Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
E2F-1 represses transcription of the human telomerase reverse transcriptase gene

The ends of human chromosomes (telomeres) lose up to 200 bp of DNA per cell division. Chromosomal shortening ultimately leads to senescence and death in normal cells. Many human carcinoma lines are immortal in vitro, suggesting that these cells have a mechanism for maintaining the ends of their chromosomes. Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein complex that synthesizes telomeric DNA onto chromosomes using its RNA component as template. Telomerase activity is found in most tumor cells, but is absent from normal cells. Little is known about how normal human cells repress telomerase (hTERT) gene expression. Mice carrying an E2F-1 null mutation develop a variety of malignant tumors, suggesting that this transcription factor has a tumor suppressor function. To determine mechanisms by which E2F-1 suppresses tumor formation, we examined the role of this transcription factor in regulation of the hTERT promoter in human cells. We identified two putative E2F-1-binding sites proximal to the transcriptional start site of the hTERT promoter. Mutation of these sites produced dramatic increases in promoter activity. Overexpression of E2F-1 but not a mutant E2F-1 repressed hTERT promoter activity in reporter gene assays. This repression was abolished by mutation of the E2F-1-binding sites in the hTERT promoter. Human cancer cell lines stably overexpressing E2F-1 exhibited decreased hTERT mRNA expression and telomerase activity. We conclude that E2F-1 has an atypical function as a transcriptional repressor of the hTERT gene in human cells.
Health as a Complete State: The Added Value in Work Performance and Healthcare Costs

Objective: Health is widely believed to be more than the absence of illness, yet no previous research has documented whether organizations would benefit if occupational health moved beyond an “absence of illness” model. Methods: Cross-sectional data from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) study were used to compare productivity outcomes and health care use among individuals in (1) complete ill health, (2) incomplete health, and (3) complete health. Results: Across the outcomes, individuals characterized as being completely healthy reported the greatest productivity and the lowest health care use. By contrast individuals in incomplete health had intermediate levels on outcomes and individuals in complete ill-health had the poorest outcomes. Conclusion: There is additional benefit of moving occupational health priorities from health as the absence of illness to health as more than the absence of illness.
10 GaN-based Light-Emitting Diodes

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) offer several advantages over traditional light sources, such as smaller size, longer lifetime, higher efficiency, and greater mechanical ruggedness. Continuing developments in LED technology are producing devices with increased output power and efficiency as well as a wider range of colors [1]. Recent progress in the fabrication of GaN-based compound semiconductors enabled the practical breakthrough of short-wavelength LEDs that emit green, blue, or ultraviolet light [2]. In particular, compact ultraviolet (UV) light sources are currently of high interest for applications in whitelight generation, short-range communication, water purification, and biochemical detection. Prime candidates are nitride LEDs with AlGaN quantum wells. However, their performance is still below the requirement for practical applications. We present here a self-consistent physics-based three-dimensional (3D) simulation of an AlGaN/GaN LED and study performance limiting internal mechanisms. Good agreement with measured device characteristics [3] is achieved by refinement of the physical model and by calibration of material parameters. Based on this agreement, we are able to analyze the practical impact of microscale and nanoscale physical effects such as current crowding, carrier leakage, nonradiative recombination, and built-in polarization. The device structure is given in the next section. Section 10.3 describes the theoretical models and the material parameters used. The main simulation results are presented and discussed in Sect. 10.4.
Automatic synthesis of reactive agents

This paper introduces a new approach to designing smart control chips that enables automatic synthesis of real-time control systems from agent specifications. An agent specification is compiled into a hardware description format, such as RTL-VHDL (Register Transfer Level-VLSI Hardware Description Language) or RTL Verilog, which is synthesized using computer-assisted tools to develop ASIC masks or FPGA configurations. A rule-based specification language called Layered Argumentation System (LAS) is defined and a sound and complete mapping to Verilog is developed. LAS combines fuzzy reasoning and nonmonotonic reasoning. This enables chip designers to capture commonsense knowledge and concepts having varying degrees of confidence collaboratively and incrementally.
A waveguide-based two-step approach for measuring complex permittivity tensor of uniaxial composite materials

A rectangular waveguide-based two-step approach for measuring the complex permittivity tensor of uniaxial highly lossy nonmagnetic composite materials in the S-band is presented. In the proposed scheme, two independent sets of reflection and transmission coefficient data for each material-under-test (MUT) are measured by aligning the electric field vector of the dominant TE/sub 10/ mode in the rectangular waveguide parallel and perpendicular to the fiber orientation of the uniaxial sample, respectively. The complex permittivity tensor of the MUT is determined from these measured scattering data in two successive steps. The first step uses the newly proposed analytical approach, which can resolve the ambiguity problem, commonly encountered with samples of electrical length larger than a wavelength. In the second step, nonlinear least square optimization algorithms are employed, where the material parameters using the first step are now used as the initial guess. The proposed two-step approach is valid for multilayered structures, and the local minima problem commonly encountered with optimization routines are also avoided. A number of carbon-fiber composite materials along and, transverse to the fiber orientation are measured using the proposed method. Finally, a brief uncertainty analysis, to study the effect of air-gaps on waveguide measurements, is carried out.
‘If you have good skin, you are god. If you have bad skin, you are a piece of rubbish’. Mastery of shame and anger in treatment-resistant body dysmorphic disorder: a single case study

Abstract Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterized by a preoccupation with a perceived flaw in one's appearance, and is often emotionally linked with early adverse experiences. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is effective but may not resolve shame and anger that can be at the emotional root of BDD. This paper presents a single-case study of a 25-year-old man with a history of treatment-resistant BDD characterized by a preoccupation with facial skin linked to a developmental history of sexual abuse and bullying. He was treated at a national residential specialist unit for 16 weeks during which time he received three individual 1-hour weekly CBT sessions (42 sessions overall), and participated in the residential group programme and therapeutic community. CBT was enhanced using imagery rescripting, compassion-focused therapy and family work to specifically target shame and anger-based past experiences. Severity of BDD was assessed with the BDD-Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (BDD-YBOCS) at pre-, mid-, post-, 3-month and 18-month follow-ups; a weekly self-report measure (Appearance Anxiety Inventory), and a client-drawn self-portrait of his perceived skin flaws at pre- and post-treatment. Treatment outcome was positive. The BDD-YBOCS dropped 94% from the extremely severe range pre-treatment to the sub-clinical range post-treatment. BDD symptoms improved progressively throughout treatment, and when the emotions of anger and shame were resolved (as reported by the client) fell to the non-clinical range. Gains were maintained at 18-month follow-up. We conclude that enhancing CBT for BDD using emotion-focused techniques is to be recommended, particularly when emotional memories continue to affect body shame.
Discrete Asian Barrier Options

A partial diierential equation method based on using auxiliary variables is described for pricing discretely monitored Asian options with or without barrier features. The barrier provisions can be applied to either the underlying asset or to the average. They may also be of either instantaneous or delayed eeect (i.e. Parisian style). Numerical examples demonstrate that this method can be used for pricing oating strike, xed strike, American, or European options. In addition, examples are provided which indicate that an upstream biased quadratic interpolation is superior to linear interpolation for handling the jump conditions at observation dates. Moreover, it is shown that deening the auxiliary variable as the average rather than the running sum is more rapidly convergent for American-Asian options.
Is U.S. Influence Dwindling in Latin America? Citizens’ Perspectives

Abstract:Although the United States remains the most important external actor in Latin America in terms of investment, trade and foreign assistance, scholars and pundits have argued that the influence of the U.S. in the region has diminished in recent years. Using 2014 survey data from the Americas Barometer, this article examines to what extent Latin American citizens believe that the United States is still an influential country in the region. Furthermore, it explores how citizens of 18 Latin American countries perceive the influence of the United States on their own country and why some citizens see it in a positive light while others perceive it as negative. While Latin Americans consider the United States to be, by large, the most influential country in the region, they also believe that its influence will diminish in the next ten years. Marked differences are found in the perception of citizens from countries that belong to the ALBA group. Regression analysis shows that Latin Americans with lower education, lower income and those who live in rural areas are more likely to have a positive view of the United States’ influence on their country. Lower levels of attention to political news as well as a lower perception of political efficacy are also correlated with a more positive view of U.S. influence. Finally, Latin Americans who place themselves to the right of the political spectrum and those with higher levels of trust in domestic political institutions are also prone to have a better opinion about the type of influence that the U.S. exerts on their country.
Molecular Population Genetics

Molecular population genetics aims to explain genetic variation and molecular evolution from population genetics principles. The field was born 50 years ago with the first measures of genetic variation in allozyme loci, continued with the nucleotide sequencing era, and is currently in the era of population genomics. During this period, molecular population genetics has been revolutionized by progress in data acquisition and theoretical developments. The conceptual elegance of the neutral theory of molecular evolution or the footprint carved by natural selection on the patterns of genetic variation are two examples of the vast number of inspiring findings of population genetics research. Since the inception of the field, Drosophila has been the prominent model species: molecular variation in populations was first described in Drosophila and most of the population genetics hypotheses were tested in Drosophila species. In this review, we describe the main concepts, methods, and landmarks of molecular population genetics, using the Drosophila model as a reference. We describe the different genetic data sets made available by advances in molecular technologies, and the theoretical developments fostered by these data. Finally, we review the results and new insights provided by the population genomics approach, and conclude by enumerating challenges and new lines of inquiry posed by increasingly large population scale sequence data.
MagAttack: remote app sensing with your phone

By tracking changes in electromagnetic radiation footprint emitted from computers using a magnetometer on commodity mobile devices, a malicious attacker can easily learn the secrets of the computer's owner without physically peeping at or hacking into the victim's system. Targeting at Applications and Web browsers, we present MagAttack, which uses the built-in magnetometer on commodity mobile phones to infer which App is running or which webpage the user is browsing on a nearby computer, as well as finer-grained information about victim's interests, habits, etc. Our preliminary results show that MagAttack is independent of the earth's magnetic filed, model of phones, and magnetometer sampling rates. We also conducted an in-the-wild evaluation where an instrumented participant uses her laptop as usual and MagAttack can detect when she opens 10 different popular Apps. MagAttack achieves a classification accuracy of up to 98%.
A Novel Routing Strategy at Intersections in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) is a special case about MANET(Mobile Ad Hoc Network), has also received extensive attention as a part of ITS (Intelligent Transportation System). Although it is a promising technology, due to different kinds of factors (such as high speed, particularity of road, traffic system, etc), the routing technology becomes the important challenging problem in Vehicle Ad Hoc Network. We assume each vehicle is equipped with a short range wireless communication device, as is a controller node placed in every intersection with data forwarding system. This paper sets up a mobility model at intersection and present mathematical analysis by the use of Markov analysis method, then proposes a novel routing strategy and shows the performance of the proposed scheme is better than the traditional flood one by simulation.
Research Work at the Mit Leg Lab and the Mit Biomechatronics Group

Since September 2001, I have worked as a postdoctoral associate with the MIT Leg Laboratory and the MIT Biomechatronics Group, also serving as the lab co-director from 2002-2004. My research accomplishments over the last three and a half years include the following: 1) Advancing the control of stable and biologically realistic movements based on the principle of the spin angular momentum regulation (Popovic et al. 2002; 2004a). I discovered this novel phenomenon in human movements and proposed that this principle may be utilized as biomimetic stability guidance for a large class of activities. This model was successfully tested in control simulation work by my group (Popovic et al. 2004a; Hofmann et al. 2004) and successfully employed (Kajita et al. 2003; 2004) on a currently most advanced humanoid robot HRP-2 by the world's leading robotics group at AIST, Japan. Control of the robotic system based on spin regulation is now widely accepted as an exciting new field in legged robotics. 2) Hypothesizing the existence of two fundamental dynamic balance strategies (Popovic & Herr 2003), which were later confirmed by direct observations-I identified a distinct switching mechanism in between these strategies in human movements (Popovic et al. 2004a; d; 2005). 3) Discovering the first entire human body movement primitives (Popovic et al. 2004b) founded on the century-old concept of Central Pattern Generators (Brown 1911; 1914), and employed these synergies as a basis of the biomimetic dimensional reduction for the control of a humanoid robot (Popovic et al. 2004c). 4) Advancing the novel control methodologies and rapid optimization techniques for humanoid systems with many degrees of freedom suffering from Bellman's " curse of dimensionality " (Popovic et al. 2004a;c, Popovic & Herr 2005). 5) Developing the humanoid biomimetic control strategies based on the learning from demonstration techniques for balancing in double support (Hofmann, Popovic and Herr 2002). 6) Numerous contributions to hardware design, manufacture and assembly of experimental testing apparatus for DARPA Artificial Muscle Project. 7) Numerous contributions in shaping and designing majority of the Biomechatronics Group projects over the last three and half years. and several other researchers. Below is a brief summary of the projects to which I have contributed over the last three and a half years: Template for rotational stability in walking Biomechanical investigations observing small moments about the body's CM (Popovic et al. 2002) and small spin angular momentum (Popovic et al. 2004a; Herr & Popovic 2005) have …
DReaM: A Novel System for Joint Source Separation and Multi-Track Coding

Active listening consists in interacting with the music playing, has numerous applications from pedagogy to gaming, and involves advanced remixing processes such as generalized karaoke or respatialization. To get this new freedom, one might use the individual tracks that compose the mix. While multi-track formats loose backward compatibility with popular stereo formats and increase the file size, classic source separation from the stereo mix is not of sufficient quality. We propose a coder/decoder scheme for informed source separation. The coder determines the information necessary to recover the tracks and embeds it inaudibly in the mix, which is stereo and has a size comparable to the original. The decoder enhances the source separation with this information, enabling active listening.
A Lossless Watermarking Using Histogram Shifting Algorithm

The watermarking of digital images, audio, video and multimedia products are used for copyright ownership and verifying originality of contents. Domain wavelet transform used in the visible watermark does not provide security for watermark. Visible watermark methods do not provide safety for both watermark and carrier image. To overcome that , lossless watermarking using histogram shifting algorithm is proposed. The carrier image carries watermark . The carrier image can be stored lossless after the extraction of watermark from it. Histogram Shifting algorithm is used to embed watermark logo in the carrier image . By using the Rijndael algorithm , the error is spread to the entire image. So the illegal user can not access the watermark image from carrier image. This algorithm can guarantee the quality of the image and safety of watermark. Add Roundkey and shift rows transformation provides more security for encryption than other methods. Keywords-lossless watermarking; visible watermark; rijndael
Quantization Aspects in LDPC Key Reconciliation for Physical Layer Security

For physical-layer security, key reconciliation procedures are needed to correct key differences that can arise as a consequence of independent noise at the two ends of a reciprocal link. We assume either a random link in a mobile environment or use reconfigurable antenna elements to randomize the channel, such that it allows for frequent key generation. We apply LDPC codes to reconcile the keys on both sides. In here, we derive the LLRs taking into account the underlying quantization.
Network architecture for joint failure recovery and traffic engineering

Today's networks typically handle traffic engineering (e.g., tuning the routing-protocol parameters to optimize the flow of traffic) and failure recovery (e.g., pre-installed backup paths) independently. In this paper, we propose a unified way to balance load efficiently under a wide range of failure scenarios. Our architecture supports flexible splitting of traffic over multiple precomputed paths, with efficient path-level failure detection and automatic load balancing over the remaining paths. We propose two candidate solutions that differ in how the routers rebalance the load after a failure, leading to a trade-off between router complexity and load-balancing performance. We present and solve the optimization problems that compute the configuration state for each router. Our experiments with traffic measurements and topology data (including shared risks in the underlying transport network) from a large ISP identify a "sweet spot" that achieves near-optimal load balancing under a variety of failure scenarios, with a relatively small amount of state in the routers. We believe that our solution for joint traffic engineering and failure recovery will appeal to Internet Service Providers as well as the operators of data-center networks.
Duration Estimation by Partial Trace Evaluation

Hard and soft real time systems require, for each process, the worst-case execution time (WCET), which is needed by the scheduler’s admission tests and subsequently limits a task’s execution time during operation. A worst-case execution time analysis is usually performed in two distinct steps: first the program is analyzed to extract semantic information and determine maximal bounds on the number of iterations for each basic block. In a second step the duration of the different program’s instructions is computed with respect to the used hardware platform. Modern systems with preemption and modern architectures with non-constant instruction duration (due to pipelining, branch prediction and different level of caches) hinder a fast and precise computation of a program’s WCET. We present a technique to approximate the instruction duration on modern processors using precise block bounds. Instead of simulating the CPU behavior on all the possible paths we apply the principle of locality limiting the effects of a given instruction to a restricted time allowing us to analyze large applications in
Fast solution techniques for a class of optimal trajectory planning problems with applications to automated spray coating

Optimal trajectory planning problems are often formulated as constrained variational problems. In general, solutions to variational problems are determined by appropriately discretizing the underlying objective functional and solving the resulting nonlinear differential equation(s) and/or nonlinear programming problem(s) numerically. These general solution techniques often require a significant amount of time to be computed, and therefore are of limited value when optimal trajectories need to be frequently computed and/or recomputed. In this paper, a realistic class of optimal trajectory planning problems is defined for which the existence of fast numerical solution techniques are demonstrated. To illustrate the practicality of this class of trajectory planning problems and the proposed solution techniques, three optimal trajectory planning problems for spray coating applications are formulated and solved. Based on the proposed discretization technique, it is shown that these problems can be reduced to either a linear program or a quadratic program, which are readily solved.
Answer Finding Guided by Question Semantic Constraints

As part of the task of automated question answering from a large collection of text documents, the reduction of the search space to a smaller set of document passages that are actually searched for answers constitutes a difficult but rewarding research issue. We propose a set of precision-enhancing filters for passage retrieval based on semantic constraints detected in the submitted questions. The approach improves the performance of the underlying question answering system in terms of both answer accuracy and time performance.