Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sliding wear of LM25 aluminium alloy with 7.5% SiC+2.5% TiO2 and 2.5% SiC+7.5% TiO2 hybrid composites

An experimental investigation on the wear behavior of aluminium alloy LM 25 and its composites reinforced with 7.5% SiC + 2.5% TiO2 and 2.5% SiC + 7.5% TiO2 is carried out to ascertain which constituent is having more influence on the metal matrix composites. The hybrid composite material is prepared by stir casting process. The wear and frictional properties of hybrid metal matrix composite are studied by performing dry sliding wear test using a pin on disc wear tester. The experiments are conducted at a constant sliding velocity of 1.04 m/s and a sliding distance of 628 m over various loads of 3, 4 and 5 kg. The result shows that, the reinforcement SiC and TiO2 has improved the wear resisting property of LM 25 alloy composite. The results also indicate that the three-fourth volume fraction of the TiO2 in a 10% volume fraction of reinforcement has better wear and frictional property than the three-fourth volume fraction of SiC. The coefficient of friction decreases with the increasing load and particle reinforcement. The microstructure analysis reveals that SiC and TiO2 particulate are uniformly distributed in the matrix. The wear surfaces are examined by scanning electron microscope which indicates an abrasive wear mechanism due to hard ceramic particles exposed on the worn surface.
Two-Dimensional Patterning by a Trapping/Depletion Mechanism: The Role of TTG1 and GL3 in Arabidopsis Trichome Formation

Trichome patterning in Arabidopsis serves as a model system to study how single cells are selected within a field of initially equivalent cells. Current models explain this pattern by an activator–inhibitor feedback loop. Here, we report that also a newly discovered mechanism is involved by which patterning is governed by the removal of the trichome-promoting factor TRANSPARENT TESTA GLABRA1 (TTG1) from non-trichome cells. We demonstrate by clonal analysis and misexpression studies that Arabidopsis TTG1 can act non-cell-autonomously and by microinjection experiments that TTG1 protein moves between cells. While TTG1 is expressed ubiquitously, TTG1–YFP protein accumulates in trichomes and is depleted in the surrounding cells. TTG1–YFP depletion depends on GLABRA3 (GL3), suggesting that the depletion is governed by a trapping mechanism. To study the potential of the observed trapping/depletion mechanism, we formulated a mathematical model enabling us to evaluate the relevance of each parameter and to identify parameters explaining the paradoxical genetic finding that strong ttg1 alleles are glabrous, while weak alleles exhibit trichome clusters.
Suppressor of Cytokine Signaling 7 Inhibits Prolactin, Growth Hormone, and Leptin Signaling by Interacting with STAT5 or STAT3 and Attenuating Their Nuclear Translocation*

We report here the role of one of the less studied members of the family of suppressors of cytokine signaling (SOCS), namely SOCS-7, in cytokine signaling. We demonstrate that SOCS-7 inhibits prolactin (PRL), growth hormone (GH), or leptin (LEP) signaling mediated through STAT3 and STAT5 in a dose-dependent manner. SOCS-7 also attenuated STAT3 and STAT5 signaling induced by overexpression of JH1, the catalytic subdomain of JAK2. Since SOCS-7 interacted with phosphorylated STAT3 or STAT5, we assumed that SOCS-7 acts at the level of STAT proteins. Indeed, we showed that SOCS-7 inhibits PRL- and leptin-induced STAT5 and STAT3 phosphorylation and prevented the nuclear translocation of activated STAT3. Taken together, our results indicate that SOCS-7 is a physiological dysregulator of PRL, leptin, and probably also GH signaling and that its mode of action is a novel variation of SOCS protein inhibition of cytokine-inducible STAT-mediated signal transduction.
Quantitative and qualitative analyses of transferrin in aqueous humor from patients with primary and secondary glaucomas.

By using a highly sensitive and specific radioimmunoassay and the slot-blot technique, transferrin was quantified in fresh samples of aqueous humor from patients with primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG, n = 36) or secondary glaucoma (SG, n = 18). The levels were compared with those in aqueous humor obtained from age-matched patients without glaucoma (n = 33) and in primary and secondary aqueous humor from normal dogs (n = 10) in which breakdown of the blood-aqueous barrier was induced experimentally. The concentration of transferrin in the aqueous humor of human control subjects ranged from 0.3-3.4 mg/dl (mean +/- standard deviation, 1.36 +/- 0.66 mg/dl); in POAG samples, from 0.34 to greater than 10 mg/dl (2.07 +/- 1.90 mg/dl); and in SG samples, from 0.29 to greater than 10 mg/dl (2.79 +/- 2.24 mg/dl). The level of transferrin in secondary aqueous humor samples obtained from dogs was as much as ninefold greater than that in primary aqueous humor. The protein concentration in the human aqueous humor samples was 11.87 +/- 4.47 mg/dl for control subjects, 62.11 +/- 56.74 mg/dl for patients with POAG, and 124.53 +/- 152.67 mg/dl for those with SG. In dogs, the protein levels were 7.97 +/- 3.12 mg/dl for primary aqueous humor and 191.9 +/- 149.8 mg/dl for secondary aqueous humor. A significant correlation (r = 0.744, P less than 0.01) was found between total protein and transferrin contents in the samples of aqueous humor from patients with glaucoma but not in the samples from age-matched control subjects. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Usefulness of Residual-Based Features in Speaker Verification and Their Combination Way with Linear Prediction Coefficients

LPC-residue and LPC coefficients in the speaker verification system. First step, in the front-end, feature extraction get the magnitude spectrum of the speech signal from a 32ms short-time segment of speech that is pre-emphasized and processed by a mel-scale filterbank. And the output of the filterbank are then cosine-transformed to produce the cepstral coefficients. After the coefficients have gotten, they are passed to a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). The GMM is used to represent the claimed speaker's acoustic classes. GMM will produce a maximum-likelihood value. If the value is greater than a predefined threshold, the claimed speaker is accepted. The input of our proposed system have two elements; one is the original speech, and the other is the residual signal. In our study, we create a new feature vector. It is composed of the cepstral coefficients (denoted as LPCC), derived from the LPC, and the MFCC of the residual signal. We find that this new feature vector perform the best comparing to the LPCC and residual-MFCC. keywordsSpeaker VerificationResidualLPC
Application of particle swarm optimization for tuning the SVR parameters

The prediction of finger pinch force via surface electromyography (sEMG) signals is important in bionic control area. The purpose of this paper was to study how to improve the prediction accuracy while using support vector regression (SVR) to predict the pinch force. Four healthy subjects performed constant-posture force-varying pinch operations. The sEMG signal was acquired using two electrodes while the force signal was recorded by a JR3 sensor. The time domain feature of sEMG and the force signal were then applied as the input of the SVR model. In order to improve the prediction accuracy, the parameters of SVR model were optimized by applying particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The relative mean square error (RMSE), correlation coefficients (CC), and mean average error (MAE) were calculated as the criteria. The results show that the predicted force is close to the real pinch force by SVR modeling technique. The RMSE results are below 8% and the CC results are above 96% with 4 subjects. Compared with the grid search (GS) method, the PSO-SVR achieves a tradeoff between the accuracy and the computational costs with different kinds of training data.
Internet of Medical Things (IOMT): Applications, Benefits and Future Challenges in Healthcare Domain

 —Internet of Medical Things (IOMT) is playing vital role in healthcare industry to increase the accuracy, reliability and productivity of electronic devices. Researchers are contributing towards a digitized healthcare system by interconnecting the available medical resources and healthcare services. As IOT converge various domains but our focus is related to research contribution of IOT in healthcare domain. This paper presents the peoples contribution of IOT in healthcare domain, application and future challenges of IOT in term of medical services in healthcare. We do hope that this work will be useful for researchers and practitioners in the field, helping them to understand the huge potential of IoT in medical domain and identification of major challenges in IOMT. This work will also help the researchers to understand applications of IOT in healthcare domain. This contribution will help the researchers to understand the previous contribution of IOT in healthcare industry.
Perforated Sheets Exhibiting Negative Poisson's Ratios

Sheets made from readily available conventional materials containing diamond or star shaped perforations are shown to exhibit various Poisson's ratio values which could also be negative (auxetic). This behavior may be exhibited in both tension and compression and can be explained through models based on “rotating rigid units. ” This provides an easy manner for the manufacture of auxetic or conventional systems at any scale which can be tailor made to exhibit particular values of the Poisson's ratio.
Bank Concentration and Enterprise Borrowing Cost Risk: Evidence from Asian Markets

Based on data from nine Asian markets, this study investigates the relationship between bank concentration and the borrowing cost risk of firms. Over the study period, the concentration of banks increased in the developed countries and decreased in developing countries. After the 2007? 2008 financial crisis, the borrowing cost risk increased in both the developed and developing economies. The empirical evidences show that bank concentration is positively related to the borrowing cost risk for developed economies only.
Node Placement for Connected Coverage in Sensor Networks

We address the problem of optimal node placement for ensuring connected coverage in sensor networks. We consider two different practical scenarios. In the first scenario, a certain region (or a set of regions) are to be provided connected coverage, while in the second case, a given set of n points are to be covered and connected. For the first case, we provide solutions that are within a small factor of the optimum. For the second case, we present an algorithm that runs in polynomial time, and guarantees a constant factor approximation ratio.
A first evaluation of logic form identification systems

This paper presents a first experience with evaluating sytems that address the issue of Logic Form Identification (LFi). A Gold Standard approach was used in which experts provide solutions to test data. The expert solutions, the gold standard, are then compared against outputs from participanting systems and different metrics observed. We proposed a few novel metrics, including precision and recall, that are further used to provide comparative results. The test data included 4155 arguments and 2398 predicates grouped in 300 sentences.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Evaluation of the Vulnerability of Speaker Verification to Synthetic Speech

In this paper, we evaluate the vulnerability of a speaker veri-ﬁcation (SV) system to synthetic speech. Although this problem was ﬁrst examined over a decade ago, dramatic improvements in both SV and speech synthesis have renewed interest in this problem. We use a HMM-based speech synthesizer, which creates synthetic speech for a targeted speaker through adaptation of a background model and a GMM-UBM-based SV sys-tem. Using 283 speakers from the Wall-Street Journal (WSJ) corpus, our SV system has a 0.4% EER. When the system is tested with synthetic speech generated from speaker models derived from the WSJ journal corpus, 90% of the matched claims are accepted. This result suggests a possible vulnerability in SV systems to synthetic speech. In order to detect synthetic speech prior to recognition, we investigate the use of an automatic speech recognizer (ASR), dynamic-time-warping (DTW) distance of mel-frequency cepstral coefﬁcients (MFCC), and previously-proposed average inter-frame difference of log-likelihood (IFDLL). Overall, while SV systems have impressive accuracy, even with the proposed detector, high-quality synthetic speech can lead to an unacceptably high acceptance rate of synthetic speakers.
Determinants of tubular bone marrow-derived cell engraftment after renal ischemia/reperfusion in rats.

BACKGROUND Ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury is a major cause of acute renal failure (ARF). ARF is reversible, due to an innate regenerative process, which is thought to depend partly on bone marrow-derived progenitor cells. The significance of these cells in the repair process has been questioned in view of their relatively low frequency. Here, we hypothesize that the severity of renal damage and the postischemic recovery time are determinants of tubular bone marrow-derived cell (BMDC) engraftment. METHODS We used a model of unilateral renal I/R in F344 rats reconstituted with R26-human placental alkaline phosphatase (hPAP) transgenic bone marrow, in which we quantified and characterized tubular BMDC engraftment with increasing severity of damage and in time. RESULTS After I/R injury, BMDC engrafted the tubular epithelium and acquired an epithelial phenotype. Tubular epithelial BMDC engraftment increased with longer ischemic time, indicating that tubular epithelial BMDC engraftment increases with the severity of damage. The number of circulating progenitor cells doubled early after I/R injury and was followed by a transient increase in tubular epithelial BMDC engraftment. The latter positively correlated with morphological recovery of the kidney over time. CONCLUSION. The extent of tubular BMDC engraftment depends on the severity of renal damage and follows a distinct time course after I/R injury. Therefore, the severity of damage and time course need to be taken into account when interpreting data on the role of tubular BMDC engraftment in renal repair after I/R injury.
Transcript Diversification in the Nervous System: A to I RNA Editing in CNS Function and Disease Development

RNA editing by adenosine deaminases that act on RNA converts adenosines to inosines in coding and non-coding regions of mRNAs. Inosines are interpreted as guanosines and hence, this type of editing can change codons, alter splice patterns, or influence the fate of an RNA. A to I editing is most abundant in the central nervous system (CNS). Here, targets for this type of nucleotide modification frequently encode receptors and channels. In many cases, the editing-induced amino acid exchanges alter the properties of the receptors and channels. Consistently, changes in editing patterns are frequently found associated with diseases of the CNS. In this review we describe the mechanisms of RNA editing and focus on target mRNAs of editing that are functionally relevant to normal and aberrant CNS activity.
The Change from Past to Future for Adsorbent Materials in Treatment of Dyeing Wastewaters

Adsorption is one of the most promising decolorization techniques in dyeing wastewater treatment. Adsorption techniques for wastewater treatment have become more popular in recent years owing to their efficiency in the removal of pollutants too stable for biological methods. Dye adsorption is a result of two mechanisms (adsorption and ion exchange) and is influenced by many factors as dye/adsorbent interaction, adsorbent’s surface area, particle size, temperature, pH, and contact time. The main advantage of adsorption recently became the use of low-cost materials, which reduces the procedure cost. The present review firstly introduced the technology process, research history and research hotspot of adsorption. Then, the application of adsorption in treatment of dyeing wastewaters in the past decades was summarized, revealing the impressive changes in modes, trends, and conditions. From this review article, the different philosophy of synthesis of adsorbent materials became evident.
Manganese-Chromium Isotope Systematics of Ivuna, Kainsaz and Other Carbonaceous Chondrites

We have shown earlier that the bulk samples of carbonaceous chondrites [CC] reveal excesses in both Cr-53 (Cr-53*) and Cr-54 (Cr-54*) as compared to the terrestrial standard value. The Cr-53/52 ratios in bulk samples of Orgueil (CI), Murray (CM), Allende (CV), and the Bencubbin/CH-like meteorite Hammadah Al Hambra 237 (HH237) are correlated with the respective Mn/Cr ratios. In contrast to CC, HH237 is characterized by a deficit of Cr-53 (-0.15 +/- 0.10(epsilon)) at a low Mn/Cr ratio of 0.07. The HH237 data point, however, falls on the CC line. Here we report new Mn-53 - Cr-53 results for the CC Kainsaz (CO) and Ivuna (CI).
Internet topology: connectivity of IP graphs

In this paper we introduce a framework for analyzing local properties of Internet connectivity. We compare BGP and probed topology data, finding that currently probed topology data yields much denser coverage of AS-level connectivity. We describe data acquisition and construction of several IP- level graphs derived from a collection of 220 M skitter traceroutes. We find that a graph consisting of IP nodes and links contains 90.5% of its 629 K nodes in the acyclic subgraph. In particular, 55% of the IP nodes are in trees. Full bidirectional connectivity is observed for a giant component containing 8.3% of IP nodes.
Neural Network-Based Thermal Simulation of Integrated Circuits on GPUs

With the rising challenges in heat removal in integrated circuits (ICs), the development of thermal-aware computing architectures and run-time management systems has become indispensable to the continuation of IC design scaling. These thermal-aware design technologies of the future strongly depend on the availability of efficient and accurate means for thermal modeling and analysis. These thermal models must have not only the sufficient accuracy to capture the complex mechanisms that regulate thermal diffusion in ICs, but also a level of abstraction that allows for their fast execution for design space exploration. In this paper, we propose an innovative thermal modeling approach for full-chips that can handle the scalability problem of transient heat flow simulation in large 2-D/3-D multiprocessor ICs. This is achieved by parallelizing the computation-intensive task of transient temperature tracking using neural networks and exploiting the computational power of massively parallel graphics processing units. Our results show up to 35× run-time speedup compared to state-of-the-art IC thermal simulation tools while keeping the error lower than 1°C. Speedups scale with the size of the 3-D multiprocessor ICs and our proposed method serves as a valuable design space exploration tool.
Safety and Liveness, Weakness and Strength, and the Underlying Topological Relations

We present a characterization that shows what it means for a formula to be a weak or strong version of another formula. We show that the weak version of a formula is not the same as Alpern and Schneider's safety component, but can be achieved by taking the closure in the Cantor topology over an augmented alphabet in which every formula is satisfiable. The resulting characterization allows us to show that the set of semantically weak formulas is exactly the set of nonpathological safety formulas. Furthermore, we use the characterization to show that the original versions of the ieee standard temporal logics psl and sva are broken, and we show that the source of the problem lies in the semantics of the sere intersection and fusion operators. Finally, we use the topological characterization to show the internal consistency of the alternative semantics adopted by the latest version of the psl standard.
On the impact of wireless network traffic location and access technology on mobile device energy consumption

In the context of wireless user's increasing demands for better device power and battery management, this paper investigates some factors that can impact the power consumption on the energy consumption of mobile devices. The focus is on two factors when performing multimedia streaming: the impact of the traffic location within a WLAN; and the impact of the radio access network technology (WLAN, HSDPA, UMTS). The energy measurement results show that by changing the quality level of the multimedia stream the energy can be greatly conserved while the user perceived quality level is still acceptable. Moreover, by using the cellular interface much more energy is consumed (up to 61%) than by using the WLAN interface.
The empirical implications of privacy-aware choice

This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of, and has preferences over, the information revealed by her choices. The main message of the paper is that little can be inferred about consumers' preferences once we introduce the possibility that the consumer has concerns about privacy. This holds even when consumers' privacy preferences are assumed to be monotonic and separable. This motivates the consideration of stronger assumptions and, to that end, we introduce an additive model for privacy preferences that does have testable implications.
MITIGATING ADVERSARIAL EFFECTS THROUGH RAN-

Convolutional neural networks have demonstrated their powerful ability on various tasks in recent years. However, they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples. I.e., clean images, with imperceptible perturbations added, can easily cause convolutional neural networks to fail. In this paper, we propose to utilize randomization to mitigate adversarial effects. Specifically, we use two randomization operations: random resizing, which resizes the input images to a random size, and random padding, which pads zeros around the input images in a random manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed randomization method is very effective at defending against both single-step and iterative attacks. Our method also enjoys the following advantages: 1) no additional training or finetuning, 2) very few additional computations, 3) compatible with other adversarial defense methods. By combining the proposed randomization method with an adversarially trained model, it achieves a normalized score of 0.924 (ranked Top 2 among 107 defense models) in a public challenge on defending against adversarial examples, which is far better than using adversarial training alone with a normalized score of 0.773.
In Time We Trust?: The Effects of Duration on the Dynamics of Trust-Building Processes in Inter-Organizational Relationships

Inter-organizational relationships (IORs) have become pervasive in the last quarter of the 20th century. This study is based on the notion that trust serves as a viable means for better comprehension of the underlying dynamics of IORs as it reinforces the positive outcomes and abates the complications due to opportunism and uncertainty. A growing interest of research on trust notwithstanding, studies on the co-evolution of trust, its antecedents, and effects on commitment over time are rather scarce. This study addresses this gap with a new conceptual model of trust incorporating the concept of duration into the process of building trust and commitment within an IOR.