Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patterned cracks in the buried oxide layer improve yield in device release from SOI wafers

Cracks patterned lithographically into the buried oxide (BOX) layer of silicon-on-insulator wafers were found to substantially improve yield in the release of ultrasoft silicon cantilevers. The BOX layer is useful as an etch stop and sacrificial layer in microfabrication. However, compressive stress in the BOX membrane can cause it to buckle and crack when released. These cracks can damage delicate structures in the device layer and reduce yield. Cracks were patterned into the BOX layer prior to avoid critical regions near or under devices; these patterned cracks reduced damage to devices from spontaneous cracks in the BOX layer and improved yield.
Aerosol–climate interactions in the Norwegian Earth System Model – NorESM1-M

Abstract. The objective of this study is to document and evaluate recent changes and updates to the module for aerosols and aerosol–cloud–radiation interactions in the atmospheric module CAM4-Oslo of the core version of the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM), NorESM1-M. Particular attention is paid to the role of natural organics, sea salt, and mineral dust in determining the gross aerosol properties as well as the anthropogenic contribution to these properties and the associated direct and indirect radiative forcing. The aerosol module is extended from earlier versions that have been published, and includes life-cycling of sea salt, mineral dust, particulate sulphate, black carbon, and primary and secondary organics. The impacts of most of the numerous changes since previous versions are thoroughly explored by sensitivity experiments. The most important changes are: modified prognostic sea salt emissions; updated treatment of precipitation scavenging and gravitational settling; inclusion of biogenic primary organics and methane sulphonic acid (MSA) from oceans; almost doubled production of land-based biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOA); and increased ratio of organic matter to organic carbon (OM/OC) for biomass burning aerosols from 1.4 to 2.6. Compared with in situ measurements and remotely sensed data, the new treatments of sea salt and dust aerosols give smaller biases in near-surface mass concentrations and aerosol optical depth than in the earlier model version. The model biases for mass concentrations are approximately unchanged for sulphate and BC. The enhanced levels of modeled OM yield improved overall statistics, even though OM is still underestimated in Europe and overestimated in North America. The global anthropogenic aerosol direct radiative forcing (DRF) at the top of the atmosphere has changed from a small positive value to −0.08 W m−2 in CAM4-Oslo. The sensitivity tests suggest that this change can be attributed to the new treatment of biomass burning aerosols and gravitational settling. Although it has not been a goal in this study, the new DRF estimate is closer both to the median model estimate from the AeroCom intercomparison and the best estimate in IPCC AR4. Estimated DRF at the ground surface has increased by ca. 60%, to −1.89 W m−2. We show that this can be explained by new emission data and omitted mixing of constituents between updrafts and downdrafts in convective clouds. The increased abundance of natural OM and the introduction of a cloud droplet spectral dispersion formulation are the most important contributions to a considerably decreased estimate of the indirect radiative forcing (IndRF). The IndRF is also found to be sensitive to assumptions about the coating of insoluble aerosols by sulphate and OM. The IndRF of −1.2 W m−2, which is closer to the IPCC AR4 estimates than the previous estimate of −1.9 W m−2, has thus been obtained without imposing unrealistic artificial lower bounds on cloud droplet number concentrations.
Privacy Enabled Digital Rights Management Without Trusted Third Party Assumption

Digital rights management systems are required to provide security and accountability without violating the privacy of the entities involved. However, achieving privacy along with accountability in the same framework is hard as these attributes are mutually contradictory. Thus, most of the current digital rights management systems rely on trusted third parties to provide privacy to the entities involved. However, a trusted third party can become malicious and break the privacy protection of the entities in the system. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving content distribution mechanism for digital rights management without relying on the trusted third party assumption. We use simple primitives such as blind decryption and one way hash chain to avoid the trusted third party assumption. We prove that our scheme is not prone to the “oracle problem” of the blind decryption mechanism. The proposed mechanism supports access control without degrading user's privacy as well as allows revocation of even malicious users without violating their privacy.
Implementation of scatterer size imaging on an ultrasonic breast tomography scanner

Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques make use of frequency-dependent information from backscattered echoes normally discarded in conventional B-mode imaging. Using scattering models and spectral fit methods, properties of tissue microstructure can be estimated. The use of full angular spatial compounding has been proposed as a means of improving the variance of scatterer property estimates and spatial resolution of QUS imaging. In this work, preliminary experimental results from a QUS implementation on an ultrasonic breast tomography scanner from TechniScan, Inc. are presented. The imaging target consisted of a cylindrical gelatin phantom of 7.8 cm diameter. The phantom contained uniformly distributed glass bead inclusions of 85 m mean diameter. The scanner provided reflection-mode data using arrays with 6 MHz nominal center frequency for 17 different angles of view distributed between 0° and 360°. Tomographic images of speed of sound were also generated by the scanner and used for refraction-compensation and registration of the effective scatterer diameter (ESD) estimates corresponding to ROIs at different angles of view. Only data from the surface of the array to the center of the tomography gantry were analyzed for each angle of view, which resulted in 8.5 effective angles of view per ROI. ESD estimates were obtained using ROIs of size 4 mm by 4 mm with a 50% overlap. The average mean and standard deviation of the single angle of view estimates considering the 17 data sets were 85.4 µm and 12.2 µm, respectively. The resulting ESD mean and standard deviation of the compounded image were 85.2 µm and 4.1 µm, respectively. The preliminary experimental results presented here represent the first implementation of QUS on an ultrasonic breast tomography scanner and demonstrate some of the benefits of integrating these technologies, i.e., the availability of full angular spatial compounding and integration with tomographic speed of sound images.
Perspectives on optimism within the context of project management: A call for multilevel research

While projects today are widely used in order to affect change, they have a remarkably high rate of failure as measured by delivery on time and budget, all too frequently failing to deliver expected benefits. Dominant project management theory explains this shortcoming in part with optimism bias and proposes several cures including the elimination the effects of optimism. However, alternative project management metaphors, such as project as temporary organization have emerged. Seen through this lens, many positive effects of optimism relating to goal selection and perseverance are highlighted. Thus, a genuine paradox emerges in research and practice. On the one hand optimism bias is recommended for eradication and on the other hand optimism is found to hold important benefits. I outline the different perspectives and show gaps in the literature and research to-date. I further suggest that future research on optimism in the context of project management be multilevel and multidisciplinary research. In particular social cognitive theory appears to be useful in order to explore both positive and negative effects of dispositional optimism on the failure of projects as temporary organizations.
Echelle d'intelligence de Wechsler pour adultes

De par la richesse des informations qu'elle permet de recueillir, la WAIS-III repond a diverses interrogations cliniques que rencontrent les professionnels evoluant dans les domaines de la psychologie, neuropsychologie, psychopathologie et du conseil en orientation. La WAIS-III est une echelle d'intelligence globale qui fournit un QI verbal, un QI performance et un QI total. Elle inclut quatre indices, cibles sur les capacites specifiques, qui permettent de depasser la notion generale de QI pour s'interesser au profil cognitif, aux ressources, aux points forts et points faibles des adultes evalues : - Indice de Comprehension Verbale (ICV) - Indice d'Organisation Perceptive (IOP) - Indice de Memoire de Travail (IMT) - Indice de Vitesse de Traitement (IVT). L'echelle est composee de14 subtests qui sont repartis en 2 echelles : ECHELLE VERBALE : Subtests de base : - Vocabulaire - Similitudes - Information - Arithmetique - Memoire des chiffres - Sequence lettres-chiffres Subtest supplementaire : - Comprehension. ECHELLE PERFORMANCE : Subtests de base : - Completement d'images - Cubes - Matrices - Codes - Symboles Subtests supplementaires : - Arrangement d'images - Assemblage d'objets. La WAIS-III est devenue un outil de reference internationale qui a considerablement enrichi la pratique clinique : * Dans l'evaluation des jeunes adultes et adultes tout-venants, la WAIS-III est utilisee pour la description du fonctionnement intellectuel en vue de l'orientation academique ou professionnelle la mieux adaptee au sujet. * Avec les populations de deficients mentaux (leger a modere), les Indices proposes revelent tout leur interet pratique en offrant la possibilite d'une passation plus souple et axee sur une ou deux dimensions en particulier. Ces donnees plus qualitatives apportent donc une precieuse contribution aux decisions d'orientation et de prise en charge dans les etablissements specialises (COTOREP, ESAT, AFPA, .). * Aupres des personnes âgees, cette batterie constitue une grande aide au depistage des troubles cognitifs et de la deterioration pathologique (deux indicateurs de deterioration mentale : methode de Wechsler et methode de Barona). Pour aider les chercheurs et cliniciens qui evaluent l'intelligence de patients inaptes a supporter une tâche standardisee longue, Jacques Gregoire et Claudine Wierzbicki ont determine une forme "abregee" qui permet d'estimer, avec la plus faible marge d'erreur possible, le QIfa (QI forme abregee) correspondant au QIT obtenu avec la forme complete de la WAIS-III. Cette etude est disponible sous la reference : J. Gregoire, C. Wierzbicki (2009) ; Comparaison de quatre formes abregees de l'echelle d'intelligence de Wechsler pour adultes. Revue Europeenne de Psychologie Appliquee, 59, 17-24. Application : adultes. Passation individuelle ; temps de passation : 1 heure 30 ; temps de correction : pendant la passation + 10 minutes.
Stochastic Motion of Bumps in Planar Neural Fields

We analyze the effects of spatiotemporal noise on stationary pulse solutions (bumps) in neural field equations on planar domains. Neural fields are integrodifferential equations whose integral kernel describes the strength and polarity of synaptic interactions between neurons at different spatial locations of the network. Fluctuations in neural activity are incorporated by modeling the system as a Langevin equation evolving on a planar domain. Noise causes bumps to wander about the domain in a purely diffusive way. Utilizing a small noise expansion along with a solvability condition, we can derive an effective stochastic equation describing the bump dynamics as two-dimensional Brownian motion. The diffusion coefficient can then be computed explicitly. We also show that weak external inputs can pin the bump so it no longer wanders diffusively. Inputs reshape the effective potential that guides the dynamics of the bump position, so it tends to lie near attractors which can be single points or contours in the plane. Perturbative analysis shows the bump position evolves as a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process whose relaxation constants are determined by the shape of the input. Our analytical approximations all compare well to statistics of bump motion in numerical simulations.
How Did Ethical Evaluation Work As a Mediator between Moral Intensity and Decision Making

IT professionals who were entitled to develop information technology required commitment with information ethics. When IT professionals facing unethical issues, how did the dominators of their ethical evaluations work between unethical issue with different moral intensity and their ethical intention? An individual’s ethical decisions are dominated by either deontological evaluation (DE) or teleological evaluation (TE). Using data collected from IT professionals who responded to three scenarios, we applied partial least squares in data analyses, resulting in the following findings. The moral intensity of an unethical action significantly influenced the teleological evaluation regarding organizational harm for IT professionals. The ethical decision of IT professionals was affected primarily by deontological evaluation. And temporal immediacy, one of the six indicators of moral intensity, showed the strongest effect on moral intensity with regard to the information ethical issues. Implications and managerial practices were then discussed.
Mouse bone marrow contains large numbers of functionally competent neutrophils

The mouse has become an important model for immunological studies including innate immunity. Creating transgenic mice offers unique possibilities to study gene‐function relationships. However, relatively little is known about the physiology of neutrophils from wild‐type mice. Do they behave like human neutrophils, or are there species‐specific differences that need to be considered when extrapolating results from mice to humans? How do we isolate neutrophils from mice? For practical reasons, many studies on mouse neutrophils are done with bone marrow cells. However, human bone marrow neutrophils appear to be heterogeneous and functionally immature. We have isolated and compared neutrophils from mouse bone marrow and from peripheral blood obtained by tail bleeding. Using the same Percoll® density gradient for both preparations, we have obtained morphologically mature neutrophils from bone marrow and blood. Both cell populations responded to formylmethionyl‐leucyl‐phenylalanine (fMLF) with primary and secondary granule release and superoxide production. Quantitative analysis of our data revealed minor differences between cells from bone marrow and blood. Superoxide production and primary granule release were stimulated at lower fMLF concentrations in blood neutrophils. However, the amplitude and the kinetics of maximal responses were similar. The principal difference was the lifespan of the two cell populations. Bone marrow cells survived significantly longer in culture, which may suggest that they are receiving antiapoptic signals that are absent in the blood. Our data suggest that mice have a large reservoir of functionally competent neutrophils in their bone marrow. This reservoir may be needed to replace circulating neutrophils rapidly during infection.
SAP Enables T Cells to Help B Cells by a Mechanism Distinct from Th Cell Programming or CD40 Ligand Regulation1

Genetic mutations disrupting the function of signaling lymphocytic activation molecule-associated protein (SAP) lead to T cell intrinsic defects in T cell-dependent Ab responses. To better understand how SAP enables Th cells to help B cells, we first assessed whether molecules important for B cell help are dysregulated in SAP-deficient (SAP knockout (KO)) mice. CD40 ligand (CD40L) expression was enhanced on unpolarized SAP KO T cells; however, Th2 polarization returned their CD40L expression to wild-type levels without rescuing their ability to help B cells. CD40L also localized normally to the site of contact between SAP KO T cells and Ag-bearing B cells. Finally, CD40L-deficient Th cells and SAP KO Th cells differed in their abilities to help B cells in vitro. These data argue that Ab defects caused by SAP deficiency do not result from a loss of CD40L regulation or CD40L function on CD4 T cells. SAP KO Th cells additionally displayed normal patterns of migration and expression of ICOS and CXCR5. Global gene expression was remarkably similar in activated SAP KO vs wild-type T cells, prompting us to investigate whether SAP is necessary for “programming” T cells to become B cell helpers. By restricting SAP expression during differentiation, we determined that SAP is not required during the first 5 days of T cell activation/differentiation to generate Th cells capable of helping B cells. Instead, SAP is necessary for very late stages of differentiation or, most likely, for allowing Th cells to communicate during cognate T:B interactions.
Parallelism in rendering algorithms

The need for increased computing power for rendering computer imagery is motivated and the sources from which it might de derived surveyed. Increased power can come from parallelism, as well as faster technology, implying new machine architectures and new algorithms. Surveys sketch early att~mpts at using available parallel architectures and look at the limitations and strengths of some existing architectures. Finally, potential parallel algorthms for the rendering process are sketched including rough analyses of potential performance bottlenecks.
Simulation based design of fuzzy wheel slide protection controller for rail vehicles

In this paper a method of designing the rule bases of fuzzy controllers for Wheel Slide Protection Systems (WSP) for rail vehicles is presented. In this method results of simulation of two reference controllers are used, both of which use signals which are nor available during normal operation of the systems, i.e. adhesion coefficient and translation velocity of the vehicle. Simulations have performed on a simulation model of a braked rail vehicle and controllers implemented in Matlab Simulink®. The proposed method makes possible automatization of the design process of WSP fuzzy controllers.
Identification of Cross-Reactive Peptides Using Combinatorial Libraries Circumvents Tolerance against Her-2/neu-Immunodominant Epitope1

The majority of the currently defined tumor-associated Ags are often overexpressed products of normal cellular genes. Therefore, tolerance deletes high-affinity T cells directed against the TAAs, leaving only a low-affinity repertoire. We have demonstrated previously that the T cell repertoire against the immunodominant p773–782 A2.1-Her-2/neu-restricted peptide has low affinity in A2xneu mice (Her-2/neu mice crossed with A2.1/Kb mice), compared with A2xFVB mice (A2.1/Kb crossed with FVB-wild-type mice). Immunizations with this peptide have a minor impact in preventing tumor growth in A2xneu mice. Therefore, attempts to expand these responses may be of little clinical value. We hypothesized that if not all possible cross-reactive peptides (CPs) are naturally processed and presented, the possibility exists that T cells against these CPs persist in the repertoire and can be used to induce antitumor responses with higher avidity against native epitopes present on the tumor cells. We have used the positional scanning synthetic peptide combinatorial library methodology to screen the p773–782 T cell clone. The screening data identified potential amino acids that can be substituted in the primary sequences of the p773–782 peptide. The designed CPs induce CTL responses of higher affinity in A2xneu mice compared with the native p773–783 peptide. These CTLs recognize A2+-Her-2/neu+ tumors with high efficiency. Moreover, multiple immunizations with CPs significantly prolonged the survival of tumor-bearing A2xneu mice. These results have demonstrated that it was possible to circumvent tolerance with the identification of CPs and that these peptides could be of significant clinical value.
Clinicopathological and prognostic relevance of uptake level using 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography fusion imaging (18F-FDG PET/CT) in primary breast cancer.

OBJECTIVE Using integrated 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography fusion imaging (18F-FDG PET/CT), the clinical significance of 18F-FDG uptake was evaluated in patients with primary breast cancer. METHODS Clinicopathological correlation with the level of maximum standardized uptake values (SUV) 60 min obtained from preoperative 18F-FDG PET/CT were examined in 152 patients with primary breast cancer. The prognostic impact of the level of SUV was explored using simulated prognosis derived from computed program Adjuvant! in 136 (89%) patients with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). RESULTS High SUV level was significantly correlated with tumor invasive size (< or = 2 cm) (P < 0.0001), higher score of nuclear grade (P < 0.0001), nuclear atypia (P < 0.0001) and mitosis counts (P < 0.0001), negative hormone receptor status (P = 0.001), high score of c-erbB-2 expression (P = 0.006), lymph node metastasis (P = 0.002), and IDC in comparison with invasive lobular carcinoma (P = 0.004). Multivariate analyses showed tumor invasive size, nuclear grade and estrogen receptor negativity were significantly correlated with SUV in primary breast cancer (P < 0.0001,< 0.0001, and < 0.012, respectively), and nuclear grade was significantly correlated with SUV in tumors of invasive size 2 cm or less (P < 0.0001). Tumors with high SUV (cutoff value 4.0) showed higher relapse and mortality rate compared to those with low SUV (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS High uptake of 18F-FDG would be predictive of poor prognosis in patients with primary breast cancer, and aggressive features of cancer cells in patients with early breast cancer. 18F-FDG PET/CT could be a useful tool to pre-therapeutically predict biological characteristics and baseline risk of breast cancer.
What to Expect When You Retire: By Women for Women

Women's labor force participation has steadily increased in the United States since the 1970s, making retirement a relevant concept to women. Current research frequently neglects the unique needs of retiring women and the manner in which women must effectively prepare for retirement. As part of a larger study exploring women's retirement satisfaction, we collected survey data from 230 retired women in a Midwestern state. The qualitative responses contained detailed advice to future retired women on issues of significance to the retirement transition. Specifically, our sample had clear messages about planning ahead, preparing financially, responding to unexpected events, and examining sources for social support. These findings are discussed and recommendations are made to practitioners and professionals working with future female retirees.