Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Gene Val66Met Polymorphism with Primary Dysmenorrhea

Primary dysmenorrhea (PDM), the most prevalent menstrual cycle-related problem in women of reproductive age, is associated with negative moods. Whether the menstrual pain and negative moods have a genetic basis remains unknown. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a key role in the production of central sensitization and contributes to chronic pain conditions. BDNF has also been implicated in stress-related mood disorders. We screened and genotyped the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism (rs6265) in 99 Taiwanese (Asian) PDMs (20–30 years old) and 101 age-matched healthy female controls. We found that there was a significantly higher frequency of the Met allele of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism in the PDM group. Furthermore, BDNF Met/Met homozygosity had a significantly stronger association with PDM compared with Val carrier status. Subsequent behavioral/hormonal assessments of sub-groups (PDMs = 78, controls = 81; eligible for longitudinal multimodal neuroimaging battery studies) revealed that the BDNF Met/Met homozygous PDMs exhibited a higher menstrual pain score (sensory dimension) and a more anxious mood than the Val carrier PDMs during the menstrual phase. Although preliminary, our study suggests that the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism is associated with PDM in Taiwanese (Asian) people, and BDNF Met/Met homozygosity may be associated with an increased risk of PDM. Our data also suggest the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism as a possible regulator of menstrual pain and pain-related emotions in PDM. Absence of thermal hypersensitivity may connote an ethnic attribution. The presentation of our findings calls for further genetic and neuroscientific investigations of PDM.
Fasting enhances growth hormone secretion and amplifies the complex rhythms of growth hormone secretion in man.

Studies in man have shown that the episodic release of growth hormone (GH) is infrequent and erratic, and unlike that in the rat does not appear to have discernible ultradian periodicities. However, these observations in nonfasted subjects may be invalid since mixed nutrients have unpredictable effects on GH release. Moreover, in the fed state basal GH levels are frequently undetectable, thus rendering the identification of low amplitude pulses unreliable. Accordingly, the 24-h pulsatile pattern of GH secretion obtained from repetitive venous sampling in six normal adult male subjects was examined during a control fed day and during the first and fifth days of a 5-d fast. The GH data were analyzed using two distinct methods: a discrete pulse detection algorithm (Cluster analysis) and Fourier expansion time-series, which allows fixed periodicities of secretory activity to be resolved. The 5-d fast resulted in a significant increase in discrete GH pulse frequency (5.8 +/- 0.7 vs. 9.9 +/- 0.7 pulses/24 h, P = 0.028), 24 h integrated GH concentration (2.82 +/- 0.50 vs. 8.75 +/- 0.82 micrograms.min/ml; P = 0.0002), and maximal pulse amplitude (5.9 +/- 1.1 vs. 12.3 +/- 1.6 ng/ml, P less than 0.005). While multiple low-amplitude sinusoidal periodicities were present on the control fed day, time-series analysis revealed enhancement of circadian and ultradian cycles on the first and fifth days of fasting. Concomitantly, fasting resulted in a decline (day 1 vs. day 5) in serum concentrations of somatomedin C (1.31 +/- 0.22 vs. 0.77 +/- 0.18 U/ml) and glucose (4.9 +/- 0.2 vs. 3.2 +/- 0.2 mmol/liter), and a marked rise in free fatty acid (0.43 +/- 0.12 vs. 1.55 +/- 0.35 mmol/liter) and acetoacetate (35 +/- 6 vs. 507 +/- 80 nmol/liter). We conclude that the acute nutritional status is an important determinant of spontaneous pulsatile GH secretion in man. Fast-induced enhancement of GH release is achieved through combined frequency (discrete pulses) and amplitude (sinusoidal periodicities) modulation. Such alterations in somatotropic hormone release may play an important role in substrate homeostasis during starvation.
New models of cache architectures characterizing information leakage from cache side channels

Side-channel attacks try to breach confidentiality and retrieve critical secrets through the side channels. Cache memories are a potential source of information leakage through side-channel attacks, many of which have been proposed. Meanwhile, different cache architectures have also been proposed to defend against these attacks. However, there are currently no means for comparing and evaluating the effectiveness of different defense solutions against these attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel method to evaluate a system's vulnerability to side-channel attacks. We establish side-channel leakage models based on the non-interference property. Then we define how the security aspects of a cache architecture can be modeled as a finite-state machine (FSM) with state transitions that cause interference. We use mutual information to quantitatively reveal potential side-channel leakage of the architectures, and allow comparison of these architectures for their relative vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks. We use real attacks to validate our results.
Design and nonlinear control of an indoor quadrotor flying robot

Micro Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) systems represent a useful class of flying robots because of their strong capabilities for small-area monitoring and building exploration. In this paper, we describe a small quadrotor flying robot for the use of indoor autonomous navigation and exploration. Three-level hardware architecture is developed and a fusion of different sensors is implemented, which enables automatic hovering, control from Remote-Controller, localization and navigation in indoor environment. Since the flying robot is a nonlinear underactuated system, an Integral- Backstepping control algorithm is proposed to realize robust attitude and position control. Both simulation and experiment results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed control algorithm.
Impaired alertness and performance driving home from the night shift: a driving simulator study

Driving in the early morning is associated with increased accident risk affecting not only professional drivers but also those who commute to work. The present study used a driving simulator to investigate the effects of driving home from a night shift. Ten shift workers participated after a normal night shift and after a normal night sleep. The results showed that driving home from the night shift was associated with an increased number of incidents (two wheels outside the lane marking, from 2.4 to 7.6 times), decreased time to first accident, increased lateral deviation (from 18 to 43 cm), increased eye closure duration (0.102 to 0.143 s), and increased subjective sleepiness. The results indicate severe postnight shift effects on sleepiness and driving performance.
Hamilton Cycles that Extend Transposition Matchings in Cayley Graphs of Sn

Let B be a basis of transpositions for $S_n $ and let Cay$( B:S_n )$ be the Cayley graph of $S_n $ with respect to B. It was shown by Kompel’makher and Liskovets [Kibemetica, 3 (1975), pp. 17–21] that Cay$( B:S_n )$ is Hamiltonian. This result is extended as follows. Note that every transposition b in B induces a perfect matching $M_b $ in Cay$( B:S_n )$. It is shown here when $n > 4$ that, for any $b \in B$, there is a Hamilton cycle in Cay$( B:S_n )$ that includes every edge of $M_b $. That is, for $n > 4$, for any basis B of transpositions of $S_n $, and, for any $b \in B$, it is possible to generate all permutations of $1,2, \ldots ,n$ by transpositions in B so that every other transposition is b.
Pathological Mutations of the Mitochondrial Human Genome: the Instrumental Role of the Yeast S. cerevisiae

Mitochondrial diseases, which altogether represent not so rare diseases, can be due to mutations either in the nuclear or mitochondrial genomes. Several model organisms or cell lines are usually employed to understand the mechanisms underlying diseases, yeast being one of them. However, in the case of mutations within the mitochondrial genome, yeast is a major model because it is a facultative aerobe and its mitochondrial genome can be genetically engineered and reintroduced in vivo. In this short review, I will describe how these properties can be exploited to mimic mitochondrial pathogenic mutations, as well as their limits. In particular; pathological mutations of tRNA, cytb, and ATPase genes have been successfully modeled. It is essential to stress that what has been discovered with yeast (molecular mechanisms underlying the diseases, nuclear correcting genes, import of tRNA into mitochondria or compounds from drug screening) has been successfully transferred to human patient lines, paving the way for future therapies.
Parser evaluation: using a grammatical relation annotation scheme

We describe a recently developed corpus annotation scheme for evaluating parsers that avoids some of the shortcomings of current methods. The scheme encodes grammatical relations between heads and dependents, and has been used to mark up a new public-domain corpus of naturally occurring English text. We show how the corpus can be used to evaluate the accuracy of a robust parser, and relate the corpus to extant resources.
Robust image hashing based on radial variance of pixels

Robust image hashing defines a feature vector that characterizes the image, independently of non-significant distortions of its content. As a consequence, the comparison between robust image hash vectors is able to indicate whether the corresponding images are equivalent or not, independently of visually non-significant distortions due for example to compression or re-sampling. We define a robust image hash based on radial projections of the image pixels. Specifically, our proposed radial hASH (RASH) considers moments of different orders to describe the luminance pdf of the pixels encountered on a set of lines articulated around the center of the image. In short, each RASH component is defined based on the moment of the pixels belonging to a specific line. Our paper provides a careful analysis of the robustness and discriminating capabilities of the RASH vectors computed based on different moment orders. As a first contribution, it demonstrates that the second order moment, i.e. the variance of the pixels on a line, allows for optimal trade-offs between the robustness and the discriminating capabilities of the resulting RASH vector. As a second contribution, extensive simulations prove that a decision engine based on RASH vectors cross-correlations is able to successfully identify pairs of equivalent or distinct images. Bottom line, the RASH assets are a low computational complexity, a strong robustness to both filtering and geometrical distortions, and a risk of collision that is estimated to less than 10 per million of images.
Intergenerational Educational Mobility in the Comprehensive Danish Welfare State : Testing the Primacy of Non-Monetary Social Origin Effects

The aim of this paper is investigate the extent to which monetary and non-monetary social background factors explain intergenerational educational attainment in Denmark. The main hypothesis tested is that non-monetary social background factors (cultural, social, and cognitive parental resources) are particularly important relative to economic factors within the institutional context of the comprehensive and highly redistributive Danish welfare state. Drawing on the notion of ‘capital’ by Pierre Bourdieu and a longitudinal Danish data set, we find that parental economic capital is of little importance in explaining educational outcomes, while different non-monetary social background resources, and especially cultural capital, are very important. Our findings then indicate that a particular Scandinavian institutional “mobility regime” may exist in which educational inequalities are predominantly generated by non-monetary forms of stratification. Several suggestions for future research are also discussed.
Historical reconstructions of evolving physiological complexity: O2 secretion in the eye and swimbladder of fishes

SUMMARY The ability of some fishes to inflate their compressible swimbladder with almost pure oxygen to maintain neutral buoyancy, even against the high hydrostatic pressure several thousand metres below the water surface, has fascinated physiologists for more than 200 years. This review shows how evolutionary reconstruction of the components of such a complex physiological system on a phylogenetic tree can generate new and important insights into the origin of complex phenotypes that are difficult to obtain with a purely mechanistic approach alone. Thus, it is shown that oxygen secretion first evolved in the eyes of fishes, presumably for improved oxygen supply to an avascular, metabolically active retina. Evolution of this system was facilitated by prior changes in the pH dependence of oxygen-binding characteristics of haemoglobin (the Root effect) and in the specific buffer value of haemoglobin. These changes predisposed teleost fishes for the later evolution of swimbladder oxygen secretion, which occurred at least four times independently and can be associated with increased auditory sensitivity and invasion of the deep sea in some groups. It is proposed that the increasing availability of molecular phylogenetic trees for evolutionary reconstructions may be as important for understanding physiological diversity in the postgenomic era as the increase of genomic sequence information in single model species.
New specs for ASD motors

The two main issues in pulse-width modulated ASD motors namely: stress concentration at slot exits and at junctions between stress grading and corona protection materials, and winding insulation aging due to partial discharge and/or dielectric heating, often intensified between turns as well as across the main-wall of the stator coils. This paper explores the IEC-60034-18-41 and IEC-60034-18-42 technical specifications for inverter duty motor insulation. These specifications describe the qualification and acceptance tests for both low and medium voltage motor windings in order to ensure reliability
Using NLP Methods for the Analysis of Rituals

This paper gives an overview of an interdisciplinary research project that is concerned with the application of computational linguistics methods to the analysis of the structure and variance of rituals, as investigated in ritual science. We present motivation and prospects of a computational approach to ritual research, and explain the choice of specific analysis techniques. We discuss design decisions for data collection and processing and present the general NLP architecture. For the analysis of ritual descriptions, we apply the frame semantics paradigm with newly invented frames where appropriate. Using scientific ritual research literature, we experimented with several techniques of automatic extraction of domain terms for the domain of rituals. As ritual research is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour, a vocabulary common to all sub-areas of ritual research can is hard to specify and highly controversial. The domain terms extracted from ritual research literature are used as a basis for a common vocabulary and thus help the creation of ritual specific frames. We applied the tf*idf, 2 and PageRank algorithm to our ritual research literature corpus and two non-domain corpora: The British National Corpus and the British Academic Written English corpus. All corpora have been part of speech tagged and lemmatized. The domain terms have been evaluated by two ritual experts independently. Interestingly, the results of the algorithms were different for different parts of speech. This finding is in line with the fact that the inter-annotator agreement also differs between parts of speech.
Is Social Phobia a “Mis-Communication” Disorder? Brain Functional Connectivity during Face Perception Differs between Patients with Social Phobia and Healthy Control Subjects

Recently, a differential recruitment of brain areas throughout the distributed neural system for face perception has been found in social phobic patients as compared to healthy control subjects. These functional abnormalities in social phobic patients extend beyond emotion-related brain areas, such as the amygdala, to include cortical networks that modulate attention and process other facial features, and they are also associated with an alteration of the task-related activation/deactivation trade-off. Functional connectivity is becoming a powerful tool to examine how components of large-scale distributed neural systems are coupled together while performing a specific function. This study was designed to determine whether functional connectivity networks among brain regions within the distributed system for face perception also would differ between social phobic patients and healthy controls. Data were obtained from eight social phobic patients and seven healthy controls by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our findings indicated that social phobic patients and healthy controls have different patterns of functional connectivity across brain regions within both the core and the extended systems for face perception and the default mode network. To our knowledge, this is the first study that shows that functional connectivity during brain response to socially relevant stimuli differs between social phobic patients and healthy controls. These results expand our previous findings and indicate that brain functional changes in social phobic patients are not restricted to a single specific brain structure, but rather involve a mis-communication among different sensory and emotional processing brain areas.
Miniaturization of RFID tag by means of an electrically small resonator

In this work, novel UHF-RFID tags able to modify the operation frequency without increasing the tag size have been presented. This has been achieved by coupling an electrically small resonator to the antenna (meander type). Different tags have been designed, fabricated, and characterized. Good agreement between the theoretical (simulated) and measured read ranges has been obtained in all the cases, with read ranges exceeding 5m.
Consistency across Repeated Eyewitness Interviews: Contrasting Police Detectives’ Beliefs with Actual Eyewitness Performance

In the legal system, inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts are often used to discredit witnesses’ credibility. This is at odds with research findings showing that witnesses frequently report reminiscent details (details previously unrecalled) at an accuracy rate that is nearly as high as for consistently recalled information. The present study sought to put the validity of beliefs about recall consistency to a test by directly comparing them with actual memory performance in two recall attempts. All participants watched a film of a staged theft. Subsequently, the memory group (N = 84) provided one statement immediately after the film (either with the Self-Administered Interview or free recall) and one after a one-week delay. The estimation group (N = 81) consisting of experienced police detectives estimated the recall performance of the memory group. The results showed that actual recall performance was consistently underestimated. Also, a sharp decline of memory performance between recall attempts was assumed by the estimation group whereas actual accuracy remained stable. While reminiscent details were almost as accurate as consistent details, they were estimated to be much less accurate than consistent information and as inaccurate as direct contradictions. The police detectives expressed a great concern that reminiscence was the result of suggestive external influences. In conclusion, it seems that experienced police detectives hold many implicit beliefs about recall consistency that do not correspond with actual recall performance. Recommendations for police trainings are provided. These aim at fostering a differentiated view on eyewitness performance and the inclusion of more comprehensive classes on human memory structure.
Adaptation to Climate Change : Evidence from US Agriculture Online Appendix

We simulate the extended learning environment described in the main text where a farmer learns from both her county and a single neighboring county. We generate a simulated temperature series of 100 years for both counties, where the true mean temperature in both counties is 24, the variance of annual temperature is 6, the farmer’s prior on average temperature in both counties is 23.5, and both priors have a variance of 3. We vary both the correlations between annual temperatures and beliefs about mean temperatures and draw each weather series from a multivariate normal distribution. We repeat this exercise 25 times and calculate the average belief about the farmer’s own county for each time period. Figure A.1 shows the farmer’s belief about average temperature in their own county over time. Observing temperature realizations from the neighboring county hastens the convergence of the belief to the true mean the most when average temperatures are highly correlated and annual realizations of temperature are uncorrelated. Nevertheless, at least for the range of parameter values explored in this simulation (which we believe spans the range of parameter values in the data), the added benefit of observing nearby counties appears modest.
Making Better Use of Information: Aiming Towards "True North"

"If I only had the right information, I could make an informed decision". How often have you heard that comment? With the information technology currently at our disposal, one would think that the right information would be available and that all decisions would be sound. However, users must still determine what data provides valuable information and what are the limitations of the soundness of a decision. What has been missing from most decision models is prediction awareness, as well as a "true north" compass reading for the organisation, based on goals that reflect the system within the organisation and that within which the organisation operates. We propose that it is easier to identify what information is needed to stay on course (true north) then make that information available to all decision makers, who can then make more holistic informed decisions when such a compass reading exists.
The Mellin Matched Filter

In propagation channels signals are undergone translation and dilation changes. The Fourier and Mellin transforms are natural foundations of the analysis of wideband signals. Three interconnected problems, where the Mellin transform plays a key role, are considered in the paper: i) synthesis of a linear matched filter that is invariant to signal scale; ii) estimation of the signal scale; and iii) the wideband ambiguity function and its properties. The filter that is invariant to the signal scale and maximizes the output SNR is synthesized in the paper using the Mellin transform. The filter is named the Mellin matched filter. Introduction of the Mellin matched filter allows to give a new interpretation of the signal scale estimation and the wideband ambiguity function. Concept of the Mellin matched filter facilitates to produce a physical interpretation of the resolution of wideband signals and the time-frequency-scale uncertainties.
Prices and Market Shares in a Menu Cost Model

Pricing complementarities play a key role in determining the propagation of monetary disturbances in sticky price models. We propose a procedure to infer the degree of firm-level pricing complementarities in the context of a menu cost model of price adjustment using product-level data on prices and market shares. We then apply this procedure by calibrating our model (in which pricing complementarities are based on decreasing returns to scale at the product level) to one particular super-market scanner data set. Although our data supports moderately strong levels of firm-level pricing complementarities, they appear to be too weak to generate much larger aggregate real effects from nominal shocks than a model without these pricing complementarities.