Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WHICH FORM POSTPONEMENT ? A TYPOLOGICAL THEORY OF FORM POSTPONEMENT EFFECTS ON OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCES

Form postponement postulates that changes in product form occur at the latest possible point along a production and distribution process. The potential benefits of form postponement have been widely investigated in the literature on the subject. However, as often happens with developing research fields, conflicting or hard-to-relate findings are quite frequent in this literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that past research findings can be reconciled by distinguishing among three mutually exclusive types of form postponement. We build this thesis by developing a typological theory that formalizes how, why and under which assumptions each type of form postponement affects inventory holding costs, delivery lead times, processing costs, transportation costs, quality conformance and order specification flexibility. Directions for future research and implications for practice are finally discussed.
Compact field programmable gate array (FPGA) controller for Aircraft / Aerospace structures

The reduction of vibration in Aircraft/Aerospace structures as well as helicopter fuselage is becoming increasingly important. The active control techniques [1] using adaptive digital filters [2] are very much suitable amp; well proven. Hitherto this was being achieved using high speed Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). But the throughput requirements of these systems have strained the abilities of general purpose DSPs. The Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have emerged as an alternative to standard DSPs, since they13; incorporate arrays of dedicated multipliers, embedded memory amp; high speed I/O. The silicon resources of an13; FPGA lead to staggering performance gains x2013; while the fastest general purpose DSP can deliver up to 513; billion MAC/s (multiply-accumulate per second), leading FPGA devices can deliver more than 500 billion13; MAC/s x2013; thatx2019;s more than 100x faster. In the present paper attempt is made to realize the Active Controller using the Xilinx System Generator [3] on VIRTEX - 4 FPGA. System Generator is a DSP design tool from Xilinx that enables the use of The MathWorks model-based design environment, Simulink for FPGA design. Designs are captured in the DSP13; friendly Simulink modeling environment using a Xilinx specific blockset. All of the downstream FPGA13; implementation steps including Synthesis, Place and route are automatically performed to generate an FPGA13; programming file. Single channel Adaptive filter amp; system identification has been successfully implemented13; amp; Hardware Co x2013; Simulation has been carried out on Virtex-4 FPGA [4] using the XtremeDSP Development kit [5]. The methodology amp; results of this novel study are brought out in this paper.
Family-Based versus Unrelated Case-Control Designs for Genetic Associations

The most simple and commonly used approach for genetic associations is the case-control study design of unrelated people. This design is susceptible to population stratification. This problem is obviated in family-based studies, but it is usually difficult to accumulate large enough samples of well-characterized families. We addressed empirically whether the two designs give similar estimates of association in 93 investigations where both unrelated case-control and family-based designs had been employed. Estimated odds ratios differed beyond chance between the two designs in only four instances (4%). The summary relative odds ratio (ROR) (the ratio of odds ratios obtained from unrelated case-control and family-based studies) was close to unity (0.96 [95% confidence interval, 0.91–1.01]). There was no heterogeneity in the ROR across studies (amount of heterogeneity beyond chance I2 = 0%). Differences on whether results were nominally statistically significant (p < 0.05) or not with the two designs were common (opposite classification rates 14% and 17%); this reflected largely differences in power. Conclusions were largely similar in diverse subgroup analyses. Unrelated case-control and family-based designs give overall similar estimates of association. We cannot rule out rare large biases or common small biases.
Horizon estimation: perceptual and computational experiments

The human visual system is able to quickly and robustly infer a wealth of scene information -- the scene "gist" - already after 100 milliseconds of image presentation. Here, we investigated the ability to estimate the position of the horizon in briefly shown images. Being able to judge the horizon position quickly and accurately will help in inferring viewer orientation and scene structure in general and thus might be an important factor of scene gist. In the first, perceptual study, we investigated participants' horizon estimates after a 150 millisecond, masked presentation of typical outdoor scenes from different scene categories. All images were shown in upright, blurred, inverted, and cropped conditions to investigate the influence of different information types on the perceptual decision. We found that despite individual variations, horizon estimates were fairly consistent across participants and conformed well to annotated data. In addition, inversion resulted in significant differences in performance, whereas blurring did not yield any different results, highlighting the importance of global, low-frequency information for making judgments about horizon position. In the second, computational experiment, we then correlated the performance of several algorithms for horizon estimation with the human data -- algorithms ranged from simple estimations of bright-dark-transitions to more sophisticated frequency spectrum analyses motivated by previous computational modeling of scene classification results. Surprisingly, the best fits to human data were obtained with one very simple gradient method and the most complex, trained method. Overall, global frequency spectrum analysis provided the best fit to human estimates, which together with the perceptual data suggests that the human visual system might use similar mechanisms to quickly judge horizon position as part of the scene gist.
MDR: performance model driven runtime for heterogeneous parallel platforms

We present a runtime framework for the execution of work-loads represented as parallel-operator directed acyclic graphs (PO-DAGs) on heterogeneous multi-core platforms. PO-DAGs combine coarse-grained parallelism at the graph level with fine-grained parallelism within each node, lending naturally to exploiting the intra --- and inter-processing element parallelism present in heterogeneous platforms. We identify four important criteria - Suitability, Locality, Availability and Criticality (SLAC) --- and show that all these criteria must be considered by a heterogeneous runtime framework in order to achieve good performance under varying application and platform characteristics. The proposed model driven runtime (MDR) considers all the aforementioned factors, and tradeoffs among them, by utilizing performance models. These performance models are used to drive key run-time decisions such as mapping of tasks to PEs, scheduling of tasks on each PE, and copying data between memory spaces. We discuss the software architecture and implementation of MDR, and evaluate it using several benchmark programs on three different heterogeneous platforms that contain multi-core CPUs and GPUs. The hardware platforms represent server, laptop, and netbook class systems. MDR achieves up to 4.2X speedup (1.5X on average) over the best of CPU-only, GPU-only, round-robin, GPU-first, and utilization-driven schedulers. We also perform a sensitivity analysis that establishes the importance of considering all four SLAC criteria in order to achieve high performance execution in a heterogeneous runtime framework.
Prediction of Antigenic Epitope Patches on Protein Surface Using Antigen Structure Information and Support Vector Machine

Identification of antigen-antibody interacting sites is an important task for vaccine design, and hence reliable computer based prediction methods are highly desirable. The prediction performances of the current existing methods to predict the conformational B-cell ep itope residues are still not satisfying and remain far fro m ideal. This is a new approach in the area of vaccine develop ment to predict the antigenic surface patches that hold the majority number of epitope resi- dues in the surface of the antigen protein structure. The proposed method is a support vector machine based model to pre- dict the epitope patches in the antigen structures by combining the accessible surface area and B-factor structural features. The Predictions are made for the known structures of benchmark dataset after removing antigens sequence redundancy where no two antigen sequences have more than 40% sequence identity. The predictions are successful for 70% of the an- tigen structure chains of the benchmark dataset. We compared the predict ion performance of our model with a protein - protein interaction predict ion server "Sharp2" using the same antigen structures of the benchmark dataset and observed that our model outperforms on Sharp2 by more than 40% accuracy. Th is paper demonstrates that the identification of the anti- genic determinant sites in the protein surface using the antigen structural information outperforms the tradit ional pro- tein-protein interaction algorith ms to predict the interacting sites in the antigen protein surface. It p rovides a new approach for the scientists to only use the predicted antigenic epitope surface patch from the target antigen structure in vaccine de- velopment rather than using the predicted epitope residues. A web server "PatchTope" has been developed for predicting antigenic epitope surface patches on an antigen protein structure surface and is available at http://www.fci. cu.edu. eg:8080/PatchTope/.
Depolarization-Induced Mitochondrial Ca Accumulation in Sympathetic Neurons: Spatial and Temporal Characteristics

Several lines of evidence suggest that neuronal mitochondria accumulate calcium when the cytosolic free Ca2+concentration ([Ca2+]i) is elevated to levels approaching ∼500 nm, but the spatial, temporal, and quantitative characteristics of net mitochondrial Ca uptake during stimulus-evoked [Ca2+]ielevations are not well understood. Here, we report direct measurements of depolarization-induced changes in intramitochondrialtotal Ca concentration ([Ca]mito) obtained by x-ray microanalysis of rapidly frozen neurons from frog sympathetic ganglia. Unstimulated control cells exhibited undetectably low [Ca]mito, but high K+depolarization (50 mm, 45 sec), which elevates [Ca2+]i to ∼600 nm, increased [Ca]mito to 13.0 ± 1.5 mmol/kg dry weight; this increase was abolished by carbonyl cyanidep-(trifluoromethoxy) phenylhydrazone (FCCP). The elevation of [Ca]mito was a function of both depolarization strength and duration. After repolarization, [Ca]mito recovered to prestimulation levels with a time course that paralleled the decline in [Ca2+]i. Depolarization-induced increases in [Ca]mito were spatially heterogeneous. At the level of single mitochondria, [Ca]mito elevations depended on proximity to the plasma membrane, consistent with predictions of a diffusion model that considers radial [Ca2+]i gradients that exist early during depolarization. Within individual mitochondria, Ca was concentrated in small, discrete sites, possibly reflecting a high-capacity intramitochondrial Ca storage mechanism. These findings demonstrate that in situ Ca accumulation by mitochondria, now directly identified as the structural correlate of the “FCCP-sensitive store,” is robust, reversible, graded with stimulus strength and duration, and dependent on spatial location.
Investigation of ultra-wideband pulses radiation by aperture stacked patch antennas and linear arrays

A low-profile ultra-wideband aperture stacked patch antenna is investigated as a radiator of ultra-wideband radio pulses with 50% relative bandwidth. Antenna design is based on low permittivity materials such as Rogers RO 4003, teflon and foam. On the basis of proposed stacked patch a 4-element linear antenna array was designed and investigated. Frequency-domain results demonstrated very good array elements matching and negligible mutual coupling. Simulated radiated transient pulses are presented for different observation angles, energy patterns and fidelity factors are calculated. Time-domain results evidence small radiated pulse degradation and high fidelity factor values for broadside directions.
A defined protein–detergent–lipid complex for crystallization of integral membrane proteins: The cytochrome b6f complex of oxygenic photosynthesis

The paucity of integral membrane protein structures creates a major bioinformatics gap, whose origin is the difficulty of crystallizing these detergent-solubilized proteins. The problem is particularly formidable for hetero-oligomeric integral membrane proteins, where crystallization is impeded by the heterogeneity and instability of the protein subunits and the small lateral pressure imposed by the detergent micelle envelope that surrounds the hydrophobic domain. In studies of the hetero (eight subunit)-dimeric 220,000 molecular weight cytochrome b6f complex, derived from the thermophilic cyanobacterium, Mastigocladus laminosus, crystals of the complex in an intact state could not be obtained from highly purified delipidated complex despite exhaustive screening. Crystals of proteolyzed complex could be obtained that grew very slowly and diffracted poorly. Addition to the purified lipid-depleted complex of a small amount of synthetic nonnative lipid, dioleolyl-phosphatidylcholine, resulted in a dramatic improvement in crystallization efficiency. Large crystals of the intact complex grew overnight, whose diffraction parameters are as follows: 94% complete at 3.40 Å spacing; Rmerge = 8.8% (38.5%), space group, P6122; and unit cell parameters, a = b = 156.3 Å, c = 364.0 Å, α = β = 90o, γ = 120o. It is proposed that the methodology of augmentation of a well-defined lipid-depleted integral membrane protein complex with synthetic nonnative lipid, which can provide conformational stability to the protein complex, may be of general use in the crystallization of integral membrane proteins.
A language-oriented data modeling approach

This paper presents a fresh data modeling tool: Language-Oriented Data Modeling (LODM). The language used is the English language. After a brief summary of previous research in this field, the paper discusses the theoretical under-pinnings of the LODM approach from the perspectives of both relational theory and linguistic theory. The paper then illustrates the implementation of LODM with a research prototype tool, "Database Designer. " Through a step-by-step description of the stages involved in using this new tool, the paper addresses the linguistic and database issues encountered in the process of mapping English sentences into a relational schema. In discussing the robustness of the LODM tool, the paper presents both its strengths and its weakness.
Multi-concept Alignment and Evaluation

In this paper we discuss a book annotation translation application scenario that requires multi-concept alignment - where one set of concepts is aligned to another set. Using books annotated by concepts from two vocabularies which are to be aligned, we explore two statistically-grounded measures (Jaccard and LSA) to build conversion rules which aggregate similar concepts. Different ways of learning and deploying the multi-concept alignment are evaluated, which enables us to assess the usefulness of the approach for this scenario. This usefulness is low at the moment, but the experiment has given us the opportunity to learn some important lessons.
Modelling and identification of MIMO non linear communication channel

During the last decade, Volterra Model has been considered as the most usual and popular way to handle non linear systems. As an alternative to this modelling strategy the last few years has registered the birth of a new modelling technique developed on a particular Hilbert Space the kernel of which is reproducing. This space known as Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) uses the statistical learning theory to provide an RKHS model. This paper proposes the modelling of a non linear Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) communication channel with two modelling techniques reduced MIMO Volterra model and RKHS MIMO. The performances of both models are evaluated and the results were successful.
Electronic Transaction of Internet Banking and its Perception of Malaysian online Customers

The purpose of this research is to find out significant factors of consumers’ perception on e-banking transaction by Malaysian bank consumers. The study utilizes a combination of theoretical frameworks and quantitative techniques o testify the statistical relationships between consumer perceptions on e-banking transaction. Meanwhile factor analysis was performed to extraction and make initial decision on the number of factors underlying asset of measured variables of interest. Thereafter structural equation mode (SEM) was estimated to anticipate the effects of the explanatory variables. This study shows that only protected transaction, have significant impact on consumers’ perception about e-banking security, followed by service quality and regulatory frame work issues. This study is the first that seeks to ascertain the insight into e-banking in Malaysia, which has not been previously been investigated and much statistical significance makes this study a potential cornerstone for future research. Therefore, this study thus sets an important benchmark for further research in the area. Key words: Consumer perception, e-banking, electronic transaction, Malaysia.
Sequential genotyping of Pseudomonas aeruginosa from upper and lower airways of cystic fibrosis patients

A controversy exists concerning the adequate specimen to characterise colonisation of cystic fibrosis (CF) airways by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Oropharyngeal, sputum and bronchoalveolar lavage samples were evaluated from 38 stable CF patients for the detection of P. aeruginosa, genetically different isolates within the same host and longitudinal variations in the genotype during repeated examinations. Bacterial isolates were typed by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis of deoxyribonucleic acid macrorestriction fragments. Sensitivity, negative and positive predictive values and specificity to detect P. aeruginosa were 35.7, 73.5, 83.3 and 96.2% for oropharyngeal cultures in nonexpectorating patients and 91.7, 94.1, 100 and 100% for sputum cultures from expectorating patients, respectively. Genotypes of Pseudomonas isolates recovered from oropharyngeal swabs and sputum differed to the strains recovered by bronchoscopy in 55% and 40%, respectively. In 62% longitudinal variations in the genotype occurred. One-half of these alterations were detectable by bronchoscopy only. In conclusion, sputum samples were of equal value as specimens from bronchoalveolar lavage to detect Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonisation. Cultures from the oropharynx are not suitable for characterising bacterial conditions in the cystic fibrosis lung. Different genotypes within the same host and longitudinal genetic alterations are common and may be detectable in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid exclusively.
Singularity elimination of Stewart Platform using redundant actuation

This paper mainly addresses the principle of the singularity elimination of the Stewart Platform. By adding appropriate redundant actuation, the rank of the Jacobian matrix of the platform is always full, accordingly the singular value of the Jacobian matrix of the platform is nonzero. Then the singular configuration of the platform can be eliminated by adding one redundant actuation. Numerical examples are taken to illuminate the principle's effectiveness. It is shown that not only singular configurations of the Stewart Platform can be eliminated, but also performances of kinematics and dynamics of the platform can be greatly perfected by adding appropriate redundant actuation.
High-power frequency-stabilized laser for laser cooling of metastable helium at 389 nm

A high-power, frequency-stabilized laser for cooling of metastable helium atoms using the 2S13→3P23 transition at 389 nm has been developed. The 389 nm light is generated by frequency doubling of a titanium:sapphire laser in an external enhancement cavity containing a lithium–triborate nonlinear crystal. With a maximum conversion efficiency of 75%, 1 W of useful 389 nm power is produced out of 2 W at 778 nm. While being stabilized to the 2S13→3P23 transition, the 389 nm frequency is tunable over ±150MHz with respect to the field-free atomic resonance frequency. This is accomplished by Zeeman tuning of the absorption lines used in the frequency-stabilization scheme. The setup for saturated absorption spectroscopy in an rf discharge cell, used to stabilize the 389 nm laser to the atomic transition, is described in detail.
FINE STRUCTURE OF THE PINEAL ORGANS OF THE ADULT FROG, RANA PIPIENS

Frontal organs and epiphyses of the pineal system from the adult frog, Rana pipiens, were fixed in s-collidine-buffered osmium tetroxide, embedded in Epon 812, and examined by electron microscopy. Epiphyseal material was also fixed in a variety of ways and subjected to a series of cytochemical tests for light microscopy. An ultrastructure resembling that of lateral eye retina is confirmed in this species. Photoreceptor cells of the epiphysis and frontal organ display many cytological features similar to those of retinal rods and cones in the arrangement of their outer and inner segments and synaptic components. However, in these pineal organs the outer segments are disoriented relative to each other and may display a disarranged internal organization unlike normal retinal photoreceptors. Furthermore, other pineal outer segments often appear degenerate. Since immature stages in the development of new outer segments also appear to be present, adult pineal photoreceptors are probably engaged in a constant renewal of outer segment membranes. The evidence further suggests that macrophages are involved in phagocytosis of degenerated outer segments. Postulated photoreceptor activities and the possibility of secondary pineal functions, such as secretion, are discussed in view of current morphological and cytochemical findings.
A QoS Aware Routing for Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks

For intermittently connected mobile networks, many hybrid routing protocols combined conventional mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) routing with Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) approach, have been proposed. These protocols transfer data quickly in networks. They transfer data by a store-carry-and-forward paradigm when network is interrupted. However, these routings do not consider the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this study, we propose a QoS aware routing protocol for data communication in intermittently connected mobile networks. The protocol is developed upon the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The QoS aware routing not only deliberates QoS requirements (such as delay, bandwidth, and communication time), but also considers node performance (such as energy and buffer), and other factors. The objective of this work is to present various models based on AHP in connected/interrupted networks. The simulation results show that the QoS aware routing is a good option to meet the QoS required applications.