Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Charge‐Carrier Mobility Requirements for Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells with High Fill Factor and External Quantum Efficiency >90%

To increase the efficiency of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells beyond 15%, 300 nm thick devices with 0.8 fill factor (FF) and external quantum efficiency (EQE) >90% are likely needed. This work demonstrates that numerical device simulators are a powerful tool for investigating charge‐carrier transport in BHJ devices and are useful for rapidly determining what semiconductor properties are needed to reach these performance milestones. The electron and hole mobility in a BHJ must be ≈10−2 cm2 V−1 s−1 in order to attain a 0.8 FF in a 300 nm thick device with the recombination rate constant of poly(3‐hexylthiophene):[6,6]‐phenyl‐C61‐butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM). Thus, the hole mobility of donor polymers needs to increase from ≈10−4 to ≈10−2 cm2 V−1 s−1 in order to significantly improve device performance. Furthermore, the charge‐carrier mobility required for high FF is directly proportional to the BHJ recombination rate constant, which demonstrates that decreasing the recombination rate constant could dramatically improve the efficiency of optically thick devices. These findings suggest that researchers should prioritize improving charge‐carrier mobility when synthesizing new materials for BHJ solar cells and highlight that they should aim to understand what factors affect the recombination rate constant in these devices.
Effects of different products of peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch) from a variety developed in southern Brazil on oxidative stress and inflammatory parameters in vitro and ex vivo

Antioxidant, anti-glycation and anti-inflammatory activities of fresh and conserved peach fruits (Prunus persica L. Batsch) were compared. Fresh peach pulps, peels, preserve peach pulps and the preserve syrup were prepared at equal concentrations. Rat liver, kidney and brain cortex tissue slices were pre-incubated with peach samples, subjected to oxidative stress with FeSO4 and hydrogen peroxide. Fresh peach pulps and peel conferred higher protection against cytotoxicity and oxidative stress than preserve peach pulps in most tissues. Release of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1β was also significantly decreased by Fresh peach pulps and peel, followed by preserve peach pulps. Total phenolic determination and HPLC analysis of carotenoids showed that the content of secondary metabolites in Fresh peach pulps and peel is significantly higher than in preserve peach pulps, while the syrup had only small or trace amounts of these compounds. Fresh peach pulps and Peel demonstrated high antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects preventing against induced damage.
Heat kernel expansion for a family of stochastic volatility models : delta-geometry

In this paper, we study a family of stochastic volatility processes; this family features a mean reversion term for the volatility and a double CEV-like exponent that generalizes SABR and Heston's models. We derive approximated closed form formulas for the digital prices, the local and implied volatilities. Our formulas are efficient for small maturities. Our method is based on differential geometry, especially small time diffusions on riemanian spaces. This geometrical point of view can be extended to other processes, and is very accurate to produce variate smiles for small maturities and small moneyness.
Identification of ablation sites in atrial flutter by causal method

A 3D atrial model was used to simulate the electrical activity of four different flutter propagation patterns: typical flutter, reverse typical flutter, superior vena cava flutter and inferior vena cava flutter. In this study we propose the use of the causal method to analyse the intracardiac atrial signal in order to automatically obtain the optimal target site for ablation. The causal method summarizes the electrical activity recorded by the electrograms in a single map, called recurrence map (RM). Three main regions can be identified in this map: (1) atrial tissue that does not belong to the re-entrant circuit, (2) atrial tissue belonging to the re-entrant circuit and (3) the thinnest path in the re-entrant circuit, with RM values of 0.03 ± 0.04, 0.41 ± 0.16 and 0.95 ± 0.05, respectively. The region with highest RM values corresponds to the optimal site for the ablation therapy. The results obtained with atrial models during flutter suggest that the proposed method allows the identification of target sites for ablation in patients with atrial flutter. This method may be useful in clinical practice to obtain atrial propagation patterns from patients with atypical atrial flutter circuits and identify the best target regions for ablation.
Characterization of spatial memory reconsolidation

Reconsolidation is necessary for the restabilization of reactivated memory traces. However, experimental parameters have been suggested as boundary conditions for this process. Here we investigated the role of a spatial memory trace's age, strength, and update on the reconsolidation process in mice. We first found that protein synthesis is necessary for reconsolidation to occur in the hippocampal CA3 region after reactivation of partially acquired and old memories but not for strongly acquired and recent memories. We also demonstrated that the update of a previously stable memory required, again, a memory reconsolidation in the hippocampal CA3. Finally, we found that the reactivation of a strongly acquired memory requires an activation of the anterior cingulate cortex as soon as 24 h after acquisition. This study demonstrates the importance of the knowledge of the task on the dynamic nature of memory reconsolidation processing.
Approximate mean value analysis algorithms for queuing networks: existence, uniqueness, and convergence results

This paper is concerned with the properties of nonlinear equations associated with the Scheweitzer-Bard (S-B) approximate mean value analysis (MVA) heuristic for closed product-form queuing networks. Three forms of nonlinear S-B approximate MVA equations in multiclass networks are distinguished: Schweitzer, minimal, and the nearly decoupled forms. The approximate MVA equations have enabled us to: (a) derive bounds on the approximate throughput; (b) prove the existence and uniqueness of the S-B throughput solution, and the convergence of the S-B approximation algorithm for a wide class of monotonic, single-class networks; (c) establish the existence of the S-B solution for multiclass, monotonic networks; and (d) prove the asymptotic (i.e., as the number of customers of each class tends to ∞) uniqueness of the S-B throughput solution, and (e) the convergence of the gradient projection and the primal-dual algorithms to solve the asymptotic versions of the minimal, the Schweitzer, and the nearly decoupled forms of MVA equations for multiclass networks with single server and infinite server nodes. The convergence is established by showing that the approximate MVA equations are the gradient vector of a convex function, and by using results from convex programming and the convex duality theory.
The Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA): rationale, objectives and methods

The Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) is a multi‐site naturalistic cohort study to: (1) describe the long‐term course and consequences of depressive and anxiety disorders, and (2) to integrate biological and psychosocial research paradigms within an epidemiological approach in order to examine (interaction between) predictors of the long‐term course and consequences.
Joint information and energy transfer for large-scale networks

In this paper, we adopt a large-scale approach of the radio-frequency energy harvesting technology and we characterize the performance of a network with random number of transmitter-receiver pairs by using stochastic-geometry tools. Specifically, we analyze the outage probability performance and the average harvested energy, when receivers employ power splitting (PS) technique for “simultaneous” information and energy transfer. A non-cooperative scheme, where information/energy are conveyed only via direct links, is considered and the outage performance of the system as well as the average harvested energy are derived in closed form in function of the power splitting.
How to Build Up an Infrastructure for Intercultural Usability Engineering

Siemens is a global enterprise that sells its products in more than 190 countries throughout the world. This internationalization of products means more than just translating the operating instructions and making changes to formats. True adaptation goes much deeper and takes into account different requirements in terms of functionality. This article starts by defining the term culture and then considers the requirements that have to be met in the context of intercultural usability engineering. Taking the establishment of usability laboratories in Beijing, China and Princeton, New Jersey as examples, the article then presents the challenges facing international cooperation and possible solutions, taking a detailed look at differences in the infrastructure, at key qualifications in international cooperation, and at the development of appropriate test methods.
Structural and functional cardiac cholinergic deficits in adult neurturin knockout mice

Neurturin (NRTN) is a neurotrophic factor required during development for normal cholinergic innervation of the mouse heart. This study used NRTN knockout (KO) and wild type (WT) mice to determine the impact of NRTN deletion on adult intracardiac cholinergic neurons and nerve fibers and on cardiac cholinergic function. Immunohistochemical analysis of atrial tissue stained for vesicular ACh transporter revealed that sinoatrial node cholinergic nerve density was reduced by more than 40% in 8 week KO hearts. Additionally, the number of cholinergic neurons in KO hearts was 80% less than in WT, and KO neurons were 22% smaller in size. Atrial ACh levels were significantly lower in 16 week KO mice compared to WT (1.8±0.3 vs 3.7±0.8 pmol/mg wt; P<0.02), as expected from cholinergic neuron and nerve fiber deficits. Maximum heart rate (HR) responses to right vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) were decreased in 16 week KO (38±6 vs 81±3% decrease at 20Hz; P<0.0001), with no difference in baseline HR. KO animals took longer to reach maximum bradycardia during VNS and longer to recover to baseline HR upon stimulus termination. Data from isolated atrial preparations showed no change in postjunctional cholinergic sensitivity. These results demonstrate that NRTN KO leads to structural and functional cholinergic deficits in the heart but residual cholinergic nerve fibers retain ability to modify cardiac function. Supported by the AHA SE Affiliate.
Multilevel Coding for Fading Channels

This paper proposes a multilevel coding system with linear mapping for fading channels. The receiver performs multi-stage decoding. Each stage employs the decision-aided successive estimation and decoding method that decouples the channel estimation and decoding without loss of information. As a result, existing codes designed for memoryless channels can be applied directly. The overall system can achieve the constrained capacity of the fading channel with a given input distribution, provided that the memoryless channel codes are capacity achieving and the channel estimator is lossless. This paper uses the block fading channel as example, and derives a low complexity channel estimator. For i.i. d. Gaussian inputs, the estimator is lossless and so the multilevel coding system achieves the mutual information of the channel. For QAM inputs, the same estimator is shown numerically to have good performance.
Dual-Purpose No-Voltage Winding Design for the Bearingless AC Homopolar and Consequent Pole Motors

A winding design approach is proposed for the bearingless ac homopolar and consequent pole motors that utilizes the same coils for both suspension force and torque production. This enables a “pure” bearingless motor design, where the same iron and copper are used for both magnetic bearing operation and torque production, and can result in more optimal machine performance. Separate terminal connections are provided for suspension and torque operation; the suspension terminals experience no motional-emf when the rotor is centered, thereby reducing the required voltage rating of the bearingless drive compared to other “dual purpose” winding designs. It is shown that only certain combinations of stator slots, phases, and poles yield suitable winding designs; most notably, the number of motor pole-pairs must be co-prime with the number of phases. A design procedure is proposed which allows the designer to simply modify end-connections of many conventional armature windings, including both integral- and fractional-slot windings; an example winding design is presented and analyzed using 3-D finite element analysis (FEA); and a hardware prototype has been constructed with experimental results included to validate the proposed design approach.
Rapid Knowledge Deployment in an Organizational-Memory-Based Workflow Environment

Knowledge management is becoming a fashion in many organizations. This entails the danger that large investments in knowledge externalization are made with little short-term repayment. Moreover, there is a risk that knowledge management administrations operate in parallel and with little connection to the business processes. We argue that the main purpose of business knowledge is improved action, and therefore we must interrelate processes of knowledge creation and usage with the normal business processes both on a conceptual and a system level. The paper presents a model-based approach for solving this integration problem, and describes an implementation architecture which links knowledges processes to a workflow environment. Experiences in an organization where our system was successfully installed indicate that such a “light-weight” integrated solution offers a relatively easy and immediately useful entry point into organizational knowledge management.
A method of spherical harmonic analysis in the geosciences via hierarchical Bayesian inference

The problem of decomposing irregular data on the sphere into a set of spherical harmonics is common in many fields of geosciences where it is necessary to build a quantitative understanding of a globally varying field. For example, in global seismology, a compressional or shear wave speed that emerges from tomographic images is used to interpret current state and composition of the mantle, and in geomagnetism, secular variation of magnetic field intensity measured at the surface is studied to better understand the changes in the Earth's core. Optimization methods are widely used for spherical harmonic analysis of irregular data, but they typically do not treat the dependence of the uncertainty estimates on the imposed regularization. This can cause significant difficulties in interpretation, especially when the best-fit model requires more variables as a result of underestimating data noise. Here, with the above limitations in mind, the problem of spherical harmonic expansion of irregular data is treated within the hierarchical Bayesian framework. The hierarchical approach significantly simplifies the problem by removing the need for regularization terms and user-supplied noise estimates. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion for picking the optimal maximum degree of spherical harmonic expansion and the resulting spherical harmonic analyses are first illustrated on a noisy synthetic data set. Subsequently, the method is applied to two global data sets sensitive to the Earth's inner core and lowermost mantle, consisting of PKPab-df and PcP-P differential traveltime residuals relative to a spherically symmetric Earth model. The posterior probability distributions for each spherical harmonic coefficient are calculated via Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling; the uncertainty obtained for the coefficients thus reflects the noise present in the real data and the imperfections in the spherical harmonic expansion.
Composing Non-functional Concerns in Composite Web Services

The support for non-functional concerns (NFC) is essential for the success and adoption of web services. However, state of the art works offer only a limited support for these concerns especially when it comes to the composition of multiple non-functional concerns with composite web services. In this paper, we focus on the composition of non-functional actions (NFA) with composite web services whose composition logic is made explicit using languages such as BPMN2 or WS-BPEL (gray box view). In contrast to the black box view where only the interface of the service is visible the gray box view reveals additional information on control flow, data flow, composed services, etc. NFAs can also be composite and constitute complex processes such as secure conversations or transactions which have to be integrated with composite web services. Additionally, the execution order of multiple superimposing NFA has to be declared. In our approach we introduce a model-driven approach for the integrated specification and realization of the different types of NFC composition (NFAs with composite services, execution order of superimposing NFAs and composite NFAs) as well as a set of editors and code generators supporting this approach.
Developmental Regulation of Neuromodulator Function in the Stomatogastric Ganglion of the Lobster, Homarus americanus

Neuromodulatory substances have profound effects on the two motor patterns generated by the adult crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG), the gastric mill rhythm and the pyloric rhythm. Developmentally regulated changes in the modulatory functions of neuromodulators could therefore play an important role in the maturation of the output from the developing STG. We compared the effects of neuromodulators on isolated embryonic and adult STG of the lobster, Homarus americanus. Bath application of Val1-SIFamide, a peptide whose expression is different in embryos and adults, activated different neuron classes in embryos and adults. Cancer borealis tachykinin-related peptide 1a, a peptide that does not appear in the terminals of modulatory neurons in the STG until after embryonic development, also produced different motor patterns in embryos and adults. In contrast, red pigment concentrating hormone, a peptide with a similar distribution in the STNS across development, produced similar motor patterns in embryonic and adult STG. Proctolin, serotonin, and allatostatin were also physiologically active on the isolated embryonic STG. Together, these results demonstrate that receptors to many neuromodulators are present and functional on STG neurons before the motor patterns of the stomatogastric nervous system are mature. Moreover, neuromodulator responses change during development, perhaps contributing to the maturation of the output from the stomatogastric nervous system.
The Cochrane Collaboration: Institutional Analysis of a Knowledge Commons.

Cochrane is an international network that produces and update new knowledge through systematic reviews for the health sector. Knowledge is a shared resource, and can be viewed as a commons. As Cochrane has been in existence for 25 years, we used Elinor Ostrom's theory of the commons and Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to appraise the organization. Our aim was to provide insight into one particular knowledge commons, and to reflect on how this analysis may help Cochrane and its funders improve their strategy and development. An assessment of Cochrane product showed extensive production of systematic reviews, although assuring consistent quality of these reviews is an enduring challenge; there is some restriction of access to the reviews, open access is not yet implemented; and, while permanence of the record is an emerging problem, it has not yet been widely discussed. The assessment of the process showed that the resource, community, and rules-in-use are complex, vary between different groups within Cochrane, and are not well understood. Many of the rules have been informal, and the underlying ethos of volunteerism where reviews get done are important features and constraints to the organization. Like all collective efforts, Cochrane is subject to collective action problems, particularly free-riding and variable commitment, and the under-production of public goods such as internal processes, surveillance of product quality, and procedures for transparent resolution of conflicts.
Shape From Texture: Integrating Texture-Element Extraction and Surface Estimation

A method is presented for identifying texture elements while simultaneously recovering the orientation of textured surfaces. A multiscale region detector, based on measurements in a Del /sup 2/G (Laplacian-of-Gaussian) scale space, is used to construct a set of candidate texture elements. True elements are selected from the set of candidate elements by finding the planar surface that best predicts the observed areas of the latter. Results are shown for a variety of natural textures, including waves, flowers, rocks, clouds, and dirt clods. >
Towards a DGSS Prototype for Early Warning for Ski Injuries

This paper reports on our ongoing research in ski injury analysis. We propose a decision guidance support system for early warning for ski injuries. We report several injury patterns in form of IF-THEN rules which could be used to build a decision guidance support system for early warning for ski injuries. The rules are induced from data merged from two databases, namely the Mountaineer rescue service database and the Ski gate entrances database. Around 2000 injuries from year 2006 to year 2011 were analyzed. Based on movement of skiers (recorded through ski gates on each lift) several statistics for each accident (e.g. average speed of skier, average weight of slopes) have been calculated.
Re-Annotator: Annotation Pipeline for Microarrays

Background Microarray technologies are established approaches for high throughput gene expression, methylation and genotyping analysis. An accurate mapping of the array probes is essential to generate reliable biological findings. Manufacturers typically provide incomplete and outdated annotation tables, which often rely on older genome and transcriptome versions differing substantially from up-to-date sequence databases. Results Here, we present the Re-Annotator, a re-annotation pipeline for microarrays. It is primarily designed for gene expression microarrays but can be adapted to other types of microarrays. The Re-Annotator is based on a custom-built mRNA reference, used to identify the positions of gene expression array probe sequences. A comparison of our re-annotation of the Human-HT12-v4 microarray to the manufacturer’s annotation led to over 25% differently interpreted probes. Conclusions A thorough re-annotation of probe information is crucial to any microarray analysis. The Re-Annotator pipeline consists of Perl and Shell scripts, freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/reannotator. Re-annotation files for Illumina microarrays Human HT-12 v3/v4 and MouseRef-8 v2 are available as well.
Web Science : An interdisciplinary approach to understanding the World Wide Web

Despite the huge success of the World Wide Web as a technology, and the significant amount of computing infrastructure on which it sits, the Web, as an entity remains surprisingly unstudied. In this article, we look at some of the issues that need to be explored to model the Web as a whole, to keep it growing, and to understand its continuing social impact. We argue that a "systems" approach, in the sense of "systems biology" is needed if we are to be able to understand and engineer the future of the Web.