Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Light-Induced Responses of Slow Oscillatory Neurons of the Rat Olivary Pretectal Nucleus

Background The olivary pretectal nucleus (OPN) is a small midbrain structure responsible for pupil constriction in response to eye illumination. Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that OPN neurons code light intensity levels and therefore are called luminance detectors. Recently, we described an additional population of OPN neurons, characterized by a slow rhythmic pattern of action potentials in light-on conditions. Rhythmic patterns generated by these cells last for a period of approximately 2 minutes. Methodology To answer whether oscillatory OPN cells are light responsive and whether oscillatory activity depends on retinal afferents, we performed in vivo electrophysiology experiments on urethane anaesthetized Wistar rats. Extracellular recordings were combined with changes in light conditions (light-dark-light transitions), brief light stimulations of the contralateral eye (diverse illuminances) or intraocular injections of tetrodotoxin (TTX). Conclusions We found that oscillatory neurons were able to fire rhythmically in darkness and were responsive to eye illumination in a manner resembling that of luminance detectors. Their firing rate increased together with the strength of the light stimulation. In addition, during the train of light pulses, we observed two profiles of responses: oscillation-preserving and oscillation-disrupting, which occurred during low- and high-illuminance stimuli presentation respectively. Moreover, we have shown that contralateral retina inactivation eliminated oscillation and significantly reduced the firing rate of oscillatory cells. These results suggest that contralateral retinal innervation is crucial for the generation of an oscillatory pattern in addition to its role in driving responses to visual stimuli.
THE EFFECTS OF GEOGRAPHIC INTEGRATION AND INCREASING COMPETITION IN THE MARKET FOR COLLEGE EDUCATION

distributed as National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 6323 (December 1997). The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Bunting Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (grant SBR-9511343). The author gratefully acknowledges advice from Charles Clotfelter, Ronald Ehrenberg, Martin Feldstein, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, Michael McPherson, Gordon Winston, and seminar participants at several universities. THE EFFECTS OF GEOGRAPHIC INTEGRATION AND INCREASING COMPETITION IN THE MARKET FOR COLLEGE EDUCATION
Environmental conditions and biotic interactions acting together promote phylogenetic randomness in semi-arid plant communities: new methods help to avoid misleading conclusions.

QUESTIONS Molecular phylogenies are being increasingly used to better understand the mechanisms structuring natural communities. The prevalent theory is that environmental factors and biotic interactions promote the phylogenetic clustering and overdispersion of plant communities, respectively. However, both environmental filtering and biotic interactions are very likely to interact in most natural communities, jointly affecting community phylogenetic structure. We asked the following question: How do environmental filters and biotic interactions jointly affect the phylogenetic structure of plant communities across environmental gradients? LOCATION Eleven Stipa tenacissima L. grasslands located along an environmental gradient from central to south-east Spain, which covers the core of the distribution area of this vegetation type in Europe. METHODS We jointly evaluated the effects of environmental conditions and plant-plant interactions on the phylogenetic structure -measured with the mean phylogenetic distance index- of the studied communities. As an indicator of environmental conditions, we used a PCA ordination including eight climatic variables. Different metrics were used to measure the following processes: i) competition/facilitation shifts at the entire community level (Species Combination index), and ii) the effect of the microclimatic amelioration provided by the two most important nurses on neighbours composition (similarity indices and comparison of the phylogenetic pattern between canopy patches and bare ground areas). RESULTS Biotic interactions and, to a less extent, environmental conditions, affected the phylogenetic pattern of the studied communities. While positive plant-plant interactions (both at the community and the scale of individual nurses) increased phylogenetic overdispersion, higher rainfall increased phylogenetic clustering. The opposed effects of environmental conditions and biotic interactions could be the main cause of the overall random phylogenetic structure found in most of these communities. CONCLUSIONS Our results illustrate, for the first time, how an overall random phylogenetic pattern may not be promoted only by the lack of influence of either environmental filtering or biotic interactions, but rather by their joint and opposing effects. They caution about making inferences about the underlying mechanisms shaping plant communities from the sole use of their phylogenetic pattern. We also provide a comprehensive set of easy-to-measure tools to avoid misleading conclusions when interpreting phylogenetic structure data obtained from observational studies.
THD Analysis in Multilevel Inverter Fed Induction Motors Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Harmonics measurement of an industrial unit is done to aid the power quality aspects in a typical factory. The real issues are the harmonics generated by the inverters which affects the induction machine performance. Several inverters like Voltage Series Inverters, PWM fed Inverters, Multilevel inverters etc. exist in literature. Amongst all these, multilevel inverters have been very popular due to its several advantages. But there is a challenge of optimal design of the inverter and optimal selection of pulse width of each level so as to get minimal Total Harmonic Distortion. For these reasons a novel multilevel inverter design based on Particle Swarm Optimization is proposed in this paper for obtaining the optimal width of the pulse of each level so as to get minimal Total Harmonic distortion. The results has been compared to that of the existing techniques and found to be quite better than the existing ones.
Natural Language Interfaces Using Limited Semantic Information

In order to analyze their input properly, natural language interfaces require access to domain-specific semantic information. However, design considerations for practical systems -- in particular, the desire to construct interfaces which are readily portable to new domains -- require us to limit and segregate this domain-specific information. We consider here the possibility of limiting ourselves to a characterization of the structure of information in a domain. This structure is captured in a domain information schema , which specifies the semantic classes of the domain, the words and phrases which belong to these classes, and the predicate-argument relationships among members of these classes which are meaningful in the domain. We describe how this schema is used by the various stages of two large natural language processing systems.
Adsorption of phenol on graphite(0001) and α-Al2O3(0001): Nature of van der Waals bonds from first-principles calculations

First-principles calculations of phenol adsorbed on two different surfaces, graphite 0001 and -Al2O3 0001 , are performed with traditional semilocal density functional theory DFT and with a recently presented density functional vdW-DF that incorporates the dispersive van der Waals vdW interactions Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 246401 2004 . The vdW-DF is of decisive importance for describing the vdW bond of the phenol-graphite system and gives a secondary but not negligible vdW contribution for phenol on alumina. We find a predominantly covalent bond at the alumina surface. There, adsorption results in a binding separation distance between surface Al and the O of the inclining phenol molecule of 1.95 Å and a binding energy of 1.00 eV, evaluated within the generalized gradient approximation GGA of DFT, i.e., from covalency, with the energy increasing to around 1.2 eV when the contribution from vdW interactions is also accounted for. On graphite, with its pure vdW bond, the adsorption distance separation between parallel surface and phenol molecule is found to be 3.47 Å and the adsorption strength 0.56 eV. Comparison of the results for alumina and graphite mutually and with published results for nickel reveals significant differences in the adsorption of this model biomolecule.
Propagation for feature matching using triangular constraints

This paper presents a novel Matching Propagation Framework for addressing the problem of finding better matching pairs between each two images, which is one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision and pattern recognition. We first select initial seed points by original matching method like SIFT, and then use T-CM to explore more seed points. Finally, a triangle constraint based quasi-dense algorithm is adopted to propagate better matches around seed points. The experimental evaluation shows that our method can get a more precise matching result than classical quasi-dense algorithm. And the 3D reconstruction of the scene from our method has a good visual effect. Both experiments demonstrate the robust performance of our method.
Graphical displays for meta‐analysis: An overview with suggestions for practice

Meta‐analyses are fundamental tools for collating and synthesizing large amounts of information, and graphical displays have become the principal tool for presenting the results of multiple studies of the same research question. We review standard and proposed graphical displays for presentation of meta‐analytic data, and offer our recommendations on how they might be presented to provide the most useful and user‐friendly illustrations. We concentrate on graphs that specifically aim to present similar sorts of univariate results from multiple studies. We start with forest plots and funnel plots, and proceed to Galbraith (or radial) plots, L'Abbé (and related) plots, further plots useful for investigating heterogeneity, plots useful for model diagnostics and plots for illustrating likelihoods and Bayesian meta‐analyses. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluating Web software reliability based on workload and failure data extracted from server logs

We characterize usage and problems for Web applications, evaluate their reliability, and examine the potential for reliability improvement. Based on the characteristics of Web applications and the overall Web environment, we classify Web problems and focus on the subset of source content problems. Using information about Web accesses, we derive various measurements that can characterize Web site workload at different levels of granularity and from different perspectives. These workload measurements, together with failure information extracted from recorded errors, are used to evaluate the operational reliability for source contents at a given Web site and the potential for reliability improvement. We applied this approach to the Web sites www.seas. smu.edu and www.kde. org. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.
Depletion of mitochondrial DNA in liver under antiretroviral therapy with didanosine, stavudine, or zalcitabine

The “D drug” HIV reverse‐transcriptase inhibitors zalcitabine, didanosine, and stavudine are relatively strong inhibitors of polymerase‐gamma compared with the “non–D drugs” zidovudine, lamivudine, and abacavir. D drugs deplete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in cultured hepatocytes. This mtDNA depletion is associated with an increased in vitro production of lactate. To investigate the origin of hyperlactatemia in HIV‐infected patients and the effects of antiretroviral therapy on liver mtDNA, we biopsied liver tissue from 94 individuals with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. Eighty subjects were coinfected with HIV. Serum lactate was measured at the time of biopsy. Hepatic mtDNA and liver histology were centrally assessed. Liver mtDNA content of HIV‐infected patients receiving D drugs at the time of biopsy (n = 34) was decreased by 47% (P<.0001) compared with those without D drugs (n = 35). Aside from a possible association between HCV genotype I status and mtDNA depletion in multivariate analysis, there were no other virologic, immunologic, histologic, demographic or treatment‐related variables that could explain the mtDNA depletion. Lactate was above the upper limit of normal in only three patients, all of whom were treated with D drugs. The mtDNA in each of them was lower than in any non–D drug patient and significantly (P = .017) depleted compared with D drug patients with normal lactate. In conclusion, D drug treatment is associated with decreased hepatic mtDNA in HIV‐infected patients with chronic HCV infection. Moderate mtDNA depletion in liver does not necessarily lead to hyperlactatemia, but more pronounced decreases in hepatic mtDNA may be an important contributor to lactate elevation. (HEPATOLOGY 2004;39:311–317.)
Relic Radiation from an Evaporating Black Hole

This paper presents a non-string-theoretic calculation of the microcanonical entropy of relic integer-spin Hawking radiation, at fixed total energy E, from an evanescent, neutral, non-rotating four-dimensional black hole. The only conserved macroscopic quantity is the total energy E which, for a black hole that evaporates completely, is the total energy of the relic radiation. Through a boundary-value approach, in which data for massless, integer-spin perturbations are set on initial and final space-like hypersurfaces, the statistical-mechanics problem becomes, in effect, a one-dimensional problem, with the "volume" of the system determined by the real part of the time separation at spatial infinity — the variable conjugate to the total energy. We count the number of field configurations on the final space-like hypersurface that have total energy E, assuming that initial perturbations are weak. We find that the density of states resembles the well-known Cardy formula. The Bekenstein–Hawking entropy is recovered if the real part of the asymptotic time separation is of the order of the semi-classical black-hole lifetime. We thereby obtain a statistical interpretation of black-hole entropy. Corrections to the microcanonical entropy are computed, and we find agreement with other approaches in terms of a logarithmic correction to the black-hole area law, which is universal (independent of black-hole parameters). This result depends crucially upon the discreteness of the energy levels. We discuss the similarities of our approach with the transition from the black-hole to the fundamental-string regime in the final stages of black-hole evaporation. In addition, we find that the squared coupling, g2, which regulates the transition from a black hole to a highly-excited string state, and vice versa, can be related to the angle, δ, in the complex-time plane, through which we continue analytically the time separation at spatial infinity. Thus, in this scenario, the strong-coupling regime corresponds to a Euclidean black hole, while the physical limit of a Lorentzian space–time (the limit as δ → 0+) corresponds to the weak-coupling regime. This resembles the transition of a black hole to a highly-excited string-like state, which subsequently decays into massless particles, thereby avoiding the naked singularity.
Text Classification in USENET Newsgroups: A Progress Report

We report on our investigations into topic classification with USENET newsgroups. Our framework is to determine the newsgroup that a new document should be posted to. We train our system by forming "metadocuments" that represent each topic. We discuss our experiments with this method, and provide evidence that choosing particular documents or words to use in these models degrades classification accuracy. We also describe a technique called classification-based retrieval for finding documents similar to a query document. A Domain For Text Classification Most work in classification has involved articles taken off of a newswire, or from a medical database(Lewis 1992). In these cases, correct topic labels are chosen by human experts. The domain of USENET newsgroup postings is another interesting testbed for classification. The "labels" here are just the newsgroups to which the documents were originally posted. Since users of the Internet must make this classification decision every time they post an article, this is a nice "real life" application of text categorization. Our approach is to create a model for each group, and then compare future documents to each model to find the best match. Newsgroups have been studied in other projects. Mostly there has been work done in filtering. In this problem, users attempt to select documents from a large pool that match their interests or are similar to other documents. The SIFT project at Stanford(Yan Garcia-Molina 1995) has users submit profiles of their interests. It then uses new documents as queries on the profiles. At CMU, the Newsweeder project(Lang 1995) has users rate new documents in terms of relevance, and attempts to learn these ratings to distinguish if future postings are relevant. We will address this problem using the techniques we tried for classification.
Low-Leakage SMARTMOS 10W Technology At 0.13μm Node with Optimized Analog, Power and Logic Devices for SOC Design

SMARTMOS 10 W technology, which was developed based on 0.13-micron technology node, combines optimized power, analog and digital devices for wireless and consumer applications. As compared to the current state-of-the-art technologies, significant size shrink in power devices is achieved for cost reduction while the leakage is lowered by more than 20 times to minimize power consumption. Also, the technology doubles the performance of analog matching across FETs, resistors and capacitors. This technology is an excellent fit for all portable applications in which device size, battery life, sound quality and overall integration capability are key considerations.
Benchmarking queries over trees: learning the hard truth the hard way

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Design of Low-Power CMOS Cell Structures Using Subthreshold Conduction Region

Subthreshold (leakage or cut-off) currents are a necessary evil in traditional VLSI design methodologies. These currents increase exponentially as threshold voltage scales, creating a serious problem for traditional design approaches. This work is based on the exclusive use of subthreshold conduction currents to perform circuit operations, turning this problem into an opportunity. It yields a dramatic improvement in power consumption compared to traditional circuit design approaches. This improvement makes it feasible to design extreme low-power circuits with such an approach. The CMOS digital circuits for this work have been designed using standard TSMC 0.18 �� m Technology. Index Terms—Low-Power, Leakage Current, Subthreshold Conduction. —————————— a —————————— 1 I With the growing scale of integration, more and more sophisticated signal processing systems need to be im- plemented on a VLSI chip. For these signal processing applications, power consumption has become a critical concern in today's VLSI system design. The need for low- power VLSI systems arises from two main forces. First, with the steady growth of processing capacity per chip, large current has to be delivered and the heat due to large power consumption must be removed by proper cooling techniques. Second, battery life in portable electronic de- vices is limited. Low-power design directly leads to pro- longed operation time in these portable devices. Also, with shrinking technology sizes, energy effi- ciency has become a critical aspect of designing digital circuits. Traditionally, voltage scaling, a mechanism in which the supply voltage is varying and the threshold voltage is constant, has been an effective solution in meet- ing stringent energy requirements. However, voltage scal- ing does come at a cost of reduction in performance. The limits of voltage scaling, and therefore energy minimiza- tion, can be explored by operating a circuit at subthresh- old (1). In subthreshold circuits, the supply voltage is re- duced well below the threshold voltage of a transistor. Due to the quadratic reduction in power with respect to the supply voltage, subthreshold circuits are classified as ultra low-power circuits. Specifically in application areas where performance can be sacrificed for low-power, subthreshold circuits are an ideal fit. Some of the applications include devices such as digital wrist watches, radio frequency identification (RFID), sensor nodes, pacemakers and battery operated devices such as, cellular phones.
A method for avoiding bias from feature selection with application to naive Bayes classification models

For many classification and regression problems, a large number of features are available for possible use — this is typical of DNA microarray data on gene expression, for example. Often, for computational or other reasons, only a small subset of these features are selected for use in a model, based on some simple measure such as correlation with the response variable. This procedure may introduce an optimistic bias, however, in which the response variable appears to be more predictable than it actually is, because the high correlation of the selected features with the response may be partly or wholly due to chance. We show how this bias can be avoided when using a Bayesian model for the joint distribution of features and response. The crucial insight is that even if we forget the exact values of the unselected features, we should retain, and condition on, the knowledge that their correlation with the response was too small for them to be selected. In this paper we describe how this idea can be implemented for "naive Bayes" models of binary data. Experiments with simulated data confirm that this method avoids bias due to feature selection. We also apply the naive Bayes model to subsets of data relating gene expression to colon cancer, and find that correcting for bias from feature selection does improve predictive performance.
Profiling-Based Log Block Replacement Scheme in FTL for Update-Intensive Executions

FTL (Flash Translation Layer) hides details of flash memory, providing file systems with an abstract view of the flash memory. For NAND flash memory, some previous researches have achieved dramatic performance enhancement by adopting log-based FTL, which records time-consuming write operations in log blocks, rather than executes them immediately. Log block replacement scheme plays an essential role in this method, due to the limitation of pre-reserved log block space, this method entails selecting some victims from the existing blocks and re-use them for newly issued operations. However, simple replacement algorithms are vulnerable to select such log blocks that will be used soon, which causes performance degradation. In this paper we propose a smarter log block replacement scheme to alleviate this problem by keeping busy log blocks from being selected, based on profiling and analyzing log block status. We show that our scheme reduces unnecessary time-consuming write operations and achieves performance improvement especially for the applications having intensive locality.