Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Regularized Smoothing Newton Method for Box Constrained Variational Inequality Problems with P0-Functions

Based on Qi, Sun, and Zhou's smoothing Newton method, we propose a regularized smoothing Newton method for the box constrained variational inequality problem with P0-function (P0 BVI). The proposed algorithm generates an infinite sequence such that the value of the merit function converges to zero. If P0 BVI has a nonempty bounded solution set, the iteration sequence must be bounded. This result implies that there exists at least one accumulation point. Under CD-regularity, we prove that the proposed algorithm has a superlinear (quadratic) convergence rate without requiring strict complementarity conditions. The main feature of our global convergence results is that we do not assume a priori the existence of an accumulation point. This assumption is used widely in the literature due to the possible unboundedness of level sets of various adopted merit functions. Preliminary numerical results are also reported.
Cross-coupled iterative learning control of systems with dissimilar dynamics: design and implementation

Cross-coupled iterative learning control has previously been applied to contour tracking problems with planar manufacturing robots in which both axes can be characterised as similar systems; having similar dynamics and identical hardware. However, there are many repetitive applications in which dynamically dissimilar systems cooperate to pursue a primary performance objective. This article introduces a novel framework to couple dynamically dissimilar systems while applying iterative learning control, showing the ability to noncausally compensate for a slow system with a fast system. In this framework, performance requirements for a primary objective can more readily be achieved by emphasising an underutilised fast system instead of straining a less-capable slow system. The controller is applied to a micro-robotic deposition manufacturing system to coordinate a slow extrusion system axis and a fast positioning system axis to pursue the primary performance objective, dimensional accuracy of a fabricated part. Experimental results show a 14% improvement in fabrication-dimensional accuracy with only marginal changes in actuator effort, as compared to independently controlled axes.
A Model for the Steady-State Photoconductance of an Abrupt p-n Junction Semiconductor Diode Assuming Flat Quasi-Fermi Levels

A theoretical model for the steady-state photoconductance of an abrupt p-n junction semiconductor diode is presented. It assumes one-dimensional geometry and flat quasi-Fermi levels (QFLs) and involves a numerical integration over electrostatic potential. The flat-QFL model permits the determination of the excess carrier concentration in both quasi-neutral regions from a measurement of a semiconductor's photoconductance, accounting for depletion-region modulation more accurately than its alternatives-particularly for thin samples and low-injection conditions. The model can be generalized to include variable carrier mobilities and to have different intrinsic carrier concentrations in n- and p-type layers
A Numerical Research of Herringbone Passive Mixer at Low Reynold Number Regime

Passive mixing based on microfluidics has won its popularity for its unique advantage, including easier operation, more efficient mixing performance and higher access to high integrity. The time-scale and performance of mixing process are usually characterized by mixing quality, which has been remarkably improved due to the introduction of chaos theory into passive micro mixers. In this paper, we focus on the research of mixing phenomenon at extremely low Reynold number (Re) regime in a chaotic herringbone mixer. Three-dimensional (3D) modeling has been carried out using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, to simulate the chaos-enhanced advection diffusion process. Static mixing processes using pressure driven and electric field driven modes are investigated. Based on the simulation results, the effects of flow field and herringbone pattern are theoretically studied and compared. Both in pressure driven flow and electro-osmotic flow (EOF), the mixing performance is improved with a lower flow rate. Moreover, it is noted that with a same total flow rate, mixing performance is better in EOF than pressure driven flow, which is mainly due to the difference in flow field distribution of pressure driven flow and EOF.
Activation of sphingosine kinase 1 by ERK1/2‐mediated phosphorylation

Sphingosine kinase 1 is an agonist‐activated signalling enzyme that catalyses the formation of sphingosine 1‐phosphate, a lipid second messenger that has been implicated in a number of agonist‐driven cellular responses, including stimulation of cell proliferation, inhibition of apoptosis and expression of inflammatory molecules. Although agonist‐induced stimulation of sphingosine kinase activity is critical in a number of signalling pathways, nothing has been known of the molecular mechanism of this activation. Here we show that this activation results directly from phosphorylation of sphingosine kinase 1 at Ser225, and present several lines of evidence to show compellingly that the activating kinase is ERK1/2 or a close relative. Furthermore, we show that phosphorylation of sphingosine kinase 1 at Ser225 results not only in an increase in enzyme activity, but is also necessary for translocation of the enzyme from the cytosol to the plasma membrane. Thus, these studies have elucidated the mechanism of agonist‐mediated sphingosine kinase activation, and represent a key finding in understanding the regulation of sphingosine kinase/sphingosine 1‐phosphate‐controlled signalling pathways.
Universal enhancement of salient object detection

Recently, numerous salient object detection methods are proposed for different data types. And a reliable method, which can accurately extract complete salient objects, is beneficial to various vision tasks. However, existing methods may fail in highlighting the entire salient object uniformly. In this work, we propose a simple and universal framework aiming to improve the detection result of existing methods. To remove inaccurate salient regions, we apply location prior and adaptive de-noising to prior saliency maps extracted from existing methods in the pre-processing step. Then, an iteration optimization algorithm considering local smoothness and global similarity is introduced to refine the pre-processed saliency map. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can universally enhance the performance of state-of-the-art salient object detection methods for 2D, 3D and light field data.
Animal exposure chambers in air pollution studies.

The following requirements were considered mandatory in the design and installation of the animal exposure facility described in this report: a source of clean (CBR filtered) air supply; a constant flow of air; controls to vary air flow over a suitable range; instruments for accurately metering air flow; apparatus for injecting an aerosol or gaseous contaminant into the input stream; uniform distribution of the input air stream throughout the exposure zone; an air supply cooling system; signal devices to indicate failure of operating equipment; provision for exhausting air from the chambers; maintenance of slight negative pressure to prevent outward leakage from the exposure units; a means of conveniently cleaning the exposure chambers; facilities for taking representative samples of the exposure chamber atmosphere; appropriate sampling ports; ease of access to exposure chamber interior; suitable observation windows; and automatic control and recording of exposure chamber variables. 7 references, 2 figures, 5 tables.
Cathepsin L and Cathepsin B Mediate Reovirus Disassembly in Murine Fibroblast Cells*

After attachment to receptors, reovirus virions are internalized by endocytosis and exposed to acid-dependent proteases that catalyze viral disassembly. Previous studies using the cysteine protease inhibitor E64 and a mutant cell line that does not support reovirus disassembly suggest a requirement for specific endocytic proteases in reovirus entry. This study identifies the endocytic proteases that mediate reovirus disassembly in murine fibroblast cells. Infection of both L929 cells treated with the cathepsin L inhibitor Z-Phe-Tyr(t-Bu)-diazomethyl ketone and cathepsin L-deficient mouse embryo fibroblasts resulted in inefficient proteolytic disassembly of viral outer-capsid proteins and decreased viral yields. In contrast, both L929 cells treated with the cathepsin B inhibitor CA-074Me and cathepsin B-deficient mouse embryo fibroblasts support reovirus disassembly and growth. However, removal of both cathepsin B and cathepsin L activity completely abrogates disassembly and growth of reovirus. Concordantly, cathepsin L mediates reovirus disassembly more efficiently than cathepsin B in vitro. These results demonstrate that either cathepsin L or cathepsin B is required for reovirus entry into murine fibroblasts and indicate that cathepsin L is the primary mediator of reovirus disassembly. Moreover, these findings suggest that specific endocytic proteases can determine host cell susceptibility to infection by intracellular pathogens.
Influence of bench angle on upper extremity muscular activation during bench press exercise

Abstract This study compared the muscular activation of the pectoralis major, anterior deltoid and triceps brachii during a free-weight barbell bench press performed at 0°, 30°, 45° and –15° bench angles. Fourteen healthy resistance trained males (age 21.4 ± 0.4 years) participated in this study. One set of six repetitions for each bench press conditions at 65% one repetition maximum were performed. Surface electromyography (sEMG) was utilised to examine the muscular activation of the selected muscles during the eccentric and concentric phases. In addition, each phase was subdivided into 25% contraction durations, resulting in four separate time points for comparison between bench conditions. The sEMG of upper pectoralis displayed no difference during any of the bench conditions when examining the complete concentric contraction, however differences during 26–50% contraction duration were found for both the 30° [122.5 ± 10.1% maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC)] and 45° (124 ± 9.1% MVIC) bench condition, resulting in greater sEMG compared to horizontal (98.2 ± 5.4% MVIC) and –15 (96.1 ± 5.5% MVIC). The sEMG of lower pectoralis was greater during –15° (100.4 ± 5.7% MVIC), 30° (86.6 ± 4.8% MVIC) and horizontal (100.1 ± 5.2% MVIC) bench conditions compared to the 45° (71.9 ± 4.5% MVIC) for the whole concentric contraction. The results of this study support the use of a horizontal bench to achieve muscular activation of both the upper and lower heads of the pectoralis. However, a bench incline angle of 30° or 45° resulted in greater muscular activation during certain time points, suggesting that it is important to consider how muscular activation is affected at various time points when selecting bench press exercises.
Temperature dependent characteristics of intrinsically switchable ferroelectric composite FBARs

This paper presents temperature dependent characteristics of intrinsically switchable ferroelectric composite FBARs. Ba0.5Sr0. 5TiO3 and Si are used to form a composite FBAR. Measurement results show that both series and parallel resonance frequencies decrease with the temperature. The temperature coefficient of frequency is approximately -35 ppm/°C. The variation of quality factor and electromechanical coupling coefficient is less than 6.5% and 6.2% above 20 V bias.
Content Normalization for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

Subspace based techniques, such as i-vector and Joint Factor Analysis (JFA) have shown to provide state-of-the-art performance for fixed phrase based text-dependent speaker verification. However, the error rates of such systems on the random digit task of RSR dataset are higher than that of Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM). In this paper, we aim at improving i-vector system by normalizing the content of the enrollment data to match the test data. We estimate i-vectors for each frames of a speech utterance (also called online i-vectors). The largest similarity scores across frames between enrollment and test are taken using these online i-vectors to obtain speaker verification scores. Experiments on Part3 of RSR corpora show that the proposed approach achieves 12% relative improvement in equal error rate over a GMM-UBM based baseline system.
MINIMAL ENDOILLUMINATION LEVELS AND DISPLAY LUMINOUS EMITTANCE DURING THREE-DIMENSIONAL HEADS-UP VITREORETINAL SURGERY

Purpose: To determine minimal endoillumination levels required to perform 3-dimensional heads-up vitreoretinal surgery and to correlate endoillumination levels used for measurements of heads-up display (HUD) luminous emittance. Methods: Prospective, observational surgical case series of 10 patients undergoing vitreoretinal surgery. Endoillumination levels were set to 40% of maximum output and were decreased at set intervals until the illumination level was 0%. Corresponding luminous emittance (lux) of the HUD was measured 40 cm from the display using a luxmeter (Dr. Meter, Model #LX1010BS). Results: In 9 of 10 cases, the surgeon felt that they could operate comfortably at an endoillumination level of 10% of maximum output with corresponding HUD emittance of 14.3 ± 9.5 lux. In the remaining case, the surgeon felt comfortable at a 3% endoillumination level with corresponding HUD emittance of 15 lux. Below this threshold, subjective image dimness and digital noise limited visibility. Endoillumination levels were correlated with luminous emittance from the 3-dimensional HUD (P < 0.01). The average coefficient of variation of HUD luminance was 0.546. There were no intraoperative complications. Conclusion: With real-time digital processing and automated brightness control, 3-dimensional HUD platforms may allow for reduced intraoperative endoillumination levels and a theoretically reduced risk of retinal phototoxicity during vitreoretinal surgery.
Multiple alleles and estimation of genetic parameters: computational equations showing involvement of all alleles.

Genetic loci that exhibit multiple (more than two) segregating alleles are generally more useful than biallelic ones for population genetic studies simply because they offer greater potential for variation in observed number of alleles as well as allele frequency differences across populations. Since allele frequencies at a locus in a population are structurally constrained (they always add to one), a matrix treatment of allele frequency data at a multi-allelic locus requires deleting one allele from the analysis. Hence the resultant estimator may be construed as dependent on which allele is being eliminated in the process of estimation (BALAKRISHNAN 1973). Such situations have been faced by BALAKRISHNAN and SANGHVI (1968) and SMOUSE and SPIELMAN (1977) when they attempted to estimate genetic distances between populations by statistics parallel to Mahalanobis-D2 (MAHALANOBIS 1936) for multivariate data. ROBERTS and HIORNS (1 962) also suggested a method of estimating genetic admixture in a hybrid population using allele frequency data that requires elimination of one allele of a multiallelic locus. Recently, this issue has resurfaced in the least-square estimation of admixture components in a hybrid population (LONG 1991). Since these investigators generally presented their estimating equations in terms of “shortened” vectors of allele frequencies (by deleting one allele from each locus) and the variance-covariance matrix of such “shortened” vectors of sampled allele frequencies, in general it is not obvious whether or not the resultant estimators depend upon the allele that is eliminated from the analysis. As a result, such methods are criticized on the ground of the subjectivity involved in selecting the allele to be eliminated (BALAKRISHNAN 1973) although in some applications algebraic verifications are given to show that any allele can be dropped without affecting the estimate (LONG 1991). The purpose of this communication is to show that by exploiting a well-known property of the variance-covariance matrix of the cell frequencies of a multinomial distribution (KURCZYNSKI 1970) a simple translation of the matrix estimators can be obtained, which indicates that even though the formal representation requires deleting one allele, the computational equation truly needs the frequencies of all alleles. Therefore, such estimators are functions of the full array of allele frequencies. This simple exercise has at least three implications.
Comparison of Software Structures in Java and Erlang Programming Languages

Empirical studies on fault behaviour in evolving complex software systems have shown that communication structures among the software entities such as classes, modules, software units and communications among them, is significantly affecting the system fault behaviour. Therefore, we were motivated to further investigate software structures. One interesting question is to investigate software structures from software products written in different programming languages. In this work we present our preliminary study for which we developed tools to examine software structures of software products written in Java and Erlang programming language. We provide details on how we extract software structure from software product and provide preliminary results analyzing four Erlang software products and four Java software products.
ARMA Model order estimation using third order computations

A novel approach for estimating the order of a non-Gaussian autoregressive moving-average process is proposed. The proposed method uses third order computations, and is based on the minimum eigenvalue of a family of covariance matrices derived from the observed output data. The algorithm uses data matrices rather than calculated cumulants. Hence, we avoid the non-stationary effects, which is due to finite-length observations. Examples are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Voting-based Classification for E-mail Spam Detection

The problem of spam e-mail has gained a tremendous amount of attention. Although entities tend to use e-mail spam filter applications to filter out received spam e-mails, marketing companies still tend to send unsolicited e-mails in bulk and users still receive a reasonable amount of spam e-mail despite those filtering applications. This work proposes a new method for classifying e-mails into spam and non-spam. First, several e-mail content features are extracted and then those features are used for classifying each e-mail individually. The classification results of three different classifiers (i.e. Decision Trees, Random Forests and k-Nearest Neighbor) are combined in various voting schemes (i.e. majority vote, average probability, product of probabilities, minimum probability and maximum probability) for making the final decision. To validate our method, two different spam e-mail collections were used.
Investigation into thiol-(meth)acrylate Michael addition reactions using amine and phosphine catalysts

This work describes a study into thiol–ene based Michael addition reactions. Different catalysts, primary and tertiary amines and phosphines, were investigated for the reaction of a range of thiols with dimers and oligomers of some (meth)acrylates. Primary and tertiary amines are efficient catalysts for the thiol–ene reaction, although these catalysts require several hours to reach high conversion. Moreover, the phosphine catalysts, dimethylphenylphosphine (DMPP) and tris-(2-carboxyethyl)phosphine (TCEP), were investigated in detail. DMPP is an efficacious catalyst yielding complete conversion in few minutes under optimized conditions. Importantly, the concentration of DMPP should be kept at catalytic levels to avoid the formation of by-products, originating from the addition of DMPP to the vinyl group. Furthermore, TCEP is an efficient catalyst for thiol–ene reactions in aqueous media when the pH of the medium is higher than 8.0 since at acidic pH the formation of by-products is observed.
Assessment of anomalous systemic and pulmonary venous connections by transoesophageal echocardiography in infants and children.

OBJECTIVE--To assess the value of transoesophageal echocardiography in the preoperative definition of systemic and pulmonary venous connections. DESIGN--Transoesophageal echocardiographic studies were performed prospectively under general anaesthesia in 76 consecutive unoperated children. Results were compared with those obtained by earlier transthoracic ultrasound studies (n = 76), cardiac catheterisation (n = 62), and subsequent surgical inspection (n = 58). SETTING--Two tertiary referral centres. PATIENTS--76 unoperated infants and children (age 0.2-14.8 years, mean age 4.1 years) with congenital heart disease. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE--Identification of anomalous systemic and pulmonary venous connections. RESULTS--Transoesophageal studies showed anomalous venous connections in 14 patients. Two had both anomalous systemic and pulmonary venous connections. Transoesophageal studies showed 12 anomalous systemic venous connections in nine patients. In eight patients these were confirmed at operation or catheterisation: one patient is awaiting operation. Six anomalous systemic venous connections were missed during earlier transthoracic studies. Anomalous pulmonary venous connections (one mixed total, six partial) were shown in seven patients. These were confirmed at operation in six and by cardiac catheterisation in one. Four of these patients were missed during earlier transthoracic ultrasound studies. No patient defined as having normal venous connections by the transoesophageal study was subsequently shown to have anomalous venous connections at operation or angiography. CONCLUSIONS--Transoesophageal echocardiography is a highly sensitive tool for the preoperative definition of systemic and pulmonary venous connections. In this series it was better than transthoracic ultrasound and complemented cardiac catheterisation and angiocardiography.
Verifying person descriptions with term-entity association

Person description extraction is an important task in biography generation, question answering and summarization, etc. While most of the previous extraction methods mainly depended on structural information, the work presented in the paper focuses on extraction verification by integrating linguistic knowledge provided by HowNet (with semantic knowledge) and the newswire corpus (with statistical information), from which the associations between terms (i.e. the words in HowNet) and person entities are measured. With term-entity association, ineligible descriptions extracted could be filtered out, and a higher precision is achieved in turn.