Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Controlling of the Subtropical High Leading Modes on the Spatial Pattern of Tropical Cyclone Genesis in the Western North Paciﬁc and Tracks Landing on the East Coast of China

: As a prime circulation system, the western Paciﬁc subtropical high (WPSH) signiﬁcantly impacts tropical cyclone (TC) activities over the western North Paciﬁc (WNP), especially TCs landing on the east coast of China; however, the associated mechanism is not ﬁrmly established. This study investigates the underlying dynamic impact of the ﬁrst two empirical orthogonal function (EOF) modes of the WPSH on the interannual variability in the genesis and number of TCs landing over the WNP. The results show that these two dominant modes control the WNP TC activity over different subregions via different environmental factors. The ﬁrst mode (EOF1) affects the TC genesis number over region I (105 ◦ –128 ◦ E, 5 ◦ –30 ◦ N) ( r = − 0.49) and region II (130 ◦ –175 ◦ E, 17 ◦ –30 ◦ N) ( r = − 0.5) and controls the TCs landing on the east coast of China, while the second mode (EOF2) affects the TC genesis number over region III (128 ◦ –175 ◦ E, 5 ◦ –17 ◦ N) ( r = − 0.69). The EOF1 mode, a southwest-northeast-oriented enhanced pattern, causes the WPSH to expand (retreat) along the southwest-northeast direction, which makes both mid-low-level relative humidity and low-level vorticity unfavorable (favorable) for TC genesis in region I and region II and steers fewer (more) TC tracks to land on the coast of China. The EOF2 mode features a strengthened WPSH over the southeast quarter of the WNP region. The active (inactive) phases of this mode control the low-level vorticity and vertical wind shear in region III, which lead to less (more) TC genesis over this region. The prediction equations combining the two modes of the WPSH for the total number of TCs and TCs that make landfall show high correlation coefﬁcients. Our ﬁndings verify the high prediction skill of the WPSH on WNP TC activities, provide a new way to predict TCs that will make landfall on the east coast of China, and help to improve the future projection of WNP TC activity.
Molecular detection of zoonotic ﬁlarioids in Culex spp. from Portugal

To investigate the role of dipterans in the transmission of Onchocerca lupi and other zoonotic filarioids, samples were collected from different sites in Algarve, southern Portugal, morphologically identified and molecularly tested for filarioids. Culex sp. (72.8%) represented the predominant genus followed by Culicoides sp. (11.8%), Ochlerotatus sp. (9.7%), Culiseta sp. (4.5%), Aedes sp. (0.9%) and Anopheles sp. (0.3%). Nineteen (2.8%) specimens scored positive for filarioids, with Culex pipiens quinquefasciatus (2%) positive for Dirofilaria immitis (1.4%), Dirofilaria repens , Acanthocheilonema reconditum , Onchocerca lupi , unidentified species of Filarioidea (0.2%, each) and Onchocercidae (0.6%). Additionally, Culiseta longiareolata (6.5%), Ochlerotatus caspius (3%) and Culex laticinctus (0.2%) scored positive for unidentified Onchocercidae, A. reconditum and for O. lupi , respectively. This is the first report of the occurrence of DNA of O. lupi , D. repens and A. reconditum in Culex spp. in Portugal. Information regarding the vectors and the pathogens they transmit may help to adopt proper prophylactic and control measures.
Soka Gakkai International in Post-Apartheid South Africa

: This paper analyzes the activities of Soka Gakkai International (SGI) in South Africa, a largely Christian country with the presence of very strong African Independent and Pentecostal churches, where Buddhism has mostly attracted the attention of a small minority of white middle-class people interested in meditational practices. By focusing on SGI South Africa, which has been able to reach out to a signiﬁcant number of black, and, to a lesser extent, Coloured and Indian / Asian members, this ethnographic study aims to contribute to the understanding of Buddhism’s interplay with a broader cross-section of post-apartheid South African society, and, secondarily, to add to the existing literature on this Japanese new religious movement overseas. After a brief overview of the historical development of SGI in South Africa, my analysis focuses on SGI South Africa’s main ritual, social, and missionary activities; its interplay with local religions; its attempts to establish a meaningful link with South African culture; and, ﬁnally, on the religious experiences and narratives of SGI’s South African members.
An overview of the EU breeding blanket design strategy as an integral part of the DEMO design effort

This paper provides an overview of the newly revised design and development strategy for the DEMO breeding blanket in Europe. This has been defined to take into account the input from the DEMO pre-conceptual design activities, the findings and recommendations of a thorough technical and programmatic assessment of the breeding blanket and the EU ITER Test Blanket Module (TBM) programs, conducted in 2017 by an independent expert panel. This work has led to the identification of (i) the most mature and technically sound breeding blanket concepts to be used as “driver” and “advanced” breeding blankets in DEMO, the latter to be installed and tested in a limited number of properly designed segments, potentially being more attractive for future fusion power plants; (ii) the remaining technical gaps and R&D priorities. A number of urgent steps that are required to better align and strengthen the EU TBM and DEMO Breeding Blanket Program as a whole and to aim at an efficient implementation of the work are described in this paper. These include a proposal to change the EU TBM options to be tested in ITER in order to obtain important and useful information from the two current breeders (solid and liquid) and coolants (helium and water) considered for DEMO.
Multi-Image Morphing: Summarizing Visual Information from Similar Image Regions

The process of synthetically producing an image illustrating merged parts of multiple source images is usually known as image morphing. In this Master’s thesis a system is developed which morphs more than two source images to one output image. Although the system accepts arbitrary image content, the focus is on using ancient coin images belonging to a common coin type. In ancient times each die was individual in its appearance and had to be renewed manually after several iterations of minting. Nowadays, the coins can be worn or damaged. The goal of the presented morphing framework is the automatic finding and summarization of visual data of common regions by which outliers like wear marks of coins are removed. Since image registration forms the basis of the morphing system, Scale Invariant Feature Transform flow’s functionalities are included. The selection of possible region-candidates is decided by exploiting a Markov Random Field in order to find the best combination of visual content. Finally, solving the Poisson equation smooths the morphed image such that any boundaries or disturbing seams become invisible. A twofold evaluation is carried out by firstly applying the system on three different data sets in order to demonstrate visually aesthetic images. Since the aesthetics of an image can be subjective, a second evaluation is done by investigating a classification task of ancient coin images using Scale Invariant Feature Transform flow’s energy as similarity metric of visual content. It is shown that substituting a morphed image as training image improves the representation of a coin type compared to a single image. Finally, the thesis is concluded by presenting an analysis about classifying ancient coins with the help of a morphed image.
UNIFIED LOGICAL MODEL TO IDENTIFY FAULTS IN A PLC CONTROLLED MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

In this paper, we present a novel approach that can identify operational faults associated with control process by using log data records of the PLC program signals. The proposed approach automatically creates a logical model, called unified logical model, of the control process, and detects faults by using that model. The unified logical model includes the signal-state logical models of the devices, and the relational logical models of the device groups. The signal-state logical model is modeled to depict a device behavior, and the relational logical model is designed to describe the relationships among the dependent devices. The proposed approach automatically generates the unified logical model from the log data records, and employs a hash table based model indexing and fault searching scheme to identify the faults in the manufacturing system. Experimental results show that the proposed model can be utilized to detect the faults effectively.
Design of a new low-phase-noise millimetre-wave quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new circuit topology of millimetre-wave quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) using an improved Colpitts oscillator without tail bias. By employing an extra capacitance between the drain and source terminations of the transistors and optimising circuit values, a low-power and low-phase-noise (PN) oscillator is designed. For generating the output signals with 90° phase difference, a self-injection coupling network between two identical cores is used. The proposed QVCO dissipates no extra dc power for coupling, since there is no dc-path to ground for the coupled transistors and no extra noise is added to circuit. The best figure-of-merit is −188.5, the power consumption is 14.98–15.45 mW, in a standard 180-nm CMOS technology, for 58.2 GHz center frequency from 59.3 to 59.6 GHz. The PN is −104.86 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset.
Enhanced particle swarm optimization based on weighted least square method

with the increase of population, electrical power systems have grown with more complexity. This complexity leads to increase the focusing on the monitoring and control system of power systems. State estimation on of the recent techniques that are used to enhance the monitoring of the power system, however traditional state estimation is one of the methods that are not enough by themselves, though optimization methods are needed to enhance the results of state estimation. PSO algorithm is an artificial intelligence optimization method which can be used to enhance the WLS estimation method. Traditional PSO-WLS has showed its efficiency however in this paper an enhancement is done to PSO method to utilize the same number of iterations to achieve better estimation. The proposed method is proved by using MATLAB simulation and applied on standard IEEE-14 bus.
Domain Driven Word Sense Disambiguation

: Many times people use a single word with multiple senses, which provides a different meaning based on the sentence in which it has been used. So, the main goal of the work is to disambiguate an ambiguous word that has been located in certain sentences. Thus, it helps in exploring the actual sense of the word that it means. This process is itself named as Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) which is an essential and on-going subject in NLP. However, the role of domain is very helpful in exploring the actual sense of an ambiguous word. There are a number of approaches to WSD which takes a wider semantic space of ambiguous words into account [10]. This semantic space can be represented as a specific domain, task or application [10]. The domain information which is one among them is more advantageous in the process of disambiguation, thus, the work explores the role of the domain in the disambiguation process. The work also includes a score allotment to all the senses of an ambiguous word based on the semantic relation of it with the ambiguous word. Later, this helps in obtaining the actual sense of the word.
Evaluation of pitch estimation in clean and noisy speech

Every human being has a distinct voice due to pitch association and it is almost like a finger print. Pitch is one of the important parameter which is used in many speech processing applications. In reality speech is a complex combination of both voiced and unvoiced sounds and cannot be separated subjectively. For the voiced speech, pitch is defined as the rate of change of vocal folds vibrations. In practice, pitch is a subjective quantity and cannot be measured directly from the voice. It is a non-linear quantity, depends upon the spectral and temporal content of the signal. Many pitch estimation methods have been developed but none can work efficiently in the presence of additive noise. It is very essential to understand the effect of noise on the pitch estimation in dealing effectively with many speech processing applications. Speech processing systems should be robust enough to counter the presence of noise to produce good quality sounds. In non-intrusive speech quality measurement algorithms, pitch is one of the quality parameter for speech assessment. The accuracy of this feature in noisy speech is correlated with the subjective quality of speech. In this paper we have been evaluated the performance of auto-correlation and cepstrum algorithms for pitch estimation and tracking.
Comparison of hepatic NRF2 and AHR binding in 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo- p -dioxin (TCDD) treated mice demonstrates NRF2-independent PKM2 induction

2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo- p -dioxin (TCDD) induces hepatic oxidative stress following activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR). Our recent studies showed TCDD induced pyruvate kinase muscle isoform 2 ( Pkm2 ) as a novel antioxidant response in normal differentiated hepatocytes. To investigate cooperative regulation between nuclear factor, erythroid derived 2, like 2 ( Nrf2 ) and the AhR in the induction of Pkm2 , hepatic ChIP-seq analyses were integrated with RNA-seq time course data from mice treated with TCDD for 2 - 168h. ChIP-seq analysis 2h after TCDD treatment identified genome-wide NRF2 enrichment. Approximately 842 NRF2 enriched regions were located in the regulatory region of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) while 579 DEGs showed both NRF2 and AhR enrichment. Sequence analysis of regions with overlapping NRF2 and AhR enrichment showed over-representation of either antioxidant or dioxin response elements (ARE and DRE, respectively), although 18 possessed both motifs. NRF2 exhibited negligible enrichment within a closed Pkm chromatin region while the AhR was enriched 29-fold. Furthermore, TCDD induced Pkm2 in primary hepatocytes from wild-type and Nrf2 null mice, indicating NRF2 is not required. Although NRF2 and AhR cooperate to regulate numerous antioxidant gene expression responses, the induction of Pkm2 by TCDD is independent of ROS-mediated NRF2 activation. by Active sequenced using 75bp) were mapped to the mouse genome (mm10) using the BWA algorithm. Aligned reads were extended to a length of 150-250 bp on their 3’ ends and density determined across 32-nt bins along the genome. Peak finding was performed
Evaluating Information-Centric Networks in Disconnected, Intermittent, and Low-bandwidth environments

This paper studies information dissemination in wireless ad hoc networks, using standard routing protocols, such as OLSR, as well as Information-Centric Networking. We performed simulations using NS-3 and ndnSIM with different node counts and transport protocols. Our simulations show that TCP performs better in lower hop count scenarios, while NDN performs better in higher hop count scenarios.
Mini-Review AAA Proteins: Lords of the Ring

AAA ATPases (those associated with various cellular activities) 1 play important roles in numerous cellular activities including proteolysis, protein folding, membrane trafficking, cytoskeletal regulation, organelle biogenesis, DNA replication, and intracellular motility. Recent structural and enzymatic studies are providing clues into the proper-ties of the conserved AAA domain that defines this large protein superfamily. In many cases, AAA domains assem-ble into hexamic rings that are likely to change their shape during the ATPase cycle. This nucleotide-dependent conformational switch may apply tension to bound proteins and thereby allow AAA proteins to unfold polypeptides, dissociate protein–protein interactions, or generate unidirectional motion along a track. Thus, AAA proteins may represent a broad class of mechanoenzymes that have evolved unique ways of using a fundamentally similar conformational change in many different biological settings.
Facial Image Manipulation: A Tool for Investigating Social Perception

Image manipulation of real face photographs, including averaging, morphing and caricaturing, is widely used in studies of face perception. These methods have led to theoretical insights across topics of interest to social psychologists, including social perception, social categorisation, stereotyping, prejudice, impression formation, and individual differences. They may also have practical applications in diagnosing clinical impairments of social perception. Here we outline key manipulation methods, comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, illustrate the breadth of theoretical insights already achieved, and offer best practice guidelines. We hope that the review stimulates greater use of these powerful methods to understand social perception, and encourages studies that bridge theory between visual perception and social psychology.
Time-Domain Solution for Corner Diffraction of UWB Signals by Flat Plate Structures with the Higher Order Diffraction Included

ABSTRACT In this paper, a new time-domain (TD) solution is proposed for corner diffraction by finite-edge flat plate structures. First, TD solution is considered for corner amplitude diffraction by edges of a flat plate, and then for corner slope diffraction (CSD) which takes into account the finiteness of the plate edges. To show the significance of CSD, results have been shown for diffraction of ultra-wideband signals by edges of a horn antenna which is a structure made by interconnected flat plates. The comparison between the TD solution and the numerical inverse fast Fourier transform of the corresponding frequency-domain solution validates the proposed solution. Finally, the computation times of both methods have been compared.
Characterization of an Enterococcus gallinarum carrying dual vanA and vanB cassette

: 25 The ability of vancomycin resistance determinants to be horizontally transferred within 26 enterococci species is a concern. Identification and characterization of vancomycin resistant enterococci 27 (VRE) in a clinical isolate has a significant impact on infection control practices. In this study, we describe 28 a clinical isolate of E. gallinarum exhibiting high level resistance to vancomycin and teicoplanin. Genetic 29 characterization of this isolate showed the presence of vanA and vanB genes in addition to naturally 30 carrying vanC gene. vanA was identified on pA6981, a 35,608-bp circular plasmid with significant 31 homology to plasmid pS177. vanB operon was integrated into the bacterial chromosome and showed 32 high level of homology to previously reported Tn 1549 and Tn 5382. 33 To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of E. gallinarum carrying both vanA and vanB 34 operons, indicating the importance of identifying vancomycin resistance mechanism in non- E. faecium 35 and - E. faecalis enterococcal species. high level of vancomycin resistance (12-16). In this study, we characterized a clinical isolate of E. 62 gallinarum containing both vanA and vanB operons conferring vancomycin resistance.
Addition of Diadenosine Pentaphosphate to Creatine Kinase Reagent Improves identification of Creatine Klnase lsoenzymes after Eiectrophoresis

Serum ferritin measurements may be clinically useful in assessing the adequacy of iron stores. Its most established utility is that a low ferritin concentration in serum is indicative of iron-deficiency anemia (1). The lower limits of ferritin reference intervals for healthy adults are approximately 10 and 20 gfL for women and men, respectively (2, 3). With use of an immunoradiometric assay (Ramco Laboratories, Houston, TX 77098), it was reported (4) that serum ferritin of 12 or less is associated with iron deficiency, and that the reference range for women is 11-122 g/L. Therefore, 10 jg/L may be regarded as the decision level for diagnosing iron deficiency. A “decision level” (5) is defined here as the threshold value below which (or above which) a clinician will make a decision, e.g., to treat the patient with iron in this case. However, if one examines the commercial qualitycontrol products now available, one finds that the ferritin concentrations of the low-level controls range from 19 to 73 ;zg/L (Table 1), with a mean of 40 LgfL. None has ferritin concentration near the decision level. The issue is that the clinical chemist should be aware ofthe analytical performance at the decision level so as to provide the clinician-user with a sense of the imprecision and bias expected at such values. Ferritin assay kits from Clinical Assays, Corning, and Ramco provide quality-control materials within the kits; and the ferritin concentrations of the low-level controls are 7.4, 8.1, and 14.2 zgfL, respectively (means of six runs), when assayed by one of us (R.H.N., manuscript in preparation). Thus, these particular manufacturers are apparently aware of the decision level in ferritin measurement. Nevertheless, most currently available ferntin assay kits do not provide quality controls within the kits-for example, those made by Abbott, Amersham, Becton Dickinson, Bio-Rad, Diagnostic Products, Hybritech, and Ventrex. Therefore, a user may not be aware that the ferritin assay is analytically out of control at the decision level in the case of: (a) laboratories that use Clinical Assays, Corning, or Ramco femtin kits, but use one of the commercial quality controls from Table 1 for all radioimmunoassays, or (b) laboratories that use ferritin assay kits with no quality controls provided, and use one of the commercial quality controls from Table 1. Thus, we believe that there is a need for both the laboratories and the manufacturers of quality controls to be aware of this problem and to take proper corrective actions.
A Multistate Model for Analyzing Transitions Between Body Mass Index During Childhood The Generation XXI Birth Cohort Study

Prevalences of overweight and obesity in young children have risen dramatically in the last several decades in most developed countries. Childhood overweight and obesity are known to have immediate and long-term health conse-quences and are now recognized as important public health concerns. We used a Markov 4-state model with states de ﬁ ned by 4 body mass index (BMI; weight (kg)/height (m) 2 ) categories (underweight ( < − 2 standard deviations (SDs) of BMI z score), normal weight ( − 2 ≤ SD ≤ 1), overweight (1 < SD ≤ 2), and obese ( > 2 SDs of BMI z score)) to study the rates of transition to higher or lower BMI categories among children aged 4 – 10 years. We also used this model to study the relationships between explanatory variables and their transition rates. The participants consisted of 4,887 children from the Generation XXI Birth Cohort Study (Porto, Portugal; 2005 – 2017) who underwent anthropometric evaluation at age 4 years and in at least 1 of the subsequent follow-up waves (ages 7 and 10 years). Children who were normal weight were more likely to move to higher BMI categories than to lower categories, whereas overweight children had similar rates of transition to the 2 adjacent categories. We evaluated the associations of maternal age and education, type of delivery, sex, and birth weight with childhood overweight and obesity, but we observed statistically signi ﬁ cant results only for sex and maternal education with regard to the progressive transitions.