Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early life influences on cognitive impairment among oldest old Chinese.

OBJECTIVES This article examines the effects of early life socioeconomic conditions on the risk of cognitive impairment among oldest old persons in China. We also examine whether adult socioeconomic status mediates the association between early life socioeconomic status and cognitive impairment in old age. METHODS Data derived from two waves (1998-2000) of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey. We estimated logistic and multinomial regression models of cognitive impairment for a nationwide sample of people aged 80 to 105 (N = 8,444). RESULTS Among both men and women, urban residence in early life as well as education was associated with lower odds of cognitive impairment at baseline. We found modest support for a protective effect of advantaged childhood background on the odds of cognitive impairment onset during the 2-year follow-up, especially among women. DISCUSSION Our findings suggest that socioeconomic environment throughout the life course, early life in particular, can influence the risk of cognitive impairment in old age. Not only can public policy that targets illiteracy, hunger, and poverty improve the lives of tens of thousands of children, but ultimately such investments will pay significant dividends many decades later in enhancing the cognitive well-being of older persons.
Employment of Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models in speaker recognition

This paper presents Subspace Gaussian Mixture Model (SGMM) approach employed as a probabilistic generative model to estimate speaker vector representations to be subsequently used in the speaker verification task. SGMMs have already been shown to significantly outperform traditional HMM/GMMs in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications. An extension to the basic SGMM framework allows to robustly estimate low-dimensional speaker vectors and exploit them for speaker adaptation. We propose a speaker verification framework based on low-dimensional speaker vectors estimated using SGMMs, trained in ASR manner using manual transcriptions. To test the robustness of the system, we evaluate the proposed approach with respect to the state-of-the-art i-vector extractor on the NIST SRE 2010 evaluation set and on four different length-utterance conditions: 3sec-10sec, 10 sec-30 sec, 30 sec-60 sec and full (untruncated) utterances. Experimental results reveal that while i-vector system performs better on truncated 3sec to 10sec and 10 sec to 30 sec utterances, noticeable improvements are observed with SGMMs especially on full length-utterance durations. Eventually, the proposed SGMM approach exhibits complementary properties and can thus be efficiently fused with i-vector based speaker verification system.
Information Theoretic Criterion Based Clutter Reduction for Ground Penetrating Radar

Singular value decomposition and information theoretic criterion based clutter reduction is proposed for ground penetrating radar imaging. The scheme is capable of discriminating target, clutter and noise subspaces. Information theoretic criterion is used with conventional singular value decomposition to flnd the target singular values. The proposed scheme also works for extracting multiple targets in heavy cluttered images. Simulation results are compared on the basis of mean square error, peak signal to noise ratio and visual inspection.
Irradiation of spices : a review

Food irradiation is a process of exposing food to ionising radiation such as gamma rays emitted from the radioisotopes 60 Co and 137 Cs, or high energy electrons and X-rays produced by machine sources. The use of ionising radiation to destroy harmful biological organisms in food is considered a safe, well proven process that has found many applications. Depending on the absorbed dose of radiation, various effects can be achieved resulting in reduced storage losses, extended shelf life and/or improved microbiological and parasitological safety of foods. The most common irradiated commercial products are spices and vegetable seasonings. Spice irradiation is increasingly recognised as a method that reduces post-harvest losses, ensures hygienic quality, and facilitates trade with food products. This article reviews recent activities concerning food irradiation, focusing on the irradiation of spices and dried vegetable seasonings from the food safety aspect.
Hybrid secure beamforming and vehicle selection using hierarchical agglomerative clustering for C-RAN-based vehicle-to-infrastructure communications in vehicular cyber-physical systems

The architecture of C-RAN-based soft-defined vehicular networks can support increasing demands of various applications in the future vehicular cyber-physical systems, but lacks strong and practical security–enhancing mechanisms in the physical layer. In this article, we propose a hybrid beamforming and vehicle-selection framework for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications to broadcast high-speed confidential messages. A one-dimensional roadway scenario having multiple lanes is considered, and the concept of secure region and interference-selection region is, respectively, developed for each roadside unit. We formulate an optimization problem of maximizing secrecy sumrate with the constraint of orthogonality-based vehicle selection. The original problem is then divided into two subproblems subtly. In terms of the first subproblem, we, by exploiting the orthogonality assumption, obtain a corresponding secure beamformer for each vehicle located in the secure region to reduce the interference and confidential information leakage. Based on secure beamformers, the second subproblem is changed to be a vehicle-selection problem, which is then solved by adopting hierarchical agglomerative clustering method and implemented by two proposed novel algorithms blending vehicle selection with beamformer generation. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in the respect of secrecy sumrate compared with the conventional zero-forcing beamforming using semi-orthogonal user selection algorithms. Furthermore, simulations show how our proposed algorithms resist against eavesdropping from collusive vehicles located in the same secure region by flexibly altering the size of secure region and interference-selection according to the traffic density.
Oxidation Kinetics of an Amorphous Silicon Carbonitride Ceramic

The oxidation kinetics of amorphous silicon carbonitride (SiCN) was measured at 1350°C in ambient air. Two types of specimens were studied: one in the form of thin disks, the other as a powder. Both specimens contained open nanoscale porosity. The disk specimens exhibited weight gain that saturated exponentially with time, analogous to the oxidation behavior of reaction-bonded Si3N4. The saturation value of the weight gain increased linearly with specimen volume, suggesting the nanoscale pore surfaces oxidized uniformly throughout the specimen. This interpretation was confirmed by high-resolution electron microscopy and secondary ion mass spectroscopy. Experiments with the powders (having a particle size much larger than the scale of the nanopores) were also consistent with measurements of the disks. However, the powder specimens, having a high surface-to-volume ratio, continued to show measurable weight gain due to oxidation of the exterior surface. The wide range of values for the surface-to-volume ratio, which included all specimens, permitted a separation of the rate of oxidation of the free surface and the oxidation of the internal surfaces of the nanopores. Surface oxidation data were used to obtain the rate constant for parabolic growth of the oxidation scale. The values for the rate constant obtained for SiCN lay at the lower end of the spectrum of oxidation rates reported in the literature for several Si3N4 and SiC materials. Convergence in the behavior of SiCN and CVD-SiC is ascribed to the purity of both materials. Conversely, it is proposed that the high rates of oxidation of sintered polycrystalline silicon carbides and nitrides, as well as the high degree of variability of these rates, might be related to the impurities introduced by the sintering aids.
ZnO Nano Particles (NPs) Properties Prepared by Liquid Phase Laser Ablation (LPLA)

In this work a ZnO NPs have been prepared by liquid phase laser ablation technique from Zn target immersed in ethanol solution. The effect of laser energy and the number of laser pulses of LPLA technique which includes the optical, morphological and structural measurement were investigated. The XRD measurements confirm the presence of ZnO nano size and particle size of average of 41 nm; this has good agreement with TEM measurement. The optical measurements show the increases in the number of the laser pulses as well as increase the laser energy lead to increase the energy band gap, however the absorptions peaks appears to be at the average of 298 nm which yield an energy band gap of 3.5 eV. [DOI: 10.22401/JNUS.20. 1.10] Keyword: Liquid Phase Laser Ablation, ZnO, Nanoparticles, Energy Band Gab.
Metastable Behavior in Digital Systems

Fault-free digital circuits may malfunction when asynchronous inputs have critical timing combinations that result in metastable operation. This mode of failure is often overlooked in digital system design and reliability analysis. Here, we survey developments in the study of metastable behavior and identify their relevance to digital system design and reliability, and we describe and evaluate a number of techniques for reducing the probability of metastable failure.
Online writing-box-free recognition of handwritten Japanese text considering character size variations

An online writing-box free method for recognizing handwritten Japanese text is proposed. This method is achieved by the following procedure. First, the average character size of input handwritten text is estimated. Second, candidates for character segmentation are detected using geometric features between two adjacent strokes. Finally, a search is performed by dynamic programming for the string that maximizes evaluation score (acceptability as Japanese text). The evaluation score reflects the likelihood of character segmentation, recognition, context and the size of each character. The size is a newly introduced factor since alphabets, numerals, symbols, Japanese phonetic characters, simple Chinese characters and compound Chinese characters are all written in different sizes even in a single line of text. Experimental results show that the incorporation of the character size likelihood increases the character recognition rate for Japanese text.
Deacetylation of the Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Latency-Associated Transcript (LAT) Enhancer and a Decrease in LAT Abundance Precede an Increase in ICP0 Transcriptional Permissiveness at Early Times Postexplant

ABSTRACT Only the latency-associated transcript (LAT) of the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) genome is transcribed during latency, while the lytic genes are suppressed, possibly by LAT antisense mechanisms and/or chromatin modifications. In the present study, latently infected dorsal root ganglia were explanted to assess both relative levels of LAT and histone H3 (K9, K14) acetylation of the LAT locus and ICP0 promoter at early times postexplant. We observed that a decrease in both LAT enhancer histone H3 (K9, K14) acetylation and LAT RNA abundance occurs prior to an increase in acetylation, or transcriptional permissiveness, at the ICP0 promoter.
Designing gaze-based user interfaces for steering in virtual environments

Since eye gaze may serve as an efficient and natural input for steering in virtual 3D scenes, we investigate the design of eye gaze steering user interfaces (UIs) in this paper. We discuss design considerations and propose design alternatives based on two selected steering approaches differing in input condition (discrete vs. continuous) and velocity selection (constant vs. gradient-based). The proposed UIs have been iteratively advanced based on two user studies with twelve participants each. In particular, the combination of continuous and gradient-based input shows a high potential, because it allows for gradually changing the moving speed and direction depending on a user's point-of-regard. This has the advantage of reducing overshooting problems and dwell-time activations. We also investigate discrete constant input for which virtual buttons are toggled using gaze dwelling. As an alternative, we propose the Sticky Gaze Pointer as a more flexible way of discrete input.
Closed-loop identification of plant and disturbance models based on generalized minimum variance evaluation

A closed-loop identification method based on generalized minimum variance (GMV) evaluation is proposed. Parameters of plant and disturbance models can be estimated simultaneously based on the data-driven control technique that minimizes the variance of the generalized output. This feature distinguishes the proposed method from conventional closed-loop identification methods. In particular, an advantage of the proposed method is ease of use like data-driven controller design methods. For the purpose of identification, we introduce a new variance criterion, which is derived from a set of input-output data generated by stochastic disturbance. The paper proves that the optimization of the proposed criterion results in the unique optimal solution which corresponds to the true plant and disturbance model parameters. The proposed method is applied to datasets obtained from a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR), which is operated around an unstable steady state. The result illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed closed-loop identification method.
Controlling for High-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Does Not Affect the Magnitude of the Relationship Between Alcohol and Coronary Heart Disease

Background— This study tested the hypothesis that moderate alcohol intake exerts its cardioprotective effect mainly through an increase in the serum level of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Methods and Results— In the Cohort of Norway (CONOR) study, 149 729 adult participants, recruited from 1994 to 2003, were followed by linkage to the Cause of Death Registry until 2006. At recruitment, questionnaire data on alcohol intake were collected, and the concentration of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in serum was measured. Using Cox regression, we found that the adjusted hazard ratio for men for dying from coronary heart disease was 0.52 (95% confidence interval, 0.39–0.69) when consuming alcohol more than once a week compared with never or rarely. The ratio changed only slightly, to 0.55 (0.41–0.73), after the regression model included the serum level of high-density cholesterol. For women, the corresponding hazard ratios were 0.62 (0.32–1.23) and 0.68 (0.34–1.34), respectively. Conclusions— Alcohol intake is related to a reduced risk of death from coronary heart disease in the follow-up of a large, population-based Norwegian cohort study with extensive control for confounding factors. Our findings suggest that the serum level of high-density cholesterol is not an important intermediate variable in the possible causal pathway between moderate alcohol intake and coronary heart disease.
Zeolite catalyzed solvent-free one-pot synthesis of dihydropyrimidin-2(1H)-ones – A practical synthesis of monastrol

A zeolite-catalyzed, simple, one-pot, solvent-free, cost effective, and environmentally benign process for the synthesis of dihydropyrimidones is described. This reaction is scaleable to multigram scale and the catalyst is recyclable. This methodology has resulted in an efficient synthesis of monastrol, a potent inhibitor of kinesin Eg5.
PresentedClass I Allele Products Regardless of Peptide Neurons Preferentially Respond to Self-MHC

Studies of mice lacking MHC class I (MHC I)-associated proteins have demonstrated a role for MHC I in neurodevelopment. A central question arising from these observations is whether neuronal recognition of MHC I has speciﬁcity for the MHC I allele product and the peptide presented. Using a well-established embryonic retina explant system, we observed that picomolar levels of a recombinant self-MHC I molecule inhibited neurite outgrowth. We then assessed the neurobiological activity of a panel of recombinant soluble MHC Is, consisting of different MHC I heavy chains with a deﬁned self- or nonself-peptide presented, on cultured embryonic retinas from mice with different MHC I haplotypes. We observed that self-MHC I allele products had greater inhibitory neuroactivity than nonself-MHC I molecules, regardless of the nature of the peptide presented, a pattern akin to MHC I recognition by some innate immune system receptors. However, self-MHC I molecules had no effect on retinas from MHC I-deﬁcient mice. These observations suggest that neuronal recognition of MHC I may be coordinated with the inherited MHC I alleles, as occurs in the innate immune system. Consistent with this notion, we show that MHC I and MHC I receptors are coexpressed by precursor cells at the earliest stages of retina development, which could enable such coordination. The Journal of Immunology , 2010, 184: 000–000.
In vivo effects of inorganic mercury (HgCl(2)) on striatal dopaminergic system.

In the present study, the effects of intrastriatal administration of different concentrations (40 microM, 400 microM, and 4 mM) of inorganic mercury (HgCl(2)) on the dopaminergic system of rat striatum were evaluated, using a microdialysis technique coupled to liquid chromatography-electrochemical detection. In previous studies, we discussed the effects of organic mercury (MeHg) administration on the striatal dopaminergic system on the basis of changes in the release and metabolism of striatal dopamine (DA). In the present study it is demonstrated that intrastriatal administration of all concentrations of HgCl(2) produced significant increases in the output of DA (1240, 2500, and 2658% for the concentrations of 40 microM, 400 microM, and 4 mM HgCl(2), respectively) from rat striatal tissue, associated with significant decreases in striatal levels of its metabolites dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC) and homovanillic acid (HVA) with the concentrations of 400 microM and 4 mM HgCl(2) (74.4 and 3.4% for DOPAC and 71.0 and 50.6% for HVA, respectively), whereas no changes in metabolite levels were observed with the concentration of 40 microM HgCl(2). These effects are explained as a result of stimulated DA release and/or changed DA metabolism. The effects of intrastriatal administration of HgCl(2) were compared with those of MeHg on DA extracellular levels.
Dynamic speaker adaptation for feature-based isolated word recognition

In this paper, we describe efforts to improve the performance of FEATURE, the Carnegie-Mellon University speaker-independent speech recognition system that classifies isolated letters of the English alphabet by enabling the system to learn the acoustical characteristics of individual speakers. Even when features are designed to be speaker-independent, it is frequently observed that feature values may vary more from speaker to speaker for a single letter than they vary from letter to letter. In these cases, it is necessary to adjust the system's statistical description of the features of individual speakers to obtain improved recognition performance. This paper describes a set of dynamic adaptation procedures for updating expected feature values during recognition. The algorithm uses maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation techniques to update the mean vectors of sets of feature values on a speaker-by-speaker basis. The MAP estimation algorithm makes use of both knowledge of the observations input to the system from an individual speaker and the relative variability of the features' means within and across all speakers. In addition, knowledge of the covariance of the features' mean vectors across the various letters enables the system to adapt its representation of similar-sounding letters after any one of them is presented to the classifier. The use of dynamic speaker adaptation improves classification performance of FEATURE by 49 percent after four presentations of the alphabet, when the system is provided with supervised training indicating which specific utterance had been presented to the classifier from a particular user. Performance can be improved by as much as 31 percent when the system is allowed to adapt passively in an unsupervised learning mode. without any information from individual users.
TOLL-LIKE RECEPTORS (TLR) 2 AND 4 EXPRESSION OF KERATINOCYTES FROM PATIENTS WITH LOCALIZED AND DISSEMINATED DERMATOPHYTOSIS

There are few studies on the role of innate immune response in dermatophytosis. An investigation was conducted to define the involvement of Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs) 2 and 4 in localized (LD) and disseminated (DD) dermatophytosis due to T. rubrum. Fifteen newly diagnosed patients, eight patients with LD and seven with DD, defined by involvement of at least three body segments were used in this study. Controls comprised twenty skin samples from healthy individuals undergoing plastic surgery. TLR2 and TLR4 were quantified in skin lesions by immunohistochemistry. A reduced expression of TLR4 in the lower and upper epidermis of both LD and DD patients was found compared to controls; TLR2 expression was preserved in the upper and lower epidermis of all three groups. As TLR4 signaling induces the production of inflammatory cytokines and neutrophils recruitment, its reduced expression likely contributed to the lack of resolution of the infection and the consequent chronic nature of the dermatophytosis. As TLR2 expression acts to limit the inflammatory process and preserves the epidermal structure, its preserved expression may also contribute to the persistent infection and limited inflammation that are characteristic of dermatophytic infections.
ROBUST TRANSMISSION OF MULTIMEDIA COMPRESSED STREAMS OVER BAND-LIMITED WIRELESS CHANNELS USING WAVELET PACKET DIVISION MULTIPLEXING

Due to the extensive use of predictive coding, multimedia compressed streams exhibit different sensitivities to transmission errors. Therefore, they are suitable for unequal error protection (UEP) techniques which aim at preserving the integrity of sensitive data. UEP is mainly based on differentiated error control coding which raises the robustness of data, but also increases the transmission bandwidth. However, the design of efficient wireless communication systems is often complicated by stringent bandwidth constraint. This work proposes a general framework for efficient and robust transmission of multimedia compressed streams over band-limited wireless channels. To cope with bandwidth restriction wavelet packet orthogonally overlapped modulation with unequal power allocation (UPA) is used for UEP of
Carotid Ligation in Gerbils Influence of Age, Sex, and Gonads

The ill effects of carotid artery occlusion or ligation vary in man and experimental animals according to surgical techniques, environmental conditions, diet, stress, sex, age, strain of the animal, blood pressure, the state of cardiopulmonary system, and other diverse factors. Unilateral carotid artery ligation in most small laboratory animals is an innocuous procedure. The gerbil, a desert rat, has been found to be quite sensitive to unilateral carotid artery ligation. The present experiments were designed to study the influence of age, sex, and castration on end results of the unilateral carotid artery ligation in gerbils. It appears that the young animals prior to sexual maturity and the sexually mature female are more resistant than the sexually mature male. This difference is assumed to be due to the influence of the gonads on the blood flow of the brain.