Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
System Level Comparative Performance Analysis of H . 264 Encoder by Network-on-Chip Topologies

This paper describes comparative analysis results of system performance by network-on-chip topologies on system level. Network-on-chip systems are implemented by typical topologies, mesh topology, crossbar topology, folded torus topology and point-to-point topology on system level. Running the x264/AVC encoding application on each system and analyze performance from simulation results. We can find the fact that performance differences exist when running the benchmark application, by network-on-chip topologies in advance. On each implemented system, there are performance differences ranged from -5.45% to +4.75% based on mesh topology. For analyzing the effect of topologies, we use the CPUs total cycles, which reflect communication latency. Types of topologies affect the number of routers on the paths related to latency and performance. More components of onchip network reinforce such trends. We analyze the reason why each topology has different result. Used approach helps to find optimal topology by changing various on-chip-network topologies on system level
Object Recognition Based on Bag of Features and a New Local Pattern Descriptor

Bag of Features (BoF) has gained a lot of interest in computer vision. Visual codebook based on robust appearance descriptors extracted from local image patches is an effective means of texture analysis and scene classification. This paper presents a new method for local feature description based on gray-level difference mapping called Mean Local Mapped Pattern (M-LMP). The proposed descriptor is robust to image scaling, rotation, illumination and partial viewpoint changes. The training set is composed of rotated and scaled images, with changes in illumination and view points. The test set is composed of rotated and scaled images. The proposed descriptor more effectively captures smaller differences of the image pixels than similar ones. In our experiments, we implemented an object recognition system based on the M-LMP and compared our results to the Center-Symmetric Local Binary Pattern (CS-LBP) and the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). The results for object classification were analyzed in a BoF methodology and show that our descriptor performs better compared to these two previously published methods.
18F-FDG PET/CT Identifies Patients at Risk for Future Vascular Events in an Otherwise Asymptomatic Cohort with Neoplastic Disease

Our objective was to evaluate the association of arterial 18F-FDG uptake and calcifications in large arteries as detected by 18F-FDG PET/CT with the subsequent occurrence of vascular events in otherwise asymptomatic cancer patients. Methods: Clinical follow-up information was obtained for 932 cancer patients examined with whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT (median follow-up time, 29 mo). Among this cohort, 279 patients had died from their oncologic disease. In 15 of 932 patients (1.6%), a vascular event, defined as ischemic stroke, myocardial infarction, or revascularization, was registered. The maximal standardized uptake value (SUV) was divided by the blood-pool SUV, yielding a target-to-background ratio (TBR) for each arterial segment. The mean TBR as well as a calcified plaque sum score per patient were calculated in the major vessels: ascending, descending, and abdominal aorta, aortic arch, as well as iliac and carotid arteries. Results: A significant correlation was observed between mean TBR and calcified plaque sum (P < 0.001). Although calcified plaque sum significantly correlated with all conventional risk factors for vascular events, mean TBR correlated only with age, the male sex, and hypertension. The Cox regression hazard model identified a mean TBR ≥ 1.7 and a calcified plaque sum ≥ 15 as independent predictors for the occurrence of a vascular event. Patients with both mean TBR and calcified plaque sum above these thresholds were identified as having the highest risk for a future vascular event. However, a mean TBR ≥ 1.7 had greater prognostic value than did a calcified plaque sum ≥ 15. Conclusion: In a large cohort of cancer patients, increased 18F-FDG uptake in major arteries emerged as the strongest predictor of a subsequent vascular event. Concomitant severe vascular calcifications seemed to impart a particularly high risk. Given the small event rate in the present study, larger, prospective trials of patients without cancer are required to substantiate these promising results.
Ethnobiology Lives! Theory, Collaboration, and Possibilities for the Study of Folk Biologies

Living and conducting research among the Tzeltal-speaking Maya allowed me to experience firsthand the depth of their knowledge about plants and animals. The children are especially impressive, and they can name over 100 plants by the time they’re nine years old (Stross, 1973). In addition to naming plants, my host family’s 12-year-old daughter could explain complicated medicinal preparations using 43 different plant species. One might think that such knowledge is less important for postindustrial societies, but I am also impressed by my six-year-old niece’s knowledge that pooh-bears eat honey, but tiggers don’t, as well as her ability to distinguish and name dogs, squirrels, and cats when she was only two. These cases illustrate an important point: biological classification is fundamental to human thought. It occurs in some form in every society and is a part of every child’s cognitive development. This alone would make
Combining Kernel and Model Based Learning for HIV Therapy Selection

We present a mixture-of-experts approach for HIV therapy selection. The heterogeneity in patient data makes it difficult for one particular model to succeed at providing suitable therapy predictions for all patients. An appropriate means for addressing this heterogeneity is through combining kernel and model-based techniques. These methods capture different kinds of information: kernel-based methods are able to identify clusters of similar patients, and work well when modelling the viral response for these groups. In contrast, model-based methods capture the sequential process of decision making, and are able to find simpler, yet accurate patterns in response for patients outside these groups. We take advantage of this information by proposing a mixture-of-experts model that automatically selects between the methods in order to assign the most appropriate therapy choice to an individual. Overall, we verify that therapy combinations proposed using this approach significantly outperform previous methods.
Differential steroidogenic enzyme activities in different populations of rat Leydig cells.

Previous reports from this laboratory have described the presence of two distinct populations of Leydig cells (I and II) in the mature rat testis which differ in hCG-stimulated testosterone production. The present study examines differences in steroidogenic enzyme activity between the different Leydig cell populations;. In addition, we now report that population I may be further separated into two subpopulations (IA and IB) by centrifugation of dispersed testicular cells in a discontinuous Metrizamide gradient. The LH receptor number, as measured by radiolabeled hCG binding, was the same in all three populations (∼100 fmol/106 Leydig cells). hCG-stimulated testosterone production was highest in population II (253 ng/106 Leydig cells), while testosterone production in population IB (183 ng/106 Leydig cells) was markedly greater than that in population IA (51 ng/106 Leydig cells). The activities of the key steroidogenic enzymes,Δ 5-3Β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-isomerase, 17- hydroxylase, C17-C20 lyase, a.
Data Replication in Current Generation Computing Environment

MANET, VANET, CLOUD and IoT are some of the recent computing models or network architecture that has evolved in the recent times. The characteristics of devices and communication links of these types of models vary largely leading to high degree of heterogeneity. The applications designed for such a heterogeneous type of network faces challenges such as frequent network partition, communication link failure, data node crash and variations in the performance of network links etc. Replication of data is a technique which increases data availability in case of occurrence of problems as mentioned above. Though the name replication sounds familiar, its implementation to different networks demands a custom methodology according to the type of network. In this article we study various replication methods used in different network architecture or computing model. We identify the challenges in replicating data in diverse environment and list the scope for possible extensions in future to improve the performance of replication.
TESTING FOR EQUAL RATES OF CLADOGENESIS IN DIVERSE TAXA

Abstract Taxa differ widely in numbers of species, which may be due either to chance alone or to factors that cause differences in speciation and extinction rates between taxa. To test whether an observed distribution of species over taxa differs from the distribution expected from chance alone, one must take into account that neither speciation nor extinction rates are known. This paper introduces a way to estimate speciation and extinction probabilities from the distribution of extant species over families and to test whether the observed distribution is different from expected. Application of this procedure to the distributions of bird, hexapod, primate, and angiosperm species over taxa provides statistical evidence of differences in rates of cladogenesis between taxa.
A PIV STUDY OF SEPARATED FLOW AROUND A

In order to acquire experimental data on an airfoil at high angles of attack, wind tunnel tests were carried out. The wind tunnel tests were carried out at Re=1.25 · 10 6 (based on chord length) on a 2-D model with 0.45 m chord and 2 m span based on the FFA-W3-211 airfoil geometry (21% thick). This airfoil is typically used in wind turbine blades. The purpose of the study was to examine the flow field and study the recirculating region around the airfoil. The present study was carried at 8 ◦ and 15 ◦ angle of attack, with more focus on the latter, by using three methods; static pressure measurement, oil flow visualisation and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). It was of particular interest to determine the position of the separation and the resulting data could than provide appropriate data for validation of computational numerical calculations (CFD) for separated flow cases. Based on the velocity vector field obtained by the PIV data, the velocity profile, boundary layer quantities and the backflow coefficients were derived. The backflow coefficient was then used as a criterion for separation. The position of separation for 15 ◦ angle of attack was determined in the PIV measurements to be at x/c=0.39±0.03, in the pressure measurements at x/c=0.40±0.05 and, somewhat subjectively, in the oil flow visualisation at x/c≈0.42. The complete report (FFA-TN-1999-52) in pdf-format and the test data in ascii-format are available on request, for comparison with numerical results [3].
Fine-Tuning Control of phoBR Expression in Vibrio cholerae by Binding of PhoB to Multiple Pho Boxes

ABSTRACT The control of Vibrio cholerae phoBR expression by PhoB involves its binding to Pho boxes at −35 (box 1), −60 (box 2), and −80 (box 3) from the putative phoB translation start site. These loci were located in the sense (box 1) and antisense (boxes 2 and 3) strands of the phoBR regulatory region, and PhoB binds to these individual boxes with distinct affinities. Fusions of sequences containing different combinations of these boxes upstream of the lacZ reporter in a plasmid demonstrated that only those carrying boxes 1, 2, and 3, or 1 alone, activated transcription under inorganic phosphate (Pi) limitation. When a fragment, including only boxes 1 and 2, was fused to lacZ, expression was no longer induced by low Pi, suggesting a repressive role for PhoB∼box2 (PhoB bound to box 2) over the transcriptional activity induced by PhoB∼box1. The similarity between lacZ expression levels from promoter fragments containing the three boxes or box 1 alone showed that PhoB∼box3 eliminated the repressive effect imposed by PhoB∼box2 on phoBR transcription. Complementation assays with a phoBR-containing plasmid demonstrated that the 234-bp promoter fragment carrying the three boxes is absolutely required for operon expression in Vibrio cholerae ΔphoBR cells. This was observed under Pi abundance, when phoBR was expressed at a basal level and, also in low Pi conditions, when Pho regulon genes were fully expressed. Thus, under Pi limitation, PhoB exerts dual regulatory functions by binding sequentially distinct Pho boxes to enable the fine-tuning and precise control of phoBR expression in V. cholerae cells.
A novel power factor correction utilizing input/output voltage waveforms sampling

In this study, a simple and novel control technique is introduced for power factor correction (PFC) in boost rectifiers with high input power factor. Operation of the proposed method is based upon sampling the input and output voltages of the boost rectifier and a comparison technique which is used to generate the proper PWM control pulses for the switch. As a result the line currents total harmonic distortion (THD) is reduced and consequently the input power factor improved. In order to further investigate the proposed control technique, its performance is compared with that of a conventional active current mode (ACM) control method for the power factor correction utilizing boost rectifiers. Computer simulations and experimental implementations are used in order to compare the performance of the proposed method in this study with that of the conventional ACM method and also to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control technique.
Privacy-preserving text mining as a service

Text mining is the process to automatically infer relevant information from semantically related text documents. This technique, which has applications from business intelligence to homeland security, terrorism and crime fight, might bring noticeable privacy issues when analyzed documents contain privacy sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving text analysis, which exploits Homomorphic Encryption, to analyze text documents in a privacy preserving manner. The proposed framework is designed to ensure that there is no disclosure of privacy sensitive information contained in the document to any party, including the analysis engine itself. Furthermore, we present two use cases of analysis based on bag-of-words classification, where the proposed framework manages to obtain good classification results without information disclosure. In particular the two different settings that are considered are: tweet analysis for detection of terrorist Twitter accounts, and out-box email analysis for detection of bot infected devices. Accuracy results with different classifiers, performances and a security analysis of our approach are presented and discussed.
Draft Genome Sequence of Brachybacterium phenoliresistens Strain W13A50, a Halotolerant Hydrocarbon-Degrading Bacterium

ABSTRACT Brachybacterium phenoliresistens strain W13A50 was isolated from a petroleum-contaminated saline site, which could degrade hydrocarbon under high salinity conditions. Here, we present 4.2-Mb draft genome sequence of this strain, which will provide insights into the diversity of Brachybacterium and the mechanism of hydrocarbon degradation in saline environments.
An Adaptive Control Strategy for a Wind Energy Conversion System Based on PWM-CSC and PMSG

This paper proposes a new adaptive control strategy for a wind energy conversion system based on a permanent magnet synchronous generator and a pulse-width modulated current source converter. Most of the studies on wind farms are based on double fed induction technology. Nevertheless, the proposed conversion system is a good alternative due to its high efficiency and reliability. Electrolytic capacitors are not required in this type of converter and the voltage in the DC-link as well as the generated reactive power can be dynamically modified according to the wind velocity, being even negative if required. However, it is challenging from the control and stability standpoint. Capacitive filters placed on the AC side, which are required for safe commutation, can create resonances with the power grid. Reactive power is generated according to the capacity of the converter, the wind velocity and the load profile. The adaptive control strategy uses an adaptive PI which is self-tuned based on a linear approximation of the power system calculated at each sample time. A model reference is also proposed in order to reduce the post-fault voltages. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed control.
NARRATIVE FORM AND THE STRUCTURE OF MYTH

At each stage in transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifica- tions take place but something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained from a time in the distant past when the narrative was embedded in a total oral worldview or cosmology. This article introduces the analogical discovery method and uses it to build up a structure based on a group of tales from Greece, Ireland and Wales. It draws the conclu- sion that the structure of myth that is indirectly discernible through them deals with four generations, both of gods and of humans, the last of which contains the king. It agrees with the view proposed by Georges Dumezil that myth reflects human social organisation and argues in addition that matrilineal succession to kingship provides a good fit with the tales. The suggestion is put forward that there was a total, quite complex, cosmological code of which narratives retain traces and that scholars today have the opportunity of deciphering it.
Increased Abundance of Opioid Receptor Heteromers After Chronic Morphine Administration

The μ-δ opioid heteromer may be a target for alleviation of chronic pain. Drug-Induced Heteromers Opioid receptors are G protein–coupled receptors and are divided into μ, δ, and κ subtypes. Homomers of μ or δ receptors signal through a Gαi-mediated pathway; however, these receptor subtypes can also form heteromers that signal through Gαz- or β-arrestin2–mediated pathways. Although morphine analgesia is mediated primarily through the μ receptor, δ receptor ligands can potentiate μ receptor–mediated signaling, suggesting that the μ-δ heteromer may also be involved in morphine analgesia. Gupta et al. developed an antibody that selectively recognizes μ-δ heteromers and found that the abundance of the μ-δ heteromer in mice increased with chronic administration of morphine. These increases were detected in regions of the brain that are involved in the modulation of pain transmission. These results suggest that the μ-δ heteromer may be a candidate for therapies to alleviate chronic pain syndromes. The μ and δ types of opioid receptors form heteromers that exhibit pharmacological and functional properties distinct from those of homomeric receptors. To characterize these complexes in the brain, we generated antibodies that selectively recognize the μ-δ heteromer and blocked its in vitro signaling. With these antibodies, we showed that chronic, but not acute, morphine treatment caused an increase in the abundance of μ-δ heteromers in key areas of the central nervous system that are implicated in pain processing. Because of its distinct signaling properties, the μ-δ heteromer could be a therapeutic target in the treatment of chronic pain and addiction.
Estimating Time Since Death from Postmortem Human Gut Microbial Communities

Postmortem succession of human‐associated microbial communities (“human microbiome”) has been suggested as a possible method for estimating postmortem interval (PMI) for forensic analyses. Here we evaluate human gut bacterial populations to determine quantifiable, time‐dependent changes postmortem. Gut microflora were repeatedly sampled from the proximal large intestine of 12 deceased human individuals as they decayed under environmental conditions. Three intestinal bacterial genera were quantified by quantitative PCR (qPCR) using group‐specific primers targeting 16S rRNA genes. Bacteroides and Lactobacillus relative abundances declined exponentially with increasing PMI at rates of Nt = 0.977e−0.0144t (r2 = 0.537, p < 0.001) and Nt = 0.019e−0.0087t (r2 = 0.396, p < 0.001), respectively, where Nt is relative abundance at time (t) in cumulative degree hours. Bifidobacterium relative abundances did not change significantly: Nt = 0.003e−0.002t (r2 = 0.033, p = 0.284). Therefore, Bacteroides and Lactobacillus abundances could be used as quantitative indicators of PMI.
Characterization of a Verocytotoxin-Producing Enteroaggregative Escherichia coli Serogroup O111:H21 Strain Associated with a Household Outbreak in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT A strain of Escherichia coli O111:H21 recently isolated in the United Kingdom harbored the phage-encoded vtx2c gene and the aggregative adherence plasmid. Although exhibiting the same pathogenic profile as the E. coli O104:H4 strain linked to the outbreak in Germany, there were important differences in strain characteristics and in the epidemiological setting.
The relative merits of population-based and targeted prevention strategies.

CONTEXT Preventive medicine has historically favored reducing a risk factor by a small amount in the entire population rather than by a large amount in high-risk individuals. The use of multivariable risk prediction tools, however, may affect the relative merits of this strategy. METHODS This study uses risk factor data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III to simulate a population of more than 100 million Americans aged thirty or older with no history of CV disease. Three strategies that could affect CV events, CV mortality, and quality-adjusted life years were examined: (1) a population-based strategy that treats all individuals with a low- or moderate-intensity intervention (in which the low-intensity intervention represents a public health campaign with no demonstrable adverse effects), (2) a targeted strategy that treats individuals in the top 25 percent based on a single risk factor (LDL), and (3) a risk-targeted strategy that treats individuals in the top 25 percent based on overall CV risk (as predicted by a multivariable prediction tool). The efficiency of each strategy was compared while varying the intervention's intensity and associated adverse effects, and the accuracy of the risk prediction tool. FINDINGS The LDL-targeted strategy and the low-intensity population-based strategy were comparable for CV events prevented over five years (0.79 million and 0.75 million, respectively), as were the risk-targeted strategy and moderate-intensity population-based strategy (1.56 million and 1.87 million, respectively). The risk-targeted strategy, however, was more efficient than the moderate-intensity population-based strategy (number needed to treat [NNT] 19 vs. 62). Incorporating a small degree of treatment-related adverse effects greatly magnified the relative advantages of the risk-targeted approach over other strategies. Reducing the accuracy of the prediction tool only modestly decreased this greater efficiency. CONCLUSIONS A population-based prevention strategy can be an excellent option if an intervention has almost no adverse effects. But if the intervention has even a small degree of disutility, a targeted approach using multivariable risk prediction can prevent more morbidity and mortality while treating many fewer people.