Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three centuries of Myanmar monsoon climate variability inferred from teak tree rings

Asian monsoon extremes critically impact much of the globe’s population. Key gaps in our understanding of monsoon climate remain due to sparse coverage of paleoclimatic information, despite intensified recent efforts. Here we describe a ring width chronology of teak, one of the first high‐resolution proxy records for the nation of Myanmar. Based on 29 samples from 20 living trees and spanning from 1613–2009, this record, from the Maingtha forest reserve north of Mandalay, helps fill a substantial gap in spatial coverage of paleoclimatic records for monsoon Asia. Teak growth is positively correlated with rainfall and Palmer Drought Severity Index variability over Myanmar, during and prior to the May–September monsoon season (e.g., r = 0.38 with Yangon rainfall, 0.001, n 68). Importantly, this record also correlates significantly with larger‐scale climate indices, including core Indian rainfall (23°N, 76°E; a particularly sensitive index of the monsoon), and the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The teak ring width value following the so‐called 1997–98 El Niño of the Century suggests that this was one of the most severe droughts in the past ∼300 years in Myanmar. Evidence for past dry conditions inferred for Myanmar is consistent with tree‐ring records of decadal megadroughts developed for Thailand and Vietnam. These results confirm the climate signature related to monsoon rainfall in the Myanmar teak record and the considerable potential for future development of climate‐sensitive chronologies from Myanmar and the broader region of monsoon Asia.
Telomerase activity of the Lugol-stained and -unstained squamous epithelia in the process of oesophageal carcinogenesis

Up-regulation of telomerase has been reported in many cancers. Our aim was to characterize telomerase activity in various states of the oesophagus to facilitate better understanding of carcinogenesis of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma. During endoscopic examinations, we obtained 45 Lugol-stained normal epithelia, 31 Lugol-unstained epithelia (14 oesophagitis, 7 mild dysplasia, 5 severe dysplasia and 5 intramucosal cancer) and 9 advanced cancer. Telomerase activity was semi-quantified by a telomeric repeat amplification protocol using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and expression of human telomerase reverse transcriptase mRNA was examined by in situ hybridization. In the Lugol-stained normal epithelia, telomerase activity increased in proportion to the increase of severity of the accompanying lesions, with a rank order of advanced cancer, intramucosal cancer, mild dysplasia and oesophagitis. In the Lugol-unstained lesions and advanced cancer, telomerase activity was highest in advanced cancer. Up-regulation of telomerase in normal squamous epithelium may be a marker of progression of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer. com
Does Vitamin D Deficiency Effect Heart Rate Variability in Low Cardiovascular Risk Population?

AIM: This study aimed to evaluate the cardiac autonomic dysfunction and the cardiac arrhythmia risk using heart rate variability parameters in subjects with vitamin D deficiency and low cardiovascular risk. MATERIAL AND METHODS: One hundred five consecutive individuals, 54 patients with low vitamin D status and 51 healthy controls were enrolled in this study. The overall cardiac autonomic tone was quantified by using various heart rate variability parameters included mean RR interval, mean Heart Rate, mean of standard deviations of intervals for 24 hours (SDNN), standard deviation of averages of intervals (SDANN), mean of standard deviation of intervals for 5 minutes (SDNNI), root mean square of difference of successive intervals (rMSSD) and the proportion of intervals differing more than 50 ms (pNN50) values. The 12-lead ECG was recorded from each participant, and QT intervals were measured. RESULTS: Baseline demographic profiles were similar between two groups. The heart rate variability parameters such as mean RR interval, mean HR, SDNN, SDANN, SDNNI, rMSSD and pNN50 (%) values were not significantly different in patients with low vitamin D status compared to control group. The electrocardiography analysis revealed only slight but significant prolongation of corrected QT (QTc) intervals in the control group. CONCLUSION: HRV variables were not significantly altered in patients with vitamin D deficiency in low cardiovascular risk profile group. Further studies evaluating these findings in other cohorts with high cardiovascular risk are required.
Reconfigurable Virtual Instrumentation Design for Radar using Object-Oriented Techniques and Open-Source Tools

Over the years, instrumentation design has benefited from technological advancements, and, simultaneously suffered adverse effects from increasing design complexity. Among these advancements has been the shift from traditional instrumentation, defined by a physical front-panel interface controlled and monitored by the user; to modern instrumentation, which utilize specialized hardware and provide interactive, softwarebased interfaces, from which the user interacts using a general-purpose computer (GPC). The term virtual instrumentation (VI) (Baican & Necsulescu, 2000) is used to describe such systems, which generally use a modular hardware-based stage to process or generate signals, and a GPC to provide the instrument with a layer of reprogrammable software capabilities. A variety of instruments can be emulated in software, limited only by capabilities of the VI’s output stage hardware. In more recent years, the popularity of reconfigurable hardware (Hsiung et al., 2009), more specifically field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) (Maxfield, 2004), have revolutionized capabilities of electronic instrumentation. FPGAs are complex integrated circuits (ICs) that provide an interface of digital inputs and outputs that can be assembled, using specialized development tools, to create customized hardware configurations. By incorporating FPGA technology into traditional VI, the instrument’s capabilities are expanded to include an additional layer of hardware-based functionality. In this chapter we explore the use of such enhanced instruments, which are further augmented by the use of object-oriented programming techniques and the use of opensource development tools. Using low-cost FPGAs and open-source software we describe a design methodology enabling one to develop state-of-the-art instrumentation via a generalized instrumentation core that can be customized using specialized output stage hardware. Additionally, using object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and opensource tools, we illustrate a technique to provide a cost-effective, generalized software framework to uniquely define an instrument’s functionality through a customizable interface, implemented by the designer. The intention of the proposed design methodology is to permit less restrictive collaboration among researchers through elimination of proprietary licensing; making hardware and software development freely available while building upon an existing open-source structure. Beginning with section 2, the concept of a
BIOSYNTHESIS AND PURIFICATION OF V AND W ANTIGEN IN PASTEURELLA PESTIS.

The separation and purification of V and W antigens is described. The methods that gave the best results were: The precipitation of both antigens from the supernatant fluid of a 36°C-grown culture of strain M23 by use of ammonium sulfate.Chromatography on DEAE-cellulose. V antigen was eluted with 0.1 M NaCl and W antigen with 0.5 M NaCl. Recycling on DEAE-cellulose resulted in a sample containing approximately 20 units of V antigen/mg of protein (100-fold purification) and no W antigen, and a sample containing 600 units of W antigen/mg of protein (1000-fold purification) and no V antigen. V antigen is a protein with a molecular weight of 90,000 and W antigen is a lipoprotein with a molecular weight of 145,000. Both antigens were stable at 60°C, but not at 80°C, for 30 min. W antigen, but not V, was lost upon extensive dialysis against distilled water, or pervaporation. Both antigens were reduced in titer by prolonged storage at 5°C or by lyophilization, but not by storage at -20°C. Based on the use of rabbit antisera containing only V antibody or only W antibody, the conclusion was drawn that V antibody, but not W antibody, can protect mice against plague.
Deco: A System for Declarative Crowdsourcing

Deco is a system that enables declarative crowdsourcing: answering SQL queries posed over data gathered from the crowd as well as existing relational data. Deco implements a novel push-pull hybrid execution model in order to support a flexible data model and a precise query semantics, while coping with the combination of latency, monetary cost, and uncertainty of crowdsourcing. We demonstrate Deco using two crowdsourcing platforms: Amazon Mechanical Turk and an in-house platform, to show how Deco provides a convenient means of collecting and querying crowdsourced data.
Hybrid modulation technique for neutral point clamped inverter to eliminate neutral point shift with minimum switching loss

In neutral-point-clamped (NPC) multilevel inverter eliminating neutral point shift is a challenging task. The carrier based pulse width modulation (CBPWM) techniques proposed in literature for this works well for certain range of load power factor and modulation index. Though non-nearest vector (NNV) Space vector PWM (SVPWM) technique would solve this problem, it does it at the cost of increased switching loss. This paper proposes a hybrid technique by combining both CBPWM and SVPWM. In this technique CBPWM is used for modulating the output voltage and SVPWM is used to eliminate neutral point shift. SVPWM technique is activated for a small duration of one carrier cycle at every zero crossing of reference. This minimizes the switching transitions and thereby switching loss. The proposed technique is tested in MATLAB-Simulink under varying load power factor(pf), different initial capacitor voltages and for unbalanced loads. Simulation results yield better performance.
Microalbuminuria is a marker of left ventricular hypertrophy but not hyperinsulinemia in nondiabetic atherosclerotic patients.

Microalbuminuria predicts cardiovascular events in diabetic and nondiabetic patients. For a better understanding of the physiopathological importance of microalbuminuria in atherosclerotic disease, we evaluated the relation between urinary albumin excretion and arterial blood pressure, left ventricular mass, insulin, and lipid levels. The studies were conducted in patients with atherosclerotic peripheral vascular disease. Urinary albumin excretion (studied by nephelometry; an average of triplicate collections from 8 PM to 8 AM), causal blood pressure, echocardiographic left ventricular mass index and wall thickness, plasma immunoreactive insulin and C-peptide (both basally and after a 75-g oral glucose load), blood lipids, and fibrinogen were studied in eight normal subjects and 20 nonobese, nondiabetic male patients with angiographically documented atherosclerotic peripheral vascular disease and preserved renal function, 12 of whom were either hypertensive or on antihypertensive treatment. Eight patients were microalbuminuric (urinary albumin > 20 micrograms/min) and 12 were not. Ankle-arm index and calf and foot transcutaneous oxygen tension were reduced in comparison with normal control subjects but superimposable between the two patient groups to indicate a comparable clinical progression of the vascular disease. In the microalbuminuric subjects, left ventricular mass index was greater, interventricular septum was thicker, and cardiac hypertrophy was more frequent than in nonmicroalbuminuric patients. The prevalence of hypertension tended to be greater and systolic blood pressure values were higher in the presence of microalbuminuria. Overall, a highly significant relation existed between urinary albumin excretion and left ventricular mass. Systolic blood pressure was greater and a history of arterial hypertension was more frequent among microalbuminurics, whereas diastolic blood pressure values showed a statistically significant correlation with both variables. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The Corporate Social Responsibility Is just a Twist in a Möbius Strip

Abstract In recent years economic agents and systems have become more and more interactive and juxtaposed, therefore the social sciences need to rely on the studies of physical sciences to analyze this complexity in the relationships. According to this point of view, the authors rely on the geometrical model of the Möbius strip used in electromagnetism, which analyzes the movements of the electrons that produce energy. They use a similar model in a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) context to devise a new cost-benefit model in order to take into account three positive effects on the efficiency of a socially responsible company: 1) cooperation among stakeholders in the same sector; 2) cooperation among similar stakeholders in different sectors; and 3) the stakeholders’ loyalty toward the company. By applying this model to a firm’s decision problem the authors find that investing in CSR activities is always convenient, depending on the number of sectors, the stakeholders’ sensitivity to these investments and the decay rate to alienation. Their work suggests a new method of analysis which should be developed not only at a theoretical level, but also at an empirical level.
Enacting musical worlds: common approaches to using nimes within both performance and person-centred arts practices

Live music making can be understood as an enactive process, whereby musical experiences are created through human action. This suggests that musical worlds coevolve with their agents through repeated sensorimotor interactions with the environment (where the music is being created), and at the same time cannot be separated from their sociocultural contexts. This paper investigates this claim by exploring ways in which technology, physiology, and context are bound up within two different musical scenarios: live electronic musical performance; and person-centred arts applications of NIMEs. In this paper I outline an ethnographic and phenomenological enquiry into my experiences as both a performer of live electronic and electro-instrumental music, as well as my extensive background in working with new technologies in various therapeutic and person-centred artistic situations. This is in order to explore the sociocultural and technological contexts in which these activities take place. I propose that by understanding creative musical participation as a highly contextualised practice, we may discover that the greatest impact of rapidly developing technological resources is their ability to afford richly diverse, personalised, and embodied forms of music making. I argue that this is applicable over a wide range of musical communities.
Involvement of vessels and PDGFB in muscle splitting during chick limb development

Muscle formation and vascular assembly during embryonic development are usually considered separately. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the vasculature and muscles during limb bud development. We show that endothelial cells are detected in limb regions before muscle cells and can organize themselves in space in the absence of muscles. In chick limbs, endothelial cells are detected in the future zones of muscle cleavage, delineating the cleavage pattern of muscle masses. We therefore perturbed vascular assembly in chick limbs by overexpressing VEGFA and demonstrated that ectopic blood vessels inhibit muscle formation, while promoting connective tissue. Conversely, local inhibition of vessel formation using a soluble form of VEGFR1 leads to muscle fusion. The endogenous location of endothelial cells in the future muscle cleavage zones and the inverse correlation between blood vessels and muscle suggests that vessels are involved in the muscle splitting process. We also identify the secreted factor PDGFB (expressed in endothelial cells) as a putative molecular candidate mediating the muscle-inhibiting and connective tissue-promoting functions of blood vessels. Finally, we propose that PDGFB promotes the production of extracellular matrix and attracts connective tissue cells to the future splitting site, allowing separation of the muscle masses during the splitting process.
Extended comprehensive study of association measures for fault localization

Spectrum‐based fault localization is a promising approach to automatically locate root causes of failures quickly. Two well‐known spectrum‐based fault localization techniques, Tarantula and Ochiai, measure how likely a program element is a root cause of failures based on profiles of correct and failed program executions. These techniques are conceptually similar to association measures that have been proposed in statistics, data mining, and have been utilized to quantify the relationship strength between two variables of interest (e.g., the use of a medicine and the cure rate of a disease). In this paper, we view fault localization as a measurement of the relationship strength between the execution of program elements and program failures. We investigate the effectiveness of 40 association measures from the literature on locating bugs. Our empirical evaluations involve single‐bug and multiple‐bug programs. We find there is no best single measure for all cases. Klosgen and Ochiai outperform other measures for localizing single‐bug programs. Although localizing multiple‐bug programs, Added Value could localize the bugs with on average smallest percentage of inspected code, whereas a number of other measures have similar performance. The accuracies of the measures in localizing multi‐bug programs are lower than single‐bug programs, which provokes future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Hierarchical Sampling Approach for Polygonizing Variational Implicit Surfaces

This article discusses an enhanced polygonization algorithm for variational implicit surfaces. The polygonization scheme is a simple hierarchical adaptation of the Marching Cubes algorithm which takes advantage of some properties of variational implicits to produce a proper and efficient sampling of the surface. The technique exploits the fact that variational objects exhibit properties akin to Euclidean distance metrics, thus allowing the polygonizer to quickly ascertain that a given volume does not contain the surface. Timings show that this technique tends to perform faster than Bloomenthal's continuation polygonizer [Bloomenthal J.
Glutathione S-transferase M 1 polymorphism and susceptibility to colorectal cancer : an updated meta-analysis

Objective: To provide a more precise meta-analysis of glutathione S-transferase M1 (GSTM1) polymorphism in estimating the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC). Methods: We conducted a comprehensive literature search in Science, PubMed, and Embase for reports on GSTM1 genetic deficiency and susceptibility to CRC up to Oct 11, 2015. Odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were adopted to evaluate results. Statistical analysis was performed using SAS software and RevMan 5.0. Results: The present meta-analysis included 17,050 cases and 23,704 controls from 51 independent case-control studies. The data indicated an overall OR of 1.13 (95% CI, 1.06 to1. 21, Pheterogeneity<0.00001), which suggested that CRC risk may increase in the individuals with GSTM1 null genotype. In subgroup by race, a positive relationship between GSTM1 null polymorphism and CRC risk was observed in Caucasians (OR=1.14, 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.24) and Asians (OR=1.12, 95% CI, 1.03 to 1.21). The CRC incidence was significantly higher in the colon than in the rectum (OR=1.17, 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.32). However, we did not identify positive correlations in sex, smoking status, and tumor subset. The results of sensitivity analysis were stable and there was no publication bias. Conclusions: GSTM1 null genotype may increase CRC risk.
A 256 Pixel Magnetoresistive Biosensor Microarray in 0.18 µm CMOS

Magnetic nanotechnologies have shown significant potential in several areas of nanomedicine such as imaging, therapeutics, and early disease detection. Giant magnetoresistive spin-valve (GMR SV) sensors coupled with magnetic nanotags (MNTs) possess great promise as ultra-sensitive biosensors for diagnostics. We report an integrated sensor interface for an array of 256 GMR SV biosensors designed in 0.18 µm CMOS. Arranged like an imager, each of the 16 column level readout channels contains an analog front-end and a compact ΣΔ modulator (0.054 mm<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$^{2}$</tex> </formula>) with 84 dB of dynamic range and an input referred noise of 49 nT/<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$\surd$</tex></formula>Hz. Performance is demonstrated through detection of an ovarian cancer biomarker, secretory leukocyte peptidase inhibitor (SLPI), spiked at concentrations as low as 10 fM. This system is designed as a replacement for optical protein microarrays while also providing real-time kinetics monitoring.
Surface EMG for force control of mechanical hands

The dexterity of active hand prosthetics is limited not only due to the limited availability of dexterous prosthetic hands, but mainly due to limitations in interfaces. How is an amputee supposed to command the prosthesis what to do (i.e., how to grasp an object) and with what force (i.e., holding a hammer or grasping an egg)? So far, in literature, the most interesting results have been achieved by applying machine learning to forearm surface electromyography (EMG) to classify finger movements; but this approach lacks, in general, the possibility of quantitatively determining the force applied during the grasping act. In this paper we address the issue by applying machine learning to the problem of regression from the EMG signal to the force a human subject is applying to a force sensor. A detailed comparative analysis among three different machine learning approaches (Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines and Locally Weighted Projection Regression) reveals that the type of grasp can be reconstructed with an average accuracy of 90%, and the applied force can be predicted with an average error of 10%, corresponding to about 5N over a range of 50N. None of the tested approaches clearly outperforms the others, which seems to indicate that machine learning as a whole is a viable approach.
MinMax Routing: The Case for Safer Routes for Electric Vehicles

MinMax routing is the task of finding a feasible route between two points such that the maximum distance between any point in the path and a set of points-of-interest is minimal. In this demonstration paper we focus on the case of routing electric vehicles and where points-of-interest are charging stations. In this scenario, the MinMax route guarantees that for any arbitrary point in such a route, the maximum distance that has to be traveled in order to reach a charging station is minimal, being thus a "safer" route. We propose a solution to the MinMax routing problem and implement a web-based prototype that produces practical MinMax routes in realistic sized networks, e.g., the state of California, in sub-second processing time.