Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel tunable high impedance surface electromagnetic band gap metamaterials for RF and microwave applications

This paper presents a novel varactor based electronically tunable high impedance surface electromagnetic band-gap (HIS-EBG) metamaterial. The proposed structure is based on two-layer mushroom-like HIS-EBG ground plane, in which by controlling the DC bias voltage on the varactors, the effective capacitance can be adjusted which alters the resonance frequency. To assess the electromagnetic (EM) wave suppression property the structure is incorporated, as the ground plane, in a microstrip transmission line and it is experimentally characterized over the 500 MHz-10 GHz frequency band. Numerical simulations of the transmission coefficient for the whole microstrip system were performed. Both the simulation and measurement results are compared.
An Attempt to Detect siRNA-Mediated Genomic DNA Modification by Artificially Induced Mismatch siRNA in Arabidopsis

Although tremendous progress has been made in recent years in identifying molecular mechanisms of small interfering RNA (siRNA) functions in higher plants, the possibility of direct interaction between genomic DNA and siRNA remains an enigma. Such an interaction was proposed in the ‘RNA cache’ hypothesis, in which a mutant allele is restored based on template-directed gene conversion. To test this hypothesis, we generated transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants conditionally expressing a hairpin dsRNA construct of a mutated acetolactate synthase (mALS) gene coding sequence, which confers chlorsulfuron resistance, in the presence of dexamethasone (DEX). In the transgenic plants, suppression of the endogenous ALS mRNA expression as well as 21-nt mALS siRNA expression was detected after DEX treatment. After screening >100,000 progeny of the mALS siRNA-induced plants, no chlorsulfuron-resistant progeny were obtained. Further experiments using transgenic calli also showed that DEX-induced expression of mALS siRNA did not affect the number of chlorsulfuron-resistant calli. No trace of cytosine methylation of the genomic ALS region corresponding to the dsRNA region was observed in the DEX-treated calli. These results do not necessarily disprove the ‘RNA cache’ hypothesis, but indicate that an RNAi machinery for ALS mRNA suppression does not alter the ALS locus, either genetically or epigenetically.
Functions Characterizing the Ground State of the XXZ Spin-1/2 Chain in the Thermodynamic Limit

We establish several properties of the solutions to the linear integral equations describing the infinite volume properties of the XXZ spin-1=2 chain in the disordered regime. In particular, we obtain lower and upper bounds for the dressed energy, dressed charge and density of Bethe roots. Furthermore, we establish that given a fixed external magnetic field (or a fixed magnetization) there exists a unique value of the boundary of the Fermi zone.
Segmentation of Printed Text in Devanagari Script and Gurmukhi Script

In this paper, we describe the line, word, character and top character segmentation for printed Hindi text in Devanagari script. And also describe the line and word segmentation for printed text in Gurmukhi script. A performance of 100% at line level, approximately 100% at word level, 99% at character level, and 97% at top character level for Devanagari script and performance of 100% at line level and 99% at word level for Gurmukhi script is obtained. Here we have observed the performance of segmentation with the help of five documents in devanagari script and five document in gurmukhi script.
Variability Aware Network Utility Maximization

Network Utility Maximization (NUM) provides the key conceptual framework to study resource allocation amongst a collection of users/entities across disciplines as diverse as economics, law and engineering. In network engineering, this framework has been particularly insightful towards understanding how Internet protocols allocate bandwidth, and motivated diverse research on distributed mechanisms to maximize network utility while incorporating new relevant constraints, on energy/power, storage, stability, etc., for systems ranging from communication networks to the smart-grid. However when the available resources and/or users' utilities vary over time, a user's allocations will tend to vary, which in turn may have a detrimental impact on the users' utility or quality of experience. This paper introduces a generalized NUM framework which explicitly incorporates the detrimental impact of temporal variability in a user's allocated rewards. It explicitly incorporates tradeoffs amongst the mean and variability in users' allocations. We propose an online algorithm to realize variance-sensitive NUM, which, under stationary ergodic assumptions, is shown to be asymptotically optimal, i.e., achieves a time-average equal to that of an offline algorithm with knowledge of the future variability in the system. This substantially extends work on NUM to an interesting class of relevant problems where users/entities are sensitive to temporal variability in their service or allocated rewards.
A Blind Source Separation Method for Convolved Mixtures by Non-Stationary Vibration Signals

Abstract A simple and feasible of BSS method to separate the convolution mixture of non-stationary vibration signals is present in this paper. The method is carried out by means of two iterative procedures: The first procedure is to estimate the coefficients of the filters. The independence criterion is used and the unknown filters are obtained by a back propagation procedure by means of simplifying the coefficients of filters. The next procedure is to estimate the source vibration signals. The coupled vibration signals are obtained by means of the filters gotten from the former procedure and the estimation sources are obtained through decoupled procedure. Simulation and experiment results show that the method is effective. This improved method can be used to separate convolutive mixtures with non-stationary mechanical vibrations.
Competitive Advantage of Nations: Lessons from Government-initiated Industry-wide IT Projects in Singapore

Information Technology (IT) in general and the Internet in particular have had a profound impact on business, global trade and governance. In this age of global competition, domestic conditions affecting companies' corporate strategy and business performance are becoming of even greater importance. Many governments now increasingly intervene, through initiation of industry-wide IT projects, to shape a favorable home base for companies seeking international competitive advantage. In this study, we first propose a preliminary theoretical framework to guide governmental intervention in the IT arena by drawing upon existing literature on business strategy and planned change. We then demonstrate and refine the applicability of this framework in the context of several key industry-wide IT projects that have been implemented by the Singapore Government. Based on the empirical data collected, we also evaluate the success of these initiatives by examining the perceptions of the various stakeholders affected by these interventions.
A clustering algorithm to find groups with homogeneous preferences1

When we are learning people’s preferences the training material can be expressed as in regression problems: the description of each object is then followed by a number that assesses the degree of satisfaction. Alternatively, training examples can be represented by preference judgments: pairs of vectors (v, u) where someone expresses that he or she prefers v to u. Usually, obtaining preference information may be easier and more natural than obtaining the labels needed for a classification or regression approach. Moreover, this type of information is more accurate, since people tend to rate their preferences in a relative way, comparing objects with the other partners in the same batch. Starting form a set of preference judgments we have to learn a real ranking function f in such a way that f(v) > f(u) whenever v is preferable to u. If we accept linear ranking functions, f is represented by a hyperplane able to separate increasing or positive differences (like v – u when v > u) from decreasing or negative differences (like u – v); see [2, 3, 6]. We will employ an SVM classifier: SVM [4].
Advances and Current Challenges in Intestinal in vitro Model Engineering: A Digest

The physiological environment of the intestine is characterized by its variegated composition, numerous functions and unique dynamic conditions, making it challenging to recreate the organ in vitro. This review outlines the requirements for engineering physiologically relevant intestinal in vitro models, mainly focusing on the importance of the mechano-structural cues that are often neglected in classic cell culture systems. More precisely: the topography, motility and flow present in the intestinal epithelium. After defining quantitative descriptors for these features, we describe the current state of the art, citing relevant approaches used to address one (or more) of the elements in question, pursuing a progressive conceptual construction of an “ideal” biomimetic intestinal model. The review concludes with a critical assessment of the currently available methods to summarize the important features of the intestinal tissue in the light of their different applications.
Emotion and Deliberative Reasoning in Moral Judgment

According to an influential dual-process model, a moral judgment is the outcome of a rapid, affect-laden process and a slower, deliberative process. If these outputs conflict, decision time is increased in order to resolve the conflict. Violations of deontological principles proscribing the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm are presumed to elicit negative affect which biases judgments early in the decision-making process. This model was tested in three experiments. Moral dilemmas were classified using (a) decision time and consensus as measures of system conflict and (b) the aforementioned deontological criteria. In Experiment 1, decision time was either unlimited or reduced. The dilemmas asked whether it was appropriate to take a morally questionable action to produce a “greater good” outcome. Limiting decision time reduced the proportion of utilitarian (“yes”) decisions, but contrary to the model’s predictions, (a) vignettes that involved more deontological violations logged faster decision times, and (b) violation of deontological principles was not predictive of decisional conflict profiles. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that time pressure simply makes people more like to say “no.” Participants made a first decision under time constraints and a second decision under no time constraints. One group was asked whether it was appropriate to take the morally questionable action while a second group was asked whether it was appropriate to refuse to take the action. The results replicated that of Experiment 1 regardless of whether “yes” or “no” constituted a utilitarian decision. In Experiment 3, participants rated the pleasantness of positive visual stimuli prior to making a decision. Contrary to the model’s predictions, the number of deontological decisions increased in the positive affect rating group compared to a group that engaged in a cognitive task or a control group that engaged in neither task. These results are consistent with the view that early moral judgments are influenced by affect. But they are inconsistent with the view that (a) violation of deontological principles are predictive of differences in early, affect-based judgment or that (b) engaging in tasks that are inconsistent with the negative emotional responses elicited by such violations diminishes their impact.
Complex Coordinative Patterns in Speech Production (oral Presentation Preferred)

There is a constantly growing body of evidence that the minimal symbolic units of speech production are discrete gestures instantiated by mutual constraints between the physical systems involved in the production of speech sounds. By extending this conception of speech processing to more abstract levels of analysis we can understand interface phenomena as due to the interaction between processes triggered by different components of the grammar. Extending the reasoning further, it has been proposed that physiological and cognitive processes interact across speakers involved in a conversation bringing them into aligned cognitive states and facilitating their interaction.
Distinct Brain Regions in Physiological and Pathological Brain Aging

Background Studying structural brain aging is important to understand age-related pathologies, as well as to identify the early manifestations of the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum. In this study, we investigated the long-term trajectory of physiological and pathological brain aging in a large number of participants ranging from the 50s to over 80 years of age. Objective To explore the distinct brain regions that distinguish pathological brain aging from physiological brain aging using sophisticated measurements of cortical thickness. Methods A total of 2,823 cognitively normal (CN) individuals and 2,675 patients with AD continuum [874 with subjective memory impairment (SMI), 954 with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and 847 with AD dementia] who underwent a high-resolution 3.0-tesla MRI were included in this study. To investigate pathological brain aging, we further classified patients with aMCI and AD according to the severity of cognitive impairment. Cortical thickness was measured using a surface-based method. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to evaluate age, diagnostic groups, and cortical thickness. Results Aging extensively affected cortical thickness not only in CN individuals but also in AD continuum patients; however, the precuneus and inferior temporal regions were relatively preserved against age-related cortical thinning. Compared to CN individuals, AD continuum patients including those with SMI showed a decreased cortical thickness in the perisylvian region. However, widespread cortical thinning including the precuneus and inferior temporal regions were found from the late-stage aMCI to the moderate to severe AD. Unlike the other age groups, AD continuum patients aged over 80 years showed prominent cortical thinning in the medial temporal region with relative sparing of the precuneus. Conclusion Our findings suggested that the precuneus and inferior temporal regions are the key regions in distinguishing between physiological and pathological brain aging. Attempts to differentiate age-related pathology from physiological brain aging at a very early stage would be important in terms of establishing new strategies for preventing accelerated pathological brain aging.
Graphical User Authentication in Mobile Device using the web RGB color palette

Existing graphical authentication methods take into account the fact that users are more capable of remembering pictures instead of text. Graphical authentication schemes are expected to be less vulnerable to specific hacker attack techniques that have greatly improved in recent years. The usability aspect of a graphical authentication product refers to the extent that a product can be used by users to achieve goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. This paper describes a prototype system providing graphical authentication of mobile devices over the Internet, covering both usability and security aspects. Color images are assigned to the mobile users and authentication is achieved by modifying the Red-Green Blue (RGB) color intensity values of the assigned image.
Perseverant grit and self-efficacy: Are both essential for children’s academic success?

Psychological factors such as grit and self-efficacy have been heralded as powerful predictors of performance. Their joint contribution to the prediction of early adolescents’ school success has not been fully investigated, however. The purpose of this study was to examine U.S. elementary and middle school students’ (N = 2,430) grit (assessed as perseverance of effort) and self-efficacy, and their predictive relationship with achievement and teacher-rated motivation and competence in reading and math across one school year. Scalar invariance was found for grit and self-efficacy measures across school level, gender, and SES. Older students and students from lower SES reported significantly lower grit and self-efficacy. Girls reported higher grit and reading self-efficacy. Grit was correlated positively with self-efficacy (.37 ≤ r ≤ .66), modestly with teacher ratings in reading and math (.14 ≤ r ≤ .25), and weakly or uncorrelated with achievement (.03 ≤ r ≤ .13). Self-efficacy was positively related to all outcomes (.21 ≤ r ≤ .36). SEM indicated that subject-specific self-efficacy was positively related, and grit weakly or unrelated, to reading and math achievement, controlling for grade level, gender, SES, and prior achievement. An examination of competing mediation models revealed that self-efficacy partially or fully mediated the relationship between grit and school outcomes. Conversely, little evidence supported grit as a mediator of self-efficacy’s relationship to outcomes. Time-lagged models across one school year confirmed these conclusions. Findings imply that, to improve student performance, teachers should target students’ self-efficacy rather than grit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
Balanced Control Strategies for Interconnected Heterogeneous Battery Systems

This paper develops new balanced charge/discharge strategies that distribute charge or discharge currents properly so that during operation, battery systems maintain uniform state-of-charge (SOC) all the time. The proposed balanced charge/discharge control strategies are useful for interconnected heterogeneous battery systems that can be built from battery modules with different types, ages, and power/capacity ratings. Both voltage-based and SOC-based balanced charge/discharge strategies are developed. Their convergence properties are rigorously established, and illustrative examples using production batteries demonstrate their convergence behavior under different charging current profiles. The approach will be especially useful for battery storage systems to support power grids with renewable energy sources where the battery systems are required to operate continuously.
Heteroskedastic Levy Flights

Truncated L\'{e}vy flights are random walks in which the arbitrarily large steps of a L\'{e}vy flight are eliminated. Since this makes the variance finite, the central limit theorem applies, and as time increases the probability distribution of the increments becomes Gaussian. Here, truncated L\'{e}vy flights with correlated fluctuations of the variance (heteroskedasticity) are considered. What makes these processes interesting is the fact that the crossover to the Gaussian regime may occur for times considerably larger than for uncorrelated (or no) variance fluctuations. These processes may find direct application in the modeling of some economic time series.
Clonal Spread of Extended-Spectrum Cephalosporin-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae Between Companion Animals and Humans in South Korea

Extended-spectrum cephalosporin (ESC)-resistant Enterobacteriaceae is an increasingly important problem in both human and veterinary medicine. The aims of this study were to describe a comparative molecular characterization of Enterobacteriaceae carrying ESC resistance genes, encoding extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) and AmpC, isolated from human stool samples, rectal swabs from companion animals, and swabs from the environment of veterinarian hospitals in South Korea, and to examine their possible dissemination and transmission. The ESC resistance genes were identified by PCR and sequencing. Isolates with the predominant ESC resistance genes were assessed for their genetic relatedness by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multi-locus sequence typing. A total of 195 Escherichia coli and 41 Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates that exhibited ESC resistance were recovered on CHROMagar ESBL from human, companion animal, and the veterinary hospital environmental samples. In companion animals, most of the ESC resistance genes were blaCMY–2–like (26.4%), followed by blaCTX –M–55 (17.2%) and blaCTX–M–14 (16.1%), whereas blaCTX–M–15 (28.6%) was predominant in human samples. The epidemiological relatedness of isolates carrying ESC resistance genes, including 124 E. coli and 23 K. pneumoniae isolates carrying CMY-2-like, DHA-1-like, or/and CTX-M-type, were analyzed by PFGE. The pulsotypes of five E. coli isolates (three from dogs and two from humans) carrying blaCMY–2–like, which were attributed to sequence type 405, from different veterinary clinics showed >85% similarity. Our results indicate direct transmission and dissemination of ESC-resistant Enterobacteriaceae between humans and companion animals.
Evaluating stream buffers as a secondary cache replacement

Today's commodity microprocessors require a low latency memory system to achieve high sustained performance. The conventional high-performance memory system provides fast data access via a large secondary cache. But large secondary caches can be expensive, particularly in large-scale parallel systems with many processors (and thus many caches). The authors evaluate a memory system design that can be both cost-effective as well as provide better performance, particularly for scientific workloads: a single level of (on-chip) cache backed up only by Jouppi's stream buffers and a main memory. This memory system requires very little hardware compared to a large secondary cache and doesn't require modifications to commodity processors. The authors use trace-driven simulation of fifteen scientific applications from the NAS and PERFECT suites in their evaluation. They present two techniques to enhance the effectiveness of Jouppi's original stream buffers: filtering schemes to reduce their memory bandwidth requirement and a scheme that enables stream buffers to prefetch data being accessed in large strides. The results show that, for the majority of the benchmarks, stream buffers can attain hit rates that are comparable to typical hit rates of secondary caches. Also, the authors find that as the data-set size of the scientific workload increases the performance of streams typically improves relative to secondary cache performance, showing that streams are more scalable to large data-set sizes. <<ETX>>
Enabling task-level scheduling on heterogeneous platforms

OpenCL is an industry standard for parallel programming on heterogeneous devices. With OpenCL, compute-intensive portions of an application can be offloaded to a variety of processing units within a system. OpenCL is the first standard that focuses on portability, allowing programs to be written once and run seamlessly on multiple, heterogeneous devices, regardless of vendor. While OpenCL has been widely adopted, there still remains a lack of support for automatic task scheduling and data consistency when multiple devices appear in the system. To address this need, we have designed a task queueing extension for OpenCL that provides a high-level, unified execution model tightly coupled with a resource management facility. The main motivation for developing this extension is to provide OpenCL programmers with a convenient programming paradigm to fully utilize all possible devices in a system and incorporate flexible scheduling schemes. To demonstrate the value and utility of this extension, we have utilized an advanced OpenCL-based imaging toolkit called clSURF. Using our task queueing extension, we demonstrate the potential performance opportunities and limitations given current vendor implementations of OpenCL. Using a state-of-art implementation on a single GPU device as the baseline, our task queueing extension achieves a speedup up to 72.4%. Our extension also achieves scalable performance gains on multiple heterogeneous GPU devices. The performance trade-offs of using the host CPU as an accelerator are also evaluated.