Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Secondary inorganic aerosol simulations for Europe with special attention to nitrate

Nitrate is an important component of (secondary inorganic) fine aerosols in Europe. We present a model sim-ulation for the year 1995 in which we account for the forma-tion of secondary inorganic aerosols including ammonium sulphate and ammonium nitrate, a semi volatile component. For this purpose, the chemistry-transport model LOTOS was extended with a thermodynamic equilibrium module and ad-ditional relevant processes to account for secondary aerosol formation and deposition. During winter, fall and especially spring high nitrate levels are projected over north western, central and eastern Europe. During winter nitrate concen-trations are highest in Italy, in accordance with observed data. In winter nitric acid, the precursor for aerosol nitrate is formed through heterogeneous reactions on the surface of aerosols. Modelled and observed sulphate concentrations show little seasonal variation. Compared to sulphate lev-els, appreciable ammonium nitrate concentrations in summer are limited to those areas with high ammonia emissions, e.g. the Netherlands, since high ammonia concentrations are nec-essary to stabilise this aerosol component at high tempera-tures. As a consequence of the strong seasonal variation in nitrate levels the AOD depth of nitrate over Europe is es-pecially significant compared to that of sulphate in winter and spring when equal AOD values are calculated over large parts of Europe. Averaged over all stations the model re-produces the measured concentrations for NO3, SO4, NH4, TNO3 (HNO3+NO3), TNH4 (NH3+NH4) and SO2 within 20%. The daily variation is captured well, albeit that the model does not always represent the amplitude of single events. The model underestimates wet deposition which was attributed to the crude representation of cloud processes. Comparison of retrieved and computed aerosol optical depth (AOD) showed that the model underestimates AOD significantly, which was expected due to the lack of carbonaceous aerosols, sea salt and dust in the model. The treatment of ammonia was found to be a major source for uncertainties in the model representation of secondary aerosols. Also, inclu-sion of sea salt is necessary to properly assess the nitrate and nitric acid levels in marine areas
Design and implementation of RSLA antenna for mobile DBS application in Ku-band downlink direction

In this paper, a SOTM (satellite on the move) DBS receiver has been designed and implemented based on Radial Line Slot Array (RLSA) antenna which operates at Kuband. This antenna is implemented with brass as conductor and air (εr ≈ 1) as dielectric material. This RLSA antenna has eight concentric array slot pairs to achieve conical beam, better gain and wider frequency bandwith compared to Makoto Ando model. From the simulation and measurement results we can see that our RLSA prototype has passed the technical specifications. This antenna has conical beam, with 14.22 dBi at 12.0 GHz, operational frequency bandwidth about 1.7 GHz and axial ratio about 3.79 dB.
The Effect of Charge Injection on EHD Conduction Pumping

Electrohydrodynamics (EHD) conduction pumping takes advantage of Coulomb force generated by externally applied electric field and dissociated charges from electrolytes present in the working fluid. With the electric field maintained below the DC breakdown limit, EHD conduction generated flow relies primarily upon the asymmetry of the electrodes where the flow is always generated toward the specific direction regardless of the electrodes polarity. The charge distribution induced by the process of dissociation may be altered by charge injection, potentially present at the electrodes' surfaces. The charge injection could occur, for example, because of the electrode surface roughness. This paper is a numerical investigation to quantify the impact of the charge injection on the performance of EHD conduction pump. The numerical domain comprises a coplanar asymmetric electrode pair embedded against a 2-D channel wall with the EHD conduction induced liquid flow expected to be generated from the narrower electrode toward the wider electrode. The electric field, net charge density, and electric body force distributions are presented in the absence and presence of charge injection. In addition, the electrically generated net flow is calculated for several operating conditions.
Socioeconomic Gaps in Early Childhood Experiences

This study compares the early life experiences of kindergarteners in 1998 and 2010 using two nationally representative data sets. We find that (a) young children in the later period are exposed to more books and reading in the home, (b) they have more access to educational games on computers, and (c) they engage with their parents more, inside and outside the home. Although these increases occurred among low- and high-income children, in many cases the biggest changes were seen among the lowest-income children. Our results indicate narrowing but still large early childhood parental investment gaps. In addition, socioeconomic gaps in preschool participation grew over this period, despite substantial investments in public preschool. Implications for early socioeconomic achievement gaps are discussed.
Face recognition using illumination-invariant local patches

Illumination variation that span globally and locally across the facial surface is one of the most important aspect in designing a robust face recognition system. The illumination variations due to changes in lighting conditions could produce different shape of shading on the face thus deforming the facial features. The effect of these variations is simply more severe in the presence of single-sample constraint since there would be many variables with very limited observations. Illumination variations have been modelled in literature as a series of undetermined multiplicative and additive noise, hence it is more convenient to eliminate or reduce the effect rather than computing them. In this paper, we present an illumination-invariant method where we use local features as basis for face classification which is obtained from partitioning histogram-equalized faces into smaller overlapping local patches (LPs). We can achieve illumination-invariance for these LPs by subtracting the vectors with local average illumination and then these vectors are logarithmically normalized to enhance the local contrast. The degree of invariance is controlled by a weight connected to the average intensity component. We have tested this method in single sample face recognition setting on AR Database and Extended YALE B Database. Recognition results show that the proposed method is suitable for robust face recognition since it achieve good performance in both even illumination and uneven illumination cases.
Machine reading of web text

Over the last five years or so, the KnowItAll project at the University of Washington has been investigating the hypothesis that a substantial fraction of the knowledge necessary for intelligence can be extracted automatically from text, and specifically from text available on the Web. We believe that the time is ripe for the AI community to set its sights on Machine Reading (MR): the autonomous understanding of text. My talk describes progress towards this goal at the University of Washington, and highlights several open questions.
Speaker diarization of spontaneous meeting room conversations

Speaker diarization is the task of identifying ``who spoke when'' in an audio stream containing multiple speakers. This is an unsupervised task as there is no a priori information about the speakers. Diagnostical studies on state-of-the-art diarization systems have isolated three main issues with the systems; overlapping speech, effects of background noise and speech/nonspeech detection errors on clustering, and signficant performance variance between different systems. In this thesis we focuss on addressing these issues in diarization. We propose new features based on structure of a conversation such as silence and speaker change statistics for overlap detection. The features are estimated from a long-term context (3-4 seconds) and are used to estimate the probability of overlap at a given instant. These probabilities are later incorporated into acoustic feature based overlap detector as prior probabilities. Experiments on several meeting corpora reveal that overlap detection is improved significantly by the proposed method and this consequently reduces the diarization error. To address the issues arising from background noise, errors in speech/non-speech detection and capture speaker discriminative information in the signal, we propose two methods. In the first method, we propose Information Bottleneck with Side Information (IBSI) based diarization to supress artefacts of background noise and non-speech segments introduced into clustering. In the second method, we show that the phoneme transcript of a given recording carries useful information for speaker diarization. This obervation was used in estimation of phoneme background model which is used for diarization in Information Bottleneck (IB) framework. Both the methods achieve significant reduction in error on various meeting corpora. We train different artificial neural network (ANN) architectures to extract speaker discriminant features and use these features as input to speaker diarization systems. The ANNs are trained to perform related tasks such as speaker comparison, speaker classification and auto encoding. The bottleneck layer activations from these networks are used as features for speaker diarization. Experiments on different meeting corpora revealed that combination of MFCCs and ANN features reduces the diarization error. To address the issue of performance variations across different sytems, we propose feature level combination of HMM/GMM and IB diarization systems. The combination does not require any changes to the original systems. The output of IB system is used to generate features which when combined with MFCCs in a HMM/GMM system reduce diarization error.
Neuron types in the rat lateral superior olive and developmental changes in the complexity of their dendritic arbors

The lateral superior olive (LSO), a conspicuous mammalian brainstem nucleus that is involved in sound localization, has become a model system for investigating the formation of topographically organized inhibitory and excitatory connections. In experiments employing intracellular injections of Lucifer yellow or neurobiotin into lightly fixed brain slices, we have examined the soma‐dendritic morphology of 483 LSO neurons of rats between postnatal day (P) 4 and P36. A detailed analysis of the shape and complexity of dendritic arbors was performed in 238 neurons in order to identify different cell classes and to determine whether age‐related changes occur that may relate to a topographical refinement. Regardless of age, seven classes of LSO neurons were identified, more than had been delineated previously with the Golgi technique. Bipolar neurons and multipolar neurons comprised the two major cell types, whereas small multipolar cells, banana‐like cells, bushy cells, unipolar cells, and marginal cells were found less frequently. Age‐related changes were analyzed in bipolar and multipolar neurons, and several modifications of their dendritic arbors were observed that are in accordance with a refinement of topography. For example, at P4, bipolar and multipolar cells had relatively broad dendritic arbors, with an average of 140 and 138 dendritic end branches, respectively. During further development, their numbers became drastically reduced by about 80%, such that an average of less than 30 endpoints remained by P36. As the dendritic arbors became smaller specifically along the transverse axis of the LSO, they became confined to a smaller frequency area. We conclude from our results that considerable remodeling takes place in the LSO and that the selective loss of dendritic branches may be a morphological correlate for the formation of exquisite tonotopy. J. Comp. Neurol. 390:20–40, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Activation of δ-Opioid Receptors Inhibits Neuronal-Like Calcium Channels and Distal Steps of Ca2+-Dependent Secretion in Human Small-Cell Lung Carcinoma Cells

Human small-cell lung carcinoma (SCLC) cells express neuronal-like voltage-operated calcium channels (VOCCs) and release mitogenic hormones such as serotonin (5-HT). Opioid peptides, on the other hand, have been shown to reduce SCLC cell proliferation by an effective autocrine pathway. Here we show that in GLC8 SCLC cells, only δ-opioid receptor subtype mRNA is expressed. Consistently, the selective δ-opioid agonist [d-Pen2-Pen5]-enkephalin (DPDPE), but not μ and κ agonists, potently and dose-dependently inhibits high-threshold (HVA) VOCCs in these cells. As in peripheral neurons, this modulation is largely voltage-dependent, mediated by pertussis toxin (PTX)-sensitive G-proteins, cAMP-independent, and mainly affecting N-type VOCCs. With the same potency and selectivity, DPDPE also antagonizes the Ca2+-dependent release of [3H]serotonin ([3H]5-HT) from GLC8 cells. However, DPDPE inhibits not only the depolarization-induced release, but also the Ca2+-dependent secretion induced by thapsigargin or ionomycin. This suggests that besides inhibiting HVA VOCCs, opioids also exert a direct depressive action on the secretory apparatus in GLC8 cells. This latter effect also is mediated by a PTX-sensitive G-protein but, contrary to VOCC inhibition, it can be reversed by elevations of cAMP levels. These results show for the first time that opioids effectively depress both Ca2+ influx and Ca2+-dependent hormone release in SCLC cells by using multiple modulatory pathways. It can be speculated that the two mechanisms may contribute to the opioid antimitogenic action on lung neuroendocrine carcinoma cells.
Detection of Abnormalities in MANETs

Abstract : Abnormalities in MANETs can be malicious attacks or selfish nodes which can affect network architecture and network operation significantly. Clearly, there are two distinct objectives: 1) To design/examine attacks and develop countermeasures and 2) design/modify current routing protocols, but adding new security features to prevent the routing from attacks and interruption. For both directions, security analysis has been addressed along with peer-to-peer networking architecture for MANETs and sensor networks. There are 10 common threats to these networks: spoofing of IP address, forging of route request, forging of route reply, injecting route reply without receiving a route request, replay attack, rushing attacks, generating false errors, jamming, man-in-the-middle attack, and modifying node list on a route request. There are many solutions that aim to design networks and networking protocols based upon the detection of abnormalities. These solutions are designed to be adaptive to any threats or abnormalities in the network.
AN EFFICIENT IMAGE DOWNSAMPLING TECHNIQUE USING GENETIC ALGORITHM AND DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM 1

Digital images are used everywhere and it is easy to manipulate and edit because of availability of various image processing and editing software. Resizing the image to a lower resolution can alter the appearance of an image. It is useful at times to create a downsampled version of the image that gives the same impression as the original. There are many methods for image downsampling. In this paper, an efficient thresholding technique is used for image downsampling based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms and Genetic Algorithm. We have combined Genetic Algorithm (GA) with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to make the image down sampling faster and to get adequate results. First the length of the histogram is reduced by using DWT. Using this reduced histogram, the number of thresholds and threshold value are determined by applying Genetic Algorithm. From the analysis of results, it can be concluded that the proposed method is fast and accurate.
OYSTER: A Study of Integrated Circuits as Three Dimensional Structures

This paper presents a design for a software system (OYSTER) for the parametric simulation and analysis of the fabrication steps of very large scale integrated circuit devices. The system is based on a solid geometric modeling approach in which the component parts of an integrated circuit are represented at any step as three-dimensional solid objects in a geometric data base. The simulation of a fabrication step transforms the data base representation of the geometry and the relations among component parts from their state before the step to their state after the step. At any step, and particularly after the final step, the component parts may be analyzed automatically to determine geometric, mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. Statistical effects may be incorporated to allow investigation of alignment tolerance build-up and yield. A prototype study is described in which an existing geometric modeling system is used to transform a set of planar masks for an FET device through 28 process steps into 3-D models which are used to compute device capacitances.
Presence and cellular distribution of HIV in the testes of seropositive subjects: an evaluation by in situ PCR hybridization

Cellular distribution of HIV‐1 proviral DNA has been studied, by in situ PCR hybridization, in the testes of infected men who died at various stages of the disease. In seropositive asymptomatic subjects, HIV‐1 proviral DNA was present in the nuclei of germ cells at all stages of their differentiation. The presence of provirus did not induce germ cell damage, was associated with normal spermatogenesis, and was not accompanied by morphologic signs of immune response. The observed HIV hybridization pattern of germ cells suggests clonal infection. Mechanisms responsible for HIV penetration in testicular germ cells remain to be clarified; however, the possibility of a direct infection of the germ cells by cell‐free virus is suggested. In the testes of AIDS‐deceased men, histologic features of hypoplasia with arrested spermatogenesis were evident, and few infected spermatogonia and spermatocytes were observed. The whole of these data demonstrates that the testis is a site of early viral localization that fails to elicit an immunological response, and that HIV‐seropositive men produce infected spermatozoa that are released in the genital tract. —Muciaccia, B. , Uccini, S. , Filippini, A. , Ziparo, E. , Paraire, F. , Baroni, C. D. , Stefanini, M. Presence and cellular distribution of HIV in the testes of seropositive subjects: an evaluation by in situ PCR hybridization. FASEB J. 12, 151–163 (1998)
Stereotypical Inferences: Philosophical Relevance and Psycholinguistic Toolkit

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide (experimental) philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are (Section 1), and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied (Section 2). It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies (Sections 3-4) how potentially questionnaire-based measures (plausibility-ratings) can be combined with process measures (reaction times and pupillometry) to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking.
Cluster-Galaxy Correlations in Cold Dark Matter Models

We study the ability of COBE-normalized cold dark matter (CDM) models to reproduce observed properties of the distribution of galaxies and clusters using N-body numerical simulations. We analyze the galaxy-galaxy and cluster-galaxy two-point correlation functions, ξgg and ξcg, in open (Ω0 = 0.4, ΩΛ = 0, σ8 = 0.75) and flat (Ω0 = 0.3, ΩΛ = 0.7, σ8 = 1.05) CDM models, both of which reproduce the observed abundances of rich clusters of galaxies. To compare models with observations, we compute projected cross-correlation functions ωgg and ωcg to derive the corresponding ξgg and ξcg. We use target galaxies selected from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, target clusters selected from the APM Cluster Survey, and tracer galaxies from the Edinburgh Durham Sky Survey catalog. We find that the open model is able to reproduce the observed ξgg, whereas the flat model needs antibias in order to fit the observations. Our estimate of ξcg for the APM cluster sample analyzed is consistent with a power law ξcg = (r/r0)γ with r0 = 10.0 ± 0.7 h-1 Mpc and γ ≃ -2.1. For the open and flat-antibiased CDM models explored we find the corresponding cluster-galaxy correlation lengths 6.5 ± 0.7 h-1 Mpc and 7.2 ± 0.5 h-1 Mpc, respectively, significantly lower than the observed value. Our results indicate that COBE-normalized CDM models are not able to reproduce the spatial cross-correlation of clusters and galaxies.