Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three-Color Chromosome Painting as Seen through the Eyes of mFISH: Another Look at Radiation-Induced Exchanges and Their Conversion to Whole-Genome Equivalency

Whole-chromosome painting (WCP) typically involves the fluorescent staining of a small number of chromosomes. Consequently, it is capable of detecting only a fraction of exchanges that occur among the full complement of chromosomes in a genome. Mathematical corrections are commonly applied to WCP data in order to extrapolate the frequency of exchanges occurring in the entire genome [whole-genome equivalency (WGE)]. However, the reliability of WCP to WGE extrapolations depends on underlying assumptions whose conditions are seldom met in actual experimental situations, in particular the presumed absence of complex exchanges. Using multi-fluor fluorescence in situ hybridization (mFISH), we analyzed the induction of simple exchanges produced by graded doses of 137Cs gamma rays (0–4 Gy), and also 1.1 GeV 56Fe ions (0–1.5 Gy). In order to represent cytogenetic damage as it would have appeared to the observer following standard three-color WCP, all mFISH information pertaining to exchanges that did not specifically involve chromosomes 1, 2, or 4 was ignored. This allowed us to reconstruct dose–responses for three-color apparently simple (AS) exchanges. Using extrapolation methods similar to those derived elsewhere, these were expressed in terms of WGE for comparison to mFISH data. Based on AS events, the extrapolated frequencies systematically overestimated those actually observed by mFISH. For gamma rays, these errors were practically independent of dose. When constrained to a relatively narrow range of doses, the WGE corrections applied to both 56Fe and gamma rays predicted genome-equivalent damage with a level of accuracy likely sufficient for most applications. However, the apparent accuracy associated with WCP to WGE corrections is both fortuitous and misleading. This is because (in normal practice) such corrections can only be applied to AS exchanges, which are known to include complex aberrations in the form of pseudosimple exchanges. When WCP to WGE corrections are applied to true simple exchanges, the results are less than satisfactory, leading to extrapolated values that underestimate the true WGE response by unacceptably large margins. Likely explanations for these results are discussed, as well as their implications for radiation protection. Thus, in seeming contradiction to notion that complex aberrations be avoided altogether in WGE corrections – and in violation of assumptions upon which these corrections are based – their inadvertent inclusion in three-color WCP data is actually required in order for them to yield even marginally acceptable results.
Geopolymer lightweight bricks manufactured from fly ash and foaming agent

This paper deals with the development of lightweight geopolymer bricks by using foaming agent and fly ash. The mix parameters analysed through a laboratory experiment with fix ratio of sodium silicate/sodium hydroxide solution mass ratio 2.5, fly ash/alkaline activator solution mass ratio 2.0, foaming agent/paste mass ratio 1:2 and molarity of sodium hydroxide solution used was 12M. Different curing temperature (Room Temperature, 60, 80) and foaming agent/water mass ratio (1:10 and 1:20) were studied. Compressive strength, density analysis, and water absorption has been investigated. The results show that the foamed geopolymer bricks with a lower foam/water mass ratio (1:10)and high curing temperature (80°C) leading to a better properties. Mixtures with a low density of around 1420 kg/m3 and a compressive strength of around 10 MPa were achieved.
FUSION OF GIS AND SAR STATISTICAL FEATURES FOR EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE MAPPING AT THE BLOCK SCALE

This work shows that multitemporal SAR data allows mapping earthquake damage in urban areas with an acceptable accuracy, once some ancillary information defining urban blocks is available. A statistical analysis of the parameters of the models representing backscatterer intensity or coherence values for each block may be used to discriminate between damaged and undamaged areas and, to some extent, to evaluate the damage. A comparison with a recently proposed supervised segmentation approach shows that the simpler, unsupervised methodology presented here can achieve comparable results.
Three‐dimensional anisotropic moisture absorption in quartz‐reinforced bismaleimide laminates

The three-dimensional anisotropic moisture absorption behavior of quartz-fiber-reinforced bismaleimide (BMI) laminates is investigated by collecting 21 months of experimental gravimetric data. Laminates of six, twelve, and forty plies and various planar aspect ratios are used to determine the three-dimensional anisotropic diffusion behavior when exposed to full immersion in distilled water at 25°C. The long-term moisture absorption behavior deviates from the widely used Fickian model, but can be accurately captured by the three-dimensional, anisotropic hindered diffusion model (3D HDM). Excellent agreement is achieved between experimental gravimetric data and the 3D HDM for all laminate thicknesses. Recovered model parameters are shown to slightly vary with laminate thickness due to the small changes in the cured-ply thickness. However, model parameters identified for a given laminate thickness are observed to accurately predict the absorption behavior of samples with different planar dimensions. Equilibrium moisture content of 1.72, 1.69, and 1.84% and corresponding diffusion hindrance coefficients of 0.807, 0.844, and 0.671 are recovered for six, twelve, and forty-ply laminates, respectively, thus confirming strong non-Fickian behavior. Moisture absorption parameters may be determined successfully at 16.5 months of immersion, before reaching approximately 85% of the equilibrium moisture content at 21 months. Subsequent gravimetric measurements up to 21 months are consistent with the predicted long-term behavior. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 54:137–146, 2014. © 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers
Ricin Trafficking in Plant and Mammalian Cells

Ricin is a heterodimeric plant protein that is potently toxic to mammalian and many other eukaryotic cells. It is synthesized and stored in the endosperm cells of maturing Ricinus communis seeds (castor beans). The ricin family has two major members, both, lectins, collectively known as Ricinus communis agglutinin ll (ricin) and Ricinus communis agglutinin l (RCA). These proteins are stored in vacuoles within the endosperm cells of mature Ricinus seeds and they are rapidly broken down by hydrolysis during the early stages of post-germinative growth. Both ricin and RCA traffic within the plant cell from their site of synthesis to the storage vacuoles, and when they intoxicate mammalian cells they traffic from outside the cell to their site of action. In this review we will consider both of these trafficking routes.
A novel rate-independent hysteresis model of a piezostack actuator using the congruency property

This paper presents a novel hysteresis prediction model for a piezostack actuator. The model proposed in this work is a type of rate-independent hysteresis and is formulated using the inherent congruency property which exists in most piezoelectric materials. Specifically, the model is established by exploiting the fact that the high-order hysteretic curve segment is congruent with its first-order one that is limited by the same consecutive maximum and minimum values of input. Thus, in order to successfully implement this model two discretized first-order datasets of the ascending and descending curves need to be experimentally identified in advance. Using both the identified datasets and the congruency property, a systematic approach for predicting the hysteresis of the piezostack actuator is then obtained in two cases of input voltage: monotonic ascending and monotonic descending. The developed model is experimentally realized in order to demonstrate the effectiveness on the hysteresis prediction. In the experiment, three waveforms of input excitation schemes—a triangular waveform of decreasing amplitude, a triangular waveform of increasing amplitude and a multi-extremes triangular waveform—are applied to the proposed model. The hysteresis characteristics of the piezostack actuator predicted from the proposed model are compared with those obtained from the classical Preisach model. It is shown that the proposed model gives better accuracy, less computation time for the hysteresis prediction and more feasibility to realize than the classical Preisach model.
Metamodel-Assisted Fast and Accurate Optimization of an OP-AMP for Biomedical Applications

The optimized OP-AMPs resulting out of a traditional flows, although may meet the given specifications after consuming significant design cycle time, do not guarantee an optimal system performance. In this paper, a three-step polynomial metamodel-assisted OP-AMP optimization flow is proposed to address these issues. The flow incorporate polynomial metamodeling, Verilog-AMS integration, and a customized Cuckoo Search optimization. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper for the first time presents such a design flow for state-of-the art OP-AMP optimization. Highly accurate and ultra-fast (~17000× speedup compared to traditional methods) polynomial metamodels are generated to estimate OP-AMP performance. An OP-AMP meta-macro model is constructed and is integrated into a Verilog-AMS module (called Verilog-AMS-POM) to facilitate fast time-domain simulations. The core optimization module is a customized Cuckoo Search algorithm which produces promising optimized results. The OP-AMP power dissipation is reduced from 252.8 μW to 65.5 μW (3.86× improvement).
International Migration and Women ’ s Reproductive Health in Mexico

We estimate the impact of international migration on contraceptive choice and pregnancy health of women in Mexico. We find that women belonging to migrant families have higher propensity to use contraceptive pills and condoms, lower pregnancy complications, higher probability of getting prenatal care and are more likely to get pregnancy check ups from a medical professional. We use historic state and municipality level migration and return migration as instruments for current migration decision to correct the potential self-selection involved in international migration. We argue that these results are robust to different specifications and estimation strategies and are not driven by individual or spatial omitted variables.
A Large Scale Video Surveillance System with Heterogeneous Information Fusion and Visualization for Wide Area Monitoring

Wide area monitoring for community and city can be a very challenging engineering task due to its scale and heterogeneity in sensor, algorithm, and visualization levels. Multi-modal cameras and algorithms have to be fused into compact presentation for a single operator to actively and effectively respond to anomaly events and jeopardy. This paper presents a distributed and scalable video surveillance system, subcontracted by intelligent surveillance components (ISCs) and visualization surveillance components (VSCs) in compliance with functional labors. The ISCs are high-level algorithms applying computer vision for behavioral analysis of human and vehicles. The VSCs constitute a multi-tier subsystem to visualize fused results of messages, key frames, streaming videos and geographic context information. The system helps the operator to focus attention on interested events gathered from distrusted ISCs and presented by VSCs on map and three-dimensional homographic views. Robustness and effectiveness of the system has been demonstrated by a test run of real scenarios deployed in a campus.
Fast approximation for peak power driven voltage partitioning in almost linear time

Voltage partitioning on functional units/blocks targeting peak power minimization has been demonstrated to be effective for energy reduction considering voltage island shutdown impact. However, the existing technique can only solve this NP-hard problem efficiently on small designs. In this paper, a much faster linear time approximation scheme is proposed, which can approximate the optimal voltage partitioning solution within a factor 1 + ϵ, for any 0 <; ϵ <; 1, and runs in O(n + 1/ϵO(1)) time, where n is the number of functional units. There are multiple ingredients in such a surprisingly low time complexity algorithm. It first categorizes all the functional units into big functional units and small functional units using an ϵ related threshold. Subsequently, a rounding based dynamic programming procedure is performed to handle big functional units and a linear programming based algorithm is performed to handle small functional units, which is followed by the discretization of the continuous linear programming solution. Moreover, through the exploration of the unique nature of our problem, a greedy algorithm is proposed to optimally solve the linear programming formulation in a combinatorial fashion. Further, since patching a salient partitioning solution of big functional units with that of small functional units could lead to a much worse combined solution, a highly efficient enumeration process running in time independent of n is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm runs very fast. It needs only 0.3 second to partition a testcase with 5000 functional units which is more than 10000 X faster than the existing algorithm while still reducing the peak power by 7.4%.
Towards Semantic Language Classification: Inducing and Clustering Semantic Association Networks from Europarl

We induce semantic association networks from translation relations in parallel corpora. The resulting semantic spaces are encoded in a single reference language, which ensures cross-language comparability. As our main contribution, we cluster the obtained (crosslingually comparable) lexical semantic spaces. We find that, in our sample of languages, lexical semantic spaces largely coincide with genealogical relations. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first large-scale quantitative lexical semantic typology that is completely unsupervised, bottom-up, and datadriven. Our results may be important for the decision which multilingual resources to integrate in a semantic evaluation task.
Gene expression profiling of favorable histology Wilms tumors and its correlation with clinical features.

The aims of this study were to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of favorable histology Wilms tumors (WTs) and to classify them based on their molecular signatures. We studied a total of 15 favorable histology WTs using microarrays containing 19,968 cDNAs. First, we found commonly altered genes in WT. A total of 267 cDNAs were significantly overexpressed at least 3-fold in all of the tumors compared with noncancerous kidney and contained known WT-related genes such as IGF II and WT1. The gene with the highest expression change compared with noncancerous kidney was topoisomerase IIalpha. By hierarchical clustering, there was a clear distinction between high-stage and low-stage tumors. A total of 30 cDNAs were found differentially expressed between the high- and low-stage groups. One of them, Stathmin 1, which is involved in the microtubule system, was highly expressed in high-stage tumors compared with the low-stage tumors. The present chemotherapy regimens for WT consist mainly of topoisomerase II inhibitors (i.e., actinomycin D, doxorubicin, and etoposide) and antimicrotubule agents (i.e., vincristine and paclitaxel). Our data suggest that high expression of topoisomerase IIalpha and microtubule-related genes such as tubulin and stathmin 1 may be related to the high chemosensitivity of WT. In addition, retinol-related genes such as CRABP2 and retinol-binding protein 1 were overexpressed in WT, and CRABP2 was more highly expressed in the poor outcome patients, which suggests that retinoid acid may be a potential drug. In summary, our findings suggest that the integration of gene expression data and clinical parameters could aid in detecting aggressive tumors among favorable histology WT and lead to the discovery of new drugs for WT.
Two different sequence elements within exon 4 are necessary for calcitonin-specific splicing of the human calcitonin/calcitonin gene-related peptide I pre-mRNA

The calcitonin (CT)/calcitonin gene-related peptide I (CGRP-I) gene (CALC-I gene) is subject to alternative tissue-specific processing of its primary transcript. CT mRNA is the predominant mRNA produced in thyroid C cells, whereas CT gene-related peptide I mRNA is the main product in neurons of the central and peripheral nervous systems. The CT-specific exon 4 is surrounded by weak processing sites. In this study we have investigated whether exon 4 sequences are involved in the tissue-specific selection of the exon 4 splice acceptor site. The results indicate that two separate elements, termed A and B, in the 5' part of exon 4 are required for production of CT-specific RNA. These sequences are located between nucleotides 67 and 88 (A) and nucleotides 117 and 146 (B) relative to the 5' end of exon 4. Variation of the distance between these sequence elements and the 3' splice site of exon 4 does not change the processing choice. These sequence elements are functionally equivalent. CT-specific splicing requires the presence of both sequence A and B or duplicates of either sequence element in exon 4. The effect of these sequences on the RNA processing choice is overruled by mutation of the CT-specific uridine branch acceptor nucleotide into a commonly preferred adenosine residue.
Multiple Layer Perceptron training using genetic algorithms

Multiple Layer Perceptron networks trained with backpropagation algorithm are very frequently used to solve a wide variety of real-world problems. Usually a gradient descent algorithm is used to adapt the weights based on a comparison between the desired and actual network response to a given input stimulus. All training pairs, each consisting of input vector and desired output vector, are forming a more or less complex multi-dimensional error surface during the training process. Numerous suggestions have been made to prevent the gradient descent algorithm from becoming captured in any local minimum when moving across a rugged error surface. This paper describes an approach to substitute it completely by a genetic algorithm. By means of some benchmark applications characteristic properties of both the genetic algorithm and the neural network are explained.
On-chip oscilloscopes for noninvasive time-domain measurement of waveforms

High-speed digital design is becoming increasingly analog. In particular, interconnect response at high frequencies can be non-monotonic with "porch steps" and ringing. Crosstalk (both capacitive and inductive) can result in glitches on wires that can produce functional failures in receiving circuits. Most of these important effects are not addressed with traditional ATPG and BIST techniques, which are limited to the binary abstraction. In this work, we explore the feasibility of integrating primitive sampling oscilloscopes on-chip to provide waveforms on selective critical nets for test and diagnosis. The oscilloscopes rely on subsampling techniques to achieve sub-10 psec timing accuracy. High speed samplers are combined with DLLs and a simple 8-bit ADC to convert the waveforms into digital data that can be incorporated as part of the chip scan chain. We will describe the design and measurement of a chip we have fabricated to incorporate these oscilloscopes with a high frequency interconnect structure in a TSMC 0.25 /spl mu/m process.
Quantitative proteomic analysis of single pancreatic islets

Technological developments make mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics a central pillar of biochemical research. MS has been very successful in cell culture systems, where sample amounts are not limiting. To extend its capabilities to extremely small, physiologically distinct cell types isolated from tissue, we developed a high sensitivity chromatographic system that measures nanogram protein mixtures for 8 h with very high resolution. This technology is based on splitting gradient effluents into a capture capillary and provides an inherent technical replicate. In a single analysis, this allowed us to characterize kidney glomeruli isolated by laser capture microdissection to a depth of more than 2,400 proteins. From pooled pancreatic islets of Langerhans, another type of “miniorgan,” we obtained an in-depth proteome of 6,873 proteins, many of them involved in diabetes. We quantitatively compared the proteome of single islets, containing 2,000–4,000 cells, treated with high or low glucose levels, and covered most of the characteristic functions of beta cells. Our ultrasensitive analysis recapitulated known hyperglycemic changes but we also find components up-regulated such as the mitochondrial stress regulator Park7. Direct proteomic analysis of functionally distinct cellular structures opens up perspectives in physiology and pathology.
SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System

This paper presents SafeStore, a distributed storage system designed to maintain long-term data durability despite conventional hardware and software faults, environmental disruptions, and administrative failures caused by human error or malice. The architecture of SafeStore is based on fault isolation, which Safe-Store applies aggressively along administrative, physical, and temporal dimensions by spreading data across autonomous storage service providers (SSPs). However, current storage interfaces provided by SSPs are not designed for high end-to-end durability. In this paper, we propose a new storage system architecture that (1) spreads data efficiently across autonomous SSPs using informed hierarchical erasure coding that, for a given replication cost, provides several additional 9's of durability over what can be achieved with existing black-box SSP interfaces, (2) performs an efficient end-to-end audit of SSPs to detect data loss that, for a 20% cost increase, improves data durability by two 9's by reducing MTTR, and (3) offers durable storage with cost, performance, and availability competitive with traditional storage systems. We instantiate and evaluate these ideas by building a SafeStore-based file system with an NFS-like interface.
Decoding low density parity check codes with finite quantization bits

This letter is concerned with the implementation issue of the sum-product algorithm (SPA) for decoding the low density parity check codes. It is shown that the direct implementation of the original form of SPA is sensitive to the quantization effect. We propose a parity likelihood ratio technique to overcome the problem. It is shown that for comparable performance the new method can be implemented with much less quantization bits, which can lead to considerably lower decoding cost.
Preparation of non-dendritic microstructure of AM60 alloy for rheoforming using self-inoculation method

Abstract A rheocasting process, i.e. self-inoculation method (SIM), has been developed for preparing sound semisolid slurry of AM60 alloy. This process involves mixing between alloy melt and particles of solid alloy (self-inoculants in SIM) and subsequent pouring of the mixed melt with a multistream fluid director. Results show that the combined action of self-inoculants and fluid director can create high nucleation and survive rate of the primary α-Mg phase even with high superheat (85°C) in the AM60 alloy. The melt treatment temperature and addition amounts of self-inoculants are the main factors influencing the slurry microstructure. In order to prepare high quality semisolid slurries, proper melt treatment temperature range of 680–700°C and self-inoculants addition range of 5–7% are suggested. The grain multiplication derives from the heterogeneous nucleation induced by self-inoculants and free crystals and dendrite fragments enhanced by the fluid director; globular grain growth and coarsening of particles should be contributed to the microstructure formation.