Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Cu doping on the electrical Properties of ZnTe by Vacuum Thermal Evaporation

In this study, the ZnTe thin films were deposited on a glass substrate at a thickness of 400nm using vacuum evaporation technique (2×10-5mbar) at RT. Electrical conductivity and Hall effect measurements have been investigated as a function of variation of the doping ratios (3,5,7%) of the Cu element on the thin ZnTe films. The temperature range of (25-200°C) is to record the electrical conductivity values. The results of the films have two types of transport mechanisms of free carriers with two values of activation energy (Ea1, Ea2), expect 3% Cu. The activation energy (Ea1) increased from 29meV to 157meV before and after doping (Cu at 5%) respectively. The results of Hall effect measurements of ZnTe , ZnTe:Cu films show that all films were (p-type), the carrier concentration (1.1×1020 m-3) , Hall mobility (0.464m2/V.s) for pure ZnTe film, increases the carrier concentration (6.3×1021m-3) Hall mobility (2m2/V.s) for doping (Cu at 3%) film, but decreases by increasing Cu concentration.
An optical fibre-based sensor for the detection of gaseous ammonia with methylammonium lead halide perovskite

Highly fluorescent perovskite materials have attracted considerable interest for fundamental research and potential applications. In this work, we demonstrate the recoverable PL quenching of methylammonium lead halides (MAPbX3, where X is Cl, Br or I) upon exposure to gaseous ammonia that enables the use of hybrid perovskites in gas-sensing applications. XRD analysis confirmed that the MA cations in the perovskite material were replaced by NH3 to form NH4PbX3·MA, thereby resulting in distinct changes in the crystalline structure and, consequently, PL quenching. However, as a weak coordination complex, NH4PbX3·MA can be easily thermally decomposed to recover the starting product MAPbX3 with the release of ammonia. An in-depth understanding of the reversible chemical and structural changes of the perovskites by exposing them to polar molecules such as ammonia can advance the development of hybrid perovskite sensors and provides insights into the mechanisms of how perovskites coordinate with polar molecules.
Age estimation by modified Demirjian's method (2004) and its applicability in Tibetan young adults: A digital panoramic study

Context: Estimation of the age is a procedure adopted by anthropologists, archeologists and forensic scientists. Different methods have been undertaken. However none of them meet the standards as Demirjian's method since 1973. Various researchers have applied this method, in both original and modified form (Chaillet and Demirjian in 2004) in different ethnic groups and the results obtained were not satisfactory. Aims: To determine the applicability and accuracy of modified Demirjian's method of dental age estimation (AE) in 8–18 year old Tibetan young adults to evaluate the interrelationship between dental and chronological age and the reliability between intra- and inter observer relationship. Settings and Design: Clinical setting and computerized design. Subjects and Methods: A total of 300 Tibetan young adults with an age range from 8 to 18 years were recruited in the study. Digital panoramic radiographs (DPRs) were evaluated as per the modified Demirjian's method (2004). Statistical Analysis Used: Pearson correlation, paired t-test, linear regression analysis. Results: Inter -and intraobserver reliability revealed a strong agreement. A positive and strong association was found between chronological age and estimated dental age (r = 0.839) with P < 0.01. Modified Demirjian method (2004) overestimated the age by 0.04 years (2.04 months)in Tibetan young adults. Conclusions: Results suggest that, the modified Demirjian method of AE is not suitable for Tibetan young adults. Further studies: With larger sample size and comparision with different methods of AE in a given population would be an interesting area for future research.
Group cohesion in foraging meerkats: follow the moving ‘vocal hot spot’

Group coordination, when ‘on the move’ or when visibility is low, is a challenge faced by many social living animals. While some animals manage to maintain cohesion solely through visual contact, the mechanism of group cohesion through other modes of communication, a necessity when visual contact is reduced, is not yet understood. Meerkats (Suricata suricatta), a small, social carnivore, forage as a cohesive group while moving continuously. While foraging, they frequently emit ‘close calls’, soft close-range contact calls. Variations in their call rates based on their local environment, coupled with individual movement, produce a dynamic acoustic landscape with a moving ‘vocal hotspot’ of the highest calling activity. We investigated whether meerkats follow such a vocal hotspot by playing back close calls of multiple individuals to foraging meerkats from the front and back edge of the group simultaneously. These two artificially induced vocal hotspots caused the group to spatially elongate and split into two subgroups. We conclude that meerkats use the emergent dynamic call pattern of the group to adjust their movement direction and maintain cohesion. Our study describes a highly flexible mechanism for the maintenance of group cohesion through vocal communication, for mobile species in habitats with low visibility and where movement decisions need to be adjusted continuously to changing environmental conditions.
Expression of Neurturin, GDNF, and GDNF Family-Receptor mRNA in the Developing and Mature Mouse

The GDNF family of neurotrophic factors currently has four members: neurturin (NRTN), glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), persephin, and artemin. These proteins are potent survival factors for several populations of central and peripheral neurons. The receptors for these factors are complexes that include the Ret tyrosine kinase receptor and a GPI-linked, ligand-binding component called GDNF family receptor alpha 1-4 (GFRalpha1-4). We have used in situ hybridization to study the mRNA expression of NRTN, GDNF, Ret, GFRalpha1, and GFRalpha2 during embryonic development and in the adult mouse. GDNF receptors were prominently expressed during embryonic development in the nervous system, the urogenital system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, and in developing skin, bone, muscle, and endocrine glands. In some regions, incomplete receptor complexes were expressed suggesting that other, as yet unidentified, receptor components exist or that receptor complexes are formed in trans. NRTN and GDNF were expressed in many trigeminal targets during embryonic development including the nasal epithelium, the teeth, and the whisker follicles. NRTN and GDNF were also expressed in the developing limbs and urogenital system. In the embryo, GDNF factors and receptors were expressed at several sites of mesenchyme/epithelial induction, including the kidney, tooth, and submandibular gland. This expression pattern is consistent with the possibility that the GDNF factors function in inductive processes during embryonic development and with the recently discovered role of NRTN as a necessary trophic factor for the development of some parasympathetic neurons. In the mature animal, receptor expression was more limited than in the embryo. In the adult mouse, NRTN was most prominently expressed in the gut, prostate testicle, and oviduct; GDNF was most prominently expressed in the ovary.
First spermatological study in the Atractotrematidae (Digenea, Haploporoidea): the case of Atractotrema sigani, intestinal parasite of Siganus lineatus

The ultrastructural organization of the mature spermatozoon of the digenean Atractotrema sigani (from Siganus lineatus off New Caledonia) was investigated by transmission electron microscopy. The male gamete of A. sigani exhibits the general morphology described in digeneans with the presence of two axonemes of different lengths showing the 9 + “1” pattern of the Trepaxonemata, a nucleus, two mitochondria, two bundles of parallel cortical microtubules, external ornamentation, spine-like bodies and granules of glycogen. However, the mature spermatozoon of A. sigani has some specific characters such as the morphology of its anterior region and the submembranous electron-dense material. Although similar structures have been reported in some digenean species, the presence of a submembranous electron-dense material describing a complete ring is reported here for the first time in the mature spermatozoon of A. sigani. In addition, sperm characteristics are compared between the Haploporoidea and their supposed close superfamilies, and possible phylogenetic implications of these findings for the Digenea are discussed.
Modeling Aggregation and Size Distribution of Nanoparticles with Monte Carlo Simulation

The size distribution of the nanoparticles and their aggregates is crucial for predictions of the fate and transport of nanoparticles in the environment. A computational model was developed, based on a Monte Carlo simulation, to predict the aggregation rate and size distribution of nanoparticles under various simulated environmental conditions. Model performance compared favorably with DLS data demonstrating the potential of the present modeling approach for use in environmental analysis of the transport and fate of nanoparticles. Keyword: nanoparticle, aggregation, size distribution, sedimentation, Monte Carlo simulation
On the Use of Context in Recommending Exception Handling Code Examples

Studies show that software developers often either misuse exception handling features or use them inefficiently, and such a practice may lead an undergoing software project to a fragile, insecure and non-robust application system. In this paper, we propose a context-aware code recommendation approach that recommends exception handling code examples from a number of popular open source code repositories hosted at GitHub. It collects the code examples exploiting GitHub code search API, and then analyzes, filters and ranks them against the code under development in the IDE by leveraging not only the structural (i.e., graph-based) and lexical features but also the heuristic quality measures of exception handlers in the examples. Experiments with 4,400 code examples and 65 exception handling scenarios as well as comparisons with four existing approaches show that the proposed approach is highly promising.
York University at TREC 2008: Blog Track

York University participated in the TREC 2008 Blog track, by introducing two opinion nding features. By initially focusing solely on the sentiment terms found in a document, using two dierent methods, and not considering the topic relevance, we saw an overall negative impact in the nal evaluations. Post-TREC improvements show the necessity of combining opinion weights with the topic relevance scores. A tunable combination function is used, which revealed some interesting ndings about the opinion nding features noting the strengths and weaknesses. We also introduce the Compass Information Retrieval system, which is based on Okapi, as the driver by which these experiments were conducted.
User-guided white balance for mixed lighting conditions

Proper white balance is essential in photographs to eliminate color casts due to illumination. The single-light case is hard to solve automatically but relatively easy for humans. Unfortunately, many scenes contain multiple light sources such as an indoor scene with a window, or when a flash is used in a tungsten-lit room. The light color can then vary on a per-pixel basis and the problem becomes challenging at best, even with advanced image editing tools. We propose a solution to the ill-posed mixed light white balance problem, based on user guidance. Users scribble on a few regions that should have the same color, indicate one or more regions of neutral color, and select regions where the current color looks correct. We first expand the provided scribble groups to more regions using pixel similarity and a robust voting scheme. We formulate the spatially varying white balance problem as a sparse data interpolation problem in which the user scribbles and their extensions form constraints. We demonstrate that our approach can produce satisfying results on a variety of scenes with intuitive scribbles and without any knowledge about the lights.
Parallel Mechanisms of the Multipteron Family: Kinematic Architectures and Benchmarking

This paper is a contribution to an invited session on the benchmarking of parallel mechanisms. The aim of the session is to compare different existing designs and prototypes of parallel mechanisms using a common set of benchmarking criteria. First, the kinematic architectures of parallel mechanisms of the multipteron family are presented. In addition to the tripteron and the quadrupteron, the pentapteron, a five-degree-of-freedom (dof) parallel mechanism is introduced. Then, the benchmarking criteria are applied to the prototypes of the tripteron (3-dof) and the quadrupteron (4-dof) prototypes. Although the tripteron and quadrupteron parallel mechanisms have been presented elsewhere, their properties, highlighted by the benchmarking analysis presented here are revealed for the first time.
An AC–DC PFC Single-Stage Dual Inductor Current-Fed Push–Pull for HB-LED Lighting Applications

An ac–dc single-stage driver for high-brightness light-emitting diodes (HB-LEDs) with galvanic isolation is presented in this paper. The driver is based on a dual inductor current-fed push–pull converter with each inductor operating in boundary conduction mode (BCM). The interleaving between the two inductors enables the converter to reduce the high input current ripple inherent to a BCM. Moreover, it is fully compliant with IEC 1000-3-2 Class C and it is able to achieve a high power factor (PF). Its low component count, simplicity, and overall outstanding characteristics make this current-fed topology suitable for medium power range HB-LED drivers in low-cost applications. The proposed topology has been tested on a 100-W prototype for the full range of the US single-phase line voltage, feeding several HB-LED strings, with an output voltage equivalent to 48 V at full load. The prototype achieves a maximum efficiency of 92% with a 0.99 PF, 8% total harmonic distorsion at full load while guaranteeing a good quality light.
An Electrochemical Study of Frustrated Lewis Pairs: A Metal-Free Route to Hydrogen Oxidation

Frustrated Lewis pairs have found many applications in the heterolytic activation of H2 and subsequent hydrogenation of small molecules through delivery of the resulting proton and hydride equivalents. Herein, we describe how H2 can be preactivated using classical frustrated Lewis pair chemistry and combined with in situ nonaqueous electrochemical oxidation of the resulting borohydride. Our approach allows hydrogen to be cleanly converted into two protons and two electrons in situ, and reduces the potential (the required energetic driving force) for nonaqueous H2 oxidation by 610 mV (117.7 kJ mol–1). This significant energy reduction opens routes to the development of nonaqueous hydrogen energy technology.
Beyond Planar Symmetry: Modeling Human Perception of Reflection and Rotation Symmetries in the Wild

Humans take advantage of real world symmetries for various tasks, yet capturing their superb symmetry perception mechanism with a computational model remains elusive. Motivated by a new study demonstrating the extremely high inter-person accuracy of human perceived symmetries in the wild, we have constructed the first deeplearning neural network for reflection and rotation symmetry detection (Sym-NET), trained on photos from MS-COCO (Microsoft-Common Object in COntext) dataset with nearly 11K consistent symmetry-labels from more than 400 human observers. We employ novel methods to convert discrete human labels into symmetry heatmaps, capture symmetry densely in an image and quantitatively evaluate Sym-NET against multiple existing computer vision algorithms. On CVPR 2013 symmetry competition testsets and unseen MSCOCO photos, Sym-NET significantly outperforms all other competitors. Beyond mathematically well-defined symmetries on a plane, Sym-NET demonstrates abilities to identify viewpoint-varied 3D symmetries, partially occluded symmetrical objects, and symmetries at a semantic level.
Synthesis and Evaluation of New Pyrazoline Derivatives as Potential Anticancer Agents

New pyrazoline derivatives were synthesized and evaluated for their cytotoxic effects on AsPC-1 human pancreatic adenocarcinoma, U87 and U251 human glioblastoma cell lines. 1-[((5-(4-Methylphenyl)-1,3,4-oxadiazol-2-yl)thio)acetyl]-3-(2-thienyl)-5-(4-chlorophenyl)-2-pyrazoline (11) was found to be the most effective anticancer agent against AsPC-1 and U251 cell lines, with IC50 values of 16.8 µM and 11.9 µM, respectively. Tumor selectivity of compound 11 was clearly seen between Jurkat human leukemic T-cell line and human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). Due to its promising anticancer activity, compound 11 was chosen for apoptosis/necrosis evaluation and DNA-cleavage analysis in U251 cells. Compound 11-treated U251 cells exhibited apoptotic phenotype at low concentration (1.5 µM). DNA-cleaving efficiency of this ligand was more significant than cisplatin and was clearly enhanced by Fe(II)-H2O2-ascorbic acid systems. This result pointed out the relationship between the DNA cleavage and the cell death.
A secure fire truck communication protocol for VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been a research focus in recent years. VANET's applications are mostly applied to the road safety and reduce the traffic accident earlier. Moreover, use VANET system can also help the emergency vehicles go to accident location as soon as possible. Therefore how to protect the transmission message is important. We propose a secure emergency vehicle transmission protocol for VANET to ensure the messages will not be revealed or stolen. The proposed scheme combines symmetric encryption and digital signature mechanism. On the other hands, the proposed scheme can achieve the mutual authentication, session key security, known-key security and prevent the known attacks.
Evaluating grapheme-to-phoneme converters in automatic speech recognition context

This paper deals with the evaluation of grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) converters in a speech recognition context. The precision and recall rates are investigated as potential measures of the quality of the multiple generated pronunciation variants. Very different results are obtained whether or not we take into account the frequency of occurrence of the words. Since G2P systems are rarely evaluated on a speech recognition performance basis, the originality of this paper consists in using a speech recognition system to evaluate the G2P pronunciation variants. The results show that the training process is quite robust to some errors in the pronunciation lexicon, whereas pronunciation lexicon errors are harmful in the decoding process. Noticeable speech recognition performance improvements are achieved by combining two different G2P converters, one based on conditional random fields and the other on joint multigram models, as well as by checking the pronunciation variants of the most frequent words.
Performance analysis of TCP fairness between wired and wireless sessions

A significant amount of wireless traffic is expected to be carried in the Internet, and wireless connections need to share the network resources with wired connections. However, in a wireless network environment, TCP, one of the most important transport protocols of TCP/IP, suffers from significant throughput degradation due to the lossy characteristics of a wireless link. Therefore, in order to design the next generation mobile networks, it is necessary to know how much the wireless connection suffers from the degradation in comparison to the wired connection. We discuss the fairness issue between TCP connections over wireless and wired links, and theoretically analyze throughput fairness between TCP over a wireless link with ARQ (automatic repeat request) based link layer error recovery and TCP over an error-free wired link. We validate our analysis by comparing numerical results obtained from the analysis with computer simulation ones.
The Anti-Repressor MecR2 Promotes the Proteolysis of the mecA Repressor and Enables Optimal Expression of β-lactam Resistance in MRSA

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is an important human pathogen, which is cross-resistant to virtually all β-lactam antibiotics. MRSA strains are defined by the presence of mecA gene. The transcription of mecA can be regulated by a sensor-inducer (MecR1) and a repressor (MecI), involving a unique series of proteolytic steps. The induction of mecA by MecR1 has been described as very inefficient and, as such, it is believed that optimal expression of β-lactam resistance by MRSA requires a non-functional MecR1-MecI system. However, in a recent study, no correlation was found between the presence of functional MecR1-MecI and the level of β-lactam resistance in a representative collection of epidemic MRSA strains. Here, we demonstrate that the mecA regulatory locus consists, in fact, of an unusual three-component arrangement containing, in addition to mecR1-mecI, the up to now unrecognized mecR2 gene coding for an anti-repressor. The MecR2 function is essential for the full induction of mecA expression, compensating for the inefficient induction of mecA by MecR1 and enabling optimal expression of β-lactam resistance in MRSA strains with functional mecR1-mecI regulatory genes. Our data shows that MecR2 interacts directly with MecI, destabilizing its binding to the mecA promoter, which results in the repressor inactivation by proteolytic cleavage, presumably mediated by native cytoplasmatic proteases. These observations point to a revision of the current model for the transcriptional control of mecA and open new avenues for the design of alternative therapeutic strategies for the treatment of MRSA infections. Moreover, these findings also provide important insights into the complex evolutionary pathways of antibiotic resistance and molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in bacteria.
Shielded From the Real World: Perspectives on Internet Cancer Support Groups by Asian Americans

Background: Despite positive reports about Internet cancer support groups (ICSGs), ethnic minorities, including Asian Americans, have been reported to be less likely to use ICSGs. Unique cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes have been considered reasons for the low usage rate of ICSGs among Asian Americans. However, studies have rarely looked at this issue. Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore (a) how Asian Americans living with cancer who participated in ICSGs viewed ICSGs, (b) what facilitated or inhibited their participation in ICSGs, and (c) what cultural values and beliefs influenced their participation in ICSGs. Methods: The study was a 1-month qualitative online forum among 18 Asian American cancer patients recruited through a convenience sampling method. Nine topics on the use of ICSGs organized the forum discussion, and the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Four themes emerged from the data analysis process: (a) "more than just my family," (b) "part of my family," (c) "anonymous me," and (d) "shielded from the real world. " Conclusion: The overarching theme was Asian Americans' marginalized experience in the use of ICSGs. Implications for Practice: Offering the most current information on cancer and cancer treatment is essential for nursing practice in developing a culturally competent ICSG for Asian Americans. Also, emotional familiarity should be incorporated into the design of the ICSG, and the ICSG needs to be based on nonjudgmental and nondiscriminative interactions.