Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A low power video processor

Multiple power saving methods were applied to a video processor for color digital video and still cameras. Architectural level methods failed to save power: asynchronous design, dynamic voltage scaling, bus switching minimization, pipeline stage merging, reduction of switching times and clock gating. However changing the algorithm to work on pixel differences yielded 3-15% power reduction in typical cases.
Contribution of Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Oxidative Stress to Cellular Premature Senescence Induced by Antiretroviral Thymidine Analogues

Objectives Treatment of HIV-infected patients is associated with early onset of aging-related comorbidities. Some of the adverse effects of antiretroviral therapy have been attributed to the mitochondrial toxicity of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI), and it is of note that mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress are involved in the aging processes. In this regard, we examined whether NRTIs could accelerate the senescence of cultured cells. Methods Human fibroblasts were exposed to NRTIs from culture passage 1 to 14. Cytochrome c-oxidase (COX) subunits 2 and 4, mitochondrial potential and mass, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) were quantified at each passage. Proliferation, cell-cycle arrest, senescence-associated β-galactosidase activity, and morphology were assessed in parallel. Mitochondrial and senescence markers were assessed in cultured murine preadipocytes and in fat samples from lipodystrophic HIV-infected patients. Results Stavudine and zidovudine induced mitochondrial dysfunction and increased ROS levels in fibroblasts at early culture passages, while cell division gradually slowed. At passages 8–12, fibroblasts exposed to stavudine or zidovudine but not abacavir, didanosine, lamivudine and tenofovir were senescent, on the basis of p16INK4 and p21WAF-1 protein expression, cell morphology and senescence-associated-β-galactosidase activity. Senescence markers and COX2 underexpression were also found in 3T3-F442A preadipocytes exposed for 7 weeks to stavudine or zidovudine, but not lamivudine, and in adipose tissue samples from lipodystrophic HIV-infected patients on antiretroviral regimens containing stavudine or zidovudine. Conclusions Mitochondrial changes and oxidative damage could partly explain the premature senescence of fibroblasts and adipose cells induced by stavudine and zidovudine. This suggests that thymidine analogues might be involved in the early aging-related diseases observed in some HIV-infected patients taking antiretroviral drugs.
Mesoscale perturbations in midtail lobe/mantle during steady northward IMF: ARTEMIS observation and MHD simulation

In this study we investigate an event of sharp and transient (≤10 min) plasma and magnetic field perturbations observed by Acceleration Reconnection Turbulence and Electrodynamics of Moon's Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS) probes in the midtail lobe at X ~ −60 RE. This event occurred under northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), and these mesoscale perturbations continued for many hours even as all solar wind and IMF parameters remained steady. The main characteristics of these transient perturbations are as follows: (1) an increase in density and plasma pressure, (2) a drop in Bx, (3) an enhancement in the tailward (−Vx) speed, and (4) tailward propagation. We conduct a global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation for this event using the observed solar wind/IMF conditions. In the simulation, Kelvin‐Helmholtz (K‐H) vortices are formed at the near‐Earth flank and are convected tailward. The K‐H vortices have a two‐mode structure with the inner mode extending several RE inside the magnetosphere from the magnetopause. The inner mode vortical flows transport denser mantle plasma from near the magnetopause deeper into the lobe, resulting in localized density and pressure enhancements, while magnetic field changes accordingly with the enhanced flow shear and pressure gradients. As these localized changes pass a fixed location, they create transient perturbations characteristically similar to those observed by ARTEMIS.
Optogenetic reporters

The discovery of naturally evolved fluorescent proteins and their subsequent tuning by protein engineering provided the basis for a large family of genetically encoded biosensors that report a variety of physicochemical processes occurring in living tissue. These optogenetic reporters are powerful tools for live‐cell microscopy and quantitative analysis at the subcellular level. In this review, we present an overview of the transduction mechanisms that have been exploited for engineering these genetically encoded reporters. Finally, we discuss current and future efforts towards the combined use of various optogenetic actuators and reporters for simultaneously controlling and imaging the physiology of cells and tissues.
Bio-inspired optical flow circuits for the visual guidance of micro air vehicles

In the framework of our research on biologically inspired microrobotics, we have developed a visually based autopilot for micro air vehicles (MAV), which we have called OCTAVE (optical altitude control system for autonomous vehicles). Here, we show the feasibility of a joint altitude and speed control system based on a low complexity optronic velocity sensor that estimates the optic flow in the downward direction. This velocity sensor draws on electrophysiological findings of on the fly elementary motion detectors (EMDs) obtained at our laboratory. We built an elementary, 100-gram tethered helicopter system that carries out terrain following above a randomly textured ground. The overall processing system is light enough to be mounted on-board MAVs with an avionic payload of only some grams.
Audio-concept features and hidden Markov models for multimedia event detection

Multimedia event detection (MED) on user-generated content is the task of finding an event, e.g., a Flash mob or Attempting a bike trick, using its content characteristics. Recent research has focused on approaches that use semantically defined “concepts” trained with annotated audio clips. Using audio concepts allows us to show semantic evidence of their relationship to events, by looking at the probability distribution of the audio concepts per event. However, while the concept-based approach has been useful in image detection, audio concepts have generally not surpassed the performance of low-level audio features like Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) in addressing the unstructured acoustic composition of video events. Such audio-concept based systems could benefit from temporal information, due to one of the intrinsic characteristics of audio: it occurs across a time interval. This paper presents a multimedia event detection system that uses audio concepts; it exploits the temporal correlation of audio characteristics for each particular event at two levels. The first level involves analyzing the shortand long-term surrounding context information for the audio concepts, through an implementation of a Hierarchical Deep Neural Network (H-DNN), to determine engineered audio-concept features. At the second level, we use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to describe the continuous and non-stationary characteristics of the audio signal throughout the video. Experiments using the TRECVID MED 2013 corpus show that an HMM system based on audio-concept features can perform competitively when compared with an MFCC-based system.
Signal Separation Using Re-Weighted and Adaptive Morphological Component Analysis

Morphological component analysis (MCA) for signal separation decomposes a signal into a superposition of morphological subcomponents, each of which is approximately sparse in a certain dictionary. Some of the dictionaries can also be modified to make them adaptive to local structure in images. We show that signal separation performance can be improved over the previous MCA approaches by replacing L1 norm optimization with “weighted” L1 norm optimization and replacing their dictionary adaptation with regularized dictionary adaptation. The weight on an atom for sparse coding is commonly derived from the corresponding coefficient’s value. In contrast, the weight of an atom in a dictionary for signal separation is derived from the mutual coherence between the atom and the atoms in the other dictionaries. The proposed solution for regularized dictionary adaptation is an extension of the K-SVD method, where the dictionary and “weighted” sparse coefficients are estimated simultaneously. We present a series of experiments demonstrating the significant performance improvement of the proposed algorithm over the previous approaches for signal separation.
Studies of the growth-promoting activity for chicks of fish solubles

The presence of unidentified growth factors in fish solubles has been postulated for more than a decade (Sunde, Cravens, Elvehjem & Halpin, 1950; Fuller, Carrick & Hauge, 1952; Lillie, Sizemore & Bird, 1953). During this period several attempts have been made to fractionate and concentrate the active constituents (Menge, Denton, Sizemore, Lillie & Bird, 1953; Mason, Sacks & Stephenson, 1961 ; Steinke, Bird & Strong, 1963) but so far they remain uncharacterized. We report here the results of our investigations, done over several years, into the growth-promoting effects of herring solubles.
INTRACELLULAR ACCUMULATION OF PROTOCOLLAGEN AND EXTRUSION OF COLLAGEN BY EMBRYONIC CARTILAGE CELLS

The synthesis of collagen can be interrupted, after the assembly of proline-rich and lysine-rich polypeptide chains called protocollagen, by incubating connective tissues anaerobically. Under these conditions the proline and lysine residues in protocollagen are not hydroxylated to hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine, and protocollagen molecules accumulate intracellularly. Chemical data and radioautographs at the level of the light and electron microscopes indicated that in tissues labeled with proline-3,4-3H under nitrogen, there appeared to be an accumulation of radioactivity over the ground cytoplasm. When the inhibition of protocollagen hydroxylase was reversed by exposing the tissue to oxygen, the accumulated protocollagen-3H was converted to collagen-3H and there was a rapid transfer of label from the ground cytoplasm to the extracellular matrix. There was no significant change in distribution of label over either the Golgi vacuoles or the cisternae of the endoplasmic reticulum. The failure to find a significant change in distribution of label over the Golgi vacuoles or the cisternae does not completely exclude the possibility that these two compartments are involved in the extrusion, but the data are consistent with the simpler notion that the completed collagen molecules pass directly from the ground cytoplasm to the extracellular matrix.
Inferring Resilience to Fragmentation-Induced Changes in Plant Communities in a Semi-Arid Mediterranean Ecosystem

Predicting the capacity of ecosystems to absorb impacts from disturbance events (resilience), including land-use intensification and landscape fragmentation, is challenging in the face of global change. Little is known about the impacts of fragmentation on ecosystem functioning from a multi-dimensional perspective (multiple traits). This study used 58 500-m linear transects to quantify changes in the functional composition and resilience of vascular plant communities in response to an increase in landscape fragmentation in 18 natural scrubland fragments embedded within a matrix of abandoned crop fields in Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, Almería, Spain. Changes in functional community composition were measured using functional diversity indices (functional richness and functional dispersion) that were based on 12 plant traits. Resilience was evaluated using the functional redundancy and response diversity from the perspective of plant dispersal, which is important, particularly, in fragmented landscapes. Scrubland fragmentation was measured using the Integral Index of Connectivity (IIC). The functional richness of the plant communities was higher in the most fragmented scrubland. Conversely, the functional dispersion (i.e., spread) of trait values among species in the functional trait space was lower at the most fragmented sites; consequently, the ecological tolerance of the vegetation to scrubland fragmentation decreased. Classifying the plant species into four functional groups indicated that fragmentation favoured an increase in functional redundancy in the ‘short basal annual forbs and perennial forbs’ group, most of which are species adapted to degraded soils. An assessment based on the traits associated with plant dispersal indicated that the resilience of ‘woody plants’, an important component in the Mediterranean scrubland, and habitat fragmentation were negatively correlated; however, the correlation was positive in the ‘short basal annual forbs and perennial forbs’ and the ‘grasses’ groups.
Latent Factor Analysis of Gaussian Distributions under Graphical Constraints

We explore the algebraic structure of the solution space of convex optimization problem Constrained Minimum Trace Factor Analysis (CMTFA), when the population covariance matrix Σx has an additional latent graphical constraint, namely, a latent star topology. In particular, we have shown that CMTFA can have either a rank 1 or a rank n − 1 solution and nothing in between. The special case of a rank 1 solution, corresponds to the case where just one latent variable captures all the dependencies among the observables, giving rise to a star topology. We found explicit conditions for both rank 1 and rank n − 1 solutions for CMTFA solution of Σx. As a basic attempt towards building a more general Gaussian tree, we have found a necessary and a sufficient condition for multiple clusters each having rank 1 CMTFA solution to satisfy a minimum probability, to combine together to build a Gaussian tree.
Reactions of denervated voluntary muscle, and their bearing on the mode of action of parasympathetic and related nerves

I. INTRODUCTORY. A PAPER recently published by one of us with H. W. Dudley [Dale and Dudley, 1929] described the isolation and identification of acetylcholine from the perfectly fresh spleens of certain animals. The occasion of the first chemical recognition of this substance, as a natural constituent of the body, was taken to review the evidence suggesting its connection with certain normal effects of parasympathetic nerves, and also with the contractures produced in denervated voluntary muscles by stimulating parasympathetic and other nerves having, normally, only vasodilator actions. The possibility of explaining this association, between the normal vaso-dilator actions and the effects on motor denervated muscles, by attributing both to the peripheral liberation of a substance having both types of action, had presented itself to several who have worked on these phenomena. It was mentioned by Bremer and Rylant[1924] and again by Hinsey and Gasser[1928]. The view published from this laboratory differed from these only in suggesting acetylcholine, which produces both types of effect with unique intensity, as most likely to be the substance in question. The recent careful review by Gasser [1930] of work on these contracture responses of denervated muscles, from their first discovery by Philipeeaux and Vulpian [1863] to the present day, makes it unnecessary for us to give a connected historical survey; we need only refer, in their proper places, to earlier observations bearing on our own. Gasser, in his review, mentions some difficulties in the way of accepting acetylcholine as the common mediator of these effects, in particular the well-known ease with which the vaso-dilator effect of acetylcholine is obliterated by small doses of atropine, which leave the otherwise similar vaso-dilator effects of the chorda tympani and of
Are CEOS Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?

A common view of CEO compensation is that there is essentially no correlation between firm performance and CEO pay. This calls into question an important component of effective corporate governance. This zero correlation' belief is based on the widely cited result that CEO wealth rises by only $3.25 for every $1,000 increase in firm value (Jensen and Murphy, 1990b) and findings that the elasticity of CEO salary and bonus with respect to firm market value is only 0.1. We use a new 15-year panel data set of CEOs in the largest U.S. firms and focus on a broad measure of compensation' that includes changes in the value of CEO holdings of stock and stock options. We find very large pay to performance sensitivity. For example, for a moderate change in firm performance (moving from a median stock price performance to a 70th percentile performance), the compensation of the median CEO in our sample increases by more than 50 percent, which represents an increase in CEO wealth of $1.8 million. We estimate a median elasticity of CEO compensation with respect to firm value of 3.9 for 1994. This value is about 30 times larger than previous elasticity estimates that ignore the effects of changes in the value of stock stock option holdings. We also document that both the level of CEO compensation and th sensitivity of CEO compensation to firm performance have grown dramatically over the past 15 years. In our sample, the direct compensation (salary and bonus plus stock option grants) of the mean (median) CEO increased by 209 percent (136 percent) from 1980 to 1994. Because of the large increase in stock option awards and in the value of stock holdings in the past 15 years, measures of CEO pay-to-performance sensitivity increased during the period by factors of 2 to nearly 7.
Heterogeneous parameters for accuracy threat

In this paper, we propose a new approach for increasingly accuracy and precision detection/prevention threat and exploratory phase correlation event in parameters to comprehensive scanning with multiple threat collection. First, we collect data from parameters which we observed previously. Second, find the best method through literature review to integrate the different parameters of collecting information from different structure, label, and variable of data. Finally, we present parameters threat correlation using data mining approach to respond and protect against threat more quickly and updated. Expectation from this research is to obtain a recognition mechanism suspicious threat to be identified before entering and damaging the network.
Plasma Cell Ontogeny Defined by Quantitative Changes in Blimp-1 Expression

Plasma cells comprise a population of terminally differentiated B cells that are dependent on the transcriptional regulator B lymphocyte–induced maturation protein 1 (Blimp-1) for their development. We have introduced a gfp reporter into the Blimp-1 locus and shown that heterozygous mice express the green fluorescent protein in all antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) in vivo and in vitro. In vitro, these cells display considerable heterogeneity in surface phenotype, immunoglobulin secretion rate, and Blimp-1 expression levels. Importantly, analysis of in vivo ASCs induced by immunization reveals a developmental pathway in which increasing levels of Blimp-1 expression define developmental stages of plasma cell differentiation that have many phenotypic and molecular correlates. Thus, maturation from transient plasmablast to long-lived ASCs in bone marrow is predicated on quantitative increases in Blimp-1 expression.
Novelty detection in airframe strain data

The structural health of airframes is often monitored by analysis of the frequency of occurrence matrix (FOOM) produced after each flight. Each cell in the matrix records a stress event of a particular severity. These matrices are used to determine how much of the aircraft's life has been used up in each flight. Unfortunately the sensors that produce this data are subject to degradation themselves, resulting in corruption of FOOMs. The paper reports a method of automating detection of sensor faults. It is the only known method that is capable of detecting such faults. The method is in essence a dimensionality reduction algorithm coupled to a novelty detection algorithm that produces measures of unusual counts of stress elements at the level of the individual cell and unusual distributions of counts over the entire FOOM. Cell-level error is detected using a probability threshold and a sum of standard deviations. FOOM-level error is detected using a novel application of the eigenface algorithm. Novelty is measured using a mixture of Gaussian model of the data, fitted using the expectation-maximisation algorithm.
Mathematical modelling of contaminant transport in riverbank filtration systems

Analytical study of contaminant transport in riverbank filtration (RBF) systems is significant in providing a guide for managing and operating drinking water supplies from pumping wells. The pumping process and the distance of the pumping well from the river are two important factors for producing permissible drinking water from the system. Simulation of the impact of pumping rate and pumping time on contaminant transport based on analytical studies are not yet extensive. Thus, there is a lack of mathematical models for RBF systems to determine the shortest distance of the pumping well to the river, that produces quality water. This research aimed to provide a mathematical model based on advection dispersion equation and Green’s function approach to determine the potential effects of pumping rate and pumping time, on one and two-dimensional contaminant transport models in RBF systems. The model would be able to show how the pumping time and pumping rate affect the contaminant concentration in RBF systems. By considering an inverse problem, the Green’s function solution was applied to the problem in order to determine the shortest distance from the pumping well to the river, to increase the percentage of the quality of river water. This distance was computed when the contaminants were released from a few scenario which include a single polluted river and two polluted rivers. The distance evaluated was based on three simulated scenarios containing the varying pumping times, pumping rates and different initial concentrations from the river. The model was assessed using parameters related to nitrate (NO3) compound obtained from RBF pilot project which had been conducted in Malaysia. The results confirmed the suitability of the proposed model in simulating the effect of pumping process on the quality of the produced water and in locating the pumping well. The proposed model is helpful in providing guide to manage the existing RBF systems as well as in establishing new sites.
In vitro chemosensitivity testing of leukemic cells: Development of a semiautomated colorimetric assay

A rapid chemosensitivity assay was developed, employing the human continuous leukemic cell lines HL 60, K 562, FLG 29.1. This automated colorimetric assay is based on the characteristic of viable, metabolically active cells to cleave p‐iodonitrotetrazolium violet (INT) into a red formazan derivative, whose optical density is readable at 492 nm by an automated microtiter‐plate reader photometer.