Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
OBSERVATIONS ON SPERMIOGENESIS IN THE FUNGUS GNAT SCIARA COPROPHILA

Although 9-membered centrioles are found in somatic tissues of Sciara, the centriole which lies at the spindle pole of the second meiotic division in male Sciara is composed of a row of approximately 70 short tubules in an oval array. Shortly after telophase of this unequal division, in the daughter cell destined to undergo spermiogenesis, microtubules become confluent with the tubules of the centriole. These tubules have the same density as other cytoplasmic microtubules after glutaraldehyde-OsO4 fixation and, like them, are not preserved with OsO4 fixation. As the centriole, now with approximately 70 attached, posteriorly directed, doublet tubules, migrates from the polar to the apolar end of the nucleus to take a final position in an oval groove which forms in the nuclear envelope, the tubules lengthen and become demonstrable after OsO4 fixation and more electron opaque than other cytoplasmic microtubules following glutaraldehyde-OsO4 fixation. Later, a singlet tubule appears peripherally to each doublet of the oval and 4 "arms" develop at specific sites on the tubules. Posteriorly, where the oval of tubules becomes discontinuous and forms a spiral, the arrangement of arms is different and the singlet tubules are lacking. Dense solid bodies develop inside this odd flagellum and become enclosed by a smooth double membrane. A single mitochondrial derivative has three components: a central area of homogeneous, moderately electron-opaque, proteinaceous material; a peripheral ring of cristae; and a crystalloid which is specifically oriented with respect to the flagellar tubules.
Hs1-siv (v2)

HS1-SIV uses a new PRF called HS1 to provide authenticated encryption via Rogaway and Shrimpton's SIV mode [7]. HS1 (mnemonic for " Hash-Stream 1 ") is designed for high software speed on systems with good 32-bit processing, including Intel SSE, ARM Neon, and 32-bit architectures without SIMD support. HS1 uses a universal hash function to consume arbitrary strings and a stream cipher to produce its output. This document defines HS1 and how to use it in an SIV construction. HS1 takes an arbitrary input string and IV and produces a pseudorandom string of any desired length. Each different (input, IV) pair supplied to HS1 yields an independent pseudorandom stream with high probability. SIV, as defined in [7], uses a block-cipher-based PRF to create a synthetic IV (an SIV) from given associated data and plaintext. The SIV is then used to encrypt the plaintext using a block-cipher-based encryption scheme. HS1-SIV instead uses HS1 to instantiate SIV mode. Ignoring many details for the moment, if A is the associated data, M is the plaintext, and N is HS1's IV, then the SIV is defined as the first 16 bytes of HS1(A||M, N) and ciphertext C is defined as all but the first 16 bytes of HS1(SIV, N) xor'ed with M. The SIV and ciphertext are bundled together to create the final ciphertext. If (A, M, N) is repeated, then an observer knows this fact because the scheme is deterministic and the SIV will be identical, but no security degradation otherwise occurs. Supplying N as a nonce thus improves security by masking repeated encryptions. HS1 does its work by pairing an almost-universal hash function with a stream cipher. When given an (input, IV) pair, HS1 uses the hash function to hash the input, it then xor's this hash result with the stream cipher's key and uses the HS1 IV as the stream cipher's IV. The stream cipher produces as many bytes as desired. As long as a (hash result, IV) pair is never repeated, and the stream cipher is secure against related-key attacks, the stream cipher will produce independent pseudorandom output streams. We introduce a new hash HS1-Hash which we use for the almost-universal phase of HS1, and Bernstein's Chacha is used as the stream cipher [1]. 1 Specification The figures in this document fully specify HS1-SIV with the exception of the Chacha stream cipher. We use the Chacha version specified in ChaCha20 …
Frame structures for hybrid spectrum accessing strategy in cognitive radio communication system

In this paper, we have exploited the novel hybrid-cum-improved spectrum access strategy to significant improvement in the throughput and data-loss rate. This proposed strategy is comprise of hybrid spectrum access and improved frame structure strategies for the cognitive radio communication system. In addition to this, the mathematical expressions of throughput for these approaches are also presented. Moreover, the proposed approaches are validated numerically as well as with reported literature.
Optimal water management in the Middle East and other regions.

North Africa and the Middle East constitute the driest region in the world. Annually it has 355 billion cu. m of renewable water resources. In the Middle East there are four major disputes over water: control of the Karun River or Shatt-al-Arab; the Euphrates River; the Jordan River; and the coastal and mountain acquifers. These conflicts cause instability in the region thus resolving them would be a good first step in building confidence and initiating a peace process throughout the region. In this regard Fisher and others created the optimization model also known as the Water Allocation System (WAS). It allocates water so as to maximize the net benefits to all consumers providing the analyst with optimal water allocations and shadow values. Among other things the model can be used for analyzing the costs and benefits of various infrastructure projects as well as to assist in water negotiations. Meanwhile the World Bank has its potential role to ameliorate the global water problem by implementing a holistic approach to water and water-related projects as was recommended in the Banks water resources management policy with member countries supporting these efforts and viewing water disputes in monetary terms.
Some Social Requisites of a Democratic Civil Peace: Democracy, Development, and Armed Conflict

The paper explores the relationship between development, democracy and civil war. I review some contributions to the literature on the bilateral relationships between the three variables, and argue that we should expect the relationship between democracy and civil war to be contingent on the levels of income, literacy/education, and primary commodity dependence. I estimate a set of different models to investigate whether the relationship between democracy and civil war is contingent on development, using Gurr’s Executive Constraints, Vanhanen’s Polyarchy and Gates et al.’s MIRPS variables as measures of democracy, and GNP per capita, percent literacy in the population, and the value of minerals exports as a share of total exports as indicators of development. I find quite strong evidence that democracy is correlated with civil peace only for developed countries, and for countries with high levels of literacy. Conversely, I find that the risk of civil war decreases with development only for democratic countries.
Cooperative control of exoskeletal assistive system for paraplegic walk-transferring between sitting posture and standing posture, and going up and down on stairs

This paper presents a cooperative control algorithm for a paraplegic patient to walk stably as requested. The algorithm generates stable motions of a lower limb for a paraplegic walk, receiving patient's preference related to his/her movement such as stand-to-sit and sit-to-stand transfers, walking and going up and down stairs. An exoskeletal walking support system assists motions of patient's lower limb in accordance with a patient wishes when a patient indicates his/her wishes by using residual functions such as motions of an upper limb. In our project, a pair of gloves with several DOFs was developed to convey wearer's wishes to the walking support system. The gloves measure his/her index fingers' swing that simulates foot motions of his/her walking and measure flexion or deviation of his/her wrist joint. The cooperative control algorithm based on a cart-table model designs trajectories of each joint for stable motions that satisfy the wishes expressed by the wearer's hand and wrist motions and then the designed motions are executed in realtime by the walking support system. As the first trial, a small humanoid robot is used for safety as a control target that corresponds to a combination of the patient body and the walking support system in an actual situation. Through some experiments it is confirmed that our algorithm enables the humanoid robot to start and stop stable walk with variable step length in the desired walking direction from a seated position and that it enables the robot to step aside and to go up and down stairs.
Judicial Reliance on Risk Assessment in Sentencing Drug and Property Offenders: A Test of the Treatment Resource Hypothesis

For almost two decades, Virginia has used risk assessment to justify “alternative” nonprison sentences for eligible drug and property offenders. In Study 1, we examined how frequently alternative sentences actually were imposed. We found that alternative sentences were given to only 42% of low-risk offenders. In Study 2, we tested the hypothesis that a lack of treatment resources explains why many judges fail to offer alternative sentences. We focused on the availability of mental health and substance abuse treatment resources across judicial circuits. Our findings support the “treatment resource hypothesis” as one explanation for variation among courts and judges in the extent to which alternative sentences are offered to low-risk offenders. To the extent that treatment resources available in a jurisdiction lead to increased judicial use of risk assessment to sentence low-risk offenders to nonjail alternatives, providing these resources will be crucial in reducing mass incarceration.
Facial Feedback Signals for ECAs

One of the most desirable characteristics of an intelligent interactive system is its capability of interacting with users in a natural way. An example of such a system is the embodied conver- sational agent (ECA) that has a humanoid aspect and the capability of communicating with users through multiple modalities such as voice, gesture, facial expressions, that are typical of human-human communication. It is important to make an ECA able to fit well in each role in a conversation: the agent should behave in a realistic and human-like way both while speaking and listening. So far most of the work on ECAs have focused on the importance of the ECA's behaviour in the role of the speaker, implementing models for the generation of verbal and non-verbal signals; but currently we are mainly interested in modelling the listening behaviour. In this paper we will describe our work in progress on this matter.
Welfare Reform and Racial Policy Regimes in the American State

Scholars have known for decades that welfare in America entails a fair amount of racial bias. Recent research suggests that the welfare reforms in the 1990s with their emphasis on work and the granting of more authority to the states may well have made matters worse. Our analysis seeks to add to the larger understanding of how race and politics interact in the new system of welfare. Our findings suggest that race conditions not only the content but also the politics of welfare reform.
Subcellular Localization of Metabotropic GABAB Receptor Subunits GABAB1a/b and GABAB2 in the Rat Hippocampus

Metabotropic GABAB receptors mediate slow inhibitory effects presynaptically and postsynaptically. Using preembedding immunohistochemical methods combined with quantitative analysis of GABAB receptor subunit immunoreactivity, this study provides a detailed description of the cellular and subcellular localization of GABAB1a/b and GABAB2 in the rat hippocampus. At the light microscopic level, an overlapping distribution of GABAB1a/b and GABAB2 was revealed in the dendritic layers of the hippocampus. In addition, expression of the GABAB1a/b subunit was found in somata of CA1 pyramidal cells and of a subset of GABAergic interneurons. At the electron microscopic level, immunoreactivity for both subunits was observed on presynaptic and, more abundantly, on postsynaptic elements. Presynaptically, subunits were mainly detected in the extrasynaptic membrane and occasionally over the presynaptic membrane specialization of putative glutamatergic and, to a lesser extent, GABAergic axon terminals. Postsynaptically, the majority of GABAB receptor subunits were localized to the extrasynaptic plasma membrane of spines and dendritic shafts of principal cells and shafts of interneuron dendrites. Quantitative analysis revealed enrichment of GABAB1a/b around putative glutamatergic synapses on spines and an even distribution on dendritic shafts of pyramidal cells contacted by GABAergic boutons. The association of GABAB receptors with glutamatergic synapses at both presynaptic and postsynaptic sides indicates their intimate involvement in the modulation of glutamatergic neurotransmission. The dominant extrasynaptic localization of GABAB receptor subunits suggests that their activation is dependent on spillover of GABA requiring simultaneous activity of populations of GABAergic cells as it occurs during population oscillations or epileptic seizures.
Plumbing for Latin American capital markets

If publicity is the measure of progress, then Latin American capital markets are booming. The financial press is awash with articles on the growth of local Latin American markets. They note that capitalisation of domestic bond markets in the seven large Latin American countries more than doubled from 1995 to 2005; in the second half of the period alone, it went up by more than 60% (see Figure 1). Stock market capitalisation rose by 52% during that same period, and trading value, averaged across countries, rose by 86%. Furthermore, foreign participation in these markets is booming (see Figure 2).
Coupled field analysis of electrostatic Comb-Drive actuator using reduced order modeling principles

This paper presents a modeling of lateral electrostatic comb drive actuator and develops a 2D finite element model using reduced order modeling (ROM) principles to analyze the coupled field. This technique reduces the comb drive to a group of equivalent lumped parameters finite elements which capture the device behavior. Finally, Simulation results are validated using an analytical approach, both methods give very similar results. The strongly coupled field problem is effectively solved by reduced order modeling (ROM) and the relation between structure parameters and the electrostatic force and the displacement is discussed.
ConReg: Analysis and Visualization of Conserved Regulatory Networks in Eukaryotes

Transcription factors (TFs) play a fundamental role in cellular regulation by binding to promoter regions of target genes (TGs) in order to control their gene expression. TF-TG networks are widely used as representations of regulatory mechanisms, e.g. for modeling the cellular response to input signals and perturbations. As the experimental identification of regulatory interactions is time consuming and expensive, one tries to use knowledge from related species when studying an organism of interest. Here, we present ConReg, an interactive web application to store regulatory relations for various species and to investigate their level of conservation in related species. Currently, ConReg contains data for eight model organisms. The regulatory relations stored in publicly available databases cover only a small fraction both of the actual interactions and also of the regulatory relations described in the scientific literature. Therefore, we included regulatory relations extracted from PubMed and PubMedCentral using sophisticated text-mining approaches and from binding site predictions into ConReg. We applied ConReg for the investigation of conserved regulatory motifs in D. melanogaster. From the 471 regulatory relations in REDfly our system was able to identify 66 confirmed conserved regulations in at least one vertebrate model organism (H. sapiens, M. musculus, R. norvegicus, D. rerio). The conserved network consists among others of the well studied motifs for eye-development and the pan-bilaterian kernel for heart specification, which are well-known examples for conserved regulatory relations between different organisms. ConReg is available at http://services.bio. ifi.lmu. de/ConReg/ and can be used to analyze and visualize regulatory networks and their conservation among eight model organisms. It also provides direct links to annotations including literature references to potentially conserved regulatory relations.
The GEMSS Grid : An Evolving HPC Environment for Medical Applications

Objectives: Grid Enabled Medical Simulation Services (GEMSS) aims to provide a health-computing Grid platform suited to the provision of accessible computeintensive health applications. The viability and performance of the Grid resource is to be tested using a series of six applications, intended to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the Grid infrastructure. Methods: The six applications are diverse and cover surgical planning, medical image processing and reconstruction, bio-fluids simulation and radiosurgery treatment planning. These are being hosted on High Performance Computing facilities in Austria and Germany with middleware built on top of existing Grid and Web technologies. This approach maintains compliance with current standards and ensures future extensibility and interoperability. The GEMSS middleware includes features that support quality of service aspects, business and security. The latter is particularly important within the legal context of European-wide health computing, and secure operation designed to safeguard patient data and confidentiality must be demonstrated. A spectrum of end users has started to evaluate the viability of the Grid from the corporate, health, research and small business sectors and exercise the computing resource in a realistic manner. Results: The applications have been adapted to accommodate the requirements of the Grid infrastructure and demonstrated successful execution. Despite the constraints placed upon compute provision by the health sector, it appears that a secure yet accessible and flexible Grid resource is a viable proposition. Conclusions: GEMSS demonstrates the possibility of much wider access to HPC facilities for users of healthcare applications without compromising security, accessibility and flexibility.
HBT Filter and Logarithmic Transform Based Edge Detection - A Modified Approach

A modified edge detection algorithm has been presented here that uses logarithmic transform and Hyperbolic Tangent (HBT) filter. The proposed algorithm incorporates Logarithmic transform along with Luminance and Contrast-Invariant Edge Similarity Measure algorithm for edge detection. The proposed algorithm gives a good quali ty edge detection of images with improved SSIM value and almost equal or higher PSNR values.
LINK-TREE : MAIN MEMORY INDEX STRUCTURE WITH CONCURRENCY CONTROL AND RECOVERY

While B+trees are the most popular index structure for disk databases, the T-Tree has been widely accepted as a promising index structure for main memory databases. For over two decades the speed of CPUs has increased faster than the speed of the main memory. Therefore, the speed gap of the CPU and memory has rapidly become steeper, and memory access has become the new bottleneck in databases. In this paper we explore concurrency control and recovery in a new index structure T -tree which enhances the cache usage, reduces the number of rotate operations and the overhead required for balancing the tree by delayed split and deletion.
Astrometric Microlensing of Stars

Because of dramatic improvements in the precision of astrometric measurements, the observation of light centroid shifts in observed stars due to intervening massive compact objects ("astrometric microlensing") will become possible in the near future. Upcoming space missions, such as SIM and GAIA, will provide measurements with an accuracy of 4-60 μas depending on the magnitude of the observed stars, and an accuracy of ~1 μas is expected to be achieved in the more distant future. There are two different ways in which astrometric microlensing signals can be used to infer information: one possibility is to perform astrometric follow-up observations on photometrically detected microlensing events, and the other is to perform a survey based on astrometric observations alone. After the predictable effects of the Sun and the planets, stars in the Galactic disk play the dominant role in astrometric microlensing. The probability that the disk stars introduce a centroid shift larger than the threshold δT at a given time for a given source in the Galactic bulge toward Baade's window reaches 100% for a threshold of δT = 0.7 μas, while this probability is ~2% for δT = 5 μas. However, this centroid shift does not vary much during the time in which a typical photometric microlensing event differs from baseline. So astrometric follow-ups (e.g., with SIM) are not expected to be disturbed by the statistical astrometric microlensing due to disk stars, so that it is possible to infer additional information about the nature of the lens that caused the photometric event, as suggested. The probability of observing astrometric microlensing events within the Galaxy turns out to be large compared to photometric microlensing events. The probability of seeing a variation by more than 5 μas within 1 yr and reaching the closest angular approach between lens and source is ~10-4 for a bulge star toward Baade's window, while this reduces to ~6 × 10-6 for a direction perpendicular to the Galactic plane. For the upcoming mission GAIA, we expect ~1000 of the observed stars to show a detectable astrometric microlensing signal within its 5 yr lifetime. These events can be used to determine accurate masses of the lenses, and to derive the mass and the scale parameters (length and height) of the Galactic disk.