Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison between different decoder algorithms for quasi orthogonal space time codes

In this paper, a quasi-orthogonal space time block coding (QO-STBC) scheme with maximum likelihood (ML) decoding via simple linear detection is compared to QOSTBC conventional ML decoder and QOSTBC with simplified zero forcing decoder. A conventional QOSTBC scheme can achieve the full rate, but at the cost of decoding complexity and diversity gain. These disadvantages of the conventional QO-STBC scheme are mainly a result of interference terms in the detection matrix. In this paper, the suggested QOSTBC scheme which eliminates interference terms is used to obtain linear detection. The proposed method achieves a great reduction in decoding complexity with respect to the conventional QO-STBC scheme, also a simplified zero forcing algorithms is compared to the suggested linear detection scheme.
First steps towards curriculum development decisions from raw educational data

The massive use of Information and Communication Technology in education allowed to collect and store a huge amount of various data about all educational aspects. The analysis of these raw data could lead to new, unexpected but valuable knowledge, useful for both teachers and students, and also for faculties and universities managers. In this paper a knowledge discovery in databases process, applied on data collected mainly from a Learning Management System implemented in “Stefan cel Mare” University of Suceava is presented.
Increased Cystatin C in Astrocytes of Transgenic Mice Expressing the K670N-M671L Mutation of the Amyloid Precursor Protein and Deposition in Brain Amyloid Plaques

Cystatin C is an essential secretory cofactor for neurogenesis with potent protease inhibitor activities. Polymorphisms of cystatin C are genetically associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and the L68Q mutation causes hereditary cerebral hemorrhage with amyloidosis of the Icelandic type, in which cystatin C and beta-amyloid are colocalized in cortical blood vessels. To determine whether cystatin C and beta-amyloid also colocalize in brain amyloid plaques, we analyzed transgenic mice expressing the Swedish APP (SweAPP) mutation. We found high levels of cystatin C in astrocytes surrounding beta-amyloid plaques, and discrete layers of cystatin C attached to amyloid plaque cores covered by a layer of beta-amyloid. In addition, cystatin C accumulated in reactive astrocytes throughout the brain, independently of, and before the onset of, amyloid plaque formation. These results show that expression of SweAPP is associated with increased cystatin C in reactive astrocytes, and they suggest an early role of cystatin C in appositional amyloid plaque growth.
Signalling molecules, growth regulators and cell cycle control in Drosophila

During the development of a given organ or tissue within a multicellular organism, growth and patterning are controlled in a coordinated manner by the activity of a discrete number of signalling molecules and their corresponding pathways to give rise to a well formed structure with a particular size, shape and pattern. Understanding how cells of different tissues or organs translate in a context dependent manner the activity of these pathways into an activation or repression of the cell cycle machinery is one of the most intriguing questions in developmental and cancer biology nowadays. Here we revise the different roles of the signalling molecules Notch and Wingless in the regulation of cell cycle progression in the developing eye and wing imaginal discs of Drosophila and propose that depending on how growth regulators are regulated in a context dependent manner by the activity of these pathways, signalling molecules might have tumour suppressor or oncogene activity.
Genetic analysis of env and gag gene fragments of bovine leukemia virus identified in cattle from Korea

Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) is the causative agent of enzootic bovine leukosis. This study was conducted to clarify the molecular characteristics of BLVs obtained from a specific region in Korea. Proviral BLVs were detected in anti-BLV antibody-positive blood samples by PCR. Env and gag fragments were sequenced and compared to previously published reference sequences. Analysis of the env gene sequence revealed that the YI strain was highly similar to genotype 1, including United States and Japanese strains. The gag gene sequence had the highest degree of similarity with a Japanese strain.
An Intronic Enhancer Regulates Splicing of the Twintron of Drosophila melanogaster prospero Pre-mRNA by Two Different Spliceosomes

ABSTRACT We have examined the alternative splicing of the Drosophila melanogaster prospero twintron, which contains splice sites for both the U2- and U12-type spliceosome and generates two forms of mRNA, pros-L (U2-type product) and pros-S (U12-type product). We find that twintron splicing is developmentally regulated: pros-L is abundant in early embryogenesis while pros-S displays the opposite pattern. We have established a Kc cell in vitro splicing system that accurately splices a minimal pros substrate containing the twintron and have examined the sequence requirements for pros twintron splicing. Systematic deletion and mutation analysis of intron sequences established that twintron splicing requires a 46-nucleotide purine-rich element located 32 nucleotides downstream of the U2-type 5′ splice site. While this element regulates both splicing pathways, its alteration showed the severest effects on the U2-type splicing pathway. Addition of an RNA competitor containing the wild-type purine-rich element to the Kc extract abolished U2-type splicing and slightly repressed U12-type splicing, suggesting that a trans-acting factor(s) binds the enhancer element to stimulate twintron splicing. Thus, we have identified an intron region critical for prospero twintron splicing as a first step towards elucidating the molecular mechanism of splicing regulation involving competition between the two kinds of spliceosomes.
Process control monitors for individual single-walled carbon nanotube transistor fabrication processes

The manufacturing yield of carbon nanotube transistors is very sensitive to changes in fabrication process parameters, while controlling length, density and orientation of nanotubes simultaneously is still proving elusive in batch fabrication processes. Here, we show an electrode design with a yield of up to 45% working transistors despite our batch fabrication process being based on randomly grown nanotubes. Transistor parameter distributions of 765 devices are shown, demonstrating the potential of our design for process monitoring and control.
NVM-Assisted Non-redundant Logging for Android Systems

Logging is the most widely used technique to ensure the consistency of persistent data structures across system crashes or power failures in Android systems. Recent proposals are primarily limited to resolving the journaling of journal anomaly in order to mitigate or eliminate explicit redundant logging, and therefore fail to reduce non-trivial overhead induced by implicit redundant logging. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of implicit redundant logging, and then present i-FTL, a byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) assisted non-redundant logging scheme for Android systems. i-FTL consists of two primary technical ingredients: i) filesystem metadata-aware application-level transaction, ii) NVM-assisted FTL mapping table. The evaluation demonstrates that i-FTL yields approximate 3x performance speedup over the ext4 file system with ordered journal mode and 10% on average performance speedup over X-FTL.
Quality of life in nursing home residents with advanced dementia: a 2‐year follow‐up

Quality of life (QOL) in dementia has become increasingly recognized as an important clinical and policy concern, but little is known about the progression of QOL in patients with advanced dementia on psychogeriatric units of nursing homes. Therefore, the primary goal of the current study was to assess the evolution of QOL in advanced dementia patients on a psychogeriatric unit.
Antibody Competition Reveals Surface Location of HPV L2 Minor Capsid Protein Residues 17–36

The currently available nonavalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine exploits the highly antigenic L1 major capsid protein to promote high-titer neutralizing antibodies, but is limited to the HPV types included in the vaccine since the responses are highly type-specific. The limited cross-protection offered by the L1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine warrants further investigation into cross-protective L2 epitopes. The L2 proteins are yet to be fully characterized as to their precise placement in the virion. Adding to the difficulties in localizing L2, studies have suggested that L2 epitopes are not well exposed on the surface of the mature capsid prior to cellular engagement. Using a series of competition assays between previously mapped anti-L1 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) (H16.V5, H16.U4 and H16.7E) and novel anti-L2 mAbs, we probed the capsid surface for the location of an L2 epitope (aa17–36). The previously characterized L1 epitopes together with our competition data is consistent with a proposed L2 epitope within the canyons of pentavalent capsomers.
Agrégation de prédicteurs pour des séries temporelles, optimalité dans un contexte localement stationnaire

Cette these regroupe nos resultats sur la prediction de series temporelles dependantes. Le document comporte trois chapitres principaux ou nous abordons des problemes differents. Le premier concerne l’agregation de predicteurs de decalages de Bernoulli Causales, en adoptant une approche Bayesienne. Le deuxieme traite de l’agregation de predicteurs de ce que nous definissions comme processus sous-lineaires. Une attention particulaire est portee aux processus autoregressifs localement stationnaires variables dans le temps, nous examinons un schema de prediction adaptative pour eux. Dans le dernier chapitre nous etudions le modele de regression lineaire pour une classe generale de processus localement stationnaires.
Changes in Religiosity in Old Age

Changes in religious identity and predictors of change in religiousness are explored in a sample of 1,191 self-respondent Jewish Israeli participants, aged 75 to 94. Data were drawn from two waves of a national survey. Assessments included measures of religious identity, reported change in religiousness, religious practice, functional status, cognitive functioning, and depression. Religious change was reported retrospectively and also examined prospectively. Change in religious identity was reported by approximately 25% of participants. Changes in religiousness were associated with worse functional status and with more depressed affect. Changes in religious identity were associated with a practice that is in the direction of change, even prior to the reported change. Findings raise concerns about the adequacy of social or functional support for persons who wish to continue their previous religious practice.
An Evolutionary Learning Approach to Self-configuring Image Pipelines in the Context of Carbon Fiber Fault Detection

Carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) play a key role for the production of leightweight structures. Simultaneously, online quality inspection of CFRP becomes more important, especially for environments with high safety standards. In this context, vision systems aim to find defects of different shape, size, contour and orientation. Little effort, however, has been made in detecting defect areas in images taken from the surface of carbon fibers. A common approach for segmenting filament defects are edge detection and thresholding. With every change of material and process adjustments, the filter parameters have to be adapted. In this paper, we propose a cartesian genetic programming (CGP) approach to semi-automatically select the best parameters. This strategy saves time for parameter identification while at the same time increases precision. A test run on randomly selected samples shows how the approach can substantially improve detection reliability.
An investigation into the involvement of defense signaling pathways in components of the nonhost resistance of Arabidopsis thaliana to rust fungi also reveals a model system for studying rust fungal compatibility.

Seventeen accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana inoculated with the cowpea rust fungus Uromyces vignae exhibited a variety of expressions of nonhost resistance, although infection hypha growth typically ceased before the formation of the first haustorium, except in Ws-0. Compared with wild-type plants, there was no increased fungal growth in ndr1 or eds1 mutants defective in two of the signal cascades regulated by the major class of Arabidopsis host resistance genes. However, in the Col-0 background, infection hyphae of U. vignae and two other rust fungi were longer in sid2 mutants defective in an enzyme that synthesizes salicylic acid (SA), in npr1 mutants deficient in a regulator of the expression of SA-dependent pathogenesis related (PR) genes, and in NahG plants containing a bacterial salicylate hydroxylase. Infection hyphae of U. vignae and U. appendiculatus but not of Puccinia helianthi were also longer in jar1 mutants, which are defective in the jasmonic acid defense signaling pathway. Nevertheless, haustorium formation increased only for the Uromyces spp. and only in sid2 mutants or NahG plants. Rather than the hypersensitive cell death that usually accompanies haustorium formation in nonhost plants, Arabidopsis typically encased haustoria in calloselike material. Growing fungal colonies of both Uromyces spp. , indicative of a successful biotrophic relationship between plant and fungus, formed in NahG plants, but only U. vignae formed growing colonies in the sid2 mutants and cycloheximide-treated wild-type plants. Growing colonies did not develop in NahG tobacco or tomato plants. These data suggest that nonhost resistance of Arabidopsis to rust fungi primarily involves the restriction of infection hypha growth as a result of defense gene expression. However, there is a subsequent involvement of SA but not SA-dependent PR genes in preventing the Uromyces spp. from forming the first haustorium and establishing a sufficient biotrophic relationship to support further fungal growth. The U. vignae-Arabidopsis combination could allow the application of the powerful genetic capabilities of this model plant to the study of compatibility as well as nonhost resistance to rust fungi.
Bottleneck Capacity Expansion Problems with General Budget Constraints

This paper presents a unied approach for bottleneck capacity expansion problems. In the bottleneck capacity expansion problem, BCEP, we are given a nite ground set E, a familyF of fea- sible subsets of E and a nonnegative real capacity ce for all e 2 E. Moreover, we are given monotone increasing cost functions fe for in- creasing the capacity of the elements e2 E as well as a budget B.T he task is to determine new capacities ce ce such that the objective func- tion given by maxF2F mine2F ce is maximized under the side constraint that the overall expansion cost does not exceed the budget B.W e in- troduce an algebraic model for dening the overall expansion cost and for formulating the budget constraint. This models allows to capture various types of budget constraints in one general model. Moreover, we discuss solution approaches for the general bottleneck capacity expan- sion problem. For an important subclass of bottleneck capacity expan- sion problems we propose algorithms which perform a strongly poly- nomial number of steps. In this manner we generalize and improve a recent result of Zhang et al. (15).
Fractal dimension in human cortical surface: Multiple regression analysis with cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and folding area

Fractal dimension (FD) has been widely used to provide a quantitative description of structural complexity in the cerebral cortex. FD is an extremely compact measure of shape complexity, condensing all details into a single numeric value. We interpreted the variation of the FD in the cortical surface of normal controls through multiple regression analysis with cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and folding area related to cortical complexity. We used a cortical surface showing a reliable representation of folded gyri and manually parcellated it into frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital regions for regional analysis. In both hemispheres the mean cortical thickness and folding area showed significant combination effects on cortical complexity and accounted for about 50% of its variance. The folding area was significant in accounting for the FD of the cortical surface, with positive coefficients in both hemispheres and several lobe regions, while sulcal depth was significant only in the left temporal region. The results may suggest that human cortex develops a complex structure through the thinning of cortical thickness and by increasing the frequency of folds and the convolution of gyral shape rather than by deepening sulcal regions. Through correlation analysis of FD with IQ and the number of years of education, the results showed that a complex shape of the cortical surface has a significant relationship with intelligence and education. Our findings may indicate the structural characteristics that are revealed in the cerebral cortex when the FD in human brain is increased, and provide important information about brain development. Hum Brain Mapp, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Computational Uncertainty in Hybrid Atomistic-Continuum Frameworks

Over the past decade micro and nanofluidics emerged as vital tools in the ongoing drive towards the development of nano-scale analysis and manufacturing systems. Accurate numerical modelling of the phenomena involved at these scales is essential in order to speed up the industrial design process for nanotechnology. However a parameter often ignored in hybrid simulations is the uncertainty level intro duced in the numerical modelling of phenomena taking place at micro and nanoscales. The main interest of the present study is the propagation of the inherent at omistic fluctuations to the continuum solver in the case of multiscale modelling and hybrid solvers.
A Low Friction Demanding Approach in Gait Planning for Humanoid Robots During 3D Manoeuvres

This paper proposes a gait planning approach to reduce the required friction for a biped robot walking on various surfaces. To this end, a humanoid robot with 18 DOF is considered to develop a dynamics model for studying various 3D manoeuvres. Then, feasible trajectories are developed to alleviate the fluctuations on the upper body to resemble human-like walking. In order to generate feasible walking patterns, not only horizontal interaction moments for the computation of ZMP, but also horizontal forces and vertical moment constraints between the feet and the ground surface are taken into account. Since the pelvis trajectory does drastically affect the walking pattern, the focus will be on generating a smooth motion for the pelvis. This smooth motion is generated based on a desired motion for the robot’s Centre of Mass (COM), which is mapped to the joint space using inverse kinematics. In fact, the proposed approach involves computing a moving ZMP based on a predefined desired COM trajectory to reduce the required friction for stable walking. The suggested gait planning approach (Low Friction Demanding Moving-ZMP, LFDM) is compared to various existing approaches considering slippage conditions. The obtained results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method for various walking speeds which will be discussed.
Go with the -Bitcoin- Flow, with Visual Analytics

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a peer-to-peer payment system, where transactions directly take place between pseudo-anonymous users, without any centralised authority. Since the block-chain (i.e., the public ledger where transactions are registered) is an example of Big Data, a straightforward visualisation is not very informative. For this reason, we employ techniques from Visual Analytics to filter out undesired information in order to obtain a tool to visually analyse the transactions and help its analysis. For instance, different views can highlight miners, or sources and leaves of bitcoin flows, together with the balance of each address and transaction. Moreover, the main view sees transactions as grouped into disconnected "islands", making it possible to focus on only one of them at once.
Compressive sensing-based data encryption system with application to sense-through-wall UWB noise radar

Security of data is an issue that is of significant interest. In this paper, we propose a new compressive sensing-based data encryption system that can represent the original signal with far fewer samples than the conventional Nyquist sampling-based system. Compressive sensing could also be treated as an encryption algorithm with good secrecy. As an application example, we apply it to sense-through-wall ultra-wideband UWB noise radar that requires enormous storage space and high security. Interestingly, a random Gaussian matrix is sufficient to capture the information of UWB noise radar signal; no knowledge of UWB signal is required in advance. Simulation results indicate only one-third of the original samples are needed to perfectly recover UWB noise radar signal, and compressive sensing provides good secrecy as an encryption algorithm. It is impossible to retrieve the original message without the entire sensing matrix. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Comparing Guanfacine and Dextroamphetamine for the Treatment of Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of the α-2a agonist guanfacine with that of dextroamphetamine for the treatment of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Seventeen adult outpatients who met DSM-IV criteria for ADHD participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study comparing drug effects on ADHD symptoms. Measures of change included the DSM-IV ADHD Behavior Checklist for Adults and the Copeland Symptom Checklist for Adult Attention Deficit Disorders. Cognitive measures of attention included the Stroop and Controlled Oral Word Association Test using the letters "C," "F," and "L" (COWAT, CFL version). For each trial, the drug was administered daily and titered up to optimal doses of maximum efficacy but with a minimum of side effects, and then data were collected. Both drugs significantly reduced ADHD symptoms on the DSM-IV Adult Behavior Checklist for Adults over placebo (p < 0.05). The Stroop Color subscale showed significant improvement for both drugs (p < 0.05), but the Color-Word measures showed significant improvement for guanfacine only (p < 0.01). The average dose of guanfacine was 1.10 (SD = 0.60), and the most common side effect of guanfacine was fatigue. No subjects discontinued drug trials. This preliminary study indicates that guanfacine may be a well-tolerated treatment option for adult ADHD.
Sleep paralysis among Cambodian refugees: association with PTSD diagnosis and severity

Among Cambodian refugees attending a psychiatric clinic (n=100), 49% (49/100) had at least one episode of sleep paralysis (SP) in the previous 12 months. The annual and monthly SP prevalences were much higher in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than in non‐PTSD patients. Among the PTSD patients, 65% (30/46) had monthly episodes of SP versus 14.85% (8/54) among non‐PTSD patients (χ2[2, n=100]=26.78, P<.001). Moreover, patients with SP in the last month (n=30) versus those without SP had much higher PTSD severity scores. In the entire sample (n=100), the PTSD severity scores correlated significantly with the rate of SP in the last month. During SP, Cambodian refugees usually hallucinated an approaching figure (90%, 44/49). The rate of SP‐associated and post‐SP panic attacks was high, indicating the great distress caused by the phenomenon. SP seems to be a core aspect of the Cambodian refugee's response to trauma. When treating Cambodian refugees, and traumatized refugees in general, clinicians should assess for its presence. Depression and Anxiety 22:47–51, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.