If a significant fraction of the grains are carbonaceous (10% in the midplane and larger at higher altitudes), ions can be slowed down to satisfy the observed velocity constraints. For neutral gas to brake the ion fluid, we find a minimum required mass ≈0.03 M⊕, consistent with observed upper limits on the hydrogen column density and substantially reduced relative to previous estimates. Our results favor a scenario in which metallic gas is generated by grain evaporation in the disk, perhaps during grain-grain collisions. We exclude a primordial origin for the gas but cannot rule out its production by falling evaporating bodies near the star.
Negative membrane curvature catalyzes nucleation of endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT)-III assembly

Significance The endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) proteins remodel and sever membranes in a wide range of biology, including HIV budding. Electron microscopy has shown that ESCRT-III is often found in contact with concave (negatively curved) membrane surfaces. It has not been possible until now to determine whether the ESCRTs have an inherent preference for binding to concave membrane because it is difficult to make nanoscale concave membranes. Here we have made such membranes on the dimensions of an HIV budding site. We show that ESCRT-III assembly begins (nucleates) much faster on concave membranes, which explains why this complex is recruited in a rapid burst late in HIV budding. The endosomal sorting complexes required for transport (ESCRT) machinery functions in HIV-1 budding, cytokinesis, multivesicular body biogenesis, and other pathways, in the course of which it interacts with concave membrane necks and bud rims. To test the role of membrane shape in regulating ESCRT assembly, we nanofabricated templates for invaginated supported lipid bilayers. The assembly of the core ESCRT-III subunit CHMP4B/Snf7 is preferentially nucleated in the resulting 100-nm-deep membrane concavities. ESCRT-II and CHMP6 accelerate CHMP4B assembly by increasing the concentration of nucleation seeds. Superresolution imaging was used to visualize CHMP4B/Snf7 concentration in a negatively curved annulus at the rim of the invagination. Although Snf7 assemblies nucleate slowly on flat membranes, outward growth onto the flat membrane is efficiently nucleated at invaginations. The nucleation behavior provides a biophysical explanation for the timing of ESCRT-III recruitment and membrane scission in HIV-1 budding.
Bilateral same-session ureteroscopy for treatment of ureteral calculi: Critical analysis of risk factors

Abstract Objective. To determine factors affecting the success of bilateral same-session ureteroscopy (BSU) in the treatment of ureteral calculi. Material and methods. From January 2003 to December 2008, BSU was carried out in 89 patients (178 renal units). A successful outcome was considered when both ureters were free of stones without intraoperative complications. Stone-free rate was evaluated with a kidney–ureter–bladder plain X-ray or non-contrast computed tomography. Factors interfering with successful completion of BSU were tested using univariate (chi-squared test and t test) and multivariate (logistic regression) analyses. Data on unilateral ureteroscopy for the treatment of multiple ureteral calculi carried out in 105 patients during the same period were compared with BSU. Results. Intraoperative complications were recorded in 11 procedures (6.2%) in the form of ureteral perforation in three and mucosal injury in eight. After BSU, 153 renal units were stone free (86%) as 17 had residual fragments, stones migrated to the kidney in six and failure was encountered in two. A successful outcome was observed in 62 patients (70%). Stone impaction, stones located in the proximal ureter and stone surface area were the significant risk factors for unsuccessful BSU (relative risks 3.6, 3.3 and 1.47, respectively). Compared with unilateral ureteroscopy, no difference were found with regard to complication rate (6.7%, p = 0.5) or stone-free rate (80%, p = 0.2). Conclusions. Bilateral same-session ureteroscopy is a safe and effective procedure in the management of bilateral ureteral stones. Proximal ureteral calculi, large and impacted stones carry the highest risk of unsuccessful results.
High- and low-alcohol-preferring mice show differences in conditioned taste aversion to alcohol.

BACKGROUND Genetic differences in sensitivity to the aversive effects of alcohol may contribute to alcohol drinking behavior. The present study examined the development of conditioned taste aversion (CTA) to various doses of alcohol in two pairs of mouse lines selectively bred for high (HAP) and low (LAP) alcohol preference. METHODS Alcohol-naïve, male and female HAP and LAP mice from both replicate 1 (HAP n = 29; LAP n = 28) and replicate 2 (HAP n = 34; LAP n = 35) were adapted to a 2-hr per day water restriction regimen. During five conditioning trials at 48 hr intervals, mice received an intraperitoneal injection of saline or 2 g/kg or 4 g/kg alcohol immediately following 1 hr of access to a 0.20 M NaCl solution. RESULTS LAP mice of both replicates showed a significantly greater magnitude of CTA to both 2 g/kg and 4 g/kg alcohol compared with HAP mice of both replicates. There were no line differences in consumption of the NaCl solution in the saline control groups. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that mice selectively bred for low alcohol preference are more sensitive to the development of alcohol CTA than mice selectively bred for high alcohol preference. The present findings indicate that common genes mediate both alcohol preference and the aversive effects of alcohol as measured in the CTA paradigm.
Risk factors for erysipelas of the leg (cellulitis): case-control study

Abstract Objective: To assess risk factors for erysipelas of the leg (cellulitis). Design: Case-control study. Setting: 7 hospital centres in France. Subjects: 167 patients admitted to hospital for erysipelas of the leg and 294 controls. Results: In multivariate analysis, a disruption of the cutaneous barrier (leg ulcer, wound, fissurated toe-web intertrigo, pressure ulcer, or leg dermatosis) (odds ratio 23.8, 95% confidence interval 10.7 to 52.5), lymphoedema (71.2, 5.6 to 908), venous insufficiency (2.9, 1.0 to 8.7), leg oedema (2.5, 1.2 to 5.1) and being overweight (2.0, 1.1 to 3.7) were independently associated with erysipelas of the leg. No association was observed with diabetes, alcohol, or smoking. Population attributable risk for toe-web intertrigo was 61%. Conclusion: This first case-control study highlights the major role of local risk factors (mainly lymphoedema and site of entry) in erysipelas of the leg. From a public health perspective, detecting and treating toe-web intertrigo should be evaluated in the secondary prevention of erysipelas of the leg.
Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood

Across a range of species including humans, personality traits, or differences in behaviour between individuals that are consistent over time, have been demonstrated. However, few studies have measured whether these consistent differences are evident in very young animals, and whether they persist over an individual’s entire lifespan. Here we investigated the begging behaviour of very young cross-fostered zebra finch nestlings and the relationship between that and adult activity levels. We found a link between the nestling activity behaviour head movements during begging, measured at just five and seven days after hatching, and adult activity levels, measured when individuals were between three and three and a half years old. Moreover, body mass was found to be negatively correlated with both nestling and adult activity levels, suggesting that individuals which carry less body fat as adults are less active both as adults and during begging as nestlings. Our work suggests that the personality traits identified here in both very young nestlings and adults may be linked to physiological factors such as metabolism or environmental sources of variation. Moreover, our work suggests it may be possible to predict an individual’s future adult personality at a very young age, opening up new avenues for future work to explore the relationship between personality and a number of aspects of individual life history and survival.
Address Obfuscation: An Efficient Approach to Combat a Broad Range of Memory Error Exploits

Attacks which exploit memory programming errors (such as buffer overflows) are one of today's most serious security threats. These attacks require an attacker to have an in-depth understanding of the internal details of a victim program, including the locations of critical data and/or code. Program obfuscation is a general technique for securing programs by making it difficult for attackers to acquire such a detailed understanding. This paper develops a systematic study of a particular kind of obfuscation called address obfuscation that randomizes the location of victim program data and code. We discuss different implementation strategies to randomize the absolute locations of data and code, as well as relative distances between data locations. We then present our implementation that transforms object files and executables at link-time and load-time. It requires no changes to the OS kernel or compilers, and can be applied to individual applications without affecting the rest of the system. It can be implemented with low runtime overheads. Address obfuscation can reduce the probability of successful attacks to be as low as a small fraction of a percent for most memory-error related attacks. Moreover, the randomization ensures that an attack that succeeds against one victim will likely not succeed against another victim, or even for a second time against the same victim. Each failed attempt will typically crash the victim program, thereby making it easy to detect attack attempts. These aspects make it particularly effective against large-scale attacks such as Code Red, since each infection attempt requires significantly more resources, thereby slowing down the propagation rate of such attacks.
Thepade's Hartley Error Vector Rotation for codebook generation in Vector Quantization

Vector quantization is simple and efficient technique of lossy image compression. Codebook generation has important role in Vector Quantization. The paper presents an effective clustering algorithm in Vector Quantization for codebook generation. Traditional Kekre's Error Vector Rotation (KEVR) resulting in slow cluster orientation. The Kekre's Error Vector Rotation using Walsh Sequence (KEVRW) gives rapid change in cluster orientation. The proposed codebook generation technique Thepade's Hartley Error Vector Rotation (THtEVR) is based on KEVR algorithm. Here Hartley Transform matrix is used to prepare error vector. The proposed THtEVR is tested for various codebook sizes on different training images. The results obtained indicated that THtEVR gives less MSE and less distortion as compared to KEVR and KEVRW giving better image compression.
Transcriptome analysis reveals unique C 4-like photosynthesis and oil body formation in an arachidonic acid-rich microalga Myrmecia incisa Reisigl H 4301

Background: Arachidonic acid (ArA) is important for human health because it is one of the major components of mammalian brain membrane phospholipids. The interest in ArA inspired the search for a new sustainable source, and the green microalga Myrmecia incisa Reisigl H4301 has been found a potential ArA-producer due to a high content of intracellular ArA. To gain more molecular information about metabolism pathways, including the biosynthesis of ArA in the non-model microalga, a transcriptomic analysis was performed. Results: The 454 pyrosequencing generated 371,740 high-quality reads, which were assembled into 51,908 unique sequences consisting of 22,749 contigs and 29,159 singletons. A total of 11,873 unique sequences were annotated through BLAST analysis, and 3,733 were assigned to Gene Ontology (GO) categories. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis uncovered a C4-like photosynthesis pathway in M. incisa. The biosynthesis pathways of lipid particularly those of ArA and triacylglycerol (TAG) were analyzed in detail, and TAG was proposed to be accumulated in oil bodies in the cytosol with the help of caleosin or oil globule-associated proteins. In addition, the carotenoid biosynthesis pathways are discussed. Conclusion: This transcriptomic analysis of M. incisa enabled a global understanding of mechanisms involved in photosynthesis, de novo biosynthesis of ArA, metabolism of carotenoids, and accumulation of TAG in M. incisa. These findings provided a molecular basis for the research and possibly economic exploitation of this ArA-rich microalga.
Hemoglobin Control of Cell Survival/Death Decision Regulates in Vitro Plant Embryogenesis1[W][OPEN]

Hemoglobins modulate embryogenesis by regulating programmed cell death. Programmed cell death (PCD) in multicellular organisms is a vital process in growth, development, and stress responses that contributes to the formation of tissues and organs. Although numerous studies have defined the molecular participants in apoptotic and PCD cascades, successful identification of early master regulators that target specific cells to live or die is limited. Using Zea mays somatic embryogenesis as a model system, we report that the expressions of two plant hemoglobin (Hb) genes (ZmHb1 and ZmHb2) regulate the cell survival/death decision that influences somatic embryogenesis through their cell-specific localization patterns. Suppression of either of the two ZmHbs is sufficient to induce PCD through a pathway initiated by elevated NO and Zn2+ levels and mediated by production of reactive oxygen species. The effect of the death program on the fate of the developing embryos is dependent on the localization patterns of the two ZmHbs. During somatic embryogenesis, ZmHb2 transcripts are restricted to a few cells anchoring the embryos to the subtending embryogenic tissue, whereas ZmHb1 transcripts extend to several embryonic domains. Suppression of ZmHb2 induces PCD in the anchoring cells, allowing the embryos to develop further, whereas suppression of ZmHb1 results in massive PCD, leading to abortion. We conclude that regulation of the expression of these ZmHbs has the capability to determine the developmental fate of the embryogenic tissue during somatic embryogenesis through their effect on PCD. This unique regulation might have implications for development and differentiation in other species.
Assessment of water pollution arising from copper mining in Zambia: a case study of Munkulungwe stream in Ndola, Copperbelt province

ii DECLARATION . iv DEDICATION . v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . vi List of Figures . x List of Tables . xiii List of Abbreviations . xv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.
The Non Thermal Effect of Weak Intensity Millimeter Waves on Physicochemical Properties of Water and Water Solutions

The comparative study of the effects of 5.8mW/cm2 Millimeter Waves (MMW) and near Infrared (IR) irradiation on thermal properties, specific adsorption rate (SAR), specific electrical conductivity (SEC) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) content of distilled water (DW), and physiological solutions (PS) was performed. The thermal effect of MMW irradiation appeared only after the first minute of irradiation, while the IR heating started from the first minute of irradiation. The heat fusion of frozen MMW-treated DW and PS was significantly less than sham and IR-treated DW and PS. MMW irradiation had time-dependent elevation effect on water SEC and SAR, which was accompanied by the increase of H2O2 formation in it. We suggest that the MMW-induced vibration of water dipole molecules caused the non thermal changes of physicochemical properties of DW and PS, which promote the formation of H2O2 in water.
Recovery of exact sparse representations in the presence of bounded noise

The purpose of this contribution is to extend some recent results on sparse representations of signals in redundant bases developed in the noise-free case to the case of noisy observations. The type of question addressed so far is as follows: given an (n,m)-matrix A with m>n and a vector b=Axo, i.e., admitting a sparse representation xo, find a sufficient condition for b to have a unique sparsest representation. The answer is a bound on the number of nonzero entries in xo. We consider the case b=Axo+e where xo satisfies the sparsity conditions requested in the noise-free case and e is a vector of additive noise or modeling errors, and seek conditions under which xo can be recovered from b in a sense to be defined. The conditions we obtain relate the noise energy to the signal level as well as to a parameter of the quadratic program we use to recover the unknown sparsest representation. When the signal-to-noise ratio is large enough, all the components of the signal are still present when the noise is deleted; otherwise, the smallest components of the signal are themselves erased in a quite rational and predictable way
Learner Know Thyself: Student Models to Give Learner Control and Responsibility

We describe an approach to student modelling where the student can delve into the student model. We describe how this can support learning on several levels. It serves as a basis for planning learning goals, improving communication between the teaching system and the learner, and as an aid to reflection about learning. There is a growing group of researchers working with accessible and understandable student models. We outline the motivations for such approaches. This paper presents the underlying philosophy for the design of our student model and shows the type of model we have built. We discuss problems of scrutability we have encountered and the interesting research agenda they define.
Are Facial Injuries Caused by Stumbling Different From Other Kinds of Fall Accidents?

AbstractThe aim of this prospective study was to evaluate and compare the epidemiology and pattern of maxillofacial injuries caused by stumbling and other kinds of falls. We evaluated all patients with facial injuries due to stumbling or falls who presented to Besat Hospital in Hamedan, Iran, during the 2.5-year study period and analyzed the acquired data. Of 2990 patients with facial injuries who were referred to Besat Hospital during the study period, 733 (24.5%) were injured by stumbling, and 246 (8.2%) were injured by falls. The male-to-female ratios in the stumbling and falls groups were 2:1 and 1.86:1, respectively. Although the rate of soft tissue injuries was the same in both groups, the rate of bone fractures was higher in fall accidents (1.6:1). In stumbling accidents, the most common type of bone fracture was nasal fracture, followed by dentoalveolar, mandibular, and zygomatic fractures. In falls, nasal fractures were the most common type of bone fracture, followed by zygomatic, mandibular, and dentoalveolar fractures. All of the Le Fort I, II, and III fractures, nasal-orbital-ethmoid, and frontal sinus injuries occurred in fall accidents. The rate of associated injuries in falls was higher than stumbling accidents. We concluded that the incidence, age distribution, rate, and pattern of bone fractures and the frequency and type of associated injuries in stumbling accidents were significantly different from that of fall accidents. For a good program planning to prevent and manage facial injuries, we recommend separate evaluation of stumbling and fall accidents.
Closed-Loop Learning of Visual Control Policies

In this paper we present a general, flexible framework for learning mappings from images to actions by interacting with the environment. The basic idea is to introduce a feature-based image classifier in front of a reinforcement learning algorithm. The classifier partitions the visual space according to the presence or absence of few highly informative local descriptors that are incrementally selected in a sequence of attempts to remove perceptual aliasing. We also address the problem of fighting overfitting in such a greedy algorithm. Finally, we show how high-level visual features can be generated when the power of local descriptors is insufficient for completely disambiguating the aliased states. This is done by building a hierarchy of composite features that consist of recursive spatial combinations of visual features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms by solving three visual navigation tasks and a visual version of the classical "Car on the Hill" control problem.