Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stress control of plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposited silicon oxide film from tetraethoxysilane

Thin silicon dioxide films have been studied as a function of deposition parameters and annealing temperatures. Films were deposited by tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) dual-frequency plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition with different time interval fractions of high-frequency and low-frequency plasma depositions. The samples were subsequently annealed up to 930 °C to investigate their stress behavior. Films that were deposited in high-frequency dominated plasma were found to have tensile residual stress after annealing at temperatures higher than 800 °C. The residual stress can be controlled to slightly tensile by changing the annealing temperature. High tensile stress was observed during the annealing of high-frequency plasma-deposited films, leading to film cracks that limit the film thickness, as predicted by the strain energy release rate equation. Thick films without cracks were obtained by iterating deposition and annealing to stack multiple layers. A series of wet cleaning experiments were conducted, and we discovered that water absorption in high-frequency plasma-deposited films causes the residual stress to decrease. A ∼40 nm thick low-frequency deposited oxide cap is sufficient to prevent water from diffusing through the film. Large-area free-standing tensile stressed oxide membranes without risk of buckling were successfully fabricated.
In vitro metabolic interactions between black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) and tamoxifen via inhibition of cytochromes P450 2D6 and 3A4

Women who experience hot flashes as a side effect of tamoxifen (TAM) therapy often try botanical remedies such as black cohosh to alleviate these symptoms. Since pharmacological activity of TAM is dependent on the metabolic conversion into active metabolites by the action of cytochromes P450 2D6 (CYP2D6) and 3A4, the objective of this study was to evaluate whether black cohosh extracts can inhibit formation of active TAM metabolites and possibly reduce its clinical efficacy. At 50 μg/mL, a 75% ethanolic extract of black cohosh inhibited formation of 4-hydroxy- TAM by 66.3%, N-desmethyl TAM by 74.6% and α-hydroxy TAM by 80.3%. In addition, using midazolam and dextromethorphan as probe substrates, this extract inhibited CYP3A4 and CYP2D6 with IC50 values of 16.5 and 50.1 μg/mL, respectively. Eight triterpene glycosides were identified as competitive CYP3A4 inhibitors with IC50 values ranging from 2.3–5.1 µM, while the alkaloids protopine and allocryptopine were identified as competitive CYP2D6 inhibitors with Ki values of 78 and 122 nM, respectively. The results of this study suggests that co-administration of black cohosh with TAM might interfere with the clinical efficacy of this drug. However, additional clinical studies are needed to determine the clinical significance of these in vitro results.
Optimum gate driver design to reach SiC-MOSFET's full potential — Speeding up to 200 kV/μs

Low conduction losses are one technical advantage of SiC-MOSFETs compared to conventional IGBTs but this benefit is generally not enough to justify the much higher wafer costs per mm2. The other very important advantage is the lower switching losses. A conventional power module design with externally connected gate drivers cannot even get into the region of what SiC-MOSFETs are capable to perform. One reason are high parasitic inductances caused by the module design (gate and drain-source inductance) but another reason is the very sensitive gate structure of today's SiC-MOSFETs compared to Si-switches. This abstract reveals the requirements a driver has to fulfil to switch SiC-MOSFETs at their maximum switching speed and shows how it is done in practical applications. Differences in the gate behavior of SiC-MOSFETs and Si-competitors are illustrated. Practical solutions are depicted and evaluated for different applications.
Soft‐decision a priori knowledge interpolation for robust telephone speaker identification

Abstract Handsets which are not seen in the training phase (a.k.a unseen handsets) are main sources of performance degradation for speaker identification (SID) applications in telecommunication environments. To alleviate the problem, a soft‐decision a priori knowledge interpolation (SD‐AKI) method of handset characteristic estimation for handset mismatch‐compensated SID is proposed in this paper. The idea of the SD‐AKI method is to first collect a set of characteristics of seen handsets in the training phase, and to then estimate the characteristic of the unknown testing handset by interpolating the set of seen handset characteristics in the test phase. The estimated handset characteristic is then used to compensate for handset mismatch for robust SID. The SD‐AKI method can be realized in both feature and model spaces. Experimental results on the handset TIMIT (HTIMIT) database showed that both the proposed feature‐ and model‐space SD‐AKI schemes were more robust than the blind cepstral mean subtraction (CMS), feature warping (FW) methods and their hard‐decision counterpart (HD‐AKI) for both cases of all‐handset and unseen‐handset SID tests. It is therefore a promising robust SID method.
Head MRI segmentation on tissue optical properties

Diffuse optical tomography is an emerging, non-invasive technique with unique portability and hemodynamic contrast capabilities. A major challenge of diffuse optical tomography is the requirement for a prior head anatomy for constructing three dimensional images of brain activation. In this paper, we use different characteristics of T1, T2 weighted magnetic resonance imaging to segment head into three parts (scalp-skull, CSF, and brain) based on tissue optical properties. Similarity index successfully demonstrated segmentation results with acceptable accuracy for diffuse optical tomography construction.
Capacitative Ca2+ Entry Is Closely Linked to the Filling State of Internal Ca2+ Stores: A Study Using Simultaneous Measurements of ICRAC and Intraluminal [Ca2+]

ICRAC (the best characterized Ca2+ current activated by store depletion) was monitored concurrently for the first time with [Ca2+] changes in internal stores. To establish the quantitative and kinetic relationship between these two parameters, we have developed a novel means to clamp [Ca2+] within stores of intact cells at any level. The advantage of this approach, which is based on the membrane-permeant low-affinity Ca2+ chelator N,N,N′,N′-tetrakis (2-pyridylmethyl)ethylene diamine (TPEN), is that [Ca2+] within the ER can be lowered and restored to its original level within 10–15 s without modifications of Ca2+ pumps or release channels. Using these new tools, we demonstrate here that Ca2+ release–activated Ca2+ current (ICRAC) is activated (a) solely by reduction of free [Ca2+] within the ER and (b) by any measurable decrease in [Ca2+]ER. We also demonstrate that the intrinsic kinetics of inactivation are relatively slow and possibly dependent on soluble factors that are lost during the whole-cell recording.
How E-Consumers Integrate Diverse Recommendations from Multiple Sources

While numerous prior studies have extended our knowledge of the impact of recommendations and decision-making strategies on e-Consumers’ purchase process, few have empirically investigated how e-Consumers integrate diverse recommendations from multiple sources. Relying on cognitive dissonance theory and signaling theory, this study postulated that consistency between diverse recommendations could be a key factor for integration and followed an exploratory approach using protocol analysis to determine how e-Consumers utilize and integrate recommendation diversity. We identified two underlying approaches (explorationdriven and confirmation-driven), each with two strategies — fit-based and consistencybased — that could provide a theoretical foundation to investigate recommendation diversity. The consistency-based strategy is a new concept and it is being applied to the context of recommendation diversity. Eliciting consistency between recommendations from multiple sources would be beneficial for e-Commerce websites because consistency reduces dissonance in consumers and facilitates the purchase process.
Planning with preferences using maximum satisfiability

The objective of automated planning is to synthesise a plan that achieves a set of goals specified by the user. When achieving every goal is not feasible, the planning system must decide which ones to plan for and find the lowest cost plan. The system should take as input a description of the user's preferences and the costs incurred through executing actions. Goal utility dependencies arise when the utility of achieving a goal depends on the other goals that are achieved with it. This complicates the planning procedure because achieving a new goal can alter the utilities of all the other goals currently achieved. In this dissertation we present methods for solving planning problems with goal utility dependencies by compiling them to a variant of satisfiability known as weighted partial maximum satisfiability (WPMax-SAT). An optimal solution to the encoding is found using a general-purpose solver. The encoding is constructed such that its optimal solution can be used to construct a plan that is most preferred amongst other plans of length that fit within a prespecified horizon. We evaluate this approach against an integer programming based system using benchmark problems taken from past international planning competitions. We study how a WPMax-SAT solver might benefit from incorporating a procedure known as survey propagation. This is a message passing algorithm that estimates the probability that a variable is constrained to be a particular value in a randomly selected satisfying assignment. These estimates are used to influence variable/value decisions during search for a solution. Survey propagation is usually presented with respect to the satisfiability problem, and its generalisation, SP(y), with respect to the maximum satisfiability problem. We extend the argument that underpins these two algorithms to derive a new set of message passing equations for application to WPMax-SAT problems. We evaluate the success of this method by applying it to our encodings of planning problems with goal utility dependencies. Our results indicate that planning with preferences using WPMax-SAT is competitive and sometimes more successful than an integer programming approach – solving two to three times more subproblems in some domains, while being outperformed by a smaller margin in others. In some domains, we also find that using information provided by survey propagation in a WPMax-SAT solver to select variable/value pairs for the earliest decisions can, on average, direct search to lower cost solutions than a uniform sampling strategy combined with a popular heuristic. Acknowledgments …
The Impact of Teacher Demographic Representation on Student Attendance and Suspensions

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context in which to test the predictions of representative bureaucracy theory at the micro (student) level. Specifically, since parents have at least some agency over primary school students' daily attendance, absences reflect parental assessments of their child's school, classroom, and teacher. The representativeness of the teacher workforce, and specifically that of the student's classroom teacher, is therefore likely to influence student absenteeism. Similarly, student suspensions reflect students' relationships with their teacher, students' comfort level in the classroom, and teachers' discretion in the referral of misbehavior. These academically and socially important outcomes provide convenient, objective measures of behaviors that are likely influenced by street-level representation. Using longitudinal student-level administrative data from the North Carolina, we use a two-way (student and classroom) fixed effects strategy to identify the impact of student-teacher demographic mismatch on primary school students' absences and suspensions. We find that representation among street-level bureaucrats significantly decreases both absenteeism and suspensions and that these effects can be given a causal interpretation. The introduction of two-way fixed effects estimators to public administration scholarship is a secondary contribution of the current study.
Impact of Early-Life Bisphenol A Exposure on Behavior and Executive Function in Children

OBJECTIVES: To estimate the impact of gestational and childhood bisphenol A (BPA) exposures on behavior and executive function at 3 years of age and to determine whether child gender modified those associations. METHODS: We used a prospective birth cohort of 244 mothers and their 3-year-old children from the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area. We characterized gestational and childhood BPA exposures by using the mean BPA concentrations in maternal (16 and 26 weeks of gestation and birth) and child (1, 2, and 3 years of age) urine samples, respectively. Behavior and executive function were measured by using the Behavior Assessment System for Children 2 (BASC-2) and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Preschool (BRIEF-P). RESULTS: BPA was detected in >97% of the gestational (median: 2.0 μg/L) and childhood (median: 4.1 μg/L) urine samples. With adjustment for confounders, each 10-fold increase in gestational BPA concentrations was associated with more anxious and depressed behavior on the BASC-2 and poorer emotional control and inhibition on the BRIEF-P. The magnitude of the gestational BPA associations differed according to child gender; BASC-2 and BRIEF-P scores increased 9 to 12 points among girls, but changes were null or negative among boys. Associations between childhood BPA exposure and neurobehavior were largely null and not modified by child gender. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, gestational BPA exposure affected behavioral and emotional regulation domains at 3 years of age, especially among girls. Clinicians may advise concerned patients to reduce their exposure to certain consumer products, but the benefits of such reductions are unclear.
Bubble bee, an alternative to arrow for pointing out directions

We present Bubble Bee - an extension for the 3D bubble cursor in Virtual Environments (VEs). This technique provides an alternative to arrows for pointing out a direction in a 3D scene. Bubble Bee is based on a ring concept. A circular ring in 3D appears like an ellipse, according to its orientation. This orientation is easy to infer by comparing the minor radius which varies with the view angle, to the reference major radius which is constant and equal to the radius of the ring. Bubble Bee is a sphere with several rings oriented towards the same direction. The rings give a natural axis to the sphere. A color gradient sets the direction of this axis. We compared the performance of Bubble Bee and a 3D arrow through an experiment. The participants were asked to indicate which object was pointed by the two competing techniques. No significant differences on decision time were found, while Bubble Bee was shown to be nearly as accurate as a 3D arrow.
C3d fragment of complement interacts with laminin and binds to basement membranes of glomerulus and trophoblast

Two mouse monoclonal antibodies generated against human placental homogenate were found to react specifically with human complement component C3. In immunofluorescence of human tissues, these antibodies gave a bright linear staining outlining the glomerular basement membrane of the adult kidney and the trophoblast basement membrane of placenta. An identical staining pattern was observed with a rabbit C3d antiserum which also prevented binding of the monoclonal antibodies to tissue sections. Only negligible basement membrane staining was observed in the same tissues with antisera to human C3c, C5, IgG, IgA, or IgM. When interactions of C3 with basement membrane proteins were tested in enzyme immunoassays and column chromatography, C3(H2O) was found to bind efficiently to solid-phase laminin. Native C3 from fresh plasma did not bind to laminin but C3 from plasma treated with methylamine bound efficiently. When C3 was cleaved with trypsin, C3b and C3d but not C3c bound to laminin-Sepharose. The interaction of C3 and laminin was inhibited by soluble laminin and by high ionic strength. The results indicate that C3d, a biologically active breakdown product of C3, can be found in glomerular and placental basement membranes in the absence of signs for ongoing local complement activation or immune complex deposition. It is possible that binding affinities between C3 and basement membrane molecules, especially laminin, are involved in the retention of C3d at these sites. Such interactions between C3 and components of the glomerular basement membrane could play important roles in complement-related pathological processes of the glomerulus.
Impact of process variations on multi-level signaling for on-chip interconnects

Global interconnects are widely acknowledged as a limiting factor in future on-chip designs. Novel interconnect driving techniques like multi-level signaling have been proposed to improve performance of on-chip interconnects. This paper presents the impact of process-induced parameter variation on multi-level signaling system for on-chip interconnects. The effects of parameter variations is analyzed by Monte Carlo simulations and parameter sensitivity analyses. Monte Carlo analyses show that the threshold voltage, effective gate length and supply voltage are the key parameters that influence interconnect delay and total average power. It also shows that the interconnect delay and total average power with multi-level signaling for 10 mm line in 100 nm technology are normally distributed with a standard deviation of around 7.8% and 14.55% respectively. Individual parameter sensitivity analyses show that the total average power is most influenced by threshold voltage and is least influenced by drain/source parasitic resistance and thickness of oxide. The impact of different technologies, which include 180 nm, 130 nm and 100 nm are analyzed and it can be seen that the impact of individual device variation on delay and power reduces as technology scaled down. Yield of high performance and low power bins in 180 nm technology under process variations is 30%, yield of high performance bins is 23.2% and yield of low power bins is 36.1%.
Semantic annotation in academic search engine

Web information can be given more explicit meanings through semantic annotation, so that computer can understand and deal with the information automatically, which is important to improve recall ratio and precision ratio of search engine. An ontology-based semantic annotation method is represented in this paper, and which has been applied in an academic search. Construction of academic ontology, semantic annotation algorithm and semantic retrieval are described.
Role Classification of Hosts Within Enterprise Networks Based on Connection Patterns

Role classification involves grouping hosts into related roles. It exposes the logical structure of a network, simplifies network management tasks such as policy checking and network segmentation, and can be used to improve the accuracy of network monitoring and analysis algorithms such as intrusion detection. This paper defines the role classification problem and introduces two practical algorithms that group hosts based on observed connection patterns while dealing with changes in these patterns over time. The algorithms have been implemented in a commercial network monitoring and analysis product for enterprise networks. Results from grouping two enterprise networks show that the number of groups identified by our algorithms can be two orders of magnitude smaller than the number of hosts and that the way our algorithms group hosts highly reflect the logical structure of the networks.
A design to reduce write amplification in object-based NAND flash devices

Write amplification is a major cause of performance and endurance degradations in NAND flash based storage systems. In an object-based NAND flash device, two causes of write amplification are onode partial update and cascading update. Updating one onode, a kind of small-sized object metadata, invokes partial page update (i.e., onode partial update) that incurs unnecessary migration of the un-updated data. An cascading update denotes that object metadata is updated in a cascading manner due to erase-before-program property of NAND flash memory. In this work, we propose a system design to alleviate onode partial update and cascading update. The proposed system design includes: 1) A multi-level garbage collection technique to minimize unnecessary data migration incurred by onode partial update; 2) A B+ table tree and selective cache design to reduce the write operations associated with cascading update; and 3) A power failure handling technique to guarantee system consistency. Experiment results show that our proposed design can achieve up to 20% write reduction compared to the best state-of-the-art.
Nutrition Counseling System and Food Menu Planning

In recent years the effects of industrial growth have resulted in drastic changes in consuming behavior, standard of living, and lifestyles. In particular there has been a significant rise in the number of people who eat out regularly. This often means that they cannot control the characteristics of the food they take, such as its taste, calories per portion, and other nutritional details. As a result they may become prone to obesity. Today people are confronted with more difficult decisions about how to select food items suitable to their nutritional needs. In this paper, we present a new nutrition counseling system for food menu planning (NCS). This NCS not only assists in finding the appropriate menu for users, by entering data parameters such as gender, age, height, weight, exercise activity and favorite food but also provides meals customized to each individual nutritional profile. In the near future such systems might become integral to an encompassing lifestyle health information system.
Improving Gene Structure Predictions for Prokaryotic Genomes

The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland has produced operon and terminator prediction databases for all sequenced prokaryotic genomes. Results indicate that considering the two databases together would improve the accuracy of both sets of predictions. I present suggestions as to how the information from the two databases could be effectively merged.