Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance analysis of pilot aided channel estimation methods for MBSFN in LTE system

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the channel estimation methods (LS, LMMSE, ALMMSE) for MBSFN in LTE system. Two methods, with and without linear interpolation, are proposed for extracting the special designed pilot in MBSFN frame. The linear interpolation method is more accurate and complicated while the non-interpolation method, with about 3∼7dB performance loss, is comparatively easier for calculation. The performance of MBSFN frame under the condition of non-delay and 1ms delay is analyzed to make our results more reliable. Additionally, our pilot extracting and channel estimation methods are proved feasible by comparing MBSFN and normal frame in LTE system.
The Effects of Child Maltreatment on Adult Crime: an Examination of a Long­term Developmental Model

This study explored the relation of child maltreatment to adult crime. Aside from examining this main effect, the study also explored school­based and behavioral mediators of the maltreatment/adult crime relation. Risk/resilience theory along with self­ trauma model informed both the main effect and mediator models. Three specific research questions guided this investigation. First, does childhood maltreatment have a significant relation to adult crime? Second, does childhood maltreatment have a significant relation to educational performance and juvenile delinquency, and third, if the above relations are found, do educational performance and juvenile delinquency mediate maltreatment's relation to adult crime? Data derived from the Chicago Longitudinal Study which has comprehensive administrative and interview data on a Chicago area cohort born in 1980. All sample members were eligible for an early school intervention program serving low­income, urban dwelling, minority families. The data set includes extensive information on child's maltreatment history, school performance, delinquency and adult crime. The adult records extend though 2004 when study participants were age 24. Probit analyses revealed that official measures of childhood maltreatment were significantly related to general and severe indicators of adult crime, controlling for salient sociodemographic characteristics. Maltreatment was also significantly related, in the expected direction, to grade reading 8 achievement, grades 6­7 acting out behavior, high school graduation, and delinquency. Hierarchical regression indicated that these school­ related measures, along with delinquency mediated maltreatment's association with all adult crime indicators in the study, reducing the main effect by magnitudes ranging from 38­63%. Additionally, the school­related mediators consistently had a greater impact on the mediator models than did the delinquency mediator. The main effect results illuminate enduring effects of maltreatment and recommend prevention and early intervention treatment strategies. The mediation findings identify school­related variables as possible catalysts of the maltreatment/crime link, highlighting a potential benefit of school­based interventions for maltreated children.
The effect of sample size and species characteristics on performance of different species distribution modeling methods

Species distribution models should provide conservation practioners with estimates of the spatial distributions of species requiring attention. These species are often rare and have limited known occurrences, posing challenges for creating accurate species distribution models. We tested four modeling methods (Bioclim, Domain, GARP, and Maxent) across 18 species with different levels of ecological specialization using six different sample size treatments and three different evaluation measures. Our assessment revealed that Maxent was the most capable of the four modeling methods in producing useful results with sample sizes as small as 5, 10 and 25 occurrences. The other methods compensated reasonably well (Domain and GARP) to poorly (Bioclim) when presented with datasets of small sample sizes. We show that multiple evaluation measures are necessary to determine accuracy of models produced with presence-only data. Further, we found that accuracy of models is greater for species with small geographic ranges and limited environmental tolerance, ecological characteristics of many rare species. Our results indicate that reasonable models can be made for some rare species, a result that should encourage conservationists to add distribution modeling to their toolbox.
Chandelier Cells in Functional and Dysfunctional Neural Circuits

Chandelier cells (ChCs; also called axo-axonic cells) are a specialized GABAergic interneuron subtype that selectively innervates pyramidal neurons at the axon initial segment (AIS), the site of action potential generation. ChC connectivity allows for powerful yet precise modulation of large populations of pyramidal cells, suggesting ChCs have a critical role in brain functions. Dysfunctions in ChC connectivity are associated with brain disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia; however, whether this is causative, contributory or compensatory is not known. A likely stumbling block toward mechanistic discoveries and uncovering potential therapeutic targets is the apparent lack of rudimentary understanding of ChCs. For example, whether cortical ChCs are inhibitory or excitatory remains unresolved, and thus whether altered ChC activity results in altered inhibition or excitation is not clear. Recent studies have shed some light onto this excitation-inhibition controversy. In addition, new findings have identified preferential cell-type connectivities established by cortical ChCs, greatly expanding our understanding of the role of ChCs in the cortical microcircuit. Here we aim to bring more attention to ChC connectivity to better understand its role in neural circuits, address whether ChCs are inhibitory or excitatory in light of recent findings and discuss ChC dysfunctions in brain disorders.
The Pitfalls of Monetary Discretion

In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to these same prices. For a range of values of the fundamental state variable — a ratio of predetermined prices — there is complementarity between actual and expected policy, and multiple equilibria occur. Moreover, this multiplicity is not associated with reputational considerations: it occurs in a two-period model.
Correlation of Air Displacement Plethysmography with Alternative Body Fat Measurement Techniques in Men and Women

Obesity has reached epidemic proportions with serious health consequences. Techniques used to measure body fat (BF) yield variable BF estimates, and this variability may lead to underestimation or overestimation of BF and subsequent treatment options. The measurements that are most accurate (Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA) and Air Displacement Plethysmography (ADP)) are expensive and often unavailable. The purpose of this study is to find the commonly available BF measurement that is the most accurate and practical for individual body types in the general population and compare these measurements to ADP (BOD POD®) as the standard. Field measurements include skinfolds (SKF), upper, lower, and whole body bioelectrical impedance (BI), waist and hip circumference ratios, body mass index calculations (BMI), and ADP. Our data indicate that BI is the least accurate measurement of body fat in males and females (paired t-tests of % body fat: BI vs. ADP, p0.05). However, preliminary data suggest female- specific SKF equations more accurately predict body fat in obese males than male-specific SKF equations. Given the current obesity trends, it is imperative to update these formulae to accurately reflect the current population.
Diabetic Ketoacidosis-Associated Stroke in Children and Youth

Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is a state of severe insulin deficiency, either absolute or relative, resulting in hyperglycemia and ketonemia. Although possibly underappreciated, up to 10% of cases of intracerebral complications associated with an episode of DKA, and/or its treatment, in children and youth are due to hemorrhage or ischemic brain infarction. Systemic inflammation is present in DKA, with resultant vascular endothelial perturbation that may result in coagulopathy and increased hemorrhagic risk. Thrombotic risk during DKA is elevated by abnormalities in coagulation factors, platelet activation, blood volume and flow, and vascular reactivity. DKA-associated cerebral edema may also predispose to ischemic injury and hemorrhage, though cases of stroke without concomitant cerebral edema have been identified. We review the current literature regarding the pathogenesis of stroke during an episode of DKA in children and youth.
Bridging the Evidence Gap in Obesity Prevention

About 68 percent of adults in the United States aged 20 years or older are either overweight or obese. Among children, the rate is nearly 32 percent. The obesity epidemic poses major challenges for policy makers, public health professionals, and other decision makers who need to act decisively to respond to this widespread health problem. To inform their decisions, they need relevant and useful evidence on promising obesity prevention actions for the populations they serve. In 2008, Kaiser Permanente asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to develop a practical, action-oriented framework to guide the use of evidence in decision making about obesity prevention policies and programs and to guide the generation of new and relevant evidence. The IOM convened a committee that sought the answers to two fundamental questions:
Self calibrating clocks for globally asynchronous locally synchronous systems

We present a local clocking mechanism based on a tunable delay line which calibrates itself from a low frequency global clock. After initial tuning, the local clock remains calibrated when environmental conditions change. Each module of a large system on a chip can use one of these clock generators running at the optimal frequency for the module. Communication between locally synchronous blocks is provided by a globally asynchronous interconnect. Reliable low latency communication between the asynchronous interconnect and a local clock domain is made possible by stretching the local clock if a metastable condition could be encountered. Stretching the clock just requires the rising clock edge to be prevented from entering the tuned delay line. Similarly, a sleep state can be entered by stopping the clock and wakeup is almost instantaneous. Fine grained sleeping is possible by sleeping whenever there is no work to be undertaken and waking up as soon as new data appears over the asynchronous interconnect.
Comparative In Vitro Susceptibility of Proteus Species Isolated from Clinical Specimens to Honey, Ciprofloxacin and Tetracycline

Comparative in vitro susceptibility of Proteus species isolated from clinical specimens to ciprofloxacin, tetracycline and honey was evaluated using standard microbiological techniques. Honey was diluted by percent volume per volume concentration of 100%(neat), 80%(v/v), 60%(v/v), 40% (v/v), 20% (v/v) and 10% (v/v) and its antimicrobial activity against Proteus species compared to ciprofloxacin and tetracycline. A honey concentration of 100% (neat) had the highest effect on Proteus species with a mean zone of inhibition of 28mm. Concentrations of 80%(v/v), 60%(v/v), 40% (v/v), and 20% yielded mean inhibition zones of 26mm, 23mm, 20mm, and 15mm respectively. Only four isolates gave inhibition zones at 20%(v/v) dilution. Tetracycline and ciprofloxacin inhibited Proteus species with comparatively lower mean zones of inhibition (15mm for tetracycline and 16mm for ciprofloxacin). The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of honey for 86.7% of the isolates was 40%(v/v) and for the remaining was 20%(v/v). The MBC values were the same for their MIC. This study reveals a significant level of susceptibility of Proteus species isolated from clinical specimens to honey, tetracycline and ciprofloxacin, with undiluted honey exhibiting comparatively higher zones of inhibition. It also revealed a high level of resistance to tetracycline by Proteus species isolated from automobile wounds. Further studies using uniform concentrations of the honey and the evaluated antibiotics may be necessary before honey may be considered a better treatment option.
A 3x blind ADC-based CDR

This paper uses a 3-bit ADC to blindly sample the received data at 3× the baud rate to recover the data. By moving from 2× to 3× sampling, we reduce the required ADC resolution from 5-bit to 3-bit, thereby reducing the overall power consumption by a factor of 2. Measurements from our fabricated test chip in Fujitsu's 65nm CMOS show a high frequency jitter tolerance of 0.19UIpp for a 5Gbps PRBS31 with a 16" FR4 channel.
Detecting Arabic spammers and content polluters on Twitter

Spam is thriving on Arabic Twitter. With a large online population, a mounting political unrest, and an undersized and unspecialized response effort, the current state of Arabic online social networks (OSNs) offers a perfect target for the spam industry, bringing both abuse and manipulation to the scene. The result is a ubiquitous spam presence that redefines the signal to noise ratio, and makes spam a de facto component of the online social platforms. English spam on online social networks has been heavily studied in the literature. To date however, social spam in other languages has been largely ignored. Our own analysis of spam content on Arabic trending hashtags in Saudi Arabia results in an estimate of about three quarters of the total generated content. This alarming rate, backed by independent concurrent estimates, makes the development of adaptive spam detection techniques a very real and pressing need. In this study, we present a first attempt at detecting accounts that promote spam and content pollution on Arabic Twitter. Using a large crawled dataset of more than 23 million Arabic tweets, and a manually labeled sample of more than 5000 tweets, we analyze the spam content on Saudi Twitter, and assess the performance of previous spam detection features on our recently gathered dataset. We also adapt the previously proposed features to respond to spammers evading techniques, and use these features to build a new highly accurate data-driven detection system.
Copy Number Variants in German Patients with Schizophrenia

Large rare copy number variants (CNVs) have been recognized as significant genetic risk factors for the development of schizophrenia (SCZ). However, due to their low frequency (1∶150 to 1∶1000) among patients, large sample sizes are needed to detect an association between specific CNVs and SCZ. So far, the majority of genome-wide CNV analyses have focused on reporting only CNVs that reached a significant P-value within the study cohort and merely confirmed the frequency of already-established risk-carrying CNVs. As a result, CNVs with a very low frequency that might be relevant for SCZ susceptibility are lost for secondary analyses. In this study, we provide a concise collection of high-quality CNVs in a large German sample consisting of 1,637 patients with SCZ or schizoaffective disorder and 1,627 controls. All individuals were genotyped on Illumina's BeadChips and putative CNVs were identified using QuantiSNP and PennCNV. Only those CNVs that were detected by both programs and spanned ≥30 consecutive SNPs were included in the data collection and downstream analyses (2,366 CNVs, 0.73 CNVs per individual). The genome-wide analysis did not reveal a specific association between a previously unknown CNV and SCZ. However, the group of CNVs previously reported to be associated with SCZ was more frequent in our patients than in the controls. The publication of our dataset will serve as a unique, easily accessible, high-quality CNV data collection for other research groups. The dataset could be useful for the identification of new disease-relevant CNVs that are currently overlooked due to their very low frequency and lack of power for their detection in individual studies.
Many Is Better Than One: An Integration of Multiple Simple Strategies for Accurate Lung Segmentation in CT Images

Accurate lung segmentation is an essential step in developing a computer-aided lung disease diagnosis system. However, because of the high variability of computerized tomography (CT) images, it remains a difficult task to accurately segment lung tissue in CT slices using a simple strategy. Motived by the aforementioned, a novel CT lung segmentation method based on the integration of multiple strategies was proposed in this paper. Firstly, in order to avoid noise, the input CT slice was smoothed using the guided filter. Then, the smoothed slice was transformed into a binary image using an optimized threshold. Next, a region growing strategy was employed to extract thorax regions. Then, lung regions were segmented from the thorax regions using a seed-based random walk algorithm. The segmented lung contour was then smoothed and corrected with a curvature-based correction method on each axis slice. Finally, with the lung masks, the lung region was automatically segmented from a CT slice. The proposed method was validated on a CT database consisting of 23 scans, including a number of 883 2D slices (the number of slices per scan is 38 slices), by comparing it to the commonly used lung segmentation method. Experimental results show that the proposed method accurately segmented lung regions in CT slices.
Tacrolimus rescue therapy for severe respiratory failure in the anti-synthetase syndrome

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is the major determinant of morbidity and mortality in the anti‐synthetase syndrome (ASS). The therapeutic efficacy of corticosteroids for the ILD component is limited; hence, additional immunosuppressive and immunomodulatory therapies have been tried with a modicum of success in recent years. Tacrolimus, a calcineurin inhibitor, is one potential therapy. We describe four consecutive patients with ASS whom we treated with tacrolimus at a quaternary referral hospital in 2009–2013. All four patients had significant ILD, three had severe and progressive ILD, and two had been referred for consideration of lung transplantation. Tacrolimus use was associated with improvement in ILD in all four patients with a mean follow‐up of 3 years. Our case series adds further evidence to support the use of tacrolimus as salvage therapy for severe respiratory failure due to ILD in ASS, which may be associated with a dramatic and enduring response.
DERIVING IMPERATIVE CODE FROM FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMS PATRICE QUINTON , SANJAY RAJOPADHYE , DORAN WILDE

Alpha is a data parallel functional language which has the capability of specifying algorithms at a very high level. Our ultimate objective is to generate eecient parallel imperative code from an Alpha program. In this paper, we discuss the related problem of generating eecient single processor imperative code. Analysis techniques that were developed for the synthesis of systolic arrays are extended and adapted for the compilation of functional programming languages. We also demonstrate how a transformational methodology can be used as a compilation engine to transform an Alpha program to a sequential form. C{code is then generated using a straightforward pretty printer from the sequential form Alpha program. The C{code may then be compiled to eeciently execute the program. Derivation de code imperatif a partir d'un programme fonctionnel R esum e : Alpha est un langage fonctionnel a parall elisme de donn ees qui permet de sp eciier des algorithmes a un tr es haut niveau d'abstraction. Notre objectif ultime est de produire du code imp eratif parall ele eecace, a partir d'un programme Alpha. Dans ce rapport, nous traitons le probl eme, li e a cet objectif, d'engendrer du code imp eratif eecace pour un seul processeur. Les techniques d'analyse qui ont et e d evelopp ees pour la synth ese d'architectures systoliques sont etendues et adapt ees a la compilation de langages de programmation fonctionnels. Nous montrons aussi comment une m ethodologie transfor-mationnelle peut ^ etre utilis ee comme moteur de compilation pour passer d'un programme Alpha a une forme s equentielle. A partir de cette forme, on peut g en erer du code C a l'aide d'un simple pretty-printer. Ce code peut ^ etre compil e aan d'ex ecuter le programme de faa con eecace.
Event Generator Benchmarking for Proton Radiography Applications

We have benchmarked the QGSM code and event generators of the MARS and LAHET3 codes as potential candidates for high-energy programs to be used in simulations for the Proton Radiography (PRad) Project. We have compiled from the literature experimental data on spectra of particles emitted from proton-induced reactions at incident energies from 30 GeV to 70 GeV on different nuclei and have performed calculations for all reactions for which we found data with these three codes without any modifications and using only default parameters and standard inputs. Our results (514 plots) show that all three codes describe reasonably most of the studied reactions, though all of them should be further improved before becoming reliable tools for PRad. We present here our conclusions concerning the relative roles of different reaction mechanisms in the production of specific secondary particles. We comment on the strengths and weaknesses of QGSM, MARS, and LAHET3 and suggest further improvements to these codes and to other models.
Analytics : Applications in Crisis Management

In this paper, we introduce a web-enabled geovisual analytics approach to leveraging Twitter in support of crisis management. The approach is implemented in a map-based, interactive web application that enables information foraging and sensemaking using “tweet” indexing and display based on place, time, and concept characteristics. In this paper, we outline the motivation for the research, review selected background briefly, describe the web application we have designed and implemented, and discuss our planned next steps.
Indicators of unemployment and low-wage traps (Marginal effective tax rates on labour)

This paper presents results of an on-going joint European Commission / OECD project, aimed at monitoring the direct influence of tax and benefit instruments on household incomes. Indicators of financial work incentives are needed for identifying any undesired influences of taxes and social transfers on people's work decisions. At the same time, a central part of recent tax and benefit reform strategies has been to reduce reliance on welfare by â€œmaking work payâ€ , that is, to make work an economically attractive option relative to welfare. It is therefore desirable to monitor the effects of such policies as well as the potential for further reform.
A User-Centric Resource Sharing Architecture for Virtual Personal Computing

As innovative technologies like ubiquitous computing and grid computing continue to emerge and become more popular, the amount of resource available on them has come to an extreme extend. However, traditional provider-centric resource sharing architecture focuses on defining service interfaces so that users must know exactly where and how to explicitly ask for resources. This method can not satisfy user's personalized task requirements. To solve the problem, this paper puts forward a user- centric resource sharing architecture which called U- RSA. The U-RSA mainly focuses on abstracting the currently personal computing environment from user's perspective. This paper also discusses the key technologies of our architecture.