Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 13.5-b 1.2-V micropower extended counting A/D converter

This work presents a study of the extended counting technique for a 1.2-V micropower voice-band A/D converter. This extended counting technique is a blend of /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulation with its high resolution but relatively low speed and algorithmic conversion with its higher speed but lower accuracy. To achieve this, the converter successively operates first as a first-order /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulator to convert the most significant bits, and then the same hardware is used as an algorithmic converter to convert the remaining least significant bits. An experimental prototype was designed in 0.8-/spl mu/m CMOS. With a 1.2-V power supply, it consumes 150 /spl mu/W of power at a 16-kHz Nyquist sampling frequency. The measured peak S/(N+THD) was 80 dB and the dynamic range 82 dB. The converter core including the controller and all reconstruction logic occupies about 1.3/spl times/1 mm/sup 2/ of chip area. This is considerably less than a complete /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulation A/D converter where the digital decimation filter would occupy a significant amount of chip area.
2 Problems 2 . 1 D . Damanik : Quantum Mechanics and Quasicrystals

eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Designing an energy efficient WBAN routing protocol

Advancement of medical science brings together new trend of proactive health care which gives rise to the era of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). A number of issues including energy efficiency, reliability, optimal use of network bandwidth need to be considered for designing any multi-hop communication protocol for WBANs. Energy consumption depends on many factors like amount and frequency of forwarding traffic, node activity, distance from sink etc. Energy consumption gives rise to other issues like heated nodes. Existing routing protocols are mostly single hop or multi-hop, and generally focus on one issue ignoring the others. In this paper, we first identify the sources of energy drain, and then propose a 2-hop cost based energy efficient routing protocol for WBAN that formulates the energy drain of a node due to various reasons and incorporates it in the routing decision. Relative node mobility due to posture change is also considered here. The protocol is simulated in Castalia simulator and compared with state of the art protocols. It is found to outperform state of the art protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio for a given transmission power level. Moreover, only a small number of relays are found to be sufficient to stabilize packet delivery ratio.
Progress in EUV photoresist technology

Resist resolution remains a significant issue for EUV. Strong concerns persist regarding the use of chemically amplified resists owing to their diffusion characteristics. Current EUV resist development is focused on a) large-scale screening efforts in an attempt to identify promising platforms and b) refinement and optimization of the processing of these formulations. Resolution arguably remains the parameter of highest importance at this time. The intrinsic resist resolution limit has been claimed to be determined by the resist diffusion length and various metrics have been proposed to characterize this diffusion length as well as resist resolution. Characterization of the intrinsic resolution limit of resists, however, is not a trivial issue due to practical complications such as pattern collapse and top-loss. Here we investigate a variety of resolution and diffusion length metrics and study the correlation between these metrics and observed resist performance when applied to a variety of leading EUV resists. The metrics we study include resist modulation transfer function, corner rounding, through-dose sub-resolution contact printing, iso-focal bias, line-edge-roughness correlation length, and mask error factor. We present an analogous study of resist process refinements. Process refinements are capable of significantly enhancing resolution, expanding process latitude, mitigating resist failure mechanisms, and attenuating line-edge and line-width roughness. Metrics used for correlation of resolution and diffusion length with resist performance show significant utility when applied to process refinement studies as well. Additionally, we show that LWR mitigation can be accomplished in selected EUV resists using post-development surface conditioner rinses. A similar post-development rinse apprach is also demonstrated to reduce pattern collapse at sub-40 nm CDs. Such strategies may become increasingly attractive as CDs shrink toward 32 nm and 22 nm nodes.
Enhancing TCP based communications in mobile satellite scenarios: TCP PEPs issues and solutions

Networking has experienced tremendous changes. Once dedicated to one single type of services, technologies are now offering integrated services: we want to have access to any services anywhere. One challenge is the mobility, with 3G terrestrial offers beginning to be successful. In such a context, satellite systems appear as a real opportunity since they may fill the gap between dense connected areas (city) and low populated areas. Nevertheless, Internet-like communications over satellite segments needs TCP Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs) to alter classical TCP on satellite part for a better behaviour. As a drawback, PEPs often induce connection splitting and thus hinder mobility. This paper tackles this issue. After a brief introduction on existing satellite mobile systems and on PEPs mechanisms, we focus on mobility scenarios and propose some architecture elements. A detailed case is settled to illustrate context transfer issues.
Effect of ageing on mechanical and impact properties of non-quenched and tempered steel wire strengthened by cold forming

The effect of ageing on the mechanical and impact properties of non-quenched and tempered steel wire strengthened by cold forming to an area reduction of 25.5% was investigated by tensile testing, charpy impact tests and scanning electronic microscopy. It was found that when the specimen was aged at 300 °C for 2 h, its tensile strength, yield strength, elongation and impact absorption energy increased by 10.8, 18.1, 44.8 and 19.6%, respectively. In addition the ductile-brittle transition temperature decreased by 5 °C. These improved properties are attributed to the decreasing dislocation density, the formation of sub-grains in a stable condition and the uniform dispersion of a fine precipitation phase during the ageing treatment.
The Design and Implementation of Flash Cryptographic File System Based on YAFFS

As the amount of flash memory being used in embedded device is increased and embedded devices become more important in many computing environments, embedded file system security becomes more important issue. Moreover embedded devices can be easily stolen or lost because of its high portability. If the lost embedded device has very important information, there's no means to protect it except data encryption. For improving embedded devices' security this paper propose design and implementation of flash cryptographic file system. For this purpose YAFFS is used. By the modified YAFFS cryptographic file system, the security of embedded devices can be improved.
Mel sub-band filtering and compression for robust speech recognition

The Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are commonly used in speech recognition systems. But, they are high sensitive to presence of external noise. In this paper, we propose a noise compensation method for Mel filter bank energies and so MFCC features. This compensation method is performed in two stages: Mel sub-band filtering and then compression of Mel-sub-band energies. In the compression step, we propose a sub-band SNR-dependent compression function. We use this function in place of logarithm function in conventional MFCC feature extraction in presence of additive noise. Results show that the proposed method significantly improves MFCC features performance in noisy conditions where it decreases average word error rate up to 30% for isolated word recognition on three test sets of Aurora 2 database.
Review of approved pioglitazone combinations for type 2 diabetes

Introduction: Pioglitazone is approved in combination with several other blood-glucose-lowering drugs for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Beyond lowering blood glucose levels, each combination of different blood-glucose-lowering drugs for the treatment of T2DM evolves specific pleiotropic effects, which might be considered on an individual basis in a certain patient. Areas covered: The objective of this article is to provide a short review of the pathophysiology of T2DM and to provide a rationale for the combination of pioglitazone with other antidiabetic drugs, based on a pathophysiological understanding of T2DM. Therefore, a PubMed search was undertaken covering the search terms ‘pioglitazone’, ‘antidiabetic drugs’ and ‘combination therapy’. Expert opinion: Treatment with pioglitazone in T2DM was shown to improve insulin resistance and blood glucose levels without increasing the risk of hypoglycemia. Beyond those metabolic activities, pioglitazone was shown to evolve anti-inflammatory and anti-atherogenic effects. It seems useful to combine different antidiabetic drugs based on the specific needs and contraindications in an individual patient. The treating of T2DM patients by addressing not only glucose control, but also the underlying pathophysiological etiology might help to improve patient prognosis in the long run, especially with regard to the vascular complications.
Toward Soft, Robust Robots for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

meltdown is one of the most challenging behaviors of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where a child could not calm down or too overwhelmed with a certain situation. Because social robots are becoming useful as a therapy tool between the therapist and a child with ASD, as robot designers, we want to anticipate that a robot could be thrown on the floor or to the therapist or caregiver. In addition, we want to investigate how to better protect the robot from being damaged. Typical robots are constructed in plastic material. In this paper, a sample of plastic material and a sample of silicone material were compared in a drop test experiment at the heights of 0.0254 m, 0.5 m, and 1 m. These heights simulate a possible situation where the robot can be dropped. Our result shows the differences in the impact between the silicone and the plastic samples. This work provides a baseline study as a step toward soft, robust robots for children with ASD.
Substring-Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Abstract In this paper, we consider a setting where a client wants to outsource storage of a large amount of private data and then perform substring search queries on the data – given a data string s and a search string p, find all occurrences of p as a substring of s. First, we formalize an encryption paradigm that we call queryable encryption, which generalizes searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and structured encryption. Then, we construct a queryable encryption scheme for substring queries. Our construction uses suffix trees and achieves asymptotic efficiency comparable to that of unencrypted suffix trees. Encryption of a string of length n takes O(λn) time and produces a ciphertext of size O(λn), and querying for a substring of length m that occurs k times takes O(λm+k) time and three rounds of communication. Our security definition guarantees correctness of query results and privacy of data and queries against a malicious adversary. Following the line of work started by Curtmola et al. (ACM CCS 2006), in order to construct more efficient schemes we allow the query protocol to leak some limited information that is captured precisely in the definition. We prove security of our substring-searchable encryption scheme against malicious adversaries, where the query protocol leaks limited information about memory access patterns through the suffix tree of the encrypted string.
Delta-Sigma Modulator with SAR Quantizer Embedded Passive Adder

A third-order low-distortion delta-sigma modulator (DSM), whose third-order noise-shaping ability is achieved by just a single opamp, is proposed. Since only one amplifier is required in the whole circuit, the designed DSM is very power efficient. To realize the adder in front of quantizer without employing the huge-power opamp, a capacitive passive adder, which is the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) array of a successive-approximation-type quantizer, is used. In addition, the feedback path timing is extended from a nonoverlapping interval for the conventional low-distortion structure to half of the clock period, so that the strict operation timing issue with regard to quantization and the dynamic element matching (DEM) logic operation can be solved. In the proposed DSM structure, the features of the unity-gain signal transfer function (STF) and finite-impulse-response (FIR) noise transfer function (NTF) are still preserved, and thus advantages such as a relaxed opamp slew rate and reduced output swing are also maintained, as with the conventional low-distortion DSM. Moreover, the memory effect in the proposed DSM is analyzed when employing the opamp sharing for integrators. The proposed third-order DSM with a 4-bit SAR ADC as the quantizer is implemented in a 90-nm CMOS process. The post-layout simulations show a 79.8-dB signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) in the 1.875-MHz signal bandwidth (OSR=16). The active area of the circuit is 0.35 mm2 and total power consumption is 2.85 mW, resulting in a figure of merit (FOM) of 95 fJ/conversion-step. key words: delta-sigma modulator, DSM, opamp sharing, relaxed dynamic element matching (DEM) timing
RESEARCH UPDATE : EFFECTS OF TRACE MINERAL SOURCE ON OXIDATIVE METABOLISM , ENDOMETRITIS , AND PERFORMANCE OF TRANSITION COWS

Trace minerals are critical for immune function, oxidative metabolism, nutrition and energy metabolism, and reproductive function in dairy cows (NRC, 2001; Spears and Weiss, 2008). The specific roles of zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), and manganese (Mn) have received substantial attention in dairy cows, and studies have been conducted to evaluate effects of Zn, Cu, and Mn on productive and reproductive performance (Siciliano-Jones et al., 2008; Formigoni et al., 2011; Nemec et al., 2012).
Syphilis epidemiology in 1994–2013, molecular epidemiological strain typing and determination of macrolide resistance in Treponema pallidum in 2013–2014 in Tuva Republic, Russia

The incidence of syphilis in the Tuva Republic (geographical centre of Asia), Russia has been exceedingly high historically. No detailed examinations and no molecular investigations of Treponema pallidum strains transmitted in the Tuva Republic, or in general, in Russia, were published internationally. We examined the syphilis epidemiology in 1994–2013, and the molecular epidemiology and macrolide resistance in T. pallidum strains in 2013–2014 in the Tuva Republic. Among 95 mainly primary or secondary syphilis patients, the arp, tpr, tp0548 and 23S rRNA genes in 85 polA gene‐positive genital ulcer specimens were characterized. The syphilis incidence in Tuva Republic peaked in 1998 (1562), however declined to 177 in 2013. Among the 70 (82%) completely genotyped specimens, six molecular strain types were found. Strain type 14d/f accounted for 91%, but also 14c/f, 14d/g, 14b/f, 14i/f, 9d/f, and 4d/f were identified. Two (2.4%) specimens contained the 23S rRNA A2058G macrolide resistance mutation. This is the first internationally published typing study regarding T. pallidum in Russia, performed in the Tuva Republic with the highest syphilis incidence in Russia. The two molecular strain types 4d/f and 9d/f have previously been described only in Eastern and Northern China and for the first time, macrolide‐resistant syphilis was described in Russia.
The relationships between morphology, irradiation and the ductile–brittle transition of isotactic polypropylene

The effect of the morphology of polypropylene, as controlled by annealing, on the material's micro-mechanical response before and after irradiation is explored using simultaneous SAXS/tensile deformation experiments. Morphology moderates the effects of cross-linking and scission on the deformation behaviour. The micro-mechanisms of deformation can be related to these morphological and chemical changes. It appears that a high tie-chain density and a low crystal thickness, which may be achieved by crystallisation at low temperatures, will encourage resistance to mechanical property deterioration under irradiation.
Mercury uptake by LLC-PK1 cells: dependence on temperature and membrane potential.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanism of inorganic mercury (Hg) uptake in LLC-PK1 cells, a renal tubular epithelial cell line, and to compare the results with those reported previously by us in rat renal cortical epithelial (RCE) cells in primary culture. The LLC-PK1 cells were cultured for 3-12 days, incubated with 1 microM HgCl2 in Hanks' balanced salt solution at 4 or 37 degrees C for 30 min, and washed with phosphate-buffered saline containing BAL to remove the cell membrane-bound Hg. The uptake of Hg was higher in nonconfluent cultures than in confluent cultures and higher at 37 than at 4 degrees C. In confluent culture (Day 8) Hg uptake at 4 degrees C was only 27% of that at 37 degrees C. The initial accumulation of Hg (5 min) from different concentrations of HgCl2 (0.5-50 microM) was linear and did not show a tendency toward saturation, suggesting that a carrier-mediated process was not involved. Pretreatment of cells with 10 microM FCCP, a metabolic inhibitor and a proton ionophore, 0.5 mm DIDS, an anion transport inhibitor, or 0.5 mM ouabain, a Na+/K+-ATPase inhibitor, resulted in 72, 60, and 57% reduction in Hg uptake, respectively. Furthermore, replacement of 137 mm NaCl in the incubation medium with 137 mM KCl or LiCl or 274 mM mannitol caused 30, 45, and 87% reduction in Hg uptake, respectively. These results suggest that in LLC-PK1 cells, as in RCE cells, Hg uptake is inversely related to cell density and is influenced by membrane fluidity, membrane potential, and HCO3-/Cl- transporter.
Effects of Intrauterine Environment on the Magnitude of Differences Within the Pairs of Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twins

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of intrauterine environment on the magnitude of intrapair differences in six somatic traits of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins (1,263 pairs; 424 MZ twins and 839 DZ twins). Differences in intrauterine environments of MZ twins enforced division of the research material into four groups: (1) MZ-MC-TTTS — MZ twins from monochorionic (MC) pregnancies with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), (2) MZ-MC (without TTTS)—MZ twins from MC pregnancies without TTTS, (3) MZ-DC—MZ twins from dichorionic (DC) pregnancies, and (4) DZ—DZ twins. The intrapair differences in all analyzed somatic traits, especially body weight and circumference of the chest, were the largest in the case of MZ twins from MC pregnancies with TTTS. DZ twins were the group presenting with the second largest intrapair differences in the analyzed traits. At the end of pregnancy, that is, in lunar months 9 and 10, the magnitude of intrapair differences in all traits of twins from this group was significantly greater than in MZ twins from both MC and DC pregnancies. Irrespective of the analyzed period, the least evident, statistically insignificant intrapair differences in the studied traits were documented in the case of MZ twins from MC pregnancies without TTTS and twins from DC pregnancies. These findings imply that the differentiating effect of intrauterine environment is associated with the occurrence of TTTS, rather than with chorionicity, as postulated previously.
In silico prediction of the structure of membrane proteins: Is it feasible?

In the 'omic' era, hundreds of genomes are available for protein sequence analysis, and some 30 per cent of all sequences are of membrane proteins. Unlike globular proteins, a 3D model for membrane proteins can hardly be computed starting from the sequence. Why is this so? What can we really compute and with what reliability? These and other matters are outlined.
Hemispherical lens based imaging receiver for MIMO optical wireless communications

White lighting LED based systems are emerging as an important form of high data rate communications, especially for indoor applications. Two limitations of existing systems are the small field of view of typical receivers and the poor performance of optical wireless MIMO due to lack of spatial diversity. In this paper we describe a novel design which overcomes these problems by using a hemispherical lens in the receiver. We show that the new system has a wide field of view and also provides significant spatial diversity for typical MIMO visible light scenarios. Numerical results are provided for a range of LED transmitters with different half power semi-angles. Our analysis shows that systems can be designed with adequate channel gain for angles of incidence as large as 70 degrees. The optical power density is also calculated to show the received optical power distributions for the case of four LED transmitters. The results indicate that the images of the LEDs are clearly separated. This reduces the channel correlations between individual transmitters and receivers and thus promises a significant diversity order for MIMO optical wireless systems.
Olfactory organ of Octopus vulgaris: morphology, plasticity, turnover and sensory characterization

ABSTRACT The cephalopod olfactory organ was described for the first time in 1844 by von Kölliker, who was attracted to the pair of small pits of ciliated cells on each side of the head, below the eyes close to the mantle edge, in both octopuses and squids. Several functional studies have been conducted on decapods but very little is known about octopods. The morphology of the octopus olfactory system has been studied, but only to a limited extent on post-hatching specimens, and the only paper on adult octopus gives a minimal description of the olfactory organ. Here, we describe the detailed morphology of young male and female Octopus vulgaris olfactory epithelium, and using a combination of classical morphology and 3D reconstruction techniques, we propose a new classification for O. vulgaris olfactory sensory neurons. Furthermore, using specific markers such as olfactory marker protein (OMP) and proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) we have been able to identify and differentially localize both mature olfactory sensory neurons and olfactory sensory neurons involved in epithelium turnover. Taken together, our data suggest that the O. vulgaris olfactory organ is extremely plastic, capable of changing its shape and also proliferating its cells in older specimens. Summary: A 3D reconstruction of the Octopus vulgaris olfactory organ, as well as the localization of PCNA and (for the first time) OMP-like proteins in cephalopod mature olfactory chemosensory neurons are described.