Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Model of Lacunar Infarction in the Gyrencephalic Brain of the Miniature Pig: Neurological Assessment and Histological, Immunohistochemical, and Physiological Evaluation of Dynamic Corticospinal Tract Deformation

Background and Purpose— Lacunar infarction accounts for 25% of ischemic strokes, but the pathological characteristics have not been investigated systematically. A new experimental model of lacunar infarction in the miniature pig was developed to investigate the pathophysiological changes in the corticospinal tract from the acute to chronic phases. Methods— Thirty-five miniature pigs underwent transcranial surgery for permanent anterior choroidal artery occlusion. Animals recovered for 24 hours (n=7), 2 (n=5), 3 (n=2), 4 (n=2), 6 (n=1), 7 (n=7), 8 (n=2), and 9 days (n=1), 2 weeks (n=2), 4 weeks (n=3), and more than 4 weeks (n=3). Neurology, electrophysiology, histology, and MRI were performed. Seven additional miniature pigs underwent transient anterior choroidal artery occlusion to study muscle motor-evoked potentials and evaluate corticospinal tract function during transient anterior choroidal artery occlusion. Results— The protocol had a 91.4% success rate in induction of internal capsule infarction 286±153 mm3 (mean±SD). Motor-evoked potentials revealed the presence of penumbral tissue in the internal capsule after 6 to 15 minutes anterior choroidal artery occlusion. Total neurological deficit scores of 15.0 (95% CI, 13.5 to 16.4) and 3.4 (0.3 to 6.4) were recorded for permanent anterior choroidal artery occlusion and sham groups, respectively (P<0.001, maximum score 25) with motor deficit scores of 3.4 (95% CI, 2.9 to 4.0) and 0.0 (CI, 0.0 to 0.0), respectively (P<0.001, maximum score 9). Histology revealed that the internal capsule lesion expands gradually from acute to chronic phases. Conclusions— This new model of lacunar infarction induces a reproducible infarct in subcortical white matter with a measurable functional deficit and evidence of penumbral tissue acutely.
An Integrated Load Balancing Scheme for Future Wireless Networks

With the emerging IEEE 802.11n standard, the WLAN is poised as a promising ubiquitous networking technology to support multimedia applications where providing QoS becomes imperative. However, the 802.11 WLAN is not designed to support delay sensitive traffic. This problem is magnified during a handover and typically results in excessive handover latency and packet loss. In addition, a 802.11 WLAN handover process is predominantly based on the physical layer detection without QoS considerations. This often causes overloading of access points and consequently all its associated connections would suffer from high delay. The former can be resolved by reducing handover latency to achieve seamless handover and the latter can be mitigated by employing link layer detection in the 802.11 WLAN handover process and having an appropriate admission control scheme. Although the IEEE 802.11e standard supports prioritized QoS, it cannot guarantee strict QoS required by real-time services under heavy load. In this paper, we proposed an integrated load balancing scheme incorporating (i) QoS-based fast handover to support seamless handover by eliminating both detection and scanning phases from the 802.11 WLAN handover process; and (ii) soft admission control to protect QoS of existing connections when resources are low. This synergy allows us to perform QoS-related handover opportunistically and guarantees service QoS during and after handover respectively. Simulations showed that our proposed integrated load balancing scheme is capable of providing seamless handover and QoS provisioning for real-time VoIP services in terms of bounded delay and packet loss when considering multimedia traffic.
Real Options in an Asymmetric Duopoly: Who Benefits from Your Competitive Disadvantage?

This paper analyzes the impact of investment cost asymmetry on the optimal real option exercise strategies and the value of firms in duopoly. Both firms have an opportunity to invest in a project enhancing (ceteris paribus) the profit flow. We show that three types of equilibrium strategies exist. Furthermore, we express the critical levels of cost asymmetry delineating the equilibrium regions as functions of basic economic variables. The presence of strategic interactions among the firms leads to counterintuitive results. First, for a certain range of the asymmetry level, a marginal increase in the investment cost of the firm with the cost disadvantage can enhance this firm's own value. Moreover, such a cost increase can reduce the value of the competitor. Finally, we discuss the welfare implications of the optimal exercise strategies and show that the presence of identical firms can result in a socially less desirable outcome than if one of the competitors has a significant cost (dis)advantage.
Realtime graphical display of intonation for speech training

A realtime visual intonation-display system for the teaching of intonation is presented. This system can be used for the teaching of intonation of foreign languages to second-language learners and of intonation of native language to deaf persons. In contrast to other visual-display systems, the visual feedback on intonation is given as a continuous representation of the pitch contour. The pitch contour contains only the perceptually relevant variations in pitch. That is, the course of the pitch contour is approximated with the help of a small number of straight lines resulting in the so-called stylized pitch contour.
Strong control, conservative point estimation and simultaneous conservative consistency of false discovery rates: a unified approach

Summary. The false discovery rate (FDR) is a multiple hypothesis testing quantity that describes the expected proportion of false positive results among all rejected null hypotheses. Benjamini and Hochberg introduced this quantity and proved that a particular step‐up p‐value method controls the FDR. Storey introduced a point estimate of the FDR for fixed significance regions. The former approach conservatively controls the FDR at a fixed predetermined level, and the latter provides a conservatively biased estimate of the FDR for a fixed predetermined significance region. In this work, we show in both finite sample and asymptotic settings that the goals of the two approaches are essentially equivalent. In particular, the FDR point estimates can be used to define valid FDR controlling procedures. In the asymptotic setting, we also show that the point estimates can be used to estimate the FDR conservatively over all significance regions simultaneously, which is equivalent to controlling the FDR at all levels simultaneously. The main tool that we use is to translate existing FDR methods into procedures involving empirical processes. This simplifies finite sample proofs, provides a framework for asymptotic results and proves that these procedures are valid even under certain forms of dependence.
Should Candidates Smile to Win Elections? An Application of Automated Face Recognition Technology

Previous studies examining whether the faces of candidates affect election outcomes commonly measure study participants’ subjective judgment of various characteristics of candidates, which participants infer based solely on the photographic images of candidates. We, instead, develop a smile index of such images objectively with automated face recognition technology. The advantage of applying this new technology is that the automated process of measuring facial traits is by design independent of voters’ subjective evaluations of candidate attributes, based on the images, and thus allows us to estimate ‘undiluted’ effects of facial appearance per se on election outcomes. The results of regression analysis using Japanese and Australian data show that the smile index has statistically significant and substantial effects on the vote share of candidates even after controlling for other covariates.
An Application of Divergence Estimation to Projection Retrieval for Semi-supervised Classication and Clustering

Decision-support systems enable human users to handle tasks such as classication or clustering. Often, this expert intervention involves simply the validation of an outcome produced by an automated system. In such cases, the decision process must be made transparent and comprehensible. We formulate the projection retrieval problem as an optimization using a divergence-based objective specic to the learning task. The framework presented in the paper uses consistent divergence estimators to extract a set of lowdimensional projections which jointly form a solution to the learning task. The method works under the assumption that each projection addresses a dierent subspace of the feature space and that it is possible to learn a function selecting the appropriate projection for a given test point. Experiments show that the method recovers the underlying structure of the data and provides low-dimensional views that aid expert assessment.
OPTIMISED RANDOM MUTATIONS FOR EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS

To demonstrate our approaches we will use Sudoku puzzles, which are an excellent test bed for evolutionary algorithms. The puzzles are accessible enough for people to enjoy. However the more complex puzzles require thousands of iterations before an evolutionary algorithm finds a solution. If we were attempting to compare evolutionary algorithms we could count their iterations to solution as an indicator of relative efficiency. Evolutionary algorithms however include a process of random mutation for solution candidates. We will show that by improving the random mutation behaviours we were able to solve problems with minimal evolutionary optimisation. Experiments demonstrated the random mutation was at times more effective at solving the harder problems than the evolutionary algorithms. This implies that the quality of random mutation may have a significant impact on the performance of evolutionary algorithms with Sudoku puzzles. Additionally this random mutation may hold promise for reuse in hybrid evolutionary algorithm behaviours.
The complexity and entropy of literary styles

Since Shannon's original experiment in 1951, several methods have been applied to the problem of determining the entropy of English text. These methods were based either on prediction by human subjects, or on computer-implemented parametric models for the data, of a certain Markov order. We ask why computer-based experiments almost always yield much higher entropy estimates than the ones produced by humans. We argue that there are two main reasons for this discrepancy. First, the long-range correlations of English text are not captured by Markovian models and, second, computerbased models only take advantage of the text statistics without being able to \understand" the contextual structure and the semantics of the given text. The second question we address is what does the \entropy" of a text say about the author's literary style. In particular, is there an intuitive notion of \complexity of style" that is captured by the entropy? We present preliminary results based on a non-parametric entropy estimation algorithm that o er partial answers to these questions. These results indicate that taking long-range correlations into account signi cantly improves the entropy estimates. We get an estimate of 1.77 bits-per-character for a onemillion-character sample taken from Jane Austen's works. Also comparing the estimates obtained from several di erent texts provides some insight into the interpretation of the notion of \entropy" when applied to English text rather than to random processes, and the relationship between the entropy and the \literary complexity" of an author's style. Advantages of this entropy estimation method are that it does not require prior training, it is uniformly good over di erent styles and languages, and it seems to converge reasonably fast. This paper was submitted as a term-project for the \Special Topics in Information Theory" class EE478 taught by Prof. Tom Cover (EE Dept., Stanford Univ.) during Spring 1996. This work was supported in part by grants NSF #NCR-9205663, JSEP #DAAH04-94-G-0058, ARPA #J-FBI-94-218-2. I. Kontoyiannis is with the Information Systems Laboratory Durand Bldg 141A, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305. Email: yiannis@isl.stanford. edu
Randomized, prospective, placebo-controlled trial of bosentan in interstitial lung disease secondary to systemic sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE Endothelin is implicated as a participatory pathway in systemic sclerosis (SSc). We tested this hypothesis in a 12-month trial of bosentan, a nonselective endothelin receptor antagonist, as a therapy for SSc-related interstitial lung disease (ILD). METHOD Patients with SSc and significant ILD were recruited to this prospective, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel group study. The inclusion criteria were designed to select a cohort enriched for patients with active and progressive disease. Exclusion factors included significant pulmonary hypertension. Patients with a diffusing capacity for carbon monoxide of <80% predicted and a 6-minute walk distance of 150-500 meters or a 6-minute walk distance of > or = 500 meters with a decrease in oxygen saturation received bosentan or placebo. The primary efficacy end point was a change in the 6-minute walk distance from baseline up to month 12. Secondary end points included time to death or worsening results of pulmonary function tests (PFTs). The safety and tolerability of bosentan were also assessed. RESULTS Among the 163 patients, 77 were randomized to receive bosentan, and 86 were randomized to receive placebo. No significant difference between treatment groups was observed for change in the 6-minute walk distance up to month 12. No deaths occurred in this study group. Forced vital capacity and diffusing capacity for carbon monoxide remained stable in the majority of patients in both groups. Significant worsening of PFT results occurred in 25.6% of patients receiving placebo and 22.5% of those receiving bosentan (P not significant). CONCLUSION No improvement in exercise capacity was observed in the bosentan-treated group compared with the placebo group, and no significant treatment effect was observed for the other end points. Although many outcome variables were stable, bosentan did not reduce the frequency of clinically important worsening. These data do not support the use of endothelin receptor antagonists as therapy for ILD secondary to SSc.
Toward Bimanual Interactions with Mobile Projectors on Arbitrary Surfaces

The field of personal mobile projection is advancing quickly and a variety of work focuses on enhancing physical objects in the real world with dynamically projected digital artifacts. Due to technological restrictions, none of them has yet investigated, what we feel is one of the most promising research directions: the (bimanual) interaction with mobile projections on arbitrary surfaces. To elicit the challenges of this field of research, we contribute (1) a technologycentered design space for mobile projector-based interfaces and discuss related work in light thereof, (2) a discussion of lessons learned from two of our research projects that support the mobile interaction with planar surfaces, and (3) an outline of open research challenges within this field.
Organization and nucleotide sequences of the genes encoding the biotin carboxyl carrier protein and biotin carboxylase protein of Pseudomonas aeruginosa acetyl coenzyme A carboxylase

The genetic organization of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa acetyl coenzyme A carboxylase (ACC) was investigated by cloning and characterizing a P. aeruginosa DNA fragment that complements an Escherichia coli strain with a conditional lethal mutation affecting the biotin carboxyl carrier protein (BCCP) subunit of ACC. DNA sequencing and RNA blot hybridization studies indicated that the P. aeruginosa accB (fabE) homolog, which encodes BCCP, is part of a 2-gene operon that includes accC (fabG), the structural gene for the biotin carboxylase subunit of ACC. P. aeruginosa homologs of the E. coli accA and accD, encoding the alpha and beta subunits of the ACC carboxyltransferase, were identified by hybridization of P. aeruginosa genomic DNA with the E. coli accA and accD. Data are presented which suggest that P. aeruginosa accA and accD homologs are not located either immediately upstream or downstream of the P. aeruginosa accBC operon. In contrast to E. coli, where BCCP is the only biotinylated protein, P. aeruginosa was found to contain at least three biotinylated proteins.
English-Persian Plagiarism Detection based on a Semantic Approach

Plagiarism which is defined as “the wrongful appropriation of other writers’ or authors’ works and ideas without citing or informing them” poses a major challenge to knowledge spread publication. Plagiarism has been placed in four categories of direct, paraphrasing (rewriting), translation, and combinatory. This paper addresses translational plagiarism which is sometimes referred to as cross-lingual plagiarism. In cross-lingual translation, writers meld a translation with their own words and ideas. Based on monolingual plagiarism detection methods, this paper ultimately intends to find a way to detect cross-lingual plagiarism. A framework called Multi-Lingual Plagiarism Detection (MLPD) has been presented for cross-lingual plagiarism analysis with ultimate objective of detection of plagiarism cases. English is the reference language and Persian materials are back translated using translation tools. The data for assessment of MLPD were obtained from English-Persian Mizan parallel corpus. Apache’s Solr was also applied to record the creep of the documents and their indexation. The accuracy mean of the proposed method revealed to be 98.82% when employing highly accurate translation tools which indicate the high accuracy of the proposed method. Also, Google translation service showed the accuracy mean to be 56.9%. These tests demonstrate that improved translation tools enhance the accuracy of the proposed method.
A 0.038-mm2 SAW-Less Multiband Transceiver Using an N-Path SC Gain Loop

An N-path switched-capacitor (SC) gain loop is proposed as an area-efficient surface acoustic wave-less wireless transceiver (TXR) for multiband TDD communications. Unlike the direct-conversion transmitter (TX: baseband (BB) filter <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to$ </tex-math></inline-formula> I/Q modulation <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to$ </tex-math></inline-formula> PA driver) and receiver (RX: LNA <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to$ </tex-math></inline-formula> I/Q demodulation <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\to$ </tex-math></inline-formula> BB Filter) that the functions are arranged in an open-loop style, here the signal amplification, bandpass filtering, and I/Q (de)modulation are unified in a closed-loop formation, being reconfigurable as a TX or RX with a local oscillator (LO)-defined center frequency. The key advantages are the multiband operation capability in the TX mode, and high resilience to out-of-band (OB) blockers in the RX mode. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS, the TXR prototype consumes up to 38.4 mW (20 mW) in the TX (RX) mode at the 1.88-GHz long-term evolution (LTE)-band2. The LO-defined center frequency covers >80% of the TDD-LTE bands with neither on-chip inductors nor external input-matching components. By properly injecting (extracting) the signals into (from) the N-path SC gain loop, the TX mode achieves an −1 dBm output power, a −40 dBc ACLR<sub>EUTRA1</sub>, and a 2% EVM at 1.88 GHz, while showing a −154.5 dBc/Hz OB noise at 80-MHz offset. In the RX mode, a 3.2-dB noise figure and a +8 dBm OB-IIP3 are measured. The active area (0.03 mm<sup>2</sup>) of the TXR is 24<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$ </tex-math></inline-formula> smaller than the state-of-the-art LTE solutions.
In vitro directed evolution of alpha-hemolysin by liposome display

We have developed a method to enable in vitro directed evolution that can be applied to membrane proteins. This method, termed liposome display, uses liposomes as compartments in which membrane proteins are synthesized and as scaffolds for membrane protein integration. Thus, the synthesized membrane proteins are displayed on the surface of the liposome and exhibit their functions. A randomly mutated DNA library of the membrane protein was generated, encapsulated in the liposomes at the single-molecule level, and used to generate a liposome library. Liposomes displaying the desired membrane protein function were selected, thus accumulating the DNA molecule encoding the desired membrane protein. We have applied this method to alpha-hemolysin, a membrane protein derived from Staphylococcus aureus. Alpha-hemolysin forms a nanopore in the membrane, which allows the penetration of small molecules. We aimed to improve this nanopore activity by using the liposome display method. Consequently, alpha-hemolysin evolved and attained a higher specific affinity for the liposome membrane. In this review, we describe the essential characteristics of liposome display and the properties of the evolved alpha-hemolysin obtained by this method.
Accelerating image local invariant features matching using cloud computing platform

Local invariant feature is a powerful tool for finding correspondences between images. However, current feature descriptors typically suffer the lack of global context and fail to resolve ambiguities that can occur when an image has multiple similar regions. Meanwhile, local features matching suffers expensive time cost, and cannot meet the needs of real time applications. This paper encompasses a global descriptor and architecture of cloud computing platform for increasing both the accuracy and efficiency of the well known SIFT method. Firstly, our global descriptor makes full use of the global characteristics of initial matched feature points obtained by SIFT for filtering out mismatches. Next, we will speed up SIFT using our cloud computing platform, iVCE. Experimental results have demonstrated that the global descriptor proposed can effectively improve the accuracy of the matched feature points without reducing the performance. The matching speed can also be enhanced dramatically by executing SIFT on our cloud computing platform.
Characterization and Expression Profiling Analysis of Calmodulin Genes in Response to Salt and Osmotic Stresses in Pear (Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd.) and in Comparison with Arabidopsis

A genome-wide identification and cloning of CaM genes in pear was conducted and in compared with Arabidopsis that indicated a conserved expansion of CaM genes in pear, and PbCaMs and AtCaMs had a similar distribution of cis-elements and expressions in response to salt and osmotic stress. In particular, PbCaM1 and PbCaM3 were both significantly upregulated in response to salt and osmotic stress in pear.