Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A new configuration of bi-directional isolated DC/DC converter using dual half-controlled bridge with pulse current link concept

This paper proposes a new circuit topology for galvanic isolated DC/DC conversion. The proposed circuit mainly consists of two half-controlled bridges connected by a transformer. One half-controlled bridge consists of two diodes and two switches and a snubber capacitor. With additional clamp switches, the number of switches is low compared to conventional converter. The current flowing in the transformer is a unidirectional pulse waveform. Soft-switching can be achieved in wide operating range, even when input and/or output voltages are changed. This paper describes control and design principles to achieve soft-switching in whole operating range. The first experimental results including brief loss analysis are reported.
Some effects of stimulus intensity on response of auditory nerve fibers in the squirrel monkey.

WE SHALL DESCRIBE in this paper some effects which change in sound pressure level of a tonal stimulus may have on the response of an auditory nerve fiber in the squirrel monkey. We shall focus our attention primarily on those observations which imply the existence of orderly relationships between the mechanical events produced on the cochlear partition and the time structure of the neural response.
Formal taxonomy of species C of the Anopheles minimus sibling species complex (Diptera : Culicidae)

The nomenclatural identity of species C of the Anopheles minimus complex is resolved by excluding the available junior synonyms of the nominotypical member of the complex and naming it An. harrisoni Harbach & Manguin, sp. n. Anopheles formosaensis I Tsuzuki, An. christophersi Theobald and An. christophersi var. alboapicalis Theobald are retained as junior synonyms of An. minimus Theobald based on the provenance of type specimens in geographical areas where An. harrisoni is not known to occur. A lectotype is designated for An. vincenti Laveran, which thus becomes the senior name of the specific entity known as An. jeyporiensis James. Molecular data that diagnose An. harrisoni are reviewed and the holotype female is contrasted with the neotype series of An. minimus. Available information on the bionomics and distribution of the new species is included.
Primary and new production in the thermocline ridge region of the southern Indian Ocean during the summer monsoon

New and primary production, measured using 15N and 13C tracers, integrated over the euphotic zone (mostly upper 80-100 m) varied from 7.5 to 14.1 mmol N m-2d-1(average 10.8 mmol N m-2d-1) and 2.7 to 17.7 mmol C m-2d-1 (average 11.3 mmol C m-2d-1), respectively, in the tropical India Ocean (TIO). Shoaling of thermocline in the thermocline ridge located in the tropical Indian Ocean (TR) influences new and total productivity by supplying nutrients to the upper layers. At the same time, N-limited conditions prevail to the north of the TR region reducing biological productivity. While higher surface light intensity reduces the surface productivity, it enhances the overall depth-integrated productivity. Productivity at different locations within the region is primarily controlled by the supply of N-nutrients from below. In contrast, at a given location with the available nutrient pool, productivity at different depths is determined by light availability. The region has potential for moderate export production, as do the other parts of the Indian Ocean; the maximum possible f-ratio is found to be 0.56, suggesting that it is capable of exporting a significant part of the total production to the deep, under favorable conditions (i.e., availability of N-nutrients). A comparison with earlier data suggests no significant temporal trend in the productivity here over the past three decades.
A FLEXIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR GENERAL , MULTI-AGENT BASED REAL-TIME CROWD SIMULATION

In this paper, we present a generic and flexible framework for multi-agent based, real-time crowd simulation. Due to the modular arcitecture and the simple structure, all components can easily be modified or replaced. In contrast to many other crowd simulation systems available, our system is able to handle very different scenarios and behaviors wit h minimal adaptation effort. Furthermore, the presented sys tem is able to simulate and visualize all scenarios in realtime on standard PCs without precalculation steps. Optimization techniques like multi-threading and cell space partitioning are discussed to further improve the simulation’s runtime performance. Finally, different scenarios with different behavior models are discussed to show the flexibility of our framework.
Altered -3 Substrate Specificity of Escherichia coli Signal Peptidase 1 Mutants as Revealed by Screening a Combinatorial Peptide Library*

Signal peptidase functions to cleave signal peptides from preproteins at the cell membrane. It has a substrate specificity for small uncharged residues at -1 (P1) and aliphatic residues at the -3 (P3) position. Previously, we have reported that certain alterations of the Ile-144 and Ile-86 residues in Escherichia coli signal peptidase I (SPase) can change the specificity such that signal peptidase is able to cleave pro-OmpA nuclease A in vitro after phenylalanine or asparagine residues at the -1 position (Karla, A., Lively, M. O., Paetzel, M. and Dalbey, R. (2005) J. Biol. Chem. 280, 6731-6741). In this study, screening of a fluorescence resonance energy transfer-based peptide library revealed that the I144A, I144C, and I144C/I86T SPase mutants have a more relaxed substrate specificity at the -3 position, in comparison to the wild-type SPase. The double mutant tolerated arginine, glutamine, and tyrosine residues at the -3 position of the substrate. The altered specificity of the I144C/I86T mutant was confirmed by in vivo processing of pre-β-lactamase containing non-canonical arginine and glutamine residues at the -3 position. This work establishes Ile-144 and Ile-86 as key P3 substrate specificity determinants for signal peptidase I and demonstrates the power of the fluorescence resonance energy transfer-based peptide library approach in defining the substrate specificity of proteases.
Distinguishing benign from malignant liver tumours

Abstract Liver masses are very common and most are benign. It is therefore important to avoid unnecessary interventions for benign lesions, while at the same time ensuring accurate diagnosis of hepatic malignancies. Many cancer patients, like the general population, have incidental benign liver lesions. In planning treatment for cancer patients, it is critical to avoid inappropriate treatment decisions based on misdiagnosis of a benign lesion as a metastasis or primary liver malignancy. This article describes the salient imaging features of the common benign liver masses and outlines a general approach to distinguishing between benign and malignant hepatic lesions.
Pain reduces discrimination in helping

Because of their shared neurobiological underpinnings, factors increasing physical pain can also increase feelings of social disconnection ("social pain"). Feelings of connection with a social group are reflected in the term social identification, and social identity is commonly associated with intergroup discrimination. In two experiments, we examined the notion that physical pain would reduce social identification and subsequently inhibit intergroup discrimination in helping. By using a pain memory manipulation and a support measure of helping in Study 1 (N = 173), and an actual pain manipulation combined with a behavioural measure of helping in Study 2 (N = 72), results from both studies confirmed the predictions. As expected, physical pain eliminated ingroup favouritism in helping, and identification mediated this effect in the ingroup condition but not in the outgroup condition. We discuss these findings in light of the apparently paradoxical relationship between social support and pain.
Breast Cancer Subtypes and Previously Established Genetic Risk Factors: A Bayesian Approach

Background: Gene expression analyses indicate that breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease with at least five immunohistologic subtypes. Despite growing evidence that these subtypes are etiologically and prognostically distinct, few studies have investigated whether they have divergent genetic risk factors. To help fill in this gap in our understanding, we examined associations between breast cancer subtypes and previously established susceptibility loci among white and African-American women in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study. Methods: We used Bayesian polytomous logistic regression to estimate ORs and 95% posterior intervals for the association between each of 78 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and five breast cancer subtypes. Subtypes were defined using five immunohistochemical markers: estrogen receptors (ER), progesterone receptors (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptors 1 and 2 (HER1/2), and cytokeratin (CK) 5/6. Results: Several SNPs in TNRC9/TOX3 were associated with luminal A (ER/PR+, HER2−) or basal-like breast cancer (ER−, PR−, HER2−, HER1, or CK 5/6+), and one SNP (rs3104746) was associated with both. SNPs in FGFR2 were associated with luminal A, luminal B (ER/PR+, HER2+), or HER2+/ER− disease, but none were associated with basal-like disease. We also observed subtype differences in the effects of SNPs in 2q35, 4p, TLR1, MAP3K1, ESR1, CDKN2A/B, ANKRD16, and ZM1Z1. Conclusion and Impact: We found evidence that genetic risk factors for breast cancer vary by subtype and further clarified the role of several key susceptibility genes. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 23(1); 84–97. ©2013 AACR.
Silurian Stratigraphy and Paleogeography of the Matapedia - Temiscouata Region. Quebec

Field work in the Matapedia - Temiscouata region has been carried out under the auspices of the QUEBEC DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES, and this brief account of the results is published with the permission of its Deputy Minister. A more detailed treatment with facies and paleogeo-graphical maps will appear later.
How to Determine Competency

In this issue of JCE, in “The Development and Piloting of a Capacity and Assessment Tool,” Maria Torroella Carney and her colleagues describe the instrument they developed to help careproviders assess patients’ decision-making capacity. They argue that primary care physicians should make a greater propor-tion of these assessments, because they tend to know their patients best; often, when psychiatrists are asked to make these assessments, they see the patient just one time. How these assessments are made, and by whom, are concerns of the utmost importance. An assessment can determine whether a patient lives or dies, because state laws on competency often are imprecise, and, when courts determine patients’ competency, they tend to rely on careproviders’ views. 1 Even when state laws are not imprecise, courts usually do what careproviders recommend, because of their special expertise. (“Competency” is the legal determination that a patient has mental “capacity.” “Competency” will be used throughout the remainder of this discussion for the sake of simplicity). Because these concerns are of such great importance, I will address how careproviders should make these assessments. I will suggest that, all too often, careproviders overlook the contexts in which they are asked to determine competency, and, that sometimes, what patients in these situations need most from careproviders is to receive the care that they can provide. Consequently, I will suggest that, when careproviders make competency decisions, initially at least, they should use a fundamentally different approach from the one that is most often used today.
Okapi-Chamfer matching for articulate object recognition

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many effective text information retrieval systems. By treating local visual features as terms, training images as documents and input images as queries, we formulate the problem of object recognition into that of text retrieval. Our formulation opens up the opportunity to integrate some powerful text retrieval tools with computer vision techniques. In this paper, we propose to improve the efficiency of articulated object recognition by an Okapi-Chamfer matching algorithm. The algorithm is based on the inverted index technique. The inverted index is a widely used way to effectively organize a collection of text documents. With the inverted index, only documents that contain query terms are accessed and used for matching. To enable inverted indexing in an image database, we build a lexicon of local visual features by clustering the features extracted from the training images. Given a query image, we extract visual features and quantize them based on the lexicon, and then look up the inverted index to identify the subset of training images with non-zero matching score. To evaluate the matching scores in the subset, we combined the modified Okapi weighting formula with the Chamfer distance. The performance of the Okapi-Chamfer matching algorithm is evaluated on a hand posture recognition system. We test the system with both synthesized and real world images. Quantitative results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our system
An unsupervised Bayesian classifier for multiple speaker detection and localization

Multiple speaker localization algorithms generally require a binary detector, which performs the source/noise classification of the location estimates. This is mainly due to the unknown timevarying number of sources, and to the presence of noise and reverberation. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning approach based on a naive Bayesian classifier. The proposed approach couples two speaker location features, namely, 1) the steered response power introduced at the location estimate, and 2) the corresponding maximum likelihood error, which characterizes the variance of the estimate. The latter is experimentally shown to be highly correlated with the steered power at the location estimate. The proposed method is further extended to control the misclassification rate through the use of a loss function. This approach is general, and can be easily extended to integrate more speaker/speech features. Experiments on the AV16.3 corpus show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
A Systematic Review of Pair Programming Research - Initial Results

paper presents the initial results of our syst ematic review of pair programming studies. As an alternative to p erforming a literature review, we conducted a systematic review in order to reveal the answers to our research questions pertai ning to the issues of pair programming in an educational contex t. Our focus is to identify factors affecting the effectiveness of students who pair programmed, particularly related to the psycho social factors such as compatibility, personality and gend er issues. Our systematic review follows the phases described in the procedures for performing systematic reviews outlin ed in (18). We have included 66 studies for the synthesis of ev idence, of which 10 studies were found relevant to answer the first research question. The findings showed that persona lity type is the most common factor investigated. However, the results of those studies were somewhat inconclusive.
Growth and fabrication of AlGaN/GaN HEMT on SiC substrate

AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) was grown on silicon carbide substrate by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition technique. The AlGaN/GaN structure was optimized by tuning the growth conditions such as AlN buffer thickness, and the Al composition and thickness of AlGaN barrier layer. As a result, the X-ray rocking curve widths were 277 arcsec and 324 arcsec for the GaN (002) and (102) planes, respectively, indicating a high crystalline quality. Hall measurement showed that the AlGaN/GaN structure has a high electron mobility of 1840 (cm2/V-s) and a sheet electron concentration of 9.85 ×1012 cm-2. Besides, HEMT device with sub-micron gate-length (0.7 μm) was also successfully fabricated. DC measurement showed that the HEMT device has a saturated current of 800 mA/mm, a transconductance of 257 mS/mm and an off-state breakdown voltage larger than 100 V. For RF performance, the device has achieved an output power density (Pout), gain, and power added efficiency (PAE) of 7 W/mm, 23.5 dB and 61.7%, respectively, measured at 2 GHz frequency. On the other hand, the RF performance measured at 8 GHz showed that the device could achieve Pout, gain and PAE of 5.01 W/mm, 14.9 dB and 26.23% respectively.
Identifying High Cardinality Internet Hosts

The Internet host cardinality, defined as the number of distinct peers that an Internet host communicates with, is an important metric for profiling Internet hosts. Some example applications include behavior based network intrusion detection, p2p hosts identification, and server identification. However, due to the tremendous number of hosts in the Internet and high speed links, tracking the exact cardinality of each host is not feasible due to the limited memory and computation resource. Existing approaches on host cardinality counting have primarily focused on hosts of extremely high cardinalities. These methods do not work well with hosts of moderately large cardinalities that are needed for certain host behavior profiling such as detection of p2p hosts or port scanners. In this paper, we propose an online sampling approach for identifying hosts whose cardinality exceeds some moderate prescribed threshold, e.g. 50, or within specific ranges. The main advantage of our approach is that it can filter out the majority of low cardinality hosts while preserving the hosts of interest, and hence minimize the memory resources wasted by tracking irrelevant hosts. Our approach consists of three components: 1) two-phase filtering for eliminating low cardinality hosts, 2) thresholded bitmap for counting cardinalities, and 3) bias correction. Through both theoretical analysis and experiments using real Internet traces, we demonstrate that our approach requires much less memory than existing approaches do whereas yields more accurate estimates.
Above the hoof: functional morphology of the fossil deer from Tegelen, the Netherlands

Villafranchian faunas were widely spread throughout the European continent during the Plio‐Pleistocene. Ungulates, and particularly ruminants, are very well represented in most of the localities of this period. The fossil site of Tegelen (Province of Limburg, the Netherlands) is a classical Villafranchian locality where cervids are especially abundant. Some of the sites from this period have been thoroughly studied in various aspects, such as faunal assemblages, biochronology, magnetostratigraphy, sedimentology or palaeoenvironmental conditions, among others. Tegelen has been as well studied, but its particular exploitation has hampered its study for years. In order to reconstruct its prevailing palaeohabitat, we have applied statistical analyses based on functional morphology for the first time for this fossil site. In this work, we have analysed the ecomorphology of the postcranial skeleton of Eucladoceros ctenoides and Metacervoceros rhenanus, the two extinct species of deer present in Tegelen. Results show that the best ecological indicators are the metapods and the tibia, while the astragalus seems to be the least informative element. The analyses reveal likewise how both taxa show adaptations to both open and forest environments, but with a slight trend to the former. These results disagree with the general assumption that E. ctenoides and M. rhenanus are indicative of forested settings, as well as with the classical interpretations of the palaeoenvironment of Tegelen made to date, which are exclusively based on the fauna. However, they go along with the appearance of some taxa typical of open habitats, such as the micromammals Hystrix and Dicrostonyx, which could help to explain their enigmatic presence. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
FANS: face annotation by searching large-scale web facial images

Auto face annotation is an important technique for many real-world applications, such as online photo album management, new video summarization, and so on. It aims to automatically detect human faces from a photo image and further name the faces with the corresponding human names. Recently, mining web facial images on the internet has emerged as a promising paradigm towards auto face annotation. In this paper, we present a demonstration system of search-based face annotation: FANS - Face ANnotation by Searching large-scale web facial images. Given a query facial image for annotation, we first retrieve a short list of the most similar facial images from a web facial image database, and then annotate the query facial image by mining the top-ranking facial images and their corresponding labels with sparse representation techniques. Our demo system was built upon a large-scale real-world web facial image database with a total of 6,025 persons and about 1 million facial images. This paper demonstrates the potential of searching and mining web-scale weakly labeled facial images on the internet to tackle the challenging face annotation problem, and addresses some open problems for future exploration by researchers in web community. The live demo of FANS is available online at http://msm.cais. ntu.edu. sg/FANS/.
A Phylogenomic Study of Birds Reveals Their Evolutionary History

Deep avian evolutionary relationships have been difficult to resolve as a result of a putative explosive radiation. Our study examined ∼32 kilobases of aligned nuclear DNA sequences from 19 independent loci for 169 species, representing all major extant groups, and recovered a robust phylogeny from a genome-wide signal supported by multiple analytical methods. We documented well-supported, previously unrecognized interordinal relationships (such as a sister relationship between passerines and parrots) and corroborated previously contentious groupings (such as flamingos and grebes). Our conclusions challenge current classifications and alter our understanding of trait evolution; for example, some diurnal birds evolved from nocturnal ancestors. Our results provide a valuable resource for phylogenetic and comparative studies in birds.
Brief announcement: read invisibility, virtual world consistency and permissiveness are compatible

This brief announcement studies the relation between two STM properties (read invisibility and permissiveness) and two consistency conditions for STM systems, namely, opacity and virtual world consistency. A read operation issued by a transaction is invisible if it does not entail shared memory modifications. An STM system is permissive with respect to a consistency condition if it accepts every history that satisfies the condition. The brief announcement first shows that read invisibility, permissiveness and opacity are incompatible. It then shows that invisibility, permissiveness and virtual world consistency are compatible.