Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
XMM-Newton observation of the Lockman Hole - II. Spectral analysis

We present the results of the X-ray spectral analysis of the first deep X-ray survey with the XMM-Newton observa- tory during Performance Verification. The X-ray data of the Lockman Hole field and the derived cumulative source counts were reported by Hasinger et al. (2001). We restrict the analysis to the sample of 98 sources with more than 70 net counts (flux limit in the (0.5-7) keV band of 1:6 10 15 erg cm 2 s 1 ) of which 61 have redshift identification. We find no correlation between the spectral index and the intrinsic absorption column density NH and, for both the Type-1 and Type-2 AGN populations, we obtainh i' 2. The progressive hardening of the mean X-ray source spectrum with decreasing flux is essentially due to an increase in intrinsic absorption. The marked separation between the two AGN populations in several diagnostics diagrams, involving X-ray colour, X-ray flux, optical/near IR colour and optical brightness, is also a consequence of dierent absorption column densities and enables the classification of optically faint obscured AGN. The Type-2 and obscured AGN have weaker soft X-ray and optical fluxes and redder R K 0 colours. They follow the evolutionary tracks of their host galaxies in a color- redshift diagram. About 27% of the subsample with R K 0 colour are EROs (R K 0 5) and most of these 18 X-ray selected EROs contain an obscured AGN as revealed by their high X-ray-to-optical/near IR flux ratios. There are six sources in our sample with LX(0:5 10)> 10 44 erg s 1 and log(NH)> 10 22 cm 2 : which are likely Type-2 QSOs and we thus derive a density of69 objects of this class per square degree.
Visualization of Diffuse Centromeres with Centromere-Specific Histone H3 in the Holocentric Plant Luzula niveaw⃞

Although holocentric species are scattered throughout the plant and animal kingdoms, only holocentric chromosomes of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans have been analyzed with centromeric protein markers. In an effort to determine the holocentric structure in plants, we investigated the snowy woodrush Luzula nivea. From the young roots, a cDNA encoding a putative centromere-specific histone H3 (LnCENH3) was successfully isolated based on sequence similarity among plant CENH3s. The deduced amino acid sequence was then used to raise an anti-LnCENH3 antibody. Immunostaining clearly revealed the diffuse centromere-like structure that appears in the linear shape at prophase to telophase. Furthermore, it was shown that the amount of LnCENH3 decreased significantly at interphase. The polar side positioning on each chromatid at metaphase to anaphase also confirmed that LnCENH3 represents one of the centromere-specific proteins in L. nivea. These data from L. nivea are compared with those from C. elegans, and common features of holocentric chromosomes are discussed.
Incorporating Robustness Requirements Into Antiwindup Design

This paper treats the problem of synthesizing antiwindup compensators that are able to handle plant uncertainty in addition to controller saturation. The uncertainty considered is of the frequency-weighted additive type, often encountered in linear robust control theory, and representative of a wide variety of uncertainty encountered in practice. The main results show how existing linear matrix inequality based antiwindup synthesis algorithms can be modified to produce compensators that accommodate uncertainty better. Embedded within these results is the ever-present performance - robustness tradeoff. A remarkable feature is that the often criticized internal model control antiwindup solution emerges as an ldquooptimally robustrdquo solution. A simple example demonstrates the effectiveness of the modified algorithms.
Progression of Congestive Heart Failure : Relation to Ventricular and Myocyte Function Time-Dependent Changes in Matrix Metalloproteinase Activity and Expression During the

The development of congestive heart failure (CHF) is associated with left ventricular (LV) dilation and myocardial remodeling. However, fundamental mechanisms that contribute to this remodeling process with the progression of CHF remain unclear. The matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) have been demonstrated to play a significant role in tissue remodeling in a number of pathological processes. The present project tested the hypothesis that the LV dilation and remodeling during the progression of CHF is associated with early changes in MMP expression and zymographic activity. LV and myocyte function, collagen content, and MMP expression and zymographic activity were serially measured during the progression of CHF caused by pacing-induced supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) in pigs. After 7 days of SVT, LV end-diastolic dimension and myocyte length both increased by 15% from control values, and LV fractional shortening fell by 20%. At the level of the myocyte, percent shortening fell by 16% after 7 days of SVT, with no change in the steady-state velocity of shortening. Longer durations of SVT caused progressive LV dilation, LV pump failure, and myocyte contractile dysfunction. Specifically, 21 days of SVT resulted in a . 50% increase in LV dimension, a 56% fall in LV fractional shortening, and a 33% decline in myocyte velocity of shortening. The decline in LV and myocyte function with 21 days of SVT was accompanied by signs and symptoms of CHF. Thus, SVT causes time-dependent changes in LV geometry and function and the subsequent development of CHF. LV myocardial collagen content and confluence fell by . 25% after 7 days of SVT and were accompanied by an 80% increase in LV myocardial MMP zymographic activity against the substrate gelatin. After 14 days of SVT, total LV myocardial collagen content was reduced by 24%, and LV myocardial MMP zymographic activity increased by . 100% from control values. Interstitial collagenase (MMP-1), stromelysin (MMP-3), and 72-kD gelatinase (MMP-2) were increased by '2-fold after 7 days of SVT. LV MMP zymographic activity and abundance remained elevated with longer durations of SVT. The results of the present study demonstrated that in this model of CHF, early changes in LV myocardial MMP zymographic activity and protein levels occurred with the initiation and progression of LV dilation and dysfunction. These findings suggest that an early contributory mechanism for the initiation of LV remodeling that occurred in this model of developing CHF is enhanced expression and potentially increased activity of LV myocardial MMPs. (Circ Res. 1998;82:482-495.)
Graph cut-based fast texture synthesis with CUDA

This paper presents a graph cut-based fast texture synthesis algorithm which utilizes CUDA to greatly accelerate the synthesis speed. The whole sample serves as a patch and is laid into the synthesized image repeatedly to build the final texture, and graph cut is used to determine the optimal patch boundaries. To speed up the synthesis speed, the patch locations are only selected based on a small set, which consists of some optimal relative offsets between two patches and is constructed in the preprocessing step. The matching errors during patch selection are also estimated without much computation from the information provided by this step. The graph cut algorithm is implemented every time a patch is laid, resulting in its becoming the bottleneck of the synthesis process. This problem is solved by virtue of the CUDA implementation of the maxflow/mincut algorithm. Graph construction and the preprocessing step are also accelerated with CUDA. The speed of the synthesis is several to dozens of times faster than the traditional algorithm without GPU acceleration.
Study on optimal design for two DOF parallel ankle joint mechanism of a biped robot

After analyzing the motion mechanism of human ankle, a new type of two DOF parallel ankle joint mechanism for a biped robot is designed in this paper. The parameterized model of the mechanism was established, of which the kinematic and dynamic analysis are also given. According to the dynamic characteristics of the ankle joint during walking, we optimize the structure parameters of the parallel mechanism through iterative calculation, which makes the driving peak power and speed of the two driving elements of the ankle joint tend to be equal to each other. Through the analysis of the experimental results for the biped robot's ankle joint motion, it shows that the peak-power used to drive parallel ankle joints is only about half of that used to drive serial joints. Based on the premise that the dynamic characteristic of biped robot ankle joints during walking are satisfied, it is beneficial to the reduction of bulk, weight and the energy consumption of the joints by using lower-power drivers.
In vivo analysis of the Hsp90 cochaperone Sti1 (p60)

Hsp90 interacts with Sti1 (p60) in lysates of yeast and vertebrate cells. Here we provide the first analysis of their interaction in vivo. Saccharomyces cerevisiae mutations that eliminate Sti1 or reduce intracellular concentrations of Hsp90 individually have little or no effect on growth at normal temperatures. However, when combined, the mutations greatly reduce or eliminate growth. Furthermore, overexpression of Sti1 has allele-specific effects on cells carrying various hsp90ts point mutations. These genetic interactions provide strong evidence that Hsp90 and Sti1 interact in vivo and that their functions are closely allied. Indeed, deletion of STI1 reduces the in vivo activity of the Hsp90 target protein, glucocorticoid receptor (GR). Mutations in GR that eliminate interaction with Hsp90 also eliminate the effects of the sti1 deletion. Examination of GR protein complexes in the sti1 deletion mutant reveals a selective increase in the concentration of GR-Ydj1 complexes, supporting previous hypotheses that Ydj1 functions at an early step in the maturation of GR and that Sti1 acts at an intermediate step. Deletion of STI1 also reduces the in vivo activity of another, unrelated Hsp90 target protein, v-Src. Our data indicate that Sti1 is a general factor in the maturation of Hsp90 target proteins and support earlier suggestions that Hsp90 matures even very different target proteins by a similar mechanism.
“What's Age Got to do With It, Got to do With It?” Midcareer College Teachers’ Experiences in the Classroom

Abstract Based on a qualitative analysis of 38 interviews with midcareer professors at liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, this paper describes the teaching experiences of professors after 20-some years in the classroom. As a result of getting older and becoming more seasoned instructors, individuals cited an increase in their skill and efficiency in the classroom, better in-class performance, and more authority and respect among students. At the same time, respondents identified challenges that they viewed as unique to midcareer professors, including adjusting to a “new breed of students,” trying to hold on to the sacred classroom when institutional pressures pull them toward service and leadership, and balancing teaching with taking care of aging parents.
Human Performance on Hard Non-Euclidean Graph Problems: Vertex Cover

Recent studies on a computationally hard visual optimization problem, the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP), indicate that humans are capable of finding close to opti mal solutions in near-linear time. The current study is a preliminary step in investigating human performance on another hard problem, the Minimum Vertex Cover Problem, in which solvers attempt to find a smallest set of vertices that ensures that every edge in an undirected graph is incident with at least one of the selected vertices. We identify appropriate measures of performance, examine features of problem instances that impact performance, and describe strategies typically employed by participants to solve instances of the Vertex Cover problem.
XML tag information management system: a workbench for ontology-based knowledge acquisition and integration

In this paper, we propose an integrated information management system in which ontology-based knowledge integration and XML-based text/data retrieval are combined using tag information and ontology management tools. The main purpose of the system is to implement a query answering system for XML-based documents in the domain of molecular biology. The aim is to provide efficient access to heterogeneous biological and genomic textual data and databases, enabling users to use a wide range of textual and non-textual resources effortlessly. Our system includes automatic term recognition, context-based automatic term clustering, ontology-based inference, and intelligent tag information retrieval. Through further description of the implementation and architecture of the system, we will demonstrate how the system can accelerate knowledge integration on the textual and non-textual resources even for novice users of the field.
Reliability Analysis of Highly Redundant Distributed Storage Systems with Dynamic Refuging

In recent data centres, large-scale storage systems storing big data comprise thousands of large-capacity drives. Our goal is to establish a method for building highly reliable storage systems using more than a thousand low-cost large-capacity drives. Some large-scale storage systems protect data by erasure coding to prevent data loss. As the redundancy level of erasure coding is increased, the probability of data loss will decrease, but the increase in normal data write operation and additional storage for coding will be incurred. We therefore need to achieve high reliability at the lowest possible redundancy level. There are two concerns regarding reliability in large-scale storage systems: (i) as the number of drives increases, systems are more subject to multiple drive failures and (ii) distributing stripes among many drives can speed up the rebuild time but increase the risk of data loss due to multiple drive failures. These concerns were not addressed in prior quantitative reliability studies based on realistic settings. In this work, we analyze the reliability of large-scale storage systems with distributed stripes, focusing on an effective rebuild method which we call Dynamic Refuging. Dynamic Refuging rebuilds failed storage areas from those with the lowest redundancy and strategically selects blocks to read for repairing lost data. We modeled the dynamically changing amount of storage at each redundancy level due to multiple drive failures, and performed reliability analysis with Monte Carlo simulation using realistic drive failure characteristics. When stripes with redundancy level 3 were sufficiently distributed and rebuilt by Dynamic Refuging, we found that the probability of data loss decreased by two orders of magnitude for systems with 384 or more drives compared to normal RAID. This technique turned out to scale well, and a system with 1536 inexpensive drives attained lower data loss probability than RAID 6 with 16 enterprise-class drives.
Diversifying Top-k Service Retrieval

As more and more applications are based on SOA (service oriented architecture), effective service discovery is an urgent requirement for such service applications in the cloud environment. Some existing work focus on taking service content as text and using document search technique to implement service discovery. However services are designed to implement some specific functions or objectives, which leads to the underlying "topic" or "semantic" of services. In this paper, we study the top-k service retrieval problem from both the text perspective and the semantic aspect, which is to find a set of k services that can best answer a query and the result set is to balance between the content relevance and the topic diversity among the returned services. Both service content and service topic are considered to identify the candidate services. We propose the objective function which is sub-modular, and we design the search algorithm with a approximation guarantee of factor 1 - 1/e for the (best-first) greedy search algorithm. Experiments on a large TREC benchmark and services collection show the effectiveness of our approach.
Automatic sense disambiguation for acronyms

A machine learning methodology for the disambiguation of acronym senses is presented, which starts from an acronym sense dictionary. Training data is automatically extracted from downloaded documents identified from the results of search engine queries. Leave-one-out cross-validation on 9,963 documents with 47 acronym forms achieves accuracy 92.58% and Fß=1=91.52%.
Sensitivity of optimal controls for time delay parabolic systems

The first order sensitivity analysis is performed for a class of optimal control problems for time delay parabolic equations in which retarded arguments appear in the integral form with h ϵ (0,6). The optimality system is analyzed with the respect to a small parameter. The directional derivative of the optimal control is obtained as a solution to an auxiliary optimization problem. The control constraints for the auxilary optimization problem are received.
Dissociation of Frontotemporal Dementia–Related Deficits and Neuroinflammation in Progranulin Haploinsufficient Mice

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative disease with hallmark deficits in social and emotional function. Heterozygous loss-of-function mutations in GRN, the progranulin gene, are a common genetic cause of the disorder, but the mechanisms by which progranulin haploinsufficiency causes neuronal dysfunction in FTD are unclear. Homozygous progranulin knock-out (Grn−/−) mice have been studied as a model of this disorder and show behavioral deficits and a neuroinflammatory phenotype with robust microglial activation. However, homozygous GRN mutations causing complete progranulin deficiency were recently shown to cause a different neurological disorder, neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis, suggesting that the total absence of progranulin may have effects distinct from those of haploinsufficiency. Here, we studied progranulin heterozygous (Grn+/−) mice, which model progranulin haploinsufficiency. We found that Grn+/− mice developed age-dependent social and emotional deficits potentially relevant to FTD. However, unlike Grn−/− mice, behavioral deficits in Grn+/− mice occurred in the absence of gliosis or increased expression of tumor necrosis factor-α. Instead, we found neuronal abnormalities in the amygdala, an area of selective vulnerability in FTD, in Grn+/− mice. Our findings indicate that FTD-related deficits resulting from progranulin haploinsufficiency can develop in the absence of detectable gliosis and neuroinflammation, thereby dissociating microglial activation from functional deficits and suggesting an important effect of progranulin deficiency on neurons.
High Flow Conditions Increase Connexin43 Expression in a Rat Arteriovenous and Angioinductive Loop Model

Gap junctions are involved in vascular growth and their expression pattern is modulated in response to hemodynamic conditions. They are clusters of intercellular channels formed by connexins (Cx) of which four subtypes are expressed in the cardiovascular system, namely Cx37, Cx40, Cx43 and Cx45. We hypothesize that high flow conditions affect vascular expression of Cx in vivo. To test this hypothesis, flow hemodynamics and subsequent changes in vascular expression of Cx were studied in an angioinductive rat arteriovenous (AV) loop model. Fifteen days after interposition of a femoral vein graft between femoral artery and vein encased in a fibrin-filled chamber strong neovascularization was evident that emerged predominantly from the graft. Blood flow through the grafted vessel was enhanced ∼4.5-fold accompanied by increased pulsatility exceeding arterial levels. Whereas Cx43 protein expression in the femoral vein is negligible at physiologic flow conditions as judged by immunostaining its expression was enhanced in the endothelium of the venous graft exposed to these hemodynamic changes for 5 days. This was most likely due to enhanced transcription since Cx43 mRNA increased likewise, whereas Cx37 mRNA expression remained unaffected and Cx40 mRNA was reduced. Although enhanced Cx43 expression in regions of high flow in vivo has already been demonstrated, the arteriovenous graft used in the present study provides a reliable model to verify an association between Cx43 expression and high flow conditions in vivo that was selective for this Cx. We conclude that enhancement of blood flow and its oscillation possibly associated with the transition from laminar to more turbulent flow induces Cx43 expression in a vein serving as an AV loop. It is tempting to speculate that this upregulation is involved in the vessel formation occuring in this model as Cx43 was suggested to be involved in angiogenesis.
An α-stable approach to the study of the P(D) distribution of unresolved point sources in CMB sky maps

We present a new approach to the statistical study and modelling of number counts of faint point sources in astro- nomical images, i.e. counts of sources whose flux falls below the detection limit of a survey. The approach is based on the theory of α-stable distributions. We show that the non-Gaussian distribution of the intensity fluctuations produced by a generic point source population - whose number counts follow a simple power law - belongs to the α-stable family of distributions. Even if source counts do not follow a simple power law, we show that the α-stable model is still useful in many astrophysical scenarios. With the α-stable model it is possible to totally describe the non-Gaussian distribution with a few parameters which are closely related to the parameters describing the source counts, instead of an infinite number of moments. Using statisti- cal tools available in the signal processing literature, we show how to estimate these parameters in an easy and fast way. We demonstrate that the model proves valid when applied to realistic point source number counts at microwave frequencies. In the case of point extragalactic sources observed at CMB frecuencies, our technique is able to successfully fit the P(D) distribution of deflections and to precisely determine the main parameters which describe the number counts. In the case of the Planck mission, the relative errors on these parameters are small either at low and at high frequencies. We provide a way to deal with the presence of Gaussian noise in the data using the empirical characteristic function of the P(D). The formalism and methods here presented can be very useful also for experiments in other frequency ranges, e.g. X-ray or radio Astronomy.
On the selection of fitness landscape analysis metrics for continuous optimization problems

Selecting the best algorithm for a given optimization problem is non-trivial due to large number of existing algorithms and high complexity of problems. A possible way to tackle this challenge is to attempt to understand the problem complexity. Fitness Landscape Analysis (FLA) metrics are widely used techniques to extract characteristics from problems. Based on the extracted characteristics, machine learning methods are employed to select the optimal algorithm for a given problem. Therefore, the accuracy of the algorithm selection framework heavily relies on the choice of FLA metrics. Although researchers have paid great attention to designing FLA metrics to quantify the problem characteristics, there is still no agreement on which combination of FLA metrics should be employed. In this paper, we present some well-performed FLA metrics, discuss their contributions and limitations in detail, and map each FLA metric to the captured problem characteristics. Moreover, computational complexity of each FLA metric is carefully analysed. We propose two criteria to follow when selecting FLA metrics. We hope our work can help researchers identify the best combination of FLA metrics.