Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Amyloid β1–42 peptide alters the gating of human and mouse α‐bungarotoxin‐sensitive nicotinic receptors

The β‐amyloid1–42 peptide (Aβ1–42), a major constituent of the Alzheimer's disease amyloid plaque, specifically binds to the neuronal α‐bungarotoxin (α‐BuTx)‐sensitive α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (α7 nAChR). Accordingly, Aβ1–42 interferes with the function of α7 nAChRs in chick and rodent neurons. To gain insights into the human disease, we studied the action of Aβ1–42 on human α7 nAChRs expressed in Xenopus oocytes. In voltage‐clamped oocytes expressing the wild‐type receptor, Aβ1–42 blocked ACh‐evoked currents. The block was non‐competitive, required over 100 s to develop and was partially reversible. In oocytes expressing the mutant L248T receptor, Aβ1–42 activated methyllycaconitine‐sensitive currents in a dose‐dependent manner. Peptide‐evoked unitary events, recorded in outside‐out patches, showed single‐channel conductances and open duration comparable to ACh‐evoked events. Aβ1–42 had no effect on the currents evoked by glutamate, GABA or glycine in oocytes expressing human or mouse receptors for these transmitters. Muscle nAChRs are also α‐BuTx‐sensitive and we therefore investigated whether they respond to Aβ1–42. In human kidney BOSC 23 cells expressing the fetal or adult mouse muscle nAChRs, Aβ1–42 blocked ACh‐evoked whole‐cell currents, accelerating their decay. Outside‐out single‐channel recordings showed that the block was due to a reduced channel open probability and enhanced block upon ACh application. We also report that the inverse peptide Aβ42–1, but not Aβ40–1, partially mimicked the effects of the physiological Aβ1–42 peptide. Possible implications for degenerative neuronal and muscular diseases are discussed.
Predictive Digital-Controlled Converter With Peak Current-Mode Control and Leading-Edge Modulation

The main theme of this paper is to present the digital controller design of a power converter with predictive peak current-mode (PCM) control and leading-edge modulation. The advantages of the control and modulation technique include the reduction of the sampling frequency of the A/D converter, no need of slope compensation, and the provision of a fast dynamic current response. The discrete-time model of the converter is presented as the fundamental to digital controller design and followed by the digital controller design. Moreover, the effect of predictive PCM control with leading edge modulation on limit cycle is analyzed. It is known that the limit cycle can be effectively suppressed as the converter has a predictive PCM control and leading edge modulation. Experimental results will be included to support fully the theoretical analysis.
The Windscale Report a nuclear apologia

Government representatives have pointed repeatedly with pride to Britain's longest nuclear planning inquiry, The Windscale Inquiry, as a model of open examination of a sensitive nuclear proposal. The official Report of the Windscale Inquiry, published in March 1978, bears little relationship to the proceedings of the Inquiry, according to the author. Instead, the Report is a heavy-handed nuclear apologia, he says, so clumsily one-sided as to provoke unease even among many Britons previously unmoved by the issue which gave rise to the inquiry. Windscale, built following WW II to produce plutonium for Britain's nuclear weapons, is now operated by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. In 1973, BNFL began to plan construction of a new full-scale oxide-fuel reprocessing plant. Protests delayed construction until the inquiry was planned and the inquiry team was formulated in March 1977. When the Inquiry ended, the inspector closeted himself to write the Report. The Report recommended that the oxide fuel reprocessing plant be built immediately. BNFL had asserted that the proposed thermal oxide reprocessing plant, THORP, was necessary for the management of spent fuel from British and other nuclear plants; that it was desirable for ''energy conservation,'' by recovering uranium and plutonium for re-use; that radioactive emissionsmore » within and outside the plant would pose no hazard; and that the servicing of foreign customers would not increase the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons, but would rather help to persuade other countries not to reprocess their own fuel. The inspector agreed without qualification and with emphasis. In doing so he made no attempt even to describe the detailed evidence on either side, or to discuss the cases advanced by objectors. The author discusses the principal conclusions of the report and cites its futility. (MCW)« less
A novel framework for detecting maximally banded matrices in binary data

Binary data occurs often in real‐world applications ranging from social networks to bioinformatics. As such, extracting patterns from binary data has been a fundamental task of data mining. Recently, the utility of banded structures in binary matrices has been pointed out for applications such as paleontology, bioinformatics, and social networking. A binary matrix has a banded structure if both the rows and columns can be permuted so that the 1s exhibit a staircase pattern down the rows, along the leading diagonal. Natural interpretations of banded structures include overlapping communities in social networks, patterns of species occurring in spatially correlated sites, and overlapping roles of genes in various diseases. In this paper, we show the correspondence between formal concept analysis and banded structure; as a direct result of this correspondence a novel framework for discovering banded structures is presented. Utilizing the framework, the MMBS algorithm (mine maximally banded submatrices) is developed. The current state‐of‐the‐art algorithm, MBS, only allows for the discovery of a single band and assumes a fixed‐column permutation. On the other hand, MMBS facilitates the discovery of multiple bands that may possibly be overlapping or segmented. Our experimental results, presented here, clearly indicate the advantage of MMBS over MBS with both, synthetic and real datasets. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining 3: 431‐445, 2010
A 0.5 V 55 $\mu \text{W}$ 64 $\times $ 2 Channel Binaural Silicon Cochlea for Event-Driven Stereo-Audio Sensing

This paper presents a 64 × 2 channel stereo-audio sensing front end with parallel asynchronous event output inspired by the biological cochlea. Each binaural channel performs feature extraction by analog bandpass filtering, and the filtered signal is encoded into events via asynchronous delta modulation (ADM). The channel central frequencies J0 are geometrically scaled across the human hearing range. Two design techniques are highlighted to achieve the high system power efficiency: source-follower-based bandpass filters (BPFs) and asynchronous delta modulation (ADM) with adaptive self-oscillating comparison. The chip was fabricated in 0.18 μm 1P6M CMOS, and occupies an area of 10.5×4.8 mm2. The core cochlea system operating under a 0.5 V power supply consumes 55 μW at an output rate of 100k event/s. The measured range of J0 is from 8 Hz to 20 kHz, and the BPF quality factor Q can be tuned from 1 to almost 40. The 1σ mismatch of J0 and Q between two ears is 3.3% and 15%, respectively, across all channels at Q ≈ 10. Reconstruction of speech input from the event output of the chip is performed to validate the information integrity in event-domain representation, and vowel discrimination is demonstrated as a simple application using histograms of the output events. This type of silicon cochlea front end targets integration with embedded event-driven processors for low-power smart audio sensing with classification capabilities, such as voice activity detection and speaker identification.
Investigation of the Relationships among Socially Interactive Technologies, Communication Competence, Social Cognition, and Formal Written Discourse

Melissa Spirek, Ph.D., Advisor The current research project called upon a two-study design to examine college students’ use of socially interactive technologies (instant messaging programs, online social networking websites, blogs, and text messaging applications on cell phones). The first study was implemented to examine the frequency and form of college students’ use of socially interactive technologies. The second study investigated whether the informal interactive written discourse typical of socially interactive technologies is permeating college students’ more formal writing. Using this two-study design, college students’ responses from a media use questionnaire were collected for Study I and examined in tandem with results from a quantitative content analysis of two formal messages written by students during an experimental computer laboratory session for Study II. The current investigation was couched in a framework based on the communication competence and social cognition literatures. These disparate fields were called upon together within an ecological schema provided by the theory of affordances to focus on the ways internal and external factors might contribute to communication outcomes in formal writing situations. The first study’s results revealed that socially interactive technologies are generally popular among the college students in the current sample. Results from Study I also revealed that among the students in this sample, college grade point average and levels of need for cognition were negatively related to the frequency with which students use certain interactive media. The second study’s results revealed that frequent use of socially interactive technologies in general, and certain formats in particular (text messaging and instant messaging), was consistently associated with the use of particularly informal written communication techniques. Specifically, iii problems with formatting as well as the inclusion of a nonstandard orthography and grammatical mistakes were all significantly related to frequent use of socially interactive technologies among the students in the current sample. Study II also revealed that multitasking on the computer while writing the two formal messages was significantly related to problems with formatting as well as the inclusion of grammatical mistakes in the two formal documents. The consistent relationships among socially interactive technology use and decreased communication competence in two formal writing situations suggest that further concerted attention from communication researchers regarding the possible relationships between socially interactive technology use and formal written discourse is warranted.
Heterogenous swarm with first and second order dynamics for function optimization

This paper addresses PSO-FA hybrid algorithm that is constructed by heterogeneous agents (particles) in the population. We describe that particle swarm optimization and firefly algorithm have different dynamical properties each other, and share the information such the global best and the brightest intensity. Then search ability of a simple combination of them is examined. The benchmark set for CEC2015 competition of single-objective computationally expensive optimization is used for the performance evaluate, we discuss the proposed hybrid algorithm.
Sequence of 29 kb around the PDR10 locus on the right arm of Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome XV: Similarity to part of chromosome I

We report a 29,445 bp sequence from the right arm of yeast chromosome XV. It contains the genes MYO2, SNC2, PDR10, SCD5 (also called FTB1), MIP1, VMA4, MRS2, ALA1, KRE5, TEA1, and a homologue of YAL034c. Several discrepancies with previously published sequences were found. PDR10 encodes a protein highly similar to the pleiotropic drug resistance protein Pdr5p. This sequence contig forms part of a region of extended similarity to part of the left arm of chromosome I, which is a relic of an ancient duplicated chromosomal region.
Introducing EqArgSolver: An argumentation solver using equational semantics

In this paper we introduce EqArgSolver, an argumentation solver using equational semantics. EqArgSolver is based on the prototype GRIS submitted to the ﬁrst International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation, but provides two major advancements over GRIS. Firstly, it uses the much more e � cient discrete version of the Gabbay-Rodrigues Iteration Schema [7], and secondly, it requires at most 1 / 8 of the memory footprint per node used by GRIS. Experimental results show that EqArgSolver runs up to 12 ⇥ faster than GRIS and is able to handle a much larger class of argumentation graphs.
Making machine-learning tools accessible to language teachers and other non-techies: T-SNE-lab and rocanr as first examples

Machine learning advancements could greatly benefit the general public. Many programs or even trained weight matrices are available as open source software or free download. At its present form, however, most results are not directly accessible to most people. We present a front end for the t-SNE algorithm and a front-end for querying English language word embedding as examples to illustrate what's needed to make these results more accessible to people outside this field. The way their usage can be combined also demonstrates the author's envisioned development of such tools in the future, following the unix tools philosophy.
Facts and Fabrications about Ebola: A Twitter Based Study

Microblogging websites like Twitter have been shown to be immensely useful for spreading information on a global scale within seconds. The detrimental effect, however, of such platforms is that misinformation and rumors are also as likely to spread on the network as credible, verified information. From a public health standpoint, the spread of misinformation creates unnecessary panic for the public. We recently witnessed several such scenarios during the outbreak of Ebola in 2014 [14, 1]. In order to effectively counter the medical misinformation in a timely manner, our goal here is to study the nature of such misinformation and rumors in the United States during fall 2014 when a handful of Ebola cases were confirmed in North America. It is a well known convention on Twitter to use hashtags to give context to a Twitter message (a tweet). In this study, we collected approximately 47M tweets from the Twitter streaming API related to Ebola. Based on hashtags, we propose a method to classify the tweets into two sets: credible and speculative. We analyze these two sets and study how they differ in terms of a number of features extracted from the Twitter API. In conclusion, we infer several interesting differences between the two sets. We outline further potential directions to using this material for monitoring and separating speculative tweets from credible ones, to enable improved public health information.
The Comparasion on Management Professionalization within the Enterprises in Hebei, China and Flanders, Belgium: Some Empirical Findings

Originating from strategic management, entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been the focus of entrepreneurship research for a considerable time. Researchers believe the concept of EO can significantly assist in explaining the growth potential of an enterprise and the success of a business (e.g., Covin & Slevin, 1988; Wiklund & Shepherd, 2005). Researchers have made studies on EO using multiple dimensions, which mainly include innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness (e.g., Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; 2005; Covin & Slevin, 1996; Miller & Friesen, 1986). Based on an extensive review of the studies about entrepreneurship, management, and EO, the authors made an argument that entrepreneurs' strategic orientation towards efficient and better-quality management is very important for business development, and initially took management professionalization as an EO dimension. In this study, following a behavioral approach, the authors used case study as the research method, and achieved a firm level empirical research, with the intention of making a comparative study on the management professionalization held by the entrepreneurs from Flanders, Belgium and Hebei, China. Furthermore, taking as the contextual framework the major dimensions of entrepreneurship (GEM Executive Report, 2004), the authors intended to interpret the contextual determinants underpinning the differences and similarities in management professionalization between the entrepreneurs in the two countries. This pioneering empirical research contributes to understanding questions such as "How and why do the Chinese enterprises in manufacturing industry achieve management professionalization, when compared with the international counterparts? "
Embodied Multi-Discursivity

Sustainable entrepreneurship is a vital and growing area of entrepreneurship studies. Although charged with multiple potentially conflicting discourses, sustainable entrepreneurship is usually viewed from a binary logic of business versus sustainability. This article uses an aesthetic process approach to sustainable entrepreneurship to move beyond this binary logic and unearth the tensions between multiple discourses. The authors introduce the construct of embodied multi-discursivity that addresses this issue methodologically as well as conceptually. By combining discourse analysis with aesthetic inquiry, the article pushes the boundaries of “traditional” qualitative methods. The aim is to encourage sustainable entrepreneurship scholars to expand their methodological horizon to capture the emotionally charged, value-laden processes they study. Embodied multi-discursivity shows how multi-discursive processes of entrepreneurship come into being, how they are disrupted, and how they can break into a duality that ignores the variety of discourses. The authors conclude by drawing some implications for sustainable entrepreneurship.
Assessment of sexual satisfaction in fibromyalgia patients Avaliação da satisfação sexual em pacientes portadoras de fibromialgia

Objective: To evaluate sexual experience and satisfaction in women with fibromyalgia. Methods: Twenty women with fibromyalgia were compared to 20 normal women using Beck depression inventory and another questionnaire on sexual experience and satisfaction. The following aspects were addressed: age, past medical and surgical history, obstetric events, schooling, use of medication, religion, marital status, and drug use. Statistical analyses were performed using chi-squared test or Fisher’s test, whenever appropriate, and Student’s t test. Results: The mean age of women with fibromyalgia was lower than that of the control group. There were more married women in the fibromyalgia group. These patients showed greater modification in sexual activities (p = 0.01); greater difficulty in having orgasm (p = 0.01) and were more likely to masturbate (p = 0.053). Conclusions: Fibromyalgia probably interferes in sexual function of women with this condition. Further studies are necessary to evaluate this issue.
Learning to Detect and Classify Malicious Executables in the Wild

We describe the use of machine learning and data mining to detect and classify malicious executables as they appear in the wild. We gathered 1,971 benign and 1,651 malicious executables and encoded each as a training example using n-grams of byte codes as features. Such processing resulted in more than 255 million distinct n-grams. After selecting the most relevant n-grams for prediction, we evaluated a variety of inductive methods, including naive Bayes, decision trees, support vector machines, and boosting. Ultimately, boosted decision trees outperformed other methods with an area under the ROC curve of 0.996. Results suggest that our methodology will scale to larger collections of executables. We also evaluated how well the methods classified executables based on the function of their payload, such as opening a backdoor and mass-mailing. Areas under the ROC curve for detecting payload function were in the neighborhood of 0.9, which were smaller than those for the detection task. However, we attribute this drop in performance to fewer training examples and to the challenge of obtaining properly labeled examples, rather than to a failing of the methodology or to some inherent difficulty of the classification task. Finally, we applied detectors to 291 malicious executables discovered after we gathered our original collection, and boosted decision trees achieved a true-positive rate of 0.98 for a desired false-positive rate of 0.05. This result is particularly important, for it suggests that our methodology could be used as the basis for an operational system for detecting previously undiscovered malicious executables.
Unsupervised Categorization (Filtering) of Google Images Based on Visual Consistency

The objective of this paper is to study the existing methods for unsupervised object recognition and image categorization and propose a model that can learn directly from the output of image search engines, e.g. Google Images, bypassing the need to manually collect large quantities of training data. This model can then be used to refine the quality of the image search, or to search through other sources of images. This integrated scheme has been implemented and optimized to be used in The Semantic Robot Vision Challenge as a new test-bed for research in the areas of image understanding and knowledge retrieval in large unstructured image databases.
Arab football in Israel as an 'integrative enclave'

Over the last two decades, football (soccer) has become a major institution within the popular culture of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. The centrality of football has given different identity agents opportunities to impose different meanings on the sport, depending on the agents' definitions of collective identity. This article utilizes ethnographic observation in the football stadium and coverage by Arab and Hebrew sports media to illustrate and analyse this battle over meaning. The Hebrew sports media, the Arab sports press, and the Arab audience are three different agents that attach divergent meanings to the notable presence of Arab players in the Israeli football leagues. The article argues that the overlapping interests of the Hebrew sports media on the one hand and the Arab football fans, players, and bureaucrats on the other lead to the construction of the football sphere as an integrative enclave in the general Israeli public sphere. The article considers the relevance of Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explain the production of the integrative meaning of football, and it suggests integrating this explanation with other recent theories regarding the tensions between different discourses of citizenship.
Flocking control for multi-agent systems with communication optimization

In this paper, we consider the flocking control and communication optimization problem for multi-agent systems in a realistic communication environment. In flocking control, it is common to specify the formation by setting the separation distance between neighboring agents and then design the control to maintain the desired formation. However, since communication quality will generally change during flocking in a physical environment, a predefined separation distance might not always be the desired communication distance. In this paper, a distributed scheme integrating potential function and extremum seeking algorithm is proposed to obtain the desired separation distance between neighboring agents in real time. A comprehensive performance index related to the environment is proposed, which captures a trade-off between formation tasks and communication quality. Since it is difficult to calculate the gradient of the performance in physical environments, an adaptive model-free extremum seeking algorithm is designed to solve for the optimal separation distances, which calls for no knowledge of the gradient of performance function. We illustrate the proposed method through simulations.