Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvement of peak and average power reduction of trellis shaped OFDM signals by controllable region expansion

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is known for its excellent bandwidth efficiency and robustness against multi-path fading channels. The major drawback of OFDM is its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) property that substantially reduces the power conversion efficiency of power amplifiers (PA). Trellis shaping (TS) is known as one of the effective methods to reduce peak power as well as average power of OFDM signals and its reduction capability depends on the number of regions in the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations that are selectable by the shaping bits. In this paper, we propose a method to considerably improve the peak and average power reduction capability of trellis shaped OFDM by expanding the controllable regions for a given QAM constellation. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by simulations in terms of PAPR and average power reduction capabilities as well as its bit error rate performance and PA efficiency under the scenario of a linear PA model.
Dating violence as a moderator in the relationship between child abuse and disordered eating

OF THE THESIS Dating Violence as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Child Abuse and Disordered Eating by Marissa Marie Salazar Master of Arts in Psychology San Diego State University, 2014 Experiencing abuse as a child, whether it is sexual, physical, or emotional, has implications that can last a lifetime. Children who have been abused are at risk for revictimization later in life, such as experiencing dating violence as a teenager or domestic violence as an adult. One of the negative outcomes for female victims of child abuse in particular, is disordered eating. The present study explored how experiencing revictimization via dating violence is associated with the likelihood to engage in disordered eating. Archival data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents from the National Study of Adolescent Health (ADD Health) was used to determine whether dating violence moderates the relationship between child abuse and disordered eating. The ADD Health study is a longitudinal study in which in-home interviews were conducted at four different time points (waves) between 1994 and 2008. The current study utilized data from participants who completed both Wave 2 and Wave 3, resulting in a total sample size of 11,620 participants (5,458 males, 6,162 females). Participants are between the ages of 11-20 (M = 16.18) at Wave 2 and between the ages of 18-27 at Wave 3 (M = 21.63). Results revealed participants who experienced abuse as a child were more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviors compared to participants who were not abused. The same effect was found for participants who were victims of dating violence. Revictimization, or experiencing child abuse and then dating violence, increased the propensity to have negative feelings about eating compared to only experiencing one type of abuse R = . 00, F(1, 7139) = 11.15, s = . 05, t(7139) = 3.34, p < . 001. However, when separated by gender, this effect only held for males R = . 005, F(1, 3191) = 16.19, s = . 09, t(3191) = 4.03, p < . 001. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed dating violence mediated the relationship between child abuse and disordered eating, however this effect only held for females when stratified by gender. Results from this study may have implications for programs designed to treat eating disorders as well as programs focused on dating violence. For example, practitioners studying eating disorders may provide treatment for overcoming abusive relationships and provide clients with the tools and knowledge necessary to have healthy relationships in the future. The results may have implications for suggested screening for revictimization among victims in both dating violence intervention and prevention programs. The present findings could also help educate the general public on how disordered eating is one of many adverse outcomes of experiencing abuse.
Predicting Ratings for New Movie Releases from Twitter Content

With microblogging platforms such as Twitter generating huge amounts of textual data every day, the possibilities of knowledge discovery through Twitter data becomes increasingly relevant. Similar to the public voting mechanism on websites such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) that aggregates movies ratings, Twitter content contains reflections of public opinion about movies. This study aims to explore the use of Twitter content as textual data for predictive text mining. In this study, a corpus of tweets was compiled to predict the rating scores of newly released movies on IMDb. Predictions were done with several different machine learning algorithms, exploring both regression and classification methods. In addition, this study explores the use of several different kinds of textual features in the machine learning tasks. Results show that prediction performance based on textual features derived from our corpus of tweets improved on the baseline for both regression and classification tasks.
Analog network coding interference mitigation methods for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) may interfere with the coexistent network when it plays a part in environmental monitoring, clinical care and so on. For the sake of interference mitigation, a cooperative analog network coding (CANC) technique is studied in the heterogeneous WSN. Furthermore, an optimal algorithm named S-CANC is proposed by combining the source node selection and CANC to minimize the interference brought by WSN. The closed-form expressions of outage probabilities for CANC, S-CANC and cooperation are derived respectively to evaluate the impact of interference on the coexistent network. Simulation results show that the outage probability of existing network is largely reduced by the proposed protocols. And these protocols have better stability and performance than cooperation.
A Brief Summary of Dictionary Learning Based Approach for Classification

This note presents some representative methods which are based on dictionary learning (DL) for classification. We do not review the sophisticated methods or frameworks that involve DL for classification, such as online DL and spatial pyramid matching (SPM), but rather, we concentrate on the direct DL-based classification methods. Here, the"so-called direct DL-based method"is the approach directly deals with DL framework by adding some meaningful penalty terms. By listing some representative methods, we can roughly divide them into two categories, i.e. (1) directly making the dictionary discriminative and (2) forcing the sparse coefficients discriminative to push the discrimination power of the dictionary. From this taxonomy, we can expect some extensions of them as future researches.
Cationic Cell-Penetrating Peptides Are Potent Furin Inhibitors

Cationic cell-penetrating peptides have been widely used to enhance the intracellular delivery of various types of cargoes, such as drugs and proteins. These reagents are chemically similar to the multi-basic peptides that are known to be potent proprotein convertase inhibitors. Here, we report that both HIV-1 TAT47-57 peptide and the Chariot reagent are micromolar inhibitors of furin activity in vitro. In agreement, HIV-1 TAT47-57 reduced HT1080 cell migration, thought to be mediated by proprotein convertases, by 25%. In addition, cyclic polyarginine peptides containing hydrophobic moieties which have been previously used as transfection reagents also exhibited potent furin inhibition in vitro and also inhibited intracellular convertases. Our finding that cationic cell-penetrating peptides exert potent effects on cellular convertase activity should be taken into account when biological effects are assessed.
Treatment and prognosis of breast cancer patients with brain metastases according to intrinsic subtype.

OBJECTIVE How breast cancer subtypes should affect treatment decisions for breast cancer patients with brain metastases is unclear. We analyzed local brain metastases treatments and their outcomes according to subtype in patients with breast cancer and brain metastases. METHODS We reviewed records and database information for women treated at the National Kyushu Cancer Center between 2001 and 2010. Patients were divided into three breast cancer subtype groups: Luminal (estrogen receptor positive and/or progesterone receptor positive, but human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 negative); human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 positive and triple negative (estrogen receptor negative, progesterone receptor negative and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 negative). RESULTS Of 524 advanced breast cancer patients, we reviewed 65 (12%) with brain metastases and records showing estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status, as well as outcome data; there were 26 (40%) Luminal, 26 (40%) had human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 and 13 (20%) had triple negative subtypes. There was no statistical difference in the number of brain metastases among subtypes; however, rates of stereotactic radiosurgery or surgery for brain metastases differed significantly by subtype (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2: 81%, Luminal: 42% and triple negative: 47%; P = 0.03). Patients having the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 subtype, a performance status of ≤1 and ≤4 brain metastases, who underwent systemic therapy after brain metastases and underwent stereotactic radiosurgery or surgery, were predicted to have longer overall survival after brain metastases. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that not having systemic therapy and not having the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 subtype were independent factors associated with an increased risk of death (hazard ratio 2.4, 95% confidence interval 1.01-5.6; P = 0.05 and hazard ratio 2.9, 95% confidence interval 1.5-5.8; P = 0.003, respectively). CONCLUSION Our study showed that local brain treatments and prognosis differed by subtype in breast cancer patients with brain metastases.
COMPLEXITY RESULTS FOR SAS+ PLANNING

We have previously reported a number of tractable planning problems defined in the SAS+ formalism. This article complements these results by providing a complete map over the complexity of SAS+ planning under all combinations of the previously considered restrictions. We analyze the complexity of both finding a minimal plan and finding any plan. In contrast to other complexity surveys of planning, we study not only the complexity of the decision problems but also the complexity of the generation problems. We prove that the SAS+‐PUS problem is the maximal tractable problem under the restrictions we have considered if we want to generate minimal plans. If we are satisfied with any plan, then we can generalize further to the SAS+‐US problem, which we prove to be the maximal tractable problem in this case.
Nitric oxide and choroidal blood flow regulation.

PURPOSE Nitric oxide (NO) has been found to be an endothelial-derived relaxing factor mediating the vasodilatation that results from the stimulation of muscarinic endothelial receptors. It also has been identified as a putative neurotransmitter of parasympathetic origin in choroidal perivascular autonomic fibers. The authors investigated a potential role of NO in choroidal blood flow (ChBF) regulation. METHODS Local ChBF in the tapetal region of 26 anesthetized cats was measured by laser Doppler flowmetry. Cats were infused through the femoral vein with increasing dosages of acetylcholine (ACh); N omega-nitro-L-arginine (NNL-A), a specific inhibitor of NO synthesis; L-arginine; and D-arginine. ChBF and mean arterial pressure (MAP) were continuously recorded. RESULTS Infusion of 20 micrograms/minute ACh induced a 68% increase in ChBF despite a 9% decrease in MAP. Infusion of 16 mg/minute NNL-A attenuated the ACh-induced increase in ChBF by 46% and increased MAP by 40%. Infusion of different dosages of NNL-A without prior administration of ACh caused ChBF to fall below and MAP to rise above baseline in a dose-dependent fashion. Infusion of L-arginine prior to ACh infusion enhanced by 27% the ACh-induced increase in ChBF, whereas D-arginine had no effect on this increase. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest the presence of a local vasodilatory cholinergic mechanism in the choroid, inducing the release of NO. They also suggest that release of NO in the choroid may maintain basal blood flow to this tissue.
The 'Go-Between': evaluation of intermediary pathfi nder projects

The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 made available a range of special measures to help vulnerable and intimidated witnesses give their best evidence. These include giving evidence by TV link or being screened from the defendant in court; video-recorded evidence-in-chief; removal of wigs and gowns; clearing the public gallery; and aids to communication. The special measures are available to prosecution and defence witnesses but not defendants. Section 29 of the Act made available the use of an intermediary to three categories of vulnerable witness: those under 17; adults whose quality of evidence is likely to be affected by a mental disorder or impairment of intelligence and social functioning or who have a physical disorder or disability. Following assessment of the witness, the intermediary’s role at investigative interview and trial is to enable ‘complete, coherent and accurate’ communication to take place. Intermediaries are approved for use by the court and are allowed to explain questions and answers to the witness, but not to change the substance or meaning of evidence. The role may assist questioners to test the witness’s evidence but intermediaries cannot provide an opinion on whether the witness is truthful.
Virtual unequal error protection in underwater image transmission

Due to its applications in marine research, oceanographic, and undersea exploration, underwater communication has been recently under intense investigation. In the last years, several works have studied the communication between autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). Although underwater communication has been improving its performance (in terms of bandwith, QoS, etc.), image transmission in AUVs networks is still considered a frontier work. Here, we address progressive image transmission for AUVs fleet. By taking into consideration the tight constraints imposed by the underwater channel, we propose a method able to improve the performance by exploiting the feature of the progressive images. Several scenarios have been investigated to demonstrate the benefit of the proposed model, focusing on the tradeoff between QoS vs. delays and energy consumption.
Spot size of photonic crystal fibers: An analytical method of calculation

Based on variational principle, we have earlier developed an analytical model for the modal field of index-guiding microstructured optical fibers (MOFs). Using the model, we study the linear properties of MOF such as spot-sizes; their application in calculating numerical aperture NA and splice loss between an MOF and SMF-28 with transverse offset. Comparisons with available experimental and simulation results have also been included.
Effectively Maintaining Multiple View Consistency in Web Warehouses

To make a Web warehouse reflect the real Web accurately, we should keep timeliness, freshness and consistency for the Webviews. This paper focuses on one important part of Webview maintenance - mutual consistency between Webviews, which is formally named as multiple Webview consistency (abbreviated as MVC). Although the same problem has been well studied in a traditional data warehouse, however, it has never been considered for a Web warehouse. Since data sources in a Web warehousing environment do not propagate base data changes to the information consumers, which are different from the case in the traditional data warehouses, it is not feasible to keep complete mutual consistency between the Webviews in Web warehouses. In this paper we introduce the interrelated-MVC, a new term based on the features of the Web environment. We show that it is enough to keep interrelated-MVC in Web warehouses. After that we present the algorithms which guarantee interrelated-MVC and are scaleable to the vertiginous real Web
Fundamental and Ethics Theories of Corporate Governance

History has revealed that there is a never-ending evolution of theories or models of corporate governance. One of the reasons is due to the very essence of social consciences that is minimal and profit making took center stage. All over the world, companies are trying to instill the sense of governance into their corporate structure. With the surge of capitalism, corporation became stronger while governments all over the world had to succumb to its manipulations and dominance. Hence, this article is a review of literature on the range of theories in corporate governance. The fundamental theories in corporate governance began with the agency theory, expanded into stewardship theory and stakeholder theory and evolved to resource dependency theory, transaction cost theory, political theory and ethics related theories such as business ethics theory, virtue ethics theory, feminists ethics theory, discourse theory and postmodernism ethics theory. However, these theories address the cause and effect of variables, such as the configuration of board members, audit committee, independent directors and the role of top management and their social relationships rather than its regulatory frameworks. Hence, it is suggested that a combination of various theories is best to describe an effective and good governance practice rather than theorizing corporate governance based on a single theory.
Fire effects on soil organic matter content, composition, and nutrients in boreal interior Alaska

Boreal ecosystems contain a substantial fraction of the earth's soil carbon stores and are prone to frequent and severe wildfires. In this study, we examine changes in element and organic matter stocks due to a 1999 wildfire in Alaska. One year after the wildfire, burned soils contained between 1071 and 1420 g/m 2 less carbon than unburned soils. Burned soils had lower nitrogen than unburned soils, higher calcium, and nearly unchanged potassium, magne- sium, and phosphorus stocks. Burned surface soils tended to have higher concentrations of noncombustible elements such as calcium, potassium, magnesium, and phosphorus compared with unburned soils. Combustion losses of carbon were mostly limited to surface dead moss and fibric horizons, with no change in the underlying mineral horizons. Burning caused significant changes in soil organic matter structure, with a 12% higher ratio of carbon to combustible organic matter in surface burned horizons compared with unburned horizons. Pyrolysis gas chromatography - mass spectroscopy also shows preferential volatilization of polysaccharide-derived organic matter and enrichment of lignin- and lipid-derived compounds in surface soils. The chemistry of deeper soil layers in burned and unburned sites was similar, suggesting that immediate fire impacts were restricted to the surface soil horizon. Resume : Les ecosystemes boreaux dont les sols renferment une partie importante des reserves de carbone de la terre sont sujets a des incendies frequents et severes. Dans cette etude, nous examinons les changements dans les stocks
Empirical Analysis of Transcriptional Activity in the Arabidopsis Genome

Functional analysis of a genome requires accurate gene structure information and a complete gene inventory. A dual experimental strategy was used to verify and correct the initial genome sequence annotation of the reference plant Arabidopsis. Sequencing full-length cDNAs and hybridizations using RNA populations from various tissues to a set of high-density oligonucleotide arrays spanning the entire genome allowed the accurate annotation of thousands of gene structures. We identified 5817 novel transcription units, including a substantial amount of antisense gene transcription, and 40 genes within the genetically defined centromeres. This approach resulted in completion of ∼30% of the Arabidopsis ORFeome as a resource for global functional experimentation of the plant proteome.
Prospective randomized trial of 5-fluorouracil versus 5-fluorouracil plus levamisole in the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer: a Hoosier Oncology Group trial.

The purpose of this study was to compare the objective response rate, duration of remission, and survival of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) versus those of 5-FU plus levamisole in metastatic colorectal cancer using the same dose and schedule of these agents as in the North Central Cancer Treatment Group and intergroup studies of adjuvant therapy. Patients with no prior history of chemotherapy for metastatic disease were entered on this Hoosier Oncology Group randomized Phase III trial. Patients were stratified by Karnofsky performance status and presence or absence of liver metastases. They were randomized to receive 450 mg/m2 5-FU i.v. for 5 days followed by 15 mg/kg i.v. weekly (arm 1) or the same dose of 5-FU plus levamisole 50 mg p.o. every 8 h for 3 days every 2 weeks (arm 2). The duration of treatment for both arms was 26 weeks. From April 1990 to March 1995, 199 patients were entered. One hundred eighty-two patients, 91 in each arm, were fully evaluable. The response rates were 12% on arm 1 and 13% on arm 2. The median duration of response was 18 weeks on both arms. The median survival was 48 weeks on arm 1 and 41 weeks on arm 2 (P = 0.20). This study failed to show any improvement in survival, response, or duration of remission with the addition of levamisole to 5-FU in the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer.
Applying Autonomic Diagnosis at Samsung Electronics

An increasingly essential aspect of many critical software systems is the ability to quickly diagnose and locate faults so that appropriate corrective measures can be taken. Large, complex software systems fail unpredictably and pinpointing the source of the failure is a challenging task. In this paper we explore how our recently developed technique for automatic diagnosis performs in the automatic detection of failures and fault localization in a critical manufacturing control system of Samsung Electronics, where failures can result in large financial and schedule losses. We show how our approach can scale to such systems to diagnose intermittent faults, connectivity problems, protocol violations, and timing failures. We propose a set of measures of accuracy and performance that can be used to evaluate run-time diagnosis. We present lessons learned from this work including how instrumentation limitations may impair diagnosis accuracy: without overcoming these, there is a limit to the kinds of faults that can be detected.
Control and Performance Analysis of a Single-Stage Utility-Scale Grid-Connected PV System

For utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems, the control objectives, such as maximum power point tracking, synchronization with grid, current control, and harmonic reduction in output current, are realized in single stage for high efficiency and simple power converter topology. This paper considers a high-power three-phase single-stage PV system, which is connected to a distribution network, with a modified control strategy, which includes compensation for grid voltage dip and reactive power injection capability. To regulate the dc-link voltage, a modified voltage controller using feedback linearization scheme with feedforward PV current signal is presented. The real and reactive powers are controlled by using $dq$ components of the grid current. A small-signal stability/eigenvalue analysis of a grid-connected PV system with the complete linearized model is performed to assess the robustness of the controller and the decoupling character of the grid-connected PV system. The dynamic performance is evaluated on a real-time digital simulator.