Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magnetic Gear Ratio Effects on Performances of Linear Primary Permanent Magnet Vernier Motor

Linear primary permanent magnet vernier (LPPMV) motor incorporates the merits of high efficiency and low cost because its long stator can be designed as a simple iron core only with salient poles, which is very suitable for long stroke applications. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the magnetic gear ratio effects on performances of the LPPMV motor. Its topology and principle is presented. Moreover, an optimized magnetic gear ratio is obtained by parametric analysis. The motor, whose magnetic gear ratio is 10, will exhibit both good force performance and low motor losses simultaneously. Finally, this LPPMV motor is prototyped for verification.
Selecting Proper Lexical Paraphrase for Children

We propose a method for acquiring plain lexical paraphrase using a Japanese dictionary in order to achieve lexical simplification for children. The proposed method extracts plain words that are the most similar to the headword from the dictionary definition. The definition statements describe the headword using plain words; therefore, paraphrasing by replacing the headword with the most similar word in the dictionary definition is expected to be an accurate means of lexical simplification. However, it is difficult to determine which word is the most appropriate for the paraphrase. The method proposed in this paper measures the similarity of each word in the definition statements against the headword and selects the one with the closest semantic match for the paraphrase. This method compares favorably with the method that acquires the target word from the end of the definition statements.
A Case Review of Poor Insight in Schizophrenia: How Much Do We Know?

Schizophrenia, an illness directly impacting 1% of the population worldwide, was estimated to cost the United States $62.7 billion in 2007.1 Much of the financial burden comes from the lack of productivity suffered by individuals with schizophrenia.1 It has been repeatedly shown that adherence to medications and psychiatric treatment directly correlates with improved long-term functioning in this patient population.2-8 Most clinical researchers would agree that lack of insight is a core symptom of schizophrenia.8 The prevalence of either partial or complete lack of insight into having a mental illness in patients with schizophrenia has been suggested to be between 50% and 80%. 2,3 However, in a World Health Organization pilot study from 1992, a number as high as 98% was quoted.9 In the past two decades, numerous research articles have focused on analyzing the role of insight and its neurocognitive etiology, and on methods to improve insight. Despite these efforts, controversy remains on how best to define and treat poor insight in patients with schizophrenia. Although differing definitions of insight are used by the various measurement scales, the scales are highly correlated.10 The most comprehensive assessment of insight includes awareness of illness, awareness of symptoms, and awareness of social consequences.11 We present the case of a young individual with schizophrenia whose lack of insight both resulted in a longer duration of illness before seeking treatment and also affected his outcome with medications. This case highlights the need for early assessment and treatment in this population.
A Novel Binding Factor Facilitates Nuclear Translocation and Transcriptional Activation Function of the Pituitary Tumor-transforming Gene Product*

Pituitary tumor-transforming gene (PTTG) is a recently characterized oncogene whose expression product contains a transcriptional activation domain at the C terminus. To understand the mechanisms involved in PTTG biological functions, we used yeast two-hybrid screening to identify proteins that interact with PTTG. This study reports the isolation and characterization of a novel PTTG-binding factor (PBF). PBF contains an open reading frame of 179 amino acids with a predicted molecular mass of 22 kDa. In Northern blot analyses, PBF mRNA was ubiquitously expressed in human tissues. Glutathione S-transferase pull-down and co-immunoprecipitation assays demonstrate that PBF interacts specifically with PTTG under both in vitro andin vivo conditions. The PTTG binding domain in PBF was located within the C-terminal 30-amino acid region that contain a nuclear localization signal. Immunofluorescence and subcellular fractionation studies showed that PTTG is predominantly expressed in the cytoplasm with partial nuclear localization, whereas PBF is localized both in the cytoplasm and the nucleus. The interaction between PBF and PTTG facilitated PTTG translocation from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. Furthermore, PBF is required for transcriptional activation of basic fibroblast growth factor by PTTG. In summary, we have characterized a novel PTTG-binding protein that facilitates PTTG nuclear translocation and potentiates its transcriptional activation function.
Author ' s personal copy Development of implicit and explicit category learning

We present two studies that examined developmental differences in the implicit and explicit acquisition of category knowledge. College-attending adults consistently outperformed school-age children on two separate information-integration paradigms due to children’s more frequent use of an explicit rule-based strategy. Accuracy rates were also higher for adults on a unidimensional rule-based task due to children’s more frequent use of the irrelevant dimension to guide their behavior. Results across these two studies suggest that the ability to learn categorization structures may be dependent on a child’s ability to inhibit output from the
Recent progress at the Keck interferometer

The Keck Interferometer (KI) combines the two 10m diameter Keck telescopes providing milliarcsecond angular resolution. KI has unique observing capabilities such as sensitive K-band V2, L-band V2 and N-band nulling modes. The instrument improvements and status of the Keck Interferometer since the 2010 SPIE meeting are summarized. We discuss the current capabilities of the KI, operational improvements, and the science from the KI during the past two years. We will conclude with a brief note on the closure of the KI facility. Details of dual field phase referencing developments and nulling science results are presented elsewhere at this conference.
COMBINED TRAJECTORY TRACKING AND PATH FOLLOWING CONTROL FOR DYNAMIC WHEELED MOBILE ROBOTS

Abstract The paper presents a solution to the problem of combined trajectory tracking and path following system design for underactuated mobile robots with non negligible dynamics. This problem is motivated by the practical need to develop control systems for mobile robots that can yield good trajectory tracking performance while keeping some of the properties that are normally associated with path following. The solution described builds on and extends previous work by Hindman and Hauser on so-called maneuver modified trajectory tracking. Simulations with a full nonlinear model of a wheeled mobile robot illustrate the performance of the control system derived.
Cocirculation of Two Transmission Lineages of Echovirus 6 in Jinan, China, as Revealed by Environmental Surveillance and Sequence Analysis

ABSTRACT Enterovirus environmental surveillance on sewage from the city of Jinan, Shandong Province, China, was initiated in 2008. Thirty echovirus 6 (E6) strains—1 in 2008 and 29 in 2010—were isolated and identified. Most E6 isolates (n = 21) came from the sewage collected on August 2010, revealing high local E6 activity at that time. Interestingly, the VP1 sequences of most isolates, even from the same sewage, were not identical. Phylogenetic analysis of VP1 sequences revealed two lineages for these isolates, with 78.0 to 80.0% nucleotide identities with one another, 94.8 to 100.0% identity within the major lineage, and 92.7 to 98.5% identity within the minor one. The VP1 sequences of environmental isolates, clinical isolates from 1998 to 2010, and global E6 were subjected to evolutionary analysis using Bayesian phylodynamic methods. The inferred E6 VP1 ancestral sequence dated back to 1901 (range, 1873 to 1928) and evolved with 7.047 × 10−3 substitutions per site per year. Shandong E6 segregated into three clusters, and the two environmental lineages belonged to clusters A and C, which originated in 2003 and 1992, respectively. The antigenicity analysis via neutralization assay confirmed great antigenic differences between Shandong isolates and a prototype strain. These findings underscore the value of continuous environmental surveillance and genetic analysis to monitor circulating enteroviruses in the population and give further insight into E6 evolution.
Ammonium decreases human polymorphonuclear leukocyte cytoskeletal actin

Ammonium, a weak base produced as a metabolic by-product of urea metabolism by bacterial pathogens, inhibits a variety of motile polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN) functions. It was initially assumed that the mechanism of leukocyte inhibition was due to cytoplasmic alkalinization. However, while it is clear that ammonium can effect cytoplasmic alkalinization, current data indicate that alterations in chemotaxis, degranulation, and receptor recycling occur independently of cytoplasmic alkalinization. Since these are motility-related events, we examined the possibility that alterations in cytoskeletal actin may account for the effects of ammonium on PMN function. The results indicate that ammonium can inhibit degranulation, decrease cytoskeletal actin, and increase actin depolymerization rates. These findings are supported by five lines of evidence. First, formylmethionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine (fMLP)-induced elastase release was inhibited by 85% +/- 3% in the presence of ammonium, and ammonium by itself did not stimulate elastase release. Second, ammonium treatment of resting PMNs caused a rapid 38% +/- 6% decrease in cytoskeletal actin. Third, ammonium treatment accelerated the fMLP-induced depolymerization phase of the cytoskeletal actin transient by 150% +/- 12%. Fourth, in resting PMNs treated with cytochalasin B or D, ammonium induced a 21% +/- 4% and a 25% +/- 5% decrease in cytoskeletal actin, respectively. Conversely, ammonium did not affect the ability of the cytochalasins to inhibit an fMLP-induced cytoskeletal actin transient. Fifth, pertussis toxin treatment of neutrophils did not affect the ammonium-stimulated decrease in cytoskeletal actin. These results suggest that ammonium can inhibit neutrophil function by altering cytoskeletal actin and therefore provide new information regarding potential pathogenic mechanisms for bacterial pathogens.
Online motion planning for robotic arms: new approach based on the reduction of the search space

This paper presents a new method for online path planning for robotic arms in dynamic environments. Most online path planning methods are based on local algorithms that end up being inefficient due to their lack of global information (local minima problems). The method presented in this paper avoids local minima by using a two stage framework. The robots react to dynamic environments using a local and reactive planning method restricted to a subset of its configuration space. Since the subset has few degrees of freedom the computational cost of the online stage is very low. An off-line stage chooses the subset of the configuration space that minimizes the probability of blockades and inefficient motions.
THE CLASSIFICATION OF MELANOMA

Malnutrition was a major problem, one that could be solved by rational measures. It had been present in the United Kingdom among children in the industrial centres at the beginning of the Second World War, and was overcome by provision of adequate supplies to individuals. With Aborigines, it was not just a case of giving handouts; supplies of food alone would not achieve long-term results. Educational and social measures were required as well, so that the individuals and communities could become
Microstrip Leaky-Wave Antenna With Control of Leakage Rate and Only One Main Beam in the Azimuthal Plane

An original leaky-wave antenna (LWA), conceived from a microstrip line which is laterally shielded by parallel plates, is presented in this paper. This structure shows, for the first time, that the leakage rate of a microstrip leaky-mode can be easily controlled while negligibly affecting the pointing direction. The antenna is based on the radiation from the second higher order mode of the microstrip line, which is perturbed by the addition of the two conductor walls to control the level of the leakage rate. The parallel-plates also serve as a mechanism to obtain a single main beam in the azimuthal plane, therefore improving the radiation pattern compared to common dual-beam second-higher order mode microstrip LWAs. The proposed antenna is analyzed by obtaining the corresponding leaky-mode complex propagation constant, which is calculated by a specific method of moments approach. The modal results obtained from the leaky-mode dispersion curves are validated with analysis performed on a three-dimensional structure using commercial finite element method solver. Also, a prototype is fabricated to experimentally confirm the advantages of this novel leaky-wave line source.
Performance Benchmarking of Indian Life Insurers: A Hybrid Non-Parametric Approach

In the last one decade, the life insurance companies operating in India have made significant progress in terms of business consolidation. In view of the same, it is of interest to make an enquiry about the operating performance of these companies. The present paper compares fifteen life insurance companies operating in India for the period 2005-06 to 2009-10 using the Hybrid Efficiency Model Tone,2004. The Hybrid Model provides a unified framework for the estimation of technical efficiency integrating the radial and non-radial characterisation of inputs and outputs. The results from the study indicate that out of the fifteen in-sample life insurance companies, the number of technically efficient life insurers declined from 9 in 2005-06 to 4 in 2006-07 and further to 3 in 2007-08 and 2008-09. However, in 2009-10 the number increased to 5. The mean technical efficiency scores of the in-sample life insurers declined sharply between 2005-06 and 2006-07 and improved somewhat thereafter. However, it again declined in 2009-10 implying a greater divergence in performance.
Tackling the x-ray cargo inspection challenge using machine learning

The current infrastructure for non-intrusive inspection of cargo containers cannot accommodate exploding com-merce volumes and increasingly stringent regulations. There is a pressing need to develop methods to automate parts of the inspection workﬂow, enabling expert operators to focus on a manageable number of high-risk images. To tackle this challenge, we developed a modular framework for automated X-ray cargo image inspection. Employing state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, including deep learning, we demonstrate high performance for empty container veriﬁcation and speciﬁc threat detection. This work constitutes a signiﬁcant step towards the partial automation of X-ray cargo image inspection.
Intercontinental test of generality for spatial patterns among diverse molluscan assemblages in coralline algal turf

The potential generality of local processes in determining spatial patterns of molluscan assemblages in turfs of Corallina officinalis is evaluated by testing hypotheses about consistency in ecological pattern on shores in Australia, Ireland and Chile. Identical sampling protocols on 2 shores in each country were used to test 2 specific hypotheses: (1) that molluscan assemblages vary significantly among patches of turf separated by tens of meters, and (2) that these assemblages differ significantly between low- and mid-shore areas. In total, 58, 24 and 27 species of molluscs were found in samples from Australia, Ireland and Chile, respectively. There was a remarkable degree of congruence in the proportion of species that were represented in broad taxonomic groups, with prosobranch gastropods accounting for 52 to 79 % of the total diversity at each locality. As predicted, there was significant variation in diversity and abundance of molluscs among patches of turf separated by tens of meters on each of the shores sampled. There was, however, little consistency in the structure of molluscan assemblages at different tidal heights, with significant differences on Australian shores, weak differences on Irish shores and no clear pattern on Chilean shores. Moreover, while the richness of species and abundance of prosobranchs was significantly greater in low-shore areas in Australia and Chile, the opposite trend was found in Ireland. Overall, the results show the potential for generality of factors that have previously been demonstrated to cause patchiness in molluscan assemblages in coralline turf at scales of tens of meters. It is proposed that testing for consistency in ecological patterns can be a useful and cost-effective first step in establishing the general importance of ecological processes.
Comparison of promoters in transgenic rice.

SUMMARY Reports of the use of rice storage protein gene promoters to express transgenes in rice grain have demonstrated that rice grain can be used as a production platform for end-use quality or seed-based edible vaccines. The generation of transgenic rice with multitraits (gene stacking), which requires the use of multiple transgenes under the control of different promoters, necessitates the use of promoters from rice and other cereals, as this is highly advantageous in reducing homology-based transcriptional gene silencing. Using the green fluorescent protein gene (gfp) as a reporter gene and a transgenic rice platform, promoters of storage protein and non-storage protein genes from barley, wheat and rice were compared with regard to their spatial and temporal control of expression. Storage protein promoters from barley (549-bp B-hordein and 433-bp D-hordein) and wheat (425-bp high-molecular-weight glutenin) directed the expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in endosperm but not embryo; however, expression was leaky, as it was also observed in seed maternal tissues, leaf and root tissues. As expected, the rice promoters (1350-bp alpha-glutelin B-1 and 1007-bp alpha-globulin) directed the endosperm-specific expression of GFP in transgenic rice. Our results indicate that seed-specific promoters from barley and wheat, although containing endosperm and GCN4 motifs, which are important for endosperm-specific expression in rice, may not be spatially regulated in the same manner as they are in their native species. The analysis of GFP expression under the control of various promoters in rice grain indicates that promoters from other cereals can drive high levels of endosperm-specific expression in rice, but their utility for seed-specific expression may depend on their tissue specificity.
Adaptive estimation over anisotropic functional classes via oracle approach

We address the problem of adaptive minimax estimation in white gaussian noise model under $L_p$--loss, $1\leq p\leq\infty,$ on the anisotropic Nikolskii classes. We present the estimation procedure based on a new data-driven selection scheme from the family of kernel estimators with varying bandwidths. For proposed estimator we establish so-called Lp-norm oracle inequality and use it for deriving minimax adaptive results. We prove the existence of rate-adaptive estimators and fully characterize behavior of the minimax risk for different relationships between regularity parameters and norm indexes in definitions of the functional class and of the risk. In particular some new asymptotics of the minimax risk are discovered including necessary and sufficient conditions for existence a uniformly consistent estimator. We provide also with detailed overview of existing methods and results and formulate open problems in adaptive minimax estimation.
Protease digestion of hepatitis A virus: disparate effects on capsid proteins, antigenicity, and infectivity

High concentrations of either trypsin or chymotrypsin caused nearly complete cleavage of capsid protein VP2 of hepatitis A virus but did not significantly reduce the infectivity, thermostability, or antigenicity of the virus. Chymotrypsin also had a lesser effect on VP1. These findings indicate the presence of a protease-accessible VP2 surface site which neither contributes significantly to the dominant antigenic site nor plays a role in the attachment of the virus to putative cell receptors.
The Association Between Quantitative Measures of Dementia and of Senile Change in the Cerebral Grey Matter of Elderly Subjects

The ageing of many populations in recent years has directed increasing attention to the social, medical and biological problems of senescence. The psychological changes associated with ageing occupy a central position in inquiries in this field. The expectation of mental disorder shows a steep increase with advancing chronological age, and beyond 75 years a large part of this increase is accounted for by disorders associated with degenerative changes in the central nervous system for which we lack remedies at the present time. Larsson et al. (1963) have estimated that the aggregate morbidity risk for these disorders up to the age of 70 is 0·4 per cent. , up to age 75, 1·2 per cent. and up to age 80, 5 per cent. For higher ages estimates were probably less reliable, but the calculated risk up to the age of 90 was 5·2 per cent. In a survey of a random sample of elderly people aged 65 and over in the general population, Kay et al. (1964), found a total of 4·2 per cent. of elderly subjects to be suffering from senile dementia, 2·9 per cent. being mild cases. The condition is generally recognized as being a major cause of serious infirmity among the elderly in psychiatric, geriatric, general medical and community practice alike.
Probing cytoskeleton organisation of neuroblastoma cells with single‐cell force spectroscopy

Single‐cell force spectroscopy is an emerging technique in the field of biomedicine because it has proved to be a unique tool to obtain mechanical and functional information on living cells, with force resolution up to single molecular bonds. This technique was applied to the study of the cytoskeleton organisation of neuroblastoma cells, a life‐threatening cancer typically developing during childhood, and the results were interpreted on the basis of reference experiments on human embryonic kidney cell line. An intimate connection emerges among cellular state, cytoskeleton organisation and experimental outcome that can be potentially exploited towards a new method for cancer stadiation of neuroblastoma cells. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Molecular Characterization of the Signal Responsible for the Targeting of the Interleukin 2 Receptor β Chain toward Intracellular Degradation*

During receptor-mediated endocytosis, most growth factor receptors are transported to late endocytic compartments and degraded. This process is important to control their expression on the cell surface and requires sorting in early endocytic compartments. Little is known about the mechanisms and the signals involved. We have studied the signal involved in targeting the interleukin 2 receptor β chain (IL2Rβ), a member of the cytokine receptor superfamily, toward degradation after internalization. We show that a motif of 8 amino acids in the cytosolic tail of IL2Rβ is sufficient to target a normally recycling receptor toward degradation. Deletion of this signal strongly impairs IL2Rβ degradation. Further molecular characterization of the motif shows that it does not resemble the well documented tyrosine and dileucine families of trafficking signals.