Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Age on Blood Rheology in Sickle Cell Anaemia and Sickle Cell Haemoglobin C Disease: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objectives Blood rheology plays a key role in the pathophysiology of sickle cell anaemia (SS) and sickle cell haemoglobin C disease (SC), but its evolution over the lifespan is unknown. Materials and Methods Blood viscosity, red blood cell (RBC) deformability and aggregation, foetal haemoglobin (HbF) and haematocrit were measured in 114 healthy individuals (AA), 267 SS (161 children + 106 adults) and 138 SC (74 children + 64 adults) patients. Results Our results showed that 1) RBC deformability is at its maximal value during the early years of life in SS and SC populations, mainly because HbF level is also at its peak, 2) during childhood and adulthood, hydroxycarbamide treatment, HbF level and gender modulated RBC deformability in SS patients, independently of age, 3) blood viscosity is higher in older SS and SC patients compared to younger ones and 4) haematocrit decreases as SS patients age. Conclusion The hemorheological changes detected in older patients could play a role in the progressive development of several chronic disorders in sickle cell disease, whose prevalence increases with age. Retarding these age-related haemorheological impairments, by using suitable drugs, may minimize the risks of vaso-occlusive events and chronic disorders.
Generating Chaos from A System of Two Stable First Order Conventional Digital Phase Locked Loops

A technique for obtaining chaotic response from a stable first order conventional digital phase locked loop (DPLL) driven by another stable first order conventional DPLL has been reported in this paper. The dynamics of the driven system has been characterized using the dynamical measures of Lyapunov exponent and Correlation dimension. It is found that the resultant chaos is low dimensional, which ensures the application potentiality of the system.
Acoustic based safety emergency vehicle detection for intelligent transport systems

A system has been investigated for the detection of incoming direction of an emergency vehicle. Acoustic detection methods based on a cross microphone array have been implemented. It is shown that source detection based on time delay estimation outperforms sound intensity techniques, although both techniques perform well for the application. The relaying of information to the driver as a warning signal has been investigated through the use of ambisonic technology and a 4 speaker array which is ubiquitous in most modern vehicles. Simulations show that accurate warning information may be relayed to the driver and afford correct action.
OPTIMAL CONTROL OF PROPERTY RIGHT OF RESOURCES WHEN TWO EXTERNALITIES (ENVIRONMENTAL PROPERTY RIGHT DISTORTION AND PRODUCTION POLLUTION DISTORTION) CO-EXIST: THE SMALL ECONOMY CASE

Few studies investigate how environmental property right and production pollution distortions influence the economy when these two externalities co-exist. This case falls into a standard "second best theory". That is, it is important that pollution control policy should be coordinated with the reduction of environmental distortions. Given the non-linearity of production pollution distortion, the optimal property right may not be perfect. To guarantee the achievement of optimal total income via optimal property right, the monitoring agency should take into account the whole system and enforce different monitoring mechanisms in diversified situations. Empirical analysis is proposed on the reef fishery of Pacific island economies and the world.
A new photonic crystal patch antenna based on EBG structure

In this paper, the antenna's performances of EBG (electronic band-gap) structure are well researched, based on FDTD (finite-difference time-domain) method. We designed a springboard structure patch antenna based on EBG (electronic band-gap) structure. After design and experiment, compared with the typical mushroom structure patch antenna based on EBG (electronic band-gap) structure, the results show that the springboard structure patch antenna has a considerable improvement in the return loss of patch antenna and a slight increase in the gain of the antenna. Conclusions indicate that the new springboard structure, relating to the mushroom structure patch antenna, can improve the return loss more effectively, and can improve the gain, and there will be a better effect when it is applied to the antenna.
PAPR reduction for OFDM systems using clipping and square rooting techniques

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an efficient modulation technique for high data rate communication systems. Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) is one of majors problems in OFDM system. In this paper, a joint clipping and square rooting (SQRT) method has been suggested and investigated for PAPR reduction of OFDM signal. The SQRT process changes the statistical characteristics of the OFDM signal from Rayleigh distribution to Gaussian like distribution after the clipping process. This change in statistical distribution results changes of both the peak and average power values of OFDM signals, and consequently reduces significantly the PAPR value. This technique decreases the bit error rate (BER) slightly while significantly reduces the PAPR value. For 64-QAM OFDM system with 1024 subcarriers, up to 7 dB PAPR reductions with fixed degradation in bit error rate (BER) equal to 2.5 dB can be achieved by combining both clipping and square rooting scheme.
Perception of nutritional risks (malnutrition, obesity) by vietnamese mothers

Literature on risk perception shows that the gap between knowledge and behavior may not come from a knowledge deficit but be related to different rationalities between experts and laymen. In this study we developed a psychometric questionnaire adapted to nutritional risks (malnutrition, obesity), which allows to identify socio-psychological characteristics influencing risk perception of Vietnamese mothers of school-aged children. First results show differences between mothers in the perceived dimensions of both risks, which could explain various risk management logics. It thus appears necessary to give targeted information to the various clusters according to their risk perception instead of general communication. (Resume d'auteur)
Performance evaluation of the microPET focus: a third-generation microPET scanner dedicated to animal imaging.

UNLABELLED The microPET Focus is the latest generation microPET system dedicated to high-resolution animal imaging and incorporates several changes to enhance its performance. This study evaluated the basic performance of the scanner and compared it with the Primate (P4) and Rodent (R4) models. METHODS The system consists of 168 lutetium oxyorthosilicate (LSO) detectors arranged in 4 contiguous rings, with a 25.8-cm diameter and a 7.6-cm axial length. Each detector consists of a 12 x 12 LSO crystal array of 1.51 x 1.51 x 10.00 mm3 elements. The scintillation light is transmitted to position-sensitive photomultiplier tubes via optical fiber bundles. The system was evaluated for its energy and spatial resolutions, sensitivity, and noise equivalent counting rate. Phantoms and animals of varying sizes were scanned to evaluate its imaging capability. RESULTS The energy resolution averages 18.5% for the entire system. Reconstructed image resolution is 1.3-mm full width at half maximum (FWHM) at the center of field of view (CFOV) and remains under 2 mm FWHM within the central 5-cm-diameter FOV in all 3 dimensions. The absolute sensitivity of the system is 3.4% at the CFOV for an energy window of 250-750 keV and a timing window of 10 ns. The noise equivalent counting-rate performance reaches 645 kcps for a mouse-size phantom using 250- to 750-keV and 6-ns settings. Emission images of a micro-Derenzo phantom demonstrate the improvement in image resolution compared with previous models. Animal studies exhibit the capability of the system in studying disease models using mouse, rat, and nonhuman primates. CONCLUSION The Focus has significantly improved performance over the previous models in all areas evaluated. This system represents the state-of-the-art scintillator-based animal PET scanner currently available and is expected to advance the potential of small animal PET.
HYBRID-BRIDGE: Efficiently Bridging the Semantic Gap in Virtual Memory Introspection via Decoupled Execution and Training Memoization

Recent advances show that it is possible to reuse the legacy binary code to bridge the semantic gap in virtual machine introspection (VMI). However, existing such VMI solutions often have high performance overhead (up to hundreds of times slowdown), which significantly hinders their practicality especially for cloud providers who wish to perform real-time monitoring of the virtual machine states. As such, this paper presents HYBRIDBRIDGE, a new system that uses an efficient decoupled execution and training memoization approach to automatically bridge the semantic gap. The key idea is to combine the strengths of both offline training based approach and online kernel data redirection based approach, with a novel training data memoization and fall back mechanism at hypervisor layer that decouples the expensive Taint Analysis Engine (TAE) from the execution of hardware-based virtualization and moves the TAE to softwarebased virtualization. The experimental results show that HYBRIDBRIDGE substantially improves the performance overhead of existing binary code reuse based VMI solutions with at least one order of magnitude for many of the tested benchmark tools including ps, netstat, and lsmod.
The Political Economy of Growth: A Review

This cursory literature review discusses the direct and indirect effects of institutions, governance, and democracy on economic growth, and the following conclusions are drawn. First, institutions and governance have a positive effect on growth. Even reforms that are less than comprehensive can stimulate, though not sustain, growth. Second, democracy neither promotes nor hampers growth directly. It secures stability and resilience in growth. It also exerts impacts on sources of growth but its net effect remains inconclusive. There remains unanswered the question of why institutions and governance matter but not democracy does not. The difference may be partly due to negative effects on investment and labor supply as well as the low credibility of young or partial democracies.
Forced Notch Signaling Inhibits Commissural Axon Outgrowth in the Developing Chick Central Nerve System

Background A collection of in vitro evidence has demonstrated that Notch signaling plays a key role in the growth of neurites in differentiated neurons. However, the effects of Notch signaling on axon outgrowth in an in vivo condition remain largely unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, the neural tubes of HH10-11 chick embryos were in ovo electroporated with various Notch transgenes of activating or inhibiting Notch signaling, and then their effects on commissural axon outgrowth across the floor plate midline in the chick developing central nerve system were investigated. Our results showed that forced expression of Notch intracellular domain, constitutively active form of RBPJ, or full-length Hes1 in the rostral hindbrain, diencephalon and spinal cord at stage HH10-11 significantly inhibited commissural axon outgrowth. On the other hand, inhibition of Notch signaling by ectopically expressing a dominant-negative form of RBPJ promoted commissural axonal growth along the circumferential axis. Further results revealed that these Notch signaling-mediated axon outgrowth defects may be not due to the alteration of axon guidance since commissural axon marker TAG1 was present in the axons in floor plate midline, and also not result from the changes in cell fate determination of commissural neurons since the expression of postmitotic neuron marker Tuj1 and specific commissural markers TAG1 and Pax7 was unchanged. Conclusions/Significance We first used an in vivo system to provide evidence that forced Notch signaling negatively regulates commissural axon outgrowth.
Structural Biology and Crystallization Communications Comparative Analysis of Glutaredoxin Domains from Bacterial Opportunistic Pathogens

Glutaredoxin proteins (GLXRs) are essential components of the glutathione system that reductively detoxify substances such as arsenic and peroxides and are important in the synthesis of DNA via ribonucleotide reductases. NMR solution structures of glutaredoxin domains from two Gram-negative opportu-nistic pathogens, Brucella melitensis and Bartonella henselae, are presented. These domains lack the N-terminal helix that is frequently present in eukaryotic GLXRs. The conserved active-site cysteines adopt canonical proline/tyrosine-stabilized geometries. A difference in the angle of-helix 2 relative to the-sheet surface and the presence of an extended loop in the human sequence suggests potential regulatory regions and/or protein–protein interaction motifs. This observation is consistent with mutations in this region that suppress defects in GLXR–ribonucleotide reductase interactions. These differences between the human and bacterial forms are adjacent to the dithiol active site and may permit species-selective drug design.
Spatial-color pixel classification by spectral clustering for color image segmentation

This work lies within the scope of color image segmentation by spatial-color pixel classification. Classes of pixels are difficult to be identified when the color distributions of the different objects highly overlap in the color space and when the color points give rise to non-convex clusters. We propose to apply spectral classification to regroup the pixels which represent the same regions, into classes. Spectral clustering achieves a spectral decomposition of a similarity matrix in order to construct an eigenspace in which the clusters are expected to be well separated. The originality of this paper lies in the similarity matrix which is derived from a spatial-color compactness function. This function takes into account both the distribution of colors in the color space and the spatial location of colors in the image plane. Experimental tests on synthetic and real images show that the spectral clustering technique associated with this spatial-color compactness function leads to promising results for segmentation purposes.
ADAPTIVE BLIND SOURCE SEPARATION IN ORDER SPECIFIED BY STOCHASTIC PROPERTIES

In adaptive blind source separation, the order of recovered source signals is unpredictable due to order indeterminacy. However, it is sometimes desired that the reconstructed source signals be arranged in specified order according to their stochastic properties. To this end, some unsymmetry is introduced to the equilibrium point, and a new unsymmetrical natural gradient algorithm is proposed, which can separate the source signals in desired order. The validity of the proposed algorithm is confirmed through extensive computer simulations.
Finding Rare Web Pages by Relevancy and Atypicality in a Category

In this paper, we propose rarity of a Web page in a category given by a user to find useful information that a few people know. A rare Web page is a page that belongs to a given category and that is atypical in the category. We define a probability that the page is a rare Web page in the given category as a rarity score. The rarity score is a product of a relevancy score and an a typicality score. The relevancy is a probability that a Web page belongs to a category given by a user. The a typicality is a conditional probability that a page is atypical in the category when it belongs to the category. Both probabilities are calculated by using tags of social bookmark services and words in Web pages. We evaluated the proposed relevancy score by classifying whether Web pages belong to a certain category. We also evaluated the proposed rarity as a metric for ranking Web pages, and compared the rankings by relevancy and a typicality. We confirmed usefulness of the rarity score to find relevant and atypical pages.
AN EEFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF SEMANTIC METADATA REPOSITORIES USING TEMPORAL BASED KALMAN FILTER ON WEB ARCHITECTURE

A major concern incorporating data accesses for web search classification is the need for accurate user result, optimality solution on semantic ontology search with combination of keyword. These concerns often make it difficult to produce results relevant to the user query with maximal metadata repositories. Moreover, with multiple pages produced as a result of current standard search on web domain, harness the augmented filtering potential relevant to the user query. To present an effective metadata managing repositories on web domain, Temporal-based Kalman Filter on Web Architecture (TKF-WA) is proposed in this paper. TKF-WA addresses a metadata based semantic ontology search on web domain. Initially, semantic learning object link class is developed to classify the set of keywords automatically for effective management of metadata repositories. The metadata links the related learning objects internally and manages maximal metadata repositories. The managed metadata repositories on Web Architecture present a Temporal-based Kalman Filtering algorithm to remove the irrelevant pages which are not related or insignificant to the user query. Temporal-based Kalman Filtering performs the series of measurement based on time with metadata repositories to satisfy the user query set. Kalman Filtering is temporal based in the proposed web architecture to not only handle the regular (i.e., sentence-based) but also the irregular (i.e., keyword-based) query set. Experiment conducted on IRIS2 dataset with factors such as system utility rate on filtering, search retrieval efficiency and average response time.
Diversity and distribution of sandflies (Diptera: Psychodidae: Phlebotominae) in a military area in the state of Amazonas, Brazil

This study reports the distribution, ecotopes and fauna diversity of sandflies captured in five training bases on a military reserve in Manaus, state of Amazonas (AM). A total of 10,762 specimens were collected, which were distributed among 58 species, with the highest number recorded at Base Instruction 1 (BI1). A higher rate of species richness was found at the Base Instruction Boina Rajada and low levels of diversity associated with a high abundance index with the clear dominance of Lutzomyia umbratilis, Lutzomyia ruii and Lutzomyia anduzei were found at BI1. The abundance of Lu. umbratilis raises the possibility of outbreaks of American cutaneous leishmaniasis by the main vector of the disease in AM.
The Effect of Economic Condition on Civil Unrest: New Insights from Agent Based Modeling

Title of Document: The Effect of Economic Condition on Civil Unrest: New Insights from Agent Based Modeling Charles Thomas Harry, PhD, 2013 Directed By: Professor, John Steinbruner, Department of Public Policy On the morning of December 17 th 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi took a can of gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of the local governor’s office in protest of having his cart and its inventory confiscated by a corrupt police force. What began as act of individual protest against the Tunisian state evolved into mass demonstrations across the Arab world significantly altering the political landscape. While researchers have explored links between economic determinants and the outbreak of civil conflict, use of large datasets and econometric analysis alone has been unable to draw the indelible connections scholars had hoped. The use of country wide data are seen as insufficient in capturing localized dynamics of civil violence calling into question the applicability of current conceptual frameworks. Case study and data collection at sufficient granularity are now necessary steps in the further exploration of this topic. To help develop our understanding of how localized conflict emerges this dissertation steps away from the use of traditional case study and econometric analysis to develop two agent based models of protest that allow exploration to changes in the average level of utility, its distribution, and growth on the onset, size, and frequency of protest. This dissertation finds that the level and distribution of utility affects the onset, evolution, magnitude, and frequency of civil instability. Further, empirical methods explored to date fail to account for significant micro dynamic behavior that influences the emergence of mass protest. This dissertation extends earlier modeling work on civil protest and discusses findings on how utility levels in a system of agents affect the magnitude, frequency, onset, and structure of civil conflict. The most surprising finding is the bifurcated relationship between utility distribution and the emergence of civil conflict. This specific result provides a plausible explanation for why empirical analysis has thus far been unable to correlate income inequality and civil violence. THE EFFECT OF ECONOMIC CONDITION ON CIVIL UNREST: NEW INSIGHTS FROM AGENT BASED MODELLING
A Tangible Difference : Participatory Design Studies Informing a Designers ’ Outpost

In our previous studies into web design [11], we found that pens, paper, walls, and tables were the primary tools used for explaining, developing, and communicating ideas during the early phases of design. One common practice was to produce information architectures using paper on walls. This practice inspired us to work towards The Designers’ Outpost, a tangible user interface that combines the affordances of paper and large physical workspaces with the advantages of electronic media to support information design. In this paper, we describe a series of three participatory design studies that explored the combination of physical and electronic media.