Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pedagogical microwave design of photonic crystal waveguides

The electromagnetic scale invariance rule was used to study photonic crystal waveguides in microwave frequencies. This pedagogical approach permits a hands-on ludic experience for students and researchers on a complex subject whose experimental implementation usually demands sophisticated photonic fabrication resources. The microwave approach allows one to construct conceptually equivalent but hand-manipulable prototypes. Square and triangular photonic crystal waveguides, with and without bends, were designed and constructed, and measured and computer-simulated results were compared.
Blood Pressure, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease: The OPTIMA Longitudinal Study

Background/Aims: Studies on the relation between blood pressure (BP), dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have yielded inconsistent results, showing an association with high or low BP, or no association with BP. The study was designed to look at the longitudinal effect of BP on cognitive function. Methods: Participants were part of the OPTIMA longitudinal study of patients with dementia and agematched cognitively healthy controls. The Cambridge Cognitive Examination (CAMCOG) and BP were measured. We tested the dependence of CAMCOG scores on BP using generalised linear mixed models. Results: A total of 235 were cognitively healthy controls, 42 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), 141 had AD, and 59 had other dementia syndrome (ODS). In AD patients, the rate of decline of CAMCOG scores showed an inverted U-shaped (non-linear) dependence on diastolic BP. High (110 mm Hg) and low (60 mm Hg) levels of diastolic BP were related to faster cognitive decline over 5 years of follow-up (z = –2.51, p = 0.012). CAMCOG scores also showed an inverted U-shaped dependence on pulse pressure (z = –2.29, p = 0.022). Conclusion: High and low BP levels are related to faster cognitive decline in AD patients. This could have implications for the prevention and treatment of AD.
Consumer alienation by brands : examining the roles of powerlessness and relationship types

theorist of gift, Mauss (1954) who proposed that gifts represent vessels that contain and transmit the gift giver’s spirit or hau . Across several studies, we investigate the gift giving effort effect. In studies 1a-1c, we demonstrate that perceived gift giving effort increases acts of reciprocity towards the gift giver in various everyday situations. We also seek to rule out alternative explanations of the gift giving effort effect. Specifically, our results show that neither gratitude, nor indebtedness, nor positive mood bias account for the gift giving effort effect. In study 2, we also examine gift giving effort effect in public (possibility of being evaluated by an audience) and private (no audience) situations. Consistent with social norm account, we find that gift giving effort increases reciprocation for high self-monitors in public but not in private situations. In private situations, social norm does not seem to account for our findings. In studies 3 and 4, we extend the underlying theoretical mechanism and the boundaries of the gift giving effort effect. We examine the role of reciprocation wariness and how it affects the gift giving effort effect. In study 3, we find that reciprocation wary participants are more likely to reciprocate in private as well as public situations. In study 4, we replicate and reverse the gift giving effort effect showing that gift giving effort may also backfire. Collectively, our findings speak to the importance of gift giving effort and particularly to the role of contagion in driving the gift giving effort effect. Our findings also show the boundaries of gift giving effort unaddressed in prior research on gifts more broadly.
A temporal-analysis-based pitch estimation system for noisy speech with a comparative study of performance of recent systems

In this paper, a new system of pitch estimation is presented. The system is designed to be robust to challenging noise conditions. This robustness to the presence of noise in the signal is achieved by developing a new representation of the speech signal, based on the operation of damped harmonic oscillators (DHOs), and temporal mode analysis of their output. The resulting representation is shown to possess qualities that are only gradually degraded in the presence of noise. A harmonic grouping based system is used to estimate the pitch frequency. This method is easily extended to simultaneously track the pitch of more than one speaker. In a series of experiments the accuracy and noise robustness of the proposed system was compared with that of a number of prominent pitch estimation and tracking systems. The results show that the proposed system's overall performance is much better than any of the other systems tested, especially in the presence of very large amounts of noise. Furthermore, the proposed system is comparatively inexpensive in terms of processing and memory requirements.
Proportional green time scheduling for traffic lights

textabstractWe consider the decentralized scheduling of a large number of urban traffic lights. We investigate factors determining system performance, in particular, the length of the traffic light cycle and the proportion of green time allocated to each junction. We study the effect of the length of the traffic cycle on the stability region a urban traffic network. We derive a simple square-root cycle length rule which is optimal for certain road traffic junctions. We prove the maximal stability of a road network under a proportional fair or P0 control scheme. Further, we support of analysis through a simulation analysis of our policy on the Melbourne CBD urban road network.
Phase I/II study of preoperative cetuximab, capecitabine, and external beam radiotherapy in patients with rectal cancer.

BACKGROUND To assess the safety and preliminary efficacy of concurrent radiotherapy, capecitabine, and cetuximab in the preoperative treatment of patients with rectal cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty patients with rectal cancer (T3-T4, and/or N+, endorectal ultrasound) received preoperative radiotherapy (1.8 Gy, 5 days/week for 5 weeks, total dose 45 Gy, three-dimensional conformal technique) in combination with cetuximab [initial dose 400 mg/m(2) intravenous given 1 week before the beginning of radiation followed by 250 mg/m(2)/week for 5 weeks] and capecitabine for the duration of radiotherapy (650 mg/m(2) orally twice daily, first dose level; 825 mg/m(2) twice daily, second dose level). RESULTS Four and six patients were treated at the first and second dose level of capecitabine, respectively. No dose-limiting toxicity occurred. Thirty additional patients were treated with capecitabine at 825 mg/m(2) twice daily. The most frequent grade 1/2 side-effects were acneiform rash (87%), diarrhea (65%), and fatigue (57%). Grade 3 diarrhea was found in 15%. Three grade 4 toxic effects were recorded: one myocardial infarction, one pulmonary embolism, and one pulmonary infection with sepsis. Two patients (5%) had a pathological complete response. CONCLUSIONS Preoperative radiotherapy in combination with capecitabine and cetuximab is feasible with some patients achieving pathological downstaging.
Modeling Topic Evolution in Social Media Short Texts

Social media short texts like tweets and instant messages provide a lot of valuable information about the hot topics and public opinion. Detecting and tracking topics from these online contents can help people grasp the essential information and its evolution and facilitate many applications. Topic evolution models built based on LDA need to set the topic number manually, which could not change during different time periods and could not be adjusted based on the contents. The nonparametric topic evolution models do not perform very well on short texts due to the data sparsity problem. So in this paper, we propose a nonparametric topic evolution model for short texts. The model uses the recurrent Chinese restaurant process as the prior distribution of topic proportions. Combining it with word co-occurrence modeling, we construct a topic evolution model which is suitable for social media short texts. We carry out experimental studies on twitter dataset. The results show that our method outperforms the baseline methods and could monitor the topic evolution in social media short texts effectively.
Introducing the La Repubblica Corpus: A Large, Annotated, TEI(XML)-compliant Corpus of Newspaper Italian

This paper describes the La Repubblica corpus, currently being developed at the SSLMIT of the University of Bologna. The corpus is a very large collection of newspaper text, currently amounting to 175 million words, but expected to grow to 400 million before the end of 2004. When completed, it will contain all the articles published between 1985 and 2000 by the national daily La Repubblica. The paper discusses the techniques used to extract the text, tokenize it and annotate it (basic TEI annotation, POS tagging, genre/topic categorization), it presents examples of how it can be used, and gives details of the ways in which interested users can access it. The paper concludes with a discussion of current and future developments, and of weak and strong points of this resource.
Classification with Active Learning and Meta-Paths in Heterogeneous Information Networks

A heterogeneous information network (HIN) is used to model objects of different types and their relationships. Meta-paths are sequences of object types. They are used to represent complex relationships between objects beyond what links in a homogeneous network capture. We study the problem of classifying objects in an HIN. We propose class-level meta-paths and study how they can be used to (1) build more accurate classifiers and (2) improve active learning in identifying objects for which training labels should be obtained. We show that class-level meta-paths and object classification exhibit interesting synergy. Our experimental results show that the use of class-level meta-paths results in very effective active learning and good classification performance in HINs.
REIHE INFORMATIK TR-03-001 Beaconless Position-Based Routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Existing position-based unicast routing algorithms, where packets are forwarded in the geographic direction of the destination, require that the forwarding node knows the positions of all neighbors in its transmission range. This information on direct neighbors is gained by observing beacon messages each node sends out periodically. The transmission of beacons and the storage of neighbor information consumes resources. Due to mobility, collected neighbor information can quickly get outdated which in turn can lead to packet drops. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to perform position-based forwarding without the help of beacons or the maintenance of neighbor tables. In our contention-based forwarding scheme (CBF) the next hop is selected through a distributed contention process using biased timers. To avoid packet duplication, the first node that is selected suppresses the selection of further nodes. We propose three suppression strategies which vary with respect to forwarding efficiency and suppression characteristics. We analyze the behavior of CBF with all three suppression strategies and compare it to an existing greedy routing approach by means of simulation with ns-2. Our results demonstrate that CBF is a promising strategy for positionbased routing.
Molecular composition and volatility of isoprene photochemical oxidation secondary organic aerosol under low- and high-NO x conditions

Abstract. We present measurements of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation from isoprene photochemical oxidation in an environmental simulation chamber at a variety of oxidant conditions and using dry neutral seed particles to suppress acid-catalyzed multiphase chemistry. A high-resolution time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometer (HR-ToF-CIMS) utilizing iodide-adduct ionization coupled to the Filter Inlet for Gases and Aerosols (FIGAERO) allowed for simultaneous online sampling of the gas and particle composition. Under high-HO2 and low-NO conditions, highly oxygenated (O : C ≥ 1) C5 compounds were major components (∼ 50 %) of SOA. The SOA composition and effective volatility evolved both as a function of time and as a function of input NO concentrations. Organic nitrates increased in both the gas and particle phases as input NO increased, but the dominant non-nitrate particle-phase components monotonically decreased. We use comparisons of measured and predicted gas-particle partitioning of individual components to assess the validity of literature-based group-contribution methods for estimating saturation vapor concentrations. While there is evidence for equilibrium partitioning being achieved on the chamber residence timescale (5.2 h) for some individual components, significant errors in group-contribution methods are revealed. In addition, > 30 % of the SOA mass, detected as low-molecular-weight semivolatile compounds, cannot be reconciled with equilibrium partitioning. These compounds desorb from the FIGAERO at unexpectedly high temperatures given their molecular composition, which is indicative of thermal decomposition of effectively lower-volatility components such as larger molecular weight oligomers.
Deletion of the rnl gene encoding a nick-sealing RNA ligase sensitizes Deinococcus radiodurans to ionizing radiation

Abstract Deinococcus radiodurans RNA ligase (DraRnl) seals 3΄-OH/5΄-PO4 nicks in duplex nucleic acids in which the 3΄-OH nick terminus consists of two or more ribonucleotides. DraRnl exemplifies a widely distributed Rnl5 family of nick-sealing RNA ligases, the physiological functions of which are uncharted. Here we show via gene knockout that whereas DraRnl is inessential for growth of D. radiodurans, its absence sensitizes the bacterium to killing by ionizing radiation (IR). DraRnl protein is present in exponentially growing and stationary phase cells, but is depleted during the early stages of recovery from 10 kGy of IR and subsequently replenished during the late phase of post-IR genome reassembly. Absence of DraRnl elicts a delay in reconstitution of the 10 kGy IR-shattered D. radiodurans replicons that correlates with the timing of DraRnl replenishment in wild-type cells. Complementation with a catalytically dead mutant highlights that nick sealing activity is important for the radioprotective function of DraRnl. Our findings suggest a scenario in which DraRnl acts at genomic nicks resulting from gap-filling by a ribonucleotide-incorporating repair polymerase.
Physical Self-Concept in Adolescent Girls: Behavioral and Physiological Correlates

For the past two decades, researchers in exercise and sport psychology have worked to refine an instrument to measure the subjective evaluations of the physical self. These perceptions of physical competence and appearance, known as physical self-concept, are believed to contribute to global self-esteem in a hierarchical fashion (Shavelson, Hubner, & Stanton, 1976). According to this model, perceptions ofone's behavior in particular situations influence appraisals of the self in certain domains (e.g., physical, academic, and social), which combine to create an overall self-concept. Although it was historically assessed as a single construct, emphasis on the hierarchical nature of physical selfconcept has given way to multidimensional measures. Recently, instruments with the ability to distinguish between specific components ofphysical perceptions (e.g., health, fitness, and body composition) have been developed (Fox, 1990; Marsh, Richards,Johnson, Roche, & Tremayne, 1994; Richards, 1988). Among these multidimensional measures, the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire (PSDQ) has demonstrated superior psychometric properties. In a multitrait-miltimethod analysis ofan adolescent Australian sample, Marsh et al. (1994) found the PSDQ to have higher internal reliability and factor loadings than comparison instruments. Confirmatory factor analyses differ-
Toll-like Receptor 9–Dependent and –Independent Dendritic Cell Activation by Chromatin–Immunoglobulin G Complexes

Dendritic cell (DC) activation by nucleic acid–containing immunoglobulin (Ig)G complexes has been implicated in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) pathogenesis. However, the mechanisms responsible for activation and subsequent disease induction are not completely understood. Here we show that murine DCs are much more effectively activated by immune complexes that contain IgG bound to chromatin than by immune complexes that contain foreign protein. Activation by these chromatin immune complexes occurs by two distinct pathways. One pathway involves dual engagement of the Fc receptor FcγRIII and Toll-like receptor (TLR)9, whereas the other is TLR9 independent. Furthermore, there is a characteristic cytokine profile elicited by the chromatin immune complexes that distinguishes this response from that of conventional TLR ligands, notably the induction of BAFF and the lack of induction of interleukin 12. The data establish a critical role for self-antigen in DC activation and explain how the innate immune system might drive the adaptive immune response in SLE.
Very High Density of Chinese Hamster Ovary Cells in Perfusion by Alternating Tangential Flow or Tangential Flow Filtration in WAVE Bioreactor™—Part II: Applications for Antibody Production and Cryopreservation

A high cell density perfusion process of monoclonal antibody (MAb) producing Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells was developed in disposable WAVE Bioreactor™ using external hollow fiber (HF) filter as cell separation device. Tangential flow filtration (TFF) and alternating tangential flow (ATF) systems were compared and process applications of high cell density perfusion were studied here: MAb production and cryopreservation. Operations by perfusion using microfiltration (MF) or ultrafiltration (UF) with ATF or TFF and by fed‐batch were compared. Cell densities higher than 108 cells/mL were obtained using UF TFF or UF ATF. The cells produced comparable amounts of MAb in perfusion by ATF or TFF, MF or UF. MAbs were partially retained by the MF using ATF or TFF but more severely using TFF. Consequently, MAbs were lost when cell broth was discarded from the bioreactor in the daily bleeds. The MAb cell‐specific productivity was comparable at cell densities up to 1.3 × 108 cells/mL in perfusion and was comparable or lower in fed‐batch. After 12 days, six times more MAbs were harvested using perfusion by ATF or TFF with MF or UF, compared to fed‐batch and 28× more in a 1‐month perfusion at 108 cells/mL density. Pumping at a recirculation rate up to 2.75 L/min did not damage the cells with the present TFF settings with HF short circuited. Cell cryopreservation at 0.5 × 108 and 108 cells/mL was performed using cells from a perfusion run at 108 cells/mL density. Cell resuscitation was very successful, showing that this system was a reliable process for cell bank manufacturing. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 29:768–777, 2013
Regional variations of increased permeability of skin capillaries induced by a histamine liberator and their relation to the histamine content of the skin

Guinea-pigs with the vital dye Pontamine Sky Blue 6X in their circulation react to an intradermal injection of the histamine liberator 48/80 by an increase in capillary permeability, which results in a local intense staining of the skin tissue by the dye. This effect is apparently due to the local liberation of histamine (Miles, 1951; Miles & Miles, 1952); blueing of the skin can thus be used as an indicator of histamine liberation. In the present experiments we extended this study to the effect on the skin of intravenous injection of 48/80 in guinea-pigs with circulating dye. Blueing of the skin occurred in these circumstances, but certain regions were regularly found to blue more rapidly and more intensely than others. It was thought possible that this uneven blueing was associated with differences in skin histamine and that the bluer regions contained the higher concentration. Accordingly, a survey was made of the histamine content of the various regions of the skin. A few experiments were also made on other species.
Steering Opinion Dynamics in Information Diffusion Networks

Our opinion is influenced by those of others we connect to in social networks. How to model opinion dynamics across social networks and can we steer the public opinion to a desired state? Answers to these questions are critically important for understanding the vulnerabilities of online social networks and increasing their resilience to rumor and false information. Recently there has been much work on modeling the dynamics in information diffusion, but few work has integrated these models into a systematic control framework. In this paper, we propose a unified multivariate jump diffusion process framework for modeling opinion dynamics over networks and determining the control over such networks. Our method can handle noisy and partially observed data, and over networks with time-varying and node birth processes. Using synthetic and real world networks, we showed that our framework is robust, able to control both stable and unstable dynamics systems with fast convergence speed, less variance and low control cost.
Vehicle-to-Aggregator Interaction Game

Electric vehicles (EVs) are likely to become very popular worldwide within the next few years. With possibly millions of such vehicles operating across the country, one can establish a distributed electricity storage system that comprises of the EVs' batteries with a huge total storage capacity. This can help the power grid by providing various ancillary services, once an effective vehicle-to-grid (V2G) market is established. In this paper, we propose a new game-theoretic model to understand the interactions among EVs and aggregators in a V2G market, where EVs participate in providing frequency regulation service to the grid. We develop a smart pricing policy and design a mechanism to achieve optimal frequency regulation performance in a distributed fashion. Simulation results show that our proposed pricing model and designed mechanism work well and can benefit both EVs (in terms of obtaining additional income) and the grid (in terms of achieving the frequency regulation command signal).
A Method for Early Requirements Triage and Selection Utilizing Product Strategies

In market-driven product development large numbers of requirements threaten to overload the development organization. It is critical for product management to select the requirements aligned with the overall business goals and discard others as early as possible. This paper presents a method that utilizes strategies for early requirements triage. The method presented is based on good practices from management literature customized for technical product strategy formulation. The creation of the method was also inspired by industry needs through exploratory interviews covering requirements triage and selection processes as well as strategy formulation. After creation, the method was subsequently validated in industry where the aspects of usability and usefulness were investigated, yielding promising initial results.
Measurement of space charge accumulation in Dicyclopentadiene resin film at high temperature under high DC stress

Recently, it is required for electronic device that an insulating material which shows an excellent characteristic at high temperature under high DC stress. In this study, we focused on insulating properties of Dicyclopentadiene (DCP) resin. The DCP resin shows a good thermal property and it is expected to be used as a molded insulating material alternative to the epoxy resin because of its superior moldability with low viscosity. On the other hand, polymer insulation material has a possibility of dielectric breakdown by accumulating of a space charge under a high DC stress. So, we investigated the space charge accumulation behavior in the DCP resin at high temperature under high DC stress using the PEA (Pulsed Electro-Acoustic) method.