Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Compact Thermal Model of an Electrothermal Micromirror Based on Transmission Line Theory

A procedure for building a parametric dynamic thermal model of electrothermally-actuated devices is developed and demonstrated using a 1-D scanning micromirror. The micromirror is actuated by thermal bimorphs and an embedded platinum (Pt) resistor is used for generating Joule heating. The thermal model is developed by drawing analogy between heat flow in the device and current-flow through an electrical transmission line. It provides the temperature of the embedded heater and the bimorph actuators. The distributed thermal impedances of the transmission-line model are represented by an equivalent circuit model with a few elements. A simplification of the circuit model is proposed when small length scales are involved. Rotation angle per unit power input predicted by the circuit model has an error of less than 8% compared to experimental results. The low-frequency decay in device response is accurately predicted.
Use of a modified Robbins device to directly compare the adhesion of Staphylococcus epidermidis RP62A to surfaces

Staphylococcus epidermidis is a frequent cause of infection associated with the use of biomedical devices. Flow cell studies of the interaction between bacteria and surfaces do not generally allow direct comparison of different materials using the same bacterial suspension. The use of a modified Robbins Device (MRD) to compare the adhesion to different surfaces of Staph. epidermidis RP62A grown in continuous culture was investigated. Adhesion to glass was compared with siliconized glass, plasma‐conditioned glass, titanium, stainless steel and Teflon. Attachment to siliconized glass was also compared with glass under differing ionic strength, and divalent cation concentrations. Both the differences in numbers adhering and changes in adhesion (slope) through the MRD were compared. There was a trend towards higher numbers adhering to the discs at the in‐flow end of the MRD than at the outflow end, probably reflecting depletion of adherent bacteria in the interacting stream. Adhesion of Staph. epidermidis RP62A to siliconized glass and Teflon was reduced when compared to glass with increasing flow rates. Adhesion to stainless steel was not affected by flow rate and titanium gave a different slope of adhesion through the MRD when compared with glass, suggesting an interaction with different sub‐populations within the interacting stream. Differences between siliconized glass and glass at flow rates of 300 ml h−1 were abolished by the addition of calcium or EDTA and reduced by the addition of magnesium. Increasing ionic strength reduced the statistical significance of the differences between glass and siliconized glass. Pre‐conditioning of glass with pooled human plasma reduced adhesion compared with untreated glass and again gave a different slope to glass. The MRD linked to a chemostat can be used to compare directly bacterial adhesion to potential biomaterials. Variable depletion of the interacting stream should be taken into account in the interpretation of results. Divalent cation concentration, substrate properties and flow rate were important determinants of the comparative adhesion of Staph. epidermidis RP62A to surfaces.
Quantitative Molecular Analysis of the Microbial Community in Marine Arctic Sediments (Svalbard)

ABSTRACT Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and rRNA slot blot hybridization with 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes were used to investigate the phylogenetic composition of a marine Arctic sediment (Svalbard). FISH resulted in the detection of a large fraction of microbes living in the top 5 cm of the sediment. Up to 65.4% ± 7.5% of total DAPI (4′,6′-diamidino-2-phenylindole) cell counts hybridized to the bacterial probe EUB338, and up to 4.9% ± 1.5% hybridized to the archaeal probe ARCH915. Besides δ-proteobacterial sulfate-reducing bacteria (up to 16% 52) members of the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium cluster were the most abundant group detected in this sediment, accounting for up to 12.8% of total DAPI cell counts and up to 6.1% of prokaryotic rRNA. Furthermore, members of the order Planctomycetales accounted for up to 3.9% of total cell counts. In accordance with previous studies, these findings support the hypothesis that these bacterial groups are not simply settling with organic matter from the pelagic zone but are indigenous to the anoxic zones of marine sediments. Members of the γ-proteobacteria also constituted a significant fraction in this sediment (6.1% ± 2.5% of total cell counts, 14.4% ± 3.6% of prokaryotic rRNA). A new probe (GAM660) specific for sequences affiliated with free-living or endosymbiotic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria was developed. A significant number of cells was detected by this probe (2.1% ± 0.7% of total DAPI cell counts, 13.2% ± 4.6% of prokaryotic rRNA), showing no clear zonation along the vertical profile. Gram-positive bacteria and the β-proteobacteria were near the detection limit in all sediments.
Using Processor-Cache Affinity Information in Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Scheduling

In a shared-memory multiprocessor system, it may be more efficient to schedule a task on one processor than on another if relevant data already reside in a particular processor's cache. The effects of this type of processor affinity are examined. It is observed that tasks continuously alternate between executing at a processor and releasing this processor due to I/O, synchronization, quantum expiration, or preemption. Queuing network models of different abstract scheduling policies are formulated, spanning the range from ignoring affinity to fixing tasks on processors. These models are solved via mean value analysis, where possible, and by simulation otherwise. An analytic cache model is developed and used in these scheduling models to include the effects of an initial burst of cache misses experienced by tasks when they return to a processor for execution. A mean-value technique is also developed and used in the scheduling models to include the effects of increased bus traffic due to these bursts of cache misses. Only a small amount of affinity information needs to be maintained for each task. The importance of having a policy that adapts its behavior to changes in system load is demonstrated. >
Spectral Regularization for Support Estimation

In this paper we consider the problem of learning from data the support of a probability distribution when the distribution does not have a density (with respect to some reference measure). We propose a new class of regularized spectral estimators based on a new notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which we call "completely regular ". Completely regular kernels allow to capture the relevant geometric and topological properties of an arbitrary probability space. In particular, they are the key ingredient to prove the universal consistency of the spectral estimators and in this respect they are the analogue of universal kernels for supervised problems. Numerical experiments show that spectral estimators compare favorably to state of the art machine learning algorithms for density support estimation.
Digital reproducibility requirements of computational genomic workflows

With the rapidly increasing reliance of life sciences research on digital data and sophisticated computational analysis techniques, the ability to reproduce findings generated by in-silico data analysis workflows is of increasing importance to the scientific community. However, challenges to reproducibility arise from the heterogeneity of approaches available to workflow definition and enactment. In this work, we explore the requirements of ‘digital reproducibility’ of genomic data analysis by implementing a complex but extensively used bioinformatics workflow using three widely adopted approaches that differ markedly in their implementation. We use these case studies to identify implicit and explicit assumptions present in each of the workflow implementations and then propose a comprehensive breakdown of reproducibility requirements that can inform a more structured, assumption-free approach to implementing highly reproducible genomic analyses.
Thermal X-ray composites as an effect of projection

A new possibility is proposed to explain the nature of thermal X-ray composites (TXCs), i.e. a class of supernova remnants (SNRs) with a thermal X-ray centrally-filled morphology within a radio shell, as a projection effect of the 2- or 3-dimensional shell-like SNR evolv ed in a nonuniform medium with scale-height ≤ $10 {\rm pc}$. Both X-ray and radio morphologies, as well as the basic theoretical features of this kind of SNR and the surrounding medium, are considered. Theoretical properties of a shell-like SNR evolved at the edge of a molecular cloud correspond to the observed properties of TXCs if the gradient of the ambient density does not lie in the projection plane and the magnetic field is nearly aligned with the line of sight. So, at least a part of objects from the class may be interpreted within the framework of the considered start. The proposed model suggests that SNRs with barrel-like radio, and centrally-brightened thermal X-ray morphologies should exist. The model allows us to consider TXCs as prospective sources of proton-origin γ -rays.
Influence of hypoxia on the expression of matrix metalloproteinase-1, -3 and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 in rheumatoid synovial fibroblasts.

OBJECTIVE The rheumatoid synovium is a hypoxic environment, and hypoxia has been implicated as a factor in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of hypoxia on the expression of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-1, -3 and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMP)-1 in rheumatoid synovial fibroblasts. METHODS Synovial fibroblasts obtained from RA patients were cultured for 48 h under normoxic or hypoxic conditions. Assays included western blot analysis and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for MMP-1, -3 and TIMP-1, and northern blot analysis to measure TIMP-1 mRNA levels. RESULTS Compared with normoxic culture, hypoxia increased MMP-1 and MMP-3 expression in rheumatoid synovial fibroblasts. Hypoxia decreased TIMP-1 expression in rheumatoid synovial fibroblasts, as measured by both protein and mRNA levels. CONCLUSION These results suggest that microenvironmental conditions, such as hypoxia, may directly contribute to joint destruction in RA by increasing the ratio of MMP-1, -3 to TIMP-1 production in synovial fibroblasts.
Relation between exposure to asbestos and smoking jointly and the risk of lung cancer

OBJECTIVES To review evidence about the joint relation of exposure to asbestos and smoking on the risk of lung cancer to answer three questions: (1) does asbestos increase risk in non-smokers; (2) are the data consistent with an additive model; and (3) are the data consistent with a multiplicative model? METHODS Analysis of 23 studies reporting epidemiological evidence on the joint relation. Comparison of risk of lung cancer in subjects unexposed to asbestos or smoking, exposed to asbestos only, to smoking only, or to both. Estimation of the relative risk associated with asbestos exposure in non-smokers and of statistics testing for additivity and multiplicativity of risk. RESULTS Eight of the 23 studies provided insufficient data on the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers to test for possible effects of asbestos. Asbestos exposure was associated with a significantly (p<0.05) increased risk in non-smokers in six of the remaining studies and with a moderately increased, but not significant, increase in a further six. In two of the three studies that found no increase, asbestos exposure was insufficient to increase risks in smokers. In 30 of 31 data sets analysed, risk in the combined exposure group was greater than predicted by the additive model. There was no overall departure from the multiplicative model, the proportional increase in risk of lung cancer with exposure to asbestos being estimated as 0.90 (95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.67 to 1.20) times higher in smokers than non-smokers. For two studies significant (p<0.05) departures from a multiplicative relation were found in some, but not all, analyses. Reasons are presented why these may not indicate true model discrepancies. CONCLUSIONS Asbestos exposure multiplies risk of lung cancer by a similar factor in non-smokers and smokers. The extent to which it multiplies risk varies between studies, no doubt depending on the type of asbestos involved, and the nature, extent, and duration of exposure.
Sentiment Analysis on the People’s Daily

We propose a semi-supervised bootstrapping algorithm for analyzing China’s foreign relations from the People’s Daily. Our approach addresses sentiment target clustering, subjective lexicons extraction and sentiment prediction in a unified framework. Different from existing algorithms in the literature, time information is considered in our algorithm through a hierarchical bayesian model to guide the bootstrapping approach. We are hopeful that our approach can facilitate quantitative political analysis conducted by social scientists and politicians.
Comparison of the Efficiency of MapReduce and Bulk Synchronous Parallel Approaches to Large Network Processing

Network structures, especially social networks, grow rapidly and provide huge datasets intractable to analyse. In this paper, two parallel approaches to process large graph structures within the Hadoop environment were compared: Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) and MapReduce (MR). The experimental studies were carried out for two different graph problems: collective classification by means of Relational Influence Propagation (RIP) and Single Source Shortest Path (SSSP) calculation. The appropriate BSP and MapReduce algorithms for these problems were applied to various network datasets differing in size and structural profile, originating from three domains: telecommunication, multimedia and microblog. The collected results revealed that iterative graph processing with BSP implementation significantly outperform popular MapReduce, especially for algorithms with many iterations and sparse communication. However, MapReduce still remains the only alternative for enormous networks.
Computer assisted proof of optimal approximability results

We obtain computer assisted proofs of several spherical volume inequalities that appear in the analysis of semidefinite programming based approximation algorithms for Boolean constraint satisfaction problems. These inequalities imply, in particular, that the performance ratio achieved by the MAX 3-SAT approximation algorithm of Karloff and Zwick is indeed 7/8, as conjectured by them, and that the performance ratio of the MAX 3-CSP algorithm of the author is indeed 1/2. Other results are also implied. The computer assisted proofs are obtained using a system called REALSEARCH, written by the author. This system uses interval arithmetic to produce rigorous proofs that certain collections of constraints in real variables have no real solution.
Research on statistics-based model for E-commerce user purchase prediction

This paper describes our work for ALIDATA DISCOVERY competition. Through analyzing massive real-world user action data provided by Tmall, one of the largest B2C online retail platforms in China, we try to predict future user purchases. The prediction results are judged by F1 Score that is consist of two parts, precision and recall rate. The provided data set contains more than 500 million action records from over 12 million distinct users. Such a massive data set drives us to finish the task in MapReduce fashion on the Open Data Processing Service (ODPS) platform. According to statistical results, we classify all users into different groups firstly. Then the rule model, timing model, statistics model are adopted for predicting future user purchases. By comparison, the statistics model obtains the best F1Score.
Enhanced angular resolution from multiply scattered waves

Multiply scattered waves are often neglected in imaging methods, largely because of the inability of standard algorithms to deal with the associated non-linear models. This paper shows that by incorporating a known environment into the background model, we not only retain the benefits of imaging techniques based on linear models, but also obtain different views of the target scatterer. The net result is an enhanced angular resolution of the target to be imaged. We carry out our analysis in the context of high-frequency radar imaging, in which a steerable beam from a moving platform is used to produce an image of a region on the earth's surface (the target scatterers being buildings, etc). We consider the case where the target we want to image is situated in the vicinity of an a priori known reflecting wall. This is one of the simplest possible multipathing environments for the scatterer, and in the case when the illuminating beam is narrow enough to isolate different scattering paths, we will show that the imaging process achieves enhanced angular resolution. Although we carry out our analysis here in the context of radar, our technique is general enough that it can be adapted to many imaging modalities, such as acoustics, ultrasound, elasticity, etc. The extension of the method to other more complicated environments is also possible.
T-Bot and Q-Bot: A couple of AIML-based bots for tutoring courses and evaluating students

Intelligent tutoring systems are computer programs that aim at providing personalized instruction to students. In recent years, conversational robots, usually known as chatterbots, become very popular in the Internet, and ALICE (artificial linguistic internet computer entity) is probably the most popular one. ALICE brain is written in AIML (artificial intelligence markup language), an open XML language. We consider the combination of both approaches, i.e, the use of AIML-based bots for tutoring purposes in open e-learning platforms like Claroline or Moodle. With that aim in mind, we have developed two different bots for helping the students during the learning process and for supporting the teaching activities of the professor. One of them is a tutor bot (T-Bot), and is able to analyse the requests made by the learners in written natural language and to provide adequate and domain specific answers orienting the student to the right course contents. The other one is an evaluation bot (Q-Bot), and is oriented to track and supervise the student progress by means of personalized questionnaires. Both bots have been already developed and integrated as user-friendly modules in Claroline and Moodle.
A Low-Computation Approach for Human Face Recognition

Several 2DPCA-based face recognition algorithms have been proposed hoping to achieve the goal of improving recognition rate while mostly at the expense of computation cost. In this paper, an approach named SI2DPCA is proposed to not only reduce the computation cost but also increase recognition performance at the same time. The approach divides a whole face image into smaller sub-images to increase the weight of features for better feature extraction. Meanwhile, the computation cost that mainly comes from the heavy and complicated operations against matrices is reduced due to the smaller size of sub-images. The reduced amount of computation has been analyzed and the integrity of sub-images has been discussed thoroughly in the paper. The experiments have been conducted to make comparisons among several better-known approaches and SI2DPCA. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach works well on reaching the goals of reducing computation cost and improving recognition performance simultaneously.
Some kinetic and steady-state properties of sodium channels after removal of inactivation

To study the kinetic and steady-state properties of voltage-dependent sodium conductance activation, squid giant axons were perfused internally with either pronase or N-bromoacetamide and voltage clamped. Parameters of activation, tau m and gNa(V), and deactivation, tau Na, were measured and compared with those obtained from control axons under the assumption that gNa oc m3h of the Hodgkin-Huxley scheme. tau m(V) values obtained from the turn-on of INa agree well with control axons and previous determinations by others. tau Na(V) values derived from Na tail currents were also unchanged by pronase treatment and matched fairly well previously published values. tau m(V) obtained from 3 x tau Na(V) were much larger than tau m(V) obtained from INa turn-on at the same potentials, resulting in a discontinuous distribution. Steady- state In (gNa/gNa max - gNa) vs. voltage was not linear and had a limiting logarithmic slope of 5.3 mV/e-fold gNa. Voltage step procedures that induce a second turn-on of INa during various stages of the deactivation (Na tail current) process reveal quasiexponential activation at early stages that becomes increasingly sigmoid as deactivation progresses. For moderate depolarizations, primary and secondary activation kinetics are superimposable. These data suggest that, although m3 can describe the shape of INa turn-on, it cannot quantitatively account for the kinetics of gNa after repolarization. Kinetic schemes for gNa in which substantial deactivation occurs by a unique pathway between conducting and resting states are shown to be unlikely. It appears that the rate-limiting step in linear kinetic models of activation may be between a terminal conducting state and the adjacent nonconducting intermediate.
and ' blueprint ' as a Trigonophorus rothschildi varians elytron of the beetle Bioinspired artificial photonic nanoarchitecture using the

References http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing. org/content/7/47/887.full. html#ref-list-1 This article cites 28 articles, 3 of which can be accessed free Rapid response http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing. org/letters/submit/royinterface;7/47/887 Respond to this article Subject collections (49 articles) biomimetics  (177 articles) biomaterials  (150 articles) nanotechnology  Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections
Recovery of non-rigid motion and structure

The elastic properties of real materials provide constraint on the types of non-rigid motion that can occur, and thus allow overconstrained estimates of 3-D non-rigid motion from optical flow data. It is shown that by modeling and simulating the physics of non-rigid motion it is possible to obtain good estimates of both object shape and velocity. Examples using grey-scale and X-ray imagery are presented, including an example of tracking a complex articulated figure. <<ETX>>
Load balancing for parallel forwarding

Workload distribution is critical to the performance of network processor based parallel forwarding systems. Scheduling schemes that operate at the packet level, e.g., round-robin, cannot preserve packet-ordering within individual TCP connections. Moreover, these schemes create duplicate information in processor caches and therefore are inefficient in resource utilization. Hashing operates at the flow level and is naturally able to maintain per-connection packet ordering; besides, it does not pollute caches. A pure hash-based system, however, cannot balance processor load in the face of highly skewed flow-size distributions in the Internet; usually, adaptive methods are needed. In this paper, based on measurements of Internet traffic, we examine the sources of load imbalance in hash-based scheduling schemes. We prove that under certain Zipf-like flow-size distributions, hashing alone is not able to balance workload. We introduce a new metric to quantify the effects of adaptive load balancing on overall forwarding performance. To achieve both load balancing and efficient system resource utilization, we propose a scheduling scheme that classifies Internet flows into two categories: the aggressive and the normal, and applies different scheduling policies to the two classes of flows. Compared with most state-of-the-art parallel forwarding schemes, our work exploits flow-level Internet traffic characteristics.