Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ag-NP-induced interleukin-1beta upregulation in a lung co-culture model

Studies have suggested that silver nanoparticles can augment the cellular immune responses of cells and thus may contribute to immunopathology, especially as an autoinflammatory disorder. This study examines the interaction of silver nanoparticles with a co-culture of alveolar macrophages and lung epithelial cells to determine if the nanoparticles are capable of activating the inflammasome for sustained production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-1beta. It is demonstrated here that interleukin-1beta is upregulated, both the transcript and the mature protein, following 24 hour exposure to 10 nm silver, but that caspase-1 function is downregulated, which prevents confirmation of the inflammasome activity. However, significant upregulation of interleukin-1beta is the contributing factor to many autoinflammatory disorders, indicating that prolonged exposure to silver nanoparticles, even at sub-lethal doses, could potentially cause pathological damage to the host through inflammation.
Blind Adaptation of a Decision Feedback Equalizer for use in a lOGbps Serial Link

The Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE) is commonly used in recovering data at the receive end of a multi-gigabit per second rate serial backplane channel. This form of equalization scheme typically relies on a training sequence. However this training sequence may not be shared by all implementations of the DFE, thus causing significant compatibility issues. A model of a DFE and adaptation algorithm was developed in MATLAB in combination with measurement data of a typical backplane channel. A method was developed to process the incoming signals from the channel involving a known adaptation algorithm in order to determine appropriate tap coefficients. These coefficients are shown to be effective for a data rate of 10 Gbps. The design presented would yield itself to standard-cell implementation except for the analog DFE structure and several stages of the up/down counters. Furthermore the design was evaluated using representative error sources and across several design parameters. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Poster : Enhancing Adversarial Example Defenses Using Internal Layers

Until recently, research on adversarial attacks on image classification models has focused on the input and the output layers of the models. This ignores potentially useful information from the internal layers of the models. In this work, we investigate the internal layers of image classification models in the context of adversarial attacks. We observe significant differences between outputs of normal and adversarial inputs at those internal layers. As a case study, we then use this property to propose an improvement to adversarial detection based on feature squeezing. Our proposed technique improves the detection rate significantly over the previous method that only considered the final layer, and suggest further opportunities for exploring internal layers.
AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION ABOUT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND TOURIST ARRIVAL: EVIDENCE FROM INDIA

This study aims to examine the causal relationship between tourism arrivals and bilateral trade of India with Germany, Netherland, Switzerland, France, Italy, USA, UK and Canada for the period 1996 January to 2008 December. After examining the order of integration by using the Zivot and Andrews structural unit root test, we have used the Granger Causality test to examine the causal relationship between the study variables. The Granger Causality test results indicate two way causal relationships between the Trade and Tourism in case of USA, Italy and Canada.
Perceived Difficulty in a Fitts Task

This study provided a detailed investigation of perceived difficulty (PD) in a Fitts task. The Fitts task has been used to study Fitts’s law, which shows that movement time (MT) is related to the information constraints of the movement (Fitts’s Index of Difficulty, ID) such that there is a positive, linear relationship between MT and ID and MTs are similar when the scale of the movement requirements vary but ID is equal (scale invariance). According to Fitts’s law, Fitts’s ID provides an index of objective difficulty; does Fitts’s ID also provide an index of subjective difficulty? The main goal of this study was to address this question. It was hypothesized that the characteristics of the MT-ID relation described by Fitts’s law extend to the PD-ID relation. This hypothesis was addressed in two experiments, both including a variety of ID and scale conditions. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 20) assessed performance difficulty in prospective action; in Experiment 2, participants (N = 40) assessed performance difficulty in imagined and actual action. The results from both experiments supported the hypothesis. The support was limited, however; under certain conditions, there was evidence of a non-linear PD-ID relation and scale variance for PD. Thus, within limits, Fitts’s ID provides an index of subjective difficulty in prospective, imagined, and actual action. In Experiment 2, MTs were collected in addition to the PD judgments. It was hypothesized that MT is superior to ID in predicting PD and that MT mediates the relationship between PD and ID. The results supported these hypotheses for many participants in both action conditions, but particularly in imagined action. An additional
Neuroimaging of language control in bilinguals: neural adaptation and reserve

Speaking more than one language demands a language control system that allows bilinguals to correctly use the intended language adjusting for possible interference from the non-target language. Understanding how the brain orchestrates the control of language has been a major focus of neuroimaging research on bilingualism and was central to our original neurocognitive language control model (Abutalebi & Green, 2007). We updated the network of language control (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) and here review the many new exciting findings based on functional and structural data that substantiate its core components. We discuss the language control network within the framework of the adaptive control hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) that predicts adaptive changes specific to the control demands of the interactional contexts of language use. Adapting to such demands leads, we propose, to a neural reserve in the human brain.
An Analytically Tractable Multi-asset Stochastic Volatility Model

A multi-asset stochastic volatility model is presented. This is based on the Heston stochastic volatility model. It has the advantage of being sufficiently flexible to interpret the individual asset dynamics as well as the interdependencies among them, while still being analytically tractable. A formula for the joint transition probability density function of the stochastic process implicitly defined by the model is deduced. This formula is expressed as a one dimensional integral of an explicitly known function and allows us to derive elementary formulae for the conditional mean and variance of the asset price log-returns. A calibration procedure is proposed and tested on simulated data.
Transmission of the Protozoan Parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha in Monarch Butterfly Populations : Implications for Prevalence and Population-Level Impacts

spread only when host density and transmission opportunities are high (Ewald 1983; Lenski and May 1994; Levin 1996). Parasites that are transmitted vertically depend on the reproductive success of infected hosts and are predicted to evolve toward lower virulence (Herre 1993; Lipsitch et al. 1995; see Kover and Clay 1998; Kover et al. 1997). However, virulent parasites that utilize both vertical and horizontal transmission can be maintained at high prevalence in host populations even when most new infections are derived from vertical transmission (Lipsitch et al. 1995; Altizer and Augustine 1997). We investigated transmission of the neogregarine protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha in monarch butterflies. Vertical transmission from infected females to their offspring has been suggested as the primary mode of transfer (McLaughlin and Myers 1970; Leong et al. 1997b). Laboratory studies have demonstrated measurable virulence (Altizer and Oberhauser 1999), and some populations show nearly 100% prevalence (Altizer et al. 2000), suggesting that additional transmission routes exist. To examine modes of parasite transmission, we measured the effects of maternal, paternal, and horizontal transmission on the survival and parasite loads of captive monarch butterflies. We then explored the consequences of varying the relative importance of different transmission modes for parasite prevalence and virulence using a deterministic model of disease spread. Ophryocystis elektroscirrha was first recovered from monarch and queen butterflies in Florida in 1966 (McLaughlin and Myers 1970). New infections INTRODUCTION
Hierarchical Classification with Hierarchical Attention Networks

Current state-of-the-art document classification methods based on attention mechanisms on document structures have been shown to perform well due to their ability to attend differentially to more and less important parts of the document when constructing the representation. While these models perform well on flat classification tasks, to our knowledge not much research has been done on hierarchical classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a few variations of the Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) that directly incorporate the pre-defined hierarchical structure of the output label space into the network structure, via the use of hierarchical output layers representing different levels of the output label’s hierarchy. We present an evaluation of this model using the task of classifying Shopify app descriptions to a hierarchically-structured app category labels, and we demonstrate that by incorporating hierarchical structure of the labels into the design of the network, the model was able to outperform the baseline by a substantial margin. Additionally, we compare the classification performance of all the proposed variations.
Economic analysis of broiler production in Peninsular Malaysia

The domestic demand for broiler meat is one of the highest in the Malaysian markets. The industry requires continuous evaluation to identify the existing problems and improves its competitive advantage. Thus, economic analysis of this sort will continue to update current statistics on production cost, output and profitability. Following this, the study, therefore, aims to assess the existing financial condition of farmers, marginal cost of production, total net income and input-output ratio of broiler production in different regions in Peninsular Malaysia. The study used multi-stage sampling in selecting 310 operators from Southern, Northern, East Coast and Centeral regions. The analytical tools include descriptive statistics and farm budget. The findings disclosed that the broiler farm incurs major cost from acquiring operating inputs especially feed. The operations in the East Coast region was almost unprofitable for the reason that feed conversion rate is more than 2 resulting in higher production cost. But the other three regions indicate positive returns based on the estimated input-output ratios of 1:1.09, 1:1.17 and 1: 1.23 for Northern, Southern and Central regions, respectively. The study advocates for both managerial and policy measures that will help cut the cost of production to attract more investors and increase export.
Temperature estimation of high-power light emitting diode street lamp by a multi-chip analytical solution

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are now widely used in many fields including traffic lights, vehicle backlights and liquid crystal display (LCD) displays because of their long life, good illumination efficiency and low energy consumption. At present, LEDs are increasingly replacing the traditional lighting and are being used in general illumination such as the street lamp. For the high-power LED street lamps, good light extraction is the most important thing, but low junction temperature of the LED modules is also critical for achieving a long lifetime and a high optical efficiency. Actually, there have been many reports about early failures of street lamps, called dead lamps that have been regarded as a barrier in the public and administration acceptance of LED street lamps. Therefore temperature estimation is always a crucial issue for LED product development. A multi-chip spreading thermal resistance model was applied to estimate the temperature distribution of LED street lamp. The experiment was first done to obtain temperatures of several locations in a prototype LED street lamp. Then the multi-chip spreading resistance model was established to calculate the full temperature distribution. Comparison between the model calculation and experimental measurement showed a good agreement, which demonstrates that the present model can be used in engineering design to estimate the temperature distribution of high-power LED street lamps.
Neural Transition Based Parsing of Web Queries: An Entity Based Approach

Web queries with question intent manifest a complex syntactic structure and the processing of this structure is important for their interpretation. Pinter et al. (2016) has formalized the grammar of these queries and proposed semi-supervised algorithms for the adaptation of parsers originally designed to parse according to the standard dependency grammar, so that they can account for the unique forest grammar of queries. However, their algorithms rely on resources typically not available outside of big web corporates. We propose a new BiLSTM query parser that: (1) Explicitly accounts for the unique grammar of web queries; and (2) Utilizes named entity (NE) information from a BiLSTM NE tagger, that can be jointly trained with the parser. In order to train our model we annotate the query treebank of Pinter et al. (2016) with NEs. When trained on 2500 annotated queries our parser achieves UAS of 83.5% and segmentation F1-score of 84.5, substantially outperforming existing state-of-the-art parsers.
The Similarity of the Action of Franklin and ESE Lightning Rods under Natural Conditions

In the lightning rods categorized as ESE an intermittent voltage impulse is applied to the lightning rod to modulate the electric field at its tip in an attempt to speed up the initiation of a connecting leader from the lightning rod when it is under the influence of a down coming stepped leader. In this paper it is shown that due to the stepping nature of the down coming stepped leader, there is a natural modulation of the electric field at the tip of any lightning rod exposed to the lightning stepped leaders and this modulation is much more intense than any artificial modulation that is possible under practical conditions. Based on the results it is claimed that artificial modulation of the electric field at the tip of lightning rods by applying voltage pulses to it is an unnecessary endeavor because the nature itself has endowed the tip of the lightning rod with a modulating electric field. Thus, as far as the effectiveness of artificial modulation of the tip electric field is concerned, there could be no difference in the lightning attachment efficiency between ESE and Franklin lightning rods.
An autonomous time dependent swarm routing system for UAV real time investigation

Abstract This paper implements an autonomous time dependent swarm routing system for navigating a set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) aka drones, to investigate a set of maritime vehicles (MVs) in an area of interest (AOI). The autonomous routing system integrates two multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodologies, namely the analytic hierarchy process AHP and PROMETHEE, a geographical information system (GIS) and a mathematical programming (MP) technique. The order of the MV investigation is based on their degree of “suspiciousness”, providing an innovative step toward intelligent swarm of UAVs operating in a coordinated and coupled fashion to achieve multiple MV investigation, managed by a single operator. This system provides first notions towards intelligent and fully autonomous UAVs. The updated functionality of this decision support system, with a combined drug trafficking and illegal immigration scene assessment case study is presented. To the best of our knowledge, a real-time dynamic autonomous routing problem has not yet been solved, especially a swarm routing one. This is our original contribution, the methods used are well-known; but their integration to solve this problem is unique. The hybrid set-up and use of MCDA techniques facilitate the translation of surveillance expert knowledge into an advanced and automated decision support tool.
Sodium Fluoride Induces Hepato-Renal Oxidative Stress and Pathophysiological Changes in Experimental Animals

The liver is a primary site for xenobiotics detoxification, and its metabolism is readily altered by toxicity. The kidney is a common target for toxic xenobiotics due to its capacity to extract and concentrate toxic substances by highly specialized cells. So, they are the target organs of sodium fluoride toxicity. The aim of this review is to highlight on hepatorenal oxidative stress and pathophysiological changes induced by treatment of experimental animals with sodium fluoride. Our review shows fluoride toxicosis caused an elevation in the serum activities of alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, alkaline phosphatase, lactate dehydrogenase, acid phosphatase, and the level of total bilirubin, and reduction in the serum levels of total protein, albumin, and globulins, and serious histopathological changes in the hepaic tissues. Also, NaF administration caused increases in serum urea, creatinine, uric acid, sodium ions, and chloride ions levels and serious histopathological changes in the kidney tissues. Treatment of experimental animals with NaF induced oxidative stress in hepatic and renal tissues. It can be concluded that administration of sodium fluoride to experimental animals induced oxidative stress, serious hepatorenal histopathological changes, and disturbance in liver and kidney functions. So, human should be advised to decrease exposure to sodium fluoride to decrease the harmful effects of NaF on liver and kidney.
A Survey of Client-Server Volume Visualization Techniques

This state-of-the-art report provides a comprehensive review of the research on client-server architectures for volume visualization. The design of such schemes capable of dealing with static and dynamic volume datasets has been an important challenge for researchers due to the need for the reduction of information transmitted. Thus, compression techniques designed to facilitate such systems are a particular focus of this survey. The ever increasing complexity and widespread use of volume data in interdisciplinary fields, as well as the opportunities afforded by continuing advances in computational power of mobile devices are strong motivations for this review. In particular, the client-server paradigm has particular significance to medical imaging due to the practical advantages and increased likelihood of use, of portable low-spec clients in lab and clinical settings.
A New Algorithm for Generalized Least Squares Factor Analysis with a Majorization Technique

Factor analysis (FA) is a time-honored multivariate analysis procedure for exploring the factors underlying observed variables. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the generalized least squares (GLS) estimation in FA. In the algorithm, a majorization step and diagonal steps are alternately iterated until convergence is reached, where Kiers and ten Berge’s (1992) majorization technique is used for the former step, and the latter ones are formulated as minimizing simple quadratic functions of diagonal matrices. This procedure is named a majorizing-diagonal (MD) algorithm. In contrast to the existing gradient approaches, differential calculus is not used and only elmentary matrix computations are required in the MD algorithm. A simuation study shows that the proposed MD algorithm recovers parameters better than the existing algorithms.
Volatile fatty acids production from household food waste

The present study aims at determining key factors and current constrains of household food waste (HFW) fermentation process and its large-scale implementation within the frame of biorefinery concept. The production of Volatile Fatty Acids (VFA) from HFW by a mixed microbial culture fermentation (MMC) was studied in both, batch and semi-continuous scale reactors.Results from batch scale trials without pH control pointed out that highest conversion yield obtained, 111 ± 20 mg of chemical oxygen demand, as VFA, per gram of volatile solids fed to the system, was reached after 6-7days of fermentation. Moreover, during semi-continuous fermentation at uncontrolled pH and hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 6 d, was observed a VFA production of 3.3 ± 0.8 g·L-1 on average, being increased up to a maximum of 30.1 g·L-1 when pH was controlled at pH 5.5. In light of the results obtained, HFW should be considered a promising feedstock for the production of chemical intermediates like carboxylic acids and platform chemicals in general. Nevertheless, best optimal operational conditions have not been still properly deciphered and further research must be done to foster economic viability of VFA production in future urban biorefineries.
An energetic variational approach to ion channel dynamics

We introduce a mathematical model to study the transport of ions through ion channels. The system is derived in the framework of the energetic variational approach, taking into account the coupling between electrostatics, diffusion, and protein (ion channel) structure. The geometric constraints of the ion channel are introduced through a potential energy controlling the local maximum volume inside the ion channel. A diffusive interface (labeling) description is also employed to describe the geometric configuration of the channels. The surrounding bath and channel are smoothly connected with the antechamber region by this label function. A corresponding modified Poisson–Nernst–Planck channel system for ion channels is derived using the variational derivatives of the total energy functional. The functional consists of the entropic free energy for diffusion of the ions, the electrostatic potential energy, the repulsive potential energy for the excluded volume effect of the ion particles, and the potential energy for the geometric constraints of the ion channel. For the biological application of such a system, we consider channel recordings of voltage clamp to measure the current flowing through the ion channel. The results of one‐dimensional numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate some signature effects of the channel, such as the current output produced by single‐step and double‐step voltage inputs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.