Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Current-voltage characteristics of high current density silicon Esaki diodes grown by molecular beam epitaxy and the influence of thermal annealing

We present the characteristics of uniformly doped silicon Esaki tunnel diodes grown by low temperature molecular beam epitaxy (T/sub growth/=275/spl deg/C) using in situ boron and phosphorus doping. The effects of ex situ thermal annealing are presented for temperatures between 640 and 800/spl deg/C. A maximum peak to valley current ratio (PVCR) of 1.47 was obtained at the optimum annealing temperature of 680/spl deg/C for 1 min. Peak and valley (excess) currents decreased more than two orders of magnitude as annealing temperatures and times were increased with rates empirically determined to have thermal activation energies of 2.2 and 2.4 eV respectively. The decrease in current density is attributed to widening of the tunneling barrier due to the diffusion of phosphorus and boron. A peak current density of 47 kA/cm/sup 2/ (PVCR=1.3) was achieved and is the highest reported current density for a Si-based Esaki diode (grown by either epitaxy or by alloying). The temperature dependence of the current voltage characteristics of a Si Esaki diode in the range from 4.2 to 325 K indicated that both the peak current and the excess current are dominated by quantum mechanical tunneling rather than by recombination. The temperature dependence of the peak and valley currents is due to the band gap dependence of the tunneling probability.
Modernizing San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez: How Evolving Supreme Court Jurisprudence Changes the Face of Education Finance Litigation

This article aims to “modernize” the current legal debate over inequitable public school funding at the state and local level. The 1973 Supreme Court case of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez established precedent, allowing for property-tax based education funding programs at the state-level—a major source of local inequality in funding. For a number of reasons discussed in this article, the jurisprudence utilized by the Supreme Court in Rodriguez is outdated and the time is ripe for education finance litigators to, once again, challenge state-level inequality in public school funding.
Demonstration of extinction ratio improvement from 2 to 9 dB and intensity noise reduction with the MZI-GCSOA all-optical 2R regenerator

In this letter, we experimentally demonstrate improved static and dynamic characteristics of the all-optical 2R regenerator based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with gain-clamped semiconductor optical amplifiers. A true digital-like optical decision characteristic with an adjustable decision threshold has been found. A tremendous noise suppression at the logic "0" and a large improvement in the extinction ratio have been obtained even for a very deteriorated input signal with small extinction ratio at a bit rate of 2.488 Gb/s. An 8-dB improvement in extinction ratio can be achieved for an input extinction ratio of 5- and 7-dB improvement for an input extinction ratio of 2 dB. Furthermore, a good regeneration is achieved over a broad wavelength range of 20 nm.
A Spiking Independent Accumulator Model for Winner-Take-All Computation

Winner-take-all (WTA) mechanisms are an important component of many cognitive models. For example, they are often used to decide between multiple choices or to selectively direct attention. Here we compare two biologically plausible, spiking neural WTA mechanisms. We first provide a novel spiking implementation of the well-known leaky, competing accumulator (LCA) model, by mapping the dynamics onto a population-level representation. We then propose a two-layer spiking independent accumulator (IA) model, and compare its performance against the LCA network on a variety of WTA benchmarks. Our findings suggest that while the LCA network can rapidly adapt to new winners, the IA network is better suited for stable decision making in the presence of noise.
The enduring importance of national identities in sport and tourism

The role of both sport and tourism in the (re)creation and (re)presentation of national identities is well established, yet relatively little work has critically explored the interrelationship of sport, tourism and national identities. Despite the advances of globalization, the nation remains a key identity marker and a central site for the exploration of identities in contemporary times. Rather than being viewed as fixed, it is now acknowledged that national identities are fluid, changing and often in a state of flux. The importance of sport and tourism to this subject represents fertile ground for the exploration of national identities in a range of contexts. In developing our understanding of the inter-relationship between sport, tourism and national identities, it is important to first consider the wider scholarship surrounding the nation and national identities. Many of the most-cited texts in this area focus on nations as historical constructs and focus on issues such as the political lineage of various places. For some time, it was elements of ‘high’ culture that were almost exclusively the focus here, and as a result, the activities constituted as ‘low’ culture were largely ignored. In addressing this lacuna, Edensor (2002) made a valuable contribution to the area in positioning national identity around numerous areas of popular culture including sport and tourism. His work offers perceptive insights into how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized. Such an approach emphasizes that culture is ordinary (Williams, 1958, 1961) and that areas such as sport and tourism are important sites for examining the nation and national identities. In recent years, while edited collections focusing on tourism (Frew & White, 2011) and sport (Smith & Porter, 2004) have made useful contributions to the discussions surrounding national identities and popular culture, there has been little focused consideration of the inter-relationship between sport, tourism and national identities. This is not to say that scholars have not touched upon this area, yet few have considered the inter-relationship as the focus of research to tease out the interplay of these areas. Weed’s (2009) meta-review of sport tourism research identified a contested terrain over which a range of reviewers had taken divergent routes. Tribe’s (1997) influential analysis of the indiscipline of tourism argued that tourism studies ‘should recognize and celebrate its diversity’ (p. 656). While rarely considered in many discussions of Journal of Sport & Tourism Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2011, pp. 181–185
Quantitavive comparison of phase unwrapping algorithms for SAR interferometry

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) extracts phase information from two complex SAR images to get DEM (Digital elevation map). The technique has been widely used in topography mapping, forest monitoring, and agriculture survey. Phase unwrapping is a key step in InSAR data processing. It directly influences the precision of the final elevation. Up to now, more than 40 phase unwrapping algorithms have been proposed in the world. They can be mainly divided into two categories, one is path- following methods, and the other is minimum-norm methods. In this paper, six classical approaches have been chosen to compare with each other under different conditions based on the criterion of final measured elevation.The work addressed in this paper presents the different effect of six widely used phase unwrapping algorithms under different conditions by comparing the precision of the final measured elevation. InSAR simulation indicates: (1) when the correlation coefficient is great than 0.7, branch cut algorithm has the best effect for the low noise interferogram. (2) when the correlation coefficient is between 0.4 and 0.7, multigrid algorithm can achieve best result for the large noise interferogram. (3) when the correlation coefficient is less than 0.4, the six algorithms all have bad results, and we should use larger filtering window to decrease the difficulty of phase unwrapping at the cost of resolution reduction. The processing of SIR-C/X X-band data of Enta volcano also proves that using different algorithms for different areas can improve the final phase unwrapping result.
AFFECT IN TUTORING DIALOGUES

ABSTRACT This paper is about INES, an intelligent, multimodal tutoring environment, and how we build a tutor agent in the environment that tries to be sensitive to the mental state of the student that interacts with it. The environment was primarily designed to help students practice nursing tasks. For example, one of the implemented tasks is to give a virtual patient a subcutaneous injection. The students can interact multimodally using speech and a haptic device under the guidance of the virtual embodied tutor. INES takes into account elements of the student's character and an appraisal of the student's actions to estimate the mental state of the student. This information is used to plan and execute the actions and responses of the tutor agent.
Should multifaceted smoking cessation programmes be more widespread?

Tobacco was introduced into the UK in the late 16th century and its popularity has risen ever since then. However, shortly afterwards, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James I of England was the first monarch to implement a tax on tobacco use. He also published his famous ‘Counterblast to tobacco’ in 1604 where he reflected on his dislike of the ‘precious stink’ and observed that: Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.Despite the noble and early attempts to practice primitive public health medicine, cigarette smoking for centuries has been one of the most prevalent, addictive and harmful pastimes throughout many countries of the world. Cigarette smoking delivers nicotine—a powerfully addictive drug—quickly and in high doses directly to the brain; addiction is …
Microbial Etiological Agents in Clinical Suspected Vaginitis Attending in Obstratic and Gynaecology Outpatient Department of Tertiary Care Hospitals

Introduction aginitis is defined as a spectrum of conditions that cause vaginal and sometimes vulvar symptoms, such as itching, burning, irritation, odor, and vaginal discharge. Vulvovaginal complaints are one of the most common reasons for gynecological consultation. Clinicians have traditionally diagnosed vaginal candidiasis, bacterial vaginosis, and vaginal trichomoniasis using some combination of physical examination, pH, the wet mount, and the whiff test. The patient's history and the physical examination should guide the choice of laboratory studies, and a complete physical examination that includes a thorough examination of both the external and internal genitalia will yield additional important
H-NS family members function coordinately in an opportunistic pathogen

The histone-like nucleoid structuring protein, H-NS, is a prominent global regulator of gene expression. Many Gram-negative bacteria contain multiple members of the H-NS family of proteins. Thus, a key question is whether H-NS family members have overlapping or distinct functions. To address this question we performed genome-wide location analyses with MvaT and MvaU, the two H-NS family members present in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We show that MvaT and MvaU bind the same chromosomal regions, coregulating the expression of ≈350 target genes. We show further that like H-NS in enteric bacteria, which functions as a transcriptional silencer of foreign DNA by binding to AT-rich elements, MvaT and MvaU bind preferentially to AT-rich regions of the chromosome. Our findings establish that H-NS paralogs can function coordinately to regulate expression of the same set of target genes, and suggest that MvaT and MvaU are involved in silencing foreign DNA elements in P. aeruginosa.
An energy saving and latency delay efficiency scheme for wireless sensor networks based on GSPNs

In order to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks, we have to optimize the energy consumption at the sensor nodes. Thereby, most research works have focused on how to increase the duration of sleeping states of sensor nodes using various wakeup strategies. In this paper, we propose to model the sleep/wakeup pattern of networked nodes with different vacation policies using the Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets formalism. To this end, we apply firstly the N-policy as queued wakeup scheme. Then we propose a new vacation policy that we call the Hybrid-policy to minimize the latency. Based on the obtained models, we give the formulas of the main performance measures of the sensor network. Finally, we give a detailed analysis to show the impact of the two vacation policies on the network performances.
Vision-based motion recognition of the hexapod for autonomous assistance

In a cooperation style in which a human operates one robot and the other autonomous robots assist that robot, the autonomous robots must be able to recognize the motion of the human operated robot in real time. Vision is the most useful sensor for this purpose. By using vision, the assistant robot recognizes the current target object and actions of the human operated robot to the target. For the working robots, we use two hexapod robots which are able to utilize two forelegs as arms in order to manipulate objects. Joint motion of each leg and occlusion by another leg makes it difficult to recognize and track the motion of the hexapod robot. We propose a method for the recognition and tracking of the 3D position and posture of the hexapod. Through the use of 2D image matching, the body of the hexapod, several legs, and toes of the legs can be recognized in turn. The positions of the body and toes are measured by binocular-stereo, and the angles of the legs can then be obtained, which are used for motion recognition. We propose a motion recognition mechanism using an eigenspace method which can reduce the dimensions necessary for matching. The effectiveness of this method is tested through an experiment using two hexapod robots.
Simvastatin Inhibits Central Sympathetic Outflow in Heart Failure by a Nitric-Oxide Synthase Mechanism

Our previous study demonstrated that oral treatment with simvastatin (SIM) suppressed renal sympathetic nerve activity (RSNA) in the rabbits with chronic heart failure (CHF). The purpose of this experiment was to determine the effects of direct application of SIM to the central nervous system on RSNA and its relevant mechanisms. Experiments were carried out on 21 male New Zealand White rabbits with pacing-induced CHF. The CHF rabbits received infusion of vehicle, SIM, or SIM + Nω-nitro-l-arginine methyl ester into the lateral cerebral ventricle via osmotic minipump for 7 days. We found that 1) in CHF rabbits, intracerebroventricular infusion of SIM significantly suppressed basal RSNA (1st day 69.5 ± 8.9% maximum; 7th day 26.0 ± 6.0% maximum; P < 0.05, n = 7) and enhanced arterial baroreflex function starting from the 2nd day and lasting through the following 5 days; 2) statin treatment significantly up-regulated neuronal nitric-oxide synthase (nNOS) protein expression in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM) (control, n = 6, 0.12 ± 0.04; SIM-treated, n = 7, 0.31 ± 0.05. P < 0.05); 3) in CATH.a neurons, incubation with SIM significantly up-regulated the nNOS mRNA expression, which was blocked by coincubation with mevalonate, farnesyl-pyrophosphate, or geranylgeranyl-pyrophosphate; and 4) incubation with Y-27632 [(R)-(+)-trans-N-(4-pyridyl)-4-(1-aminoethyl)-cyclohexanecarboxamide] significantly up-regulated nNOS mRNA expression in these neurons. These results suggest that central treatment with SIM decreased sympathetic outflow in CHF rabbits via up-regulation of nNOS expression in RVLM, which may be due to the inhibition of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA reductase and a decrease in Rho kinase by SIM.
Distinct memory circuits composing the hippocampal region

The very different anatomical designs of the adjacent circuitries of the cortico‐hippocampal pathway, along with their somewhat different synaptic plasticity mechanisms, suggest a nearly serial pathway of distinct memory circuits each contributing its own specialized processing operation to overall hippocampal function. Modeling and formal theoretical analysis of the prominent anatomical design features of particular circuits (piriform/entorhinal cortex; hippocampal field CA3; hippocampal field CA1) are found to identify potential emergent function not readily arrived at in the absence of these formal models, and yet which once derived can be seen potentially to confer unique capabilities to an integrated hippocampal mechanism for processing memories during behavior. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
On a Fast, Compact Approximation of the Exponential Function

Recently Schraudolph (1999) described an ingenious, fast, and compact approximation of the exponential function through manipulation of the components of a standard (IEEE-754 (IEEE, 1985)) floating-point representation. This brief note communicates a recoding of this procedure that overcomes some of the limitations of the original macro at little or no additional computational expense.
Fingerprint Image Segmentation Based on Support Vector Machine

Exact segmentation of fingerprint image is very important for fingerprint singular points and minutiae features extraction. In this paper, a method for fingerprint image segmentation is proposed based on Support Vector Machine (SVM). The fingerprint image is broken into 16*16 prospects blocks and background blocks. The block average gray, block gray variance, block contrast and the largest peak of non-DC amplitude are used as the feature inputs. An optimization filtering method is used to obtain the kernel function parameters and the error penalty factor. With less training samples, a classifier with good generalization performance is gained. After post-processing using morphological method, the algorithm is simulated with the FVC2002DB-4B fingerprint database. The result of the simulation shows that the correct rate increase to 99%. Both the theoretical analysis and the experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed method.
La fidelidad del consumidor a las marcas de automóviles

Siguiendo el enfoque de marketing relacional, podemos distinguir diferentes tipos de consumidores en funcion de su tendencia a mantener relaciones duraderas con la empresa y de sus rasgos personales. En este trabajo, tratamos de caracterizar a los consumidores que desean mantener relaciones duraderas con una empresa determinada (clientes «relacionales’) y a los clientes que prefieren entablar intercambios con diferentes empresas (clientes «transaccionales»). El trabajo de campo se realiza para la compra de automoviles. Obtenemos tres grupos principales de compradores: inconformistas, «transaccionales » y «relacionales», siendo el grupo de clientes «relacionales» el de menor tamano.
Constraint Satisfiability Algorithms for Interactive Student Scheduling

A constraint satisfiability problem consists of a set of variables, their associated domains (i.e., the set of values the variable can take) and a set of constraints on these variables. A solution to the CSP is an instantiation (or labeling) of all the variables which does not violate any of the constraints. Since constraint satisfiability problems are, in general, NP-complete, it is of interest to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of heuristic algorithms as applied, in particular, to our application. Our research effort attempts to determine which algorithms perform best in solving the student scheduling problem (SSP) and under what conditions. We also investigate the probabilistic techniques of Nudcl for finding a near optimal instantiation order for search algorithms, and develop our own modifications which can yield a significant improvement in efficiency for the SSP. Finally, we assign priorities to the constraints and investigate optimization algorithms for finding schedules which rank high with respect to the priorities. Experimental results have been collected and are reported here. Our system was developed for and used at Bar-Ilan University during the registration period, being available for students to construct their timetables.
Breast cancer imaging: Mammography among women of up to 45 years

Summary Background: Among women under the age of 40, screening mammography examinations are not performed routinely. An ultrasonography scan is considered to be a basic breast imaging examination among younger women. The purpose of this study was to analyze mammography images, as well as to evaluate the usefulness and role of mammography in breast cancer diagnostic processes in women of up to 45 years, based on own experience. Material/Methods: A retrospective analysis of mammography images, including 144 cases of breast cancer diagnosed in the group of 140 women of 45 years of age. All the patients underwent pre-treatment mammography and surgery procedure. The images were evaluated in accordance to BIRADS criteria. Lesions detectable in mammography were grouped as follows: • spiculated mass; • non-microcalcified oval/round mass; • microcalcified mass (regardless of shape); • microcalcifications; • architectural distortion; • breast tissue asymmetry. Results: The most common mammographic symptom was solid tumor (41%), followed by microcalcified tumors (20.8%). Clusters of microcalcifications constituted 17.4% of mammography findings. In 4.9% of mammography scans, examination did not reveal any pathological lesions. Conclusions: Breast cancer mammograms of women aged up to 45 years do not differ from diagnostic pictures of breast cancer in older women. The diagnostic appearance of breast cancer in 1/3 of the patients involved microcalcifications detectable only on mammograms. All the women with suspicion of breast cancer should have their mammography examinations performed, irrespective of ultrasonography scans.
Executive functions and intraindividual variability following concussion

The long-term outcomes of executive functions and intraindividual variability (IIV; i.e., trial-to-trial or across-task variability in cognitive performance) following concussion are unclear due to inconsistent and limited research findings, respectively. Objective: Responding to these gaps in scientific understanding, the current study aimed to assess the utility of both executive functions and IIV at predicting concussion history. Method: Altogether 138 self-identified athletes (Mage = 19.9 ± 1.91 years, 60.8% female, 19.6% with one concussion, 18.1% with two or more concussions) completed three executive-related cognitive tasks (i.e., n-back, go/no-go, global–local). Ordinal logistic regression analyses examined the joint effect of person-mean and IIV as predictors of concussion status. Results: Only mean response time for the global–local task predicted the number of past concussions, while no IIV variables reached unique significance. Conclusions: IIV research on concussion remains limited; however, the preliminary results do not indicate any additional value of IIV indices above mean performances at predicting past concussion. For executive functions, shifting appears most sensitive at detecting concussion group differences, with past researchers identifying post concussion impairment in attentional processing.
Rapid prototyping for DSP systems with multiprocessors

The authors describe the hardware and software of a system for prototyping digital-signal-processing applications by using commercially available digital-signal processors linked to form multiprocessors. The graphical programming environment makes it easier to program, compile, debug, and test DSP algorithms. The system reduces the cost of application prototyping, making it a feasible step at early design stages. To demonstrate the advantages of their approach, the authors explain how they prototyped a digital audio broadcast system. The complexities encountered highlight the limitations of the system. <<ETX>>