Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual Phases of Respiration Chain Defect-Augmented mROS-Mediated mCa2+ Stress during Oxidative Insult in Normal and ρ 0 RBA1 Astrocytes

Mitochondrial respiratory chain (RC) deficits, resulting in augmented mitochondrial ROS (mROS) generation, underlie pathogenesis of astrocytes. However, mtDNA-depleted cells (ρ 0) lacking RC have been reported to be either sensitive or resistant to apoptosis. In this study, we sought to determine the effects of RC-enhanced mitochondrial stress following oxidative insult. Using noninvasive fluorescence probe-coupled laser scanning imaging microscopy, the ability to resist oxidative stress and levels of mROS formation and mitochondrial calcium (mCa2+) were compared between two different astrocyte cell lines, control and ρ 0 astrocytes, over time upon oxidative stress. Our results showed that the cytoplasmic membrane becomes permeated with YO-PRO-1 dye at 150 and 130 minutes in RBA-1 and ρ 0 astrocytes, respectively. In contrast to RBA-1, 30 minutes after 20 mM H2O2 exposure, ρ 0 astrocytes formed marked plasma membrane blebs, lost the ability to retain Mito-R, and showed condensation of nuclei. Importantly, H2O2-induced ROS and accompanied mCa2+ elevation in control showed higher levels than ρ 0 at early time point but vice versa at late time point. Our findings underscore dual phase of RC-defective cells harboring less mitochondrial stress due to low RC activity during short-term oxidative stress but augmented mROS-mediated mCa2+ stress during severe oxidative insult.
A System for 3D Video Acquisition and Spatio-Temporally Coherent 3D Animation Reconstruction using Multiple RGB-D Cameras

We present a system for acquiring synchronized multi-view color and depth (RGB-D) data using multiple off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect and a new method for reconstructing spatiotemporally coherent 3D animation from time-varying dynamic RGB-D data. Our acquisition system is independent of any specific hardware component for the synchronization of the camera system. We show that the data acquired by our framework can be synchronously registered in a global coordinate system and then can be used to reconstruct the 3D animation of a dynamic scene. The main benefit of our work is that instead of relying on expensive multi-view video capture setups, multiple low cost Microsoft Kinect sensors can capture both the image and the depth data to do a 360 o reconstruction of a dynamic scene. We also present a new algorithm for tracking dynamic three-dimensional point cloud data that can be used to reconstruct a time-coherent representation of a 3D animation without using any template model or a-prior assumption about the underlying surface. We show that despite some limitations imposed by the hardware for the synchronous acquisition of the data we can get reasonably good reconstruction of the animated 3D geometry, which can be used in a number of applications.
The role of savings and investment in balancing the current account: some empirical evidence from the United States

Current account deficits ultimately reflect a disparity between a country's national savings and investment. As such, the issue of how current account balance is achieved in practice can be viewed in terms of whether it is savings or investment that adjusts to an external deficit. In this article, the author examines empirically how savings and investment have responded to current account imbalances in the United States over the past 40 years. The main finding is that, on average, investment was largely responsible for rebalancing the current account in the long run. The finding that investment has borne the largest fraction of the external adjustment conforms with the view that, in the long run, the national savings rate constrains a country's rate of investment. Thus, in a situation with outstanding net external debt, low levels of national savings ultimately imply low levels of domestic investment. To the extent that one views net additions of capital as essential for a country's future growth prospects, low savings may signify a reduction in future standards of living.
On the quantum and tempo of fertility.

ESTIMATES OF FERTILITY are among the most widely used demographic statistics. In many developing countries recent levels and trends in fertility are avidly watched by policymakers, family planning program managers, and demographers to determine whether and how rapidly fertility is moving in the desired downward direction. In much of the developed world, where fertility is now at historic lows, these same statistics are examined for signs of an upturn in fertility back to the replacement level needed to prevent future declines in population size. Given this interest in measuring human reproduction, it is desirable for users of fertility statistics to understand the strengths and weaknesses of available indicators. It is particularly important to avoid basing policies on statistics that give potentially misleading information. Although the demographic literature offers many measures of fertility, the total fertility rate (TFR) is now used more often than any other indicator. The TFR is defined as the average number of births a woman would have if she were to live through her reproductive years (ages 1549) and bear children at each age at the rates observed in a particular year or period. It is a hypothetical measure because no real group of women has experienced or will necessarily experience these particular rates. The actual childbearing of cohorts of women is given by the completed fertility rate (CFR), which measures the average number of births 50-year-old women had during their past reproductive years. The CFR measures the true reproductive experience of a group of women, but it has the disadvantage of representing past experience: women currently aged 50 did most of their childbearing two to three decades ago when they were in their 20s and 30s. The advantage of the TFR is that it measures current fertility and therefore gives up-to-date information on levels and trends in fertility. Another reason for the popularity of the TFR is its ease of interpretation compared with some other measures. Most interested persons will have little
Design and optimization of an efcient (96.1%) and compact (2 kW/dm3) bidirectional isolated single-phase dual active bridge AC-DC converter

The growing attention on plug-in electric vehicles, and the associated high-performance demands, have initiated a development trend towards highly efficient and compact on-board battery chargers. These isolated ac-dc converters are most commonly realized using two conversion stages, combining a non-isolated power factor correction (PFC) rectifier with an isolated dc-dc converter. This, however, involves two loss stages and a relatively high component count, limiting the achievable efficiency and power density and resulting in high costs. In this paper, a single-stage converter approach is analyzed to realize a single-phase ac-dc converter, combining all functionalities into one conversion stage and thus enabling a cost-effective efficiency and power density increase. The converter topology consists of a quasi-lossless synchronous rectifier followed by an isolated dual active bridge (DAB) dc-dc converter, putting a small filter capacitor in between. To show the performance potential of this bidirectional, isolated ac-dc converter, a comprehensive design procedure and multi-objective optimization with respect to efficiency and power density is presented, using detailed loss and volume models. The models and procedures are verified by a 3.7 kW hardware demonstrator, interfacing a 400 V dc-bus with the single-phase 230 V, 50 Hz utility grid. Measurement results indicate a state-of-the-art efficiency of 96.1% and power density of 2 kW/dm3, confirming the competitiveness of the investigated single-stage DAB ac-dc converter.
Booms, Busts, and Fertility

In this paper, I present estimates of the effect of local labor demand shocks on birth rates. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-education composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men’s labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women’s labor market conditions have smaller negative effects. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small decreases in birth rates at the state level.
Latent Hinge-Minimax Risk Minimization for Inference from a Small Number of Training Samples

Deep Learning (DL) methods show very good performance when trained on large, balanced data sets. However, many practical problems involve imbalanced data sets, or/and classes with a small number of training samples. The performance of DL methods as well as more traditional classifiers drops significantly in such settings. Most of the existing solutions for imbalanced problems focus on customizing the data for training. A more principled solution is to use mixed Hinge-Minimax risk [19] specifically designed to solve binary problems with imbalanced training sets. Here we propose a Latent Hinge Minimax (LHM) risk and a training algorithm that generalizes this paradigm to an ensemble of hyperplanes that can form arbitrary complex, piecewise linear boundaries. To extract good features, we combine LHM model with CNN via transfer learning. To solve multi-class problem we map pre-trained category-specific LHM classifiers to a multi-class neural network and adjust the weights with very fast tuning. LHM classifier enables the use of unlabeled data in its training and the mapping allows for multi-class inference, resulting in a classifier that performs better than alternatives when trained on a small number of training samples.
Computing Similarity Measure Based on Names of Goods for Fuzzy Clustering

Clustering is a method which can be helpful in retrieval of relevant information from databases [9, 1]. Businesses use databases to gather information about completed transactions. Huge part of it has a linguistic form or categorical attributes, which do not have a natural order. Data in that form can be clustered by using of the measure of similarity [6]. Most of earlier work focused on form can be clustered (for Web search engines). In this paper we discover similarity measure based of name of goods. This method adapts cosine correlation by use the thesaurus and new algorithm to compute weight of terms.
Image Magnification based on Directed Linear Interpolation

The technology of computer graphics and digital cameras are prevalent. High-resolution display and printer are available. High-resolution images are needed in order to produce high quality display images and high quality prints for use in desktop publishing, large artistic printing, mobile phone etc. However, since high-resolution images are not usually provided, there is a need to magnify the original images. This paper proposes an algorithm for image magnification by linear interpolation, which is better than some of the prevalent methods such as pixel replication, bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation. The proposed algorithm uses linear interpolation method to magnify pixels that lie in the perimeter, whereas it uses directed bilinear interpolation method to magnify the interior region inside the magnified blocks. Determination of the right direction for interpolation is the key for achieving better performance of the proposed algorithm.
Análise do modelo de Solow e aplicações macroeconômicas

The aim of this study is to formally demonstrate the importance of the Solow-Swan Model in the assessment of the differences in economic development among countries and its macroeconomic applications. This demonstration is achieved through the presentation and solution of the Solow-Swan Model, the Solow-Swan Model with Technological Progress, the Golden Rule of Capital Accumulation, the Transitional Dynamics and Convergence, the Solow-Swan Model with Human Capital and Fiscal Policy in the Solow Model formulas. Though this analysis, it is possible to demonstrate the Solow-Swan Model answers questions related to the differences in development among countries and assists in the study of current macroeconomic issues, such as the financing of government expenses through taxes or running into debt.
Utterance verification based on neighborhood information and Bayes factors

Inthispaper, weproposetouseneighborhoodinformationinmodel space to perform utterance veriﬁcation (UV). At ﬁrst, we present a nested-neighborhood structure for each underlying model in model space and assume the underlying model’s competing models sit in one of these neighborhoods, which is used to model alternative hy-pothesisinUV.Bayesfactors(BF)isﬁrstintroducedtoUVandused asamajortooltocalculateconﬁdencemeasuresbasedontheabove idea.ExperimentalresultsinBellLabscommunicatorsystemshow thatthenewmethodhasdramaticallyimprovedveriﬁcationperfor-mancewhenverifyingcorrectwordsagainstmis-recognizedwords inrecognizer’soutput,relativelymorethan20%reductioninequal errorrate(EER)whencomparingwiththestandardapproachbased onlikelihoodratiotestingandanti-models.
S-R compatibility: correspondence among paired elements within stimulus and response codes.

The present paper is the second dealing with the usefulness of the concept of S-R compatibility for behavior theory. This concept concerns the effects of a class of variables that influence task difficulty in experiments in which learning, complexity (amount of information), and discriminability are controlled. Compatibility effects are conceived as resulting from hypothetical information transformation processes (encoding and/or decoding) that intervene between receptor and effector activity. The rate of processing information is assumed to be maximum when these receding processes are at a minimum. The objective of the study of compatibility effects is to discover conditions under which these effects occur, and to establish principles that will permit specification of the nature and difficulty of perceptual-motor tasks in terms of (hypothetical) intervening information transformation processes. Such processes must be inferred, just as do constructs such as habit strength, from measures of performance obtained in appropriate experiments. The type of experiment of greatest interest for the present purpose is one in which it is possible to measure the rate of information trans-
Cut-off for large sums of graphs

Si L est le laplacien combinatoire d'un graphe, exp(-Lt) converge vers une matrice dont tous les coefficients sont egaux. La vitesse (le convergence est mesuree par la distance d'entropie maximale. Quand le graphe est la somme d'un grand nombre de composantes, un phenomene de convergence abrupte peut survenir: avant un certain instant la distance a l'equilibre tend vers l'infini: apres cet instant elle tend vers 0. Une condition suffisante de convergence abrupte est donnee, et l'instant de convergence est exprime en fonction fin trou spectral et des vecteurs propres des composantes. Les sommes de cliques, d'etoiles et de lignes sont traitees en exemple.
Fast mesh segmentation by using the LexicoGraph Cut algorithm

Since segmentation of surface data is of growing interest, many image segmentation algorithms have already been applied to surfaces. Mesh segmentation can not only be based on color and texture but also on shape properties like curvature. Graph Cuts based methods are very popular and also applicable to mesh data having irregular vertex neighborhoods. However, Graph Cuts suffer from problems such as shortcuts, generation of small regions and sensitivity to variations of the boundary indicator function. Moreover, they are often hard to implement and computationally expensive. Here we show that a quite old approach for image segmentation, a fast and extremely simple greedy algorithm, which we call LexicoGraph Cut, avoids the problems mentioned above. In this paper we use this algorithm to segment triangulated surface meshes and we introduce new boundary indicator functions, which combine color and curvature properties. We show that using these boundary indicator functions the LexicoGraph Cut algorithm produces a globally optimal result regarding a lexicographic optimization criterion.
On Distributed Systems Debugging

Software engineers have to face many problems when creating, testing and debugging their applications. One of the most challenging problems today is closely associated with the modification of distributed systems. Even a small modification of such a system can considerably change its behavior. This paper explores methods which play an important role in the research on debugging parallel and distributed systems. We will study the detection of global state predicates and the use of temporal logic operators. Finally, on-line and off-line approaches to the problem of debugging a distributed system will be discussed. These include real-time monitoring and deterministic replay.
LUT Optimization In Implementation Of Combinational Karatsuba Ofman On Virtex-6 FPGA

This paper discusses different approaches that allow optimizing the combinational logic used in Multipliers for Generic ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) implementation in the Galois field GF(2n) . First,a Combinational Multiplier using Karatsuba Ofman logic with 2*2as a base multiplier has been studied. Proper utilization of Look Up Table (LUT) at base level results in effective optimization of the hardware resources. Hence in order to optimize LUT utilization, designs for combinational logic with 3*3 base and 2*3 base have been explored, keeping the LUT structure of Virtex-6 FPGA in mind. Comparisons have shown that, 3*3 base multipliers designed using Karatsuba Ofman algorithm outperformed 2*2 and 2*3 base Multiplier in terms of resource utilization. To further maximize utilization of hardware resources, the exploration has been further carried out using Shift and Add Algorithm(SAA) and it has been found that SAA remains optimized for lower length operands. Algorithmic and platform oriented optimization results in efficient hardware implementations. The final proposed design is a Hybrid Karatsuba Algorithm, which uses SAA at lower level and at higher level uses Karatsuba Ofman Logic. Again here using 3*3 bit Multiplier with SAA configuration is better than the other two. This approach stands a step closer for efficient implementations of fast algorithm on hardware based applications, as this hybrid multiplier is found to use least number of FPGA resources. All the operations in this paper have been performed based on Virtex-6 ML605 using ESD tool as XILINX 12.1
Towards discovering the role of emotions in stack overflow

Today, people increasingly try to solve domain-specific problems through interaction on online Question and Answer (Q&A) sites, such as Stack Overflow. The growing success of the Stack Overflow community largely depends on the will of their members to answer others' questions. Recent research has shown that the factors that push members of online communities encompass both social and technical aspects. Yet, we argue that also the emotional style of a technical question does influence the probability of promptly obtaining a satisfying answer. In this paper, we describe the design of an empirical study aimed to investigate the role of affective lexicon on the questions posted in Stack Overflow.
A simulation study of combined routing and contention resolution algorithms in connection-oriented OPS network scenario

The connection-oriented optical packet-switched network integrates MPLS and OPS layers to exploit the best of electronic and optical technologies. In particular, routing components use enhanced routing algorithms to compute the paths; forwarding components examine the labels of incoming packets to determine the next hop and contention resolution algorithms to solve packet contention; finally packets are physically transferred to the output interface, properly chosen by the forwarding component, using optics. In this paper we describe the details of such a network scenario, identifying some problems and suggesting different routing and contention resolution algorithms. The resulting network is evaluated by simulation in order to obtain network performance characteristics for suitable combined selection of these algorithms.
Flows in Oriented Matroids

Recently Hochstattler and Nesetřil [3] introduced the flow lattice of an oriented matroid as generalization of the lattice of all integer flows of a digraph or more general a regular matroid. This lattice is defined as the integer hull of the characteristic vectors of signed circuits. We describe the structure and the dimension of the flow lattice for uniform and rank 3 oriented matroids and construct a basis of signed circuits. Furthermore, we analyze the behaviour of the dimension of the flow lattice under the 2-sum of oriented matroids and present some quesions based on computational results on catalogs of oriented matroids.
Home-Based Child Care Provider Education and Specialized Training: Associations With Caregiving Quality and Toddler Social-Emotional and Cognitive Outcomes

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Although there has been considerable research on the associations between the qualifications of teachers in center-based settings and preschool-age children’s developmental outcomes, very little is known about the relationships between home provider qualifications and the developmental outcomes of toddlers who attend licensed family child care settings or unregulated family, friend, and neighbor care settings. Analyzing a sample of toddlers and their providers drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, we found positive relationships between home-based quality and higher education degree (defined as an associate’s degree or at least a bachelor’s degree), field of major, and coursework in early childhood education or a related field. However, provider qualifications were unrelated to children’s cognitive outcomes and related to a limited number of social-emotional outcomes. Practice or Policy: Our results suggest that as states consider the spectrum of supports needed for strengthening home-based child care in ways that facilitate responsive and developmentally supportive caregiving, strategies should include opportunities for home-based care providers to pursue higher education. A more nuanced analysis of the content and comprehensiveness of providers’ formal education is needed to better understand relationships between toddlers’ social and cognitive development and providers’ formal education.