Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ProACt: A Processor for High Performance On-demand Approximate Computing

We present ProACt, a Processor for high performance on-demand Approximate Computing. ProACt is a general purpose processor that can dynamically approximate floating point operations. In ProACt, the approximations are done in hardware, but the software can directly enable, disable or control the accuracy of approximations. In addition, ProACt offers a complete open-source development framework consisting of a hardware processor and associated software tool chain. ProACt uses functional approximations and is proven in FPGA. Further, we show performance improvements of about 30% on case studies in image processing and scientific computing.
A high sensitivity z-axis torsional silicon accelerometer

This paper presents a high sensitivity silicon micromachined capacitive accelerometer fabricated using a three mask, dissolved wafer process. High electrical sensitivity is obtained by using high aspect-ratio comb fingers with narrow air gaps of 2 /spl mu/m and large overlap area of 12 /spl mu/m/spl times/300 /spl mu/m. Torsional suspension beams 150 /spl mu/m long with a cross-sectional area of 12 /spl mu/m/spl times/3 /spl mu/m are used to improve the mechanical gain (form factor). By using a varying overlap area method, the dynamic range, the pull-in voltage and the bandwidth are improved. The fabricated accelerometers yielded sensitivities of 263-300 mV/g, a nonlinearity less than 0.2% over a range of -4 g to +3 g, a full scale range of -4 g to +6 g and pull-in voltages greater than 8 V. A 3-dB cut-off frequency of 30 Hz was measured in air. The minimum resolution measured by the readout electronics was 0.077 g.
Structure and Majority Classes in Decision Tree Learning

To provide good classification accuracy on unseen examples, a decision tree, learned by an algorithm such as ID3, must have sufficient structure and also identify the correct majority class in each of its leaves. If there are inadequacies in respect of either of these, the tree will have a percentage classification rate below that of the maximum possible for the domain, namely (100 - Bayes error rate). An error decomposition is introduced which enables the relative contributions of deficiencies in structure and in incorrect determination of majority class to be isolated and quantified. A sub-decomposition of majority class error permits separation of the sampling error at the leaves from the possible bias introduced by the attribute selection method of the induction algorithm. It is shown that sampling error can extend to 25% when there are more than two classes. Decompositions are obtained from experiments on several data sets. For ID3, the effect of selection bias is shown to vary from being statistically non-significant to being quite substantial, with the latter appearing to be associated with a simple underlying model.
Activated release of membrane-anchored TGF-alpha in the absence of cytosol

The ectodomain of proTGF-alpha, a membrane-anchored growth factor, is converted into soluble TGF-alpha by a regulated cellular proteolytic system that recognizes proTGF-alpha via the C-terminal valine of its cytoplasmic tail. In order to define the biochemical components involved in proTGF-alpha cleavage, we have used cells permeabilized with streptolysin O (SLO) that have been extensively washed to remove cytosol. PMA, acting through a Ca(2+)-independent protein kinase C, activates cleavage as efficiently in permeabilized cells as it does in intact cells. ProTGF-alpha cleavage is also stimulated by GTP gamma S through a mechanism whose pharmacological properties suggest the involvement of a heterotrimeric G protein acting upstream of the PMA- sensitive Ca(2+)-independent protein kinase C. Activated proTGF-alpha cleavage is dependent on ATP hydrolysis, appears not to require vesicular traffic, and acts specifically on proTGF-alpha that has reached the cell surface. These results indicate that proTGF-alpha is cleaved from the cell surface by a regulated system whose signaling, recognition, and proteolytic components are retained in cells devoid of cytosol.
Heat Stress Alters Ovarian Insulin-Mediated Phosphatidylinositol-3 Kinase and Steroidogenic Signaling in Gilt Ovaries1

ABSTRACT Heat stress (HS) compromises a variety of reproductive functions in several mammalian species. Inexplicably, HS animals are frequently hyperinsulinemic despite marked hyperthermia-induced hypophagia. Our objectives were to determine the effects of HS on insulin signaling and components essential to steroid biosynthesis in the pig ovary. Female pigs (35 ± 4 kg) were exposed to constant thermoneutral (20°C; 35%–50% humidity; n = 6) or HS conditions (35°C; 20%–35% humidity; n = 6) for either 7 (n = 10) or 35 days (n = 12). After 7 days, HS increased (P < 0.05) ovarian mRNA abundance of the insulin receptor (INSR), insulin receptor substrate 1 (IRS1), protein kinase B subunit 1 (AKT1), low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR), luteinizing hormone receptor (LHCGR), and aromatase (CYP19a). After 35 days, HS increased INSR, IRS1, AKT1, LDLR, LHCGR, CYP19a, and steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (STAR) ovarian mRNA abundance. In addition, after 35 days, HS increased ovarian phosphorylated IRS1 (pIRS1), phosphorylated AKT (pAKT), STAR, and CYP19a protein abundance. Immunostaining analysis revealed similar localization of INSR and pAKT1 in the cytoplasmic membrane and oocyte cytoplasm, respectively, of all stage follicles, and in theca and granulosa cells. Collectively, these results demonstrate that HS alters ovarian insulin-mediated PI3K signaling pathway members, which likely impacts follicle activation and viability. In summary, environmentally induced HS is an endocrine-disrupting exposure that modifies ovarian physiology and potentially compromises production of ovarian hormones essential for fertility and pregnancy maintenance.
Essential Principles of Information Systems Development

This article draws together and examines research findings and practical industrial experiences related to computer-based information systems. Its purpose is to identify a set of the most fundamental principles that have emerged in the field to guide development information systems in organizations. It also presents a foundation from which further research efforts can be launched. The characteristics of computer-based information systems are examined as background. Technical and developmental principles are then examined, including such important areas as data management, data independence, and information system structure. Behavioral and organizational principles are discussed next, encompassing resistance to systems, user and management involvement in development activities, and integration of systems into the organization. Finally, the question of "where do we go from here" is raised to point out areas needing continued research and development.
Extravasation Injuries in Adults

Insertion of an intravascular catheter is one of the most common invasive procedures in hospitals worldwide. These intravascular lines are crucial in resuscitation, allow vital medication to be administered, and can be used to monitor the patients' real-time vital parameters. There is, however, growing recognition of potential risks to life and limb associated with their use. Medical literature is now replete with isolated case reports of complications succinctly described by Garden and Laussen (2004) as “An unending supply of “unusual” complications from central venous catheters. ” This paper reviews complications of venous and arterial catheters and discusses treatment approaches and methods to prevent complications, based on current evidence and endeavours to provide information and guidance that will enable practitioners to prevent, recognise, and successfully treat extravasation injuries in adults.
Butyl Isocyanide as a Probe of the Activation Mechanism of Soluble Guanylate Cyclase

Nitric oxide (NO) is a physiologically relevant activator of the hemoprotein soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC). In the presence of NO, sGC is activated several hundredfold above the basal level by a mechanism that remains to be elucidated. The heme ligand n-butyl isocyanide (BIC) was used to probe the mechanism of NO activation of sGC. Electronic absorption spectroscopy was used to show that BIC binds to the sGC heme, forming a 6-coordinate complex with an absorbance maximum at 429 nm. BIC activates sGC 2-5-fold, and synergizes with the allosteric activator YC-1, to activate the enzyme 15-25-fold. YC-1 activates the sGC-BIC complex, and leads to an increase in both the Vmax and Km. BIC was also used to probe the mechanism of NO activation. The activity of the sGC-BIC complex increases 15-fold in the presence of NO, without displacing BIC at the heme, which is consistent with previous reports that proposed the involvement of a non-heme NO binding site in the activation process.
Speeding-up multi-robot exploration by considering semantic place information

In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring an unknown environment with a team of mobile robots. One of the key issues in multi-robot exploration is how to assign target locations to the individual robots. To better distribute the robots over the environment and to avoid redundant work, we take into account the type of place a potential target is located in (e.g., a corridor or a room). To determine the type of a place, we apply a classifier learned with AdaBoost which additionally considers spatial dependencies between nearby locations. Our approach to incorporate the type of places in the coordination of the robots has been implemented and tested in different environments. The experiments demonstrate that our system effectively distributes the robots over the environment and allows them to accomplish their mission faster compared to approaches that ignore the semantic place labels
Almost sure functional central limit theorem for ballistic random walk in random environment

Nous considerons une marche aleatoire multidimensionnelle en environnement aleatoire produit. La marche est a pas bornes, transiente dans une direction spatiale donnee, et telle que le temps de regeneration possede un moment suffisamment haut. Nous prouvons un principe d'invariance, ou un theoreme limite central fonctionnel, sous presque tout environnement pour la marche centree et diffusivement normalisee. Le point principal derriere le principe d'invariance est que la moyenne trempee (quenched) de la marche est sous-diffusive.
Analyzing Social Bookmarking Systems : A del . icio . us Cookbook

Social bookmarking systems have recently gained interest among researches in the areas of data mining and web intelligence, as they provide a vast amount of user-generated annotations and reflect the interests of millions of people. In this paper, we discuss our initial findings obtained from analyzing a vast corpus of almost 150 million bookmarks found at del.icio. us. Apart from investigating bookmarking and tagging patterns in this data, we discuss evidence that social bookmarking systems are vulnerable to spamming and hence need to be preprocessed before any insightful analysis can be carried out. We present a method, which limits the influence of spam in social bookmarking analysis and provide conclusions and directions for future research.
The refractometric determination of the total protein concentration in some animal plasmas.

Abstract Extract Refractometry has been used for serum or plasma total, protein determination since the beginning of this century and while at times the value and accuracy of the technique has been open to question (see Lines and Raine, 1970a,b), many studies have shown close agreement between refractometric determination of serum total protein and estimation by such techniques as the Biuret method and the Kjeldahl nitrogen determination (Lines and Raine, 1970b; Barry et al., 1960; Drickman and McKeon, 1962).
How to Allocate Resources For Features Acquisition?

We study classification problems where features are corrupted by noise and where the magnitude of the noise in each feature is influenced by the resources allocated to its acquisition. This is the case, for example, when multiple sensors share a common resource (power, bandwidth, attention, etc.). We develop a method for computing the optimal resource allocation for a variety of scenarios and derive theoretical bounds concerning the benefit that may arise by non-uniform allocation. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method in simulations.
Page ranking and topic-sensitive page ranking: micro-changes and macro-impact

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the marketing and sales implications of page ranking techniques, in terms of how companies may use knowledge of their operation to increase the chances of attracting custom.Design/methodology/approach – Explaining the calculation, implementation and impact of the PageRank and Topic Sensitive Page Ranking is the prerequisite to recapitulating existing search engine optimization strategies and to identifying new methods for leveraging the Internet for sales and marketing purposes.Findings – Different strategies have to be adapted to effectively attract potential customers.Originality/value – This paper aligns the complex calculations of the two concepts to enable a comparison. The changing technology of search engines means that they are getting ever more complex – this article offers a snapshot of major developments.
EEG Bands of Wakeful Rest, Slow-Wave and Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep at Different Brain Areas in Rats

Accumulating evidence reveals that neuronal oscillations with various frequency bands in the brain have different physiological functions. However, the frequency band divisions in rats were typically based on empirical spectral distribution from limited channels information. In the present study, functionally relevant frequency bands across vigilance states and brain regions were identified using factor analysis based on 9 channels EEG signals recorded from multiple brain areas in rats. We found that frequency band divisions varied both across vigilance states and brain regions. In particular, theta oscillations during REM sleep were subdivided into two bands, 5–7 and 8–11 Hz corresponding to the tonic and phasic stages, respectively. The spindle activities of SWS were different along the anterior-posterior axis, lower oscillations (~16 Hz) in frontal regions and higher in parietal (~21 Hz). The delta and theta activities co-varied in the visual and auditory cortex during wakeful rest. In addition, power spectra of beta oscillations were significantly decreased in association cortex during REM sleep compared with wakeful rest. These results provide us some new insights into understand the brain oscillations across vigilance states, and also indicate that the spatial factor should not be ignored when considering the frequency band divisions in rats.
Sparse Signal Recovery Using Iterative Proximal Projection

This paper is concerned with designing efficient algorithms for recovering sparse signals from noisy underdetermined measurements. More precisely, we consider minimization of a nonsmooth and nonconvex sparsity promoting function subject to an error constraint. To solve this problem, we use an alternating minimization penalty method, which ends up with an iterative proximal-projection approach. Furthermore, inspired by accelerated gradient schemes for solving convex problems, we equip the obtained algorithm with a so-called extrapolation step to boost its performance. Additionally, we prove its convergence to a critical point. Our extensive simulations on synthetic as well as real data verify that the proposed algorithm considerably outperforms some well-known and recently proposed algorithms.
Karyotype characterization and comparison of three hexaploid species of Bromus Linnaeus, 1753 (Poaceae)

Abstract Chromosome morphometry and nuclear DNA content are useful data for cytotaxonomy and to understand the evolutionary history of different taxa. For the genus Bromus Linnaeus, 1753, distinct ploidy levels have been reported, occurring from diploid to duodecaploid species. The geographic distribution of Bromus species has been correlated with chromosome number and ploidy level. In this study, the aims were to determine the nuclear genome size and characterize the karyotype of the South American Bromus species: Bromus auleticus Trinius ex Nees, 1829, Bromus brachyanthera Döll, 1878 and Bromus catharticus Vahl, 1791. The mean nuclear 2C value ranged from 2C = 12.64 pg for B. catharticus to 2C = 17.92 pg for B. auleticus, meaning a maximum variation of 2C = 5.28 pg, equivalent to 41.70%. Despite this significant difference in 2C value, the three species exhibit the same chromosome number, 2n = 6x = 42, which confirms their hexaploid origin. Corroborating the genome size, the chromosome morphometry (total, short- and long-arm length) and, consequently, the class differed among the karyotypes of the species. Based on the first karyograms for these Bromus species, some morphologically similar and several distinct chromosome pairs were found. Therefore, the karyotype characterization confirmed the hexaploid origin of the studied Bromus species, which differ in relation to the karyogram and the nuclear 2C value. Considering this, cytogenetics and flow cytometry can be used to discriminate Bromus species, contributing to taxonomy and systematic studies and providing information on the evolutionary history of this taxa.
First order reset elements and the Clegg integrator revisited

We revisit a class of reset control systems containing first order reset elements (FORE) and Clegg integrators and propose a new class of models for these systems. The proposed model generalizes the models available in the literature and we illustrate, using the Clegg integrator, that it is more appropriate for describing the behavior of reset systems. Then, we state computable sufficient conditions for L/sub 2/ stability of the new class of models. Our results are based on LMIs and they exploit quadratic and piecewise quadratic Lyapunov functions. Finally, a result on stabilization of linear minimum phase systems with relative degree one using high gain FOREs is stated. We present two examples to illustrate our results. In particular, we show that for some systems a FORE can achieve lower L/sub 2/ gain than the underlying linear controller without resets.
Bond strength to radicular dentin and sealing ability of AH Plus in combination with a bonding agent

Abstract Objective. To evaluate the sealing ability and bond strength of AH Plus sealer associated with the hybridization protocol of radicular dentin with Scotchbond Multi Purpose (SB). Materials and methods. Ninety palatal roots of maxillary molars were selected and divided into three groups (n = 30) according to filling protocol (G1, AH Plus/Resilon; G2, SB/AH Plus/Resilon; and G3, AH Plus/Gutta-Percha). In groups in which AH Plus + resin cones were used, dentin was hybridized before applying sealing material. For the bond strength test, 60 roots of bovine teeth were selected. Six holes were made in each root, two in the cervical, middle and apical third of the root. The roles were filled with AH Plus sealer with or without an adhesive system and submitted to push out test and the fracture mode was examined using a stereomicroscope (×32). Results. Statistical analysis showed that ScotchBond Multi Purpose (SB) + Resilon cone + AH Plus group promoted higher sealing ability than the gutta-percha + AH Plus group (p < 0.05). Bond strength was lower with SB application than without it (p < 0.05). A reverse correlation was found between bond strength and sealing ability. The fracture mode methodology revealed 22.77% of adhesive, 11.67% of cohesive and 65.55% of mixture fractures for SBMP/AH Plus protocol, whereas the AH Plus protocol indicated 86.11% of cohesive and 13.89% of mixed fractures. Conclusion. It was concluded that the use of the adhesive system Scotchbond Multi Purpose improved coronal sealing ability of AH Plus, but bond strength of sealer was reduced when adhesive was applied.
The effects of MyD88 deficiency on disease phenotype in dysferlin‐deficient A/J mice: role of endogenous TLR ligands

An absence of dysferlin leads to activation of innate immune receptors such as Toll‐like receptors (TLRs) and skeletal muscle inflammation. Myeloid differentiation primary response gene 88 (MyD88) is a key mediator of TLR‐dependent innate immune signalling. We hypothesized that endogenous TLR ligands released from the leaking dysferlin‐deficient muscle fibres engage TLRs on muscle and immune cells and contribute to disease progression. To test this hypothesis, we generated and characterized dysferlin and MyD88 double‐deficient mice. Double‐deficient mice exhibited improved body weight, grip strength, and maximum muscle contractile force at 6–8 months of age when compared to MyD88‐sufficient, dysferlin‐deficient A/J mice. Double‐deficient mice also showed a decrease in total fibre number, which contributed to the observed increase in the number of central nuclei/fibres. These results indicate that there was less regeneration in the double‐deficient mice. We next tested the hypothesis that endogenous ligands, such as single‐stranded ribonucleic acids (ssRNAs), released from damaged muscle cells bind to TLR‐7/8 and perpetuate the disease progression. We found that injection of ssRNA into the skeletal muscle of pre‐symptomatic mice (2 months old) resulted in a significant increase in degenerative fibres, inflammation, and regenerating fibres in A/J mice. In contrast, characteristic histological features were significantly decreased in double‐deficient mice. These data point to a clear role for the TLR pathway in the pathogenesis of dysferlin deficiency and suggest that TLR‐7/8 antagonists may have therapeutic value in this disease. Copyright © 2013 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
New Scholars COMING OUT OR NOT? HOW NONHETEROSEXUAL PEOPLE MANAGE THEIR SEXUAL IDENTITY AT WORK

The context of workplaces could be defined as heteronormative, from a structural, discursive and practical point of view. Sexual orientation is still an underresearched area of diversity in work organizations (Ward & Winstanley, 2005) because of the difficulties in accessing information around themes connected to sexuality. As a result, the framework provided by the present study produces a significant contribution to our understanding of minority sexual identity at work. Through the conceptual framework of performativity, this article’s aim is to give voice to every individual who doesn’t recognise her/himself in a heterosexual definition of her/his orientation, desires, behaviours, emotions, and identities. I propose to adopt Greimas’s semiotic square (1970) in order to define a heuristic device relating to the “disclosure” and “silence” possibilities in workplaces. The empirical material in this article is based on 34 in-depth interviews conducted with nonheterosexual members of private and public Italian organizations.