Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiuser MIMO precoding and user scheduling for mobile communications

Long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) mobile wireless communications has adopted multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO). Precoding is paramount to achieve downlink MU-MIMO capacity. Tomlinson Harashima Precoding (THP) can eliminate inter user interference (IUI) and inter antenna interference (IAI) to achieve lower bit error rate (BER). THP first decompose MU-MIMO into single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) blocks then further decompose into independent single-input single-output (SISO) channels. THP limits the transmitter power to avoid high instantaneous peak transmit power and achieve performance close to Dirty Paper Coding (DPC) but with much lower complexity. User scheduling for transmission select favorable channels to maximize sum rate. Our proposed THP decomposition method with user scheduling outperforms the existing Block Diagonalization (BD) schemes.
Types and prevalence of extended–spectrum beta–lactamase producing Enterobacteriaceae in poultry

Abstract For several billion years, bacteria have developed mechanisms to resist antibacterial substances. In modern time, antibiotics are frequently used in veterinary and human medicine for prevention and treatment of diseases, globally still also for their growth promoting effects as feed additives. This complex situation has evolved in accelerating development and prevalence of multi-drug resistant bacteria in livestock and people. Extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producing bacteria are resistant to a wide range of ß-lactam antibiotics. They are currently considered as one of the main threats for the treatment of infections in humans and animals. In livestock and animal products, poultry and poultry products show the highest prevalence of ESBL-producers with CTX-M-1, TEM-52 and SHV-12 being the most common ESBL-types in poultry. Escherichia coli and Salmonella spp. are the bacteria in poultry, which carry ESBL-genes most frequently. ESBL-producing bacteria are present at every level of the poultry production pyramid and can be detected even in the meconium of newly hatched chicks. The environment close to poultry barns shows high prevalence rates of these bacteria and contributes to an ongoing infection pressure with further ESBL-types. Probiotics have been shown to successfully reduce ESBL-producers in chicken, as well as ESBL-gene transfer. Other feed additives, such as zinc and copper, increase the prevalence of ESBL-producing bacteria when fed to animals. To our best knowledge, this is the first publication presenting a comparative overview of the prevalence of ESBL-types using data from different countries. To reduce the hazard for public health from poultry carrying high numbers of ESBL-producers, preventive measurements must include the surrounding environment and avoidance of antibiotic usage at all levels of the production pyramid. The first results, of the research on the impact of feed additives on the spread of ESBL-genes, indicate the diet as a further, possible magnitude of influence.
Faces presenting sadness enhance self‐control abilities in gifted adolescents

Self-regulation skills refer to processes allowing emotional and cognitive adaptation of the individual. Some gifted adolescents are known for their imbalance between high intellectual abilities and low emotional skills. Thus, this study aimed at examining the interplay between emotion and cognition in gifted and non-gifted adolescents. A stop-signal task, a response inhibition task including neutral, happy, or sad faces as signal triggering inhibition, was administered to 19 gifted and 20 typically developing male adolescents (12-18 years old). Gifted adolescents showed lower response inhibition abilities than non-gifted adolescents in the neutral and happy face conditions. Sad faces in gifted adolescents were associated with higher response inhibition compared to happy condition. In typically developing adolescents, emotional information (happy or sad faces) was related to lower response inhibition compared to neutral face condition. This study highlights that gifted adolescents present different self-regulation skills than their typically developing peers. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Some gifted adolescents present higher intellectual abilities alongside with lower socio-emotional skills. Self-regulation skills refer to processes allowing emotional and cognitive adaptation. Self-regulation skills might help to understand gifted adolescents, but remain scarcely studied. What does this study adds? Task-relevant emotional information impaired cognitive control in typically developing adolescents. Gifted adolescents are able to use sad faces to enhance their cognitive control abilities.
Chromosomal and Nuclear Alterations in Root Tip Cells of Allium Cepa L. Induced by Alprazolam

ABSTRACT Introduction: Alprazolam is a triazolobenzodiazepine used in panic disorders and other anxiety states. Target organ of Alprazolam is CNS, causing depression of respiration and consciousness. Aim: This study aimed to estimate the genotoxic potential of Alprazolam using Allium cepa test. Methods: Allium cepa is one of the most suitable plants for detecting different types of xenobiotics. The test enables the assessment of different genetic endpoints making possible damage to the DNA of humans to be predicted. Results: Alprazolam induced chromosomal (anaphase bridges, breaks, lagging and stickiness, abnormal spiralisation, multipolarity and polyploidy) and cytological aberrations, especially nuclear alterations (nuclear buds, fragmented nucleus and apoptotic bodies, cells without nucleus, binucleated and micronucleated cells), morphological alterations in shape and size of cells, spindle disturbance and polar deviation in root tip meristem cells of Allium cepa at all tested concentrations. Alprazolam also caused significant inhibition of mitotic index in these cells. Conclusion: These changes in cells are indicators of genotoxic potential of Alprazolam suggesting a need for further in vitro studies on animal and human lymphocytes as well as in vivo studies.
DPSAF: Forward Prediction Based Dynamic Packet Scheduling and Adjusting With Feedback for Multipath TCP in Lossy Heterogeneous Networks

As multihomed terminals are equipped with multiple interfaces and allowed to access heterogeneous networks, transferring data simultaneously through all the available paths becomes possible and also brings many benefits. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been proposed to distribute an application stream over different TCP connections. However, due to the disparate latencies of different paths, the problem of existing out-of-order packets usually occurs at the receiver. Large number of these packets exhaust the limited receiving buffer and make the receive window be stalled, which greatly degrade the throughput. Thus, an efficient scheduling mechanism will play an important role to keep in-order delivery. However, almost all of the previous intelligent scheduling mechanisms ignored packet losses, and didn't consider window changes of the congestion control algorithm and utilize the feedback information, which cannot perform well in the lossy heterogeneous networks. In this paper we propose a new scheduling algorithm: Forward Prediction based Dynamic Packet Scheduling and Adjusting with Feedback (DPSAF). DPSAF first utilizes maximum likelihood estimation in TCP modeling to estimate the data amount sent on other paths simultaneously, which takes packet loss rate and time offset into consideration, then gets feedback information from SACK options and fixes the scheduling value. From the simulation, we can see that our mechanism obviously improves throughput and reduces cache occupancy at receiver in lossy heterogeneous networks.
The rationale for a role for diet and nutrition in the prevention and treatment of cancer

There is considerable evidence to support dietary recommendations for prevention of cancer as well as for patients undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment. We consider here implications from human, animal and in-vitro studies of the effects of dietary factors (macronutrients and micronutrients-phytochemicals) on cancer. An important epidemiology study, the China Project found a significant correlation between disease incidence and markers of animal product consumption. Evidence of the role of animal protein in the promotion of cancer also comes from animal studies. Food restriction has been shown in human and animal studies to slow cancer progression. Phytochemicals from whole plant foods are protective against oxidative stress, inhibit cell proliferation, induce cell-cycle arrest, and apoptosis, act as antiangiogenesis factors, and inhibit cyclooxygenase-2, which has been related to metastasis. Some mechanisms that mediate the effect of diet on cancer involve cell signaling through insulin factors and mammalian target of rapamycin, a nutrient sensing complex related to growth, altered gene expression through epigenetics, and the effects of microbial metabolites produced by the gut microbiota that is strongly influenced by dietary factors. The evidence accumulating for many years indicates that diet, what we eat every day, can affect disease. Besides preventing the development of cancer, this could also be harnessed to positively influence treatment outcomes as well as prevent recurrence. As research strategies developed for drug studies are not appropriate, it is important that new methodologies be developed to study these effects.
Circuit and System Designs of Ultra-Low Power Sensor Nodes With Illustration in a Miniaturized GNSS Logger for Position Tracking: Part II—Data Communication, Energy Harvesting, Power Management, and Digital Circuits

This two-part paper reviews recent innovations in circuit design that have accelerated the miniaturization of sensor nodes. In this second part of the paper, we focus on key building blocks of miniaturized sensor nodes, such as data transceivers, energy harvesters, power management units, and digital logic circuits. System level design considerations are also discussed to provide guidelines for the design of a miniaturized system. As an example prototype design, a 2.7-cm3 global navigation satellite system (GNSS) logger is proposed. This paper includes a die-stacked sensor platform composed of an ARM cortex M0 processor, energy harvester, power management unit, solar cell, optical receiver, sensor layer, and RF transmitter that exploits the discussed design techniques for ultra-low power operation. The GNSS logger can store GNSS signals of >1 k positions on a single battery charging without additional energy harvesting.
Parallel power grid analysis using preconditioned GMRES solver on CPU-GPU platforms

In this paper, we propose an efficient parallel dynamic linear solver, called GPU-GMRES, for transient analysis of large power grid networks. The new method is based on the preconditioned generalized minimum residual (GMRES) iterative method implemented on heterogeneous CPU-GPU platforms. The new solver is very robust and can be applied to power grids with different structures and other applications like thermal analysis. The proposed GPU-GMRES solver adopts the very general and robust incomplete LU (ILU) based preconditioner. We show that by properly selecting the right amount of fill-ins in the incomplete LU factors, a good trade-off between GPU efficiency and GMRES convergence rate can be achieved for the best overall performance. Such a tunable feature makes this algorithm very adaptive to different problems. Furthermore, we properly partition the major computing tasks in GMRES solver to minimize the data traffic between CPU and GPU, which further boosts performance of the proposed method. Experimental results on the set of published IBM benchmark circuits and mesh-structured power grid networks show that the GPU-GMRES solver can deliver order of magnitudes speedup over the direct LU solver UMFPACK. GPU-GMRES can also deliver 3-10× speedup over the CPU implementation of the same GMRES method on transient analysis.
A label-free optical waveguide biosensor with sub-wavelength gratings

In this paper, the reflection resonance spectrum of a sub-wavelength diffraction grating-coupled waveguide is used to analyze biomolecular interactions in real time. When the diffraction grating waveguide structure is destroyed by external factors such as slight refractive index changes of the buffer or molecule adsorption on the grating surface, the optical path of the light coupled through the grating into the waveguide is changed and a resonance wavelength shift is induced as a result. By detecting this resonance wavelength shift, the optical waveguide biosensor provides the ability to identify the kinetics of the biomolecular interaction on an on-line basis without the need for the extrinsic labeling of the biomolecules. A theoretical analysis of the sub-wavelength optical waveguide biosensor is performed. A biosensor with a narrow reflection resonance spectrum, and hence an enhanced detection resolution, is then designed and fabricated. Currently, the detection limit of the optical waveguide sensor is found to be approximately 10-5 refractive index units. The developed biosensor is successfully applied to study the kinetics of an antibody interaction with protein G adsorbed on the sensing surface.
On the continuum versus atomistic descriptions of dislocation nucleation and cleavage in nickel

A hybrid atomistic-finite-element model is compared with the continuum-based Peierls-Nabarro model for several crack orientations in a nickel crystal. Both methods incorporate the same embedded-atom potential for Ni, in order to make the comparison as valid as possible. The agreement (expressed in terms of a stability diagram showing envelopes in loading space where fracture or dislocation nucleation are likely to occur) is excellent in the case of a crack lying on a (111) plane, with a crack front running along a (211)-type direction, subject to mixed-mode I-II loadings. That orientation involves dislocation nucleation on the prolongation of the crack plane, and hence no ledge is formed upon dislocation nucleation. In other geometries considered (involving a crack on a (100)-type plane), the agreement seems to get poorer with increasing size of the ledge the is created when a dislocation nucleates. In all geometries, the atomistic model shows that incipient dislocation-like features are present before dislocation nucleation takes place, which serves as additional validation of the continuum Peierls-Nabarro model.
Gestural reduction, lexical frequency, and sound change: A study of post-vocalic /l/

Abstract The magnitude of anterior and dorsal constrictions for laterals in /(C)(C)VlC/ words produced by eight American English speakers was measured using ultrasound imaging. The results replicate previous findings that laterals have weaker anterior constrictions when followed by labial or velar consonants than when followed by alveolar consonants. The main novel finding is that, in words with /VlClabial/ or /VlCvelar/ sequences, this anterior constriction was weaker in high-frequency words (help , milk ) than in low-frequency words ( whelp , ilk ). Although high-frequency words also showed slight reduction of the dorsal constriction, dorsal reduction was stable, small in magnitude, and not correlated with anterior reduction, consistent with alveolar reduction not being simply a consequence of overall weaker lingual constrictions in more frequent words. Acoustic measures for laterals showed that the degree of anterior constriction correlated with the frequency separation between F1 and F2: more reduced alveolar constrictions – especially likely in high-frequency words – were linked with greater formant proximity. These articulatory and acoustic patterns are interpreted as potentially contributing to the initiation and lexical diffusion of historical /l/ lenition. It is proposed that gestural reduction in high-frequency words in which the anterior gesture for laterals must be coordinated with another supralaryngeal constriction serves as a precipitating factor in /l/ vocalization and possibly (although to a lesser extent) /l/ loss.
A neuroscience perspective on sexual risk behavior in adolescence and emerging adulthood

Abstract Late adolescence and emerging adulthood (specifically ages 15–24) represent a period of heightened sexual risk taking resulting in the greatest annual rates of sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies in the US population. Ongoing efforts to prevent such negative consequences are likely to benefit from a deepening of our understanding of biological mechanisms through which sexual risk taking emerges and biases decision making during this critical window. Here we present a neuroscience framework from which a mechanistic examination of sexual risk taking can be advanced. Specifically, we adapt the neurodevelopmental triadic model, which outlines how motivated behavior is governed by three systems: approach, avoidance, and regulation, to sexual decision making and subsequent risk behavior. We further propose a testable hypothesis of the triadic model, wherein relatively decreased threat-related amygdala reactivity and increased reward-related ventral striatum reactivity leads to sexual risk taking, which is particularly exaggerated during adolescence and young adulthood when there is an overexpression of dopaminergic neurons coupled with immature top-down prefrontal cortex regulation. We conclude by discussing how future research based on our adapted triadic model can inform ongoing efforts to improve intervention and prevention efforts.
SkyLiTE: End-to-End Design of Low-Altitude UAV Networks for Providing LTE Connectivity

Un-manned aerial vehicle (UAVs) have the potential to change the landscape of wide-area wireless connectivity by bringing them to areas where connectivity was sparing or non-existent (e.g. rural areas) or has been compromised due to disasters. While Google's Project Loon and Facebook's Project Aquila are examples of high-altitude, long-endurance UAV-based connectivity efforts in this direction, the telecom operators (e.g. AT&T and Verizon) have been exploring low-altitude UAV-based LTE solutions for on-demand deployments. Understandably, these projects are in their early stages and face formidable challenges in their realization and deployment. The goal of this document is to expose the reader to both the challenges as well as the potential offered by these unconventional connectivity solutions. We aim to explore the end-to-end design of such UAV-based connectivity networks particularly in the context of low-altitude UAV networks providing LTE connectivity. Specifically, we aim to highlight the challenges that span across multiple layers (access, core network, and backhaul) in an inter-twined manner as well as the richness and complexity of the design space itself. To help interested readers navigate this complex design space towards a solution, we also articulate the overview of one such end-to-end design, namely SkyLiTE-- a self-organizing network of low-altitude UAVs that provide optimized LTE connectivity in a desired region.
DSPCP: A Data Scalable Approach for Identifying Relationships in Parallel Coordinates

Parallel coordinates plots (PCPs) are a well-studied technique for exploring multi-attribute datasets. In many situations, users find them a flexible method to analyze and interact with data. Unfortunately, using PCPs becomes challenging as the number of data items grows large or multiple trends within the data mix in the visualization. The resulting overdraw can obscure important features. A number of modifications to PCPs have been proposed, including using color, opacity, smooth curves, frequency, density, and animation to mitigate this problem. However, these modified PCPs tend to have their own limitations in the kinds of relationships they emphasize. We propose a new data scalable design for representing and exploring data relationships in PCPs. The approach exploits the point/line duality property of PCPs and a local linear assumption of data to extract and represent relationship summarizations. This approach simultaneously shows relationships in the data and the consistency of those relationships. Our approach supports various visualization tasks, including mixed linear and nonlinear pattern identification, noise detection, and outlier detection, all in large data. We demonstrate these tasks on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets.
ShaVe-ICE

Traditional approaches for managing software-programmable memories (SPMs) do not support sharing of distributed on-chip memory resources and, consequently, miss the opportunity to better utilize those memory resources. Managing on-chip memory resources in many-core embedded systems with distributed SPMs requires runtime support to share memory resources between various threads with different memory demands running concurrently. Runtime SPM managers cannot rely on prior knowledge about the dynamically changing mix of threads that will execute and therefore should be designed in a way that enables SPM allocations for any unpredictable mix of threads contending for on-chip memory space. This article proposes ShaVe-ICE, an operating-system-level solution, along with hardware support, to virtualize and ultimately share SPM resources across a many-core embedded system to reduce the average memory latency. We present a number of simple allocation policies to improve performance and energy. Experimental results show that sharing SPMs could reduce the average execution time of the workload up to 19.5% and reduce the dynamic energy consumed in the memory subsystem up to 14%.
Reciclagem de embalagens plásticas flexíveis: contribuição da identificação correta

Packages have high rotation as they become municipal solid waste just after the consumption of the product. Therefore, packages should be labeled with identification of the material they are made of in order to help the recycling chain. Many products made from plastics show a resin identification code - usually from 1 to 7 inside a three-arrow triangle above a monogram - aimed at identifying the type of plastic the product is made of, and help its separation and later recycling. In other words, one aims to facilitate recovery of plastics discarded with the municipal solid waste. In this study we collected data on the resin identification code in flexible plastic packages to assess whether the guidelines for material identification are being followed. The data collection was performed in a total of 509 flexible plastic packages used for packing food and non-food products available in the Brazilian market. Even though the NBR 13230 Brazilian standard is already in its second revision, the resin identification code in plastic packages is still used in a very heterogeneous fashion. Approximately 50% of the packages had the resin identification code. Up to 30% of some packages showed incorrect material identification code. Therefore, misinformation still occurs in the Brazilian market concerning the type of material for plastic packaging - including lack of the resin identification code and incorrect form of identification code in the plastic packaging. Both of these problems have negative effects on the plastic recycling chain. We propose that other materials used in flexible plastic packages, e.g. aluminum foil, should also be identified, in order to make the separation and recycling easier.