Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Approximation to the condition number distribution of almost square matrices

The condition number distribution of random matrices is crucial to understand for statistical characterization of various communication systems. In this paper, we propose a general approximation methodology for the condition number distribution of finite dimensional Wishart matrices. This approximation leads to a computable expression for condition number distributions. The proposed method can be applied to both uncorrelated and correlated central Wishart matrices. This approximation is shown to be most accurate when the multivariate sample matrix is close to a square matrix and when there is correlation in the smaller of the dimensions of the sample matrix. The accuracy of the proposed approximation formula is validated by comparing with simulation results, with the achieved accuracy being remarkably good.
Extent and drivers of intra-regional trade in food products in ECOWAS

Agriculture is the mainstay of the economies in most of ECOWAS countries. Ironically, however, persistent food shortage arising from constraints on agriculture is exposing many of them to threats of extreme hunger and starvation. Trade in food products has been identified as a very critical factor in safeguarding food security for the world's poor. This study therefore examined the extent and drivers of intra-regional trade in food products in ECOWAS and the two monetary zones (WAEMU and WAMZ) in the sub-region. Poisson Quasi Maximum Likelihood of Santos-Silva and Tenreyro was used to estimate the gravity model. While exporter income discourages intra-regional trade in food products, importer income promotes it. Landed area irrigated and the land available for cultivation promotes intra-regional trade in food products in ECOWAS. It is only in WAMZ that colonial ties and border enhance intra-regional trade in food products.
Illegal Immigration, Foreign Aid, and the Transit Countries

This article examines the problem facing an advanced, final-destination country as it seeks cooperation from its less-well-off neighbors to impede unauthorized, third-country migrants from transiting their territories. With that aim, it transfers aid to the transit countries in support of their border-control efforts. Aid recipients, however, may have an incentive to divert resources to border security objectives other than immigration control. We characterize the donor’s optimal allocation of aid between the transit countries and the optimal use of aid by the latter in the Nash equilibrium. These values of the policy instruments are subsequently compared with those in an equilibrium where the transit countries (i) compete for a share of aid, (ii) collude to maximize joint welfare, and (iii) follow the donor who moves first. (JEL codes: F22).
A New DFT-Based Phasor Estimation Algorithm Using High-Frequency Modulation

This paper proposes a new fast algorithm to estimate the fundamental phasor of fault current signals, based on discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Since fault currents include decaying dc component (ddc), DFT-based algorithms have inaccuracy in phasor estimation. The proposed algorithm consists of four steps. First, a new auxiliary signal is introduced based on a simple high-frequency modulation of the fault current. Then, DFT of the fault current and sample-summation of both fault current and auxiliary signal are calculated, for each one-cycle-length data stream. Next, DFT estimation error due to the ddc is calculated. Finally, by removing this error, accurate fundamental phasor is obtained. This paper uses an innovative and accurate formulation based on notations of signal processing literature. To validate the proposed algorithm, several computer-simulated signals and an electromagnetic transient program-generated signal are employed. The proposed algorithm is compared with recent phasor estimation methods, using wide variety of test signals. Standard indices of rise time, settling time, and percentage overshoot are used for comparison. These comparisons show that the proposed algorithm has robust performance in off-nominal frequency condition, and presence of harmonics, noise and multiple ddc components. Moreover, it provides faster convergence speed and lower computation burden.
Mobile phase modifier effects in multimodal cation exchange chromatography

This study examines protein adsorption behavior and the effects of mobile phase modifiers in multimodal chromatographic systems. Chromatography results with a diverse protein library indicate that multimodal and ion exchange resins have markedly different protein binding behavior and selectivity. NMR results corroborate the stronger binding observed for the multimodal system and provide insight into the structural basis for the observed binding behavior. Protein‐binding affinity and selectivity in multimodal and ion exchange systems are then examined using a variety of mobile phase modifiers. Arginine and guanidine are found to have dramatic effects on protein adsorption, yielding changes in selectivity in both chromatographic systems. While sodium caprylate leads to slightly weaker chromatographic retention for most proteins, certain proteins exhibit significant losses in retention in both systems. The presence of a competitive binding mechanism between the multimodal ligand and sodium caprylate for binding to ubiquitin is confirmed using STD NMR. Polyol mobile phase modifiers are shown to result in increased retention for weakly bound proteins and decreased retention for strongly bound proteins, indicating that the overall retention behavior is determined by a balance between changes in electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions. This work provides an improved understanding of protein adsorption and mobile phase modifier effects in multimodal chromatographic systems and sets the stage for future work to develop more selective protein separation systems. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2012;109: 176–186. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The demise of social insurance

The disincentive e¤ects of social insurance have recently become a major point of debate in Western Europe, leading to cuts in bene ts and renewed focus on providing incentives. We study the evolution of the welfare state in a context of cultural transmission and endogenous taxes. Insurance allows agents to spread risk between di¤erent states of nature, but it creates moral hazard opportunities that some agents take advantage of. This static cost of moral hazard is augmented by a dynamic cost: social insurance tends to reduce the number of productive agents in the population and can lead to its complete unraveling over time. We show that a long period of generous welfare bene ts is not sustainable and is usually followed by reduced generosity in order to provide incentives to work. Even when the economy eventually reaches a state without any free riding the transition to this state
Water flow detection from a wearable device with a new feature, the spectral cover

This paper presents a new system for water flow detection on real life recordings and its application to medical context. The recognition system is based on an original feature for sound event detection in real life. This feature, called ”spectral cover” shows an interesting behaviour to recognize water flow in a noisy environment. The system is only based on thresholds. It is simple, robust, and can be used on every corpus without training. An experiment is realized with more than 7 hours of videos recorded by a wearable device. Our system obtains good results for the water flow event recognition (F-measure of 66%). A comparison with classical approaches using MFCC or low levels descriptors with GMM classifiers is done to attest the good performance of our system. Adding the spectral cover to low levels descriptors also improve their performance and confirms that this feature is relevant.
Identifying Credit Constraints Using Direct Elicitation Methodology: The Case of Indonesia

Credit loan is very essential for household economies which is mainly used for consumption smoothing to cope with income changes or other shocks. Households who are marginalised from financial systems find themselves have limited or no access to financial services to get credit loans. In understanding the different category of credit rationing, I use A2F survey data which covers adequate information about Indonesian households' financial behaviour. This nationwide survey carefully select households in order to ensure representativeness by using multistage random sampling based. Using DEM (direct elicitation methodology) approach as proposed by Boucher et al. (2009), I classify households according to their status towards credit market. The classification between constrained and unconstrained households is based on the loan supply and households' demand for loans. Using DEM approach, the classification can be brought into operational concept in household survey such as A2F survey. The effects of the constraints are investigated further by estimating the welfare loss. The results show that the credit constraints have negative impact where welfare costs occur between Rp. 6 millions and Rp. 24.5 millions in terms of annual household income.
Symbiosis of Aeromonas veronii Biovar sobria and Hirudo medicinalis, the Medicinal Leech: a Novel Model for Digestive Tract Associations

ABSTRACT Hirudo medicinalis, the medicinal leech, is applied postoperatively in modern medicine. Infections by Aeromonasoccur in up to 20% of patients unless a preemptive antibiotic treatment is administered. The associated infections demonstrate the need for a better understanding of the digestive tract flora ofH. medicinalis. Early studies reported the presence of a single bacterial species in the digestive tract and suggested that these bacteria were endosymbionts contributing to the digestion of blood. In this study, we cultivated bacteria from the digestive tract and characterized them biochemically. The biochemical test results identified the isolates as Aeromonas veronii biovar sobria. This species identification was supported by sequence comparison of a variable region of the genes coding for 16S rRNA. In a colonization assay, a rifampin-resistant derivative of a symbiotic isolate was fed in a blood meal to H. medicinalis. The strain colonized the digestive tract rapidly and reached a concentration similar to that of the native bacterial flora. For the first 12 h, the in vivo doubling time was 1.2 h at 23°C. After 12 h, at a density of 5 × 107 CFU/ml, the increase in viable counts ceased, suggesting a dramatic reduction in the bacterial growth rate. Two human fecal isolates, identified as Aeromonas hydrophila and A. veronii biovar sobria, were also able to colonize the digestive tract. These data demonstrate that the main culturable bacterium in the crop of H. medicinalis isA. veronii biovar sobria and that the medicinal leech can be used as a model for digestive tract association ofAeromonas species.
A Novel Configuration of Modular Bipolar Pulse Generator Topology Based on Marx Generator With Double Power Charging

A bipolar pulse has been proved to be more advanced in the treatment of tumor because of the elimination of muscle contractions and the effect for ablating nonuniform tissue. In this paper, a new type of modular bipolar pulsed-power generator based on Marx generator with double power charging is proposed. The concept of this generator is charging the two series of capacitors in parallel by two power sources, respectively, and then connecting the capacitors in series through solid-state switches with different control strategies. Utilizing a number of fast solid-state switches, the capacitors can be connected in series with different polarities, so that a positive or negative polarity pulse will be delivered to the load. The simulated models of this generator have been investigated in a PSPICE platform, and a laboratory prototype has been implemented in a laboratory. The simulation and test results verify the operation of the proposed topology in different switching modes. The development of this pulse generator can provide the hardware foundation for the research on biological effect without muscle contraction when the tumors are applied with bipolar pulse electric field.
Lumped-parameter model for in vivo cochlear stimulation

A lumped-parameter model that simulates the in vivo electrical properties of a guinea pig cochlea implanted with a multielectrode stimulating array is presented. A basic model of the low-frequency electroanatomy in a normally functioning guinea pig cochlea is developed by adding critical membrane capacitances to D. Strelioff's resistive network model (1973). The basic model of normal cochlear tissues is modified to account for anatomical and physiological differences between a normal and implanted cochlea, resulting in an impedance model of an implanted cochlea. Simulating the results of in vivo cochlear stimulation verifies the accuracy with which the modified cochlear model represents electrical properties within an electrically stimulated cochlea. Generalized simulations using this model suggest a straightforward phasing scheme capable of achieving sharply focused, channel-independent multielectrode cochlear stimulation. <<ETX>>
Automated segmentation of the choroid from clinical SD-OCT.

PURPOSE We developed and evaluated a fully automated 3-dimensional (3D) method for segmentation of the choroidal vessels, and quantification of choroidal vasculature thickness and choriocapillaris-equivalent thickness of the macula, and evaluated repeat variability in normal subjects using standard clinically available spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). METHODS A total of 24 normal subjects was imaged twice, using clinically available, 3D SD-OCT. A novel, fully-automated 3D method was used to segment and visualize the choroidal vasculature in macular scans. Local choroidal vasculature and choriocapillaris-equivalent thicknesses were determined. Reproducibility on repeat imaging was analyzed using overlapping rates, Dice coefficient, and root mean square coefficient of variation (CV) of choroidal vasculature and choriocapillaris-equivalent thicknesses. RESULTS For the 6 × 6 mm(2) macula-centered region as depicted by the SD-OCT, average choroidal vasculature thickness in normal subjects was 172.1 μm (95% confidence interval [CI] 163.7-180.5 μm) and average choriocapillaris-equivalent thickness was 23.1 μm (95% CI 20.0-26.2 μm). Overlapping rates were 0.79 ± 0.07 and 0.75 ± 0.06, Dice coefficient was 0.78 ± 0.08, CV of choroidal vasculature thickness was 8.0% (95% CI 6.3%-9.4%), and of choriocapillaris-equivalent thickness was 27.9% (95% CI 21.0%-33.3%). CONCLUSIONS Fully automated 3D segmentation and quantitative analysis of the choroidal vasculature and choriocapillaris-equivalent thickness demonstrated excellent reproducibility in repeat scans (CV 8.0%) and good reproducibility of choriocapillaris-equivalent thickness (CV 27.9%). Our method has the potential to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with eye diseases in which the choroid is affected.
Food Security Assessment

India has made enormous progress in providing food security for its people. Per capita calorie consumption increased 20 percent between the early 1980s and 2000. However, a sizeable share of the population still lacks access to sufficient quantities of food. Poverty remains a problem in that nearly a third of the country’s population lives below the poverty line. In the 1990s, rising prices of staple foods was the principal constraint to improving economic access to food. This increase was in contrast to a declining historical trend and reflects a fundamental contradiction in India’s food policy. Policymakers seek to provide low-priced foods to consumers while supporting producer prices. Mounting government expenditures are required to subsidize both farmers and consumers through price policies, implying the need for policy alternatives to address the trade-off between the welfare of the poorer consumer and that of the producer.
Cooperative movement of human and swarm robot maintaining stability of swarm

This paper proposes a method that a human and a swarm robot move cooperatively so as to maintain the swarm situation that the swarm robot surround the moving human. This paper is concerned with the control for maintaining the high stability of the swarm, and proposes a control algorithm for the robotic swarm in obstacle space. In this paper, the robotic swarm which includes whole robots is defined as a whole swarm. In addition, each robot with neighboring robots forms a local swarm that overlapped the other ones partially, so a robot can belong to some local swarms. The proposed algorithm for overcoming above problems is based on the center of gravity of the local swarm which attracts the robot of it, and is applied to the omni-directional mobile robots. It is confirmed that the effectiveness about maintaing the stability of the swarm through simulations using ODE (open dynamics engine).
Relative Lempel-Ziv with Constant-Time Random Access

Relative Lempel-Ziv [1] (RLZ) is a variant of LZ77 that can compress collections of similar genomes well, while still allowing fast random access to them. We implemented RLZ using compressed bit vectors to support constant-time random access at the cost of sublinear extra space. We compared our implementation of RLZ to Deorowicz and Grabowski's GDC [11] scheme and achieved comparable compression and much smaller access times for short substrings.
Mouse cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator forms cAMP-PKA–regulated apical chloride channels in cortical collecting duct

The cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) is expressed in many segments of the mammalian nephron, where it may interact with and modulate the activity of a variety of apical membrane proteins, including the renal outer medullary potassium (ROMK) K+ channel. However, the expression of CFTR in apical cell membranes or its function as a Cl− channel in native renal epithelia has not been demonstrated. Here, we establish that CFTR forms protein kinase A (PKA)-activated Cl− channels in the apical membrane of principal cells from the cortical collecting duct obtained from mice. These Cl− channels were observed in cell-attached apical patches of principal cells after stimulation by forskolin/3-isobutyl-1-methylxanthine. Quiescent Cl− channels were present in patches excised from untreated tubules because they could be activated after exposure to Mg-ATP and the catalytic subunit of PKA. The single-channel conductance, kinetics, and anion selectivity of these Cl− channels were the same as those of recombinant mouse CFTR channels expressed in Xenopus laevis oocytes. The CFTR-specific closed-channel blocker CFTRinh-172 abolished apical Cl− channel activity in excised patches. Moreover, apical Cl− channel activity was completely absent in principal cells from transgenic mice expressing the ΔF508 CFTR mutation but was present and unaltered in ROMK-null mice. We discuss the physiologic implications of open CFTR Cl− channels on salt handling by the collecting duct and on the functional CFTR–ROMK interactions in modulating the metabolic ATP-sensing of ROMK.
The UBX Protein SAKS1 Negatively Regulates Endoplasmic Reticulum-associated Degradation and p97-dependent Degradation*

Endoplasmic reticulum-associated degradation (ERAD) is an essential quality control process whereby misfolded proteins are exported from the endoplasmic reticulum and degraded by the proteasome in the cytosol. The ATPase p97 acts as an essential component of this process by providing the force needed for retrotranslocation and by serving as a processing station for the substrate once in the cytosol. Proteins containing the ubiquitin regulatory X (UBX) ubiquitin-like domain function as adaptors for p97 through their direct binding with the amino terminus of the ATPase. We demonstrate that the UBX protein SAKS1 is able to act as an adaptor for p97 that negatively modulates ERAD. This requires the ability of SAKS1 to bind both polyubiquitin and p97. Moreover, the association between SAKS1 and p97 is positively regulated by polyubiquitin binding of the UBX protein. SAKS1 also negatively impacts the p97-dependent processing required for degradation of a cytosolic, non-ERAD, substrate. We find SAKS1 is able to protect polyubiquitin from the activity of deubiquitinases, such as ataxin-3, that are necessary for efficient ERAD. Thus, SAKS1 inhibits protein degradation mediated by p97 complexes in the cytosol with a component of the mechanism being the ability to shield polyubiquitin chains from ubiquitin-processing factors.
Neuroanatomical and behavioral correlates of urinary dysfunction induced by 1 vaginal distension in rats 2

24 The aim of the present study was to use a model of simulated human childbirth in 25 rats to determine the damage to genitourinary structures and behavioral signs of 26 urinary dysfunction induced by VD in female rats. In Experiment 1, the length of the 27 genitourinary tract and the nerves associated with it were measured immediately 28 after simulated human delivery induced by vaginal distension (VD) or sham (SH) 29 procedure. Electroneurograms of the dorsal nerve of the clitoris (DNC) was also 30 recorded. In Experiment 2, histological characteristics of the bladder and major 31 pelvic ganglion (MPG) of VD and SH rats were evaluated. In Experiment 3, urinary 32 parameters were determined in conscious animals, during 6 h of dark and 6 h of 33 light, before and three days after VD or SH procedure. VD significantly increased 34 distal vagina width (p<0.001) and length of the motor branch of the sacral plexus 35 (p<0.05), the DNC (p<0.05) and vesical nerves (p<0.01), and decreased DNC 36 frequency and amplitude of firing. VD occluded the pelvic urethra inducing urinary 37 retention, hematomas in the bladder and thinness of the epithelial (p<0.05) and 38 detrusor (p<0.01) layers of the bladder. MPG parameters were not modified after 39 VD. Rats dripped urine in unusual places to void, without the stereotyped behavior 40 of micturition after VD. The neuroanatomical injuries after VD occur alongside 41 behavioral signs of urinary incontinence as determined by a new behavioral tool for 42 assessing micturition in conscious animals. 43