Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High thermoelectric performance due to nano-inclusions and randomly distributed interface potentials in N-type (PbTe0.93−xSe0.07Clx)0.93(PbS)0.07 composites

In a composite of two dissimilar or homologous semiconductors with different energy band gaps or metal/semiconductor composites, we expect a band bending effect at the interfaces. The band bending effect induced by the different Fermi levels of two compounds can selectively scatter carriers due to energy-dependent scattering time, resulting in enhancement of the Seebeck coefficient. In addition, nano-inclusions in a matrix will effectively scatter phonons. Here, we demonstrate the effects of electron and phonon scattering by nano-inclusions in n-type (PbTe0.93−xSe0.07Clx)0.93(PbS)0.07 (x = 0.0005, 0.01, 0.1 and 0.2) composites. In the matrix, the nano-inclusions increased the Seebeck coefficient while reducing lattice thermal conductivity in (PbTe0.93−xSe0.07Clx)0.93(PbS)0.07. The chlorine doping increases the Fermi level to the bottom of the conduction band giving rise to increased electron concentration. The simultaneous emergence of the high Seebeck coefficient and low thermal conductivity resulted in the exceptional ZT value of 1.52 at 700 K for low chlorine doping (x = 0.0005), which is a very high value in n-type thermoelectric materials. The randomly distributed interface potential, induced by Fermi level tuning, with nano-inclusions is a new criterion for investigating thermoelectric properties.
Viterbi ( Convolutional ) Encoding and Viterbi Decoding . 2 . 1 Viterbi encoder

Abstract: Convolutional code is a coding scheme used in communication systems including deep space communications and wireless communications. It provides an alternative approach to block codes for transmission over a noisy channel. The block codes can be applied only for the block of data. The Convolutional coding has an advantage over the block codes in that it can be applied to a continuous data stream as well as to blocks of data. Viterbi decoder employed in digital wireless communication plays a rife role in the overall power consumption of trellis coded modulation decoder. Power reduction in Viterbi decoder could be achieved by reducing the number of states. A pre-computation architecture with T-algorithm was implemented for this purpose, and when we compare this result with full Trellis Viterbi decoder, this approach significantly reduces power consumption without degrading decoding speed. Convolutional encoding with viterbi decoding is a powerful FEC technique that is particularly suited to a channel in which the transmitted signal is corrupted mainly by Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). It operates on data stream and has memory that uses previous bits to encode. The Viterbi Algorithm (VA) is proposed, used for decoding a bit stream that has been encoded using FEC code. The Convolutional encoder adds redundancy to a continuous stream of input data by using a linear shift register. A pre-computation architecture with Viterbi algorithm is implemented for this purpose, Viterbi (Convolutional) encoder and Viterbi decoder are designed and implemented using FPGA technology, which are the essential blocks in digital communication systems. It is particularly suited to a channel in which the transmitted signal is corrupted mainly by AWGN. The Viterbi decoder of Constraint length 7 and code rate 1⁄2 is considered. The design is implemented using verilog on Xilinx Spartan 3E and advanced Spartan 6 board and the results and Comparisons are presented.
On the Sparsity of Spreading Sequences for NOMA with Reliability Guarantee and Detection Complexity Limitation

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology for handling massive connectivity in future 5G wireless networks. Even though the spectral efficiency can be promoted, the transmission reliability is sometimes poor, due to the introduced multiple access interference (MAI), and the computational complexity for multiuser detection is usually high in NOMA. To solve this problem, we investigate the NOMA regime with sparse multiple-access sequences, so as to leverage sparse signal processing methods, e.g., the message passing algorithm (MPA) for low-complexity and highly- reliable multiuser detection. Particularly, we formulate an optimization problem to design the sparsity of spreading sequences, while maximizing the efficiency of NOMA subject to the allowable symbol error rate (SER) constraint as well as the affordable detection complexity constraint. To evaluate the detection performance of MPA, we give the large-system limit analysis and derive the density evolution method. The impact of variable and function sparsity on the performance is then analyzed. Based on the uncovered characteristics of the optimization problem, an efficient algorithm is proposed to derive the optimal sparsity achieving the desired trade-off between efficiency, reliability and complexity.
The effectiveness and safety of fixed low‐dose prothrombin complex concentrates in patients requiring urgent reversal of warfarin (CME)

A rapid method of reversal is required for patients on warfarin who suffer acute bleeding or require emergency surgery. Prothrombin complex concentrates (PCCs) have recently been recommended by the Canadian Blood Services for use at a fixed low dose of 1000 IU of Factor (F)IX activity. The main goal of this study was to investigate both the effectiveness and the safety of fixed low‐dose PCCs.
Cellular and Humoral Antibody Responses of Normal Pastel and Sapphire Mink to Goat Erythrocytes

This study was undertaken to determine whether normal sapphire and royal pastel mink differ immunologically at the cellular and humoral levels. Two days after primary intraperitoneal (ip) inoculation of goat erythrocytes (GE), essentially no 19 or 7S plaque-forming cells (PFC) per 106 cells were detected in spleen or in abdominal and peripheral lymph nodes of either color phase. On the 4th day, more 19S PFC were detected in pastel than in sapphire tissues; pastel tissues also contained 7S PFC, whereas essentially none was present in sapphires until the 6th day. After an ip booster inoculation, the number of PFC was markedly different between the two color phases. These differences were most apparent in spleen and peripheral lymph nodes. In parallel with differences observed in PFC responses between the color phases, total hemolysin and 2-mercaptoethanol-resistant hemolysin titers of pastels exceeded those of sapphires in all but one interval after the primary, and at every interval after the booster, inoculation. These data indicate that sapphire mink are not immunological cripples, nor are they immunologically hyperactive, but that differences do exist between sapphire and royal pastel mink, especially in the response to booster injections of GE.
Can Machine Learning Algorithms Improve Phrase Selection in Hybrid Machine Translation?

We describe a substitution-based, hybrid machine translation (MT) system that has been extended with a machine learning component controlling its phrase selection. Our approach is based on a rule-based MT (RBMT) system which creates template translations. Based on the generation parse tree of the RBMT system and standard word alignment computation, we identify potential "translation snippets" from one or more translation engines which could be substituted into our translation templates. The substitution process is controlled by a binary classifier trained on feature vectors from the different MT engines. Using a set of manually annotated training data, we are able to observe improvements in terms of BLEU scores over a baseline version of the hybrid system.
Novel Derivative of Benzofuran Induces Cell Death Mostly by G2/M Cell Cycle Arrest through p53-dependent Pathway but Partially by Inhibition of NF-κB*

The Dracaena resin is widely used in traditional medicine as an anticancer agent, and benzofuran lignan is the active component. In this report, we provide evidence that the synthetic derivative of benzofuran lignan (Benfur) showed antitumor activities. It induced apoptosis in p53-positive cells. Though it inhibited endotoxin-induced nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) activation in both p53-positive and -negative cells, the activation of caspase 3 was observed in p53-positive cells. It showed partial cell death effect in both p53-positive and -negative cells through inhibition of NF-κB. Cell cycle analysis using flow cytometry showed that treatment with this novel benozofuran lignan derivative to Jurkat T-cells, but not U-937 cells, resulted in a G2/M arrest in a dose- and time-dependent manner. It increased amounts of p21, p27, and cyclin B, but not phospho-Rb through p53 nuclear translocation in Jurkat T-cells, but not in U-937 cells. It inhibited amounts of MDM2 (murine double minute 2) by repressing the transcription factor Sp1, which was also proved in silico. It induced cell death in tumor cells, but not in primary T-cells. Overall, our data suggest that Benfur-mediated cell death is partially dependent upon NF-κB, but predominantly dependent on p53. Thus, this novel benzofuran lignan derivative can be effective chemopreventive or chemotherapeutic agent against malignant T-cells.
A Feature-rich Supervised Word Alignment Model for Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation

Word alignment plays an important role in statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. The output of word alignment can be used to build a phrase table, which is the core model in the decoding of new sentences. Most current SMT systems use GIZA++, a generative model, to automatically align words from sentence-aligned parallel corpora. GIZA++ works well when large sentence-aligned corpora are used. However, it is difficult to encode syntactic and lexical features useful for handling sparse data and unseen words, such as POS tags, affixes, lemmas, etc., using generative models. A discriminative model such as conditional random fields (CRF) can solve this problem. We treat word alignment as a labelling problem, and encode the syntactic, lexical, and contextual features. Our experiments were conducted using a 35K Chinese-English hand-aligned corpus. Our model gives better word alignment results than GIZA++ by 7% AER. Finally, we also prove that 2% higher BLEU score can be obtained with phrase-based SMT systems when our alignment models are used.
Application of Small-Angle X-Ray Scattering to Predict Microfibril Angle in Acacia mangium Wood

Partially crystalline cellulose microfibrils are wound helically around the longitudinal axis of the wood cell. A method is presented for the measurement, using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), of the microfibril angle, (MFA) and the associated standard deviation for the cellulose microfibrils in the S2 layer of the cell walls of Acacia mangium wood. The length and orientation of the microfibrils of the cell walls in the irradiated volume of the thin samples are measured using SAXS and scanning electron microscope, (SEM). The undetermined parameters in the analysis are the MFA, (M) and the standard deviation (σФ) of the intensity distribution arising from the wandering of the fibril orientation about the mean value. Nine separate pairs of values are determined for nine different values of the angle of the incidence of the X-ray beam relative to the normal to the radial direction in the sample. The results show good agreement. The curve distribution of scattered intensity for the real cell wall structure is compared with that calculated with that assembly of rectangular cells with the same ratio of transverse to radial cell wall length. It is demonstrated that for β = 45°, the peaks in the curve intensity distribution for the real and the rectangular cells coincide. If this peak position is Ф45, Then the MFA can be determined from the relation M = tan-1 (tan Ф45 / cos 45°), which is precise for rectangular cells.
Wanderlust : Extracting Semantic Relations from Natural Language Text Using Dependency Grammar Patterns

A great share of applications in modern information technology can benefit from large coverage, machine accessible knowledge bases. However, the bigger part of todays knowledge is provided in the form of unstructured data, mostly plain text. As an initial step to exploit such data, we present Wanderlust, an algorithm that automatically extracts semantic relations from natural language text. The procedure uses deep linguistic patterns that are defined over the dependency grammar of sentences. Due to its linguistic nature, the method performs in an unsupervised fashion and is not restricted to any specific type of semantic relation. The applicability of the proposed approach is examined in a case study, in which it is put to the task of generating a semantic wiki from the English Wikipedia corpus. We present an exhaustive discussion about the insights obtained from this particular case study including considerations about the generality of the approach.
Semantic web and natural language in online discussion forums

Personal weg pages, blogging services and discussion forums have gained widespread acceptance among casual Internet users to communicate their views and preferences across diverse areas of topics. Unfortunately, since these contributions are written in free-form natural language it is difficult and error-prone to automatically extract much more than a classification of postings into subject categories; the statements contained in the individual sentences of the text remain largely inaccessible to automated analysis. The RDF Resource Description Framework provides sophisticated vocabulary for semantic markup, however, due its complexity it is not suitable for casual users. In this work an approach similar to the historical evolution of trade languages among different native speakers is suggested that aims at merging RDF and natural language into simple community-specific web pidgin languages interactively evolving based on the input of participating users.
Isolation and molecular characterization of beta-lactamase-producing Haemophilus parainfluenzae from the genital tract

Three Haemophilus parainfluenzae strains isolated from the urogenital tract harbored a beta-lactamase-coding 3.2-megadalton plasmid identical, by restriction endonuclease digestion and hybridization with radioactive and biotin-labeled probes specific for the TEM-1 beta-lactamase and TnA sequences, to the 3.2-megadalton "African-type" plasmid found in Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
Canopus: A Scalable and Massively Parallel Consensus Protocol

Achieving consensus among a set of distributed entities (or participants) is a fundamental problem at the heart of many distributed systems. A critical problem with most consensus protocols is that they do not scale well. As the number of participants trying to achieve consensus increases, increasing network traffic can quickly overwhelm the network from topology-oblivious broadcasts, or a central coordinator for centralized consensus protocols. Thus, either achieving strong consensus is restricted to a handful of participants, or developers must resort to weaker models of consensus. We propose Canopus, a highly-parallel consensus protocol that is 'plug-compatible' with ZooKeeper, which exploits modern data center network topology, parallelism, and consensus semantics to achieve scalability with respect to the number of participants and throughput (i.e., the number of key-value reads/writes per second). In our prototype implementation, compared to EPaxos and ZooKeeper, Canopus increases throughput by more than 4x and 16x respectively for read-heavy workloads.
Detection of Benzodiazepines in Human Hair by Radioimmunoassay

OBJECTIVE: In this preliminary investigation, we sought to determine whether a standard benzodiazepine radioimmunoassay (RIA) could detect three benzodiazepines in human hair. DESIGN: Hair samples of 20–50 strands (minimum 10 mg) were cut from eight patients receiving diazepam, two patients receiving alprazolam, three patients receiving lorazepam, and two negative controls. Samples were treated with ethanol and phosphate buffer washes at 37 ° to remove external contamination. The protein hair matrix was destroyed using proprietary procedures, then analyzed with Abuscreen RIA designed to detect various benzodiazepines and their metabolites, using oxazepam as a reference standard. SETTING: Patients were hospitalized in a locked psychiatric facility. PATIENTS: Twelve patients with chronic psychiatric conditions who had received therapeutic dosages of benzodiazepines for 1–11 months were included in the sample. One outpatient who reported heavy prior diazepam use was also included. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Detection of benzodiazepines was well above a 1.5 ng/10 mg cutoff level with the Abuscreen assay. RESULTS: Diazepam was readily detected, but alprazolam and lorazepam were not detected. CONCLUSIONS: There is no test that can currently determine duration and extent of prior benzodiazepine use. Hair analysis for diazepam offers a potential, new clinical and research tool for characterizing prior level and extent of usage.
Design of compact X-band 128 elements microstrip patch array antenna for airborne and space borne SAR applications

Microstrip Patch Array Antennas are widely used nowadays in radar satellite and other communication Systems. Use of Microstrip array as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is wide-spread these days in Airborne as well as Space Borne SAR missions. In this paper, design of a compact 128 elements Microstrip Antenna Array is discussed operating in X-Band. Designed array is high gain with total 128 radiating elements in configuration of 2×4 sub-arrays. 16 elements are single fed and constitute a single sub-array. Elements are excited using corporate feed network and have inter-element spacing of 0. 6λ. Microstrip array is designed using commercially available low-loss dielectric substrate Rogers having relative permittivity ∊r=2.2, thickness 1.575 mm and loss tangent 9 × 10−4 and simulated using Advance EM Simulator. Simulated gain of single sub-array is 17 dB while complete array has gain of 26 dB. Return Loss or S11 of array is less than −50 dB which proves that designed array is matched to input impedance of 50Ω. As Array is in form of 2×4 sub-arrays having total 8 inputs, it can be used effectively for electronic beam steering by changing phases at input ports. Designed array is manufactured using highly precise PCB manufacturing facility and testing using far-field testing facility. Measured results are in close conformance with the simulated results.
H-2-bearing damped Lyman-alpha systems as tracers of cosmological chemical evolution

The chemical abundances in damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) show more than 2 orders of magnitude variation at a given epoch, possibly because DLAs arise in a wide variety of host galaxies. This could significantly bias estimates of chemical evolution. We explore the possibility that DLAs in which H_2 absorption is detected may trace cosmological chemical evolution more reliably since they may comprise a narrower set of physical conditions. The 9 known H_2 absorption systems support this hypothesis: metallicity exhibits a faster, more well-defined evolution with redshift than in the general DLA population. The dust-depletion factor and, particularly, H_2 molecular fraction also show rapid increases with decreasing redshift. We comment on possible observational selection effects which may bias this evolution. Larger samples of H_2-bearing DLAs are clearly required and may constrain evolution of the UV background and DLA galaxy host type with redshift.
Load modulated arrays: a low-complexity antenna

This article describes promising recent progress in the area of massive antenna array architectures with low front-end hardware complexity. The presented technology enables the design and implementation of antenna arrays with large numbers of elements, while obtaining significant front-end hardware savings as compared to the conventional solutions. This newly appearing design approach could be used in order to design either massive arrays with complexity that would be prohibitive with the current technology, or smaller arrays that offer high spatial degrees of freedom and are suitable for future small yet powerful cell nodes. RF hardware architectures with a single RF chain are reviewed, compared, and found superior to conventional MIMO implementations in terms of cost, dissipated heat, and physical size. The proposed improvements on the RF side allow the merging of the two dominant cellular technologies of virtual (distributed) and massive (centralized) MIMO into a hybrid approach of antenna arrays that is suitable for both large base stations and small (possibly cooperative) units such as remote radio heads.
Interferometric fibre-optic sensor for acetic acid measurement

An optical fibre sensor for determination of acetic acid is presented. The sensing probe is based on a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) Fabry-Perot cavity, coated with a thin film of sol-gel-PVP (polyVynil Pirrolidone) composite material. The polymeric thin film renders interferometric output sensitive to the presence of carboxylic acid species. Results show that the wavelength of the interferometric peaks change with acetic acid concentration, enabling its quantification. Coupling the fibre probe with a serrodyne modulated readout interferometer enables pseudo-heterodyne interrogation and the detection of acetic acid with a sensitivity of 1 deg/0.01% and a resolution of 0.2% v/v. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed scheme to operate as a sensitive chemical sensor platform.
CS 224 N Class Project Automatic Hypernym Classification

Hypernym classification is the task of deciding whether, given two words, one word “is a kind of” the other. We present a classifier that learns the noun hypernym relation based on automatically-discovered lexico-syntactic patterns between a set of provided hyponym/hypernym noun pairs. This classifier is shown to outperform two previous methods for automatically identifying hypernym pairs (using WordNet as a gold standard), and is shown to outperform those methods as well as WordNet on a hand-labeled data set.
Improved Understanding of Soil Surface Roughness Parameterization for L-Band Passive Microwave Soil Moisture Retrieval

Surface roughness parameterization plays an important role in soil moisture retrieval from passive microwave observations. This letter investigates the parameterization of surface roughness in the retrieval algorithm adopted by the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission, making use of experimental airborne and ground data from the National Airborne Field Experiment held in Australia in 2005. The surface roughness parameter is retrieved from high-resolution (60 m) airborne data in different soil moisture conditions, using the ground soil moisture as input of the model. The effect of surface roughness on the emitted signal is found to change with the soil moisture conditions with a law different from that proposed in previous studies. The magnitude of this change is found to be related to soil textural properties: in clay soils, the effect of surface roughness is higher in intermediate wetness conditions (0.2-0.3 v/v) and decreases on both the dry and wet ends. Consequently, this letter calls for a rethink of surface roughness parameterization in microwave emission modeling.
The first biopolymer-wrapped non-carbon nanotubes

DNA-wrapped halloysite nanotubes were obtained by a mechanochemical reaction in the solid state. The characterization by scanning electron microscopy showed that the nanotubes were cut into shorter lengths and were completely covered with DNA. This resulted in a high aqueous solubility of the product with stability of the solution for about 6 weeks. The nanotubes were cut to different fractions with lengths of 200–400 nm (30–40%), 400–600 nm (10–20%) and 600–800 nm (5–10%) after ball milling. FTIR spectroscopic analysis shows that the DNA in the product remained intact. This straightforward technique for obtaining water-soluble halloysite nanotubes by a solid-state reaction has great potential for biomedical applications of nanotubes.