Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Resolution on Observed HII Region Properties from WFPC2 Observations of M101

Two continuum subtracted H-alpha HST frames of M101 are used to determine the positions, angular sizes and absolute fluxes of 237 HII regions using a semi-automated technique. From these we have constructed the luminosity and diameter distribution functions. We repeat this process on the images after artificially reducing the linear resolution to that typically obtained with ground based imaging. We find substantial differences in the luminosity function and diameter distribution. The measured internal properties, such as central surface brightness and radial gradient are dominated by the PSF at linear resolutions less than roughly 40 pc FWHM. From the ground such resolutions are currently only obtainable for the nearest galaxies. We find evidence for two regimes of clustering of the HII regions and diffuse emission, suggesting two different regimes of star formation in late type spiral galaxies. This property in combination with the blending that occurs at ground based resolutions might be responsible for the break in the luminosity function which is usually found at log L=38.6 erg/s. From the high resolution HST data we find a luminosity function slope of alpha=-1.74+/-0.08. We also observe a flattening at luminosities log L<36.7 erg/s. For the diameter distribution we find a characteristic scale of D0=29.2 pc from an exponential fit. However, a scale free power law with index beta=-2.84+/-0.16 provides a better fit to the data.
Concept of a soft exosuit for the support of leg function in rehabilitation

In the past couple of years, the concept of exosuits has emerged. These soft, robotic devices are primarily made of textiles and can be worn like clothes. They assist the user during specific motions by transmitting forces around the human joints making use of the bone structure. By definition, these systems lack rigid structures as they are used in traditional exoskeletons. Hence, exosuits are able to reduce some of the negative aspects of these devices like high mass and kinematic constraints. Thus far, exosuits have mainly been used for performance augmentation of healthy people. In this paper, we present an approach that transfers these devices to rehabilitation by setting the objective to restore mobility of people with lower limb impairments. Therefore, a suitable application scenario in rehabilitation has been identified. Based on a detailed analysis of existing gait and motion data, a concept and a passive prototype for a multiarticular, lower limb exosuit was developed. By exploiting synergies of torque and power in kinematically coupled joints, the exosuit will be able to create assistive torques in multiple joints with only one linear actuator per leg.
Memristor-based reservoir computing

As feature-size scaling and “Moore's Law” in integrated CMOS circuits further slows down, attention is shifting to computing by non-von Neumann and non-Boolean computing models. Reservoir computing (RC) is a new computing paradigm that allows to harness the intrinsic dynamics of a “reservoir” to perform useful computations. The reservoir, or compute core, must only provide sufficiently rich dynamics that are then mapped onto a low-dimensional space by an readout layer. One of the key advantages of this approach is that only the readout layer needs to be adapted to perform the desired computation. The reservoir itself remains unchanged. In this paper we use for the first time memristive components as reservoir building blocks that are assembled into device networks. Memristive components are particularly interesting for this purpose because of their non-linear and memory characteristics. In addition, they can be integrated very densely and provide rich dynamics with a few components only. We use pattern recognition and associative memory tasks to illustrate the memristive reservoir computing approach. For that purpose, we have built a software framework that allows to create valid memristor networks, to simulate and evaluate them in Ngspice, and to train the readout layer by means of a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Our results show that we can efficiently and robustly classify temporal patterns. The approach presents a promising new computing paradigm that harnesses the non-linear, time-dependent, and highly-variable properties of current memristive components for solving computational tasks.
Cellular response upon proliferation in the presence of an active mitotic checkpoint

Cells that replicate with an active mitotic checkpoint remain capable to mount multiple times an efficient arrest, are bigger than unperturbed cells, rely more heavily on Cdh1, and have an altered protein expression profile. Eukaryotic cells treated with microtubule-targeting agents activate the spindle assembly checkpoint to arrest in mitosis and prevent chromosome mis-segregation. A fraction of mitotically arrested cells overcomes the block and proliferates even under persistent checkpoint-activating conditions. Here, we asked what allows proliferation in such unfavourable conditions. We report that yeast cells are delayed in mitosis at each division, implying that their spindle assembly checkpoint remains responsive. The arrest causes their cell cycle to be elongated and results in a size increase. Growth saturates at mitosis and correlates with the repression of various factors involved in translation. Contrary to unperturbed cells, growth of cells with an active checkpoint requires Cdh1. This peculiar cell cycle correlates with global changes in protein expression whose signatures partly overlap with the environmental stress response. Hence, cells dividing with an active checkpoint develop recognisable specific traits that allow them to successfully complete cell division notwithstanding a constant mitotic checkpoint arrest. These properties distinguish them from unperturbed cells. Our observation may have implications for the identification of new therapeutic windows and targets in tumors.
Draft:Assigning Future Smile Surfaces: Conditions for Uniqueness and Absence of Arbitrage

We explore in this paper to waht extent future implied volatility surfaces can be assigned by a trader without incurring the risk of modelindependnt arbitrage. We give precise meaning to the concepts of floating and forward-propagated smile, and show under what condtions such smiles can be arbitrage free. We introduce a mechanism to produce future stochastic smile surfaces. We show that, if some conditions are met, for pricing purposes a future deterministic smile surface would produce the same prices produced under a stochastic setting.
Extension and FPGA architecture of the Generalized Hough Transform for real-time stereo correspondence

The Generalized Hough Transform (GHT) is a widely known image processing method to find arbitrary shapes in images. In the first part of this work, we present an extension of the Hough voting scheme to perform the disparity calculation of stereo correspondence. The approach is optimized for a hardware implementation in terms of processing regularity, data storage requirements and pipelining. The second part of this work is the presentation of a raster scan architecture of the main processing blocks in an FPGA. The architecture employs high data throughput with low latency and low resource utilization. Compared to other approaches, our method achieves comparable results in terms of disparity information calculation performance, tested with real world benchmark datasets. The hardware architecture outperforms other approaches in terms of speed and resource utilization.
Lycium Barbarum Polysaccharides Rescue Neurodegeneration in an Acute Ocular Hypertension Rat Model Under Pre- and Posttreatment Conditions.

Purpose To investigate the posttreatment neuronal rescue effects of Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBP) in an acute ocular hypertensive (AOH) model. Methods Intraocular pressure (IOP) was elevated manometrically to 80 mm Hg (AOH) or 15 mm Hg (sham) for 120 minutes in adult Sprague-Dawley rats. Five experimental groups were considered: Three AOH groups were pretreated with PBS (vehicle) (n = 9), LBP 1 mg/kg (n = 8), or 10 mg/kg (n = 13), and one AOH group was posttreated with LBP 10 mg/kg (n = 8), once daily. The sham cannulation group (n = 5) received no treatment. Pretreatments commenced 7 days before and posttreatment 6 hours after AOH, and continued up through postcannulation day 28. All the animals underwent optical coherence tomography and electroretinogram measurements at baseline and postcannulation days 10 and 28. The ganglion cell layer (GCL) densities were quantified at day 28. Results Both inner retinal layer thickness (IRLT) and positive scotopic threshold response (pSTR) underwent significant reduction (≥50% of thickness and amplitude) in the vehicle group (P < 0.05). Pretreatment with LBP 1 and 10 mg/kg retained 77 ± 11% and 89 ± 8% of baseline IRLT, respectively, and preserved pSTR functions. The posttreatment group showed a significant reduction in IRLT (-35 ± 8%, P < 0.001) and pSTR (∼48% of baseline, P < 0.001) on day 10. By day 28, there was an improvement in functional pSTR (∼72% of baseline, P > 0.05) with no significant further thinning (-40 ± 8%, P = 0.15) relative to day 10. GCL density was reduced in vehicle control (P = 0.0001), but did not differ between sham and pre- and posttreated AOH groups. Conclusions The rescue effect of LBP posttreatment was observed later, which arrested the secondary degeneration and improved the retinal function.
Productivity and Patent Quality : Measurement with Multiple Indicators by

We analyse the determinants of the decline in measured research productivity (the patent/R&D ratio) using panel data on manufacturing firms in the U.S. for the period 1980-93. We focus on three factors: the level of demand, the quality of patents, and technological exhaustion. We first develop an index of patent ‘quality’ using detailed information on patents in the U.S. in seven technology fields. Using a factor model, we construct a minimum-variance index based on four patent characteristics and show that using multiple indicators substantially reduces the measured variance in quality. We then show that research productivity at the firm level is negatively related to the patent quality index and the level of demand, as predicted by an optimizing model of R&D, and positively related to the stock market valuation of patented innovations held by firms. JEL Codes: 031, 032
a chapter titled "Computationally Intensive Methods for Integration in Econometrics"

Economic models are often used to study a single decision or outcome. The outcome variable may be fully observed, continuous, and unrestricted (for example, log consumption); fully observed and continuous but restricted to an interval (fraction of expenditure devoted to a certain category of goods); continuous but censored (earnings subject to known withholding limits for social insurance); a mixture of discrete and continuous outcomes (earnings of full-time high school students); categorical (income from survey data known only to be in a designated interval); or discrete (dichotomous choice, such as labor force participation). Depending on the model and data, other kinds of outcomes may be observed as well. In all of these models, it is useful to conceive first of a latent outcome (denoted˜y t , for observation t), and then a corresponding set-valued observed outcome, denoted y t. For example, in the case of a continuous outcome censored from above at c, y t = ˜ y t if˜y t ≤ c , and y t = c, ∞ () if˜y t > c. In the case of a dichotomous outcome, one observes y t = −∞, 0 (] if˜y t ≤ 0 and y t = 0, ∞ This section treats the linear model˜y t = ′ β x t + u t , with observed outcomes of the form y t = c t ,d t [ ], y t = c t , d t [), or y t = c t , d t (], it being understood that c t ≤ d t and that c t and d t are extended real numbers. The disturbances u t t = 1,K,T () are independent and identically distributed conditional on x t t = 1,K,T (). The disturbance u t has a normal mixture distribution. We make this assumption because the normal mixture density can approximate any density arbitrarily well (Ferguson, 1983), and because it leads to practical methods for inference. It avoids the well-known problems that arise if the
The ROSAT Bright Survey: I. Identification of an AGN sample with hard ROSAT X-ray spectra †

The ROSAT Bright Survey (RBS) aims to completely optically identify the more than 2000 brightest sources detected in the ROSAT all-sky survey at galactic latitudes |b| > 30° (excluding LMC, SMC, Virgo cluster). This paper presents a subsample of 66 bright point-like ROSAT survey sources with almost hard PSPC spectra, the hardness ratio HR1 is > 0.5 for most of the sources. Teh subsample could be nearly completely identified by low-resolution optical spectroscopy with the following breakdown into object classes: 31 Seyfert galaxies, 22 BL Lac candidates, 5 clusters of galaxies, 1 cataclysmic variable, and 5 bright stars. Only one object remained unidentified and one X-ray source was a spurious detection. The redshift distrbution peaks around 0.06 for the Seyferts and around 0.13 for the BL Lac candidates. Observations with medium spectral resolution were obtained for most of the new Seyfert galaxies. A large fraction (20 objects) are type 1 Seyfert galaxies, the other fraction includes Seyfert galaxies of type 1.5 – 1.8 (5 objects), two LINERs, and 4 possible narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1). About one third of the new Seyfert's have nearby companion galaxies displaying either emission or absorption lines at the same redshift. Among them are a couple of systems showing direct morphological evidence for interaction. The large fraction of interacting galaxies among our sample suggests a scenario where interaction is the main trigger of AGN activity.
Collusion-Tolerable Privacy-Preserving Sum and Product Calculation without Secure Channel

Much research has been conducted to securely outsource multiple parties' data aggregation to an untrusted aggregator without disclosing each individual's privately owned data, or to enable multiple parties to jointly aggregate their data while preserving privacy. However, those works either require secure pair-wise communication channels or suffer from high complexity. In this paper, we consider how an external aggregator or multiple parties can learn some algebraic statistics (e.g., sum, product) over participants' privately owned data while preserving the data privacy. We assume all channels are subject to eavesdropping attacks, and all the communications throughout the aggregation are open to others. We first propose several protocols that successfully guarantee data privacy under semi-honest model, and then present advanced protocols which tolerate up to k passive adversaries who do not try to tamper the computation. Under this weak assumption, we limit both the communication and computation complexity of each participant to a small constant. At the end, we present applications which solve several interesting problems via our protocols.
An Empirical Study of Long Method and God Method in Industrial Projects

Code smell is any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem. Though code smells are usually not proper bugs which are defined as technically incorrect and functionality block, they indicate poor programming practices in code level which increases risk of bugs in the future. Long method smell is identified as a kind of methods which are have large number of executable statements, at the same time God method smell is identified as a kind of methods which is doing too much. On the previous research and practice, people treat these 2 concepts equivalently. However, the definition of "large number of executable statements" shows us the size of the method, and at the same time definition of "doing too much" shows us the complexity of the logic which is implemented and nested in this method. Though intuitively the two definitions are equivalent -- methods with large number of statement means it nests much business logic so that the complexity of these methods is high, a dearth of studies suggest the research of difference between these two definitions. In this paper, present 2 research questions to study these 2 definitions. We choose one release of 11 java based web application projects which is in maintenance period respectively. In these releases, we ask the developers to analysis the bug reports and related code, then collect all 125 bugs which is caused by code smell and the related code for fixing these bugs. We get 45 bugs caused by the Long method smell and the related 31 methods, and we analyzed the data compared with the longest methods in these projects. The study highlights the need for a clearer definition of this kind of code smell, and there are many factors not only length which is affecting the code quality. So the real thing which is affecting the code quality is beyond the definition of "large number of executable statement", and at the same time the definition of "doing too much" should be modeling to illuminate this kind of code smell.
Sparse similarity matrix learning for visual object retrieval

Tf-idf weighting scheme is adopted by state-of-the-art object retrieval systems to reflect the difference in discriminability between visual words. However, we argue it is only suboptimal by noting that tf-idf weighting scheme does not take quantization error into account and exploit word correlation. We view tf-idf weights as an example of diagonal Mahalanobis-type similarity matrix and generalize it into a sparse one by selectively activating off-diagonal elements. Our goal is to separate similarity of relevant images from that of irrelevant ones by a safe margin. We satisfy such similarity constraints by learning an optimal similarity metric from labeled data. An effective scheme is developed to collect training data with an emphasis on cases where the tf-idf weights violates the relative relevance constraints. Experimental results on benchmark datasets indicate the learnt similarity metric consistently and significantly outperforms the tf-idf weighting scheme.
Vitreomacular Interface Abnormalities and Glaucoma in an Elderly Population (The MONTRACHET Study).

Purpose To investigate the prevalence of vitreomacular interface abnormalities (VMIAs) in a French elderly glaucomatous population. Methods Using a population-based study, the MONTRACHET (Maculopathy Optic Nerve nuTRition neurovAsCular and HEarT diseases) study conducted in Dijon from 2009 to 2013 in individuals older than 75 years, the prevalence of VMIAs was estimated on glaucoma patients. Results A total of 1130 participants (2225 eyes) were included in the study. The mean age of participants was 82.3 ± 3.8 years, and 62.74% were women. Regarding the frequency of all VMIAs, there was no statistical difference between glaucoma patients and nonglaucoma participants (51.85% vs. 53.92%, respectively, P = 0.372). In univariate analysis, vitreomacular adherences were more frequent in nonglaucoma participants (18.39% vs. 10.78%, P = 0.036). Epiretinal membranes were more frequent in the glaucomatous population (47.06% vs. 38.13%, P = 0.018). The prevalence of macular cysts was comparable in the two groups (7.84% vs. 5.64%, P = 0.262). Macular cysts were more frequent in eyes treated with preservative-free, IOP-lowering eye drops when compared with the eyes of nonglaucomatous participants treated with IOP-lowering eye drops containing a preservative (26.67% vs. 3.37% and 5.76%, respectively, P < 0.001). In multivariate analysis, these results were no longer significant. Conclusions The prevalence of VMIAs was high in this elderly population and similar in both glaucomatous and nonglaucomatous participants. The information provided by macular optical coherence tomography scans should be considered with caution when used for glaucoma management in elderly patients.
Shear-Transformation Zone Activation during Loading and Unloading in Nanoindentation of Metallic Glasses

Using molecular dynamics simulation, we study nanoindentation in large samples of Cu–Zr glass at various temperatures between zero and the glass transition temperature. We find that besides the elastic modulus, the yielding point also strongly (by around 50%) decreases with increasing temperature; this behavior is in qualitative agreement with predictions of the cooperative shear model. Shear-transformation zones (STZs) show up in increasing sizes at low temperatures, leading to shear-band activity. Cluster analysis of the STZs exhibits a power-law behavior in the statistics of STZ sizes. We find strong plastic activity also during the unloading phase; it shows up both in the deactivation of previous plastic zones and the appearance of new zones, leading to the observation of pop-outs. The statistics of STZs occurring during unloading show that they operate in a similar nature as the STZs found during loading. For both cases, loading and unloading, we find the statistics of STZs to be related to directed percolation. Material hardness shows a weak strain-rate dependence, confirming previously reported experimental findings; the number of pop-ins is reduced at slower indentation rate. Analysis of the dependence of our simulation results on the quench rate applied during preparation of the glass shows only a minor effect on the properties of STZs.
Combined Doppler/LBL Based Navigation of Underwater Vehicles

This paper first reviews conventional techniques for underwater vehicle navigation, and describes a dopplerbased navigation system recently implemented by the authors. Experimental results show that a system combining conventional long-baseline (LBL) acoustic navigation data with doppler navigation data provides superior navigation precision and update rates in comparison to raw LBL or doppler navigation alone. The experiments were conducted during a field deployment in which the new robot navigation system enabled precision acoustic and optical survey, as well as minimally invasive object recovery in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In situ oligonucleotide synthesis on poly(dimethylsiloxane): a flexible substrate for microarray fabrication

In this paper, we demonstrate in situ synthesis of oligonucleotide probes on poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microchannels through use of conventional phosphoramidite chemistry. PDMS polymer was moulded into a series of microchannels using standard soft lithography (micro-moulding), with dimensions <100 μm. The surface of the PDMS was derivatized by exposure to ultraviolet/ozone followed by vapour phase deposition of glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane and reaction with poly(ethylene glycol) spacer, resulting in a reactive surface for oligonucleotide coupling. High, reproducible yields were achieved for both 6mer and 21mer probes as assessed by hybridization to fluorescent oligonucleotides. Oligonucleotide surface density was comparable with that obtained on glass substrates. These results suggest PDMS as a stable and flexible alternative to glass as a suitable substrate in the fabrication and synthesis of DNA microarrays.