Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors affecting HAZ cracking susceptibility of laser welds. Study of weldability of Inconel 718 cast alloy (4th report)

TIG and electron beam welding have so far been chiefly used for welding of Ni-base superalloys. To improve the accuracy, performance, reliability, and productivity of welding, however, recent years have seen increasing applications of laser welding, although a major problem facing laser welding is its ready susceptibility to weld cracking and porosity. " Since first developed, Inconel 718 alloy has generally been used as a forged alloy. More recently, efforts have been made to develop cast alloy applications to reduce the number of welding sites in eg rocket engines. Because of various adverse features, such as its eutectic Laves phase, coarse grain size, and solidification segregations during casting, however, Inconel 718 cast alloy is reported to have a poorer weldability than the forged alloy. Performance results for laser welding applications to the heatresisting cast alloy are also relatively scant. Shinozaki et al ' have researched the laser weldability of Inconel 718 cast alloy. The results obtained by these authors suggest that the HAZ cracking affecting Inconel 718 cast alloy is a major cause of constitutional liquation of NbC at the grain boundaries. The applicability of laser welding to Inconel 718 cast alloy, however, has so far been little studied. The problems likely to be encountered in such applications therefore remain rather obscure. To examine the applicability of laser welding to Inconel 718 cast alloy, this paper establishes the relationship between the welding process parameters, bead crosssectional shapes, and appearance of welding defects during laser welding. Also discussed are the factors affecting the HAZ cracking susceptibility of laser welds as the most important problem facing application of laser welding to Inconel 718 cast alloy. Sample alloys and experimental method
Research on light scattering from randomly rough metal and dielectric surfaces with Monte Carlo method based on method of moment

In order to study light scattering from randomly rough surface, the linear filtering method is used to generate Gaussian randomly rough surface, and the method of moments is used to calculate the scattering light intensity distribution from perfect conduct and dielectric surfaces. The calculation results show that scattering characteristics between conductor and dielectric surfaces exist several significant differences: (1) the scattering peak value of perfectly conduct is larger than scattering peak value of dielectric on the same roughness; (2) the difference between s- and ppolarized scattering results are rather small in perfectly conduct randomly rough surfaces, while there is a obvious difference between s- and p-polarized scattering results in the condition of dielectric randomly rough surfaces; (3) though in both conditions of perfectly conduct and dielectric randomly rough surfaces, there is a shift from specular to backscattering direction when incident is p-polarized light, however, in dielectric randomly rough surface situation, the shift is much more obvious than in conduct situation.
A Receptor-based Switch that Regulates Anthrax Toxin Pore Formation

Cellular receptors can act as molecular switches, regulating the sensitivity of microbial proteins to conformational changes that promote cellular entry. The activities of these receptor-based switches are only partially understood. In this paper, we sought to understand the mechanism that underlies the activity of the ANTXR2 anthrax toxin receptor-based switch that binds to domains 2 and 4 of the protective antigen (PA) toxin subunit. Receptor-binding restricts structural changes within the heptameric PA prepore that are required for pore conversion to an acidic endosomal compartment. The transfer cross-saturation (TCS) NMR approach was used to monitor changes in the heptameric PA-receptor contacts at different steps during prepore-to-pore conversion. These studies demonstrated that receptor contact with PA domain 2 is weakened prior to pore conversion, defining a novel intermediate in this pathway. Importantly, ANTXR2 remained bound to PA domain 4 following pore conversion, suggesting that the bound receptor might influence the structure and/or function of the newly formed pore. These studies provide new insights into the function of a receptor-based molecular switch that controls anthrax toxin entry into cells.
Proceedings of the Joint Workshops on Xml, Ir, and Db Extending the Xml Fragment Model to Support Querying Over

The XML Fragment model offers a convenient formalism for querying XML collections "by example", that is, by formulating the query as a piece of XML that expresses the user's needs. This allows relevant results to be returned either as full documents or as XML Fragments, using a simple extension of the vector space model for ranking. In this work, we investigate extending this model to text analytics applications where semantic tags (e.g., names, entities, relations, etc.) are automatically generated to annotate the underlying text. Each type of tag can easily be represented as an XML element, but the spans of these tags often cross over each other, which, of course, is not allowed by the XML DOM structure. We discuss how our original XML Fragments model can be extended to query annotated documents with possibly overlapping annotations and illustrate our approach with examples of queries over annotated documents generated in the context of IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework.
Separating Authentication , Access and Accounting : A Case Study with OpenWiFi

Guest WiFi systems has become an integral part of our lives. Nonetheless, guest WiFi systems continue to be plagued by issues that are largely unresolved. In this technical report, we argue for the separation of authentication, access and accounting. To understand our proposal and understand how it can help to open up wireless access, we prototyped the OpenWiFi system. We describe OpenWiFi, its uses, implementation and the numerous challenges we faced. Finally, we outline trials we have undertaken with OpenWiFi to share our experiences. Initial Posting : July 2011 Last Updated : September 2011 Separating Authentication, Access and Accounting: A Case Study with OpenWiFi Kok-Kiong Yap∗ Yiannis Yiakoumis∗ Masayoshi Kobayashi† Sachin Katti Guru Parulkar Nick McKeown Stanford University NEC† {yapkke,yiannisy,mkobaya1,skatti,parulkar,nickm}@stanford.edu
Tumor suppressor pRB functions as a co‐repressor of the CCAAT displacement protein (CDP/cut) to regulate cell cycle controlled histone H4 transcription

The CCAAT displacement protein (CDP‐cut/CUTL1/cux) performs a key proliferation‐related function as the DNA binding subunit of the cell cycle controlled HiNF‐D complex. HiNF‐D interacts with all five classes (H1, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4) of the cell‐cycle dependent histone genes, which are transcriptionally and coordinately activated at the G1/S phase transition independent of E2F. The tumor suppressor pRB/p105 is an intrinsic component of the HiNF‐D complex. However, the molecular interactions that enable CDP and pRB to form a complex and thus convey cell growth regulatory information onto histone gene promoters must be further defined. Using transient transfections, we show that CDP represses the H4 gene promoter and that pRB functions with CDP as a co‐repressor. Direct physical interaction between CDP and pRB was observed in glutathione‐S‐transferase (GST) pull‐down assays. Furthermore, interactions between these proteins were established by yeast and mammalian two‐hybrid experiments and co‐immunoprecipitation assays. Confocal microscopy shows that subsets of each protein are co‐localized in situ. Using a series of pRB mutants, we find that the CDP/pRB interaction, similar to the E2F/pRB interaction, utilizes the A/B large pocket (LP) of pRB. Thus, several converging lines of evidence indicate that complexes between CDP and pRB repress cell cycle regulated histone gene promoters. J. Cell. Physiol. 196: 541–556, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
NC-APT: An Efficient and Scalable Download Mirror Selecting System

When large files are offered by many mirrors for clients to download, selecting the proper download mirrors is necessary in speeding up the clients' download. The existing method, which measures all the Round Trip Time (RTT) between clients and all mirrors, costs much time and Internet traffic. In this paper, we propose NC-APT, an efficient and scalable download mirror selecting system, which is capable to provide clients an efficient method to select quick download mirror. NC-APT is scalable because it only requires the mirrors to response to ICMP ping instead of keeping running an NC software program. Our experimental results show that NC-APT significantly improves the clients' download rates with slight cost of time and Internet traffic.
Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality †

Biologists use genetic relatedness between family members to explain the evolution of many behavioural and developmental traits in humans, including altruism, kin investment and longevity. Women's post-menopausal longevity in particular is linked to genetic relatedness between family members. According to the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, post-menopausal women can increase their genetic contribution to future generations by increasing the survivorship of their grandchildren. While some demographic studies have found evidence for this, others have found little support for it. Here, we re-model the predictions of the grandmother hypothesis by examining the genetic relatedness between grandmothers and grandchildren. We use this new model to re-evaluate the grandmother effect in seven previously studied human populations. Boys and girls differ in the per cent of genes they share with maternal versus paternal grandmothers because of differences in X-chromosome inheritance. Here, we demonstrate a relationship between X-chromosome inheritance and grandchild mortality in the presence of a grandmother. With this sex-specific and X-chromosome approach to interpreting mortality rates, we provide a new perspective on the prevailing theory for the evolution of human female longevity. This approach yields more consistent support for the grandmother hypothesis, and has implications for the study of human evolution.
Intrinsically stretchable transparent electrodes based on silver-nanowire–crosslinked-polyacrylate composites

Stretchable transparent composites have been synthesized consisting of a silver nanowire (AgNW) network embedded in the surface layer of a crosslinked poly(acrylate) matrix. The interpenetrating networks of AgNWs and the crosslinked polymer matrix lead to high surface conductivity, high transparency, and rubbery elasticity. The presence of carboxylic acid groups on the polymer chains enhances the bonding between AgNWs and the polymer matrix, and further increases the stretchability of the composites. The sheet resistance of the composite electrode increases by only 2.3 times at 50% strain. Repeated stretching to 50% strain and relaxation only causes a small increase of the sheet resistance after 600 cycles. The morphology of the composites during reversible stretching and relaxation has been investigated to expound the conductivity changes.
Passive haptics significantly enhances virtual environments

One of the most disconcertingly unnatural properties of most virtual environments (VEs) is the ability of the user to pass through objects. I hypothesize that passive haptics, augmenting a high-fidelity visual virtual environment with low-fidelity physical objects, will markedly improve both sense of presence and spatial knowledge training transfer. The low-fidelity physical models can be constructed from cheap, easy-to-assemble materials such as styrofoam, plywood, and particle board. The first study investigated the effects of augmenting a visual-cliff environment with a slight physical ledge on participants' sense of presence. I found when participants experienced passive haptics in the VE, they exhibited significantly more behaviors associated with pit avoidance than when experiencing the non-augmented VE. Changes in heart rate and skin conductivity were significantly higher than when they experienced the VE without passive haptics. The second study investigated passive haptics' effects on performance of a real-world navigation task after training in a virtual environment. Half of the participants trained on maze navigation in a VE augmented with a styrofoam physical model, while half trained in a non-augmented VE but were given visual and audio contact cues. The task was to gain as much information as possible about the layout of the environment. Participants knew before the VE session that their training would be tested by navigating an identical real maze environment while blindfolded. Significant differences in the time to complete the blindfolded navigation task and significant differences in the number of collisions with objects were found between the participants trained in an augmented VE and the participants trained in a non-augmented VE. 11 of 15 participants trained without passive haptics bumped into the next-to-last obstacle encountered in the testing session and turned the wrong direction to navigate around it: only 2 of 15 participants trained with passive haptics made the same navigation error. On the other hand, the assessment of the participants' cognitive maps of the virtual environment did not find significant differences between groups as measured by sketch maps and object dimension estimation.
Latent Variable Graphical Model Selection Using Harmonic Analysis: Applications to the Human Connectome Project (HCP)

A major goal of imaging studies such as the (ongoing) Human Connectome Project (HCP) is to characterize the structural network map of the human brain and identify its associations with covariates such as genotype, risk factors, and so on that correspond to an individual. But the set of image derived measures and the set of covariates are both large, so we must first estimate a 'parsimonious' set of relations between the measurements. For instance, a Gaussian graphical model will show conditional independencies between the random variables, which can then be used to setup specific downstream analyses. But most such data involve a large list of 'latent' variables that remain unobserved, yet affect the 'observed' variables sustantially. Accounting for such latent variables is not directly addressed by standard precision matrix estimation, and is tackled via highly specialized optimization methods. This paper offers a unique harmonic analysis view of this problem. By casting the estimation of the precision matrix in terms of a composition of low-frequency latent variables and high-frequency sparse terms, we show how the problem can be formulated using a new wavelet-type expansion in non-Euclidean spaces. Our formulation poses the estimation problem in the frequency space and shows how it can be solved by a simple sub-gradient scheme. We provide a set of scientific results on 500 scans from the recently released HCP data where our algorithm recovers highly interpretable and sparse conditional dependencies between brain connectivity pathways and well-known covariates.
MMSE-based joint source and relay precoding design for amplify-and-forward MIMO relay networks

Two new precoding schemes based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion for amplify-and-forward MIMO relay networks with quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are proposed. In the optimal joint source and relay precoding (OJSRP) scheme, primal decomposition technique is employed to decompose the non-convex optimization problem into a sub-problem and a master problem, which are convex and solvable. To relax the computation complexity of the OJSRP scheme, the suboptimal relay only precoding (SROP) scheme, which assumes equal power distribution over source antennas and has closed form solution, is also studied. Our numerical results show that both the minimum mean-square (MSE) performance and the capacity achieved by the two proposed schemes improve with the increase in signal-to-noise- ratio (SNR). Furthermore, OJSRP scheme has better MSE performance and capacity than SROP scheme. Finally, given a total transmission power, it is found that there exists an optimal power distribution over the source and the relay to achieve the best MSE performance and capacity. This indicates that transmission power should be distributed delicately over the source and the relay to optimize the resource utilization.
Schwann cells seeded in acellular nerve grafts improve functional recovery

Introduction: This study evaluated whether Schwann cells (SCs) from different nerve sources transplanted into cold‐preserved acellular nerve grafts (CP‐ANGs) would improve functional regeneration compared with nerve isografts. Methods: SCs isolated and expanded from motor and sensory branches of rat femoral and sciatic nerves were seeded into 14mm CP‐ANGs. Growth factor expression, axonal regeneration, and functional recovery were evaluated in a 14‐mm rat sciatic injury model and compared with isografts. Results: At 14 days, motor or sensory‐derived SCs increased expression of growth factors in CP‐ANGs versus isografts. After 42 days, histomorphometric analysis found CP‐ANGs with SCs and isografts had similar numbers of regenerating nerve fibers. At 84 days, muscle force generation was similar for CP‐ANGs with SCs and isografts. SC source did not affect nerve fiber counts or muscle force generation. Conclusions: SCs transplanted into CP‐ANGs increase functional regeneration to isograft levels; however SC nerve source did not have an effect. Muscle Nerve 49: 267–276, 2014
Linguistically Informed Statistical Models of Constituent Structure for Ordering in Sentence Realization

We present several statistical models of syntactic constituent order for sentence realization. We compare several models, including simple joint models inspired by existing statistical parsing models, and several novel conditional models. The conditional models leverage a large set of linguistic features without manual feature selection. We apply and evaluate the models in sentence realization for French and German and find that a particular conditional model outperforms all others. We employ a version of that model in an evaluation on unordered trees from the Penn TreeBank. We offer this result on standard data as a reference-point for evaluations of ordering in sentence realization.
Visual verification of space weather ensemble simulations

We propose a system to analyze and contextualize simulations of coronal mass ejections. As current simulation techniques require manual input, uncertainty is introduced into the simulation pipeline leading to inaccurate predictions that can be mitigated through ensemble simulations. We provide the space weather analyst with a multi-view system providing visualizations to: 1. compare ensemble members against ground truth measurements, 2. inspect time-dependent information derived from optical flow analysis of satellite images, and 3. combine satellite images with a volumetric rendering of the simulations. This three-tier workflow provides experts with tools to discover correlations between errors in predictions and simulation parameters, thus increasing knowledge about the evolution and propagation of coronal mass ejections that pose a danger to Earth and interplanetary travel.
Portable Parallel Programming on Cloud and HPC: Scientific Applications of Twister4Azure

Recent advancements in data intensive computing for science discovery are fueling a dramatic growth in use of data-intensive iterative computations. The utility computing model introduced by cloud computing combined with the rich set of cloud infrastructure services offers a very attractive environment for scientists to perform such data intensive computations. The challenges to large scale distributed computations on clouds demand new computation frameworks that are specifically tailored for cloud characteristics in order to easily and effectively harness the power of clouds. Twister4Azure is a distributed decentralized iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure Cloud. It extends the familiar, easy-to-use MapReduce programming model with iterative extensions, enabling a wide array of large-scale iterative data analysis for scientific applications on Azure cloud. This paper presents the applicability of Twister4Azure with highlighted features of fault-tolerance, efficiency and simplicity. We study three data-intensive applications - two iterative scientific applications, Multi-Dimensional Scaling and KMeans Clustering, one data - intensive pleasingly parallel scientific application, BLAST+ sequence searching. Performance measurements show comparable or a factor of 2 to 4 better results than the traditional MapReduce runtimes deployed on up to 256 instances and for jobs with tens of thousands of tasks.
Test-driven Assessment of [R2]RML Mappings to Improve Dataset Quality

rdf dataset quality assessment is currently performed primarily after data is published. Incorporating its results, by applying corresponding adjustments to the dataset, happens manually and occurs rarely. In the case of (semi-)structured data (e.g., csv, xml), the root of the violations often derives from the mappings that specify how the rdf dataset will be generated. Thus, we suggest shifting the quality assessment from the rdf dataset to the mapping definitions that generate it. The proposed test-driven approach for assessing mappings relies on rdfunit test cases applied over mappings specified with rml. Our evaluation is applied to different cases, e.g., dbpedia, and indicates that the overall quality of an rdf dataset is quickly and significantly improved.
Online deforestation detection

Deforestation detection using satellite images can make an important contribution to forest management. Current approaches can be broadly divided into those that compare two images taken at similar periods of the year and those that monitor changes by using multiple images taken during the growing season. The CMFDA algorithm described in Zhu et al. (2012) is an algorithm that builds on the latter category by implementing a year-long, continuous, time-series based approach to monitoring images. This algorithm was developed for 30m resolution, 16-day frequency reflectance data from the Landsat satellite. In this work we adapt the algorithm to 1km, 16-day frequency reflectance data from the modis sensor aboard the Terra satellite. The CMFDA algorithm is composed of two submodels which are fitted on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The first estimates the amount of surface reflectance as a function of the day of the year. The second estimates the occurrence of a deforestation event by comparing the last few predicted and real reflectance values. For this comparison, the reflectance observations for six different bands are first combined into a forest index. Real and predicted values of the forest index are then compared and high absolute differences for consecutive observation dates are flagged as deforestation events. Our adapted algorithm also uses the two model framework. However, since the modis 13A2 dataset used, includes reflectance data for different spectral bands than those included in the Landsat dataset, we cannot construct the forest index. Instead we propose two contrasting approaches: a multivariate and an index approach similar to that of CMFDA.