Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extraction and Modeling of the Optoelectronic Characteristics of an Optical Interconnect Link by Direct Measurement of its Electrical Performance

Direct measurements of optical characteristics of a deployed optical interconnect is difficult. We present here a technique that enables the extraction and modeling of some of the channel's optoelectronic characteristics by direct measurement of its end-to-end electrical performance. This technique can greatly facilitate the optimization of optical link transceivers by providing a realistic model of the optical and optoelectronic components utilized in the link.
Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Microgastrinae) Associated with Lepidoptera in India

Glyptapanteles Ashmead (Hymenoptera: Braconidae: Microgastrinae) is a cosmopolitan group of hyperdiverse parasitic wasps. The genus remains taxonomically challenging in India due to its highly speciose nature, morphological similarity amongst species and negligible host records. The Indian fauna is one of the most diverse and also the least studied. The present study is based on 60 populations reared from 35 host species, 100+ individual caterpillar rearings (1100 wasp specimens pinned and 2000 in alcohol) and from 12 different geographical locations of the country (11 states and one Union territory) that represent 26 provisional Glyptapanteles species within 8 species-groups. Out of 60 populations, phy-logenetic analyses were performed on 38 based on mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase sub-unit I (COI) nucleotide sequences. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference methods displayed three and four major discrete Glyptapanteles clades, respectively. In clade A very few Indian species were grouped along with Neotropical and Thailand species. The other clades B and C grouped the majority of the Indian species and showed considerable host specificity in both the trees. All parasitic wasp species were gregarious in nature, except for two populations. Three different sets of data (morphology, host records, and COI) were integrated in order to generate accurate boundaries between species/species-groups. Illustrations of all parasitized caterpillars/cocoons and 42 habitus views of Glyptapanteles spp. , distributional information, and GenBank accession numbers, are presented. The present study, perhaps the most comprehensive done to date in India, suggests the presence of several additional Glyptapanteles species, which were previously unrecognized. access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and in the Supporting Information files. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Synonymic versus Verbatim Scoring of the Cloze Procedure

in reading at the University of Missouri, Columbia. ■ Since the introduction of the cloze procedure as a means of measuring readability (Taylor, 1953), uncertainty has persisted over how best to score results. The preferred method has been to accept verbatim responses only, with no allowance for synonymous answers or for "stylistic" deviations. The principal justification for this policy has been ease in scoring. Permitting synonyms and other sensible responses involves the often difficult distinction between what should be counted and what should not. For most cloze tests, it is highly probable that different scorers will produce different scores. The central issue is whether
Estimating regressions and seemingly unrelated regressions with error component disturbances

The estimation of regressions models with two-way error component disurbances, is considered for the case where both the random effects are non-spherically distributed. The usual approach that first transforms the effects into uncorrelated ones and then applies within and between transformations, cannot be conveniently applied. Here, it is proposed to revert this scheme by firstly applying the within and between transformations. This results in simple General Linear Model which can be partitioned into three smaller GLMs. Then, by exploiting the structure of the models and using the Generalized QR decomposition as a tool, a computationally efficient and numerically reliable method for estimating the regression parameters is derived. This estimation method is generalized to the case of a system of seemingly unrelated regressions.
Segmentation of multi-modality MR images by means of evidence theory for 3D reconstruction of brain tumors

In this paper, we propose a segmentation scheme for magnetic resonance (MR) images based on a two step algorithm. The first step consists of a classification based on an evidential k-NN rule initially proposed by Denoeux (1995). The second step allows to take into account the spatial dependence of each voxel of the MR volume in order to lead the segmentation. The goal is to locate properly tumors in MR images of the brain allowing the 3D reconstruction of the different brain structures and the tumor. It can help clinicians observe the tumors accurately and to follow the evolution of the tumors in multidate acquisitions of MR images.
Designing StoryRooms: interactive storytelling spaces for children

Costly props, complicated authoring technologies, and limited access to space are among the many reasons why children can rarely enjoy the experience of authoring room-sized interactive stories. Typically in these kinds of environments, children are restricted to being story participants, rather than story authors. Therefore, we have begun the development of StoryRooms, room-sized immersive storytelling urrent technology implementation and example StoryRooms.
Efficient Exact Stochastic Simulation of Chemical Systems with Many Species and Many Channels

There are two fundamental ways to view coupled systems of chemical equations: as continuous, represented by differential equations whose variables are concentrations, or as discrete, represented by stochastic processes whose variables are numbers of molecules. Although the former is by far more common, systems with very small numbers of molecules are important in some applications (e.g., in small biological cells or in surface processes). In both views, most complicated systems with multiple reaction channels and multiple chemical species cannot be solved analytically. There are exact numerical simulation methods to simulate trajectories of discrete, stochastic systems, (methods that are rigorously equivalent to the Master Equation approach) but these do not scale well to systems with many reaction pathways. This paper presents the Next Reaction Method, an exact algorithm to simulate coupled chemical reactions that is also efficient: it (a) uses only a single random number per simulation event, and (b) .
Bacteriological Quality of Abattoir Effluents Discharged into Water Bodies in Abuja, Nigeria

Bacteriological characteristics of abattoir effluents (wastewater), abattoir water source, and water bodies receiving abattoir wastewater were investigated in Abuja, Nigeria using the multiple-tube fermentation technique. Source of water to the abattoirs and the usage of water bodies receiving abattoir effluents were determined using questionnaires. Bacterial counts ranged from 4.8 × 106 to 5.8 × 105 /100 mL of total coliform (TC), 8.2 × 104 to 3.2 × 104/100 mL of Fecal coliform (FC), 5.2 × 104 to 2.0 × 104/100 mL of Fecal streptococcus and 1.2 × 104 to 2.0 × 103/100 mL of Escherichia coli for abattoir effluents 6.6 × 105 to 6.0 × 105/100 mL of TC, 6.2 × 104 to 1.8 × 104/100 mL of FC, 1.8 × 104 to 6.0 × 103/100 mL of F. streptococcus, and 4.8 × 103 to 6.6 × 102/100 mL of E. coli for water bodies receiving abattoir effluents 100 m downstream. TC bacteria counts for abattoir effluents exceeded recommended limit for discharge into surface water in Nigeria. No significant difference (P < 0.05) was observed between bacterial counts of abattoir effluents and receiving water bodies 100 m downstream: an indication of contamination of receiving water bodies by abattoir effluents and possible public and environmental health hazards.
Informing the selection of futility stopping thresholds: case study from a late‐phase clinical trial

In an environment where (i) potential risks to subjects participating in clinical studies need to be managed carefully, (ii) trial costs are increasing, and (iii) there are limited research resources available, it is necessary to prioritize research projects and sometimes re‐prioritize if early indications suggest that a trial has low probability of success. Futility designs allow this reprioritization to take place. This paper reviews a number of possible futility methods available and presents a case study from a late‐phase study of an HIV therapeutic, which utilized conditional power‐based stopping thresholds. The two most challenging aspects of incorporating a futility interim analysis into a trial design are the selection of optimal stopping thresholds and the timing of the analysis, both of which require the balancing of various risks. The paper outlines a number of graphical aids that proved useful in explaining the statistical risks involved to the study team. Further, the paper outlines a decision analysis undertaken which combined expectations of drug performance with conditional power calculations in order to produce probabilities of different interim and final outcomes, and which ultimately led to the selection of the final stopping thresholds. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
H-2D control of recovery from Friend virus leukemia: H-2D region influences the kinetics of the T lymphocyte response to Friend virus

A Friend virus (FV)-specific T lymphocyte proliferation assay was used to compare the T lymphocyte responses of H-2 congenic mice that differed in their ability to recover from FV leukemia after inoculation of high virus doses. Gene(s) of the H-2D region influenced the kinetics of this response such that H-2Db/b homozygous mice were positive 6-8 d earlier than H-2Dd/b mice. This correlated with the Rfv-1, H-2D-linked influence on recovery from FV by these mice, and also appeared to explain the prominent effect of virus dose on recovery incidence. These findings were supported by the ability of passively transferred immune splenic T lymphocytes to induce recovery from leukemia at 6 d after FV inoculation, but not at 16 d. H-2a/a mice were found to be unresponsive in the FV-specific T lymphocyte proliferation assay. This effect mapped to the left of H-2D, possibly in the H-2I region, and may be an in vitro manifestation of the Rfv-2 gene. No evidence for nonspecific immunosuppression of the T lymphocyte response to concanavalin A was observed in any of the H-2 congenic F1 mice studied.
Internal Waves in Laboratory Experiments

Recent methods developed to generate and to analyze internal waves in laboratory experiments have revealed important insights that sometimes guide and sometimes challenge theoretical predictions and the results of numerical simulations. Here we focus upon observations of internal waves generated by oscillatory or uniform flow over a solid boundary in a continuously stratified fluid. In the laboratory such flows are often examined by moving the boundary in an otherwise stationary ambient. This can be done by oscillating or towing an object, or by sequentially oscillating a series of plates to simulate a translating or standing-wave-like boundary. The generated waves are sometimes visualized and measured using a non-intrusive optical method called synthetic schlieren. This takes advantage of the changes of the refractive index with salinity which differentially bends light passing through salt-stratified fluid, a property that hampers the use of of more standard non-intrusive observation methods such as particle image velocimetry. From schlieren images, filtering methods can be applied to distinguish between leftward and rightward as well as upward and downward propagating two-dimensional waves. Inverse tomographic techniques can be employed to measure the structure and amplitude of axisymmetric and relatively simple three-dimensional disturbances.
Muscle synergy patterns as physiological markers of motor cortical damage

The experimental findings herein reported are aimed at gaining a perspective on the complex neural events that follow lesions of the motor cortical areas. Cortical damage, whether by trauma or stroke, interferes with the flow of descending signals to the modular interneuronal structures of the spinal cord. These spinal modules subserve normal motor behaviors by activating groups of muscles as individual units (muscle synergies). Damage to the motor cortical areas disrupts the orchestration of the modules, resulting in abnormal movements. To gain insights into this complex process, we recorded myoelectric signals from multiple upper-limb muscles in subjects with cortical lesions. We used a factorization algorithm to identify the muscle synergies. Our factorization analysis revealed, in a quantitative way, three distinct patterns of muscle coordination—including preservation, merging, and fractionation of muscle synergies—that reflect the multiple neural responses that occur after cortical damage. These patterns varied as a function of both the severity of functional impairment and the temporal distance from stroke onset. We think these muscle-synergy patterns can be used as physiological markers of the status of any patient with stroke or trauma, thereby guiding the development of different rehabilitation approaches, as well as future physiological experiments for a further understanding of postinjury mechanisms of motor control and recovery.
Web Service Clustering using a Hybrid Term-Similarity Measure with Ontology Learning

Clustering Web services into functionally similar clusters is a very efficient approach to service discovery. A principal issue for clustering is computing the semantic similarity between services. Current approaches use similarity-distance measurement methods such as keyword, information-retrieval or ontology based methods. These approaches have problems that include discovering semantic characteristics, loss of semantic information and a shortage of high-quality ontologies. In this paper, the authors present a method that first adopts ontology learning to generate ontologies via the hidden semantic patterns existing within complex terms. If calculating similarity using the generated ontology fails, it then applies an information-retrieval-based method. Another important issue is identifying the most suitable cluster representative. This paper proposes an approach to identifying the cluster center by combining service similarity with term frequency—inverse document frequency values of service names. Experimental results show that our term-similarity approach outperforms comparable existing approaches. They also demonstrate the positive effects of our cluster-center identification approach.
REGULARIZED 3 D ITERATIVE RECONSTRUCTION ON A MOBILE CARM CT

3D iterative CT reconstruction is an active research area in medical imaging. Compared with analytic reconstruction methods such as FDK, iterative methods may provide better reconstruction results for incomplete and noisy projec tion data. The simultaneous algebraic reconstruction tech nique (SART), one of the most popular iterative reconstruction methods, is applied in the cone-beam geometry for highresolution reconstruction, with the help of graphics hardw are (GPU) and total variation (TV) regularization. GPU greatly improves the efficiency of SART, which is computationally intense for CPU, and thus makes it suitable for clinical applications. TV regularization reduces the effects of noise and helps the convergence of SART for noisy data. Experimental results for both synthetic and real data are provided to eval uate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed framework.
Joanna : a woman in science : one life history in dialogue with the literature

Few women choose careers in the physical sciences. Of the Bachelor's degrees awarded nationally in Mathematics and Physical Sciences only 29% were awarded to females (Statistics Canada, 1986). Using a biographical approach, this study sought to identify factors which may have facilitated the success of women in these areas. Joanna, a female university student majoring in chemistry, was interviewed. Tapes were transcribed and factors which possibly directed her success in the sciences were identifi·ed by both authors and validated by Joanna. A literature review on psycho-social influences as they affect the science achievement and interest of girls was integrated with the themes emerging from Joanna's life history. The dialogue between the literature and Joanna revealed a common profile which appears to characterize mo s t f e rna 1 esc i e n tis t s • Joanna, herself, overlapped with 26 of the 33 factors that were identified by the literature. The profile was split into seven categories: Personality, Sex Role Identity, Motivational Style, Family Influence, Childhood/Adolescence, Role Models, and Influence of
Some Forgery Attacks on a Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Smart Cards

Smart card has been adopted to various applications. In 2000, Hwang and Li proposed a remote user authentication scheme, which is also using smart card. Nine months later, Chan and Cheng pointed out that there is a weakness in the remote authentication scheme proposed by Hwang and Li. In this paper, we show that Chan and Cheng's attack does not work well because they did not consider the format of user's identity. In addition, we propose several ways to solve the problem of Chan and Cheng's attack.
Basic Principles in Immunology: Relevance for Studies in Psychoneuroimmunology

Basic Principles in Immunology Relevance for Studies in Psychoneuroimmunology Sarah M. Clark,1 Kerry C. Michael,1 Achsah D. Keegan,2 and Leonardo H. Tonelli1,3 1Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroimmunology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA 2Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Center for Vascular and Inflammatory Diseases and Program in Oncology, Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA 3Veterans Affairs Maryland Healthcare System, Baltimore, MD, USA
Symbolic Representation of Musical Chords: A Proposed Syntax for Text Annotations

In this paper we propose a text represention for musical chord symbols that is simple and intuitive for musically trained individuals to write and understand, yet highly structured and unambiguous to parse with computer programs. When designing feature extraction algorithms, it is important to have a hand annotated test set providing a ground truth to compare results against. Hand labelling of chords in music files is a long and arduous task and there is no standard annotation methodology, which causes difficulties sharing with existing annotations. In this paper we address this problem by defining a rigid, contextindependent syntax for representing chord symbols in text, supported with a new database of annotations using this system.
Metal Mixture Modeling Evaluation project: 2. Comparison of four modeling approaches

As part of the Metal Mixture Modeling Evaluation (MMME) project, models were developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (Japan), the US Geological Survey (USA), HDR|HydroQual (USA), and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (United Kingdom) to address the effects of metal mixtures on biological responses of aquatic organisms. A comparison of the 4 models, as they were presented at the MMME workshop in Brussels, Belgium (May 2012), is provided in the present study. Overall, the models were found to be similar in structure (free ion activities computed by the Windermere humic aqueous model [WHAM]; specific or nonspecific binding of metals/cations in or on the organism; specification of metal potency factors or toxicity response functions to relate metal accumulation to biological response). Major differences in modeling approaches are attributed to various modeling assumptions (e.g., single vs multiple types of binding sites on the organism) and specific calibration strategies that affected the selection of model parameters. The models provided a reasonable description of additive (or nearly additive) toxicity for a number of individual toxicity test results. Less‐than‐additive toxicity was more difficult to describe with the available models. Because of limitations in the available datasets and the strong interrelationships among the model parameters (binding constants, potency factors, toxicity response parameters), further evaluation of specific model assumptions and calibration strategies is needed. Environ Toxicol Chem 2015;34:741–753. © 2014 SETAC
A Cross-Layer Design to Improve Spectral Efficiency in Wireless Networks

A cross-layer design is developed which combines the Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) at the physical layer and truncated Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) at the data link layer to maximize the spectral efficiency under prescribed error performance constraints. Depending on the error correcting capability of the truncated ARQ, which depends on the maximum allowable number of retransmissions, we design AMC transmission modes, with each mode consisting of a specific modulation and FEC code pair as in IEEE 802.16 standard, that guarantee the required performance. Numerical results reveal that retransmissions at the data link layer relieve stringent error control requirements at the physical layer and thereby enable considerable spectral efficiency gain. This gain is provided by the maximum number of retransmissions per packet which equals the diversity order. The improvement on spectral efficiency decreases when the number of retransmissions increases, suggest that a small number of retransmissions offers a desirable delay-throughput tradeoff, in practice. The performance analysis is done in terms of outage probability also.
KaPPA-View4: a metabolic pathway database for representation and analysis of correlation networks of gene co-expression and metabolite co-accumulation and omics data

Correlations of gene-to-gene co-expression and metabolite-to-metabolite co-accumulation calculated from large amounts of transcriptome and metabolome data are useful for uncovering unknown functions of genes, functional diversities of gene family members and regulatory mechanisms of metabolic pathway flows. Many databases and tools are available to interpret quantitative transcriptome and metabolome data, but there are only limited ones that connect correlation data to biological knowledge and can be utilized to find biological significance of it. We report here a new metabolic pathway database, KaPPA-View4 (http://kpv.kazusa.or.jp/kpv4/), which is able to overlay gene-to-gene and/or metabolite-to-metabolite relationships as curves on a metabolic pathway map, or on a combination of up to four maps. This representation would help to discover, for example, novel functions of a transcription factor that regulates genes on a metabolic pathway. Pathway maps of the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and maps generated from their gene classifications are available at KaPPA-View4 KEGG version (http://kpv.kazusa.or.jp/kpv4-kegg/). At present, gene co-expression data from the databases ATTED-II, COXPRESdb, CoP and MiBASE for human, mouse, rat, Arabidopsis, rice, tomato and other plants are available.