Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance Analysis of Downlink Inter-Band Carrier Aggregation in LTE-Advanced

Carrier aggregation (CA) is one of the most distinct features for LTE-Advanced systems, which can support a much wider transmission bandwidth up to 100 MHz by aggregating two or more individual component carriers (CCs) belonging to the same (intra-band) or different (inter-band) frequency bands. With CA, it is possible to schedule a user equipment (UE) on multiple CCs simultaneously. From radio resource management (RRM) perspective, CC selection plays an important role in optimizing the system performance, especially in the case of inter-band CA where the radio propagation characteristics of each CC can be different. In this paper, we investigate the downlink resource allocation for inter-band CA, i.e., how to assign carrier(s) to different UEs. A simple yet effective G-factor based carrier selection algorithm, which takes both traffic load and radio channel characteristics into considerations, is proposed with the objective to guarantee good coverage for Rel'8 UEs and robustness for Rel'10 UEs. Simulation results show that our proposed G-factor based carrier selection algorithm can achieve much better coverage performance compared to the least-load carrier selection in scenarios with relatively high inter-site distance and relatively high frequency separation between carriers, at the expense of some marginal average user throughput loss.
Characterization of a subgenomic DNA isolated from Triticum aestivum plants infected with wheat dwarf virus

Summary A subgenomic DNA has been isolated from wheat tissue infected with a Swedish isolate of wheat dwarf virus and cloned. Restriction endonuclease analysis and nucleotide sequence determination indicated that the subgenomic DNA (1472 nucleotides) was derived from the genomic DNA (2749 nucleotides) by two separate deletions. The subgenomic DNA had lost open reading frames (ORFs) encoding the virus coat protein and a putative protein of M r 10146, but retained an ORF and an open reading region encoding putative proteins of M r 30156 and 17292, respectively, and two structural features thought to be important for virus DNA replication i.e. a potentially stable stem-loop structure containing the conserved TAATATTAC sequence and a putative primer initiation site.
CROP: Community-relevance-based opportunistic routing in delay tolerant networks

Researchers have developed several social-based routing protocols for delay tolerant networks (DTNs) over the past few years. Two main routing metrics to support a social-based routing in DTNs are centrality and similarity metrics. These two metrics help packets decide how to travel through the network to achieve a low delay or low drop rate. This study presents a new routing scheme called Community-Relevance based OPportunistic routing (CROP). CROP uses a different message forwarding approach in DTNs by combining community structure with a new centrality metric called community relevance. One fundamental change in this approach is that community relevance values do not represent the importance of communities themselves. Instead, they are computed for each community-community relationship individually which means that the level of importance of one community varies depending on the packet's destination community. This study compares CROP with other routing algorithms such as BubbleRap and SimBet. Simulation results show that CROP achieves an average delivery ratio improvement of at least 30% and can distribute packets more fairly within the network.
Gabapentin Inhibits Protein Kinase C Epsilon Translocation in Cultured Sensory Neurons with Additive Effects When Coapplied with Paracetamol (Acetaminophen)

Gabapentin is a well-established anticonvulsant drug which is also effective for the treatment of neuropathic pain. Although the exact mechanism leading to relief of allodynia and hyperalgesia caused by neuropathy is not known, the blocking effect of gabapentin on voltage-dependent calcium channels has been proposed to be involved. In order to further evaluate its analgesic mechanisms, we tested the efficacy of gabapentin on protein kinase C epsilon (PKCε) translocation in cultured peripheral neurons isolated from rat dorsal root ganglia (DRGs). We found that gabapentin significantly reduced PKCε translocation induced by the pronociceptive peptides bradykinin and prokineticin 2, involved in both inflammatory and chronic pain. We recently showed that paracetamol (acetaminophen), a very commonly used analgesic drug, also produces inhibition of PKCε. We tested the effect of the combined use of paracetamol and gabapentin, and we found that the inhibition of translocation adds up. Our study provides a novel mechanism of action for gabapentin in sensory neurons and suggests a mechanism of action for the combined use of paracetamol and gabapentin, which has recently been shown to be effective, with a cumulative behavior, in the control of postoperative pain in human patients.
Large scale dissemination using a peer-to-peer network

The widespread use of broadband networks and the evolution of Peer-to-Peer systems changed dramatically the way Internet is used today. P2P file sharing networks are one of the most popular ways of sharing and distributing new content. But along with the benefits of these networks, certain patterns became apparent. It could take a long period of time for new, highly anticipated files to become available for download, due to high demand. Therefore, the use of such networks as a mean of file dissemination is not always successful, especially when the files are of considerable size. In this paper Peercast is presented, a P2P dissemination system, along with simulation results. Our focus in this paper is on how this and other P2P file sharing networks can be configured to optimize the dissemination process of highly anticipated files.
A high performance and low power consumption USB DMB receiver

A low power USB DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) receiver with small size and high performance is reported. The receiver can be plugged in PC via USB port and play the DMB programs through a DMB player software installed on PC. The receiver is designed on a 2-layer PCB board with a small size of 59 mm * 23 mm. Test results showed that the receiver can achieve −99.5 dBm receiving sensitivity and consume only 55 mA current for 384 kbps DMB video receiving and 38 mA for 128 kbps DMB audio receiving. These features make it a suitable solution for portable DMB receiver, especially for laptop-based DMB receiver.
Spoken Lecture Summarization by Random Walk over a Graph Constructed with Automatically Extracted Key Terms

This paper proposes an improved approach for spoken lecture summarization, in which random walk is performed on a graph constructed with automatically extracted key terms and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). Each sentence of the document is represented as a node of the graph and the edge between two nodes is weighted by the topical similarity between the two sentences. The basic idea is that sentences topically similar to more important sentences should be more important. In this way all sentences in the document can be jointly considered more globally rather than individually. Experimental results showed significant improvement in terms of ROUGE evaluation.
C 4 bioenergy crops for cool climates , with special emphasis on perennial C 4 grasses

There is much interest in cultivating C4 perennial plants in northern climates where there is an abundance of land and a potential large market for biofuels. C4 feedstocks can exhibit superior yields to C3 alternatives during the long warm days of summer at high latitude, but their summer success depends on an ability to tolerate deep winter cold, spring frosts, and early growth-season chill. Here, we review cold tolerance limits in C4 perennial grasses. Dozens of C4 species are known from high latitudes to 63 °N and elevations up to 5200 m, demonstrating that C4 plants can adapt to cold climates. Of the three leading C4 grasses being considered for bioenergy production in cold climates— Miscanthus spp. , switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), and prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata)—all are tolerant of cool temperatures (10–15 °C), but only cordgrass tolerates hard spring frosts. All three species overwinter as dormant rhizomes. In the productive Miscanthus×giganteus hybrids, exposure to temperatures below –3 °C to –7 °C will kill overwintering rhizomes, while for upland switchgrass and cordgrass, rhizomes survive exposure to temperatures above –20 °C to –24 °C. Cordgrass emerges earlier than switchgrass and M. giganteus genotypes, but lacks the Miscanthus growth potential once warmer days of late spring arrive. To enable C4-based bioenergy production in colder climates, breeding priorities should emphasize improved cold tolerance of M. ×giganteus, and enhanced productivity of switchgrass and cordgrass. This should be feasible in the near future, because wild populations of each species exhibit a diverse range of cold tolerance and growth capabilities.
Design of programmable gain amplifier with accurate gain

A novel digital programmable gain amplifier (PGA) is proposed in this paper. The proposed design avoids the gain accuracy affected by on-resistance of control switches, leading to much more accurate gain. The corresponding algorithm is shown in this paper. The circuits are implemented in CSMC 0.35 μm Technology. When the gain is from 0dB to 20dB, step is 2dB; from 0dB to -20dB, step is 20dB. It is concluded that the difference of the gain between simulation result and theoretical value is within ±0.05 dB.
A model-based line detection algorithm in documents

In this paper we present a novel model based approach to detect severely broken parallel lines in noisy textual documents. It is important to detect and remove these lines so the text can be segmented and recognized. We use directional single-connected chain, a vectorization based algorithm, to extract the line segments. We then instantiate a parallel line model with three parameters: the skew angle, the vertical line gap, and the vertical translation. A coarse-to-fine approach is used to improve the estimation accuracy. From the model we can incorporate the high level contextual information to enhance detection results even when lines are severely broken. Our experimental results show our method can detect 94% of the lines in our database with 168 noisy Arabic document images.
Mixed strategy may outperform pure strategy: An initial study

A pure strategy metaheuristic is one that applies the same search method at each generation of the algorithm. A mixed strategy metaheuristic is one that selects a search method probabilistically from a set of strategies at each generation. For example, a classical genetic algorithm, that applies mutation with probability 0.9 and crossover with probability 0.1, belong to mixed strategy heuristics. A (1+1) evolutionary algorithm using mutation but no crossover is a pure strategy metaheuristic. The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance between mixed strategy and pure strategy metaheuristics. The main results of the current paper are summarised as follows. (1) We construct two novel mixed strategy evolutionary algorithms for solving the 0-1 knapsack problem. Experimental results show that the mixed strategy algorithms may find better solutions than pure strategy algorithms in up to 77.8% instances through experiments. (2) We establish a sufficient and necessary condition when the expected runtime time of mixed strategy metaheuristics is smaller that that of pure strategy mixed strategy metaheuristics.
Effects of homosynaptic depression on spectral properties of H-reflex recordings

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of homosynaptic depression (HD) on spectral properties of the soleus (SOL) H-reflex. Paired stimulations, separated by 100 ms, were used to elicit an unconditioned and conditioned H-reflex in the SOL muscle of 20 participants during quiet standing. Wavelet and principal component analyses were used to analyze features of the time-varying spectral properties of the unconditioned and conditioned H-reflex. The effects of HD on spectral properties of the H-reflex signal were quantified by comparing extracted principal component scores. The analysis extracted two principal components: one associated with the intensity of the spectra and one associated with its frequency. The scores for both principal components were smaller for the conditioned H-reflex. HD decreases the spectral intensity and changes the spectral frequency of H-reflexes. These results suggest that HD changes the recruitment pattern of the motor units evoked during H-reflex stimulations, in that it not only decreases the intensity, but also changes the types of motor units that contribute to the H-reflex signal.
Direct Load Control on Smart Micro Grid supported by Wireless Communication and Real Time Computation

A load management scheme applied to micro grid, in a smart grid environment is presented in this paper. A smart micro grid simulator is developed and used for the validation of the study. The simulator is provided with synchronized measurement facility that is wirelessly connected to computational network. The proposed load management scheme is a direct load control adopted as a demand response program executed on frequency based decisions.
The effect of stellar winds on the formation of a protocluster

We present smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of protoclusters including the effects of the stellar winds from massive stars. Using a particle-injection method, we investigate the effect of structure in close proximity to the wind sources and the short-time-scale influence of winds on protoclusters. We find that the structures such as discs and gaseous filaments have a strong collimating effect on winds. By a different technique of injecting momentum from point sources into our simulations, we compare the large-scale and long-term effects of isotropic and intrinsically collimated winds on protoclusters and find them to be similar, although the collimated winds take longer to exert a significant influence. We find that both types of wind are able to dramatically slow the global star formation process, but that the time-scale on which they can expel significant quantities of mass from the cluster is rather long (approaching 10 free-fall times). Clusters may then experience rapid star formation very early in their lifetimes, before switching to a mode where gas is gradually expelled, while star formation proceeds much more slowly over many free-fall times. This complicates any conclusions regarding slow star formation derived from measuring the star formation efficiency per free-fall time. We find that estimates of the efficacy of winds in dispersing clusters derived simply from the total wind momentum flux may not be very reliable. This is due to material being expelled from deep within stellar potential wells, often to velocities well in excess of the cluster escape velocity, and also to the loss of momentum flux through holes in the gas distribution. Winds have little effect on the accretion-driven stellar initial mass function (IMF) except at the very high mass end, where they serve to prevent some of the most massive objects accreting more material. Feedback does not result in the formation of further massive stars through the monolithic collapse of massive cores. We also find that the morphology of the gas, the rapid motions of the wind sources and the action of large-scale accretion flows prevent the formation of bubble-like structures. These effects may make it difficult to discern the influence of winds on very young clusters.
Diagnosis Murder: The Death of State Death Taxes, 42 Econ

Since 1976, more than 30 states have eliminated their "death" taxes and many others have reduced them. This unexplored case of interstate tax competition presents a unique opportunity to develop a new, more satisfying definition of competitor based on historical elderly migration patterns. Using data from 1967 onward, we outline the recent history of state death tax competitio n and present a spatial econometric analysis. Interstate tax competition is evident and grows stronger when using migration-based definitions of competitors. The article concludes with still more evidence of interstate tax competition--the recent movement by states to effectively revive their death taxes. (JEL H7, D7) Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
Maximising sum rate for two interfering wireless links

In this paper, we consider the problem of maximising the sum rate of two interfering links in Gaussian noise. We assume no fading and that interference is treated as worst-case Gaussian noise, and that the optimal power allocation must be time-invariant. We show that either both links must operate at maximum power, or one link operates at maximum power and the other link is switched off. The switching point between one power scheme to another depends on the value of gamma which is the SNR of the link, as well as the channel gains at all links.
The Cellular Basis for Biocide-Induced Fluorescein Hyperfluorescence in Mammalian Cell Culture

Clinical examination of the ocular surface is commonly carried out after application of sodium fluorescein in both veterinary and medical practice by assessing the resulting ‘staining’. Although localized intensely stained regions of the cornea frequently occur after exposure to ‘adverse’ clinical stimuli, the cell biology underlying this staining is unknown, including whether intense fluorescein staining indicates the presence of damaged cells. Ocular exposure to certain contact lens multipurpose solutions (MPS) gives rise to intense fluorescein staining referred to as solution induced corneal staining (SICS), and we have made use of this phenomenon with Vero and L929 cell culture models to investigate the fundamental biology of fluorescein interactions with cells. We found that all cells take up fluorescein, however a sub-population internalize much higher levels, giving rise to brightly staining ‘hyperfluorescent’ cells within the treated cultures, which contain fluorescein throughout the cell cytoplasm and nucleus. The numbers of these hyperfluorescent cells are significantly increased after exposure to MPS associated with SICS. Surprisingly, hyperfluorescent cells did not show higher levels of staining with propidium iodide, a marker of lysed cells. Consistently, treatment with the cytolytic toxin benzalkonium chloride resulted in almost all cells staining with propidium iodide, and the complete abolition of fluorescein hyperfluorescence. Finally we found that internalization of fluorescein and its loss from treated cells both require cellular activity, as both processes were halted after incubation at 4°C. We conclude that fluorescein hyperfluorescence can be replicated in three diverse cell cultures, and is increased by MPS-treatment, as occurs clinically. The process involves the concentration of fluorescein by a sub-population of cells that are active, and does not occur in lysed cells. Our data suggest that corneal staining in the clinic reflects active living cells, and is not directly caused by dead cells being produced in response to adverse clinical stimuli.
Neural Network Identification of Halo White Dwarfs

The white dwarf luminosity function has proved to be an excellent tool for studying some properties of the Galactic disk, such as its age and the past history of the local star formation rate. The existence of an observational luminosity function for halo white dwarfs could provide valuable information about its age and the time that the star formation rate lasted, and it could also constrain the shape of the allowed initial mass functions. However, the main problem is the scarce number of white dwarfs already identified as halo stars. In this Letter, we show how an artificial intelligence algorithm can be used successfully to classify the population of spectroscopically identified white dwarfs, thus allowing us to identify several potential halo white dwarfs and to improve the significance of its luminosity function.
Control System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

An open project, dealing with autopilot design for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is introduced in this paper. Networked hierarchical distributed control system is being proposed and its hardware and software structure is briefly described. Mathematical model of a small rotorcraft is presented and identification methodology and state estimation using Extended Kalman Filter are discussed. Control algorithms, based on PI, LQG and SDRE approaches, focused on rotorcraft UAVs are proposed, including a complex hierarchical autopilot design. Real data, measured during test-flights of an experimental UAV, are presented.
Object-of-interest extraction based on sparse coding

Usually, there are different kinds of targets in a complicated scene, but we human beings are only interested in some of them with salient or rare features, therefore how to detect and locate such objects of interest from a cluttered background is a key issue in computer vision research. In this paper, we propose an object-of-interest extraction method based on a rarity model derived from sparse coding. The rarity of an image is computed by analyzing the sparse coefficient matrix after dictionary learning and then used to extract the interested objects. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than traditional methods.
Ultimately thin double-gate SOI MOSFETs

The operation of 1-3 nm thick SOI MOSFETs, in double-gate (DG) mode and single-gate (SG) mode (for either front or back channel), is systematically analyzed. Strong interface coupling and threshold voltage variation, a large influence of substrate depletion underneath the buried oxide, the absence of drain current transients, and degradation in electron mobility are typical effects in these ultra-thin MOSFETs. The comparison of SG and DG configurations demonstrates the superiority of DG-MOSFETs: ideal subthreshold swing and remarkably improved transconductance (consistently higher than twice the value in SG-MOSFETs). The experimental data and the difference between SG and DG modes is explained by combining classical models with quantum calculations. The key effect in ultimately thin DG-MOSFETs is volume inversion, which primarily leads to an improvement in mobility, whereas the total inversion charge is only marginally modified.
Detecting SPIT Calls by Checking Human Communication Patterns

SPam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) is expected to become a very serious issue in the next years. The threat is going to spin out from the well known email spam problem by bot nets being re-programmed to initiate not just spam emails but also Voice over IP (VoIP) calls. Preventing SPIT is a new problem, because many well-established methods for blocking email spam cannot be applied. Currently, several SPIT prevention methods are being proposed but SPIT prevention research is still at a very early stage. In this paper, we propose an innovative way to detect SPIT calls by comparing applying hidden Turing tests that compare them with typical human communication patterns. For passing these tests, significant resource consumptions at the SPIT generating bot nets would be required which contradicts the spammer's objective of placing as many SPIT calls as possible, The proposed method has several advantages compared to other methods that also interact with the caller. We validated its feasibility with a prototype implementation that we integrated into our modular VoIP security system called VoIP SEAL.