Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DSP implementation of an efficient bit allocation algorithm for indoor wireless multicarrier systems

Adaptive bit loading, a technique which is essential for taking full advantage of multicarrier modulation (MCM), has been shown to yield significant performance improvement, especially in the case of wireless MCM. However, because of its high computational cost and the rapid variations of wireless channels, it is seldom used in present wireless standards. In this paper, we present a proof of concept implementation of an adaptive bit loading algorithm, intended for a wireless MCM system, onto a fixed-point DSP. The algorithm considered is iterative in nature and aims to maximize the throughput under a BER constraint. The performance of the implementation is studied in terms of throughput given time varying conditions. Further, the implementation’s robustness is evaluated, relative to sudden changes in the channel that interrupts the algorithm’s run. Issues such as real-time operations and fixed-point representation are included in the discussion. Additionally, a modified implementation, more robust to channel variations is proposed.
Clinical value of echocardiographic Doppler-derived right ventricular dp/dt in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension.

AIMS Right ventricular (RV) dp/dt is the instantaneous rate of RV pressure rise during early systole and is a surrogate marker of RV contractility. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of echocardiographic Doppler obtained RV dp/dt to predict long-term survival in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and chronic thrombo-embolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). METHODS AND RESULTS Seventy-eight consecutive newly diagnosed untreated patients (64 ± 15 years, 71% female, 57% PAH, 43% inoperable CTEPH) were included in the study. At baseline, patients were assessed clinically [New York Heart Association (NYHA) and 6 minutes walking distance (6MWD)], by transthoracic cardiac ultrasound and by right heart catherization. RV dp/dt was assessed using spectral Doppler recordings from the tricuspid regurgitation signal at a sweep speed of 200 mm/s by measuring the time interval in which the regurgitant velocity increased from 0.5 to 2 m/s. During a mean follow-up period of 3.5 ± 1.7 years, 31 patients died and 3 received a lung transplant [study endpoint reached in 34/78 (44%) patients]. The optimal RV dp/dt cut-off was determined by receiver operating characteristic analysis at 3 years to be 410 mmHg/s (specificity 84%, positive-predictive value 55%, and negative-predictive value 83%). In univariate analysis, RV dp/dt <410 mmHg/s (hazard ratio 2.67, 95% CI 1.30-5.47, P = 0.007), tricuspid annulus plane systolic excursion (TAPSE) <15 mm, NYHA, 6MWD, and right atrial pressure were predictors of mortality. In a multivariate model with TAPSE, RV dp/dt remained an independent predictor of mortality (P = 0.01). CONCLUSION A reduced baseline RV dp/dt is a clear indicator of poor outcome independent of TAPSE in patients with PAH/CTEPH.
A comparative review of the efficacy and safety of established phosphate binders: calcium, sevelamer, and lanthanum carbonate*

ABSTRACT Background: Obstacles to successful management of hyperphosphatemia in chronic kidney disease include inadequate control of dietary phosphate and non-compliance with phosphate-binder therapy. Three major classes of phosphate binders include calcium-based binders, sevelamer HCl, and lanthanum carbonate. Scope: A literature search was performed using MEDLINE and EMBASE databases to identify clinical trials from January 1966 to May 2007 comparing classes of phosphate binders with regard to efficacy, safety, compliance, or pharmacoeconomics. Search terms included lanthanum AND sevelamer, lanthanum AND calcium, and sevelamer AND calcium. A total of 1372 articles were identified in the search, with 125 review articles and clinical trials of interest identified. Findings: Calcium-based binders are effective, but their potential to contribute to total body calcium overload and vascular calcification is an important long-term clinical concern. Sevelamer HCl is effective in reducing serum phosphate, has no systemic absorption, and does not increase total body calcium load. However, sevelamer HCl binds bile acids, is not an efficient phosphate binder in an acidic environment, and contributes to metabolic acidosis. Lanthanum carbonate is a potent and selective phosphate binder that retains high affinity for phosphate over a wide pH range, does not bind bile acids or contribute to metabolic acidosis, and has the potential to reduce pill burden and increase patient compliance compared with other phosphate binders. Conclusions: All three classes of phosphate binders are effective at reducing serum phosphate levels. Lanthanum carbonate may result in increased adherence by decreasing the pill burden.
An analysis of piling-up or sinking-in behaviour of elastic–plastic materials under a sharp indentation

Finite-element simulation has been carried out to investigate the piling-up or sinking-in behaviour of elastic–plastic strain-hardening materials under a sharp indentation. An empirical model is proposed to relate the contact area to the material parameter E/σy and the experimental parameter h e/h max. Materials with E/σy<89.07 in the limit of vanishing friction and E/σy<150.7 for a friction coefficient μ = 0.2 may show only sinking-in. Other materials may show either piling-up or sinking-in depending on the h e/h max ratio or strain-hardening exponent. There is no universal h e/h max ratio that can be used to predict the piling-up or sinking-in behaviour of materials. Rather, the critical h e/h max ratio or strain-hardening exponent for no piling-up or sinking-in is a function of E/σy. The piling-up or sinking-in behaviour of materials is found to be closely related to fully plastic deformation. The influence of friction on the amount of piling-up or sinking-in has also been considered in this study.
Enhancing scalability in distributed storage systems with Cauchy Reed-Solomon codes

System scaling becomes essential and indispensable for distributed storage systems due to the explosive growth of data volume. As fault-protection is also a necessity in large-scale distributed storage systems, and Cauchy Reed-Solomon (CRS) codes are widely deployed to tolerate multiple simultaneous node failures, this paper studies the scaling of distributed storage systems with CRS codes. In particular, we formulate the scaling problem with an optimization model in which both the post-scaling encoding matrix and the data migration policy are assumed to be unknown in advance. To minimize the I/O overhead for CRS scaling, we first derive the optimal post-scaling encoding matrix under a given data migration policy, and then optimize the data migration process using the selected postscaling encoding matrix. Our scaling scheme requires the minimal data movement while achieving uniform data distribution. To validate the efficiency of our scheme, we implement it atop a networked file system. Extensive experiments show that our scaling scheme reduces 7.94% to 58.87%, and 39.52% on average, of the scaling time over the basic scheme.
A Novel Hierarchical Information Fusion Method for Three-Dimensional Upper Limb Motion Estimation

Motion capture provides the best interface to the understanding of trajectory planning and formations in the central nervous system, which has enormously benefited the research in interactive game and learning, animation, film special effects, health care, and navigation. The existing human motion capture techniques, which use structured multiple high-resolution cameras in a dedicated studio, are complicated and expensive. With the rapid development of microsensors on chip, a ubiquitous real-time low-cost human motion capture system that uses wearable microsensors becomes possible. Because of the agility in movement, upper limb motion estimation has been regarded as the most difficult problem in human motion capture. In this paper, we take the upper limb as our research subject and present a novel upper limb motion estimation algorithm by hierarchical fusion of sensor data and human skeleton constraints. Our method represents the orientations of upper limb segments in quaternion, which is computationally effective and can avoid the singularity problem. To address the nonlinear human body segment motion, a particle filter is proposed to fuse inertial and magnetic sensor data. To compensate for the drift, which is the most challenging issue in motion estimation using inertial sensors, we present a novel solution by modeling the geometrical constraint in elbow joint and fuse the constraint in the framework of particle filter to revise the sensor fusion results and improve the estimation accuracy. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm can provide accurate results compared to the ground truth.
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity Food Advertising and Marketing Directed at Children and Adolescents in the Us

In recent years, the food and beverage industry in the US has viewed children and adolescents as a major market force. As a result, children and adolescents are now the target of intense and specialized food marketing and advertising efforts. Food marketers are interested in youth as consumers because of their spending power, their purchasing influence, and as future adult consumers. Multiple techniques and channels are used to reach youth, beginning when they are toddlers, to foster brand-building and influence food product purchase behavior. These food marketing channels include television advertising, in-school marketing, product placements, kids clubs, the Internet, toys and products with brand logos, and youth-targeted promotions, such as cross-selling and tie-ins. Foods marketed to children are predominantly high in sugar and fat, and as such are inconsistent with national dietary recommendations. The purpose of this article is to examine the food advertising and marketing channels used to target children and adolescents in the US, the impact of food advertising on eating behavior, and current regulation and policies.
Spatiotemporal Detection and Analysis of Urban Villages in Mega City Regions of China Using High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery

Due to the rapid urbanization of China, many villages in the urban fringe are enveloped by ever-expanding cities and become so-called urban villages (UVs) with substandard living conditions. Despite physical similarities to informal settlements in other countries (e.g., slums in India), UVs have access to basic public services, and more importantly, villagers own the land legitimately. The resulting socio-economic impact on urban development attracts increasing interest. However, the identification of UVs in previous studies relies on fieldwork, leading to late and incomplete analyses. In this paper, we present three scene-based methods for detecting UVs using high-resolution remotely sensed imagery based on a novel multi-index scene model and two popular scene models, i.e., bag-of-visual-words and supervised latent Dirichlet allocation. In the experiments, our index-based approach produced Kappa values around 0.82 and outperformed conventional models both quantitatively and visually. Moreover, we performed multitemporal classification to evaluate the transferability of training samples across multitemporal images with respect to three methods, and the index-based approach yielded best results again. Finally, using the detection results, we conducted a systematic spatiotemporal analysis of UVs in Shenzhen and Wuhan, two mega cities of China. At the city level, we observe the decline of UVs in urban areas over the recent years. At the block level, we characterize UVs quantitatively from physical and geometrical perspectives and investigate the relationships between UVs and other geographic features. In both levels, the comparison between UVs in Shenzhen and Wuhan is made, and the variations within and across cities are revealed.
How to test software for optimal software reliability assessment

The controlled Markov chains (CMC) approach to software testing models the software under test as a controlled Markov chain and treats it as a controlled object. It treats software testing strategy as the corresponding controller. Our previous work has shown that the CMC approach is applicable to dealing with the software testing problem for optimal software reliability growth. In this paper we show that software reliability assessment can be treated as an adaptive control problem and the CMC approach is also applicable to dealing with the optimal software testing problem for software reliability assessment. The work presented in this paper is a contribution to the new area of software cybernetics that explores the interplay between software and control.
Carbon Nanotube Field‐Effect‐Transistor‐Based Biosensors

There is an explosive interest in 1D nanostructured materials for biological sensors. Among these nanometer‐scale materials, single‐walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) offer the advantages of possible biocompatibility, size compatibility, and sensitivity towards minute electrical perturbations. In particular, because of these inherent qualities, changes in SWNT conductivity have been explored in order to study the interaction of biomolecules with SWNTs. This Review discusses these interactions, with a focus on carbon nanotube field‐effect transistors (NTFETs). Recent examples of applications of NTFET devices for detection of proteins, antibody–antigen assays, DNA hybridization, and enzymatic reactions involving glucose are summarized. Examples of complementary techniques, such as microscopy and spectroscopy, are covered as well.
Markov-modulated Marked Poisson Processes for Check-in Data

We develop continuous-time probabilistic models to study trajectory data consisting of times and locations of user 'check-ins'. We model the data as realizations of a marked point process, with intensity and mark-distribution modulated by a latent Markov jump process (MJP). We also include user-heterogeneity in our model by assigning each user a vector of 'preferred locations'. Our model extends latent Dirichlet allocation by dropping the bag-of-words assumption and operating in continuous time. We show how an appropriate choice of priors allows efficient posterior inference. Our experiments demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by comparing with various baselines on a variety of tasks.
PROMISE retreat report prospects and opportunities for information access evaluation

The PROMISE network of excellence organized a two-days brainstorming workshop on 30th and 31st May 2012 in Padua, Italy, to discuss and envisage future directions and perspectives for the evaluation of information access and retrieval systems in multiple languages and multiple media. This document reports on the outcomes of this event and provides details about the six envisaged research lines: search applications; contextual evaluation; challenges in test collection design and exploitation; component-based evaluation; ongoing evaluation; and signal-aware evaluation. The ultimate goal of the PROMISE retreat is to stimulate and involve the research community along these research lines and to provide funding agencies with effective and scientifically sound ideas for coordinating and supporting information access research.
Recognizing Entailment and Contradiction by Tree-based Convolution

Recognizing entailment and contradiction between two sentences has wide applications in NLP. Traditional methods include featurerich classifiers or formal reasoning. However, they are usually limited in terms of accuracy and scope. Recently, the renewed prosperity of neural networks has made many improvements in a variety of NLP tasks. In our previous work, the tree-based convolutional neural network (TBCNN) has achieved high performance in several sentence-level classification tasks. But whether TBCNN is applicable to the recognition of entailment and contradiction between two sentences remains unknown. In this paper, we propose TBCNN-pair model to recognize entailment/contradiction. Experimental results on a large dataset verify the rationale of using TBCNN as the sentencelevel model; leveraging additional heuristics like element-wise product/difference further improves the accuracy. Our model outperforms previously published results by a large margin.
ENCODE whole-genome data in the UCSC genome browser (2011 update)

The ENCODE project is an international consortium with a goal of cataloguing all the functional elements in the human genome. The ENCODE Data Coordination Center (DCC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz serves as the central repository for ENCODE data. In this role, the DCC offers a collection of high-throughput, genome-wide data generated with technologies such as ChIP-Seq, RNA-Seq, DNA digestion and others. This data helps illuminate transcription factor-binding sites, histone marks, chromatin accessibility, DNA methylation, RNA expression, RNA binding and other cell-state indicators. It includes sequences with quality scores, alignments, signals calculated from the alignments, and in most cases, element or peak calls calculated from the signal data. Each data set is available for visualization and download via the UCSC Genome Browser (http://genome.ucsc.edu/). ENCODE data can also be retrieved using a metadata system that captures the experimental parameters of each assay. The ENCODE web portal at UCSC (http://encodeproject.org/) provides information about the ENCODE data and links for access.
Abnormal Diurnal Variation of Blood Pressure, Cardiac Output, and Vascular Resistance in Cardiac Transplant Recipients

BackgroundAn attenuated or absent nocturnal decline in blood pressure has repeatedly been documented in cardiac transplant recipients. The present study was aimed at investigating the hemodynamic mechanism underlying this abnormality. Methods and ResultsIn 23 cardiac transplant recipients (11 to 36 months after transplantation) and in 23 control subjects matched for age and 24-hour mean arterial pressure, invasive 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure was measured by means of the Oxford technique. Beat-to-beat relative values of stroke volume were determined by means of a pulse-contour method, and relative changes of cardiac output (stroke volume × heart rate) and total peripheral vascular resistance (blood pressure/cardiac output) over the 24-hour period were calculated. The nocturnal decline in blood pressure was 20 ± 8% (mean ± SD) in control subjects but only 5 ± 9% (P < .001) in cardiac transplant recipients. In control subjects, the nocturnal decline in blood pressure was associated with a nocturnal fall in cardiac output of 24 ± 13%, whereas vascular resistance compared with daytime value did not change. The small nocturnal decline in blood pressure in cardiac transplant recipients was associated with an attenuated nocturnal fall in cardiac output of 14 ± 12% (P < .05 versus control subjects). In addition, vascular resistance compared with daytime value was increased by 9 ± 9% (P < .05) during the night. Both in cardiac transplant recipients and in control subjects, the nocturnal changes in blood pressure were correlated with the nocturnal changes in cardiac output but not with the nocturnal changes in total peripheral vascular resistance. ConclusionsThis study confirms the attenuated nocturnal fall in blood pressure in cardiac transplant recipients. Hemodynamically, this attenuated blood pressure decline is characterized by a reduced nocturnal fall in cardiac output, and it is associated with a nocturnal increase in vascular resistance.
Potential of the approximation method

Developing some techniques for the approximation method, we establish precise versions of the following statements concerning lower bounds for circuits that detect cliques of size s in a graph with m vertices. For 5/spl les/s/spl les/m/4, a monotone circuit computing CLIQUE(m, s) contains at least (1/2) 1.8/sup min(/spl radic/s-1/2,m/(4s))/ gates. If a non-monotone circuit computes CLIQUE using a "small" amount of negation, then the circuit contains an exponential number of gates. The former is proved very simply using so called bottleneck counting argument within the framework of approximation, whereas the latter is verified introducing a notion of restricting negation and generalizing the sunflower contraction.
Highly Ordered Nanoporous Alumina Films: Effect of Pore Size and Uniformity on Sensing Performance

The effect of pore size and uniformity on the humidity response of nanoporous alumina, formed on aluminum thick films through an anodization process, is reported. Pore sizes examined range from approximately 13 to 45 nm, with a pore size standard deviations ranging from 2.6 to 7.8 nm. The response of the material to humidity is a strong function of pore size and operating frequency. At 5 kHz an alumina sensor with an average pore size of 13.6 nm (standard deviation 2.6 nm) exhibits a well-behaved change in impedance magnitude of 10^3 over 20% to 90% relative humidity. Increasing pore size decreases the humidity range over which the sensors have high sensitivity and shifts the operating range to higher humidity values. Cole–Cole plots of 5 to 13 MHz measured impedance spectra, modeled using equivalent circuits, are used to resolve the effects of water adsorption and ion migration within the adsorbed water layer. The presence of impurity ions within the highly ordered nano-dimensional pores, accumulated during the anodization process, appear highly beneficial for obtaining a substantial variation in measured impedance over a wide range of humidity values.
Thermoplastic Nanocomposites Filled With Wheat Straw Cellulose Whiskers. Part II: Effect of Processing and Modeling

The reinforcing effect of cellulose microcrystals, or whiskers, dispersed in a thermoplastic matrix is analyzed. In Part I [Polym. Compos. , 17, 604 (1996)], the preparation and the characterization of cellulose whiskers obtained from wheat straw were detailed. Composite films were processed by freeze-drying and molding a mixture of aqueous suspension of these microcrystals and a film forming latex of poly(Styrene-co-ButylAcrylate). Using the same filler and latex, materials were processed by casting and evaporating the mixture of aqueous suspensions. It was found that the reinforcing effect is greater in the latter case. This behavior is ascribed to the sedimentation of the filler during evaporation, evidenced by scanning electron microscopy, wide angle X-ray scattering, and dynamic mechanical analysis, and to the formation of a network of whiskers governed by a percolation mechanism. The behavior of the composite is modeled by subdividing the sample into layers with different whisker contents lying parallel to the film surface.
Posterolateral Fusion for Spondylolisthesis in Adolescence

Summary: Previous reports of posterolateral fusion for treatment of adolescent spondylolisthesis at L5-S1 suggest that persistent slippage is a significant problem in the postoperative period. Of 40 adolescent patients who underwent posterolateral fusion for L5-S1 spondylolisthesis, 23 demonstrated Grade 3 slip or worse. Two patients had progression of the slip postoperatively with subsequent spontaneous healing. All patients had complete incorporation of bone graft with resolution of neurologic deficits and pain. Improvement in results is attributed to the surgical technique and to postoperative casting. The displacement index, a new method to document relative L5-S1 position, is described.