Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iron Abundance in the Intracluster Medium at High Redshift

We present the analysis of the X-ray spectra of 18 distant clusters of galaxies with redshift 0.3 < z < 1.3. Most of them were observed with the Chandra satellite in long exposures ranging from 36 to 180 ks. For two of the z > 1 clusters, we also use deep XMM-Newton observations. Overall, these clusters probe the temperature range 3 keV ≲ kT ≲ 8 keV. Our analysis is aimed at deriving the iron abundance in the intracluster medium (ICM) out to the highest redshifts probed to date. Using a combined spectral fit of cluster subsamples in different redshift bins, we investigate the evolution of the mean ICM metallicity with cosmic epoch. We find that the mean Fe abundance at = 0.8 is Z = 0.25 Z☉, consistent with the local canonical metallicity value, Z ≃ 0.3 Z☉, within the 1 σ confidence level (c.l.). Medium- and low-temperature clusters (kT < 5 keV) tend to have larger iron abundances than hot clusters. At redshift ~ 1.2 (four clusters at z > 1), we obtain a statistically significant detection of the Fe K line in only one cluster (Z > 0.10 Z☉ at the 90% c.l.). Combining all the current data sets from Chandra and XMM at z > 1, the average metallicity is measured to be = 0.21 Z☉ (1 σ error), thus suggesting no evolution of the mean iron abundance out to z ≃ 1.2.
Continuous positive airway pressure does not reduce blood pressure in nonsleepy hypertensive OSA patients

Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is associated with high cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Several randomised controlled trials have shown that continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment of OSA reduces blood pressure (BP). This randomised, sham-placebo controlled crossover trial assesses whether CPAP produces a similar clinically significant fall in BP in hypertensive OSA patients, but without hypersomnolence. Thirty-five, nonsleepy, hypertensive patients with OSA were treated with CPAP for 1 month, randomised first to either therapeutic or sham-placebo (subtherapeutic CPAP, about 1 cmH2O pressure). The second months' alternative treatment followed a 2-week washout period. BP was measured over 24 h, before and at the end of the two treatment periods: mean 24-h BP was the primary outcome variable. There was no overall significant difference in mean 24-h BP: the change in mean 24-h BP on therapeutic CPAP was -2.1 mmHg (sd 8.1), and -1.1 mmHg (sd 8.1) on subtherapeutic CPAP, with a difference of 0.7 mmHg (95% confidence interval (CI) +2.9– -4.4). There was a small significant fall in Epworth Sleepiness Score, therapeutic (-1.4) versus sham (-0.3), and difference -1.2 (95% CI -2.0– -0.4), but no change in objective sleepiness. In nonhypersomnolent hypertensive patients with obstructive sleep apnoea, there is no significant fall in mean 24-h blood pressure with continuous positive airway pressure, in contrast to the fall seen in hypersomnolent patients with obstructive sleep apnoea.
The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Illusory Contour Processing: Combined High-Density Electrical Mapping, Source Analysis, and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Because environmental information is often suboptimal, visual perception must frequently rely on the brain's reconstruction of contours absent from retinal images. Illusory contour (IC) stimuli have been used to investigate these “filling-in” processes. Intracranial recordings and neuroimaging studies show IC sensitivity in lower-tier area V2, and to a lesser extent V1. Some interpret these data as evidence for feedforward processing of IC stimuli, beginning at lower-tier visual areas. On the basis of lesion, visual evoked potentials (VEP), and neuroimaging evidence, others contend that IC sensitivity is a later, higher-order process. Whether IC sensitivity seen in lower-tier areas indexes feedforward or feedback processing remains unresolved. In a series of experiments, we addressed the spatiotemporal dynamics of IC processing. Centrally presented IC stimuli resulted in early VEP modulation (88–100 msec) over lateral–occipital (LOC) scalp—the IC effect. The IC effect followed visual response onset by 40 msec. Scalp current density topographic mapping, source analysis, and functional magnetic resonance imaging results all localized the IC effect to bilateral LOC areas. We propose that IC sensitivity described in V2 and V1 may reflect predominantly feedback modulation from higher-tier LOC areas, where IC sensitivity first occurs. Two additional observations further support this proposal. The latency of the IC effect shifted dramatically later (∼120 msec) when stimuli were laterally presented, indicating that retinotopic position alters IC processing. Immediately preceding the IC effect, the VEP modulated with inducer eccentricity—the configuration effect. We interpret this to represent contributions from global stimulus parameters to scene analysis. In contrast to the IC effect, the topography of the configuration effect was restricted to central parieto–occipital scalp.
Distributed under Creative Commons Cc-by 4.0 Pdia3 Gene Induces Visceral Hypersensitivity in Rats with Irritable Bowel Syndrome through the Dendritic Cell-mediated Activation of T Cells

This study investigated the mechanism of protein disulfide-isomerase A3 (PDIA3)-induced visceral hypersensitivity in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Rats were treated with saline (control), acetic acid and restraint stress (IBS model), empty vector (RNAi control) and PDIA3-RNAi vector (PDIA3-RNAi). Mesenteric lymph node DCs (MLNDCs) and splenic CD4+/CD8+ T cells were isolated for co-cultivation. Compared with control, MLNDCs co-cultured with CD4+ or CD8+ T cells showed an increased ability to promote T cell proliferation and produced more IL-4 or IL-9 secretion. Compared with the RNAi control, MLNDCs from the PDIA3 knockdown models were less effective in promoting the proliferation of CD4+/CD8+ T cells. It is concluded that PDIA3 plays an important role in the development of IBS through the DC-mediated activation of T cells, resulting in degranulation of MCs and visceral hypersensitivity.
On the Potential of Robust Satellite Techniques Approach for SPM Monitoring in Coastal Waters: Implementation and Application over the Basilicata Ionian Coastal Waters Using MODIS-Aqua

Monitoring river plume dynamics and variations in complex coastal areas can provide useful information to prevent marine environmental damage. In this work, the Robust Satellite Techniques (RST) approach has been implemented and tested on historical series of Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data to monitor, for the first time, Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) anomalies associated to river plumes. To this aim, MODIS-Aqua Level 1A data were processed using an atmospheric correction adequate for coastal waters, and SPM daily maps were generated applying an algorithm adapted from literature. The RST approach was then applied to these maps to assess the anomalous presence of SPM. The study area involves the Basilicata region coastal waters (Ionian Sea, South of Italy). A long-time analysis (2003–2015) conducted for the month of December allows us to find that the maximum SPM concentration value was registered in December 2013, when an extreme hydrological event occurred. A short-time analysis was then carried out applying RST to monitor the dynamics of anomalous SPM concentrations. Finally, the most exposed areas, in terms of SPM concentration, were identified. The results obtained in this work showed the RST high potential when used in combination with standard SPM daily maps to better characterize and monitor coastal waters.
The Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research External Financing and Future Stock Returns

We develop a comprehensive and parsimonious measure of the extent to which a firm is raising (distributing) capital from (to) capital market participants. We show that the relation between our measure of net external financing and future stock returns is stronger than has been documented in previous research focusing on individual categories of financing transactions. Decompositions of our measure reveal additional insights. First, the weaker results of previous research are attributable to ‘refinancing’ transactions having no change on net external financing. Second, after controlling for refinancing transactions, there is a consistently strong and negative relation between all major categories of external financing transactions and future stock returns. Third, the negative relation between external financing and future stock returns is most consistent with a combination of over-investment and aggressive accounting.
Reranking Medline Citations by Relevance to a Difficult Biological Query

We have initialized research aimed at automatically extracting Medline citations of biomedical articles and reranking them according to their relevance to a certain biomedical property difficult to express as PubMed query. Our proposed approach to this problem is to train support vector machines as classifiers able to distinguish relevant citations from the rest of retrieved citations. We used their predictions to re-rank citations retrieved from PubMed and represented as vectors of term frequencies. Major improvements were achieved in reranking citations with respect to protein disorder-function relationships where the average relative ranking of a relevant citation was improved from 48% to 16%. On average only 13% and 28% of citations relevant to our target topic were recalled in the top 5 and top 10 citations retrieved by queering PubMed with disordered protein names. By our reranking method, this was improved to about 58% and 78%, respectively, suggesting that the proposed method might provide a cost-effective tool for identifying articles that are difficult to express as specific PubMed queries.
A Self Adaptive Jamming Strategy to Restrict Covert Timing Channel

Covert timing channel may compromise multi-level security system, it's necessary to eliminate or restrict them. Jamming covert timing channel is a main method to restrict the channel's capacity, but existing works' jamming strategies don't take the packets arriving rate and queue's length into account, the jamming strategies they use may affect the overt channel's availability. This paper proposes a self adaptive jamming strategy which can adjust the service time according to the packets' arriving rate and the queue's length. The experiment result shows that the new strategy can effectively restrict the covert timing channel and keep the availability of the overt channel.
Classifying Swedish dialects based on vowel pronunciation

Among Swedish dialects vowels differ a lot in contrast to consonants, and the variation in vowel pronunciation is important for characterizing dialectal identity. In this poster presentation Swedish dialects are classified on the basis of vowel pronunciation. The data come from the project Swedia2000 (http://swedia.ling.gu.se/) where vowels were elicited with mono-or bisyllabic words with vowels in a coronal context. 105 sites in Sweden and Swedish-language areas in Finland are included and each site is represented by 12 speakers (3 elderly women, 3 elderly men, 3 young men and 3 young women). The traditional way of measuring vowel quality acoustically is by means of formant measurements. However, formant measurements are complicated by the need for manual correction of the data. Jacobi, Pols and Stroop (2006) showed that there is a high correlation between formant measurements and principal components of bark filtered spectra. An advantage of band filter analysis compared to formant analysis is that band filtering needs no manual correction and thus can be applied automatically to big data sets. In this study vowel spectra are filtered up to 18 bark and analysed by means of principal component analysis. The vowel segments are analysed at three different points in time in order to analyse degrees of diphthongisation. In order to classify the Swedish dialects a factor analysis is carried out. In the factor analysis older and younger speaker at every site are also compared to each other in order find signs of language change.
A Statistical Approach to Thai Word Filtering *

Three nontrivial problems of Thai morphological processing are word boundary ambiguity, tagging ambiguity and implicit spelling errors. These problems cause the alternative or erroneous chain of words which make a lot of jobs for the parser. This work attempts to provide a computational solution, called Word Filtering, to those linguistic phenomena. Word Filtering consists of a filtering process and a scanning process. The basic idea of the filtering process is to calculate the probabilities of all possible chains of tagged words by using a Markov Model. The most likely sequence of tagged word is the one(s) that maximizes chain probabilities. However, it may be an erroneous chain which has an implicitly spelling error. The Word Filtering, then, includes the scanning process for detecting and correcting the error. Both filtering and scanning process use statistical data collected from the hand-tagged corpus. From the results of the experiment, the word filter can eliminate alternative word sequences as many as possible and can correct the implicit error as well.
Executive Summary : A new understanding of star formation in the local

A key step in the evolution of galaxies—the building blocks of the Universe—is the formation of the billions of stars they contain. The star formation process is very sensitive to the local environment, almost ceasing in regions of high galaxy density. This effect has been recognised for decades, but we still do not know if it is due to the formation of different galaxy types in these regions or a direct suppression of star formation. We propose a new approach to separate these two hypotheses by combining radio and optical data to measure the star formation efficiency in galaxies, rather than just the overall star formation rate as in previous work. The specific aims of the project are: 1. We will develop and apply new machine learning techniques to match galaxies from very large radio and optical catalogues. These techniques have not previously been applied to such problems in astrophysics. 2. We will use these matched data to measure how the star formation efficiency in galaxies varies with the local galaxy density. This will allow us to test the two rival star formation models discussed above. 3. This project will help UQ develop the expertise necessary to join a national consortium preparing to seek major government funding to support Australian participation in the International Virtual Observatory project.
Discovery of Hard X-Ray Delays in the X-Ray Emission of the Seyfert 1 Galaxy Markarian 110: Possible Evidence of Comptonization

We report the discovery of hard X-ray delays in the X-ray emission of the Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 110, based on a long XMM-Newton observation. Cross-correlation between the X-ray light curves of different energy bands reveals an energy-dependent delay ranging from a few minutes to an hour. We find that the energy spectrum can be modeled by Comptonization of disk blackbody photons. The energy-dependent delay can be modeled as due to the effect of Comptonization in a hot plasma confined within 10 Schwarzschild radii of the black hole. We discuss our results in the context of inverse Comptonization of the soft photons by highly energetic plasma.
How to Cook an Automated System for Linux Driver Verification

We present the preliminary results of our work on designing an automatic toolset for verification of Linux kernelspace drivers. By now the toolset includes three components: • a library of verification models each model is a formal description of some safety property to be checked • a preprocessor unit it is intended for simulating an environment of a driver • a verification unit BLAST it is a general-purpose toolkit intended for automatic program verification based on Boolean abstraction and counter-example guided abstraction refinements techniques. We discuss in some details how our system operates and outline the directions for future work.
90–140 GHz frequency octupler in Si/SiGe BiCMOS using a novel bootstrapped doubler topology

This paper presents a novel bootstrapped frequency doubler, which is used to implement a wideband frequency multiplier-by 8 with balanced differential output. In terms of conversion gain, common mode rejection, and output balance, the proposed frequency doubler achieved better performance than the conventional Gilbert-cell frequency doubler by adopting the proposed bootstrapping technique. Wideband matching was also applied to broaden the bandwidth. The circuit is implemented in 0. 13μm SiGe:C BiCMOS and operated from 90-140 GHz with an 8 dB gain variation, a 22dB conversion gain, a -1 to 7 dBm output power, and a power consumption of 250mW.
The Predominant Neural Stem Cell Isolated from Postnatal and Adult Forebrain But Not Early Embryonic Forebrain Expresses GFAP

Periventricular germinal zones (GZs) of developing and adult brain contain neural stem cells (NSCs), the cellular identities and origins of which are not defined completely. We used tissue culture techniques and transgenic mice expressing herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) from the mouse glial fibrillary acid protein (GFAP) promoter to test the hypothesis that certain NSCs express GFAP. To do so, we determined the relative proportions of multipotent neurospheres that are formed by GFAP-expressing cells derived from GZs at different stages of development. In this transgenic model, dividing GFAP-expressing cells are ablated selectively by treatment with the antiviral agent ganciclovir (GCV). Single-cell analysis showed that transgene-derived HSV-TK was present only in GFAP-expressing cells. GCV applied in vitro eliminated growth of multipotent neurospheres from GZs of postnatal and adult transgenic mice but not early embryonic (embryonic day 12.5) transgenic mice. GCV prevented growth of secondary multipotent neurospheres prepared after passage of primary transgenic neurospheres derived from all three of these developmental stages. In addition, GCV prevented growth of multipotent neurospheres from transgenic astrocyte-enriched cell cultures derived from postnatal GZ, and elaidic acid GCV given for 4 d to adult transgenic mice in vivo abolished the ability to grow multipotent neurospheres from GZ. Extensive control experiments, including clonal analysis, demonstrated that failure of neurosphere growth was not merely secondary to loss of GFAP-expressing support cells or the result of a nonspecific toxic effect. Our findings demonstrate that the predominant multipotent NSCs isolated from postnatal and adult but not early embryonic GZs express GFAP, and that NSCs exhibit heterogeneous expression of intermediate filaments during developmental maturation
Evolving Swarm Communication with NEAT Rex

We believe that communication in swarm robotics can be crucial and offer significant improvements in efficiency of certain tasks. Influenced by the paper Comparative Evolutions of Swarm Communications[2] written by previous cs81 students Amy Jin and Murphy Austin, we designed a task where having communication would provide an efficient solution. Inspired by the behaviors of ants collaborating to search and transport food, we created a world where three swarm agents are to search for a food object and all gather around the food. It is important to note that the agents do not have any information about the food besides a sensor that indicates whether the agents have reached food or not. This way, solving this task without communication would mean that the three agents need to individually stumble upon the food. On the other hand, if the agents are capable of communicating, an ideal situation would be that one agent discovers the food and through communication signals the two other agents. We will utilize neural networks and the genetic algorithm NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) to evolve such communication between the agents. Our hypotheses are that not only will all three agents reach the food object, but also effective communication strategies will be evolved so that the agents complete this task efficiently. In addition, we believe that NEAT is powerful enough to make sense of the inputs that we provide and generate meaningful outputs. To test these hypotheses, we created three testing groups: agents that have free communication, fixed communication, and no communication. After gathering the results, we discovered that all three groups were able to come up with strategies that allow them to complete the task, however we did not observe any meaningful communication being evolved. Yet, on a more optimistic note, there was evidence that the agents did react differently when they reached the food object, so this indicated that on some level NEAT still made a difference, and it is our future work to further understand what evolved behaviors our agents possess.
An Over Expression APP Model for Anti-Alzheimer Disease Drug Screening Created by Zinc Finger Nuclease Technology

Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), famous for their ability to precisely and efficiently modify specific genomic loci, have been employed in numerous transgenic model organism and cell constructions. Here we employ the ZFNs technology, with homologous recombination (HR), to construct sequence-specific Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) knock-in cells. With the use of ZFNs, we established APP knock in cell lines with gene-modification efficiencies of about 7%. We electroporated DNA fragment containing the promoter and the protein coding regions of the zinc finger nucleases into cells, instead of the plasmids, to avoid problems associated with off target homologous recombination, and adopted a pair of mutated FokI cleavage domains to reduce the toxic effects of the ZFNs on cell growth. Since over-expression of APP, or a subdomain of it, might lead to an immediately lethal effect, we used the Cre-LoxP System to regulate APP expression. Our genetically transformed cell lines, w5c1 and s12c8, showed detectable APP and Amyloid β (Aβ) production. The Swedish double mutation in the APP coding sequence enhanced APP and Aβ abundance. What is more, the activity of the three key secretases in Aβ formation could be modulated, indicating that these transgenic cells have potential for drug screening to modify amyloid metabolism in cells. Our transformed cells could readily be propagated in culture and should provide an excellent experimental medium for elucidating aspects of the molecular pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease, especially those concerning the amyloidogenic pathways involving mutations in the APP coding sequence. The cellular models may also serve as a tool for deriving potentially useful therapeutic agents.
Platform based design for a multimedia Motion JPEG decoder case study

In recent years, computational requirements for embedded applications are increasing exponentially. This complexity, coupled with constantly evolving specifications, has forced designers to consider intrinsically flexible implementations. For this reason, heterogeneous multiprocessor architectural platforms are gaining prevalence for embedded systems. Deploying applications typical of multimedia domains is difficult, not only due to the heterogeneous parallelism in the platforms, but also due to the performance constraints that typify these systems. In this paradigm, the digital system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform-based design environment for shared memory multiple instructions multiple data (MIMD) architectures (Disydent) is used. The applicability of the Disydent design flow to systems in the multimedia domain is illustrated. The case studied consists in deploying a motion JPEG decoder application onto a configurable prototype of a multiprocessor MIPS platform architecture.