Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Kojic Acid Production from Agro-Industrial By-Products Using Fungi

A total of 278 different isolates of filamentous fungi were screened using synthetic medium for respective ability to produce kojic acid. Nineteen, six, and five isolates proved to be low, moderate, and high kojic acid producers, respectively. Levels of kojic acid produced were generally increased when shaking cultivation was used rather than those obtained using static cultivation. A trial for the utilization of 15 agro-industrial wastes or by-products for kojic acid production by the five selected higher kojic acid producer isolates was made. The best by-product medium recorded was molasses for kojic acid. A. flavus numbers 7 and 24 were able to grow and produce kojic acid on only 12 out of 15 wastes or by-products media. The best medium used for kojic acid production by A. flavus number 7 was rice fragments followed by molasses, while the best medium used for kojic acid production by A. flavus number 24 was the molasses followed by orange, pea, and rice fragments. An attempt for production of kojic acid using a 1.5 L laboratory fermentor has been made. Aspergillus flavus number 7 was used and grown on molasses medium; maximum level (53.5 g/L) of kojic acid was obtained after eight days of incubation.
Sonar image segmentation based on implicit active contours

Sonar images are susceptible to noise pollution and the image intensities are often inhomogeneous. So there are many difficulties in sonar image segmentation. When apply the current popular region-based active contour models to sonar image segmentation, the objects we interested may be segmented inaccurately sometimes, especially for the image with shadows. To solve the problem, a simple algorithm was proposed in this paper. Firstly we analyzed the initial contour action in level set evolution, and then combined with a strict local binary fitting energy we segmented sonar images selectively by changing the initial contour. Computer experiment results show that our method is very suitable for sonar image segmentation. Target regions with weak border can be obtained perfectly. And for the sonar image with shadows, interested objects and the shadows could be distinguished separately, avoiding the boundary leaking problems caused by the shadows' existing.
First detection of cosmic structure in the 21‐cm intensity field

We present the first statistically significant detection of cosmic structure using broadly distributed hydrogen radio emission. This is accomplished using a cross-correlation with optical galaxies. Statistical noise levels of 20 μK are achieved, unprecedented in this frequency band. The signal is consistent with arising from the collective flux of known populations of galaxies. This lends support to the idea that large volumes of the Universe can be rapidly mapped without the need to resolve individual faint galaxies, enabling precise constraints to dark energy models. We discuss strategies for improved intensity mapping.
rbcL data reveal two monophyletic groups of filmy ferns (Filicopsida: Hymenophyllaceae).

The "filmy fern" family, Hymenophyllaceae, is traditionally partitioned into two principal genera, Trichomanes s.l. (sensu lato) and Hymenophyllum s.l. , based upon sorus shape characters. This basic split in the family has been widely debated this past century and hence was evaluated here by using rbcL nucleotide sequence data in a phylogenetic study of 26 filmy ferns and nine outgroup taxa. Our results confirm the monophyly of the family and provide robust support for two monophyletic groups that correspond to the two classical genera. In addition, we show that some taxa of uncertain affinity, such as the monotypic genera Cardiomanes and Serpyllopsis, and at least one species of Microtrichomanes, are convincingly included within Hymenophyllum s.l. The tubular- or conical-based sorus that typifies Trichomanes s.l. and Cardiomanes, the most basal member of Hymenophyllum s.l. , is a plesiomorphic character state for the family. Tubular-based sori occurring in other members of Hymenophyllum s.l. are most likely derived independently and more than one time. While rbcL data are able to provide a well-supported phylogenetic estimate within Trichomanes s.l. , they are inadequate for resolving relationships within Hymenophyllum s.l. , which will require data from additional sources. This disparity in resolution reflects differential rates of evolution for rbcL within Hymenophyllaceae.
Calmodulin Is Involved in Membrane Depolarization-Mediated Survival of Motoneurons by Phosphatidylinositol-3 Kinase- and MAPK-Independent Pathways

In the present work, we find that the elevation of extracellular K+ concentration promotes the survival of chick spinal cord motoneurons in vitro deprived of any neurotrophic support. This treatment induces chronic depolarization of the neuronal plasma membrane, which activates L-type voltage-dependent Ca2+ channels, resulting in Ca2+influx and elevation of the cytosolic free Ca2+concentration. Pharmacological reduction of intracellular free Ca2+ or withdrawal of extracellular Ca2+ reversed the effects of depolarization on survival. The intracellular Ca2+ response to membrane depolarization developed as an initial peak followed by a sustained increase in intracellular Ca2+concentration. The depolarizing treatment caused tyrosine phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) without involving tyrosine kinase receptor activation. The calmodulin antagonist W13 inhibited the survival-promoting effect induced by membrane depolarization but not the tyrosine phosphorylation of MAPK. Moreover, depolarization did not induce phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI-3K) phosphorylation in our cells, and the PI-3K inhibitor wortmannin did not suppress the survival-promoting effect of K+ treatment. These results suggest that calmodulin is involved in calcium-mediated survival of motoneurons through the activation of PI-3K- and MAPK-independent pathways.
Dynamic Price Dependence of Canadian and World Art Markets : An Empirical Analysis

Although the market for Canadian paintings is now of substantial magnitude, with several works having recently sold for well over a million dollars, it remains true that with very few exceptions, the works of Canadian painters are bought and sold only in Canada and held only by Canadian collectors. This market can thus be viewed as almost exclusively local, and it is therefore not clear that there should be any linkage between price movements for Canadian art and those for the mainstream global market in old master, impressionist, and modern art. This paper investigates the presence and nature of such time series dependence econometrically, both in terms of long term trends as reflected in the co-integrating relationship between Canadian and the global market, and in terms of short-run comovements as represented in correlations. The possibility that the local market "follows" the global one is also considered through an analysis of Granger-Causality. For Canadian art prices we use a new hedonic index that has been computed using an updated version of the data set of Hodgson and Vorkink (2004), while for the international prices, we use an index provided by Mei and Moses.
A kernel running in DSM - design aspects of a distributed operating system

The Plurix project implements an object-oriented operating system (OS) for PC clusters. Communication is achieved via shared objects in a distributed shared memory (DSM). The consistency of this distributed memory is guaranteed by an optimistic synchronization scheme and restartable transactions. We contend that coupling object orientation with the DSM property allows quick system startup, simplified development of distributed applications and a type-consistent system bootstrapping procedure. The OS (including kernel and drivers) is written in Java using proprietary Plurix Java compiler (PJC) to translate Java source code directly into Intel machine instructions. We briefly illustrate the architecture of our DSM-based OS kernel and the resulting synergies for communication between applications and OS. We present advanced issues of memory management with respect to the DSM-kernel classes and strategies to avoid false-sharing.
PERIPHERAL FUNCTIONS OF THE ENDOCANNABINOID SYSTEM: PATHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY

Introduction Although the endocannabinoid system (ECS) is best known for its important neuromodulatory role, it has become apparent in recent years that the physiology of almost every organ is affected by the ECS. This is especially true under pathological conditions, in which an up-regulation of the expression of cannabinoid receptors and increased endocannabinoid production can often be observed. The ECS in peripheral tissues thus seems to constitute an important stress-response system that becomes activated in situations that challenge homeostasis.
Room for monsters and writers: Performativity in children’s classroom drawing

Much research on children’s classroom drawing emerged from an interest in the relationships between drawing and early writing and focused on drawing as a pedagogical tool to engage young children in planning, generating, and illustrating story ideas. In an eight-month case study of children’s drawing in a kindergarten language arts curriculum, the author focused on children’s classroom drawing not as a pedagogical intervention, but as an emergent event in which the intra-actions of children, drawing, and discourses coalesce. Of the many findings from this project, prevalent is the notion that children’s drawing and drawings function as vehicles for more than just pre-literacy—that drawing and drawings produce critical, creative, and constructive thinking and learning. In this article, the author discusses children’s drawing and drawings as events in which the often divergent interests of children, teachers, and curriculum materialize. Butler’s and Barad’s notions of performativity—the ways in which bodies materialize larger social discourses, such as gender—help the author to make sense of the ways children perform popular culture discourses, such as “monster,” or local classroom discourses, such as “writer,” in the kindergarten classroom. In looking at children’s drawing and drawings as material, discursive, and productive events, the author hopes to expand perceptions of children’s drawing beyond indicators of development, aesthetics, or literacy acquisition into critical, creative, and constructive learning experiences with significant cultural implications.
Can Knowledge Trash be Utilized as Knowledge Resource ?-Toward Utilizing Deleted Text Fragments

There have been many researches to efficiently utilize knowledge so far. These focused on knowledge that is formalized and is determined useful. On the other hand, it is common that trial and error is carried out in the process of creating this knowledge. During this process, knowledge fragments judged useless are discarded as knowledge trash and are paid no attention. However, knowledge trash is only judged useless in the creation of certain knowledge. It is not appropriate to judge that it is also unnecessary in other knowledge creation. The authors have focused on the possibility of utilizing knowledge trash and have studied to utilize Deleted Text Fragments (DTFs) which are text fragments deleted as knowledge trash in document writing process. We developed a document composition support system named “Text ComposTer,” which can separately collect R-DTFs with high possibility to be utilized and F-DTFs with comparatively low possibility to be utilized. In this paper, we investigate whether R-DTF collected by Text ComposTer is actually used in new document creation, and discuss the design of environment to utilize the DTFs as intellectual resource based on the experimental results.
An eye-tracking study of information usage in Web search : Variations in target position and contextual snippet length

Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for the better presentation of search results. The studies reported here are to be published in CHI 2007[13, 13]. Author
Joint Source/Relay Precoder Design in Amplify-and-Forward Relay Systems Using an MMSE Criterion

This paper addresses the joint source/relay precoder design problem in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication systems where multiple antennas are equipped at the source, the relay, and the destination. Existing solutions to the problem only consider the relay link and, thus, do not fully exploit all the available link resource. Using a minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) criterion, we propose a joint precoder design method, taking both the direct and relay links into account. It is shown that the MMSE is a highly nonlinear function of the precoder matrices, and a direct minimization is not feasible. To facilitate analysis, we propose to design the precoders toward first diagonalizing the MSE matrix of the relay link. This imposes certain structural constraints on both precoders that allow us to derive an analytically tractable MSE upper bound. By conducting minimization with respect to this upper bound, the solution can be obtained by an iterative waterfilling technique. Simulations show that the proposed design can significantly enhance the performance of MIMO AF cooperative systems.
Diverse Topic Phrase Extraction from Text Collection

extraction is an efficient approach to managing an explosion of online text on the Web. Traditionally, an abstraction of the online text is constructed though keywords, which are extracted according to a certain importance measure. One such measure is their occurrence frequency. However, previous work has not considered another important factor: the diversity of the keywords. Therefore, the extracted keywords tend to crowd on one hot topic in the corpora while failing to cover other important topics. In this paper, we propose new algorithms to alleviate the disadvantages of these traditional methods for keyword extraction. Firstly, we propose to extract key phrases instead of keywords because phrases can effectively reduce the ambiguity of single words. Secondly, by leveraging latent semantic analysis, we can learn the related topics for each phrase as well as the distance among the phrases, so that the extracted phrases are able to cover more topics. To demonstrate the performance of our method, we conducted experiments on two open datasets: 20 Newsgroup and Reuters-21578.We design three novel evaluation metrics, based on which both qualitative and quantitative analyses shows that our proposed algorithm can be used to improve the key phrase extraction performance significantly.
CD47Low Status on CD4 Effectors Is Necessary for the Contraction/Resolution of the Immune Response in Humans and Mice

How do effector CD4 T cells escape cell death during the contraction of the immune response (IR) remain largely unknown. CD47, through interactions with thrombospondin-1 (TSP-1) and SIRP-α, is implicated in cell death and phagocytosis of malignant cells. Here, we reported a reduction in SIRP-α-Fc binding to effector memory T cells (TEM) and in vitro TCR-activated human CD4 T cells that was linked to TSP-1/CD47-induced cell death. The reduced SIRP-α-Fc binding (CD47low status) was not detected when CD4 T cells were stained with two anti-CD47 mAbs, which recognize distinct epitopes. In contrast, increased SIRP-α-Fc binding (CD47high status) marked central memory T cells (TCM) as well as activated CD4 T cells exposed to IL-2, and correlated with resistance to TSP-1/CD47-mediated killing. Auto-aggressive CD4 effectors, which accumulated in lymph nodes and at mucosal sites of patients with Crohn’s disease, displayed a CD47high status despite a high level of TSP-1 release in colonic tissues. In mice, CD47 (CD47low status) was required on antigen (Ag)-specific CD4 effectors for the contraction of the IR in vivo, as significantly lower numbers of Ag-specific CD47+/+CD4 T cells were recovered when compared to Ag-specific CD47−/− CD4 T cells. In conclusion, we demonstrate that a transient change in the status of CD47, i.e. from CD47high to CD47low, on CD4 effectors regulates the decision-making process that leads to CD47-mediated cell death and contraction of the IR while maintenance of a CD47high status on tissue-destructive CD4 effectors prevents the resolution of the inflammatory response.
Time-symmetric Cellular Automata

Together with the concept of reversibility, another relevant physical notion is time-symmetry, which expresses that there is no way of distinguishing between backward and forward time directions. This notion, found in physical theories, has been neglected in the area of discrete dynamical systems. Here we formalize it in the context of cellular automata and establish some basic facts and relations. We also state some open problems that may encourage further research on the topic.
Edinburgh Research Explorer A Low Dark Count Single Photon Avalanche Diode Structure Compatible with Standard Nanometer Scale CMOS Technology

-A single photon avalanche diode structure implemented in a 130nm imaging process is reported. The device employs a p-well anode, rather than the commonly adopted p+, and a novel guard ring compatible with recent scaling trends in standard nanometer scale CMOS technologies. The 50 m m m m m 2 active area device exhibits a dark count rate (DCR) of 25Hz at 20°C and a photon detection efficiency (PDE) peak of 28% at 500nm.
Succinate production from CO 2 -grown microalgal biomass as carbon source using engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum through consolidated

The potential for production of chemicals from microalgal biomass has been considered as an alternative route for CO2 mitigation and establishment of biorefineries. This study presents the development of consolidated bioprocessing for succinate production from microalgal biomass using engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum. Starch-degrading and succinate-producing C. glutamicum strains produced succinate (0.16 g succinate/g total carbon source) from a mixture of starch and glucose as a model microalgal biomass. Subsequently, the engineered C. glutamicum strains were able to produce succinate (0.28 g succinate/g of total sugars including starch) from pretreated microalgal biomass of CO2-grown Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. For the first time, this work shows succinate production from CO2 via sequential fermentations of CO2-grown microalgae and engineered C. glutamicum. Therefore, consolidated bioprocessing based on microalgal biomass could be useful to promote variety of biorefineries.
The identification and characterization of non-coding and coding RNAs and their modified nucleosides by mass spectrometry

The analysis of ribonucleic acids (RNA) by mass spectrometry has been a valuable analytical approach for more than 25 years. In fact, mass spectrometry has become a method of choice for the analysis of modified nucleosides from RNA isolated out of biological samples. This review summarizes recent progress that has been made in both nucleoside and oligonucleotide mass spectral analysis. Applications of mass spectrometry in the identification, characterization and quantification of modified nucleosides are discussed. At the oligonucleotide level, advances in modern mass spectrometry approaches combined with the standard RNA modification mapping protocol enable the characterization of RNAs of varying lengths ranging from low molecular weight short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to the extremely large 23 S rRNAs. New variations and improvements to this protocol are reviewed, including top-down strategies, as these developments now enable qualitative and quantitative measurements of RNA modification patterns in a variety of biological systems.
A Novel and Efficient Algorithm for Segmentation of Fingerprint Image Based on LBP Operator

Segmentation of fingerprint image is to extract the region of interest (ROI) of image and highly influences the performance of Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). In this paper, we present a novel segmentation approach which is very different from traditional segmentation methods. It is based on local binary pattern (LBP) which has good performance on texture discrimination. The proposed algorithm is applied on the images from FVC database. Experimental results demonstrate the high efficiency and good performance of the algorithm. This method serves for minutiae detection compared with VeriFinger 6.0 published by Neurotechnology Company in 2008, and the result indicates that our algorithm leads to an improved accuracy of minutiae detection since many remaining ridges which are the residual images of the previously scanned finger are removed as background accurately.
Brain-computer interface speller using hybrid P300 and motor imagery signals

In this paper we propose a fast brain computer interface speller based on electroencephalography (EEG). The slow performance of conventional BCI spellers is overcome by combining the fast motor evoked potentials (MEPs) with the accuracy of P300 event related potentials. The μ rhythms associated with motor imagery are extracted using morlet wavalet based time-frequency analysis. Selected features were subsequently classified using minimum Mahalanobis distance. A hybrid MEP-P300 algorithm incorporating text prediction was proposed and experiments were conducted to gauge its accuracy and speed. Results show significantly faster performance when compared with conventional P300 spellers while comparable, but reduced accuracy was also noted.
Cooperative sensing under imperfect feedback channels in dynamic spectrum access networks

In this paper, cooperative spectrum sensing under perfect and imperfect feedback channels is investigated. In particular, the optimal number of cognitive radios (CRs) required to minimize the total error of the sensing process when a perfect/imperfect reporting channels is derived. We show that the total error is always greater than zero regardless of the number of cooperating nodes. Furthermore, we derive a general formula that represents the boundaries of false alarm probability, and demonstrate that tightening the value of this boundary alone will not result in an improvement of system performance. Additionally, we show that errors in the reporting feedback channels can easily be mitigated when the optimal number of CRs participating in the sensing process is used; therefore, the overall detection probability is improved. Interestingly, results show that errors in the feedback channels can improve the detection probability at a low signal to noise ratio (SNR) link between the primary users (PUs) and the CRs.
Building Extraction from Polarimetric SAR Data using Mean Shift and Conditional Random Fields

This paper presents a classification framework for extracting buildings from polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. Buildings in SAR data are generally composed of layover and shadow regions. First, mean shift bottom-up segmentation approach divides a SAR image into small homogeneous patches. Then conditional random fields (CRF) framework is applied to classify the patches into layover, shadow and other regions. The spatial connectivity between layover and shadow regions is exploited to improve the accuracy of CRF shadow detection. Promising segmentation results of buildings are presented and compared to the results of a basic logistic regression classifier.