Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A database and tool for boundary conditions for regional air quality modeling: description and evaluation

Abstract. Transported air pollutants receive increasing attention as regulations tighten and global concentrations increase. The need to represent international transport in regional air quality assessments requires improved representation of boundary concentrations. Currently available observations are too sparse vertically to provide boundary information, particularly for ozone precursors, but global simulations can be used to generate spatially and temporally varying lateral boundary conditions (LBC). This study presents a public database of global simulations designed and evaluated for use as LBC for air quality models (AQMs). The database covers the contiguous United States (CONUS) for the years 2001–2010 and contains hourly varying concentrations of ozone, aerosols, and their precursors. The database is complemented by a tool for configuring the global results as inputs to regional scale models (e.g., Community Multiscale Air Quality or Comprehensive Air quality Model with extensions). This study also presents an example application based on the CONUS domain, which is evaluated against satellite retrieved ozone and carbon monoxide vertical profiles. The results show performance is largely within uncertainty estimates for ozone from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument and carbon monoxide from the Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT), but there were some notable biases compared with Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) ozone. Compared with TES, our ozone predictions are high-biased in the upper troposphere, particularly in the south during January. This publication documents the global simulation database, the tool for conversion to LBC, and the evaluation of concentrations on the boundaries. This documentation is intended to support applications that require representation of long-range transport of air pollutants.
Experienced tutors’ deployment of thinking skills and what might be entailed in enhancing such skills

In the context of research that reports weaknesses in adults’ critical thinking skills, the primary aim was to examine adults’ use of critical thinking skills that are described in taxonomies and to identify areas for development. Position papers written by an opportunity sample of 32 experienced adult educators formed the data for a descriptive sample survey design intended to reveal participants’ use of critical thinking skills. Each 6000‐word paper was written during a development programme that supported such skills. A content analysis of the papers revealed that when participants drew on personal and published ideas about learning to derive their proposals for change, they accepted the ideas uncritically, thereby implying that they might find it difficult to help learners to examine ideas critically. The evidence supports research that implies that critical thinking skills are unlikely to develop unless overall course design privileges the development of epistemological understanding (King and Kitchener 1994, Kuhn 1999). A fundamental assumption underlying the study is that this understanding influences effective citizenship and personal development, as well as employability. A proposition that merits attention in future research is that the development of epistemological understanding is largely neglected in current curricula in formal post‐16 education.
Properties of synaptic transmission and the global stability of delayed activity states

The influence of synaptic channel properties on the stability of delayed activity maintained by recurrent neural networks is studied. The duration of excitatory post-synaptic current (EPSC) is shown to be essential for the global stability of the delayed response. The NMDA receptor channel is a much more reliable mediator of the reverberating activity than the AMPA receptor, due to a longer EPSC. This allows one to interpret the deterioration of the working memory observed in NMDA channel blockade experiments. The key mechanism leading to the decay of the delayed activity originates in the unreliability of synaptic transmission. The optimum fluctuation of the synaptic currents leading to the decay is identified. The decay time is calculated analytically and the result is confirmed computationally.
A Comparative Study of Different Fuzzy Time Series Forecasting Techniques - Case Study: Marine Fish Production Forecasting

Various forecasting methods have been developed on the basis of fuzzy time series data, but accuracy has been matter of concern in these forecasts. The historical data of marine fish production of India have been taken to implement the model; as such time series data obtained through sample survey are likely to be imprecise. The study uses the fuzzy sets theory of Zadeh (1) and fuzzy time series models introduced by Song and Chissom (2), Chen (3), Chen and Hsu (4) and Singh (5). The study is aimed to find the marine fish production forecast for a lead year by using different fuzzy time series models. The forecasted marine fish production, obtained through these techniques, have been compared and their performance has been examined and it has been found that forecast obtained by Chen and Hsu(4) is more efficient and provides better forecast in comparison to Singh(5),Chen (3) and Song and Chissom (3) method.
Examining Generational Differences among Diverse Families Regarding Parental School Involvement

The purpose of this study was to examine parental involvement by viewing generational differences among diverse families through the lens of the overlapping spheres of influence for school-family-community partnerships. The study’s population consisted of one African American family, one Hispanic family and one Caucasian family. A grandparent, children, and a grandchild represented each family. Findings suggest that while parental involvement is still as important today as it was decades ago, based on the family’s culture it was viewed differently. Another finding was the need for developing partnerships with the home, school, and community to enhance opportunities for all parents regardless of race, culture, or ethnicity to become involve in their children’s education. The implications for teacher and principal training are significant.
Predicting Five Dimensions of Police Officer Stress: Looking More Deeply Into Organizational Settings for Sources of Police Stress

Research on police officer stress has focused primarily on the rather atypical nature of police work and extent of adherence by law enforcement agencies across the nation to the Weberian bureaucratic form of organization and management practices. This study explores the effect of individual perceptions of work environment on male officer stress. Survey data from two large police departments in the northwestern United States are used in the analysis. The findings observed suggest that the levels of five dimensions of workplace stress are similar to adult males in the U.S. workforce and that an individual's perceptions of their work environment do have a significant impact on police officer stress.
EWOS: A sealed-bid auction system design and implementation for electricity interonnector capacity allocation

Electricity Transmission System Interconnectors are critical infrastructures at a national and European level, connecting different electricity areas. Phenomena of capacity demand congestion of the Transmission Interconnectors are handled with auction mechanisms. In this paper, we describe EWOS, a “sealed-bid, first price” method and auction system for electricity auctions. EWOS guarantees the auction security by implementing a transparent and verifiable by all process, based on public-key encryption and a two-phase time protocol. Additional and demanding critical system security and dependability properties are ensured with the use of security policy, and software assurance. EWOS method being secure, reliable and efficient, is used since 2006 for the conduct of numerous daily, monthly and yearly auctions for Transmission Interconnection capacity allocation.
Comparison of Protective Efficacy of Subcutaneous versus Intranasal Immunization of Mice with a Brucella melitensis Lipopolysaccharide Subunit Vaccine

ABSTRACT Groups of mice were immunized either subcutaneously or intranasally with purified Brucella melitensis lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or with LPS as a noncovalent complex with Neisseria meningitidis group B outer membrane protein (LPS-GBOMP). Control mice were inoculated with sterile saline. Two doses of vaccine were given 4 weeks apart. Mice were challenged intranasally with virulent B. melitensis strain 16M 4 weeks after the second dose of vaccine. Sera, spleens, lungs, and livers of mice were harvested 8 weeks after challenge. The bacterial loads in the organs were determined by culture on brucella agar plates. Protective efficacy was determined by comparing the clearance of bacteria from organs of immunized mice with the clearance of bacteria from organs of control mice. At 8 weeks postchallenge there was significant protection from disseminated infection of spleens and livers of mice intranasally immunized with either vaccine compared to infection of control mice (P < 0.01). There was no significant difference in clearance of bacteria from the lungs of immunized mice and control mice. However, mice immunized subcutaneously with either LPS or LPS-GBOMP vaccine showed significant protection against infection of the spleen (P < 0.001), liver (P < 0.001), and lungs (P < 0.05). These results show that intranasal immunization of mice with either vaccine provided significant protection against disseminated infection of the spleen and liver but subcutaneous immunization of mice with the vaccines conferred significant protection against infection of the spleen, liver, and lungs.
Singer melody extraction in polyphonic signals using source separation methods

We propose a new approach for singer melody extraction, based on blind source separation techniques. The short time Fourier transform (STFT) of the singer signal is modelled by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) explicitly coupled with a generative source/filter model. We then introduce a simplification of this general GMM and approximate the STFT of the music signal using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) techniques. The melody line is extracted from the explicit source component of the model thanks to a Viterbi algorithm. The results are very promising and comparable or better than those of state-of-the-art systems.
Stained Glass Makes the Ceiling Visible

While women represent the vast majority of participants in religious organizations in the United States, their participation in top leadership positions within Christian congregations remains remarkably low. In this article, the author uses the National Congregations Study to examine the situations that lead to this “stained glass ceiling” effect, prohibiting women from attaining top congregational leadership positions. The author also investigates similar barriers that exist at other levels of congregational leadership. The results suggest that while a queue-like process appears, the specifically religious nature of these organizations produces barriers that are quite different from the traditional glass ceiling conceptualization.
Abnormal Pattern of Mucin Secretion at the Resection Margin of Colorectal Carcinomas

In a retrospective study, we investigated 56 consecutive patients who had undergone radical intestinal resection for colorectal adenocarcinoma and who had developed local or distant recurrences of the disease. We found that the presence of a predominant sialomucin pattern at the margins of resection of the surgical specimen was correlated with a high percentage of local, endoluminal recurrence in the anastomotic mucosa. In contrast, no correlation could be found when the recurrences occurred in the outer tissues around the anastomosis or at some distance from it.
WarpPool: Sharing requests with inter-warp coalescing for throughput processors

Although graphics processing units (GPUs) are capable of high compute throughput, their memory systems need to supply the arithmetic pipelines with data at a sufficient rate to avoid stalls. For benchmarks that have divergent access patterns or cause the L1 cache to run out of resources, the link between the GPU's load/store unit and the L1 cache becomes a bottleneck in the memory system, leading to low utilization of compute resources. While current GPU memory systems are able to coalesce requests between threads in the same warp, we identify a form of spatial locality between threads in multiple warps. We use this locality, which is overlooked in current systems, to merge requests being sent to the L1 cache. This relieves the bottleneck between the load/store unit and the cache, and provides an opportunity to prioritize requests to minimize cache thrashing. Our implementation, WarpPool, yields a 38% speedup on memory throughput-limited kernels by increasing the throughput to the L1 by 8% and the reducing the number of L1 misses by 23%. We also demonstrate that WarpPool can improve GPU pro-grammability by achieving high performance without the need to optimize workloads' memory access patterns. A Verilog implementation including place-and-route shows WarpPool requires 1.0% added GPU area and 0.8% added power.
RF-fingerprint based authentication: Exponents and achievable rates

RF fingerprinting exploits the variations in the RF chain of radios to uniquely identify transmitters, and distinguish adversarial transmissions from transmissions of legitimate nodes. We provide a systematic approach rooted from information theory to evaluate basic performance limits of RF fingerprinting. We develop a novel channel model for RF fingerprinting, where the imperfections in the RF chain are modeled as a fingerprint channel, cascaded to the actual physical channel. We address the authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique fingerprint channels, in addition to a possible secret key available at the legitimate nodes. We provide achievable bounds for the error exponents for reliable communication of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent for impersonation and substitution attacks of the adversary, as a function of certain parameters based on their RF-fingerprints, and the shared key rate. We illustrate that keyless authentication is possible via RF fingerprints when the legitimate channel is not simulatable.
Multi-Layer Electrospun Membrane Mimicking Tendon Sheath for Prevention of Tendon Adhesions

Defect of the tendon sheath after tendon injury is a main reason for tendon adhesions, but it is a daunting challenge for the biomimetic substitute of the tendon sheath after injury due to its multi-layer membrane-like structure and complex biologic functions. In this study, a multi-layer membrane with celecoxib-loaded poly(l-lactic acid)-polyethylene glycol (PELA) electrospun fibrous membrane as the outer layer, hyaluronic acid (HA) gel as middle layer, and PELA electrospun fibrous membrane as the inner layer was designed. The anti-adhesion efficacy of this multi-layer membrane was compared with a single-layer use in rabbit flexor digitorum profundus tendon model. The surface morphology showed that both PELA fibers and celecoxib-loaded PELA fibers in multi-layer membrane were uniform in size, randomly arrayed, very porous, and smooth without beads. Multi-layer membrane group had fewer peritendinous adhesions and better gliding than the PELA membrane group and control group in gross and histological observation. The similar mechanical characteristic and collagen expression of tendon repair site in the three groups indicated that the multi-layer membrane did not impair tendon healing. Taken together, our results demonstrated that such a biomimetic multi-layer sheath could be used as a potential strategy in clinics for promoting tendon gliding and preventing adhesion without poor tendon healing.
Qualitative analysis of stroke patients' motivation for rehabilitation

Abstract Objective: To explore the attitudes and beliefs of stroke patients identified by professionals as having either “high” or “low” motivation for rehabilitation. Design: Qualitative study with semistructured interviews. Setting: The stroke unit of an inner city teaching hospital. Participants: 22 patients with stroke who were undergoing rehabilitation; 14 with high motivation for rehabilitation and eight with low motivation. Results: All patients thought rehabilitation was important for recovery. High motivation patients were more likely to view rehabilitation as the most important means of recovery and to accord themselves an active role in rehabilitation. These patients were also more likely to understand rehabilitation and in particular to understand the specialist role of the nursing staff. Many patients reported independence at home as a personal goal, though few low motivation patients related this goal to success in rehabilitation. Information from professionals about rehabilitation, favourable comparisons with other stroke patients, and the desire to leave hospital had a positive effect on motivation. Conversely, overprotection from family members and professionals, lack of information or the receipt of “mixed messages” from professionals, and unfavourable comparisons with other patients had a negative effect. Conclusions: There are some differences in beliefs between stroke patients identified as having low or high motivation for rehabilitation. These beliefs seem to be influenced by the environment in which the patient is rehabilitated. Professionals and carers should be made aware of the ways in which their behaviour can positively and negatively affect motivation.
A Human Immunoglobulin λ Locus Is Similarly Well Expressed in Mice and Humans

Transgenic mice carrying a 380-kb region of the human immunoglobulin (Ig) λ light (L) chain locus in germline configuration were created. The introduced translocus on a yeast artificial chromosome (YAC) accommodates the most proximal Igλ variable region (V) gene cluster, including 15 Vλ genes that contribute to >60% of λ L chains in humans, all Jλ-Cλ segments, and the 3′ enhancer. HuIgλYAC mice were bred with animals in which mouse Igκ production was silenced by gene targeting. In the κ−/− background, human Igλ was expressed by ∼84% of splenic B cells. A striking result was that human Igλ was also produced at high levels in mice with normal κ locus. Analysis of bone marrow cells showed that human Igλ and mouse Igκ were expressed at similar levels throughout B cell development, suggesting that the Igλ translocus and the endogenous κ locus rearrange independently and with equal efficiency at the same developmental stage. This is further supported by the finding that in hybridomas expressing human Igλ the endogenous L chain loci were in germline configuration. The presence of somatic hypermutation in the human Vλ genes indicated that the Igλ-expressing cells function normally. The finding that human λ genes can be utilized with similar efficiency in mice and humans implies that L chain expression is critically dependent on the configuration of the locus.
A framework for tourist expectations

Purpose – As there is still only limited research about expectation formation in destination marketing, the aim of this paper is to enhance this body of knowledge by providing theoretical and empirical evidence about the role of different factors which generate tourist expectations. In particular, since expectations may significantly condition not only the tourist choice process but also the perceptions of experiences, the objective of this paper is to examine the factors contributing to the expectations of a tourist destination. Based on service expectations literature, a theoretical framework postulates the main factors generating tourist expectations.Design/methodology/approach – Empirical research tests the research hypotheses. More specifically, several in‐depth interviews and focus groups (qualitative research) and a survey conducted in a holiday destination (quantitative research) led to data collection.Findings – Tourist expectations are a second‐order factor based on inter‐correlations among seve.
Treatment of a compulsive paraphiliac with buspirone

This report provides an illustration of the potential value of drugs which enhance the effects of serotonin in the treatment of a compulsive paraphilia. A 37-year old man who had a long history of little control over urges to expose and to engage in obscene telephone calling, was placed on an open trial of buspirone. Buspirone proved very effective and this outcome, along with other reports of the beneficial effects of serotonin enhancers, encourages further research. Most interesting and notable was the observation that benefits continue to be maintained at 30 months after withdrawal of treatment.
Induction of ER Stress in Macrophages of Tuberculosis Granulomas

Background The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress pathway known as the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR) is an adaptive survival pathway that protects cells from the buildup of misfolded proteins, but under certain circumstances it can lead to apoptosis. ER stress has been causally associated with macrophage apoptosis in advanced atherosclerosis of mice and humans. Because atherosclerosis shares certain features with tuberculosis (TB) with regard to lesional macrophage accumulation, foam cell formation, and apoptosis, we investigated if the ER stress pathway is activated during TB infection. Principal Findings Here we show that ER stress markers such as C/EBP homologous protein (CHOP; also known as GADD153), phosphorylated inositol-requiring enzyme 1 alpha (Ire1α) and eukaryotic initiation factor 2 alpha (eIF2α), and activating transcription factor 3 (ATF3) are expressed in macrophage-rich areas of granulomas in lungs of mice infected with virulent Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). These areas were also positive for numerous apoptotic cells as assayed by TUNEL. Microarray analysis of human caseous TB granulomas isolated by laser capture microdissection reveal that 73% of genes involved in the UPR are upregulated at the mRNA transcript level. The expression of two ER stress markers, ATF3 and CHOP, were also increased in macrophages of human TB granulomas when assayed by immunohistochemistry. CHOP has been causally associated with ER stress-induced macrophage apoptosis. We found that apoptosis was more abundant in granulomas as compared to non-granulomatous tissue isolated from patients with pulmonary TB, and apoptosis correlated with CHOP expression in areas surrounding the centralized areas of caseation. Conclusions In summary, ER stress is induced in macrophages of TB granulomas in areas where apoptotic cells accumulate in mice and humans. Although macrophage apoptosis is generally thought to be beneficial in initially protecting the host from Mtb infection, death of infected macrophages in advanced granulomas might favor dissemination of the bacteria. Therefore future work is needed to determine if ER-stress is causative for apoptosis and plays a role in the host response to infection.
Single-molecule observations of surfactant diffusion at the solution-solid interface.

Individual fatty acid molecules adsorbed at the interface between hexadecane and fused silica have been tracked using total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. Two cooperative diffusive mechanisms are observed: continuous small-scale Brownian motion and occasional large "jumps. " The continuous diffusion exhibits evidence of confinement. The effective interfacial diffusion coefficients for each mechanism increase systematically with temperature; an Arrhenius analysis gives an activation barrier of approximately 50 kJ/mol for "jumping" and an upper limit of approximately 10 kJ/mol for confined diffusion.