Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bi-Directional Relay for Coded Cooperation

Coded cooperation (CC) allowing a pair of users to help each other with relaying part of partner's data is investigated to extend wireless channel reach by cooperative diversity. Taking advantage of a bidirectional property of data flows, instead of transmitting the each packet from each user in the second phase of CC, we propose to broadcast a joint packet with XOR-gated information of the two second packets from both users. The throughput is increased and the quality is also improved based on mathematical analysis and simulation.
DE-tree ray tracing and box-query performance data

A solenoid valve especially intended for wet-room fittings. It has a housing with an intake and an outlet sealed off from each other and prevented from communicating while the valve is closed by a body that rests on a seat. The housing is essentially flower-pot shaped and has a threaded section at the open end positioned concentric and coaxial to the intake and outlet, which are in turn rotationally symmetric and face the open end such that the incoming flow is opposite the outgoing flow.
Coarsening by compatible relaxation

A proper coarse variable set for algebraic multigrid (AMG) solvers can be constructed using compatible relaxation (CR). For a given coarse set, CR is a modified relaxation scheme that keeps the values of the coarse variables intact. Its convergence factor is a predictor of the potential AMG efficiency, similarly to the smoothing factor in geometric multigrid. A practical, CR‐based coarse set construction algorithm is presented. Numerical results for model problems are demonstrated. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Prognostic significance of pretreated serum lactate dehydrogenase level in nasopharyngeal carcinoma among Chinese population

Background:A large number of studies have investigated the prognostic value of pretreated lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) level in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients while the role of it was inconsistent and inconclusive. Hence, the aim of the current study was to conduct a meta-analysis of all published studies to quantify the prognostic impact of pretreated serum LDH in NPC for Chinese population. Objectives:The aim of the current study was to conduct a meta-analysis of all published studies to quantify the prognostic impact of pretreated serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) for Chinese population. Methods:The PubMed, Medline, Embase, and Web of Science databases were searched for studies that assessed survival outcome and LDH in NPC. Overall survival (OS) was the primary survival outcome. Distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS) and disease-free survival (DFS) were secondary outcomes. The pooled hazard ratios (HRs), associated with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs), were combined to calculate overall effects. The Cochran Q and I2 statistics were used to assess heterogeneity. When apparent heterogeneity was observed, sensitivity and meta-regression analyses were performed to explore its origin. Results:Sixteen studies, which included 14,803 patients, were enrolled in the current meta-analysis to yield statistics. Overall, the pooled HR for OS in 11 eligible studies with high LDH level was 1.79 (95% CI = 1.47–2.12), and the pooled HR for DMFS in 9 eligible studies with high LDH level was 1.85 (95% CI = 1.48–2.22). Meanwhile, the pooled HR for DFS in 5 eligible studies with high LDH level was 1.63 (95% CI = 1.34–1.91). Egger test and funnel plots revealed that the publication bias in the current meta-analysis was insignificant. Conclusions:The present meta-analysis demonstrated that high pretreated LDH level is significantly associated with poorer OS, DMFS, and DFS, suggesting that pretreated LDH could sever as a prognostic factor in NPC among Chinese population.
Whither the Yen? Implications of an Intertemporal Model of the Yen/Dollar Rate

This paper documents the evidence for a fiscal model of the Yen/Dollar real exchange rate over the 1974-1994 period. Cointegrating relationships between the real exchange rate and productivity, government spending and the real price of oil are estimated using the Johansen (1988) and Stock-Watson (1993) procedures. The neoclassical fixed-factors fiscal model of Rogoff (1992) is found to have some substantiation in the data. Estimates of the long-run equilibrium exchange rate indicate a current overvaluation of the Yen relative to the US Dollar of approximately 30%.
An all SiC MOSFET high performance PV converter cell

Recent studies have pointed out the benefits of using Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices in photo-voltaic power conversion. In Particular, SiC Power MOSFET technology has greatly advanced over the last years and has presently reached sufficient maturity to stimulate a concrete interest in the development of power conversion circuits based entirely on this technology, in view of the clear potential advantages it offers over alternative SiC device technologies (e.g., JFET, BJT). This paper presents a thorough characterization of an all SiC MOSFET based single-phase bi-directional switched neutral-point-clamped (BSNPC) three level inverter, in which, for the first time, SiC Power MOSFETs of different voltage ratings (1200 and 600V) are used. A parametric experimental characterization of the power cell performance is carried out, separating the effects of output power, heat-sink temperature and switching frequency and load variations by means of bespoke heat-sink design. The effect of relying exclusively on the MOSFET body-diode for inductive load current freewheeling is critically assessed against usage of an external SiC Schottky diode. The experimental results are compared with a mixed approach design, where Silicon (Si) devices are used for the lower voltage switches and SiC MOSFETs are kept for the higher voltage ones, deriving a clear indication of the superior possibilities offered by SiC Power MOSFETs for improved efficiency, power density and reliability, key aspects of power electronics technology evolution.
Microeconomic Determinants of Economic Growth in East Asia

Tulisan ini mencoba mengungkap lebih dalam mengenai faktor yang mempengaruhi pertumbuhan ekonomi Asia Timur selama dekade terakhir. Studi-studi sebelumnya lebih banyak melihat dari sisi makroekonomi, sementara dalam tulisan ini, sisi mikroekonomi yang akan menjadi perhatian utama, terutama perilaku perusahaan (firm) dan rumah tangga (household). Temuan menarik berasal dari perusahaan manufaktur di perkotaan, khususnya sektor yang berorientasi ekspor. Kebijakan outward looking pemerintah turut memberikan kontribusi dalam keberhasilan jenis perusahaan tersebut. Temuan lain misalnya, bahwa sekitar 50% dari tabungan swasta disumbangkan oleh perusahaan. Rumah tangga juga turut berperan baik dari tabungan (saving) maupun penyediaan tenaga kerja (labor) dengan tingkat pendidikan yang lebih baik. Tak luput pula peranan pemerintah yang tak terpisahkan dari kisah sukses perekonomian Asia Timur.
Conjoined Use of EM and NMR in RNA Structure Refinement

More than 40% of the RNA structures have been determined using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique. NMR mainly provides local structural information of protons and works most effectively on relatively small biomacromolecules. Hence structural characterization of large RNAs can be difficult for NMR alone. Electron microscopy (EM) provides global shape information of macromolecules at nanometer resolution, which should be complementary to NMR for RNA structure determination. Here we developed a new energy term in Xplor-NIH against the density map obtained by EM. We conjointly used NMR and map restraints for the structure refinement of three RNA systems — U2/U6 small-nuclear RNA, genome-packing motif (ΨCD)2 from Moloney murine leukemia virus, and ribosome-binding element from turnip crinkle virus. In all three systems, we showed that the incorporation of a map restraint, either experimental or generated from known PDB structure, greatly improves structural precision and accuracy. Importantly, our method does not rely on an initial model assembled from RNA duplexes, and allows full torsional freedom for each nucleotide in the torsion angle simulated annealing refinement. As increasing number of macromolecules can be characterized by both NMR and EM, the marriage between the two techniques would enable better characterization of RNA three-dimensional structures.
Non-contiguous finished genome sequence and description of Anaerococcus provenciensis sp. nov.

Anaerococcus provenciensis strain 9402080T sp. nov. is the type strain of A. provenciensis sp. nov., a new species within the genus Anaerococcus. This strain was isolated from a cervical abscess sample. A. provenciensis is a Gram-positive anaerobic cocci. Here, we describe the features of this organism, together with the complete genome sequence and annotation. The 2.26 Mbp long genome contains 2099 protein-coding and 57 RNA genes including 8 rRNA genes and exhibits a G+C content of 33.48%.
Who are experts specializing in landscape photography?: analyzing topic-specific authority on content sharing services

With the rapid growth of Web 2.0, a variety of content sharing services, such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and TripAdvisor etc, have become extremely popular over the last decade. On these websites, users have created and shared with each other various kinds of resources, such as photos, video, and travel blogs. The sheer amount of user-generated content varies greatly in quality, which calls for a principled method to identify a set of authorities, who created high-quality resources, from a massive number of contributors of content. Since most previous studies only infer global authoritativeness of a user, there is no way to differentiate the authoritativeness in different aspects of life (topics). In this paper, we propose a novel model of Topic-specific Authority Analysis (TAA), which addresses the limitations of the previous approaches, to identify authorities specific to given query topic(s) on a content sharing service. This model jointly leverages the usage data collected from the sharing log and the favorite log. The parameters in TAA are learned from a constructed training dataset, for which a novel logistic likelihood function is specifically designed. To perform Bayesian inference for TAA with the new logistic likelihood, we extend typical Gibbs sampling by introducing auxiliary variables. Thorough experiments with two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TAA in topic-specific authority identification as well as the generalizability of the TAA generative model.
Efficiency enhancement of estimation of distribution algorithms by a compressed tournament selection

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms EDA are population-based meta-heuristics that use probabilistic models to describe the relationships between variables of a problem. From these models, new solutions can be sampled without disruption of Building Blocks, leading to a more effective search. The key aspect of EDAs is the model-building step and better models should enable a better exploration of the search space. However, high-quality models require computationally expensive algorithms, resulting in too costly EDAs. This paper proposes an efficient implementation of the tournament selection algorithm TS, called Compressed Tournament Selection CTS. CTS avoids the insertion of repeated solutions in the population during the TS. Therefore, model-building can be performed on a reduced population equivalent to the original, improving the EDAs' performance as a whole. In the experiments the method was applied to the Extended Compact Genetic Algorithm and the results showed that by using an appropriate tournament size, CTS can lead to high speed-ups without a decrease of model quality. Besides, CTS keeps the characteristics of TS and can be easily used to enhance the efficiency of any EDA based on the tournament selection algorithm.
On the Critical Behavior of D 1-brane Theories

We study renormalization-group flow patterns in theories arising on D1-branes in various supersymmetry-breaking backgrounds. We argue that the theory of N D1-branes transverse to an orbifold space can be fine-tuned to flow to the corresponding orbifold conformal field theory in the infrared, for particular values of the couplings and theta angles which we determine using the discrete symmetries of the model. By calculating various nonplanar contributions to the scalar potential in the worldvolume theory, we show that fine-tuning is in fact required at finite N, as would be generically expected. We further comment on the presence of singular conformal field theories (such as those whose target space includes a “throat” described by an exactly solvable CFT) in the non-supersymmetric context. Throughout the analysis two applications are considered: to gauge theory/gravity duality and to linear sigma model techniques for studying worldsheet string theory.
Mathematical modeling of an oscillating gene circuit to unravel the circadian clock network of Arabidopsis thaliana

The Arabidopsis thaliana circadian clock is an interconnected network highly tractable to systems approaches. Most elements in the transcriptional–translational oscillator were identified by genetic means and the expression of clock genes in various mutants led to the founding hypothesis of a positive–negative feedback loop being the core clock. The identification of additional clock genes beyond those defined in the core led to the use of systems approaches to decipher this angiosperm oscillator circuit. Kinetic modeling was first used to explain periodicity effects of various circadian mutants. This conformed in a flexible way to experimental details. Such observations allowed a recursive use of hypothesis generating from modeling, followed by experimental corroboration. More recently, the biochemical finding of new description of a DNA-binding activity for one class of clock components directed improvements in feature generation, one of which revealed that the core of the oscillator is a negative–negative feedback loop. The recursive use of modeling and experimental validation has thus revealed many essential transcriptional components that drive negative arms in the circadian oscillator. What awaits is to more fully describe the positive arms and an understanding of how additional pathways converge on the clock.
Assignment commands and array structures

Straight line programs in which array elements can be referenced and set are considered. Two programs are equivalent if they compute the same expression as a function of the inputs. Testing the equivalence of programs with arrays is shown to be NP-complete, while programs without arrays can be tested for equivalence in linear time. Equivalence testing takes polynomial time when programs have either no references or no assignments to array elements.
Blind steganalytic attack as pattern recognition, using ROC for distance calculation in k-Nearest neighbour Classification Technique

Steganographic techniques are used to hide the existence of the messages. An advantage of steganography is that it can be employed to secretly transmit messages without the fact of the transmission being discovered. Steganalysis is the mechanism of detecting the presence of hidden information in the stego media and it allows an adversary to use steganalytic techniques to reveal that a secret communication is taking place. Steganalysis can be a targeted steganalysis or a blind steganalysis. In the existing method, multi-class steganalysis classification technique is used to detect low embedded capacity. In this paper, a new multi-class steganalysis classification technique is implemented to detect the high embedded capacity with detection accuracy of atleast 95% with textual or a mixture of textual and graphic images using k-Nearest neighbor Classification Technique in which Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC)curve is used to calculate the distance function for improving the used classification technique.
Introducing the Portuguese web archive initiative

This paper introduces the Portuguese Web Archive initiative, presenting its main objectives and work in progress. Term search over web archives collections is a desirable feature that raises new challenges. It is discussed how the terms index size could be reduced without significantly decreasing the quality of search results. The results obtained from the first performed crawl show that the Portuguese web is composed approximately at least by 54 million contents that correspond to 2.8 TB of data. The crawl of the Portuguese web was stored in 2 TB of disk space using the ARC compressed format.
Guided Image Filtering for Interactive High‐quality Global Illumination

Interactive computation of global illumination is a major challenge in current computer graphics research. Global illumination heavily affects the visual quality of generated images. It is therefore a key attribute for the perception of photo‐realistic images. Path tracing is able to simulate the physical behaviour of light using Monte Carlo techniques. However, the computational burden of this technique prohibits interactive rendering times on standard commodity hardware in high‐quality. Trying to solve the Monte Carlo integration with fewer samples results in characteristic noisy images. Global illumination filtering methods take advantage of the fact that the integral for neighbouring pixels may be very similar. Averaging samples of similar characteristics in screen‐space may approximate the correct integral, but may result in visible outliers. In this paper, we present a novel path tracing pipeline based on an edge‐aware filtering method for the indirect illumination which produces visually more pleasing results without noticeable outliers. The key idea is not to filter the noisy path traced images but to use it as a guidance to filter a second image composed from characteristic scene attributes that do not contain noise by default. We show that our approach better approximates the Monte Carlo integral compared to previous methods. Since the computation is carried out completely in screen‐space it is therefore applicable to fully dynamic scenes, arbitrary lighting and allows for high‐quality path tracing at interactive frame rates on commodity hardware.
Volatility Risks and Growth Options

We propose to measure growth opportunities by firms’ exposure to idiosyncratic volatility news. Theoretically, we show that the value of a growth option increases in idiosyncratic volatility but its response to volatility of aggregate shocks can be either positive or negative depending on option moneyness. Empirically, we show that price sensitivity to variation in idiosyncratic volatility carries significant information about firms’ future investment and growth even after controlling for conventional proxies of growth options such as book-to-market and other relevant firm characteristics. Consistent with our theoretical arguments, we also find that firm’ exposure to aggregate volatility, while priced, does not help predict their future growth. Option-intensive firms identified using our idiosyncratic volatility-based measure earn a lower premium than do firms that rely more heavily on assets in place. This paper was accepted by Jerome Detemple, finance.
Matching event sequences approach based on Weyl's discrepancy norm

A novel approach for matching event sequences, that result from threshold-based sampling, is introduced. This approach relies on Hermann Weyl's discrepancy norm, which plays a central role in the context of stability analysis of threshold-based sampling. This metric is based on a maximal principle that evaluates intervals of maximal partial sums. It is shown that minimal length intervals of maximal discrepancy can be exploited, in order to efficiently cluster spikes by means of approximating step functions. In contrast to ordinary spikes, these spike clusters can not only be shifted, deleted or inserted, but also stretched and shrinked, which allows more flexibility in the matching process. A dynamic programming approach is applied in order to minimizing an energy functional of such deformation manipulations. Simulations based on integrate-and-fire sampling show its potential above all regarding robustness.
Greek sign language alphabet recognition using the leap motion device

The goal of this paper is to present a method for sign language recognition using the Leap Motion Controller and apply it to the recognition of the Greek sign language alphabet. The method utilizes 3D positional data provided by the device along with SVM classification and achieves over 99% classification accuracy in an experiment involving 6 subjects and leave-one-person-out cross validation.
Sodium content of processed foods in the United Kingdom: analysis of 44,000 foods purchased by 21,000 households

Background: In the United Kingdom, sodium reduction targets have been set for a large number of processed food categories. Assessment and monitoring are essential to evaluate progress. Objectives: Our aim was to determine whether household consumer panel food-purchasing data could be used to assess the sodium content of processed foods. Our further objectives were to estimate the mean sodium content of UK foods by category and undertake analyses weighted by food-purchasing volumes. Design: Data were obtained for 21,108 British households between October 2008 and September 2009. Purchasing data (product description, product weight, annual purchases) and sodium values (mg/100 g) were collated for all food categories known to be major contributors to sodium intake. Unweighted and weighted mean sodium values were calculated. Results: Data were available for 44,372 food products. The largest contributors to sodium purchases were table salt (23%), processed meat (18%), bread and bakery products (13%), dairy products (12%), and sauces and spreads (11%). More than one-third of sodium purchased (37%) was accounted for by 5 food categories: bacon, bread, milk, cheese, and sauces. For some food groups (bread and bakery, cereals and cereal products, processed meat), purchase-weighted means were 18–35% higher than unweighted means, suggesting that market leaders have higher sodium contents than the category mean. Conclusion: The targeting of sodium reduction in a small number of food categories and focusing on products sold in the highest volumes could lead to large decreases in sodium available for consumption and therefore to gains in public health.
Simultaneous Planning of PEV Charging Stations and DGs Considering Financial, Technical,and Environmental Effects

The growing demand for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) in the world has driven researchers to pay extra attention to charging stations (CSs) in order to meet supplying needs. Lower emission, convenient charging experience, high performance, and energy security are considered as the significant benefits of the mentioned technology. Despite the aforementioned advantages, inappropriate place and size of CSs have brought new challenges for electric distribution systems. Prominent features of distributed generations (DGs) make this technology appropriate for compensating relevant problems of CSs installation. In this paper, simultaneous optimal planning (placing and sizing) of CSs and DGs is presented to address new challenges. In addition, financial (investment costs), technical (system reliability, power loss, and voltage profile), and environmental (CO2 emission) issues are considered in the proposed objective function. A genetic algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem. Furthermore, the simulation study is carried out on a 33-bus radial distribution network. The simulation results show the effects of installation of CSs in the presence/absence of DGs on total costs, reliability, loss, voltage profile, and emission. Moreover, the effects of increasing PEV's availability are evaluated on the aforementioned terms in the electric distribution network.