Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of TEC gradients and higher-order ionospheric disturbances on spaceborne single-pass SAR interferometry

This paper analyzes the impact of a spatially inhomogeneous ionosphere on spaceborne single-pass SAR interferometry. For this, linear TEC gradients and higher-order irregularities are considered. It is shown that TEC gradients as low as 0.01 TECU/km may already noticeably affect the accuracy of an L-band cross-track interferometer, causing, e.g., horizontal and vertical offsets in the order of 1-2 m. Higher-order perturbations of the electron plasma lead to additional errors that vary nonlinearly with the length of the interferometric baseline. To predict these errors, we model the ionospheric irregularities as the product of a vertical profile and a second-order stationary stochastic process with a 3-D power-law spectrum. The interferometric errors are then derived via a set of projection integrals that express the expected phase error variance as a function of the baseline length and the angular extent of the synthetic aperture. With this model, we show that the phase errors of an L-band single-pass SAR interferometer may reach several tens of degrees under medium turbulence conditions. Since these phase errors are highly correlated among neighboring resolution cells, they cannot be reduced by multi-looking, thereby posing a possible challenge for multiple baseline interferometry and SAR tomography.
The Ins and Outs of Caveolar Signaling: m2 Muscarinic Cholinergic Receptors and eNOS Activation versus Neuregulin and ErbB4 Signaling in Cardiac Myocytes a

Abstract: Endothelial cells constitutively express the NOS isoform eNOS, which generates NO in response to specific extracellular signals to regulate vascular smooth muscle tone, vascular permeability, and platelet adhesion, among other actions. In addition to coronary vascular and endocardial endothelium, both atrial and ventricular myocytes express eNOS, the activation of which is also dependent on specific intracellular and extracellular signals. eNOS is targeted in cardiac myocytes to caveolae in plasma membranes and, in the case of cardiac myocytes, possibly T‐tubular membranes as well. eNOS targeting to caveolae in cardiac myocytes requires co‐translational myristoylation and subsequent palmitoylation for efficient targeting of the enzyme to the specialized lipid microdomains characteristic of caveolae. Although eNOS also contains a caveolin binding motif, this is insufficient for correct targeting of eNOS to caveolae. Recent evidence obtained from ventricular myocytes of mice with targeted disruption of the eNOS gene indicates that the lack of functional eNOS interrupts muscarinic cholinergic control of ICA‐L in these cells. eNOS‐/‐mice are hypertensive and develop cardiac hypertrophy as they age, and these animals also exhibit an accelerated degree of vascular remodeling in response to injury. Reconstitution experiments confirm both the essential role of eNOS in coupling m2 AchR signaling to the control of ICA‐L and myocyte automaticity and the importance of eNOS subcellular localization within caveolae in mediating this signal transduction pathway. It appears that translocation into caveolae is essential for signaling. However, this is not the case with all receptors associated with caveolae.
Tissue-specific regulation of Chk1 expression by p53.

The regulation of Chk1, a critical protein kinase involved in G(2) phase arrest, has been a subject of recent research. Chk1 phosphorylates tumor suppressor p53 at multiple sites, while p53 has been shown to downregulate Chk1 expression under stress conditions in vitro, suggesting negative feedback between the two checkpoint proteins. Using the p53 knockout mouse model, we demonstrate by Western blot and immunohistochemistry that mChk1 expression is induced in spleen, thymus, and dermal fibroblasts and is reduced in lung and testis in p53(-/-) mice compared to p53(+/+) controls. The mChk1 protein was undetectable in heart, kidney, and skin, whereas abundant expression was observed in brain and liver in both p53(+/+) and p53(-/-) mice. These data indicate that p53 regulates Chk1 expression in a tissue-specific manner.
Illocutionary Acts in Declarative Mood: A Functional Grammar Approach

This research focuses on two main points: (1) What kinds of illocutionary acts roles can be identified in Declarative Mood ? ; (2) What t he most kinds of illocutionary acts can be used in Declarative Mood ? The method applied in t his research is descriptive qualitative method. This research employs Functional Grammar Ap proach (FGA). The result of this research shows that (1) Based on the roles of illoc utionary acts, making a statement or giving information can be identified as Direct Illocutiona ry Acts in Declarative Mood and giving direction such as getting someone to do something o r stop doing something, giving advice, and giving warning, and also giving exclamation such as expressing emotion can be identified as Indirect Illocutionary Acts in Declarative Mood; (2 ) Based on the kinds of illocutionary acts and roles, mostly Direct Illocutionary Acts can be used in Declarative Mood.
Public Awareness and Knowledge of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) Control Activities in Abuja, Nigeria

The need to engage the public in Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) control activities has become imperative in the context of morbidity reduction through preventive chemotherapy and community participation. Therefore, a survey was conducted among the general public to assess their knowledge and awareness of NTDs control activities in Nigeria. A simple questionnaire was administered to the general public attending a job fair in Abuja, Nigeria. Of the 461 respondents, a significant proportion 337 (73.1%) have heard of NTD before, but only 291 (63.1%) have good knowledge about NTDs. However, among the specific NTDs, only the control of onchocerciasis (50.8%) was of average public awareness in Nigeria, while all the other NTDs control activities were significantly less known to the general public. 397 (87.1%) stated that government support for NTD control activities is poor and were willing to assist to advocate for NTDs control. This survey demonstrates that despite government's numerous activities towards the control of NTDs in Nigeria, there is little sensitization of the general public. There is a need for policy changes that would raise the participation and involvement of the general public in NTDs control activities for sustainability.
Molecular cloning of CD31, a putative intercellular adhesion molecule closely related to carcinoembryonic antigen

cDNA clones encoding CD31 have been isolated by transient expression. The sequence of CD31 expressed on human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) is identical to that expressed on the monocyte-like cell line HL60. In HUVEC. CD31 is concentrated in regions of cell-cell contacts. CD31 is a member of the Ig superfamily and is most closely related to the carcinoembryonic antigen CEA, consisting of four contiguous C2 domains. The localization of CD31 to regions of cell-cell contacts, and the sequence similarity to CEA, a known intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM), strongly suggest that CD31 may function as an ICAM, possibly mediating endothelial cell-cell contacts and also promoting interactions between leukocytes and endothelial cells.
Surround view pedestrian detection using heterogeneous classifier cascades

Pedestrian detection is of particular interest to the automotive domain, where an accurate estimation of a pedestrian's position is the first step towards reliable collision avoidance systems. Driven by rapid advances in technology, several systems to detect pedestrians in front of a moving vehicle have been proposed in recent years. This paper introduces a novel pedestrian detection system for low-speed driving scenarios, capable of detecting pedestrians in a 360-degree fashion around the vehicle. Detected pedestrians are displayed to the driver in an intuitive way using a dynamically generated Birds's Eye View image. Furthermore, a novel classifier architecture to efficiently handle this complex application scenario is provided. By combining the processing speed of a classifier cascade with the discriminative power of a multi-stage neural network, the system achieves state of the art performance while retaining real-time capability. To keep classifier complexity low, a new feature-based inter-stage information transfer method is presented. All classifier components are compared to recent pedestrian detection approaches and evaluated on a real-world data set.
Feature selection in software defect prediction: A comparative study

Software has become a vital part of human's life - hence building defect free software is a must. Various studies have been carried out to predict defects, probability of defect prone modules, and implementation of defect prediction for real life softwares. The focus of this paper is towards building a framework using attribute selection for defect prediction based on five classifiers IBk, KStar, LWL, Random Tree and Random Forest. Performance comparison is done on the basis of accuracy and ROC values. The result and analysis shows that the framework has reduced total number of attributes used for each dataset by 6 folds on average, also LWL performed better than other four classifiers when tested with 10 Cross Validation (10CV) and percentage split of 66%.
Do students perceptions of the purpose and use of feedback change between year 1, 2 and 3 of a programme? A comparative study.

3 Question/challenge 3 Literature review 4 Project Aims 6 Methodology 6 Ethical issues 7 Participants 7 Focus group 7 Focus group results 8 The purpose of feedback 8 Timing and mechanisms of feedback 9 The impact and benefit of feedback on students 9 Questionnaire 10 Questionnaire Results 11 Demographics of respondents 11 Data Analysis 12 What do you consider the purpose of feedback to be? 12 What feedback should be given? 13 When feedback should be given? 15 How feedback is used? 17 Conclusions 18 Contribution 23 What contribution might this work make to the literature? 23 References 24
[Continuing medical education].

December 2014, Vol. 104, No. 12 Tuberculous meningitis (TBM) is a frequent cause of meningitis in South Africa (SA) and has a dismal prognosis. [1] In a study from a Cape Town hospital, TBM accounted for more than half of adult meningitis cases over a 6-month period; at 6-month follow-up mortality was 48%. [1] HIV co-infection, particularly in patients with severe immunosuppression, increases the risk of disseminated forms of tuberculosis (TB), such as meningitis, and contributes significantly to the TBM burden in high HIV/TB settings. The diagnosis of TBM is often complicated and optimal management strategies are uncertain; such challenges are likely to contribute to poor outcome in affected patients. [2]
Perceived risk of cancer and practice of cancer prevention behaviors among employees in an oncology center.

METHODS A survey of oncology center employees was conducted to determine those factors associated with perceived risk of cancer and compliance with preventive care guidelines. Five hundred six employees participated in the survey. RESULTS The average perceived absolute risk of developing cancer in the next 20 years was 29%. Perceived risk for cancer was higher among women than men. Among men, only current smoking and duration of employment, adjusting for age, were significantly associated with the perceived risk of developing cancer. For women, in addition to smoking, personal experience with cancer among family and friends and perceived health status were significantly associated with the perceived risk of cancer. The practice of cancer preventive behaviors was unrelated to personal risk perception. Less than one-fourth of participants age 40 years and older had a sigmoidoscopy in the last 3 years and less than one-third reported having had their stool checked for blood. The majority of women had a pap smear in the past 10 years; 89% had a pap smear in the past 3 years. Eighty-eight percent of women over 40 and 94% of women over 50 had ever had a mammogram; the majority of these women had had mammograms in the past two years. CONCLUSION Perceived risk of developing cancer was significantly higher than in projected probabilities based on the incidence of cancer in the United States. Despite the high perceived risk of developing cancer, the practice of colon cancer screening was low. Factors other than perception of personal risk of cancer may be important in encouraging participation in screening programs.
New renal drug development to face chronic renal disease

Introduction: For the first time in 2012, chronic kidney diseases were added to WHO disease list because of their impact on morbidity/mortality and their substantial impact on the cost to the health care system. Although representing a clear unmet medical need and a huge business case for the pharmaceutical industry, its clinical treatment still mainly relies on drugs invented in the 1980s used for controlling blood pressure. Areas covered: In this review, the authors aim to elucidate why renal drug development is feasible today. The article provides a particular focus on the treatments that target the pathways involved in inflammation, fibrosis and the core mechanisms driving the vicious cycle responsible for disease progression and organ function loss. Expert opinion: Currently, it is plausible to develop effective therapeutics for renal diseases with a plethora of approaches available for their development at a preclinical and clinical level. Furthermore, the relevance of biomarkers and the use of surrogate rare disease indications as proof of mechanism for faster and/or smaller clinical development are now possible; and these developments could revolutionize the way we treat renal disease in the future.
Fully-integrated low-voltage high-efficiency CMOS rectifier for wirelessly powered devices

We present in this paper a new full-wave CMOS rectifier topology. It uses bootstrapped capacitors to reduce the effective threshold voltage of selected MOS switches. It achieves a significant increase in overall power efficiency and low voltage-drop. The structure does not require complex circuit design. The highest voltages available in the circuit are used to drive the gates of selected transistors in order to reduce the leakages and to lower their channel on-resistance, while having high transconductance. The proposed rectifier was implemented using the standard TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS process and then characterized with the SpectreS simulator. When connected to a source of 3.3 V nominal peak amplitude, it allows improving the power efficiency by 11%. For low source voltages (0.8 V peak), the average output voltage improvement is up to 210% over previously published results. The circuit was laid out and reported post-layout simulation results were found to be in good agreement with schematics-based simulations.
Face detection with the modified census transform

Illumination variation is a big problem in object recognition, which usually requires a costly compensation prior to classification. It would be desirable to have an image-to-image transform, which uncovers only the structure of an object for an efficient matching. In this context the contribution of our work is two-fold. First, we introduce illumination invariant local structure features for object detection. For an efficient computation we propose a modified census transform which enhances the original work of Zabih and Woodfill. We show some shortcomings and how to get over them with the modified version. S6econdly, we introduce an efficient four-stage classifier for rapid detection. Each single stage classifier is a linear classifier, which consists of a set of feature lookup-tables. We show that the first stage, which evaluates only 20 features filters out more than 99% of all background positions. Thus, the classifier structure is much simpler than previous described multi-stage approaches, while having similar capabilities. The combination of illumination invariant features together with a simple classifier leads to a real-time system on standard computers (60 msec, image size: 288/spl times/384, 2GHi Pentium). Detection results are presented on two commonly used databases in this field namely the MIT+CMU set of 130 images and the BioID set of 1526 images. We are achieving detection rates of more than 90% with a very low false positive rate of 10/sup -7/%. We also provide a demo program that can be found on the Internet http://www.iis. fraunhofer.de/bv/biometrie/download/.
Complexity Issues in Automated Addition of Time-Bounded Liveness Properties

Abstract : In this paper, we concentrate on synthesis of real-time programs modeled by Alur and Dill timed automata for automatic addition of different types of time-bounded liveness properties. Time-bounded liveness (also called time-bounded response) that something good will happen soon, in a certain amount of time - captures a wide range of requirements for specifying real-time and embedded systems. We show that the problem of automatic addition of a time-bounded liveness property to a given timed automaton while maintaining maximal nondeterminism is NP-hard in the size of locations of the input automaton. Furthermore, we show that by relaxing the maximality requirement we can devise a sound and complete algorithm that adds a time-bounded liveness property to a given timed automaton, while preserving its existing MTL specification. This synthesis method is useful in adding properties that are later discovered as a crucial part of a program. Moreover, we show that addition of interval time-bounded liveness, where the good thing should not happen sooner than a certain amount of time, is also NP-hard in the size of locations even without maximal nondeterminism. Finally, we show that adding time-bounded and interval time-bounded as well as unbounded liveness properties are all PSPACE-complete in the size of the input timed automaton.
Quantum Racah coefficients and subrepresentation semirings.

Let G be a group and A a G -algebra. The subrepresentation semiring of A is the set of subrepresentations of A endowed with operations induced by the algebra operations. The introduction of these semirings was motivated by a problem in material science. Typically, physical properties of composite materials are strongly dependent on microstructure. However, in exceptional situations, exact relations exist which are microstructure-independent. Grabovsky has constructed an abstract theory of exact relations, reducing the search for exact relations to a purely algebraic problem involving the product of SU(2)-subrepresentations in certain endomorphism algebras. We have shown that the structure of the associated semirings can be described explicitly in terms of Racah coefficients. In this paper, we prove an analogous relationship between Racah coefficients for the quantum algebra Ŭq(sl2) and semirings for endomorphism algebras of representations of Ŭq(sl2). We generalize the construction of subrepresentation semirings to the Hopf algebra setting. For Ŭq(sl2), we compute these semirings for the endomorphism algebra of an arbitrary complex finite-dimensional representation. When the representation is irreducible, we show that the subrepresentation semiring can be described explicitly in terms of the vanishing of q -Racah coefficients. We further show that q -Racah coefficients can be defined entirely in terms of the multiplication of subrepresentations.
Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Inhibition and the Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes

Dipeptidyl peptidase (DPP)-4 is a complex enzyme that exists as a membrane-anchored cell surface peptidase that transmits intracellular signals via a short intracellular tail and as a second smaller soluble form present in the circulation. DPP-4 cleaves a large number of chemokines and peptide hormones in vitro, but comparatively fewer peptides have been identified as endogenous physiological substrates for DPP-4 in vivo. Both glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) are endogenous physiological substrates for DPP-4, and chemical inhibition of DPP-4 activity, or genetic inactivation of DPP-4 in rodents, results in increased levels of intact bioactive GIP and GLP-1. Furthermore, mice and rats with genetic inactivation or inhibition of DPP-4 exhibit improved glucose tolerance, elevated levels of GLP-1 and GIP, and resistance to diet-induced obesity and hyperglycemia. Sustained DPP-4 inhibition lowers blood glucose via stimulation of insulin and inhibition of glucagon secretion and is associated with preservation of β-cell mass in preclinical studies. Although DPP-4 cleaves dozens of regulatory peptides and chemokines in vitro, studies of mice with genetic inactivation of incretin receptors demonstrate that GIP and GLP-1 receptor–dependent pathways represent the dominant mechanisms transducing the glucoregulatory actions of DPP-4 inhibitors in vivo. The available preclinical data suggests that highly selective DPP-4 inhibition represents an effective and safe strategy for the therapy of type 2 diabetes. DPP-4 is a widely expressed cell surface peptidase that exhibits a complex biology encompassing cell membrane–associated activation of intracellular signal transduction pathways, cell-cell interaction, and enzymatic activity exhibited by both the membrane-anchored and soluble forms of the enzyme (1). DPP-4, also originally known as the lymphocyte cell surface marker CD26, or as the adenosine deaminase (ADA)-binding protein, is a 766–amino acid serine protease that preferentially cleaves peptide hormones containing a position two alanine or proline. The human gene encoding DPP has been localized …
LMX dissimilarity and coworkers’ interpersonal emotion When my supervisor dislikes you more than me: The effect of dissimilarity in leader- member exchange on coworkers’ interpersonal emotion and perceived help (In press in the Journal of Applied Psychology)

According to balance theory (Heider, 1958), when two coworkers develop different levels of leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships with their supervisor, a triadic relational imbalance will arise among the three parties that may result in hostile sentiments and poor social interactions between them. This study examines the consequences and psychological processes of (dis)similar levels of LMX on the interpersonal interactions between coworkers. Using data from two independent studies, the results of social relations analyses show that (1) actual (dis)similarity in LMX between coworkers A and B increases A’s feelings of contempt for B and decreases A’s perception of help received from B (Study 1); (2) A is more likely to experience contempt for B when A perceives that he/she has a higher or lower level of LMX compared to B than when A perceives that his/her level of LMX is similar to B’s (Study 2); and (3) these relationships only hold true for employees with a high social comparison orientation (SCO) in both Studies 1 and 2. Particularly, in Study 1, we also show that contempt is a crucial mediator that transmits the interactive effect of LMX (dis)similarity and SCO on perceptions of help received from coworkers. Furthermore, an average level of perceived help from coworkers is positively related to the sales performance of individual employees.
Preventive Health Psychology: An Interface of Social and Clinical Psychology

Many of the leading causes of death in the United States are associated with un-healthful lifestyles and behaviors Reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with these preventable conditions is primarily a behavioral, not a medical, problem. The solution to these health problems lies in prevention rather than treatment Both clinical and social psychologists can play major roles in the next revolution in health care. It is proposed that we combine those aspects of clinical and social psychology that involve helping and influencing people to create a subfield of behavioral health: preventive health psychology.