Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Syndrome-coupled rate-compatible error-correcting codes

Rate-compatible error-correcting codes (ECCs), which consist of a set of extended codes, are of practical interest in both wireless communications and data storage. In this work, we first study the lower bounds for rate-compatible ECCs, thus proving the existence of good rate-compatible codes. Then, we propose a general framework for constructing rate-compatible ECCs based on cosets and syndromes of a set of nested linear codes. We evaluate our construction from two points of view. From a combinatorial perspective, we show that we can construct rate-compatible codes with increasing minimum distances. From a probabilistic point of view, we prove that we are able to construct capacity-achieving rate-compatible codes.
Mass transfer in rolling rotary kilns

A novel approach to modeling mass transfer in rotary kilns or rotating cylinders is explored. The movement of gas in the interparticle voids in the bed of the kiln is considered, where particles move concentrically with the geometry of the kiln and gas is entrained by these particles. The approach considers a di,erential section along the length of a rotary kiln where the gas concentration in the freeboard is assumed to be uniform in that section. A reactor modelling approach has been used to derive e,ectiveness factors for the bed as a function of bed 9ll, reaction kinetics and rotation speed. In many cases, the entrained gas becomes depleted within the bed, leading to a simpli9ed model for the bed e,ectiveness factor. Experimental data con9rms the validity of this model for slower rates. At faster rates, mass transfer can be much higher than the model predicts, indicating that other mechanisms, such as dispersion or di,usion are also important in these conditions.
Production of Salinity Tolerant Nile Tilapia Through Introducing Foreign DNA into Fish Gonads 3 Random Amplified Polymorphic

This study was conducted to produce a salinity tolerant Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus through genetically modified breeding by introducing a fragmented purified DNA isolated from Artemia, Artemia salina into the gonads. Two groups of adult fish (16 females and 8 males) were chosen to be injected with the foreign DNA into their gonads using a hypodermic needle with two different concentrations (10 μg and 5 μg /0.1 ml/fish), besides the control group (4 males and 8 females) carried out. Post-hatching fry which produced from each treatment of DNA were collected and weighed then transferred separately to glass. Two salinity levels were used to rear the hatching fry during the present study20 ppt (equivalent to half the sea salinity level) and 40 ppt (equivalent to the sea salinity level) beside the freshwater as a control. The results showed a significant improvement (P≤0.05) in most of the growth performance parameters of genetically modified O. niloticus treated with 10 μg of Artemia DNA compared to the lowest dose of 5 μg of DNA and the control fish reared at 20 ppt of salinity. The results also showed that, the number of amplified bands detected varied, depending on the primers and DNA treatment. Highly genetic polymorphic percentage ranged from (8.00 to 71.79%) with an average of 39.05% using different random primers. The results of the present work suggested that, hyper-saline genetically modified O. niloticus with higher growth rate can be produced using a feasible and fast methodology.
Using the growth mindset to improve opportunities for negotiation in argument-based inquiry elementary classrooms

The purpose of this study is to evaluate if teaching students about the growth mindset improves achievement on standardized science assessment in a classroom that uses argument-based inquiry (ABI) instruction. A critical part of ABI is also referred to as negotiation and is considered cognitively demanding for students. The demands of argumentation often make its implementation extremely challenging for teachers because students often do not have strategies to overcome the failure they will encounter during the process. ABI is a research-based instructional practice that has been shown to improve student learning in science. This study will look at specific aspects of ABI and ways to improve student negotiation. Specifically, I was interested if including the growth mindset will help teachers with the rigor of ABI instruction. In order for meaningful negotiation to take place, students must develop their claims, back them with evidence, and critique the claims of others. Deciding that an alternative claim has better evidence than the student’s current claim is not always easy to accept, and that is why teaching the growth mindset could greatly impact students’ ability to overcome their false beliefs and recognize that failure is a part of learning. To determine if lessons about the growth mindset led to more meaningful ABI experiences, a quantitative analysis of Iowa Assessment Science scores was conducted through a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Students in the study showed statistically significant growth in their science scores from third grade (where they did not learn about the growth mindset) to fourth grade (where they did learn about the growth mindset), which is encouraging data for teachers who use the growth mindset as a part of their ABI instruction. USING THE GROWTH MINDSET TO IMPROVE OPPORTUNITIES 1
Effects of gain-loss frames on social preferences

The paper provides new experimental evidence on the difference between inequality aversion in the gain and in the loss domain. Incorporating loss aversion in the model by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and relying on a modified dictator game as proposed by Blanco et al. (2011), we demonstrate that the parameter of inequality aversion is lower when the game is framed with losses than with gains. Individuals would be less inequality averse for losses than for gains. The results also manifest that women are more inequality averse than men.
A compact SPECT/CT for small animal

A dual-modality compact SPECT/CT system for small animal imaging has been developed. The SPECT system consisted of a pinhole collimator and plate type NaI(Tl) scintillation crystal coupled to a PSPMT. The X-ray system consisted of a microfocus X-ray tube and a CMOS flat-panel detector. The SPECT system was mounted perpendicular to the X-ray system. Individual projections of SPECT and CT were acquired by rotating the animal about a vertical axis in front of the detectors. The SPECT and CT image were reconstructed using OSEM and Feldkamp's cone-beam algorithms, respectively. Mouse and rat SPECT demonstrated detailed activity distributions at the expected structures. A CT image obtained with 40 RVp and 0.5 mA presented high-resolution anatomic details. Fused SPECT/CT images demonstrated good agreement between the CT images and the corresponding uptake of the radiotracer. The SPECT/CT system developed in this study provides high-quality dual-modality images and could be useful to obtain functional images with high-resolution morphology information.
Combination of racial/ethnic and etiology/disease‐specific factors is associated with lower survival following liver transplantation in African Americans: an analysis from UNOS/OPTN database

Higher rates of hepatitis C virus (HCV) recurrence and lower response to HCV antiviral therapy contribute to the lower post‐liver transplantation (LT) survival among African Americans with HCV. The current study aims to evaluate race/ethnicity‐specific and etiology‐specific factors contributing to lower post‐LT survival among African Americans in the USA. The 2002–2012 United Network for Organ Sharing registry was utilized to evaluate race/ethnicity‐specific post‐LT survival among patients with HCV, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), alcoholic liver disease (ALD), non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis, and cryptogenic cirrhosis. From 2002 to 2012, HCV was the leading indication for LT. While African Americans accounted for 9.5% of all LT during this period, they had the lowest overall and etiology‐specific five‐yr post‐LT survival. On multivariate Cox proportional hazards modeling, African Americans had significantly lower post‐LT survival compared with non‐Hispanic whites among patients with HCV (HR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.19–1.41), HCC (HR, 1.49; 95% CI, 1.25–1.79), and ALD (HR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.19–1.94). In conclusion, African Americans had the lowest post‐LT survival among patients with HCV, HCC, and ALD. Race/ethnicity and the etiology of chronic liver disease were observed to have a combined detrimental effect leading to lower survival following LT in African Americans.
Sentiment analysis for Turkish Twitter feeds

Sentiment analysis is one of the most useful tools in social media monitoring. Implementing sentiment analysis on data gained from social media (Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook) can increase the customer satisfaction and decrease the costs for a company. Also sentiment analysis can be used in various domains, such as economic, commercial and opinion mining for the users to get meaningful information. In this study, Turkish Twitter feeds collected from Twitter API have been analyzed in terms of the sentiment context whether positive or negative using document classification methods. Experimental results have been conducted on machine learning algorithms such as SVM, Naive Bayes, Multinomial Naive Bayes and KNN. The features represented by vector space are extracted from two different models which are Bag of Words and N-Gram. The experimental results have been investigated on the effect of classification methods.
Cooperation in Supply Chains: from practical problems to conceptual models

Improving the performance of supply chains is a critical issue in nowadays industry. In that purpose, cooperation between partners motivates a great attention. Technical aspects of current cooperation procedures as promoted by large companies are firstly described, and compared to some real problems identified after interviews in the aeronautical industry. Technical issues are in our opinion insufficient for fully explaining the described situations. Therefore, behavioral concepts suggested in the literature of management and sociology of organizations are explored and conceptual models linking the selected concepts are suggested, allowing to have a deeper understanding of real cooperation situations.
Económico Contagion spillovers between sovereign and financial European sector from a ∆ CoV aR approach

I examine the evolution of contagion indexes between the European Financial sector and the sovereign sector (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain) during the European sovereign credit crisis. Contagion indexes, ∆CoV aR and ∆CoES, reflect events associated with extreme left tail returns and interdependencies between defaults different than those observed in tranquil times. These measures reveal very useful information concerning risk management. I use a copula approach with time-varying parameters to capture changes in the tail dependence between returns in the financial and the sovereign sectors. I employ a Switching Markov model to identify the most stressful moments of the contagion indicators. The results point out the emergence of Greek debt crisis on March 2010 and the vulnerable situation of Spain and Italy in summer 2011 as the main periods where the contagion from the sovereign to the financial sector was stronger. The decrease in contagion was gradual since the speech made by the ECB on July 26th; 2012. The statistical significance of the change in the contagion indicators is checked using boostrap tests.
How resonance assists hydrogen bonding interactions: An energy decomposition analysis

Block‐localized wave function (BLW) method, which is a variant of the ab initio valence bond (VB) theory, was employed to explore the nature of resonance‐assisted hydrogen bonds (RAHBs) and to investigate the mechanism of synergistic interplay between π delocalization and hydrogen‐bonding interactions. We examined the dimers of formic acid, formamide, 4‐pyrimidinone, 2‐pyridinone, 2‐hydroxpyridine, and 2‐hydroxycyclopenta‐2,4‐dien‐1‐one. In addition, we studied the interactions in β‐diketone enols with a simplified model, namely the hydrogen bonds of 3‐hydroxypropenal with both ethenol and formaldehyde. The intermolecular interaction energies, either with or without the involvement of π resonance, were decomposed into the Hitler‐London energy (ΔEHL), polarization energy (ΔEpol), charge transfer energy (ΔECT), and electron correlation energy (ΔEcor) terms. This allows for the examination of the character of hydrogen bonds and the impact of π conjugation on hydrogen bonding interactions. Although it has been proposed that resonance‐assisted hydrogen bonds are accompanied with an increasing of covalency character, our analyses showed that the enhanced interactions mostly originate from the classical dipole–dipole (i.e., electrostatic) attraction, as resonance redistributes the electron density and increases the dipole moments in monomers. The covalency of hydrogen bonds, however, changes very little. This disputes the belief that RAHB is primarily covalent in nature. Accordingly, we recommend the term “resonance‐assisted binding (RAB)” instead of “resonance‐assisted hydrogen bonding (RHAB)” to highlight the electrostatic, which is a long‐range effect, rather than the electron transfer nature of the enhanced stabilization in RAHBs. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 28: 455–466, 2007
On the Generalized Witsenhausen Counterexample

Witsenhausen’s counterexample is a deceptively simple distributed control problem that has remained unsolved for the last 40 years. Our recent work uses information-theoretic techniques that exploit implicit communication between the controllers to obtain characterizations of optimal costs for the Witsenhausen counterexample to within a constant factor uniformly over the problem parameters. To gain deeper insight into the nebulous concept of implicit communication, four modifications to the counterexample are considered — a zerosum variant inspired by secrecy, two alternative orderings of the controllers, and a generalized Witsenhausen counterexample that includes quadratic costs on all states and inputs. For the first three modifications, implicit communication is either detrimental, impossible, or useless, and the optimal strategies are linear. However, nonlinear strategies outperform linear strategies by a substantial factor for the last, where implicit communication is central to strategy design. This is true even though linear strategies are no longer arbitrarily far from optimal with the inclusion of these additional cost terms.
Personalized SMS, Survey Participation and Data quality – The Italian Case

A number of papers have found that personalization of salutations in e-mail communications may lead to higher response rates. Given their widespread use, Short Text Messages (SMS) may also be useful contact modes in surveys. Using experimental data from an online survey on Italian graduates, this work intends to evaluate the impact of personalized SMS salutations on response and measurement error. We find evidence that personalization has a positive impact on response rates and some indication that it may lead to better survey data. Limitations and implications of the study are also discussed.
High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) Fingerprinting, Mineral Composition and In Vitro Antioxidant Activity of Methanol Leaf Extract of Synsepalum dulcificum (Sapotaceae) -

This study was carried out to identify the phytochemicals present and in vitro antioxidant activity of methanol leaf extract of Synsepalum dulcificum (MSD). Standard protocols were used to evaluate the total phenols, total flavonoids and total antioxidants content of the extract. Nitric oxide (NO), hydroxyl radical (OH), ABTSÂ·+ and 2,2-diphenyl -1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radicals scavenging activity, inhibition of lipid peroxidation and the ability of MSD to chelate ferrous ion as well its reductive potential were also evaluated. HPLC was used to confirm the presence of polyphenols and carotenoids. Results showed the presence of flavonoids, saponins, terpenoids and cardiac glycosides in the extract. Among others, appreciable levels of potassium, calcium, sodium and magnesium were detected in the extract. The extract showed a high DPPH, ABTSÂ·+, hydroxyl and nitric oxide radicals scavenging activity. The IC50 of the extract for DPPH, NO, OH-, and ABTSÂ·+ radicals scavenging assays were 139.45 μg/ml, 119.17 μg/ml, 147.65 μg/ml, and 135.83 μg/ml respectively. The total phenol and total flavonoids of MSD were estimated to be 3.244 mg/gTAE and 13.02 mg/gQE respectively. It could be inferred that MSD showed appreciable in vitro antioxidant activity and could be useful in preventing and ameliorating diseases in which free radicals are implicated.
Generative Adversarial Networks for High Fidelity Simulation of Spacecraft Docking

This report describes a image rendering method based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Given an input synthetic image of a target spacecraft with a certain pose configuration, the proposed method outputs a high fidelity image of the target spacecraft with the same pose. This work demonstrates this method by generating two image datasets of a spacecraft, the first dataset will be produced using an OpenGL rendering pipeline while the second dataset will be produced by capturing real images of a mock-up spacecraft placed in a high fidelity illumination environment.
Modeling Firm Population Dynamics: An Application to the Turkish Manufacturing Industry for the 1950¡V2000 Period

This paper examines the population dynamics of Turkish manufacturing firms using annual data on the aggregate industry over the period 1950-2000. Among the four models considered, the density dependence model seems to provide the best fit. This model is extended for further examination. One interesting finding is that business cycles do not play a role in determining changes in firm numbers in the industry. The number of firms is negatively influenced by average number of employees; however, it does not appear to depend on average payments to employees. Energy intensity also does not seem to influence the population size dynamics.
Exploring the Effects of Environment Density and Target Visibility on Object Selection in 3D Virtual Environments

Object selection is a primary interaction technique which must be supported by any interactive three-dimensional virtual reality application. Although numerous techniques exist, few have been designed to support the selection of objects in dense target environments, or the selection of objects which are occluded from the user's viewpoint. There is, thus, a limited understanding on how these important factors will affect selection performance. In this paper, we present a set of design guidelines and strategies to aid the development of selection techniques which can compensate for environment density and target visibility. Based on these guidelines, we present two techniques, the depth ray and the 3D bubble cursor, both augmented to allow for the selection of fully occluded targets. In a formal experiment, we evaluate the relative performance of these techniques, varying both the environment density and target visibility. The results found that both of these techniques outperformed a baseline point cursor technique, with the depth ray performing best overall.
S-CAVE: Effective SSD caching to improve virtual machine storage performance

A unique challenge for SSD storage caching management in a virtual machine (VM) environment is to accomplish the dual objectives: maximizing utilization of shared SSD cache devices and ensuring performance isolation among VMs. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of S-CAVE, a hypervisor-based SSD caching facility, which effectively manages a storage cache in a Multi-VM environment by collecting and exploiting runtime information from both VMs and storage devices. Due to a hypervisor's unique position between VMs and hardware resources, S-CAVE does not require any modification to guest OSes, user applications, or the underlying storage system. A critical issue to address in S-CAVE is how to allocate limited and shared SSD cache space among multiple VMs to achieve the dual goals. This is accomplished in two steps. First, we propose an effective metric to determine the demand for SSD cache space of each VM. Next, by incorporating this cache demand information into a dynamic control mechanism, S-CAVE is able to efficiently provide a fair share of cache space to each VM while achieving the goal of best utilizing the shared SSD cache device. In accordance with the constraints of all the functionalities of a hypervisor, S-CAVE incurs minimum overhead in both memory space and computing time. We have implemented S-CAVE in vSphere ESX, a widely used commercial hypervisor from VMWare. Our extensive experiments have shown its strong effectiveness for various data-intensive applications.
Self-association of herpes simplex virus type 1 ICP35 is via coiled-coil interactions and promotes stable interaction with the major capsid protein

The ordered copolymerization of viral proteins to form the herpes simplex virus (HSV) capsid occurs within the nucleus of the infected cell and is a complex process involving the products of at least six viral genes. In common with capsid assembly in double-stranded DNA bacteriophages, HSV capsid assembly proceeds via the assembly of an outer capsid shell around an interior scaffold. This capsid intermediate matures through loss of the scaffold and packaging of the viral genomic DNA. The interior of the HSV capsid intermediate contains the viral protease and assembly protein which compose the scaffold. Proteolytic processing of these proteins is essential for and accompanies capsid maturation. The assembly protein (ICP35) is the primary component of the scaffold, and previous studies have demonstrated it to be capable of intermolecular association with itself and with the major capsid protein, VP5. We have defined structural elements within ICP35 which are responsible for intermolecular self-association and for interaction with VP5. Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) two-hybrid assays and far-Western studies with purified recombinant ICP35 mapped a core self-association domain between Ser165 and His219. Site-directed mutations in this domain implicate a putative coiled coil in ICP35 self-association. This coiled-coil motif is highly conserved within the assembly proteins of other alpha herpesviruses. In the two-hybrid assay the core self-association domain was sufficient to mediate stable self-association only in the presence of additional structural elements in either N- or C-terminal flanking regions. These regions also contain conserved sequences which exhibit a high propensity for alpha helicity and may contribute to self-association by forming additional short coiled coils. Our data supports a model in which ICP35 molecules have an extended conformation and associate in parallel orientation through homomeric coiled-coil interactions. In additional two-hybrid experiments we evaluated ICP35 mutants for association with VP5. We discovered that in addition to the C-terminal 25 amino acids of ICP35, previously shown to be required for VP5 binding, an additional upstream region was required. This region is between Ser165 and His234 and contains the core self-association domain. Site-directed mutations and construction of chimeric molecules in which the self-association domain of ICP35 was replaced by the GCN4 leucine zipper indicated that this region contributes to VP5 binding through mediating self-association of ICP35 and not through direct binding interactions. Our results suggest that self-association of ICP35 strongly promotes stable association with VP5 in vivo and are consistent with capsid formation proceeding via formation of stable subassemblies of ICP35 and VP5 which subsequently assemble into capsid intermediates in the nucleus.