Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coarsening of Lamellar Structures at Elevated Temperatures

The coarsening of lamellar eutectic alloys is controlled by faults in the as-grown structure. A model, based on the use of In cosh cylinder co-ordinates, is proposed to calculate the rate of shrinkage of lamellar terminations. It is found that for high volume fractions and diffusion through the continuous phase around the fault, the fault shape remains approximately constant and a value can be obtained for the rate of shrinkage of an isolated fault. For the case of interface diffusion, the shape is not preserved and only the initial shape changes can be calculated. The problem of coarsening of an array of faulted lamellae is considered. The important variables in the coarsening rate are the lamellar spacing and fault density. These results are compared to the experimental observations of Graham and Kraft on unidirectionally solidified Al-CuAl2 alloys. (Received August 11, 1973)
Locally Supervised Deep Hybrid Model for Scene Recognition

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkable successes in various image classification and understanding tasks. The deep features obtained at the top fully connected layer of the CNN (FC-features) exhibit rich global semantic information and are extremely effective in image classification. On the other hand, the convolutional features in the middle layers of the CNN also contain meaningful local information, but are not fully explored for image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel locally supervised deep hybrid model (LS-DHM) that effectively enhances and explores the convolutional features for scene recognition. First, we notice that the convolutional features capture local objects and fine structures of scene images, which yield important cues for discriminating ambiguous scenes, whereas these features are significantly eliminated in the highly compressed FC representation. Second, we propose a new local convolutional supervision layer to enhance the local structure of the image by directly propagating the label information to the convolutional layers. Third, we propose an efficient Fisher convolutional vector (FCV) that successfully rescues the orderless mid-level semantic information (e.g., objects and textures) of scene image. The FCV encodes the large-sized convolutional maps into a fixed-length mid-level representation, and is demonstrated to be strongly complementary to the high-level FC-features. Finally, both the FCV and FC-features are collaboratively employed in the LS-DHM representation, which achieves outstanding performance in our experiments. It obtains 83.75% and 67.56% accuracies, respectively, on the heavily benchmarked MIT Indoor67 and SUN397 data sets, advancing the state-of-the-art substantially.
Fasting serum glucose level and cancer risk in Korean men and women.

CONTEXT Diabetes is a serious and costly disease that is becoming increasingly common in many countries. The role of diabetes as a cancer risk factor remains unclear. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between fasting serum glucose and diabetes and risk of all cancers and specific cancers in men and women in Korea. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Ten-year prospective cohort study of 1,298,385 Koreans (829,770 men and 468,615 women) aged 30 to 95 years who received health insurance from the National Health Insurance Corp and had a biennial medical evaluation in 1992-1995 (with follow-up for up to 10 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Death from cancer and registry-documented incident cancer or hospital admission for cancer. RESULTS During the 10 years of follow-up, there were 20,566 cancer deaths in men and 5907 cancer deaths in women. Using Cox proportional hazards models and controlling for smoking and alcohol use, the stratum with the highest fasting serum glucose (> or =140 mg/dL [> or =7.8 mmol/L]) had higher death rates from all cancers combined (hazard ratio [HR], 1.29; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.22-1.37 in men and HR, 1.23; 95% CI, 1.09-1.39 in women) compared with the stratum with the lowest level (<90 mg/dL [<5.0 mmol/L]). By cancer site, the association was strongest for pancreatic cancer, comparing the highest and lowest strata in men (HR, 1.91; 95% CI, 1.52-2.41) and in women (HR, 2.05; 95% CI, 1.43-2.93). Significant associations were also found for cancers of the esophagus, liver, and colon/rectum in men and of the liver and cervix in women, and there were significant trends with glucose level for cancers of the esophagus, colon/rectum, liver, pancreas, and bile duct in men and of the liver and pancreas in women. Of the 26,473 total cancer deaths in men and women, 848 were estimated as attributable to having a fasting serum glucose level of less than 90 mg/dL. For cancer incidence, the general patterns reflected those found for mortality. For persons with a diagnosis of diabetes or a fasting serum glucose level greater than 125 mg/dL (6.9 mmol/L), risks for cancer incidence and mortality were generally elevated compared with those without diabetes. CONCLUSION In Korea, elevated fasting serum glucose levels and a diagnosis of diabetes are independent risk factors for several major cancers, and the risk tends to increase with an increased level of fasting serum glucose.
Software-defined radio implementation of multiple antenna systems using low-density parity-check codes

This paper presents the implementation of a multiple antenna communication system using low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes on the software-defined radio (SDR) platform developed at EPFL's Mobile Communications Laboratory. After briefly presenting the general structure and the main capabilities of our SR platform, we describe the methods and algorithms used for designing, encoding and decoding the LDPC codes for MIMO (multiple input multiple output) systems. We have implemented MIMO LDPC systems with up to four transmit and four receive antennas and performed on-the-air measurements which show strong agreement with the theory.
Ghost fields, pair connectedness, and scaling: exact results in one-dimensional percolation?

The percolation problem is solved exactly in one dimension. The functions obtained bear a strong resemblance to those of the n-vector model on the same lattice. Further, we include a ghost field exactly in all dimensions d, thereby treating the 'ther- modynamics' of percolation without appealing to the Potts model. In particular, we show for d = 1 that the nature of the singularities near the critical percolation probability, pE = 1, is described by CY, = yp = 1, /3, = 0, and 6, = CO. We also calculate the pair connectedness and correlation length explicitly, and find 7, = vP= 1, in agreement with the hyperscaling relation dv, = 2-up. Finally, scaling is demonstrated for both the cluster sue distribution and the percolation function analogous to the Gibbs free energy, and the scaling powers are explicitly evaluated; in particular, we find the exponents U = 1 and T = 2.
METHODS FOR ORBIT OPTIMIZATION FOR THE LISA GRAVITATIONAL WAVE OBSERVATORY

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission is a joint ESA-NASA mission for detecting low-frequency gravitational waves in the frequency range from 0.1mHz to 1Hz, by using accurate distance measurements with laser interferometry between three spacecraft, which will be launched around 2015 and one year later reach their orbits around the Sun. In order to operate successfully, it is crucial for the constellation of the three spacecraft to have extremely high stability. In this paper, several problems of the orbit optimization of the LISA constellation are discussed by using numerical and analytical methods for satisfying the requirements of accuracy. On the basis of the coorbital restricted problem, analytical expressions of the heliocentric distance and the trailing angle to the Earth of the constellation's barycenter are deduced, with the result that the approximate analytical solution of first order will meet the accuracy requirement of the spacecraft orbit design. It is proved that there is a value of the inclination of the constellation plane that will make the variation of the arm-length a minimum. The principle for selecting the optimum starting elements of orbits at any epoch is proposed. The method and programming principles of finding the optimized orbits are also presented together with examples of the optimization design.
SrrAB Modulates Staphylococcus aureus Cell Death through Regulation of cidABC Transcription

ABSTRACT The death and lysis of a subpopulation in Staphylococcus aureus biofilm cells are thought to benefit the surviving population by releasing extracellular DNA, a critical component of the biofilm extracellular matrix. Although the means by which S. aureus controls cell death and lysis is not understood, studies implicate the role of the cidABC and lrgAB operons in this process. Recently, disruption of the srrAB regulatory locus was found to cause increased cell death during biofilm development, likely as a result of the sensitivity of this mutant to hypoxic growth. In the current study, we extended these findings by demonstrating that cell death in the ΔsrrAB mutant is dependent on expression of the cidABC operon. The effect of cidABC expression resulted in the generation of increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and was independent of acetate production. Interestingly, consistently with previous studies, cidC-encoded pyruvate oxidase was found to be important for the generation of acetic acid, which initiates the cell death process. However, these studies also revealed for the first time an important role of the cidB gene in cell death, as disruption of cidB in the ΔsrrAB mutant background decreased ROS generation and cell death in a cidC-independent manner. The cidB mutation also caused decreased sensitivity to hydrogen peroxide, which suggests a complex role for this system in ROS metabolism. Overall, the results of this study provide further insight into the function of the cidABC operon in cell death and reveal its contribution to the oxidative stress response. IMPORTANCE The manuscript focuses on cell death mechanisms in Staphylococcus aureus and provides important new insights into the genes involved in this ill-defined process. By exploring the cause of increased stationary-phase death in an S. aureus ΔsrrAB regulatory mutant, we found that the decreased viability of this mutant was a consequence of the overexpression of the cidABC operon, previously shown to be a key mediator of cell death. These investigations highlight the role of the cidB gene in the death process and the accumulation of reactive oxygen species. Overall, the results of this study are the first to demonstrate a positive role for CidB in cell death and to provide an important paradigm for understanding this process in all bacteria.
Rain or Shine? — Making Sense of Cloudy Reliability Data

Cloud datacenters must ensure high availability for the hosted applications and failures can be the bane of datacenter operators. Understanding the what, when and why of failures can help tremendously to mitigate their occurrence and impact. Failures can, however, depend on numerous spatial and temporal factors spanning hardware, workloads, support facilities, and even the environment. One has to rely on failure data from the field to quantify the influence of these factors on failures. Towards this goal, we collect failures data along with many parameters that might influence failures from two large production datacenters with very diverse characteristics. We show that multiple factors simultaneously affect failures, and these factors may interact in non-trivial ways. This makes conventional approaches that study aggregate characteristics or single parameter influences, rather inaccurate. Instead, we build a multi-factor analysis framework to systematically identify influencing factors, quantify their relative impact, and help in more accurate decision making for failure mitigation. We demonstrate this approach for three important decisions: spare capacity provisioning, comparing the reliability of hardware for vendor selection, and quantifying flexibility in datacenter climate control for cost-reliability trade-offs.
Stability Analysis for Communication of Voice and Data Terminals with Packet Reservation Multiple Access Protocol

This paper studies nonlinear instability and bifurcations in a packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) protocol for communication of voice and data terminals. This protocol has been widely considered for providing speech and data communications in a terrestrial microcell system. Recently modified versions of the PRMA protocol have been the subject of extensive research, with the goal of application to low earth orbit mobile satellite systems. These systems are expected to play a significant role in providing communication services to users around the world. A bistable behavior of the PRMA protocol for traffic with both voice and data sources is investigated, and bifurcations of equilibrium points when system parameters change are determined. A price based bifurcation control scheme is proposed to increase capacity of the PRMA protocol, defined as the number of simultaneous users within the system. Markov analysis show that the adaptively controlled system has a unique probability distribution function. Also, equilibrium point analysis (EPA) shows that the system possesses a unique equilibrium point. Finally, a brief discussion concerning the extension of the proposed bifurcation control scheme to the PRMA protocol over a random packet error channel is also provided.
Experience with secure multi-processing in Java

As the Java/sup TM/ platform is the preferred environment for the deployment of network computers, it is appealing to run multiple applications on a single Java enabled desktop. We experimented with using the Java platform as a multiprocessing, multi user environment. Although the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is not inherently a single application design, we have found that the implementation of the Java Development Kit (JDK) often implicitly assumes that the JVM runs exactly one application at any one time. We report on the limitations we encountered and propose improvements to several aspects of the Java technology architecture, including its security features. We have implemented all the proposed changes in a prototype based on an in-house beta version of JDK 1.2. Our prototype uses a Bourne shell like command line tool to launch multiple applications (such as Appletviewer) within one JVM.
Mapping techniques for transmit diversity precoding in SC-FDMA systems with four transmit antennas

Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is a recent modulation technique combining most of the advantages of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) with the low Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of single-carrier transmission. This paper presents the key design criteria for space-time and space-frequency transmit diversity precoding in SC-FDMA with four transmit antennas. In particular, we propose a novel quasi-orthogonal space-time-frequency precoding. We show that our proposed precoding conserves the single-carrier property of the signal on all of the four transmit antennas with improved performance at the expense of a slight increase of the frame granularity with respect to existing space-frequency solutions.
Asbestos‐induced injury to cultured human pulmonary epithelial‐like cells: role of neutrophil elastase

The mechanisms responsible for asbestos‐ induced pulmonary epithelial cell cytotoxicity, especially oxidant‐independent mechanisms, are not established. We determined whether human polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN) proteases contribute to asbestos‐induced damage to human pulmonary epithelial‐like cells (PECs) assessed using an in vitro chromium‐51 release assay. Serine antiproteases, phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride and αι ‐antitrypsin, each ameliorated PEC injury induced by amosite asbestos and PMNs. A role for a specific proteinase, human neutrophil elastase (HNE), is supported by the facts that (1) asbestos increased HNE release assessed by an enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay technique (1.7 ± 0.5 vs. 2.8 ± 0.5 μg/ml; P < .025), (2) purified HNE or porcine pancreatic elastase (PPE) each alone caused PEC detachment, (3) asbestos plus either HNE or PPE caused PEC lysis similar to that mediated by asbestos and PMNs, and (4) cationic agents released from PMNs were unlikely to be involved because polyanions did not ameliorate injury resulting from asbestos and PMNs. Compared to elastase, cathepsin G caused less PEC detachment and negligible augmentation in asbestos‐ induced PEC lysis. Asbestos increased the association of 125I‐labeled elastase with PECs nearly 50‐fold compared with PPE alone (14.4% vs. 0.3%, respectively; P < .01) and nearly 10‐fold compared with another particle, opsonized zymosan. We conclude that PMN‐derived proteases, especially elastase, may contribute to asbestos‐ induced lung damage by augmenting pulmonary epithelial cell injury.
Hand Grip Pattern Recognition for Mobile User Interfaces

This paper presents a novel user interface for handheld mobile devices by recognizing hand grip patterns. Particularly, we consider the scenario where the device is provided with an array of capacitive touch sensors underneath the exterior cover. In order to provide the users with intuitive and natural manipulation experience, we use pattern recognition techniques for identifying the users' band grips from the touch sensors. Preliminary user studies suggest that filtering out unintended user hand grip is one of the most important issues to be resolved. We discuss the details of the prototype implementation, as well as engineering challenges for practical deployment.
Enhanced Cytochrome P450 IA1 Activity of Self-Assembled Rat Hepatocyte Spheroids

Primary rat hepatocytes can self-assemble to form multicellular spheroids when plated onto Primaria petri dishes. Spheroids have been observed to exhibit enhanced liver-specific functions and differentiated ultrastructure compared to monolayer cultures on dry collagen. With confocal scanning laser microscopy, CYP1A1 activity was evaluated in situ by detecting resorufin. This highly fluorescent molecule is the P450-mediated product of 7-ethoxyresorufin O-dealkylation (EROD). Significantly higher P450 activity was observed in spheroids compared to monolayers on collagen upon induction with 50 μM β-naphthoflavone (BNF), a CYP1A inducer. This was confirmed by measuring microsomal EROD activity. The distribution of CYP1A1 activity within spheroids was heterogeneous, with higher activity localized to the hepatocytes in the interior. During the process of spheroid formation, cells were initially seen to attach and spread out as a monolayer. This stage was associated with relatively low CYP1A1 activity. As cells formed multicellular structures and aggregated into spheroids, the level of CYP1A1 activity increased over time. At least a fivefold higher fluorescence intensity was observed in spheroids compared to that of monolayers maintained on collagen. The higher P450 activity within spheroids may be associated with their ability to maintain a greater degree of differentiation compared to monolayers. These studies demonstrate the potential of hepatocyte spheroids as a model system for investigating drug metabolism, tissue engineering, and tissue self-assembly.
Sleep difficulties in infants at risk for developmental delays: a longitudinal study.

OBJECTIVES We compared the sleep of infants at risk for neuromotor delays to that of infants without such risks, and examined the predictive validity of risk indicators to the development of sleep problems. METHODS Conveniently recruited infants (n = 142) were assessed for neuromotor achievements and sleep behaviors at 4-6 months and 10-12 months of age. Assessment tools were the Harris Infant Neuromotor Test and Morrell's Infant Sleep Questionnaire. Based on a cumulative risk index, three groups were defined: higher risk (n = 28), lower risk (n = 42), and no risk (n = 72). RESULTS At both ages, the sleep scores were similar among the groups. In the no risk and lower risk group, sleep difficulties decreased with age, while for infants in the higher risk group, more difficulties were reported over time. Overall, the neuromotor attainments were not related to sleep fragmentation or settling difficulties. CONCLUSIONS In a diverse sample of infants, with and without risks for developmental delays, overall, sleep patterns were similar. It appears that the neuromotor achievements are not associated with sleep-wake regulation, as measured by caregivers' report.
Association between the Dynamics of Multiple Replication Origins and the Evolution of Multireplicon Genome Architecture in Haloarchaea

Haloarchaeal genomes are generally composed of multiple replicons, and each replicon has a single or multiple replication origin(s). The comparative genomic analysis of replication origins from closely related species can be used to reveal the evolutionary mechanisms that account for the development of multiple origin systems. Multiple replication origins have been in silico and experimentally investigated in Haloarcula hispanica, which raise the possibility for comparisons of multiple replication origins in Haloarcula species. Thus, we performed a comparison of H. hispanica replication origins with those from five additional Haloarcula species. We demonstrated that the multiple replication origins in the chromosome were evolved independently multiple times from the oriC1-dependent ancestral chromosome. Particularly, the two origins oriC1 and oriC2 were conserved in location, and both of them were adjacent to an rRNA operon, suggestive of correlations in replication and expression of surrounding genes that may promote the conservation of these two origins. Some chromosomal variable regions were used as hotspots for origin evolution in which replication origins were continually being acquired, lost, and disrupted. Furthermore, we demonstrated that autonomously replicating sequence plasmids with H. hispanica minichromosomal replication origins were extremely unstable. Because both organization and replication origins of minichromosomes were not conserved, we proposed an association between the evolution of extrachromosomal replicons and origin variation. Taken together, we provided insights into the evolutionary history of multiple replication origins in Haloarcula species, and proposed a general model of association between the dynamics of multiple replication origins and the evolution of multireplicon genome architecture in haloarchaea.
Time-offset interaction with a holocaust survivor

Time-offset interaction is a new technology that allows for two-way communication with a person who is not available for conversation in real time: a large set of statements are prepared in advance, and users access these statements through natural conversation that mimics face-to-face interaction. Conversational reactions to user questions are retrieved through a statistical classifier, using technology that is similar to previous interactive systems with synthetic characters; however, all of the retrieved utterances are genuine statements by a real person. Recordings of answers, listening and idle behaviors, and blending techniques are used to create a persistent visual image of the person throughout the interaction. A proof-of-concept has been implemented using the likeness of Pinchas Gutter, a Holocaust survivor, enabling short conversations about his family, his religious views, and resistance. This proof-of-concept has been shown to dozens of people, from school children to Holocaust scholars, with many commenting on the impact of the experience and potential for this kind of interface.