Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
915-MHz wireless 64-channel neural recording SoC with programmable mixed-signal FIR filters

A system-on-chip (SoC) neural recording interface with 64 channels, 64 16-tap programmable mixed-signal FIR filters and a fully integrated 915MHz OOK/FSK closed-loop wireless transmitter is presented. Each recording channel has a fully differential amplifier with 54dB of gain and utilizes a tunable low-distortion subthreshold MOS-resistor to reject DC offsets with an input-referred noise of 6. 5μV and a CMRR of 78dB. Each channel contains a modified 8-bit SAR ADC with an ENOB of 7.8-bits and can provide analog-digital multiplication by modifying the the sampling phase of the ADC. It is used in conjunction with 12-bit digital adders and registers to implement 64 programmable transposed FIR filters that enable precise separation of various bands in the neural spectrum. The 915MHz FSK/OOK transmitter offers data rates up to 1.5Mbps with a maximum output power of 0dBm. The 4×3mm chip fabricated in a 0. 13μm CMOS process dissipates 5.03mW from a 1.2V supply.
B-MYB Is Essential for Normal Cell Cycle Progression and Chromosomal Stability of Embryonic Stem Cells

Background The transcription factor B-Myb is present in all proliferating cells, and in mice engineered to remove this gene, embryos die in utero just after implantation due to inner cell mass defects. This lethal phenotype has generally been attributed to a proliferation defect in the cell cycle phase of G1. Methodology/Principal Findings In the present study, we show that the major cell cycle defect in murine embryonic stem (mES) cells occurs in G2/M. Specifically, knockdown of B-Myb by short-hairpin RNAs results in delayed transit through G2/M, severe mitotic spindle and centrosome defects, and in polyploidy. Moreover, many euploid mES cells that are transiently deficient in B-Myb become aneuploid and can no longer be considered viable. Knockdown of B-Myb in mES cells also decreases Oct4 RNA and protein abundance, while over-expression of B-MYB modestly up-regulates pou5f1 gene expression. The coordinated changes in B-Myb and Oct4 expression are due, at least partly, to the ability of B-Myb to directly modulate pou5f1 gene promoter activity in vitro. Ultimately, the loss of B-Myb and associated loss of Oct4 lead to an increase in early markers of differentiation prior to the activation of caspase-mediated programmed cell death. Conclusions/Significance Appropriate B-Myb expression is critical to the maintenance of chromosomally stable and pluripotent ES cells, but its absence promotes chromosomal instability that results in either aneuploidy or differentiation-associated cell death.
What is the optimal treatment strategy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations?

The present study aims to determine whether treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations with intravenous steroids and aerosol bronchodilators (group I) is superior to oral steroids and multiple dose inhaler (MDI) bronchodilators with a spacer (group II). Group I received 40 mg methylprednisolone·day−1 intravenously with a decrease to 20 mg after 10 days and a further decrease of 4 mg·4 days−1. Aerosol therapy consisted of 10 mg salbutamol and 1 mg ipratropiumbromide·day−1. Group II received 32 mg methylprednisolone orally for 1 week followed by 24 mg·day−1 for 4 days and a subsequent decrease of 4 mg·week−1. Duovent® MDI with a spacer was given at a dose of 1.6 mg fenoterol and 640 µg ipratropiumbromide·day−1. In group I (n=19) forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) rose from 0.82±0.46 to 0.91±0.47 L and average dyspnoea decreased from 6.0±1.9 to 4.1±2.6 within 10 days. The Chronic Respiratory Disease Index Questionnaire (CRQ) score increased from 78±24 to 90±24 points after 4 weeks. In group II (n=18) FEV1 increased from 0.70±0.27 to 0.90±0.29 L, dyspnoea regressed from 6.2±2.4 to 2.7±2.6 and CRQ from 67±17 to 86±20. Both groups showed similar results in dropout rate, length of hospital stay and patient satisfaction. In conclusion, the two treatment strategies appear equally effective in treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations, although oral steroids and metered dose inhaler bronchodilators appear associated with a higher risk of hospital re-admission.
A compact UWB antenna with dual band-notched at WiMAX and WLAN for UWB applications

A compact slot Ultra Wide Band (UWB) antenna with dual band-notched characteristics at WiMAX and WLAN communication links is proposed. The proposed antenna has modified rectangular radiating patch and is beveled near the 50Ω microstrip feed-line. The band-stop filtering at WiMAX and WLAN is achieved by etching a rectangular-slot in the defective ground structure and a C-shaped slot in the modified metal patch. The novelty of the proposed antenna design is achievement of dual notches with reduced overall size as shown through comparison with other quoted reference antennas. The simulated group delay and peak gain are within UWB requirements. Good agreement between the simulated and measured results for VSWR (<; 2) and 2-D radiation patterns (omnidirectional) proves that this antenna may be suitable for UWB applications covering frequency range from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. The two band-notches avoid the interference problem with other narrowband wireless communication systems.
An Efficient Task Serializer for Hard Real-Time TMO Systems

Timeliness-guaranteed computing considering the worst case can hardly be accomplished at run time because of the uncertainty caused by resource sharing, asynchronous events and conflicting timing constraints between tasks. An easier way to reach it is to do some off-line analysis from design time with predictable characteristics of tasks. The TMO model supporting time-triggered (SpM) and message-triggered (SvM) member-threads is a well-known real-time object-oriented task model that aims the design-time guaranteed computing. In this paper, a new efficient task serializer that allocates the executions of time-triggered periodic tasks of multiple TMOs without delay and preemption to avoid resource conflicts is presented. The serializer tries to find scheduling scenarios in that each SpM is executed at its exact trigger-time without delay based on the given WCET. This is done by recasting the initial offsets of SpMs to avoid overlaps of executions. And several methods to handle SvMs according to the types of SvMs using the serializer are also proposed.
Actively Learning Object Names Across Ambiguous Situations

Previous research shows that people can use the co-occurrence of words and objects in ambiguous situations (i.e., containing multiple words and objects) to learn word meanings during a brief passive training period (Yu & Smith, 2007). However, learners in the world are not completely passive but can affect how their environment is structured by moving their heads, eyes, and even objects. These actions can indicate attention to a language teacher, who may then be more likely to name the attended objects. Using a novel active learning paradigm in which learners choose which four objects they would like to see named on each successive trial, this study asks whether active learning is superior to passive learning in a cross-situational word learning context. Finding that learners perform better in active learning, we investigate the strategies and discover that most learners use immediate repetition to disambiguate pairings. Unexpectedly, we find that learners who repeat only one pair per trial--an easy way to infer this pair-perform worse than those who repeat multiple pairs per trial. Using a working memory extension to an associative model of word learning with uncertainty and familiarity biases, we investigate individual differences that correlate with these assorted strategies.
Effects Of Macroeconomic Announcements On Stock Returns Across Volatility Regimes

AbstractThis article presents evidence on the effects of macroeconomic announcements on individual stocks returns across two volatility regimes: one with high volatility and the other with low volatility. At 5% level of significance, the response of stock returns to macroeconomic announcements is much stronger in the low volatility regime. However, the effects of the Fama-French factors is unambiguously significant in both regimes.
New Materials for Thin Film Solar Cells

Thin film technology has a world-wide reputation in the field of thin film deposition process and also it paves a way for innovative techniques in large scale applications. Modern thin film technology has evolved into a sophisticated way to increase the performance and esthetic value for making new functional devices. One such application is search of new materials for thin film solar cells as it provides the solution for the today’s concern of energy crisis. Depending on the processing technology solar cells are of various types. Among them, silicon wafer solar cells and thin film solar cells are most promising. Thin film technology has made solar cells more feasible to be employed in terms of device design and fabrication. The efficiencies produced by these solar cells still need to be improved. For this many investigations for further improvement from CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) solar cell to dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite solar cells. Due to toxic nature and environmental impact the use of lead in perovskite solar cells are replaced by tin or some materials which would equalize the achieved efficiency of lead. Hence the developments in search of innovative materials continue its path in thin film solar cells to develop the photovoltaic field by enhancing its efficiency.
Gender difference in passive listening to stories: high-field fMRI study using multiple subject analysis based on individual activation maps.

Gender dependent diŠerences in behavior are well-recognized phenomena in mammals, especially for those behaviors directly andWor indirectly related to reproduction. Whether or not such sexual dimorphism can be found in other fundamental human brain functions such as language remains debatable. While classical behavioral studies generally indicate the presence of a gender diŠerence, there has been no objective physiological evidence demonstrated in support of this. More recent studies using functional imaging, on the other hand, purport to exhibit substantial diŠerences in temporal lobe activation associated with passive listening to stories. While males almost exclusively activated the left hemisphere, females showed substantial bi-hemispheric activation. One of the main pitfalls of activation studies, especially those based on single composite activation maps derived from multiple subjects andWor sessions, a common practice employed in positron emission tomography (PET) studies or fMRI performed on conventional systems, is cumulative statistical errors generated primarily because of the necessity of using standardized brain coordinates. This eŠect is especially apparent in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis performed in a similar fashion, because fMRI raw data, especially those obtained using conventional systems are inherently artifact-prone. In contrast, appropriately performed fMRI based on high-ˆeld systems is capable of providing highly reproducible, high-resolution activation maps for each individual subject. Multiple subject analysis based on these individually deˆned activation maps can eŠectively eliminate such cumulative errors. Accordingly, we investigated gender diŠerences in temporal lobe activation associated with passive listening to stories utilizing a 3.0T system speciˆcally optimized for fMRI.
OpenSMT 2 : An SMT Solver for Multi-Core and Cloud Computing

This paper describes a major revision of the OpenSMT solver developed since 2008. The version 2 significantly improves its predecessor by providing a design that supports extensions, several critical bug fixes and performance improvements. The distinguishing feature of the new version is the support for a wide range of parallelization algorithms both on multi-core and cloud-computing environments. Presently the solver implements the quantifier free theories of uninterpreted functions and equalities and linear real arithmetics, and is released under the MIT license.
Title : Evaluation of accelerated shelf life testing of UHT milk

Development of UHT dairy products requires time consuming and resource intensive shelf life tests. Thus, a valid accelerated shelf life test would be of high value in the development of new products. This thesis provides a quantification of chemical and physical changes in commercial UHT milk stored at different temperatures, with the aim of establishing a valid setup to accelerate shelf life development. The temperatures selected were; 10 °C, 20 °C, 30 °C, 40 °C and 50 °C as well as three temperature cycles. The skimmed and full fat UHT milk samples were analysed during a storage period of 24 weeks. This included chemical analyses of the three phases of the Maillard reaction (MR) as well as the lipid oxidation. The initial stage of the MR was analysed by a quantification of furosine using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The intermediate stage of the MR was analysed by fluorescence spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC-MS). Finally, the late stage of the MR was analysed with colour measurements. An evaluation of physical destabilization was conducted with focus on gravitational separation, in form of creaming and sedimentation. Physical changes were analysed using; optical stability analyzers, evaluation of protein and fat distribution in; top, middle and bottom fractions, as well as analysis of fat globule size distribution. Exposure to elevated temperatures accelerated both chemical and physical changes over the storage period. The chemical changes revealed data possible to describe with kinetic models. Formation of furosine followed a first order reaction kinetic, whereas fluorescence and colour changes followed a zero order reaction kinetic. Additionally, all three stages of the MR fitted into the Arrhenius equation. Following corresponding Q10 values were obtained; for the initial MR of 1.5 to 2.3, for the intermediate MR of 3.9 to 10.9 and for the late MR of 2.8 to 6. The acceleration of physical changes varied between the applied methods, where different rates of creaming and sedimentation were observed. No changes in fat globule size distribution were found, which may indicate that other parameters are affecting the creaming rate, possibly by viscosity and density changes. Development of the three temperature cycles varied between chemical and physical parameters analysed. This was illustrating that it is only slightly possible to delay the MR once it has started, even when exposed to lower storage temperatures. On the other hand, physical parameters followed the average temperature. For future accelerated shelf life tests, a prediction of shelf life seems to be possible within the temperature range of 20 °C to 30 °C. These findings are based on the Arrhenius plots obtained in the present study.
Real-time face alignment with tracking in video

Real-time face alignment in video is very critical in many applications such as facial expression analysis, driver fatigue monitoring, etc. This paper presents a real time algorithm for face alignment in video that combines Active Shape Model (ASM) based face alignment and spatial-temporal continuity based tracking strategy. To guarantee the correctness of the tracked shape in each frame, a verification procedure is introduced so that when inter-frame shape tracking failed the intra-frame ASM algorithm can be restored to initialize a new shape for tracking. Experiments show that the implemented system can run totally automatic with a quite good accuracy that may have many practical applications.
Novel dynamic structure neural network for optical character recognition

This paper presents a novel dynamic structure neural network (DSNN) and a learning algorithm for training DSNN. The performance of a neural network system depends on several factors. In that, the architecture of a neural network plays an important role. The objective of the developing DSNN is to avoid trial-and-error process for designing a neural network system. The architecture of DSNN consists of a three-dimensional set of neurons with input/output nodes and connection weights. Designers can define the maximum connection number of each neuron. Moreover, designers can manually deploy neurons in a virtual 3D space, or randomly generate the system structure by the proposed learning algorithm. This work also develops an automatic restructuring algorithm integrated in the proposed learning algorithm to improve the system performance. Due to the novel dynamic structure of DSNN and the restructuring algorithm, the design of DSNN is fast and convenient. Furthermore, DSNN is implemented in C++ with man-machine interactive procedures and tested on many cases with very promising results.
Update on Plastid Stromules Stromules : Recent Insights into a Long Neglected Feature of Plastid Morphology and Function 1 [ W ]

Extensions and protrusions of the plastid envelope had been described a number of times in the pre-1990s literature, including a report in 1888 and a 1908 monograph on plastids (for review, see Gray et al., 2001; Kwok and Hanson, 2004a), but they were never generally accepted features of chloroplasts and nongreen plastids until the era of fluorescent protein technology. The first GFP-labeled plastids in transgenic plants were visualized in 1996 (Köhler et al., 1997), leading to the rediscovery of the sometimes motile tubular structures extending from chloroplasts that were previously best documented by Sam Wildman and colleagues by phase contrast microscopy in the 1960s (Wildman et al., 1962). Plastids were occasionally observed that were connected by the long, thin extensions (Fig. 1), raising the possibility that molecules could be exchanged through them. Inspired by a report from the Lippincott-Schwartz group that utilized a photobleaching method to observe protein flow in the Golgi (Cole et al., 1996), we performed photodestruction of the green fluorescent signal present in a plastid connected to another plastid. Photobleaching eliminated the fluorescence of the targeted plastid, but green fluorescence quickly reappeared, due to the flow of GFP from the connected, unbleached plastid to the plastid body where GFP fluorescence had been abolished (fluorescence recovery after photobleaching [FRAP]; Köhler et al., 1997). GFP fluorescence could be eliminated from two different plastid bodies by directing the laser at a tubule connecting them (fluorescence loss in photobleaching; Hanson and Köhler, 2001). An example of a FRAP experiment is shown in Figure 1 and can be found as a time-lapse movie in Supplemental Movie S1. After a science writer called with a request for an interview concerning the “microtubules” that had been found on chloroplasts, it became evident that a name was needed for the plastid tubules that would prevent confusion with other subcellular structures. In 1999, we chose the name “stromules” for these stromafilled tubules, and it appeared first in 2000 in several of our papers (Köhler and Hanson, 2000; Köhler et al., 2000). Ten years later, this name now seems generally accepted and has appeared in a number of papers and reviews (Gray et al., 2001; Hanson and Köhler, 2001; Kwok and Hanson, 2004a; Natesan et al., 2005; Hanson and Sattarzadeh, 2008). A 2006 Web essay on stromules that accompanies a plant physiology textbook (Taiz and Zeiger, 2010) is available at http://5e.plantphys. net/article.php? ch=7&id=122.
Power and bias of subset pooling strategies

We define a method to estimate the random and systematic errors resulting from incomplete relevance assessments.Mean Average Precision (MAP) computed over a large number of topics with a shallow assessment pool substantially outperforms -- for the same adjudication effort MAP computed over fewer topics with deeper pools, and P@k computed with pools of the same depth. Move-to-front pooling,previously reported to yield substantially better rank correlation, yields similar power, and lower bias, compared tofixed-depth pooling.
A gravity balancing leg orthosis for robotic rehabilitation

A number of methods can be found in the literature to gravity balance a machine. In this paper we use hybrid method to achieve gravity balancing. Hybrid method employs a mechanism to locate center of mass of the robot in conjunction with springs. This method is used to develop a rehabilitation device, which compensates the effect of gravity on a human leg. For a quantitative evaluation of the performance of the device, electromyograph data of the muscles involved in the motion of leg were collected and analyzed. This data showed that the machine could be used for gravity balancing of the leg and could be potentially used for rehabilitation of patients.
Are we ready to use surrogate end points and surrogate tissues to evaluate response to chemopreventive and therapeutic intervention?

In this issue of Clinical Cancer Research , Zeng et al. [(1)][1] describe the analysis of putative intermediate biomarker gene expression in oral cavity mucosa biopsies from 17 patients with advanced malignancies who were enrolled in a Phase I clinical trial of liarozole. This agent was administered
FearNot! Designing in the classroom

In this paper, we present a classroom-based approach to obtaining design input from children in the 8-12 age group. The method described, Classroom Discussion Forums, allowed children to verbalise their opinions about FearNot (Fun with Empathic Agents to Reach Novel Outcomes in Teaching), a virtual school populated by synthetic characters for exploring bullying issues. Children’s views have had a significant impact on research, design and development of FearNot. Our findings highlight the importance of children’s perspectives for designing interactive products.
Genetic diversity of STLV-2 and interspecies transmission of STLV-3 in wild-living bonobos

There are currently four known primate T-cell lymphotropic virus groups (PTLV1-4), each of which comprises closely related simian (STLV) and human (HTLV) viruses. For PTLV-1 and PTLV-3, simian and human viruses are interspersed, suggesting multiple cross-species transmission events; however, for PTLV-2 this is not so clear because HTLV-2 and STLV-2 strains from captive bonobos (Pan paniscus) form two distinct clades. To determine to what extent bonobos are naturally infected with STLV, we screened fecal samples (n = 633) from wild-living bonobos (n = 312) at six different sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the presence of STLV nucleic acids. STLV infection was detected in 8 of 312 bonobos at four of six field sites, suggesting an overall prevalence of 2.6% (ranging from 0 to 8%). Six samples contained STLV-2, while the two others contained STLV-3, as determined by phylogenetic analysis of partial tax and Long Terminal Repeats (LTR) sequences. The new STLV-2 sequences were highly diverse, but grouped with previously identified STLV-2 strains as a sister clade to HTLV-2. In contrast, the new STLV-3 sequences did not cluster together, but were more closely related to STLVs from sympatric monkey species. These results show for the first time that fecal samples can be used to detect STLV infection in apes. These results also show that wild-living bonobos are endemically infected with STLV-2, but have acquired STLV-3 on at least two occasions most likely by cross-species transmission from monkey species on which they prey. Future studies of bonobos and other non-human primate species in Central Africa are needed to identify the simian precursor of HTLV-2 in humans.