Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vertically Correlated Echelon Model for the Interpolation of Missing Wind Speed Data

The wind speeds of a wind farm are not always available or accurately measurable due to uncontrollable events such as anemometer failures or data transmission errors. However, the data are of great importance for wind resource assessment and wind speed prediction. In this paper, a vertically correlated echelon model (CEM) is proposed to interpolate the missing data of wind speeds by utilizing the correlation of wind speeds at different heights. First, the data of wind speed are checked according to a national standard. Second, the model based on the correlation of wind speeds at different heights is proposed for short interval of missing data. Third, the proposed method is compared with typical interpolation methods and its advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, the uncertainty of the proposed method is analyzed for improved evaluation of interpolation errors.
Pulmonary hypertension: Past, present and future

P arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive disease characterized by an elevation of pulmonary artery pressure and pulmonary vascular resistance, leading to right ventricular failure and death. Idiopathic PAH (IPAH; formerly termed primary pulmonary hypertension) occurs in the absence of known causes. Estimates of the incidence of IPAH and familial PAH (FPAH) range from 1-2 cases per million people in the general population, with at least 6% of these patients having FPAH. Although the incidence of PAH in patients with other illnesses is not known with certainty, from various reports it appears that 2-4% of patients with portal hypertension and 0.1-0.6% of HIV patients have PAH. The incidence of PAH that occurs in patients with connective tissue disease is extremely variable; prevalence ranges from 2 to 35% in patients with the scleroderma spectrum of disease and may reach as high as 50% of patients with limited scleroderma. PAH has also been reported to occur in 10-45% of patients with mixed connective tissue disease and in 1-14% of cases with systemic lupus erythematosus. The incidence of PAH associated with anorexigens is cyclical in nature and varies depending on the availability of specifi c appetite suppressants. The link was fi rst identifi ed in the 1960s when an epidemic of PAH occurred in Switzerland, Austria and Germany that was linked to the anorexigen aminorex fumarate. Use of the anorexigens fenfl uramine and dexfenfl uramine have also been linked with an increased risk for PAH.
Supplying the Power Requirements to a Sensor Network Using Radio Frequency Power Transfer

Wireless power transmission is a method of supplying power to small electronic devices when there is no wired connection. One way to increase the range of these systems is to use a directional transmitting antenna, the problem with this approach is that power can only be transmitted through a narrow beam and directly forward, requiring the transmitter to always be aligned with the sensor node position. The work outlined in this article describes the design and testing of an autonomous radio frequency power transfer system that is capable of rotating the base transmitter to track the position of sensor nodes and transferring power to that sensor node. The system's base station monitors the node's energy levels and forms a charge queue to plan charging order and maintain energy levels of the nodes. Results show a radio frequency harvesting circuit with a measured S11 value of −31.5 dB and a conversion efficiency of 39.1%. Simulation and experimentation verified the level of power transfer and efficiency. The results of this work show a small network of three nodes with different storage types powered by a central base node.
Chaos for Stream Cipher

This paper discusses mixing of chaotic systems as a dependable method for secure communication. Distribution of the entropy function for steady state as well as plaintext input sequences are analyzed. It is shown that the mixing of chaotic sequences results in a sequence that does not have any state dependence on the information encrypted by them. The generated output states of such a cipher approach the theoretical maximum for both complexity measures and cycle length. These features are then compared with some popular ciphers.
Attachment characteristics and sexual harassment perpetration and receipt among adolescent peers

This study investigated the association between adolescents' perceived attachments to mothers and fathers and their sexual harassment experiences with peers via attachment characteristics. Using the Sexual Harassment Survey and the Adolescent Attachment Questionnaire, grades eight to twelve students (N= 475, 43.8% male, n = 208; 55.4%) female, n = 263) in a public school in western Canada self-reported on their sexual harassment behaviour and experiences with peers and their perceived current attachments to mothers and fathers. Hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for gender and previous engagement in social-sexual relations, revealed that adolescents' perceptions of mothers' availability was negatively related to perpetrating peer sexual harassment. Adolescents' perceived paternal angry distress showed a positive association to perpetrating this behaviour, however, the interaction between adolescents' perceived paternal angry distress and availability accounted for slightly more variance in the dependent variable than angry distress alone. Finally, adolescents' perceptions of fathers' availability showed a negative relationship to receiving peer sexual harassment. Distinctions between mother-child and father-child interactions throughout childhood and adolescence are discussed as the basis for the differences in results between mothers and fathers. The implications of a parent-adolescent attachment model for understanding the emergence of peer sexual harassment in adolescence are addressed. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of
Tumor-targeted liposomal drug delivery mediated by a diseleno bond-stabilized cyclic peptide

Peptide ligands have played an important role in tumor-targeted drug delivery as targeting moieties. The in vivo fate of peptide-mediated drug delivery systems and the following antitumor effects may greatly depend on the stability of the peptide ligand. In the current study, a tumor-targeting cyclic peptide screened by phage display, Lyp-1 (a peptide that specifically binds to tumor and endothelial cells of tumor lymphatics in certain tumors), was structurally modified by replacement of the original intramolecular disulfide bond with a diseleno bond. The produced analog Syp-1 (seleno derivative of Lyp-1) maintained specific binding ability to the target protein p32 (Kd = 18.54 nM), which is similar to that of Lyp-1 (Kd = 10.59 nM), indicated by surface plasmon resonance assay. Compared with Lyp-1, Syp-1 showed significantly improved stability against serum. After the peptide attached onto the surface of fluorophore-encapsulating liposomes, the more efficient tumor uptake of liposomal fluorophore mediated by Syp-1 was observed. Furthermore, Syp-1 modified liposomal doxorubicin presented the most potent tumor growth inhibitory ability among all the therapeutic groups, with a low half maximal inhibitory concentration of 588 nM against MDA-MB-435 cells in vitro and a high tumor inhibition rate of 73.5% in vivo. These findings clearly indicated that Syp-1 was a stable and effective tumor targeting ligand and suggest that the sulfur-to-selenium replacement strategy may help stabilize the phage-displayed cyclic peptide containing disulfide-bond under physiological conditions and strongly support the validity of peptide-mediated drug targeting.
Reduced Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate Is Associated with Stroke Outcome after Intravenous rt-PA: The Stroke Acute Management with Urgent Risk-Factor Assessment and Improvement (SAMURAI) rt-PA Registry

Background: The aim of this study was to determine whether renal dysfunction affects the outcome of stroke patients treated with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA). Methods: A retrospective, multicenter, observational study was conducted to identify the effects of underlying risk factors on intravenous rt-PA therapy using 0.6 mg/kg alteplase in 10 stroke centers in Japan. Consecutive stroke patients with a premorbid modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score ≤3 who received rt-PA were studied. Renal dysfunction was defined as estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) <60 ml/min/1.73 m2 on admission. The outcome measures were any intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and symptomatic ICH within the initial 36 h; favorable (mRS 0–1) outcome, poor outcome (mRS 4–6) and mortality at 3 months. Results: Of a total of 578 patients (372 men; 64.4%, 71.4 ± 11.7 years old), renal dysfunction was present in 186 patients (32.2%). These patients were older and more commonly had hypertension, atrial fibrillation, prior ischemic heart disease and prior use of antithrombotic agents than patients without renal dysfunction. ICH (27.4 vs. 16.6%) and symptomatic ICH (8.1 vs. 2.6%) was more common in patients with renal dysfunction than in those without. At 3 months, patients with renal dysfunction had higher median mRS scores than those without (3 vs. 2). After multivariate adjustment for established outcome predictors, renal dysfunction was related to any ICH (odds ratio 1.81, 95% confidence interval 1.16–2.84), symptomatic ICH (2.64, 1.10–6.56), poor outcome (1.55, 1.01–2.38), and mortality (2.94, 1.38–6.42). Conclusions: Reduced eGFR was associated with early ICH and 3-month unfavorable outcome in stroke patients receiving intravenous rt-PA.
Are All "Adolescent Econometricians" Created Equal? Racial, Class, and Gender Differences in College Enrollment

To explain whether high school graduates enroll in college, human capital theory suggests that youths act as adolescent econometricians, assessing the added value of education in terms of their expected income returns to schooling. Although there is some truth to this explanation, the application of the theory is often limited because researchers have ignored important racial, class, and gender differences in economic and educational arenas. This study used data from High School and Beyond to examine whether economic conditions similarly influence the postsecondary enrollment of adolescents from distinct groups. The results indicate that the effect of income returns varies systematically by race, class, gender, and cognitive skills; the college enrollment of white men from lower socioeconomic origins with lower cognitive skills is the most consistent with human capital predictions. Thus, membership in different groups in the stratification hierarchy importantly alters the calculations and decisions made by adolescent econometricians
PEComa of the Upper Extremity: A Unique Case and Description of an Initial Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy

Purpose. Tumors of the perivascular epithelial cell tumor (PEComa), first described in 1992, represent a rare soft tissue neoplasm of varying malignant potential. Cases of PEComa have been previously described in a few somatic and visceral sites, most notably in the gastrointestinal tract, genitourinary tract, and one extremity case in the thigh. To date, most malignant cases of PEComa have been resistant to chemotherapy, and as such, an appropriate therapy is not known. Case report. Here we describe the first case of PEComa of the upper extremity. Open biopsy revealed a high-grade malignant lesion, and the patient subsequently underwent both neoadjuvant therapy with doxorubicin, ifosfamide and mensa, and radiation therapy prior to wide surgical resection. After six cycles of chemotherapy, the tumor underwent an 80% reduction in size. Subsequent neoadjuvant radiation therapy of 5000 cGy did not further reduce the size of the tumor. Following limb sparing radical resection, pathology showed 20% necrosis within a high-grade malignant lesion. Twenty one months after beginning treatment, the patient shows no sign of local recurrence, but metastatic disease was confirmed after resection of a lung nodule. Conclusion. Given the favorable albeit partial response seen in this patient, the course of therapy outlined here may represent a good starting point for neoadjuvant treatment in a tumor with a historically bleak prognosis. In addition, the diagnosis of PEComa must now be entertained in the differential diagnosis of upper extremity soft tissue sarcoma.
Evaluation of BacT/Alert 3D Liquid Culture System for Recovery of Mycobacteria from Clinical Specimens Using Sodium Dodecyl (Lauryl) Sulfate-NaOH Decontamination

ABSTRACT A total of 52 mycobacterial isolates were recovered from 1,197 clinical specimens decontaminated by a sodium dodecyl (lauryl) sulfate (SDS)-NaOH protocol. Of these, 94% were recovered with the BacT/Alert 3D system (Organon Teknika, Durham, N.C.) and 79% were recovered on Löwenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium. Mean times to detection of organisms of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (n = 47) were 22.8 days with LJ medium and 16.2 days with the system. The BacT/Alert 3D system is a rapid and efficient detection system which can be used with an SDS-NaOH decontamination procedure.
Employee voice behaviour in organisations: evidence from Pakistan

To remain competitive, organisations seek innovative ideas and solutions from employees. Since employees can give more practical views they often participate by sharing their ideas and by giving opinions termed as voice. The current study contributes to the literature by examining the effect of big five personality traits combined with the psychological antecedents on employees' voice behaviour in the Pakistani service sector context. Four independent variables, organisational-based self-esteem, felt obligation, job motivation and personality traits were proposed to have a positive relation with dependent variables, promotive and prohibitive voices in the presence of a moderator, psychological safety. Data was collected from 200 employees of the leading insurance sector organisation of Pakistan through a survey questionnaire. The results confirmed the hypotheses.
Learning topic knowledge to improve Chinese word sense disambiguation

This paper addresses an issue of incorporating topic knowledge to improve Chinese word sense disambiguation. The key is how to learn topic knowledge as features in the design of classifiers for disambiguating word senses. This paper presents two solutions to learn topic knowledge. In the first solution, a Chinese domain knowledge dictionary named NEUKD is used to generate domain feature set. However, due to the limited coverage of the NEUKD, a constrained clustering algorithm is adopted for dictionary expansion. The second method is to build topic feature set by utilizing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm on a large scale unlabeled corpus. Experiments on the SENSEVAL-3 Chinese dataset demonstrated that integrating topic knowledge improve the performance of Chinese word sense disambiguation.
The antibody response to an HLA mismatch: a model for nonself–self discrimination in relation to HLA epitope immunogenicity

Antibodies to HLA mismatches are specific for epitopes rather than antigens. HLAMatchmaker considers each HLA antigen as a string of eplets that represent key elements of epitopes. Certain antibodies are specific for single eplets, but recent studies have demonstrated that epitopes defined by eplet pairs always involve one nonself‐eplet and a self‐eplet shared between the immunizing antigen and the antibody producer. This suggests an autoreactive component of the alloantibody response to an HLA mismatch and this report expands this concept. During B‐cell development, VH and VL gene rearrangements produce a diversity of Ig receptors that can recognize epitopes on autologous proteins. It is hypothesized that B cells carry low‐affinity receptors for self‐HLA antigens. Their interactions with self‐HLA proteins will not lead to B‐cell activation or antibody production. In contrast, exposure to HLA mismatches induces often strong alloantibody responses. The activation of self‐HLA‐specific B cell by a nonself‐eplet may require that the remainder of the structural epitope of the immunizing antigen has considerable structural similarity with one of the antibody producer’s alleles. This hypothesis has been tested in molecular modelling studies with six epitopes defined by human monoclonal antibodies. In each case, one allele of the antibody producer had no or few differences with the immunizing allele in antibody‐accessible positions defined by a 15 Ångstrom radius of the mismatched eplet. The other alleles of the antibody producer showed significantly greater numbers of residue differences with the immunizer (5.8 ± 2.0 versus 1.0 ± 0.6, P < 0.0001). These data support the concept that HLA antibodies originate from B cells with self‐HLA immunoglobulin receptors that recognize mismatched eplets as nonself entities on immunizing antigens. The nonself–self paradigm provides a new insight of HLA epitope immunogenicity and may explain why sensitized patients have antibodies to a restricted number of mismatched epitopes.
Fault Tolerance in MPI Programs

This paper examines the topic of writing fault-tolerant MPI applications. We discuss the meaning of fault tolerance in general and what the MPI Standard has to say about it. We survey several approaches to this problem, namely checkpointing, restructuring a class of standard MPI programs, modifying MPI semantics, and extending the MPI specification. We conclude that within certain constraints, MPI can provide a useful context for writing application programs that exhibit significant degrees of fault tolerance.
Face Recognition Based on PCA , DCT , DWT and Distance Measure

Face Recognition has been identified as one of the attracting research areas and it has drawn the attention of many researchers due to its varying applications such as identity authentication, security access control human computer interaction and surveillance. In this paper, we compare different features extraction algorithms like Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with different types of distance measures such as Euclidean distance, Cosine distance and Correlation distance. The proposed methods are tested on ORL and Yale Face Databases. These methods are successfully applied to face-recognition, and the experimental results on ORL database gave the good results. we found that the DWT 3rd level decomposition method is the best method with the Euclidean Distance (above 95.33% recognition rate), and the PCA gives the better results with Cosine distance and Correlation distance, The overall results show that the using of DWT method is useful for recognition.
Antibacterial activity of Ulva reticulata from southwest coast of Kanyakumari, India

Objective: To evaluate the antibacterial activity of Ulva reticulata species collected from the Kanyakumari coast of India to determine their potential for bioactivity. Methods: The algal extract was prepared using n-butanol for evaluating the antibacterial activity of Salmonella typhi, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Vibrio cholerae, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Bacillus cereus and Listeria monocytogenes. Results: It was observed that the n-butanolic extract of the seaweed powder of Ulva reticulata (25-100 mg/mL) exerted notable antibacterial activity against tested bacterial strains. The maximum antibacterial activity was exhibited against Escherichia coli and Bacillus cereus in all concentrations. Conclusions: The results obtained in the present investigation supported the traditional use of the seaweeds against various infections. However, further investigation has been carried out to elucidate the exact mechanism and isolation of active principle.
Volume‐regulated chloride channels and cerebral vascular remodelling

1 Transmembrane Cl− transport through volume‐regulated Cl− channels (VRCC) is implicated in cell cycle control and the proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC). In cerebrovascular VSMC, volume‐regulated Cl− movement is enhanced with the severity of cerebrovascular remodelling induced by hypertension. 2 Expression of the ClC‐3 chloride channel, a potential molecular candidate for the VRCC, is significantly increased with the progression of VSMC proliferation, but is decreased in apoptosis. 3 In the present review, we summarize recent findings regarding the functional role of volume‐regulated ClC‐3 chloride channels in VSMC proliferation, apoptosis and cerebrovascular remodelling during the development of hypertension. In addition, we discuss the relationship between the channel and intracellular signalling pathways, including the production of reactive oxygen species and the phosphorylation of Akt. 4 Recent studies strongly suggest that VRCC/ClC‐3 is involved in the regulation of both cell proliferation and apoptosis. These findings suggest that ClC‐3 chloride channels may be potential new targets for the prevention of the cerebrovascular remodelling that occurs during the development of hypertension.
Perinatal exposure to a noncoplanar polychlorinated biphenyl alters tonotopy, receptive fields, and plasticity in rat primary auditory cortex

Noncoplanar polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are widely dispersed in human environment and tissues. Here, an exemplar noncoplanar PCB was fed to rat dams during gestation and throughout three subsequent nursing weeks. Although the hearing sensitivity and brainstem auditory responses of pups were normal, exposure resulted in the abnormal development of the primary auditory cortex (A1). A1 was irregularly shaped and marked by internal nonresponsive zones, its topographic organization was grossly abnormal or reversed in about half of the exposed pups, the balance of neuronal inhibition to excitation for A1 neurons was disturbed, and the critical period plasticity that underlies normal postnatal auditory system development was significantly altered. These findings demonstrate that developmental exposure to this class of environmental contaminant alters cortical development. It is proposed that exposure to noncoplanar PCBs may contribute to common developmental disorders, especially in populations with heritable imbalances in neurotransmitter systems that regulate the ratio of inhibition and excitation in the brain. We conclude that the health implications associated with exposure to noncoplanar PCBs in human populations merit a more careful examination.