Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Ginsenoside Rg1 on the Expression of Toll-Like Receptor 3, 4 and Their Signalling Transduction Factors in the NG108-15 Murine Neuroglial Cell Line

As one of the most important components of Panax ginseng, ginsenoside Rg1 has certain anti-aging effects, improving the activity of learning and memory. Studies have showed that ginsenoside Rg1 improves the memory impairment associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this study, the effects of ginsenoside Rg1 were investigated through the activity of toll-like receptor (TLR) 3, TLR4 and their signaling transduction pathways in amyloid β peptide 25–35 (Aβ25–35) induced AD cell model. Thus we investigated several critical components of the TLR pathway. The neuroglial cell line NG108-15 was stimulated with or without Aβ25–35, while different concentrations of ginsenoside Rg1 were administered. After 24 h, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interferon-β (IFN-β) in cell supernatant and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in cell lysate supernatant were measured with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). The mRNA and protein expression of TLR3, TLR4, nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) and tumor necrosis factor receptor-associated factor-6 (TRAF-6) were detected by real-time PCR and western blot methods, respectively. The experimental results showed that Aβ25–35 could markedly raise the level of TNF-α, IFN-β and iNOS, and increase the expressions of mRNA and TLR3, TLR4, NF-κB and TRAF-6 protein in the NG108-15 cells. At the same time, the ginsenoside Rg1 significantly reduced the expressions of proteins and mRNA of TLR3, TLR4, NF-κB and TRAF-6, and down-regulated the levels of TNF-α, IFN-β of cell supernatant and iNOS of cell lysate supernatant in a concentration-dependent manner. In conclusion, ginsenoside Rg1 has good activity for suppressing the signaling transduction pathway of TLR3 and TLR4, and decreasing the inflammation factors induced by Aβ25–35 in NG108-15 cells, and this may be the mechanism of ginsenoside Rg1 action in AD treatment, but more studies are needed to identify its specificity.
A class of irregular LDPC codes with low error floor and low encoding complexity

In this letter, we propose a class of irregular structured low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with low error floor and low encoding complexity by designing the parity check matrix in a triangular plus dual-diagonal form. The proposed irregular codes clearly lower the error floor and dramatically improve the performance in the waterfall region of error-rate curves. Being characterized by linear encoding complexity, the encoders of the proposed codes attain throughputs over 10 Gbit/s.
Spatial and temporal contrast sensitivities of neurones in lateral geniculate nucleus of macaque.

The discharges of single neurones in the parvocellular and magnocellular laminae of the macaque's lateral geniculate nucleus (l.g.n.) were recorded with glass‐insulated tungsten micro‐electrodes. Linearity of spatial summation was examined using the test devised by Hochstein & Shapley (1976). 2 of 272 parvocellular units and 6 of 105 magnocellular units showed clearly non‐linear spatial summation. A quantitative index of non‐linearity did not suggest the existence of a distinct 'non‐linear' class of magnocellular unit. Spatial contrast sensitivity to moving gratings was measured by a tracking procedure in which contrast was adjusted to elicit a reliable modulation of discharge. With the exception of cells that were driven by blue‐sensitive cones, measurements of contrast sensitivity did not reveal distinct subgroups of parvocellular units. All had low sensitivity, and those with receptive fields in the fovea could resolve spatial frequencies of up to 40 cycles deg‐1. Magnocellular units had substantially higher sensitivity, but poorer spatial resolution. The higher sensitivities of magnocellular units led to their giving saturated responses to stimuli of high contrast. Responses of parvocellular units were rarely saturated by any stimulus. At any one eccentricity the receptive fields of parvocellular units had smaller centres than did those of magnocellular units. Receptive fields of magnocellular units driven by the ipsilateral eye had larger receptive fields than did those driven by the contralateral eye. Parvocellular units were most sensitive to stimuli modulated at temporal frequencies close to 10 Hz; magnocellular units to stimuli modulated at frequencies nearer 20 Hz. The loss of sensitivity as temporal frequency fell below optimum was more marked in magnocellular than parvocellular units. Changes in temporal frequency altered the shapes of the spatial contrast sensitivity curves of both parvocellular and magnocellular units. These changes could be explained by supposing that centre and surround have different temporal properties, and that the surround is relatively less sensitive to higher temporal frequencies.
Adaptive channel selection control equalizing sojourn time of sending packets inside wireless stations in wireless access networks

In recent years, wireless networks have been utilized in many situations. However, further increase in network capacity is essential in order to transfer large volume of traffic demanded by many and various clients and applications. By introducing multi-channel environment, network capacity is increased. However, in cases that packet generation rates from wireless stations to a base station are different among wireless stations, all the communication bandwidth over multiple channels is not properly allocated to wireless stations with larger generation rates in particular, even though there is enough available network bandwidth in total. This issue becomes significantly serious in actual wireless access networks where the distance between the base station and each wireless station is different, that means different maximum transmission rate of each station, under the fading condition. Therefore, in this paper, we adaptively allocate proper communication channel, and as a result, adaptive bandwidth to all wireless stations so that they transmit all generated packets by equalizing sojourn time in their sending buffers if there is enough total network bandwidth over all channels. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulation.
K-Corrections and Spectral Templates of Type Ia Supernovae

With the advent of large dedicated Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) surveys, K-corrections of SNe Ia and their uncertainties have become especially important in the determination of cosmological parameters. While K-corrections are largely driven by SN Ia broadband colors, it is shown here that the diversity in spectral features of SNe Ia can also be important. For an individual observation, the statistical errors from the inhomogeneity in spectral features range from 0.01 (where the observed and rest-frame filters are aligned) to 0.04 (where the observed and rest-frame filters are misaligned). To minimize the systematic errors caused by an assumed SN Ia spectral energy distribution (SED), we outline a prescription for deriving a mean spectral template time series that incorporates a large and heterogeneous sample of observed spectra. We then remove the effects of broadband colors and measure the remaining uncertainties in the K-corrections associated with the diversity in spectral features. Finally, we present a template spectroscopic sequence near maximum light for further improvement on the K-correction estimate. A library of ~600 observed spectra of ~100 SNe Ia from heterogeneous sources is used for the analysis.
Seroprevalence of Antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii in the Pennsylvania Bobcat (Lynx rufus rufus)

From 2000 to 2002 bobcat blood samples were collected, in association with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, during the recently reactivated bobcat hunting and trapping season. Sex, age, and county/township data were recorded for each animal. Blood was tested for antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii using the modified agglutination test. In the 2-yr study, 131 bobcat samples were collected in 14 Pennsylvania counties and 109 (83%) of these had antibodies to T. gondii (titer≥25). A two-way Chi-Square test (95% confidence interval) yielded no significance differences in antibody prevalence between males (83%) and females (88%) or adults (83%) and juveniles (77%). All 14 counties had at least one bobcat with antibodies to T. gondii.
A Producer-Consumer Model with Stoichiometric Elimination Mechanisms

Producer-consumer (predator-prey) systems have been studied for many years in terms of energy flow or mass balance of the system. In recent years related models have been adjusted to take into account not only food quantity, but also food quality. In other words, the nutrient content, or equivalently, the stoichiometric ratio of nutrient to biomass, as well as the biomass, is of interest. In this paper we start from a version of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur [11] model of a producer-consumer system and modify it by introducing stoichiometry. The model considered here includes a sediment class in addition to the producer and consumer classes. The model is open for both carbon and the nutrient. It sets “target” structural ratios for both the producer and consumer, who eliminate carbon or nutrient, whichever appears in excess. This introduction of stoichiometry allows for different bifurcation sequences and corresponding dynamics than those that appear in the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model. The stoichiometric mechanisms we use are also in contrast to those presented in the Loladze, Kuang, Elser model [9] which has become a standard starting point for stoichiometric models. Especially notable is a parameter range where we observe the coexistence of an attracting equilibrium and an attracting periodic limit cycle.
' s report Title : What inference for two — stage phase II trials ? Version : 1 Date : 5 April 2012

In this paper the Authors provide an overview of the frequentist inferential procedures proposed in the literature (based on point estimation, confidence intervals and computation of p—values) for two—stage designs in phase II clinical trials. Specifically the focus is on Simon's designs, which are the most used for cancer trials. A numerical study is performed to compare these procedures under different scenarios. The article does a good job of comparison, however the Authors could add more details, clearly stating which methods are compared for the first time in their paper. Major Compulsory Revisions 1. Sub—section "Confidence interval", page 7. The initial discussion about the type of interval and the confidence level is not clear. It seems that the two—sided (1—2#) confidence interval is consistent with the one—sided test used in Simon's designs differently from the (1—#) one—sided confidence interval. Instead, as it is well explained in Koyama and Chen (2008), the choice of the two—sided (1—2#) confidence interval is consistent with the one—sided hypothesis testing at level , differently from the two—sided (1—#) confidence interval usually computed. 2. When fixing the different scenarios for the numerical study, the Authors made a choice between Simon's optimal and minimax design on a case by case basis (see the end of page 9) " according to the expected total sample size of the trial and the
Multiwavelet-like bases for high-quality image interpolation

We present a simple but generalized interpolation method for digital images that uses multiwavelet-like basis functions. Most of interpolation methods uses only one symmetric basis function; for example, standard and shifted piecewise-linear interpolations use the "hat" function only. The proposed method uses q different multiwavelet-like basis functions. The basis functions can be dissymmetric but should preserve the "partition of unity" property for high-quality signal interpolation. The scheme of decomposition and reconstruction of signals by the proposed basis functions can be implemented in a filterbank form using separable IIR implementation. An important property of the proposed scheme is that the prefilters for decomposition can be implemented by FIR filters. Recall that the shifted-linear interpolation requires IIR prefiltering, but we find a new configuration which reaches almost the same quality with the shifted-linear interpolation, while requiring FIR prefiltering only. Moreover, the present basis functions can be explicitly formulated in time-domain, although most of (multi-)wavelets don’t have a time-domain formula. We specify an optimum configuration of interpolation parameters for image interpolation, and validate the proposed method by computing PSNR of the difference between multi-rotated images and their original version.
Efficient incomplete ellipse detection based on minor axis for ultrasound fetal head approximation

Fetal head detection and approximation from ultrasound image is an important method in obstetric and gynaecology. In this research, we propose a modification of an efficient algorithm to detect an ellipse shape in an image. Our proposed method is using an efficient way to approximate an ellipse based on its minor axis. By enumerating every possible minor axis from a pairs of pixels, other ellipse parameter can be estimated. For verifying the ellipse approximation result, a voting mechanism is conducted to vote the most appropriate set of parameters for an ellipse. Instead of using every edge pixels in the image, we randomize the pixels to gain speed improvement. We test the algorithm using two different data. The first one is real ultrasound image and the second one is synthetic image which has been populated with salt noise. The ultrasound image is cleaned from speckle noise using Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD) algorithm. The experiment gives satisfying result in both of synthetic and real images.
A reliability-oriented design method for power electronic converters

Reliability is a crucial performance indicator of power electronic systems in terms of availability, mission accomplishment and life cycle cost. A paradigm shift in the research on reliability of power electronics is going on from simple handbook based calculations (e.g. models in MIL-HDBK-217F handbook) to the physics-of-failure approach and design for reliability process. A systematic design procedure consisting of various design tools is presented in this paper to design reliability into the power electronic converters since the early concept phase. The corresponding design procedures and reliability prediction models are provided. A case study on a 2.3 MW wind power converter is discussed with emphasis on the reliability critical component IGBT modules.
Tracking Wide-Band Rapidly Moving Targets

A method is derived for passively locating wide-band targets (typically acoustic targets) which may be moving at speeds sufficient to produce significant Doppler shift. The method involves a generalisation of standard beam forming techniques. It is shown that conventional beam forming techniques have less discrimination in the direction of motion of the sources, whereas the proposed technique exhibits no such degradation. The derivative and Hessian of the likelihood function can be used for locating the maximum likelihood solution or for deriving a Gaussian approximation to the likelihood function for particle filtering applications. The expressions are applicable for subsonic and supersonic sources
Environmental Degradation and the Demand for Children: Searching for the Vicious Circle

The authors explore the hypothesis that--because of the important role children play in collection activities (firewood, water, grazing)--the demand for children may increase as local environmental resources are depleted, setting up a vicious circle between resource depletion and population growth. Using a large-scale household data set from Pakistan, with detailed information on fertility and the allocation of time to collection activities, they find that: (i) collection activities absorb a substantial part of household resources--firewood collection accounts for 6.2 percent of household expenditures, valued in collection time; (ii) collection absorbs a quarter of the time of children; (iii) women benefit when there are older children in the household; they work 2.6 hours a week less in household activities for each child aged 10 to 15, and 3.2 hours less for each child over 15; and (iv) there seems to be an inverse relationship between fertility and the availability of firewood; even after controlling for other determinants of fertility in reduced form regressions, the authors show that households that live some distance from firewood have more children, whereas households that live where firewood is more expensive have fewer children.
Optimal Iambs in Kashaya

This paper presents the three major ways that iambs play a role in Kashaya phonology: iambic lengthening, reshuffling of vowel length, and location of stress. Contrasting analyses of the phenomena are given in an ordered-rule Lexical Phonology approach and in constraint-based Optimality Theory. It is shown that only a nonderivational approach based on surface constraints succeeds in unifying the metrical motivation of lengthening and reshuffling. To account then for the location of stress without recourse to cyclicity, it is necessary to formalize analogy among output forms as a constraint on the uniform exponence of stress.
Investigation into the Role of Religiosity and its Dimensions in Predicting of Marital Commitment of Personnel of State Welfare Organization of North Khorasan

Background and Purpose: Commitment is related to better communication, greater happiness and more constructive behavior during difficulties, therefore it is important and thus the study of factors that play role in marital commitment would be important. The aim of this study was investigating religiosity and its dimensions in predicting marital commitment of personnel of state welfare organization of Northern Khorasan. Materials and Methods: This study is a descriptive–correlation study. The study populations were all married personnel of offices of Northern Khorasan welfare organization in 2013 and the sample consisted of 155 persons (67male and 88 female) that were selected by multi stage cluster sampling. Adams and Jones dimensions of commitment inventory along with Glock and Stark Religiosity Questionnaire were used in data gathering. Data analysis was performed by SPSS18 software and using Pearson Correlation and linear regression methods. Results: showed that the religiosity and its dimension positively and significantly correlated with marital commitment (r = 0.548, p < 0.01) and they are important predictor for marital commitment So that about 30% of variance of marital commitment can be explained by religiosity. Also results showed that the correlate between marital commitment with age (r = 0.29), number of children (r = 0.33) and Length of marriage (r = 0.299) was positively and significant(p < 0.01). Conclusion: Results of present study show that religion is a promoter of commitment in person and in the institution of marriage and religiosity provides sacred purposes for Marriage, thus promotion and extension of religious beliefs can enhance fidelity and commitment in the relation of the spouses.
Interpreting Neural-Network Models

Artiicial Neural Network seem very promising for regression and classiication, especially for large covariate spaces. These methods represent a non-linear function as a composition of low dimensional ridge functions and therefore appear to be less sensitive to the dimensionality of the covariate space. It is possible to show that some of these methods extend the well known logistic regression model. In this paper we propose a method for model interpretation and prediction via neural networks that takes advantage of the possible high non-linearity of the model.
Integrate multi-modal cues for category-independent object detection and localization

To detect and localize objects is an indispensable step for many computer vision tasks. Most of the state-of-the-art methods of object detection and localization are category-dependent. These methods can achieve a significant performance. However, they are useless for detecting and localizing objects belonging to an unknown category when applying them to an unknown environment. In this paper, a method is proposed for detecting and localizing generic objects without specifying their categories. The proposed method combines diverse cues, including multi-scale saliency, superpixels straddling, intensity, depth and global information, into a uniform Bayesian framework to obtain accurate detection and localization. By comparison to state-of-the-art methods, our experiments show the promising performance of the proposed method based on the PASCAL VOC 08 dataset and our indoor scene dataset.
Stability of Vitamin A, Iron and Zinc in Fortified Rice during Storage and Its Impact on Future National Standards and Programs—Case Study in Cambodia

Fortified rice holds great potential for bringing essential micronutrients to a large part of the world population. The present study quantified the losses of three different micronutrients (vitamin A, iron, zinc) in fortified rice that were produced using three different techniques (hot extrusion, cold extrusion, and coating) and stored at two different environments (25 ± 5 °C at a humidity of 60% and 40 ± 5 °C at a humidity of 75%) for up to one year. Fortified rice premix from the different techniques was mixed with normal rice in a 1:100 ratio. Each sample was analyzed in triplicate. The study confirmed the high stability of iron and zinc during storage while the retention of vitamin A was significantly affected by storage and the type of techniques used to make rice premix. Losses for iron and zinc were typically <10% for any type of rice premix. After 12 months at mild conditions (25 °C and humidity of 60%), losses for vitamin A ranged from 20% for cold extrusion, 30% for hot extruded rice 77% for coated rice premix. At higher temperatures and humidity, losses of vitamin A were 40%–50% for extruded premix and 93% for coated premix after 6 months. We conclude that storage does lead to a major loss of vitamin A and question whether rice is a suitable food vehicle to fortify with vitamin A. For Cambodia, fortification of rice with iron and zinc could be an effective strategy to improve the micronutrient status of the population if no other food vehicles are available.
A three steps admission control method for cognitive radio based on UWB control transmission

In this paper we propose a three steps admission control Method for cognitive radio based on UWB (Ultra Wide Band) control transmission. Two algorithms have to be applied during this control Admission procedure the ACCA (Admission Control for Cognitive Association) and the ACAR (Admission control based on Available Resources). To enhance the efficiency of the Admission control Method a multi — association procedure was proposed. These algorithms are applied during the association period and completed by a ACRP (Admitted Cognitive users Rejection Procedure) applied during the beacon period to the associated cognitive users. We show by simulation the good impact of the proposed Method on enhancing the Served Cognitive Radio Users Ratio (SCUR), on the Spectrum Usage Ratio (SUR) and on decreasing the Admission Ratio (AR) when the number of not-served cognitive radio users increases. To improve the efficiency of the proposed method a Dynamic Beacon Window procedure was proposed.
z-Tree - Zurich toolbox for readymade economic experiments: experimenter's manual

This manual explains the use of z-Tree, the "Zurich Toolbox for Readymade Economic Experiments". No programming knowledge is necessary to use z-Tree. This software allows to program and to conduct a wide range of experiments. This includes simultaneous and sequential games as well as market experiments and posted offer markets or double auctions. Because many features needed in an experimental software are built into z-Tree (as data saving, time and period display, profit calculation, group matching, provisions in case of losses and bankruptcy), new experiments can be developed quickly and easily.