Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Refinements to the method of epicentral location based on surface waves from ambient seismic noise: introducing Love waves

SUMMARY The purpose of this study is to develop and test a modification to a previous method of regional seismic event location based on Empirical Green's Functions (EGFs) produced from ambient seismic noise. Elastic EGFs between pairs of seismic stations are determined by cross-correlating long ambient noise time-series recorded at the two stations. The EGFs principally contain Rayleigh- and Love-wave energy on the vertical and transverse components, respectively, and we utilize these signals between about 5 and 12 s period. The previous method, based exclusively on Rayleigh waves, may yield biased epicentral locations for certain event types with hypocentral depths between 2 and 5 km. Here we present theoretical arguments that show how Love waves can be introduced to reduce or potentially eliminate the bias. We also present applications of Rayleigh- and Love-wave EGFs to locate 10 reference events in the western United States. The separate Rayleigh and Love epicentral locations and the joint locations using a combination of the two waves agree to within 1 km distance, on average, but confidence ellipses are smallest when both types of waves are used.
A simple method for slip detection of prosthetic hand

To achieve a human like grasping with a multifingered robot hand, the grasping force should be controlled without using information from the grasped object such as its weight and friction coefficient. In this study, we describe an experiment focusing on the consistency of slip detection of a prosthetic hand equipped with a force sensing resistor (FSR) which can capture force variations during the slip of grasped object. A method for detecting the slip of a grasped object using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of the high frequency signal output of FSR was proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed in tests of slip detection during grasping. Moreover, the test results indicated that the hardness and mass of the object and disturbing force have very limited impact on the slipping patterns. Finally, a simple model was proposed to obtain the decline value of grasping force by using the results from DWT. This model can also be used as a method for slip detection.
Molecular Phylogeny of Asian Meconopsis Based on Nuclear Ribosomal and Chloroplast DNA Sequence Data

The taxonomy and phylogeny of Asian Meconopsis (Himalayan blue poppy) remain largely unresolved. We used the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA) and the chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) trnL-F region for phylogenetic reconstruction of Meconopsis and its close relatives Papaver, Roemeria, and Stylomecon. We identified five main clades, which were well-supported in the gene trees reconstructed with the nrDNA ITS and cpDNA trnL-F sequences. We found that 41 species of Asian Meconopsis did not constitute a monophyletic clade, but formed two solid clades (I and V) separated in the phylogenetic tree by three clades (II, III and IV) of Papaver and its allies. Clade V includes only four Asian Meconopsis species, with the remaining 90 percent of Asian species included in clade I. In this core Asian Meconopsis clade, five subclades (Ia–Ie) were recognized in the nrDNA ITS tree. Three species (Meconopsis discigera, M. pinnatifolia, and M. torquata) of subgenus Discogyne were imbedded in subclade Ia, indicating that the present definition of subgenera in Meconopsis should be rejected. These subclades are inconsistent with any series or sections of the present classifications, suggesting that classifications of the genus should be completely revised. Finally, proposals for further revision of the genus Meconopsis were put forward based on molecular, morphological, and biogeographical evidences.
A fuzzy approach to discriminating heartbeat types and detecting arrhythmia

Traditional ECG inspection procedures can be very complicated and need professional assistance. When minor abnormality occurs the subject's heartbeat often returns to normal before he/she takes a detailed examination. Thus, the cause of abnormality remains ignored. In this study, we propose an effective heartbeat monitoring ECG real-time detection system for homecare service, which uses the ECG sensors and a wireless sensor network technology to detect the subject's heartbeats and their variations. In addition, the MIT-BIH database is used to analyze arrhythmia. Based on the selected features an arrhythmia detection module is devised to detect the arrhythmia that is determined by the proposed fuzzy rules. Experimental results show that the proposed system is able to discriminate normal and arrhythmia heartbeats. For NORM, LBBB, RBBB, VPC, APC and PB the discriminant accuracy rates are 97.5%, 87.5%, 92.5%, 100%, 95% and 100%, respectively.
Dstool: Computer assisted exploration of dynamical systems

Ian Stewart (Notices, December, 1991) described a computer program, entitled kaos, that was developed at Cornell University by S. Kim and J. Guck-enheimer. We describe here a \second generation" program, called dstool, with much the same functionality as kaos, but a substantially diierent implementation. From the user's point of view, the most obvious diierence is that dstool uses the X11, rather than the SunView, windowing system. However, the distinguishing features of dstool pertain to its modular design. Dstool was built to promote extension and improvement of its capabilities. Dstool (short for Dynamical System TOOLkit) is designed to aid researchers in the investigation of dynamical systems. Toward this goal, our ultimate objective is to construct a comprehensive, open \package" that provides an interactive interface for all computations involving dynamical systems. This objective is ambitious and is certainly not yet fully realized. Sci-entiic libraries of numerical algorithms (e.g., LINPACK, EISPACK, .) are extraordinarily valuable resources for building complex programs out of modular components. But the value of these individual units is greatly enhanced when they are integrated into a larger software package which uses shared data structures to connect the algorithms with a sophisticated user interface that provides interactive control. Such a package can increase our ability to use computers as tools for gaining insight by minimizing time wasted in repetitious programming and using clumsy schemes for manipulating data. Programs constructed to meet these goals have applications in the classroom 1
A Novel Growth- and Cell Cycle-Regulated Protein, ASK, Activates Human Cdc7-Related Kinase and Is Essential for G1/S Transition in Mammalian Cells

ABSTRACT A novel human protein, ASK (activator of S phase kinase), was identified on the basis of its ability to bind to human Cdc7-related kinase (huCdc7). ASK forms an active kinase complex with huCdc7 that is capable of phosphorylating MCM2 protein. ASK appears to be the major activator of huCdc7, since immunodepletion of ASK protein from the extract is accompanied by the loss of huCdc7-dependent kinase activity. Expression of ASK is regulated by growth factor stimulation, and levels oscillate through the cell cycle, reaching a peak during S phase. Concomitantly, the huCdc7-dependent kinase activity significantly increases when cells are in S phase. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that ASK serves an essential function for entry into S phase by showing that microinjection of ASK-specific antibodies into mammalian cells inhibited DNA replication. Our data show that ASK is a novel cyclin-like regulatory subunit of the huCdc7 kinase complex and that it plays a pivotal role in G1/S transition in mammalian cells.
Personalized service recommendation algorithm

In this paper, we present personalized service recommendation algorithm PSRA. Based on web service semantics, demographic factors and users' recommendation ratings and by redefining similarity measurement, PSRA presents different succeeding service recommendation towards the same current service to meet users' personalized needs. Experiment results show that our algorithm is feasible and effective in practical utility.
A New-User Cold-Starting Recommendation Algorithm Based on Normalization of Preference

Cold-starting problem of recommender system has attracted much attention. In the case of cold-starting, the extreme sparsity of ratings would induce poor performance of traditional recommendation algorithms. This paper presents a new algorithm to deal with the issue of cold-starting by taking the preference of user's ratings into consideration. After normalizing historical rating matrix, two-stage weighted prediction with user similarity is proposed, then the predicted rating value can be obtained by inverse normalization. The experimental results indicate that the method can not only guarantee good recommendation performance in the condition of user cold-starting, but also keep the recommendation consistency when the rating matrix is in normal state.
Collision Helps! An Analytical Study of ZigZag Decoding

The nature of the wireless network is intrinsically different from the wired network because of the shared medium among several transmitters. Such a restriction requires a form of scheduling algorithm to coordinate access to the medium, usually in a distributed manner. The conventional approach to the Medium Access Control (MAC) problem is contention-based protocols in which multiple transmitters simultaneously attempt to access the wireless medium and operate under some rules that provide enough opportunities for the others to transmit. Examples of such protocols in packet radio networks include ALOHA, MACAW, CSMA/CA, etc. However, in many of contention-based protocols it is possible that two or more transmitters transmit their packet simultaneously, resulting in a collision. The collided packets are considered lost in the conventional approaches, but Gollakota and Katabi [2] show how to recover multiple collided packets in a 802.11 system using ZigZag decoding when there are enough transmissions involving those packets. In fact, they suggest that each collision can be treated as a linearly independent equation of the packets involved. Therefore, the packets are recoverable only if the system of equations is full rank. ZigZag decoding provides a fundamentally new approach to handle collisions in a wireless setting without using any central scheduler, or knowledge about the network topology such as number of neighbors, etc. In this project, we wish to understand the effects of this new approach to interference management, in terms of the achievable throughput and delay for the multiple access communication. We provide an abstraction of the multiple-access channel when ZigZag decoding is used at the receiver. We use this abstract model to analyze the delay and throughput performance of the system in various scenarios. First, we analyze the scenario when each user has one packet to send. We characterize upper and lower bounds on the expected time to deliver
A Comparative Study Between Self-Perception of Walking Ability, Balance and Risk of Fall with Actual Clinical Assessment

Gait and balance disorder are among the most common causes of falls in elderly and often lead to injury, disability and loss of independence. However, there might be a discrepancy between elderly’s perception of their own walking ability, balance, risk of fall with doctor’s evaluation. The aim of this study was to compare perception of the elderly’s walking ability, balance and risk of fall with clinical assessment. This cross sectional study was done in a Primary Care Clinic which involved elderly > 60 years using systematic random sampling. Participants completed a self-administered questionnaire comprising of sociodemographic data and question assessing their perception of ability of walking, balance and risk of fall. Actual clinical assessment was done using Tinetti Performance Oriented Mobility Assessment. Most of the participants perceived they had good walking (84.4%) and balance ability (77%). A small proportion (11.5%) agreed that they are at risk of fall. There was a good agreement in walking ability (k: 0.702, p: <0.001), moderate agreement in balance (k: 0.546, p: <0.001) but poor agreement in the risk of fall (k: 0.300, p: <0.001). Multiple logistic regression demonstrated that factors associated with participant’s perception of risk of fall are age, having stroke and taking psychotropic drugs. A discrepancy is observed between self-perception of balance and risk of fall with actual assessment. Advancing age, history of stroke and psychotropic drugs were significantly associated with increased perception of fall risk. The future intervention programme need to focus on creating awareness particularly among those who have these factors.
An Innovative Approach for Storing and Accessing Small Files in Hadoop Distributed File System

In the recent years, the use of internet get increases, so all user wish to store data on cloud computing platform. Most of the time user"s files are small in size, so it leads to small files. Hadoop is developed as a software structure for distributed processing of large datasets across large clusters of computers. Hadoop structure consists of Hadoop Distributed file system (HDFS) and Execution engine called Map Reduce layers. HDFS has the property of handling very large datasets whose sizes are in Megabytes, Gigabytes and Terabytes, but the performance of Hadoop Distributed file system degrades when handling large amount of small size files. The massive numbers of small files impose heavy burden to the NameNode of HDFS, correlations between small files were not considered for data storage. In this paper, an efficient approach is designed to improve the storage and access efficiencies of small files, small files are classified based on file correlation features and File merging and prefetching technique is applied for structurally-related small files. AVRO technique is applied to further improve the storage and access efficiency of small files. Experimental procedures show that the proposed technique effectively improves the storage and access efficiency of small files when compared with the original HDFS.
Parameterized Integer Quadratic Programming: Variables and Coefficients

In the Integer Quadratic Programming problem input is an n*n integer matrix Q, an m*n integer matrix A and an m-dimensional integer vector b. The task is to find a vector x in Z^n, minimizing x^TQx, subject to Ax <= b. We give a fixed parameter tractable algorithm for Integer Quadratic Programming parameterized by n+a. Here a is the largest absolute value of an entry of Q and A. As an application of our main result we show that Optimal Linear Arrangement is fixed parameter tractable parameterized by the size of the smallest vertex cover of the input graph. This resolves an open problem from the recent monograph by Downey and Fellows.
Home Literacy of Dual-Language Learners in Kindergarten From Low-SES Backgrounds

This study aimed to describe home literacy (HL) activities of Spanish-/English-speaking children of low–socioeconomic status backgrounds and examine the relationship between HL and performance on standardized assessments. Parents of 65 dual-language learners (DLLs) in kindergarten completed an HL questionnaire. Parents reported an average of 17 books at home and engaged in active HL activities for 24 minutes a day on average. The relations between HL activities and performance were evaluated using correlations and regression. Analyses revealed a significant relation between HL and children’s language abilities, as measured by a bilingual measure of morphosyntax and semantics. Children’s reported interest in reading was also positively associated with their phonological awareness skills. HL was significantly related to child interest in reading and language performance. These findings suggest that home literacy plays a role in the language and literacy development of DLLs.
Bar-Ilan University’s submission to RTE-5

This paper describes Bar-Ilan’s submissions to RTE-5. This year we focused on the search pilot, and enhanced our RTE-4 system to address two issues introduced by this novel setting: candidate texts search and document-level discourse analysis. Our system achieved the highest score on the search task, and may be viewed as a first step towards fully addressing this challenging task.
Three-dimensional model study of the Arctic ozone loss in 2002/2003 and comparison with 1999/2000 and 2003/2004

Abstract. We have used the SLIMCAT 3-D off-line chemical transport model (CTM) to quantify the Arctic chemical ozone loss in the year 2002/2003 and compare it with similar calculations for the winters 1999/2000 and 2003/2004. Recent changes to the CTM have improved the model's ability to reproduce polar chemical and dynamical processes. The updated CTM uses σ-θ as a vertical coordinate which allows it to extend down to the surface. The CTM has a detailed stratospheric chemistry scheme and now includes a simple NAT-based denitrification scheme in the stratosphere. In the model runs presented here the model was forced by ECMWF ERA40 and operational analyses. The model used 24 levels extending from the surface to ~55km and a horizontal resolution of either 7.5° x 7.5° or 2.8° x 2.8°. Two different radiation schemes, MIDRAD and the CCM scheme, were used to diagnose the vertical motion in the stratosphere. Based on tracer observations from balloons and aircraft, the more sophisticated CCM scheme gives a better representation of the vertical transport in this model which includes the troposphere. The higher resolution model generally produces larger chemical O3 depletion, which agrees better with observations. The CTM results show that very early chemical ozone loss occurred in December 2002 due to extremely low temperatures and early chlorine activation in the lower stratosphere. Thus, chemical loss in this winter started earlier than in the other two winters studied here. In 2002/2003 the local polar ozone loss in the lower stratosphere was ~40% before the stratospheric final warming. Larger ozone loss occurred in the cold year 1999/2000 which had a persistently cold and stable vortex during most of the winter. For this winter the current model, at a resolution of 2.8° x 2.8°, can reproduce the observed loss of over 70% locally. In the warm and more disturbed winter 2003/2004 the chemical O3 loss was generally much smaller, except above 620K where large losses occurred due to a period of very low minimum temperatures at these altitudes.
Comparison of the sequence complexity and abundance frequency of polyadenylated messenger RNA in human breast and prostate carcinoma cells.

The sequence complexity and frequency distribution of polyadenylated [poly(A)+] messenger RNA (mRNA) in human breast and prostate carcinoma cells were compared by the kinetics of homologous and heterologous mRNA:complementary DNA hybridization. The apparent total sequence complexity of human breast cell poly(A)+ RNA was estimated to be about 47,300 kilobases (kb). It appeared to be distributed in three abundance classes comprising about 14 (32 kb), 43 (2,000 kb), and 43% (45,270 kb) of the total. The poly(A)+ mRNA of human prostate cells also appeared to be organized in three abundance classes: the highest-abundance class comprising about 15% of the total with an approximate complexity of 88 kb; an intermediate-abundance class comprising about 32% of the total with a complexity of about 2,330 kb; and a low-abundance class which was about 53% of the total and had an estimated complexity of 66,840 kb. The results of heterologous hybridization reaction suggested that about 75 to 80% of the poly(A)+ mRNA sequences present in human breast cells were also present in human prostate cells. Similarly, about 75 to 80% of the sequences in human prostate cells appeared to be present in human breast cells. The sequences held in common by these two cell types appeared to be present in roughly similar relative abundance. The hybridization of kinetically fractionated abundant complementary DNA of breast or prostate cells with homologous and heterologous poly(A)+ mRNA suggested that the abundant sequences of one cell type (e.g., breast) were present in reduced abundance in the other cell type (e.g., prostate) but only by a factor of 2 to 4. Nearly all of the abundant sequences of one cell type appeared to be present in the second cell type.
The P1 latency of single-trial ERPs estimated by two peak-picking strategies

Reliable latency estimation of a given component is essential for single-trial analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs). Peak-picking is a straightforward method for latency determination in single trials. The peak-picking method has so far been carried out according to the maximal-peak strategy, which looks for the largest deflection in a low-pass filtered epoch within a predefined time window. We introduced another peak-picking criterion and named it as the closest-peak strategy in the present study. According to the strategy, the peak of an ERP component in single trials is defined as the peak timely closest to the average-ERP peak. The main results derived from visual stimulus ERP data at POz showed that: 1) the single-trial P1 latency estimated by the closest-peak strategy was timely concentrated around the P1 peak in average ERP while the P1 peak extracted by the maximal-peak strategy distributed relatively scattered on the time axis; 2) the P1 amplitude in average ERP acquired by the maximal-peak strategy was larger than that acquired by the closest-peak strategy at 5% significance level. Although the conclusion is premature, this comparative study suggested that the closest-peak strategy may be more suitable and reliable for peak-picking method.
Loss of circadian photoentrainment and abnormal retinal electrophysiology in Math5 mutant mice.

PURPOSE To determine how the absence of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in Math5 (Atoh7) mutant mice affects circadian behavior and retinal function. METHODS The wheel-running behavior of wild-type and Math5 mutant mice was measured under various light-dark cycle conditions. To evaluate retinal input to the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) anatomically, the retinohypothalamic tracts were labeled in vivo. To assess changes in retinal function, corneal flash electroretinograms (ERGs) from mutant and wild-type mice were compared under dark- and light-adapted conditions. Alterations in retinal neuron populations were evaluated quantitatively and with cell-type-specific markers. RESULTS The Math5-null mice did not entrain to light and exhibited free-running circadian behavior with a mean period (23.6 +/- 0.15 hours) that was indistinguishable from that of wild-type mice (23.4 +/- 0.19 hours). The SCN showed no anterograde labeling with a horseradish peroxidase-conjugated cholera toxin B (CT-HRP) tracer. ERGs recorded from mutant mice had diminished scotopic a- and b-wave and photopic b-wave amplitudes. The scotopic b-wave was more severely affected than the a-wave. The oscillatory potentials (OPs) and scotopic threshold response (STR) were also reduced. Consistent with these ERG findings, a pan-specific reduction in the number of bipolar cells and a smaller relative decrease in the number of rods in mutant mice were observed. CONCLUSIONS Math5-null mice are clock-blind and have no RGC projections to the SCN. RGCs are thus essential for photoentrainment in mice, but are not necessary for the development or intrinsic function of the SCN clock. RGCs are not required to generate any of the major ERG waveforms in mice, including the STR, which is produced by ganglion cells in some other species. The diminished amplitude of b-wave, OPs, and STR components in Math5 mutants is most likely caused by the decreased abundance of retinal interneurons.