Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sympathetic regulation of vascular function in health and disease

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is known to play a pivotal role in short- and long-term regulation of different functions of the cardiovascular system. In the past decades increasing evidence demonstrated that sympathetic neural control is involved not only in the vasomotor control of small resistance arteries but also in modulation of large artery function. Sympathetic activity and vascular function, both of which are key factors in the development and prognosis of cardiovascular events and disease, are linked at several levels. Evidence from experimental studies indicates that the SNS is critically influenced, at the central and also at the peripheral level, by the most relevant factors regulating vascular function, such as nitric oxide (NO), reactive oxygen species (ROS), endothelin (ET), the renin-angiotensin system. Additionally, there is indirect evidence of a reciprocal relationship between endothelial function and activity of the SNS. A number of cardiovascular risk factors and diseases are characterized both by increased sympathetic outflow and decreased endothelial function. In healthy subjects, muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) appears to be related to surrogate markers of endothelial function, and an acute increase in sympathetic activity has been associated with a decrease in endothelial function in healthy subjects. However, direct evidence of a cause-effect relationship from human studies is scanty. In humans large artery stiffness has been associated with increased sympathetic discharge, both in healthy subjects and in renal transplant recipients. Peripheral sympathetic discharge is also able to modulate wave reflection. On the other hand, large artery stiffness can interfere with autonomic regulation by impairing carotid baroreflex sensitivity.
PHONETIC AND AUDITORY TRADING RELATIONS BETWEEN ACOUSTIC CUES IN SPEECH PERCEPTION: PRELIMINARY RESULTS

When two different acoustic cues contribute to the perception of a phonetic distinction, a trading relation between the cues can be demonstrated if the speech stimuli are phonetically ambiguous. Do the cues trade also in unambiguous stimuli? Four different trading relations were examined using a fixed-standard AX discrimination task wi th stimuli either from the vicinity of the phonetic category boundary or from within a phonetic category. The results suggest that certain trading relations (presumably of audi­ tory origin) hold in both conditions while others are tied to the perception of phonetic contrasts and thus appear to be specific to the speech mode.
POLARIMETRIC SAR TOMOGRAPHY USING l2,1 MIXED NORM SPARSE RECONSTRUCTION METHOD

The growing interest of Radar community in retrieving the 3D re∞ectivity map makes both polarimetric SAR interferometry and SAR tomography hot topics in recent years. It is expected that combining these two techniques would provide much better discriminating ability for scatterers lying in the same pixel. Generally, this is about reconstruction of scattering proflles from limited and irregular polarimetric measurements. As an emerging technique, Compressive Sensing (CS) provides a powerful tool to achieve the purpose. In this paper, we propose a '2;1 mixed norm sparse reconstruction method for jointly processing multibaseline PolInSAR data based on multiple measurement vector compressive sensing (MMV-CS) model, and also address the signal leakage problem with MMV-CS inversion by presenting a window based iterative algorithm. The results obtained by processing simulated data show that the proposed method possesses superior performance advantage over existing methods.
Ethics of patriotism: NFL players’ protests against police violence 1

This article traces debates about African American professional football players’ protests during the national anthem. After reviewing over 400 media texts, we found that each side operates from mirrored ethical positions that lead to competing conceptions of patriotism. We use the term “patriarchal patriotism” for people opposed to the protests since they hold that institutions of authority protect citizens, and therefore citizens owe them loyalty and deference. We use “constructive patriotism” for protest supporters since they hold that citizens have an ethical obligation to oppose inequities and work on the nation through protest and dissent. Each position, however, operates as two sides of the same racial–patriotic coin. We argue that the strategic embrace of patriotism by protest proponents limits the radical, transformative potential of the protests by operating on a nationalistic political terrain that suggests the racial state can operate for racial benevolence.
Experimental Models of Microvascular Immunopathology: The Example of Cerebral Malaria

Human cerebral malaria is a severe and often lethal complication of Plasmodium falciparum infection. Complex host and parasite interactions should the precise mechanisms involved in the onset of this neuropathology. Adhesion of parasitised red blood cells and host cells to endothelial cells lead to profound endothelial alterations that trigger immunopathological changes, varying degrees of brain oedema and can compromise cerebral blood flow, cause cranial nerve dysfunction and hypoxia. Study of the cerebral pathology in human patients is limited to clinical and genetic field studies in endemic areas, thus cerebral malaria (CM) research relies heavily on experimental models. The availability of malaria models allows study from the inoculation of Plasmodium to the onset of disease and permit invasive experiments. Here, we discuss some aspects of our current understanding of CM, the experimental models available and some important recent findings extrapolated from these models.
A New Formulation of Coupled Hidden Markov Models

Among many variations of more complex hidden Markov models, coupled hidden Markov models (CHMM) have recently attracted increased interests in many practical applications. This paper describes a new CHMM formulation in which the joint transition probability is modeled as a linear combination of the marginal transition probabilities and the weights used to capture the interactions among multiple HMMs. The new formulation greatly reduces the parameter space for CHMM. New approximated forward procedure and training algorithm are proposed to reduce the computational complexity to a practical level. Experimental results show that our new CHMM formulation perform better in our recognition task on both artifical and real data compared to non-coupled HMMs. And our approximated training algorithm still converges to local maxima even though there is no theorectical proof thus provides an efficient practical algorithm for our CHMM formulation.
Reconfigurable, retargetable bignums: a case study in efficient, portable Lisp system building

In the paper, use of names like '-F&' and '*&' will imply these semantics, and furthermore, the Lucid Common Lisp compiler ought to emit the most efficient, flxnum-only arithmetic instructions for such operators. In the explanations below, note that 'I ' used as a operator does not mean 'logics] or,' as in the C language, but rather 'juxtaposition,' as in msthmetical logic. The sense of the 'juxtaposition' is base arithmetic; for example, when the base is 10, then 315 means just $5. In general, when dealing with "bigits'wbignum digits--Zlll means (+ (ash x b l t s p e r b l g S t ) y).
Indirect adaptive control for a class of unknown nonlinear systems based on LS-SVM

An indirect adaptive control approach based on LS-SVM is proposed for a class of nonlinear dynamic systems with unknown nonlinearities in this paper. The LS-SVM technique is employed to perform approximating unknown nonlinear functions. The updating rule of LS-SVM parameters is derived from Lyapunov stability theory. The proposed control law can guarantee that the output tracking error and the states of the obtained closed-loop systems are uniformly ultimately bounded. The effectiveness and robustness of the presented control scheme are demonstrated in the case of van der Pol system.
Consumer Acceptance of Eco-Labeled Fish: A Mexican Case Study

Fish eco-labeling is a market-based incentive program for sustainable fisheries. This paper examines consumers’ acceptance of eco-labeled fish by using data from a pilot study conducted in a coastal area of northwestern Mexico. An ordered probit model was applied, using 364 observations. The results show that most respondents favor the idea of eco-labeled fish as a sustainable option and know that this is a costlier option. Income level, consumers’ occupation and frequency of fish consumption are factors taken into account in the buying decision. Price was not a statistically significant factor affecting purchase decision. The study suggests that employed consumers with knowledge of labels may prioritize their demand for eco-labeled fish. Thus, providing a clear definition of sustainability that increases consumer awareness might be a promising strategy in developing the market for eco-labeled fish. The results and their implications could be employed as an element for future development of consumer policies related to fish sustainability.
Optimal power loading for OFDM transmissions over underspread Rayleigh time-varying channels

OFDM renders multipath channels with finite memory equivalent to parallel flat fading subchannels, over which equalization amounts to simple phase compensation. If the channel status information is known at the transmitter side, optimal power loading across subchannels is possible. Users mobility, time and carrier asynchronism introduce variations in the equivalent channel impulse response setting the channel coherence time as a boundary for the OFDM symbol duration. Optimal design should incorporate such variations, possibly avoiding the overhead of frequent training. Most adaptive modulation schemes assume knowledge of the channel response and flat fading. Modeling the channel taps as correlated Gaussian random processes, we develop the optimal power/bit loading strategies for frequency selective fading, based on the knowledge of the channel past estimates and correlation. In practice the channel sample correlation are obtained as a by-product of channel estimation which, however, does not need to be performed on a block by block basis.
Retinal vessel tracking using bilateral filter based on Canny method

This paper presents a new method to measure retinal blood vessel with sub-pixel accuracy. The method is based on a modified Canny edge detection method with a bilateral filter. There are three stages of the method. First, the bilateral filter is used to remove the vessel background noises, and then the Canny detector is used to detect all vessel edges. Second, vessel sample profiles crossed vessel boundaries are obtain based on Canny edges. Third, the new vessel positions are measured from the Gaussian fits of the sample profiles. The validation of the method is tested by real images with outputs of the vessel walls and center lines in sub-pixel accuracy.
Transformation of Wiktionary entry structure into tables and relations in a relational database schema

This paper addresses the question of automatic data extraction from the Wiktionary, which is a multilingual and multifunctional dictionary. Wiktionary is a collaborative project working on the same principles as the Wikipedia. The Wiktionary entry is a plain text from the text processing point of view. Wiktionary guidelines prescribe the entry layout and rules, which should be followed by editors of the dictionary. The presence of the structure of a Wiktionary article and formatting rules allows transforming the Wiktionary entry structure into tables and relations in a relational database schema, which is a part of a machine-readable dictionary (MRD). The paper describes how the flat text of the Wiktionary entry was extracted, converted, and stored in the specially designed relational database. The MRD contains the definitions, semantic relations, and translations extracted from the English and Russian Wiktionaries. The parser software is released under the open source license agreement (GPL), to facilitate its dissemination, modification and upgrades, to draw researchers and programmers into parsing other Wiktionaries, not only Russian and English.
Combining marker-based mocap and RGB-D camera for acquiring high-fidelity hand motion data

Motion capture data has been pivotal to the success of creating realistic animation for human characters. There are a number of public full-body motion databases available, but large and heterogeneous databases for hand articulations are not available. In this paper, we introduce a novel acquisition framework for acquiring a wide range of high-fidelity hand motion data. Our key idea is to leverage marker position data recorded by a twelve-camera optical motion capture system and RGB/Depth data obtained from a single Microsoft Kinect camera. We formulate the hand motion capture problem in a nonlinear optimization framework by maximizing consistency between the reconstructed motion and observed measurement. We introduce an efficient optimization technique to estimate the optimal hand pose that best matches observed data. We have demonstrated the power and effectiveness of our system by capturing a wide variety of delicate hand articulations, even in case of significant self-occlusion.
The Programming Language Wars: Questions and Responsibilities for the Programming Language Community

The discipline of computer science has a long and complicated history with computer programming languages. Historically, inventors have created language products for a wide variety of reasons, from attempts at making domain specific tasks easier or technical achievements, to economic, social, or political reasons. As a consequence, the modern programming language industry now has a large variety of incompatible programming languages, each of which with unique syntax, semantics, toolsets, and often their own standard libraries, lifetimes, and costs. In this paper, we suggest that the programming language wars, a term which describes the broad divergence and impact of language designs, including often pseudo-scientific claims made that they are good or bad, may be negatively impacting the world. This broad problem, which is almost completely ignored in computer science, needs to be acted upon by the community.
A new low cost fault tolerant solution for mesh based NoCs

In this paper a new fault tolerant routing algorithm with minimum hardware requirements and extremely high fault tolerance for 2D-mesh based NoCs is proposed. The LCFT (Low Cost Fault Tolerant) algorithm, removes the main limitations (forbidden turns) of the famous XY. So not only many new routes will be added to the list of selectable paths as well as deadlock freedom, but also it creates high level of fault tolerance. All these things are yielded only by the cost of adding one more virtual channel (for a total of two). Results show that LCFT algorithm can work well under almost bad conditions of faults in comparison with the already published methods.
Ultraluminous X‐ray Sources: Beambags and Optical Counterparts

A significant fraction of ultraluminous X‐ray sources appear to be embedded in observable ionized nebulae that take the form of large, several 100 pc diameter interstellar bubbles. Here we review optical observations of these bubbles, their importance for our understanding of the nature of ULXs, the energetics involved and their formation and evolution. Among the results obtained are new arguments against conventional superbubble scenarios and hypernova remnants, and we present the case in favour of ULX‐wind/jet driven bubbles. We report the discovery of new ULXs in very large SNR candidates in nearby galaxies, and finally present an image of a triple X‐ray source coincident with the radio‐bright bubble S26 in the galaxy NGC 7793 which appears to be a clone of the microquasar SS433/W50 system.
Improved sparse representation using adaptive spatial support for effective target detection in hyperspectral imagery

With increasing applications of hyperspectral imagery (HSI) in agriculture, mineralogy, military, and other fields, one of the fundamental tasks is accurate detection of the target of interest. In this article, improved sparse representation approaches using adaptive spatial support are proposed for effective target detection in HSI. For conventional sparse representation, an HSI pixel is represented as a sparse vector whose non-zero entries correspond to the weights of the selected training atoms from a structured dictionary. For improved sparse representation, spatial correlation and spectral similarity of adjacent neighbouring pixels are exploited as spatial support in this context. The size and shape of the spatial support is automatically determined using both adaptive window and adaptive neighbourhood strategies. Accordingly, a solution based on greedy pursuit algorithms is also given to solve the extended optimization problem in recovering the desired sparse representation. Comprehensive experiments on three different data sets using both visual inspection and quantitative evaluation are carried out. The results from these data sets have indicated that the proposed approaches help to generate improved results in terms of efficacy and efficiency.
Area-constrained wirelessly-powered UWB SoC design for small insect localization

This paper describes a wireless-powered UWB system-on-a-chip (SoC) tag for area-constrained localization applications. An antenna-rectifier co-design methodology optimizes sensitivity under area constraints. A 300-nA power management unit (PMU) and low-voltage (0.8-V) UWB TX reduces tag load and required rectifier output voltage. The rectifer, PMU and UWB TX are integrated in 65nm CMOS and the rectifier demonstrates state-of-the-art -30.7 dBm sensitivity for 1 V output voltage with only 1.3 cm2 antenna area. Wireless measurements demonstrate sub-10 cm range resolution at range exceeding 10 m.
Nanowastes and the environment: Using mercury as an example pollutant to assess the environmental fate of chemicals adsorbed onto manufactured nanomaterials

Emerging nanotechnologies hold great promise for creating new means of detecting pollutants, cleaning polluted waste streams, and recovering materials before they become wastes, thereby protecting environmental quality. Studies focusing on the different advantages of nanoscience and nanotechnology abound in the literature, but less research effort seems to be directed toward studying the fate and potential impacts of wastes that will be generated by this technology. Using a combination of biogeochemical and toxicological methods, we conducted a preliminary investigation of the potential environmental fate of Hg as an example pollutant bound to nanomaterials used in treatment of gas effluents. Methylation of Hg sorbed onto SiO2‐TiO2 nano‐composites was used as a proxy for Hg bioavailability to sedimentary microorganisms, and the FluoroMetPLATE™ assay was used to assess the toxicity of both virgin and Hg‐loaded SiO2‐TiO2 nanocomposites. Our results show that the bioavailability of Hg sorbed onto SiO2‐TiO2 nanocomposites to sedimentary microorganisms is pH dependent, with decreasing reaction rates as the pH increases from 4 to 6. Toxicity tests conducted using liquid extracts obtained by leaching of Hg‐loaded SiO2‐TiO2 nanocomposites with the synthetic precipitation leaching procedure solution showed an average inhibition of 84% (vs 57% for virgin SiO2‐TiO2 nanocomposites). These results suggest that Hg sorbed onto engineered nanoparticles could become bioavailable and toxic if introduced into natural systems. Accordingly, studies focusing on the environmental implications of nanomaterials should include determination of the fate and impacts of pollutants that enter the environment bound to engineered nanomaterials.
Load Balancing in a Cluster Computer

This paper proposes a load balancing algorithm for distributed use of a cluster computer. It uses load information including CPU queue length, CPU utilisation, memory utilisation and network traffic to decide the load of each node. This algorithm is compared to an algorithm using only the CPU queue length. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm performs well
Temporal Dynamics of User Interests in Tagging Systems

Collaborative tagging systems are now deployed extensivelyto help users share and organize resources.Tag prediction and recommendation systems generallymodel user behavior as research has shown that accuracycan be significantly improved by modeling users’preferences. However, these preferences are usuallytreated as constant over time, neglecting the temporalfactor within users’ interests. On the other hand, littleis known about how this factor may influence predictionin social bookmarking systems. In this paper, weinvestigate the temporal dynamics of user interests intagging systems and propose a user-tag-specific temporalinterests model for tracking users’ interests overtime. Additionally, we analyze the phenomenon of topicswitches in social bookmarking systems, showing that atemporal interests model can benefit from the integrationof topic switch detection and that temporal characteristicsof social tagging systems are different fromtraditional concept drift problems. We conduct experimentson three public datasets, demonstrating the importanceof personalization and user-tag specializationin tagging systems. Experimental results show that ourmethod can outperform state-of-the-art tag predictionalgorithms. We also incorporate our model within existingcontent-based methods yielding significant improvementsin performance.
Recent Developments, Characteristics, and Potential Applications of Electrochemical Biosensors

The objective of this study is to analyze the technical importance, performance, techniques, advantages, and disadvantages of the biosensors in general and of the electrochemical biosensors in particular. A product of reaction diffuses to the transducer in the first generation biosensors (based on Clark biosensors). The mediated biosensors or second generation biosensors use specific mediators between the reaction and the transducer to improve sensitivity. The second generation biosensors involve two steps: first, there is a redox reaction between enzyme and substrate that is reoxidized by the mediator, and eventually the mediator is oxidized by the electrode. No normal product or mediator diffusion is directly involved in the third generation biosensors, direct biosensors. Based on the type of transducer, current biosensors are divided into optical, mass, thermal, and electrochemical sensors. They are used in medical diagnostics, food quality controls, environmental monitoring, and other applications. These biosensors are also grouped under two broad categories of sensors: direct and indirect detection systems. Moreover, these systems could be further grouped into continuous or batch operation. Therefore, amperometric biosensors and their current applications are focused on more in detail since they are the most commonly used biosensors in monitoring and diagnosing tests in clinical analysis. Problems related to the commercialization of medical, environmental, and industrial biosensors as well as their performance characteristics, their competitiveness in comparison to the conventional analytical tools, and their costs determine the future development of these biosensors.