Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physical, Thermal, and Spectroscopic Characterization of Biofield Energy Treated Methyl-2-Naphthyl Ether

Methyl-2-naphthyl ether (MNE) is an organic compound and used as the primary moiety for the synthesis of several antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory agents. This study was attempted to evaluate the impact of biofield energy treatment on the physical, thermal, and spectroscopic properties of MNE. The study was carried out in two groups i.e., control and treated. The treated group was subjected to Mr. Trivedi’s biofield treatment. Afterward, the control and treated samples of MNE were evaluated using X-ray diffraction (XRD), surface area analyzer, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogravimetric analysis-derivative thermogravimetric analysis (TGA-DTG), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy. The XRD study exhibited the decrease in average crystallite size by 30.70%. The surface area analysis showed 5.32% decrease in surface area of the treated sample with respect to the control. The DSC thermogram of treated MNE exhibited no significant change in the melting temperature; however, the latent heat of fusion was slightly increased (0.83%) after biofield treatment as compared to the control sample. The TGA analysis showed the onset temperature of thermal degradation at 158â in the control sample that was reduced to 124â after biofield treatment. The result showed about 21.52% decrease in onset temperature of thermal degradation of treated MNE as compared to the control. Similarly, the end-set temperature of thermal degradation was also reduced by 13.51% after biofield treatment with respect to the control. The FT-IR and UV spectroscopic studies did not show any changes in the wavenumber and wavelength, respectively in treated MNE with respect to the control. Overall, the XRD, surface area and thermal analysis suggest that biofield treatment has the impact on physical and thermal properties of the treated MNE as compared to the control.
The Colony Structure and Population Biology of Invasive Ants

Abstract: Ants are among the most widespread and damaging of introduced species. Many invasive ants share a suite of characteristics that facilitate their introduction, establishment, and subsequent range expansion. One feature of particular importance is the ability to form numerically large, ecologically dominant colonies. We review the population biology of invasive ants, focusing on the role of sociality and colony structure in their success. Specifically, we considered different hypotheses that have been proposed for the observed transitions in social structure of the two most well‐studied ant invaders, the Argentine ant ( Linepithema humile) and the red imported fire ant ( Solenopsis invicta). In both species, genetic changes during or subsequent to introduction have led to alterations in social behavior and colony structure; these, in turn, have promoted the invasive success of introduced populations. Although many other invasive ant species appear to have similar forms of social organization, little is known about the basic population biology of these species.
Fully Secure Identity Based Proxy Re-Encryption Schemes in the Standard Model

A proxy re-encryption scheme allows the proxy to transform ciphertext computed under one public key into the different ciphertext that can be decrypted by using another public key. Recently, many identity-based proxy re-encryption schemes have been proposed. However, all of these schemes are only proved secure in the random oracle not in the standard model. In this paper, Based on Waters's identity based encryption, an identity based proxy re-encryption scheme is proposed that is proved fully secure without the random model. The proposed scheme's security can be reduced to the decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption.
Stroke Case Fatality Shows Seasonal Variation Regardless of Risk Factor Status in a Japanese Population: 15-Year Results from the Takashima Stroke Registry

Background: Seasonal variation in fatality caused by stroke was examined using 15 years of data from a stroke registry of a Japanese population. Methods: Data were obtained from the Takashima Stroke Registry, which covers approximately 55,000 residents in central Japan. There were 1,650 registered cases of first-ever stroke between 1988 and 2002. 7- and 28-day fatality rates and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for winter, spring, summer and autumn. After adjusting for gender, age at onset and risk factors, the hazard ratios for fatal strokes in winter, spring and autumn were calculated, with summer serving as the reference. Results: For cerebral infarction, the highest 7- and 28-day fatality rates occurred during spring and winter, where they were more than double the rate during summer. The severest strokes were also more likely to occur during winter and spring. A high spring and winter hazard ratio for 28-day mortality was present in both lacunar and nonlacunar subtypes, in both genders and in subjects <65 and ≥65 years of age. No apparent seasonal pattern was observed for cerebral hemorrhage or subarachnoid hemorrhage. The spring and winter excess fatality persisted even after adjusting for age, gender and risk factors. Conclusion: Patients who suffer an ischemic stroke during winter or spring have a poorer prognosis. Further investigation is needed to determine the factors that explain this excess risk.
On fast large-scale program analysis in Datalog

Designing and crafting a static program analysis is challenging due to the complexity of the task at hand. Among the challenges are modelling the semantics of the input language, finding suitable abstractions for the analysis, and handwriting efficient code for the analysis in a traditional imperative language such as C++. Hence, the development of static program analysis tools is costly in terms of development time and resources for real world languages. To overcome, or at least alleviate the costs of developing a static program analysis, Datalog has been proposed as a domain specific language (DSL). With Datalog, a designer expresses a static program analysis in the form of a logical specification. While a domain specific language approach aids in the ease of development of program analyses, it is commonly accepted that such an approach has worse runtime performance than handcrafted static analysis tools. In this work, we introduce a new program synthesis methodology for Datalog specifications to produce highly efficient monolithic C++ analyzers. The synthesis technique requires the re-interpretation of the semi-naive evaluation as a scaffolding for translation using partial evaluation. To achieve high-performance, we employ staged-compilation techniques and specialize the underlying relational data structures for a given Datalog specification. Experimentation on benchmarks for large-scale program analysis validates the superior performance of our approach over available Datalog tools and demonstrates our competitiveness with state-of-the-art handcrafted tools.
Feature selection and channel optimization for biometric identification based on visual evoked potentials

In recent years, biometric identification has received general concerns around the world, and become a frontal and hot topic in the information age. Among the internal biometric traits, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have emerged as a prominent characteristic due to the high security, uniqueness and impossibility to steal or mimic. In this paper, individual difference of visual evoked potentials (VEPs) with cognition task were investigated, in addition, a feature selection and channel optimization strategy was developed for the VEPs based biometric identification system, where three different methods, including genetic algorithm (GA), Fisher discriminant ratio (FDR), and recursive feature elimination (RFE) were employed. In our experiments with 20 healthy subjects, the classification accuracy by support vector machine (SVM) reached up to 97.25% with AR model parameters, compared to 96.25% before optimization, and 32 channels of most discriminative were eventually selected from 64 channels with best performance. Results in this study revealed the feasibility of VEPs based EEG to be used for biometric identification. The proposed optimization algorithm was shown to have the ability to effectively improve the identification accuracy as well as simplifying the system. Further investigate may provide a novel idea for the individual difference analysis of EEG and for its practical design and optimization in the field of biometrics in the future.
Empirical Evidences in Citation-Based Search Engines: Is Microsoft Academic Search dead?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the obsolescence process of Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) as well as the effects of this decline in the coverage of disciplines and journals, and their influence in the representativeness of organizations. Design/methodology/approach – The total number of records and those belonging to the most reputable journals (1,762) and organizations (346) according to the Field Rating indicator in each of the 15 fields and 204 sub-fields of MAS, have been collected and statistically analysed in March 2014, by means of an automated querying process via http, covering academic publications from 1700 to present. Findings – MAS has no longer been updated since 2013, although this phenomenon began to be glimpsed in 2011, when its coverage plummeted. Throughout 2014, indexing of new records is still ongoing, but at a minimum rate, without following any apparent pattern. Research limitations/implications – There are also retrospective records being indexed at present. In.
Phase Feedforward Control for Single-Phase Boost-Type SMR

In this letter, a phase feedforward control (PFFC) for a single-phase boost-type switching-mode rectifier is addressed. In the conventional input voltage feedforward loop, the feedforward signal is fixed regardless of the load level. The proposed phase feedforward signal adjusts according to the load level without sensing the load current. The simulated and experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed PFFC. Compared to a conventional feedforward signal, relatively small proportional gain can be used in the proposed PFFC without loss of current tracking performance, which would also increase the overall system immunity against noise.
Variations of ionospheric total electron content during the Chi‐Chi Earthquake

On 20 September 1999 UT (21 September in local time, LT) a large earthquake Mw=7.7 struck central Taiwan near the small town of Chi‐Chi. The greatest plasma frequency in the ionosphere, foF2, observed by the Chung‐Li ionosonde (25.0°N, 121.2°E) reveals three clear precursors at 1, 3, and 4 days prior to the earthquake. This paper examines the ionospheric total electron content (TEC) observed by a network of the global positioning system (GPS) receivers in Taiwan area. It is found that variations in foF2 and overhead TEC recorded at Chung‐Li have a similar tendency. Combining the data of the network of 13 GPS receivers, time, and spatial variations of TEC prior to the Chi‐Chi earthquake are examined. Results show that the equatorial anomaly crest moves equatorward and its TEC value significantly decreases 1, 3, and 4 days before the earthquake. A comparison between the disturbed and reference (previous 15‐day median) days confirms that TEC decreases significantly around the epicenter in the afternoons of these days. Finally, possible mechanisms are proposed and discussed.
Compressed K-Means for Large-Scale Clustering

Large-scale clustering has been widely used in many applications, and has received much attention. Most existing clustering methods suffer from both expensive computation and memory costs when applied to large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering method, dubbed compressed k-means (CKM), for fast large-scale clustering. Specifically, high-dimensional data are compressed into short binary codes, which are well suited for fast clustering. CKM enjoys two key benefits: 1) storage can be significantly reduced by representing data points as binary codes; 2) distance computation is very efficient using Hamming metric between binary codes. We propose to jointly learn binary codes and clusters within one framework. Extensive experimental results on four large-scale datasets, including two million-scale datasets demonstrate that CKM outperforms the state-of-the-art large-scale clustering methods in terms of both computation and memory cost, while achieving comparable clustering accuracy.
Learning Head-modifier Pairs to Improve Lexicalized Dependency Parsing on a Chinese Treebank

Due to the data sparseness problem, the lexical information from a treebank for a lexicalized parser could be insufficient. This paper proposes an approach to learn head-modifier pairs from a raw corpus, and to integrate them into a lexicalized dependency parser to parse a Chinese Treebank. Experimental results show that this approach not only enlarged the coverage of bi-lexical dependency, but also improved the accuracy of dependency parsing significantly.
Sensory Tuning of Thalamic and Intracortical Excitation in Primary Visual Cortex and Novel Methods for Circuit Analysis

The mammalian brain contains many regions in which feedforward excitatory afferents impinge on neurons that are interconnected by recurrent excitatory circuits. The functional in vivo properties of feedforward versus recurrent excitation are poorly understood due to the technical difficulty of distinguishing between these two sources of excitation in individual neurons. To address these issues I developed novel techniques for measuring the in vivo functional properties of the specific neuronal circuits that impinge onto individual neurons. Chapters 1 and 2 describe how feedforward and recurrent excitation onto individual neurons in the mouse primary visual cortex respond to visual stimuli. In the primary visual cortex, individual neurons are tuned to specific features of visual stimuli namely their orientation, direction of movement, and retinal location of bright and dark regions. I examined the extent to which these sensory tuning properties are present in the thalamic versus intracortical excitation onto single cortical neurons using in vivo intracellular recording techniques during optogenetic silencing of cortical excitatory neurons to isolate thalamic excitation. These results reveal that the main tuning properties observed in the primary visual cortex, namely receptive field structure, orientation selectivity, and direction selectivity, are already present in the thalamic excitation onto individual neurons. Estimation of the intracortical excitation from the total excitation recorded in the absence of cortical silencing revealed that thalamic and intracortical excitation share similar tuning properties demonstrating that tuned feedforward thalamic excitation is amplified by recurrent intracortical excitation. Chapter 3 describes a novel photolabeling method that allows neurons with known in vivo functional properties to be studied in in vitro brain slice preparations in order to reveal their cellular, synaptic, and circuit properties. This technique helps bridge the gap between systems and cellular neuroscience and opens up new possibilities for understanding how neuronal circuits underlie neuronal function in the intact brain. Together, these novel experimental approaches allow us to understand a fundamental aspect of neuronal circuit operation: the transfer and integration of information via synaptic connections. Such knowledge will aid in our understanding of the neuronal mechanisms underlying sensation, learning, and behavior
“Be Patient, Dear Mother … Wait For Me”

In social reality, illness and death occur in myriad ways, yet Hollywood films have historically preferred spectacular, violent death over realist depictions of the terminal stages of life. Yet an ever-growing number of popular films, which I term neo-infirmity films, incorporate episodes of women characters debilitated by illness or injury. Operating at the intersection of melodrama and realism, the scenes are instrumental in staging contemporary cinema's gender politics. I argue that women's deathbed and hospital-bed scenes in contemporary cinema validate anew the maternal role and the figure of the mother, transporting the woman-centered discursive space of melodrama into narrative terrain often hostile to women's presence. Through this relocation, the films emphasize her importance to sons in particular (and less often to daughters, husbands, and the larger family unit). Many such scenes simultaneously undermine women's agency, reducing mothers to principally symbolic, literally immobile roles. Ailing women can become catalysts for male psychological transformation occurring through grief, action, or both in combination. In all, such scenes speak to continued ambivalence surrounding women's representation in popular cinema, and to continued patrolling of the boundaries of female power. This essay compares selected texts from contemporary Hollywood cinema, alongside three parallel discourses that also deploy melodramatic modes of articulation: nonfiction amateur video as relayed via television news programs, international art cinema, and US independent cinema. Arguing for homologies across multiple fields of textual production, I seek through this comparison to generate insights into the cultural work done by filmic representation.
Topic and user based refinement for competitive perspective identification

The competitive perspective implied in online texts reflect people's conflicts in their stances and viewpoints. Competitive perspective identification aims to determine people's inclinations to one of multiple competitive perspectives, which is an important research issue and can facilitate many security-related applications. As the word usage of different perspectives is distinct in various topics, in this paper, we first proposes a supervised topic-refined method for competitive perspective identification. Our method refines perspective classifiers with the document-topic distributions mined from texts. To reduce human labor in data annotation, we further extend our work in a semi-supervised manner and propose a user-based bootstrapping framework. As the perspectives people hold are relatively stable, our bootstrapping process leverages the user-level perspective consistency to select high-quality classified texts from unlabeled corpus and boost the perspective classifier iteratively. Experimental studies show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in identifying the competitive perspectives of online texts.
When may systematic reviews and meta-analyses be considered reliable?

In a systematic review in this issue of the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, Stevanovic et al. compare the event rate of upper airway adverse events and recovery after desflurane in comparison with other volatile anaesthetics and propofol in patients undergoing general surgery with a laryngeal mask airway (LMA). The authors found desflurane comparable with other agents with regard to upper airway reactions, but desflurane appeared to offer a significantly faster emergence from general anaesthesia. Furthermore, the authors advocate the need for large multicentre trials because large inter-study variations were detected. In light of such uncertainty, does inclusion of less than 600 patients in most of the primary and secondary outcome statistics across 13 trials in this systematic review justify drawing firm conclusions or even partially answer the clinical questions of interest? To answer the above questions, one should look beyond the numbers and reflect on some fundamental issues. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses serve the important purpose of identifying potential benefits or harms of an intervention and ideally provide the answers in a rapid and reliable manner. They are often the cornerstone of clinical practice guidelines and may serve as a justification for funding of further trials.
Evaluation of face recognition system using Support Vector Machine

Face recognition is an interest subject in pattern recognition study for machine learning applications. It is a non-intrusive system which requires minimal participation from user in order to perform identification tasks. In this paper we present a face recognition system based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) which acts as a multiclass classifier. The performance of this system is evaluated using Yale database with various facial expressions and illumination conditions. This method train and test the images with raw image data of 625 features. The result has achieved an encouraging recognition rates compares to Principal Component Analysis method (PCA).
A 180MW, 450kV solid state modulator based on Press Pack IGBT technology

A new solid state power modulator for free electron laser applications is studied. This modulator comprises a 4.5kV Press Pack IGBT module that can handle pulsed currents higher than 3kA. The reliability of this module concerning current distribution among the paralleled IGBT chips is studied, where the internal parasitic components and couplings causing the asymmetries are extracted by means of the Partial Element Equivalent Circuit method. Simulated waveforms showing the currents in each IGBT chip during switching transients are revised together with the dissipated losses for different pulse durations.
Dynamical analysis of simple models with flexible body for bounding in quadrupeds

The observation of quadruped animals has suggested that the body flexibility is important for the bounding gait. In particular, the body flexibility is assumed to be crucial for determining the ground reaction force (GRF). In this paper, we investigated the dynamic effect of the body flexibility on the GRF in quadruped bounding with simple physical models by focusing on the vertical motion. More specifically, we first showed that the body flexibility reduces the GRF using a simple two legged model in sagittal plane. Next, to clarify the GRF reduction mechanism, we further simplified the model, which has only one leg. This allowed us to analytically obtain periodic solutions. Based on the solutions, we investigated the mechanism that the body flexibility reduces the GRF during quadrupedal bounding.