Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Rate Loss of Multiterminal Source Codes

In this paper, we study the rate loss and achievable region of the multiterminal source code (MTSC), which is the code designed for a system comprising two independent encoders and joint decoder: encoders 1 and 2 describe sources X and Y using rates R<sub>1</sub> and R<sub>2 </sub>, respectively, and the joint decoder reconstructs X with distortion D<sub>1</sub> and reconstructs Y with distortion D<sub>2</sub>. The rate loss of an MTSC is defined as L<sub>1</sub> = R <sub>1</sub> $R<sub>X|Y</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>), L<sub>2</sub> = R<sub>2 </sub> - R<sub>X|Y</sub>(D<sub>2</sub>), and L<sub>0</sub> = R<sub>1 </sub> + R<sub>2</sub> - R<sub>XY</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>, D<sub>2</sub>), where R<sub>XY</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>, D<sub>2</sub>) is the joint rate-distortion function of (X,Y), and R<sub>X|Y</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>) and R<sub>Y|X</sub>(D<sub>2</sub>) are two conditional rate-distortion functions. We first show that for general real-valued memoryless sources and mean squared error distortion measure, the rate loss has an intrinsic connection with K<sub>1</sub> = R<sub>XY</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>, D<sub>2</sub>) $R<sub>Y</sub>(D<sub>2</sub>) - R<sub>X|Y</sub>(D<sub>1 </sub>) and K<sub>2</sub> = R<sub>XY</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>, D<sub>2</sub>) - R<sub>X</sub>(D<sub>1</sub>) - R<sub>Y|X</sub>(D<sub>2</sub>). We then study two common types of sources, jointly Gaussian sources and remote sources, in more details and bound K<sub>1</sub> and K<sub>2</sub> from above by small universal constants, which leads to small universal upper bounds on the rate loss and therefore good approximations of the achievable region
Soft Consistency Reconstruction: A robust 1-bit compressive sensing algorithm

A class of recovering algorithms for 1-bit compressive sensing (CS) named Soft Consistency Reconstructions (SCRs) are proposed. Recognizing that CS recovery is essentially an optimization problem, we endeavor to improve the characteristics of the objective function under noisy environments. With a family of re-designed consistency criteria, SCRs achieve remarkable counter-noise performance gain over the existing counterparts, thus acquiring the desired robustness in many real-world applications. The benefits of soft decisions are exemplified through structural analysis of the objective function, with intuition described for better understanding. As expected, through comparisons with existing methods in simulations, SCRs demonstrate preferable robustness against noise in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, while maintaining comparable performance in high SNR regime.
Modification of the minimum-degree algorithm by multiple elimination

The most widely used ordering scheme to reduce fills and operations in sparse matrix computation is the minimum-degree algorithm. The notion of multiple elimination is introduced here as a modification to the conventional scheme. The motivation is discussed using the k-by-k grid model problem. Experimental results indicate that the modified version retains the fill-reducing property of (and is often better than) the original ordering algorithm and yet requires less computer time. The reduction in ordering time is problem dependent, and for some problems the modified algorithm can run a few times faster than existing implementations of the minimum-degree algorithm. The use of external degree in the algorithm is also introduced.
Forest mapping and monitoring with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)

A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active sensor transmitting pulses of polarized electromagnetic waves and receiving the backscattered radiation. SAR sensors at different wavelengths and with different polarimetric capabilities are being used in remote sensing of the earth. The value of an analysis of backscattered energy alone is limited due to ambiguities in the possible ecological factor configurations causing the signal. From two SAR images taken from similar viewing positions with a short time-lag, interference between the two waves can be observed. By subtracting the two phases of the signals, it is feasible to eliminate the random contribution of the scatterers to the phase. The interferometric correlation and the interferometric phase contain additional information on the three-dimensional structure of the scattering elements in the imaged area. A brief review of SAR sensors is given, followed by an outline of the physical foundations of SAR interferometry and the practical data-processing steps involved. An overview of applications of InSAR to forest mapping and monitoring is given, covering tree-bole volume and biomass, forest types and land cover, fire scars, forest thermal state and forest canopy height.
Modulation technique based on CSV-PWM and HEPWM for THD reduction in flying capacitor multilevel inverters

This paper presents a modulation technique for flying capacitor multilevel inverter. The proposed modulation improves power quality, reducing the total harmonic distortion and combining the advantages of two modulation techniques: HE-PWM and CSV-PWM. In order to validate the proposed method, experimental results have been included concerning a three-level 6 kW, 0.92 power factor flying capacitor inverter. The experimental results presented THD around 41.38%.
Faster Algorithms for Computing Maximal Multirepeats in Multiple Sequences

A repeat in a string is a substring that occurs more than once. A repeat is extendible if every occurrence of the repeat has an identical letter either on the left or on the right; otherwise, it is maximal. A multirepeat is a repeat that occurs at least mmin times (m$_{min}$g 2) in each of at least q g 1 strings in a given set of strings. In this paper, we describe a family of efficient algorithms based on suffix arrays to compute maximal multirepeats under various constraints. Our algorithms are faster, more flexible and much more space-efficient than algorithms recently proposed for this problem. The results extend recent work by two of the authors computing all maximal repeats in a single string.
NRAMP1 3′ Untranslated Region Polymorphisms Are Not Associated with Natural Resistance to Brucella abortus in Cattle

ABSTRACT The NRAMP1 gene encodes a divalent cation transporter, located in the phagolysosomal membrane of macrophages, that has been associated with resistance to intracellular pathogens. In cattle, natural resistance against brucellosis has been associated with polymorphisms at the 3′ untranslated region (3′UTR) of the NRAMP1 gene, which are detectable by single-strand conformational analysis (SSCA). This study aimed to evaluate the association between NRAMP1 3′UTR polymorphisms and resistance against bovine brucellosis in experimental and natural infections. In experimentally infected pregnant cows, abortion occurred in 42.1% of cows with a resistant genotype (SSCAr; n = 19) and in 43.1% of those with a susceptible genotype (SSCAs; n = 23). Furthermore, no association between intensity of pathological changes and genotype was detected. In a farm with a very high prevalence of bovine brucellosis, the percentages of strains of the SSCAr genotype were 86 and 84% in serologically positive (n = 64) and negative (n = 36) cows, respectively. Therefore, no association was found between the NRAMP1-resistant allele and the resistant phenotype in either experimental or naturally occurring brucellosis. To further support these results, bacterial intracellular survival was assessed in bovine monocyte-derived macrophages from cattle with either the resistant or susceptible genotype. In agreement with our previous results, no difference was observed in the rates of intracellular survival of B. abortus within macrophages from cattle with susceptible or resistant genotypes. Taken together, these results indicate that these polymorphisms at the NRAMP1 3′UTR do not affect resistance against B. abortus in cattle and that they are therefore not suitable markers of natural resistance against bovine brucellosis.
Mobile Digcovery: A Global Service Discovery for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) enables a homogeneous and seamless machine to machine (M2M) between any Internet-enabled devices in the real world. IoT provides global communications, access to services and information for the development of Smart Cities, environmental monitoring, bus tracking and parking. For this purpose, IoT requires scalability, extensibility, and integration of emerging resources in order to reach a suitable ecosystem for data acquisition and interaction with the citizens. This work presents a way to interact with the IoT through a homogeneous and suitable mechanism for the global resource discovery of devices and sensors on different scenarios. For discovery purpose, a infrastructure called "digcovery" is defined for maximizing efficiency and sustainability of deployments offering the framework to allow users to register/include their own sensors into a common infrastructure, and access/discover the available resources through a mobile phone. This presents how to use the smartphone capabilities, in terms of identification, geo-location and context-awareness, to access and interact with the available resources that are surrounding us.
An improved speech feature extraction algorithm using DWT

This paper proposes a novel approach for speech feature extraction. , the proposed noise robust feature extraction algorithm is found to be robust to different noise characteristics, SNRs, and under various training-testing matched or unmatched conditions. And the algorithm this paper presents exhibit a low computational cost. We also give a practical weighting technique here. The experiment compares traditional MFCCs algorithm and our methods, results show overall improvement with the application of proposed wavelet based denoising algorithm with a modified thresholding procedure.
Efficient recognition of machine printed Arabic text using partial segmentation and Hausdorff distance

There is an urgent need for reliable and efficient systems for off-line automatic reading of machine printed Arabic texts. A partial list of applications that may use such system includes searching and reading in scanned books and manuscript as a part of digital libraries; recognizing text on digitized maps, vehicle license plates, road signs and others. In this research we aim to contribute to the research of recognizing Arabic machine printed texts using a partial segmentation process and Hausdorff distance. The process analyses the layout of the image and segments it to words and Parts of Words (PAWs). The Stroke Width Transform (SWT) is used to calculate the size and the font in order to define a set of multi size sliding windows to search and identify characters within the given shape of a PAW. The process evaluates the similarity of the two sub images (character and sliding window) using Hausdorff distance. The top k - ranked candidates and their places within the PAW are recorded and used to generate a list of full PAWs images. In the next step elements of this list are matched to the given shape in a holistic manner. We have tested our approach using the APTI, the PATS- A01 data sets and a private collection of text images and encouraging results were obtained.
Riboflavin as a determinant of plasma total homocysteine: effect modification by the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase C677T polymorphism.

BACKGROUND Plasma total homocysteine (tHcy) is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. tHcy concentrations are partly determined by folate, cobalamin, and vitamin B(6) status, and methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) and other flavoenzymes are important for the biotransformation of these vitamins. This motivates the investigation of the possible relationship between riboflavin status and tHcy. METHODS The study had a cross-sectional design and included 423 healthy blood donors, ages 19-69 years. We determined plasma tHcy, serum folate, serum cobalamin, serum creatinine, and MTHFR C677T genotype. In addition, we measured riboflavin and its two coenzyme forms, flavin mononucleotide and flavin adenine dinucleotide, in EDTA plasma by capillary electrophoresis and laser-induced fluorescence detection. RESULTS Riboflavin determined tHcy independently in a multiple linear regression model with adjustment for sex, age, folate, cobalamin, creatinine, and MTHFR genotype (P = 0.008). tHcy was 1.4 micromol/L higher in the lowest compared with the highest riboflavin quartile. The riboflavin-tHcy relationship was modified by genotype (P = 0.004) and was essentially confined to subjects with the C677T transition of the MTHFR gene. CONCLUSIONS Plasma riboflavin is an independent determinant of plasma tHcy. Studies on deficient populations are needed to evaluate the utility of riboflavin supplementation in hyperhomocysteinemia.
Electricity Auctions: An Overview of Efficient Practices

This report assesses the potential of electricity contract auctions as a procurement option for the World Bank's client countries. It focuses on the role of auctions of electricity contracts designed to expand and retain existing generation capacity. It is not meant to be a 'how-to' manual. Rather, it highlights some major issues and options that need to be taken into account when a country considers moving towards competitive electricity procurement through the introduction of electricity auctions. Auctions have played an important role in the effort to match supply and demand. Ever since the 1990s, the use of long-term contract auctions to procure new generation capacity, notably from private sector suppliers, has garnered increased affection from investors, governments, and multilateral agencies in general, as a means to achieve a competitive and transparent procurement process while providing certainty of supply for the medium to long term. However, the liberalization of electricity markets and the move from single-buyer procurement models increased the nature of the challenge facing system planners in their efforts to ensure an adequate and secure supply of electricity in the future at the best price. While auctions as general propositions are a means to match supply with demand in a cost-effective manner, they can also be and have been used to meet a variety of goals.
Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do: Crime Mapping and its Implications in the Real World

A small but growing North American trend is the publication of maps of crime on the Internet. A number of web sites allow observers to view the spatial distribution of crime in various American cities, often to a considerable resolution, and increasingly in an interactive format. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to map crime is a rapidly expanding field that is, as this paper will explain, still in a developmental stage, and a number of technical and ethical issues remain to be resolved. The public right to information about local crime has to be balanced by a respect for the privacy of crime victims. Various techniques are being developed to assist crime mappers to aggregate spatial data, both to make their product easier to comprehend and to protect identification of the addresses of crime victims. These data aggregation techniques, while preventing identification of individuals, may also be inadvertently producing maps with the appearance of 'greater risk' in low crime areas. When some types of crime mapping have the potential to cause falling house prices, increasing insurance premiums or business abandonment, conflicts may exist between providing a public service and protecting the individual, leaving the cartographer vulnerable to litigation.
Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science to Design Affirmative Action Programs

A PARABLE Imagine a mad bomber with a stockpile of biological and radiation weapons. The bomber takes a state map that indicates the boundaries of every county. He picks out a dozen counties and colors some of those counties red, some green, and the rest blue. Taking that map aloft, he drops biological weapons on the red counties, radiation weapons on the green counties, and all that he has left of both kinds on the blue counties. He then kills himself in a suicide crash. Although many residents of the targeted counties become ill almost immediately, the terrible extent of the harm he caused becomes apparent only as the years go by and public health officials begin to notice patterns of cancer and birth defects. The situation is complicated not only by the puzzling variety of problems within and among the counties, but also by the passage of time as people move out of the targeted counties, carrying illness with them, and others move into the counties where the still potent effects of the bombing linger. The government becomes increasingly frustrated by the complexity of the problem, its persistence, and the limited, and occasionally counterproductive, results of efforts to restore public health. Then the bomber’s map is discovered in the rubble of his crashed plane.
A National Study of the Net Benefits of State Pension Plans for Educators

Although benefits can be a sizable part of an educator's total compensation, there has been little scholarly inquiry into the state pension plans for educators. Despite the fact that all defined benefit plans rely on the same basic formula for calculating annual pensions, they vary across states in the multiplier used, the method for calculating final average salary, the cost of participating in the plan, whether caps are imposed on first-year benefits, how cost-of-living increases are made, whether benefits are subject to state income taxes, and whether educators can retain Social Security benefits. All of these factors can influence the total pension received by educators. Educators are unlikely to know the net effect of the parameters used in each state's plan on their net benefits and how the net benefits compare across states.This study addresses this aspect of educator compensation by analyzing the differences among state-run defined benefit plans and how these plans can affect the net benefits for educators. The first portion of this article reviews the empirical and theoretical literature on retirement benefits and their effects on the labor market decisions of educators. The second section describes how to calculate the net benefits from state-run defined benefit plans, and how the components of these plans can affect an educator's retirement compensation. Next, data are used on the defined benefit plans for educators in 49 states to estimate the net retirement compensation for educators and demonstrate how the net benefits vary across states. Finally, this article concludes with some suggested implications of changes in pension systems for educators and directions for future research.
The Pros and Cons of a Discretionary Moetary Policy Strategy: An Empirical Assessment

This paper empirically assesses the pros and cons that emanates when the discretionary monetary policy maker aims to achieve the dual objectives of inflation and output. In order to facilitate theoretically plausible empirical analysis a typical case of a discretionary monetary policy s of a developing economy of Pakistan is considered. A two-step strategy is adopted to generate three novel behavioural time series indicators namely discretion indicator (DI), inflation objective indicator (IOI) and output objective indicator (OOI) using Hodrick and Prescott filter. These indicators tend to capture the discretionary behaviour of the monetary policy maker and the potential resultant corresponding behaviours in inflation and output over time respectively. ARDL bounds testing and estimation approach is used to obtain stable long and short run estimates from these behavioural indicators. The results indicate that discretion is biased towards the inflation objective in the long run. It slightly helps achieve the output objective only in the short run but its channel is not the conventional inflation-output trade-off (due to its negative relationship) rather it might accrue via the close link of money supply with the credit. The indicative welfare gains from discretion are nominal and accrue only in the short term as against disproportionately higher indicative welfare losses, which incurs in the long run.
Investigation of anomalous estimates of tensor‐derived quantities in diffusion tensor imaging

The diffusion tensor is typically assumed to be positive definite. However, noise in the measurements may cause the eigenvalues of the tensor estimate to be negative, thereby violating this assumption. Negative eigenvalues in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data occur predominately in regions of high anisotropy and may cause the fractional anisotropy (FA) to exceed unity. Two constrained least squares methods for eliminating negative eigenvalues are explored. These methods, the constrained linear least squares method (CLLS) and the constrained nonlinear least squares method (CNLS), are compared with other commonly used algebraic constrained methods. The CLLS tensor estimator can be shown to be equivalent to the linear least squares (LLS) tensor estimator when the LLS tensor estimate is positive definite. Similarly, the CNLS tensor estimator can be shown to be equivalent to the nonlinear least squares (NLS) tensor estimator when the NLS tensor estimate is positive definite. The constrained least squares methods for eliminating negative eigenvalues are evaluated with both simulations and in vivo human brain DTI data. Simulation results show that the CNLS method is, in terms of mean squared error for estimating trace and FA, the most effective method for correcting negative eigenvalues. Magn Reson Med, 2006. Published 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Role of NMDA Receptor Subtypes in Short-Term Plasticity in the Rat Entorhinal Cortex

We have previously shown that spontaneous release of glutamate in the entorhinal cortex (EC) is tonically facilitated via activation of presynaptic NMDA receptors (NMDAr) containing the NR2B subunit. Here we show that the same receptors mediate short-term plasticity manifested by frequency-dependent facilitation of evoked glutamate release at these synapses. Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were made from layer V pyramidal neurones in rat EC slices. Evoked excitatory postsynaptic currents showed strong facilitation at relatively low frequencies (3 Hz) of activation. Facilitation was abolished by an NR2B-selective blocker (Ro 25-6981), but unaffected by NR2A-selective antagonists (Zn2+, NVP-AAM077). In contrast, postsynaptic NMDAr-mediated responses could be reduced by subunit-selective concentrations of all three antagonists. The data suggest that NMDAr involved in presynaptic plasticity in layer V are exclusively NR1/NR2B diheteromers, whilst postsynaptically they are probably a mixture of NR1/NR2A, NR1/NR2B diheteromers and NR1/NR2A/NR2B triheteromeric receptors.