Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High-Speed 16-Bit SAR-ADC Design at 500 MS/s with Variable Body Biasing for Sub-Threshold Leakage Reduction

In this study, a high-performance 16-bit, 500 MS/s successive approximation register analog-to-digital con-verter (SAR-ADC) with variable body biasing (VBB) for re-ducing sub-threshold leakage is designed and optimized. The suggested ADC architecture makes use of a voltage threshold complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (VTCMOS) cir-cuit with Widlar current mirror technology to efficiently con-sume 39.2 μW at an operating voltage of 1.0 V. Notably, the optimized ADC achieves outstanding performance measures, such as a signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of 97 dB and a total harmonic distortion (THD) of -97.97 dB, which are crucial markers of the ADC's accuracy and fidelity. An over-view of the growing need for high-resolution ADCs in contem-porary high-speed data conversion systems opens the study. The main goal of this effort is to improve overall ADC per-formance and tackle the problem of sub-threshold leakage. The Widlar current mirror technology and the VTCMOS cir-cuit are integrated for enhanced linearity, decreased current mismatch errors, and minimized leakage current. This inte-gration is highlighted in the full explanation of the ADC de-sign. The advent of the VBB approach as a successful method of leakage reduction is a significant contribution to this re-search. The theoretical foundations and workings of the VBB technique are discussed, and thorough simulations and tests are used to assess how the VBB technique affects leakage cur-rent and circuit performance. The SAR-ADC design and simulations were carried out using Cadence Virtuoso soft-ware.
Study on supporting technology for operational procedure design of IT systems in cloud-era datacenters

Datacenters are now widely used, and their sizes are increasing due to the rapid spread of cloud computing. Meanwhile, the cost of IT-system operations occupies 60% of the total cost in a datacenter. So far, improving operations has been focused on automating operations with operation management middleware. However, designing operational procedures, including composing and modifying operational manuals and checklists, is also a big issue since it is time consuming. Supporting technology that improves the efficiency of IT-system operational procedure design has been studied by focusing on the commonly used procedural parts. Existing checklists were analyzed to extract the iterated patterns of the procedures in order to evaluate the technology. The evaluation results showed that common operations such as the ones on management middleware and the remote log-in were extracted as procedural parts. The number of checklist composition steps was reduced by 45% on average and that of the modification steps was reduced by 87% on average by using these procedural parts. A prototyping tool was developed, and the checklists of a sample system different from the analyzed one were implemented on the tool.
Pareto optimal search based refactoring at the design level

Refactoring aims to improve the quality of a software systems' structure, which tends to degrade as the system evolves. While manually determining useful refactorings can be challenging, search based techniques can automatically discover useful refactorings. Current search based refactoring approaches require metrics to be combined in a complex fashion, and producea single sequence of refactorings. In this paper we show how Pareto optimality can improve search based refactoring, making the combination of metrics easier, and aiding the presentation of multiple sequences of optimal refactorings to users.
MRIO model-based study on water nitrogen pollution transfer embodied in international trade

ABSTRACT This study uses the global pollutant emission databases and global input–output model in 2015 to calculate the impact of international trade on global water nitrogen emission patterns, based on considering the total amount of pollutant transfer and pollutant emission intensity of trade flows The main conclusions are as follows: (1) There are always a large amount of water nitrogen emissions transferring from developed economies to developing economies embodied in their bilateral trade activities. Small amount of transfers are of some areas with similar endowments of agricultural resources or long distances. (2) In 2015, the net import of water nitrogen pollution embodied in China’s trade was 160,000 tons, accounting for 2.72% of the global water nitrogen imports. The sharp increases in cereal imports, together with high food storage as well as high pollution intensity embedded in trade are the main reason. It is recommended that through applying alleviations such as agricultural machinery assistance and technical training to accelerate the transfer and spread of agricultural technology in Africa, Asia, and other regions, thus helping increase agricultural production productivity in underdeveloped areas and reducing the pollution intensity embodied in trade flows from underdeveloped areas to developed areas.
Spoken Dialogue for Virtual Advisers in a semi-immersive Command and Control environment

We present the spoken dialogue system designed and implemented for Virtual Advisers in the FOCAL environment. Its architecture is based on: Dialogue Agents using propositional attitudes, a Natural Language Understanding component using typed unification grammar, and a commercial speaker-independent speech recognition system. The current application aims to facilitate the multimedia presentation of military planning information in a semi-immersive environment.
In Utero Exposure to Diethylstilbestrol and Blood DNA Methylation in Women Ages 40–59 Years from the Sister Study

In utero exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES) has been associated with increased risk of adverse health outcomes such as fertility problems and vaginal as well as breast cancer. Animal studies have linked prenatal DES exposure to lasting DNA methylation changes. We investigated genome-wide DNA methylation and in utero DES exposure in a sample of non-Hispanic white women aged 40–59 years from the Sister Study, a large United States cohort study of women with a family history of breast cancer. Using questionnaire information from women and their mothers, we selected 100 women whose mothers reported taking DES while pregnant and 100 control women whose mothers had not taken DES. DNA methylation in blood was measured at 485,577 CpG sites using the Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip. Associations between CpG methylation and DES exposure status were analyzed using robust linear regression with adjustment for blood cell composition and multiple comparisons. Although four CpGs had p<105, after accounting for multiple comparisons using the false discovery rate (FDR), none reached genome-wide significance. In conclusion, adult women exposed to DES in utero had no evidence of large persistent changes in blood DNA methylation.
Testing and applying a fish vitellogenesis model to evaluate laboratory and field biomarkers of endocrine disruption in Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus) exposed to hypoxia

Recently, hypoxia has been shown to act as an endocrine disruptor. We used a model of vitellogenesis in a female sciaenid fish to simulate the effects of hypoxia and to determine if reproductive impairment observed in field‐caught fish could be attributed to dissolved oxygen conditions at the sampling sites. The model is a set of coupled, ordinary differential equations that simulate major biochemical reactions from the secretion of gonadotropin to production of vitellogenin. Various intermediate variables in the model correspond to commonly measured biomarkers, and we assume a direct relationship between cumulative vitellogenin (VTG) and the gonadosomatic index (GSI). Model predictions were compared to results of laboratory studies that examined the effects of hypoxia on Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus) reproduction. When hypoxia was assumed to cause reduced gonadotropin and impaired aromatase activity, model predictions of VTG production were similar to laboratory‐measured reductions in GSI. The model was then applied to reproductive biomarkers measured in fish from normoxic and hypoxic locations in Pensacola Bay (FL, USA). We simulated the relationship between reduced estradiol‐17β and VTG production under hypoxia, and we compared these results with field data. Good agreement between field and simulation results suggested that croaker collected from hypoxic sites in October were exposed to hypoxic conditions for an extended period during gonadal recrudescence and that hypoxia was a dominant cause for the reduced GSIs. Monte Carlo uncertainty analyses suggested that the maximum rate of free testosterone production is the most sensitive parameter. Our simulations demonstrated that the model can be used identifying the mechanism underlying endocrine disruption and for interpreting field‐measured biomarkers in situations of multiple stressors.
Computing the Hybridization Number of Two Phylogenetic Trees Is Fixed-Parameter Tractable

Reticulation processes in evolution mean that the ancestral history of certain groups of present-day species is non-tree-like. These processes include hybridization, lateral gene transfer, and recombination. Despite the existence of reticulation, such events are relatively rare and, so, a fundamental problem for biologists is the following: Given a collection of rooted binary phylogenetic trees on sets of species that correctly represent the tree-like evolution of different parts of their genomes, what is the smallest number of "reticulation" vertices in any network that explains the evolution of the species under consideration? It has been previously shown that this problem is NP-hard even when the collection consists of only two rooted binary phylogenetic trees. However, in this paper, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable in the two-tree instance when parameterized by this smallest number of reticulation vertices.
Improving Inertial Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning by Detecting Unmodified Switched-on Lamps in Buildings

This paper explores how inertial Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning (PDR) location systems can be improved with the use of a light sensor to measure the illumination gradients created when a person walks under ceiling-mounted unmodified indoor lights. The process of updating the inertial PDR estimates with the information provided by light detections is a new concept that we have named Light-matching (LM). The displacement and orientation change of a person obtained by inertial PDR is used by the LM method to accurately propagate the location hypothesis, and vice versa; the LM approach benefits the PDR approach by obtaining an absolute localization and reducing the PDR-alone drift. Even from an initially unknown location and orientation, whenever the person passes below a switched-on light spot, the location likelihood is iteratively updated until it potentially converges to a unimodal probability density function. The time to converge to a unimodal position hypothesis depends on the number of lights detected and the asymmetries/irregularities of the spatial distribution of lights. The proposed LM method does not require any intensity illumination calibration, just the pre-storage of the position and size of all lights in a building, irrespective of their current on/off state. This paper presents a detailed description of the light-matching concept, the implementation details of the LM-assisted PDR fusion scheme using a particle filter, and several simulated and experimental tests, using a light sensor-equipped Galaxy S3 smartphone and an external foot-mounted inertial sensor. The evaluation includes the LM-assisted PDR approach as well as the fusion with other signals of opportunity (WiFi, RFID, Magnetometers or Map-matching) in order to compare their contribution in obtaining high accuracy indoor localization. The integrated solution achieves a localization error lower than 1 m in most of the cases.
The Weibull–Lognormal Fading Channel: Analysis, Simulation, and Validation

In frequency-nonselective fading channels, the partial waves arriving at the mobile receiver cannot explicitly be of homogeneous nature due to nonuniform scattering caused by objects of specific reflective nature. Moreover, shadowing influences the received signal level by causing slow variations to its local mean. In this paper, we investigate a mixture stochastic process accounting for both inhomogeneous scattering and shadow fading by multiplying a Weibull process with a lognormal process. The first process models the possible scattering nonuniformities of the channel, whereas the second process accounts for the slow-term variations of the local mean due to shadowing. An exact solution for the composite probability density function (pdf) will be given, together with approximate solutions for the second-order statistics, i.e., the level crossing rate (LCR) and the average duration of fades (ADF). The approximate solutions come from the assumption of a slowly time-varying lognormal process compared with the Weibull process, the validity of which will be tested via an efficient deterministic simulation scheme that implements the analytical model on a digital computer. Finally, a curve fitting of the LCR to real-world data drawn from channel measurements will demonstrate the flexibility and usefulness of the proposed model.
THE EFFECT OF GLUTARALDEHYDE ON CATALASE

Peroxidatic activity of catalase (E .C .1 .11 .1 .6) was discovered by Keilin and Hartree (1), and it has been firmly established that, catalase oxidizes various substrates such as ethanol, methanol, nitrite, and formate (2-4) . Crystalline beef liver catalase, used as an enzyme tracer (5), and the peroxisomal catalase (6, 7) have been visualized cytochemically by a modification of the 3,3'diaminobenzidine tetrahydrochloride (DAB)' technique of Graham and Karnovsky (8), and it has been suggested that the peroxidatic activity of catalase is responsible for this reaction (9) . The
A Regression Approach to Single-Channel Speech Separation Via High-Resolution Deep Neural Networks

We propose a novel data-driven approach to single-channel speech separation based on deep neural networks (DNNs) to directly model the highly nonlinear relationship between speech features of a mixed signal containing a target speaker and other interfering speakers. We focus our discussion on a semisupervised mode to separate speech of the target speaker from an unknown interfering speaker, which is more flexible than the conventional supervised mode with known information of both the target and interfering speakers. Two key issues are investigated. First, we propose a DNN architecture with dual outputs of the features of both the target and interfering speakers, which is shown to achieve a better generalization capability than that with output features of only the target speaker. Second, we propose using a set of multiple DNNs, each intending to be signal-noise-dependent (SND), to cope with the difficulty that one single general DNN could not well accommodate all the speaker mixing variabilities at different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. Experimental results on the speech separation challenge (SSC) data demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves better separation results than other conventional approaches in a supervised or semisupervised mode. SND-DNNs could also yield significant performance improvements over a general DNN for speech separation in low SNR cases. Furthermore, for automatic speech recognition (ASR) following speech separation, this purely front-end processing with a single set of speaker-independent ASR acoustic models, achieves a relative word error rate (WER) reduction of 11.6% over a state-of-the-art separation and recognition system where a complicated joint back-end decoding framework with multiple sets of speaker-dependent ASR acoustic models needs to be implemented. When speaker-adaptive ASR acoustic models for the target speakers are adopted for the enhanced signals, another 12.1% WER reduction over our best speaker-independent ASR system is achieved.
On the Use of RLS with Covariance Reset in Tracking Scenarios with Discontinuities

Low-complexity algorithms used for adaptive filtering applications have been shown to be ineffective in rapidly changing environments. This work investigates the use of the recursive least-squares algorithm with the addition of covariance resetting (RLS+R) to limit the memory of the algorithm and allow it to react to more rapid variations in the environment, including the sudden appearance of an interferer. A comparison is made of the performance of the least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm with RLS+CR in rural and urban environments with and without interference using measured channel data. The RLS+CR algorithm is shown to outperform the LMS algorithm in urban environments as well as environments with high-powered interference
Wearing complete dental prostheses - Effects on perioral morphology

Background To adequately perform rehabilitation of edentulous patients by a complete removable dental prosthesis (CRDP) is from basic interest to dentists to understand the morphologic changes caused by re-establishment of a physiologic jaw relationship. Anthropometric analyses of standardized frontal view and profile photographs may help elucidate such changes. Material and Methods Photographs of 31 edentulous patients were compared in relaxed lip closure and after insertion of a CRDP in stable occlusion. 2232 anthropometric distances were raised. Eighteen anthropometric indices reflecting the perioral morphology and its integration in the vertical facial harmony were investigated. Results The intercanthal – mouth width index (p<.001), medial - lateral cutaneous upper lip height index (p=.007), lower vermilion contour index (p=.022), vermilion - total upper lip height index (p=.018), cutaneous - total upper lip height index (p=.023), upper lip - nose height index (p=.001), nose - upper face height index (p=.002), chin - mandible height index (p=.013), upper lip - mandible height index (p=.045), nose - lower face height index (p=.018), and nose - face height index (p=.029) showed significant pre- to post-treatment changes. Conclusions The investigated anthropometric indices presented reproducible results related to an increase in occlusal vertical dimension. Their application may be helpful in assessment, planning, and explanation of morphologic effects of CRDPs on the perioral and overall facial morphology, which may helps to improve the aesthetic outcome. Key words:Dentures, removable dentures, anthropometry, perioral morphology.
Efecto de técnicas de agricultura de conservación en la respiración del suelo en plantaciones de almendro en la región mediterránea (SE, España)

The soil-management system in agricultural lands could be affected substantially on dynamics of CO2 fluxes from soil. An experiment was carried out in Lanjaron (SE Spain) to evaluate the effect of three soil-management systems in almond plantations: 1) minimum tillage with spontaneous vegetation strips (MTSV), 2) minimum tillage and thyme ( Thymbra capitata L.) strips (MTT), and 3) minimum tillage without plant strips (MT). The CO2 emission rates from soil presented the following increasing trend MTSV>MT>MTT, showing highly variability in the short term. Also, higher CO2 soil emissions were recorded during the spring, in contrast to autumn. Moreover, the soil- water content was the most influential environmental factor. Consequently, the use of conservation agricultural techniques such as minimum tillage and plant strips to sequester atmospheric carbon are sustainable measures for Mediterranean rainfed agro-ecosystems.
Identifying Critical Factors in Case-Based Prediction

A reversible outcome is one that can be changed. For example, the failure of an ongoing project may be avoided if certain actions are taken, while an outcome such as the path of a hurricane cannot be changed under current knowledge. The major benefit of predicting reversible outcomes resides in the possibility to avoid unwanted results. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify contributing factors responsible for the outcome, which once modified, can steer the result to a desired outcome. Consequently, the incorporation of a method into a case-based reasoning system to identify contributing factors affecting an outcome can improve its usefulness. This paper compares different approaches, particularly the use of domain knowledge, with respect to their ability to identify sets of factors that reverse software development projects predicted to fail into a prediction of success.
Long Term Progression-Free Survival in a Patient with Locally Advanced Prostate Cancer under Low Dose Intermittent Androgen Deprivation Therapy with Bicalutamide Only

Androgen deprivation is a common treatment option in patients with locally advanced or metastatic prostate cancer. No case of long term treatment with an intermittent approach with only low dose bicalutamide (50 mg daily) has been described yet. We report a 60-year-old patient, initially presenting with a PSA elevation of 19.2 ng/mL in 1996. After diagnosis of well to moderately differentiated prostate cancer by transrectal biopsy, the patient underwent an open radical prostatectomy. Final diagnosis was adenocarcinoma of the prostate, classified as pT3a, pR1, pV0, and pL1. Adjuvant intermittent androgen deprivation therapy with flutamide 250 mg was applied, which was changed to bicalutamide 50 mg once daily when it became available in 2001. Six on-phases were performed and PSA values never exceeded 20 ng/mL. The patient did not experience any serious side effects. To date, there are no clinical or radiological signs of progression. Current PSA value is 3.5 ng/mL.
Surveillance of Levofloxacin Resistance in Helicobacter pylori Isolates in Bogotá-Colombia (2009-2014)

Increased resistance of Helicobacter pylori to clarithromycin and metronidazole has resulted in recommendation to substitute fluoroquinolones for eradication therapy. The aims of the study were to determine the prevalence and changes in primary levofloxacin resistance related to H. pylori gyrA sequences. The study utilized H. pylori strains isolated from patients undergoing gastroscopy in Bogotá, Colombia from 2009 to 2014. Levofloxacin susceptibility was assessed by agar dilution. Mutations in gyrA sequences affecting the quinolone resistance-determining region (QRDR) were evaluated by direct sequencing. Overall, the mean prevalence of primary levofloxacin resistance was 18.2% (80 of 439 samples). Resistance increased from 11.8% (12/102) in 2009 to 27.3% (21/77) in 2014 (p = 0.001). gyrA mutations in levofloxacin resistant strains were present in QRDR positions 87 and 91. The most common mutation was N87I (43.8%, 35/80) followed by D91N (28.8%, 23/80) and N87K (11.3%, 9/80). Levofloxacin resistance increased markedly in Colombia during the six-year study period. Primary levofloxacin resistance was most often mediated by point mutations in gyrA, with N87I being the most common QRDR mutation related to levofloxacin resistance.