Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magnetic navigation behavior and the oceanic ecology of young loggerhead sea turtles

ABSTRACT During long-distance migrations, animals navigate using a variety of sensory cues, mechanisms and strategies. Although guidance mechanisms are usually studied under controlled laboratory conditions, such methods seldom allow for navigation behavior to be examined in an environmental context. Similarly, although realistic environmental models are often used to investigate the ecological implications of animal movement, explicit consideration of navigation mechanisms in such models is rare. Here, we used an interdisciplinary approach in which we first conducted lab-based experiments to determine how hatchling loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) respond to magnetic fields that exist at five widely separated locations along their migratory route, and then studied the consequences of the observed behavior by simulating it within an ocean circulation model. Magnetic fields associated with two geographic regions that pose risks to young turtles (due to cold wintertime temperatures or potential displacement from the migratory route) elicited oriented swimming, whereas fields from three locations where surface currents and temperature pose no such risk did not. Additionally, at locations with fields that elicited oriented swimming, simulations indicate that the observed behavior greatly increases the likelihood of turtles advancing along the migratory pathway. Our findings suggest that the magnetic navigation behavior of sea turtles is intimately tied to their oceanic ecology and is shaped by a complex interplay between ocean circulation and geomagnetic dynamics. Highlighted Article: Lab-based experiments and simulations of observed behavior in an ocean circulation model give new insight into how magnetic navigation shapes the ecology of small sea turtles.
Automatic recognition of children's read speech for stuttering application

Stuttering is a common speech disfluency that may persist into adulthood if not treated in its early stages. Techniques from spoken language understanding may be applied to provide auto-mated diagnoses of stuttering from voice recordings; however,there are several difficulties, including the lack of training data involving young children and the high dimensionality of these data. This study investigates how automatic speech recognition(ASR) could help clinicians by providing a tool that automatically recognises stuttering events and provides a useful written transcription of what was said. In addition, to enhance the performance of ASR and to alleviate the lack of stuttering data, this study examines the effect of augmenting the language model with artificially generated data. The performance of the ASR tool with and without language model augmentation is com-pared. Following language model augmentation, the ASR tool’s performance improved recall from 38% to 62.2% and precision from 56.58% to 71%. When mis-recognised events are more coarsely classified as stuttering/ non-stuttering events, the performance improves up to 73% in recall and 84% in precision.Although the obtained results are not perfect, they map to fairly robust stutter/ non-stutter decision boundaries.
Low bias voltage tunable phase shifter based on inkjet-printed BST MIM varactors for C/X-band phased arrays

This paper presents a novel topology and method for the fabrication of tunable ferroelectric components based on inkjet printing for phased arrays applications at C/X-Band. This method enables low voltage biased tunable phase shifters by inkjet printing of tunable dielectric thick films. The loaded line tunable phase shifter is tuned by integrated metal-insulator-metal (MIM) varactors. The MIM varactors are fabricated by photo lithography and subsequently inkjet printing of barium-strontium-titanate striplines, enabling a simple and reliable process. In comparison to coplanar capacitors, such MIM varactors require significantly lower DC-voltage for tuning. A tunability of 32 % at 8.5 GHz is achieved by applying only 25 V across a 1.2 μm thick BST film and a tunability of 46 % by applying 50 V. The 11 unit cells loaded line tunable phase shifter achieves a figure of merit (FoM) above 40 °/dB across 7 to 8.5 GHz by applying maximum 50 V tuning voltage. The size of the phase shifter is 1×0.45 cm2.
AppCracker: Widespread Vulnerabilities in User and Session Authentication in Mobile Apps *

A fundamental security principle in developing networked applications is end-to-end security, where the confidentiality and integrity of the data transmitted over the network does not rely on the security of the network. In response to the ever increasing traffic from mobile apps, WiFi networks are spreading fast and widely. Since WiFi networks are unregulated, a passive attacker may eavesdrop on the traffic on open WiFi networks, while an active attacker may set up his own WiFi networks to modify their traffic at will. In theory, end-to-end security should protect mobile apps from both these attacks; in practice, however, the situation is far less rosy. We examine how the popular, important mobile apps on Chinese Android markets defend themselves against untrusted networks. We select the top apps from major categories, such as online shopping, banking, social networks, travel services, and apps from companies with high market capitalization. We analyze both their code and their network traffic to identify vulnerabilities. We design a mini-language for describing the vulnerabilities and develop a tool, AppCracker, that launches both passive and active attacks on these apps to verify their vulnerabilities. AppCracker has confirmed that 100 apps from 69 companies are vulnerable during their user or session authentication. These vulnerabilities allow an adversary to capture the victim user’s login credentials or to hijack the victim’s session. We describe these diverse types of vulnerabilities, many of which are caused by misuse of cryptography in their home-grown cryptographic protocols. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned during our investigation to help app developer avoid similar pitfalls. * More information, including video, is available at http://shtech.org/appcracker/. We thank HTC for providing mobile phones for our experiments. This paper is based upon work supported by ShanghaiTech University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ShanghaiTech University.
The impact of succession on family business internationalisation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the successor's perceptions of the major objective and subjective factors as well as networks that facilitate or inhibit the process of internationalisation of entrepreneurial family firms. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a qualitative methodological approach, the current study relies on case study evidence from a sample of six mature entrepreneurial family firms operating in different sectors. Findings – Relying on data collected, this study found that the perception of foreign market opportunities; international vision; successor's proactivity; innovative spirit and specific technical knowledge are relevant variables that initiate the process of internationalisation of a family firm within the context of (post-) succession. By contrast, the study did not find high evidence of the importance of speaking a foreign language and educational background. The study also confirmed that a disrupted process, such as succession, may re-position a mature dome.
Table size reduction for data value predictors by exploiting narrow width values

Recently, the practice of speculation in resolving data dependences has been studied as a means of extracting more instruction level parallelism (ILP). An outcome of an instruction is predicted by value predictors. The instruction and its dependent instructions can be executed simultaneously, thereby exploiting ILP aggressively. One of the serious hurdles for realizing data speculation is huge hardware budget of the predictors. In this paper, we propose a technique reducing the budget by exploiting narrow width values. The hardware budget of value predictors is reduced by up to 45.1%. Simulation results show that the technique, called 2-mode scheme, maintains processor performance with slight decrease of the value prediction accuracy.
A Transformation Approach for Modeling and Analysis of Complex UML Statecharts: A Case Study

We have previously proposed a Petri-net based transformation approach to support formal modeling and analysis of complex UML statecharts. The generation of the target net model is based on an intermediate model. In this paper we define steps for generating the target model from the intermediate model, and focus on a case study to evaluate the overall approach. The case study is based on modeling and simulation of an Early Warning System and a set of four experiments.
Streaming Extensions for Object-Oriented Languages

Stream languages provide constructs to express different types of parallelism, such as pipeline parallelism, in a simple way. In the past, these languages were mainly used for the development of signal processing or graphics applications. We argue that the integration of stream programming concepts into universal object-oriented languages has great potential to simplify general-purpose parallel programming on multicore architectures.
A Conditional Random Field Model for Cell Segmentation Using Multispectral Data

Multispectral microscopy for applications in histology and cytology has shown that the unique transmission spectra of biological tissue provides additional information that is potentially useful for better classification and segmentation of sub-cellular structures. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model for segmentation that incorporates spectral data during inference. Relationship between neighboring bands is weighted by the spectral profile of the sample. The proposed CRF model improves the accuracy of the segmentation be- cause the spectral information helps to achieve a more stable estima- tion of model parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively suppresses the non-uniform appearance of the cell chromatin by integrating spatial and spectral constraints within the seg- mentation process and robustly labels fine textured cells. Comparative analysis of the proposed model against the commonly used watershed (WS) approach for cell delineation is also performed. Results of this evaluation show the benefits of our approach.
Data Labeling method based on Rough Entropy for categorical data clustering

Clustering is one of the most important method in data mining. Clustering a huge data set is difficult and time taking process. In this scenario a new method proposed that is based on Rough Entropy for improving efficiency of clustering and labeling the unlabeled data points in clusters. Data Labeling is a simple process in numerical domain but not in categorical domain. Why because distance is a major parameter in numerical whereas not in categorical attributes. So, In this paper proposed a new method for data labeling using Rough Entropy for clustering categorical data attributes. This method is mainly divided into two phases. Phase-1 is aimed to find the partition with respect to attributes and phase-II is to find the Rough Entropy to know the node importance for data labeling.
Genetic Dissection of Peroxisome-Associated Matrix Protein Degradation in Arabidopsis thaliana

Peroxisomes are organelles that sequester certain metabolic pathways; many of these pathways generate H2O2, which can damage proteins. However, little is known about how damaged or obsolete peroxisomal proteins are degraded. We exploit developmentally timed peroxisomal content remodeling in Arabidopsis thaliana to elucidate peroxisome-associated protein degradation. Isocitrate lyase (ICL) is a peroxisomal glyoxylate cycle enzyme necessary for early seedling development. A few days after germination, photosynthesis begins and ICL is degraded. We previously found that ICL is stabilized when a peroxisome-associated ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme and its membrane anchor are both mutated, suggesting that matrix proteins might exit the peroxisome for ubiquitin-dependent cytosolic degradation. To identify additional components needed for peroxisome-associated matrix protein degradation, we mutagenized a line expressing GFP–ICL, which is degraded similarly to endogenous ICL, and identified persistent GFP-ICL fluorescence (pfl) mutants. We found three pfl mutants that were defective in PEROXIN14 (PEX14/At5g62810), which encodes a peroxisomal membrane protein that assists in importing proteins into the peroxisome matrix, indicating that proteins must enter the peroxisome for efficient degradation. One pfl mutant was missing the peroxisomal 3-ketoacyl-CoA thiolase encoded by the PEROXISOME DEFECTIVE1 (PED1/At2g33150) gene, suggesting that peroxisomal metabolism influences the rate of matrix protein degradation. Finally, one pfl mutant that displayed normal matrix protein import carried a novel lesion in PEROXIN6 (PEX6/At1g03000), which encodes a peroxisome-tethered ATPase that is involved in recycling matrix protein receptors back to the cytosol. The isolation of pex6-2 as a pfl mutant supports the hypothesis that matrix proteins can exit the peroxisome for cytosolic degradation.
Supramolecular Catalysis of Ester and Amide Cleavage by a Dinuclear Barium(II) Complex.

Five components spontaneously self-assemble to yield the productive complex 1, where one barium ion delivers an ethoxide to the carbonyl group of an amide substrate anchored by means of a distal carboxylate moiety to the other barium ion. High substrate specificity, fairly high reaction rates with catalytic turnover, and competitive inhibition by inert substrates are observed.
Analysis of video coding standards using PSNR and bit rate saving

This paper mainly deals with the performance comparison of several video coding standards by means of peak signal-to-noise ratio and subjective testing like Rate Distortion (RD) curves and average bit-rate savings. A particular procedure is applied for the video coding standards H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), H.264/MPEG4- Advance Video Coding (AVC), MPEG4V2, MPEG4 and the Google video codec's such as VP8, VP9 at different bit-rates and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR) are estimated. The bit-rate reduction on an average is achieved about 50% for comparable to earlier video coding standards. The results obtained illustrate the H.265/HEVC achieving high peak signal-to-noise at low bit rates. This resembles high coding efficiency, comparing with lower versions of video coding standards.
Analysis of cut-off criteria in ROC curve for endarterectomy decision making

A method to compute the atherosclerotic plaque activity index (AI) was recently proposed in the literature to support the decision of endarterectomy. The dependency of this index on objective measures, extracted from Ultrasound and Clinical Data, aims at the increasing of the diagnosis accuracy by removing part of the subjective component assoc i ted with the human decision. The cut-off used to decide the surgical intervention for plaque removal depends on several factors such as population specificities, ac tivity index computation algorithm and on the optimality criterion used for the selection of that threshold. A common naive approach to select the optimal cut-off value assumes the same cost on the reduction of False Positives Rate(FPR) and increasing of the True Positive Rate(TPR) which means finding the intersection of the ROC curve with the descending diagonal. In the Youden index, another widespread ROC based criterion, the optimalcut-off is chosen in order to maximize the difference between TPR and FPR. In this paper a preliminary statistical analysis of these naive approaches is presented, in order to suggest more sophisticated and complex criteria that would take into account other factors.
Quality improvement of enhanced speech in DCT domain using modified a priori SNR

This paper illustrates the superiority of using time-frequency varying averaging factor to estimate the a priori SNR for speech enhancement using spectral subtraction rules. An expression for the smoothing parameter is derived in the DCT domain. Improvements over conventional spectral subtraction rules in terms of objective quality measures e.g., log-area-ratio (LAR), output SNR and average segmental SNR are shown.
Experimental verification of the temperature and strain dependence of the critical properties in Nb/sub 3/Sn wires

The critical current density in Nb/sub 3/Sn conductors is described with an improved scaling formula for the temperature, magnetic field and strain dependence. In an earlier study, it is concluded that the largest uncertainties in this description arise from the temperature dependence that is described with various slightly different empirical relations. For the optimization of the numerical codes, used to predict the stability of large magnet systems, a more accurate description is required. Therefore, two different bronze processed conductors for the ITER CS model coil are analyzed in detail. The critical current is measured at temperatures from 4.2 K up to the critical temperature, in magnetic fields from 1 T to 13 T and with an applied axial strain from -0.6% to +0.4%. The axial strain is applied by a U-shaped bending spring and a comparison is made between brass and Ti-6Al-4V, as substrate material.
Towards improving user satisfaction in decentralized P2P networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures are more and more used in recent content distribution platforms because of their valuable characteristics as scalability, performance, and negligible maintenance and distribution costs. In general, P2P applications allow users to provide preferences that are mainly related to performance, like number of connections and bandwidth limits. As user resources are the wealth of P2P systems, we think it is important to satisfy user preferences in a more meaningful and personalized way. Users should be able to define the kind and quality of peers they prefer to exchange with. In this work, we present What Users Want (WUW), a framework to measure and improve the satisfaction of the users based on personal preferences that reflect their expectations from the P2P system. We then present the design of a distributed P2P service that implements our framework. Experimental results, obtained with a prototype running on top of BitTorrent, show improvement of user satisfaction and the possibility to minimize the impact on the overall performance of the content distribution.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Research Department Staff Report 267 Predicting Turning Points

This paper presents a new method for predicting turning points. The paper formally defines a turning point; develops a probit model for estimating the probability of a turning point; and then examines both the in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model. The model performs better than some other methods for predicting turning points. *While working on this paper, all three authors were affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The authors thank Doug Hamilton for his helpful suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Congressional Budget Office, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, or the Federal Reserve System.
Small-bias probability spaces: efficient constructions and applications

It is shown how to efficiently construct a small probability space on n binary random variables such that for every subset, its parity is either zero or one with “almost” equal probability. They are called $\epsilon $-biased random variables. The number of random bits needed to generate the random variables is $O(\log n + \log \frac{1}{\epsilon })$. Thus, if $\epsilon $ is polynomially small, then the size of the sample space is also polynomial. Random variables that are $\epsilon $-biased can be used to construct “almost” k-wise independent random variables where $\epsilon $ is a function of k.These probability spaces have various applications: l. Derandomization of algorithms: Many randomized algorithms that require only k-wise independence of their random bits (where k is bounded by $O(\log n)$), can be derandomized by using $\epsilon $-biased random variables. 2. Reducing the number of random bits required by certain randomized algorithms, e.g., verification of matrix multiplication. 3. Exhaustive tes.
The Tprk Protein of Treponema pallidum Is Periplasmic and Is Not a Target of Opsonic Antibody or Protective Immunity

The finding that Treponema pallidum, the syphilis spirochete, contains 12 orthologs of the Treponema denticola outer membrane major sheath protein has engendered speculation that members of this T. pallidum repeat (Tpr) family may be similarly surface exposed. In this regard, the TprK protein was reported to be a target of opsonic antibody and protective immunity and subject to immunologically driven sequence variation. Despite these findings, results from our previous analyses of treponemal outer membranes in concert with computer-based predictions for TprK prompted us to examine the cellular location of this protein. TprK–alkaline phosphatase fusions expressed in Escherichia coli demonstrate that TprK contains a signal peptide. However, opsonophagocytosis assays failed to indicate surface exposure of TprK. Moreover, results from three independent methodologies, i.e., (a) indirect immunofluorescence analysis of agarose-encapsulated organisms, (b) proteinase K treatment of intact spirochetes, and (c) Triton X-114 phase partitioning of T. pallidum conclusively demonstrated that native TprK is entirely periplasmic. Consistent with this location, immunization with the recombinant protein failed to induce either protective immunity or select for TprK variants in the rabbit model of experimental syphilis. These findings challenge the notion that TprK will be a component of an efficacious syphilis vaccine.
A clinical evaluation on the spatial patterns of non-invasive motor imagery-based brain-computer interface in stroke

This clinical study investigates whether the spatial patterns of hemiparetic stroke patients operating a non-invasive Motor Imagery-based Brain Computer Interface (MI-BCI) is comparable to healthy subjects. The spatial patterns for a specific frequency range are generated using the common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm, of which is highly successful for discriminating two classes of EEG measurements in MI-BCI. The spatial patterns illustrate how the presumed sources project on the scalp and are effective in verifying the neurophysiological plausibility of the computed solution. The spatial patterns show focused activity in ipsilateral as well as contralateral hemisphere with respect to the hand by tapping or motor imagery in 2 BCI-artful healthy subjects and 12 BCI-naïve hemiparetic stroke patients. The results also show that neurophysiologically interpretable spatial patterns is more common in performing motor imagery compared to finger tapping by hemiparetic stroke patients. Hence, this shows that hemiparetic stroke patients are capable of operating MI-BCI.