Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential BPSK modulation for cooperative communication systems in time-selective rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we consider the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying cooperative communication system employing differential binary phase-shift-keying (DBPSK) modulation in time-selective (fast) Rayleigh fading channels. When channel gains are fast-varying, it is well known that differential modulation can ease the channel estimation process and reduce the power and bandwidth overhead occurred in coherent modulation schemes. Unlike the previous work on this topic which always assumed the channel gains are the same over two adjacent symbol periods, we model the channel time-selectivity exactly in our formulation and derive the optimal diversity combining weights for the AF relaying system based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Since the optimum combining rule depends on the channel gains of the relay-to-destination links which are usually unavailable in the context of differential modulation, we propose a suboptimal diversity combining rule which replaces the instantaneous channel gains by their second order statistics. Compared with the performance of the diversity combining rule without taking the time-selectivity into account, computer simulation results show that the proposed diversity combining rule has superior performance for the AF relaying system in time-selective Rayleigh fading channels, especially when the relay and destination nodes have different Doppler spreads.
Tissue Discrimination by Uncorrected Autofluorescence Spectra: A Proof-of-Principle Study for Tissue-Specific Laser Surgery

Laser surgery provides a number of advantages over conventional surgery. However, it implies large risks for sensitive tissue structures due to its characteristic non-tissue-specific ablation. The present study investigates the discrimination of nine different ex vivo tissue types by using uncorrected (raw) autofluorescence spectra for the development of a remote feedback control system for tissue-selective laser surgery. Autofluorescence spectra (excitation wavelength 377 ± 50 nm) were measured from nine different ex vivo tissue types, obtained from 15 domestic pig cadavers. For data analysis, a wavelength range between 450 nm and 650 nm was investigated. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) were used to discriminate the tissue types. ROC analysis showed that PCA, followed by QDA, could differentiate all investigated tissue types with AUC results between 1.00 and 0.97. Sensitivity reached values between 93% and 100% and specificity values between 94% and 100%. This ex vivo study shows a high differentiation potential for physiological tissue types when performing autofluorescence spectroscopy followed by PCA and QDA. The uncorrected autofluorescence spectra are suitable for reliable tissue discrimination and have a high potential to meet the challenges necessary for an optical feedback system for tissue-specific laser surgery.
Technical Support Using Assistive Robotics for Physically Challenged People

The purpose of the present work is to create a robotic leg for physically challenged person. Using this product person will be able to apparently walk like any normal person. The idea is to make the program govern the motion of leg and control the leg driving mechanism accordingly. This can be achieved using Mega Ardiuno 2560 micro-controller and C++ based embedded system. This Robotic leg is accessed by user friendly keypad which will have the functions like simple walk, sit on chair, stand up and stop. Mechanical motion is carried by using worm and wheel mechanism which is self-locking, motor speed is reduced and produces high torque.
Reduced Expression of the Extracellular Calcium-Sensing Receptor (CaSR) Is Associated with Activation of the Renin-Angiotensin System (RAS) to Promote Vascular Remodeling in the Pathogenesis of Essential Hypertension

The proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs), remodeling of the vasculature, and the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) play important roles in the development of essential hypertension (EH), which is defined as high blood pressure (BP) in which secondary causes, such as renovascular disease, are absent. The calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) is involved in the regulation of BP. However, the underlying mechanisms by which the CaSR regulates BP are poorly understood. In the present study, the role of the CaSR in EH was investigated using male spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRs) and rat and human plasma samples. The percentages of medial wall thickness to external diameter (WT%), total vessel wall cross-sectional area to the total area (WA%) of thoracic arteries, as well as the percentage of wall area occupied by collagen to total vessel wall area (CA%) were determined. Tissue protein expression and plasma concentrations of the CaSR, cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), renin, and angiotensin II (Ang II) were additionally assessed. WT%, WA%, and CA% were found to increase with increasing BP, whereas the plasma concentration of CaSR was found to decrease. With increasing BP, the levels of smooth muscle actin and calponin decreased, whereas those of osteopontin and proliferating cell nuclear antigen increased. The CaSR level negatively correlated with the levels of cAMP and Ang II, but positively correlated with those of renin. Our data suggest that reduced expression of the CaSR is correlated with activation of the RAS, which induces increased vascular remodeling and VSMC proliferation, and thereby associated with EH in the SHR model and in the Han Chinese population. Our findings provide new insights into the pathogenesis of EH.
Analysing heart attack survival using intelligent systems

A successful application of a new intelligent system design approach called Multimethod in knowledge extraction and discovery in heart attack areas is presented in this paper. The results show that the Multimethod approach is a powerful and promising technique enabling the conformation of existing medical knowledge and more interestingly, also enabling the induction of new facts and hypothesis, which can reveal some new interesting patterns and possibly improve the existing medical knowledge.
Phylogeography of the genus Xenopus in southern Africa

Xenopus laevis (Daudin, 1802) has been the subject of numerous studies but is taxonomically poorly understood. Part of the Cytochrome b gene in mitochondrial DNA was sequenced from 50 individual Xenopus from three currently recognised species, taken from 28 localities in southern Africa, and from an outgroup of two West African X. epitropicalis . Phylogenetic analyses of these data reveal well-supported tree structure, demonstrating three clades within what is currently regarded as X. laevis : X. l. laevis from the Cape, X. l. petersii , and X. l. laevis from further north. This evidence agrees with other studies (on morphology, call and parasite data) which suggest that what is currently regarded as X. laevis encompasses more than one species. Workers using Xenopus collected away from the Cape of South Africa are not safe in assuming that they are using X. laevis .
On the Effect of Shadow Fading on Wireless Geolocation in Mixed LoS/NLoS Environments

This paper considers the wireless non-line-of-sight (NLoS) geolocation in mixed LoS/NLoS environments by using the information of time-of-arrival. We derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for a deterministic shadowing, the asymptotic CRB (ACRB) based on the statistical average of a random shadowing, a generalization of the modified CRB (MCRB) called a simplified Bayesian CRB (SBCRB), and the Bayesian CRB (BCRB) when the a priori knowledge of the shadowing probability density function is available. In the deterministic case, numerical examples show that for the effective bandwidth in the order of kHz, the CRB almost does not change with the additional length of the NLoS path except for a small interval of the length, in which the CRB changes dramatically. For the effective bandwidth in the order of MHz, the CRB decreases monotonously with the additional length of the NLoS path and finally converges to a constant as the additional length of the NLoS path approaches the infinity. In the random shadowing scenario, the shadowing exponent is modeled by sigmav = usigma, where u is a Gaussian random variable with zero mean and unit variance and sigma is another Gaussian random variable with mean musigma and standard deviation sigmasigma. When musigma is large, the ACRB considerably increases with sigmasigma, whereas the SBCRB gradually decreases with sigmasigma. In addition, the SBCRB can well approximate the BCRB.
RELAX: Incorporating Uncertainty into the Specification of Self-Adaptive Systems

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behaviour at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Self-adaptation is particularly necessary for applications that must run continuously, even under adverse conditions and changing requirements; sample domains include automotive systems, telecommunications, and environmental monitoring systems. While a few techniques have been developed to support the monitoring and analysis of requirements for adaptive systems, limited attention has been paid to the actual creation and specification of requirements of self-adaptive systems. As a result, self-adaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we argue that a more rigorous treatment of requirements explicitly relating to self-adaptivity is needed and that, in particular, requirements languages for self-adaptive systems should include explicit constructs for specifying and dealing with the uncertainty inherent in self-adaptive systems. We present RELAX, a new requirements language for self-adaptive systems and illustrate it using examples from the smart home domain.
Does Corporate Governance Quality Lend Credibility to Open‐Market Share Repurchase Announcements?

Manuscript Type. Empirical. Research Question/Issue. Low‐quality firms may use share repurchase announcements to send a false or conflicting message regarding firm value to the capital market. This study examines whether firm‐level corporate governance mechanisms can alleviate this mimicking behavior by affecting managers' buyback behavior following open‐market share repurchase announcements. I further investigate the extent to which differences in corporate governance affect the changes in insider shareholdings and the degree of information content provided in repurchase announcements. Research Findings/Insights. Using unique archival data from Taiwan, I find that the capital market reaction to share repurchases announced for the purpose of signaling undervaluation is more favorable for firms with quality corporate governance. The increasing post‐repurchase insider shareholdings confirm the credibility of repurchase announcements for firms with better corporate governance. The buyback outcome subsequent to repurchase announcements is affected by internal corporate governance mechanisms. Furthermore, external monitoring factors, such as having Big Four accounting firms as auditors, listing requirements, and regulatory preset buyback price ranges, also determine the execution rate of repurchase programs. Theoretical/Academic Implications. The signaling hypothesis, the leading hypothesis on open‐market share repurchases, suggests that low‐quality firms may engage in mimicking behavior to send a false signal regarding firm value when the signal cost is low. This study provides insight regarding the impacts of firm‐level corporate governance structures on the signaling effects of repurchase announcements, the subsequent insider shareholdings, and the completion of repurchase programs. In addition, this study is the first to analyze the influence of corporate governance mechanisms on the degree of information content in open‐market share repurchase announcements. Practitioner/Policy Implications. This study suggests that higher quality corporate governance mechanisms lend credibility to a firm's open‐market share repurchase announcement, which is also noteworthy in assessing the wealth effect of the repurchase announcements on shareholder value. Moreover, the findings suggest that buyback regulations (e.g., preset buyback price ceiling and floor) in Taiwan influence managers' buyback decisions.
A long-term evaluation of once-daily inhaled tiotropium in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Currently available inhaled bronchodilators used as therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) necessitate multiple daily dosing. The present study evaluates the long-term safety and efficacy of tiotropium, a new once-daily anticholinergic in COPD. Patients with stable COPD (age 65.2±8.7 yrs (mean±sd), n=921) were enrolled in two identical randomized double-blind placebo-controlled 1-yr studies. Patients inhaled tiotropium 18 µg or placebo (mean screening forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) 1.01 versus 0.99 L, 39.1 and 38.1% of the predicted value) once daily as a dry powder. The primary spirometric outcome was trough FEV1 (i.e. FEV1 prior to dosing). Changes in dyspnoea were measured using the Transition Dyspnea Index, and health status with the disease-specific St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire and the generic Short Form 36. Medication use and adverse events were recorded. Tiotropium provided significantly superior bronchodilation relative to placebo for trough FEV1 response (∼12% over baseline) (p<0.01) and mean response during the 3 h following dosing (∼22% over baseline) (p<0.001) over the 12-month period. Tiotropium recipients showed less dyspnoea (p<0.001), superior health status scores, and fewer COPD exacerbations and hospitalizations (p<0.05). Adverse events were comparable with placebo, except for dry mouth incidence (tiotropium 16.0% versus placebo 2.7%, p<0.05). Tiotropium is an effective, once-daily bronchodilator that reduces dyspnoea and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbation frequency and improves health status. This suggests that tiotropium will make an important contribution to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease therapy.
Heat Shock Protein 20 Interacting With Phosphorylated Akt Reduces Doxorubicin-Triggered Oxidative Stress and Cardiotoxicity

Doxorubicin (DOX) is a widely used antitumor drug, but its application is limited because of its cardiotoxic side effects. Heat shock protein (Hsp)20 has been recently shown to protect cardiomyocytes against apoptosis, induced by ischemia/reperfusion injury or by prolonged &bgr;-agonist stimulation. However, it is not clear whether Hsp20 would exert similar protective effects against DOX-induced cardiac injury. Actually, DOX treatment was associated with downregulation of Hsp20 in the heart. To elucidate the role of Hsp20 in DOX-triggered cardiac toxicity, Hsp20 was first overexpressed ex vivo by adenovirus-mediated gene delivery. Increased Hsp20 levels conferred higher resistance to DOX-induced cell death, compared to green fluorescent protein control. Furthermore, cardiac-specific overexpression of Hsp20 in vivo significantly ameliorated acute DOX-triggered cardiomyocyte apoptosis and animal mortality. Hsp20 transgenic mice also showed improved cardiac function and prolonged survival after chronic administration of DOX. The mechanisms underlying these beneficial effects were associated with preserved Akt phosphorylation/activity and attenuation of DOX-induced oxidative stress. Coimmunoprecipitation studies revealed an interaction between Hsp20 and phosphorylated Akt. Accordingly, BAD phosphorylation was preserved, and cleaved caspase-3 was decreased in DOX-treated Hsp20 transgenic hearts, consistent with the antiapoptotic effects of Hsp20. Parallel ex vivo experiments showed that either infection with a dominant-negative Akt adenovirus or preincubation of cardiomyocytes with the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase inhibitors significantly attenuated the protective effects of Hsp20. Taken together, our findings indicate that overexpression of Hsp20 inhibits DOX-triggered cardiac injury, and these beneficial effects appear to be dependent on Akt activation. Thus, Hsp20 may constitute a new therapeutic target in ameliorating the cardiotoxic effects of DOX treatment in cancer patients.
Capital and Risk: New Evidence on Implications of Large Operational Losses

Operational risk is currently receiving significant media attention, as financial scandals have appeared regularly and multiple events have exceeded one billion dollars in impact. Regulators have also been devoting attention to this risk and are finalizing proposals that would require banks to hold capital for potential operational losses. This paper uses newly available loss data to model operational risk at internationally active banks. Our results suggest that the amount of capital held for operational risk will often exceed capital held for market risk and that the largest banks could choose to allocate several billion dollars in capital to operational risk.
Robust Point Sets Matching by Fusing Feature and Spatial Information Using Nonuniform Gaussian Mixture Models

Most of the traditional methods that handle the point sets matching between two images are based on local feature descriptors and the succedent mismatch eliminating strategies, which usually suffers from the sparsity of the initial match set because some correct ambiguous associations are easily filtered out by the ratio test of SIFT matching due to their second ranking in feature similarity. In this paper, we propose a nonuniform Gaussian mixture model (NGMM) for point sets matching between a pair of images which combines feature with position information of the local feature points extracted from the image pair to achieve point sets matching in a GMM framework. The proposed point set matching using an NGMM is able to change the correspondence assignments throughout the matching process and has the potential to match up even ambiguous matches correctly. The proposed NGMM framework can be either used to directly find matches between two point sets obtained from two images or applied to remove outliers in a match set. When finding matches, NGMM tries to learn a nonrigid transformation between the two point sets and provide a probability for every found match to measure the reliability of the match. Then, a probability threshold can be used to get the final robust match set. When removing outliers, NGMM requires that the vector field formed by the correct matches to be coherent and the matches contradicting the coherent vector field will be regarded as mismatches to be removed. A number of comparison and evaluation experiments reveal the good performance of the proposed NGMM framework in both finding matches and discarding mismatches.
Trust is bound to emerge (In the repeated Trust Game)

This paper addresses the emergence of cooperation in asymmetric pris- oners' dilemmas in which one player chooses after having observed the other player's choice (Trust Game). We use the finite automata approach with complexity costs to study the equilibria of the repeated version of this game. We show that there is a small set of automata that form the unique Closed Under Rational Behavior (CURB) set for this game. This set contains two non-strict Nash equilibria, a cooperative and a non- cooperative one. We show that the cooperative equilibrium is the only (cyclically) stable set under the so called Best Response Dynamics.
Kinematic model identification of planar delta manipulator using Random Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm

An accurate kinematic model is one of the fundamental requirements of high performance robotic manipulators. But due to the existence of tolerance and clearance, calibration should be always carried out first of all to identify the inaccuracy and further modification of the kinematic model. In this paper, the calibration work of a planar parallel manipulator was presented in details. And an innovative algorithm to solve the nonlinear optimization problem was proposed, which's named “Random-Levenberg-Marquardt” algorithm. With specific illustration and practical experiment result, this algorithm was proved to be efficient, accurate and easily implementable comparing to the traditional methods.
Quality of the Business Environment Versus Quality of Life: Do Firms and Households Like the Same Cities?

This paper develops a new measure of the quality of business environment that complements existing measures of the quality of life. An annual panel of these measures is constructed and analyzed for 37 cities from 1977 to 1995. Findings indicate that many cities attractive to firms are unattractive to households, and vice versa. In addition, the size of a city's workforce increases with improvements in the quality of the business environment. In contrast, cities most likely to be dominated by retirees are those that are less attractive to firms. Additional specifications support theoretical arguments that retirees are drawn to cities in which local attributes are capitalized into lower wages rather than higher rents.
On the Interaction between a Nanoparticulate System and the Human Body in Body Area Nanonetworks

In this work, we investigate the interaction of a nanoparticulate system for nanomedicine applications with the biological environment, i.e., the human body. Following the molecular communication paradigm, we assess how our nanoparticulate system model is suitable for coexistence in a biological environment. Specifically, we assume the presence of the human immune system that can affect the optimal behavior of nanoparticles, aiming to locally deliver drug inside the human body. When a flow of nanoparticles is injected into the blood, the interference due to the immune system can provide a strong decrease of the nanoparticle concentration, by means of “humoral immunity”, the phagocytosis process, etc. As a consequence, the correct drug delivery will occur with a lower probability. Since the mechanism behind the biological immune system is very complicated, in this paper, we start from a simplistic nanoparticulate model, where the nanoparticles and the cells of the immune system are subject to the diffusion laws. Finally, we derive the end-to-end physical model of our nanoparticulate nanomedicine system with the presence of the human immune system cells. The error analysis is then investigated in terms of how these errors can affect the performance of the system, i.e., nanoparticle survival probability.