Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complex Adaptations Can Drive the Evolution of the Capacitor [PSI +], Even with Realistic Rates of Yeast Sex

The [PSI+] prion may enhance evolvability by revealing previously cryptic genetic variation, but it is unclear whether such evolvability properties could be favored by natural selection. Sex inhibits the evolution of other putative evolvability mechanisms, such as mutator alleles. This paper explores whether sex also prevents natural selection from favoring modifier alleles that facilitate [PSI+] formation. Sex may permit the spread of “cheater” alleles that acquire the benefits of [PSI+] through mating without incurring the cost of producing [PSI+] at times when it is not adaptive. Using recent quantitative estimates of the frequency of sex in Saccharomyces paradoxus, we calculate that natural selection for evolvability can drive the evolution of the [PSI+] system, so long as yeast populations occasionally require complex adaptations involving synergistic epistasis between two loci. If adaptations are always simple and require substitution at only a single locus, then the [PSI+] system is not favored by natural selection. Obligate sex might inhibit the evolution of [PSI+]-like systems in other species.
Finance and Economics Discussion Series a Primer on the Economics and Time Series Econometrics of Wealth Effects a Primer on the Economics and Time Series Econometrics of Wealth Effects

NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other than acknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Abstract This paper reviews the statistical approach typically applied by macroeconomists to investigate the empirical link between aggregate data on household consumption, income, and wealth. In particular, we focus on studies determining whether and how much changes in net worth, such as those generated by the stock-market boom in the U.S. over the latter 1990s, are responsible for subsequent swings in the growth rate of consumer spending. We show how simple economic theory is used to motivate an econometric strategy that consists of two stages of analysis. First, regressions are used to identify trend movements shared by consumption, income, and wealth over the long run, then deviations of these series from their common long-run trends are used to help forecast consumption growth over the short run. Our discussion highlights the various judgments that researchers must make in the course of implementing this empirical approach, and we detail how specific parameter estimates describing the magnitude of the wealth effect on consumption-and even broad conclusions about its existence-are affected by making alternative choices. We have benefitted from discussions with many of our colleagues at the Federal Reserve Board. In particular, we appreciate detailed comments and criticisms offered 1 In the national accounts, the personal saving rate is defined as the percentage of after-tax (disposable) income not spent by households on consumer goods and services or as interest payments to businesses. Throughout this paper we use the term " personal saving rate " and " saving rate " interchangably. 2 Both values are expressed at annual rates.
Liquidity Risk of Corporate Bond Returns Viral

We study the exposure of the U.S. corporate bond returns to liquidity shocks of stocks and treasury bonds over the period 1973 to 2007. A decline in liquidity of stocks or Treasury bonds produces conflicting effects: Prices of investment-grade bonds rise while prices of speculative grade bonds fall substantially. This effect is regime-switching in nature and holds when the state of the economy is in a “stress” regime. The likelihood of being in such a regime can be predicted by macroeconomic and financial market variables that are associated with adverse economic conditions. Our model can predict the out-of-sample bond returns for the stress years 2008-2009. These effects are robust to controlling for other systematic risks (term and default). Our findings suggest the existence of time-varying liquidity risk of corporate bond returns and episodes of flight to liquidity.
Dendritic HCN2 Channels Constrain Glutamate-Driven Excitability in Reticular Thalamic Neurons

Hyperpolarization activated cyclic nucleotide (HCN) gated channels conduct a current, Ih; how Ih influences excitability and spike firing depends primarily on channel distribution in subcellular compartments. For example, dendritic expression of HCN1 normalizes somatic voltage responses and spike output in hippocampal and cortical neurons. We reported previously that HCN2 is predominantly expressed in dendritic spines in reticular thalamic nucleus (RTN) neurons, but the functional impact of such nonsomatic HCN2 expression remains unknown. We examined the role of HCN2 expression in regulating RTN excitability and GABAergic output from RTN to thalamocortical relay neurons using wild-type and HCN2 knock-out mice. Pharmacological blockade of Ih significantly increased spike firing in RTN neurons and large spontaneous IPSC frequency in relay neurons; conversely, pharmacological enhancement of HCN channel function decreased spontaneous IPSC frequency. HCN2 deletion abolished Ih in RTN neurons and significantly decreased sensitivity to 8-bromo-cAMP and lamotrigine. Recapitulating the effects of Ih block, HCN2 deletion increased both temporal summation of EPSPs in RTN neurons as well as GABAergic output to postsynaptic relay neurons. The enhanced excitability of RTN neurons after Ih block required activation of ionotropic glutamate receptors; consistent with this was the colocalization of HCN2 and glutamate receptor 4 subunit immunoreactivities in dendritic spines of RTN neurons. The results indicate that, in mouse RTN neurons, HCN2 is the primary functional isoform underlying Ih and expression of HCN2 constrains excitatory synaptic integration.
New order selection technique using information criteria applied to SISO and MIMO systems predistortion

This paper presents a new order selection technique of matrix memory polynomial technique that models the nonlinearities of single-branch and multi-branch transmitters. The new criteria take into account the complexity of the model in addition to its mean-square error in the selection criteria. The quasi-convexity of the proposed criteria was proven in this work. By using this proposed Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) criteria, the model order selection was cast as a cost minimization problem. To minimize the criteria, modified gradient descent and simulated annealing algorithms were utilized which resulted in a considerable reduction in the number of search iterations. The performances of the criteria were shown by comparing the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of a higher-order model and the optimum model. It has been shown that the NMSE difference is <0.5 dB, but the complexity is much smaller.
Novel three-DOF ankle mechanism for lower-limb exoskeleton: Kinematic analysis and design of passive-type ankle module

In this paper, a novel three-DOF ankle mechanism is introduced. A lower-limb exoskeleton is developed by our research group to strengthen wearer's muscle power in military missions. Owing to the tough operational condition, each module of the exoskeleton should be carefully designed for safety and to reduce the sense of fatigue of the wearer. To this end, it is desirable for the ankle module to be lightweight and compact and to have a remote center of rotation which is closely located to the rotation center of the wearer's ankle. In order to satisfy these design considerations, the proposed ankle mechanism consists of the parallel connection of a spherical five-bar linkage and an RSU (revolute-spherical-universal)- serial chain. The spherical five-bar linkage realizes two-DOF ankle rotations of inversion/eversion and internal/external rotation, and the RSU-serial chain controls the ankle dorsiflexion/plantar flexion. The forward and inverse kinematics are derived, and instantaneous kinematics as well as force relations are analyzed by deriving the screw-based Jacobian and the reciprocal Jacobian. Finally, based on the gait data obtained from a normal subject with 4km/h of walking speed and 45kg of backpack load, the initial version of it is designed as a fully passive-type mechanism with a torsional spring. It is shown from a simulation that 42% reduction of the wearer's ankle peak torque is expected by using the proposed ankle exoskeleton.
Less of a Puzzle: A New Look at the Forward Forex Market

The two-country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence. This is set within a limited participation framework. The model is simulated using the artificial economy methodology. The 'puzzles' in the forward market are re-examined. The model is able to account for (a) the low volatility of the forward discount (b) the higher volatility of expected forward speculative profits (c) the even higher volatility of spot rate changes (d) the persistence in the forward discount and (e) the random walk in spot exchange rates The major innovation is that it is able to replicate some of the extent of the bias of the forward discount as a predictor of realised spot rate changes.
Major Gene for Field Stem Rust Resistance Co-Locates with Resistance Gene Sr12 in ‘Thatcher’ Wheat

Stem rust, caused by Puccinia graminis (Pgt), is a damaging disease of wheat that can be controlled by utilizing effective stem rust resistance genes. ‘Thatcher’ wheat carries complex resistance to stem rust that is enhanced in the presence of the resistance gene Lr34. The purpose of this study was to examine APR in ‘Thatcher’ and look for genetic interactions with Lr34. A RIL population was tested for stem rust resistance in field nurseries in Canada, USA, and Kenya. BSA was used to find SNP markers associated with reduced stem rust severity. A major QTL was identified on chromosome 3BL near the centromere in all environments. Seedling testing showed that Sr12 mapped to the same region as the QTL for APR. The SNP markers were physically mapped and the region carrying the resistance was searched for sequences with homology to members of the NB-LRR resistance gene family. SNP marker from one NB-LRR-like sequence, NB-LRR3 co-segregated with Sr12. Two additional populations, including one that lacked Lr34, were tested in field nurseries. NB-LRR3 mapped near the maximum LOD for reduction in stem rust severity in both populations. Lines from a population that segregated for Sr12 and Lr34 were tested for seedling Pgt biomass and infection type, as well as APR to field stem rust which showed an interaction between the genes. We concluded that Sr12, or a gene closely linked to Sr12, was responsible for ‘Thatcher’-derived APR in several environments and this resistance was enhanced in the presence of Lr34.
Realtime ray tracing on current CPU architectures

In computer graphics, ray tracing has become a powerful tool for generating realistically looking images. Even though ray tracing offers high flexibility, a logarithmic scalability in scene complexity, and is known to be efficiently parallelizable, its demand for compute power has in the past lead to its limitation to high-quality off-line rendering. This thesis focuses on the question of how realtime ray tracing can be realized on current processor architectures. To this end, it provides a detailed analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of current processor architectures, for the purpose of allowing for highly optimized implementation. The combination of processor-specific optimizations with algorithms that exploit the coherence of ray tracing, makes it possible to achieve realtime performance on a single CPU. Besides the optimization of the ray tracing algorithm itself, this thesis focuses on the efficient building of spatial index structures. By building these structures from scratch for every frame, interactive ray tracing of fully dynamic scenes becomes possible. Moreover, a parallelization framework for ray tracing is discussed that efficiently exploits the compute power of a cluster of commodity PCs. Finally, a global illumination algorithm is proposed that efficiently combines optimized ray tracing and the parallelization framework. The combination makes it possible to compute complete global illumination at interactive frame rates.
Exploring Action Research as an Approach to Interactive (Participatory) Evaluation.

between evaluators and practitioners, thus, strengthens voice, organization and action. Despite its limitations or challenges, this form of evaluation involves and is useful to the programme's end -users with respect to their contexts, concerns, interests a nd problems; acknowledges and extensively benefits from the knowledge and experiences of key stakeholders; endorses the collective methods of knowledge creation in contrast to authoritarian, single -handed conclusions for others to follow for future plannin g; and finally, shares powers and outcomes with the stakeholders.
Scene reconstruction from multiple views using a locally planar model

Image based rendering techniques allow reconstructions of a scene from an arbitrary viewpoint, given views of the scene. In this paper a locally planar representation of the scene structure is presented, where each block of pixels in the input images is assumed to correspond to some patch of an object's surface. A multi-resolution particle filter method of estimating the position and orientation of these patches is described. This method offers fast computation without sacrificing accuracy. The estimated patches often include a significant amount of redundant information. We present an algorithm for identifying this redundancy and producing a compressed data set. Finally we introduce a simple, fast, algorithm for generating reconstructions of the scene. Results on both synthetic and real data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques.
Reading on-screen text with gaze-based auto-scrolling

Visual information on eye movements can be used to facilitate scrolling while one is reading on-screen text. We carried out an experiment to find preferred reading regions on the screen and implemented an automatic scrolling technique based on the preferred regions of each individual reader. We then examined whether manual and automatic scrolling have an effect on reading behaviour on the basis of eye movement metrics, such as fixation duration and fixation count. We also studied how different font sizes affect the eye movement metrics. Results of analysis of data collected from 24 participants indicated no significant difference between manual and automatic scrolling in reading behaviour. Preferred reading regions on the screen varied among the participants. Most of them preferred relatively short regions. A significant effect of font size on fixation count was found. Subjective opinions indicated that participants found automatic scrolling convenient to use.
A Kurosh-type theorem for type III factors

We prove a generalization of N. Ozawa's Kurosh-type theorem to the setting of free products of semiexact II 1 factors with respect to arbitrary (non-tracial) faithful normal states. We are thus able to distinguish certain resulting type III factors. For example, if M = LF n ✇ LF m and {ϕ i } is any sequence of faithful normal states on M, then the l-various (M, ϕ 1 ) *. * (M, ϕ 1 ) are all mutually non-isomorphic.
Rethinking FPGA Computing with a Many-Core Approach

While ASIC design and manufacturing costs are soaring with each new technology node, the computing power and logic capacity of modern FPGAs steadily advances. Therefore, high-performance computing with FPGA-based system becomes increasingly attractive and viable. Unfortunately, truly unleashing the computing potential of FPGAs often stipulates cumbersome HDL programming and laborious manual optimization. To circumvent such challenges, we propose a Many-core Approach to Reconfigurable Computing (MARC) that (i) allows programmers to easily express parallelism through a high-level programming language, (ii) supports coarse-grain multithreading and dataflowstyle fine-grain threading while permitting bit-level resource control, and (iii) greatly reduces the effort required to repurpose the hardware system for different algorithms or different applications. Leveraging a many-core architectural template, sophisticated logic synthesizing techniques, and state-of-art compiler optimization technology, a MARC system enables efficient highperformance computing for applications expressed with imperative programming languages such as C/C++ by exploiting abundant special FPGA resources such as distributed block memories and DSP blocks to implement complete single-chip high efficiency many-core microarchitectures. To quantitatively validate the proposed MARC system, we implemented a MARC prototype machine consisting of one control processing core and 32 arithmetic processing cores using a Virtex-5 (XCV5LX155T-2) FPGA. For a well-known general-purpose Bayesian computing problem, we compare the throughput and runtime of this MARC machine, with fully synthesized application-specific processing cores, against a manually optimized FPGA implementation—BCM (Bayesian Computing Machine) [1]. As the problem sizes range from 10 to 10, this MARC machine achieve 8.13 GFLOPS in throughput on average, which is 43% of that of BCM but with much less design/implementation effort and much greater portability and retargetability. More importantly, we developed a simple analytical performance model to explain the performance discrepancy between the MARC machine and the hand-optimized BCM FPGA implementation [1].
Techniques for creating mathematical model of structures for active vibration control

First step of Active Vibration Control is to drive the equations of motion. It depends upon shape, material and boundary condition of the structure. Numbers of methods have been applied on structures so far. In this paper exhaustive study has been done to show the mathematical model of some structures such as beam, plate and shell like structure containing piezoelectric sensors and actuators.
Constrained geocast to support Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) merging

In this paper we introduce a new geocasting concept to target vehicles based on where they will be in the direct future, in stead of their current position. We refer to this concept as constrained geocast. This may be useful in situations where vehicles have interdependencies based on (future) maneuvers. We have developed a first version of such a protocol in the context of an automated merging application, and tested it using simulations. Results show that the protocol is able to meet the requirements of such applications. Compared to a common geo-broadcast protocol this protocol becomes more reliable as road traffic densities increase, but in other aspects the performance is so far lacking. Based on our experiences with implementing the protocol however we see plenty of room for further improvement.
Correction: Trans-Homophilic Interaction of CADM1 Activates PI3K by Forming a Complex with MAGuK-Family Proteins MPP3 and Dlg

CADM1 (Cell adhesion molecule 1), a cell adhesion molecule belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily, is involved in cell-cell interaction and the formation and maintenance of epithelial structure. Expression of CADM1 is frequently downregulated in various tumors derived from epithelial cells. However, the intracellular signaling pathways activated by CADM1-mediated cell adhesion remain unknown. Here, we established a cell-based spreading assay to analyze the signaling pathway specifically activated by the trans-homophilic interaction of CADM1. In the assay, MDCK cells expressing exogenous CADM1 were incubated on the glass coated with a recombinant extracellular fragment of CADM1, and the degree of cell spreading was quantified by measuring their surface area. Assay screening of 104 chemical inhibitors with known functions revealed that LY294002, an inhibitor of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K), efficiently suppressed cell spreading in a dose-dependent manner. Inhibitors of Akt and Rac1, downstream effectors of PI3K, also partially suppressed cell spreading, while the addition of both inhibitors blocked cell spreading to the same extent as did LY294002. Furthermore, MPP3 and Dlg, membrane-associated guanylate kinase homologs (MAGuK) proteins, connect CADM1 with p85 of PI3K by forming a multi-protein complex at the periphery of cells. These results suggest that trans-homophilic interaction mediated by CADM1 activates the PI3K pathway to reorganize the actin cytoskeleton and form epithelial cell structure.
Involvement of Monkey Inferior Colliculus in Spatial Hearing

The midbrain inferior colliculus (IC) is implicated in coding sound location, but evidence from behaving primates is scarce. Here we report single-unit responses to broadband sounds that were systematically varied within the two-dimensional (2D) frontal hemifield, as well as in sound level, while monkeys fixated a central visual target. Results show that IC neurons are broadly tuned to both sound-source azimuth and level in a way that can be approximated by multiplicative, planar modulation of the firing rate of the cell. In addition, a fraction of neurons also responded to elevation. This tuning, however, was more varied: some neurons were sensitive to a specific elevation; others responded to elevation in a monotonic way. Multiple-linear regression parameters varied from cell to cell, but the only topography encountered was a dorsoventral tonotopy. In a second experiment, we presented sounds from straight ahead while monkeys fixated visual targets at different positions. We found that auditory responses in a fraction of IC cells were weakly, but systematically, modulated by 2D eye position. This modulation was absent in the spontaneous firing rates, again suggesting a multiplicative interaction of acoustic and eye-position inputs. Tuning parameters to sound frequency, location, intensity, and eye position were uncorrelated. On the basis of simulations with a simple neural network model, we suggest that the population of IC cells could encode the head-centered 2D sound location and enable a direct transformation of this signal into the eye-centered topographic motor map of the superior colliculus. Both signals are required to generate rapid eye-head orienting movements toward sounds.