Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A binary channel characterization using partitioned Markov chains

The characterization of binary communication channels using functions of finite-state Markov chains is considered. Two distributions which are relevant to code evaluation, i.e., the error-free run and error-cluster distributions, are derived. It is shown for an N -state model, partitioned into a group of k error-free states and N-k error states, that the general form of the error-free run distribution is the weighted sum of at most k exponentials, and that of the error-cluster distribution the weighted sum of at most N-k exponentials. As evidence of the capability of such models to characterize real communication channels, a simple class of models is investigated and shown experimentally to be capable of representing HF radio statistics.
Genetic parameters of body weight and ascites in broilers: effect of different incidence rates of ascites syndrome

ABSTRACT 1. The objectives of the current study were to investigate the effect of incidence rate (5%, 10%, 20%, 30% and 50%) of ascites syndrome on the expression of genetic characteristics for body weight at 5 weeks of age (BW5) and AS and to compare different methods of genetic parameter estimation for these traits. 2. Based on stochastic simulation, a population with discrete generations was created in which random mating was used for 10 generations. Two methods of restricted maximum likelihood and Bayesian approach via Gibbs sampling were used for the estimation of genetic parameters. A bivariate model including maternal effects was used. The root mean square error for direct heritabilities was also calculated. 3. The results showed that when incidence rates of ascites increased from 5% to 30%, the heritability of AS increased from 0.013 and 0.005 to 0.110 and 0.162 for linear and threshold models, respectively. 4. Maternal effects were significant for both BW5 and AS. Genetic correlations were decreased by increasing incidence rates of ascites in the population from 0.678 and 0.587 at 5% level of ascites to 0.393 and −0.260 at 50% occurrence for linear and threshold models, respectively. 5. The RMSE of direct heritability from true values for BW5 was greater based on a linear-threshold model compared with the linear model of analysis (0.0092 vs. 0.0015). The RMSE of direct heritability from true values for AS was greater based on a linear-linear model (1.21 vs. 1.14). 6. In order to rank birds for ascites incidence, it is recommended to use a threshold model because it resulted in higher heritability estimates compared with the linear model and that BW5 could be one of the main components of selection goals.
Distributions of Cobalt-60, Zinc-65 and Selenium-75 in Encased Embryos of the Spotted Dogfish (S. Canicula): Comparison of Absorption by Maternal Transfer and from Seawater

Our previous studies on the bioaccumulation of various radioisotopes (241Am, 109Cd, 57Co, 51Cr, 134Cs, 54Mn and 65Zn) directly from seawater by juvenile dogfish Scyliorhinus canicula (Chondrichthys: Scyliorhinidae) had shown their enhanced capacity to accumulate most of these radioisotopes, compared to the turbot Psetta maxima (Actinopterygii: Teleostei), which also represents one of three ICRP-nominated marine reference organisms for radiological dose assessment. These experimental results indicated the greater permeability of dogfish to most of these radio isotopes in seawater, with some attaining whole-body concentration factors (CFs) in dogfish of more than 102 during short-term exposures. This heightened capacity for bioaccumulation from seawater was also seen in another stage of the dogfish's life cycle. Encased embryos of S. canicula also absorbed six radioisotopes (241Am, 109Cd, 57Co, 134Cs, 54Mn and 65Zn) directly from seawater during short-term experimental exposure, demonstrating the permeability of the egg-case to these contaminants. Among different components of the encased embryo the egg case was the major repository (69-99%) of all six radioisotopes, that were evenly distributed throughout its wall. Egg case CF's were as high as 103 for 57Co and 65Zn, making it the major source of gamma radiation exposure to the embryo, however any chemotoxic effects of their stable analogues would be limited, unless they are subsequently remobilised from the egg case for absorption by the embryo. Another important pathway of exposure of the embryo to contaminants, that has been recently investigated, is that of maternal transfer during the development of the egg prior to hatching. We report here on some of our first results. This experiment has determined the uptake and distributions of 60Co, 65Zn and 75Se in dogfish eggs, following maternal transfer of contaminants in radio-labelled food. These distributions are also compared with those resulting from direct uptake from the aquatic medium following their parturition, that has been studied in a parallel experiment.
Analysis of the Electromagnetic Characteristics of Coplanar Waveguide by FDTD Method

In this paper, we analyzed the effect of ground-plane width change on electromagnetic characteristics of coplanar waveguide. Eight full-space coplanar waveguide models with different ground-plane width were simulated using finite-difference time-domain method. Numerical implementation was presented in detail, key technology of finite-difference time- domain method were discussed, including excitation source, numerical stability condition and boundary truncation. Electromagnetic property parameters of coplanar waveguides were calculated and compared with experiment results. The simulation results agree well with experiment results. Finally, the effects of ground-plane width change on electromagnetic characteristics of the coplanar waveguide are presented.
Androgens are associated with hemostatic and inflammatory factors among women at the mid-life.

GOAL The goal of this study was to relate annually measured endogenous androgens to hemostatic and inflammation markers in women longitudinally. METHODS A total of 3302 participants from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, aged 42-52 yr at baseline and self-identified as African-American (28%), Caucasian (47%), Chinese (8%), Hispanic (8%), or Japanese (9%) were evaluated for testosterone (T), dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, and SHBG at four time points in 5 yr. Cardiovascular disease markers were fibrinogen, activated factor VII-c, C-reactive protein (hsC-RP), and the fibrolytic factors, plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1), and tissue plasminogen activator [t(PA)]. RESULTS T and free androgen index (FAI) were associated highly positively with PAI-1 and t(PA), and FAI was associated highly and positively with hsC-RP. Lower SHBG levels, associated with greater bioavailable T, were associated significantly with higher levels of PAI-1, t(PA), hsC-RP, and factor VII-c. SHBG was lower in Chinese and Japanese women markedly, resulting in FAI values that, on average, were higher among Chinese and Japanese women compared with African-American, Caucasian, and Hispanic women. IMPLICATIONS There were strong, positive associations of androgens with fibrolytic and inflammation markers, even after considering age, body size, smoking, and race/ethnicity. It is important to study androgens, their precursors, and their carrier protein as part of the risk profile for heart disease in mid-aged women.
UIS-Failure of DMOS Power Transistors

It is a major concern in the design of power devices to achieve the largest possible SOA. The latter is limited by the failure of the device under specific operating conditions. It is not always clear, however, how the device actually runs into a failure mode and thus, which design and technology parameters influence the SOA. The SOA for DMOS power transistors under normal operation (i.e. ) has been addressed elsewhere [1]. Also, the failure under unclamped inductive switchingconditions (UIS) has been attributed to the switching of the parasitic BJT caused by the rise of the intrinsic base resistance with temperature [2]. As our numerical analysis shows, this explanation is not complete; the failure is temperature-driven indeed, but the increase of the base resistance is only one contribution to the failure mechanism. For the specific device investigated, it can be shown that the increase in intrinsic carrier density with temperature is an important key to understanding the failure under UIS conditions, unless the current is extremely high. Moreover, since the actual device consists of several hundreds DMOST-cells, an uniform current distribution among all cells must be ensured in order to safely dissipate the generated heat. However, there exists an unstable operating point, where a slight deviation from the uniform current distribution leads to current crowding concentrated in the hot spot occurring in one single cell of the chip array. The device consists of an array of several hundred cells. Such a cell is schematically depicted in fig. 1; due to symmetry, only one half of the structure is shown. Several partial current flows are indicated which are needed in the further analysis.
Dynamic fluid connectivity during steady-state multiphase flow in a sandstone

Significance The movement of immiscible fluids through permeable media occurs in many settings, including oil and water flow through rock. Here we present observations of a previously unidentified type of steady-state flow behavior that we term “dynamic connectivity. ” We demonstrate that flow of the nonwetting phase occurs through a network of connections that continuously rearrange between filled pores. This observation suggests that we need to modify our models of two-phase flow that are fundamental to describing subsurface flow processes such as geologic CO2 storage and hydrocarbon recovery. The current conceptual picture of steady-state multiphase Darcy flow in porous media is that the fluid phases organize into separate flow pathways with stable interfaces. Here we demonstrate a previously unobserved type of steady-state flow behavior, which we term “dynamic connectivity,” using fast pore-scale X-ray imaging. We image the flow of N2 and brine through a permeable sandstone at subsurface reservoir conditions, and low capillary numbers, and at constant fluid saturation. At any instant, the network of pores filled with the nonwetting phase is not necessarily connected. Flow occurs along pathways that periodically reconnect, like cars controlled by traffic lights. This behavior is consistent with an energy balance, where some of the energy of the injected fluids is sporadically converted to create new interfaces.
Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications

Cross-Cultural Psychology is a leading textbook offering senior undergraduate and graduate students a thorough and balanced overview of the whole field of cross-cultural psychology. The team of internationally acclaimed authors present the latest empirical research, theory, methodology and applications from around the world. They discuss all domains of behavior (including development, social behavior, personality, cognition, psycholinguistics, emotion and perception), and present the three main approaches in cross-cultural psychology (cultural, culture-comparative, and indigenous traditions) as well as applications to a number of domains (including acculturation, intercultural relations and communication, work and health). With new additions to the writing team, the third edition benefits from an even broader range of cross-cultural perspectives. Now in 2-colour, the format is even more reader-friendly and the features include chapter outlines, chapter summaries, further reading and an updated glossary of key terms. This edition also offers an accompanying website containing additional material and weblinks.
Alteration in Antioxidant Capacity in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major public health problem that needs greater attention. Variability in the susceptibility to develop COPD is related to both genetic and environmental factors. Oxidative stress and inflammation are the major hallmarks of COPD and antioxidant status can be used as a biomarker to assess the risk of chronic diseases. Materials and Methods: We used the FRAP (ferric reducing ability of plasma) assay as a simple and powerful test for determination of the total antioxidant capacity of plasma of patients and normal subjects. The patients were selected by cross-sectional method. The mean average age ±SD of normal subjects and patients was 56 ± 4 and 60±2 years respectively. The spectrophotometeric method was used for this assay. Results: The means of the FRAP assays in the patients were higher (about twice) than those of normal subjects. The differences were significant (p<0.01). Conclusion: The high levels of antioxidant capacity in the patient group indicated that the antioxidant defense system had been activated due to the oxidative stress and hypoxic condition. A though, FRAP assay can probably be used for demarcation of severity and risk of developing COPD, clinical follow-up and further investigation are required for the assessment of this hypothesis. (Tanaffos 2007; 6(4): 13-17)
Segmentation and object detection with Gabor filters and cumulative histograms

This paper proposes an algorithm for segmentation and extracting an object region by using Gabor filters. Gabor filters are exploited to attract the spatial frequency in some orientations, and not only the outputs of Gabor filters but also color information are used to construct the features at each image pixel. The criterion is devised so as to consider the similarity, the region size and the region shape factors in order to efficiently merge the features. In general, a complex object may be segmented into multiple regions. However for purpose of detecting such a complex object, we represent the object region by the normalized cumulative histogram of features. From experimental results, it is found that the proposed algorithm is able to efficiently detect the object regions such as cars in images of usual traffic scenes.
Site-directed, virus-free, and inducible RNAi in embryonic stem cells

RNAi is a powerful tool for interrogating gene function in ES cells. Combining the high penetrance of a microRNA-embedded shRNA (shRNA-mir) cassette with a locus-defined, inducible expression strategy, we developed a system for RNAi in mouse ES cells. An shRNA-mir cassette is targeted near the constitutively active HPRT locus under a tetracycline (tet)-regulatable promoter through Cre-mediated site-specific recombination. The major advantage of this system is that the shRNA-mir cassette can be targeted to a precise locus, allowing for control of shRNA-mir expression in an inducible fashion. Induction of an shRNA-mir directed against the pluripotency factor, Nanog, resulted in the loss of self-renewal and differentiation to parietal endoderm-like cells, which can be rescued by the introduction of an RNAi-immune version of Nanog cDNA. Knockdown efficiency can be enhanced by using multiple shRNA-mir hairpins against the target gene, which was further validated by knocking down two additional ES cell factors. This site-directed, virus-free, and tet-inducible RNAi system, designated as SDVFi RNAi in our study, presents an efficient option for controlled gene silencing in ES cells.
Fels-Rand: an Xlisp-Stat program for the comparative analysis of data under phylogenetic uncertainty

MOTIVATION Currently available programs for the comparative analysis of phylogenetic data do not perform optimally when the phylogeny is not completely specified (i.e. the phylogeny contains polytomies). Recent literature suggests that a better way to analyse the data would be to create random trees from the known phylogeny that are fully-resolved but consistent with the known tree. A computer program is presented, Fels-Rand, that performs such analyses. A randomisation procedure is used to generate trees that are fully resolved but whose structure is consistent with the original tree. Statistics are then calculated on a large number of these randomly-generated trees. Fels-Rand uses the object-oriented features of Xlisp-Stat to manipulate internal tree representations. Xlisp-Stat's dynamic graphing features are used to provide heuristic tools to aid in analysis, particularly outlier analysis. The usefulness of Xlisp-Stat as a system for phylogenetic computation is discussed. AVAILABILITY Available from the author or at http://www.uq. edu.au/~ansblomb/Fels-Rand.sit. hqx. Xlisp-Stat is available from http://stat.umn. edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/xlsinfo.html. CONTACT s.blomberg@abdn.ac. uk
Akhter Is globalization what it ’ s cracked up to be ? Econom ic freedom , corruption , and human development

This paper examines the effect of economic globalization on human development and argues that the relation between economic globalization and human development is mediated by economic freedom and corruption. Findings suggest that economic globalization affects economic freedom positively and corruption negatively. In turn, economic freedom has a positive effect and corruption has a negative effect on human development. All relations are in the hypothesized directions and significant. Research, business, and public policy implications as well as directions for future research are presented. The benefits of globalization are obvious: faster growth, higher standards of living, and new opportunities. Kofi Annan, 2001. Globalization is an emotional word. It evokes strong reactions among exponents as well as opponents of globalization. While the former group equates globalization with higher living standards, greater transparency, and increased economic freedom, the latter associates it with economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and cultural homogenization. The controversies surrounding the effects of globalization reached a pinnacle when, during the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle, USA (November 29–December 3, 1999) and in Genoa, Italy (July 19–24, 2001), a variety of interest groups challenged the legitimacy of globalization and protested against what they considered to be its direct and collateral effects. The WTO considers the opposition to globalization a serious development. To avoid confrontation with the anti-globalization groups and also because of the reluctance of developed economies to host the WTO, the WTO held its recent meeting in Doha, Qatar (November 12–14, 2001). The anti-globalization groups have been successful in reaching out to the general public. They have put together a coherent case for their position, drawing attention to issues such as the use of child labor in less developed economies, the indifference of pharmaceutical companies to the spread of AIDS and of the developed countries to the burden of third-world debt. These concerns about globalization have sparked heated debates among different segments of society. It is generally agreed that the nature and outcome of these debates will influence the progress of globalization. Globalization, as Weisbrot, Naiman, and Kim (2001) note, is not an inevitable outcome, but the result of the laborious process of rule making.
Relations Between Motor, Social, and Cognitive Skills in Young Children with Developmental Disabilities

RELATIONS BETWEEN MOTOR, SOCIAL, AND COGNITIVE SKILLS IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES Helyn Kim, M.A George Mason University, 2012 Thesis Director: Dr. Timothy W. Curby The importance of children’s motor abilities, in relation to other developmental areas, has been acknowledged in both theory and research. However, researchers have typically focused on gross motor abilities in relation to cognitive and social abilities, and associations between fine motor, cognitive, and social abilities have received little research attention. In addition, very few studies have looked at the potential interrelations between motor, social, and cognitive abilities in preschool-aged children with developmental disabilities. The current study examined three areas of development, motor (both fine and gross motor), social, and cognitive skills, in preschool-aged children with developmental disabilities, to see whether there were associations between the three areas. The data for the study come from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP; Winsler et al., 2008), a large-scale, collaborative, school readiness project, taking place in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Participants were children receiving early childhood special education services (N = 3,191), who were assessed for overall development and socio-emotional protective factors in the Fall and Spring of their pre-kindergarten year, using the LAP-D (Nehring, Nehring, Bruni, & Randolph, 1992) and the DECA (LeBuffe & Naglieri, 1999). Results indicated that there were definite associations between motor, cognitive, and social skills. Also, both fine motor and gross motor skills in the Fall of the pre-kindergarten year significantly predicted later cognitive and social skills, measured in the Spring of the pre-kindergarten year, after controlling for child gender, age, and disability type; however, associations were stronger for fine motor skills, as opposed to gross motor skills, for both cognitive and social skills. In addition, disability category moderated the associations between motor and social and cognitive skills; however, gender was not a moderator, suggesting that the underlying associations between the three areas are similar for both boys and girls. The findings from this study have important implications for early educational programs and interventions, as well as for policymakers.
A Computational Acoustic Model of the Coupled Interior Architecture of Ancient Chavín

We present a computational acoustic model of the well-preserved interior architecture at the 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center at Chav´ın de Hu´antar, Per´u. Our previous model prototype [Kolar et al . 2010] translated the acoustically coupled topology of Chav´ın gallery forms to a model based on digital waveguides (bi-directional by deﬁnition), representing passageways, connected through reverberant scattering junctions, representing the larger room-like areas. Our new approach treats all architectural units as “reverberant” digital waveguides, with scattering junctions at the discrete planes deﬁning the unit boundaries. In this extensible and eﬃcient lumped-element model, we combine architectural dimensional and material data with sparsely measured impulse responses to simulate multiple and circulating arrival paths between sound sources and listeners.
A Metaobject Protocol for Optimizing Application-Specific Run-Time Variability

Just-in-time compilers and their aggressive speculative optimizations reduced the performance gap between dynamic and static languages drastically. To successfully speculate, compilers rely on the program variability observed at run time to be low, and use heuristics to determine when optimization is beneficial. However, some variability patterns are hard to capture with heuristics. Specifically, ephemeral, warmup, rare, and highly indirect variability are challenges for today's compiler heuristics. As a consequence, they can lead to reduced application performance. However, these types of variability are identifiable at the application level and could be mitigated with information provided by developers. As a solution, we propose a metaobject protocol for dynamic compilation systems to enable application developers to provide such information at run time. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate performance improvements for a few scenarios in a dynamic language built on top of the Truffle and Graal system.