Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recycling, Nonferrous Metals

Richardson, H. Wayne (Phibro-Tech, Inc.). The methods of recycle for various nonferrous metals of economic importance are detailed. Principal metals are aluminum, copper, lead, and zinc, although cobalt, nickel, tin, and precious metals such as gold, silver, and palladium are also recycled. Types and sources of scrap and waste metal are given. Much recyclable material arises from discarded automobile parts, beverage cans, and industrial metal industry wastes. Factors that influence the decision to recycle by pyrometallurgical or hydrometallurgical means are discussed. These processes are described, including the types of furnaces employed for smelting operations and the extractants used for solvent extraction systems. Recycling of nonferrous metals is heavily dependent on the economics of using secondary metal feed rather than ore. The role of waste management is also considered. Vol. 20, pp. 1106–1126, 31 refs. to August 1995. Keywords: Recyclingx2Aluminum; Copper; Lead; Zinc; Tin; Cobalt; Nickel; Alloys; Classifications; Magnetic separation; Hydrometallurgical methods; Solvent extraction; waste management; Multi-metal waste
Gestural De-Aggregation via Prosodic Structure

It has been proposed that when two gestures involving the same articulator are organized with sufficient overlap, the resulting ‘gestural aggregation’ blends or averages the two movements to result in a smooth, often plateau-like kinematic trajectory (Munhall & Löfqvist 1992). We analyze the effects of a phrasal boundary on sequences of two consonants across a word boundary. Prosodic structure has been shown to affect the temporal overlap among gestures (Byrd et al. 2000). Given the overlap account of gestural aggregation, we expect the case of juncture geminates—two identical sequential consonants—to be influenced by prosodic structure in a similar fashion as other coproduced gestures are. In fact, our results show that, as expected, the overlapped gestures are temporally pulled apart or deaggregated across a phrase boundary. [Supported by NIH DC 03172]
Automatic Intonation Recognition for the Prosodic Assessment of Language-Impaired Children

This study presents a preliminary investigation into the automatic assessment of language-impaired children's (LIC) prosodic skills in one grammatical aspect: sentence modalities. Three types of language impairments were studied: autism disorder (AD), pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and specific language impairment (SLI). A control group of typically developing (TD) children that was both age and gender matched with LIC was used for the analysis. All of the children were asked to imitate sentences that provided different types of intonation (e.g., descending and rising contours). An automatic system was then used to assess LIC's prosodic skills by comparing the intonation recognition scores with those obtained by the control group. The results showed that all LIC have difficulties in reproducing intonation contours because they achieved significantly lower recognition scores than TD children on almost all studied intonations (p <; 0.05). Regarding the “Rising” intonation, only SLI children had high recognition scores similar to TD children, which suggests a more pronounced pragmatic impairment in AD and PDD-NOS children. The automatic approach used in this study to assess LIC's prosodic skills confirms the clinical descriptions of the subjects' communication impairments.
Characterization and influences of classical insect hormones on the expression profiles of a molting carboxypeptidase A from the cotton bollworm (Helicoverpa armigera)

Molting is a very important physiological behavior to arthropods. During molting, integument apolysis occurs, which is the digestion and absorption of the old endocuticle for new cuticle formation. Proteases play critical roles in this process. Molting carboxypeptidase A (Ha‐CPA) is characterized from Helicoverpa armigera. The Ha‐CPA transcript was mainly present in the integument from the 5th instar larvae. In the integument, the transcription level of the gene reached its peak at the 5th instar molting stage and the 6th instar prepupal stage, respectively. The examination of immunohistochemistry revealed that Ha‐CPA could distribute into the molting fluid in the molting‐ and prepupal‐stage larvae. The expression of Ha‐CPA could be up‐regulated by 20‐hydroxyecdysone (20E). These facts indicate that Ha‐CPA participates in the apolysis of the integument during larval molting and metamorphosis.
Additive roles of platelets and fibrinogen in whole-blood fibrin clot formation upon dilution as assessed by thromboelastometry

Summary Blood dilution after transfusion fluids leads to diminished coagulant activity monitored by rotational thromboelastometry, assessing elastic fibrin clot formation, or by thrombin generation testing. We aimed to determine the contributions of blood cells (platelets, red blood cells) and plasma factors (fibrinogen, prothrombin complex concentrate) to fibrin clot formation under conditions of haemodilution in vitro or in vivo. Whole blood or plasma diluted in vitro was supplemented with platelets, red cells, fibrinogen or prothrombin complex concentrate (PCC). Thromboelastometry was measured in whole blood as well as plasma; thrombin generation was determined in parallel. Similar tests were performed with blood from 48 patients, obtained before and after massive fluid infusion during cardiothoracic surgery. Addition of platelets or fibrinogen, in additive and independent ways, reversed the impaired fibrin clot formation (thromboelastometry) in diluted whole blood. In contrast, supplementation of red blood cells or prothrombin complex concentrate was ineffective. Platelets and fibrinogen independently restored clot formation in diluted plasma, resulting in thromboelastometry curves approaching those in whole blood. In whole blood from patients undergoing dilution during surgery, elastic clot formation was determined by both the platelet count and the fibrinogen level. Thrombin generation in diluted (patient) plasma was not changed by fibrinogen, but improved markedly by prothrombin complex concentrate. In conclusion, in dilutional coagulopathy, platelets and fibrinogen, but not red blood cells or vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors, independently determine thromboelastometry parameters measured in whole blood and plasma. Clinical decisions for transfusion based on thromboelastometry should take into account the platelet concentration.
Mapping Infected Cell Phenotype

Quantitative modeling of the phenotypic changes in the host cell during the bacterial infection makes it possible to explore an empirical relation between the infection stages and the quantifiable host-cell phenotype. A statistically reliable model of this relation can facilitate therapeutic defense against threats due to natural and genetically engineered bacterium. In the preliminary experiment, we have collected several thousand cell images over a period of 72 h of infection with a 2-h sampling frequency that covers various stages of infection by Francisella tularenesis (Ft). Segmentation of macrophages in images was accomplished using a fully automatic, parallel region growing technique. Over two thousand feature descriptors for the host cell were calculated. Multidimensional scaling, followed by hierarchical clustering, was used to group the cells. Preliminary results show that the host-cell phenotype, as defined by the set of measureable features, groups into different classes that can be mapped to the stages of infection.
New Unintended Adverse Consequences of Electronic Health Records

Summary Although the health information technology industry has made considerable progress in the design, development, implementation, and use of electronic health records (EHRs), the lofty expectations of the early pioneers have not been met. In 2006, the Provider Order Entry Team at Oregon Health & Science University described a set of unintended adverse consequences (UACs), or unpredictable, emergent problems associated with computer-based provider order entry implementation, use, and maintenance. Many of these originally identified UACs have not been completely addressed or alleviated, some have evolved over time, and some new ones have emerged as EHRs became more widely available. The rapid increase in the adoption of EHRs, coupled with the changes in the types and attitudes of clinical users, has led to several new UACs, specifically: complete clinical information unavailable at the point of care; lack of innovations to improve system usability leading to frustrating user experiences; inadvertent disclosure of large amounts of patient-specific information; increased focus on computer-based quality measurement negatively affecting clinical workflows and patient-provider interactions; information overload from marginally useful computer-generated data; and a decline in the development and use of internally-developed EHRs. While each of these new UACs poses significant challenges to EHR developers and users alike, they also offer many opportunities. The challenge for clinical informatics researchers is to continue to refine our current systems while exploring new methods of overcoming these challenges and developing innovations to improve EHR interoperability, usability, security, functionality, clinical quality measurement, and information summarization and display.
X-Ray Variability of the Magnetic Cataclysmic Variable V1432 Aquilae and the Seyfert Galaxy NGC 6814

V1432 Aquilae (=RX J1940.2-1025) is the X-ray-bright, eclipsing magnetic cataclysmic variable ~37' away from the Seyfert galaxy NGC 6814. Because of a 0.3% difference between the orbital (12,116.3 s) and the spin (12,150 s) periods, the accretion geometry changes over the ~50 day beat period. Here we report the results of a Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer campaign to observe the eclipse 25 times, as well as of archival observations with ASCA and BeppoSAX. Having confirmed that the eclipse is indeed caused by the secondary, we use the eclipse timings and profiles to map the accretion geometry as a function of the beat phase. We find that the accretion region is compact and that it moves relative to the center of white dwarf on the beat period. The amplitude of this movement suggests a low-mass white dwarf, in contrast to the high mass previously estimated from its X-ray spectrum. The size of the X-ray emission region appears to be larger than in other eclipsing magnetic cataclysmic variables. We also report on the RXTE data as well as the long-term behavior of NGC 6814, indicating flux variability by a factor of at least 10 on timescales of years.
Observations of wild hunting behaviour and bioluminescence of a large deep-sea, eight-armed squid, Taningia danae

Our newly developed underwater high definition video camera system took the first live images of adults of the mesopelagic large squid, Taningia danae, between 240 and 940 m deep off Ogasawara Islands, western North Pacific. The resulting footage includes attacking and bioluminescence behaviours, and reveals that T. danae is far from the sluggish neutrally buoyant deep-sea squid previously suspected. It can actively swim both forward and backward freely by flapping its large muscular triangular fins and changes direction quickly through bending its flexible body. It can attain speeds of 2–2.5 m s−1 (7.2–9 km h−1) when attacking bait rigs. They emitted short bright light flashes from their large arm-tip photophores before final assault, which might act as a blinding flash for prey as well as a means of measuring target distance in a dark deep-sea environment. They also emitted long and short glows separated by intervals while wandering around the double torch lights attached to the bait rig, suggestive of potential courtship behaviours during mating.
Feature Extraction and Database Design for Music Software

Persistent storage and access of sound/music meta-data is an increasingly relevant topic to the developers of multimedia software. This paper focuses on the design of music signal analysis tools and database formats for modern applications. It is partly tutorial in nature, and partly a discussion of design issues. We begin with a high-level overview of the dimensions of music database (MDB) software, and then walk through the common g feature extraction techniques. A requirements analysis of several application categories will allow us to carefully determine which features might be most useful for them. This leads us to suggest concrete architectural and design criteria, and to close by introducing several of our recent implemented systems. The authors believe that much current MDB software suffers due to ad-hoc design of analysis systems and feature vectors, which often incorporate only low-level features and are not tuned for the application at hand. Our goal is to advance the state of the art of music meta-data extraction and database design by fostering a better engineering practice in the construction of high-level feature vectors and analysis engines for music software.
Optimizing budget constrained spend in search advertising

Search engine ad auctions typically have a significant fraction of advertisers who are budget constrained, i.e., if allowed to participate in every auction that they bid on, they would spend more than their budget. This yields an important problem: selecting the ad auctions which these advertisers participate, in order to optimize different system objectives such as the return on investment for advertisers, and the quality of ads shown to users. We present a system and algorithms for optimizing budget constrained spend. The system is designed be deployed in a large search engine, with hundreds of thousands of advertisers, millions of searches per hour, and with the query stream being only partially predictable. We have validated the system design by implementing it in the Google ads serving system and running experiments on live traffic. We have also compared our algorithm to previous work that casts this problem as a large linear programming problem limited to popular queries, and show that our algorithms yield substantially better results.
Therapy response evaluation with FDG-PET/CT in small cell lung cancer: a prognostic and comparison study of the PERCIST and EORTC criteria

Abstract Introduction: Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive form of lung cancer with poor prognosis. Adequate staging and therapeutic evaluation is necessary for therapy planning. Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) has been shown to be useful for staging and therapy response evaluation. The European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and Positron Emission Tomography Response Criteria In Solid Tumors (PERCIST) criteria were compared in the evaluation of response assessment and prognostic factors were defined in a cohort of SCLC patients. Methods: Twenty-nine consecutive patients with SCLC were included in this study. Sixteen patients had extensive disease and 13 had limited disease. All patients had chemotherapy, 21 had thoracic radiotherapy. FDG-PET/CT scans were performed before and after therapy to evaluate treatment response. Metabolic responses were assessed using the EORTC criteria and PERCIST criteria. Univariate and multivariate analysis were performed using a Cox model to investigate the association between progression-free and overall survival time with a number of covariates. Results: There was perfect concordance between the EORTC and PERCIST criteria. Eight patients had a complete metabolic response (CMR), 9 had a partial metabolic response (PMR), 5 had stable metabolic disease (SMD) and 7 had progressive metabolic disease (PMD). Overall survival time in patients with CMR was significantly longer compared with patients who did not have CMR. The initial or delayed CMR and post-therapeutic standardized uptake value corrected for lean body mass were significantly associated with overall survival. Conclusion: CMR on post-therapeutic FDG-PET/CT in patients with SCLC is an important prognostic factor and may help decision making for therapeutic management.
DROUGHT TOLERANCE STUDIES THROUGH WSSI AND STOMATA IN UPLAND COTTON

Water stress susceptibility index (WSSI) and stomatal conductance were used to determine the stress tolerance of 10 upland cotton cultivars during 2009 at Sindh Agriculture University, Tandojam, Pakistan. The experiment was conducted in spilt plot design with irrigations as main plots and cultivars as sub-plots. Two irrigation treatments were used i.e. one has two irrigations (water stress) and other has eight irrigations (non-stress). Analysis of variance revealed significant genotypic differences about WSSI for all the traits. Non-significant interaction between irrigations and cultivars for seed cotton yield and boll weight exhibited varietals stability over irrigation regimes, whereas significant interactions between above parameters for plant height and bolls per plant suggested genotypic instability over irrigation treatments for these traits. Overall, cultivars mean performance for all the traits in stress conditions was poor as compared to non-stress conditions, nevertheless some cultivars exhibited nonsignificant mean differences in both irrigation regimes, thus showing higher stress tolerance. The WSSI values of seed cotton yield as displayed in biplot revealed that cultivars CRIS-477, CRIS-483 and CRIS-486 were found highly susceptible to water stress. Cultivars CRIS-476, CRIS-482, CRIS-487 and NIAB-78 were characterized as highly susceptible with minimum production even under optimum irrigation conditions. Cultivar CRIS-9 was moderately tolerant as produced low production. However, cultivars CRIS-485 and CRIS-484 were found highly stress tolerant because of minimum WSSI value and lower stomatal conductance. Negative correlations between water stress and WSSI for seed cotton yield and plant height revealed that any increase in the degree of stress caused a corresponding decrease in WSSI.
An information-interconnectivity-based retrieval method for network attached storage

Network attached disk storage is characterized by independent network attachment and embedded intelligence. For Internet applications, it provides the key functionality of geographical replication and intelligent retrieval of data objects.The paper describes a latency reducing method based on the relative interconnectivity between data objects. We follow the locality-of-reference principle to partition interrelated data objects on close disk areas or network storage nodes. The method incorporates a clustering algorithm to support smarter placement of related objects and read-ahead group caching. Objects that are associated together are clustered in the same group and can be read from disk and cached together. The proposed clustering and cache algorithms do not use floating point, allowing direct and fast implementation on a variety of disk controllers.
New PPARG mutation leads to lipodystrophy and loss of protein function that is partially restored by a synthetic ligand

Purpose: Familial partial lipodystrophy caused by mutations in the PPARG gene is characterised by altered distribution of subcutaneous fat, muscular hypertrophy and symptoms of metabolic syndrome. PPARG encodes peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)γ, a nuclear hormone receptor playing a crucial role in lipid and glucose metabolism and in several other cellular regulatory processes. Methods:PPARG was screened for mutations by direct sequencing in two patients with lipodystrophy, one unaffected family member and 124 controls. Body composition was examined in affected patients, and they were investigated for abnormalities in laboratory results. Functional analysis of the mutant protein was assessed by determining transcriptional activity and possible interference with the wild-type protein. Results: In two patients with familial partial lipodystrophy, we identified a nucleotide substitution in the PPARG gene. This mutation results in the substitution of aspartate by asparagine at residue 424 (D424N) in the ligand-binding domain of PPARγ. The unaffected family member and all 124 controls did not carry this mutation. D424N PPARγ had a significantly lower ability than wild-type PPARγ to activate a PPARγ-stimulated reporter gene, but did not exert a negative effect on the wild-type protein. Partial activation of D424N PPARγ was achieved in the presence of the agonist rosiglitazone. Conclusion: We report a new PPARG mutation, D424N, which is located in the ligand-binding domain of the protein and leads to familial partial lipodystrophy. D424N PPARγ exhibited a loss of function, which was partially restored by adding the PPARγ agonist rosiglitazone, suggesting possible treatment potential of this agent.
Phaseless super-resolution using masks

Phaseless super-resolution is the problem of reconstructing a signal from its low-frequency Fourier magnitude measurements. It is the combination of two classic signal processing problems: phase retrieval and super-resolution. Due to the absence of phase and high-frequency measurements, additional information is required in order to be able to uniquely reconstruct the signal of interest. In this work, we use masks to introduce redundancy in the phaseless measurements. We develop an analysis framework for this setup, and use it to show that any super-resolution algorithm can be seamlessly extended to solve phaseless superresolution (up to a global phase), when measurements are obtained using a certain set of masks. In particular, we focus our attention on a robust semidefinite relaxation-based algorithm, and provide reconstruction guarantees. Numerical simulations complement our theoretical analysis.
LR Parsing for LCFRS

LR parsing is a popular parsing strategy for variants of Context-Free Grammar (CFG). It has also been used for mildly context-sensitive formalisms, such as Tree-Adjoining Grammar. In this paper, we present the first LR-style parsing algorithm for Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems (LCFRS), a mildly context-sensitive extension of CFG which has received considerable attention in the last years in the context of natural language processing.
Tribology for space applications

Historically, space mechanism lubricant choices were based on space heritage rather than on the latest technology or best available materials. With the limited mission lives and minimal duty cycles of the early space programme, this strategy was highly successful. As missions extended, other spacecraft components, such as electronics, batteries, and computers, failed before lubricated mechanisms; however, during the 1980s and 1990s, these ancillary components vastly improved and tribological systems became a main factor limiting spacecraft reliability and performance. Although tribological components represent only a small fraction of the spacecraft's cost, they are often single-point failures that cripple or debilitate expensive spacecraft. This paper will discuss the following: common space lubricants, mechanism components, testing, and factors affecting lubricant selections.