Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Autonomous Time Synchronization Algorithm and Time Synchronization Link Performance Analysis in the Satellite Constellation

A variety aerospace applications require high-precision time frequency reference and the corresponding time synchronization method. This paper studies the movement characteristics of the satellite in the constellation, and proposes an autonomous dynamic two-way high-precision time synchronization algorithm with adaptation to between the moving satellites. According to the given three-tier constellation structure including GEO satellites, IGSO satellites and MEO satellites,which simulates the intersatellite range between tier in the constellation, and analyzes the time synchronization link performance of GEO-IGSO, GEO-MEO and IGSO-MEO at band S with setting intersatellite transmission system, link parameters, transmission loss and without regard to intersatellite pointing accuracy error, etc. The results show that when the intersatellite range is the maximum, S-band transmission rate shall reach 1Mbps or more, when the diameter of the antenna is 1m, the required transmitting power of GEO,IGSO and MEO satellite is about 50W.The results provide references for the choice of transmitter power of the satellite, antenna diameter, and intersatellite information transmission rate, etc., so as to improve the autonomous time synchronization accuracy and the establishment of a two-way time synchronization link.
Efficient physical operators for cost-based XPath execution

The creation of a generic and modular query optimization and processing infrastructure can provide significant benefits to XML data management. Key pieces of such an infrastructure are the physical operators that are available to the execution engine, to turn queries into execution plans. Such operators, to be efficient, need to implement sophisticated algorithms for logical XPath or XQuery operations. Moreover, to enable a cost-based optimizer to choose among them correctly, it is also necessary to provide cost models for such operator implementations. In this paper we present two novel families of algorithms for XPath physical operators, called LookUp (LU) and Sort-Merge-based (SM), along with detailed cost models. Our algorithms have significantly better performance compared to existing techniques over any one of a variety of different XML storage systems that provide a set of common primitive access methods. To substantiate the robustness and efficiency of our physical operators, we evaluate their individual performance over four different XML storage engines against operators that implement existing XPath processing techniques. We also demonstrate the performance gains for twig processing of using plans consisting of our operators compared to a state of the art holistic technique, specifically Twig2Stack. Additionally, we evaluate the precision of our cost models, and we conduct an analysis of the sensitivity of our algorithms and cost models to a variety of parameters.
Experiments with a teleoperated system for improved bio-micromanipulations

Cell and embryo microinjections, like many other biomanipulation tasks, involve delicate and precise manual control of micropipettes under a microscope. These operations are repeatedly carried out by highly trained personnel, who spend hours peering through the binoculars of the microscope. As a result, the taxing working conditions and the skills of the operators have a significant impact on the results of the operations. To facilitate the training of new operators and to improve the consistency and efficiency rates of microinjections, we have developed a teleoperated system that demonstrated remarkable improvements in performance and skill acquisition levels during blastocyst microinjection tasks. It combined the advantages of easy, controlled and accurate teleoperation with a more ergonomic work environment, resulting in outstanding reduction in operator training period and amateur performances comparable to those of highly trained operators. This new system, which is fully controlled from a remote computer using a game joystick, was evaluated by comparing teleoperated blastocyst microinjections conducted by one expert and two amateurs. Further, these results were compared to those from expert microinjections conducted on a conventional system. The experiments demonstrated fast learning on the new system and high microinjection success rates (around 90%) for all operators after only three microinjection sessions. Microinjection quality on the new teleoperated system also proved to be high. This was assessed by having the embryos develop to term and computing the birth rates. Higher birth rates (up to twice as high) were observed for embryos injected on the novel system than for those injected on the traditional system. These results prove that the incorporation of robotics into biomanipulation improves the efficiency of the operations, and of the operator, and it eliminates the need for extensive training of microinjection personnel.
On K-wise Independent Distributions and Boolean Functions

We pursue a systematic study of the following problem. Let f:{0,1}^n -> {0,1} be a (usually monotone) Boolean function whose behaviour is well understood when the input bits are identically independently distributed. What can be said about the behaviour of the function when the input bits are not completely independent, but only k-wise independent, i.e. every subset of k bits is independent? more precisely, how high should k be so that any k-wise independent distribution "fools" the function, i.e. causes it to behave nearly the same as when the bits are completely independent? We analyze several well known Boolean functions (including AND, Majority, Tribes and Percolation among others), some of which turn out to have surprising properties. In some of our results we use tools from the theory of the classical moment problem, seemingly for the first time in this subject, to shed light on these questions.
Characterization of Dedifferentiating Human Mature Adipocytes from the Visceral and Subcutaneous Fat Compartments: Fibroblast-Activation Protein Alpha and Dipeptidyl Peptidase 4 as Major Components of Matrix Remodeling

Mature adipocytes can reverse their phenotype to become fibroblast-like cells. This is achieved by ceiling culture and the resulting cells, called dedifferentiated fat (DFAT) cells, are multipotent. Beyond the potential value of these cells for regenerative medicine, the dedifferentiation process itself raises many questions about cellular plasticity and the pathways implicated in cell behavior. This work has been performed with the objective of obtaining new information on adipocyte dedifferentiation, especially pertaining to new targets that may be involved in cellular fate changes. To do so, omental and subcutaneous mature adipocytes sampled from severely obese subjects have been dedifferentiated by ceiling culture. An experimental design with various time points along the dedifferentiation process has been utilized to better understand this process. Cell size, gene and protein expression as well as cytokine secretion were investigated. Il-6, IL-8, SerpinE1 and VEGF secretion were increased during dedifferentiation, whereas MIF-1 secretion was transiently increased. A marked decrease in expression of mature adipocyte transcripts (PPARγ2, C/EBPα, LPL and Adiponectin) was detected early in the process. In addition, some matrix remodeling transcripts (FAP, DPP4, MMP1 and TGFβ1) were rapidly and strongly up-regulated. FAP and DPP4 proteins were simultaneously induced in dedifferentiating mature adipocytes supporting a potential role for these enzymes in adipose tissue remodeling and cell plasticity.
Fast evaluation of structured queries for information retrieval

Information retrieval systems are being challenged to managelarger and larger document collections. In an effort to providebetter retrieval performance on large collections, moresophisticated retrieval techniques have been developed that supportrich, structured queries. Structured queries are not amenable topreviously proposed optimization techniques. Optimizing execution,however, is even more important in the context of large documentcollections. We present a new structured query optimizationtechnique which we have implemented in an inference network-basedinformation retrieval system. Experimental results show that queryevaluation time can be reduced by more than half with little impacton retrieval effectiveness.
Active Consensus over Sensor Networks via Randomized Communication

Distributed consensus has been widely studied for sensor network applications. Whereas the asymptotic convergence rate has been extensively explored in prior work, other important and practical issues, including energy efficiency and link reliability, have received relatively little attention. In this paper, we present a distributed consensus approach that can achieve a good balance between convergence rate and energy efficiency. The approach selects a subset of links that significantly contribute to the formation of consensus at each iteration, thus adapting the network's topology dynamically to the changes of the sensor states. A global optimization problem is formulated for optimal link selection, which is subsequently factorized into sub-problems that can be solved locally, and practically via approximation. An algorithm is derived to solve the approximation efficiently, using quadratic programming (QP) relaxation and random sampling. Simulations on networks of different types demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the communication energy costs without significantly impacting the convergence rate and that the approach is robust to link failures.
The KaffeOS Java runtime system

Single-language runtime systems, in the form of Java virtual machines, are widely deployed platforms for executing untrusted mobile code. These runtimes provide some of the features that operating systems provide: interapplication memory protection and basic system services. They do not, however, provide the ability to isolate applications from each other. Neither do they provide the ability to limit the resource consumption of applications. Consequently, the performance of current systems degrades severely in the presence of malicious or buggy code that exhibits ill-behaved resource usage. We show that Java runtime systems can be extended to support processes, and that processes can provide robust and efficient support for untrusted applications.We have designed and built KaffeOS, a Java runtime system that provides support for processes. KaffeOS isolates processes and manages the physical resources available to them: CPU and memory. Unlike existing Java virtual machines, KaffeOS can safely terminate processes without adversely affecting the integrity of the system, and it can fully reclaim a terminated process's resources. Finally, KaffeOS requires no changes to the Java language. The novel aspects of the KaffeOS architecture include the application of a user/kernel boundary as a structuring principle for runtime systems, the employment of garbage collection techniques for resource management and isolation, and a model for direct sharing of objects between untrusted applications. The difficulty in designing KaffeOS lay in balancing the goals of isolation and resource management against the goal of allowing direct sharing of objects.For the SpecJVM benchmarks, the overhead that our KaffeOS prototype incurs ranges from 0&percent; to 25&percent;, when compared to the open-source JVM on which it is based. We consider this overhead acceptable for the safety that KaffeOS provides. In addition, our KaffeOS prototype can scale to run more applications than running multiple JVMs. Finally, in the presence of malicious or buggy code that engages in a denial-of-service attack, KaffeOS can contain the attack, remove resources from the attacked applications, and continue to provide robust service to other clients.
Incidence of bacterial enteropathogens among hospitalized diarrhea patients from Orissa, India.

Bacteriological analysis of 1,551 stool/rectal swabs from all age groups of diarrhea patients of different hospitals of Orissa from January 2004 to December 2006 was carried out using standard procedures. Among all enteropathogens isolated in 886 culture-positive samples, Escherichia coli constituted 75.5%, including 13.2% pathogenic E. coli; Vibrio cholerae O1 constituted 17.3%; V. cholerae O139, 1%; Shigella spp. , 4.5% (Shigella flexneri type 6, 2.9%, S. dysenteriae type I, 0.7%, S. sonnei, 0.6%, and S. boydii, 0.3%); Salmonella spp. , 0.7%; and Aeromonas spp. , only 2.0%. The isolation of bacterial enteropathogens was highest during July, 2005, followed by September, 2006. The prevalence of shigellosis in this region was relatively low. Cholera cases were more frequent during the rainy seasons. The dominance of V. cholerae O1 Inaba over Ogawa serotypes was observed in 2005, whereas this trend was reversed in 2006. The resistance profile of V. cholerae O1 was co-trimoxazole (Co), furazolidone (Fr), and nalidixic acid (Na); for Aeromonas spp. , it was ampicillin (A), Fr, ciprofloxacin (Cf), Na, norfloxacin (Nx), and Co. Pathogenic E. coli strains were resistant to A, Fr, Co, streptomycin (S), Cf, Na, Nx, and neomycin (N); Shigella spp. were resistant to Fr, Na, Co, and S; and Salmonella spp. were resistant to A and Fr. Active surveillance should be continued among diarrhea patients to look for different enteropathogens and to define the shifting antibiogram patterns in this region.
Discriminative Low-Rank Tracking

Good tracking performance is in general attributed to accurate representation over previously obtained targets or reliable discrimination between the target and the surrounding background. In this work, we exploit the advantages of the both approaches to achieve a robust tracker. We construct a subspace to represent the target and the neighboring background, and simultaneously propagate their class labels via the learned subspace. Moreover, we propose a novel criterion to identify the target from numerous target candidates on each frame, which takes into account both discrimination reliability and representation accuracy. In addition, with the proposed criterion, the ambiguity in the class labels of the neighboring background samples, which often influences the reliability of discriminative tracking model, is effectively alleviated, while the training set is still kept small. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our tracker performs favourably against many other state-of-the-art trackers.
A Novel Viral SOCS from Infectious Spleen and Kidney Necrosis Virus: Interacts with Jak1 and Inhibits IFN-α Induced Stat1/3 Activation

Interferon (IFN)-induced Janus kinase (Jak)/signal transducer and activator of transcription (Stat) pathway is important in controlling immune responses and is negatively response-regulated by the suppressor of cytokine signaling (SOCS) proteins. However, several viruses have developed various strategies to inhibit this pathway to circumvent the anti-viral immunity of the host. The infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus (ISKNV) is the type species of the genus Megalocytivirus in the family Iridoviridae and a causative agent of epizootics in fish. ISKNV ORF103R encodes a predicted viral SOCS (vSOCS) with high homology to the vertebrate SOCS1, but lacks a SOCS-box domain. Interestingly, vSOCS only exists in the genus Megalocytivirus. ISKNV-vSOCS can block the IFN-α-induced Jak/Stat pathway in HepG2 cells. Over-expression of ISKNV-vSOCS inhibited the activities of IFN-stimulated response element (ISRE) promoter; however, the inhibitions by ISKNV-vSOCS were dose-dependent. ISKNV-vSOCS interacted with Jak1 protein and inhibited its tyrosine kinase activity in vitro. ISKNV-vSOCS also impaired the phosphorylation of Stat1 and Stat3 proteins and suppressed their activations. The point mutations (F18D, S66A, S85A, and R64K) of ISKNV-vSOCS significantly impaired the inhibition of IFN-α-induced ISRE-promoter activation. In conclusion, vSOCS inhibits IFN-α-induced Stat1/Stat3 signaling, suggesting that Megalocytivirus has developed a novel strategy to evade IFN anti-viral immunity via vSOCS protein.
Sorafenib prevents liver fibrosis in a non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) rodent model

Liver fibrosis occurring as an outcome of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) can precede the development of cirrhosis. We investigated the effects of sorafenib in preventing liver fibrosis in a rodent model of NASH. Adult Sprague-Dawley rats were fed a choline-deficient high-fat diet and exposed to diethylnitrosamine for 6 weeks. The NASH group (n=10) received vehicle and the sorafenib group (n=10) received 2.5 mg·kg-1·day-1 by gavage. A control group (n=4) received only standard diet and vehicle. Following treatment, animals were sacrificed and liver tissue was collected for histologic examination, mRNA isolation, and analysis of mitochondrial function. Genes related to fibrosis (MMP9, TIMP1, TIMP2), oxidative stress (HSP60, HSP90, GST), and mitochondrial biogenesis (PGC1α) were evaluated by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Liver mitochondrial oxidation activity was measured by a polarographic method, and cytokines by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Sorafenib treatment restored mitochondrial function and reduced collagen deposition by nearly 63% compared to the NASH group. Sorafenib upregulated PGC1α and MMP9 and reduced TIMP1 and TIMP2 mRNA and IL-6 and IL-10 protein expression. There were no differences in HSP60, HSP90 and GST expression. Sorafenib modulated PGC1α expression, improved mitochondrial respiration and prevented collagen deposition. It may, therefore, be useful in the treatment of liver fibrosis in NASH.
Exploring Changes in Science Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Culturally Diverse Students During an Equity-Focused Course

ABSTRACT In recent decades, schools in most Western countries, including the United States, have become increasingly culturally diverse. As global migration rises, cultural diversity in schools will continue to grow. Though an expansive research base has shown that teacher attitudes play an important role in student performance, comparatively little is known about science teachers’ attitudes toward cultural diversity or teaching culturally diverse students. The purpose of this study was to explore how the attitudes of beginning secondary science teachers toward teaching culturally diverse students were influenced by a four-week course focused on equitable science teaching. We conducted semi-structured interviews with participants (n=8) at two time points: once during the first week of the course and once during the last week. Both interviews followed an attitude-eliciting, card-sort activity completed by teachers in small groups. Qualitative analysis of the data indicated that, following their participation in the course, science teachers felt more prepared to work with their culturally diverse students; posited that authority shifting in the classroom could benefit student learning; and openly acknowledged that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences influence the classroom environment. These findings suggest that engaging beginning science teachers in opportunities to be introduced to, reflect upon, and consider practical applications of culturally responsive teaching may positively impact their attitudes and beliefs about teaching culturally diverse students and about the students themselves.
Multi-recipient encryption, revisited

A variant of public key encryption that promises efficiency gains due to batch processing is multi-recipient public key encryption (MR-PKE). Precisely, in MR-PKE, a dedicated encryption routine takes a vector of messages and a vector of public keys and outputs a vector of ciphertexts, where the latter can be decrypted individually, as in regular PKE. In this paper we revisit the established security notions of MR-PKE and the related primitive MR-KEM. We identify a subtle flaw in a security model by Bellare, Boldyreva, and Staddon, that also appears in later publications by different authors. We further observe that these security models rely on the knowledge-of-secret-key (KOSK) assumption---a requirement that is rarely met in practice. We resolve this situation by proposing strengthened security notions for MR-PKE and MR-KEMs, together with correspondingly secure yet highly efficient schemes. Importantly, our models abstain from restricting the set of considered adversaries in the way prior models did, and in particular do not require the KOSK setting. We prove our constructions secure assuming hardness of the static Diffie-Hellman problem, in the random oracle model.
Abstract framework for social ontologies and folksonomized ontologies

Many web-based public repositories are widely adopting tag-based metadata approaches as their main classification mechanism. This phenomenon is fostering initiatives to improve the semantic interpretation of tags, usually involving two main entities: "social ontologies", which emerges from the collaborative tagging (folksonomies), and formal ontologies. In order to analyze and compare these initiatives we present here an abstract framework. It supports our argument that existing approaches do not explore the full potential of the combination between folksonomies and ontologies due to their unidirectionality. The framework is also the basis to evidence that a fusion approach---as proposed in our "folksonomized ontology"---enables to better explore the organic semantics of folksonomies combined to the engineered semantics of ontologies.
Quadtree based variable rate oriented mean shape-gain vector quantization

Mean shape-gain vector quantization (MSGVQ) is extended to include negative gains and square isometries. Square isometries together with a classification technique based on average block intensities enable us to enlarge the MSGVQ codebook size without any additional storage requirements while keeping the complexity of both the codebook generation and the encoding manageable. Variable rate codes are obtained with a quadtree segmentation based on a rate-distortion criterion. Experimental results show that our scheme performs favorably when compared to previous product code techniques or quadtree based VQ methods.
Comparison of different quantitative sensory testing methods during remifentanil infusion in volunteers.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare thermal and current sensory testing stimuli with respect to opioid responsiveness. METHODS Eighteen healthy volunteers were randomized in a placebo-controlled, double-blind crossover study to receive an infusion of remifentanil 0.08 micro g kg(-1) min(-1) or saline for 40 min. Test procedures included determination of pain perception thresholds (PPT) and pain tolerance thresholds (PTT) to heat, cold, and current at 5, 250 and 2000 Hz, at baseline and at the end of the infusion. RESULTS Both current at 5 Hz (PPT 3.69 (SD 2.48) mA vs 2.01 (1.52) mA; PTT 6.42 (2.79) mA vs 3.63 (2.31) mA; P<0.001) and 250 Hz (PPT 4.31 (2.42) mA vs 2.89 (1.57) mA; PTT 7.08 (2.68) mA vs 4.81 (2.42) mA; P<0.001) and heat (PPT 47.4 (2.7) degrees C vs 45.2 (3) degrees C; PTT 51.1 (1.8) degrees C vs 49.7 (1.8) degrees C; P<0.05) detected a significant analgesic effect of remifentanil compared with placebo. No analgesic effect was shown on cold or current at 2000 Hz. The magnitude of responsiveness of current stimuli at 5 Hz and 250 Hz was superior to heat stimuli. CONCLUSION Both current (5 and 250 Hz) and heat sensory testing detected a significant analgesic effect of a remifentanil infusion compared with saline. There was more response to current testing.