Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symmetrical Realization for Predistorted Microwave Filters

This paper presents a symmetric realization for a predistorted bandpass filter using a general cross-coupled resonator structure. The new method enables much simpler conversion from an existing filter design without predistortion. Hence both design and tuning efforts are reduced. A 10-4-4 dielectric resonator filter was built to verify the validity of the new method. The filter, coupled with an input circulator and output isolator was tested over temperature to validate the suitability for practical applications such as satellite transponder input multiplexers.
Serotonin 5-HT4 Receptor Agonists Improve Facilitation of Contextual Fear Extinction in an MPTP-Induced Mouse Model of Parkinson’s Disease

Previously, we found that 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)-induced Parkinson’s disease (PD) model mice (PD mice) showed facilitation of hippocampal memory extinction via reduced cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)/cAMP-dependent response element-binding protein (CREB) signaling, which may cause cognitive impairment in PD. Serotonergic neurons in the median raphe nucleus (MnRN) project to the hippocampus, and functional abnormalities have been reported. In the present study, we investigated the effects of the serotonin 5-HT4 receptor (5-HT4R) agonists prucalopride and velusetrag on the facilitation of memory extinction observed in PD mice. Both 5-HT4R agonists restored facilitation of contextual fear extinction in PD mice by stimulating the cAMP/CREB pathway in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. A retrograde fluorogold-tracer study showed that γ-aminobutyric acid-ergic (GABAergic) neurons in the reticular part of the substantia nigra (SNr), but not dopaminergic (DAergic) neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc), projected to serotonergic neurons in the MnRN, which are known to project their nerve terminals to the hippocampus. It is possible that the degeneration of the SNpc DAergic neurons in PD mice affects the SNr GABAergic neurons, and thereafter, the serotonergic neurons in the MnRN, resulting in hippocampal dysfunction. These findings suggest that 5HT4R agonists could be potentially useful as therapeutic drugs for treating cognitive deficits in PD.
Excitonic condensation of strongly correlated electrons: The case of Pr 0.5 Ca 0.5 CoO 3

(R=Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Y) family (PCCO) a decade ago,accompanied by a change from a metal to an insulator and a drop of the magneticsusceptibility, fulﬁlls the above deﬁnition. Recently, the observation of an exchangesplitting on the Pr site in materials lacking magnetic order added to the PCCO puzzle.Here, we address the physics of PCCO with dynamical mean-ﬁeld model calculationsand material speciﬁc calculations using the density-functional LDA+U method. Weshow that a condensation of spin-triplet, atomic-size excitons provides a consistentexplanation of the observed physics and suggest that PCCO are the ﬁrst known re-alization of this type of excitonic condensation, which was predicted to take place inthe proximity of spin-state transitions.TheR
Deposition of Titanium Layer on Steel Substrate Using PECVD Method: A Parametric Study

Metallic titanium film was deposited on H-13 steel substrate at 470°C - 530°C using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) method. In this paper, the effects of manufacturing parameters were investigated on deposited titanium coating characteristics. XRD, FESEM, XPS and AFM were used in order to study coating characteristics. Increasing hydrogen flow rate from 200 to 360 sccm, resulted in a 72% decrease in oxygen content and 38% decrease in chlorine content of the film. Applied plasma voltage has a severe effect on nanohardness of coating. Pressure of the deposition chamber has a negative effect on titanium characteristics.
Website Design Guidelines: High Power Distance and High-Context Culture

This paper aims to address the issue of offering a culturally adapted website for a local audience. To date, the vast majority of studies in the website design arena have examined mainly Western and American (low power distance and low context) culture, disregarding possible cultural discrepancies. This study fills this gap and explores the key cultural parameters that are likely to have an impact on local website design for Asian-Eastern culture, in a high power distance and high context, correlating with both Hofstede’s and Hall’s cultural dimensions. It also reviews how website localisation may be accomplished more effectively by extracting the guidelines from two different yet compatible cultural dimensions: high power distance and high context.
Identification of a Novel SBP1-Containing SCFSFB Complex in Wild Dwarf Almond (Prunus tenella)

S-RNase-based gametophytic self-incompatibility (SI), in which specificities of pistil and pollen are determined by S-RNase and the S locus F-box protein, respectively, has been discovered in the Solanaceae, Plantaginaceae, and Rosaceae families, but some underlying molecular mechanisms remain elusive and controversial. Previous studies discovered SI in wild dwarf almond (Prunus tenella), and pistil S (S-RNase) and pollen S (SFB) determinant genes have been investigated. However, the SCF (SKP1–Cullin1–F-box-Rbx1) complex, which serves as an E3 ubiquitin ligase on non-self S-RNase, has not been investigated. In the current study, PetSSK1 (SLF-interacting-SKP1-like1), SBP1 (S-RNase binding protein 1), CUL1, and SFB genes (S-haplotype-specific F-box) were identified in an accession (ZB1) of P. tenella. Yeast two-hybrid assays revealed interactions between PetSBP1 and PetCUL1 and between PetSBP1 and PetSFBs (SFB16 and SFB17), and subsequent pull-down assays confirmed these interactions, suggesting a novel SBP1-containing SCFSFB complex in wild dwarf almond. Moreover, despite a putative interaction between PetSSK1 and PetCUL1, we revealed that PetSSK1 does not interact with PetSFB16 or PetSFB17, and thus the canonical SSK1-containing SCFSFB complex could not be identified. This suggests a novel molecular mechanism of gametophytic SI in Prunus species.
Preventing and Diagnosing Software Upgrade Failures by Rekha Bachwani Dissertation Director :

OF THE DISSERTATION Preventing and Diagnosing Software Upgrade Failures by Rekha Bachwani Dissertation Director: Ricardo Bianchini Modern software systems are complex and comprise many interacting and dependent components. Frequent upgrades are required to fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, and add or remove features. Unfortunately, many upgrades either fail or produce undesired behavior resulting in service disruption, user dissatisfaction, and/or monetary loss. To make matters worse, when upgrades fail or misbehave, developers are given limited (and often unstructured) information to pinpoint and correct the problems. In this dissertation, we propose two systems to improve the management of software upgrades. Both systems rely on environment information and dynamic execution data collected from users who have previously upgraded the software. The first (called Mojave) is an upgrade recommendation system that informs a user who intends to upgrade the software about whether the upgrade is likely to succeed. Regardless of Mojave’s recommendation, if the user decides to upgrade and it fails, our second system (called Sahara) comes into play. Sahara is a failed upgrade debugging system that identifies a small subset of routines that are likely to contain the root cause of the failure. We evaluate both systems using several real upgrade failures with widely used software. Our results demonstrate that our systems are very accurate in predicting upgrade failures and identifying the likely culprits for upgrade failures.
Personal Profile of the Leader: Explanatory Factor in the Practice of Business Intelligence

With globalization, the discovery of new opportunities and their realization can only be successful if companieshave an adequate field of vision. They must have the ability to collect, store, distribute and analyze informationespecially relating to the status and trends of socio-economic environment. Hence the development of businessintelligence structures within companies. Almost all developed countries have realized the importance of thisactivity and have developed intelligence. Africa in general and Cameroon in particular, knowledge and practiceof business intelligence is very low both at market and state level. The business leader is considered as the mainactor of this practice, the empirical study of 62 companies in Cameroon not only to highlight the characteristicsof the practice of business intelligence but also to analyze the influence of personal profile the leader of thispractice.
Lesion Location Attention Guided Network for Multi-Label Thoracic Disease Classification in Chest X-Rays

Traditional clinical experiences have shown the benefit of lesion location attention for improving clinical diagnosis tasks. Inspired by this point of interest, in this paper we propose a novel lesion location attention guided network named LLAGnet to focus on the discriminative features from lesion locations for multi-label thoracic disease classification in chest X-rays (CXRs). By revealing the equivalence of the region-level attention (RLA) and channel-level attention (CLA), we find that the RLA is available as priors for object localization while the CLA implicitly provides high weights to the attractive channels, which both enable lesion location attention excitation. To integrate the advantages from both mechanisms, the proposed LLAGnet is structured with two corresponding attention modules, i.e., the RLA and CLA modules. Specifically, the RLA module consists of the global and local branches. And the weakly supervised attention mechanism embedded in the global branch can obtain visual regions of lesion locations by back-propagating gradients. Then the optimal attention region is amplified and applied to the local branch to provide more fine-grained features for the image classification. Finally, the CLA module adaptively enhances the weights of channel-wise features from the lesion locations by modeling interdependencies among channels. Extensive experiments on the ChestX-ray14 dataset clearly substantiate the effectiveness of LLAGnet as compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
Passive monitoring in the workplace: Design guidelines for self quantified employee feedback system

The use of online social networking services is considerably more accessible today due to advances in ICT in workplaces. Employees are spending more time on Internet engaging in non-work-related activities, such as maintaining personal networks, interacting with friends, streaming music and video, checking sports scores and following Web bookmarks by visiting various online social venues. As such, organizations are increasingly concerned about maintaining a stable workforce, and thus they make the use of monitoring systems. However, the current monitoring practices violate employees’ reasonable expectation of privacy, decrease self-determination and cause employees to complain and possibly increase intent to quit jobs. We present the use of passive monitoring in the workplace as a new tool to observe employees’ Internet activities with objective measures. Based on Self Quantified movement, we aim to design a system that can passively monitor employees, provide visualization feedback based on their Internet usage activities, and allow employees to understand the implications of their actions concerning the boundary between work-related and non-work related Internet activities.
Metabolomics Applied to the Study of Extracellular Vesicles

Cell-secreted extracellular vesicles (EVs) have rapidly gained prominence as sources of biomarkers for non-invasive biopsies, owing to their ubiquity across human biofluids and physiological stability. There are many characterisation studies directed towards their protein, nucleic acid, lipid and glycan content, but more recently the metabolomic analysis of EV content has also gained traction. Several EV metabolite biomarker candidates have been identified across a range of diseases, including liver disease and cancers of the prostate and pancreas. Beyond clinical applications, metabolomics has also elucidated possible mechanisms of action underlying EV function, such as the arginase-mediated relaxation of pulmonary arteries or the delivery of nutrients to tumours by vesicles. However, whilst the value of EV metabolomics is clear, there are challenges inherent to working with these entities—particularly in relation to sample production and preparation. The biomolecular composition of EVs is known to change drastically depending on the isolation method used, and recent evidence has demonstrated that changes in cell culture systems impact upon the metabolome of the resulting EVs. This review aims to collect recent advances in the EV metabolomics field whilst also introducing researchers interested in this area to practical pitfalls in applying metabolomics to EV studies.
Structures of MERS1, the 5′ processing enzyme of mitochondrial mRNAs in Trypanosoma brucei

Most mitochondrial mRNAs are transcribed as polycistronic precursors that are cleaved by endonucleases to produce mature mRNA transcripts. However, recent studies have shown that mitochondrial transcripts in the kinetoplastid protozoan, Trypanosoma brucei, are transcribed individually. Also unlike most mitochondrial mRNAs, the 5′ end of these transcripts harbor a triphosphate that is hydrolyzed. This modification is carried out by a putative Nudix hydrolase called MERS1. The Nudix motif in MERS1 is degenerate, lacking a conserved glutamic acid, thus it is unclear how it may bind its substrates and whether it contains a Nudix fold. To obtain insight into this unusual hydrolase, we determined structures of apo, GTP-bound and RNA-bound T. brucei MERS1 to 2.30 Å, 2.45 Å, and 2.60 Å, respectively. The MERS1 structure has a unique fold that indeed contains a Nudix motif. The nucleotide bound structures combined with binding studies reveal that MERS1 shows preference for RNA sequences with a central guanine repeat which it binds in a single-stranded conformation. The apo MERS1 structure indicates that a significant portion of its nucleotide binding site folds upon substrate binding. Finally, a potential interaction region for a binding partner, MERS2, that activates MERS1 was identified. The MERS2-like peptide inserts a glutamate near the missing Nudix acidic residue in the RNA binding pocket, suggesting how the enzyme may be activated. Thus, the combined studies reveal insight into the structure and enzyme properties of MERS1 and its substrate-binding activities.
NILMTK-Contrib: Towards reproducible state-of-the-art energy disaggregation

Research shows that providing an appliance-wise energy breakdown can help users save up to 15% of their energy bills. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) or energy disaggregation is the task of estimating the household energy measured at the aggregate level for each constituent appliances in the household. The problem was ﬁrst was introduced in the 1980s by Hart. Over the past three decades, NILM has been an extensively researched topic by researchers. NILMTK was introduced in 2014 to the NILM community in order to motivate reproducible research. Even after the introduction of the NILMTK toolkit to the community, there has been a little contribution of recent state-of-the-art algorithms back to the toolkit. In this paper, we propose a new disaggregation API, which further simpliﬁes the process for the rapid comparison of different state-of-the-art algorithms across a wide range of datasets and algorithms. We also propose a new rewrite for writing the new disaggregation algorithms
MGnify: the microbiome analysis resource in 2020

Abstract MGnify (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics) provides a free to use platform for the assembly, analysis and archiving of microbiome data derived from sequencing microbial populations that are present in particular environments. Over the past 2 years, MGnify (formerly EBI Metagenomics) has more than doubled the number of publicly available analysed datasets held within the resource. Recently, an updated approach to data analysis has been unveiled (version 5.0), replacing the previous single pipeline with multiple analysis pipelines that are tailored according to the input data, and that are formally described using the Common Workflow Language, enabling greater provenance, reusability, and reproducibility. MGnify's new analysis pipelines offer additional approaches for taxonomic assertions based on ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS1/2) and expanded protein functional annotations. Biochemical pathways and systems predictions have also been added for assembled contigs. MGnify's growing focus on the assembly of metagenomic data has also seen the number of datasets it has assembled and analysed increase six-fold. The non-redundant protein database constructed from the proteins encoded by these assemblies now exceeds 1 billion sequences. Meanwhile, a newly developed contig viewer provides fine-grained visualisation of the assembled contigs and their enriched annotations.
Convexity and the Natural Best Approximation in Spaces of Integrable Young Measures

The natural best approximation in function spaces singles, out of the family of best L1-approximation of an integrable function in a convex set, the element which is the limit as p converges to 1+, of the unique best Lp-approximation of the function. The present paper extends the result to convex sets in spaces of integrable Young measures. Such spaces lack a standard affine structure. In this paper convexity is considered via a limiting procedure. Consequently, the proof of the existence of a natural best approximation does not rely on tools like weak convergence, available in an ordinary function space. Rather, the interplay of compactness and convexity in the relaxed setting plays a major role.
Enhancement of Minor Ginsenosides Contents and Antioxidant Capacity of American and Canadian Ginsengs (Panax quinquefolius) by Puffing

The effects of puffing on ginsenosides content and antioxidant activities of American and Canadian ginsengs, Panax quinquefolius, were investigated. American and Canadian ginsengs puffed at different pressures were extracted using 70% ethanol. Puffing formed a porous structure, inducing the efficient elution of internal compounds that resulted in significant increases in extraction yields and crude saponin content. The content of minor ginsenosides (Rg2, Rg3, compound K) increased with increasing puffing pressure, whereas that of major ginsenosides (Rg1, Re, Rf, Rb1, Rc, Rd) decreased, possibly due to their deglycosylation and pyrolysis. Furthermore, 2,2′-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid) (ABTS) radical scavenging activity, total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, amount of Maillard reaction products, and acidic polysaccharides content increased with increasing puffing pressure, but 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging activity did not. There was no substantial difference in the results between puffed American and Canadian ginsengs. Consequently, these results suggest that puffing can be a promising novel technology for processing P. quinquefolius to achieve higher levels of minor ginsenosides and obtain value-added products.
Recurrent functional misinterpretation of RNA-seq data caused by sample-specific gene length bias

Data normalization is a critical step in RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) analysis, aiming to remove systematic effects from the data to ensure that technical biases have minimal impact on the results. Analyzing numerous RNA-seq datasets, we detected a prevalent sample-specific length effect that leads to a strong association between gene length and fold-change estimates between samples. This stochastic sample-specific effect is not corrected by common normalization methods, including reads per kilobase of transcript length per million reads (RPKM), Trimmed Mean of M values (TMM), relative log expression (RLE), and quantile and upper-quartile normalization. Importantly, we demonstrate that this bias causes recurrent false positive calls by gene-set enrichment analysis (GSEA) methods, thereby leading to frequent functional misinterpretation of the data. Gene sets characterized by markedly short genes (e.g., ribosomal protein genes) or long genes (e.g., extracellular matrix genes) are particularly prone to such false calls. This sample-specific length bias is effectively removed by the conditional quantile normalization (cqn) and EDASeq methods, which allow the integration of gene length as a sample-specific covariate. Consequently, using these normalization methods led to substantial reduction in GSEA false results while retaining true ones. In addition, we found that application of gene-set tests that take into account gene–gene correlations attenuates false positive rates caused by the length bias, but statistical power is reduced as well. Our results advocate the inspection and correction of sample-specific length biases as default steps in RNA-seq analysis pipelines and reiterate the need to account for intergene correlations when performing gene-set enrichment tests to lessen false interpretation of transcriptomic data.
Evaluation and Proteomic Analysis of Lead Adsorption by Lactic Acid Bacteria

Heavy metals are a growing threat to human health due to the resulting damage to the ecology; the removal of heavy metals by lactic acid bacteria (LAB) has been a focus of many studies. In this study, 10 LAB strains were evaluated for their ability to absorb and tolerate lead. Lactobacillus plantarum YW11 was found to possess the strongest ability of lead absorbing and tolerance, with the rate of absorption as high as 99.9% and the minimum inhibitory concentration of lead on YW11 higher than 1000 mg/L. Based on the isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) proteomics analysis of YW11, a total of 2009 proteins were identified both in the lead-treated strain and the control without the lead treatment. Among these proteins, 44 different proteins were identified. The abundance of 25 proteins increased significantly, and 19 proteins decreased significantly in the treatment group. These significantly differential abundant proteins are involved in the biological processes of amino acid and lipid metabolism, energy metabolism, cell wall biosynthesis, and substance transport. This study contributed further understanding of the molecular mechanism of L. plantarum in the binding and removal of lead to explore its potential application in counteracting heavy metal pollution of environment, food, and other fields.
Bifurcation Analysis on the Dynamics of a Genralist Predator-Prey System

In this paper a generalist predator prey system is modeled as a two dimensional coupled differential system. We identified three vital parameters stands for the maximum uptake rate of the generalist predator, stands for half saturation value and such that is the conversion efficiency of the generalist predator where is the intrinsic growth rate of the predator. Using these parameters a novel way to divide the parameter space based on the number of interior equilibrium solutions admitted by the system has been presented. We investigate the considered model is reach in dynamics and identified various bifurcations that are experienced by the considered system from the parameter space. These are Saddle-Node bifurcation, Trans-Critical bifurcation and pitchfork bifurcation. In this study we offer mathematical proof for the incidence of these bifurcations that take place in the considered dynamical system as the parameters move between the regions presented in the parameter space.