Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chebyshev Design of Linear-Phase FIR Filters With Linear Equality Constraints

By using basis transformation, the Chebyshev approximation of linear-phase finite-impulse response (FIR) filters with linear equality constraints can be converted into an unconstrained one defined on a new function space. However, since the Haar condition is not necessarily satisfied in the new function space, the alternating property does not hold for the solution to the resulted unconstrained Chebyshev approximation problem. A sufficient condition for the best approximation is obtained in this brief, and based on this condition, an efficient single exchange algorithm is derived for the Chebyshev design of linear-phase FIR filters with linear equality constraints. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can converge to the optimal solution in most cases and to a near-optimal solution otherwise. Design examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Designing with urban grassroots organisations in South America: Pilot study in Argentina

In this paper we present our first attempt at bringing to the field a community-oriented design research agenda situated in the South American grassroots context. We discuss early insights, which reveal that pursuing autonomy through education provides means to sustain grassroots efforts; that by leveraging thematic interests the organisations can build strong local networks, and; that bringing design methods of seeing and doing to existing projects can help develop their own entrepreneurial agendas. In this paper we also consider our insights through three notions: provocation, conflict and appropriation. By doing so, it instigates a discussion of positioning participatory design in South America, the role that designers and design researchers could play in this space, highlighting the tensions that emerge in co-creating publics within this particular context.
Empirical assessment of frauds on banks’ liquidity: evidence from Nigeria

The study examined the effects of frauds on the liquidity position of banks in the Nigerian banking sector using time series data for the period 1994 to 2015. The study used unit root test to determine the stationary state of the variables. It also employed the Johansson co-integration and error correction model (ECM) statistical techniques to establish both short-run and long-run dynamic relationships between the endogenous and exogenous variables. The findings revealed that total number of fraud cases, actual amount involved in the fraud and the loss associated with it negatively affect banks liquidity position in the long- run, though the effect is not as strong as in the short run. The paper concluded that fraud is a key variable that depletes the banks’ ability to meet up with short term obligation as well as impinge on the ability to effectively maximize the wealth of the shareholders. The study therefore suggested that the services of the forensic accountants should be given utmost priority by banks and all concerned stakeholders so as to constantly and effectively monitor the internal control system, report levels of frauds, as well as come up with a model to fight the effect of frauds on banks’ operation. The CBN and other law enforcement agencies should come up with stiffer penalties for any perpetrator of frauds of any nature and categories in the banking sector. This will help to create sanity and serve as deterrent to the other would be perpetrators of frauds. Another peculiar aspect that should be empirically examined is banks’ staff involvement in frauds and forgeries and how they impact on the banking sector operations and liquidity position. Keywords: Liquidity, number of fraud cases, actual loss, amount involved in fraud cases
Inclusion of Vpr accessory gene in a plasmid vaccine cocktail markedly reduces Nef vaccine effectiveness in vivo resulting in CD4 cell loss and increased viral loads in rhesus macaques

Abstract: We compared the immunogenicity of plasmid vaccines containing multiple human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antigens and found that covaccination with plasmids expressing HIV‐1 14 kDa vpr gene product profoundly reduces antigen‐specific CD8‐mediated cytotoxic T‐cell activity (CTL). Interestingly, Th1 type responses against codelivered antigens (pGag‐Pol, pNef, etc.) encoded by the plasmid vaccines were suppressed. This suggested that vpr might compromise CD8 T‐cell immunity in vivo during infection. A pilot primate vaccine study was designed to test the hypothesis to compare the following groups: unvaccinated controls, animals vaccinated without simean immunodeficiency virus (SIV)‐Nef antigen plasmid, and animals covaccinated with the identical plasmid antigen and a plasmid construct encoding SIV Vpr/Vpx. Animals were subsequently challenged intrarectally with pathogenic SIVmac251 after the final vaccination of a multiple immunization protocol. Control animals were all infected and exhibited high viral loads and rapid CD4+ T‐cell loss. In contrast, the Nef plasmid‐vaccinated animals were also infected but exhibited preservation of CD4+ T‐cells and a multilog reduction in viral load compared with controls. Animals covaccinated multiple times with the Nef vaccine and pVpr/Vpx plasmid suffered rapid and profound loss of CD4+ T‐cells. These results have important implications for the design of multicomponent and particle vaccines for HIV‐1 as well as for our understanding of HIV/SIV pathogenesis in vivo.
Two alternative job stress models and the risk of coronary heart disease.

OBJECTIVES This study examined the association between two alternative job stress models-the effort-reward imbalance model and the job strain model-and the risk of coronary heart disease among male and female British civil servants. METHODS The logistic regression analyses were based on a prospective cohort study (Whitehall II study) comprising 6895 men and 3413 women aged 35 to 55 years. Baseline measures of both job stress models were related to new reports of coronary heart disease over a mean 5.3 years of follow-up. RESULTS The imbalance between personal efforts (competitiveness, work-related overcommitment, and hostility) and rewards (poor promotion prospects and a blocked career') was associated with a 2.15-fold higher risk of new coronary heart disease. Job strain and high job demands were not related to coronary heart disease; however, low job control was strongly associated with new disease. The odds ratios for low job control were 2.38 and 1.56 for self-reported and externally assessed job control, respectively. Work characteristics were simultaneously adjusted and controlled for employment grade level, negative affectivity, and coronary risk factors. CONCLUSIONS This is apparently the first report showing independent effects of components of two alternative job stress models-the effort-reward imbalance model and the job strain model (job control only)-on coronary heart disease.
Dynamic Hedging Strategies Based on Changing Pricing Parameters for Compound Ratchets

Abstract Equity-Indexed Annuity products (EIAs) are becoming increasingly popular as they are accumulation vehicles that offer participation in the equity market growth while keeping the initial capital protected. This paper focuses in particular on a special type of EIAs; the Compound Ratchet (CR). Sellers of this product retain the right to change one of the pricing parameters on each contract anniversary date while promising not to cross a certain predetermined threshold. Changing these parameters can sometimes have an impact on the value of the EIA, which makes them interesting to study. In order to reproduce the pattern of these changing parameters, a new approach of dynamically hedging the CR EIA and simultaneously protecting the issuer from hedging risk is proposed and tested. Trading can only be done in discrete time, which produces hedging errors. Therefore, the new approach is applied to transfer these errors from the issuer to the buyer by dynamically changing the pricing parameters. The distribution of these parameters is extracted and analyzed.
Smart Parser for Identifying and Detecting Insecure Functions

Buffer overflow is a known attack that exploits the software vulnerabilities by injecting an arbitrary code to gain a full or partial control on the targeted machine. Usually, the attackers target the C/C++ software applications that consist of insecure functions to overfill the buffer and crash that software. Thus, they cause a memory corruption, and run their arbitrary code. Several approaches have been developed to detect the buffer overflow. Those approaches rely mainly on static and dynamic analysis of the source code and generally require expertise in formal analysis and modeling of the source code and in some cases familiarity of binary code analysis. This paper proposes a smart parser that able to detect the C/C++ insecure functions that could be exploited by the buffer overflow attack. The smart parser is expected to be integrated with the early phase of the coding process as to help the software developers to coding their application securely. The smart parser has been implemented using Python and evaluated on five different applications that are written in C/C++ language. Additionally, the smart parser generates a report that shows the numbers and types of insecure functions that are found in each application.
Combination epigenetic therapy has efficacy in patients with refractory advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

UNLABELLED Epigenetic alterations are strongly associated with the development of cancer. We conducted a phase I/II trial of combined epigenetic therapy with azacitidine and entinostat, inhibitors of DNA methylation and histone deacetylation, respectively, in extensively pretreated patients with recurrent metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. This therapy is well tolerated, and objective responses were observed, including a complete response and a partial response in a patient who remains alive and without disease progression approximately 2 years after completing protocol therapy. Median survival in the entire cohort was 6.4 months (95% CI 3.8-9.2), comparing favorably with existing therapeutic options. Demethylation of a set of 4 epigenetically silenced genes known to be associated with lung cancer was detectable in serial blood samples in these patients and was associated with improved progression-free (P = 0.034) and overall survival (P = 0.035). Four of 19 patients had major objective responses to subsequent anticancer therapies given immediately after epigenetic therapy. SIGNIFICANCE This study demonstrates that combined epigenetic therapy with low-dose azacitidine and entinostat results in objective, durable responses in patients with solid tumors and defines a blood-based biomarker that correlates with clinical benefit.
B-domain deleted factor VIII is aggregated and degraded through proteasomal and lysosomal pathways

Summary Factor VIII (FVIII) processing within mammalian cells is demonstrated to be much less efficient than proteins of similar size. The deletion of the B-domain from FVIII improves the level of production, due partly to the increase in mRNA synthesis. We aimed to characterise the cellular fate and the intracellular processing of the FVIII molecule devoid of B-domain. A B-domain deleted factor VIII (BDD-FVIII) possessing a furin consensus cleavage site in the connecting segment between the heavy and the light chain, was produced in CHO cell line. In such cells, FVIII was retained as two single chain products from which a majority was aggregated. The two species were located in Triton X-100 soluble (for 60–80%) and insoluble fractions (for 20–40%). The incubation of the expressing cells with tunicamycin (5 μg/ml) and the treatment of the intracellular species with a mixture of Neuraminidase and N-glycosidase-F revealed that both intracellular species were N-glycosylated. Furin over-expression neither diminished the intracellular FVIII contents nor improved its extracellular production. Intracellular FVIII was degraded through both lysosomal and proteasomal pathways as evidenced by inhibitor treatments (e.g. NH4Cl, leupeptin, clasto-Lactacystin β-lactone and MG-132), pulse-chase analysis and confocal observations. This study demonstrates that a BDD-FVIII expressed in CHO cells is inefficiently processed consecutively to intracellular aggregation, proteasomal degradation, and routage to lysosomes.
Patient perceptions associated with the 5% lidocaine medicated plaster in daily practice

Abstract Objective: To evaluate patients’ perceptions of 5% lidocaine medicated plaster for treatment of chronic neuropathic pain in daily clinical practice. Research design and methods: In a prospective, multicentre, non-interventional observation, patient-reported outcome data were collected in clinical practices in Germany using the German Pain Questionnaire for pre-treatment documentation and the German Pain Diary for documentation of weekly treatment-associated changes. Questionnaires were completed by the patients without input from their physicians. Main outcome measures: Mean changes over the 12-week treatment period in pain intensity, in impairments of daily activities (modified pain disability index, mPDI) and of quality of life (quality of life impairment by pain inventory, QLIP), in Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scores (HADS-A and HADS-D), and in overall burden of pain. Results: Data of 922 patients were evaluated. Mean average pain intensity over 24 h improved by 5.1 points (74%) from 6.9 ± 1.6 points at baseline. A 30% reduction in overall pain intensity was already observed within the first 2–3 weeks with continuous further reductions until end of observation. Marked improvements in anxiety and depression scores (40% and 52%, respectively), and in pain-related restrictions in daily life activities (66%) and quality of life (157%) were also noted. Burden of pain was reduced by 56.2 points (73%) from 77.5 points at baseline. Stratification by diagnosis showed a treatment effect of lidocaine plaster for all underlying conditions with highest treatment effects for diabetic polyneuropathy and postherpetic neuralgia. Conclusions: In a patient population where 46% of individuals already suffered from chronic to markedly chronic pain, patients perceive the 5% lidocaine medicated plaster as an efficacious topical treatment of chronic neuropathic pain in daily clinical practice. Strongest pain relief as well as associated improvements in pain-related restrictions were observed within the first five treatment weeks; however, beneficial effects continued until end of observation.
A new method to train VQ codebook for HMM-based speaker identification

In this paper, we build a HMM-based speaker identification system by using a novel method to trained VQ codebook. The codebook is trained based on the criterion of making each codeword in the codebook to share training vectors equally and is implemented with genetic algorithm. An evaluation experiment has been conducted to compare the codebooks trained by the Linde-Buzo-Grey (LBG) and the new algorithm. It is showed that the codebook trained with the new algorithm can give a much higher speaker identification rate than the LBG trained codebook when used in HMM-based speaker identification, especially for text-independent speaker identification.
Equivalent circuit model for GaN-HEMTs in a switching simulation

An equivalent circuit model for gallium nitride-based high electron mobility transistors (GaN-HEMTs) in an exact circuit simulation is proposed. The equivalent circuit contains inherent GaN device properties, such as current-collapse and shot-channel effects. Base on the equivalent model, an power loss simulator was developed. The simulation accuracy was more than 93%. A converter optimum design method is discussed using the power loss simulator.
Use of fluorescence in situ hybridization to detect chromosome‐specific changes in exfoliated human bladder and oral mucosa cells

Change in chromosome number, numerical aneuploidy, has been consistently linked with cancer development. Since 90% of cancers arise in epithelial tissues, techniques that measure aneuploidy in these tissues would be very useful. Here we describe methods of optimization and suggest use of fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) to detect aneuploidy in exfoliated epithelial cells collected from the mouth and bladder. A total of 10,383 urothelial cells and 4,691 buccal cells were scored in order to determine a baseline frequency of aneuploidy in human volunteers using a classical satellite probe for chromosome 9. Protein digestion with pepsin was found to be more efficient at removing the keratinized cell membrane and optimizing probe penetration than acid washes, detergent washes, or hypotonic treatments. A 20 min cellular digestion with 200 μg/ml and a 30 min digestion with 300 μg/ml of pepsin in 0.01 M HCI optimized probe penetration in urothelial and buccal cells, respectively. Average frequencies for 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 hybridization regions were 10.3, 10.1, 78.4, 1.0, and 0.3% for urothelial cells and 8.8, 9.8, 79.4, 1.3, and 0.3% for buccal cells, respectively. These results are very similar to those previously described in lymphocytes. The urothelial cells of males had a lower frequency of diploid cells and a higher frequency of cells without hybridization regions than females (P < 0.02). No statistically significant variability was found between individuals or sex groups in buccal cells. Our data show that FISH is a useful tool to detect changes in frequency of aneuploidy in exfoliated epithelial cells and has good potential for monitoring human populations exposed to genotoxic agents. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Monetary assessment of the recreational benefits of improved water quality – description of a new model and a case study

The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) has created a demand for comparing the benefits and costs of the remedial measures. A major part of the benefits from improved water quality relate to the increased recreational value. However, there is a lack of easily operative and widely applicable quantitative methods to assess the benefits of improved water quality for recreational use. We present a new model to link physical indicators of water quality, water feasibility indicators for different recreational uses, individuals’ perceptions concerning the current feasibility of water for recreational purposes and monetary measures of water-related recreation benefits. The model has been applied to nine lakes, three rivers and one large coastal area in Finland. In this paper, we present the principles of the method and the results from one case study. In Finland, the method has been applied for the economic analysis required in the WFD.
Strengthening Family Violence Coalitions Through Engaging Citizen Participants in Action Research

STRENGTHENING FAMILY VIOLENCE COALITIONS THROUGH ENGAGING CITIZEN PARTICIPANTS IN ACTION RESEARCH by Raven Elizabeth Cuellar Family violence (FV) has gained recognition as a major public health issue facing the United States. Though many approaches to FV intervention and prevention have been attempted, few have been adequately evaluated or demonstrated as effective. Aligned with community-centered, participatory approaches to FV research and evaluation, the current action research project was designed and implemented in collaboration with a FV prevention coalition. This research investigated one method of engaging citizen participants as researchers in the study of FV in their community, and through this process to surface barriers to effective FV prevention and preferred prevention approaches. It was hypothesized that participation in research study groups would positively impact youth participants’ knowledge, attitudes and beliefs towards FV, while generating information which would inform the coalition’s prevention efforts. Findings show that participants reported significant increases in their knowledge, awareness, and prosocial attitudes towards FV from preto post-intervention as well as increased efficacy to impact their community. Additional findings highlight gains for citizen participants and the community coalition who partnered in the research. Results suggest that action research is a promising method for promoting citizens’ awareness of salient issues affecting communities and facilitating citizens’ investment in partnering in violence prevention. STRENGTHENING FAMILY VIOLENCE COALITIONS THROUGH ENGAGING CITIZEN PARTICIPANTS IN ACTION RESEARCH
Agglomerations and firm performance: who benefits and how much?

ABSTRACT Agglomerations and firm performance: who benefits and how much? Regional Studies. Agglomeration can generate gains. If it does, how does it work and how are those gains distributed across agglomerated firms? The paper examines the effect of localization externalities on innovation. Localization externalities are measured as industry specialization or a firm’s co-location in a relatively high own-industry employment region. By analyzing a large dataset of 6697 firms integrated with another regional agglomeration-related dataset, results show that (1) co-location in an agglomeration has a positive influence on a firm’s innovative performance; and (2) firms benefit heterogeneously from agglomerations, with benefits being distributed asymmetrically. Agglomeration gains exist but not all firms benefit equally.
Semi-automatic segmentation of subcutaneous tumours from micro-computed tomography images

This paper outlines the first attempt to segment the boundary of preclinical subcutaneous tumours, which are frequently used in cancer research, from micro-computed tomography (microCT) image data. MicroCT images provide low tissue contrast, and the tumour-to-muscle interface is hard to determine, however faint features exist which enable the boundary to be located. These are used as the basis of our semi-automatic segmentation algorithm. Local phase feature detection is used to highlight the faint boundary features, and a level set-based active contour is used to generate smooth contours that fit the sparse boundary features. The algorithm is validated against manually drawn contours and micro-positron emission tomography (microPET) images. When compared against manual expert segmentations, it was consistently able to segment at least 70% of the tumour region (n = 39) in both easy and difficult cases, and over a broad range of tumour volumes. When compared against tumour microPET data, it was able to capture over 80% of the functional microPET volume. Based on these results, we demonstrate the feasibility of subcutaneous tumour segmentation from microCT image data without the assistance of exogenous contrast agents. Our approach is a proof-of-concept that can be used as the foundation for further research, and to facilitate this, the code is open-source and available from www.setuvo. com.