Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Star Formation in Bright-rimmed Clouds. I. Millimeter and Submillimeter Molecular Line Surveys

We present the results of the first detailed millimeter and submillimeter molecular line survey of bright-rimmed clouds, observed at FCRAO in the CO (J = 1 → 0), C18O (J = 1 → 0), HCO+ (J = 1 → 0), H13CO+ (J = 1 → 0), and N2H+ (J = 1 → 0) transitions, and at the Heinrich Hertz Telescope in the CO (J = 2 → 1), HCO+ (J = 3 → 2), HCO+ (J = 4 → 3), H13CO+ (J = 3 → 2), and H13CO+ (J = 4 → 3) molecular line transitions. The source list is composed of a selection of bright-rimmed clouds from the catalog of such objects compiled by Sugitani et al. We also present observations of three Bok globules done for comparison with the bright-rimmed clouds. We find that the appearance of the millimeter CO and HCO+ emission is dominated by the morphology of the shock front in the bright-rimmed clouds. The HCO+ (J = 1 → 0) emission tends to trace the swept-up gas ridge and overdense regions, which may be triggered to collapse as a result of sequential star formation. Five of the seven bright-rimmed clouds we observe seem to have an outflow; however, only one shows the spectral line blue-asymmetric signature that is indicative of infall in the optically thick HCO+ emission. We also present evidence that in bright-rimmed clouds the nearby shock front may heat the core from outside-in, thereby washing out the normally observed line infall signatures seen in isolated star-forming regions. We find that the derived core masses of these bright-rimmed clouds are similar to other low- and intermediate-mass star-forming regions.
Elevated cAMP opposes (TNF-α)-induced loss in the barrier integrity of corneal endothelium

Purpose Elevated cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) enhances the barrier integrity of the corneal endothelium and thereby facilitates stromal hydration control, which is necessary for corneal transparency. This study investigates whether elevated cAMP is effective against the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)-induced loss of barrier integrity in monolayers of bovine corneal endothelial cells (BCEC). Methods BCEC in primary culture were used for the study. Trans-endothelial electrical resistance (TER), a measure of barrier integrity, was determined by electrical cell-substrate impedance sensing. The changes were also ascertained by measuring paracellular permeability to fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-dextran (10 kDa) across cells grown on porous culture inserts, and by immunofluorescence imaging of the apical junctional complex (AJC). The activation of p38 MAP kinase was assessed using western blotting. Results Co-treatment with forskolin, which activates adenylate cyclase, and rolipram, which inhibits cAMP-dependent phosphodiesterase PDE4, reduced the TNF-α-induced increase in the flux of FITC-dextran. Similar co-treatment also prevented the TNF-α-induced disorganization of zona occludens-1 (ZO-1) and cadherins at the AJC. Co-treatment, as well pre-treatment, with forskolin plus rolipram prevented the TNF-α-induced decrease in TER. The influence of the agents was significant after 12 h of exposure to the cytokine. This effect was also mimicked by A2B agonists, adenosine and 5′-N-ethylcarboxamidoadenosine (NECA), which are known to mobilize cAMP in BCEC. Elevated cAMP also inhibited the cytokine-induced activation of p38 MAP kinase, and further blocked the disassembly of microtubules as well as the disruption of the PAMR (peri-junctional actomyosin ring) at the AJC. Conclusions These results suggest that elevated cAMP opposes the TNF-α-induced loss in barrier integrity of the corneal endothelium. This effect follows inhibition of the cytokine-induced activation of p38 MAP kinase and its downstream signaling involved in the disruption of AJC and PAMR, as well as the disassembly of microtubules.
The value of T2 relaxation times to characterize lumbar intervertebral disks: preliminary results.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The present standard for staging intervertebral disk degeneration is a discrete scale, consisting usually of 5 stages. The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the use of T2 measurements as a continuous measure of intervertebral disk degeneration. METHODS We obtained images in 5 volunteers with a 3D fast spin-echo sequence modified for the purpose of calculating T2 relaxation times from multiple echoes in the echo train. Disks were classified on the basis of conventional criteria into one of the 5 stages of disk degeneration. Average T2 values were calculated for stage II, III, and V disks, which were identified in the volunteers. Differences between the disk levels were analyzed with analysis of variance and differences between stages tested with a Student t test with significance set at the 0.01 level. RESULTS In the 5 volunteers, 20 stage II, 4 stage III, and a single stage V disk were found. Contour plots showed the highest T2 values in the nucleus pulposus near the vertebral endplates and lower T2 values in the intranuclear cleft region and peripheral annulus fibrosus. Average T2 values were significantly lower in the type III and V disks than in the normal disks. CONCLUSIONS The study suggests that intervertebral disks can be characterized and classified accurately by means of T2 values. More studies are warranted to determine the range of T2 values for normal disks.
Why transition is not the whole story: neurocognitive function and risk for psychosis

i Declaration of Authorship ii Ethics Declaration iv Statement of Candidate’s Contribution to the Study v Acknowledgements vi List of Tables xi List of Figures xiii List of Abbreviations xiv Chapter 1. The Psychosis Prodrome 1.1 Identifying Individuals in Prodromal Phase of Psychotic Illness 3 1.2 Intervention in the Prodrome 5 1.3 Understanding the Mechanisms of Transition to Psychosis 9 Chapter 2. Schizophrenia – A Neurodevelopmental Perspective 2.1 Overview of Schizophrenia 11 2.2 The Pathogenesis of Schizophrenia 12 Chapter 3. Neurocognitive Function and Schizophrenia 3.1 Why Study the Neurocognitive Performance of Individuals with Schizophrenia? 16 3.2. Evidence of Neurocognitive Impairment in Individuals with Schizophrenia 17 3.3 Is Neurocognitive Impairment Evident in the Early Stages of the Illness? 20 3.3.1 Why study neurocognition in individuals who experience a first episode of psychosis? 20 3.3.2 Evidence of neurocognitive impairment in individuals who experience a first episode of psychosis 20 3.4 What is the Effect of Moderator Variables on Neurocognitive Performance? 21 3.5 Summary 22 Chapter 4. The Neurocognitive Function of Unaffected Relatives and Neurocognitive Impairments before the Onset of Psychosis 4.1 Evidence from the Unaffected Relatives of Individuals with Schizophrenia 24 4.2 Investigating Individuals at Genetic High Risk for Schizophrenia 28 4.3 Evidence from Longitudinal Birth Cohorts Studies 32 4.4 Evidence from Draft Registry Studies 36 4.5 Summary 38
Joint perceptual decision-making: a case study in explanatory pluralism

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches.
Survey evaluation of the National Patient Safety Agency’s Root Cause Analysis training programme in England and Wales: knowledge, beliefs and reported practices

Background: Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic approach to investigations, and is applied in many healthcare settings within comprehensive patient safety systems. The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) in England and Wales commissioned a survey evaluation of its national training programme which consisted of 3-day workshops and internet support materials. Methods: Anonymous survey of 374 health professionals immediately after they attended the programme (T1), and a further 350 participants 6 months after the programme (T 2), who had attended courses in England and Wales in 2005. Results: T1 knowledge tests showed a greater understanding of the frameworks and techniques of RCA but with less accuracy in application to scenarios. Personal beliefs about conducting RCAs were consistently positive at both times, but many participants experienced personal barriers to conducting RCA in their current role and trust context, and some felt low confidence in undertaking cascade training of other staff in their trust. There was also low confidence in implementing RCA as standard practice at both times. At T2, 76.7% were confident the outcomes from their RCA had been implemented, but only 12.1% were aware if improvements had been shared outside the local organisation. Barriers to RCA at both times most often concerned time and resources to apply RCA. At T1, there was particular concern for personal development, at T2 greater concern for organisational impediments. Conclusions: The RCA programme enhanced knowledge of RCA, and participants valued the programme, but further personal development and organisational support are required to achieve continued improvement in practice and sustained organisational learning.
Power grid voltage integrity verification

Full-chip verification requires one to check if the power grid is safe, i.e., if the voltage drop on the grid does not exceed a certain threshold. The traditional simulation-based solution to this problem is computationally expensive, because of the large variety of possible circuit behaviors that would need to be simulated; it also has the disadvantage that it requires full knowledge of the details of the circuit attached to the grid, thereby precluding early verification of the grid. We propose a power grid verification technique that can be applied before the complete circuit has been designed and without exact knowledge of the circuit currents. We use current constraints, which are upper bound constraints on the currents that can be drawn from the grid, as a way to capture the uncertainty about the circuit details and activity. Based on this, we propose two solution approaches. One approach gives an upper-bound on the worst-case voltage drop at every node of the grid. Another, less expensive approach, applies a sufficient condition (thus, this becomes a conservative approach) to check if the drop on the grid exceeds a given voltage threshold.
Analysing Recognition Errors in Unlimited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition

We analyze the recognition errors made by a morph-based continuous speech recognition system, which practically allows an unlimited vocabulary. Examining the role of the acoustic and language models in erroneous regions shows how speaker adaptive training (SAT) and discriminative training with minimum phone frame error (MPFE) criterion decrease errors in different error classes. Analyzing the errors with respect to word frequencies and manually classified error types reveals the most potential areas for improving the system.
Mitochondrial Genetic Variants Identified to Be Associated with BMI in Adults

It has been suggested that mitochondrial dysfunction plays a role in metabolic disorders including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. The fact that mitochondrial defects can be accumulated over time as a normal part of aging may explain why some individuals can eat all sorts of foods and remain at normal weight while they are young. However, around the fourth decade of life there is a trend towards “middle-age spread” with weight gain and the body's decreasing ability to metabolize calories efficiently. To test the hypothesis that mitochondrial variants are associated with BMI in adults, we analyzed a total number of 984 mitochondrial single nucleotide polymorphisms (mtSNPs) in a sample of 6,528 individuals participating in the KORA studies. To assess mtSNP association while taking heteroplasmy into account we used the raw signal intensity values measured on the microarray and applied linear regression. Significant results were obtained for 2 mtSNPs located in the Cytochrome c oxidase subunit genes (MT-CO1: Padjusted = 0.0140 and MT-CO3: Padjusted = 0.0286) and 3 mtSNPs located in the NADH dehydrogenase subunit genes (MT-ND1, MT-ND2 and MT-ND4L: Padjusted = 0.0286). Polymorphisms located in the MT-CO3 and MT-ND4L genes have not been associated with BMI or related phenotypes in the past. Our results highlight the importance of the mitochondrial genome among the factors that contribute to the risk of high BMI. Focusing on mitochondrial variants may lead to further insights regarding effects of existing medications, or even to the development of innovative treatments.
Performance Evaluation of Reconfigurable TCP Communication on Wi-Fi Network Using GE Channel Model

Recently, many commercial cloud-computing services have rapidly evolved to process and back up large volumes of data. With wireless broadband networks also gaining popularity, users increasingly access cloud services using mobile devices and wearable devices for interactive communication, such as remote desktops and augmented reality (AR) applications. In many cases, interactive applications use the TCP protocol between a server and a mobile device. However, end-to-end TCP sessions are easily influenced by packet losses in wireless networks and long delays on international lines, which may degrade communication quality. To cope with these problems, we propose a dynamic TCP communication method that improves the response for interactive communication by dynamically changing congestion control algorithms in accordance with changes in network quality and application characteristics. In this paper, we implement the proposed method on the NS-3 network simulator and evaluate it by using the GE (Gilbert-Eliott) channel model, assuming that the method is applied to a Wi-Fi network. We find that our method improves response time for interactive communication with a remote desktop to the level where users will not feel uncomfortable.
Acoustical tuning of CMUT receiver arrays

Cell placement in an element and structural modifications on the array baffle significantly change the bandwidth, band shape and signal to noise ratio of a CMUT receiver array. In this paper, optimum receiver performance tailoring by means of cell placement, cell size variation and use of dummy cells in the array elements is discussed. The performance of the array is modified acoustically at the acoustic port of the elements.
The Major Autolysin Acm2 from Lactobacillus plantarum Undergoes Cytoplasmic O-Glycosylation

ABSTRACT The major autolysin Acm2 from the probiotic strain Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1 contains high proportions of alanine, serine, and threonine in its N-terminal so-called AST domain. It has been suggested that this extracellular protein might be glycosylated, but this has not been experimentally verified. We used high-resolution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to study the possible occurrence of glycans on peptides generated from lactobacillary surface proteins by protease treatment. This approach yielded five glycopeptides in various glycoforms, all derived from the AST domain of Acm2. All five glycopeptides contained the hydroxy-amino acids serine and threonine, suggesting that Acm2 is O-glycosylated. By using lectin blotting with succinylated wheat germ agglutinin, and by comparing the wild-type strain with an Acm2-negative derivative (NZ3557), we found that the attached N-acetylhexosamines are most likely N-acetylglucosamines (GlcNAc). NZ3557 was further used as a genetic background to express an Acm2 variant lacking its secretion signal, resulting in intracellular expression of Acm2. We show that this intracellular version of Acm2 is also glycosylated, indicating that the GlcNAc modification is an intracellular process.
Compressed Bundle Header Encoding (CBHE)

This document describes a convention by which Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) Bundle Protocol (BP) "convergence-layer" adapters may represent endpoint identifiers in a compressed form within the primary blocks of bundles, provided those endpoint identifiers conform to the structure prescribed by this convention. Compressed Bundle Header Encoding (CBHE) compression is a convergence-layer adaptation. It is opaque to bundle processing. Therefore, it has no impact on the interoperability of different Bundle Protocol implementations, but instead affects only the interoperability of different convergence- layer adaptation implementations. This document is a product of the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group and has been reviewed by that group. No objections to its publication as an RFC were raised. This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
Path Specific Register Design to Reduce Standby Power Consumption

A methodology is proposed to design low leakage registers by considering the type of timing path, i.e., short or long, and type of register, i.e., launching or capturing. Three different dual threshold voltage registers are developed where each register trades, depending upon the timing path, a different timing constraint for reducing the leakage current. For example, the first proposed register is used as a launching register in a noncritical path, trading clock-to-Q delay for leakage current. Other timing constraints such as setup and hold times are maintained the same not to introduce any timing violations. Alternatively, the second and third registers, trade, respectively, setup time and hold time for leakage current while maintaining clock-to-Q delay constant. The effect of the proposed methodology on leakage current is investigated for four technology nodes. The overall reduction in the leakage current of a register can exceed 90% while maintaining the clock frequency and other design parameters such as area and dynamic power the same. Three ISCAS 89 benchmark circuits are utilized to evaluate the methodology, demonstrating, on average, 23% reduction in the overall leakage current.
Low Expansion Packings and Embeddings of Hypercubes into Star Graphs: A Performance-Oriented Approach

We discuss the problem of packing hypercubes into an n-dimensional star graph S(n), which consists of embedding a disjoint union of hypercubes U into S(n) with load one. Hypercubes in U have from [n/2] to (n+1)/spl middot/[log/sub 2/ n]-2([lod/sub 2/n]+1)+2 dimensions, i.e., they can be as large as any hypercube which can be embedded with dilation at most four into S(n). We show that U can be embedded into S(n) with optimal expansion, which contrasts with the growing expansion ratios of previously known techniques. We employ several performance metrics to show that, with our techniques, a star graph can efficiently execute heterogeneous workloads containing hypercube, mesh, and star graph algorithms. The characterization of our packings includes some important metrics which have not been addressed by previous research (namely, average dilation, average congestion, and congestion). Our packings consistently produce small average congestion and average dilation, which indicates that the induced communication slowdown is also small. We consider several combinations of node mapping functions and routing algorithms in S(n), and obtain their corresponding performance metrics using either mathematical analysis or computer simulation.
TARGETLESS CAMERA CALIBRATION

In photogrammetry a camera is considered calibrated if its interior orientation parameters are known. These encompass the principal distance, the principal point position and some Additional Parameters used to model possible systematic errors. The current state of the art for automated camera calibration relies on the use of coded targets to accurately determine the image correspondences. This paper presents a new methodology for the efficient and rigorous photogrammetric calibration of digital cameras which does not require any longer the use of targets. A set of images depicting a scene with a good texture are sufficient for the extraction of natural corresponding image points. These are automatically matched with feature-based approaches and robust estimation techniques. The successive photogrammetric bundle adjustment retrieves the unknown camera parameters and their theoretical accuracies. Examples, considerations and comparisons with real data and different case studies are illustrated to show the potentialities of the proposed methodology.
The lifting scheme: a construction of second generation wavelets

We present the lifting scheme, a simple construction of second generation wavelets; these are wavelets that are not necessarily translates and dilates of one fixed function. Such wavelets can be adapted to intervals, domains, surfaces, weights, and irregular samples. We show how the lifting scheme leads to a faster, in-place calculation of the wavelet transform. Several examples are included.
Active Learning for Chinese Word Segmentation

Currently, the best performing models for Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are extremely resource intensive in terms of annotation data quanti ty. One promising solution to minimize the cost of data acquisition is active learning, which aims to actively select the most useful instances to annotate for learning. Active learning on CWS, h owever, remains challenging due to its inherent nature. In this paper, we propose a Word Bounda ry Annotation (WBA) model to make effective active learning on CWS possible. This is achie ved by annotating only those uncertain boundaries. In this way, the manual annotation cost is l argely reduced, compared to annotating the whole character sequence. To further minimize the a nnotation effort, a diversity measurement among the instances is considered to avoid duplicat e annotation. Experimental results show that employing the WBA model and the diversity measurement into active learning on CWS can save much annotation cost with little loss in the perfor mance.