Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The characterisation of pollution aerosol in a changing photochemical environment

Measurements are presented from a sampling location 50 km downwind of Greater London, UK, to investigate the timescales required for the atmospheric transformations of aerosol in urban emissions plumes in the context of photochemical age based on the benzene to toluene ratio. It is shown that particles at or around 100 nm in diameter exhibit the greatest systematic variability in chemical properties, and thus hygroscopic properties, on a timescale of 1-2 days. The smaller Aitken mode and larger accumulation mode particles exhibit less variability on these timescales, which we propose is as a result of their different residence times in the atmosphere. The larger accumulation particles have been in the atmosphere longer than the 100 nm particles and their chemistry and hygroscopic properties have been integrated over several days and potentially over several source regions. In contrast, the smaller Aitken mode particles show little systematic variability with photochemical age because their atmospheric lifetimes are short, thus chemical changes and hence changes in water affinity have not had time to occur. Increases in the particle diameter of up to 40% are observed at 90% relative humidity in the accumulation mode from the uptake of water as the particles become increasingly soluble in nature.
Historical Context and Recent Advances in Exposure-Response Estimation for Deriving Occupational Exposure Limits

Virtually no occupational exposure standards specify the level of risk for the prescribed exposure, and most occupational exposure limits are not based on quantitative risk assessment (QRA) at all. Wider use of QRA could improve understanding of occupational risks while increasing focus on identifying exposure concentrations conferring acceptably low levels of risk to workers. Exposure-response modeling between a defined hazard and the biological response of interest is necessary to provide a quantitative foundation for risk-based occupational exposure limits; and there has been considerable work devoted to establishing reliable methods quantifying the exposure-response relationship including methods of extrapolation below the observed responses. We review several exposure-response modeling methods available for QRA, and demonstrate their utility with simulated data sets.
Communication and Coordination Patterns in Sensor Networks-CS 294-4 Project Report , Spring 2007-Prabal

The research community has justified considerable research efforts in the area of sensor networks based on the conjecture that sensor networks require fundamentally different communication and coordination patterns than traditional IP networks. An effort to codify the nature of these patterns has already begun in many aspects of the still developing field of sensor networks, including software design [23], network layer formation [7], and system design principles [6]. As this trend continues and the field matures, the key services for communication and coordination will continue to emerge, allowing for this fledgling class of networks to have an overall architecture [3] that imitates, but is vastly different than traditional networking and distributed systems. In this paper, we survey fielded applications and distill the actual communications and coordination patterns in use. By performing this study, we validate our hypothesis that a small set of services is sufficient to meet the needs of most applications. Since we recognize that only time can definitively determine the actual services that become widespread, we also examine less widely used communication and coordination services, as they may become more common in future applications.
Low-Complexity Multiclass Encryption by Compressed Sensing

The idea that compressed sensing may be used to encrypt information from unauthorized receivers has already been envisioned but never explored in depth since its security may seem compromised by the linearity of its encoding process. In this paper, we apply this simple encoding to define a general private-key encryption scheme in which a transmitter distributes the same encoded measurements to receivers of different classes, which are provided partially corrupted encoding matrices and are thus allowed to decode the acquired signal at provably different levels of recovery quality. The security properties of this scheme are thoroughly analyzed: first, the properties of our multiclass encryption are theoretically investigated by deriving performance bounds on the recovery quality attained by lower-class receivers with respect to high-class ones. Then, we perform a statistical analysis of the measurements to show that, although not perfectly secure, compressed sensing grants some level of security that comes at almost-zero cost and thus may benefit resource-limited applications. In addition to this, we report some exemplary applications of multiclass encryption by compressed sensing of speech signals, electrocardiographic tracks and images, in which quality degradation is quantified as the impossibility of some feature extraction algorithms to obtain sensitive information from suitably degraded signal recoveries.
Suboptimality of Sales Promotions and Improvement Through Channel Coordination

This paper deals with sales promotions in the form of consumer price discounts in fast-moving consumer goods. First, we show analytically that suboptimality is to be expected with respect to the size of the consumer price discount. This is due to the separate decision making of the retailer and the manufacturer. We then compute the impact of this suboptimality for a database of eighty-six sale promotions, and we find that it is substantial. On average, the actual profitability of the sales promotions is only about one fourth of its potential profitability. The suboptimality problem can be solved through specific arrangements between retailer and manufacturer, which have the purpose of better channel coordination. One of these is a proportional discount sharing arrangement, in which each party contributes to the consumer price discount in proportion to its original margin (without sales promotion). Several other winwin arrangements are possible also.
Cascading Use of Soft and Hard Matching Pattern Rules for Weakly Supervised Information Extraction

Current rule induction techniques based on hard matching (i.e., strict slot-by-slot matching) tend to fare poorly in extracting information from natural language texts, which often exhibit great variations. The reason is that hard matching techniques result in relatively high precision but low recall. To tackle this problem, we take advantage of the newly proposed soft pattern rules which offer high recall through the use of probabilistic matching. We propose a bootstrapping framework in which soft and hard matching pattern rules are combined in a cascading manner to realize a weakly supervised rule induction scheme. The system starts with a small set of hand-tagged instances. At each iteration, we first generate soft pattern rules and utilize them to tag new training instances automatically. We then apply hard pattern rule induction on the overall tagged data to generate more precise rules, which are used to tag the data again. The process can be repeated until satisfactory results are obtained. Our experimental results show that our bootstrapping scheme with two cascaded learners approaches the performance of a fully supervised information extraction system while using much fewer hand-tagged instances.
Estimating glomerular filtration rate in the general population: the second Health Survey of Nord-Trondelag (HUNT II).

BACKGROUND Guidelines recommend the modification of diet in the renal disease (MDRD) formula or the Cockcroft-Gault formula for estimating the glomerular filtration rate (GFR). However, there is an ongoing discussion whether the MDRD formula should be used in the general population as several studies have found a large underestimation of its GFR estimates. METHODS In this study, 1,029 low-risk subjects, eligible for kidney donation according to internationally accepted criteria were selected from the population-based second Health Survey of Nord-Trondelag (HUNT II). Serum creatinine values traceable to isotope dilution mass spectrometry were used with the re-expressed MDRD formula recently published. The 2.5th, 50th and 97.5th percentiles of GFR by age were calculated and compared to reference values from the literature, which are based on GFR measured with gold standard methods in potential kidney donors. RESULTS The difference between the 50th percentiles for MDRD estimates and measured GFR in the literature was small and constant over age: +0.5 ml/min/1.73 m(2) at age 20 and -2.0 ml/min/1.73 m(2) at age 80. Bias for Cockcroft-Gault estimates varied from 0.0 ml/min/1.73 m(2) to -21.4 ml/min/1.73 m(2). Other formulae also had a too steep age correction, and bias among the elderly varied from -10 to -30 ml/min/1.73 m(2). Hence, 30-80% of the general population above age 60 had GFR estimates below their age-specific 2.5th percentile of normal kidney function, while the MDRD formula was much more conservative (13.3%). CONCLUSION The MDRD formula gave nearly unbiased estimates for normal GFR. All other formulae tested had, especially in the elderly, a much larger negative bias and cannot be recommended for use in the general population.
AtmosphericChemistryandPhysics Measurements of the sum of HO 2 NO 2 and CH 3 O 2 NO 2 in the remote troposphere

The chemistry of peroxynitric acid (HO 2 NO 2 ) and methyl peroxynitrate (CH 3 O 2 NO 2 ) is predicted to be particularly important in the upper troposphere where temperatures are frequently low enough that these compounds do not rapidly decompose. At temperatures below 240 K, we calculate that about 20% of NO y in the mid- and high-latitude upper troposphere is HO 2 NO 2 . Under these conditions, the reaction of OH with HO 2 NO 2 is estimated to account for as much as one third of the perma-nent loss of hydrogen radicals. During the Tropospheric Ozone Production about the Spring Equinox (TOPSE) campaign, we used thermal dissociation laser-induced ﬂuorescence (TD-LIF) to measure the sum of peroxynitrates ( 6 PNs ≡ HO 2 NO 2 +CH 3 O 2 NO 2 +PAN+PPN+.) aboard the NCAR C-130 research aircraft. We infer the sum of HO 2 NO 2 and CH 3 O 2 NO 2 as the difference between 6 PN measurements and gas chromatographic measurements of the two major peroxy acyl nitrates, peroxy acetyl nitrate (PAN) and peroxy propionyl nitrate (PPN). Comparison with NO y and other nitrogen oxide measurements conﬁrms the importance of HO 2 NO 2 and CH 3 O 2 NO 2 to the reactive nitrogen budget and shows that current thinking about the chemistry of these species is approximately correct. During the spring high latitude conditions sampled during the TOPSE experiment, the model predictions of the contribution of (HO 2 NO 2 +CH 3 O 2 NO 2 ) to NO y are highly temperature dependent: on average 30% of NO y at 230 K, 15% of NO y at 240 K, and < 5% of NO y above 250 K. The temperature dependence of the inferred concentrations corrob-orates the contribution of overtone photolysis to the photochemistry of peroxynitric acid. A model that includes IR photolysis (J=1 × 10 − 5 s − 1 ) agreed with the observed sum to: of HO 2 NO 2 +CH 3 O 2 NO 2 to better than 35% below 240 K where the concentration of these species is largest.
Universal computation by networks of model cortical columns

We present a model cortical column consisting of recurrently connected, continuous-time sigmoid activation units that provides a building block for neural models of complex cognition. Recent progress with a hybrid neural/symbolic cognitive model of problem-solving [T. A. Polk et. al., 2002] prompted us to investigate the adequacy of these columns for the construction of purely neural cognitive models. Here we examine the computational power of networks of columns and show that every Turing machine maps in a straightforward fashion onto such a network. Furthermore, several hierarchical structures composed of columns that are critical in this mapping promise to provide biologically plausible models of timing circuits, gating mechanisms, activation-based short-term memory, and simple if-then rules that will likely be necessary in neural models of higher cognition.
Essential role of PDK1 in regulating endothelial cell migration

The serine/threonine protein kinase phosphoinositide-dependent kinase 1 (PDK1) plays a central role in cellular signaling by phosphorylating members of the AGC family of kinases, including PKB/Akt. We now present evidence showing that PDK1 is essential for the motility of vascular endothelial cells (ECs) and that it is involved in the regulation of their chemotaxis. ECs differentiated from mouse embryonic stem cells lacking PDK1 completely lost their ability to migrate in vitro in response to vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A). In addition, PDK1−/− embryoid bodies exhibit evident developmental and vascular defects that can be attributed to a reduced cell migration. Moreover, the overexpression of PDK1 increased the EC migration induced by VEGF-A. We propose a model of spatial distribution of PDK1 and Akt in which the synthesis of phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5 triphosphate at plasma membrane by activation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase recruits both proteins at the leading edge of the polarized ECs and promotes cell chemotaxis. These findings establish a mechanism for the spatial localization of PDK1 and its substrate Akt to regulate directional migration.
An Agent Bilateral Multi-issue Alternate Bidding Negotiation Protocol Based on Reinforcement Learning and its Application in E-commerce

With the rapid development of multi-agent based E-commerce systems, on-line automatic negotiation protocol is often needed. But because of incomplete information agents have, the efficiency of on-line negotiation protocol is rather low. To overcome the problem, an on-line agent bilateral multi-issue alternate bidding negotiation protocol based on reinforcement learning is present. The reinforcement learning algorithm is presented to on-line learn the incomplete information of negotiation agent to enhance the efficiency of negotiation protocol. The protocol is applied to on-line multi-agent based electronic commerce. In the protocol experiment, three kinds of agents are used to compare with, which are no-learning agents (NA), static learning agents (SA) and dynamic learning agent (DA) in this paper. In static learning agent, the learning rate of Q-learning is set to 0.1 unchangeable, so itpsilas called static learning. While in dynamic learning proposed in this paper, the learning rate of Q-learning can change dynamically, so itpsilas called dynamic learning. Experiments show that the protocol present in this paper can help agents to negotiate more efficiently.
Genetic ablation of the mammillary bodies in the Foxb1 mutant mouse leads to selective deficit of spatial working memory

Mammillary bodies and the mammillothalamic tract are parts of a classic neural circuitry that has been implicated in severe memory disturbances accompanying Korsakoff's syndrome. However, the specific role of mammillary bodies in memory functions remains controversial, often being considered as just an extension of the hippocampal memory system. To study this issue we used mutant mice with a targeted mutation in the transcription factor gene Foxb1. These mice suffer perinatal degeneration of the medial and most of the lateral mammillary nuclei, as well as of the mammillothalamic bundle. Foxb1 mutant mice showed no deficits in such hippocampal‐dependent tasks as contextual fear conditioning and social transmission of food preference. They were also not impaired in the spatial reference memory test in the radial arm maze. However, Foxb1 mutants showed deficits in the task for spatial navigation within the Barnes maze. Furthermore, they showed impairments in spatial working memory tasks such as the spontaneous alternation and the working memory test in the radial arm maze. Thus, our behavioural analysis of Foxb1 mutants suggests that the medial mammillary nuclei and mammillothalamic tract play a role in a specific subset of spatial tasks, which require combined use of both spatial and working memory functions. Therefore, the mammillary bodies and the mammillothalamic tract may form an important route through which the working memory circuitry receives spatial information from the hippocampus.
Ready-to-use activity recognition for smartphones

In this study, every day activities are recognized from data collected using smartphones accelerometer sensors. Offline experiments are made to show that the presented method is user- and body position-independent. In addition, it is shown that the features used in the classification are not dependent on the calibration of the phone. The recognition models trained using the offline data are also tested online. A mobile application running these models is built for two operating systems: Symbian^3 and Android. Real-time experiments using these applications are made to show that the presented method can be implemented to any operating system and hardware variations do not affect recognition results. High recognition accuracies are obtained, in the offline study, the average recognition rate is almost 99% and, also, in the online study, the average recognition accuracy is over 90%.
MiR‐134‐Mbd3 axis regulates the induction of pluripotency

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are post‐transcriptional modulators of gene expression and play an important role in reprogramming process; however, relatively little is known about the underlying regulatory mechanism of miRNAs on how they epigenetically modulate reprogramming and pluripotency. Here, we report that the expression level of microRNA‐134 (miR‐134) was low in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) but significantly up‐regulated during neural differentiation, while down‐regulated during the induction of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from neural progenitor cells (NPCs). Inhibition of miR‐134 by miR‐134 sponge promoted the efficiency of reprogramming which also was highly similar to mESCs. On the contrary, up‐regulation of miR‐134 repressed iPSCs induction. We also found that inhibition of miR‐134 promoted the maturation of pre‐iPSCs and increased its pluripotency. We also showed that miR‐134 can directly target to the pluripotency related factor Methyl‐CpG‐binding domain protein 3 (Mdb3) 3′ untranslated regions (3′ UTR) to down‐regulate its expression. And Mbd3 was found to promote the induction of iPSCs and could block the repression of reprogramming caused by overexpression of miR‐134. This work revealed the critical function of miR‐134‐Mbd3 axis on regulating reprogramming and pluripotency of iPSCs derived from the NPCs, and might provide an insight into the miR‐134‐Mbd3 axis on regulating the iPSCs quality for further clinical treatment.
Reference Classes and Multiple Inheritances

The reference class problem in probability theory and the multiple inheritances (extensions) problem in non-monotonic logics are special cases of conflicting beliefs. One popular solution accepted in the two domains is the specificity principle. By analyzing an example, several factors beyond specificity are found to be relevant to the priority of a reference class. A new approach, Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), is discussed, where these factors are all taken into account. It is argued that the solution provided by NARS is better than the solutions provided by probability theory and non-monotonic logics.
An Investigation into Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging

We develop a method to improve POS tagging, which attempts to account for problematic ambiguities by redefining the tagset. Hand evaluating the taggerbenchmark disagreements shows us the profound effect errors have on reported accuracies, and we also explore the effect of correcting training data errors. Our results emphasize the need to focus on particular tagging problems in evaluation.
A Lexicon of French Quotation Verbs for Automatic Quotation Extraction

Quotation extraction is an important information extraction task, especially when dealing with news wires. Quotations can be found in various configurations. In this paper, we focus on direct quotations introduced by a parenthetical clause, headed by a ""quotation verb"". Our study is based on a large French news wire corpus from the Agence France-Presse. We introduce and motivate an analysis at the discursive level of such quotations, which differs from the syntactic analyses generally proposed. We show how we enriched the Lefff syntactic lexicon so that it provides an account for quotation verbs heading a quotation parenthetical, especially those extracted from a news wire corpus. We also sketch how these lexical entries can be extended to the discursive level in order to model quotations introduced in a parenthetical clause in a complete way.
Different control schemes of entire microgrid: A brief overview

The key target of this very literature to give a brief overview of overall control schemes used so far to control an entire microgrid system. The control schemes are classified according to their applications and operations. Brief descriptions of them are also provided. The overall control architecture is divided into four basic control levels, such as: tertiary, secondary, primary, and the last is internal control scheme. Trends and different strategies used so far, in above control levels are clearly showed in block diagrams to take a quick review.
A novel adaptive oscillators-based control for a powered multi-joint lower-limb orthosis

This paper introduces a novel control strategy for a multi-joint lower-limb exoskeleton during ground-level walking assistive tasks. It is aimed to define a physiologically consistent assistance to the human movements without engaging a complex sensory apparatus, hence providing a simple and comfortable human-robot interface. The control system is a two-block structure: one is based on adaptive oscillators (AOs) dedicated to the hip joint control, the other is a finite-state machine utilized for managing the assistive functions of knee and ankle joints. This control strategy was validated with two subjects walking on a treadmill wearing a hip-knee-ankle-foot (HKAF) exoskeleton. The tests were carried out at different speeds under both zero-torque and assistive control modes. Results presented repetitive and adaptive desired assistive torque profiles during all conditions and both subjects confirmed the benefits of gait assistance. We also analyzed the alterations of kinematics induced by assistive torques: the maximum-changed angle was 8.84 deg at ankle joint, and the time shifts of maximum/minimum angles were always lower than 2% of one stride cycle.
Learning Mathematics in a Borderland Position: Students’ Foregrounds and Intentionality in a Brazilian Favela

In this article the authors introduce a theoretical framework for discussing the relation between favela students’ life conditions in relation to their educational experiences and opportunities. A group of five students from a favela in a large city in the interior of the state of São Paulo in Brazil was inter-viewed. The students were invited to look into their future and explore whether or not there could be learning motives relating mathematics in school and possible out-of-school practices, either in terms of possible future jobs or further studies. Four themes were identified: discrimination, escape, obscurity of mathematics, and uncertainty with respect to the future. Students in a favela could experience what the authors call a borderland position, a relational space where individuals meet their social environment and come to terms with the multiple choices that cultural and economic diversity make available to them.