Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Amorphous carbon active contact layer for reliable nanoelectromechanical switches

This paper reports an amorphous carbon (a-C) contact coating for ultra-low-power curved nanoelectromechanical (NEM) switches. a-C addresses important problems in miniaturization and low-power operation of mechanical relays: i) the surface energy is lower than that of metals, ii) active formation of highly localized a-C conducting filaments offers a way to form nanoscale contacts, and iii) high reliability is achieved through the excellent wear properties of a-C, demonstrated in this paper with more than 100 million hot switching cycles. Finally, a full inverter using a-C contacts is fabricated to demonstrate the viability of the concept.
Controlling Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Smartphones and Mobile Networks ; an evaluation of the Latency requirements

Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can be useful to several applications, such as urban surveillance and monitoring of mass events. To build and maintain a swarm formation, the UAVs need to compute, communicate, and coordinate their actions. However, it is complex to design and integrate computing and communicating chips into the UAV control board. Thus, in this paper, we argue that out-of-the-box Smartphones can be coupled to UAV and fulfill this role as a proxy computing unit, i.e., they can be attached to UAVs to do their computing and communicating tasks. Based on this hypothesis, we present a framework to coordinate the UAV swarms using conventional mobile networks. Then, we evaluate if this approach, under different latencies and swarm speed, is fast enough to coordinate the UAV Swarms. The results indicate that the proposed approach present stable swarm formations under 200ms, a higher limit than standard 3G and 4G latencies. Further, the results show that the ratio leader speed communication latency is the key aspect that determines the swarm formation accuracy.
Differential prognostic impact of interleukin-34 mRNA expression and infiltrating immune cell composition in intrinsic breast cancer subtypes

Interleukin-34 (IL-34) is a ligand for the CSF-1R and has also two additional receptors, PTPRZ1 and syndecan-1. IL-34 plays a role in innate immunity, inflammation, and cancer. However, the role of IL-34 in breast cancer is still ill-defined. We analyzed IL-34 mRNA expression in breast cancer cell lines and breast cancer patients and applied established computational approaches (CIBERSORT, ESTIMATE, TIMER, TCIA), to analyze gene expression data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Expression of IL-34 was associated with a favorable prognosis in luminal and HER2 but not basal breast cancer patients. Gene expression of CSF-1 and CSF-1R was strongly associated with myeloid cell infiltration, while we found no or only weak correlations between IL-34, PTPRZ1, syndecan-1 and myeloid cells. In vitro experiments showed that tyrosine phosphorylation of CSF-1R, ERK, and FAK and cell migration are differentially regulated by IL-34 and CSF-1 in breast cancer cell lines. Collectively, our data suggest that correlation of IL-34 gene expression with survival is dependent on the molecular breast cancer subtype. Furthermore, IL-34 is not associated with myeloid cell infiltration and directly regulates breast cancer cell migration and signaling.
Real-time super-resolved 3D in turbid water using a fast range-gated CMOS camera.

We present a range-gated camera system designed for real-time (10 Hz) 3D estimation underwater. The system uses a fast-shutter CMOS sensor (1280×1024) customized to facilitate gating with 1.67 ns (18.8 cm in water) delay steps relative to the triggering of a solid-state actively Q-switched 532 nm laser. A depth estimation algorithm has been carefully designed to handle the effects of light scattering in water, i.e., forward and backward scattering. The raw range-gated signal is carefully filtered to reduce noise while preserving the signal even in the presence of unwanted backscatter. The resulting signal is proportional to the number of photons that are reflected during a small time unit (range), and objects will show up as peaks in the filtered signal. We present a peak-finding algorithm that is robust to unwanted forward scatter peaks and at the same time can pick out distant peaks that are barely higher than peaks caused by sensor and intensity noise. Super-resolution is achieved by fitting a parabola around the peak, which we show can provide depth precision below 1 cm at high signal levels. We show depth estimation results when scanning a range of 8 m (typically 1-9 m) at 10 Hz. The results are dependent on the water quality. We are capable of estimating depth at distances of over 4.5 attenuation lengths when imaging high albedo targets at low attenuation lengths, and we achieve a depth resolution (σ) ranging from 0.8 to 9 cm, depending on signal level.
Early Life Exposure and its Effects on Health in the Puerto Rican Elderly Population

Abstract Season of birth may help disentangle the effects on health of early life exposure to poor nutrition and infectious diseases from effects associated with other childhood conditions. Using data from 60 to 74 year old Puerto Ricans who lived in rural areas during childhood (n=1459), we estimated effects of exposure to poor nutrition and infectious diseases during late gestation on the probability of (a) chronic conditions (diabetes, heart disease, obesity), (b) decreased functionality (limitation in at least one ADL and IADL), and (c) poor self-reported health controlling for childhood health and SES and knee height. Findings: (1) strong associations between exposure and heart disease; (2) virtually no attenuation of effects of self-reported childhood health with controls for exposure; (3) no association between exposure and diabetes, obesity, functionality, poor health. Conclusions: timing of birth may reveal conditions experienced perinatally which affect adult heart disease, but there is little evidence of similar effects on adult diabetes and obesity.
Controllable Dendritic Crystal Simulation Using Orientation Field

Real world dendritic growths show charming structures by their exquisite balance between the symmetry and randomness in the crystal formation. Other than the variety in the natural crystals, richer visual appearance of crystals can benefit from artificially controlling of the crystal growth on its growing directions and shapes. In this paper, by introducing one extra dimension of freedom, i.e. the orientation field, into the simulation, we propose an efficient algorithm for dendritic crystal simulation that is able to reproduce arbitrary symmetry patterns with different levels of asymmetry breaking effect on general grids or meshes, including spreading on curved surfaces and growth in 3D. Flexible artistic control is also enabled in a unified manner by exploiting and guiding the orientation field in the visual simulation. We show the effectiveness of our approach by various demonstrations of simulation results.
EuroLoveMap: Confronting feelings from News.

Opinion mining is a natural language analysis task aimed at obtaining the overall sentiment regarding a particular topic. This paper presents a prototype that presents the overall sentiment of a topic based on the geographical distribution of the sources on this topic. The prototype was developed in a single day during the hackathon organised by the OpeNER project in Amsterdam last year. The OpeNER infrastructure was used to process a large set of news articles in four different languages. Using these tools, an overall sentiment analysis was obtained for a set of topics mentioned in the news articles and presented on an interactive worldmap.
Enhancing performance of Bayes classifier for the hardened password mechanism

In pattern recognition, Bayes classifier is considered a powerful tool in the decision making process as its gives the lowest probability of committing a classification error. This has been highlighted in a number of previous works. The diversity in algorithm parameters, criteria used and number of users involved as well as the evaluation method makes the task of comparing their results and selecting an appropriate system a very thorny one. The purpose of this paper is four fold: to study the different approaches reported using a true password, to establish how normalization and using a single variance/mean impact on the results, using a maximum number of features does necessarily improve performance and finally demonstrate that performance optimization is feasible through careful selection of features and approach taken.
Feature Curve Co‐Completion in Noisy Data

Feature curves on 3D shapes provide important hints about significant parts of the geometry and reveal their underlying structure. However, when we process real world data, automatically detected feature curves are affected by measurement uncertainty, missing data, and sampling resolution, leading to noisy, fragmented, and incomplete feature curve networks. These artifacts make further processing unreliable. In this paper we analyze the global co‐occurrence information in noisy feature curve networks to fill in missing data and suppress weakly supported feature curves. For this we propose an unsupervised approach to find meaningful structure within the incomplete data by detecting multiple occurrences of feature curve configurations (co‐occurrence analysis). We cluster and merge these into feature curve templates, which we leverage to identify strongly supported feature curve segments as well as to complete missing data in the feature curve network. In the presence of significant noise, previous approaches had to resort to user input, while our method performs fully automatic feature curve co‐completion. Finding feature reoccurrences however, is challenging since naïve feature curve comparison fails in this setting due to fragmentation and partial overlaps of curve segments. To tackle this problem we propose a robust method for partial curve matching. This provides us with the means to apply symmetry detection methods to identify co‐occurring configurations. Finally, Bayesian model selection enables us to detect and group re‐occurrences that describe the data well and with low redundancy.
A Social Media Based Examination of the Effects of Counseling Recommendations after Student Deaths on College Campuses

Student deaths on college campuses, whether brought about by a suicide or an uncontrollable incident, have serious repercussions for the mental wellbeing of students. Consequently, many campus administrators implement post-crisis intervention measures to promote student-centric mental health support. Information about these measures, which we refer to as "counseling recommendations", are often shared via electronic channels, including social media. However, the current ability to assess the effects of these recommendations on post-crisis psychological states is limited. We propose a causal analysis framework to examine the effects of these counseling recommendations after student deaths. We leverage a dataset from 174 Reddit campus communities and ~400M posts of ~350K users. Then we employ statistical modeling and natural language analysis to quantify the psychosocial shifts in behavioral, cognitive, and affective expression of grief in individuals who are "exposed" to (comment on) the counseling recommendations, compared to that in a matched control cohort. Drawing on crisis and psychology research, we find that the exposed individuals show greater grief, psycholinguistic, and social expressiveness, providing evidence of a healing response to crisis and thereby positive psychological effects of the counseling recommendations. We discuss the implications of our work in supporting post-crisis rehabilitation and intervention efforts on college campuses.
Attitudes toward people with disabilities: the perspective of attachment theory.

OBJECTIVE Attachment theory was employed as the theoretical framework for the purpose of examining attitudes toward people with disabilities. METHOD A total of 404 Jewish Israeli students without disabilities completed the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Toward Persons With Disabilities (MAS) and the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR). RESULTS Reading a scenario about an encounter with a person with a disability gave rise to more negative emotions than reading a similar scenario about an encounter with a person without a disability, regardless of participants' attachment orientations. However, attachment orientations moderated participants' positive cognitions and distancing behaviors. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest a dynamic process of self-regulation when reacting to a written scenario about people with disabilities. This process consists of an initial spontaneous negative emotional response accompanied by compensatory positive cognitions and behavioral tendencies.
Ideal Standards, the Self, and Flexibility of Ideals in Close Relationships

Two studies tested how romantic ideal standards and their flexibility are associated with relationship quality. In Study 1, individuals rated themselves and their ideal romantic partners on three dimensions: warmth/trustworthiness, vitality/attractiveness, and status/resources. They then reported how flexible their ideals were on each dimension and how closely their current partner matched their ideal standards. Individuals who rated themselves higher on each dimension held higher ideal standards that were less flexible and perceived higher relationship quality the more their partners matched their ideals. This latter effect was moderated by the flexibility of ideals on two dimensions—warmth/trustworthiness and status/resources. In Study 2, members of dating couples reported their ideals, how closely their partners matched their ideals, and their flexibility. People were happier the more they matched their partners’ ideals. Partner discrepancy ratings once again mediated the link between self-perceptions and perceived relationship quality for the warmth/trustworthiness dimension.
Autocatalytic closure and the evolution of cellular information processing networks

Cellular Information Processing Networks (CIPNs) are chemical networks of interacting molecules occurring in living cells. Through complex molecular interactions, CIPNs are able to coordinate critical cellular activities in response to internal and external stimuli. We hypothesise that CIPNs may be abstractly regarded as subsets of collectively autocatalytic (i.e., organisationally closed) reaction networks. These closure properties would subsequently interact with the evolution and adaptation of CIPNs capable of distinct information processing abilities. This hypothesis is motivated by the fact that CIPNs may require a mechanism enabling the self-maintenance of core components of the network when subjected to internal and external perturbations and during cellular divisions. Indeed, partially replicated or defective CIPNs may lead to the malfunctioning and premature death of the cell. In this thesis, we evaluate different existing computational approaches to model and evolve chemical reaction networks in silico. Following this literature review, we propose an evolutionary simulation platform capable of evolving artificial CIPNs from a bottom-up perspective. This system is a novel agent-based Artificial Chemistry (AC) which employs a term rewriting system called the Molecular Classifier System (MCS.bl). The latter is derived from the Holland broadcast language formalism. Our first series of experiments focuses on the emergence and evolution of selfmaintaining molecular organisations in the MCS.bl. Such experiments naturally relate to similar studies conducted in ACs such as Tierra, Alchemy and α-universes. Our results demonstrate some counter-intuitive outcomes, not indicated in previous literature. We examine each of these “unexpected” evolutionary dynamics (including an elongation catastrophe phenomenon) which presented various degenerate evolutionary trajectories. To address these robustness and evolvability issues, we evaluate several model variants of the MCS.bl. This investigation illuminates the key properties required to allow the self-maintenance and stable evolution of closed reaction networks in ACs. We demonstrate how the elongation catastrophe phenomenon can be prevented using a multi-level selectional model of the MCS.bl (which acts both at the molecular and cellular level). Using this multi-level selectional MCS.bl which was implemented as a parallel system, we successfully evolve an artificial CIPN to perform a simple pre-specified information processing task. We also demonstrate how signalling crosstalk may enable the cooperation of distinct closed CIPNs when mixed together in the same reaction space. We finally present the evolution of closed crosstalking and multitasking CIPNs exhibiting a higher level of complexity.
A decade of an underestimated nosocomial pathogen - Acinetobacter in a tertiary care hospital in Punjab.

24 www.jkscience. org Vol. 11 No. 1, January-March 2009 Acinetobacter are opportunistic pathogens that readily colonize patients with compromised host defences. Acinetobacter calcoaceticus, the species usually involved in human infection, causes disease chiefly in a hospital setting usually associated with respiratory therapy equipment and indwelling catheters. Sepsis, pneumonia and urinary tract infections are the most frequent manifestations (1). Excluding enterobacteriaceae, Acinetobacter species and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia are the second and third most common gram negative bacilli respectively encountered in clinical specimens (2). This genus contains strictly aerobic, short, often capsulate, nonmotile, Gram negative (or gram variable) bacilli or coccobacilli (often diplo coccobacilli) that grows well on simple media. ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Aphanomyces astaci PsI-genotype isolates from different Finnish signal crayfish stocks show variation in their virulence but still kill fast

We detected significant virulence differences among five tested (PsI-Puujarvi, PsI-Pyhajarvi, PsI-Kukkia, PsI-Saimaa I and PsI-Saimaa II) PsI-genotype crayfish plague (Aphanomyces astaci ) isolates against lake Mikitanjarvi noble crayfish population. The crayfish were inoculated with a dose of 300 m·L-1 A. astaci spores in ambient water under experimental conditions. Mortalities started from four to seven days after inoculation, depending on the PsI-genotype isolate. In all the experimentally infected groups it took no more than three days for all the crayfish to die after the first mortality. The PsI-Puujarvi isolate proved to be the most virulent strain, while PsI-Kukkia was the least virulent. The average day of death for these experimental groups was fifth and ninth day, respectively. We did not discover correlation between the average day of death and gender or level of additional Psorospermium haeckeli infestation. Our results show that there are, from the practical point of view, minor virulence differences among PsI-genotype A. astaci isolates, and that all the tested five isolates are highly virulent. The present results emphasize the necessity to prevent all further spread of highly virulent strains of A. astaci to aid and shelter successful conservations attempts of the native European crayfishes.
Effects of ultraviolet radiation on metabolic rate and fitness of Aedes albopictus and Culex pipiens mosquitoes

Natural and anthropogenic changes (e.g., land use change, pollution) will alter many environmental factors in the coming years, including the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface. Alterations in solar radiation exposure is likely to impact the ecologies of many living organisms, including invertebrates that inhabit aquatic habitats. In this study, we assessed the effect of UV-B radiation on the metabolic rates and fitness (survival, development time, body size) of Aedes albopictus and Culex pipiens mosquitoes and the activity of their microbial food resources in experimental aquatic microcosms. We exposed single-species cohorts of newly hatched Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens larvae and a control treatment with no larvae to three UV-B conditions that mimicked those in full-sun and shade in the field and to a control condition with no UV-B radiation. Our results indicated that UV-B radiation affected the metabolic rates of both Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens larvae, with significantly higher rates found in full-sun compared to shade and no-UV conditions, 8 and 15 days after exposure began. Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens survival was also affected by UV-B radiation condition, with significantly lower survival in full-sun compared to shade and no UV-B conditions. Microbial metabolic rates were consistently significantly lower in full-sun compared to shade and no-UV conditions, especially at 8 days of exposure. These results show that UV-B radiation at levels found in open spaces showed strong and important impacts on the metabolic rates and survival of Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens larvae. Decreased survival of Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens with higher UV-B radiation levels may be caused by both direct exposure to radiation as well as the indirect effects of reduced microbial food, resulting in greater metabolic demands and stress. Negative impacts of UV-B radiation on the survival of Ae. albopictus and Cx. pipiens are likely to have important implications for the distribution and abundance of these mosquitoes, and the transmission of pathogens that these two broadly distributed mosquitoes vector.
Measuring the perceived quality of ophthalmology services in private organizations. A marketing perspective

Nowadays, the competition registered on the Romanian markets regarding the activity of private ophthalmology organizations has raised their interest in developing consumer-oriented strategies. The key factor that assures a differentiation as well as a competitive advantage is the service quality from a marketing perspective. Objectives: From a marketing perspective, service quality is measured as a perceived discrepancy between the consumers’ expectations and was actually performed in health care services. The most widely and validated measurement is the SERVQUAL scale. However, a variety of SERVQUAL scales have been applied in different health care environments without taking into consideration the specialty of the health care service. Thus, the objective of this paper was to measure the service quality in the Romanian ophthalmology private organizations using the SERVQUAL measurement, by identifying the SERVQUAL dimensions, which register the highest and the lowest gap scores. Materials and methods: The instrument for data collection was the SERVQUAL self-administered questionnaire that consisted of 22 items measured on a 5-point Likert scale. The sample size encompassed 100 participants and the sampling technique was the snowball. The internal consistency, validity and the reliability of the SERVQUAL scale was determined by the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients and factor analysis. The SERVQUAL questionnaire focused on 5 dimensions (tangibles, reliability, assurance, empathy and responsiveness) and each dimension, in its turn, was characterized by different items. Results: The mean age of the participants was 49.52 years, with a mean income of 3031 Romanian Currency and the mean period of wearing eyeglasses was 5 years (±2). Further, there were 47% females and 53% males. The overall internal consistency of the SERVQUAL scale, as well as the dimensions’ internal consistency were all above 0.7 and the factor analysis revealed that the items loaded properly on each dimension. Moreover, the gap scores of the SERVQUAL scale’s dimensions pinpointed that the highest gap score was registered by the Tangibles dimension and the lowest gap score was registered by the Reliability dimension. Conclusions: Performing the ophthalmology service right the first time, contributes significantly to the improvement of the marketing effectiveness and the operating efficiency.