Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficiency improvement in charge pump circuits

Conventional charge pump circuits use a fixed switching frequency that leads to power efficiency degradation for loading less than the rated loading. This paper proposes a level shifter design that also functions as a frequency converter to automatically vary the switching frequency of a dual charge pump circuit according to the loading. The switching frequency is designed to be 25 kHz with 12 mA loading on both inverting and noninverting outputs. The switching frequency is automatically reduced when loading is lighter to improve the power efficiency. The frequency tuning range of this circuit is designed to be from 100 Hz to 25 kHz. A start-up circuit is included to ensure proper pumping action and avoid latch-up during power-up. A slow turn-on, fast turn-off driving scheme is used in the clock buffer to reduce power dissipation. The new dual charge pump circuit was fabricated in a 3-/spl mu/m p-well double-poly single-metal CMOS technology with breakdown voltage of 18 V, the die size is 4.7/spl times/4.5 mm/sup 2/. For comparison, a charge pump circuit with conventional level shifter and clock buffer was also fabricated. The measured results show that the new charge pump has two advantages: (1) the power dissipation of the charge pump is improved by a factor of 32 at no load and by 2% at rated loading of 500 /spl Omega/ and (2) the breakdown voltage requirement is reduced from 19.2 to 17 V.
Load balancing algorithm using reputation-ReDS in the magnified distributed hash table

In Peer to Peer networks (P2P), single peer is linked to further peer in a scattered storage system. Solitary group of resolutions describes distributed hash tables charts assets onto nodes in P2P network and offers a “locate - acquire” construction where assets can be amassed in the network and consequently get back. In DHT offer expandable position of nodes and services, but do not guard beside malevolent node maneuvering lookups (the activity used to situate the assets in the system). Malevolent nodes on a lookup pathway can simply undermine query. Systems like Halo (based on chord) decrease such assaults by using superfluous lookup queries. To supply better declaration; Reputation for Directory services is a foundation for boosting lookups in superfluous DHT by trailing how well further nodes service lookup desires. ReDS procedure can be implemented to practically any superfluous DHT containing halo. And also recognize joint recognition and elimination of bad lookup lanes in a way that does not bet on the dividing of reputation counts and dividing is susceptible to attacks that create it unfit for the majority utilization of ReDS. Halo is a scheme that deeds the deterministic planning of routing-table access to nodes in chord to present a “high-assurance locate” through superfluous explores. Halo was intended to contain forceful lookups and path miscellany. Divided reputation method for halo, has deterministic finger collection. In determining reputation stage, the sums of assailants are decreased by using original RCVI method. Load inequity issue is raised through this lookup action. Every Peer handles the load in comparative to its capacity. ReDS develops lookup achievement rates for halo, yet beside deliberate aggressor endeavoring to sport their reputation attains and in the existence of node swirl.
Unsupervised classification based on decomposition of RISAT-1 images for oil spill detection

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the identification of oil spill using Hybrid polarity SAR architecture of India's first Radar imaging Satellite RISAT-1 SAR images. The RISAT-1's Hybrid polarity SAR architecture and imaging modes are discussed. The characterization of EM waves with polarization ellipse and polarization state are discussed. The Stokes parameters S1,S2,S3,S4 and its importance for deriving ellipticity and relative phase angle is described. The new m-chi and m-delta decomposition methods are used in India's Chandrayaan-1 mission for water-ice identification are illustrated. These methods are applied to Norway oil spill image of RISAT-1 to identify the oil spill region and discriminate look alikes. The preliminary results are encouraging to highlight the potential of unsupervised classification for identification of oil spill with SAR images.
An Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Infrastructure-Less Opportunistic Networks

In this paper, an energy-aware version of a recently proposed History-Based Prediction for Routing (HBPR) protocol for opportunistic networks (OppNets) called energy-efficient HBPR (AEHBPR) is proposed, which saves the energy consumption by avoiding unnecessary packets transmission in the network and by clearing the buffer of nodes carrying the copies of the already delivered packets. The proposed AEHBPR is simulated using the ONE simulator, using synthetic and real mobility traces, showing a superior performance compared to HBPR and AEProphet, in terms of average remaining energy, number of dead nodes, number of delivered messages, and overhead ratio, where AEProphet is the ProPHet routing protocol for OppNets, on which the same energy-aware mechanism has been implemented.
Embodiment as first affordance: tinkering, tuning, tracking

This article begins from a discussion of philosophical realism and the turn towards close analysis of skilled material practices that characterizes many recent critical interventions. I examine the roots of this turn and suggest that skilled practice is a privileged site for the enactment and testing of realist ontologies. However, I question the extent to which realist thinkers have emphasized practices in which materials outside the human body are central over those in which embodiment itself is the primary medium of practice. Thinkers of realist ontology, I argue, have neglected embodiment as the primary site of an engagement with the fine-grained detail of the world. In contrast, I propose that realist ontologies developed through reference to technological engagements not only apply equally well to embodied practices but actually find their original and primary manifestation there. The body itself is the ‘first affordance’ and the site at which questions of realism and objectivity are first encountered and resolved in practice. I illustrate this point by considering how three modes of material engagement — tinkering, tuning, and tracking — manifest in embodied practices ranging from dance and sport to those of everyday life. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing political importance of embodiment as first affordance and its crucial place as a ‘fragile junction’ between ecology and technology.
Effects of Antithrombotic Drugs Fondaparinux and Tinzaparin on In Vitro Proliferation and Osteogenic and Chondrogenic Differentiation of Bone-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells

An unexpected side effect of some classes of anticoagulants has been osteoporosis which may be, at least in part, related to deranged mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) function. The aim of the present study was to compare the effect of fondaparinux (FDP), a novel antithrombotic with a traditional widely used low molecular weight heparin, tinzaparin (TZP) on MSC proliferation and differentiation. MSCs were isolated from trabecular bone of 14 trauma patients by a collagenase‐based digestion procedure and expanded in standard conditions until passage 3. Proliferation and differentiation of MSCs to chondrocytes and osteoblasts was assessed with or without the addition of FDP and TZP using standard in vitro assays and a broad range of drug concentrations. Flow cytometry was used for MSC phenotyping. In the age studied group (17–74 years old) the MSC frequency in collagenase‐released fractions was 641/106 cells (range 110–2,158) and their growth characteristics were ∼4 days/population doubling. Cultures had a standard MSC phenotype (CD73+, CD105+, CD146+, CD106+, and CD166+). Cell proliferation was assessed by both colony‐forming unit‐fibroblast (CFU‐F) and colorimetric tetrazolium salt XTT assays. In both assays, MSC proliferation was inhibited by the addition of TZP, particularly at high concentrations. In contrast, FDP had no effect on MSC proliferation. Osteogenic differentiation and chondrogenic differentiation were not affected by the addition of either TZP or FDP. Whilst MSC proliferation, but not differentiation, is negatively affected by TZP, there was no evidence for adverse effects of FDP in this in vitro model system which argues well for its use in the orthopedic setting. © 2011 Orthopaedic Research Society Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 29: 1327–1335, 2011
Financial Management's Success as an Academic Journal

At its inception, Financial Management (FM) had the difficult mission of serving the needs of all members of the Financial Management Association (FMA), both academic and practitioner. That mission has now changed. FM's revised mission is to focus solely on the publication of original scholarly research of the highest quality. This paper employs citation analysis to evaluate FM's relative performance among academic research journals in finance. The evidence from the analysis is consistent across all measures. FM ranks among the top five finance journals. Additionally, the trend is toward increasing influence.
Lipoxygenase modulation to reverse carcinogenesis.

New studies of the relationship between polyunsaturated fatty acid metabolismand carcinogenesis have led to novel molecular targets for cancer chemoprevention research. These targets include procarcinogenic lipoxygenases (LOXs), including 5-, 8-, and 12-LOX, and anticarcinogenic LOXs, including 15-LOX-1 and possibly 15-LOX-2. Recent studies indicate that 15-LOX-1 is down-regulated in colorectal cancer cells and that the ability of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, a class of clinically active cancer chemopreventive agents, to induce apoptosis and growth inhibition in these cells was dependent on the induction of 15-LOX-1 and its metabolic product 13-S-hydroxyoctadecadienoic acid. Consistent with the colorectal studies, 15-LOX very recently has shown anticarcinogenic activity in esophageal and prostatic carcinogenesis. Inhibitors of other LOXs (e.g., 5-LOX) have preclinical anticarcinogenic activity and are being developed for clinical chemoprevention study. These and other LOX data led us to propose that the various LOX pathways exist in a dynamic balance that shifts during carcinogenesis toward 5-, 8-, and 12-LOX (and cyclooxygenase-2) and away from 15-LOX. A novel approach for cancer chemoprevention would involve LOX modulators, i.e., agents that can induce the anticarcinogenic and/or inhibit the procarcinogenic LOXs, thereby shifting the balance of LOX activities from procarcinogenic to anticarcinogenic metabolism of polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Learning, planning, and the life cycle of workflow management

This paper describes an approach towards workflow management based on the combination of learning and planning. Assuming that processes cannot be fully described at build-time, the approach makes use of learning techniques, namely inductive logic programming (ILP), in order to discover workflow activities as planning operators. These operators are subsequently fed to a partial-order planner in order to find the process model as a planning solution. The continuous interplay between learning, planning and execution aims at arriving at a feasible plan by successive refinement of the operators. The approach is illustrated in two simple scenarios. The paper concludes by relating the proposed approach with previous developments in this area.
Fast and efficient real-time GPU based implementation of wave field synthesis

Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) aims to replicate true sound field in an extended listening area with the help of loudspeaker arrays. WFS practical setups are heavily computational, as they need to drive many loudspeakers to accurately render multiple virtual sources. Thus, performance bottleneck occurs due to the sequential implementation on PCs with few cores. In addition, real-time spatial audio reproduction systems like WFS are subjected to hard real-time constraints, limiting system throughput and require cascading of several PCs to improve performance. In this paper, a fast and efficient graphics processing unit (GPU) based implementation of WFS is proposed to enhance the system throughput by extracting maximum data parallelism in the algorithm. The proposed method, implemented on NVidia C2075 GPU, uses block based partitioning approach to achieve peak system throughput of 1,400 Msamples per second, while rendering up to 200 real-time sound sources.
The Mg isotopic systematics of granitoids in continental arcs and implications for the role of chemical weathering in crust formation

Continental crust is too Si-rich and Mg-poor to derive directly from mantle melting, which generates basaltic rather than felsic magmas. Converting basalt to more felsic compositions requires a second step involving Mg loss, which is thought to be dominated by internal igneous differentiation. However, igneous differentiation alone may not be able to generate granites, the most silicic endmember making up the upper continental crust. Here, we show that granites from the eastern Peninsular Ranges Batholith (PRB) in southern California are isotopically heavy in Mg compared with PRB granodiorites and canonical mantle. Specifically, Mg isotopes correlate positively with Si content and O, Sr, and Pb isotopes and negatively with Mg content. The elevated Sr and Pb isotopes require that a component in the source of the granitic magmas to be ancient preexisting crust making up the prebatholithic crustal basement, but the accompanying O and Mg isotope fractionations suggest that this prebatholithic crust preserved a signature of low-temperature alteration. The protolith of this basement rock may have been the residue of chemical weathering, which progressively leached Mg from the residue, leaving the remaining Mg highly fractionated in terms of its isotopic signature. Our observations indicate that ancient continental crust preserves the isotopic signature of compositional modification by chemical weathering.
Generation Investment and Capacity Adequacy in Electricity Markets

One of the major challenges in restructured power systems is to maintain a level of generation capacity that ensures an acceptable level of certainty against power interruptions. A power market with a wellfunctioning spot market and long-term markets for allocation of risks between consumers and producers should in theory generate optimal investments in new power generation capacity, but this may not always be the case. In this paper we describe potential problems for adequate generation investments in electricity markets. We also discuss different policies that have been implemented and proposed to address the problem of capacity adequacy. Finally, we look at the experience so far with generation investment in some restructured electricity markets, focusing on Scandinavia and the United States.
Hippocampal place fields: Relationship between degree of field overlap and cross‐correlations within ensembles of hippocampal neurons

The capacity to record from multiple neurons in awake freely moving animals provides a means for characterizing organizational principles of place field encoding within ensembles of hippocampal neurons. In this study, cross‐correlations between pairs of hippocampal place cells and degree of overlap between their respective place fields were analyzed during behavioral performance of delayed matching (DMS) or non‐matching sample (DNMS) tasks, or while the same rats chased pellets in a different environment. The relationship between field overlap and cross‐correlations of neural spike activity within ensembles was shown to be a positive, exponentially increasing, function. Place fields from the same neurons were markedly “remapped” between the Delay and Pellet‐chasing tasks, with respect to physical location and size of fields. However individual pairs of place cells within each ensemble retained nearly the same degree of overlap and cross‐correlation even though the spatial environment and the tasks differed markedly. This suggested that place cells were organized in functional “clusters” which exhibited the same interrelations with respect to place field overlap and cross‐correlations, irrespective of actual field location. When cross‐correlations between place cells were compared to placement of the array recording electrodes within the hippocampus, the strongest correlations were found along previously defined posterior‐projecting fiber gradients between CA3 and CA1 subfields (Ishizuka et al. [1990], J Comp Neurol 295:580–623; Li et al. [1994] (J Comp Neurol 339:181–208). These findings suggest that the functional organization of place fields conforms to anatomical principles suspected to operate within hippocampal ensembles. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Experiment Study of Multi-Step Predictive Control in AGV Path Tracking

Automatic guided vehicle (AGV) is a kind of wheeled mobile robot (WMR) that is used to convey material and supplies in unmanned production workshop. To finish transporting task for differential driving XAUT.AGV100 with nonholonomic constraints made by ourselves, multi-step predictive control algorithm (MSPCA) is designed and used to control AGV to track plan-path to improve the speed of path tracking and the stability of motion. It is verified that MSPCA is feasible and effective through by the theory simulation and the experiment.
Taking Care and Taking Over: Daughter’s Duty, Self-Employment, and Gendered Inheritance in Zacatecas, Mexico

Although disproportionate housework and care responsibilities ascribed to mothers and wives have been found to greatly impact women’s self-employment, less is known about how family-level labor structures may shape daughters’ entrepreneurship. Family business scholarship has shed partial light on this question by showing that household hierarchies and gender norms impede daughters’ recognition and inheritance within family firms in the United States. Drawing on interviews with 32 women microenterprise owners in Zacatecas, Mexico, this article builds on previous research by suggesting that gendered mechanisms and labor structures may in fact position daughters to inherit businesses or business-related resources such as skills, financial capital, and property from their parents. Daughters acquire these assets by virtue of contributing to their parents’ enterprises as part of their childhood chores and maintaining a continued attachment to these businesses into adulthood. Daughters’ job prospects aside from inheritance were found to further shape their perceptions of business succession and inform their decision about whether to take over the family enterprise. Such acquisitions can be said to comprise instances of “gendered inheritance,” in which gendered institutions largely understood as disadvantaging women also may position them to attain valuable assets.
Exploring Balkanet Shared Ontology for Multilingual Conceptual Indexing

As the size of the Web grows, it becomes an imperative to equip search engines with sophisticated indexing modules in order to enable a meaningful organization of the stored data. In this paper we present a structured multilingual conceptual repository that has been employed as the backbone of a conceptual indexing and retrieval system. Our conceptual warehouse originates from a multilingual semantic network (Balkanet) and its Inter-Lingual-Index, which was enriched with domain ontology information inherited from the SUMO ontology. We report on the ontology's design principles and provide a description of its structure. We argue that an important attribute of the Balkanet’s ILI is its flexibility in incorporating new concepts and/or languages by allowing the percolation of shared semantic attributes to all concepts represented within taxonomies. We further present our approach to conceptual indexing, and introduce an indexing algorithm that utilizes Balkanet’s classified conceptual taxonomies. Finally, we discuss how conceptual taxonomies can help retrieval algorithms in making links between terms used in search requests and semantically related terms that might be found in the indexed documents.
Circulating Virus Load Determines the Size of Bottlenecks in Viral Populations Progressing within a Host

For any organism, population size, and fluctuations thereof, are of primary importance in determining the forces driving its evolution. This is particularly true for viruses—rapidly evolving entities that form populations with transient and explosive expansions alternating with phases of migration, resulting in strong population bottlenecks and associated founder effects that increase genetic drift. A typical illustration of this pattern is the progression of viral disease within a eukaryotic host, where such demographic fluctuations are a key factor in the emergence of new variants with altered virulence. Viruses initiate replication in one or only a few infection foci, then move through the vasculature to seed secondary infection sites and so invade distant organs and tissues. Founder effects during this within-host colonization might depend on the concentration of infectious units accumulating and circulating in the vasculature, as this represents the infection dose reaching new organs or “territories”. Surprisingly, whether or not the easily measurable circulating (plasma) virus load directly drives the size of population bottlenecks during host colonization has not been documented in animal viruses, while in plants the virus load within the sap has never been estimated. Here, we address this important question by monitoring both the virus concentration flowing in host plant sap, and the number of viral genomes founding the population in each successive new leaf. Our results clearly indicate that the concentration of circulating viruses directly determines the size of bottlenecks, which hence controls founder effects and effective population size during disease progression within a host.
Directed Evolution of a Model Primordial Enzyme Provides Insights into the Development of the Genetic Code

The contemporary proteinogenic repertoire contains 20 amino acids with diverse functional groups and side chain geometries. Primordial proteins, in contrast, were presumably constructed from a subset of these building blocks. Subsequent expansion of the proteinogenic alphabet would have enhanced their capabilities, fostering the metabolic prowess and organismal fitness of early living systems. While the addition of amino acids bearing innovative functional groups directly enhances the chemical repertoire of proteomes, the inclusion of chemically redundant monomers is difficult to rationalize. Here, we studied how a simplified chorismate mutase evolves upon expanding its amino acid alphabet from nine to potentially 20 letters. Continuous evolution provided an enhanced enzyme variant that has only two point mutations, both of which extend the alphabet and jointly improve protein stability by >4 kcal/mol and catalytic activity tenfold. The same, seemingly innocuous substitutions (Ile→Thr, Leu→Val) occurred in several independent evolutionary trajectories. The increase in fitness they confer indicates that building blocks with very similar side chain structures are highly beneficial for fine-tuning protein structure and function.