Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exchange interaction of two spin qubits mediated by a superconductor

Entangling two quantum bits by letting them interact is the crucial requirement for building a quantum processor. For qubits based on the spin of the electron, these two qubit gates are typically performed by exchange interaction of the electrons captured in two nearby quantum dots. Since the exchange interaction relies on tunneling of the electrons, the range of interaction for conventional approaches is severely limited as the tunneling amplitude decays exponentially with the length of the tunneling barrier. Here, we present an approach to couple two spin qubits via a superconducting coupler. In essence, the superconducting coupler provides a tunneling barrier for the electrons which can be tuned with exquisite precision. We show that as a result exchange couplings over a distance of several microns become realistic, thus enabling flexible designs of multiqubit systems.
A connectionist language generator

Connectionism has been gaining ground as a psychological modelling technique annd shows great promise as a way to build fast, robust systems to perform intelligent tasks. Connectionism contrasts with the older tradition, that of explaining intelligent behaviour in terms of the manipulation of complex symbol structures. Without expecting either style of research to be exclusively correct, it is still important to seek out the relative strenghts and weaknesses of each. The partisans of the two camps have taken-up the challenge; the controversy has been fierce, as befits the prize-acceptance as the best technique for understanding people and building intelligent systems. Language, the quintessential human activity, is often used as a touchstone for the two approaches. The traditional approach views language as composed of symbols and language use as the manipulatoin of symbol structures. Connectionists have largely conceded to this, accepting the idea of structure as an essential component of language. This text calls into question this common assumption, that "structure is necessary for language modelling", by presenting a generator which produces appropriate natural language utterances without building structures along the way. It backs up this demonstration by an analysis of the generation task, which leads to the conclusion that massively parallel computation and numeric combination of evidence are, in fact intrinsically necessary for generation, and that, conversely, structure building is computationally awkward.
Benchmarking process formalization and a case study

Aims to formalize the benchmarking process by proposing methods and tools for the steps of the process. Focuses on the first two phases of the benchmarking process: measurement and self analysis (phase 1), and determination of subject and partners of a benchmarking study (phase 2). For this purpose, related to the first phase, a method of diagnosis is employed. In the second phase, three different data analysis methods (lexical analysis, principal components analysis and common factor analysis) are utilized. These two phases serve the purpose of an internal benchmarking (comparison between different domains of activities in the enterprise) and of an external benchmarking study (comparison between different enterprises). Three enterprises are selected for the benchmarking application. Related data are collected and analyzed, and results are reported.
Research on corona inception electric-field strength and critical electric-field values for valve hall fittings

Valve hall fittings' corona characteristics, corona inception electric-field strength and the critical electric-field values are the key factors to consider while designing fittings. Furthermore, the characteristics and value have guiding significance for engineering application. However it is difficult to obtain electric-field strength by theoretical calculation as there are varied types of valve hall fittings with irregular and complex shapes. This paper adopted the research method of combining DC corona test with FEM (finite element method) calculation. Spherical electrodes were tested with a wide range of diameter, thus corona inception voltage and corona characteristic curve of spherical electrode with diameter from 33 to 1000mm was obtained. Based on the corona electric field FEM simulation with the inception voltage as an input, a formula similar to Peek formula and the change regulation of corona inception electric-field strength with electrode diameter were obtained. The article consulted China's national standard modification of fittings' discharge voltage and actual size of fittings in valve hall, and consequently proposed the differentiated critical electric-field values for various fittings. The critical electric-field value is 2000V·mm-1, when the fittings' equivalent diameter is below 200mm, e.g. valve tower shield and arrester grading ring, and for fittings with equivalent diameter above 200mm, e.g. shield ball, bushing shield, the value is 1200V·mm-1. The research method and conclusion of the article will provide a reference for designing fittings.
The Stability of the Credit Supply in the Globalized Banking Sector Environment: The Case of the EU New Member States-10

The influence of foreign banks on a host country's lending depends on several factors, including the policy of the parent bank, the strategy of entry, economic cycles in the home country and abroad, growth prospects, the indebtedness of commitments and the capital adequacy of the parent bank. During the most recent economic crisis, the credit supply of foreign banks in the 10 new European Union (EU) Member States has not remained stable in the crisis. More specifically, we find evidence that foreign banks have cut the credit supply slightly in the new EU Member States.
Sources and significance of variation in basal, summit and maximal metabolic rates in birds

The rates at which birds use energy may have profound effects on fitness, thereby influencing physiology, behavior, ecology and evolution. Comparisons of standardized metabolic rates (e.g., lower and upper limits of metabolic power output) present a method for elucidating the effects of ecological and evolutionary factors on the interface between physiology and life history in birds. In this paper we review variation in avian metabolic rates [basal metabolic rate (BMR; minimum normothermic metabolic rate), summit metabolic rate (Msum; maximal thermoregulatory metabolic rate), and maximal metabolic rate (MMR; maximal exercise metabolic rate)], the factors associated with this variation, the evidence for functional links between these metabolic traits, and the ecological and evolutionary significance of avian metabolic diversity. Both lower and upper limits to metabolic power production are phenotypically flexible traits, and vary in association with numerous ecological and evolutionary factors. For both interand intraspecific comparisons, lower and upper limits to metabolic power production are generally upregulated in response to energetically demanding conditions and downregulated when energetic demands are relaxed, or under conditions of energetic scarcity. Positive correlations have been documented between BMR, Msum and MMR in some, but not all studies on birds, providing partial support for the idea of a functional link between lower and upper limits to metabolic power production, but more intraspecific studies are needed to determine the robustness of this conclusion. Correlations between BMR and field metabolic rate (or daily energy expenditure) in birds are variable, suggesting that the linkage between these traits is subject to behavioral adjustment, and studies of the relationship between field and maximal metabolic rates are lacking. Our understanding of avian metabolic diversity would benefit from future studies of: (1) the functional and mechanistic links between lower and upper limits of metabolic power output; (2) the environmental and ecological cues driving phenotypically flexible metabolic responses, and how responses to such cues might impact population responses to climate change; (3) the shapes of metabolic reaction norms and their association with environmental variability; and (4) the relationship of metabolic variation to fitness, including studies of repeatability and heritability of minimum and maximum metabolic power output [Current Zoology 56 (6):
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY REPORTING IN AUSTRALIA'S LARGEST COMPANIES

As organizations have recognized the need to address the expectations of a wider group of stakeholders, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting has become an increasingly important issue for business. During the last decade the volume of CSR reporting has increased markedly and the concept has attracted corresponding levels of academic and media attention. Alongside this growth in activity, a number of reporting frameworks have been created to provide templates against which companies can report their initiatives. This paper reports on a research project that examined the CSR reporting of the top 100 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX100) using 2006 company annual reports. The reports are evaluated against core elements of the UN Global Compact and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework. The article summarises the overall pattern of CSR reporting in the ASX100 as well as level of reporting in different industry categories and around broad environmental and social issues. The latter includes a significant number of human resources (HR) and equity issues.
Hybrid Cooperative Positioning in Harsh Environments

Hybrid cooperative positioning involves the combination of satellite pseudoranges with measurements based on terrestrial radio signals, with the aim to improve both coverage and accuracy. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of hybrid cooperative positioning in low signal-to-noise ratio environments, explicitly accounting for scenarios where receivers can receive signals but cannot decode navigation messages. We propose an extended pseudorange model, suitable for evaluation of measurements made by the receiver in these scenarios, as well as extended cooperation across agents attempting to enable satellite navigation functionality of receivers operating below signal-to-noise ratio threshold required for proper message decoding. The advantages of such extended cooperation are illustrated on a realistic scenario by means of the Cramer-Rao lower bound.
Microglial Apoptosis Induced by Chromogranin A Is Mediated by Mitochondrial Depolarisation and the Permeability Transition but Not by Cytochrome c Release

Abstract: Chromogranin A is up‐regulated in the senile plaques of Alzheimer's brain and is a novel activator of microglia, transforming them to a neurotoxic phenotype. Treatment of primary cultures of rat brain microglia or the murine N9 microglial cell line with chromogranin A resulted in nitric oxide production, which triggered microglial apoptosis. Exposure of microglia to chromogranin A resulted in a fall in mitochondrial membrane potential. Mitochondrial depolarisation and apoptosis were reduced significantly by cyclosporin A, but not by the calcineurin inhibitor FK506. Cytochrome c did not translocate from the mitochondria to the cytosol, but its expression became significantly enhanced within the mitochondria. Inhibition of caspase 1 attenuated chromogranin A‐induced microglial apoptosis, but did not prevent mitochondrial depolarisation, indicating that apoptosis occurred downstream of mitochondrial depolarisation. Conversely, staurosporine‐induced microglial apoptosis led to mitochondrial cytochrome c release, but not caspase 1 activation. Our findings provide insight into the pathways controlling activation‐triggered microglial apoptosis and may point to routes for the modulation of microglial evoked neurotoxicity.
ANABOLIC-ANDROGENIC STEROID EFFECTS ON ACUTE & CHRONIC NOCICEPTION AND MORPHINE ANTINOCICEPTION

by Kimberly T. Tsutsui, M.S. Washington State University May 2010 Chair: Rebecca. M. Craft Use of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) has been anecdotally associated with pain reduction as well as opioid abuse. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of AAS on nociception and morphine antinociception in acute pain models, as well as on chronic nociception in an arthritis model, in adult male Sprague-Dawley rats. Rats were injected s.c. for 28 days with either 5 mg/kg dihydrotestosterone proprionate (DHT), testosterone proprionate (T), or stanozolol proprionate (STAN), or safflower oil vehicle (N=16-20/group). Half of the rats in each group were tested on acute thermal and mechanical nociceptive assays on day 28, without and then with morphine. The other half of the rats in each group were injected with mineral oil or complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA) into one hindpaw, and then tested for thermal hyperalgesia, mechanical allodynia, inflammation and locomotor suppression intermittently for 28 days. Body weight was recorded at least weekly, and reproductive organs were harvested on the last day of testing. While AAS affected body weight and reproductive organ weights in a mostly expected manner, AAS did not significantly alter acute nociception nor did they significantly attenuate the development of various pain parameters after administration v of CFA. Further, morphine antinociception was only modulated by DHT, only on the hotplate test, and in the opposite direction to what was predicted: rather than potentiating morphine antinociception, DHT decreased morphine potency. The findings of this study have produced results that conflict with many past findings of experiments that utilized gonadectomized subjects, implicating a need for further pain studies done in gonadally intact subjects that more accurately model human AAS users.
Reovirus variants selected during persistent infections of L cells contain mutations in the viral S1 and S4 genes and are altered in viral disassembly

Reoviruses isolated from persistently infected cultures (PI viruses) can grow in the presence of ammonium chloride, a weak base that blocks acid-dependent proteolysis of viral outer-capsid proteins during viral entry into cells. We used reassortant viruses isolated from crosses of wild-type (wt) reovirus strain, type 1 Lang, and three independent PI viruses, L/C, PI 2A1, and PI 3-1, to identify viral genes that segregate with the capacity of PI viruses to grow in cells treated with ammonium chloride. Growth of reassortant viruses in ammonium chloride-treated cells segregated with the S1 gene of L/C and the S4 gene of PI 2A1 and PI 3-1. The S1 gene encodes viral attachment protein sigma1, and the S4 gene encodes outer-capsid protein sigma3. To identify mutations in sigma3 selected during persistent reovirus infection, we determined the S4 gene nucleotide sequences of L/C, PI 2A1, PI 3-1, and four additional PI viruses. The deduced amino acid sequences of sigma3 protein of six of these PI viruses contained a tyrosine-to-histidine substitution at residue 354. To determine whether mutations selected during persistent infection alter cleavage of the viral outer capsid, the fate of viral structural proteins was assessed by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis after treatment of virions of wt and PI viruses with chymotrypsin in vitro. Proteolysis of PI virus outer-capsid proteins sigma3 and mu1C occurred with faster kinetics than proteolysis of wt virus outer-capsid proteins. These results demonstrate that mutations in either the S1 or S4 gene alter acid-dependent disassembly of the reovirus outer capsid and suggest that increased efficiency of proteolysis of viral outer-capsid proteins is important for maintenance of persistent reovirus infections of cultured cells.
Link Analysis Based on Rhetorical Relations for Multi-Document Summarization

This paper presents link analysis based on rhetorical relations with the aim of performing extractive summarization for multiple documents. We first extracted sentences with salient terms from individual document using statistical model. We then ranked the extracted sentences by measuring their relative importance according to their connectivity among the sentences in the document set using PageRank based on the rhetorical relations. The rhetorical relations were examined beforehand to determine which relations are crucial to this task, and the relations among sentences from documents were automatically identified by SVMs. We used the relations to emphasize important sentences during sentence ranking by PageRank and eliminate redundancy from the summary candidates. Our framework omits fully annotated sentences by humans and the evaluation results show that the combination of PageRank along with rhetorical relations does help to improve the quality of extractive summarization. key words: probability model, N-grams, link-based analysis, support vector machine, rhetorical relation
Evaluation of hybrid GSC-based and ASSB-based beamforming methods applied to ultrasound imaging

Supervisory Committee Dr. Daler Rakhmatov, Department of Electrical and C omputer Engineering Supervisor Dr. Panajotis Agathoklis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Departmental Member The application of adaptive beamforming to biomedic al ultrasound imaging has been an active research area in recent years. Adaptive b eamforming techniques have the capability of achieving excellent resolution and si elobe suppression, thus improving the quality of the ultrasound images. This quality impr ovement, however, comes at a high computational cost. The work presented in this thes is aims to answer the following basic question: Can we reduce the computational complexit y of adaptive beamforming without a significant degradation of the image quality? Ou r objective is to explore a combination of low-complexity non-adaptive beamforming, such as the conventional Delay-and-Sum (DAS) method, with high-complexity adaptive beamfor ming, such as the standard Minimum-Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) met hod implemented using the Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (GSC). Such a combin ation should have the lower computational complexity than adaptive beamforming, but it should also offer the image quality comparable to that obtained using adaptive beamforming. In addition to the adaptive GSC-based MVDR beamforming method, we also investigate the performance iv of the so-called Adaptive Single Snapshot Beamforme r (ASSB), which is relatively unexplored in the ultrasound imaging literature. The main idea behind our approach to combining a no n-adaptive beamformer with an adaptive one is based on the use of the dat a-dependent variable known as the coherence factor. The resulting hybrid beamforming method can be summarized as follows: For each input snapshot to be beamformed, calculate the corresponding coherence factor; if the coherence factor is below a certain threshold, use non-adaptive DAS beamforming, otherwise use adaptive (GSC-based or ASSB-based) beamforming. We have applied this simple switching scheme to the simulated B-mode ultrasound images of the 12-point and point-scatterer-cyst pha ntoms that are commonly used in the ultrasound imaging literature to evaluate the image quality. Our simulation results show that, in comparison to optimal high-complexity alwa ys-adaptive beamforming, our hybrid beamformer can yield significant computational savi ngs that range from 59% to 99%, while maintaining the image quality (measured in te rms of resolution and contrast) within a 5% degradation margin.
Responses of the entomopathogenic nematode, Steinernema riobrave to its insect hosts, Galleria mellonella and Tenebrio molitor

SUMMARY Potential hosts for infective juveniles of entomopathogenic nematodes can vary considerably in quality based on the characteristics of the host species/stage, physiological status (e.g. stress, feeding on toxins), and infection status (heterospecific or conspecific infection). In this study, we investigated responses of the entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema riobrave to hosts (Galleria mellonella or Tenebrio molitor) that were previously parasitized with conspecifics or injected with the nematode-symbiotic bacterium, Xenorhabdus sp. , to determine if there is a preference for previously parasitized/injected hosts and when this preference might occur. In no-choice bioassays, the number of juveniles infecting both host species decreased with increasing time post-infection. However, infective juveniles continued to infect previously parasitized hosts up to 72 h. Significant preference was exhibited by S. riobrave for 24 h post-infection G. mellonella larvae over uninfected, and by 24 h post-injection G. mellonella larvae over 48 h post-injection larvae. No significant preference was exhibited by S. riobrave for T. molitor hosts previously parasitized with conspecifics or those injected with bacteria in any treatment combination. Such preference for, or continued infection of parasitized insects, has the potential to impact nematode efficacy.
Plasma Proteomic Analysis of Pancreatic Cancer by 2-Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis

Objective: Late diagnosis is the major reason for poor prognosis of pancreatic cancer (PC). Developing new biomarkers of early stage detection is critical. Methods: Proteomic analysis with 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis was used to identify differentially expressed proteins in plasma of PC patients. The 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis plasma protein profiles of 11 PC patients (preoperative and postoperative) were compared with those of 10 patients with chronic pancreatitis (CP) and 11 healthy controls. Results: Five proteins were found to be constantly changed. Haptoglobin (Hp) &bgr; chain and leucine-rich &agr;2 glycoprotein up-regulated slightly in PC plasma. Pancreatic cancer had a higher frequency of Hp2-2 phenotype but lacked Hp1-1 phenotype. Hemoglobin was increased significantly in plasma samples of PC and CP. &agr;1 Antitrypsin gradually increased its expression level in healthy control, PC, and CP. Immunoglobin J chain was elevated in CP plasma samples. Haptoglobin, &agr;1 antitrypsin, and leucine-rich &agr;2-glycoprotein were all greatly elevated after tumor resection in PC patients. Conclusions: Proteomic analysis can simultaneously detect changes of multiproteins in plasma of PC, but detected proteins are abundant and common plasma proteins and their diagnostic value may be limited.Abbreviations: 2-DE - 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis, &agr;1-AT - &agr;1 antitrypsin, CP - chronic pancreatitis, Hb - hemoglobin, Hp - haptoglobin, Ig - immunoglobulin, LRG - leucine-rich &agr;2-glycoprotein, MS - mass spectrometry, PC - pancreatic cancer, SELDI-TOF - surface-enhanced laser desorption ionization time- of-flight, sIgA - secretory immumoglobin A
Bis(1,3-thiazol-2-aminium) hexachloridostannate(IV)

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, (C3H5N2S)2[SnCl6], contains one cation in a general position and one-half of the dianion situated on an inversion center. The geometry of the [SnCl6]2− dianion is almost regular octahedral. In the crystal, weak N—H⋯Cl and N—H⋯S hydrogen bonds and electrostatic forces link cations and anions into a three-dimensional framework.