Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of neural network backpropagation algorithms for electricity load forecasting

Load forecasting plays a significant role in planning and operation of electrical power networks. Artificial neural networks have been extensively employed for load forecasting over the last 20 years, owing to their powerful non-linear mapping capability. A range of neural network training algorithms have been developed to solve different kinds of problems. Due to different goals of prediction and variation in size of datasets for load forecasting, the choice of algorithm to train the neural network can greatly influence the forecasting result. In this paper we consider different backpropagation training algorithms for medium term load forecasting and analyze each of the characteristics such as parameter setting complexity, training speed, convergence, prediction accuracy and result stability. From our case study, we conclude Bayesian Regulation Backpropagation to be the best overall choice for medium term load prediction. For cases where processing capability is limited, Resilient Backpropagation and Conjugate Gradient Backpropagation may be suitable alternative choices.
Soluble carbohydrate content of shoots of Arctic wetland plants that are consumed by lesser snow geese

We recorded seasonal changes in the total amounts of soluble carbohydrates in shoots of salt- and fresh-water coastal plants at La Perouse Bay, northern Manitoba, to determine whether adult snow geese and their goslings selected forage rich in soluble carbohydrates during the breeding season. The selection of forage plants in spring and summer by adults and goslings was strongly linked to the presence of high amounts of soluble carbohydrates in tissues: on the order of 100 mg·g–1 dry mass. When the content fell as a result of shoot development or leaf senescence, the geese switched to alternative sources of forage. The extent to which individual shoots rich in soluble carbohydrates of the primary freshwater forage species are grazed depends on the local density of breeding geese at the study site, which has fallen in the last decade as a result of the earlier destruction of much of the coastal vegetation by foraging geese.
Simultaneous noninvasive measurement of CBF and CBV using double‐echo FAIR (DEFAIR)

A new method for measuring cerebral blood flow (CBF) and cerebral blood volume (CBV) noninvasively using MRI is presented. The approach is based on the technique of arterial spin labelling (ASL), in which CBF‐based contrast is generated by controlled modulation of the longitudinal magnetization of the blood. The proposed method also uses differences in T2 between tissue and blood to differentiate the two compartments and allow assessment of the relative size of each. Two successive EPI images are acquired following spin preparation using either a slice‐selective or global inversion pulse, and the technique is therefore referred to as double‐echo FAIR (DEFAIR). DEFAIR is demonstrated in the normal gerbil brain and during hypothermia, where reductions of both CBF and CBV are known to occur. It is also shown theoretically that this method can be extended to include a measurement of oxygen extraction fraction. The main drawbacks of the technique are the long acquisition time and relatively low sensitivity to hemodynamic changes compared to conventional qualitative T *2 ‐weighted BOLD contrast, which may limit its applicability and practical use in monitoring functional cerebral activation. However, the technique can be used repetitively in longer‐term time course studies due to its noninvasive and quantitative nature. Magn Reson Med 45:853–863, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Hero of Alexandria's Mechanical Geometry

Greek mathematics is often identified with the achievements of a rather select group of Hellenistic authors, most notably Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius. In these authors we find a highly sophisticated form of mathematics and fully developed practices of deductive demonstration and it is the works of these authors and their predecessors that have received the majority of attention in the scholarship. Other forms of mathematics, such as the mathematics employed by professionals or practitioners working with land-measurement, trade, architecture or administration, have also received some measure of interest, and it has become clear that Greek mathematics covers a plurality of practices. The methods employed by these practitioners, often based on numerical calculations and approximations, have, however, often been sidelined as 'applied' or even 'lower' forms of mathematics. These two categories of mathematics provide a strangely polarized picture of mathematical practices, a picture that does not accurately portray the mathematical landscape of antiquity. Although the dichotomy is still alive and well, some doubt has already been cast over the possibility of a strict division between high-level and low-level practices, or between theoretical and applied mathematics. Reviel Netz has gestured at a 'material' element in the manipulations of Euclidean-Archimedean geometrical diagrams, which are, for instance, 'constructed' and 'cut' in real space. In the case of professional mathematicians, Jens
Comparison of feeding guild structure and ecomorphology of intertidal fish assemblages from central California and central Chile

The hypothesis of ecological and morphological convergence of the taxonomically distinct intertidal fish assemblages from central California, USA, and central Chile was tested by comparing the feeding guild structures and the morphologies associated with food capture and processing of guild members from each region. We determined the diets of the most abundant intertidal fishes from 3 central California sites by examining gut contents. A matrix of dietary overlap among species within the Californian and Chilean assemblages (diets of Chilean fishes determined in another study) was constructed, and statistically significant guilds were determined using a bootstrapping procedure. Ten morphological features were examined for species in each region, and the relationship between diet and consumer morphology was evaluated. Three feeding guilds, omnivore, microcarnivore, and carnivore, were common to both regions, but a fourth guild, polychaete feeders, was unique to California. Feeding guild structure was not associated with phylogenetic relatedness within either assemblage. An assemblage-wide relationship between diet and morphology was found in each assemblage, but only a few associations between diet and morphology were common to both regions. In both California and Chile, omnivores tended to have longer digestive tracts and closer-set gill rakers, microcarnivores tended to have larger relative mouth heights, and all carnivorous fishes tended to have shorter guts and more widely spaced gill rakers. Overall, interregional morphological patterns were associated with phylogenetic relatedness, rather than with dietary similarities.
Research n enhanced ADRC algorithm for hydraulic active suspension

The purpose of this paper is to present a double loop auto disturbances rejection control (ADRC) algorithm for hydraulic active suspension system that can help the six-wheel off-road vehicle to improve passing performance. The nonlinear model equations are discussed along with compensation for the parametric uncertainties. The separate principle based control algorithm is developed for tracking control, and applied to an experimental valve-controlled cylinder. The experimental results show that the improved ADRC algorithm gives a good performance for the tracking task of electro-hydraulic servo system in the low frequency stage. With tracking error lower than 5%, the algorithm is greatly superior to PID in those aspects, such as rapidity, robustness, adaptivity, disturbances rejection, tracking accuracy and so on.
Influence of Dietary Sex Hormones on Chick Lipid Metabolism

The major ovarian hormones (estradiol and progesterone), the major testicular hormone (testosterone), and the major precursor to steroid hormones (cholesterol) were fed ad libitum in various combinations for either 2 weeks or 2 months (56 days) to 5-day-old female chicks; the effects of these treatments on liver lipids and plasma lipoproteins were measured. After two weeks, chicks fed basal diet supplemented with 0.05% estradiol had significant increases in plasma total cholesterol, triglycerides, and phospholipids (P less than .01). The combined supplementation of 0.05% estradiol plus 1% cholesterol produced an additive increase in plasma total cholesterol resulting in levels higher than obtained by either treatment alone (P less than .01). The addition of 0.2% progesterone to the 1% cholesterol diet inhibited the accumulation of plasma cholesterol (P less than .05), liver cholesterol (P less than .01), and liver triglycerides (P less than .01), which were found in comparable animals fed only 1% cholesterol. Likewise, the addition of 0.2% progesterone to diet containing 0.05% estradiol inhibited (P less than .01) accumulations in all of the plasma lipid classes which were found in comparable birds fed only 0.05% estradiol. After 2 months feeding, 0.1% testosterone had no effect on plasma or liver lipids. The combination of 0.05% estradiol plus 0.1% testosterone for 2 months was not very effective in reducing the hyperlipidemia caused by estradiol alone, but this treatment did result in a peculiar dwarf chicken. The results demonstrate strong steroid sex hormone interactions which produce major changes in chick plasma and liver lipid metabolism.
ACOUSTIC BAND GAP CHARACTERISTICS OF ONE- DIMENSIONAL PIPE PERIODICALLY INSTALLING DOUBLE HELMHOLTZ RESONATORS*

The study of acoustic and elastic wave propagation in artificial periodic structures has received increasing attention in the last few decades. The presence of band gaps in phononic crystals, which forbids elastic/acoustic wave propagation within the band-gap frequency range, supplies a new way to control noise and vibration. Koo and Sorokin study the acoustic and elastic wave propagation in artificial periodic pipe, focus attention into the vibration of the wall, and find the band gaps. The acoustic band gaps in artificial periodic pipe also get some researchers’ attention recently. Acoustic characteristics in the cavity of the pipe periodically installing double Helmholtz resonators are investigated theoretically and numerically in this paper. The results are compared to double Helmholtz resonators with variable parameters including the length and radius of the necks and resonators. The resonance frequency, transmission loss and acoustic band gaps of the pipe system can be further modulated by the parameters of the double Helmholtz resonators based on our study. These numerical results show a good agreement with those of the simulation by FEM software, while showing that one double Helmholtz resonator has some positive acoustic band-gap characteristics. This provides us a possible way to achieve a wider acoustic band gap via using the double Helmholtz resonator with appropriate parameters.
The ABC Index of Trees with Given Degree Sequence

The atom-bond connectivity index of a graph G is defined as where E(G) is the edge set and d(u), d(v) are the degrees of the vertices u and v in G, respectively. We characterize the trees with given degree sequences, extremal w. r. t. the ABC index.
Tap selection based MMSE equalization for high data rate UWB communication systems

The performance of a tap selection based minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization technique for high data rate ultra wideband (UWB) systems is analyzed. This technique is shown to outperform significantly the conventional uniformly spaced equalizer with the same number of taps. In addition, the impact of channel estimation error on the performance of tap selection based decision feedback equalization (DFE) is analyzed. This channel estimation based DFE is shown to perform well with only a few training symbols. It can then be adapted effectively using a least mean squares (LMS) algorithm for improved performance. Numerical analysis and simulation results show that the tap selection based equalization technique is a promising approach for practical high performance UWB system implementation with reduced complexity.
Phylogenetic analysis of new hepatitis B virus isolates from Nigeria supports endemicity of genotype E in West Africa *

Isolates of hepatitis B viruses were collected from 20 acute and chronic hepatitis patients in a highly endemic region of Nigeria. Sequencing classified the isolates to the ayw4, as they all contained the amino acid variations characteristic for that serotype. In the pre‐S2 region of five isolates, three to seven amino acids were deleted, suggesting that immune escape mutations previously associated only with chronic HBV infection may be observed also in acute disease. Phylogenetic analysis of the complete pre‐S2/S (large S) genes (831 nt) demonstrated that all the viruses belonged to the same genotype E. So far, no isolates of genotype E have been found in any other region of the world, including the Americas. This may suggest a relatively recent introduction of this genotype into humans and would explain the relatively low genetic diversity of viruses belonging to this genotype. One genotype E virus had been found previously in a chimpanzee, and viruses belonging to the CHIMP genotype are related to other genotype E viruses. These findings are compatible with a transmission of genotype E viruses from chimpanzees to humans. J. Med. Virol. 65:463–469, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
P2X7 receptor polymorphisms do not influence endothelial function and vascular tone in neo-diagnosed, treatment-naive essential hypertensive patients

Objective: Endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffness are early vascular alterations, linked to oxidative stress and inflammation, with prognostic significance in essential hypertensive patients. P2X7 receptors (P2X7R), responding to extracellular ATP, are encoded by a highly polymorphic gene and modulate inflammatory responses and cell growth, potentially playing a role in the control of vascular tone. This study evaluated the effects of P2X7R gene polymorphisms (single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs) on a detailed vascular hypertensive phenotype. Methods: We determined by real-time PCR two SNPs of the P2X7R gene (489C>T and 1513A>C) in 134 newly diagnosed, treatment-naive essential hypertensive patients and 131 normotensive controls (CTL). Endothelium-dependent response was assessed as flow-mediated dilatation (FMD) of the brachial artery, arterial stiffness as aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) and augmentation index (AIx) by tonometry. Markers of oxidative stress were also measured. Results: FMD was lower (P < 0.05), whereas aortic PWV and AIx were higher (P < 0.01) in essential hypertensive patients than in CTL. The allelic distribution of the two P2X7R SNPs was similar in essential hypertensive patients and CTL, either concerning homozygosis or presence of the mutant alleles. No difference was observed for FMD, aortic PWV, AIx or markers of oxidative stress between carriers and noncarriers of the mutant alleles, either in essential hypertensive patients and in CTL. In the whole group, logistic regression showed that the mutant allele of 1513A>C was a main determinant of AIx (odds ratio 1.90; P = 0.03). Conclusion: P2X7R 489C>T and 1513A>C SNPs are not associated with altered endothelial function or arterial stiffness in untreated newly diagnosed essential hypertensive patients; a possible role in influencing peripheral wave reflection should be further addressed.
Learning image semantics with latent aspect model

Automatic image annotation has become an important and challenging problem due to the existence of semantic gap. In this paper, we present an approach based on probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) to accomplish the tasks of semantic image annotation and retrieval. In order to model training images precisely, we employ two PLSA models to capture semantic information from visual and textual modalities respectively. Then an adaptive asymmetric learning approach is proposed to fuse aspects which are learned from both modalities. For each image document, the weight of each modality is determined by its contribution to the content of the image. Consequently, the two models are linked with the same distribution over aspects. This structure can predict semantic annotation for an unseen image because it associates visual and textual modalities properly. Finally, we compare our approach with several previous approaches on a standard Corel dataset. The experiment results show that our approach performs more effective and accurate.
Fuzzy-Semantic Similarity for Automatic Multilingual Plagiarism Detection

A word may have multiple meanings or senses, it could be modeled by considering that words in a sentence have a fuzzy set that contains words with similar meaning, which make detecting plagiarism a hard task especially when dealing with semantic meaning, and even harder for cross language plagiarism detection. Arabic is known by its richness, word’s constructions and meanings diversity, hence changing texts from/to Arabic is a complex task, and therefore adopting a fuzzy semantic-based approach seems to be the best solution. In this paper, we propose a detailed fuzzy semantic-based similarity model for analyzing and comparing texts in CLP cases, in accordance with the WordNet lexical database, to detect plagiarism in documents translated from/to Arabic, a preprocessing phase is essential to form operable data for the fuzzy process. The proposed method was applied to two texts (Arabic/English), taking into consideration the specificities of the Arabic language. The result shows that the proposed method can detect 85% of the plagiarism cases.
Switched Compensator for Contactless Power Transfer Systems

Contactless power transfer systems require compensators to improve power factor degradation caused by significant leakage inductance in the contactless power transformer. The most commonly used compensators are LC series- and parallel-resonant compensators. In this paper, we present a comparison between the characteristics of the compensators with a focus on transfer efficiency. Based on these characteristics, a compensator capable of switching between the LC parallel- and series-resonant topologies is proposed, and its changeover algorithm is explained. The proposed compensator was experimentally examined and was found to perform efficiently over a wider range of output power than conventional LC resonant compensators.
A review of the applications and hotspots of reinforcement learning

The learning behavior of the agent is a challenging and interesting issue in an unknown environment. Reinforcement learning obtain the developed strategy through exploration and interaction with the environment, and the characteristic of online learning make it as an important branch of machine learning research. In this paper, we summarize the current research of the reinforcement learning applications and hotspots. Firstly, the principle, structure and the main classic algorithms of the reinforcement learning are introduced. Secondly, according to the recent research results, we introduce four main applications of reinforcement learning, namely robot, unmanned aerial vehicle, multi-agent and intelligent traffic. Finally, the research hotspots and the development direction of the reinforcement learning are introduced, which conclude the partial perception, hierarchical reinforcement learning, combination with other artificial intelligence technologies and game theory.
Prenatal detection of trisomy 21 in uncultured amniocytes by fluorescence in situ hybridization: A prospective study

A prospective study was undertaken to evaluate the use of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for the detection of trisomy 21 in interphase nuclei of uncultured amniotic fluid cells. Five hundred cases were analysed in situ and classified as normal or abnormal; the results were subsequently checked against the cytogenetic findings. Four hundred and ninety‐three were correctly identified as normal with an 86·6 per cent average frequency of scored nuclei exhibiting two signals; six cases were correctly identified as trisomic for chromosome 21 with 81·7 per cent of scored nuclei exhibiting three signals; and one abnormal case involving an unbalanced chromosome 21·21 translocation was falsely scored as normal due to poor hybridization/detection efficiency. The method has been substantially improved and simplified so that it is suitable for the rapid detection of trisomy 21. As aneuploidy detection in interphase does not identify structural chromosome aberrations, it is not a substitute for fetal chromosome analysis.
The Keck Carbon Cycle AMS Laboratory, University of California, Irvine: Initial Operation and a Background Surprise

A new radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) laboratory for carbon cycle studies has been established at the University of California, Irvine. The 0.5MV AMS system was installed in mid-2002 and has operated routinely since October of that year. This paper briefly describes the spectrometer and summarizes lessons learned during the first year of operation. In the process of setting up the system, we identified and largely suppressed a previously unreported 14C AMS background: charge exchange tails from 14N beams derived from nitrogen-containing molecular ions produced near the entrance of the accelerator.
Proust and Signs: The Complete Text

Translator's Note Preface to the Complete Text Preface to the 1972 Edition Works by Proust Part I: The Signs 1. The Types of Signs 2. Signs and Truth 3. Apprenticeship 4. Essence and the Signs of Art 5. Secondary Role of Memory 6. Series and Group 7. Pluralism in the System of Signs Conclusion to Part I: The Image of Thought Part II: The Literary Machine 8. Antilogos 9. Cells and Vessels 10. Levels of the Search 11. The Three Machines 12. Style Conclusion to Part II: Presence and Function of Madness: The Spider Notes.
Determination of heat‐shock transcription factor 2 stoichiometry at looped DNA complexes using scanning force microscopy.

Gene activation frequently requires an array of proteins bound to sites distal to the transcription start site. The assembly of these protein‐bound sites into specialized nucleoprotein complexes is a prerequisite for transcriptional activation. Structural analysis of these higher order complexes will provide crucial information for understanding the mechanisms of gene activation. We have used both electron microscopy and scanning force microscopy to elucidate the structure of complexes formed between DNA and heat‐shock transcription factor (HSF) 2, a human heat‐shock transcriptional activator that binds DNA as a trimer. Electron microscopy reveals that HSF2 will bring together distant DNA sites to create a loop. We show that this association requires only the DNA binding and trimerization domains of HSF2. Metal shadowing techniques used for electron microscopy obscure details of these nucleoprotein structures. Greatly increased resolution was achieved by directly imaging the complexes in the scanning force microscope, which reveals that at least two trimers are required for the association of HSF2‐bound DNA sites.