Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of Mycobacterium leprae antigens in the sera of leprosy patients by sandwich immunoradiometric assay using monoclonal antibodies

An immunological technique for demonstration of Mycobacterium leprae antigen in sera was developed by using specific as well as cross-reactive monoclonal antibodies. The sandwich immunoradiometric assay which we developed is a simple, robust assay that is sensitive to the nanogram level. Sera from 72 leprosy patients were screened for the presence of antigen by this assay. A total of 69% of untreated tuberculoid leprosy patients showed 35-kDa antigen positivity, and 45% of these patients showed anti-35-kDa antibody positivity. Consistently higher antigen positivity rates for the 35-, 12-, and 30- to 40-kDa components of M. leprae were observed in lepromatous leprosy patients than in tuberculoid leprosy patients. During the course of therapy the antigen positivity rate gradually declined, and the antigen could not be detected in any of the 15 patients with subsided cases of leprosy. As antigen is presumably in excess before the antibody response is evoked, our experimental approach for antigen detection is likely to be useful by itself or along with antibody detection for diagnosis of early leprosy.
2-V 900-MHz quadrature coupled LC oscillators with improved amplitude and phase matchings

Coupled LC oscillators are known to provide good performance in terms of phase noise, signal amplitude, power consumption, and quadrature output signals. However, IQ amplitude and phase mismatches in these oscillators can be quite large due to the serious mismatch problem of large area inductors and varactors. A simple design modification of the coupled LC oscillators shows a significant improvement of the amplitude and phase mismatches. Detailed operational principle is examined. A 2 V 900 MHz prototype using this simple idea has been designed.
Coated microspheres as enhanced probes for optical trapping

In an optical trap, micron-sized dielectric particles in aqueous solutions can be held by a tightly focused laser beam. The optical force on the particle is composed of an attractive gradient force and a destabilizing scattering force. To optimize the trapping potential, we reduced the scattering force by using coated microspheres. The shell of the particle was designed such that it acts as an anti-reflection coating. We made and characterized such particles and found that in comparison with the uniform microspheres of the same diameter a more than two-fold stiffening of the trap. Compared to larger spheres, we achieved an increase in trap stiffness of up to 10-fold. These results quantitatively agree with our calculations based on the generalized Lorenz-Mie theory. By improving the trapping potential higher overall forces can be achieved with the same laser power, or vice versa the same force can be reached by using less laser power. A higher maximal force increases the range of possible experiments, and a reduced laser intensity leads to less photo-toxic interactions or laser heating relevant for biological applications.
Quantitative analysis methods of dissipated energy in the ocean turbulence

Turbulent energy cascade and intermittency are very important properties in marine fluid flows and it has become an interesting field in physical oceanography research. To quantitatively characterize that how the turbulent dissipated energy are distributed among the various scales of motion and examine the different physical processes occurring on these different time scales, we propose a quantitative analysis method based on the adaptive empirical mode decomposition, wavelet transform technique and local intermittency measure approach. The energy cascade in the ocean turbulence is investigated using the measured shear data in the South China Sea. These collected long-term turbulence series are used to resolve the critical role of energy cascade and larger-scale ocean circulation dynamics.
50% adherence of patients suffering chronic conditions – where is the evidence?

The World Health Organization states that in a widespread report that “in developed countries, adherence among patients suffering chronic diseases averages only 50%”. We followed the quoted references to this statement. The data basis for this statement is one randomized controlled trial (RCT) on hypertensive steel workers in Canada published in 1975 and one study dealing with neurotic outpatients in Pennsylvania, USA published in 1965. Both studies are not suitable to assume such generalized adherence estimation and are not for different reasons transferable to today’s patient care.
Chasing the Perfect Splitter: A Comparison of Different Compound Splitting Tools

This paper reports on the evaluation of two compound splitters for German. Compounding is a very frequent phenomenon in German and thus efficient ways of detecting and correctly splitting compound words are needed for natural language processing applications. This paper presents different strategies for compound splitting, focusing on German. Four compound splitters for German are presented. Two of them were used in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) experiments, obtaining very similar qualitative scores in terms of BLEU and TER and therefore a thorough evaluation of both has been carried out.
Short communication Molecular characterization of Agrotis segetum nucleopolyhedrovirus from Poland

Abstract The turnip moth, Agrotis segetum (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae), is an important pest insect in Europe, Asia, and Africa. We havegenetically characterized and classiWed a nucleopolyhedrovirus isolated from A. segetum larvae in Poland (AgseNPV-P). The restric-tion pattern of AgseNPV-P was distinct from an isolate from England/France (AgseNPV-UK and AgseNPV-F). Sequence analysisof three conserved baculovirus genes, polyhedrin , lef-8 and pif-2 , revealed that AgseNPV-P diVers substantially from the alreadydescribed NPVs isolated from A. segetum and possibly represents a new NPV species. Phylogenetic analysis placed AgseNPV-Pamong group II NPVs and showed the closest relationship to Agrotis ipsilon (Agip) NPV and Spodoptera exigua (Se) MNPV.  2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Agrotis segetum ; Nucleopolyhedrovirus; AsMNPV; Phylogeny; Taxonomy The turnip moth Agrotis (Scotia) segetum Dennisand SchiVenm:ller (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae) is a seriouspest occurring throughout Europe, Asia, and part ofAfrica. The larvae belong to cutworms (noctuids spend-ing a large portion of their time in the soil, Bourner andCory, 2004) and feed on many vegetable and Weld cropsincluding corn, rape, beet, potatoes, cabbage, cereals,tobacco, vine, and many others (IgnoVo and Garcia,1979).
The Virulent Wolbachia Strain wMelPop Efficiently Establishes Somatic Infections in the Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae

ABSTRACT Wolbachia pipientis bacteria are maternally inherited endosymbionts that are of interest to control the Anopheles mosquito vectors of malaria. Wolbachia does not infect Anopheles mosquitoes in nature, although cultured Anopheles cells can be infected. Here, we show that the virulent Wolbachia strain wMelPop can survive and replicate when injected into female Anopheles gambiae adults, but the somatic infections established are avirulent. These in vivo data suggest that stable Wolbachia infections of Anopheles may be possible.
Weaving rewrite-based access control policies

Access control is a central issue among the overall security goals of information systems. Despite the existence of a vast literature on the subject, it is still very hard to assure the compliance of a large system to a given dynamic access control policy. Based on our previous work on formal islands, we provide in this paper a systematic methodology to weave dynamic, formally specified policies on existing applications using aspect-oriented programming. To that end, access control policies are formalized using term rewriting systems, allowing us to have an agile, modular, and precise way to specify and to ensure their formal properties. These high-level descriptions are then weaved into the existing code, such that the resulting program implements a safe reference monitor for the specified policy. For developers, this provides a systematic process to enforce dynamic policies in a modular and flexible way. Since policies are independently specified and checked to be later weaved into various different applications, the level of reuse is improved. We implemented the approach on test cases with quite encouraging results.
Novel nonuniformity correction method for 128×128 MOS resistor array infrared projector

Nonuniformity correction technique for MOS resistor array is always the key problem and advanced technology in the research and development of infrared scene generator. Based on a lot of tests on 128×128 MOS resistor array, the cause of the nonlinearity and nonuniformity is deeply analyzed, and a novel nonuniformity correction algorithm for MOS resistor array is presented. Firstly the entire projection array is covered with a sparse grid and a linear look-up table is established. Then a compensation table is created by collecting the corrected data. The above procedure is iterated to refine the compensation table gradually. The final experimental results show that the nonuniformity correction method may improve the infrared image uniformity remarkably and preferably satisfy the infrared imaging simulation requirement.
On-Stack Replacement à la Carte

On-stack replacement (OSR) dynamically transfers execution between different code versions. This mechanism is used in mainstream runtime systems to support adaptive and speculative optimizations by running code tailored to provide the best expected performance for the actual workload. Current approaches either restrict the program points where OSR can be fired or require complex optimization-specific operations to realign the program's state during a transition. The engineering effort to implement OSR and the lack of abstractions make it rarely accessible to the research community, leaving fundamental question regarding its flexibility largely unexplored. In this article we make a first step towards a provably sound abstract framework for OSR. We show that compiler optimizations can be made OSR-aware in isolation, and then safely composed. We identify a class of transformations, which we call live-variable equivalent (LVE), that captures a natural property of fundamental compiler optimizations, and devise an algorithm to automatically generate the OSR machinery required for an LVE transition at arbitrary program locations. We present an implementation of our ideas in LLVM and evaluate it against prominent benchmarks, showing that bidirectional OSR transitions are possible almost everywhere in the code in the presence of common, unhindered global optimizations. We then discuss the end-to-end utility of our techniques in source-level debugging of optimized code, showing how our algorithms can provide novel building blocks for debuggers for both executables and managed runtimes.
The SuperSID project: exploiting high-level information for high-accuracy speaker recognition

The area of automatic speaker recognition has been dominated by systems using only short-term, low-level acoustic information, such as cepstral features. While these systems have indeed produced very low error rates, they ignore other levels of information beyond low-level acoustics that convey speaker information. Recently published work has shown examples that such high-level information can be used successfully in automatic speaker recognition systems and has the potential to improve accuracy and add robustness. For the 2002 JHU CLSP summer workshop, the SuperSID project (http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/ws2002/groups/supersid/) was undertaken to exploit these high-level information sources and dramatically increase speaker recognition accuracy on a defined NIST evaluation corpus and task. The paper provides an overview of the structure, data, task, tools, and accomplishments of this project. Wide ranging approaches using pronunciation models, prosodic dynamics, pitch and duration features, phone streams, and conversational interactions were explored and developed. We show how these novel features and classifiers indeed provide complementary information and can be fused together to drive down the equal error rate on the 2001 NIST extended data task to 0.2% - a 71% relative reduction in error over the previous state of the art.
Ensuring data integrity using blockchain technology

Blockchain is a relatively new technology that has shown a lot of possibilities. It emerged in 2009 as a public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain technology is finding applications in wide range of areas: digital assets and stocks, smart contracts, record keeping, ID systems, cloud storage, ride sharing, etc. We investigate the blockchains' activity in terms of how to store, retrieve and share files in decentralized network.
Fault Tolerant Fingerprint-Based Positioning

The increasing demand for indoor location-based services has motivated the development of positioning methods that exploit the existing wireless network infrastructure. Accuracy is an important requirement, however fault tolerance is also highly desirable in case of failures or malicious attacks. We investigate the fault tolerance of fingerprint-based methods under a variety of fault or attack scenarios. We study the Subtract on Negative Add on Positive (SNAP) algorithm and modify it appropriately for the WLAN setup. Our results indicate that SNAP achieves adequate accuracy with very low computational complexity and exhibits smoother performance degradation in the presence of faults compared to other methods.
Structure and Dynamics of Calcium-activated Calmodulin in Solution

Abstract Two 4-ns molecular dynamics simulations of calcium loaded calmodulin in solution have been performed, using both standard nonbonded cutoffs and Ewald summation to treat electrostatic interactions. Our simulation results are generally consistent with solution experimental studies of calmodulin structure and dynamics, including NMR, cross-linking, fluorescence and x-ray scattering. The most interesting result of the molecular dynamics simulations is the detection of large-scale structural fluctuations of calmodulin in solution. The globular N- and C-terminal domains tend to move approximately like rigid bodies, with fluctuations of interdomain distances within a 7 Å range and of interdomain angles by up to 60 deg. Essential dynamics analysis indicates that the three dominant types of motion involve bending of the central helix in two perpendicular planes and a twist in which the domains rotate in opposite directions around the central helix. In the more realistic Ewald trajectory the protein backbone remains mostly within a 2–3 Å root-mean-square distance from the crystal structure, the secondary structure within the domains is conserved and middle part of the central helix becomes disordered. The central helix itself exhibits limited fluctuations, with its bend angle exploring the 0–50° range and the end-to-end distance falling in 39–43 Å. The results of the two simulations were similar in many respects. However, the cutoff trajectory exhibited a larger deviation from the crystal, loss of several helical hydrogen bonds in the N-terminal domain and lack of structural disorder in the central helix.
Signal Processing Independent component analysis using successive interference cancellation for oversaturated data

In this paper, advanced interference cancellation strategies are considered and applied in DS-CDMA uplink receivers. Namely, we introduce a new successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme in which blind source separation (BSS) techniques based on independent component analysis (ICA) are considered. Our main emphasis is on the oversaturated data in which situation easily arises for example in DS-CDMA systems when the number of active connections/users is high compared to number of chips per bit being used, that is, a highly loaded system. Proposed receiver structures combine the main benefits of pure BSS/ ICA and SIC methods: (i) inherent mitigation of various types of interference sources by BSS/ICA, (ii) robustness against parameter estimation errors due to BSS/ICA, (iii) greatly improved interference suppression capability due to novel combination of SIC ideology and ICA for oversaturated data. The last item in the list can also be seen as a way to somewhat circumvent the ‘more sources than sensors’— problem, which is a challenging problem in BSS area. Numerical experiments with DS-CDMA uplink data are given to illustrate the achieved gains in capacity and bit-error-rate performance compared to conventional successive and parallel interference cancellation (PIC) schemes as well as more an advanced LMMSE-PIC receiver and variants of BSS/ICA techniques alone. Copyright # 2005 AEIT.
Early Deterioration After Thrombolysis Plus Aspirin in Acute Stroke: A Post Hoc Analysis of the Antiplatelet Therapy in Combination With Recombinant t-PA Thrombolysis in Ischemic Stroke Trial

Background and Purpose— Aspirin early after intravenous thrombolysis in acute ischemic stroke increases the risk of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (SICH), without influencing functional outcome at 3 months. The effect of aspirin on early neurological deterioration (END) was explored as a post hoc analysis of the randomized Antiplatelet Therapy in Combination With Recombinant t-PA Thrombolysis in Ischemic Stroke (ARTIS) trial. Methods— END, defined as a ≥4 points National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale worsening ⩽24 hours after intravenous thrombolysis, was categorized into SICH (ENDSICH) and cerebral ischemia (ENDCI). Multinomial logistic regression was used to assess the effect of aspirin on END. Results— Of the 640 patients, 31 patients (4.8%) experienced END (14 ENDSICH, 17 ENDCI). Aspirin increased the risk of ENDSICH (odds ratio, 3.73; 95% confidence interval, 1.03–13.49) but not of ENDCI (odds ratio, 1.14; 95% confidence interval, 0.44–3.00). After adjustment for other explanatory variables, the association between aspirin and ENDSICH remained significant. Conclusions— In this trial, there is no evidence of an early antithrombotic effect from the addition of aspirin to intravenous thrombolysis in acute ischemic stroke.
Classifying some cardiac abnormalities using heart rate variability signals

In this paper, the heart rate variability signals were utilized to discriminate different cardiac abnormalities. The performance of traditional feature extraction techniques and new complexity estimators was compared using hidden Markov model (HMM). This was done by analyzing data recorded for healthy subjects and patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF) and myocardial infarction (MI) diseases. The techniques utilized included time, frequency parameters as well as approximate entropy, sample entropy, detrended fluctuation analysis coefficient, fractal dimension, Poincare plot and largest Lyapunov exponent. Results have shown that using complexity-based estimators gives higher rates for classifying cardiac abnormalities. Classification rate reaches to 98.18%.
Radio Frequency and Optical Metamaterials

Abstract : This research encompassed the study of radio frequency (RF) and optical metamaterials. The RF study of metamaterials focuses on the polarization behavior of split-ring-resonators (SRR), wire-post (WP) elements, and the spatially dispersive behavior of the SRR-WP elements. The optical study of metamaterials consisted of using the nano -dot and - particle media for their electric and magnetic plasmon behavior.
Numerical Simulation of Clinching Process in Copper Alloy Sheets

The clinch joining is a new technique to join light alloy materials. This paper studies the process of clinching in joining Copper alloy sheets based on the method of numerical simulation combined with experiment. The studies are performed by employing software ansys/ls-dyna considering with the contact conditions and material models in the model. Efficient analytic results of forming of clinching in Copper alloy sheets are provided. The experiments of clinched joints in Copper alloy sheets are carried out to validate the simulation. It is shown that the simulation of process of clinching joints in Copper alloy sheet has a good agreement with the experimental result. That suggests the developed finite element model, considering the contact conditions of materials and the material models can be used to predict the joint forming of Copper alloy by clinching ideally.
Kinetic simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection in presence of a guide field

The results of kinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection in Harris current sheets are analyzed. A range of guide fields is considered to study reconnection in plasmas characterized by different $\beta$ values, $\beta > m_e/m_i$. Both an implicit Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation method and a parallel explicit PIC code are used. Simulations with mass ratios up to the physical value are performed. The simulations show that the reconnection rate decreases with the guide field and depends weakly on the mass ratio. The off-diagonal components of the electron pressure tensor break the frozen-in condition, even in low $\beta$ plasmas. In high $\beta$ plasmas, evidence is presented that whistler waves play a key role in the enhanced reconnection, while in low $\beta$ plasmas the kinetic Alfv\'en waves are important. The in-plane and the out-of-plane ion and electron motion are also considered, showing that they are influenced by the mass ratio and the plasma $\beta$.
Far-field beam-pattern of a twin-slot HEB mixer at 600GHz

In this paper, we report on the measured and simulated far-field beam-patterns of a quasi-optical NbN superconducting hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer at 600GHz. This superconducting HEB mixer consists of an extended hemispherical lens with a diameter of 12.7mm and an extension length of 2.45mm, a twin-slot planar antenna (two slots measuring 148.5μm × 10.4μm with a separation of 78.98μm) and a 5.5-nm thick NbN thin-film micro-bridge with an area of 2μm × 0. 2μm . The far-field beam pattern of this mixer is measured by a direct-detection technique with a dynamic range of nearly 25dB, showing an FWHM beam angle of 2.7° and -18dB level of the first side-lobe. The measured beam of the quasi-optical mixer is nearly collimated and has good Gaussian beam efficiency. In addition, the far-field beam-pattern is measured at different DC bias voltages of the superconducting HEB mixer and at different bath temperatures. The measured results are compared with the ones simulated by two different methods. Detailed measurement and simulation results will be presented.