Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Waveform Receiver for Continuous Registration of Fast Processes in Pulsar Radio Emission

This paper presents the investigation of fast processes in radio emission of pulsars, magnetars, RRATs, etc. demands a long continuous recording with high time resolution. Now pulse radio emissions from magnetosphere of different kind of neutron stars are observed in the range from decameter wave length up to 40 GHz. In the lowest one - decameter wave range it's very difficult to achieve high time resolution due to effects of scattering and dispersive delay of the pulse propagation in the interstellar medium (ISM) which lead to the broadening of pulse signal in the receiving band. In spectral receivers, real time digital receivers with fast Fourier transform (FFT) or in the filter bank analyzers time resolution is determined by the pulse broadening in the frequency band of a single digital channel. The analogue part of the receiver - amplifiers and mixers for the work under high level of interference have been worked off long ago in the equipment developed in the RINAN of Ukraine for the radio telescopes UTR-2 and URAN.
13C and 15N assimilation and organic matter translocation by the endolithic community in the massive coral Porites lutea

Corals evolved by establishing symbiotic relationships with various microorganisms (the zooxanthellae, filamentous algae, cyanobacteria, bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses), forming the ‘coral holobiont'. Among them, the endolithic community is the least studied. Its main function was considered to be translocation of photo-assimilates to the coral host, particularly during bleaching. Here, we hypothesize that (i) endolithic algae may show similar primary production rates in healthy or bleached corals by changing their pigment ratios, and therefore that similar production and translocation of organic matter may occur at both conditions and (ii) diazotrophs are components of the endolithic community; therefore, N2 fixation and translocation of organic nitrogen may occur. We tested these hypotheses in incubation of Porites lutea with 13C and 15N tracers to measure primary production and N2 fixation in coral tissues and endoliths. Assimilation of the 13C atom (%) was observed in healthy and bleached corals when the tracer was injected in the endolithic band, showing translocation in both conditions. N2 fixation was found in coral tissues and endolithic communities with translocation of organic nitrogen. Thus, the endolithic community plays an important role in supporting the C and N metabolism of the holobiont, which may be crucial under changing environmental conditions.
Determination of Gait Parameters from the Wearable Motion Analysis System eSHOE

Limitation of mobility often leads to considerable loss in quality of life. The mobile motion analysis system eSHOE represents a new method for the detection of gait parameters, in order to enable monitoring of the rehabilitation processes. The system has been tested in a pilot study at a geriatric hospital in Vienna. Autocorrelation and cross-correlation analyses proved to be suitable methods for the extraction of gait parameters from eSHOE data. Based on the results a method for gait symmetry determination will be developed as a next step.
Fuzzy control of a new type of piezoelectric direct drive electro-hydraulic servo valve

A new type of piezoelectric direct drive electro-hydraulic servo valve is developed in this paper. Multilayer piezoelectric actuator is used as the electricity-machine converter in this new electro-hydraulic servo valve, which makes the electro-hydraulic servo valve system have higher dynamic and steady performance. Because the system exists complicated nonlinearity and uncertainty, the conventional control method cannot meet the speed and precise requirements for positioning. An improved fuzzy control method with self-adjusted function is designed and implemented. Because of eliminating the undesirable nonlinear effects, the proposed method demonstrates substantial improvements in the dynamic and steady characteristics of the system. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.
Modeling of Soft-Switching Losses of IGBTs in High-Power High-Efficiency Dual-Active-Bridge DC/DC Converters

Soft-switching techniques are very attractive and often mandatory requirements in medium-voltage and medium-frequency applications such as solid-state transformers. The effectiveness of these soft-switching techniques is tightly related to the dynamic behavior of the internal stored charge in the utilized semiconductor devices. For this reason, this paper analyzes the behavior of the internal charge dynamics in high-voltage (HV) semiconductors, giving a clear base to perform overall converter optimizations and to understand the previously proposed zero-current-switching techniques for insulated-gate bipolar-transistor (IGBT)-based resonant dual active bridges. From these previous approaches, the two main concepts that allow switching loss reduction in HV semiconductors are identified: 1) shaping of the conducted current in order to achieve a high recombination time in the previously conducting semiconductors; and 2) achieving zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) in the turning-on device. The means to implement these techniques in a triangular-current-mode dual-active-bridge converter, together with the benefits of the proposed approaches, are analyzed and experimentally verified with a 1.7-kV IGBT-based neutral-point-clamped (NPC) bridge. Additionally, the impact of the modified currents in the converter's performance is quantified in order to determine the benefits of the introduced concepts in the overall converter.
Mutagenicity Characteristics of 255 Environmental Chemicals

The mutagenicity of 255 compounds were examined under the same conditions using the improved Ames test. These compounds were detected frequently in environment, were suspected of high toxicity, or were used as the positive standards for several toxicity tests. The relationships between the chemical structure and the strength of the mutagenicity were analyzed. Thirty compounds of the 255 tested compounds showed mutagenicity. It was found that the compounds, which are unintentionally formed, tended to show mutagenicity in a higher ratio but the artificially synthesized compounds tended to show it in a lower ratio. The number of compounds showed indirect mutagenicity (+S9) were more than the number of compounds showed direct mutagenicity (-S9) in the tested compounds. The mutagenicity strength was different by several hundred thousand times among the compounds. Condensed polycyclic aromatic nitrohydrocarbons, on the whole, showed very strong mutagenicity. The compounds were classified by the positive conditions. All of the tested condensed polycyclic aromatic nitrohydrocarbons accounted for the greatest majority of the compounds which showed mutagenicity under all the conditions of TA98 ± S9 and TA100 ± S9. Only two specific compounds showed mutagenicity under the three conditions except for TA98-S9. Some compounds showed mutagenicity only under the conditions of -S9 but there were various kinds of compounds which showed mutagenicity only under the conditions of +S9. The compounds which showed mutagenicity under only one condition showed weak mutagenicity.
Assessment of gender differences in health status with the Leicester Cough Questionnaire (LCQ)

Kelsall et al were surprised that there were no differences in Leicester Cough Questionaire (LCQ)1 scores in men and women with chronic cough and suggest that this was because the LCQ did not capture gender-specific differences in health status.2 We disagree. We have previously reported significantly worse health status in a larger group of females with chronic cough (see table 1). 3 4 Furthermore, Polley et al investigated the gender differences in health status in 147 patients with chronic …
MINDFULNESS INCREASES ANALYTICAL THOUGHT AND DECREASES JUST WORLD BELIEFS

A growing body of research has found that engaging in mindfulness may alter thought processes in a range of different manners, such as increasing psychological well-being, decreasing stress, decreasing implicit racism, and many other positive psychological effects. The present study investigated whether engaging in mindfulness meditation would influence analytical thought processes. Participants listened to a 10-minute audio recording via noise-canceling headphones then answered a series of questions. Individuals who listened to the mindfulness recording answered more Cognitive Reflection Test questions analytically while participants in the control group answered them more intuitively. Participants in the mindfulness condition also indicated significantly lower scores on the Belief in a Just World scale.
Gaze and zoom controls for visual tracking

Visual tracking is widely used in many applications such as security surveillance, robot navigation and industrial inspection. In this paper gaze and zoom controls for visual tracking with a monocular camera are considered. The gaze control keeps the camera pointing to the centroid of a moving object of interest to keep the object centered in each image. The zoom control adjusts the camera focal length to preserve the object at a desired constant image size. Both gaze control and zoom control are explicitly designed with simple formulas. Simulation results validate the controls.
Movement-Related Feedback and Temporal Accuracy in Clarinet Performance

SENSORY INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN MUSICIANS' fingers arrive on instrument keys contributes to temporal accuracy in piano performance (Goebl & Palmer, 2008). The hypothesis that timing accuracy is related to sensory (tactile) information available at finger-key contact was extended to clarinetists' finger movements during key depressions and releases that, together with breathing, determine the timing of tone onsets. Skilled clarinetists performed melodies at different tempi in a synchronization task while their movements were recorded with motion capture. Finger accelerations indicated consistent kinematic landmarks when fingers made initial contact with or release from the key surface. Performances that contained more kinematic landmarks had reduced timing error. The magnitude of finger accelerations on key contact and release was positively correlated with increased temporal accuracy during the subsequent keystroke. These findings suggest that sensory information available at finger-key contact enhances the temporal accuracy of music performance.
Opening the legal literature Portal to multilingual access

The issues of multilingual access to legal information are examined, and strategies of cross-language retrieval to legal information resources are illustrated as additional services of the Portal to legal literature created by ITTIG. Consideration is given to the peculiarities of legal language as a technical language closely related to the diverse legal systems. The paper describes a methodological approach planned for the Portal to provide a single point of access into disparate repositories where categories of law (i.e. trade law, constitutional law, criminal law) are the essential metadata to point to relevant material irrespective of the language used in a query. Categories of law of a specific legal system represent the way how retrieval can be satisfactorily achieved. Strategies and techniques for translating legal queries to different target languages, eventually disambiguating ambiguous words by a machine learning approach are illustrated.
Next generation genetic algorithms

New developments in Gray Box Optimization makes it possible to construct new forms of Genetic Algorithms that do not use random mutation or random recombination. Instead, for certain classes of NP Hard problems (ranging from MAXSAT to the Traveling Salesman Problem), it is possible to exactly compute the location of improving moves (often in constant time), and to use highly efficient forms of greedy deterministic recombination. In some cases, this makes random mutation and random recombination unnecessary and obsolete.
Indications that paraoxonase-1 contributes to plasma high density lipoprotein levels in familial hypercholesterolemia Published, JLR Papers in Press, December 1, 2004. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M400052-JLR200

HDL-associated paraoxonase type 1 (PON1) can protect LDL and HDL against oxidative modification in vitro and therefore may protect against cardiovascular disease. We investigated the effects of PON1 levels, activity, and genetic variation on high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) levels, circulating oxidized LDL (OxLDL), subclinical inflammation [high-sensitive C-reactive protein (Hs-CRP)], and carotid atherosclerosis. PON1 genotypes (L55M, Q192R, −107C/T, −162A/G, −824G/A, and −907G/C) were determined in 302 patients with familial hypercholesterolemia. PON1 activity was monitored by the hydrolysis rate of paraoxon, diazoxon, and phenyl acetate. PON1 levels, OxLDL, and Hs-CRP were determined using an immunoassay. The genetic variants of PON1 that were associated with high levels and activity of the enzyme were associated with higher HDL-C levels (P values for trend: 0.008, 0.020, 0.042, and 0.037 for L55M, Q192R, −107C/T, and −907G/C, respectively). In addition to the PON1 genotype, there was also a positive correlation between PON1 levels and activity and HDL-C (PON1 levels: r = 0.37, P < 0.001; paraoxonase activity: r = 0.23, P = 0.01; diazoxonase activity: r = 0.29, P < 0.001; arylesterase activity: r = 0.19, P = 0.03). Our observations support the hypothesis that both PON1 levels and activity preserve HDL-C in plasma.
Tunable plasmonic Au-film over nanosphere SERS substrate by rapid thermal annealing

In this work, 5 nm Au film was deposited on 100 nm polystyrene (PS) nanobeads and tuned by three different temperatures of a short rapid thermal annealing (RTA) process, 250°, 500° and 750°. Results show that structural alteration of Au-film morphology due to RTA led to a gradual enhancement of SERS response on the detection of Rhodamine 6G (R6G) Raman probe achieving the highest enhancement factor (EF) at 1.08 × 108 by 750° of RTA. Overall, a novel approach of a non-lithographic SERS substrate with tunable plasmonic response assisted by RTA was achieved.
ISOLATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF RHEINHEIMERA SP . FROM BLACK TIGER SHRIMP PENAEUS MONODON

Two bacterial strains designated C9 and C11 were isolated and characterized from black tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon maintained in laboratory conditions. The shrimp exhibited tiny white spots along with clinical signs of bacterial infection, probably, due to suboptimal water quality and resulting stress. Absence of white spot syndrome virus was confirmed by PCR. Bacterial isolates obtained from the haemolymph, hepatopancreas and gills were predominated by two types of strains. Strains C9 and C11 were Gram negative, aerobic, nonpathogenic, pigmented, rod shaped and motile. C9 was highly pigmented whereas C11 was less pigmented. Optimum growth temperature for C9 and C11 was 25 0 C. Lower salinity was more suitable for growth and pigmentproduction. On the basis of the 16SrRNA gene sequence, the strains C9 and C11 were allotted the accession numbers KR135116 and KR135117, respectively. Strains C9and C11 exhibited no differences in their 16S rRNAsequences. They were shown to belong to the class Gammaproteobacteria, being most closely related to Rheinheimera aquimaris with 87% bootstrap support. The DNA G+C content of the two strains C9 (53.36mol%) and C11 (53.14mol%) are the highest reported so far among Rheinmeinhera spp. Molecular data demonstrated that both the strains showed 96% bootstrap support witheach other butdifference in their phenotypic characteristics strongly support that they belong to different biotypes.
Stochastic Simulation of DNA Double-Strand Break Repair by Non-homologous End Joining Based on Track Structure Calculations

Abstract A Monte Carlo simulation model for DNA repair via the non-homologous end-joining pathway has been developed. Initial DNA damage calculated by the Monte Carlo track structure code PARTRAC provides starting conditions concerning spatial distribution of double-strand breaks (DSBs) and characterization of lesion complexity. DNA termini undergo attachment and dissociation of repair enzymes described in stochastic first-order kinetics as well as step-by-step diffusive motion considering nuclear attachment sites. Pairs of DNA termini with attached DNA-PK enter synapsis under spatial proximity conditions. After synapsis, a single rate-limiting step is assumed for clean DNA ends, and step-by-step removal of nearby base lesions and strand breaks is considered for dirty DNA ends. Four simple model scenarios reflecting different hypotheses on the origin of the slow phase of DSB repair have been set up. Parameters for the presynaptic phase have been derived from experimental data for Ku70/Ku80 and DNA-PK association and dissociation kinetics. Time constants for the post-synaptic phase have been adapted to experimental DSB rejoining kinetics for human fibroblasts after 137Cs γ irradiation. In addition to DSB rejoining kinetics, the yields of residual DSBs, incorrectly rejoined DSBs, and chromosomal aberrations have been determined as a function of dose and compared with experimental data. Three of the model scenarios obviously overestimate residual DSBs after long-term repair after low-dose irradiation, whereas misrejoined DSBs and chromosomal aberrations are in surprisingly good agreement with measurements.
Distributed adaptive compressed video sensing using smoothed projected landweber reconstruction

A novel Compressed-Sensing-based (CS-based) Distributed Video Coding (DVC) system, called Distributed Adaptive Compressed Video Sensing (DISACOS), is proposed in this paper. In this system, the input frames are divided into key frames and non-key frames, which are encoded by block CS sampling. The key frames are encoded as CS measurements at substantially higher rates than the non-key frames and decoded by the Smoothed Projected Landweber (SPL) algorithm using multi-hypothesis predictions. For the non-key frames, a small number of CS measurements are first transmitted to detect blocks having low-quality Side Information (SI) generated by the conventional interpolation or extrapolation at the decoder; then, another group of CS measurements are sampled again upon the decoder's request. To fully utilise the CS measurements, we adaptively allocate these measurements to each block in terms of different edge features. Finally, the residual frame is reconstructed using the SPL algorithm and the decoded non-key frame is simply determined as the sum of the residual frame and the SI. Experimental results have revealed that our CS-based DVC system yields better rate-distortion performance when compared with other schemes.
Differential location privacy for crowdsourced spectrum sensing

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) enables secondary users (SUs) to access the underutilized licensed spectrum when the primary users (PUs) are absent and is a key solution to address the worldwide spectrum scarcity and improve the spectrum utilization. Database-driven DSA is a popular DSA paradigm and has been approved by FCC. In a database-driven DSA system, a spectrum service provider (SPP) accepts registrations from PUs and estimates the spectrum availability. To improve the accuracy of spectrum estimation in such a system, crowdsourced spectrum sensing (CSS) has been proposed, where the SPP recruits a large number of ubiquitous mobile users and outsources spectrum-sensing tasks to them. Although showing great potential, CSS requires the SPP to know the locations of mobile users for spectrum-sensing task allocation, which presents a serious privacy concern. In this paper, we propose an approach for protecting location privacy of mobile users while ensuring the sensing performance in CCS. The proposed approach is based on differential privacy and geocast, which allows the SSP to allocate tasks to mobile users without inferring their individual location information. Analytic models and task allocation strategies are developed in this paper to balance privacy, utility, and system overhead in CSS. Experimentation results based on real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can provide rigorous privacy protection to mobile users while providing effective services with low system overhead.
Effects of exposure to air pollution on blood coagulation

Summary. Background: Consistent evidence has indicated that air pollution increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The underlying mechanisms linking air pollutants to increased cardiovascular risk are unclear. Objectives: We investigated the association between the pollution levels and changes in such global coagulation tests as the prothrombin time (PT) and the activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) in 1218 normal subjects from the Lombardia Region, Italy. Plasma fibrinogen and naturally occurring anticoagulant proteins were also evaluated. Methods: Hourly concentrations of particulate (PM10) and gaseous pollutants (CO, NO2, SO2, and O3) were obtained from 53 monitoring sites covering the study area. Generalized additive models were applied to compute standardized regression coefficients controlled for age, gender, body mass index, smoking, alcohol, hormone use, temperature, day of the year, and long‐term trends. Results: The PT became shorter with higher ambient air concentrations at the time of the study of PM10 (coefficient = −0.06; P < 0.05), CO (coefficient = −0.11; P < 0.001) and NO2 (coefficient =−0.06; P < 0.05). In the 30 days before blood sampling, the PT was also negatively associated with the average PM10 (coefficient = −0.08; P < 0.05) and NO2 (coefficient = −0.08; P < 0.05). No association was found between the APTT and air pollutant levels. In addition, no consistent relations with air pollution were found for fibrinogen, antithrombin, protein C and protein S. Conclusions: This investigation shows that air pollution is associated with changes in the global coagulation function, suggesting a tendency towards hypercoagulability after short‐term exposure to air pollution. Whether these changes contribute to trigger cardiovascular events remains to be established.
Customer Relationship Management Scale for Video Games’ Players: Exploratory and Ordinal Factor Analysis

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) turns out to be a relevant source of competitive advantage in a highly competitive scenario, as in the video game’s industry. Thereby, the main objective of this study is to develop and validate a scale to assess players’ perceptions regarding aspects they consider relevant in their relationship with Nintendo Wii games, the world’s market leader in the video game’s industry. We conducted a qualitative and quantitative study with 493 subjects using both exploratory and ordinal factor analysis to compare the results. We’ve also assessed the influence of some demographics (age, gender, and frequency of playing) on players’ perceptions concerning their relationship with video games, specifically Nintendo Wii games. The results of both factor analyzes were pretty similar and the scale showed good psychometric parameters. This research is a starting point to provide a comprehensive valid measure of CRM based on customers’ perspectives regarding video games. As practical implications, the CRM scale for video games may be * Doutora em Psicologia Organizacional pela Universidade de Brasília, pós-doutora em Management & Organizations pela UCLA/EUA e Professora do Departamento de Administração e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração da Universidade de Brasília ** Universidade de Brasília *** Universidade de Brasília