Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Second-order harmonic and combination modes in graphite, single-wall carbon nanotube bundles, and isolated single-wall carbon nanotubes

We report a study of second-order combination and overtone modes in highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (HOPG), in single-wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) bundles and in isolated SWNTs. We found both dispersive and nondispersive Raman bands in the range $1650\char21{}2100{\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}1},$ and we show that the appearance and frequency versus laser energy ${E}_{\mathrm{laser}}$ behavior of these features are in agreement with predictions from double-resonance Raman theory. In the case of SWNTs, these second-order bands depend on the one-dimensional structure of SWNTs, and at the single nanotube level, the spectra vary from tube to tube, depending on tube diameter and chirality and on the energy of the van Hove singularity relative to ${E}_{\mathrm{laser}}. $
Measuring Similarity Based on Link Information: A Comparative Study

Measuring similarity between objects is a fundamental task in domains such as data mining, information retrieval, and so on. Link-based similarity measures have attracted the attention of many researchers and have been widely applied in recent years. However, most previous works mainly focus on introducing new link-based measures, and seldom provide theoretical as well as experimental comparisons with other measures. Thus, selecting the suitable measure in different situations and applications is difficult. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis and critical comparison of various link-based similarity measures and algorithms are presented. Their strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Their actual runtime performances are also compared via experiments on benchmark data sets. Some novel and useful guidelines for users to choose the appropriate link-based measure for their applications are discovered.
Design and Implementation of AMI System Using Binary CDMA for Smart Grid

To solve the energy problem and find new growth engines, the smart grid is getting more and more attention these days. AMI is the key component that should be preferentially constructed for smart grid. To establish a PLC-based AMI system with the existing conventional power supply network can save cost in construction of communication lines. However, the infrastructure is not ideal for communication because of signal attenuation and noise due to its harsh and noisy transmission medium, regulations and admission, and isolated place. In this paper, we analyze the requirements for building AMI system with Binary CDMA technology, and design a Binary CDMA-based AMI system. The performance evaluation results show that the Binary CDMA-based AMI system can be used together with the conventional PLC-based AMI system, or used alone.
An Estimation Algorithm of Channel State Transition Probabilities for Cognitive Radio Systems

In this paper, an estimation algorithm of channel state transition probabilities in Markov channel model for cognitive radio systems is proposed. The framework of POMDP is adopted to solve the problem of channel selection. Maximum likelihood method is used to estimate the channel state transition probabilities, which is crucial to POMDP. Central Limit Theorem is introduced to get the relationship between the precision, sample times and the channel state transition probability values. The simulation results show the reliability of the estimation results.
Elevation of surfactant protein A in plasma and sputum in cigarette smokers

Serum surfactant protein (SP)-A has been postulated to associate with pulmonary fibrosis, but its role in cigarette smoking-related lung diseases is undefined. SP-A levels in plasma and induced sputum in nonsmokers, smokers with respiratory symptoms (cough and/or phlegm) and symptom-free smokers were assessed using a validated EIA method. A total of 474 current smokers without any diseases or medications were enrolled and followed for 2 yrs with 111 of them succeeding in stopping. Plasma SP-A level was detectable in all subjects and elevated in smokers independently of the symptoms compared to nonsmokers (p = 0.001). After 2 yrs of follow-up, the SP-A level was higher in those who continued smoking compared to the quitters (p<0.001). Plasma SP-A levels were associated with age, smoking history and lung function. Sputum (n = 109) SP-A was nondetectable in most nonsmokers, whereas smoking and symptoms increased sputum SP-A highly significantly (p = 0.001). In conclusion, SP-A may be involved in pathogenesis of cigarette smoking-related lung diseases. Further studies are needed to elucidate the role of SP-A in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Aflatoxin B1-induced hepatocellular carcinoma in developing countries: Geographical distribution, mechanism of action and prevention

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most well-known primary liver malignancy worldwide. Its incidence is rising at alarming rates and has become a public concern globally. It is more frequent in developing countries than in industrialized countries with respect to geographical variation, ethnic disparities and socioeconomic status. Dietary exposure to aflatoxins is among the major HCC risk factors. Aflatoxin B1, which is a genotoxic hepatocarcinogen, which presumptively causes cancer by inducing DNA adducts leading to genetic changes in target liver cells. AFB1 is metabolized by cytochrome-P450 enzymes to the reactive intermediate AFB1-8, 9 epoxide (AFBO) which binds to liver cell DNA, resulting in DNA adducts. DNA adducts interact with the guanine bases of liver cell DNA and cause a mutational effect in the P53 tumor suppressor gene at the codon 249 hotspot in exon 7, which may lead to HCC. Approximately 4.5 billion of the world’s population is exposed to aflatoxin-contaminated food, particularly in low-income countries. Prevention involves treating crops that are susceptible to fungal contamination, appropriate handling of foodstuffs and the use of chemopreventive intervention. Moreover, an integrated network collaboration of different sectors, including public health, agricultural departments and mass media, is required to ensure effective food regulation systems so as to minimize the contamination of food by aflatoxins.
Risk, resources and state-dependent adaptive behavioural syndromes

Many animals exhibit behavioural syndromes—consistent individual differences in behaviour across two or more contexts or situations. Here, we present adaptive, state-dependent mathematical models for analysing issues about behavioural syndromes. We find that asset protection (where individuals with more ‘assets’ tend be more cautious) and starvation avoidance, two state-dependent mechanisms, can explain short-term behavioural consistency, but not long-term stable behavioural types (BTs). These negative-feedback mechanisms tend to produce convergence in state and behaviour over time. In contrast, a positive-feedback mechanism, state-dependent safety (where individuals with higher energy reserves, size, condition or vigour are better at coping with predators), can explain stable differences in personality over the long term. The relative importance of negative- and positive-feedback mechanisms in governing behavioural consistency depends on environmental conditions (predation risk and resource availability). Behavioural syndromes emerge more readily in conditions of intermediate ecological favourability (e.g. medium risk and medium resources, or high risk and resources, or low risk and resources). Under these conditions, individuals with higher initial state maintain a tendency to be bolder than individuals that start with low initial state; i.e. later BT is determined by state during an early ‘developmental window’. In contrast, when conditions are highly favourable (low risk, high resources) or highly unfavourable (high risk, low resources), individuals converge to be all relatively bold or all relatively cautious, respectively. In those circumstances, initial differences in BT are not maintained over the long term, and there is no early developmental window where initial state governs later BT. The exact range of ecological conditions favouring behavioural syndromes depends also on the strength of state-dependent safety.
Developing Criteria for the Selection of Academic Leaders at Saudi Arabia’s Higher Education Institutions and Technical and Vocational Training Corporation

This study was started in light of the researcher's perception that the determination procedure of academic leaderships in his own country’s higher educational institutions is not based on scientific grounds, and many of the appointed academic leaders are in reality with no prior training on leadership. The study aimed to develop appropriate criteria and techniques for choosing academic leaders in Saudi higher educational institutions and Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC). The study's sample consisted of 215 respondents with a background of deans, vice deans, chairmen of academic departments, and faculty members. These respondents came from five selected higher educational institutions such as Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, King Saud University, Prince Sattam University, Shaqra University, and Al Majmaah University; and five technical colleges such as College of Technology in Riyadh, College of Technology in Kharj, College of Technology in Zulfi, College of Technology in AlMajmaah, and College of Technology in Alartauah. Results of the electronic survey showed that the present criteria used for selecting educational leaders require some few changes by creating a more standardized selection criteria, that depends on logical grounds. The following are the items/questions regarding “Standards for selecting academic leadership,” which were evaluated “high to very high” by both the HEIs and TVTC respondents: Having good reputation among his colleagues in the college; Efficient in his role and position; Held various managerial academic positions previously; among others mentioned in the discussion. According to the results of the study, the researcher recommended several recommendations at the end of the study.
Proactive displays: Supporting awareness in fluid social environments

Academic conferences provide a social space for people to present their work and interact with one another. However, opportunities for interaction are unevenly distributed among the attendees. We seek to extend the opportunities for interaction among attendees by using technology to enable them to reveal information about their background and interests in different settings. We evaluate a suite of applications that augment three physical social spaces at an academic conference. The applications were designed to augment formal conference paper sessions and informal breaks. A mixture of qualitative observation and survey response data are used to frame the impacts from both individual and group perspectives. Respondents reported on their interactions and serendipitous findings of shared interests with other attendees. However, some respondents also identify distracting aspects of the augmentation. Our discussion relates these results to existing theory of group behavior in public places and how these social space augmentations relate to awareness as well as the problem of shared interaction models.
Overcoming Computational Errors in Sensing Platforms Through Embedded Machine-Learning Kernels

We present an approach for overcoming computational errors at run time that originate from static hardware faults in digital processors. The approach is based on embedded machine-learning stages that learn and model the statistics of the computational outputs in the presence of errors, resulting in an error-aware model for embedded analysis. We demonstrate, in hardware, two systems for analyzing sensor data: 1) an EEG-based seizure detector and 2) an ECG-based cardiac arrhythmia detector. The systems use a small kernel of fault-free hardware (constituting <;7.0% and <;31% of the total areas respectively) to construct and apply the error-aware model. The systems construct their own error-aware models with minimal overhead through the use of an embedded active-learning framework. Via an field-programmable gate array implementation for hardware experiments, stuck-at faults are injected at controllable rates within synthesized gate-level netlists to permit characterization. The seizure detector demonstrates restored performance despite faults on 0.018% of the circuit nodes [causing bit error rates (BERs) up to 45%], and the arrhythmia detector demonstrates restored performance despite faults on 2.7% of the circuit nodes (causing BERs up to 50%).
Scope for a Subjective Assessment of Milking Speed

Abstract Farmers’ subjective evaluations of their cows’ milking speed, scored as “very fast”, “fast”, “average”, “slow”, or “very slow”, were recorded between 1982 and 1985 under Agriculture Canada's Record of Performance milk recording scheme. For the analysis, scores taken at the beginning (score 1) and the end (score 2) of the lactation were distinguished. Edited data comprised 20,909 records for score 1 and 19,012 records for score 2 for Ayrshires and 190,455 and 148,536 for Holsteins. Data were analyzed in eight subsets. The effects of herd-year-seasons (of calving), calving age, and stage of lactation when scored were evaluated and variance and covariance component estimates were obtained for sires, cows, and residuals. Heritabilities were . 21 and . 14 for score 1 for Holsteins and Ayrshires, respectively, and . 17 and . 16 for score 2. Repeatabilities were . 42 and . 37 for the two breeds. The scope of a sire evaluation for milking speed based on subjective scores is discussed.
Publish/Subscribe on the Web at Extreme Speed

This demonstration presents Le Subscribe an event notification system for the Web. It is widely accepted that the majority of human information will be on the Web in ten years. As pointed out in [6], besides systems for searching, querying and retrieving information from the Web, there is a need for systems being able to capture the dynamic aspect of the web information by notifying users of interesting events. This functionality is crucial for web users (or applications) who want to exploit highly dynamic web information such as stock markets updates or auctions. A tool that implements this functionality must be scalable and efficient. Indeed, it should manage millions of user demands for notifications (i.e. subscriptions); It should handle high rates of events (several millions per day) and notify the interested users in a short delay. In addition, it should provide a simple and expressive subscription interface and efficiently cope with high volatility of web user demands (new subscriptions, new users and cancellations). Finally, it should facilitate integration of similar kinds of information issued by different publishers (e.g. new auctions coming from distinct auction sites). The classical approach for query subscription is a mediator system where queries are periodically evaluated against static data. This static approach does not scale for high rate of events and a large number of volatile subscriptions, since it requires the storage of large event histories between two successive computations and requires repeated complex multi-query optimization. In Le Subscribe we adopt a different approach where events are processed on-the-fly to discover matching subscriptions. Our main contributions in Le Subscribe are: A semi-structured event model which is well suited for the information published on the Web, and flexible enough to support easy integration of publishers. Founded by “Instituto Superior Técnico” Technical University of Lisbon and by a JNICT fellowship of Program PRAXIS XXI (Portugal) A subscription language which is designed to be simple while supporting the most usual queries on event notifications. An efficient matching algorithm for processing events in real time which can handle a large number of volatile subscriptions and supporting high event rates. Simple interfaces for publishing and subscribing which enable an easy integration of the system in the Web. The system supports both HTTP protocol and Java RMI. The demonstration consists of an application whose goal is to notify interested users of items put up for auction. These items are captured by Le Subscribe from a set of auction Web sites, e.g. ebay [5], amazon [2] or yahoo [15], or can be transmitted to our system using a web interface. Every day, the system has to handle a large number of items. For example, ebay publishes about 560000 new auction items per day.
Coherent Enterprise Information Modelling in Practice

In large-scale organizations, the need for enterprise information modelling originates from new business opportunities like B2C and B2B and new cross-domain business demands. This paper sketches why enterprise information modelling is important in this context and where it should be situated in the software engineering process. We further stress the importance of coherent modelling. The content of this position paper is the result of the application of academic ideas in the real-life context of Toyota Motor Europe.
A Survey on Optimal Route Selection and Load Balancing in MANET

MANET is a self-organized and self-configurable network where the mobile nodes move arbitrarily. Routing is a critical issue in MANET and hence the focus of this paper along with the performance analysis of routing protocols and growing interest in mobile ad hoc network technique has resulted in many routing protocol proposal. The objective of this paper is to create taxonomy of the mobile ad hoc routing protocols, and to survey and compare representative examples for each class of protocols. We compared three types of routing protocols i.e. proactive, reactive and hybrid. The performance of all these routing protocols is analysed by Q0S parameters. All the MANET routing protocols are explained in a deep way with QoS metrics.
Design space exploration of control system with hardware-implemented interrupt handler

In this paper, we propose a system-level design tool for control systems that enables the development of hardware-implemented interrupt handler. The increasing complexity of control systems has led to a rise in the frequency of interrupts. As a result, the processor load increases, leading to deterioration in the latency of interrupt processing. To solve these problems, we require dedicated hardware that is activated by an interrupt and can directly access devices during its processing. The proposed method enables control systems with above dedicated hardware to be developed using a model that abstracts an interrupt, interrupt processing, and communication between the control processing and devices. Case studies on a motor control system show that the proposed method enables the designer to explore design space of control system, reduces the processor load and improves the latency of the interrupt processing.
SCoPE: Towards a Systolic Array for SVM Object Detection

This paper presents SCoPE (systolic chain of processing elements), a first step towards the realization of a generic systolic array for support vector machine (SVM) object classification in embedded image and video applications. SCoPE provides efficient memory management, reduced complexity, and efficient data transfer mechanisms. The proposed architecture is generic and scalable, as the size of the chain, and the kernel module can be changed in a plug and play approach without affecting the overall system architecture. These advantages provide versatility, scalability and reduced complexity that make it ideal for embedded applications. Furthermore, the SCoPE architecture is intended to be used as a building block towards larger systolic systems for multi-input or multi-class classification. Simulation results indicate real-time performance, achieving face detection at ~33 frames per second on an FPGA prototype.
Safe enclosures: towards cryptographic techniques for server protection

Cryptography is generally used to protect sensitive data from an untrusted server. In this paper, we investigate the converse question: can we use cryptography to protect a trusted server from untrusted data? As a first step in this direction, we propose the notion of safe enclosures. Intuitively, a safe enclosure is a cryptographic primitive that encapsulates data in a way that allows to perform some computation on it, while at the same time protecting the server from malicious data. Furthermore, a safe enclosure should come equipped with a dedicated protocol that implements the enclosing function with unconditional integrity. Otherwise, unguarded data may reach the server. We discuss the novelty of these concepts, propose their formal definition and show several realizations.
Impact of climate variability and land use changes on global biogenic volatile organic compound emissions

A biogenic emissions scheme has been incorporated in the global dynamic vegetation model ORCHIDEE (Organizing Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic EcosystEms) in order to calculate global biogenic emissions of isoprene, monoterpenes, methanol, acetone, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde and formic and acetic acids. Important parameters such as the leaf area index are fully determined by the global vegetation model and the influences of light extinction (for isoprene emissions) and leaf age (for isoprene and methanol emissions) are also taken into account. We study the interannual variability of biogenic emissions using the satellite-based climate forcing ISLSCP-II as well as relevant CO 2 atmospheric levels, for the 1983–1995 period. Mean global emissions of 460 TgC/yr for isoprene, 117 TgC/yr for monoterpenes, 106 TgC/yr for methanol and 42 TgC/yr for acetone are predicted. The mean global emission of all biogenic compounds is 752±16 TgC/yr with extremes ranging from 717 TgC/yr in 1986 to 778 TgC/yr in 1995, that is a 8.5% increase between both. This variability differs significantly from one region to another and among the regions studied, biogenic emissions anomalies were the most variable in Europe and the least variable in Indonesia (isoprene and monoterpenes) and North America (methanol). Two scenarios of land use changes are considered using the 1983 climate and atmospheric CO 2 conditions, to study the sensitivity of biogenic emissions to vegetation alteration, namely tropical deforestation and European afforestation. Global biogenic emissions are highly affected by tropical deforestation, with a 29% decrease in isoprene emission and a 22% increase in methanol emission. Global emissions are not significantly affected by European afforestation, but on a European scale, total biogenic VOCs emissions increase by 54%.
Strand-specific fluorescence in situ hybridization: the CO-FISH family

The ability to prepare single-stranded chromosomal target DNA allows innovative uses of FISH technology for studies of chromosome organization. Standard FISH methodologies require functionally single-stranded DNAs in order to facilitate hybridization between the probe and the complementary chromosomal target sequence. This usually involves denaturation of double-stranded probes to induce temporary separation of the DNA strands. Strand-specific FISH (CO-FISH; Chromosome Orientation-FISH) involves selective removal of newly replicated strands from DNA of metaphase chromosomes which results in single-stranded target DNA. When single-stranded probes are then hybridized to such targets, the resulting strand-specific hybridization is capable of revealing a level of information previously unattainable at the cytogenetic level. Mammalian telomeric DNA consists of tandem repeats of the (TTAGGG) sequence, oriented 5′→3′ towards the termini of all vertebrate chromosomes. Based on this conserved structural organization, CO-FISH with a telomere probe reveals the absolute 5′→3′ orientation of DNA sequences with respect to the pter→qter direction of chromosomes. Development and various applications of CO-FISH will be discussed: detection of cryptic inversions, discrimination between telomeres produced by leading- versus lagging-strand synthesis, and replication timing of mammalian telomeres.