Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidence of a Long-Duration Component in the Prompt Emission of Short Gamma-Ray Bursts Detected with BeppoSAX

A statistical study on the light curves of all the short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected with the Gamma Ray Burst Monitor (GRBM) aboard BeppoSAX is reported. Evidence of a very weak and long-duration component associated with these events in the two 1 s ratemeters of the GRBM (40-700 and >100 keV) is found. It starts a few tens of seconds before the burst and continues for about 30 s after the burst. The overall hardness of this component is comparable to that of the event itself. The detection of a signal before the onset time and the hardness are consistent with an interpretation of the long-duration component in terms of prompt emission associated with short GRBs.
The Hβ Index as an Age Indicator of Old Stellar Systems: The Effects of Horizontal-Branch Stars

The strength of the Hβ index is computed for the integrated spectra of model globular clusters from the evolutionary population synthesis. For the first time, these models take into account the detailed systematic variation of horizontal-branch (HB) morphology with age and metallicity. Our models show that the Hβ index is significantly affected by the presence of blue HB stars. Because of the contribution from blue HB stars, the Hβ does not monotonically decrease as metallicity increases at a given age. Instead, it reaches a maximum strength when the distribution of HB stars is centered around 9500 K, the temperature at which the Hβ index becomes strongest. Our models indicate that the strength of the Hβ index increases as much as 0.75 Å because of the presence of blue HB stars. The comparison of the recent Keck observations of the globular cluster system in the Milky Way with those in the giant elliptical galaxies NGC 1399 and M87 shows a systematic shift in the Hβ-metallicity plane. Our models suggest that this systematic difference is explained if the mean age of globular cluster systems in giant elliptical galaxies is several billion years older than the Galactic counterpart. Further observations of globular cluster systems in the external galaxies from the large ground-based telescopes and space UV facilities will enable us to clarify whether this difference is indeed due to the age difference or whether other explanations are also possible.
Adiponectin Attenuates Angiotensin II-Induced Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Remodeling through Nitric Oxide and the RhoA/ROCK Pathway

Introduction: Adiponectin (APN), an adipocytokine, exerts protective effects on cardiac remodeling, while angiotensin II (Ang II) induces hypertension and vascular remodeling. The potential protective role of APN on the vasculature during hypertension has not been fully elucidated yet. Here, we evaluate the molecular mechanisms of the protective role of APN in the physiological response of the vascular wall to Ang II. Methods and Results: Rat aortic tissues were used to investigate the effect of APN on Ang II-induced vascular remodeling and hypertrophy. We investigated whether nitric oxide (NO), the RhoA/ROCK pathway, actin cytoskeleton remodeling, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) mediate the anti-hypertrophic effect of APN. Ang II-induced protein synthesis was attenuated by pre-treatment with APN, NO donor S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine (SNAP), or cGMP. The hypertrophic response to Ang II was associated with a significant increase in RhoA activation and vascular force production, which were prevented by APN and SNAP. NO was also associated with inhibition of Ang II-induced phosphorylation of cofilin. In addition, immunohistochemistry revealed that 24 h Ang II treatment increased the F- to G-actin ratio, an effect that was inhibited by SNAP. Ang II-induced ROS formation and upregulation of p22phox mRNA expression were inhibited by APN and NO. Both compounds failed to inhibit Nox1 and p47phox expression. Conclusion: Our results suggest that the anti-hypertrophic effects of APN are due, in part, to NO-dependent inhibition of the RhoA/ROCK pathway and ROS formation.
Connectionism , Cognitive Maps & the Development of Objectivity

It is claimed that there are pre-objective phenomena, which cognitive science should explain by employing the notion of non-conceptual representational content. It is argued that a match between parallel distributed processing (PDP) and non-conceptual content (NCC) not only provides a means of refuting recent criticisms of PDP as a cognitive architecture; it also provides a vehicle for NCC that is required by naturalism. A connectionist cognitive mapping algorithm is used as a case study to examine the affinities between PDP and NCC.
An Assessment and Categorisation of Quantitative Uncertainty Visualisation Methods for Geospatial Data

Visualisation of uncertain geospatial data has become an intriguing part of uncertainty communication. Many methods, which vary from static to dynamic or interactive, have evolved to cater to different data and user requirements which are determined by parameters such as the measurement scale of the phenomenon, type of uncertainty bound, the data format and their spatial temporal extents (Pang et al. 1997, Heuvelink et al. 2007). Certainly, one particular method does not bear the ability to fulfil all requirements to visualise uncertain data with different combinations of the above mentioned parameters. Many researchers who have extensively discussed the use of visualisation methods with respect to different use cases and user criteria have described these methods based on a few specific parameters, which are in particular data type, data format, uncertainty type and interaction type (Pang 2001, Cliburn et al. 2002). However, so far no explicit categorisation of methods according to their supported parameters has been investigated. In order to provide an ease of selecting a best relevant visualisation method based on the data and user requirements, this paper in its first section presents an overview of standard uncertainty visualisation methods and their conformance with the identified parameters. Subsequently, we lay out the basis for a formalised model of categorisation which is capable of automatically selecting the suitable visualisation methods for specified data and user requirements. Finally, future work towards an automatic selection model and further user requirements are discussed briefly.
Polyphonic Pitch Modification Using Phase Vocoder Techniques

In the field of digital music processing, the phase vocoder is a well-established tool for pitch shifting and time scaling. Dolson and Laroche (1999) suggest a peak based phase vocoder, which opens the door for a much wider range of spectral modifications. We investigate the ability to change single notes in polyphonic music recordings using this technique, and the underlying theory is reviewed to provide motivation for the main implementation choices. We found that good results can be obtained for shifts of one or a few semitones, and possibly for even greater shifts, though at a great computational cost. Finally, we discuss the possibility of real time application and simple refinements to obtain other effects. Polyfon tonjustering baserad på en fas-vocoder
The Rate of Adaptation in Large Sexual Populations with Linear Chromosomes

In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can bring together beneficial alleles from different backgrounds, but tightly linked alleles may still greatly interfere with each other. We show for well-mixed populations that when this interference is strong, the genome can be seen as consisting of many effectively asexual stretches linked together. The rate at which beneficial alleles fix is thus roughly proportional to the rate of recombination and depends only logarithmically on the mutation supply and the strength of selection. Our scaling arguments also allow us to predict, with reasonable accuracy, the fitness distribution of fixed mutations when the mutational effect sizes are broad. We focus on the regime in which crossovers occur more frequently than beneficial mutations, as is likely to be the case for many natural populations.
Integrated-light VRI imaging photometry of globular clusters in the Magellanic Clouds

We present accurate integrated-light photometry in Johnson/Cousins V, R and I for a sample of 28 globular clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. The majority of the clusters in our sample have reliable age and metallicity estimates available in the literature. The sample encompasses ages between 50 Myr and 7 Gyr, and metallicities ([Fe/H]) between −1.5 and 0.0 dex. The sample is dominated by clusters of ages between roughly 0.5 and 2 Gyr, an age range during which the bolometric luminosity of simple stellar populations is dominated by evolved red giant branch stars and thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars whose theoretical colours are rather uncertain. The VRI colours presented in this paper have been used to calibrate stellar population synthesis model predictions.
Performance Optimization Using Partitioned SpMV on GPUs and Multicore CPUs

This paper presents a sparse matrix partitioning strategy to improve the performance of SpMV on GPUs and multicore CPUs. This method has wide adaptability for different types of sparse matrices, and is different from existing methods which only adapt to some particular sparse matrices. In addition, our partitioning method can obtain dense blocks by analyzing the probability distribution of non-zero elements in a sparse matrix, and result in very low proportion of zero padded. We make the following significant contributions. (1) We present a partitioning strategy of sparse matrices based on probabilistic modeling of non-zero elements in a row. (2) We prove that our method has the highest mean density compared with other strategies according to certain given ratios of partition obtained from the computing powers of heterogeneous processors. (3) We develop a CPU-GPU hybrid parallel computing model for SpMV on GPUs and multicore CPUs in a heterogeneous computing platform. Our partitioning strategy has balanced load distribution and the performance of SpMV is significantly improved when a sparse matrix is partitioned into dense blocks using our method. The average performance improvement of our solution for SpMV is about 15.75 percent on multicore CPUs, compared to that of the other solutions. By considering the rows of a matrix in a unique order based on the probability mass function of the number of non-zeros in a row, the average performance improvement of our solution for SpMV is about 33.52 percent on GPUs and multicore CPUs of a heterogeneous computing platform, compared to that of the partitioning methods based on the original row order of a matrix.
Dynamic Bayesian Networks in Classification-and-Ranking Architecture of Response Generation

Problem statement: The first component in classification-and-ranking architecture is a Bayesian classifier that classifies user utterances into response classes based on their semantic and pragmatic interpretations. Bayesian networks are sufficient if data is limited to single user input utterance. However, if the classifier is able to collate features from a sequence of previous n-1 user utterances, the additional information may or may not improve the accuracy rate in response classification. Approach: This article investigates the use of dynamic Bayesian networks to include time-series information in the form of extended features from preceding utterances. The experiment was conducted on SCHISMA corpus, which is a mixed-initiative, transaction dialogue in theater reservation. Results: The results show that classification accuracy is improved, but rather insignificantly. The accuracy rate tends to deteriorate as time-span of dialogue is increased. Conclusion: Although every response utterance reflects form and behavior that are expected by the preceding utterance, influence of meaning and intentions diminishes throughout time as the conversation stretches to longer duration.
A Comprehensive Analysis of Swift XRT Data. III. Jet Break Candidates in X-Ray and Optical Afterglow Light Curves

The Swift XRT data for 179 GRBs (050124 to 070129) and the optical afterglow data for 57 pre- and post-Swift GRBs are analyzed to explore whether the observed breaks in the afterglow light curves can be interpreted as jet breaks, as well as their implications for jet energetics. We find that no burst is included in our “Platinum” sample, in which the data fully satisfy the jet break criteria. By relaxing one or more of the requirements for a jet break, candidates to various degrees are identified. In the X-ray band, 42 of 103 well-sampled X-ray light curves have a decay slope ≳1.5 in the postbreak segment (the “Bronze” sample), and 27 of these also satisfy the closure relations of the forward-shock models (“Silver” sample). The numbers of “Bronze” and “Silver” candidates in the optical light curves are 27 and 23, respectively. The X-ray break time is earlier than that in the optical bands. Among 13 bursts having both optical and X-ray light curves, only seven have an achromatic break, and even in these cases, only in one band do the data satisfy the closure relations (“Gold” sample). These results raise concerns about interpreting the breaks as jet breaks and further inferring GRB energetics. Assuming that the “Silver” and “Gold” breaks are jet breaks, we derive jet opening angles (θj) and kinetic energies (EK) or lower limits on them and find that the EK distribution is much more scattered than the pre-Swift sample, but a tentative anticorrelation between θj and EK,iso is found, indicating that the EK could still be quasi-universal.
Deep Transform: Error Correction via Probabilistic Re-Synthesis

Errors in data are usually unwelcome and so some means to correct them is useful. However, it is difficult to define, detect or correct errors in an unsupervised way. Here, we train a deep neural network to re-synthesize its inputs at its output layer for a given class of data. We then exploit the fact that this abstract transformation, which we call a deep transform (DT), inherently rejects information (errors) existing outside of the abstract feature space. Using the DT to perform probabilistic re-synthesis, we demonstrate the recovery of data that has been subject to extreme degradation.
Comparison of Ligation-Mediated PCR Methods in Differentiation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains

Fast and inexpensive identification of epidemiological links between limited number of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains is required to initially evaluate hospital outbreaks, laboratory crosscontaminations, and family or small community transmissions. The ligation-mediated PCR methods (LM-PCR) appear sufficiently discriminative and reproducible to be considered as a good candidate for such initial, epidemiological analysis. Here, we compared the discriminative power of the recently developed in our laboratory fast ligation amplification polymorphism (FLAP) method with fast ligation-mediated PCR (FLiP). Verification of the results was based on analyzing a set of reference strains and RFLP-IS6110 typing. The HGDI value was very similar for both LM-PCR methods and RFLP-IS6110 typing. However, only 52% of strains were correspondingly grouped by both FLiP and FLAP methods. Differentiation by FLAP method demonstrated a limited similarity to IS6110-RFLP (37,7%). As much as 78,7% of strains were grouped identically when differentiated by FLiP and IS6110-RFLP methods. The analysis differentiated 31, 35, and 36 groups when using FLAP, FLiP, and RFLP-IS6110 methods, respectively.
An Efficient Method to Recognize Human Faces From Video Sequences with Occlusion

- There are several research endeavors and results in aptly recognizing faces from video clips. However recognizing partially occluded and pose variant face images poses a greater challenge and concern for professionals in image and video processing fields. There are efforts underway for unearthing pragmatic algorithms and viable mechanisms for better recognition rate of occluded and pose-variant images. In this paper, a new method is proposed for efficiently recognizing human faces from videos with varying poses and partial occlusion. In the proposed model, a training dataset is created with faces of varying inclination and occluded region that are subjected to in-painting. A variety of features are being extracted using the discrete curvelet transform method from the captured faces in the training set and they are matched against the features from the videos for recognition. We have supplied the implementation results in this paper in order to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach and the algorithm leveraged.
Enabling SRAM-PUFs on Xilinx FPGAs

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) based on the evaluation of uninitialized SRAM are one of the most promising PUF candidates to date. However, transferring their concept to Xilinx FPGAs is not straightforward since all SRAM-based block memories in these FPGAs are automatically cleared on power-up, destroying the desired initial bits of information. In this work we therefore propose a novel strategy to convert block memories of 28nm Xilinx FPGAs into SRAM-PUFs by exploiting their recently introduced feature of power-gating and partial reconfiguration.
Constant Delay Enumeration for Acyclic Conjunctive Queries over X Structures

We present an efficient answer enumeration algorithm for an extension of Conditional XPath with variables, which is a first-order complete query language for unranked trees of bounded depth. Our algorithm requires constant delay and linear preprocessing time for fixed queries, while depending linearly on the size of the query. It is based on a new enumeration algorithm for disjunctions of acyclic conjunctive queries on so called X-structures that we introduce.
Iterative schedule optimization for voltage scalable distributed embedded systems

We present an iterative schedule optimization for multirate system specifications, mapped onto heterogeneous distributed architectures containing dynamic voltage scalable processing elements (DVS-PEs). To achieve a high degree of energy reduction, we formulate a generalized DVS problem, taking into account the power variations among the executing tasks. An efficient heuristic is presented that identifies optimized supply voltages by not only "simply" exploiting slack time, but under the additional consideration of the power profiles. Thereby, this algorithm minimizes the energy dissipation of heterogeneous architectures, including power-managed processing elements, effectively. Further, we address the simultaneous schedule optimization toward timing behavior and DVS utilization by integrating the proposed DVS heuristic into a genetic list scheduling approach. We investigate and analyze the possible energy reduction at both steps of the co-synthesis (voltage scaling and scheduling), including the power variations effects. Extensive experiments indicate that the presented work produces solutions with high quality.
E ffects of sorghum wet distillers grains plus solubles in steam-flaked corn – based finishing diets on steer performance , carcass characteristics , and digestibility characteristics 1

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of sorghum wet distillers grains (SWDGS) in finishing diets on steer performance, carcass characteristics, and nutrient digestibility. In Exp. 1, 240 steers (initial BW = 379 ± 1 kg) were fed steam-flaked corn–based diets with or without 25% SWDGS and 7.5, 10.0, or 12.5% alfalfa hay. There were no effects of alfalfa hay concentration on BW, DMI, ADG, or G:F (P ≥ 0.16). Including SWDGS reduced (P ≤ 0.05) ADG and G:F. Fat thickness decreased (P = 0.03) and DP tended to decrease (P = 0.09) linearly as level of alfalfa hay increased. Final BW of steers consuming diets containing 25% SWDGS were 12 kg lighter (P = 0.05) than those of steers fed diets without SWDGS. Hot carcass weight tended (P = 0.09) to be lighter for steers fed SWDGS. In Exp. 2, effects of corn processing method (steam-flaked corn and dry-rolled corn) and 20% corn wet distillers grains with solubles (CWDGS) or SWDGS inclusion on ruminal pH and in situ digestibility were evaluated. Cattle consuming diets containing SWDGS had a greater (P ≤ 0.05) ruminal pH than steers consuming diets with CWDGS or no wet distillers grains with solubles. Including wet distillers grains with solubles did not affect (P ≥ 0.37) steam-flaked corn or dry-rolled corn in situ DM digestibility. In situ digestibility of DM and NDF differed between CWDGS and SWDGS (P < 0.0001). Differences in performance and nutrient digestibility between CWDGS and SWDGS are the result of differences in the product rather than an interaction with corn processing method.
UMEA: translating interaction histories into project contexts

Virtual environments based on the desktop metaphor provide limited support for creating and managing project-specific work contexts. The paper discusses existing approaches to supporting higher-level user activities and presents a system named UMEA (User-Monitoring Environment for Activities). The design of the system is informed by activity theory. The system: (a) organizes resources into project-related pools consisting of documents, folders, URLs, and contacts, (b) monitors user activities, (c) automatically adds new resources to pools associated with active projects, and (d) provides personal information management tools linked to individual projects. An empirical evaluation of the system is reported.
The Sol Genomics Network (solgenomics.net): growing tomatoes using Perl

The Sol Genomics Network (SGN; http://solgenomics.net/) is a clade-oriented database (COD) containing biological data for species in the Solanaceae and their close relatives, with data types ranging from chromosomes and genes to phenotypes and accessions. SGN hosts several genome maps and sequences, including a pre-release of the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum cv Heinz 1706) reference genome. A new transcriptome component has been added to store RNA-seq and microarray data. SGN is also an open source software project, continuously developing and improving a complex system for storing, integrating and analyzing data. All code and development work is publicly visible on GitHub (http://github.com). The database architecture combines SGN-specific schemas and the community-developed Chado schema (http://gmod.org/wiki/Chado) for compatibility with other genome databases. The SGN curation model is community-driven, allowing researchers to add and edit information using simple web tools. Currently, over a hundred community annotators help curate the database. SGN can be accessed at http://solgenomics.net/.