Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of thermal expansion homogeneity by optical interferometry

Different measurement methods exist for the extraction of the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). Among them the observation of the sample length as a function of its temperature is the direct way. In the last decade, the use of phase shifting interferometry in combination with computer-based analysis of interference phase maps drastically improved interferometrical length measurements. In addition to the observation of the length itself, such measurements allow the extraction of a length topography L(x,y) of the sample as shown in this paper. From the behaviour of the length topography at different temperatures an upper limit of CTE-homogeneity can be obtained. It is shown in which way disturbing influences can be removed so that uncertainties of L(x,y) in the sub-nm range can be reached for different shaped samples
Color afterimages in autistic adults Autism is characterized by difficulties in social communication and behavioral traits including rigid patterns of behavior, preference for sameness, and intense and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Sensory symptoms, including both hy

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano & Burr, 2012). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the influence of top-down knowledge. We found no difference in color afterimage strength between autistic and typical adults. Effects of top-down knowledge on afterimage intensity shown by Lupyan (2015) were not replicated for either group. This study finds intact color adaptation in autistic adults. This is in contrast to findings of attenuated adaptation to faces and numerosity in autistic children. Future research should investigate the possibility of developmental differences in adaptation and further examine top-down effects on adaptation.
A Deductive Verification Platform for Cryptographic Software

In this paper we describe a deductive verification platform for the CAO language. CAO is a domain-specific language for cryptography. We show that this language presents interesting challenges for formal verification, not only in the rich mathematical type system that it introduces, but also in the cryptography-oriented language constructions that it offers. We describe how we tackle these problems, and also demonstrate that, by relying on the Jessie plug-in included in the Frama-C framework, the development time of such a complex verification tool could be greatly reduced. We base our presentation on real-world examples of CAO code, extracted from the open-source code of the NaCl cryptographic library, and illustrate how various cryptography-relevant security properties can be verified.
Malassezia Infections in Humans and Animals: Pathophysiology, Detection, and Treatment

The fungal genus Malassezia comprises lipid-dependent and lipophilic yeast species that are part of the normal skin microbiota [1]. The 14 species are classified in class Malasseziomycetes in the Ustilaginomycotina of Basidiomycota [2]. Malassezia species can be involved in skin disorders, such as pityriasis versicolor, seborrheic dermatitis, atopic eczema, and folliculitis, and occur at higher population densities on scalps with dandruff than on scalps without dandruff [3], [4]. Occasionally, invasive infections by Malassezia pachydermatis and lipid-dependent Malassezia spp. occur in neonates, most often in those who are receiving intravenous lipid supplementation, or in immunocompromised patients receiving parenteral nutrition via a catheter. Malassezia spp. have not yet been cultured from the environment, but metagenomics identified Malassezia phylotypes from terrestrial and marine habitats [5]. For instance, Malassezia ribosomal DNA (rDNA) has been reported from soil nematodes [6], sponges [7], and rocks [8]. Undeniably, much remains to be discovered about the spectrum of habitats exploited by Malassezia that would advance our knowledge on the ecological relationships between the Malassezia skin biotic community, their hosts, and the environment. The aim of this article is to review and discuss the literature available on the pathogenesis, detection, typing, and treatment of Malassezia infections in humans and animals.
A 1.2 volt, 90nm, 16-bit three way segmented digital to analog converter (DAC) for low power applications

This paper presents a new scheme of designing a 16-bit Digital to Analog Converter with a Supply voltage of 1.2 Volts. The proposed design combines three different architectures in a novel way so as to achieve low power and low area requirements of the present day technology. The design is targeted to cater the needs of Digital Audio applications. Simulations are done in CADENCE Virtuoso Front to Back Design Environment at 90nm technology node. Low power Consumption and low area are reported with moderate accuracy.
Snapshot density queries on location sensors

Density queries are of practical importance in many mobility related applications. In this paper, we employ the location sensors, which are placed in a geographical area and can only detect the amount of objects moving in vicinity, to estimate the dense regions of objects. Our approach partitions the region of interest into subregions, and deploys in each subregion both location sensors and a processing node that issues and answers density queries. Three algorithms are proposed to process density queries on those processing nodes. Their accuracy and efficiency are empirically evaluated.
A Node Plug-In Architecture for Evolving Network Virtualization Nodes

"Virtualization nodes" (VNodes) for programmable network-virtualization platforms enable mutually independent evolution of computational node-component called programmer and networking node-component called redirector; however, no method for this evolution has been available. Accordingly, a method for evolving programmer and redirector and developing new types of virtualized networking and/or computational functions in two steps is proposed. The first step is to develop a new function without updating the original VNode, which continues services to existing slices, using a proposed plug-in architecture. This architecture defines predefined interfaces called open VNode plug-in interfaces (OVPIs), which connect a data and a control plug-ins to a VNode. The second step is to merge the completed plug-ins into the original programmer or redirector. A prototype implementation of the above plug-in architecture was developed, tested, and evaluated. The prototype extends the redirector by adding new types of virtual links and new types of network accommodation. Estimated throughputs of a VLAN-based network accommodation and a VLAN-based virtual link using network processors are close to a wire rate of 10 Gbps.
Direct BMP2/4 signaling through BMP receptor IA regulates fetal thymocyte progenitor homeostasis and differentiation to CD4+CD8+ double-positive cell

BMP2/4 signaling is required for embryogenesis and involved in thymus morphogenesis and T-lineage differentiation. In vitro experiments have shown that treatment of thymus explants with exogenous BMP4 negatively regulated differentiation of early thymocyte progenitors and the transition from CD4−CD8− (DN) to CD4+CD8+ (DP). Here we show that in vivo BMP2/4 signaling is required for fetal thymocyte progenitor homeostasis and expansion, but negatively regulates differentiation from DN to DP cell. Unexpectedly, conditional deletion of BMPRIA from fetal thymocytes (using the Cre-loxP system and directing excision to hematopoietic lineage cells with the Vav promoter) demonstrated that physiological levels of BMP2/4 signaling directly to thymocytes through BMPRIA are required for normal differentiation and expansion of early fetal DN thymocytes. In contrast, the arrest in early thymocyte progenitor differentiation caused by exogenous BMP4 treatment of thymus explants is induced in part by direct signaling to thymocytes through BMPRIA, and in part by indirect signaling through non-hematopoietic cells. Analysis of the transition from fetal DN to DP cell, both by ex vivo analysis of conditional BMPRIA-deficient thymocytes and by treatment of thymus explants with the BMP4-inhibitor Noggin demonstrated that BMP2/4 signaling is a negative regulator at this stage. We showed that at this stage of fetal T-cell development BMP2/4 signals directly to thymocytes through BMPRIA.
1674 Stroke June 2016 Genetic variant or genetic risk score C-reactive protein Risk of ischemic stroke Is C-reactive protein causally associated with ischemic stroke ?

Establishing new approaches for the prevention and treatment of stroke relies on identifying modifiable risk factors that contribute to the development of this complex disease. Mendelian randomization (MR) studies, analogous to naturally occurring randomized trials, can assess causality of potentially modifiable biomarkers and offer new insights into biological pathways. Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide and the chief determinant of long-term disability. Stroke is a heterogeneous disease arising from several distinct underlying pathologies and is typically classified as ischemic or hemorrhagic, and further subclassified using imaging data. Ischemic stroke (IS), including its 3 main subtypes: small vessel disease, large vessel disease, and cardioembolic stroke, accounts for ≈80% of stroke and is the result of an interrupted blood supply, leading to localized areas of ischemia in the brain. Small vessel disease may be a consequence of nonatherosclerotic, as well as atherosclerotic, mechanisms that result in an occlusion of the small perforating arteries, whereas large vessel disease results from occlusions or emboli from plaque rupture in larger vessels, such as a carotid artery. Cardioembolic stroke arises typically from emboli from the heart. By contrast, hemorrhagic stroke is a consequence of intracerebral hemorrhage (bleeding into the brain) or subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding into the subarachnoid space). These diverse stroke subtypes have distinct underlying pathologies reflecting different risk factor distributions. MR studies, using genetic variants as instrumental variables, afford a powerful approach to assessing causality of risk factors and avoid biases inherent in observational studies, including confounding and reverse causation. This review considers the contribution of MR studies to stroke epidemiology and their relevance to understanding risk factors and new therapeutic targets for stroke.
Characterization and Classification of Vegetation Canopy Structure and Distribution within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Using LiDAR

Vegetation canopy structure is a critically important habitat characteristic for many threatened and endangered birds and other animal species, and it is key information needed by forest and wildlife managers for monitoring and managing forest resources, conservation planning and fostering biodiversity. Advances in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technologies have enabled remote sensing-based studies of vegetation canopies by capturing three-dimensional structures, yielding information not available in two-dimensional images of the landscape provided by traditional multi-spectral remote sensing platforms. However, the large volume data sets produced by airborne LiDAR instruments pose a significant computational challenge, requiring algorithms to identify and analyze patterns of interest buried within LiDAR point clouds in a computationally efficient manner, utilizing state-of-art computing infrastructure. We developed and applied a computationally efficient approach to analyze a large volume of LiDAR data and characterized the vegetation canopy structures for 139,859 hectares (540 sq. miles) in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This study helps improve our understanding of the distribution of vegetation and animal habitats in this extremely diverse ecosystem.
WirelessHART: Applying Wireless Technology in Real-Time Industrial Process Control

Wireless technology has been regarded as a paradigm shifter in the process industry. The first open wireless communication standard specifically designed for process measurement and control applications, WirelessHART was officially released in September 2007 (as a part of the HART 7 Specification). WirelessHART is a secure and TDMA- based wireless mesh networking technology operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM radio band. In this paper, we give an introduction to the architecture of WirelessHART and share our first-hand experience in building a prototype for this specification. We describe several challenges we had to tackle during the implementation, such as the design of the timer, network wide synchronization, communication security, reliable mesh networking, and the central network manager. For each challenge, we provide a detailed analysis and propose our solution. Based on the prototype implementation, a simple WirelessHART network has been built for the purpose of demonstration. The demonstration network in turn validates our design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported effort to build a WirelessHART protocol stack.
Gelatin-Based Emulsion Hydrogels as a Matrix for Controlled Delivery System

The study describes the development of gelatin based emulsion hydrogels with different proportions of sunflower oil. During the preparation of emulsion hydrogels, the microstructures of the emulsions were studied under light microscope. The hydrogels were characterized by light microscopy, swelling property, mucoadhesivity, pH, dc impedance measurements, and hemocompatibility studies. Salicylic acid was incorporated within the oil phase, and its release behavior was studied. The microscopy of the emulsions indicated that the droplet size distribution becomes monodispersed as the proportion of the oil was increased. The microscopy of the emulsion hydrogels showed distorted oil droplets for all the samples. The swelling property, mucoadhesivity, dc impedance measurements, and release rate of salicylic acid were found to dependent on the oil proportion. All the samples were found to have pH in the range of 6.00–7.00 and were hemocompatible in nature, indicating its probable use as controlled delivery vehicles.
The population incidence of cancer

In this thesis stochastic techniques are used in attempts to understand cancer risk, its relationship to patient age and genotype, as well as its distribution in human populations. The starting point for the thesis is the general observation that cancer incidence grows in approximate proportion to an integer power of age. Quasi-mechanistic mathematical models of cancer incidence have suggested that the integer power in a given case is related to the number of crucial cellular events that must occur for a malignant tumour to evolve from a healthy tissue. This idea and its limitations are explored. Further applications of cancer incidence models are then evaluated and developed. Specifically, a critical examination is presented of the notion that increases in risk associated with a particular predisposing germline gene mutation, can provide information about the disease-associated activity of that gene. Finally, there is a discussion of heterogeneity in liability to cancer. Methods for quantifying this heterogeneity and its effect on incidence patterns are investigated.
High-Performance and Endurable Cache Management for Flash-Based Read Caching

Flash-based SSDs are widely used as storage caches, which can benefit from both the higher performance of SSDs and lower price of disks. Unfortunately, issues of reliability and lifetime limit the use of flash-based cache. One way to solve this problem is to use the flash memory as read cache and use other devices like nonvolatile memory for write buffering. In this paper, we propose a new flash-aware read cache design, which leverages out-of-place update property of SSDs to improve both cache hit ratio and lifetime. Due to the out-of-place update property, when a cache entry is evicted from the flash cache, the eviction only removes the metadata, while the real data is still accessible and resides in the physical flash page until the whole flash block being erased. The main idea of our flash-aware cache is to reuse these evicted but still available data, when a request for the previously evicted data page arrives, instead of accessing underlying storage to fetch the data and rewriting it into fash cache, our design just needs to revive the evicted data. To evaluate the benefits of flash-aware cache design, we implemented the normal LRU, normal ARC, flash-aware LRU (FLRU), and flashaware ARC (FARC) cache algorithms on the Disksim simulator with SSD extension. Our simulation results demonstrate that our flashaware cache can improve the cache hit ratio by up to 28 percent, reduce the average response time by up to 40 percent with higher performance stability, and alleviate the lifetime limitation of flash cache by reducing the erase count by up to more than 70 percent. Besides of the flash-aware design, we also propose a new zero-migration garbage collection scheme to further extend the lifetime of flash cache. Our experiments show that the combination of our flash-aware cache design and the zero-migration garbage collection scheme reduces the erase count by up to nearly 90 percent.
RankMass Crawler: A Crawler with High PageRank Coverage Guarantee

Crawling algorithms have been the subject of extensive research and optimizations, but some important questions remain open. In particular, given the unbounded number of pages available on the Web, search-engine operators constantly struggle with the following vexing questions: When can I stop downloading the Web? How many pages should I download to cover "most" of the Web? How can I know I am not missing an important part when I stop? In this paper we provide an answer to these questions by developing, in the context of a system that is given a set of trusted pages, a family of crawling algorithms that (1) provide a theoretical guarantee on how much of the "important" part of the Web it will download after crawling a certain number of pages and (2) give a high priority to important pages during a crawl, so that the search engine can index the most important part of the Web first. We prove the correctness of our algorithms by theoretical analysis and evaluate their performance experimentally based on 141 million URLs obtained from the Web. Our experiments demonstrate that even our simple algorithm is effective in downloading important pages early on and provides high "coverage" of the Web with a relatively small number of pages.
Fault Diagnosis and Life Prediction of DC-link Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors Used in Three-phase AC/DC/AC Converters

A very simple and low-cost strategy for the fault diagnosis and life prediction of DC-link aluminum electrolytic capacitors which is used in three-phase converters is presented in this paper. The main idea of this paper is to calculate the value of ESR and C using the inverter based on Recursive Least Square (RLS) method whenever the motor is stopped. The proposed strategy can provide a quick and accurate estimation of ESR and C with minimal hardware requirements. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiment are implemented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed technique.
Modification Point Depth and Genome Growth in Genetic Programming

Abstract The evolutionary computation community has shown increasing interest in arbitrary-length representations, particularly in the field of genetic programming. A serious stumbling block to the scalability of such representations has been bloat: uncontrolled genome growth during an evolutionary run. Bloat appears across the evolutionary computation spectrum, but genetic programming has given it by far the most attention. Most genetic programming models explain this phenomenon as a result of the growth of introns, areas in an individual which serve no functional purpose. This paper presents evidence which directly contradicts intron theories as applied to tree-based genetic programming. The paper then uses data drawn from this evidence to propose a new model of genome growth. In this model, bloat in genetic programming is a function of the mean depth of the modification (crossover or mutation) point. Points far from the root are correspondingly less likely to hurt the child's survivability in the next generation. The modification point is in turn strongly correlated to average parent tree size and to removed subtree size, both of which are directly linked to the size of the resulting child.
One-pot synthesis of super-bright fluorescent nanogel contrast agents containing a dithiomaleimide fluorophore

Fluorescent nanogels with radii ranging from 12–17 nm, high quantum yield, concentration-independent emission, and fluorescent lifetimes of ca. 25 ns have been synthesised in a one-pot process. Solutions demonstrate a concentration independent emission between 0.1–10−3 wt%, allowing for true quantitative imaging where dye emission is a measure of local nanoparticle concentration.
Lattice QCD 1 17 . LATTICE QUANTUM CHROMODYNAMICS

Gauge theories form the building blocks of the Standard Model. While the SU(2) and U(1) parts have weak couplings and can be studied accurately with perturbative methods, the SU(3) component—QCD—is only amenable to a perturbative treatment at high energies. The growth of the coupling constant in the infrared—the flip-side of asymptotic freedom—requires the use of non-perturbative methods to determine the low energy properties of QCD. Lattice gauge theory, proposed by K. Wilson in 1974 [1], provides such a method, for it gives a non-perturbative definition of vector-like gauge field theories like QCD. In lattice regularized QCD—commonly called lattice QCD or LQCD—Euclidean space-time is discretized, usually on a hypercubic lattice with lattice spacing a, with quark fields placed on sites and gauge fields on the links between sites. The lattice spacing plays the role of the ultraviolet regulator, rendering the quantum field theory finite. The continuum theory is recovered by taking the limit of vanishing lattice spacing, which can be reached by tuning the bare coupling constant to zero according to the renormalization group.
Silver Nanoparticles - Graphene Oxide Nanocomposite for Antibacterial Purpose

Graphene oxide (GO) sheets, a single layer of carbon atoms which can be served as substrates for fabricating metallic nanoparticles-GO nanocomposites. In this study, the nanocomposite of silver nanoparticles and graphene oxide were produced via in-situ synthesis and with the addition of chitosan to investigate the formation of silver nanoparticles on the graphene oxide sheets. XRD and UV-Vis studies confirmed the formation of silver nanoparticles on GO sheets, while TEM and FESEM images presented the loading of silver nanoparticles on the GO sheets. The degree of loading and distribution of the silver nanoparticles on the graphene oxide were depend on the method during the formation of silver nanoparticles. The nanocomposites can be potentially used in food packaging and biomedical applications.