Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of an In-house Built 50 Hz Single Dielectric Barrier Discharge System Having Asymmetric Electrodes

An in-house built asymmetric dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) system comprising of a 50 Hz high tension ac source and single dielectric barrier layer (quartz, glass) between two conducting electrodes is used to generate and sustain the micro-discharge plasmas of practical importance. Most of the DBDs of industrial interest are operated in this filamentary mode. The variations in transported charge and discharge power with increase in ac input voltage and barrier thickness are reported. Whereas, the optical emission spectroscopy technique with line intensity ratio method is used to determine the electron temperature and electron number density from recorded spectra as a function of ac input voltage, dielectric barrier thickness and inter-electrode air gap. It is observed that the applied voltage, type and thickness of dielectric barrier and inter-electrode air gap significantly influence the corresponding DBD plasma parameters. Index Term-Atmospheric pressure plasmas, Step up transformer, Dielectric materials, Plasma processing
Zero-outage strategy for multi-antenna broadcast channels with limited feedback

Transmission techniques for the wireless multi-antenna broadcast channel often require that the receivers feed back their channel state information (CSI) to the transmitter. In this paper, we propose a limited feedback method to approximate zero-forcing beamforming. Each user feeds back quantized information about channel direction and a deterministic lower bound on its signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), which require no more than an integer and a real number. With this information, the Base Station performs user scheduling, beamforming and rate adaptation. In this method, the information from both receiver and transmitter sides are taken into account to arrive at a tight lower bound on the supported rate of each user. Since a lower bound on the SINR is fed back, the proposed method avoids outage. We discuss the feedback load of the method, and show numerical results of the relationship between sum-rate and feedback load, SNR and number of users, as well as a comparison with similar methods.
Mouse primordial germ cells produce cysts that partially fragment prior to meiosis

Mammalian germ cells divide mitotically and form nests of associated cells just prior to entering meiosis. At least some nests contain germline cysts that arise by synchronous, incomplete mitotic divisions, but others may form by aggregation. To systematically investigate early murine germ cell development, we lineage marked the progeny of individual, newly arrived primordial germ cells in the E10.5 gonad. All the marked germ cells initially develop into clones containing two, four or eight cells, indicating cyst formation. Surprisingly, growing cysts in both sexes partially fragment into smaller cysts prior to completion and associate with cysts from unrelated progenitors. At the time divisions cease, female clones comprise five cysts on average that eventually give rise to about six primordial follicles. Male cyst cells break apart and probably become spermatogonial stem cells. Thus, cysts are invariant units of mouse germ cell development and cyst fragmentation provides insight into the amplification of spermatogonial stem cells and the origin of primordial follicles.
Essential role of platelet-activating factor receptor in the pathogenesis of Dengue virus infection

Severe dengue infection in humans causes a disease characterized by thrombocytopenia, increased levels of cytokines, increased vascular permeability, hemorrhage, and shock. Treatment is supportive. Activation of platelet-activating factor (PAF) receptor (PAFR) on endothelial cells and leukocytes induces increase in vascular permeability, hypotension, and production of cytokines. We hypothesized that activation of PAFR could account for the major systemic manifestations of dengue infection. Inoculation of adult mice with an adapted strain of Dengue virus caused a systemic disease, with several features of the infection in humans. In PAFR−/− mice, there was decreased thrombocytopenia, hemoconcentration, decreased systemic levels of cytokines, and delay of lethality, when compared with WT infected mice. Treatment with UK-74,505, an orally active PAFR antagonist, prevented the above-mentioned manifestations, as well as hypotension and increased vascular permeability, and decreased lethality, even when started 5 days after virus inoculation. Similar results were obtained with a distinct PAFR antagonist, PCA-4246. Despite decreased disease manifestation, viral loads were similar (PAFR−/−) or lower (PAFR antagonist) than in WT mice. Thus, activation of PAFR plays a major role in the pathogenesis of experimental dengue infection, and its blockade prevents more severe disease manifestation after infection with no increase in systemic viral titers, suggesting that there is no interference in the ability of the murine host to deal with the infection. PAFR antagonists are disease-modifying agents in experimental dengue infection.
Pamini: A framework for assembling mixed-initiative human-robot interaction from generic interaction patterns

Dialog modeling in robotics suffers from lack of generalizability, due to the fact that the dialog is heavily influenced by the tasks the robot is able to perform. We introduce interleaving interaction patterns together with a general protocol for task communication which enables us to systematically specify the relationship between dialog structure and task structure. We argue that this approach meets the requirements of advanced dialog modeling on robots and at the same time exhibits a better scalability than existing concepts.
A Sustained Rat Model for Studying the Long-Lasting Catabolic State of Sepsis

ABSTRACT Most animal models of sepsis induced high mortality or early recovery and do not mimic the long-lasting catabolic state observed in patients. The purpose of this study is to develop a model of sepsis which reproduces these disorders, especially the long-lasting muscle wasting. This report summarizes our observations in a series of seven experiments using this model with rats to study the route of liveEscherichia coli administration, dose of bacteria, reproducibility of the model, bacterial count in tissues, comparison of injection of live or dead bacteria, metabolic perturbations linked to infection, and potential role of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) in muscle wasting. After intravenous infection, animals were anorexic and the catabolic state was long-lasting: body weight loss for 2 to 3 days followed by a chronic wasting state for several days. Liver, spleen, lung protein content, and plasma concentration of α2-macroglobulin were increased 2 and 6 days after infection. At 6 days, muscle protein content was substantially (−40%) reduced. The plasma TNF-α level measured 1.5 h after infection correlated with body weight loss observed 9 days later. The inhibition of TNF-α secretion by administration of pentoxifylline 1 h before infection reduced muscle wasting and activation of proteolysis at day 2 and abolished them at day 6. This septic model mimics in rats the prolonged protein metabolism alterations and muscle atrophy characteristics of infected patients and thus is useful for studying the impact of nutritional support on outcome.
Voltage-Aware Static Timing Analysis

Static timing analysis (STA) techniques allow a designer to check the timing of a circuit at different process corners, which typically include corner values of the supply voltages as well. Traditionally, however, this analysis only considers cases where the supplies are either all low or all high. As will be demonstrated, this may not yield the true maximum delay of a circuit because it neglects the possible mismatch between the supplies of successive gates on a path. A new methodology for timing analysis is proposed, where, in a first step, the critical paths of a circuit are identified under an assumption that all the supply nodes are independent of one another, thus allowing for mismatch between the supplies. Then, given these critical paths, the authors incorporate into the analysis the relationships between the supply node voltages by considering the power grid that they are tied to, and refine the worst case time delay values on a per-critical-path basis. This refinement is posed as a sequence of optimization problems where the operation of the circuit is abstracted in terms of current constraints. The authors present their technique and report on the implementation results using benchmark circuits tied to a number of test-case power grids
High levels of physical activity are associated with lower levels of fatigue among lymphoma patients: Results from the longitudinal PROFILES registry

Abstract Background. Studies show a cross-sectional association between physical activity (PA) and fatigue among lymphoma cancer patients. However, few longitudinal studies have examined whether PA has a sustained effect on fatigue over time. Purpose. To examine the longitudinal relationship between PA and fatigue. Methods. All living individuals diagnosed with lymphoma between 1999 and 2010 as registered by the Dutch population-based Eindhoven Cancer Registry received a questionnaire on three time points. Generalized linear mixed models were used to estimate the independent effects of PA on fatigue. Results. PA and fatigue levels did not differ between patients short-term (< 1 year) and long-term after diagnosis (1–5 years or > 5 years). PA behavior was relatively constant over time with 84% of the patients meeting the Dutch PA guidelines at all assessment periods. Fatigue scores also remained fairly stable over time with 46% of the patients never being fatigued and 29% always being fatigued. Multivariate analyses showed that patients who met the PA guidelines scored 6.2 (95% CI 3.1–9.2) points lower on total fatigue over time (between subject effect; p < 0.01), compared to patients not meeting PA guidelines. Conclusion. During a period of two years, PA and fatigue levels were rather stable within lymphoma patients. Patients who met the PA guidelines reported lower levels of fatigue compared to those not meeting the guidelines, which appeared to be a constant association over time. The observed association between PA and fatigue underlines the importance to focus upon physical training in the care of cancer patients.
The Evolutionary Pattern of Glycosylation Sites in Influenza Virus (H5N1) Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase

Two glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA), on the surface of influenza viruses play crucial roles in transfaunation, membrane fusion and the release of progeny virions. To explore the distribution of N-glycosylation sites (glycosites) in these two glycoproteins, we collected and aligned the amino acid sequences of all the HA and NA subtypes. Two glycosites were located at HA0 cleavage sites and fusion peptides and were strikingly conserved in all HA subtypes, while the remaining glycosites were unique to their subtypes. Two to four conserved glycosites were found in the stalk domain of NA, but these are affected by the deletion of specific stalk domain sequences. Another highly conserved glycosite appeared at the top center of tetrameric global domain, while the others glycosites were distributed around the global domain. Here we present a detailed investigation of the distribution and the evolutionary pattern of the glycosites in the envelope glycoproteins of IVs, and further focus on the H5N1 virus and conclude that the glycosites in H5N1 have become more complicated in HA and less influential in NA in the last five years.
Dependable End-to-End Delay Constraints for Real-Time Systems using SDNs

Real-time systems (RTS) require dependable delay guarantees on delivery of network packets. Traditional approaches for providing such guarantees for mission critical applications require the use of expensive custom built hardware and software resources. We propose a novel framework that reduces the management and integration overheads of the traditional approaches by leveraging the capabilities (especially global visibility and management) of Software-defined networking (SDN) architectures. Given the specifications of flows requiring real-time guarantees, our framework synthesizes paths through the network and associated switch configurations that can meet the requisite delay requirements for real-time flows. Using exhaustive simulations as well as emulations with real switch software, we show the feasibility of our approach.
Benefits of Walking for Obese Women in the Prevention of Bone and Joint Disorders

The incidence of obesity in the United States is at epidemic levels (Flegal, 1999). More than half of adults are overweight or obese, with an 80% increase in women with BMIs > 40 (Grundy et al., 1999;Leermakers, Dunn, & Blair, 2000). Physical activity is a common strategy for weight loss, but activity levels in more than 60% of adults are not sufficient to provide appropriate health benefits (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2003). Women are usually less active than men (CDC, 2003; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [USDHHS], 2000). Many obese individuals engage in physical activity programs only to return to unhealthy behaviors. Walking is one of the most beneficial and easiest ways for obese women to increase their physical activity. This article reviews the literature on bone and joint benefits of walking for obese women. Information from this review is important for the future design of health-promotion interventions and physical activity programs for obese women.
A Review of Recent Advances in Surface Defect Detection using Texture analysis Techniques

In this paper, we systematically review recent advances in surface inspection using computer vision and image processing techniques, particularly those based on texture analysis methods. The aim is to review the state-of-the-art techniques for the purposes of visual inspection and decision making schemes that are able to discriminate the features extracted from normal and defective regions. This field is so vast that it is impossible to cover all the aspects of visual inspection. This paper focuses on a particular but important subset which generally treats visual surface inspection as texture analysis problems. Other topics related to visual inspection such as imaging system and data acquisition are out of the scope of this survey. The surface defects are loosely separated into two types. One is local textural irregularities which is the main concern for most visual surface inspection applications. The other is global deviation of colour and/or texture, where local pattern or texture does not exhibit abnormalities. We refer this type of defects as shade or tonality problem. The second type of defects have been largely neglected until recently, particularly when colour imaging system has been widely used in visual inspection and where chromatic consistency plays an important role in quality control. The emphasis of this survey though is still on detecting local abnormalities, given the fact that majority of the reported works are dealing with the first type of defects. The techniques used to inspect textural abnormalities are discussed in four categories, statistical approaches, structural approaches, filter based methods, and model based approaches, with a comprehensive list of references to some recent works. Due to rising demand and practice of colour texture analysis in application to visual inspection, those works that are dealing with colour texture analysis are discussed separately. It is also worth noting that processing vector-valued data has its unique challenges, which conventional surface inspection methods have often ignored or do not encounter. We also compare classification approaches with novelty detection approaches at the decision making stage. Classification approaches often require supervised training and usually provide better performance than novelty detection based approaches where training is only carried out on defect-free samples. However, novelty detection is relatively easier to adapt and is particularly desirable when training samples are incomplete
Gaussian Z-interference channel with a relay link: Type II channel and sum capacity bound

This paper studies the Gaussian Z-interference channel with a rate-limited digital relay link from one receiver to the other receiver. In a companion paper, we dealt with the Type I channel, where the relay link goes from the interference-free receiver to the interfered receiver. It was shown that in the weak interference regime, each relay bit can improve the sum capacity by up to one bit asymptotically in the high signal-to-noise-ratio and interference-to-noise-ratio limit. In this paper, we study the Type II channel where the relay link goes from the interfered receiver to the interference-free receiver. The capacity region for such a channel is established in the strong interference regime; achievable rate regions are established in the moderately strong and weak interference regimes. In the weak interference regime, we show that in contrast to the Type I channel, the sum capacity improvement due to relaying for the Type II channel is upper bounded by at most half a bit, even as the relay link rate goes to infinity.
Speech Denoising via Low‐Rank and Sparse Matrix Decomposition

In this letter, we propose an unsupervised framework for speech noise reduction based on the recent development of low‐rank and sparse matrix decomposition. The proposed framework directly separates the speech signal from noisy speech by decomposing the noisy speech spectrogram into three submatrices: the noise structure matrix, the clean speech structure matrix, and the residual noise matrix. Evaluations on the Noisex‐92 dataset show that the proposed method achieves a signal‐to‐distortion ratio approximately 2.48 dB and 3.23 dB higher than that of the robust principal component analysis method and the non‐negative matrix factorization method, respectively, when the input SNR is −5 dB.
Pregroups and the French noun phrase

: We study mathematical and algorithmic properties of Lambek’s pregroups and illustrate them by analysing the French noun phrase. We establish robustness properties of pregroups and present a simple algorithm of complexity 3 n for deciding reduction in an arbitrary free pregroup as well as a linear algorithm covering a large class of language fragments. In the French noun phrase, the agreement of determiners, adjectives and nouns and word order are treated.
CRITICAL INQUIRY AND PROBLEM-SOLVING IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Whether they agree that we are now in a period of postmodernity, late modernity or high modernity (Kirk 1997), social commentators do agree that we live in times characterised by profound social and cultural changes which are recognisable globally but reach into the everyday lives of individual. The nature of these changes is in large part attributed to enormous advances in technology which have allowed for the rapid processing and transmission of information within and across countries and cultures. On one hand, the greater accessibility of information from a larger range of sources has exposed different points of view and thus provided more spaces for the challenging of taken-for-granted truths. At the same time, however, the ubiquitous presence of television and other forms of electronic media have provided a context in which populations can be persuaded to particular points of view, which include ways of understanding health and the values and meanings associated with physical activity and sport. For individuals the information explosion, rapid changes in values across and between generations and social groups, and exposure to a wide range of values, produces a world in which knowledge is less certain and in which identities are no longer experienced as fixed and constant (Fernandez-Balboa 1997). These uncertainties extend to work, health, livelihoods, relationships and so. Living in such times has effects on how young people think about and do schooling. In Britain, Furlong and Cartmel (1997) have linked these changes to the concept of the risk society (Beck 1992), in which traditional and institutional forms of social and economic relationships have become fragmented and individuals bear the responsibility and cost of shaping their lives. Rather than follow a predetermined linear trajectory, young people are now called on to balance their multiple involvements in study, employment, relationships and leisure; they are active in constructing their own lives. Wyn and Dwyer (1999) and others (Du Bois-Reymond 1998) call this a 'choice biography', emphasising the extent to which
SomamiR 2.0: a database of cancer somatic mutations altering microRNA–ceRNA interactions

SomamiR 2.0 (http://compbio.uthsc.edu/SomamiR) is a database of cancer somatic mutations in microRNAs (miRNA) and their target sites that potentially alter the interactions between miRNAs and competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNA) including mRNAs, circular RNAs (circRNA) and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA). Here, we describe the recent major updates to the SomamiR database. We expanded the scope of the database by including somatic mutations that impact the interactions between miRNAs and two classes of non-coding RNAs, circRNAs and lncRNAs. Recently, a large number of miRNA target sites have been discovered by newly emerged high-throughput technologies for mapping the miRNA interactome. We have mapped 388 247 somatic mutations to the experimentally identified miRNA target sites. The updated database also includes a list of somatic mutations in the miRNA seed regions, which contain the most important guiding information for miRNA target recognition. A recently developed webserver, miR2GO, was integrated with the database to provide a seamless pipeline for assessing functional impacts of somatic mutations in miRNA seed regions. Data and functions from multiple sources including biological pathways and genome-wide association studies were updated and integrated with SomamiR 2.0 to make it a better platform for functional analysis of somatic mutations altering miRNA–ceRNA interactions.
Optimized inducible shRNA and CRISPR/Cas9 platforms for in vitro studies of human development using hPSCs

Inducible loss of gene function experiments are necessary to uncover mechanisms underlying development, physiology and disease. However, current methods are complex, lack robustness and do not work in multiple cell types. Here we address these limitations by developing single-step optimized inducible gene knockdown or knockout (sOPTiKD or sOPTiKO) platforms. These are based on genetic engineering of human genomic safe harbors combined with an improved tetracycline-inducible system and CRISPR/Cas9 technology. We exemplify the efficacy of these methods in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), and show that generation of sOPTiKD/KO hPSCs is simple, rapid and allows tightly controlled individual or multiplexed gene knockdown or knockout in hPSCs and in a wide variety of differentiated cells. Finally, we illustrate the general applicability of this approach by investigating the function of transcription factors (OCT4 and T), cell cycle regulators (cyclin D family members) and epigenetic modifiers (DPY30). Overall, sOPTiKD and sOPTiKO provide a unique opportunity for functional analyses in multiple cell types relevant for the study of human development. Highlighted article: Novel optimized inducible knockdown and knockout platforms are developed and used to assess gene function in human pluripotent stem cells and their differentiated progeny.