Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact breaching of Europa's ice: Constraints from numerical modeling

Numerical simulations show that impactors can penetrate Europa's ice, creating conduits to the underlying ocean. Breaching becomes inevitable when transient cavity depth exceeds 90% of ice thickness. Results indicate that a 0.5 km comet would penetrate 5 km ice, and a 5 km comet could breach 40 km ice. Thinner ice would be breached more frequently, thicker ice less so, but even the 40 km upper estimates for ice thickness would be penetrated by comets with recurrence intervals less than 250 Ma. If actual ice thickness is 8–13 km (indicated by comparing Europan and simulated crater geometries), the ocean could be exposed by impactors in the range 0.7–1.5 km, which have recurrence intervals ≈3 to 7 Ma. Thus, it seems that Europa's ice has been penetrated often in the past and possibly in geologically recent time. The largest known impact sites, Callanish and Tyre, probably represent transition from craters to penetrating impacts. The geomorphic expression of full penetration must exist on the surface; chaos terrain is a candidate. Astrobiological materials could be transported to the ocean via these impact‐created conduits.
Complications of thyroidectomy for large goiter

Thyroidectomy is a routinely common practiced surgery. Morbidity and mortality from thyroid surgery are disregarded nowadays and undervalued in the literature. Perioperative risks and complications still exist for large goiters and can be life-threatening. These complications may occur during the anesthesia and intubation, intra-, or postoperatively. We set out through a case of a large cervical multinodular goiter (MNG) and a review of literature the perioperative complications and how to avoid them. During the total thyroidectomy operation, an accidental devascularisation of a parathyroid gland, a cervical hematoma which was evacuated by surgical reoperation, hemodynamic disorder and a transitory hypoparathyroidism were the postoperative complications that occurred. Surgery for large goiters remains difficult; so adequate preoperative assessment, particular attention and careful operative procedure should be followed to obtain better surgical outcomes.
Characterization of the uirB Operon from an Agrobucterium tumefuciens Ti Plasmid

The virulence genes of the Agrobacterium tumefaciens Ti plasmid are grouped into six transcription units and direct the transfer of T-DNA into plant cells. We report here the nucleotide sequence of the largest vir operon, virB, from the Ti plasmid pTiA6NC. This operon contains 11 open reading frames, 7 of which show evidence of translational coupling. trpE:virB gene fusions were used to confirm the reading frames of genes virB2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11. In addition, the native gene products of virB6 and virB9 were identified using maxicell and in vitro transcriptiontranslation techniques, and the VirB9 protein was found to be proteolytically processed. The codon usage of the predicted virB genes is very similar to the other pTiA6 vir genes and is much less biased than Escherichia coli. Since many of the virB gene products have secretion signals common to exported bacterial proteins, it is likely that they will be membrane-associated. We propose that the VirB proteins are involved in the formation of a transmembrane structure which mediates the passage of the transferred T-DNA molecule through the bacterial and plant cell membranes.
Semantic Web Reasoning by Swarm Intelligence

Semantic Web reasoning systems are confronted with the task to process growing amounts of distributed, dynamic resources. This paper presents a novel way of approaching the challenge by RDF graph traversal, exploiting the advantages of swarm intelligence. The natureinspired and index-free methodology is realised by self-organising swarms of autonomous, light-weight entities that traverse RDF graphs by following paths, aiming to instantiate pattern-based inference rules. The method is evaluated on the basis of a series of simulation experiments with regard to desirable properties of Semantic Web reasoning, focussing on anytime behaviour, adaptiveness and scalability.
Multimodal Biometrics-Based Student Attendance Measurement in Learning Management Systems

In this paper we present a solution to obtain useful and reliable user logs in a Learning Management System (LMS). Current LMS logs are combined with biometric-based logs that show the student behaviour. Our system models the student behaviour, allowing to know exactly how much time the student spends in front of the computer examining the con-tents of the LMS. Besides, user verification and face tracking are also integrated, what guarantees that the student is the person actually interacting with the system. The presented multimodal solution for user tracking and user ver-ification combines face tracking, face verification, speakerverification and fingerprint verification. Face tracking and face verification are performed in a non-collaborative fashion. Fingerprint or speaker verification is performed on demand, with the aim of avoiding a negative in¿uence of adverse environmental or behavioural human factors in the reliability of the user logs generated by the system. These circumstances can thwart the non collaborative face veri-fication performance involved in the tracking process. The presented solution solves the problem of user tracking and authentication even in adverse environments for face verifi-cation.
A scheme to compensate for the input multipath channel effect in an interference cancellation repeater for mobile communication systems

Conventional interference cancellation (ICAN) techniques are mainly used to prevent feedback oscillation of a radio repeater when the repeaterpsilas gain is larger than the isolation between the transmit and receive antennas of the repeater. Therefore, the output signal distortion of the radio repeater, which is caused by the multipath channel between the repeaterpsilas input antenna and a base station, is not properly compensated. In this paper, a scheme to compensate for the output signal distortion in conventional ICAN repeaters is proposed. The compensation is performed by estimating the input multipath channel, inverting the estimated channel, and compensating the input signal using the inverted channel prior to feedback signal cancellation. The validity of the proposed scheme is confirmed by showing that the output signal quality of a conventional ICAN repeater is considerably improved by this scheme.
Adaptive Novice Supporter

In this paper, we implemented very simple plan generator which can help the novice researchers do their research efficiently. We have assumed that we should not make domain experts annoying when building the knowledge-base, and at the same time, we could provide users with the beneficial information made by them using very simple mechanisms. This is the main purpose of implementing ANOS (Adaptive Novice Supporter). We could realized that in order to overcome some limitations of ANOS, we should perform several further researches including the adoption of machine learning methods and the enhancement of knowledge-base providing much intensive user’s surveying.
Time, location and interest: an empirical and user-centred study

The importance of context in meeting user information needs has gained increasing interest. When developing interactive information retrieval systems, we do need to consider how contextual information might be used to improve information retrieval. In this paper, we present a user-centred experiment that focuses on three potential context attributes. These are time, location, and user's interest. The experiment involved tasks using a scenario that would be suitable for mobile situations - one very promising area for the application of context information that can help to deliver personalised services. The scenario involves situations with local events such as jazz concerts and includes the use of a simplified map to help visualise locations. The effect of the three attributes and the interactions between them are analysed and discussed. The effects in most cases were considerable and data analysis showed statistically significant effects. The study shows that time, location, and interest matter to users in mobile situations. There appears to be a priority emerging in the relative importance of these attributes for the mobile user. Also, the results show high order interaction effects between the attributes.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Development and initial evaluation of a semi-automatic approach to assess perivascular spaces on conventional magnetic resonance images

Purpose: Perivascular spaces (PVS) are associated with ageing, cerebral small vessel disease, inﬂammation and increased blood brain barrier permeability. Most studies to date use visual rating scales to assess PVS, but these are prone to observer variation. Methods: We developed a semi-automatic computational method that extracts PVS on bilateral ovoid basal ganglia (BG) regions on intensity-normalised T2-weighted magnetic resonance images. It uses Analyze TM 10.0 and was applied to 100 mild stroke patients’ datasets. We used linear regression to test association between BGPVS count, volume and visual rating scores; and between BGPVS count & vol- ume, white matter hyperintensity (WMH) rating scores (periventricular: PVH; deep: DWMH) & volume, atrophy rating scores and brain volume.
Gesturing on the Steering Wheel: a User-elicited taxonomy

"Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel" is a crucial principle to be taken into account designing interactions for current in-vehicle interfaces. Gesture interaction is a promising modality that can be implemented following this principle in order to reduce driver distraction and increase safety. We present the results of a user elicitation for gestures performed on the surface of the steering wheel. We asked to 40 participants to elicit 6 gestures, for a total of 240 gestures. Based on the results of this experience, we derived a taxonomy of gestures performed on the steering wheel. The analysis of the results offers useful suggestions for the design of in-vehicle gestural interfaces based on this approach.
Integrated generator for more electric engine: Design and testing of a scaled size prototype

In this paper the main design characteristics of a scaled-size prototype of an integrated generator for More Electric Engine (MEE) application are presented. The reference electrical machine is a surface mounted PM machine directly integrated inside the aircraft main gas turbine engine. Therefore, as for the reference machine, the designed scaled-size prototype is characterized by an annulus shape outer rotor structure and it is cooled by air flowing through the airgap. To satisfy the fault-tolerant requirements imposed by the aerospace application, the stator winding is constituted by multiphase single-layer non-overlapping fractional-slot concentrated windings. In order to validate the designed machine, the experimental results of tests conducted on the prototype are reported. Among these ones, particular interest is focused on the cooling capabilities of the cooling air which flow through the machine airgap. Furthermore, based on the reduced scale prototype experience, some considerations and the main design characteristics of the full-size machine design are reported too.
“The Birth Control Divide”

For more than 140 years, religious, medical, legislative, and legal institutions have contested the issue of contraception. In this conversation, predominantly male voices have attached reproductive rights to tangential moral and political matters, revealing an ongoing, systematic attempt to regulate human bodies, especially those of women. This analysis of 1873-2013 press coverage of contraception in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune shows a division between institutional ideology and real-life experience; women’s reproductive rights are negotiable. Although journalists often reported that contraception was a factor in the everyday life of women and men, press accounts also showed religious, medical, legislative, and legal institutions debating whether it should be. Contraception originally was predominately viewed as a practice of prostitutes (despite evidence to the contrary) but became a part of everyday life. The battle has slowly evolved into one about the Affordable Care Act, religious freedom, morality, and employer rights. What did not significantly change over the 140-year period are larger cultural and ideological structures; these continue to be dominated by men, who retain power over women’s bodies.
Multifarious hierarchies of mechanical models for artist assigned levels-of-detail

We present a new framework for artist driven level of detail in solid simulations. Simulated objects are simultaneously embedded in several, separately designed deformation models with their own independent degrees of freedom. The models are ordered to apply their deformations hierarchically, and we enforce the uniqueness of the dynamics solutions using a novel kinetic filtering operator designed to ensure that each child only adds detail motion to its parent without introducing redundancies. This new approach allows artists to easily add fine-scale details without introducing unnecessary degrees-of-freedom to the simulation or resorting to complex geometric operations like anisotropic volume meshing. We illustrate the utility of our approach with several detail enriched simulation examples.
On Modelling Reliability in RED Gateways

In this paper we investigate the reliability of Random Early Detection (RED) gateway. For the RED buffer behavior a new model based on Markov chains is offered. The reliability of RED gateway is defined by an average rate of accepted packets. We examine the impact of RED tuning on the reliability by taking into account stick-slip nature of traffic intensity. The goal of the proposed model is to improve RED buffer management by using a technique of traffic intensity change detection.
Enhanced Remote Sensing Imaging in Uncertain Environment Fusing Adaptive Least Squares and Variational Analysis Methods

This paper proposes a new approach for the reconstruction of the RS images degraded by composite noise (additive and multiplicative), taking into account the limitations of the sensor system. Our proposal takes advantage of the statistical and probabilistic qualities of the employed Weighted Constrained Least Squares (WCLS) and Robust Bayes Minimum Risk (RBMR) algorithms. The restoration of the image optimized by aggregating the WCLS, RBMR, the maximum entropy and variational analysis techniques.
Variational Bayesian super-resolution based on composite prior modeling

This paper proposes adaptively combining the known total variation model and more recent Frobenius norm regularization for multi-frame super-resolution (SR). In contrast to existing literature, both composite prior modeling and variational optimization are achieved in the Bayesian framework by utilizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and the parameters related to the composite prior and noise statistics are determined adaptively and automatically, resulting in a spatially adaptive SR reconstruction method. Experimental results show that the new method can produce a high-resolution image with higher signal-to-noise ratio and better visual perception.
A Multicentre Study of Acute Kidney Injury in Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock: Association with Inflammatory Phenotype and HLA Genotype

Background To investigate the association between severity of acute kidney injury (AKI) and outcome, systemic inflammatory phenotype and HLA genotype in severe sepsis. Methodology/Principal Findings Prospective multicenter observational study done in 4 intensive care units in two university hospitals. Severe sepsis and septic shock patients with at least 2 organ failures based on the SOFA score were classified: 1) "no AKI", 2) "mild AKI" (grouping stage 1 and 2 of AKIN score) and 3) "severe AKI" (stage 3 of AKIN score). Sequential measurements: The vasopressor dependency index (VDI; dose and types of drugs) to evaluate the association between hemodynamic status and the development of early AKI; plasma levels of IL-10, macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), IL-6 and HLA-DR monocyte expression. Genotyping of the 13 HLA-DRB1 alleles with deduction of presence of HLA-DRB3, -DRB4 and -DRB5 genes. We used multivariate analysis with competitive risk model to study associations. Overall, 176 study patients (146 with septic shock) were classified from AKIN score as "no AKI" (n = 43), "mild AKI" (n = 74) or "severe AKI" (n = 59). The VDI did not differ between groups of AKI. After adjustment, "mild and severe AKI" were an independent risk factor for mortality (HR 2.42 95%CI[1.01-5.83], p = 0.048 and HR 1.99 95%CI[1.30-3.03], p = 0.001 respectively). "Severe AKI" had higher levels of plasma IL-10, MIF and IL-6 compared to “no AKI” and mild AKI (p<0.05 for each), with no difference in mHLA-DR at day 0. HLA-DRB genotyping showed a significantly lower proportion of 4 HLA-DRB alleles among patients requiring renal replacement therapy (RRT) (58%) than in patients with severe AKI who did not receive RRT (84%) (p = 0.004). Conclusions AKI severity is independently associated with mortality and plasma IL-10, MIF or IL-6 levels. Presence of 4 alleles of HLA-DRB in severe AKI patients seems associated with a lower need of RRT.
Synchronization in the MAEstro multimedia authoring environment

MAEstro is a distributed, multimedia authoring environment designed to simplify the process of creating multimedia documents [5]. The environment consists of a suite of applications to manipulate various media, or sources of information. A messaging system, based on Sun remote procedure calls, is used to control playback of multimedia documents. This distributed nature of multimedia authorship and playback poses unique problems in the area of synchronization, but the MAEstro architecture also allows for a simple and relatively effective solution. The solution is a combination of policy to be followed by application programmers, and oneway (non-blocking) RPC calls during playback of multimedia documents [2]. The MAEstro solution to the synchronization problem works with any combination of media, if the author of a document is willing to live with coarse-grained synchronization (on the order of one second). Thus, MAEstro synchronization is not adequate for applications such as dubbing voice with video where the two media come from different sources, but for most applications, MAEstro synchronization is acceptable. This paper discusses the techniques used in the MAEstro environment to achieve synchronization.
Throughput Fairness Enhancement Using Differentiated Channel Access in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Nowadays, with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) being widely applied to diverse applications, heterogeneous sensor networks (HSNs), which can simultaneously support multiple sensing tasks in a common sensor field, are being considered as the general form of WSN system deployment. In HSNs, each application generates data packets with a different size, thereby resulting in fairness issues in terms of the network performance. In this paper, we present the design and performance evaluation of a differentiated channel access scheme (abbreviated to DiffCA) to resolve the fairness problem in HSNs. DiffCA achieves fair performance among the application groups by providing each node with an additional backoff counter, whose value varies according to the size of the packets. A mathematical model based on the discrete time Markov chain is presented and is analyzed to measure the performance of DiffCA. The numerical results show that the performance degradation of disadvantaged application groups can be effectively compensated for by DiffCA. Simulation results are given to verify the accuracy of the numerical model.
An efficient SiGe double-balanced mixer with a differential rat-race coupler

This paper describes an efficient, fully differential mixer intended to be used in a 77-GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave radar transceiver, which is realized in a Silicon-Germanium bipolar technology. The double-balanced mixer is equipped with a differential rat-race coupler, which uses a differential transmission line with a circumference of only one wavelength and provides an LO-RF isolation better than 30 dB over a wide frequency range. The mixer draws a very low quiescent current of 7.5 μA from a supply voltage of 3.3V. The measured voltage conversion loss is 0.5 dB and 0.3 dB at an LO power of 0dBm and 2 dBm, respectively. The measured input referred 1-dB compression point is -3dBm at an LO power of 0dBm and -2.2dBm if the LO power is increased to 2 dBm.
Control of Hes7 Expression by Tbx6, the Wnt Pathway and the Chemical Gsk3 Inhibitor LiCl in the Mouse Segmentation Clock

The mouse segmentation is established from somites, which are iteratively induced every two hours from the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) by a system known as the segmentation clock. A crucial component of the segmentation clock is the gene Hes7, which is regulated by the Notch and Fgf/Mapk pathways, but its relation to other pathways is unknown. In addition, chemical alteration of the Wnt pathway changes the segmentation clock period but the mechanism is unclear. To clarify these questions, we have carried out Hes7 promoter analysis in transgenic mouse embryos and have identified an essential 400 bp region, which contains binding sites of Tbx6 and the Wnt signaling effector Lef1. We have found that the Hes7 promoter is activated by Tbx6, and normal activity of the Hes7 promoter in the mouse PSM requires Tbx6 binding sites. Our results demonstrate that Wnt pathway molecules activate the Hes7 promoter cooperatively with Tbx6 in cell culture and are necessary for its proper expression in the mouse PSM. Furthermore, it is shown that the chemical Gsk3 inhibitor LiCl lengthens the oscillatory period of Hes7 promoter activity. Our data suggest that Tbx6 and the Wnt pathway cooperatively regulate proper Hes7 expression. Furthermore, proper Hes7 promoter activity and expression is important for the normal pace of oscillation.
CS 231 N Project : Coloring black and white world using Deep Neural Nets

We address the problem of adding colors to gray scale images. We use convolutional neural-nets because color of a pixel is strongly dependent on the features of its neighbors. In this work, we use a pre-trained neural net (VGG) as a base-network to extract features. We then add a featurecompression layer and small conv-net on top of it to perform the task of coloring. Since the base-network is pre-trained, the rest of the network requires only 3 hours to train.