Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of Thin-Film Liquid-Crystal-Polymer Surface-Mount Packages for $Ka$ -Band Applications

In this paper, we present the design and development of thin-film liquid-crystal-polymer (LCP) surface-mount packages for Ka-band applications. The packages are constructed using multilayer LCP films and are surface mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Our experimental results demonstrate that the package feed-through transition including a PCB launch and bond wires achieve a return loss of better than -20 dB and an insertion loss of less than 0.4 dB around Ka-band. We achieve a measured port-to-port isolation of the package to be more than 45 dB across the Ka-band. We demonstrate the package feed-through circuit model by comparing the simulation of model and bare die measurement data to a packaged amplifier measurement. Finally, we report an LCP cavity that has a measured fine leak rate of 3.6 times 10-8 atmldrcc/s.
The reduceron reconfigured

The leading implementations of graph reduction all target conventional processors designed for low-level imperative execution. In this paper, we present a processor specially designed to perform graph-reduction. Our processor -- the Reduceron -- is implemented using off-the-shelf reconfigurable hardware. We highlight the low-level parallelism present in sequential graph reduction, and show how parallel memories and dynamic analyses are used in the Reduceron to achieve an average reduction rate of 0.55 function applications per clock-cycle.
Comparison on Phenolic Compounds and Antioxidant Properties of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot Wines from Four Wine Grape-Growing Regions in China

The antioxidant activities in the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines from four wine grape-growing regions in China were measured by different analytical assays: 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH·), cupric reducing antioxidant capacity (CUPRAC), superoxide radical-scavenging activity (SRSA) and the contents of total phenols, total flavonoids, total flavanols and total anthocyanins were determined. The results showed that the contents of phenolic compounds and the levels of antioxidant activity in the wine samples greatly varied with cultivar and environmental factors of vine growth. The contents of phenolic compounds and antioxidant activities in Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines from the Yuquanying region of Ningxia were significantly higher than other three regions, followed by the wines from Shacheng region of Hebei, and these parameters were the lowest in Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines from the Changli regions of Hebei and Xiangning region of Shanxi. Taken together, a close relationship between phenolic subclasses and antioxidant activity was observed for the wine samples. Moreover, there were significant discrepancies in the individual phenolic composition and content of four regional Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot wines, among which the individual phenolic compounds (catechin, epicatechin, cinnamic acid, quercetin-3-O-glucuronide, quercetin-3-O-glucoside, laricitrin-3-O-glucoside and isorhamnetin-3-O-glucoside) revealed a significant correlation (p < 0.05) with the antioxidant capacity in present study, especially for catechin and epicatechin.
The Spitzer c2d Survey of Weak-Line T Tauri Stars. II. New Constraints on the Timescale for Planet Building

One of the central goals of the Spitzer Legacy Project ``From Cores to Disks'' (c2d) is to determine the frequency of circumstellar disks around weak-line T Tauri stars (WTTSs) and to study the properties and evolutionary status of these disks. Here we present a census of disks for a sample of over 230 WTTSs located in the c2d IRAC and MIPS maps of the Ophiuchus, Lupus, and Perseus Molecular Clouds. We find that ~20% of the WTTSs in a magnitude-limited subsample have IR excesses at IRAC wavelengths. These disks frequencies are ~3-6 times larger than that recently found for a sample of relatively isolated WTTSs located outside the highest extinction regions covered by the c2d maps. The disk fractions we find are more consistent with those obtained in recent Spitzer studies of WTTSs in young clusters such as IC 348 and Tr 37. According to their location in the H-R diagram, the WTTSs with excesses in our sample are among the younger part of the age distribution. Still, up to ~50% of the apparently youngest stars in the sample show no evidence of IR excess, suggesting that the circumstellar disks of a sizable fraction of pre-main-sequence stars dissipate in a timescale of ~1 Myr. We also find that none of the stars in our sample apparently older than ~10 Myr have detectable circumstellar disks at wavelengths <24 μm. The WTTS disks in our sample exhibit a wide range of properties (SED morphology, inner radius, Ldisk/L*, etc.) that bridge the gaps observed between the CTTSs and the debris disk regimes.
Lyapunov-based switching supervisory control of nonlinear uncertain systems

The problem of controlling nonlinear noisy systems affected by parametric uncertainties is approached via the introduction of a supervisor which switches on, in feedback to the plant, one controller selected from a finite set of predesigned controllers. A Lyapunov-based falsification criterion allows one to ensure robust stability in the presence of uncertain constant parameters and exogenous bounded disturbances.
Vehicle Behavior Analysis to Enhance Security in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) will help to improve traffic safety and efficiency. By exchanging information between each other, vehicles can warn drivers or even prepare for a dangerous situation, i.e. engage pre-crash functionalities like airbag preloading. The decision how to react on information received from other vehicles always has to be made locally. For the security of the system, i.e. to prevent misuse or distortion, each vehicle must be able to evaluate its surrounding independently. In this paper, we propose a framework for behavior analysis of other vehicles in the vicinity to approach this problem. By combining the output of multiple behavior analysis modules, each vehicle is assigned a trustworthiness value which may be additionally exchanged among all vehicles, building up reputation. Based on this information, vehicles are classified into trustworthy, untrustworthy or neutral. Applications, for example, may then take this trust rating into consideration in order to react appropriately on incoming information.
The Role of Oxidative Stress in Noise-Induced Hearing Loss

Modern research has provided new insights into the biological mechanisms of noise-induced hearing loss, and with these new insights comes hope for possible prevention or treatment. Underlying the classic set of cochlear pathologies that occur as a result of noise exposure are increased levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that play a significant role in noise-induced hair cell death. Both necrotic and apoptotic cell death have been identified in the cochlea. Included in the current review is a brief review of ROS, along with a description of sources of cochlear ROS generation and how ROS can damage cochlear tissue. The pathways of necrotic and apoptotic cell death are also reviewed. Interventions are discussed that target the prevention of noise-induced hair cell death: the use of antioxidants to scavenge and eliminate the damaging ROS, pharmacological interventions to limit the damage resulting from ROS, and new techniques aimed at interrupting the apoptotic biochemical cascade that results in the death of irreplaceable hair cells.
Contiguity of the Whittle measure for a Gaussian time series

For a stationary time series, Whittle constructed a likelihood for the spectral density based on the approximate independence of the discrete Fourier transforms of the data at certain frequencies. Whittle's likelihood has been widely used in the literature for constructing estimators. In this paper, we show that, for a Gaussian time series, the Whittle measure is mutually contiguous with the actual distribution of the data. As a consequence, most asymptotic properties of estimators and test statistics derived under the Whittle measure can be carried over to the actual distribution. Copyright Biometrika Trust 2004, Oxford University Press.
Self-actuation of Cameras for Redundant Data Elimination in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

With the increasing interest in the deployment of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), new challenges arouse with effective use of camera sensors to provide maximized event coverage with the least amount of redundancy in the collected multimedia data. Given that the processing and transmission of multimedia data are costly in terms of energy, camera sensors should only be actuated when an event is detected within their vicinity. While achieving maximum coverage with such actuation is desirable, multiple camera sensors’ field-ofview (FoV) can be covering the same spots and thus redundant multimedia data can unnecessarily be sent to the base-station. In this paper, assuming camera sensors with fixed orientation, we propose a low-cost distributed actuation scheme which strives to turn on the least number of camera sensors to avoid possible redundancy in the multimedia data while still providing the necessary event coverage. The basic idea of this distributed scheme is the collaboration of camera sensors that have heard from scalar sensors about an occurring event in order to minimize the possible coverage overlaps among their FoVs. The scheme requires only 1-hop information for camera sensors and its messaging overhead is negligible. Through simulation, we show how the distributed scheme performs with respect to the cases when all the cameras within the vicinity or the region are actuated and assess the performance under various conditions.
First order error propagation of the Procrustes method for 3D attitude estimation

The well-known Procrustes method determines the optimal rigid body motion that registers two point clouds by minimizing the square distances of the residuals. In this paper, we perform the first order error analysis of this method for the 3D case, fully specifying how directional noise in the point clouds affects the estimated parameters of the rigid body motion. These results are much more specific than the error bounds which have been established in numerical analysis. We provide an intuitive understanding of the outcome to facilitate direct use in applications.
Implementation of object-oriented GIS data model with topological relations between spatial objects

Traditional GIS (Geographical Information System) data models are focused on the description of the data organizational structure and constraints from single aspect, which are the absence or little relevance of the hierarchy and connotation of data objects. These data models do not match the natural concept of humans about geographical spatial data and also failed to fully consider the spatial relationships and arithmetic operations with the relationship between geographic objects. Object-oriented technology mimics the human way of thinking as much as possible, it appears to overcome the shortcomings of traditional software design methods and improve the stability and reusability of the software systems. Based on the existing GIS data model, this paper introduces the basic idea of object-oriented GIS data model combined the object-oriented methods and the vectorial expression of spatial entities, and describes the definition and implementation of the object-oriented GIS data model. Furthermore, the topological operations between spatial objects have been defined in the paper for the importance of topological relationships among spatial relationships. The topological operations are directly defined in geometry classes by means of methods, and they include Touch, Disjoint, Cross, Contains, Overlaps, and Intersects and so on.
Predictors and behavioural outcomes of parental involvement among low-income families in elementary schools, United States

ABSTRACT Parental involvement (PI) in their children’s schools has been shown to have a positive influence on the children’s behaviours and academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of PI and relations of PI in schools to child externalizing and internalizing behaviours. Data were from the fifth-grade wave of the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, with 1354 fifth grade low-income children and parents. Results revealed that family conflict predicted child internalizing and externalizing and negatively predicted PI in schools. However, PI in schools partially reduced the negative effect of family conflict on both internalizing and externalizing. Parental warmth negatively predicted child externalizing behaviours, and positively predicted PI in school. Additionally, PI in schools further enhanced the positive effect of parental warmth in reducing externalizing behaviours. The study highlights home and parent characteristics that relate to low-income fifth-grade parents’ involvement in their child’s education and demonstrates the mediating role of PI in reducing behavioural problems of low-income children.
ILP Methods for Family Trio Phasing

In population genotyping, it is common to genotype family trios consisting of the two parents and their child since that allows to recover haplotypes with higher confidence. Interestingly, the available software tools are primarily intended to phase only unrelated genotypes. In this section we first formulate the problem and describe specificity of family trio phasing and then analyze existing computational tools and discuss the pure parsimony objective. In the following section we give three integer linear program formulations and compare their runtime for the Daly et al [18] data. The haplotypes of children is much harder to recover than haplotypes of parents since we are not aware of recombinations which may happened when parents haplotypes are inherited by a child. Therefore, for simplicity, we assume no recombinations in child chromosomes and that exactly one child chromosome is inherited from one parent and another from the other parent. Formally, given a set of genotypes partitioned into family trios, the Trio Phasing Problem (TPP) requires to find for each trio a quartet of parent haplotypes which agree with all three genotypes. A simple logical analysis allows to substantially decrease uncertainty of phasing. For example, for two SNP’s in a trio with parent genotypes f = 22 and m = 02, and the child genotype k = 01, there is a unique feasible phasing of the parents: f1 = 10, f2 = 01, m1 = 01, m2 = 00 such that the haplotypes f2 and m1 are inherited by the child. In fact, it is not difficult to check that logical ambiguity exists only if all three genotypes have 2’s in the same SNP site. Another source of ambiguity is in missing data – certain SNP’s for certain individuals may be not available due to failures during genotyping. Although in the most recent data the missing data rate decreases, still they constitute a substantial part of the entire data (as large as 16% of the genotype data in Daly et al [5] data and 10% in Gabriel et al [19]). As mentioned above, one of the goals of these study has been to design and verify discrimination algorithms for the data [5] which is one of infrequent publicly available large-scale case/control genotype data. We have tried several well-known computational methods for phasing this data trying to find feasible solution for the TPP since this data are given in family trios. Surprisingly, all the methods which we have tried give infeasible solutions with high inconsistency rate. The error rate has been measured as the ratio of the number of inconsistently phased SNP’s over the total number of ambiguous SNP which are either missed or cannot be logically inferred. Note that the error rate does not rely on the assumption that no recombinations happen in the children. The Phamily tool based on well-known phasing tool PHASE is intended to phase the trio families [2]. It first uses the logical method described above to infer the SNP’s in the parental haplotypes. Then children genotypes are discarded while the parental genotypes and known haplotypes are passed
Improved Coding-Theoretic and Subspace-Based Decoding Algorithms for a Wider Class of DCT and DST Codes

The decoding of a class of discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete sine transform (DST) codes that are maximum distance separable codes (MDS) is considered in this paper. These class of codes are considered for error correction over real fields. All the existing algebraic decoding algorithms are capable of decoding only a subclass of these codes [which can be characterized into the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) form], and fails to decode the remaining even though they are MDS. In this paper, we propose a new generic algorithm along the lines of coding theoretic and subspace methods to decode the entire class of MDS DCT and DST codes. The proposed subspace approaches are similar to popular ESPRIT and MUSIC algorithms. The proposed algorithms also perform significantly better than the existing algorithms on the BCH-like subclass. A perturbation analysis is also presented to study the effect of various parameters on the error localization due to the quantization noise. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the capability of proposed algorithms to decode the entire class and to perform significantly better on the BCH-like subclass than the existing algorithm under the influence of quantization noise.
Travel Video Scene Detection by Search

We propose an approach to conduct video scene detection especially for travel videos captured by amateur photographers in journeys. The correlation between a travel video and its corresponding text-based travel schedule is discovered. Because scene boundaries are clearly defined in schedules, we segment videos into scenes by checking the discovered cross-media correlation. To make these two modalities comparable, photos related to the visited scenic spots are retrieved from image search engines, by the keywords extracted from text-based schedules. Sequences of key frames and retrieved photos are represented as visual word histograms, and the problem of correlation determination is then transformed as an approximate sequence matching problem. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed idea, and show the promising research direction of utilizing cross-media correlation in media analysis.
Effect of LCD monitor type and observer experience on diagnostic performance in soft-copy interpretations of the maxillary sinus on panoramic radiographs

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor type and observer experience on the diagnostic performance in soft-copy interpretations of maxillary sinus inflammatory lesions on panoramic radiographs. MATERIALS AND METHODS Ninety maxillary sinuses on panoramic images were grouped into negative and positive groups according to the presence of inflammatory lesions, using CT for confirmation. Monochrome and color LCDs were used. Six observers participated and ROC analysis was performed to evaluate the diagnostic performance. The reading time, fatigue score, and inter-/intra-observer agreements were assessed. RESULTS The interpretation of maxillary sinus inflammatory lesions was affected by the LCD monitor type used and by the experience of the observer. The reading time was not significantly different, however the fatigue score was significantly different between two LCD monitors. Inter-observer agreement was relatively good in experienced observers, while the intra-observer agreement for all observers was good with monochrome LCD but not with color LCD. CONCLUSION The less experienced observers showed lowered diagnostic ability with a general color LCD.
Opioids excite dopamine neurons by hyperpolarization of local interneurons

Increased activity of dopamine-containing neurons in the ventral tegmental area is necessary for the reinforcing effects of opioids and other abused drugs. Intracellular recordings from these cells in slices of rat brain in vitro showed that opioids do not affect the principal (dopamine-containing) neurons but hyperpolarize secondary (GABA- containing) interneurons. Experiments with agonists and antagonists selective for opioid receptor subtypes indicated that the hyperpolarization of secondary cells involved the mu-receptor. Most principal cells showed spontaneous bicuculline-sensitive synaptic potentials when the extracellular potassium concentration was increased from 2.5 to 6.5 or 10.5 mM; these were prevented by TTX and assumed to result from action potentials arising in slightly depolarized local interneurons. The frequency of these synaptic potentials, but not their amplitudes, was reduced by opioids selective for mu-receptors. It is concluded that hyperpolarization of the interneurons by opioids reduces the spontaneous GABA-mediated synaptic input to the dopamine cells. In vivo, this would lead to excitation of the dopamine cells by disinhibition, which would be expected to contribute to the positive reinforcement seen with mu-receptor agonists such as morphine and heroin.
Anergic T Cells Are Metabolically Anergic1

Full T cell activation requires TCR engagement (signal 1) in the context of costimulation (signal 2). Costimulation is required for maximal expression of effector cytokines and prevention of T cell anergy. It has become increasingly clear that another major function of costimulation is to up-regulate the metabolic machinery necessary for T cell function. In this report we demonstrate that anergic T cells are metabolically anergic, in that upon full stimulation (signals 1 plus 2) they fail to up-regulate the machinery necessary to support increased metabolism. These findings suggest that one mechanism responsible for the maintenance of T cell anergy is failure to up-regulate the metabolic machinery. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by blocking leucine, glucose, and energy metabolism, T cell activation is mitigated. Additionally, inhibition of these metabolic pathways during T cell activation leads to anergy in Th1-differentiated cells. Overall, our findings extend the role of T cell metabolism in regulating T cell function.
THE CHEMICAL IMPRINT OF SILICATE DUST ON THE MOST METAL-POOR STARS

We investigate the impact of dust-induced gas fragmentation on the formation of the first low-mass, metal-poor stars (<1 M☉) in the early universe. Previous work has shown the existence of a critical dust-to-gas ratio, below which dust thermal cooling cannot cause gas fragmentation. Assuming that the first dust is silicon-based, we compute critical dust-to-gas ratios and associated critical silicon abundances ([Si/H]crit). At the density and temperature associated with protostellar disks, we find that a standard Milky Way grain size distribution gives [Si/H]crit = −4.5 ± 0.1, while smaller grain sizes created in a supernova reverse shock give [Si/H]crit = −5.3 ± 0.1. Other environments are not dense enough to be influenced by dust cooling. We test the silicate dust cooling theory by comparing to silicon abundances observed in the most iron-poor stars ([Fe/H] < -4.0). Several stars have silicon abundances low enough to rule out dust-induced gas fragmentation with a standard grain size distribution. Moreover, two of these stars have such low silicon abundances that even dust with a shocked grain size distribution cannot explain their formation. Adding small amounts of carbon dust does not significantly change these conclusions. Additionally, we find that these stars exhibit either high carbon with low silicon abundances or the reverse. A silicate dust scenario thus suggests that the earliest low-mass star formation in the most metal-poor regime may have proceeded through two distinct cooling pathways: fine-structure line cooling and dust cooling. This naturally explains both the carbon-rich and carbon-normal stars at extremely low [Fe/H].