Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal associations between stressors and work ability in hospital workers

ABSTRACT This study sought to assess associations between work stressors and work ability in a cohort (2009–2012) of 498 hospital workers. Time-dependent variables associated with the Work Ability Index (WAI) were evaluated using general linear mixed models. Analyses included effects of individual and work characteristics. Except for work demands, the work stressors (job control, social support, effort-reward imbalance, overcommitment and work-related activities that cause pain/injury) were associated with WAI (p < 0.050) at intercept and in the time interaction. Daytime work and morning shift work were associated with decreased WAI (p < 0.010). Work stressors negatively affected work ability over time independently of other variables.
An HMM-based approach for gesture segmentation and recognition

Gesture, as a "natural" means, provides an alternative way for human-computer interaction. The recognition of continuous gestures suffers greatly from the existence of non-gesture hand motions. The given gestures can start at any moment in an input sequence. The Hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to tackle this problem. The paper proposes a method for the spotting and recognition of continuous spatio-temporal features. Without sliding the input temporal patterns past the trained models, the algorithm makes use of accumulation scores for evaluation. So it is an exhaustive evaluation method but only a sum operation is needed in each input frame. The method is demonstrated with real experiments on the recognition of some spatio-temporal trajectories. Results of the experiments show that the proposed method is very effective and fast in extracting given gestures from a continuous trajectory containing non-gestures.
Development of a radioligand tissue receptor assay for human follicle-stimulating hormone.

A rat testes tubule receptor preparation has been characterized with respect to its usefulness for measurement of FSH activity in fractions derived from human pituitary glands. Highly purified human FSH, iodinated by a modification of the chloramine-T procedure, was employed as the radioligand. A series of human gonadotropin fractions were assayed in the FSH radioligand-receptor assay (RLA) and also in the Steelman-Pohley hCG-augmented rat ovarian weight gain assay (S-P assay), using LER-907 (20 IU/mg) as the assay reference preparation in each instance. The index of discrimination (ID) for a series of hFSH fractions ranging in potency from 53 IU/mg to 3608 IU/mg was 1.05. Highly purified hLH, hTSH and hCG showed 125I-hFSH uptake inhibition activity ranging from 0.9 to 3.6% that of highly purified hFSH. Significant uptake inhibition of labeled hFSH could be obtained with 2.5 ng of pure hFSH, while no uptake inhibition was seen with 10,000 ng of human growth hormone, human prolactin, ovine prolactin, ACTH .
Discovery and characterization of single‐nucleotide polymorphisms in steelhead/rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss

Single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have several advantages over other genetic markers, including lower mutation and genotyping error rates, ease of inter‐laboratory standardization, and the prospect of high‐throughput, low‐cost genotyping. Nevertheless, their development and use has only recently moved beyond model organisms to groups such as salmonid fishes. Oncorhynchus mykiss is a salmonid native to the North Pacific rim that has now been introduced throughout the world for fisheries and aquaculture. The anadromous form of the species is known as steelhead. Native steelhead populations on the west coast of the United States have declined and many now have protected status. The nonanadromous, or resident, form of the species is termed rainbow, redband or golden trout. Additional life history and morphological variation, and interactions between the forms, make the species challenging to study, monitor and evaluate. Here, we describe the discovery, characterization and assay development for 139 SNP loci in steelhead/rainbow trout. We used EST sequences from existing genomic databases to design primers for 480 genes. Sanger‐sequencing products from these genes provided 130 KB of consensus sequence in which variation was surveyed for 22 individuals from steelhead, rainbow and redband trout groups. The resulting TaqMan assays were surveyed in five steelhead populations and three rainbow trout stocks, where they had a mean minor allele frequency of 0.15–0.26 and observed heterozygosity of 0.18–0.35. Mean FST was 0.204. The development of SNPs for O. mykiss will help to provide highly informative genetic tools for individual and stock identification, pedigree reconstruction, phylogeography and ecological investigation.
Receiver architecture for multi-standard based Passive Bistatic Radar

In this paper a receiver architecture for a Passive Bistatic Radar (PBR) based on multiple broadcast signals is described. Specific receiver sections are foreseen for each selected waveform of opportunity, while a common part of the system performs the I&Q demodulation and the Analog-to-Digital conversion. The scheme for a double conversion (up-conversion stage from Radio Frequency to Intermediate Frequency and down-conversion from IF to Base Band) of the received signals is introduced for PBR applications. This allows to remove the image frequency even in the wide bandwidth occupied by the digital TV signals. A prototype of the proposed concept has been developed and fielded, with proper laboratory tests and real data acquisition campaigns, at DIET Dept. of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. The results obtained with the receiver, in two possible configurations, are reported and discussed: FM-based PBR (for medium/long-range air targets surveillance) and WiFi-based PBR (for short-range human target localization).
Robust FT H-infinite controller design of uncertain continuous-time singular systems

Robust finite-time (FT) stabilization of uncertain continuous-time singular systems is of concern in this paper. By adopting a Lyapunov-like functional (LLF) and the finite-time stability (FTS) technique, the linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based conditions are derived for uncertain continuous-time singular systems to be stabilizable. Then, based on solving these LMIs, a FT H-infinite state feedback controller is obtained such that the controlled system has a prescribed level of H-infinite performance and the responses of the states are constrained in a FT interval. In the end, the effectiveness of the obtained theorems are illuminated by a numerical example.
Preparation of patient‐related allergens for hyposensitization

An affinity chrormatography method for preparation of patient‐related antigens from commercially available allergen extracts has been investigated. IgC1,2,4 from a patient previously hyposensitized with dog hair and dandruff allergen was bound to protein A‐sepharosc, Secondly, commercial allergen extract was applied to the immunosorbent, and patient‐related antigens were selectively absorbed by the specific antibodies from the patient serum. Finally, immune complexes containing antigen and IgG were eluted. Alternatively, the antigens alone were purified by retaining the IgG on the column by means of a covalent reinforcement of the protein A‐IgC‐binding. Purified, patient‐related antigens were investigated in crossed immunoelectrophoresis and identity to IgG‐and IgE‐binding antigens (as determined by the CRIE‐technique) was suggested. The affinity purified IgG was unaltered with regard to protein A‐binding, binding of antigen and affinity for monoclonal antibody to human IgG‐subclasses. Further, it was demonstrated that the antigen‐binding capacity of IgG in the immune complexes was intact as evidenced by strong affinity to antigens even at low pH. The antigens eluted together with IgG were predominantly found in immune complexes with a molecular weight of > 300 kdalton equivalent to 2 or more molecules of IgG. The possibility of employing a similar method with IgE instead of IgG for preparation of patient‐related allergens instead of antigens, is discussed.
ABS control using optimum search via sliding modes

The paper presents the control design for antilock braking systems via the sliding mode approach. In this study we formulate the problem as that of extremum searching in a highly uncertain situation. We consider the friction force as an output of the dynamic system which includes mechanical motion equations and the hydraulic circuit equations. This setting is complicated by the optimized function being a priori unknown, and the input (slip) not being measurable. <<ETX>>
Tailoring antibodies for radionuclide delivery

Therapeutic antibodies are well established as an important class of drugs in modern medicine. The exquisite specificity and affinity for a specific target offered by antibodies has also encouraged their development as delivery vehicles for agents such as radionuclides to target tissues, for radioimmunoimaging and radioimmunotherapy. Specifically, in nuclear medicine, radionuclide-conjugated antibody molecules make it possible to image diseased loci with greater sensitivity than other imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging. Furthermore, two radionuclide-conjugated antibodies have recently been approved for the therapy of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. However, optimal implementation of antibodies has been limited by the extended circulation persistence that is characteristic of native antibodies, which is responsible for increased background activity in radioimmunoimaging applications and dose-related normal organ toxicities in radioimmunotherapy. In this article the current status of radiolabelled intact antibodies is reviewed, focusing on strategies to improve their pharmacokinetic properties to suit a desired application. Examples from the literature that represent different approaches to accomplishing this task in terms of their successes as well as limitations, and perspectives for the future are discussed.
Techniques and Conditions for Embryonic Germ Cell Derivation and Culture

Embryonic germ cells (EGCs) are pluripotent stem cells derived from primordial germ cells (PGCs), which are unipotent cells that in vivo give rise to the gametes (McLaren, 2003). Specification of PGCs takes place in the proximal posterior part of the epiblast shortly before gastrulation, when the epiblast is about to give rise to the three germ layers ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. PGCs can be identified by expression of tissue non-specific alkaline phosphatase (TNAP) activity, various surface antigens stage specific embryonic antigen (SSEA1,3,4), mouse vasa homolog (Mvh) and intracellular proteins (Stella, Fragilis, Oct-4, Nanog and Blimp1 among others). From the proximal epiblast, PGCs migrate along the extraembryonic mesoderm at the base of the allantois, and then move into the epithelium of the hindgut. Later, PGCs start to move through the dorsal mesentery reaching the aorta-gonad-mesonephros (AGM) region and finish their migration at the developing genital ridges. When in gonads, PGC proliferate by mitosis until males enter in mitotic quiescence and in females enter into meiosis (De Felici, 2009). Under special conditions, PGCs become pluripotent stem cells. In vivo PGCs can generate embryonal carcinoma cells (ECC), the pluripotent stem cells of testicular tumors (Stevens, 1967; Oosterhuis& Looijenga, 2005), while in vitro they can generate EGCs (Matsui et al., 1992; Resnick et al., 1992; Surani, 2007; De Felici et al., 2009; De Miguel et al., 2010). PGCs could be isolated and cultured as such during short periods (up to 10 days) maintaining their phenotype, until they undergo apoptosis. When exposed to a specific mixture of growth factors, PGCs generate EGC colonies. EGCs could be an important source of cells for germ cell or stem cell therapy and a valuable model for understanding development processes involved in reprogramming such as the acquisition of pluripotency. EGCs were first derived in mice (Matsui et al., 1992; Resnick et al., 1992), and afterwards in a wide variety of mammals like cow (Cherny et al., 1994), goat (Jia et al., 2008), pig (Shim et al., 1997), and sheep (Ledda et al., 2010) among others. Importantly, in 1998 Shamblott et al. derived the first human EGC line, providing a potential source of pluripotent stem cells for therapy. In this chapter, differences and similarities of EGC derivation and culture of different species are discussed, including species in which long term EGC lines derivation has not yet been achieved.
Identification of a Diesel Engine using Advanced Dynamic Local Affine Models

Abstract Nonlinear system identification using local affine models is investigated with the focus on the structure of the submodels. In general, submodels in input/output form are applied whose parameters change simultaneously. In many cases this submodel structure results in an insufficient model quality in terms of generalization performance and interpretability. As improvement a new submodel structure with a delayed parameter change is used as well as an extended offset with an independent numerator dynamics. This submodel structure is applied for the identification of the air path of a simulated and a real diesel engine which is equipped with an external exhaust gas recirculation and a turbocharger with variable geometry turbine.
PRAM: A probing range adjusting mechanism in energy-efficient and sensibility-aware probing environment WSNs

In this paper, we explore the operations of probing environment sensor networks and force to define some mathematical models to describe the operations. By these models, a probing radius adjusting mechanism “PRAM” has been provided to control the trade-off between energy efficiency, network scalability and sensing rate. PRAM can estimate the desirable probing range to minimize the energy consumption based on the premise that the required sensing rate and scalability of WSNs can be satisfied. Simulation results show PRAM can adjust exactly the value of probing range to satisfy the required sensing rate and extend substantially the life time of sensor networks.
KADIR HAS UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING SOLVING LINEAR EQUATIONS WITH CONJUGATE GRADIENT METHOD ON OPENCL PLATFORMS

The parallelism in GPUs offers extremely good performance on a lot of highperformance computing applications. Linear algebra is one of the areas which can benefit from GPU potential. Conjugate Gradient (CG) benchmark is a significant computation in computing applications. It uses conjugate gradient method that offers numerical solutions on specific systems of linear equations. The Conjugate Gradient contains a few scalar operations, reduction of sums and a sparse matrix vector multiplication. Sparse matrix-vector multiplication is the part where the most computation time is spent. In this thesis, we present GPU, Conjugate Gradient (CG) Method, Sparse MatrixVector Multiplication (SpMxV) on Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) format, OpenMP and OpenCL. The aim of the thesis is parallelization of SpMxV on CSR format which is the most costly part of CG and gain some performance by running it on GPU. We use OpenCL that allows writing programs which run across heterogeneous platforms such as CPUs, GPUs and other processors. The experiments show that SpMxV on a GPU with OpenCL spends less time according to SpMxV running on a CPU. Furthermore, OpenMp, which is another parallel programming language, is compared to OpenCL. OpenCL is a bit better than OpenMP at some points. APP END IX C APPENDIX B
Analysis and sequence of the speB gene encoding agmatine ureohydrolase, a putrescine biosynthetic enzyme in Escherichia coli

The speB gene of Escherichia coli encodes the enzyme agmatine ureohydrolase (AUH). AUH catalyzes the hydrolysis of agmatine to urea and putrescine in one of the two polyamine biosynthetic pathways in E. coli. Sequencing of a 2.97-kilobase-pair fragment of the E. coli chromosome containing speB revealed the presence of three intact open reading frames (ORFs), ORF1 and ORF2 on one strand and ORF3 on the opposite strand, as well as a truncated ORF, ORF4, which terminated 92 kilobase pairs upstream from ORF3. ORF3 contained the coding sequence of the speB gene, as confirmed by complementation analysis. Two ORF3 transcripts were detected: a shorter transcript that included only ORF3 and a longer transcript that included both ORF3 and ORF4. The short transcript was abundantly expressed when the ORF4 sequences were deleted, but when ORF4 and its upstream sequences were present, the polycistronic message predominated and the amount of the monocistronic message was drastically reduced. The promoter from which the shorter transcript was produced contained a TATACT sequence at position -12, but sequences upstream from the -12 position seemed to be irrelevant for promoter activity. The predicted amino acid sequence of AUH contained three regions of high homology to the arginases of yeasts, rats, and humans.
A high slew rate, low voltage CMOS class-AB amplifier

A simple low voltage operational amplifier is introduced with an efficient class-AB output stage. Two biasing transistors are present in between common source stage. This amplifier is simulated in 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The proposed class-AB amplifier is designed to operate from ±500 mV supplies. The simulated phase margin of proposed class-AB amplifier is 87° at the load of 10 kΩ∥1 pF. The class-AB amplifier's total compensation capacitance is 5 pF, which is less than 50% of conventional amplifiers. The unity gain frequency of proposed class-AB amplifier is 21.17 MHz, when driving a resistive load from 10 kΩ to 500 kΩ and capacitive loads from 1 pF to 5 pF. The slew rates of modified amplifier are 7.5 V/μs and 8.57 V/μs. This modified amplifier greatly increases the slew rate compared to the conventional circuits.
Exploiting radar waveforms for wireless power transmission

In the wireless power transmission/transfer (WPT) research field, great efforts are currently being devoted to the design of specific types of waveforms which leads to high power conversion efficiencies. This is mainly achieved by using those communication signals with a large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this work, the exploitation of commonly-employed radar signals featuring this high PAPR characteristic is proposed for the first time for the WPT application. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate that the engineered approach outperforms conventional WPT schemes based on other classes of waveforms in terms of RF-to-DC power conversion efficiency.
Design of binary sequences with tunable exponential autocorrelations and run statistics based on one-dimensional chaotic maps

This paper describes simple design methods of chaotic binary sequences with prescribed exponential autocorrelation properties and run statistics. We employ one-dimensional piecewise monotonic onto maps and a simple threshold function for generating such sequences. Some examples of such designs are also given. Furthermore, bounds on run statistics are discussed and compared to the result for sequences of general binary random variables.
Characterization of polymorphic microsatellite loci in the endangered Miho spine loach (Iksookimia choii) and cross‐species amplification within the Cobitidae family

The Miho spine loach (Iksookimia choii) is an endangered freshwater fish endemic to Korea. To aid a conservation programme for this species, 20 polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated and characterized in 67 individuals from three populations. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 8 to 33. Within populations, the observed and expected heterozygosities ranged from 0.59 to 1.00 and from 0.56 to 0.96, respectively, indicating its usefulness in population genetics studies. Cross‐species amplification of the loci was tested in six species of the family Cobitidae, and 18 loci were amplified in two or more related species.
Training platform for rescue robot operation and pair operations of multi-robots

Abstract In this paper, we introduce a report on the situation at Fukushima and present two lessons that were learned involving: (1) multi-robot operation and (2) robot operation by workers. Workers with no prior experience with robots operated multi-robots in dynamically changing environments. We focus on the following two themes in multi-robot operations: (1) communication between operators and (2) pairing of operators. An experiment using a rescue robot operation training platform based on Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation is shown, and the results of the experiment are discussed. We believe that these verify that the training platform is useful for recue robot operation.
Evaluation of design parameters for a cache vector quantization system

Observation of the usage of codevectors in vector quantization (VQ) reveals the locality of the reference, both temporally and spatially. Cache VQ takes advantage of such property by providing a large main codebook for quality concerns and a much smaller cache codebook for compression and computational concerns. We evaluate some design parameters for the cache VQ system. Our experimental results show that for various combinations of cache sizes, distortion thresholds, and line sizes, bit ratios ranging from 60% to 97% can be achieved by the cache VQ, with PSNRs between 33 dB and 38 dB and with codevector dimensions of 4 and 16. The corresponding compression ratio without entropy coding ranges from 6:1 to 24:1. These results clearly indicate that a very good performance in terms of time as well as fidelity and bit rate can be realized with the cache VQ. <<ETX>>
A prospective study of indexes predicting the outcome of trials of weaning from mechanical ventilation.

BACKGROUND The traditional predictors of the outcome of weaning from mechanical ventilation--minute ventilation (VE) and maximal inspiratory pressure (Plmax)--are frequently inaccurate. We developed two new indexes: the first quantitates rapid shallow breathing as the ratio of respiratory frequency to tidal volume (f/VT), and the second is termed CROP, because it integrates thoracic compliance, respiratory rate, arterial oxygenation, and Plmax. METHODS The threshold values for each index that discriminated best between a successful and an unsuccessful outcome of weaning were determined in 36 patients, and the predictive accuracy of these values was then tested prospectively in an additional 64 patients. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated, and the data were also analyzed with receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) curves, in which the proportions of true positive results and false positive results are plotted against each other for a number of threshold values of an index; the area under the curve reflects the accuracy of the index. RESULTS Sensitivity was highest for Plmax (1.00), followed closely by the f/VT ratio (0.97). Specificity was highest for the f/VT ratio (0.64) and lowest for Plmax (0.11). The f/VT ratio was the best predictor of successful weaning, and Plmax and the f/VT ratio were the best predictors of failure. The area under the ROC curve for the f/VT ratio (0.89) was larger than that under the curves for the CROP index (0.78, P less than 0.05), Plmax (0.61, P less than 0.001), and VE (0.40, P less than 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Rapid shallow breathing, as reflected by the f/VT ratio, was the most accurate predictor of failure, and its absence the most accurate predictor of success, in weaning patients from mechanical ventilation.