Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design approaches for EHV OHL "compact" tower grounding systems

The lightning performance of an EHV overhead transmission line (OHL) largely depends on tower grounding behavior; when high ground flash density values are expected, a proper design of grounding arrangements, focused on their high frequency behavior instead of the conventional power frequency analysis, can significantly reduce the backflashover rate (BFR) of the OHL. A technical optimization is reported, aiming at improving the BFR of an EHV OHL in Brazil, which crosses a region with widely different soil resistivity values, resulting in a compact tower grounding system design. Although exhibiting a larger resistance at power frequency value, the proposed compact grounding system offers better impulse responses than conventional buried counterpoises.
Environmental Uncertainty and Scanning Behavior: An Assessment of Top-Level Hotel Executives

ABSTRACT Serious concern by hoteliers pertaining to how managers' perceptions of environmental uncertainty may influence the incidence and scope of environmental scanning in the company's strategy formulation process has not been matched by appropriate research in the area. It has been argued that objective measures of the instability, or volatility associated with the heterogeneous and diverse hospitality business environment may be less strongly related to the strategy-making process than subjective perceptions to which managers respond. The findings here suggest that hotel executives perceive higher levels of hostility, dynamism, and complexity in the task environment when compared to the remote environment and tend to scan the environment with greater frequency and more broadly in response to increased uncertainty.
Two Plant–Viral Movement Proteins Traffic in the Endocytic Recycling Pathwayw⃞

Many plant viruses exploit a conserved group of proteins known as the triple gene block (TGB) for cell-to-cell movement. Here, we investigated the interaction of two TGB proteins (TGB2 and TGB3) of Potato mop-top virus (PMTV), with components of the secretory and endocytic pathways when expressed as N-terminal fusions to green fluorescent protein or monomeric red fluorescent protein (mRFP). Our studies revealed that fluorophore-labeled TGB2 and TGB3 showed an early association with the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and colocalized in motile granules that used the ER-actin network for intracellular movement. Both proteins increased the size exclusion limit of plasmodesmata, and TGB3 accumulated at plasmodesmata in the absence of TGB2. TGB3 contains a putative Tyr-based sorting motif, mutations in which abolished ER localization and plasmodesmatal targeting. Later in the expression cycle, both fusion proteins were incorporated into vesicular structures. TGB2 associated with these structures on its own, but TGB3 could not be incorporated into the vesicles in the absence of TGB2. Moreover, in addition to localization to the ER and motile granules, mRFP-TGB3 was incorporated into vesicles when expressed in PMTV-infected epidermal cells, indicating recruitment by virus-expressed TGB2. The TGB fusion protein-containing vesicles were labeled with FM4-64, a marker for plasma membrane internalization and components of the endocytic pathway. TGB2 also colocalized in vesicles with Ara7, a Rab5 ortholog that marks the early endosome. Protein interaction analysis revealed that recombinant TGB2 interacted with a tobacco protein belonging to the highly conserved RME-8 family of J-domain chaperones, shown to be essential for endocytic trafficking in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. Collectively, the data indicate the involvement of the endocytic pathway in viral intracellular movement, the implications of which are discussed.
Policy based generic autonomic adapter for a context-aware social-collaborative system

Autonomic computing was intended to tackle the growing complexity of Information Technology infrastructure by making it self-managing and self-adaptive. The core idea is to endow the system with enough intelligence to monitor continuously all aspects of the changing environments and resources, and to control management decisions according to high-level policies. For several years, great efforts have been devoted to the study of system performance, security, and fault management issues, but without much attention paid to self-adaptive social-collaborative system development. This may be because it is difficult to create such autonomic systems, which must sense and adapt to ongoing social context changes and support cyber-physical collaborations with minimal human involvement. These collaborations will have interactions between human and non-human entities that need to be self-managing with adaptive goals. This paper tackles the problem by introducing a new Generic Autonomic Social-Collaborative Framework (GASCF). It focuses on a high-level social-context based self-adaptive system, and its use of intelligent agents called autonomic adapters(AAs) that are driven by predefined policies. The paper describes the architecture of autonomic adapters and the general representation of policies. It explores the effectiveness of the approach by applying it to a large-scale collaborative healthcare service called GRaCE (https://www.egrist.org/) that supports mental-health within the United Kingdom National Health Service and other organisations.
From Self-Innovation to International Standardization: A Case Study of TD-SCDMA in China

Time Division Synchronous Address (TD-SCDMA) is one of three 3G standards in China, the two others being Wideband Code Division Synchronous Address (WCDMA) from Europe and Code Division Synchronous Address (CDMA2000) from the US. TD-SCDMA is a Chinese-developed standard currently applied only in the Chinese market. From the very beginning, TD-SCDMA has caught tremendous attention. As a government-led standardization, it demands continuous technical progress, industry accumulation, and national confidence. At the time of its inception, China was not yet the second largest economy in the world; furthermore, as a developing country and technology latecomer, it faced many difficulties and challenges. Thus, it is interesting to note how the Chinese government reached the decision to apply standardization and prepare the relevant conditions to fully commercialize TD-SCDMA in China. After five years of TD-SCDMA application, more information has become available to help answer the questions above. Thus, in the current paper, we introduce the evolution of TD-SCDMA, from its very early stage technology to a standard approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), until its first launch during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The paper provides arguments and evidence to show that TD-SCDMA is a successful case because it has been selected by the ITU as one of the 3G standards for commercial application, even though it is a standard used only domestically in a country, which is considered a technology latecomer with low technological capabilities.
Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks on Additive Manufacturing Systems

Additive manufacturing systems, such as 3D printers, emit sounds while creating objects. Our work demonstrates that these sounds carry process information that can be used to indirectly reconstruct the objects being printed, without requiring access to the original design. This is an example of a physical-to-cyber domain attack, where information gathered from the physical domain, such as acoustic side-channel, can be used to reveal information about the cyber domain. Our novel attack model consists of a pipeline of audio signal processing, machine learning algorithms, and context-based post-processing to improve the accuracy of the object reconstruction. In our experiments, we have successfully reconstructed the test objects (designed to test the attack model under various benchmark parameters) and their corresponding G-codes with an average accuracy for axis prediction of 78.35% and an average length prediction error of 17.82% on a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) based additive manufacturing system. Our work exposes a serious vulnerability in FDM based additive manufacturing systems exploitable by physical-to-cyber attacks that may lead to theft of Intellectual Property (IP) and trade secrets. To the best of our knowledge this kind of attack has not yet been explored in additive manufacturing systems.
Zur korrekten Interpretation der Ergebnisse einer log-linearen Regression bei Heteroskedastie. Eine methodische Untersuchung mit einer Anwendung auf die relativen Löhne von Ausländern / Correctly Interpreting the Results from a Log-linear Regression under Heteroskedasticity. Methods and an Applicati

Summary The common estimator for relative adjusted wage differentials based on dummy variables in loglinear regressions is inconsistent in the presence of group-specific heteroskedasticity. The direction and magnitude of the bias are derived. At the same time, a heteroskedasticity-consistent estimator is proposed. The formulas are exact for normally distributed errors and approximations otherwise. An example on the wage determination in the German labor market shows that ignoring the problem of heteroskedasticity will lead to an underestimation of the relative wage gap between Germans and Immigrants, since the wages of immigrants are relatively less dispersed. Evidence from the literature as well as an independent analysis using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1996 yield a downward bias of up to 25 percent. The importance of these results extend beyond the case of dummy variables to the general problem of Computing expectations of retransformed variables. Zusammenfassung Die übliche Schätzfunktion zur Bestimmung der relativen Lohndifferenz mittels Dummyvariable in einer log-linearen Regressionsfunktion ist inkonsistent, falls gruppenspezifische Heteroskedastie vorliegt. Die Richtung und Größenordnung der Verzerrung wird abgeleitet. Ein Fallbeispiel zur Lohnbestimmung am deutschen Arbeitsmarkt zeigt, daß eine Vernachlässigung dieses Problemes zu einer Unterschätzung des Lohnvorteiles von Deutschen gegenüber zugewanderten Arbeitnehmern führt, da die Löhne von Ausländern eine geringere Streuung aufweisen. An Beispielen aus der Literatur wie auch in einer eigenständigen Analyse mittels Daten des Deutschen Sozioökonomischen Panels für das Jahr 1996 werden Verzerrungen von bis zu 25 Prozent nachgewiesen.
The Baseline Pattern and Age-related Developmental Metabolic Changes in the Brain of Children with Autism as Measured on Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography Scan

[18F] 2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose positron emission tomography-computed tomography scan was performed on 45 children with autism to study the baseline pattern and age-related developmental changes in the brain metabolism. Median standardized uptake values (SUVs) were compared with published healthy control data. Results showed that, in contrary to control data, the median SUVs in children with autism decrease linearly with increase in age. As compared to controls, autism children below 5 years showed greater metabolism and older children showed lower metabolism. In autism group, comparison of absolute SUVs within different regions of the brain revealed relatively lower metabolism in amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, caudate nucleus, cerebellum, mesial temporal lobe, thalamus, superior and middle temporal pole, and higher metabolic uptake in calcarine fissure and Heschl's gyrus. These results help in understanding the baseline metabolism and developmental changes of brain among different age groups in autism.
Do Politics in Europe Benefit from Politicising Corruption?

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation.
Seasonal female brain plasticity in processing social vs. sexual vocal signals

While cerebral plasticity has been extensively studied and demonstrated – during ontogenetic development, few studies have considered adult plasticity in different social contexts using relevant social communication signals. Communication requires adaptability throughout the life of an individual, especially in species for which breeding periods (when intersexual signaling prevails) are interspersed with more ‘social’ (non‐sexual) periods when intrasexual bonding prevails. In songbirds, structure or frequency of songs or song elements may convey different information depending on the season. This is the case in the European starling, where some song structures characterize social bonds between females while other song structures are more characteristic of male courtship. We hypothesized that the female perceptual system may have adapted to these changes in song structure and function according to season, and we tested for potential seasonal brain plasticity. Electrophysiological recordings from adult female starlings during playback of song elements with different functions showed clear seasonal (breeding/non‐breeding) changes in neuronal responses in the primary auditory area. The proportion of responsive sites was higher in response to social (non‐sexual) songs during the non‐reproductive season, and higher in response to sexual songs during the reproductive season.
Serum Oxidized Protein and Prostate Cancer Risk within the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial

To evaluate the role of oxidative stress in prostate cancer risk, we analyzed serum levels of protein carbonyl groups in 1,808 prostate cancer cases and 1,805 controls, nested in the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial that found finasteride decreased prostate cancer risk. There were no significant differences in protein carbonyl levels in baseline samples between those later diagnosed with prostate cancer and those without at the end of study biopsy. Adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for the 4th quartile of protein carbonyl level for the combined, placebo, and finasteride arms were 1.03 (95% CI, 0.85-1.24), 0.88 (95% CI, 0.69-1.12), and 1.27 (95% CI, 0.94-1.71), respectively. There were no significant associations between carbonyl level and risk when analyzing high-grade and low-grade disease separately, nor did finasteride affect protein oxidation levels. The results of this large nested case-control study do not support the hypothesis that oxidative stress, at least as measured by protein carbonyl level, plays a role in prostate cancer. Cancer Prev Res; 3(4); 478–83. ©2010 AACR.
Robust 3D Motion Tracking for Robotic-Assisted Beating Heart Surgery

The past decades have witnessed the notable development of minimally invasive surgery (MIS). The benefits of this modality of surgery for patients are numerous, shortening convalescence, reducing trauma and surgery costs. In this context, robotic assistance aims to make the surgical act more intuitive and safer. In the domain of cardiac MIS, heartbeat and respiration represent two important sources of disturbances. Even though miniaturized versions of heart stabilizers have been conceived for the MIS scenario, residual motion is still considerable and has to be manually canceled by the surgeon. In this thesis, the focus is put on computer vision techniques for estimating the 3D motion of the heart relying solely on natural structures on the heart surface for active compensation of physiological motions. Two main contributions on the subject of motion compensation for robotized cardiac MIS are proposed. The first is a visual tracking method for estimating the 3D deformation of a region of interest on the heart surface. A thin-plate spline model is used for representing the heart surface deformations and a novel efficient parameterization for 3D tracking using stereo endoscopic images is proposed. The method is robust to illumination variations and large tissue deformations. The second contribution is a robust visual tracking method using motion prediction. A time-varying dual Fourier series for modeling the quasi-periodic beating heart motion is proposed. For estimating the parameters of the Fourier series, a probabilistic framework is based on the Extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used. The visual tracking method is integrated in the heart motion prediction framework, creating an unified framework for estimating the temporal motion and spatial deformation of the heart surface. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Devising a Practical Model for Predicting Theatrical Movie Success: Focusing on the Experience Good Property

This study attempts to devise a new theoretical framework to classify and develop predictors of box office performance for theatrical movies. Three dependent variables including total box office, first-week box office, and length of run were adopted. Four categories of independent variables were employed: brand-related variables, objective features, information sources, and distribution-related variables. Sequel, actor, budget, genre (drama), Motion Picture Association of America rating (PG and R), release periods (Summer and Easter), and number of first-week screens were significantly related to total box office performance.
Visceral leishmaniasis in Omani children: a review

Summary A retrospective study was undertaken of 33 children with visceral leishmaniasis admitted to Sultan Qaboos University Hospital (SQUH), Oman between 1993 and 1999. The aim was to study the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of visceral leishmaniasis in children in Oman. All presented with fever, anaemia and splenomegaly. Hepatomegaly and lymphadenopathy were present in 88% and 39% of children, respectively. All had iron deficiency anaemia. Hypertriglyceridaemia is a new observation. Diagnosis in all cases was confirmed by histological demonstration of Leishmania amastigotes in bone marrrow (32 subjects) or splenic aspirate (one subject). All children were treated with sodium stibogluconate, 14 needed blood transfusion or blood products and all but two responded well. There were two deaths from associated complications (6% mortality).
Microsatellite Instability and Programmed Cell Death-Ligand 1 Expression in Stage II/III Gastric Cancer: Post Hoc Analysis of the CLASSIC Randomized Controlled study.

OBJECTIVE We investigated microsatellite instability (MSI) status and programed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression as predictors of prognosis and responsiveness to chemotherapy for stage II/III gastric cancer. BACKGROUND The clinical implications of MSI status and PD-L1 expression in gastric cancer have not been well-elucidated. METHODS Tumor specimens and clinical information were collected from patients enrolled in the CLASSIC trial-a randomized controlled study of capecitabine plus oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy. Five quasi-monomorphic mononucleotide markers were used to assess tumor MSI status. PD-L1 expressions of tumor and stromal immune cells were evaluated using immunohistochemistry. RESULTS Of 592 patients, 40 (6.8%) had MSI-high (MSI-H) tumors. Among 582 patients available for immunohistochemistry evaluation, PD-L1 was positive in tumor cells (tPD-L1) of 16 patients (2.7%) and stromal immune cells (sPD-L1) of 165 patients (28.4%). Multivariable analysis of disease-free survival (DFS) showed that MSI-H and sPD-L1-positivity were independent prognostic factors [hazard ratio 0.301 (0.123-0.736), 0.714 (0.514-0.991); P = 0.008, 0.044), as were receiving chemotherapy, age, tumor grade, and TNM stage. Although adjuvant chemotherapy improved DFS in the microsatellite-stable (MSS) group (5-year DFS: 66.8% vs 54.1%; P = 0.002); no benefit was observed in the MSI-H group (5-year DFS: 83.9% vs 85.7%; P = 0.931). In the MSS group, sPD-L1-negative patients, but not sPD-L1-positive patients, had significant survival benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy compared with surgery only (5-year DFS: 66.1% vs 50.7%; P = 0.001). CONCLUSION MSI status and PD-L1 expression are clinically actionable biomarkers for stratifying patients and predicting benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy after D2 gastrectomy for stage II/III gastric cancer.
Supramolecular Collagen Assemblies a

The family of triple-helical proteins known as collagens exhibits a higher degree of structural polymorphism than any other fibrous protein. In order to fill their structural role, collagen molecules aggregate into a variety of tissue-specific forms. These include the network structures formed in basement membranes by type IV collagen, the discrete aggregates described for type VI collagen, and the D-periodic cylindrical fibrils formed by interstitial collagens in many tissues. We will address only the latter D-periodic fibrils and the remarkable diversity that this fibrillar form shows. From tissue to tissue there are differences in the orientation of fibrils, and in the diameters and the density of packing of the fibrils in the tissue. This variation continues at the molecular level, where there are tissue-specific differences in the lateral packing of individual molecules into fibrils. Even the characteristic axial D period shows some variation. In most tissues a clear axial repeat of 67 nm is present, but shorter values have been reported for skin',' and in mineralized bone: and the axial repeat is not clearly visualized in the fibrils of cartilage and vitreous. This diversity in fibril structure undoubtedly relates to the specific mechanical and structural properties required for different connective tissues, and understanding the basis of fibril diversity will help clarify the basis of tissue specificity. One approach to the study of these variations in fibril structure is to use X-ray diffraction to determine the structure at high resolution so that we can localize the positions of the molecules and model the interactions between side chains and possibly carbohydrate groups. We will summarize the current knowledge from X-ray diffraction work and indicate some directions and ideas that may lead to a better understanding of how various connective tissues are constructed and maintained.