Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Noise Consideration for Micromachined Digital Accelerometers

Three noise sources are present in a sigma-delta modulator (SigmaDeltaM) type system applied to a micromachined accelerometer: mechanical noise due to Brownian motion, electronic noise introduced by the interface circuit due to thermal noise sources in the electronic devices and quantisation noise due to the analog to digital conversion process. Based on theory of limit cycles in nonlinear closed loop systems, the mathematical model and formulae for power spectral density calculation of a micromachined accelerometer are derived in this paper. The theoretical considerations agree well with the simulation results in Matlab SIMULINK
Feature-Based Neural Network Approach for Oscillometric Blood Pressure Estimation

In this paper, we present a novel feature-based neural network (NN) approach for estimation of blood pressure (BP) from wrist oscillometric measurements. Unlike previous methods that use the raw oscillometric waveform envelope (OMWE) as input to the NN, in this paper, we propose to use features extracted from the envelope. The OMWE is mathematically modeled as a sum of two Gaussian functions. The optimum parameters of this model are found by minimizing the least squares error between the model and the OMWE using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm and are used as features. Two separate feed-forward NNs (FFNNs) are then designed to estimate the systolic and diastolic BPs using these features. The FFNNs are trained using the resilient backpropagation learning algorithm and tested on a data set of BP measurements recorded from 85 subjects. The performance is then compared with that of the conventional maximum amplitude algorithm, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, and already published NN-based methods. It is found that the proposed approach achieves lower values of mean absolute error and standard deviation of error in the estimation of BP. In addition, the proposed approach has the following advantages: lower complexity with respect to the design parameters, smaller training data set, and lower computational load.
GROWTH CHARACTERISTICS IN HELA CELLS OF THE RAPIDLY GROWING ACID FAST BACTERIA, MYCOBACTERIUM FORTUITUM, MYCOBACTERIUM PHLEI, AND MYCOBACTERIUM SMEGMATIS

With the techniques found suitable for the growth of tubercle bacilli in HeLa cells (Shepard, 1955, 1957a) little extracellular bacterial growth occurs when virulent strains are used. When rapidly growing mycobacteria (Gordonand Smith, 1953, 1955) are introduced into the tissue cultures in the same concentration, bacterial growth in the extracellular tissue culture fluid is rapid and soon results in death of the HeLa cells. To be able to observe whether the well known saprophytes Mycobacterium phlei and Mycobacterium smegmatis and the potentially pathogenic Mycobacterium fortuitum could grow in HeLa cells, it was necessary to modify the procedures in two respects. The first was the addition of 500 ,g streptomycin/ml of tissue culture fluid after the bacilli had been phagocytosed by the HeLa cells, so that the growth of bacilli remaining outside the cells would be suppressed. It had previously been shown that concentrations of streptomycin up to 2,000 ,ug/ml were without effect on intracellular growth of tubercle bacilli (Shepard, 1957b). The second modification was introduced because observations of stained smears revealed that many large clumps of organisms were present in the bacterial inocula prepared from the rapidly growing mycobacteria when the method found suitable for tubercle bacilli was followed (Shepard, 1955, 1957a). This change consisted of filtering the bacterial suspension through filter paper (Fenner, 1951). The classification of the rapidly growing acid fast bacteria, M. phlei, M. smegmatis, and M. fortuitum, has been placed on a firm basis by the studies of Gordon and Smith (1953, 1955). Wells et al. (1955) studied the pathogenicity in animals of a culture of M. fortuitum which they had isolated from a patient with cellulitis and lymphadenitis. A distinctive disease picture was produced in mice following intraperitoneal injection of this culture, as well as of 8 of 9 cultures of M. fortuitum which these workers received from Dr. Gordon.
Effect of physical activity on the cognitive performance of middle aged New Zealand workers

9 General Introduction 11 1 Chapter 1. Review of literature 14 1.1 Age-related changes in cognitive function 14 1.2 Brain and cognitive reserve 15 1.3 Physical activity and cognitive function 18 1.3. 1 Epidemiological studies 19 1.3. 2 Intervention studies 25 1.3. 3 Summary of the literature for physical activity and cognition 32 1.4 Mechanisms for building cognitive reserve 33 1.4. 1 Direct neurophysiological adaptations 33 1.4. 2 Indirect mediators 33 1.5 The workplace as a vehicle for physical activity 35 1.5. 1 Physical activity programs 36 1.6 Summary of literature and directions for research 37 2 Chapter 2. A feasibility study of a workplace exercycle program (Study 1) 39 2.
Understanding Relations between Science, Politics, and the Public: The Case of a GM Field Trial Controversy in Belgium

In 2011, a Belgian field trial with genetically modified crops triggered fierce public protests and debates. Opponents of the trial protested against its performance and some advocated its destruction, in response to which scientists and the government defended a scientific freedom to perform the trial. This article investigates why the different stakeholders came to occupy such mutually exclusive positions towards the trial. Based on analyses of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, document analyses, and field observations, the article argues that the different stakeholders were involved in an ontological politics. This politics centred on the question of which ontologically different, co-existing versions of the trial should be attended to in institutionalised scientific and political appraisals of the trial. The article concludes that the institutional handling of the trial as if it represented a single reality that merited only epistemological struggles contributed to turning a multifaceted debate into a dichotomous one, figuring field trial proponents and opponents. As such, the opposition between the different stakeholders was not antecedent to the institutional handling of the trial – as different stakeholders claimed – but rather an outcome of it.
Beyond Sparsity: Tree Regularization of Deep Models for Interpretability

The lack of interpretability remains a key barrier to the adoption of deep models in many applications. In this work, we explicitly regularize deep models so human users might step through the process behind their predictions in little time. Specifically, we train deep time-series models so their class-probability predictions have high accuracy while being closely modeled by decision trees with few nodes. Using intuitive toy examples as well as medical tasks for treating sepsis and HIV, we demonstrate that this new tree regularization yields models that are easier for humans to simulate than simpler L1 or L2 penalties without sacrificing predictive power.
Evaluating speech intelligibility enhancement for HMM-based synthetic speech in noise

It is possible to increase the intelligibility of speech in noise by enhancing the clean speech signal. In this paper we demonstrate the effects of modifying the spectral envelope of synthetic speech according to the environmental noise. To achieve this, we modify Mel cepstral coefficients according to an intelligibility measure that accounts for glimpses of speech in noise: the Glimpse Proportion measure. We evaluate this method against a baseline synthetic voice trained only with normal speech and a topline voice trained with Lombard speech, as well as natural speech. The intelligibility of these voices was measured whenmixed with speech-shaped noise and with a competing speaker at three different levels. The Lombard voices, both natural and synthetic, were more intelligible than the normal voices in all conditions. For speechshaped noise, the proposed modified voice was as intelligible as the Lombard synthetic voice without requiring any recordings of Lombard speech, which are hard to obtain. However, in the case of competing talker noise, the Lombard synthetic voice was more intelligible than the proposed modified voice.
Demand-driven incremental object queries

Object queries are essential in information seeking and decision making in vast areas of applications. However, a query may involve complex conditions on objects and sets, which can be arbitrarily nested and aliased. The objects and sets involved as well as the demand---the given parameter values of interest---can change arbitrarily. How to implement object queries efficiently under all possible updates, and furthermore to provide complexity guarantees? This paper describes an automatic method. The method allows powerful queries to be written completely declaratively. It transforms demand as well as all objects and sets into relations. Most importantly, it defines invariants for not only the query results, but also all auxiliary values about the objects and sets involved, including those for propagating demand, and incrementally maintains all of them. Implementation and experiments with problems from a variety of application areas, including distributed algorithms and probabilistic queries, confirm the analyzed complexities, trade-offs, and significant improvements over prior work.
Novel image-reconstruction method applied to deep Hubble space telescope images

We have developed a method for the linear reconstruction of an image from undersampled, dithered data, which has been sued to create the distributed, combined Hubble Deep Field images - the deepest optical images yet taken of the universe. The algorithm known as variable-pixel linear reconstruction, preserves photometry and resolution, can weight input images according to the statistical significance of each pixel, and removes the effects of geometric distortion both on image shape and photometry. In this paper, the algorithm and its implementation are described, and measurements of the photometric accuracy and image fidelity are presented. In addition, we describe the use drizzling to combine dithered images in the presence of cosmic rays.
Reduced Fertility in Female Mice Lacking Copper-Zinc Superoxide Dismutase*

Copper-zinc superoxide dismutase (CuZn-SOD) is believed to play a major role in the first line of antioxidant defense by catalyzing the dismutation of superoxide anion radicals to form hydrogen peroxide and molecular oxygen. Recent studies have shown that missense mutations in this gene contribute, evidently through a gain-of-function mechanism, to about 20% of familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. To define further the physiologic role of this enzyme, a model of mice deficient in this enzyme was generated using gene targeting technology. Mice lacking this enzyme were apparently healthy and displayed no increased sensitivity to hyperoxia. However, they exhibited a pronounced susceptibility to paraquat toxicity. Most surprisingly, female homozygous knock-out mice showed a markedly reduced fertility compared with that of wild-type and heterozygous knock-out mice. Further studies revealed that although these mice ovulated and conceived normally, they exhibited a marked increase in embryonic lethality. These data, for the first time, suggest a role of oxygen free radicals in causing abnormality of female reproduction in mammals.
Structural similarity between the lepidoptera- and diptera-specific insecticidal endotoxin genes of Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. "kurstaki" and "israelensis"

A gene from Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. "israelensis" was cloned from the large plasmids of this subspecies and was shown to code for a mosquitocidal polypeptide. The gene could be expressed in either Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, or B. thuringiensis subsp. "israelensis" to produce the larvicidal activity. Similarly, a Lepidoptera-specific toxin gene from B. thuringiensis subsp. "kurstaki" was also cloned and expressed in E. coli and B. subtilis. Both cloned genes were sequenced and subjected to computer analysis. A long open translational reading frame coded for the B. thuringiensis subsp. "kurstaki" gene product. However, the B. thuringiensis subsp. "israelensis" clone was composed of two adjacent open reading frames oriented as if they were in a transcriptional operon. The products of the cloned genes retained their specificity for either Lepidoptera or Diptera. The control regions immediately preceding the toxin genes of both B. thuringiensis subspecies showed considerable DNA homology, most likely because both toxins are expressed only during sporulation. In addition, the deduced amino acid sequences from the two contiguous B. thuringiensis subsp. "israelensis" genes bore a striking resemblance to the deduced amino acid sequence from the single larger B. thuringiensis subsp. "kurstaki" gene, as if these two arrangements were evolutionarily related.
ZDB-high performance key-value store

Nowadays key-value stores play a critical part in large-scale high performance applications. Attention paid to key-value stores prove the importance of the key-value store that have already been used. This paper presents ZDB which is a high performance persistent key-value store designed for optimizing reading and writing operations. This key-value store support sequential write and single disk seek for read and write operations. Key contributions of this paper are the principles in architecture, design and implementation of a high performance persistent key-value store. This is achieved by using a data file structure organized as commit log storage where every new data is appended to the end of the data file. An in memory index is used for random reading. ZDB architecture optimize the index of key-value store for auto incremental integer keys which can be applied in storing many real life data efficiently with minimize memory overhead and reduce the complexity for partitioning data.
Trace driven simulation of GDSF# and existing caching algorithms for web proxy servers

Web proxy caching is used to improve the performance of the Web infrastructure. It aims to reduce network traffic, server load, and user perceived retrieval delays. The heart of a caching system is its page replacement policy, which needs to make good replacement decisions when its cache is full and a new document needs to be stored. The latest and most popular replacement policies like GDSF use the file size, access frequency, and age in the decision process. The effectiveness of any replacement policy can be evaluated using two metrics: hit ratio (HR) and byte hit ratio (BHR). There is always a trade-off between HR and BHR [1]. In this paper, using three different proxy server logs, we use trace driven analysis to evaluate the effects of different replacement policies on the performance of a Web server. We propose a modification of GDSF policy, GDSF#, which allows augmenting or weakening the impact of size or frequency or both on HR and BHR. Our simulation results show that our proposed replacement policy GDSF# gives close to perfect performance in both the important metrics: HR and BHR. Key-words: Web caching, Replacement policy, Hit ratio, Byte hit ratio, Trace-driven simulation
Electronic Medical Record Features and Seven Quality of Care Measures in Physician Offices

The effect of electronic medical records (EMRs) on quality of care in physicians’ offices is uncertain. This study used the 2008-2009 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey to examine the relationship between EMRs features and quality in physician offices. The relationship between selected EMRs features and 7 quality measures was evaluated by testing 25 associations in multivariate models. Significant relationships include reminders for guideline-based interventions or screening tests associated with lower odds of inappropriate urinalysis and prescription of antibiotics for upper respiratory infection (URI), prescription order entry associated with lower odds of prescription of antibiotics for URI, and patient problem list associated with higher odds of inappropriate prescribing for elderly patients. EMRs system level was associated with lower odds of blood pressure check, inappropriate urinalysis, and prescription of antibiotics for URI compared with no EMRs. The results show both positive and inverse relationships between EMRs features and quality of care.
Enhanced query processing using weighted predicate tree in edge computing environment

Edge computing is a novel computing paradigm in which the edge nodes of Internet of Things (IoT) are heavily involved in data processing. Resource Description Framework (RDF) plays an important role in Semantic Web due to the explosive growth of data of IoT. RDF is a graph-based data model employed for representing the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and SPARQL is the standard query language used for processing the query of RDF data. Growth of data throws a big challenge to the data storing and processing. In this paper a new data storing and query processing approach is proposed using weighted predicate tree. The predicate tree is used for effective storing of data and extracting the weights indicating the relation of the data. Computer simulation with SP2 Bench data set and SPARQL query reveals that the proposed approach allows substantially higher performance than three existing representative query processing schemes.
Stiffness and dexterous performances optimization of large workspace cable-driven parallel manipulators

Cable-driven parallel manipulators (CDPMs) provide an easy way to achieve large workspace since flexible cables can be readily stored on reels. Generally, cables are treated as massless and inextensible that can only be tensioned. But for large workspace applications, cable curve due to their self-weight must be considered. In this paper, a curved cable is modeled as the series of an inextensible parabolic cable and a flat elastic cable to accurately account for its curve effect. The stiffness and Jacobian matrices of CDPMs are derived, which provide quantitative representations of stiffness and dexterity of manipulators. An optimization model is presented to simultaneously improve the stiffness and dexterity by selecting proper sectional area of cables and other structural parameters. Numerical examples demonstrate the curve effect on the stiffness of manipulators and a remarkable improvement of the performances can be obtained by properly determining structural parameters. Graphical Abstract
Analysis of Protein by Spectrophotometric and Computer Colour Based Intensity Method from Stem of Pea (Pisum sativum) at Different Stages

In this study proteins were analyzed from pea plants at three different growth stages of stem by spectrophotometric i.e Lowry and Bradford quantitative methods and computer colour intensity based method. Though Spectrophotometric methods are regarded as classical methods, we report an alternate computer based method which gave comparable results. Computer software was developed the for protein analysis which is easier, time and money saving method as compared to the classical methods.
Cardiovascular, Renal, and Endocrine Response to Atrial Natriuretic Peptide in Angiotensin II Mediated Hypertension

Studies done in vitro have demonstrated that atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) antagonizes angiotensin H-mediated contraction of vascular smooth muscle. The present studies were designed to examine the in vivo actions of ANP in acute angiotensin II-mediated hypertension. The cardiovascular, renal, and hormonal effects of intravenous ANP were evaluated in anesthetized nor mo tensive (n = 6) and hypertensive (n = 6) dogs. In both groups, ANP (3.0 &mgr;g/kg bolus, 0.3 &mgr;g/kg/min continuous infusion) reduced arterial pressure and cardiac output without changing systemic vascular resistance. ANP specifically reduced renal vascular resistance and increased sodium excretion. The natriuresis observed was greater in hypertensive than in normotensive dogs. This occurred without a significant change in glomerular filtration rate or aldosterone. The ANP-mediated reduction in arterial pressure was associated with an increase in circulating arginine vasopressin and catecholamines but not in renin. These studies demonstrate that (1) ANP-mediated hypotension results from a reduction in cardiac output without changing systemic vascular resistance, (2) ANP acts as a specific renal vasodilator, (3) ANP-mediated natriuresis can occur without alteration in glomerular filtration rate or aldosterone, and (4) ANP specifically inhibits the release of renin without inhibiting the release of other circulating vasoconstrictors.
Reconciling contradictory paths: identity play and work in a career transition

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the interconnection of identity play and identity work during transitions. Design/methodology/approach – The authors have conducted a 46-year longitudinal and process-based study on film director Denys Arcand. The focus is on his contested career shift from being a political documentary filmmaker to a box-office success and maker of television commercials. Films and media interviews were largely and systematically analyzed. Findings – In order to explain how to maintain a sense of authenticity in transitioning between contradictory paths, the authors highlight how identity play and identity work appear in self-fuelling interaction through four processes (fragmenting, developing, mixing, and extracting). Practical implications – The authors suggest new ways to deal with career transitions as well as identity construction in constraining environments. Originality/value – The authors offer a theoretical framework that makes it possible to combine understan.
A note on finite axiomatization of partial propositional calculi

At the Princeton Bicentennial in 1946 Tarski posed the question as to whether or not certain problems connected with partial propositional calculi were recursively solvable. Since that time the specific problems mentioned by Tarski as well as a number of related problems have been shown to be recursively unsolvable. Such results are due to Post and Linial [5], Yntema [9], Gladstone [2], Ihrig [3] and Singletary [7], [8].
Genes and Group Membership Predict Gidgee Skink (Egernia stokesii) Reproductive Pairs

Due to their role in mate choice, disease resistance and kin recognition, genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are good candidates for investigating genetic-based mate choice. MHC-based mate choice is context dependent and influenced by many factors including social structure. Social structure diversity makes the Egernia group of lizards suitable for comparative studies of MHC-based mate choice. We investigated mate choice in the gidgee skink (Egernia stokesii), a lizard that exhibits high levels of social group and spatial stability. Group membership was incorporated into tests of the good genes as heterozygosity and compatible genes hypotheses for adaptive (MHC) and neutral (microsatellite) genetic diversity (n = 47 individuals genotyped). Females were more likely to pair with a male with higher MHC diversity and with whom they had a lower degree of microsatellite relatedness. Males were more likely to pair with a female with higher microsatellite heterozygosity and with whom they shared a lower proportion of MHC alleles. Lizards were more likely to mate with an individual from within, rather than outside, their social group, which confirmed earlier findings for this species and indicated mate choice had already largely occurred prior to either social group formation or acceptance of an individual into an existing group. Thus, a combination of genes and group membership, rather than group membership alone, predicted mate choice in this species. This work will contribute to an enhanced understanding of squamate group formation and a deeper understanding of the evolution of sociality within all vertebrates.