Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating FRP Repair Method for Cracked Prestressed Concrete Bridge Members Subjected to Repeated Loadings (Phase 1)

This report presents the details of a research study on the use of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheets to repair and strengthen prestressed concrete bridge girders in flexure and shear. Five specimens that were removed from an overloaded bridge (Bridge #56) in Graham County, Kansas were tested. Three of the beams were statically tested to failure to determine their flexural capacity with and without strengthening. It was found that longitudinal CFRP sheets significantly increased the ultimate flexural capacity of the specimens. The other two specimens were tested in fatigue. High stress ranges in the prestressing strands caused the early failure of both specimens. Failure of Specimen 4 occurred by rupture of strands at the location of the mid-span push down device. A special strengthening scheme was applied to Specimen 5 to reduce any tensile stress concentration expected to develop at the push down device detail of the harped strands. This scheme successfully protected the push down device area causing failure to shift outside the mid span region, where higher strand stress range existed. Corrosion may have also contributed to the premature failure. Shear capacity was also examined on the two ends of each of the failed specimens. Two cases were evaluated in shear. The first one had the applied load such that shear cracks would form within the transfer length of the prestressing strands (allowing a bond-slip failure within that region). The second case had the applied load outside the transfer length of the prestressing strand (preventing bond-slip failure). The test results showed that transverse CFRP sheets increased the shear capacity of the specimens tested, but did not prevent bond-slip failures when diagonal cracks propagated into the transfer zone.
A novel dynamic TDMA protocol for ad hoc networks using directional antennas

To improve capacity and reduce interference, directional antennas are being become more and more important in ad hoc networks. A new MAC Protocol is proposed in this paper, termed dynamic TDMA protocol using directional antennas (NDTDD). The NDTDD dynamically allocates time slots for each beam of every node without center coordinator. The time frame is composed of three sub-frames, separately called admission, assignment and reservation sub-frames. The NDTDD takes full advantage of the characters of directional antennas. A node can transmit packets in different beams simultaneously. Each beam of new node can achieve high successful possibility entering the network in admission sub-frame. Coherence of available transmitting reservation slots set and receiving reservation slots set of the whole network is maintained by using only two-hop topology beam information. The reservation mechanism ensures that all beams get reservation slots fairly according to their traffic. The high spatial reuse ratio achieved by directional antennas makes the NDTDD achieve high time reuse ratio for ad hoc networks. Analysis and simulation results are presented to verify how this new protocol performs.
Ginsenoside Rg-1 Protects Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE) Cells from Cobalt Chloride (CoCl2) and Hypoxia Assaults

Severe retinal ischemia causes persistent visual impairments in eye diseases. Retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells are located near the choroidal capillaries, and are easily affected by ischemic or hypoxia. Ginsenoside Rg-1 has shown significant neuroprotective effects. This study was performed to test the cytoprotective effect of ginsenoside Rg-1 in RPE cells against hypoxia and cobalt chloride (CoCl2) assaults, and to understand the underlying mechanisms. We found that Rg-1 pre-administration significantly inhibited CoCl2- and hypoxia-induced RPE cell death and apoptosis. Reactive oxygen specisis (ROS)-dependent p38 and c-Jun NH(2)-terminal kinases (JNK) MAPK activation was required for CoCl2-induced RPE cell death, and Rg-1 pre-treatment significantly inhibited ROS production and following p38/JNK activation. Further, CoCl2 suppressed pro-survival mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) activation in RPE cells through activating of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), while Rg-1 restored mTORC1 activity through inhibiting AMPK activation. CoCl2-induced AMPK activation was also dependent on ROS production, and anti-oxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) prevented AMPK activation and RPE cell death by CoCl2. Our results indicated that Rg-1 could be further investigated as a novel cell-protective agent for retinal ischemia.
Globally asymptotically stable reconstruction of flux, rotor position and speed for permanent magnets machines

An original full-order observer is presented for stator fluxes and speed reconstruction for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines. The estimation is carried out in a fixed reference frame exploiting the stator currents and voltages as the only known variables. Global asymptotic convergence properties of the proposed scheme are drawn, casting the estimation problem into adaptive systems theoretical framework. Insightful modification to the flux estimation dynamics is proposed in order to improve the observer performance in the low speed region. Simulation tests asses the features of the presented method.
Fast face detection based on skin color segmentation using single chrominance Cr

In this paper, a simple and fast algorithm was proposed to detect face. Firstly, some interest points marking skin regions were searched by only using simple chrominance Cr information instead of simultaneously using chrominance Cr and Cb. And then, a conventional and popular AdaBoost algorithm was employed to make a decision whether around the detected interest points was there face and then located the face if there was. 400 face patches were translated into YCbCr space, and it was found from the 400 face patches that skin Cr histogram overlapped a little with non-skin Cr histogram and its cut-off was about 137. From LFW database, another 215 facial images of 108 subjects were random selected to test the proposed method. Compared with other interest detection methods, the detection based simple Cr method can not only find out all face regions, but also the number of its detected interest points was the least and the whole detection time was the least too. Therefore, the proposed method was an effective face detection method.
Association Between the Choice of IV Crystalloid and In-Hospital Mortality Among Critically Ill Adults With Sepsis*

Objective:Isotonic saline is the most commonly used crystalloid in the ICU, but recent evidence suggests that balanced fluids like Lactated Ringer’s solution may be preferable. We examined the association between choice of crystalloids and in-hospital mortality during the resuscitation of critically ill adults with sepsis. Design:A retrospective cohort study of patients admitted with sepsis, not undergoing any surgical procedures, and treated in an ICU by hospital day 2. We used propensity score matching to control for confounding and compared the following outcomes after resuscitation with balanced versus with no-balanced fluids: in-hospital mortality, acute renal failure with and without dialysis, and hospital and ICU lengths of stay. We also estimated the dose-response relationship between receipt of increasing proportions of balanced fluids and in-hospital mortality. Setting:Three hundred sixty U.S. hospitals that were members of the Premier Healthcare alliance between November 2005 and December 2010. Patients:A total of 53,448 patients with sepsis, treated with vasopressors and crystalloids in an ICU by hospital day 2 including 3,396 (6.4%) that received balanced fluids. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:Patients treated with balanced fluids were younger and less likely to have heart or chronic renal failure, but they were more likely to receive mechanical ventilation, invasive monitoring, colloids, steroids, and larger crystalloid volumes (median 7 vs 5 L). Among 6,730 patients in a propensity-matched cohort, receipt of balanced fluids was associated with lower in-hospital mortality (19.6% vs 22.8%; relative risk, 0.86; 95% CI, 0.78, 0.94). Mortality was progressively lower among patients receiving larger proportions of balanced fluids. There were no significant differences in the prevalence of acute renal failure (with and without dialysis) or in-hospital and ICU lengths of stay. Conclusions:Among critically ill adults with sepsis, resuscitation with balanced fluids was associated with a lower risk of in-hospital mortality. If confirmed in randomized trials, this finding could have significant public health implications, as crystalloid resuscitation is nearly universal in sepsis.
Carry Prediction and Selection for Truncated Multiplication

This paper presents an error compensation method for truncated multiplication. From two n-bit operands, the operator produces an n-bit product with small error compared to the 2n-bit exact product. The method is based on a logical computation followed by a simplification process. The filtering parameter used in the simplification process helps to control the trade-off between hardware cost and accuracy. The proposed truncated multiplication scheme has been synthesized on an FPGA platform. It gives a better accuracy over area ratio than previous well-known schemes such as the constant correcting and variable correcting truncation schemes (CCT and VCT)
Geolocation in mines with an impulse response fingerprinting technique and neural networks

The location of people, mobile terminals and equipment is highly desirable for operational enhancements in the mining industry. In an indoor environment such as a mine, the multipath caused by reflection, diffraction and diffusion on the rough sidewall surfaces, and the non-line of sight (NLOS) due to the blockage of the shortest direct path between transmitter and receiver are the main sources of range measurement errors. Unreliable measurements of location metrics such as received signal strengths (RSS), angles of arrival (AOA) and times of arrival (TOA) or time differences of arrival (TDOA), result in the deterioration of the positioning performance. Hence, alternatives to the traditional parametric geolocation techniques have to be considered. In this paper, we present a novel method for mobile station location using wideband channel measurement results applied to an artificial neural network (ANN). The proposed system, the wide band neural network-locate (WBNN-locate), learns off-line the location 'signatures' from the extracted location-dependent features of the measured channel impulse responses for line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) situations. It then matches on-line the observation received from a mobile station against the learned set of 'signatures' to accurately locate its position. The location accuracy of the proposed system, applied in an underground mine, has been found to be 2 meters for 90% and 80% of trained and untrained data, respectively. Moreover, the proposed system may also be applicable to any other indoor situation and particularly in confined environments with characteristics similar to those of a mine (e.g. rough sidewalls surface).
Multilingual Document Clustering: An Heuristic Approach Based on Cognate Named Entities

This paper presents an approach for Multilingual Document Clustering in comparable corpora. The algorithm is of heuristic nature and it uses as unique evidence for clustering the identification of cognate named entities between both sides of the comparable corpora. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it does not depend on bilingual or multilingual resources. However, it depends on the possibility of identifying cognate named entities between the languages used in the corpus. An additional advantage of the approach is that it does not need any information about the right number of clusters; the algorithm calculates it. We have tested this approach with a comparable corpus of news written in English and Spanish. In addition, we have compared the results with a system which translates selected document features. The obtained results are encouraging.
Face Detection: Mapping Human Performance

The recognition of faces has been the focus of an extensive body of research, whereas the preliminary and prerequisite task of detecting a face has received limited attention from psychologists. Four experiments are reported that address the question how we detect a face. Experiment 1 reveals that we use information from the scene to aid detection. In experiment 2 we investigated which features of a face speed the detection of faces. Experiment 3 revealed inversion effects and an interaction between the effects of blurring and reduction of contrast. In experiment 4 the sizes of effects of reversal of orientation, luminance, and hue were compared. Luminance was found to have the greatest effect on reaction time to detect faces. The results are interpreted as suggesting that face detection proceeds by a pre-attentive stage that identifies possible face regions, which is followed by a focused-attention stage that employs a deformable template. Comparisons are drawn with automatic face-detection systems.
3D stochastic completion fields for fiber tractography

We approach the problem of fiber tractography from the viewpoint that a computational theory should relate to the underlying quantity that is being measured - the diffusion of water molecules. We characterize the Brownian motion of water by a 3D random walk described by a stochastic non-linear differential equation. We show that the maximum-likelihood trajectories are 3D elastica, or curves of least energy. We illustrate the model with Monte-Carlo (sequential) simulations and then develop a more efficient (local, parallelizable) implementation, based on the Fokker-Planck equation. The final algorithm allows us to efficiently compute stochastic completion fields to connect a source region to a sink region, while taking into account the underlying diffusion MRI data. We demonstrate promising tractography results using high angular resolution diffusion data as input.
Refinement of Synchronizable Places with Multi-workflow Nets

Stepwise refinement is a well-known strategy in system modeling. The refinement rules should preserve essential behavioral properties, such as deadlock freedom, boundedness and weak termination. A well-known example is the refinement rule that replaces a safe place of a Petri net with a sound workflow net. In this case a token on the refined place undergoes a procedure that is modeled in detail by the refining workflow net.
Molecular Modeling of Mechanosensory Ion Channel Structural and Functional Features

The DEG/ENaC (Degenerin/Epithelial Sodium Channel) protein family comprises related ion channel subunits from all metazoans, including humans. Members of this protein family play roles in several important biological processes such as transduction of mechanical stimuli, sodium re-absorption and blood pressure regulation. Several blocks of amino acid sequence are conserved in DEG/ENaC proteins, but structure/function relations in this channel class are poorly understood. Given the considerable experimental limitations associated with the crystallization of integral membrane proteins, knowledge-based modeling is often the only route towards obtaining reliable structural information. To gain insight into the structural characteristics of DEG/ENaC ion channels, we derived three-dimensional models of MEC-4 and UNC-8, based on the available crystal structures of ASIC1 (Acid Sensing Ion Channel 1). MEC-4 and UNC-8 are two DEG/ENaC family members involved in mechanosensation and proprioception respectively, in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We used these models to examine the structural effects of specific mutations that alter channel function in vivo. The trimeric MEC-4 model provides insight into the mechanism by which gain-of-function mutations cause structural alterations that result in increased channel permeability, which trigger cell degeneration. Our analysis provides an introductory framework to further investigate the multimeric organization of the DEG/ENaC ion channel complex.
Dairy product consumption has no impact on biomarkers of inflammation among men and women with low-grade systemic inflammation.

BACKGROUND Randomized controlled trials specifically designed to assess inflammation-related outcomes in response to dairy consumption are lacking. OBJECTIVE We investigated the impact of dairy food consumption on biomarkers of inflammation in healthy men and women with low-grade systemic inflammation. METHODS In a multicenter randomized crossover study, 112 adult men and women with high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) values >1 mg/L consumed 3 servings/d of dairy (375 mL low-fat milk, 175 g low-fat yogurt, and 30 g regular-fat cheddar cheese) or energy-matched control (fruit juice, vegetable juice, cashews, and 1 cookie) products as part of prudent 4-wk diets, each separated by a 4- to 8-wk washout period. Serum concentrations of inflammation biomarkers were measured at the beginning and end of each dietary phase. Expression levels of key inflammatory genes and transcription factors in whole blood cells were assessed at the end of each diet by real-time polymerase chain reaction in a random subset of 53 subjects. RESULTS Analysis of within-diet changes (post- vs. prediet values) showed a significant reduction in hs-CRP concentrations after the control diet (-11.7%, P = 0.05) but no change after the dairy diet (-7.3%, P = 0.47). As a result, changes in hs-CRP differed between the dairy and control diets (P = 0.04). Both the control and dairy diets similarly reduced interleukin-6 concentrations compared with diet-specific baseline values (-17.6% and -19.9%, respectively; P < 0.0001 for both, P = 0.77 for between-diet comparison). No between- or within-diet difference was observed in adiponectin concentrations, and there was also no between-diet difference in the expression of inflammatory genes and transcription factors. CONCLUSION Consistent with data from previous work, these results suggest that short-term consumption of a combination of low- and high-fat dairy products as part of a healthy diet has no adverse effects on inflammation. This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials. gov as NCT01444326.
Cloning and characterization of the Bacillus licheniformis gene coding for alkaline phosphatase

The structural gene for alkaline phosphatase (orthophosphoric monoester phosphohydrolase; EC 3.1.3.1) of Bacillus licheniformis MC14 was cloned into the Pst1 site of pMK2004 from chromosomal DNA. The gene was cloned on an 8.5-kilobase DNA fragment. A restriction map was developed, and the gene was subcloned on a 4.2-kilobase DNA fragment. The minimum coding region of the gene was localized to a 1.3-kilobase region. Western blot analysis was used to show that the gene coded for a 60,000-molecular-weight protein which cross-reacts with anti-alkaline phosphatase prepared against the salt-extractable membrane alkaline phosphatase of B. licheniformis MC14 .
Expressivity and comparison of models of discourse structure

Several discourse annotated corpora now exist for NLP exploitation. Nevertheless, it is not clear how these annotations compare: are they incompatible, incomparable, or do they share some inter- pretations? In this paper, we relate three types of discourse annotation as found in: (i) the RST Tree Bank corpus, (ii) SDRT corpora DISCOR and ANNODIS, and (iii) dependency tree structures. The latter have not yet been used in actual annotations, but represent elementary substructures which are interesting for automated parsing. Specifically, we discuss two ways of interpreting RST trees by taking discourse relations as semantics operators, one is fully specified, the other one underspecified. We also provide an underspecified semantic interpretation of dependency trees. We define trans- lations between RST and DT that preserve these underspecified interpretations. On this basis, we design similarity measures that quantify the loss of information implied by these translations. Over- all, these translations and metrics provide a unified framework that will hopefully enable us to take advantage of the various existing discourse annotation data that are available for automated tasks.
Bacteria Associated with Gut Lumen of Camponotus japonicus Mayr

ABSTRACT Camponotus ants harbor the obligate intracellular endosymbiont Blochmannia in their midgut bacteriocytes, but little is known about intestinal bacteria living in the gut lumen. In this paper we reported the results of a survey of the intestinal microflora of Camponotus japonicus Mayr based on small-subunit rRNA genes (16S rRNAs) polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-restriction fragment-length polymorphism analysis of worker guts. From 107 clones, 11 different restriction fragment-length polymorphism profiles were identified, and sequences blasting analysis found these represent four types of bacteria. Most (91.6%) of the clones were “Candidatus Blochmannia”, the obligate endosymbionts of Camponotus ants, and 6.5% of the clones were “Candidatus Serratia symbiotica”, a secondary endosymbiont of aphids; the remaining 2% clones were Fructobacillus fructosus and uncultured Burkholderiales bacterium, respectively. These results show that the diversity of gut bacteria in C. japonicus was low. “Candidatus Serratia symbiotica” was identified from Camponotus ants for the first time, an interesting result because Blochmannia's closest bacterial relative is also in the genus Serratia. This discovery supports the scenario that consumption of aphid honeydew or tissue provides an initial step in the evolution of an advanced symbiosis, and suggests that Camponotus ant could acquire other secondary endosymbionts from Hemiptera host through their diet. In addition, Burkholderiales bacterium also was identified from the gut of C. japonicus for the first time, and whether it is a nitrogen-recycling endosymbiont in Camponotus ants needs to be investigated further.
OBJECT-PROTOCOL MODEL DATA MANAGAMENT TOOLS `97

The development of the Object-Protocol Model (OPM) and OPM data management tools started in 1992. The main motivation for developing OPM at the time was the need to provide data management support for large scale DNA sequencing laboratories. We designed the protocol class as a construct for modeling sequencing, as well as other scientific, experiments. Since objectbased data models were well suited for modeling the complex data underlying the scientific and traditional database applications targeted by OPM, we decided to incorporate the protocol class construct into the framework of an object data model [2]. The development of the OPM data management tools can be split into three stages. Initially, the OPM data management tools aimed only at providing
Clock Glitch Attacks in the Presence of Heating

Fault attacks have been widely studied in the past but most of the literature describes only individual fault-injection techniques such as power/clock glitches, EM pulses, optical inductions, or heating/cooling. In this work, we investigate combined fault attacks by performing clock-glitch attacks under the impact of heating. We performed practical experiments on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller which resulted in the following findings. First, we identified that the success rate of glitch attacks performed at an ambient temperature of 100°C is higher than under room temperature. We were able to induce more faults and significantly increase the time frame when the device is susceptible to glitches which makes fault attacks easier to perform in practice. Second, and independently of the ambient temperature, we demonstrate that glitches cause individual instructions to repeat, we are able to add new random instructions, and we identified that opcode gets modified such that address registers of individual instructions get changed. Beside these new results, this is the first work that reports results of combined glitch and thermo attacks.