Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-Foster Matching Circuit Design via Tunable Inductor for VLF Receive Loop Antennas

This paper presents a non-Foster matching circuit (NFC) for very low frequency (VLF) receive loop antennas. A 1 1 m VLF receive loop antenna was designed with a CMOS switch-based tunable inductor built into the NFC. The NFC can be applied to different VLF loop antennas by adjusting the number and inductance of the cells in the tunable inductor. A loop antenna was matched to the designed NFC with −10 dB fractional bandwidth, marking a 383% improvement as well as enhanced transducer gain ( ) compared to most bands in passive matching (over 15–30 kHz). The noise and received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the matching network were assessed to find that, with a low noise floor level (4 dB) receiver, the SNR of the passive loaded antenna performs better than the non-Foster loaded antenna in VLF.
Cavity QED with cold atoms trapped in a double-well potential

We investigate the interplay dynamics of a cavity QED system, where the two-level atoms are trapped in a double-well potential, and the cavity mode, with a frequency largely detuned from the atomic level splitting, is driven by a probe laser. The interaction between the center-of-mass motion of the atoms and the cavity mode is induced by the position-dependent atom-field coupling. The dynamics of the system is characterized by two distinct time scales, the inverse of the atomic interwell tunneling rate and the inverse of the cavity loss rate. The system shows drastically different (quasi)steady behaviors in the short- and long-time intervals, and the detection of the statistics of atom number distribution from the transmission spectra is available only in the short-time interval.
The Detection of Early Atherosclerosis in Healthy Male Relatives of Men with Peripheral Arterial Disease: a Feasibility Study

Aim: A feasibility study to attempt to determine if conventional ultrasound and multi-gate ultrasound could differentiate between men with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), healthy first-degree male relatives (FDRs) of men with PAD, and age/sex matched controls in identifying early atherosclerosis. Methods: three groups were studied using conventional ultrasound: first, four men with premature PAD (≤65 years); second, four healthy first-degree relatives; third, seven male controls with no known family history or evidence of premature cardiovascular disease. Primary outcome measures were plaque and intima-media thickness of the common carotid artery, flow mediated vasodilatation of the brachial artery, and lower extremity arterial plaque. Multigate Doppler ultrasound blood velocity profile measurements were obtained for three controls, but this series of measurements was discontinued due to technical difficulties. Statistics: mean (standard deviation) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) (p<0·05) Results: Conventional ultrasound demonstrated lower extremity arterial lesions in all four of the patients with PAD. One of their first-degree relatives was found to have a non-significant lesion. No significant carotid artery lesions were found in any of the patients, but males with PAD had significantly greater carotid artery intima-media thickness than a combined group of first-degree relatives and controls (0·75±0·06 mm, versus 0·56±0·07 mm; p≤0·01). The mean (standard deviation) flow mediated vasodilation per cent change of the brachial artery was for males with PAD, 3·49±4·15; relatives, 6·17±2·53; and control subjects, 3·53±6·63. Results from the multigate system were inconclusive. Conclusion: Carotid artery intima-media thickness seemed able to differentiate between patients with PAD and the other two groups. This measurement could be used in future case-control family PAD studies and possibly eventually as a screening tool. Flow mediated dilatation per cent change showed a wide variation in measurements and was not able to differentiate between the three groups. For researchers considering future studies, it is worth noting that recruitment figures for this pilot study were much lower than quoted in previous reports.
Estilos de Rendering

1. Introducc ión En los últimos 20 años, la computación gráfica[1] estuvo dirigida a generar imágenes con un alto grado de fotorealismo, o sea crear escenas generadas por computadoras tan convincentes que ellas pareciesen indistinguibles de las fotografías o filmes. Cada año los avances en modelado, iluminación y animación ayudaron a lograr este objetivo. Sin embargo, un desafío similar y opuesto se presentó en el área de rendering no fotorealístico[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Cualquier estilo de rendering que no trate de crear un aspecto realístico se denomina no fotorealístico. Esto incluye:
An implementation of interactive jobs submission for grid computing portals

The Globus Toolkit has been widely used as middleware in Grid computing environments. Java CoG, Web Service and Portlet help to build Grid computing portals easily and productively. Many Grid Portals can provide a customizable interface allowing scientists and researchers to perform Grid operations such as remote submission of their own programs, staging input and ouput files, and querying resources and queues information. However, the Globus Toolkit does not support interactive jobs submission, nor is there an interactive extension for Grid computing portals. In this paper, a Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) enabled Java SSH client is introduced and implemented as a novel way to submit interactive jobs to the computing resources in ScGrid, which is a scientific computing environment provided by the Supercomputing Center, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SCCAS).
Bioactivity of Fungal Endophytes associating with Allium Plants growing in Uzbekistan

Endophytes are the microorganisms that live in the intercellular space of a healthy plant tissues without causing symptoms of disease (Padhi et al., 2013; Strobel and Daisy, 2003). The symbiosis between plants and microorganisms is well known. In particular, the plant protects and feeds the endophyte which in response produce bioactive substances that enhance the growth and resistance of plants in environment (Nair and Padmavathy, 2014). Moreover, some endophytic microorganisms are characterized by their ability to synthesize the same metabolites as the host plant. So, systematic investigation of endophytic fungi associated with different plants is necessary, and will not only provide with genetic information, but also may allow for new natural products with higher bioactivity to be found with potential application in medicine, agriculture and industry (Gutierrez et al., 2012; Pimentel et al., 2011).
High performance deferred update replication

Replication is a well-known approach to implementing storage systems that can tolerate failures. Replicated storage systems are designed such that the state of the system is kept at several replicas. A replication protocol ensures that the failure of a replica is masked by the rest of the system, in a way that is transparent to its users. Replicated storage systems are among the most important building blocks in the design of large scale applications. Applications at scale are often deployed on top of commodity hardware, store a vast amount of data, and serve a large number of users. The larger the system, the higher its vulnerability to failures. The ability to tolerate failures is not the only desirable feature in a replicated system. Storage systems need to be efficient in order to accommodate requests from a large user base while achieving low response times. In that respect, replication can leverage multiple replicas to parallelize the execution of user requests. This thesis focuses on Deferred Update Replication (DUR), a well-established database replication approach. It provides high availability in that every replica can execute client transactions. In terms of performance, it is better than other replication techniques in that only one replica executes a given transaction while the other replicas only apply state changes. However, DUR suffers from the following drawback: each replica stores a full copy of the database, which has consequences in terms of performance. The first consequence is that DUR cannot take advantage of the aggregated memory available to the replicas. Our first contribution is a distributed caching mechanism that addresses the problem. It makes efficient use of the main memory of an entire cluster of machines, while guaranteeing strong consistency. The second consequence is that DUR cannot scale with the number of replicas. The throughput of a fully replicated system is inherently limited by the number of transactions that a single replica can apply to its local storage. We propose a scalable version of the DUR approach where the system state is partitioned in smaller replica sets. Transactions that access disjoint partitions are parallelized.
The consumer-employee as a member of a Mental Health Assertive Outreach Team. I. Clinical and social outcomes

Background: The Health Service is among the largest employers in Britain and has the potential to provide supported work for significant numbers of people who have been long-term unemployed as a result of mental health problems. Aims: The study set out to investigate the feasibility and impact of employing mental health service users as health care assistants within an assertive outreach team. Method: Forty-five clients of the assertive outreach team were randomly assigned to receive either standard case management (n = 21) or to case management plus additional input from a consumer-employee (n = 24) working as a health care assistant (HCA) to the team. Results: Clients allocated to the HCAs were more engaged with treatment as reflected in lower rates of non-attendance at appointments, higher levels of participation in structured social care activities and significantly fewer unmet needs in the domains of daytime activity, company, finances, transport and access to benefits. There were no differences between groups in terms of social networks (size or subjective quality) or in satisfaction with the service received. Conclusions: Employing service consumers in front-line caring roles is feasible and may contribute to improved client engagement with services. Conflict of interest: None.
The utilization of procedure models in digital image synthesis.

Abstract : Many algorithms have been developed for synthesizing shaded images of three dimensional objects modeled by computer. In spite of widely differing approaches the current state of the art algorithms are surprisingly similar with respect to the richness of the scenes they can process. One attribute these algorithms have in common is the use of a conventional passive data base to represent the objects being modeled. This paper postulates and explores the use of an alternative modeling technique which uses procedures to represent the objects being modeled. The properties and structure of such 'procedure models' are investigated and an algorithm based on them is presented.
Statistical Analysis of features used in Automatic Audio Genre Classification DOI: 10.14209/jcis.2006.9

This paper presents statistical models for some of the most important features used to classify audio signals into musical genres. The genres used here are selected according to a given taxonomy. The features are computed for each genre using the signals from a dataset and the results are grouped into histograms. Each proposed statistical model consists of an estimated Probability Density Function (PDF), optimized to best fit a determined histogram and the optimization criterion is the minimization of the Mean Square Error (MSE). Finally, the paper discusses how these models can be applied to classify audio signals into genres.
PHYSICOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISATION OF BUTTERNUT JUGULANS CINEREA ) OIL EKA B . ESSEIN

Some physical and chemical properties of butternut (jugulans cinerea) oil were investigated. The oil was found to be deep amber in color and slightly thick. The oil melts at 26c, has specific gravity of 0.99 and a refractive index of 1.44 at 40c. The chemical characteristics showed the total oil content to be 46.15%. Unsaponifiable matter was 0.69%, saponification value was 248.02mg/KOH/g oil. The iodine value was 40.45 while the acid and peroxide values were 3.96mg/KOH/g oil and 7.2Meq/100g oil respectively. The free fatty acid content of the oil was 3.16%. The oil was thus observed to have some advantageous physicochemical properties and could be regarded as seed oil due its high fat content.
College integrated care: Effectiveness of the use of a modified version of the patient health questionnaire for patients in a university health clinic

In primary medical care settings, problems with providing appropriate behavioral care led to development of the integrated care model providing behavioral services alongside medical services. The present study explored the potential need for this model at a Midwest university health center, by investigating how two behavioral questionnaires influenced providers’ prescription of psychotropic medications and referrals for behavioral intervention. After random assignment to condition, 109 participants in the experimental condition completed the mentalhealth-oriented Patient Health Questionnaire and the college-adjustment-oriented College Health Questionnaire, and 91 control participants received treatment as usual. Results indicated significantly higher rates of discussion of behavioral problems and prescription of psychotropic medications (not behavioral referrals) for the experimental condition. Patients in the experimental condition and providers both indicated a desire to use the questionnaires in future visits. These findings suggest that university health services would be fertile ground for implementation of an integrated care model.
Would I lie to you? Strategic deception in the face of uncertain penalties

Using an experiment we investigate the effect of different centralised punishment mechanisms on deception and beliefs about deception in a principal-agent interaction that resembles many everyday expert advisor - client relationships. Agents have private information to transmit to Principals who must decide whether to follow Agent advice. Across our treatments, Agents face a range of expected penalties for deceptive behaviour with varying severity and monitoring probability. The Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the principal-agent interaction predicts penalties to have no effect on Agent behaviour. We find the magnitude of penalties to have important deterrent effects on deceptive Agent behaviour while Agents do not respond to changes in monitoring probabilities. Principal following behaviour increases in response to high penalties. However, it is unaffected by equivalent increases in monitoring. To help us understand the mechanism through which penalties deter deceptive behaviour, we test whether framing activates norms, providing an additional deterrence effect. We find norms are only activated by large penalties, providing a possible explanation for the impact of penalties on deceptive behaviour.
Optimal Central Bank Transparency

Should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further? We show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency. Up to this optimum more transparency is desirable: it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts. But beyond the optimum people might: (1) start to attach too much weight to the conditionality of their forecasts, and/or (2) get confused by the large and increasing amount of information they receive. This deteriorates the (perceived) quality of private sector inflation forecasts. Inflation then is set in a more backward looking manner resulting in higher inflation persistence. By using a panel data set on the transparency of 100 central banks we find empirical support for an optimal intermediate degree of transparency at which inflation persistence is minimized. Our results indicate that while there are central banks that would benefit from further transparency increases, some might already have reached the limit.
Spiking networks for biochemical detection

Artificial neural networks have proven to be a useful tool for olfactory pattern recognition; but most silicon-based implementations have been limited in scale due to inherent constraints on chip real estate and synapse routing. This paper presents a new spiking neural network approach to odorant learning and detection based on new learned information about the mammalian olfaction system. The network is designed to accept more than 1000 inputs and detect odors via an unlimited number of outputs. The basic theory is presented, including stochastic learning, and detection based on hamming distance. Simulation shows the network functions well, even in noisy environments where more than 10% of inputs are contaminated by background noise. Digital hardware implementation using VHDL shows that, a representative system with 128 inputs and 8 outputs fits on a single Xilinx Virtex v1000 chip and would occupy just 0.118 mm/sup 2/ using 0.16um CMOS technology.
Using a Developed Instrument to Evaluate University Students' Perceptions of Six Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge

This research aimed to evaluate university students’ perceptions of six teachers’ PCK (pedagogical content knowledge) development, using a developed instrument and workshop intervention, in order to help the university teachers understand their teaching better. The survey was conducted twice in this study, with the pre-test carried out during the mid-term examination and the post-test, in the last week of the semester. PCK workshops were also held for six university participated teachers to facilitate the reflection and exchange of ideas among teachers. This study adopted a case study approach and conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results show that except for teachers B and C, who show no significant difference in scores between the two surveys and slightly lower average points, the average points of the other four teachers improve significantly. In particular, this study clearly describes every teacher’s teaching performance before and after the reflection. The research limitations and difficulties encountered are also discussed in this study.
Modeling and solving the multi-period inventory routing problem with constant demand rates

The inventory routing problem (IRP) is one of the challenging optimization problems in supply chain logistics. It combines inventory control and vehicle routing optimization. The main purpose of the IRP is to determine optimal delivery times and quantities to be delivered to customers, as well as optimal vehicle routes to distribute these quantities. The IRP is an underlying logistical optimization problem for supply chains implementing vendor-managed inventory (VMI) policies, in which the supplier takes responsibility for the management of the customers' inventory. In this paper, we consider a multi-period inventory routing problem assuming constant demand rates (MP-CIRP). The proposed model is formulated as a linear mixed-integer program and solved with a Lagrangian relaxation method. The solution obtained by the Lagrangian relaxation method is then used to generate a close to optimal feasible solution of the MP-CIRP by solving a series of assignment problems. The numerical experiments carried out so far show that the proposed Lagrangian relaxation approach nds quite good solutions for the MP-CIRP and in reasonable computation times.
The US-UK productivity gap in the twentieth century: a race between technology and population

Recent developments in endogenous growth models have enabled researchers to reconsider some key events such as the take-off of the United States in the twentieth century. This paper investigates the roles played by innovative activity and population growth on comparative total factor productivity (TFP) growth between the US and the UK in the period 1870–2009. The study finds that the comparative lead in the US TFP was a race between innovative activity on the one hand and population growth on the other. While the first factor influenced TFP growth positively, the latter created a growth drag. Moreover, the findings strongly support the Schumpeterian hypothesis, where innovative activity has permanent growth effects in the long run.
Triacylglycerol analysis of argan oil by proton magnetic resonance

Argan oil (AO) is produced from the kernels of the tree Argania spinosa (Sapotaceae) and is one of the most expensive oils in the world. The therapeutic benefits of AO consumption have been claimed for more than eight centuries and appear to be very promising leads for possible pharmaceutical exploitation since modern science has made it possible to specify their potential medical significance with cardioprotective properties and in the treatment of skin infections [1,2].
Carbon and water balance of European croplands throughout the 20th century

We assessed the effects of rising atmospheric CO2, changing climate, and farmers' practice on the carbon and water balance of European croplands during the past century (1901–2000). The coupled vegetation‐crop model ORCHIDEE‐STICS is applied over western Europe for C3 crops (winter wheat) and for maize, with prescribed historical agricultural practice changes. Not surprisingly, the enormous crop yield increase observed in all European regions, 300–400% between 1950 and 2000, is found to be dominantly explained by improved practice and varieties selection, rather than by rising CO2 (explaining a ∼11% uniform increase in yield) and changing climate (no further change in yield on average, but causing a decrease of ∼19% in the southern Iberian Peninsula). Agricultural soil carbon stocks in Europe are modeled to have decreased between 1950 and 1970, and since then to have increased again. Thus, the current stocks only differ by 1 ± 6 tC ha−1 from their 1900 value. Compensating effects of increasing yields on the one hand (increasing stocks) and of higher harvest index values and ploughing on the other hand (decreasing stocks) occur. Each of these processes taken individually has the potential to strongly alter the croplands soil carbon balance in the model. Consequently, large uncertainties are associated to the estimated change in carbon stocks between 1901 and 2001, roughly ±6 tC ha−1 a−1. In our most realistic simulation, the current cropland carbon balance is a net sink of 0.16 ± 0.15 tC ha−1 a−1. The annual water balance of cropland soils is influenced by increasing crop water use efficiency, one third of which is caused by rising CO2. However, increasing water use efficiency occurred mainly in spring and winter, when water is not limiting for plant growth, whereas no strong savings of soil water are achieved in summer through elevated CO2. Overall, trends in cultivation practices have caused a 3 times larger increase of water use efficiency than rising CO2.
Linux Kernel

2 This work was supported by DARPA on contract number: F30602-96-C-0388. Abstract This paper describes the results of the Hypervisors for Security and Robustness (Kernel Hypervisors) program. Using the concept of a loadable module, kernel loadable wrappers (KLWs) were implemented in a Linux kernel. These kernel loadable wrappers provide unbypassable security wrappers for application specific security requirements and can also be used to provide replication services. KLWs have a number of potential applications, including protecting user systems from malicious active content downloaded via a Web browser and wrapping servers and firewall services for limiting possible compromises. This paper also includes a summary of the composability analysis that was done on the program.