Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Observer-Based Adaptive Fuzzy Backstepping Output Feedback Control of Uncertain MIMO Pure-Feedback Nonlinear Systems

This paper is concerned with the problem of adaptive fuzzy tracking control for a class of uncertain multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) pure-feedback nonlinear systems with immeasurable states. The dynamic output feedback strategy begins with a state observer. Fuzzy logic systems are utilized to approximate the unknown nonlinear functions. The filtered signals are introduced to circumvent algebraic loop problem encountered in the implementation of the controller, and an adaptive fuzzy output feedback is obtained via a backstepping recursive design technique. It is shown that the proposed control law can guarantee that all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded and that the observer and tracking errors converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. Simulation studies are included to illustrate the effectiveness and potentials of the proposed techniques.
The Possibility to Resolve the Security Problems through the LTE in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) can provide communications between vehicles or infrastructures. It provides the convenience of driving and the secure driving to re duce accidents. In VANET, the security is more important because it is closely related to accidents. Additionally, VANET raises a privacy iss ue because it can track the location of vehicles and users’ identity when a security mechanism is provided. In this paper, we analyze th e problem of an existing solution for security requirements require d in VANET, and resolve the problem of the existing method when a k ey management mechanism is provided for the security operation in VANET. Therefore, we show suitability of the Long Term Evo lution (LTE) in VANET for the solution of this problem. Keywords—VANET, Privacy, Security, LTE
Pharmacoproteomic investigation into antidepressant response in two mouse inbred strains

In this study, we present a pharmacoproteomic investigation of response to antidepressants two inbred strains. Our aim was to uncover molecular mechanisms underlying antidepressant action and identify new biomarkers to determine therapeutic response to two antidepressants with proven efficacy in the treatment of depression but divergent mechanisms of action. Mice were treated with the pro‐noradrenergic drug nortriptyline, the pro‐serotonergic drug escitalopram or saline. Quantitative proteomic analyses were undertaken on hippocampal tissue from a study design that used two inbred mouse strains, two depressogenic protocols and a control condition, (maternal separation, chronic mild stress, control), two antidepressant drugs and two dosing protocols. The proteomic analysis was aimed at the identification of specific drug‐response markers. Complementary approaches, 2DE and isobaric tandem mass tagging (TMT), were applied to the selected experimental groups. To investigate the relationship between proteomic profiles, depressogenic protocols and drug response, 2DE and TMT data sets were analysed using multivariate methods. The results highlighted significant strain‐ and stress‐related differences across both 2DE and TMT data sets and identified the three gene products involved in serotonergic (PXBD5, YHWAB, SLC25A4) and one in noradrenergic antidepressant action (PXBD6).
In Times of Uncertainty: Predicting the Survival of Long-Distance Relationships

The authors examined the degree to which ratings of negative affectivity (NA) and relational security predicted the breakup of long-distance and same-city dating relationships. Couples completed initial surveys and were contacted 1 year later about the status of their relationship. In the initial surveys, both partners completed NA and relational security assessments. Overall, both the NA and relational security of men and women predicted stability. However, as predicted, structural equation modeling revealed a gender difference in the interaction between NA and long-distance status. The presence of high NA in men was associated with breakup for long-distance but not same-city couples. High NA in women was not differentially associated with relational stability on the basis of long-distance status. The authors discuss the psychological basis of this gender difference.
Medical student training in the performance of diagnostic laboratory procedures

Summary. A study was conducted to determine what diagnostic laboratory procedures medical students recalled being taught during pre‐clerkship training, how well they felt they could perform these procedures on entrance to and exit from their clerkship year, and the estimate of frequency of personal performance during the clerkship year. Surveys were mailed to 223 graduating senior students of a medical school. They were asked to supply data regarding 15 pre‐selected procedures. In only seven cases did a majority of students recall being taught a procedure. Higher percentages of students who trained at health science centres and a Veterans Administration hospital recalled being taught procedures compared to students who trained at community hospitals. In general, students who performed their pre‐clerkship training at the health science centres rated their ability to perform procedures without assistance on entrance to the clerkship year higher than the other two groups. Students who performed at least one half of their clerkships at a health science centre rated their ability to perform procedures without assistance at the termination of their clerkship year higher than those who performed a majority of clerkships at community hospitals. The former group also reported a higher frequency of performance of the procedures than the community hospital group. Most of the procedures for all groups, however, were performed at a rate of less than one/month.
Estudio de las comisiones de gestión de los fondos de inversión españoles

En esta tesis doctoral nos vamos a centrar en los Fondos de Inversion que establecen la comision de gestion sobre el resultado del Fondo, y en su repercusion en el inversor. En este sentido, se pretenden analizar las caracteristicas de los propios Fondos que determinan la eleccion de este tipo de comision, los cambios tanto en la cuantia como en el tipo de la misma, la evaluacion de la gestion de este tipo de Fondos y la relacion que se da entre los gastos cobrados al inversor y los resultados ofrecidos al inversor. En esta tesis, se proponen tres ensayos con un objetivo comun: analizar la comision de gestion en la industria de fondos de inversion. Los ensayos son auto contenidos y utilizan diferentes frecuencias de datos, muestras, modelos y metodologias de estimacion. El capitulo 1 analiza los atributos de los fondos de inversion que determinan la eleccion de la comision de gestion sobre resultados, frente a establecerla sobre los activos gestionados. El capitulo 2 se enfoca en estudiar los cambios en la cuantia en la comision de gestion, y los cambios de tipo (sobre resultados o sobre activos). Finalmente, el capitulo 3 estudia si el modo en que se establece la comision de gestion influye en los resultados obtenidos, y en la relacion que se da entre los resultados proporcionados a los inversores y los gastos cobrados por el fondo.
PReFerSim: fast simulation of demography and selection under the Poisson Random Field model

The Poisson Random Field (PRF) model has become an important tool in population genetics to study weakly deleterious genetic variation under complicated demographic scenarios. Currently, there are no freely available software applications that allow simulation of genetic variation data under this model. Here we present PReFerSim, an ANSI C program that performs forward simulations under the PRF model. PReFerSim models changes in population size, arbitrary amounts of inbreeding, dominance and distributions of selective effects. Users can track summaries of genetic variation over time and output trajectories of selected alleles. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION PReFerSim is freely available at: https://github.com/LohmuellerLab/PReFerSim CONTACT: klohmueller@ucla.eduSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Threshold voltage and mobility mismatch compensated analogue buffer for driver-integrated poly-Si TFT LCDs

An analogue buffer for driver-integrated poly-Si TFT LCDs is described where large mismatches of poly-Si TFT in threshold voltage and mobility are compensated. The buffer has a very simple configuration consisting of an nMOS, a pMOS, three switches, and a capacitor. Because of its simple and compact architecture, the panel size can be kept small even with integrated driver circuits. The measurement results show the analogue data buffer can achieve 4.5 bit resolution.
Which Extractive Summarization Method For Malay Texts

The number of texts written in Malay increases every day. When these texts are lengthy, interested readers tend to skim through them. Automatic text summarization may assist these readers to get access to the important parts of the texts without scanning from the beginning to the end. As of today, only few Malay text summarizers have been presented in the literature. Therefore, a comparative study of three extractive summarization methods (Luhn’s method, Edmundson’s method, and LexRank method) was undertaken and the results are reported in this paper. The aim of the study is to determine the adequate extractive method. Several experiments were conducted by comparing the results of three extractive methods with human extracts as well as human abstracts. It appears that the Luhn’s method, one of the oldest automatic extractive summarization, shows a good perfor-mance while tested on 14 Malay abstract summaries and 20 Malay extrac-tive summaries.
Learning data-driven image similarity measure

Image quality assessment gains a greater interest due to development of digital imaging and storage. In that field, structural similarity (SSIM) index has been shown to favorably agree with human perceptual assessment, significantly outperforming the method of mean squared error, i.e., L2 distance. The similarity measure function in SSIM which compares a target (distorted) image with its reference (original) image is handcrafted in a simple form via a top-down approach based on the human visual system. It, however, might lack optimality without directly considering the relationships between image data and the perceptual assessment (scores). In this paper, we propose a method to construct an image similarity measure based on actual data. The proposed method optimizes a similarity measure function by exploiting annotated data in a bottom-up and data-driven manner, while retaining the favorable property of structural similarity in SSIM. The non-linear similarity function is optimized as the global optimum of high generalization power. In addition, the proposed method is simply formulated and thus applicable to the family of SSIM, especially to FSIM which has been recently proposed exhibiting superior performance to SSIM. The experimental results on image quality assessment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the other methods.
Evidence for Specific Secretion Rather than Autolysis in the Release of Some Helicobacter pyloriProteins

ABSTRACT We investigated whether Helicobacter pylori cells actively secrete proteins such as the urease subunits UreA and UreB and the GroES and GroEL homologs HspA and HspB or whether these proteins were present in the extracellular compartment as a consequence of autolysis. Using a subcellular fractionation approach associated with quantitative Western blot analyses, we showed that the supernatant protein profiles were very different from those of the cell pellets, even for bacteria harvested in the late growth phase; this suggests that the release process is selective. A typical cytoplasmic protein, a β-galactosidase homolog, was found exclusively associated with the pellet of whole-cell extracts, and no traces were found in the supernatant. In contrast, UreA, UreB, HspA, and HspB were mostly found in the pellet but significant amounts were also present in the supernatant. HspA and UreB were released into the supernatant at the same rate throughout the growth phase (3%), whereas large portions of HspB and UreA were released during the stationary phase (over 30 and 20%, respectively) rather than during the early growth phase (20% and 6, respectively). The profiles of protein obtained after water extraction of the bacteria with those of the proteins naturally released within the liquid culture supernatants demonstrated that water extraction led to the release of a large amount of protein due to artifactual lysis. Our data support the conclusion that a specific and selective mechanism(s) is involved in the secretion of some H. pylori antigens. A programmed autolysis process does not seem to make a major contribution.
Association between early childhood aggression and internalizing behavior for sibling pairs.

OBJECTIVE This article investigates sibling similarity in early childhood problem behavior. METHOD Analyses are based on an Australian longitudinal study of health and development that included sister, brother, and mixed-sex sibling pairs. Pregnant women were recruited into the study in 1981 to 1983 and provided information regarding family characteristics and child behavior from birth through the age of 5 years. The relationship between older and younger siblings' aggression and internalizing behavior at the age of 5 years is examined, based upon maternal reports on a shortened version of the Child Behavior Checklist for 414 sibling pairs (60% of the initial sibling sample). RESULTS The results demonstrate a moderately strong association between sibling's aggression and internalizing behavior, for mixed- and same-sex siblings, with correlation coefficients of 0.26 to 0.39. The association between older and younger sibling's behavior remains significant, controlling for family characteristics such as mother's age, mental health, marital status, affection toward children, and family size and income. CONCLUSIONS The findings highlight the importance of including siblings in family-based intervention programs aimed at reducing child behavior problems.
Wisdom‐based and evidence‐based medicine

Evidence seems to be what we need in medicine. Decades ago, at the time of the Spanish Civil war and Second World War, Archie Cochrane, a young physician in a prison camp, worried that his advice to colleagues about treating tuberculosis might not be appropriate and feared indeed that some procedures and medications might be harmful: ‘I knew that there was no real evidence that anything we had to offer had any effect on tuberculosis, and I was afraid that I shortened the lives of some of my friends by unnecessary intervention’ [1]. So began the history of evidence-based medicine, and its laudable enlargement and formalization—the Cochrane Reviews and the Cochrane Collaboration—with their careful approach to grades of evidence. Standing on this firm platform of evidential practice we are sure in our prescribing, now, that tuberculosis can, usually, be eliminated by triple therapy, that ACE inhibitors lower blood pressure and can improve longevity, and that peptic ulceration is often caused by Helicobacter pylori and can be treated with a 1-week course of antibiotics. These are triumphs of research and the accumulation of evidence. However, with time the complexity of medicine increases. Faced with diabetes, what are we hoping to treat? If we are simply trying to improve mortality does this not marginalize the significance of reducing morbidity? Would our patients prefer to live longer but live with renal failure? Is the prevention of stroke less important than absolute longevity? At this point in our medical practice we arrive at a dilemma. We have evidencebased medicine pointing in different directions depending on our choice of what it is that we are trying to treat or prevent, and so it emerges that clinical practice becomes knowledgebased rather than evidence-based. Knowledge is wider than evidence. Evidence implies that we are facing a situation where a decision can be right or wrong. The word ‘evidence’ is most commonly used in courts of law where a jury is assessing whether something is right or wrong. Is someone innocent or guilty? Courts do not like the concept of someone being partly guilty! But in medicine our knowledge tells us that agents or procedures or policies or combinations of drugs work in general but not in everyone. The cry goes up that we need more evidence. But if we were going to use randomized control trials to look at permutations and combinations of five agents that we know would work to reduce glycaemia in type 2 diabetes, then we would need a trial with 120 arms. This is never going to happen. So we decide, discuss and prescribe on the basis of our knowledge base. Our deliberations may not be strictly evidencebased, but we would hope they might be rational. Figure 1 shows how the evidence base that we embrace is not necessarily the leading influence on a therapeutic decision—indeed were it to be we would feel that much had been lost from the art of Patient Physician Evidence Base “Experts” and Guidelines
Cloning, expression and characterization of Bauhinia variegata trypsin inhibitor BvTI

Abstract A Bauhinia variegata trypsin inhibitor (BvTI) cDNA fragment was cloned into the pCANTAB5E phagemid. The clone pAS 1.1. 3 presented a cDNA fragment of 733 bp, including the coding region for a mature BvTI protein comprising 175 amino acid residues. The deduced amino acid sequence for BvTI confirmed it as a member of the Kunitz-type plant serine proteinase inhibitor family. The BvTI cDNA fragment encoding the mature form was cloned into the expression vector, pET-14b, and ex-pressed in E. coli BL21 (DE3) pLysS in an active form. In addition, a BvTI mutant form, rmutBvTI, with a Pro residue as the fifth amino acid in place of Leu, was produced. The recombinant proteins, rBvTI and rmutBvTI, were purified on a trypsin-Sepharose column, yielding 29 and 1.44 mg/l of active protein, respectively, and showed protein bands of approximately 21.5 kDa by SDS-PAGE. Trypsin inhibition activity was comparable for rBvTI (K i=4 nM) and rmutBvTI (K i=6 nM). Our data suggest that the Leu to Pro substitution at the fifth amino-terminal residue was not crucial for proteinase inhibition.
Effectiveness of Jigsaw learning compared to lecture‐based learning in dental education

AIM The objective of this study was to evaluate the success levels of students using the Jigsaw learning method in dental education. METHOD Fifty students with similar grade point average (GPA) scores were selected and randomly assigned into one of two groups (n = 25). A pretest concerning 'adhesion and bonding agents in dentistry' was administered to all students before classes. The Jigsaw learning method was applied to the experimental group for 3 weeks. At the same time, the control group was taking classes using the lecture-based learning method. At the end of the 3 weeks, all students were retested (post-test) on the subject. A retention test was administered 3 weeks after the post-test. Mean scores were calculated for each test for the experimental and control groups, and the data obtained were analysed using the independent samples t-test. RESULTS No significant difference was determined between the Jigsaw and lecture-based methods at pretest or post-test. The highest mean test score was observed in the post-test with the Jigsaw method. In the retention test, success with the Jigsaw method was significantly higher than that with the lecture-based method. CONCLUSION The Jigsaw method is as effective as the lecture-based method.
Web Watcher: A Tour Guide for the World Wide Web

1 We explore the notion of a tour guide software agent for assisting users browsing the World Wide Web. A Web tour guide agent provides assistance similar to that provided by a human tour guide in a museum { it guides the user along an appropriate path through the collection, based on its knowledge of the user's interests, of the location and relevance of various items in the collection, and of the way in which others have interacted with the collection in the past. This paper describes a simple but operational tour guide, called WebWatcher, which has given over 5000 tours to people browsing CMU's School of Computer Science Web pages. WebWatcher accompanies users from page to page, suggests appropriate hyperlinks, and learns from experience to improve its advice-giving skills. We describe the learning algorithms used by WebWatcher, experimental results showing their e ectiveness, and lessons learned from this case study in Web tour guide agents.
The Flavone Luteolin Suppresses SREBP-2 Expression and Post-Translational Activation in Hepatic Cells

High blood cholesterol has been associated with cardiovascular diseases. The enzyme HMG CoA reductase (HMGCR) is responsible for cholesterol synthesis, and inhibitors of this enzyme (statins) have been used clinically to control blood cholesterol. Sterol regulatory element binding protein (SREBP) -2 is a key transcription factor in cholesterol metabolism, and HMGCR is a target gene of SREBP-2. Attenuating SREBP-2 activity could potentially minimize the expression of HMGCR. Luteolin is a flavone that is commonly detected in plant foods. In the present study, Luteolin suppressed the expression of SREBP-2 at concentrations as low as 1 μM in the hepatic cell lines WRL and HepG2. This flavone also prevented the nuclear translocation of SREBP-2. Post-translational processing of SREBP-2 protein was required for nuclear translocation. Luteolin partially blocked this activation route through increased AMP kinase (AMPK) activation. At the transcriptional level, the mRNA and protein expression of SREBP-2 were reduced through luteolin. A reporter gene assay also verified that the transcription of SREBF2 was weakened in response to this flavone. The reduced expression and protein processing of SREBP-2 resulted in decreased nuclear translocation. Thus, the transcription of HMGCR was also decreased after luteolin treatment. In summary, the results of the present study showed that luteolin modulates HMGCR transcription by decreasing the expression and nuclear translocation of SREBP-2.
Fourier Synthesis of Linear Arrays Based on the Generalized Scattering Matrix and Spherical Modes

This paper presents a novel, simple pattern synthesis procedure for linear equispaced arrays which can be characterized by a generalized scattering matrix (GSM) and whose radiated field can be expressed as a weighted sum of shifted spherical waves. It can be viewed as an extension of the classic design techniques of the Fourier series (FS) method or the Woodward-Lawson frequency sampling method, to the case in which the individual antenna elements' patterns and all interelement couplings are taken into account. The design procedure, which yields the excitations needed to achieve the desired pattern, is based on either the FS or the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the spherical mode expansion of the array radiated field, as well as on various properties associated to the FS or DFT coefficients. In this work, to compute the GSM of the array and the spherical mode expansion of the field, a validated hybrid full-wave methodology, based on the finite element method and rotation and translation properties of spherical waves, is used. Numerical results of different synthesized array patterns are presented for different arrays made up of dielectric resonator antennas and cavity-backed microstrip circular patches.