Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty in Signals of Large-Scale Climate Variations in Radiosonde and Satellite Upper-Air Temperature Datasets

There is no single reference dataset of long-term global upper-air temperature observations, although several groups have developed datasets from radiosonde and satellite observations for climate-monitoring purposes. The existence of multiple data products allows for exploration of the uncertainty in signals of climate variations and change. This paper examines eight upper-air temperature datasets and quantifies the magnitude and uncertainty of various climate signals, including stratospheric quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) and tropospheric ENSO signals, stratospheric warming following three major volcanic eruptions, the abrupt tropospheric warming of 1976‐77, and multidecadal temperature trends. Uncertainty estimates are based both on the spread of signal estimates from the different observational datasets and on the inherent statistical uncertainties of the signal in any individual dataset. The large spread among trend estimates suggests that using multiple datasets to characterize large-scale upperair temperature trends gives a more complete characterization of their uncertainty than reliance on a single dataset. For other climate signals, there is value in using more than one dataset, because signal strengths vary. However, the purely statistical uncertainty of the signal in individual datasets is large enough to effectively encompass the spread among datasets. This result supports the notion of an 11th climate-monitoring principle, augmenting the 10 principles that have now been generally accepted (although not generally implemented) by the climate community. This 11th principle calls for monitoring key climate variables with multiple, independent observing systems for measuring the variable, and multiple, independent groups analyzing the data.
How Has Regionalism in the 1990s Affected Trade?

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth, whereas aid extended to countries that are not allies is highly effective. The result appears to be robust across different specifications and estimation techniques. In particular, new methods are employed to control for endogeneity. The paper suggests that aid allocation should be scrutinized carefully to make aid as effective as possible.
Energy-Efficient Power Allocation Strategy in Cognitive Relay Networks

Cognitive radio and cooperative technique are two essential techniques for the future generation green com- munication paradigm owing to its inherent advantages of adaptability and cognition. Typically, previous studies on power allocation in the cognitive relay networks often con- centrate on two goals independently: the first goal is to min- imize the transmit power to reduce energy consumption, as depicted in strategy 1; the second goal is to maximize the transmit rate, as depicted in strategy 2. In this paper, we shift our focus to energy-efficient-oriented design, that is, green power allocation between source and relay. There- fore, we present a novel power allocation strategy consid- ering the two goals jointly, as depicted in strategy 3, and compare the proposed strategy with two previous strategies. Specifically, because the strategy 3 is nonlinear, we use the Lagrange dual method to solve it effectively. Finally, the numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical results through theory simulation and Monte Carlo simula- tion. Numerical performance results show that the proposed strategy works better than that of the two previous strategies from the viewpoints of energy-efficient.
Design of LC/sub p/C/sub s/ resonant inverters as a power source for HID lamp ballast applications

This paper presents a new criterion for the design of resonant inverters for driving high intensity discharge (HID) lamps. The proposed converter behaves almost as a power source, for a wide load range, regardless of the lamp aging. In order to achieve a better production yield at industrial scale, the analysis of lamp power sensitivity regarding the tolerance of the circuit components is carried out. The design is validated with experimental results and a statistical simulation by the Monte Carlo method.
Real multiplication on K3 surfaces and Kuga Satake varieties

The endomorphism algebra of a K3 type Hodge structure is a totally real field or a CM field. In this paper we give a low brow introduction to the case of a totally real field. We give existence results for the Hodge structures, for their polarizations and for certain K3 surfaces. We consider the Kuga Satake variety of these Hodge structures and we discuss some examples. Finally we indicate various open problems related to the Hodge conjecture.
Nonlinear control of a dynamic model of HIV-1

Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) reduces the viral burden in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infected patients. The paper addresses the problem of controlling the predator-prey like model of the interaction among CD4/sup +/ T-cell, CD8/sup +/ T-cell, and HIV-1 by an external drug agency. By exploring the dynamic properties of the system, the original system is first regrouped into two subsystems, then a nonlinear global controller is presented by designing two controllers over two complementary zones: a local controller on a finite region and a global controller over its complement. The local controller is designed to guarantee nonnegativity, and avoids the problem of control singularity within the neighborhood of the origin /spl Omega/. The complementary controller is designed via backstepping for both subsystems over the complementary region. The closed-loop system is globally stable at nominal values through the introduction of a novel bridging virtual control, and the resulting controller is singularity free and guarantees nonnegativity. In this paper, simulations are conducted in discrete-time with sampling time T/sub s/ to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Energy-efficient Coverage for Target Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we consider the coverage problem for target detection applications in wireless sensor networks. Unlike conventional coverage problems which assume sensing regions are disks around sensors, we define the sensing region according to detection constraints in terms of false alarm probability and missing probability. We show that exploiting cooperation between sensors can extend the overall sensing region while maintain the same constraints on false alarm probability and missing probability. We then propose an energy efficient cooperative detection scheme and study the trade-offs on energy consumption between cooperative and non-cooperative schemes. The cooperative scheme can use half the number of sensors to monitor the whole field compared to disk model in networks deployed on grids. We also study the communication overheads incurred by the cooperative scheme, and show that only cooperation between limited number of nearby sensors is profitable in terms of energy consumption. In our simulations on randomly deployed networks, cooperation reduces the number of sensors to cover the area by 30% and nearly doubles the number of disjoint sensor sets where each can fully cover the area. Appropriately trading off energy consumption with coverage extension, our cooperative detection scheme can increase the network lifetime by nearly 70%.
On assignability of Lyapunov spectrum of discrete linear time-varying system with control

In this paper we study discrete linear time-varying system with control and bounded coefficients. For such systems we consider problems of the proportional global assignability and proportional local assignability of the Lyapunov spectrum of the discrete linear time-varying system with control. This is a generalization of the pole placement theorem, which is well-known in the theory of time-invariant system. The main results present sufficient conditions for considered types of assignability.
Role of glycine-534 and glycine-1179 of human multidrug resistance protein ( MDR 1 ) in drug-mediated control of ATP hydrolysis

The human multidrug resistance protein (MDR1) (Pglycoprotein), a member of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) family, causes multidrug resistance by an active transport mechanism, which keeps the intracellular level of hydrophobic compounds below a cell-killing threshold. Human MDR1 variants with mutations affecting a conserved glycine residue within the ABC signature of either or both ABC units (G534D, G534V, G1179D and G534D}G1179D) were expressed and characterized in Spodoptera frugiperda (Sf9) cell membranes. These mutations caused a loss of measurable ATPase activity but still allowed ATP binding and the formation of a transition-state intermediate (nucleotide trapping). In contrast with the wild-type protein, in which substrate drugs accelerate nucleotide trapping, in the ABC
Neoclassical Theory Versus Prospect Theory: Evidence from the Marketplace

Neoclassical theory postulates that preferences between two goods are independent of the consumer's current entitlements. Several experimental studies have recently provided strong evidence that this basic independence assumption, which is used in most theoretical and applied economic models to assess the operation of markets, is rarely appropriate. These results, which clearly contradict closely held economic doctrines, have led some influential commentators to call for an entirely new economic paradigm to displace conventional neoclassical theory e.g., prospect theory, which invokes psychological effects. This paper pits neoclassical theory against prospect theory by investigating three clean tests of the competing hypotheses. In all three cases, the data, which are drawn from nearly 500 subjects actively participating in a well-functioning marketplace, suggest that prospect theory adequately organizes behavior among inexperienced consumers, whereas consumers with intense market experience behave largely in accordance with neoclassical predictions. The pattern of results indicates that learning primarily occurs on the sell side of the market: agents with intense market experience are more willing to part with their entitlements than lesser-experienced agents.
Targeting the Checkpoint to Kill Cancer Cells

Cancer treatments such as radiotherapy and most of the chemotherapies act by damaging DNA of cancer cells. Upon DNA damage, cells stop proliferation at cell cycle checkpoints, which provides them time for DNA repair. Inhibiting the checkpoint allows entry to mitosis despite the presence of DNA damage and can lead to cell death. Importantly, as cancer cells exhibit increased levels of endogenous DNA damage due to an excessive replication stress, inhibiting the checkpoint kinases alone could act as a directed anti-cancer therapy. Here, we review the current status of inhibitors targeted towards the checkpoint effectors and discuss mechanisms of their actions in killing of cancer cells.
Do the Changes in the Serum Levels of IL-2, IL-4, TNFα, and IL-6 Reflect the Inflammatory Activity in the Patients with Post-ERCP Pancreatitis?

Background. Acute pancreatitis is the major complication of endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) procedure and there are some reports showing cytokine changes in ERCP-induced pancreatits. Goals. To investigate the association between early changes (within 24 hours) in the serum interleukin (IL)-2, IL-4, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)α, and IL-6 levels and the development of post-ERCP pancreatitis. Study. Forty five consecutive patients who underwent therapeutic ERCP and 10 patients with acute pancreatitis without ERCP were enrolled to the study. Serum concentrations of IL-2, IL-4, TNFα, and IL-6 were determined immediately before, 12 hours and 24 hours after ERCP. Results. Seven of the 45 patients (15.5%) developed post-ERCP pancreatitis. The levels of IL-4 at 24 hours after ERCP were significantly lower in the patients with post-ERCP pancreatitis than in those without pancreatitis, while TNFα levels at 12 hours after ERCP were higher in the complicated group than those of the uncomplicated group. The ratios of TNFα/IL-4 at 12 and 24 hours after ERCP were found significantly higher in the patients with post-ERCP pancreatitis than in those without pancreatitis. IL-6 in the complicated patients was found significantly increased at 24 hours after ERCP. Conclusions. The enhancement of serum TNFα and IL-6 levels in the patients with ERCP-induced pancreatitis reflects the inflammatory activity. Additionally, these cytokines together with IL-4 can be used in clinical laboratory monitoring of ERCP.
Carrier Frequency Synchronization for OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is, with substantial progress in digital signal processing, becoming an important part of the telecommunications arena. The most appealing feature of OFDM is the simplicity of the receiver design due to the efficiency with which OFDM can cope with the effects of frequency-selective multipath channels. Multicarrier systems such as OFDM are, however, more sensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO) than are single-carrier systems. We first review the basics of OFDM communications systems and then address the CFO estimation problem. Both pilot-based and blind estimation techniques are presented. The Cramér–Rao bound is established, and an optimal null carrier placement scheme is derived.
Information Status and Prosody: Production and Perception in German *

In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the (de-)coding of discourse-new, inferentially and textually accessible and given discourse referents by prosodic means. Results reveal that a decrease in the referent’s level of givenness is reflected by an increase in its prosodic prominence (expressed by differences in the status and type of accent used) providing evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new. Furthermore, perception data indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent’s level of givenness.
Lossless audio coding using Burrows-Wheeler Transform and move-to-front coding

In this paper we present a new lossless audio coder using the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT). Audio signals under consideration, which are assumed to be of integer values, are first permuted using the BWT to get the transform coefficients; and then the resulting coefficients are compressed using a combination of the move-to-front coding (MTF) and an entropy coder. Both Arithmetic and Huffman coding have been used for entropy coding. Simulations show that the proposed coder outperforms other lossless coders, namely, the integer discrete cosine transform (intDCT) and the integer wavelet transform (intWT).
The form and Dynamics of Langmuir Circulations

When the wind blows at modest speeds over natural bodies of water, numerous streaks or slicks nearly parallel to the wind direction may appear on the surface. This form of surface streakiness is commonplace, and under favorable conditions it is readily apparent to the casual observer. The streaks result from the collection of floating sub­ stances-seaweed, foam from breaking waves, marine organisms, or organic films-into long narrow bands. Flotsam makes the bands visible directly, and compressed films make them visible by the damping of capillary waves, thereby giving the bands a smoother appearance. Naturalists and seafarers often note color variations of the sea due to minute marine organisms. Bainbridge (1957) cited many old descriptions of long narrow "bands," "streaks," or "lanes" including several by Darwin in 1839 during the voyage of the Beagle. James Thomson (1862) described observations of streaks made jointly with his brother, Lord Kelvin, in a paper that also indicated increased abundances of marine life below the streaks. The first connection between the wind and streak directions, among the authors cited by Bainbridge, was made by Collingwood (1868): "if a moderate breeze were blowing and the sea
Comparative Stability of Cloned and Non-cloned Code: A Replication Study

Code cloning is an important software engineering aspect. It is a common software reuse principle that consists of duplicating source code within a program or across different systems owned or maintained by the same entity. There are several contradictory claims concerning the impact of cloning on software stability and maintenance effort. Some papers state that cloning is desired since it speeds up the development process and helps stakeholders meet the tight schedule and deliver on time. Other papers argue that code clone leads to code bloat and causes increase software maintenance costs due to copied defects and dead code. In this paper, we are replicating a previous study done on cloning by the original author. We are repeating his work using the same methods and metrics but with different subjects and experimenters. The paper we are addressing evaluates the impact of code cloning on code stability using three different stability-measuring methods. Our team will apply the same stability measurement techniques on a different software system developed in C programming language to determine generalizability, assure that the results are reliable, validate their outcomes, and to inspire new search by combining previous findings from related studies.
Characteristics of Inpatient Falls not Reported in an Incident Reporting System

An incident reporting system is the most commonly used method to identify patient safety incidents in a hospital. However, non-reporting of incidents for various reasons is a serious problem. We studied the rate of inpatient falls that were not reported in an incident reporting system but were recorded in medical charts and we evaluated characteristics of those falls by comparing with the falls reported in incident reports in a Japanese acute care hospital setting. Falls recorded in medical charts were detected by using a text mining method followed by a manual chart review. About 25% of the recorded falls were not reported in incident reports. Male patients, first fall, long lag time until recording, no witness at the time of the fall and physician profession were shown to be significant factors associated with non-reporting. Our results show that the rate of non-reporting of inpatient falls in a Japanese acute care hospital is compable to that shown in previous studies in other conutries and that the same barriers to incident reporting as those found in previous studies exist in the medical staff.
Darkroom

Specialized image signal processors (ISPs) exploit the structure of image processing pipelines to minimize memory bandwidth using the architectural pattern of line-buffering, where all intermediate data between each stage is stored in small on-chip buffers. This provides high energy efficiency, allowing long pipelines with tera-op/sec. image processing in battery-powered devices, but traditionally requires painstaking manual design in hardware. Based on this pattern, we present Darkroom, a language and compiler for image processing. The semantics of the Darkroom language allow it to compile programs directly into line-buffered pipelines, with all intermediate values in local line-buffer storage, eliminating unnecessary communication with off-chip DRAM. We formulate the problem of optimally scheduling line-buffered pipelines to minimize buffering as an integer linear program. Finally, given an optimally scheduled pipeline, Darkroom synthesizes hardware descriptions for ASIC or FPGA, or fast CPU code. We evaluate Darkroom implementations of a range of applications, including a camera pipeline, low-level feature detection algorithms, and deblurring. For many applications, we demonstrate gigapixel/sec. performance in under 0.5mm2 of ASIC silicon at 250 mW (simulated on a 45nm foundry process), real-time 1080p/60 video processing using a fraction of the resources of a modern FPGA, and tens of megapixels/sec. of throughput on a quad-core x86 processor.
Evolutionary Design of Relatively Large Combinational Circuits with an Extended Stepwise Dimension Reduction

In this paper, an eXtended Stepwise Dimension Reduction approach (XSDR) to evolutionary design of relatively large combinational logic circuits is proposed. In our previous work, a Stepwise Dimension Reduction approach (SDR) is introduced. The SDR divides a circuit into several layers. The layers are evolved one after another. However, some layers are difficult to be evolved. The XSDR improves the SDR by decomposing the original truth table of a layer to two truth tables. The new truth tables after decomposing are easy to be evolved. The proposed method has been tested with multipliers and the circuits taken from the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) benchmark library. The experimental results demonstrate that the XSDR extensively improves the performance of the SDR in terms of the number of fitness evaluations and the computational time.
Extending La Salle's invariance principle for a class of nonautonomous systems to a sufficient rank condition

The stability of a large class of nonlinear, nonautonomous systems is analysed. In particular, our main contribution is to formulate some easier to verify sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability. To this end, invariance properties of the system are exploited even in the nonautonomous system case in order to derive a rank based asymptotic stability condition. The approach used in this paper, extends LaSalle's invariance principle by identifying from the structure of the system that suitable limiting equations exist, with reference to which a limit set indeed forms an invariant set for the nonautonomous system. Finally, an illustrative example is used to verify the theoretical analysis.
The Molecular Epidemiology and Evolution of Murray Valley Encephalitis Virus: Recent Emergence of Distinct Sub-lineages of the Dominant Genotype 1

Background Recent increased activity of the mosquito-borne Murray Valley encephalitis virus (MVEV) in Australia has renewed concerns regarding its potential to spread and cause disease. Methodology/Principal Findings To better understand the genetic relationships between earlier and more recent circulating strains, patterns of virus movement, as well as the molecular basis of MVEV evolution, complete pre-membrane (prM) and Envelope (Env) genes were sequenced from sixty-six MVEV strains from different regions of the Australasian region, isolated over a sixty year period (1951–2011). Phylogenetic analyses indicated that, of the four recognized genotypes, only G1 and G2 are contemporary. G1 viruses were dominant over the sampling period and found across the known geographic range of MVEV. Two distinct sub-lineages of G1 were observed (1A and 1B). Although G1B strains have been isolated from across mainland Australia, Australian G1A strains have not been detected outside northwest Australia. Similarly, G2 is comprised of only Western Australian isolates from mosquitoes, suggesting G1B and G2 viruses have geographic or ecological restrictions. No evidence of recombination was found and a single amino acid substitution in the Env protein (S332G) was found to be under positive selection, while several others were found to be under directional evolution. Evolutionary analyses indicated that extant genotypes of MVEV began to diverge from a common ancestor approximately 200 years ago. G2 was the first genotype to diverge, followed by G3 and G4, and finally G1, from which subtypes G1A and G1B diverged between 1964 and 1994. Conclusions/Significance The results of this study provides new insights into the genetic diversity and evolution of MVEV. The demonstration of co-circulation of all contemporary genetic lineages of MVEV in northwestern Australia, supports the contention that this region is the enzootic focus for this virus.