Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contamination Sensitivity Of Typical Mirror Coatings - A Parametric Study

Contamination budgeting for space optical systems basically starts at understanding the sensitivity of component performance, e.g. mirror reflectance, window transmittance, etc., to surface deposits. To evaluate contamination sensitivity for mirror coatings, eight types representative of those used in the vacuum ultraviolet, visible, and infrared were modeled assuming that the contaminant is uniformly deposited on the mirror surface. Parametric studies over a range of complex refractive indices combined with an examination of optical data available for several organic materials suggested division of the contaminant layer index into three categories, N = 1.5 + 0.1i, N = 1.5 + 0.5i, and N = 1.5 + 2.0i. Contaminant thickness sensitivity curves were then calculated for each of the selected mirror coatings. For comparative purposes, critical thicknesses for each type were extracted, assuming a reflectance loss of 10 percent was allowable. Critical thicknesses ranged from about 10Å. to 1000Å depending on the specifics of coating design and spectral region.
Ego 2 Top : Matching Viewers in Egocentric and Top-view Cameras

Egocentric cameras are becoming increasingly popular and provide us with large amounts of videos, captured from the first person perspective. At the same time, surveillance cameras and drones offer an abundance of visual information, often captured from top-view. Although these two sources of information have been separately studied in the past, they have not been collectively studied and related. Having a set of egocentric cameras and a top-view camera capturing the same area, we propose a framework to identify the egocentric viewers in the top-view video. We utilize two types of features for our assignment procedure. Unary features encode what a viewer (seen from top-view or recording an egocentric video) visually experiences over time. Pairwise features encode the relationship between the visual content of a pair of viewers. Modeling each view (egocentric or top) by a graph, the assignment process is formulated as spectral graph matching. Evaluating our method over a dataset of 50 top-view and 188 egocentric videos taken in different scenarios demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach in assigning egocentric viewers to identities present in top-view camera. We also study the effect of different parameters such as the number of egocentric viewers and visual features.
Auxin/AID versus conventional knockouts: distinguishing the roles of CENP-T/W in mitotic kinetochore assembly and stability

Most studies using knockout technologies to examine protein function have relied either on shutting off transcription (conventional conditional knockouts with tetracycline-regulated gene expression or gene disruption) or destroying the mature mRNA (RNAi technology). In both cases, the target protein is lost at a rate determined by its intrinsic half-life. Thus, protein levels typically fall over at least 1–3 days, and cells continue to cycle while exposed to a decreasing concentration of the protein. Here we characterise the kinetochore proteome of mitotic chromosomes isolated from a cell line in which the essential kinetochore protein CENP-T is present as an auxin-inducible degron (AID) fusion protein that is fully functional and able to support the viability of the cells. Stripping of the protein from chromosomes in early mitosis via targeted proteasomal degradation reveals the dependency of other proteins on CENP-T for their maintenance in kinetochores. We compare these results with the kinetochore proteome of conventional CENP-T/W knockouts. As the cell cycle is mostly formed from G1, S and G2 phases a gradual loss of CENP-T/W levels is more likely to reflect dependencies associated with kinetochore assembly pre-mitosis and upon entry into mitosis. Interestingly, a putative super-complex involving Rod-Zw10-zwilch (RZZ complex), Spindly, Mad1/Mad2 and CENP-E requires the function of CENP-T/W during kinetochore assembly for its stable association with the outer kinetochore, but once assembled remains associated with chromosomes after stripping of CENP-T during mitosis. This study highlights the different roles core kinetochore components may play in the assembly of kinetochores (upon entry into mitosis) versus the maintenance of specific components (during mitosis).
Fluid interaction for information visualization

Despite typically receiving little emphasis in visualization research, interaction in visualization is the catalyst for the user's dialogue with the data, and, ultimately, the user's actual understanding and insight into these data. There are many possible reasons for this skewed balance between the visual and interactive aspects of a visualization. One reason is that interaction is an intangible concept that is difficult to design, quantify, and evaluate. Unlike for visual design, there are few examples that show visualization practitioners and researchers how to design the interaction for a new visualization in the best manner. In this article, we attempt to address this issue by collecting examples of visualizations with ‘best-in-class’ interaction and using them to extract practical design guidelines for future designers and researchers. We call this concept fluid interaction, and we propose an operational definition in terms of the direct manipulation and embodied interaction paradigms, the psychological concept of ‘flow’, and Norman's gulfs of execution and evaluation.
Availability and Redundancy in Harmony: Measuring Retrieval Times in P2P Storage Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) storage systems are strongly affected by churn - temporal and permanent peer failures. Because of this churn, the main requirement of such systems is to guarantee that stored objects can always be retrieved. This requirement is specially needed in two main situations: when users want to access the stored objects or when data maintenance processes have to repair lost information. To meet this requirement, exiting P2P storage systems introduce large amounts of redundancy that maintain data availability close to 100%. Unfortunately, these large amounts of redundancy increase the storage costs, either by reducing the overall net capacity or by increasing the communication required for data maintenance. In order to minimize storage costs, P2P storage systems can reduce data redundancy. However, less redundancy means lower data availability, which leads to increase object retrieval times. Unfortunately, longer retrieval times could compromise data maintenance processes and could penalize user's retrieval times. It is crucial then for P2P storage systems to predict the effects of a redundancy reduction. In order to provide this information, we present a novel analytical framework to measure object retrieval times under different redundancy and churn circumstances. Our framework can be directly used by backup applications aiming to maintain durability at the lower cost, or by data sharing applications that seek to reduce costs by penalizing user retrieval times. We validate our framework by simulation using real P2P traces (Skype and eMule's KAD).
The impact of a brief mindfulness meditation intervention on cognitive control and error-related performance monitoring

Meditation is associated with positive health behaviors and improved cognitive control. One mechanism for the relationship between meditation and cognitive control is changes in activity of the anterior cingulate cortex-mediated neural pathways. The error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe) components of the scalp-recorded event-related potential (ERP) represent cingulate-mediated functions of performance monitoring that may be modulated by mindfulness meditation. We utilized a flanker task, an experimental design, and a brief mindfulness intervention in a sample of 55 healthy non-meditators (n = 28 randomly assigned to the mindfulness group and n = 27 randomly assigned to the control group) to examine autonomic nervous system functions as measured by blood pressure and indices of cognitive control as measured by response times, error rates, post-error slowing, and the ERN and Pe components of the ERP. Systolic blood pressure significantly differentiated groups following the mindfulness intervention and following the flanker task. There were non-significant differences between the mindfulness and control groups for response times, post-error slowing, and error rates on the flanker task. Amplitude and latency of the ERN did not differ between groups; however, amplitude of the Pe was significantly smaller in individuals in the mindfulness group than in the control group. Findings suggest that a brief mindfulness intervention is associated with reduced autonomic arousal and decreased amplitude of the Pe, an ERP associated with error awareness, attention, and motivational salience, but does not alter amplitude of the ERN or behavioral performance. Implications for brief mindfulness interventions and state vs. trait affect theories of the ERN are discussed. Future research examining graded levels of mindfulness and tracking error awareness will clarify relationship between mindfulness and performance monitoring.
MICROSTRUCTURAL STUDY OF MECHANICAL AND THERMAL PROPERTIES OF DIAMOND-LIKE CARBON

This paper describes the microstructural study of a chemical vapor deposited diamond-like carbon (DLC) thin film, ranging the thickness from 1μm to 1. 36μm. The effect of deposition condition on the microstructure of the DLC film was analyzed by Raman spectroscopy. Increasing the bias voltage and the discharge current shifted the peak shift of G band toward high frequency and enlarged I(D)/I(G) ratio. Lower density films were obtained by lowering bias voltage at discharge current of 5A, but conversely higher density films by lowering bias voltage at 10A and 20A. The hardness and Young's modulus were directly proportional to density of the film. Molecular dynamics analyses gave a linear relationship between the bonding ratio, density and Young's modulus of the film. These analytical results qualitatively agreed with the experimental results. The thermal conductivity of the DLC films was discussed based on the molecular dynamics results.
THYROID CANCER Tumor histology is not an independent determinant of the prognosis of differentiated thyroid cancer

CLINICAL THYROIDOLOGY  APRIL 2009 16 VOLUME 21  ISSUE 4 ultrasonography, and computed tomography scans or magnetic resonance imaging was performed as indicated. Tumor staging was done according to the World Health Organization standard at the time of surgery. Tumor size was measured on the primary tumor specimen. Patients had to undergo lymph-node surgery to be considered free of lymph-node metastases.
Machine Translation as a Testbed for Multilingual Analysis

We propose that machine translation (MT) is a useful application for evaluating and deriving the development of NL components, especially in a wide-coverage analysis system. Given the architecture of our MT system, which is a transfer system based on linguistic modules, correct analysis is expected to be a prerequisite for correct translation, suggesting a correlation between the two, given relatively mature transfer and generation components. We show through error analysis that there is indeed a strong correlation between the quality of the translated output and the subjectively determined goodness of the analysis. We use this correlation as a guide for development of a coordinated parallel analysis effort in 7 languages.
Who do you sync you are?: smartphone fingerprinting via application behaviour

The overall network traffic patterns generated by today's smartphones result from the typically large and diverse set of installed applications. In addition to the traffic generated by the user, most applications generate characteristic traffic from their background activities, such as periodic update requests or server synchronisation. Although the encryption of transmitted data in 3G networks prevents an eavesdropper from analysing the content, periodic traffic patterns leak side-channel information like timing and data volume. In this work, we extract such side-channel features from network traffic generated from the most popular applications, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, Dropbox, and others, and evaluate whether they can be used to reliably identify a smartphone. By computing fingerprints from approx,6,hours of background traffic, we show that 15 minutes of monitored traffic suffice to reliably identify a smartphone based on its behavioural fingerprint with a success probability of 90%.
6D pose estimation of textureless shiny objects using random ferns for bin-picking

We address the problem of 6D pose estimation of a textureless and shiny object from single-view 2D images, for a bin-picking task. For a textureless object like a mechanical part, conventional visual feature matching usually fails due to the absence of rich texture features. Hierarchical template matching assumes that few templates can cover all object appearances. However, the appearance of a shiny object largely depends on its pose and illumination. Furthermore, in a bin-picking task, we must cope with partial occlusions, shadows, and inter-reflections.
Classification of e-commerce web pages using statistical descriptor vectors

Abstract Nowadays, there is a huge volume of information on the web, which is disseminated to the users in a chaotic way. In order to be easily accessed, the information must be clustered and classified in appropriate knowledge areas. Thus, many heavily visited sites or Portals try to unify the access to multiple information sources, providing by this way classification of information. This paper proposes a system, aiming to classify e-commerce web pages and sites according to their web-content. This system can be implemented for automatic knowledge segmentation in a Portal or in a search engine repository. The system performance reached 93% in the first test sets, after the learning phase. However, relevance feedback mechanisms increase the performance significantly (up to 95%) as the number of the test sets increases.
Inbreeding drives maize centromere evolution

Significance The diversity of centromere-specific DNA repeats in different species (centromere paradox) and the seemingly parallel rapid evolution of the cenH3 histone protein have previously been interpreted to be related to evolutionary pressures acting on both molecules based on their interaction (centromere drive hypothesis). Here we describe the detailed mechanism and chronology of centromere repeat replacement, and identify inbreeding as a major driver of centromeric DNA replacement that ultimately gives rise to new tandem centromere repeats at genetically indistinguishable loci. These insights explain both the frequently observed disturbance of established centromeres in crop plants following their domestication and the rapid appearance of novel centromere repeat sequences in genetically isolated individuals in nature during speciation. Functional centromeres, the chromosomal sites of spindle attachment during cell division, are marked epigenetically by the centromere-specific histone H3 variant cenH3 and typically contain long stretches of centromere-specific tandem DNA repeats (∼1.8 Mb in maize). In 23 inbreds of domesticated maize chosen to represent the genetic diversity of maize germplasm, partial or nearly complete loss of the tandem DNA repeat CentC precedes 57 independent cenH3 relocation events that result in neocentromere formation. Chromosomal regions with newly acquired cenH3 are colonized by the centromere-specific retrotransposon CR2 at a rate that would result in centromere-sized CR2 clusters in 20,000–95,000 y. Three lines of evidence indicate that CentC loss is linked to inbreeding, including (i) CEN10 of temperate lineages, presumed to have experienced a genetic bottleneck, contain less CentC than their tropical relatives; (ii) strong selection for centromere-linked genes in domesticated maize reduced diversity at seven of the ten maize centromeres to only one or two postdomestication haplotypes; and (iii) the centromere with the largest number of haplotypes in domesticated maize (CEN7) has the highest CentC levels in nearly all domesticated lines. Rare recombinations introduced one (CEN2) or more (CEN5) alternate CEN haplotypes while retaining a single haplotype at domestication loci linked to these centromeres. Taken together, this evidence strongly suggests that inbreeding, favored by postdomestication selection for centromere-linked genes affecting key domestication or agricultural traits, drives replacement of the tandem centromere repeats in maize and other crop plants. Similar forces may act during speciation in natural systems.
Test methodology for rain influence on automotive surround sensors

Automotive safety systems aim to provide maximum protection to vehicle occupants and vulnerable road users. These safety features rely on data from surround sensors such as radar, lidar and camera, which provide detailed information about the environment of the vehicle. A minor error in the measurements of these sensors can lead to major injuries or death. Hence, the reliability and accuracy of these sensor systems is mandatory. The performance of surround sensors depends on their local environment, because of the attenuation of the ambient atmosphere. Environmental influences such as rain additionally affects the accuracy of sensor systems. Therefore, these sensors must be tested under various weather conditions. This paper presents a new test methodology for rain influence on automotive surround sensors. Therefore, a rain simulator was designed and validated. The proposed test methodology was applied to radar, lidar and camera sensors in an experimental setup.
Chronic &agr;-Adrenergic Receptor Stimulation Modulates the Contractile Phenotype of Cardiac Myocytes In Vitro

BackgroundHeart failure is characterized by contractile dysfunction of the myocardium and elevated sympathetic activity. We tested the hypothesis that chronic &agr;-adrenergic (&agr;-ADR) stimulation modifies the molecular and contractile phenotype of cardiac myocytes. Methods and ResultsAdult rat ventricular myocytes in culture were exposed to &agr;-ADR stimulation (norepinephrine + propranolol) for 48 hours. &agr;-ADR stimulation decreased the mRNAs for sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase and Ca2+ release channel by 56% and 52%, respectively, and increased mRNA and protein for the Na+-Ca2+ exchanger by 70% and 39%, respectively. After washout of the &agr;-ADR agonist, simultaneous measurement of [Ca2+]i transients with fura 2 and myocyte shortening by video edge-detection showed that [Ca2+]i amplitude and myocyte shortening were decreased in &agr;-ADR–treated myocytes, and the time to peak and time from peak to 80% decline of both [Ca2+]i and myocyte shortening were increased. The concentration-response curve for myocyte shortening by the Na+ channel activator veratridine was shifted leftward in &agr;-ADR–stimulated myocytes (EC50, 21.6±4.6 versus 105.8±10.5 nmol/L, P <0.001). ConclusionsChronic &agr;-ADR stimulation of cardiac myocytes causes decreases in the expression of sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase and the Ca2+ release channel that are associated with decreases in [Ca2+]i and contractility. &agr;-ADR stimulation simultaneously increases Na+-Ca2+ exchanger expression, thereby increasing sensitivity to intracellular Na+.
Linked lives, dependent demise? Survival analysis of husbands and wives

Past research has found that married individuals have substantially lower risks of mortality than their single counterparts. This paper examines how household characteristics affect spouses’ risks of mortality. A paired hazard rate model is estimated and tests are made to ascertain whether the estimated coefficients associated with risk factors differ between husbands’ and wives’ equations. Cigarette smoking, risk-avoidance behavior, poverty, and children are found to affect wives’ and husbands’ mortality in similar ways. Divorce, which can be interpreted as the termination of this shared household environment, is found to affect spouses differently.
Leveraging Static Analysis Tools for Improving Usability of Memory Error Sanitization Compilers

Memory errors such as buffer overruns are notorious security vulnerabilities. There has been considerable interest in having a compiler to ensure the safety of compiled code either through static verification or through instrumented runtime checks. While certifying compilation has shown much promise, it has not been practical, leaving code instrumentation as the next best strategy for compilation. We term such compilers Memory Error Sanitization Compilers (MESCs). MESCs are available as part of GCC, LLVM and MSVC suites. Due to practical limitations, MESCs typically apply instrumentation indiscriminately to every memory access, and are consequently prohibitively expensive and practical to only small code bases. This work proposes a methodology that applies state-of-the-art static analysis techniques to eliminate unnecessary runtime checks, resulting in more efficient and scalable defenses. The methodology was implemented on LLVM's Safecode, Integer Overflow, and Address Sanitizer passes, using static analysis of Frama-C and Codesurfer. The benchmarks demonstrate an improvement in runtime performance that makes incorporation of runtime checks a viable option for defenses.
Mammalian target of rapamycin in the human placenta regulates leucine transport and is down‐regulated in restricted fetal growth

Pathological fetal growth is associated with perinatal morbidity and the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life. Placental nutrient transport is a primary determinant of fetal growth. In human intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) the activity of key placental amino acid transporters, such as systems A and L, is decreased. However the mechanisms regulating placental nutrient transporters are poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signalling pathway regulates amino acid transport in the human placenta and that the activity of the placental mTOR pathway is reduced in IUGR. Using immunohistochemistry and culture of trophoblast cells, we show for the first time that the mTOR protein is expressed in the transporting epithelium of the human placenta. We further demonstrate that placental mTOR regulates activity of the l‐amino acid transporter, but not system A or taurine transporters, by determining the mediated uptake of isotope‐labelled leucine, methylaminoisobutyric acid and taurine in primary villous fragments after inhibition of mTOR using rapamycin. The protein expression of placental phospho‐S6K1 (Thr‐389), a measure of the activity of the mTOR signalling pathway, was markedly reduced in placentas obtained from pregnancies complicated by IUGR. These data identify mTOR as an important regulator of placental amino acid transport, and provide a mechanism for the changes in placental leucine transport in IUGR previously demonstrated in humans. We propose that mTOR functions as a placental nutrient sensor, matching fetal growth with maternal nutrient availability by regulating placental nutrient transport.