Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phylogeny and Historical Biogeography of Lauraceae: Evidence from the Chloroplast and Nuclear Genomes

Phylogenetic relationships among 122 species of Lauraceae representing 44 of the 55 currently recognized genera are inferred from sequence variation in the chloroplast and nuclear genomes. The trnL-trnF, trnT-trnL, psbA-trnH, and rpll6 regions of cpDNA, and the 5' end of 26S rDNA resolved major lineages, while the ITS/5.8S region of rDNA resolved a large terminal lade. The phylogenetic estimate is used to assess morphology-based views of relationships and, with a temporal dimension added, to reconstruct the biogeographic history of the family. Results suggest Lauraceae radiated when trans-Tethyean migration was relatively easy, and basal lineages are established on either Gondwanan or Laurasian terrains by the Late Cretaceous. Most genera with Gondwanan histories place in Cryptocaryeae, but a small group of South American genera, the Chlorocardium-Mezilauruls lade, represent a separate Gondwanan lineage. Caryodaphnopsis and Neocinnamomum may be the only extant representatives of the ancient Lauraceae flora documented in Midto Late Cretaceous Laurasian strata. Remaining genera place in a terminal Perseeae-Laureae lade that radiated in Early Eocene Laurasia. Therein, non-cupulate genera associate as the Persea group, and cupuliferous genera sort to Laureae of most classifications or Cinnamomeae sensu Kostermans. Laureae are Laurasian relicts in Asia. The Persea group and Cinnamomum group (of Cinnamomeae) show tropical amphi-Pacific disjunctions here credited to disruption of boreotropical ranges by Eocene-Oligocene climatic cooling. The Ocotea complex accommodates remaining Cinnamomeae and shows a trans-Atlantic disjunction possibly derived from a Madrean-Tethyan ancestral distribution. These findings support Laurasian ancestry for most extant Lauraceae, with their considerable neotropical representation primarily derived from Early Miocene radiation of the Ocotea complex upon reaching South America.
Improving Loop Dependence Analysis

Programmers can no longer depend on new processors to have significantly improved single-thread performance. Instead, gains have to come from other sources such as the compiler and its optimization passes. Advanced passes make use of information on the dependencies related to loops. We improve the quality of that information by reusing the information given by the programmer for parallelization. We have implemented a prototype based on GCC into which we also add a new optimization pass. Our approach improves the amount of correctly classified dependencies resulting in 46% average improvement in single-thread performance for kernel benchmarks compared to GCC 6.1.
The Microglia-activating Potential of Thrombin

The serine protease thrombin is known as a blood coagulation factor. Through limited cleavage of proteinase-activated receptors it can also control growth and functions in various cell types, including neurons, astrocytes, and microglia (brain macrophages). A number of previous studies indicated that thrombin induces the release of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines from microglial cells, suggesting another important role for the protease beyond hemostasis. In the present report, we provide evidence that this effect is not mediated by any proteolytic or non-proteolytic mechanism involving thrombin proper. Inhibition of the enzymatic thrombin activity did not affect the microglial release response. Instead the cyto-/chemokine-inducing activity solely resided in a high molecular weight protein fraction that could be isolated in trace amounts even from apparently homogenous α- and γ-thrombin preparations. High molecular weight material contained thrombin-derived peptides as revealed by mass spectrometry but was devoid of thrombin-like enzymatic activity. Separated from the high molecular weight fraction by fast protein liquid chromatography, enzymatically intact α- and γ-thrombin failed to trigger any release. Our findings may force a revision of the notion that thrombin itself is a direct proinflammatory release signal for microglia. In addition, they could be relevant for the study of other cellular activities and their assignment to this protease.
Volitional hamstring force production during closed kinetic chain lower extremity exercise in supine position: a randomized controlled trial

The hamstring muscle group is a vital constituent to injury prevention and lower extremity rehabilitation. During closed chain activity, hamstring muscle fibers influence dynamic interaction between the pelvis, sacrum, femur and lower leg. The hamstring muscle group functions as a frontal and transverse plane stabilizer, influencing knee flexion deceleration and eccentric extension during forward propulsion [1-3]. The hamstring muscle group is most often injured during high-speed propulsion activities most notably among track runners, football players and hockey players. Consequently, the biceps femoris in particular is considerably vulnerable to strain or injury during moments of acceleration [3-5]. Heiderscheit et al. [6] further noted that the incidence of hamstring re-injury can be attributed to chronic musculotendinous shortening secondary to previous injury [6]. According to Sherry et al. [7], hamstring injuries often require significant recovery time and exhibit a long period of increased susceptibility [7].
H6-type transformerless single-phase inverter for grid-tied photovoltaic system

There has been an increasing interest in transformerless inverter for grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) system because of the benefits of lower cost, smaller volume as well as higher efficiency compared with the ones with transformer. However, one of the technical challenges of the transformerless inverter is the safety issue of leakage current which needs to be addressed carefully. In addition, according to the international regulations, transformerless inverter should be capable of handling a certain amount of reactive power. In this study, a new H6-type transformerless inverter for grid-tied PV system is proposed that can eliminate the threat of leakage current. The proposed topology has also the capability to inject reactive power into the utility grid. Three-level output voltage employing unipolar sinusoidal pulse-width modulation can be achieved with the proposed topology. The proposed topology structure and detail operation principle with reactive power control are investigated. The relationship among the existing topologies and their reactive power control capability are also discussed. The proposed topology is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink software to initially verify the accuracy of theoretical explanations. Finally, a universal prototype rated 1 kW has been built and tested. The experimental results validate the theoretical analysis and simulation results.
The data locality of work stealing

This paper studies the data locality of the work-stealing scheduling algorithm on hardware-controlled shared-memory machines. We present lower and upper bounds on the number of cache misses using work stealing, and introduce a locality-guided work-stealing algorithm along with experimental validation. As a lower bound, we show that there is a family of multi-threaded computations G n each member of which requires T( n ) total instructions (work) for which when using work-stealing the number of cache misses on one processor is constant, while even on two processors the total number of cache misses is O( n ). This implies that for general computations there is no useful bound relating multiprocessor to uninprocessor cache misses. For nested-parallel computations, however, we show that on P processors the expected additional number of cache misses beyond those on a single processor is bounded by O ( C ⌈ m/s P T ∞ ), where m is the execution time of an instruction incurring a cache miss, s is the steal time, C is the size of cache, and T ∞ is the number of nodes on the longest chain of dependences. Based on this we give strong bounds on the total running time of nested-parallel computations using work stealing. For the second part of our results, we present a locality-guided work stealing algorithm that improves the data locality of multi-threaded computations by allowing a thread to have an affinity for a processor. Our initial experiments on iterative data-parallel applications show that the algorithm matches the performance of static-partitioning under traditional work loads but improves the performance up to 50% over static partitioning under multiprogrammed work loads. Furthermore, the locality-guided work stealing improves the performance of work-stealing up to 80%.
Rhipicephalus humeralis Rondelli 1926

1. The male of Rhipicephalus humeralis is redescribed and the female and immature stages are described for the first time. The synonymy of the species is discussed and the various stages are compared with those of R. pulchellus. 2. Details of the life cycle under laboratory conditions are given. 3. The host list and distribution of the species are given.
Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury with Concomitant Brain Injury: In-hospital Complication Rates and Resource Utilization

Background context: Literature reports variable incidence rates of concomitant traumatic brain and spinal cord injury. Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate and compare in-hospital outcomes among patients with concomitant SCI and TBI diagnosis and patients with isolated SCI. Study design/setting: Retrospective cohort study using the National Trauma Data Bank. Methods: The National Trauma Databank was queried to identify isolated SCI and concomitant SCI and TBI patient cohorts. Demographics, injury mechanism and severity, complications, and mortality data were obtained. Multivariate comparisons of outcomes and univariate comparisons of unmatched and propensity score matched groups were performed. Results: There were 16,577 patients diagnosed with SCI; 5,968 of these patients also had a TBI. The population was 67% white and 25% female; 63% of the patients were treated at level I trauma centers. Unmatched and propensity score matched analyses revealed that the patients with the concomitant SCI+TBI diagnosis had longer ICU days (9.6 days vs. 8.6 days; p-value < 0.0005), increased complications rates (32.6% vs. 27.5%; p-value < 0.0001), higher mortality (1.06% vs. 1.52%; p-value < 0.0001), and were less likely be discharged to a rehab facility (7.39% vs. 8.61%; p-value < 0.0243). Presence of alcohol was associated with the dual SCI+TBI diagnosis (25.60% vs. 20.77%, p-value <.0001), increased risk of complications (OR: 1.282; p-value < 0.0001), and higher mortality (OR: 2.025; p-value < 0.001). Conclusion: This large database sample study confirms that patients with concomitant spinal and cranial neurotrauma fared worse in essentially all measured outcome categories than patients with isolated SCI.
A Novel Edge-Map Creation Approach for Highly Accurate Pupil Localization in Unconstrained Infrared Iris Images

Iris segmentation in the iris recognition systems is a challenging task under noncooperative environments. The iris segmentation is a process of detecting the pupil, iris’s outer boundary, and eyelids in the iris image. In this paper, we propose a pupil localization method for locating the pupils in the non-close-up and frontal-view iris images that are captured under near-infrared (NIR) illuminations and contain the noise, such as specular and lighting reflection spots, eyeglasses, nonuniform illumination, low contrast, and occlusions by the eyelids, eyelashes, and eyebrow hair. In the proposed method, first, a novel edge-map is created from the iris image, which is based on combining the conventional thresholding and edge detection based segmentation techniques, and then, the general circular Hough transform (CHT) is used to find the pupil circle parameters in the edge-map. Our main contribution in this research is a novel edge-map creation technique, which reduces the false edges drastically in the edge-map of the iris image and makes the pupil localization in the noisy NIR images more accurate, fast, robust, and simple. The proposed method was tested with three iris databases: CASIA-Iris-Thousand (version 4.0), CASIA-Iris-Lamp (version 3.0), and MMU (version 2.0). The average accuracy of the proposed method is 99.72% and average time cost per image is 0.727? sec.
Into a SEIFA SES cul‐de‐sac?

Use of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' SEIFA scores has almost become an automatic practice in area‐based research on socio‐economic status (SES) corrrelates of health inequalities in Australia in recent years. This article questions the wisdom of this emerging heavy, often singular, reliance on the SEIFA indexes for representing areal socio‐economic condition. It is argued that improvements in our understanding of the social and economic processes that produce health inequalities will not occur unless we move beyond SEIFA's broad brush. Data for New England Area Health local government areas are used to support the argument.
The DeLey-Doudoroff Pathway of Galactose Metabolism in Azotobacter vinelandii

Azotobacter vinelandii cell extracts reduced NAD+ and oxidized d-galactose to galactonate that subsequently was converted to 2-keto-3-deoxy-galactonate. Further metabolism of 2-keto-3-deoxy-galactonate required the presence of ATP and resulted in the formation of pyruvate and glyceraldehyde 3-P. Radiorespirometry indicated a preferential release of CO2 at the first carbon position of the d-galactose molecule. This suggested that Azotobacter vinelandii metabolizes d-galactose via the DeLey-Doudoroff pathway. The first enzyme of this pathway, d-galactose dehydrogenase, was partially characterized. It has a molecular weight of about 74,000 Da and an isoelectric point of 6.15. The pH optimum of the galactose dehydrogenase was about 9. The apparent Kms for NAD+ and d-galactose were 0.125 and 0.56 mM, respectively. Besides d-galactose, the active fraction of this galactose dehydrogenase also oxidized l-arabinose effectively. The electron acceptor for d-galactose or l-arabinose oxidation, NAD+, could not be replaced by NADP+. These substrate specificities were different from those reported in Pseudomonas saccharophila, Pseudomonas fluorescens, and Rhizobium meliloti.
Dating of Inkpad Seals Using the Extraction Rate Method: Preliminary Findings

Inkpad seals are often placed on important documents, and determining the date when a seal was affixed can be important to assess the authenticity of a document. In this study, three different brands of inkpads and four different types of paper were used to make diachronic samples of the seals. A double‐solvent extraction method was employed to date the inkpad seals by comparing extraction rates with inks of known age. Cyclohexane was selected as a weak solvent, and chlorobenzene was selected as a strong solvent. After testing, curves were created to show the relationship between the extraction percentage of ink and the date of the seals. The experimental results showed that the extraction rate method was applicable for the relative dating of inkpad seals in some cases where the seal was placed on the document within 6 months.
Experimental evidences of quantum-mechanical effects on low-field mobility, gate-channel capacitance, and threshold voltage of ultrathin body SOI MOSFETs

The characteristics of ultrathin-body (UTB) SOI MOSFETs, whose SOI-channel thickness T/sub SOI/ is thinner than the inversion-layer thickness of bulk MOSFETs, are investigated. It is found for the first time that at low temperatures (<50 K) the mobility of the UTB MOSFETs coincides with that of thicker body SOI MOSFETs in spite of the fact that at room temperature the mobility of UTB MOSFETs decreases as T/sub SOI/ decreases. It is experimentally demonstrated for the first time that the gate-channel capacitance of the UTB MOSFETs increases as T/sub SOI/ decreases. In addition, it is demonstrated that the physical origins of the threshold voltage increase in UTB MOSFETs can be categorized as mobility degradation and a subband energy level increase. All these results are consistently explained in terms of quanturn-mechanical effects.
Using hierarchical modeling in genetic association studies with multiple markers: application to a case-control study of bladder cancer.

BACKGROUND Genetic association studies are generating much information, usually in the form of single nucleotide polymorphisms in candidate genes. Analyzing such data is challenging, and raises issues of multiple comparisons and potential false-positive associations. Using data from a case-control study of bladder cancer, we showed how to use hierarchical modeling in genetic epidemiologic studies with multiple markers to control overestimation of effects and potential false-positive associations. METHODS The data were first analyzed with the conventional approach of estimating each main effect individually. We subsequently employed hierarchical modeling by adding a second stage (prior) model that incorporated information on the potential function of the genes. We used an empirical-Bayes approach, estimating the residual effects of the genes from the data. When the residual effect was set to zero, we instead used a semi-Bayes approach, in which they were pre-specified. We also explored the impact of using different second-stage design matrices. Finally, we used two approaches for assessing gene-environment interactions. The first approach added product terms into the first-stage model. The second approach used three indicators for subjects exposed to gene-only, environment-only, and both genetic and environmental factors. RESULTS By pre-specifying the prior second-stage covariates, the estimates were shrunk to the mean of each pathway. The conventional model detected a number of positive associations, which were reduced with the hierarchical model. For example, the odds ratio for myeloperoxidase (G/G, G/A) genotype changed from 3.17 [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.32-7.59] to 1.64 (95% CI, 0.81-3.34). A similar phenomenon was observed for the gene-environment interactions. The odds ratio for the gene-environment interaction between tobacco smoking and N-acetyltransferase 1 fast genotype was 2.74 (95% CI, 0.68-11.0) from the conventional analysis and 1.24 (95% CI, 0.80-1.93) from the hierarchical model. CONCLUSION Adding a second-stage hierarchical modeling can reduce the likelihood of false positive via shrinkage toward the prior mean, improve the risk estimation by increasing the precision, and, therefore, represents an alternative to conventional methods for genetic association studies.
Highly Discriminatory Variable-Number Tandem-Repeat Markers for Genotyping of Trichophyton interdigitale Strains

ABSTRACT Trichophyton interdigitale is the second most frequent cause of superficial fungal infections of various parts of the human body. Studying the population structure and genotype differentiation of T. interdigitale strains may lead to significant improvements in clinical practice. The present study aimed to develop and select suitable variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) markers for 92 clinical strains of T. interdigitale. On the basis of an analysis of four VNTR markers, four to eight distinct alleles were detected for each marker. The marker with the highest discriminatory power had eight alleles and a D value of 0.802. The combination of all four markers yielded a D value of 0.969 with 29 distinct multilocus genotypes. VNTR typing revealed the genetic diversity of the strains, identifying three populations according to their colonization sites. A correlation between phenotypic characteristics and multilocus genotypes was observed. Seven patients harbored T. interdigitale strains with different genotypes. Typing of clinical T. interdigitale samples by VNTR markers displayed excellent discriminatory power and 100% reproducibility.
Snd3D; a 3D sound system for VR and interactive applications

Snd3D is a software based real-time 3D sound system based on ambisonics (Gerzon, 1980) and reproduction over loudspeakers aiming at VR and interactive applications. The system is able to perform real-time simulation of direction, distances and movements as well as the acoustic environment. The system is implemented in PD (Puckette, 1996), a graphical programming environment for audio and MIDI processing. One of the novelties with Snd3D is its ability to represent and simulate environmental sounds.
A 5-volt operated MEMS variable optical attenuator

We report a micro mechanical variable optical attenuator (VOA) using an electrostatic micro torsion mirror combined with a fiber-optic collimator. The VOA operates at low voltages (DC 5 V or less) for large optical attenuation (40 dB) and fast response time (5 ms or faster). The mirror has been designed to be shock-resistive up to 100 G without causing operation error and up to 500G without any mechanical failure. We also have suppressed temperature dependence of VOA's optical performance by mechanically decoupling the parasitic bimorph effect from the electrostatic operation.
A Syntax for Describing Media Feature Sets

A number of Internet application protocols have a need to provide content negotiation for the resources with which they interact [1]. A framework for such negotiation is described in [2], part of which is a way to describe the range of media features which can be handled by the sender, recipient or document transmission format of a message. A format for a vocabulary of individual media features and procedures for feature registration are presented in [3].
MACULAR PHOTOSTRESS TESTING: SENSITIVITY AND RECOVERY WITH AN AUTOMATED PERIMETER

Purpose: To describe a novel method for the evaluation of macular function with photostress testing and outline normative foveal threshold and recovery data for the adult population. Methods: In this prospective study, 50 adult subjects (25 men and 25 women aged 30–49 years) with no ocular disease underwent foveal threshold testing using the Humphrey Visual Field Perimeter Model 750. Baseline values and recovery time after photostress were measured. Baseline measurements were compared with threshold sensitivity after photostress at 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10 minutes. Results: Mean foveal sensitivities were reduced from 38.53 db to 32.36 db after photostress, representing an average sensitivity reduction of 16%. The mean recovery time to baseline sensitivity was 6.58 minutes. There was no significant difference between sexes, races, or smokers and nonsmokers. Conclusions: This standardized protocol for testing the foveal threshold response to photostress is an inexpensive and noninvasive adjunct for following macular disease and also distinguishing optic neuropathy from macular disease.
Website Interaction Network

The websites-based social network, as a social media, provides and shares abundant information via organizing users’ content and contacts, whereby users’ activities in the real world can be imaged to the websites. However, users’ content and contacts in real-world social networks cannot be detected easily. Herein, we construct a website interaction network to reflect the online social network, based on mapping relationships among websites, webpages, and attributes of a social event. This network reflects the social association relationships between websites of an event, which can be mapped to the users’ relationships in the real-world social network. In this article, we study the structural features of a website interaction network and, then, mapping of these features to the real-world social network. Further, we discuss implications for human behaviors, human relationships, and structure of human society. Experimental results show that the website interaction networks concerning popular social events have power-law scaling in degree distribution and exhibit small-world properties.