Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Water Permeability of Cochlear Outer Hair Cells: Characterization and Relationship to Electromotility

The distinguishing feature of the mammalian outer hair cells (OHCs) is to elongate and shorten at acoustic frequencies, when their intracellular potential is changed. This “electromotility” or “electromechanics” depends critically on positive intracellular pressure (turgor), maintained by the inflow of water through yet uncharacterized water pathways. We measured the water volume flow,Jv, across the plasma membrane of isolated guinea pig and rat OHCs after osmotic challenges and estimated the osmotic water permeability coefficient,Pf , to be ∼10−2 cm/sec. This value is within the range reported for osmotic flow mediated by the water channel proteins, aquaporins. Jv was inhibited by HgCl2, which is known to block aquaporin-mediated water transport. Pf values that were estimated for OHCs from neonatal rats were of the order of ∼2×10−3 cm/sec, equivalent to that of membranes lacking water channel proteins. In an immunofluorescence assay we showed that an anti-peptide antibody specific for aquaporins labels the lateral plasma membrane of the OHC in the region in which electromotility is generated. Using patch-clamp recording, we found that water influx into the OHC is regulated by intracellular voltage. We also found that the most pronounced increases of the electromotility-associated charge movement and of the expression of OHC water channels occur between postnatal days 8 and 12, preceding the onset of hearing function in the rat. Our data indicate that electromotility and water transport in OHCs may influence each other structurally and functionally.
Automatic Decision of Piano Fingering Based on a Hidden Markov Models

This paper proposes a Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based algorithm for automatic decision of piano fingering. We represent the positions and forms of hands and fingers as HMM states and model the resulted sequence of performed notes as emissions associated with HMM transitions. Optimal fingering decision is thus formulated as Viterbi search to find the most likely sequence of state transitions. The proposed algorithm models the required efforts in pressing a key with a finger followed by another key with another finger, and in two-dimensional positioning of fingers on the piano keyboard with diatonic and chromatic keys. Fundamental functionality of the algorithm was verified through experiments with real piano pieces. This framework can be extended to polyphonic music containing chords.
Characteristics of brain neural activities of orientation perception of wrestle antagonism athletes

The purpose of the study was to explore the characteristics of brain neural activities of orientation perception of wrestle antagonism athletes. This study selected 12 participants. Research paradigm of reaction time (RT) and recording technique of Event-related Potentials (ERPs) were collected to compare between wrestle antagonism athletes and general undergraduates during the selective responses of orientation perception. The results indicated that there had significant differences in the perceptual speed and perceptual strategy applied in selective responses of orientation perception between wrestle antagonism athletes and general undergraduates. Moreover, there was an “economic” tendency of mental energy during the whole cognitive process of orientation perception of wrestle antagonism athletes. These were related to the long-term specialties training of antagonistic events athletes.
Rotor performance enhancement through blade surging

This short paper introduces a new concept of rotor where the blades undergo a periodic surging motion in the rotor disk plane. It is shown that the unsteady actuation induces aerodynamic phenomenon that can enhance both rotor thrust and efficiency, depending on the amplitude and frequency of actuation. In particular, the increase in aerodynamic performance is found to correlate with the development of a large scale leading edge vortex. Accordingly, the optimal frequency is found to correlate with the formation time of this vortex.
Muscle activity during running with different body-weight-support mechanisms: aquatic environment versus body-weight-support treadmill.

BACKGROUND Body-weight (BW) support during running can be accomplished using deep-water running (DWR; 100% BW support) and a lower-body positive-pressure (LBPP) treadmill. PURPOSE To compare lower-extremity muscle activity during DWR and running on an LBPP treadmill at matched stride frequency. METHODS Eight subjects (40 ± 6.5 y, 173 ± 7.2 cm, 66.9 ± 11.7 kg) completed 4 running conditions all at a preferred stride frequency that was determined while running with no support. Two conditions were running on the LBPP treadmill at 60% and 80% of BW, and the other 2 conditions were different DWR styles: high knee (DWR-HK) and cross-country (DWR-CC). Average (AVG) and root-mean-square (RMS) electromyography (rectus femoris, biceps femoris, gastrocnemius, and tibialis anterior) were each compared among conditions (repeated-measures analysis of variance). RESULTS Results for AVG and RMS variables were identical for statistical tests for each muscle. Rectus femoris electromyography during DWR-HK was lower than that of DWR-CC (P < .05) but not different than either 60% BW or 80% BW (P > .05). Biceps femoris electromyography was less during DWR-HK than DWR-CC (P < .05) but greater during DWR-HK than either BW 60% or BW 80% (P < .05). Neither gastrocnemius nor tibialis anterior electromyography differed between conditions (P > .05). CONCLUSION Neither the mechanism of BW support nor style of DWR influenced gastrocnemius or tibialis anterior muscle activity during running at the same stride frequency. However, rectus femoris and biceps femoris muscle activity were influenced by not only the mechanism of BW support but also the style of DWR.
Similarity-based matching for face authentication

We propose in this paper a face authentication method based on a similarity measure. The SIFT descriptor is used to define some interest keypoints characterized by an invariant parameter. A graph is then built where nodes correspond to these keypoints. We model the authentication problem as a graph matching process. Experimental results on the AR database show an EER equals to 12% with only one image used for the enrollment and with images simulating real conditions.
Unique Regulation of Carbohydrate Chemotaxis in Bacillus subtilis by the Phosphoenolpyruvate-Dependent Phosphotransferase System and the Methyl-Accepting Chemotaxis Protein McpC

ABSTRACT The phosphoenolpyruvate-dependent phosphotransferase system (PTS) plays a major role in the ability of Escherichia coli to migrate toward PTS carbohydrates. The present study establishes that chemotaxis toward PTS substrates in Bacillus subtilis is mediated by the PTS as well as by a methyl-accepting chemotaxis protein (MCP). As for E. coli, a B. subtilis ptsH null mutant is severely deficient in chemotaxis toward most PTS carbohydrates. Tethering analysis revealed that this mutant does respond normally to the stepwise addition of a PTS substrate (positive stimulus) but fails to respond normally to the stepwise removal of such a substrate (negative stimulus). An mcpC null mutant showed no response to the stepwise addition or removal ofd-glucose or d-mannitol, both of which are PTS substrates. Therefore, in contrast to E. coli PTS carbohydrate chemotaxis, B. subtilis PTS carbohydrate chemotaxis is mediated by both MCPs and the PTS; the response to positive stimulus is primarily McpC mediated, while the duration or magnitude of the response to negative PTS carbohydrate stimulus is greatly influenced by components of the PTS and McpC. In the case of the PTS substrate d-glucose, the response to negative stimulus is also partially mediated by McpA. Finally, we show thatB. subtilis EnzymeI-P has the ability to inhibit B. subtilis CheA autophosphorylation in vitro. We hypothesize that chemotaxis in the spatial gradient of the capillary assay may result from a combination of a transient increase in the intracellular concentration of EnzymeI-P and a decrease in the concentration of carbohydrate-associated McpC as the cell moves down the carbohydrate concentration gradient. Both events appear to contribute to inhibition of CheA activity that increases the tendency of the bacteria to tumble. In the case of d-glucose, a decrease ind-glucose-associated McpA may also contribute to the inhibition of CheA. This bias on the otherwise random walk allows net migration, or chemotaxis, to occur.
AZD9291, an irreversible EGFR TKI, overcomes T790M-mediated resistance to EGFR inhibitors in lung cancer.

UNLABELLED First-generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR TKI) provide significant clinical benefit in patients with advanced EGFR-mutant (EGFRm(+)) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Patients ultimately develop disease progression, often driven by acquisition of a second T790M EGFR TKI resistance mutation. AZD9291 is a novel oral, potent, and selective third-generation irreversible inhibitor of both EGFRm(+) sensitizing and T790M resistance mutants that spares wild-type EGFR. This mono-anilino-pyrimidine compound is structurally distinct from other third-generation EGFR TKIs and offers a pharmacologically differentiated profile from earlier generation EGFR TKIs. Preclinically, the drug potently inhibits signaling pathways and cellular growth in both EGFRm(+) and EGFRm(+)/T790M(+) mutant cell lines in vitro, with lower activity against wild-type EGFR lines, translating into profound and sustained tumor regression in EGFR-mutant tumor xenograft and transgenic models. The treatment of 2 patients with advanced EGFRm(+) T790M(+) NSCLC is described as proof of principle. SIGNIFICANCE We report the development of a novel structurally distinct third-generation EGFR TKI, AZD9291, that irreversibly and selectively targets both sensitizing and resistant T790M(+) mutant EGFR while harboring less activity toward wild-type EGFR. AZD9291 is showing promising responses in a phase I trial even at the first-dose level, with first published clinical proof-of-principle validation being presented.
Exponential Current Pulse Generation for Efficient Very High-Impedance Multisite Stimulation

We describe in this paper an intracortical current-pulse generator for high-impedance microstimulation. This dual-chip system features a stimuli generator and a high-voltage electrode driver. The stimuli generator produces flexible rising exponential pulses in addition to standard rectangular stimuli. This novel stimulation waveform is expected to provide superior energy efficiency for action potential triggering while releasing less toxic reduced ions in the cortical tissues. The proposed fully integrated electrode driver is used as the output stage where high-voltage supplies are generated on-chip to significantly increase the voltage compliance for stimulation through high-impedance electrode-tissue interfaces. The stimuli generator has been implemented in 0.18-μm CMOS technology while a 0.8-μm CMOS/DMOS process has been used to integrate the high-voltage output stage. Experimental results show that the rectangular pulses cover a range of 1.6 to 167.2 μA with a DNL and an INL of 0.098 and 0.163 least-significant bit, respectively. The maximal dynamic range of the generated exponential reaches 34.36 dB at full scale within an error of ± 0.5 dB while all of its parameters (amplitude, duration, and time constant) are independently programmable over wide ranges. This chip consumes a maximum of 88.3 μ W in the exponential mode. High-voltage supplies of 8.95 and -8.46 V are generated by the output stage, boosting the voltage swing up to 13.6 V for a load as high as 100 kΩ.
The Utility of Randomness in Decision Tree Ensembles

The use of randomness in constructing decision tree ensembles has drawn much attention in the machine learning community. In general, ensembles introduce randomness to generate diverse trees and in turn they enhance ensembles’ predictive accuracy. Examples of such ensembles are Bagging, Random Forests and Random Decision Tree. In the past, most of the random tree ensembles inject various kinds of randomness into deterministic models. Very few of these ensembles considered variable randomness or found it insensitive to performance. In contrast, this thesis uses complete-random tree ensembles as a starting point to investigate the utility of randomness and finishes with a variable random model, capable of finding the appropriate settings of randomness for individual data sets in order to improve predictive accuracy. Firstly, we construct a taxonomy of tree randomisations to categorise existing randomisation techniques. Then, we analyse the benefits and problems of different randomisation techniques to gain a better understanding of their effects. Secondly, we find that the key component of random tree ensembles is simply the probability averaging ensemble method. Based on the results of vigorous experimentations, probability averaging brings out the best of complete-randomness in decision tree ensembles. Using this key component alone permits the highest degree of diversity. We name this complete-random tree algorithm Max-diverse Ensemble as it achieves exceptional accuracy by maximising diversity. Interestingly, without the presence of any feature selection criterion, Max-diverse Ensemble’s accuracy is comparable to Random Forests, a popular implementation of random tree ensemble. Furthermore, visual evidence shows that complete-randomness provides a distinctive representational power to model target concepts. Taking the advantages of this representational power, we propose a decision tree algorithm with variable randomness. It is called Max-diverse. α. Max-diverse. α forms a smooth convex error-rate contour using different degrees of randomness. In many cases, individual data sets with appropriate settings of randomness achieve better accuracy than the complete-random settings. Finally, we propose a simple estimation technique for estimating an effective settings of randomness generated entirely from the progressive training errors. Applying the estimation technique, Max-diverse. α improves significantly from Max-diverse Ensemble. The experimental results show that Max-diverse. α performs significantly better than Random Forests and comparably with the state-of-the-art C5 Boosting.
Multi-Engine Machine Translation by Recursive Sentence Decomposition

In this paper, we present a novel approach to combine the outputs of multiple MT engines into a consensus translation. In contrast to previous Multi-Engine Machine Translation (MEMT) techniques, we do not rely on word alignments of output hypotheses, but prepare the input sentence for multi-engine processing. We do this by using a recursive decomposition algorithm that produces simple chunks as input to the MT engines. A consensus translation is produced by combining the best chunk translations, selected through majority voting, a trigram language model score and a confidence score assigned to each MT engine. We report statistically significant relative improvements of up to 9% BLEU score in experiments (English→Spanish) carried out on an 800-sentence test set extracted from the Penn-II Treebank.
Effect of Cereal Rye and Hairy Vetch on Pest Suppression and Corn Yield

ABSTRACT A study was conducted in 2016 to determine the effect of cereal rye (Secale cereale) and hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) combination on pest suppression and corn yield in Northwest Missouri. The experiments consisted of six treatments corresponding to cereal rye and hairy vetch combinations, plus a control. The corn treatments included conventional corn and transgenic corn. Harvested ears were assessed for rating on corn earworm damage and fungal damage on ears. Similarly, corn yield was measured across the treatments on randomly selected ears. Visual assessments of weed suppression, pest suppression (corn earworm damage), and fungal ear rots revealed no significant treatment effects. However, relevant trends in higher corn yield were observed with increasing hairy vetch proportion from 33% to 66% level. Delayed termination of hairy vetch caused poor corn growth and higher true armyworm (Mythimna unipuncta) infestation.
Biasing web search results for topic familiarity

Depending on a web searcher's familiarity with a query's target topic, it may be more appropriate to show her introductory or advanced documents. The TREC HARD [1] track defined topic familiarity as meta-data associated with a user's query. We instead define a user-independent and query-independent model of topic-familiarity required to read a document, so it can be matched to a given user in response to a query. An introductory web page is defined as A web page that doesn't presuppose any background knowledge of the topic it is on, and to an extent introduces or defines the key terms in the topic. while an advanced web page is defined as A web page that assumes sufficient background knowledge of the topic it is on, and familiarity with the key technical/ important terms in the topic, and potentially builds on them. We develop a method for biasing the initial mix of documents returned by a search engine to increase the number of documents of desired familiarity level up to position 5, and up to position 10. Our method involves building a supervised text classifier, incorporating features based on reading level, the distribution of stop-words in the text, and non-text features such as average line-length. Using this familiarity classifier, we achieve statistically significant improvements at reranking the result set to show introductory documents higher up the ranked list. Our classifier can be seamlessly integrated into current search engine technology without involving any major modifications to existing architectures.
Do the Poor Move to Receive Higher Welfare Benefits

This paper examines the extent of welfare induced migration using 1980 and 1990 Census data. I begin by discussing a number of methodological issues which suggest biases in past methods used to study welfare migration. Using several different methods, I then provide new estimates which avoid many of the problems of past work. The estimates imply that there is welfare induced migration, but it is modest in magnitude.
Design of a globally asynchronous locally synchronous digital system

The article addresses a design methodology of globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) digital systems from the designer's point of view. It discusses the nature of this special type of electronic circuits, its advantages as well as drawbacks as comparison to standard synchronous and asynchronous systems. Furthermore, it describes the top-down design flow for various implementation approaches. The first one is the implementation onto silicon chip as ASIC, the second one is the implementation into the FPGA. The paper also discusses the comparison of three different implementations of the same circuitry.
1 MS tracking of target boundaries using contour propagation

We propose a method for tracking the boundary of an object at frame rates beyond 1 kHz, based on a novel contour propagation mechanism operating in polar image space. The work draws inspiration from well established methodologies in object tracking and segmentation. The main contribution is how the polar representation is exploited for tracking, including enabling parallelization for sub millisecond performance. The presented results show the feasibility of the method in a wide range of settings.
Distribution of Coronary Artery Calcium by Race, Gender, and Age: Results from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA)

Background— Coronary artery calcium (CAC) has been demonstrated to be associated with the risk of coronary heart disease. The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) provides a unique opportunity to examine the distribution of CAC on the basis of age, gender, and race/ethnicity in a cohort free of clinical cardiovascular disease and treated diabetes. Methods and Results— MESA is a prospective cohort study designed to investigate subclinical cardiovascular disease in a multiethnic cohort free of clinical cardiovascular disease. The percentiles of the CAC distribution were estimated with nonparametric techniques. Treated diabetics were excluded from analysis. There were 6110 included in the analysis, with 53% female and an average age of 62 years. Men had greater calcium levels than women, and calcium amount and prevalence were steadily higher with increasing age. There were significant differences in calcium by race, and these associations differed across age and gender. For women, whites had the highest percentiles and Hispanics generally had the lowest; in the oldest age group, however, Chinese women had the lowest values. Overall, Chinese and black women were intermediate, with their order dependent on age. For men, whites consistently had the highest percentiles, and Hispanics had the second highest. Blacks were lowest at the younger ages, and Chinese were lowest at the older ages. At the MESA public website (http://www.mesa-nhlbi.org), an interactive form allows one to enter an age, gender, race/ethnicity, and CAC score to obtain a corresponding estimated percentile. Conclusions— The information provided here can be used to examine whether a patient has a high CAC score relative to others with the same age, gender, and race/ethnicity who do not have clinical cardiovascular disease or treated diabetes.
Program indentation and comprehensibility

The consensus in the programming community is that indentation aids program comprehension, although many studies do not back this up. We tested program comprehension on a Pascal program. Two styles of indentation were used--blocked and nonblocked--in addition to four passible levels of indentation (0, 2, 4, 6 spaces). Both experienced and novice subjects were used. Although the blocking style made no difference, the level of identation had a significant effect on program comprehension. (2--4 spaces had the highest mean score for program comprehension.) We recommend that a moderate level of indentation be used to increase program comprehension and user satisfaction.
Modelling the performance of distributed admission control for adaptive applications

We outline a methodology for the performance analysis of distributed admission control for adaptive applications, or long-lived flows, where each flow can transmit at one of a discrete set of rates, and can switch between these rates. Specific examples are certain voice over IP or conferencing applications. In the Internet, UDP based protocols such as RTP have the potential to allow sources to alter their sending rates using periodic feedback, where again the rate can take values from a limited set.