Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automated probabilistic classification of transients and variables

There is an increasing number of large, digital, synoptic sky surveys, in which repeated observations are obtained over large areas of the sky in multiple epochs. Likewise, there is a growth in the number of (often automated or robotic) follow-up facilities with varied capabilities in terms of instruments, depth, cadence, wavelengths, etc., most of which are geared toward some specific astrophysical phenomenon. As the number of detected transient events grows, an automated, probabilistic classification of the detected variables and transients becomes increasingly important, so that an optimal use can be made of follow-up facilities, without unnecessary duplication of effort. We describe a methodology now under development for a prototype event classification system; it involves Bayesian and Machine Learning classifiers, automated incorporation of feedback from follow-up observations, and discriminated or directed follow-up requests. This type of methodology may be essential for the massive synoptic sky surveys in the future.
Enumerative coding for tree sources

Efficient enumerative coding for tree sources is, in general, surprisingly intricate-a simple uniform encoding of type classes, which is asymptotically optimal in expectation for many classical models such as FSMs, turns out not to be so in this case. We describe an efficiently computable enumerative code that is universal in the class of tree sources in the sense that, for a string emitted by an unknown source supported on a known tree, the expected normalized code length approaches the entropy rate of the source with a convergence rate (K/2)(log n)/n, where K is the number of free parameters of the source. The results extend also to the twice-universal setting, where the tree is unknown.
New Renin Inhibitor VTP-27999 Alters Renin Immunoreactivity and Does Not Unfold Prorenin

Renin inhibitors like aliskiren not only block renin but also bind prorenin, thereby inducing a conformational change (like the change induced by acid) allowing its recognition in a renin-specific assay. Consequently, aliskiren can be used to measure prorenin. VTP-27999 is a new renin inhibitor with an aliskiren-like IC50 and t1/2, and a much higher bioavailability. This study addressed (pro)renin changes during treatment of volunteers with VTP-27999 or aliskiren. Both drugs increased renin immunoreactivity. Treatment of plasma samples from aliskiren-treated subjects with excess aliskiren yielded higher renin immunoreactivity levels, confirming the presence of prorenin. Unexpectedly, this approach did not work in VTP-27999–treated subjects, although an assay detecting the prosegment revealed that their blood still contained prorenin. Subsequent in vitro analysis showed that VTP-27999 increased renin immunoreactivity for a given amount of renin by ≥30% but did not unfold prorenin. Yet, it did bind to acid-activated, intact prorenin and then again increased immunoreactivity in a renin assay. However, no such increase in immunoreactivity was seen when measuring acid-activated prorenin bound to VTP-27999 with a prosegment-directed assay. The VTP-27999–induced rises in renin immunoreactivity could be competitively prevented by aliskiren, and antibody displacement studies revealed a higher affinity of the active site-directed antibodies in the presence of VTP-27999. In conclusion, VTP-27999 increases renin immunoreactivity in renin immunoassays because it affects the affinity of the active site-directed antibody. Combined with its lack of effect on prorenin, these data show that VTP-27999 differs from aliskiren. The clinical relevance of these results needs to be established.
Repeated Exposure to β-phenylethylamine Produces Locomotor Sensitization to Amphetamine, but Not Vice Versa, in the Rat

Repeated administration of amphetamine (AMPH) produces behavioral sensitization, a proposed model for the escalation of drug use characteristic of human addicts. βPhenylethylamine (PEA) is an endogenous trace amine found in mammalian brain and resembles AMPH both structurally and behaviorally. Previously, it has been reported that chronic PEA administration produces behavioral sensitization to the challenges of AMPH. However, these data were obtained with very high amount of PEA for a relatively long period of time. Further, the effect of PEA challenge on the expression of behavioral sensitization developed by AMPH pre-exposures has not been tested yet. Thus, we examined in the present experiment the expression of behavioral sensitization with AMPH challenge after a mild chronic PEA treatment. Rats were repeatedly administered with systemic injections of saline, β-phenylethylamine (PEA) (10 or 50 mg/kg), or amphetamine (AMPH) (1.5 mg/kg). When challenged a week after the last pre-injection, rats pre-exposed to either PEA or AMPH showed behavioral sensitization to AMPH (1.0 mg/kg), while these effects were not observed to PEA (50 mg/kg) itself. These results demonstrate that repeated exposure to PEA produces behavioral sensitization to AMPH challenge, while PEA challenge has no effect on the expression of behavioral sensitization developed by AMPH pre-exposures, suggesting that PEA may play a role in the development of locomotor sensitization to AMPH, but not in the expression of it.
Shopping as a Coping Behavior for Stress

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of diversion buying for stress release. Diversion buying was examined by survey, and it was found that women engaged in it more often than men. In Experiment 1, diversion buying was divided into an expenditure factor and an acquisition factor, in order to examine which was more effective for stress release; both had a significant main effect. The effectiveness of the acquisition factor was confirmed in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, the expenditure factor was divided into the amount available for expenditure and the amount spent, in order to examine the effectiveness of each. It was shown that a certain amount of expenditure was needed for stress release; however, a high expenditure rate (spending most of the money) did not relieve stress.
Design of Tamper-Resistant Registers for Multiple-Valued Cryptographic Processors

This paper presents the design of tamper-resistant registers for multiple-valued cryptographic processors. The voltage-mode and current-mode registers are proposed for hiding dependencies between power consumption and input data. For this purpose, the voltage-mode register activates any one of two flip-flops in a complementary style, and the current-mode register maintains the number of current signals independently of the input value. This paper also applies the two registers to RSA processors in Multiple-Valued Current-Mode Logic and evaluates the power characteristics by HSIM simulations using 90nm process technology. The result shows that the proposed designs can achieve constant power consumption with lower overhead in comparison with the conventional designs.
Stress Management Techniques: Anxiety Reduction, Appeal, and Individual Differences

Four stress management techniques were evaluated for their general appeal, their immediate benefits, and the subjective experiences they evoke. One hundred undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of five treatment groups: (1) progressive muscle relaxation (PMR); (2) distraction imagery; (3) focused imagery; (4) listening to music; (5) sitting quietly (control). Distraction imagery and listening to music were the only techniques found to reduce anxiety to a greater extent than simply sitting quietly. The techniques differed in the way they made subjects feel, but not in their general appeal. Individuals with a “blunting” coping style were more likely to find all five techniques appealing.
A Novel Cascade Model for Learning Latent Similarity from Heterogeneous Sequential Data of MOOC

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With massive learners being offered MOOCs, there is a demand that the forum contents within MOOCs need to be classified in order to facilitate both learners and instructors. Therefore we investigate a significant application, which is to associate forum threads to subtitles of video clips. This task can be regarded as a document ranking problem, and the key is how to learn a distinguishable text representation from word sequences and learners’ behavior sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel cascade model, which can capture both the latent semantics and latent similarity by modeling MOOC data. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our textual representation outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised counterparts for the application.
Building a large and efficient hybrid peer-to-peer Internet caching system

Proxy hit ratios tend to decrease as the demand and supply of Web contents are becoming more diverse. By case studies, we quantitatively confirm this trend and observe significant document duplications among a proxy and its client browsers' caches. One reason behind this trend is that the client/server Web caching model does not support direct resource sharing among clients, causing the Web contents and the network bandwidths among clients to be relatively underutilized. To address these limits and improve Web caching performance, we have extensively enhanced and deployed our browsers-aware framework, a peer-to-peer Web caching management scheme. We make the browsers and their proxy share the contents to exploit the neglected but rich data locality in browsers and reduce document duplications among the proxy and browsers' caches to effectively utilize the Web contents and network bandwidth among clients. The objective of our scheme is to improve the scalability of proxy-based caching both in the number of connected clients and in the diversity of Web documents. We show that building such a caching system with considerations of sharing contents among clients, minimizing document duplications, and achieving data integrity and communication anonymity is not only feasible but also highly effective.
Crystal Structure and Computational Modeling of the Fab Fragment from a Protective Anti-Ricin Monoclonal Antibody

Background Many antibody crystal structures have been solved. Structural modeling programs have been developed that utilize this information to predict 3-D structures of an antibody based upon its sequence. Because of the problem of self-reference, the accuracy and utility of these predictions can only be tested when a new structure has not yet been deposited in the Protein Data Bank. Methods We have solved the crystal structure of the Fab fragment of RAC18, a protective anti-ricin mAb, to 1.9 Å resolution. We have also modeled the Fv structure of RAC18 using publicly available Ab modeling tools Prediction of Immunoglobulin Structures (PIGS), RosettaAntibody, and Web Antibody Modeling (WAM). The model structures underwent energy minimization. We compared results to the crystal structure on the basis of root-mean-square deviation (RMSD), template modeling score (TM-score), Z-score, and MolProbity analysis. Findings The crystal structure showed a pocket formed mainly by AA residues in each of the heavy chain complementarity determining regions (CDRs). There were differences between the crystal structure and structures predicted by the modeling tools, particularly in the CDRs. There were also differences among the predicted models, although the differences were small and within experimental error. No one modeling program was clearly superior to the others. In some cases, choosing structures based only on sequence homology to the crystallized Ab yielded RMSDs comparable to the models. Conclusions Molecular modeling programs accurately predict the structure of most regions of antibody variable domains of RAC18. The hypervariable CDRs proved most difficult to model, particularly H chain CDR3. Because CDR3 is most often involved in contact with antigen, this defect must be considered when using models to identify potential contacts between antibody and antigen. Because this study represents only a single case, the results cannot be generalized. Rather they highlight the utility and limitations of modeling programs.
A New Model for Scattering From Tree Canopies Based on Physical Optics and Multiple Scattering Theory

This paper presents a new model for scattering from tree canopies based on a modified physical optics approach. In this way, propagation through a canopy is accounted for by respecting the complex propagation constant, which can be obtained either by the multiple scattering theory (MST) or approximated based on the canopy specific attenuation. Unlike the case when MST is applied directly, the proposed approach offers significant benefits, including a straightforward software implementation, feasible computation times for high frequencies and electrically large canopies, and, most importantly, near-field calculations in regions close to a canopy. The new model is first tested against MST using two artificial single-tree scenarios at 2 and 10 GHz. Then, experimental data at 2 GHz obtained with the use of a remote controlled airship for an actual single-tree scenario are utilized as well. In this way, the model is thoroughly validated and its advantages over MST are presented in detail.
Cross-Layer Cooperative MAC Protocol in Distributed Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study medium access control (MAC) protocol design for distributed cooperative wireless networks. We focus on beneficial node cooperation by addressing two fundamental issues of cooperative communications, namely when to cooperate and whom to cooperate with, from a cross-layer protocol design perspective. In the protocol design, taking account of protocol overhead we explore a concept of cooperation region, whereby beneficial cooperative transmissions can be identified. We show that a rate allocation in the cooperation region provides higher link utilization than in a non-cooperation region. To increase network throughput, we propose an optimal grouping strategy for efficient helper node selection, and devise a greedy algorithm for MAC protocol refinement. Analysis of a successful transmission probability with cooperative or direct transmission is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can effectively exploit beneficial cooperation, thereby improving system performance. Further, analytical and simulation results shed some light on the tradeoff between multi-user diversity gain at the physical layer and the helper contention overhead at the MAC layer.
Substructure in Dark Halos: Orbital Eccentricities and Dynamical Friction

The virialized regions of galaxies and clusters contain significant amounts of substructure; clusters have hundreds to thousands of galaxies, and satellite systems and globular clusters orbit the halos of individual galaxies. These orbits can decay owing to dynamical friction. Depending on their orbits and their masses, the substructures either merge, are disrupted, or survive to the present day. We examine the distributions of eccentricities of orbits within mass distributions similar to those we see for galaxies and clusters. A comprehensive understanding of these orbital properties is essential to calculate the rates of physical processes relevant to the formation and evolution of galaxies and clusters. We derive the orbital eccentricity distributions for a number of spherical potentials. These distributions depend strongly on the velocity anisotropy, but only slightly on the shape of the potential. The eccentricity distributions in the case of an isotropic distribution function are strongly skewed toward high eccentricities, with a median value of typically ~0.6, corresponding to an apocenter-to-pericenter ratio of 4.0. We also present high-resolution N-body simulations of the orbital decay of satellite systems on eccentric orbits in an isothermal halo. The dynamical friction timescales are found to decrease with increasing orbital eccentricity because of the dominating deceleration at the orbit's pericenter. The orbital eccentricity stays remarkably constant throughout the decay; although the eccentricity decreases near pericenter, it increases again near apocenter, such that there is no net circularization. We briefly discuss several applications for our derived distributions of orbital eccentricities and the resulting decay rates from dynamical friction. We compare the theoretical eccentricity distributions to those of globular clusters and galactic satellites for which all six phase-space coordinates (and therewith their orbits) have been determined. We find that the globular clusters are consistent with a close-to-isotropic velocity distribution, and they show large orbital eccentricities because of this (not in spite of this, as has been previously asserted). In addition, we find that the limited data on the Galactic system of satellites appears to be different and warrants further investigation as a clue to the formation and evolution of our Milky Way and its halo substructure.
The Role of Proteases in Fibronectin Matrix Remodeling in Thyroid Epithelial Cell Monolayer Cultures

Abstract Fischer rat thyroid (FRT) cells organize a matrix of extracellular fibronectin (FN) fibrils, which undergoes extensive remodeling according to cell culture confluence. In nonconfluent cells FN forms a fibrillar array associated with the ventral cell surface. However, basal FN is progressively removed in confluent cultures and substituted by nonfibrillar FN deposits at lateral cell domains in regions of cellcell contacts. FRT cells secrete and expose on the plasma membrane the tissuetype plasminogen activator and, in serumfree cultures, plasminogen induces a rapid loss of FN fibrils. Incubation with plasmin inhibitors greatly reduces this effect. FRT cells also express annexin II, a plasminogen receptor, suggesting that plasmin activity is associated with the pericellular enviroment. This is in agreement with the observation that a great reduction in FN degradation is observed if the cells are preincubated with carboxypeptidase B, which prevents plasminogen binding to the cells. A gelatinolytic activity with a molecular weigth equivalent to MMP-2 has been demonstrated by zymography of culture media, and the presence of MMP-2 and MT1-MMP on the cell plasma membrane has been detected by immunofluorescence. These results indicate that in the FN remodeling process, occurring during FRT epithelium maturation, both plasmindependent (tPA activated) and plasminindependent proteolytic activities are involved.
‘‘Stop Cutting—Rock!’’: A Pilot Study of a Music Therapeutic Program for Self-Injuring Adolescents

Abstract Music and Medicine 2(1) 59-65 a The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1943862109356928 http://mmd.sagepub.com Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a common phenomenon in adolescence. This pilot study blended elements of dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents (DBT-A) with music therapy to reduce NSSI in a project for self-injuring female adolescents (N 1⁄4 5; mean age: 14 years 8 months; age range: 14-16 years). Four out of the 5 female adolescents had stopped self-injuring at the end of the program, and the depression score declined. The program proved to be a feasible alternative in an outpatient setting, although severe suicidal ideation presented as a problem. Blending different therapeutic approaches might be an interesting way to tailor effective treatments for specific patient groups. Keywords nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), self-harm, music therapy, dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents (DBT-A), adolescents
Local shape patch based object detection

We present a novel object detection framework that uses the local shape patches features combining the interclass global features information. A supervised local model learning architecture is proposed: a novel interest point descriptor is proposed and applied to detect the local shape patches, the local shape patches are formed by chains of several connected contour segments. Then the object local contour parts model are learned from a small set of training images. In order to make the local contour patch model is invariant to rotation and translation, the local contour patch descriptor is represented by modified shape context. By adding the edge orientation information and interclass global information, the power of differentiating mismatches is increased, especially detecting the objects existing similar parts. Both experiments on image feature point matching and object detection comparing with other feature descriptors are carried out in order to validate the proposed method.
Putting the London 2012 Olympics into perspective: the challenge of understanding mega-events

The idea that the Olympics should leave hosts with a ‘legacy’ has become an increasingly important theme in Olympic and public discourse since the turn of the millennium. This is partly because of the Olympic corruption crisis in 1998/99 and the change of guard in International Olympic Committee (IOC) leadership in 2001, and the need from this time to re-energise the worldwide movement around a reassertion of principles. ‘Olympic legacy’ refers most obviously to the venues and facilities required by the Games and subsequently available for use by host cities (Moragas et al., 2003). However, in my view we need more expansive and sociological concepts of Olympic legacy. These should at least include the impact of the event on public sport participation in the host country. In addition, they should include, among other things, the cultural legacies of people’s collective memories both national and international. Most people in Britain and also around the world will not be able to attend the Games in London in 2012. But many will nonetheless participate and ‘see’ it by watching it on television, and on this basis they are likely to remember some of the Games’ sport highlights or newsworthy events. This media aspect is important culturally and sociologically in constructing the event as being both of potential personal significance to people and also as an historical and cultural reality. In my view it should be recognised as a significant element of any research agenda relating to London 2012 and its legacy. In this contribution I would like to offer a wider perspective on events like London 2012 by reference to the analysis of ‘mega-events’ and what we can call ‘the mega-event phenomenon’ (Roche, 2000, chs 1, 8; Horne & Manzenreiter, 2006; Close et al., 2008). The main social scientific and academic questions I will focus 21st Century Society Vol. 3, No. 3, 285–290, November 2008
Design and implementation for a coin identification system

This paper proposes two methods to implement a coin identification system. The proposed methods have several advantages, such as good identification accuracy, simple hardware configuration, and easy extension. Method 1 uses a single winding high-frequency sinusoidal voltage exciting method. By injecting a fixed-amplitude, fixed-frequency sinusoidal voltage, the exciting current, which is related to the impedance of the winding, can be detected. By measuring the amplitude and phase between the input voltage and current, the coin feature can be identified and then a `true' or `fake' coin can be determined. Method 2 uses a square-wave voltage exciting method. Two windings are used. The primary winding is connected to the square-wave voltage, and the second winding is used to measure the induced voltage. The induced voltage waveform of the secondary winding is varied as a coin passes through. By using Fourier analysis, the proposed system can determine the coin as a `true' or `fake' coin. The performance of these two methods is compared and discussed. Finally, a normalization technique of method 2 is discussed. By using the normalization technique, the accuracy rate of method 2 can reach 90%, which is better than the accuracy rate of method 1.