Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Retrieval of atmospheric CH4 vertical information from TCCON
FTIR spectra

Abstract. TCCON (Total Carbon Column Observing Network) column-averaged dry air mole fraction of CH4 (XCH4) measurements have been widely used to validate satellite observations and to estimate model simulations. The GGG2014 code is the standard TCCON retrieval software performing a profile scaling retrieval. In order to obtain several vertical information in addition to total column, in this study, the SFIT4 retrieval code is applied to retrieve CH4 mole fraction vertical profile using TCCON spectra (SFIT4TCCON) at six sites (Ny-Ålesund, Sodankylä, Bialystok, Bremen, Orléans and St Denis) during the time period of 2016−2017. The retrieval strategy of SFIT4TCCON is investigated. The degree of freedom for signal of the SFIT4TCCON retrieval is about 2.4, with two distinct species of information in the troposphere and in the stratosphere. The averaging kernel and error budget of the SFIT4TCCON retrieval are presented. The data accuracy and precision of the SFIT4TCCON retrievals, including the total column and two partial columns (in the troposphere and stratosphere), are estimated by TCCON standard retrievals, ground-based in situ measurements, ACE-FTS satellite observations, TCCON proxy data and AirCore measurements. By comparison against TCCON standard retrievals, it is found that the retrieval uncertainty of SFIT4TCCON XCH4 is similar to that of TCCON standard retrievals with the systematic uncertainty within 0.35 % and the random uncertainty about 0.5 %. The tropospheric and stratospheric XCH4 from SFIT4TCCON retrievals are assessed by comparing with AirCore measurements at Sodankylä, and there is a 1.2 % overestimation in the SFIT4TCCON tropospheric XCH4 and a 4.0 % underestimation in the SFIT4TCCON stratospheric XCH4, which are within the systematic uncertainties of SFIT4TCCON retrieved partial columns in the troposphere and stratosphere, respectively.
Spatial join selectivity using power laws

We discovered a surprising law governing the spatial join selectivity across two sets of points. An example of such a spatial join is “find the libraries that are within 10 miles of schools”. Our law dictates that the number of such qualifying pairs follows a power law, whose exponent we call “pair-count exponent” (PC). We show that this law also holds for self-spatial-joins (“find schools within 5 miles of other schools”) in addition to the general case that the two point-sets are distinct. Our law holds for many real datasets, including diverse environments (geographic datasets, feature vectors from biology data, galaxy data from astronomy). In addition, we introduce the concept of the Box-Occupancy-Product-Sum (BOPS) plot, and we show that it can compute the pair-count exponent in a timely manner, reducing the run time by orders of magnitude, from quadratic to linear. Due to the pair-count exponent and our analysis (Law 1), we can achieve accurate selectivity estimates in constant time (O(1)) without the need for sampling or other expensive operations. The relative error in selectivity is about 30% with our fast BOPS method, and even better (about 10%), if we use the slower, quadratic method.
Application-Aware Power Management

This paper presents our approach for application-aware power management. We combine continuous monitoring of critical workload indicators, online power and performance model usage and timely p-state control to realize application-aware power management. We present two new power management solutions enabled by our methodology: PerformanceMaximizer (PM) finds the best possible performance under specified power constraints and PowerSave (PS) saves energy while keeping performance above specified requirements. We evaluate both using the SPEC-CPU2000 suite on a Pentium M platform discussing implications of workload characteristics and benefits of being workload-aware
Mining the pharmacogenomics literature - a survey of the state of the art

This article surveys efforts on text mining of the pharmacogenomics literature, mainly from the period 2008 to 2011. Pharmacogenomics (or pharmacogenetics) is the field that studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response. Therefore, publications span the intersection of research in genotypes, phenotypes and pharmacology, a topic that has increasingly become a focus of active research in recent years. This survey covers efforts dealing with the automatic recognition of relevant named entities (e.g. genes, gene variants and proteins, diseases and other pathological phenomena, drugs and other chemicals relevant for medical treatment), as well as various forms of relations between them. A wide range of text genres is considered, such as scientific publications (abstracts, as well as full texts), patent texts and clinical narratives. We also discuss infrastructure and resources needed for advanced text analytics, e.g. document corpora annotated with corresponding semantic metadata (gold standards and training data), biomedical terminologies and ontologies providing domain-specific background knowledge at different levels of formality and specificity, software architectures for building complex and scalable text analytics pipelines and Web services grounded to them, as well as comprehensive ways to disseminate and interact with the typically huge amounts of semiformal knowledge structures extracted by text mining tools. Finally, we consider some of the novel applications that have already been developed in the field of pharmacogenomic text mining and point out perspectives for future research.
Towards a More Functional and Secure Network Infrastructure

We propose an overlay network infrastructure that provides better protection against DoS attacks as well as more functionality than today’s Internet. Our solution is based on three simple principles: (i) enabling end-hosts to communicate without revealing their IP address, (ii) giving end-hosts control to defend against Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks at the overlay level, and (iii) making sure that the added functionality does not introduce vulnerabilities not present in the Internet. Our design is based on the Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3).
Antigen-independent Induction of Histamine Synthesis by Immunoglobulin E in Mouse Bone Marrow–derived Mast Cells

Immunoglobulin (Ig)E-mediated activation of mast cells has long been thought to occur only when FcεRI receptor-bound IgE is cross-linked via multivalent antigens. However, recent studies have raised the possibility that mast cells may be activated by the binding of IgE to the FcεRI receptor in the absence of antigen. Here we demonstrate that IgE binding without antigen induces the expression of histidine decarboxylase (HDC) in mouse interleukin (IL)-3–dependent bone marrow–derived mast cells (BMMCs). The induction of HDC by the binding of IgE was found to require an influx of extracellular calcium ions, which was attenuated by pretreatment with U73122, a phospholipase C inhibitor. Furthermore, the increase in HDC activity upon sensitization with IgE was completely suppressed by pretreatment of BMMCs with protein kinase C inhibitors, such as H7, staurosporine, and Gö6976. In addition, immediate activation of the tyrosine kinase Lyn was not detectable upon treatment with IgE. These results suggest that the binding of IgE to its receptor in the absence of antigen results in de novo synthesis of HDC in BMMCs through a signaling pathway distinct to that operating during antigen-stimulated FcεRI activation.
A small nucleolar RNA functions in rRNA processing in Caenorhabditis elegans

CeR-2 RNA is one of the newly identified Caenorhabditis elegans noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). The characterization of CeR-2 by RNomic studies has failed to classify it into any known ncRNA family. In this study, we examined the spatiotemporal expression patterns of CeR-2 to gain insight into its function. CeR-2 is expressed in most cells from the early embryo to adult stages. The subcellular localization of this RNA is analogous to that of fibrillarin, a major protein of the nucleolus. It was observed that knockdown of C/D small nucleolar ribonucleoproteins (snoRNPs), but not of H/ACA snoRNPs, resulted in the aberrant nucleolar localization of CeR-2 RNA. A mutant worm with a reduced amount of cellular CeR-2 RNA showed changes in its pre-rRNA processing pattern compared with that of the wild-type strain N2. These results suggest that CeR-2 RNA is a C/D snoRNA involved in the processing of rRNAs.
Optical imaging of infants' neurocognitive development: Recent advances and perspectives

Near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) provides a unique method of monitoring infant brain function by measuring the changes in the concentrations of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin. During the past 10 years, NIRS measurement of the developing brain has rapidly expanded. In this article, a brief discussion of the general principles of NIRS, including its technical advantages and limitations, is followed by a detailed review of the role played so far by NIRS in the study of infant perception and cognition, including language, and visual and auditory functions. Results have highlighted, in particular, the developmental changes of cerebral asymmetry associated with speech acquisition. Finally, suggestions for future studies of neurocognitive development using NIRS are presented. Although NIRS studies of the infant brain have yet to fulfill their potential, a review of the work done so far indicates that NIRS is likely to provide many unique insights in the field of developmental neuroscience. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol, 2008
Partial seizures induced by latrunculin A microperfusion in the mouse hippocampus: Role of extracellular glutamate and NMDA receptors

SourceURL:file:///Macintosh%20HD/Users/cruz/Desktop/mol-cell-epi/MOL-CEL.doc We have previously shown that in vivo disruption of F-actin filaments induces acute and chronic seizures in rats and mice. On these basis, we have studied the effect of latrunculin A microperfusion in the mice hippocampus on seizure patterns, actin filaments and NMDA receptors. Latrunculin A (8 mg/ml) was perfused for three consecutive days into the mice hippocampus using microdialysis probes with continuous EEG and video monitoring. After microdialysis experiments, F-actin depolymerization and synaptic and extrasynaptic NR1 protein levels were investigated. Intrahippocampal latrunculin A microdialysis induced partial seizures during the third day of perfusion, and the animals started showing spontaneous partial seizures one month after treatment. Increased levels of extracellular glutamate via microdislysis probes induced seizures in treated mice. F-actin levels were significantly decreased, while NMDA receptor density increased both in synaptic and non-synaptic locations. These results support the hypothesis that actin disruption might be not just a consequence but also a possible cause of epileptic seizures. Actin depolymerization-induced seizures are related to an increase in synaptic and extrasynaptic NMDA receptors and to changes in the extracellular environment. We propose a new experimental model in mice to study the biochemical changes that may lead to chronic seizures, and a method for testing new antiepileptic drugs.
Capacity model for the CDMA/HDR high-speed wireless data service

CDMA/HDR (High Data Rate) is a high-speed wireless data service that is optimized for best-effort data services (for a description of HDR see [1]). As with all best-effort services, as the number of users increases, the quality of service experienced by each user decreases. In order to provide an acceptable level of service to users, the system must be engineered for a limited number of connected users and ensure (by admission controls) that this number is rarely exceeded. In this paper we provide a capacity model that can be used to determine user perceived delays and throughput as a function of the total number of users. This can then be used to determine the maximum number of simultaneous users that the system can support for specified limits on user delay and throughput.
Towards model checking graph grammars

We sketch a setup in which transition systems are generated from graph grammars and subsequently checked for properties expressed in a temporal logic on graphs. We envisage this as part of an approach where graph grammars are used to express the behavioural semantics of object-oriented programs, thus enabling automatic verification of those programs. This paper describes work in progress.
Social Stress and the Health of Women in the Andean Highlands: An Explorative Study

Social stress and health were explored among Andean highlanders to understand what stressors Andean women experience. The women’s stressors were investigated using the research methods of cultural domain analysis: free listing, unconstrained pile sorting, and constrained pile sorting. Analysis of the data has shown insight into how Andean women process the stressors they experience. The collected data was analyzed using cultural domain analysis to examine relationships between demographic variables and social stress. The findings reflect a shared consensus among women in the Andean highlands surrounding the kinds of stressors they experience, as well as how they categorize these stressors.
Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This achievement was made possible by inviting the general public to visually inspect and classify these galaxies via the internet. The project has obtained more than 4 × 107 individual classifications made by ∼105 participants. We discuss the motivation and strategy for this project, and detail how the classifications were performed and processed. We find that Galaxy Zoo results are consistent with those for subsets of SDSS galaxies classified by professional astronomers, thus demonstrating that our data provide a robust morphological catalogue. Obtaining morphologies by direct visual inspection avoids introducing biases associated with proxies for morphology such as colour, concentration or structural parameters. In addition, this catalogue can be used to directly compare SDSS morphologies with older data sets. The colour–magnitude diagrams for each morphological class are shown, and we illustrate how these distributions differ from those inferred using colour alone as a proxy for morphology.
RESILIENCE AND POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH IN PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

From the day their child is diagnosed, parents of children with special needs are traveling on a journey of extremes. The stress parents experience can lead down many paths filled with stress, worries, and concerns as their constant companion. These conditions exert extreme pressure on parents and can lead to life-altering changes. Parents who are resilient and able to cope with continuous change will ultimately weave through the unknown to a place of positive growth known as post-traumatic growth. The research project was based on qualitative data obtained from interviews with eleven parents of children with special needs. One of the many service professionals these parents interact with on a regular basis is service coordinators. Service coordinators know many personal details related to each family and are in a position to support parents positively to encourage post-traumatic growth. Separate interviews were conducted with nine service coordinators to collect qualitative data for this project. The researcher also conducted an analysis of peer-reviewed research articles and discovered the key factor related to parent’s resilience is encouraging social support provided by peer parents. This increases their resilience and is a critical factor towards achieving positive post-traumatic growth. During research analysis, the researcher found Family-Centered Care to be the most promising method for service coordinators to interact with families and increase the factors of resilience in parents. The current focus at Regional
Distributed and reactive query planning in R-MAGIC: an agent-based multimedia retrieval system

We present the planning scheme for a cooperative agent-based multimedia retrieval architecture that integrates a heterogeneous set of repositories into a coherent information system. The agents in the system collaborate in context of a conceptual query to formulate unique retrieval strategies for the different collections. The retrieval plan makes need-based use of independent content analysis tools available on the network. The retrieval strategies for the repositories so formulated satisfy the specified constraints on quality of results and the response time requirements. The retrieval plan is reactively updated based on the retrieval performance at the individual repositories. We present some experimental results to show the effectiveness of the planning scheme for repositories with different characteristics and the scalability of the architecture. We present a prototype implementation of this architecture that integrates a set of dissimilar collections of multimedia data on Indian cultural heritage. A comparison of the retrieval results with some existing Internet search tools proves the effectiveness of the architecture.
Domain Adaptation in the Absence of Source Domain Data

The overwhelming majority of existing domain adaptation methods makes an assumption of freely available source domain data. An equal access to both source and target data makes it possible to measure the discrepancy between their distributions and to build representations common to both target and source domains. In reality, such a simplifying assumption rarely holds, since source data are routinely a subject of legal and contractual constraints between data owners and data customers. When source domain data can not be accessed, decision making procedures are often available for adaptation nevertheless. These procedures are often presented in the form of classification, identification, ranking etc. rules trained on source data and made ready for a direct deployment and later reuse. In other cases, the owner of a source data is allowed to share a few representative examples such as class means. In this paper we address the domain adaptation problem in real world applications, where the reuse of source domain data is limited to classification rules or a few representative examples. We extend the recent techniques of feature corruption and their marginalization, both in supervised and unsupervised settings. We test and compare them on private and publicly available source datasets and show that significant performance gains can be achieved despite the absence of source data and shortage of labeled target data.
Factors Associated with Breastfeeding Initiation: A Comparison between France and French-Speaking Canada

Background Breastfeeding is associated with multiple domains of health for both mothers and children. Nevertheless, breastfeeding initiation is low within certain developed countries. Furthermore, comparative studies of initiation rates using harmonised data across multiple regions is scarce. Objective The aim of the present study was to investigate and compare individual-level determinants of breastfeeding initiation using two French-speaking cohorts. Methods Participants included ~ 3,900 mothers enrolled in two cohort studies in Canada and France. Interviews, questionnaires, and medical records were utilised to collect information on maternal, family, and medical factors associated with breastfeeding initiation. Results Rates of breastfeeding initiation were similar across cohorts, slightly above 70%. Women in both Canada and France who had higher levels of maternal education, were born outside of their respective countries and who did not smoke during pregnancy were more likely to initiate breastfeeding with the cohort infant. Notably, cohort effects of maternal education at the university level were found, whereby having ‘some university’ was not statistically significant for mothers in France. Further, younger mothers in Canada, who delivered by caesarean section and who had previous children, had reduced odds of breastfeeding initiation. These results were not found for mothers in France. Conclusions and Implications for Practice While some similar determinants were observed, programming efforts to increase breastfeeding initiation should be tailored to the characteristics of specific geographical regions which may be heavily impacted by the social, cultural and political climate of the region, in addition to individual and family level factors.
Assessment of resolution and accuracy of the Moving Window Cross Spectral technique for monitoring crustal temporal variations using ambient seismic noise

SUMMARY Temporal variations in the elastic behaviour of the Earth’s crust can be monitored through the analysis of the Earth’s seismic response and its evolution with time. This kind of analysis is particularly interesting when combined with the reconstruction of seismic Green’s functions from the cross-correlation of ambient seismic noise, which circumvents the limitations imposed by a dependence on the occurrence of seismic events. In fact, because seismic noise is recorded continuously and does not depend on earthquake sources, these cross-correlation functions can be considered analogously to records from continuously repeating doublet sources placed at each station, and can be used to extract observations of variations in seismic velocities. These variations, however, are typically very small: of the order of 0.1 per cent. Such accuracy can be only achieved through the analysis of the full reconstructed waveforms, including later scattered arrivals. We focus on the method known as Moving-Window Cross-Spectral Analysis that has the advantage of operating in the frequency domain, where the bandwidth of coherent signal in the correlation function can be clearly defined. We investigate the sensitivity of this method by applying it to microseismic noise cross-correlations which have been perturbed by small synthetic velocity variations and which have been randomly contaminated. We propose threshold signal-to-noise ratios above which these perturbations can be reliably observed. Such values are a proxy for cross-correlation convergence, and so can be used as a guideline when determining the length of microseismic noise records that are required before they can be used for monitoring with the moving-window cross-spectral technique.