Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Graft copolymerization of benzyl methacrylate onto wool fibers

Benzyl methacrylate (BzMA) was graft copolymerized onto wool fibers by using ammonium peroxydisulphate as the initiator. Grafted samples with different polymer add ons ( from 7 to 180%) were obtained by varying the monomer concentration in the reaction system. Following grafting with BzMA, the X-ray diffraction peak at 20.2° slightly moved towards higher spacing values. Birefringence decreased, indicating a lower degree of molecular orientation of grafted wool fibers. The equilibrium regain values of grafted wool decreased with increasing add on. Tensile strength increased in the range 45-77% add on, while elongation at break decreased. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetry (TG) measurements showed a higher thermal stability for grafted wool. Following grafting, the drop of dynamic storage modulus (E') shifted to a lower temperature. Accordingly, the intensity of the loss modulus (E) peak decreased, indicating that the thermally induced molecular motion was enhanced by grafting. Thermomechanical analysis (TMA) confirmed the increase in chain mobility for the grafted wool fibers. Above 35-40% add on, the presence of homopolymer on the surface of the wool fibers was identified by scanning electron microscopy.
Initialization-robust Bayesian multipitch analyzer based on psychoacoustical and musical criteria

We present a new Bayesian multipitch analyzer that dispenses with a precise optimization of parameter initialization or hyperparameters. Our method uses a new family of prior distribution, characteristic prior; it efficiently restricts the existence region of the latent variables, that is, the product of a conjugate prior and a characteristic function. The update formulas become a simple form that is actually suitable for Gibbs sampling. We construct characteristic priors of harmonic structures based on psychoacoustical and musical knowledge and apply them to nonnegative harmonic factorization. Experimental results improve 5.2 points in F-measure under a tough condition, random initialization with no hyperparameter optimization.
Endoscopic ultrasound–guided fine needle aspiration cytology of solid liver lesions: a large single-center experience

OBJECTIVES:The aim of this study was to report the sensitivity, cytological diagnoses, endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) features, complications, clinical impact, and long term follow-up of a large single-center experience with endoscopic ultrasound–guided fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA) of benign and malignant solid liver lesions.METHODS:A database of cytologic specimens from EUS-FNA was reviewed to identify all hepatic lesions aspirated between January, 1997, and July, 2002. Procedural indications, prior radiographic data, patient demographics, EUS examination results, complications, and follow-up data were obtained and recorded.RESULTS:EUS-FNA of 77 liver lesions in 77 patients was performed without complications. Of these 77 lesions, 45 (58%) were diagnostic for malignancy, 25 (33%) were benign, and seven (9%) were nondiagnostic. A total of 22 lesions were confirmed as negative for malignancy by follow-up (mean 762 days, range 512–1556 days) or intraoperative examination; however, seven lesions could not be classified as benign or malignant. Depending on the status of the seven unclassified lesions, sensitivity of EUS-FNA for the diagnosis of malignancy ranged from 82 to 94%. When compared with benign lesions, EUS features predictive of malignant hepatic masses were the presence of regular outer margins (60% vs 27%; p = 0.02) and the detection of two or more lesions (38% vs 9%; p = 0.03). Of the 42 patients with malignancy identified by EUS-FNA and other available imaging records, EUS detected the malignancy in 41% of patients with previously negative examinations. For the 45 subjects with cytology positive for malignancy, EUS-FNA changed management in 86% of subjects.CONCLUSION:EUS-FNA of the liver is a safe and sensitive procedure that can have a significant impact on patient management. Prospective studies comparing the accuracy and complication rate of EUS-FNA and percutaneous fine needle aspiration (P-FNA) for the diagnosis of liver tumors are needed.
Dynamic key for encryption

In this paper proposed a new secret-key block cipher method, in the proposed method, the plaintext and the ciphertext are 33152 bit blocks or multiple of 33152. The ciphertext are 33152 bit blocks or multiple of 33152. The secret key is dynamic key with 33152 bit long or multiple of 33152. The proposed method is combine of RSA, DES, TowFish, Caesar and Reversed ciphers.
Cross-device gaze-supported point-to-point content transfer

Within a pervasive computing environment, we see content on shared displays that we wish to acquire and use in a specific way i.e., with an application on a personal device, transferring from point-to-point. The eyes as input can indicate intention to interact with a service, providing implicit pointing as a result. In this paper we investigate the use of gaze and manual input for the positioning of gaze-acquired content on personal devices. We evaluate two main techniques, (1) Gaze Positioning, transfer of content using gaze with manual input to confirm actions, (2) Manual Positioning, content is selected with gaze but final positioning is performed by manual input, involving a switch of modalities from gaze to manual input. A first user study compares these techniques applied to direct and indirect manual input configurations, a tablet with touch input and a laptop with mouse input. A second study evaluated our techniques in an application scenario involving distractor targets. Our overall results showed general acceptance and understanding of all conditions, although there were clear individual user preferences dependent on familiarity and preference toward gaze, touch, or mouse input.
Stress corrosion cracking of sensitized austenitic stainless steels in Kuwait petroleum refineries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate stress corrosion cracking (SCC) for 304, 316, and 321 stainless steels in petroleum‐processing environments.Design/methodology/approach – Sensitized austenitic stainless steels were subjected to a microstructure investigation and electrochemical test. Stressed sensitized 304, 316, and 321 stainless steels were selected and subjected to various environments that included polythionic acid, sour solution, and chloride solution that were prepared in the laboratory to simulate service environments in the petroleum refinery.Findings – Microstructure investigation reveals more severe SCC in polythionic acid than in the sour and chloride solutions. Type 321 SS gives better resistance to SCC than do 304 and 316 SS in the three solutions. It is concluded that acidity of solutions has a relatively minor influence in promoting cracking. However, polythionic acid is found to be the primary causative agent.Originality/value – The results demonstrated that SCC is mor.
Effect of tillage and mulching practices on soil properties and growth and yield of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L), Walp) in Southeastern Nigeria.

This paper reports the field evaluation of the effect of tillage [tilled (MT) and untilled, (NT)], mulching material [Panicum maximum (p) and Chromolaena odorata (c)] and mulching method [incorporated (b), surface (s) and no mulch (o)] on soil properties and growth and yield of cowpea (Vigna unquiculata) in 2000 and 2001 cropping seasons, in Akwa Ibom State, Southeastern Nigeria. The study was a three-factor factorial in randomize complete block (RCB). The soil in 2000 and 2001 was strongly acidic. Organic C increased by about 83.6% at harvest in 2000 and declined by 16.4% in 2001. Available P declined by about 15.9% in 2000 and 59.6% in 2001. Base saturation increased by 9.6% in 2000 and decreased by 6.8% in 2001. Tillage and mulching practices improved water-stable aggregates >2mm by 16.6% in 2001. Bulk density was similar between MT and NT in 2000, but significantly lower (P Agro-Science Vol. 7 (2) 2008: pp. 118-128
Perceptual Decision Making “Through the Eyes” of a Large-Scale Neural Model of V1

Sparse coding has been posited as an efficient information processing strategy employed by sensory systems, particularly visual cortex. Substantial theoretical and experimental work has focused on the issue of sparse encoding, namely how the early visual system maps the scene into a sparse representation. In this paper we investigate the complementary issue of sparse decoding, for example given activity generated by a realistic mapping of the visual scene to neuronal spike trains, how do downstream neurons best utilize this representation to generate a “decision. ” Specifically we consider both sparse (L1-regularized) and non-sparse (L2 regularized) linear decoding for mapping the neural dynamics of a large-scale spiking neuron model of primary visual cortex (V1) to a two alternative forced choice (2-AFC) perceptual decision. We show that while both sparse and non-sparse linear decoding yield discrimination results quantitatively consistent with human psychophysics, sparse linear decoding is more efficient in terms of the number of selected informative dimension.
Sympathoadrenal Stress Reactivity Is a Predictor of Future Blood Pressure: An 18-Year Follow-Up Study

In the present study we hypothesized that arterial catecholamine concentrations during rest and 2 laboratory stress tests were independent predictors of blood pressure at an 18-year follow-up. At entry, blood pressure, heart rate, and arterial plasma epinephrine and norepinephrine concentrations were measured in 99 healthy men (age: 19.3±0.4 years, mean±SD) at rest, during a mental arithmetic test, and during a cold pressor test. After 18.0±0.9 years of follow-up, resting blood pressure was measured. The norepinephrine and epinephrine concentrations during the mental arithmetic explained 12.7% of the variation of future systolic blood pressure after adjusting for initial resting blood pressure, family history, body mass index, and systolic blood pressure during the stress test in a multiple regression analysis (adjusted R2=0.651; P<0.001). To conclude, the present study shows that sympathetic nervous activity during mental arithmetic predicts future blood pressure, indicating a possible causal factor in the development of essential hypertension independent of the initial blood pressure.
High-throughput RNAi Screening Identifies a Role for TNK1 in Growth and Survival of Pancreatic Cancer Cells

To identify novel targets in pancreatic cancer cells, we used high-throughput RNAi (HT-RNAi) to select genes that, when silenced, would decrease viability of pancreatic cancer cells. The HT-RNAi screen involved reverse transfecting the pancreatic cancer cell line BxPC3 with a siRNA library targeting 572 kinases. From replicate screens, approximately 32 kinases were designated as hits, of which 22 kinase targets were selected for confirmation and validation. One kinase identified as a hit from this screen was tyrosine kinase nonreceptor 1 (TNK1), a kinase previously identified as having tumor suppressor-like properties in embryonic stem cells. Silencing of TNK1 with siRNA showed reduced proliferation in a panel of pancreatic cancer cell lines. Furthermore, we showed that silencing of TNK1 led to increased apoptosis through a caspase-dependent pathway and that targeting TNK1 with siRNA can synergize with gemcitabine treatment. Despite previous reports that TNK1 affects Ras and NF-κB signaling, we did not find similar correlations with these pathways in pancreatic cancer cells. Our results suggest that TNK1 in pancreatic cancer cells does not possess the same tumor suppressor properties seen in embryonic cells but seems to be involved in growth and survival. The application of functional genomics by using HT-RNAi screens has allowed us to identify TNK1 as a growth-associated kinase in pancreatic cancer cells. Mol Cancer Res; 9(6); 724–32. ©2011 AACR.
Characterization for Staling of Chinese Rolls

Chinese rolls are prepared from hot water dough and wrapped with meat and vegetable when consumption. Staling of Chinese rolls results in loss in texture and eating quality. Moisture content, enthalpy change (H), texture and sensory quality of Chinese rolls which are significantly affected during staling at 4°C storage, were monitored over a storage period of four days. Moisture content was founded to decrease steadily during staling of Chinese rolls. Enthalpy change, H, as measured by DSC increased with storage time. The texture of Chinese rolls became progressively harder with storage at 4°C. A decrease in sensory quality and acceptability of the Chinese rolls was observed with storage. Most of the staling parameters show good correlation. Texture showed the best overall correlation with all other staling parameters.
CIC-FBK Approach to Native Language Identification

We present the CIC-FBK system, which took part in the Native Language Identification (NLI) Shared Task 2017. Our approach combines features commonly used in previous NLI research, i.e., word n-grams, lemma n-grams, part-of-speech n-grams, and function words, with recently introduced character n-grams from misspelled words, and features that are novel in this task, such as typed character n-grams, and syntactic n-grams of words and of syntactic relation tags. We use log-entropy weighting scheme and perform classification using the Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm. Our system achieved 0.8808 macro-averaged F1-score and shared the 1st rank in the NLI Shared Task 2017 scoring.
Mosaics from MPEG-2 video

Construction of panoramic mosaics from video is well established in both the research and commercial communities, but current methods generally perform the time-consuming registration procedure entirely from the sequence's pixel data. Video sequences usually exist in compressed format, often MPEG-2; while specialized hardware and highly-optimized software can often quickly create accurate mosaics from a video sequence's pixels, these products do not make efficient use of all information available in a compressed video stream. In particular, MPEG video files generally contain significant information about global camera motion in their motion vectors. This paper describes how to exploit the motion vector information so that global motion can be estimated extremely quickly and accurately, which leads to accurate panoramic mosaics. The major obstacle in generating mosaics with this method is variable quality of MPEG motion vectors, both within a stream from a particular MPEG encoder and between streams compressed with different encoders. The paper discusses methods of robustly estimating global camera motion from the observed motion vectors, including the use of least absolute value estimators, variable model order for global camera motion, and motion vector weighting depending on their estimated accuracy. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm.
ApproxPIM: Exploiting realistic 3D-stacked DRAM for energy-efficient processing in-memory

Processing-in-Memory (PIM), has recently been revisited as one of the most promising solutions to deal with the issue of bandwidth and power wall between processor and memory. In this paper, we propose a light-weight PIM architecture, approxPIM, which leverages approximate computing techniques to enable InMemory Processing in a realistic 3D-stacked DRAM, Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). Using the newly-released atomic instruction support of the HMC, approxPIM can process a wide range of data-intensive applications without adding any logic resources into the memory devices. Furthermore, we propose to approximate those accuracy-insensitive applications with the limited functioning set of HMC commands so that they could be smoothly mapped to the HMCs without the inference from processors, therefore enabling energy-efficient Processing-in-Memory and greatly expanding the scope of target PIM applications with HMC. In general, approxPIM gives a comprehensive study on HMC's potential and weakness in the application of Processing-in-Memory. Evaluation results show that our approxPIM significantly boosts the energy-efficiency and performance of the whole system.
A Fluid Heuristic for Minimizing Makespan in Job Shops

We describe a simple online heuristic for scheduling job shops. We assume there is a fixed set of routes for the jobs, and many jobs, say N, on each route. The heuristic uses safety stocks and keeps the bottleneck machine busy at almost all times, while the other machines are paced by the bottleneck machine. We perform a probabilistic analysis of the heuristic, under some assumptions on the distributions of the processing times. We show that our heuristic produces makespan, which exceeds the optimal makespan by no more than clogN with a probability that exceeds 1-1/N for all N ≥ 1, where c is some constant independent of N.
Effect of Sintering Time on the Mechanical Properties of WC-8Co Cemented Carbide for Friction Stir Welding Tool

WC-8Co cemented carbide specimens were prepared via vacuum sintering. The influences of sintering time on phase composition, microstructure and mechanical properties of WC-8Co cemented carbide were investigated. The results show that dense specimens were obtained in the sintering time range of 15min~60min and the relative density reached over 95%. Only WC and Co3W3C (γ-phase) were detected by XRD without any else phases, even though Co. With the ascended sintering time, the transverse rupture strength (TRS) increased and hardness ascended to peak value and then descended. WC-Co cemented carbide with excellent mechanical properties (HRA>90, TRS~630MPa and KIC>7MPa·m1/2) were obtained. It would be a good candidate for applications of friction stir welding tool.
Global Equilibrium Exchange Rates: Euro, Dollar, 'Ins', 'Outs', and Other Major Currencies in a Panel Cointegration Framework

This paper presents a methodology for calculating bilateral equilibrium exchange rates for a panel of currencies in a way that guarantees global consistency. The methodology has three parts: a theoretical model that encompasses the balance of payments and the Balassa-Samuelson approaches to real exchange rate determination; an unobserved components decomposition in a cointegration framework that identifies a time-varying equilibrium real exchange rate; and an algebraic transformation that extracts bilateral equilibrium nominal rates. The results uncover that, by the start of Stage III of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the euro was significantly undervalued against the dollar and the pound, but overvalued against the yen. The paper also shows that the four major EMU currencies locked their parities with the euro at a rate close to equilibrium.
The forcegrid: a buffer structure for haptic interaction with virtual elastic objects

Real-time surgical simulation often requires computing the deformations of visco-elastic human-body tissue and generating both graphic and haptic renderings. As human users are more sensitive to small haptic discrepancies than visual ones, good force rendering requires a refresh rate of 500 Hz or more, which is far beyond the capabilities of current simulators. Moreover, if the simulator runs on a remote server, limited bandwidth, network latency and variance further compromise the quality of haptic rendering. To address these problems, a new interpolation-extrapolation data structure called the forcegrid is proposed, which makes it possible to approximate forces at rates greater than 500 Hz, regardless of the complexity of the simulated object. The forcegrid is designed for haptic interaction with continuous contact. It is a regular grid defined over the virtual workspace, in which every vertex contains a force. An extrapolation algorithm updates this force at every simulation cycle, while an interpolation algorithm computes the force to be rendered on the haptic device at the desired rate. The forcegrid has been successfully tested on various virtual deformable objects.
Characterization of the Native Lysine Tyrosylquinone Cofactor in Lysyl Oxidase by Raman Spectroscopy*

Lysine tyrosylquinone (LTQ) recently has been identified as the active site cofactor in lysyl oxidase by isolation and characterization of a derivatized active site peptide. Reported in this study is the first characterization of the underivatized cofactor in native lysyl oxidase by resonance Raman (RR) spectrometry. The spectrum is characterized by a unique set of vibrational modes in the 1200 to 1700 cm−1 region. We show that the RR spectrum of lysyl oxidase closely matches that of a synthetic LTQ model compound, 4-n-butylamino-5-ethyl-1,2-benzoquinone, in aqueous solutions but differs significantly from those of other topa quinone-containing amine oxidases under similar conditions. Furthermore, we have observed the same 18O shift of the C=O stretch in both the lysyl oxidase enzyme and the LTQ cofactor model compound. The RR spectra of different model compounds and their D shifts give additional evidence for the protonation state of LTQ cofactor in the enzyme. The overall similarity of these spectra and their shifts shows that the lysyl oxidase cofactor and the model LTQ compound have the same structure and properties. These data provide strong and independent support for the new cofactor structure, unambiguously ruling out the possibility that the structure originally reported had been derived from a spurious side reaction during the derivatization of the protein and isolation of the active site peptide.
Insulin Sensitivity, β-Cell Function, and Incretin Effect in Individuals With Elevated 1-Hour Postload Plasma Glucose Levels

OBJECTIVE Individuals with normal glucose tolerance (NGT), whose 1-h postload plasma glucose is ≥155 mg/dL (NGT 1h-high), have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. The purpose of this study was to characterize their metabolic phenotype. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 305 nondiabetic offspring of type 2 diabetic patients was consecutively recruited. Insulin secretion was assessed using both indexes derived from oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and intravenous glucose tolerance test (IVGTT). Insulin sensitivity was measured by hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. RESULTS Compared with individuals with a 1-h postload plasma glucose <155 mg/dL (NGT 1h-low), NGT 1h-high individuals exhibited lower insulin sensitivity after adjustment for age, sex, and BMI. Insulin secretion estimated from the OGTT did not differ between the two groups of individuals. By contrast, compared with NGT 1h-low individuals, the acute insulin response during an IVGTT and the disposition index were significantly reduced in NGT 1h-high individuals after adjustment for age, sex, and BMI. Incretin effect, estimated as the ratio between total insulin responses during OGTT and IVGTT, was higher in NGT 1h-high individuals compared with NGT 1h-low individuals. CONCLUSIONS NGT 1h-high individuals may represent an intermediate state of glucose intolerance between NGT and type 2 diabetes characterized by insulin resistance and reduced β-cell function, the two main pathophysiological defects responsible for the development of type 2 diabetes. Postload hyperglycemia is the result of an intrinsic β-cell defect rather than impaired incretin effect.