Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of the Radiation Efficiency for the Dielectric Resonator Antenna and the Microstrip Antenna at Ka Band

The radiation efficiency of a dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) and a microstrip antenna (MSA) at Ka band is investigated numerically and experimentally. For direct comparison, one cylindrical DRA and one circular disk MSA were designed with similar feeding networks for operation at around 35 GHz. The efficiency of both devices was measured using the directivity/gain (D/G) method and the Wheeler cap method, in both of which the losses in the test system and the feeding structure were taken into account for calibration purposes. A good agreement between measured and simulated results for both methods is found, when considering the effect of the sampling interval and cross-polarization in the D/G method and the effect of the metallic cap size in the Wheeler cap method. It is finally demonstrated that the radiation efficiency of the DRA is significantly higher than that of the MSA at millimeter wave frequencies.
Measurement of CD8+ T Cell Responses in Human Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a T cell–mediated autoimmune disease targeting pancreatic β‐cells. Despite this textbook definition, it is quite striking that neither the diagnosis nor the therapy nor the follow‐up of T1D “belong” to immunologists, but rather to endocrinologists whose only option is to limit the consequences of the disease. Immune therapies would seem better suited to correct the causes of T1D, but critical laboratory tools are missing for early diagnosis, prognostic stratification, and therapeutic follow‐up. The immune markers routinely available are limited to autoantibodies, which have some intrinsic limitations. Because T cells are central pathogenic actors of T1D, the quest for their measurement appeared to offer a path towards new autoimmune markers. Given the strong association between T1D susceptibility and the HLA class II locus, investigators have long been focused on CD4+ T cells. However, data gathered in the NOD mouse and the examination of human insulitis point to a critical role of CD8+ T cells in the pathogenesis of T1D. These observations have revived interest in trying to measure CD8+ T cell responses in human T1D. Achievement of this goal mainly depends on two factors. First, the relevant epitopes need to be identified. Second, appropriate readouts and measurement techniques need to be selected. This review summarizes recent advances on both of these battlefronts, and discusses the potential clinical applications of T cell assays.
Cell wall assembly in Bacillus subtilis: how spirals and spaces challenge paradigms

Although the bacterial cell wall has been the subject of decades of investigation, recent studies continue to generate novel and controversial models of its synthesis and assembly. Here we compare and contrast the transcompartmental biosyntheses of peptidoglycan and teichoic acid in Bacillus subtilis. In addition, the current paradigms of B. subtilis wall assembly and structure are distinguished from emerging models of murein insertion and organization. We discuss evidence for the directed, cytoskeleton‐dependent insertion of nascent peptidoglycan and the existence of a periplasmic compartment. Furthermore, we summarize the challenges these findings represent to the existing paradigm of murein insertion. Finally, motivated by these new developments, we discuss outstanding issues that remain to be addressed and suggest research directions that may contribute to a better understanding of cell wall assembly in B. subtilis.
Microsomal Triglyceride Transfer Protein Enhances Cellular Cholesteryl Esterification by Relieving Product Inhibition*

Cholesteryl ester synthesis by the acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferase enzymes ACAT1 and ACAT2 is, in part, a cellular homeostatic mechanism to avoid toxicity associated with high free cholesterol levels. In hepatocytes and enterocytes, cholesteryl esters are secreted as part of apoB lipoproteins, the assembly of which is critically dependent on microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTP). Conditional genetic ablation of MTP reduces cholesteryl esters and enhances free cholesterol in the liver and intestine without diminishing ACAT1 and ACAT2 mRNA levels. As expected, increases in hepatic free cholesterol are associated with decreases in 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA reductase and increases in ATP-binding cassette transporter 1 mRNA levels. Chemical inhibition of MTP also decreases esterification of cholesterol in Caco-2 and HepG2 cells. Conversely, coexpression of MTP and apoB in AC29 cells stably transfected with ACAT1 and ACAT2 increases cholesteryl ester synthesis. Liver and enterocyte microsomes from MTP-deficient animals synthesize lesser amounts of cholesteryl esters in vitro, but addition of purified MTP and low density lipoprotein corrects this deficiency. Enrichment of microsomes with cholesteryl esters also inhibits cholesterol ester synthesis. Thus, MTP enhances cellular cholesterol esterification by removing cholesteryl esters from their site of synthesis and depositing them into nascent apoB lipoproteins. Therefore, MTP plays a novel role in regulating cholesteryl ester biosynthesis in cells that produce lipoproteins. We speculate that non-lipoprotein-producing cells may use different mechanisms to alleviate product inhibition and modulate cholesteryl ester biosynthesis.
Cluster-based scalable network services

We identify three fundamental requirements for scalable network services: incremental scalability and overflow growth provisioning, 24x7 availability through fault masking, and cost-effectiveness. We argue that clusters of commodity workstations interconnected by a high-speed SAN are exceptionally well-suited to meeting these challenges for Internet-server workloads, provided the software infrastructure for managing partial failures and administering a large cluster does not have to be reinvented for each new service. To this end, we propose a general, layered architecture for building cluster-based scalable network services that encapsulates the above requirements for reuse, and a service-programming model based on composable workers that perform transformation, aggregation, caching, and customization (TACC) of Internet content. For both performance and implementation simplicity, the architecture and TACC programming model exploit BASE, a weaker-than-ACID data semantics that results from trading consistency for availability and relying on soft state for robustness in failure management. Our architecture can be used as an off the shelf infrastructural platform for creating new network services, allowing authors to focus on the content of the service (by composing TACC building blocks) rather than its implementation. We discuss two real implementations of services based on this architecture: TranSend, a Web distillation proxy deployed to the UC Berkeley dialup IP population, and HotBot, the commercial implementation of the Inktomi search engine. We present detailed measurements of TranSend's performance based on substantial client traces, as well as anecdotal evidence from the TranSend and HotBot experience, to support the claims made for the architecture.
Where are the horses? With the sheep or cows? Uncertain host location, vector-feeding preferences and the risk of African horse sickness transmission in Great Britain

Understanding the influence of non-susceptible hosts on vector-borne disease transmission is an important epidemiological problem. However, investigation of its impact can be complicated by uncertainty in the location of the hosts. Estimating the risk of transmission of African horse sickness (AHS) in Great Britain (GB), a virus transmitted by Culicoides biting midges, provides an insightful example because: (i) the patterns of risk are expected to be influenced by the presence of non-susceptible vertebrate hosts (cattle and sheep) and (ii) incomplete information on the spatial distribution of horses is available because the GB National Equine Database records owner, rather than horse, locations. Here, we combine land-use data with available horse owner distributions and, using a Bayesian approach, infer a realistic distribution for the location of horses. We estimate the risk of an outbreak of AHS in GB, using the basic reproduction number (R0), and demonstrate that mapping owner addresses as a proxy for horse location significantly underestimates the risk. We clarify the role of non-susceptible vertebrate hosts by showing that the risk of disease in the presence of many hosts (susceptible and non-susceptible) can be ultimately reduced to two fundamental factors: first, the abundance of vectors and how this depends on host density, and, second, the differential feeding preference of vectors among animal species.
The effects of intraruminal infusions of sodium bicarbonate, ammonium chloride and sodium butyrate on urea metabolism in sheep

1. Three sheep fitted with rumen cannulas were fed hourly a daily ration of 1000 g pelleted-grass cubes, and during four successive 2-week periods were intraruminally infused (0·45 l/d) with solutions containing sodium chloride (0·47 mol/d), sodium bicarbonate (0·47 mol/d), ammonium chloride (0·47 mol/d) and sodium butyrate (0·47 mol/d). Each solution, except that for NaHCO3, was adjusted to pH 7 before infusion, and provided equal sodium intakes for sheep in all periods. 2. In the final week of each infusion period, a balance trial was conducted and on separate days each sheep was continuously infused with [14C]urea and NaH14CO3 intravenously and NaH14CO3 intraruminally. Carbon transfer rates between blood urea, blood bicarbonate and rumen fluid bicarbonate were calculated from the specific radioactivity of urea and bicarbonate samples and isotope infusion rates during each experimental period. 3. There was no significant effect of intraruminal infusions on N balance, and with the exception of sheep in fused with NH4Cl, all sheep utilized apparently digested N with similar efficiency for N retention. Sheep infused with NH4Cl (6·2 g N/d) excreted the equivalent of 93% of the infused N as urea in urine. 4. Infusion of NaHCO3. NH4Cl and sodium butyrate significantly (P < 0·05) increased the rurnen fluid concentrations of bicarbonate, ammonia and butyric acid respectively, and all infusions significantly (P < 0·05) increased total volatile fatty acid concentrations. Both NaHCO3 and sodium, butyrate significantly (P < 0·05) increased the pH of rumen fluid There was no significant effect of infusion on the proportions of propionic acid or the osmolality of rumen fluid. 5. Intraruminal infusions of NH4Cl significantly (P < 0·05) increased and infusion of sodium butyrate significantly (P < 0·05) decreased plasma urea concentrations. Sheep infused with NH4Cl had higher rates of urea synthesis and urinary urea excretion compared with sheep on the other treatments, and a significantly (P < 0·05) lower proportion of urea synthesized by these sheep was degraded in the digestive tract. Sheep infused with sodium butyrate degraded a significantly (P < 0·05) greater amount (3·2 g N/d) and proportion (0·24) of total urea synthesis in the rumen than did sheep infused with NaCl. Corresponding values for the control (NaCl) sheep were 1·5 g N/d and 0·13 respectively. There was no significant effect of other infusions on the amount of urea recycled to the rumen or on the distribution of total urea degradation between the rumen and lower digestive tract. Plasma urea clearance to the rumen was significantly (P < 0·05) increased during sodium butyrate infusion, and the clearance of urea to the lower digestive tract was significantly (P < 0·05) decreased during NH4Cl infusion. 6. The mechanism by which urea entry into the rumen is regulated by rumen metabolite levels is discussed.
A state of the art opinion mining and its application domains

This paper critically evaluates existing work, presents an opinion mining framework and exposes new areas of research in opinion mining. Individuals, businesses and government can now easily know the general opinion prevailing on a product, company or public policy. At the core of this field is semantic orientation of subjective terms in documents or reviews which seeks to establish their contextual connotation through opinion mining. Overall item sentiment can be expressed based on its sentiment words in general or by specifically identifying its features and the opinions being expressed about them. This leads us to the motivation of the framework for opinion mining and categorizing current literature in such a manner as to make clear, research opportunities. The freedom offered by the web as a platform for presenting opinions on any subject brings with it many new opportunities.
Failure of the EB-PVD TBCs of Rare Earth Zirconates

Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) have very important applications in gas turbines for higher thermal efficiency and protection of components at high temperature. TBCs of rare earth materials such as lanthanum zirconate (La2Zr2O7, LZ), lanthanum yttrium zirconate (3wt% Y2O3- La2Zr2O7, 3YLZ), lanthanum cerium zirconate (La2(Zr0.7Ce0.3)2O7, LZ7C3) were prepared by electron beam-physical vapor deposition (EB-PVD). The compositions, crystal structures, thermal expansion behaviors, cross-sectional morphologies and cyclic oxidation behaviors of these coatings were studied. These coatings have partially deviated from their original compositions due to the different evaporation rates of oxides, and the deviation could be reduced by properly controlling the deposition condition. The thermal expansion behavior of LZ coating can be largely improved after doping with 3wt% Y2O3 and CeO2. The excess La2O3, chemical incompatibilities of the ceramic coatings with thermally grown oxide (TGO) layers, the visible cracks initiation, propagation and extension, the abnormal oxidation of bond coat, and the thermal expansion mismatch between ceramic coatings and bond coat are the primary factors for the spallation of LZ, 3YLZ and LZ7C3 coatings.
Current concepts in cholesterol gallstone pathogenesis

Pathogenesis of cholesterol gallstones is related to the failure of bile to maintain cholesterol in micellar solution. The predominant defect is supersaturation of bile with cholesterol caused mainly by hepatic secretion of free cholesterol. A measure for this defect is the conventional cholesterol supersaturation index (CSI). This parameter seems to over‐estimate the ‘effective supersaturation’ in terms of thermodynamic activity of cholesterol monohydrate in bile. The basic information about cholesterol solubilization has been derived from systematic studies of model bile systems at equilibrium. The various cholesterol carriers in bile are summarized in Fig. 8. Mixed micelles and unilamellar vesicles appear to be the major cholesterol carriers. The absolute amount, however, carried by each lipid aggregate cannot be precisely determined by the current methodology. Fusion of cholesterol‐rich vesicles and aggregation into large lamellar liquid crystals is correlated with appearance of solid cholesterol crystals. Therefore, it has been postulated that cholesterol crystals nucleate from these liquid crystalline aggregates. Further growth occurs by apposition of cholesterol molecules, presumably derived from unilamellar vesicles. Recently, however, evidence has been provided that the lecithin and cholesterol of liquid crystalline aggregates may derive directly from both micelles and vesicles [87].
Damage Mechanics Approach to Material-Dependency of Fracture Toughness in Aluminum Alloys

Mixed-mode elastic-plastic fracture toughness in aluminum alloys,i.e., heat-treatable and non-heat-treatable alloys, depends on the hardening mechanism. Present investigation have been carried out to clarify the material dependency of the fracture toughness in aluminum alloys. Two kinds of alloys were regarded as particle reinforced composites which contain inclusions and dispersoids in different matrices. The matrix in the non-heat-treatable alloy has low yield stress and high strain hardening, while the matrix in the heat-treatable alloy has high yield stress and low strain hardening because it is hardened by shearable precipitates. Elastic-plastic analyses of mode I and mode II cracks were conducted for two alloys using finite element method based on Tohgo–Chou–Weng’s constitutive relation of particle-reinforced composites which describes the plasticity of the matrix and the debonding damage between the particles and matrix. From the numerical results for plastic zone and damage evolution around a crack tip, it is qualitatively explained that the heat-treatable alloy exhibits the crack initiation in brittle manner from mode I crack and in ductile manner from mode II crack, while in the non-heat-treatable alloy the crack initiation occurs in ductile manner from both cracks.
Automatic Prediction of Discourse Connectives

Accurate prediction of suitable discourse connectives (however, furthermore, etc.) is a key component of any system aimed at building coherent and fluent discourses from shorter sentences and passages. As an example, a dialog system might assemble a long and informative answer by sampling passages extracted from different documents retrieved from the Web. We formulate the task of discourse connective prediction and release a dataset of 2.9M sentence pairs separated by discourse connectives for this task. Then, we evaluate the hardness of the task for human raters, apply a recently proposed decomposable attention (DA) model to this task and observe that the automatic predictor has a higher F1 than human raters (32 vs. 30). Nevertheless, under specific conditions the raters still outperform the DA model, suggesting that there is headroom for future improvements.
A feedforward approach to the dynamic emulation of mechanical loads

A simple practical approach to the testing of variable speed and torque drives with the application of the dynamic emulation of mechanical loads is presented. Both, linear and non-linear dynamics can be applied. The experimental system consists of the drive under test, which is mechanically connected to the active loading system. The emulation procedure is performed by the closed-loop calculation of the torque, applied by the load machine, in such a manner that the input/output behavior of the experimental system resembles the one of the drive under test propelling the emulated load. A simple feedforward scheme, combined with a feedback controller, is used. In contrast to existing references the method is simple and requires no torque measurement equipment. Also the influence of the nonlinear dynamics of the experimental system is discussed. The method can be used for the evaluation of the control algorithms, regardless the control and estimation methods used. The applied load machine is assumed to be torque-controlled with high precision. An induction motor is used as a drive machine and a BLDC machine is used as a load machine. Algorithms are developed with the use of Matlab/Simulink and experiments are executed with the use of the dSPACE system.
Cloudifier: An Ecosystem for the Migration of Distributed Applications to the Cloud

The Cloudifier project deals with the design and development of an ecosystem of tools for the assisted migration to a cloud or multi-cloud environment of scientific and business-oriented distributed applications. Recent surveys show that many of the organizations that are not yet running their applications in the cloud are experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service mode. The Cloudifier tools will provide capabilities to evaluate the characteristics of a legacy distributed applicationby profiling its behavior, to collect information about performance, cost and security on commercial cloud service providers, as well as to assess the quality of the interconnections between providers. On the basis of this data, and interacting with the customers that expose their requirements in an informal way, a "smart" brokering system will find an optimal service composition and evaluate its execution cost, by taking into account the cost plans of the providers, and possibly exploiting multi-cloud configurations.
The Linear Time-Branching Time Spectrum I The Semantics of Concrete , Sequential ProcessesR

In this paper various semantics in the linear time { branching time spectrum are presented in a uniform, model-independent way. Restricted to the class of nitely branching, concrete, sequential processes, only fteen of them turn out to be diierent, and most semantics found in the literature that can be deened uniformly in terms of action relations coincide with one of these fteen. Several testing scenarios, motivating these semantics, are presented, phrased in terms of`button pushing experiments' on generative and reactive machines. Finally twelve of these semantics are applied to a simple language for nite, concrete, sequential, nondeterministic processes, and for each of them a complete axiomatization is provided. 2 The linear time { branching time spectrum I Introduction Process theory A process is the behaviour of a system. The system can be a machine, an elementary particle, a communication protocol, a network of falling dominoes, a chess player, or any other system. Process theory is the study of processes. Two main activities of process theory are modelling and veriication. Modelling is the activity of representing processes, mostly by mathematical structures or by expressions in a system description language. Veriication is the activity of proving statements about processes, for instance that the actual behaviour of a system is equal to its intended behaviour. Of course, this is only possible if a criterion has been deened, determining whether or not two processes are equal, i.e. two systems behave similarly. Such a criterion constitutes the semantics of a process theory. (To be precise, it constitutes the semantics of the equality concept employed in a process theory.) Which aspects of the behaviour of a system are of importance to a certain user depends on the environment in which the system will be running, and on the interests of the particular user. Therefore it is not a task of process theory to nd thètrue' semantics of processes, but rather to determine which process semantics is suitable for which applications. Comparative concurrency semantics This paper aims at the classiication of process semantics. 1 The set of possible process semantics can be partially ordered by the relation`makes strictly more identiications on processes than', thereby becoming a complete lattice 3. Now the classiication of some useful process semantics can be facilitated by drawing parts of this lattice and locating the positions of some interesting process semantics, found in the literature. Furthermore the ideas involved in the construction of …