Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Photovoltaic plant array reconfiguration: Design of a new device

An efficient strategy to improve unequally irradiated PV plants performances is based on the reconfiguration of the connections between the modules. In this paper, an algorithm, for this purpose conceived, is presented. Moreover, the design, realization and finally also the set up of a new reconfiguration system device is fully shown and discussed. The algorithm conceived simulates several possible series-parallel connections under varying irradiation conditions, and determines the optimal modules connection in order to get the maximum output power. In this way, the reconfiguration system may set up the reconfiguration strategy. The reconfiguration system prototype set up, basically consists of one acquisition and conditioning system, one control system (Arduino Mega 2560 based on the ATmega2560 microcontroller) and one actuation system. It has been conceived to research the best homogeneity condition (string PV modules irradiation condition) in order to increase the energy produced under partial shading conditions.
Hedonic editing and order effect in decision-making with neurometric evaluation

Investment decisions are based largely on the information that investors are received from the target firm. In this research, we consider both the variable of Organization of Information, either segregate or integrate, and the Order of the information, either in the order of Negative-Positive or in the order of Positive-Negative. Three groups of information are tested in the experiment: a piece of Big Positive information and a piece of Small Negative information (BP/SN); a piece of Big Negative information and a piece of Small Positive (BN/SP); and a piece of Small Positive information and a piece of Small Negative information (SP/SN). The study applied the gathering of the electroencephalographic rhythms variations, as well as the heart rate and galvanic skin response. The neurometric indicators here employed were the Approach-Withdrawal (AW) and the Emotional (EI) indexes. In SP/SN group, the recency effect is found in AWI. However, when receiving information in large scale, either big positive or big negative, emotion plays a role during decision-making. In both case of BP/SN and BN/SP, emotion is effected by organization of information. In the condition of BP/SN, neurometrics AWI result suggests more approach potentials when two pieces of information presented integrated. While in the case of BN/SP, we observe the influence of both order and organization. Individual favours separation of information with the order of Negative-Positive, the recency effect.
How cochlear implants encode speech

Purpose of reviewThis review summarizes the history of cochlear implant signal processing and provides the rationale underlying current approaches. Present strategies are explained and recent research findings are summarized. It is suggested how these results may drive future advancements in signal processing. Recent findingsSubstantial advances have been made in our understanding of the spectral and temporal cues necessary for cochlear implant recipients to perceive music, speech in noise, and interaural timing. It is clear that higher levels of both spectral and temporal resolution, as well as better loudness and pitch coding are necessary for higher levels of performance. These factors are highly interrelated, however, and are beneficial for differing aspects of hearing. Signal processing algorithms incorporating these findings are under active development and some are currently undergoing clinical investigation. SummaryCurrent implant devices, and those soon to be available, have substantial untapped potential to improve the auditory experience of their recipients. It is likely that in the near future, recent findings on pitch and loudness perception, as well as techniques to better emulate the normal functions of the cochlea will result in much higher levels of prosthetic hearing fidelity than are possible today. As the performance of these remarkable devices continues to improve, the population of hearing-impaired individuals who can benefit from implantation is likely to increase significantly.
FBXW7 is involved in the acquisition of the malignant phenotype in epithelial ovarian tumors

FBXW7 is a ubiquitin ligase that mediates ubiquitylation of oncoproteins, such as c‐Myc, cyclin E, Notch and c‐Jun. FBXW7 is a known tumor‐suppressor gene, and mutations in FBXW7 have been reported in various human malignancies. In this study, we examined the sequences of the FBXW7 and p53 genes in 57 ovarian cancer clinical samples. Interestingly, we found no FBXW7 mutations associated with amino acid changes. We also investigated FBXW7 expression levels in 126 epithelial ovarian tumors. FBXW7 expression was negatively correlated with the malignant potential of ovarian tumors. That is to say, FBXW7 expression levels in ovarian cancer samples were significantly lower than those in borderline and benign tumors (P < 0.01). FBXW7 expression levels in serous carcinoma samples were the lowest among four major histological subtypes. In addition, p53‐mutated ovarian cancer samples showed significantly lower levels of FBXW7 expression compared with p53 wild‐type cancer samples (P < 0.001). DNA methylation arrays and bisulfite PCR sequencing experiments revealed that 5′‐upstream regions of FBXW7 gene in p53‐mutated samples were significantly higher methylated compared with those in p53 wild‐type samples (P < 0.01). This data indicates that p53 mutations might suppress FBXW7 expression through DNA hypermethylation of FBXW7 5′‐upstream regions. Thus, FBXW7 expression was downregulated in ovarian cancers, and was associated with p53 mutations and the DNA methylation status of the 5′‐upstream regions of FBXW7.
Inhibitory effects of hinokitiol on tyrosinase activity and melanin biosynthesis and its antimicrobial activities

The inhibitory effects of hinokitiol, a constituent of the woody oils isolated from Cupressaceae heartwood, on mushroom tyrosinase and melanin formation in B16 melanoma cells as well as its antimicrobial activity were investigated. Our results showed that hinokitiol could strongly inhibit both monophenolase activity and diphenolase activity of the enzyme and the inhibition was reversible. The IC50 values were estimated as 9.67 μM for monophenolase activity and 0.21 μM for diphenolase activity. The lag time of the monophenolase activity was not obviously lengthened by the compound. Kinetic analyses showed that the inhibition mechanism of hinokitiol was a mixed-type inhibition of the diphenolase activity. Hinokitiol effectively inhibited both cellular tyrosinase activity and melanin biosynthesis in B16 melanoma cells with significant cytotoxicity. Furthermore, it was found that hinokitiol could inhibit the proliferation of Salmonella enteritidis, Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Staphyloccocus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Ralstonia solanacearum to different extents. This research may widen the use of hinokitiol in the fields of food preservation, depigmentation, and insecticide use.
Conhecimento especializado do professor para ensinar ciências

From the work of Shulman (1986, 1987) several researchers have studied the specific knowledge of the teacher to teach science in order to better define and understand it (Van Driel et al, 1998); Magnusson et al., 1999; Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Van Dijk and Kattmann, 2007; Park & Oliver, 2008). With this study presentation we also aim to contribute to the understanding of that knowledge and, most of all promote and support priorities during the organization of the curriculum of teacher training courses. After all the research is complete we will have answered to three research questions: a) What knowledge has a teacher to teach natural science? ; b) What are the characteristics of that knowledge in face of the model of knowledge for teaching mathematics (Carrillo et al., 2013) and c) How to adapt its the model of knowledge for teaching math (Carrillo et al., 2013) to the natural sciences? This research study fits in a qualitative methodology and corresponds to an instrumental case study (Stake, 1998). Data collection was performed by video recording in the context of the classroom in primary and elementary education, with interviews, analysis of lesson plans and conversations. At this time only two of the fourteen lessons were analyzed with the N Vivo software to support enable manage the evaluation of the information collected from the practice of two teachers.
Integrating third party AI components into mainstream applications

Software engineers must make numerous decisions throughout the development lifecycle. CASE (Computeraided Software Engineering) tools offer decision support facilities to aide engineer in project planning, estimat ng, requirements analysis and tracking, design, configuration control, coding, testing, integration and maintenance. A s the features of and demand for these tools increase, the complexity of decisions support by the CASE tools (i.e. amount of intelligence embedded in these systems) is sur e to increase. Thus, the demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) components in mainstream CASE tool applications will require more developers to integrate COTS reasoning (decision making) solutions into their applications. However, the AI community has yet to view itself as a COTS vendor and requires end-users of their tools to invest in a significant integration effort. Severa l projects at Laboratory for Intelligent Processes and System have incorporated third party AI reasoning components including current software engineering tool development effort. In this paper we use this tool development effort as a backdrop for a discussion on architectures for integratin g third party AI components and a brief discussion on component selection.
Analysis of the Failure of 122 Polyethylene Inserts From Uncemented Tibial Knee Components

The extent of wear of retrieved, polyethylene tibial components appears to be related to design. To test this observation, 122 tibial inserts were graded for wear, and new components of several designs were tested for contact stress using Fuji film. Finite element analysis provided insight into subsurface stresses. Significant wear was seen in 61.5% of the tibial inserts examined. The presence of unconsolidated polymer powder was seen in 44% of the tibial inserts and was found to be statistically correlated with severe wear of the articulating surface. Contact stress in several noncongruent designs was found to exceed the yield strength of polyethylene. There was a positive correlation between the intensity of wear and the level of contact stress, with noncongruent designs having greater wear than fully congruent geometries. In the non-congruent designs, the thinner polyethylene components showed greater wear than thicker polyethylene inserts of the same design.
Hematopoietic cytokines: Similarities and differences in the structures, with implications for receptor binding

Crystal and NMR structures of helical cytokines–interleukin‐4 (IL‐4), granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (GM‐CSF), and interleukin‐2 (IL‐2)–have been compared. Root mean square deviations in the Cα coordinates for the conserved regions of the helices were 1–2 Å between different cytokines, about twice the differences observed for independently determined crystal and solution structures of IL‐4. Considerable similarity in amino acid sequence in the areas expected to interact with the receptors was detected, and the available mutagenesis data for these cytokines were correlated with structure conservation. Models of cytokine‐receptor interactions were postulated for IL‐4 based on its structure as well as on the published structure of human growth hormone interacting with its receptors (de Vos, A.M., Ultsch, M., & Kossiakoff, A.A., 1992, Science 255, 306–312). Patches of positively charged residues on the surfaces of helices C and D of IL‐4 may be responsible for the interactions with the negatively charged residues found in the complementary parts of the IL‐4 receptors.
Exploration prudente : une approche par méthode de Monte-Carlo arborescente contrainte

En robotique autonome, nous souhaitons permettre a l'agent d'explorer son environnement afin d'y effectuer les tâches desirees. Cette exploration autonome pose le probleme de la securite de l'agent evoluant dans un environnement potentiellement dangereux. Cet article presente, dans un contexte d'apprentissage par renforcement, une implementation d'exploration prudente par methode de Monte-Carlo contrainte nommee Educated MCTS. Cette approche maintient a jour parallelement a l'exploration un modele permettant de se restreindre aux etats proches de ceux connus et supposes surs. Les resultats experimentaux montrent que Educated MCTS permet une amelioration significative du compromis exploration-securite
Robust Composite Nonlinear Feedback Control With Application to a Servo Positioning System

A new robust composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control method is proposed to achieve fast and accurate set-point tracking for linear systems subject to input saturation and disturbances. The basic idea is to incorporate disturbance estimation and compensation into the framework of the original CNF control so as to eliminate the steady-state bias due to disturbances and retain the fast transient performance of the original CNF control. There is no additional integration action introduced in the new method, which is in contrast with the previous work, i.e., the enhanced CNF control. The new method is applied to design a control law for a dc servomotor positioning system. Simulation and experimental results show that the new method can achieve better transient performance and steady-state accuracy in set-point tracking and is more robust to amplitude variations of disturbance/set point compared to integration-based control
Tumour necrosis factor gene polymorphisms as severity markers in rheumatoid arthritis

A large number of diseases are multifactorial whereby both environmental and genetic factors contribute to the aetiology and/or clinical severity. The genetics of many of these diseases is complex, involving multiple genes, and Mendelian patterns of inheritance do not apply. The genetic contribution in susceptibility for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is exemplified by family clustering and a threefold to fourfold higher pairwise concordance percentage for clinically expressed RA in monozygotic twins than dizygotic twins. 1‐3 The mode of segregation in the population is best explained by a polygenic background influenced by the right environmental stimulus. Estimates suggest that at least 10 diVerent genetic regions may be linked to susceptibility to RA. 4 As a consequence, variability in the contribution of genetic factors involved in disease may be related to variability in clinical presentation with a spectrum ranging from mild to severe disease. Good evidence exists that RA is associated with HLA-DRB1 alleles, in particular alleles that share a short amino acid sequence QKRAA,QRRAA or RRRAA at position 70‐74 in the binding groove of the MHC molecule found in HLA-DR1 (HLA-DRB1*0101 and 0102), DR4 (HLA-DRB1*0401, 0404, 0405), DR6 (HLA-DRB1*1402) and DR10 (HLADRB1*1001) specificities named shared epitope (SE) alleles. 5‐7 Parametric linkage analysis suggests that HLA may contribute up to 30% of overall inherited susceptibility in RA. 8
Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (Version 4.1)

NARS (Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System) is an intelligent reasoning system. It answers questions according to the knowledge originally provided by its user. What makes it different from conventional reasoning systems is its ability to learn from its experience and to work with insufficient knowledge and resources. The NARS 4.1 demo is a Java applet. It comes with help information and simple examples to show how the system does deduction, induction, abduction, analogy, belief revision, membership evaluation, relational inference, backward inference, new concept formation, and so on, in a unified manner. The demo also allows its user to create new examples to test the system, as well as to see the internal structure and process when the system is running. The on-line help document contains links to relevant publications. A previous version of the system, NARS 3.0, is described in detail in (Wang, 1995), which, and other related publications, are available at the author’s web page.
Introduction to the Third International Symposium on Charcot‐Marie‐Tooth Disorders

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) is the most common inherited peripheral neuropathy in humans, with a prevalence of I in 2500. ' CMT is usually inherited as an autosomal dominant disorder, although recessively inherited forms do occur. The most frequent fom1 of CMT, CMT l , is associated with severe PNS demyelination as demonstrated by slowed nerve conduction velocities and segmental demyelination on nerve biopsy The average age of clinical onset of CMT is 12.2 ± 7.3 years, and the clinical course is slowly progressive. Patients may require foot care or bracing to ambulate normally, and sometimes become unable to walk. Among the nerves most severely affected in CMT, the peroneal nerves are often involved earliest, hence the alternate name for this disease, peroneal muscular atrophy. Over the past several years, considerable progress has been made toward understanding the genetics and pathogenesis of CMT. Much of this progress has occurred since the last international symposium on CMT, held in 1988 at the Arden House in New York. Current progress in CMT has been particularly striking in the fields of genetics, molecular biology, and in gene therapy. Some of these advances are outlined below.
Object-Based Communication Architecture for System-on-Chip Design

In this work, we present an integrated approach to the SoC design problem based on a mixed (HW and SW) implementation of a system-level middleware specifically designed for SoCs: the Object-Oriented Communication Engine (OOCE). OOCE provides a high-level and homogeneous view of the SoC components based on the Distributed Object paradigm. The resulting communication infrastructure easies the integration of the HW and SW parts, allows the automatic generation of the HW/SW interfacing adapters and also enables true concurrent design methodologies. To prove the viability and efficiency of our proposal a prototype implementation on the Xilinx-V2 Pro platform has been developed. Keywords-SoC design; automatic synthesis; object-oriented design methodology; HW/SW interfacing
Structure and performance of the HIPERLAN/2 physical layer

At present, standards for broadband wireless multimedia communications in the 5 GHz band are being developed in Europe as well as in the USA and Japan. HIPERLAN/2 is an upcoming standard which is being specified by the ETSI Project BRAN and is intended to be finished in April 2000. The physical layers of the three systems will be well-harmonized whereas the upper layer protocols are different. In this paper, the concepts and parameters of the physical layer of HIPERLAN/2 are described. According to the harmonization with the American and the Japanese system similarities and differences are pointed out. Furthermore, exemplary performance results are included and discussed.
Characterizing Long Interval Cortical Inhibition over the Time-Frequency Domain

Objective Long-interval cortical inhibition (LICI) can be recorded from motor and non-motor regions of the cortex through combined transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with electroencephalography (EEG). This study aimed to evaluate additional dimensions of LICI characteristics over an extended time-frequency and spatial domain. This was done by introducing two alternative measures of LICI signal amplitude: the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and the Hilbert transform (HT). Both approaches estimate signal amplitude not taking into account the phase. In both cases LICI was measured as the difference between the unconditioned and conditioned activity evoked by the test pulse. Finally, we evaluated whether the topographical patterns of single and paired responses differed beyond the expected variations in amplitude. Materials and Methods LICI was delivered as single and paired pulses to the motor cortex (MC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in 33 healthy subjects with TMS-EEG. Results Significant differences (p<0.0001) between the unconditioned and conditioned evoked activity were found for both the DLPFC and MC using both methods (i.e., DFT and HT) after correcting for multiple comparisons in the time-frequency domain. The influence of inhibition was found to be significantly larger in space and time than previously considered. Single and paired conditions differ in intensity, but also in their topographic pattern (i.e., the specific spatiotemporal configuration of active sources). Conclusion Similar results were found by both DFT and HT. The effect of inhibition across the cortex was also found to be complex and extended. In particular, it was found that LICI may be measured with high sensitivity in areas that were relatively distant from the stimulation site, which may have important practical applications. The analysis presented in this study overcomes some limitations of previous studies and could serve as a key reference for future studies examining TMS-indices of inhibition/excitation in healthy and diseased states.
Efficiently Tracking Selection in a Multiparental Population: The Case of Earliness in Wheat

Multiparental populations are innovative tools for fine mapping large numbers of loci. Here we explored the application of a wheat Multiparent Advanced Generation Inter-Cross (MAGIC) population for QTL mapping. This population was created by 12 generations of free recombination among 60 founder lines, following modification of the mating system from strict selfing to strict outcrossing using the ms1b nuclear male sterility gene. Available parents and a subset of 380 SSD lines of the resulting MAGIC population were phenotyped for earliness and genotyped with the 9K i-Select SNP array and additional markers in candidate genes controlling heading date. We demonstrated that 12 generations of strict outcrossing rapidly and drastically reduced linkage disequilibrium to very low levels even at short map distances and also greatly reduced the population structure exhibited among the parents. We developed a Bayesian method, based on allelic frequency, to estimate the contribution of each parent in the evolved population. To detect loci under selection and estimate selective pressure, we also developed a new method comparing shifts in allelic frequency between the initial and the evolved populations due to both selection and genetic drift with expectations under drift only. This evolutionary approach allowed us to identify 26 genomic areas under selection. Using association tests between flowering time and polymorphisms, 6 of these genomic areas appeared to carry flowering time QTL, 1 of which corresponds to Ppd-D1, a major gene involved in the photoperiod sensitivity. Frequency shifts at 4 of 6 areas were consistent with earlier flowering of the evolved population relative to the initial population. The use of this new outcrossing wheat population, mixing numerous initial parental lines through multiple generations of panmixia, is discussed in terms of power to detect genes under selection and association mapping. Furthermore we provide new statistical methods for use in future analyses of multiparental populations.