Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generating various levels of detail of architectural objects for image-quality and frame-rate control rendering

This paper presents a method for representing complex models with various levels of detail. It is based on a geometrical simplification algorithm applied to a hierarchical scene described by a rooted-tree structure. In order to control the resulting image quality and the computation time, we use two algorithms which allow to choose an adequate representation of the scene according to user-specified criteria.
Comparing Lipid Membranes in Different Environments

When engineering lipid membranes for applications, it is essential to characterize them to avoid artifacts introduced by manipulation and the experimental environment. Wide-angle X-ray scattering is a powerful structural characterization tool for well-ordered lipid systems. It reveals remarkable differences in rotational order parameters for samples prepared in different ways. New data and perspectives are presented here for multilamellar systems that support and extend the characterization work on unilamellar systems that is reported by Watkins et al. in this issue of ACS Nano.
The Association Between the Socioeconomic Status and Thyroid Cancer Prevalence; Based on the Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2010-2011

The incidence of thyroid cancer has recently increased in most industrialized countries, including Korea. To date, few studies have examined the association between thyroid cancer and socioeconomic status (SES). The current study was based on data collected from a total of 12,276 subjects (5,277 men and 6,999 women) by the Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) between 2010 and 2011. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that older age (odds ration [OR], 1.03; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.00-1.05), being female (OR, 8.16; 95%CI, 2.99-22.24), being overweight (OR, 1.04; 95%CI, 1.01-1.06), monthly household income (OR, 3.27; 95%CI, 1.16-9.20 for medium-highest household income vs lowest household income; OR, 3.30; 95%CI, 1.16-9.34 for highest household income vs lowest household income), educational level (OR, 2.74; 95%CI, 1.16-6.46 for 10-12 yr vs < 7 yr) and alcohol consumption (OR, 1.89; 95%CI 1.08-3.32) were significant risk factors for thyroid cancer. Our results indicate that the recent increase in thyroid cancer is attributable to better early detection rather than to any increase in actual prevalence.
Design of Bandwidth-Enhanced Doherty Power Amplifiers for Handset Applications

A quarter-wavelength impedance transformer as well as a number of other factors limit the bandwidth (BW) of Doherty power amplifiers (PAs). We utilize the lower Q of a quarter-wave length transformer and propose a phase compensation circuit and an additional offset line to be incorporated into the matching net works for an enhanced BW of the Doherty PA. The quarter-wave length transformer and the final output circuit have the same Q. Input dividing networks are also analyzed for operation of broad BW. The Doherty PA for long term evolution (LTE) applications is integrated into a 1.4 × 1.4 mm2 die using an InGaP/GaAs hetero junction bipolar transistor (HBT) process. For an LTE signal with a 7.5-dB peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and a 10-MHz BW, the PA with a supply voltage of 4.5 V delivers a power-added ef ficiency (PAE) of 36.3% and an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of -32 dBc with an average output power of 27.5 dBm at a frequency of 1.85 GHz. Across frequencies from 1.6-2.1 GHz, the PA performs with a PAE of more than 30%, a gain of more than 28 dB and an ACLR of less than -31 dBc at an average output power of 27.5 dBm while satisfying the standard spectrum mask. These figures verify that the proposed bandwidth enhancement techniques are effective for handset Doherty PAs.
Entropy/Length Profiles, Bounds on the Minimal Covering of Bipartite Graphs, and Trellis Complexity of Nonlinear Codes

The trellis representation of nonlinear codes is studied from a new perspective. We introduce the new concept of entropy/length profile (ELP). This profile can be considered as an extension of the dimension/length profile (DLP) to nonlinear codes. This elaboration of the DLP, the entropy/length profiles, appears to be suitable to the analysis of nonlinear codes. Additionally and independently, we use well-known information-theoretic measures to derive novel bounds on the minimal covering of a bipartite graph by complete subgraphs. We use these bounds in conjunction with the ELP notion to derive both lower and upper bounds on the state complexity and branch complexity profiles of (nonlinear) block codes represented by any trellis diagram. We lay down no restrictions on the trellis structure, and we do not confine the scope of our results to proper or one-to-one trellises only. The basic lower bound on the state complexity profile implies that the state complexity at any given level cannot be smaller than the mutual information between the past and the future portions of the code at this level under a uniform distribution of the codewords. We also devise a different probabilistic model to prove that the minimum achievable state complexity over all possible trellises is not larger than the maximum value of the above mutual information over all possible probability distributions of the codewords. This approach is pursued further to derive similar bounds on the branch complexity profile. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed upper bounds are the only upper bounds that address nonlinear codes. The novel lower bounds are tighter than the existing bounds. The new quantities and bounds reduce to well-known results when applied to linear codes.
Experimental Study of MIMO Channel Statistics and Capacity via Virtual Channel Representation

This work presents an experimental study of MIMO channel statistics and capacity via the recently proposed virtual channel representation, which describes the channel by a finite number of fixed virtual transmit/receive angles and delays. Our results confirm two important implications of virtual path partitioning: the virtual coefficients are approximately uncorrelated, and there exist fundamental angle-delay dependencies which limit the degrees of freedom in MIMO channels. The virtual channel power matrix reflects the distribution of channel power in angle-delay domain, quantifies the spatial-frequency correlation of actual channel coefficients, and also provides an intuitive explanation of the impact of scattering environments on capacity. The modeling accuracy of the popular Kronecker model, as well as the recently proposed eigenbeam model, is compared to the virtual channel model. The results indicate that both the virtual and eigenbeam models achieve good prediction accuracy, because they can model nonseparable 2D angular spectrum, while the Kronecker model results in larger prediction error due to the restrictive structure.
Reduced MLH1 expression after chemotherapy is an indicator for poor prognosis in esophageal cancers.

PURPOSE Loss of function or expression of the mismatch repair gene MLH1 has been implicated in experimentally acquired resistance to cisplatin (CDDP) and other anticancer agents. The clinical significance of MLH1 expression was evaluated in advanced thoracic squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus (ESCC) treated by neoadjuvant chemotherapy. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN We investigated MLH1 and P53 expression by immunohistochemistry in the surgical specimens of 107 patients who had undergone preoperative chemotherapy using CDDP along with 5-FU and ADM. These findings were correlated with the clinical outcome for this treatment. Biopsy samples before chemotherapy in 20 of these patients, and another 43 surgical specimens without chemotherapy, were also examined as control samples. RESULTS In surgical specimens of ESCC, low MLH1 expression was not frequent without chemotherapy, whereas it was commonly observed after chemotherapy (14 versus 37%, P = 0.0057). Comparison between samples before and after chemotherapy revealed that MLH1 expression was unchanged during chemotherapy in 12 of 20 patients (60%) but was from high to low in 8 of 20 patients (40%). In the surgical specimen after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, MLH1 expression was not correlated with any clinicopathological factors, including the response to chemotherapy. However, low MLH1 showed poorer prognosis than high MLH1 (5-year survival 40.6 versus 19.3%, P = 0.0393), and in multivariate analysis, MLH1 was an independent prognostic factor for this multimodal treatment, following lymph node metastasis and clinical response to chemotherapy. Positive p53 expression, which was not affected by chemotherapy, was weakly associated with a poor response and clinical outcome, although this trend was not significant. CONCLUSIONS In advanced ESCC, expression of MLH1 is reduced during CDDP-based chemotherapy, and this may partly account for poor postoperative survival.
Nurturing Young Black Males. Challenges to Agencies, Programs, and Social Policy.

Crime, drugs, unemployment. These are the problems. Nurturing Young Black Males offers proven solutions. Most young black American men grow up to lead productive lives. Among high-school drop-outs, though, only half have jobs and over 40 percent are in prison, on parole, or on probation. But there are programs, mostly private, that are proving it is possible to help these teenagers. This book tells how these programs work, describes the difficulties they encounter, and shows how a national program network can be developed. Includes chapters on adolescent development, shifting the focus of youth programs from deterrence to development, and Afrocentrism and the African-American male.
Research on fault location system of aircraft cable based on principle of least squares solution

In this paper, based on the electric theory of distribution parameter circuit, a mathematical model of aircraft cable fault location is created. The least squares solution is selected as the control algorithm because it has been applied successfully to parameter estimation. An aircraft cable fault location system is designed and the experimental results show that the system is rational and effective.
A network-based approach to detect spammer groups

Online reviews nowadays are an important source of information for consumers to evaluate online services and products before deciding which product and which provider to choose. Therefore, online reviews have significant power to influence consumers' purchase decisions. Being aware of this, an increasing number of companies have organized spammer review campaigns, in order to promote their products and gain an advantage over their competitors by manipulating and misleading consumers. To make sure the Internet remains a reliable source of information, we propose a method to identify both individual and group spamming reviews by assigning a suspicion score to each user. The proposed method is a network-based approach combining clustering techniques. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach on a real-world and manipulated dataset that contains over 8000 restaurants and 600,000 restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor website. We tested our method in three testing scenarios. The method was able to detect all spammers in two testing scenarios, however it did not detect all in the last scenario.
Basic principles of optical imaging and application to the study of infant development

New optical methods of studying the infant brain have been developed over the last 20 years. These techniques make use of a window of transparency of biological tissue to near infrared light. Using spectrophotometry new insights have been gained into mechanisms of brain damage in newborn infants undergoing intensive care, and non-invasive functional activation studies have been pioneered in awake infants. Recently topographic mapping of activated cortex has become possible, and preliminary tomographic images of regional oxygenation in infants have been constructed. This is a rapidly changing field which offers exciting possibilities for studying both normal and abnormal child development.
High-Redshift Galaxies and the Lyα Forest in a Cold Dark Matter Universe

We use a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation of a cold dark matter universe to investigate theoretically the relationship between high-redshift galaxies and the Lyα forest at redshift z = 3. Galaxies in the simulation are surrounded by halos of hot gas, which nevertheless contain enough neutral hydrogen to cause a Lyα flux decrement, its strength increasing with galaxy mass. A comparison with recent observational data by Adelberger et al. on the Lyα forest around galaxies reveals that actual galaxies may have systematically less Lyα absorption within 1 Mpc of them than our simulated galaxies. In order to investigate this possibility, we add several simple prescriptions for galaxy feedback on the intergalactic medium (IGM) to the evolved simulation. These include the effect of photoionizing background radiation coming from galactic sources, galactic winds whose only effect is to deposit thermal energy into the IGM, and another, kinetic model for winds, which are assumed to evacuate cavities in the IGM around galaxies. We find that only the latter is able to produce a large effect, enough to match the tentative observational data, given the energy available from star formation in the simulated galaxies. Another intriguing possibility is that a selection effect is responsible, so that galaxies with low Lyα absorption are preferentially included in the sample. This is also viable but predicts galaxy properties (including clustering) that are very different from the other scenarios.
Establishing Fungal Entomopathogens as Endophytes: Towards Endophytic Biological Control

Beauveria bassiana is a fungal entomopathogen with the ability to colonize plants endophytically. As an endophyte, B. bassiana may play a role in protecting plants from herbivory and disease. This protocol demonstrates two inoculation methods to establish B. bassiana endophytically in the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), in preparation for subsequent evaluations of endophytic biological control. Plants are grown from surface-sterilized seeds for two weeks before receiving a B. bassiana treatment of 108 conidia/ml (or water) applied either as a foliar spray or a soil drench. Two weeks later, the plants are harvested and their leaves, stems and roots are sampled to evaluate endophytic fungal colonization. For this, samples are individually surface sterilized, cut into multiple sections, and incubated in potato dextrose agar media for 20 days. The media is inspected every 2-3 days to observe fungal growth associated with plant sections and record the occurrence of B. bassiana to estimate the extent of its endophytic colonization. Analyses of inoculation success compare the occurrence of B. bassiana within a given plant part (i.e. leaves, stems or roots) across treatments and controls. In addition to the inoculation method, the specific outcome of the experiment may depend on the target crop species or variety, the fungal entomopathogen species strain or isolate used, and the plant's growing conditions.
Joint learning user's activities and profiles from GPS data

As the GPS-enabled mobile devices become extensively available, we are now given a chance to better understand human behaviors from a large amount of the GPS trajectories representing the mobile users' location histories. In this paper, we aim to establish a framework, which can jointly learn the user activities (what is the user doing) and profiles (what is the user's background, such as occupation, gender, age, etc.) from the GPS data. We will show that, learning user activities and learning user profiles can be beneficial to each other in nature, so we try to put them together and formulate a joint learning problem under a probabilistic collaborative filtering framework. In particular, for activity recognition, we manage to extract the location semantics from the raw GPS data and use it, together with the user profile, as the input; and we will output the corresponding activities of daily living. For user profile learning, we build a mobile social network among the users by modeling their similarities with the performed activities and known user backgrounds. Compared with the other work on solely learning user activities or profiles from GPS data, our approach is advantageous by exploiting the connections between the user activities and profiles for joint learning.
Supervised Learning for Self-Generating Neural Networks

In this paper, supervised learning for Self-Generating Neural Networks (SGNN) method, which was originally developed for the purpose of unsupervised learning, is discussed. An information analytical method is proposed to assign weights to attributes in the training examples if class information is available. This significantly improves the learning speed and the accuracy of the SGNN classiier. The performance of the supervised version of SGNN is analyzed and compared with those of other well-known supervised learning methods.
Polymer properties on-line estimation for gas-phase polyethylene based on particle filtering joint estimation

Due to the lack of suitable on-line polymer property measurements, the control of multi-grade product quality in industrial polymerization reactors is difficult. In this article, a predictive model of polymer properties is deduced for industrial polyethylene process by combining the first principle model and the feature modeling scheme. Combining the extended Kalman filtering, a method of design the particle filtering joint estimation is proposed to update the estimation of polymer properties based on the off-line lab analysis data in this article. The application results of the proposed method to an industrial gas-phase polyethylene plant have verified its effectiveness and feasibility. With the proposed method, multi-grade polymer properties of industrial gas-phase polyethylene process can be online estimated and make it possible for achieving the advanced on-line multi-grade product quality control.
An assessment of eye-gaze potential within immersive virtual environments

In collaborative situations, eye gaze is a critical element of behavior which supports and fulfills many activities and roles. In current computer-supported collaboration systems, eye gaze is poorly supported. Even in a state-of-the-art video conferencing system such as the access grid, although one can see the face of the user, much of the communicative power of eye gaze is lost. This article gives an overview of some preliminary work that looks towards integrating eye gaze into an immersive collaborative virtual environment and assessing the impact that this would have on interaction between the users of such a system. Three experiments were conducted to assess the efficacy of eye gaze within immersive virtual environments. In each experiment, subjects observed on a large screen the eye-gaze behavior of an avatar. The eye-gaze behavior of that avatar had previously been recorded from a user with the use of a head-mounted eye tracker. The first experiment was conducted to assess the difference between users' abilities to judge what objects an avatar is looking at with only head gaze being viewed and also with eye- and head-gaze data being displayed. The results from the experiment show that eye gaze is of vital importance to the subjects, correctly identifying what a person is looking at in an immersive virtual environment. The second experiment examined whether a monocular or binocular eye-tracker would be required. This was examined by testing subjects' ability to identify where an avatar was looking from their eye direction alone, or by eye direction combined with convergence. This experiment showed that convergence had a significant impact on the subjects' ability to identify where the avatar was looking. The final experiment looked at the effects of stereo and mono-viewing of the scene, with the subjects being asked to identify where the avatar was looking. This experiment showed that there was no difference in the subjects' ability to detect where the avatar was gazing. This is followed by a description of how the eye-tracking system has been integrated into an immersive collaborative virtual environment and some preliminary results from the use of such a system.
Variable Structure Model Reference Adaptive Control, for Vehicle Automatic Steering System

A variable structure model reference adaptive control (VS-MRAC) strategy for automatic active steering of a two wheel steering car is proposed. An ideal steering system with fixed properties and moving on an ideal road is used as the reference model, and the automatic active steering system is forced to attain the same behavior as the reference model. The proposed system can treat the nonlinear relationships between the side slip angles and lateral forces on tire, and the uncertainties on friction of the road surface, whose compensation are very important under critical situations. Simulation results show improvements on side slip, yaw rate and Dy angle.
Political corporate social responsibility and development

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has attracted varied applications in management. This chapter contribution provides evidence of a political CSR where multinational corporations (MNCs) are complementing government’s role in bridging governance gap. The governance gap thesis and political costs hypothesis provide grounding for the discussions in this paper. Data from case studies across the Middle-Eastern countries were critically analysed and justify the political and developmental undercurrents of CSR initiatives. The key argument is that governance is crucial for development, and where there is a governance gap, it is in the interest of corporations to bridge the gap with their CSR initiatives to stimulate development. Pressure groups and civil society organisations in developing countries could leverage on the political dimension of CSR to lobby corporations to intervene in socio-economic issues especially poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship development in their operating environment for mutual benefits.
Mobile Termination with Asymmetric Networks

This paper examines mobile termination fees and their regulation when networks are asymmetric in size. It is demonstrated that with consumer ignorance about the exact termination rates (a) a mobile network's termination rate is the higher the smaller the network's size (as measured through its subscriber base) and (b) asymmetric regulation of only the larger operators in a market will, ceteris paribus, induce the smaller operators to increase their termination rates. The results are supported by empirical evidence using data on mobile termination rates from 48 European mobile operators from 2001 to 2003.
Laparo-endoscopic combined approach for excision of gastrointestinal stromal tumour close to the oesophagogastric junction

Tumours close to the oesophagogastric junction (OGJ) are difficult to excise due to high risk of complications. Laparoscopic and endoscopic combined surgery allows minimally invasive access while increasing tumour visualization. Computed tomography (CT) scanning of a 68-year-old female demonstrated a lesion suspicious of a gastrointestinal stromal tumour located 2 cm from the OGJ on the posterior gastric wall. Stapled excision was performed intragastrically and followed by endoscopic removal. Gastroscopy 7 months post-op and follow-up CT scan at 5 years demonstrated no recurrence of the primary tumour and no new disease. Laparoscopic and endoscopic combined approach is a safe and effective method of removing tumours close to the OGJ.