Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genomic selection on shelling percentage and other traits for maize

Genomic selection (GS) is the one of the new method for molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) that can improve selection efficiency and thereby accelerate selective breeding progress. In the present study, we used the exotic germplasm LK1 to improve the shelling percentage of Qi319 by GS. Genome-wide marker effects for each trait were estimated based on the performance of the testcross and SNP data for F2 progenies in the training population. The accuracy of genomic predictions was estimated as the correlation between marker-predicted genotypic values and phenotypic values of the testcrosses for each trait in the validation population. Our study result indicated that selection response for shell percentage was 33.7%, which is greater than those for grain yield, kernel number per ear, or grain moisture at harvest. Selection response for tassel branch number and weight per 100 kernels was greater than 60%. The Higher trait heritability resulted in better prediction efficiency; Prediction accuracy increased with the training population size; Prediction efficiency did not differ significantly between SNP densities of 1000 bp and 55,000 bp. The results of the present research project will provide a basis for genome-wide selection technology in maize breeding, and lay the groundwork for the application of GS to germplasms that are useful in China.
GaN-Based LEDs With Rough Surface and Selective KOH Etching

The authors propose a simple method to enhance the performances of GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with rough surface. By using KOH to selectively smooth the area beneath the p-contact pad, it was found that we could reduce the forward voltage and enhance output power of the GaN-based LEDs. It was also found that wall-plug efficiency (WPE) of the proposed LEDs was 10.3% larger than that of the conventional LEDs with rough surface and 33.9% larger than that of the conventional LEDs with flat surface. Furthermore, it was found that the use of selective KOH etching will not degrade drooping effect of the LEDs.
Plug-In Dual-Mode-Structure Repetitive Controller for CVCF PWM Inverters

Repetitive control (RC) is found to be a high-performance control scheme for constant-voltage constant-frequency (CVCF) pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) converters to eliminate output total harmonic distortion. In this paper, a dual-mode-structure RC (DMRC) is proposed to further improve the control performance of RC. The proposed DMRC controller comprises of two paralleled periodic signal generators: an odd-harmonic one and an even-harmonic one. Without additional complexity and loss of tracking accuracy, DMRC can achieve a faster error convergence rate than the conventional RC does. Moreover, the tracking accuracy of DMRC is higher than that of odd-harmonic RC. In the presence of nonlinear load disturbances and parameter uncertainties, an application example of a DMRC-controlled single-phase PWM inverter is provided to evaluate the proposed DMRC scheme. Systematical experimental results show the effectiveness and superior advantages of the DMRC approach.
Impact of Educational Intervention Based on Interactive Approaches on Beliefs, Behavior, Hemoglobin A1c, and Quality of Life in Diabetic Women

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a public health challenge worldwide and to manage it the patient is required to make some fundamental changes in behavior. Patients should be involved in care program to improve their diabetes condition and quality of life (QOL). This study aimed to examine the effect of educational program on beliefs, behavior, glycemic control indicator, and QOL among diabetic women. Methods: In this interventional study, 90 female outpatients with type 2 diabetes were randomly selected from those referred to diabetes clinic in Khoy, Iran, during 2011. They were divided into two groups, 45 participants as the intervention group and 45 subjects as the comparison group. Knowledge, beliefs, and behavior by valid and reliable questionnaires, and health-related QOL (HRQOL) by means of WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire were assessed. Hemoglobin A1c level (HbA1c) was measured by the colorimetric method, educational program was conducted on the intervention group for 4 weeks, and changes were compared in two groups after a 3-month follow-up. Results: After intervention, there was a significant difference between two groups in terms of the mean scores of knowledge (P < 0.001), attitude (P < 0.01), self-efficacy (P < 0.001), and behavior (P < 0.001). The findings also indicated that there were significant differences between the groups in mean scores of physical, psychological, and social domains of QOL after intervention (P < 0.001). In addition, there was a statistically significant difference between two groups in the mean value of HbA1c after educational intervention (P < 0.01). Conclusions: Instructional interventions based on interactive approaches can be useful, and applicable for behavior modification and improvement of HbA1c level and HRQOL in people with DM.
Development of Embodied Sense of Self Scale (ESSS): Exploring Everyday Experiences Induced by Anomalous Self-Representation

The scientific exploration of the self has progressed, with much attention focused on the Embodied Sense of Self (ESS). Empirical studies have suggested the mechanisms for self-representation. On the other hand, less attention has been paid to the subjectivity itself of the self. With reference to previous studies, the current study collected items that reflect the ESS and statistically extracted three factors for it: Ownership, Agency, and Narrative. The developed questionnaire [Embodied Sense of Self Scale (ESSS)] showed good enough validity and reliability for practical use. Furthermore, ESSS discriminated schizophrenia, a disorder of the ESS, from controls. We discuss the factorial structure of ESS and the relationship among factors on the basis of the current results.
A zinc‐dependent proteinase from the cell wall of Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus.

A zinc‐dependent proteinase was extracted from the cell wall of Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and partially purified despite a marked unstability. The caseinolytic activity was associated with a polypeptide chain of 65 kDa that belonged to the M1 family of zinc‐dependent proteases. This zinc‐dependent proteinase could degrade intact caseins, with a significant preference for β‐casein. The pH‐profile of its activity indicated that its relative contribution to the caseinolytic activity increased at acidic pH, suggesting that this zinc proteinase could be involved in the late stages of milk fermentation.
Phoneme acquisition model based on vowel imitation using Recurrent Neural Network

A phoneme-acquisition system was developed using a computational model that explains the developmental process of human infants in the early period of acquiring language. There are two important findings in constructing an infant's acquisition of phonemes: (1) an infant's vowel like cooing tends to invoke utterances that are imitated by its caregiver, and (2) maternal imitation effectively reinforces infant vocalization. Therefore, we hypothesized that infants can acquire phonemes to imitate their caregivers' voices by trial and error, i. e. , infants use self-vocalization experience to search for imitable and unimitable elements in their caregivers' voices. On the basis of this hypothesis, we constructed a phoneme acquisition process using interaction involving vowel imitation between a human and an infant model. Our infant model had a vocal tract system, called the Maeda model, and an auditory system implemented by using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) through STRAIGHT analysis. We applied Recurrent Neural Network with Parametric Bias (RNNPB) to learn the experience of self-vocalization, to recognize the human voice, and to produce the sound imitated by the infant model. To evaluate imitable and unimitable sounds, we used the prediction error of the RNNPB model. The experimental results revealed that as imitation interactions were repeated, the formants of sounds imitated by our system moved closer to those of human voices, and our system could self-organize the same vowels in different continuous sounds. This suggests that our system can reflect the process of phoneme acquisition.
Policy‐Oriented Research on Improved Physician Incentives for Higher Value Health Care

Policy makers (both public and private) are seeking ways to improve the value delivered within our health care system, that is, using fewer resources to provide the same benefit to patients, or using equivalent resources to provide more benefit. One strategy is to alter the predominant fee‐for‐service (FFS) economic incentives in the current system. To inform such policy changes, this paper identifies areas in which little is known about the effects of specific incentives (FFS, salary, etc.) on the two components of value: resource use and quality. Specific suggestions are offered regarding research that would be informative for policy makers, focusing on fundamental “building block” studies rather than overall evaluations of complex interventions, such as accountable care organizations. This research would better identify critical aspects of the FFS model and salary‐based payments that are particularly problematic, as well as situations in which FFS or salary may be less problematic. The research would also explore when alternatives, such as episode‐based payment might be feasible, or simply be hypothetical solutions. The availability of electronic health record‐based data in various delivery systems would allow many of these studies to be accomplished in 3–5 years with budgets manageable by public and private funding sources.
Modeling & control of a meat-cutting robotic cell

In this paper, the modeling, simulation and control of a robotic meat cutting cell is described. A dual-arm system is used in the separation task, one arm cuts the meat along a deformable guide line while the second arm graps and pulls the meat to further increase the opening of the valley. The steps taken to model the cell in order to ensure a realistic interaction between the robots and the flexible object are outlined. A control scheme, using an external vision and force sensors, is proposed that copes with on-line object deformation. The proposed control scheme is validated using the simulator environment.
Algorithms on Exact Personalized PageRank

As one of the most well known graph computation problems, Personalized PageRank is an effective approach for computing the similarity score between two nodes, and it has been widely used in various applications, such as link prediction and recommendation. Due to the high computational cost and space cost of computing the exact Personalized PageRank Vector (PPV), most existing studies compute PPV approximately. In this paper, we propose novel and efficient distributed algorithms that compute PPV exactly based on graph partitioning on a general coordinator-based share-nothing distributed computing platform. Our algorithms takes three aspects into account: the load balance, the communication cost, and the computation cost of each machine. The proposed algorithms only require one time of communication between each machine and the coordinator at query time. The communication cost is bounded, and the work load on each machine is balanced. Comprehensive experiments conducted on five real datasets demonstrate the efficiency and the scalability of our proposed methods. CCS Concepts •Mathematics of computing → Graph algorithms; •Theory of computation → Parallel computing models;
The Effects of Dynamic Axial Loading on the Rat Growth Plate

Longitudinal bone growth can be suppressed by compressive loading. In this study, we applied three different magnitudes (17, 8.5, and 4N) of compressive force to growing rat ulnas 10 minutes/day for 8 days and investigated the effects on the distal growth plate biology. Further, to investigate growth rate recovery after cessation of loading, we examined rats 7 days after the loading period. Longitudinal growth of the ulna was suppressed in a dose‐dependent manner by applied compressive force. In the 17N group, the longitudinal mineralization rate (LMR) at the distal growth plate was suppressed completely by loading and did not recover. However, in the 8.5N and 4N groups, LMR suppression recovered in 1 week. In the 17N group, growth plate height and hypertrophic zone height were significantly greater than control; the number of hypertrophic chondrocytes was increased; and some traumatic changes such as cracks in the growth plate were found. In addition, 17N loading suppressed cartilage mineralization and capillary invasion beneath the growth plate, although the number of chondrocytes synthesizing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) was increased. Our study shows longitudinal growth suppression caused by axial loading of the ulna, which is proportional to the magnitude of load. Only the largest load (17N) caused morphological changes in the distal growth plate cartilage. There was no association found between mineralization and type X collagen localization or capillary invasion and VEGF expression.
Speech separation by efficient combinatorial decoding of speech mixtures

We formulate the cocktail party problem as the minimization of a symmetric posimodular function defined on fragments of the signal captured by a single microphone. This formulation allows the application of tractable combinatorial optimization techniques, and in particular the Queyranne's algorithm [1], to exactly solve a problem which was previously considered exponential in the size of the signal, and was typically addressed by greedy search or posterior distribution approximations. While the main idea described in the paper may be be applicable to a variety of signal segmentation problems (e.g., image or video segmentation), we focus here on unsupervised separation of sources in mixed speech signals recorded by a single microphone. As the optimization criterion we use the likelihood under a generative model which assumes that each time-frequency bin is assigned to one of the two speakers, and that each speaker's utterance has been generated from the same generic speech model. (This assumption has previously been motivated by the sparsity of the time-frequency representation, making it unlikely that more than one speaker would dominate any given time-frequency bin.) The partition of the time-frequency space that maximizes the likelihood under the model corresponds to the one for which the resultant decoded speech of each independent source has the highest combined likelihood. The exact search over all possible assignments of the time-frequency bins to the two speakers is performed in polynomial time. Further speedups are achievable by presegmenting the spectrogram into a large number of small segments which do not violate the deformable spectrogram model [2]. We show that this technique leads to blind separation of mixed signals where the two speakers have identical spectral characteristics, opening up a variety of possible applications in teleconferencing and telephony.
Y-chromosomal analysis of Greek Cypriots reveals a primarily common pre-Ottoman paternal ancestry with Turkish Cypriots

Genetics can provide invaluable information on the ancestry of the current inhabitants of Cyprus. A Y-chromosome analysis was performed to (i) determine paternal ancestry among the Greek Cypriot (GCy) community in the context of the Central and Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East; and (ii) identify genetic similarities and differences between Greek Cypriots (GCy) and Turkish Cypriots (TCy). Our haplotype-based analysis has revealed that GCy and TCy patrilineages derive primarily from a single gene pool and show very close genetic affinity (low genetic differentiation) to Calabrian Italian and Lebanese patrilineages. In terms of more recent (past millennium) ancestry, as indicated by Y-haplotype sharing, GCy and TCy share much more haplotypes between them than with any surrounding population (7–8% of total haplotypes shared), while TCy also share around 3% of haplotypes with mainland Turks, and to a lesser extent with North Africans. In terms of Y-haplogroup frequencies, again GCy and TCy show very similar distributions, with the predominant haplogroups in both being J2a-M410, E-M78, and G2-P287. Overall, GCy also have a similar Y-haplogroup distribution to non-Turkic Anatolian and Southwest Caucasian populations, as well as Cretan Greeks. TCy show a slight shift towards Turkish populations, due to the presence of Eastern Eurasian (some of which of possible Ottoman origin) Y-haplogroups. Overall, the Y-chromosome analysis performed, using both Y-STR haplotype and binary Y-haplogroup data puts Cypriot in the middle of a genetic continuum stretching from the Levant to Southeast Europe and reveals that despite some differences in haplotype sharing and haplogroup structure, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots share primarily a common pre-Ottoman paternal ancestry.
Presence of carbamazepine, naproxen, and ibuprofen in wastewater from northern Tunisia

Abstract We investigated the occurrence of three pharmaceutical residues in four wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) from northern Tunisia. The selected compounds were carbamazepine, naproxen, and ibuprofen; they are among the most commonly prescribed and widely used pharmaceutical agents worldwide. Samples (200 mL) were pre-concentrated using the solid phase extraction (SPE) enrichment procedure and the analysis of the pharmaceuticals was performed with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC-UV). The overall procedure provided limits of detection (LOD) lower than 0.5 µg. L−1and recoveries of 78–97%. For the carbamazepine compound, the mean concentrations were 60.58, 93.19, and 132 µg. L−1 for the Bizerte, Jendouba, and Tunis WWTPs, respectively. This pharmaceutical was not detected in the Beja WWTPs. Naproxen and ibuprofens were not detected in the Jendouba WWTP but were found in the three other WWTPs with concentrations ranging from 2.94 to 36.17 µg. L−1 and from 8.02 to 43.22 µg. L−1, respectively. From the obtained data, it seems that these WWTPs are not able to eliminate this kind of micro-pollutants.
Eliciting a DAG for a multivariate time series of vehicle counts in a traffic network

In this paper we elicit a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for the multivariate time series of hourly vehicle counts at the junction of three major roads in the UK. A flow diagram is introduced to give a pictorial representation of the possible vehicle routes through the network. It is shown how this flow diagram, together with a map of the network, can suggest a suitable DAG which represents the conditional independence structure across the time series. We discuss how the DAG can be used to define a linear multiregression dynamic model for the multivariate time series, so that each individual series is simply modelled by a univariate dynamic linear model.
Exploiting Available Domain Knowledge to Improve Mining Aviation Safety and Network Security Data

This paper discusses a method for incorporating available domain knowledge into data mining techniques in order to improve the interestingness of the discovered rules. Existing domain knowledge is represented by a simple grammar and is used within the algorithms in order to reduce the search space and generate more interesting results. We implemented the proposed approach in the APriori and C4.5 algorithms and applied them to data from aviation safety and intrusion detection domains. Our experiments show promising results.
Influence of materials in time-coded chipless RFID tags characterized using a low-cost UWB reader

This paper studies the impact in the performance of time-coded chipless UWB RFID tags when materials are attached to them. Specifically, in terms of read range and reading angle. The characterization is performed using a low-cost and portable integrated radar. Several typical materials where RFID tags are usually attached to are used in the study. A good performance is observed for the majority of the cases.
Melting curve and chemical stability of ammonia at high pressure: Combined x-ray diffraction and Raman study

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Melting curve and chemical stability of ammonia at high pressure: a combined x-ray diffraction and Raman study Jean-Antoine Queyroux, Sandra Ninet, Gunnar Weck, Gaston Garbarino, Thomas Plisson, Mohamed Mezouar, Frédéric Datchi
Computing a Uniform Scaling Parameter for 3D Registration of Lung Surfaces

A difficulty in lung image registration is accounting for chang- es in the size of the lungs due to inspiration. We propose two methods for computing a uniform scale parameter for use in lung image registration that account for size change. A scaled rigid-body transformation allows analysis of corresponding lung CT scans taken at different times and can serve as a good low-order transformation to initialize non-rigid registra- tion approaches. Two different features are used to compute the scale parameter. The first method uses lung surfaces. The second uses lung volumes. Both approaches are computationally inexpensive and improve the alignment of lung images over rigid registration. The two methods produce different scale parameters and may highlight different functional information about the lungs.
Owner Prediction for Accelerating Cache-to-Cache Transfer Misses in a cc-NUMA Architecture

Cache misses for which data must be obtained from a remote cache (cache-to-cache transfer misses) account for an important fraction of the total miss rate. Unfortunately, cc-NUMA designs put the access to the directory information into the critical path of 3-hop misses, which significantly penalizes them compared to SMP designs. This work studies the use of owner prediction as a means of providing cc-NUMA multiprocessors with a more efficient support for cache-to-cache transfer misses. Our proposal comprises an effective prediction scheme as well as a coherence protocol designed to support the use of prediction. Results indicate that owner prediction can significantly reduce the latency of cache-to-cache transfer misses, which translates into speed-ups on application performance up to 12%. In order to also accelerate most of those 3-hop misses that are either not predicted or mispredicted, the inclusion of a small and fast directory cache in every node is evaluated, leading to improvements up to 16% on the final performance.
Saliency-seeded localizing region-based active contour for automatic natural object segmentation

In this paper, we propose a new saliency-seeded active contour based automatic natural object segmentation method. It is known that using saliency regions or pixels can easily get the approximately location of the desired object in the map. The salient object points are employed as the seeds of convex hull to generate the initial contour for our automatic object segmentation system. In contrast with localizing region-based active contours that require considerable user interaction, the proposed method does not require it, i.e., the segmentation task is fulfilled in a fully automatic manner. Extensive experiments results on a large variety of natural images confirm that our framework can reliably and automatically extract the object from the complex background.