Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Earliest Triassic origin of Isoetes and quillwort evolutionary radiation

Isoetes beestonii new species is the most ancient known species of this living genus. In earliest Triassic shales of the Sydney and Bowen Basins of Australia it is locally abundant as circlets of transversely wrinkled leaves. It was heterosporous with megaspores of Maiturisporites rewanensis and microspores of Lundbladispora sp. cf. L. springsurensis. Isoetes thus predates Pleuromeia from which it has been thought to have evolved. Australian Pleuromeia-like subarborescent lycopsids are here reviewed as whole plants, with names based on fertile structures, and include Cylostrobus sydneyensis Helby and Martin from the Sydney Basin, Pleuromeia dubia (Seward) Retallack from the Sydney and Canning Basins, and Cylostrobus indicus (Lele) new combination and Pleuromeia sternbergii (Münster) Corda for Germar, newly recorded from the Canning Basin. There are in addition an array of cormose lycopsids that formed compact conelike plants when fertile, intermediate in stature between Isoetes and Pleuromeia. One of these is Tomiostrobus australis (Ash) Sadovnikov, formerly regarded as a cone, but here reinterpreted as a small pioneering plant of oligotrophic lakes and ponds, like Isoetes. Its megaspores are Horstisporites and its microspores are the stratigraphically important Aratrisporites tenuispinosus. Other similar forms are Tomiostrobus polaris (Lundblad) new combination from the early Triassic of Greenland, T. mirabilis (Snigirevskaya) new combination from the early Triassic of the Tunguska Basin of Siberia, T. taimyrica (Sadovnikov) new combination from the Early Triassic of the Taimyr region of Siberia, Lepacyclotes ermayinensis (Wang) new combination from the middle Triassic of China, L. convexus (Brik) new combination from the middle-late Triassic of Kazachstan, and L. zeilleri (Fliche) new combination from the middle Triassic of France and Germany. The diversity of isoetaleans in early Triassic floras and the weak vascular system of permineralized Tomiostrobus and Pleuromeia contradict the traditional view that Isoetes evolved by reduction in size from Pleuromeia and that its opportunistic life style allowed it to avoid plant competition. It is now more likely that Isoetaceae were weedy survivors of Permian-Triassic extinctions. The adaptive radiation and decline of Triassic quillworts matches the recovery from near-extinction, then decline of therapsid reptiles, for which these plants may have been an important food.
Feature extraction for tweet classification: Do the humans perform better?

Sentiment analysis of Twitter data became a research trend the last decade. Thanks to the Twitter API, massive amounts of tweets, relating to a topic of interest, can be collected in real time. Performing sentiment analysis of these tweets can be used to conduct social sensing and opinion mining. For instance, forecasting elections is a primary area in which sentiment analysis of tweets has been extensively applied the last few years. Sentiment analysis of Twitter data presents important challenges compared to the similar task of text classification. Tweets are limited to 140 characters; thus, the conveyed message is compressed and often context-dependent. The tweets are informal and unstructured, usually lacking grammatical soundness and use of a standard lexicon. On the other hand, tweets are usually annotated by their authors regarding their topic and sentiment with the aid of hashtags and emoticons. Identifying appropriate features for sentiment analysis of tweets remains an open research area since text indexing methods face the sparseness problem while POS tagging methods fail due to the lack of grammatical structure of tweets. Character based features, i.e., n-grams of characters, are currently getting popular because they are language independent. However, their effectiveness remains quite low. In this paper, we argue that tokens used by humans for sentiment analysis of tweets are probably the best feature set one can use for that purpose. We compare several automatically extracted features with the features (tokens) used by humans for tweet classification, under a machine learning framework. The results show that the manually indicated tokens combined with a Decision Tree classifier outperform any other feature set-classification algorithm combination. The manually annotated dataset that was used in our experiments is publicly available for anyone who wishes to use it.
Optimal content-dependent dynamic brightness scaling for OLED displays

Brightness scaling is the most common way to reduce power consumption in OLED displays. Such “dimming” is generally static, i.e. it is applied either manually by the user, or automatically by the system in correspondence of predefined battery state-of-charge conditions. This is obviously sub-optimal, because it makes brightness adaptation (i) too coarse-grain in time, and (ii) agnostic of the image being displayed. In this work, we overcome the two above limitations by proposing a novel brightness scaling approach based on the online calculation of a content-dependent optimal dimming factor. While keeping the simplicity of traditional scaling, this solution enables a true dynamic scaling applicable on a frame-by-frame basis. Results show that the proposed strategy is able to obtain an average power saving greater than 30% for different reference image datasets, while maintaining the Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM) between the original and transformed images at about 97%. We also perform an analysis of the costs for both hardware and software implementations of the transformation.
Approximation-aware Multi-Level Cells STT-RAM cache architecture

Current manycore processors exhibit large on-chip last-level caches that may reach sizes of 32MB - 128MB and incur high power/energy consumption. The emerging Multi-Level Cells (MLC) STT-RAM memory technology improves the capacity and energy efficiency issues of large-sized memory banks. However, MLC STT-RAM incurs non-negligible protection overhead to ensure reliable operations when compared to the Single-Level Cells (SLC) STT-RAM. In this paper, we propose an approximation-aware MLC STT-RAM cache architecture, which is partially-protected to restrict the reliability overhead and in turn leverages variable resilience characteristics of different applications for adaptively curtailing the protection overhead under a given error tolerance level. It thereby improves the energy-efficiency of the cache while meeting the reliability requirements. Our cache architecture is equipped with a latency-aware hardware module for double-error correction. To achieve high energy efficiency, approximation-aware read and write policies are proposed that perform approximate storage management while tolerating some errors bounded within the user-provided tolerance level. The architecture also facilitates runtime control on the quality of applications' results. We perform a case study on the next-generation advanced video encoding that exhibit memory-intensive functional blocks with varying resilience properties and support for parallelism. Experimental results demonstrate that our approximation-aware MLC STT-RAM based cache architecture can improve the energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art fully-protected caches (7%-19%, on average), while incurring minimal quality penalties in the output (-0.219% to -0.426%, on average). Furthermore, our architecture supports complete error protection coverage for all cache data when processing non-resilient application. The hardware overhead to implement our approximation-aware management negligibly affects the energy efficiency (0.15%-1.3% of overhead) and the access latency (only 0.02%-1.56% of overhead).
An area-efficient 12-bit 1.25MS/s radix-value self-estimated non-binary ADC with relaxed requirements on analog components

A 12-bit algorithmic (cyclic) ADC is designed and fabricated in 90nm CMOS, and only occupies as small active area as 0.037mm2. With the proposed radix-value self-estimation scheme for a non-binary 1-bit/step architecture, the accuracy requirement on analog components is largely relaxed. Therefore, the implementation of analog circuits such as amplifier and comparator becomes simple, and high-density MOM capacitors can be used to achieve small area. Furthermore, the novel radix-value self-estimation technique can be realized by only simple logic circuits without any extra analog input, so that the total active area of ADC is dramatically reduced. The prototype ADC achieves 62.3dB SNDR at 1.4V power supply and 1.25Msps (20MHz clocking) using a poor DC gain amplifier as low as 45dB and MOM capacitors without any careful layout techniques to improve the capacitor matching. The measured DNL is +0.94/-0.71LSB and INL is +1.9/-1.2LSB at 30kHz input.
Supply Chain Coordination Under Ramp-Type Price and Effort Induced Demand Considering Revenue Sharing Contract

In this paper, a revenue sharing contract is designed to coordinate a distribution channel where the demand of the product is ramp-type price and effort sensitive. It is shown that traditional revenue sharing contract does not coordinate the system. As an alternative, two new mechanisms are proposed (i) revenue sharing with coordinated effort of the retailer alone and (ii) both revenue and effort sharing contract. In addition, a crucial modification of revenue sharing fraction is also proposed. To enhance the applicability of revenue sharing contract, the contract parameters are determined by using bi-level multi-objective fuzzy goal programming technique where manufacturer sets the wholesale price greater than the marginal cost. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate all the models.
Measurement of the vascular input function in mice for DCE-MRI

DCE-MRI is an important technique in the study of small animal cancer models because its sensitivity to vascular changes opens the possibility of quantitative assessment of early therapeutic response. However, extraction of physiologically descriptive parameters from DCE-MRI data relies upon measurement of the vascular input function (VIF), which represents the contrast agent concentration time course in the blood plasma. This is difficult in small animal models due to artifacts associated with partial volume, inflow enhancement, and the limited temporal resolution achievable with MR imaging. In this work, the development of a suite of techniques for high temporal resolution, artifact resistant measurement of the VIF in mice is described. One obstacle in VIF measurement is inflow enhancement, which decreases the sensitivity of the MR signal to the presence of contrast agent. Because the traditional techniques used to suppress inflow enhancement degrade the achievable spatiotemporal resolution of the pulse sequence, improvements can be achieved by reducing the time required for the suppression. Thus, a novel RF pulse which provides spatial presaturation contemporaneously with the RF excitation was implemented and evaluated. This maximizes the achievable temporal resolution by removing the additional RF and gradient pulses typically required for suppression of inflow enhancement. A second challenge is achieving the temporal resolution required for accurate characterization of the VIF, which exceeds what can be achieved with conventional imaging techniques while maintaining adequate spatial resolution and tumor coverage. Thus, an anatomically constrained reconstruction strategy was developed that allows for sampling of the VIF at extremely high acceleration factors, permitting capture of the initial pass of the contrast agent in mice. Simulation, phantom, and in vivo validation of all components were performed. Finally, the two components were used to perform VIF vi measurement in the murine heart. An in vivo study of the VIF reproducibility was performed, and an improvement in the measured injection-to-injection variation was observed. This will lead to improvements in the reliability of quantitative DCE-MRI measurements and increase their sensitivity.
Fabrication and Performance of All-Solid-State Chloride Sensors in Synthetic Concrete Pore Solutions

One type of all-solid-state chloride sensor was fabricated using a MnO2 electrode and a Ag/AgCl electrode. The potentiometric response of the sensor to chloride in synthetic concrete pore solutions was systematically studied, and the polarization performance was also evaluated. The results show a good linear relationship between the potential reading of the sensor and the logarithm of chloride activity (concentration ranges from 0.05 to 5.0 M), and the potential value remains stable with increasing immersion time. The existence of K+, Ca2+, Na+ and SO42− ions have little influence on the potentiometric response of the sensor to chloride, but the pH has a significant influence on the potential value of the sensor at low chloride concentration. The potential reading of the sensor increases linearly with the solution temperature over the range from 5 to 45 °C. Meanwhile, an excellent polarization behavior is proven by galvanostatic and potentiodynamic tests. All of the results reveal that the developed sensor has a great potential for monitoring chloride ions in concrete environments.
ETS1 Mediates MEK1/2-Dependent Overexpression of Cancerous Inhibitor of Protein Phosphatase 2A (CIP2A) in Human Cancer Cells

EGFR-MEK-ERK signaling pathway has an established role in promoting malignant growth and disease progression in human cancers. Therefore identification of transcriptional targets mediating the oncogenic effects of the EGFR-MEK-ERK pathway would be highly relevant. Cancerous inhibitor of protein phosphatase 2A (CIP2A) is a recently characterized human oncoprotein. CIP2A promotes malignant cell growth and is over expressed at high frequency (40–80%) in most of the human cancer types. However, the mechanisms inducing its expression in cancer still remain largely unexplored. Here we present systematic analysis of contribution of potential gene regulatory mechanisms for high CIP2A expression in cancer. Our data shows that evolutionary conserved CpG islands at the proximal CIP2A promoter are not methylated both in normal and cancer cells. Furthermore, sequencing of the active CIP2A promoter region from altogether seven normal and malignant cell types did not reveal any sequence alterations that would increase CIP2A expression specifically in cancer cells. However, treatment of cancer cells with various signaling pathway inhibitors revealed that CIP2A mRNA expression was sensitive to inhibition of EGFR activity as well as inhibition or activation of MEK-ERK pathway. Moreover, MEK1/2-specific siRNAs decreased CIP2A protein expression. Series of CIP2A promoter-luciferase constructs were created to identify proximal −27 to −107 promoter region responsible for MEK-dependent stimulation of CIP2A expression. Additional mutagenesis and chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments revealed ETS1 as the transcription factor mediating stimulation of CIP2A expression through EGFR-MEK pathway. Thus, ETS1 is probably mediating high CIP2A expression in human cancers with increased EGFR-MEK1/2-ERK pathway activity. These results also suggest that in addition to its established role in invasion and angiogenesis, ETS1 may support malignant cellular growth via regulation of CIP2A expression and protein phosphatase 2A inhibition.
Potential new atmospheric sources and sinks of odd nitrogen: Sources involving the excited O2, and the N2O•O3 species

The NO and NO2 radicals play important roles in atmospheric chemistry. This paper, therefore, theoretically discusses the following speculations: (1) the O2 (B³Σ) + N2 → 2NO reaction, and perhaps the photoexcitation of the N2•O2 dimers (or collision complexes) by Herzberg band photons as well, may be potentially important atmospheric sources of odd‐nitrogen, (2) there is a tantalizing potential for a substantive NOx production of the order of 1200 NOx cm−3 s−1 in the upper troposphere subject to certain condition, and (3) photodissociation of the possible N2O•O3 species in the 320 to 430 nm may be a non‐trivial source of NOx in the upper troposphere. Experimental studies of these ideas are needed, due to their relevance in regional pollution and global change issues.
Discrete phase space based on finite fields

The original Wigner function provides a way of representing in phase space the quantum states of systems with continuous degrees of freedom. Wigner functions have also been developed for discrete quantum systems, one popular version being defined on a 2Nx2N discrete phase space for a system with N orthogonal states. Here we investigate an alternative class of discrete Wigner functions, in which the field of real numbers that labels the axes of continuous phase space is replaced by a finite field having N elements. There exists such a field if and only if N is a power of a prime; so our formulation can be applied directly only to systems for which the state-space dimension takes such a value. Though this condition may seem limiting, we note that any quantum computer based on qubits meets the condition and can thus be accommodated within our scheme. The geometry of our NxN phase space also leads naturally to a method of constructing a complete set of N+1 mutually unbiased bases for the state space.
Modeling frequency reconfigurable antenna array using neural networks

In order to avoid the computational complexities involved in analyzing reconfigurable antennas, neural networks are used as an alternate approach. The neural network finds the location of the operational frequency bands for any combination of switches connecting different radiating elements. The network outputs are compared with the experimentally measured results. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 44: 351–354, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.20632
Asymmetric / Active-Active High-Availability for High-End Computing

Linux clusters have become very popular for scientific computing at research institutions world-wide, because they can be easily deployed at a fairly low cost. However, the most pressing issues of today‘s cluster solutions are availability and serviceability. The conventional Beowulf cluster architecture has a single head node connected to a group of compute nodes. This head node is a typical single point of failure and control, which severely limits availability and serviceability by effectively cutting off healthy compute nodes from the outside world upon overload or failure. In this paper, we describe a paradigm that addresses this issue using asymmetric active-active high availability. Our framework comprises of n + 1 head nodes, where n head nodes are active in the sense that they provide services to simultaneously incoming user requests. One standby server monitors all active servers and performs a fail-over in case of a detected outage. We present a prototype implementation based on a 2 + 1 solution and discuss initial results.
Inclusion of Parton Distribution Functions in PYTHIA8

A selection of the latest and most frequently used PDFs is incorporated in Pythia8, including the MC-adapted PDFs from the MSTW and CTEQ collaborations. This thesis examines the differences in PDFs as well as the effect they have on results of simulations. The results are also compared to data collected by the CDF experiment.
Tucker Dimensionality Reduction of Three-Dimensional Arrays in Linear Time

We consider Tucker-like approximations with an $r \times r \times r$ core tensor for three-dimensional $n \times n \times n$ arrays in the case of $r \ll n$ and possibly very large $n$ (up to $10^4$-$10^6$). As the approximation contains only $\mathcal{O}(rn + r^3)$ parameters, it is natural to ask if it can be computed using only a small amount of entries of the given array. A similar question for matrices (two-dimensional tensors) was asked and positively answered in [S. A. Goreinov, E. E. Tyrtyshnikov, and N. L. Zamarashkin, A theory of pseudo-skeleton approximations, Linear Algebra Appl. , 261 (1997), pp. 1-21]. In the present paper we extend the positive answer to the case of three-dimensional tensors. More specifically, it is shown that if the tensor admits a good Tucker approximation for some (small) rank $r$, then this approximation can be computed using only $\mathcal{O}(nr)$ entries with $\mathcal{O}(nr^{3})$ complexity.
Lung function and clinical risk factors for asthma in infants and young children with recurrent wheeze

Background: Although several risk factors for asthma have been identified in infants and young children with recurrent wheeze, the relevance of assessing lung function in this group remains unclear. Whether lung function is reduced during the first 2 years in recurrently wheezy children, with and without clinical risk factors for developing subsequent asthma (ie, parental asthma, personal history of allergic rhinitis, wheezing without colds and/or eosinophil level >4%) compared with healthy controls was assessed in this study. Methods: Forced expiratory flows and volumes in steroid naïve young children with ⩾3 episodes of physician confirmed wheeze and healthy controls, aged 8–20 months, were measured using the tidal and raised volume rapid thoracoabdominal compression manoeuvres. Results: Technically acceptable results were obtained in 50 wheezy children and 30 controls using tidal rapid thoracoabdominal compression, and 44 wheezy children and 29 controls with the raised volume technique. After adjustment for sex, age, body length at test and maternal smoking, significant reductions in z scores for forced expiratory volume at 0.5 s (mean difference (95% CI) −1.0 (−1.5 to −0.5)), forced expired flow after 75% forced vital capacity (FVC) has been exhaled (FEF25) (−0.6 (−1.0 to −0.2)) and average forced expired flow over the mid 50% of FVC (FEF25–75) (−0.8 (−1.2 to −0.4)) were observed in those with recurrent wheeze compared with controls. Wheezy children with risk factors for asthma (n = 15) had significantly lower z scores for FVC (−0.7 (−1.4 to −0.04)) and FEF25–75 (−0.6 (−1.2 to −0.1)) than those without such risk factors (n = 29). Conclusions: Compared with healthy controls, airway function is reduced in young children with recurrent wheeze, particularly those at risk for subsequent asthma. These findings provide further evidence for associations between clinical risk factors and impaired respiratory function in early life.
Expression of the mammalian c-fes protein in hematopoietic cells and identification of a distinct fes-related protein

The avian c-fps and mammalian c-fes proto-oncogenes are cognate cellular sequences. Antiserum raised against the P140gag-fps transforming protein of Fujinami avian sarcoma virus specifically recognized a 92,000-Mr protein in human and mouse hematopoietic cells which was closely related in structure to Snyder-Theilen feline sarcoma virus P87gag-fes. This polypeptide was apparently the product of the human c-fes gene and was therefore designated p92c-fes. Human p92c-fes was associated with a tyrosine-specific protein kinase activity in vitro and was capable of both autophosphorylation and phosphorylation of enolase as an exogenous protein substrate. The synthesis of human and mouse p92c-fes was largely, though not entirely, confined to myeloid cells. p92c-fes was expressed to relatively high levels in a multipotential murine myeloid cell line, in more mature human and mouse granulocyte-macrophage progenitors, and in differentiated macrophage like cells as well as in the mononuclear fraction of normal and leukemic human peripheral blood. p92c-fes was not found in erythroid cells, with the exception of a human erythroleukemia line which retains the capacity to differentiate into macrophage like cells. These results suggest a normal role for the p92c-fes tyrosine kinase in hematopoiesis, particularly in granulocyte-macrophage differentiation. In addition, a distinct 94,000-Mr polypeptide, antigenically related to p92c-fes, was identified in a number of hematopoietic and nonhematopoietic human and mouse cells and was also found to be associated with a tyrosine-specific protein kinase activity.