Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A CMOS W-band ×4 frequency multiplier with cascading push-pull frequency doublers

This letter presents a CMOS W-band ×4 frequency multiplier with two cascading push-pull frequency doublers for a W-band frequency synthesizer. A pseudodifferential class-B biased cascode amplifier is adopted for the push-pull frequency doublers to achieve high fundamental rejection and low power consumption. The stacked coplanar spiral transformers are utilized for AC-coupling and single-to-differential transformation. It is fabricated in 65nm CMOS, consumes 16mW from 1.5V power supply, and occupies 0.342mm2. Limited by the frequency range of measurement, the measured output frequency covers from 75 to 110GHz with maximum output power of -14.3dBm at 85.5GHz.
Phosphatidic Acid Plays a Central Role in the Transcriptional Regulation of Glycerophospholipid Synthesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae*

In eukaryotic cells, PA2 is a central precursor for the synthesis of major glycerophospholipids, DAG and TAG, as well as a major signaling lipid. In mammalian cells, PA is implicated as an activator of cell growth and proliferation, vesicular trafficking, secretion, and endocytosis (1–7). In plants, PA is implicated in seed germination and response to stress induced by drought, salinity, and low temperature (3, 4). The signaling roles of PA in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have not received as much attention as they have in higher eukaryotic cells. However, it is known that PA production via phospholipase D-mediated turnover of PC is necessary for suppression of growth and membrane trafficking defects in mutants defective in Sec14p, an essential PI/PC-binding protein (8–10). In addition, PA production via phospholipase D is implicated in Spo20p-mediated fusion of vesicles with the pre-spore membrane during sporogenesis (11, 12). The best studied regulatory function of PA in S. cerevisiae is its role as a signaling molecule in the transcriptional regulation of glycerophospholipid synthesis itself, the major topic of this review. We will focus on the pathways generating and utilizing PA in yeast and the evidence that PA plays a central role in the transcriptional regulation of glycerophospholipid synthesis.
Biofilm microenvironment induces a widespread adaptive amino-acid fermentation pathway conferring strong fitness advantage in Escherichia coli

Bacterial metabolism has been studied primarily in liquid cultures, and exploration of other natural growth conditions may reveal new aspects of bacterial biology. Here, we investigate metabolic changes occurring when Escherichia coli grows as surface-attached biofilms, a common but still poorly characterized bacterial lifestyle. We show that E. coli adapts to hypoxic conditions prevailing within biofilms by reducing the amino acid threonine into 1-propanol, an important industrial commodity not known to be naturally produced by Enterobacteriaceae. We demonstrate that threonine degradation corresponds to a fermentation process maintaining cellular redox balance, which confers a strong fitness advantage during anaerobic and biofilm growth but not in aerobic conditions. Whereas our study identifies a fermentation pathway known in Clostridia but previously undocumented in Enterobacteriaceae, it also provides novel insight into how growth in anaerobic biofilm microenvironments can trigger adaptive metabolic pathways edging out competition with in mixed bacterial communities.
An empirical study of the factors that reduce the effectiveness of coverage-based fault localization

Coverage-based fault localization techniques typically assign a suspiciousness rank to the statements in a program following an analysis of the coverage of certain types of program elements by the failing and passing runs. The effectiveness of existing techniques has been limited despite the fact that researchers have explored various suspiciousness metrics, ranking strategies, and types of program elements. This work aims at identifying the factors that impair coverage-based fault localization. Specifically, we conducted an empirical study in which we assessed the prevalence of the following scenarios: 1) the condition for failure is met but the program does not fail; 2) the faulty statement is executed but the program does not fail; 3) the failure is correlated with a combination of more than one program element possibly of different types; 4) a large number of program elements occurred in all failing runs but in no passing runs. The study was conducted using 148 seeded versions of ten Java programs which included three releases of NanoXML, and seven programs from the Siemens test suite that were converted to Java. The results showed that most of the above scenarios occur frequently.
Strengthening the Case: Prenatal Alcohol Exposure Is Associated With Increased Risk for Conduct Disorder

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between alcohol exposure in pregnancy and offspring conduct disorder symptoms in adolescence and to examine how much this increasingly known association may be mediated by maternal and paternal externalizing diagnoses, including lifetime maternal and paternal alcohol and drug abuse/dependence diagnoses as well as antisocial disorders. Few other studies have examined the contribution of these diagnoses across both parents. METHOD. A population sample of 1252 adolescents (53.8% female; drawn from the Minnesota Twin Family Study) as well as both of their parents completed structured diagnostic interviews to generate lifetime psychiatric diagnoses; mothers were also retrospectively interviewed about alcohol and nicotine use during pregnancy. Linear regression models were used to test the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on adolescents' conduct-disorder symptoms. RESULTS. Prenatal exposure to alcohol was associated with higher levels of conduct-disorder symptoms in offspring, even after statistically controlling for the effects of parental externalizing disorders (illicit substance use disorders, alcohol dependence, and antisocial/behavioral disorders), prenatal nicotine exposure, monozygosity, gestational age, and birth weight. CONCLUSIONS. Prenatal alcohol exposure contributes to increased risk for conduct disorder in offspring.
From utilities to mental models: A critical survey on decision rules and cognition in consumer choice

This work critically discusses a selected body of (mainly experimental) studies on consumer behavior in the light of two general questions. First, can one identify within the vast literature from psychology, marketing, etc., a few stylized facts which might be the grounds of a behavioral theory of consumption parsimonious enough to be useful to economic theorizing, and, at the same time, not in open violation of the evidence on how consumers actually behave? Second, to what extent should such theories be nested into an explicit account of the cognitive processes leading to particular consumption acts? Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Non-Distorted Texture Mapping Using Angle Based Flattening

: This article introduces a new method for surface parameterization for texture mapping. In the ﬁrst step of the algorithm we compute a planar triangulation of the faceted surface, using an Angle Based Flattening (ABF) formulation. This provides a mapping function from a three-dimensional surface to the plane. The ABF formulation deﬁnes the ﬂattening problem as a constrained minimization problem in terms of angles (only). After generating the ﬂat triangulation we compute a mapping from the ﬂat triangulation to a rectangular region. The mapping minimizes the distortion of distances and areas in the parameterization with respect to the original three-dimensional surface. The texture mapping function is generated by combining the two mapping functions. The method is more general and robust than previous methods and is guaranteed to generate a valid solution. It can handle any surface for which a connected, valid, two-dimensional parameterization exists, including surfaces with large curvature gradients. It does not require the boundary of the ﬂat two-dimensional domain to be pre-deﬁned or convex. The ﬂattening step of the algorithm uses the necessary and suﬃcient constraints for a valid two-dimensional triangulation. As a result, the existence of a theoretical solution to the ﬂattening procedure is guaranteed. The second step of the algorithm aims at the preservation of distances in the combined mapping, resulting in a minimal distortion texture mapping.
Downlink distributed beamforming through relays with imperfect CSI

Future wireless systems face challenges in supporting high-rate multimedia streaming with wide coverage area and at low power. In this paper we study cooperative MIMO systems in the context of imperfect channel estimation with per-user quality-of-service constraints with the objective of minimizing the sum transmission power at the source and relays. Simulation results quantify the different performance tradeoffs obtained in incorporating imperfect CSI into the problem formulation as a function of channel estimation accuracy.
Comparative study of different MPPT methods for photovoltaic system

Over many years, a number of tracking control methods of the maximum power point (MPPT) from the photovoltaic (PV) systems have been developed. The performances of these methods under varying environmental conditions vary in terms of energy capture, conversion efficiency, response time and reliability. This paper presents a comparative analysis between different MPPT, that are perturb-and-observe (P&O), incremental conductance(INC), fuzzy logic controller (FLC) and artificial neural networks (ANN). A model of PV module and DC/DC boost converter with the different techniques of MPPTs was simulated using MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results show that the artificial neural networks (ANN) MPPT technique is more efficient when compared to other techniques and presents an estimated fast response of 98.41.
The Relationship between Perceived Organizational Justice with the Meaning at Work and Feeling of Energy at Workplace: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Perceived organizational justice in the workplaces can have different roles for staff. One of its roles is reinforcing the search for meaning and a feeling of vitality and energy. So, based on this, the role of perceived organizational justice dimensions for the meaning at work and a feeling of energy in the workplaces have been examined in this study. For this purpose, through a correlation study, by choosing 296 staff of art and cultural organization of Isfahan municipality who answered the questionnaires of perceived organizational justice, a feeling of energy at work, and the meaning at work, the research hypotheses were examined through Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM). The results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between four dimensions of organizational justice included distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice, and a feeling of energy and the meaning at work. The results of structural equation modeling also showed that firstly, among four dimensions of perceived organizational justice, just an interpersonal justice can predict the meaning at work and a feeling of energy in the workplaces. Also, the results of mediation analysis showed that the meaning at work is a partial mediator variable in the relationship between interpersonal justice and a feeling of energy.
Glucocorticoids regulate transendothelial fluid flow resistance and formation of intercellular junctions

Underwood, Johnnie L. , Collin G. Murphy, Janet Chen, Linda Franse-Carman, Irmgard Wood, David L. Epstein, and Jorge A. Alvarado. Glucocorticoids regulate transendothelial fluid flow resistance and formation of intercellular junctions. Am. J. Physiol. 277 (Cell Physiol. 46): C330–C342, 1999. —The regulation of transendothelial fluid flow by glucocorticoids was studied in vitro with use of human endothelial cells cultured from Schlemm’s canal (SCE) and the trabecular meshwork (TM) in conjunction with computerlinked flowmeters. After 2–7 wk of 500 nM dexamethasone (Dex) treatment, the following physiological, morphometric, and biochemical alterations were observed: a 3to 5-fold increase in fluid flow resistance, a 2-fold increase in the representation of tight junctions, a 10to 30-fold reduction in the mean area occupied by interendothelial ‘‘gaps’’ or preferential flow channels, and a 3to 5-fold increase in the expression of the junction-associated protein ZO-1. The more resistive SCE cells expressed two isoforms of ZO-1; TM cells expressed only one. To investigate the role of ZO-1 in the aforementioned Dex effects, its expression was inhibited using antisense phosphorothioate oligonucleotides, and the response was compared with that observed with the use of sense and nonsense phosphorothioate oligonucleotides. Inhibition of ZO-1 expression abolished the Dex-induced increase in resistance and the accompanying alterations in cell junctions and gaps. These results support the hypothesis that intercellular junctions are necessary for the development and maintenance of transendothelial flow resistance in cultured SCE and TM cells and are likely involved in the mechanism of increased resistance associated with glucocorticoid exposure.
Biochemical markers of bone turnover in benign paroxysmal positional vertigo

Objective Several studies have suggested a possible relationship between recurrent benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) and altered calcium homeostasis in the endolymph of the inner ear. The present study aimed to evaluate the association between Ca2+ and vitamin D status and BPPV occurrence as well as the status of bone biochemical markers in osteoporotic patients who were diagnosed with idiopathic BPPV. Methods The study included total 132 patients who were referred to our clinic between August 2008 and October 2013. Based on the bone mineral density (BMD) results, the subjects were divided into three groups: normal BMD (n = 34), osteopenia (n = 40) and osteoporosis (n = 58). The biochemical markers of bone turnover including serum Carboxy-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (s-CTX), osteocalcin, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and urinary free deoxypyridinoline (u-DPD), were analyzed, along with the serum Ca2+ and vitamin D levels. Results The mean serum calcium, phosphate and creatinine clearance levels were within the standard laboratory reference range. The incidence of vitamin D deficiency was 11.8% (4/34) in the normal BMD group, 15% (6/40) in the osteopenia group and 43.1% (25/58) in the osteoporosis group. There was a positive correlation between the 25(OH)D and BMD results in the patients with BPPV. Among the bone turnover markers, the osteocalcin and u-DPD levels were significantly elevated in the osteoporotic patients with BPPV. Multiple logistic regression analyses showed that osteoporosis and vitamin D deficiency were associated with BPPV. Conclusion Our findings suggest that the prevalence of BPPV in osteoporotic patients is associated with vitamin D deficiency and high bone turnover rates at systemic level, which could disturb local Ca2+ homeostasis in the inner ear.
Recognizing Emotions in Text

People express emotions as part of everyday communication. Emotions can be judged by a combination of cues such as facial expressions, prosodies, gestures, and actions. Emotions are also articulated by written texts. Inspired by works in sentiment analysis, this thesis explores approaches to automatic detection of emotions in text. I draw from emotion theories in the fields of psychology and linguistics, and use natural language processing and machine learning techniques for automatic emotion detection. In this thesis, I describe studies and experiments in manual and automatic recognition of expressions of the six basic emotions (Ekman, 1992) – happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and fear – in text form. The text under study comprises data collected from blogs, representing texts rich in emotion content and therefore suitable for this study. The first task I consider is to prepare a corpus annotated with emotion-related information. The annotations include emotion category out of the aforementioned six; emotion intensity at one of the four levels – high, medium, low, and neutral; and spans of text indicating emotion expressions within sentences. To measure consensus amongst human judges on annotation and to gauge the complexity of the task under investigation, an inter-annotator agreement study is also performed. In my work, I investigate features that can help differentiate emotion from non-emotion. A combination of lexical and semantic features is used to train classifiers for emotion/nonemotion classification. I describe the techniques implemented for discerning the six basic emotion categories. I use a knowledge-based approach for this task based on semantic resources – WordNet-Affect and Roget’s Thesaurus. This approach provides results that significantly surpass the baseline term-counting method. For emotion intensity recognition, I use corpus-based syntactic bigrams to improve the performance of a baseline system that only uses unigrams as features.
Application of Multi-Input Volterra Theory to Nonlinear Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Aerodynamic Systems

This paper presents a reduced-order-modeling approach for nonlinear, multi-degree-of-freedom aerodynamic systems using multi-input Volterra theory. The method is applied to a two-dimensional, 2 degree-of-freedom transonic airfoil undergoing simultaneous forced pitch and heave harmonic oscillations. The so-called Volterra cross kernels are identified and shown to successfully model the aerodynamic nonlinearities associated with the simultaneous pitch and heave motions. The improvements in accuracy over previous approaches that effectively ignored the cross kernels by using superposition are demonstrated.
The Proposed 5 T SRAM Cell 3 . 1 The Proposed 5 T SRAM Cell Configuration

In this paper, a novel single-port five-transistor (5T) Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cell and associated read/write assist are proposed. Amongst them, a word line suppression circuit is to provide a voltage of the respective connected word line to be lower than or equal to the power supply voltage VDD, so that the read/write-ability of the cell can be improved, and the half-selected cells disturbance can be reduced. Furthermore, a voltage control circuit is coupled to the sources corresponding to the driver transistors of each row memory cells. This configuration is aimed to control the source voltages of driver transistors under different operating modes. In addition, a pre-charging circuit is designed to pull up the bit line BL of a selected column to the voltage VDD before the read operation. Finally, with the standby start-up circuit design, the memory cell can be rapidly switched to the standby mode, thereby reducing leakage current in standby.
Protein Transport in Intact and Severed (Anucleate) Crayfish Giant Axons

Abstract: Using video‐enhanced microscopy and a pulse‐radiolabeling paradigm, we show that proteins synthesized in the medial giant axon cell body of the crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) are delivered to the axon via fast (∼62 mm/day) and slow (∼0.8 mm/day) transport components. These data confirm that the medial giant axon cell body provides protein to the axon in a manner similar to that reported for mammalian axons. Unlike mammalian axons, the distal (anucleate) portion of a medial giant axon remains intact and functional for >7 months after severance. This axonal viability persists long after fast transport has ceased and after the slow wave front of radiolabeled protein has reached the terminals. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that another source (i.e., local glial cells) provides a significant amount of protein to supplement that delivered to the medial giant axon by its cell body.
Optimisation by Selection and Compensation: Balancing Primary and Secondary Control in Life Span Development

Individuals as producers of their own life span development are discussed with regard to the major challenges, opportunities, and constraints encountered over the life course. Major challenges of life span development and human behaviour include the need to be selective in choosing life course paths, and the failure proneness of human behaviour. Management mechanisms directed at these challenges can be identified on the societal and the individual level. Socio-structural regulations of life course selectivity and failure are viewed as constraining but also supporting individual life course management. Individual life course management is conceptualised in terms of the model of optimisation by selection and compensation, which is elaborated by applying the life span model of primary and secondary control developed by Heckhausen and Schulz. The integrated model conceptualises optimisation as a higher-order process regulating selection and compensation, so that the long-term potential for primary control is promoted. Primary and secondary control strategies are identified for both selection and compensation, thus yielding four types of life-management strategies. Finally, it is argued that selection and compensation are not adaptive in and of themselves and may become dysfunctional when impairing the long-term potential for primary control.
MID-YEAR PROGRESS REPORT Candidate : Kevin

Descriptions of dramatic scenes occur frequently in fiction books, not only describing the layout and contents of a scene, but often including details such as the speech articulated by characters in a scene, and the movements and actions performed by the characters. Provided these descriptions can be accurately identified and interpreted, they serve as instructions for populating three-dimensional virtual worlds and animations. The primary problem with natural language text is its inherent sparseness in detail and ambiguous nature. During the comprehension of natural language text a human generally fills in much of the missing detail required for the visualisation of the scene using relevant world-knowledge. This research aims to determine the extent to which computational techniques may be used to overcome the ambiguity of natural language texts, with the purpose of locating information that describes the scene.
Epidemiologic evidence of slow growing, nonprogressive or regressive breast cancer: A systematic review

The general aim of this systematic review is to mitigate breast cancer (BC) overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The specific aim is to summarize available data on the occurrence and features of indolent invasive or in situ (DCIS) BC, and precisely survival of untreated cases, prevalence of occult cancers found in autopsies, frequency of regressive BC. PubMed, Embase and Cochrane Library were systematically searched up to 3/31/2014. Eligibility criteria were: cohort studies, case‐control studies, uncontrolled case series assessing survival in women with a diagnosis of BC who did not receive treatment compared to treated women; case series of autopsies estimating the prevalence of undiagnosed BC; cohort studies, case‐control studies, uncontrolled case series, case reports assessing the occurrence of spontaneous regression of BC in women with a confirmed histology diagnosis. Untreated BC: 8 cohort studies and 12 case series (3593 BC) were included. In three controlled cohort studies (diagnoses 1978–2006), the 5‐years overall survival was 19–43%. Occult BC: 8 case series (2279 autopsies) were included. The prevalence of invasive BC undiagnosed during lifetime range was 0–1.5%, while for DCIS the range was 0.2–14.7%. Spontaneous regression: 2 cohort studies, 3 case reports, 1 case series included. In the cohort studies the relative risk of regression for screen detected compared with nonscreened BC was estimated as 1.2 and 1.1. It seems plausible that around 10% of invasive BC are not symptomatic during life, and that one fith of BC patients if untreated would be alive after 5 years. Around 1 of 10 screen‐detected BC may regress according two studies.